Chapter 19 #2
A circle of salt. It seemed so simple, so easy—the Miriam in her mind, malignant and almighty, would never be contained by something so banal. But then it was obvious, wasn’t it?
Salt had prevented her from entering the townhouse, all those years ago. If she were surrounded by it, she wouldn’t be able to go anywhere.
Magic was exchange. Rosamund knew that. The rituals in this grimoire were pageantry—but Rosamund hypothesised that they were also the basis by which Miriam had been created.
She was a shadow given form: something summoned, something made.
If her makers had believed these things would weaken her, it was likely that they would.
Still, weakening was only one step in a more complicated dance.
More would have to be done to ensure Rosamund’s survival.
Miriam would start looking for her eventually, and Rosamund didn’t want to be found until she was ready.
She turned to the section on concealment, pen in hand.
Exhaustion made her eyes water. She looked at yet another long paragraph of unreadable gibberish, and for a moment, Rosamund felt despair.
What was the point of all this? Once the deal was up, it wouldn’t matter how hidden she was. Her soul would be Miriam’s.
Rosamund paused to consider this, recalling a promise she’d made two lifetimes ago.
‘My soul will be yours,’ she said to herself.
Then she looked to the mirror beside the bed.
In her reflection, two other versions of herself stood beside her, their throats bloodied and bruised, their hands on her shoulders.
They were smiling, and behind them, the shadows danced on the wall: necks stretching to the ceiling, flickering as the candles burnt themselves out.
Rosamund had the grimoire translated in full by the beginning of spring.
She spent her remaining time in school excelling in her classes and avoiding any interactions with the other girls.
And each night, she made a deal with herself: she called the darkness and bore the pain as she carved off slices of her soul for its plate.
She would not fear her own power—not this time.
If Miriam had ruled the darkness with terror, Rosamund would rule it with love.
She whispered to the night with affection and loyalty, fed her light to the shadows so they trembled with joy.
Don’t tell her where I am, she told the shadows.
Make me a ghost, a whisper. You fear her, but she cannot give you what I can.
I am a kinder mistress than she will ever be.
Over holidays, when she had to stay with her family in their Holland Park house, she wandered the hallways only half tangible, sending whispers into her family’s minds so they would forget she was there.
She did whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted; her siblings and her parents knew she existed, of course, but they recalled her presence with the gentle confusion of someone trying to remember a dream.
‘Oh, Rosamund,’ her eldest sister had once said, walking in on her in the library. ‘Where’ve you been all week?’
To which Rosamund had replied, ‘Here, with all of you,’ her voice laced with darkness—and to her sister’s mind, to all their minds, that was now the truth.
Rosamund graduated the next year with an offer to read history at Newnham College. She liked Cambridge well enough, liked the libraries in particular, the dry-paper hush of them; she enjoyed shadow-skating on the Cam during the summer, gliding her fingers through the tall grass along the banks.
Rosamund didn’t much like the people at college—just as, she found, she didn’t much like the people anywhere, after two deaths and five centuries.
It was ironic, in a way. There was no longer the whispered stigma of a curse to impose isolation, but Rosamund was still as isolated as ever.
Once the deal is done, she told herself, then I can do whatever I want.
But it rang hollow. Something in her had broken, at some point; maybe in Cybil’s life, maybe in Esther’s.
Either way, Rosamund didn’t feel capable of fixing it.
The ladies at the college discussed dictators and the Depression with the earnest and affected air of those insulated by privilege but determined not to be.
They spoke softly of the duty their blue blood and education had given them, the elected custodians of the greater good: Oh, think of it, think of how lucky we are.
Rosamund despised them for it, but she also admired them for caring at all.
She wanted to care, too, because that would mean that this was her life and she was living it, that the world and all its cruelties were hers to bear; that she wasn’t simply an echo of an echo of a woman who had died in a time when bringing up Wall Street and fascism would have you burnt at the stake for being possessed.
But she still tried, she really did. She tried to be alive, to act as Rosamund Harding would have—as if Rosamund Harding was all she was.
For a while, Rosamund dallied with a poet named Astride who wrote her sonnets without punctuation and wept at her beauty; it lasted two months before she gave up.
Astride had wanted sweetness and light and tearstained romance, but real love wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t sad.
Love was fury; love had blood and bones and entrails.
Her former lives whispered as much to her, whenever she almost believed otherwise.
That was why Rosamund could both hate Miriam and love her still, after all this time. For she loved her desperately, anguishing over her, longing for her, even as she despised her.
And so, in the end, she gave up on Astride and all the others.
She pretended to herself that she was still cursed, that it wasn’t her fault she was alone.
Rosamund lay in her bed the night before her final exams, touching herself as she pictured the woman who’d killed her, and thought: So much for redemption.
Rosamund’s dissertation was on the early work of Machiavelli, and she graduated with distinction. Her tutor called her work accomplished, but oddly cynical in tone. ‘If you choose to pursue academia further,’ he told her, ‘you may need to take a… softer approach.’
She had no intention, of course, of pursuing academia.
Her ambitions were rather more far-reaching; if things went her way, she’d be able to go anywhere she wanted, see all the parts of the world her previous lives hadn’t had access to.
So, she took an apartment in London, where she lived off her parents’ money and prepared herself for the end of the deal.
On her twenty-second birthday, Rosamund went with one of her sisters to a party in Pimlico.
The hosts were bohemians, a couple in matching caftans who took one look at Rosamund with her perfectly curled hair and her jewelled-buckle shoes and labelled her a ‘finishing-school princess’.
She wanted to ask them, later, as they talked about the dismantlement of the zeitgeist and the revolutionary spirit, whether they had ever set a man on fire just for the pleasure of seeing him burn.
