by Quenby Olson
So sure am I of this fact, that I believe there is not a single thing that could contrive to shock me. Should Tower Bridge choose this exact moment to fling itself into the Thames, not a modicum of surprise would register upon my features. My prescience is so strong that when my thoughts push outward, beyond the confines of the bedroom, I already know the exact line of Chissick’s crumpled form, and the darkening shade of the blood that stains the floor beneath him.
Chapter Twenty-One
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Tripping downstairs with my skirts wrapping around my legs, all of my movements fall out of synchronization with one another. The room I stumble into is empty, and here the staleness of the air has me gasping for breath. The warmth from the insulating layer of dust, from windows shuttered, from the sickly flame of a lamp sending its streamer of smoke into the air, all work towards dulling my senses until I fear I may faint away before I’ve taken another step forward.
But I do manage a few shaking steps, one hand still clutching at my skirts, the other passing in front of my face to better clear away the haze that has gathered in front of my eyes. So muddled is my sight in the gloom that I’m forced to rely on my other senses: my hearing, poor as it is, and also my hands, trembling as they curl around the corner of a roll-top desk while my legs seek to regain their strength.
I move around the desk, but everything is quick to become another barricade. Even the slithering of my heel in a smear of blood is simply another hindrance, preventing me from moving to the other side of a threadbare armchair before it is too late.
Too late… Too late…
I push the thought out of my head, though the whispers that echo in its wake gain strength, until a single, solitary note rises above everything else, an accompaniment to the sight laid out before me.
Chissick is quite near to the wall, his spine curved awkwardly as if he had attempted to fit himself in the small space behind the chair. One arm is flung out behind him, and I notice a hole in his shirtsleeve, from where the fabric must have snagged on the edge of a broken brick in the fireplace as he fell. His face, for the moment, is obscured by a leg of the chair, but there is nothing to cover the streaks of blood that fan out from the side of his head, their acrid darkness unfurling from behind his skull like the petals of a flower.
I grasp the back of the armchair for balance, not only to compensate for my own dizziness, but for the subtle listing of the floor on this side of the room, as if the wall is sinking, the whole thing ready to one day tip itself into the neighbouring street. There's little space for two bodies in this corner, and so I grope my way to the other side of the chair, nearer to the fireplace and the cold ashes that coat the blackened hearth.
Perhaps it is my refusal to acknowledge Chissick’s upper half, the wound on his head that must be there, that allows me to take better stock of the scene before me. A few feet away, to my right, I see the wrought iron shovel that must have been snatched from its place beside the fireplace, its edge still decorated with coagulated blood and a few reddish hairs from Chissick’s own head.
It takes little effort to summon a picture of the scene that must have played out while I had been upstairs, nearly unconscious on the floor. Lady Francesca arriving at the door, and Chissick—oh, how I could curse myself for ever allowing our acquaintance to extend beyond our first meeting!—attempting to keep her away from me, until she slipped past him and grabbed the weapon from the fireplace when he made to remove her from the house.
And then she walked upstairs and took up a position beside my prostrate form, seating herself there for two hours while Chissick bled out only one floor below.
A blink of my eyes, and I force myself to return to the present. I'm still standing, my free hand hovering uselessly at my side. I do not know what makes me so reluctant to touch him. Slowly, more because I fear I cannot remain on my feet much longer than for any desire to close the distance between us, I lower myself to my knees. His legs are the nearest things to me, one of them straight and one bent at an awkward angle. I crawl forward until I can take hold of his wrist, but my own heartbeat is too erratic for me to make out the pace of his own pulse, if he even has one. I reach up and across his abdomen, over his ribcage until my fingers brush along the edge of his collarbone and settle in a hollow place beneath his jaw.
His skin is cool to the touch. Seconds pass, and I rest my forehead on his shoulder, the pain that saturates my skull throbbing with such intensity that flashes of coloured light crowd my vision. I will count to one hundred. I tell myself this, while my fingers press against him, waiting for some sign of life to make itself known. I drag out each number, my voice a mere rasp upon the worn fabric of his shirt.
