Chapter Eleven
Grace
Tom’s violent hands were eclipsed by Nick’s ardent need for me, for my body. Where fear lived before, as deep as my bones, love replaced it.
It was close to dawn, still dark, twilight bleeding in with its deep blues, by the time Nick finished loving me. We did things together that made me blush just to think of them; things I wouldn’t dare to tell another living soul.
The most tender parts of me were sore, aching, in the most wonderful way. When he curled his large body around me and held me until we fell asleep, I felt certain that if I died then, I would die the happiest I had ever been, or ever would be again.
I could have only been asleep for an hour or so.
The moon was still present in the sky, fading like a round scuff of white chalk among the deep blue.
I got up from the bed and sensed immediately that something was wrong.
A strange humming sound surrounded me, as if the house was alive and rumbling with some anticipation.
I glanced at the bed to wake Nick, but he was gone, the bedding rumpled and abandoned on his side.
Then came a knocking. Slow, deliberate. The woodpecker once more, drawing my mind back to Heather House and all its ills, all its secrets.
My hands began to shake as my eyes drifted to the voiles hanging over the terrace doors, seeking to look through them and spot the woodpecker high in a tree.
An uneasiness came over me; a bitter taste hanging in my mouth, souring, tasting something rotten.
Bringing a hand to my mouth, I screamed.
My fingers were gnarled like the limbs of a tree, the knuckles swollen, the skin papery thin.
Thick veins threaded the backs of my hands like worms.
I’d know them anywhere. They were my mother’s hands.
Flying to the mirror, I screamed all the louder, cupping the familiar hands that were not mine over my wide, gaping mouth. My mother, with her wisps of long white hair, her wasted body barely holding up the long white nightdress she had died in, gaped back at me.
As if from a sudden punch to the gut, I was winded, incapable of even releasing the tiniest of screams.
My mother’s reflection lowered her hands from her face independently, no longer mirroring me.
Her eyes were dark, tormented, turning red at the edges as blood collected.
Her sallow skin took on a purple hue, as if some invisible thing suffocated her.
A vein bulged in her temple. Suddenly she lurched forward, vomiting loudly, a red and black pulp gushing from her open mouth.
It splattered the floor within the mirror world while I watched in horror from my side.
When she looked up, pleading desperately with her pained expression, her hands raised and stained with the deep red, I saw it. Hundreds of tiny yellow pips. A sliver of deep purple skin, like a piece of leather, oozed from her mouth and dropped down her night dress.
The foul smell hit me first, repulsing me. I staggered backwards.
She was vomiting the pulp of rancid figs.
My mother held out her hands, palm-side up, as if to beg for change, but it was too late for her. I turned and ran from my room, throwing the door open, escaping down the mahogany staircase. I screamed for Nick, wailing his name, but he wouldn’t come to me this time.
I could hear her behind me. I flew through the house, out of the back door, down the stone steps into the garden.
Birds chirped. The morning clouds held their breath. The woodpecker continued its slow, incessant knocking.
The orangery came into view. The fig tree hunched against the glass.
I wanted to tear it down, uproot it with my bare hands if I had to.
Pausing to catch my breath against the stone basin of the fountain, I dared a glance back up towards my bedroom.
Mother was there, on the balcony, vomiting black pulp.
She moaned my name into the night and I ran, fleeing into the orangery.
My father was there, on the ground, his body bloated and stained the same deep red of the rotting figs. Mother appeared over him, sobbing, holding his head in her lap. Maggots collected at the corners of father’s mouth, his eyes, just as they had in Heather House.
A sharp pain split open my head. Louisa’s statue paid no mind, shunning me. As I wrapped my arms around my head, grimacing at the pain, a high pitched ringing drowned out my mother’s wailing voice. The first thuds came, then more, as they fell.
Rotting figs, dropping all around us. They rained down from the glass ceiling, hitting the tiles with a thump like parcels of wet sand.
I hid in my forearms, crossing them over my face to blot it all out.
The ringing exploded in my ears, turning white behind my eyelids.
And then came silence.
I woke at the bottom of the fig tree, the blackened leaves curling around my limbs as I lay against the cold, cracked tiles of the orangery floor.
