“Christopher? William? Is everything quite all right?”
They both turned.
Agnes Cartwright stood in the parlour doorway, her dark eyes wide and blinking. She stared at Chris, and then her gaze slipped away and focused on Will. “Oh,” she said, her voice soft and syrupy and sad. “Oh, William. My boy. You’re hurt. Come here, let me.”
“I’m fine, Mother,” Will said tightly. Chris heard the pain in his voice. He was barely biting back tears, but he wouldn’t dare let his mother see them. Or was it Chris he was hiding them from? The thought hurt. He deserved it. “Just—just go back to your room, all right? I’m sorry that I woke you.”
Missus Cartwright stepped forward. “Will,” she murmured. “Oh, Will, don’t put on your strong face.” She reached out her arms. “What happened, darling?
“Mother, please,” Will said, and this time his voice caught. “Please, just go back to your room.”
The pain in Will’s voice, the aching emptiness, the grief—Chris had done all of that. Chris the pathetic, weak-willed coward, too worried about what should be or should not be had done that to his friend. To someone who was more than his friend, and had been from the very start.
He watched Agnes slide her fingers through Will’s hair, and he saw what a godsdamned mess he’d made of it, and Will was hurting because of him, and he had to fix it.
He had to fix it.
It would be so easy to just….
Chris closed his eyes. He imagined a bubble of contentment, of peace. He struggled against his desire to put forgiveness and acceptance and understanding into it because that would be selfish, and he didn’t want to be selfish. He just… wanted to make this better. So he blew every positive bit of emotion he had inside of him into that glass bubble of serenity, and his eyes flickered open, and he focused on Will, and he slowly floated it toward him.
He enjoyed momentary relief when the anguish on Will’s features softened.
And then it shattered.
Will whipped his gaze to Chris. He actually bared his teeth like an animal. “Don’t you dare!” he shouted, every word spitting fury. “Who the hell do you think you are? My emotions belong to me, and if you—how can you—how dare you!”
Chris recoiled. “I—” He blinked away tears. Will had warned him a hundred times. Will had made it clear that he thought what Chris could do was repulsive. Will had never left any ambiguity. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to… I just….”
“Get the fuck away from me,” Will hissed. “I can’t believe I—I can’t bloody fucking sodding believe that I’ve let myself get so—”
There was an ominous click.
They both turned.
Agnes Cartwright’s pistol glowed brightly, throwing her delicate features into stark contrast. The barrel pointed straight at Chris, and her dreamy, beautiful face was locked into an expression of pure, flat anger. “Get away from my son,” she commanded. “Or I’ll blow your head off.”
There was a long moment of silence.
And then, William’s voice, gruff with emotions Chris couldn’t read: “You heard her.”
Chris fled.
lifetime ago, Julia Buckley had held her son in her lap and smoothed his hair and wiped away his tears. In her sweet, quiet voice, Mother had whispered comforts that flew in the face of his father’s insults. She’d murmured that there was no shame in tears. That crying was good. That expressing painful emotions lanced them like a boil, letting the hurt flow out and away. He’d sniffed and hiccupped, and she’d gently massaged his hurts and his shame away with her kind words and gentle voice. Never hold back a good cry, she’d said. Let it all out. You’ll feel worlds better after.
Fifteen years older, struggling to fit his and Olivia’s luggage into their assigned compartment, Chris decided that his mother’s words had been hopelessly naive.
He was beyond exhausted. He remembered dreaming, intense and bright fever-dreams that his mind seemed to have conjured specifically to torment him, but he couldn’t actually remember sleeping. His own hiccupping sobs would jerk him awake every time he drifted far enough, and his stomach would seize into a ball of knots while his mind replayed the scene from Black Canning Street over and over. He couldn’t stop identifying bright moments, picked out in gold thread, where he could have done something different and avoided everything. He had cried, and cried, and cried.
By his mother’s wisdom, he should have felt fantastic. Well and truly purged of all bad feeling.
