Dark Season by Joanna Lowell

Author:Joanna Lowell
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2016-06-19T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

When Isidore arrived in front of Clement’s house, the morning fog was thick as soup. As he climbed the steps to the front door, the skies opened. He rang the bell and stood beneath the portico. He wore hat, gloves, and a heavy Inverness coat. His chill had retreated like a beast from the fire, but it had not fled. It had hidden inside his bones, inside his bloody molars. His teeth ached, and his joints cooperated with his movements under protest.

He listened to the rushing, pattering sound of the downpour. No melody. No harmonies. Rain made music unconnected to scales, pitches, phrasings. So did sand, whispering across the desert on the back of the wind. The unintelligible music of the world. In Egypt, the many Arabics he heard in the city bazaars and the villages washed him at first in the same kind of noise—resonant and meaningless.

After last night, everything had changed for him, and nothing. He had risen from that stinking river with Ella in his arms. He had temporarily lost the power of speech and had poured forth into her ear the primal sounds that continued the world’s music, no words, but a guttural crooning, letting her know she was not alone. And if she wasn’t alone, then he wasn’t alone either. She was with him. He was with her. It was simple. It was profound and transformative and shook the foundations of his being. He’d knelt beside her on the shore, waiting for her to open her eyes, needing her to open her eyes. When she did, the exultation he felt was near to violence. A ferocious joy the likes of which he had never known.

The first word she had said, before her eyes focused: Robert.

He stamped his feet to bruise them out of numbness, to vent his rage and self-loathing. Robert, she’d said, a hoarse cry, rough with longing. He was a fool, a fool to have felt the name like a blow, and later, after he’d nearly boiled himself alive in his bath, a fool not to have locked himself in his room and waited out the hours until morning. Instead, he’d gone to her. He’d buried his face on her lap and felt as though the chambers of his heart were leaking. He’d had to ask her, needed to know if she’d meant it, to know if, when she’d climbed up on that wall overlooking the river, she had courted destruction, and she had guessed it then. His darkest suspicion. More than suspicion. It was the certainty that had hounded him across the globe.

He had forced Phillipa into death’s open arms.

She didn’t guess the sordid details, of course, but now she would wonder. Why did she jump? Why would Phillipa have jumped? If she needed fodder for her spiritualist antics, for blackmail, he had given her plenty. Five years ago, he had closed everything inside him, set seals upon his heart, and now, this woman, this stranger, was opening them one by one.

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