Chapter Twenty
Nicholas
Minutes after Grace left me in the marquis, I took a stroll around the grounds to absorb the enormity of the day.
No sooner had I divorced, I was re-married.
No longer was I bound between the two loves of mine.
Though I would always watch over Louisa, settle her hospital bills and visit with her, I had finally severed our marital tie.
Contending with the emotions this dug up inside me would be my new task; dealing with the terrible guilt an inevitable price.
When I made my vows to Louisa, two decades ago, I had looked into her young, desperate eyes and promised I would never leave her side.
I promised her that her demons were my demons, and I would be her sword and shield.
But fate had other plans, and Louisa, like ashes, had filtered through my fingers.
Her mind took her to places I couldn’t go, giving her thoughts I couldn’t erase.
Once those thoughts became reality – scorching, searing, destructive reality – I had to accept that I couldn’t keep my vows.
The best I could do was be her manager, her administrator, her carer – but never again her lover.
The medication saw to it that she spent so little time in a lucid state that we began, over time, to drift slowly but surely away from one another, cast away on the infinite black sea.
Then came Grace, and the impossible, the unthinkable, began to emerge from that sea. A desperate need to love, to care, rose up in me once more like the undead. My frozen heart was thawed and I began feeding from Grace, love-starved and gasping.
I gazed up at the west side of the house and observed the tangle of Virginia Creeper that had crawled, desperate and unyielding, up to the roof.
It was thickest around the iron balcony, leading up and around the terrace doors to what was once Louisa’s library.
I could see clearly how she had made her way up there, desperate, as she must have been, to see it again.
I could envisage her terror in seeing Grace, hand on her golden bannister, making her way up to the mezzanine.
To see her own usurper in full view, in her own house, would have crushed her soul to dust.
To think I had allowed Louisa to experience that was devastating.
I sighed a weary sigh, shaking my head as I observed the library windows, knowing that despite my best efforts to please us all, I’d hurt the most vulnerable among us.
Louisa was deranged, almost beyond help.
..but she had been my wife, and I did not take that responsibility lightly.
The wheels were in motion to transfer her to another hospital, given that my faith in the Infirmary had well and truly worn out.
Louisa was a master at escape when she managed to avoid her medication; she had been a sleuth before her illness took hold of her, let alone now, when she had reason and desire to pull these stunts.
I knew there was little they could do if she outsmarted them.
Rather than sue them – which I’d been tempted to do, for negligence – I thought it best to move her on, very gradually, to ease the transition and cause her the least disruption.
If only Louisa could know that the young woman she’d seen in her house – the woman who looked so eerily like her, 20 years ago – had ensured her safety.
Had Grace not vowed to sell Heather House, we would have been too penniless to afford for me to divorce Louisa.
Her hospitalisation, combined with her share of the house and business, would have cost me everything to divide.
As it stood, the assets could remain with me and Grace, and the funds from the sale of Heather House and all its land would provide Louisa’s half.
Grace would, at that point, have a claim to half my home and its assets, including the business we would now be running together.
I had assured Grace that she was my partner in every sense, and I was capable of putting my money where my mouth was.
It pained me to see Grace making arrangements to sell Heather House, especially at such an impossibly young age. Twenty-one, and already she’d endured too much adult responsibility...just as I had, when the fire killed my adoptive family, and I inherited everything.
If it weren’t for the fact that her home was a vessel for her horrific memories and, more recently, our dealings with Tom Stoddard, I might have insisted against it.
But Grace understood her own mind, her own needs, and she was a pragmatic woman.
When she insisted that this was the simplest way to settle the divorce, I couldn’t argue with her.
She was correct. We would have the cash for the settlement without the need to sell the home and business we wanted to share together. We could have it all.
It was only a matter of time, now, before the house and land were sold and tethers to her old life were officially cut off.
She would be free to go on as Mrs Crowthorne.
We could refurbish our home, bring love and life into it.
All the dreams I had laid to rest could be resurrected.
All the dreams my haunted little Grace could dare to imagine could come true, here, in our home.
A blood-curdling scream startled me from my thoughts.
I turned my head in time to see Eugenie and Dorian staggering backwards in the front garden, cupping their hands over their mouths.
I sprinted toward them in time for Eugenie to point a finger toward my attic room.
Dorian bellowed something unintelligible into the darkness.
At his feet was shattered glass and my wooden bust of the crow and thorns.
“She’s got her! Oh god, oh god – Nick! Nick!” It was Eugenie, gesturing wildly to the balcony.
They were there, both of them, on the terrace. Louisa had Grace’s throat the way a falcon clutches a mouse in its talons.
Black smoke billowed from behind them. Orange flames licked inside the house like a hidden monster.
“Stop, Louisa!” I bellowed. “Don’t do this!”
All that I loved and cared about on this earth was on the cusp of being torn away from me.
Adrenaline fuelled me as I sprinted across the lawn, but they were already falling, splitting apart in mid-air.
