17. Beneath the Blade of Words
BENEATH THE BLADE OF WORDS
ERIC
S he’s quiet beside me, but her awareness is a second engine in the quiet of the car.
It’s been thrumming at the back of my mind since the door shut and the tyres hit gravel.
The road, because of course, swerves this way and that, and it feels more like I’m leading a horse-drawn carriage down to Gretna Green or something to wed my damn lover.
The locket gleams at her throat, a strobing reminder of everything off about this godforsaken duchy. She sits angled towards the window, knees drawn to her chest. It drags my eyes to the sliver of bare skin above her waistband. To the pink lace of her underwear still peeking over.
I’ve never hated denim more, yet my heart gives an appreciative beat.
I try again, with obsessive compulsion, to assign her a font, as though branding her will return some semblance of control to me. After spending seventeen days with her, I was certain I had figured her out.
Baskerville .
What else could it be?
But then I catch her scaling a fucking wall, and the font no longer fits. Francesca, at this moment, exists purely as a disruption to every system my brain understands. I can barely recall the box I initially built for her as I sat furious in my room with a stack of information on Sheffolk.
She should’ve been easy enough to parse: nobleman’s daughter, public tragedy, dead fiancé and heir of expectation tethered to a castle built by witches and haunted by ghosts. But she is the ghost, and yet she’s simultaneously here , seated next to me and very much real.
I misjudged her, and the thought is irritating.
There’s wit under that grief, and spaces between her words that tell me she’s entirely composed of undiscovered punctuation, written by a ghostly hand that was never concerned with rules. She makes no sense to me yet complete sense in her own terms. Half her meaning is hidden between sentences.
And still— still —I want fluency. I want to hear her speak and know exactly what she means. If she lets me close enough to learn even one sentence of her, I know I’ll remember it forever.
“Is it surrender,” I start, “if I ask if we can forgo the daggers in our words for once?”
“Tired of bleeding?”
“I want a truce,” I correct softly, flicking the indicator and guiding us onto a narrower road at her instruction.
She stares at me, waiting for me to mock her. When I don’t, she lowers her legs and shifts slightly to face me. “I don’t know how to speak without them, not to strangers.”
I huff out a chuckle. “Same, but I’m willing to try if you are.
I’ll be in Sheffolk for fuck knows how long.
C’mon, even knives begin to rust, Lady Francesca.
Give it a bit more time, and we’ll both be bleeding out from something as stupid as tetanus.
Foaming at the mouth and stuck in poetic rigour mortis. ”
The locket lifts and falls with her every breath, testing the weight of trust. “Bold assumption that you haven’t already contracted it. You’ve been tense since you first arrived. Though, I’d prefer you with lockjaw. For obvious reasons.”
Amusement tugs at my mouth. Dangerous girl. “Yet you still requested my company this morning and when you visited your aunt. Strange behaviour for someone allegedly repulsed by my voice.”
I wait for her to grab onto the mention of Delphine and maybe explain the full reasoning behind that trip.
She chooses to tease. “Call it medical morbid curiosity.”
I keep my voice flat, fighting against a smirk. “Do you realise that, medically speaking, lockjaw would freeze my mouth open? So really, I’ll just be grinning at you permanently. Possibly the most polite I’ll ever be.”
She laughs, another real one that catches her by surprise. The sound fills the car like smoke, and suddenly my lungs forget how to work. I turn my head just in time to watch her hand cover her mouth too late, but I catch the crooked little half-smile there.
“Permanent grin,” she mutters to herself, shaking her head. “You’re impossibly infuriating.”
“And you’re laughing,” I point out, taking another turn down a winding road. “That rather defeats your argument, doesn’t it?
She doesn’t grace me with a response, but she doesn’t pick up a blade either. I take the win. The quietude lasts for about ten more minutes, though no longer tense, before she speaks again. “You know, I Googled you the other day.”
“Did you now?”
A faint hum. “I did. And when we met, through all of your brooding and general royal trauma, you conveniently failed to mention you’re practically an academic wet dream.”
Despite the need to laugh at her phrasing, I find myself weirdly validated.
It’s been years since somebody sounded this impressed by me; I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to be anything other than a disappointment.
There’s an irritating moment where I almost offer to show her everything I’ve ever worked on, and for a heartbeat, I miss that boy.
