A Heart That Drank In Water

Was this how Lohengrin must have felt, the man who could never reveal who he truly was? Herman’s confession had struck me like the ground heaving beneath my feet, and yet his sincerity alone could solve none of the problems I faced. Even Lohengrin, for all that it was only a story, ended in tragedy. So in reality, mere fondness, or even love, could hardly be enough to fight one’s way through hardship or rise above adversity.

I was still ‘Marienne,’ the woman whose name had been stolen from her, and Herman was still nothing more than the husband of ‘Gloria.’ Nothing made less sense than trying to fill that chasm with a feeling I couldn’t even prove, however much our two hearts might beat as one.

Such a thing could never, ever be.

I have to go back. The sooner the better — even by a single day.

In the carriage on the way home, that was the one and only thing I firmly resolved.

Yes. As fast as I possibly can.

For several days after that, I was laid low with a bad fever.

I worried I might pass the illness on to Herman, but he utterly ignored my suggestion that we sleep apart until I was well again.

“You still have so much left to do, Herman. If you were to fall ill too, at this rate…”

Cough, cough. As I coughed, Herman wound a warm scarf around my neck and said,

“Better you pass it to me, then. They say that’s how you get well faster.”

Ever since he’d handed over his confession in the forest like a love letter, Herman no longer hid what he felt. Gentler and softer now than ever, he came at me so directly it was almost more than I could bear, so that each time I had to fend him off, shutting my eyes on the pretext of being ill.

“Your fever does seem to have broken, though.”

Whether he was only pretending not to notice or was genuinely taken in, each time Herman would lay his broad hand across my forehead and mutter in a grave voice,

“This won’t do. I’ll send for the physician again.”

I told him there was no need, tried to make him stop, but words like those never seemed to reach his ears. Then he would change out the wet cloth on my forehead, one of the first things he did each night when he came back from his work in the study. It did no good to explain that a maid had set a fresh one there only moments before; nothing satisfied him unless he laid the cloth on himself.

And that was hardly the end of it. Insisting that a day spent lying in bed had left my circulation sluggish, he kneaded and pressed at my arms and legs, the very limbs that had done nothing but rest all day.

“Bear with the tickling a moment. I’ll be done soon.”

It was no use protesting that I felt fine. Whenever I curled up in embarrassment, Herman would coax me gently and go on working away at me, here and there.

“No matter how little appetite you have, you still have to eat.”

What’s more, at some point he’d taken to arriving at every mealtime, spoon in hand, and settling himself down at my bedside. However I begged him to stop, pleading how mortifying it was in front of the others, he wouldn’t listen.

Then again, if he were the sort of man to listen to me, he’d never have carried on like this in the first place.

For a man who ranked among the five busiest people in all the Empire, the sheer, devoted care he lavished on me was a thing to behold. Enough that I came to see, all too plainly, what a mistake feigning illness had been.

There was no shaking Herman off: for every step I retreated, he closed the distance twice as fast. Wanting to turn away from him, at least in body if nothing else, I put my back to him and pushed myself toward sleep.

And so those awkward days between us went on a while longer.

“Must you really go?”

Herman asked me, one day. He seemed uneasy about my attending the Drake family’s society ball, set for this coming weekend.

“You’re not even well — I have to wonder whether it’s worth going out of your way for it.”
“…”
“I only mean, don’t push yourself, Ria.”

Herman said it with a look of displeasure, over a meal where, for the first time in a long while, we sat facing each other. The pet name ‘Ria,’ which somewhere along the way he’d worn thin with overuse, grated on me, though I couldn’t let it show, and wouldn’t have wanted to.

And so I shook my head slowly and parted my lips.

“I’m fine. I can go.”
“Ria.”
“No, Herman. I’m going.”

I can’t say how hard I fought to swallow down the word ‘without fail.’ Ever since the invitation had come flying in from the Drakes, I had prepared for that day down to the last detail. No matter what happened, I had to reach the Drake manor, and I had to carry out, flawlessly, everything I’d spent all this time preparing.

But Herman, who could have no notion of what lay in my heart, let out a long sigh, his face wholly unable to make sense of me.

