Isle of the Seventh Sentry

by Fortune Kent

  “What was that?” She looked up, startled.

  “I heard nothing.”

  “Listen.” A cry from somewhere behind the house. Silence. Feet running along the hall. The front door thrown open. The young upstairs maid. Alice? Alicia? Wide eyed, sobbing.

  “An accident,” she cried. Tears streaked her cheeks, and she tried to speak but no words came.

  Jeffrey grasped the girl by the upper arms. Not harshly, Beth thought. Almost tenderly.

  “Tell me,” he commanded.

  “The tree,” she said. “Mrs. Jamison was underneath. She…she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead.”

  Chapter Six

  Beth followed Jeffrey across the lawn and around the house. Her mind whirled in confusion, but one thought returned again and again—Now I’m alone in this house of strangers. Alone in this house of enemies.

  Beth stared in horror at the body sprawled next to a thick tree limb. Jeffrey knelt beside Mrs. Jamison and felt her pulse. “She’s alive,” he said, and Beth, looking over his shoulder, could see the steady rise and fall of her chest.

  “See if the doctor has left,” Jeffrey shouted to one of the men who came running from the stable.

  The cook hurried from the pantry carrying a glass half-filled with an amber liquid. “Let me help,” Beth said, and the woman handed her the glass. Beth raised Mrs. Jamison’s head. The injured woman was pale, her breathing rapid and shallow, and most of the liquor ran down her cheeks, but she swallowed some, coughed, and began shaking her head from side to side, moaning softly.

  “Put her down, put her down.” Dr. Smith strode to Mrs. Jamison and knelt beside her. Beth and the others stepped back, gladly giving way to the authority of the physician. After a cursory examination the doctor called to two of the men, and they hurried to the lumber shed beside the barn and returned with a wooden door. They eased Mrs. Jamison onto the makeshift stretcher and carried her to the living room.

  “Mrs. Bemis can help me,” the doctor said. “The rest of you stay outside.”

  Beth saw John Price, who had been standing to one side, wipe his hands uneasily on his trousers. His arms were bare and the pale skin was smudged, but Beth noticed scratches reaching to both of his elbows. “What happened?” Jeffrey asked him.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” John said.

  “Tell us about the accident,” Beth said kindly.

  “I was trimming the tree with the handsaw like Mr. Jeffrey told me to,” he said. He appeared to Beth to be at once apologetic and defiant. “I cut the branches from near Miss Beth’s balcony and then started thinning out the rest of the tree. I’d been working for all of two hours, cutting and clearing away, when of a sudden the branch I was standing on gives way with an awful cracking and the saw drops from my band, and I grabbed the big branch over my head. The branch under me fell to the ground, and I was left hanging there. I never saw the lady, Mrs. Jamison, until after she hollered.”

  Jeffrey looked at Beth, shrugged, and turned back to John. “Clear out this debris,” he said. “I’ll talk to you and Mr. Bemis later.” Mr. Bemis, Beth knew, was the head groundkeeper.

  Jeffrey went with her into the parlor and left her there while he went to see if Dr. Smith needed help. Beth wandered about the house, drinking a cup of tea and eating a comfit in the kitchen, leafing through books in the library, her steps returning to the living room time and again, wanting to do something for Mrs. Jamison but knowing she would be more of a hindrance than a help. Once she heard muffled moans coming from inside, and she winced and turned away, hands clenching and unclenching on her damp handkerchief.

  She returned to the parlor and was sitting alone when Dr. Smith entered. Again she had the impression that his eyes rested on her just a moment longer than necessary.

  “She’ll be all right,” the doctor, said. His voice was warm and comforting.

  “I’m so relieved,” Beth told him. “May I see her now?”

  “No, she’s sleeping. Wait until tomorrow; she needs rest. She has a compound fracture of the tibia. She should, in time, have full use of the leg.” He noticed Beth’s questioning look. “The lower leg, that is,” he explained. “The bone broke through the skin. If it’s all right with you, I’m going to have her moved into the bedroom next to yours.”

  “Thank you, doctor,” Beth said. Dr. Smith glanced over his shoulder at Jeffrey and Charles talking in the hallway just beyond the parlor door. He lowered his voice. “Tomorrow,” he said, in a whisper, “see me after church if you possibly can.”

