Page 51 of The Dravenhearst Brides

Dear Ruth,

Keep this letter and show it to me if I am ever mad enough to desire this again. To subject myself to such horror.

Horror, yes—a woman is never closer to the veil between life and death than when she gives birth to a child.

—Excerpt, a letter from Babette Dravenhearst to Ruth

As dawn approached, Margot awoke to blinding pain.

Violent cramps pulsed through her abdomen, ripples of sickening throbs. She knew it was wrong. Something was wrong. So very terribly wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Her vision swirled when she opened her eyes. Merrick’s lips were moving, but she couldn’t hear his words. He was very pale. His eyes were hypnotizingly black, scarcely a band of amber peeping through.

She focused on the glimpse of gold. The light.

Far better, she realized faintly, to look at his eyes than all the red in the bed.

Another wave of pain. She gritted her teeth. It was agonizing, ripped through her heart as much as her body.

She understood enough to know something was being taken from her. Something precious.

Before she closed her eyes again, before she gave herself to unconsciousness, she saw it there, on the nightstand. A teacup.

So that was it then.

She had failed.

A soft breeze tickled her cheek. A shower of white all around.

Blossoms. Petals. Raining down from heaven. The eaves overhead dripped, heavy with them.

She spun, floating dreamily in her cocoon. Blooms landed in her hair. Her lungs filled with the scent of honeysuckle sweetness.

Her fingertips curled open, stretching to catch silk.

A soft murmur of voices. So soft.

The breeze crested, tugging at the ends of her hair.

Margot slept.

“I will rest after she wakes. I have to know she’s okay.”

Soft buzzing filled her ears. Bumblebees in spring. Cicadas in summer.

A thunderously jarring punch, a fist hitting a wall. A tree falling in the forest.

A tree.

Falling.

Falling.

Falling.

“No. I’m not moving. Why won’t she wake?”

Her eyes opened slowly, fluttering, and with great difficulty.

The room was dim, the bedding lavender. A hunched silhouette slumped on the edge of the mattress.

Margot shifted her weight. Her legs felt heavy and stiff.

Merrick’s head popped up. “Margot?”

He was a sight—jaw unshaven, cheeks hollow, dark circles etched beneath his eyes.

“Merrick?” she rasped.

“I’m right here.” He squeezed her hand, pushed back his seat, and called for Dr. Smalls.

When the physician entered, his face was grim.

“What happened?” she asked.

Merrick put his head in his hands. The knuckles of his right fist were bruised and swollen.

She dragged herself upright, leaned against the headboard.

The slightest movement was tiring. A dull but persistent ache throbbed in her lower abdomen.

She started to pull back the blankets; something wasn’t right.

Her stomach…it was soft and doughy, where only yesterday, it had been stretched taut.

A barely there swell, but she’d been able to feel it. It had been there. She was sure of it.

“What happened?” she repeated. “What happened to me?”

Her memories were fuzzy. She grabbed for them as she’d grabbed for silk magnolia blooms in her dreams.

Sunshine and soft breezes and spinning, spinning, spinning beneath a canopy of white.

But before that…before…

She’d chased Elijah in her dreams. Through the house. Through this godforsaken house.

And in the end, on the nightstand…

She remembered the teacup.

And that was it. That was how her whole world ended.

In a blasted cup of tea.

She heard her voice from a great distance, reflected back to her as though shouted from the end of a long tunnel. “Merrick, did something happen to the baby?”

His face was still buried in his hands. He could do nothing but shake his head.

Dr. Smalls stepped forward. The look in his eyes was pitying. Hearing the words would make it real, but God help her, she didn’t want to.

He said them anyway. “Margot, I’m so sorry.”

“No…”

“It was a strenuous evening, very distressing…yes, distressing circumstances indeed. Perhaps they…proved overtaxing? It’s impossible to know for certain. These things simply happen. We can’t—I can’t always explain them.” He was wringing his hands.

Margot stared blankly at them, hearing only two words.

Distressing circumstances.

In those two words, Margot heard the echo of every single physician, the ones who had paraded through her life for years.

They all stood before her now, their lips moving in unison.

Voices raised like a chorus to the heavens, reading the words that would adorn her tombstone.

That would sum up her entire life. That she would have to stand before God himself one day and answer to.

They were all she was, the distillation of all her parts.

Prone to fits of hysteria.

Avoid distressing circumstances.

Avoid.

Hysteria.

Fits.

Distress.

Nothing would ever change. She looked at Merrick with longing in her eyes. She’d wanted to believe it could…that she could change. But no matter how many times she opened the music box, the same song always played. The ballerina spun the same way.

