Chapter 4 A Body

Beatrice

The first thing I noticed was the noise.

Not loud, not at first. Only a disturbance in the quiet, hurried footsteps in the corridor, a door opening too fast, voices rising and breaking off again. For one soft, disorienting moment, I lay still beneath the sheets, not remembering where I was, only aware that I had slept, truly slept more deeply than I would have thought possible after such a day.

I pushed myself upright, my heart already racing. At the same moment, the adjoining door flew open.

Abel stepped through from his room, half dressed and fully awake, his expression sharpened by the same confusion that had seized me. We stared at one another for the briefest second, as though neither of us had expected to find the other already listening to disaster.

"What is happening?" I said.

"I don't know."

Another cry sounded from somewhere below.

That was enough. I seized my robe from the bedpost and dragged it around me with clumsy hands. Abel was already moving toward the door. I followed close behind him into the corridor, where servants were rushing past with pale faces and lowered voices.

No one stopped to explain. We went down the stairs together. By the time we reached the lower hall, several members of the household had already gathered near the open rear doors. A maid stood with one hand pressed to her mouth. A footman was staring out into the morning as if he had forgotten how to move. Cold light spilled in across the stone floor.

Abel stepped forward first. I came just behind him, and then I saw.

A body lay crumpled on the stones below the terrace. One leg twisted beneath him. One arm flung wide. His coat was crooked, his face turned partly toward the house, and even from where I stood I could see the dark stain at his temple.

For a second, I did not understand what I was looking at. Then recognition struck. It was Abel's uncle. My breath caught so hard it hurt.

The terrace rose above him in pale stone and iron shadow, harmless now in the thin morning light. But the moment I saw where he lay, the memory came back whole.

His hand crushing my wrist. The stink of wine on his breath. The way he had leaned over me, smiling as though my disgust amused him. And then the kick. The sound he made. The way he had doubled over, both hands dropping at once as I tore free and ran.

Alive.

He had been alive. I knew it with absolute certainty. When I left him, he had still been standing. Bent nearly in half, gasping, cursing me perhaps, but standing. He had not fallen. He had not been dying. He had been alive, and I had run from him. So how had he ended up there?

The question seemed to split through me like cold water. I became aware, all at once, of Abel beside me. He had gone very still.

Behind us, more footsteps approached. Voices crowded the hall. Someone whispered a prayer. Someone else began to cry. But I could not stop staring at the body below the terrace.

A dreadful thought rose in me then, fast and sharp, I should have told Abel. I had meant to.

I had run straight back to my room with the intention of doing exactly that, of crossing to his door, waking him if I must, and telling him what his uncle had tried to do. My hands had been shaking so badly I had scarcely been able to untie my robe. I remembered going first to the bedside table, taking up the glass of water there because my throat felt scraped raw.

After that, everything blurred strangely. I remembered sitting down for only a moment.

Then nothing. No memory of lying back. No memory of closing my eyes. No memory of sleep taking me.

Only this morning, noise, and a body on the stones. The thought struck me with fresh unease.

Lady Odessa appeared at the foot of the stairs a moment later, pale but rigid with control. Her gaze moved once across the gathered servants, then past them to the courtyard below. Whatever grief she felt, if she felt it at all, did not soften her face.

"What happened?" she asked.

No one answered immediately. At last the footman nearest the door swallowed and said, "He was found there at first light, my lady."

Found there. As if he had simply fallen from the sky.

I drew my robe tighter around me. My wrist had begun to throb again, though no one looking at me would have known why.

Abel said nothing. His face had become unreadable once more, but I felt rather than saw the tension in him. Whether it was shock, anger, or something else entirely, I could not tell. My gaze drifted back to the terrace above.

That was where I had left him. 

"Send for the doctor," he said at last, his voice even. Someone answered that the doctor had already been sent for. 

A terrible thought came then, unbidden and unwelcome, What if someone had seen us?

My stomach turned.

Not because I feared guilt for his death. I had not killed him, but because I knew too well what the scene might look like if anyone had glimpsed even a fragment of it. A bride on a terrace after midnight. A drunken older man following her. A struggle. Then silence.

That was enough to ruin any woman, whether a corpse followed or not.

"Beatrice."

Abel turned then and looked at me properly.

Whatever he saw in my face made something in his expression shift.

I had not realized how badly I was shaking until he said my name. The cold in my hands had spread upward, leaving the rest of me strangely light, as though I were no longer standing quite firmly inside my own body.

"You should not be here," he said quietly.

It was not unkind. If anything, it sounded almost gentle.

Before I could answer, he took my arm. Not tightly, not possessively, only with enough pressure to guide me away from the open doors and the sight beyond them.

"I am all right," I said, though the words came thin.

"No," he said. "You are not."

There was no room in his voice for argument.

Behind us, the household had begun to stir into fuller confusion. Servants whispered. Lady Odessa was issuing orders in a tone sharp enough to cut glass. Someone had started to sob in earnest. But all of it seemed to grow fainter as Abel led me farther down the hall.

My knees felt unsteady. I hated that he noticed.

At the foot of the staircase, I tried to pull away. "I can walk alone."

"I do not doubt it," he said. "Walk anyway."

The answer was so like him, calm, composed, impossible, that under any other circumstance I might have resented it. Now I was too cold to resent anything.

He did not stop until we reached the shadowed quiet of the upper corridor. Only then did he let go of my arm and look at me again, more closely this time.

"You are pale," he said. I almost laughed.

It seemed an absurd thing to say when a man lay dead below the terrace and my heart had not yet remembered how to beat properly.

"I have just seen a corpse," I said.

Something unreadable passed over his face.

"Yes," he said. "And that is enough for one morning." He opened the door to my room.

I stepped inside without argument. For once, I was grateful for the walls, the dimness, the closed door between myself and the rest of the house.

But even there, with the chamber silent around me, I could still see the body on the stones.

And all I could think was this...

I left him alive.