by Fine, Clara
He had only been out on the porch for a minute when he heard an unidentifiable scraping sound. He couldn't pinpoint where it came from at first, until there was a more distinct sound, a soft footstep from above his head. It was at that moment that he realized what the scraping sound had been. Someone had opened a window on the second floor and climbed out onto the balcony. His first thought, as inside of the house a bright tune began playing, was that someone was trying to steal from the Johnsons. He took a few steps back into the shadowy corner of the porch, out of the light that streamed from the windows, as whoever was above walked to the other side of the balcony, where a twisted oak that was probably older than the house grew.
He could hear branches rustling as the intruder climbed into the tree, and a suspicion began to grow in his mind. When he was able to see a stockinged leg and the hem of a striped skirt, he knew that it was Cam.
Her sister was right, he thought, not so indisposed after all.
Where was she going? What had her out and about at this hour? His first theory was a lover, but the dress she wore was even plainer that the one she'd been wearing at the barbecue, and her hair had come loose and fallen around her shoulders. She hadn't taken much care with her appearance, which made him doubt that she had taken a leaf out of her sister Diana's book and taken a lover. What then? Tales of young ladies misbehaving usually involved young men. If there was no young man, what could she be up to?
She moved with an almost catlike grace through the branches of the tree, which was remarkable given that even a simple dress seemed remarkably constricting to a woman's movement. She landed softly and froze, listening. He could see the gentle rise and fall of her chest. The light of the half-moon illuminated her face, darkening her eyes to jet and giving her skin a silvery gleam. He caught his breath and held it, while she listened to make sure that she had not been observed. The corner where he stood was shadowed by a stand of trees. She couldn't see him, and he didn't make a sound. In a minute her skirt twirled as she vanished down the porch steps and around the side of the house.
Brent didn't even need to debate with himself. He just followed her.
***
Cam could smell the smoke on the air as she walked through the darkness to the kitchen. Caro and Grandma must have already started lighting the candles. She could identify every herb they burned and knew what each one was for. She smelled one herb for protection, one for peace, one for strength, and three for secrecy. It was always that way. Secrecy was all-important. It had been since she was a little girl and she had first taken the path to the kitchen. She had been searching for someone to replace her mother and had found instead a family secret that was truly a matter of life and death.
Following their mother's death, each of the girls had sought her own refuge. Helen had been little more than a baby when their mother had died, and she had grown up with the sadness imprinted on her soul. She couldn't remember the mother that she was mourning, but she would mourn her forever nonetheless. Helen had escaped into her books, her studies and her prolific diary-keeping. Cam didn't think that her younger sister had missed a daily diary entry since she was seven or eight.
Diana searched in the wrong places for a love to replace the love she had lost. People still gossiped about her scandal, whispered that she was a wanton woman. Cam hated them for it. She couldn't forgive society for its harsh judgment of her sister, not when she knew that loneliness and sadness were to blame, not wantonness.
Cam had found peace in the kitchen, away from her melancholy father, strict aunt and sisters who were as distant and emotionally crippled as she. After her mother's death she had felt constantly, inexplicably cold. She was constantly falling ill and shivered her way through several months before she discovered the kitchen. Winter, spring, summer and autumn, the kitchen was sweltering and full of life. Despite the strange things that went on there was also a sense of normalcy. Potatoes were peeled, the bones were cast, butter was churned and graveyard dirt was kept in a jar behind the jellies and jams. Cam had listened to Grandma and Caro, learning all that they would teach her. In time she found that their presence chased the cold away.
Cam knew every step of the path that she walked, and so even in the dark she could avoid the spot where the old carriage house had once stood. In the years after his wife's death, Cam's father had tried more than once to grow new grass over the spot where Solange and Sam had burned to death. Eventually, almost reluctantly, the grass had taken root. Since then they'd had storms. Wind that tore through like the devil himself, rain that fell until the Mississippi itself was drowning under the deluge. The ash had washed away, but Cam could still discern, with perfect precision, the outline of the carriage house. The ash may not have been there, but traces of the evil that had ended Solange’s life remained. In Cam’s family it was called rootwork, but it was known by other names: conjure, the evil eye, hoodoo. Whatever you termed it, however you practiced it, there was a distinction, a line that wasn’t meant to be crossed. A line that had been trampled that day in 1839, when the carriage house had burst into unnatural flames and consumed two lives.
