The Vespertine (18 page)

"Should I recite for you?" he asked. "Shakespeare, on parting with a kiss?"

Emboldened by his touch, fearless with the whole world beneath me, I said, "No. Speak
your
heart to me."

"I always do," Nathaniel said. He shifted, covering his arm with mine. As he brushed a kiss behind my ear, he laid my own hand on my breast, mapping me against his body. "In there, that's my heart. My breath."

Swept unsteady, I startled at the sweet pain that filled me. Since our first meeting, I ran mad with him; he ran wild in my veins. We had no quiet affection to spare between us, only tempting and taunting and impossible longings. I felt dashed on his shore, or that I was the stone on which he wrecked, and recklessly I said, "Tell me you love me."

He skimmed our joined hands to my throat, our mingled fingers touching the points of the setting sun on velvet. "Amelia."

"Tell me," I said, making a spiral in his arms, coming round to face him. Oh, and in that moment's dizziness, I felt the empty air behind me yawning, spreading out for me to fall through it, but I clutched Nathaniel's red coat and pressed into him. "Tell me you do, as you never have done."

Suddenly, the blackness of his eyes seemed very like the void that followed a crack of lightning. Something happened there, a steeling or a surrender, I couldn't tell which.

Deliberate, he traced my face, only this once, and let his gaze follow his fingers. They marked the curve of my brow, the hollow of my cheek, and so entranced was I by the prospect that he might line my lips, that I barely noticed the step he took forward—the step that propelled me back.

Just as he parted his lips to speak, I parted mine, but instead of a confession, he said, with the most exquisite weight to the words, "Jump with me."

F
ROM BENEATH US
, a wind came off the harbor, as if commanded. It pulled at my gown, my hair, whispering as it pulled ringlets loose and tossed them. It carried the spice of gardens in bloom, the sweet song of hoofbeats, the salty wake of the sea—the cool kiss of summer almost at an end. Dancing, pulling—swirling in eddies all around us, it beckoned.

Growing still, I searched Nathaniel's face for some evidence of amusement. I found none—I knew I would find none. Maybe I had none of his little details, no stolen glimpses of him at a washboard or playing cards, but I had his heart. His breath. And that soothed me.

I gave a glance at my skirts, then raised them enough to step onto the rail. Everywhere, I burned; I trembled—I had the most curious, perhaps hysterical sensation that the wind would take me off my feet and we would go flying, Nathaniel and I. That we could master this sky and disappear into it.

"Are you certain?" Nathaniel asked. He offered my escape as easily as he would offer to fill my glass, and when I nodded, he stepped onto the railing beside me. The wind came up again, mussing the waves of his hair. How queer that none should see us, that none of those citizens scurrying as ants below should call out.

We stood there, silhouetted against white marble, gazing out at a harbor town grown large. How many little houses there were; how many lives lived there on the shores of the

Tightening my hand in Nathaniel's, I closed my eyes to all of it and said, "Shouldn't I be afraid?"

"Let me tell you, Amelia," he replied, "as I've told no other."

His arms came round me, and we slipped off the rail, plunging into a gold and glimmering dark. It wound around us as a cloak, swallowing sound and light, even the furious pull of gravity, and then, with a jolt, it lifted.

Stumbling like a wet foal, I held my arms out wide. I opened my eyes to the yard behind the Stewarts' house.

I whipped around and fell into Nathaniel's arms, prickling numb everywhere. This could be neither heaven nor hell, for flames licked not at our heels, and Mrs. Stewart's voice, carried out the window as she fixed a homely dinner, was surely no angelsong.

"What ... how did you do this?" I asked, though I'm not sure I spoke the words.

All the same, he answered me. Curling his knuckle beneath my chin, he said, "How do you see the future?"

The ground seemed to move beneath my feet, as if I'd stepped from a ship after a long voyage. "The sunset parts a curtain for me, nothing more. That's hardly the same as slipping the bonds of earth, how ... you said you went on foot as any man!"

"I do!"

At once, I remembered his explanation for my ability. "Are you ... do you think you're the air?!"

"Yes, I do," he said.

