3
Victor was having that dream again.
The dark parlor in which he stood was longer than he could see end-to-end and its ceiling was lost to misty distance, but the vast, veined marble floor that spread endlessly around shone with liquid moonlight. Long-paneled windows, far taller than many trees, rose majestically along the wall before him, framing the vague and far-off gray shapes of pines and grass behind a cloying, settling gloom; the moon in the sky was cloaked in a cloud-rippled corona as it gently tipped light from a bottomless pail to spill across the polished black floors, bright as sunlight's blue twin. All that was not lit was black beyond seeing, but he had been here far too often before to question where to go. He could see her even now, seated away from him at the piano in the center of the moon's puddled light, almost swimming between the heavy motes of dust that drifted in the air like snow.
("Mister Van Dort?")
"Emptily," Victor called to her, but upon saying the word he knew that it hadn't been right at all. In the next moment, he was at her side, brushing his hands along the ivory keys of the beautiful old piano while she bowed her head toward her lap. She was dressed in some mild hue, indefinite beneath the heavy color of the moon, but her hair was brown – that much he knew. "I'm so sorry," he said to her, stepping backward to give her space. "I can't remember your name."
"Mister Van Dort…?"
Wind sighed against the unseen rafters far above. "Do you want me to leave?" he asked.
"Mister Van Dort!"
And then he woke up.
Victor jerked himself upright on the wooden bench. His eyes were pained instantly by the dull lampglow in the short upstairs hallway, and his neck was afire as he sat upright to address Doctor MacGregor, a squat man with a fussy moustache who so resembled Victor's father-in-law that he would have imagined them related if he hadn't known that no Everglot would ever deign to marry a Scot. "I'm so sorry," he mumbled. He hadn't meant to fall asleep, but rest had been hard to come by for the last two days. He knew he'd been dreaming of something beautiful, but already he couldn't remember what.
Doctor MacGregor, though, he realized, had been speaking since he woke, and only now was Victor beginning to catch up with him. "…well-along. You'll want to keep her abed, rather – hrrm – and well-rested, of course. Unfortunate we cannot begin treatment quite yet. What is the, hrrm, presumed date of delivery, sir?"
Victor looked up. "I'm sorry, I – w-what?"
"The child," the little man said, rocking backward on his heels. "You do know when the infant is due to be born, Mister Van Dort?"
Victor would have thought it the doctor's place to know such things, but he had no energy for debate. "Um," he mumbled, rolling his thin shoulders and slumping forward on the bench. "The latter half of November by – by V-Victoria's estimate…"
"Rather good, rather good," harrumphed the doctor as he took down small notes in the small paper pad he never seemed to look up from. "Now, I must ask this serious question," – he raised a prodigiously fluffy eyebrow at the young man – "is it possible you yourself may have been – hrrm – infected, sir?"
Victor sat up on the bench slowly. "Infected with what?" he asked, though he already knew the answer.
Doctor MacGregor sniffed, clearly unimpressed. "The consumption, as I said." He kept saying something after that as well, but whatever it was, it was quite lost on Victor, because abruptly, the entire world had come to a complete stop.
Victor Van Dort was not a rash man. He might have become angry, or tried to argue the small doctor, or perhaps stood without thought and rushed to Victoria's bedside to clasp her hand. He didn't, though. He stayed sitting on the bench in the dark-lit hallway while Doctor MacGregor talked about lungs and laudanum and labor, though the latter was submitted with much delicacy and many euphemistic references to "the process." Victor found himself nodding weakly at every suggestion. When the doctor spoke of sanitariums he murmured quiet assent, and when the benefits of fresh air were broached, Victor promised to keep the bedroom window open without thought for how cold the late days of October were. Quite suddenly, he was standing with Doctor MacGregor at the front door and receiving a highly-specialized prescription for "soup and bedrest," to which he smiled graciously, shook the good doctor's fat hand, and bid him good night.
And then, with a slam and a spin, the door was closed, and Victor stood in the center of the hall with his eyes on the wooden floor and nothing on his mind but a heavy woolen blanket of unspeakable despair. Sensation cycled between his stomach and his hands and his feet and up to his eyes and back down to his stomach, thrilling and twisting wherever it moved. He thought he might be ill.
The grandmother clock on the mantel struck eight and Victor looked up.
Mrs. Hall was standing at the top of the stairs with a deeper frown than usual and her hands clasped in front of her apron. Hers was a disapproving face, but he thought that there was sorrow beneath the heavy lines around her mouth.
"Did you hear?" he asked, taking a small step toward the base of the stairs.
The older woman sighed. "I did, Mister Van Dort."