Solange had been a practitioner, a rootworker, just as Caro and Grandma were. Cam wasn’t entirely sure when her family had first been introduced to rootwork. Perhaps when they first settled in Haiti, perhaps before then. Cam had never asked.
Like so many things in life, it could be used for good purpose or ill. Cam had never had cause to hurt anyone with her conjure, but she knew how. She knew how to defend herself with it, even how to kill with it. Though in light of her mother’s death, the very thought made her ill.
It was her secret, hers, Grandma’s and Caro’s. Her sisters knew too, though as far as Cam knew neither of them practiced. She frequently wondered about Diana. Grandma certainly hadn’t trained Diana, but Diana had been older when their mother had died, almost nine years old. Solange might have begun training her before she died. Cam frequently wanted to ask, but there never seemed to be a right time to discuss their mother.
The scent of herbs grew stronger as she drew closer to the kitchen, and Cam caught the faint sound of their voices. She heard Caro's voice first, heard her speaking softly and steadily. Her grandmother's voice was higher, cracking with age, but they both sounded calm. Her foot creaked on the step and they both fell silent. There was a rustling sound at the window and then Caro opened the door, and warm, flickering candlelight spilled out, illuminating Cam's face and casting a narrow circle of light on the weathered steps beneath her feet. “It's the child,” she told Daphne, shaking her head slightly. “I told you she wouldn't be at that ball.”
“Oh, Cam,” her grandmother said, but she didn't sound terribly bothered. She had reached the age where one ball blended into the other and became indistinguishable from barbecues and weddings, and she didn't much care if Cam attended any of them.
Grandma was seated at the hearth, which was not lit, with Mary, Caro's niece. Mary had come to Cypress Hall as a young child, and Caro had raised her since then. She was delicately built and her face was attractive, with big eyes and small, perfect white teeth. She had recently turned eighteen, but something in her face looked younger, perhaps fifteen or sixteen. She stared up at Cam pensively as though trying to read her expression and then smiled when Cam did. The table in front of her was scattered with various roots, a pocket-sized bible, some polished bones and a set of playing cards.
“And Elizabeth?” Grandma asked, giving a weary sigh. She was probably the only one in the county who didn't think Aunt Beth was a saint for moving in with them to raise three children who weren't hers. In fact, Cam was fairly certain that her grandmother wished Aunt Beth had just minded her own business and stayed in Jackson.
“I told her I was indisposed.” Cam said.
“How that works every time I will never know.” Mary said, without looking up from her sewing. “Did she never lie as a child?”
“What of the Anderson boy?” Cam's grandmother asked. It was a little strange to he
ar him called the ‘Anderson boy’ because there was nothing boyish about him, but she supposed that at her grandmother's age almost any man seemed like a boy.
“He doesn't know anything,” Cam said confidently, taking a seat at the cold hearth. Caro remained standing at the window, her fingers on the curtain.
“I had a dream last night,” Mary said. She had a low, sweet voice. “I dreamt that I stood beneath a great oak tree at dusk. There was a house in the distance, with dark empty windows and doors locked against the coming night. It was Cypress Hall. I watched it for hours. I was waiting for something. The right time, I think.”
Mary was unusual. She had been for as long as Cam could remember. She had visions, heard whispers of what was to come. She wasn’t all-seeing; sometimes things came to pass and she received no warning at all. The visions themselves were often hard to read. They usually came to her in fragments, as strange, distorted flashes. No one could explain her gift. Caro knew of no one else in her family who received such visions.
