Nineteen Seventy-Four

by Sarah M. Cradit

  And now Charles was going to be a father. News that should radiate a fresh, much-needed happiness through the family, but was marred by the woman bearing the child.

  Augustus and his wife struggled through the silence between them, asking for no help from anyone, and offering no word of whether they’d make it through whatever ailed them.

  Evangeline… something was amiss with her, but she wouldn’t say what, and Colleen feared she’d let her down again, in some way she couldn’t foresee. If anything tempted her to return home for Christmas, it was Evangeline, but her sister insisted she was just busy with school, and not to stress so much.

  Mama implied she was worried about Lizzy, too, but didn’t know why, or wouldn’t say.

  Keeping busy was the goal. Colleen considered taking a stroll down Prince Street, or the Royal Mile, where she’d be surrounded by crowds of shoppers and people-watchers. The lives of others had a way of helping numb the need to obsess over your own. But as she deliberated the possibility, overthinking future situations as she often did, it occurred to Colleen that rather than consoling her, this activity would serve as further reminder of her own loneliness. Grateful as she was, she’d chosen it. Bemoaning the current situation would not only be pointless, but selfish.

  Funds were not now, nor would they ever be, a factor in any of her decisions, both a gift and a curse. A curse, now, because her family refused to accept her reasons for staying in Scotland during the Christmas holidays, though every single one of them was feeling the same acute, cutting ache, the same loss. They expected her to share it. Well, she was sharing it, but she would do so alone. For four Christmases, she’d mourned her sister alongside the family. This Christmas was hers. She refused to drown.

  But drown she would, if she chose to mire herself in the dismally silent apartment. Her new roommate—another move that was unnecessary financially but completely necessary for her emotional well-being—had gone home to Aberdeen days ago. Colleen had an entire university at her disposal, and she intended to use it.

  * * *

  The heavy, oaken doors creaked open as she leaned into them, a sound that would be muffled in the busyness of a term in full-swing, but now resonated and bounced across every book, every shelf.

  Colleen scanned the massive library, wide-eyed. She’d never considered what it might look like with the students scattered to their homes. How the musty, welcoming smell of hundreds of thousands of tomes would fill her with the warmth of her own.

  She wasn’t alone, though. That fourth-year who had given her a hard time as if it were his job, Noah, had taken up residence at a table normally suited for two dozen students or more during the term. A guilty expression flashed across his face as he watched her checking him out, then it passed and evolved toward something resembling annoyance.

  “Sorry,” she said, startled at how her voice echoed without the din of students. “I wasn’t expecting to find anyone here. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  Noah set his pen in the binding of his notebook. “Shouldn’t you be home in New Orleans?”

  “Shouldn’t you?”

  “Never been a fan of Christmas. What’s your excuse?”

  Colleen sensed, as much by his expression as through her own innate gift as a Deschanel, the unspoken pain behind his words. “My sister died a few years ago,” she answered, startled at her instinctive willingness for truth with someone who clearly wasn’t fond of her. “The last few holidays were very painful. I needed a pardon.”

  Noah’s impudence faded to remorse in an instant. “I completely forgot about that. I’m sorry.”

  Colleen approached his table and set her satchel on a chair across from him, taking the next seat over. He glanced at the bookbag as if preparing to tell her the seat was taken. He didn’t. “No reason for you to remember,” she conceded. “You were in Charles’ class, yes? When he spent his senior year at Jesuit?”

  Noah frowned, nodding. She sensed a myriad of emotions in him.

  His dumbfounded stare turned the moment awkward for her, and she broke the silence. “My brother isn’t always a very nice person.”

  Colleen caught him regarding her closely, and she broke a rule of hers and decided to read his mind.

  Until she sat across from him, the distractions of a classroom and other demands missing from the equation, Noah had never evaluated Colleen beyond her genetic link. He’d noticed details about her face and saw Charles staring back, sneering, calling him a poor Mick, an orphan, anything degrading that fit the moment.

  She didn’t really resemble her brother at all, though. Colleen’s dark hair, normally strangled into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, flowed in waves over her loose, cable-knit sweater. Her chocolate eyes, free of makeup, were tinged in thoughtfulness, not hatred.

  Her heart sank. She understood Noah better now, but she’d had to betray him to do it. This was a wrong she could never apologize for, just as Charles would never apologize for his.

  “Have you had much of a chance to see Scotland yet? Outside of Edinburgh, I mean?” Noah asked.

  Colleen crossed her legs, folding both hands over one knee. “No, though I’ve been dreaming of Skye,” she confessed, then blushed, wondering, once again, what had gotten into her. Why she was telling this man, who had no care for what she dreamed about, such personal things. “I have a terrible suspicion I’ll spend the next few years at the university without ever getting out of the city.”

  And then his words came from seemingly nowhere. “Then let’s go.”

  Colleen blinked. “What? To Skye?”

  “Professor MacDougal has a summer home near Portree, and he’s urged me to use it many times. I don’t know why I haven’t.”

