“You see many things, don’t you?”
A chill ran over me. It was obvious that Gerard suspected me capable of…something, though I prayed he didn’t understand the full scope of my abilities. And he’d told her this. Was that what they spoke of while they…I shook my head against the unwanted images.
She sighed. “Come with me, Verity.”
* * *
“Tell me everything,” Constance ordered once we were in the kitchen, the gas lamps glowing brightly.
I sat down on a stool along the island, tucking my feet up on its highest rung, wishing I could curl into myself and forget the humiliating shame of this night. All of my secrets—seeing spirits, that terrible little voice in my head—were about to be yanked out.
By this girl.
Gerard’s mistress.
She’d tell him everything I said and that would be that.
My engagement would be broken.
I’d never see Alex again.
I’d be lucky if I wasn’t cast off to an asylum.
Perhaps Camille would visit, lording her sanity and unquestionable rightness over me.
Constance reached out as if to put her hand over mine, drawing me from my spiral of thoughts. But she stopped just short of touching me, indecision written across her features. “Verity…you can tell me anything. I’ll believe you. You don’t have to hold all this on your own.” An intense fervor brightened her eyes. “I won’t tell a soul.”
“You wouldn’t tell Gerard?” I asked cautiously, feeling like an animal approaching a trap, sensing the danger but willing to ignore it for the allure of the promised bait.
She bit back a laugh. “I assure you, he’ll never hear a thing from me.”
My question fell out before I could think through its appropriateness. “Did something happen between you?”
Her head dipped, cheeks red, though I couldn’t tell if it was shame or anger that caused them to burn. “Yes. You could say that.”
“I…” I didn’t know what to say.
I hated that this girl had hurt Dauphine, that her presence in the house was a jagged burr, tearing a marriage apart with its festering thorns. When she was a mere concept, a name listed in some little notebook, one girl out of dozens, it had been so easy to despise her, to dismiss her. She was just a mistress.
But the pained expression etched across her face made my heart ache.
It wasn’t her I hated, or all the women who had come before her.
It was Gerard.
He had brought these girls here, these mistresses, and when he was done with them, finished wringing out whatever novel pleasure it was he’d found within them, he moved on to the next. I wondered how many girls had left Chauntilalie with those hollow eyes, those burning cheeks.
Constance balled her hands into fists. “None of that matters right now. I need to know about tonight. What happened? What did you see?”
Slowly, in half starts, I told her everything. Hearing the peacocks, spotting Alex in the hall, seeing him walk away. I told her about the servant I’d seen the morning of Dauphine’s party, the one who looked so much like Alexander. How Frederick had seen him too. When I was done, I felt wrung out, impossibly exhausted.
She pressed her lips together, mulling over my tale. “You said you were going to get tea?”
I nodded wearily.
“A cup of chamomile will do you a world of good,” Constance reasoned, glancing toward the rack of tins lining the wall above the sink.
“Not chamomile,” I protested. “The blooming tea. In the purple hexagon.”
With obvious reluctance, she reached on tiptoe to grab it. The tin fell through her fingers and clattered onto the countertop. Constance turned toward me, shaking her head slowly, fearfully. “Oh, Verity. I’m certain this isn’t what you want.”
“Of course it is.” I slid off the stool and busied myself, preparing the kettle of water, lighting the stove. “It’s the only thing that helps me sleep.”
I picked up the tin and removed one of the tightly packed blossoms. Her face wrinkled with disgust and she swatted her hand out, casting the flower into the fire. Constance looked as stunned by her sudden action as I was.
The scent of the burning tea leaves filled the room. It was a familiar scent but I couldn’t place exactly where I’d smelled it before.
Unease flickered through my insides. “What is it?”
“They’re poppy flowers. Poppies,” she repeated with emphasis, as if that was enough to make me understand.
“What…what does that mean? I don’t know anything about…” I stopped short, my words dying away as I remembered the sectioned off area of the greenhouse. “Are they poisonous?”
Her eyebrows furrowed. “Not exactly. But…the pods of the flowers can create a terribly powerful drug. They can cause you to fall into deep sleeps, almost like an unconscious swoon. Some people don’t wake for days. Some…don’t wake at all.”
I recalled my mornings after drinking the tea: waking in the same position I’d fallen asleep in, hot and disoriented, my limbs aching from not shifting at all in sleep. I’d blamed the peacocks for causing such exhaustion, but what if…
“Why…why would anyone drink that?”
“It’s said that these states, these trances, help to open minds. The tea can thin the veil between worlds. It lets you see beyond the here and now.”
“What do you mean? What worlds?” I flashed back to the memory of the woman with the black tears. Of my terribly, terribly dead sisters. Gerard had said something similar after my encounter with the laurel tree in the poison garden. “The afterlife? People see the afterlife?”
She offered me a weak smile. “Or…the Sanctum. Some use this to speak to the gods… It also can make you see things,” Constance added meaningfully. “Things here, that others can’t.”
“Things like…like Alexander walking through corridors,” I guessed.
She nodded.
A hallucination.
The boy I’d seen had been nothing but a hallucination.
It had felt so real.
“How long do its effects last? I’ve been drinking it for weeks. Would it…would it still be in me tonight?” I squirmed, imagining the toxic tea slithering through my bloodstream, a jeweled snake with poison dripping from its fangs.
Constance peered at the canister as if the answer might be printed upon its metal sides. I noticed she would not touch it. “I don’t know. I think it depends on how much you drink, on the potency of the brew.”
“Why would Gerard give me this?”
Her gaze listed away, carefully avoiding me. “Maybe he wanted to see what you would see…”
There was a mistake, a misunderstanding somewhere. Perhaps someone else had put the poppies in and Gerard hadn’t realized it. Perhaps I had grabbed the wrong tin. Gerard was capable of many things but he would never willingly hurt me.
Would he?
A scream sliced through the air, sharp in pitch, pounding my head and scraping my eardrums raw. I flinched.
Constance turned to the whistling kettle. So quick was she to silence it, she forgot to grab a cloth. I cried out a warning as her fingers wrapped around the hot handle.
“Let me,” I said, hastily pushing her back as I wrapped a towel round the metal. I moved the whistling pot to the back burner. Its cry died away. I cringed before looking toward Constance, fearing the worst.