Thunder Heights

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  Did she not, indeed? And when she thought of them, she saw Ross’s face all too clearly, and she did not want to see it at all. She shook her head impatiently and stood up.

  “There’s time for all that. If you don’t mind, Aunt Letty, I’ll go back inside. The heat is worse out here than it is in the house.”

  “What is it you’re running away from?” Letty asked.

  Camilla stared at her, not answering, and after a moment her aunt went on.

  “Once I thought there was plenty of time. But when I look back the years are gone and my life with them.”

  “I’m sorry,” Camilla said softly.

  “Don’t be,” Letty told her. “I’ve known contentment and happiness a good deal of the time. Though it’s of a different sort than I might have had. A lesser sort, perhaps.” She rose from the bench and came close to Camilla. “Don’t make the mistake I did, dear. The mistake of closing the door on life.”

  For all that she could be so vague and misty and tremulous at times, Letty saw the truth all too clearly when she chose to. But these were things Camilla did not want glimpsed in her own life, matters she could not discuss. She turned away and went quickly into the house.

  As the day wore on, the air grew ever more still and stifling, with the sun burning fiercely through a haze that seemed to magnify the heat. Late that afternoon relief was promised in thunderheads that loomed across the Hudson, bringing gusty winds to tear at the house and set its old timbers creaking. Wind rattled the shutters, wailed down the chimneys of Thunder Heights, and heat fled before the damp onslaught of the wind. All through dinner the buffeting seemed to increase. Nevertheless, the storm held back its expected torrents and was for a time only wind and sound.

  Except for the wind noises, dinner was a quiet meal. Letty ate little and spoke not at all. Booth seemed lost in moody silence. Camilla, deep in her own tormenting thoughts, made no bid for conversation. Thoughts stirred to uneasy life by Letty’s words.

  Letty’s headache had grown in severity, and after dinner she excused herself and went up to bed, refusing Camilla’s offer to get her something to ease the throbbing. Camilla watched her go anxiously, and Booth saw her concern.

  “She often feels like this when it’s about to storm,” he said.

  The weather had a different effect upon Camilla. She slipped away from Booth and went outside to the ledge above the river. There she stood for a long while in the open, where wind whipped her skirts and buffeted her with rough fingers. Out here, with this exhilaration of the elements all about her, she could lose something of her depression, her loneliness.

  Below her the river churned into choppy gray waves, and on the heights above trees thrashed their branches and moaned in the wind. How far above, invisible in the gusty darkness, the stony head of the mountain seemed tonight. Had it been on such a night that Althea had ridden to the crest? Camilla wondered.

  She could understand the invigoration her mother might have found in so wild a ride. The racing black clouds overhead, the cold thrust of the wind, even the stinging slap of the first rain against her face—all these were exciting, stimulating.

  Cold needles of rain pricked through the thin stuff of her shirtwaist, and she turned reluctantly back to the house. From the lawn Thunder Heights looked dark and somber and cheerless. No one had lighted the swinging lamp above the stairs tonight—that was usually Hortense’s charge, and Letty must have forgotten. Lamps had not yet been lit in the parlor, and the dark windows had an eerie look. Camilla remembered her first feeling about the house when she had seen it from the river—that it was a place enchanted and spellbound.

  It drew her now, in spite of herself, and she moved toward it just as thunder clapped against the mountain and went echoing from hill to hill up the valley of the Hudson. She did not glimpse Booth in the shadows of the veranda until she reached the steps. His presence startled her. How long had he stood there, watching her?

  “It’s time you came in,” he said. “Don’t tempt the spirit of the mountain.”

  Thunder rumbled nearer now, and lightning flashed, illuminating black towers, striking brilliance from blank windows. Then darkness swept down again, all the more blinding in contrast. Camilla went up the steps, still feeling the strange lure of the house. As she reached the door, Grace came to light lamps in the parlor, and Booth followed her in, locking the French doors against the storm.

