Randolph laughed. “What an imagination you have! Do you recall that I told you that I would not debase this house by bringing her to live here? I have kept my word on that and will continue to keep my word.”
“Then why are you bothering me?” Amelia wrung her hands, suddenly uncertain.
“I have changed my mind on another front. That is the surprise I’m anxious to share with you.” He looked down at the basket sitting beside him on the floor. It was a simple basket, a Moses basket of light reeds that looked carefully crafted. She had seen that basket before. She had touched that basket.
“No! I don’t want to see it. Go away!” Amelia rushed the door to slam it shut, but Randolph was too fast and shoved it back at her.
“You’re acting like a madwoman again, Amelia. Don’t force my hand with this. I don’t want to have to send you away.”
She retreated to the back of the room, to the window that looked out over the eastern side of the property and the carriage house beyond the drive. “I won’t see it. You can’t make me see it!”
Randolph picked up the basket. “Stop being foolish. He can’t hurt you, and you’re acting like he can. He’s tiny, Amelia. He’s hardly even a baby, he’s so tiny. Look. Look at him.” He strode across the nursery, kicking one of the upended tea table chairs out of his way so that it landed on top of one of the staring dolls. “He can’t hurt you. When has a baby ever hurt anyone?”
She would not look! As Randolph came closer, she pressed herself into the corner beside the window and put a hand on the cold glass. If only she could push the window open and escape. But the window was fastened, and she was caught.
“Just think, Amelia. We can raise him as our own. We will say that he is the child from some distant part of your family whose parents have died. No one will question it. You’re a woman of integrity. No one will dare question you.”
“Get it away from me.”
In the basket, the baby began to writhe and fuss. Its mouth worked, its tiny lips stretching in its distress.
“He needs a mother. You will be his mother.”
“He has a mother. Take it away. Why are you doing this to me?” Amelia began to sob. She was not heartless. It was an infant like any other infant. Hungry like any other infant. The way Tamora had been as a child until she stopped wanting to eat.
“He is my child. He can be our child. Tamora was imperfect, and God called her back to Him. But this child can save you. Listen to me. This child can save you, Amelia.”
Hearing Tamora’s name, she took a breath, and her sobbing subsided.
“How dare you. How dare you talk about Tamora that way when you’re holding that son of a filthy pagan. Tamora was my child!”
“Your child is dead because you left her, isn’t she?” Randolph spoke over the baby’s pathetic cries. The baby was so tiny that its loudest wail didn’t reach the level of his speaking voice.
There. He had said it. Said what she had been thinking since Tamora had died. Her fault. Wasn’t every child’s death the fault of the mother because she had neglected her duty of protecting it?
“Get away from me. You don’t have the right to speak her name. You’re a monster. Raise your bastard. But you’ll do it without me.” Finally, here was her courage. She didn’t need to remain behind a locked door any longer. She saw Randolph as a weak, vulnerable man, finally the weaker of the two of them. He had suggested the inexcusable thing. The impossible thing. He had swept all regard or concern for her out of the house, out of his life, as though they were so much trash.
Where had this courage come from? This courage that propelled her past him and through the disheveled nursery, a place that she no longer needed. Tamora/not-Tamora was beckoning at her from the doorway, looking excited.
“Mother! Mother! I will help you. Come with me!”
Amelia followed as Tamora/not-Tamora ran down the gallery, and she laughed with the freedom of it. She felt light, lighter than air. This was how Tamora must have felt as she ran, evading the strong, warm hands of Harriet or her mother’s tender grasp. How difficult it had been for Tamora to simply be. No wonder she ran. Amelia felt closer to Tamora in those moments than she ever had before.
Randolph was calling after her, telling her to stop, that Doctor Beard would be there soon. “Don’t be foolish, Amelia. This is madness. You are mad!”
Yes, perhaps she was mad, but it did not matter. If this was how mad felt, then she would have more of it! As they reached the staircase to the third floor, Tamora/not-Tamora stopped and reached for her hand. But even as Tamora/not-Tamora took her hand, Amelia could see that the child was fading. Her hand felt ice-cold, even colder than it had the first time she had touched her, and that moment had been shocking. Tamora/not-Tamora was leading her to the place where she would find the real Tamora. The child that she had known her daughter could be. The child she would have been if she had not been blighted with the sickness that she had surely inherited from her father. For Randolph was ill. Of that she was certain. He had been mad from before the first day that they met. If only she had been honest enough with herself to ask his brother, Douglas, if Randolph had always been mad. Surely Douglas would have told her. He had always seemed like an honest man.
No one was coming after them. When she and Tamora/not-Tamora reached the third-floor gallery, she paused, breathless, and Tamora/not-Tamora stopped as well.
“Come on!” Tamora/not-Tamora pinched her to get her attention, but Amelia wanted to see where Randolph was. It seemed Randolph had not crossed the gallery, and neither was he coming behind them.
Amelia called out, taunting him even though she couldn’t see him. He was carrying a baby in a basket. “Your baby, Randolph! He’s your baby now. I’m sure you’ll be a wonderful father.” Then she laughed, knowing she sounded like the madwoman he had accused her of being.
