His Love Is a Cage with My Name on It

Chapter Nine: Lavender's Blue

Here is an inventory I made that night, sitting on the floor of my bedroom with Greta's note in my hand.

Cups of tea poured for me by Madame Iris across six weeks: I counted eleven that I could remember, which meant the true number was higher. The parlor tea, the breakfast coffee, the tisane she sent up on my sleepless nights, so thoughtful, so warm in the pot that never emptied. I had drunk everything that woman ever handed me, because she frightened me, and frightened people are polite.

Symptoms: none. That was the terrifying part. I felt fine. I had felt fine for six weeks, if you did not count the dreamless sleep. The deep, black, dreamless sleep that I had been grateful for, in a strange house, every single night since the wedding.

I am a restorer. My whole profession is one act performed over and over: removing, gently, the layer that hides the original. So I ran the only experiment I had. I kept taking the cups. I smiled. I praised the blend. And I poured every drop into the roots of the parlor's potted fern when Iris turned her back, and I waited to see what the varnish had been covering.

The fern, for the record, died in nine days. I stopped sleeping dreamlessly in three.

The dreams did not come like dreams. They came like restoration: a section at a time, cleaned out of blackness, colors truer than memory has any right to be. A lavender garden that I knew, that does not exist, that I could walk blind. A man's laugh from behind me, young and unguarded, and I turned and it was Damian, my Damian's face exactly, in a linen shirt with paint on his hands, saying a name that was mine and was not: Ella. A wedding at night, candles down the whole length of a gallery I recognized, because I had stood in it six weeks ago and looked at my own portrait. A hand teaching mine to hold a brush loaded with white lead, a voice saying you hold your breath when you work, you've done it since we were children.

You've done it since. He had started that same sentence in the orangery, in this century, and stopped himself.

I woke from that one crying without knowing it, with my hand still curled around the ghost of the brush, and I lay in the dark doing the arithmetic I had been refusing for weeks. The portrait's craquelure said one hundred years. Damian's face in the dream said one hundred years. I have hated your face for a hundred years said one hundred years. And Iris's tea, poured down my throat from the first morning, before I had asked one question or picked one lock, said that someone had needed me not to dream from the very beginning. The forgetting was not a side effect.

The forgetting was the treatment.

You're not supposed to remember, he had said in the gallery. Not you're not supposed to know. Remember. As if the knowledge was already in me, under varnish, waiting for solvent and a steady hand.

I stopped fighting the dreams after that. I invited them, the way you invite grief: I kept lavender from the garden on my pillow, I read Greta's note before sleeping like a prayer, and every night the restoration continued, section by section, a life coming up out of the black. Her studio, which was my orangery, a hundred years younger. Her hands, which were my hands. Her wedding veil, and the weight of it, and the way she, I, we, had turned at the altar to smile at someone standing proudly at the front, our dearest friend, the one who had arranged everything, painted everything, made everything possible.

On the ninth night the dream gave me the terrace: an easel, a canvas half finished, lavender in my painted hands, and the painter working at my portrait in the summer light, humming a tune I have known all my life. Lavender's green, dilly dilly. The painter looked up from the canvas to check my face against her work.

Grey silk. Weak-tea eyes. Not one hour older than she is now.

Iris.