Instead she went to his clothes and started looking for the remnant she knew she’d find. Tucked into the inner pocket of his jacket, she found a pair of golden wedding rings. One of them shone, and the other was scratched and dented and stained. She threw them both into the fire without a second thought. She didn’t want to think about weddings. She’d thought about weddings enough for a lifetime. Her entire girlhood had been filled with, “When you marry….” and “When you have a household of your own.” But she’d never marry, and she’d never have a household, because she’d been stupid enough to believe a man.
She ate dry bread. She slept. She woke. The fire was blazing bright, and on the mantle the two rings glinted, the woman’s ring burned clean by the flames. She knelt in front of the fire and felt its searing heat. It couldn’t burn her clean. Even her death wouldn’t clean her. Nothing would. She’d left her only path to salvation in the snow.
Other things accumulated on the mantle as her protector went about his strange business. A pair of women’s dancing slippers. A boning knife. A sack stitched of thin, mismatched strips of pale leather, with a pebble and some dried petals inside. Sometimes she picked up remnants and her fingers tingled: a box, a locket, a girl’s ring. Once, she cried for an hour over a half-knitted baby sock, then tucked it away safely, but when she woke up, it was gone.
That day, she reached into his jacket and pulled out a small jar with a thick black fluid inside. She loosened the cork and recoiled from the odor of death that instantly filled the room. The vial dropped from her hand and a droplet of the fluid squeezed out from under the loosened cork. She backed away from it before it crawled inside her.
Then her benefactor came back into the room. He scooped up the vial and the droplet clinging to the rim. “Ah,” he said. “I forgot about this. It almost escaped, I see.”
Julia nodded, her hand clamped over her mouth and nose. She could still smell the stench over the scent of her well-soaped hand.
He tilted his head, looking at her a half-smile. “Unbearable, is it?”
She nodded again, and glanced at the door. He clicked his tongue. “Tsk. All it takes is a bad smell for you to consider breaking my simple rules? You are a naughty girl.” He looked at her a moment longer, then strode toward her.
She backed away and he said, “Don’t be idiotish, or I’ll leave you with the remnant.” He caught her wrist and pulled her to him, then pried her hand away from her face. Before she could react, he lowered his head to hers and inhaled sharply, stealing her breath away utterly. She couldn’t smell anything. She couldn’t breathe. Then he exhaled, and burnt sweetness surrounded her and carried away her consciousness.
She heard him whispering amidst her nightmares. “Leaving that was an accident, my cinder-girl. But a thought occurs: you chose to open the vial. Perhaps you wanted what it contained, deep inside? Shall I leave it on the mantle for you to find again? You can drink it, then, and it will take you beyond the reach of Hell itself. Shall I leave it, then?”
“No, no,” she cried. “I was only doing as I was asked. I was only curious. I didn’t know that it contained such death! You didn’t tell me!”
“Ah,” he said. “You prefer this Hell, then.” And a cold wind blew over her, snow stinging her face, and she woke up next to a fireplace that was guttering with the draft from the chimney and a dark and open door.
She stumbled over and slammed the door closed, the flagstones like ice under her feet. The wind howled outside. She went to build up the fire again and realized that under the wind’s howl, someone was singing beyond the other door. It was her protector, and he was singing a lullaby. She pressed her ear to the door and heard little sounds under the song. Little sounds she recognized.
With a sharp spike of pain and fear, Julia remembered the milk and knew, knew her benefactor hadn’t just brought her home. He’d also brought home her baby.
She sat by the fire, rocking back and forth and hugging her chest. He had her baby. She’d seen him bringing milk in, and she’d never wondered why. She’d tried so hard not to wonder what had happened after she’d placed the child in the nest of snow, and she’d never thought past that. She couldn’t. She’d abandoned her baby. She’d abandoned everything.
He had her baby and he’d been crooning a lullaby. The soft lilt of the tune circled in her mind, inescapable.
Hours later, he emerged from the door and crossed the kitchen to the exit. He glanced at her only once. As he looked away again, he smiled, as if amused by the way she huddled against the hearth.
She’d been trying to gather up her courage all that time. Now, as he was about to walk away, she took what scraps she had to hand. “Sir?”
He paused. “Yes?”
“Can I see her? My baby? I heard you singing.”
He gave her that laughing smile again, his eyes like cold starlight. “No. You don’t deserve your baby. You abandoned her in the snow. She’s mine now. I’ve named her Ciara.”
Julia lowered her eyes. He was right.
And yet, was it her fault? What else could she have done, with William’s betrayal? She had surely given up after he rejected her for the final time, but he was the baby’s father and the child was the result of his lies. Didn’t what happened to the child also lay at his feet?
But that didn’t bring her baby back.
She crept to the inner door after her protector returned through it, hoping to hear her baby’s gurgle. When she didn’t, she turned away and went to the fire. It didn’t warm her anymore, even when she held her hands so close that they hurt.
She’d always followed the rules, until William. She’d lived surrounded by the rules, until William had seduced her away from them. And once she’d broken the rules, she’d lost everything.
Julia looked at the door. The rules, she decided, did not apply where William was concerned.
