The Sweet Far Thing (78 page)

“Yes, miss,” Bessie answers hoarsely. She opens her mouth obediently.

With her eyes on Felicity, Pippa places the berry on Bessie’s waiting tongue. Horrified, Felicity runs for her and grabs her hand, knocking the berry free. Pippa pushes her, and Felicity shoves back hard. Pip’s face crumples for a moment, her eyes roll back in her head, and a high keening escapes her, like a laugh gone wrong. Her limbs jerk as she falls to the ground, her body swept into a dance of beautiful violence.

“Pippa!” Felicity calls. “Pippa!”

Bessie and the others back away, frightened. At last, the fit subsides; Pippa’s clawlike hands go limp, and she lies upon the ground, a misshapen stick. Slowly, Pip sits up, her breathing labored. A bit of drool runs from her mouth; there is dirt in her hair and along her dress where she has fallen. Felicity cradles her.

“Wh-what has happened?” Pippa whimpers. She tries to stand and stumbles, her legs as weak as a newborn colt’s.

“Shhh, it was a fit,” Felicity says softly. She guides Pip to the altar and helps her sit.

Pip’s lips tremble. “No. Not here. Not now.”

She reaches toward Bessie, offering the berry once more, but Bessie shrinks from her touch. The factory girls stand apart from her. Fear shows on their faces.

“No!” Pip wails. “I am special! Chosen! You will not leave me!”

She throws out her hands, and we’re surrounded by a wall of fire. The heat of it blows me back several
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steps. This is no magic-lantern show, no illusionist’s trick meant to frighten and entertain. This is real.

Whatever power Pippa has inside seems to have grown with her seizure into something new and terrible.

The girls fall back even more, the flames shadowing the terror and awe in their widening eyes. A strange smile lights Bessie’s broad face, a cross between ecstasy and fear. She falls to her knees in devotion.

“Oh, miss, you’ve been touched by the hand of God!”

Mae prostrates herself as well. “I knew it when you saved us from those ghouls.”

Even Mercy falls to her knees, swayed by the might of Pippa’s power.

“We saw it! We all did! A miracle it was. A right sign!” Bessie exclaims with the passion of the converted.

“A right sign of what?” I ask.

“It’s proof that she’s chosen, like she said.” Tears stream down Mae’s face. She believes she has witnessed a miracle, and I cannot tell her otherwise.

Felicity keeps a tight grip on Pip’s arm. “It was a fit. You have to tell them.”

I witnessed one of Pip’s fits when she was alive. It was frightening in its fury, but nothing like this.

Pippa stretches her arms wide. “I will lead you to glory. Who will follow?”

“You must tell them the truth!” Felicity hisses.

“Shut yer mouth,” Mae warns, and in her eyes I see a devotion that would kill.

“Don’t order me about!” Pippa snaps. “Everyone’s forever ordering me about.”

Felicity looks as if she’s been hit hard. Pip twists out of her grip and walks among the factory girls, who reach up to touch her. She graces them with a soft laying of hands and they cry out in happiness, eager for a blessing. Pippa glances at us, tears in her eyes, her smile the picture of innocence.

“It was meant to be. It was all preordained! That is why I could not cross,” she says. “How else to explain why the magic has grown in me?”

“Pip,” I begin, but I do not finish. For what if she is right after all?

“You had a fit,” Fee says, shaking her head.

“It was a vision, like Gemma’s!” Pippa shouts.

Felicity slaps Pippa, and Pip turns on her with the ferocity of a cornered animal. “You’ll be sorry for that.”

The factory girls are on Felicity, Ann, and me, holding our arms behind our backs till we are forced to bend. I could try for the magic. I could. I try to summon it, and see Circe in my head, and then I’m gasping for air, terrified and woozy.

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“I felt that, Gemma!” Pippa shouts. “Don’t try again.”

“Unbelievers.” Bessie spits and it lands as an ugly spot on Fee’s cheek.

They pull us outside, holding us tightly, and Pip unleashes her fury in a new ring of fire. It makes my eyes burn and sting.

