House of Masques

by Fortune Kent

  They left the path and climbed a hill where the pine needles made the forest floor feel soft beneath her feet. Bushes barred the way until the Captain held the branches to one side and Kathleen stepped through to find herself but a few feet from the Worthington house. She held her hand to her mouth, startled, the three stories of the mansion looming over her, the chimneys on the outside of the walls leading her eyes up and up, past the multitude of windows, up to the steep-pitched roofs where pointed lightning rods thrust into azure sky.

  “We’ve never used the whole house,” he said, coming to her side. “My grandfather added rooms and towers and turrets, year after year, for no apparent reason except to build. To create. I never knew him, he was killed before I was born, and I used to think him foolish, one of the nouveaux riches. The kind of man who likes a metal deer on the front lawn. Now I’m not sure. In a way I’d like to leave behind more than I receive, leave the Estate better than I found it.” He motioned back along the way they had come. “Like planting the trees,” he said.

  They walked past the kitchen with its fresh bread smells to the side yard where two upstairs maids used looped metal beaters to send dust rising from a rug hanging over a clothesline.

  “You have so many servants,” Kathleen said.

  “I know. Five years ago my father left Blasingame in charge. His solution to every problem is to hire more people. We have servants, servants, and more servants. What can I do?”

  “You might let some of them go.”

  “I couldn’t. My father makes those decisions.” Kathleen held her tongue.

  “At least they’ll be busy this weekend,” he told her. “See where the stone balustrade makes a half-circle behind the house? Those French windows open from the ballroom where we’ll have more than a hundred guests at the masquerade tomorrow night. They’re coming from all over the State, from New York City, Albany and Poughkeepsie. A few cadets from the summer encampment at the Point. I had to go to Newburgh to hire the musicians.” He spoke rapidly, and for the first time an excitement entered his voice. She wondered if he was speaking to her or thinking aloud. “I’ll make this house come alive, perhaps for the last time for me and perhaps only for one night. But alive.”

  They entered the house and passed curtsying maids on long curving stairs, walked down corridors lined with portraits, explored dusty attics piled haphazardly with trunks and boxes filled with clothes and toys from long ago. A steep stairway descended into the old section of the house. The Captain pointed to the beams in an ill-lighted bedroom. “My great-grandfather built this himself at the turn of the century,” he told her. The past must have been a narrow, rough-hewn place, Kathleen thought.

  He showed her the library last. A young girl finished flicking a feather duster over the books and hurried from the room. “When I was young,” the Captain said, “this room was my favorite. If there’s a secret passage anywhere in the house, I think it must be here. But no matter how I searched, I never found one.”

  “I didn’t know you grew up on the Estate.”

  “I wasn’t born here. My parents moved from the West when I was five and I lived in this house for ten years. The happiest years of my life.” He leaned with his back against a table while his hand idly spun a globe. She remembered the globe at Gleneden. What is Josiah doing now? she wondered. When will I see him again?

  “I guess I came back here last winter because of the way I felt when I was a boy living in this house,” he went on. “To try to recapture the feeling I had then.” He stopped the globe with a slap of his hand. “I found you can’t.” He turned to her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Here, take a novel with you, I must see to the horses.” He handed her The Curse of Clifton and Little Women.

  Kathleen climbed the back stairs. At the top she opened the door, expecting to find the hall to her bedroom, but after going several steps she stopped, realizing she was in a sewing room instead, a room so small it was almost filled by a frame upon which stretched a partially completed patchwork quilt. A faint scent of lavender filled the air.

  “Come in, child.” A woman’s voice from near the one small window. The room still hoarded the shadows of night and Kathleen was forced to look closely before she found a shadow blacker than the rest. As her eyes accustomed themselves to the dark, the shadow became an old woman in a rocking chair, a chair which moved to and fro so slowly that the motion was more a suggestion than a fact.

  “I’m so sorry,” Kathleen said, backing toward the door. “I’m afraid I was wool-gathering. Can you tell me the way to the main hall?”

