Dynasty of Death

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Don’t be tiresome, Elsa. Give me back my book.” Gertrude’s dark colorless cheek was suddenly red with embarrassment and annoyance. “If you don’t like Wordsworth, the others do. They’re not all barbarians.”

  “I don’t like it. Sounds so milky, to me,” said sixteen-year-old Lucy, grinning. She was a smallish, plump young girl, with a pretty rosy complexion, rather tiny sparkling eyes, the color and shine of black-raspberry jelly, a big red mouth showing small white teeth set far apart in pink gums, and a mop of dark chestnuts curls tied with a red ribbon that matched her gay red dress.

  “I think it’s pretty,” protested little ten-year-old Renee Bouchard, who loved her cousin, Gertrude. Even in childhood, Renee’s face was not young; it was very narrow, sharp and bony, sallow and uninnocent. She had a prominent nose, with a long ridge in it, fleshless and acquisitive, and a wide, pale mouth pressed tightly together. Her eyes, long and narrow, never opened either in great joy or laughter; the pupils had an unpleasant habit of sliding quickly from side to side. Beautiful blond Dorcas, her mother, never was consoled for Renee’s lack of comeliness, nor could be reconciled to the Indian-straight, lank black hair that always escaped its ribbons, and the lean, stringy young body that was never to be graceful. Dorcas contented herself, therefore, with her handsome Etienne, her distinguished Honore, and her beauties, her darlings, the twins, Andre and Antoinette, so rosy and blond, so exuberant and affectionate.

  At eighteen, Elsa was a coquette, but a sly and anxious one. She was not courted for herself, nor her handsomeness, though she was a comely girl, big and vigorous and full of vitality, her dark blue eyes bold and vivid and blazing, her mouth red and full, her short, dilated nose straight and well-shaped, her hair dark and full of deep, shining waves. Her figure, though verging, as her Aunt May said, “on the goddess side,” was yet youthful and symmetrical, and her manner was forthright and breezy. Yet, she was not popular among the men she liked, though she had a large number of suitors, attracted by the glow of the Barbour wealth. It is true that her widowed Mama was not as wealthy as Aunt May’s husband, and Uncle Eugene, and Aunt Florabelle, but she was very comfortable, and it was rumored that Elsa and Lucy would have large dowries. Elsa, however, though not intellectual, was shrewd and sharp, and was not to be had, just yet at any rate, for her money alone. She wanted romance, secretly desired it, in spite of her bluff and common-sense personality.

  Elsa had no subtlety, and made no secret of the fact that she ardently desired her cousin Godfrey’s favor, and she did not shrink from urging upon her cousin Gertrude her brother Paul’s preference for her. It was her hope, more or less evident, that some day she would be Godfrey’s wife, and Paul would be Gertrude’s husband. In that way, she thought, more or less aloud to her mother, and her sister, Lucy, everyone would be happy and the Barbour money would be kept in the family. It was an itch to her that her sister, Lucy, was already engaged to a New York gentleman of some twenty-four years, handsome, gallant, wealthy, and with a most fetching little black mustache. (He was eight years older than Lucy, not at all to Amy’s taste, but of a prominent family.)

  The four young girls (including Renee, whom Lucy pettishly referred to as “that nosy child, always underfoot wherever grown-ups are”), were sitting in a white, ivy-covered summer house situated on a lower slope of the Sessions grounds. Elsa was clumsily working on lace to be used as pillow-borders, Lucy was embroidering napkins for her trousseau, Gertrude was reading aloud, and Renee, at her feet, was trying to weave a basket of raffia.

  A translucent green light filled the summerhouse, like airy water, spangled with the yellow, diamond-shaped light of the sun falling through the lattices. It lay on the girls’ young faces and bright silk dresses and flashing needles. Gertrude sat upright, a little primly, her back supported by an octagon wall. She was not a pretty girl, many said; she was slim and tall, not graceful, but inclined to a touching and youthful angularity, for her shoulders were thin and wide, her hips unfashionably narrow, her movements swift and a little jerky, and, oddly, though she was really very repressed, very self-controlled and poised, she yet often gave an impression of wildness and dim, passionate bewilderment. Her hair was straight and without shine, and framed her small, colorless face like a cloud of dusky smoke. But the bones of her face were delicate and fine, and the contour of her cheek-bones, especially, seemed to shine through the clear dark skin like ivory. May said that her daughter had her grandmother Beveridge’s eyes, wide, a little distended, restless, with a bright, startled expression in them. But they were singularly beautiful to discerning people, their hazel tint appearing to be an intense black when she was moved or intensely excited. Her mouth, too, though almost without color, had a lovely shape, and when she smiled it was as if that small face burst into a living radiance, quick and intelligent.

