Chapter 7 Grace
On my finger, that pale circle still lingers where that ring used to sit. I press my other thumb against it until a crescent blooms, pink, then white again.
I do it again.
And again.
It’s a small rebellion, a small pain, a place to focus the thrum under my ribs. To scratch the itch that is perpetual boredom.
Mrs Vale waltzes in unannounced, and I know this is her way of reminding me that none of this space is mine. That privacy is not a thing I am permitted.
I lift my head and arrange my face into the kind of calm that they all have come to expect from me.
Oh, I know it unnerves them. I know they expected emotion, tantrums, something more akin to a fight.
Perhaps this silent refusal to behave the way they expect is my protest – the problem is, I have no way to come up with any alternative.
My mind spends most of my waking hours spiralling.
This outward calm is the only way I can at least pretend I’m not already giving in to the tamest form of torture there is.
“You have a visitor,” she says. She glances at the pale welt on my finger, and her mouth twitches with the ghost of satisfaction.
“Who?” I ask, keeping my voice level. Who on earth is permitted to see me?
Her eyes shift to something behind her shoulder. “Mr Macrae.” She says in a tone of reverence I’ve never heard from her before.
It takes a second for the name to stand up, to clothe itself in the figure that follows into my room.
The Kingmaker; Antonio Macrae.
The man who arranges outcomes the way people arrange flowers, who deals with people the way someone dead heads roses.
My stomach flips when I see him, as if I’m having some visceral reaction. I know this man, I’ve already encountered him so many times, in some many horrific moments.
He was there, back at our safe house, after Devin Blake had almost slit my throat and then tied me and my mother up.
He was there too, all those months before.
Meeting with my father, drinking with him, laughing with him, plotting to make him Chapter Lord.
And he was there when they took my father, when they locked me and my mother in cages and they all sat around, feasting on the pieces of our despair.
He moves as if there is invisible music and he is perfectly tuned to it. His suit is the kind that looks hand-stitched, the dark wool drinking the white into itself.
“Grace,” he says, with a voice like velvet.
He says it like we are old friends and he is sorry the sea has been rough. He has that scent that men acquire when they have lived too well for too long -bergamot, cedar, something ink-dry and ridiculously expensive.
I let the silence hold him at arm’s length. I gather the blanket around my knees as if cold ought to explain everything. Mrs Vale hovers like a guillotine waiting to cut me down an inch or two the moment I fail to show the appropriate level of respect.
“You may leave us,” he says without looking at her.
She stiffens, and I see the slow calculation, the way her eyes go to the camera in the corner and then back to him.
It is one of those moments when a rule buckles. She pouts her lips with a quiet, spiteful precision and leaves. The door clicks shut softly enough to sound harmless.
Antonio walks to the chair opposite my bed and sits, composed, as if he has all afternoon and perhaps a little of the evening to waste on little old me.
He is not young and he wears it without apology, a face that has contained the processes of ambition until they have sculpted it.
His hair is threaded with silver the way some cliffs are threaded with pale quartz.
“This room,” he says, looking around with a sympathy he makes you believe is personal. “It does not suit you.”
I make a small sound that could be a laugh, but it’s been so long since I had anything to laugh about. “What does suit me, Mr Macrae?”
“Call me Antonio.” He corrects me gently. Too fucking gently.
“Is that what my mother did?” I can’t keep the bite from my voice, and I realise quickly I’m making a huge mistake already. He may be my enemy, but this man holds the fate of countries in his hands. With barely a word, he could destroy half a continent.
I need to be smart here. Very fucking smart, and careful too.
There’s no way this visit is just a frivolity. He wants something, and though I have no clue what that is right now my best game is to play docile, to continue being that meek little girl they all see me as.
“Antonio…” I murmur the name as if trying it on, testing it, apologising too in some small way.
He inclines his head with a sprinkle of amusement in his eyes, and then he looks about again as if he sees something I don’t. But there’s nothing here but walls. White, clinical, boring as hell walls.
“Congratulations,” I say. “You are now one of the five living people to see me in this habitat. Does it live up to the legend?”
