Winter smiled a little bitterly at the mention of her brothers. Their names brought them to mind with almost painful clarity. Kenny was Kenneth Junior, the oldest, whose wife Patricia sold real estate for a Long Island broker. Wycherly was her younger brother, named, as Winter was, for the well-researched ancestors of the formidable Musgrave lineage.
"You spoil Kenny, Mother." And Wycherly resented the obvious favoritism shown to his golden and glorified elder sibling. "And you know that Wych—"
"I suppose you think I ought to have sent Wycherly and Patricia?" her mother said with a silvery laugh. "Well, never mind. I know you're tired and aren't feeling well; we'll be home soon, and then you can rest. I hope you'll be planning to stay for a while; you've been quite the stranger these past few years, and though Father would never dream of mentioning it I know you've hurt him terribly. You really ought to think more of others, Winter, dear; but then you never did think of anyone but yourself." Satisfied with the placement of her last barb, Mrs. Musgrave changed to another subject.
Why did 1 come here? Winter wondered, half-despairing. Her mother's voice purled on, like a quiet stream deep enough to drown in, but Winter tuned it out, watching the cars slide past them on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
She'd gone home because she had no place else to go, because she'd owed this visit ever since she'd left Fall River, because they were her parents and deserved to know how things were with her.
But nothing here had changed. Kenneth still got all the attention and the lavish marks of parental favor—and drank too much, as far as Winter remembered, though certainly that wasn't something the family ever spoke of. Wycherly still drifted from this to that, looking for some position that would engage his talents and ending up living back at home more often than not—and at thirty it was becoming obvious that the youngest Musgrave sibling was what previous generations had not hesitated to label a wastrel.
Mother tended her house, her wardrobe, and her friendships, serving on this committee or that, all indistinguishable from one another except for the names of the benefiting charity and the committee members she was fighting with.
Father worked, eighty-hour weeks at the brokerage on Wall Street, barely home enough to interfere in the lives of his family.
Nothing had changed.
"Are you listening?"
"Yes, Mother," Winter answered dutifully.
"I said, you ought to see my doctor while you're here. He's very good, you know; keeps up with all the latest literature on depression and nerves. I don't know if you really ought to even consider going back to work for a year or so at least. Your health has never been terribly good, you know, and work isn't all there is in the world."
What alternative are you offering me? Winter wondered, knowing there was none. She reached for the comforting illusion of Grey's presence, but it wasn't there. All she had was the sick heavy outliers of a headache that owed nothing to poltergeists or the paranormal, and everything to coming home again.
When it had been built in 1916, Wychwood had been considered a tiny jewel-box of a house—only twenty-six rooms, built as a wedding present by Great-Grandfather Wycherly for his daughter and her husband.
With the Great Depression, the family fortunes had declined to such an extent that when a fire had destroyed the stables and one wing of the house they had not been rebuilt, and time had taken the tennis courts, the boxwood maze, and the formal gardens that Winter knew only from her study of old photo albums. But what remained of Wychwood was, by today's standards, a stately home indeed, and as the Mercedes pulled in through the high iron gates—now rusted permanently half-open—and slid up the long graveled drive, Winter could feel privilege and expectation wrap her in bonds as unyielding as the grave.
Who's the coward now?
Winter stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at the archway that led into the dining room. Her encounter with Rhiannon in San Francisco was only a jumbled collection of impressions now, but the irony of that taunt remained: Winter couldn't remember the last time she'd been this scared. The headache she had expected had never quite fulfilled its promise: The worst of the pain remained in the future, and its potential made everything in the house seem to be taking place under water. With damp palms Winter smoothed the thin silk voile of the borrowed Hannae Mori dress against her thighs and reminded herself that what waited at the foot of the stairs could not be so very bad. It was only her family, after all. What harm could they wish her?
Coward. Coward, coward, coward. If you were going to run, you should have run away.
