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Thomas was enough. Thomas was everything.
The clean, faintly musky smell of his skin. The warmth of his breath. The heat of his body, unseen but always nearby as they lay in bed, listening to the wind howl at the chimneys. His hands on her, firm and sure, gentle, never letting her fall. She thought she could write a symphony of the quiet sounds he made when she reciprocated. It was a dance she knew perfectly, never faltering. It was security. It was home.
Thomas was enough.
Except when he wasn’t.
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It started, as far as she could remember, with their nursemaid.
Theresa had arrived when Thomas was four, and the children had been dutifully dressed in their best and bustled downstairs by the housekeeper to meet her. Their father smiled for Theresa, welcoming her warmly. He positively beamed when he brought Thomas forward, announcing the chubby-cheeked boy as “the young master of the house, then!” Thomas hadn’t yet learned how to disappoint James, nor James how to hate him.
“My daughter, Lucille,” was little more than an afterthought, when all the fuss over Thomas died down. She dropped a curtsey and expected that to be the end of it.
Only for her eyes to widen when Theresa knelt down and extend her hand solemnly.
“I’m very pleased to meet you, Miss Lucille. My, but aren’t you a lovely young lady. How old are you?”
“S-six,” Lucille barely managed to stammer. For an adult to ask her questions- in the bounds of her tiny world, such things were unprecedented. She almost forgot to shake the proffered hand, but remembered at the last moment.
“Six!” Theresa her other hand to her chest as if alarmed, but her smile only widened. “Quite grown-up!” She leaned closer and stage-whispered conspiratorially, “I shall have to learn a great deal from you, I expect. Will you teach me all about the house and the nursery?”
Lucille nodded, still feeling a little stunned.
Something new had entered her world.
Theresa was a revelation. Physically, she was unlike anyone the Sharpe siblings had ever seen: not a pallid ghost of gray eyes and fading blonde hair like their mother, nor robust and almost florid in coloring like their father. Not like any of the other servants, either. Her hair was a riot of coppery curls; her face dotted with freckles and her eyes a shining hazel. But her appearance was the least of the difference.
Theresa laughed. The sound of laughter in the nursery was infrequent when the children weren’t alone- which, until recently, hadn’t been often. She knew, it seemed to them, an endless number of new games. She came back from her Sunday off one winter with toys: a jumping-jack for Thomas and a tiny china doll for Lucille.
“She looks like you,” Theresa said, tapping Lucille’s nose. And indeed, Lucille marveled, the little figure had a white china face, dark china hair, and blue painted eyes. She clutched it to her chest for a moment, then ran to find the jam-jar-imprisoned butterfly she’d captured in the garden. Theresa always asked about her butterflies; it wouldn’t do to leave one un-shown.
Everything about the nursemaid was different. Even the way she spoke hinted at something Lucille had never considered before: a world outside Allerdale Hall.
(“Where are you from?” she’d asked one night, when autumn leaves piled up against the sides of the house and the wind seemed to find every chink in the nursery walls.
“Halifax, lovey,” Theresa had said. Then she smoothed Lucille’s hair back from her forehead and told her about a city by the sea, where the snow was thick and white and so unlike the scarlet winters the little girl knew.)
As she grew, Theresa became an increasing source of fascination for her. At six, she realized the maid was nice and clever and didn’t like to hit, and that was quite enough. At eight, she realized she was pretty.
21 years old, though she wouldn’t know that until she found Theresa’s letter of reference in a desk years later and did a bit of mental math. Still with the same shining curls and sparkling eyes. Her waist beneath her neat calico dress seemed as small as that of the French doll Lucille was handed when she and Thomas were paraded in front of company, though it was mostly the width of her skirts that made it seem so. Her body curved in places Mama’s didn’t- most grown-up ladies’ bodies did, Lucille knew. But most grown-up ladies didn’t have Theresa’s sweet face and ringing laugh.
At least, not the grown-up ladies she knew.
Every word of praise from Theresa was like a jewel, and she felt she could never have enough. When they smiled together over Thomas’ antics- his first attempts to read, his fumbling efforts at pasting blocks of wood together –Lucille felt quite old and wise. More often than not, she’d slip out of her own bed and curl up with Theresa, who always lifted the blankets sleepily to let her in. Warm and safe, with her idol close at hand, she never seemed to be troubled by nightmares.
Which was where Lady Beatrice found them the morning Theresa got sacked.
Lucille watched her go from the attic window, legs still smarting from the birch switch. Eventually she would learn that the maid had been turned out with no character reference and no last wages. She never knew about the scar Theresa would keep forever, from a slap with a spiky ring in it. A scar that would later become the only lasting thing they shared.
“I never, ever,” Mama had said between lashings, “want to see my daughter so close to some filthy servant again.”
