by Fortune Kent
During those few minutes Matthew didn’t think about the important events in his life with Mary—their meeting at the church, the marriage and honeymoon, the move to the new practice in Canterbury, the birth and the death of their son. Instead, he remembered that day in August when they had made love in a meadow.
Father Moran nodded to the group at the graveyard, then took Matthew’s arm and led him a few feet away. He spoke quietly, earnestly. “She isn’t here,” he said. “She lives, but she isn’t here in this earth. She’s with God, but she lives on earth as long as we remember her and honor her memory.”
Father Moran moved away to the graveside, and Matthew found himself gazing toward the cemetery entrance. There was a fence on either side of the gate with vines twining over it, and beyond he saw the hills, brown and serene under the winter sun.
Never again, he knew, would she see the sun and the clouds and the sky, never again feel the mist rising from the lake, never again hear the happy cries of children in the distance.
Oh my God, he said to himself. My God, my God, my God.
Matthew put down his pipe and lowered his head into his hands. Beth saw the tears run down his cheeks, saw his body shake with sobs until her throat tightened and tears came to her eyes. She went and sat beside him and lightly touched his arm, and he lowered his hands and leaned against her so she instinctively placed her arm about him and felt his face warm on her shoulder.
“This is the first time I’ve been able to cry. Four years and this is the first time.” His voice was muffled by her dress.
Her heart went out to him.
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right, everything is going to be all right.” She held him tightly while their bodies swayed together.
Chapter Nine
During the following weeks Beth found a friend, dreamed a dream, and made a decision from which there would be no turning back.
Jeffrey left Monday morning on the steamship to New York. Two hours before sailing, Charles Fremont decided to accompany him and the house bustled with last-minute preparations for the trip.
The departure of the two men caused hardly a ripple in the smooth operation of the estate. Beth was impressed. She saw the inside staff settle easily into the routine of cooking and cleaning. She watched the groundsmen, after clearing away the storm’s debris, clamber precariously about on the sloping roofs to ready the house for the winter to come.
What was John Price doing? she wondered, looking up at the blond young man on the roof pulling a rope hand over hand from one of the house’s chimneys. A black bundle flopped honking and flapping onto the shingles. Alive! Her stomach turned. She had seen farmers in Ohio do the same. John was lowering and raising a live goose, tied by the legs, to clean the soot from the chimney.
She knew he would scoff at her if she called out for him to stop. I will anyway, she told herself, and was about to shout his name when she saw him lower the goose to the ground and climb down a ladder. He had finished. I’ll talk to Jeffrey when he comes back, she decided; he should be able to find a sweep.
Later, when she watched the smoke rise from her fireplace, she thought of the blackened goose and felt a renewed revulsion for this house of the Worthingtons.
She understood that the house, like any other, had been built by men, and without men would decay and fall. She also knew, thinking rationally, the foolishness of her fears on first seeing the Worthington place. Why then did she persist in believing in her heart that this edifice of wood and stone and mortar had a life of its own, as though the men and women who had lived here had breathed into the very building some part of their mortality?
This house can’t harm me, she reassured herself as she threaded her way through narrow attic passageways between piles of trunks and boxes; explored the damp cellars stocked with shelves of preserves and wood piled high in readiness for the fires of winter; looked out over the estate from towers standing empty except for cobwebs which caught in her hair and dust which floated in the narrow bands of sunlight entering the fortress like window slits.
Beth’s sense of unease, of foreboding, persisted. An emptiness, she decided. These rooms were made for living and for a time, many years ago, life flowed through them. Today they were almost deserted.
Listen! There were no footsteps on the stairs, no laughter from the parlor, no cries from the nursery. It was almost as though the house were waiting, but for what she could not tell.
Beth didn’t feel the emptiness, the aloneness, when she walked about the grounds. The gazebo with the view of the mountains and the river became her favorite retreat.
“Gazebo,” she said to Mrs. Worthington. “What a strange name.”
