Chapter 13 The Morning After #3
Because that’s what they were doing. Measuring his torpraxia—the numbness that crawled across his body in conjunction with the seith rot—as they had many times before.
He informed his cock that there was no action required on its part.
Stand down. False alarm. But it was too late: his cock didn’t want to stand down.
It was attentive. Fairhrim was touching him.
The doily was going to start tenting soon.
Fairhrim drew her finger down Osric’s shin and over the top of his foot, and did the same down his arms and forearms. He could feel everything. He said so. He did not advise Fairhrim that her touch was stimulating in other ways. The doily stirred and began to lift.
“Torpraxia receding,” muttered Fairhrim, returning to her notes. “This really is astonishing.”
“You really are a Phenomenon,” said Osric.
Fairhrim put away the chart and began to pack her things, and Osric knew that his audience was at an end.
He didn’t want her to go.
He dressed. His cock disagreed with the proceedings and rebelled by popping out of his underthings twice, because it wished to be examined for torpraxia, too. He camouflaged it with his trousers and untucked shirt.
“While you’re here, there’s something I still owe you,” said Osric.
“What is it?”
“The books on the Dreor.”
Upon Fairhrim’s face broke a smile of so sweet a loveliness that Osric’s tormented heart stopped beating. It tugged in her direction instead.
“Oh,” she said. “I hadn’t dared ask again, after our—after I—”
“After you betrayed me, and threw me into a cupboard like a wretched mop?” said Osric.
Fairhrim did not have the grace to look contrite. The lovely smile persisted. Osric was no longer certain whether his chest housed a heart or a Fairhrim-obsessed compass.
She fell into step with him as they exited the sitting room. He was aware of everything to do with her: her nearness, the slight sway in her hips as she walked and the corresponding swish of soft pastel skirts, the sound of her heels on floorboards.
There were two libraries on the estate, loosely divided into arts and sciences. The Dreor material, consisting of a few historical accounts, lived in the arts library, in the east wing upstairs.
Osric unlocked the library doors and drew them open. After the darkness of Rosefell’s corridors, he and Fairhrim were briefly blinded by sun diffusing through long white curtains.
Fairhrim put both hands on her heart and said, “Oh.”
It was the correct reaction. Distant Mordaunt forebears, with more taste and wisdom than Osric’s immediate ancestry, had made this library beautiful.
Floor-to-ceiling windows, giving onto Juliette balconies, dominated one side of it.
The walls were panelled in ornate oak joinery; the ceiling was vaulted plaster and gilt cornices, upon which danced ancient Roman deities.
Velvet and leather spines sat on the shelves in orderly rows, interspersed by Osric over the years with antique prints, silk paintings, folios, and the occasional scandalous French novel.
Given the ceiling, he had decided to make Ovid’s Metamorphoses the theme, and so had acquired marble sculptures to ornament the spaces between shelves. Now Arachne wove, Io transformed, Bacchus capered, and Apollo chased Daphne among tomes and sliding ladders.
Fairhrim was delighted by all of it. Her delight delighted Osric.
“This is so lovely,” she sighed, tracing her fingers along shelves as she passed.
“Many a life’s works, finished and forgotten,” said Osric.
“Books have a way of outlasting the hands that wrote them.”
At the far end of the library was a hearth, unlit, around which plush chairs with gilt paws clustered. On a low table there, Osric had stacked the books on the Dreor Order. They had sat there untouched since his quarrel with Fairhrim.
“Those are for you,” said Osric.
Fairhrim took a step towards him—a step that brought her close enough for him to feel her breasts against his chest. The next thing he knew, she had pressed her lips to his left cheek, then his right cheek.
She backed away before he could gather himself to react.
He reeled. He tried to be nonchalant, but Fairhrim had just kissed him on both cheeks with an affection that she had hitherto reserved for men who were not Osric.
She knelt on the rug next to the low table and flipped through the books. Her eyes were riveted to the pages, Osric’s to her profile. Her kisses and her happiness gave him pleasure, pleasure far beyond the small hit of satisfaction that came with pretty new things.
If he truly was in love with her—not that he was, but if—then what would be the procedure? Drown? Poison himself? Walk off the balcony? He preferred not to dwell on it.
Her hair, still unpinned, fell over the pages. Osric came behind her and drew it over her shoulder. His fingers lingered at the side of her neck too long, at the place where he would like to put his mouth.
Fairhrim looked up at him. Osric waited for his tongue to supply some cheeky remark, or at least a plausible excuse, for his tenderness, but none came. He found himself instead fighting a blush, because he was acting like a smitten imbecile. He shoved his hands in his pockets.
Fairhrim collected the books into her arms. “Thank you ever so much. I’ll have a look at these when I’m back at Swanstone and return them straight away. These books may be of enormous importance working out the why. Now I’ve got to figure out the who.”
“You know who could tell you?” asked Osric.
Fairhrim regarded him inquisitively.
“Tristane,” said Osric. “But you went and got her sentenced to death, didn’t you?”
“The Wardens have interrogated her. She refused to talk.”
“She’ll refuse to talk even more when she’s dead.”
Fairhrim narrowed her eyes at him. She looked dangerously as though she was calculating something. She did not share the calculation with Osric.
Osric narrowed his eyes in turn. “What are you thinking of?”
“Nothing.”
“Promise you won’t do anything stupid.”
“I promise,” said Fairhrim, and Osric was well aware that the promise was worth precisely nothing.
“That wasn’t a promise. That was an anti-promise, Fairhrim. An unpromise.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Fairhrim.
She held the books to her chest. That the books, rather than Osric’s face, should be pressed to her breasts was a matter of profound unfairness. Osric met the injustice with resolute courage.
Fairhrim said, “I’d better be off.”
Osric, a bit addicted to her gasps of pleasure, and unprepared to say farewell just yet, asked, “Would you like to see the science library?”
And Fairhrim, normally a pillar of composure, rewarded him with a wide-eyed, enthusiastic, “Yes.”
Osric led her to Rosefell’s west wing. “The east library is the estate’s original library. I had to build a new one. We outgrew it.”
Her arm brushed his as they walked; the touch was a small glory. As Osric unlocked the doors, Fairhrim eyed the collection of Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica in its glass display case.
Osric kept the curtains tightly drawn in this library, which housed rarer and older tomes. Long lines of shelves disappeared into shadow. The library was adorned with gold Venetian lanterns, suspended from chains throughout. Osric did not usually trouble to light them, but as Fairhrim was here—
It was worth it just for her intake of breath as the lanterns, spinning slowly, cast their traceries of light through the room. He stared after her longingly.
Like an idiot.
The lanterns illuminated hushed rows of books, Renaissance tapestries, and, above it all, a blue-black ceiling adorned with stars.
“Here we bid farewell to Ovid,” said Osric. “That’s the northern celestial hemisphere.”
Fairhrim looked up in wonder. The lantern light made the gilt constellations glitter.
“Ovid is still with us,” she said. “Hercules. Ursa Major, Ursa Minor. Andromeda. Perseus.”
“I suppose you’re right.”