  “The main hall?” The blank tone told Kathleen she might as well have asked the route to Zanzibar. “My eyes get tired,” the old woman said with a nod in the direction of the quilt. “Yours will too when you’re as old as I am. I was eighty-four last May. When I weary of sewing I sit by my window. Come here beside me.” Her voice had become sharp, imperious. Kathleen maneuvered around the frame to stand by the rocker.

  “Look,” the old woman nodded to the window. “See, down there, the kitchen and the whole yard on this side of the house. And to the west.” Kathleen saw the driveway disappearing into the woods. Beyond the cluster of trees ribbons of smoke rose from the village to merge with the overcast.

  “Yes, yes, you have a pleasant view,” Kathleen said impatiently.

  “I don’t see many folks these days,” the woman told her. “Not since Becky married last summer and moved to Connecticut. I hope someone cares more about you when you’re eighty-four. Did you know that’s how old I was last May? On the twelfth. A body doesn’t much feel like gallivanting about when it’s my age.”

  “I really must go,” Kathleen said.

  “Just a few minutes? For old Grandma Ehrman?” Her voice was querulous. “Push them clothes aside and sit down. Always something to mend. And I must finish the quilt. Been too long on that quilt. I have so much to do.”

  Kathleen glanced to the door with the vain hope of rescue. Finding none, she resigned herself to spend a few minutes making the best of Grandma Ehrman. She moved the clothes to the floor so she could sit on the edge of the chair.

  “In all my life I’ve never traveled more than ten miles from Cornwall,” Mrs. Ehrman said. “Can you imagine, no further than ten miles in eighty-four years?” She paused. “Except once.” The old woman leaned toward Kathleen, her voice quick and quavering. “Did they tell you? About my trip?”

  “No, not a word.”

  The old woman leaned back. “They get tired of listening to me. ‘Old Grandma Ehrman at it again,’ they say. Think I’m simple because I’m old. Did you know I was…yes, I told you. Do I seem like someone who’s simple?” Kathleen shook her head. The room was lighter now, and she saw that the old woman had thin white hair and a face creased like an old letter which had been folded and refolded many times.

  “When the War began,” Mrs. Ehrman said in a monotonous, high-pitched voice, “my grandson Stephen, my only grandson, who was just nineteen, joined the Union Army. Wanted to fight, he did. Left his father, Ephraim, and his father’s wife Becky, and me to run the farm. Near the forest we lived, not two miles from here. Ephraim worked harder than ever, he was used to work, had worked hard all his life, but he was older and it told on him, yet for a time we got along all right.”

  The old woman pulled a shawl fringed with tassels from her shoulders, held it in her lap, fingers kneading the material as she talked. “Then in ’64, in March, the fourth year of the War, Ephraim went hunting rabbits in the Black Rock Forest. He’d been going into the Forest since he was a boy. Only this day he left at six in the morning and he didn’t come back. We waited, Becky and me, all day, expecting him any minute, and dark came and then, as the time went by, the worry came creeping in on us like the night mist from the bogs.”

  “Did he come back? What happened?” Kathleen held the edges of her chair with her hands.

  “We never knew.
The men from the village searched and found nothing. Some folks said he’d just left like Floyd Potter did the year before, but I never credited the idea. Weeks passed, then months, then years. Last October two boys hiked into the Forest and found a skeleton near one of the ponds. Sitting against a huge black rock with the rusted rifle across him. Ephraim it was.”

  “How horrible,” Kathleen said. She grimaced with distaste. “And you were left alone with your daughter-in-law.”

  “Becky could do a lot and me some. Yet we couldn’t manage, not by half. What with the War we couldn’t get help. So I wrote the letter, packed my bag and took the train, the first time in my life I’d set foot in one. And the last. Faster than the wind, it was. I’d never been more than ten miles from Cornwall before.”

  “You took the train? Where to?”

