Addiction

By the end of the first week, Garrick Wynmore had broken every rule he possessed.

He had not planned it. That was what he told himself, in the gray hours before dawn, when he lay awake with the woman's weight against his side and the first sparrows beginning in the plane trees. He was not a man given to impulse. He had spent his life distrusting appetite. He had measured it, and mapped it, and put it in a drawer with the other unreliable instruments. And yet here he was, thirty-three years old, a peer of the realm, the Seventh Viscount Wynmore, creeping down a corridor at midnight like a footman with an assignation.

I should stop, he thought, nightly, with perfect lucidity.

And nightly, he did not.

…

It began as a kind of study.

That was the fiction. On the second night, when she came to his door in her night-robe with her hair unbound and a candle in her hand, he said, "I do not think this is wise," and she said, "I did not ask you to be wise," and he opened the door. On the third night he told himself that it was a matter of observation: a controlled condition, a repeated trial. On the fourth he gave up the pretense.

He had never known that a body could be a language.

He had thought he understood it. He had lain with women. There had been Perpetua, who was clever and brisk and amused, and who had treated the whole business as a kind of civilized sport; there had been two or three others, in ports, whom he remembered chiefly for their kindness. It had been pleasant. It had been, in its way, adequate. It had never occurred to him that a man might lie in the dark with a woman's head on his shoulder and feel, for an hour, nothing at all but peace.

She laughed in bed. That was the first surprise. She laughed at his earnestness, at his notebooks, at the way he said hypothesis when he meant hope. She laughed when he fumbled the hooks. She laughed so deep and so unselfconsciously that it shook the bed, and then she would catch his face between her palms and say, "You are so serious, Garrick. Look. Look at the moon. It is not going to examine you," and he would find himself laughing too, helplessly, like a boy, with his forehead pressed to her collarbone.

She taught him the island.

Not with smoke. Never with smoke. She had told him once, in the dark, that she would not, and he had tested it in the way he tested everything, secretly, over three nights, and found that it was true. She taught him with her mouth. She would lie on her back with her fingers laced in his and tell him, in a low drowsy voice, the names of trees. Aluma, which bleeds red when it is cut. Teyu, which only blooms on the eve of rain. Sennet, she said once, which is the name for a tree that stands alone on a hill, and lives a thousand years, and is not lonely. She told him the story of the first priestess, who had walked into the sea and come back with the stone in her hands. She told him how the old women chewed leaves to dream, and how the boys were sent into the forest at fourteen to find their names.

He listened. He listened as he had never listened to anything. His mind, that tireless cold engine, ground slowly to a halt and was still.

And then, at the door of every dawn, with the gray creeping over the sill and her hair a dark cloud on his arm, he would turn his head and look at the ceiling and think, with a dread so clear that it was almost calm:

I am going to lose her.

And I do not know how I know.

…

It was Odette who first said it aloud.

They were in the conservatory on the ninth day, a long glass house at the back of Wynmore House where Mrs. Hatch's cousin kept a handful of fretful orchids. It was warm and humid and smelled of earth. Odette lay on the wicker chaise with a rug over her knees and a pencil behind her ear. Ixara had gone to fetch tea. Garrick stood at the window with his hands behind his back, pretending to examine a leaf.

"You are happy," said Odette.

He did not turn. "I am engaged in a taxonomic observation."

"You are grinning. At a fern."

"I am not."

"You are. I can see your reflection in the glass." There was a rustle. "Garrick. You look ten years younger. You have been humming at breakfast. Mrs. Hatch dropped a plate."

"I do not hum."

"You do, now. It's a hymn, I think. The tune is dreadful." She paused. The silence had a different quality; when he finally glanced round, she was looking at him with her huge gray eyes, and the teasing was gone. "I want you to be happy. You know that. I have wanted it for years."

"Odette."

"No, let me. I'm allowed. I'm the invalid." A small crooked smile. "I think you love her."

He said nothing.

"You needn't say. I only wanted to say I'm glad. She's kind, and she's clever, and she doesn't talk to me as though I were made of spun sugar." A cough took her, dry and short, and she pressed a handkerchief to her mouth. When she lowered it, he saw a thin pink thread on the linen, and his whole body went cold. She folded the cloth in her lap, quickly, as if it were nothing. "But I worry, Garrick."

"About what?"

"That you only let yourself have it because you think it's a debt that you can pay with."

He stared at her.

"I'm not a fool," said Odette gently. "I've seen you with the Duke's letters. I've seen you look at the box. You think if you work hard enough, and give enough, and hold your breath, then some great accountant in the sky will let me stay. You've always thought that. It's the way you love. By paying." She reached out, and her thin, cool hand closed over his. "It doesn't work like that. I wish it did. But it doesn't."

"Don't."

"I only want you to know. If I die—"

"You will not."

"If I die, I want you to have had this. Do you understand? That's all. I should hate to think you hadn't."

He could not speak. His eyes burned. He sat down on the edge of the chaise, heavily, and put his forehead against his sister's shoulder, as he had done when he was nine years old and she was a baby, and she put her hand on the back of his head, and they stayed that way for a long time among the dripping ferns, until the sound of the tea tray in the passage made them both sit up and wipe their faces and pretend to be examining the leaves.

…

He told her about Odette on the twelfth night.

He had not meant to. They were lying in the dark with the window open, and a warm wind moving the curtain, and the sound of a night-watchman crying the hour in the square. Ixara lay on her stomach with her chin on her folded arms. He lay beside her, one hand drifting idly along the curve of her spine, and she said, in the quiet, apropos of nothing: "Tell me about her."

"About whom?"

