Page 12 of The Phoenix Bride
“Cecilia,” I say. I can’t stand to hear my married name spoken aloud. He has said it too many times already.
He winces. Perhaps the thought of such familiarity pains him. “Cecilia, then. When you awaken each morning, how do you feel? Drowsy? Nauseated?”
When I awaken each morning, I open the curtains, and then sit upon my mattress and stare at the wall. Sometimes I am quiet. Sometimes I think I am quiet, and then a realization comes, slow and inevitable, that I am sobbing without tears. When that happens, I find myself disgusted by my own pitifulness. I scrub my face with my hand as if I can erase myself likechalk on a board. It doesn’t work. I score scratches against my forearm as if I might peel away my skin and find another woman beneath. It doesn’t work. Nothing works.
“Cecilia?” he says when I don’t reply.
“Forgive me. I—I don’t—” I gasp. “I don’t know.”
Alarmed, he stoops beside me. I turn my head to look at him. How dark his eyes are, how alarmingly wide. Will had eyes like the surface of frozen water: you could skitter across them, dazzled by the light reflected. Not this man. His gaze threatens to swallow me whole.
“I’m sorry,” he says softly. “You have been deeply wounded, I think.”
“We all have wounds, Master Mendes.”
He looks down at his own hands, curled around his knees. “Yes,” he replies. “We do.”
The door to the courtyard opens, and my sister enters. Mendes stands up and steps back from me.
Margaret seems quite panicked, clutching her elbows with her hands; when she sees me, her fear becomes annoyance. “Oh, Cecilia, honestly,” she says. “I have been looking everywhere for you.”
“I was acquainting myself with Master Mendes,” I reply.
She turns to give him an accusatory look. He seems more embarrassed than frightened, flushing under her gaze.
“We only spoke of her symptoms,” Mendes says. It is true—theoretically—but still a deflection. He wears deceit uncomfortably, his gaze ricocheting across the courtyard.
“Fine,” Margaret says. “I was going to call for tea, but perhaps now it would be best to proceed with the examination.”
I blink at her. “Examination?”
“Cecilia, he is a physician. He must examine you if he is tohelp.” She grimaces and gives Mendes a look of unconcealed disdain. “Pardon. I know it’s not…ideal.”
“It’s fine,” I say.
She blinks. “It—it is?”
“But if I agree,” I say, “and you still find him lacking…then no new physicians. Swear it.”
“But—”
“No more, Maggie.”
“Very well.”
She gives me a watery smile, and her gratitude fills my mouth like gristle. Smiling back, I resist the urge to spit it out.
Master Mendes offers me an arm. I take it, despite her glower, and we go inside. As we walk up the staircase, I sneak glances at my new physician, and each step we take seems more and more like a dream, in which we will ascend forever and never reach my rooms at all.
Men like David Mendes don’t exist, not in Cecilia Thorowgood’s life. My life is silk and sorrow, spinets and portraits and tea tables. My physicians are old men with jars of leeches and trembling hands. They are not Jews with gazes like ink and musical voices. I think of the tremble of his hands on his knees, the sudden vulnerability in his eyes as he crouched beside me—those extraordinary eyes, black on white.
He has seen loss, too, I am sure of it. He is printed with his past, but the words are in a language I cannot read.
We all have wounds,I think.Even doctors cannot cure an injured heart.
I have agreed to meet Jan at Saint James’s Park this afternoon, to see the canal they have opened there. Despite the strange sense of unease I feel after my first appointment with Cecilia Thorowgood, Jan is my closest friend, and I can’t disappoint him. Besides, the park is only a short walk from the Eden townhouse.
Jan is waiting outside the gate of the park. Prodigiously tall and vexingly handsome, he is all elbows and ears, with ginger hair and eyes the color of the summer sky. A pair of ladies pass by as they enter, and they giggle at him behind their hands. He doesn’t notice. “David!” he cries, sweeping me into an embrace. “See? I am on time.”
