by Ash Krafton
They entered at last into a grand sun room, with a comfortable arrangement of settees and chairs nearest the tall windows. A pretty garden had been constructed outside in the courtyard, a colorful piece of the fragrant country tucked away in the corner of a cold, stone city.
Facing the window was a huddled figure in a wheeled chair. So reminiscent of her last days with Henry—a tiny sob slipped free, a hiccup, before she squashed her bruised feelings back down to where they couldn’t harm her.
A nurse sat next to the patient, helping her to drink broth from a sipping pot. She looked over at the pair near the door before dabbing her patient’s chin with a napkin.
“Master Richard is here, missus.” She spoke loudly and slowly, as if her patient were addled. “He’s brought company. You like company, remember?”
The nurse packed up everything onto her tray and came over to the door. In a much lower voice, she confided to Breckenridge. “Tough day, today. Be careful not to excite her.”
“Ah, Dixon. Don’t you worry. This would be a happy excitement for her. I’m sure she’ll be fine.”
Senza still in tow, Richard hastened to the woman’s side. “Gran, I’m home. I brought someone to meet you.”
The woman had lifted her head toward his voice. Senza pulled free from his grasp, allowing him to greet her in private, to share a moment of happy reunion. And when he pulled her forward, and the woman turned to look at her—
Senza slowed, ceased, fell straight out of time into a moment that in itself would last a tiny eternity. Time had been a heavy hand upon her, adding lines and layers and blemishes of the skin. Aggie looked old, withered. All that would have horrified Senza if only she could look away from her eyes.
Aggie’s eyes, untouched by the years, staring out of a face that had felt those years all too much.
And those eyes beheld Senza, and they knew her. The disbelief that shone in them was proof. The trembling of the hand that raised to point at her was proof.
Aggie opened her lips, giving a glimpse of crowded teeth, and uttered a coughing scrape of sound that seemed to rip itself out of her throat. The horrifying noise made Senza shrink back.
“Yes, Gran. This is my new friend, Senza. She saw your portrait in the gallery and wanted to meet you straight away.”
Her gaze locked with Aggie’s, Senza shook her head behind his shoulder, so he couldn’t see. I’m sorry, she mouthed. I’m so sorry.
Aggie’s eyes bulged in her head, and a fit of coughing overtook her. It sent Breckenridge into a tizzy, looking for a water glass. There was none. The coughing increased.
Breckenridge apologized and dashed from the room in search of a remedy.
The minute he was gone, Aggie’s cough subsided. She pinned Senza in place with a commanding glare and jerked a finger at the couch in front of her. Senza sank down, obediently, and faced her cousin.
They stared at each other for many long moments.
Then Aggie did the unthinkable. She reached for Senza’s face.
Senza closed her eyes, expecting a hand upon a cheek, a moment of recognition, of homecoming—
Instead, Aggie grasped the flip of hair that poked from under Senza’s hat and pulled it free. Wig, hat, all slipped off, revealing the ruby-red hair that tumbled free.
The thief, discovered.
Senza studied Aggie’s eyes, waiting for some reaction. Instead, there was only a slow deterioration of the commanding attitude, a gradual surrender to the reality of what lay between them. Disappointment may have been the overlay of it. Despair may have tinged it. But something darker was the base, and seemed all too comfortable a fit for her features.
Senza watched the roiling emotions shift into their rightful places in her cousin’s expression. She read each one, and interpreted each one, and accepted each one. Her heart had ached from the absence of Aggie’s company all these years, the loss now fully realized.
This couldn’t be easy on Aggie. Such an impossible thing to see Senza, as perfect as the day they parted.
Senza had become adept at blocking out the passage to time and the transpiration of events. Aggie’s eyes had not changed. Senza’s love had not changed. That surely would be enough to bind them, to find comfort. There had to be a way to ease Aggie’s distress. She reached for her hand, grasping it in both of hers, and whispered her cousin’s name.
Aggie’s gaze turned baleful and she pulled her hand away.
