by L. K. Rigel
“And something to eat,” Eleanor added.
“Penelope, do rest now.” Marta felt it was right to call her Penelope. “Harry, we need a clean cloth and water.”
Penelope Adams, on the first of two occasions in her life, cried. Sobs of exhaustion and relief wracked her frame while Marta washed her face. Eleanor offered a cup of broth which was refused. Josef brought a glass of brandy which she downed in two gulps.
“What I have seen,” she said. Her usually bold voice was low, awestruck, filled with sorrow. She held out the empty glass, which Josef refilled without pause. “What day is this?”
“Thursday, August 25,” said the newspaperman. “1831,” he added, in case she were quite addled.
“Four days,” Mrs. Adams fixed a wild look upon each of them. “I have been riding for four days.” She scanned the room. “And all is well here, and in Shermer Landing generally?”
“All is quite well, Mrs. Adams,” Eleanor said. She again urged the soup on Penelope, who this time took it greedily.
“Penelope,” Marta said. “Tell us what you have seen.”
“Four days ago, Sunday night—or I suppose it was Monday morning—a strange sound woke me. It was a muted, gurgling sound. The sound of my husband Mr. Adams dying of a slit throat.”
“Oh!”
“Good Lord.”
“In the moonlight, I saw dear Franklin’s bewildered face. Suddenly someone grabbed my wrist, and I felt sure I was to be next. I became aware of the terror around me. Screams of horror and woeful cries in the house where we were staying—Franklin’s family plantation in Southampton—and from outside the house as well.
“I heard a strange voice say ‘not yet,’ but I could not place the voice in a body.
“Another man, not the one who held my arm, cried out, ‘Not her!’ He pointed to my necklace. The one who held me shrieked ‘Voudon!’ and let go my wrist. They both fled.
“Through the window, I saw a band of black men, slaves, I am sure, some on horses with rifles. One of the men on horseback shouted to the others—the sound of it has haunted me these last days—‘Remember: the first shall be last, and the last shall be first!’ His voice was commanding, beautiful, but his words were terrible. I couldn’t call out for help or they would be back for me; Uncle James’s necklace would not save me twice. The murderers moved on.
“Oh! My dear Franklin. His expression I’ll never forget. He was angry! Not afraid, but furious. And then his face softened. He looked directly at me, and his soul touched my soul, more profoundly than I know how to say. And then he was gone. There on the bed lay a shell, no more than a slab of flesh. That wasn’t Franklin. I waited for hours beside the body. I heard or imagined screams and wailing through all that time.
“At some point near the dawn’s break, I heard a horse’s whinny and dared to peek through the window to see if the men had returned. But the horse was riderless, fully saddled. Someone had lost his mount. I wasted no time. I grabbed this overcoat and ran, down the stairs, past Franklin’s mother and father slaughtered on the stairway, out to the yard past the bodies of all eight boys who lived in the dormitory above the school house, even the slain corpses of Franklin’s six month old niece and her mother.”
“This is too terrible!” Eleanor said. It became clear the dark blotches on Mrs. Adams’ nightdress were not dirt at all but dried blood.
“I flew up onto that horse, screaming, like I was shouting myself out of hell. He set out at a mad pace and I hung on, surely terrifying him with my own terror. I have slept hidden under bridges or among trees all the way. I wasn’t sure how far the rebellion had spread.”
“Rebellion,” Harry said, confirming his own suspicion. “So there has been a slave uprising after all.”
“It appears so,” said Josef.
“Excuse me for a moment.” Harry spoke to his valet. “Jones, fetch Jackson. You’ll find him at The Snowy Owl. Tell him to come round at once. I’ve got a story here I want him to write.”
No one thought Harry heartless. They’d known Penelope Adams all or most of their lives. They admired her courage and brashness and knew she’d gladly tell her story to his reporter.
“Poor Franklin,” She said. “He predicted this. He hates—hated slavery with a passion. Anyone who knew him...” Replenished by the soup, emboldened by the brandy, and never having had any sense of propriety anyway, Penelope Adams then said, “What are you all doing in my house?”
