The Kingdom of Night (Book 3)

Acceptance

This time: Celia, and we're stepping back into the past with this one. It's a bit bittersweet, because while I was able to revisit some of the characters, I knew it would be the last time. I also think it says something about Celia's memory–because given the symptoms, it's likely she suffers from early-onset Alzheimer's. That makes the preservation of her memories so much more important.

Above: Sophie Nélisse in The Book Thief.

April 1925

Celia 

Memory is a funny thing. It had been some forty-odd years since I'd first met Emma, as a girl of only fifteen. Even then I remember seeing her strength, glowing dully under her deep mourning. She had just lost her father, newly an orphan, but already someone who was determined to close off her feelings, sealing them in a place where they couldn't be touched.

I think of Catherine sometimes too. When I first came to Allerton, a Jane Eyre in the flesh with parents I never knew and a distant relative who'd shipped me off to boarding school as soon as I'd turned thirteen, she was the first girl I ever looked up to. She was from wealth—the way she carried herself and looked at the world down the length of her nose said so.

Instantly I gravitated towards her. She always had a circle of girls around her, holding court much like I imagined Her Majesty Queen Victoria might. To me, she was royalty, and I'd felt an innate need to be in her orbit.

Largely, however, I was ignored, by her and by her friends. She didn't speak to me, look at me, nothing. That was until Emma arrived. The rumours of her powers rippled throughout the entire school, and soon it was clear she was not to be tangled with. We became thick as thieves, Emma, Catherine and I. I won't go into the snarl of thorns that was Benedict Huntley's reign of terror, however. Elementals and Naturals alike know the story, and re-telling it all again would only warp my memory more.

That, at least, is a constant. My memory started acting up after the Great War, automatically released from my position of lady's maid when the Spanish Flu took Catherine and her husband. I drifted around for months, finding odd jobs that would pay my rent on a small flat I'd moved into, but nothing that lasted more than six weeks at a time. Quite possibly it was because I kept forgetting things. Money became extremely tight, and I wondered constantly how I was going to eat, clothe myself, and have somewhere to live all at the same time.

That was how I eventually ended up in a home, somewhere the polite people called a mental hospital. The world shrank to the size of my room, and I became familiar with the life that went on outside my window. I saw no one I knew, only the doctors and nurses that shuttled in and out on an hourly schedule.

And then, one day, someone different.

'Miss Fairfax,' the nurse said, looking in on me. 'You have some guests.'

As she went out, my visitors entered. I recognised Emma immediately, because even if her once brilliant-red hair was now streaked mostly with grey, and her skin was carved with far more wrinkles than I remembered, her eyes were still the same. Behind her followed her daughter, Charlotte, the spitting image of her mother; her son Peter, who had me believing it was Christopher's ghost returned, and Catherine's daughter Grace. And how like her mother she had grown to be. Yet the war had aged them all, changing them and rendering them in different strokes than their parents.

'Celia.' My name rushed out of Emma in a single breath, and before I knew it she came forward and pulled me into a tight embrace. And just like that, we were girls again, reuniting after a long separation.

'Emma,' I breathed into her shoulder, the scent of the rose water she always wore bringing scraps of memory back—sitting on our bunks at school, talking late into the night; walking around London on our holidays, watching the seasons change; reuniting with her in that dreadful cave and knowing I was safe. 'However did you find me?'