She knocked loudly, with conviction. Charles would open the door and gather her up; slide his arms around her waist like he had in the alleyway in Fez, and she would feel the firm touch of his mouth and the hardness of him, and she would taste him and fold into him and everything would be right. Nobody else would exist. When Celeste opened the door, frowning and wiping her hands on a towel, Dimity blinked, bewildered, and Celeste’s face darkened.
“Dimity. Why have you come? Why do you persist?” she said. Dimity opened her mouth but there were no words within it. The air whistled in and out of her throat. “Tell me, do you honestly think he would leave his daughters to be with you? Do you think that?”
Her voice was flat and angry. Dimity stayed silent. She felt faint, hazy; not quite real. “He’s not here, if that’s what you were hoping. He’s gone with the girls to Swanage, to ride the donkeys on the beach and to shop and play on the amusements.”
“I wanted to…” Dimity started to say, but she didn’t know what it was that she had wanted. The woman in front of her was the sum of everything she would never have. In a hindquarter of her brain, Dimity gazed at Celeste and despised her. “I brought these for you. For all of you,” she said, putting a hand on the plants she had collected.
“There is no need.” Celeste tapped her toe against a basket on the doorstep, already full of leafy plants. “Delphine went early this morning. Without you. She left me these herbs to make a soup for my lunch.”
“Oh.” Dimity struggled to focus her eyes, struggled to think. There was a shrill humming sound in her ears, and Celeste’s voice seemed to come from a long way away. She squinted up at the Moroccan woman and wondered how she had ever thought her beautiful. Celeste was shadowy and cruel, a figure to be feared and loathed. A stubborn blight, an open sore that refused to heal.
“Now listen to me. No more of this.” Celeste sighed abruptly, through her nose. “Leave us alone,” she said, and closed the door.
Dimity rocked slightly on her heels. The ground was a queasy blur at her feet and a sudden sickness filled her throat with a foul, acid taste. If he was free, he would be with me. She shut her eyes and pictured Charles rescuing her, saving her, as she lay on the ground, ready to be torn apart by wild men in Fez; she thought of his kiss in the alleyway, the touch of his hand as he helped her up; the flowers like a wedding bower arching over them as they had sat together at the Merenid Tombs. That desert place where everything had been as perfect and glorious as a dream. Dimity opened her eyes and looked down at Delphine’s basket. She saw wild garlic and parsley; celery, lovage, and caraway. It was a good forage, the leaves all young and tender, nothing picked that might have gone woody or bitter. And caraway was a rare find, a delicious one. Delphine had been an attentive pupil. Dimity stood and stared down at the herbs for a long time. She looked at her own collection, in the sling hanging at the end of her numb arm. The weight of it was suddenly too much and she set it down at her feet, bending low over it. Garlic, parsley, celery, lovage, caraway. The blood thumped in Dimity’s head, painful and insistent. The greenery swam in front of her eyes, half hidden by her own trailing hair. Garlic, parsley… There was the water hemlock, the cowbane, in her own pile. Carefully kept apart, carefully bunched together; leaves, stems, sweet thick roots. Dimity could hardly breathe for the pain behind her eyes. She stood up at last and walked away with jerky, wobbling steps. And somehow the cowbane was no longer in her sling. It was in Delphine’s basket.
CHAPTER TEN
Three days after Ilir had fought with Ed Lynch in the pub, Zach began to pack up all his things. A catalog slipped from his fingers onto the floor, the spine cracked by the number of times he had looked at it so that it fell open at a picture of Dennis, the young man who’d brought him to Blacknowle in the first place. Dennis, and Delphine: the daughter who disappeared. He pictured her face, hanging on the gallery wall; all the hours he had spent studying it and coveting it. He’d been so sure, for a while, that he would find out what had happened to her. That Dimity Hatcher would know, and would tell him once he had fetched hearts for her, and charmed her with portraits of herself she had never seen before. Now he had to choose between Charles Aubrey and Hannah Brock, since Hannah was somehow involved in cheating the man to whom Zach felt a fierce, if nebulous, loyalty. Hannah who had shut him out, and lied to him, and possibly felt nothing for him. Soon, he would have to drive out of Blacknowle with a destination in mind. Soon, but not quite yet. He breathed a small sigh of relief as he gave himself this stay of execution.
The Watch was silent and lifeless, the windows blank, betraying not even a flicker of movement from within. Zach stood beneath the small window in the north-end wall and stared up at it. This was the room from which the sounds of movement had always come. The glass pane was broken in one corner, a small hole at the center of a starburst of cracks, as though somebody had thrown a pebble through it at some point. He could see pale curtains hanging inside, half open, half closed. One of them shifted slightly in the breeze, and the sudden movement made Zach jump, made him duck for cover nearer the wall, before he realized what it was. Was there something in that room that Dimity Hatcher wanted to hide? Something, or someone? Just then he heard the quiet, dry sound of paper sliding against paper, coming from the window. The turning of a page; the discarding of one piece from a pile. Zach’s scalp crawled peculiarly, and he hurried away from the window.
He knocked several times on the door, but there was no answer. He couldn’t think where else Dimity could be, except inside. He pictured the way her gaze drifted into the distance, the way she seemed to vanish into her thoughts. He thought of her oddness, her charms and spells. He thought of a kitchen knife in her hand and the way her light sometimes stayed on late into the night, as though she never slept. He thought of blood beneath her fingernails, staining her disheveled mittens. Shivering slightly, he knocked again, more softly; suddenly almost afraid to rouse her. This time, he heard movement from within.
There was a pitch-black thing, crowding the room; swelling like a huge and deadly wave, waiting to break. Dimity cowered from it. It did no good to shut her eyes. When she shut her eyes, she saw rats. Rats twisted up with their eyes bulging and their bodies twitching and jerking into death. Rats that had eaten Valentina’s hemlock bait. She went from room to room, murmuring all the charms she knew, but the threatening darkness kept after her. What happened to Celeste? she heard Zach ask, and she spun around, wondering how he’d got inside, how long he’d been there, listening. But no, just another echo, the echo of a question he’d asked before. Recently, or a long time ago? She couldn’t remember now. Time was behaving oddly; day and night had blurred. She could no longer sleep at night, only in fitful snatches during the safety of the daylight hours. Too many visitors, too many voices. Élodie doing handstands against the living room wall; Valentina laughing, mocking, waving her finger; Delphine’s sad, sad eyes. And now this dreadful black thing, too, which had no name, which refused to identify itself. But in the writhing rats, scrabbling in the corners of the room, Dimity understood what it was, and she feared it more than anything. It was the thing that she did. The awful thing.