  How hot and close it seemed inside, once the wind was shut out. Hot and close and alive with rattling sound.

  “Perhaps Aunt Letty would like someone with her tonight,” Camilla said. “Perhaps I’d better go upstairs.”

  “Wait,” Booth said. “There’s no need to go to Letty. I’ve given her one of her own witch brews and she’ll sleep through it all and feel better in the morning. Stay with me awhile, Cousin. It’s I who don’t want to be left to my own company.”

  She had no desire to be alone either, in this creaking, whispering house. She sat down in a chair from Malaya, resting her hands upon its ornately carved teak arms. It was too warm for a fire to be lighted, but she missed the bright leaping of flames on a night like this. A fire always made this museum of a room seem more cheerful. Tonight it was a room of oppressive shadows, abounding in its own secrets.

  Booth did not take the chair opposite her, but moved restlessly about, tinkling a brass temple bell from India, picking up an ivory elephant and setting it down again. She had the feeling that he wanted to talk to her, and she waited for him to begin. Something in her listened to the storm, tensing to the thunder and vivid flashes of lightning. The fury seemed to be lessening a little now—rolling away toward the Catskills. Rain still lashed against the windows and roofs but the wild vitality was ebbing.

  Booth continued his uneasy prowling, and she watched his finely chiseled head as it moved from lamplight into shadow, to emerge again, the face visible in all its dark intensity. Drawn as she had been more than once in the past, she began to wonder about him. It was as if his somber presence made a focus of its own, matching the storm in a strange concentration of energy.

  “Why do you stay here, Booth?” she asked. “Why haven’t you left this house and found yourself a better life out in the world? What is there for you here?”

  Her words brought him about to face her. He leaned against the mantel, one arm stretched along its marble surface.

  “How little you know me, Cousin! You don’t even know that everything I’ve wanted in life is contained in this one household, and always has been. Contained, but held beyond my reach. For the moment, at least. But not forever. No, I think not forever.”

  His eyes were bright with a mirthless laughter that was troubling to see.

  “What is it that you want of life?” she asked him.

  He ran an appreciative hand along the graceful fluted edge of the marble. “To be a gentleman,” he told her. His sardonic smile flashed for an instant and was gone as suddenly as the lightning. “To be a gentleman, to live like a gentleman, to enjoy myself as a gentleman. This has been my purpose for as long as I can remember. Does it astonish you?”

  It did indeed.

  “I suppose,” Camilla said, “that I’ve never thought of the matter of being a gentleman—or a lady—as being an end in itself.”

  “That’s because you never lived as a child hating your father’s butcher shop, longing to get away from the look and smell of it. You didn’t grow up watching ladies and gentlemen from a distance, having coppers tossed to you in an offhand manner, being treated as an underling.”

  He left the mantel and flung himself into a chair, watching her face now, as if he looked for something in it.

  “What are you thinking?” he demanded. “What are you feeling about me?”

  She sensed a surging need in him, something that reached out to her, almost in pleading.

  “Why, surprise, mainly, I suppose,” she said, trying to answer him honestly.

  “You mean because I’ve succeeded so well that you’d nev
er have guessed my miserable origin?”

  She shook her head. “No—only surprise that anyone should feel as you do. I suppose that all my life I’ve known people in different walks of life, and if I liked them, their background made no difference to me. It must be easy enough to adopt a veneer of polish, if that’s what you want. But how can that be an end in itself?”

  “It can easily be an end,” he said, “if it coincides with everything you wanted up to the time when you were ten years old. And if it is what you were taught from that time on.”

  “Aunt Letty told me you were adopted when you were ten,” Camilla admitted. “Sometimes I’ve wondered about that. Aunt Hortense doesn’t seem exactly—” she hesitated, not wanting to hurt him.

  “Don’t you know why she brought me here? Don’t you know why she snatched me out of my humble beginnings and made a gentleman out of me?”

  There was something hard in his tone and Camilla was silent.

