Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil — Chapter no 60

II

Hampshire, England 1879

It is easy to lose track of time.

After all, the days look different, but the nights appear the same. The darkness bleeds like watercolor, and time runs with it. A month becomes a year. A decade. Three. Then four.

And suddenly it’s almost Christmas, and Charlotte is stepping down from a carriage, her boots sinking a little in the English soil, and she knows, even with Sabine’s fingers like a veil over her eyes, that she is back in Hampshire. She can hear the breeze through dry tall grass, can smell the hawthorn and the dogwood, the birch smoke rising from the hearth, half hopes, half fears that when Sabine takes her hands away, Charlotte will find herself staring up at Clement Hall.

Instead, when she’s allowed to look, she is greeted by a stranger’s stately house, the windows candlelit and traced in garlands. A ribbon of pale pebbles for a drive, a wreath of holly on the door, a rooftop laced with frost.

It might as well be made of gingerbread, it is so beautiful.

“A gift,” says Sabine, leaning to kiss the slope of skin just beneath her jaw. “I know it’s not the same, but—”

Charlotte cuts her off, throws her arms around her neck.

“It’s perfect,” she says with every kiss.

All these years, and Sabine still manages to take her by surprise.

She cranes her head, studies the cobalt blue of early night, the winter sky she knows so well, and wonders how far they are from Clement Hall.

“A mile down the road,” answers Sabine. “I thought you’d like a taste of home.”

Charlotte nods. Sabine is always telling her to look forward, never back, but these last few years she has been longing for just that.

A taste of home.

It’s a turn of phrase Charlotte doesn’t fully grasp until they’re walking up the drive. Until she’s forced to face the fact that the house Sabine has

chosen for them isn’t empty.

Yet.

But Sabine only smiles, looking pleased as a cat, and Charlotte knows there is no turning back. They knock, claiming to be carolers. It is the season, after all, for charity, for kindness. How quickly they are let inside.

The wife offers them tea—Charlotte will always remember that—and the husband takes their coats, the air around them unsuspecting, filled with nothing but the scent of pine. Sabine follows the woman from the room.

Charlotte stays, and takes the man.

He doesn’t scream, or thrash, or plead.

She has learned how to make the killing fast, to bite down hard and deep, leaving them frightened but too stunned to fight. But she prefers to take her time. To bury the violence in something gentle, sweet, only the tips of her teeth breaking the skin. To take their life so slow they barely notice that they’re hurt until it’s far too late to fight.

So that’s what Charlotte does. She is as kind as she can be, lets him sink against her as she lingers in the sunlight, in the heartbeat, in the warmth, as long as she is able, and then when there is nothing left, she lays him down.

She feels the tears slip down her cheeks, brushes them away as she goes

to find Sabine.

Strange, she isn’t in the kitchen.

The wife is there, propped in a chair, her head resting on her folded arms as if she’s drifted off to sleep. Charlotte touches the woman’s face, half expecting her to wake, when she hears the scream.

It comes from overhead, spills down the stairs, and Charlotte rushes up, the stolen heart still beating in her chest as she reaches the bedroom at the end. And stops.

Across the room, Sabine holds a girl dressed in nothing but a nightgown against her front. A child, no older than thirteen. Her terror, thick as paint, is splashed on every wall, and blood is weeping from her cheek, her wrist, her throat.

“Sabine,” says Charlotte, but she doesn’t seem to hear.

In her arms, the girl twists and pleads, trying to get free. Sabine loosens her grip and the girl tears away.

“Help!” she cries out, scrambling one step, two, before Sabine catches her again, pulls her back, and clamps a hand over her mouth.

“Who are you calling for?” she purrs. “Everyone is dead.”

Horror washes over Charlotte, brighter than she’s felt in years.

“Sabine, enough,” she snaps.

The girl sees her and thrashes like an animal, eyes wild and afraid, as Charlotte starts forward, determined to put a stop to this, to end her suffering. But when she gets close enough to try, Sabine pushes her away.

Sabine, who until that very moment has never laid a hand on her except in hunger, love, or want. Never left a mark unless it was a part of pleasure.

That Sabine now pushes Charlotte hard enough to send her staggering.

She stumbles back into the bed frame, the wood behind her splintering from the force. Charlotte’s vision flickers black and white, and she recovers just in time to see Sabine sink her teeth into the child’s throat.

It is a shallow, brutal bite, not deep enough to kill, only to tear, to hurt.

The girl claws and scrambles, feral in her fear, but Sabine’s grip is a cage, unbreakable, and soon her thrashing turns to feeble twists, her screams to whimpers. She pushes weakly at Sabine, a final, desperate pawing until at last she slumps, the fight and then the life snuffed out of her.

