Chapter 78: Eudora In Flesh

Beatris

Every eye in the corridor found me the moment I stepped out of the room.

A maid stopped so suddenly the folded linens in her arms nearly slipped. Another froze near the window, one hand still resting against the brass sconce she had been polishing. Farther down the hall, a servant carrying a tray lowered it slowly, as if any sharper movement might break whatever spell had just settled over the west wing.

No one spoke. They only stared. I understood why.

The black corset fit me too perfectly, the dark fabric narrowing my waist before spilling into a heavy skirt that brushed against the floor with every step. My hair, no longer brown, had been dyed a deep, vivid red and pinned back from my face in the same style I had seen again and again in the portraits.

Eudora's style. Eudora's hair. Eudora's face. I kept my chin lifted and walked through their silence as though I belonged inside it.

As though I had always belonged inside it.

My heart pounded too hard beneath the corset, but I refused to let it show. This was what I wanted. If Alexander saw Eudora when he looked at me, then I would use that. I would wear her shape like armor, even if it made my skin crawl.

Even if some part of me was beginning to understand why it worked. I found him in the garden.

He stood near the rose paths with one hand behind his back, half turned toward the fountain as if he had only stepped out for a breath of air and not for another quiet act of control. The afternoon light fell across his face when he looked up.

Then he saw me. He went utterly still. Something shattered open behind his eyes so quickly and so nakedly that I nearly stopped walking.

Hurt. Joy. Disbelief.

A grief so deep it looked like an old wound tearing fresh.

"Eudora," he said.

My breath caught. His voice had gone rough. Shaken. I kept walking until I stood directly in front of him.

For one suspended second, neither of us moved. Then his hands lifted. Slowly. Almost reverently.

He touched my face as if he were afraid I might disappear beneath his fingers. I understood in that moment that he was not really seeing me.

That was what I had wanted. And suddenly it felt far crueler than I had expected.

"You're back," he whispered.

His hands trembled where they cupped my face.

"You're really back."

The joy in his voice was so raw that something in my chest twisted painfully. For one dangerous second, all I could see was what he had lost. The man who had stood in a field with his dead wife in his arms. The man who had waited through decades, through women he never loved, through all the strange and terrible rituals buried beneath this house.

He really had loved her. That much was true. And if I let myself think about that for too long, I knew I would start pitying him.

So I lowered my gaze before the feeling could settle too deeply.

He pulled me into him without warning.

His arms closed tight around me, with the desperate certainty of someone holding something he had once buried and found again against all reason. His face pressed into my hair. I could feel his breath there, uneven.

I let him hold me. Only for a moment. Only because I needed him to believe this.

But my body gave the moment more than I meant it to. Some strange, traitorous softness moved through me, not fully mine and not fully borrowed either. It made me feel weak in the worst way.

When he finally drew back, he held my face again, searching it.

"Is it really you?" he asked, almost under his breath.

There was no calculation in him then. No careful lie. Only a terrible, wounded hope. I could not bear it.

So I smiled, faintly, carefully, and let my eyes drop as if the answer cost me something.

That seemed to be enough.

His hand moved through the length of my red hair in a gesture so intimate I had to stop myself from flinching.

I did not know whether the desire that moved faintly through me belonged to Beatris, to Eudora, or to some blurred place where the two of us had begun to touch.

I hated that I could no longer tell. Because part of me wanted him. Even now.

Even after the coffin. After Catherine. After Clara. After the blood and the lies and the endless trying to drag me into a life I had never chosen.

Maybe that part belonged to Eudora. Maybe that was what it meant to carry her memories inside me.

I did not want more of them. I did not want the rest of that life. Not if it ended with him turning me into a monster that burned, fed, died, and came back.

No.

I would not let love, hers or mine make that choice for me.

Alexander was still looking at me with that searching confusion when I stepped back from his arms and turned toward the house.

I heard the servants before I saw them, quick breaths, whispers, startled movement. They were all watching now from the edges of the garden and the hall beyond.

Good.

I walked back inside like a woman returning to her own rooms. The skirts whispered around my ankles. The black corset held me upright. The red hair fell over my shoulder like a declaration.

At the great hall I stopped. Several servants froze.

I turned slowly, letting my gaze move over the portraits that no longer hung there.

"Put them back," I said.

Silence. No one moved. I looked at the nearest maid.

"All of Eudora's portraits. Return them to the walls."

A soft gasp broke somewhere behind me. I did not wait to see who made it. I turned and continued walking. Behind me, I heard Alexander catch up.

He touched my arm lightly, as if not yet certain what might break the spell.

When I looked at him, his face still held that same impossible mixture of wonder and doubt. He did not know what to call me now. I could see it. Beatris or Eudora. Present or past. Woman or memory.

"Are you sure?" he asked quietly.

His voice had gentled again.

"We can take this slowly. You have all the time you want."

I looked at him and smiled. That seemed to unsettle him more than if I had wept.

He kept staring into my eyes, searching for some proof, some certainty that she was really there, that this was not simply another shape my defiance had taken.

He could search all he wanted. I had no intention of giving him an answer he could trust.