by Sarah Bryant
Still, I could not help feeling that there must be something in the journals I was missing, the piece of the puzzle that would link the others. I fanned through the pages, letting the book fall open at random. The entry was the one in which Eve described Louis’s planned murals:He intends to paint the story of the Fall in four panels. But he says that he does not want them to look like church frescoes, so he will make them modern in their setting, using our own gardens, and Lizzie and me as models . . . imagine!
Imagine, I thought grimly. It was all I could do.
I closed the book, and drained the last of Alexander’s tea. It had indeed calmed my nerves; in fact, for the first time in days I was overwhelmingly sleepy. I put the book and the empty cup on the bedside table and shut off the reading light. Darkness settled over me like a mantle, and I lay for a time listening to the faint whir of insects beyond the screens and the deep, hypnotic tick of the grandfather clock in the corridor below. Then the sounds receded, and sleep closed its fist around me.
I looked up through clouded eyes into the face of a stone figure. At first I thought that it was the gargoyle from Joyous Garde, but gradually the haziness cleared, and I realized that it was not a monster at all, but the stone angel from the Boston Public Garden.
When I turned, however, I found that I was not in the Public Garden, but the rose garden beside the ballroom of the house on the hill. It was evening, overcast and chill. From beyond the closed French doors came the sounds of a string quartet playing a waltz I didn’t recognize: melancholy, yet imminently compelling. Opening the nearest door, I stepped into the ballroom.
The great chandelier was filled with lit candles, which had melted and dripped such that it no longer looked like a chandelier at all, but the ponderous, glowing hive of some colony of bright-bodied insects. In this dubious light, couples in late-nineteenth-century clothing danced to the thin, plaintive strains of the string players. Something about the people was wrong, but enveloped as I was by the woolly confusion particular to dreams—which is never quite thick enough to block the conviction that things are not as they should be, nor transparent enough to discern what is amiss—I couldn’t tell what.
Then I chanced to look up. Where the fantastically painted ceiling should have been, there was instead a limitless void, dark as a night without stars or moon. Taut golden threads emanated from the darkness. Following them downward with my eyes, I saw that each thread joined with one of the dancing figures, disappearing mutely beneath the costumes of their owners.
Summoning my courage, I touched the arm of a man near me. He let go of his partner, who drifted away in a trail of white, and turned to me. The man was Alexander, his face fixed in an expression of latent fear.
“We must not stop the dance,” he said in a low, excitable voice.
“Only tell me what they’re for,” I answered, indicating the filament that ran from his coat to the lightless sky.
He turned to me and opened his jacket. In the centre of his chest a red, living heart was exposed, beating in time to the music, the golden filament wound around it like scaffolding. I took a step back in horror. He saw the revulsion in my face, and his own took on a look of condescending pity, not unlike what I had seen of late in Mary’s.
“I’m sorry,” he said, looking into the blank darkness above, “but we are all bound, and the dance does not stop for anyone—”
Suddenly Alexander’s face contorted with terror and pain. The other dancers seemed oblivious, even as he staggered and let out a terrible cry, clutching his exposed heart. Then, like a discarded marionette, he fell lifeless on the checkered floor, the frayed end of the snapped cord swinging lazily above him.
I flung myself on him, but he was still and cold. As I wept over him, something soft and white brushed my cheek, the same gauzy white of his partner’s skirt. Looking up, I saw that she was one of the twins, but I could not tell which. Though her gown was white, as Elizabeth’s always seemed to be, the jewel glinting at her throat was a ruby.
She looked at me, her eyes sympathetic but her face circumspect. “He lost his step,” she said. “You couldn’t have saved him.” Then she turned away again and disappeared into the crowd.
“Wait!” I cried, pushing against the people who had closed around the woman, trying to reach her retreating figure. When I finally caught up to her, she was face-to-face with Dorian.
“So, you have come for a partner,” he said to her.
