It was strange, the way hydrangeas still bloomed outside my window, still found themselves devoured by the season’s new batch of fawns. Their mothers still fretted over their indulgence, as mothers do. They watched from the bushes while their children feasted, thinking always of men with weapons who, the deer knew, lurked behind the brick walls the hydrangeas were nestled against. If they could’ve, the doe mothers would have pulled their fawns away from those pale blue delicacies; but the children were reaching that age where they learn a new game called stubbornness. For deer, it happened in the second month of their frightened lives.
I realized, perched on my windowsill and allowing thoughts to meander through the numb fog that had become my mind, that it was already June. May had passed me by.
And April, of course, didn’t bear thinking about.
A lot of things continued as they always had, despite the way my world had crumbled. The wagons rumbled by, not visible past the hedges that lined the great yard and winding driveway, but as loud as they’d been before the bushes were planted. I imagined the drivers sweating under the sun, maybe craning their necks to see the wrought-iron gate and the manor beyond. I pictured they were on their way to markets and laughter and children’s feet thudding on cobblestone streets.
I’d always envied that: The freedom to touch the cobbles.
My only friend once had it, before she was deemed a corruption and sent away. Her family was wealthy enough for my father’s approval, but common enough that she would never outshine me. I would watch her run, laughing, towards my carriage across the square, watch the coachman open a door I wasn’t permitted to touch. Let the help do what they’re paid for, my father would always say.
But I hadn’t seen my old friend in over a decade, and my father was long dead. I was alone; I’d even dismissed the manor’s staff the day I lost the baby.
The thought of it—stated more plainly than I usually allowed myself—sapped the serenity from my roost at the high, arching window. I stood abruptly, stirring up a small sandstorm of dust. Though I was in my own personal bedroom, it was abysmally unkept, and the rest of the house was worse.
Yet how could I keep a staff, in a house whose lord had abandoned it, whose lady was caught in the throes of tragedy? I’d dismissed the nanny first. My own fault, I supposed, for hiring her so early. The silent hallways were almost a comfort, almost a punishment.
So I walked the grounds. Slowly, aimlessly, like some properly mournful spectre in the foggy green— I even donned my most solemn black mantle to match my dress. I didn’t know why I bothered with the pretense, with mourning the way I was told I should. No one could see me; the neighbors were too far removed to be worth worrying about. And if I was seen? Why should I care? Concern for my reputation had left me abandoned.
I kept to the rear garden, where the old groundskeeper had been allowed more freedom with his work. Here the trees were older, the flowers brighter, the paths less uniform and easier to get lost in. I liked the walking. I liked the fog, and the soft tread of my shoes on the dead leaves. The hedges were overgrown; they tugged at the lace of my skirt. And the roses, too, were day-by-day succumbing to an encroaching sea of nettle. I plucked a surviving blossom, held it to my nose, then regretted the violence of it. I crushed the rose and left it to rot with the leaves.
I liked the specific manner of loneliness that the garden provided. I was alone, but there was birdsong. In the house there were only echoes of a family that had been reduced to me. Removed from the empty windows and the ivy that strangled them, I could almost pretend that everything was as it had been. At the very least, I could learn to be numb.
Proximity broke the soft spell of delusion. The closer I got to the house, the more I could feel the agony that clung like dew to the shutterless panes. It was familiar—it was mine. I knew intimately how it gathered like dust, I knew the way the dust had become a shroud.
Less familiar than grief was company.
The stranger on the back porch steps watched me approach. I might have given a start when I first saw them hovering there, one foot on the first stone stair, but then my surprise was past and I could only continue as I had. I walked with my usual measured steps, as though I didn’t see the stranger—not deliberately, but simply because I didn’t have it in me to react. They were already speaking as I reached them, some apology, some explanation: they’d tried to knock on the front door, but had received no response.
I passed the stranger silently, but held the door as I entered the house.
“Milady,” they said, following me inside, “there’s a terrible chill today. You’re not dressed warmly enough.”
I hadn’t realized, but it was cold for the middle of June. I shrugged the mantle from my shoulders, only then noticing how my arms were peppered with goosebumps. The wool-lined silk crumpled on the mudroom’s stone floor. I’d developed a habit of leaving things where they lay, but the stranger leaned down and picked up my mantle. They restored it to its place on the coat hanger.
They didn’t speak again until we reached the parlor. Was it out of respect for my silence? Or just a gathering of their thoughts?
The fireplace was cold, as it had been for months. Only one armchair had been used, my mournful weight having visibly pressed down the thick velvet of the seat. The rug was bunched up and folded over in more places than one, so that walking over it had almost become a hazard.