As a child Cam had thought it was terribly clever and exciting, and she had envied Mary her gift. Now, she pitied the girl. Mary didn’t see everything, but she tended to see the bad first, to sense tragedy before joy. When she had her visions she experienced them as if she were inside the body of whoever she was seeing. If she saw a murder, it was not as an observer, but as either the murderer or the victim. It was chilling.
“What did it mean?” Cam asked Mary.
“Nothing good.” Grandma frowned.
“We don’t know that,” Caro disagreed.
“Watching? Waiting for the right time?” Grandma repeated. “The right time for what? I’ll wager it’s not to bring over a jar of preserves.”
Cam looked up, her eyes narrowing as she remembered the strange events at the barbecue. “Someone was watching me today,” she told them.
All three of them turned to stare at her.
“Mr. Anderson?” Grandma asked.
“No. Well, him too. But someone else, not a guest at the barbecue. There was someone standing in the forest. At first I thought it was one of the Charmon boys, but whoever it was didn’t want to be seen. I think he was watching me. Me or perhaps Helen.”
“Helen?” Grandma asked sharply.
“She wandered off into the forest to work on her diary. Aunt Beth wasn’t pleased. I suppose whoever it was could have been watching her.”
Grandma shifted in her seat, her brow wrinkled with worry. “That can’t be good.”
“How long was he watching?” Caro asked.
“I don’t know,” Cam said, “I was talking to Mr. Anderson.”
“Are you sure that the man knows nothing?” Mary asked, making one last stitch and biting the thread. She was sewing a charm bag and had used blood red thread. “There is a threat. I can feel it. It is new and dangerous, and so is he.”
“New or dangerous?” Cam asked
“Both,” Caro answered from the window. “What is he doing at the barbecue when his brother's wife is dying?”
“She’s dying?” This was news to Cam. “I thought she was just sick. How do you know that?”
Caro shook her head. “Everyone knows. You’d know if you spent more time with people your own age.”
“I don’t have anything in common with most people my own age. What’s wrong with her?”
“No one knows that,” Caro said, “not even the Doctor. She’s just wasting away. Or so I’ve heard. Maybe some kind of fever.”
“But we have nothing to do with that,” Grandma said, and then she glanced at Cam. “You don’t, do you?”
Cam made a face, “why would I curse a woman I don’t even know? No, whatever is wrong with her, it’s nothing to do with us.”
“Yet that Mr. Anderson is looking for something. Are we sure that he’s not kin to—”
“No,” Cam said quickly. “As far as I know he never knew Kat Varennes. And I don’t think—”
“Ssh!” The hiss was Mary’s, and the girl suddenly twisted in her seat to stare at the kitchen windows.
Cam stood immediately, prepared to hide. “Someone’s coming? Is it Aunt Beth? It’s not father is it?”
“No one’s coming,” Mary said solemnly, “but someone’s watching the kitchen.”
“Watching us?” Grandma also stood. “Who?”
“Are you sure, Mary?” Caro was already filling a shallow bowl with water. “Hand me an egg, Daphne,” she said to Cam’s grandmother, in a moment of informality that came naturally between the two of them but would have shocked and horrified Aunt Beth or Cam’s father.
“I felt it for a minute before I said anything,” Mary whispered, and with the candlelight playing upon her face, there was something haunting about her face, something almost ageless. She didn’t look like a young woman. She looked like an oracle, a prophet of old, seeing things in the flames that mere mortals could only guess at. “You won’t be able to see him now,” she said as Grandma cracked an egg into the bowl that Caro had filled with water. It was an old divining trick that was used to allow people to see that which was unseen. “I think he’s leaving.”
“Who is it?” Cam asked. Mary closed her eyes to concentrate, several fine lines appearing on her brow while Caro and Grandma studied the contents of the bowl carefully.
“I don’t know,” Mary said finally, her eyes opening again. “I’m sorry.”
