Spindrift

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  F.G. here today. Happy.

  F. pays attention to me. Arthur forgets I’m alive.

  Arthur away on business. F. came. We were discreet because of the servants. But Rosie can be trusted.

  Arthur still away. I’m in love.

  Papa forced this marriage. I wanted to wait. He said love was silly, sentimental. Who married for love? Arthur was rich and railroads important. And now there is love. What am I to do?

  Rosie says Mr. Townsend next door has been snooping around. He and Arthur are very thick. I don’t think he could have seen anything.

  I feel sorry for Maddy Townsend, married to that awful man. Theron is vicious. He loves power. So does Arthur, but in a different way. All that room of armor and weapons. Frightening.

  Theron watches. F. hasn’t dared to come.

  Today I met F. in town. I feel reckless and wicked. And happy. Nothing sordid. A small, plain room with a lovely view of the harbor. I watched a boat with a white sail on the green water. F. loves me and I him. If only I could run away with him. Imagine what Papa would say—and Arthur.

  Arthur home. No more meetings. I think he suspects nothing. But what am I to do? How can I go on living with him?

  That awful Theron Townsend is making trouble. He and Arthur have always been close friends. Maddy came to see me. She is on my side. Theron is going to talk to Arthur. So I will talk to him first.

  Arthur says he will never let me go. He called me a silly fool and said I didn’t know when I was well off. Townsend has been having me watched. They know about my trips to town. I’ve written F. to go away. Rosie took the letter.

  There was a space in the jottings, and then they took up again at a later date.

  No word from F. Arthur says he went off alone on a hunting trip. But I think he would have let me know. I am frightened.

  F.’s mother came to Newport. Arthur and Theron Townsend talked to her. Convinced her of the hunting trip. But no word for too long. Perhaps some accident. That’s what they say.

  I don’t believe any of this, but they have satisfied F.’s mother. She is sending friends up to the north woods to look for him. He will never be found. I know that now.

  How can I live? How can I bear to see the sun come up over the ocean on a new day? Arthur says I must give a party. I must stop any gossip that might be starting.

  Some of the time I am numb, without feeling. I wonder if I have become a ghost? I wonder if I will live in this house to a great old age and wander its halls, remembering. There is to be a ball, as Arthur wishes. The invitations have gone out. I am a stronger woman than I thought. Or a weaker one. Should I speak out. I am afraid. I have no proof.

  The ball is tonight Now I have need for strength. I must dance tonight with horror for my partner. I know what happened to F. I found the book in Arthur’s study. The poems by H.W.L. Page 83. He had marked the poem. And I knew. I wondered which one of them killed him—Arthur or Theron? Arthur, I think. And who performed the ghastly deed of hiding the body? The two of them together, undoubtedly. I have brought the book here and I will put it away with this. Someone must know someday. Someday F. will be found and the answer must be given. Shall I go to Redstones? Do I dare?

  I felt a little sick as I read. It was as if I had written these words with my own hand, my own blood. I had nearly forgotten Jon Pemberton, and he, fortunately, was paying no attention to me. I took the second book from the recessed hiding place, knowing very well what I would find. It fell open naturally to page 83, as though it had been opened to that old chestnut of Longfellow’s a great many times. The words seemed to leap at me from the page with old melodrama that had suddenly become real.

  Speak, speak thou fearful guest!

  Who, with thy hollow breast

  Still in rude armor drest

  Comest to haunt me.

  I turned back to the few pages left of the diary.

  Last night I danced at the ball as though nothing had happened. Am I a monster too? But how can I speak out and cause a scandal that would destroy us all? When I know F. is dead. What am I to do?

  Mr. Sargent came to the ball. Arthur wants him to paint me, but what will he see in my face? I am to begin the sittings tomorrow.

  Every day I sit for Mr. Sargent. I am beginning to find the scent of geranium sickening. Every day I try to hide my secret from him. He paints with elegance, brilliantly. He records the moment as he sees it—but I think he does not see very deeply. I am safe. Sitting for him is a respite. Arthur is pleased with the picture. Arthur does not guess what I know.

