“Yes, Miss Ellis,” the woman replied with a puzzled look of her own. “You’ve known me since you drew your first breath. What kind of game are you playing at now, child?”
“Ellis!”
It was another voice, this time from the back of the stage. In the moment the two peacocks pulled aside the doors and vanished with them into the wings.
There, toward the back of stage, was a woman in an elegant purple dress, her back as straight as that of the wingback chair in which she sat. Her hands were folded in her lap with study the precision. Her face, in its day, might have been considered to be an exceptional beauty if it had not been for a slight overbite and a minor irregularity in the straightness of her teeth. Her face was narrow, with high cheekbones. Her hair was carefully styled, a predominantly dark color partly due to the woman paying excessive attention to keeping the gray roots at bay. It was in her large, dark eyes, however, where her most formidable weapon lay and the all-too-familiar gaze with which she now fixed Ellis.
“Ellis, I have just entertained Mrs. Lawrence,” the woman said without preamble. “And she has given me a report of the most alarming nature regarding your conduct. I have warned you about this time and time again and still you insist on ignoring my wishes and my direction in this. Is it true what Mrs. Lawrence has told me? Is it true what the entire street not to mention every member of our social circle and a good many beyond will be gossiping about before the sun has a chance to go down?”
A murmur of concern washed over the stage as it was uttered by the audience collectively.
Ellis started shaking, her eyes fixed on the woman in the chair.
“Are you going to answer me?”
Silenus moved to prompt her, but Ellis spoke on her own.
“Yes, Mother,” she replied.
5
UNWARRANTED ACTS
“Yes it is true or yes you’re going to answer me?” the woman seated in the wingback chair demanded, although there was a quiver in her voice.
“Both, I suppose.” Ellis spoke the words as though she were delivering lines in the play. They were words that she had spoken before and though it pained her to repeat them, she felt compelled to reproduce them now. It was her first and tenuous connection with the true memory of her past and yet the crushing pain of it was nearly too much to bear.
Men and women costumed as suns, moons and stars brought in a pair of painted flats that resembled her mother’s drawing room of the house. One of the painted flats featured a large window. As Ellis watched, the window in the painting began to brighten with the light of an afternoon sun. Leaves on the painted trees began to move in an afternoon breeze while the muted sound of their rustling passed across the stage. Ellis could smell the lacquer of the finished wood below the wainscot of the walls.
“This is no time for your impertinence,” her mother snapped at her.
Victoria Bradlee-Harkington, Ellis realized with a shock. My mother’s name.
Victoria was not a woman to be trifled with but there was definitely pain behind her stern eyes. “This is a serious matter, young lady!”
The audience behind Ellis uttered a collective “ooh,” anticipating Ellis’s response.
“I quite agree,” Ellis said hesitantly, drawing the words from reluctant memory. She had a terrible feeling of foreboding. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to do this again. Yet Ellis could not help but utter the words she knew she would later regret. “I think it very serious that Mrs. Lawrence’s daughter should be so shockingly unfamiliar with how humans reproduce.”
The audience behind her gave an appreciative laugh. Ellis winced.
“I will not discuss such a thing here!” her mother exclaimed. “And you should have more sense than to acquaint that innocent young girl with such personal matters!”
“Well someone needed to tell her, Mother.” The words came from Ellis’s mouth but tears stung her eyes. “She’s nearly seventeen and Sarah knew I was studying at the School of Medicine and she didn’t feel comfortable asking her mother about it. That Sargent boy has been fluttering around her and from what I hear he has something of a reputation…”
The audience in the theater laughed out loud at the cleverness of Ellis’s dialogue. She turned around in anguish.
“Stop it, Merrick!” Ellis demanded. “Make it stop!”
The masked revelers in the packed audience roared with delight.
“But that’s not possible.” Merrick smiled back in satisfaction. “It’s your play! If you want to end it, then go ahead and finish it!”
Ellis turned to face her mother, knowing what would follow and dreading it.
“Then it is true,” her mother said, fire in her eyes and her brow furrowed in distress. “You discussed the most intimate knowledge between a husband and a wife with Sarah Lawrence? How could you, Ellis! Her father is a bishop!”
“It’s hardly a secret, Mother!” Ellis said, tears welling up in her eyes despite the hotness of her words. Finish it! “I’m told that people come into the world pretty much the same way everywhere. Any farm girl in the world who has ever raised so much as a dog or a pig knows more about sex than the debutantes of the Boston Brahmins.”
Victoria sprang up from her chair with a suddenness that surprised Ellis. Her mother raised her hand and brought it sharply across Ellis’s face with a stinging crack.
Ellis, still wearing her clown costume, fell to the floor from the shock of the blow, just as she had remembered it. She still felt the sting of it on her hot cheek.
Victoria stood over her, trying to rub the pain from her hand. Tears were running down her cheeks as well but her mother had set her mind to a course of action and there would be no going back.
“You think this is some sort of lark?” Her mother’s voice shook with her rage. “You’ve squandered every social opportunity we have afforded you. You’ve taken no interest in any of the boys we’ve arranged for you to meet and your behavior at your cotillion was an embarrassment to the family!”
