Chapter 21
Bloody Jungle
ALISTAIR
After our coffee, Isobel hands over a bundle of flowers the size of a small child that the gardener had just cut from the garden.
“I have some business to take care of this morning. Please take these to Brumilde with my love—they are her favorites.”
Lavender and sweet peas and sprigs of rosemary, and the old-fashioned roses she grows along the south wall.
Still wet at the stems. The brown paper is ribboned at the base the way her gardener does it.
She is fully dressed but she is not coming.
Perhaps she will rest, but knowing my mother, I wouldn’t count on it.
Ivy is quiet on the drive. She doesn’t put her hand on my thigh the way she usually does, and her thumb works at the edge of a nail she has been chewing. The new development with Hargrove is worrying.
The hospital lobby smells of antiseptic mixed with both hope and despair.
Christopher is pacing the corridor outside Brumilde's ward when we get there.
He sees me and stops pacing and then starts again.
Ariana is on the bench with her hand on the small curve of her stomach, and Henderson is against the wall opposite, and the specific quality of his stillness tells me they have been arguing.
He comes forward to shake my hand and give me an update.
A nurse comes out of the ward as I approach, clocks the flowers in my arms.
“That's a lot of garden,” she says. “Come on, give them here—she's got half the florists in Ascot in there already, but we'll find a spot.”
I hand them over. She tells us Brumilde is stable, that she came round briefly in the night and said something about baby Alex which had everyone a bit misty-eyed, and is sleeping again now.
No visitors for today. They'll call if there's any change.
She takes the flowers into Brumilde's room, which, she informs us over her shoulder, is already, in her professional opinion, a bloody jungle in there.
Ivy laughs, once—a small damp surprised laugh—and I feel the relief of it move through my chest.
Alex is in the pediatric ward three floors up. He is awake, sitting up in his cot, the dressing looking wrong on his forehead. When Ivy comes into his line of sight his face brightens and both his small arms come up at once.
Ivy makes a sob-like noise and crosses to him and lifts him out of the cot. He tucks immediately into her shoulder. I put my hand on his back, and he looks up at me over Ivy's shoulder with those solemn eyes, and for a moment the three of us stand like that.
The discharge paperwork takes half an hour. When we come back down the corridor with Alex asleep in his car seat, Christopher and Henderson and Ariana are exactly where we left them, arranged in the same uncomfortable geometry, none of them having spoken to each other while we were gone.
I set the car seat down carefully beside the bench and take Ivy's hand in mine.
“There's something I need to take care of this afternoon,” I say. “Will you be all right without me for a few hours?”
Ivy looks at me for a long moment, and I watch the decision move across her face. Christopher stands ten feet away pretending not to listen.
Then she says, “No.”
Henderson hears it, too. Of course he does. He turns to Ariana. “Ari.”
“Don't.”
“I have to go with him.”
“No, Harry, you bloody don’t.”
“We keep each other safe.”
She didn’t have a response to that, and seemed to soften a little.
“Ari,” he murmurs, “you are my everything. You always have been. But you must understand that I have a duty to this family. Your family.”
“A duty?” she snorts. “You have done more than enough.”
“Ari. I’m here to protect you and the rest of the family. And to do that, my place is beside Alistair.”
Ariana’s nostrils flared, and I could see the muscles in her jaw tense. Her eyes come up very slowly.
“Your place?”
“Ariana—”
“Don’t call me that!”
“Ari—”
“Say it. Say ‘My place is beside Alistair’. Say that to me one more time and see what happens.”
He doesn't say it again. She doesn’t move her hand from her stomach.
“I don’t need you to protect me. I have never needed anyone to protect me.
You know what I am. You know what I can do.
If someone comes through the door of that house tonight I will handle it.
What I have been asking for is a man who comes home.
And what you are telling me, right now, in this corridor, is that when Alistair calls you will go.
Every time. For the rest of our lives. Because your place is beside him. ”
“Ari, that isn't—”
“It is. It is exactly that. You have just told me.” She looks at him very steadily. “So go. Go and take your fucking place.”
“Ari—”
“Just fucking go.”
She watches him move toward me with the same cold focused attention.
Ivy has watched all of this without moving. She is still holding my hand.
“Alistair.”
“We won’t be long.”
“Don't.”
“I have to.”
“You don't have to. You think you have to.”
“It's a debt. It's a conversation. That's all.”
“Elena was supposed to be a conversation too.”
“Ivy—”
“Elena was supposed to be a conversation, Alistair. And look what happened. The nursery exploded. Our son is asleep in a car seat with a dressing on his head because your last conversation. Brumilde almost died.”
Her voice is quiet but coolly focused.
“I can't keep doing this. I can't keep sitting in rooms that aren't ours waiting to hear whether the people I love are alive.”
I could tell her the things that would be true. That the debt will follow us home if I don't clear it. That Hargrove is the real threat—and I need to sort this out before I can deal with him with my full attention.
It kills me, but I have to go.
Christopher is behind me. Henderson is at my shoulder. At the bench, Ariana is on her feet, her back to all of us, her hand still pressed against the small curve of her belly. I hate the look in Ivy’s eyes, but I have to go.