Page 28 of Demonic Delights

“Tea?” It’s only then that I spot the mug in her hand. “I thought you might want some.”

“Good thinking.” I indicate the slew of papers strewn across my work surface. “Ta, love. I can’t believe I left these until the last minute.”

“Happens.” She shrugs, setting the cup down on the coaster next to my pencil holder.

Then she walks over to my reading armchair. Is it just me, or is she sitting down a little gingerly ... the way someone might after getting their arse whipped with a cane and then fucked?

She regards me with a small, amused smile.

“This weekend has gone by very fast,” she remarks off-handedly as I take my first sip.

I inhale some of the liquid and hack and wheeze, my hand still holding the mug and spilling some of its contents over my students’ essays. I realise at the same time how very drained I feel, fevered, as if I were mortally ill.

“It’s like there hasn’t been one at all,” I croak in response to her.

She lets out a small, guttural ‘hmmm’, a sound as if she had confirmed something for herself. She gets up to her feet again, readying to leave.

“Was it the same for you?” I ask on an impulse.

She stops by the door with one hand on the handle, considering.

“No,” she says after a while. “No, I had a very nice, very ordinary weekend.”

But before I can figure out why she put so much emphasis on the word ‘ordinary’, she walks out.

12

ROXANA

Ipretend to be still asleep as Silas gets ready and leaves for work. But the moment the front door shuts behind him, I’m on my feet and rushing about. I don’t even bother brushing my hair or changing out of my pyjamas and gulp down my coffee quickly, letting it scald my throat in my haste as I stand in the kitchen. I leave the mug in the sink and hurry upstairs, in my hand the secret key to his office that Silas doesn’t know I have.

I scan his bookshelves, open his cupboards and search his desk drawers, making sure to put everything back where it was. But I don’t find anything that would either confirm or deny my mounting, otherworldly suspicions.

Perfunctorily, I turn the rest of the house upside down, but just as I expect, there are no discoveries to be made here. My failure to unearth anything incriminating—for a lack of a better word—in itself doesn’t mean my outlandish hunch is incorrect. If what I think might be happening is really happening, the proof would likely not be found in our house. It would be found somewhere Andrew Wilson had access to.

I don’t waste another minute. I throw some clothes on, tie my hair up, wash my face. There are bags under my eyes, my cheeks look dull, and my lips are pale. I look exactly the way I feel, tired, unsettled, like I need a break. But for once, I don’t care enough to put any makeup on. Let people see that I have bad days too. There are only so many opportunities in a day I may have, and Silas’s morning lecture is one of them.

I don’t even stop to button my coat up before I step outside into a world shrouded in swirling mist, my earlobes and the tip of my nose burning in the bitter cold. Walking swiftly, I rub my hands.

The walk isn’t pleasant, but damn if it isn’t impressive. This kind of weather suits the campus like no other.

I fell irrevocably in love with Thornedale the minute I stepped through its wrought iron gates. With the Cumbrian-slate buildings, their shapes varying, but their dark gable roofs unifying their serene, gothic look. With the creeping ivy that snakes around the tall, narrow windows of the old asylum buildings, connected by long archways. With the rain-sheened stone that always looks a little wet. With the gravel paths that run underneath sprawling branches of ancient oaks and beech trees.

With a tug at my heart, I recall that distant day when I first arrived, completely enchanted and feeling like the luckiest girl in the world for getting in on a scholarship. For years, I had worked so relentlessly hard to achieve it, burning midnight oil to cram for exams, volunteering, sacrificing whole weekends and summers to English language courses. Only to throw it away, not two years later, to marry Silas. The magnitude of what I gave up for the chance that a man might love me still takes my breath away any time I think about it.

But at least I got to stay at Thornedale forever.

The cheery click-clack of my heels against the flagstone floor carries me through the winding corridors until I reach Goodwoman Stubbs’ little nook right next to Silas’s office.

“Roxie! What a pleasant surprise! How are you, my lovely?”

As I mumble something non-committal in response, she stands up to greet me, her starched tweed garments so stiff that they nearly creak with her movement. Her tone is affectionate, but with that familiar, patronising undertone that never fails to grate against my nerves. As one of the rare few, Goodwoman Stubbs sees me as something much worse than just the Eastern European hussy who “fucked an older man’s brains out to marry him for citizenship”—as I’ve heard some of Silas’s more outspoken colleagues put it when they thought they weren’t being overheard. She sees me as his fucking victim.

I really wish that she would keep her condescending pity for me to herself. Her sympathy never fails to make me feel worse about my life. Because, honestly, could I possibly sink any lower than to have a pitiful creature like her feel sorry for me?

No matter what I do, though, I’m unable to make myself off-putting to her.

“How’s your writing going?” she asks, and suddenly I see another chance to make her like me a little bit less.