Eternal Deception

by Jane Steen

  Tess had given me even more to think about. Perhaps a little solitude would help me regain some mastery over my unruly thoughts.

  I had walked perhaps a quarter of a mile with the wind full in my face, and my thoughts had settled down into two overriding notions. First, that fashionable hats were too small to shade one’s face from the bright sunlight, and I should have brought that old bonnet. Second, the parcel was dreadfully heavy, and my arms were aching already. And in and out of these two nagging realities wove Tess’s tale of Lucetta, Dr. Calderwood, and Judah. Their faces played tag in my mind, dodging in and out of view as I stomped along as fast as I could.

  “Nell!”

  The shout was so close behind me that I nearly dropped the parcel. I whirled round and took a step backward, tripping over a clump of grass and saving myself from falling only by performing a sort of Saint Vitus’ dance on one foot.

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to wander around alone.” Martin had evidently been running but was not particularly out of breath. One hand was clutching his hat, his hair blown wild by the wind.

  My heart gave its now-familiar lurch at his appearance. Yet in truth I was becoming so used to its antics that I was able to face Martin with as much equanimity as is possible when you think you’re quite alone and then discover you’re not. Was this what being in love was like? I wondered, and then shut that thought firmly in a box and sat on it.

  “I have Mrs. Addis’s dress to deliver, and Tess wasn’t inclined to accompany me,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster. “And what are you about, sneaking up on me like that?”

  “I was not sneaking up on you,” Martin said with emphasis. “I must have shouted your name twenty times—I thought you were ignoring me on purpose.”

  “I didn’t hear a thing,” I admitted. “I was thinking—and the wind—“

  “And the person who, I understand, shot one of the seminary’s faculty on the prairie could have been upon you and plugged you with a bullet in a second.”

  Martin dragged his free hand through his hair and stuck his hat back onto it, whereupon the wind promptly tugged it off and sent it bowling into a clump of sunflowers, their stiff stalks still green against the waving grasses. He retrieved it and ran back to me, glaring in a way that cheered me immensely because it felt so normal, as if the world were slowly righting itself around the correct axis.

  “Who told you about Professor Wale?” I asked as Martin took the parcel from me and tucked it under one long arm, where it fitted much better than in mine.

  “The servants.” Martin frowned. “It perturbs me that I’ve neither heard of it from you nor from anyone else. Would you mind telling me your version of the story?”

  The next mile passed quickly as I obliged Martin with the detailed story of how I’d spotted Professor Wale’s body on the prairie. He was particularly interested in the dramatic scene in the library when Reiner had been accused. He asked so many questions that I ended up relating what had happened almost verbatim.

  “His father is Gerhardt Lehmann, then? I believe Fassbinder is a friend of his,” he said.

  “Yes. I do hope he’s doing well—do you know, Martin, I rather miss him. He gave up on the idea of marrying me, but I thought of him—and Professor Wale—as friends of mine. Reiner would have offered me his protection to cross the prairie today, I’m sure.”

  “You’ll have to make do with me.”

  Martin offered me his arm and I took it, feeling somewhat self-conscious but glad of his solid warmth under my hand.

  “I’d rather walk with you than with Reiner anyway,” I sighed. “Only—“

  I felt myself redden and looked away across the prairie, suddenly awkward again in Martin’s company and all too aware of the buzzing warmth inside me.

  “Don’t worry—I’m not going to make a nuisance of myself,” Martin said. “We need to remain friends, above all things—putting all other feelings aside. I’m not going to drag you into any wrongdoing, but I can’t go around behaving as if you don’t exist. Whatever happens, Nellie, you’ve been part of my life—the best part of my life—for twenty years. I can’t bear to think I might destroy that through wanting more than I can have.”

  I nodded, wanting to say something but finding it difficult to shape the words. So I walked on in silence, my steps easily matching Martin’s long stride. The wind shifted and quieted a little, and I opened my parasol to shade my face, angling it so it blocked much of my view of the prairie. With Martin beside me, I felt as if we were in a small world of our own, a moment of calm between storms, a fragile soap bubble of contentment and longing that would burst if one of us made the slightest move in the wrong direction.