Nick’s voice came, then, calling for me.
I could hear birds singing, and saw the pale morning light pouring in.
The creaking of the door told me that Nick had found me.
As he hurried toward me, wearing only a black T-shirt and a pair of black jogging bottoms, I allowed my eyes to roam.
There was no sign of them; not my mother, not my father’s corpse, not even the figs.
Nick gathered me up and held me against his chest, warming my shivering body.
“What the hell are you doing here, Grace? I thought for one horrible minute that you’d left Crowthorne House for good. That you’d run away from me,” he said into my hair, kissing the crown of my head repeatedly. “You’re colder than stone.”
“You weren’t in the bed,” I said, my voice breaking as I shivered. “You left me alone with her.”
Nick flinched. I felt him, his muscles stiffening suddenly as he held his breath.
“Alone with who, Grace?”
“My mother,” I cried, giving way to tears.
Nick seemed to relax just a little, then, and resumed stroking my back, my hair. I wondered who he was expecting me to say. My eyes drifted to Louisa’s statue, resentfully watching the back that was forever turned to me.
“She can’t hurt you now,” said Nick, as if he knew and understood how I had hated my mother, without me even needing to say so. “Just a terrible dream, that’s all. You were sleepwalking.”
It was as if he knew, instinctively, how cruel she was. As if he knew how worn down I was from years of taking care of her every emotional and physical need, locked away in the Dales with no provisions or even running water. I held him tighter, digging my fingernails into his shirt.
“I saw him, too. My father. I saw his body, bloated and...” I trailed off, unable to describe the awful scene.
I hadn’t recalled this last image of him in my dreams before.
Why now? It was as if mother had joined him in the afterlife and blamed me, cursed me, because even in death, she couldn’t find him.
Only his silent corpse to hold in her lap.
I wiped tears from my damp face and Nick replaced every one of them with warm, light kisses against my skin. Soon I was pawing at him, my mouth seeking his, tugging down his jogging bottoms to seek the hard, reassuring length inside.
He responded with his assured desire, tearing at my nightdress.
When we lay back against the white tile, panting, he drew me into his arms. I enjoyed the notion that we’d made love in front of Louisa’s statue, cementing me as Nick’s lover, officially replacing her. Not even the memory of her, captured in white stone, could stop Nick from wanting me more.
A black lump caught my eye in my periphery. Some kind of fruit, shrivelled up on the floor. Its leathery shell was concave as the fruit flies and garden wasps devoured its flesh.
“I see them everywhere,” I said, breathlessly. “These awful rotting figs.”
Nick kissed the crown of my head, turning his gaze to where I saw the black lump of mouldy flesh.
“It was a bad choice of location. They hadn’t a hope in hell of thriving in here,” he murmured, his hand massaging one of my small breasts until my nipple budded.
“The disease is in the soil, then it’s carried on the flies, the beetles.
The microorganisms infect the fruit before it even begins to bud, and when it does, it’s too late.
It’s the growing environment that ruins them. ”
I looked at the ruined fruit and felt almost sorry for it.
“They were rotten from the start,” I said, observing it from the safety of his arms.
A powerful urge built up in me, thinking about the rot. I wondered, in that moment, if I should tell him all the things about me that he didn’t know. But first, I wanted to learn things from him.
“Tell me your biggest regret, Nick. No, not regret...tell me your biggest secret. Your deepest, darkest secret. And I’ll tell you mine,” I said in a hushed, fearful tone.
His embrace around me tightened, his limbs stiff. He held his breath again until he spoke.
“Oh, Grace...I couldn’t possibly begin.”
“Just something. Anything.” I pressed, turning my face into his neck. I could feel his jugular pulsing against my skin. “Please. And I’ll tell you mine.”
He swallowed hard.
“All right,” he began, his voice deep and reluctant. “When the fire ripped through the house, taking everyone I loved with it...there was one person I didn’t miss.”
I held my breath, clinging to him.
“Who?”
“My brother, Alexander.”
He waited a moment. The pause seemed to last an eternity. I wondered if I should confess that I knew some of his story, but I resisted.
“Please go on, Nick.”
He let out a long breath.