21 August 1959
Lucien was floating.
Well, he felt as if he was floating. The earth seemed to turn and roil beneath his feet, and the bookshelves kept coming at him from funny angles, and his stomach felt rather as if it had been turned inside out, and his fingers were vibrating, and, for the moment, his heart did not weigh him down. The reason for his current state - not one of euphoria, necessarily, but one in which every grief and every hurt had been dampened, like cloth around the end of a drumstick, softening the impact of the blow, and every good sensation had been heightened to the point that he could not recognize just how very bad things had gotten - was a mostly empty whiskey lying on its side by his foot, its contents slowing dripping out onto the carpet.
He did not know what time it was, or how long he had been here, banging away on the piano in the parlor. He did not know, any more, how he had come to be here, or why, and he was certainly not at all aware that the sun had risen behind the still-closed curtains. He might remember, later, that he had been unable to sleep on Thursday night, and had in the still small hours cast off his covers and gone prowling in search of drink, thinking it might send him off to sleep. It hadn't, of course; unconsciousness was not the same as sleep, and the drink had not yet graced him with even that meager gift.
To his mind the melody pouring out of his fingertips was jaunty and merry, a lively tune that set his toes to tapping and made his heart light. That was only the drink talking, however, for when Mrs. Penny opened the door that Friday morning and heard the terrible clamor coming from the parlor merriment was the farthest thing from her mind. She had, unbeknownst to him, tiptoed carefully towards the room where he sat muttering and banging away on the old piano, taken one look at the mess of her employer, and promptly left.
Having taken no note of her coming and going whatsoever Lucien might happily have stayed right where he was until at last exhaustion claimed him, but such uninterrupted revelry was not to be, for Mrs. Penny had placed a phone call on her way out the door, and not more than twenty minutes after she left a pale blue police car lumbered to stop on the drive in front of the Blake residence.
Lucien was oblivious to all of this until, quite with any warning, Matthew Lawson stepped into his line of sight. It did not occur to Lucien that his might have come for any reason other than to join him in his delightful pursuit, and he grinned, delighted at the prospect of sharing a drink with the Superintendent, but he had no sooner opened his mouth to offer a greeting than Matthew struck him hard across the face and sent him flying arse over tea kettle. Lucien landed, sputtering, in a heap on the floor, but when he tried to rise the world swam nauseatingly beneath him and he had to close his eyes after a sudden wave of nausea that had as much to do with the sudden revelation of his own depravity as it did the ill effects of the drink.
For a moment he lay there, feeling the earth spin beneath him, his hands clutching at the carpet, his eyes screwed up tight against the sudden urge to vomit. He breathed deeply, once, twice, three times, and at long last he found the strength to speak.
"I've made a mess of things, haven't I?" he said morosely. And then he rolled onto his side and heaved the meager contents of his stomach onto the floor.
Two hours later Lucien found himself sitting in his shirtsleeves at the kitchen table, sipping gingerly at a cup of tea while Matthew frowned at him from across the table. His mind had cleared quickly once he purged the drink from his system; he still felt rather delicate, and his head ached something terrible, but when he opened his eyes he saw the world as it was, and knew himself for a fool.
"Doctor Harvey performed the autopsy herself," Matthew told him, and Lucien's heart sank still further in his chest. He had forgotten, somehow, that he was due at the morgue first thing in the morning. I've let Matthew down as well, he thought glumly. My father, my wife, my daughter, Jean, Matthew, Christ, even Mrs. Penny; I can never make any of them happy. I wonder how long it will be before Matthew leaves me, too?
"I suppose this is the part where you give me the sack, is it?" Lucien asked him grimly.
To his utter confusion, Matthew only barked out a laugh.
"Everyone's entitled to a sick day, every now and then," he said. "So long as you don't pull any stunts like that at the station, I don't see any reason why you can't keep your job. But the moment you stuff up…"
Lucien nodded in agreement, and immediately regretted the action, for it only set his stomach to churning once again and compounded the terrible pain in his head.
"You want to tell me what happened?" Matthew asked. "Mrs. Penny tells me she's been keeping an eye on your drinks cart, and you haven't had a spell like this for a while now."
