Being back inside the city walls tugs at me painfully, as if this incrementally greater nearness to Marie only enhances the dull yet ever-present ache of missing her. It has been over a month now since I have seen her in person, and nearly three weeks since she wrote to me last. I can barely fathom that I will be spending this coming winter without her warmth, and yet this is where I find myself.
Then my breath halts altogether when I spot a familiar figure hastening across the promenade, her pennant of dark hair whipping in the wind. As if I have conjured her there with the sheer force of my yearning.
“Stop!” I call to my coachman, my heart kicking up. I track Marie’s weaving progress through the pedestrians, afraid to let her leave my sight. “Do you hear me, stop now!”
I fling myself out of the carriage almost before it’s rolled to a full halt, rushing after her. I know my coachman is still the marquise’s man, but I have taken to augmenting his salary with my own coin—enough that I can buy his silence for at least this one encounter.
When I grip her shoulder, Marie wheels around to face me, her teeth all but bared, a stiletto materializing in each hand. Shock whips back and forth between us like a jagged rod of lightning as we take each other in.
“Catherine?” she says incredulously, her eyes narrowing even as she lowers her knives. “What are you doing here?”
I ignore the question, searching her face.
“What’s happened to you?” I half whisper, setting my hands on her frail shoulders. Where she was once slim, my best friend is now painfully gaunt, her bones standing stark beneath her skin. She’s clearly been eating neither often nor well. Her lips are tinged dark blue with chill, and the whites of her eyes murky as puddle water, bleary from lack of sleep. “You look …”
“Terrible,” she finishes flatly, blowing a wayward strand of hair out of her mouth. “How observant of you. Whereas you look quite splendid, a proper lady.”
Recoiling a little at the unexpected sharpness of her tone, I jerk my chin back to the carriage.
“Why don’t you come talk with me?” I offer. “I can take you wherever you’re headed, save you the walk. Steal a little time together, just this once.”
“Oh, how generous of you.” She sheathes her stilettos, casting my waiting carriage a withering look even as her shoulders quake with cold under my hands. Her cloak is threadbare, worn nearly transparent from overuse. “But you know, it being such a lovely bracing night, I really think I’d rather walk.”
“Marie!” I exclaim, consternation sweeping over me at her acerbic demeanor, this almost-cruelty that I’ve never seen from her before; at least, not wielded against me. I reach for her thin arm as she turns away. “I understand that you are … angry with me, perhaps, for keeping away. But I told you, I explained why it was necessary. And you wrote to me that you understood!”
“And I do, Catherine.” She huffs out a faint husk of a laugh laced with bitterness. “I understand altogether better than I wish.”
I should have known, I think with a sinking heart, from the brevity of her last note, that all was not right between us. And yet I did not question her, press her on it.
Perhaps I simply did not wish to know the depth of her distress.
“I understand that when push truly came to shove, you chose this life”—here, she gestures scathingly at my fine brocade skirts, the plush ermine lining of my cloak—“over me. Without so much as a backward glance.”
“You know it was not like that!” I protest, though guilt gnaws sharply at me in response to the accusation. “I, I wrote you every week! Is this why you haven’t written back, because you were cross with me? But you know that the marquise demanded that I not—”
“And you did not exactly fight her, did you, Catherine?” Marie breaks in, her eyes glittering with a well of sudden, furious tears. “When she directed you to jump, you leapt dutifully at her bidding. As if leaving me behind barely even pained you.”
“Of course it pained me! Of course it did!”
She gives a listless half-shrug, looking away from me. “Not enough, it would seem.”
Perhaps she is right, at least in part. For all that I have missed her every day, perhaps I acquiesced to the marquise’s demands more readily than I should have, for fear of being thrust out of my promising new life and banished back to the cité. To the specter of poverty and squalor ever looming forbiddingly over my head.
As if now that I have become accustomed to so much more, that old life—the one Marie still inhabits—has become the worst fate that I could imagine for myself.
I wish desperately to draw her into my arms, but there is little Marie puts more stock by than her pride. And I can see that I have wounded it badly, along with her secretly tender heart.
I lick my dry lips instead, attempting to gather myself. “Please, Marie, give me only a few minutes. I keep a spare cloak in the carriage as well. If you like, you need only stay until you’ve warmed your bones.”
She chews her lip, her face still simmering with hurt, but it is the promise of warmth that finally sways her. She gives a grudging nod and follows me inside, shrugging me off brusquely when I move to help her up. After I’ve ordered the coachman to strike ahead once more, I throw the cloak over her shoulders and take her
