House of Masques

by Fortune Kent

  The bureau. She opened the top drawer and her fingers touched porcupine-sharp balls. Puzzled, she warily handled the objects and smiled in recognition. Pine cones. Four or five of them. And nothing else.

  The middle drawer. Packed full. The feel of wool on her palms. Clothing of some sort. The bottom drawer rattled when she opened it and her fingers groped about before closing over a long waxy rod. A candle. She explored further and found and shook a small box. Yes, she thought, matches. And she felt the faint stirring of hope.

  The first matchstick broke. She tried another and the sulphur hissed and flamed, and she lit the candle. The room sprang into view and her shadow wavered on the wall behind her. The room had one window and one door, and the window was boarded over.

  Kathleen sat on the bed with the candle in her hand and looked from the locked door to the boarded window to the bureau and back to the bed.

  “Oh!”

  She dropped the candle and wiped the melted wax from her hand. The candle lay on the bed and the sheet browned and the odor of burning wrinkled her nose. She retrieved the lighted candle, dripped a puddle of wax on the top of the bureau and pushed the base of the candle into it.

  She piled the bedding, the clothing from the drawer, and the pine cones along the far wall and held the candle under the pile. The cloth singed yet would not burn. The pillow. The covering was old and thin and ripped easily in her hands. Feathers spurted into the air. She shook the rest of the feathers from the case and wadded them beneath the pile of clothing and held the candle to them and nodded in satisfaction as the flames leaped upward.

  “Fire, fire!” she called and ran across the room and pounded on the door with her fist. The fire flickered higher and smoke rose to the ceiling and drifted toward her. “Fire, fire,” she called again. The flames crackled as the pine walls began to burn.

  The smoke stung her nose and throat, and she gasped for air. She tried to call once more for help but choked and bent over in a fit of coughing. Kathleen’s eyes watered and she blinked and rubbed them with her palms and felt stabs of pain.

  She slumped to the floor with her head leaning on the door. Flames crawled across and up the far wall. Unhooking and removing her shoe, she pounded with the heel on the door. Her eyes smarted and watered, and she felt as if her head would burst.

  A scraping. A bolt sliding. The door pushed against her head, so she crawled aside and the door swung open. The man on the other side backed away, coughing. “My God!” he shouted and she heard his steps running away from her. The smoke spewed into the large room and she crawled through the door, gulping down the clearer air.

  The short, unshaven man, a handkerchief to his face, ran past her into the bedroom carrying a pail. She stood unsteadily, one shoe lost, and groped her way across the room. Her carpetbag sat beside the stove and she reached inside, pushing the clothing out of the way until she found the tightly wrapped bundle near the bottom. She unwound and spread the cloth on the floor and placed the revolver on top.

  Her father’s gun. A Colt .44, loaded except for the chamber beneath the hammer.

  The second kidnapper ran from outside into the room and, without seeing Kathleen, entered the bedroom. She heard the two men shout to one another, and in a few minutes the smoke lessened and she could no longer see flames. She stood and waited. At last the men came from the bedroom and she saw that their hands and faces were streaked with soot.

  Kathleen faced them with the revolver in her hand. The men shook their heads as though trying to tell her she did not understand and advanced on her with their hands before them in gestures of entreaty.

  “Stop,” she whispered and her thumb cocked the revolver. “Stop,” she said louder. Her hand shook. The men looked at one another and she saw surprise on their faces.

  “What are you…?” the short one began.

  “Raise your hands,” she interrupted. Slowly their arms moved up.

  Kathleen sensed someone moving behind her and she began to glance back when a blow struck her hand and the revolver clattered to the floor. She gasped and held her wrist tight against her body. Her assailant leaped in front of her and knelt, his back to her, and picked the gun from the floor and faced her. The two kidnappers looked at each other and turned and ran from the room through the door at the rear of the cabin.

  Kathleen’s mouth opened and she stared at him. Where had he come from? Why had he disarmed her?

