Chapter Nine - Cordelia

 

Butterscotch. 

As Cordelia chews upon the sweet confectionary, she considers how deceptive the name is. Not for any critique as to the ingredients which comprise it, butter and sugar and the application of heat towards both. Rather, it possesses nothing of alcoholic substance. Deceptive. Treacherous. 

She considers for a moment whether scotch could, indeed, be added to the treat, transforming it into a sugary object of her total desires, then recalls that the caramelizing heat would likely render its inebriating effect null. 

Cordelia considers this, swallows the candy, then takes another enlightening sip of her provided bourbon. 

From the very first sip this evening, Cordelia feels as though finally in control again, for the first time in months. Just the initial sting of liquor upon her tongue sends a glorious peace somersaulting down her whole body, its warmth reigniting her mind like a dormant engine. The slipping off of a heavy coat, and the donning of a warm, comfortable robe. 

Peace. And clarity. 

It’s like she suddenly rediscovered breath after holding it impossibly long. It’s like the first kiss of cool wind on a scorching day. It’s like a flood in the parched desert. 

She feels instantly compelled towards something ridiculous, such as composing poetry just to commemorate this moment. 

She’d not fully appreciated how loud her mind is, all the fucking time. A thousand voices at once. A hundred observations pouring in from all directions. The light. The sound. The scents. The fucking oppression of atmosphere on her skin. It’s constant and maddening, like a prick from a needle across every surface of her body - except there’s no rhythm to adapt to, no melody to accept. It’s chaos. It’s nonsense. 

Cordelia absolutely, unequivocally, hates the sound of herself thinking. 

And at that very first drink, she no longer hears it. By an unknowable God above, it’s bliss. It’s plugged up as a leak in a boat, damned as a river. She’d forgotten how drinking keeps it tamed and domesticated. Oh, how she loves the feeling of being less and less of herself with each moment. 

This bourbon is a gift from the late Duke Hirschfield, Algers tells the assembled party, a squat six of them including Cordelia, who cares little for the connections with someone of note. She considers instead the hidden vanilla behind the smooth, dark liquor, the majestic circumference of caramel. How tastefully the drink descends into her, flowing as though from a holy grail into her cup, then accepted into her lips with greater care than any lover could possibly. 

She prefers the sting and punch of whiskey, it’s assaulting embrace, but how sweet of a companion this bourbon will be tonight. She feels as though she’s known her emptying glass all her life, adores the shapeliness of its elegance and the caress of its touch. She feels it fill her with a soft pleasure, entreating itself gracefully past all the defenses she might woefully erect, gliding into her like the divinity of a woman’s lust. 

It is almost a languid, lascivious carnality to pour a second glass in front of others. How depraved, how forward. Perhaps her lust ought to be a private affair between herself and the late Duke Hirschfield’s bottle, tucked away in her own bedsheets or some stolen closet. She considers again the appeal of exhibitionism, surrenders herself to the need, and allows the amber nectar to refill her cup, lounging back into the comfortable leather of her sofa. 

And her mind, that horrid, pathetic, killable thing, falls quiet. 

She ought to be annoyed by the sight of Alstair Goodman being seized upon by Clarke Caraman, tucked into a squat grapple and generally causing a commotion, but at present, Cordelia feels as though her patience is endless. Provided the golden glass bottle remains within an eager reach. 

“-had him like this, grabbing hold of him and damning anyone who tried to retrieve the football,” Clarke boasts, much to Alstair’s displeasure. Cordelia wonders if the shorter, more fragile Goodman is regretting his decision to volunteer as a prop for the story. “I held on for twenty - no! Thirty seconds.” 

“You may as well kill the man then and there,” their host, Lord Cunninghill, laughs, his face warmed from his own bourbon cup. “Gods, I’d rather take my own life than be shown up like that.” 

“He might’ve!” Clarke finally releases Alstair, who frowns and makes a motion like dusting off his vest and shirt. Clarke’s wideset chest puffs out valiantly, proud and hearty. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he went home and took a knife to himself then and there.” 

“And it didn’t incur a foul?” The soft-spoken Edgar chimes in, sitting quietly upon a stool by the bar counter in the lounge. The comfortable study is ringed by a row of bookcases Cordelia is sure Algers has never truly partaken of. 