So, as when Thomas got a private tutor and she was told to focus on her needlepoint and music, Lucille retreated and watched.
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She watched a succession of maids come and go, the only other women in the house besides her mother. She watched how they moved, how they dressed. Some were her particular favorites- the young ones, with soft skin and strands of hair escaping beneath their caps. The ones that shone like candles in the growing darkness of the house.
The ones Sir James hadn’t yet cornered in the hallway or visited in their garret rooms.
Lucille sometimes heard them crying, in her bed down the attic corridor. She shoved her head under the pillow and burrowed deeper under her coverlet. Stupid girls. At eleven, she had learned that crying never helped it be over faster.
But before that point came- or if it never did, or if she never knew –they seemed as light as butterflies to her, jewel-bright and otherworldly. They flew in and out of Allerdale Hall almost as quickly; there one day and gone the next. Fleeing back into the light.
She read one day, in an old book someone had consigned to the trunk-room shelf, that butterflies fed on sunshine. Glancing up at the huge black moths on the walls, she decided it must be true.
There were other books, in the big library downstairs. Ones she wasn’t supposed to read. But in spite of the danger, in spite of the bruises and welts if she was caught, she couldn’t resist them. The words spoke of things like what her father did, on the worst nights, but so unlike that she couldn’t believe they were really the same.
“Love,” over and over. “The congress of our love.” “The consummation of our love.” “How hard I shall love you!”
Love was a rare currency, in Lucille’s world. It was a stream that only flowed to her from one source: Thomas.
At thirteen, she showed him what love meant. Puzzled, but not disturbed, he followed her lead. And she found that it wasn’t like her father, at all. It was something that could be sweet, soothing. Something that could make the only real person in her world happy. A touch that never became a blow.
Something she could control.
“I love him,” the heroines in books sighed, lounging in their perfumed bowers. “I love him,” Lucille repeated to herself as she practiced her scales at the battered upright piano in the nursery. It formed the single truth of her life, one constant star to steer by.
“I love her.”
It was a book she’d never noticed before, small and dusty on the highest shelf. Lucille put her candlestick down carefully on a side table and scaled the sliding ladder. Slipping the leather-bound volume down, she descended and began to read.
It was very dull to start off with: two ladies bemoaning their lack of gentlemen. She began to wonder if there would be any love in it at all. And then, all at once in the way of the love-stories, things changed tone dramatically.
Embraces, kisses. Hands roving over soft flesh that was gently rounded, not hard and angular. Whispers of beauty, invocations of Venus herself. Fingers, and then lips, finding secret places on the body that Lucille herself felt tingling at the mention of them. The blood rose in her cheeks as she read on, skipping the illustrations for perhaps the first time in her life. Beneath one whisper-thin page, she caught a glimpse of two curved forms entwined, and hurriedly turned the next two pages at once. Somehow, she couldn’t bear to turn those words into any images but the ones in her mind.
This too, it seemed, could be love.
The next day, when the chambermaid assigned to the nursery came to dust, Lucille couldn’t seem to look her in the eye. She was a plain country-girl, pleasant enough in an absent way. Hardly Venus. But all Lucille could think of when she looked at her was her pink mouth and what it might look like “stopped up with kisses,” her smooth, callused hands, “sliding, sliding.” When their eyes met, Lucille blushed and looked away, feeling like she’d swallowed one of her butterflies.
She’d never blushed with Thomas. Blushing, she decided, must mean the love wasn’t real. Books always talked about “lying blushes,” after all.
Two nights later, she heard her father’s voice coming from the maid’s room, then the expected creaking of bedsprings. It was almost a relief.
Anyone debased like her was no longer a brilliant, floating light. They were just another part of the darkness.
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When Lucille was fourteen, everything changed.
She made it change.
There was no choice. Losing Thomas was not an option. But even if there had been, she reflected as she scrubbed the porcelain bathtub and watched the rag turn scarlet, she might have done it anyway. Her mother’s face had been many things over the years: scowling, berating, mocking, disdainful.
She might have split it with a cleaver just to never have to see it again.
And then- they were separated all the same.
The asylum wasn’t a house of horrors. It wasn’t a haven of rest. It was nothing; day after day of handicrafts when the doctors wanted her to be awake and sedatives when they wanted her to sleep. Certain answers to their questions, she learned, bought her more waking hours and less time dragged down into her nightmares. Years of beatings hadn’t been able to make Lucille the perfect lady her mother had always desired, and she doubted any Swiss boarding school could have done it, either. For all her refinements- perfect posture, elegant speech, careful sketches of insects and etudes played without a single mistake –she’d never learned social graces.
Until now.
Whoever they wanted her to be, that was the girl they’d release back to Allerdale. Back to Thomas. Back to safety. So that was who she became.
