The Stars and the Cookie Jar

"Opiates," she said, "before 1950."

Victorian London, ca. 1873. Buckle up.

            The plates were pewter, and the only course was potatoes. Clary's waistcoat had one gold button making do for three, and Violante had no earrings and no gloves; but they both remembered how to behave, ladies of Empire in a two-shilling room on Hanbury street, and kept genteel silence between the fall of forks and knives.
            "I thought about getting a situation somewhere," said Violante, and waited for Clary before she continued. "Governess."
            The Spitalfields bell was going, for seven o'clock. Around the core of candlelight, their room was completely dark; Clarissa's pale eyes were attentive, but her expression stubbornly shut.
            "Clary, surely, I can teach poxy brats to read."
            "A governess generally lives in the house of her employ." Clary frowned. "What about that, then?"
            "I'd -- I'd tell them I couldn't!"
            Clarissa, who had fooled the dons at Oxford two years running before the scandal, pushed her plate aside and said nothing at all.
            There was ninepence in the cashbox between the salt-dish and the candle; it scraped when Vi picked it up, two silver fourpence and a bit. A noise like a tin cup against a tooth, and the small box was empty.
            "I wish you would write something," Violante said, chafing copper and silver between her finger-tips. "It doesn't even have to be something to sell..."
            "It does."
            "You had that letter, from the editor of The Strand."
            "Yes, and The Strand doesn't want women's stories!"
            The candle wavered between them, dipping Clarissa's face into wild shadow, and Violante bit the inside of her mouth and flinched. Clary dressed the man, and sat in the saddle like a man, and gave up her gasps to the pillows when Violante whispered my lord, but she would not sign her works Clarence Rush, not anymore.
            Ninepence clinked as Violante clenched her fingers, rising fast from the table, from Clary's eyes and the fight that lay in the silence. "What are we going to eat, then? Air?"
            When she slammed the door, it shook the floor and the stairwell; she was half across Whitechapel, in the dark, before she missed her shawl or her hat.
           
            The room was dim with white smoke, fierce and sweet to breathe. The sweetness settled in her head like snow, feathers; Violante set down her parcel and ran her fingers over all it held,  like a blind woman, just to be sure in all the smoke. A pound loaf of bread, a packet of tea, bacon and candles and the poppy, four halfpenny sticks. It was too expensive to burn, but Violante had rather had smoke than syringes in their bed. In the corner, with her feet up on the counterpane, Clary was tipped back in her chair and chewing the end of a fountain pen. White ash had left tiny holes in her shirtsleeve, but she was decently far from the coals.
            She took the pen down, and turned to face Violante. Her lips were pale and her eyes were rimmed red; she had cried, or else taken too much of the smoke.
            'You came back."
            Violante crossed the room before saying anything, because burned flowers always made her feel whispery and stupid; she swept her skirts over, and slid between the desk and the bed and Clary. "Of course I," she started, "Clarissa..."
            Close, she could see by the red-edged light of the little Delftwork burner; there were three broad sheets folded and cut, and words, on every page, writing. She reached out before she knew, to read them.
            "You're working," she said.
            Clarissa hushed her, with a finger laid on Violante's lips. "Shh, love. Writing."
            She moved, a little, and closed her mouth around Clary's fingertip; gum arabic on her tongue, and the taste of skin, and against her teeth the warm callused spot from the pen.
            "Writing," Clary insisted, and tangled for a second in Violante's hems, trying to stand her away; but she smiled, in the darkness, heady and sweet as poppy.
           
            It was a good dream. 
            Violante felt herself waking; perhaps she was never asleep. She felt the plain rough linen of the sheets, and saw the yellow rosebuds buttoning the pillow-slips. But there was sunlight, too, and grass brushing her feet through blue satin slippers. Her sister Viviane, in the silver-lawn walking dress that cost her father twenty guineas, standing under the chestnut tree; her cousin Charlotte, with a picnic hamper, and then the dark damp corner of her room, her and Clary's room where no sunlight ever got and the air reeked fish, but she was nudging Charlotte's shoulder, and they were talking.
            "Lottie, Lottie, who is that young man?"
            The light was green as emeralds. Charlotte laughed.
            "That's young Master Rush. Is he not desperately handsome? They say he writes stories, and talks a perfect French."
            "The Rushes, Lottie, the Rushes don't have a son. They have --"
            But Charlotte drifted away in sunlit smoke, and Vi was on her back midst turned earth and lupines in the winter garden, with Clary's strong small fingers undoing her waist and her busk. Clary above her, along her, in brown velvet coat and trousers, and from the memory, from the frightened fire in her veins Violante knew he, her, she was Clarence yet. No one knew, no one in the world, not the tutors in their high rooms, not Violante. Her hands were furrowing the soft soil, catching in the hollows of the mattress, for an anchor, for anything, for Clary.
            She gasped, and someone held her. Solid, real. Clary kissing and coaxing her, scented of opium and ink. "Hush, love, hush, come down, come down..."
            His, her breeches were torn, and her silk shirt's laces undone, so anyone could see that bindings crossed her chest; and they stood in the snow by Kings Cross station, freezing, the way it had not happened then, when Clary had come home in the middle of term-time and without tutors' references. The snow was brilliant, brilliant white, a diamond on her finger, and a diamond at her throat. Clary knelt in the drawing room and crumpled the night-colored bag the jewels had arrived in, brought from a locked case at Whitfields where there had always been a son in the Rushes' line. Clarence, Clarissa, Violante had known it then, when Clary was in the drawing room on her knees and said marry me, now, today, they won't call banns, no one will know. Marry me. I love you. Please.
            "Violante!"
            There was air in the room. Cold. Fish. Rain, silver as scales. Air enough to breathe.
            Clarissa held both her hands. They were in a dark, close room, and the Spitalfields churchbells told three o'clock, and it was all real.