The Honeysuckle Withers

The fog that night was the colour of wet ash. It pressed against the windows of the boarding house on Dorset Street like something alive, something that wanted to get in. Aimee Foster sat by the gas lamp, her fingers still stained with ink from the hat factory, and watched it move.

Behind her, Clara's bed was empty. The sheets had been pulled up to the pillow in a way that suggested she had simply risen and not yet gone anywhere. Aimee had made this bed herself that morning, after Clara had slept in it for the third night in a row without coming to bed. The comb lay on the dresser, just as Clara had left it: black, four teeth missing, the kind of comb that lasts ten years if you take care of it.

Aimee did not cry. She had stopped crying about two years ago, when her father died, and something had shifted inside her that made tears feel like a language she had forgotten how to speak.

Instead, she took out her notebook and drew honeysuckle. Not the way it grows in gardens, neatly trained along a trellis. The way it grows in Whitechapel: through cracks in brick walls, around rusted iron gates, over the bones of things that used to mean something.

The door opened at ten o'clock. Clara came in smelling of rain and gin and something else -- something sharp and chemical that Aimee could not name. Her face was flushed. Her eyes were bright in a way that frightened Aimee.

"He didn't come," Clara said. She did not ask how Aimee knew. She never did.

Aimee put down her pencil. "Who didn't come?"

Clara sat on the edge of her bed and stared at the wall. "Thomas. I waited outside the tavern on Wapping Street for an hour. He didn't come."

Aimee remembered the look on Clara's face when she first told her about Thomas: the way her eyes lit up, the way she said his name like it was a flower she had just discovered. "He was busy," Aimee said. It was the most she could manage.

"Busy," Clara repeated. She said it like a word she had never heard before and did not trust. "He was busy with Lydia and her friends. I saw them through the window. I could hear them laughing." She touched her face, her fingers pressing into the soft flesh of her cheek. "I wore the blue dress. The one with the ribbon."

Aimee stood up and went to the sink. She poured water into a basin and brought it to Clara. She did not offer to wash her face. She did not need to. Clara took off her shoes and sat on the floor, leaning against the bed, and stared at the puddle forming beneath her feet.

Two weeks later, Clara was gone from the boarding house. Aimee found only a letter slipped under her door: "Mother is taking me home. Don't look for me. I am not ready to be found."

The letter smelled of carbolic soap and something sweet -- beeswax, perhaps. The handwriting was Clara's: bold, looping, the kind of writing that takes up space because the writer has not learned to shrink herself.

Aimee folded the letter and put it in her apron pocket. She went to work at the hat factory as usual. She pinned brims and stitched crowns and listened to the women around her talk about their mothers and their boyfriends and the price of butter. She said nothing. She pinched brims and stitched crowns and thought about carbolic soap and beeswax and a letter that smelled like someone trying to make themselves presentable even in departure.

On the way home, it rained. Not the gentle London drizzle that makes everything shiny. The kind of rain that falls at an angle, driven by wind from the Thames, cold and insistent. Aimee took shelter in a doorway in Wapping -- the doorway of a building that used to be a church, before the priest left and the congregation scattered and the doors were nailed shut.

She stood there for maybe ten minutes, watching the rain. The fog and the rain mixed together so that she could not tell where one ended and the other began.

Thomas Gray appeared from the alley beside the building. He was smoking a cigarette, his hands in the pockets of a coat that had been finer once. He stopped when he saw her.

"You'll catch your death out here," he said. His voice was rough, the kind of voice that has spent too many years shouting over the sound of cranes and chains at the docks.

"I'm fine," Aimee said.

He looked at her. She looked at him. The rain fell.

"You're the girl from Dorset Street," he said finally.

"I'm Aimee."

"I know." He flicked ash onto the cobblestones. "Clara's friend."

"She's not my friend," Aimee said. Then, because it was not true and they both knew it: "She was."

Thomas studied her face. Aimee did not look away. She had learned, over sixteen years of living in Whitechapel, that looking away was the same as admitting defeat.

"What are you doing in a doorway in Wapping?" he asked.

