Nettleblack, page 26
I snatched a frantic breath, and nearly swallowed her thumb.
It startled her back – it startled me back – and then she was straightening up, brushing at her sleeves for something to do with her hands. “Right. Yes. Well. Good to see you looking better. That’ll be it for tonight – in – y’know – Div stuff. For you. Yes. Yes – ah – rest. Yes! Rest. I’ll get back out there. Meant to be on Sweetings lookout tonight. But you stay – get dry – get warm. Yes. I – I’ll expect you at the desk tomorrow. Usual time. Back to normal. Yes. I – yes – good night!”
And I barely had nerve left to stammer a pleasantry before she’d spun on her heel and sprinted away, headlong down the corridor, until the shadows had submerged her.
I ran. Straight through the dormitory and out the other side – as soon as I was sure I could stand, as soon as I heard the double doors slam. A dazed glance round the darkened dorm gave me bare windows, streetlamps, the sleeping ferret on my pillow, the smudgy silhouette of Septimus vanishing into the roads beyond the market. I kept my footfalls, as much as I could, to a hasty hysterical tiptoe, veering wildly to dodge the worst of the cracks in the floorboards. There wasn’t a human soul left to loiter in the room, but even so – I didn’t think I’d survive being caught sneaking out to the tavern again.
No. I wasn’t doing anything of the sort. I was slipping quietly through the dormitory’s back door to get some air in the wake of my attack, and if Rosamond was still lingering out there she would have to come to me.
The rain had pattered itself out. The market square was sodden as a bathtub, more puddles than pathways, deserted now that Septimus had disappeared. A streak of fox prised itself from the butcher’s threshold and splashed through the awnings, skittering away when it spotted me staggering out into the cold. The tavern – Checkley’s – was a greenish smudge in the gloom, ringed with mist, considerably quieter than it had been in the dreadful frenzy of earlier. I stared at it, at the faint shapes shifting behind the tinted windows. I’d quite no intention of going inside again, but – would she know to glance out of the door? She had said she would wait there, and in her favourite language. Was it too much to hope that the drunken delirium hadn’t sucked the recollection out of her?
“Nos da.”
I gasped. Rosamond peeled herself from the nearest tavern wall, shivering in her thin fabric, a brittle glass of water notched in her hand. She was staring me out, with more fixed determination than she’d shown for years, her lazy smirk almost an afterthought under her gleaming eyes. It wasn’t in the least hostility, though. Between us, we must have come bearing enough apologies to uproot every cobblestone in the square – unspoken apologies, all of them, simmering between our stares. At least, mine certainly were.
But I’d more than a mind to talk of something else. Fancy a game of chess, she’d drawled at me earlier. She quite couldn’t condemn me. Clementines – feral and trembling as I was, it seemed perfectly logical to indulge the hopeful suspicion that she might actually be pleased – that, for the first time since leaving Wales, she might find some part of my present existence worth her attention –
“Rosamond, I – erm – I – I’m – erm – infatuated – with Division Sergeant Septimus.”
She squinted at me. “Chwaerlet fach, that much is obvious! I don’t see why you had to run away for it, though.”
Obvious?
“What? – no! – I – I ran away because of Lady Miltonwaters – ”
“Eddie’s benevolent overlord?” She grinned. “What, did you bewitch her too? I never thought her the type, but – ”
“No! She wanted to trap me in an estate and – and – offer me up to pheasant-hungry suitors! And you – you didn’t want to help me!”
She rolled her eyes – the movement nearly toppled her – and let her smile fade, tipped a dash of water down her throat. “Eddie wouldn’t have listened to me, bach, even if I’d been English and a thousand times less disreputable. Ein chwaer wants nothing more than to shove a sister into the aristocracy – if she needs it that much, she should just do it herself. But she might yet have to now. I take it you’re not planning on coming back?”
She’d snatched the words quite through my teeth. I opened my mouth, even so, more to gape at her than answer her. I’d expected – cranberries, I don’t know – threats, entreaties? She didn’t want to writhe in the midst of Edwina’s scheming any more than I did. Surely she’d want me to return, if only so there could be another shoulder to share the burden with!
Sallow against the darkening windows, she arched an eyebrow, watched my confusion with mild bemusement. Bemusement – and more shivering, until her teeth chattered against her glass. The square was quiet enough for me to catch the sound, shrill and insistent over the cobblestones between us.
It was her teeth that tugged me out of my stupor. Out under that gaping sky, with a tavern behind her and my new bright certainty throbbing in my gullet, it seemed the most natural thing in the world for me to dart up to her, unbutton my greatcoat and drape it over her shoulders.
“Rosamond – you – you’re freezing! – I – look – shall we find somewhere more sheltered? – ”
She blinked at me. I’d quite wrong-footed her. The greatcoat soaked up her black hair, left her face pallid and sharp and naked in the gloom.
“Rosamond?”
Her lip curled in a hasty smile. “Chwaerlet! This is the wrong way round, isn’t it? I used to drape things about you, as a quivering infant.”
