by Julia Byrd
“Ask, lady,” I said softly.
She searched my eyes and nodded. “I believe you like me. Your heart knows mine, despite everything else you choose to complicate with suspicion.”
“I believe I have little choice,” I said, then dared to put my hand on her bent leg. The wind toyed with a loose lock of her hair. Her proximity heated my blood and made me aware of the constriction of my coat across my shoulders, my trousers, the collar of my shirt, everything between Juno and me. We had green walls around us and an open sky above us, but too much fabric between us.
“That was no answer.”
I squeezed her knee in admonishment. “Because you posed no question.”
Her hand moved from my neck to my scalp, and her fingernails rasped my skin, sending a shiver down my spine. Then she caught a handful of my hair and tugged my head closer. Her lips came near my ear.
“Tell me you like me,” she whispered. The pressure on my scalp made it into a teasing command.
“You know I do,” I said. Her fingers relaxed to stroke through my hair. “I don’t think I could stop. But I also like Everett, and almond biscuits, and azaleas. You, strange creature, are another matter entirely. I think about you when I shouldn’t. I cannot fathom what spell you have cast over me, and I wish I did not feel so desperate to know.”
“You scarcely know me at all. But you know me better than most. I wish I liked you less, Benjamin Hood.” She stopped toying with my hair and slid her hand down to press against my chest, just over my heart. “If I liked you less I might do more good. Instead, I like you more and do less good.”
Her words were half riddle to me, but her warm eyes and murmured tone made the meaning clear enough. I gripped her knee again and shifted it to part her legs, still hidden under her long skirt, and leaned into the gap. Her strong limbs bracketed my hips, and her arms encircled my neck. The fabric bunched between us gave me cause to wonder if I could tear it away without releasing my hold on her. Instead, I pressed close and accepted her weight as she shifted forwards on the railing. When I lifted my chin to kiss her, I found her lips already there, kissing me with a passion I could not doubt. She assailed me with sweet desperation and a faint, breathy noise from deep in her throat. She wanted me to understand something about her, something about how she felt. The kiss felt almost like…an apology. Juno gave me honeyed kisses to soothe some other wrong, but in that heated moment, I could think of nothing for which I was owed an apology.
Finally, she lifted her head, and I could not tear my eyes from the sight of her reddened lips. I passed a hand over my own mouth, feeling the burr of unshaven whiskers, and winced at the damage I’d done to her. How much damage could we do to each other? Was abraded skin what she meant by the dangers of love?
“You had something to tell me,” I prompted. I stepped back and tugged her skirt down but allowed my hand to linger on her ankle. Juno tucked one foot behind the other. The afternoon was growing old, and we would need to retreat to the house before dusk. Until then I could steal another few moments hidden away in a hedge maze. I had yet to ask Juno my own thorny question about Mrs. Horvath’s child.
“Indeed.” She exhaled noisily and pushed an errant lock of hair into a hidden pin. “Ben, do you know that I inherited a small fortune from the late, unlamented Mr. Stephens?”
I frowned. A question, finally, that I could answer. “No.” I suppose I’d assumed a widow would receive her husband’s funds, but I hadn’t thought much about it.
“I did. And my father’s, of course.”
“Your father?”
She tipped her chin. “You really don’t know me at all, do you? You don’t remember me?”
“Remember you from where?” Sometimes, in my perennial self-involvement, I could imagine that Juno existed only from the moment she first appeared in my cemetery. “I am certain your face, figure, and manner would have made an impression even on my slow wits.”
Her gaze dropped to somewhere halfway down my shirtfront. “You were never slow, Ben. You were just quiet.” She looked up and met my eyes. “My father was William Davies.”
I studied her face. William Davies. Davies had been a cloth merchant, away traveling for much of the year, and I recalled two daughters, but…I dredged up a memory of a girl holding her father’s hand, and the sheen of a long, dark braid.
“You’re J-J-Jane Davies,” I croaked out through a stammer so thick and stubborn it penetrated Juno’s spell.