But she refrained. Smiling grimly at her sidecar, she stood in the corner of the room, wondering why she’d agreed to come in the first place—why she was still putting on this mask, after all this time.
Rosamund wandered upstairs in search of somewhere quiet, where she could slip into the shadows and leave. She found one room that appeared unoccupied, but when she opened the door, she found two naked men on the bed in a rather compromising position.
She said, ‘Excuse me,’ mildly, and closed the door again. Rosamund wondered that she was still capable of shock—the mundanity of a human love affair was hardly enough to warrant it.
A moment later, one of the men burst out into the corridor. He was still buttoning his shirt. ‘Listen,’ he said, in a broad Boston accent, ‘I don’t know what you saw, but…’
The man was a giant, several heads taller than Rosamund, with acre-wide shoulders and hands the size of tennis racquets. He had dark hair and dark eyes, and when their gazes met, he flashed her a megawatt smile that could pop a lightbulb.
‘But?’ Rosamund prompted.
‘Well—y’know. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention it.’
There was no threat in the words, or even desperation; he was so innately confident in his own charm that he felt no need for either. Those gleaming teeth, the cut-glass jaw—there was power there. He was not afraid of Rosamund. Maybe he was incapable of fear at all. How refreshing.
‘Mention what?’ Rosamund asked, and the smile flashed again.
‘Attagirl.’ The man stuck out one of his enormous hands. ‘I’m Walter. Call me Walt.’
‘Rosamund.’
‘Wow, that’s a five-dollar name if I ever heard one. Rosie for short?’
‘No,’ she said, and he laughed: a laugh like cannon fire, booming through the corridor.
‘You’re gorgeous,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’
‘Listen—I’m finished with this party, I think. Want to go grab a drink somewhere else?’
Rosamund refused, as reflexively as breathing: an instinct born of centuries, really, to deny and push away, to isolate and hide. ‘I can’t.’
He slung an arm around her shoulder. Rosamund considered shrugging him off, but it seemed like a lost cause. ‘Yes, you can,’ he said. ‘I don’t bite, I promise. And I don’t know doodly squat about this town, so I could sure use a local to show me around.’
He wasn’t going to take no for an answer; that much was clear. On his head be it.
She said, ‘Fine. One drink.’
‘One drink,’ he agreed. ‘And then, I promise—you’ll never see me again.’
It wasn’t one drink. It was several, that night and the next, and then several more across the month, until Rosamund and Walter were definitively friends—because Rosamund liked him, for all his bluster and his bombast, and liking someone was such a novelty that it felt worth the effort.
Building a relationship with Walt made it feel like she was planning for the future, like she hadn’t given up on escaping the deal. One afternoon, they went to Claridge’s for lunch, where Walt ate three entrées and ordered dessert immediately after.
‘Pa’s getting antsy,’ he told her, through a mouthful of peaches and ice cream. ‘This whole vacation was supposed to be a couple of weeks.’
‘How long have you been here now?’
‘Three months.’
Rosamund snorted and took a prim bite of her own ice cream, leaving a soft rim of red lipstick halfway down the spoon. She was wearing a scarlet dress to match, with a fringe so long it made a sound like a waterfall as she moved. ‘He’s still sending you money?’
‘He’s hoping I’ll pick up a British girl and bring her back with me. He loves you people, you know that? The whole upper-class fox-hunting set, I mean. No offense.’
‘None taken.’
‘I think he thinks that’s how we’ll really cement our fortune. Marrying a duchess, or something. I dunno.’ He took a sip of his coffee, nose wrinkling. He grabbed three sugars from the bowl and dropped them inside.
Rosamund looked at his cup with disgust. ‘Three, Walt? You’re an animal.’
‘Thanks, doll,’ he replied with a wink. ‘You know, you’re his dream daughter-in-law—my pa, I mean. He’d be over the moon if we got hitched.’
‘A shame you’re not looking for a wife.’
He chuckled. ‘Yeah. Real shame. You’re just torn up about it, aren’t you?’ He took another bite, and then, with his mouth half full, continued. ‘You know what’s so great about you, Rosie?’
‘What?’ she replied, swirling her spoon around the bowl.
‘The lack of expectation. As in, I could stand up right now, go over, and lay one on that waiter, and you’d just shrug your shoulders and keep eating your ice cream.’
Rosamund looked down at her bowl. ‘It’s good ice cream.’
Walter’s smile widened. ‘What about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘No secret torch for some English fella?’
‘I’m a lesbian, Walt.’
He blinked. ‘Oh. Then—hey. Wait a moment.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve just had the niftiest idea.’
They were married a week later at the Register Office. Walt wore a blue shirt with a red bow tie. Rosamund wore a white pantsuit with a seal-fur collar.
Rosamund had agreed to Walter’s proposal with only one caveat: they would return to the States in time to see Walter’s father that Christmas.
She’d been planning to sail that year for her birthday, anyway, and this seemed like a good excuse to do it.
But a winter crossing meant choppy seas, a likelihood of storms—Walt complained constantly in the weeks before their departure.
‘Let’s just wait until spring,’ he said, as she was packing her suitcase. ‘No need to hotfoot it out of here. Don’t you want to spend your birthday on land? Why’ve we got to celebrate on an ocean liner?’
Rosamund took a book from her purse and carefully transferred it to the case. ‘I like the ocean,’ she said, and she pressed her fingers into the book’s cover; the embossed hawk seemed to shiver beneath her touch.
‘What’s so swell about a bunch of water?’
She closed the case and turned to look at him, smiling with the sort of satisfaction only centuries could provide.
‘It’s not the water, Walt,’ she said. ‘It’s the salt.’