“PUT LOTTIE’S IPAD DOWN, LIV,” said my mother. “You know perfectly well that I won’t have that sort of thing at meals.”
“I have to look something up for school. If I had a smartphone like everyone else, I’d have done it long ago.” Much to our annoyance, Mia and I only had ancient, clunky cell phones for emergencies, obsolete SIM-card models passed on from our father. Useless and embarrassing.
I entered “sub umbra floreo” into the search field.
“Latin?” asked Mom, who could obviously read at a distance better than I’d expected. “What subject do you need that for?”
“For … er…” The search engine was spewing out any number of hits. I let my finger run down them. Sub umbra floreo—“I flower in the shade.” The inscription was part of the coat of arms of Belize. Hmm. “Geography,” I said. “Where exactly is Belize?”
“In Central America. Next door to Guatemala. Its former name was British Honduras.” Sometimes Mom was faster than the iPad, and she knew at least as much as Wikipedia.
“Aha.” I wondered where my unconscious mind had fished up the motto of the state of Belize. I was fairly sure that today was the first time I’d ever heard of the country. So how could I dream of it? It was really odd, all the stuff you could subconsciously snap up and store away.
Another odd thing was that I could still remember almost every detail of last night’s dream. Even as a child I’d had vivid dreams (I fell out of bed quite often, and for a while I went sleepwalking. Lottie liked telling the story of how she found me standing beside her bed and ordering an orange sorbet in Spanish). But normally my memories of a dream disappeared much faster than I liked, sometimes just seconds after I awoke, never mind how exciting or important or funny the dream might have been. So for a while I got into the habit of writing down particularly interesting dreams right away. I always kept a notebook and a pen on my bedside table. (I had to hide the notebook in a safe place during the day, because of course I didn’t want anyone else reading it.) But there’d been no need to write last night’s dream down.
Moreover, I’d been woken in the night not by a genuine thunderstorm but by the sound of the garbage men out in the street, and the clanking of bins and other containers. My heart had still been in my mouth as I struggled up from the floor and tried to sort my thoughts out. Crazy as the dream might have been, it had seemed to me so real that I’d switched on the golden lamp on my bedside table and taken a surreptitious look at the soles of my fluffy socks, to see if they showed traces of earth from the cemetery, then checked to see if I had resin on my hands or cedar needles in my hair. Of course there was nothing of the kind.
By then I could laugh at myself. At least I couldn’t accuse myself of a lack of imagination.
“Please can I have another piece of toast?” asked Mia, as I typed “Christina Rosetti” into the search field. It was her grave that Grayson had been looking for in the dream. I spelled the name wrong, but there were any number of hits.
“That’s your fifth piece of toast,” Mom said to Mia. And she told me, “Didn’t you hear what I said? No iPads at meals. Put it away.”
She was too late, because the display had just revealed some surprising facts: Christina Rossetti really was a poet of Victorian times, died 1894, buried in London—and in Highgate Cemetery at that.
This was getting a little sinister.
I closed the cover of the iPad and pushed it a little way away from me.
“Would you rather I was anorexic?” asked Mia. “Anorexia is a great danger to girls of my age, particularly in unstable family remonstrances.”
“Circumstances,” said Mom, automatically correcting Mia as she handed her the bread basket.
But it wasn’t as sinister as all that, when you came to consider it carefully. I ignored my goose bumps and opened up the iPad again. There was sure to be a logical explanation. And after all, my mother was a lecturer in English studies, so it was more than likely that I’d heard her mention the name of Christina Rossetti, particularly as she was a contemporary of Emily Dickinson, and Mom and I both loved Emily Dickinson’s poems. The information about where she was buried must have lodged itself somewhere in my unconscious mind, and last night it had made its way into my dream. Simple.
On the other hand … I couldn’t remember the precise wording of the poem that Grayson and Henry had quoted in my dream, but it had rhymed and it sounded genuine. And good. If my unconscious mind had made that up all by itself, I was probably a genius.
“Mom, do you know anything about Christina Rossetti?”
“Yes, of course. I have a lovely illustrated edition of Goblin Market. In one of my crates of books.”
“Did you maybe read it aloud to me when I was little?”
“I could have.” Mom took the iPad away from me and closed the cover. “But you really only liked poems with happy endings. The poetry of Christina Rossetti is rather gloomy.”
“Like the atmosphere in this apartment.” Mia looked at the kitchen doorway through which Lottie had disappeared just now. After her second cup of coffee, Lottie always disappeared into the bathroom for a quarter of an hour—every morning without fail. “Have you told Lottie that you and Mr. Spencer will soon be throwing her out, or do we have to do it?”
“No one is going to throw Lottie out,” said Mom. “Her time as an au pair in this family is simply coming to an end—and Lottie has known that for a long time. You two aren’t children anymore, even if the way you act is anything but grown-up. I was really ashamed of you last night.…”
“Ditto.” Mia had spread about half a pound of marmalade on her toast and was trying to cram the whole thing into her mouth, before it sagged and gave way in the middle.
“But where will Lottie go if she can’t work for us anymore?” I asked. Christina Rossetti and my crazy dream were forgotten for the time being. “She hasn’t studied or trained for anything. If you and Papa hadn’t persuaded her to stay on after her first year as an au pair with us, then she’d have studied and had a career. She gave all that up for us. And now she’s old, she has to be told that she isn’t wanted anymore. I call that shabby.”
Mom laughed briefly. “Good heavens, Liv, don’t be such a drama queen! First, it was Lottie’s own decision to stay on, and if you ask me, not a bad one. She’s seen a great deal of the world, she’s learned foreign languages, and goodness knows she’s not earned badly in all these years—all your father’s maintenance payments for you two have gone toward her salary. Second, she’s only thirty-one—and if that’s old, then what would you call me?”
“Ancient,” said Mia with her mouth full.
Mom sighed.
“What did Lottie say when you told her she was going to be fired?”
“I’m sure she cried.” Mia looked as if she were going to cry herself. “Poor old Lottie.”
“Nonsense,” said Mom. “Of course Lottie will miss you, but she’s looking forward to new challenges.”
“Oh, sure.” Did she think we were stupid?
“Anyway, it’s not going to be as soon as all that,” said Mom. “She’ll certainly be staying with us until Easter, probably until the end of the school year. We’ll see. And she has plenty of time to think what she’d like to do next.”
“Buttercup will pine away if Lottie isn’t here anymore,” said Mia. “Remember how Lottie had to go to Germany when her granny died? Buttercup didn’t eat for seven whole days.”
I looked at the door, but Lottie’s quarter of an hour wasn’t up yet. “Poor Lottie, I expect she’s trying to be brave. This will break her heart.”
“You may be taking yourselves a little too seriously,” said Mom. “Can’t you envisage someone enjoying her life even without you?”
“Yes. I bet that’s been your dream ever since you met Mr. Spencer,” said Mia.
Mom rolled her eyes. “Seriously, mousies, don’t be so selfish. Lottie might meet a man, settle down, and have children of her own.”
Mia and I looked at each other. I was pretty sure we were thinking exactly the same thing.
“That’s a great idea!” said Mia, her eyes shining. “If we want Lottie to be happy, we just have to find her a husband.”
Mom laughed at that. “Right,” she said. “Have fun.”