  She was not very fond of her girl-cousins, and privately thought them singularly stupid, but May had brought her up well and she concealed her impatience with them perfectly. Renee touched her; she thought the ugly child pathetic, and she was gratefully aware of the fact that Renee, at ten, surpassed Lucy and Elsa in wit and subtlety. Sometimes, when she talked to Renee, her rather cold voice warming, she felt that the child understood to the very uttermost nuance. Sometimes the seventeen-year-old girl and the child exchanged involuntary glances of faintly contemptuous amusement when Elsa and Lucy were present. The robust exigency, the blatant inquisitiveness, the greediness, the lack of reticence, of the two sisters, were an ache along their nerves. Sometimes Gertrude felt that their strong, undelicate hands seized on her roughly, and proceeded to handle her, turn her, examine her with a crude and childlike curiosity. “I feel like Gulliver in the grasp of the baby Brobdingnagian,” she once told her mother. She was not unconscious of the fact that Elsa and Lucy privately thought her a rather “poor stick,” and not very bright. They thought her breeding a sign of lack of character, her reticence cowardice. When she failed to respond to a vulgar frankness, they considered her exceedingly dull, or prim, or patronizing. Elsa, who adored her twin brother, Paul, could not understand his slavish infatuation for Gertrude, but as he seemed set upon her she had decided that he would have her, though she struggled to the end. Too, the greedy Elsa could not endure the thought that Paul, whose share of their mother’s fortune would necessarily be modest, might be “cheated” out of the vast inheritance that Gertrude would some day possess. She, herself, had a passion for Godfrey, and lovingly decided that when she was married to him she would cure him of his “music-nonsense,” thus assuring her own happiness and gratifying her adored Uncle Ernest. For the sake of all these agreeable advantages, she cultivated Gertrude, whom she rather despised, and was almost constantly at the Sessions house.

  Because Wordsworth had been unsympathetically received by Elsa and Lucy, Gertrude closed the book gently and laid it beside her on the cushioned seat that ran along the inside of the octagon-shaped summer-house. She folded her small dark hands in her lap and smiled down at Renee.

  “Child! What a mess you have that basket in! Here, let me take it. I’m not much better than you, but I think I can find the end you are fishing for.”

  “I don’t know why she bothers,” said Lucy, flouncing pettishly, and favoring her young cousin with an unpleasant downward glance from her small, shining eyes. “I’m sure no one would want that ugly thing, anyway.”

  “My Mama wants it,” said Renee, regarding Lucy with a swift balefulness. “She has no sewing basket, and she told me she would like a raffia one.”

  “Your Mama,” instructed Elsa, with a grown-up and final air, “was just trying to be kind to you. What hideous colors you have in it! Purple and green! I think it uncommonly awful.”

  Gertrude set her lips for a moment, then said coldly and quietly: “And I think it uncommonly pretty. It’s commodious, not like the silly little gilt things that ladies use for sewing baskets. You’ve got sturdy little brothers, Renee, always wearing out their stockings, and I’m sure your Mama will find t
his big enough for all her yarns. If you have time, I’d love one for my birthday, darling.”

  Renee favored her with a sad, somewhat whimsical smile, but said nothing. Gertrude put her hand impulsively on the untidy black head, as if in protection.

  “There,” she said. “Here is the end. Don’t you think a little yellow would be nice here, between the purple and green? There, that’s just the color.” She compared the raffia critically.

  “O heavens!” Lucy sat forward, looked at the contrast, and burst into loud laughter. “How appalling! Gertrude, I thought you had a little taste! Elsa, do look at the mustard-yellow that brat is going to put next to the purple!”

  “Vile,” was Elsa’s uncompromising verdict.

  Renee looked at them with intense contempt and dislike. “I think both of you are vile,” she said. “My Mama says you girls have no breeding, and I believe it.”

  “Oh, Renee!” exclaimed Gertrude in a shocked voice. But she smiled a little, irrepressibly. Lucy’s and Elsa’s hilarious expressions faded, were replaced by disagreeable smirks.

