Maude’s gaze fell to the floor.
“Not going to find an answer from your slippers, girl,” the old woman said with a snarl. “Answer me, damn you!”
“I like books—”
“Who told you!” This time with such force, Maude jumped. She glared at this evil old woman.
“No one!” Maude shouted. “No one! I just did it because I wanted to!”
The old woman blinked. The scowl slipped away and she began cackling, a dry, rasping laugh. It ended with a wet coughing fit. “That got yer back up, didn’t it, lass?” the old woman said when she caught her breath. “Good! What’s your name, child?”
“Maude.”
The old lady smiled and Maude was surprised how wide and bright her smile was. There was a flash of a gold tooth.
“Well, hello, Maude. You and I are of a kin. I can see it in the piss in your eyes when someone riles you.”
The old woman gestured to the walls of books. “My favorite room as well. You are free to come and go from here anytime, day or night. Read what you like, as much as you like. Hell, you can even read the bawdy stuff up on the top shelves, if you can figure out how to climb up there and get it. Anyone ever explain the he’ing and she’ing to you before, lass? ”
Maude shook her head. The old lady laughed again, sharp and loud and alive. Maude had never heard a lady laugh that way before.
“Just as well,” the old woman said. “Some mysteries are more fun to unravel on your own.” She turned to leave, a little wobbly on her feet, and Isaiah steadied her. “We eat when we’re hungry around here and we go to bed when we damn well feel like it,” she said. “You need something, you get it yourself. You can’t find it, then go pester Isaiah, understand?”
“Yes,” Maude said.
“Welcome to Grande Folly,” the old woman said. “You can call me Bonnie. It’s as good a name to use as any, at least for starters.”
The sound of Arthur’s and Constance’s raised voices pulled Maude out of the mirror of memories. She threw on a camisole quickly and hurried down the hallway.
“You will not speak to me in that manner, young lady!” Arthur Stapleton shouted, red faced. “I am your father and you will do as I say!”
Constance was equally angry. Her gaze burned into Arthur’s blandly handsome face. The banker loomed over the girl, fists clenched.
“I am not doing anything wrong, Father!” she yelled back. “I would never do what you’re implying!”
Maude stepped between the two. “What on earth is going on here?”
Arthur smelled of lilac hair tonic and gin. His eyes were unfocused and she knew he had spent much of this day in “business meetings” at the Paradise Falls. He turned the furnace of his anger toward her.
“Your daughter is intent on cavorting around like some common gutter whore at this hayseed dance! She might as well be spreading her legs for that simpleton Muller boy!”
“It’s the church social, Daddy!” Constance said over Maude’s shoulder. “And Jess is a good person; he likes me. I don’t care if his family doesn’t have much money!”
“Arthur, Constance, please.” Maude said, closing her eyes.
“It’s obvious you have no care what anyone thinks of this family!” Arthur said. “We have to present a sense of propriety at all times. My reputation as a banker depends on that!”
“Is that why you drink all day in that saloon?” Constance said. “And play cards all night? To uphold your—”
Everything happened fast. Too fast. Arthur lunged at Constance, smashing into Maude. Maude spun, old, flabby muscles struggling to remember the training, even if her mind was quick enough. She felt the wind leave her lungs, but not before she clutched his lapels and shifted her weight, twisting at the hips. She managed to divert the majority of Arthur’s momentum toward the dining table, away from Constance. The laws of motion and cheap gin did the rest. Arthur smashed into the table, knocking it over as he tumbled to the floor and lay still.
Maude turned to her daughter. With great effort she hissed out the words with what little air remained in her. “You will not speak to your father that way. Go to your room and we will discuss this shortly. Go on.”
Constance nodded and scurried down the hall. Maude heard the door to her room click shut and lock. She turned back to where Arthur was slowly climbing to his feet, shaking his head.
“You stupid, clumsy cow,” he mumbled. “Could have killed me.”