  “I’ll take you to Mrs. Addis’s door,” Martin said as we crossed the bridge over the creek. “Then there’s a fellow called Fairland I’m told I should look up—do you know him?”

  “Vaguely,” I replied. “He’s the Wells Fargo agent. He’ll probably be in his office near the mercantile. You can’t miss it.”

  “Promise me you’ll look for me there when you’re done. Don’t think of walking back alone.” His arm pressed my hand tight into his side for a second.

  I pointed my parasol in the direction of Mrs. Addis’s street. “That way. As long as you don’t make me late for dinner—what are you talking to Mr. Fairland about anyway? Business?”

  “Horses. It seems he’s quite the horse fancier. I’m hoping for a letter of introduction to a certain breeder in Kentucky.”

  The wind had died down now that we were in the shelter of the houses. Martin handed the package back to me so he could rake back his hair with his fingers and put his hat back on. He smiled down at me as he regained possession of the parcel.

  “You have a curl coming loose.” He indicated a spot on the back of my head. “I’d fix it for you, but—“ His glance at the surrounding houses was eloquent.

  I located the errant curl and pushed it back into the mass of hair. “I’ll be making some purchases at the mercantile in twenty minutes’ time,” I said. “Don’t let Mr. Fairland talk your ear off.”

  Exactly twenty-five minutes later, I exited the mercantile with a brown paper parcel—containing three cakes of Rose Soap, two pairs of seven-eighths-yard laces, and a dozen hooks and eyes—dangling from its loop of string around my wrist.

  I spotted Martin immediately. His height and his pale hair made him easy to pick out from a distance, even if he had not suddenly become the lodestone of my existence. He was deep in conversation with Mr. Fairland, whose whiskers and girth had both expanded since I had last seen him. They were standing outside the Wells Fargo office, poring over what looked like a closely printed and illustrated catalogue. Next to Martin stood Judah Poulton, shorter than Martin by half a head. His sleek, lithe build somehow contrived to make Martin look even more like a Viking warrior by comparison.

  Martin saw me first, his head lifting as though by instinct, but Judah was quick to follow his gaze, and it was he who greeted me.

  “Nell!” He came toward me and drew my arm through his, relieving me of my small parcel and adjusting my parasol to shade me from the morning sun. “Are you on your way back to the seminary? I must also return—I have a class to teach.” He turned to the other gentlemen, laughing. “A poor man must sing for his supper, unfortunately. Speaking of singing, Rutherford,” he said to Martin, “your lady wife has the most spectacular voice—our good doctor is quite enchanted with her. Are you coming to the grand dinner, Fairland? You’ll have a treat.”

  Not waiting for a reply, Judah drew his watch from his vest pocket and flipped open the case, still keeping my arm tucked firmly under his. “We must leave, Nell—oh! If I may.” He ducked his head under my parasol and, leaning in close to me, touched my hair. “You have a loose curl.” He poked at my woven tresses, an intimate, possessive gesture, his eyes intensely blue in the diffused light cast over his face by my shade.

  “There. Shall we go?”

  I looked over
at Martin, whose face had assumed the unreadable expression I had thought was disdain but now realized to be a mask for some powerful emotion. “Are you not coming with us, Mr. Rutherford?”

  The corners of Martin’s mouth turned upward in what might have been a smile. “Mr. Fairland has suggested we eat a morsel together at his house. I’m confident I may relinquish you to Mr. Poulton’s care.”

  Judah stepped an inch closer to me, hitched my hand a little more securely into the crook of his elbow, and regarded me with a confident smirk. “Oh yes. She’s quite safe with me.”

  36

  Possession

  “I want this one.” Sarah smoothed her hand over the pages of her children’s magazine. She flattened it out so that the gruesome illustration of a little girl with her hair and clothing in flames was more clearly visible.

  “But it’s a horrible story,” I protested. “And you’ll be going to bed soon. You’ll have nightmares.”

  “No, I won’t.” Sarah scooted her small, bony posterior along my lap and settled her skirts neatly. “Tess says I won’t get burnded up because I’m a good girl, and good girls don’t get burnded.”

