Autumn Sage

by Genevieve Turner

  Hope. The room spun sickeningly. He gripped the edge of the table tightly, clutching for some kind of anchor.

  “I do not,” he spat through his clenched jaw.

  His mother sighed. “What you did at the beginning, as a cure? It was necessary. I know that. But now… it’s too much, too severe. You must unbend, or you will break.”

  He gripped the table tighter and tighter, his fingers aching with the effort of keeping himself right there, not to fly off into who knew where. He couldn’t answer her, could barely breathe. All he could do was hang on for dear life.

  After a time, she rose and left.

  And still he gripped the table.

  Slowly, minutes or hours later—he wasn’t certain—he pried his stiff, cramped fingers from the table and went for the safety of the library.

  Only it wasn’t safe any longer. She had been there.

  A lone hairpin crunched under his boot as crossed the room. He picked it up and studied the twisted shape, bent beyond repair by his clumsiness.

  He contemplated that little reminder of what happened when he grew careless.

  Things ended up bent, broken.

  Destroyed.

  He carefully placed the pin on a side table for Isabel to find tomorrow, then pulled down his notebook and sat on the sofa.

  Before he began to catalogue the day’s sins—and there were many—he leaned his head back, letting his jaw sag, remembering what he’d done with her in this exact spot not a few hours earlier.

  He raised a hand to sketch her: the slope of her jaw, her breasts which curved just so, the swell of her hip coming to hand. And finally her hair, the great dark fall of it, enough to shield the both of them from the rest of the world.

  He could write an entire novel of what they’d done that day, of everything still running through him at the thought of her, but really, the one sentence would do.

  He picked up his pen and set it down in ink.

  Quiero chingar Isabel Moreno.

  The word looked so rude, hissing and guttural all at once. He wrote it out in English as well, for good measure.

  I want to fuck Isabel Moreno.

  Strange that the English words should be so different, yet still hold the same rasp, the same thrust, as the Spanish.

  He put it down in French, in Italian, in Latin, in every language he knew. He wanted to set his hands and mouth to her until her cries were beyond any language either of them knew—

  He slammed the book shut.

  Done.

  Gone.

  But it wasn’t. The urge to grab hold of her, to bury himself—all of himself—within her still crept under his skin. It would take a surgeon to remove it at this point. She was invading all the small parts of him, just as he’d feared.

  There wasn’t room for her within him; his years of self-denial had made sure of that. She would burrow her way in and then, in her quest for space, would shatter the shell of him from the inside out.

  There was no way to stop it. He could only hope to survive until she left.

  He set the notebook back on the shelf, and before he retired for the night made certain the dog was securely locked outside of the house—and well away from Isabel.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Isabel spent the morning being interrogated by her mother.

  The experience was a novel one for her. She’d seen that look of the Señora’s before—the pinched mouth, the narrowed eyes—but it had never been directed toward her. She was the good child, the one who never put a foot wrong.

  She supposed she should be experiencing something like shame—clearly her mother thought so—but the best she could summon was a sort of abashed bemusement. She sat with folded hands on the edge of her bed, awaiting her mother’s scolding.

  “I always expected something like this from Catarina,” her mother began, “but never from you.”

  “Because I’m not beautiful?” So keen was the edge of her mother’s words against her pride that she spoke without thought.

  “Because you are too intelligent,” her mother snapped. She’d utter no false compliments about Isabel’s beauty. “You’ve never let a man turn your head. You were so methodical, so sure, with Joaquin—I never had to be concerned about your choices.”

  Her mother studied her as if trying to puzzle out what was happening in Isabel’s head. Isabel wasn’t quite sure what was happening there herself.

  “Was I wrong?” her mother demanded.

  Before today, she would have agreed with her mother. She had chosen Joaquin with deliberation and a lack of sentiment she’d thought would serve them both well. But now?

  Now all she could think of was the marshal’s hands on her, his mouth tangling with hers, the pure need he awakened within her. She wasn’t sure if she liked this, this burning on her tongue, in her throat, a burning that ran throughout her entire body when she tried to ignore it.

  “No, you weren’t wrong.”

  At least not when it came to what Isabel had been before. Before, she’d never been the kind of girl who kissed a man with her spectacles off and her hair down.

  “I’ve learned some very disturbing things about the marshal’s father from Cousin Enrique,” her mother said. “He told me when we were out, the day the shooting occurred, but I thought it best not to mention. Not with what you had to face the next day.”

  The next day had been the trial. And the judge’s collapse.

  Tangles upon tangles—would she ever feel unknotted again?

  “What did he say?” Isabel ventured.

  “That Judge Spencer was overly fond of drink and it killed him.”

  Which wasn’t even half of what Isabel suspected had happened. “The marshal is a teetotaler,” was all she said.

  “These things do run in families.”

  “So we are to condemn the marshal with the sins of his father?” Isabel retorted.

  If only her mother had seen Sebastian’s reaction whenever his father was mentioned, she would not say such things.