Clarke stares in disbelief, vacant and befuddled. The flat mash of brown hair upon his head rises and falls with his confused breath. It’s as though the man has never heard such a ridiculous notion as rules within sport. 

“Forget I’ve spoken,” Edgar sighs. 

Cordelia cataloged the dynamics of the party quickly upon entry. Algers, as the host, is, well… the host. She shakes away the mild fogginess in her mind. Clarke is the buffoon, simple and stupid and lively and active. Alstair is the ass, taunted and gangly and easy to torment for a quick laugh - though generally a good sport about it. Edgar is the spoilsport and no one likes him. A sober-minded Cordelia had no preference about him when taking down the account of his encounter with the Coven; a less-than-sober-minded Cordelia is willing to accept his deflating solemnity as a detriment. Thomas is the go-along. Even now he claps vacantly as Clarke launches into another boasting cacophony. 

She’d meant to take this opportunity to learn more about this group, documenting within her mind what roles they play in the local politics. Where do they affiliate? What borders of land have been drawn up? Who is more strict with rent and who is more lenient? 

Swimming away into her second drink, Cordelia doesn’t care. She finally doesn’t have to care. Nothing matters, and that is her own personal heaven. Christ, sometimes the burden of detective work is suffocating - she does it partially because no one else was smart enough to do it. Solve the cases no one can. Deduce the connections that should be obvious to everyone else but apparently aren’t. 

She comes to the realization that people are quite stupid. Fundamentally. 

It isn’t their fault - not entirely. While the mind can be sharpened and cultivated with great effort, the value of investment in education, some people simply possess the natural faculties of genius. Surely. Most people do not possess the same intrinsic ability of intelligence that her own mind contains. 

Yes, that’s it. Cordelia is, and has always been, the smartest person in the room. Plain fact. Case closed. 

She smiles at her glass as she brings it to her lips with sumptuous intent. 

At the conclusion of her second glass she is invincible. 

“So I told him, if you can’t make it in the colonies, you’ll never be able to make it anywhere,” Thomas recounts, now perched up onto a stool at the bar counter, his attention directed towards Algers. “The colonies are easy pickings, easy money. No one in their right mind could fail there, and if they do, well…” He feigns tying a noose and hanging himself. Cordelia briefly considers that they’ve one joke and it’s rather uninteresting. 

“That’s why I’d much prefer the Isles,” Algers agrees. “True, sportsmanlike challenge.” 

“Which colonies?” Asks Edgar.

Thomas is laughing incredulously, start-stop puffs of air. “Which colonies? Which colonies? The colonies.” 

“I’m aware. There are quite a few.” 

“All of them, you twat. It’s easy in all of them.” 

Edgar rolls his eyes. “Yes, but when you say colonies, you typically mean the States. The States aren’t colonies anymore.” A disgruntled sip of his drink. “In fact, you’ve never been alive when they were colonies.” 

Thomas mutters something under his breath, joined in his exasperation by Clarke, who has taken to flicking his fingers across the spines of books on the library shelves Algers installed in his lounge. The flickering light of the fireplace sends shadows dancing over his form. Neither look pleased by the situation - whether that situation be Edgar’s correction or the independence of the States from Emril, Cordelia doesn’t particularly care. 

“They should be,” Thomas grouses. 

Algers, ever chipper, rescues the mood, sportily declaring, “You know, I say good for them, over in the States. Independence takes initiative. Spirit. Cunning. Now, do I think they’re particularly well suited to the effort…?” His voice fades away and he holds out a hand like an unbalanced scale tipping back and forth. “We’ll see how their great experiment plays out.” 

And having heard the host’s approval of such an idea, the rest of the assembled party chirp out their agreements. Clarke expouds vacantly on the barbarism of the frontier and how well he’d fare under such challenge. Alstair comments on the news that the States are expanding further westward on their continent, curious of the scientific benefit of new ecology. Thomas holds his drink sourly as Edgar shoots him a smug grin. 

And it is Clarke who unexpectedly acknowledges Cordelia’s presence for the first time since she’d arrived a half hour ago. He plumps down onto the lounge chair across from her, the leather squeaking in protest at his large form, kicking one of his legs up to rest a boot upon his knee and asking, “So, Detective Jones, have you ever killed a man?” 

A little bored, she doesn’t even find it satisfying to her senses to utter a response. She nods without much attachment, the cool glass of her drink resting between her palms. 

