The Crimson Inkwell

by Kenneth A Baldwin

  I was elsewhere.

  “I didn’t want it this way. I just wanted to honor my father.”

  The fire flickered. What were only coals minutes ago were now sizeable flames. Their light played tricks in the tent. Their tips seemed to beckon to me in waves.

  “Don’t be afraid, Luella.” He put a hand on my elbow and helped me up. “I’m with you. You can do something remarkable.”

  He walked me to the writing desk and put the pen there across a blank sheet of paper.

  “If you are tired of writing silly stories, write something significant. Write something that Brutus can’t call a trifle.” He crossed to the tent door and held it open. “But, I’ve never intended to hold you prisoner. The choice must be yours.”

  I wasn’t sure what I wanted. I wasn’t sure how to think anymore. What was the future? What was my writing? I thought about my old reasons for using the pen. I was worried about the rent and the bills. It seemed so petty now.

  The pen beckoned to me. Was it witchcraft, dark magic, or a benevolent gift?

  Was it my only true tool to fulfill the life my father had wanted for me?

  Bram looked so harmless with the flap of his yurt open like that. I wasn’t sure whether to blame him or thank him. I felt like I had an escalating fever. Perhaps I was beginning to hallucinate. My vision was blurred, and I could hardly remember my name. But one thing rang through clear as crystal.

  “His writing will become nothing more than ‘do you remember that one time’.” Brutus’ critique was pounding in my brain. Drowning out all my other thoughts.

  I held my breath and seized the pen as slowly as molasses, scribbling furiously like a woman possessed. I didn’t care what I was writing. I just reached out for details, any details my mind could summon. Bram came to the desk and began copying whatever came out of the pen as quickly as he could.

  As I wrote, a wave of euphoria and dopamine shot through me, invigorating my senses and further clouding my mind. How could writing be anything but holy? Bram was right. I could wake up readers everywhere, and I would. All writers must sacrifice. I would sacrifice. The magic must come through. The fog was just the beginning.

  My hand continued as though it had a mind of its own. I filled a page then a second. I jotted down names, details, things I would never have dared to write before.

  Bram watched me as I put the pen to the paper. The flames called to me. The fire was so bright. Warm and welcoming, like the tickles of my father’s whiskers on my cheek as a little girl. This was for him. This was for Anna. The flames danced, warm and welcoming, like an optimistic vision for the future.

  Finally, the pen fell from my hand, and I collapsed to the floor. Bram folded his pages neatly and put them in a sealed envelope. Then he took my pages and tossed them into the flames.

  The fire blazed a crimson red.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Old Gossip

  I STAYED THERE well past midnight trying to recover from my episode, fueled by the feverous energy left in me by the pen’s magical residue on my mood. Bram did not leave my side. I felt something odd and wholesome, as if the pen— or at least whatever nether worldly force that powered it—seemed satisfied. I tried to recall the details of the story, but I couldn’t. I could see the paper I had written on in my mind, but in my memory, the pen wrote invisibly.

  Whatever I had offered to my ailment, it caused the fire to behave in ways I’d never before seen. It blazed a bright red whenever I looked into it, flickering upward in strange shapes, more akin to bubbles and water than to natural flame. These shapes continued for hours, and the fireballs floated delicately around the tent. I didn’t even marvel at them. They felt like old friends, discounting Brutus’ critique and offering me support and praise with their warmth.

  Bram’s expression glowed with a mix of stupor and glee, whether caused by witnessing magic or by seeing me cause these effects I still cannot say. But, he hurried about the room, stoking the fire and reaching out his fingers, daring to touch the floating fireballs. They were, in a bizarre way, our children, as were these stories. He pushed me into the unknown, encouraged and dared me to defy the boundaries of a world I thought I knew. I, the writer, realized his aspirations. Together, we made the fireballs.

  “What did I write?” I managed to ask Bram.

  “Something Brutus won’t be able to ignore.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It was a story about financial scandal. You wrote about a wealthy business owner who meets financial scandal when his dishonest book ledgers are discovered by a cutthroat competitor.”

