by Sarah Bryant
“Perhaps. But I’ve had the feeling for a while now that more is happening here than irony or coincidence.”
“What do you mean?” His face was expressionless, his eyes and tone guarded. This put me on edge, but I stumbled on.
“It seems almost that we’re expected to take part in something. But at the same time, I can’t help feeling that everything’s already being done. That whatever is happening at Eden, whether or not it involves any of us, is far beyond our control.”
Alexander was silent for a few long moments, then said abruptly, “I would like to see your house on the hill.”
I shook my head, only mildly surprised at the tears I felt in the corners of my eyes. All I could think of was that cloying melody drifting through dim corridors, traversing stagnant shafts of sunlight, winding up the chambered nautilus of the staircase. Alexander must have understood my reaction, because the next minute he was leaning forward, taking my hand in his. A part of me wondered how we could have come so close so quickly, yet at the same time, like the clues to the twins’ history that kept falling into my path, it seemed right, or at least inevitable.
I shut my eyes, and time suddenly seemed many layers removed from us, and the present we inhabited. I do not recall the fear passing, only my own growing awareness of Alexander’s body near mine, of its great strength and greater frailty. When I looked at him again, his eyes were waiting to catch mine, bright within their darkness. I knew that nothing of myself was hidden from him or ever had been; also that I did not begin to understand him, as he apparently understood me. It was at that moment that I realized I loved him. All I could think of was that first night at the concert hall, when I knew that he was gifted beyond any talent the opulent crowd could imagine, and that hearing his music had altered my life irrevocably.
“Alexander, I—”
“Don’t,” he interrupted, letting go of my hand again. “You don’t begin to know what I am.” He was distancing himself, his eyes furling inward like severed morning glories, leaving me with a sense of loss as terrible as the fear.
“Maybe not, but I know you!” The tears I had suppressed were still dangerously near the surface. “I knew you the first time I laid eyes on you. And you knew me. You saw me, and you knew me. Alexander—you can’t deny it.” The words were as much an appeal as a statement of fact.
He watched me for a moment more, then looked away. His hands fell back to his sides slowly, perhaps with resignation. My throat was clogged with the words I couldn’t speak, confusing my thoughts. It had been a misunderstanding: a terrible misunderstanding. I was on my feet, turning away, not wanting him to see me cry. After all, he had never promised me anything, never said that he shared my feelings.
“I’m sorry,” I managed to blurt out as I stumbled toward the darkness of the doorway. The images of the room dissolved, blurring as the tears rose. For once I longed to be out in the living silence of the forest, but I was not halfway through the adjacent living room when he caught me, his hand closing firmly around my wrist. I stopped at the edge of the strip of light the study lamp cut through the darkness, sobbing and resigned.
“Eleanor,” he said, with unmistakable tenderness. He reached out and turned my face toward his, and what I saw there was very far from indifference.
“There are parts of me,” he said, “that you cannot begin to imagine. You heard me playing tonight, and it frightened you. Don’t argue; I know that it did, and what you heard was only the edge of it.” He sighed. “I wouldn’t flatter myself by giving you advice, but for my own conscience I must tell you to turn around right now and leave me and this haunted place, and don’t look back. You deserve much more than this.”
“Then why did you stop me from leaving?”
My words faded into the hush of rain in the trees. Their echo died, leaving nothing in its place. When Alexander finally looked up, the defiance in his face had faded too, leaving something that looked oddly like remorse.
“Because,” he said, “I love you as I have never loved anyone.”
The words seemed to come not from that moment but from a distant past. I took his hands in mine, and at the moment of contact there was a flicker of images: a fire that reddened the night sky, a woman’s white face with a red gash across it, the sound of heartbroken weeping. It was only a flicker, barely enough for me to register, yet the words I spoke next seemed a response to it as much as they were to what he had said.
“If you do love me,” I said, my voice dreamily detached from myself, “then please don’t ever speak of us parting again.”