Then for another, I wonder if I could ever be him again.
“Didn’t think it was important.”
The answer doesn’t impress her because she huffs out my name and then says, “You’ve got degrees in mathematics, classics and philosophy, and you didn’t think that was worth mentioning?
” I keep my eyes on the road and bite down on my smile.
“Jesus, I’m practically Victorian in comparison.
Don’t ever ask me to do sums; you’d vomit. ”
I can’t help it; that makes me laugh. “And what exactly did my ghostly Victorian companion study, you know, other than my fucking Wikipedia page?” The question sounds more curious than I would’ve liked her to know. “Or should I go ahead and look up local cults and see if your name pops up?”
She shrugs, a pink tinge to her cheeks. “Don’t bother; I was homeschooled.”
“Of course you were.”
Lady Homicide shoots me a glare. “Oh God, was that an insult, Atherbourne?”
I keep the Bentley at an even forty, fast enough that time won’t catch up to us, yet still slow enough that nothing feels rushed.
“Francesca, the day we met, you took me to see the noose your ancestor used to hang herself and then showed me the plot where you bury your dead. I didn’t exactly walk away from that encounter thinking you screamed student council or Head Girl. ”
“You say that like you weren’t the weirdo standing beneath my window at, like, three in the morning, coming to watch plants dance. A little hypocritical to suddenly be playing the sceptic.”
My eyes flicker from the road for a second, drinking in her amusement.
Fuck, she’s relentless. “Don’t make me bring up the mildew, duchess.
And don’t think I haven’t noticed the portraits that blink or the fact that the walls whisper when I sleep or the statue in the garden.
Foolishly, I’m still driving you to fuck knows where.
” Laughter spills from her lips as she tips her head back.
“I’m going to need answers soon because this is starting to feel like psychosis. ”
A glance to the left shows me that she’s still wearing a little smile.
I’m convinced it’s not real until an overhead street lamp illuminates her face and I see it.
She’s still got that look of incredulity stitched into her expression, as though she’s stuck on the fact that a crown prince is chauffeuring her probably someplace haunted at four in the morning.
“Fair enough,” she hums. “But I decide when you’re ready for them.”
A look of appraisal passes over me, akin to the way I once stared at my initial acceptance letter, wondering if this will be worth it.
It strikes me that the castle probably reports to her, and until she’s certain of my hunger for knowledge, my access to Redford’s documents remains strictly read-only.
My knuckles are white on the wheel. “I never know when you’re joking. Do you grasp, coming from someone with a masters in philosophy, how categorically insane it is that I’m even entertaining… whatever this is?”
Her grin is wicked. “Doesn’t philosophy teach you to doubt everything? Congratulations, Professor, you’re top of your class.”
Something in me twitches at that low, teasing ‘ Professor ’. I exhale heavily, almost missing the next turn. New form of academic masochism unlocked. My brain latches onto the fact that she sometimes rolls her Rs, and I have to coax it like a wayward animal towards a new subject.
“So, what does a future duchess do around here for fun?” I cringe as soon as I say it.
She wrinkles her nose. “Really, small talk?”
“My father said I’m excruciatingly awful at it and should practise more. Consider yourself my first victim.”
“The ‘excruciatingly awful’ bit tracks, not gonna lie, considering how you literally fled instead of keeping conversation with both Bertie and Edmund.”
She says I fled . As if I’m afraid of conversation.
If only she knew I’d essentially had a fat discussion with Albert just before she entered.
Granted, he was doing most of the talking, and my contributions were more…
minimalist. Albert spoke at me whilst I blinked in the right places and gave the occasional smile.
But then Edmund appeared, and my nervous system rejected his presence.
So no, I didn’t flee the conversation.
I fled the contagion.
“But, since you’re asking…” she continues and shifts further so she’s facing me somewhat, head tipped back against the window and smiling like she’s about to weaponise her answer.
“Let’s just say I don’t have too many formal duties.
Not yet, at least. So if I have more free time than I know what to do with, I usually just amuse myself by playing games. ”
“Ouija?”
A startled, bright laugh rips right out of her. “Oh, fuck you . I meant the Sims.”
Of all possible answers.
She bites her lip in anticipation of my response, and I play with the idea of teasing her or expressing how deeply disturbed I am by the modernity of her hobby. Because apparently Murder Barbie plays God in her free time.