The Benedict Bastard (A Benedict Hall Novel)

by Cate Campbell

  It would have been nice to dream of such things as an assignation in a garden above the waters of Puget Sound. It would have been even better to dream of Roxelana, the long-dead sultana, the slave girl who had become a queen. He loved Roxelana, though he had never known her. He loved the idea of her, a woman who was both beautiful and ruthless, powerless and yet all-powerful, because she let nothing stand between her and what she wanted. He had taken possession of her sapphire, that ancient and mysterious stone, and taken upon himself all of Roxelana’s strength and determination. Once he had the jewel, all of his abilities, all of his talents, found their focus.

  Yes, it would have been good to dream of Roxelana, but the mind was a strange thing. At least, his mind was a strange thing. The thought made him bark with hoarse, self-mocking laughter. In sleep, when he was trying to escape the grim reality of his waking life, his mind served up all the things he wanted most to forget.

  There was the fire, and that awful moment when he heard the bursting of the oxygen bottles in the storage room of Margot’s filthy clinic. The fire had accelerated, flared out of control, and the consequences had been worse than he could have imagined.

  There was the ghastly period of recuperation in a remote country hospital, where no one knew him, or cared about him, and where they were so stingy with the morphine sulphate prescribed for his pain that he was tempted, once he was released, to set fire to that place, too. Only the fear that some savvy policeman might connect the two events had stopped him.

  There was the side trip to Port Townsend, all impulse and no thought. He knew there had been a baby, and he hadn’t cared, not when he received the girl’s letter. But now—now that there would never be women in his life, now that any woman who saw his monstrous scars averted her eyes—somehow he needed to know the baby had been born, had survived. In those days he clung to anything that might have meant life would go on. Really, people were shockingly easy to manipulate. That cook—Andrew, her name was, as sour an old puss as he’d ever encountered—handed over everything he wanted to know. He crossed her palm with a few dollars, and she spouted all of it—that the baby had been born, was a boy, and had been shipped off to Seattle. The boy might be living in comfort and security with some good family, but in his dreams he was lost and alone, perpetually wandering in a wide world of danger.

  Those dreams were bad, worthy of being called nightmares, but they weren’t the worst. His worst dreams, the ones that made him wake shivering with misery, were dreams of his mother.

  It was ridiculous. He was a grown man, a decorated war veteran, a noted columnist. He was also, he reflected with neither irony nor regret, a criminal. An arsonist. A murderer. It was laughable that such a person should dream about his mother.

  He would certainly have laughed at any other man fitting that description, but there was no disputing its truth. Preston Benedict was incapable of empathy, as a general rule. It was something he had known about himself since childhood, something that had been useful to him in his efforts to get his sister out of his way. His father, and his brother, worshiped Margot as if she weren’t quite human. Only Edith, his mother, had truly cared about him.

  It wasn’t that she saw through Margot, not the way he did, though she wasn’t as foolishly enthusiastic over Margot’s scholarship and achievement as Father and Dick. They behaved as if no woman before Margot had ever managed to get through medical school. Edith had put her youngest son first in her affections. She loved Preston for himself, and celebrated his special gifts. She didn’t want him to go into the family business, or to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or any of those things the pater so valued. Edith wanted Preston to be happy.

  And despite everything that had happened, despite his crimes and his incarceration, despite his hideous disfigurement, she still did.

  No one was calling the Walla Walla Sanitarium a prison, at least not out loud, but that’s what it was. They all knew it: his father; his brother, Dick; and especially—probably reveling in the fact—Margot. Here, they spoke of him as a guest rather than as a patient. His medicines were administered by a pretty nurse in a long apron and starched cap, and a cook sent menus to his room for his approval. It was all charmingly deceptive, but no one was fooled, least of all Preston himself. It was as well-appointed a prison as anyone could expect, but it was still a prison. The pretty nurse never showed up without the burly orderly known as Oscar. Oscar even escorted Dr. Dunlap, or his wife, Nurse Dunlap. The cook never came at all, sending his trays up in Oscar’s hairy and brutish hands.