  “Oh, didn’t I say?” The old woman looked slyly at Kathleen. “To Washington to see the President. Like I said, I wrote him to have Stephen let go from the Army so he could work the farm. Such a big city, Washington. I left my bag in a rented room and walked to the White House. And what do you think?”

  Kathleen shook her head.

  “My letter hadn’t come. They showed me to a room where a short man with bushy sideburns sat behind a desk. Smoking a big cigar, he was. ‘Letter?’ he asks. ‘Mrs. Ehrman?’ Like he never heard of me. He went away and after a while came back and shook his head. He sat and wrote, and I sat and watched, and when they closed I went to the rooming house. I was back the next morning. The man shook his head. Waved the cigar in the air. ‘There is absolutely no possibility of your seeing the President,’ he said. ‘Absolutely no possibility.’ For three days I kept going to sit in the office of the man with the cigar. On the third day, a Friday it was, the man was gone a long time. He came back looking the way a man looks when he knows better than somebody else but they won’t listen to him. Instead of shaking his head he put his cigar in a tray and led me through high halls to an enormous room, all blue, the drapes, the carpet, the chairs. He left me alone, afraid to sit in one of those elegant chairs.”

  The old woman’s eyes wandered from Kathleen to the quilt and then to the window. They did not seem to see the yard or the woods but looked beyond them to another place, another time.

  “He was in the room before I saw him,” she went on, her voice low. “Such a tall man. Older than I thought he’d be from the pictures I’d seen. And sad. Yet lively, too. I can’t explain, yet he was both at once. His eyes… I’ll never forget his eyes.

  “‘Sit down,’ Mr. Lincoln said and sat on a chair beside me. ‘Tell me about your grandson,’ he said. Right off I wasn’t frightened anymore. I told him about Stephen and the farm and Ephraim disappearing in the Forest. All the while I talked he didn’t say a word, just sat with his large hands clasped together in his lap.

  “When I finished he began to talk. Slow and friendly, like I’d stopped by for a chat of an afternoon. About his sons, ’specially the one who’d died. About the War some and the way he felt, the pain of the men killed and wounded. Not only the Union men, the rebels, too. And though he didn’t use the words, I knew this was the cross he had to bear.

  “Then something reminded him of when he’d been a lawyer in Illinois and he told me a story ’bout a judge, and I laughed right out loud, the way he put it, and he told some more funny stories about the times when he was young and there was no war. And he said he’d see to it that Stephen was allowed home and he called in the man with the cigar, though of course he didn’t have the cigar then, and scrawled on a piece of paper. The man nodded and nodded. You’d’ve thought he’d forgot how to shake his head ‘no’.

  “The President walked with me to the door just like he was a neighbor I’d been visiting in the village ’stead of the President of the whole United States. Dark outside it was by this time, with lights along the avenue and carriages stopping in front and men and women standing aside for him, bowing, ‘Good evening, Mr President.’ ‘God bless you, Mr. President.’ He’d had a carriage brought for me. I looked back through the isinglass window. He stood looking after me, a tall, lonely man. And I had this notion, this foolish notion, wondered whether he might not like to be riding away from the White House like I was, going home, to his real home where he grew up, instead of back into that great house that belongs to everybody.”

  Mrs. Ehrman paused, her eyes closed. “Your grandson?” Kathleen asked. “Was he mustered out so he could come back to the farm?”

  “Stephen? No, five days before I even left for Washington he’d been killed in the Wilderness in Virginia. Becky was waiting with the message when I stepped off the train.”

  “I’m sorry,” was all Kathleen could think to say.

  “We sold the farm to come here to the Estate. Mr. Blasingame, bless him, hired us both. Now Becky’s married again and I’m alone.” She got up from her rocker to sit before the frame. “Do you like my quilt?” she asked.

  Kathleen looked at the pieces of cloth arranged in a multicolored pattern, light and dark, as varied as life itself. “Very much,” she said.

  “I know I weary them, the other help and the ladies and gentlemen. They’re tired of hearing ’bout the time I went to Washington. They think I’m simple.” Her fingers began to work, the needle darting in and out. Kathleen came to stand beside her.

