Chapter VI
VI
Charlotte walks between the shuttered stalls, scouring the ground for flowers.
She searches what’s left of the little makeshift market, and finds mostly leafless stems. Half-trampled buds. Heads crooked or bent or losing petals.
Before this new war broke out, she spent whole evenings wandering the empty aisles of Covent Garden’s flower stalls, surrounded by the heady scent of peonies and roses. But Jubilee Hall was commandeered, like so much of London. Put to better use.
Everything is worse this time.
The wailing sirens, the shaking ground, the constant haze of fear.
Month after month the residents of London vanish—some to the safety of the countryside and others to the front, while death wafts back across the Channel, and clouds the air like smoke.
Charlotte hates it here, has tried a dozen times to talk of fleeing north, or south, or west, but Sabine insists they stay in London. It’s easier to hunt, she says, when so many disappear.
Charlotte suspects it is a test.
To see if she will keep her word, or seek out Antonia again.
Her head turns, eyes drifting even now toward Southwark as she wonders if the Way Down is still there. She doesn’t know.
She stops, foot hovering over an almost perfect rose.
A stunning find, given the dregs that litter the ground.
Charlotte kneels, adding the bloom to the other castoffs she’s collected.
She drags in a breath, tasting the air, and immediately wishes she hadn’t.
That patina of grief and panic fills her chest, her mind, makes her feel like she’s going mad.
Sabine was wrong. There is no way to block it out.
She’s tried. Tried to clog her ears, cordon off her mind, but it is impossible.
All she can do is hide how much it still disturbs her.
Sabine has no patience for Charlotte’s hysteria, as she has named it, while Charlotte, for her part, can hardly bear her poise. Nothing seems to disturb Sabine, whose chief complaint is that the rationing has made the blood taste bland.
Charlotte stared at her when she said it.
Wanted to be aghast, and instead felt only sad.
What happened to the woman who seduced her on the stairs?
The one who taught her how to dance in hidden parlors, how to dream and want and take more than she was given?
The one who ran barefoot with her through empty castle halls, and made her heart feel like it had never stopped beating?
Charlotte wonders where she is right now.
They were together earlier that night, strolling down a half-empty road, as strangers with hunched shoulders hurried by, and Charlotte suggested that they pick someone together.
But Sabine was strange, distracted, too restless in her skin, and eventually she pulled away, and announced that she would take a walk alone, and meet Charlotte back at home.
Charlotte watched her go, and felt . . . relieved.
She is so tired of keeping up appearances, pretending that this lonely life isn’t wearing her from stone to sand.
She crouches to rescue a trampled peony, and brings the makeshift bouquet to her nose. Closes her eyes as she inhales and imagines herself back at Clement Hall.
A memory of laughter. The tickle of fresh grass. Her mother’s voice, and—
An air-raid siren whines to life, a wretched, haunting howl.
Charlotte sighs, presses the little bouquet to her chest. She looks up at the sky, searching for the edges of a plane, wonders what would happen if she held her ground, and something fell. Would her fragile heart be crushed, or would she crawl from the rubble?
She starts walking, ignoring the citizens who dart for cover, the older man who waves, trying to point her toward the nearest shelter.
Maybe it is the fresh coat of panic, but Charlotte quickens her pace, suddenly eager to get home, to Sabine.
Their current flat reminds her of the house on Merry Way, with Aunt Amelia and her charges—two stories tall, too large for just the two of them, claimed when the last inhabitants decamped to somewhere safer, greener, farther from the noise.
She arrives, the flowers in one hand and the keys in the other, and finds—
Blood.
Blood on the doorknob.
Blood on the stairs.
Blood, sliding like fingers down the wall.
The gruesome trail leads to their bedroom, where she finds Sabine standing in the center of the room, covered head to toe in red. It streaks her face, drips from her hands, pools beneath her bare feet on the floor.
Charlotte recoils at the sight, the wood creaking beneath her shoes. Sabine’s head drifts up, her eyes black, the pupils wide. She smiles dreamily.
“There you are,” she says in an airy voice, too kind to be the stranger’s, too wrong to be her own.
“My love,” says Charlotte, fighting to sound gentle, “what have you done?”
Sabine lets her head fall back. Her gaze trails across the ceiling. “They came apart like Christmas paper.” Her arms drift at her sides, as if through water. “Ribbons, everywhere.”
Charlotte shivers.