  The Walla Walla Sanitarium was a hell of a lot more comfortable than the city jail, and infinitely less unpleasant than the state hospital had been, but it was a jail, nonetheless.

  Preston’s dreams were of his mother weeping as she gazed out her bedroom window in Benedict Hall. His mother alone in the dark, crying for her favorite son. And he, Preston Benedict, as cold-hearted a bastard as was ever born, felt sorry for her. He even grieved for her.

  It was ludicrous.

  In the year Frank had lived in Benedict Hall, he had never seen the door standing open to the big bedroom at the front of the house, just across from the one Margot had occupied before their wedding. It mystified him at first, an airy front bedroom with all that space, an attached bath, two tall windows facing the park, all of it sitting empty.

  His own boyhood home, the ranch house where his parents still lived, had only three bedrooms on its cramped second floor. Until he went to college, he and his parents and the ranch hand had used an outhouse set thirty yards from the back porch. The building of an attached bathroom hadn’t taken place until the summer after his freshman year. It occasioned a lot of talk and laughter in the community, but after a few neighbors tried it out, imitators sprang up everywhere in the Bitterroot Valley.

  His and Margot’s rooms at the back of Benedict Hall were luxurious by contrast. From their windows they had a full view of the garden. Often, when the clouds parted, the shimmering silhouette of Mount Rainier hovered on the horizon in white-shouldered glory. There was a private bath, a sitting room that was almost as big as the small parlor on the main floor, and an enormous bed of black cherry, shipped around the Cape in the previous century. Before he and Margot returned from their wedding journey, someone had covered it with a wedding ring quilt and smooth, new, white sheets.

  Benedict Hall was a lively place. The servants lived on the third floor. The family occupied the second floor. Margot’s old room was kept ready for guests, dusted and cleaned, the windows opened frequently, the bedding aired often. Only that one bedroom at the front of the house remained always empty, its door closed. Edith Benedict forbade anyone to go into it except the maids, and then only under her supervision, and he knew Margot worried over that symptom of her mother’s obsession.

  “He’s never coming home, Frank,” she had said, the night she explained about the closed bedroom. “But everything in that room is just the way he left it. Once a month or so it gets dusted and swept, but Mother watches the maids as they do it so that everything is put back where he wanted it.”

  “Have you talked to her about it?” They had been relaxing in their sitting room, Frank with the Times spread out on the small coffee table, Margot with a medical journal in her lap.

  She closed the journal, and idly smoothed its cover with her fingers. “No. I’m not the right person.” She gazed out toward the dark garden and the glimmer of light from Blake’s apartment above the garage. “Mother can’t talk to me about Preston.”

  “She must know about him by now. What he’s done. What he is.”

  “You would think so. I’m sure Father has tried to make her understand. I’m not sure if she listens.”

  “What about Dick?”

  Margot’s lips tightened at the corners. “It was always different with Dick. I’m sure Mother cared for him well enough, and he’s always done what was expected. He wasn’t a girl, obviously, so Mother didn’t need him to be—well, feminine.

  “She wanted some
thing different from me, some interest in clothes, hairstyles. I passed up a debutante year in favor of getting myself into the University as early as possible. I was a terrible disappointment, I’m afraid. Dick tried to help, but—when a parent has a favorite, I suppose sometimes there’s nothing anyone can do.” Her shoulders hunched in a way he recognized, a gesture that appeared when something hurt her. He closed the newspaper, ready to go to her, to soothe the pain, but she drew a deliberate breath and straightened. She gave him a quiet smile. “It was all a long time ago,” she said. “I should be over it by now.”

  Frank said stoutly, “So should she.”

  Margot’s smile widened. “Fair enough. So should she.” She leaned forward to put her long-fingered hand on his. He turned his hand over to hold hers as tightly as he dared. The flicker of the small fire in the grate set reflections dancing in her dark eyes. “She can’t help it, Frank. Poor Mother. She just can’t.”