She waited until her protector went out. He was always gone for hours when he left via the kitchen door. This time after he left, she went out too.
It was snowing beyond, and she wasn’t bundled against the cold. Yet just as the fire hadn’t warmed her, so the cold didn’t deepen her chill. She tied paper ‘round her feet and a scrap of ribbon in her hair and she went walking until she found William’s lodgings. She’d known the address once, before she’d fallen in the snow and a monster had saved her baby. She didn’t know the number anymore, but she still knew the way.
She didn’t knock. She knew what would happen if she knocked. She wouldn’t get a toe past the threshold, if indeed they even answered it for her rather than sending somebody out to drive her off. No. She didn’t knock. She waited. When he came out, polished and shining, swinging a cane and tipping his hat to a passing acquaintance, she didn’t approach him.
Instead, she followed him, drifting along in his wake. She followed him to his club, and then to a party, where she waited outside until he went home again. Then she went home again too, to her protector’s house.
He wasn’t waiting to punish her when she returned. She went to the door her baby was behind and listened to the gentle sounds of the stirring child. She couldn’t tell if he was also beyond. She didn’t dare open the door and find out. Instead, she turned to the stones of the hearth and scrubbed them until she couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore.
The next day, and the next, she left the kitchen and went into the night to follow her lover. Nobody ever noticed her. She trod right by fine carriages and ladies in ermine wraps and they never saw her. She was nothing, she was nobody. She’d broken the rules and she’d stopped existing.
But she did exist. She knew she existed. She couldn’t clean the stains from her kitchen, but she could see her breath in the fog she blew onto the windows of his study. She had broken the rules and fallen but he was the one who had lied. He was a stain, too.
The third time she followed him, he went to a house late in the evening and stood outside for a moment. When he went within, it was only for a few moments, not enough time to even remo
ve his gloves. He paused outside and looked around, as if he could feel her stare from where she lingered by the servants’ stairs. Then he shivered, drew his scarf around his neck, and strode down the street.
She didn’t go after him right away. Something called to her from the house he’d visited so briefly. She waited.
After the clouds had blown across the stars, she heard a cry from high in the house. It was a sound of betrayal and of denial. She knew that cry; she’d uttered it often enough. The realization of a broken life always sounded the same.
For another day, she followed him. She watched as he went to three parties, bright and enthusiastic and just as lovely as the day she had met him. He thought nothing of the business he’d concluded the night before, but as he left his final party and wandered toward his club, he stopped and turned in the snow.
Julia wondered if he would see her, address her. Once the thought would have made her heart leap with joy, but now it only thudded in her chest like the drumbeat of a dirge.
His eyes flickered over her and he recoiled, then turned away and hastened to his club in a rapid shambling walk, as if he’d wanted to run but he’d forgotten how. It made her laugh in spite of herself.
At her master’s house, she dropped off asleep by the hearth, still upright. She woke when her master returned, as he was dropping a pile of laundry on the table. “I can almost see some change,” he told her. “Maybe you’re finally getting the hang of keeping clean.”
She ate something, scrubbed the plate until she saw a glint of the metal underneath the tarnish. Her protector didn’t know what he was talking about; she was still no better than she had been at cleaning this mess. So she turned to the laundry, which practically cleaned itself. She went through the garments absently and found a scrap of paper in an inside pocket, wrapped around a thin blade. Her fingers tingled when she touched it: the shock of a shared scream. The paper was a torn scrap, stained with blood and bearing the words, “Why god does he go on like this? How can—”
Out of nowhere—she was sure he hadn’t been in the room—her protector said, “There’s no point in trying to clean that.” He plucked the paper out of her hand. “There’s hardly anything left to be going on with.” When he opened his fingers, it fluttered over to the fire. The flames grew and brightened as they consumed the fragment, as if it was a much larger piece of fuel.
The knife, he ignored. Instead he went to the table and took a seat, stretching out his legs in a simulacrum of rest. “Would you like to hear about Ciara? She’s an adorable child. So good for those who care for her. So loving.” He flashed his wide smile. “She always looks to me when I enter the room, follows me with her eyes. She knows who cares for her.”
Julia looked down at the knife in her hand, then slowly turned away to put it on the mantel full of trophies.
“I can’t decide if she looks like her father, or takes after her mother,” her protector went on.
“I thought she looked like him once,” Julia said, and felt like her heart was breaking. She wanted to hold her baby again. But this man, this strange monster in the shape of a man, with his bloody trophies had claimed her and he, even he, a monster was a better father than her true father. A better parent than her mother. “Perhaps she’ll take after you now.”
“Perhaps,” said the man, and smiled again. Then, pleasantly, he asked, “How is the gentleman in question lately?”
Hatred spiked through her, sudden and furious. “He is what he’s always been. Gay to dissolution, all flash and poison. I was just a paper doll to him, I and all the others.”
In the blink of an eye, her protector moved from his seat by the table to backing her against the side of the fireplace. “Have you been leaving the house, my little cinder-girl? Breaking my rules?” He touched her cheek with the back of his fingers. It was gentle, intimate in a way William had never been intimate, and it scared Julia to her core.