“A summerhouse,” the old woman snorted. “A high-class name for a common, ordinary summerhouse.”
Beth sat on the upper porch of the small building and read or watched the sloops and sailboats on the river or leaned back and daydreamed in the warm sun.
Dr. and Mrs. Matthew Smith. Elizabeth Smith, she said to herself. What did she feel for the doctor—respect? pity? affection?…love? The desire she had known for Francis, the wanting to be with him, to touch him, was absent. I’m older now, she reasoned, more mature. This may be what’s left for me. I may be fated to love only once.
Time will tell, she thought. I must give myself time.
The sun was setting, and Beth took her book and climbed down the stairs of the gazebo. She much preferred the chores she had done in the Shepherd house, she was thinking, to the leisure she found here where Mrs. Worthington insisted on supervising the household staff. It was then she noticed the dog lying curled in the sun. When she passed he stretched and followed a few cautious feet behind. She stopped and turned and saw the dog back away—a mongrel, probably part terrier, with short brown hair, his head reaching to her knee. Beth knelt and reached out, and he growled, a long deep growl, part warning, part invitation, the sound like the muttering of a distant storm.
“I’ll call you Thunder,” she said. The dog crawled to her, tail wagging, and she rubbed his head and kneaded the back of his neck.
“So you called him Thunder.” Mrs. Worthington laughed. Beth was sitting beside the four-poster bed making her nightly visit.
“Why are you laughing?” she asked.
“Oh, I thought you knew. The leader of the tenants, the one who’s urging them on, trying to get them to refuse to pay their rents when they’re due in a few weeks—he’s known as Big Thunder, and his second in command is Little Thunder.” She pulled the coverlet higher around her. “I don’t want to talk about such foolishness.”
Beth opened Oliver Twist.
“Shall I read?”
“Dickens is so comforting,” Mrs. Worthington said. “No matter what the problems, no matter how dire the trouble, at the end of the story the world is a better place. So restful. In a way your coming was like that.”
“Like a Dickens novel?”
“Yes, the heiress found, the family reunited. We thought at first, you know, that there were no survivors of the shipwreck. I had been in England for years, probably would have lived there the rest of my life. Imagine learning your son, daughter-in-law, and both grandchildren were lost at sea. Then the joy when we knew Jeffrey was safe, and Charles Fremont too. And now little Beth has returned. Like Dickens. Yes, please read to me.”
After Beth left Mrs. Worthington, who fell asleep in the middle of a chapter, Beth herself lay in bed a long time before finding sleep. This is what happens, she thought, when you get to know people. You become involved and then they hurt you and you hurt them. I must keep my distance. I don’t want to wound Grandmother Worthington. I don’t want to disappoint Matthew. Jeffrey? Ah, Jeffrey, he was another story. What is Jeffrey doing in New York? She wondered. Probably he was…She slept and, sleeping, she dreamed.
She was climbing a mountain and the trail divided; she saw one path ascend precipitously, but the route was short and direct. The other path was long yet easy.
&nbs
p; Without hesitating Beth chose the steep trail and clambered over the rocks to the cloud-covered summit where she leaned against a tree, out of breath.
The mist thinned and parted, leaving wraithlike wisps, and she found herself in front of a house she did not know. Before she could knock, the door swung open and a smirking John Price bowed her through. The room within seemed endless, for she saw neither walls nor ceiling.
Mrs. Worthington, Dr. Smith, and Jeffrey waited at a long mahogany table. A large grandfather clock stood behind them, silent. Beth sat on a three-legged stool, her eyes going from face to face. Jeffrey leaned forward and handed her a long sheet of paper, a quill pen, an inkwell, and an ink dryer.
“Answer the questions on the application in your own handwriting,” he instructed.
She wrote in her large, flowing script, wrote, and wrote, and wrote. When she finished Beth shook sand from the dryer on the paper and handed the form to Jeffrey. He inspected it and shook his head.
