Eye of a Rook by Josephine Taylor

Author:Josephine Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

It will be late by the time he gets to chambers, but there are no clients until the afternoon and he must speak with Mrs Wilson, still new to the job, see how she is coping with a mistress effectively absent, ask how she is managing the preparations for his wife’s journey to Hierde House, all this before Emily and her mother return from the consultation—yet another physician specialising in “women’s complaints”, yet more pills and potions. Thank goodness the housekeeper was engaged before Emmie became so ill and that she has taken it upon herself to make sensible decisions without troubling them. Without troubling his wife.

He hears the roar as he leaves the library, another as he trudges up the stairs. When the wind is in the right direction, they can hear them from Regent’s Zoo, those exotic lions; picture them pacing behind their bars, demanding meat, their claws and teeth sharp and keen.

He goes through the bedroom, quietly enters the dark chamber beyond, now claimed as hers; eyes the narrow bed that has replaced, for her, their cosy nest with its tousled bedclothes and his ready embrace. I must be alone, she ’d said. I have hardly the strength to be in my own body. And when he ’d entered this chamber one day without knocking, thinking to ease her loneliness, her hands had made fluttering movements like birds trying to take flight, and she ’d blurted out that she couldn’t tolerate the presence of another person, their unspoken expectations … and he knew that she meant him. That he was another person. She cried and apologised, over and over, as he made to approach her, as he backed out quickly without a word.

It is damp here, the coals cold in their hearth. The new couch is naked save for a pair of lady’s drawers strewn over it, legs without feet. Emily retreats to this so-called spinal couch regularly now, clutching at herself, and he can’t help but resent the object for the time she shares with it, the tears she weeps on it that should be shed in his presence. Was purchasing the couch a sound decision? How much of the back pain that has now joined the list of her other, private, pains is a true part of that complaint and how much simply a result of the way she must sit now—when she has to sit, for convention’s sake—her hips forward and posture slumped? Does it benefit her to closet herself away from the natural light, the busyness of the everyday?

He sniffs and turns, draws in the unfamiliar scent, finds it most pungent at the cabinet next to the bed: musky, like newly turned earth; bitter, but swaddled in cloying sweetness. Laudanum, perhaps, prescribed by her father, who does not seem to know what else to do, apart from recommending physicians and throwing out words that mean precisely nothing for all the good they do. Unmoored, he says. Nerves.

But the outlandish words do fit this

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