Page 57 of Oleander

I’m on my way home. Can you wait for me? Please.

He never responded, and when Luke drove me up the long drive to the back door of Deveraux I already knew I was too late.

I found Gideon in one of the downstairs sitting rooms. He was sipping a glass of whiskey and writing something in what looked like a journal. He glanced up as I came into the room.

“Jude, there you are,” he said as though he’d been expecting me and I hadn’t come bursting unexpectedly into his house.

“Is he gone?” My voice was twisted tight like a knot.

Gideon gave me a sad little smile. “He left this morning. His flight into Zurich landed...” He looked at his Rolex. “Oh, about twenty minutes or so ago.”

Of course, he’d sent me the text after landing then.

I felt the strength leave me. Impotent fury curling my fists. This was my fault. I shouldn’t have run away on Saturday. If I’d stayed. If I’d called or texted or come to see him on Sunday...maybe he wouldn’t have left.

I sank down onto the closest couch and put my head in my hands, exhausted suddenly.

“Why…?” I breathed out. I hadn’t meant for Gideon to hear, but he had, and he got up from the desk and came to sit next to me. He put a comforting hand on the back of my head, ruffling my hair gently.

“Why do you think?”

I lifted my head to look at him and his hand fell away.

“I don’t know.” I shook my head.

Gideon had the strangest expression on his face as he said, “Oh, Jude, I think you do.”

I shook my head. “I don’t. You said he hated it there. Why would he go back?”

“Cas is a bit of a masochist at heart.” Gideon seemed almost amused by this. “He likes to prove to himself he can do anything, stick out anything. But, well, I do know that he would have stayed had he thought there was something worth staying here for.” He levelled at me the most calculated look I’d ever seen on a human. It chilled me to the bone. “Did something happen between you two? Did you have a fight?”

I shrugged miserably. “We always fight. But I wanted...” I trailed off. “I hoped I’d get here before he left...to tell him...” I couldn’t order a single thought in my head so that I might explain it. Though truly, I had no idea what I was trying to tell Gideon. Or what I’d have told Caspien had I got there in time.

Of course, it wouldn’t have made any difference. I know that now. But I was stupid then. Naïve. I was Sisyphus and Cas the mountain.

Gideon said nothing for a long time, but then he reached into his pocket, pulled out a handkerchief, and handed it to me. I was embarrassed to find I’d been crying.

The handkerchief was pale grey and had the initials G.L.D monogrammed in darker grey. For Gideon Lorcan Deveraux, I would learn later.

“I was in love once, too,” he said.

I started with shock.

I shook my head again. “I’m not. That’s not what I—.”

“Not even with your girlfriend?” He cut in easily. “Lovely young lady by all accounts. Pretty, too.” His mouth twitched with something resembling distaste, but I was distracted as his sharp stare left mine and drifted across the room. I followed his eyes to where a portrait of his sister, Caspien’s mother, hung. She wore a yellow dress, the neckline hanging off her shouldersto show off a long, elegant neck. She had his eyes, a crystalline stare that pierced through skin and bone, but her mouth was softer. A hint of a smile pulled at the corner. I could imagine her laugh.

“Love is often painful. I think it’s rather the very nature of it.”

“What happened to her?” I heard myself asking. I’d meant to ask something else. Something about love and pain and why he was so sure the nature of one was the other.

But I suddenly wanted to know about Seraphina Deveraux. I’d heard stories. Everyone who lived on this island had. Some stories had her locked in the attic of this house still. Some had her alive in a hospital in London, feral and unhinged. But most believed she’d died by suicide because the husband she gave up her name and her inheritance for left her for another woman. I wasn’t sure which one I believed or hoped was true; all of them were equally as tragic.

“She fell in love too,” he said obliquely before turning from her image and looking back at me. “You could write to him,” Gideon said, standing. He was walking back to his desk.

“Write?”

Until then, I’d written exactly one letter in all of my fifteen years. To a boy in 1942. For a history project a few years ago, they’d made us write to our imaginary counterparts in occupied Jersey to ask them how they felt about the Nazis and tell them what lessons had been learned from the second world war. Jacob – the name I’d invented – had not written back.