My eyes widened, both at the name and the voice that had said them. Mary’s imitation of my accent had been quite credible. I moved into the sight line of the open door and saw Lane standing, red cap bunched in his hands, looking slightly bewildered. Just behind his head hung the portrait of my guardian. I turned back to the hearth.
“I … wondered if … Miss Tulman might like to go rolling,” I heard his voice say. “In the ballroom.”
Shock and surprise made my forehead crease, sending shivers of uncertainty to dance along my spine. I looked over my shoulder, careful not to focus on the portrait, and found the gray eyes already on me, expressionless, just letting me decide. Mary turned from the door she still blocked with her body, her round eyes also seeking mine. I studied a hole in the carpet. I wasn’t certain I wanted another conversation with Lane; I was still aching from the last one. But he had requested, not insisted, and I had never stopped wondering about how much of our last trip to the ballroom had been real.
“All right.” I steadied my voice. “You may tell him yes … that I …”
I looked up to see that Mary’s eyes had grown rounder as she gazed at me, her head jerking once to the side as if she’d experienced some sort of spasm.
“… that I would and …”
Her neck spasmed again, eyes growing larger.
“… and Mary shall …” Mary gave one more jerk of the head toward Lane. “… shall accompany us, of course.”
Mary sighed in relief, then slammed the door in Lane’s face. She grabbed me by the arms and sat me hard on the bench in front of the dressing table. “Fix your hair, quick!” she whispered, “and I’ll be doing your dress!”
“Just a minute!” I called through the door. “Mary,” I said, holding my voice low, “my hair is fine, and don’t make such a fuss. He only wants …” Actually I had no idea what he wanted.
“Don’t be daft, Miss! I’ve never once been seeing Lane Moreau knock on a girl’s door, and there are plenty who wouldn’t have minded if he had, no matter what their papas had to say about a Frenchman….” She paused. “Or maybe because of what their papas had to say … but anyway, if he did come knocking, they’d be brushing their hair when they was bid!”
Mary ran like a demon for water and a cloth while I capitulated and opened the drawer on the right side of my dressing table. My hair things weren’t there. “Mary, did you move the hairbrush?”
“I didn’t move it, Miss, you did. Remember? It’s on the left, now.” She dipped a cloth in the basin and began sponging frantically at the wrinkles in my dress. I opened the left-hand drawer without comment, took out the brush, and tried to better arrange my hair. Mary’s breath whooshed from her nose and she slapped away my hand.
“Stop trying to pull it all back so! What’s wrong with you, Miss!” She pulled loose a small piece of hair, one of the wisping curls that so vexed me, and to my horror, snipped it off, cheek length, with a pair of scissors. My mouth dropped.
“Hush!” Mary ordered. She snipped five more times, and when she was done, hair lay all over the dresser, a match of what was locked in the wardrobe drawer, and I had a few twining curls around my face. “Now come on!” she said, and shoved me off the bench.
I let the wind set flight to my newly cut curls as we glided down the floor of the ballroom. It had taken a few minutes to regain my previous skill, but soon my feet remembered themselves and kept me upright. Mary sat at the bottom of the steps, having refused Lane’s offer of skates, stating her lengthy opinion that putting wheels on one’s feet was the “devil’s own foolishment.” She propped her chin in her hands and gazed at the sparkling lights instead. Lane showed me how to lift one skate and cross the other, so that we could roll in wide circles around the edge of the ballroom without need for changing direction. Other than that, we did not speak.
We were making our seventh circle in this way, and I was concentrating on the feel of my speed when Lane said, “You didn’t go to clock-winding.”
I glanced at him sidelong. I knew he had brought me here for a reason, that he must have something to say, but this was not what I had expected.
“Mr. Tully was upset,” he continued. “And then you didn’t come to the workshop, and he was upset again. He didn’t have playtime.”
“He didn’t?”
