Three hours later, she complained of fatigue and went to lie down.
By supper, she was dead.
And Evelyn had been there, her little fingers stained yellow, confused and terrified as the doctors crowded around the deathbed. The maids had pulled her away, but not before she heard them arguing in low tones about what could have caused the sudden death. It made no sense, they said. Had she eaten something? Drunk something?
And she had thought only of the teacup.
The maids sent her to bed, but Evelyn had lain awake, unable to sleep. It had been easy enough to slip out; the household had retreated to the kitchen to whisper over her mother’s death, and they knew her to be obedient and forgettable. She ran out into the darkness, past the hedges, into the wilder woods. She went to the tree her mother loved to sit beneath, tears burning in her eyes, and she grabbed fistfuls of the yellow blossoms. But when she tasted one, there was no sweetness. Only a bitter wrongness that made Evelyn gag and spit.
And then she knew. It had been her cup, her childish impulse to delight her mother, that had killed her.
When her nursemaid realized at last that she was missing and came calling across the yard, she had hidden in a thick curtain of rose bushes. The thorns scarred her hands and limbs and cheeks in what felt like a necessary punishment. Evelyn had killed her mother, killed her with every painstaking drop of nectar added to the teacup.
They found her just past morning. They took her inside, bandaged her hands, and prepared her for her mother’s funeral. A hundred times she thought to say something, to confess, but she would break down into tears with each attempt. Her father and brothers grew irritated with her histrionics, uncaring of her pain. And then her mother was interred, and she was alone, and that seemed like more of a punishment than anything else imaginable.
Now, with broken fury, she approached the draping gelsemium vines she had planted a year after she killed her father. It had been another punishment she had devised for herself, and nobody in the house had known how to read it. The start of ruin. What else could it be, but the shame that resided in this house, that had driven her onward to every other horrible act? It had been the excuse that had allowed every other transgression. How could a girl who had, at seven, spent a whole day lacing her mother’s teacup with poison be anything but wicked? And why should she even try? It had been so easy to find herself capable of her first murders after that, so easy to excuse every drop of violence she’d distilled in her grasping quest for power.
She should have confessed. The rose bush had not been penance enough. Neither had the isolation. This, though…this was a true testament to her guilt. If this entity, this creeping horror from the sea, had felt in the woodwork of her ships and the tension of her sails the seed of blackness, the indelible mark upon her soul—how was she to argue with it?
Her own silence had been worst of all.
This unearthly horror, among every other person and plant and beast upon this world, had seen her for the wicked girl she had always been, and it had come to pull her house down around her. No matter how high she built her walls against the spread of it, it would find her. It would bring suspicion and fire to her doorway. If, somehow, she managed to hide this stain from Pollard, she would still have to deal with the whole of the city, with her competitors, with Danforth. Nothing would keep him from tearing her down, given the spreading rumors, the witness statements, the focus of the Judiciary upon her home. They would find her soldier, useless except to damn them all. She might fool Pollard, but she could not fool them all.
She seized at the vines, and tried to tear them down, but only succeeded in unbalancing herself. She fell to her knees beneath the arbor, tears burning in her eyes. Her fingers clawed into the soil and it crumbled under the pressure of her touch.
“Mother,” she whispered, voice cracking. “Mother, I never meant to hurt you.” She’d said it a thousand times before this moment, and a thousand times she’d had no answer, but maybe now. Maybe, with her house polluted by the unnatural, something would form a bridge between them.
Maybe she could speak apologies, and be heard. Maybe she could be forgiven, and this whole nightmare would finally, finally end.
She heard it distantly, as if from another room: the whisper of lace over fabric, the soft exhale of the young woman her mother had ceased to be. Her heart clenched, and she bowed forward, bringing her forehead to the soil. Its earthen perfume wrapped around her, fetid fertilizer shot through with fresh green and old roots. The smell tangled in her veil.
“How do I make this right? Tell me, how do I carve out the poison in me that calls out to this new infection? How do I make amends?”
She received no response to her plea. Above her pounding heart, Evelyn heard only the sheeting of rain against the glass.
Then footsteps. Footsteps, from just before her. Evelyn jerked her head up, looking for her mother’s gentle, sad smile.
It was only Violetta, standing on the pathway that led out of the greenhouse. “The servants are all gone,” she said. “And I think I know what that thing meant about the start of ruin.
“This all started the night we found the soldier.”
“The soldier?”
Violetta reached out to help Evelyn up from the ground. “It cannot be a coincidence. By the time The Verity had docked and your men had fallen in to their stupor, he must have already been within the borders, perhaps even within the city. He has not told us how he came to be on our road in particular. Perhaps—perhaps this is the secret of his presence here. A plague-bearer, a carrier for that pestilence.”
It made a certain kind of sense; more, truly, than drugs brought into the harbor or a punishment sent by the bleakness of the heavens to lay her low after so many years. And yet she could not believe it. It did not track, not entirely.
“Why, then,” Evelyn said, “would it come for me, instead of anyone else?”
“It’s seeking him out, like a dog to its master.” Violetta was alight, frantic, hating. “Perhaps he was sent specifically to you, to take you down. You hold so much of what is left together. Without you, Delphinium will fall.”
A flash of panic lanced through her. “A knife in the back would have been more effective,” Evelyn said. “It’s impossible. Violetta—”
“Perhaps it was insurance. He would come to your home, ingratiate himself, and if he could not kill you straight because of how you keep to yourself, then his infection would give chase.”
“No.” She shook her head. Violetta’s logic made sense, but then she thought of the soldier, thought of the promise still carried in that head of his. If they could just get through this night—if she could just put him to use—
But there was violence in Violetta’s eyes, and a fierce triumph. Her expression fixed Evelyn in place.
“And what would you have me do?” Evelyn asked at last, voice softening.
“Kill him.”
Kill him. Evelyn’s own ambition and brutality echoed in those words, but they were Violetta’s entirely. The other night, in her self-medicated destruction, lying in bed half-delirious beside her companion, Evelyn had been so grateful that they could be honest with one another. Now that honesty tasted sour in her mouth. She did not want to know that Violetta was capable of this.
Evelyn swallowed thickly. “And what would you have me do with the body? We can’t explain it away. If they find it, Pollard will call for an inquiry, and they will go to investigate Iris at the hospital and find the rope marks. They’ll see the tattoos on the soldier. We’ll be ruined, Violetta. All of this will be taken from us.”