To which, of course, I could only swallow – it was either swallow or burst into tears. I thought, involuntarily, of my sodden-faced slumber in the lambswool blanket, of the voice I’d conjured to accompany it: cer di i gysgu nawr. And now I had Rosamond – close, and attentive, and softer-voiced – as if my imagination had summoned the very sentiments out of her. Of course, she was still the Rosamond of 1893, with her gaunt face and her bloodshot eyes – I can hardly say that the moment prised her decadence from her like a glove – but there was something new in her features, and it wasn’t entirely the languid disdain to which I had grown so smartingly accustomed.
She sighed, lifted one cold hand and pushed my fringe back. “Fear not. No colder than Rhossili in winter, eh? Shelter, though – that I can resoundingly agree to, if we can make one of these benches a bit less sodden. Care to attempt it?”
It might have been a dream, one of the hazy wistful dreams that lingered in the minutes after I’d woken. There we were, tipping the worst of the water off one of Checkley’s outside benches – I had insisted upon the most surreptitious positioning their outdoor seating could offer, all too wary of yet more unexpected Septimian visibility – and perching on it, her knee sharp against mine through the chaotic tumble of her skirts, my greatcoat lolling from her shoulders. She was quite my sister, and quite someone else, in entirely the same instant.
“You cut your hair,” she observed, almost hesitantly.
The smile twitched out of me before I could stop it. “I – erm – more or less. Not very well.”
She tilted her head, quick as a magpie, to catch my eye, grinned right to her porcelain tooth the moment she had it. “I liked it, at any rate! That would have been quite the lark, wouldn’t it, if I’d really chessed you all unknowing?”
“No it quite would not!”
She sniggered. “Septimus would never have forgiven me. Division Sergeant Septimus – ti a hi – you never did make things easy for yourself, did you?”
“What?” I felt myself frowning; I’d quite forgotten to ask. “You – erm – how do you know – have you met her before?”
She winked. “I haven’t seduced her, if that’s what you’re asking. Only heard things. Next time we meet, I might actually be sober enough to tell you them.”
“I – erm – next time?”
“Oh, yes.” One sallow hand curled around my knee, rapped a jaunty minuet into the damp fabric of my skirt. “I knew I had a sister, bach, and I knew I practically raised her – but I had no idea I was raising anything half so exciting as a quaint little sapphist! And if you’re really going to spend the rest of your life hiding from Eddie, well – when else am I going to see you, if not clandestinely?”
I swallowed. “You – erm – you quite didn’t want to see me before – ”
She sighed, grimaced – then flinched it away, raised up a teasing smirk instead. “The whims of a decadent, eh? The moment I can’t see you, I suddenly want to! Seize the moment whilst we’ve still got it, and all that, even if it’s just a matter of days. And you’ve only had that murderous ferret for Nettleblackian company – you must be in need of some variety. You’re definitely going to need me, the way you’re going. Getting an ody out of ody hi’n dy licio di is only going to be the beginning of it, if it’s Septimus you’re after – ”
I ought to have pressed her – all well and good of me to conjecture this retrospectively, but even so! – on her first admission. The whims of a decadent was so much nonsense. There was something else perturbing her – some strange new threat haunting seize the moment and a matter of days, and if I’d turned the conversation back to it she may have given it to me. But – was it selfish to want to drive the conversation on, instead of backwards? Was it wrong to feel that warmth still scorching in my throat – and grasp towards it – and let the ominous secrets alone to be untangled another night?
“I – erm – I’m quite not after anyone! I just – she – she’s very – as I said! – and when she – every time she touches my face I – erm – I just want to kiss her – ”
“Every time?” she echoed, eyebrows soaring. “Fond of the caresses, is she?”
I crimsoned quite to my eartips. There’d be no stopping her now.
So I told her the lot. I’ve not the faintest how I managed to stammer half of it, and by the time I’d finished the sky was more grey than black, but I took all that I knew, and I gave it as much faltering voice as I was able. How it was to dart along beside Septimus, staring at her peculiar jumble of confidence and insecurity, brusqueness and gentleness. That first speech she’d given me, notebook in hand, her bright fierce excitement about being a Divisioner. Those flowers, proffered to me by accident, just around the corner from where we were sat. The way she looked onstage at the Dallyangle Theatre, outdazzling the performers and demanding the records, swaggering about in her trousers like the hero of some grand baroque opera. Her fingers on my cheek, trying to thumb away where Lady Miltonwaters had hurt me. The close darkness of Lorrie’s hallway, her lips glancing against my fringe. That stunned, smiling offer to teach me how to cycle. The endless agonies of watching Nick Fitzdegu, and Mr. Adelstein, and even Lorrie himself, to make sure that none of them could claim to be her sweetheart. And, latest and most brilliant – the discovery that she wasn’t stepping out with anyone – and the revelation that had followed it – and the truth of me, steadying my spine like my abandoned corset, put into words that I could understand.
