by Tanai Walker
Salacia sat in the middle of a wide plot of land, flat and green with a few small copses of trees scattered about. The house itself looked much smaller from the main road, but as we drove closer, I could see the towering palms around the yard that barely cleared the roof. It was old and Southern with white columns and a veranda. My mother got out and opened the white wrought iron gate topped with tritons.
A narrow drive covered with white gravel led us to the front yard where a peacock and peahen strutted through the green grass. Aunt Quinn appeared in a red and orange strapless sundress, the hem trailing the ground behind her, and the front brushing the tops of her bare feet. Her hair was lighter and curlier than Mom’s and rested on her shoulders. Her frame was slighter. She smiled when she saw me and rushed over to hug me.
“Is this our little Tinsley?” She kissed my cheek. “She’s gorgeous.”
“Please be patient with her,” Mom said. “She’s shy.”
She sounded wary, almost anxious.
“Of course,” Aunt Quinn said. I hadn’t noticed, but she held my hand. “Well, it’s time for Tinsley to see her family home.”
She led the way with me in tow. Mom lagged behind as if she were a guest and hadn’t grown up in that grand old house. She stopped to hug a matronly Mexican woman called Lola who then hugged me.
Quinn showed us around the house like a docent and recited its history as we went.
“This site of the house is even older than the city. The original was torn down in 1856, and this one was built by your great-great-grandmother, Cornelia.”
She led us past a sweeping foyer with marble floors and a winding staircase that separated two wings. A chandelier loomed over us, its crystal fixtures winking minute rainbows of light.
“The Tinsleys have never been very good with money.” She grinned. “In the mid eighteen hundreds, we were ridiculously wealthy.”
She showed us the parlor, the Victorian furniture, and the library with oak shelves that reached the ceiling. The shelves were lined with old leather-bound volumes with gold or silver lettering.
“Your uncle Charles practically lived in here. After he passed, I finally got it cleaned of all the bachelor germs.” She smiled at me. “Your mother says you’ll like this room the best.”
She was right. The large, stuffy room was cramped with tables and shelves of objects. A glass cabinet full of curious objects captured my attention first. My fingers itched to handle the bounty before me; a feathered wooden pipe, a mask carved from black stone, and a sheriff’s badge, among other things. There were some antique pieces from the Egyptomania period, a silver and gold sphinx clock, and matching jackal candlesticks.
“I do like this room,” I said decidedly, and they laughed.
“Well, you’re welcome to take any of these things home when you leave,” Aunt Quinn said. “They’re part of your inheritance.”
“Oh Lord,” Mom said. “She loves old things. Her room will look like an old man’s study.”
We passed through another hall and stopped at a large set of double doors with large brass handles. I reached out and touched the carvings, two large stars with seven points.
“That is a family crest of sorts,” Aunt Quinn said next to me. “The great heptagon.”
“What is this room?” I asked.
“The ballroom,” she answered. “I will show it to you soon.”
We had an old-fashioned tea for just the three of us, with sandwiches and lovely little cakes. The two of them laughed and talked of old times. They were beautiful together, and I wished for a sister to share things with. We went out to the back porch, and as the sun faded, they smoked cigarettes and chatted.
The time came when Mom announced that she had to go. Tears pooled in my eyes as I watched my mother and aunt hug, kiss, and say their good-byes. I blinked back my emotion, determined not to seem like a baby. I managed to hold myself together as I said good-bye to Mom. If she noticed the tears that threatened, she graciously ignored them. She kissed my forehead and roared away in the Mercedes, leaving the smell of her perfume and cigarette smoke in the air.
Aunt Quinn put an arm around my shoulders in the gathering darkness. “You’re very brave, Tinsley.”
I followed my aunt back inside the stately house and barely listened to her idle chatter about how stuffy it could get at night, about visiting the stables the next day and planning a ride into town. My thoughts were of home and my place in the passenger seat next to my mother, our own front yard, and our kitchen.
Aunt Quinn and I sat in the parlor and looked over old family albums. There were scenes around the house and at the beach mostly, but there were settings all over the country and the world. The pictures dated back over a hundred years.
I was surprised to find that women and girls were prevalent in the family. Aunt Quinn pointed out a school picture with her and my mother, and a boy she claimed that she and my mother were both in love with.
“Before I knew better,” she said, as if she knew that I knew of her preferences.
She then asked me about school, if I had any friends, specifically boyfriends.
I blushed and shook my head.
“Girlfriends?”
I didn’t have anything to say except: “That would be very hard.”
Aunt Quinn laughed and sighed. “Yes, and it remains that way, until you can become independent of those who disapprove.”
I shook my head. “I’ll have to wait to think much about those things. I want to finish school and go study someplace far away. In England. Daddy doesn’t approve, so I’ll work hard to get a scholarship.” I had never spoken of my true plans for the future with anyone. I often fanaticized about my life as a grown-up―successful, freed to go where I chose, and of course being with a woman.
Aunt Quinn smiled. “You’re very wise, but life sometimes upsets our plans.”
