Jennifer Horseman

by GnomeWonderland

  It would be over; she would be safe. ... Stella exercised extreme gentleness as she carefully wiped the slender back with a cool cloth. Not once did Juliet cry out, though she shivered uncontrollably. "Oh, Juliet my poor, poor lady. How badly does it 'urt?" Juliet shook her head, unable to reply as she tensed, fighting the shivers and the searing hot sting as Stella now began to lay the salve to her wounds. "Oh, dear God, easy . . . easy. You're bound to get a fever from this. . . . Mercy, 'tis a wonder you can still draw breath." Trying to ease Juliet's attention from the sting of her ministrations, she asked angrily, "What did 'e say to you?"

  "At first nothing," Juliet whispered, her normally melodic voice changed with fear or pain or both. "Stella, Stella, I didn't know he was to do this to me. Not with all his financial woes, the worry of losing the house ... I knew he was angry when he discovered the book missing from his library, but when the bankers came today, I thought he had forgotten. So when he appeared in my room and I saw the whip, I, I was so frightened ... I couldn't bear it and I ran to the window," her voice lifted with the emotion, falling to a whisper of defeat, "And . . . and he struck me then—"

  Stella cautiously slipped around the side of the bed to see her mistress's face. "Oh mercy in 'eavens . . ."

  The bruise marked her face just as the fear marked her eyes, and Stella slowly reached out to touch it. Juliet winced slightly. Stella stopped her tears, crying when Juliet no longer could, and returned to applying salve to the wounds on Juliet's back, waiting until she was done before revealing the news of Tomas's return.

  Stella's thoughts kept turning through circles of helplessness. "She's tried to run away twice now," her husband had summed it up the other night. "Think of those mad dogs, Stella! 'E said the next time he'd kill 'er and !e would at that, I 'ave no doubt. 'E'd watch as those dogs tore 'er to pieces, along with anyone who tried to 'elp 'er. Nay, 'er only 'ope is that boy she loves. . . ."

  Juliet managed to overcome the stinging pain long enough to reveal her own confused thoughts: "He told me he would purge the stain of my mother's wickedness from his house if it was the last thing he ever did, and that it was for disobedience as much as for stealing his book that he beat me. He said he would beat servitude and obedience into me nightly if he had to."

  Why did he hate her mother so? Why did his hate still burn "seven years after her mother's death? For trading England for France? For falling in love with a Frenchman? For bearing a child without benefit of matrimony?

  It was as if her uncle kept punishing her for something her mother had done, without ever telling her what this might be. Assuming, of course, there was a rationale behind his cruelty, however demented and unjust. Yet all Juliet knew of her parents came before her mother's death just before she entered her tenth year. Before she was born, her father had been murdered in the post-revolutionary struggles of the Committee of Public Safety, in which he had been a participant. He had dedicated his life to the committee and had lost it in the service of their exalted cause. He had died before she was born, but he lived on in the colorful pictures her mother painted of him for her. He had been a hero: brave, moral, and handsome . . .

  Yet her father died leaving them no inheritance, and any other time but now Juliet would have smiled when she thought of the story her mother had made up to explain his neglect. With the wisdom of a seventeen-year-old, she knew now many heroes were simply poor. Yet her mother could not bear to leave such a plain truth alone, so she adorned it with her imagination, turning it into something exciting and lively, something worthy of telling over and over again. Still, because they had no inheritance, her mother had to work in a flower shop across the city, leaving her to the loving care of Madame Gaston, an elderly widow with whom she lived over a bakery shop in Montparnasse.

  How she missed the old woman, too, her tender loving care, the warmth and happiness of Monsieur Rovere's small bakery, his teasing and laughter and generosity. She missed these simple and good people terribly. What happened to them? She sent hundreds of letters through Tomas with careful instructions to return the post to him, but she never got a reply. Sometimes she worried that they, too, had left her. . . .

  Mamma, I miss you most of all . . .

