Chapter 6 #2
It was a cold day. Cybil wore her silver riding habit lined with white fur, sleeves puffed so wide they resembled pauldrons, her red hair pinned up and tucked into a feathered black cap.
She did not whiten her face—the cold would freeze the paint, make it flake away.
But she reddened her lips, and dripped belladonna into her eyes, and she told herself she looked the picture of a respectable lady.
She told herself no one would see any darkness where they should not.
She took the path through the woods. The earth was wet and spongy, carpeted with decaying leaves, beneath Charmeuse’s thundering hooves.
The sun leaked watery beams of gold light through the gaps in the clouds.
There was an autumnal rot in the air, and an owl hooted softly from overhead.
Every autumn Cybil had ever lived had looked and sounded and smelt exactly as this one did, and for a moment, she wondered if her encounter with Richter the previous night had simply been another nightmare.
Cybil had never seen the woman before, even though everyone knew everyone in the village, and the forest then had seemed hostile and alien; a different place entirely from this familiar wood, with its burnished trees and dappled sunshine.
Then the road—a road she had previously only ever travelled with her parents as a small child; it looked just as it did in her memories—and the gates of the town, glinting grey and metal, rising as an unhammered nail from the earth.
Cybil paid to stable Charmeuse with the inn outside Ipswich.
Then she went to stare at the gates. They were open for the day’s trade, but there was a host of corpses swinging from the tops of the bars, the sunlight casting them into sharp relief.
Cybil did not know why they had been hanged; it could have been anything from murder to treason.
One of the corpses was a woman, bloated ankles peeking out beneath rain-rotted skirts.
Cybil found she could not look away from her—she felt, for some reason, as if she owed it to her to stare.
Cybil was hardly one to feel pity for corpses, to mourn for them, but seeing the dead woman made her feel flayed.
It made her feel as if anyone passing her by would turn to look at her and say, Should you not be swinging there, too?
For all those you have killed, all those you will burden?
And the moment that thought occurred to Cybil, she could not help but envision herself up there, too, swinging in the wind, the flesh sloughing off her, her eyes open and unseeing.
She felt a presence at her feet, and when she looked down, the shadow of the hanged woman had detached itself from its place and was floating slowly towards her, reaching out its arms. Cybil squeezed her eyes shut and attempted to calm herself.
Leave me, she thought, desperately, before anyone sees. No one may see—
There was an exclamation of shock behind her.
Cybil opened her eyes just as the shadow darted away from her, like a fish frightened by movement.
She turned to see a young man staring at her through the open gate.
For a moment, she feared that he had exclaimed because he had seen the shadow, but then she realised that she recognised him from the dance the previous night; he had been staring at her then, too.
He was more handsome in the daylight, fair and doe-eyed, with a strong jaw and broad shoulders.
There was a brace of rabbits dangling from one hand, and it was obvious he had come for market day.
‘You are Lady Cybil,’ the man said. ‘I saw you at the dance.’
Cybil flushed; it would not do if he told the village she was wandering about the town alone. ‘And you are?’ she said, as imperiously as she could, as if there were nothing amiss with her presence.
He kicked the cobbles beneath his boot, glancing between Cybil and the corpses. ‘Peter Oswyn,’ he said, very slowly. ‘I… Since you are here, I wished to thank you.’
Cybil blinked, surprised. ‘Thank me? For what reason?’
‘Last night. When you told the witchfinder to quit the village. It was brave. And I am sorry that you got muddy.’
‘Oh.’ Mollified, Cybil cleared her throat. ‘Well—I—it did not matter to me. It was only mud.’
‘You looked very upset.’
‘I was not.’
Emboldened, Peter took a step forward. Cybil shrank back instinctively; he did not seem to notice. Behind him, the noise of the town—the tread of feet and the cries of the market sellers—faded to a low hum.
He said, ‘You ought to be treated with respect. You are a lady, after all.’
