from her. She’d swam in a lake of her own shame and sorrow, drowning in the dark of her unconscious, plagued by dreams and memories of blood and cruelty and fear.
She’d surface from the dark to a world of white. White-hot pain lanced through her chest and arm, whilst blinding-white fluttering veils obscured the world from view.
Then, Titus would appear—a miracle haloed by all that purity—frowning down at her from features older and more brutal than she remembered. She would drink in the sight of him like a condemned soul would their last glance of salvation, fingers twitching with the need to smooth that frown from his dignified brow.
She knew her limbs were incapable; to move would only cause her pain, so she’d simply gaze at him and try to remember how her dry, swollen tongue worked.
In these brief moments of semi-lucidity, she would catalogue the changes wrought in this Titus from the one who resided in her precious memory.
His hair had darkened to a rich umber, though that unruly forelock still wanted to rest above his eye. The crests of his cheeks stood out in stark relief from features once angled by youth and now squared by maturity. His eyes, though etched with a few more lines than before, were still the color of brilliant sunlight through a glass of young whiskey. Light enough to glimmer golden against skin kissed by a foreign sun.
His lips moved, and the rumble of his voice would transfix her so utterly, the words fluttered in her mouth like a riot of butterflies disturbed by a predator.
Don’t hate me.
She’d try so hard to say it, until a prick in her arm would drag her away from him. Back to that place where vivid dreams would first seduce her, then lash at her as they turned into nightmares.
Sometimes when she surfaced, other dear faces would hover above her in the white. Prudence, her features like a younger, fuller mirror of her own, the space between her eyebrows a furrow of worry. She spoke of forgiveness and love, and wiped away the tears that leaked from Nora’s eyes into her hair.
Felicity’s emotion would fog her spectacles, so she’d keep her thoughts to herself, deciding instead to read aloud, her gentle voice a soothing melody in the chaos of Nora’s unruly dreams.
Mercy would often take her hand, squeezing too tightly as she bade her—commanded her—to recover. To win whatever battle she must in order to return to them.
Sometimes a stern-looking woman with a corona of fair, disobedient hair would startle her awake, only to pacify her with unexpected gentility whilst she took care of necessities.
In those moments, Nora would become certain that she’d merely dreamed Titus and her beloved sisters into existence, and she was really trapped in some strange sort of purgatory, awaiting her sentencing to hell.
Just as she began to despair that the floating void would keep her forever, Titus’s voice breached the haze with a new clarity as he held a genial conversation in her periphery.
When Nora surfaced, she was both delighted and dismayed to discover that she was herself. Her vision swam, her body was unnaturally heavy, and her shoulder throbbed like the very devil, but not so urgently as her disquiet heart.
She wasn’t dead. William hadn’t killed her.
Would wonders never cease?
Information permeated her muddled senses incrementally as she took in her surroundings. The white sheets acted as some sort of privacy partition in what she assumed was a hospital. Her nose twitched at scents unfamiliar to any hospital she’d ever visited. Something stringent and clean permeated the distinctive aroma of creosote and coal, horses, petrol, and the brine and grime of the river, all amalgamating into an atmosphere of industry.
Turning her head, she caught her breath as either the early-morning or late-afternoon sun—she couldn’t be certain which—cast perfect shadows of people on the other side of the sheet.
She watched the pantomime with arrested interest.
An astonishingly tall, wide-shouldered man braced his knee against the table where another man lay. With a strong, brutal motion, he gave the patient’s arm a mighty wrench.
Nora heard the shoulder go into the socket before the patient’s bark of pain tugged at her heart.
A smile also tugged at the corner of her lips as she listened to a sonorous baritone soothe and encourage as the tall man made a sling and secured his patient’s arm to his chest.
Years at Cambridge still never trained the Yorkshire out of Titus’s voice. His vowels were as long and lush as ever.
Nora