Morning crept in, wet chrome of the streets and yellow dawn mist, in through the hazy windowpanes.
Before she let herself be stirred by the day, Lily had let herself dream. Since the accident she had always been able to tell the difference between her waking moments, and the brightly visceral images that stirred against her imagination on her dreamscape.
She had had no name for it, the shape and color of her dreams, until Victor had recently taken her to the London Museum of Art. There she had stared open mouth and wide eyed at the vibrant oil paintings of Fra Angelico and Botticelli. Feeling a kinship to the startling reds and the garish blues and greens of such masterworks. Now when she dreamed she was kean enough to identify shape and color by the inanimacy and otherworldliness of each moment. A man was not a man, but form and outline and color. Gestures were burnt into frozen being, still in scope, but still transmutable, despite being transfixed. What she saw was not memory, but the ghost and echo of what she knew to be real.
Often times, in the sleepy moments when she knew herself to be awake, yet her eyes had not yet opened, she would ponder the scope of the life she had lead with Victor. Behind her eyes she could conjure the image of them as children; as in her dreams these conjuring's took the shape of paintings, rather than anything resembling life form. She saw her life as he had explained: a childhood running after each other through an open field that was ethereal in its furtive greenness. She envisioned growing from a child to a woman was something akin to hair growth, like Rapunzel in a fairy story - she was once a child, and like the curling of hair from root to tip, she now was not.
Lily could feel Victor beside her in the small bed. She had been woken often by his stirrings and sleep sounds in the night. She was even surprised by how hard he clung to her in the blackest parts of the night when the thunder clattered above them as though they were in the eye of the storm itself. It was a gesture that pleased her, calming her own fears, and giving credence to her earlier notion that the fear of storms had been shared by both of them, rather than just her, as he had tried to explained.
She felt a kiss, light as a breath of air, atop her head and she knew that Victor was awake. He detangled himself from her and she felt the rise and fall of the mattress as he stood. She wanted to fall back asleep but the sight of him as he went to the window, his back to her, and stood watching, waiting, unmoving and silent, hypnotized her. Lily could only imagine where his thoughts were, though she could see the rigidity of his spine and the way he locked his hands behind his back.
"It's still raining slightly," he spoke in a long sigh, and immediately any insecurity she had been feeling left her with the lightness of his tone. "I can see a rainbow as well." He pointed offhandedly to the corner of the dirty glass. "Just past High Street, it looks like."
The smile that spread across Lily's face was both gesture and the embodiment of the tremendous joy that had overtaken her. "Come back to bed," she whined. Crossing her arms over her head she pouted, "It couldn't possibly be real morning."
Victor laughed, rich and genuine. "I have my work, Ninny."
"Ninny!" She challenged, freeing her face from the cage of her hands. Her tone turned accusatory, "Cousin Victor, I'm astonished that such a simple word such as the likes of 'ninny' would pass from your lips."
He went to her side of the bed, laughing, and closing all space between them until he was touching her. Running his hands down her face and kissing away her own resounding giggles.
"Poppycock!" He mocked, his posture taking on the severity of an outraged and shocked old woman.
"Why, Doctor Frankenstein." She chided, still deep in mirth.
"Sweetheart."
She giggled at his blush.
"Truly, though," Victor looked at her earnestly. "What happened last night..."
She put her fingers to his lips."I love you."
Victor all but melted against her face, renagged of doubt, "I love you."
He took in long gulps of her presence, studying how she was first calm, then scattered in her hesitation.
"Tell me a story?" She begged sometime later when the edge of his silence began to frighten her. "Tell me something of when we were young."
She felt his body shift and change with a smile. "Do you have any recollection of your Shakespeare?"
Searching her mind, and the many shelves of clues that he had given her for her past, she shook her head, truly unsure.
"Here," he said, getting up from the bed and returning to her with a thick leather bound volume of the bard's complete works. "We loved this book when we were children." He ran his hand along the smoothness of each page, his fingers tracing the margins with the notes he had penned over the last decade since his boyhood. "We loved all of the plays even though they were all different. At times Hamlet was our favorite, or Lear, or Cymbeline. They're all so different." He stopped at the title page toward the back of the book, then turned the next few pages slowly, while still speaking. "It was something you said this morning that reminded me."
"What did I say?"
He flipped the book so it was facing her and she could see the title scrolled at the top of each page: Romeo and Juliet.
"You said 'it couldn't possibly be morning,' and look, just here..." His fingers slid down the page to one of Juliet's passages:
Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day.
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear.
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree.
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.
"It reminded me, you see. The plays a bit dull honestly, all that endless love and mellodrama, but Juliet," he cupped her cheek, "...well."
Lily hated to show any weakness around him and with some trepidation she said, "What's it about? I'm sorry, I can't remember."
Victor was still cupping her cheek and when he didn't let go she leaned her whole face into his touch, breathing in the musk of his skin, which still held the faint tang of his profession.
"Well it's about these two families that have been at odds - well war, really, - for several generations... And, well, the only son of one family falls in love with the only daughter of the other. It's forbidden, you see."
She was captivated. "And what happened to them."
He paused for the briefest of moments."He, the son, Romeo, is banished for killing a man, and while he's gone, the girl, Juliet, is told she needs to marry another."
Lily could see darkness shadowed behind his eyes. She pressed lightly, "And then?"
"Juliet fakes her own death, and Romeo, believing she truly is dead comes back to find her tomb, and hopefully, end himself entirely so that in death he can once again be with her."
Lily gasped, unable to stop the lump of dread forming at the back of her throat.
Victor continued, slowly, "And he finds her."
Lily couldn't keep still on the bed. "And then what?"
Victor smiled. "Well, like my Lily, Juliet came back from certain death. The two lovers were reunited with many kisses and renewed wedding vows and the lived happily ever after."
Her face lit up from the unexpected happy ending and Victor took her hand to kiss the top reverently.
"Now, I really must see to my work."
Lily saw the shadows return to his eyes, and before he could rise and walk away from her, she grasped his hand. "What's bothering you? Is it... What happened last night...?" She could feel her whole body start to sink into itself from fear. "Was I too forward?"
"No," he laughed a little. "Of course not."
"Is it," there was still fear in her voice, but this time it was from a different reason, "because of John Claire."
Victor didn't meet her eye. "He can be... That is to say, he has been known to be a very dangerous man. I worry..."
Fear gnawed at her.
When she thought of Mr. Claire it was always with trepidation, as though the mere thought of him was enough to insight misgivings. She believed that he cared for her, yes. And the story he had told her about kissing his hand on the street near a group of ruffians also felt true, but she was unable to deny the pull she felt toward Victor. She was unable to conceive of any other truth than this.
He kissed her again, but it was a quick kiss of resolve, not the long lingering kiss she would have preferred.
"Look this over while I'm away." He laid the large book of Shakespeare's work in her lap. "Look it over, it might jog a memory, perhaps."
He left her bedside, crossing the room to dress. She couldn't help watching him in stolen glances as she leafed through the pages.
"Which is your favorite of the plays?"
"At the moment... Titus, I think."
"Why?"
He shrugged, "The amount of blood, I expect."
"Victor," she chided.
"Well, I'm off." He returned to her, kissing the top of her head. "Sweetheart." The endearment made her heart quiver in her chest.
When he had gone she fingered the pages again, moving back and forward in the play. Reading aloud so the sound of her voice became a comfort in the silence. She found another of Juliet's passages:
Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-browed night,
Give me my Romeo. And when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
These were the things that she longed for now. The coming of night, and Victor's return.