Title: Days of Jade, Nights of Onyx
Chapter 4: The Warp and the Weft
Author: Elliott Silver
Timeline: Set at the end of "Murder Under the Mistletoe." For the purposes of this story's chronology, this episode takes place before the finale, "Unnatural Habits," which will be addressed in chapter 5 (to come), the last chapter of this series.
Summary: A pastiche of scenes from Jack and Phryne's newest joint venture. Phryne has woven him into her life.
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221B The Esplanade is so quiet when he enters that without the familiar faces Jack Robinson would think he was in the wrong place.
Mr. Butler comes forward first, takes his hat and coat, and withdraws. Dot stands at attention nervously, glances up the stairs, and retreats. They flee faster than the soldiers at North Beach and Anzac Cove.
Jack stands at the bottom of the stairs, alone, and breathes.
He has not seen Phryne Fisher for almost a week after the family wreckage that was her Christmas in July. She'd become distant at the chateau, as the snow had finally stopped and police tallied up the family body count in their usual, abrasive, and non-personal way. He'd stayed to assist the investigation, as it was, and by then, she had already left for Melbourne, leaving behind the blood and the death.
Or so he'd thought.
But of all people, he knows that blood and death are not so easily left behind.
He should have known better. He let her grieve, when he shouldn't have. He hasn't yet learned (and maybe will never) when she wants to be alone, and when she only says she does. She is a woman, after all.
But he does know in pain Phryne pushes away those she loves most, the precious little family she has (which is now a great deal smaller), until distance soothes the scars on her heart.
Still he doesn't hesitate but walks up, even the stairs quiet beneath his tread. At the top, the landing is dim in the fading afternoon light; a wave of dust motes floats in a fleeting shaft of sunlight.
The doors are all closed, so he enters through her bedroom first (the room he is most familiar with), moving slowly in the shrouded light to avoid the sharp dark edges of her furniture.
The only light comes from the open door to the bath.
She is there, curled in the tub. Her eyes are closed, her chin resting on her knees, her arms tied around calves, as if to keep herself from falling apart.
Phryne seems small here like this, and fragile. Her bare skin is the pale color of bone china, and there are dark circles under her eyes.
Everything about her is purple, the color of bruises and violets and mourning.
For what is a bruise, but blood spilled beneath skin and trapped there?
The bath is cool to his touch, so he goes to the taps and runs hot water to replace the cooling reservoir, loosening the plug under her feet to let out the cold.
Only then does she open her eyes, and when she looks at him, he feels her sharpness as a physical pain. He knows if he touches her, she will cut and he will bleed. But he goes to her because he cannot stay away.
She may push him, like everyone else, but he now he pushes back.
Jack sheds his clothes, folding them military-neat over the black lacquer chair she has come to call his, placing his cufflinks in her cloisonné dish, his collar stays next to her framed picture of Janey.
He strips until he too is nothing but skin, and then he goes back to her.
His hands settle on her shoulders, her bones under his fingers. He presses her forward so he comes into the tub behind her.
The hot water surges over them, rising to their arms as he gathers them together.
The water scalds, but her skin is cold like winter. And yet Phryne comes to him as always; she fits.
Jack takes her against him, pulling her back to his chest, the outside of her thighs brushing against the inside of his, her ankles to his toes.
The ends of her hair drip onto his chest, cold splashes like tears. He takes her hands in his to warm them, fingers tangled against fingers, a delicate lace of skin and bone, sinew and tendon.
At last she speaks.
"Sometimes I think this world takes away everything we love."
She could be talking about the past weekend as much as the last war, and perhaps she is. He doesn't disagree with her, but he has come to hope that there is more to it than that, that the world too has mercy and justice, that it must.
He brushes back the dark sweep of her hair so he can see the profile of her face, the slide of her cheekbone as she speaks.
"We lose things so easily," she continues.
Phryne curls against him uneasily, her pain so sharp it would puncture him, shards of sorrow slicing mercilessly through flesh.
"Keys, gloves, tram tickets, bank books, library cards, aspirins, umbrellas – " she takes a quick breath from her litany, as if it hurts, and he knows it does.
Then she says, " – family – "
And finally, " – love."
Her breath hitches now – a hurt as deep as the Stanley Mines.
"Everyone dies," she continues, "We investigate murders, after all – "
Jack appreciates the plural (strictly unofficial, of course) there.
" – and even after all I've been through, all I've seen, everything I've promised myself, sometimes I forget how important it is to live."
Phryne switches into the singular here, and he realizes how much changed for her over that wintry weekend. There is some damage that only blood can do to blood.
"We could miss so much," she says, and a small droplet sends ripples across the surface of the bath water. He realizes it is a tear, and that he has never seen her cry before. It shocks him, baffles him, crushes him.
So he does the only thing he can, he holds her and kisses the salt from her lashes.
"We could," he agrees with her, speaking at last. "But we won't."
Her skin has become the shade of hyacinths, reflected in the otherwise still water. Jack presses the side of his forehead against hers, pushing her head sideways so he can kiss the soft skin of her neck, the place where her pulse beats. He can feel her blood under his tongue as her head rocks backward onto his shoulder, as she breathes with him.
Steam billows around them as he shifts against her. Under the still surface of the water he slides his hand, palm-down, from belly to sternum to breast. The bones of her shoulder press into his chest as his other hand moves lower, as he traces hip to bend of thigh and then inward.