  Her mother hadn’t heard Sebastian’s confessions about his father, about what the man had done to Señora Vasquez—and Isabel wouldn’t share those with her mother. That intimacy was hers and Sebastian’s alone.

  As for Isabel’s own confession about her mother’s first husband—that too she’d keep between him and her.

  “I thought—well, never mind what I thought yesterday,” her mother said. “You are not to be alone with him.”

  For the very first time in her life, Isabel was ready to disobey her mother. “Am I confined to my room?” she challenged.

  Her mother’s face softened. “No. I’ll be here, to act as a chaperone. You may go to the library, as long as he’s not there.”

  Señora Moreno was wrong about Sebastian. Isabel wouldn’t allow her mother’s prejudice to keep him from her, even if she had little hope of convincing her mother of her error.

  Isabel pondered how to give the appearance of agreeing with her mother without actually doing so. Deceit did not come easily to her, but she couldn’t promise. She nodded once, quickly, and hoped it would be enough.

  Her mother relaxed at Isabel’s seeming acquiescence. “I will be sewing in the parlor with Señora Vasquez. Will you join us?”

  Here then already was a test. She could sit quietly with the ladies, avoiding temptation, or—

  “May I go to the library?”

  Her mother’s expression hardened, but she only motioned Isabel toward the door.

  In the end, temptation—and her mother—had nothing to fear, since Sebastian wasn’t in the library.

  Now, she had only the task of finding something to read.

  But first… she sidled up to the window. A tilt of her head, and a sliver of the street came into view.

  A little further tilt, a little more street. Her neck stretched, her gaze searching inch by inch…

  She fell onto the shelves behind her. He wasn’t there today. He wasn’t there.

  She rubbed at
her temple, wishing her nerves would give her some rest, would let her look at such things rationally, instead of through a haze of terror. Telling which dangers were real and which were phantoms was impossible when her anxiety insisted that it was all real, that danger was just outside every window.

  She knew it wasn’t—she only wished to be able to tell the difference again.

  She tilted her head back, the twist of her hair dragging along the books behind her as her gaze fell on the far shelves.

  Row upon row of unmarked black spines—their very blankness sparked her curiosity. She walked over, looked more closely. She’d wondered before what they were, deciding they must be journals or diaries of some sort and therefore not for her perusal.

  Only, what if they weren’t?

  She ran a fingertip along the spines as though the contents would seep through the pages into her skin, the ink coiling through her to sink into her mind.

  What was in them?

  There must have been at least twenty, all bound in the same black leather, all the same size. Perfectly matched books, marching along like grim soldiers.

  Likely they were only household accounts or something equally prosaic, a tally of all the odds and ends that summed up a household.

  It certainly wouldn’t be a tally of Sebastian’s odds and ends, the bits that summed up to the whole of him.

  A deep tug of inquisitiveness had her choosing one at random and pulling. It slid halfway free then stuck, as if to ask, Are you certain?

  He hadn’t said she couldn’t look at them. He hadn’t forbidden her anything.

  The notebook came completely free of its neighbors with a soft sigh of surrender. She opened it to a random page.

  26th January, 1892—Took pleasure in the sunset. Angered by a lawyer’s questions.

  Neat, intent script—no excess flourishes or blots. The paper under her fingers was nearly as smooth as the sheets she’d slept on last night. What a strange thing to record, those moments of pleasure and of anger. She flipped through the rest of the book.

  Wished to strike the judge.

  Had carnal thoughts about a lady on the street.

  Almost smiled at a child playing with a dog.

  No actions, no deeds—only sensations. Thoughts. Impulses. Not every day—certain dates had no entries at all. Did that mean he’d felt nothing important enough to record on those days?

  Or had felt nothing at all?

  She slid the book back, her hand trembling. She looked them over again, all twenty-some of them. Her curiosity was a flame, fed by the strangeness of what she’d seen. Were they all like this?

  She noticed three volumes at the very bottom of the shelves, tucked into a corner, and crouched to see them better.

  Touching each one with a fingertip, she read off the titles. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. The Works of Seneca the Younger. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

  Nothing exceptional there. If there ever was a man inclined to the philosophy of the Stoics, it was Sebastian.

  There weren’t only books there; a slip of thick paper peeped out from between Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. The photograph came free with the slightest of tugs, much easier than the notebook had.

  She recognized his father at once, despite never having seen him before. Where Sebastian carried his heft like a possession he didn’t want, this man sat with his bulk on proud display, his mouth concealed by a beard, the gaze beneath his heavy brow direct, intent. As if he could rise from the photograph and bend one to his will.

  She slid the photograph back in its hiding place, her fingertips feeling unclean. She pulled out the last notebook, the one closest to her, and flipped to the most recent entry.

  What she saw set her aflame.

  He had written this just last night. While she had been in her bed, dreaming of all the dark, sensual things she wanted to do with him, he was writing this.

  Her skin sizzled as she read the words again and again. She ought to be repelled by the crudity of it, but it excited her. A shameful urge took root between her legs.

  She shut the book with an echoing thump, trying to slow her wild breath, to will away this dizzy heat that made her ache.