There is no violence in her voice, but what’s left is somehow worse. This languid monster in her lover’s flesh.
She wants to turn and run.
To flee this room, this flat, this life.
Instead, Charlotte forces herself forward. “Come,” she says, taking Sabine’s hand. “Let’s get cleaned up.”
She runs a bath, and for once, Sabine makes no effort to reclaim control.
She lets herself be led into the tub, lounges as the water to every side turns pink, then red.
Purrs in pleasure as Charlotte washes her hair, scrubs the gore from beneath her nails, cleans and tends the body that she has loved so long and knows so well.
Remains pliant as Charlotte dries her, limb by limb, and then takes her to bed. Settles her there among the pillows.
“I can’t hear your thoughts,” Sabine murmurs sleepily. “They are so quiet.” The faintest crease forms between her brows. “Are you keeping secrets from me?”
Charlotte shakes her head. “No,” she whispers, her mind locked tight. “I am just tired.” She smooths the furrow with her thumb. “Aren’t you tired?”
“Yes,” says Sabine, sinking back among the pillows.
Charlotte curls in against her side, and strokes her hair, waiting for the light to come back on behind those eyes. But it never does. And so instead, she whispers the poem, the one Sabine kissed into her skin night after night over the years.
“Bury my bones in the midnight soil.
Plant them shallow and water them deep.
And in my place will grow a feral rose . . .”
Until she’s sure Sabine is asleep.
Then slowly, slowly, Charlotte frees herself. Sabine used to reach for her every time Charlotte so much as moved, but she sleeps so deeply now, so rarely stirs once she is down. As if she is buried beneath dirt instead of blankets.
Lost to herself, her love, the world.
Charlotte slips from the bed and pads silently across the room. There is a blade in the top drawer of the nearby desk. A blunted edge, more like a letter opener than a weapon, but it will do.
She climbs back onto the bed, and kneels over Sabine.
Sabine, who even now looks like a painting, tendrils of wet hair spread across the pillow, tokens dripping like roots between her breasts. She lies so still, she looks already lifeless.
Charlotte swallows as she lifts the blade and drives the metal point down toward Sabine’s chest.
It slices through the air.
And stops.
The tip hovers there, an inch over her heart, as if it’s met a wall.
Charlotte stares in shock, grits her teeth, tries to force the blade down, knuckles white around the hilt.
Realizes that it’s not the knife, or the air, holding back the blade.
It’s her. Her own limbs restrained, her body held in place by ropes she cannot see.
Her mind races, reels, and with a dawning horror, she understands.
Not ropes.
Words.
Ones said more than fifty years ago, when Charlotte left her home behind a final time. Promise that you will never hurt me.
How strange the words had struck her, even then, as they lay curled together in the bed of that cursed house, after that darkness had taken her the first time.
Promise that you will never hurt me.
Of all the things Sabine could ask for. All the oaths she could extract.
How simple this one seemed to Charlotte then.
How easy to say yes.
But those words cinch around her now, her hands trembling as she tries to force the knife those last few inches. Can’t. Her eyes burn in frustration, grief. A crimson tear runs down her chin. Drips onto Sabine’s cheek.
Perhaps it is the scent of blood that wakes her.
Perhaps it is the way Charlotte’s walls are crumbling, her panic spilling out into the air.
Sabine’s eyes flutter, and drift open. Still black, still bottomless.
They take in the blade, still frozen over her chest, and Charlotte, just beyond it. And the look that sweeps across her face isn’t shock, or rage. Instead, her mouth twitches in amusement. As if this is another game, and Charlotte has just tipped her hand.
Charlotte drops the knife and scrambles backward off the bed, as Sabine sits up.
“Silly Charlotte,” she says, reaching for the blade as she backs away across the room. She balances it thoughtfully, the weight tipping side to side, before her cold black eyes flick up again. “Why don’t you come back to bed?”
But there is no going back, not now, and so Charlotte turns, and runs.
She expects to make it one stride, two, before Sabine’s arms close over her, and she drives the blade into her heart.
But she makes it to the end of the room, and then, to the end of the hall, and then, to the bottom of the stairs, and then, out into the street, and there is no rending in her chest, no death or darkness rushing up, only the night air, and the ghostly echo of the sirens, and she forces her body forward, on, away.
Charlotte is Orpheus, Sabine, Eurydice.
And she does not look back.