Chapter 29 The Fight #2
My favorite dish is duck confit. If I had never tasted it, I would not know that I liked it.
Perhaps that would be better. Papa prefers to sell our ducks, not eat them, so we have it rarely.
If I had never had it, I would not daydream about it when I was hungry, or long for it when something less delightful graces my plate.
My mouth would not water to the point of pain, thinking about it during the long days without it.
She should not have kissed me. I should have pulled away.
I did not. That first taste wiped my mind clear like a sponge on a slate.
It went through me like the lightning on the hill, but sweeter, oh, sweeter.
A vise I did not even know was around my heart seemed to loosen and then unfold inside my chest into a thousand flutters of warmth.
At the first touch, I had stepped back in surprise, but she followed me, her lips moving over mine, and then I was surging forward, against her, voracious, my hands wrapping around her waist, clutching the soft fabric of her nightdress.
Oh, glory. I knew I would be hungry all my life.
The tinkle of broken glass awoke us. I pulled back and opened my eyes to find that we had careened against the laboratory table. We had knocked a phial over, and a pool of golden-beige liquid was dripping onto the floor. With a guilty start, I took my hands off her and stepped back.
Georgiana made a broken little sound. “There I go, making a mess as usual,” she said. “You go on downstairs. I’ll clean it up.”
I made to step forward. “I’ll help. It was—”
“I said , I’ll do it,” she said. “Wouldn’t want to get any of me on you.” And she grabbed a rag from the counter and began to clean. Her tears were wet on my cheeks.
My throat was too tight to respond, so I just nodded and stepped back. “Be careful,” I ground out. “Don’t hurt yourself.” She nodded without turning around.
I went down the stairs and sat on her bed. I only meant to give her a moment to recover—but I was so upset that my brain seemed to simply shut down, and I fell into a half-sitting, troubled sleep.
As ought to be clear, I was by this time extremely overwrought. What happened next—what I thought happened next—was surely no more than a freak of my anguished brain. I believe in elemental particles, and calculus, and Linnean classification. I do not believe in mag whatever this was.
I awoke to a sound from above. Miss Darcy gave a yelp, as though in pain. Forgetting our quarrel, I rose immediately. “Georgiana? Did you cut yourself?” There was no response. I hurried up the stairs.
She was kneeling in a pool of moonlight and looked up at my reappearance. From Cariad’s cage came a low keen of dread. Georgiana’s eyes went wide and she stumbled to her feet. A hand came to my shoulder, urgently guiding me back toward the door. “I am quite well. Go on.”
“But what was—”
“Nothing! Go, I say!” She practically snarled the words. She had never spoken so to me, even in the midst of our recent, vicious fight. I flinched, but did not let go.
“Not until you tell me what is wrong.”
“Tell you?” She laughed hysterically. “You have made it quite clear you do not wish to know what I really am.”
My mind was whirling. “I have no idea what you are referring to.”
“And that is for the best, for both of us. Go, for God’s sake! Leave me to my shame!”
“No!” I said. There were strange shivers passing under her skin, like the tremors of a frightened horse. The rippling seemed to grow deeper, deeper than anyone’s muscles really could. Georgiana wrenched herself away from me.
“Very well,” she said. “You shall regret it.” She laughed a high, despairing laugh. “You wanted to know the secret of my illness? You shall. Never say I failed to warn you.”
Her tremors were so deep now that they were visible to the naked eye. In their wake, she looked— different . Her skin, dappled with moonlight, looked suddenly covered with a fine, downy coat.
Not a coat. Feathers. “Georgiana?”
“It used to happen every night,” she whispered. “I have been able to restrict it to a few days a month. The moon makes it worse. Your potions have been of some help there.” She gulped a sob. “Goodbye, Mary. Good luck with whatever your own secret may be.”
Another high, desperate sob turned into a keening cry. Cariad screamed in counterpoint.
Where Miss Darcy had crouched, there was now a large, tawny-white owl. Before I could do more than gasp, it spread its wings and was out the window.
I am asleep , I thought. I am asleep and this is a dream.
Mechanically, I went to Cariad and comforted him. I finished cleaning the broken phial; the liquid it had spilled was the same creamy, brown-threaded beige-white as the owl’s feathers.
I am asleep. I am asleep. I am asleep.
I went downstairs and went to bed. Sleep seemed a long time coming.
I know it was a dream. It had to be. The alternative is that I am going mad, and that I refuse to do, no matter how richly I deserve it. A strange dream, a sort of metaphor for our sudden and shocking rupture. Now I have written it down, I shall put that strange vision out of my head.
Today I told my mother I felt ill and stayed in bed.
I lay, staring at the wall, trying to separate which parts of that strange night I had dreamt and which were real.
The whole thing was so painful that in the end I gave it up and soothed myself with an hour or so of calculating Fibonacci numbers, which I always find to be a balm to the spirit.
I had got to around the forty-fourth one (701,408,733—a personal favorite) when I heard a clatter of wheels outside.
That was all the notification I had that Miss Darcy had gone.
She was right, of course. When she said I was keeping something back from her. I could not stand to tell it—not even to you, Harry. But I suppose the time has come. Once I can get out of bed without trembling, I will finally put pen to paper and relate the story of that night.