Her Dark Artifice [t.r]

Chapter 17: The Secret Riddle

XVII
The Secret Riddle

Tom immediately got up and ran a hand through his black hair. His back turned to Evadne, he gazed out of his small window, his eyes alive with self-dutiful calculation. His mouth was thick and venomous with the silence of doubt.

After a couple of seconds of painful contemplation about what she ought to do, Evadne stood up and stepped into the small space beside Tom's narrow window.

He glanced down at her briefly. A weak wash of sunlight managed to permeate the London overcast, sending a golden beam through Tom's window that illuminated the specs of dust floating seamlessly like stardust in the air between them.

"That building used to be a hospital for pregnant women and children," Tom said.

Evadne's heart sunk in her chest. "When was the hospital bombed?"

"This summer," he said simply.

There wasn't a hint of emotion nor concern in Tom's apathetic voice.

Evadne looked on at the high mound of rubble and ash that she now knew to be the sanctuary and shelter of mothers and their children. Sadness transformed into spite, and spite metamorphosed into rage. What did any of these people do to deserve such an ill-starred life? What did the homeless men on the street do to deserve no food and no shelter? What did the orphans do to deserve abandonment and a lifetime of misery and neglect?

At that moment, it was an odd sort of catharsis for someone like Evadne, and so the rose-coloured glasses she donned customarily for her disposition quickly came off, replaced with something new and frightening — the birth of an indisputable abnegation for a "better world".

*

Evadne remained in Tom's bedroom as he went downstairs to interrogate his matron, Mrs Cole. She fished through his things, but there wasn't much in Wool's to satisfy Evadne's nosiness. She desperately wanted nothing more than to know more about Tom.

Curiosity killed the cat, she thought, tinkering with a few seaside stones arranged into a neat line on Tom's tiled windowsill.

But satisfaction brought it back.

Evadne took some photographs of a sunlit seashore from inside Tom's bedside drawer. She sat and stared absentmindedly at the tiled wall for a short moment. She held up one of the photographs from the pile in front of her, tilting her head to the side inquisitively.

It was of any ubiquitous English seaside – a rocky beach, lapping, foamy waves, children playing in the shallow water, seashells scattered haphazardly across the shimmering stones, women languishing in the English fascimile of a summer sun.