Werewolf fairytales

Spending the Night together

*Paisley*

My life has settled into a rhythm these past weeks. Every time Ella nurses Jonas, he cries bitterly for hours. Ella and I take turns walking him, rocking him, massaging him… nothing seems to help his aching stomach.

But, I point out with somewhat immodest pride, he’s growing plumper, without the castor oil and emetics the doctor prescribed. In fact, by the end of my second week in the castle, Jonas’s improvement is undeniable.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” I croon to him in the middle of the night after Ella has fed him and handed him over to me, his now indispensable nursemaid. He blinks up at me. His eyes flutter, and he almost, almost goes to sleep, but then another pang must catch him because his face twists in anguish, and he pulls up his legs and cries out.

“Poor baby,” I say, kissing his cheek, then popping him up onto my shoulder in his favorite position. It means he hangs gracelessly down my back, rather like a sack of beans, but it works. Unless I stop walking, of course.

I decide to take him to the portrait gallery because I’ve walked around and around the nursery earlier this evening, and I feel that one more turn around that well-worn path will drive me mad.

The castle is warm and dark. I descend a level and make my way to the portrait gallery to find moonlight streaming in the windows, its color as pale and chilly as the white gooseberries I used to gather as a child. I don’t stop long before the portraits, just pause to examine how the moonlight makes the be-ruffed gallants look like faded copies of their daily selves.

I know the moment Mr. Theodon… or Theo, as he’s insisted I call him… enters the room. It’s as though the air changes somehow. He always finds me in the middle of the night. He looks for me in the nursery, or the gallery, and walks with me. When we encounter each other during the day, usually at dinner, we talk courteously enough of Jonas, of the castle, of whatever… but never of our nocturnal rendezvous.

All that polite daylight conversation and observance of convention melts away in the soft glimmer of moon and candle. It’s as though the obscurity of the night gives us sanction to be our true selves. The way he looks at me is nothing like the way Rodney used to look at me. Oh, Theo desires me. I can see a demand in his eyes, a hunger he can’t mask.

But more than that… he likes me. He thinks I’m funny. He actually enjoys listening to me. It’s intoxicating, it’s bewitching, it’s everything Rodney never demonstrated and never could.

I turn around to see Theo walking toward me, his step unhurried. He’s smiling, that lopsided grin that makes me feel warm all over.

“How do you manage to always look so impeccable?” I ask, when he’s near. “Do you never sleep?” I wear a nightdress and a wrapper, and my hair tumbles down my back every which way. After the first night or two, when the baby cried all night long, I stopped worrying about what I look like at night.

“I don’t sleep in my livery, if that’s what you mean,” Theo says. “How is our princeling tonight?” He peers at the baby’s little head. Seeing that he has a new audience, Jonas lets out a howl but quiets again.

“I think he’s better,” I say, rubbing the baby’s back. “He won’t let me sit down, though, or even stop walking.”

In the last nights, we’ve talked about everything from Shakespeare… I like Romeo and Juliet; he thinks Romeo is a tiresome melancholic… to lawyers..: I think they ought to donate their time to poor widows; he thinks that’s unlikely… to dissections… I find the idea disturbing; he’s of the opinion that it’s the only way to really identify the kind of illness a patient suffered from.

Now he picks up our conversation directly where we left it the night before.

“I thought of another reason that dissection is important. How else are we to learn of the body’s systems if we don’t investigate them thoroughly?”

“I wouldn’t want to learn about the body if it required cutting one open,” I say with a shudder.

“Why not? I think it would be fascinating. I wouldn’t want to be a surgeon; I don’t like causing pain. But if the person has already left his body, why not try to find out how he died, and why?”

“All those blood and guts,” I say. “Obviously.”

“Entrails,” he says, almost dreamily. “Back when I was at university, I read that there are enough entrails in the human body to stretch all the way down an average street. I can’t imagine.”

“Don’t listen to him,” I tell Jonas, who has woken. “You’ll feel queasy and start crying again.”

Jonas burps and closes his eyes once more.

“I’m going to stop walking and sit down, Jonas,” I tell him. “Just for a little while.” Then I sink carefully into the sofa that Theo had ordered placed in the portrait gallery after it became clear it was prime walking-Jonas territory.

“Why don’t you go and dissect some dead bodies, then?” I ask, trying to ignore the fact… and utterly failing to do so… that Theo has sat down beside me. My pulse instantly quickens. For one thing, his leg is touching mine. For another, as soon as we sit down, it feels as if the world draws in and becomes as small as the three of us. As if Theo and sleeping Jonas and I are utterly alone in the whole castle.

“Me?” He seems startled for a moment. “Nonsense.”

“Why nonsense? My uncle told me that there’s a terrible shortage of doctors in England. You told me the other night that you’d been at Alpha School; did you take a degree?”

“Of course.”

“A good degree?” I persist.

“A double first. Is that good enough for you?”

“Goodness. Well, then, all you have to do is attend the university in Edinburgh for a year,” I say. “I suppose it would be better to go a little longer, but my uncle told me that many doctors attend for only a year.”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Why?”

“Well, because Gabriel and I… because I’m here.”

“I can see that it’s quite nice for your brother to have you as his majordomo,” I acknowledge, “but if you wish to heal people, I think every sick person would feel that you should forfeit the butler’s pantry.” I hear my own voice and wince with embarrassment. It’s something about him. He makes me feel joyful and slightly cracked.

“My father…”

“Your father isn’t here,” I say, cutting him off. “I know you’re an Alpha king’s son, Theo, but it doesn’t seem to have done you much good. Why not just forget about that and do what you wish?”

“As I wish…” There’s a tinge of wistfulness in his voice. “I would wish that my father had never seduced my mother although that would have had unfortunate consequences for myself.”

“I meant realistic wishes,” I say, sitting up straighter so she can rock back and forth in her place, in hopes of keeping Jonas asleep.

His reply comes with a rueful smile. “I cannot believe that it would surprise you to know how many doors are closed to bastards.” I meet his eyes, and the pain in them is unmistakable.

“Those doors hold only fools,” I say softly but fiercely. “You should be judged for the man you’ve become, not by the circumstances of your birth.”

He’s silent for a moment, his eyes still on mine. The expression in them changes somehow, and suddenly my heart is beating in my throat.

“At any rate,” I say quickly, taking refuge in words, “no one here in England would have the faintest idea whether your birth was irregular or not.”

“I have a responsibility to my brother,” Theo says. But that expression is still there. It’s almost… tender.

I start rubbing Jonas’s back again. “If I understood the conversation at dinner last night properly, Gabriel assumed responsibility for this castle along with some members of his brother’s court even though he would have preferred to be an archaeologist off somewhere… Tunis, was it? Looking for a city called Carthage? That seems to suggest that a sense of familial responsibility does not reside only in the lower echelons.”

Theo laughs at that. “I did my best to persuade him to go to Tunis, but he refused, thinking that he had to provide an income for the castle. Then he wrote a book… not to mention married… an heiress and now he is free to go where he wishes.”

“I expect you tried very hard to convince him. I can tell that you are extremely close.”

“He was so miserable before meeting Ella,” Theo explains.

“Yet he can’t manage without you? Would he not wish the same happiness for you?”

There’s another moment of silence. Then he smiles down at me. I suddenly think I would love to kiss him. I would give him a scandalous kiss, the kind that Rodney had demanded and I hadn’t allowed.