Instead, his tongue was dry and fuzzy and huge. His throat felt raw and cracked. Someone had packed cotton bolls into his skull, making his thoughts fuzzy and his head ache. His eyelashes were crusty and gooey in turns, and his eyes didn’t seem to want to water correctly. His actual eyeballs felt swollen, his lips felt like salty rubber, and he looked like hell. All he wanted was to slump down into the seat and really sleep. Instead, he wrestled with baggage and misery.
“You have that under control?” Olivia asked innocently. Chris grunted and heaved Olivia’s overstuffed valise farther into the compartment. It finally squeezed in with a thunk as it slid back and hit the outer shell of the car.
Olivia handed him another bag. One of his, this time. He took it wordlessly and went back to work. She didn’t point out his difficulty. To her credit, she hadn’t pointed out any of it. Yet.
The train whistle cut through his skull like a knife. He fumbled and nearly dropped the bag.
“Last call!” the conductor cried, voice muffled by their assigned steel box. “Last call for Gilton, Cardinalia, Summergrove, and Northshire!”
Olivia winced at the name of her hometown. “Ugh,” she groaned while he struggled. “I truly, truly had not intended to be on this train until Solstice. If then. I had a decent excuse in the works to get out of it.” She sighed. “I cannot believe Maris talked me into this.”
It was hard to focus on her words. Chris reached for the next bag. “I didn’t think I’d get to see it,” he murmured. He wasn’t sure if that was the truth or not. Really, it was just something to say.
“Get to see it, hah. But phrasing aside, what’s got you so dispassionate? I thought you were quite looking forward to riding a train!”
It was an invitation, and one he rejected. “I was,” he said. He reached for another bag
She sighed. “Fine, we’ll do this the hard way,” she said. “But you can’t get all worked up and tell me to mind my own business, now can you?” She brushed her hands off, having handed him the last one. “Are you quite all right, Christopher?”
He swallowed. A lump swelled in his throat, which just seemed improbable. After a certain point, could there possibly be more tears left? “I’m not sure William and I are friends anymore.” He was impressed at how even his voice was.
During the silence that followed his statement, Chris managed to stow the final bag. He closed the compartment and turned back to Olivia. She watched him with a carefully blank expression, but he thought he saw a touch of pity in her ice-blue eyes. “I take it,” she said finally, picking her words as if she were stepping through a field of cow patties, “that you don’t mean that you’ve finally decided to become something more?”
He shook his head. “Definitely not,” he rasped.
Olivia reached out and patted his shoulder awkwardly. He appreciated the effort, but not enough that it actually helped. “I’m not going to tell you that you’re a bloody backwards-thinking idiot firmly lodged up your own rectum, but only because I’m fond of you.”
Somehow, that did make an impression on him. He smiled faintly. “Thank you,” he said ruefully. “I appreciate your admirable restraint. Though… I think I might deserve it.”
“Oh. You absolutely do. And yet.” She smiled back. She opened her mouth as if to say something else, and then closed it and shook her head. “All right,” she said. “Now we have to talk about something else because I’m biting my tongue so hard it’s bleeding.”
Really, part of him craved
the tirade she struggled to hold back. Her tongue could flay muscle from bone, and there might be catharsis in that. Perhaps Olivia could even tear such a strip off that it would make him do something about it.
He slid into his seat and wrapped his arms around his middle. The train whistle pierced the air again, and this time, their car jerked forward. They were underway.
“Well,” Olivia said, pulling him out of the dark, whirling abyss of his own mind. “All right. How about a distraction? This particular topic is inevitable, and so… I suppose I ought to let you know what to expect from my girlhood home.”
He glanced up. Olivia’s lips were pursed, and her hands were wrapped around each other in a messy knot in her lap. She looked out the window of their car instead of at him. He sat up a little straighter. Well. If nothing else, she was right about one thing. This did promise to be diverting.
“By all means.” He winced at the touch of eagerness in his voice, but Olivia didn’t seem to notice. She simply sighed and swung her gaze back to him.
