One month later…
The house was far too quiet, these days. Danny had been awarded a position in Melbourne, an opportunity to train to be a detective. It was all he'd wanted, all his life, and his Auntie Jean had wished him well, and kissed his cheek when he left her, and never let him see the tears that threatened to fall as she watched another young man she loved and cared for walking away from her. It was the nature of young men, she thought, to leave. Some returned, and some never came home again, and all she could do was wait, and see what the future might have in store.
Mattie was next to go; she had begun a new study in Melbourne, and was away from Ballarat more often than she was present. There were whispers, throughout the town, that perhaps the time had come to find a new district nurse, and whispers, too, about Mattie and Danny both disappearing off to the big city at the same time, but Jean knew them both, and Jean knew better. They were only spreading their wings, and learning how to fly.
Lucien, too, had spread his wings, and flown off to Shanghai. He'd sent Jean a telegram, assuring her that he'd landed safely and that all was well, but there had been no word from him since then. Not that Jean expected there would be; Lucien had far more pressing matters to attend to than assuaging his housekeeper's worries for his safety, and she could not fault him for being focused on his child. Truth be told, Jean was grateful he'd not written to her more, and she was grateful, too, for the quiet, for it gave her time to think.
The night before Lucien set off for Shanghai Jean had overheard that conversation between Nemea and Halcyon, and she'd been playing it over and over again in her mind, an endless looping song she could hardly understand.
He's quite fond of her, you know, Nemea had said. Said it as casually as if she were remarking on the weather, as if Lucien's fondness for Jean was a fact, and not a particularly shocking one. If he was so fond of her, Jean thought, he'd had a funny way of showing it, drinking all hours of the day and night, making such an awful racket, completely disregarding her attempts to civilize him and often deriding the town that had given her birth, the town that was as much a part of Jean as Jean was part of it. He'd had a very funny way of showing it indeed, for when he'd left her that next morning he'd shaken her hand, and said only be well, Jean. Shaken her hand, as if she were a patient in his surgery, and wished her well, and offered her no reassurances as regarded his return or his intentions. Fond indeed.
But a sly voice in the back of Jean's mind pointed out her folly; Halcyon had likewise been insistent that Jean herself was dreadfully fond of Lucien, and Jean had only wished him a safe journey before she sent him on his way. She'd offered him no particular warmth, on that day, and she had been, she knew, perhaps a bit chilly towards him of late, after the incident in the butcher's. Perhaps Lucien was only confused, as Jean was herself, thrown by their daemons' sudden affection for one another in light of their own reticence. Perhaps he was only fond as she was fond, fond in a way that frightened her.
He doesn't know what's become of his wife, and until he knows for certain he's frozen in place.
Perhaps he did not wish to be, she thought. Perhaps he wished for the ice that shrouded his heart to melt, as with the coming of spring. Perhaps if only he knew for a certainty, then he might be able to move, and perhaps he longed to move towards her.
Then again perhaps he might return from Shanghai with his wife in tow. What a mess.
With very little to occupy herself at present, given there was no one to feed this evening but herself, no patients to tend to, and no more cleaning to be done, Jean settled herself behind Lucien's desk with a stack of his medical journals. Jean had ever been an avid reader, but she saved the romances and the murder mysteries for the evening hours. Daylight ought to be used for practical pursuits, and she had always been curious about the good doctor's profession, and the medical journals both expanded her mind and made her more valuable to his practice. It seemed the best way to keep her mind off her troubles; idle hands do the devil's work, her mother used to say, and Jean believed it.
She was finding it rather difficult to concentrate, however, for Halcyon was fluttering by the window, looking longingly out into the bright and brilliant sunlight.
"Oh, Jean, why don't we go down to the lake?" he asked her. "We could watch the cranes, and there might be rowers, later. We could pack a little picnic basket, and a blanket. Wouldn't that be lovely?"
"Halcyon, it is a Tuesday," Jean told him, smiling. "I'll not be seen lying about doing nothing at all in the middle of the day when civilized folk ought to be working."
"But there's no work to do!" he protested. "And those journals are all dreadfully boring."
