But better than the ship, she’d said Better than the ship. Moving, yet still catatonic. The mad light in her eyes had been only the animate version of her now-unblinking stare. They were linked. It was spreading.
It was spreading, and it had arrived on her ship. “What do we do?” Violetta asked. She was hanging back, trembling. “We cannot bring her in the carriage, not if she is ill. And we cannot leave her here.”
Kill her, burn her, bury her. She did not want to deal with this. She wanted it to be gone.
Evelyn watched as the girl’s lips began to pale. Her breathing was growing shallower. The blow to the back of her head, combined with the dull state the sickness left her in, were working together swiftly. “We will not have to do either,” Evelyn said. “She is all but dead. We will alert the Judiciary and have them send somebody out to handle the body.”
Violetta swallowed. “But to leave her here—”
“If we took her, she would still die. But if it pleases you, we can remain by her side until she breathes her last.” She looked between Violetta and the shame-faced driver.
Neither said a word. Evelyn turned back to the girl. She didn’t struggle or look like she was dying. As long as Evelyn didn’t look into her eyes, she didn’t look unnatural, just pathetic. Evelyn clung to the image. Perhaps she had been wrong. Perhaps she was only over- sensitive.
Another few breaths. And then—nothing. “There,” Evelyn said. “Now, may we continue upon the road?”
Violetta returned wordlessly to the carriage. The driver went to tend to the horses, who had become calm once more.
We will not go out with the tide, now.
The girl’s face clung to her thoughts as she sat through an awkward exchange with Officer Pollard’s secretary, who informed her that he had been called away on some business but she was welcome to return the next day. It festered, haunting her on the return trip up the hills. It followed her into the depths of her house, into the sickroom of the soldier where he lay insensate, his promise bound up in danger. And it chased her into her workroom, where she shut herself into the close, green- smelling darkness and tried to breathe.
Sickness provoked delirium. Certain drugs, too. Perhaps—oh, but perhaps the catatonia was the result of a new compound, something her sailors had brought home with them, had distributed to a pretty girl met in a tavern, celebrating one last time before she risked her life to reunite with her family. Evelyn could picture it now. The sticky pulp of a flowering plant, rolled into a ball, chewed between the teeth, causing confused ecstasy. The affected, wandering and raving, delighted by the smallest thing and spouting out nonsense, until the pulp curdled in their bellies and suddenly twisted the effect. The delight turning to blankness, permanently or not.
That had to be it. And if the girl had met one of her sailors over a mug of ale, it made sense that she would speak in maritime-inflected riddles. That she might know Evelyn’s name. There was no larger secret to it. None at all. And only coincidence had drawn the girl towards Evelyn’s home, following the path of a disguised soldier.
And yet. And yet. Something felt wrong. The memory drew her in again: the cold upon her hands, the tension in her spine. She could hear the horses crying, see the fly moving across the girl’s eye. If it had been a drug, wouldn’t some of the men have partaken before they left the port they obtained it at? Wouldn’t somebody have fallen into that stupor long before The Verity made dock?
Wouldn’t the doctors have solved the puzzle? No matter the cause, it was spreading. It was spreading, and her ship had brought it to Delphinium. She could feel the world pitch beneath her, threatening to shake her loose. If it continued to spread, would she be blamed? Would they burn her ships, take her power from her, drag her out before the magistrates? Search her home, find her poisons and her poultices and her traitorous captive? Her hands shook, her breathing coming in rapid, ragged bursts. She turned to the rows of bottles and began to fumble through them, the lantern she’d hung by the door casting barely enough light to work by.
She needed to be numb. She couldn’t be afraid. Evelyn pulled bottles by long practice, small vials of tinctures and large ceramic jars filled with dried rootstock. Her hands shook as she peeled, grated, pounded in mortar and pestle. She could have used alcohol, but it had never given her the particular kind of remove she craved. It didn’t give her the ecstasy, the agony, the warping of the edges of the world until she was truly, perfectly alone, safe and floating in the void of her body, uncaring of everything around her. And while poppy juice might bring her close to what felt like death, she would be too insensate to realize its closeness before she slipped over the edge. No, she crafted her own obliteration.
From her lantern, she lit a long match, and with that the burner below the alembic filled halfway with water. The rest of the ingredients needed to be boiled, in sequence, and she fed them into the glass neck, piece by piece. Acrid steam curled up around her, and she inhaled, deeply, holding the fumes in her chest. They burned her, making her head swim. Her mind began to dull.
No; she had to focus, make the finished draught. At first, the work produced a blissful stillness in her, an absence of everything beyond the glass in front of her. She became focused and clear. But then her thoughts crept back in, sickly and pale, self-aware and sharp along the edges. Broken, broken, they whispered as she blew out the flame, took up the glass with tongs and swirled it to cool the milky fluid inside. When the glass was cool enough to touch, she poured it into the mortar, stirred it three times, and then lifted the bowl to her lips. As she took the draught, her lips twisted with the sick, bitter pleasure of it. Giving in—it always felt like giving in. Giving up, in the most precious way she could. She might be killing herself, but she did so slowly and by her own rules. Her self-destruction was modulated. It was therapeutic. Let her kill herself as she chose to, for nobody else should have the pleasure.
She had earned this pain. She had earned this oblivion. She sank to the floor, drawing her knees up to her chest. Her corset protested the curling of her spine, and she reached back, fumbling for the tiny buttons along her dress. She needed Violetta there, to undress her, to crack open her armor. But no; Violetta could never see her like this, could never see her weak and writhing, wretched and retching.
She should have demanded privacy before retreating into her workroom, sent Violetta away from the sanctum on some task. She had forgotten, in her panic. Where was her assistant now? And did she feel as sick as Evelyn did, as haunted by the fevered gaze of that girl?
Slowly, Evelyn pushed herself up to her feet. She almost fell over the hem of her skirts, lurching forward and catching herself against one of the shelves that lined the wall opposite her workbench. The lamp had guttered out, or perhaps her pupils were constricting, blinding her despite the light. She felt her way to the door, fumbled with the key, let herself fall out into the hallway. She pulled herself together again just long enough to lock the door and slip the key back onto her chatelaine. Around her, the walls of the house wavered, pulsed, shifted in texture.
The bedroom. The bedroom, or the garden. Those were her private places, her final sanctuaries. If she had been smarter, she would have taken the draught there, already comfortably ensconced in anonymity.
She was a few doors down from the sickroom, and she could hear the soldier’s breathing, heavy and ragged, pulsing through the walls. She walked towards it, hand over hand along the rippling plaster, the colors of the paper bleeding onto her pale fingers in time with the movements of his lungs. He was so loud; was he dying?