Once

by Elisabeth Grace Foley et al.

  “All right, you win. But I want to see her. What was your original plan? Show me to Ava and let her incriminate herself? We’ll do it again. Only this time, I won’t run away.”

  But he shook his head. “Absolutely not. It’s too risky. I was an idiot to try it. Leave her to me; I’ve already got her to confess.”

  “You have to let me face her. It’s the only way.”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  “You can be right there with me.”

  “I can’t. Not as a friend; she thinks I want you dead.”

  “So you’ll have to go on pretending to hate me. That would be best, I think. If you take my part now we’ll spook her, and we’ll never get the proof we need.” I laughed, trying not to sound as nervous as I felt. “You’ll have to chase me through the bush or something, so I can pretend to fall gratefully into her arms. It’ll be fun.”

  “I still don’t like it.” He stepped forward, putting out a hand to brush my cheek. “Xue Bai, you don’t know how precious you are to me… Now I’ve got you back, I won’t risk you again.”

  “You think Dad wasn’t precious to me? You think I wouldn’t fight for him as readily as you’ve fought for me?” He’d dropped the butterfly comb on the table. I marched over and picked it up. “He didn’t want me to make a career of opera, you know. He wanted me to be a good traditional Chinese girl: tiny voice, tiny movements, tiny feelings. But when he gave me this comb he told me I would have made the greatest Madame Butterfly the world had ever seen.” I ran my finger along the glimmering enamelled wings. “Oh, Max. If I’d only gone back to him…”

  “If you’d gone back to him you’d be dead. That’s the thing about fighting, Ruby. You lose your life.”

  “Then I’ll lose it. It might be the first really important thing I’ve done with it.”

  He pursed his lips.

  I touched his arm pleadingly. “Come, Max, aren’t you pleased with me? You begged me to take something seriously, and now I have.”

  He shook his head with a wry smile, and took my face gently between his hands. “You’re so different, Xue Bai—Ruby. To what I expected. I’d spoken to so many people about you; I thought I knew you.”

  “The more fool you! So it’s agreed?”

  “Oh, thunder. Yes. It’s agreed.” He paused, searching my face again, shaking his head with an incredulous smile.

  I blushed. “You really fell in love with a dead girl, just trying to figure out how she died?”

  A grimace. “That sounds horribly morbid.”

  “Well, I’m getting used to you, Max.”

  His thumb brushed my cheekbone. “You are? Don’t make yourself too comfortable. Dead girls are overrated. I’m thinking of giving them up.”

  He leaned down and kissed me.

  Far away, in a place of shadow and ice, my cold spirit remembered and felt warm.

  Pain blossomed in my head from a dull ache to a raging agony. Then it faded to nothing at all.

  A blinding light pierced my vision. My lungs heaved. My body jerked: retching, coughing, emptying itself of water. Other senses began to come back. Taste: water and weeds and the grit of dirt. Hearing: someone steadily cursing and a counterpoint closer at hand, “Ruby! Ruby!” Touch: the bite of a harsh cold wind, the hard curved boards of a boat, and the lingering impression of lips on mine.

  Sight, as a hand scraped the clinging hair from my face: a grey glare of morning light, and Max Moran, streaming with water and looking like death.

  In the background, the swearing continued.

  “Shut up and get us to shore,” Max said without turning his head. He was kneeling across my body, holding one of my wrists with his free hand as if I’d interrupted him in the middle of a resucitation exercise. “Ruby, speak to me.”

  It hurt to say it, because coughing up so much water had turned my throat to fire. “Where’s Ava? What time is it?”

  I don’t think it was till then that he really believed. “Ruby,” he said again, and pulled me fiercely into his arms.

  As the boat surged toward shore, he pulled a blanket around my shoulders. “It’s eleven o’clock in the morning, and Ava’s behind bars. What the blazes, Ruby, we thought you’d been down there for twelve hours.”

  I coughed again. “I was.”

  “We would have come sooner, but we thought Ava had you, and it took us all night to run her down. It was your disappearance that clinched it for her. After that anyone could see there’d been foul play… You went down in four metres of water like glass. I saw you lying on the bottom.”

  I had been poisoned too. “How on earth did you bring me round?”

  “Bring you round? Who do you think I am, God Almighty? That’s not a league I can compete in. I fished you out and went through the old Boy Scout routine, but when does that work?”

  The boat bumped against the jetty and I looked up into a crowd of faces. Bill Fisher and the seven staff of the Lakeside Chalet. The undertaker, Mr. Berry, and his hearse. Jack McGinnis. Mr. Hunt. Dr. Bernard. The Roys.

