A tear dropped onto her fingers and Lina wiped her eyes with her sweater sleeve. She sniffed rather loudly and cleared her throat.
“Nobody likes to talk about bad things in their own families,” she said at last. “I don’t, and you wouldn’t if there were anything really wrong in your heredity. But there’s bad blood in our line. Not criminal. I wish it was that simple. It’s madness.”
Marise felt a surge of surprise, mixed with more than a little shock. “Auntie, are you certain? I never in my life met anyone more sane and sensible than you and your brother. Not to mention Ben and Hannibal; they’re almost too brilliant for their own good.”
Lina rubbed her eyes, now, loosing Marise’s hands to do so. That allowed her to avoid looking straight at the girl as she spoke. “There have been afflicted children born, at least one to each generation for the past three.” She sounded hoarse, as if the words were difficult to speak.
“But not in Ben’s generation!” Marise said. Ben’s aunt did not contradict her.
“Emanuel and I swore not to marry,” Lina went on. “I kept my vow, but when he met Elizabeth, he seemed to forget about that and all the other things we had taken into consideration.
“Perhaps...perhaps if I had met someone I loved, who truly loved me, I’d have done the same. I judge him harshly, I know, and that may be because I’m jealous of his family. But I’ve spent my life thinking about what might happen because my brother fell in love. I’m afraid. Afraid for you and Ben, if you decide to have a baby.”
Marise stared into Lina’s eyes. She saw there such pain that she stood and cradled the older woman’s head against her side, patting her grizzled hair gently. She still didn’t understand what drove Lina to this desperation, but she knew, whatever its cause and however valid her concern was, it was totally genuine.
That had been the end of their conversation. Marise puzzled over it for weeks, trying to see in any of the Clarringtons around her a hint of eccentricity or mental imbalance. She found nothing at all to disturb her. In fact, she had more cause to doubt her own sanity than that of any of the family.
That was because the house itself troubled her. She woke in the night, hearing odd sounds, the remnants of lost echoes or whispers or tappings. Once she left a book in the sitting room and went down, after going to bed, to retrieve it.
She still recalled standing in the dim-lit room, holding the book, listening to the scrabbling noise that seemed to come from the door onto the stair. It had been disturbing, though she told herself it was a mouse in the paneling. The old building was overrun with the creatures, and she had heard them in the space above her bedroom ceiling.
But this sounded as if someone was trying to open the door. Ben had put a bolt on the inside and cautioned her to use it always, if she was the last to come to bed. “In our home?” she’d asked him, feeling incredulous. “What could possibly harm us here?”
He’d looked tired and harassed, but he answered calmly enough: “Call it a hangover from my illness. I just don’t feel secure unless it’s fastened. Do it for me, love. I have lived for so long, in so many odd places, and among such strange sorts of people that it has shaken my nerve. Do it for me.”
Of course she had, faithfully, and that night she had been glad of the strong bolt. The fumbling and scratching had sounded as if it were on the other side of the solid door. She kept insisting to herself that if it wasn’t a mouse, it was a squirrel in the wall, and she knew that had to be true.
Yet after that night she felt obscurely nervous as she went about the house. She would have the sense of being watched in the oddest locations. Once, sitting in the kitchen before Hildy’s beaming gaze, she had suddenly felt her back go cold, as if someone stared at it. When she made some reason to turn, there was no one there, and she had known that would be true.
“I’m getting notional,” she told herself sternly. “There’s nothing wrong with me, and there’s nothing wrong with anyone else here. It’s just living in a house that is so much bigger than I’m used to. I’m a poor farm girl, after all.”
Besides being notional, she also began being nauseated, and she attributed that to nerves. But, in a few weeks more, after Ben sent her to the doctor who had treated the family for half a generation, she learned the problem was not in her mind. Despite what Dr. Field had told her, she was pregnant.
The night after that was confirmed beyond doubt, when Ben came into her bedroom she met him with such a joyful face that he had known at once something exciting was happening. “We’re going to be parents!” she said, forgetting entirely the qualms Lina had tried to instill in her. She caught him by the elbows and whirled him around the room until they fell, laughing, onto the bed.
“There is going to be another Clarrington to brighten up this gloomy old house. I am so happy!”
He sat up then, very slowly and carefully. Taking her shoulders into his hands, he looked at her solemnly. His eyes held happiness, affection...and a trace of fear. That was natural, she thought. He never had been a father before.
“I’m so happy, Doll,” he said. “We’re going to love it almost too much. But promise me something. Tell Aunt Lina before you tell anyone else. Tell her in private. She...has a special interest. And my parents won’t be upset by that.”
“I know she’ll be interested,” Marise said, remembering that odd conversation earlier. “She talked with me once, for a while. I never did quite understand what she was getting at. I’ll go to her tomorrow and tell her.”
Ben kissed her then, very tenderly, but that night he cried out in his sleep as he had not done for months. She patted him quiet without waking him, there in the darkness, wondering what it could be that he feared so terribly.
The next morning she tapped once again on the sewing room door, to hear Aunt Lina’s deep voice bid her to enter. Lina looked up at her over the tops of her glasses, her jade green eyes full of laughter at some nonsense she was listening to on the radio at her elbow. The laughter faded as she looked more closely at her visitor.
