Chapter 9
Cecilia
IT IS SO QUIET. Perfectly, impossibly quiet. Cecilia cannot hear the noise of the servants downstairs or the chime of the clocks or the wheels of carriages outside. There is nothing.
They have left her in a spare room to rest, as though lying amongst more pillows is what she best needs. Her mother near-fainted away and was too weak to go back to the Gate House. She sleeps now in an armchair in the corner of the room, head tipped back.
Cecilia cannot believe what Odette has done. It feels unreal, impossible, like the product of a fever or one of their own plays gone so darkly wrong. She could not have meant it, surely. She would have stopped, whether or not she had been dragged off.
Wouldn’t she?
And yet Cecilia can still feel the press of the cotton against her nose and mouth, the weight of dense down and the bar of Odette’s arm behind her, stealing the breath from her lungs. It felt like she thinks drowning must, breathing but finding no air, lungs heaving against nothing.
At least in drowning, there would be the give of water, something to fill her.
This was an absence, a panic, a hard stop.
Odette did this to her.
She cannot sleep.
Cecilia wriggles away from the pillows, out from beneath the covers, and pads softly from the room without waking her mother.
She must speak to Odette. So much poison lies between them now. If she cannot draw it from the wound, then it will fester and kill them both.
Perhaps it already has.
Perhaps she is doing nothing but chasing a ghost.
When she comes to Odette’s door, she can hear crying from the other side.
At least they are not so lost as all that. At least emotion touches them still.
So she goes inside.
Odette is slumped on the floor, leaning against the wall. The fire has died down low, and the cold has begun to creep in from the windows.
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ is the first thing Odette says. ‘It’s too dangerous. You shouldn’t be here.’
Cecilia does not sit near her. Instead, she drops down onto the rug before the bed and puts her back to the footboard. ‘No. Probably not.’
She thinks, for a while, that Odette might apologise. There is such a torturous look of despair and shame on her face that Cecilia cannot imagine that any other thoughts occupy her mind.
Eventually, she speaks. ‘It – went too far,’ she says haltingly. ‘I am sorry.’
Cecilia finds, abruptly, that she is furious. ‘I never thought you would hurt me. I never thought I would be scared of you.’
Odette buries her face in her hands. ‘You don’t know how it pains me to hear you say that.’
‘No, I don’t. If you did truly feel pain over the way you’ve treated me, you would have stayed your hand long before now.’
‘I couldn’t! You don’t understand. This isn’t about you – it’s—’ She cuts herself off.
‘What is it about, Odette? I have been begging you to tell me, begging you to let me help you, and instead you make wild accusations and turn your back on me, take a knife to everything we have held dear between us. Why? For God’s sake, Odette – why?’
Odette grinds the heels of her hands into her eyes, taking several ragged breaths. ‘All right. All right, I’ll tell you.’
Cecilia’s breath catches in her throat.
It is like some different creature lifts its head from Odette’s hands, a ruined, ancient thing.
‘I have seen my mother’s ghost,’ says Odette, voice low and flat.
Cecilia searches her face. ‘You mean – you mean really?’
‘Yes. I thought I was mad at first, but she has haunted me since the day of her funeral. It’s real.’
‘Is that why you took me to the séance?’
‘Yes. I wanted you to see her for yourself.’
Cecilia does not speak for a while, turning it over in her mind.
‘I see.’
‘She told me Claudine murdered her and I must seek revenge. I have been frantic with it. It is true – don’t you see? I have to get Claudine to confess. There – that is all of it. Do you believe me?’
There is a long, cold silence. The room is so quiet and so dark, and Cecilia feels herself sinking, sinking.
This cannot be.
‘You mock me,’ she says softly. For what else can it be?
How can she trust Odette now?
‘I do not mock you. Cecilia, please—’
‘Do not,’ she cuts her off, sharp and shaking. ‘Do not ask me to make a fool of myself for you again. I have stood by you through all of this – this—’
‘Madness?’ says Odette.
‘Yes! Perhaps.’
‘So you side with them.’
‘For God’s sake Odette, you know I do not. I told you today that I have been trying to find the money your mother promised you so we can escape. What I do not understand above all is why you are being so cruel.’
What escape is left to them now? They cannot escape what they have said to each other. What Odette has done. Perhaps she should tell her now about George and Claudine’s past engagement, but what would be the point? Odette needs no more fuel on the fire of her obsession.
Odette slumps back against the wall, and a hard mask falls across her face, mouth pulling into a tight line.
‘You have said it yourself. I am mad. Mad for grieving my mother, mad for detesting my father for marrying my aunt, mad for railing against those who mistreat me.’
‘Madness is not the same as being self-absorbed and cruel. You are not the only person in the world to have felt loss.’
‘So you agree with Claudine.’
Cecilia all but throws her hands up in frustration. ‘I have loved you and loved you, and you toy with me and mock me and hurt me. Perhaps you are mad if you want to destroy all that you have.’
Odette falls silent.
There is a horrible, dizzy, lurching feeling that makes Cecilia place both hands on the floor to steady herself.
‘I am sorry I have disappointed you,’ she says. ‘I . . . I do not know how else to be other than how I am.’
‘You do not believe me,’ says Odette again.
‘How can I?’ says Cecilia, angry and distraught. ‘This is – it is too much. I do not know how to help you anymore.’
Odette turns away. ‘Then stop trying. I don’t need your help.’
‘Fine. As you like.’
Trembling, Cecilia goes.
Odette does not need her. There it is. That is the truth.
Beneath her, the world cracks open, a void dropping all the way down into the core of the earth, into Hell.