Do I dare tell him? Lucien wondered. Matthew had warned him off Jean from the very first, had been adamant that no good could come of Lucien being friendly with her, insistent that he stood to lose his job, his reputation, his very future, by virtue of his taking on a whore. And yet Lucien had done it, just the same, for Jean was everything to him, a piece of hope in the darkness, a piece of goodness he could cling to. He had flown in the face of Matthew's careful warning, and been repaid with grief, but there was no reason now, he thought, to continue to hide his transgressions, for the thing was done, and he could visit Jean no more, and his heart ached, desperate to share his story with someone else, to hear some sympathy or wise counsel.
And so he did. Slowly, haltingly he confessed the whole sorry tale, how he had first solicited Jean, how he had come to care for her so deeply, how she had encouraged him to go to China and his hopes had been dashed by his daughter, how she had comforted him afterwards, how Derek Alderton had come to the Lock and Key, how Jean and Lucien between them had tried to devise some means of dealing with him, and how Lucien had so spectacularly offended his lady love that she refused to see him, ever again. Matthew did not interrupt him beyond a hum or a harrumph at the expected times, but his frown deepened with each passing second, and by the time Lucien was through there was an expression rather like pity in his sharp eyes.
"I did tell you, Lucien," he said grimly.
Lucien raised his hands as if in defeat. "I know," he sighed, "I know. But Jean is..she's…"
"She's a good woman," Matthew finished for him. "She is. And her girls are good women, too. But it's dangerous, to get too close. Jean knows the rules, even if you don't."
"Oh, bugger the bloody rules!" Lucien spat, and Matthew appeared taken aback by his sudden display of vitriol. "I want her to be my wife, Matthew. I want her to live in this house with me, and I want us to eat our meals together, and I want her to have a garden to grow things in and I want her to be safe, and I want…" He realized, as he spoke, how utterly ridiculous it sounded. Talking about all the things he wanted, all the dreams he had harbored in his heart for their future when it was his callous disregard of Jean's feelings that had sent her running from his side, when it was his own actions that seemed to prove her fears founded and left him without her.
"How long has it been since you met her, Blake?" Matthew asked.
"I don't know," Lucien answered slowly, wondering what on earth Matthew was trying to get at with this particular line of questioning. "It was after we found that dead girl in the lake. That was what...mid-May?"
"And now it's August," Matthew pointed out, and realization began to dawn slowly in Lucien's mind. "You've known her three months? Thereabouts? Three months, and you're talking about marriage and moving her out of the pub. Really, Lucien, you hardly even know the woman. And it's clear from how all this has fallen apart that you don't really understand her. You pushed too hard, things fell apart. It happens. Try not to be too hard on yourself, would you?"
It was, Lucien thought, the most confusing mishash of advice he'd ever received, but there was a thread of sense running through it, even he could see that. Yes, it was his fault Jean had left, but it was not cruelty on his part or spite on hers that had driven a wedge between them. It was a misunderstanding, he could see that now; for all that he felt as if she had taken up residence inside his heart the truth remained that they had a very great deal to learn about one another, and he could not fault Jean for the way she had responded to him, for how quickly she had rushed to defend herself against a man she had in truth known only for a very little while.
Just as he could not fault Li, truly, for how wary she had been when he turned up at her door; he was a stranger to her, and long years of fear had left her mistrustful. She was only trying to protect her heart, the life she'd tried to build for herself, and he had intruded on that life, and he represented to her an almost untenable risk, a threat that could ruin everything she'd worked so hard for. It was Jean who had encouraged him to reach out to Li, to continue to write to her, to slowly, carefully, reveal himself to her and hope that she would do the same for him. Would Jean offer him the same counsel now, he wondered; would it help matters if he bared his heart to her, if he tried to find some way for them to continue to learn about one another, or had he crossed a line from which there was no returning? Was it too late, he wondered, or was there hope yet?
Matthew would say it was too late, he knew. Matthew would say they were doomed from the start, and the kindest thing he could do, for both their sakes, would be to simply let her go, let her return to her life and he to his, never again to cross paths with one another. That was the advice Matthew would give, but the very idea was intolerable to Lucien. Oh, he was not so much a fool as to consider marching through Jean's front door when the wounds he had created were still so very fresh and she had been so firm in her directive that he not return, but he was fool enough to cling to hope.
"Now," he said, looking to change the subject. "What did Alice find in the autopsy?"