“You must try to look more pathetic,” he suggested as footsteps approached. “The more helpless they believe you to be, the better.”
I gave him a flat look, which I realized, belatedly, he could not see. “I look exceptionally pathetic, I assure you.”
“You do not sound like it. I know you are as indomitable as the tides, but they must not.”
“Please stop complimenting me,” I requested. I was blushing yet again, and growing weary of it.
The footsteps reached us, and we braced.
There was a clatter. A nondescript guard shoved a tray under the door, tested the lock with a firm jerk, and walked away again.
“Perhaps we should have expected that,” I surmised, glad for the shift in focus. I went and retrieved the tray, which proved to have two bowls of bread stew and two cups of water.
“What if it is drugged?” I asked. “You were convinced so, earlier.”
We both stared at the tray for a long, long time. My stomachaudibly growled, and Lewis rubbed at his chin.
“I will test it,” he said. “If all is well in an hour, you eat, too.”
“Nonsense,” I returned. “It will be even harder for me to carry you out of here if you are senseless.”
“Then neither of us should eat.”
I stared at the stew and water and swallowed a rush of self-pity. “All right. Agreed.”
I set the tray aside and came to sit on the floor beside the cot.
“I am so hungry,” I said bitterly. “Tell me about your time in The Sarre. I need a distraction.”
“You know a great deal already,” he reminded me, rolling onto his side and looking in my direction with a companionability, a lack of poise that I had rarely seen before. “Tell me of your life, here in Harrow.”
I hesitated, but the quiet was too loud. “What do you want to know?”
“Something I do not know,” he decided. “Your architecture.”
I thought for a time, struggling to find something to say that he would not find mundane. Finally, however, the silence grew too thick, and I began to speak.
“One of my neighbors is a cellist,” I said, settling back against the stone. It was cold and gritty and unpleasant, but I hid in the memory of my courtyard. “She plays every day, at the same time. Just before dawn, when my threads twine. I lie in my bed and listen. I leave the balcony door open for Ronny, of course, no matter the weather. And it is peaceful, the cool breeze, the chirping of the birds in the wisteria, and the cello.”
Lewis made a noise, low and appreciative and prompting me to go on.
I did. I described not the novelties of my days in Harrow, but the mundanities, the common experiences that had been the foundation of my life. The small moments I savored between the work and the plotting and the obligations.
Finally, with the sound of his breathing steady in the dark, my words trailed off. And, head leaning on the cot next to his, I fell asleep.
Iawoke to music and shadow and strange plays of light. The swell and lulls of an orchestra drifted around me, melancholy and brimming with emotion. Lewis watched from a doorway, his cap under his arm and his eyes overbright, his focus somewhere beyond the stage where the Kessan Opera from the other night played out.
I drifted past him in my opera gown, my gaze equally distant. Wake strode hard on my heels, a forceful hand on my back, and I felt the surge of Lewis’s ire.
“Illing,” Madge’s voice called.
The music changed, shifting into a faster, more harried movement. I saw Lewis and I at the Guild’s engagement ball, dancing with a dozen other couples. Skirts swirled. Backs arched. Lewis’s eyes trailed from my lips down the smooth skin of my throat, to the hollow of my collar and the swell of my breasts.
Another shift in melody, simplifying, growing more distant. A gramophone in a tent on the edge of the world. A stack of letters covered with my writing, neatly stacked on a crate beside a perfectly made cot. Lewis shaving at a small, jury-rigged mirror, a sketch of Hieronymus that I had sent him pinned beside it.
“Ottilie?” his voice rasped.
I closed my eyes, but nothing changed. I opened them again and saw a woman standing over me, dressed in the Kessan fashion with a fitted jacket and small bustle beneath her straight skirts.