  “Why do you—?” she began, but he had already turned and joined the other men. Beth watched them walk along the hall and out onto the front porch. What does Dr. Smith want with me? she wondered. She liked him while at the same time she was puzzled by him. And his evident interest in her made Beth uneasy.

  Dinner was a funereal affair. Charles and Jeffrey sporadically discussed investments and their trip to New York the following week. Beth, unable to take part, feeling left out, remained silent. She ate voraciously, though—two helpings of green beans and potatoes, scalloped oysters, and two portions of bread pudding.

  They left the dining room together, and Beth went with the men to the library to select a book. Alice—not Alicia, Beth had learned from the cook—calm now, approached them.

  The young maid was short, about five feet tall, with blonde hair piled helter-skelter on her head, a look of continual amazement in her large blue eyes, a pale complexion, almost unnatural, probably induced, Beth thought, by following the current custom of eating chalk. Her body was well rounded, an attribute Alice emphasized with a low-cut bodice.

  Beth saw Alice look up at Jeffrey and remembered how often, as a young woman in Ashtabula, she had seen tall men attracted to girls who were short, blonde and, many times, vacuous.

  Alice’s face seemed to glow in Jeffrey’s presence. A woman, Beth thought, who would spend her life deferring to men. Any man, anytime, anywhere. I’m being too harsh, Beth told herself. Why do I feel this way when I don’t even know the girl?

  “Mrs. Worthington is awake,” Alice said. She looked coolly at Beth, almost as if she had read her mind.

  “And she would be pleased,” the maid went on, “if Miss Worthington and Mr. Jeffrey would join her in her chambers.”

  “Thank you, Alice,” Jeffrey said and the girl curtsied. Beth nodded and Jeffrey left Charles in the library and led her to the front hall and up the winding stairway, their steps muffled by the deep carpet. The unlit chandelier permitted the gloom of an early autumn evening to seep into the house, half-hiding the portraits in their deep ornate frames, making their ascent a journey from twilight into darkness.

  They walked to the right along the upper hall to the west wing of the house, away from Beth’s room, to a passageway where she had never been, cramped and narrow with a low heavy-beamed ceiling, dark sooty walls, a section of the house built in a distant and constricted past. They went on through a half-open door into the bedchamber, and all Beth could think was How small she is, seeing the little old lady adrift among pillows and comforters on a four-poster bed, a bed covered by a pink canopy with scalloped sides. From beside the bed a short, stout nurse watched them warily.

  The woman in the bed raised her hand, and Beth looked into the clouded green eyes set deep in an old, old face, wrinkled yet mobile and alive, saw the hand reach out, an old, old hand, gnarled and stiff with rheumatism. All at once there was nothing for Beth in the room except this woman, and she hurried forward and grasped the hand in both of hers and pressed it to her lips.

  “My dear,” the woman murmured, “it’s been so very, very long.”

  What was it like to be so old? Beth wondered. Did Grandmother Worthington lie in this bed day after day immersed in the past? She had been born before the Revolution near Liverpool, had been nineteen when she crossed the Atlantic on a sailing ship, a young woman when she visited Washington at Mount Vernon, a married woman and mother when the first president died, middle-aged during the
second war with England in 1812.

  The past seemed to crowd about them. Is the future here, too? the clouded eyes of the woman in the bed seemed to ask. Do this young man and this young woman, Jeffrey and Beth, represent my link to generations of Worthingtons yet to come?

  The old woman held Beth at arm’s length and studied her. “You’re a beautiful woman,” she said and Beth blushed. “Somewhat more darkly complected than my daughter-in-law, and taller, I believe.” Then quickly, hopefully—“But the cheekbones are the same, the way you walk and hold yourself is the same.”

  Beth felt the conflict within the other woman, the wanting to believe mixed with skepticism. To whom had she compared Beth—her daughter-in-law? How much more natural to have said “than your mother, Beth.” Or was she hearing subtleties where none existed?