  This latest story seemed to me the least fantastic and imaginative I had penned to date. It was simple. The details consisted of the type of rubbish I’d read time and time again in novels written by boring men and articles from the bigger papers from London. A career falls apart. A less than loveable maverick gets the dues he deserves. But, hopefully, its effects would grab Brutus by the lapels and make him pay attention. If he wanted stories of substance, it sounded like I’d given him one. After all, it was exactly the type of story that men in suits loved to read about. My father’s daughter gagged at the thought.

  Well, papa, you won’t be gagging when I win the Golden Inkwell.

  He handed me the sealed envelope. I accepted it with an upturned nose. I had no desire to read it. It almost broke my heart to see my name under such a dull, grimy bit of reporting.

  After what felt like days, the flames finally died down, and my senses slowly returned to me, though my memory did not. Bram gave me some water, and I found I could get up and walk, despite my spinning head. Given the hour, Bram offered his bed to me, insisting he would sleep outside, but I settled by requesting that he escort me home. I wasn’t sure I’d make it alone.

  I must have tumbled in around three o’clock after a long, mostly silent walk together. I was too groggy and tired to process the day’s events. My lunch with Edward seemed years ago. Instead, I allowed myself to be guided through the cold city streets by the man I didn’t know if I should trust or detest. I could not, at my current state, unravel the arguments for and against our continued interaction. He had posed several to me, and common sense had insisted in its own right. For now, I had to take life one step at a time down dark, cobbled paths to Harbor Street.

  I wanted nothing more than to fall asleep in my bed and wake up two months ago.

  When I did arrive at home, I was shocked to see not only my dear sister waiting up for me but a very perturbed-looking Mrs. Crow.

  “Oh Luella!” Anna cried, rushing forward to embrace me. “We feared the worst. But, what happened to you? You look ill. Are you hurt?”

  “I’m just tired. I need to go to bed.”

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  “I was writing.”

  “Not at Langley’s. We called on Mr. Livingston, and he said the two of you had a domestic,” Mrs. Crow piped in like a ruffled owl on a perch. I was sure the woman’s head could turn three hundred sixty degrees. Even in my current state of weariness, I couldn’t help contesting her words for accuracy.

  “You can hardly have a domestic with someone who doesn’t live with you,” I said.

  “Well then, where were you?” asked Anna.

  I took her hand, in part to steady myself, in part to reassure her. “I’ll explain all tomorrow. Please, you must be exhausted, dear sister. I’ve kept you up waiting, and I’m sorry. But, I’m alright.”

  She nodded, but it took a good deal of time before she allowed me to persuade her to retire. First, she made me sit and drink some warm tea, while putting a hand to my forehead and helping me loosen my bodice. I insisted over and over again that everything was alright with me, but it was no use. When she finally left the kitchen to warm up the bed for me, I turned to our neighbor.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Crow for staying up with her—”

  “Your sister may be young and naive,” Crow said, “but it’s not my first late night waiting for a friend. I th
ink it’s time we have a talk.”

  A lecture from Mrs. Crow was the last thing I wanted.

  “I have to beg your leave. I’m so very tired.”

  “Anna’s ears are still tuned to her own concerns, but the ears of an old woman recognize a man’s voice in the dark.”

  I froze. I had never before allowed Bram or Edward to walk me home. In fact, I seldom allowed Byron the occasion. I had considered it a sign of submission that I only wanted to yield after wedlock. For the others, it was a simple matter of discretion that I had blown directly out of the water tonight.

  “I beg your pardon.” My fingers started twitching.

  “Don’t play dumb with me,” said Crow. “Your business is your business, but I can’t let you bring ruin onto your family.”

  “Are you insinuating—”

  “That you came home at three in the morning with a strange man? I’m not insinuating anything. I’m stating the facts! I don’t care what happened; it’s the image of the thing! Luella, I care about you, and it’s hard for me to talk to you like this, but someone has to. Your behavior recently has been erratic, unsisterly, and irresponsible. Poor Anna has been going through one of the great episodes of her life.”

  “It’s young love,” I said, taken aback by Mrs. Crow’s brash attack.

  “It’s love. Which, I’m now sure, is something you know less about than you let on.”

  Her words hit me like a cold-water slap on the face. Something inside of me, that dark unnatural heat, sprang up in response, chasing out my fatigue. But, now fear came with it. I was afraid of losing control.

