Victorian Boy || l.s. ✔︎

CHAPTER XIX

"The pain we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all."

― Sophocles, Oedipus the King

The air was stale and thick as molasses inside Louis' fox den, the earth moist from the recent rainfall. Harry picked up the box of matches on the small mud shelf and tried to light a candle, but the matches were damp and splintered between his fingers.

He felt around for the pile of journals. He took the first one he touched, remembering that the volume in question rested on top. He grabbed it and crawled back outside. He could barely make out the title in the moonlight: Bulletin de l'Académie Imperiale de Médecine, Vol. 8. He was about to open it when he stopped himself.

Thunder clapped overhead and rain began to patter on the fallen leaves at his feet. The storm was back like an orchestra returning for its encore.

He couldn't risk getting the journal wet if it was to be evidence, so he tucked it inside his cloak and ran back to the house, the heels of boots stabbing the wet earth like daggers with each step.

Above him he saw the silhouette of Louis standing by his window.

The door to the house was heavy and creaked open. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and he looked upon the burned faces in the Warwick family portrait. The face of Louis' brother James was completely burned, a simulacrum of the real James who lay burned in the earth. Eyeless, the image watched him as he ran across the rotunda and up the staircase.

He quietly crept to his bedchamber, cold still clinging to the wool of his cloak.

As he turned the corner of the east wing, past the painting of The Battle of Thermopylae, one of the doors opened a sliver. The shadowed face peering through the crack was unmistakably that of William. He was staying in one of the guest bedrooms? This stung almost as much as seeing him with Louis. William, a servant, was given his own room in the upper part of the house near his master. He had won the Duke's favor and likely his heart.

Once inside his bedchamber, Harry sat at the vanity and, hand quivering, lit a candle. The orange flame blossomed on the wick and the room flickered into view. This room had once belonged to James but after Louis' restoration bared no mark of its previous owner. Even still Harry felt James' presence in the walls, the floorboards and the very air he breathed.

Harry didn't drink but he craved a finger of brandy to steady his nerves. He swallowed and placed a hand on the journal's tattered cover, touching the square typeface and imperial coat of arms.

The pages used as the catalyst for the fire were numbered six to eleven.

Harry opened the journal.

One. Two. Three.

He skimmed past illustrations of anatomy, medical equipment and detailed descriptions of disease. His stomach churned.

Four. Five.

On the fifth page was a description of a disease that very much sounded like what James suffered from: une respiration sifflante, une toux persistante, essoufflement...

Harry held his breath.

Six.

The sixth page was there. And so was the seventh, the eighth, ninth, tenth and eleventh.

The journal was intact.

More than that, the margins of each page were filled with Louis' handwritten notes. In the inky, lopsided cursive of a child he had marked beside each symptom the degree to which his brother was affected in a tone that precociously mimicked the journal's scientific rhetoric: