The Abandoned Heart

by Laura Benedict

  Putting her hands to her belly, she found that it hadn’t changed in size at all, and tears of relief filled her eyes. The baby was still, though, which worried her. Her dream had been so tormented that she could not imagine that the child had not experienced it as well.

  Will my own child mean my death? Such a thing cannot be possible.

  But the thought took root inside her.

  Pressing her ear against the door, she listened. There were no voices. No crying women. But there was something.

  At her feet, the key lay on the floor, fallen out of the keyhole. When she tried the handle, it turned easily, and the door opened.

  Chapter 33

  LUCY

  May 1914

  Sometime after midnight, Randolph stood at Michael Searle’s door, pounding on it, telling him to come out and stop hiding. Lucy threw on a robe and went out to the hall to confront him.

  Randolph now existed in a state of perpetual wakefulness, which meant that the rest of the house suffered as well. Long ago, she had told Michael Searle to lock his bedroom door at night so Randolph would not wake him. Previously, Randolph had come to him in the night to compel him to perform strange errands, like taking a lantern into the orchard to find the withered apples that Randolph believed were “soiling the ground,” or to muck out the stalls because he had, that morning, fired the groomer. Randolph was nearly seventy years old, and in the past five years, he had aged more quickly. He had lost considerable weight, and the very infrequent times he demanded that Lucy come to his bed to perform her wifely duties, she had been surprised that he was not more fragile. The very act of sex seemed to flood him with some of his old vigor, though the appearance of strange women at the back of the house had become far less frequent.

  “Randolph! Let the boy sleep. He’s done nothing wrong. Please, please go back to bed.”

  The hall blazed with light from the newly electrified chandelier. The rest of the house had been electrified two years earlier, in 1912, but the chandelier had had to be taken down and wired. The electric light gave everything in its glow a harsh look that Lucy didn’t like. It made her feel too exposed.

  “He’s in there plotting with Aaron. I can hear them all the way down in the library. They’re plotting to take over everything that belongs to me, and they must be stopped. Just because that creature is my child doesn’t mean he will inherit everything. There are others, Amelia. There are others, as you well know!”

  It wasn’t the first time he had called her Amelia. During the day, he rarely confused her with his long-dead wife. But at night he was obsessed with Amelia. Obsessed with either believing Lucy was she, or that she was walking the halls of Bliss House, her footsteps pounding in his head.

  “Let’s go downstairs and I’ll warm you some milk. Listen. You can’t hear them now, can you?”

  Randolph turned his head slightly, listening. “Aaron is crafty. I never should have had him stay here. He infected this house with his perfidy. You, too, Amelia. He infected you.”

  Odette had told her about handsome Aaron Fauquier, who had been involved in the building of Bliss House and was staying with the family when Amelia Bliss had killed herself. There had been a small scandal because, after Amelia’s death, Randolph had accused him of burning down an empty cottage in the woods where Randolph had once kept a mistress. Fortunately, it had been winter and the fire had not spread, and Aaron had never been prosecuted. Soon after, he had moved to Lynchburg to work as an architect, selling his unfinished house in town. Lucy wondered if he were even still alive.

  Knowing Randolph as she did, and the regretful tone Odette’s voice took on when Amelia Bliss’s name was mentioned, Lucy immediately sympathized with Amelia. Had something really happened between her and Aaron Fauquier? Lucy knew that if there were an Aaron Fauquier living in Bliss House right now, she too might seek solace from Randolph’s capriciousness in his arms.

  “Please. Let’s go downstairs.”

  “You tell Aaron that I won’t stand for his turning Michael Searle against me.”

  “Of course, Randolph.”

  He followed her to the head of the stairs and maneuvered around her. “No, I won’t stand for it.”

  Lucy! Push him, Lucy! Suffer him no more. Send him to us, Lucy!

  Did Randolph hear the voices, too? They were loud in her ears, not quiet or aimless as they so often were. Lucy took another step toward Randolph. It would not be difficult. All it would take was a firm shove, and he would be gone.

  Now, Lucy! Do not wait.

  Could she? The house had taken her mother. Why was it demanding that she push Randolph? Why would it not please itself, as it had with her mother, Selina? The answer came quickly:

  Free yourself, Lucy. Free your child!

  I can. I will!

  She was not hypnotized, nor was there a fog of enchantment in her head. Her head was clear as she lifted her hand to Randolph’s back, but before she made contact with it, he spoke. Lucy looked down to see Terrance standing at the bottom of the stairs.

  “What do you think, Terrance? Fauquier is up there importuning that young man to cheat me. I heard them from down in the library. This must stop. If they don’t stop, I’ll kill them both!”

  Despite the unholy hour, Terrance was dressed. Always he was dressed as though he slept in his plain white shirt and black pants and trim black jacket. Dressed and spotless, so different from the silent young man who had opened the door of Bliss House to her almost fifteen years earlier. It seemed to her that the more careless Randolph got with his appearance, the more careful Terrance became of his own.

  Lucy halted her step on the stair, lowered her hand.

  “Mister Fauquier is a duplicitous individual. I can understand your distress.” Terrance was always calm and affirming with his employer. His father?