“Yes,” she muttered. “I’m so sorry, dear, you were just so angry, and—”
He telegraphed the slap; she would have seen it coming even if he wasn’t drunk. She was ready this time and she rolled with it, felt the snap and sting of the blow across her cheek and chin, but had arched her neck enough that it wouldn’t even leave a mark. She grunted and flew across the room in an impressive enough manner that Arthur’s tiny reptile brain would feel the glow of accomplishment. Perhaps later his human mind would feel guilt and remorse. Perhaps not. It was hard to say anymore.
She fell to the floor. The humiliation of this show stung more than the slap. She was glad Constance was in her room. Arthur stood over her, panting; his eyes were unfocused.
She looked down at the floor.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Arthur blinked and quickly grabbed his coat from the peg beside the door.
“I shall be out late. Business. I’ll eat. I’m … I’m sorry.”
He didn’t wait for a reply. He didn’t slam the front door. The house became quiet again. Maude stood and began to repair the damage done to the room. In her mind, Gran Bonnie was laughing at her, a demonic cackle.
The first few weeks at Grande Folly were some of the most wonderful of Maude’s life. She ate when she wanted, slept when she wanted, read what she wanted. No orders, no demands, no restrictions. It was paradise.
After a while, Gran Bonnie, as she asked to be called (“too damned many ‘greats’ in there to keep up with,” she would say), began to request Maude’s presence at dinner. She was not required to eat herself, but was given the option and was allowed to drink the same wine Bonnie did. Maude was primarily there for conversation. Bonnie wanted to know all about her, about her life and, most surprisingly, about her dreams and aspirations. She seldom asked about Mother and Father.
“You aren’t your ma and da, girl,” Bonnie said. “Oh sure, they mix the clay you come from, and true, they press the shape of you, build you up or deform you, but you’re still wet, still a work in progress, and you choose what kind of vessel you will be.”
“What if you dry up?” Maude had asked. “Clay dries.”
Bonnie had smiled and nodded. She took another long draught of her wine in a bejeweled goblet, wiped her mouth with the back of her bony hand and cackled with glee. “Aye, love, aye. It does. And so do people. I suppose if the clay dried up, you’d need to smash it, break it and then get it all good and wet again, yes?”
She laughed and clapped her hands like a child, pleased with herself.
The best part of dinner was the tales Bonnie told of all the places she had traveled to, all the thing she had learned, the languages she’d heard that sounded like fluttering wings and staccato rain; the myths, the gods, the curses, the beasts and the treasures that were all out there, past the sea, past Charleston Harbor, past the clean linen, warm bed world Maude had always known.
“The world is a wonderful place, lass,” Bonnie said. Her voice began to slur around her second bottle of wine. “And terrible too. All rolled together like glass candy. It’s especially hard for ones such as you and me.”
Maude frowned and tilted her head, “Like us?”
“Women,” Bonnie said. “Deck’s been stacked agin’ us since the first of us stood on two feet.”
“Eve?” Maude said. “Father’s read me the stories of how she caused the fall from grace in Eden.”
Bonnie cussed and hurled the half-full goblet toward the fireplace. It exploded. The wine hissed as it hit the fire;
jewels and pieces of gold scattered in the roaring blaze and lay glittering among the hot ashes.
“Ya see!” she barked, rising swiftly from her chair. “The kind of nonsense they put into a lass’s head from day one! How is any woman expected to have a voice as strong as a man’s, to have the will to overcome like a man, to conquer and triumph like a bloody soddin’ pego-wielding Richard! They’re not to! Oh no! That’s the reason for the stories, lass! To lock you down good and tight, to wrap you up in guilt and shame just for being what you are. Bloody bastards!”
Maude stood very still. The fire glittered in her wide eyes. Bonnie spit. There was a sizzle in the fire, fifteen feet away, for an instant. Isaiah was suddenly at his mistress’s side, stepping from the shadows. He offered her an arm to lean on; she refused it and turned to leave the room on her own power.