“Have you now?” Algers seems interested. He waits for a breath, then makes a pleading expression that Cordelia realizes is him asking for details. 

“More than one,” is all she supplies. 

Alstair pips up. “I’m not sure I’ve ever met a woman who has killed before.” 

“Then I’d suggest you keep uninteresting company,” Cordelia taunts. She feels larger in her mind, blissfully superior to the unambiguous chauvinism sporting through the room. Her comment promotes a bark of laughter from everyone but Clarke. 

 “Only in self defense, I presume?” Asks Algers. 

She ought not feel so compelled by that comment to tack onwards, but something inside of her cries out to prove herself in their eyes, to demonstrate by how much her reputation and her genius towers over them. 

“If it had not been self-defense, I’d imagine I’d have to hire myself to investigate myself for murder.” Cordelia considers the glass in her hand, holding it up and studying it as though it were the crown’s jewels. The room is rapt. “That need not imply a lack of willingness, desire, or capability.” 

“I pity the man whose death was brought about by a woman,” barks Thomas on the bar stool, who then, as though expunging the insult from her memory, adds, “No offense.” 

Cordelia rolls her eyes, deciding instead to flex her muscles and prove herself greater than they might expect. She sits forward, glass between her palms, mindful of the revolver still tucked neatly away upon her person. “The first man I killed was one William Jefferson Smalls…” 

And so begins the story, told as though she loved the art of story, ready to regale, ready to fascinate, ready to entertain. In truth, she abhors the act, finds it demeaning to her person. But Algers supplies the drink and her ego feels an unsuitable bystander to the moment. 

“He was known rather by his pseudonym in Bellchester, The Midtown Mark, so bestowed upon him after his first trio of killings were reported by a local paper,” she explains. “He was not a terribly interesting murderer, motivated only by a lust for bloodshed and an opportunist in his art. Mister Smalls deduced correctly that hardly anyone would care for his indulgence of death if his targets mattered nothing - beggars, the landless, et cetera.” 

“I’ve heard of this fellow,” says Edgar, leaning forward, captivated. Cordelia enjoys the rapture, killing her current glass and pouring another. “I wasn’t aware his capture was your doing.” 

“Did I capture him?” Cordelia plays coy. “Mister Smalls made his first mistake when he set his violence upon Withela Sturns, a woman who he mistook as a prostitute. In fact, she was the collar of Lord Elivar of Turntown Lane. A beloved collar. Chainlaid, you understand.” She circles her hand in air.

The room nods and murmurs words of understanding. Something sour bubbles in Cordelia’s chest, which she shoves away unceremoniously. Habitually. 

Algers scratches his head. “Turntown Lane… That’s where the Honeylark Meadery is, is it not?” 

“The very same.” 

Which, of course, sparks another round of groveling murmurs as the room proves they’ve heard of their host’s interest before. Thomas makes a comment about the mead. Edgar muses about the swan populations around Turntown. Clarke belches unapologetically. 

“Lord Elivar commissioned me to enact justice,” Cordelia continues. “I cared little for poor Withela, nor for her chainlaid master, but rather, I was perturbed by the lack of creativity in Mister Small’s work. A simple stab of a knife in an alleyway. Unremarkable, for a man set to be a serial killer. Boring.” 

Clarke guffaws. “A knife is a true man’s weapon. You’ve got to really,” he mimes a crude stabbing, “crimson the fellow.” 

He’s certainly never stabbed anyone. 

“And how did you encounter Mister Smalls?” Edgar asks intently. 

“A boring killer requires a straightforward approach: I disguised myself as a forgotten nothing on the streets and waited,” says Cordelia. “I feigned some gravely illness to make myself a more attractive mark, dirtied up and tattered a set of clothes for the purpose. Simple, really.

“It took three days for a likely suspect to begin popping up throughout my time on the dark streets. I’d notice him skulking about, deep cloak and skittish feet.” Here, she sits back disinterestedly, as though insulted the killer couldn’t stomach the nerves of desiring death. Inside, she feels a prickle of reminiscent fear that she’d never admit to. 

“And then what?” 

Cordelia’s eyes shadow. “He came upon me, dagger in hand.” She pauses, sipping from her drink as the room watches her, hungry, devious, delighted by the prospect of gore. “I’d like to say we fought valiantly and for some time, dueling as rivals in the sport of death - but that would be untrue.” Her hand slips into her pocket, fingers curling upon heavy metal. “He pulled his knife, and my bullet met his teeth.”

