For nothing.
Fornothing.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees something move, a flash of lavender silk embroidered with white lilies.
Lydia’s shawl, stolen by Claudine.
Claudine.
At once, Odette’s sorrow turns to fury – howdareClaudine follow them? This is unbearable, for her to witness Odette’s humiliation, her powerlessness.
She spins around amid the crowd, causing a ripple of movement around her.
But it is not Claudine.
It is Penelope, in the purple shawl. She stumbles back reflexively, recoiling from Odette, her face contorted with shock and guilt. Was she spying on them? Had Claudine sent her?
They are so close to the platform edge.
Odette did not realise how close.
Nor did Penelope.
The train bores into the station, thunderous and heavy on the tracks.
The crowd surges, but Penelope is unsteady on her feet, buffeted, with nowhere else to go.
It is the work of a moment. The slightest of missteps.
There is no ground beneath her feet.
Odette is frozen in horror.
Penelope goes over the platform edge just as the train hits her head-on.
Late Summer
September 1898, Hampstead, London
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain
‘Ode to a Nightingale’, John Keats
1
Odette
ADARK AND BITTER AUTUMNcomes early to greet Lydia’s return to the London house, she the sick and stately queen, and the rest her muffled retinue. A squall of rain daily sheets across the Heath, scattering against the many windows like pebbles flung in anger. The place is battered, wind howling in the chimneys and water blown in beneath the doors; a phalanx of servants mop and dust and sweep, but there is no keeping nature out.