“You like stories about far-off places and secret treasures, lass?” Bonnie said. “Get to bed, get some sleep and I’ll tell you a fine tale tomorrow. I think you are as ready for it as you will ever be.”
Maude rapped gently on Constance’s door before she opened it. Her daughter was lying on her brass bed, swollen red eyes staring into space. Maude sat on the edge of the bed and placed her hand on the small of her daughter’s back.
“I hate him,” the girl said after a time.
“I know,” Maude said. “You shouldn’t. He’s your father.”
“That doesn’t give him the right to treat us the way he does,” Constance said, turning to regard her mother. “Does it?”
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t. He can be weak and childish and selfish and you don’t deserve to be spoken to that way, Constance.”
“Neither do you, Mother.”
Maude fought the urge to explain to her daughter, on the edge of womanhood, that it was different for her. Different because as much as her daughter hadn’t asked for this man to be in her life, to be her father, Maude had stepped into this relationship willingly, fully aware of what Arthur was, and was not. Arthur’s hubris, his petulance, his anger, it was the price she paid for Constance, for a normal life in this age.
“Do you want to go train,” Maude asked, “out in the desert? Your father won’t be home until very late.”
Constance raised her head off her pillow, looked at her mother with wet, red eyes and smiled.
Isaiah woke Maude before dawn the next day.
“Lady Cormac is waiting for you on the beach past the groves around the back of the estate,” he said softly, his face pooled shadows in the lantern’s light. “She instructed me to tell you to dress sensibly and to take your horse and ride out to meet her. She said not to dawdle.”
Maude did as she was instructed, putting on riding clothes and a thick wool cloak to ward off the chill. Her horse was saddled and waiting in the drive before the plantation. She rode out alone into the dead pre-morning. The fragments of moonlight in the bruised sky were all she had to navigate the forest of hunched, weary trees with their curtains of Spanish moss.
She smelled the ocean before she heard the thunder of the waves; tasted salt spray in the back of her throat. It spoke to something in her that usually slept, made her feel connected, alive. Made her feel that possibilities and actualities were one. She pushed through the last few yards of foliage and into view of the beach. The dark sky bled into the black, churning waters. It was virtually impossible to tell where one ended and the other began, infinity upon infinity.
Gran Bonnie stood waiting for her, watching the crash and the foam swirl, admiring the drowning moon’s final pleas to an uncaring, departing night. She stood tall, proud, no weakness, no frailty, like it was all there just for her, only for her. Her horse was nearby, unsaddled—Bonnie apparently always rode bareback. The mare munched on the tall grass that guarded the border between the end of the grove and the beginning of the beach.
“Come here, girl,” Bonnie said softly, yet Maude heard each syllable over the rumble of the waves.
Maude climbed down from her horse and released its reins. The pony wandered over to join the older horse for breakfast. Maude walked down to the wet, packed sand and out to stand alongside the old woman. It was low tide and the spring tide was nearly upon them. The water was far out, the beach wide and the sand strangely silver in the finishing moonlight. Bonnie sighed and the looked away from the moon and sea and down to Maude.
“I’m Crone, now,” she said. “I should have done this long ago, lass, when I was still Mother. I’ve waited a long time for a good prospect, Maude. I thought it would be your mother, rest her soul, but I waited too long, was too caught up in my own selfishness. By the time I got to your ma, she was already too old, too set in the ways of this world. I did what I could for her and she was very receptive, but she was just too old to begin to carry The Load.”
“The Load?” Maude asked.
“Aye,” Bonnie said. “We’ll get to that in a bit. First off, we need to take off our masks now and speak plain.”
“I’m not wearing a mask,” Maude said. “Neither are you.”
“Mostly true,” Bonnie said. “You’re too young to have made much of a mask yet; that’s one of the reasons I like you. And you haven’t had much of one forced onto you yet, like a muzzle. What has been done to you, you still fight. That’s good. As long as you can do that, bloody bastards haven’t tamed you.
