He tugged Drew’s head right and then left, and Drew, with a flinch and a quick look at Mother, hollered, “Ow!” and she, her self-Containment breached by the one thing sure to breach it—any threat to her precious ones—closed the distance between herself and the threat in two or three long strides, raised the parasol by its pointed end, and smacked the side of the handle into the side of Lockwood’s head as hard as she could. Nathaniel winced with sympathetic pain; the force of the blow, the ferocity of the attack, seemed way out of proportion to whatever harm was being done.

Lockwood let go of Drew, one hand covering his cheek. In the same moment, Mother, now that she’d subdued the threat, had to punish it for being a threat and for making her lose her composure; quickly reversing her grip, she jabbed the parasol’s spike end into Lockwood’s ribs as he was getting to his feet. He looked down at his shirt, as if expecting to see blood, and then stood with one palm aside his face, the other on his ribs.

“Holy cow! I was only joking around.…”

“You keep your hands off him, and you watch what you say, Lockwood Braithwaite!”

Strands of black hair had fallen across her forehead, a tendril tumbled alongside an ear. Nathaniel never had seen her looking so wild, so fierce, quite ungoddesslike now, and he felt the same vicarious shame as he had watching Lockwood last night, the shame then not so much in seeing his half brother’s private parts but in seeing a previously private aspect of his personality suddenly revealed, and the shame now in beholding a heretofore hidden aspect of his mother’s character: the violence bequeathed by her ancestors, for when she’d swung the parasol into Lockwood’s cheek, Nathaniel had seen, with imagination’s eye, her father or grandfather raising a whip over a black back. For the first time ever, he was afraid of her.

“I didn’t hurt him,” Lockwood pleaded.

“You’ve been indulging yourself, haven’t you?” She brushed locks of undone hair, but they fell back across her forehead, and she swatted at them as she would at a mosquito. “Since last night, I believe. Isn’t that right? Moira tells me she found you in the library this morning, dead asleep on the desk, and—disgusting … And all on a Sunday morning, too.”

Lockwood said nothing, glanced over his shoulder at Moira, who suddenly found a reason to go back into the house. Nathaniel felt a little relieved—now he wasn’t sole possessor of the secret: knowledge of what Lockwood had done—that, too, must have been behind the whack Mother had delivered with such inspiration.

“I apologize, Mrs. Braithwaite. I … Well, now, don’t reckon there’s much I can say about that.”

“Most certainly not.”