If Pippa has crowned herself queen, Bessie has surely made herself second-in-command. “Mistress Pippa, we’ll do wha’ever you ask of us. Just a word and it’s done.”

“My whole life I’ve been ordered about. Now I shall give the orders.”

I’ve never seen Felicity so wounded. “Not me,” she says. “I never ordered you about.”

“Oh, Fee.” The old Pippa surfaces for just a moment, hopeful and childlike. She pulls Felicity to her.

Something I cannot name passes between them, and then Pip’s lips are on Fee’s in a deep kiss, as if they feed on one another, their fingers entwined in each other’s hair. And suddenly, I understand what I must have always known about them—the private talks, the close embraces, the tenderness of their friendship.

A blush spreads up my neck at the thought. How could I not have seen it before?

Felicity breaks away, her cheeks inflamed, but the fierce passion of that kiss lingers. Pip grabs her arm.

“Why do you always go? You are always leaving me.”

“I’m not,” Felicity says. Her voice is raw with smoke.

“Don’t you see? Here we can be free to do as we wish.”

Felicity’s lips tremble. “But I cannot stay.”

“Yes, you can. You know how.”

Felicity shakes her head. “I can’t. Not that way.”

Pippa speaks in low, measured tones. “You said you loved me. Why will you not eat the berries and stay with me?”

“I do,” Felicity whispers. “But—”

“You do what?” Pippa demands. “Why will you not say it?”

“I…do,” Felicity says with terrible difficulty.

Pip lets go Felicity’s arm. Her eyes fill with angry tears. “The time has come to make a choice, Fee.

Either you are with me or against me.”

Pippa opens her hand. The berries sit waiting, fat and ripe. I can scarcely breathe. Felicity’s face shows her torment—her affection and her pride locked in fierce battle. She stares at the berries for a long moment, neither accepting nor declining them, and I come to realize that the silence is her answer. She will not trade one trap for another.

Pippa’s eyes brim with tears. She closes her hand over the berries, squeezing so tightly that the
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blue-black juice runs over her knuckles and onto the ground, and I fear what she will do to us now.

“Let them go. We do not need unbelievers in our midst,” she says at last. She parts the flames for us.

“Go on, then. Leave.”

The only way out is through the fire, and there is no promise that she will not burn us to cinders as we pass. Swallowing hard, I lead Ann and Felicity through the passage in the flames.

Pippa sings loudly, ferociously. “Oh, I’ve a love, a true, true love, and my true love lies waiting…”

It was a simple, merry tune once, but now it chills me. It is a desperate song. One by one, the girls join in, their voices gaining power until Fee’s sobs have been completely drowned by them. I do not dare to glance back until we are through the bramble wall on the path to the garden, and Pippa and her followers, set against the flames, seem like white-hot coals going to ash.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

FELICITY WILL NOT SPEAK TO EITHER OF US. THE MOMENTwe return to Spence, she stumbles up the stairs, holding the banister as if it were the only thing tying her to the earth. Ann and I do not speak of what has happened. The night feels heavy and hard and no words can lighten it. Only when Ann has joined Cecily for needlework do I make my way to Felicity’s room. I find her lying on her bed, so still I fear she is dead.

“Why did you come?” Her voice is a shadow of itself. “Did you come to see the degenerate?” She turns to me, her face slick with tears. In her hand she clutches Pippa’s glove. “I can see it in your eyes, Gemma. Go on—say it. I’m a degenerate, then. My affections are unnatural.”

My mouth opens, but I can find no words.

“Say it! Tell me what you long to say, what everyone suspects!”

“I never suspected it. Truly.”

Her breathing is labored. Her nose runs. Strands of hair are caught in the moisture and stick to her cheeks. She will not look at me again. “But now you know, and you despise me.”

Do I? No. What I feel is confused. I have questions I do not yet know how to ask: Has she always been this way? Does she feel this same affection for me? I have undressed before her. She has seen me. And I have seen her, have noted her beauty. Do I harbor these secret feelings for Felicity? Am I just as she is?

How would I know if I were?

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Felicity splays across the bed, choking on her tears. Her body shudders with sobs. I reach out a nervous hand and touch her, letting my palm rest on her back. I should say something, but I am at a loss. So I say the only words that come to mind.

