The Surface Breaks(39)

“Ready, Grace?” Oliver says, and I nod my head.

I leave that room.

I leave Ling with him.


“Apologies,” Oliver says as we climb the red-carpeted stairs to my bedroom. My feet are sinking into the fabric, and yet its luxury grants them no comfort. “I know I wasn’t much fun tonight.” The walls of the corridor are lined with images of his family, photographs, they’re called. Oliver as a child, always holding his father’s hand, his mother smiling too brightly. Alexander Carlisle, a handsome man with broad shoulders who becomes smaller with each passing year. “I’m tired.”

He tires easily, I have noticed. Daisy said his valet told them downstairs that Oliver hasn’t slept properly since the accident. Maybe he’s afraid of the darkness, the weight of an endless sleep pressing down upon him. Maybe he’s afraid he will never wake up. Maybe he’s secretly hoping he won’t. I could make you happy, Oliver. I could save you for the second time, if you would allow it.

“You are beautiful,” he says. He rests his forehead against mine, so close, and I find myself short of breath. This is it. Please, Oliver. Please kiss me.

“Is it okay if I…?” he whispers, moving his lips to mine. It feels so different to when Zale forced his tongue into my mouth that my eyes prick with tears. This is how my first kiss should have felt like. Oliver will heal me.

He pulls away, a hand against the wall to steady himself. Oli. I reach for him. “No,” he says. “I shouldn’t have done that. It’s too late and I’ve had too much to drink. And it’s too…” His face pinches. “It’s too soon, don’t you understand?”

He leaves me. And all I understand is that I am buzzing, as if every nerve ending in my body is being kissed by bees. I am alive.


I sit on my bed, re-live what just happened in graphic detail. His thigh nudging my legs apart, his fingers on my throat. That heat rising. I pull the dress up around my waist, my hand drifting to that new place, that part of me that I had not known would exist when I struck a bargain with the Sea Witch for human legs. I am made wild with longing, my fingers dipping inside the wet heart, imagining Oliver’s body on top of mine. Something akin to bliss, or maybe agony, teetering on the knife edge in between shivers from my very centre to my toes, an overwhelming relief knocking me drowsy.

I did not know such ecstasy could exist for women, is my second-last thought before I fall asleep.

I am running out of time, is the last.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Where’s Oliver?

He is not there the next morning when I go to the orangery, my skin flushing as I remember what I did in his name last night. Eleanor is at the breakfast table by herself, folders piled beside her plate as she discusses today’s schedule with her assistant, a fair-haired young man called Gerald.

“And there is that museum opening at—” She breaks off when I walk in, and Gerald pauses his incessant scribbling in that notebook he carries everywhere with him.

“Grace, there you are,” Eleanor says. “How did you sleep? Gerald happened to be passing your room last night and he said that you were thrashing around in your bed. Like a woman possessed, he said. Not bad dreams, I trust?”

I was dreaming of Ceto, sitting in her chair in the Shadowlands, counting the pearls in her tail. One, two, three, she began, touching each pearl in its turn. Thirteen, she said, staring at me. Remember that, little mermaid.

“I want to be sure that my guest is happy, while you are here,” she says. “And we don’t know how long that will be, after all. Not too long, of course. I’m sure that you have your own family to return to. Do you have family, Grace? Brothers? Sisters? A mother who misses you? I bet your mother looks just like you, doesn’t she?”

Eleanor waves a hand at the seat beside her, gesturing at me to sit. “You’ll be wondering where Oliver is,” she continues. “He’s in his room, I think, but I wouldn’t disturb him when he’s in one of these moods. So like his father, that one. Best leave him to it.”


And so it goes. Day after day. Did Alexander Carlisle also spend days disappearing from sight, turning into a ghost, slipping away before anyone could catch him? Oliver’s crumpled napkin is on his plate when I arrive to the orangery for breakfast, no matter how early I wake up. Eleanor and I, side by side, and she always has so many questions.

Where are you from? Who are your people? Blink your eyes once for yes and twice for no, Grace. We must be able to communicate in some manner, since you can’t read or write. Most unusual in this day and age. If Oliver was here he would say, Stop it, Mother, there’s no need to interrogate Grace. But he’s not here. He’s never here any more.

At lunch he has always gone out with ‘the boys’, hunting or riding, servants following with picnic baskets of food and drink. I am not invited. “Boys will be boys,” Daisy says, attempting to reassure me as I stand by my bedroom window, watching them leave. “It’s nothing personal, Grace.”

And maybe it wouldn’t feel so personal if my life wasn’t resting in his careless hands. It wouldn’t feel so personal if I hadn’t made the sacrifices I have in order to be with him. Why is he punishing me? It was he who initiated the kiss, not me.

The only time I catch a glimpse of Oliver is at dinner, but he doesn’t sit with me now. It is always a grand affair, the guests are business people and members of this country’s parliament, others in dark sunglasses that they refuse to remove, even indoors, as if disguising their unusually attractive faces. Tonight, there is a man on either side of me, the duke of something on my left and a Mr Large Gold Watch on my right. “Gosh, you’re pretty,” Gold Watch says, open-mouthed, his wife opposite him frowning at me, as if it was my fault.