My mouth dropped open. Shock turned my head, and my thoughts clamored. So many at once, I could barely sort them. Finally, before he put a hand on me, I managed to demand, "Then how could you leave me waiting in Annapolis?"

"Water below the ground slows me. Rivers may as well be walls." Nathaniel closed into himself, adding with a defensive tilt to his gaze. "And it was the truth that I couldn't afford my share of the cab."

Trembling, I reached for my pendant. "Are you even a man?"

He closed on me, hands out, as if he couldn't quite bear the thought of touching me. "I'm no more and no less the thing you are. You see in the fire at day's end. I go on the wind. I wish you wouldn't look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Miss Stewart's almost at the front door," he answered, taking my elbow. "Go on then, and catch up with her, before she gets inside. You won't be ruined on account of me. Not tonight, anyway."

Temper alight, I pulled my arm from him and snapped, "You cannot close yourself to me, Nathaniel! I will not be driven."

"You
can't
be driven—you're too inconstant," he said. Stalking out before me, he turned and gestured at his whole self. "You say to me, tell me you love me—"

"And you still haven't!"

"I gave you the one thing I have! The only thing I possess, owed no one, and no thing. Is that not token enough for you?"

Swallowed in the sudden heat of tears, I came toward him, making my voice low, for the lights had risen in two windows beside us. Zora's voice echoed from the street, her laughter carried on a breeze. "I only asked for words."

Weary, Nathaniel considered the yellow streaks spilling into the drive. Stepping carefully around them, to keep the shadows to him, he came toward me, but our time to argue or make endearments had died.

"I love you," he said, and before me he disappeared.

***

After dinner, after what seemed like every dish in the house needed washing, Zora and I finally retired upstairs.

We'd had little to say while we ate, for while the Stewarts knew we played at sendings and visions, they truly thought it playing. Mrs. Stewart called it my Eastward Parlor Trick and only laughed that it seemed to make us so popular.

Closing ourselves in our room came as a relief to me. I felt as though I wore weights on my fingers instead of rings. My narrow slice of bed had never seemed so inviting.

"Did you find him?" Zora finally asked.

Shaking my head, I told her, "I'd rather not speak of it."

What a great crevasse that left between us, so I asked, "What did it look like when I slipped into my vision this afternoon? I felt as though I blinked, and it was over."

"It was very like that for us, too." She moved as if through water, peeling her layers one by one.

I left my wrapper at the foot of our bed. "Sometimes losing myself in the sight frightens me, but I'd rather have that a hundred times than ... I can't begin to define it. I don't know what to call what happened today."

Zora moved around me, a pattern intricate as a quadrille that we'd learned bit by bit. I turned toward the desk, while she opened the armoire, closing the windows, and one-two-three-four.

"Writing, I suppose." Zora started the work of unclasping all her hooks. "That's all it seemed to us."

"Not particularly crazed?"

She offered an apologetic smile and shook her head. "Dull, really. Like watching Joey Dobbs work his figures on the board."

That slice of ordinary made me laugh; Zora made me laugh, and I felt the worst guilt at holding my tongue with her. The last thing I should have hoped for her was to lay my own troubles on her shoulders. "How is Thomas?"

"Horrified at you," she said, but she took the edge from the answer with a smile. She hung her wrapper inside the armoire, then turned to lean back against it. "Would you think I've gone mad if I said that the longer I know him, the fonder I become?"

"I thought you already quite fond."

"This is something else entirely. It's not just the spark that jumps out of the fire." Then, blushing, she hurried to add, "That's there yet. Oh, I'm making a mess of this."

Sitting heavily on the bed, I heard something hit the floor. As I pulled my skirts up to search, I said, "You are, indeed, for I haven't the first idea what you're getting at."

Zora swept down suddenly, rooting on the floor, and as I looked at her dark head, she told me, "I like listening to him. His philosophies, and he listens to mine..."

"Do you have even one?" I asked. "It's the first you've mentioned it to me."

Slapping my knee with a glove, she rose and shoved it in my hands. "A great many of them, thank you. And the point I'm trying hard to make—in spite of your endless interruptions—"

With a cheeky grin, I said, "Am I interrupting? I apologize."

Zora flung herself back toward the armoire, raising her voice as if to beat me with it. "I feel as though each time I see him, we become something greater. More ourselves than we've ever been."

