Page 20 of The Phoenix Bride
It is such a simple statement, an inane comfort, and yet something about it almost brings me to tears. I look at the linden flower I pulled out of his hair, pinched between my thumb and forefinger. I have crushed the bulb; sticky, sweet-smelling sap glues the petals to my skin.
My sister calls my name. I wipe my hand on the tree’s trunk.
“Thank you,” I say to him. “For everything.”
He watches me in silence as I walk away.
—
Over the next week, I decline to take the decoction for melancholy, although the other medicines do seem to have done some good. I have found my stomach has settled a little, and I haven’t vomited again. But perhaps that is simply due to the easement of my loneliness, a reprieve I will soon lose once Mendes is dismissed.
The day of my final appointment with him, I wake up to see that a storm has brewed overnight. Crawling out of bed, I run my hands over the shutters of the window. The sky is ashen, in contrast to the idyllic blue of the day before. Rain smacks against the glass in obdurate handfuls. It is as if nature herself admonishes me for not staying asleep.
Icouldsleep more if I wanted to. But I feel oddly impatient, as if there is something I should do, but can’t remember. The three decoctions Mendes gave me sit expectantly upon my desk. I ignore them.
The clouds outside rumble. Something in the construction of the townhouse’s roof amplifies the noise, and the rain sounds like falling rubble, the thunder cannon fire. It feels closer to a siege than a storm. To soothe my anxiety, I walk in a circuit around the room, taking each step slowly and methodically, eyes following the movements of my feet. I pause at the window, staring at the house on the other side of the street. There, a figure shifts behind a pane of glass: the same silhouette I have seen before. It pauses, also, and it raises its hand. I wave back. We are twin shadows, greeting each other across the void.
I am startled by the sound of the door opening. Margaret enters, bearing a tray of pastries and a tea service.
“Good morning,” she says with false cheer. “Are you well, Cecilia?”
“Well enough,” I reply. It is not a bad day, I think, although perhaps it is too early to tell.
She lays out breakfast on the table. “I thought we could eat together.”
I make a noncommittal sound and sit on the mattress. Meanwhile, Margaret continues to babble about the weather and the newest fashions at court. When she compels me to join her, Iprod the food, silent, as her voice fills the space between us. It is not a conversation. It is a performance I am watching.
It has been like this since Margaret married Robert. The first time I came to visit her in London, for instance, I brought honey cakes. She nibbled around the edges of one like a hare, leaving the center untouched on her plate. Once, I would have snatched the rest from her, but I couldn’t make myself reach across the table to do so. Some new sense of propriety had leashed me to the chair. She poured me tea, but only after asking,Tea, Cecilia? Once, she would have simply gestured to the pot. Our conversation now required effort to maintain. We were sisters still, but no longer friends.
Watching her now, chattering nervously to prevent me from speaking, I suddenly feel the loss of our childhood connection very keenly, like a splinter being pulled from skin. Margaret wants me to live with her, I think, because she wants a project to work on, someone to care for in the absence of a child. But I am not a child anymore; neither of us is. She has lost most of me, and now she clings to the small part that is left. It won’t work. I know what loss is like, and she can’t prevent it. Nothing can prevent it.
“…a new portrait,” she was saying. “Myself as Diana. Won’t that be wonderful?”
“Oh, yes, very.”
“We could have you painted, also, Cecilia.”
I look down at my wrists—the way they jut out flintlike beneath the skin—and say wryly, “There isn’t much of me left to paint.”
“Hush, you’d make a lovely subject.” She pauses. “What have you done with it?” she asks, voice gentle. “The wedding portrait?”
“I left it at the estate.”
“You’ll want it returned.”
“I will not,” I reply. “It feels vulgar to look at it; some foolish way of pretending, as if all is as it was.”
“You must want some memory of him.”
“I remember Will already. Sometimes I wish I didn’t.”
This shocks her. “You shouldn’t say such things,” she says. “You are permitted to miss him. You can do so and still move forward.”
“Move forward?”
“Surely you will not spend your life a widow?”
First Mendes, now her. What is this obsession with my remarrying? Who would want me now? Will is with me always; I can hardly remove his touch from my skin, like peeling the rind of a fruit, and offer my flesh anew. “I don’t want a new husband,” I tell her.
