“Really?” I said. “I don’t—”
I felt her hand on the inside of my knee. “Tomorrow.”
“All right. If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure,” she said. “Let’s try to have some fun tonight.”
The ache faded to a sick, sad feeling and sank down into my stomach. “Sure.” I pointed at the corner of my own eye. “Do you want to—?”
“Yeah. Let me put myself back together and then I’ll come find you.” She handed me her mostly empty cup. “You want to get me a drink?”
“Will it help?”
“It won’t hurt.”
She slid off the table, her hand trailing down off my knee. I watched her silhouette as she crossed the yard, the wind rising again and lifting her hair, dragging it behind her. When she disappeared inside, the wheels and cogs of my brain began to turn, slowly at first. What did she want to tell me that was so tremendous it had drawn tears from her, a woman made of marble?
I had tortured myself asking whether my own selfish desire to pursue her with impunity was a stronger factor than fear of Richard when I agreed to let him die. But I had never considered the possibility that Meredith might be guilty of something just as bad—or something worse. The past six months splintered into sharp little fragments of memory: the firelight flashing on Meredith’s teeth as she laughed, sand and water and a wet sheet clinging to her body on the beach. Her, falling on the stage, blood creeping down out of her sleeve. Arms rigid at her sides as she shouted at Richard in the kitchen. His fingers clenched in her hair. A scrap of bloody fabric in the fireplace. Could she have done it? Left me sleeping in her room, crept out of the Castle and down to the dock and killed him, then stripped her clothes off and crawled back into bed with me? I felt light-headed just thinking about it. But it was absurd, almost impossible. I would have woken, surely.
Another image, another flash, half dream and half recollection, came unbidden into my brain. Studio Five. Her. James. I squeezed my eyes shut tightly and shook my head to dissolve the picture, disarrange it, like a drawing in dry sand. In an effort to distract myself, I tipped her cup to my lips to taste the drops on the bottom. Vodka. I climbed down off the table and stepped through the back door just as the wind began howling again.
Voices and music swelled in the Castle, trapped there by the gales sweeping past outside. In the kitchen, Wren and Colin talked with the second-years from Lear. Filippa and Alexander were nowhere to be seen, and Meredith, too, had disappeared by then. I slid between a few first-years discussing their summer plans with little enthusiasm and made my way toward the stairs. Wren had said the Stoli was stashed upstairs, but never specified where. Not Alexander’s room, which had been declared a substance-free zone. The library seemed most likely. I ducked in from the stairwell and stopped, surprised not to find it empty.
“James.”
He was standing on the table with his back to me, hands in his pockets. He’d opened the window and the wind rolled into the room, ruffling the tails of his shirt, which he hadn’t bothered to button. An open fifth of vodka stood on the table beside him, but I didn’t see a glass.
“What are you doing?” I asked. All of the candles—which normally we never lit, considering the number of books in the room—burned and flickered at the caprice of the breeze and sent shadows chasing one another across the shelves and floor and ceiling. It looked like he was having some kind of séance.
“You know you can see the boathouse if you stand up here.”
“Great,” I said. “Will you get down? You’re making me nervous.”
He turned around and stepped off the edge of the table, hands still in his pockets. He landed with surprising ease for someone who’d drunk a pint of vodka in less than an hour, then wandered across the room until he was standing right in front of me. He hadn’t washed his face since the show—his pale powder makeup and the pencil smudged along his lower lash line gave the impression that his eyes were retreating deep into his skull.
“Brother, a word,” he said, with an odd lopsided leer.
“Okay, but can we close the window first?”
“Shut up your doors, my lord: ’tis a wild night.”
I stepped around him, went to the window, and pulled it shut. “You’re in a weird mood.”
“This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.”
“Stop that. I can’t understand you.”
He sighed and said, “They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace.”
“What is the matter with you?”
“Sick, O, sick!”
“Drunk, more like.”
“By an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence!” he said, insistently. “And pat! He comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy.” He climbed up on the table again and sat with his legs dangling off the side. He was drunker than I’d ever seen him, and unsure of what else to do, I decided to play along.
“How now, brother Edmund?” I asked. “What serious contemplation are you in?”
“I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read this other day,” he said. “Death, dearth, dissolutions of ancient amities, menaces and maledictions, banishment of friends, nuptial breaches, and I know not what.”
“Do you busy yourself with that?”
He jumped several lines ahead. “If you do stir abroad, go arm’d.”
“Arm’d, brother?”
“I advise you to the best. Go arm’d. I am no honest man.”