The bushes and her wedding gown broke Grace’s fall as she plummeted to the thicket of greenery below.
Louisa didn’t scream as she fell, even stretching out her arms, the wind in her tortured face, as if experiencing freedom, truly, for the first time.
The spike impaled her, swift and true, through the middle.
I was stalled. My heart seized up to see Louisa meet her fate so cruelly, and so suddenly – yet my wife was in danger, and might be fatally wounded. I ran, first, for Grace.
“Please, God, tell me you’re all right – ”
Grace was in a heap among the shrubs.
Scrapes, bruises, a little blood at her mouth – my wife appeared to have survived the drop itself with barely an injury. Her leg, however, was burned horribly, red and raw. She was confused, her skirt blackened and ravaged from the flames.
“Speak to me, Grace – are you hurt anywhere else? Your back, your head?”
“I’m okay, I’m okay,” she muttered, her voice hoarse. “Oh god, Nick . Don’t look up.”
“I’ve seen her,” I said through my tears. Pain like I’d never experienced before ripped though me.
I gathered Grace in arms and held her to my breast as she cried, her fists balled, beating my chest. I shouted for Eugenie to call the ambulances and fire brigade. She nodded abruptly, running back toward the house. Dorian was hunched over, vomiting on the grass.
“Please believe me!” Grace cried, seeming inconsolable. “I tried to help her! She wouldn’t stop!”
“I know, I know, darling,” I told her, soothing her.
I understood completely. I knew only too well.
Margaret appeared, her screams piercing the night as she hurried toward the fence where Louisa was suspended.
Soon others came, spilling out onto the lawn like coloured beads.
I rocked Grace in my arms, knowing as sure as I knew anything that Louisa had died instantly, and she was never coming back.
?
And so my wedding day marked the first day of grief.
Louisa, not one to be upstaged, had made her mark before she left us.
Grace, stalwart and rational to the last, allowed me my moods, my intermittent anger and heartache, during what should have been the happiest days of our lives.
All I could do was remind her of my love physically, expressing my pent-up rage between her legs, when I couldn’t find the words to explain it.
When she clawed at my back and cried out in pleasure, I knew she was with me, that she understood me, and knew that my heart was with her.
My failure to protect Louisa could not have been made more acutely apparent to me. Yet I knew, as Grace reminded me so often, that I did everything I could to protect her. I couldn’t protect her from her illness. Her self had been lost so long ago that there was nothing for her, or me, to save.
The last thing I could do for her was to wash, embalm, and prepare her body. During this process, I said all the things I needed to say to her, all my sorrows and regrets, and put those demons to sleep for the final time. My grief, like any other’s, was a process.
I restored her scarred face to its former porcelain beauty using clay and cosmetics.
I gave her new locks of white-blonde hair to make her whole again, using weaves that she had refused to wear in her madness.
In life, she wanted all the world to see her scars, her pain.
In death, I could restore her to what once was my Louisa. She was forty-one years old.
We laid her out in the chapel of rest and allowed the few who knew her or remembered her to mourn her. Margaret and some of the staff at the infirmary, who loved her, came to say their goodbyes.
And then it was time to cast her body into the same flames that so beguiled her, and reduce her body to ash.
We interred her ashes at the foot of her statue, which we turned to face outward, towards the shards of light piercing through the broken roof.
It would be her monument until we decided what to do with the orangery, whether to repair it or dismantle it to allow for something new.
We would eventually move Louisa’s statue to a proper place in the graveyard, and allow the weather to make its mark on the stone.
Grace held my hand as I said the few words I wanted to say over Louisa’s ashes. When we were done, we walked among the graves, lacing our fingers.
“How is it you can be so compassionate to a woman who would have killed you?” I asked her, still quite bewildered by it all.
She was so young to be so level-headed; it wasn’t a description I could have used for myself at that age. “The woman who would have overshadowed your life, your marriage...who would have watched you burn.”
It was true, and I could see it all too clearly, now.
Louisa would have never allowed Grace and I to move on.
A sense of relief washed over me when I realised that.
It was a sensation I couldn’t ignore. She was gone, now, and we were unburdened.
It was a complicated feeling that I found impossible to express, but I knew Grace understood it, the way she seemed to understand everything else.
We came to a stop on the gravel. Grace closed her eyes and enjoyed the soft wind on her skin. When summer came around, she would have to cover up again, though her treatment seemed to be helping.
It was a gloomy, overcast day of grey, chalky clouds above head.
“She couldn’t help being who she was, any more than you or I can,” said Grace, quite simply. “We were all bound to be peculiar fruit. Some thrive, while others fester...that just seems to be the way of things.”
She looked up toward the orangery, then, her eyes settling on the tree growing outside of the missing panes of glass. She watched it for a short while, seemingly deep in thought.
I smiled softly, drawing Grace into my arms. I kissed her, ardent yet slow, and swayed her among the gravestones. We danced gently, just as we did on our wedding night. She laid her head against my chest and closed her eyes, while I whispered the words to Fairy Tale in her waiting ear.