A Study in Drowning(64)
Hearing her stir, he turned around. His normally untidy hair had achieved an unprecedented level of anarchy; the brown strands seemed to all be rebelling against one another, and against his scalp. He had his glasses back on.
The first thing she said as she sat up was, “It’s a good thing Blackmar didn’t peek in.”
Preston’s face reddened. “There was nothing untoward about it. But I can imagine how it might have looked.”
“No, you were very well-behaved.” Effy let the covers fall off her. One of the straps of her nightgown had slipped down her shoulder, and she noticed Preston intentionally averting his gaze as she righted it again. “Thank you.”
“There’s nothing to thank me for,” he said, still not quite meeting her eyes. “I slept well, actually.”
“And you kept your hands to yourself.” She couldn’t help but try to fluster him more, just because she liked the way he looked blushing.
In that room, just her and Preston, she almost forgot they were at Penrhos at all. They could have been anywhere, in this small, safe place just for them, everything quiet and gentle and slow. Even the light crawling in was tender and pale gold.
Reluctantly, Effy got out of bed, and Preston turned around again, facing the wall so that she could dress.
He had stayed dutifully on his side of the bed all night, knees curled to allow for the too-short length of the mattress, even his breathing soft and unobtrusive. He hadn’t touched her, but Saints, she wanted him to.
Twelve
What defines a romance? All scholars seem to converge on a single point: it is a story that must have a happy ending. And why is that? I say, it is because a romance is a belief in the impossible: that anything ends happily. For the only true end is death—and in this way, is romance not a rebuke of mortality? When love is here, I am not. When love is not, I am gone. Perhaps a romance is a story with no end at all; where the end is but a wardrobe with a false back, leading to stranger and more merciful worlds.
From An Epistemological Theory of Romance by Dr. Edmund Huber, collected in the Llyrian Journal of Literary Criticism, 199 AD
After spending so long at Hiraeth, Effy had almost forgotten what it was like to live in a regular house. She bathed in Blackmar’s perfectly proper and mundane claw-foot tub. She wrapped herself in a borrowed silk robe.
All of it was very pleasant. The floorboards were not particularly cold, and the windows let in no drafts of early winter wind. When she finished bathing, she went back into the bedroom, feeling clean and bright-eyed, and flopped down on the unmade bed. She could hear the sounds of Preston running the water in the other room and felt, for some reason, suddenly flushed.
All that had happened the night before (though nothing had really happened—they hadn’t even so much as brushed fingers) nearly distracted Effy from her task. While Preston bathed, she stood up and began to pick her way around the room.
She opened desk drawers and found, disappointingly, nothing. Someone had cleaned this room thoroughly a long time ago, and let it lie fallow after that. She wondered whose room it had been.
There were a number of musty-smelling dresses in the wardrobe, but no false back, no secret room behind it—Effy even pulled it out from the wall to check. She peeked behind the opaque black curtains. The immaculately manicured lawn of Penrhos looked as untouched as an oil painting.
It felt almost too silly to look under the bed, too facile and childish, but she dropped to her knees anyway. Instantly her nose itched. It was too dark to see beneath the bed frame, so Effy reached out her arm and felt around.
Her fingers closed around something: a scrap of paper. Two, three.
She snatched them up as quickly as she could, afraid for some reason that they might just vanish, float away. Effy held them to her chest, breathing hard. They felt like a secret, just the way the diary had, just the way she had felt when she paged through those ancient books in the university library. She was about to look at them when she heard the door open.
Effy whipped around, but it was only Preston, his hair damp and mussed from the bath, wearing one of Blackmar’s dressing gowns. It was too short on him, and Effy felt, momentarily, very lascivious for taking notice of that at all. What young girl of this century was left feverish by the sight of a man’s calves? She was like one of those protagonists from a novel of manners, swooning over a glimpse of their betrothed’s bare ankle.
“Effy,” said Preston, “what are you doing on the floor?”
“I found these,” she said, holding out the papers. “Under the bed.”
She had been planning to stand up, but before she could, Preston knelt on the floor beside her. There was still water glistening on the sharp planes of his face, one damp strand of hair curling down over his forehead. Even wet, it appeared untidy. Effy drew in a breath, now fully irritated at herself for becoming attuned to these inane details.
The papers were very old; she could tell as much right away, without even looking at the dates at the top. Their edges were curling, ink slightly faded, and they seemed overall as if they had been forgotten—as if someone running away had let them slip out of their grasp and lie gathering dust under the bed, or a maid who came in to clean had simply been unable to reach them with her broom.
Effy held the first page out so that she and Preston could both read it.
17 April 189