16. Chapter 16
Logan
She’d been pacing around the garden all day with a ball of cotton stuck up her nostril.
Currently laying with her arms spread open on the grass, holding a black parasol over her head while Piper plucked an extensive amount of my expensive grass and flower petals to throw over her pliant body.
Since the Cleansing, she’d stopped going to the library, snooping around the mansion, digging for answers in Theodora’s kitchens, and had taken to talking to herself in dark corners of my property.
Our property, as she liked to remind me.
All this told me I should regret what I’d done to her in that carriage, but I couldn’t. Even though she seemed to have regretted it. Even though she’d told me she wanted me. As far as schemes went, she was pretty good at them and I was as good as caught. Willing prey at best.
The plants and charred soot Henry and Arthur had collected from the Basilica grounds sat in a jar submerged in a bigger jar on the other side of my study.
After she’d prepared her herby concoctions and made a salad of herbs, salts, and meticulously-tied threads of various colours, lit a dozen candles around them, and carefully hand-drawn runes on the glass, she came by twice a day to check on them.
And she chose the specific hour when I was not here to do so.
“Look at me,” I murmured to myself, leaning against the balcony balustrade. “Come on, just look at me.”
And whatever God there was, it must have heard me. Because she rolled on her side, and finally noticed me standing there.
Frozen still, she stared at me wide-eyed as a trail of blood slid down her cheek and dripped on the grass.
What was I even doing?
I had to tell her why I couldn’t have her.
That I couldn’t afford to give Ulric any opportunity to get what he wanted from us.
But I’d have to admit the truth about the worst part of my existence.
She was the last person I wanted to see me how they all saw me.
And if I’d relented to her request that day, in her state, she would have regretted it even more than she already seemed to.
Her desire had been drug induced, I’d tried to convince myself.
Because I was not a better man; I’d wanted her to touch me.
“Her and those damn nose bleeds,” I sighed.
“She must have been nervous about the Cleansing,” Liam said, struggling to neatly gather the pile of documents he had to deliver to the parliament.
“Why do you say that?”
“She mentioned she gets them when she’s really, crazy nervous.”
The glass tumbler almost cracked in my hold. “She said that?”
Liam nodded.
I watched, trying not to smile too hard, as she tripped all the way across the gardens while her white rat quickly tailed after her.
Piper’s bedroom door was open and her bed was almost empty. A fat rat in a tiny purple dress was sprawled on its back on her pillow.
Chuckling, I shut the door and stopped by my wife’s room, crouching down to peek under the bed.
Piper was tucked against her chest. From the looks of it, a bit reluctantly on Willow’s part.
Which was strange. My niece was the most reserved four-year-old.
An ancient old man trapped in a tiny, terrible ballerina’s body.
I’d considered for a whole two seconds cutting her visits to Willow short.
Until they’d started whispering and giggling together, until Piper had started sneaking to her for comfort.
Until she’d become determined to be like her.
I guess like called to like. Piper’s nature would start to become more difficult to control, just like Willow had said.
Soon, the doctors would demand to put her on all kinds of mental suppressants, like they did for most witches of her kind when the nightmares, the urges, and the unexplainable accidents started happening around her.
I’d lost track of how long I’d stayed there, watching them. But I knew my knees hurt when I got up, and the whiskey was mostly water when I decided to pull away.
A flicker of light emanating from the end of the upper corridor caught my eye, and I decided to visit my past for the first time in many years.
My mother’s portrait was uncovered and there was a candle lit underneath it among a bunch of other consumed candles that were now only puddles of wax.
“Sire?” Christof asked. “What are you doing up here?”
“Is this my wife’s work?”
“She’s been visiting the portraits for a while.” He cleared his throat. “She brought Piper a few days ago, introduced her to your mother. They drew together and talked for a bit. Now they both come once in a while to say…hello, I suppose.”
Above Piper’s terrible renditions of colourful stick-people, my wife had written: Boo, Bunny, and Nana.
For the first time in so long, I looked up at my mother’s portrait.
Meeting the same petrified eyes that I’d met that day so many years ago now.
Was terror all she’d felt when she’d seen me?
