But despite her frantic waving—waving that grew more frantic as the carriage approached at a dangerously fast pace, the horses’ hooves spraying up arcs of glittering snow—she might well have been invisible. The carriage passed her seconds after she jumped to the barely defined edge of the road, slipping on a feathery patch that laid her on her side, the horses’ quickening hooves missing her by a half dozen feet.
Her horses. Her own carriage nearly killing her!
Clayton Poole, his stupidity frozen on his face like a gruesome holiday mask, had been the driver. But there was another face in the carriage. A red-cheeked, often sly face. A face that she had trusted. The only face she had trusted when she had left Old Gate for a short visit to see Samantha in North Carolina.
Harriet. Harriet’s face was all fear, and pushed forward as though she would make the horses run even faster.
The front door of Bliss House was open, like an invitation to a bad dream. The house felt more alive than it ever had before: welcoming and repelling her at once.
Now that you are back, you will never leave again and I will punish you.
Guilty implication hit her like a wave. Her soul answered: I will be punished.
As a child she had had a pet rabbit. But she had gone away to Boston with her parents for a month, and no one had thought to make provisions for the rabbit. Not one servant had stayed behind, and so the rabbit, Sir Hopkins, was forgotten in its gilt wooden cage.
No one had punished her; her mother blamed the servants.
But a week after they had returned to the dead and moldering rabbit in its hutch in the garden, Amelia used paper shears to cut off her own hair in jagged hanks and hid the damage beneath a linen-and-lace mob cap that had belonged to her grandmother. When her mother jerked the cap off her head, Amelia refused to tell her why she had done it. The reasons weren’t even clear to Amelia herself. She felt the same sense of guilt now. The same desire for punishment.
The trip to North Carolina hadn’t really been necessary. It had been pure selfishness that had made her leave Tamora alone with Randolph and Harriet and the nurse that Doctor Beard had engaged for them.
If only Tamora were all right.
Perhaps Randolph had fired Harriet, sick of her, and hadn’t hesitated because he knew Amelia was on her way home.
“Randolph!”
There was no answer. Only her own voice traveling to the top of the house.
“Tamora! Darling, come to Mother!”
The house was empty, the cold from the doorway beaten back with heat and a sense of something living, breathing, but empty. Amelia was filled with regret for a thousand little things, each one tied to the life she had had before she had come to this house. Now they could never be forgotten or forgiven.
At that moment, she would even have been glad to see Aaron. They had been awkward and cool with each other, and he had managed to make sure he was away during dinners for the time she was there after the debacle of the small hours of New Year’s Day.
The chandelier was lighted, an extravagance that she didn’t understand. All the lamps were lighted. Had Bliss House caused them all to come on by itself? Clayton Poole was gone, but where was Maud?
“Tamora!”
“I’m here, Mother.”
She looked up. Tamora had never spoken those words before.
Tamora stood outside the nursery, leaning on the railing, her tangled hair hanging about her face in blond ropes. No one had brushed her hair in days, it seemed. What had that slag, Harriet, been doing? She had probably stolen as much silver as she could get her hands on on her way out.
“Mother, watch.”
Amelia couldn’t help but stare at this new, disheveled, calm, loquacious Tamora. Of course she would stare! Had Tamora grown in the six days she had been gone? The doctors hadn’t been hopeful about her reaching a normal stature, but there she was looking as straight and tall as any seven-year-old.
“Yes, my darling. I’m here.” Despite the wetness of her boots, her ruined dress, and the snow melting on the hall rug, Amelia kept her face upturned. Let her lose both of her feet and her hands, if necessary, if her daughter was speaking to her. It was a miracle!
Happiness melted to terror as Tamora, now peculiarly agile and bold, climbed onto the railing with a happy bounce and sat with her bare feet dangling into the air.
“Look, Mother! Look at me!” She raised her arms in a victorious V, her hands outstretched to heaven, so that she was only attached to the gallery railing via the thin, grubby nightgown that covered her down to her knees.
Amelia held back her scream, not wanting to startle her daughter.
But is this my daughter, my one Tamora?
Should she stand beneath the railing to catch her if she fell, or should she run to the stairway, in hope of distracting her from her game?
All these stairs, Randolph, the dangerous openness. You know she can be uncontrollable. How he had smiled, so patronizingly, reminding her that he or Harriet or the nurse would be there every moment, and certainly he would make sure she came to no harm.
Where are you now, Randolph?
She chose to stand beneath those small, kicking feet.
“Mother would like you to get off the railing. Please do what Mother asks, Tamora.”
“Say ‘pretty please,’ Mother. If you say ‘pretty please,’ I might.”
Tamora’s was an oddly adult voice now. But Amelia obeyed, at the same time praying that Aaron or Randolph, or even Maud, might appear to help her.
“Pretty please with sugar on it, darling.” She tried to keep the shaking out of her voice. “And cinnamon if you want. You know how you like cinnamon.”
Tamora laughed like a girl a dozen years older.
“Why are you such a dirty little slut, Mother?”
Amelia was speechless, her breath gone.
“Where did you ever—?” She couldn’t finish.