“No,” Juno said. A muscle twitched in her cheek. “I was that girl. I am Juno Stephens as you know.”
I assembled the pieces and memories as best I could. Jane Davies had been skinny, pale, and a bit odd. Our private tutors at home meant that Joseph and I had never attended the village schoolroom, but she would have been younger than him and older than me. I had a dim recollection of Joseph taunting the girl once, something about a dead grass snake. That that meek girl had grown into the sparkling, fearless woman before me was a miracle I could attribute to herself alone.
“Stephens I understand, but how did you come to be called Juno?”
“I picked it for myself shortly after I married Rupert.” Her lips flashed in a brief smile. “I had to take his name, but I wanted one for myself as well. As for why…You’ve already said it. Goddess of Rome, protector of women. A flight of fancy, to be sure, but I needed its power.”
“You needed a transformation.”
She nodded. “My wedding to Rupert was the last time I set foot in a Christian church. Poor man. He thought he was acquiring meek and mild Jane Davies, but he couldn’t have known that Juno Stephens was almost bursting out of me.”
“Juno, did your husb…did that man do something to do you? Did he hurt you such that you needed to shed Jane entirely?”
“Oh, please,” Juno scoffed. “My internal gears were turning all along, you know, before and after the wedding. Men love to think they affect a woman’s every thought and action. No, Ben, Rupert never physically hurt me. When I abandoned the preposterous notion of a supernatural, male, omnipotent deity, I was freed. That’s when I jettisoned little Jane. It took me months of nagging Rupert before he remembered to call me Juno. He was a bit dim.”
I filled my lungs with air as my heart surged for a woman who would redefine herself after no less than a goddess and change the world around her. “It suits you better than Jane, although I’m sorry I didn’t come to know Jane Davies as a child. Perhaps you could have poured some magic over my stammer twenty years sooner.” I returned her faint smile.
“I doubt it,” Juno said. “Little Jane wasn’t good for much. But maybe I could have been more useful if I’d had the sheltering right arm of Ben Hood in those years.”
“I doubt it,” I echoed. “Gangly, silent Ben Hood wasn’t good for much, either. I should have recalled you, even if you are much changed since those days. Why didn’t you say anything sooner?”
“Must you ask? You might be the only person I know who could understand hiding in plain sight. You didn’t even change your name. You just decided to make yourself transparent.”
“I receded.”
Juno nodded. “There is power and control in allowing people to see only what you want them to see. It’s a way to live privately in a small village. That is why I waited before reminding you of my old name. And that’s why I thought I could help encourage your speaking voice.”
“Because I live privately?”
“No. Because you and I both have experience in cloaking our public selves, although it takes time and effort to shed. Maybe the years sort themselves out as they should.”
“Maybe it’s God,” I countered. “Charting the course of our lives.”
Juno narrowed her eyes. “Do you believe that?”
“Not really,” I said without thinking. I took a sudden, off-balance step backward, then folded my arms to cover for my stumble. I’d never before said anything aloud that was so casually heretical.
“Hmm. Regardless, I started telling you
all of this because of the fortune. Two fortunes, both at my disposal.”
She paused, looking to me for a response, but I had nothing of significance to say. Her cheeks flushed, certainly from the falling temperatures. We would need to begin our exodus from the maze.
“Congratulations?” I offered.
Juno emitted a strange noise and wriggled forwards on the railing. I stepped up and put my hands on her waist to steady her, and she hopped down.
“That’s all you have to say on the matter?” As soon as her feet were on the ground, she pushed my hands away.
“I do have a question for you, but it’s not about your inheritance. It’s growing late; we should return to the house.” She was already walking away, although in the direction of the wrong opening in the hedges. “Which is this way,” I called out.
Juno spun on her heel and marched towards the path I indicated. She avoided looking at me as she passed by. What had I done so monumentally wrong in the preceding sixty seconds? Since she was already irked with me, perhaps I could tweak her a little further.