And for theatrical measure, she produces her revolver, the very same one that had killed William Jefferson Smalls so many years ago. She aims it directly at Clarke, eyes peering down the barrel as though he were the murderer all along. And with a whispered Bang!, she mimes pulling the trigger. 

As the weapon returns to her pocket, Clarke glowering at her challenge, she’s greeted by a host of applause and delight, raucous noises that men only make in the delight of something wicked, like schoolboys stealing away into a liquor cabinet. She basks in the adoration, the proof of her superiority, the necessity of their approval. 

And as she does, that rancid, sour feeling in her chest sets a chill upon her spine. 

Even as she promenades, even as she gloats, even as the celebration of death as spectacle grips the room around her, it is as though her body bristles with betrayal. The telling of an important memory in an untrue way. The perfidy of hollowing out trauma for sport. 

Cordelia finds herself lost in that moment, the world silent and forgotten around her. She’s back in that alleyway in Bellchester, back upon Hostelle Road, glaring down at the blood pooling on stone, the spilling of something sacred. She feels again the death of innocence, leaving her kicking and screaming and pleading for her to make it right, to un-kill the man, to not carry this stain upon her. She remembers the terror which had governed her motions, the pitiable fright in her body when his knife was lunging at her. How her hands had trembled upon her gun.

Her breath catches in her throat, heavy and sickly. 

Fever sets upon her spine. 

She is a killer. 

All the glory of investigation had become like sticks before swords - that wretched naivety of imagination dying before the horrible, cruel reality of the blade. Why must children play knight, play swashbuckler - pretend to carry the burden of swords when the truth of them was overflowing with violence? The scythic harshness of steel carving flesh compares nothing to the invulnerability of childhood stupidity. 

Before that moment, it had been fun to play Detective. She was smarter, cleverer, full of the blissful indiscretion of proving, over and over and over again, how much sharper her mind was than the common killer. Locking them away was as enjoyable as the sugared rush of candy - insatiable, invigorating. She’d strutted through a prison with a pep in her step. 

The blood of William Jefferson Smalls likewise shed her own; the death of her childhood preciousness. Death. Destruction. She was no longer a witness but a participant in that most corrupting of sins. 

She’d released heaving sobs in that alleyway, unexpectedly ripped out of her as though the innocence could only leave through violent expulsion. It escapes with a fight, grabbing hold of each part of her and pleading for her not to have done the very thing she’d done. It could no longer tolerate the dissonant cavern she’d carved open. It cried and cried again for her to turn back time, to abandon the carnage of errors which had led her to this emptiness. 

Breath, no more. 

And then death became easier to unleash. Stung less with each necessary occasion. It became more acceptable to her mind to rationalize. Self-defense was a shield of glass. 

With bourbon upon her tongue, laughter in her ears, and a poverty of spirit in her chest, Cordelia feels as though she’d recommitted the sin - packaged this memory as a spectacle to delight in, a conversational dessert. As though it had not split her heart asunder in a way it would never recover from. 

And that cool invincibility of alcohol no longer protects her from her own spiraling, reproachful, pathetic mind. 

You gave this feeling to Annette. 

You monster. 

Faced with the impossibility of her mind, she gives in to the conversation as well, cavorting about like she, too, was a loathsome schoolboy. She’s taunting Clarke to finish the bottle, then doing it herself. She’s joining in on mocking poor Edgar for his… she can’t really consider anything wrong about the man, it was simply that the party decided he must be mocked. 

She forgets Annette. She forgets herself. To do anything else would acknowledge the trembling despondency inside. 

“A toast!” Declares Algers, brandishing his glass high. He leaves it aloft, majestic and polished despite the alcohol coloring his handsome face. “What am I drinking to next?” 

“To women!” Cheers Thomas, “and their lovely breasts!” 

An amused groan leaves Edgar, who protests, “You always drink to breasts.” 

“And I always will!” 

Cordelia finds little struggle in toasting with them, hardly caring if any of them regard her suspiciously as a result. It’s easy enough to toast to women and their breasts, and she finds herself fondly recalling the shapeliness of Annette’s. 

“To the king!” 

“Hail Edward!” 

Cordelia drinks, caring nothing for monarchy but adoring the freshly unstopped bourbon sloshing in her glass. 