And, there! A slight fluttering, almost imperceptible, but enough to put a hold on my next breath. So I wait—wait!—and there it is again, and stronger, enough that I allow myself to exhale, and with that expelled air, my shoulders slump, and a burning heaviness rises in the back of my throat, almost choking me.
But I cannot give way to emotion, not now that I know he is safe. My hands scrabble upward, over his jaw, until I'm cradling one side of his head as I examine the wound that graces his scalp. His hair is clotted with blood, but as my fingers prod the damaged flesh, I realise that the mark left by the shovel is not as deep as I had feared. The skin, however, is a ragged mess, and fresh blood oozes under my ministrations, gentle as they are.
I know little about the treatment and care of wounds. I glance around me, as if a great pile of bandages and antiseptics will appear out of nowhere, brought into being by the sheer force of my need for them.
"I have to leave you." I speak, my voice still a weak and trembling thing. I try to move him, shifting his arms and his legs into positions less likely to cause him additional discomfort when he wakes. By the time I'm finished, blood stains my dress, my hands, and no doubt my face. Chissick’s own person bears no less evidence of his attack from Lady Francesca, and so I rise to my feet, one hand reaching out for whichever solid object is nearest as I stagger upstairs.
I pass by the room that had borne witness to my recuperation of the last few days, and begin opening and closing doors, searching for the room that must be Chissick’s. I find it at the end of the hall, a large, cluttered space showing all the signs of recent habitation. There are books strewn about, resting in stacks, some of them still open, with torn bits of paper or broken pens marking the pages. The bed is unmade, though the linens seem tolerably clean, and the entire room comes off as the most used and also most cared for in the house.
My hands grasp at what I trust myself to be strong enough to carry back down the narrow flight of stairs. I snatch several of Chissick’s shirts from the depths of a wardrobe. There is a slight smell of must and mildew carried by the fabric, but they are clean, and so they will have to do. I struggle with an armful of bed linens, the bulk of them dragging behind me like a tail as I slip into my room long enough to collect the pitcher of stale, tepid water from my bedside table.
I return downstairs, the spoils of my journey spilling out of my arms as I drop to my knees at Chissick’s side. His shirts are all in terrible need of mending, and so I use the various holes and thin spots as places in which to tear the already weakened fabric into more manageable pieces. I douse a few of them with water before I lean over him, my hands moving restlessly in the air above him as I take in the amount of blood and mess that covers half his head.
My progress is slow, and my arms begin to ache after only a few minutes of effort. It’s not until I daub at the edges of the wound itself that there is a marked change in Chissick’s state. As I wipe away the congealed blood, his eyes twitch beneath his eyelids, and he draws in a deep breath before his lips move once, but with nothing spoken that I can hear.
I'm unaware of the passage of time as I work, and it is not until I'm tying a strip of cloth from one of his erstwhile shirts around his head that I glance up at the window and notice how altered the light is that pushes it
s way through the shutters. My eyes are strained from both the constant headache that will not relent and the faint tinge of smoke that permeates the air. I cannot move Chissick from where he lies on the floor, but I make what I can of a bed for him with the pilfered linens from his room and the remnants of his shirts that aren’t soaked in blood and filthy water.
"Rest," I tell him, though I’ve no idea if he can attend to my words. "I have to leave you now. But you will recover," I add, as I slip a wadded shirt beneath his injured head, the makeshift pillow raising his cheek from the level of the still damp floor boards. "I know you will."
There is nothing more I can say. Vague promises of my eventual return, that I will see him again before the day is at an end… I can offer no such thing. And so I use the armchair for support as I rise to my feet, my skirts sodden and streaked with Chissick’s blood.