“Mnn. Extremely short version,” she pronounced. She looked as if she was about to bite into a lemon. With the skin on. “My family has owned an especially productive and lucrative apple orchard and cider mill for generations. I’m sole heiress to the affair, and I’m expected to take over operations after my mother passes. I have absolutely no interest in this! My mother takes umbrage at my disregard for familial duty. She and I do not get along. At all. It’s… complicated. There’s baggage. It’s not entirely to do with the issue of inheritance. I—don’t want to talk about it.” She uncoiled her hands to tap her fingers on her knee for a long moment and then dove back in. “I was very close with my father. He passed when I was a bit older than you are now. He waited too long to see a lifeknitter about his tuberculosis, and it was too late to do anything when he finally gave in. Stubborn old git. I miss him terribly. Father had kept Mother and me from one another’s throats, and after he was gone, we set about tearing each other limb from limb. Something had to break, or we would break one another, and so I boarded a train and relocated to Darrington. Plenty of murders and not a mother to be seen.”
She glanced up at Chris, and he cleared his dry throat delicately after an awkward silence. “The end?” he prodded, moderating his tone carefully.
She sighed. She spread her hands before her, long fingers splayed, and shrugged. “Yes, essentially,” she said, but her voice dripped with reluctance. “The end, I suppose. For now.”
The train picked up speed and Darrington blurred beside them. Chris watched out the window, turning the information over in his mind. Even without her admission, he’d have known there were large swaths of the story missing. It didn’t all follow. The part of him that trawled the society pages for gossip couldn’t help but want to pore over the tidbits she’d offered and suck the marrow from their bones.
But she was a very private person.
She watched him from under pale eyelashes.
He coughed delicately. “I’ve never heard of Faraday branded cider.”
Olivia snorted. She shook her head and slumped back in her seat. “Good Gods,” she groused, “your polite mannered nonsense will be the death of me. This is your chance to pry. Don’t you want to pry?”
“Yes,” he replied, very honestly. “But I’d rather you tell me what you want to.”
Olivia sighed and rubbed her index finger against her temple. “Ugh. Christopher, please. How unpleasant! Fine. Respect my privacy then, see if I care. To answer your tepid question, the estate belongs to my mother’s line, not my father’s. Miller, not Faraday.”
Chris sat up straighter. That was a name he did recognize. “Miller Ciders?” he asked, and, considering he hadn’t much taste for cider himself, he sounded embarrassingly eager. “That was Fernand’s favourite! He swore on the stuff!”
“Yes,” Olivia agreed, averting her eyes. Did he imagine a touch of colour on her cheeks? “If you recall, our current situation only came into being because Mister Spencer offered you his estate in Summergrove, an offer which later went off the table when his nephew swooped onto the property following your guardian’s…” she winced and avoided his gaze, “… incident. If you hadn’t mentioned the town, I’d never have thought of it.”
“Then…” Chris paused. He turned her words over in his mind but could find only one logical conclusion. “Wait. You knew Fernand?”
“Knew is a very strong word, Christopher,” Olivia said. She sounded pained, and her expression matched it, corners of her mouth curled into a grimace. “I might have recognized him, or he me, if we’d passed one another on the street, but I doubt it very much. He’d never spent much time at his family estate, after all, and I’d left mine a decade before!”
“But you were acquainted,” Chris murmured. She acted as if he shouldn’t be surprised as if this were obvious. And in truth, she was right. But he couldn’t see it that way. Couldn’t wrap his mind around it. It seemed like something she should have told him a long time ago.
She sighed. He tried to meet her eyes, but she avoided him. “Well, yes. Of course, we were. Summergrove and its environs are a very small, tightly knit community, and, ah, well… The Miller and Spencer estates are quite close.”
“How close?”
She cleared her throat awkwardly. “…adjacent?” she offered with a tremulous smile.
“Mother Deorwynn!” Chris exploded. He surged from his seat and almost toppled over into hers. The motion of the train was considerably more pronounced than he’d thought. The way he stumbled and swayed and waved his arms to balance himself would probably have been very funny if he were in any sort of laughing mood. “Olivia!” he said, and then stopped because he didn’t know what he could say to follow it up.