  Not one of them moved. Not one of them spoke.

  Without warning, we were half blinded by a flash. Phipps, the photographer from the Mirror, reappeared from behind his camera.

  “Come on, Moran!” he said. “Give us the scoop!”

  I had lunch that afternoon on the north-facing balcony at the Chalet, rugged up like an invalid and settled comfortably in the sunlight. I might have somehow survived the night, but I had a host of ailments to remember it by: a tender stomach, an aching head, a sore throat, and skinned knees that hurt like fire.

  Also my life lay in a heaped-up pile of wreckage before me, and I did not even know where to begin picking up the pieces and fitting them back together.

  I pulled my blanket closer with fingers still pale and wrinkled from twelve hours in the water, and picked up my teacup.

  The door opened, and I spilled a little tea in the saucer.

  “It’s me.” Max came onto the balcony. “Dr. Bernard just ‘phoned.”

  “And?”

  “He thinks it was the hypothermia. Enough cold, and your body goes into hibernation. It uses less oxygen, so you take longer to drown. There have been other cases of prolonged survival in cold water.”

  I shook my head. “How prolonged? Twelve hours?”

  “That’s his story, and he’s sticking to it.” There was glimmer of laughter in his eyes. “He said you’ve certainly suffered a near-toxic dose of methanol. Your father will get justice, and that’s what matters.” He folded his arms and leaned against the balcony rail. “How are you mending?”

  “Pretty well—considering. Have some lunch.”

  “Thanks. I ate something at the police station.”

  “There’s apple juice,” I coaxed. “They found the still, I’m afraid, so it’s the best I can offer you. Here.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t plan to stay.”

  He shifted, and moved toward the door.

  I put down my tea and said, “What’s wrong? You ask me to come up and recover on your balcony, but you refuse to share it with me?”

  “No, it’s…”

  “Go on.”

  “I can call you Ruby?”

  “Oh, heavens, please. I don’t think I’m ready to be Wu Xue Bai again, not yet.”

  “Ruby.” He leaned on the back of the other chair, a little line between his eyebrows. On the balcony rail behind him a red admiral butterfly alit and sat with quivering wings— “Look,” Max said, “I know I’ve done a lot of bossing you around since we met—and I’m thinking, you have a lot of decisions to be making about your future, aye. If you keep me around, I might be tempted to make some of them for you.”

  I stared unseeing at my teacup and then glanced up at him, managing to smile. “Why not? It’s worked well so far.”

  “Don’t laugh.” He stared at the table with a scowl of concentration. “You need to set your own life in order. There’ll be Ava’s trial, and your legal existence, and you
r father’s estate to take care of, and—”

  I interrupted him. “D’you think I need to wade through a lake of paperwork before I know my own mind, Max Moran?”

  “No, but you do need to know—”

  “The only thing I need to know is whether you meant what you said the other night.”

  The butterfly scudded away on the breeze. Max circled the table, put his hands on the arms of my chair, and leaned down to look me sternly in the eye.

  “You need to do this, Ruby.”

  “So much for letting me make my own decisions.”

  A muscle tightened in his jaw; a dangerous glint shone in his eye. “Ruby—”

  “Hypocrite.”

  “Ruby—”

  “You’re not answering my question. Did you mean it? Yes or no.”

  For a moment he wavered. Then he broke his gaze and glanced at the sky. “Did I mean it?—Oh, shut up, Ruby,” and for a little while he made it impossible for either of us to say anything at all.

  S.D.G

  About Suzannah Rowntree

  When Suzannah Rowntree isn’t travelling the world to help out friends in need, she lives in a big house in rural Australia with her awesome parents and siblings, trying to beat her previous number-of-books-read-in-a-year record. She blogs the results at Vintage Novels and is the author of both fiction and non-fiction.

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  This book, more than any other I’ve yet written, owes its existence to friends.

  Thank you all.

  I.

  Once upon a time, there had been a door in the tower.

  Nella knew so, for she had stepped through it nearly a dozen years ago, away from one life and into another. She remembered hauling stones and mixing cement to help her grandmother wall up the entrance, every moment fearing that they had been followed. When no hordes of angry villagers had pursued them that fear had turned to relief, which had, as years passed, turned to boredom, until it had finally culminated into something like contentment. Hidden within a forest bordered by the Alpi, it was unlikely, after all, that anyone would happen upon her small corner of the world.

  Nella softly stepped across the tile floor, her bare feet not making the least bit of noise. The parakeets were chirping in their cage, which Nella had moved outside onto the balcony since the day was so fine.