“No.” Lane had his hands in his pockets, gazing straight ahead as he rolled, the dark hair blowing as if in a storm. “Mr. Tully hasn’t missed playtime since his mother died, that’s what Aunt Bit said. I told him you were resting, that you didn’t feel well, and then he was afraid you were ‘going away’ and wouldn’t get to count your years. He had a tantrum over it. I had to wrap him in his blankets so he could sleep.”
I did not know how to respond to this, so I said nothing. We began our ninth circle. The roar of the wheels reverberated around the ballroom.
“I shouldn’t have spoken my mind the way I did,” Lane said. “My temper is too hot, and I let it get the better of me.”
“It’s no matter,” I replied, rolling on a little faster. I didn’t want to hear him apologize; how could I have expected him to think differently? He caught up to me easily.
“Come back to the workshop. Have your party. Mr. Tully needs those things now, even if … no matter what happens … after that.”
I bit my lip. Now he wanted me to pretend as well. Surely that had been a failed experiment. But for my uncle …
“Will you come?”
I caught sight of our reflections in the passing mirrors. Lane was watching me, waiting for my answer, his jaw tight, the muscle working in and out, in and out. I nodded my assent without meeting his eyes, and he put his hands back in his pockets. We made our twelfth turn in silence, passing Mary, who now lay full length on the steps, eyes closed, arms tucked comfortably behind her head.
“I reckon,” Lane said at length, “that you must feel it’s … a wrong thing, to lie to your aunt….”
I made a noise of disbelief at that, and he reached out and yanked me to a stop, pulling me around to face him. “Then why won’t you lie? Why? You understand him! Better than I do in some ways and I’ve had the running of him since I was a boy. If you won’t do it for us, then for God’s sake do it for him!”
His voice rang against the wood, glass, and gilding. I waited for the sound of it to die before I spoke. “My aunt will find out the truth and take Uncle Tully away no matter what I tell her. And Stranwyne, too. And if she finds I’ve lied to her — when she finds I’ve lied — she’ll leave me to the streets without a thought.” I pulled my arm away. “I can’t keep Uncle Tully out of an asylum, and I can’t keep the villagers out of the workhouse. The only person I can possibly save is myself.” I pushed my wheels against the floor and rolled away from him. I was no Joan of Arc. His voice came from right beside me.
“You needn’t always live with your aunt.”
“She is my guardian. She’ll hold my purse strings until she dies.”
“Have you no inheritance of your own?”
I shook my head. He swore softly, and we began our fourteenth circle.
“Then you will marry.”
Again I shook my head. It had been made plain over the course of too many years that there was nothing in or about me to draw the attention of a man. Even now it was so. Lane had only brought me here to get something he wanted. Perhaps he had come to the same conclusion as the village: sugar, instead of vinegar. He reached out and pulled me to a stop again, gently this time. I turned my face away.
“Lie for him,” he said. “Please, Katharine.”
I could not answer; there were no answers to give, but I also couldn’t breathe. It had seemed so natural when he said my Christian name, thoughtless even, and yet never had I heard it spoken in such a way. In his voice, my name had almost been … beautiful. My eyes were drawn upward, slowly, and then I was drowning in a gaze that covered me like a calm gray sea, a look I’d seen only one time before and told myself I’d imagined.
“Just say you’ll thin
k on it,” he said. “We don’t have to talk of it again. But say you’ll think on it, and that you’ll come back to the workshop. For Mr. Tully.”
I nodded, still mesmerized, and he took both my hands in his, pulling me to the center of the ballroom. I did not resist.
“I’m going to teach you how to spin,” he said. “Davy showed me, he …” But he loosened his grip on my right hand, which I had not bothered to bind up again. “Did I hurt you?”
I looked down at the red-marked hand he still held, pale against his tan. “No,” I whispered. “It’s healing.”
“Good. Then we’re going to spin.”
“I don’t think I can.”
“It’s easier than the other things you’ve done. All you have to do is hold on.” A hint of a smile showed at the corner of his mouth. “But you really do have to hold on. Turn your feet like this and cross your arms. Don’t let go now!”
