Page 93 of The Grosvenor's Ghost
I know I should give it back but I can’t. I thought about it, when I first got back—maybe I should’ve given it to Digby for when the time comes but I didn’t. Something stopped me, the delusion that maybe I’d have the chance to put it on her finger for a second time.
I rest my head in my hands, drop the ring into the pile of letters I’ve never given her to read.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Lady Phoebe
That afternoon, I go to Cynthia’s. That little house in Notting Hill with the famous lilac front door, shadowed in crawling ivy and hydrangeas.
She answers the door, waving a stick of sage around. I cough, wave the smoke away from my face as I walk in. Her house is a fucking mess, I’m going to be honest. Statues, mannequins, sculptors, different psychedelic wallpaper on every wall, neon sofas, plants in every corner. Not a single nook or cranny is empty or plain.
Absolute hell in the summer.
It’s exactly what you’d expect from an eccentric woman who was most definitely reincarnated after being hung in Salem.
“Had a bad feeling this morning,” she tells me, inviting me into the front reception room.
“Oh, really?” I place my bag on my lap. “Care to share?”
“No,” she says instantly, sits opposite me, places her stick of sage onto an ashtray. “I can’t burden you with my ghosts.”
“I appreciate that.”
She pours us two mugs of jasmine tea imported from Singapore in a cute little vintage teapot. I sip on it in small doses, the repercussions of last night have yet to exit my body—even after I sat in a steam room for two hours and had a massage at Espa. I did actually feel a bit better after that but it was when I went back home and saw Digby’s face that my stomach started to curdle again.
“What can I do for you?”
A little black kitten jumps up onto her lap, she strokes the fur like she’s had it all her life.
“I didn’t know you had cats?”
“I don’t,” she shakes her head. “But he appeared in my garden after a storm so it was a sign, I took him in.”
“Jesus Christ,” I mutter into my mug. “There’s probably some poor girl out there looking for her kitten.”
She shakes her head again, sure of herself. “No, he told me—he said, I’m here for you. Like a guardian angel.”
“Okay,” I nod, squeeze my eyes shut. I’m far too hungover for this. After a second, I sit up, face her, head on. “What would you do if you loved someone to the point of insanity but couldn’t be with them?”
She takes a sip from her tea, thinks about it for a second.
“Kill myself or them.”
“Cynthia.”
She throws her hands up. “I’m serious! I’d never love someone to the point of insanity—the only person you should love to that extent should be yourself, my love.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“If you give all your love to someone else, how will there be enough to give to yourself?” She tilts her head, looks a bit sorry for me. “Is this about Arthur?”
I nod.
“Well, in that case, I don’t understand the issue. You tell each other everything,” she shrugs airily as if it’s as easy as that. And I guess, for her it is. Some people are reckless when it comes to love, they do and say things without thinking of the other person—honesty is the best policy and all that. But it isn’t. Love is a careful, delicate, often fickle thing. It’s the thread you sow into a needle with your tongue poking out and an eye squinted. It’s the seaweed covered rocks you cross to reach an oasis. It’s the early morning sunrise before everyone is awake—even ifthere is no sun—and the entire world is quiet and it’s just you, your breath so low with the fear of breaking the peacefulness that’s so little and far between in this world.
I shake my head, hang my shoulders. “I can’t tell him this.”
“Why not?”