“Not him,” said another voice, before she could answer. It was the other twin, dressed in red with a diamond necklace. All three of them had the same golden lines running from their breasts to the boundless reaches above, and I sickened at the thought of the livid hearts hidden by their clothing.
“You must choose,” Dorian said.
“Your will is your own,” the woman in red retorted.
The woman in white looked from one to the other. Then, with a melancholy smile, she stepped toward her sister. With a cry of rage and pain, Dorian ran at them. Reaching up, he took hold of both their filaments and snapped them. They crumpled without a sound, but as they hit the floor their forms thinned and vanished, leaving only a pale-pink rose. Dorian looked at the flower for a moment, and then crushed it beneath his heel.
Before I could make sense of the violent action, the ballroom disappeared. I stood in the garden with the statue of the boy flautist. The tree’s branches were bare against the overcast sky. Dry leaves tumbled across the yellow grass, catching in the sunken hollow that had been a pool.
With a feeling of dread I knelt and cleared the drift of desiccated leaves from the depression, revealing a pane of ice. It covered the still, white face of one of the twins. Her hands, crossed over her shrouded breast, were bound with a length of frayed golden cord. There was a dark gash across her cheek.
I couldn’t look at that face and its terrible implications. I tried to cover it with leaves again, but the wind cleared them as quickly as I set them there. As I struggled with mounting frustration, the incongruous sound of a clock’s chiming filled my head. The chimes grew louder and louder, until I thought I could not bear another second of the sound; then, with a final, earsplitting toll of the bell, the dream shattered.
I jerked awake in a sweat as the last bell of four o’clock rang through the quiet hallways of Eden. As it died away, Dorian’s parting words from the party echoed in my mind, intertwined with the images from the dream, and that random passage I had read from Eve’s journal; together, they formed an idea that on any other night I would have called madness.
I bolted from my bed, and then clutched at one of its posts as the room swam and melted around me. For a moment I couldn’t think what was wrong; but the sensation was not unfamiliar, and then I knew that the tea had been drugged, probably with my own chloral hydrate—a good deal of it. Though I knew that he had meant to help, it was an effort to push aside my anger at Alexander and focus again on the matter at hand.
When I felt steady enough, I fumbled the door open and stepped out into the hallway. A night-light burned at one end, but it was nothing more than a reassurance; I could see only a short distance in front of me. My breath came in short, sharp gasps as I crept down the stairs, which slid and jumped as the drug wreaked havoc on my vision. I turned right into the corridor at the bottom, where the grandfather clock measured seconds like a ponderous metronome. I slid my thumbnail under a peeling corner of the red paper that lined the wall behind it. It came away easily, and I didn’t know whether to be sickened or elated when I found not bare plaster underneath but a painted spray of flowers.
I needed more light but didn’t want to risk waking anyone. After a moment’s consideration I opened the door to the library and turned on the lamp on my grandfather’s desk. Enough of its light filtered out into the hall to allow me to see what I was doing.
I tore the wallpaper off in wide swaths, barely noticing when it cut my fingers, aware only of the growing picture of the garden beneath. Then I uncovered a face: the face of a woman
, white and heart-shaped, with black Byzantine eyes.
“Eleanor!” a voice cried, shocking me from my numbness. I turned and met Mary’s bemused face. “What in God’s name are you doing?”
I pointed with a trembling finger at the twin’s face, looking down at us from the middle of the wall. Mary looked at it, then at me. She reached out tentatively and touched my cheek; at the coolness of her fingers, I realized how hot I was.
“I—I had a dream,” I said, hoping to quell the anxiety that was tightening her face. “A nightmare. Alexander was dead, and Dorian killed the twins . . . and then I knew that it was here.” I gestured to the mural.
Mary grasped my arm. “Eleanor, you’re ill. Let me take you back to bed.”
I pulled away and tore two more ribbons of paper from the wall, uncovering another image of the woman’s face, her eyes downcast and sad.
