The Magician's Lie

by Greer Macallister

  “But you survived. That’s close to a miracle.”

  He lets himself sit, lowering his body onto the desk facing her, leaning forward. “Is it? They got the one in my leg but the one in my back is still there. Next to the spine. The doctor in Waterloo is the best for miles around. I wanted him to take it out. He said it was too risky. Too close to the nerve. If he goes after it, there’s a good chance of paralyzing me, so he won’t operate. Flat out refused.”

  “It still seems like a happy ending. Isn’t it? Aren’t you better off alive with a bullet in your back than dead, with or without one?”

  “You’d think so, but no,” he says grimly. “The human body isn’t like a block of ice or wood, holding steady. Over days or weeks or years, the bullet could move. If it moves too far toward my spine, I’ll lose the use of my legs. Or if it migrates—that’s the word he used—toward a major organ, I could bleed to death from the inside.”

  “Oh,” she breathes.

  She sounds sincere. She sounds like she pities him. It brings him up short for a moment. Her pity for him is wrong, so wrong, when he is the one with the gun and the cuffs and the power to put her on the gallows, and she is alone and weak and handcuffed, still, to a chair. He doesn’t want to be pitied. He wants to be whole.

  “That’s my story,” he says. “Now tell me yours. Tell me what comes next. How did you turn from a girl who liked to dance into a living scandal onstage every night, cutting grown men in pieces?”

  “I’m getting to that,” she says.

  He says, “I’m listening.”

  It’s only after she begins her story again, her voice as smooth and warm as a pillow, that his eyes come to rest on her throat. And he notices, with some surprise, that the bruise that piqued his curiosity earlier is gone, as if it had never been there at all.

  Chapter Nine

  1895

  Lady to Tiger

  At night I went. And along the way, for the first time in a long time, I thought of my father. Who had he been? What had he bequeathed me? Right now I didn’t need my mother’s elegance and grace. Both were useless. I needed determination and confidence. And in the absence of my father, I assigned him those qualities so they would be mine too. My mother had called him weak, but I chose not to believe what she’d said. She had been searching for a way to justify her own choices. It was the first time I realized that we all bend and shape our stories to fit our own ends. It was certainly not the last.

  To say I climbed over mountains would give the wrong impression, but still, it was true. And those are different on foot than they are in a carriage. But you go over a mountain the same way you go over any road in the end. Step by careful step. As long and dark as that walk was, there was still a joy to it, because I was making my own way. No one would stop me, no one would hold me down, no one would be using me for their own ends. Whenever I thought I might fall down from exhaustion, I breathed in the sharp pine-scented air and reminded myself that whatever else I was or wasn’t, I was free.

  At last, the road sloping down under my weary feet and the sun a white ball of fire in the clear blue sky, I arrived at the land surrounding the Biltmore and saw the castle itself rising up against that selfsame sky like a fortress. I’d reached it. The building’s pale stone walls rose so high and so steep that they took my breath away, what little breath I had remaining.

  Even from half a mile away, I could see the differences from the last time I had visited. They had built more rooms onto the back, wedging a new great wide wall of stone against the others. The seams were invisible, but I knew the old shape from memory. The west wing too had shifted its shape and was finished with a graceful turret. There were more statues in the nearby courtyard, cherubs and horses and a marble Diana. I could see curtains in windows that had previously been bare. Everywhere I looked, the place was different. I was different too, of course. I avoided looking to the west, where I knew the barn must be finished by now and in use. This was a place where my life had been changed forever. I hoped it would be so again, this time for the better.

  I waited for nightfall. The plan I had in mind would be easier to manage in the dark. In the meantime, I retreated deeper into the forest, hunching next to a burbling stream. I let my aching, swollen fingers trail in the cool water, wishing they would heal, and either the coldness of the stream or the power of my imagination dulled the ache until it was no longer the only thing I could think of. Something tickled at my brain—a half-formed idea that maybe the wishing really did make a difference, as I had wished my broken leg healed and my recovery did seem surprisingly quick—but I wasn’t thinking entirely clearly. The bread had run out long before, and I was so hungry I felt my stomach might touch my spine.

  Darkness came. I edged closer to the house, lingering where the trees were thinner, and watched the sun set behind the massive stone walls. At first, I could see light glowing from windows in every part of the house, but as the evening wore on, the glow broke into scattered spheres, lesser by the hour. Once the sky turned from dark blue to utter black, only a few small pale lights flickered in the highest and lowest windows as the servants finished the last of the evening’s work and carried their candles up to bed. I watched as the final light in the final window went dark.

  There was barely a sliver of moon and a speckled pattern of distant stars high above. I crossed the dark lawn until I reached the lowest, smallest door. No noise, no movement. There was only silence in the great house.

  I opened the door slowly and stepped inside.

  The room I entered was the laundry room, hot and dark and damp like I imagined jungle air must be. The water in the vats was still warm, but the fires were out. In the dim light from the window, there was just enough light to make out shapes and edges, and along one wall, I saw what I’d come for.

  The uniforms hung there, all in a line, identical. Black and white. White and black. One after another after another. Because they were all the same, it was impossible to tell one from the next.