The awkward silence was short-lived. Harry the future politician told the truth as he knew it in terms most palatable to his listener.
Penelope blanched. The glass slipped from her hand and shattered on the floor. As she fell toward the shards, Harry and Josef jumped forward to steady her.
“Ugh,” Eleanor pointed to a spot of bright blood on the floor.
A sickening odor suddenly permeated the air, and Josef inspected Penelope’s lower extremities. A gash on the right calf was swollen, crusted with dried brown blood and oozing fresh blood and pus. It smelled of decaying flesh. “Get the doctor.”
Harry raced from the house, but it was of no matter. By the time he returned with the doctor, Penelope was delirious. By the time the ladies got her into bed, she was comatose. The doctor confirmed the gangrene had spread. Through the night, Marta kept her vigil. By morning, that magical creature, the pirate’s golden-haired daughter, who had enchanted Leopold Singer, mystified Franklin Adams, and awed her own daughter, had left this world.
Miracles
When the party from Massachusetts arrived at Laurelwood, Marta and Igraine straightaway took Sara aside to tell her the horrible news about her parents.
“The strangest thing happened.” Marta produced a parcel from her pocket, a cloth pouch containing an amulet. “Your mother was delirious. She hadn’t known a soul for hours. I was sitting with her, and I fell asleep. But I dreamed I was awake there beside her.
“The fire had long gone cold, but in my dream it blazed to a roar. Penelope sat up in her bed. She knew me. She knew herself. She was quite lucid and adamant to her purpose. ‘Give this to Sara,’ she said. She stretched her hand toward me. Then the room was dark. The hearth was as cold as her poor lifeless body. I was awake, and this was in my hand. I cannot explain it.”
Sara opened the little purse. “Uncle James!”
“What do you mean, dear?” Geordie examined the amulet. “Does this belong to your mysterious guardian angel?”
“It’s my Uncle James’s. He wore it every day of my life until my mother and father went away. He must have given it to mama.”
“She said it saved her from your father’s murderers,” said Igraine.
“Are you so shocked, my dear?” Sara said to her husband. “You know I come from pirate stock. An artifact of island custom is bound to fall out of my past from time to time.”
“More provocative than shocking,” Geordie Carleson kissed Sara’s hand with obvious warm regard. Marta felt gratified. She’d given Sara the right advice.
“How provocative is this, then?” Sara put the amulet on. “Now the loa will protect me.”
“I am full in favor of anything that protects my darling.” Geordie laughed as if he didn’t believe in island spirits, but Marta saw that Sara believed it all, even the dream.
There was more to it than she’d told, something which could be no dream. When Penelope had fixed on her that look of recognition, Marta had blurted out. “Sara is married. You have a granddaughter!”
Penelope’s expression had radiated eager pleasure which metamorphosed into rage—rage against Death coming for her, Marta supposed, come to steal the one thing she wanted: more. More time. More life.
‘More’ was the last word on her last breath.
-oOo-
The next day Marta came down to breakfast alone. A message had come saying the baroness was in extremis, and the Carlesons and Lady Asher had gone to The Branch. Marta’s fellow travelers had left even earlier to go on a walk to view the “sublime” waterfalls some four mil
es away. She was certainly glad to have missed that.
“Bi-ket.”
“Oh, and who can this be!” Marta squealed.
Little Jane came running in on strong little legs looking for fun. Marta saw none of Sir Carey in the child, and for that she was grateful. There was not much of Sara there either. The straw-blonde hair and irreverent blue eyes were likely Penelope’s gift to the granddaughter she never knew.
“Bi-ket,” Jane said again.
“Do you want a cookie? Let’s see what we can find, dear.” In the kitchen, Marta lifted the girl up onto a stool. “Stand here dear. I want to get a good look at you.”
“Ooh, ‘nake,” Jane pointed at Marta’s brooch.