"I understand if you feel the need to leave. F-for your health, of course," Victor said, even as it stung slightly to do so. Mrs. Hall had come into his and Victoria's employment in their third month in the townhouse, hailing from out-of-town and so placing little stock in the rumors of corpses and weddings that had haunted the Van Dort family since that fateful night some months past. Though her demeanor had been too similar to Maudeline Everglot's for Victor to be immediately comfortable with her perpetual presence in his house, he had grown rather fond of the woman. She was grounded where Victor tended to be forgetful, kept quiet about any and all unorthodox or unbecoming goings-on in the house, and if nothing else she kept food on the table while neither of the young Van Dorts was entirely sure as to how to light a stove. However much they depended on her, it would be far from fair to ask her to remain in a sickhouse.
Even as these thoughts were running through the young man's mind, though, Agnes Hall was shaking her head. "No, Mister Van Dort," she said sternly, "I had consumption as a girl. I won't be catching any ill in this house." Running a palm along the graying hair tied in a tight knot behind her head, she began descending the stairs. "The further question, I believe, is whether you are safe here."
"I'll be fine," he said dismissively, himself alighting the staircase. The two met in the middle of the stairwell, him heading up and she down. The candle on the entrance hall table lit their faces dully, like foxfire. "I don't know how to thank you for being willing to stay," he said.
The older woman was not one to take a compliment without resistance. "It's my job," she said bluntly, stepping downward past Victor without a backward glance. "If my father taught me nothing – and he did teach me nothing, the bastard – but if he taught me one thing, it's that one never leaves one's work unfinished. I will not be leaving any sooner than you will." And with a small click she stepped out into the entrance hall and disappeared into the dining room. Despite his heavy cloak of sadness, Victor couldn't help smiling as she left.
When he stood alone on the stairwell again, though, the smile disappeared, and he peered up into the darkened hallway with as much dread in his heart as he had once felt staring down a chalice full of poison. The stairs creaked as he took one step, and then another; Victoria's bedroom was close to him, but it felt a thousand miles.
How could this happen?
Crrrkk, errrrck, kkkrl.
In the upstairs hallway where that same flickering candle puddled in its sconce, Victor laid a hand on Victoria's bedroom door. He half wanted to stand outside and berate himself further for something which he held no responsibility for, or even walk away and leave his wife in peace for the night, but he turned the handle instead and stepped into the bedroom where he found a smoldering hearth and, against all his expectations, Victoria, propped up in the big canopied bed and reading a book.
She laid the tome in her lap as he entered. "I was wondering if you were going to come at all," she said, offering him a sweet smile.
"I thought you might be asleep," he admitted, closing the door behind and approaching her bedside. "The doctor is quite, ah, liberal with his laudanum, from what I've heard."
"I asked for no laudanum," Victoria said softly as her husband seated himself on the chair beside the bed. "For the baby," she added as he gave her a concerned look. "After she's born, certainly, Victor, I'll – I'll try anything they can think of." She reached out and took his hand, much larger than hers. "We only need to wait until November. I'm going to get better, I promise you." Her face was so pale and beautiful in the firelight, and her hair so long and soft, that Victor, for just an instant, thought he might be dreaming. Maybe it would have been better for Victoria if he were, but he was glad it was real; if he were to ever wake up one morning and find her a fantasy, nothing could have filled the hole left in his heart. He leaned forward to plant a kiss on her lips and she placed a hand on his shoulder in return.
They pulled away from one another with a small shared smile, but Victoria looked at him for only a moment before frowning and turning away. "You shouldn't be here," she murmured toward the fire. "You could … get sick."
Dying the first time wasn't so bad, he almost said, but he held his tongue because he knew it wasn't true. It had actually hurt quite a lot. Rather, he gestured to the book in Victoria's lap and asked, "So, did you, ah, find something enjoyable to read?"
"Not at all," Victoria said with a small smile, closing the book to reveal the embossed cover reading Ladies' Book of Etiquette. "If I wanted to hear a woman lecture me in etiquette for hours at a time, I would invite my mother to visit," she said. "I'm not sure how it came to be on my nightstand, but after the doctor left it was the only thing I could reach." She ran her fingers lightly over the green cloth binding.
"We could put it in the fire, I suppose," Victor suggested quietly as he stared into the dying embers. Victoria let out a small snort of laughter that turned quickly into a cough. It was light at first, but within seconds became increasingly deep and rough. She turned away from him and shuddered into the handkerchief atop the nightstand, which Victor averted his eyes from, but not quickly enough to avoid seeing the small drops of red peppering its corners. Victoria took a moment, but presently the coughing died down, and she silently opened the small bureau drawer and slipped the cloth inside before sitting up and taking a deep, almost healthy-sounding breath.
"I don't know if we should burn it," she said conversationally, as if nothing at all had happened. "It might come of use someday, if our daughter…" Her jaw moved to finish her sentence, but the words never came out.
