Chapter 2: The tearful sister

Wren 

“Drink it, Wren.”

Julian’s voice was barely louder than the scrape of Thomas’s heels as he dragged the limp body into the dark hall. The smear of red on the glass was still wet, running down in thin legs toward the floor.

My hands shook for real this time. Cold terror settled deep in the bone. I looked from the tip of the cane to the half-empty pitcher. I swallowed it. I had believed the pills were the only danger.

Julian shut the oak door. The bolt slid home with a final thud.

Pitch black.

I collapsed onto the cot, knuckles pressed to my teeth to keep the sob inside. My stomach twisted hard. Poison? Slow sedative? Every pulse behind my eyes said the walls were closing, the air thickening, the fog finally coming for me.

I lay there for hours listening to water drip from the vaulted ceiling, waiting for my heart to stop.

Grey morning light leaked down the stairwell and I was still breathing. The horror had not killed me, but it had stripped every scrap of false confidence. Exhausted, skin burning, lips cracked, I stared at the pitcher as it might strike.

The bolt drew back mid-morning.

Not Julian. A soft sigh, the rustle of silk. Lyra stepped through carrying a silver tray with a porcelain teacup, dry toast, and a small velvet-framed oval.

Her eyes were red. Tear tracks shone on her pale cheeks. She looked like a grieving angel carrying the weight of my collapse.

“Oh, Wren,” she breathed, voice trembling with a tenderness that turned my stomach. She set the tray outside the glass, unlocked the door, and stepped in. “You look so pale. Did you sleep at all, darling?”

I shrank against the headboard, blanket to my chin. Play the part. If they knew I had understood Thomas, Julian would stop playing with poison and glass.

“The boy,” I rasped. “Thomas. He was here. Bleeding on the glass.”

Lyra paused over the tea. She turned, eyes full of gentle pity, and brushed a strand of hair from my forehead with cool fingers.

“Thomas?” Soft, as if speaking to a frightened child. “Sweetheart, Thomas died three days ago. He slipped into the river by the mill. We buried him yesterday.”

“No.” I leaned away. “He was here. Julian hit him. There was blood”

“Look at the glass, Wren.” She stepped aside.

Spotless. Crystal clear. Not a smudge, not a drop.

“You’re having the visions again,” she murmured, sitting on the edge of the cot. Lavender and damp earth rose from her skirts. “The doctor said this stage would be hard. Your mind builds these violent stories because it’s fighting the fever.”

She drew the small framed portrait from her pocket. “I brought something to anchor you. From before you got sick.”

I took the cold brass frame. Our family Father in the wingback, Mother behind him, the two of us at their feet.

Wrong.

I was the one holding the hoop and sticking in the plain grey dress. Lyra sat on Father’s knee wearing the pearl necklace he had given me on my twelfth birthday. The necklace I had worn the night he died.

“This isn’t the painting from the parlour,” I whispered. “I held the pearls. You stood by the window.”

Lyra squeezed my hand with fierce, tearful intensity. “You’ve always misremembered that day. You were distant. Quiet. Father worried about your moods.”

She was rewriting me. Stroke by stroke.

“Look at your dresser.” She pointed to the washstand. “You left the silver music box out again. You used to wind it until the springs broke when an episode came.”

The music box sat on the faded wood.

I had buried it in the garden behind the old townhouse five years ago, after Mother died. I covered it with my own hands.

Yet there it was, proving to any outsider that I was mad, that I conjured ghosts into my cage.

A cold clarity cut through the fear.

She was brilliant. The tears were real. The pity was perfect. Her weapon was not a cane. It was the slow drip of rewritten reality until I would beg for the poisoned water just to make the noise stop.

I looked at the painting, then at her shining eyes. The tiny quiver at the corner of her mouth was not sorrowful.

Satisfaction.

“I remember now,” I stammered, shoulders slumping, portrait sliding from my fingers. I forced my eyes wide and unfocused on the music box. “I buried it… but it came back. It always comes back.”

Lyra sighed in relief and kissed my cheek. “Yes, darling. It always comes back. Rest. Drink your water.”

She locked the door behind her.

“Lyra?” My voice was small.

She looked back with that sweet tragic smile. “Yes?”

“Where is my pearl necklace? The one Father gave me?”

Her smile held, but her hand froze on the keys. For a fraction of a second her gaze dropped to the pocket of her dress where the outline of a heavy beaded chain pressed against the silk.

“You broke it,” she said smoothly. “You threw the pearls into the lake the night Father died. Don’t you remember?”

The door closed. Her footsteps faded.

I sat motionless until the house went quiet. Then I turned the music box over.

Dry red clay caked the bottom the same clay from the banks of the estate lake. Dug up this morning.

Stuck in the mud was a tiny scrap of dark green wool. From the jacket Thomas had been wearing when Julian struck him down.

My heart stopped.

They had not killed him. They had dragged him somewhere else.

And from deep beneath the flagstones under my bed, through the cracks in the ancient stone, came a faint rhythmic tapping.

Three short. Three long. Three short.

Someone was alive down there. Knocking on my floor.