  “Burned,” I corrected, my eyes on the nasty drawing. I loved the times when Sarah and I were alone and could sit in the glow of a single lamp and talk or read together, but I preferred to choose the subject matter of our reading. Sarah had a taste for the most severe of moral tales, and even though I had been raised on them myself, I still found them chilling. The one about the little boy who had his nose bitten off by an escaped tiger because he refused to use his handkerchief had ensured I couldn’t sleep without checking behind all the curtains and under the bed for wild animals. I still hated Little Goody Two-Shoes for her role as a comparison with my own wretched self.

  I sighed and drew a deep breath. “How Margaret Died, or Some Instructions For The Child Regarding Fire,” I read. “Fire is a pretty thing, is it not, little one? Its flickering flame gives us light, its warmth renders the winter’s chill bearable . . .” The image of my own child bursting into flame crept into my mind and made itself comfortable there, leering at me as I wound my way through the tedious description of fire’s benefits.

  I had just reached “Now take heed, O tender Reader!” when a loud knock heralded the arrival of Mrs. Drummond.

  Now there was a sight to scare a child, I mused. The housekeeper, once a handsome woman, had in the last year become gaunt to the point of emaciation. The skin of her face stretched tight over the broad cheekbones and rounded chin. Her once-glossy hair had lost its sheen and acquired silver streaks and white patches over the temples. Her hands were nervous, plucking at her skirts obsessively as she spoke. And her eyes—those gray-green irises that had assessed me so coolly upon my arrival at the Eternal Life Seminary—now positively burned in their sockets. It gave me the grues just to look at her.

  “Ah, you are not alone, Mrs. Lillington,” was her opening salvo. She moved nearer to us so she could see what we were reading and nodded her head approvingly. “You do well to instruct your daughter in the ways of righteousness. Child, remember it is better to burn in the fires of this world than to spend eternity in the flames of hell,” she remarked conversationally to Sarah, who slipped her little hand around my neck and held tight.

  I mentally cursed the woman but kept a polite smile on my face as I stood, hoisting Sarah into my arms. “I think Mrs. Drummond wants to have a talk with me,” I told her. “Why don’t we go to the stairs, and then I’ll listen while you run all the way up to our room? Tess is there; you can call down to let me know when she opens the door.”

  “All right,” said Sarah stoutly. “I’m not afraid of the stairs.” In fact, the stairs made her nervous at night, with their dim shadows rendered somehow darker by the lamp in the hallway and their echoing emptiness. We had been making a game of letting her run up ahead of me, as it was in Sarah’s nature to try to conquer her fears.

  It was a full five minutes before Tess’s voice reassured me that she was not yet asleep. Sarah had taken her magazine with her. I hoped Tess would refuse to read “How Margaret Died” to her, as Tess would certainly have nightmares if she went to bed thinking of that story.

  Mrs. Drummond still stood where I had left her, staring at the flame of the lamp as if sleepwalking. I turned up the flame so the lamp burned brighter and resumed my seat, gesturing for her to sit down.

  “If you’ll forgive my saying so, you don’t look very well, Mrs. Drummond,” I said. “Have you been ill?”

  “A touch of ague, nothing more.” The woman nodded, brushing at an imaginary speck on her black skirt.

  “Nothing more? You’re wasting away.” I decided to confront the matter square on.

  Mrs. Drummond linked her bony hands in her lap and gazed at me, the whites of her eyes showing. “It is this place, Mrs. Lillington, that is eating away at me.” She glanced over her shoulder, but my door was shut, and I had heard no footsteps in the corridor. “This place, and the people in it. I once thought this building a Garden of Eden, a city upon a hill, a light shining in the darkness. But the Serpent dwells here now, and he is spawning others like him.”

  A chill rippled over my skin, although I was uncertain why. She was surely insane; but she sounded rational enough as long as I didn’t look too hard at her eyes.

  “Why did you wish to talk with me, Mrs. Drummond?” I asked, my voice sounding high and faint in my ears.