“Don’t you see?” I cried. “They’re Louis’s paintings!”
“Come away now, Eleanor,” she said. “Please.”
Something was wrong; she seemed afraid. “Mary? Are you all right?”
“Of course I am,” she said with false brightness. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
She wouldn’t meet my eyes. All at once, the pieces began to fall into place.
“It’s not what you think,” I said, because, finally, I did know what she thought. I also realized that I had no idea how to disabuse her of it. Dorian had been working on her for weeks, after all, as he had been working on us all, but unlike Alexander and me, she had had no confidante to check his influence.
“It’s the medicine,” I pleaded. “Alexander gave me too much medicine!”
Mary looked at me, frightened and uncomprehending. When I considered how I must look to her—soaked with sweat, hollow-eyed, weak and shaking—I almost didn’t blame her for the conclusion she had drawn. Now, too, the clarity of mind I had awakened with was dissipating back into drugged fog. As Mary led me back to my bed, I wondered sluggishly whether my grandmother had ever actually been ill at all.
After what seemed an eternity, we reached my room. Mary urged me gently back into bed, then turned on a light. I heard her shifting bottles on my dressing table. She returned with the bottle of chloral hydrate. I didn’t have the strength left to fight her when she poured some into the glass of water by my bed and made me swallow it.
Promising that she would be back soon to check on me, she shut off the light and closed the door. Before her footsteps moved away, I heard the soft, insidious click of the lock sliding into place.
I dreamed of Eve again directly before waking. Or perhaps it was my mother: even in sleep, my mind was too muddled by the drug to be certain. She came to me out of the darkness, her face white and pinched, her eyes flickering fear.
“Eleanor!” she cried, moving toward me, arms outstretched.
“I’m here,” I answered, stretching my own arms to meet hers.
She took them gently, entreatingly, and said, “You must listen to him.”
“Who?” I asked.
She didn’t answer, or perhaps she couldn’t. She simply said, “You are in grave danger.”
The feeling of her fingers on my arms was fading, her black eyes and white face growing dim. “Wait!” I cried, panicked at the thought of her leaving me alone.
She only repeated, “Listen to him.” Then she was gone. For a few moments I was alone in the dark silence with the gutted feeling of abandonment, before the dream faded into the grey light of morning.
SIX
I awakened to dull light. It was some time before I could focus my eyes, still longer before I could turn my leaden body so that I lay on my back. My tongue was thick and dry in my mouth, and the feeling seemed to translate directly to my other senses: there was a cottony greyness in the peripheral vision, and sounds seemed to come to me from behind a thick pane of glass. My head pounded, not with pain but with a density that seemed both to be inside trying to get out and outside trying to get in.
I only realized I was not alone when my companion shifted position in the chair next to my bed and coughed politely. I turned my head slowly, expecting to see Alexander, and instead met Dorian’s direct stare.
Despite my foggy head and heavy limbs I sat up, clutching the sheets to my neck as though this would lessen the feeling of violation. “What are you doing here?” I asked, my voice shaky and querulous.
Dorian laughed, the sound rolling deep in his throat. “I came to offer my apologies for last night. And when I heard that you were ill . . . well, you can imagine my concern.” His words were distant, tinny, secondary to the discord of his presence.
“How did you get in here?” I heard myself ask.
“Mary let me in. She seemed to think that seeing me might be beneficial to you.”
“Get out,” I told him flatly.
He raised his eyebrows in professed surprise. “Miss Rose, I know that we’ve had our disagreements—”
“Mary!” I cried, knowing that she could not be far away. In a moment she appeared in the doorway, the expression on her face that of a scolded dog who cannot decide whether to ask its master’s forgiveness or run away and cower.
“Please, make him leave,” I said.
She looked from one of us to the other, wringing her hands. I began to raise myself with the intention of standing, but Dorian got up first.