I entered the room with the ease that came with ownership, but my unknown guest lingered near the doorway much as they’d lingered by the rear garden.
I turned to look at them, and this time I actually looked. It was disheartening: the effort it took to see as I looked, listen as well as hear, to live rather than drift. The stranger wore clothes that were typical of the latest fashion—high trousers, met at the waist by a tight vest, all contained by an unbuttoned tailcoat. They wore, too, a handsome tophat, but they took it off when we entered the house. Now it was held in front of their chest.
“Milady, forgive my intrusion, and forgive me for entering your home without first introducing myself.” But they shouldn’t have to, I realized; the voice was familiar. The stranger’s next words confirmed what I was slowly suspecting, made me ashamed to have thought them strange. “I suppose I had hoped you’d remember me.”
And suddenly, I did.
Staring at them now, locking eyes with this “stranger” across a sea of carpet worth handfuls of gold, I knew who I needed them to be. The bold set of their shoulders, the curious tilt of their chin, the passion for life simmering behind their eyes; all of it spoke of what I’d been missing these past months. All of these were traits I’d imposed on my child’s father, admired in him. All of them had withered in my mind, fallen dead when he fled from me.
Yet here those traits were, more alive than anything else in this house. In my visitor was the promise of strength, of comfort, and so I imposed on this familiar thing the unfamiliar notion of a loving husband.
“Of course I remember you, darling!” I reached out my arms to him, a grin spreading across my face. My cheeks almost ached, unused to the motion.
My husband smiled sadly in response, as though there was some great sorrow that he wanted to spare me. But our sadness was the same; it was the sadness of parents who had lost a child before hearing it cry. It was a shared sadness, and we were grieving together. Mourning together. I continued to stare at my husband’s sharp jaw, intense eyes, and the heavy laugh lines carved into both. I’d imagined our child would laugh like he did. I’d thought of it before I considered the shame of bearing his child when we weren’t wed. I thought first of the child laughing.
Our eyes were still locked as mine began to fill. I tasted the tears before I felt them on my cheeks or registered that they were coming from me. A sob choked me before I could fight it down. “Dearest, where have you been?” I was ashamed of how small I sounded. I felt I should hold my voice in both hands to keep it from trembling. I felt I needed to be held together to keep from shattering.
And then, as though he’d heard my quiet desire, my husband was at my side, holding me afloat. Or maybe it was because I’d sunk to my knees. Maybe it was because I was tipping over, falling towards the back of my father’s old armchair.
There was an arm around my shoulders, a hand feeling my forehead for fever. The voice that said, “You caught a chill out there,” was as deep and steady as I remembered it. Perhaps a little more tender. Perhaps there was something odd about an arm around my shoulders, not my waist—a hand on my forehead, not my breasts. But I was happy, despite any strangeness, to have him beside me. I loved my husband; that much could never be doubted.
And I couldn’t doubt, either, that it was my husband who led me through the many winding hallways. His strength was too familiar, as were his heavy, echoing footsteps. He asked me briefly which room was mine, but he could be forgiven for forgetting. He’d been gone nearly as long as we’d been married.
I was placed in my bed, the blanket pulled to my neck, and my water filled from the pitcher in the bathroom. I think he noted the layer of dust on my nightstand, but said nothing. Then he vanished again.
I assumed, without really thinking about it, that he had left altogether. I imagined he’d glanced at my life and my failure to live it—my refusal to mourn and move on—and decided it wasn’t worth staying for. He’d returned only because he assumed my sadness was through. Upon learning otherwise, of course he’d fled.
That thought rooted itself in my mind and followed me into a feverish unconsciousness. It can’t be said that I slept through the night, but I certainly wasn’t awake for much of it. Though some shadowy figure came to place a warming pan under my sheets and mop the sweat from my brow, I couldn’t believe it was my husband.
But when I came to with the next day’s sun filtering dimly through the window, he was still there. It had been evening when I’d been carried to my bed. It looked like early afternoon now.
I recognized the soup he gave me: It came from a restaurant in the nearby town. It was the same restaurant that had provided all my food lately; they left a week’s worth at my gate every Saturday, and they billed the estate— I hadn’t seen a reason to dismiss the family accountant. I didn’t have the heart to tell my husband I knew the flavor, or that it had never been good soup and I’d asked the restaurant to stop sending it. It was a delicacy from his hands.
I couldn’t stop staring at him. I could hardly believe he was at my bedside, let alone in the country. I’d heard he’d been travelling, yet here he was, sitting in an armchair that looked slept in.
