Chapter II #2
Charlotte cannot help herself. She knows she shouldn’t—Sabine has warned her a dozen times about leaving the past in its place. But it’s the image of Sabine that drives her forward, up the path. Away from one life and toward another.
With each step, she tells herself she will turn back. With each, she tells herself she is only getting close enough to feel for signs of life, to make out the shape of minds within.
The sculptures her mother made peer out at her as she goes by, half-hidden by a rosebush or a hedge.
The fox. The crow. The cat.
And the rabbit.
Charlotte slows, and stops, and kneels. She runs a hand over the clay, feeling for the soft indents of her mother’s fingers, the thumb pad pressed like a signature into the back. How far she is from the girl who found its ruined body. How close she feels.
She strokes its small stone ear thoughtfully, and her mother’s parting words come rushing back.
Some people keep their heart tucked so deep, they hardly know it’s there. But you have always worn it like a second skin. It will make your life harder. But it will also make it beautiful.
“Who’s there?”
The voice scratches at the air.
Charlotte rises and spins round, scouring the dark until she spies the woman bundled in a lawn chair. She scolds herself—she should have heard the woman’s heartbeat. Should have felt her mind staining the air. Now that she sees her, she can’t imagine how she didn’t.
The woman is old—far too old to be out here at this hour, in this cold. A shawl rests around her narrow shoulders, but her hands are thin and bare, knotted in her lap. Her hair, once black, is gray, and gathered at her neck. Her eyes, once jade, have faded to a paler shade of green.
But it is still Jocelyn.
Her Joss.
“I know you’re there,” she rasps, and though her voice is so much weaker now, it is the exact same tone she took when they were young, and playing hide-and-seek.
When Joss was forced to be the seeker, and she was so convinced that Charlotte would leap out and frighten her—which she did, more than once, just so Jocelyn would shriek.
Charlotte doesn’t leap out now.
She comes forward carefully, until she’s close enough to make out Jocelyn’s shallow pulse, the soft tangle of her thoughts. A murmur of sadness, shot through with calm, contrasting threads of grief and hope and dread.
Charlotte continues until she’s near enough that the moonlight catches on her hair and cheeks, and Jocelyn looks up with those watered-down eyes, and sees her—Charlotte, who has not aged a day since eighteen—and the air around her narrow shoulders ripples, not with shock, or fear, but relief.
“Oh,” she says with a soft sigh. “It’s you.” As if they’ve been apart for hours, days, instead of decades. Jocelyn shifts a little in her chair. “Come to haunt me again, I see.”
Her slippered feet slide back and forth across the grass. An absent gesture, one she had when they were young.
Charlotte kneels before the chair, so they are eye to eye, face-to-face.
Jocelyn’s breath forms thin clouds that rise around her cheeks, and out of habit, Charlotte begins to breathe as well—she has learned to make a bellows of her lungs in winter, to force the air in and out, even though she doesn’t need it.
Charlotte stares into her first love’s eyes. She has imagined this reunion a thousand times, but now she cannot find the words.
“Joss . . .” she says gently.
“I dream of you, you know,” says Jocelyn. And then, “I dream of us.”
The words claw at Charlotte’s ribs. Wrap like hands around her throat. She wants to throw her arms around her friend, but doesn’t trust herself, her strength.
“I dream of another life,” Jocelyn goes on. “One where I wasn’t so afraid.” A sigh. “I was such a coward, Lottie,” she murmurs, and that name cracks something deep inside her.
The tears Charlotte has been holding back since she was first sent away now come rolling down her cheeks. To her surprise, Jocelyn reaches up one frail hand to catch the bloodred drop. “Did you find someone brave enough to love you?”
Sabine flares behind her eyes. Not as she is that night, but as she’s been, almost every night before, proud, and bold, and bright enough to burn.
“Yes,” Charlotte whispers.
“Good,” says Jocelyn. Her eyes go sharper then, mouth twitching with mischief, and she is eighteen again, racing away with the journal in her arms. Their hands knot together, one young and one old—and both cold. Jocelyn squeezes, but Charlotte doesn’t dare squeeze back.
“How cruel,” says Joss, the words little more than breath, “some nights you feel so real.”
Just then a door swings open, light spilling like a backward shadow down the steps.
A young man calls out into the dark. “Nan?”
Then his steps are coming down the stairs and Charlotte forces herself to let go of Joss’s hands, to pull away, retreat into the shadow of the nearest hedge. He goes right past her, his hair sleep-mussed and his voice bright with concern; she almost gasps.
God, he looks like James.
Her heart twists with sudden hope, then sinks as she remembers how many years have come between them.
And sure enough, this boy does not look like James as he would now.
He looks like James as he was that spring, when Charlotte left Clement Hall.
Younger, even. Her brother as he was that Christmas Eve when they were studying the stars.
Charlotte watches as he heads straight for the chair, and the withered woman in it.
“Nan,” he says, the air around him thick with worry. “It’s the middle of the night. What are you doing out here?”
Jocelyn blinks, gazes round the garden, doesn’t seem surprised to find it empty.