“Don’t trouble yourself,” he said. “I’ll come later, when you’re feeling more yourself.” He leaned toward me, as if to kiss my cheek, but instead he whispered, “I’ve seen the pictures. Not quite the reaction I was hoping for. You’re a clever one, Eleanor Rose . . . but you can’t outsmart me.”
Shutting my eyes and mustering my strength, I cried, “Mary!”
She fluttered in the doorway a moment longer, her stricken eyes on me. Then she said, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Ducoeur—”
Dorian smiled placatingly at her. “You needn’t worry, Mrs. Bishop. I imagine it’s to be expected of someone in her condition.” His eyes flickered over mine again, apparently to make certain that I had registered the remark. “I’m sorry to trouble you. Oh, and do let me know if you’d like help restoring those fabulous murals. I’ve had some experience in that kind of work, you know.” He smiled again, then exited.
Mary came to the bedside and looked down at me. Now both anger and helplessness were on her face, along with the fear. “Eleanor, I know that you’re ill, but I can’t abide your treating him so badly.”
Again I tried to think of a way to make her aware of how he was using her, and again I realized that my mind in its present state was not equal to the task.
“I don’t want him here,” was all I could say.
“You might have chosen a more ladylike way of telling him so.”
As Mary continued to lecture, my gummed mind replayed Dorian’s parting words. It was clear that he was afraid of me, but without knowing why, I couldn’t imagine what he might do next. What I did know was that in this state I could never defend myself against him.
“Mary,” I interrupted, “I need to see Alexander.”
“Eleanor, I really don’t know whether—”
“Please, Mary!”
She looked at me for a long moment, then said, “All right, I’ll get him. But I’m calling the doctor as well.”
“If you think it’s best,” I said, settling back against the pillows, already exhausted again. “Please hurry.”
I must have dozed, because it seemed only a moment had passed before Alexander entered. He shut the door softly behind him and sat down in the chair that Dorian had vacated.
I struggled upright and clutched his hand. “Why did you give me the medicine, Alexander?”
“I only meant to help you,” he said miserably.
“And instead, I’ve played right into Dorian’s hands.”
His eyebrows drew together. “What do you mean?”
“Apparently, he’s been suggesting to Mary that I’m going mad,” I said. “And after l
ast night, she believes it.”
“That’s preposterous! Mary knows you better than that!”
“Not anymore.”
“Eleanor, honestly—”
“Go and ask her.”
He looked at me skeptically for a moment, then said, “All right.”
He went out the door, and I shut my eyes again. It seemed that many minutes went by before he returned.
“Well?” I asked as he sat down again.
“She said . . . that she is afraid you are showing the first signs of your grandmother’s illness. And she showed me two letters she said you’d hidden from her—one from a local doctor, the other from that hospital in Paris. I tried to explain it to her, but she didn’t listen.”
The room spun. I closed my eyes. Thinking of Dorian, my mind wandered back to the night I’d sat up with Tasha and she’d spoken his name. Against the backdrop of his unknown menace, she was like a white moth fluttering too near the web of a particularly cunning spider. A fragile white moth with the sun on its wings . . . a luminous angel . . . the sun in blond hair . . . a fragile white dress. Eve’s overexposed photograph of her mother materialized behind my eyes and then dissolved again into the image of the moth, which in turn changed to a pale rose, tumbling through the dark.
I opened my eyes to find Alexander leaning over me, his brows furrowed. “Eleanor? What is it?”
“The roses,” I said, closing my eyes against the light from the windows, which stung them like wind-driven rain.
Alexander put a hand on either side of my face, gentle but firm. “What are you talking about?”
I wanted to drift away from the voice, to melt into the soft, beckoning haze. Yet my mind clung to the images and refused to let go: a little girl in white, with her face buried in a bunch of roses far too sophisticated for her, and a fragile woman in white, her eyes turgid with fear.
“Tasha’s illness,” I said. “It was like my grandmother’s. It had no apparent cause.”