“I’d rather not go so far as to say this, but it does seem a touch like sheer stubbornness. You’ve never once taken part in any social occasion, and now you’re set on attending this one no matter what — I hardly know how I’m meant to take that.”

Herman went on, his brow furrowing.

“As far as I can tell, you plainly dislike the Drake family — and yet, every so often, it’s almost as though you’re strangely fixated on them.”
“…”
“Is there perhaps something going on that I don’t know about? If there’s anything you have to tell me, I’d like you to tell me now. That way, if something does happen, I can at least face it together with you.”
“You’ve misunderstood. There’s nothing of the sort.”

I answered, fixing my gaze deliberately on the food-laden dish before me.

“The falling-out between us twins has been the favorite thing to chew over in society of late, hasn’t it? I feel I ought to show — outwardly, at least — that she and I are on decent enough terms.”
“I’m fairly sure I told you plainly once before that there’s no need to mind gossip of that sort.”
“It’s only that I think I’ll rest easier in myself this way.”
“Very well. If that’s what you wish.”

Herman set down his knife and gently closed his eyes. It wasn’t a wholly convinced face, but no further word of objection came from his lips.

“Still — if I’m to be honest, I don’t much care for it.”

A little while later, mid-meal, Herman spoke up in discontent. Turning it over, he seemed to have decided he had a great deal more he wanted to say. I lifted my head and gazed steadily at him.

What is it…

Before I could even ask, he went on.

“The cold, the Drakes — whatever it is that weighs on you, whatever it might be. All of it.”

I gripped my fork and knife tight and could say nothing at all.

“And I don’t understand this resolve of yours, to go and face a thing head-on when you could just as easily avoid it.”

Herman cut into his meat with no little force.

“When you try to shoulder everything alone like this, it leaves me a little heavy of heart. It makes me wonder whether, to you, I’m not someone you can lean on with any ease.”

Slice, slice. Not one of his movements broke with etiquette, and yet his displeasure showed through in every one of them, plain as day.

“Am I really so hard to rely on?”

Yet for all the force behind his cutting, the face he turned on me wore an easy, gentle smile.

“You could lean on me a little more, you know.”

I was the one who’d suffered the fever, so why was it he who wore the face of the one in pain?

“It isn’t that I can’t rely on you, or that I can’t trust you. You know that.”
“I know. It’s only these feelings you’ve been stirring in me lately, that’s all. Standing before you, there are times I come to see I’m a more powerless thing than I’d ever thought.”

Herman confessed, evenly, that he’d felt it when he saw me fall into the lake, and again when my face had burned with fever.

“I’m a little afraid. Somehow it feels as though, just like this, I might lose you.”
“…”
“Is it always this way — does caring for someone leave you so unsettled?”

The man before me was honest. Far too honest. As though he meant to prick the conscience of a woman who could be honest about nothing.

“…”

I rolled my lips inward and bit down against the ache welling up in me. As if he’d never been hoping for any other answer, Herman took up his meal once more. Watching him, I understood, all at once, a single truth.

There isn’t much time left, is there — for sitting down to a meal like this, face to face.

The past few months spent with Herman felt like a midsummer night’s mirage. Absurdly, the very first thing to come to me was a faint regret that the time was passing at all.

Don’t turn sentimental, Marienne. However many times I turn it over, this is what’s right.

I admonished myself, struggling to press down the emotion surging up in me, but the gloom that had settled into one corner of my heart would not be so easily dislodged. My conviction that I had to make the right choice hadn’t changed, and yet the weight in my chest grew heavier and heavier, like cotton soaked with water. That tremendous weight bore down on me and left my body sluggish, until in the end it slowed even the pace at which I ate.

Perhaps it was the day I fell into the lake in Rosenwald Forest that my heart had drunk in the water and swelled to its fullest. And the aftermath of that swollen heart seemed to carry on to this very day.

Still — once time has passed, it’s bound to be all right.

Just as one dries water-logged cotton well beneath the sun, if I hung my own heart out, too, somewhere cool and airy, wouldn’t it dry out someday? I wanted, with all my heart, to believe that it would.