He said lady with such awe that Cybil felt she ought to sprout wings and fly. ‘I… I suppose so.’
‘I never believed the rumours, you know. ’Bout you being cursed.’
‘I am not cursed,’ she said, keeping her face expressionless.
He glanced over her shoulder, towards the road. ‘What is it like up there?’ he asked her. ‘In Harding Hall? My cousin works the gardens. He says ’tis very grand.’
Recalling her solitary breakfast; her mother’s weak, piping voice through the door; the empty echo of her footsteps through the silent corridors, she replied, ‘It is fine enough.’
‘’Tis true the queen sometimes visits?’
‘She has not in a long time.’
‘Will she?’
‘I would not know.’ Cybil was disarmed by his earnestness, by the wide, adoring eagerness of his gaze. She took a faltering step back. ‘Listen, I—Master Oswyn—’
‘Peter,’ he said.
‘Master Oswyn. I have business here, in Ipswich. Business that is not with you. Because it is with someone else. Who, as I said, is not you.’ She cursed herself silently for her awkwardness. ‘I— No matter. I appreciate your greeting me.’
‘Oh.’ He glanced down at his rabbits, then back to her. His expression was pleading. ‘’Haps I could aid you? Do you know your way around the town, my lady?’
No one had ever asked to spend time with her, let alone with such desperation.
Propriety and logic dictated it would be best to dissuade him—but there was something so compelling about being wanted, especially when it happened so rarely.
Without wishing to, Cybil thought of Richter whispering in her ear: she had wanted her, also.
She had wanted her so much that Cybil must have dreamed it, because no woman in existence would hold another like that and tell her unashamedly how much she desired her.
Cybil looked at Peter, fair and sweet, smiling hopefully at her.
Comparing him to Richter was akin to comparing a raindrop to a tempest. He was real, and normal, and safe.
And considering her curse, perchance it endangered him for her to agree—in that manner, she was being cruel.
But she did not have the strength to deny herself this.
Surely, for one day, Cybil could allow herself the simple pleasure of a friend.
‘Very well,’ she told him. ‘I am seeking an apothecary. Could you take me there?’
There was a crow on the roofs of Ipswich, watching incredulously as Cybil simpered at a mortal boy with a soul no brighter than a firefly.
Miriam was frustrated, and the shadows echoed that frustration.
Diminished as they were by the daylight, they fluttered down Miriam’s throat, twisted themselves in her feathers, hungry and insistent; they desired Cybil as much as she did.
Patience, she told them, as she followed Cybil and Peter Oswyn toward the market square.
But she did not feel patient. After Miriam’s first meeting with Cybil, she had taken an oak tree by its trunk and torn it out of the earth, flinging it with a great groan to the forest floor.
She had never offered a deal that wasn’t then immediately taken, so in tune was she with the desperation of her victims. Now to encounter this—this capriciousness, this arrogance?
Miriam considered her interest a privilege, and yet Cybil seemed entirely unimpressed.
But then, Cybil was special—a rare delicacy, the sort of prize worth a chase.
In centuries, Miriam had never seen such a soul.
To consume it would likely be the greatest pleasure of her existence.
It was her conviction in that which now led her to such frustration.
No one could burn with such light unless they had some fire within them, some stubbornness.
It was to be expected that Cybil would put up some resistance.
It would be disappointing if she did not.
But this? This was an insult. To reject Miriam and take up with this man instead—it was akin to declining a banquet for a hunk of bread.
As they walked, Oswyn said something to her, gesticulating wildly with his dead rabbits, and Cybil actually afforded him a glimmer of a smile.
Truly, what was the appeal? In his colouration, Miriam thought Oswyn had something of unbaked dough in him, and it was hardly as if a woman as beautiful as Cybil needed to stoop so low.
But that was the thing about beauty, real beauty, which was sharp and distant and isolating.
Humans were so frightened of it. Mayhap this man was even commendable for his obvious infatuation.