“You must miss him.”
Charlotte’s hand closed over the ring. “I try not to.”
“Why not?”
Elspeth’s gaze was unbearable. Charlotte busied herself putting the vials away, planning to reexamine them in the morning. Once her samples were fully infected, she’d think how to test the acorns’ efficacy against the sickness.
“My father vanished in the wood thirty years ago,” she blurted, resuming her seat, “and my mother was never the same after. Arthur carted me around the village, begging for jobs or money so we could eat. When John died...”
Her throat tightened. She’d talked about him so little in the past eight years.
She swallowed with difficulty. “For the first week afterward, it was all I could do to get out of bed. And Mam was so weepy about it, you would’ve thought it was herhusband dead all over, instead of mine, and I thought about how little she’d been there for us after Dad vanished. My children weren’t even as old as I’d been. I had to be there for them. But I couldn’t be if I thought too hard about John, because every time I thought about him I missed him, and every time I missed him I fell apart, so I...”
God help her. If Elspeth asked what he’d been like, Charlotte wouldn’t be able to stand it. She was already constantly close to tears since her illness.
Her chest ached like it might shatter. She remembered the first words he’d ever said to her, after three days in which he’d drifted in and out of consciousness while she’d tried to save his life, this beautiful stranger.Soyou’re real. Thought you might be an angel.He used to bring her sea pinks when he came home after a long day of fishing. He used to ask Charlotte to teach him what she could about healing, because sometimes accidents happened on the boats and there wasn’t time to getback to land for help. He used to whittle; he’d whittled her favorite whistle.
He used to sit up half the night wondering why he couldn’t remember more of his life as a sailor. When he’d first come to, he’d had no idea where he’d been or how he’d gotten there; he’d thought he was nineteen, living back home with his mother. He didn’t remember what ship he’d manned, what port he’d sailed from. He didn’t remember leaving home, in fact, though he knew he’d always wantedto be a sailor. When he wrote home to his mother and received a letter back from a neighbor instead, they discovered he was twenty-five. He’d left home six years prior, shortly after his mother’s death.
That had been the worst part, John learning his mother was dead. Or rather relearning, because he’d been there for it. He’d arranged for her burial. But after whatever had happened at sea, he’d forgotten it. Everything from that point in his life onward was gone.
Sasha, his mother’s name had been. He’d asked if they could name the baby after her. Around the same time, they’d planted a rosebush at the corner of the cottage because his mother had always kept a sachet of rose petals in her pocket. Unable to remember his sailing days, John had tried to re-create as much of the life he could remember as possible. All knowledge of his life at sea came from letters exchanged with a friend back home, accepted as fact but never really remembered except in bits and pieces: the way he could work a boat almost instinctively; half the tune and lyrics to a shanty one of the crew had taught him.
Sometimes, Charlotte wondered how much more he might have eventually remembered if he’d lived longer. If one day he might’ve told the children stories about his days at sea the way her own father had once told her and Arthur about his travels through the forest.
She blinked, but tears dripped down her cheeks.
“Sorry,” she said thickly.
Elspeth thumbed away her tears, then seemed to realize what she was doing and pulled away. “What for? Does a body good to weep now and then.”
Charlotte laughed snottily, made a face, and accepted the handkerchief Elspeth offered. “I’m not sure about that. It doesn’t feel good.”
She wiped her eyes, blew her nose.
“You got more options, you know,” Elspeth said. “It ain’t a choice between letting your grief swallow you whole and never spit you back out, or refusing to feel it at all.”
Charlotte’s skin prickled. Between her mother and the rest of Seacliff, those had always felt like the only options. Just as it felt her only option regarding her pain and fatigue was to push through them, no matter how disabling they were.
Behind them, in the forest, something screamed.
Elspeth scrambled to her feet, bootless. The mule snorted and tugged at its line. Charlotte’s heart pounded at the unexpected noise. She reached for the kettle, the nearest item that might do as a makeshift weapon.
Another scream. Elspeth’s brow furrowed. “That sound like a horse to you?”
Charlotte stood slowly, clutching the kettle. “Yes.”
A horse burst through the trees, wearing a bridle and the remains of a harness. Driving lines and traces trailed behind it.
It galloped right past them, toward the edge of the cliff. Charlotte gasped, but it pulled up short. It reared, still screaming. She stumbled back.
Elspeth approached the creature cautiously.
“Don’t,” Charlotte said, but Elspeth said in a low, soothing voice, “S’all right.”
She raised her hands, like the horse was a constable whomight arrest her, and kept speaking in that low, soothing tone.
“There now, me beauty. S’all right. Let’s have a look at you, eh?”
