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Beatrix is at the market when she gets the note, handed to her by a gangly 12 year old whose mother she thinks she knows, with dirty cheeks as if he’s been playing in mud. She gives the boy some change and a piece of chocolate she has on her, and as he runs off she opens the note.
There’s no envelope–the note is only folded over and sealed with wax; the emblem is Jean’s. The note, when she opens it, is written in Marion’s hand, a couple sentences scrawled either carelessly or very fast.
‘Jean is sick. Come to the Basar House? I could use some help. -M’
_
Jean’s youngest servant–Alice, who’s only 16 or so, shadowing her mother around the house–opens the door.
“Oh–hello,” she says, looking a little startled and out of sorts. “Doctor Basar is–”
“I know, dear,” Bea says, and holds up the letter. “I was summoned. Could you let Mr Collodi know that I’m here?”
When Bea gets led up into the bedroom, she finds Marion hovering anxiously around the bed. Jean is asleep, but it’s obvious that the sleep hasn’t been peaceful–her cheeks are flushed and the bedsheets are soaked with sweat, tangled around her. The air in the room is warm and thick, almost oppressive.
“Auntie Bee,” Marion says, leans in to kiss her cheek when she approaches him. He looks a little pale himself, but he doesn’t feel warmer or colder than usual. “Sorry to–I didn’t know what to do. I don’t know how to tell if this is fine or–She’s the person I would ask. The fever’s not going down.”
“Oh, dear boy, you did the right thing,” Bea says. “You look exhausted. How long has she been like this?”
“Like this–two days now,” Marion says. “She wakes up, but I haven’t been able to get any food in her.”
He goes back to the bed to wipe the sweat off her brow with a cloth, to rearrange her hair so tendrils of it stop sticking to her face and neck. He cradles her cheek in the palm of his hand.
For a moment she just watches him, the devoted attention, the way his touch lingers over her face. Jean moves, as if to lean into the touch even in her sleep.
When Bea leans in, places a hand on her forehead to get a sense of her temperature, Jean’s eyes flutter open.
“Mama?” she says, quiet, hoarse, and it’s like something tears open in Bea’s chest. She aches . “When’d you get here?”
“Only a few minutes, dear,” Bea manages, and then, when Jean tries to sit up, “it’s okay. Lay down. You don’t need to get up.”
“I need–water,” Jean mumbles, and Bea doesn’t have to move for it. Behind her, Marion is already filling up a glass from a pitcher on the table. “’m thirsty. I hurt.”
He spills a little bit of the water, hands fumbling in his speed, and when she looks across at him he’s so plainly anxious, worried. Bea takes a deep breath, wills him to do the same, and he does.
“Alright, let’s sit you up,” Bea says, to Jean, adjusting the pillow behind her back so she can sit back against the headboard. “Sweet girl.”
One of Jean’s hands takes the glass, shaky even as Marion helps her hold it to her mouth. The other hand doesn’t let go of Bea’s.
_
“Has Jean ever mentioned her mother to you?” Bea asks, when Jean is asleep again and Marion has just woken up from where he’s nodded off on the armchair. A chilly breeze comes in through the open window. They’ll have to close it again soon.
“Never,” Marion says, rubbing a hand over his eyes, then his beard. “I didn’t think she ever knew her. Too young.”
Lately, Jean has taken the family portraits off the walls. She’s hidden them, Bea assumes, until she can bear seeing her father’s face again without losing the composure she keeps so tight a grip on, but Bea’s been down these corridors often enough to remember what they look like. In one of them, Jean is a hearty, serious looking girl of about eight or nine, and in the other, she’s a young woman, younger than she is now but not by much, artist’s refinements notwithstanding.
In neither portrait is there a mother.
“Dear boy, you should get some rest,” Bea says, to Marion. “You’ll mess up your back sleeping on that chair–ask me how I know. I can stay with her.”
“Are you sure?” Marion asks, as if he truly has a choice in whether sleep takes him or not, in the state he’s in, rumpled and wrung out. He looks at Jean again, who’s been sleeping much more peacefully after some willow bark tea and a dram of whiskey. She’s still warm though, feverish, and her fingers are still curled loosely around Bea’s hand.
“Certain,” Bea says, and then, “hey. Don’t wear those clothes to bed, alright? And make sure you wash your face and hands. If you get sick too I’ll be very upset with you, so don’t even think about doing it.”
Marion hangs his head, but he’s got the first smile Bea’s seen on his face since she entered the house. He pulls the window all the way shut, when he stands, and as he passes he kisses the top of Bea’s head.
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Auntie Bee.”
_
Jean has this dream where she’s on a train. She doesn’t know where the train is going, but it’s going fast. Gravity seems strange, but no matter which way the train leans, her feet are glued to the floor. The train is going too fast. Too fast. She can’t get out. Her feet won’t move. The train leaves the rails and is falling, falling, hurtling through space, too fast. It never lands.
Sometimes she has the impression of a hand holding hers, touching her face, squeezing her shoulder. She never sees the person who the hand belongs to, but she doesn’t have to. She knows whose hand it is.