“And all his mistresses!” Raucous laughter fumbles out of Clarke, met by a chorus of, “Hear, hear!” 

“To properly settling this god-awful backwoods of a town!” Bursts out Thomas. “May it be finally made something Emrish and civilized!” 

“And may I never look upon horrid Kerish cuisine ever again,” Edgar grouses. Cheers sound out in agreement.

The delightful, wretched confidence of alcohol finally recovers itself within Cordelia, washing away the doubt, the drudgery of her horrible, terrible conscience. Replacing it, without a whisper of shame, emerges conviction in herself. 

Arrogance. 

She is always the smartest in the room. The most cunning. Fearsome. How could she be anything else? 

And when the conversation turns to Clarke’s boxing hobby, Cordelia snorts. Audibly. 

“Hobby?” She sneers. 

“Sport!” He protests. 

“Oh, you should see Clarke bear his fists,” Algers promotes. “He’s truly a, well, it almost feels ridiculous to then call him bear-like.”

“A boar?” Supplies Alstair. 

Not to be forgotten, a slurring Thomas screeches out, “AN TORC SCREADACH!!”

Clarke spits. “I’m no Kerish beast. I’m a proper Emrish monster.” 

“Like the Loch Hale serpent-,”
“A serpent!” The burly man drops the cigar he’d been holding onto his ashtray. “I ought to clobber you just for thinking it. A serpent? A bloody serpent!” 

“It wouldn’t be a fair fight against poor, brittle Edgar,” chides Algers. 

Without prompting, Cordelia repeats, “Hobby.” 

“Clarke, the woman thinks ill of your pastime,” complains Thomas. 

“I’ll not have a woman telling me what is and isn’t my sport-,”

“-Hobby-,”

“Sport.” 

“Hobby.” 

“SPORT.” 

“Hobby.” 

“SPORT!”

“Hobby-,”
“-SPORT!!!-,”

“I cannot wait for this to continue longer than it has already,” Algers sighs. 

Cordelia delights at Clarke’s frustration. His vein-protruding, grisly, bearded neck tenses with the rest of his body, soured from drink and alighted with misogyny. She loves how angry it makes him, how diminished his sense of self. 

She hardly even notices herself saying, “I’m sure I’d have you on your back in a single round.” 

Clarke leaps to his feet. He’s already rolling his sleeves to his elbows and grunting like a boar. Apt. 

Edgar is standing, too, leaping between them as though to shield Cordelia from his fury. She despises the act, first for its patronizing sexism and second for its utter preposterousness. Defended by Edgar. Edgar. She laughs aloud, cocky and coy. And then she’s joining them on her feet, dropping her coat as suave as she can muster and rolling the sleeves of her own button down. She ignores the brief complaint from her injured leg.

“Edgar, don’t be stupid,” she paces his paternalism. “He’d crush you in an instant.” 

Algers, Thomas, and Alstair take positions around them, and where Cordelia might expect the jovial mood to die, not a single one of them shares Edgar’s fear. Instead, Thomas is muttering, “She has killed a man before.” 

“With a gun,” Alger’s head cocks like he’s debating odds for a bet. 

Clarke huffs out a distinctly mannish breath, full of that pitiful angst of testosterone and a desperate clutching of ego. “I’ll not suffer this insult!”

“Come now,” pleads Edgar, “we’re having a perfectly pleasant evening-,”

Cordelia pokes her head around him and smugly locks eyes with Clarke. “Hobby.” 

“Bitch!” 

Any pity Cordelia might’ve had leaves her. She realizes quite quickly there was none in her to begin with. Her fists tremble, eager. 

“Edgar, be a gent and step aside,” she waves dismissively. “I’ve a man to humiliate.” 

“Detective Jones, he’s a beast of a man, he’ll-,”

“Fall like a cuck at a wedding, yes, yes. Move.” 

Algers looks intrigued. “Do you box, Detective Jones?” 

“Not as a hobby.”

Clarke is muttering foul things under his breath. “I ought to teach her not to-,” and “This fucking bitch is going to get it I swear-,” and “Hobby. Hobby. I’ll show her a bloody hobby-,” 

“You oaf, we can all hear you,” goads Alstair. 