  He went on evenly, coldly. “She had lost the man she’d set her heart on—your father. She didn’t intend to marry and have children. But she wanted to make sure that a good portion of Orrin Judd’s fortune came her way. She thought that presenting him with an heir of sorts would safeguard the money she wanted in her own hands. My father was happy to be rid of me. My mother had died the year before and left the whole brood of us to him. Miss Judd had a look at me, talked to me, found that I was bright enough and eager to be part of a different world. I’d shown some talent for painting even then, and she thought me a likely boy to present to her father, who was all for humble beginnings. Unfortunately, old Orrin and I never cared for each other—though she wouldn’t see that. Your Aunt Hortense has always believed only what she wanted to believe. She imagines that she has been a doting mother. But all her doting developed after I was twenty and she found she liked a grown young man at her beck and call.”

  Camilla made a small gesture of distaste, of disbelief. Booth laughed.

  “It’s not a pretty story, is it? Can you imagine Hortense mothering a boy of ten? And of course she wouldn’t take a small baby. She felt I was at least old enough to be of little trouble. I might have run away once or twice, if it hadn’t been for Letty. It was Letty who mothered and loved me and brought me up. Of course when I was older I began to see very well which side my bread was buttered on. Sooner or later the old man would die. And whether he left me anything for myself or not, I would have Hortense eating out of my hand and whatever she had would be mine. I’ve never for a moment lost sight of that. Everything I want is here at Thunder Heights.”

  Camilla listened, her sympathy aroused, for all that she felt a little sickened. He had, she suspected, deliberately put everything in the worst possible light, driven by some strange need for self-inflicted punishment. The phrase “edge of danger” came to mind. In telling her these things, perhaps he moved a little closer to that edge of destruction that so fascinated him, tantalizing and tormenting himself with his own words.

  “How sad and—pitiful,” she said softly, more to herself than to him.

  He smiled, and his dark face sprang into that strange beauty that she had surprised in it before.

  “Scarcely pitiful, Cousin. Though you must admit that my plans and hopes went awry for a time when you appeared on the scene and we discovered that you were to inherit everything that might have come to my mother.”

  “I should think you would have left then,” Camilla said. “I can understand why two women like Hortense and Letty might feel they couldn’t leave a security they had depended on all their lives. But you—”

  “Tell me, Cousin,” he said, “have I been unkind to you? Have I made you feel that I resented and disliked you?”

  “No. No, not at all. You’ve been far kinder to me than Hortense has been.” Or than Ross Granger had, for that matter.

  “Perhaps I stayed because of you,” he said, and there was a gentleness, almost a tenderness, in his voice.

  The storm had come rumbling back upon its own tracks, and Camilla saw the blinding glitter of lightning. The windows shivered in an almost instantaneous crash of thunder, and this time she winced.

  “A close one,” Booth said. “That was on the mountain above us, I think.” He went to one of the long doors to peer out through the lashing branches of an elm tree. When he turned and looked at her across the room, his gaze was long and searching.

  She was suddenly aware of how closed off they were in this room. She was aware, too, of a change in Booth, of a quickening in him as he watched her. Something in her own blood stirred in response to the urgency she sensed in him.

  Because the knowledge left her shaken, she rose uncertainly and walked from the parlor into the antehall. Candies had been lighted in the outstretched marble hands, but the octagon stairway beyond lay in shadow without the usual illumination from above. Intermittently the tall window above the stairs flickered with lightning. All the dark secrets of Thunder Heights seemed to center in the heart of that weirdly lighted stairway, and she dreaded walking up it.

  In the moment that she hesitated, Booth came through the door to find her there. Perhaps she had wanted to hesitate, knowing he would come.

  This time he moved toward her with assurance and took her into his arms, kissed her full on the mouth. His lips were cool in the hot and stifling house, and the shock of their touch brought her to herself. She thrust him away, in spite of the response that throbbed in her own blood. Thrust him back instinctively, lest his darkness engulf them both.