Memories just beyond her grasp roiled the sluggish surface of Winter's consciousness, troubling but not enlightening her. But if there were something here in the house where she'd grown up that she no longer remembered, it could hardly be important—to her or to Grey.
With that thought, a dull spike of pain began to throb monotonously behind her right eye. She really ought to go down. Waiting would not improve matters, and would only give Mother more ammunition in her campaign to render Winter a homebound invalid.
And why not? Isn't she right? All I proved by leaving Fall River was that I'm not capable of coping with the real world. I set out to remember the past, and all I did was confuse myself further. I don't even know what's real any more. I've lost Grey forever, and now I feel guilty about that, too. And as for whatever it is that's chasing me . . .
It wouldn't follow her here to Wychwood. It couldn't.
There was something so disturbing about that certainty that it made dinner seem innocuous by comparison. Winter smoothed her dress one last time and hurried down the stairs.
Despite her penchant for continual redecorating, Mother had left the dining room alone. It was just as Winter remembered it: cream and Wedgwood blue, the colors echoed in the Aubusson carpet and the stiff damask curtains that stayed closed no matter the hour or the season. The first course was already on the table and five places were laid. Winter wondered who the holdout was, Father or Patricia; her mother and her two brothers were already there, waiting for her.
"Winter! How good to see you." Kenny came around the table, looking formidably stuffy in his three-piece Brooks Brothers suit in banker's gray. He hugged her in a distant formal fashion, and Winter could smell the mingled scents of bay rum and expensive bourbon. Kenny was the eldest; in his early forties now. More whiskey, less hair, but otherwise unchanged from her last memory of him—how many years ago?
"Kenny," she said. "You're looking well. Is Patsy joining us?" Those were the things people said, weren't they? Normal people—and people passing for normal?
An elaborate Waterford chandelier showered light on the silver and crystal on the table and the mirrors on the walls; a setting as pristine and inhuman as the surface of the moon.
"Patricia had to stay late to show a house farther out on the Island. Father will be along when he can," Mrs. Musgrave said from the foot of the table. She'd also changed for dinner, into something floaty and formal the color of ashes of roses. Heirloom diamonds glittered in her ears. "If only you'd let us know you were coming—"
"He'd have had time to beat it out for Frankfurt instead of just a late meeting—but I forget, Winty, you were always his favorite," the last of the dinner party guests said.
The childish diminutive brought back an instant snapshot memory of her sixth birthday party—and of the toddler, crowing with delight as he buried his face and both hands in her birthday cake, ignoring Winter's hysterical screams of rage.
"Hello, Wych," Winter said. "And it was Kenny who was his favorite, not me."
A ripple of surprise spread among the others at this plain speaking; Kenny coughed and Wych grinned maliciously and Miranda Musgrave sat up straighter in her chair. Disapproval etched stark lines into her face.
"Do sit down, Winter. Father will want us to start without him. And you do need to keep up your strength."
"Yes, Mother," Winter said meekly, her flash of defiance over. She sat down at the table across from h
er brothers. The ghosts of dinners past crowded around her as she picked up her soupspoon and tried to will herself invisible.
"And how are things at the bank today, Kenneth dear?" Mrs. Musgrave asked, smoothly taking command of the conversation.
Kenny began his reply—which would be exhaustive yet diplomatic, as always—and under cover of her mother's ostensible absorption in the discussion with her elder brother, Winter studied her youngest brother. Everything else was the same—was he?
Wych was dressed much too casually for a dinner at Wychwood, wearing a rumpled sport coat over an open shirt. His hair was several weeks late for a haircut. Like Winter, he possessed the pale chestnut hair and hazel-brown eyes of their Wycherly grandmother, but instead of the stubbornness that dominated Winter's face and the set of her mouth, Wycherly's features seemed forged by some streak of cowardly cruelty.
Why am I thinking these thoughts?