I walk towards the door, my steps sounding loud and uneven as I break the silence that weighs over the house. There are no gloves on my hands, nor a hat to cover my head. I'm only half-dressed, in clothes that could not even be salvaged by a proper laundering. It is funny, I think, that the state of my dress should be what occupies my thoughts at such a moment. But what should be the focus of my current musings? An injured Chissick lies on the floor behind me, and ahead of me exists something I do not believe I yet have the power to contemplate.
I grasp the edge of the door frame, pausing long enough to pull in enough air to fill my lungs. The road before me is blurred, and so I blink once, twice, but a moisture invades my eyes, and I feel a burning along the edges of my eyelids. I glance heavenward and I see tendrils of smoke, and above them, still darker clouds, and all of them moving out of synchronization with one another, so that they swirl and crash against themselves, a roiling ocean of dark smoke and sickly smog, the latter lending its own palette of colours to the ever-changing canvas.
I cling to the outer walls, my hands brushing against brick, against wood, against roughly hewn stone as I place one foot in front of the other, until I feel the distance grow between myself and the worst of the fires. But the smell seems to buffet me from every side, the bitter odour of smoke that claws at my throat until every breath feels as if I'm pulling a bit of the fire into myself.
No need to look ahead, I tell myself, my gaze pinned to the ground, to the tips of my scuffed boots as they wink in and out of sight from beneath the hem of my filthy skirt. Step after step, I walk until my legs no longer feel as if they would respond to any orders my poor, demolished mind could conceive.
Fortunately, my feet know where to go, even taking care to sidestep every pile of refuse left in the street. For the sweepers have long since disappeared, leaving the filth to accumulate. But does it matter when there is no one left to walk the uneven cobbles?
Well, there is myself. And a few others, I'm sure. There are some left, the ones who cannot leave, mingling with the proud folk burdened by their own confidence, their belief that no such threat as ostentatious as the one hovering over the city’s rooftops will cause them any manner of harm.
I'm beyond exhaustion, I think. Hunger is a trivial thing. My stomach has ceased to rumble in protest of its barren state, while my limbs respond sluggishly to each and every command my mind sends out to them. And there is the renewed pain, searing in its potency since Lady Francesca’s arrival at the house set the walls to crumbling inside my head. It took only the slightest pressure, and all of my thoughts and memories broke through. Everything is illuminated now, and the clarity of it all is quite an impossible thing to bear.
I can see my Aunt Ann, never as beautiful a creature as my mother, but more quiet, less obtrusive with her particular gifts of wit and ingenuity. It was she, I remember, who introduced my mother to a fascination with spirits and sittings and the world beyond the veil. And then how difficult would it be to recognise the talent I possessed for it, the dreams and the peculiar foreknowledge I had always considered to be my great affliction singling me out in her keen eyes? A word in my mother’s ear, and I was given a place at the table, where the candles flickered into dull pinpricks of blue and the cold crept over my skin like water.
I turn onto another street—this one unfamiliar—and yet my steps continue forward with such confidence, such surety that there is no other path I could take that would lead me home.
Home.
I want to baulk at the word, at the connotations associated with that solitary syllable. But it is not to Mrs. Selwyn’s that I'm returning, nor Marta’s, nor any other friend or relative who took it upon themselves to offer their charity to an orphan girl left to face the censure of the world after the scandalous death of her parents.
My steps gain strength as the daylight wanes, despite the hours I’ve spent on my feet, travelling lanes and avenues now abandoned by the city’s gentler folk. The fires are some ways behind me, but I wonder how much longer until their destructive path reaches the parched lawns, the gardens left to dry into dust beneath the ever-present sun.
I try to imagine how it must look to someone glancing out their window as I pass by. A solitary figure, decorated with dried blood, dressed in clothes that display an entire catalogue of scuffs and stains and tears. My hair has come loose from its pins, the lank strands hanging tangled and unwashed over my drooping shoulders.
