Queen Anne's Lace

by Susan Wittig Albert

  But Delia was another story. When he touched his lips to her cheek in the usual welcome-home kiss, he felt her pull away from him, and her glance was sharp as she looked around the sitting room.

  “I see you’ve let Greta skip the dusting,” she said. “And the carpet needs to be taken out and beaten. What did that girl do while I was gone?”

  At first he was relieved at Delia’s distance from him, for a night with her could afford no great happiness beyond a certain physical release. He would have felt oddly unfaithful, as if Annie were his true wife and Delia a woman who shared his house. But when she pulled away from even the most casual touch again and then again, he was swept by a wave of guilty apprehension. Had his wife returned home early because she had learned about him and Annie? But how in the world could she have found out? Had the hired girl—Greta—somehow discovered what they were doing and written to tell her?

  At first, he had dismissed that possibility, because he didn’t think Greta could have found them out, or was likely to know Delia’s Galveston address, or have the courage to write. She was a stolid, unattractive young woman with heavy breasts, a pockmarked complexion, and an ugly scar that gave her mouth a sinister look. She moved slowly and seemed, he thought, to be a bit simple-minded. In her late teens and clearly destined to be a spinster, Greta lived with her mother and aunt on the other side of town and went home every evening after she had finished serving dinner and tidying the kitchen. Adam had never left for Annie’s until after the girl had gone for the evening, and he was back at home before she came to work in the morning. He even made sure that his sheets were rumpled, as if he had slept all night in his bed.

  But in the past few days, Greta had seemed to regard him with a new and different expression that he couldn’t read. He was afraid she had somehow discovered the truth. He was unnerved.

  And then he happened on what he thought was an easy way to gain the girl’s confidence and ensure her silence. Delia had never been a sympathetic mistress. None of the several girls who had worked for her had been able to please her, this one least of all—and least of all now, it seemed. Her leisurely weeks of parties and sophisticated social gatherings in glamorous Galveston had not sweetened Delia’s disposition, and she made no secret of the fact that she wasn’t happy about returning to Pecan Springs. She was curt with Adam and short-tempered even with Caroline.

  But it was Greta who had become the chief target of Delia’s ire. The girl could do nothing right. If it wasn’t the cooking that Delia found fault with, it was the laundry, and the ironing, and the making of beds. Never the most compliant of workers, the young woman retaliated by becoming balky. She was silent and sullen, and there were mistakes at table. Salt for sugar, for instance, in the crystal bowl from which Delia sweetened her breakfast fruit, and sour cream instead of top cream for her coffee. Black ink was spilled on the rose-colored parlor carpet, and the next day, two glass lamp chimneys were found to be mysteriously broken.

  Trying to keep the peace, Adam intervened. When Delia discovered the broken lamp chimneys, her hand flew out to slap Greta’s face. But Adam seized her arm and made her step backward, and Greta threw him a look of astonished gratitude.

  Something similar happened the following evening, when there was no hot water for Delia’s bath and Adam stepped in to stop a tongue-lashing. In that instance, Greta’s gratitude was even more obvious. She clearly viewed him as her protector, and he decided his strategy must be working. From then on (and never imagining that he might be misunderstood), he took Greta’s part whenever he saw the opportunity and made a point of smiling sympathetically at her when Delia was looking the other way. Even if the young woman suspected him of anything, he felt confident that she wouldn’t confide it in her mistress.

  Now that Delia was home, of course, Adam could not see Annie. Because his wife’s arrival was a surprise, he had not even been able to say a proper good-bye, and the sad loss of their hours together left him empty and hollow. Over the next few days, he saw her through the open windows of her workroom and kitchen and heard her singing as she tended her vegetables on the other side of the hedge. And once, when he saw her lifting her arms to smooth her auburn hair into its customary knot on the top of her head, he glimpsed the tantalizing curve of her breast and felt the hot desire knot in his belly. He thought longingly of waiting until Delia was asleep and then going next door, not to make love but just to talk with Annie, to hear her dear voice and touch her sweet face.