“I am not an embarrassment!” Ellis responded on cue, though she knew that in her mother’s eyes she most certainly was a heartbreaking disappointment.
“Do you know why I agreed to send you to medical school?” Victoria continued. “It was not because you idolize your father, although that is certainly true enough. I permitted it because I despaired of you ever managing to make a proper place in Boston society. I thought if you got this ridiculous notion out of your head that you might come to your senses and make a marriage that would secure your future and that of your family.”
“Ah!” the audience sighed behind her, but Ellis barely heard it.
Victoria looked down on the quaking form of her daughter. She reached down toward her but then hesitated and withdrew. “I see now that this is all just a game to you, something for your mother to play at. Well, you can’t win the game until you learn the rules…”
Ellis looked up in shock.
“The rules of Boston society are complicated and unforgiving. Their rules are my rules and now they are your rules as well,” Victoria said as she slowly sat back down, regaining her cool poise as she did. “You are going to play by those rules, Ellis, or—as it is the only thing that seems to motivate you—I will take away your schooling and your ambitions after your father’s profession. You have been a disappointment all my life, Ellis. I will not permit you to disappoint us again.”
“Yes, Mother,” Ellis the clown whimpered as she sat beaten upon the floor.
“I have arranged for you to meet that young Cabot boy,” Victoria said, her voice weary and tired. “Friday at one thirty sharp at the Union Oyster House down in the North End. I understand he insists on punctuality. Do you understand, Ellis?”
“Yes, Mother.”
She had understood. There would be no going back. There would never be a going back. Although she had no specific recollection, Ellis knew that things would never be the same between her and her mother after that day. While she knew nothing
about their relationship before that scene nor had any memory of events afterward, she felt the deep, aching loss of the moment, the sadness that would color her thoughts of Victoria in more somber hues thereafter.
“Bravo!” cried Merrick.
Merrick’s voice drew Ellis’s focus from the memory playing both in her mind and on the stage. Two worlds had collided as this moment plunged into the memory of another life and back again.
In a flash of insight she looked out over the audience and whispered, “My life, I remember my real life.”
The audience erupted in laughter and applause.
This world, the Tween, came sharply into focus for Ellis. She had been here before and she had left it through the Gate to somewhere beyond. She had lived the life she was seeing on the stage.
How? Why am I here again? she wondered. Where is the stage life … my real life?
Memory failed beyond the moment and the sting on her cheek felt very real. The sun, moon and stars costumes again pranced onto the stage as the applause continued. Ellis raised her tear-streaked face toward the wingback chair.
Her mother was not there. Behind the chair the painted flats were once again only paintings. Margaret was walking off the stage. Next to her, Silenus was breaking into more exposition.
“Ah, but what of this Cabot?” he said, waving his mask with a flourish. “What of her meeting with that sad and much besotted youth?”
The previous flats were being replaced by new ones depicting an old restaurant interior, but Ellis barely knew it.
Her costume made sense to her now. She was dressed for the commedia dell’arte. She was the Columbine character, the “fatal woman” who was the betrayer of true love for the riches of the world. Merrick was obviously Harlequin—the trickster and seducer of Columbine.
Yet she had remembered something of her life before Gamin, before the madness and the nightmare from which she could not awaken. What did all this have to do with finding Jenny?
“Here is the restaurant, and, yes, Ellis is late!”
The audience cooed in anticipation.
A new character walked onto the stage from the wings. He wore a costume in white, with wide pants and puffed sleeves. His volto mask was that of a sad clown, also white with a light blue domino painted onto it in the shape of a paisley.
Pierrot, Ellis thought. The sad clown that Columbine betrayed. She stood up, wondering what her next lines were supposed to be.
Silenus stepped up behind her once more and whispered into her ear, “Say, ‘I am sorry I am so late.’”
Ellis sighed and then repeated without enthusiasm, “I am sorry I am so late.”
“Yes, it is, and it has, for me, just gotten much better,” the clown said.
The clown’s response was wrong and made no sense. Silenus hesitated, uncertain. He shot a glance at Merrick but got only a deep frown for direction.
The clown leaned in toward Ellis and whispered, “Begin again with, ‘Good day, sir.’”
Ellis furrowed her brow, not understanding.
“Say, ‘Good day, sir,’” the clown urged.
Ellis complied out of curiosity. “Good day, sir.”
“Yes, it is, and it has, for me, just gotten much better,” the clown responded again. “How may I help you?”
Ellis caught her breath.
The clown urged her quietly again. “Is it your watch?”
“It is my watch,” Ellis said, the words rising from somewhere inside her once more. “I think … I think it is broken.”
“Then it is fortunate that you have found me,” the clown replied. “Although I’m afraid that I would prefer time to run a little slower while you’re here.”
A confused murmur ran through the audience behind her.
“Are you that poor of a watchmaker?” Ellis said, a smile coming to her lips at the warmth of the memory. “Or are you saying my face would stop a clock?”
The colors of the flats in the background were shifting, running together and separating. They no longer depicted a restaurant but rather the interior of a shop. Numerous clocks began emerging from the paint as though to cover the walls. The sound of their ticking quietly settled on the stage.
