Page 32 of Hold Me Fast
“Did I wake you?” Tammie asked. “I am sorry. I came down to find a book to read because I could not sleep, and I fell over a footstool.”
Evangeline dismissed the apology with a wave of her hand. “No matter. It is useful to hear how you have responded before. It will help.”
“Then you get better?” Jowan asked.
Tammie wished that was so! “Then it gets worse,” she explained. “It turns to hell. That is when I need you to hold fast. I shall beg for any release from the pain. Drugs. Alcohol. Death. Any release. You must keep me from them. I might see or hear things that are not there. I might fight you, believing you have turned into some kind of monster. And all the time, right through it, I will be longing for opium, for a drink. Craving them beyond anything you can imagine. As if they would grant me a day in paradise, though I know full well their promise is a lie.”
She took a deep breath. “When the craving is on me, I will do anything and say anything to make it stop. To make the pain stop. I have failed five times. I have never yet managed to get through to the other side.”
“But there is another side, and youcanreach it,” Evangeline said, reassuringly. “I have seen it repeatedly. Just when you think the hell will go on forever, you will find yourself coming out of it. You will sleep for the first time in days, and when you wake, the worst of the symptoms will be gone. Then, each day after that, you will feel more well. You will be able to see the beauty around you again. Life will be worth living once more.”
That was what Tammie wanted. That was what she hoped she could hold on to when the pains and the cravings were at their worst. “If I can reach the end, it will all have been worthwhile,” she said. “But it is not the only possible outcome, Evangeline, and you know it. If I die in the coming days, you must all three remember I prefer death to living in thrall to the poppy and the booze. Do not blame yourselves. Do you hear me? If death is my way to freedom, then so be it.”
*
It was asbad as Tamsyn had described. No, worse, because the beginning was so benign. Jowan sat up with her for the rest of the night, and they shared memories of the childhood they had shared when he was the only son of the baronet, she the only daughter of the housekeeper, and both were neglected by their parents.
A “do you remember” would set off a torrent of stories to take out of storage and bring into the light. Some things, they remembered differently, and when that happened, they argued amiably, even as they had back then, when in all the world there was only Jowan for Tamsyn and Tamsyn for Jowan.
By dawn, her nose had begun to run, and her eyes were red and itchy. The aching had increased, too. She did not complain, but she shifted again and again, never still for more than a moment, and, while she kept her trained voice light and easy, the strain on her face spoke of pain.
It was downhill from then. Jowan went to bed after breakfast. Tamsyn ate little but seemed cheerful enough when he left her playingvingt et unwith Bran. By the time he woke, the next stage had begun. She was calling for a chamber pot every half hour and complaining of the cold while sweating profusely.
As day turned to night and back to day again, they pushed her to drink lemonade, mint tea, broth—anything she could tolerate. Evangeline was calmly determined. “You must drink, Tammie.”
To Tamsyn’s complaint, “I will only bring it back up again,” she said. “Enough of it will stay to do some good.” Sure enough, it inevitably came up again. The maid was kept busy bringing clean chamber pots upstairs as Evangeline removed the one that was recently filled.
Evangeline took most of the burden of care, cleaning up after Tamsyn, sponging her face with cooling water, helping her to change—which she did every couple of hours since she sweated so much.
Jowan and Bran sat with her when Evangeline slipped away for a couple of hours of sleep and also took turns to keep her company throughout the day. Tamsyn said little as she walked up and down or shifted, tossed, and turned in her bed. She was absorbed in her fight against the pain and the fever, which the willow-bark tea Evangeline made did not seem to touch.
On the fourth day, Tamsyn began begging. For opium, for alcohol, for anything that would relieve the pain. “It is crushing my bones. I cannot bear it.”
Each of them had their own way of coping with her increasingly desperate pleas. Evangeline reminded her of the goal—a life no longer in thrall to the drugs and the people who gave them to her. Bran scolded that she had made him promise to say no, and he intended to keep his promise.
The first time she pleaded with Jowan, he thought his heart would break. “You don’t want it, Tammie. Not really. Not deep down. Take my hand. If you need to, squeeze it. Hold me fast, dearest, and we shall get through this together.”
When he relinquished her to Evangeline or Bran, his hand was bruised from her squeezing, but he always offered it again, and again.
By now, she was not just shivering, but shaking, and her fever was so high they were constantly changing the water they used to sponge her down. Even so, she was losing touch with reality, casting each of her carers as a person from her past—a dresser she once knew, her mother, a rival singer, a lover. In those hours, Jowan learned more about her past than he wanted to know.
Around the middle of the day, she sat up straight, her eyes wide with horror. “Snakes!”
Jowan followed her eyes. Nothing.
“Coming out of the wall,” Tamsyn insisted, her voice shrill. “Help me! They are coming for me. Won’t somebody help me?”
Jowan put his arms around her, and though she struggled, saying the snakes were coming, he would not let her go, but held her and murmured to her that she was safe, that he would let nothing hurt her.
A short time later, she fell into convulsions, her shakes turning to full-body shudders, her eyes wide open and staring at nothing, her legs and arms stiff, her teeth clenched. Evangeline was perturbed, though she remained calm.
“Talk to her, Jowan,” she recommended. “Anything you like. A human voice might help, and she knows yours.”
Jowan obeyed, telling an oblivious Tamsyn about the nefarious agent Thatcher, and how Drew had helped him and Bran find replacement investors.
He didn’t get far. According to Bran, the fit only lasted a couple of minutes, though it had seemed much longer. Afterward, Tamsyn slept briefly, only to wake convinced that Jowan and Bran were bears, coming to eat her.
It was the beginning of days of fits and delusions.The shaking frenzy, Evangeline called it. “I should have realized Tammie was drinking heavily, as well as taking drugs… Ah, well. We are started now, and must stay the course,” she said.
