Jennifer Horseman

by GnomeWonderland

  A knock at the door interrupted Juliet's reveries. Thinking it was Lady Evelyn, she softly bid entrance. Elsbeth swept into the room, looking like a fresh breath of summer air, having bathed and changed from her ride. She wore a white dress trimmed in blue ribbons and ruffles of lace. The pretty dress reminded Juliet of the three trunks sent from a fashionable London shop for her, trunks that remained unopened, stacked neatly in the closet, for she chose instead to mend and wash the skirt and blouse Gayle had given her. She had not seen the young lady since arriving and she suffered a moment's awkwardness, the very same she had first felt.

  Elsbeth would have none of that, however, and looking a bit mischievous and guilty, she came right to the point of her visit. "I am sorry to interrupt your solitude like this. Mother said not to, you know. I suppose I'm breaking the law, but Garrett always talks of civil disobedience when a law or rule is unjust and this, I think, is a good example of what he means by that high-minded ideal. I think, nay, I know!—you've had enough solitude to last your lifetime. Tis such a lovely afternoon and I thought you might like to walk around the lake. And before you answer me, you should know that the one thing, the only thing, I don't have when we stay at the castle here in the country is ... is a friend."

  Juliet's shy smile was a thing to behold. "A friend . . . I think I'd like that very much."

  A knock sounded on the door, interrupting the low voices of the men within. Carl opened the door, a slight bow of his graying head served as an apology for interrupting the gentlemen. "A Mr. Rob Peterson to see you, sir. He says it's important. Naturally, I told him they all say it's important but he insisted I make the announcement-"

  "A moment, Carl," Garrett said as the admiral and Colonel Cameron stood to leave. "Admiral?"

  Admiral Kingston took Garrett's hand to shake. A strange feeling had filled him, so alarming he tried desperately to shake it. This was not the last time he'd ever see Garrett, he kept reassuring himself; certain the forbidding feeling sprang from the tragedy of losing Nelson. . . . Despite these mental reassurances, he held Garrett's gaze too long, suddenly unable to release his friend's strong hand.

  "Admiral?" Garrett questioned.

  "I ... I wish it was over, Garrett."

  "The last trip; the beginning of the end of French tyranny, I know." Garrett said, trying to reassure the admiral. "Two weeks in Bristol, a month or less in France, and I'll turn The Raven home for the last time."

  "When you meet your agents in Bristol, if there is the slightest discrepancy—"

  "My agents will understand my need for absolute safety during my final appearance in France. They've not failed me yet."

  "Aye . . . aye." The small man released Garrett's hand at last, taking Leifs. "Leif, I count on you to watch over each and every move he makes." Leif nodded solemnly, and the admiral turned his gaze back to Garrett. "May God be with you," he whispered, the very same words that sent thousands through the centuries to battle, and with a bow, he and the colonel took leave.

  Leifs stern gaze came to Garrett with an unspoken accusation.

  "Leave it be, Leif," Garrett said in a low voice, like the hiss of a snake, a warning. "It must be done and I will do it."

  "Aye, and get the French guillotine for the trouble. Kingston has never acted afraid, an unnatural sentiment from him, you must admit. One that perfectly reflects my own dream."

  "Your dream, your dream . . . The flying of the flag of danger ... Ah Leif," he dismissed this. "That flag has shadowed my whole life. The danger sign in your dream could mean anything, anything—"

  "I don't know what it means Garrett but . . . but with Juliet wavin' it back and forth, back and forth—"

  Garrett slammed his fist on the table. "She is safe, Leif. Safe. Nothing can happen to her. I have ten men at the castle watching her and—" He stopped, startled by the force of emotion her name brought, let alone when paired with the idea that she might be in danger. "God's curse, Leif, but I can not so much as say her name without—"

  Garrett said no more, but then he didn't have to. Leif knew well how he suffered. His emotional agony increased rather than decreased with each day of their separation. An embarrassingly long parade of dozens of nameless women, long runs, drinking and gambling binges, brawls Garrett single-handedly made into wars had not helped. Even this last week of a different kind of expiation: of fasting and meditating, seeking that peacfc that strayed forever from his reach, had hardly touched it.