  “All my life,” the old woman said, “I lived on the farm. My son is dead. My grandson is dead. What do I have left but memories? Once the President of the United States sat and talked with me and told funny stories and we laughed together.” Kathleen saw tears in the woman’s eyes. Did she cry for her son and grandson? For the martyred President? For herself? For all times past? “Just like visiting a friend,” she said, “and he was the President of the United States.”

  Kathleen laid her hand on the other woman’s shoulder and bent over to kiss her lightly on the forehead. For a moment the gnarled hands were still, then began to sew yet another fragment into the pattern. The quilt, Kathleen saw, would soon be finished…

  Later in the day Kathleen returned to the library alone to browse among the books. “They have so many,” she told Clarissa that evening as they sat in Clarissa’s room. “I wish I had the time to read them. There’s so much to learn. Why do men like Captain Worthington think we’re only interested in novels or Godey’s Lady’s Book?”

  Clarissa smiled, her knitting needles clicking.

  “I don’t understand the Captain,” Kathleen said. “Sometimes I think he’s trying to make me feel sorry for him. Other times, I don’t know.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, he talked of the past like my grandfather used to before he died. He said this might be his last party at the Estate. People who talk that way never do anything. To themselves, I mean. They don’t, do they?”

  “You can’t be sure,” Clarissa said, laying the knitting beside her chair. “Years ago when I was left alone and thought there was no reason to go on living I…” She paused. “Finally I went to Josiah. To live at Gleneden. If I hadn’t…” Her voice trailed off. “Josiah saved my life,” she said.

  A maid knocked and entered the room. “My milk,” Kathleen said. “Dr. Gunn’s orders.” The maid handed her the glass and left. “The herbs taste horrible.”

  “They’re good for you.”

  Kathleen made a face and placed the glass on the table. “I think the Captain’s toying with me,” she said. “Taking advantage of me.” She rose and walked to the window where she could see the dull red in the west. “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,” she murmured.

  “I’ve made a mistake,” Kathleen went on after a moment. “A grievous one. I’ve gotten to know him, the Captain, though only a little. And in many ways I like him. I’ve even been wishing I could go to the masquerade tomorrow night.”

  “You are going. Josiah’s idea, he said you should. The gown he sent from New York came this afternoon on the stage.�
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  “A gown? For me to wear to the ball? I couldn’t go, I have no one to take me.”

  “Edward Allen will escort you.”

  “No. Impossible. Edward? I wasn’t serious. Going to the ball will only make everything worse.”

  “You should try to get to know Captain Worthington better. Find out more about him. I think you’re being unfair.”

  Kathleen shook her head. “No, he killed Michael.”

  “Listen to what he has to say. You could be making a mistake.”

  “I have to act now or I may never be able to,” Kathleen said. “I’ll find a way. He showed me today where the ball is going to be, where the French windows open to the rear of the house. The ball…I think perhaps I should go to the masquerade tomorrow night. I have a feeling I’ll be able to settle matters then.”

  She paced back and forth in front of Clarissa. Her breath came quickly. She felt excited, expectant. “The revolver. Do you have the revolver?”

  “No, I thought you did. In your carpet bag.”

  “Edward Allen took the gun from me while we were at the cabin. He told me he’d clean it.”

  Clarissa shook her head. “I didn’t know,” she said.

  Kathleen went to the door. “Isn’t his room in the building beside the stable?”

  “Edward Allen’s? Yes.” Clarissa rose to her feet and started toward the door. “I wouldn’t—” she began, but Kathleen pulled the door shut and hurried down the hall.

  She left the house through the kitchen and the buttery. The sun had set and although a faint afterglow lingered in the sky the grounds and the surrounding woods were dark. As Kathleen followed the path at the rear of the house she heard voices and laughter from the side porch. She could see the glow of several cigars but no other lights, probably, she suspected, to avoid attracting mosquitoes.