I hardly slept that night, being in a strange place, and my aunt’s words plagued me. I slipped out of bed at dawn, dressed, and went down to the library. I perused stacks of books. One of the authors jumped out at me: Marquis De Sade. I had heard some girls at school talk about the word sadism and how it came from a man who wrote horrifyingly perverted books. Curious, I opened the book. It was titled Justine of the Misfortunes of Virtue and it was about an orphaned young woman separated from her sister in seventeenth-century France. She tried to remain virtuous, but she fell into all sorts of traps, was raped and imprisoned.
Disgusted, I put the book away. Several stiff sheets of yellowed paper fell from the book to the dark, wooden floor. I noticed that they were pictures, and so I stooped to inspect them. They were old black-and-white pictures of women in various states of undress. Then there was the Golden Goddess, as I would come to call her. As I stared at the picture, the edges of the world around me seemed to darken. When I looked away, I wasn’t sure how much time had passed. I replaced the pictures and wandered from the room still in a daze.
Aunt Quinn met me in the hallway, smiling. “There you are, poking around in that old library. Find anything interesting?”
“Lots of stuff,” I told her, too embarrassed to go into detail.
We had breakfast together and then walked down a worn path laced at the sides with wild flowers. Quinn looked different, yet just as pretty in jeans and a Western shirt, her hair pulled back into a sandy, red-gold tail. I was excited to slip on my riding boots. I wanted to ride the open space of the estate and down to the beach.
Determined to prove how much I knew about horses, I talked about the work I usually did in the summers at the stable. It had been Daddy’s idea that I learn the value of a dollar. So I worked at the stables where I took riding lessons. It was my hope that my father would reward me with my own horse. For years, I had known that we could certainly afford it. Buying a horse was what my father would call frivolous spending. So I answered the phones in the office and kept things tidy in the storeroom and tack room to prove how responsible I could be.
Aunt Quinn had two
horses, a black Tennessee Walker named Nonios, and a sorrel mustang with a white blaze between his eyes she called Abatos, named for two of Hades’ steeds. She was especially proud of the mustang because he had been born a feral horse, captured, and broken in Nevada.
“He’s still practically wild,” Aunt Quinn told me. “I got him just for you.”
I grinned in disbelief. “Really?”
“Of course,” she said. “It’s time we spoiled you a bit. You are a Tinsley, after all.”
I went to the horse and patted his muzzle. He was larger than any horse at the stables where I took lessons. He seemed overwhelmingly muscled, eager to flaunt his strength as he tossed his head and trotted away.
“We’ll get him used to you,” Aunt Quinn assured me in a half-scolding manner. “You’ll have to learn to assert yourself. Once you tame a horse, women are a piece of cake.”
I flushed at her talk. She showed me around the stables. There were ten stalls. She told me that once each held a horse.
“In better times,” Aunt Quinn said bitterly. “When the money was plentiful.”
“What happened?”
“Time,” she answered. “But we have other riches in our family.”
We saddled the horses and I climbed atop Abatos. The big horse fidgeted once I mounted him. I reined him in clumsily, scared of the big horse’s genealogy. At the stable where I worked, we knew of each horse’s sire and dam. The painted stallion, though, was a mystery, as wild and mysterious as his mythological namesake.
We rode side by side, and my heart swelled. This was the land the mysterious Tinsleys had lived on for over two hundred years. It seemed I was learning a new part of myself.
“You handle that horse well,” Quinn said with a smile.
“You think so?” I asked. “He’s a big horse.”
Wildflowers weaved through the tall grass of the open field. We skirted around the occasional oak and their roots that twisted above the ground. I smiled when I heard the roar of the Gulf ahead.
“I want to show you something,” Quinn said. She stopped her hose and dismounted. I followed suit. She took Abatos’s reins away from me and motioned to the tall grass ahead. I walked in the direction she pointed and noticed a white stone obelisk among the twisting vine with trumpet-shaped purple flowers. I pulled away the greenery and saw that words had been chiseled into the stone.
Here Alexandrine D’Orleans landed in 1786
Long Live the Sisterhood
Below was a carving of the seven-sided star. I wondered what it meant. I straightened and turned to Quinn. “Who is Alexandrine D’Orleans?”
“Our ancestor,” she said. “She was a French noble who left her home and privileged life for a great cause.”
“The Sisterhood?” I asked. “What is that?”
“Our legacy,” Quinn told me.
She handed back the reins. “There is much I have to share with you, Tinsley.”
I nodded, and as we walked, I waited for her to tell me about Alexandrine and the Sisterhood, but she remained silent. She watched me gallop through the surf and seemed pleased to watch me do so.
We returned to the house and had lunch. After that, we looked at more photographs in the parlor. The phone rang, and Aunt Quinn went to answer it in the other room. I heard her chatting excitedly in French. I picked up on a few phrases and found myself impressed with her fluency. After half an hour of listening to the talk and trying to catch the gist of the conversation, I closed the album in my lap and drifted to the library. After doing some serious poking around, I found a bottle of rum stashed in a hollowed-out old globe. I also found a case of beetles pinned down under glass. A corresponding book lay close by, full of exact little lithographs.
