by Kelley York
Adelia comes to my side, taking my hands in hers. “Virgil will find him,” she assures me. “We need to get you inside. You’re limping. What did you do to your leg?”
“No, he can’t…” I jerk a hand free, grasping hold of her arm. “He won’t know what to do and James is—”
“William,” Adelia says sharply. “Please, trust Virgil. You’re only going to exacerbate your injury and you’re of no use to James if you do. Come inside.”
Dragging in a deep and quaking breath, I try to heed her words. Virgil may not be as experienced as us, true, but he does have experience; he isn’t going into this blind, and if I had to trust anyone with James’ safety, it would be him.
Still, I cannot seem to stop shaking from nerves as I let Adelia lead me back to the house. She pushes me down into a kitchen chair and attempts to check over my leg. I mumble that it’s fine and shy away. Whatever I did to it doesn’t appear to be serious, just a twinge that needs to work itself out. I don’t even want to be sitting until James returns safely. “I’m going to strangle him.”
Adelia has a seat in the chair across from me. “He’s trying to help that poor boy.”
“We don’t separate when working,” I snap. “It’s a rule. After Whisperwood, it’s always been one of our rules about this whole bloody business.”
Adelia opens her mouth, sighs, and turns away to look for the door. “I’m sure they’ll return soon.”
I almost wish she would argue with me, just to give me something to focus on. Instead, I’m left to bow my head, hands fisted against my knees as I breathe in deep. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to speak so harshly.”
“You’re worried,” she says simply.
I don’t even begin to know how to word it. How to say how much this job terrifies me, how great and crippling the fear is that something will happen to James, and without him, I…
I swallow hard and nod, hunching forward to press my face into my hands.
How much times passes, I’m uncertain, but it can’t have been as long as it feels. Eventually, Adelia stands and says, “They’ve returned.”
My head snaps up. I can just barely make out the sound of their voices—both their voices—and relief crashes over me. As soon as the door opens, I lurch to my feet to go to James. “Are you all right?”
He’s dirty, his hair is a mess, and his expression is screwed tight in frustration, but otherwise he appears no worse for wear. “I’m all right. I’m afraid we lost sight of him, though. Fast little bugger.”
Now that I’m reassured he’s unharmed, I’ve half a mind to punch him. The anger swiftly edges out the worry. “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”
James pauses and blinks slowly. “Ah… How is your leg?”
My hands clench, expression twisting into something furious. “Have you lost your mind?! You ran off, James!”
My tone startles him into straightening his spine. “I apologise? I didn’t want him to get away again.”
Anger has pushed me near to tears, coupled with the fact he doesn’t seem to grasp why I’m upset. “Why do you make that apology sound like a question?”
“Because I feel as though you were wanting one but I’m uncertain as to why,” he responds slowly. “We’re working, William. I was doing my job.”
“We do not split up, James Spencer. I’ve made that perfectly clear.”
“Well, you couldn’t exactly follow after, could you? What if this was the only chance we had before it was too late for him?”
“What if he’d turned back on you and attacked again?” I hiss. “What if there’d been more than him? What if he led you straight into a trap? We do not go where the other can’t follow. I don’t care for what reason!”
James’ mouth draws tight, and his voice lowers. “This is not a fight you wish to pick right now, William. I apologised. It’s done. Drop it.”
I bristle at the seeming threat. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Instead of answering, James steps around me. “I need to clean up.”
With a groan, I run my hands over my face and shove the front door closed. “Christ, I need a drink.”
Behind me, James’ steps come to an abrupt halt. A moment of pause, and then, “I’m surprised you didn’t bring any with you.”
Facing the direction I am, I see the way Virgil grimaces and he touches a hand to Adelia’s arm as though about to coax her outside. Before he has the chance, I turn to James. “Come again?”
“I find it hysterical you’ve the audacity to stand there and lecture me,” James drawls, folding his arms, “when none of this would have been an issue had you not come to our job off your face with alcohol. You reek of it, do you realise? So who’s the reckless one, exactly? Because I suspect being completely foxed while working is the epitome of recklessness.”
My stomach knots as my heart plummets straight into it. Shame rolls over me like a wet, smothering blanket on a hot day, and with it, a layer of anger I am not proud of. “My alcohol consumption has nothing to do with what happened tonight.”
James lets out a bitter laugh. “Oh, right then. So you standing there like an idiot as that boy threw himself at you was…what, precisely?”
Heat floods into my face. “Fear, because Lord knows it’s not the first time such a thing has scared me half to death. For that matter, perhaps I wouldn’t need to show up intoxicated just to function if it weren’t for these fucking jobs!”
“Because God forbid you handle yourself for once, eh?” he snaps. “Never mind that I’ve been handing out your drugs at whatever ridiculous rate you require, without commentary nor judgement.” He takes a step closer, putting us almost nose to nose. “Never mind that you know precisely how I feel about drinking outside of social situations. Never mind that I’ve never forced you to join me on these ‘fucking jobs’!”