  That was what I needed and wanted. To blend in.

  Thankful for the warmth of the room, I stepped out of my dark homespun dress, moving in haste. I slipped the white blouse over my head and the jumper over the blouse. I smoothed my tangled hair as best I could and tucked it up under the cap. The water of the stream had carried off the dirt from under my fingernails, but broken fingers were not so easy to wash away, so I also pulled on a pair of clean white gloves, gritting my teeth against the pain. My own clothes I tucked into a bundle, and after exploring a warren of bins and cabinets, I found what I hoped was the safest corner, and there I squirreled the bundle away.

  Once I had the uniform on, I took a candle from a shelf near the doorway and lit it with a long match. I could hide better in the dark, but because a real servant would have a candle, I needed to have one too. I could hide best in plain sight. So I put on my most correct posture and walked down the hall to find a task to keep busy at.

  As hungry as I was, I avoided the kitchen, fearing that once I started eating, I might never stop. I couldn’t be discovered there, where I clearly wouldn’t belong. I knew from my grandparents’ house how closely cooks kept an eye on things. Anywhere else in the house would be better.

  Almost as soon as I began exploring, I was lost. Even with the candle, I could only see a few feet in any direction, and the place was an utter maze of doors and halls and stairs. I had remembered the impression from my last visit that the place was simply too large to be comprehended, but this time it was truer and more frightening. Every step was fraught. There was no way to know if I was moving away from danger or into it.

  The first hallway I followed dead-ended in the vegetable pantry, a room that smelled overwhelmingly of earth, and I had no choice but to double back the way I’d come. I thought I was headed back toward the laundry, but the next door I opened took me into the unfinished swimming pool, an absolutely cavernous room lined wi
th gleaming white tile where my every footstep echoed like a gunshot. I hustled up the nearest staircase and down a carpeted hall to escape, trying to move quickly but not too quickly, my heart hammering underneath the stolen uniform. After this, I carried my shoes in my hand, trying my best to move soundlessly. I wanted to pause and savor the beauty of the carpets, plush and lovely under my feet, but instead I only gave thanks that they muffled my footfalls and kept moving.

  On the third floor, I tiptoed down long hallways full of identical doors, like something from a storybook, and had to choose at random which to open. My breath caught in my throat each time. The way the moonlight streaked across the bed in one of the guest rooms tickled the back of my brain, but I wasn’t sure whether it was the room I had slept in after my accident or just another indistinguishable in its luxury. My leg gave a twinge, and I quickly backed out of the door and shut it tight.

  When I finally found the front of the house, I knew I was in the right place at last. These were the most formal rooms; it made sense to fuss over them. Here there were stone fireplaces half a head taller than my own head, carved with intricate stone acorns and branches and a thousand other dust-collecting places. There were chimneypieces and side tables and cabinetry. Here, there was work to do. I applied myself with great relief. When it felt like there was no more to do in one room, I moved slowly to the next.

  What with straightening furniture and shaking out curtains and squaring carpets, I spent several hours at labor, and before I was found, the sun had come up. After the uncertainty of scrambling around this huge house in the night’s nerve-racking darkness, there was something reassuring about the light.

  The one who found me was a round-faced woman with her hair pulled back in a perfectly formed bun. Her dress was plain but didn’t match the uniforms from the laundry. Clearly she was in charge. I tried not to meet her gaze, but she pinned me like a butterfly in a box. I hovered on a high ladder, my good hand on a thick braided cord holding back a sunshade from a huge, spotless window.

  “You. Come here. I don’t know you,” she said.

  “Of course you do.”

  “No, miss. I do not know you because I did not hire you, and no one I did not hire works here. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “So how did you get here, Miss…?”

  Hastily I said, “I can be of use. Please don’t send me away.”

  She sized me up again.

  “Get down from there,” she said, and so I did. Standing face-to-face with her, I found her a full two inches shorter than I was, a fact which did not make her even a mote less intimidating.

  “You should know better than to lie,” she said. “That eye of yours gives you away. Makes you memorable. Never pretend you’re someone I wouldn’t remember.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” And yet if she had seen me last time I was here, she didn’t seem to recognize me. It gave me a thrill of confidence, which I certainly needed.

  “Tell me your name.”

  “Ada Bates.” No need to carry a lie if the truth would do.

  “Miss Bates,” she said, “this is your lucky day.”

  She didn’t tell me why and I didn’t ask. I found out later one of the servant girls had caught her arm in the mangler not ten hours before, while doing the evening’s wash, and could no longer do her assigned work. More help was needed. The angels were smiling on me, in their way.

  The woman in charge said, “Report to the laundry room and tell Miss Fischer, the one with the long black braid, that Mrs. Severson sent you.”

  “Yes ma’am!”

  “If you do a bad job, I will dismiss you.”

  “Yes ma’am. If that happens, I’ll dismiss myself first.”

  I almost caught her starting to smile before I turned to go. It took me half an hour to find the laundry room again.

  ***

  I wondered if perhaps I should have lied about my name, but it quickly seemed it wouldn’t matter. First names, in this household, went unspoken. I was always Miss Bates. Same went for the others. It was always Miss Godwin and Mr. Madison, Mrs. Severson and Mr. Shelby.