  She was wrong. She had found a tally of him, the bits and pieces he tried to hide from the world.

  His entire emotional life was right here, locked away behind these black spines.

  But why? Why must everything be imprisoned here? Why wouldn’t he allow himself to experience these emotions?

  Frowning as she did so, she pulled down the very first notebook and set to find out.

  So she had found them.

  Sebastian looked at Isabel sitting on the floor of the library, notebooks pinning down the circle of her skirts. She was so engrossed, she hadn’t glanced up as he entered.

  Or perhaps she couldn’t bear to look at him after what she’d read there.

  Her expression was indecipherable, as flat and blank as when he’d first met her. He told himself it was better than disgust, even as his hands began to shake.

  The same dizziness that had taken hold of him last night jolted him again, and he knew if he didn’t grab on to something, he would spin out into nothingness.

  But there was nothing to grab hold of except for her. And she would never allow him to touch her again.

  Not if she’d read the notebooks.

  “I see you found them,” he said, when he trusted his voice not to shake.

  “Yes.” She didn’t look up, and he was grateful to be spared her gaze. “But you wanted me to look in them. Didn’t you?”

  She turned another page.

  Had he? He’d every opportunity to remove them—and he never had. “I suppose I did.”

  His heart throbbed painfully as he watched her for a moment more. As he etched in his infallible memory the silk of her hair as the afternoon light caught it, the curve of her jaw as she ever so faintly mouthed the words, the sweep of her lashes as her eyes ran across the pages.

  This might be the only time he could look on her like this, without others watching. Without her turning from him.

  The last thing he wanted to do was speak, to ask the question that would send them hurtling to their inevitable end.

  He steeled his nerve anyway.

  “Did you read them all?” His words were splintered, but he’d no control at this moment. No control at all.

  “Is that your way of asking if I know all your secrets?”

  He swore that her gaze, unflinching as it was, burned a hole straight through his center. He raised his hand to rub at the scorch marks that must be there, the fabric of his waistcoat as rough as a hair shirt.

  “Your way of asking if I now know that you beat a man to death with your bare hands?” she finished.

  He was more stunned by her tone than her words.

  She’d said it baldly, as if it weren’t a terrible deed, as if his soul weren’t forever stained by it. Perhaps she was still in shock from what she’d read. Because if she knew, if she truly knew, she’d not be so calm. So… so serene.

  He noticed then that she had the notebook open to the very first entry, the start of what was to become the rest of his life. Her fingers idly traced the smear of rust red on the page.

  “Don’t.” His voice cracked.

  “Why?” It was more demand than question.

  There was a wealth of meaning behind it. Why have her stop tracing the visceral evidence of his crime? Why did he have all these notebooks? Why had he done what he had all those years ago?

  He began with the easiest part. “My father, he… he brutalized us. For years.” It wasn’t an excuse, but it was an explanation. “Rage was his constant companion and he set that rage upon us when the mood struck him. Which was often. The liquor fed the rage.” Rage had been Sebastian’s constant companion then as well, an impotent fury desiring the destruction of all he encountered. “I couldn’t intervene when he set upon my mother—that only made it worse. And he was always so much bigger
than me, no matter how I grew.”

  She closed the book and looked up at him. God, why wasn’t she running away? Her composure stung more than her hand across his face would have.

  He swallowed, moving on to the difficult part. “Finally, after years of wishing for it, when I was fifteen, he died. I was packed with dynamite by then and his death lit the match.” He sighed softly. “I went mad.”

  Still no reaction. He suspected she could be staring at the very mouth of Hell and would wear that unsettling blankness on her face.

  “If I could fight it, I did. If I could fuck it, I did.” His gut twisted in rebellion that he should have to admit this to her, but there was worse to come, and she knew it. “There was no limit to the evil a young man with a bit of money could do in this town, especially with the company I kept.”

  “Liquor?” Sharp—she expected him to say yes.

  “No.” He shuddered. “After watching him die the way he did… He was yellow by the end, as if he were turning to wax.” He gave a violent shake of his head. “No, never that. Everything but that.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She was frantic, of course. She had no idea what to do with me. She’d only just buried the man who’d made her life a prison, and now her son was traveling the same path. I would come home bloody, bruised, after a night of depravity—or was carried home, in the worst cases.” Even now, the thought of how badly he’d wounded his mother, just as surely as his father had, made his throat clog. His nostrils flared, catching the faint scent of smoke in the air. “She never tried to stop me, though. She’d learned that lesson with my father—never try to stop us when we’re in a rage.”

  She tapped the cover of the book, the sound echoing through the room. “When did this occur?”

  Her tone was as implacable as any judge’s, demanding a full and true accounting of his crimes. Of course, he knew what would happen after the confession.

  The punishment.

  “I was seventeen,” he said.

  “So, not old.” She speared him with her gaze. “But not young.” She held the book in her palm, weighing it, watching him as if she were weighing his very heart. He prayed she should not find it wanting and toss it to the waiting jackals.