Rosamond wasn’t precisely a decorous listener. She snorted, and sniggered (“You were worried about the men?”), and sipped her water with sardonical intent. Once or twice she pinched my cheek, or squeezed my knee where she had it caught under her fingers. Even so – I’m inclined to think she was the best and only listener there could have been, on that frantic night. If she’d been grave, or disapproving, I quite don’t know what might have happened to me. I was too fragile, too raw, to defend anything of my feelings – but, with her, I didn’t have to. She clapped me on the shoulder when it was done, declared her ultimatum: I must make sure to sneak out and see her again soon, as surreptitiously as was necessary, and she would furnish me with her best advice.
Then the sky was grey in earnest, and she was drifting off across the square, her shoulders stark and bony again without my greatcoat to warm them. Then I was scrambling as softly as I could through the narrow back door, past heaped blankets and snoring bodies until I reached my bed. Now, it must be – figs, far too close to next morning’s call-time – this morning’s – at my feeble guess between chimes, somewhere vaguely approaching four o’clock?
I’m quite too delirious to sleep, but I ought to. Apart from anything else, if I sleep I might dream of Septimus.
And what of her? Too early to say – in every sense – but – across reception, in her office – perhaps with her hair loose – is it entirely audacious to wonder whether she might be thinking of me?
13.
IN WHICH RODENTS DO
NOT HELP MATTERS
Correspondence (from the past)
4th Dec, 1890
Edwina – can I ask you something? Thought it might be easier if I don’t ask in person – there’s no pressure – just all the time you need if you want to answer.
*
20th January 1891
Of course.
*
3rd March, 1891
What do you think of me?
*
16th April 1891
I esteem you more greatly than anyone I have ever known. Your good sense, kindness and tact is unmatched – certainly by comparison with mine – and our friendship is a bright spot amidst these bleak years. I do not know if that answers your question?
*
20th May, 1891
I’m not sure I’ve got good enough words for saying it too – but I feel the same! Everything you said! Your forthrightness – your drive – how much you care – your – just everything that’s you, I suppose – I can’t tell you how glad I am you wanted to start corresponding. And then start having tea. And then do both. And – all of it!
But there are things I want to check. You don’t mind that I’m a tailor? That I grew up in an orphanage? That I’ve got no idea about this fortune stuff you have to deal with?
*
17th July 1891
I do not understand in what sense I am supposed to ‘mind’ these things. I can hardly not be conscious of our differences, but I do not see why they should alter my opinion of you. I concede that the persons with whom I am obliged to ingratiate myself may feel differently on the matter, and that I must proceed with caution – but, if I have learned nothing else from these years of toadying, it is that I am far less alike to them than even I suspected.
*
9th Nov, 1891
When you say you want to proceed with caution – what do you mean?
*
8th December 1891
I mean that, for all that I may struggle to decipher the social mores of those people, I cannot alienate them entirely yet – only, mind you, for the sake of my sisters. It was our parents’ dearest wish that our family should marry up, and I do not want to be the reason the girls’ opportunities are spoilt. Why should I deny them their prestige, their fine things, their good matches?
Although I fear any matches I could have made for Rosamond have been all but destroyed.
*
7th March, 1892
So – what? You think we’re just going to have to – keep each other secret? What’s the plan? I want Sept to meet you as soon as it’s not going to strangle your reputation. I want – don’t know if it’s selfish, but – I want not to meet your sisters – definitely not Rosamond, because then we’d only end up with the family tailor yelling at her for wrecking all of your plans. But then if they’re marrying up, I’m probably not going to meet them, am I?
And I want to wait. For you. I mean – as long as you need for juggling everything. I want to help you scheme us out of this tangle.
(‘Us’?)
*
4th April 1892
Us.
You are right to suppose that a plan has occurred to me – circumstances under which we will both be free to own our friendship. I fear it cannot be as immediate as I would like, but nor is it a vague and distant prospect. I shall explain:
Once my sisters are married, I am free to choose my company where I see fit. I am perfectly prepared to distance myself from Rosamond and Henrietta as much as is required to protect their reputations – a movement which will not be difficult, considering that the pair of them are determined to keep me at a distance as it is. I cannot imagine any aristocrat would go through the humiliation and hassle of a divorce simply because the estranged sister of his wife acknowledged her friendship with a tailor. And now that the law has changed, my sisters would have full control of their finances even after their marriages.
But at present, I am far too afraid to give my sisters financial control of anything. Rosamond has utterly destroyed her reputation, her health, and quite possibly her sanity. She would have destroyed her inheritance had I not kept it from her – she has burnt through enough of my money as it is. She has lost me my London circle – she all but lost me the friendship of Lady Miltonwaters. I am afraid that, if I attempt to push her further down the path towards matrimony, it will do nothing but harm Henrietta’s chances.
And – in Henrietta’s chances – there lies our hope. Henrietta has so far remained out of the disastrous proceedings. She can succeed where Rosamond has failed. And when she does, it will leave me free to meet your sister, and leave us free to do as we wish.
*
13th May, 1892
Sounds like a plan to me!
Also – I’m glad we’ve got the plan. For that – and for you – and for everything. I want to start on the endearments – but they all sound insane when you write them down. It feels almost like heckling to call you ‘darling’ on paper – and you’re definitely not a ‘pet’.
*
1st Aug, 1892
News – news – news – and it can’t wait – do you want to know something fun?
*
5th August 1892
