“Stay still,” he said. “I’ll start cutting now.”
She felt a tug at the corner of her eye and fought the urge to jerk away from him. He moved fast, using a pair of suture scissors and fine forceps to pull the thread out of the skin without it tearing. Once done with both eyes, he rubbed cream onto the eyelids. It smelled unexpectedly sweet.
“It’s a concoction of my own making,” he said. “Cold cream to which I added honey and tincture of calendula. It will soothe the skin and lubricate the lid. Don’t open your eyes for another hour. Take it slow.”
Seraphina nodded. “Thank you.”
He patted her shoulder. “You’re welcome. You’ve been an exemplary patient. The easiest so far.”
She laughed. “Well, you’re a great surgeon. I have no complaints.”
“When you asked for a naturalist at Schloss Ewigheim…” he said in a lower tone, “It’s good that it was me.”
“Yes. I’m so glad it was you.”
He started cleaning his tools and replacing them in their compartments in the medicine chest.
“Do you think we can leave tomorrow?” Seraphina asked.
“I think so. It’s not snowing as hard. I’ll clear the path again, and let’s pray it lasts until morning.”
She wanted to leave today, right now, but didn’t want to push Idris. He’d done so much, and all of it by himself. She’d been a burden to him, her only redeeming quality that she was his intellectual equal and could make good conversation.
Before heading outside with the shovel, Idris left her the cream and told her to use it generously and not let her eyes dry out. Seraphina massaged it over her eyelids gently, slowly prying them open. The shock of feeling cold air on her eyeballs was almost too much, but she took a deep breath and opened her eyes little by little. She didn’t know if an hour had passed since the sutures had been removed, but she felt ready. She needed to be ready, because they’d been stuck in this filthy barn for five days, and she knew it wasn’t only because of the snowstorm. Had they not been snowed in, Idris would’ve found a way to keep her here until she was healed.
It was all blurry. She blinked a few times to get the cream into her eyes and moisturize them, then looked around. It was all unformed shapes, objects and barn furniture she didn’t immediately recognize. On the other side of the wide space, across the threshing floor, she saw the cart and Bramble eating his hay a few feet away from it. It was as if she was looking through a thin film that wouldn’t let her see details.
She turned her head and gasped. Orange. The first color after two years of moving in the world blind. The fire burned low in its corner, the flames murky and undefined, but undoubtedly orange.
Seraphina’s chin trembled, and she caught her lower lip between her teeth. She felt pressure behind her eyes, as if she was about to cry, but thought better of it and calmed down, focusing on breathing evenly. She didn’t want to force her eyes.
For the next hour, she simply studied her surroundings, blinked often, and added more cream to her upper and lower lashes when she felt her skin raw. She walked over to Brambleand ran her hand over his neck, smiling at the discovery that his coat was a dirty white. She inspected the cart but didn’t linger when she saw how Idris had arranged his blankets so he could sleep in it. It felt too intimate to dwell on her friend’s makeshift bed.
She wandered closer to the barn doors and peered outside. The sunlight reflecting in the wide expanse of snow made her recoil. Too harsh for her sensitive eyes, and nearly incomprehensible to her brain that had gotten used to darkness. She shuffled back inside and spotted her cloak hanging on the peg, next to her daggers. Her heart leapt in her throat.
With reverent fingers, she pulled out Matteo’s journal and carried it to the workbench. She found a candle, then settled with her legs tucked under her and her back to the wall. She opened the weathered sketchbook. The words and drawings danced before her blurry vision. She leaned over and stuck her face close to the pages, inhaling their musty scent. They smelled like him, like ink and graphite pencil, like his clothes, his hair, his skin…
Seraphina swallowed heavily. The pressure in her head turned into a dull ache. She was tired already, and all she wanted was to lie down and close her eyes. But then sleep would follow, and she didn’t want that. She was sleep-deprived, dreaming of coffee, which she hadn’t had since leaving Matteo’s family home in Tuscany. That journey had been their last one. The end of his life, and her life as she’d known it.
His handwriting was small and flowery, interspersed with sketches of bones and lattice patterns. He wrote his thoughts in an economical way, focusing on facts more than impressions. Seraphina had been reluctant to read his journal, thinking he might’ve written about her. His feelings for her. But as she turned the pages, she learned that Matteo hadn’t been a man of sentiment. Much less a poet. The first half of the journal didn’tmention her, nor anything about his personal life. Toward the end, she found one sentence that contained her name:
“Seraphina’s cheeks have grown considerably rosier since our arrival; the Tuscan sun, it seems, agrees with her.”
She let out a sob and pressed the notebook to her chest. She stayed like that for a few minutes, trembling, allowing herself to think about him, to conjure his image from memory. Tall and handsome, with broad shoulders and a slim waist. His hair had been dark and long, gathered at his nape with a silk tie. Strands always slipped out to frame his face. His eyes, golden-brown and kind, had looked upon her with intensity in those last few days, after he’d been shunned by his family for wanting to marry her. Seraphina had never felt so chosen.
“Oh,” she whispered. “How I miss you.”
She dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve, which resulted in getting cream all over herself.
Now confident that Matteo hadn’t used his notebook like a private journal, she felt less guilty about reading it. Most of what he’d written were observations about relics he was studying, their classifications and attributes, and how they could be cut to be added to lattices. His sketches of patterns were harder for Seraphina to understand, as they weren’t her specialty. When cutting and polishing bone shards, she followed instructions but didn’t fully grasp how they worked together when sewn. She turned the pages and studied every drawing nonetheless, as it all had come from Matteo, and it was all she had left of him.
She reached the last written page and frowned at the evidence of torn pages before it. Not a few; many. She ran her finger over the tattered edges poking out of the spine and narrowed her eyes at the tiny writing that followed the onslaught. It was the most Matteo had written in one go without interrupting himself with sketches.
“I shouldn’t be writing this. I know it, and I’m trying to stop myself even as my pen glides over the page and words appear. My jaw is clenched, my knuckles white as I grip the edge of the table and try to pry myself away, but the voices in my head are too loud, too insistent. They’re driving me mad. I can barely hear my own thoughts, and when I sleep at night, I wake up with the horrible feeling that I’ve been talking while unconscious. There’s no one there to hear, but still, I rush to the door of whatever inn we’re staying at and check the corridors. By the mercy of God, they’ve been empty so far. At home, in Tuscany, I had to ask Mother to put me in the most isolated wing of the villa. She was all too happy to comply with my request, thinking I was choosing to sleep far from Seraphina’s room out of respect for the family.
No, but I can’t delay it a moment longer. I’m writing in circles, hoping the urge will go away. It only grows stronger. I have to write it, or I’ll say it out loud, I’ll find the nearest unfortunate soul and whisper it in his ear. I know… I know that if I did it, silence would follow. I haven’t known blessed silence in six months.
Six months of mental torture.
