by Jerico Lenk
“Goodness, child, you ought to be mentally diagnosed, sounding like a witch with a curse, yourself!” Miss Valérie disparaged with a forced little laugh. She was afraid of me, too.
But something in my father’s eyes changed at her comment. The sadness there was real, I realised, real and hopeless.
He stood roughly and held me fast before I could writhe away, scowling and hissing witlessly at him to let me go. But he had both hands closed firmly on my shoulders as he stooped to speak low and thick into my ear.
“I did not come to upset you,” he said. “Nor to threaten you. I only came to make you aware of the repercussions of your actions. Willow, I never wanted this for you. Not after your mother.”
God, but the name Willow injured me today, even more from his mouth than any. As though he spoke of someone special I ought to have known but didn’t. Someone kind and obedient, next to whom I seemed an utter failure; someone he’d wanted me to be … and who I very much wasn’t, in many ways.
Someone whom we both knew was a different sort of ghost—missing, but having never really existed in the first place at all.
“Darling,” he mourned, “you chose to leave! I would have provided the world for you, but you cast it aside for the same dreadful sideshow hobbies as your mother—it’s broken my heart and you must bear the weight of that. Whether you hate me or not, I am still your father, and I wish you only the best in your endeavours, I hope for your happiness, but I shall not have you back. You’ve made it painfully clear you want nothing to do with me, your only family … ”
“Well,” I whispered very gravely, voice trembling. “The Cross is my family now, and they’ve been better to me in a few fortnights than you have been for many years.”
I should have felt guilt, I thought. I should have felt love for him. Maybe I did, and I hated for those to be my last words to him today, but guilt was certainly no part of it. I pitied him. And it was a much worse feeling.
My father and Miss Valérie left.
Clutching the letters, I watched from the high windows until they disappeared into a coach at the corner. And then I fled.
I wanted to feel exultant. I’d meant it when I’d told my father the Cross was more family than he’d ever been, but—
I almost rounded a corner right into Westwood on my way out of the main offices. He looked at me keenly, raising his thick grey brows. I was in such a daze. But I wasn’t as good at lying as my father. Westwood would see right through me; certainly, he already knew my tragic situation and was simply waiting for me to confess. Perhaps he even knew who my visitors had been, or had overheard it all. Willow. Fraudulent. Disowned.
Panicked, I just bobbed my head in gracious apology and took off, rushing through the halls towards the dormitories.
Westwood didn’t stop me.
***
I went straight along for King’s Hall. Cain didn’t answer when I knocked, perhaps out with his family. But I just couldn’t bear being alone. I tried Clement’s door, the second on the right, Cain had said sometime before.
Clement was in.
“Well, I’m alone in the world!” I choked out, throwing the letters down on his faded floor and climbing onto the small striped chaise in the corner. My bandages were torture; they made it feel as though my chest closed like an asthmatic’s.
Clement just gawked at me, his brows raised and mouth open like his casual greeting had gotten stuck in his throat in the face of my outburst. He was half-dressed, swimming in a comfy-looking banyan robe, knit wool socks peeking from his casual trousers. His was one of the windowless rooms in the center of the terrace building, and a scholarly disaster. Papers and books were scattered about with lamps and candles, the rug at his bedside a bit crooked from use. A Catholic cross hung over a small wash stand, with his dusting powder and tooth-paste, comb and dish of water to soak up unclean air considering the absence of a window for a fresh draft. It was almost like a small corner of Mr. Zayne’s in there. Except it smelled much better. Like peppermint and sweet cloves. Cigarettes and him.
Clement dragged the lopsided wooden chair from his desk around to sit directly in front of me. “What are you going on about?” he ventured impatiently, but I recognised it as one of his fronts because there was a very worried spark in his eyes.
“Do you really want to hear it all?” I muttered.
Clement hesitated just a moment, then nodded.
As if some vengeance against my father, it was with a furious storm inside that I told him everything.