  A strange, wary look came into her eyes, as if she didn’t quite trust me. “I wish to know if you will marry Mr. Poulton,” she said. “Tess thinks you might.”

  A ghastly grin stretched her mouth, and I moved back slightly in my chair. “She would prefer you to marry Mr. Rutherford, but he has a wife already. She asked me if it would be possible for him to take a second wife in the manner of the patriarchs of the Old Testament.” She giggled, a horribly girlish ripple of high-pitched mirth that froze the blood in my veins.

  “I—I doubt I will marry anyone at present,” I said. “And with respect, Mrs. Drummond, I don’t see the purport of your question. Do you really expect me to lay open the state of my heart to you? And precisely why do you wish to know?”

  “You have behaved with more discretion and sense than I expected of you,” Mrs. Drummond continued, not heeding my question. “When you came here—well, I will admit I anticipated trouble. And I concede I was wrong about you. I believe now that you have never sought attention from any of the gentlemen. You cannot help it, I suppose, if Mr. Poulton’s eye should fix itself on you.”

  “No, I can’t,” I said bluntly. “But please don’t think for a moment that I would follow any dishonorable course of action. Mr. Poulton’s—virtue is quite safe with me.”

  How absurd this conversation was, I thought. I wished the woman would get to the point and leave me be.

  “Oh, I am not at all concerned for Mr. Poulton,” was her surprising rejoinder. Her eyes opened wide, and she stared at me. “It is your well-being that preoccupies me.”

  “Mine?”

  “If I tell you something in the strictest confidence, will you swear before God you will not breathe a word of it to anyone, most of all Judah Poulton?”

  “Yes, of course. I swear.”

  “Before God?”

  “Before God.”

  “I am to leave this place on the twelfth of December.” Mrs. Drummond drew herself up, and for a moment she sounded like her old self, confident and in command. “I am engaged as an under-housekeeper in a large establishment in Boston.”

  “An under-housekeeper? But you’ve been in sole charge of this place for years. Isn’t that a step down?”

  “It is no matter.” Mrs. Drummond smiled grimly. “I do not feel—secure in this place anymore. It is fear that has changed me, Mrs. Lillington. Fear has made me reluctant to leave my rooms and made my food repellent to me. If I seem a little—unbalanced, that is to be expected. I have lived with the anticipation of sudden harm these last six months, and I live with
it still.”

  “From Judah?” I breathed the words out in an incredulous whisper. “But that’s ridiculous—and won’t he already know that you’re leaving? He’s in the Calderwoods’ confidence.”

  “Nobody knows I am leaving.” Mrs. Drummond hissed the words at me, leaning forward in her chair. “Except you.”

  A soft knock on the door made me almost jump out of my skin. “Who’s there?”

  “It is Dorcas.” Mrs. Drummond smiled. “She is to accompany me to my bedroom.” And indeed the door opened a crack, and Dorcas’s dark face appeared. She nodded once and then closed the door again gently.

  “But you can’t just leave,” I protested. “Not without making some arrangement for a replacement, surely.”

  “I have trained the servants well.” There was a note of pride in Mrs. Drummond’s voice. “They know what is expected of them, and Mrs. Calderwood is also thoroughly acquainted with everything I do. I will ensure that the provisions store is full before I go. You know your job to the utmost degree; and Tess understands my bookkeeping methods better than anyone.” Her face softened. “I’ll miss Tess. You won’t desert her, will you, even if he wants it?”

  I shook my head vehemently. “No man will ever come between us. Nor between me and my daughter.”

  Mrs. Drummond rose to her feet. I did likewise, and she placed a bony hand on my arm. “That is what I wanted to hear.” Her emaciated face seemed to glow with a strange fervor. In her eyes, I saw the flame of the lamp reflected as twin sparks of light.

  “Now, listen carefully to me. The twelfth of December is a Sunday. I will depart while everyone is at chapel. And just before I do, I will hide—something—in a place you know about. Do you understand? I know you know about it because I saw you search for it after Professor Wale’s death. You must go there straight after chapel while everyone is still talking. Do not delay—and do not forget.”