Charlotte stands there stunned and angry as Sabine finally lets go, the body dropping to the floor. A heap of limbs that now will never grow.

Charlotte stares at her love— And stops.

She has known Sabine for more than twice her mortal life. Five decades spent in each other’s company. Long enough to study every facet of Sabine, to learn the tones of voice that go with every mood, the way her limbs drift when she is tired, and drag when she is drunk, and dance when she is glad, but never stop unless she sleeps. The way she moves and speaks and loves and kills.

Long enough to know that this is not Sabine.

Her eyes are black and bottomless, so unlike the burning hazel ones that Charlotte knows and loves. There is a stranger looking out. A stranger tugging at her smile.

“What’s wrong, my love?” she asks in a dreamy voice as she steps over the corpse.

“Why did you do that?” demands Charlotte. “You didn’t need to—”

“Need to? No . . .”

“You shouldn’t have,” she snaps.

“Says who?” The black eyes narrow, cold and angry. “You?” She reaches Charlotte, who tries to step back, only to find the broken bedpost in her way.

“Stop,” warns Charlotte, her voice unsteady.

Sabine reaches up to stroke her tearstained cheek. “My fragile-hearted little flower . . .” Her hand slides past, into Charlotte’s hair. “You want to know why I did it,” she whispers. “Why I let her scream and fight. Why I stoked her fear.” She leans close, too close, and smiles, blood staining her teeth. “I like the way it tastes.” Her fingers twist, a stranger’s hold in a lover’s hand, the curls drawn tight enough to hurt.

Charlotte flinches, but doesn’t try to pull free, just looks into the stranger’s eyes and says, “Let go of me.”

And whether it’s the sharpness of the words, or the disgust and anger rolling off her, the stranger blinks, and disappears.

Sabine stares back at her.

The candles reignite behind her eyes.

Her body recoils slightly, as if burned.

Her grip loosens and lets go.

“Charlotte,” says Sabine, and at least her voice is hers again, but Charlotte cannot bring herself to stand and listen to it. The moment she is free, she turns and leaves.

Walks out of the room, and then the house, and then keeps going, her dress wicking up the night-damp grass, clinging to her legs with a chill she registers, but doesn’t feel. She walks because she cannot bear to stop, let alone turn back, but at some point the balance tips, and she’s no longer fleeing one place, but being drawn forward toward another, the ground sloping beneath the weight of memory. Until she looks up, and there it is.

Clement Hall.

Not the long front drive and grand façade, but the sprawling gardens at its back.

The gardens, which she revisits every time she drinks. In her mind they are unchanged, unchanging, but even in the dark she sees the subtle work of time, her mother’s wilderness pushed out, the edges tamed. The patches where frost has killed a plant or tree, the spots where new ones have been planted.

But the bulk of it is just as she remembered.

Her steps crunch softly on the pebbled path as she takes in the same rose- covered trellises and ivy arches, bare in winter. The same fountain at the garden’s heart, the figure looming at its center, two fingers chipped from the time she played horseshoes with its lifted hand.

The same night sky stretches overhead, as wide as it has always been, though the scattered points now seem to her a tapestry of light. A star shoots by, and she is fourteen again, and James is with her in the dark, arranging the telescope he received that Christmas, calibrating it against Polaris and murmuring the winter constellations to himself.

“Orion . . . Taurus . . . Auriga . . . Carina . . .” he says, swiveling the lens on its brass stand.

It is a crisp, clear night, and her nose and lips are chapped with cold, but she can’t bring herself to burrow down into her scarf, not when all the wonder comes from looking up, and any moment their father and mother will appear at the back door and call them in, out of the dark.

But then Charlotte blinks, and her brother and his telescope are gone, and

she is alone again.

Her gaze goes to the house.

It is the middle of the night, and nearly all the shutters have been drawn, but ghosts of lamplight seep here and there between the slats, and she wonders, five decades on, what member of her family lives there now?

Her father is surely gone. Her mother, too.

But James? Could he be up there, in his bed?

Charlotte cannot help herself. She knows she shouldn’t—Sabine has warned her a dozen times about leaving the past in its place. But it’s the image of Sabine that drives her forward, up the path. Away from one life and toward another.

With each step, she tells herself she will turn back. With each, she tells herself she is only getting close enough to feel for signs of life, to make out the shape of minds within.

The sculptures her mother made peer out at her as she goes by, half-

hidden by a rosebush or a hedge.

The fox. The crow. The cat.

And the rabbit.

Charlotte slows, and stops, and kneels. She runs a hand over the clay, feeling for the soft indents of her mother’s fingers, the thumb pad pressed

like a signature into the back. How far she is from the girl who found its ruined body. How close she feels.