  Her mother arrived on the sabbath and stayed with her until TUesday. Each hour they were together was a holiday filled with joy and laughter and frivolity: they went to parks, cafes, museums, theaters, and music halls. They talked and sang, laughed and pretended Tuesday would never come. Her mother told her so many things, fanciful tales about people and places, love and life. . . . Her mamma was so terribly beautiful, yet even as a young child Juliet had seen a strange sadness hidden beneath her smile and laughter. . . .

  What was it mamma? What secret did you keep from me? It's as if you knew what would happen to us, parted by death and me forced into my uncle's cruel hands. That letter sitting on the nightstand the night you unwound our hair and died, the letter that made you weep with fear. Was it from him? The uncle you never told me about?

  Her mother had never once mentioned her uncle—she had told a completely different story about their lost English family: a century of barristers, her grandparents passing in the terrible influenza epidemic that left her mother an orphan. Juliet still remembered the day when, as a young ten-year-old girl still lost to her grief at her mother's death, her uncle's agent arrived at the bakery in Paris, literally pulling her from Madame Gaston's arms. She remembered the crying and screaming and monsieur's threats, and it seemed the terror started that very day. . . .

  "There, 'tis done," Stella finished, but, "Lord, Juliet, you're shiverin' with the fever. Let me fix this blanket around you." No cloth could touch her skin, but Stella carefully covered her legs and padded a blanket around her sides.

  "Stella," she whispered the name and said, not for the first time, "I don't know what I'd do if not for your comfort."

  As if it were enough, Stella sighed and rose to fetch a brush from the vanity. A soft knock sounded on her door. Both young ladies tensed. Juliet flinched as she looked up to stare at Stella in alarm. Would he come back at this hour? Or did Bess sneak back into the house to see her?

  "Who's there?" she asked in a whisper.

  " Tis me, Clarissa . . . Please do hurry, I must speak with you. ..."

  Juliet watched as Stella moved swiftly to the door, opening it to Clarissa. "Clarissa . . ." The young lady was tall and quite lovely, though for reasons not clear-to Juliet, she refused to see the similarity between her older cousin and herself. . . . "They kin pass for sisters," she once overheard Samuels say. "Save for the eyes . . ." The likeness stemmed from their hair, like her mother's, the same burnt red color that must run in the family, though Clarissa wore hers at a fashionable length, just off the shoulders and ironed into tight ringlets that took hours to make. The likeness stopped there; where Juliet's eyes were dark blue, Clarissa's were pale like her father's, and where Juliet's face was oval, thin, almost angular, Clarissa's was all rounded, plump, whimsical. Even Clarissa's figure, the sloping shoulders and voluptuous curves, enhanced her look of extreme delicacy and whimsy. She wore a white silk nightdress that swept the floor as she stepped inside the dim light of the modest room, ignoring Stella in the way that she had with servants. Juliet carefully tried to sit up to face her cousin. This was the first time Clarissa had ever entered her small attic room. Trepidation marked her cousin's steps. Her pale blue eyes considered her but briefly before they anxiously swept to either side. The revulsion quickly disappeared, changing to a fear that shocked Juliet. Now her cousin, too, was afraid of something, as if fear were indeed a contagious disease running rampant in the household.

  Juliet could not guess why, for as far as anyone knew, Clarissa reigned as the only living being her father loved since his wife's death at Clarissa's birth. He treated her like a princess, showering her with presents and affection. To see his face when Clarissa was in the room was to see a changed man. Of the entire household, though, only Juliet knew Clarissa's secret: that sh
e returned her father's love with a carefully concealed hatred. Yet she had never shared the reason for her hatred, and, perhaps unkindly, Juliet suspected it had naught a thing to do with his malevolence toward others.

  She had never been close to Clarissa. Until last year, Clarissa had been away at boarding schools where wealthy English families of position sent their daughters. She returned to Fairwoods only for holidays, appearing as a brief interruption of the pattern of days, leaving only the faint scent of perfume in her wake. Except for those holidays,

  Clarissa might never had existed at all. Even now, they saw each other infrequently, taking care to honor the inexplicable antipathy Clarissa felt toward her, the tension put between them for no reason beyond an extension of her uncle's hatred. Those few times they were together, for church and Sunday supper, they were painfully civil to each other, rarely talking and then only on the most superficial of levels: the weather or the Sunday sermon, the tepidness of the stew, for her uncle had expressly forbidden their friendship on a day Juliet would never forget, the day after her arrival from France.

