Re: London, Murray House, Mina & Vanessa
Vanessa had not forgotten. When she emerged from her illness, her father had told her of Mina's wedding in the city. Then, of course, Mina had told her of it herself. It had been Sir Malcolm who had explained Mina's sudden disappearance from her husband's house, the subsequent dissolution of their marriage pact that left the two of them standing there together with their maiden names. "Re-entrance, then," she said, correcting the semantics, watching Mina's regal bearing, her obvious disinterest in delving too deeply into anything. She lifted her chin a half an inch.
In the end, all her warnings meant nothing, and the apparent hypocrisy and dangerous ground of warning Mina from the company of men did not escape her. It hardly mattered. She didn't know what her friend still knew, but it had to be said, or, if she was snatched up again, not warning her would haunt Vanessa as her other failures did. This might be an impossible second chance, or merely the second act of a deepening tragedy. But she would try, for the friends they'd been, for the girl she had imagined herself to be.
The irony. There was no name to give for this nameless threat. It would have soothed her better if there was. Then again, she had always said that things needed names to live, and the beast was not really alive.
Mina said that she had already been seduced, and Vanessa's brow bounced, slightly. That was utterly unexpected.
"Do you remember his name?" she asked, her gaze turning hawk-sharp, forgetting the miles of troubled memories between them. Mina could not possibly remember the thing it had made her if she did not remember coming to Vanessa again and again, drawing her toward her hidden master as a prize, using Vanessa's guilt as efficiently as a hook embedded in her cheek. But perhaps Mina still had the name that would let Vanessa sink her talons in and hunt.
Mina was too still, now. She was too even, too steady, too unruffled to genuinely know what had happened to her. Perhaps Vanessa's own transgression had been the thing that drew her away from her simple, sweet husband, the memory of betrayal making fidelity somehow boring, a lost love making passion all the sweeter. Those thoughts were cruel, and vain, perhaps, or fueled by guilt. Did all things trace back to that night before the never-wedding, really? Or was it simply an inability to accept a depth in her friend, a small darkness that she had been so blind to? Did she corrupt all things she loved?