Looking at me with those unfathomable eyes, Alexander said something in Russian; and then, in English, he said, “Never again.”
All at once I was acutely aware of the silence. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun. There was no sound of insects or birds, no breath of wind, nothing but the rustle as we shifted, his arms slipping to my waist as he leaned down to kiss me.
THIRTEEN
I make no moralistic pretensions. So strong was my feeling for Alexander that I would have given myself to him that night. It was his own restraint that kept us from an act that perhaps would have been premature then.
I admit that I wondered about his hesitancy, particularly after I left him early the next morning. However, I was too tired and confounded by all that had changed in the last few hours to ascribe much meaning to it. I tiptoed upstairs and fell asleep in my clothes, only to be awakened what seemed moments later by Mary, who told me anxiously that Alexander had come to the house to use the telephone because Tasha was ill.
Apparently Mary was too overwrought by this news to notice that I had slept in my dress. As such, I never had the chance to discuss with her what had happened between Alexander and me. It was one of those seemingly trivial oversights that bore more repercussions than I could ever have imagined.
Mary, like the rest of the household, was immediately caught in the suspense of Tasha’s sudden illness. By afternoon the child was complaining of stomach pains and was having trouble breathing. Mary and I both went to the cottage to offer help. A local doctor—thankfully not Dr. Brown—was called in, and after listening to her chest, he determined that her breathing wasn’t consumptive. Nonetheless, he left several bottles of medicine and explicit instructions to phone him at the slightest worsening of her condition.
We took turns trying to distract Tasha from her discomfort all afternoon, and in the early evening she finally drifted into a fitful sleep, aided by a hot drink mixed with a tablespoonful of sweet rum—a remedy Mary had used on me during my own childhood illnesses. Once she was soundly asleep, we sat at the kitchen table and spoke in whispers about what was to be done.
“Should I call the doctor back?” Mary asked.
Alexander shook his head. “Not yet. Since the illness, I panic every time she sneezes. It’s likely that she only has a cold.”
“It can’t hurt to have the doctor in, anyway.” Mary was off to the house to call without waiting for a reply.
I reached across the table and squeezed Alexander’s hand. He looked up at me and smiled, though it didn’t begin to mask his anxiety.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” I said, forcing myself to sound steady and sincere. “It was probably the change in climate. I always catch colds when I travel.”
“I cannot bear to think of her becoming so ill again,” he said, and was lost once more in a world of his own.
An hour later the doctor arrived. He listened to Tasha’s chest, took her temperature, and diagnosed the illness as influenza. He told us to watch her carefully and to call him again if she seemed any worse.
We all stayed up with Tasha that night, watching her as she tossed and moaned, trying to make her drink water which she only vomited back up, finally calling the doctor again early in the morning. His look at the end of the examination was graver than it had been the previous day, and he no longer made any pronouncements about the cause of the illness. He gave us a number of new medicines, which Tasha swallowed with
the obedient resignation of a practiced invalid.
That night Alexander finally managed to persuade Mary to sleep, though she insisted on staying at the cottage. I was as far from sleep as Alexander. The two of us stayed in Tasha’s room, to read to her and sing to her and keep all of our minds from dwelling on darker anxieties until she, too, fell asleep.
In her stillness she was like a porcelain doll, her lashes silken fringes against the fever-flushed cheeks. When I looked up from my musings, I saw that Alexander had fallen asleep in his chair. As I reached to turn off the bedside lamp, my arm brushed a bunch of roses that stood beside it, sending a shower of faded petals and dusty pollen onto the linen cloth beneath.
I hadn’t noticed the roses before, but it occurred to me now that they must be the ones Dorian had given Tasha. They weren’t like Eden’s roses, but bigger, with fleshy ivory petals. There was something corrupt about them, as there had been about the rotting leather bindings of the books in the house on the hill. I was wondering why Dorian had chosen them as a gift for a little girl, when another clump of petals broke away, revealing crimson sepals and tough, dark stems from which the thorns hadn’t been clipped. Then I could only wonder how I had been so naïve. Dorian could never have known there was a little girl at Eden.