“Oh,” she says, dragging her attention from the dark. “Talking to ghosts.”
He frowns, and all the things he thinks but doesn’t say cloud the air around his head. “Come,” he says, “let’s get you back to bed.”
He helps her from the chair, scolding gently about the hour and the cold as he leads her up the stairs, and into the stream of lamplight, his shoulders strong, and hers hunched, her gray hair ignited silver.
Charlotte watches until the door swings shut, snuffing out the light.
Listens until she can hear nothing but the whisper of the garden, her turning thoughts, her too-still heart.
Then she sinks into the grass and draws her knees into her chest, her whole body shaking with the grief.
How easy to forget the way time wears on other people when she is with Sabine, the two of them preserved like insects inside amber. How easy, and then how hard, to see the proof of it, that life races on, relentless in its pace.
Sabine was right.
This is why the past is left behind. Why they can only move forward, like Eurydice and Orpheus, never glancing back, lest they be trapped among the dead.
Charlotte stays until the darkness ebbs.
Until the first wisps of light begin to seep around the edges of the sky and throw tendrils through the garden. Until the warning ache sets in beneath her skin, behind her eyes.
Then she stands, and walks away.
She plucks a single rose on her way out, cradles the red bloom against her chest as she retraces the path that carried her across the downs.
By the time the stolen house comes into sight dawn has broken fully, molten daylight spilling over everything.
Her head pounds, limbs shivering as she crosses the last stretch of lawn and stumbles through the door, into the safety of the darkened hall.
Charlotte braces herself against the wall, the sickness withdrawing like a tide. She steels herself and looks around. The corpses have been cleared away, the only evidence of last night’s crimes a missing rug, a few stray flecks of blood against the wall.
The house is quiet, but not empty.
The knowledge fills Charlotte with a tired dread, and also grim relief. She does not want to be alone. Not now.
She climbs the stairs and finds Sabine where she always is, in the finest room, on the finest bed.
But despite the hour, she is not asleep.
Instead, Sabine sits perched at the foot of the bed, before the window. The curtains have been parted, so she sits facing the early-morning light, as if in penance. Charlotte flinches, crosses and pulls the curtains shut, plunging the room safely back into shadow.
Sabine slackens, just a little, in relief. Charlotte lies down, and Sabine lies with her, so they are face-to-face atop the sheets. Charlotte looks into her eyes. Eyes she knows so well, amber-brown and candlelit, no sign of the stranger from earlier that night.
Sabine doesn’t ask her where she went, doesn’t ask her anything, only reaches up to touch her cheek. Charlotte flinches back, and then, seeing the pain that crosses Sabine’s face, takes her hand and brings it to rest against her soundless heart.
Sabine speaks into the sliver of space between their lips.
“Forgive me,” she whispers. Fifty-two years, and it is the closest she has ever come to an apology.
Her golden eyes find Charlotte’s. “I don’t know what happened.
I don’t know why. I only know it wasn’t me.
” And for the first time, Sabine lets her graze the edges of her shuttered mind, lets her feel the aura of confusion, fear.
“Please believe me,” she says, before the walls go up again.
And here is the awful thing about belief.
It is a current, like compulsion. Hard to forge when it goes against your will, but easy enough when it carries you the way you want to go.
In that moment, Charlotte wants so badly to believe Sabine.
And so she does.
“It’s all right,” she says, stroking her lover’s cheek. “I’m here.”
Sabine sags in relief, leaves a trail of kisses down her throat.
Fatigue rolls over Charlotte like a tide, and she turns away, Sabine’s hand still clasped in hers. Sleep drags at her limbs, her mind, and she lets herself sink into it, is just slipping beneath the surface when Sabine whispers into her hair.
“Promise me something.”
Charlotte makes a hmm ing sound, awake enough to listen, but too tired to form words. Sabine shifts closer in the bed, until their limbs are flush, their bodies molded to each other.
“Promise,” she says, soft and low, “that you will never hurt me.”
Charlotte frowns. It is not the promise she expected her lover to extract. Promise you will always love me, perhaps. Promise not to leave again. But this? It strikes her as an odd request. After all, she has never tried to hurt Sabine.
She cannot imagine that she ever will.
Charlotte does not wonder, then, why Sabine would ask for such a thing. She does not know the power of the words. The weight of them. And she is tired. So tired. She will tell Sabine what she wants to hear, if it will bring her peace. If it will let Charlotte rest.
“I promise,” she murmurs.
Sabine sighs.
And Charlotte lets the dark fold over her.
They rise at dusk.
By night, they’re gone.
Charlotte feeling rested, and Sabine seemingly restored, so much her old self that Charlotte is convinced that what she saw the night before was nothing but an awful dream. Some kind of fit, or perhaps even a possession. The stranger that replaced Sabine a foul spirit, bound up with the house.
And so, they rid themselves of both.
They set out arm in arm beneath the veil of night, Sabine awash in beauty, and Charlotte in relief. They escape that cursed property, the demons lurking in it, and she tells herself that all is well. Her lover is back. The danger has passed.
And for a while, at least, she is right.