Cecilia hurries after her. This is happening too fast. ‘How will we play it?’ she asks. ‘Will you be Hunt or Byron? Or Trelawny?’
‘I don’t think you can trust anyone who wouldchooseto be Byron,’ says Odette, tossing in another match.
The fire has caught in the depths of the wood, smoke seeping out from within. Odette stops to assess her work. Cecilia cannot read her face, and it is disconcerting. She did not ever think there would be a world in which Odette was a stranger to her.
‘Nothing of him that doth fade,but doth suffer a sea-change,into something rich and strange.’ Odette quotes the passage fromThe Tempestthat is inscribed on Shelley’s grave. She worries at the book of matches, ripping up the card and tossing it and the last of the matches into the rising flames. ‘It is not complete.’
‘We could strike poses?’ suggests Cecilia. ‘One of us could kneel like Mary Shelley in the painting?’
‘No. It needs a body.’
Without warning, Odette flings herself towards the pyre and tries to climb the side, as though she intends to lie upon it and be immolated. With a shriek of horror, Cecilia throws herself after Odette, grabbing at her nightgown. The flames seem to have come to life at once, swallowing the base of the bonfire and gusting up through it in long licks of red and orange. The smoke burns Cecilia’s eyes. The whole thing will go up in a moment – she knows it. This is madness, madness.
Knotting her hands in Odette’s nightdress, she pulls her back, spins her round so that Cecilia stands between her and the flames. Heat rises up her back, startling and close.
Suddenly, Odette’s horrified face is almost touching her own.
‘Get down!’ she cries, pushing her to the ground, rolling her over on the dew-wet grass – and then comes the slap of cold, as brackish water fills her nose. Odette has thrown her into the stream at the foot of the fields, quenching the flames that singed her own nightdress.
Coughing, they sit together in the shallow water.
‘Don’t ever do that again,’ says Cecilia, when she can find the breath to speak.
If she were a different person she thinks she would slap Odette.
Instead, she clings to her. They wrap their arms around each other, press their bodies together and take some familiar animal reassurance from the feeling of hot skin and heartbeat.
‘I’m sorry,’ whispers Odette.
Cecilia shakes her head, beyond herself. ‘Why would you do that?’ She is crying, hot angry tears. ‘I love you so much – why would you do that to the person I love?’
Here, Odette breaks. ‘Because I don’t know what else todo, Ces. What do I do? What do I do if she dies? What’s the point of me? How do I live if she dies? I will be dead, too.’
She buries her face into Cecilia’s shoulder and sobs again.
Odette’s expression makes Cecilia more afraid than she knew she could be. There is some new, broken wildness in her. Odette has stepped through a door into a place where Cecilia does not know if she can reach her anymore.
As they walk back up to the house, shamefaced and shaking, the clouds darken and a squall of rain blows through. Behind them, the smoke from the bonfire slopes away, rain hissing as it meets the still burning fire.
It is the end of one world. The next one will meet them, whether they are ready or not.
Act Three
December 1898, Hampstead, London
I owe a longer allegiance to the dead than to the living
Antigone, Sophocles
1
Cecilia
‘ODETTE,ODETTE.’
Cecilia scrambles down the pitch-dark steps, following the sound of Odette’s feet, and bursts into the too-bright hallway of the medium’s house. The front door is open, and Odette is just out of sight, skirts flashing down the winter London street.
She catches Odette halfway to Camden Road station and places a hand on her arm, half expecting to be shaken off.
