Chapter 18 Lord Edward
I’m back in Manhattan and I can’t move; it’s as though I left the bottom half of my body somewhere else. Anne’s waiting for me on the other side of the street, the paparazzi crowding her. The headlines will read, Lady Anne’s Good-for-Nothing Brother Leaves Her Waiting.
That’s too long for a tabloid headline. They’d be cleverer than that.
Lady Anne Waits, Lord Eddie Ditched Their Date.
They love a good rhyme.
I wake abruptly, pressing the heel of my hands into my eyes. My dreams are terrible—a side effect, supposedly, of the opiates—but being conscious isn’t any better.
I roll over and discover what woke me: My phone is ringing. Set to vibrate and perched on one of the downy pillows, it makes the whole mattress shake. In London, it’s morning. Whoever’s calling must think I’m still in the UK, which means that Anne’s campaign to get me here stealthily worked.
I look at the screen. It’s not a number I recognize.
I was thirteen when Dad and Anne gave me my own phone.
The calls started almost at once: unknown numbers at odd hours, a voice on the other line saying, “Hey, how are you?” as though we were old friends.
Groggy and still half-asleep, nervous about offending anyone by admitting I didn’t recognize their voice, I kept up my end of the conversation—where I was, what I’d done that day, when I’d last seen my mother, whom my father had been out with that night.
The very next day, the details of the call would be published on the cover of some tabloid.
The voice on the other end had been a grown man pretending to be a classmate, or perhaps they had a son or daughter who’d done it for them.
My father would scold me for falling for such an obvious ploy; Anne would roll her eyes in disgust. Even when she was my age, her expression communicated, she’d never been so dumb.
I stretch my arms overhead, fully awake now. For months, I’ve been living in the UK. The doctors thought it would be better for me if I recovered with my family close at hand.
Here, they have a physical therapist called Bryce on call. He took me through my exercises first thing this morning—yesterday morning, I suppose—before breakfast. Bryce promised acupuncture treatments, an hour in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber every day, a cold plunge in an ice bath if I’m willing.
“We’ll get you on your feet again,” Bryce had said, then blanched at his choice of words.
In August, the official press release stated that there’d been an accident in the States and my leg had been damaged.
No further details were given regarding my condition.
Was that Anne’s idea, or mine? Will she leak the truth someday, when she needs a story to appease the press? When she wants to punish me?
I toss the covers off. This mattress is too soft. I’ll tell Dr. Rush at breakfast so they can replace it with a firmer model. Whatever we can do to make you more comfortable, Dr. Rush will surely say.
The phone falls silent on the bed beside me, and now I notice a musical thump in the air, coming in through the windows so they’re practically pulsing in time with the beat.
I pull myself out of bed and move awkwardly toward the wall of windows. I don’t turn on the lights. I don’t want to see my reflection.
Even though we’re in the middle of nowhere—not a skyscraper or a signpost around to brighten the sky—it’s not that dark out. The moon and starlight reflect off the water, creating the illusion of dawn though it’s after midnight.
I can see two other structures from my bedroom, about ten yards away on either side, each a corner of an equilateral triangle. The one on the left is lit up. Through the glass, I make out a figure with a bleach-blond mop of hair, dancing.
I slide the terrace door open, hopping outside.
The cold air feels thin, easier to breathe than the artificially warm air inside.
The music is louder out here, though I can’t quite make out what song is playing.
I clutch the railing for balance, the metal so cold against my palms that it feels sharp.
On my right, the third cabin is dark but for a tiny dot of light on the terrace. It takes me a second to recognize it as the tip of a cigarette. Finally, I make out the silhouette of a small person smoking.
Amelia Blue.
The girl I met because the driver said Sir, I’m afraid there’s been an accident.
Hasn’t anyone else noticed the absurdity of using the same word to refer to a missed train or spilled drink that we use to describe a fatal car crash, a broken limb?
My birth—or at least my conception—was surely an accident.
My parents can’t have possibly intended to have a second child so many years after Anne was born, particularly when they were on the verge of their inevitable divorce.
They didn’t need another child, their duty long since done.
(Before Anne was born, Dad arranged it so that his estate would be passed down to his eldest child regardless of gender, breaking centuries of tradition, garnering praise from the public. The progressive duke, the press said.)
The music must’ve woken Amelia Blue. Or perhaps she never fell asleep.
If she’s here for coke or some such, there could be so many stimulants coursing through her system that she literally cannot close her eyes.
I’ve heard that some people need to be sedated so the drugs they took recreationally have time to get out of their systems. In the car with her, I was too busy feigning sleep to notice whether her pupils were overlarge, the whites of her eyes bloodshot.
Before I can limp back to bed, there’s a light flashing in my eyes. I raise a hand as if I’m blocking the sun. Amelia Blue is holding up her phone, the flashlight pointing in my direction. I’m grateful that the railing around the deck is solid rather than slatted. It blocks my bottom half.
She’s waving at me.
Then she’s moving—across her terrace, down the metal stairs that lead into the courtyard between our cottages.
Good lord, is she coming here?
Quick as I can, I make my way inside and ready myself, pulling on sweatpants and boots, shivering.
I head back to the terrace and down the stairs, keeping my focus on the light from her phone, bouncing steadily with each step she takes.
Her gait is short and quick, something of a shuffle as she doesn’t pick her feet high off the ground.
On the streets of the cities where I’ve lived—London, Manhattan—there are a million different kinds of walkers: businesspeople rushing from one appointment to the next; tourists taking up entire sidewalks as they inch along, enjoying their vacations; groups of students bent over their phones while they gossip, each and every one so sure of their steps that they don’t bother looking where they’re going.
Even the dogs have particular strides: sure-footed Labradors and golden retrievers, tiny chihuahuas rushing to keep up with their humans’ long legs, puppies who haven’t yet learned to walk in a straight line.
I wish I could recall exactly how I walked before. I hope, at least, that the dim light conceals my limp enough that Amelia Blue won’t ask questions.
The metal handrail along the stairs has a thin coating of ice that cracks beneath my grip like glass. I wonder if Amelia Blue will be dressed more warmly tonight than she was when she arrived.
Someone could catch their death out here.