“I spoke with Mrs. Horvath this morning at her home,” I said, and Juno slowed. “She mentioned you.”
Juno turned and narrowed her eyes. “What were you doing there?”
“The very question I wanted to ask you. What did you have to do with Mrs. Horvath and her baby? What do you know about the child’s death?” The sun slipped below the tops of the yew hedges. The gravel alleys were all in shadows. “Come on, you can walk and answer me at the same time.” I touched Juno’s elbow to start her moving again, but she shrugged me off and kept a pace ahead.
“I told you I would not plead my innocence to you. You insult me. There are things you don’t know. Things you aren’t entitled to know. You should be focused on identifying the arsonist, not interrogating me about the unavoidable, coincidental death of the Horvath infant.” She glared at a wall of shrubs marking another intersection. “Damn it—left or right?”
“Left. Look, the Maida chimneys are visible there if you’re too stubborn to walk beside me.” I pointed, and Juno nodded. She took the next turn on her own, still a yard or two ahead of me. “There are some things you don’t know, too. Things you’re not entitled to know,” I said, thinking of Everett’s worries and the shop girl’s talk of a hex.
“Oh, I doubt that.”
“It’s true. Remember who I am. I feel responsibility for many of the families in this area. If you know anything about these deaths, Juno, I must know about it, too. Dear God, this is why I should not kiss you, why I cannot trust myself near you. What have I blinded myself to?”
“Even the most ignorant, willfully blind male could not possibly think that childbearing and childbirth are safe or predictable. Things happen, Ben. Even you, in your grand reincarnation as master of Maida House, cannot control life and death.”
She stalked towards the middle branch of three options before us, but it felt wrong to me. “It’s the right side,” I said. “I asked Mrs. Horvath and the others if they were ever sick. They all denied any illness in themselves or in the household. Some other complicating factor must be involved in the deaths.”
“I’m sure it’s the center. Look, you can see that poor dove just ahead.” She was right, the little dove’s corpse was a darker blot on the white gravel. Juno threw a triumphant glance over her shoulder. I was forced to dip my head in assent as we continued into the middle branch.
“You’ve been asking those women the wrong questions, Ben. In your grim version of the tale, my interference would be motivated by…what, witchcraft? Human sacrifice?” Juno spun and planted herself in the middle of the path facing me. I stopped a pace away. “It’s a soft moral center you’ve shown. Five minutes ago you kissed me like a dying man, and yet you can believe me a murderess. A child killer, no less. What does that say about you?”
“Nothing good.” But what did I really believe? Was she capable of hurting an infant? I thought of the soft crack of the dove’s neck. But…that had been an act of mercy. Maybe both our senses of right and wrong were misaligned. “I don’t kiss like a dying man.”
Juno barked out a rough laugh and turned again to continue walking. I followed and glared at her stiff spine. Stubborn, insulting, godless woman.
“You hear what’s relevant to you and have no interest in the rest,” she said. “I know how you kissed me. Every time you touch me, it’s like the world might end tonight. Like you’re dying.”
No. More like I might die without her. It infuriated me. “You kissed me like you were apologizing for something,” I growled, eager to dent her dignity as she’d dented mine.
“If that’s true, it certainly wasn’t an apology for killing babies. Of all the horrible things.”
“So tell me the truth!” I threw up my hands, although she was still in front of me and couldn’t see. She would hear the frustration. “Tell me what you were doing with Mrs. Horvath. Tell me what I saw in Maida Green that rainy night. Tell me why you are sheltering Sarah Greeley.”
“I’m not apologizing for any of that, either,” Juno said. She rounded the next corner and stopped. I drew up beside her, and together we stared at the wide exit from the maze. The upper stories of Maida House were visible over the rise.
“Juno, please. You of all people should not demand unquestioning faith. Will you explain to me how you’re involved?”
She turned her head up, and her dark eyes roamed over my face. I couldn’t read her expression, but I held my breath waiting for an answer.