“You dear thing.” How right April Zehetner was! Marta’s heart had been here in England, in the safekeeping of this child.
“There you are, Jane!”
The woman in the kitchen doorway was not a stranger. “Gray? Susan Gray?”
“Mrs. Singer, hello. I’ve been looking forward to seeing you again.”
“Why are you here?”
Marta heard all about the duke’s softhearted, romantic side, Susan’s tragic marriage, and her relation to Lady Asher. “So I have lived here all these years, and my time in London seems unreal to me now. Sara told us about his—about Mr. Singer’s dreadful accident. I am so very sorry.”
Jane sat on Marta’s lap with a half-eaten biscuit suspended in front of her mouth, staring thoughtfully out the open half of the kitchen’s Dutch door.
“That one will be a philosopher,” Susan said. “Much good will it do her.”
“You were going to tell me about your father?” Marta said.
“Just this: My father was a gentleman, but my mother was poor, with no connections. When they married, my father’s family disowned him. He died when I was fifteen, and my mother had no capacity for the world. She disintegrated, essentially.”
“Susan, you use the most marvelous language.”
“My father understood me. After he was gone, except for one brief time, I never felt I belonged anywhere. Then I came to Laurelwood. I was useful to the people I cared for and who cared for me. And Mr. Geordie’s Jane is a dear.”
Mr. Geordie’s Jane. Marta said, “I want to hear about all of her adventures.”
Susan looked past Marta, “Now who is this coming to the back of the house?” They watched a man get out of a carriage and come through the kitchen garden, looking a little lost.
“I know that man,” Marta said. “No doubt, he has come in pursuit of the ever-elusive Miss Igraine Fiddyment.”
Susan said, “We’d better see what there is for the poor man to eat.”
“I’ll bring him in.” Marta met Solomon Grasmere at the winter squash and led him into the kitchen.
“Mrs. Singer, what luck,” he said. “I’ve found the right place, then. I didn’t want to present myself at the front door to total strangers.”
“Come in, Mr. Grasmere.”
If Solomon Grasmere thought it was odd to be given tea and scones right there in the kitchen, he made no sign of it. He devoured the offering and after some moments said, “I found I could not stay away.”
“We’re all on your side, you know,” Marta said. “Miss Fiddyment will come round. Love will find its way.”
-oOo-
Sara returned from The Branch and slipped into her sitting room. It was the morning of the equinox, and a light rain fell on the Peak. The red oak at the mallard pond had lost all its leaves but one, and it fluttered in the chilly breeze.
An occasional splash of sunlight broke through the clouds. It was cozy in her little room, its fire burnt down to radiating embers while outside Nature shed the last of summer. On the other side of winter would come every shade of green and blue skies with cotton-puff clouds. Around the pond, white narcissus would burst out laughing in every tiny depression as the yellow of daffodils strained at the tips of their green shafts. The whole world would be born again, then.
But on this autumn day, the oak’s fingers were black against a gray sky, holding on against everything to this year’s remains. But the world couldn’t hold on to her mother, always greater than life, and now death was taking Aunt Philomela. An hour ago, she had been in her great aunt’s room for a last goodbye.
“Elizabeth tells me Circe’s brat—I mean your mother is dead,” Philly had said. “So when I am gone, you will be Baroness Branch, and the estate will be yours.”
“That can’t be right. Somehow it seems Sir Carey—and therefore Wills should have a better claim.”
“Officially, Wills is no relation, no matter how well-loved. He’s not in the line.”
“Officially?”
“The world is full of secrets and unfairness, as you well know, dear Sara.” Philomela’s grip tightened. “You have a secret. I hope you value the good husband the Fates sent you.”
“I do.”
“I told my secret once, but the person I told died before he could do anything about it. Now you will have to bear my secret with your own. Someone needs to bear it, and I think you’re the proper person.”
“Oh, Aunt Philly.”
“There is nothing to say about Jane. I know men. I knew my son, and his son, and I think I know my own great-granddaughter.”
“Great-granddaughter?”
