Page 24 of This Vicious Hunger

Chapter Fifteen

L eonardo and I have dinner most nights this week, as has become our custom, including the night of the new moon.

I’ve been irritable all day, stumbling my way through the day’s lectures without taking much usable information in, and by the time I get to dinner I’m downright ill-tempered.

I’ve been queasy since yesterday, constantly covered in a sheen of sweat although it’s cooler than it has been since I arrived at the university; my head pounds a sick, steady beat.

Leo is already at our usual table when I arrive for dinner, and he’s taken the liberty of ordering us a fresh pitcher of ice-cold lemonade. He pours as I sit, and I gulp down the glass in one go, tartness tightening my throat, before I say anything at all.

“Well, hello to you too,” Leo says.

I glare at him, irrational annoyance curling my lip. “Don’t you have anything better to do than criticise me, Leo?”

Leonardo’s lips thin and he draws his hands back towards himself on the table, where he presses them against his napkin. The normal clatter of the diners is so loud it feels as if my head might explode, and I rub at my forehead angrily.

“Are you unwell?”

I sigh and lean back in my chair. “Who knows,” I say. I certainly feel unwell. Everything is too bright, too loud. I miss the quiet, dreamlike darkness of the garden. “Could be. It’s been a long week. I feel rotten.”

Leonardo waits for my apology, and when he gets none he signals to the server that we’d like to order.

An icy silence falls over the table, but I’m too tired to much care.

I have a document to write up for Petaccia’s next tutorial—one I’ve been putting off for several days, but now thanks to my reduced garden hours I should be able to get it finished tonight.

I’m just so damned tired. My whole body feels on the edge of collapse, mild aches and pains in every joint.

“Thora,” Leo says. “Hello?”

“Sorry, what?”

“I asked if you’d been to see the physician. Perhaps they can give you something.”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” I say, this time trying to warm my words with a smile. “I’ll be all right. I’m just tired, that’s all. And actually starving .” I feel like I’ve been hungry for days. Have I? I hadn’t noticed before. I felt fine until yesterday.

When the server returns to the table, it is with a platter of fresh salad, green leaves and tomatoes, soft, milky cheese, and herby vinaigrette.

Thick slices of chicken gleam tenderly. I pick at the olives first and swallow two of them nearly whole in my hurry to eat.

Did I skip lunch again? I actually can’t remember.

It’s laughable how quickly I have forgotten the rules of propriety and society: four square meals a day, tea and juice and coffee, polite chatter over a meal.

“ Thora ,” Leonardo says.

“What?”

“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asks. Concern has etched itself into the lines around his eyes and across his forehead. His glasses are slipping down his nose and he doesn’t even bother to push them back up. “You seem very distracted.”

“I’m just tired,” I insist.

Leonardo is silent again, but this time I pay attention to the silence, my stomach no longer screaming loud enough to drown it out. He’s hardly touched his food and he plays with the tines of his fork before opening and closing his mouth several times fruitlessly.

“Say it, Leo,” I say tiredly. “Whatever it is.”

“It’s nothing,” he says. “Well. Not nothing. Only…” He sighs, blowing warm lemon-scented air across the small table.

He’s so different from Olea; he takes up so much more space, even though he doesn’t mean to, and he smells different.

Although I’ve never been that close to her, she always has a fragrance.

I notice it when she walks by the gate, or when we’re moving down the wall together, an earthy and yet somehow bitter floral scent.

Like burnt coffee on a bed of wild roses.

“So, what is it?” I prompt. “Nothing, or something?”

“I’m worried about you. Is that so impossible to believe?”

“Nobody ever worries about me,” I scoff. “I’m fine.”

“Not even your father?” Leo knows what he’s doing, mentioning him. I can see in his face that he thinks he’s doing the right thing. Trying to get through to me. He meets my gaze steadily. My head thuds and my food squirms undigested in my belly. I don’t want to rise to the bait but I can’t help it.

“My father didn’t worry as long as I was following his rules.

His rites, his Silence,” I say bitterly.

The betrayal sits like ash on my tongue, dusty and drying.

I’m not sure, as I say it, whether I have always felt this way, or if being here—seeing the life I could have had for longer if only he had asked—has made me change my mind.

Leo listens intently but doesn’t speak while I chew on the words that follow, although I can see he wants to.

The frustration of the day threatens to overflow and I have to clench my fists.

“Not that it matters, but he had a view of me, and it didn’t quite line up with the reality—but only because his view of himself was distorted.

We were too alike, and too unlike everybody else.

” I rub at my knuckles, remembering the lash of the whip the first time I dared suggest I might avoid marriage and take over the sepulchre.

The idea that I was just like him scared my father more than anything else ever had.

“He wanted me to be normal,” I say, “but he refused to relinquish me, kept me hanging on with a string of hope that he never would, which is what I thought I wanted. It’s why my marriage wasn’t finalised until he knew he was sick. ”

“You didn’t know he was unwell?”

“No. He hid it from me until the end.” I bite back the angry tears that well, nipping at my lip until I draw the sobering blood. “So, no, Leo. My father didn’t worry.”

Leonardo is silent again, though he watches me intently. I see flickers of sympathy and empathy in his eyes.

“Well, I do worry,” he says eventually. “Thora, I’m your friend. I’m going to be honest: I’m seeing something and—I’m praying I’m wrong. But it’s happening again.”

I blanch. “Excuse me?”

“I told myself I would look out for you. There’s—something’s happening with you and it’s just like before. You’re not yourself. Distracted, irritable.” He ticks the list on his fingers.

The pieces slot together and I have to fight not to laugh. “You’re talking about—about what happened with Clara ,” I say. “You think I’m—like her. That I’m going to run off or go mad or something. Is that what all this is about?”