“Legends are for men who need to believe in what they do,” he says gently. “I prefer accuracies.”
“And what is your accuracy today?” The questions are the only weapons I am permitted, have ever been permitted. I learned a long time ago that their sharpness depends on my ability to say them with the right amount of polite inquiry.
He watches me the way men watch an incoming storm: with seriousness, aware that something they cannot control is nevertheless their business. “That you have been wronged. That you have been isolated as a method, not a happenstance.”
The room tilts.
I draw a low breath, trying to steady both the anger and the confusion because we both know what part he played in my ‘happenstance’. We know it very well.
“Why are you here?” I ask. I keep it in the soft range like a prayer, but the question still sits like sweat under silk.
“Because your father is dead, and your mother is…” He pauses, adjusting his mouth around the word that has lived for too long in rumour and is now a location, a sentence, a place under a place.
“In Oblivion,” I say, wondering if he feels the knife twists as much as I do.
His eyes right now are not kind and not unkind; they are unnervingly attentive, studying my face, as if he expects me to start crying and begging him for mercy. As if I’d ever play that part. “Yes. Because through no fault of your own, you have been left without any protection.”
Protection. He says it so carefully it’s hard not to scoff. Afterall, am I not a pig they’re all fattening up in time for slaughter?
“I do not need protection.” I tell him.
“Of course you do,” he says, as if he is telling me that of course I need to breathe. “It merely offends you to accept it. Pride is the only garment no one takes from you here.”
Perhaps he is right. He speaks such pretty words, such pretty sentences and I’m certain that to him this is all some amusing game.
That he sees me simply as some silly little girl with no thoughts in her head, and no family left to protect her.
I want to lash out, to bite back some clever retort, but the words aren’t there and that makes me feel like I really am that silly girl after all.
“What does the Kingmaker want with me?” I sigh. Whatever it is I’m certain he’ll get it, one way or another. The world has never said no to him. The world has always bent to his will.
He looks amused at the title. “It is so operatic, isn’t it?
I prefer Antonio. And what I want is perhaps unfashionable to say: I want to look at you and be reminded that this world still produces anomalies.
That despite the Brethren’s careful engineering, unpredictable things still grow. Would you allow me that small vanity?”
“Depends on whether you do so as an observer, or as an instigator.”
“You have a way with words.” He murmurs as if this is now our secret, that we’re allies in this. “I have been both,” he adds. And then, softer, with the sincerity that men learn when they are lying about intentions but not about feeling. “But to your mother, I was simply a friend.”
Something in the room changes temperature.
He says it like an admission, and something in his face loses rehearsal as all that false charm seems to slip. I could say nothing; I could ask the question he is aching for me to ask. Instead, I choose to tilt it.
“Everyone was a friend to my mother,” I say lightly. “She was a cathedral that allowed many pilgrims.”
“She was a bell,” he says, not offended, only winnowing.
“She called things to her and made them ring. She had this way of listening to you that made you think you were a discovery you had made yourself.” He says it as if he is placing one hand on a door he is not allowed to open and feeling for the breath on the other side. “You have her eyes.”
I do not. My eyes are my father’s, a dirty brown that looks like a muddy puddle at a distance.
I know this because people told me enough times that I could recite it like a mantra.
But I understand what he is telling me: not that there is a resemblance that can be measured, but that he intends to see one, and make me carry it.
“Do I?” I ask and keep the anger out of my voice. “I hope I have her hands.” Hands are more useful than eyes. They cook, clean, and lift and when necessary, they strike hard enough to draw blood.
“They are very beautiful hands,” he says, looking at them with the courtesy of not letting his gaze linger on skin. Clearly, he is a man who knows the difference between a look that is a caress and a look that is an assessment.
I do not know yet which one he will choose, but my heart hammers in my chest all the same.
He reaches into the inner pocket of his jacket and brings out a small parcel wrapped in brown paper tied with twine that looks like a kindness from a more honest century.
He lays it on the white coverlet between us, like an offering.
“A little something to occupy your mind,” he says.
“If your jailers complain, tell them I intend to handle it.”