  Garrett pulled the bell rope and Carl stepped in. Without looking up, Garrett asked him to admit Rob Peterson. "Leif," he returned to the subject for the last time. "Every last word says they don't know me yet. We will validate that fact in Bristol before Toulon. We will be safe. And my friend, that is final."

  Aided by his cane, Mr. Rob Peterson made his way into the private room behind his lordship's butler. His other arm clutched a leather case that contained the papers. Leif rose to aid the old man in his effort to reach a chair.

  At age seventy, Rob Peterson looked as old as a weatherworn centurion oak. Bent, frail, and reed thin, his frame could be toppled by a good wind. Yet beneath the frailty his mind remained sharper and shrewder than Garrett's next three best personal agents. Five years ago, after a particularly clever maneuver that saved the Van Ness family a tidy fortune, Garrett sent the old man an antique gold gilt clock with a retirement pension fit for a king. The clock came back with a curt note: "This handsome clock ticks closer to my death each and every second, as it ticks ever closer to your death as well, Lord Van Ness. I will not hurry it along by passing idle empty days on a park bench. With your permission, my lord, I will remove myself from your service the first and only time I fail you."

  Garrett had him working every day since.

  Leif offered a greeting as he poured the old man a glass of water and an ample shot of his favorite cognac. Garrett turned to view the familiar face through the light of the candles on the table. "Mr. Peterson?"

  "I bring news of a tragedy," he said. In a voice weighed heavily with emotion he confessed, "A more sorry one I have not heard in all my years."

  Leif stood up with a fist on the table, apparently ready to give chase. "She has escaped?"

  "Indeed. Clarissa Stoddard escaped, but through . . . death's portal."

  Leif slowly sunk back to the chair. Mr. Peterson drained the warm brandy in his glass, despite the certain knowledge that nothing on earth could chase away the chill of the story he must tell. For the story had nothing to do with heaven or God's earth and everything to do with the unfathomable depth of evil far, far below.

  He held his empty glass for a moment before reaching into his case and removing Clarissa Stoddard's last letter. This he handed wordlessly to Garrett. Hesitating but briefly, Garrett's gaze focused to find the strained flair of her last words. Words addressed to Juliet.

  To Juliet, my last living relative:

  You are the only person to whom this letter could mean anything to and yet I write to you with little hope that you will ever read it. I am not sorry for your tragic fate—whatever that may be— and I suppose 'twill be no shock to you that my deep animosity for you is but a token remnant of any natural feeling I have left. Your crime might only be that, unlike me, you remained untouched by him, but that is enough, my dear Juliet, that is enough.

  I should have known he'd not let me go. He might be dead in flesh, but he is alive in spirit. He won't leave me alone, he refuses to let me go. His accusing ghost follows me from room to room, task to task, appearing even in my dreams and making me relive the hell over and over again until I drop to my knees, trembling and shaking, screaming into an empty room to let me alone, please to God, let me go. Even now he waits in the shadows of the room, calling to me over and over ... as always mistaking my name for another, Anna, he says, Anna come back to me. . . .

  Anna, his sister and our mother, there it is: read these words a hundred times, the effort will not change them. I once heard you telling Stella how confused you were by the terribl
e presence of your uncle, that our mother said your family consisted of a hundred years of barristers, that your grandparents died in an influenza outbreak, leaving her orphaned and without siblings at a young age. What pretty tales she must have spun for you! Tales that hid the horror of her past, for her parents were my father's: the Stoddards of Bristol, snipping magnates for a century and more. You are his niece and half sister to me, for I am the daughter he put in his sister, I am the daughter she left in his unholy hands. I know the madness she had to escape from, for she left me to endure it in her place. She knew he would love me in her place; she knew her daughter would have the knowledge of a father that no daughter ever should, and as I wonder at the depravity of her heart, I know a hate that is worse than the hell she made of my life.