The look on Leo’s face says it all.

“You’re getting distant, just like she did. Moody. I know I wasn’t the best husband, but Clara was my best friend. I knew she was unhappy, and because I was too… I didn’t help her. I’m sorry, I have to say it: Have you been…” He trails off.

“Have I been what?” I demand. My head pounds with my rapid pulse. I’m going to be sick.

“Have you been going to the garden?”

I lay down my fork. When I meet Leo’s gaze I don’t like what I see.

My stomach clenches, a sheet of cold water down my back.

How does he know? He couldn’t possibly—and yet, he does.

What if he finds a way to stop me from visiting the garden?

He could tell Petaccia, or somebody . Maybe nobody official knows about Olea and the garden.

Maybe they should know. And, oh god, maybe Leo knows about Olea.

A flash of jealousy roars to the surface, drowning my other thoughts. I’m not sure why, but the thought of Leo knowing about Olea—and keeping her a secret from me—makes me feel sick. He can’t know about her, can he? If he did, why would he hide it?

“You said you’d help me find out more about it,” I release through gritted teeth. “I thought that meant you didn’t know anything.”

“Okay, so I lied. But you promised not to go there!” Leonardo throws his hands up, nearly sending his fork flying. He glances around, panicked, and then leans forward and lowers his voice. “I didn’t want you to go there, Thora. I warned you. I told you it’s dangerous.”

“And what’s so dangerous about it?” I play dumb despite the sick feeling, tilting my head, pretending to myself and to Leo that I’m not about to get up and walk out.

“All this silliness about the tower being unstable. It’s hogwash.

I told you I wouldn’t go inside and I haven’t.

So what’s the problem? What’s got you so twisted up? ”

“It’s not just about the garden or the plants or the tower or any of that.”

“Then what is it about?” I demand, breathless despite my attempts to hide it. Olea, and the garden, are mine . “Why are you being so pigheaded about this?”

“It’s because of her .”

All around us is the clatter of knives and forks, men talking and drinking and laughing together.

But the silence between Leo and me at the table is sharp enough to cut glass.

For a second I consider lying; Leo has no proof that I know anything about Olea, and I’m not sure I want to have this conversation.

Yet—I need to have it. Because Leo knew about her, and I need to know how, and why he lied.

“What do you know of her?” My words come out so cold and slow they might as well be ice. “And why didn’t you say anything about her before?”

Leonardo wilts under my gaze. He steeples his fingers against his lips and lets out another long sigh that does nothing to abate the unfamiliar jealousy inside me.

“I didn’t say anything because it isn’t my place to spread gossip. And I especially don’t want to say anything negative about… a woman. To you.”

“Right. But you’ve changed your mind,” I say bitterly. “Why?”

“There are rumours about her. She gives me a very bad feeling, Thora. I’ve felt this way for a long time. Since before you came here. I… Look, I have my suspicions. It’s not my place to spread—”

“Gossip,” I cut him off. “Yes, you said. But that’s exactly what you’re doing.”

“You know she’s your Dr. Petaccia’s ward?

I bet she didn’t tell you that, did she?

” Leonardo’s cheeks are pink—though I’m not sure if it’s anger or embarrassment.

Both emotions war within me, too, bile rising in my throat, the sharp stab of betrayal in my chest. “She likes to float about and warn people about entering the garden, trying to make them think she’s going to—going to curse them or something. ”

“She’s what?” The words are like pollen in my brain; I can’t understand them. “She’s her ward?”

A wave of confusion engulfs me. Why has Petaccia never mentioned her?

And somehow worse: Why has Olea never mentioned the doctor?

Not for the first time I feel as if I’m on the outside, a waif staring through the window of a bakery, starved.

Am I so naive that everybody thinks they must keep things from me?

“I don’t know the details, but people say she has some sort of illness.

The kind you have from birth. Her parents abandoned her and she was left on the steps of the St. Ellie chapel years ago, and Dr. Petaccia—being the only woman on staff—took her in.

” Leo takes his spectacles off and lays them on the table, his mouth twisting urgently.

The next wave of my thoughts is much muddier, a mixture of regret, and still that spiky jealousy, but also— excitement . This could be an opportunity. If Petaccia were to support my budding friendship with Olea—lonely, strange Olea—what favour might await me? My mind is abuzz.

“You have to understand, I’m not saying this to upset you or monopolise you.

I just… This girl is strange, Thora, and she doesn’t have a job or a family so far as I know.

She can afford to spend her time however she wants, flouncing about not sleeping or whatever it is you’re both doing.

But you—you have work to do here, and you’re distracted. ”

I’m distracted . Am I? I disagree.

I’m angry. At Leo and at Olea both. But this could be a beginning; it could open more doors than it might close.

Alongside Petaccia’s award-winning works, my name might only be a footnote, a mere acknowledgement within—but with a friendship with Olea, if she is truly the doctor’s ward…

I might have something else to bargain with to show my worth.

“I just thought it was important that I said something before you got yourself into a mess with the doctor,” Leo adds, much more quietly.

So quiet I can hardly hear him over the hum of my thoughts.

“I’ve heard she’ll come down like a tonne of bricks on anybody who dares mess with the girl.

Thora… I don’t know if you understand what’s riding on this—but you’re in a more vulnerable position than I think you know. ”

“Thank you, Leo,” I say, giving him my best winning smile.

I’m not sure it’s entirely convincing, but I also think the poor man would thank me for scraps if it meant keeping our gentle friendship alive.

“It must have been hard to bring this up, and I wish you hadn’t lied to me before, but I’m glad you’ve told me. You’re a true friend.”