The door opened up. Violetta emerged, beautiful Violetta, radiant in white, not afraid at all. Fear shook Evelyn’s bones, shame curling around her heart. Against Evelyn’s fingers, there was no change in the pulse of the walls. Against her ears, there was no change in the volume of the soldier’s breathing, his lungs still shaking the foundations.
No. No, it was her breathing. She laughed, helpless. Violetta noticed her then, turning to stare wide-eyed at her, linens gathered in her arms. Soiled. Evelyn could smell it from here. Her stomach rebelled, softened and rotted from the fluid clotting in it. “My lady?”
Go away, go away. She needed to pull herself upright, force herself to be proper and in control. Leave me be, I will see you in the morning. But all Evelyn could see was the fear in Violetta’s eyes. Violetta, in the carriage. Violetta, on the road. Violetta, reaching out to care for the refuse that was the soldier, fretting over the crumpled body of the addled girl.
Evelyn wanted that. She wanted to fall by the roadside, let Violetta take command of her fate.
Evelyn reached out for her. Cursing under her breath, her voice so soft and delicate, Violetta locked the sickroom door and dropped the linens, hurrying to her side. She smelled of the soldier, of the sickroom, of the medicines Evelyn had instructed her to give him whether he woke or dozed. She smelled of all that Evelyn had done, and Evelyn took her proffered arm, leaning in to inhale deeply.
“Should I call for the doctor, my lady?” Violetta murmured, leading her down the hallway. “Is this the sickness? The sickness from the road, from The Verity?”
Evelyn shook her head, tangling her fingers into the frills along the waist of Violetta’s gown. “No,” she replied, voice alien to her own ears. “No, just a bath. A bath, Violetta.”
Violetta had come to her four years ago as a simple maid, but she had always been special. Delicate, yet decisive. Watchful, yet discrete. Evelyn had cleaved onto her, raised her salary, made her head of the household staff, because she had wanted somebody like Violetta all her life. She had found in her somebody she could trust to watch the maids that came and cleaned her bedchamber, so that she no longer had to do it.
Ah, but she needed Violetta. Longed for her approval. She should feel shame, only shame, for Violetta to see her weakness so clearly, and yet it was an easy thing to do now—wasn’t it?—to ask for her gentle hands to pry her corset loose, to watch her heat a kettle of water in the fireplace, fill the basin, prepare soaps and sponge and towel. Easier than to think of the girl dying at the side of the road.
She lost her moorings as Violetta slowly removed the pins in her hair, as she cleaned her arms and legs and stomach with hot, perfumed water. She caught those moments only in glimpses, the rest of her world contorting, stretching, darkening. She saw the townhouse her father had tried to move her to just after her mother’s death, trying to break her mourning. She wandered the halls of that narrow house, and then of her own, all of them shivering and insubstantial, made of clumping, clotting shadows. She was alone. She was alone, and that was all she needed.
Then, back into her body, clothed in a chemise and wrapped in a blanket, tucked into the plush chair by the window. Violetta had not removed her veil even when she plaited Evelyn’s hair, and that gesture of understanding brought tears to Evelyn’s eyes.
But nobody was there to see them. Violetta had left.
To resume the laundry, or to flee? Her stomach twisted at the thought. She had assumed she had seen loyalty and care in Violetta’s eyes, but she had been wrong, so wrong. Of course she had felt nothing but disgust. Evelyn fixed upon how stricken she had looked, the soiled linens clutched to her chest. Bile rose in her throat.
No, not just bile. Her gut was cramping, savagely, fiercely. Something was trying to claw its way out of her. Incorrect dosage, she thought, weakly.
She only barely got herself out of the chair and to the chamberpot in time not to foul herself.
More time. Hours lost, half-dreaming nightmares, leaned against the wall by the pot. Wracking shivers. Violent vomiting, sometimes with Violetta there to hold her, sometimes not. She brushed against the precipice, toeing her way along the crumbling edge, feeling her body waver and shudder. A healthy woman could withstand this, but her? Her, with her weak bones and weaker flesh? Twice, she felt herself come close to tipping over, and there was no exhilaration to it. No delight, no relief, no fervent knowledge that she was destroying herself because she was tired, so tired, of preserving herself.
But she did not think about the girl with staring eyes. She did not think about the first mate of The Verity, catatonic below decks. She did not think about the soldier, or her guilt, or her need for him to mean something. She was given that one small mercy.
At some point, Violetta guided her to the bed, tucked her beneath the sheets. She perched on the edge of the mattress, against the heavy damask curtains that sagged from the beams above the bed, and watched her.
Slowly, Evelyn’s senses sharpened. Her eyes focused. She regained perspective: her, incapacitated, shaking and standing at the shores of death. Violetta, watching, fearing. Violetta was an intelligent woman, and a caring one; she would have called for a doctor despite Evelyn’s pleas. He would be on his way, and he would smell it on her, the poison, the filth of her, so different from a natural illness.
“Send the doctor away,” she hissed. “There is no doctor, my lady,” she said. “You told me not to call one. I listened.”
“Good,” Evelyn said, quickly, too quickly. She wanted to reach out, but was too weak to do so. She hadn’t meant to make Violetta look at her with fear. This was all so far beyond her control, all of it slipping away from her. She shuddered.
“My lady?” Evelyn looked away, flushing with shame. She reached for the lie, but there was none close to hand. No; trust was all she had left to her. She had always trusted Violetta. Why would this be different?
“I miscalculated,” she said, throat thick. Her heart pounded in her ears.
Violetta didn’t ask for details, though. She reached beyond the heavy curtains and poured a cup of cool water. “Did it affect you so much? The girl?”
She understood. The realization made her bones and lungs burn. Violetta understood. There was no judgment in her voice, and Evelyn could hardly believe it. “Yes,” she said, wonderingly, hesitantly. “The girl. The soldier. Everything.” Slowly, Evelyn pushed herself up, sheets falling into her lap. Her ribs stood out against her chemise and the thin, sallow skin below, her chest where it was bare turned splotchy red as the poison was mellowed by her flesh. “The Verity.”
“We can be thankful, at least, that it wasn’t burned,” Violetta said, offering the cup.
Evelyn drained the water and returned the cup to Violetta. She reached up to adjust the pins holding her veil in place. They had pulled out or broken sections of her fine, brittle hair, and the gauze refused to hang straight before her eyes. “Perhaps it should be,” she said as she worked, focusing on the pain against her scalp instead of the drums of panic beating inside her chest. She could see it, the tarred ropes catching fire, the flames spreading, eating up one of her remaining twenty ships. “Perhaps the whole fleet should be burned. Perhaps the harbor should be closed.”
“My lady?” She looked at Violetta. She was attentive, and in command of the worry that flashed behind her eyes. “Have you ever thought of fleeing? Like the girl?”