I rear back, the words like a sharp slap in the face. Of course James has told me I needn’t come along, and yet I always thought it was him being kind, his way of gently letting me know he wouldn’t hold it against me. Never did I think that, perhaps, it might be because he truly felt he didn’t need me.
I cannot seem to find my voice. It’s fled off into the darkness, leaving only anger and humiliation and pain in its wake. James may as well have cut my chest wide open to allow every niggling insecurity and fear about my laudanum and alcohol consumption spill out at my feet like an infection.
“I think you ought to go back to Evenbury,” James says coldly. “I will handle this on my own.”
Without waiting for a response, he storms off to the bedroom, door slamming behind him.
I watch him go, desperation biting at my heels to give chase to him, to throw myself at his mercy and beg him not to dismiss me in such a manner. But I stay put, rooted uselessly to the spot, feeling sick to my stomach and dizzy and like I want to crawl outside and lie face-down in the mud where I belong.
In the course of our relationship, James and I have bickered plenty over chores, finances, work, family... But I can count the number of large arguments we’ve had on one hand. Even those—aside from our blow-up at Whisperwood—were swiftly resolved. It takes a special kind of idiocy on my part for James to go off like that, to the point where it causes me to clam up and be unable to respond and create a cataclysmic breakdown of communication. James’ temper is a beast when it’s let loose, and it has a remarkable knack of making a person feel two inches tall.
Not that he said anything that wasn’t completely true, of course. Were I at all capable of being normal and dealing with things, then none of this would be an issue, would it?
I become aware of Adelia and Virgil in the room, both silent observers—undoubtedly judging—and I cannot bring myself to meet their eyes. “I apologise for that display,” is all I can manage, before forcing my legs to move so I can step outside.
For
the better part of an hour, I sit in the cold, staring out at the woods as though expecting Abraham or the spirits will return. Hoping for it, almost, so that James and I can put whatever the hell that argument was behind us and work together, the way we always do. The way we’re supposed to.
No such thing happens, of course. Virgil joins me at one point, but before he can get a word out I say, “Don’t.” He takes a deep breath, and eventually disappears back inside.
Christ almighty, what a failure I am. I’m angry with my inability to function, frustrated by it. As Virgil reminded me this morning, I tried to sober up completely during my fourth year at Whisperwood. With no access to my laudanum, with Charles Simmons no longer lording over me, and with the ghosts gone, it had seemed a logical thing to try to do.
What a glorious disaster that had been.
Final exams had left me a quivering, hysterical mess. There were days I could scarcely force myself out of my room. Days where I sat down, right in the middle of the hallway, unable to breathe and certain I was suffocating. The world had been too large, too loud, too frightening to deal with.
James had been so endlessly patient with me, even when I could tell that patience was wearing thin in places. He’d done his best, bringing me my schoolwork, making excuses for my absences to the teachers, sneaking me meals when I could not bring myself to go the dining hall to eat.
He’d been everything I needed him to be, and despite all that, eventually…I caved. I begged him for my laudanum because the alternative was so much worse.
Now, I wonder if I was wrong.
Did I not try hard enough? Did I not try long enough? Perhaps it needed more time to get out of my body. Perhaps I needed to be stronger, or perhaps, now that I’m no longer in school, it would be easier.
I press my face into my hands. My mind is running a hundred miles a minute, and I cannot make sense of my thoughts. As the night grows swiftly colder and I’m without a thick coat on, I re-enter the house. There are only two bedrooms; James has one, and the children’s room is closed so I assume Adelia claimed that bed. So, I snag a kitchen chair, pull it over by one of the windows, and slouch down into it, figuring I will try to get some uneasy rest.
Thinking, over and over again, since Whisperwood there has never been an argument where James and I have gone to bed angry or hurt with one another.
I suppose we’ve broken that streak.
Being hungover and having slept crooked in a chair all night leaves me aching and cranky. Not that I sleep much anyway. Frankly, we’re all a bit on the grouchy side come morning, and one look at James’ face as we settle down at the rickety kitchen table tells me now is not the time I ought to try to speak to him about much of anything.
Or maybe I’m being a coward.
From Evenbury, I brought along a selection of snacks and eggs and bread, enough to make us all a small breakfast. Adelia has undoubtedly never eaten so scantly in all her life, yet she doesn’t so much as pull a face at the meagre offering. She was wise enough to dress down in a maid’s dress yesterday, and I suspect it was easier to dress herself this morning without help than it might have otherwise been in her usual garb and corsets.
For that matter, I wonder how she fared last night. Virgil slipped into the bedroom after James and, I suspect, demanded a place on the bed, however awkward that must have been. Adelia slept in the children’s room with the door cracked open, and I’m feeling immensely guilty over not having checked up on her because I was so involved in my own self-pity.
No one says a word as we eat. Having James seated right across from me in such frigid silence is enough to drive me mad. I’m also distinctly aware I’ve gone more than a full day without my medicine and my body has begun to feel the effects. Perhaps not so drastically as it did the last time—I don’t fear blacking out, for instance—but my hands have begun to quake and the headache behind my eyes is distracting.
I’m sure as hell not about to ask James for my usual morning dose.
