Page 72 of Infamous

‘Please do come here, Edie. I cannot stand to see you look so glum over so little cause.’

He didn’t wait for her to answer; he just stepped forwards and kissed her, his hands finding hers where they held the manuscript and taking hold of them. Eddie was still halfway to crying, frustrated and hurt, and could not reconcile these feelings withkissing. She could feel the paper crumpling beneath their hands, and it was all she could think about; his fingers tightened – she supposed in passion, although she had no idea where it could have appeared from – and she felt panic unfurl in her chest at the thought of her manuscript being bent and torn beneath them.

She pulled away, and Nash sighed, that little hint of frustration back immediately. Eddie felt like an enormous disappointment. They were both still holding on to the sheaf of papers between them, Nash’s hands overlapping Eddie’s.

‘I .?.?. I need to go and fix this,’ she said. ‘I will not rest until it’s done.’

She tugged at the manuscript and felt a moment’s resistance before Nash let it go.

‘All right. I admire your perseverance. Not about the rest part, though – youmustrest, or you will become so sick of inventing delightful adjective combinations that you will throw yourself neatly in the lake. Come and find me later and I shall fortify you with whisky and wine, hmmm?’

Eddie nodded.

The rain had let up, and she walked from the house not really knowing where she was going, the maelstrom of emotions inside her narrowing to a sharp resolve that settled behind her sternum and made her burn with purpose. She found herself at the boathouse, and when she opened the door she discovered that Dayo was sitting inside at a makeshift desk, blankets heaped over his shoulders to warm him.

He glanced briefly up at her and then shrugged one of the blankets off, holding it out for her to take.

‘Come in if you are coming in. And take care when you close the door – there is a spider up there the size of Germany just waiting for her chance to strike.’

Chapter Twenty-four

By the first week of November, the rain had paused. When the early morning fog rolled away the days were bright, greyish-white, a constant thin cover of cloud preventing the sunshine from breaking through.

It was also bitterly cold. All the little quirks and cracks of the house colluded to allow freezing draughts to blast through every room, so that the only way to stay a vaguely healthy temperature was to huddle around the fire wearing every possible layer of clothing. Blankets became currency; they could be traded for the last of a bottle of wine, a nip of good whisky, or as payment for being the person to go up and call for one of the servants or fetch something from another room. The damp only made it worse. Even the cleanest bedclothes would succumb quickly to that peculiar, half-rotted smell; Eddie would sometimes catch a whiff of it even on a freshly laundered dress, and could no longer tell if it was real or imagined.

Eddie and Dayo had worked side by side in the boathouse very briefly until it became untenable, and then had taken up residence in the library at opposite ends of the desk. On the first truly cold day, Dayo had come downstairs to discover Eddie vigorously rubbing her hands together in an attempt to regain some feeling in them, and had immediately dragged the desk as close to the fireplace as possible without setting it alight. They worked mostly in silence, although occasionally one of them would ask the other for the correct spelling of a word, or how many sentence clauses constituted a glut. Dayo would sometimes read passages aloud to test the cadence of them, and Eddie would forget about her own work and listen, transfixed, as he carefully unspooled the inner workings of colonialism and the slave trade for proper examination.

The others mostly gathered in the drawing room, which was small enough to retain heat. Eddie thought they also favoured it due to the fact that the walls were a deep red, which gave the impression of warmth even before one factored in the fire. The South Parlour, with its gaping hole now boarded over and so much of the outer wall made of glass, had become uninhabitable.

At night, Eddie and Rose disrobed as quickly as possible with fumbling fingers, emitting little shrieks and groans of agony as they did; after the first few nights of bitter cold, Eddie had rolled over to Rose’s side of the bed while half-asleep, seeking the heat from her body, and Rose had nestled in close without hesitation. After that they slept wrapped around each other like cats, too cold to waste energy on acknowledging this new arrangement as anything other than a necessity, although Eddie often found herself struggling to drift off, guiltily attuned to the feeling of Rose breathing against her in the dark. Sometimes Eddie would open her eyes to discover that her face was pressed into the crook of Rose’s neck, or that one of Rose’s arms was thrown over her, their dark hair mingling on the white pillows until she couldn’t tell which belonged to her any more. She would lie awake trying to soothe her racing heart and think of Rose’s words –I like girls– and wonder what, exactly, constituted alikeso strong and certain that it was worth speaking aloud. She liked Rose right here, pressed against her under a heap of blankets. She liked the smell of her hair, and the odd little snuffling noises she made in her sleep, and the all-encompassing warmth of her.

