“Dreadful,” she said. “How are you?”
“How I am does not matter,” Will replied shortly, cupping a hand at her throat and encouraging her to lift her head. “Angelika, what were you thinking?” He didn’t expect a reply and she gave none. “Victor has gone mad. He’s running around searching for Mary. She’s the one who will know what to do.”
“We had a row; I think she’s hiding. I just need water.” She managed to drink a few mouthfuls before patting Will on the cheek and crawling back into his bed. “You live like a monk,” she told him, before she fell back into the black place.
Chapter Nineteen
Angelika stayed in Will’s bed, and clung to it when they tried to remove her. Every time he, or her brother, attempted to question or scold her over the events in the forest, she pretended to be sick and closed her eyes.
But it wasn’t pretending.
Her bones felt bendy and the room became unfriendly; the beams on the ceiling were sickening, and she asked for air more than water. The shutters stayed open throughout the night, with a candle sputtering in the cold breeze.
Everyone was in the room: Lizzie on the edge of the mattress, Victor on the sill, Will leaning a forearm on the mantel. Belladonna’s piglet was asleep by the hearth. “I’m all right,” Angelika said at one point, causing them all to start in surprise, but their simultaneous movements and questions were too much and she fell back under the oily black pall.
When she woke again, she called for Mary—surely one of her divine cool compresses would make her recover—but she did not come, and Angelika felt hopeless. It was painfully obvious to her now as she lay back shivering. Mary was, for all intents and purposes, her grandmother, and Angelika felt her absence as keenly as grief. The memories and fragments she dredged up were all miscolored: running to Mary’s open arms as a wobbly tot, being carried and fed, being tucked in too tight, and all the while, Mary despised her?
“Don’t cry,” Lizzie said.
“Tell her I understand why she hates me, and it’s all right,” Angelika insisted to Victor, before vomiting into a bowl on Lizzie’s lap.
It was an endless night. The worst night. But like anything terrible, there were a few bright spots if one knew where to look.
Will took a turn on the mattress edge, and he read to her from his book of plants. Surely heaven would feel like this, his hand occasionally stroking her arm and his soft whisper alternating between French and Latin. She knew he was probably telling her a list of fungi, but she could believe he was saying anything she wished, as long as she lay with her hurt head on his pillow.
“Is that one of the bigger toadstools?” She tried to make conversation. “Or is it one of the smaller varieties?”
“Come and get me if she wakes,” Victor said to Will, hoisting up a snuffling, sleepy Lizzie in his arms. “If she’s still rambling about mushrooms in the morning, I shall send for a doctor. I’m going back out into the forest to search for him. Not now, Belladonna. Shoo.”
“Take him some food, he’s starving,” Angelika urged. She lay back down and dozed.
Before dawn, Will asked in the silent room, “What possessed you?”
“Your ring,” Angelika replied.
“You were planning on marching down there, to that big wild man, and taking it from his hand?”
“Yes.”
Will let out a huff of disbelief. “What is it like, moving through the world with the confidence of an empress?”
“It’s nice.” She looked around the room with her eyes only opened to slits. “What’s it like, living as a pauper?”
He echoed back, “It’s nice. You really would do anything for me, wouldn’t you?”
“I will prove it, again and again. Why aren’t I in my own room?”
Will hesitated for a few moments. “I was half out of my mind with worry. I . . .” He looked sideways, wincing at a memory. “Victor could barely get a hand on you. I gathered you up from the ground and was growling and guarding you like an animal. I brought you here.”
“You don’t lose control often. I wish I’d been conscious,” she said teasingly, but he remained serious.
“I was no more civilized than that giant beast. You must never do that again.”
“But—”
“Do you understand me?” He was kneeling by the bed now, his lips moving on the back of her hand. “Not for that ring, not for me. Never. You could have been killed. He flung you like a doll. There was a rock on the ground beside you. Six inches was the difference between you lying in my bed rambling about toadstools and you lying on a slab in that nightmare morgue.”