  “Your Mama,” Lucy blurted, “is not a lady. My Mama is. My grandma was a Sessions, and my grandfather was a gentleman. But your Papa is a French peasant, who had to run away from France because they were going to arrest him for goodness knows what. And your Mama—”

  “Is my father’s sister!” said Gertrude sharply. Her voice shook with anger. “And your father’s sister! I am ashamed of you both, Elsa and Lucy. If you can’t be nicer to poor little Renee, and be ladies, I’m sure that I would prefer that you don’t visit me so often—”

  “Indeed, ma’am!” cried Lucy, bouncing so violently to her feet that her sewing fell to the ground, where Renee surreptitiously rubbed her black boot against it. “Well, I’m sure, my lady Gertrude, that it’s not my wish to come here! I come because Elsa asks me to, and because she’s sweet on Godfrey, and she wants you to marry Paul! Though, I don’t see why any one would want Frey, or you, either, ma’am, with all your airs and high-and-mighty ways, and—” Her small black eyes sparkled with rage, and her breath expelled itself gustily from her furiously red mouth.

  Elsa calmly, and without hurry, kicked her sister in the shins, and the young girl’s enraged howling filled the hot summer quiet with clamor, and her painful dancing shook the frail wooden floor. She kicked back, after a moment, with a savage turmoil of skirts, but Elsa swung her legs dexterously onto the seat, and shrieked gleefully into her sister’s face. Gertrude had burst into a sweet hysteria of laughter, and Renee, laughing helplessly, rolled out of the way of Lucy’s boots, which were ardently seeking Elsa. Lucy, to facilitate her efforts, had lifted her skirts and multitudinous white ruffled petticoats very high, and showed lengths of plump, white, agitated stocking.

  “I’ll kill you!” she shouted. She panted, breathing fire, then dropped her skirts. Her hands, curved like claws, sprang at her sister, pulling her hair down upon her shoulders, ripping open the blue stripes that covered her plump bosom. Elsa, exhausted, weak with laughter, rolled about on the seat, fending herself as best she could. But when one of Lucy’s nails found her cheek, and dragged a thin red wake behind it, Elsa’s laughter abruptly ceased, and her big florid face became ugly and contorted with sudden rage. She was much larger than Lucy, and with one swing of her strong hand she swept the younger girl to the floor in a riotous confusion of skirts and waving legs and disordered hair. Gertrude had pulled her own legs up beside her, and Renee was standing on the seat, jumping up and down and shouting with excitement, and egging the sisters on.

  “Girls!” said a shocked, half-laughing voice from outside, and a shadow fell into the green light of the summer-house. “Girls!”

  The mêlée suddenly quieted. Lucy, on the floor, burst into savage sobs, and Elsa sullenly mopped her bleeding cheek. “Nasty little cat!” she said, as May entered the enclosure. “I’m sorry, Aunt May. Some one ought to break Lucy’s neck.”

  “What a noise!” exclaimed May, amusedly, but trying to assume a severe expression. “You aren’t children, to be fighting like this, Elsa and Lucy. You, Lucy, a young engaged lady—”

  “I know, Aunt May,” said Lucy, scrambling to her feet, and beginning to mop her wet eyes. Then her face crimsoned with fury again, and she stamped her foot. “But what can you do with a jealous old maid, who can’t get a beau herself, and who kicks you out of sheer mean feeling? She’s just jealous of me, because I’m going to be married soon, and she’s an eighteen-year-old hag, already on the shelf.”

  “Pooh! I wouldn’t have your girl-faced Oswald if he were the last man on earth,” replied Elsa, touching her cheek tenderly. “He’s been cultivating mustaches for years, and they aren’t any bigger than a wisp, after all.”

  Lucy began to dance frenziedly. “His name isn’t Oswald!” she screamed. “It’s Percival! And he’s a man, which is more than you can get, for all your big eyes and your flirting!” She clenched her plump white fist suddenly under Elsa’s nose, and the older girl involuntarily backed away. “Don’t you call him Oswald again; or I’ll—I’ll—”

  May watched and listened with a faint smile in which there was a subtle cast of cruelty. Amy’s daughters! She glanced at Gertrude, who had formally risen at her mother’s entrance, and now stood in silence, her head a little bent, her expression absent and cool. She is a young birch, thought May. Gertrude’s dress, pearl gray striped in darker gray silk, clothed her like a sleek second skin from throat to hip, and from there was draped elaborately over a bustle in the back, thereafter to fall behind in a crisp, fashionable cascade. The dress showed every young, delicate line and curve of breast and slender waist and smooth, narrow hip. Above the close plain neckline rose the smoky coils of her hair, the fine small oval of her face. No, she is not a pretty girl, thought her mother for the thousandth time, but she is very fascinating, and that is a great deal better. She is also a lady, makes Elsa and Lucy look like farm girls.