Tamora/not-Tamora tugged at her hand, but she was not so strong now. She had faded even more in the hallway’s bright light.
“I’m coming, darling. Don’t pull so.” Yes. She would follow her daughter/not-daughter because she knew that the real Tamora was at the end of their journey. Far down below, the front door opened.
Randolph called out, “Aaron, she’s gone to the third floor. Will you go after her?”
For all his agitation, Randolph did not sound frantic. How hard he worked to prove that he was in command of everything around him. His wife was a problem for someone else to handle. Amelia heard Aaron answer, but she didn’t care about Aaron, either.
“This way, Mother.” Tamora/not-Tamora led her past the theater to the small bedroom at the very front of the house. It was lightly furnished, and she had only visited it once, to make sure it had been dusted properly before their party so that anyone who might wander into it looking for quiet would find it hospitable. Hospitality. For all her mother’s shortcomings, she had at least known to teach Amelia to be hospitable.
There was no one in the room, but one of the windows at the far end of the room was open.
“Mother, I told you I would help you. You must go quickly, before they find us.”
This was surely the surprise that Tamora/not-Tamora had meant. Somewhere behind them, she could hear Aaron calling her name. He did sound frantic, and she knew that he would take what she was about to do very personally. She smiled to think of it. It was vengeful and mean, and she hadn’t thought of herself that way. But it was his own fault. He had let himself be Randolph’s pawn, because he was weak.
She was no longer weak.
“Help me, darling,” she said to the fading child beside her.
For once, Tamora/not-Tamora was not irritable or capricious or crude. She nodded and let go of Amelia’s hand, and stepped up onto the low sill of the open window.
“Hurry, Mother!”
Amelia watched the creature-child that had been both a torment and a comfort to her spread her arms and fall into the cold night air. She had faded so much that Amelia could see, through her small body, the care
fully laid-out beginnings of the maze that Aaron had planned and planted below. But she disappeared completely before she reached the ground, as Amelia had known she would.
She stepped up onto the sill. When she looked far afield, she could see the stars above the ragged line where the dark sky met the even darker mountain ridge. It was a majestic sight, the sort of thing a person might want to see just before they died. If only she hadn’t glanced down at the woods beyond her own garden, it would have all been perfect.
Smoke drifted from the chimney of the little cottage, and light spilled from the open front door. It did look like something out of one of the fairy tales her father’s German mother had told her when she was small. Tales of wolves, and talking birds, and witches in the woods who were always trying to trick children and eat them. The stories had frightened her as a child, but she wasn’t afraid now.
There was a figure on the porch of the cottage, and Amelia knew it was the woman-child watching the house, waiting to see if Randolph would return her baby to her.
Hearing Aaron’s running footsteps in the gallery behind her, she stepped out the window, watching the woman watching her, until the cold air took her breath away, and she closed her eyes.
Chapter 40
LUCY
January 1919
Randolph was dead.
A long line of mourners waited in the thin, winter light of the hall to express their condolences to Lucy and Michael Searle, who stood by her side. Douglas was there, too, with Mary, who was fashionably under-attired in one of the French jersey dresses that had emerged in wake of the war. The faces of Old Gate society were suitably arranged for grief, but Lucy knew they were also there because they were curious. They had seen Lucy in their homes, but she was in the habit of sending them elaborate gifts rather than reciprocating their hospitality, because Randolph had long ago stopped allowing guests in the house. His death must have seemed sudden and mysterious to them.
He had become a further recluse these last two years, rarely leaving Bliss House, or even his bedroom. The previous October, Lucy had brought their lawyers to see him so they could witness his diminished state, and from that point they had brought all questions about his businesses and investments to her. Those times when Randolph did come out of his room, she found his appearance shocking: He had stopped bathing, and his hair was carelessly trimmed, though Terrance still shaved his face frequently. He shuffled through the halls in soft slippers and a series of baroque-looking robes that might have been made for a king. When she asked him where they had come from, he replied, “Terrance.” Though how Terrance had managed to get them, she didn’t know. He rarely left his master’s side.
Immediately after Randolph’s death, he had set about readying the house for the funeral. Lucy saw no grief on his face as he moved among the mourners.
“Darling, I can’t believe we weren’t here.” Faye embraced Lucy and kissed her warmly on both cheeks. “Josiah is heartbroken.”
Indeed, Josiah had dark circles beneath his eyes, and those eyes had an inward, pained gaze. Randolph hadn’t wanted to see him very often, either, and news of Randolph’s death had come while he and Faye were in New York on a month-long vacation. There had been no time for a good-bye or even an examination of his good friend’s body.
Lucy embraced Josiah. “Dear Josiah, I don’t know what to say.” In fact, she felt far sorrier for him than she did for herself. She knew she should feel bad, but the truth was that she was relieved Randolph was dead. She might begin to live again. Except for Terrance. Always Terrance.
“I wish I had an explanation for what Randolph suffered, Lucy. I’m only glad that you were able to care for him the way you did.”