“But, Aggie.” Senza reached up and unpinned her hair, spreading it with her fingers. “It’s me. It’s really me. I know I look strange, but I promise, it’s me.”
Aggie shook her head emphatically.
Senza took to her knees at Aggie’s feet. “Please, Aggie. You don’t know what happened. You have no idea what even happened, or what I went through.”
Finally Aggie pointed at her, then held up both palms, before she turned her eyes away, an arrogant lift to her chin, shutting her out.
Defeated, Senza pushed to her feet, eyes on the floor. The silence crushed her, the air stale.
Another death of something she’d loved. Is this what eternity has come to mean? A million tiny losses instead of one merciful death?
Hastily, she coiled her hair on top of her head and slipped back on her disguise, tucking the last errant strands beneath her cap just as footsteps sounded in the hall.
Richard arrived a moment later with a water glass, tenderly ministering to his grandmother. She reached up and cupped his face with a gnarled hand before closing her eyes and drooping her head against the pillowed headrest.
Senza stood awkwardly away from them, wishing for something to do with her hands.
“Ah.” Richard looked apologetic. “I’d hoped for a longer visit. She’s frail, you know. Drops off at any moment. I’m glad you met, however. She’s my treasure.”
“She would have been mine, too, Richard. Family is the greatest treasure of all.” She pointedly turned toward the old woman, who didn’t appear asleep so much as pretending. A certain gaiety managed to force its way into her voice. “I do miss my own, but the memories I have of them are so pure, so perfect, that I fear if I were to see even a single cousin today, that cold reality would ruin forever my perfect memories of yesterday.”
“A beautiful way to express a sad sentiment. You do have such a lovely way with words.”
“I’ve had years to perfect them, Richard.” She glanced down at Aggie, who seemed intent on keeping her eyes shut tight against Senza’s offensive countenance. “We should go. I’d hate to disturb her peaceful repose a minute longer.”
He gestured with a hand and extended his arm once more, but this time, Senza did not lay her fingers in the bend of his elbow, nor did she smile her coy smile at him as they strolled out of the room. Her mind was quite pre-occupied with the fact that this charming young man was Aggie’s great-grandson.
The concept of stealing his beats seemed almost repulsive.
Senza focused on the inherent vileness of such an act, if only to drown out the more distressing thought. Aggie, her beloved cousin and dearest friend, had grown to resent her to the point that she could not bear to look upon her likeness.
They toured the rest of the collection with an odd disconnect, although Senza did her best to play up her part. Breckenridge was a keen man, however, and had scented the storm on the wind, even though the wind pretended to be cordial and fair. He entertained her gallantly and they promised to dine together soon, pretty promises that neither believed to be true.
A decent man, through and through. And from a large family, too…
London would be full of Aggie’s progeny. Senza felt stifled, as if all the air disappeared. Upon arriving at her apartments, she ordered her things packed even as she strode the stairs. Fervently, she prayed for a sign that she could escape the suddenly oppressive city, full of heartbeats for which she had no appetite.
Taking off her hat, she walked over to her vanity and set it down, spying at once the folded parchment note in front of he
r mirror.
His script.
Her next escape.
At least, Knell had seen to that. She crumpled it in her hand, fisting it against her mouth against a wash of bitter tears. After all these years, after all she’d endured, nothing had truly changed.
She was well-kept, indeed.
Senza became a wanderer, and all the world was an open door.
Despite the abundance of open doors, however, the world never offered more than the scantest of allure; open doors led to cavernous, echoing hallways and sparsely-furnished quarters. It was almost as if each new country, each town were little more than an empty manor house, a shell of pretty façade, lacking hospitality or reason to stay past a curious walk-through.
She moved in slow-motion, like a ribbon trailing through still water, flowing against the stream of time in her timeless, motionless way. The rest of the world was a raging river, full of life and a cacophony of crashes on the rocks and on the shore. No two moments were ever same, despite the perilous, inescapable sense of “now”.