She strokes its small stone ear thoughtfully, and her mother’s parting words come rushing back.

Some people keep their heart tucked so deep, they hardly know it’s there.

But you have always worn it like a second skin. It will make your life harder. But it will also make it beautiful.

“Who’s there?”

The voice scratches at the air.

Charlotte rises and spins round, scouring the dark until she spies the woman bundled in a lawn chair. She scolds herself—she should have heard the woman’s heartbeat. Should have felt her mind staining the air. Now that she sees her, she can’t imagine how she didn’t.

The woman is old—far too old to be out here at this hour, in this cold. A shawl rests around her narrow shoulders, but her hands are thin and bare, knotted in her lap. Her hair, once black, is gray, and gathered at her neck.

Her eyes, once jade, have faded to a paler shade of green.

But it is still Jocelyn.

Her Joss.

“I know you’re there,” she rasps, and though her voice is so much weaker now, it is the exact same tone she took when they were young, and playing hide-and-seek. When Joss was forced to be the seeker, and she was so convinced that Charlotte would leap out and frighten her—which she did, more than once, just so Jocelyn would shriek.

Charlotte doesn’t leap out now.

She comes forward carefully, until she’s close enough to make out Jocelyn’s shallow pulse, the soft tangle of her thoughts. A murmur of sadness, shot through with calm, contrasting threads of grief and hope and dread.

Charlotte continues until she’s near enough that the moonlight catches on her hair and cheeks, and Jocelyn looks up with those watered-down eyes, and sees her—Charlotte, who has not aged a day since eighteen—and the air around her narrow shoulders ripples, not with shock, or fear, but relief.

“Oh,” she says with a soft sigh. “It’s you.” As if they’ve been apart for hours, days, instead of decades. Jocelyn shifts a little in her chair. “Come to haunt me again, I see.”

Her slippered feet slide back and forth across the grass. An absent gesture,

one she had when they were young.

Charlotte kneels before the chair, so they are eye to eye, face-to-face.

Jocelyn’s breath forms thin clouds that rise around her cheeks, and out of habit, Charlotte begins to breathe as well—she has learned to make a bellows of her lungs in winter, to force the air in and out, even though she doesn’t need it.

Charlotte stares into her first love’s eyes. She has imagined this reunion a thousand times, but now she cannot find the words.

“Joss . . .” she says gently.

“I dream of you, you know,” says Jocelyn. And then, “I dream of us.”

The words claw at Charlotte’s ribs. Wrap like hands around her throat.

She wants to throw her arms around her friend, but doesn’t trust herself, her strength.

“I dream of another life,” Jocelyn goes on. “One where I wasn’t so afraid.” A sigh. “I was such a coward, Lottie,” she murmurs, and that name cracks something deep inside her.

The tears Charlotte has been holding back since she was first sent away now come rolling down her cheeks. To her surprise, Jocelyn reaches up one frail hand to catch the bloodred drop. “Did you find someone brave enough to love you?”

Sabine flares behind her eyes. Not as she is that night, but as she’s been, almost every night before, proud, and bold, and bright enough to burn.

“Yes,” Charlotte whispers.

“Good,” says Jocelyn. Her eyes go sharper then, mouth twitching with mischief, and she is eighteen again, racing away with the journal in her arms. Their hands knot together, one young and one old—and both cold.

Jocelyn squeezes, but Charlotte doesn’t dare squeeze back.

“How cruel,” says Joss, the words little more than breath, “some nights you feel so real.”

Just then a door swings open, light spilling like a backward shadow down the steps.

A young man calls out into the dark. “Nan?”

Then his steps are coming down the stairs and Charlotte forces herself to let go of Joss’s hands, to pull away, retreat into the shadow of the nearest hedge. He goes right past her, his hair sleep-mussed and his voice bright

with concern; she almost gasps.

God, he looks like James.

Her heart twists with sudden hope, then sinks as she remembers how many years have come between them. And sure enough, this boy does not look like James as he would now. He looks like James as he was that spring, when Charlotte left Clement Hall. Younger, even. Her brother as he was that Christmas Eve when they were studying the stars.

Charlotte watches as he heads straight for the chair, and the withered woman in it.

“Nan,” he says, the air around him thick with worry. “It’s the middle of the night. What are you doing out here?”

Jocelyn blinks, gazes round the garden, doesn’t seem surprised to find it empty.

“Oh,” she says, dragging her attention from the dark. “Talking to ghosts.”

He frowns, and all the things he thinks but doesn’t say cloud the air around his head. “Come,” he says, “let’s get you back to bed.”