  You may read the rest of our mother's life in my father's unsent letters. There are a series of letters where my father writes that he discovered one of her lovers—your father, I guess, if you examine the dates. His madness rears its head at this point and he asks your mother if she truly believes she can escape him before he says these words ... "I have at last discovered the highly kept secret of his residence. Will you think of me when you find him dead soon?" He killed her lovers as he killed mine; at the last, neither one of us escaped the poison of his love.

  I know our mother never mentioned the small sacrifice of flesh she left in England, otherwise you might have known why you were so hated and despised by him. You had the dual gifts of her love and his hate, while I was fed the poison of the opposite. My only solace as his voice echoes again in my mind is that she is tormented in her resting place with the knowledge she made death a welcome portal for her firstborn daughter, the last portal open that will let me escape. . . .

  Garrett handed the letter to Leif as Mr. Peterson gave him a thick package of Stoddard's apparently unsent letters. Garrett examined the two unfolded letters he had selected from the rest to validate the truth revealed in Clarissa Stoddard's suicide note. He glanced at these but briefly before Leif broke the silence with a soft curse, "May God have pity on her soul. How did she leave this sorry world?"

  "Strychnine-"

  "Influenza, did you say Mr. Peterson?" Garrett said, as he gathered up all the papers. Moving to the fire leaping wildly in the hearth, he carefully set them ablaze, watching until they darkened to ashes. "Juliet, I think, will not be too surprised with the epidemic sweeping through the city. An easy death, relatively speaking."

  A bright summer moon rose high in the night sky as Garrett entered the quiet of the barn. Moonlight streamed in ribbons of light through the open windows of the hayloft where he found the two young women sound asleep amidst the redolent sweetness of freshly shorn hay. As if they had fallen asleep sharing a secret, they were turned toward each other, and Laydy slept between them. Entwined in the little monkey's hands were two plaits, one of Juliet's and one of Elsbeth's. A new promise . . .

  He did not know how long he stared at the picture, so startling, beautiful, innocent, but he finally felt the cramp in his hand where he gripped the wood side of the rail, a desperate attempt to fight the avalanche of emotion brought on by seeing her again.

  "... I don't want to feel anything when you rape me again, and right now I feel so much like dying, I'm afraid I might. . . ."

  He used the words to fight the force of his desire, this monster that lived inside of him like a great caged beast, and he turned away again. He walked the half mile back to the house, trying to clear his thoughts and exorcise her from his mind. An impossible task, he knew . . .

  Garrett quietly let himself inside. His knee-high moccasin boots made no sound as he moved down the familiar hall to his mother's favorite sitting room on the west side, always her favorite room, with sunlight filtering through the tall windows in the morning, a cool breeze off the lake in the afternoon. He stepped through the door, still soundlessly, and against the soft pinks of the room, he found his mother sitting in her sewing chair by the window, her eyes downcast on the needlework on her lap. The sight triggered in him the memory of a fourteen-year-old standing in this room, filled with ideas and understanding that separated him from her, even then. ...

  "What are you saying, Garrett?"

  "That the goddamn gold thimble on your thumb could feed a starving family the winter."

  "How dare you take the Lord's name in vain in my house!"

  "Ah, forgive me my sin, Mother, these breaches of etiquette reserved for your society. Dear me," he had said with a mock sarcasm that hurt her worse than the words, "one might think I was raised with paupers."

  He remembered watching her hands tremble, a small thing, but one that took on greater significance in his mind, for that was the first time he realized she was not half as strong as he thought, not half as strong as one might think of a woman who saved her son the only way she could.

  "Garrett, this idea of yours, 'tis not fair! The Van Ness family has always been charitable—"

  "Yes, I know. A hefty ten percent of the Van Ness fortune goes to the archdiocese annually. I'm sure they set a fine table on our generosity. Hell, they probably have a few gold thimbles to boot."

  "Garrett-"

  "I'm sorry, Mother, but I can't stay. . . ."

  How many times had he said those words?