He stood, crossing in front of the bed and making for the window. I’d been perched there just yesterday, healthy but alone. Now I was watching my husband’s broad shoulders rise and fall with his breath. I remembered tracing the lines of that back, never in daylight and never without some sense of fear. Our wedding night had been the only time we didn’t have to hide it, but he’d refused. He said it was because I was pregnant. I didn’t believe it; I thought he’d stopped wanting me because it was no longer a game.
He turned back to me and smiled, commenting on the fog that had overtaken the yard. “Is it really June?”
Consciousness couldn’t hold me long.
I barely spoke a whole sentence in the short time I was awake. I made sure, at least, to remind him that I loved him. I was greeted only by that same sad smile.
The next time I woke, it was the third day of the fever.
I was getting used to being tended to. The sickness had almost felt inevitable—like I’d been fighting it off for weeks now, only waiting for a moment when I wouldn’t have to suffer it alone.
I spoke more this time, but I doubt it was very coherent. I think I asked where he’d been.
“Nearly everywhere. Nowhere as important as here.”
I asked him how that could be possible, when he’d only been gone a couple of months. He told me it felt like longer. He said that, for him, it had been years. He commented on the weather.
I asked him why he’d left.
I think I lost consciousness again, before I heard the answer.
On the sixth night, the fever broke.
The fog lifted, too. The moon was full—I only learned that when its light came shining through the window, brighter than the sun had been in the haze. The light drew my eye first, but movement at the edge of my vision had me staring again at the figure by my bed.
I let out a small cry of shock. The person in the chair opened their eyes.
It seems my delusions had vanished with my fever, vanished like the fog. Gone was my husband’s deep stare, a stare that promised adventure, but no permanence. The eyes that greeted me were sharper, still passionate but steady and still.
I flinched as they reached out a hand to feel my forehead; though they’d spent the week tending me, suddenly they were again a stranger.
“The fever’s broken,” they said, and I was amazed that I ever mistook them for him.
For, though my visitor’s clothing and mannerisms were those of a man, their body— and the tight fit of modern fashion— betrayed them. Their face, too, was slender, with a thin jaw and high cheekbones, and a stunningly arched pair of eyebrows. Their voice was the final clue, and the clearest: this was a woman.
“You are not my husband,” I said, my voice flat and numb.
“No.” They smiled that sad smile again, but this time their face was their own.
“But I know you.”
Their hand had been on my forehead, separated from me by the dampness of a warm washcloth. Now it moved up to brush my hair, gentler than any caress I’d felt. “We were girls together, don’t you remember?”
I did remember—or I was trying to. I was trying to remember what they’d looked like, decades younger and wearing a flowered dress rather than a neat black coat. Their pale brown hair in two braids rather than cut to the base of the neck, small hands reaching for me from the branch of a great sprawling peach tree. And later, once we’d gorged ourselves, our sticky hands plucking daisies to be woven into crowns.
How we’d spoken our deepest darknesses and most secret wants into each other’s hair. How we’d been discovered there, shamed, spat on. They were sent away, and I was left with a father who claimed to be sickened at the sight of me. I was remembering now, how I’d called out to them in the cold emptiness that remained.
Their name dropped from my lips like a fine paperweight: Beautiful, but heavy with the weight of all it meant. It had been nearly a decade since I saw them. We hadn’t parted by choice, yet when my father died, it hadn’t occurred to me to seek them out. Shame, by then, had formed a home in my gut. Shame for what we’d done, despite the happiness it brought me. For all the shadowed places we’d occupied and soft things we’d murmured. The years had made me ashamed of it.
Shame had also driven me to marry a man who loved me less than I loved the footsteps he left, simply because I carried his child.
So what good had shame done me?
I asked tentatively, “What are we now?”
“Not girls any longer.”
Silence fell. The kind only possible at night; when the crickets and birds form a symphony that makes the scene somehow quieter than true silence.
“What made you come back?” I finally asked.
“I met a man.” I looked at them. They smiled. “A horrible man. A man who flaunted the money he’d stolen from the wife he left behind…” They looked at me. I’d grown used to pity, but I’d given up on understanding. The heart that beat behind their eyes almost broke mine. “The wife he’d left cradling their stillborn daughter.”
I didn’t ask how they knew it was me the man had abandoned. I didn’t have the voice—I was crying again.
The tears I shed now were more real than any I’d loosed before. The arms that held me and the voice that soothed me were not imagined, and their owner was not some distant spectre. And though there was still a dull hollowness where I’d once carried my illusions, the hand that helped lift me from my bed also laid a hand on my grief.
And when they walked me to the window and I looked down, the hydrangeas were still in bloom.