“Daddy taught me all the words, Mother. Words that you won’t even say because your mouth is too pure. What’s it like to have the mouth of a virgin whore? That’s what he called you, Mother. His stick of a virgin whore.”
Now Amelia was sure she was hallucinating. Perhaps she hadn’t risen from where she had fallen in the road, and her brain was slowly freezing, shutting down. This talking abomination could not be her daughter, but was the bitter mix of her growing hatred for Randolph and his heathen whore, and her worry about Tamora. The real Tamora was surely safe in her bed, tucked in for a nap and maybe even medicated to sleep by the fleeing Harriet.
Perhaps Randolph hadn’t fired her, but she had fled because of something terrible Randolph had done to her. Or to Tamora.
She bit the top of her knuckles, hard, to make sure she was awake. Not dead or dreaming.
“Tamora, come down. Right this minute. I’ve had enough of this game.”
Am I shaking from cold, or from fright?
Surely this Tamora would get off of the railing and disappear, and Amelia would go to the nursery and find her true daughter asleep in her own comfortable bed. Only then would she find Randolph and discover the truth of why she hadn’t been met at the train, and why Clayton Poole had carried Harriet away from the house as though she were a criminal being pursued.
“I’m coming, Mother.”
Tamora’s victorious expression disappeared, and her face turned as violent as the clouds visible in the windows around the dome above their heads. She was perfectly still for a moment before stiffening like a wooden doll, and leaning forward, forward, forward, until her body left the railing.
Amelia’s mouth opened but no sound came out. She opened her arms to catch Tamora, straining to keep her eyes on her angry face. She would be her daughter’s target. If she were to die saving her, it didn’t matter.
But the impact never came. One moment she was looking into that purple-gray face, those eyes that had turned hellish and strange, and in the next she was staring up at the balcony to see Tamora standing safely behind the rai
ling. Laughing.
Her laughter filled the hall, growing louder and louder, until Amelia had to cover her ears. Tamora laughed, and then she began to run, her footsteps thundering through the house. Amelia watched as Tamora—but oh! This is surely not my daughter, my own daughter, but some demon child—ran to the stairs and began to descend as though she would run into Amelia’s arms. When she was halfway down, she began to fade like a shadow disappearing in a slowly growing light, and then she was gone.
Amelia felt her heart drop inside her from a great height.
A sound from the back of the hallway startled her and she cried out.
“Amelia, how are you here? How did you know?”
Randolph came out of the shadowed entry to the library and crossed the room, holding out his hands to her. She found she could not move.
Chapter 35
KIKU
January 1879
Mason pounded on the cottage door, startling Kiku and Odette, who had just awakened.
“You’ve got to get out. Odette!” His words were muffled as though his face were pressed against the wood.
“Sweet Jesus, what is wrong with you?” Odette opened the door, and Mason stumbled in.
“She wants her dead.”
He stopped speaking when he heard the bedroom door open and saw Kiku standing there.
“You’ve scared us both to death.” Odette pushed at his chest, irritated, but Kiku could see worry in both their faces.
Despite his hurry, Mason propelled Odette gently away.
“Maud sent Clayton to tell me Missus Bliss is screaming about Kiku and Mister Randolph. She said she was going to come here.”
So it wasn’t the police who were going to hurt her or take her away. It was Amelia. Hers would be a rougher justice than even that of the police. Kiku had worried all the previous day and through much of the night, imagining the pain that Amelia was feeling, knowing that her child was dead. Kiku’s own child kicked inside her, a constant reminder that it was still alive, even as Tamora lay cold and dead in some room in the big house.
“I will see her.”
“Oh, no, you’re not going to be here.” Odette was in motion, putting on her boots. “We’re getting your things now.”
“I will talk to her. She will understand.” Kiku put her hand on her belly as though to reassure herself that she was saying, doing the right thing.
“Clayton said she looks like a wild woman and hasn’t slept all night. She knows the little girl was here.”
“We’ll take her to our place,” Odette said from Kiku’s bedroom.
They weren’t listening to her. Kiku could not make them listen. For a long time she had wanted to speak with Amelia Bliss, to tell her that she meant her no harm. That she was only Randolph’s concubine and made no claims on him.
Why would I claim such a man, a man who hurts me? Does he hurt Amelia so?
“I must stay here. She has seen that I’m with child. She will trust me.”
“She’s talking like a fool. You’re going to have to carry her out of here.” Odette turned to Kiku, pointed at her belly. “There is such a thing, little girl, as being too foolish to live. And I know you want to live long enough to bring that baby into the world.”
“You had best listen to her, Kiku.” Mason’s voice was low and serious.
Nodding, she withdrew into the bedroom to dress.
When everything was gathered, Mason carried out her bag, and Odette held onto Kiku’s arm as they went down the porch stairs.
“You couldn’t have brought a trap or the carriage?” Both she and Mason had to help the ungainly Kiku up onto the broad seat of the wagon. “How is she supposed to ride on this bumpy old thing? You want the baby born in the road?”
“No time.”
A distant, hoarse keening shuttled through the trees between the cottage and the gardens of Bliss House.
“Dear God. That poor woman.” Odette looked through the trees, but they were too far away to know if Amelia was any closer to them than the house.