Her “now” and the “nows” of the multitudinous masses were two very different things. To the rest of the world, “now” was a single sweet moment easily missed, fondly remembered, often regretted. Senza’s “now” was simply a snapshot of eternity, played out again and again. Her “nows” were one and the same, forever without end. Empty and bereft of companionship, genuine love, true comfort.
The world sped on around her, cities swelling and industry blooming like daisies in a field, bigger and better and faster and louder.
Yet, she was part of none of it. Deep in her heart, she would always be a scared young girl from the English countryside. Each new invention and accomplishment just ate away at the world she’d known, corroding it and replacing it with the new and the metallic and the modern.
In all its shiny newness, Senza saw only decay.
She sailed from Europe, crossing the Atlantic, seeing the new world for the first time. It was not new at all. All was awash in the inevitable shades of decay. And when she stopped and looked at the people surrounding her, she saw only the hollow despair that came from living their fleeting lives, desperate leaps from one “now” to the next, fervently praying for yet another…
They never noticed the decay that mouldered the shadows, darkening each footstep behind them.
Could she sleep forever? Could she ever escape these heavy sentiments?
Upon arriving in the Americas, she travelled by southbound train, exploring the costal colonies—states, she’d remind herself—but never finding roost. She felt most at home in the South, finding welcome at the wealthiest homes. The stock market crash and the second Great War did not pollute the most prosperous of families, who ignored the tribulations of the world around them, lost in their cotillions and grand teas populated by belles and sharp-suited gentlemen.
In Georgia the plantation manors with their long, scenic tree-lines drives and imposing column-faced homes reminded her most of the home she’d once knew. The lilt of the aristocrats’ voices sounded like music to her English ears; their manner of speaking, their eloquent diction, and their loquacious expressions mimicked the mother tongue, despite the distinct Southern melody with which they spoke.
She lingered longest in Savannah, attending many a coming-out ball, able to wear ballroom finery without shame. She took to society the same way she’d done at her own debut, submerging herself in the comforts of rigid propriety and social intercourse. So easy it was, to become that girl she’d once been.
Georgia in 1931 felt so very much like the England of a century earlier.
It would have been a balm to her hollowing soul, were she not constantly reminded of her wretched state. The locket hung like a stock lock around her neck, a weight she could not escape. Heartbeats were stacked in heaps about her, hers for the taking. Her beauty untarnished, she watched the world around her sour just a bit more, darken as if drawing another tick of the clock toward midnight. Senza drew men to her orbit, her beauty and wit and allure impossible to resist. She was the embodiment of Southern Charm, even though she was never truly a part of that world. Always the flame. Never the moth.
Never the moth again.
The current population of Savannah did not bear the same sentiments for history or tradition as did she, and eventually the pleasant squares were shredded to make room for traffic, the historical building razed to make way for the newer, more glorious age. Senza could not bear to watch another love die, and fretted until her parchment dispatches arrived.
Even as she boarded the west-bound train, she mourned Savannah, with its decaying eloquence, the dripping moss in the trees, the songs of the insects and the smell of the river. Eyes closed, she listened to the clickety-clack of the train on the rails but in her mind’s eye she saw the carts on River Street, wheels rolling in rickety bumps over the cobblestones.
There was something timeless about that town that tugged at her deepest regrets, the way a wistful child pulled at the sleeve of a beloved caregiver. Perhaps the city recognized something inside her, a kindred spirit, and felt as desolate as she. Senza and Savannah shared a tender grief that each wore with stubborn pride, beautiful even as the world turned to grey around them. The past was gone, over, perished, and each of the timeless ladies pinned their hats and spread their fans, too polite to acknowledge time’s regretful passing.
Savannah would never die, not all the way. Neither would Senza. The bitter sweetness of her affection for that city was precisely the reason she left. If she loved, she could lose, and Savannah did not deserve so cruel a fate.
She made her way across the seemingly endless country.