  He didn’t, of course, but not for fear of being discovered. His wife and daughter were in the house, and Adam had just enough integrity left to resist betraying them while they were both present. Given that he had already committed the ultimate betrayal, this was a quixotic distinction, and he knew it. But he needed to think of himself as an honorable man, and maintaining the fiction of his faithfulness while Delia and Caroline were at home seemed the honorable thing to do, the only thing he could do. So he resolutely turned away from any glimpse of Annie and tried to put her out of his thoughts.

  The unceasing pain that this effort cost him, he thought with a rueful self-knowledge, was the punishment for his foolish wish to appear to be honorable when he wasn’t.

  * * *

  • • •

  ANNIE felt the same pain, and for very much the same reason. She had no regrets, for she knew that what she and Adam had was a deep, true love, the coming together of two people who had found in the other what each lacked, what each needed. Surely what they had shared couldn’t just vanish, as if it had never happened.

  But as the days went on, she had to ask herself what was to become of their relationship, now that Adam’s wife had returned home. Delia herself was not to be seen, and when Annie spoke briefly with Greta, the Hunts’ hired girl, she said that Mrs. Hunt was ill—not seriously, but enough to keep her at home. Their clotheslines were on either side of the low hedge between the two houses, which made it easy to talk as they hung up the laundry or took it down, and Annie cultivated their conversation.

  In the beginning, the young woman wasn’t very forthcoming. Annie often heard Delia shrieking at Greta and one morning after a particularly loud exchange, she had seen a darkening bruise on her cheek, as if from a slap or a blow. She felt a natural sympathy toward Greta, as she did toward the women she employed, and worried that the girl was being mistreated. She didn’t intentionally press her for information and she never asked direct questions, but the two gradually developed an over-the-hedge friendship and bits of information emerged.

  In Greta’s view, Mrs. Hunt was clearly a witch, and completely irredeemable. But she spoke of Adam, “Mr. Hunt,” with an eager lilt in her voice. Annie heard it and took note as well of the girl’s bright eyes and ardent, even smitten expression, and she knew she had stumbled on a painful truth. Poor Greta was in love with her employer. Two or three months before, she might have smiled at the idea. Now, she couldn’t. She knew what it was like to love someone she could never have. She knew how much it hurt.

  Annie hadn’t seen Adam—except for too-brief glimpses of him on his way out to the stable or on the street, walking to work or coming home. She hadn’t heard from him, either, not even a note asking how she was or saying that he was thinking of her, or perhaps suggesting a time and place that they might meet, if he thought it was too dangerous to slip through the hedge.

  But then she had to ask herself what she had expected. Adam said he loved her, and she believed he did. The passion they felt together, the meeting of minds and bodies in such a compelling union, could not be pretended—which made their separation all the more unendurable. If being together had been heaven, being separated was hell. Now that she was sleeping alone again, without the comfort of his body next to hers, she wasn’t sleeping well. She wasn’t eating well, either, and when she looked in the mirror over her dressing table, she saw a woman with a pale face, a taut mouth, and dark circles under her eyes—the face of a woman who had comm
itted adultery with her neighbor’s husband and was being punished for it.

  But she would not, could not blame Adam. She had welcomed him eagerly, with her whole heart, without asking for any word of promise. If they had been characters in one of the dime novels that were so popular nowadays, he might have proposed that they run away to Mexico or to the South Seas and build a new life there, together. But that was not Adam’s way. He was honorable. He took his obligations seriously. He had never said he intended to leave his wife or suggested that they might have a future together. And as for the possibility that Delia might leave him, Annie knew that would never happen. Adam’s wife might love him or she might not, but love was simply irrelevant. Delia needed the marriage, and the house, and Adam’s financial support. She would never give it up or allow it to be taken from her.

  And now that she and Adam had been apart for a while, Annie had decided that even if he asked her to begin meeting him secretly, she could not do that. Their time together had been incomparably sweet, but it had been only an interlude. It would be foolish to think that they could resume their relationship where they’d left off, or that it could go on in some other form.