His long fingers encircled my wrists, my pulse beat a staccato against them, and I could feel the warmth of him stealing into me. I hung on as he began to skate sideways, picking up speed, until I looked up and said, “No, wait. Stop!” He slowed instantly, forehead creasing. “You’re going the wrong way around.”
He relaxed back into a grin and rolled the other way, turning clockwise, swinging me in a circle, and soon we were swinging each other, faster and faster, until the lights were a blur and I knew I could not hold on and would go flying across the ballroom. I shrieked, and Lane slowed our speed as Mary sat upright with a start.
“Again?” he asked. I nodded, a smile spreading over my face as he tightened his grip. The way his eyes stood out against his skin fascinated me. And then I didn’t care that he was pretending, if I was making a fool of myself, that he was my uncle’s servant, or if every single bit of this was false. I wanted it anyway.
We spun until I shrieked with delight and a little fear, and then again, and again, always stopping just before I lost my hold. I was dizzy, breathless with laughter, and all my carefully combed hair had come down.
“How could you have done this with Davy?” I gasped. “Surely he couldn’t hang on? You’re too heavy.”
“Oh, it’s different with Davy, to be sure.” Lane leaned over, whispering in my ear. “Davy goes air borne.”
My eyes widened even as I laughed and tried to get away, but his grip was too strong. “Don’t you dare,” I warned him.
“Ready?” he asked, grinning like a dark and very handsome devil. “I’d hold on tight, if I were you….”
And he spun me again, though he never let my feet leave the ground.
That night in Marianna’s room, Mary was working the tangles back out of my hair when she said, “Do you speak French, Miss?”
“French? Only a very little, Mary.” A very little.
“Enough to be writing letters in it, Miss?”
I winced as she pulled the brush through a tangle. “Goodness, no. I’ve never written a word in French in my life. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, somebody was sending letters in French, and I told them it wasn’t you, and I was right, don’t you see?”
I did see, indeed. Ben had mentioned before that the letters were being watched closely. I would have watched them, too, if I lived in the village. “Mr. Moreau speaks French, Mary. Maybe it was him.”
“Fancy you knowing that, Miss.” I caught her face looking smug in the mirror, and she leaned close to my shoulder. “You know I think you’re right canny, Miss, to keep him guessing like that.”
I turned to look at her, and her eyes widened innocently.
“You know what I’m meaning! To not be telling him right out that you won’t be saying nothing to your relations about Stranwyne! To keep him wondering, like. ’Tis a lesson to me, on how to string your young man along….”
“Mary.” I turned fully around on the little bench, and she stopped brushing, waiting for me to go on. Obviously she had not been napping on the stairs. “Listen carefully to me. Mr. Moreau only wants —”
“I know, Miss, he —”
I held up a hand, and Mary clamped her mouth closed.
“I don’t need you spreading such talk about the village. He merely wants something from me, that’s why —”
“To lie for us, I know, he —”
I looked at her again, and she put a hand over her mouth.
“He wants something from me, that is why he took me to the ballroom today, no other reason.” Lane had told me once that he would do anything for Uncle Tully, and I was certain that was true. He was trying to manipulate me, most likely. Would hate me, probably, before all this was done, but for now I would taste the sugar, if for no other reason than I could not resist it. But when I looked into Mary’s freckled face, her hand clamped over her chin to ensure her own silence, my conscience pricked. It was one thing to pretend because one wanted to; it was another to serve lies to someone who had no idea what they were getting. “Mary, you do understand that I told Mr. Moreau nothing but the truth?”
Mary’s words were muffled by her hand. “No, you didn’t.”
I waited long before answering her, the shortness of her sentence catching me off guard. “Didn’t what?”
She dropped her hand. “You didn’t tell him the truth. You never told him once you’d be lying to your aunt.”
“Oh, Mary,” I breathed. Her faith was a blow I hadn’t seen coming. “When I go back to my aunt’s, I will have to tell her the truth.”
“No, you won’t.”
I waited again for her to go on before discovering my mistake. “Yes, Mary. I will.”
“No, you won’t. I’ve already told my mum you’ll be lying to the old witch, certain as certain.”