I smiled, swallowed up in her sentiment—cloaking myself in it, I suppose, to forget my own upset. "Zora Stewart, have you fallen in love with the doctor's son?"

"I think I have." With a great sigh, Zora sank to sit on the armoire bench. Then, shaking herself back to sense, she held out her hand. "Give me your gloves, I'm right here."

Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out two, which, curiously, left me with a third. With the extra in hand, I turned it backwards and fore, shaking my head. "This isn't mine."

"You little thief." Zora's smile twisted in admiration. "You made your own prediction come true!"

In running mad, I'd forgotten entirely the line that had incensed our hostess so—
In the vespers, I see this lovely glove of crê pe and kid, gone missing and ruining the set.
The thing must have fallen into the layers of my polonaise—how miraculous that it could have stayed there across the city by carriage and magic alike.

"My mystic eye is never wrong," I said, pretending dramatics like Privalovna. Watching Zora pet the glove as if it were a curious artifact from the sands of Egypt, I couldn't help but laugh.

***

When the storms came to Baltimore, they painted it with a laden, gray brush. Though thunder rippled across the sky, it was no furious peal; it had no lightning to decorate it. It was the sort of storm that wrapped a day in cotton, blunting mind and mood to a singular, dreary state.

I stood at the back door, trying to tempt some of the cooling mist into a kitchen sweltering with all-day baking, but none came. Somewhere in this, Zora sat with a sick aunt, no doubt enjoying her visit as much as I enjoyed my lack of one, which was to say, not at all. I had it on good authority that this aunt smelled of camphor and onions.

"Plenty to do if you've run out of your own errands," Mrs. Stewart told me. Elbow deep in bread dough with the downstairs girl, she cut me a practical look. "You're slowing down my rise, letting the wind in like that."

"Sorry," I murmured, closing the door and leaning back against it. "I could help, if you like."

Mrs. Stewart shook her head, and I noticed for the first time the fine, silver streaks shot through her hair. "Got four elbows in here already. Take some lace to mend; you've got a pretty hand."

"Thank you," I said, groaning inwardly. Patently foolish to ask for a chore and then regret getting one, but so it was. I picked up the sewing basket on my way from the kitchen, thinking to settle in the foyer, where the light was good.

"Have you ever seen such a fine day?" Mr. Stewart joked. He sat in the little chair by the window, the one I'd meant to take.

"It's handsome, indeed," I answered, carrying on to the parlor, where I could smell the rain vividly, mixed with a bit of ash. As I settled near the fireplace, I shivered. The wind whistled down the chimney, offering a chill more spiritual than physical.

How funny that I should find the cries of Maryland wind so disconcerting. The screams a nor'easter made had driven any number of hearty souls from Maine; I enjoyed them, in my own way.

But then, nothing but snow came on that wind, did it?

My heart caught in a painful twist. Pulling lace from the sewing basket, I fixed my attention on its net. I bade myself think of needles and thread, of closing broken strands, of naught more. But fixing lace was no strenuous task. My fingers knew it uncommanded; they gave my thoughts leave to wander.

What could I make of myself? I was, in part, fearsomely delighted that so much water in the wind would keep Nathaniel from coming to me. Then, the next part wept in agony over the same.

Rent in two, I saw neither clearly nor completely my whole—for how could I want him and wish him away at once? My country concerns of becoming a good woman and making a good match had been abandoned to the tempest entirely. To the elements.

Pricking through the lace and into my flesh, I frowned and stuck the finger in my mouth. To keep from staining it, or because I had no genuine wish to mend it, I dropped the lace into the basket again and laid my head in the curl of my arms, right on the table.

I stirred my lazy fingers through the box of calling cards. Picking out one, I listlessly admired the script printed there, then dropped it on the table. Reaching in for another, I drew outyet another strawberry pink card, and I smiled, unsurprised that the sugar heiress had called again.

I'd seen two gentlemen in shirtsleeves fighting on a lawn for her, and as she was society, I'd had the pleasure of reading that prediction come true in the
Sunpapers.
Scandal at the Sugarcane Ball! A photograph of the heiress in question had shown her exquisitely pleased in place of horrified.