Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Nine
Before dawn, Annette and Petunia, helping one another wade through the thick, rock-like continent of snow, which reached to their shoulders, bearing little but two small bags and Rosella’s memoir, shut their eyes to the dark wind, which tried to pry open their lids, cackled in their ears, cracked apart their lips, and stabbed up their nostrils. They’d thought it all through: they might very well die, today, but, even then, to die in protest at their world would at least signal their derision. Even if no one knew; if they were presumed to have followed Marcel and Deirdre off the precipice; even then, their protest would have registered, they believed, somewhere, somehow. But if they survived—then they’d find shelter, be taken in by a farmwife, in defiance of her husband, whose guests would castrate him for his ill humour, absorb his wife into their ranks, and press onward, onward, to Petunia’s sister’s house in Picardy, then to Paris, to London, to all the capital cities, their numbers swelling with sisterhood, unreconstructed cocks falling to the gutters of Westminster in their thousands.