  But why shouldn’t Mrs. Worthington withhold judgment? Wouldn’t she, Beth, do the same if their places were reversed? What must Mrs. Worthington have thought seven months ago when, after fourteen years of fading hope, she received the brief letter from a Margaret Jamison in Ashtabula, Ohio, reporting she had met a young woman whose antecedents were obscure, who looked like—“Undoubtedly I’m mistaken,” Mrs. Jamison cautioned—“but an attractive young lady who could be—unlikely of course—but who could be your granddaughter. Should I make discreet inquiries?”

  “Yes, please,” came the reply. And now, months later, Beth was here.

  The old woman’s eyes examined Beth’s hair, her face, her clothes. “Do you have the brooch?” she asked.

  “The brooch?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Worthington said, “my present to you from England on your eighth birthday.”

  “Ah,” Beth sighed, “the silver pin with the king’s portrait in gold.” Grandmother Worthington smiled. Beth smiled back, relieved—she had remembered the single reference in the journal. “I’m sorry,” she went on, “the brooch must have been lost in the shipwreck. I never saw it again.”

  The old woman lay back amidst the pillows, and the nurse shook her head at Beth.

  “She mustn’t go just yet, Ellen,” Mrs. Worthington said. She looked at Beth. “I’ve a gift for you,” she said. “A gift from the past. Jeffrey, bring the chest here to me.” He went to the far corner of the room and returned to place a rectangular wooden box beside the bed.

  “Lift the lid so we can see,” his grandmother told him.

  “Ah, so pretty,” Mrs. Worthington said. Inside the chest, each in a compartment of its own, were five dolls. “You liked them all,” she went on, “but you loved only one.”

  The unasked question hung over Beth’s head like a sword. Which one? Beth leaned over the chest and looked at the dolls, each in turn:

  A tall aristocrat, wooden, with an exquisitely carved face, high blonde hair held by a broad black band, and a full black gown with a large white bow just below the neck.

  A peddler doll, an itinerant woman dressed in brown with a shawl and a bonnet, carrying a wide basket laden with sewn-on wares offered for sale.

  A boy in a sailor suit, head of plaster, painted brown hair, and large brown glass eyes.

  A simple, worn rag doll, clothed in calico, a red bow at her waist, with long natural hair.

  An elongated pegwood girl doll with golden hair, a simple pink dress with a high, ruffled collar and half-sleeves, also ruffled.

  The room was hushed, and Beth felt all eyes on her—Ellen’s, Jeffrey’s, Mrs. Worthington’s. Jeffrey stared with raised eyebrows, a quizzical smile on his face. Mrs. Worthington leaned forward and her eyes moved from Beth to the dolls and back, and Beth wondered how many times the older woman had lovingly held these mementos of her lost granddaughter before returning them to their resting places.

  Beth reached into the chest. Without hesitation she selected the calico doll, held her clasped in her arms, and danced a few steps about the room. There was a gasp, and then everyone seemed to be talking at once.

  Chapter Seven

  The weather changed during the night, and in the morning the lawn was white with frost and the few flowers surviving from the summer had died and blackened.

  Beth found flames crackling in the stone fireplace in Mrs. Jamison’s bedroom. She sat beside the injured woman who was lying propped up in bed, her scarred face pale, her hair still uncombed. The bedcovers humped unnaturally where they were raised away from her leg, and when she shifted in the bed Beth saw her wince with pain.

  “I’m so thankful you’re going to be all right,” Beth said reassuringly. “At first we were afraid you had been hurt even worse than you were.”

  “I’ve never in all my days been so frightened. I heard a crash and looked over my head and saw the branch falling. I slipped when I tried to get out of the way and remember nothing until I woke up on the ground with your arm around me.”

  Beth murmured in sympathy.

  “I feel so bad,” Mrs. Jamison went on. “Dr. Smith put my leg in a splint, and I’ll be in this bed for who knows how long. Just like my mother. For ten years before she passed away I took care of my mother, bedridden, in pain.”

  Beth pressed Mrs. Jamison’s hand, feeling her heart go out to the older woman.

  “I get so discouraged,” Mrs. Jamison said. “My mother was in service all the years of her life until she took sick, and then we had nothing of our own except what I brought home from cleaning and washing. The disgrace. I hid my head when I saw the neighbors peek out through their curtains when the almoner visited. ‘Why don’t you send your mother to the county poorhouse?’ he always wanted to know while he doled out our pittance.”

