“I’ve seen her,” I said through my tears. Pain like I’d never experienced before ripped though me.
I gathered Grace in arms and held her to my breast as she cried, her fists balled, beating my chest. I shouted for Eugenie to call the ambulances and fire brigade. She nodded abruptly, running back toward the house. Dorian was hunched over, vomiting on the grass.
“Please believe me!” Grace cried, seeming inconsolable. “I tried to help her! She wouldn’t stop!”
“I know, I know, darling,” I told her, soothing her.
I understood completely. I knew only too well.
Margaret appeared, her screams piercing the night as she hurried toward the fence where Louisa was suspended. Soon others came, spilling out onto the lawn like coloured beads. I rocked Grace in my arms, knowing as sure as I knew anything that Louisa had died instantly, and she was never coming back.
♥
And so my wedding day marked the first day of grief.
Louisa, not one to be upstaged, had made her mark before she left us. Grace, stalwart and rational to the last, allowed me my moods, my intermittent anger and heartache, during what should have been the happiest days of our lives. All I could do was remind her of my love physically, expressing my pent-up rage between her legs, when I couldn’t find the words to explain it. When she clawed at my back and cried out in pleasure, I knew she was with me, that she understood me, and knew that my heart was with her.
My failure to protect Louisa could not have been made more acutely apparent to me. Yet I knew, as Grace reminded me so often, that I did everything I could to protect her. I couldn’t protect her from her illness. Her self had been lost so long ago that there was nothing for her, or me, to save.
The last thing I could do for her was to wash, embalm, and prepare her body. During this process, I said all the things I needed to say to her, all my sorrows and regrets, and put those demons to sleep for the final time. My grief, like any other’s, was a process.
I restored her scarred face to its former porcelainbeauty using clay and cosmetics. I gave her new locks of white-blonde hair to make her whole again, using weaves that she had refused to wear in her madness. In life, she wanted all the world to see her scars, her pain. In death, I could restore her to what once was my Louisa. She was forty-one years old.
We laid her out in the chapel of rest and allowed the few who knew her or remembered her to mourn her. Margaret and some of the staff at the infirmary, who loved her, came to say their goodbyes.
And then it was time to cast her body into the same flames that so beguiled her, and reduce her body to ash.
We interred her ashes at the foot of her statue, which we turned to face outward, towards the shards of light piercing through the broken roof. It would be her monument until we decided what to do with the orangery, whether to repair it or dismantle it to allow for something new. We would eventually move Louisa’s statue to a proper place in the graveyard, and allow the weather to make its mark on the stone.
Grace held my hand as I said the few words I wanted to say over Louisa’s ashes. When we were done, we walked among the graves, lacing our fingers.
“How is it you can be so compassionate to a woman who would have killed you?” I asked her, still quite bewildered by it all.
She was so young to be so level-headed; it wasn’t a description I could have used for myself at that age. “The woman who would have overshadowed your life, your marriage...who would have watched you burn.”
It was true, and I could see it all too clearly, now.Louisa would have never allowed Grace and I to move on. A sense of relief washed over me when I realised that. It was a sensation I couldn’t ignore. She was gone, now, and we were unburdened. It was a complicated feeling that I found impossible to express, but I knew Grace understood it, the way she seemed to understand everything else.
We came to a stop on the gravel. Grace closed her eyes and enjoyed the soft wind on her skin. When summer came around, she would have to cover up again, though her treatment seemed to be helping.
It was a gloomy, overcast day of grey, chalky clouds above head.
“She couldn’t help being who she was, any more than you or I can,” said Grace, quite simply. “We were all bound to be peculiar fruit. Some thrive, while others fester...that just seems to be the way of things.”
She looked up toward the orangery, then, her eyes settling on the tree growing outside of the missing panes of glass. She watched it for a short while, seemingly deep in thought.
I smiled softly, drawing Grace into my arms. I kissed her, ardent yet slow, and swayed her among the gravestones. We danced gently, just as we did on our wedding night. She laid her head against my chest and closed her eyes, while I whispered the words toFairy Talein her waiting ear.
Epilogue
Grace
It was in the mortuary, elbows deep in a chest cavity, that I felt the first twinge.
A slow, piercing pain came searing through my womb, before building up to a cramp. I paused my work, scalpel in hand, visor on, waiting. Then came another, and another, so different from anything I’d ever experienced before.
Moments later, I sensed the hot, damp sensation of blood between my legs.
“Nick,” I muttered, rousing him from his body. He was just sewing up, humming to himself.