  Edward Allen smiled and slipped the pistol into his pocket. Kathleen slumped into a round-backed chair and held her throbbing wrist pressed tight in her lap. The wicks of the two kerosene lamps were turned low, and the dim light left much of the room in shadow. She stared before her at the inch of amber liquid in a glass and at the cards scattered on the table. The two eyes of the king of spades stared back.

  “Listen.” Edward Allen’s voice. She looked up and saw him poised but unmoving. Hoofbeats pounded in front of the cabin.

  “In here,” Edward Allen told her and opened the door of the second bedroom. Clarissa sat facing them, hands folded, and in the mirror on the wall behind her Kathleen saw the reflection of her uncombed wisps of golden hair.

  “I had to take the gun,” Edward Allen said. “The barrel is rusted. You might have blown your hand off.”

  The crack of gunshots came from outside and she started at the noise which reminded her of the logs snapping in Josiah’s fireplace. A man shouted an order and then she heard the thudding steps of men running.

  The door opened and two men entered. The first, tall and dark and with an orange scarf knotted around his neck, stood just inside the door with pistol in hand. The second man, she noticed, paused behind and glanced at him as though waiting for directions.

  “Are you all right?” the tall man said. The two women nodded. “Thank God,” he said. Kathleen straightened her disheveled dress and smoothed her hair.

  Before the stranger in the orange scarf spoke again she knew who he was and what his next words would be. Knew with certainty. And she was right. “I’m Captain Worthington,” he told them.

  She felt a repugnance, an actual crawling of her skin. This was the man who had killed her brother. Kathleen wanted to run but she knew she must not. She examined him instead with the same mixture of distaste and fascination she had known as a child when she moved a wet and rotting timber behind the barn and watched the black insects scurry away from the unaccustomed light.

  He looked older than Josiah’s guess of twenty-six or twenty-seven, she decided, and not at all handsome or dashing. Tall certainly, no question of that, probably six feet or more, and his slenderness accentuated his height. His hair was straight and jet-black, and his face was without beard or mustache, though dark from not having shaved. The angular face reminded Kathleen of a photograph she had seen of Lincoln as a young lawyer, even to the sadness lurking in his eyes and in the hollows around them.

  Captain Worthington escorted them into the large room and listened while Edward Allen told a jumbled story of their capture, the drive to the cabin, and the fire. The Captain strode into the fire-blackened bedroom, and when he returned he knelt before Kathleen with one knee on the floor like the picture in her book of fairy tales of the prince proposing marriage. What offering was this he held toward her? Ah yes, her shoe. She stretched her leg forward and he slipped the shoe onto her foot and clumsily fastened the buttons.

  He smiled, the quick grin of a boy, and for a moment the sadness was gone and she saw why others might find him attractive. The smile vanished as quickly as it had come and the Captain rose and bowed to her and was gone. Only after he left did she realize neither of them had spoken.

  She and Clarissa waited in front of the cabin while a short distance away Edward Allen talked to the man who had been posted to protect them. From time to time the quiet of the night was broken by the calls of Captain Worthington’s men searching the woods for the kidnappers.

&nb
sp; “Will Captain Worthington take us to the Estate?” Kathleen asked.

  “I’m sure he will. Where else? Edward Allen says it’s only a few miles from here and we wouldn’t be able to find another lodging place at this hour of the morning in this forsaken country. Being allowed to stay any length of time at the Estate, though, is another matter.”

  “I hope we can find—” Kathleen began when Captain Worthington rode into the clearing and swung down from his horse.

  “They got away,” he said, “at least for now.” He led his horse to the two women. “One of you will have to ride with me.” He held his hand to Clarissa, she moved to him and he grasped her about the waist and lifted her easily onto the blanket behind the saddle.

  Kathleen felt a pang of disappointment. Why had she expected him to choose her? She looked at Clarissa sitting sidesaddle, her hair swept back from her face, her delicate features calm. There was a detachment about her, as though some inner Clarissa always remained concealed. Would a man be tempted to try to pierce her outward serenity? And what would he discover within?