“You will love again, Fee.”

Felicity’s face is pressed to her pillow, but she rolls her head back and forth. “No. No, I won’t. Not like this.”

“Shhh—”

“Never like this.” She is lost to her sobbing now. It comes over her in violent waves. There’s nothing to do but let her be lost. At last, the tide recedes. She lies beside me, limp and damp, wholly spent. Long shadows of evening creep up the walls, inching closer. Gradually, they reach fully across us, holding us in the stillness that only night can bring. In the hazy gloom of dusk, we are silhouettes of ourselves, reduced to our very essence. I lie down beside her. She takes my fingers in her moist palm. She holds and I do not break away, and that is something after all. We lie there, tethered to each other by the fragile promise of our fingers while the night grows bolder. Unafraid, it opens its mouth and swallows us whole.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

THE TRAIN STEAMS ACROSS THE COUNTRYSIDE TOWARDLondon. I’ve left the cloth in the ivy, along with a note for Kartik explaining about my father and promising I will return as soon as I can.

I’ve left notes for Felicity and Ann as well. Heartsick, I pass from carriage to train to carriage until at last our street is in view.

The house in Belgravia is gloomy and quiet. Dr. Hamilton is in attendance. He and Tom stand in hushed conference in the foyer while Grandmama and I sit in the parlor, staring into a fire we do not need. The house is already uncomfortably warm, but Grandmama insists. In her hand, Father’s handkerchief bursts open like an angry flower. There on the field of pristine white is a small red stain of blood.

Tom enters silently, his shoulders slumped. He closes the door behind him, and the silence is more than I can bear.

“Tom?” I say.

He sits by the fire. “Consumption. Months now.”

“Months?” I ask.

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“Yes,” Tom says.

It wasn’t my doing. It is the drink and the laudanum and the opium and that bloody refusal to live. That selfish grief. I thought I could change it with magic, but I can’t. People will be who they are, and there is not enough magic in any world to change that.

Grandmama folds Father’s handkerchief over and over, making neat squares that hide the stain. “That infernal climate in India.”

“It isn’t the climate. Let’s not pretend,” I say. Tom glares a warning.

Grandmama prattles on. “I told him he should return to England. India’s no place for an Englishman. Far too hot…”

I’m out of my chair. “It isn’t the bloody weather!”

I’ve shocked them into silence. I should stop. Apologize for my outburst. Make amends. Blame the climate. But I cannot. Something in me has given way and it cannot be put back again. “Did you know that he had returned to the laudanum? That he couldn’t give it up? That our good intentions were not nearly so powerful as his will to die?”

“Gemma, please,” Tom snaps.

“No, Thomas. Is this the life you want for me? To be like you? To wear blinders and talk of nothing that matters and drink weak tea with other people who would do anything to hide the truth, especially from themselves? Well, I won’t do it! And I won’t lie for you anymore.”

Grandmama presses her thumb across the white plain of the folded handkerchief, forcing it to lie down.

She is suddenly small and frail. I’m ashamed to have treated her so shabbily and more ashamed that I hate her for her frailty. As I storm from the room, I hear her voice, faint and unsure. “It’s the climate.”

Tom catches me on the stairs and pulls me into the library. Father’s books stare down at us from their shelves. “Gemma, that was unkind.”

My blood has settled and my anger is now tamed by remorse, but I’ll not give Thomas the satisfaction of knowing it. I take a book from Father’s shelves, and perching in a rather uncomfortable wooden chair, I open to its title page.
The Inferno
by Dante Alighieri.

“Father’s health isn’t the sole reason I sent for you. Your behavior at the ball was…” He trails off.

“Frightening.”

You’ve no idea, Tom.
I turn the page, feigning passionate interest.

“Since the moment we arrived in England, you’ve been rebellious and difficult. It only takes one infraction, one whiff of scandal, to ruin your reputation and your chances forever.”

Anger surges past the constraints of shame. “My reputation,” I say coolly. “Is that all I am?”

“A woman’s reputation is her worth, Gemma.”

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