Decades passed. Clothing, music, entertainment…it changed and evolved with every passing decade. All she could bring herself to do was acknowledge that times had indeed changed. That was all. Her days in the throbbing pulse of society were over. She’d tried to remain mainstream, always possessed the means to blend in wherever she wanted to be—to blend in before standing out, her eyes, her skin, her mouth. A hundred years earlier, these were things to be admired from a politely aloof distance.
Now, manners were becoming increasingly familiar to the point of vulgarity. Conversations were bluntly intimate. Sex was a public spectacle, commonplace to the point of being commercialized.
And nowhere was it more evident than in the land of California, deep in the bowels of Hollywood.
When she tired of the offers and the comparisons, she headed back east to New York. No longer the steel glitter of Frank Lloyd Wright and Fifth Avenue, the city had aged, weakened its façade, and the reality peered through. She swam through the nightclubs, packed with pulses and delirium a thousand times worse than the opium dens of Whitechapel. She drifted through the raging river of the nineteen-seventies, engorging herself on the beats of life, stealing from people who seemed all too intent on burning themselves out upon the throes of too fast a life.
In 1984, she stood in the middle of Times Square, surrounded by cacophony of motion and sound and light. The veins of this city ran slick with emotion, dark spurts of desperation and lust and pain. The ragged and torn that clung to the fringe, the fiery predators that hunted the tides of society—these are the heartbeats upon which she fed. And what was she feeding upon, if not the precursors of death?
The realization staggered her. She averted her eyes, not wishing to remain a single moment longer. Please, Knell. If you have any compassion, any thought of me at all…
A shoulder rough-shoved her from behind and she fell to her knees, dazed. A group of loud teenagers swarmed around her, commenting loudly about weirdoes and druggies. On the ground before her lay a strip of parchment. Wild-eyed she looked up, catching the sight of a man with a glassy black ponytail walking away, a head taller than anyone in the crowd around him.
She clutched the paper and, crumpling it to her chest, pushed to her feet. No one acknowledged she’d even fallen.
The paper bore an address in Canada.
; Her locket was full, heavy with the beat and the rhythm of life, so many pulses stolen from the streets of this ceaseless city. It was time to go, and all too easy to leave another world behind.
She boarded a bus in Port Authority, looking very much like some of the waifs that stood in line with her. They looked like orphans, with weary haunted eyes that spoke of despair and loss and surrender. They may have come to this city to realize their dreams, only to learn those dreams may as well have been stars, out of reach and so much brighter when looked upon with eyes that knew hope.
Those souls would one day find peace. Senza could reach up and pluck stars from their perches sooner than peace would be hers. Farther North she travelled, straight through New York to the colonies above.
New England, they called it. The land was as unlike the South as she could have imagined; very much like the north and the south of old England. Massachusetts was the Manchester to the Carolinas’ Brighton; they simply stood a greater distance apart.
Originally, she intended to continue on through to Canada as she’d been instructed, perhaps to visit Prince Edward Island, if only to dispel the notion that the island would have appealed to the ancient boy-king. However, she’d become travel-weary and, during a transfer in Massachusetts, she left the station to seek a room, intending a brief stay.
Boston was quaint and charming in its austerity, the colonial trappings and fierce revolutionary pride that flowed through the veins of the city. She explored the town, as she’d done countless others, and with each conversation, each greeting and pleasantry, another root took hold. Her two-night sojourn turned into a week, a week that became a month. Senza was attracted to this new England and its ever-changing sameness. Slowly she gave in to the admission that she’d finally found someplace to drop an anchor.
She was home, and for once it was a home of her choosing, not a destination on a scrap of parchment.
It wasn’t the home of her childhood, nor any of the temporary homes she’d known. Only a single element beckoned to her, a quality so odd she found herself shaking her head and laughing at herself for admitting it. She stayed because of the voices of the people, their absurd accent. Unlike the English quality of the Southern vice, these northern voices were broad and hard and sharp, nearly savage in its lack of gentility.