shayna ♡’s Reviews > We Have Always Lived in the Castle > Status Update

I dusted the wedding-cake trim with a cloth on the end of a broom, staggering, and looking up and pretending that the ceiling was the floor...

When we had neatened the upstairs rooms we came downstairs together, carrying our dust cloths and the broom and dustpan and mop like a pair of witches walking home.

There were sparkles at the sink where a drop of water was swelling to fall. Perhaps if I held my breath until the drop fell Charles would go away, but I knew that was not true; holding my breath was too easy.

"We'll always be here together, won't we, Constance?"
"Don't you ever want to leave here, Merricat?"
"Where could we go?" I asked her. "What place would be better for us than this? Who wants us, outside? The world is full of terrible people."
"I wonder sometimes." She was very serious for a minute, and then she turned and smiled at me. "Don't you worry, my Merricat. Nothing bad will happen."

[Mrs. Wright,] "she bought the arsenic."
"To kill rats," Constance said to the teapot, and then turned and smiled at me.
"To kill rats," Uncle Julian said. "The only other popular use for arsenic is in taxidermy, and my niece could hardly pretend a working knowledge of that subject."

"The dining room...?" Mrs. Wright said timidly. "Just a glance?"
"Madam." Uncle Julian contrived a bow from his wheel chair, and Mrs. Wright hurried to reach the door and open it for him. "Directly across the hall,"

(Cont in comments)

"In some ways," Uncle Julian sailed on, "a piece of extraordinarily good fortune for me. I am a survivor of the most sensational poisoning case of the century. I have all the newspaper clippings. I knew the victims, the accused, intimately, as only a relative living in the very house could know them. I have exhaustive notes on all that happened. I have never been well since.”
(Cont in comments)

"Arsenic in the sugar," Mrs. Wright said, carried away, hopelessly lost to all decorum.
"I used that sugar." Uncle Julian shook his finger at her. "I used that sugar myself, on my blackberries. Luckily," and he smiled blandly,

(Cont in comments)

From page 16:

I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world…

From page 16:

I wondered if their parents taught them, …leading regular drills of their children, teaching them with loving care, making sure they pitched their voices right; how else could so many children learn so thoroughly?

Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you'll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!