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It was his fault, and he should have known better.
A man who builds a tar-paper shack by the sea knows that with each season of storm he risks all that he owns being swept away. Storms are what they are; they cannot stop themselves even if they wish it. It is the shack owner's responsibility to read the signs, to see that the light of the sun is too hard and bright, the sea is too still, the sunrise glowing brick-dust red.If a man does not watch the signs and flee the storm, he has only himself to blame.
So when Thomas woke in his bed with no memory of how he got there, a head full of thoughts as fuzzy as the cloud-heavy sky beyond the windows, and a body that ached softly from the roots of his hair to the soles of his feet, the only person he was angry with was himself. But as he had learned long ago, anger at one's self, or even at others, served no purpose. He allowed himself the luxury for a few moments, and then he let it go.
This wasn't so bad, really. He would loose a few days of work on the mining machine, but that was not a tragedy. It had happened before, and no doubt it would happen again. He was comfortable enough, nestled in the softness of the master bed. The aches were gentle, and beyond that he simply felt a bit weak, and almost pleasantly drowsy. There was nothing to be done, so he might as well try to enjoy the comfort, and the rest.
He was just falling asleep again when he heard the door creak open, followed by the familiar rattle of china on a tray.Thomas opened his eyes, and there was Lucille. She stood in the doorway with a loaded tea tray in her hands and her face wreathed in smiles. She wore a robe of pale spring green, embroidered with sparkling blue forget-me-nots. Her hair was down, falling in sleek ebony waves to her hips. He loved that robe, and he loved her wild hair.
Which she knew very well, of course.
“You're awake! How are you feeling, my dear?”
He tried to sit up, but a wave of dizziness forced him to lie back again. “I'm not feeling altogether well, Lucille.”
She made a sympathetic clucking sound as she set the tray down. It bore a familiar meal, light
buttery toast, chicken soup and hot, sweet tea. (Not Firethorn Berry tea, though, thankfully).“You've been working far too hard, of late. It's no wonder you've made yourself ill.”
He held his tongue at that, and instead watched the silken movement of her shining hair as she bent to pour the tea.“Well,” she said with a sigh as she straightened, “it's a pity that you aren't feeling well, but I will take care of you, and you'll be up and about before you know it.”She turned to him and slid a practiced arm beneath his shoulders to prop him up as she held the teacup to his lips. “But perhaps it isn't all bad,” she murmured. She lowered her lashes to hide the sparkle dancing in her ice blue eyes.
“At least we can spend some time together.” she said. And there, he thought, was the crux of the matter.
He had made a breakthrough on the mining machine, and for several days now it had consumed his every waking moment. Lucille had become lonely. He had been sensible of her becoming first clinging and affectionate, then smolderingly angry, and finally ominously silent. But he had not wanted be moved from his chosen path, so though he noticed, he quickly slid into the comforting embrace of denial. Just a day or two more, he told her several times, giving her an absent pat. Just be patient.
Clearly she had run out of patience.
“You brought me oatmeal this morning, while I was working on the machine,” he said as the memory returned to him. “You put something in it.”
“Cinnamon and brown sugar, just the way you like it.”
He caught at the sleeve of her robe and tugged until she looked down, and met his eyes.
“Lucille,” he said softly.
Her shoulders sagged, and she sank onto the edge of the bed. She took his hand in both of hers, and lifted it to her lips. She brushed a kiss as soft as the touch of a moth's wings over the back of his hand. “I don't know,” she said in answer to his silent question. “I miss you when you are away from me, even if it is only in spirit. And when I miss you I will do anything to bring you back to me. Foolish things. Mad things.”
Thomas felt a pain that had nothing to do with any poison. “I am so sorry,” he whispered. “I never meant to hurt you. I just became … caught up.”
“I know. Mechanical things are your joy. God help me, sometimes I am jealous of that machine.”
“Oh, Lucille,” with an effort that made his vision go slightly gray at the edges, he slid over beneath the covers and patted the empty space beside him. She climbed into the bed and nestled close, burying her face in his shoulder. He wound his fingers in her hair. “I've always loved tinkering with things, and I will not deny it. It helps me to … escape. But that is not what drives me, where the mining machine is concerned. I want to make the mines yield again. I want to make this house sound again. I want to fill it with servants to keep it that way.”
He slipped his hand beneath the collar of her robe and gently touched the rough, raised scars that marred her shoulder blade.“You've always taken care of me. I will not rest until I know that I can take care of you, for all the days of your life.”
Lucille gave a long, trembling shudder in his arms. When she raised her head, her eyes were red -rimmed, her face streaked with tears.
“Oh no, none of that!” He wiped the tears from her cheeks with slightly tremulous fingers. “Poison me all you want, but don't cry.”
She choked out a watery laugh at that, and smoothed the hair back from his brow. “For the record, what I did will keep you in bed another day or two, but there will be no lasting harm.”
“It never entered my mind that there would be.” That was the gospel truth. She might be wild as any animal wandering the moors beneath the moon, but he knew that she would never do him real hurt.
“Good.” She looked down into his eyes, tears still tricking from her own. “You are my heart, Thomas. You are the blood in my veins and the air in my lungs, and the skin that holds my bones together.”In the normal course of things, Lucille's acts of love were like all of her other acts; a facade of crisp, wintery control concealing a bottomless well of the dark and the feral and the raw. But now she took his face in her hands as though she were handling something fragile and precious beyond price.
She pressed her lips to his with an aching tenderness that made him moan, that forced tears from beneath his eyelids as he let them fall shut. Her hands, the hands that were long fingered and snow white, but roughened by years of scrubbing and washing and cooking, slid beneath his shirt to rasp over the planes of his chest and stomach.
Outside the sky had become almost night dark, the gloom complementing the rich dark decay of the room as a ballgown compliments a beautiful woman. Around them the house gave a deep wheezy groan as the rising wind played each and every one of it's cracks and chinks like a master piper. A low growl of distant thunder harmonized.
When he reached for the button fastening his trousers, she stilled his hands.“You are tired,” she whispered in his ear, sending an almost painful thrill down that side of his spine. “Rest, and let me see to everything.”
So he lay still, cradled by the softness of the big feather bed while the storm rose to wail against the ancient stones, and Lucille saw to him with her hands, her lips, and the ends of her heavy hair.
He felt strange, oddly light-headed and drowsy, almost as though he were slipping into a trance. His thoughts drifted, loose and jumbled as motes of dust floating in a stripe of sunlight.
Her hands were cold, they were always so cold. How could hands so icy start the fires they did?
For a time he slid into a kind of waking dream in which it was not Lucille's touch he felt, but he fluttering wings of the thousands of great black moths that haunted the attic. They lifted him with those velvet black wings, and bore him up and up and up …
The dream broke with the next clap of thunder, which was so close that it seemed to be inside the house, or perhaps inside his heart. His eyes flew open just as lightning flooded the room with radiance, banishing for an instant even the centuries old shadows. By that merciless light he saw Lucille as she straddled him, her night-dress hiked up to reveal the tops of her smooth white thighs, the ivory curve of her calf, her bare feet with their silvery nails. She was cloaked by her dark hair (the only shadows that remained) and her eyes were the same crackling electric blue as the lightning.
Yes, he thought as he looked up into her face, she was the storm. But he was not a fisherman in a tar-paper shack. He was the land itself. She could batter him, erode him, draw him into the frigid dark maelstrom of her madness, but he would not run, even if he could.
Neither of them could help what they were.
So Thomas did the only thing he could. He raised his face to the wind, and let the storm take him.