Ellen Datlow - Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

When she opened her eyes he was squatting before her, a few sheets of paper in his hand. Everything is changed, she thought, and touched his knee. He offered the pages.

“I love you,” he said.

JUNE, 1920

He jerked his finger away and Conny laughed, grabbing for it. “Come on, ninny! It won’t hurt!”

“It’s macabre,” he objected, waving at the bottle of ink and candle on the floor of her room, and the needle in her hand. “Your uncle is already furious about this.”

“What does that have to do with anything? Uncle Francis would be furious with anyone taking his favorite niece from him.”

“And you want to compound it with this superstitious nonsense.”

“I don’t intend to tell him, William.” She snatched at his hand again and caught his wrist. He tugged but she held it firmly. “What am I going to say? ‘Oh, Uncle, I know you’re displeased that I’m marrying a writer, but it’s all right, we’re signing the certificate with our blood, so everything will work out.’”

“I think it’s silly.”

“As silly as the wedding itself?”

“Well…”

“Come on, open your fist. This will only take a second. Didn’t you ever do this with your friends when you were a boy? Blood brothers and all?”

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t have any friends.”

She squeezed his wrist. “Open.”

His hand unfolded and she shifted her grip to hold his index finger stiffly. She waved the needle through the candle flame again, then jabbed the fingertip in the center of the faint sworls. He almost pulled free, but Conny held on. Blood beaded and she brought the finger over the open bottle of ink. She pressed both sides of the wound to bring more blood and let it drip into the ink.

“Not so much!” he complained.

Conny dabbed his finger with a ball of cotton soaked in gin and released him. “Ninny,” she said playfully, then stabbed her own finger and added her blood to the bottle. She sucked at the tiny puncture while she took a piece of straw she had plucked from a broom and stirred the mixture.

“I don’t see what this is supposed to accomplish,” William said.

Conny capped the bottle. “What do you mean you didn’t have any friends?”

He looked at her with the sour expression he gave to unpleasant topics, a reproachful look that embarrassed her that she had even asked the question.

“I was never strong,” he said. “And people mistook my asthma for tuberculosis. I seldom got to play with others.”

Conny thought, I could have figured that out for myself. She said, “So who is this Geoffrey you’ve asked to be your best man?”

His expression relaxed. “College. We roomed together for one term.” His voice sounded instantly lighter.

“What’s he like?”

“Different than me. You’ll see. I think you’ll like him.”

Conny entered the small chapel on her uncle’s arm. A few of her friends smiled at her over the backs of the dark pews. They, and a couple of Uncle Francis’s colleagues, comprised the entire guest list. William had no family, and, evidently, no friends. Conny’s cousin Janet waited, diminutive bouquet in hand, opposite William and the man beside him. Geoffrey.

He had arrived this morning and this was Conny’s first look at him. As she drew nearer, she stared, shocked. A deep reddish-purple scar trailed across the left side of his face from the bridge of his obviously broken nose to the hinge of his heavy jaw. William was taller, but Geoffrey possessed a robustness that more than compensated.

She jerked her attention back to William just before she reached her place.

The parson cleared his throat and proceeded through the ceremony. He ended by having them sign their certificate. The parson held out his pen. William hesitated, then pulled the pen from his pocket—the ivory one Conny had talked her uncle out of—and signed. He handed the pen to Conny. She anxiously scrawled her signature and returned the pen to William, who tucked it in his jacket pocket. Conny’s cousin took the parson’s pen and signed in one of the spaces for witness. Geoffrey bent over the parchment.

“Ah!” he shook the pen, tried again, then dropped it, empty. “Pardon me,” he said and snatched the ivory pen from William’s pocket. Deftly, he uncapped it and signed on the second line for witness.

Conny felt a brief, giddy vertigo. She blinked at Geoffrey, who frowned for a moment, then gave the pen to William. William looked around as if startled, then laughed.

“That’s it, then,” he said.

The parson’s housekeeper set out scones and punch in the parlor.

“I’m sorry for arriving so late,” Geoffrey said. “No excuse. I just lost track of time.”

“Geoffrey almost ended up expelled for tardiness.” William said with a wry grin. “Never could keep an eye on the clock.”

“Don’t like them much,” Geoffrey admitted.

“Still, you made it,” Conny said. “I’m glad you did. I haven’t met any of William’s friends.”

“He doesn’t have any but me.” Geoffrey frowned in the silence. “Now he’s got you,” he added quietly. He ducked his head. “Excuse me.”

Conny watched him move away. He managed with a kind of artless grace to pass by people at the exact moment they were turned away from him.

“What does he do?” she asked.

“Lately? I don’t know. He’s been a miner. Worked on the docks in Liverpool. Bargehand on the Thames.”

“I meant his profession.”

“He doesn’t have one, really. He could never decide.”

“How did he get his injury?”

“Um… a misunderstanding.”

William said no more. Geoffrey had disappeared. She did not see him again until she climbed into the taxi her uncle had rented them. Then he was there, leaning in the window.

“Luck,” he said, clasping William’s hand. He looked at Conny. “I’m pleased he found you.”

Conny moved quickly and kissed Geoffrey, first on the scar, then on the mouth. He looked startled. Then his face relaxed into a grin.

MAY, 1922

Conny watched morning sunlight dapple the walls and furniture, filtered through the thin curtains that shifted across the windows, and thought how it even seemed to get into her dreams, the same color, lucidity. She sat up.

The other half if the bed was neat, unslept in. Conny stared around her and wondered who had waked her. Who was touching me? Her nerves rippled pleasantly. She bent over herself, hands between her thighs, and tried to remember what she had dreamed. Men and women with no faces, standing around her, hands outstretched, moving…

Gone. She pushed the damp sheets back.

She found William in the next room, the dining room-turned-study. Books piled everywhere. William sat at the long table, still dressed from the night before, jacket draped over the back of his chair. He rubbed his forehead absently, staring at the pages spread in front of him, the ivory pen in his hand. Conny hesitated. Since his last bout of illness he wrote seldom, little besides reviews of other peoples’ books and the letters he drafted for her almost every night. Judging from the pages stacked by him elbow and the sensations she woke from, he must have been writing those letters all night.

He looked up. “Oh. Good morning.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

He shook his head.

“What are you writing?”

“Dreck, by the look of it. I thought I’d solved a problem with the new novel, but…” He tossed the pen atop the sheets.

Novel? “Then maybe I should let you work. I thought I’d go out. Do you want me to bring you anything back?”

“No.” He smiled briefly, then picked up the pen.