“Neither, miss,” the clown answered with a bow. “I am just grateful for whatever time we have. You mentioned your watch?”
“Yes,” Ellis replied, only mildly surprised to find a watch in her hands as she held it out. “I am in rather a hurry. I have an appointment across town and the gentleman is something of a stickler for being on time.”
“Well, if I were him,” the clown said from behind his mask, “then I would wait however long it pleased you.”
“The watch?” Ellis insisted.
“Yes, the watch,” the clown said, taking the broken timepiece. “Let me take a look.”
“Have we met before?” Ellis delivered the words as she had spoken them before in this shop.
“I am sure I would have remembered you,” the clown answered.
The murmur running through the audience was getting louder. Merrick stood up in the front of the theater. “What is this?”
“Sorry, of course you’re right,” Ellis continued, repeating the words as they came to her. “People are always saying that to each other.”
“It doesn’t mean they’re wrong.” The clown nodded. “We’re meeting now and that’s a good start. Your watch has a broken balance wheel, Miss…?”
“Ellis.” She smiled at the memory. “Ellis Harkington.”
“This may take some time, Ellis,” the clown said with a catch in his voice.
“There is no rush,” Ellis sighed. The words she had spoken before but now there was a warmth to them that she did not understand but felt deeply. She stepped forward, breaking out of the memory. The paintings on the background flats rearranged themselves back into the depiction of a restaurant interior and fell backward onto the stage with a bang.
“I knew you,” Ellis said. “You were there … I knew you in Boston! You’re…”
“JONAS!” Merrick shouted, rushing toward the stage. “The play is finished! Let the hunt begin!”
A cheer rang out from the audience as they leaped to their feet.
Jonas grabbed Ellis’s hand. “Run, Ellis! RUN!”
He pulled her toward the wings of the stage.
They ran.
6
BELOW STAIRS
Ellis trailed behind Jonas, his grip on her hand as firm as steel and, to her touch, just as cold. She caught a glimpse of the astonished face of Margaret as they slipped past her. The fire-safe stage door was wedged slightly ajar. Jonas made a beeline toward it, shoving it open with his free arm. The door swung violently open, rebounding off of the wall behind it. Ellis slipped through the opening just before the door slammed closed behind them.
Jonas did not hesitate. He turned at once to the left down a long, whitewashed hallway with mounted pipes running along the ceiling. Caged light fixtures with bare bulbs cast stark light in pools down the short length of the narrow hall that ended in a T intersection of even narrower passages. Jonas chose the right, smashing against the wall as he careened around the corner. Ellis, too, crashed against the wall but was dragged forward again almost at once by Jonas’s unrelenting grip.
“Where are you taking me?” Ellis asked, her breath already coming in short gulps.
“Away,” Jonas replied. His volto mask still clung to his face. “As far away as possible.”
“But where,” she demanded.
“Anywhere!” Jonas cried out.
Their costumes rubbed against the narrowing walls. Ellis could see a wooden door at the end of the passage but the walls seemed to be closing in on them. She wondered for a moment if they would become stuck before they reached the door.
Voices echoed from the corridor behind them. Laughing voices. Giggling voices. Hysterical, disparate and desperate voices.
Jonas snatched at the latch handle. It shifted reluctantly and, in a moment, the wooden d
oor swung open onto darkness.
Ellis cried out as Jonas pulled her in with him.
Jonas pressed the door closed behind them. Ellis’s eyes quickly grew accustomed to the dim light. They stood on a landing of an open stairwell. The stairs were narrow, made of wood with an oil finish. She looked up but could not make out the ceiling let alone the top landing of the stairs. She leaned forward slightly against the railing to look downward. It gave slightly at her touch. She pulled back but even in that moment knew that she could not perceive the bottom of the stairwell, either.
“Don’t stop, Ellis,” Jonas whispered urgently to her. “We have to keep going.”
“Going?” Ellis gaped. “I’m not going anywhere until you—”
“Stop it!” Jonas demanded, his voice firm, as though he would brook no opposition. “For this once, Ellis, just listen to me. Don’t argue. Don’t question. Don’t doubt. Just follow me. Can you do that for just a few minutes until we’re somewhere safe?”
Ellis felt her face redden. She wanted to defy him … was shocked at how natural it felt to defy him …
The muted murmur of voices could be heard on the other side of the door.
Ellis held her tongue and only nodded.
Jonas drew in a deep breath and then plunged down the stairs with Ellis in tow. They traversed several flights, each time coming to a landing with a door identical to the door they had just left on the previous landing. Jonas, however, did not appear to be looking at the exits at all, but rather was counting to himself with each landing to which they descended. Finally he muttered, “Seven!” to himself, reached out for the doorknob and pulled open the door.
He ran almost at once into the metal frame of a small bed that nearly filled the bare room. The steel legs screeched horribly as the frame scraped across the floor. Jonas swore indistinctly through teeth clenched against the pain, and pulled Ellis around the bed toward the door on the opposite side.
It was a nursery. The room was ornately decorated in muted Alice blue and light pink tones. There was a coffered ceiling in this room with a rocking chair set near an unlit fireplace and a large bassinet in the corner.
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