Algers wraps an arm around Edgar’s shoulder, beaming and smiling and warm with alcohol, pulling the lean, frail man out of the way. He condescends to swipe Edgar’s glasses from him and wipe them on his own shirt, throwing them back onto the smaller man’s face without a care for his protestations. 

“Boxing! What ho!” Shouts their host. “A spectacle is afoot! Thomas, would you do the honor, the honor, of refereeing?” 

“A referee I’ll show them a referee I don’t need a referee-,” Clarke paces like a wounded tiger. 

Thomas steps between the would-be boxers and spins in a tight circle, lurching to the side as his drunkenness threatens his balance. “Standard rules, yes? Nothing fancy?” Seeing agreement from the both of them - Cordelia shrugs and Clarke curses - he nods and clears the space. He chimes a spoon against his glass as bell-like as he can muster, and the room begins its horrible cheering and chanting. 

Clarke doesn’t wait for her to begin, charging at her as though pulled by a chariot. His bursting, hairy arms leap up into his boxing posture -

- Sloppy, rugged, angered - 

And he thunders forward. 

Right hook, then left - 

Cordelia is already bobbing between his first two blows, enjoying how obviously telegraphed his every movement is. He’s an ape of a man, slow and impatient, and soon her fists are cracking against the side of his ribs; not hard enough to injure, but enough to get a sense for how much force she’d need. 

Sturdy, she concludes of his ribcage. 

She allows a blow to strike her left cheek, only to bounce with the movement and circle around Clarke, unleashing a trio of heavy smacks against the side of his face. His arm launches out and pushes her back, separating them enough to study one another. 

“Hobby,” Cordelia taunts. 

Screaming, “BITCH!!!!” As loud as he can, Clarke rages at her. His fists fall in flurries like snow, crashing into her blocking forearms and hurting her far more than she’d ever admit. Cordelia staggers back, briefly considering if she’d underestimated him, only to quickly spot a weakness in his form. 

She ducks, head and torso and all, and slips into his defense, awkwardly forcing Clarke off balance. There, it’s all too easy to thunder her fists forward, smashing into his ugly chin from below and hopefully cracking at least one of his teeth. 

Clarke roars and slams his fists down on Cordelia’s back, crashing her down to the floor as he stumbles backwards, his hands frantically scanning across his mouth. A quick survey shows Edgar as the only member of the party horrified by the grotesque act. 

Cordelia leaps up to her feet and gives him no reprieve, once more ignoring the pain in her injured leg. Two jabs bounce off his fists, but another bloodies his nose. Clarke returns the effort striking Cordelia directly in her left eye and causing her to screech in pain. Then she’s on the back foot, suffering blow after blow as the huge man capitalizes on her momentary blinding. Defense falters for Cordelia, and she turns to choosing where to take his hits rather than blocking them or dodging. 

But Clarke is reckless, and stupid, and sloppy. Nursing a throbbing pain in her eye, Cordelia finds a gap and strikes his left eye as well to return the act. And where Clarke doesn’t seem to know how to press the full advantage, Cordelia does. She hovers in that blind spot and unleashes hell upon him, striking again and again and again with no thought for mercy, no thought for letting up. 

And suddenly she’s not punching Clarke because they’re boxing and she’s proving her superiority. Suddenly she’s punishing him, pouring out that putid, awful feeling inside of her and using him to release it. That monstrous thing inside her savors the gore, the brutality, and soon Clarke is falling to his knees. She doesn’t stop. 

Cordelia finds her fists bloodying his face even as he falls flat onto his back and stops moving. The fury in her delights in the spectacle, and every horrible thing she’s suffered finds itself in her knuckles. Every moment of loneliness, every rejection, every sideways look and misogynistic comment, every moment of suffering the fucking carnival of her mind is given power by way of savagery. 

Clarke isn’t Clarke to her anymore. He’s simply a feeling that must be broken beyond repair. 

It’s Thomas who pulls her off of him. 

It’s Edgar who throws her coat.

It’s Alstair who refuses to give her the rest of the bourbon. 

It’s Algers who shows her to the door.  

In the doorway, she finds her fingers on the revolver once more. Then it’s pointing at Clarke’s defeated body. Then she’s saying, “Don’t ever call me a bitch again.” 

Threat made, she leaves Hill Castle and allows her shame and her self-hatred to descend upon Fieldston below, knowing nothing, feeling nothing, save for the naive, innocent part of herself who somehow thinks Annette will know how to fix her.