“Mary, I’m very sorry, you can’t imagine how sorry, but that decision is already made. I’ve no choice in the matter.”
“You won’t do it, I’m telling you.”
“Mary …” I hesitated. “When my time here is over, you … you do understand that I’ll be leaving Stranwyne, and that I won’t be able to take you with me?”
“No,” she said placidly. “I don’t understand that. You won’t be leaving Stranwyne.”
I looked into her comfortable face, utterly bereft of doubt, and felt a chill trickle down my back. The room must have a draft. I turned away without answering and heard the rattle of a cup and saucer on my dressing table.
“Have your tea, Miss,” she said happily. “Sleep well.” And she trotted off through to her own room, cheerfully slamming the doors in between. I studied myself in the mirror while sipping my tea. If Mary could live a lie, then so could I. Apparently it’s what we had all decided to do. I drained the teacup. I had nineteen days.
When I opened my eyes, I thought I was flying. My nightgown whipped around my knees as the corridors of Stranwyne whizzed by, dark, dusty, or gaslit and clean, some that were familiar, some I had never seen. I held out my arms to feel the passing air, laughing, the joy of it almost more than I could contain. I flew around the clocks, listening to their many happy ticks, and then zipped through a different door and was lifted right off my feet, floating up a winding set of stairs. And then it was dark, a pearly, shimmering dark, and I could see the stone floor of the chapel far below me, nothing between us but a cool expanse of lovely air.
The parson was down there. He would laugh when he saw me floating; we would both laugh. I stretched out my arms for the stone floor, wanting to feel the rush of wind, but I could not get there. I frowned, waving my hands, but I was held back, and the floor moved farther and farther away from me. I struggled a little more, but even my sight was receding. The shining dark shrank to a pinpoint, and then for a long time the world was black, strange colors twisting one upon the other, writhing through my mind like insects.
When I woke I was cold, aching, on a hard surface that chilled me through, breath shuddering against the nightgown that stuck clammily to my chest. I was on my back in a puddle, and I had no idea where I was. As my sight came back, I perceived shadows on a
ceiling, the wet hair on my forehead, the smell of old stone and stagnant water, and a muttering that echoed softly from the walls. I stirred, and the muttering stopped.
“Did my little niece wake up?”
I sat up. I was in the gallery of the chapel, beside the stone rail that looked over to the floor below, and my uncle sat cross-legged just a few feet away, rocking back and forth, twisting fistfuls of his coat. His white beard spread with his smile, and then the smile disappeared.
“I was thinking you might not wake, Simon’s baby. You didn’t go away?”
“No, Uncle,” I whispered.
“That’s good. That is splendid. People should only go away when they’re too tired. That is what’s best. You’re not too tired?”
“I don’t think so.” I was very muddled.
“And if you had gone away you would not have so many years to count, would you, little niece? That would not be so fun.”
“No.” I sat up farther, shivering in my soaked nightgown, though I wasn’t sure if all my trembling was from the cold. “Uncle,” I said slowly, “can you tell me … why I’m here?”
Uncle Tully frowned. “You got confused, little niece. Sometimes people get confused. They forget. They make mistakes. You forgot about stairs.”
I hugged myself, trying to stop the shaking. “I forgot about … stairs?”
“Yes!” My uncle’s eyes were two points of blue in the dark. “You wanted to go down, and you forgot about stairs. And you didn’t want to remember. And then you went to sleep, and you wouldn’t wake up. You got confused.” He leaned back again, rocking a little. “Sometimes people get confused. That’s what Marianna said.”
Memory was starting to come back to me, visions of the floor of the chapel. I got to my feet and looked over the rail.
“Don’t forget again, little niece!”
Moonlight was flooding the grimy windows, and I saw the stone flags spreading ghostly gray far beneath me, but not so far away as I remembered. I looked at the marbled rail that was beneath my hand, remembering the feel of the same cool stone beneath my bare feet, and of flying, floating to the floor. I backed away, eyes on the rail, and sat down on the edge of a raised stone step, where benches would have once been. Had I really been standing up there?
The Dark Unwinding Page 14