"Going home. You?"

"Getting a cigarette. Or trying to. The one I've got is nearly finished." He held up the stub -- half an inch of tobacco and paper, dripping rain. "This is what I call progress."

Aimee almost smiled. She did not. But something in her chest shifted, just slightly, the way a stone shifts when you least expect it to.

"You work at the docks," she said. It was not a question.

"Wapping. Yes."

"You're Thomas Gray."

He looked surprised. "You know my name."

"I know everyone's name in Whitechapel. It's what you do when you're small and quiet. You learn to remember the people who are loud and close."

Something crossed his face. Not a smile. Not a frown. Something that might have been a smile if it had been born in better conditions.

"Clara talks about you," he said. "Says you're the only person who ever just... sits with her. Doesn't try to fix anything."

"She doesn't need fixing," Aimee said. "She needs someone to tell her that being laughed at is not the same as being wrong."

Thomas was quiet for a long time. The rain softened to mist. The fog moved around them like a curtain.

"My mother used to say that," he said. "Before she died. She used to say, 'Tom, being laughed at is not the same as being wrong. The world laughs at dockworkers. That doesn't mean we're wrong.'" He exhaled. "I forgot what she said. For a while there, I was going to forget it forever."

Aimee looked at him properly for the first time. She saw the lines around his eyes that suggested he spent a lot of time squinting, not at the sun -- London does not have much of that -- but at something inside himself that he could not quite focus on.

"Your birthday," he said suddenly. "When is it?"

"April sixth."

He stared at her. "October sixth."

"Same number."

"Same number." He said it twice, like he was testing the weight of it.

They stood in the doorway of the old church for another minute. Then Thomas finished his cigarette, nodded once, and walked away into the fog. Aimee went home. She drew honeysuckle in her notebook. She went to work the next morning.

She brought him a jar of honey-lemon tea on Saturday.

She did not give it to him directly. She left it with the tavern landlord, a woman with a face like a clenched fist and a voice like gravel, and said, "For Thomas Gray. From a friend."

The landlord looked at the jar, then at Aimee, then at the jar again. "Friends don't leave things for other people through landlords," she said. "That's what enemies do."

Aimee said nothing. She turned and walked away.

Thomas found the jar on Monday. It was sitting on the small shelf in his room above the scrapyard where he slept, wrapped in a cloth Aimee had cut from an old apron. The jar was filled with golden liquid, and floating in it were thin slices of lemon that had turned translucent in the honey.

He opened it. He smelled it. It smelled like April, or at least like the idea of April -- warm, sharp, something growing through cracks in the cold.

He took a spoonful. It was too sweet and not sweet enough. It was the kind of thing you make when you have lemons and honey and nothing else to give.

He kept the jar on his shelf. He looked at it sometimes when he thought no one was watching.

Lydia found it three weeks later. She was looking for a clean shirt and opened the wrong drawer. She saw the jar, the golden liquid, the lemon slices floating like small suns in a tiny sea.

"What is this?" she said.

Thomas, who was sitting on the bed tying his boots, did not look up. "Nothing."

"Nothing?" She held the jar up to the light. "Honey-lemon tea. From a friend. Is this from the girl from Dorset Street?"

"I didn't ask her to leave it."

"That's worse. That means she gave it to you and you didn't even have to ask." She set the jar down carefully, like it was something fragile, like it might break if she dropped it. "How sweet."

Thomas said nothing. He finished tying his boots. He stood up. He put on his coat. He left the room.

Lydia watched him go. Then she picked up the jar and walked to the window. She opened it and poured the honey-lemon tea onto the cobblestones below. The golden liquid disappeared into the grey.

Aimee did not know about the jar. She made another one the following Saturday. She left it with the landlord. The landlord looked at it and said nothing. That was something.

On Thursday evening, Lydia left. She took a trunk, a portfolio, and a silver hairbrush that belonged to her grandmother. She did not take the honey-lemon recipe Aimee had left in a small envelope on Thomas's desk. She did not take the sketch of honeysuckle growing along the Thames embankment that Aimee had slipped into Thomas's coat pocket two days earlier.

