“You don’t,” Beatrix assures him. He cares for her like he cared for therabbits he sometimes found suffering in a poorly set snare, a woodsman’s sympathy for a wounded creature. She is injured. She is in his woods. It’s his duty to care.
“You don’t even know me,” she adds. They haven’t spoken a word to each other since the day she fled the forest and left him speechless in her wake. Four years seems forever ago, now.
His eyes meet hers. “I know you’re happiest in this clearing. Like the trees lift a weight from you every time you pass beneath them. It’s the only time I see you smile. I know you stare into the Wye for hours, like you can see a hundred futures flowing past, but you go back to Lancaut.” He swallows, and his throat bobs. “I know you’re always in a hurry. Always rushing somewhere, even when you have nowhere to be. Like you’re afraid if you stand still, even for a single moment, the whole world will pass you by. That everyone else will keep moving forward and you’ll be left behind, rooted to the spot like an oak when everyone else is the river. Until you’re forgotten.”
Beatrix’s breath catches. “How could you know all that?”
“Because I know you,” he says. “Because I’m afraid, too.”
“You are?” It’s like she’s seeing him for the first time. Like she is being seen for the first time.
“I am.” He takes her hand in his. It’s warm and calloused. “I’d live in the woods if I could, too,” he says. “But maybe we should go back to Lancaut… together?”
Together. There is a promise in the word, in the tentative way he holds her hand. She nods.
William bends to her. He smells faintly of dried sweat and wool and the forest. He lifts her gently off the ground, assures her she will be all right when she cries out against the motion. But he doesn’t sound like himself. He sounds uncertain. Afraid.
Beatrix cradles her injured arm against her chest as William carries her slowly toward Lancaut. She lays her head against his shoulder. He tries to keep her awake. He tells her of his latest trip to Gloucester with his father, of the wondrous abbey he saw there. But the adrenaline has faded—the strength to declare she wanted nothing to do with Lancaut ever again, gone. She wants to go home.
Her twisted arm throbs, and her wounded body aches. Exhaustioncreeps over her like a blanket of fog, turns her limbs leaden and her mind numb. William’s voice fades into silence.
Beatrix stirs in the dark, her mouth dry, her thoughts too fractured to make whole, caught between waking and dreaming and nothingness. The pain is distant and detached now, as if it belongs to someone else’s body instead of her own.
Hushed voices drift to her ears from her bedside. Mama. Papa. Isabella. Even Alice, come from her new cottage with her new husband. Beatrix can’t make out every word, but she hears enough. Enough to know that the voices are real.
It’s past time we consider…
Perhaps with a larger dowry…
The abbey at Tintern…
The darkness claims Beatrix again, or maybe she sinks willingly into its embrace, her only escape from the whispers.
June 14, 1605London, England
Beatrix snatches a bird-pecked apple from a fruit cart trundling across St. Paul’s yard and conceals it beneath her cloak. Her stomach growls. She might not starve, but the gnawing pain of an empty stomach hollows her out the same as anyone. Some days, that is reason enough to go hungry.
The cathedral doesn’t look nearly as imposing as it did the first time she laid eyes on it. It has lost its spire since that night, struck by lightning some forty years ago. An act of God, they said, proof the people of London needed to mend their ways. No one has mended anything, as far as Beatrix can tell.
She weaves her way through men selling books she cannot read and scurries up the wide stone steps past beggars she can’t afford to help. She slips through the cathedral’s arched wooden door and pulls the hood of her cloak down, grateful to be out of the damp.
A raucous wave of voices greets her: laughter and curses, shouts and whispers, all tumbling over each other in languages foreign and familiar. The whole place hums with it, like the world’s largest, crudest hive of bees.
Merchants hawk their wares up and down the long central aisle—as if the grandest church Beatrix has ever seen is merely another market—and gossip is traded freely. News from near and far, lewd jokes, and whispered deals are all exchanged beneath the stone arches edging the walk, and sometimes the men pick up more than gossip from the cathedral hall. It is the least holy thing Beatrix has ever seen, and her favorite place in all of London.
She takes a bite of her apple and strolls down the aisle, admiring the stained-glass window at the east end of the walk. The night she first sawit, she couldn’t tear her eyes away. She thought it looked like a marigold blooming in her mother’s summer garden, except this flower was made of thousands of pieces of colored glass, painstakingly fitted together to make an intricate, perfect whole. It is the one thing she never tires of seeing.
Unsuspecting Londoners pass her by without a second glance—or even a first—talking and laughing and conducting their business. She assesses their value, tallying a list of marks. With a bit of luck and the coins from last night, she might just get her own bed at the inn tonight.
“Do you seek to save your mortal soul?” A man’s voice echoes off the vaulted ceiling, as if his words were a proclamation from the heavens. It raises goose bumps across Beatrix’s skin, even in this decidedly unchurch-like church. She follows the words, finds their speaker tucked beneath an arch at the far end of the walk. He looks nothing like his booming voice would suggest: a slight, balding man with stooped shoulders and splotched skin. He stands on an overturned crate, an island in a sea of people paying him no mind.
He gestures grandly to the miniature green glass bottle resting in his palm. “One sip of my elixir will protect your soul from the evils of the world.”
Beatrix chokes on her apple.
“Ah! Might we have a skeptic in our midst?”
She makes the mistake of meeting the man’s shrewd gaze. He straightens as best he can, a predator who has found his prey. She hopes she isn’t that obvious when she spots a mark.
