Page 45 of House of Furies
“God above, ofcourseI am!”
The wagon wove hard from side to side, tossed by the uneven ground. That was the wrong thing to say. The doctor smiled at me and moved, quickly, darting from his bench to mine, stepping over the widow easily with his long legs. He sat down next to me. Close. Too close. I remembered then his hand on my leg in the Red Room, and the frost of the nighttime air turned perilously cold. How long was the ride to Derridon?
“True innocence is so rare,” he said, and I recoiled at the sultry note in his voice. He no longer regarded me with that odd but endurable fondness. His intent had sharpened, his breath heavy and sour on my shoulder. “My young girl was innocent, too. You remind me of her—my daughter—the same dark hair and dark eyes...”
I scrambled for the right thing to say. The right distraction. “What is she like?’
“Not very clever, but trusting and good. She always listened to her father. Always did as she was told.” He sighed wistfully.“Until one day she didn’t. I always wondered how it came to pass.... How a good, loving child could change into a sullen chit too important for her father, too important for all the world.”
The doctor sighed again, but now he sounded disappointed.
“It might be that innocence is a candle; it can be blown out short or it can burn down to nothingness, but it is destined one way or another to die.” He shook his head and placed that dreaded hand on my thigh, and I felt my spirit wither at the touch. God, Chijioke was right—and curse him, Mr. Morningside was right. These people drawn to Coldthistle were rotten to the core. “For a long time I blamed her mother, but no, Catarina chose her own path. She chose another man above me and was never the same again.”
“Please,” I said in a choked whisper. “Could you remove your hand...”
“I don’t think so.” He tightened his grip, fingers biting through blanket and skirts and into my flesh. “I buried her with my own two hands, you know. Washed the body. Dressed the body. Digging the grave took much longer than I anticipated, but it was worth it, to do it all, to be the only one alone with her in the end.”
I swallowed hard and looked up at the ceiling. Perhaps he was just a lost and grieving father. This moment would pass once he collected himself. I would survive it. “You must miss her terribly.”
“Every single moment, yes.”
“If it upsets you so, then we need not speak of—”
“It helps to talk about her,” he interrupted. His dark brown eyes filled with tears. “There is sadness, yes, and bitterness. Rage. Regret.... So much regret.”
“I’m sure you did everything a father could,” I said weakly. A reliable voice in the back of my mind insisted I did not want to know how the girl had died.
The roughness of the road and the way it rattled us made my jaw ache.
Dr. Merriman rocked back and forth, his hand still tight around my thigh like a vise. His expression relaxed after a moment, and he patted my leg. It felt as if he might veer from this upsetting conversation, but then he looked at me once more and I felt my heart stop.
A feral dog looked like that. Hungry. Blind, hungry, and mad. And though he smiled, I sensed no joy in it, only fixation. “You could be like her. Like the good Catarina. You could be obedient and sweet, never placing another man above your father.”
“I... I’m certain your daughter is irreplaceable.”
The laugh he gave was indistinguishable from a sob. “You have no idea what it’s like. You couldn’t know... what it’s like to make someone. To make another person! It is heaven and hell in one, for the love you bear them is painful. Every lie they tell, every scrape they incur, it wounds you. They are your flesh,but they do not act as your flesh. You cannot control them; I could not control her. You cannot understand it, young Louisa, how it feels to fail that way.”
I made my face a blank mask of submission.Do not smile. Do not frown.Even the slightest hint of mockery or dissent felt like it might plunge him deeper into this melancholy. His hand became wet with sweat, a dampness that seeped through the blankets and my skirts to my skin. I gulped down a shake of revulsion.
“I failed her. I failed myself. I made a body with my own body and she turned wild and strange. In her last days I hardly recognized the soft, sweet girl who once sat in my lap and sang lullabies. My father beat me, oh God, did he beat me! But I never laid a finger on her, never until she became a stranger. Your own flesh and blood should never become a stranger to you.”
Coldthistle was out of view now, swallowed by the night and a light mist that rolled in off the moors. Its vanishing frightened me more than I cared to admit; we traveled through the night in what felt like a sea of fog and shadow, unanchored, adrift until we reached Derridon.
IfI reached Derridon.
My thigh ached, a cramp spreading out from where he squeezed my veins shut.
“Sir, you’re hurting my leg.”
The doctor rambled on, perspiration making his skin glisten. The wagon thumped into another crater in the road. “Icreated her flesh and it spoiled. There was only one way open to me: to take that flesh back in and try again.”
“Take... the flesh back in,” I repeated in a horrified whisper.
“You recoil, sweet girl, but like the tribes of New Guinea, I have sought to ferry Catarina’s soul on to another generation. I am the vessel and I carry her now within me, as I did before she was born into this world.” He looked over my shoulder at the wall with a dreamy expression. That thoughtful smile soon crumbled, and he turned his attention back to me, nostrils flaring, jaw tense. “Was I wrong to take her life? I know not. Was I wrong to consume her? Who can say.... I regret raising her poorly. I regret taking early signs of impudence as nothing more than childish whimsy. And now I think on it, I see that I must take another for my daughter. Her soul is tainted. It was not innocent when it left her body.”
Welts were rising underneath his fingernails. My leg throbbed. I felt his mood twist a moment too late and I called out, pushing at the doctor’s shoulders and flinging myself away toward the other bench.
“Chijioke!” I tried to scream, but it died in my throat, a blow to the back of my head making me choke and sputter and fall to the floor. My vision blurred, the white droppings on the boards under my fingers bleeding together until the wood looked pure ivory. Scrambling, I managed to hoist myself up onto the bench and gasp for air.
