Read Online The Mirk and Midnight Hour by Jane Nickerson - Free Book Online Page A

than the temperature justified.
    A striped sock she was knitting had been lying limp in her lap for the past hour. She dabbed her forehead with a handkerchief.
    I stroked Goblin, who was curled, purring, on my lap under the book I was reading, and wondered about my stepmother. She had always appeared pale and fragile, but in the week since my father’sdeparture, she’d begun looking consumptive—thin and almost bluish white, with purple shadows beneath her eyes. She would fall asleep sitting up, in the middle of the day. I had asked her if she was ill, but she had brushed me off. Maybe when I knew her better, I could inquire more persistently. If I ever know her better . Conversations with Miss Elsa were fragmented, with a detached quality, as if she weren’t quite with us.
    “Mama!” Sunny said loudly.
    Miss Elsa winced as though her daughter had thrown a firecracker at her feet.
    “Mama, don’t you think we ought to redecorate this room?”
    My stepmother fluttered her hands without looking up. “I’m not sure.… Perhaps Mr. Dancey …”
    “You know it’s hideous,” Sunny said.
    “It’s not!” I cried.
    “Shows your taste, miss,” Sunny said tartly. “The carpet’s all nubby and homespun and holey, there are cracks in the plaster, and there’s not even a lick of wallpaper. And that ghastly bird on the mantel!”
    “It’s a bittern,” I said under my breath.
    “It did what?”
    “It’s a bittern,” I said, louder. “My uncle Ed trapped it and had it stuffed.”
    “Whatever it is, must it lurk up there staring at me?”
    Once I would have agreed with Sunny that the bird was ghastly; as a child, I had been frightened of its long, pointed beak and its beady little eyes glaring down from the polished black mantel, but nowI loved it because everything in this shabby room meant home to me. I loved the furniture in the simpler style of the last century and my graceful harp of burnished wood, whose strings tinkled softly, hauntingly when anyone walked near it. The flaws—a cracked pane in the bookcase door, the funny, warped shadow the bittern cast on the wall, the indentations on the floor Rush had caused when he was stomping around inside with homemade stilts—only made everything more endearing.
    “Mama!” Sunny said piercingly again. When she saw her mother shudder, she lowered her voice and continued in a wheedling tone, “If you’ll just give me the money, I’ll take care of everything. Even these days, Memphis is sure to have all we’ll need, and Papa William left you plenty of cash—I saw.”
    “I don’t think—” Miss Elsa began, closing her fingers protectively over the purse she kept in her pocket.
    “You can’t spend Pa’s money on wallpaper!” I interrupted hotly. “Not when we need it for food, and heaven knows how long this war will last.” The stimulation of speaking my mind to Sunny these days was enjoyable. It felt as if I had loosened the corset laces I had begun cinching more tightly since Sunny’s comment about them.
    “It’d be fun, Miss Priss!” Sunny retorted. “Don’t you know anything about fun? I’ve got to have something to do here . I’m dying of boredom. Can’t you see I’m bored as a pancake?”
    I laughed out loud. “ ‘Bored as a pancake’? What is that supposed to mean?”
    My stepsister stared, baffled by my amusement.
    “Poor Sunny, you have no idea how idiotic that was, do you? Thesaying is ‘flat as a pancake.’ Who knows what someone as silly as you could be as bored as?” I laughed again. “I have to admit it was funny, though.”
    She compressed her lips. “Do you always have to make me feel stupid?” Her voice shook and she turned her back on me. “You’re just like my aunt and the teachers at school and—and everyone else. Always treating me as if I’m a useless fool.”
    These last words stopped me short.
    Could it be true? Could it be that all the while Sunny had been making me feel despicable and inferior, I had