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◄◄ Previously: The Compass and the Thorn ❂🌹
Rain trembled on the conservatory’s glass panes, a lace of water that turned the morning into a dim chapel. The plants wore the light like veils. A bench of white camellias stood near the door and, farther in, a careful procession of things that preferred the shade. Lucille’s shears clicked softly as she removed a single spent bloom and let it fall onto the black soil.
“Stand still,” she said without looking up. “You’re casting a shadow across my hellebores.” Her tone softened to something that almost resembled affection. “They sulk when they feel neglected.”
Thomas stopped where she intended. The air smelled of wet earth and citrus oil. His suit had absorbed the night’s damp, and beneath it lingered a faint trace of another man’s scent: a sharp, dry note that clung like guilt. He could feel it even now, pressed against his throat.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” he said. “I thought you were at the office.”
“I was, until I remembered some things can’t be trusted to assistants.” The shears flashed again. “Nor to brothers who stay out until dawn.”
A pause settled between them. Outside, London was a grey curtain. Inside, the world felt curated. Lucille moved to a tray of labelled cuttings — monkshood, foxglove, lily-of-the-valley — and pinched a leaf between two fingers, bringing it to her nose as though scent alone could confirm its identity.
“Do you remember Allerdale’s winter garden?” she asked, almost tender in her reminiscence. “How cold crept in at the edges no matter how tightly the doors were sealed? I would wrap your scarf around your mouth, and you’d tug it down because it made you feel trapped. You always hated to be managed.” She turned at last. “And yet you come back to me every time.”
His gaze slid to the tray of cuttings. “You kept the labels,” he said. “How thoughtful.”
“Thoughtful would be removing temptations before they take root.” She stepped closer. Silk whispered against the tiles. “Surely you must realise that he’s just another one of those doomed experiments you like to conduct when you’re tired of your own reflection.”
His expression barely moved. “You shouldn’t listen to gossip.”
“I don’t need gossip,” she said lightly. “You walk in with it painted on your skin.” Her fingers brushed the knot of his tie, an old habit disguised as neatness. She smoothed it in place and did not withdraw.
He didn’t look at her. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“I have.” Her touch lingered a heartbeat too long before falling away. “You used to dream of falling. Now you dream of being caught.”
“Would that displease you?” he asked quietly.
Lucille’s smile deepened, sweet as rot. “It would disappoint me. I taught you to land on your feet.”
She set the shears down on the bench and turned a camellia toward the light, its petals white and unsullied. “I was beginning to think you’d grown bored of me. I should have known better. Men like you don’t grow bored — they grow careless.”
“Is that what you think this is? Carelessness?”
“I think it’s weakness dressed as adventure.” She tilted her head, studying him as if he were one of her rarer plants, something temperamental that refused to bloom without cruelty. “Tell me his name.”
He gave her the look that always used to stop arguments: steady, civil, unreadable. “No.”
Lucille laughed softly. It wasn’t joy; it was recognition. “Good. I’d have been disappointed if you gave him away that easily.”
She crossed to the window. Rain pressed against the glass like hands. “It’s almost touching,” she said. “You trying so hard to keep secrets from someone who built you out of them.”
“You make everything sound like property,” he said. “Even affection.”
“Because affection is what property becomes when it’s loved properly.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Don’t pretend you don’t understand. I saved the mines, saved us from the rumours, from all of it. We would have drowned in red ink without me.”
“You only saved me because you couldn’t stand to be alone.”
Lucille turned fully, expression pointed. “Then do you stay because you can’t either?”
The air thickened between them. He could smell her perfume. Amber and something mineral beneath it, like stone after lightning. It had always unsettled him, that scent: familiar, narcotic, impossible to wash off.
“I don’t owe you explanations,” he said.
“Of course you do.” Her voice softened again, like his dissent was mere silliness. “I built the world that keeps you alive. Every wall, every polished piece of glass that shows you the version of yourself people can bear to look at — all of it, my doing. You live in a house of my making. You breathe because I kept the world from closing its jaws.”
“You make that sound like mercy.”
“It is mercy.” She picked up the shears once more and held them absently, turning them so the metal caught the grey light. “You bring other people into this world, Thomas, and they won’t survive it. You know that. They’ll nick their fingers on the edges. And when they bleed, it will be on us.”
“You kept me alive, Lucille. But now I’d like to live.”
Lucille’s eyes sharpened. “You forget yourself.”
“Maybe I’m remembering.”
The silence trembled like glass under pressure. Then Lucille set the shears down and closed the distance between them. Her hands came up to his face, thumbs tracing the line of his jaw as though to memorise it. “You were never meant to live among ordinary people,” she whispered. “You’re too easily worshipped. They see the tragedy and mistake it for grace. They’ll use you, Thomas, until there’s nothing left but the part of you that still calls my name when you wake from a nightmare.”
Thomas caught her wrists and gently pushed them down, the movement outwardly tender, inwardly defiant. “You’ve mistaken survival for devotion.”
Lucille’s mouth curved. “And you’ve mistaken rebellion for freedom.” She took a step back, composed again, serene. “Wear the charcoal tonight. Not the navy. It makes you look… honest.”
“I’ll choose what I wear.”
“Of course you will.” She smiled that slow, knowing smile that had terrified and comforted him since childhood. “I laid three of them out for you.”
He turned towards the door. The rain’s rhythm filled the pause. Behind him, Lucille’s voice followed, low and certain: “Be careful with him, Thomas. Some things poison by touch, not by taste.”
He didn’t answer. The door shut softly behind him, leaving her with the flowers and the sound of rain.
Lucille looked down at the fallen camellia at her feet. It was perfect, pale, unblemished. She ground it beneath the ball of her foot until the petals turned translucent, almost red.