  That conversation had taken place during the winter. Preston had just been moved from Western State Hospital, leaving Edith deprived of her weekly visits to him. It was too far, over snow-blocked and poorly maintained roads, to drive. The train journey was an arduous one, south to Portland, east to a tiny place called Wallula, then across the Columbia River. Dickson had forbidden his wife to make the trip in winter. In fact, Margot said her father had forbidden her mother to make the journey with just a maid, as she proposed to do. He would take her himself, he promised, when his schedule allowed.

  That hadn’t happened yet, and Edith, though she wrote regularly to Preston, had begun to mope again, to stay in her room, sometimes for days on end. Frank didn’t know if Preston wrote back to his mother, but there were always packages going off to the sanitarium, Hattie sending tins of cookies, Edith collecting books and magazines and toiletries.

  Once, when a brown paper package, neatly tied with white twine, was waiting on the hall table for the mailman, Frank had seen one of the twins spit on it. She didn’t know he was watching, and he stepped back quickly into the dining room so she wouldn’t see him. When he told Margot later, she said, “Oh, that must have been Leona. She’s never forgiven Preston for what he did to her sister.”

  He had seduced her, Frank remembered. Impregnated her, and then arranged an abortion that nearly caused her death. “I didn’t say anything,” he confessed. “Didn’t think a little spit would hurt him.”

  “No,” Margot said wryly. “And it probably made her feel better.”

  Edith was another matter. On a sunny June afternoon, Frank came home early, having caught the streetcar rather than telephone for Blake. He meant to go out to the Sand Point Airfield and meet one of the Boeing pilots. Tyndall had been testing the Model 15, the first Boeing-designed fighter airplane, and Frank was going to go up with him, see how the new arc-welding process was working. He hadn’t flown in months, and he was as excited as a boy. When Bill Boeing gave him the assignment he had to school his face to hide the thrill it gave him.

  He let himself into the hall through the front door. He would have preferred to use the back, and to climb the back staircase, but too often he encountered the maids there, and they embarrassed him by curtsying and stepping hastily out of his way. He would never, he thought, get used to having servants. They were just not the same as the hired hands he had grown up with. Frank and his father worked side by side with those hands, haying, plowing, rounding up cattle, branding. There was very little difference in their social standing.

  He hooked his Stetson onto the coatrack and started up the front staircase with his briefcase under his arm. The house was quiet, but not silent. He heard Hattie humming in the kitchen, and the chirping voices of the twins coming from the dining room, with the lower, rougher voice of the maid Thelma answering. He supposed Louisa was napping, with Nurse watching beside the crib. Often Edith rested in the afternoons, too, rousing only to change for dinner, coming down to preside, in her somnolent way, over drinks in the small parlor and the family gathering for dinner.

  On this day, something was different. Frank saw, as he reached the landing, that the door to Preston’s bedroom stood half open, the afternoon sun slanting through it to cast wedges of light on the patterned carpet. He heard a sound from within, a sibilant murmur, the rustle of fabric, the click and slide of drawers being opened.

  It was, of course, none of his affair. He and Preston had never been friends. When Frank first arrived in Seattle, Preston had pretended they were, but that had been for the sake of having a larger audience. Once Preston knew Margot cared about Frank, all pretense evaporated. The tension between them had turned into naked hatred. Frank had no sympathy left for Preston. He knew him to be without remorse. He doubted he possessed any human feelings at all.

  But Edith Benedict would never be convinced, and Edith was now his mother-in-law. If he couldn’t hold her in the same regard he held his own mother, she was still the only mother Margot had, and Margot worried over her. If something was wrong—or if someone was disturbing the room she kept guard over as if someday her son would return to it—perhaps that should concern him. Quietly, he set his briefcase down, bracing it against the newel post, and walked along the corridor toward the bedroom.

  The murmuring grew clearer as he approached the open door. Once or twice a little gasp punctuated its flow, as if someone had been surprised. Or was weeping.