I told him who my father was. I rattled on about my mother, and how she’d had the same gifts as me, she could have been there for me, but she’d left us and I had this gnawing suspicion that her name was somewhere in the criminal witchcraft files, though I couldn’t say why. I told him I’d joined the Cross against my father’s wishes and after helping me, Daphne and Zelda had flown to Paris so now I was really, truly alone.
“That Julien’s?” Clement stressed.
“I’m alone in the world!” I reminded him.
“Lord, Will, hush that nonsense up already.”
“I’m a pariah. I’m hated. I’m a reject like the rest of you—”
“Pardon?” Clement gave a little flick of the brow.
Exasperated, I clambered up to my elbow. “My father finally paid me a visit to cruelly disown me, Clement,” I said through clenched teeth, not sure what he did not understand here. “I am no longer welcome at home. I can’t live on my own! I don’t know how to live a normal life. I grew up in a glorified brothel!”
Clement’s hazel eyes clashed with mine. “What makes you think you must live on your own?”
“The Cross’s charity can’t last forever, obviously.”
“Of course it shall! Men have breathed their last breaths here, devoting their entire lives to the study.”
“So, you advise I live as a burden on others? That’s your suggestion?”
“You’re not alone, and you’re not a burden!” Clement heaved an impatient sigh, fed up with my dramatics. “You’re not thinking clearly! It’s not the end of the world. In fact, I believe it a fine new beginning.”
I scoffed, wiping angrily at my face now that the tears were through, their tracks sticky along my flushed cheeks. “He even removed me from his will.”
“Like a courtesan king has anything to offer a son!”
The sting of truth that I knew, but resented.
“Even that would have been something,” I murmured in a ragged way. “A proper place in life instead of just … ”
Just a living Missing, drifting around amongst those who actually had a place, and a home, and a name.
“I don’t find it very comforting to think we all belong in some place,” Clement said, looking again so very young and tortured. “I’m of the belief it’s about belonging to someone.”
I waited for him to look my way. But he avoided me, deliberately.
Oh … That had come from that secret self of his, I realised with a tight pinch in my chest. The self that understood me more than I’d ever given him credit for, that just sat there and let me berate it time and time again.
And it left me feeling hollow in a strange new way—a good way, somehow. A numb sort of peacefulness.
“I don’t mean that others own you.” Clement sighed curtly, fumbling for better words. “Only that you belong with certain people.”
I smiled a little. Oh, Clement. “I know what you’re trying to say,” I said. “And I’m sorry to be this way. It’s just … have you ever felt so relieved and sad at the same time?”
He rummaged through the piles on his desk for a bottle of cough syrup and nodded, throwing me a sincere glance that caught me off guard. “Yes,” he finally replied. He smiled faintly, too, a little perk of the mouth. And then his secret self flitted away again, as if he hadn’t known it had come in the first place. “Yet, Will, you’ve been doing it on your own already.”
This was true. Perhaps it had been true even before I�
�d left home.
“Here’s the thing. Your sadness is his victory, but your triumph is his failure. Simple as that.” Clement paused, tapping a finger idly on the little tawny medicine bottle. “Does Westwood know?” he prompted, raising his brows.
“Of what?” I mumbled.
“Your curiosity about your mother and her potential ties to the Cross.”
“No.”
“Is this place full of lies?”
That was a different sort of question. “No.” I wiped at my face the last time with the pinched end of my sleeve like all proper manners said not to.
“Your father’s wrong about that, then.” Clement shrugged. “Are you like your mother?”
“No. I don’t think so. Though I must’ve gotten my knack from her.”
“Are you a devious and deceiving son?”
I thought about this a moment, running my tongue along the ridge of my teeth as the tension in my jaw began to fade. “No,” I finally said, eyes flickering over to meet his.
“There, do you see?” Clement gave another idle shrug. “Listen. Being unaccounted for, existing on the fringes, not known but not sought, either … Would you really rather be weighed down by responsibility and reputation like Kingsley?” He smirked with good-natured pity and opened the cough syrup bottle, holding it my way. “I’m terrible at this solace thing. Do you want a sip to calm your nerves?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him he only thought he was terrible at it. “Thank you, no.”