_
In the morning Jean’s hot again–the fever is nearly as stubborn as she is, coming back doggedly every time they manage to shift it.
“Mama?” she says again, when she opens her eyes, but this time Beatrix is prepared, and the ache is more like a twinge and she’s certain she keeps it off her face. She wonders, vaguely, about the woman who birthed Jean, what she looked like, what she sounded like. What she might think of the kind of life her daughter lives.
“Hello dear, what do you need?” Bea asks, and Jean lets herself be subjected to a hand pressed over her forehead. Pushes into it, even. “Some water? Something to eat?” she continues, but Jean is already looking around the room.
“Where’s Marion? He was here,” she says, which strikes Bea as an oddly lucid observation for her plainly delirious state.
“Marion’s getting some sleep, he’s just in the other room,” Bea says, takes her hand again and squeezes it. “Let me make you some tea, it’ll help with the fever.”
“Okay,” she says, and sinks back into the bed. She pulls the cover up to her chin and says, nonsensically, “I’m sorry… about your wrist.”
“That’s alright, dear,” Bea says, without bothering to decipher what she means, putting the kettle over the fire to re-warm. “Don’t you worry about me.”
“I’ll fix it,” she says, so soft it’s not clear if she’s still talking to Bea, “I can fix it. When I’m done.”
By the time the tea is ready, she’s asleep again.
_
Jean dreams of the darkness in the corners of the room growing teeth, of that thing behind the Flare with Marion in its hand, of Doctor Boucher and the feeling of gunmetal in her palm. She dreams of Avery’s face, spectral, the sound of their laugh, and of her father’s voice coming out of her own mouth. She dreams of fixing Draven Kingsley, of reversing it, of not being too late, and she dreams of a creature that only takes Sean’s face the moment she pulls the trigger. She dreams of Marion’s scar, growing over her whole body, and a pain like birth through fire.
She dreams of petunias.
_
Jean wakes up, and the angle of the light through her window tells her it’s early afternoon. She sits up, and notices Marion in the corner of the room at about the same moment that he notices her–he starts slightly, and then he closes a book that’s been open in his lap and sets it aside.
“Hey,” he says, gentle, with the kind of soft smile on his face that makes her feel like early morning sunshine streaking through the windows. “How are you feeling?”
She stretches. She feels sore, and sticky. Her mouth is dry. “What time is it?”
She watches Marion procure her watch from the table, check the face, put it back. “Almost 2 in the afternoon,” he says. “It’s Friday. You’ve been out for a while. Gave us a bit of a scare. Who doctors the doctor, y’know?”
She pulls her feet out of bed to put them on the floor. She distinctly remembers climbing into bed, feeling a little worse for wear, in her regular day clothes, but now she’s dressed in a linen slip, and her feet are bare. She moves to stand, and Marion throws his hand out towards her.
“Don’t get up yet,” he says, already on his feet and moving towards her. “Give it a minute. You haven’t eaten in–What do you need?”
“Um–water,” Jean says. “My head hurts.”
She passes a hand over her face, to her temples, and then out of curiosity backwards, to her hair. It had still been pinned up when she lay down, what was apparently a couple of days ago, but it’s subsequently been unpinned and it’s an unruly tangle.
“If you’re up to getting out of bed we can draw you a bath, but I think you should eat first,” Marion says. There’s a chair that’s been pulled from the study that sits right beside the bed, and Marion moves into it, handing her a glass but not pulling his arm away entirely. He means to catch it if she drops it, she realises, which helps her establish a rough gauge of the state she’s been in these past few days. “If you passed out, I wouldn’t know what to do.”
Her left hand is gloved–it has to be gloved, now, all the time, but as she takes a long pull of water from the glass and sets it down, steady, Marion takes it and starts massaging it with his thumb.
“Ms Monroe was here,” Jean says, slowly picking through fragments of memory from the past few days, thinking about cool hands touching her forehead and about someone always knowing what to do. “Wasn’t she?”
Marion stills for a second, but by the time she looks at him he’s gone back to massaging out her hand. “She was,” he says. “You knew it was her?”
She tries to parse the emotion that flicked across his face just for a moment there, but failing that, goes back to trying to parse her flickers of memory into a form that makes sense.
“I remember her voice,” she says. “I remember feeling–”
She remembers feeling safe. Taken care of. They’re the feelings of a child, ones she’d grown out of long ago. Meanwhile, Marion is starting to rub his way up her fingers, and mindful of the flames even through the glove, she tries to pull away. He resists when she resists, and she doesn’t force it.
“I must look terrible,” she says, thinking about the tangle of her hair. She’d been wearing makeup, had been planning to meet Marion for lunch and hadn’t bothered removing it before she laid down, and doesn’t even want to imagine the mess of it smeared across her face, her pillow. She can tell she’s been sweating. Her hair feels greasy.
Marion smiles. “You?” he says, and brings her hand up to his face. He kisses it, right in the centre of her palm. “Never.”