Page 49 of Bonetide

I lower my hand, shove it in my damp pocket, and walk on.

The castle in the rain is a different castle. The downpour makes it streaked and shining, the stone gone dark, water sheeting from the broken parts of the parapet, running down the curtain wall in fast bright lines. It’s only now that I notice another building behind some brush and a rocky outcrop—maybe that’s the stable where he keeps the bay horse?—and a ruin of sorts with a car parked beside it.

So, he does have a car. It’s an old one, too; though I guess I expected that. A boxy khaki-green Land Rover from ‘70s it looks like. It seems to be in mint condition, but that could just be the rain covering up its flaws.

I stare at it for a moment, then turn my attention to the castle. I scramble down into the ditch and up the other side, gracelessly, slipping and sliding, through the gateway into the courtyard.

The foxgloves in the courtyard are bowed flat. The wild roses are dropping their last petals into puddles. I walk through with the rain in my face, and head straight to the door.

I knock.

The knock sounds faint, swallowed up by the rushing rain. I knock again, harder.

The door opens.

He stands in a dark blue sweater with the sleeves shoved to the elbows and an open book in his hand, his finger keeping the page, his hair a little disheveled like he’s been sitting in a chair reading for a long time. He sees me and his face does a thing I have not seen it do before.

It opens.

It’s the only word for it. The way his flawless, carefully-composed face seems to come apart at the seams, opening like the clouds do for the sun, uncovering a smile that is so full it almost has light in it. He looks at me, soaked to the bone with my hair plastered to my skull, and he smiles like he’d been given a gift he had long stopped expecting.

For a few seconds I forget how to breathe.

“Iris,” he whispers in awe.

“Can I come in?”

“Aye, you certainly can.”

He steps back from the doorway and I cross the threshold of the castle.

The hall is cool stone and warm light. The book in his hand goes onto a small table inside the door. He has not stopped smiling and it does silly things like let loose a swarm of butterflies in my chest.

“You’re soaked.”

“The rain started halfway down your road.”

“Here, take off your coat,” he insists, and I shuck it off, the water dripping all over his floor. He takes it in his hands and hangs it up for me.

“Come, I’ll start a fire,” he says.

He touches my shoulder lightly to guide me and brings me through into the room I saw from the courtyard window. The room is cold but it’s still warmer than outside, the numerous candles giving off heat of their own. The leather chair he was reading in is pulled close to the hearth, as is the small wood table beside it.

“Sit,” he commands, “by the hearth.”

“I’ll ruin your chair.”

“It’s survived worse.”

He goes to a heavy wooden chest at the side of the room and takes out a folded length of cloth and brings it back. I can’t tell if it’s a blanket or a piece of tapestry, all deep crimson velvet, worn to thinness in places, an embroidered crest at one corner, the gold thread of the crest tarnished almost to black. He drapes it over my shoulders and I immediately feel warmer.

I reluctantly sit down in the chair, my body immediately sinking into the soft leather, thanking me for getting off my feet. The walk down here has woken the fibro up the way the damp always does, the ache settling deep into my hips and the small joints of my hands, and I must give a certain look without meaning to—a wince perhaps, I can’t control my face—because he goes still, watching me, and his brow draws down.

“You’re in pain,” he notes, looking me over attentively.

“It’s nothing. An old friend.” I flex my fingers and they complain about it, loudly. “I have fibromyalgia. My body decided years ago it would hurt for no particular reason, and the cold and the wet make it worse, and I just walked here through both, so.” I shrug, the practiced shrug, the one that says please don’t make it a thing. “It’ll settle.”

I expect him to do what people do—the quick sympathetic noise, the changing of the subject, the faint discomfort of the healthy faced with a body that doesn’t work right. Instead he crouches by the hearth and builds the fire up higher, deliberately, until the heat of it reaches me where I sit, and then he takes the velvet from where it’s slipped off one shoulder and draws it back up, settling it over the worst of where I hurt without my having told him where that is.