She glanced toward Kenny. Though he was only a few years older than she, Kenny's hair had already faded to the color of tarnished brass, and in place of cruelty, his face showed nothing so much as a bovine indifference to the world around him.
"But you're not eating, dear," her mother said. "Shall I have Martha fix you something else?"
So that one moment you can say I'm putting on too much weight and the next try to force-feed me? "No thanks, Mother," Winter said briefly.
"Wycherly, do try to sit up straight. I'm sure Winter would like to hear what you've been doing."
Wycherly regarded Winter with sullen resentment. "Oh, I don't think so," he began nastily, but stopped at his mother's expression of doe-eyed injury. Surrendering, he'd only gotten a few sentences into a hopelessly muddled explanation of some venture partnership when Kenny interrupted with the tale of a boat that he and Patricia were thinking of buying.
"—I'd heard that Stevenson down in Term Mortgages had been looking at something like it but couldn't quite swing the financing, so naturally I took the opportunity to ask his opinion—"
And make sure he knew you were buying a boat he couldn't afford, Winter finished for him silently. The atmosphere in the room shifted like water; water to put out fire. . . .
Something was wrong here—more wrong than the clash of weak and spiteful personalities—but she could not be quite sure what. Of course everyone's family were perfect horrors; Mother wanted her own way no matter who was hurt, Kenny was a snob and a tyrant, and Wych was as much of a bully as he could get away with being, but somehow she didn't remember them being quite so blatant about it.
And if they were all of these things, what was she?
Dinner seemed to last for an eternity.
Kenneth Musgrave, Senior, arrived as predicted, about the time dinner was over and the dessert service had been laid out by the ever-faithful Martha. They had always had servants, and if Winter had thought about it at all, she'd considered it an automatic sign of privilege—but how much of a privilege was it, really, to have to wait for and depend on other people to do things you were perfectly capable of doing yourself?
She welcomed her father's arrival with relief. It had taken all her ingenuity to skate around the gaps in her memory; the only reason she was able to manage was the unwillingness of the others to mention anything that might open the subject of Winter's stay at Fall River. She wondered what they'd say if she told them her problem had been diagnosed as poltergeists, not nervous collapse!
"Daddy!" Winter cried, flinging herself into his arms with the first unmixed emotions she'd felt all day.
"How's my baby girl?" Kenneth Musgrave greeted her.
Now in his late sixties, Winter's father was tanned, silver-haired, and vigorous; so perfect a depiction of a prosperous Wall Street financier that he might almost be a symbol and not the thing itself. He hugged his daughter hard and then released her, studying her with acute steel-gray eyes.
"And what brings you to our humble hacienda?" he said, smiling. "I thought you were settled in to that place you bought upstate. Randa, get me a drink, would you?"
Winter let the baffling reference pass as her mother hurried to get her father his drink. This was what life at home had been like as long as Winter could remember: Kenneth Musgrave would enter like a conquering lion, and the Musgrave women would scurry to do his bidding.
And the Musgrave men . . . ?
She stepped away from her father, glancing at her brothers, the princes in waiting, to see them both regarding her father with identical expressions of resentful envy.
"I hope you'll be getting back to work, soon," Mr. Musgrave said. "You can't let one failure define your entire life."
With her father's arrival, Winter realized, the last player in the family tragedy had appeared, and events settled into their accustomed paths as if they had been repeated every night for a thousand years.
"Oh, Kenneth," her mother fluttered, "don't you think it's too soon? After all, Winter is so fragile. . . ."
"Fragile is another word for failure," her father said flatly. "Ken Junior might not be as bright as his sister, but he's risen right to the top. Persistence is what matters. You aren't going to fail me twice, are you Winter?"
His pale eyes transfixed her, allowing no room for evasion. All Winter could think of was every time she'd failed, every occasion on which she'd disappointed this man.
"I won't fail," she said in a low voice.
Her father smiled, and it seemed to Winter as if there were something of gloating in it, as if some victory had been achieved that stretched far beyond her obedience.
