Page 2 of This Vicious Hunger

Chapter One

A fter Aurelio, only the university remains.

I have dreamt of it my whole life and I dream of it still.

When I was a child my father described it like one of the Isliano palaces of old, a parade of white columns and sculpted stone women carrying water in vast urns.

I imagined what it would be like to stroll through halls hung with masterpieces in gilded frames, to smell the smoky sweetness of clove cigarettes in the mouths of scholars.

My father described the university as though it was inevitable—as though I would one day see it.

I did not realise until I was much older that he told such richly embellished stories because he never expected me to see it, and never expected he might see it again either, since he had never had a son.

He took solace in the tales he told as I watched from my perch in the corner of the embalming room or looked on from the grassy slopes as he tended his garden of herbs; by the time I left home I could recount each story word for word, as I often had at bedtime to ward off the thoughts of what would come if my parents ever received an offer for my hand.

When I was a wife, the vision in my head became twisted by desperation, the university an oasis of dark cubbies, vaulted arches, and the cool darkness of libraries recessed deep underground.

I never stopped thinking of it as mine, my story, my fairy tale.

I knew by this time that I would never have the honour of attending as I might have if I’d been a boy instead of a wretched girl, but I longed for nothing more.

I should never have been a daughter of Death, learning my father’s profession despite my mother’s protests, condemned to a life as little more than Aurelio LeVand’s wife.

If my father had had his way—and if I had had mine—I would have been a son of science.

Instead, I was married and ordered to leave any childish dreams of education behind.

I made a good match in Aurelio. His mother said he was charmed by my beauty, some softness in me that hadn’t been lost during the years of constant mourning—or perhaps a softness that had emerged from it.

My father said there had been some scandal, years ago, and while Aurelio was a very good match for me, with my rising age and my diminished dowry, I was also a welcome match for him, even despite my strange upbringing and his family’s standing.

He should have married a countess, but instead he got an undertaker’s spinster daughter.

Although Aurelio’s family settled for me, my husband himself was agreeable enough.

He seemed relieved that I wasn’t ugly and was eager to teach me the proper behaviour expected of a respectable lady.

I’d never considered what might happen if I ended up with a society husband because I’d always hoped I would never be a society wife, but my father assured me on my wedding day that all fresh brides fear change, and my only duty was not to let Aurelio see it.

I assumed, naively, that Aurelio’s teaching would open this new world up to me.

After all, my father had nothing but my best interests at heart, so surely Aurelio must as well.

I’d expected to make some sacrifices, of course—my father’s rules for the rules of domesticity, the trade of mourning for other wifely duties—but I wasn’t prepared, when it came to it, to release the hold my father’s tales still had on me.

Women , Aurelio had informed me the week after our wedding, do not read .

I’d been holding a paperback novel—hardly scandalous material—and he swept it from my hands without pause, dashing it straight into the open fireplace.

Now that you are grown you must set aside these childish fancies.

Didn’t your father know he was doing you no favours by filling your head with such silly stories?

Aurelio never understood that these stories were the sun that warmed me through the winter days of my marriage; when all I had of my old life was the familiar scent of loamy dirt in the greenhouse and the steady growth of the unfurling leaves I’d cut from my father’s prized pothos vines, these remembered fantasies of the university reminded me that Death had taken my father but he was not entirely absent.

I never told Aurelio that my father’s stories about the university were perhaps the most normal parts of my childhood.

The reading was foreign enough to him. Most women mourn perhaps five times in their whole lives: they celebrate their fathers and mothers, suffer the loss of their new babies, grown sons gone to war, or daughters taken in the birthing bed; if they are lucky, they might live long enough to mourn their husbands.

I have mourned more in my life, spent more days in thoughtful, solemn Silence, than Aurelio has— had —spent days in the schoolroom.

He might have assumed I had helped my parents on occasion, but I suspect if he realised how much of my life I’d spent wearing the veil of death, he would have decided to give me thirteen hundred days of mourning instead of thirteen.

And now Aurelio is gone and the ceremony, and my Silence, is done.

There are no more secrets I must keep from him.

The house we once shared echoes with his absence, with the memory of how much space he demanded, how much clatter and bulk there was to him, and I spend the days after my mourning ends rattling around it like I still wear the chains of my Silence.

The servants stay out of my way as I catalogue the house and all its contents through the lens of my widowhood. Uncertainty colours the airy rooms, my thoughts returning, as they did during my Silence, as they have done my whole life, to the familiar stories of the university.

I know it is callous to say, but as I wander the halls of our home I’m struck not by the loss of my husband, of the life we shared and the potential of our future, but by the sequestered dreams of the university.

I hadn’t realised how badly I had hoped, deep, deep down, that Aurelio might one day grow to be more like my father.

How eventually he might have come around to my reading, my learning bits and pieces of science or history—and how one day, maybe, just maybe, he might have considered becoming a benefactor, letting me attend a few lectures as a guest…

It was a stupid, senseless dream, not even something I paid much mind to while he was alive, but with him dead…

It is even less of a dream than before, and the loss is a wave big enough to engulf me whole.

Now I am at the mercy of his family, nothing more than a tool to be bartered, another moving piece on the chessboard.

I await my fate like the condemned awaits the axe.

Is it too much to hope for a life of solitude, to be left alone to run my household and tend to my plants in the greenhouse?

The alternative—the prospect of remarriage so soon after Aurelio’s death—leaves an ashy taste in my mouth.

Will I have to simply trade one set of chains for another?

I am in the greenhouse three days after my mourning ends when Madame LeVand finds me.

She insists we all, her children and their spouses included, call her that— Madame .

Perhaps she thinks it is sophisticated; perhaps it makes her feel strong.

She always marches about this house as though it is hers, coming and going without warning, hosting dinner parties at our table without even so much as telling me in advance, directing our staff by first name in very nearly the same tone she uses on me.

Aurelio always told me that it wouldn’t be this way forever.

Once you have children , he’d say, it’ll be different then .

Once you have children, as though it was my job—and mine alone—to create this new life.

With Aurelio dead it’s exactly as it was before.

Madame stomps into the greenhouse while I am in the middle of repotting my poison ivy—I believe its proper name is Toxicodendron radicans , though I’m not sure I’m remembering that correctly; I only ever saw it written in one of the books I left at my father’s house before he died.

This time I’m wearing gloves. The rash on my left arm is still there from my last attempt the day before Aurelio died; I’d thought it was a kind of creeper, a mistake I won’t make again.

Others might have had the servants throw it out, wretched little thing, but I’m surprisingly fond of it.

I half turn as my mother-in-law enters; I smelled her before I saw her, the clack of her heels accompanied as always by too much sickly rose perfume.

Madame is tall and thin, not unlike Aurelio in the quiet strength in her shoulders, her stern jaw, straight nose, and piercing blue eyes, but she’s lost weight with the death of her only son—just about the only visible evidence of her loss.

“What are you doing rooting around in the dirt?” Madame says sniffily.

Politeness dictates that I should have stood a little straighter to show interest when she entered, or at least pulled off my gloves; I still could do both of those things.

Instead, some small spark of defiance holds me bent slightly over the potting bench with soil on my dress.

I doubt my behaviour will change anything she has to say.

“Aurelio liked when I maintained the garden,” I explain. “So I’m maintaining it.”