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  • Sisters of the Blood
  • Michael Humfrey (bio)

ON the evening of Fern and Alicia’s last day at their hotel on the Lizard peninsula it rained a little. The two women put on their plastic jackets and walked across the deserted gardens to the edge of the cliff. Each year they had noticed how the insatiable sea stole more of the land in front of the hotel, and the coastal path, which had previously run along the strip of public land between the hotel’s lawns and the water, had at last been rerouted to pass behind the building itself. The old wooden fence at the top of the cliffs had not been maintained, and one of the posts had been lost with the last movement of soil from the edge of the cliff to the sea. A thin mist was drifting in with the rain to veil the shoreline, and the women were glad of their jackets.

Fern and Alicia could not remember a time when they had not known each other. They had been born in the same week of the same month, and their houses were separated only by a graveled driveway and a narrow strip of emerald grass. There had never been a fence of any kind between them.

Their parents, who had no other children, were happy that the two girls took to each other at their first meeting. By the time they were three years old, everyone agreed they were inseparable. “Sometimes I think they’re more like twins than twins,” Alicia’s mother told Fern’s mother. “They even seem to think alike.”

The likeness did not extend to their looks. Fern was blonde, petite, and pretty; Alicia dark-haired and—even as a baby—heavy-set and big for her age. Otherwise, as Fern’s mother agreed, they really did seem to think the same thoughts. They shared their favorite toys and gave each other their chocolate eggs. No one ever heard them fall out over anything. Almost the first words they spoke had been each other’s names.

When they were eight years old, they swore lifelong friendship in a private ceremony of their own making. They pricked their index fingers with a darning needle, pressed out a quivering drop of blood onto a white saucer and mixed together the [End Page 547] separate drops into a single, shining, scarlet bead. “Best friends for ever and ever,” they chanted as their blood fused together at the bottom of the saucer; then, “Best friends, true unto death,” they promised each other. But Fern was not satisfied: “And death to the first who breaks this oath,” she added; and Alicia clasped her friend’s hand and nodded gravely in agreement. “Yes, bloody death,” she intoned. And so the pact was sealed between them.

“Sisters of the Blood,” they had called themselves from that moment onward.

Fern and Alicia had gone to the same schools and then to the same college. They found jobs with the same firm, married in the same year and lived—as their parents had done—next door to each other. Fern’s job involved traveling for their company; Alicia, who had a way with figures, worked in the accounts department.

Only in their choice of husbands did their tastes differ. Fern married Mark, an ambitious, extroverted young engineer, whose sense of fun and affectionate nature had attracted her from the moment she first met him. Alicia’s husband, Philip, was a designer, whose job, some thought, perfectly suited his unexciting, gentle, considerate personality. Like Fern he traveled several days each month on the business of his firm.

Marriage in no way affected the bond between Fern and Alicia. Both their husbands were well aware of their lifelong love for each other, approved of it, and agreed at once that they should all spend their annual holidays together.

That first year they discovered in Cornwall the hotel on the cliffs of the Lizard peninsula. The hotel stood on its own large grounds, a mile or so from the nearest village. It was a serene and beautiful place, and all four of them came to love it. When Fern’s children...

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