  So Annie reached down deep inside herself and found a new resolve. She would simply ignore the pain and get on with her life. For her, Annie’s Laces was a salvation. Now that she had located three San Antonio shops that were eager to buy her lace, there was plenty of demand to be met, and she worked every day with the girls and every evening by herself, often until late at night. She ordered more finely spun linen and cotton thread from the Corticelli Mills in Massachusetts. She advertised in the Pecan Springs Weekly Enterprise for another lacemaker and found two, one of whom had three children and could only work at home. There was no reason not to allow that, Annie decided, as long as the woman’s lacework was acceptable.

  And thus was born a new idea: women could choose to come to her workroom or work at home. When she offered the choice to her workers, two accepted immediately: old Mrs. Hathaway, who lived across town and had to walk quite a distance; and Miss Windsor, whose ill and elderly mother had just moved in with her and needed care and attention. They would work at home and deliver their work once a week. To Annie’s surprise, that resulted in even more and better work and certainly more contented workers.

  But there were still those who chose to spend their days in Annie’s workroom, where their labor was lightened by laughter, camaraderie, and books. They finished Huckleberry Finn and began a detective novel by a new British writer named Arthur Conan Doyle. First published as a magazine serial in England the year before, the book was called A Study in Scarlet and featured a “consulting detective” named Sherlock Holmes and his friend and roommate, Dr. Watson. Annie and the girls agreed that it was an interesting and most unusual story, and very different from Little Women and Huckleberry Finn.

  Annie had just finished reading aloud the last page of Mr. Doyle’s book when she happened to glance out the window. That’s when she saw him: a good-looking man with a dark pencil-thin mustache, springing almost eagerly up the steps of the Hunts’ house next door. He was wearing a brown frock coat and a brown bowler hat, and he carried a gold-headed cane. Annie didn’t recognize him as anyone she knew, and she knew almost everyone in Pecan Springs. He stood for a moment, knocking, and then the door opened. He took off his hat, bowed, and went inside.

  It would be another day before she would learn the man’s name. And it would be Delia who would tell her.

  But Adam would learn it first.

  That afternoon, Adam had business at the bank and came home to pick up some papers he had forgotten. As he turned the corner on Crockett Street, the front door of his house opened and a gentleman stepped out, clapping a brown bowler on his head. He was tall and slender, mustachioed and dressed for the city in a smart brown frock coat, with a cigar in his mouth and a gold-headed walking stick under one arm. He looked up, saw Adam, smiled and tipped his hat, and walked briskly in the opposite direction.

  In the parlor, Delia was seated on the sofa, reading what looked like a letter on pale blue paper. Her blond hair was carefully dressed, and she was wearing her prettiest pink gown and amethyst earrings. She looked up, startled, when Adam stood in the doorway. Her eyes widened and she drew in her breath.

  “Oh, you’re home,” she said, clearly flustered. “I . . . I wasn’t expecting you.”

  So it would seem, he wanted to say, but didn’t. He felt he should say something, though, so he remarked, “Looks like we’ve had a visitor.” He sniffed the pungent odor of cigar smoke. “Smells like it, too.”

  She gave a nervous chuckle. “Oh, perhaps you met Mr. Simpson on his way out.” She folded the letter (Adam was sure that’s what it was) and tucked it into her sleeve. There was a guilty flush high on her cheekbones. He saw that the top button of her bodice was missing and the lace of her collar was disarranged. “I hope you were polite to him,” she added.

  “I would have been, but he didn’t give me the chance,” Adam said. “Who is Mr. Simpson?”

  Delia lifted her head with the coquettish tilt that Adam had once found so attractive. “A friend of my sister’s,” she said lightly. “He was passing through on his way to Austin.” She gestured toward an open box of foil-wrapped chocolate candies on the low table in front of the sofa. “He dropped in to bring me a gift and a letter . . . from her. From Clarissa.”