"Your sister. Not as a case. As a girl."

He was silent so long that he thought she had fallen asleep.

"She was born in a hard winter," said Garrick. "I was sixteen. My mother died of it. A bad lying-in, they said, in the cold. My father had her carried upstairs and shut himself in the library and did not come out for three days. I remember I stood in the corridor holding this tiny thing in a shawl. I did not know what to do with her. She was so light."

"And then?"

"And then I held her, and she looked at me." He smiled in the dark. "She had those great gray eyes. She wouldn't stop staring. The nurse said all babies stare, but I knew she was looking at me. As though she had decided." His throat tightened. "She learned to walk by holding my hand. She learned to read from my books. She used to follow me to the observatory at night and sit on the stairs in her nightgown. The next autumn they sent me up to Oxford, she wrote to me every week. Every week for eight years. She sent me drawings of the stars, and the stars were always wrong, and I kept every one."

"She is a person who is very easy to love."

"Yes."

"And you were afraid, when she grew ill."

"I was afraid before that." He shut his eyes. "My mother had the same cough. She had it for years before it took her. I recognized it. In the first winter, when Odette was fourteen, I heard her on the stairs, and I stood in the hall in the dark and thought, No. Not again. I didn't tell anyone. I took her to every physician in London. I read every treatise on the lungs. Pike came, and Marsh, and a Dutchman who wanted two hundred guineas and a lock of her hair. They all said the same."

"That there is no cure."

"That one cannot say." His hand stopped moving. "That it might be a year, or ten, or tomorrow. That a mild climate might help. That the great thing was to keep up her spirits."

"And so you made a plan."

He turned his head.

She was looking at him in the half-light, with the moon on her cheek. Her face was perfectly still. She had spoken it without accusation, almost gently, but a chill ran up his spine.

"I... have made certain arrangements."

"Yes."

"I have been working on a method. A means by which—" He broke off. "Ixara. I will tell you. I want to tell you. But I have given my word to a man, and the matter is of a delicacy that I... I cannot. Not yet."

"I know."

"You do not blame me?"

"I do not know what you have done," said Ixara.

She said it so carefully that he almost missed it. A very small stress, laid upon the word know. He looked at her. Her eyes were calm and dark and bottomless, and for a moment he had the dizzying impression of standing on the lip of a well and looking down.

She knows, he thought. She knows something. She has always known.

But when he opened his mouth, she laid a finger across it.

"Not tonight," she said. "Tell me about the stars. The ones she drew."

And he did, because it was easier. And she listened, and her hand lay warm on his chest, and somewhere in the telling the dread in him loosened, and the night wore on.

He did not notice that she had not answered.

…

"You are a fool," said Hollis Pike.

It was the fourteenth day. They sat in the study with the door shut and the brandy between them. Pike had come in from his rounds at the Foundling Hospital, where he had lately taken a post, and he looked tired and unusually severe. He did not touch his glass.

"I did not ask for your opinion."

"You have it anyway. I have known you sixteen years, Garrick. I have never once seen you behave like this." He flicked a hand toward the ceiling. "The household knows. Do not be an idiot. A footman cannot carry a tray to the east wing at midnight and not notice the lamplight under a door. Hatch has said nothing. Hatch will say nothing. But Betsy is sixteen and she has a sister in service at the Duke's."

Garrick's jaw tightened. "I will speak to Betsy."

"You will do nothing of the sort. You will remember that you are a peer and she is a maid, and that nothing a peer says to a maid is ever without consequence." Pike drew a long breath. "I am not here to preach. God knows I am the last man. I like her. I like her very much. I think she is clever and brave and a good deal kinder than either of us deserve. But I am your friend, and I would be a poor one if I did not say this."

"Say it."

"She is hiding something."

The words fell like stones into water.

"We all are," said Garrick, lightly.

"Not like this." Pike leaned forward. "Think. A woman lands on your ship with a stolen name, a bag of drugged smoke, and an exact knowledge of your most private affairs. She tells you where your sister's letters are tied. She tells you things about your dead father. And when you offer her sanctuary, she accepts it without a murmur, goes docile as a lamb, and within a month is in your bed. Do you not see how it looks?"

"I see how it looks to a man who has been a physician for twenty years."

"I see how it looks to a man who has been sixteen years your friend."

Garrick rose. He walked to the window. Below, in the square, the plane trees stood in the lamplight, dusty and still. A cat crossed the road.

He thought of her face in the dawn, with the tears slipping sideways into her hair. He had seen them, though she thought he was asleep. He had lain with his eyes shut and his arm across her and had not moved, had not spoken, because some wordless instinct had told him that to speak would be to break something.

She was weeping.

She was weeping, and she did not tell me why.

"If she is a fraud," said Garrick slowly, "then she is the finest I have ever met. If she is a spy, she is a spy for a country I cannot find on a map. If she is a witch—" He laughed shortly. "Then I have been bewitched. I do not mind it, Hollis. I find, to my surprise, that I do not mind at all."

"You cannot mean that."

"I mean it entirely." He turned from the window. His face in the lamplight was pale and tired and quite steady. "I am a scientist. I will not pretend I am not afraid. But I have lived thirty-three years in a house of mirrors, and she is the first thing in it that is not a reflection. If I am being deceived, then I wish to be deceived. And if she is a fraud—"

He picked up his glass.

"If she is a fraud, then I am content to be defrauded."

Pike looked at him for a long, long time.

"God help you," he said at last, softly. "You've gone and fallen in love with her."

Garrick drank the brandy.

It was very good. It tasted of smoke and plums, and he could not have said why that made his chest ache.