  He eased the door open with his fingertips. It was Edith in Preston’s bedroom, whispering to herself as she opened and closed drawers in the bureau that stood opposite the window. The gasps were tiny, muffled sobs, which seemed to escape without her knowing it. Small tears lay on her cheeks, their flow obstructed by a thin layer of face powder. Her mouth, pale and trembling, was a little swollen, as if she had been crying for some time.

  Frank spoke with all the gentleness he could muster. “Mother Benedict? Is everything all right?”

  She looked up, her pale blue eyes widening and her cheeks flushing beneath her cosmetics. Her hand flew to her throat as if she had been caught doing something shameful. “Oh!” she said. “Oh! Major!”

  Frank stepped into the room, but slowly. He felt as if she might startle and flee, like a doe caught nibbling rose hips in the garden. “Surely,” he said, “you could call me Frank now? I’d like that.”

  “Oh!” she said again. Her eyes were unfocused, as if she had been someplace else entirely. She gazed at him as if she couldn’t quite place him or understand what he was saying.

  Frank took in the small piles of clothes on the neatly made bed, and a brocade traveling bag lying beside them. “You must be sending some things to the sanitarium,” he said.

  “Taking,” she said in a voice both faint and insistent. “I’m taking them.”

  Frank couldn’t think what to say to her. He hadn’t heard anything of a trip, though the Sunset Highway across Snoqualmie Pass had been clear of snow for some weeks now. He said, awkwardly, “When are you going, Mother Benedict?”

  “Soon,” she said. “I’m going very soon.”

  “Will Blake be driving you?”

  Her eyes, wide and blue, came up to his. “Blake? Oh, no. I don’t want to go with Blake.” Frank gave a little shake of his head, not understanding. She said, “Train. I’m going by train. Preston needs—” She gestured toward the suitcase. “He needs clothes. Brushes. Some things to make him more comfortable.”

  “I see.” Frank thought it probably wasn’t his place to argue with her. In a way, it was good to see her with a bit of energy. He decided the best thing was to tell Margot, or even to speak to his father-in-law. “Do you need help?”

  “Oh, no, dear, thank you.” She didn’t look up again, but opened another drawer. She took out a stack of linen collars, something Frank was sure Preston would have no use for where he was. Edith laid them on the bed beside the valise, and Frank, following her movements, saw the antique sapphire glimmering from the dark lining of the case.

  He hadn’t seen it since the day he watched Margot bury it in the
wet concrete of the footings of her clinic. He knew Preston had dug it out, taking a chunk of concrete with it. Preston had used it to send Margot the message that had almost gotten her killed.

  Frank’s nerves jumped at the memory. Involuntarily, he glanced down at his left hand, the Carnes hand, where the scoring from the straight razor still showed in the hard fiber of the palm. He could have replaced the hand for an unmarked one, but he didn’t want to. He had said to Margot that bodies bear the scars of their experiences, and this hand—rubber and leather and metal—was part of his body now. It was part of his life.

  He hadn’t seen the sapphire again, not then, nor in the year he had lived in Benedict Hall. He pointed to the valise, forgetting to speak gently to his mother-in-law. “Mother Benedict, you don’t want to take that thing to Preston. It’s better if he never sees it again.”

  She was just turning back to the bureau, but she stopped. Her hands were empty, and they hung beside her as if she had forgotten what she meant to do. “That thing?” she whispered.

  Frank took two long strides forward, and plucked the fist-sized scrap of cement out of the valise. The sapphire, half buried in its jagged surface, glowed in the afternoon light. “This,” Frank said tightly, “should be disposed of. Someplace where no one has to see it again.”

  “Oh, no, dear,” Edith said faintly. “We can’t do that. Preston asked for it particularly.”

  “Mother Benedict.” Frank drew a steadying breath, and forced himself to speak more quietly. “This isn’t good for Preston. He imagines it has—well, that it has—” He couldn’t think how to express it, though he knew well enough. Preston believed the sapphire—the damned sapphire, as Frank thought of it—had power. Magic, or something like it. It was part of his delusion, one of the symptoms of his derangement. Frank wished he had known the sapphire was here, in Preston’s bedroom. He would have happily stolen it, smashed it, made it disappear forever.