“Is this the best you can do?” He held up his hand, and she saw the paper was completely blank.
“Yes,” she admitted. Her face burned with humiliation.
“Thank you.” He passed the application to Mrs. Worthington and Dr. Smith, and they smiled and whispered together.
The clock struck once, the bong lingering in the air. “What do you have for me?” Mrs. Worthington asked. They were alone.
“A small gift of my own work.” Beth gave the older woman an embroidered handkerchief.
“And I have a present for you,” Mrs. Worthington said and handed Beth a jewel box.
Beth unsnapped the catch and the lid sprang open. Beth cried out, and the box clattered to the floor where tiny spiders scuffled over the carpet. She brushed frantically at her skirt and cringed at the sensation of hundreds of legs on her skin. Beth sobbed, both hands seeking to crush and sweep away the insects crawling on her legs, her arms, her entire body.
The clock struck two times.
“What do you have for me?” Dr. Smith asked. They were alone.
“Here.” She reached into her reticule and handed him a long black key.
The door, rusted and heavy, yielded grudgingly. They entered a room with dark walls and a dark ceiling. Empty. Completely empty. The doctor lowered his head into his hands. He walked a few steps away from her, and when he turned he was holding a bouquet.
“What a wonderful fragrance,” she said.
She accepted the bouquet and saw the lilacs were black and the leaves were curled and brittle. As she held the dead flowers in her hand, a spider, larger than a man’s fist, crawled out from among the wilted leaves, its furry legs stretching along her wrist. Her knees trembled and she was falling, falling.
The clock struck three times.
The spider, the bouquet, and the doctor were gone, and Jeffrey stood with his hands clasped behind him.
“Give me your gift,” he told her.
She went to him, fitted her body to his, and ran her hand along his shoulder and caressed his cheek and the back of his neck.
Beth drew away, horrified. “I’m your sister,” she said.
“No, you’re not. I know you’re not.”
Jeffrey opened a massive door, revealing a thick, heavy blackness. Hand to her mouth, she screamed. She knew with a terrible certainty what was inside. The clock struck time after time after time. She screamed. She knew.
Beth was awake in her darkened room with her heart throbbing in her chest as if keeping time with the striking of the clock, and she struggled to separate dream from reality. Then, knowing she had been asleep, her mind reached back to recapture the dream before it could slip away.
Later in the morning she related the dream to Mrs. Jamison, omitting only the embrace with Jeffrey.
“The meaning is as clear as the nose on your face,” Mrs. Jamison said. “Don’t trust any of them, that’s what you’re being told.”
Beth agreed. But the message, if there had been a message, was not so simple, she decided. Beth shivered. Someone walking on your grave, she remembered Mrs. Shepherd saying. To her, the dream reflected the past like a distorted mirror and showed a time yet to come as seen darkly through a clouded spyglass.
She was still mulling over the meaning of the dream while she baked a pound cake that afternoon. A boy shyly entered the kitchen and asked a question of one of the cooks who motioned toward Beth. The boy brushed his long blond hair back with one hand and held out a folded paper in the other. Beth took the note and the boy scurried away.
She broke the green seal.
Saturday evening at eight. My home. Trustingly, M.
Beth folded the message and slipped it into her pocket. Should I go? she asked herself. Later, in her room, she threw the note into the fire. She had decided.
Saturday at eight, she promised.
As the paper blackened and burst into flame, Beth realized she was committing herself to a future as enigmatic as her dream of the night before, as unreadable as the message in the charred ashes falling to the grate at her feet.
Chapter Ten
Mrs. Worthington surprised the household on Saturday by coming downstairs not only for lunch but for dinner as well. She and Beth finished the evening meal shortly before seven o’clock.
“Shall we sit in the parlor?” Mrs. Worthington suggested. She led the way down the hall.
Dr. Smith’s note said eight, Beth thought. Fifteen minutes to change clothes, fifteen minutes to walk down the mountain. I must go upstairs by seven thirty. Dr. Smith—odd, I still don’t think of him as Matthew.