  I cannot write any more. I will never keep a diary again. There is too much which cannot be recorded. But I have at least dedicated my life. I know what I shall do. I can punish Arthur through the weapon of torment I will never love again and I will never place another man in jeopardy, but I will give Arthur a life as unhappy as I can make it He will pay for what he has done.

  The last lines Zenia had written were scrawled in a strong, reckless hand. They were not like the meticulous writing that had gone before. I would never know whether she had gone to Redstones or not. I closed the diary and put both books back in the recess. It was terrible to think of her later life, lived always in deception and for the purpose of revenge—until the final ending when all the other actors were gone, and only she walked these halls in madness. Or had that very madness meant respite for a mind which had faced horror for too long a time?

  In any event, it was not for me to turn these things over to Jon Pemberton. Joel and Bruce would have to decide whether the true story should be told. Since everyone was gone, perhaps the story should be written in all honesty—as could now be done. But Jon Pemberton must wait until Joel and Bruce could think about this. And Theo.

  His voice startled me from across the room.

  “You look like a very lost lady, Zenia-Christy. I think Sargent never saw all that your face might have told him.”

  I stared at him in distress, because my own story and Zenia’s were beginning to be intertwined. I lived in another day and my problems were hardly the same. Nor were the cures apt to be the same as they had been in the day of Arthur Patton-Stuyvesant and Theron Townsend. But I too was married, and had my “F.” I was being blocked from going to him because Joel and his mother held my son. I was even blocked by my own feelings about Peter and the fact that I must take him from his father.

  “I think I’m a little tired tonight,” I said. “I don’t feel like going back to the ball. I’ll just go down to get Peter and see him to bed. Then I’ll go to bed myself.”

  He came quickly to stand beside Zenia’s desk. “Give me a little more of your time tonight, will you? There’s something else I want to see—that later portrait of Arthur. Painted, I believe, shortly before he committed suicide. If that’s what he did. Will you show it to me?”

  I had no wish to go upstairs to the Tower Room, but his request was not unreasonable, and I sensed that he had absorbed himself into the mood and life of the house, as it had once been, and I could serve him best if he saw that portrait now. Besides, though I didn’t want to see the room again, I wanted to look with new eyes at Arthur’s picture. Tonight it would tell me a great deal.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll go and get Peter, see him to bed, and come back here.”

  Jon waved a cheerful hand at me as I went out of the room. I walked along the corridors and down the stairs, aware of my midnight blue gown that was made in the pattern of Zenia’s gown in the portrait, and I felt as though I too were a ghost who walked with horror. Spindrift was a house of death and tragedy—Zenia’s and Arthur’s, and mine because of Adam. Because of Bruce. But no one was going to kill Bruce. Joel was a civilized man. His weapons were different. Nevertheless, I was trapped in my age as Zenia had been trapped in hers.

  I had taken the back stairs and when I went through the door to the musicians’ balcony, the band down below was playing “Love Walked In.” I tried to shut the tune away from me. I didn’t want to hear those words e
choing in my mind. There was no “sunniest day” for me.

  Peter had given up watching and I felt a little guilty because I had not come to him sooner. He had stretched out on the floor beside the balcony rail in his woolly robe, and gone sound asleep, with all that kaleidoscope of sound and color moving brilliantly below him.

  For a moment I stood at the rail, not watching the women in their Sargent gowns, but looking straight across to the place on the wall where Theo had hung Zenia’s portrait. With all my senses, I felt that picture. A living, suffering woman had posed for it, had been alive to horror for every moment while she had endured its painting. Yet she had hidden all this from the painter. He had caught the faraway mystery in her eyes, but he had been more concerned with light and shadow than in portraying a woman. She was there as a lovely, surface thing, but there was no heartbeat in the picture. Zenia had, as she realized, not needed to be afraid of the artist.