She had liked kissing her. More than she had liked kissing Nash, in retrospect. That was hard to deny. It was also hard to categorise, in her mind. She could almost place it firmly in the realm ofunderstandable, kissing is a pleasant physical act, and Rose is very pleasant.?.?. but sometimes it got away from her somewhat, and she found herself gently panicking and disentangling herself from Rose’s sleeping form. It was no good wondering what might be – or what they could be to each other, if Eddie followed that thread – when all Rose wanted and needed was for Eddie to be her friend.

For her part, Rose had seemed pleased by Eddie’s easy acceptance of her blanket revelation, but was still keeping a little more distance than usual during the daylight hours. Perhaps she was still angry at Eddie for kissing Nash. Perhaps she regretted telling Eddie the truth.

There were endless perhapses, and Eddie made sure that she was too busy writing to study them properly.

The heroine in her manuscript, Delilah Fortescue, had now successfully impersonated her husband – with a few near misses – at dinner parties, at Parliament, and even in front of his own mother. She had accidentally begun a new romance with a stranger and was hurtling towards the third act, when all the consequences would come knocking. Eddie felt so mired in all the different threads that she could barely see the path ahead. The only way out was to write, and she barely stopped; she wrote at breakfast, wolfing down the hottest food she could manage before escaping to the library; she spent all day crouched over the desk by the fire, inching closer until she was in grave danger of a singeing; she rarely got away with writing at dinner, but when they all relocated to the drawing room afterwards she wedged herself firmly into a corner and put pen to paper again until the words blurred or someone (usually Valentine) threatened to toss the manuscript into the fire and carry her to bed themselves.

She tried to put herself in the mind of a London editor, to imagine what he might want from her. Nash had been strangely and unhelpfully taciturn on the subject, which left her rudderless and unsure, constantly second-guessing her instincts. She was beginning to suspect that she didn’t have any at all.

All her hard work seemed to be irritating Nash, who was drinking more heavily than ever, and kept insinuating that Eddie was being absolutely dire company. Truth be told, he seemed sick of all of them. It seemed as if hehadsent something to his editor, as he had recently received a number of very pointed letters, which Eddie had found half-burned in the grate; from what she could gather, he had missed both a deadline and an extension on a deadline, and things were getting slightly fraught.

As Eddie’s chances at publication rested entirely on Nash’s continuing relationship with this man, she couldn’t help but frown across the room when she saw him not writing in the morningorthe afternoon. In fact,anyopportunity to not write was taken up enthusiastically, to the point that Eddie once saw him pick up a quill and then use it to try to wrestle with the dog.

‘You have all atrophied,’ he said one night at dinner, gesturing around at them with an accusatory wineglass. ‘I only ever discover you sitting in the exact same places. What on earth is the point of being here at all? You might as well be sitting sentry around your fires in London.’

‘Yes,’ Albert said to Rose under his breath. ‘We might as well be.’

‘I didn’t quite catch that, Albert.’

Albert cleared his throat and put down his own glass.

‘We are, in fact, thinking of returning to London. We are enormously grateful to you for hosting us, of course, but we have intruded on your hospitality for long enough. We have a wedding to plan, and the weather being as it is—’

‘Nonsense,’ said Nash, slamming his glass down so hard on the table that Eddie was surprised it didn’t shatter. ‘You only think the fun has run out because you have ceased to contribute. It is hardly cold enough to warrant an evacuation. We ought to be .?.?. you know .?.?. telling ghoulish stories, and roasting things on the fire, and drinking enough that the weather never touches us.’

Valentine, who was drinking almost as much as Nash but had been noticeably quieter as the weather had turned, raised a glass in salute.