The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney Page B

appraising eyes–like a farmer assessing a horse for broken wind. She’ll never find a husband if she looks at all men like that, he thinks, irritated.
    ‘Perhaps the wolves saved them from a fate worse than death.’ The cliché sounds, in her mouth, like a bad joke.
    ‘You don’t really think so.’ He is surprised at his boldness in contradicting her.
    Maria shrugs. ‘A few years ago, two children here were drowned in the bay. It was a terrible accident. Their parents grieved, of course, but they are still alive. They seem happy enough now–as happy as any of us are.’
    ‘Perhaps it is lack of certainty that is so hard to bear.’
    ‘Which enables the unscrupulous to prey upon your hope, until you are sucked dry.’
    Donald is surprised again by the things she says. He dimly hears his father’s voice, saying in that lecturing tone of his, ‘The desire to shock is an infantile trait that should disappear with maturity.’ Yet Maria seems anything but immature. He reminds himself that he doesn’t need to agree with his father any more; they are on different continents.
    ‘Mr Sturrock does not appear to be a rich man,’ Donald says, in a sort of defence.
    Maria looks past Donald down the street, then looks at him with a smile. Her eyes, unlike Susannah’s, are blue. ‘Just because you like someone, doesn’t mean that you can trust them.’ And with a bob of the head–almost a mockery of a curtsey–she walks away from him.
    Donald spends the rest of the afternoon and evening combing through Jammet’s possessions, but, like othersbefore him, he can find nothing that seems of relevance to his death. The Frenchman’s worldly possessions are stacked in a dry part of the stables, and he and Jacob, who supervised the emptying of the cabin in the interests of security, have sorted them into boxes and piles. It all adds up to surprisingly little. Donald tries not to think about how little his colleagues would be sifting through if he were suddenly swept off this mortal coil. There would be nothing at all to indicate these new but enormously significant feelings for Susannah, for instance. He vows to himself to write to her the instant he leaves Caulfield–absurdly, since they are still in the same house, and since Donald has taken the decision to wait until Mackinley and Knox have returned before setting out on what is probably a wild goose chase, he could be here for another day or two.
    He will ask for a picture of her, or a keepsake. Not that he is planning on getting himself killed, of course. Just in case.

 
    When I was a girl, while my parents still lived, I was troubled by what were termed ‘difficulties’. I was seized with paralysing fears that rendered me incapable of movement, even of speech. I felt that the earth was sliding away from under me, and that I could not trust the ground beneath my feet–a terrifying feeling. Doctors took my pulse and stared into my eyes before saying that whatever it was, it would probably disappear with the onset of adulthood (by which I think they meant marriage). However, before this theory could be tested, my mother died in unclear circumstances. I believe she took her own life, although my father denied it. She had been taking laudanum, and an overdose killed her, whether intended or not. I was increasingly plagued by fears until my father could stand it no longer and had me placed in a–not to put too fine a point on it–mental asylum, although it had a fancy name to do with exhausted gentlefolk. Then he too died, leaving me at the mercy of the unscrupulous superintendent, and I ended up in a public asylum, which was at least honest enough to call itself what it was.
    In the public asylum laudanum was freely available. First prescribed for the crippling panics, it became the thing I relied on, taking the place of parents or friends. It was widely applied to quieten troublesome patients, but I soon realised that I preferred to be in charge of administering it