  “I’m not sure I could have managed,” Beth said.

  “I don’t know how I did. And now I’ve been in service myself, a lace woman, a lady’s maid, all my life like my mother before me and I’ve nothing. Nothing. Sometimes I wake in the night and see myself sick and old and I cry myself to sleep. I don’t want my last years to be like Mother’s.”

  Mrs. Jamison took Beth’s hand between her own. “You’re all I have,” she said.

  Beth, not knowing what to say, was quiet. “You’ll be up and around before long,” she murmured at last.

  “Two or three months, the doctor told me. I liked him; he made me feel he cared.”

  “What do you know of Dr. Smith?” Beth asked.

  “Ah-h-h-h.” Mrs. Jamison glanced at Beth. “The doctor interests you.” She considered the possibilities and frowned. “He pulls a tooth for a quarter, sets an arm for fifty cents, and delivers a baby for three dollars.” She shook her head. “You can do much better,” she concluded. “You mustn’t throw yourself at the first available man.”

  “I’m doing nothing of the sort,” Beth said, coloring. “I asked because he looks at me so…so oddly, and he…” She was about to mention the doctor’s suggested meeting at his house. She decided not to. “He makes me feel uneasy—I can’t really explain the strange sensation I get.”

  “He’s older, of course,” Mrs. Jamison said half to herself, “must be in his early forties. I can understand his interest well enough. You’re an heiress and a very attractive one, too,” she added, looking admiringly—or was it enviously?—at Beth’s full, maroon dress with the narrow waist accentuated by a white bow on one side, puffed sleeves, and a modest yet sweeping neckline. Beth held a pert beribboned hat in one hand.

  “I still can’t believe you had no one,” Mrs. Jamison said.

  Beth looked at her, puzzled, then remembered their conversation on the ship.

  “There was one, a long time ago,” she said slowly. “So gentle and kind; older, twenty-one when I was eighteen. ‘Perhaps he’ll come to feel the way I do,’ I thought. Hoped, really.” She looked away. Why do I still feel so much love for Francis after so long? she wondered.

  “What became of him?”

  “He entered the priesthood,” she said with finality. She could see the lake steamer pulling away with Francis waving from the top deck. And she, smiling, waving back, thinking, How can I smile when
I want so much to cry?

  Beth stood. “Wait,” Mrs. Jamison said. “You asked me about Dr. Smith; let me tell you what I know. He’s lived here for some eight years, came when Dr. McGeary took ill, and then continued the practice after the old doctor passed on. They say he’s a widower and has been for four or five years. There was a child, I believe, a son who died very young. A fine-looking man, the doctor, to my way of thinking.”

  Beth nodded. “I must go,” she said. “One of the boys, Andrew, is bringing the buggy around to take me to Mass.”

  “I hope attending the Catholic church doesn’t undo the impression you’ve made so far. I hear Mrs. Worthington is quite taken with you.”

  “Oh, you must mean the dolls. I was drawn to the calico doll right away, attracted without reason, and yet anyone else would probably have done the same. She looked to be the most loved, the most fondled. I was fortunate to choose the right doll, I suppose, but there was nothing else I could do.”

  “The servants are talking of little else this morning,” Mrs. Jamison said. “The nurse must be a gossip; most of them are. All I hear is ‘Miss Beth this’ and ‘Miss Beth that’. You’ve taken everyone’s attention from the anti-renters and their troublemaking. The whole household has been worried about them and what they might do.”

  “I’m not,” Beth said.

  “You’re too sure of yourself, Beth. This is the time to be most careful. Just because you’ve been a success till now puts you in that much more danger.”

  “Danger? From whom?”

  “From anyone who stands to gain from the Worthington fortune. Jeffrey, Charles, probably others. They’re watching you, waiting for you to make a mistake. Whatever you do, don’t become involved in this anti-rent affair. You have too much at stake.”

  “I have no intention of becoming involved,” Beth said, rising and going to the door. She promised to visit again in the afternoon.

  Beth walked down the stairs and found the buggy waiting on the graveled drive. Andrew flicked the reins, and they left the estate under a canopy of maples whose leaves were beginning to turn as the year died in a splendor of reds, oranges, and yellows.