Marise sat in the low chair again. It was very like that other day, she thought, as she reached to take the woman’s hand. “Auntie, I’ve come to tell you something wonderful. Something Ben thinks you should know before anyone else in the family.
“The doctor was wrong. Ben wasn’t sterile at all. We’re going to have a baby.”
As Marise watched in horror, Lina’s face turned gray, literally gray, as if the accumulated essence of old age and death washed across it, leaving nothing but devastation behind. The big hand struggled free of her own and grasped the arm of the chair as if holding to some dream of security.
“What is wrong?” Marise had cried, going to her knees beside the sewing chair. “Aunt Lina, are you ill?”
“Pay it no mind. I have...little spells, now and again. When I get excited.” Lina drew a long breath, held it for a moment, and let it out again. She straightened in the chair and managed a weak smile.
“Never think, child, about that nonsense I told you before. We all take risks constantly, all through our lives. Maybe it’s better so. You have a greater chance of having a sound child than an unsound one, and I’m an old fool.
“Just because I wasted my life and my youth doesn’t mean that everybody else has to do it too. Take my hand and help me up. We have to go down and tell Emanuel and Elizabeth the news, or they’ll never forgive us.”
They had gone together, through this very door Marise touched it, and it opened, revealing the now dim interior. The chair in which Aunt Lina had stitched so many miles of seams and darns and mends stood empty, of course, except for memories.
This older Marise sighed. Even pain grows dim, in time.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Kitchen
Marise hated going into the big kitchen almost more than any other room in the house. Hildy’s bright yellow curtains still hung at the windows, kept washed
and starched crisp by Marise’s hands. The huge cook stove and the Formica-topped work table cried out, even now, for Hildy’s ample shape, her capable hands, her strange little chicken-peep of a voice.
Marise had not realized until too late that Hildy, more even than Father Clarrington, was the heart of Clarrington House. The furnace itself had no more to do with keeping the place warm and alive than the big cook had done.
Marise sighed as she put the kettle onto a burner, took bread from the plastic bread box, and brought little dabs of this and that from the great refrigerator. The shelves looked cavernous, interrupted only by her piddling bits of food.
Her supply of perishables was getting low, even considering how little she ate. She reached up to make a notation on the pad beside the telephone. It was time, once more, to call the Trustees and have their man bring what she needed.
Turning, she poured hot water into the warmed teapot and set her scrappy meal on the table. She ate at the small one where Hildy had served coffee or tea or cookies to anyone who came, no matter how unusual the hour. The cook had been sitting here....
* * * *
Hildy smacked biscuit dough with a plump fist, turning and pummeling it until a light mist of flour rose into the air. The rich smell of the roast in the oven was already making Marise’s mouth water; she nibbled at a whole-grain wafer Hildy had prescribed for her, along with milk, every day.
Something made Marise feel mischievous. She had never been particularly inclined in that direction before her pregnancy, but it seemed to have brought out the devilment in her nature.
“Hildy,” she asked innocently, “when are you going to show me the whole of the third floor? I know Aunt Lina’s room well, and we’re working on the old nursery and schoolroom, getting them ready for future use. But all the rooms around the bend at the other end of the corridor are ones I’ve never seen.”
This was not quite the innocent question it seemed, for Marise had been noticing that any mention of the rear part of the third floor made every one of the Clarrington family uneasy.
It didn’t really bother her. She had been too busy with making her own suite into a comfortable nest, as well as working on the nursery, to bother with any more of this endless house and its seemingly uncountable rooms.
Hildy’s hands jerked, and she turned to look at Marise as if not sure she had heard the question. Her new hearing aid was helping, but she still didn’t trust her ears.
“You said?” she asked.
“I asked about the third floor. I’ve never seen even half of it.”
“Plenty time for that later,” Hildy said, giving the dough a solid thump. “You take one look at the musty old rooms back there, you go crazy to clean, to fix nice. No way you can do that now.
“I’d be shamed to let you see how we let the old place go, since I get old and achy.” The big hands flipped the dough, smoothed it expertly, flattened it on the special board in a puff of flour dust, and began patting it flat. No rolling pin did the job to suit Hildy.
Her pale golden hair wisped around her face in strands that had escaped from her hairnet. Her pale eyes did not rise to meet Marise’s questioning gaze.
“It’s really odd,” Marise mused. “Nobody will take me up there. Even Ben, when he’s home at all, won’t even bother to do it. And there’s so much room back there I was thinking we might set up an indoor gym or something like that, when the baby gets old enough to need a place to play on rainy days. Don’t you think that would be nice for him?”
“You know for sure it will be a him?” Hildy teased. “It might be nice, yes, but who would do it? Everyone very busy, including you. That farm take much of your time, and I don’t see you turn it loose, even after the baby come.”
Marise sighed. “I suppose you’re right. I seem to have too much energy right now, even with all the things I’m doing. And I only go out to the farm two or three times a week, since the doctor warned me to take it easier. I seem mostly to sit and fidget. Maybe I should just go up and explore by myself.”
