So he could grab an actual hammer, lug a smooth board across the room, and set it in place.Soon he’d be done. Perhaps, even, tonight. No more putting off the inevitable. He must finish the house and leave. As soon as possible so he did not magnify the carnage he’d already be leaving in his wake.
Thirteen
December 21, 1822
Another nightmare woke Atlas, and he gulped in gray dawn light with the air, muffling his ragged breaths with a blanket shoved over his mouth. The dreams, once rare, ripped through his sleeping hours more often than not the last several weeks, and each one found him sweating, reaching for the trigger of a rifle or the hilt of a sword from the cold, hard floor of his bedchamber.
When his heartbeat settled to a slightly softer rhythm, he glanced at the bed. Clara slept soundly, as she did every morning, fresh sunlight spilling over her luscious form. Shadows reigned, still, in the cold corner he’d used as bed since the day he’d returned from the dairy. He groaned as he pushed out of the little nest he slept in each night and stretched. Damn, he missed his bed. His body demanded comfort, but he’d demanded they continue this hellish game of pretend until after Christmas. For his family’s sake. His body’s needs be damned.
And he couldn’t very well share the bed with Clara anymore. She’d yelled at him a bit the first time he’d curled up on the floor,showing a fiery passion that had made him want to toss her onto the very bed she insisted he use and use it in a way she no longer wanted.
He’d slept in the dower house that night to avoid further temptation. Not something he could do every night without arousing his family’s suspicion.
The hard floor his penance, his sacrifice. Over soon, though. Christmas fast approached, and then they’d reveal the true state of their marriage to his mother.
Good. It must end soon, or he’d go mad.
Because every damn day he wanted his wife more than the day before. Wasn’t supposed to be this way. Love at first sight never lasted. A bright burst, a short life, a quick end. Something to be glad for before moving on to the next thing.
But Clara …
Clara. Pink and green and red, curves and color and apple. The most beautiful part of his day, the moments before she woke up. Her thick eyelashes shadowed her pale cheek, and her lips parted slightly in sleep. Her long hair escaped in wild tendrils from her plait, and if a curl crossed her eyelids, he tucked it behind her ear. And if the quilt had strayed too low on her form, he tugged it up to her neck.
Today, both were in need of fixing, so he did, trying not to linger, failing. Then, like every morning, he left her warm and rosy-cheeked and opened the door so slowly flowers likely unfurled beneath morning light before he could slip through and into the empty hallway. And finally breathe without taking in the clean scent of his wife along with the air.Likeair. Soap and paint. He’d never again smell either without thinking of Clara.
But he should not be thinking of Clara at all. She did not want him to. And she had a point. They’d made great strides with the dower house in the month and a half since she’d come to Briarcliff, and he guessed that, perhaps, in a month or a little bitmore, he’d be able to leave. He’d be able to visit in life the places he haunted while sleeping, the places that haunted him. He’d be able to see them green and glowing and breathe in the smell of air and sea and sun, not blood and sweat and gunpowder. And once he saw that soil could heal, maybe he could heal, too.
Everyone thought him already mended. Because he wanted them to, needed them to. But he wasn’t. Not even close, and the most brutal wounds were those no one could see. He had to suture those first before…
Before what?
No looking beyond that moment. He hadn’t looked beyond it in years. Leaving, traveling, healing, his only horizon.
He crossed the field that led to the dower house in the gray morning fog and let himself in. What was there to do today? They worked, still on the molding that would go around the ceilings of each room. Clara helped him when she could. When she wasn’t resurrecting tables with chips and chairs with broken legs. She insisted on not just fixing them but refinishing them, claiming, rightly, that it would be better than spending money on new furniture.
Running his hand across a pedestal table she’d completed yesterday, he closed his eyes. A silky finish. But not as silky as her hair. He began to hum, an old tune he’d crafted before he’d met her.
But the words didn’t come, neither the old ones nor any new ones. He had no new words since he’d left their bed. Tunes hummed through him, but lyrics kept their distance. How could the words come when everything had turned gray? Every flower, every sunrise, every damn blade of grass.
He stomped up the stairs to the room he’d been working on for weeks. The floor fixed now, smoothed and stained and shining. He’d moved on to other tasks, smaller ones that signaled the room would soon be finished.
Bypassing all tools, all tasks, he strode straight to the window, checked the lock. Still in place. As it had been for weeks now.
Not that Alfie had tried to climb through it. Clara had told him the window needed to be nailed shut for some reason or another. The boy had glanced at Atlas, frowned, then shrugged and ambled off, likely to find some other height to risk his life with.
Atlas turned from the empty square and sorted through his tools, studied the list Clara had given him of tasks to be completed.
A tap against the glass, and Atlas’s heart leapt. He leapt to his feet and turned to the window. Empty. A rising wind had knocked a tree branch against the closed window.
Not Alfie.
Atlas rubbed his chest, tried to massage the howling knot out of his heart. But pacing uncountable laps around the room didn’t do it. With a growl, he collapsed against the wall, sinking to the floor and reaching for his small knife, the ill-shaped chunk of wood next to it. The first slice shaved off a bit of his restlessness, and by the time a man’s head formed beneath his strokes, he could breathe again, he could resist looking at that empty window.
Each tap of the branch against the window, though, so like a boy’s fist demanding entrance, may as well have been a slice of his knife into his flesh.
Focus on the form taking shape, cut away everything that doesn’t matter. Each snick of blade against wood, a note. Each breath from his lungs, a chorus. Until the form looked more boy than man. Should be perched in a tree.
Hell.