She parts for him, her knees knocking his to the tub wall as his fingers trace the warming folds of her flesh.
They build a cadence as they always do, the slide of his forearm against her belly, the knuckles of his hand against her thigh, the strum of his fingers, the rub of his thumb blurring the boundaries between their bodies.
It doesn't burst but bloom outward, tremors that begin at her core and ripple gloriously outward until even her fingertips tingle. She kicks out as it rushes over her, a cascade of water spilling over the edges of the tub.
Slowly her body unfolds and melts back against him. He waits until she comes back to herself, not seeking more, but content to rest too. As much as he wants her now, he always remembers this was a coupling of brains long before their bodies followed suit.
So he couldn't have been prepared for the furious need in her eyes as she turns in the tub and pulls him up with her.
Jack Robinson has never been needed like this, and if he didn't love her the way he does, he might be scared by this, how intrinsic they have become to each other, as obvious and necessary as breath, or perhaps, even more than that, as blood – something that makes their hearts beat.
Tides of water sluice off her skin as she stands, and they step out.
"I missed you," Phryne says.
She is dripping wet and just slightly unsteady on her feet (he feels a certain pride in this fact). She leans on him as she's only recently come to do, to find her own balance not against him but with him.
She pushes him backward, and they hit the door – hard – ricocheting into the shadows of her bedroom.
In the darkness they somehow fall to the bed. Their eyes meet and she kisses him slowly, thoroughly, without closing them. Her tongue slides across his upper lip, then into his mouth, and she sucks at his tongue that tastes like the bitter violets of her soap.
"I missed you," she says again, and then – "I don't want to miss you."
He's not sure he understands her exactly (that would be a hope too far, even for Jack Robinson, to believe she is saying what he thinks she is, and he can't claim to be thinking very clearly at the moment), but he lets her have him as she wants. Phryne takes him with a rough tenderness, something so fierce and unyielding that it does bring tears to his eyes. He isn't afraid of it; he doesn't care that she sees and stops for a moment to touch them, as if to see if they were real, before moving again. His hands hold her hips as she rocks them together, the glow of her skin the only brightness, the flash of her cheekbone, her ribs, her wrist, the only illumination.
He can't last like this, and it breaks over him before he's ready, a confirmation of things not lost, but found, of two lives not taken, but given.
It seems a mercy; it seems a miracle.
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Later the bedroom is awash in damp towels, their stark whiteness like storm clouds against the mauve geography of her bedroom. Lying with Phryne in his arms, Jack feels like he's looking down at the world from the top of the sky, from a storm broken and turned inside out.
Phryne dozes, her chin resting against his chest, and he lets her sleep, holding her close until Dot raps softly and announces that the guests have arrived. Phryne wakes slowly and reaches for the light.
The room is flooded with brightness.
Everything is as it has been; her lilac dress (that one she wore when she hitched up her hemline and revealed just how many things a woman conceals, including a golden stiletto in her stocking band) is hung next to his black suit. Dot has prepared her clothes as Mr. Butler has prepared his.
I don't want to miss you, she has said. Jack understands now what she has been saying. He's not sure he's really understood until now, the way their lives have come together. His books are in her study, his clothes in her room. Dot knows how he likes his tea (two sugars, no cream); Mr. Butler knows how he likes his toast (crisp but not browned). Jane knows the secrets of his heart, and she can express them in fluent French. It is, after all, the language of love.
Phryne has woven him into her life, a larger life. She is the warp; he is the weft.
Downstairs, the sounds of the party reach them, Bert and Cec's laughter above the not-so-sharp-as-it-might-have-been reproof from Mrs. Stanley.
Phryne rises, naked as a goddess, and sits primly before the mirror to apply her make-up.
They dress without speaking, as only those with a past can.
Jack stands at the door, unwilling to go, watching her simply because he can (that's the wonder of it), the swift tug of the brush through her short hair, the dab of dark shadow across her eyes.
"What?" she asks into the mirror, the ox-blood lipstick in hand.
"I don't want to miss you," he says.
For a moment she holds his gaze through the mirror and then she comes to him, in a state of dishabille that still makes him weak in the knees.
"You won't," she answers, stealing his words as she has done with his heart.
Then she pushes him out the door.
He goes, still conscious of her desire to maintain appearances, to be respectable (whatever society currently thinks that is). At the bottom of the steps, Mr. Butler offers him a glass of champagne, Jane attacks him in a barrage of French, Bert and Cec salute happily, and even Mrs. Stanley acknowledges him with her usual stoic nod. It doesn't feel forced; it feels like family.
At last into the mêlée comes Phryne, rushing down the stairs as she always does – loudly and at speed – whirling into the room.
She is wearing not the lilac silk dress that was hung out, but something far more radiant. The gold lamé is rash and extravagant and beautiful, and just as flamboyant as the sun at dawn, as her smile when she looks at him from across the room.
Suddenly everything in his life feels complete, now that she is there.
Phryne may not be ready to make public their relationship – though yes, they now agree they have one, they have names for what this is between them – and he isn't certain he is either. But he is certain – as certain as she is – that they aren't prepared to do so over (or under) a sprig of (hemi)parasitic greenery.
So they drink champagne and they celebrate as they always do, together.
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