  Yet Captain Worthington could not be interested, Kathleen decided. He must be paying deference to her age. Still, no matter how she explained away his choice and no matter how ridiculous she realized she was, Kathleen felt slighted and hurt.

  One of the men helped Kathleen mount and they left the cabin, single file, Kathleen holding the saddle horn while the man walked ahead leading the horse. They came out of the woods and ahead of them the pine trees on the mountains formed a jagged border between earth and sky. The ride seemed to her a succession of fragments, interrelated yet separated, like the recollection of a dream broken by restless awakenings: the dark shapes of the riders in front of her, the horses behind, tired, walking with slow funereal steps, hooves muffled. From far away she heard a dog bark three times; she waited for him to bark again but he did not. They moved in another world, the world of night, a world she seldom visited and now she wondered why as she saw and felt its eerie beauty.

  The luminescent glow of the moonlight surrounded them, muting and blurring harsh day shapes into strange and alien designs. The moon rode high, a half-moon sliding silently behind clouds and, a few minutes later, emerging to throw mottled leaf shadows on the road. Mist lay in the hollows and curled wraithlike along the ground and through the tall grass. Drifting, Insubstantial mist, yet cold and real.

  A horseman trotted by. “We’re almost there,” he called to her. The Worthington Estate. Almost there. Worthington. The words echoed in her mind to the rhythm of the clip-clop of the horses’ hooves. Almost there. Worthington. Almost there. Worthington.

  Kathleen wished she could turn back time, could be once more in Ohio with life as it had been before Michael enlisted. Or, if that were not possible, as her life had been before the letters came. The letters. The first arrived two months after the social notice informing them of Michael’s death, one month after the Colonel of the regiment wrote praising her brother’s services “for God and country”. A strange document, that first letter, replete with whereas’s and unsigned except for the carefully printed words, The Committee.

  She tried to remember the words, and some came back to her. Whereas on the tenth day of October in the year eighteen hundred and seventy in the attack on a Cheyenne encampment near the upper Arkansas River, one Captain Charles Worthington, U.S.A., did with malice aforethought and without provocation shoot one Corporal Michael Donley, U.S.A., while Corporal Donley was engaged in the performance of his duty dispersing an armed band of Cheyenne warriors who through their depredations had held the Kansas Territory in a state of unrest and grievous fear, and Whereas Corporal Donley died of his wounds on the eleventh of October, and Whereas…

  Kathleen had been both puzzled and curious, half-believing and half-disbelieving. Even after the second letter announced the arrest of Captain Worthington and his imminent court-martial she had withheld judgment. She talked to Mrs. Horobin and sought the old woman’s advice, but she had not acted.

  The third letter from the Committee, or more likely the accompanying newspaper clipping, convinced her. The clipping was from a St. Louis paper. Unusual Occurrence at Fort Leavenworth the smeared black type of the headline proclaimed. She read the subheading: Captain Acquitted at Court-martial. Officer Accused in Slaying of Enlisted Man. Contradictory Testimony of Fellow Officers. A skeptical, damning article followed. I must find Captain Worthington, she had decided, before Michael will rest in peace.

  Stone pillars flanked the entrance to the Estate, and in the moonlight she saw two guards saluting as the horsemen passed. The driveway looped beside a stone gatehouse and through a grove of maples. Beyond the trees she saw the road circle in front of the old house, a vast sweep of stone and wood with countless windows, sloping roofs, and tall brick chimneys. On either side the wings of the house extended into the darkness and appeared to merge into the surrounding woods.

  A cold fear crept up the backs of her legs as though the mist had followed and was now enveloping her. She tightened her hold on the saddle horn. Her eyes returned to the windows, windows seemingly placed at random, round windows, square windows, oval and rectangular windows. They are watching me, Kathleen thought. Judging me. And waiting.

  Captain Worthington stopped at the front of the house, held his arm aloft, and the riders began to dismount and lead their horses away. The Captain lifted Clarissa and then Kathleen to the ground. The glow of gaslight from inside the window beside the door fell softly across the porch onto the pillars on either side of the steps and the bushes next to the drive.