She looked up at him from under her lashes. There were definitely two little roses of colour in her cheeks. “Goodness, it’s all immensely obvious, Christopher,” she insisted. “And it’s hardly as if we were on one another’s Solstice list!”
He held up a hand. Shook his head. “You’re completely correct,” he said. “But I feel angry and betrayed and very, very foolish and—I need a moment to think.” His voice was steady, and he felt very good about himself as he slid open their compartment door and moved into the hall, leaving Olivia behind. At least if he was going to be irrational, he could admit it was irrational before he said something he would regret.
Gods only knew it was how he should have handled matters with Will yesterday.
He needed to steady himself against the walls as he moved through the train car. The motion was even and smooth, unlike the unbound wheels of the taxis he’d been riding in of late. But he wasn’t used to it, either, and part of him kept insisting that the train would abruptly stop and he’d be flung forward onto his face. So he made his way very slowly and with great care, following the arrows that promised a dining cart towards the back of the train.
The car’s rear door slid aside to open air and deafening sound. Chris froze as the rushing wind slapped his face, sending his coat flapping wildly. His eyes swept the platform, and he saw that the little bridge of steel he was meant to cross was narrow and welded together. Below, the tracks and wheels threw off furious cascades of yellow sparks, glowing brighter than he’d ever seen from spirit-glow in his life.
At any moment, that glow could flicker, and—
He wrested his eyes up, heart pounding. Focus on something else. Anything else. So he looked outwards.
Green rolling hills fell away around him.
If he craned his head just right, he could see the grey smudge of the city where he’d lived his whole life fading into the distance. The farthest he’d ever been out of the city before was visiting the val Daren estate during his and Olivia’s first case together. That had been to the east, where the land was all owned by the Old Blood who cultivated their acres carefully, enclosed them in stone fences, and built their great estates away from the prying eyes of the populace.
This was something else
entirely. Wild greenery sprouted. The grass was patchy and uneven, punctuated by dead, dark sections, hollows, treefalls… A glimmer of water caught his eye, and moments later, a flock of ducks took to the air, all turning in unison like they’d rehearsed it. He followed their flight into the patchy forest on the horizon. Some trees still had all of their lush summer leaves. Others were spotted brown, red, or orange. Still others had turned entirely, bright and beautiful shocks of colour. And a very few had already lost their coats, standing bare and naked by their proud fellows.
The wind was freezing as it whipped at his coat and his hair, but he only barely registered it. There was something—something mesmerizing about the world, untouched. The wide open spaces. He felt….
The car ahead of him opened and disgorged two pretty young ladies wearing pastel-hued traveling dresses, and Chris snapped back to reality. He nodded to them and smiled and stood to one side while they fearlessly crossed the steel bridge and dipped little curtsies to him before giggling together and vanishing inside the car he’d come from. One of them—a blonde with perfectly coiled ringlets, a lovely laced bonnet, and lips like rose petals—had a waist so small Chris thought he could wrap two hands around it and encircle it entirely. He watched her until the door shut behind them and left him, face and thoughts heated, standing in the cold wind.
Gods, but he could be a dog. He really hoped that neither of them had been heartreaders.
Well. If two delicate young ladies could do it without difficulty, Christopher Buckley would be something of a pansy if he couldn’t. He gripped the railing, didn’t look down at the pluming sparks, and pretended confidence as he crossed.
The next car was another a narrow hall bordering private compartments for higher-paying travellers, just like the one he’d just left Olivia in.
Gods, she’d known Fernand.
She must have met him at least a decade before Chris had even been alive. From Olivia’s family holdings, he’d be able to walk to Fernand’s estate, the estate he’d intended to entrust to Chris and Rosie. Summergrove was a nexus point for his entire life. Rosie was there. Rachel was there. Olivia’s family and Fernand’s family lived side-by-side. Doctor Livingstone and Miss Banks worked together to realize a future without categorization, and they were only there doing it because of things that he had done, he and Olivia together. It started to all add up, string after string, looping together and tethered to him.
The Heartreader's Secret Page 8