  She understood, though. To venture there alone felt lonelier than staying on campus, where they were surrounded by familiarity. There was a loneliness in Noah not so unlike her own, and she was sad not to have seen it until now.

  Colleen tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, re-crossing her legs. This boy—no, man. There was nothing the least bit boyish about how he looked at her now, nor in his invitation. No, he’d spent the last few months reproving her for her studiousness, punishing her, she felt, for something her brother must have done years past. And now he was asking her to go away to Skye, alone, together?

  Everything rational within Colleen Deschanel appealed to her to say no.

  She said yes.

  * * *

  Charles slipped up the stairs of his mother’s townhome, wearing the pathetic, downtrodden look of the repentant guilty. He managed to avoid his mother and her overbearing excitement at his pending fatherhood, but he would’ve almost preferred that to what awaited upstairs.

  Elizabeth passed him on the stairs. She shook her head, and he waited for her to say something, but what was there to say, really? The dark yellow moving truck parked outside said it all.

  “She in her room?” he asked, when Elizabeth kept walking. He knew the answer, but he just needed a normal human moment with someone else before seeing Maureen.

  Elizabeth nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Alone?”

  “Mama went to the storage unit to get the rest of her things.”

  “Makes sense.” He didn’t move forward. He was stalled, in his actions, his words.

  “You know nothing you’re going to say to her is going to make this better,” Elizabeth said. She looked back, down the hall. “She’s not capable of reason right now. Or ever.”

  “I didn’t come here to reason with her,” Charles insisted.

  “Why did you come? Penance?”

  “Maybe,” he said. There was so much more; their unusual alliance after that night by the river. The secret partnership at Franz Hendrickson’s. Few words ever passed between the siblings, but they didn’t need to, when you’d experienced these things together. Charles was the one Maureen could trust, and Charles had let her down. Maybe one day she’d see it differently, but he expected the full weight of her wrath for a lot longer
than he thought he could handle.

  “Well, she’s in her room. Proceed at your own risk.”

  It was only after Elizabeth was downstairs and banging around in the kitchen that he realized how much weight she’d lost.

  * * *

  “You have a lot of nerve, Huck,” Maureen said. The screech of packing tape filled the room. She was using more than she needed, and the way she snapped the tape against the teeth of the roller made him think she was doing it just for the sound.

  “I didn’t come here to fight.”

  “How nice for you, that you get to roam the world freely and decide for yourself what’s best for you.” Screech. Snap.

  “I know you’re mad…”

  “Mad?” Maureen’s laugh was that of an old woman, and he remembered how she once fancied herself that old hag from the Dickens novel. “Why would I be mad?”

  “I know Edouard isn’t the man you saw yourself marrying.” Though he was a huge step up from that loser Evers. “But maybe you can still have that life you’ve always wanted. Raising your kids while your husband works.”

  Screech. “Keep telling yourself that.” Snap.

  “He’s not a bad man, Maureen.”

  She sniffled, hunched over a box that was covered so heavily in tape there was hardly any cardboard showing. “You don’t know what happened the night he got me pregnant, and after what you, and Colleen, and Aggie did to me, I can’t trust you to tell you.”

  Charles sat at the edge of the bed. His hand hovered above her shoulder, not quite connecting. “Did he hurt you?”

  “With Peter, at least I had a choice,” was all she said.

  A powerful force pushed at the back of his eyes. They blurred with the force of it, and he knew, though it had happened only a few times in his life, that he was on the verge of crying.

  He’d only wanted to protect Maureen. To temper his anger this time, and not leave her with an even bigger trail of regret at the end of his rage. But in not acting impulsively, had he missed the point entirely?

  “I didn’t know,” he whispered. He did touch her, then, but she recoiled and rolled forward and away from him. “I wish you’d told me.”

  “Not everything is your business, Charles.”

  “You’re my business, Maureen. You always will be.”

  “Not anymore. You may be the Deschanel heir, but I’m a Blanchard now. Or have you forgotten?”

  His mind snapped back to the dingy lighting of the courthouse. The smell of old, cracked leather and furniture polish. The persistent cough of the judge, who clearly had somewhere better to be.

  Maureen’s silent, streaming tears paired next to Edouard’s stoic resolve.

  I now pronounce you husband and wife.

  Maureen, fleeing back down what should have been an altar decorated in her favorite flowers but was instead just an aisle with seats on either side. Seats that would house spectators for some court case or another, later that afternoon.

  Do not even dare think of making my sister miserable, Charles had said to his new brother-in-law.

  She’ll have anything she wants, anything at all, except that which I cannot give.

  Which is?

  He’d shrugged, as if about to espouse one of the most basic facts of life. My affection.

  “Maureen… do you want… do you want me to…”

  Maureen threw her head back, alternating between sniffles and laughter. “Kill him? Little late for that, don’t you think? Although, Widow Blanchard has a nice ring to it.”

  “I didn’t know. I didn’t know he’d hurt you.” He reached forward and tugged at her arm to turn her. No matter how it hurt, he needed to see her face. “I didn’t know.”