  On that day her uncle sat her down in his great study to paint the picture of her life for the next long years: "Your mother never wanted me to see you. She had reason to fear. Now she is finally in the hell she so justly deserves. And now my poor, poor Anna can not stop me from fulfilling my ... ah, Christian duty to at least care for you, her precious daughter. A duty that upon my word," he swallowed the drink whole, "will make you pay for your mother's slutting wickedness before I at last join her in the grave. This duty extends to seeing you housed, fed, and raised within the strictest orthodoxy of Christian life. Though make no mistake, each time I look into your eyes and see hers, I will be reminded of the despicable circumstances surrounding your birth. I will not pretend otherwise."

  What followed was a great list of his demands, rules he felt necessary to keep her from "your mother's wickedness and sins. . ." He forbid her to mention her parents' name, to mention any part of her life in Paris; he forbid her to speak or sing in French, to suffer any idleness or indiscretion that might lead her away from a chaste Christian life. "Therefore, you shall be given a tutor, and beyond the studies common to young ladies, I shall further induce you into Christian piousness and obedience by demanding you copy one chapter of the Bible daily. . . . My greatest fear of course is that you pollute my daughter's gentle and fragile countenance. This will not be tolerated. Therefore, I will demand you limit your association with Clarissa to the barest civility. Fortunately, she shall be away most of the time, at Fairwoods only for holidays, and so your influence, as I am determined to see it, cannot be much. . . ." Clarissa, Julie had reasoned, must have received a different warning for the same purpose: keeping them from friendship.

  One day not long ago Clarissa had shown her an unexpected side of her personality with the revelation of how much she hated her father. Out riding, Clarissa came across her and Tomas in the woods by the river. Clarissa might have been her uncle himself, as far as Juliet was concerned, and her fear was great indeed. Yet Clarissa had laughed as if it were a joke, "You, too, my distant cousin? Refuge in a young man's arms? No, cousin, your secret is safe with me." Then with real vehemence she said as she kicked her heels to her mare, "I'll not tell my father, whom I hate more than life!"

  Those words of hatred haunted Juliet. A page turned in her mind to a new and different picture of her cousin. All of Clarissa's docility and pretty sighs, her lace and ruffles, perhaps even her fragile state of health . . . well, could they not be a pretense put on for her father's benefit? Could there possibly be a young lady numb with hate and cold with bitterness beneath the extremely quiet and gentle countenance? Why though? Was she, too, afraid of him, though he had never raised a hand to her? Juliet never knew for sure; she had hoped the incident would bridge their separate lives and had waited for Clarissa to approach her. Yet she never did.

  Until now. Juliet searched the large, anxious eyes, seeing all the signs of her cousin's extreme distress. Clarissa had been ill with a mild pneumonia for well over a month now and yet there was no sign of it. Still, large red lines circled her eyes and it appeared as if she had been crying, agitated by heightened emotions.

  "Clarissa?" Juliet said her name in a question.

  "Your face," she whispered as she touched her own. "And Missy said Father . . . took a strap to your back?"

  Juliet's eyes lowered, not knowing what to say as Clarissa stepped around the bed. Clarissa said nothing as she stared at the slender arch of her cousin's back for a long time; the silence spoke well of her shock.

  Clarissa came back around, and to Juliet's utter incomprehension she dropped to her knees before her, burying her face in her lap, crying. Juliet froze, hardly knowing what to make of this most unexpected show of emotion. Her hand touched her cousin's curls, tentatively at first, but then, moved by her cousin's distress, with the kind if not loving sentiments her heart found so readily.

  "I ... I fear he is mad!"

  This was not a new thought. Juliet often used it as the only explanation for his unfathomable cruelty. Yet the idea was obviously new to her cousin.

  "I don't know what to do . . .1 am lost. I must leave this house, and yet—"

  "What happened?"

