The Honey and the Sting by E C Fremantle

Author:E C Fremantle [Fremantle, E. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405920155
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

Hester

The hall is as quiet as a morgue, Melis’s breath coming in laboured rasps through the stale air. She is pallid, the colour of despair. But the fine structure of her face is intact, her beauty persisting where her body is a map of bruises. The sleeping draught has put her into an uneasy slumber, her eyelids twitching, scribbled with veins, as if a child has taken a pencil to them.

I sit beside her in limbo, waiting and praying, my heart squeezed out, like an old dishcloth. As a physician’s daughter, my immediate thought was to send for a surgeon but I knew the moment I saw her on the steps – no, before: I knew the moment she fell – that there was no hope. She had seen this. A day’s ride to Ludlow and back would be pointless. Now all I can pray for Melis is swift oblivion. I try to picture her soul, imagining it as a filament of vapour, barely visible, reaching upward from her breast.

It chills me to consider how close I came to facing my own end. Hope saved my life. She is sitting nearby in a state of quiet agitation, shredding the edge of her cuff, scattering white lint over her dark dress. I can’t hold Hope together too, not now.

Rafe and the lieutenant return. I don’t want my son to have to witness the heavy approach of death, so I ask Hope to take him upstairs. The lieutenant refuses to sit, standing beside the door like a sentry.

Time wavers. Margie tries to press food on me and some kind of pungent infusion of herbs. ‘For shock,’ she says. I can’t eat but sip the drink, which is as bitter as a bad almond.

Melis’s lips take on a blue tinge, her lids are still and I fear she has died while I was distracted with the bitter drink. I lean in to listen for a sign of breath when her eyes pop open, she grabs my arm and is somehow levering herself to sit up, as if risen from the dead.

Her voice is straight and clear, eyes chips of glass, sliding from side to side. ‘I can see George.’ Her mouth crumples in disgust, as if she can’t stomach the taste of his name.

‘You’re imagining things, my love.’ All I want is for her to be in peace, not racked any more by hallucinations.

‘I see his death. An assassin’s blade, his blood spilling. He’s falling to the ground.’ She stops to catch her breath, and the ghost of a smile plays over her lips. ‘There will be rejoicing in the streets. I know the day. It flies to us. He will not see September. The twenty-third day of the eighth month will be his last.’

Understanding alights, fragile as a butterfly. It is my sister’s fantasy. She wants to leave this world believing her family will be safe. If only it could be so.

The lieutenant, behind me, makes a small incomprehensible sound. He is close, too close for this private moment.

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