Virgil is the one who finally breaks the silence. “I think two of us ought to try the woods again today. See if we can’t find where that boy ran off to, or if the neighbours saw anything.”
James takes a bite of his food but doesn’t look up. “I’d be happy to look again.”
I open my mouth to say that I’ll go along, but the look Virgil shoots me suggests that I am not supposed to be one of the two.
“It might be best for you to rest that leg of yours,” Virgil says. My leg feels almost completely fine and he must know that, which means he’s sending me off for other reasons. “I suspect Mr. Foss will be on the lookout for Lady Adelia today, anyway, so she ought not to stay absent too long.”
Adelia sighs in displeasure, but given that she doesn’t argue, she must see the logic in that statement. “William, you could help me look through Father’s library today. I want to see if I can find anything related to the history of this area. Perhaps something will give us an idea of what spirits could be lingering here.”
I lock eyes with Virgil. He has some sort of reason for dismissing me like this, and I can only guess what that reason is. If he feels he’s helping, if he feels James and I need time to cool our heads because working together while things are unsteady between us or—
My gaze drops back to my food. Not that I had much of an appetite to begin with, but now I’m certain I cannot stomach another bite. “Yes, Adelia. Of course.”
We say little further. What food can be wrapped and brought back with us is packed up, and I busy myself transporting our things back to the carriage. As Adelia and I prepare to head out, Virgil catches me by the door, his voice low.
“Go into my room back at the manor. There’s a bottle in there you may use.”
My face flushes hot as I pull my arm free. “Pardon?”
He frowns. “You have that look about you, William. You can’t just stop taking that stuff when you’ve been on it so long, and you know it.”
“James gives me my medication now.”
“Yes, well, he’s not going to be there, so you’ll need to be a big boy and take it on your own. Perhaps you don’t trust yourself, but I think when it comes down to it, between your love and your drugs…you’ll choose him.”
He pats my shoulder and slips out of the house, leaving me with a headache forming behind my eyes and the urge to throw something at him. I know he’s trying to help, but it doesn’t feel helpful spreading temptation at my feet.
Arguing or no, I cannot leave without saying something to James. I find him still in the bedroom, fussing with his neckwear and packing his own bag. I watch him, resisting the urge to approach and nudge his hands aside to tie the cloth for him like I always do.
“Please be safe,” I say quietly.
James’ hands fall still, although he does not look up. “I promise.”
I want to tell him I love him, that I’m sorry, that I promise to make things right, but my voice catches, and I suspect we haven’t the time for a heart-to-heart right now. Instead, I swallow hard, bow my head, and say, “Thank you,” before retreating from the room.
Virgil bids Adelia and me a safe trip as we board the carriage and set off to the estate. It’s early, it’s cold, and my head is pounding. The quiet of a chilly, empty morning in the countryside makes me homesick.
Adelia is so painfully quiet beside me that it forces me to dwell on how awkward this entire trip has probably been for her, particularly having to witness James and I carrying on as we were. “I owe you a sincere apology for last night.”
Adelia glances at me. “You owe me no such thing.”
“I feel that I do. I imagine all that was…uncomfortable.”
“You needn’t fret so much. I only hope you two can resume being on good terms.”
“We’ll be all right,” I murmur, focusing on the passing scenery. “It’s hardly the first argument we’ve had.”
Adelia turns her gaze forward. “Well, that’s all part of love, isn’t it?”
My shoulders tense and I have to force myself not to simply pitch myself out of the carriage and hope I land conveniently under its wheels. I steal a look at her. She hinted before at suspecting something between James and myself, but this is a far more brazen accusation, and fear at being found out is embedded deep no matter how much I trust her to keep our secret.
I wish I were better at speaking, that I had the knack for words that James does so I might know how to verbalise to someone how I feel. There are so many things I’ve never been able to articulate to anyone, even to James, because whenever I’ve tried the end result is frustration and running circles around my own head while struggling to spit the words out.
Would that I could, I would try to confess properly to Adelia how desperate I am to make James happy, and that I sometimes fear I’m incapable of it in the long run. That I fear my presence is somehow holding him back from greatness.
I’ll have to settle with quietly responding, “Yes, I suppose so,” and allowing that to be enough of a confirmation of her assumptions. Which is, really, more than I’ve ever offered anyone else.
She reaches out then, giving my hand a gentle pat. “Everything will be all right. Please, no moping, hm?”
My expression softens the slightest bit. Adelia really is a remarkable woman, and her understanding is appreciated right now. “Thank you.”
I shall do my best not to mope, as requested. We’ve things to do, after all. Such as sneak back into Evenbury and slip past Foss before he can come calling. We’ll go our separate ways long enough to get washed and changed.
Before reconvening, I slip into Virgil’s room and head straight for his medicine bag. As promised, there is a brand-new bottle of laudanum amongst his other supplies. I stare at it in my hand for what feels like hours, thinking I ought to leave it. Thinking I ought to take it. Perhaps take extra in case it ends up being a while before I can have more…except that’s not really how it works, is it?