Clement fell quiet for a long moment, slouched in the chair. His eyes wandered off elsewhere, empty of their usual fire. Finally, he murmured, “The Cross is family.” There was a distance to his smile as he dragged his fingers through his hair, but his smile still warmed the silence as he stood, pulling me up with him.
“Are you happy here with the Cross?” he asked, hand lingering on my arm. The frank hopefulness in the question was both pathetic and endearing, something I hadn’t expected at all. He wanted me happy? Something in my chest tightened as I peered up at him and he stared back, waiting for my answer, in a simple sort of hush that needed nothing else. Was I happy here?
“Yes,” I whispered. And it was the truth. I had him and Cain, and even the others, and my own room with its own ghost, and people who believed in me for some reason. Wasn’t that more than enough?
Clement’s gaze roamed my face. “When you look at me like that, Will, you’d think you were a lady awaiting her knight’s victorious kiss.”
Nearly choking on a startled breath, I swept his hand away as my heart fell and then lurched to my throat. “Well, aren’t you just full of yourself, now?” I sputtered, face on fire.
“Not to mention you sound like a girl when you cry, too.” He sank back down on the chair and slouched against his arm at the edge of the desk, grinning at me.
I bristled, and scoffed, hoping to come across far less thrown than I was as I flashed him a disapproving look. “What does that even mean? Is there some sort of difference between male and female tears?”
“I don’t believe so … ” He kicked up a foot to prop against the chaise, wagging his leg back and forth so that his knee bumped into mine. “I wouldn’t blame you for fancying me, Will. I’m quite the remarkable man, don’t you think?”
“Remarkable? Trust, Clement, if I were romantically inverted, I could find much more suitable—well, suitors—and you’re hardly a man, anyway, you’re not even twenty-one—”
Clement laughed, waving his hands. “Good Lord, Will, I’m giving you a hard time!”
“Well, hush up, already!”
I couldn’t say I was not romantically inverted. I knew he only meant to play, but I was just suddenly very aware of how real romance was outside my father’s house. Of my own romantic compass and the way it could inexplicably and unwarrantedly swing north or south or west or east, unpractised and vulnerable.
And … when had he stopped calling me Winchester?
“You have a real talent for ruining your character as soon as you’ve redeemed it,” I muttered.
Clement froze halfway through a catlike stretch, arms in the air. “I’ve redeemed myself?” he said in dismay. “Why, now I’m quite embarrassed!”
“God, you’re unbearable, and I regret telling you anything,” I said, blushing madly and casting him a sharp glance as I swatted his leg out of the way.
In truth, I didn’t regret it. By his harmless laughter, I knew he actually hadn’t the slightest clue what secret self of mine he’d narrowly avoided.
I stooped to gather up the letters from Zelda and Daphne, lying fanned out on his floor as they were, utterly impatient with my flustered state. Damn Clement. I certainly had not looked at him that way, the bastard. A lady awaiting the knight’s kiss, please.
And yet, for some reason, the exchange delighted me greater than I’d been prepared for.
I felt somehow as though … I mattered very much.
“Let’s go for a stroll,” Clement said, scraping up out of his chair and sorting through his room for some real clothes. “Have you been to St James’s Baths? I aim to go once a month. Nice, really, not too expensive.”
“Oh—no.” The public baths? I shook my head quickly, still rattled by the moment and cautious of what it meant and what that meant if it meant anything at all.
He pouted at me from the corner, holding a clean shirt. “Well, fine then. You might just tell me I’m horrid company and get it over with.”
I closed my eyes and covered my face with a hand, taking a moment to gather myself. But also, so he couldn’t see how he made me laugh. “I just need some time to myself, I think. Tomorrow, perhaps.”
On the way out, I met his eyes over my shoulder, offering the best smile I could muster. “Thank you,” I said. I meant it.
