Following this warning, Mr. Picton anxiously inquired as to why the Doctor’d been so determined to have me come along on the visit. “You’ll forgive my asking, I hope, Doctor,” he said. “And you, too, Stevie. I understand, of course, how crucial Clara’s reactions to Mr. Montrose may be-”
“Provided,” the Doctor interrupted, “that the Westons have not prejudiced her mind in that area.”
“Oh, no, not at all,” Mr. Picton answered quickly. “I come out to visit Clara fairly regularly. The Westons, as I say, are aware of my suspicions about Libby, and though they’ve never said as much, I think that their years of taking care of her daughter have planted doubts about the woman’s honesty in their minds.” He paused, glancing at me. “But Stevie-what is his role to be?”
The Doctor looked at me with a smile. “Stevie, although he would be loath to admit it, has a unique and reassuring effect on troubled children. I’ve observed it many times at my Institute. And bringing at least one person who is not an adult will make us appear far less threatening, I suspect.”
“I see…” Mr. Picton replied.
“But tell me,” the Doctor went on, “has she really not uttered a word since the attack? Not a sound?”
“Sounds, occasionally, yes,” Mr. Picton answered. “But no words.”
“And what of written communications?”
“Again, no luck. We know that she has the ability-Mrs. Wright, the housekeeper, taught her the basics of both reading and writing. But Clara’s done neither since the attack. Doctor Lawrence and his colleagues attribute it to the spinal damage. You may not believe it, Doctor, but they actually told me that the injury must have had some kind of indirect effect on her entire nervous system!”
The Doctor almost spat in disgust. “Idiots.”
“Yes,” Mr. Picton said. “Yes, I must say, they never seemed to pursue the matter very energetically. Not that I’ve been able to do much better. I’ve tried every way I can think of to get her to tell me something, anything, about what happened. But no luck. I hope you have some experience getting people with such afflictions to communicate, Doctor-because this little girl is a hard case.”
Cyrus and I glanced at each other quickly, and then I turned around to stare straight ahead. Mr. Picton, of course, had no way of knowing what he’d just said, no way of knowing exactly what kind of bittersweet experience the Doctor did in fact have with getting through to people-and to one person in particular-who’d been written ofí” as unable to communicate with the rest of the world. For the Doctor’s lost love, Mary Palmer, had suffered from just such an affliction, and his efforts to find a way to communicate with her had formed the beginnings of the bond between them that had endured right up to her death.
“I… believe I know some techniques that may prove effective,” was all the Doctor said.
“I hoped you would,” Mr. Picton answered. “Indeed, I hoped you would. Oh, and one more request, Doctor: when you meet Clara, make a note of her coloring.”
“Her coloring?” the Doctor repeated.
“Her hair, eyes, and skin,” Mr. Picton went on with a nod. “I’ll tell you something you’ll find very interesting about it, on our way home…”
As we rolled up the Westons’ long drive, we caught sight of a thick-armed, middle-aged man and a boy who looked a little older than me standing on the edge of a piece of pastureland what was located between the house and a stream that ran at the base of a high wooded hill behind it. They were wrestling and struggling with a section of barbed wire, trying to mend it. On the other side of the house was a big vegetable garden, where a girl in her late teens and an older woman were weeding and tending to produce. Like the man and the boy, they were dressed in worn farm clothes and were going about their business with a kind of determination what was enthusiastic and a little frustrated at the same time. It was the sort of attitude I’ve seen in a lot of similar farmers, over the years: the manner of people who have to fight against everything that Nature and human society can throw at them just to get by, but who still have a strange love for a life lived so close to the land.
There was a fifth member of this little family, too, a girl who, I already knew, was just shy of nine years old, and who didn’t fit into the peaceful scene around her quite so comfortably as the others. Her dress wasn’t made for working: even with two good arms and hands, a kid her age wouldn’t have been able to do a whole lot of the kind of physical labor a place like that required, and it was obvious even from far off that this little girl couldn’t use but one of her upper limbs. She just sat at the edge of the garden with a doll and what looked like a big pad of paper in her lap, her good left hand going over the paper again and again with some kind of writing or drawing utensil.
The smell of manure started to hit us about fifty yards from the house, which was set close to a big brick-red barn. When they saw our rig drawing up, all five of the residents came ambling in from their chores, the little girl moving the slowest and most cautiously and needing to be nudged along by the woman. As they got closer, I could see that the Westons themselves looked to be in their forties or fifties, the deep creases in their leathery skin and the graying of their hair making any more exact guess impossible. They had broad, kindly faces, but that didn’t mean much to me: some of the worst people I’d ever come across in my life had been kindly looking foster parents-not a few of them farmers-who took in poor kids from the city and treated them like slaves, or even worse. But the two teenage kids looked happy and healthy enough, so I wasn’t too suspicious to start out with.
As Mr. Weston-Josiah, we discovered his name was-approached Mr. Picton, he glanced at me and Cyrus with a kind of concern that caused the pair of us to hang back a bit, away from the others.
“I took it as understood that there weren’t to be but one visitor, Mr. Picton, sir,” he said.
“Yes, Josiah,” Mr. Picton answered. “That being Dr. Kreizler, here.” Mr. Weston wiped his hand to shake the Doctor’s. “But the other gentleman and the boy are associates of his, and he feels that he may need them in order to accurately assess the situation.”
Josiah Weston nodded, not happily, exactly, but not in a hostile way, either. Then his wife spoke up: “I’m Ruth Weston, Doctor, and these are our children, Peter and Kate. And hiding somewhere around here,” she went on, pretending to search the area behind her skirt where Clara was hiding, “is another young lady…”
Clara didn’t make any move to reveal herself yet; and seeing this, Peter smiled and said, “We’ll get what we can finished while there’s light, Papa. Come on, Katie, and give me a hand.”
The pair of them went back off to the chore of mending the wire fence. They looked pretty cheerful as they did, and from this I figured that they had in fact been treated well during their years with Josiah and Ruth Weston. Once they were gone, little Clara started to appear from behind Mrs. Weston slowly, her pad of paper and doll tucked under her left arm and a bunch of pencils held tight in her left hand.
“Well!” Mr. Picton said, merrily but gently. He’d caught sight of Clara, but was glancing around as if he hadn’t. “Where is my little girl? I’d hate to think I came all the way out here only to find that she’s disappeared… no sign of her? All right, then-thank you, anyway, Ruth, but I suppose we’ll just have to head back to town.”
Mr. Picton started to walk back toward the surrey, and then Clara rushed out from her hiding place to tug at the tail of his jacket with those parts of her thumb and forefinger what weren’t engaged in holding the pencils. As she did, I got my first really good look at her (though in fact it was my second overall, since I’d seen her likeness in the group photograph hidden in the secretary at Number 39 Bethune Street); she was a skinny little thing, with light brown hair gathered into one big, wide braid at the back of her head; eyes of a color similar to the hair (though, I noted uneasily, a touch more golden); and pale skin with very rosy cheeks. Like most kids who’ve seen things at an early age that nobody should ever have to, Clara’s skittish movements were echoed by the pitiable nervousness of her silent face.