Had I made her as sick as I made myself staring at my reflection in the mirror?
When the dull ache between my rib bones pounded hard against my lungs, suffocating me, I looked away, swallowing air in gulps.
I plucked Piper’s drawing off the wall, running my fingers over the words. Boo, Bunny, and Nana.
“You would have loved my ridiculous witch, wouldn’t you?” I murmured to myself, the most I’d ever had the courage to speak to my mother.
“I’ll cover the portrait,” Christof offered.
“Leave it,” I said, folding the drawing and sticking it in my pocket.
It was the quietest it had been in this house in a long while yet the most alive it had ever felt.
The most it had felt like home. Your house is not my home, she’d told me.
And I hadn't known at the time how to tell her that my house had never been my home either. For the first few years after I’d been forced to take over from Heath, I’d slept in Bloodhouses, saloon bars, coaching-inns, places as far from here as I could find.
Until Piper had turned a year old, I’d refused to accept Cassandra’s cruel inheritance.
She would have been better off with her grandparents.
What the Hell did I know about raising a child?
But she and I were the same. Two strangers living in a stranger’s house.
If I abandoned her, how was she any different from me? She had to be different from me.
I smiled against the glass, swallowing a gulp of watered-down whiskey, when the sound of an erratic heart seeped into the air, warming it. I let her follow me downstairs and outside as I sat on the garden stairs.
She sat beside me when I lit a cigarette, at last wearing something besides her chemise.
Her hair was unbound, the pale grey strands carried by the wind, and I felt the inexplicable urge to run my fingers through it.
Hovering in her proximity, I felt like another ghost haunting her.
Was I tormenting her, too? If she had the chance, would she banish me?
Her throat worked a hard swallow. “Christof says you have a copy of the Holy Script in your study. He said I am not allowed to touch it. There was a mention of bursting into flames of damnation. I got a little excited, but I couldn’t break into your study with my magic trick.”
So, this was why she’d broken her silence.
Digging into my pocket, I handed her the twisted hair pin I’d found lodged in the lock. I pulled it back when she reached for it, and pocketed it again. “Who taught you to do that?”
“Ethel.” She smiled to herself as she spoke the name.
“She’d wake me up at the crack of dawn to break into Agnes’s study and steal her cigars and liquor.
We’d sell them in the market for candy canes and syrup, and put those back instead.
With the rest of the money, we’d stop by the orphanage we grew up in and treat all the kids with ice cream. ”
“Vengeful and cruel.”
“Hell hath no fury like an Ethel scorned.”
I lifted my hand to push some hair behind her ear, and revelled in the fact that she didn’t flinch away a little too pridefully. “What did Agnes do to deserve Ethel’s wrath?”
“Ethel has some…strong opinions on Agnes. She resents our Holy Mother for buying us like some left over cattle from the orphanage. She paid twenty-five sterlings for me, and wouldn’t offer more than ten for her.
We almost got split up. We were only seven at the time, and I would have probably never seen her again if I’d not—” She stopped herself, wrapping her arms around her shoulders.
“An orphan witch is still an orphan. Good for working. At least until they point a finger at the wrong person.”
I let my hand fall down her jaw, watching her tremble. “You don’t share the same sentiment about Agnes?”
She shrugged, her fingers pinching the edges of her nightgown for relief.
“I always did what she asked of me. I was good. I worked hard. All so she wouldn’t find a reason to separate us.
As long as Ethel and I were together, I didn’t care for much.
I’d do anything to keep it that way even if it meant doing whatever Agnes wanted me to do. ”
“You miss her?”
Her thumb ran back and forth across a long scar on her palm. “She’s the only thing close to a family I’ve ever had. And she is wonderful. In every way a person could be.” Her smile trembled. “Ethel was the most pure thing I’ve met in this lifetime. A draw with Piper now.”
She drew in a slow breath when I reached for her pendant. “Did you ever look for your parents?”
“Never.”
“Why not?”
Her shoulder rose in a shrug when wind blew across the garden. “I just…never. There had to be a reason why they surrendered me. Why should I attempt to go back where I am not wanted? I don’t want to be a burden to anyone. I don’t want to leave this earth the way I came into it.”