Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“ L ady Vespera!” Mary’s sweet voice called out. My eyes fluttered open. Why couldn’t I see? Had the curse morphed into me being fully blind? Trust my wretched luck.
Gentle hands tugged at the silk on my face, pulling it down.
Harsh light pinning through my eyes like needles. I winced at the intrusion. After our brief moment of intimacy, Maaier had led me back to the room with the blindfold still in place. Urging me to keep it on without further explanation.
“Are you alright?” She said softly. I fumbled for a lie. Hoping Maaier wouldn’t be disappointed in me. I told her the ribbon helped me sleep a little better when it was completely dark. Mary accepted my lie easily. Believing that I needed darker shade to sleep and not an open curtain with the night shining through.
She bustled around me. Pulling a dress from the closet.
I sat up. My fingers brushing against something soft on my left. A scrap of paper laid bare.
I hope you enjoyed your brush with Death. We will meet again soon. My throat tightened at the words. A threat. I was going to be attacked again. I crumpled the note in my fist. Looking down at where it was first laid. The words written in the same handwriting as the book of death.
I shifted the blanket. The dark stem of a rose peaked out of the fabric sheets. I pulled it out. Careful of the thorns. The bloom came free. Beautiful in the morning light. The colour blooming against the white sheets. A red so sure I knew I wasn’t dreaming. My heart leapt to life.
“Vespera?” Mary’s voice grew distant as my heart thundered in my ears.
A grin widened over my face.
Dorian sat against her bedhead. Gazing at her hands still dotted with Maaier’s blood. Confusion lining her features.
“Is Grandmother awake?” I beamed despite her tense mood lingering in the air. Mary was startled at my sudden expression.
“She is in the back garden.” She cocked a brow but said nothing further.
“Do you really want to know about the curse? Such a dark topic for such a beautiful day.” The old woman smiled. I looked at the garden. A thin layer of snow covered the lawn. A frown covered my face. She was losing her mind the older she got.
I sat beside her on the bench, fixing a woollen blanket over her legs.
“You know all about the curse already.” She hugged herself tighter. An expression of annoyance lining her face. Dark circles lined her sagging under eyes.
“I know but has there ever been a record of colour slowly fading in rather than all at once?”
“Why do you ask?” She raised a brow. Eyes scanning my face.
“I was just curious as to what it would be like when I find my love.” Wasn’t exactly a lie. My mind had been wandering more often to that instance.
“No. The colour comes as a wave. Like a wave crashing on a dark shore. At least it did for me. Your mother was the same,” She sighed, turning back to the garden. Clearly not believing a word I said.
“I knew my colour was coming the moment I laid eyes on your grandfather.”
I smiled, taking her hand in mine as she spoke. The tale, though told a million times over, still warmed my heart each and every time.
Snow fell lightly on the lawn.
“Your great aunt Agatha never found her colour. Never wanted to either. You remind me of her sometimes.” She tilted her head at me, plucking a stray thread in the blanket free.
“Really?”
“She was the only one to be born a twin along with my mother in the whole of our bloodline.” Grandmother smiled, lost in the memory of her parentage. I focused my gaze back on the lawn covered in a coating of powdery snow.
“How did it all come about?” I asked. Keeping my voice soft. “Mother never told me.” I added. She was forewarned of the curse before she conceived but never expanded on how it came about to me.
“Six generations ago, Lizbeth Florian was said to have met a man who fell madly in love with her. He pursued her for months. Showering her in gifts and affection. Only to find out she was courting another man. Lizbeth had kept it hidden. For months she assured him that there was no other man. Until one night she found the man she was truly in love with dead in his bed. His skin was void of colour. She looked around only to find that she could see no colour at all. The man who had fallen madly in love with her appeared from the shadows and told Lizbeth that he had taken her colour and cursed her and each of her female descendants to bear the same effect. So they could see the world as he did. He warned that only when they find their love can they have their sight back.. That he took away her ability to see the beauty of the world just as she had taken it from him.”
I listened intently to the tale Grandmother told. Drinking in the information. A million more questions swirled through my mind, weighing heavily on my tongue.
A tremor ran through her. The cool breeze ghosted over her skin. Without a single word she stood, pressed her lips to my forehead and went back inside the manor.
Leaving me with the questions swirling and a million more forming.
I longed for the book to show me more. To teach me about death and what to prepare for. Seeing as both Death and Maaier were showing me red, I needed to determine which one was the correct one and the other half of my dark soul.
I lay on the library floor, staring at the painted ceiling. Boredom seeking out in the early afternoon.
Rolling my head as Dorian and Victor entered, I flashed them my widest smile.
“You truly have gone mad,” She sighed before laying beside me. Stretching out so our heads touched, our bodies forming a triangle. A bubble of laughter left me.
“Not as mad as you.” Victor teased, laying on my other side. His head touched both of ours.
“You must be pretty mad yourself, daisy boy,” Dorian said with an amused snort.
“Yes, well I suppose that it is true,” He noted. “But being around you two makes me seem like the most normal lad there ever was.”
I laughed deeply. Dorian herself cackled at the statement.
“We are said to be the most mad people in all of England,” I said through my giggles.
Dorian barked out a laugh once more. “Remember that time old man Ronald chased us down to the docks because you coughed in his store and they thought you were speaking a curse?” She said with a wheeze. Victor joined the laughter, his laugh like sunshine.
“Oh that man hated me! Completely believed I was the devil at ten years old.”
“Were you?” Victor chuckled.
“Oh yes. I was a terror.” I turned to him.
Dorian’s hands met my head. “Bullshit! You used to make me do the dirty work and you would run.
“I did not!”
“Yes you did. Remember when you said you wanted that candy from Madame Peters but you thought she would eat you so you convinced me to steal it for you? My bottom hurt for a week after that caning!”
“That was one time!” I laughed.
Dorian sat up, looking down at us both as she rattled off names of all those I supposedly forced her to terrorise. Victor was in a fit of laughter by the end of Dorian’s tale of how we stole a plant and brought it back to her father’s only to find it poisonous so we told the man we found it in the middle of the street when we returned it and told him a stray dog had stolen it too. The old man was so confused as to why two eight year olds were stealing his plant. From a church nonetheless.
Footsteps sounded outside the open doors. I didn't have to look to notice the shuffling foot falls.
“I had to convince that priest for an hour that you weren’t possessed by a demon after that incident,” Grandmother said as she passed. The three of us fell back laughing. My stomach and cheeks ached with the exertion. I hadn’t laughed this hard in a long time. I don’t think I had ever laughed like that prior.
“Alright, I guess I was the instigator,” I said as Dorian resumed her spot beside me.
A comfortable silence fell between us. The afternoon sun was beginning to creep in, illuminating Victor where he faced the window feet first.
“Tell us about you, Daisy. How much of a terror were you?”
Victor huffed out a laugh.
“I wasn’t a terror. I was the one sweeping the pews when you two came in with the pot plant.”
I roared with laughter at his words.
“Were you really?” Dorian said, her tone genuinely curious.
“Sure was,” He sighed. Not going any further. Dorian didn’t push, knowing full well it would spoil the mood.
“If you stepped foot in a church, Dori, I think it would burn down.”
Her small hand swatted my side as she reached for me.
“Says you, demon child!”
I grinned whilst the silence settled in, just three friends enjoying each other's company. Something I had never thought I would be able to see.
“Do you remember when you threw paint on old man Ronald’s horse and told him it was magic?”