If our daughter has no mother of her own to learn etiquette from, Victor thought. It was a heinous idea, so he said nothing in response, and for several moments they two simply sat next to one another in the dark room, staring at the fire in silence. The window was open just a crack, likely by the doctor's doing, and Victor felt a sharp prickling along the back of his neck. Whether or not that could be entirely attributed to the October chill, he wasn't sure.
Presently they began talking again. It was of little things at first, like moths and clocks and bell jars, but soon the conversation managed to break through tragedy's frosting shroud and turn into the sort of talk that Victor truly loved about his most perfectly-arranged marriage. Victoria was an educated woman, but all her life had been discouraged from any learning that could be construed as exploratory or enriching. Victor, conversely, was never discouraged to read – at least not expressly, since he'd spent most of his childhood alone in a bedroom with his mother and father paying not the least bit of attention to his goings-on. Left to his own resources, he had often visited libraries in his spare time and tried to find all possible information on all possible subjects, just to pass the hours. Only a few disciplines had held any lasting sway over him, lepidoptery being chief among them, but he still possessed a fair collection of facts from many areas of life. When Victoria found herself curious about how magnets work, or how a photograph is taken, he would tell her what he knew, and then make up the rest. On rare occasions at the beginning of their marriage they would open a bottle of wine and nearly choke to death on it, swapping theories in front of the fire, but these occasions had become less frequent since Victoria learned that drink might harm the baby.
Now, in that small bedroom beside the hearth, it was almost possible to forget the illness eating the life out from between them, and Victor had not felt so warm or happy in months. Before long he found himself perched on the edge of the bed, explaining to his wife that yawning was clearly a disease spread between people within range of vision, which could be deadly if it manifested itself while underwater. Victoria had never been prone to displays of excessive mirth, but still she covered her mouth and shook with laughter as he spoke.
The clock in the entrance hall struck nine o' clock, and then ten. The embers in the fireplace were burning low and cold as husband and wife found themselves whispering still, half-asleep in the darkness.
"Why," Victor muttered, laying across the foot of the bed, "does water drown a fire?"
He could hear Victoria's rustling from her nest of soft pillows and layered quilts. "Because," she murmured back, "fire, it… it never learned to swim."
Victor chuckled. "That's a good answer," he said, stifling a yawn.
"I never learned to swim," Victoria said, voice quieter than before.
"Neither did I," Victor said. His eyelids were heavy and the room was so dark that when he closed them it made his vision no different than before. He took a deep breath, a settling sound. From the head of the bed, Victoria was quiet.
He had almost fallen asleep when, nearly whispered, he heard, "Victor?"
"Yes?" he asked, opening his eyes.
"You should leave," Victoria murmured into the pillows. He sat up on his elbows. "Please, Victor. I don't want you to…"
He sighed. "I'm not afraid of getting sick," he said, slowly gaining his feet. "But I understand." He edged along the side of the bed to find Victoria, and of course ended up kicking the bedside chair straight into the wall with a wayward step. Victoria jumped in the darkness.
"Sorry," he whispered, putting out a hand to find her. It landed atop her belly, warm and firm even beneath all the bedquilts. For a moment he paused and heard only her breathing in the night; then he took a bow beneath the canopy and kissed her forehead. "Goodnight," he said, tiptoeing away. He managed to make it all the way to the door without incident.
For a year, he had shared Victoria's bright warm room each and every night. Now he found himself walking into the cold darkness of the master bedroom, a big and dreary room with a hard mattress and yawning hearth which hadn't seen fire in who-knew-how-long. The bedroom was fitted with a private water closet, but his night clothes were stored elsewhere. The only comfort to be found was the light of the waxing moon cresting past the cushioned windowsill on the far wall. The last several days had been cold and wet, but the sky this night was cloudless. He approached the window and laid against the sill with a deep sigh. Of course, Victoria was right in asking him to leave. If only he'd had somewhere to go.
The cold moon was blindingly bright above. Victor would have gazed at it for the rest of the night had bright lights not tended to make him so sleepy. Gently he closed his eyes as his mind drifted back to Victoria's room, imagining he was staying beside her in her illness, the way it seemed to him a husband ought to. Falling ill myself, he tried to convince himself, would solve nothing and possibly make everything much worse. No rationalization seemed help, though. What was a husband who couldn't protect the woman he loved?
He hadn't been able to do it before, after all. When he'd tried to protect Victoria in the church, he'd only gotten himself killed instead.
It seemed to take him a long time to fall asleep, despite his tiredness. The swirling thoughts in his head slowed and quieted; the sill was not as comfortable as a bed, but it would do for tonight, and so Victor Van Dort fell asleep in a patch of moonlight.