“Jane is Wills’s daughter, no? Sir Carey was known to the world as my ward. He was in truth my son. And he was born in a manner very like Jane, I imagine. His father was Aristaeus Sande.”
“My grandfather?”
“Your grandfather was also Wills’s grandfather. Sande got to two Asher sisters. Now someone knows.” Philomela let go of Sara’s hand.
“But I cannot be a baroness,” Sara said at last.
“So thought I, my dear. So thought I.”
Sara had fled the sickroom, fled the Branch. Geordie, tolerant as always, had not stopped her. Here in this room at Laurelwood, Sara could still be Sara Adams. Not Mrs. Geordie Carleson or, horror of horrors, The Right Honorable, the Baroness Branch. She looked through the window at the small lake and the oak. The leaves had fallen until there was only the one.
A letter from Uncle James lay unopened on her desk, long in coming from Jamaica, addressed to Miss Sara Adams. He didn’t know she was married. It was her first contact from him since he’d left her at the Boston docks, and she dreaded what news it might contain. She would never see Uncle James again, and she hated to think of him alone so far away.
She turned instead to a different letter she kept in her skirt pocket. In the last year and a half of cruel uncertainty, this had been her one constant, her most comforting companion, its every phrase now marked on her brain. She had held fast to the letter, but like the oak tree, she had to let go of the past if she was to have a future. She moved to the hearth for better light and unfolded the page.
My darling S,
I know you will never forgive me. I can never forgive myself. You must believe my intention was to make you mine—not to drive you forever from me. I disgraced myself even in my own eyes. I post this from London, but when you receive it I shall have left England for ever.
When I met you, I was redeemed, recalled from the path of debauchery and self-contempt. If it is any small consolation for the pain I have caused you, I live and shall live daily aware of the happiness that could have been. Happiness I destroyed through my own folly.
Be assured, I shall not accost you further. I intend to remain abroad.
Your humble and most sorry admirer, always,
W
The sharp, screaming honks of geese flying over the lake startled her. At the same time, she heard her husband’s voice outside the door. She must let go of the ideal she had made of Wills—and made in error, no question of that. At all events, she wouldn’t see him again in this lifetime. And if Aunt Philly’s disclosure had not been enough, yesterday she had learned from the physician a thing which must force her to break every bond between her and Wills. Again t
he geese shrieked.
She flung the letter like a sacrifice into the fire; eighteen months were immolated in less than eighteen seconds.
-oOo-
“A double rainbow!” April called up from the veritable cliff she and Josef had begun to descend.
“Lovely!” Lovely! Lovely!
To her delight, Igraine’s echo repeated off the hillside across the chasm. She was in love with the feast that was England. The standing stones and the old buildings, the impeccable manners, and the enthusiastic reception she had been given by her London bookseller. Her life had taken a wonderful turn all because four years ago her friend had the faith to send in that story.
Today she was self-sufficient. Not wealthy, but well-to-do. And she had created her fortune herself. It was hers, and no one was going to take it from her.
“Daydreaming?” April came back up the hill.
“Contemplating my wonderful life. I am so very content. Mr. Murray gave me letters from readers all wanting more. He is anxious to continue as my London publisher. I told him that my next title is The Moonstone’s Return. I suppose I should begin writing it sometime!”
“You are content to be the popular lady novelist—and no more?”
“I’m not so lucky as you, my beautiful friend. And where is your dashing sea captain?”
“Gone to find any lingering wildflowers. He sent me back to rest.”
“And you let him send you away?”
April patted her stomach. “I have to think of more than myself, now.”
“Oh, April, that’s wonderful.”
Igraine hugged her friend and smelled her hair, as if it would be different somehow, and without thinking put her hand on April’s abdomen. They both laughed and lay down on the grass to watch for shapes in the gathering clouds.
“Igraine, why won’t you marry Mr. Grasmere?” April said. “He loves you, he adores you. He’s a good man.”
“Yes, yes. But I…” In truth, it was becoming harder to continue to refuse Mr. Grasmere.