  I glanced about the floor and found Theo, Ferris, Joel and Bruce. But I could not find Lady Macbeth. Fiona, who hadn’t wanted to come to the ball anyway, had probably made her escape. As I would do shortly. I had no desire to join any of the four who belonged to Spindrift. I would show Jon Pemberton Arthur’s portrait, and then I would go to bed. I would take a sleeping pill to make me forget everything. Everything. I too needed respite. Tomorrow, like Zenia, I must find the strength to fight again. But my solution would never be like hers. I meant to solve my problem somehow. Only for tonight I would not think about it.

  I couldn’t carry Peter with that cast on his leg, and he wakened drowsily, to stumble upstairs to his room with my help. He was half asleep as I got him into bed and covered him gently. Miss Crawford came in from her adjoining room and watched as I kissed him on the cheek and drew the blanket up over his shoulders. There was no animosity in her now.

  When I moved to the door she came into the hallway with me. “Did Mrs. Keene find you?”

  I shook my head. “I saw her earlier in the evening. Was she looking for me again?”

  “Just a little while ago. She said it was important. She said she couldn’t find you downstairs.”

  “No, I wasn’t there all the time.”

  “I told her I’d let you know she was looking for you when you brought Peter back.”

  “Thank you. I’ll look into her room and see what she wants.”

  It meant another journey to the floor below, but I hurried down and tapped at Fiona’s door. Jon Pemberton wouldn’t mind waiting. He was happy where he was.

  There was no answer and I tapped again. Then I opened the door and looked into the room. The lamp beside the bed had been left burning, but Fiona was not here. On’ her pillow lay the gilded coronet she had worn with her costume tonight, but there was no other evidence of her presence. I would have to wait until she found me. But I would not stay up for her.

  Jon Pemberton was ready for me when I returned to Zenia’s room, and he was alight with excitement over plans for his book.

  “I was bored with my last writing job,” he said. “But I can’t wait to get my teeth into this one. There’s more here than meets the eye. I’ll have to fictionalize, of course. That’s my thing—storytelling—and there’s too much here that no one seems to know the answers to. So I’ll have to make things up.”

  “Perhaps you won’t have to make up a great deal,” I said. “I’m ready now to show you the room Arthur used as a retreat, and show you his picture. Not that the room has been kept the same, as Zenia’s room has. But at least his portrait is there. It’s called the Tower Room.”

  He nodded and gave me a sidelong look as we went back to the stairs, and I knew he must have been aware of Adam and that particular room. But he said nothing, and I was grateful for that. A heaviness of sorrow lay upon me. Sorrow for Zenia, sorrow for myself. And for Arthur, and Joel and Bruce.

  “Here we are,” I said, and Jon opened the door for me.

  I went first into the room and old horror came up at me like a blow. Old horror and new. I had been here before. I had stood in this spot before. I had seen death before. As I saw it now.

  Fiona lay sprawled where Adam had lain, and there were dark, wet stains on the blue of her gown. There was no carpet now, but patches of scarlet on the floor spread away from her body. I turned a little wildly back to Jon Pemberton, and I think I fainted in his arms.

  17

  When I opened my eyes I was sitting in a chair in the Tower Room, with Jon Pemberton shaking me, not too gently. “Pull yourself together, Christy,” he was saying. “She’s dead, and I’ve got to go for help. Can you stay here? Can you hold on?”

  I managed to tell him that I would hold on, and he went away, leaving the door open. Waves of terror and nausea swept through me, but I breathed deeply, gulping in the air that would steady me, keep me from being sick or passing out again. When I put my hand to my face, I could smell the geranium scent on my fingers, but I didn’t know where I had dropped Zenia’s geranium.

  When I had quieted a little, I sat back in my chair and stared at Arthur’s portrait. I could not look at poor Fiona lying where Adam had lain. Zenia’s tragedies were at least more remote and I must make myself think about them. That portrait of Arthur Patton-Stuyvesant had been painted by a lesser artist than Sargent a short time before he died. His grim expression must have been a guard against any revelation of his thoughts. He had been known as a hard and ruthless man. But there had been a weakness, a vulnerability that Zenia had been able to attack. In the end he had taken poison. Now he had watched this new death, impervious to anything that happened in this haunted room. I could well believe that he had died by his own hand—because of the torment to which Zenia had submitted him. And perhaps because of his own memories. Her prophecy in the diary had come true and she had lived to be a very old lady, walking the halls of Spindrift with her bitter memories, until she had peopled the house with those who were no longer there.