He helps her from the chair, scolding gently about the hour and the cold as he leads her up the stairs, and into the stream of lamplight, his shoulders strong, and hers hunched, her gray hair ignited silver. Charlotte watches until the door swings shut, snuffing out the light. Listens until she can hear nothing but the whisper of the garden, her turning thoughts, her too-still heart.

Then she sinks into the grass and draws her knees into her chest, her whole body shaking with the grief.

How easy to forget the way time wears on other people when she is with Sabine, the two of them preserved like insects inside amber. How easy, and then how hard, to see the proof of it, that life races on, relentless in its pace.

Sabine was right.

This is why the past is left behind. Why they can only move forward, like Eurydice and Orpheus, never glancing back, lest they be trapped among the dead.

Charlotte stays until the darkness ebbs.

Until the first wisps of light begin to seep around the edges of the sky and throw tendrils through the garden. Until the warning ache sets in beneath

her skin, behind her eyes.

Then she stands, and walks away.

She plucks a single rose on her way out, cradles the red bloom against her chest as she retraces the path that carried her across the downs. By the time the stolen house comes into sight dawn has broken fully, molten daylight spilling over everything. Her head pounds, limbs shivering as she crosses the last stretch of lawn and stumbles through the door, into the safety of the darkened hall.

Charlotte braces herself against the wall, the sickness withdrawing like a tide. She steels herself and looks around. The corpses have been cleared away, the only evidence of last night’s crimes a missing rug, a few stray

flecks of blood against the wall.

The house is quiet, but not empty.

The knowledge fills Charlotte with a tired dread, and also grim relief. She does not want to be alone. Not now.

She climbs the stairs and finds Sabine where she always is, in the finest room, on the finest bed.

But despite the hour, she is not asleep.

Instead, Sabine sits perched at the foot of the bed, before the window. The curtains have been parted, so she sits facing the early-morning light, as if in penance. Charlotte flinches, crosses and pulls the curtains shut, plunging the room safely back into shadow.

Sabine slackens, just a little, in relief. Charlotte lies down, and Sabine lies with her, so they are face-to-face atop the sheets. Charlotte looks into her eyes. Eyes she knows so well, amber-brown and candlelit, no sign of the stranger from earlier that night.

Sabine doesn’t ask her where she went, doesn’t ask her anything, only reaches up to touch her cheek. Charlotte flinches back, and then, seeing the pain that crosses Sabine’s face, takes her hand and brings it to rest against her soundless heart.

Sabine speaks into the sliver of space between their lips.

“Forgive me,” she whispers. Fifty-two years, and it is the closest she has ever come to an apology. Her golden eyes find Charlotte’s. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why. I only know it wasn’t me.” And for the first time, Sabine lets her graze the edges of her shuttered mind, lets her feel the aura of confusion, fear.

“Please believe me,” she says, before the walls go up again.

And here is the awful thing about belief.

It is a current, like compulsion. Hard to forge when it goes against your

will, but easy enough when it carries you the way you want to go.

In that moment, Charlotte wants so badly to believe Sabine.

And so she does.

“It’s all right,” she says, stroking her lover’s cheek. “I’m here.”

Sabine sags in relief, leaves a trail of kisses down her throat.

Fatigue rolls over Charlotte like a tide, and she turns away, Sabine’s hand still clasped in hers. Sleep drags at her limbs, her mind, and she lets herself sink into it, is just slipping beneath the surface when Sabine whispers into

her hair.

“Promise me something.”

Charlotte makes a hmming sound, awake enough to listen, but too tired to form words. Sabine shifts closer in the bed, until their limbs are flush, their bodies molded to each other.

“Promise,” she says, soft and low, “that you will never hurt me.”

Charlotte frowns. It is not the promise she expected her lover to extract.

Promise you will always love me, perhaps. Promise not to leave again. But this? It strikes her as an odd request. After all, she has never tried to hurt

Sabine.

She cannot imagine that she ever will.

Charlotte does not wonder, then, why Sabine would ask for such a thing.

She does not know the power of the words. The weight of them. And she is tired. So tired. She will tell Sabine what she wants to hear, if it will bring her peace. If it will let Charlotte rest.

“I promise,” she murmurs.

Sabine sighs.

And Charlotte lets the dark fold over her.

They rise at dusk.

By night, they’re gone.

Charlotte feeling rested, and Sabine seemingly restored, so much her old self that Charlotte is convinced that what she saw the night before was nothing but an awful dream. Some kind of fit, or perhaps even a possession.

The stranger that replaced Sabine a foul spirit, bound up with the house.

And so, they rid themselves of both.

They set out arm in arm beneath the veil of night, Sabine awash in beauty,

and Charlotte in relief. They escape that cursed property, the demons lurking in it, and she tells herself that all is well. Her lover is back. The danger has passed.

And for a while, at least, she is right.

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