  “I don’t suppose you wish to leave,” she told the birds, stroking the smallest one’s feathers through the bars. “It’s a dangerous world out there, you know,” she reminded them. “You wouldn’t wish for a hawk or a fox to snatch you up, would you? The world is full of such creatures, eager to devour whoever gets in their way.” She frowned at this last thought and her eyes scanned the view from the balcony out of habit. Think of something else, she told herself. No one is going to find you. “For I am young and fain to sing,” she began, “In this happy tide of spring, of love and many a gentle thing…” She heard the sounds of wheels and bells in the distance and her voice grew softer and distracted for a moment before her singing ceased altogether. Her heartbeat rang in her ears as she strained her head to see past the balcony. She let of sigh of relief escape her when she saw who it was. Of course it is him, she reminded herself. Who else would it be? Stop worrying so much.

  “Hello, Cornelius!” she said, her voice carrying on the breeze as she greeted the friendly, middle-aged merchant whom she knew so well. A large wagon, full of bottles and bags and luggage, dragged behind him.

  “Good day, Nella,” he said. “And how is m’lady this fine morning?” He had to strain his neck to get a glimpse of her, as the balcony was at least fifteen feet from the ground. In times past she would have let down a ladder for him to climb, but his age and a bad leg had curtailed such activities.

  “I am well, Cornelius. I have some new salves for you! I’ll be right back.” She flew back into the tower and up two flights of stairs. Her products were ready, but she hadn’t been expecting Cornelius to come until tomorrow or else she would have moved the basket of her jars and bottles to the balcony already. She came back down quickly, tied the basket to a long piece of rope, and gently lowered it to the ground. Cornelius caught it and then unloaded the basket. He refilled it with several bags and then tugged on the rope.

  “All right!” He yelled.

  She pulled the rope to find the basket filled with a slab of bacon, a leg of lamb, two quarts of fresh milk, and a dozen eggs.

  She couldn’t remember a time when Cornelius wasn’t nearby to deliver supplies. He’d been doing it before she and her nonna had ever moved into the tower, and he had never wavered in his constancy—not even when the villagers had run them out of town. Of course her beauty supplies, salves, and medicines fetched him more than a fair price, so it was only good business to keep her well stocked. Even so, Cornelius was genuinely fond of Nella, and she blessed his kindness. Now that Nonna was gone, succumbed to the illness that not even the best of her elixirs could cure, Cornelius was Nella’s sole connection to anything human besides herself. And as his journeys took him all over the Holy Roman Empire, he brought her news directly from Rome itself—albeit several months late. But the passage of time didn’t matter so much in the tower as it seemed to in other places.

  There was also a small bag in the basket, and she opened it to find several gold coins. “Oh Cornelius, what am I to do with this?”

  “It’s always best to be prepared, Nella,” he said, his perpetual grin suddenly disappearing. “It would be unbecoming of me to make so much of a profit from your work and not give you a florin.”

  “But what would I do with it?” Nella asked, almo
st annoyed. “I’ve no way to spend it.”

  Though she knew Cornelius would have liked nothing better than to tell her she would if she would just leave her tower, he didn’t. “I may not always be near to you, Nella. You know how the country is in turmoil. If there was to be a war—”

  “There isn’t to be a war, as you’ve told me a hundred times.” Though Cornelius often brought her word of what was happening in the outside world, he was always quick to reassure her that their conflict with the neighboring kingdom of Ruchartes would come to naught.

  But Cornelius was frowning. “I find myself less certain of that these days. I just want you to be safe. If one day I cannot come to you—”

  “I will be fine, Cornelius. I am grateful for your concern, but I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

  Though Cornelius was clearly anything but reassured, he smiled up at her and said, “I have something else for you before I go.” He made his way to the back of the wagon where he pulled out something and cradled it in his arms before placing it in the basket. “Pull it up now,” he said. “But be careful!”

  The basket was almost within arm’s reach when she heard a mewling sound. “Oh, Cornelius!” A small gray kitten was curled up within. “Where did it come from?”

  “My wife’s cat had kittens, and she insisted you have one to keep you company.”

  “Does it have a name?”

  “Well, Tosca’s been calling it Persephone. Her tastes do run a little romantic, don’t they?”

  Nella laughed. “If your wife liked it, then Persephone it is.” She lifted the kitten into her arms and giggled as it licked her fingers. “She’s beautiful!”

  “I can’t stay long, but I’ll be back next week. My daughter’s had her baby, and the family’s a bit occupied at the moment.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful! How are they? Was it a boy or a girl?”