I was too broken to answer. My world came down, shattering like the glass roof of the orangery, showering down over Louisa’s angelic statue. Wasps swarmed the rotten figs in my mind, agitated, working themselves into a fury. They fought against one another to eat away at my flesh.
It was her, Louisa, who had entered my room. Opened my blinds and shutters, moved my things. It was Louisa I had seen in the library, watching me through the window, a stranger in her house.
“It’s not her fault,” said Nick, his voice stern but solemn. “It’s my fault. Entirely my fault. I should have protected you.” He whispered the last part into her hair, sounding broken.
It was killing me to see him so close to her, cherishing her, his precious secret.
“Nice job you’ve made of that so far. The poor mite’s confused, Nicholas. Her drugs wear off and she forgets who she is or where she is. She sneaks out into the night, all alone, and there’s only one place she knows to come to,” said Tom, his tone pious and admonishing. He looked at me. “And here you are, about to announce your engagement to a married man.”
“She hasn’t the capacity to consent to a divorce,” said Nick over the crown of Louisa’s fragile head. I noticed how even now, he cupped her ears against his words.
“These things take time. I tried, Grace. I had hoped the lawyers would move things along...that I would have time to set things right, but I risked losing you.”
Tears were flowing freely now, streaming down my face. A hand touched my shoulder. It was Eugenie, dressed for the evening, carrying a large makeup box meant for me. Her hair was drenched, her makeup running.
“What’s all this?” she asked timidly, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and hugging me to her. “Grace?”
“She was the woman at the church,” I said, my voice breaking as I realised. “You go and see her, don’t you? Youtake her to a church service, you...you spend time with her every Monday.”
“Of course I do,” Nick snapped. “I can’t leave her all alone. She’s not well.”
It seemed so horribly unfair that I almost couldn’t speak. How could he take that tone with me, as if I should have known, as if I should have accepted the ugly truth that had been staring me in the face all along?
“You said you lovedme.”
Nick flinched, still holding Louisa against him, as if terrified that she might fall from his grasp and shatter into thousands of pieces. Like a fragile bird in his palm, he kept her safe, just as he had intended to for the last twenty years. She was his beloved wife.
“It’s more complicated than you could ever know,” he said, his voice breaking. “I’m so sorry.”
“But what about the fire?” asked Eugenie, looking confused. She comforted me, holding me in her arms just as Nick held Louisa. “Your partner died in the house fire. Everyone knows the story.”
“I managed to save her,” said Nick, his voice breaking again as he struggled to maintain control of his emotions. “Louisa started the fire. She...she had a fascination with them, with the flames. I’d find fires she’d set all over the house, the grounds, scorch marks, matches...she had a compulsion that I couldn’t contain. She wasn’t like that when we first married. It developed over the course of the year, getting worse with her moods. When she remembered painful things, her relative comfort made it unbearable, and she developed a desire for destruction. She wanted to set her new, perfect world ablaze to feel somenormality.
“One night, she set a fire outside my brother’s room. It was worse than anything I’d ever seen before. It took over rapidly. I found her, I...I dragged her out. They put her into an induced coma, but the smoke had done its damage to her brain. She was never the same. I lost her that night. I put her in a place where I could look after her, but she spends her days oscillating between sedation and confusion. Please, don’t blame her.”
“Everybody blamedyou,” said Eugenie, in almost a whisper.
Nick stroked Louisa’s remaining hair, holding her close to him like a newborn baby.
“I couldn’t let anyone know it was her. They would never understand. It isn’t her fault that she’s like this. She’s a product of terrible things beyond her control, things that were done to her since she was a little girl, for heaven’s sake,” he said.
“I still don’t understand,” said Eugenie.
But I could. Nicholas protected her, the way he would protect me. The knowledge of it left me seething with jealousy. She was stealing him from me, even though he’d never been mine to have.
“My competitors, the other funeral directors, they knew something was wrong. They suspected my dishonesty and I lost their respect. There was no death certificate for her. She simply vanished from society,” said Nick.
Louisa’s groans turned into a wail. She thrashed in Nick’s arms, despite his whispers and reassurances, as if she’d lost her mind; lost in a dark void none of us could seeor understand.
Was that what he saw in me, too? A troubled little girl, who needed looking after? Who needed protecting from herself?
“He lied to you. This isn’t love,” said Tom, watching my crestfallen face. “You don’t belong here, Grace. I told you. Tried to explain it to you, plain and simple, but you wouldn’t listen.”
I didn’t know what I believed any more. Everything I thought I knew had been torn away from me. A life that I thought was mine was nothing but an illusion. I was the apprentice, nothing more. I was a placeholder for the woman Nick had always truly wanted; who had succumbed to an illness and been burned by her own flames, leaving her husband to take the fall. He’d covered for her, taken the blame, the rumours, to spare her the humiliation.
Because he loved her. And that’s what I couldn’t stand.
“Let me get her upstairs. We’ll call the infirmary right away,” said Margaret, her expression steeped in fear and concern.