She looked around the table, and it was suddenly as if each of them stood in the shadow of someone she knew: Kenny was Janelle, who'd surrendered everything she was good at for peace and security and found neither; Wycherly was Ramsey, afraid to try and knowing that the failure was killing him. . . .
Both of her brothers had lost the golden time that Ramsey had talked about, and were doomed now to repeat their parents' failures until the end of time.
And her parents? Her father and mother? Whose failures were Kenneth and Miranda Musgrave doomed to recreate? Ramsey had said she'd escaped—she and Grey—but had he known how easy it was to fall back into failure? No matter what she did now—fail or win—Winter would disappoint one of her parents, and the realization was an unbearable, inescapable pressure.
"I— Excuse me; I don't think I feel very well." Winter flung down her napkin and all but fled the dining room.
Her mother had given Winter her old room, but no trace remained now of Winter's childhood occupancy. The room had long since been converted to the perfect guest room, from the Laura Ashley Ribbons & Roses wallpaper to the trendy country look of the hand-painted furniture and patchwork quilt on the bed. The room was light-years from Janelle's Sears, Roebuck kitchen, but even at its stifling worst there had been something more . . . human . . . about Janelle's house.
The illness she had feigned appeared for real; Winter bolted for the bathroom as her stomach tried to eject what she'd managed to swallow of the evening's meal.
Afterward, trembling and sore, Winter opened the medicine cabinet in search of toothpaste and found instead several miniature bottles of liquor.
So Wycherly's following at least one family tradition.
The only thing that surprised her was how much sadness the knowledge gave her. But she knew it had to be his; Kenny didn't live here and neither of her parents would have felt the need to hide their liquor.
Winter twisted the cap off one of the little bottles, rinsed her mouth with vodka and spat, then opened another and drank it straight down. Cold eighty-proof fire spread through her aching stomach, soothing the pain. Every instinct urged her to leave right now, to flee, but that was madness. This was her house; her family.
"What family doesn't have its ups and downs?" Winter tipsily quoted James Goldman as she reached for another of the little glittering bottles. I'm having a relapse. Another breakdown. Whatever.
And whatever it was, she couldn't bear it. Why ha
d she come back here, if coming was going to cause her so much pain? What kind of coward was she?
A pretty stupid one.
She'd been smarter before she'd gone to Fall River. The last time she'd been here was the summer she'd left school. She hadn't been back since then. Not for Christmas, not for Thanksgiving. Not in fourteen years.
And you'd think, wouldn't you, that someone in the family would have mentioned that on the evening when Winter Musgrave came home again at last?
Suddenly she was crawlingly cold to the tips of her fingers. All the secrets she'd cavalierly tried to unearth weren't tidily deposited elsewhere. Some of the puzzles were here.
And I said I wanted to know the truth. How stupid can you get? Oh, Grey, darling, help me!
Winter retreated back to the bedroom, taking a third little bottle with her. Her headache was coming now in waves of chill and nausea, and in the world outside it had started to rain. The storm that had been threatening all afternoon and evening was breaking at last, and when Winter looked out the window she could see white lines of rain illuminated by the security floodlights.
It had been raining that night.
No! She could feel the effect it took to shove the memory beneath the surface, but she managed to make it. Her heart beat faster with fear, and the exertion left her dazzled and weak. She fell into the chair and stared morosely out the window.
There were memories in the rain:
—Winter Musgrave! That plate was Limoges!
—But I didn't touch it, Mommy! I didn't!
But her mother didn't believe her. She never did. Just wait till your father gets home, young lady— And Winter had no way to rationalize the things she'd never done—or couldn't remember doing.
—If you're going to go around trying to be different, don't come crying to me that you're not popular.
—But, Daddy, all I wanted to do was . . .
—If you'd spend less time trying to make yourself interesting and more on your schoolwork, young lady, you wouldn't have time to complain that no one wants to take you to the prom.
Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02 Page 23