“It’s my fault,” she whispered. She drank the tea. Eleanor’s tea, yes, but Margot’s weakness.

“No.” Merrick spoke into his hands, still not looking at her. His words came out muffled. “It’s not your fault. It’s mine.”

She looked at him, her eyes brimming with tears. “I lost the baby?”

He didn’t answer; he didn’t have to. She was staring at her shrunken stomach and Merrick’s bruised hands instead of his amber eyes, and all the blame, all the doubt, all the shame in this mortal world landed squarely upon her shoulders.

“I lost the baby,” she repeated.

His hands finally dropped. His lashes were damp, eyes red-rimmed. “We lost the baby.”

She shattered.

They spoke in the corner, Dr. Smalls and Merrick. They spoke about her, not to her. In low voices. Concerned head tilts. Small nods. They discussed her body and her mind and her failings. And most importantly, as always, “the fix.”

Because broken dolls cannot stay broken. They must always, always be fixed.

How asininely enraging, she realized, her anger sharp enough to cut through her sorrow, a hot knife lancing through butter. How absolutely infuriating that they—these men—believed they could fix what was broken inside her. That they believed she needed fixing at all.

Because that was where the problem lay, where it festered.

Fix implied an endpoint. Like flipping a switch to bring a room from darkness to light. That wasn’t how this worked. It wasn’t how she worked. It wasn’t how grief and sorrow and distress worked either. There was no endpoint to those demons. There was no “cure.” This house was proof enough of that.

Margot wrapped her arms around her middle, forcibly holding herself together. If she let go, she would shatter all over again. Broken porcelain doll fragments would scatter across the floor.

She closed her eyes, feeling hopelessly tired. Today, surely, she’d earned sleep. And tomorrow?

Tomorrow, she prayed, she might be strong enough to rise.

The longer Margot slept, the deeper the house sank its tendrils in. Eleanor and Babette cuddled beside her on the bed, wrapping their arms around her. The women—the ghosts—were there instead of her husband.

“You’re like us now,” Eleanor cooed, petting Margot’s hair. “We’re the same, you and me.”

Babette snorted in displeasure.

“I only ever wanted you girls, both of you,” Eleanor continued, reaching out to grip Babette, the same as Margot, “to understand.”

Oh, Margot understood. She didn’t even blame Eleanor, especially not now they shared the same pain. The same loss.

No, Margot only blamed herself.

A wounded whimper escaped her, that of a kicked dog.

“Oh, dearie,” Eleanor murmured, rubbing her back. “It’ll be okay, you’ll see. It’s still the best thing you’ve ever done.” Wet splotches appeared on the veil where her eyes should be. Tears, thick ones, streamed down her face.

Margot’s lids drifted shut. She didn’t want to talk. “What is?”

“Becoming a mother.”

Margot stayed in bed for a week. Sleeping was so much easier than being awake; being with the dead was easier than the living. Merrick was aching, needing things from her…things she couldn’t give to him, things he couldn’t give to her in return.

Her husband visited dutifully every morning and every evening. He was distant and businesslike every time. Asked how she was sleeping, if her pain was getting better.

Which pain?

She didn’t say that. He might understand, but he certainly didn’t want to hear it. He could barely shoulder his own; she couldn’t possibly ask him to carry her load too.

It became their own choreographed waltz. They skated across the surface, determined not to crack the ice.

Yes, I’m sleeping well.

Yes, the pain is improving.

Yes, I’m okay.

No, I don’t need anything.

Exit.

Return.

Repeat.

Everything they didn’t say hung so heavily in the air, it choked them both.

But Margot clung to the steps of the dance nonetheless.

She tiptoed around him, because to look into Merrick’s eyes, to see his pain…

it would be like surrendering herself to the undertow.

She was just barely afloat. One single look, and he would drown her.

Her buoy in the storm was her bottle of laudanum. She clung foolishly to it instead of her husband, his distance a growing thorn in her side. An anchor tied to her feet. She wanted Merrick desperately, wanted him to crawl into the bed and just be with her.

And yet, she couldn’t get rid of him fast enough when he arrived.

She didn’t know how to ask for what she needed. She simply wanted him to know how to give it to her. He’d always known before, and it was the loss of her husband, more so than the baby, that hit like a freight train.

She was tied to the railroad tracks, being run over again and again. Every time the door closed behind him. Every night when he failed to come into bed with her.

Margot cried quietly into her pillow every evening, not wanting him to hear through the bedroom wall. She tossed and turned all night, imagining him doing the same ten feet away. She was a prisoner to her grief, and he to his.