  For an instant he seemed taken by surprise, as if he had not expected her to resist. Then he drew her roughly against him and kissed her again.

  “Never fight me, Cousin,” he said as she tried to turn her head away. “Always remember that—never fight me!”

  There was a warning in his voice that made her cease her struggling. She went limp in his arms, resting there inert, until he put her quietly away from him.

  “Haven’t you known the attraction you’ve had for me from the first, Camilla? There’s no cousin relationship between us—that’s a pretty fantasy. Don’t you know that you are why I’ve stayed in this house? That I’ve stayed because I wanted you and mean to have you?”

  She found herself moving backward from him, toward the stairs and possible flight. She no longer feared the darkness. She feared Booth Hendricks more. Or was it herself she feared—the response he had aroused against her will?

  “You were drawn to me in the beginning,” he persisted. “It was clear enough. What turned you away? I suppose you’ll tell me it was Granger?”

  “No,” she whispered. “Ross Granger is nothing to me.”

  He laughed with a queer exultance. “Do you think I haven’t seen the way you look at him? Not that I mind. There’s all the more satisfaction when a formidable opponent is beaten. I don’t underestimate Granger, believe me. But I think you both underestimate me.”

  She had reached the stairs, and she turned and fled up them through the flashing light, with the thunder drowning out any sound of pursuit. She did not look back until she reached the door of her room and flung it open. In a flash of lightning the hall behind her stretched empty and livid. Below, in the heart of the house, she heard a ringing shout of laughter. Booth was amused by her flight, by her fear of her own emotions, but he had not followed her upstairs.

  She closed the door and locked it, stood trembling against it in the warm safety of her room. But before she had found matches to light a candle on the stand near the door, she stood alone in the darkness, welcoming the soft gloom that hid her.

  Never before had she felt such shame and fear. Not alone because of Booth, but for herself. She knew now that her own loneliness must be watched. It was true that she had always found Booth attractive. But was she, who had been so rudely rejected by Ross Granger, now responding to Booth out of her own need, and because he needed her? Was her fear of becoming like Letty, dry and brittle as herb leaves on a shelf, to drive her to desperate action?

&nbs
p; Her hands shook as she lighted the candle. Was it even possible that Booth was what she wanted, after all? Certainly they shared a good deal—a lonely background and the insecurity of the past. What was it then that held her back from him? What was it she distrusted? Booth Hendricks could be artist or devil. She did not know which.

  Now she was afraid in this house as she had never been afraid before. She was seized by forebodings that she could not put aside. Booth would not easily be stopped in his purpose. And his purpose was to have her. Only then would he achieve all he wanted of Thunder Heights. Had she the strength to stand against him? Would she always want to?

  NINETEEN

  In the morning she dreaded the moment when she must come face to face with him again. When she went downstairs to the dining room, Booth was there, as if he waited for her. He stood near the bay window overlooking Letty’s herb garden, but he stood with his back to it, as if he were studying the room.

  “Good morning, Camilla,” he said cheerfully as she paused at the sight of him, trying to hide her dismay. He hurried to draw out her chair, a faint mockery beneath his good manners, as if he knew very well how she felt about seeing him.

  “I’ve been admiring this room,” he said. “You’ve done wonders with it. I can remember how many depressing meals I’ve eaten in the old room under Orrin Judd’s eyes, with dark wallpaper and draperies adding to my depression. You’ve been good for this house.”

  She had nothing to say to him. She stared at her plate, avoiding his eye as Grace brought coffee and oatmeal. He was smiling as he took his place beside her.

  “Did you sleep well?” he asked.

  She nodded and began to eat in silence. How could she pretend, as he seemed to be pretending, that everything was as it had been before he had kissed her last night?

  Plainly amused, he passed her cream and sugar, set the honey bowl by her plate. Then he picked up a knife and made a mark on the tablecloth with the rounded end of it.