  “What’s that?” One of the men ran to the porch and Kathleen heard a muttered oath. The Captain and the others followed and stood grouped next to the paneled door.

  Kathleen hurried up the steps and the men stepped aside to let her pass. On both sides she heard the questions “What?” “How?” “When?” One man laughed in a high-pitched voice. Others shifted their weight from foot to foot or folded their arms across their chests as though they felt a cold wind.

  The coffin leaned against the house to the right of the door. It stood almost as high as the door, built for a large man, crafted of a dark and richly grained wood.

  One of the men held his lantern in front of the coffin. Kathleen saw the glint of metal and came closer and found a small, professionally lettered plaque on a level with her eyes.

  She felt a tingle along her spine. A chill, a premonition. Like someone walking on a grave, she thought.

  CAPTAIN CHARLES WORTHINGTON, she read. Below the name were the dates 1845—1871. Under the dates was a one-word epitaph:

  TRAITOR.

  Chapter Six

  Kathleen woke from a dreamless sleep and turned onto her back, rubbed her eyes, and sank deeper into the softness of the bed. Over her head she saw a canopy, blue tassels dangling from its scalloped sides, covering the top of the four-poster. Very pretty, she thought, and nothing but a dust catcher. She frowned. Stop thinking like a girl who works, she told herself. I’m a guest, not a maid.

  From the light filling the room and the heat which seemed to press in upon her, Kathleen knew the sun was already high. She threw back the coverlet and sat on the edge of the bed, saw herself reflected in the mirror on the wardrobe. Such a huge room. The elegance of the flowered wallpaper. The softness of the thick pile of the blue carpet bordered with a gold fringe. White curtains drifted inward from the three windows, but the breeze brought no coolness.

  Kathleen stretched both arms above her head. A guest. She was a guest on the Worthington Estate, and this was a new day. And she had only five days left. She remembered her night fears of a few hours before and shuddered, thinking of the fog and the casket. Don’t think, be active. Get up. She walked about the room, trying to push the panic from her mind. After all, she thought, I have accomplished a great deal. I am in the Worthington house. I do have Clarissa and Edward Allen to help me. I will succeed. I
will, I will!

  A light tapping on the door. “Good morning, Miss Stuart.” Clarissa came into the bedroom dressed in a loose white gown gathered at the waist by a sash the color of her hair. “You’ll never guess what the Worthingtons have,” she said. Kathleen looked puzzled. “An indoor bathroom. It’s new and on this very floor.”

  “Indoors. I’ve never seen one before.”

  “And,” Clarissa added as Kathleen walked by her, “they use store-boughten soap.”

  When Kathleen returned to the bedroom, still in nightgown and robe, she found Clarissa rocking beside one of the windows. The room was on the second story, and through the window Kathleen saw an elm reaching skyward like a giant fountain. Beyond the elm, the mountainside rose in a series of wooded ridges to the summit.

  A maid stood by the bed with a tray and Kathleen smelled ham and coffee. Breakfast in bed, she thought, sliding back under the sheets and beginning to eat. I’ve never known such luxury.

  “How do you feel this morning?” Clarissa asked when Kathleen had finished. Kathleen lifted the tray onto the night table and lay back on the piled pillows.

  “A little sore. My knee and my wrist.”

  “You must have gotten a lot of smoke in your lungs from the fire. Does your chest hurt?”

  Kathleen took a deep breath. “No, not at all.”

  “Well, we’ll see what the doctor has to say.”

  “A doctor? For me? What in heaven’s name for?”

  “If we’re to stay here at the Estate, we need a reason, and Josiah suggested illness as a good excuse. What would be more natural than to have a doctor forbid you to travel? Edward Allen has gone to fetch him.”

  “Clarissa, there’s nothing the matter with me. The doctor will only—” Kathleen began to protest.

  Clarissa walked to the bed. “Let me tell you about the doctor,” she said. “He’s—” A knock at the door interrupted her. “Oh, the maid. Come in.”