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I closed them knowing we had landed on the flagstones.
     

    Something changed inside me during that fall. It was as if a window lifted in my mind, and I could see something I had not noticed a moment earlier. Yet, I did not understand what I saw—what I felt. It was as if a switch had been turned, and a room that had once been darkened became illuminated. I heard a voice whisper to me, Jack, swing up, and Jack swing down, up to the window, over the ground. Swing over the field and the garden wall—
     
    I opened my eyes. I felt pain in my back and along my legs and arms, but I was alive. It seemed someone had put a mattress down below, and yet I knew no one had.
     
    Harvey had been my mattress, my cradle.
     
    He lay there, beneath me, holding me tight, his head smashed on the stones and a calm pool of blood beside him, diluted by raindrops.
     
    I finished the rhyme for him, in my head, the voice of a little girl on a swing tied by rope to the thick branch of a tree.
     
    But watch out for Jack Hackaway if you should fall.
     

Part Two
     
    The Swallow
     
    “Come ye not here to sleep or slumber.”
     

FIVE
     

1
     
    Mrs. Haworth had Percy come in and board up the window, for no one wanted to look out from it again. Old Marsh sent me a note that Percy left for me in the hall and Mrs. Haworth brought to my bedside. All he had scribbled down was, “A hasty recovery, miss,” signing it “Mr. M.”
     
    By February, I could walk again.
     

2
     
    In early March, my jaw no longer hurt, and by the following summer only a few noticed my limp. I had such an ache at the core of my being, for a day did not pass that I did not think of Harvey and feel a searing pain at the center of my body as if I were experiencing the throes of death and birth itself.
     
    And still, I walked the hallways and the stairs; I ate now and then, and watched the sea from windows; I sat in the gardens and stared at the flowers and vines as they grew and died and grew, and I wondered why people could not be like this, why if we planted them, they could not grow again.
     
    Edyth remained with us though I ignored any teaching or guidance she offered. No one ever told of what she and Spencer had done; nor did I wish to, though I hated her with all my heart. I blamed her for Harvey’s death.
     
    I blamed Spencer for it as well.
     
    I blamed our mother and Dr. Witherspoon ’ s tonic and our father and Our Father Who Art in Heaven.
     
    I blamed myself.
     
    I blamed the pictures of the nude women my grandfather had tucked into the old Bible.
     

3
     
    I had been too weak to attend Harvey’s funeral, but they buried him in the Tombs, as many Villiers before him had been buried. I watched from my window as the doors were opened, and the men crouched down to take his coffin through the entryway. I thought of him there, among our ancestors, and wondered how room had been made for his coffin, or how it was sealed, or if they placed it into the stone wall as some had been buried, or into one of the few stone biers left in that passageway of death.
     
    My father returned for two months only, and then left again for his foreign wars. I have no memory of his visit. Lewis came from university but—too much like my father—did not stay long, either. Like my father, my eldest brother was a stranger to me by then, and I barely recognized him.
     
    My mother wept for ages, and when I tried to comfort her, she said, “When they put him in the Tombs, I remembered how scared he was of the trunk. In the play. Do you remember? How he didn’t want to go in it, because it scared him to be confined like that in a box. When he was a boy, he didn’t like small spaces. I hate thinking of him there.”
     
    “He’s not there,” I whispered as I combed my fingers through her hair. “He’s in heaven.” I began crying, too, and my mother turned away from me.
     
    “There is no heaven,” she said. “It’s what people say because they don’t want to think