If We Were Villains: A Novel

I returned to the Castle an hour later, the cold gnawing at my limbs even as I climbed the stairs. I was still shivering (or maybe shaking, like Wren, a symptom unrelated to the temperature outside) when I appeared in the library doorway. James and Filippa were on the couch, noses buried in their scripts until they heard me come in. Stale shock must have lingered in my expression, because they both jumped to their feet.

Filippa: “Oliver!”

James: “What’s wrong?”

I tried to speak, but at first no sound came out, lost in the clamor of immediate memories crowding my brain.

James grabbed both my shoulders. “Oliver, look at me,” he said. “What is it?”

“It’s Wren,” I said. “She just—collapsed—in the middle of her speech.”

“What?” He spoke so loudly that I flinched away from him. “What do you mean, collapsed? Is she all right? Where—”

“James, let him talk!” Filippa pulled him back a step and said, more gently but still white-faced, “What happened?”

I told them, in a monologue fraught with awkward stops and pauses, how Wren had keeled over in the rehearsal hall, how after an abortive attempt to revive her, I’d gathered her up off the floor and run full tilt to the infirmary with Gwendolyn and Frederick close on my heels, struggling to keep up.

“She’s stable now, that’s what they said. She was just opening her eyes when the nurses shoved me out. They wouldn’t let me stay.” The last piece I said, apologetically, to James.

He opened his mouth, moved it wordlessly, like a man speaking underwater, then said, suddenly, “I have to go.”

“No, wait—” I reached for his arm but only brushed his sleeve. He was already out of reach, moving toward the door. He gave me one pained look, trying to communicate something I didn’t have time to grasp, before he turned and dashed down the stairs. When he was gone the adrenaline drained out of my body all at once and my knees buckled. Filippa guided me into a chair, but not the nearest one—not Richard’s.

“Just sit here awhile and be quiet,” she said. “You’ve done enough.”

I grabbed her wrist, squeezed it much too hard, in a strange fit of despair. Wren had lost her grip and slipped so quickly I couldn’t catch her, and now James had vanished, too, out the door and into the night, like water trickling through my fingers. I was reluctant to be left alone, more reluctant still to let another friend out of my sight, as though one or the other of us might simply disappear. Filippa sank to the floor beside my chair and rested her head on my knee, saying nothing, simply waiting until I didn’t need her there anymore.

After ten minutes or so I let her go, but it wasn’t until Alexander and Meredith arrived that I felt like standing up again. I told the story to them, more coherently, and we spent an hour clustered close around the fire, not speaking much, waiting for news.

Me: “Do you think they’ll go ahead with the masque?”

Filippa: “They can’t cancel it now. People would panic.”

Alexander: “Someone else will have to learn her part. No one will even know it was supposed to be her.”

Meredith: “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m sick of all this mystery.”

We retreated into silence, watched the fire, and waited.

It was midnight before James came back. Alexander had slumped sideways on the couch and fallen asleep—his face ashen, his breathing shallow—but the girls and I were awake, bleary-eyed and restless. When we heard the front door open we all sat up straighter, listening for footsteps on the stairs.

“James?” I called.

He didn’t reply, but a moment later he appeared in the doorway, snow clinging to his hair. Two vivid red spots glowed on his cheeks, as if he’d had his face rouged by a little girl who had no idea what was too much.

“How is she?” I asked, pushing myself off the couch to help him out of his coat.

“They wouldn’t let me see her.” His teeth chattered, making his words quiver and stall.

“What?” Meredith said. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. Other people were in and out and back and forth like it was Grand Central Station, but they made me sit in the hall.”

“Who was there?” Filippa asked.

“Holinshed, and all the nurses. They brought a doctor in from Broadwater. The cops were there, too—that guy Colborne and another one, Walton.”

Alexander had woken at James’s entrance, and I looked straight at him. His mouth made a grim, hard line. “What were they doing there?” he asked, eyes on me.

James fell heavily into a chair. “I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell me. Just asked if I knew what she’d been up to lately.”

“Well, it’s exhaustion, isn’t it?” Meredith said. “Fatigue. She’s had this terrible … experience, and she comes back here to have everyone skirting around her, and on top of that five hundred lines to learn. It’s a miracle the rest of us are on our feet.”

I was only half listening. Walton’s words bounced around my brain like a stray pinball. My money’s on the cousin. I sat quietly at the table, folded James’s coat, and clutched it in my lap, hoping nobody would pay any attention to me. Keeping Colborne’s ongoing investigation secret from the rest of them no longer felt fair, and I doubted I’d be able to maintain my silence if anyone asked me even an unrelated question. Alexander watched me like a hawk, and when I risked lifting my eyes to meet his, he shook his head, just barely.

“What do we do?” Filippa asked, looking from James to Meredith.

“Nothing,” Alexander said, before either of them could speak, and I wanted to ask, Is that your answer to everything? I wondered how many ways he could use that word, and if my soul would squirm and shrink away every time he said it. “We carry on as usual, or they’re going to want to ask all kinds of questions we don’t want to answer.”

“Who?” Meredith said. “The police?”

“No,” he said, swiftly. “The school. They’ll pull all of us in for fucking counseling if we get any more jumped up than we are.”

“We have every reason to be jumped up,” she said. “One of our classmates is dead, and another one’s just had some kind of nervous breakdown.”

“And how do you think that looks?” he asked. “I get that we can’t pretend not to be affected by it, but if we all start acting like we killed somebody, they’re going to start to wonder whether we did.”

“We did not kill him,” Meredith said, instantly, angrily. I recognized the reflex, guilt kicking out against an allegation too close to the truth.

“No, of course not,” Alexander said, and made every word sting. “We just let him die.”

At the time, it had seemed such an important distinction. But in the weeks that followed, as we recovered from the temporary madness of that morning, it grew more and more tenuous. Alexander’s words snapped the last thread of pretense. We knew by then as well as Richard did that there was no difference at all.

Alexander stood, including everyone in a sweeping glare as he patted his pockets. “I need a smoke. Come find me if there’s news.” He left the room abruptly, a cigarette already sticking out of his mouth. James watched him go, then slumped and let his head sink into his hands. Filippa perched on the arm of his chair, one hand alighting on the back of his neck, bending low to say something I couldn’t hear. As soon as Alexander was out of sight, Meredith shot me a look of mingled indignation and confusion.

“The fuck is wrong with him?” she said.

“I have no idea.”