Thomas came home to an empty room. He found the sketch. He found the recipe. He found the drawer where Lydia had left a note: "Gone to my sister's in Kensington. Do not follow. Do not write. Do not --" The note ended there. The ink was smudged, as if she had put the pen down before she could finish.

He sat on the bed. He held the honeysuckle sketch in his hands. He held it the way you hold something that is already gone.

He sent for Aimee through the baker's boy.

She arrived at eleven o'clock. Thomas was sitting on the floor of his room, back against the wall, surrounded by three empty gin bottles. The gas lamp was low. The fog pressed against the window.

"Sit down," he said.

Aimee sat on the other side of the room. She did not ask why he had sent for her. She did not ask why he was drinking. She sat, and she waited, and she existed in the space between them like the fog existed in the room -- quietly, persistently, filling every corner.

He spoke for two hours.

He told her about his mother and the way she used to sing to the honeysuckle that grew over her garden wall. He told her about the docks and the way the foremen looked at him when he asked for a raise -- not with anger, but with something worse: amusement. He told her about Lydia and the way she loved him the way you love a pet: with affection, with ownership, with the certainty that it cannot leave because it does not know how.

He told her about the time he was twelve and his mother lay in bed and could not breathe and he held her hand and he wished and wished and wished and she died anyway. "I was twelve," he said. "I didn't know that wishing doesn't work. I thought if I wished hard enough, she would stay. I was wrong."

Aimee listened. She did not offer comfort. She did not say "I'm sorry." She did not say "It will be alright." She simply sat across from him in the dim light, in the room that smelled of gin and fog and the honeysuckle sketch that lay between them like a small white flag.

When he finished, he said: "Thank you for coming."

"I was sent for," Aimee said.

"I know. But you came." He looked at her. "Most people don't."

The gas lamp flickered. The fog shifted. Aimee stood up.

"I'll be going," she said.

"Tomorrow," Thomas said. "Will you come tomorrow?"

She considered this. She thought about the factory. She thought about Clara, somewhere in the Midlands, her face changed and her heart heavier. She thought about the honeysuckle sketch and the jar of honey-lemon tea poured onto the cobblestones.

"Yes," she said. "I'll come tomorrow."

She went home. She drew honeysuckle in her notebook. She went to work the next morning.

Clara died on a Tuesday morning, three weeks later. Not dramatically. Not heroically. The infection spread from her face to her blood, and her heart simply stopped, somewhere between dawn and the baker's first loaf coming out of the oven. Her mother found her when she brought up breakfast and saw that the bed was cold.

Aimee was told at the factory. She finished her shift. She pinned brims and stitched crowns. She listened to the women talk about their mothers and their boyfriends and the price of butter. At five o'clock, she walked to the boarding house, picked up her notebook, and left it on Clara's empty desk with a single honeysuckle flower pressed between the pages.

Thomas died three weeks after that. A crate fell from a ship's crane at Wapping dock and struck him on the head. He died before he hit the ground. The foreman said it was an accident. The coroner agreed. The dock went on working.

Aimee did not attend the funeral. No one invited her. But every Sunday morning for the rest of her life, she walked to the edge of Whitechapel where a small wooden marker said Thomas Gray, 1869 to 1888, and she placed a sprig of honeysuckle at the base of the wood.

She never married. She continued working at the hat factory until her eyes failed her. On her desk, in a drawer beneath a pile of unpaid bills and factory timecards, she kept the honeysuckle sketch that Lydia had not found. The second one. On the bottom corner, in letters so small they could only be read by gaslight, she had written one word:

Stubborn.

OTMES-V2-F3A7B2-098-M0-150-9R7210-0A3E
E_total: 14.1
Dominant Mode: M1 (Tragedy) = 10.0
Angle: 150 degrees
Rank: 10 (highest)
Irreversibility: 1.0
M: [10.0, 0.0, 5.0, 9.5, 2.0, 3.0, 2.5, 0.0, 4.0, 1.5]
N: [0.20, 0.80]
K: [0.88, 0.12]