“I do wear a mask of a sort; we all do. The trick is choosing your own masks and when to wear them. I’ll teach you all about that. As women, we can wear a thousand masks, be a thousand goddesses and claim a thousand powers and roles. All in time.”
Bonnie groaned and knelt to look Maude in the eyes. She leaned on the girl’s shoulder.
“But now is the time for me to take one of my masks off and show you something true, lass. My name isn’t Bonnie Cormac. It’s Anne, Anne Cormac. That’s the name I was born to in County Cork, in 1697. I traveled under several names in my life, changed them as I wandered the world like changing my hair or my mind.”
She cackled a little and then continued.
“The one I always liked the best I think was Bonny, though. Anne Bonny. You can call me that; that’s what I call myself. Never cared much for ‘Toothless Annie,’ though, seemed rather rude. I had a damn sight more teeth than most in those days, I can say!
“I have been daughter, wife, mother, mistress, thief, sailor, warrior, murderess, pirate, protector and more, in my nearly two centuries. I’ve sailed the seven seas, been to the frozen ends of the world, walked the burning deserts of the pharaohs, joined in the demon dances of the loas in the Caribbean; stalked the Dark Continent and been counsel to Bantu witch-women there. It was there that I was initiated, there in the cradle of human life that I was taught the secrets of The Load and took up the burden for the first time.”
“I don’t understand,” Maude said.
The old woman, Anne Bonny, stood. She cupped the girl’s face and raised it toward the diminishing moon.
“You will in time, Maude. I promise you will understand it all in time.”
She began to speak and her voice carried over the din of the waves; it settled in Maude’s heart, heavy with power and truth, and made the girl’s chest ache.
“I carry within me the clock of the moon.
“The clock of nature, inviolate, unerring.
“I carry within me the secret of God.
“The power of new life in a universe of darkness and death.
“I carry within me the most potent of swords.
“For my will can overcome any steel forged by a man.
“And my suffering can overcome any trial of pain or sadness.
“For my blood is that of the first woman, she who would not bow down to the tyrant of Heaven and was cast out, called the mother of beasts. She who would not be bride to either Heaven or Hell but walked her own sharp, lonely path.
“It is my birthright, these gifts, this pain, this wisdom.
“It is my privilege to understand them and in doing so unders
tand and love myself.
“It is my load to carry them, to protect them, to use them in defense of the worthy and the weak.
“And to teach this to others of the blood who live in chains of shame and guilt and fear forged by men and their gods, shackled to them by their own limited comprehension of their divine nature.
“This is the secret. This is the load you must bear alone all your days upon this earth. This is the price of truly being free.”
They took the buggy out the old road that ran past Rose Hill, past the old cemetery, out to the edge of the 40-Mile. Maude had Constance carry the wicker chest that contained the training implements out to the carriage. Maude kept the basket hidden from Arthur among the items in the chest she had been willed from her Gran Bonnie, items Arthur was arrogantly confident were of no interest whatsoever to any seriously minded man. He would have been disappointed and horrified to uncover its true content.
“Poisons,” Constance said as they approached the place they usually stopped to train. It was marked with a large boulder that was roughly the shape of a giant’s fist. “I want to translate more about poisons out of Gran’s old books.”
“No,” Maude said curtly. “No more poison training, or languages and codes, until you have completed your knife work to my satisfaction.”
They climbed out of the buggy and Maude busied herself with removing and arranging the brace of throwing knives out of the basket. Constance moved to the proscribed distance of twenty paces and awaited her mother’s instruction.
“Now you have become a fairly decent knife thrower,” Maude said as she hefted the wickedly sharp, thin blades and fanned them between her fingers and thumb. “And I am pleased with how you are coming along with your short-blade fighting, but we still need to work on your knife catching, dear.”
The Six-Gun Tarot Page 7