But I'm not as solitary as appearances would allow, for is there not a bevy of companions, all of them whispering, their chattering growing in pitch and receding as one voice presses forward, until there is nothing else for me to hear?
Home, the voice speaks to me. The word now a caress, and then a threat. Home, it says again. The voice is calling me home.
Chapter Twenty-Two
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The house is still there. Red brick and white trim, sandwiched neatly between a dozen other homes indistinguishable from one another but for the brass numbers above the front door. The brass needs polishing, I notice, the dull surface of the metal reflecting little of the light from the streetlamp that rises out of the sidewalk, less than ten feet away.
I grasp the railing and feel it give beneath my weight. Perhaps the bolts are loose, or perhaps I have misjudged my own strength. Or lack thereof. I move from one step to the next like a woman much older than myself, my shoulders bowed, both feet together before I trust my balance enough to release the right foot and plant it solidly on the next stair.
The door is different than I remember. From the street, the colour appeared to be the same dark green that my mother had favoured, but standing here, so close I believe I could lean forward and press my forehead onto the painted wood, I notice it is now an ugly shade of brown. I blink a few times, until I can see the bubbles in the paint, the cracks where it is peeling and I can glimpse a few streaks of the original green beneath it.
There is no key for the lock, at least none in my possession. My fingers brush over the latch, and I entertain a fleeting thought that ever since that fateful day nearly a dozen years ago, I’ve never been given any knowledge of to whom the house belongs. But it is nothing more than a simple twist of my hand for the door to open before me. And there I stand on the threshold, afraid to set a foot onto the span of floor where my shadow now stretches out before me.
I must admit it is at the forefront of my mind that this doorstep, this simple collection of ascending stones flanked by an iron railing, is also the place where a young coster stumbled upon the body of Christopher Hawes, his deceased form already beginning to smell in the heat of early summer. My father, stripped of his dignity, of his very life, by a bloodless wound in the soft flesh of his throat.
I don't have to close my eyes before the scene is laid out before me. The coster's nervous cries, how his breath pushed at the curtain of fog that swirled around him. And more men arrived, only a few, as it was still early in the day. One of them checked for a pulse, a redundant action, judging by the depth of the cut that almost severed the victim's neck in half. The chaos held off until the arrival of the constable, an
d then it became an event, shouts sounding from every corner, the death of a gentleman. Murder! Murder! And all while the shadows writhed, shadows that shouldn't have been there in the mist and the fog, shadows that shouldn't have disappeared as the first rays of the sun speared across the rooftops.
But they're all gone now. No trace of an unnatural shadow, not even a smudge clinging to the crevice around the door frame. Of course, a dozen years have passed since my father breathed his last here. The emptiness should calm my nerves, but still, there is a familiar uneasiness that presses on the base of my throat.
The open doorway presents a darkness so close I'm convinced the brightest lights of Heaven wouldn't succeed in banishing it. My shoulder now set against the frame, I hesitate, having no wish to take that first irrevocable step forward. But the fear is almost palpable out here, though I'm still undecided as to whether I'm about to walk into it, or if I will bring it along with me.
Clearing my throat, I pull in the deepest breath I can manage, biting down on it until I suspect my lungs might rupture from the pressure. When I exhale, more than mere air slides out of me. I feel a resistance slipping away, and free of these latest encumbrances, I close my eyes and walk into the imagined dark.
There is no offending odour to prick my senses, only the smells of dust and, though I'm unsure it can be counted as an aroma, a staleness that hangs in the air, so heavy that my next breath feels as if it's being drawn through a cloth pressed over my mouth.
But the heat overwhelms me. Within seconds, it's enough to muddle my thoughts, the warmth possessing a numbing quality that leaches all of the energy from my limbs, until every step is an effort. How long has the house been shut up? Since the day I left? Without a draft to shift the air, the heat given free rein to build upon itself, day after day, until what I now inhale feels like the cumulative warmth of a decade's sultry days.