  Randolph nodded vigorously. “We should talk about what needs to be done. This can’t continue, and Amelia is too compromised.”

  “I’m going to make him some milk. You can go back to bed, Terrance.” Lucy tried to keep her voice from shaking. There had been a tone in Randolph’s words that alarmed her. He had never suggested that he would kill Michael Searle, or anyone else, but now she feared he was considering it.

  Terrance looked skeptical. The harsh light from the chandelier highlighted the sharp bones of his cheeks and his small, dark eyes. He looked to Lucy like an animated cadaver. “Shall I return to my room, sir?”

  “Leave us, Amelia. I’ve no time for your ministrations. You have treated me shabbily for too many years to try to make it up to me now. And how do I know that you won’t poison my drink? I’m sure that’s what Fauquier would have you do.”

  Lucy had no answer. How, indeed? She could hardly believe how easily the idea of murdering Randolph rested in her mind.

  “Very well.”

  Terrance gave her a grim, satisfied nod and held out his arm for Randolph to grasp as he took the last stair, but Randolph rebuffed him.

  “Stop treating me like a child, Terrance. Know your place.”

  It was with her own grim smile of satisfaction that Lucy turned and went slowly back up the stairs to speak to her son.

  “He doesn’t frighten me anymore. He’s mad, Mother. He should be locked up. Do you think he really sees the ghosts as well?”

  Lucy sat beside him on the bed and lightly stroked his hair.

  Yes, he sees them.

  “In the day, he’s almost normal,” she said. “Who knows what he sees at night. I don’t know that there’s anything we can do, my darling. Not right now.” Not now. Not yet.

  “I’m big enough that if he tries to do something to me, I can defend myself. I’ve done it at school.”

  Both his delicate features and his wealth had made him a kind of target at school in earlier years. But now that he was fourteen most of the bullies his age had quit or been taken out of school to work on their families’ farms, so the past two years had been easier. Michael Searle was not big, but he had a lean
strength that he had cultivated by riding his horse, Julius, and working in the orchards under the elderly Mason. Michael Searle took a great deal of pride in working with Mason, and his hands were not nearly as soft as those of other boys of his class.

  “You’ve done wonderfully. I’m so proud of you.”

  After a few moments of quiet, in which they could hear Randolph’s loud complaints to Terrance, Michael Searle said the words she had known she would eventually hear, but hadn’t wanted to.

  “It’s time for me to go away to school, but I don’t want to leave you here with him.”

  Lucy rallied, unwilling to show her distress. The child hid enough pain of his own. “Darling, it is definitely time. And while I know you’ll worry, I promise that I can take care of myself. He’s deranged, but not dangerous, and much of the business is in the hands of lawyers now. I’ve been making inquiries and I think not a military academy as your father suggested. The Episcopal academy near Washington is a good one, and you could come home for holidays.”

  “Could you come and visit me there?”

  “Of course. If that’s what you want.” She covered his hand with her own. “We’ll have to talk about the summers. There’s too much going on in Europe right now, and they say there will be a war. It’s not a good time for summer holidays there.”

  What went unspoken was his reason for not wanting to come home. They both knew all too well.

  “What if I have to live with another boy at school?”

  It was a worry she had shared since he was a small child. There had been no swimming with the other children during the summers after he was nine or ten years old, lest he be required to undress, and someone note the insufficiency of his male member; no visiting at other children’s houses overnight as some were fond of doing. She and Odette had kept his hair short and masculine even as some of the other boys had worn their hair around their collars and cheeks like young Byrons.

  “We’ll arrange for you to have a private room, and if the school disagrees, we will find you another school, or have Josiah write some explanation. He won’t ask questions. He will do what I ask.”

  Josiah Beard had stepped into his father’s medical practice soon after he and Faye had married. If Randolph had told him about Michael Searle’s affliction, he had remained discreet, and he would happily indulge her request for the sake of their families’ relationship. Randolph was a very private man, and it would have made sense to Josiah that his son would be private as well. Plus, he and Faye were both fond of Michael Searle, and their twin daughters were his friends, celebrating birthdays and holidays together. They had been partners at dancing lessons as well.

  “What about—?” Lucy hesitated. A year earlier, Michael Searle had come to her in her room, shamefaced and fearful, and lifted his shirt to show her that his breasts had begun to bud. She and Odette had been frank with him about his differences from other children before he went to school, and she had told him it might happen. But she had held him as he cried, and his tears had mixed with hers on her cheek.

  When they were done crying, she and Odette had given him the softest cotton bandages they could find and had shown him how to bind himself so that the breasts would not show.

  With a confidence she did not quite feel, she told him, “Perhaps they will stop growing. That is what we hope.” But there was no expert they could safely ask. She wouldn’t even know where to find an expert in such things and would die before telling a stranger her son’s secret.

  Aside from Randolph and Odette (and possibly Mason, though she did not worry about him), only Terrance knew. She would never be free of Terrance for that reason.

  “I’m good at wrapping myself now, Mother. No one will find out. I promise.”

  He looked at her with such trust and confidence that it almost broke her heart.

