Hunting for Silence (Storm and Silence 5)

‘So what?’ I demanded impulsively. ‘Let her go the devil! We don’t need her. We can rent a flat.’

Ella’s eyes went as wide as extremely scared, forkophobic dinner plates.

‘Rent a flat? You’re mad! How? With whose money?’

Mine. I’ve been saving for over a year now. I could do it.

The realization that I was no longer in my aunt’s power was almost scary.

‘I’d find a way,’ I said aloud. One day I would tell her the truth. One day. But not today. Today, after my talk with Amy, I had too much on my mind. Too much to do to waste my time with my aunt’s stupid schemes.

‘You are mad,’

Ella concluded. ‘Or sick. Let me feel your forehead. Do you have a fever? Do you feel hot?’

‘I am perfectly fine. And I’m telling you the truth, Ella. I would be able to support the two of us somehow.’

She didn’t look as if she believed me. And I didn’t dare tell her the truth. If my aunt squeezed it out of her, she would lock me up in my room and not let me out for a year. I might be moderately independent, from a financial point of view, but I was still a minor. Only on my twenty-first birthday would that old vulture lose all control over me, and that was still far in the future. Ella’s even farther. I couldn’t leave her alone to fend for herself. I had to help her somehow.

She gave me a sad little smile.

‘Thanks for trying to cheer me up, Lill. But I can’t run away. It’s not me. I just can’t!’

‘Ella, I—’

‘I know what you’ll say! That I’m being a bad, disobedient child, and that I should be grateful to her for all the good she’s done for me.’

No, that was actually not what was I was going to say. That sounded more like the kind of nonsense she would spout on occasion.

‘And I suppose I am being ungrateful, Lill, but I just can’t help it! I…there’s something you don’t know, and…’ She was squirming like an eel on trial for being too slippery. ‘I cannot say. I’ve sworn to keep it secret, but there’s something…Oh, this is torture! If only I could tell you! But…no, I can’t! I just can’t! I…I don’t know what to do, I—’

‘Oh, put a sock in it already, will you?’ I interrupted. ‘I know all about you and Edmund.’

Ella blinked.

‘You…know?’

‘Yes.’

‘You can’t know!’

‘Edmund. Piano tuner’s son. About this high, brown hair, brown eyes. Lives next door. Occupation: piano tuner. Hobbies: classical music, the occasional flutter, and smooching my little sister in the moonlight.’

‘You do know!’

‘Yes.’

‘Everything?’

‘Well, let me put it this way—there was this one time when you went to his house in the middle of the night, and he fell down while trying to climb out of the window, and you grabbed him, and pulled him in for a great, big—’

Ella’s face flushed beet-red. I hadn’t seen her looking so guilty since she was five and I had caught her with her hand in the cookie jar. She hadn’t actually taken any cookies, of course, but to make up for the sin of contemplation, she baked us fresh cookies three times in a row.

‘So you do know! But…how?’

I patted her on the back. ‘Sisterly intuition.’

Also, I had been listening in on her secret garden rendezvous from behind the nearest bush for, oh…how long had it been? One year?