  The servants in my grandparents’ house had shared rooms, but here we each had our own, and I couldn’t believe my luck. Each morning, I rose in silence, alone, and had a few moments to myself to work through my exercises, keeping my arms and legs in their accustomed condition, reaching gracefully up to a ceiling higher than I’d ever had at home, though it was less than half the height of some of the rooms on the first floor. On occasion, I was able to steal a few morning moments to dance elsewhere in the house, and they were a great blessing. Executing a blazing fast string of thirty turns across the long open floor of a ballroom let me imagine for the first time that I was on a real stage, and the feeling was intoxicating.

  My dancer’s body came in handy. I was stronger than the typical girl of my age, and after my hand healed, I was the most able of all the girls at Biltmore. In the laundry, we repeated many movements over and over—dunking the sheets into the hot vat, stirring them around and around and around in the soap, lifting them out, heaving them into a different vat of cleaner water, stirring again and again and again. Even when we used the mechanical drum washer, it took strength to lift and spread the linens over the racks in the drying room and to fold and carry the dried sheets to closets on every floor. Repetition was nothing new for me. It was almost as if this was what I had spent my life practicing for. I knew it wasn’t, not really. But I also knew that for now, it was good enough.

  I found that my strength was not the only thing that set me apart, although I held the secret close. One day, another girl and I reached out for an iron at the same time, believing it cold, but it had already been left on the stove to heat, hot enough to burn. We both seared our fingertips, and they rose up in bright red blisters. Almost out of habit, I wished my fingers would heal quickly. The next day, I was surprised to see the blisters on her fingertips just as red and angry as the day before, while my blisters were already starting to fade. The next day, hers were slightly less red; mine were gone completely. I knew it made no sense that a wish had made the difference, yet I couldn’t see any other explanation. I certainly couldn’t tell anyone. If it sounded impossible to me, to others it would sound like insanity.

  It was weeks before I thought to wonder how my deserted family felt back in Tennessee, how worried they probably were about me, and after that brief fleeting thought, I went right back to not thinking about them again. I was convinced I’d been right to go. The bones I’d broken had healed, but that didn’t mean that I’d never been injured in the first place. I didn’t forget that. I never would.

  At Biltmore, I discovered I was a quick learner when it counted. Not only did I learn how to use lemon juice to bleach wine stains from a tablecloth and to iron velvet with the nap, never against it, I learned all about people.

  All of them kept secrets, and nearly all of them had bad habits. It fascinated me how many people thought they’d managed to keep their vices secret when to the rest of us they were as plain as day. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but people were careless. I learned who had been sent here after dismissal from a convent and who had a brother in prison back in Ireland who she sent all her wages to. I also learned things by observing—happening to notice when certain people tended to absent themselves from company and where they went when they did. Miss Godwin had a weakness for nicking canned peaches from the pantry. Mr. Carlisle snuck cigarettes behind the garden shed.

  A few months into my life at the Biltmore, it was because of Mr. Carlisle that I made another important discovery. Mrs. Severson was shouting her cap off for him, swearing he’d promised to make a delivery that very afternoon. I knew of his cigarette habit, and so I snuck off to fetch him. He was, of course, behind the shed, and as soon as I told him the situation, he took off like a shot. I stayed outside and didn’t run after him. Partly beca
use I wasn’t the one in trouble, and partly because I wanted to stand in the sun for a moment and drink in the smell of green spring plants growing.

  That was when I saw the young man.

  He emerged from the other side of the shed and strode toward the rose garden, which was at that time about three-quarters complete. When it was finished, it would be spectacular, long formal rows in the English style, but the rows had not yet been fully planted. As best as I could tell, he was my height and not far from my age. He had dark hair that looked like it was wet. There was something magnetic about him. He set my arms tingling. I wanted to know more.

  The dark-haired young man passed behind the high trellis into the garden. I hustled forward and arranged myself behind a thick cluster of climbing roses, the vines and leaves and buds and blooms obscuring my outline, and made myself be still.

  I watched him for half an hour, not even noticing the time pass. I only felt the tingling of my arms, a hotness in my throat, strange shifts in temperature that had nothing to do with the sun. From time to time, I caught glimpses of his face—a sharp cheekbone, an arched eyebrow. He dug down into the dark ground with a spade until he was satisfied with the size of the hole and then carefully, gracefully, he lifted a rosebush from its resting place on the ground and settled its roots inside. He was what I imagined Adam in the garden to be—somehow part of the earth while master over it.

  After the new bush was in the ground, he crouched down next to it. He sprinkled water slowly and lightly over the new roots, lowering his hand into a bucket of water and lifting a scooped handful at a time, careful not to displace too much soil. And when he stood back up and drew his forearm over his sweating forehead, the underside of his muscled arm framed against the blue sky, a swarm of buzzing surged up into my temples and I felt faint.

  I was afraid to step out from behind my trellis and greet him because I wasn’t supposed to be there, and if he asked me any questions, I was just the kind of girl who would have to answer them.