Shivering with repugnance, I picked up the jar and the fallen petals in the linen cloth, opened the window screen, and dropped the lot outside, shaking the cloth well. Then I leaned on the sill, gratefully breathing the cooler air. Clouds covered the stars; the darkness was nearly complete.
Pulling the screen back into place, I stepped across the room and out the door, through the narrow hall, and into the dark of Alexander’s bedroom, where Mary lay asleep. The speck of light high up on the hill elicited no surprise, only a sinking kind of acceptance. I don’t know how long I would have stood watching it if Tasha hadn’t whimpered in her sleep.
Back in her room, Alexander was still deeply asleep. Tasha had not awakened, but she was no longer sleeping peacefully. Her head had fallen to one side, her lips were parted, and periodically her forehead creased. I smoothed the hair back from her face. Her skin was still too warm. When I touched her, she recoiled and cried out, “No!” and then she began to speak. At first it was only a jumbled whisper, but soon I could discern specific words. Then, quite clearly, she said, “Dorian.”
Almost simultaneously her eyes opened. When she saw me looking down at her, she seemed at first confused, even frightened. Then she blinked, and smiled. “Eleanor,” she said, reaching frail arms toward me. “It’s you.”
I got up on the bed beside her, and she snuggled into my arms.
“Do you remember what you said just a minute ago, love?” I asked her.
She looked up at me, her eyes wide and puzzled. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You don’t remember saying anything when you woke up?”
Slowly she shook her head. I smoothed her hair. Her eyes were already drooping again, and I was about to resign myself to yet another mystery, when she said, “I was dreaming.”
“What were you dreaming of?”
“A man.”
“What was he like?”
She thought for a moment, then answered, “He was the man with the magic roses.”
I smiled encouragingly at her, though I shuddered at the mention of those flowers. “Did you speak to him?”
Again she seemed to be contemplating something carefully before she answered. “He didn’t see me. He was looking at you.”
“Was he?” It was a strain to keep the trepidation out of my voice, but I must have succeeded, because the child remained relaxed.
“Mmm,” she answered drowsily.
“That’s all right,” I told her, and hugged her tightly. “It was only a dream, anyway. Go back to sleep, now.”
“Will you sing me a lullaby?”
I began to sing the first lullaby that came to mind, a French lullaby my mother had sung to me:Dans les monts de Cuscione la petite a vu le jour
Et je fais dodelinette pour que dorme mon amour
La bercait avec tendresse lui prédit sa destinée . . .
I wondered for the first time where the song had come from; if it had passed down through the generations of my enigmatic ancestry from some region of France where once two families had lived side by side, locked in feud. The lullaby trailed off; I couldn’t remember the rest of the words. Perhaps my mother had not even known them, and anyway, the theme of motherless girls was too prevalent for me to be comfortable singing a mother’s words to a child who wasn’t my own.
I tried to stop the flow of morbid thoughts. I told myself that my aunt had been an impetuous girl who clearly had done something to displease her family, but the story was common enough among affluent families. After all, my mother had done the same: I had never known of the existence of a grandfather before he appeared at my mother’s funeral. As for the house on the hill, it was as haunted as any old, abandoned house. More likely than not, its inhabitant was some wayward vagrant, as Alexander had suggested.
But at Dorian Ducoeur, logic faltered. There was something amiss about him that not only Alexander and I, but also Tasha, could sense. I recalled what she had said about him looking at me, and shivered again.