Kiku’s heart ached for Amelia. There was nothing she could do for her now. But a day would come, she was certain, that she could somehow help her. None of them knew why the girl, Tamora, had been wandering in the snow, but Kiku was as certain as she could be that it was Randolph’s fault.
Odette was called to the big house the afternoon of the second day to help with preparations for the funeral. She didn’t want to go, didn’t like the unpleasant way the people who worked at the house sometimes treated her. Kiku knew this, but Odette didn’t complain when she returned, exhausted, her hands aching from scrubbing all afternoon.
Kiku woke from a late nap to find Mason sitting at the kitchen table with his wife, rubbing her fingers with the minty salve that Odette kept to keep her skin from drying in the winter cold. But when Kiku entered the room, Odette pulled her hands away from her husband and rested them in her lap.
“Go on and put it away,” she said quietly.
Odette puzzled Kiku with the way she never wanted to be seen asking for comfort. There were times when she wanted to sit with Odette and rest against her shoulder in the way that her own baby sister had done when she was very tired.
“Did you see Amelia?”
Odette nodded. “She’s white as that snow outside. Didn’t speak much.”
“And Randolph?”
Odette shuddered. “He’s there. She won’t let him near her. I don’t blame her.”
Kiku heard the hesitation in her voice. Odette rarely hesitated.
“Don’t.” Mason put the lid back on the jar of salve. Kiku could smell the mint, and it made her hungry. Since she had arrived at their house, she had been hungrier than she had been since she arrived in Old Gate back in the summer. “It’s gossip. We don’t engage in gossip.”
Kiku wanted to know more, but she had become practiced in navigating the vagaries of Odette and Mason’s relationship.
She went to the shelves and took down the flour and fat for biscuits. Odette didn’t stop her as she often did. Mason retired to the small parlor in the front of the house. Kiku knew she’d find him reading by lamplight when she came to get him for dinner. They had passed the equinox, but the days still felt short, and it was already getting dark outside. When the biscuits were shaped and cooking, she put the beans and ham she had made that afternoon on the top of the stove to heat. The baby kicked when she breathed deeply of the smell of baking biscuits, and she realized she didn’t want to leave this pleasant house where she had friends.
Friends. Had she ever before had good friends? Not since the village. On the boat, Christiana had slept beside her and taught her English, but they were desperate friends by circumstance. Madame Jewel had called herself her friend, but it was the girls who looked out for one another.
They ate in silence. When dinner was over and cleared, Mason went to bed, but Kiku and Odette stayed by the fire and sewed by lamplight. Odette had brought her linen and cotton and the softest wool she could find for the baby. She wanted Odette to talk about Randolph and what he had done to his daughter, but she knew she needed to be careful.
“What do you think Randolph will do with us when our baby comes?”
“You go away, is what you do. You don’t think he wants a child running around here, do you? I think he’d just as soon kill it.” She paused, obviously thinking she’d been too frank. “I know that’s not what you want to hear. He’s not a man made for children, though it might be different if you have a boy. Rich people don’t care so much about bastards. He might even bring it to the house to raise.”
It hadn’t been difficult to hear, because Kiku knew it was the truth. Randolph had no use for a baby. In the darkest hours of the dark night she had thoughts—terrifying thoughts—of what he might do to the child that would be worse than murdering it.
Was it possible that he would give the child to Amelia? What might Amelia do to it in her grief?
Mason had made a cradle for the baby and she had bee
n rocking it, empty, for practice, with her stockinged foot. Now she stopped.
“Where would we go?”
Odette was silent.
“Not to New York. Not back to—” Kiku was about to say “Madame Jewel’s.” She felt herself redden with horror at the thought.
“Maybe you won’t have to worry, Kiku. Maybe he’ll let Mason and me take it.”
Kiku knew it was one of Odette’s sadnesses that they had had no children in all the years they’d been married. It was, perhaps, one of the reasons she was so harsh with Mason. Did she blame him? That she loved him, Kiku understood. When he had presented the cradle, Odette had been unable to keep the pride from her face. Mason looked as though he wanted to disappear into the floor.
“I would see him then.”
“Yes, you would.”
Kiku had been so relieved when Randolph stopped coming around her because of her pregnancy that she had almost almost forgotten the real circumstances of her life. Why she was there, living in a cottage in the woods like a girl in a story. But she wasn’t a girl in a story. When Randolph had arrived at the cottage with Aaron, it became real once again.
They sat, silent, each thinking of the fantasy of Kiku being there to see her child grow, each knowing that it was unlikely to be, but afraid to think of all the things that were more likely to happen.
Kiku woke to faint morning light and sounds in the kitchen. Normal sounds, low voices. Odette and Mason were to attend the funeral and go immediately back to the house to help with all the guests who were expected. Mason had said that Randolph had invited the entire town, though Amelia had wanted only family and their closest friends.
Mason had told them how, at that first big party after Amelia arrived, Randolph had tried to show off his poor, addled daughter by putting her on a swing in the ballroom, and everyone in town had been scandalized. But Mister Bliss had had no shame and had laughed when his wife discovered it.
The Abandoned Heart Page 29