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Valancy held up her hand near the window glass, her thumb and forefinger curved to cup the moon outside. Behind her the ashy grey sky deepened into a finer bluish black, the skeletal lace
of the trees shivering in the wind. She held her fingers there a moment longer before she released them and let the curtain go slack against the sill.
“I don’t always like nights like tonight,” Cissy said. She let her cheek rest against the embroidered whorls of the coverlet. Her fingers stroked the pretty, faded threading: forget-me-nots and violets, delicate twists that had been part of her mother’s trousseau. Valancy had found it pressed between two old work dresses and had insisted on airing it out. It’s lovely, she had said. I’m sure she would want you to have it.
“It’s a witching night,” Valancy said. She stood and slipped across the room, ordering pill bottles and the water pitcher into neat patterns on the nightstand. “That’s what John Foster calls them.” Her voice fell softer, almost dreamlike in its cadences. “They are nights when spirits are invited to climb up upon the shores of the lakes and rivers, their slender fingers finding berth in seagrass and lavender, secreting themselves in the hollows of trees.”
“I like that,” Cissy said. She loved to hear Valancy talk more than she liked reading the words on the page: read to me, she urged her. And Valancy did, filling the room with visions of frost-covered apples, of grass dappled with light, the bridal white of freshly fallen snow. It was a little like heaven, Cissy thought, or hoped. When she told Valancy this Valancy kissed her forehead and said she thought heaven would be far better; but Cissy would almost prefer this. There would be room for her in a shabby backwoods cottage overgrown with wild pansies and damp running creeks.
“It makes me feel better about it, too,” Valancy said, almost soberly before her expression shifted and she laughed, sinking down onto the bed and taking Cissy’s hands in her own. “I used to be such a small scared creature. My mother told me all these stories— of Big Black Men and bad things that would pop me into a bag — especially on nights like these.”
“Those are terrible stories,” Cissy said, shifting and letting the coverlet drop into her lap. “I would have never — I would never,” she amended, her gaze dropping down to the embroidery. “Tell a child that.”
“No,” Valancy said. She raised her hand and stroked it over Cissy’s forehead. Valancy’s fingers were wonderfully cool and dry. “I’m sure you wouldn’t.”
This next breath felt harder, forcing its way down and about the ruins of her lungs. The air was cool and constricted, and she leaned forward, her hands braced against the bedcovers. She knew Valancy hated to hear her cough, but the rattle caught the taut line of muscle and made it ache, the blood sour in her mouth.
Valancy was there in a moment, her hands holding Cissy’s. “Some tea?” she asked.
“No,” Cissy said. She felt the steadiness of Valancy’s hands. Hers didn’t falter: she was too good, she hadn’t failed. She knew Valancy’s bitterness, hidden beneath the joking references to her mother and Cousin Stickles, the scent of liniment, but she had come beyond it. She squeezed Valancy’s hands. “Just you. I’ll be fine.”
“All right,” Valancy said. Her hands pulled the coverlet up around Cissy’s shoulders again. “You should rest. You must be tired.”
“It’s nights like these,” Cissy said. “They make me feel like walking. Out. I used to like to ramble— out by the hotel shore — it was like being in a fairy tale.” That was what Nicolas had told her. Just like Rapunzel, he had said, and pulled the pins from her hair, letting the strands fall like silk, his fingers parting them.
“Do you want to go out?” Valancy looked anxiously at her, her fingers knotted together. Cissy shook her head. Her hair was faded now, more chaff than wheat. Sometimes it felt like that had already died; it was a pale, silvery color now, almost invisible in its braid.
“No, no,” she said. “I am tired. I should rest.”
It was easy to fall asleep with Valancy’s steady breathing on the sofa, between the warm milk and their soft laughter. How she wished she had had a sister growing up, or her mother to come and rest Cissy’s head in her lap. Knights, Valancy told her, used to lay their heads in their ladies’ laps, and the ladies would braid flowers and stroke their fingers through the tawny heads of the knights. They would lay on a blanket of roses, and the knight would leave, carrying the lady’s emblem — usually some kind of flower or a handkerchief.
“That sounds beautiful,” Cissy said, imagining the shine of the knight’s armor, how wonderful it would be for the lady to have him home again. But the thought occurred to her too, that Valancy could be sure — if you had a knight, then of course he would come back, he would return to his lady. Cissy knew she would have to tell Valancy, sooner or later, about her knight, how he’d wandered away and not wanted to return to her. So she had sent him away. She clung to this memory with ferocity, her fingers curled around its hard edges, never minding the occasional hints of blood. She had done the right thing, she thought. This made it easy to fall asleep, the security of she had done right, and Valancy’s murmurs of stories, ladies with golden tresses and courts and wonderful things — wonderful, magical things — next to her.
When Cissy woke up, the room had taken on the usual bone-deep, drenching chill, but she didn’t notice it. She felt feverish, the heat emanating from her whole body, her limbs damp and heavy with sweat. Cissy pressed the cool side of the pillow to her cheek and trembled. These nights were the worst. She put her hands against the spot where the baby had kicked. She remembered those days, the painful joys beneath the fear that she would be discovered. The flutterings, the turnings of the baby. She had used to stop her work and press both palms to the rise of her belly. She was always too warm in those days, not with her skin as warm as rising dough, the baby straining inside. And then the sweetness of other days: the scent of milk and sleepy arms, the baby’s body content against hers. The sweet noises, how utterly dependent on her he was, and how much she had desperately needed him. Little William, but she had always called him Baby and Dear One, Sweetness and Darling Boy.
She pushed the covers back, her feet noiselessly hitting the floor. She had to walk — it would set her mind at ease to get cool again, the room was too small and tight, it would do nothing for her to stay in bed. She would just walk out to the garden; the garden where William had cooed his baby songs to her, where he would have taken his first, tentative steps to her arms. It was easy to see him in the garden. The bed was a reminder of too much, the long strain to get him to her, the nights she had spent taking him to her breast.
Valancy turned in her sleep, lips parted just slightly, and Cissy looked back at her once. She didn’t want to wake her. Not because Valancy would disapprove (a midnight ramble is sometimes all that’s needed, she had said before) but because she would want to come, and this — this Cissy needed for herself.
Outside, a fine layer of frost had covered the clusters of grass and the curve of the rose thorns. Cissy imagined for a moment nestling inside the brambles, letting the ice cover her until she fell asleep, deeply, her body chilled and then the baby would be warm in her arms, delighted by her once more. How easy it would be, she thought to allow the coughing to simply stop. The dead leaves above her drooped, clustered like feathery hands. She closed her eyes. A teacher, once, had told her about marble. It was hard and always cold, the teacher had said, and began life as a chunk of rock and was eventually whittled down to the fine-cut features of an angel. The roses were soft and drooping in the chill, their petals edged with frost. They wouldn’t last much longer. The yellow roses were already withered and gathered up inside to make into rose sachets and potpourri. But Cissy seized one enormous white rose, her favorite, and buried her nose into its heart. She smelled it as if from a distance, the delicious scent of wistful love and virginal sweetness.
This was the way to heaven, her way back to her baby. She closed her eyes. It wasn’t too long now, surely, just a few more weeks. And then — if she was good enough, if she was forgiven enough, she would slip into the rose garden and cradle the baby back to her again, and never have give him up again. She would hope — she would ask Valancy to bury her in white, to cover her in roses, the white petals covering her own stained skin as a prayer that here she would be admitted. She felt anticipation suddenly, hot and wonderful, that sense of possibility. And if she were very lucky, this was what her heaven would be, a bower of roses and her own sweet knight, the baby and she would not have to wait for anything. She would already have her return.