There were no recriminations from Singh or Ian. They draped no guilt over her shoulders for what her sister had done, yet the shame and remorse clung to her like sopping-wet wool.
They gave her a moment alone to say goodbye to her sister. Though Mary’s flesh was cold and pale, Edwina held her hand in hers. The skin, though slack from death, still carried the softness of youth, and she had to steady herself against denial. Her sister, the one other person who understood what it was like to live with the burden of possessing two forms in one body, was inexplicably dead. The vibrant, rosy youth drained from her cheek, replaced with this still, gray death at the river’s edge. Grief, anger, and disbelief braided their knot around Edwina’s heart until it hurt to breathe.
She could not forgive, but she would strive to understand the compulsion that had taken her sister from her. She assured Mary that much. And there in the cold, stark white room, she saw the corpse light rise, the first she’d ever seen without Mary’s magic to guide it out of the body, shimmering and blue and more beautiful than she’d imagined. In that moment, Benjamin walked up the steps from the river, mesmerized, as she was, by the light floating above the body. He did not come any nearer, satisfied to watch until the light floated out over the water, where it hovered momentarily before flickering out. She and the boy briefly looked each other in the eye one last time before each retreated from the room in silence.
After promising Chief Inspector Singh they would come by the Constabulary headquarters in the morning to make a full statement for the inquest, Ian and Edwina rebuffed an offer of a ride home, choosing instead to linger by the water for a moment longer. When the hansom cab had gone, they took the steps up to the bridge.
“The river tried to warn me,” Edwina said, thinking of the skull that had washed up on the rocks. “But I didn’t know it would cost so dearly.”
Ian leaned on the railing beside her, watching the dark water swirl and eddy in pools along the shore. He had no poetry to offer then. No spell to cast a fog over all that had happened. Only the silent reflection of a man mourning his own loss to the river.
Edwina could never know the depth of forfeiture he’d suffered because of her sister’s nature. And hers, if she were honest with herself. She’d have done anything to appease her sister and keep her by her side after their parents had walked away without a word. But murder? People died of natural causes every day in the city. How could that not have been enough for her sister?
“Mary craved the lights,” she said, still shocked and bewildered by the night’s events. “I think maybe she needed to possess them. Control them. To know they were hers to manipulate and no one else’s. But in the end, the compulsion controlled her, didn’t it?”
Ian straightened, reeling in the private meditations he’d spooled out over the river. His brow creased in thought. “A little like the wretch who seeks oblivion in the opium den, is it not?” he asked. “I’ve seen a man go in a place like that looking for escape, only to end up the same as a rabbit caught in a snare, willing to chew his leg off to get more of the stuff. If that’s what your sister was feeling, maybe it was a mercy she didn’t kill more.”
Mary had said as much, denying to the end she was the murderer they’d accused her of being. Ian had been her proof. She’d left him alive when he could have easily been another victim. Edwina gazed at the stars above, shining bright before the dawn. Had his life been spared because of something her sister had seen brewing among the stars? Had Mary left him alive for her sake, knowing she would someday be alone?
The vagaries of such fate were too much for her to contemplate, so she stepped away from the center railing as a barge piled wide with coal floated silently beneath the bridge like a mythical beast slithering past their feet.
“It was just there,” she said, pointing near the riverbank. “We might yet search the foreshore for the orb when the water goes down. There’s still a chance the memory may surface. I’ll spot the sharp blue color if it does. We shouldn’t give up hope of finding it.”
Ian stared out at the dark water floating under their feet. “Nae, I think those memories are gone for good. And maybe it’s for the best.” He took her hand as a steam tug chugged by. “There are moments to hold on to forever. The ones you want to cherish, like the love you had for your sister before all this trouble, ye ken. But there are others . . .” He shook his head at something unpleasant. “Nae, you do not mind if the current takes those memories, and good riddance. I have all I need to start again,” he said and held her hand.