Lucy nodded, and thanked him, and said that she was glad that he and Faye had been able to come home so quickly. When they moved on, she glanced at Michael Searle. Almost nineteen, he was taller than she, and while his face was smooth, his jaw had sharpened and hardened. In his black suit he looked every inch the grieving young man. Did he grieve? They hadn’t talked, but had only had time to go through the actions of grief. She suspected that he was not terribly sorry, either, for the death of this man who had treated him with so much disdain. A man he hadn’t even seen in four long years. She wanted to hang onto Michael Searle and never let him go again.
Lucy knocked on Odette’s door, and after a long moment the door opened a couple of inches. Seeing that it was Lucy, Odette let the door swing open and made her way back to her rocking chair in front of the window overlooking the herb garden. She sat down carefully, her thin sweater hanging loose over her diminished frame, hands tightly grasping the arms of the chair. When she was resettled, she gave a gusty sigh of relief.
“You’re a pretty sight in your widow’s weeds. Is everybody gone? I have something I want to give you before you go.”
“I brought you some angel food cake. How are you feeling?”
Odette had come down with a fever the same morning that Terrance had found Randolph dead in his bed, and Lucy had told her that she would bring in a couple of girls from town to help serve at the wake so Odette could stay in her room and rest. The Lynchburg doctor Lucy had taken her to the previous summer had diagnosed her with lung cancer, but Odette worked as much as she was able. “I won’t stop earning my keep,” she had said on the drive home. “You can depend on that. Like strong medicine, I don’t go down easy. That’s what Mason used to say.”
At Odette’s nod, Lucy put the plate with the cake and a fork in the elderly woman’s lap.
“Angel’s food at the Devil’s party.” Odette chuckled to herself.
Lucy pulled the room’s other seat, a cane-bottom hassock, near to Odette’s chair. She sighed less vehemently as she sat. “I’m glad it’s over.”
“It won’t ever be over. Not in this house. They’re all still here.”
“I meant all the fuss of the funeral. But Randolph is gone. It’s already been strange not to hear him at night. Talking to God knows who.”
“You think that’s going to stop? I hear it. I hear it every night.”
Lucy touched Odette’s wrinkled forearm. Her physical decline had seemed to coincide with Mason’s death three years earlier. He had been older than both Odette and Randolph. Lucy had paid for a grave attached to the church where he and Odette had worshipped all their married life, and she had bought one for Odette beside it.
“How sure are you that Mister Randolph is dead? He’s not just trying to fool you?”
“I saw him, Odette. I saw him dead in his bedroom, and I saw the coffin lowered into the ground.”
Odette gave a grunt of disbelief. “The body may die, but souls that mean don’t die. Just like the souls of the wronged. They live on.” The corners of her mouth twitched. “I may just live on myself, I’m that mean.”
Lucy smiled. The last thing that Odette was was mean. “What about heaven?”
“Mason’s in heaven.” Odette sat up straighter. “Mason deserved heaven. One of the only people I know who deserved heaven.”
“He was a good man. He was very good to me.”
“He was good to everybody. He didn’t look at a single person different from another. He did his job and loved everyone like the Lord tells us all to do. I didn’t love him nearly the way he should’ve been loved, though Lord knows I tried.”
They sat in silence for a moment.
“I loved Randolph. Once. I think I even loved him a little when he died. After Michael Searle went away to school, it was like he lost much of his desire to be cruel. There was no one left. Just me. And he was afraid I might leave if he pushed me too far.”
“What will you do now? You and Michael Searle going away?”
Lucy laughed. “Where would I go? That was what was so funny about Randolph thinking I would leave. My sister, Juliet, and her husband left France for Norway when the war came, and are still there. My father long ago sold my family’s house and moved into a small house near the church. We could hardly move in with him. In
fact, I should probably bring him here. This is my home. Michael Searle’s home. I want him to have Bliss House when I’m gone.”
“Even though he won’t have a family then? What’s he going to do in this place alone? You should make him go away from here. There’s nothing for him.”
“What makes you think there’s anything for him out there? Randolph’s gone. No one here will hurt Michael Searle anymore.”
What could Odette be thinking? If Michael Searle were to have any chance at happiness, it was here, in the house he knew best. Together, they could make Bliss House a better, happier place. She wouldn’t live forever, it was true. But they would find him someone. She knew he worried that he might never marry, never have the love of another person. A woman. Before he went off to school, she had sometimes heard him weeping in his room, and she, more than anyone, had understood why.
“You look out, Miss Lucy. Don’t be a stupid woman. Don’t be blind, like he wanted you to be. Like you have pretended to be sometimes. I’ll be gone, and there will be no one to remind you.”
“I don’t think—” She and Lucy were necessarily close, but Odette’s words were disrespectful, if not downright rude.
“You don’t have to pretend with me. I’ve seen everything in this house. I’m not going to see much more because I’ll be dead soon. Probably before the end of the week. I bet I don’t even make it to church on Sunday.” She pursed her pink lips in irritation and turned her face again to the window.
“Why do you say that, Odette? You don’t want to die, do you?” There had been times that Lucy had wanted to die. She thought of the hideous man in Paris. The smell of Brilliantine on his hair and the image of his clouded spectacles were burned in her mind. But it was the moment she had noticed that Randolph was still in the room, watching, that she had wanted to die.
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