  How many times had she nodded and pretended to understand?WasitEdric'sdeath orJulietthathad stirred the intense desire he felt to stay. Like a salmon fighting to swim upstream or geese flying to warmer skies, for the first time in the whole of his life he wanted to stay, to pull up a chair and take his mother's hands as he eased her grief and made her smile. A woman's smile was becoming as fine a prize as saving the world.

  She finally looked up to see him watching her. He met the kindness in her eyes, but he turned away, too shaken to put his emotions in words. Always he turned away. Bracing his long arms on the hearth, he said quietly, "Tell me, Mother."

  "I don't know where to begin," she said after a thoughtful pause, "Juliet touched me from the start. I can not explain how much, but . . . but we have spent more than one night crying together."

  Those words made him swing around.

  "At first I was so frightened for her. She sat in her room and while I came in the mornings and evenings to keep her company, and while we shared quiet conversations ... as women do ... you know, about people and families, she was still lost, so grief stricken from all that has happened to her." She hesitated, remembering the first time she had seen Juliet's hand, trying to make sense of it, then when Elsbeth came running to her, crying after seeing the scars on her back. ... "A hundred, no less . . . oh, Mama . . ."

  " Twas Elsbeth who first drew her outside. I don't know how she did it but you know Elsbeth with all her impetuousness and her kindness, and as it happened, one day Elsbeth just arrived for supper with Juliet's hand in hers. . . . Now they have grown very close, we all have. Juliet has begun sharing things. Elsbeth and Juliet spend their days together, climbing up to the summit, swimming and fishing in the lake. Elsbeth made a present of one of the mares and now they ride together too. Your men have quite a problem keeping up, they tell me. Juliet made Elsbeth visit the poorhouses in town, where they bring those good people huge baskets of foodstuffs—she reminds me so of you sometimes. At night Juliet reads to us, she's quite gifted in that way . . . like Jane. She still has times when she needs to be alone of course. . . ." There was, she thought, no reason to mention that this occurred whenever his name was mentioned, for the slightest reference to Garrett caused pain, followed by a quick departure. "We have come to love her, Garrett . . . and she is learning to be happy again."

  He closed his eyes to the last words. The idea that she was learning to be happy again filled him with a strange, sad joy and relief. He could want no more. He could hope for no more. The quiet, late night air sang with his mother's understanding, her inability to offer any more than these pictures of Juliet: swimming in the lake, long walks up mountainsides, riding with his sister, or reading to his family before
the fireside, happy and safe at last. Aye, it was enough.

  "Juliet's cousin died last week."

  Lady Evelyn's gaze lifted to Garrett, not knowing what to make of such news. "How—"

  "Influenza. A small epidemic swept through London recently."

  "Will you tell her?"

  "Yes."

  "Juliet worries about our . . . charity."

  "She has inherited a fair monthly allowance."

  Lady Evelyn nodded, knowing it was a lie, of course. "Will you be sailing out again?"

  "Yes. Tomorrow."

  She nodded quickly, pretending to understand.

  "Goodness, she's as bad as Nanny Goat! She's eating my hair!" Juliet tried to free her loose hair from Laydy's tenacious clutches. Laydy squealed, jumping up and down. "Elsbeth, help me-"

  "Laydy!" Elsbeth pronounced the monkey's name with a thick Cockney accent, the very same outrage that had given rise to the name—outrage that was produced by Elsbeth's maid, Marguerite, shortly after the announcement that the monkey would sleep in Elsbeth's chambers. Elsbeth carefully pried the monkey's fingers from Juliet's unbound hair and laughed, " Tisn't your hair she's after but the daisy crown. Oh me, Laydy, what a nuisance!"

  Laughing, Juliet disentangled the crown from her hair and began hand-feeding Laydy the daisies. Elsbeth took one too, yet began plucking the petals from the flower one by one. "He loves me ... he loves me not," she repeated, tossing the petals in the cool lake water, where the two girls dangled their bare feet. "He loves me! What glad news, don't you think?"