Work Text:
On the landing the clock struck the half-hour. Pain dulled at last by morphine, Agatha Dawson dozed. Her body was still, but her mind was free, half-way between dream and memory. It was late...
Clara was one to be up with the lark, out with the hounds at daybreak, and, though Agatha followed her, blinking and yawning, over hedge and gate, ford and field, she always preferred staying up late. Even as a child, out with the poachers, interested not so much in the night's spoils as in the sheer thrill of being out past bedtime, quite illicitly of course, but nobody said no to Miss Agatha. Mamma and Papa never found out, though no doubt Nanny and Miss Morton had their suspicions, particularly after Agatha fell asleep over her books one Tuesday morning. Still, nothing was said.
Later, at the balls, whirling through waltz after lancers after quadrille, emerging at last onto the terrace, feeling chill night air against her flushed cheeks, laughing as devoted gentlemen brought champagne. She had never married any of them, nor had she any desire to, for all that James proposed to Harriet one of those starry nights. Clara never cared for dancing. Agatha danced with every gentleman and sat out with none; she would have danced alone if she could.
And later still, once it was generally accepted that she was an old maid, and so was Clara, and they started keeping house together, she could stay out as late as she liked, rambling in the fields and the woods, watching, listening. She bought a telescope and became something of an amateur astronomer. Even Clara stayed up with her to see the comet in 1910. And in the winter, when it was too cold even for her, sitting up with a book and a glass of sherry by the fire. Agatha was always one for staying up late...
The pain, always present and only sometimes to be ignored, caught at her again. She opened her eyes and saw, where Mary had not quite closed the curtains, two stars against the deep blue. She squinted. Orion? It was difficult to tell, not knowing the time. She dropped the question. For a little while all seemed utterly hushed, her own breathing harsh and ragged, but, as she always knew it would, the silence blossomed: the hoot of an owl, the roar of a solitary motor car, the soft swishing of the wind in the beech tree outside her window. Hampshire could sound much like Warwickshire, after all, if only one were happy to stay up late enough; and she would stay up for as long as the power was granted her.