***
Every time Brent began to feel guilty for his prying, the same conscience that was torturing him reminded him what was at stake: his sister-in-law’s life and his brother’s happiness. Still, he couldn’t help but feel disgusted with himself as he stood in one of the many shadows on Cam’s beautiful, moon-flooded lawn, and watched the kitchen into which she had vanished. There was a strange scent in the air, sharp and spicy, and smoke billowed from the chimney. What were they burning? What was Cam doing in the kitchen at this hour? Why had she said that she was indisposed?
He remembered some of the rumors he had heard, whispers about some odd religion, a sort of superstition or witchcraft. It had all sounded quite ridiculous at the time. Now, standing there watching the candlelight flicker behind those tightly closed curtains, catching the faintest of murmurs from inside of the kitchen, and smelling those strange herbs, he wondered.
There was another scent in the air, too, he realized, one that could only be scented softly beneath the odor of the herbs, but was there nonetheless, thick in his mouth and his throat. Ash. Old ash. Not from whatever they were burning inside of the kitchen, but from a greater, more powerful fire. The kind of ash that remained on a landscape long after the flames had claimed their victims. He hadn’t smelled it when he’d first walked across the yard, but now, now it was inescapable. The wind must have changed, he thought, because suddenly all he could smell was the harsh scent of a fire long quenched.
Where is it coming from? He wondered and glanced down. The ground glowed silver beneath his feet. He shifted, and when his feet moved they raised a cloud of white ash that dusted his boots and trousers in fine powder. Now entirely uneasy, Brent glanced all around him. Somehow he had walked into a field of ash without even realizing it. The stuff surrounded him, gleaming from beneath blades of grass, smoking in heaps at his feet. How had he not seen it when he walked into it? And what was it from?
Then a chill ran down his spine, because he remembered. The carriage house fire, the fire that had killed Sam and Solange. The fire that had claimed two lives. It had been so many years ago, surely he couldn’t be standing in the ashes from that night. But as he stared at the yard around him, so very different at night than it was during the day, as barren and windswept and moon-pale as a white desert, he could almost taste death in the air.
He was standing on the ruins on that carriage house. He was standing on the grave of Cam’s mother. What was he doing on this lawn, spying on a woman who had already known such darkness? How could he intrude on a family tragedy like this? Suddenly, Brent wanted nothing more than to leave Cam i
n peace, to stop his desecration of this place and return to the ball where he belonged, away from the scene of such sadness.
So he left. He had intended to wait until Cam or someone else emerged from the kitchen, but he no longer had the will to. He felt unnerved and ashamed, as though he were a grave robber plundering caskets for information rather than jewels. Brent walked gingerly across the ash until he reached the soft green grass that he remembered from the barbecue earlier that day, and then he quickly crossed the lawn to the house and the brightly lit gathering within.
One of the young local husband-hunters found him and pounced on him before he had taken too many steps within the door. “Mr. Anderson!”
Brent managed to smile at her. It took him a moment to remember her name, only because there had been so many young women trying to win his favor since he had moved into the neighborhood. This one had a pretty face, but her personality and conversational skills were altogether unremarkable, so he couldn’t quite recall…
Ah, yes, Carreen Williams. “Good evening Miss Williams.”
“Good evening Mr. Anderson,” she returned with a wide smile.
“Tell, me, Miss Williams,” he said, before she had a chance to start chattering about something that he would undoubtedly have absolutely no interest in. “What are those ashes outside from?”
Carreen blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“The ashes,” Brent said, trying to keep his voice even so that it sounded like an idle curiosity. “The field of ash on the Johnson lawn, outside. Do you know what those ashes are from?” They had to be from the fire, he was almost certain of it. Hell, he had practically felt the flames licking at his own skin. Yet it wasn’t possible. It had been fourteen years, and the ashes should have been washed away.
“I don’t recall any ashes,” Carreen said, looking perplexed.
It took a little doing, but Brent finally coaxed her out onto the porch. She blushed more than once, perhaps because she expected he was luring her out there so that he could take liberties. No. He just wanted to know about the ashes. It had been damned unnerving. “There,” he said finally, pointing at where he had stood just a few minutes earlier. “Do you know anything about the ash?”