Page 114 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
I got to my feet, but I didn’t say anything.
Auden was behind her, one hand on the small of her back, the other holding his phone as they mounted the stairs. When he looked up from his phone and saw me, his entire body seemed to quake with relief.
“Rebecca,” he said. The flat was all open spaces and hard surfaces, so I could hear him easily, even though he spoke in the quiet, forced tones of someone trying very, very hard to keep it together.
Concern flooded through me. My friend could be many things—bitter, restless, melancholic—but he never, ever looked like he was about to break. Even at his worst moments, the times when I knew his father had hit him, when his mother had caused a drunken scene, when he had worn himself down to the bone to prove himself at school or his new firm—even then, he moved through life with a sepia-toned elegance and genteel control.
More than once it had occurred to me that he might enjoy my same deviant tastes, because that control, that restraint—it wasn’t all inherited Guest decorum and educated finish, oh no. It was innate to him, inborn. Authority, hubris, insolence. Streaks of cruelty. As deep in him as his vision, his discipline, his loyalty. As deep as his fiercely moral view of the world and everyone in it.
; “Do you need to sit . . . ” The invitation died on my lips. It was meant for Auden, but once I saw Delphine’s face, I knew that she wasn’t okay either, I knew that she needed to sit more.
Her luxurious gold waves hung limply around her face, lank with lack of washing and flat with sleeping. Her face was stripped bare of makeup—which wasn’t concerning by itself—but her eyes had deep smudges underneath and her lips were frightfully chapped and split. She was wearing wrinkled rich-girl pajamas—silk and lapelled, with buttons marching up between braless breasts—and a pair of expensive trainers without socks.
I slid my eyes over to Auden’s, and what I saw there was desperation.
“I didn’t have—” His hand left Delphine’s back to stab anxiously through his hair, which settled back over his forehead the minute his fingers left it. “I’m so sorry, Quartey. I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
Delphine didn’t seem to react to this, not much anyway. She heaved a little sigh and then drifted farther into the room, standing there like the world’s most pathetic mannequin.
“Guest,” I said. “Get yourself a drink.”
“I can’t,” he murmured, looking down at the phone.
“Did you drive?”
“Yes.”
“Are you leaving again?” I looked over to Delphine, who still stood in the middle of the room. It bothered me to see her motionless. To see her dull. Always she was laughing and chattering and beaming, always always, and I’d thought I hated it, but—
This was worse. Much worse.
“Delphine,” I said, my voice coming out sharper than I’d planned. “Sit down.”
I hadn’t meant it to come out like a command, but perhaps I was more upset than I realized. I took in a breath to apologize—to soften the order and make it more of a suggestion—but she surprised me and Auden both when she dutifully walked over to one of the sofas and sat. She stared straight ahead, eyes focused on nothing, her lush mouth in a dead, expressionless shape.
If someone had asked me what I would have felt to see Delphine Dansey like this—grimy and grotty and blank—I would’ve said that I would feel pity, and maybe disdain. Maybe a distant sort of compassion, in the global Buddhist sense of the word.
But that’s not what I felt looking at her.
I felt fear.
Fear so powerful it climbed up my throat. Fear like I hadn’t felt since the first night Daddy and I stayed in London without Ma, in a brand-new flat without furniture or food or plants or both my parents.
“Stay there,” I told her—pointlessly, because she obviously wasn’t moving under her own willpower. Then I walked to the kitchen and gestured for Auden to follow me.
“What’s happening?” I asked him once we got there. “The trial’s over, isn’t it? Shouldn’t she be relieved? Happy?”
Auden rubbed his face with a hand. His other hand hadn’t stopped clutching his phone since the moment he came up the stairs.
“She’s not doing well,” said Auden quietly. “I’ve been staying with her when I can—it’s technically against the rules—but everyone at the Grange has been letting it slide, considering the circumstances. She’s been seeing a therapist here in London once a week, she’s been able to make most of her classes. And at the trial—she rallied, didn’t she? She was so focused. So sharp. Which is why when Mum took ill, I thought I could come down—” He broke off, guilt twisting at his mouth.
I touched his shoulder. “Your mother isn’t well?”
“Pneumonia,” Auden said without emotion. “Aspirated her own sick after drinking too much. She was managing, but things have gotten worse. They’re moving her to critical care.”
“Auden.”