There was another girl there about her age, a girl named Anna. She was sixteen years old and she had set a henhouse on fire because a ghost told her to- or so she claimed.
Lucille almost laughed when she heard- laughed, in that place, after everything. But Anna’s dark eyes twinkled almost impishly when she told her story, and her brown skin was like satin. Lucille instantly decided she was Pararge aegeria, the speckled wood butterfly, all warmth and rich earth tones. Exactly like it, innocent and flawless. Something worthy of wanting.
The first time they kissed, kneeling behind a shrub in the walled garden to hide from the matron, it felt like- drinking light. Like some heady fire was rushing into Lucille from Anna’s lips, setting her veins ablaze. Thomas’ kisses were sure, familiar, comforting. This was almost frightening, but she didn’t want to stop.
Lying awake in bed at night, having proven her ability to stay put without sedatives, Lucille felt sure that fire would light up the darkness of the dormitory. How could nobody else see it? The flames licking at her mind and body must certainly be twice as bright as gaslight. She had taken light into herself- how could that simply be invisible?
Two weeks of kisses and soft touches in stolen moments. Two weeks, and then she came back from knitting stockings for the parish poor to find a new girl, blank and uninteresting, sitting on Anna’s bed. For Anna, it seemed, had left her behind.
“She’s gone home, dear,” the nurse explained when she asked, trying to keep her voice steady. “Her uncle signed her out after luncheon. Now, do be a good girl and fetch your linens for the maid.”
Lucille didn’t weep. Not really. All the tricks were old knowledge by now- look at the ceiling. Don’t blink for as long as possible. Find that hard place where none of this matters, the one gaining ground by the day in her heart, and curl up on its rocky shore.
She decided that fire, like blushing, was a lie.
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Freedom, when the men with the monocles decided sufficient time had passed, came easily enough. Lucille smiled prettily and thanked them for such devoted care as she imagined cutting their hearts out.
And then- Thomas. His smell, his familiar warmth. Home.
Margaret was a thudding bore. A washed-out, faded shell of a woman who existed to simper and dote on Thomas. Her Thomas. But she had money and they did not, so when her sentimental proposal came, Lucille pushed Thomas to accept. He was beautiful, she noted with pride, his skin umarred by scars from their mother’s cane and ring, or their father’s belt. Not like hers. It was a beauty that could save their home, as it had saved her for years.
She gave Margaret her ring when Thomas asked, with a chaste kiss on the cheek. She took it back by severing the old woman’s swollen finger with a kitchen knife. It was, she thought idly, really very kind of her to wait until Margaret was dead.
Pamela, pale and quiet, came and went just as easily. Little more than a wraith already, weeping for the doting father who’d begged Thomas to accept his sickly daughter’s hand in marriage. Lucille thought the squeaking of that infernal chair through the corridors would drive her mad before the estate transfer was finalized.
Enola. Something had been different with Enola. Not much, but enough.
When she swept in on a sunny May afternoon, merry on Thomas’ arm. Lucille prepared her mask along with the tea things. Smile, nod. Touch her distended stomach and murmur something gentle about a husband abroad for business. A handsome cousin- even in a fiction, she couldn’t imagine not being a Sharpe. No matter the variations, the play remained essentially the same.
Enola’s eyes flickered to Lucille’s bare left hand, then back to her face. “I see,” she said. Her accent was a bit like music, her hair dark and glossy about a round, olive-colored face.
The traitor spark, the lying fire. This one might be dangerous. She might be fun.
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“Enola, my dear, you’re shivering.”
Enola jumped slightly in her chair by the fire. Lucille could almost hear her heartbeat speed up, leaning over her left shoulder.
“Am I? It is only-” a coughing fit broke the sentence off. When the handkerchief left Enola’s mouth, Lucille noted a few dark drops on it with satisfaction. Not much longer now- for either of them, she thought, as the life inside her kicked weakly against her abdomen. Life-in-death and death-in-life, poetic irony.
She tutted and stroked Enola’s hair. “Shhh, poor thing. You must rest. I’ll make you some tea.”
Turning to go, she found herself stopped by a hand on her sleeve. She stopped and looked back, registering the question in Enola’s eyes for a brief second before-
Her sister-in-law stretched halfway out of the chair and kissed her.
It was the briefest brush of lips against hers, but it was unmistakable in its intent. She could feel her eyes widening as her mind raced to catch up to what just happened.
Enola blushed. “I- I’m sorry,” she said in that almost too-precise English. “It’s just that I thought…you have always been so kind to me, Lucille, and your husband is never home…” she trailed off. “Forgive me, I incorrectly assumed your intentions.”