“You’re right. Unquestioning faith is not a consolation. I’m not sure I can tell you,” she said. “It’s not my story to tell. But perhaps I can show you. Not tonight—I don’t know when. Wait for me, Ben. Do not judge me until you have seen my work.”
Chapter 18: Rite of Transition
Juno and I retreated to Maida House and found Everett and Sarah in the kitchen. They had made free use of the supplies I’d purchased to assemble a reasonably civilized dinner. As we seated ourselves at the library table to eat, Juno spoke of light things, and even Sarah seemed cheerful. I ate and smiled and commiserated with Everett over the humid heat of the afternoon. It felt a little like…family. The vehement disagreement between Juno and me on several important topics—the existence of God, the cause of the infant deaths, the nature of our relationship—had the contrary effect of making me feel more at peace. I would rather argue again with Juno than exchange inane pleasantries with any other woman.
“I carted another load of your plants up here, Mrs. Stephens, and put them in the glass room,” said Everett. He had made two plates of food disappear in the way that only young men can do.
“Thank you so much,” Juno replied. “Setting up new planter beds will keep me busy all day tomorrow.”
The following day was Sunday. “All day?” I asked.
“Perhaps not. What’s your counter-offer for a better diversion?” Juno parried.
“I am walking with my mother to attend church services. Do you care to accompany us?”
Juno raised her water glass and sipped.
“I’m going too, with my mother and sister,” Everett said, looking at Sarah.
“As am I,” Sarah added. “I mean, not with my mother and sister. Just me. I find it calms my thoughts, even as my mind has expanded. My father is always asleep on Sunday mornings, so I needn’t worry about encountering him.”
“You might come and sit with us, Sarah,” Everett said. “If you want. Or not. Lucy is annoying, but her singing voice is quite good.” He was trying too hard to sound like he didn’t care either way.
“Thank you, I will.” Sarah gave a tiny smile. “I do like singing.”
“I must decline, I’m sorry,” said Juno. “But I hope to meet Mrs. Hood very soon.”
“You will,” I said. “But why must you decline? Will you turn to smoke and ash on the blessed doorstep?”
“Ben, don’t be awful,” Everett objected. “Sorry, Mrs. Stephens.”
“Don�
��t apologize for me. I’ll be rude and awful if I please.”
“No smoke or ash, as far as I know. But I’m a terrible liar, and I can never pay any attention in church. I won’t bother going,” Juno said briskly. “What if I prepare a luncheon and have it waiting for you all when you return?”
“Good,” I said, then slid my chair back. “And now, the gentlemen are retiring to the study for port.”
“Is there a study?” Juno asked.
“Is there port?” asked Everett.
“Yes and yes. Although it’s rather disheartening to think you both supposed I referred to hypothetical port in Joe’s imaginary study. Such low estimations of my mental stability. Are you coming, Everett?”
“Your study,” Juno said softly.
“Pardon me?”
“You said ‘Joe’s imaginary study.’ It’s yours if it does exist.” One dimple appeared fleetingly.
I picked up my water glass and gulped down the last half-inch of liquid. My study, my house, my family. “Quite right. Bring your cup, Mr. Toth, lest we find only illusory vessels on the sideboard. Goodnight, ladies.”
Juno dropped her hand to her side, below the table, and caught my fingers in a brief, tight squeeze before I stood.
The study was tucked into the front corner of the main floor, and it was cold and damp when we entered. I laid a fire while Everett dusted off chairs and poured two measures of wine. I had no desire just then to sit behind the big walnut desk, although I knew eventually I must. A portrait of St. George occupied the place over the mantel, and Opere et Omissione had been carved into the stone to match the library. The shelves behind the desk held two decades’ worth of records and account books. The spines from Father’s era were neatly labeled, but the books for the years after his death grew more and more disorganized. The last shelf was a jumble of loose papers, some creased as if Joe had crumpled pages in his fist before tossing them aside.