"They aren't," Jean told him. Truth be told they were a bit...dry, but some of the information inside was interesting. "Look here, see, this is an article about a new drug that's being used to treat morning sickness. Imagine if they'd had something like that when I was pregnant with Jack."
Jean had been ill nearly every second of every day for nearly six months, when she was pregnant with Jack. Young Christopher had just started walking, and Jean's husband had to spend all his time working the farm, and she'd been so worn out and frustrated by the whole thing she'd gone to bed weeping more often than not. A medication like Distaval might have been very helpful to her, indeed.
For a moment Halcyon was quiet; he seemed quite taken, she thought, with something on the other side of the window. Perhaps a bright flower in bloom, or an unfamiliar car trundling by, or-
"Jean?" he said, sounding dreadfully unsure of himself. "You said there are no stoats in Australia, didn't you?"
Jean's heart swooped in her chest, as fear came rushing over her fast and unstoppable as a flood.
"Halcyon-"
"Only there's one in the garden, again. I think it's the same one. Major Alderton's."
Jean leapt to her feet and raced to the window, joined Halcyon there just in time to see the white and brown tail of Derek Alderton's daemon disappearing over the fence.
What on earth could he want with us? Jean wondered. It had been strange, sleeping all by herself in that grand house when she'd never been alone like that in all her life, but she'd never truly felt afraid, never truly felt unsafe until now. Ballarat was a quiet little town, and folks had nothing to fear from their neighbors - usually - and she hadn't given a thought to how vulnerable she was, staying in the Blake house all by her lonesome. But the thought of Derek Alderton and his Lilith sniffing around left her dreadfully uneasy. It occurred to her suddenly that perhaps she ought to purchase some ammunition for Christopher's old pistol; the unloaded gun had frightened off Sergeant Hannam, but Jean had only been bluffing, then. Somehow she didn't think Alderton would fall for that sort of ruse.
Then again he might want nothing at all to do with you, she told herself sternly. It's Lucien he wants, and Lucien is not here. Perhaps he'll simply leave.
"What's happening, Jean?" Halcyon asked her in a small, frightened voice. Jean held out her hand to him and he came at once, settled on her palm and let her draw him in close against her chest.
"I don't know," she told him honestly, stroking her forefinger gently across the brilliant blue feathers that covered his head. "But everything will be all right, sweetheart, you'll see."
"I'd feel better if Nemea were here," Halcyon said sadly.
"So would I," Jean confessed. She'd missed the proud lioness as much as she missed the man who accompanied her, and she had never missed the pair of them more than now. The house seemed suddenly massive, like a great, sprawling prison, and Jean herself trapped inside, afraid to cross the threshold for fear of what waited for her, out there in the world. Perhaps if she only kept the doors locked, she'd have nothing to fear. Perhaps she was only being silly.
"Come on, you," she said. "Let's settle down. Whatever she wants, she can't get to us here. Perhaps she's seen that Lucien's gone, and the Major will leave town again."
The words were spoken as much for her benefit as much for Halcyon's; Jean needed all the reassurance she could get, at present, but it was not forthcoming from any quarter. All she had was herself, and Halcyon.
"I wonder where they are now," Halcyon said, leaving Jean's embrace to hop instead over Lucien's desk while Jean returned to the chair behind it. "Lucien and Nemea."
"Wherever they are, they must be with Lucien's daughter, and that is as it should be," Jean told him.
"I wonder what she's like, Lucien's daughter," Halcyon mused. "I wonder what her mother was like."
Jean had seen a photograph of them both, tucked away in Lucien's trunk. His Chinese wife, with her shiny dark hair and her soft face, his darling little girl with a ribbon in her hair, Lucien himself young and proud and happy, standing beside them. The photograph was old and faded but the image was burned in her mind, for she had asked herself the same questions. Had wondered what sort of woman could claim Lucien Blake's attention, and keep it, when he seemed so distractible. Had wondered what a child of Lucien's might be like, whether she would be wild and reckless as her father, clever like him, kind like him, or if the horrors she had seen in her life had changed her. Whatever they were like, Lucien's family, Jean wished for his sake that they were well, and that he found comfort with them. And she wished, too, that he would return to her, sooner rather than later. The world was an uncertain place, and she longed to find comfort in the nearness of him.