“No!” Hildy’s voice was thin shrill, almost terrified. “Promise me you not do that, Marri. This...this is very old house, not all in good repair. There is soft floor, loose woodwork back there. Also spiders, very many, and rats. Even some black widow spiders I have seen. You do not need spider bite, with the baby so near. Promise!”
Marise realized that she was even paler than her usual Scandinavian fairness would warrant. Her tone verged on the frantic.
Filled with remorse, she reassured Hildy at once. “Why, of course. I promise, Hildy. I don’t want to give you any more worry, on top of all the work you have to do. I just have a case of the don’ts, as my mother used to say. I hate having Ben away so much. I suppose that’s the real reason why I’m so restless.”
The fair face was flushed again from the heat of the stove and her own exertions. Hildy beamed at her with approval. “Exactly so. You lonely for Ben, since he is so busy in woods. There is not so much for you to do around the house, too.
“Maybe you go walk in the garden? Or along street? Walk is good exercise and not too hard for you.”
“I just might do that.” Marise rose and set her cup and plate in the sink. “It’s nice and windy. That will keep it from being too hot, if I stay in the shade. Good idea, Hildy.” She smiled and left the kitchen, leaving the door open to the breeze that pulled through the hall.
She had almost reached the front door when Hildy called after her. She turned, struck by the odd note in the old woman’s voice.
“Marri, we all love you. You make Ben happy. You make him well, when he might die. You make Hanni smile, Mr. Clarrington laugh, the Mrs. feel better. We do not want anything to happen. We want baby to come, fine and healthy, no trouble.
“Maybe we try too hard to keep you safe, yes? But it is because you bring life to a house that has been dead for a very long time. This is not a good house. Not always. It has seen bad things, many times.
“Some very bad things happen up there on the third floor. They make us all unhappy, even now, and afraid too. Even so much later, we are still afraid. Please, Marri, do not go back along the corridor on the third floor?” Her voice was pleading.
Marri laughed and went back through the open door to take the floury hand held out to her. “Why, Hildy, I promised. And I promise again. Of course I won’t go there. But what did happen up there? Not knowing is worse than knowing. My imagination will make up all sorts of horror stories until I know the truth.”
Hildy chose her words with such care that her accent all but disappeared. “It is not my place to speak of my employers’ troubles. We have been together for very many years, but still I am their servant. I have no right to tell you things that Mr. Clarrington may not want you to know, so soon.
“Perhaps you have not seen that hesitation in him. I know how it is when you are young. You think always about making a good impression on others. They also, you might see, want for you to like them.”
Marise squeezed the big hand. “I will ask him, then. You are quite right, Hildy. I shouldn’t have teased you or tried to worm information out of you. It wasn’t polite, and it wasn’t right.” She hugged the plump figure for an instant, feeling the constant warmth and solidity of the woman.
“And don’t try to fool me that you’re a servant. You’re one of the family if any of us are. We all come to you when we’re depressed or restless or just hungry! Don’t sell yourself short!”
Hildy’s high, tinkling laugh had followed her through the corridor and out the front door.
Now the bright curtains still made the room look as if sun shone outside, even though the late fall day had turned gray beyond the windows. Marise thought of her joyous young self, walking through this room, the corridors, all the other rooms in this big pile of a house.
She had been unknowing, hopeful for the future. She had trusted fate to guide h
er correctly.
She chinked her dirty dishes together into the dishwasher, measured detergent, turned on the switch. Of the eight people, family and servants and child, who had lived here together, only she remained.
Now she dared not set her foot outside the front door. Even though she was healthy, still in early middle age, she did not trust fate, or the world, or (and this she found it difficult to admit to herself) her own reactions and abilities. The world might not be dangerous to her, but she was terribly, frighteningly uncertain whether she might not be dangerous to it.
She sighed heavily and moved into the corridor, closing the door upon the bright room. Once more the grateful shadows sheltered her.
CHAPTER FIVE
Outside
Marise dialed and listened to the ring at the office end of the line. One...two...three...four.... Mrs. Fisk was not her usual prompt self, taking all the calls to see what was going on.
“Clarrington enterprises. Mrs. Fisk.” The voice was sharper than usual.
“This is Marise Clarrington, Mrs. Fisk. Is Evan in? I need to speak with him.”
“He’s not in this morning, Mrs. Clarrington. I am taking his clients today. He went to Washington to lobby for the timber bill. May I help you? He left word it was time for your monthly call.” There was an avid quality to that voice, and Marise had a sudden realization that Fisk had some unnatural interest in her affairs. But what couldn’t be cured must be endured.
“Thank you, Mrs. Fisk. If you don’t mind, I need to have my usual order of groceries delivered. I called my order to the supermarket, and the manager will have them ready tomorrow at noon. If your young man will pick them up and bring them out, I will appreciate it.
“I also have just mailed the instructions for the fall plantings at the farm. Evan should have those tomorrow. I also need to see the balance sheets on the entire operation, farm, timber, securities, and the Trust, as well, as soon as he has time to prepare them.” She heard a sharp intake of breath from Fisk.
The Clarrington Heritage Page 3