I looked down at Tasha, asleep again in my arms, and decided two things then and there. First, I would take Alexander up on his suggestion of visiting the house again, and flush out its mysterious inhabitant once and for all. Second, I would resurrect my grandparents’ abandoned tradition and bring society to Eden—in particular, Dorian Ducoeur. His mystery could not be watertight, and I was certain that I was capable of unraveling it. With those resolutions I pulled the coverlet over Tasha and myself and settled into deep and dreamless sleep.
I awakened long after the sun had risen over the hazy tops of the trees. At first, finding the bed empty, I was seized by fear for Tasha, but then I heard her laughter somewhere below, and I settled back into the pool of sunlight on the pillow. It streamed through the gauzy curtains to touch my face like a blessing. I felt like a child myself, ready to smile at the sun. I lay for a time like that, with the sun on my face, listening to the humming world outside, for once not bothered by the mounting heat.
Then a thought fluttered into that bright, placid void, like a sa mara carrying nightmare seeds. It was the name Tasha had spoken last night from her dream: Dorian. Somehow, inexplicably, he was infecting all of our lives, and despite my resolutions of the previous night, this thought troubled me again in the light of day.
“You’re awake.” Alexander’s voice cut into my musings.
I scrambled to my feet. He stood smiling in the doorway. “You should have awakened me sooner.”
“Tasha told me that you were up with her in the night. I thought it was only fair to let you rest, as you seem to have cured her.”
“So she’s better?”
“Much—thanks to you.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
He came and sat down on the side of the bed, taking my hand in his. “You were kind to her. Sometimes such things are more powerful than any medicine.”
“Well, she’s better now. Let’s not ask why.”
We were quiet for an awkward moment, realizing that we were alone for the first time since the night of the rainstorm. Then Alexander said, “You must think me a brute for ignoring you these past two days.”
“I understand how you must worry about her,” I said.
He leaned down and kissed my forehead. But when he looked up again his smile was gone, eclipsed by sadness and anxiety.
There must have been a similar expression on my own face, because he asked, “What is it, Eleanor?”
I sighed. “I’ve been considering what you said, and I think now that we should go back up to the house on the hill.”
“Why the sudden change of heart?”
“I had a lot of time to think last night.” I shuddered, remembering Tasha’s voice speaking Dorian’s name. “Besides
, I don’t believe in ghosts. If someone is in that house, I want to know about it.”
He paused, looking out the window. He turned back to me with the inscrutable grimness I was coming to dread. “Eleanor . . . please don’t take offense if I say that it’s important that you know what you’re looking for up there, and that you are prepared for whatever you might find.”
The anxiety in his eyes made me speak impetuously. “Do you know something I don’t?”
He only said, “Who knows anything, really?”
“I ought to have known you’d bring in the philosophy!”
“I only meant that mysteries have a nasty habit of losing their glamor when one pursues them. Anyone, or anything, could be hidden away in the house on the hill.”
We looked at each other for a moment. Then I said, “Let me go home and change.”
He nodded, then followed me downstairs. At the door, I said, “I’ll come get you sometime in the afternoon. I’m sure Mary will stay with Tasha.”
Again he nodded, his stance oddly resigned. Then, as I turned to go, he pulled me back into the doorway and kissed me. “Don’t be long,” he said.
MARY was pleased with the prospect of spending the afternoon with Tasha, particularly when I told her that Alexander and I wanted to go for a walk. I didn’t like to lie to her, but I wanted more information before I let her know that the house might be inhabited. Or so I told myself.
Mary sat down with me at the breakfast table. There were a few letters by my plate. On top was a pale-blue envelope I recognized immediately. I picked it up, looking at the stamp, the Baton Rouge postmark.
“At least he sent it by the conventional route this time.” I slit the envelope.
Mary raised her eyebrows. “From Mr. Ducoeur? What does it say?”
I looked up into her cornflower eyes; as always, they melted the sarcasm on my tongue. “It’s an invitation to a party at Joyous Garde. Two weeks from Saturday. For all of us: you, me, Alexander, and anyone else we care to bring. As though we know anyone else to bring!”