The Writing Retreat(49)
I nodded, unsure of how to respond.
“You want a moral to the story, yes?” Roza reached out and grasped my hand. “Here’s one. The moral is that we don’t need to worry. The appropriate punishments will be meted out to the appropriate people. Often in this very lifetime.”
On one hand I felt honored, being ushered into Roza’s confidence like this. On the other, I felt vaguely disappointed. It was like reaching the cave of a guru I’d been searching for for years, hoping for a revelation, and being given a trite affirmation.
Roza let go of my hand and patted it. “Up until now you’ve given and Wren has taken. It’s time to take. How can you use what she’s given you? Turn it into something of your own? Step into your power?”
“I don’t know.” I felt suddenly confused, unmoored, as if there had been some drug in the tea. I looked down into the milky cup. I wouldn’t put it past Roza, but this was my own uncertainty.
Roza was right. I needed to step into my power. I wasn’t sure what that meant yet, but something told me it would have to come out on the page.
Roza smiled, like she’d been in my brain to see this tiny silent shift.
“Don’t forget that word,” she said. “?‘Power.’?”
Excerpt from The Great Commission
“Daphne.” Florence’s gaze was steady. “You need to listen to me.”
Daphne felt a bubble of hilarity rising in her throat and pushed it back down. Imagine: Florence, the middle-aged spinster, telling her to stop just because she was jealous.
“I’m listening.” Daphne smiled at Florence, keeping her gaze bland. It was easy; she’d used the blandness as a cover in her previous life. You couldn’t imagine the things you’d overhear working at a restaurant: men bragging in detail about their conquests, women complaining about the state of their marriage beds and bodies. And this was from the mouths of wealthy folks.
Before the restaurant, she’d been a barmaid. It had been impossible to escape attention then. She’d kept her dress just loose enough to fall away from her bosom, enduring the leers. That was the way to get tips. It wasn’t something she was proud of. It was just survival.
She and her friend Jillian would laugh at the men while counting their pay. Jillian had shown her how to roll the bills and stash them in her bodice, in case someone accosted her on her way back to her miserable boardinghouse room. And it was Jillian who’d saved her from getting fired that one night, after a smelly customer pulled Daphne down and planted a wet kiss on her lips. Daphne reacted immediately, slapping him across the face. Normally the man would’ve just been thrown out, but he was a dockmaster and a big spender at the bar. If not for Jillian cooling down the manager, Daphne would’ve been sent away without a second thought.
That night Daphne had been so unsettled that Jillian had walked her home through the drizzling rain, holding an umbrella over them the whole way. Daphne invited her in for a hot tea to warm up before she went onward. Somehow, Jillian made the sad little place feel a little more bright and merry. They hung up their wet dresses over the stove and had burrowed under Daphne’s covers in their slips. Jillian convinced her to add a dash from her flask to their tea, and then…
Blandness. Pleasantries. Masks. It had gotten her hired at the restaurant. And perhaps it had made Horace fall in love with her. A hollow husk of a person, smiling in polite agreement—in their dining room, their parlor, their bed.
But in the world of spiritualism, a husk was a rare and precious thing. A husk could be a channel, could transmit great amounts of energy from one world to the next. And the feeling of power that swelled up—well, the only thing she could compare it to was those secret nights with Jillian.
Daphne had lost Jillian abruptly when her friend got a better-paying job at a café across town. Jillian promised to get Daphne a position there, too, but she disappeared. When Daphne went to visit her one evening, she was told that Jillian had left town with the cook.
Daphne hadn’t had a choice about that ending. But now she did. When you had the opportunity to feel this level of energy, intensity—well, she wasn’t just going to stop.
Florence was talking and Daphne was nodding, but she didn’t really listen until Abigail moved closer and took her arm.
“We’re worried about you.” Abigail’s soft words permeated her thoughts.
“But why?” Daphne asked, perplexed.
“Because…” Abigail’s sweet, innocent face was pained. “Because you’ve changed.”
From a hollow husk to something more? They were just like everyone else, wanting her to be whatever they most wanted to see, whatever they could control. Now that she was beginning to strengthen, they weren’t happy about it.
“We’re afraid this ‘great commission’ will be too much for you,” Abigail went on. “You know these things tire you out. And this… creature.”
“Her name is Lamia,” Daphne said curtly.
“Lamia,” Abigail echoed obediently. “She seems… well… angry.”
Daphne hid a smile. Of course these women, wealthy from birth and unencumbered by a husband, didn’t understand. They pretended to feel upset about the state of society, about the second-class citizenship of women—women with the same pallor of skin, at least. But they didn’t know hardship. They’d never gone hungry, or had to kill rats under their beds with a fire poker, or had silently borne a man’s weight as he pumped in and out, scraping their insides, making them bleed.