1932: Hermione Ingrid Mallard (Auntie Duckie)
Private papers
You will not find me in the Peerage, though you will find my silver on the sideboard and my name in the account books. Men have always confused ownership with authorship. They think that because they signed the deed, they planted the tree; because they married the woman, they made the child. Nonsense. A spade digs whether or not you keep its receipt.
My sisters each had their way. Elspeth kept her diaries and Euphemia wrote her crimes. I kept a household, which is a trickier business than murder or memory. You may shoot a man once, but you must feed him every day until he dies.
As for my son, he is called a bigamist, though I prefer cryptomagist. A bigamist is clumsy: two rings, two churches, two witnesses who may compare notes. A cryptomagist works like a conjuror—one man, two houses, neither the wiser. I cannot decide if it was vanity or cowardice, but either way the women suffered for it, and I was left to mend the seams.
Marriage, I often said, is only housekeeping with witnesses. Octavia makes a whole etymology out of “to husband,” but she misses the simpler truth: a housewife is nothing but a bag of pins, and a house-man—as I know too well—is a bag of nails. Sharp, scattered, and always underfoot.
We Mallard women do not forget Jeanne d’Anatis. She taught us to laugh while calling a thing by its true name. Euphemia found her murders, Elspeth her musings; I found my spade. If you read on, remember: a spade is only a spade until it is used. After that, it is history.
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