  A week before the fall school term began, Michael Searle shook hands with his father on the platform at the train station. Faye, Josiah, and their girls looked on, the girls’ pretty faces dewy and pink with heat. Terrance had stayed with the car out on the street. He had given Michael Searle a leather letter folder embossed with his initials before they had left the house, an act that both touched and puzzled Lucy. Was he trying to gain the boy’s trust? Randolph showed no emotion, but gave Michael Searle a brief lecture on the hiring of cabs.

  “Yes, Father.”

  Faye’s girls giggled behind their hands. A soft breeze ruffled their demure pastel blue-and-pink dresses. They reminded Lucy so much of when she and Faye had been their age. Their dresses were slightly longer and more sophisticated than the ones Lucy and Faye had worn, and they looked almost like young women. Lucy and Faye were now also less burdened with layers and layers of ruffles and adornment. Faye’s nautical-style dress was loose through the waist, accommodating her more generous bosom, and Lucy wore a mauve linen and cotton two-piece dress with a straight skirt and long, belted jacket that buttoned on the diagonal. As the day was fine, she had worn shoes, rather than boots, and had made the bold choice to go without stockings because of the heat.

  When Randolph stepped away, one of the twins impulsively approached Michael Searle and put her arms around him.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Lucy heard her whisper. “You will be so much happier there.” When she pulled away, she glanced briefly at Lucy with her eyes the muted green of winter grass and went back to her mother.

  “We must go.” Lucy kissed Faye, whose own brown eyes were glazed with unshed tears, and was grateful that she had a friend who cared so much for her son.

  As the train pulled away, relief crept over her son’s face, and she knew that they had made the right choice. What she did not know then was that he wouldn’t return to Old Gate for nearly four years, or that their circumstances would be so changed.

  Chapter 34

  AMELIA

  January 1879

  The moment she stepped off the train back in Old Gate, Amelia knew something was very wrong. She liked to think of herself as a woman who didn’t give in to strong emotion, but the feeling had started as a sharp twinge at the back of her head when she arrived at the station to find that neither Randolph nor Clayton Poole was there to meet her. It was not simply a matter of their having forgotten, she was certain. The platform, indeed the entire street had been deserted, and she had been the only person to come off the train. After waiting for thirty minutes, cold and angry, she had dragged her valises to the empty stationmaster’s office and set them inside. It wasn’t her fault that they had forgotten her—she had planned the hour of her return with Randolph even before leaving—but still she felt frustrated and embarrassed. It had been uncomfortably chilly on the train, but the sharp wind cutting across the platform was far worse. She began to walk, thinking she would eventually run into Clayton Poole and the carriage. Her fine leather boots were useless against the thick snow and her feet along with the bottom inches of her skirt were soon soaked. She walked, uncertain of where to stop. There were no cabs in Old Gate, as there were in the city, no line of carriages outside the station. In fact, the thought of the differences between New York and Old Gate drew an involuntary sneer on her cold-stiffened upper lip. Old Gate was nothing like the city, nor even as convenient as North Hempstead. It didn’t help that she still felt like a stranger here.

  Old Gate was laid out in a strange confusion of concentric circles, but the road on which the station sat—just outside of town—ran straight through. But Bliss House was more than a mile outside the town on the other side, and she worried she might freeze to death before she reached it. She passed the road that led to Maplewood, as well as the Baptist church and town hall. It was Sunday, but services had either ended for the day or they hadn’t yet resumed.

  Was everyone dead? Was she dreaming?

  The stores were unlighted, some even shuttered, because it was Sunday. At the farthest edge of town, where there were a few houses set well back from the road, there were signs of life: candlelight flickering in a window, footprints
and hoofprints in the snow as though someone were leading a horse up ahead. But she could see no people.

  Damn Randolph! Damn the good-for-nothing Clayton Poole!

  Her anger heated her as she walked, lifting her feet and her skirt as high as she could above the snow. Fortunately, her wool cape of green and gold windowpane plaid was lined with fur and covered most of her body. Hiding her hands within, she felt like a clumsy wraith billowing through the streets. Surely there were people watching her from windows, either not knowing who she was or laughing at her inconvenience because she was Randolph’s wife.

  Beneath the anger and the growing pressure in her head was the certainty that she should be at home, with Tamora, this very moment.

  Above her, layers of clouds the color of coal ash scudded over the treetops, racing her home. If only she could reach up and grab the tail of a cloud and let it deposit her there. She might fly like the witch Randolph had once, in supposed jest, accused her of being.

  Finally the road flattened and she could see the entrance to their lane a quarter mile away. The entrance with its ridiculous gates, as though it were one of New York’s great estates. As though anyone here would bother to arrive unannounced. Randolph’s pretensions refused to end and had worsened now that they lived among these Southern heathens. Thank God her parents had refused to visit. Her mother’s criticisms would be her undoing.

  Her spirits lifted when she saw a pair of horses pulling the brown carriage emerge and make the turn onto the road. Her boots were like sodden stockings on her feet now, and she couldn’t wait to get out of the snow. She removed a gloved hand from her cape and waved to flag the carriage down. So happy was she that she resolved not to immediately send the shiftless Clayton Poole packing with his impertinent wife, Maud.