  Maureen wiped at her face. “Not your fault, right? Nothing is ever the fault of Charles Deschanel. I never should have gone to that bitch Colleen. I knew better! I knew she’d never do anything if it didn’t involve protecting the family name!”

  “Hey.” Charles almost didn’t say the words that came next, but his conscience, or whatever existed of such a thing, wouldn’t allow him not to. “Colleen didn’t make this decision, Maureen.”

  She laughed. “Sure she did. This has Colleen written all over it.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Colleen called me, and her number one concern was you and your happiness. When I told her, after, what I’d decided, she was furious with me. She knew you’d hate it. She cursed me out and said if she’d thought I’d botch the job so badly, she would have flown home and handled it herself.”

  “Then she should have!”

  “Augustus and I, we sat down and agonized over the right thing to do. We didn’t just move the chess pieces around the board. We knew we were talking about your future, and both of us wanted what was best for you. All of us want what’s best for you.”

  Maureen threw the box on the ground. The contents rattled, and something broke. She didn’t care. “Don’t you get it? Everything you’re saying is about how all of you chose what my future should be. Even if you’d gotten it right, would that make it okay? Would it?”

  Charles didn’t have the answer to this question.

  She turned back to her packing. He was dismissed.

  * * *

  When Charles got back to Ophélie, Cordelia’s car was in the drive, which wasn’t a surprise. They’d mutually agreed to spending Christmas together, even if they never entered the same room at the same time, was better for appearances.

  The other car in the drive was a surprise. Darwin.

  Cordelia and her brother were not especially close, though she’d been meeting with him more frequently since their father passed. Through her, Darwin tried to get Charles to part with more of his money by way of investments in their business, but even Cordelia didn’t put too much effort into the task. She’d have lunch with her brother, come home and say, Darwin needs a hundred thousand dollars for the factory down payment. Up to you.

  Charles paused at the bottom of the steps. He wanted to know what that bastard was doing in his house. Needed to know, dammit. Cordelia might or might not tell him later, depending on her mood, and her moods had become even more unpredictable since introducing pregnancy hormones to the equation.

  Instead, he went around to the back of the house and entered by way of the old servant’s door, between the two kitchens. He used to do this, years before, when he was a younger man who required privacy for his indiscretions, so the staff gave him nary a look when he did it now.

  He stepped quietly through the house, and when he came around the side of the broad central staircase, he saw the doors open to the first parlor, and that’s where the voices came from.

  “You’re a fool, Cordelia. If you didn’t want to marry him, then you should have been more resourceful before you signed your life away. And now you’re carrying his child?” Darwin made a disgusted sound.

  “We’re entirely incompatible.”

  Darwin laughed. “You think you’d be compatible with someone else? Does such a man exist?”

  “I think Father is dead now, and this makes us free to do our own bidding.”

  “Free? We’ll never be free, as long as this business is ours. And this business, Cordelia, it’s failing. Failing, because of Father’s foolish choices. Failing, because of that stupid brat, and her words that he was even more stupid to believe. It’s failing, and your goddamn husband isn’t living up to his end of the marriage.”

  “Charles is a paragon of faults, but our business failing is not one we can assign to him, brother.”

  “It may not be his fault it’s failing, but he has the means to fix it!”

  Cordelia snorted. “And why should he?”

  “Because he’s family now, and this is a family matter, Cordelia.”

  “My marriage to him doesn’t make him family,” she said. “Any more than you being my brother makes you my friend.”

  “You say the worst things sometimes, you know that?” His dress shoes clacked across the cypress of th
e parlor floor. “You really know how to cut deep, when you want to.”

  “I say what I mean, and what’s true, Darwin. I can’t help if you don’t like it.”

  “What I don’t like is that this marriage of yours has given us no advantage whatsoever! None! We’re not only no better than we were before you married him, we’re worse!”

  “Must we continue to talk about this?”

  “Don’t you care?”

  “About your sniveling?”

  “About Father’s business! He built it from nothing, Cordelia. Nothing.”

  Cordelia laughed. “Have we forgotten the two million dollars of Grandfather’s money that he toted across the ocean from Germany? Or, other than that, you mean?”

  “I just don’t understand how you’ve been married to him half a year and haven’t had any luck getting him to agree to help. You’re his wife, Cordelia.”

  “We’re back to Charles, again?”

  Charles’ heart leapt into his throat when Condoleezza came up behind him. “What trouble you into now, child?”

  “Shh,” he said and pointed at the parlor.

  She nodded, winked, and headed up the stairs. “Carry on, then.”

  Darwin’s pacing stopped. “I’ve done everything I know to do! I even had that no-account philanderer photographed with all the women he ran around with when you were engaged. Sure, he gave me money the first time I asked, but he was so snide about it. I asked him again at your party, and he told me to go service myself.”

  Nothing came from the parlor for almost a full minute. When Cordelia spoke, there was a thin line of rage seeding through the center of her words. “You come here. Talk about family. Espouse your bullshit about familial responsibility. When all this time you’ve been bribing mine?”