I went for my sketchbook and began to sketch the beetles in studious detail using a wonderful old oak desk as my work area. I equipped it with a magnifying glass on a stand and a green-hooded lamp. I lost myself in drawing, truly pleased with my skills. I don’t know how much time passed. I heard the door open and turned to see Quinn. She crossed the room to study my handiwork.
“Your mother said you’re clever,” Aunt Quinn said. I turned to see her standing behind me, gazing at my drawings.
She told me it was dinnertime, so I followed her to the dining room. We talked of Abatos and my hopes that my father would not see the gift as undermining his parenting.
“You must stop being frightened of your father,” Quinn said. “He’s only a man.”
I didn’t know what to make of such talk. Though not a fan of my father’s denial of certain things, I was under the impression I would be a better person for it in the end. There were too many girls at school who were spoiled and reckless because their parents could afford it.
“I’m not afraid of my father. I only wish he wasn’t so stuffy and that he didn’t work so much.”
Aunt Quinn looked at me with obvious pity.
“I’ll talk to him first about the horse,” I said. “Abatos is mine, a gift from my other family. I should be allowed to keep him.”
Quinn smiled, obviously impressed. I returned to the library and my sketches until I could hardly keep my eyes open. Tired, I went upstairs to the wonderful claw foot tub in the bath that adjoined my room. As the tub filled with steaming water, I pinned up my hair. I stepped over the porcelain rim and sank into hot, clear water. The pipes made noises that startled me when I pulled the stopper from the drain.
“Just pipes,” I said to myself and wondered if the old house was haunted. Someone had to have died there. I admonished myself for spooking myself like a little kid. I returned to my room dressed in my pajamas. A still figure in red startled me. It was Aunt Quinn standing statue still as she gazed down at a pile of my sketches. She wore a blood-red kimono embroidered with gold and silver cranes, alternating with orange and yellow peony. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders like a headdress. She glowed in the lamplight.
She looked up at me. “Come, Tinsley, there’s something I must show you.”
Quinn moved toward the door, turned, and saw the reluctance on my face. She came to me and took my hand. I followed her down the dimly lit hall. She seemed to float in the floor-length kimono; the only proof that she walked were the minute peeks of the balls of her bare feet. We went down the stairs past the library to the carved double doors of the ballroom.
From her sleeve she produced a key. She glanced at me as she fit the key just under the door handle. “This is your legacy, Tinsley.”
She pushed the doors open, exposing a room lit with flickering lamps, their dim light revealing walls paneled in golden-colored, gleaming wood. The floors were the same, as was a circle of round, low stools covered in a plush red fabric.
The ballroom, though I did not see how anyone could dance in there, ended with a set of steps that led to a raised platform, all carpeted with a pattern of stars.
“This room is a chapel of sorts. It symbolizes the wisdom Alexandrine has passed down to us through the ages.”
I paused in my step, shaken. Though my parents were not very religious (I couldn’t see my father having faith in anything or anyone more than what he could accomplish with his own brain), I couldn’t imagine people in modern times worshipping any other religion.
“Our beliefs are a gift that came to our ancestor in France, Alexandrine D’Orleans, years before anyone thought to call this continent under our feet a country,” Aunt Quinn told me. “She started the Sisterhood, an opportunity for women to explore the true nature of the other realm, away from men and their lies.”
She smiled at me and touched my face. “Your eyes are as huge as saucers.”
“Is this for real?”
She chuckled softly. “The Sisterhood will come next week. Members from all over the world, as we do every seven years. It is my hope that you will join us.”
I didn’t know what to say. I walked past her and explored the room. On the floor at the center of the circle of seats was a large tile mosaic of a seven-sided star wre
athed in fire.
“The great heptagon,” Aunt Quinn said, touching my back. “The source of our power comes from seven, Tinsley. Being a member of the Sisterhood means that you cannot become a mother. We give you that choice. We invite new members from our family―nieces, cousins, friends.”
“Does that mean Mom is not a member?”
“Our aunt Cornelia invited me,” Quinn said. “Your mother was chosen to give us you, a true descendant of Alexandrine, the last.”
She pointed in the distance, and I followed her finger to two paintings. One seemed to put the viewer at a high vantage point looking down at the small figures of seven hooded figures leading a pale, naked woman. The other was a portrait of a dark-haired woman. She wore a low-cut dress that must have been scandalous in her time. Being an amateur student of art, I noted that the picture was unlike any from its time. Alexandrine looked as if she had been painted on the move. Her dark tresses flowed behind her, right off the frame, brow bent, determination in her eyes. Her décolletage shadowed a book that she carried under her arm. Her eyes were fierce.
“Her line ends with you, Tinsley,” Quinn said softly behind me. “I need you to accept.”
“What do I need to do?” I asked without turning.
She came close behind me and took my hand. I turned to face her. Without a word, she pulled me to the platform. There was a low table with a heavy gold pitcher and two short glasses. Quinn poured what looked to be wine into each of the glasses.
“Drink.”
I reached out, then hesitated.
“It’s okay, Tinsley. Trust me.”
I did. The wine was sweet. It warmed my stomach and calmed my nerves. My aunt downed her glass in one swallow. She used the sleeve of her kimono to wipe away the red rivulet that escaped the corner of her mouth.