Clement nodded because he knew I meant it, and that was enough for the two of us because after everything, we certainly knew each other well by now. Well … well, enough.
Closed into my Knight’s Hall room, I surrendered to the delicate acceptance of being disowned. It was like a bruise, rotten under the skin … but healing.
I paused at the mirror to fix my hair a bit, keenly conscious of the fact that Zelda wasn’t there to trim it lately. It was long enough about my ears to tuck behind them now, flipping up at my neck, wavy and a bit wild.
Like a ghost conjurer preparing for contact, I sat with little treasures laid out before me—the opened letters, Agatha’s comb, Cook’s knife, Daphne’s ring, the sullen and bewitching photograph of my mother.
Mary Ann watched me from the corner, her eyes wide and dark like holes in a sheet. “Sir?” she peeped. “I mean, miss?”
“Sir is all right today,” I said without looking up.
She crouched down to her haunches, apparition shimmering there in her colourless glory. “What’s all that?” she hummed.
“The extent of my personal possessions,” I replied. Daphne’s ring was a bit too small for my thumb, so I put it on my locket chain instead. The locket … I’d never been able to get it open. When I’d been younger, I spent hours one afternoon trying. Zelda had told me to leave it alone because perhaps that meant it wasn’t to be opened. But now I was beyond curious. My father had said it was my mother’s locket. What was in it? Another picture of her? Or in the true splendour of a witch, if she’d really been one, cemetery dirt? Black cat’s teeth and a lock of her hair?
“Who’s that?” Mary Ann drew closer to me, voice a whispery little warble.
My eyes slid to the photograph. “That’s my mother.”
“She’s beautiful.”
“She’s dead.”
“So am I!” Mary Ann thought this was the most tickling thing. Her laughter echoed even after she flickered out, disappearing into the in-between.
Alone again, I read the letters through which my father had already snooped. My chest hurt with the urge to cry once more, but the tears felt all dried up, leaving just the raw ache inside. One letter was from Zelda, date
d the first of October, sent from Dover on the coast. Felt like so long ago … She described in her uneven looping words all her love for me and her hope for my future and how she and Daphne had called but I had been out, and they could not miss the train for which my father had presented them tickets, though she knew I’d forgive her anyway. That was true. Yet I still felt such a failure. I had missed her, twice. First with my trunk of things, then with Daphne as they …
I took a slow, steadying breath and kissed the letter, willing the meaning travel somehow to Paris and comfort her.
Sliding out of the second letter before the note itself, cool and smooth in my palm, was one of Daphne’s cameo hair pieces. Twisted gold, like a gentleman’s stick pin but for a lady’s tresses. The three Greek Graces—Splendour, Mirth, and Good Cheer—danced and twined with each other lovingly like sisters where they were carved in the creamy-coloured conch shell at the top. I ran my thumb over their delicate figures, smiling faintly. Surprising, that my father had not taken it from the letter when he’d checked it. But he wasn’t all coldhearted; I had to admit that. We just were not right for each other.
“I love cameos!” Mary Ann trilled from the corner.
Clearing my throat, I stuck the hair pin behind my ear like a pencil and drew out Daphne’s letter. It bore the same date as Zelda’s.
Will, she’d written in a lovely slanting script, I told you before I wished I ached to live life as much as you. I’ll tell you now that you were and will always be my brightest star, my baby brother and gallant little hero. I am forever sorry I stole Madame Zelda, but I feel you’ll be more comforted to know where you might find us both should you ever feel inclined to look. I’ll forward an address soon. All my love, Daphne.
I remembered her kissing the corner of my mouth when I’d left the house, and now, no longer in such a hurried moment, I suddenly recalled the soft sweet feel of it, the familiar scent of her hair. Something pinched deep in my chest. Tightened, and twisted. Gallant little hero … A lady awaiting the knight’s kiss, Clement said; had Daphne ever looked at me that way, and gone unnoticed?