  May sat down, still smiling, and fanned herself with a thin cambric handkerchief, which, as she waved it, dispensed an invisible mist of rose-odor. Her plump, still-smooth face was scarlet, the gray-red of her hair bursting into little spirals about her hot moist cheeks.

  “Gracious, isn’t it a warm day! Too warm, I’m sure, for fighting, girls. Lucy, do sit down, and Elsa, put down your legs. You’re naked to the knees. Renee, darling, do stop jumping up and down in this heat; you’ll have a fit. Here, let me tie your ribbon: it’s hanging half-way down your frock.” She restored order with her good-humored, pleasant voice, with its affectionate and amused undertone. Lucy pointedly sat at the greatest distance possible from her sister, who glowered at her constantly. Renee docilely permitted her aunt to pat and fold and tie her into coherence and neatness, her narrow eyes sliding sideways upon her in sly adoration. Gertrude sat down again, clasped her hands in her lap. With May’s coming, she had become silent, and a little stiff, as though ill at ease.

  Tying Renee’s hair-ribbon, May glanced at her daughter with maternal censoriousness. The glance was affectionate enough, but, as usual, had in it a slight irritation and antagonism.

  “I’m sure, Trudie, that if you had been aware of your duty as hostess, the girls would never have gotten into such a quarrel,” she said, trying to make her voice light and succeeding only in making it a little malicious.

  Gertrude colored a little, pressed her mouth together, but said nothing. Mama knows she is unfair, she thought with bitter and cynical passion, and that just makes her more unfair. She stared broodingly at a diamond of sunlight on the floor.

  “’Tain’t—’tisn’t—Gertrude’s fault,” said Renee stoutly, twisting her hair out of her aunt’s hand as she swung her head around to see May. “She was just reading the prettiest poetry, and Elsa said ‘pooh!’ and teased Gertrude, and then she and Lucy made fun of my raffia, and Gertrude said—”

  “Renee! How do you expect me to tie your ribbon if you jerk so? Besides, you talk too much for a very little girl, and I’m sure you didn
’t try to help any, jumping up and down and clapping your hands and shouting like an Indian.”

  A look of pleasure passed over Renee’s dark and narrow little face. “Andre and Antoinette like me and Honore to play Indian for them, and we pretend to scalp them, and Antoinette yells like everything, the silly thing—!”

  May gave her a good-natured little push. “There, do sit down like a civilized child! I’ve got something to say to the girls, and if you’re very good you may listen quietly, and then we’ll go to the house and have punch and iced cakes and cream.” She beamed at the older girls, and then withdrew a letter from a fold of her mauve silk dress. Above the delicate, rather trying color, her plump hot face looked too florid and middle-aged. But her neck was still round and white, and her bosom full and shapely. Her round eyes still had their girlhood twinkle and mischief, her small mouth its dimples and ready laughter. If, in the presence of others her face was frequently drawn and sad, as though she momentarily forgot a determined rôle, she made up for it immediately in brighter gaiety and humor. Only Ernest, and his daughter, Gertrude, felt the hard strain behind all this, and were ill at ease in consequence, Ernest with good reason and understanding.

  “I’ve just received another letter from Frey,” she announced vivaciously, glancing about the little circle, and becoming pleased at the happy sensation she produced. Gertrude lifted her head sharply in that strange, gently wild gesture of hers, Elsa glowed and sparkled for all her bigness, and Lucy smiled politely. Frey was no favorite of Lucy’s. Renee bounced on her seat and clapped her hands delightedly, not that Godfrey had ever particularly noticed her, not that she had cared much for him, but because of the joy she knew that Gertrude was feeling. May unfolded the letter impressively, removed a little sealed slip of paper. “Here, Trudie, is dear Frey’s usual note for you, though I still do not see why he seals it. As if I would read it! And now, I’ll read my letter aloud to all of you.