There was a moment of silence. Then, Lucille took Enola’s chin in her hand and tilted her face upwards again.
“What makes you so sure?” she whispered.
The second kiss was much longer, intense, slow and deliberate. Enola’s lips, when Lucille slipped her tongue past them, tasted faintly of copper and bitter almonds.
O trespass sweetly urged, she thought, give me my sin again.
Beneath her hands, Enola’s pulse beat like wings against a cage.
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Enola and the baby she tried so hard to save slipped into a vat of clay on the same day.
Lucille stared at the smooth, scarlet surface impassively, remembering warm flesh against her lips and bruises blooming in the wake of her teeth. It wouldn’t do to bruise Thomas, not when his perfection was everything she’d worked and suffered for. But lesser creatures pinned to pasteboard…she could do whatever she wanted with those.
She went upstairs and carefully washed the knife, feeling nothing at all.
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The little blonde angel, the monarch flitting from one flowering moment in her charmed life to another, promised to be another lovely diversion. Lucille brushed her petal-soft cheek with a dying butterfly’s wing and told her that black moths consumed such as the butterfly. Such as her.
And then she was looking at Thomas. And Thomas was looking at her, in a way he’d never looked at his previous wives. And everything started to fall apart.
When Lucille glanced out of the kitchen and saw her standing in the doorway, looking so small in her ridiculous, beribboned cream coat, and clearly wondering what she’d gotten herself into, the worry eased somewhat. Edith was a tiny flicker in the darkness. A flame drawn to the moths, just like the rest. She wouldn’t present any problem at all.
The game didn’t change- “accidental” touches, looks that lingered just a moment too long. Staring at her as she sat engrossed in a book or playing with that stupid dog. Nothing that couldn’t be explained by a sister-in-law with more affection than tact.
She didn’t respond as Enola did; she shrank from Lucille’s hand on her shoulder or a chaste embrace in the hallway. But that could be amusing, too, in its own way. Pushing lines, testing boundaries. Watching her pupils dilate, with an interest between scientific and sexual. Was it fear or lust? Perhaps even Edith herself didn't know.
(Lucille thought of those wide pupils, black almost swallowing blue, on the rare nights Thomas left her and returned to his wife’s side. Her hand moved between her legs under the coverlet, imagining Edith spread out before her like a specimen on a card. Undressed and panting with need.)
Except- she was never still.
The damned woman kept turning up exactly where she wasn’t wanted. Stealing keys and sneaking about the house at night. The more Lucille tried to keep Edith in check, the more she slipped from her grasp.
When the talk of a ghost with Mother’s face began, Lucille increased the dosage in her tea. What Edith was playing at, she didn’t know, but the game had to end sooner rather than later. She was spending too much time with Thomas.
Lucille heard the sighs, the rustle of silk against a table, before she strode into Thomas’ workroom with knuckles white on the tea-tray. It mustn’t be allowed to happen.
The night the snow fell in deep drifts outside the house, she sat at the piano, unable to face her bed. Cold. Empty. Alone. It was never empty before, and she hadn’t been alone in the house overnight since…she couldn’t remember when. Even during Thomas’ honeymoons, she’d insisted Findlay come in from his cottage on the grounds and stay on a cot in the kitchen. In case of visitors, she said, and the faintly addled old man didn’t question it. Even his silly, tiresome presence three floors down had been enough to slow her mind from chasing the fear of being left behind, all by herself, never to see another human face again.
But now…
It was all she could do, the next morning, to stop the frying-pan’s trajectory in midair and bring it crashing down on the table instead of Edith’s beautiful, hateful face.
“I was frantic,” she hissed. “Is this a game to you?”
No. Stop. That wasn’t what a concerned sister-in-law would say.
Coating her words in as much syrupy sympathy as she could muster- which even she realized wasn’t much –she backtracked. The storm. No way to send word. No idea what had happened, if there had been an accident.
(There had been an accident. If only it were as simple as the carriage overturning.)
When Edith lay in bed, almost too weak to move, Lucille felt the old flame spark up once more. She touched the pale face that was slowly losing its bloom with a damp cloth. She spooned porridge heavily laced with cream, sugar, cinnamon, and cyanide into the rosebud lips. Like this, Edith could nearly seem safe. Something precious, to hold or release as she liked.
But she’d refused the tea. Somehow, she knew.
And so, this had to end.
The knives rested in the kitchen drawer. A rusted cleaver waited beneath the clay pit floor tiles. Twisted sheets, heavy lamps- even her own hands would do. They’d been good enough for the little bitch’s puffed-up father. Poison would take too long, and Lucille wanted Edith’s incursion into her life- their life -over.
Thomas was enough. Thomas was everything.
And in the end, no matter how pretty their wings looked, butterflies were always safest after she pinned them down.