“I halfway expected to see Jeffrey and Charles back today,” the older woman interrupted Beth’s reverie. “Mr. Gerken, who lives in the Tudor house at the landing, came home from the city yesterday. Jeffrey often sends a message with him, but this time there wasn’t a word.”
Jeffrey—still in the city. Beth imagined him dining in an elegant restaurant, looking over his wineglass at a beautiful woman whose long blonde curls fell teasingly over bare shoulders. She saw him dancing into the early morning hours, the women laughing, their faces flushed with excitement, their dresses a whirl of color below white bosoms.
Stop daydreaming, Beth told herself as they entered the parlor, a large musty-smelling room, reminding Beth of long Sunday afternoons and formal visits from Father Dougall. The parlor, she knew, was intended to be admired, not lived in. The windows were shut to keep out the dust, the flies, and the mosquitoes, and the curtains were drawn to protect the rose-patterned Brussels carpet from the glare of the sun.
Beth found the marble-topped tables cold both in appearance and to the touch, and she hesitated to sit in the chairs covered with fragile damask. A Worthington stove, the room’s only concession to practicality, squatted in a far corner. A square table stood precisely on the center design of the rug and on the brown and white marble top was the family Bible.
Beth looked down curiously at the yellow cloth marker inserted between the open pages and saw the record of Worthington births and deaths. One entry stood out from all the rest:
Elizabeth Aldridge Worthington. March 29, 1818.
The script was circular, expansive, much like Beth’s own. Then in a darker ink in a small, crabbed hand:
Lost in the wreck of the Sailing Ship Alexander Hamilton, Lake Erie, July 26, 1827, aged 9.
The remainder of the page was blank. No entries had been made for fifteen years.
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Quick, insistent. The mantel clock. Seven, time enough yet, Beth thought. She finally sat down in a high-backed straight chair. Mrs. Worthington had gone immediately to a straight chair to which rockers had been added.
“Since I was eight years old,” the old woman said, rocking slowly, eyes closed, “every day I’ve read at least one chapter of the Holy Word. When I was eight years old…” she said, and the words trailed off and Beth thought she was asleep, but her eyes opened and she looked at Beth as though from a great distance.
“More and mo
re,” she went on, “I find my thoughts returning to those days. I find myself remembering Jared as a boy and you and Jeffrey when you were babies, and at times the years run together and I can’t separate the one from the other.”
Beth glanced surreptitiously at the clock. 7:10.
“I always wished,” the old woman said, “you had seen more of your father when you were a girl. He was away so much. I lived in the gatehouse for a short while after my husband died, and I would lie awake listening for my son’s horse on the driveway, back from another business trip. How he adored you. ‘My princess,’ he called you. ‘I’ll build you a Tuscan tower,’ he said, ‘and you’ll live in your castle until the day your prince comes riding by.’ And when you were eight he built you the tower, and the next year he was dead.”
She rocked, eyes closed again, hands unconsciously smoothing the funereal black dress. 7:20, Beth noted uneasily.
“Sometimes,” Mrs. Worthington went on, “sometimes I wish there had never been a Worthington stove. Was Jared happier after his success? I don’t think so. He was a craftsman, not a seller of stoves. He needed to create, and when the business was established he built this house. He made sure the house was never finished. Without the. business and the success there would have been no trip West, no ship on Lake Erie, no…” The old woman rocked quietly as she remembered. “Oh, my son, my son, Jared my son,” she mourned as parents have mourned since the time of David and before.
“Forgive me,” she said. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. “Tomorrow we’ll go to Willow Dell, and I’ll show you where your grandfather, mother, and father are buried. We must make sure Mr. Bemis has your headstone removed. Eerie, to visit one’s own grave.”
Ding. 7:30. Beth began to break in with an excuse for retiring to her chambers when her grandmother’s words caught and held her attention.