  What would life be like for me, if I lived till I was very old? Fiona would never know old age. Fiona, who had been Adam’s wife.

  It was no use. I couldn’t think of Zenia and Arthur now. I could only think of Fiona and who might have killed her—because she knew too much and was perhaps ready to talk. She had wanted to see me, Miss Crawford had said. Perhaps she would have confided in me then—finally. Since she had told me a few things earlier, she might have decided to finish her story. Now it was too late and she had been silenced for good. If only I had met her earlier! Perhaps then I could have helped to protect her from the hunter.

  At last I made myself look at her there at my feet. She had fallen on her back, with one arm outflung, the pointed green sleeve in that creeping patch of wetness. The other hand was curled in toward her body and I saw for the first time the pistol which lay beneath it.

  I was on my feet at once, bending over the gun, though I did not touch it. It looked like the one she had hidden in Zenia’s desk—Ferris’s automatic pistol. Had she killed herself? Had she done what they claimed Adam had done, repeating the pattern with ironic deliberation? Or had someone else repeated so useful a manner of hiding guilt?

  An age seemed to pass, though it must have been only a little while before they were all there in the room with Fiona and me—Theo, Joel, Ferris, Bruce. Jon Pemberton stayed on and no one told him to go away. The police had been sent for, Theo said. She was angry, furiously angry. Adam’s death had been bad enough, but she seemed to take Fiona’s as a personal affront, and she was more concerned with its happening than she was with Fiona herself.

  “If Cabot had only lived—” she said once, and Ferris tried to soothe and quiet her. I remembered Fiona’s words—that Ferris detested Theo. Yet he played his role well and Theo leaned on him more than she did on Joel or Bruce. But she did not lose entirely her habit of authority. Once she looked at me with critical eyes. “Are you all right, Christina? Joel, see to her. She looks dreadful, and she’ll have to talk to the police when they come.”

  Joel came obediently to my sid
e, but he did not touch me. “Perhaps you could go and lie down for a little while, Christy. We can get you when you’re needed.”

  I had borne enough and I answered them hotly. “Nearly a year ago someone killed Adam in this room. Now the same person has killed Fiona! When are you going to stop what’s happening, Theo?”

  Ferris cut quietly into my challenge, though there was tension in his voice. “Adam killed himself and now Fiona has done the same thing.”

  “No!” I cried. “No, I don’t believe it!”

  “Don’t excite yourself, Christina,” Theo said ominously. “If Adam didn’t kill himself, perhaps Fiona was the one who shot him, and now she has taken her own life in remorse. God knows she’s been upset about something.”

  We all stared at her, and she looked almost pleased, as though she had finally concocted a theory that would put a final period to everything, leaving no loose ends.

  But I wouldn’t accept such reasoning. “I don’t believe that, and I don’t think you do either. Fiona was frightened about something, but she wanted to live.”

  “In any case,” Bruce said, “it’s going to be up to the police again.”

  Joel said nothing at all.

  I looked at Bruce desperately and found his gaze upon me unhappily. He still had no right to come to me, to take charge as I might have wanted him to. Nevertheless, when Joel moved away, Bruce came to stand beside my chair. He made no effort to offer empty comfort, but merely stood beside me and I regained a little courage, knowing he was there.

  Jon, of us all, was the mere observer, and I suspected that he was making mental notes that would creep into his writing later, but at least his eyes were kind when he glanced in my direction, and in a strange way he and I shared this event. We two had found her. We two had experienced the first horror and the shock. It had been worse for me because I knew Fiona, and because I had been through this same dreadful experience in this very room less than a year ago.