  Adam thought that a box of chocolates was an unlikely gift from Delia’s sister, and that if Mr. Simpson were truly traveling from Galveston to Austin, Pecan Springs was considerably out of his way. Then his eye was caught by a pink button on the floor. He picked it up and handed it to his wife.

  “I believe you’ve lost this,” he said quietly, dropping his eyes to the obviously empty buttonhole on her bodice.

  Delia’s flush heightened. She looked uncomfortably apprehensive, and her wordless glance seemed to interrogate him: How much do you guess? How much do you know? But she only said, “Thank you, Adam,” and took the button.

  “I’ve come for some papers,” Adam said quietly, “and then I’m on my way to the bank.” He left the room, his feelings a jumble of suspicion mixed with guilt and—yes—an odd relief. What was sauce for the goose, his mother had often said, was sauce for the gander. If Delia had been on intimate terms with Mr. Simpson in Galveston, he could scarcely complain. What’s more, he found that he didn’t care. He had been with Annie while his wife was gone, and he longed to be with her at this very moment. But of course he was only guessing what might have happened—either in Galveston or this afternoon in the parlor. He might speculate, but he could not be sure.

  Until he encountered Greta. As he went down the hall to the small room he used as an office, he saw her standing in the kitchen door, her feet planted wide apart, arms akimbo, eyes gleaming. She lifted her head and gazed at him boldly, and her look needed no interpretation. I saw what your wife was doing with that man, it said. I know her secret. She raised a hand to the shirtwaist that strained tightly across her heavy breasts, and her fingers played with the top button. She smiled—a smile that was clearly intended to be inviting, although the scar that pulled down her mouth gave the expression a starkly menacing cast.

  If she can enjoy herself, the smile said, so can we. I’m willing. Are you?

  Adam might be shocked at the open, undisguised invitation in the girl’s eyes, but he was scarcely surprised. He had stood between Greta and his wife that very morning at breakfast, when the girl splashed hot coffee on the sleeve of Delia’s blue silk dressing gown. Delia had shrieked and jerked her arm away, grabbing at a napkin to sop up the brown liquid.

  “You did that on purpose!” she cried.

  “Oh, no, ma’am,” Greta had said. She’d glanced sideways at Adam. “I would never do that.”

  Adam had put down his newspaper. “I’m sure it was an accident,” he’d said, and smiled briefly at Greta. “Get a towel and cl
ean it up, Greta.” Simpering at him, she’d done what she was told.

  Now, seeing the invitation so plain on her face, he was suddenly unnerved. She must have misinterpreted his defense as a mark of personal interest. He remembered the way she had leaned against him as she set down a plate of fresh buttered toast, her full round breast brushing his shoulder. Had he inadvertently encouraged the girl to imagine that he had romantic intentions toward her—or worse, that he wanted to make love to her? The thought made him feel very small and cold inside.

  He shook his head at her, turned, and went into his office, cursing himself. He was in a fix, and it was his own damned fault. He had never meant to give Greta any reason to think he might want to— Sweet Jesus, he thought. How could he have been so stupid? He stood for a moment, turning it over in his mind, aware now of his idiocy. But what could he do? The mistake had already been made. He’d been a fool.

  After a few moments, Adam found the papers he was looking for and went back out into the hallway. Greta hadn’t moved. She continued to stand in the kitchen doorway, her eyes fixed on his face, her fingers playing with the button on her shirtwaist, her mouth pulled into that oddly disturbing smile. Her expression was still inviting, but now it seemed to him to be menacing as well, and another alarming thought occurred to him.

  Delia had given Greta every reason to hate her. It was likely that the girl had put an eye to a crack in the sitting room door a few moments ago and had seen something illicit going on between her and Mr. Simpson. The two of them on the sofa. Frantic embraces, ardent kisses, passionate caresses. The man’s hand inside Delia’s bodice, searching for her breast, or up her skirt. Armed with that kind of sensational report, what might a disgruntled, vindictive employee do? She might threaten to spread it all over town unless—

  He shivered, and the word blackmail elbowed its brutal self into his consciousness. Unless what? Unless money changed hands? Unless . . . something else? But what?