Page 82 of The Light Between Worlds

I stretch my hands and shake tension from my arms. The drowned girl’s eyeless sockets are staring blankly at me in the tortured mess of my own mind, and I can’t dodge the image, no matter how hard I try. “You’re right. I promise to behave. Can I at least bring you your shirt and fix a cup of tea?”

The door opens, and I hand Jack’s shirt over demurely.

“I’m sor—” I begin, but he presses a finger to my lips.

“Don’t be. Let’s have that tea you mentioned.”

We have our tea, and suddenly I’m dead tired, hardly able to keep awake. I fall asleep alone in Jack Summerfield’s bed, and it’s not a grey beach that haunts my dreams, or the way a drowned girl looks, but the smell of paint and canvas.

58

“IT’S NOT MUCH, BUT IT’S YOURS IF YOU WANT IT,” SAYSMrs. Hammond, Jack’s blowsy and accommodating landlady, a round and apple-cheeked woman with greying blond hair. First thing in the morning he smuggled me out of the house to ring the doorbell and introduce myself as his friend, who’s looking for a place to stay.

There’s very little to this room under the eaves. Just a bed, a wardrobe, and an old-fashioned washstand with a pitcher and basin on it that Mrs. Hammond says she’ll fill for me during the days. The bathroom and the lav are shared, off the hall outside Jack’s own rooms. This is what I’ve come to, in my waiting and my endless repentances—a girl who pays rent, but who’s really living on charity, stuffed into the corners of other people’s lives, because they pity me, because they see I’m falling apart.

“It’s exactly what I need,” I say with a smile as bright as the sun. “Could I have a moment?”

I can hear them speaking in low voices as they retreat down thehallway, Mrs. Hammond sounding anxious, Jack quiet and self-assured.

“How long will she stay, do you think?”

“I don’t know. As long as she needs to.”

“Is she good for the rent?”

“Of course, Mrs. Hammond. We work together, you know. I’d vouch for her anywhere.”

Once they’ve gone, I walk over to the wardrobe and glance inside. When I open the door, mothballs roll out, accompanied by a scent of cedar. It’s empty, with more than enough room for the few things I have to my name.

For the first time, I wonder if Evelyn felt this way—as if she was existing on crumbs of compassion, on fading goodwill, always on the edges, in the shadowland between worlds.

“Evie, my love,” I whisper, into the silence of the attic room. “How I miss you.”

When I walk down the hall to the restoration studio the following day to meet Jack for lunch, he’s already waiting outside the door. The hello I was about to offer dies on my lips. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Jack runs a hand across his face and shakes his head. “Nothing. Just promise me you’ll keep out of the studio for a few days.”

My breath catches in my throat. “Why?”

“Please. Just promise.”

But I push past him and stop on the threshold, pressing a hand to my mouth to hold in the frightened sound that wants to escape.

Three paintings hang on the far wall. Each of them depicts a single female figure. The first sits in a little boat, about to set off downstream, her face a study in heartbreak—Waterhouse’sLady of Shalott, sailing to her death. The second lies on her back in the water itself, being borne away by the current, unseeing eyes turned skyward—Millais’sOphelia, who walked willingly into the river.

And between the two, stark and simpler in its rendering, is Watts’sFound Drowned. Its lonely, lifeless figure lies cast up on the shore of the Thames, with water still lapping at her while London broods in the distance.

Jack takes me by the arm and steers me away, through the quieter galleries and out the front doors into the sun. I can hear him speaking distantly, saying meaningless, comforting things. But I’m waking in the New England dark again, and hearing Jamie’s voice across the Atlantic. I’m standing on the bank of the River Went with Hobb, feeling the cold water close over my head. I’m sitting in the Harpers’ barn, offering hope to Tom that I can’t keep for myself. I’m knocking on the bathroom door, and jimmying the lock only to find Evelyn seated in a pool of her own blood, holding a blade sharper than truth.

There’s a commotion building in the square below us, and it filters through my remembering. I look down in confusion as people push away from the square’s far end. Shocked exclamations ring through the spring air.

Impossibly, a stag is picking his way across the pavement. He goes carefully on cloven hooves, tall and rust-red and wearing his antlers like a crown. There’s a glint in his eyes that says he’s out ofplace and afraid, and I know that look for I’ve worn it a thousand times.

I fly down the steps before Jack can stop me. Bystanders back away from the stag, wary of his crown, and they part before me like ripples around a rock.

We meet in empty space, he and I, set apart from the watching crowds, and there’s an animal sort of confusion in the way the creature tosses his head that tugs at my heart.

“Come here,” I murmur, reaching out to him. “Have you lost your way?”