“I— I—” She couldn’t answer. She could barely think.
His hand moved to her tangled hair. “Don’t lie,” he said softly. “I know all your lies.”
“I hate him,” she whispered. It was the truth. “I hate him so much.”
Her protector’s hands moved to her shoulders, down her arms. His fingers skimmed over her hands, then brushed her hips. He knelt, bringing his hands down her legs lightly. Then he placed his palms over her feet. “Such cold feet. You’ve walked through snow on these feet, cinder-girl.” He pressed harder and pain exploded in her feet, as if there were needles between his fingers.
She moaned and swayed back against the warm hearth. The fire were still bright and high and she thought she might fall into it. He was going to kill her for breaking his rules. She’d had a chance to live and she’d throw it away. Her mother and sister flashed through her mind and away; her father flickered away even faster. William sparkled at her through cut glass. And then, finally, she saw the face of her daughter, the little soul she had abandoned and a monster had saved.
Living wasn’t the answer, she realized.
Not just living.
“What would you be without rules, little Julia?” murmured her protector in her ear. “You would be nothing. Not even a cinder-girl. Don’t the rules keep you safe? Don’t we protect you?” His arms caged her against the hearth and his forehead rested against hers.
She found her voice. “Are you going to kill me?”
He lifted his head so she could see his wide smile. “I’m not your murderer, cinder-girl. “
The pain in her feet ebbed. “You’re a liar, just like he is. You’re all liars and killers. Go away and lie to each other, if you’re not going to kill me.” She ducked under his imprisoning arms and stepped past the fire. A spark landed on her skirt and she absently beat it out.
William was worthless. All the men of his type were worthless. Maybe all men were worthless.
Everything was worthless.
The door closed behind her protector, as if he’d gotten bored.
Everything was worthless. She knew that, she admitted it to herself, and yet she still wanted things. Worthless things, except for maybe one.
Everything was worthless, and that included her. William had made her worthless, and she had let him.
She looked at all the tokens on the mantle. Unbidden, her hand drifted over the mementos: the dance shoe, the ring, the locket, the coil of hair. The candy box. One after another, she picked them up and tucked them in a basket, taking the knife last of all. Then she picked up her protector’s stainless shirt and walked, once again, out into the snow.
It was just before the dinner hour when she walked into the kitchen at William’s lodgings. The staff looked at her, but not one of them moved to stop her. They couldn’t, not when she was wearing her protector’s shirt over her smock. He was stainless and so was she.
She climbed the stairs until she reached the floor William occupied, then went through the rooms until she found him in the saloon. He had two friends with him, young men as bright and shining as him. She was glad. It was better that way.
“Hello, William,” she said softly, but her voice carried.
He whirled around, then dropped his drink. The crystal shattered on the floor. “Who… who are you?’
She smiled at him, just as she’d smiled all those months ago. “I’ve come with gifts, William. Mementos, of the gifts you’ve given others.” As she put the basket on the polished table, one of William’s friends stirred, as if he wanted to interfere. She hummed a snatch of song that she’d heard somewhere, a lullaby, and he stilled again, staring at her with fascinated, horrified eyes.
“What do you have there?” asked William apprehensively. “Where’s the footman?”
“They’re near,” Julia told him. “Very near. Here, William. Do you remember this?” She pulled out the dancing slipper and put it in his hand. “She wept over it, like a child. She’s not weeping now, though.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” began William.
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br /> “And this. Do you remember this?” She showed William the ring. “She turned it over and over on her finger and waited for you.”
“I only told her it was pretty,” he said sharply. “And that she might find an even prettier one someday. It was hardly a promise.”
Julia smiled at him warmly and put the ring on his smallest finger. Then she pulled out the candy box. “A gift for a girl still in the schoolroom. There’s blood smeared inside the lid, you see?”
“Oh, ugh, how disgusting,” said William, and tried to pull away. Tried, and failed.
Julia unclasped the locket and put it around his neck. “You made promises, William. So many promises. You think that because you didn’t say the words, it wasn’t a promise. But it was. A promise in skin.” She put the lock of hair to his mouth, pushed it between his lips. “We gave you everything you wanted and all you gave us was our own destruction.”
He gagged on the hair, then managed, “Julia? You’re mad. What did you do with the child?”
Julia shook her head. “No, William. That you can’t have, not where you’re going.” Instead she put the knife into his hand and closed his fingers around it. He stared down at it, at the crimson edge, as if mesmerized.
She smiled again at William’s two friends, then walked out of the room, past the gathered lodging house staff. They parted like the sea for her, then closed up behind her, and that was right. Then there was a shocked shout from one of William’s friends and that was right, too.
She went back to her dark kitchen. Her protector sat in the kitchen chair, his feet on the table. “I see you took my shirt,” he drawled.
Julia looked at him blankly as she dropped the shirt on the floor. “I want my baby.”
Raising his eyebrows, he said, “Do you deserve such a wonderful baby, so sweet and innocent? So unstained?”
She stared at him for a long moment, waiting to see if he had anything else to say. When he didn’t, she walked past him and through the other door.
Etiquette of Exiles (Senyaza Series Book 4) Page 2