  "I can't speak of it," Clarissa told her, her eyes filled with worry and emotion. "I know you will find it hard to believe, but what he has done to me is so much worse. There was a young man . . . and Father found us. ... I was so frightened that I, I ... oh," she closed her eyes tight in a desperate effort to shut the vision from her mind: the rage and jealousy on her father's face when she let him find them, let him know that Edric had made love to her. . . . Then the rage had turned to murder and she cried, "I can't speak of it! I can't!" Clarissa hardly had to act this part. Every time she closed her eyes she heard young Edric's screams and it terrified her. Her father had earned his death a hundred times, and when on the morrow—dear God, let it be so! —he died, it would be the happiest day of her life. Only she would not die with him! It was his madness and sickness; she had suffered enough.

  She never believed Edric when he talked of an older brother, a famous criminal his family had disowned, a man of wealth and power whom he could not name. "Everyone knows him! I am forbidden to speak his name but can you not guess?" She thought he had made it up to impress her; she had even laughed at his stories, until after her father and his men had left Edric to die in his young friend's arms, locking her in the next room to listen to the awful sound of abject pain and terror as he died so terribly slowly. She overheard his last words to his friend, demanding word be gotten to his infamous older brother.

  She still could not believe the name Black Garrett. She hadn't believed it, not at first. She thought somehow that he had made it up to scare her. Until suddenly the gruesome circumstances of Edric's death appeared vividly in her mind—to save her, she thought—and she realized the terror caused by Edric's mutilation could not exist merely to frighten her. Then she had been terrorized too: the most famous criminal and barbarian in all of England was going to come for her and her father, and he would do things worse than killing. She had been about to run to her father, screaming, when from the heavens she saw her salvation. Black Garrett would have his revenge, but only half of it. ...

  Confused, Juliet looked to Stella for help, but her friend only shrugged slightly, having no idea what to make of it, either.

  "I've come to warn you," Clarissa finally managed shakily. Her very life rested on getting Juliet out of the house on the morrow, and she braced as she asked: "Missy said that your young man has come back, that he sent you word and you should be seeing him on the morrow?"

  "What?" Juliet's eyes flew to Stella. Was he back? Dear God, has he come back?

  Seeing that Juliet didn't know, Clarissa almost panicked.

  "Yes." Stella removed the note from her pocket and brought it to her mistress. "I thought to wait until you recovered some afore showin' you."

  Juliet
read it at a glance: "Waiting as you read. Love. Always."

  Tomas was back! Waiting for her, but—"Do you know, cousin? Is my secret safe with you?"

  "You know it is! And . . . and I want to help you. I can not in conscience bear the thought of you getting caught as I did." Clarissa stopped and looked away, her pause more ominous than any words, or so Juliet thought. Juliet saw only that something horrible had happened, that Clarissa had been caught by her father with a young man and then, then what? "What happened to you?"

  "You cannot want to know. . . . Oh, believe me," she cried dramatically, sending the curls swinging about her face as she shook her head. "You know his wrath better than anyone, though I dare say he would be more merciful to you than to me. It was horrible and I just... I just can't bear the thought of you suffering likewise. Oh my cousin, I know I've always ignored your affairs, he made me, but now I will assist you in any way I can. On the chance father returns early to find you gone tomorrow, I'll stall his discovery until. . . ah, Stella or someone else has a chance to find you and bring you home. Do tell me, though, just so I might rest easier, how you plan to slip out tomorrow. Where will you meet him?"

  Clarissa was truly frightened by the idea of her getting caught! Juliet tried to imagine why. What was this event she kept alluding to, an event that triggered this sudden change? How could it matter though? She had to see Tomas at whatever risk, he was all she had in this life, her only love and solace. She had to risk everything to see him, for she had nothing without him.

  "He'll never catch me," she said finally, to reassure herself as much as Clarissa. "I simply plead a headache and send word to my tutor, Mr. Grover. He has never told your father yet, not when he gets paid for no work. As soon as your father leaves for the docks, I slip out the back doors when no one is looking. I return before him and no one ever knows, past those like Stella here, whom I can trust."