Chapter 16 #2
Miriam pulled her closer. Esther resisted, just for a moment, but then begrudgingly leaned into the touch, allowing Miriam to hold her in her arms.
‘You said you loved me,’ Esther said, looking up at her. ‘As much as something like you can love.’
‘I did.’
‘Did you mean it?’
‘Yes.’
Her expression was flint, sharp and brittle. ‘Then let him go.’
Miriam wavered. She could hear Thomas whimpering on the floor. It would be so easy to end it now; so easy to step forward and snap his neck.
‘Let him go,’ Esther repeated, her face softening now, voice a low murmur, as she looked up at Miriam through her lashes in a transparent attempt at manipulation.
Was that not cruel? If Miriam hadn’t seen her as she had only hours ago, squirming on the bed in her ecstasy, it might not have mattered.
But she’d seen it now, and she wanted to see it again.
Miriam wanted to taste Esther in every way that was possible.
If she killed him, Esther would never forgive her for it. They had barely half a year until the deal was complete, and, at the very least, they could spend that time together—why not? Esther had yet to remember her past life. Perhaps, if Miriam was careful, she never would.
Miriam said, ‘If I allow you this, my dear, I expect to be repaid.’
‘I know. I am yours entirely, Miriam, if only you spare him.’
Miriam hummed in satisfaction, bowing down to brush her mouth over Esther’s neck.
‘Entirely,’ she agreed.
She looked over Esther’s shoulder at Thomas, who was curled on the rug, shoulders shaking. If his life was to be spared—well. There were other ways to punish him.
Go, she told the shadows, take what is left—and, like feasting maggots, the darkness swarmed toward the coffin on the bed.
Esther flinched in her arms, then pressed her face against Miriam’s chest so she wouldn’t see.
That was a shame; it was quite the performance.
The wood of the coffin began to rot and crumble, the scent of putrescence filling the air.
Thomas cried out, stood up, and reached toward the bed—but there was nothing he could do.
What was left of his wife’s body within began to spill out onto the sheets as the coffin itself disappeared, and the shadows took that, too.
They squirmed over the corpse, eating away at the decayed and mummified flesh, until all that remained was a pile of bones lying on the stained coverlet.
Thomas began to sob. Miriam ignored him. She stroked a loving hand over Esther’s head. Then she scooped her into her arms, and she carried her away.
The Season was almost over, and Esther felt as if it had lasted for centuries.
Thomas had locked himself in his rooms. Esther couldn’t blame him. Meanwhile, Isaac was as he always was—he came to breakfast the morning after Thomas had shot Miriam, and asked, ‘Did some furniture fall over last night? I heard a rather loud bang.’
‘I didn’t hear anything,’ Esther said. Isaac gave her a narrow-eyed stare, reaching across the table for the teapot. He was only ever half as na?ve as he first appeared.
‘You know,’ he replied, ‘you have an awful habit of trying to shoulder all the burden yourself. You could share it with me, sometimes, if you wanted.’
‘I wish I could,’ she said. And when he pressed her, she refused to respond.
She couldn’t stop thinking about poor Lily, consumed by shadows.
She couldn’t stop thinking about Thomas, the soft sobs he’d made as the coffin had crumbled to dust. And she couldn’t stop thinking about Miriam afterwards, once they’d returned to Esther’s room—her head between Esther’s thighs, smiling as if she were Paris with Helen in his bed.
There was only one event remaining that the Hardings were expected to attend: the Carroway Ball next week, the highlight of the Season, a party so pre-eminent in importance that missing it was akin to social suicide.
Still, Esther was little inclined to go.
She’d woken up that morning, and Miriam had been gone.
She might’ve wondered if the events of the previous night had been a dream, except she still had love bites sucked into her thighs, finger-shaped bruises pressed into her lower back.
Whatever Miriam was, she still seemed to understand Esther and what she needed, in the same way a clockmaker knows a watch.
She had somehow been able to take her apart and fit her back together; to give her pleasure of a sort that, even now, even despite her fear and her horror, made Esther squirm in her chair to think of.
She excused herself from breakfast. In her lime-coloured room, she tried to distract herself by considering her gown for the ball.
With the madness of the Season, she hadn’t remembered to visit the tailors, and so she was left with a relic from last year.
It was fine enough, she supposed, cream with lace to match, albeit a little stained—at a dance last year, another woman had ‘accidentally’ tipped her wine onto the hem.
Esther held up the dress and looked into the mirror, giving a moue of displeasure.
She pressed her fingers against the stain on the dress, closing her eyes.
She wanted it white, wanted to believe that it was.
So, as her power gathered, she conjured images of the colour in her head: blank paper, summer clouds, royal icing on a wedding cake; then snow falling in a forest, limning the leaves with ice, the pale clouds of breath on a winter’s day.
She pictured herself walking through that forest, the chill on her skin, her skirts heavy as they trailed the ground.
Then the flakes of snow weren’t cold anymore; they were warm: ash from a fire, not snow after all. In her mind’s eye, Esther looked up to see a building burning, the flames fraying the night sky, the heat making the air dry and caustic. A woman was screaming. Esther’s throat ached.
She couldn’t breathe. She was dying.
Esther gasped and opened her eyes.
The gown was white now, a pristine ivory, but the lace that trimmed it was the scarlet of fresh blood.
And the woman holding the dress in the reflection wasn’t her; or—it was her, but not quite.
Her hair was longer, loose to her shoulders, and her face was twisted into a sneer.
Around her throat there was a necklace of black-bruised flesh, as if someone had tried to slit the skin with an inked quill.
‘Do not trust her,’ the reflection said to Esther. ‘And remain vigilant. “Wars begin when you wish them to, but they do not end as you please.”’
It was a quote from Machiavelli: one Esther had learnt herself as a girl, when she’d torn through her father’s library.
‘Who are you?’ Esther said.
The reflection shook her head. ‘She has begun the war,’ she told her, ‘but we shall be the ones to finish it.’
Esther reached out to touch the mirror, astonished, but she found only her reflection. Her fingers pressed against the glass. When she pulled away, the only evidence of the encounter were the five smudges her prints had left.