  “She is in love with that young man,” she continued. “You may describe it as infatuation or frivolity, but you’ve been gone for weeks, and you don’t know. While you’ve been away—doing whatever it is that you’ve been doing—I’ve tried my best to fill in the cracks. But, I’m not her sister, and I’m not your mother. It’s time for you to gird up your petticoats and walk uprightly. I cannot allow you to waste away your sister’s honest prospects at a happy and fruitful match because you’re going through a mid-life crisis. Her relationship with Mr. Rigby is already in peril. How do you think his family would react to news that her sister is a philanderer?”

  I didn’t have the energy to fight the fire brewing, even though I knew she was right and that I could no longer trust my own emotions. I had been coerced, critiqued, and backed into too many corners for one day. My fists clenched. Enough was enough.

  “Mrs. Crow, you are right. You’re not my mother, nor are you a member of this family. If you are done pretending to know everything about our situation and how to fix it all, I must insist you leave.”

  “But, Luella—”

  “Immediately!” I slammed my hands down hard on the table in an uncharacteristic display of force. She jerked backwards as my voice shook, and I pointed to the door. My jaw had gone rigid, and I felt powerful. It was a sweet, invigorating power, and it swam over me like warm water. I had had it with this old woman and her old-fashioned sense of what womanhood was about.

  Mrs. Crow’s old papery skin crinkled around her shocked frown. Her lip quivered, and she looked up at me with big, bright gray eyes welling with moisture. She looked ugly and wretched, and I saw in those eyes a deep pool of longing and loneliness. No fear. Just sadness. For a moment, I thought she was going to speak again, but instead she tenderly grabbed my hand, squeezed it, and made her way out the door.

  I closed it firmly behind her. At the touch of her hand, the magic had fled right out of my system, leaving me empty again and even more tired than before. I shook. I had been so angry at one our dearest friends. I looked at the table and rubbed my fist where a bruise was forming. What if I had struck her?

  I stumbled to our bedroom and fell asleep after hardly spending the energy to change out of my clothes.

  I tumbled through a deep sleep full of odd dreams. Fireballs chased me around a shadowy and ash-filled park. A man in a fine suit stood in the middle of the park, knee-deep in a reflection pool, staring at me. No matter how I tried to call for his help, he just continued to stare.

  I made my way toward him, but as I did so, he appeared to sink deeper into the pool. When I looked closer, I saw his hands and feet tied with strong cords. I rushed forward faster, ignoring fireballs, but the harder I pumped my legs, the further he appeared from me. A heavy fog settled in until the fireballs were all but embers in a dying campfire. With a terrible scream, the man plunged beneath the surface, and the fog completely obscured him from my view. When he was gone, the sound of my father laughing darkly echoed through the trees.

  “Papa?” I cried, but the laugh just continued. “Papa, where are you? I need you!”

  I woke up to the sound of a kettle and groggily checked my surroundings. I was at home in my room. The only relic from last night was Bram’s sealed envelope on my nightstand. That’s right. There was my sellout financial drudgery of a story. I rolled my eyes.

  In the kitchen, Anna had set the table with a healthy breakfast of bread, cheese, and Barker’s iced buns. I wrapped myself in a blanket and made my way gingerly to a seat. The world looked jarringly bright.

  “Oh, you’re up,” Anna said. “You tossed and turned all night.” I poured myself a large glass from a water jug on the table and gulped it down.

  “I must have kept you up.”

  “Oh, I haven’t been sleeping that well anyway,” she said sheepishly.

  She stood, bathed in the light that filtered through the drapes on the window. She nervously fiddled with a small kitchen towel and buried her eyes in the ground, a sad smile for me on her lips. Were those creases on her eyes, lines around her mouth? She looked older, worn, fatigued. I had stopped paying attention for a couple of weeks, and my baby sister grew up.

  “Have you heard anything from Jacob?” I asked.

  “We’ve spoken,” she said. “It’s not quite like it was before, but I’m working on it. I think it’s improving. Mrs. Barker sent over some of the buns you love.”

  She produced a small basket from the counter.

  “Anna, I’m sure you have a lot of questions,” I said. She busied herself on the countertop with an apple.

  “I just feel like I haven’t seen you in a while,” she said without looking at me. “I couldn’t help but wonder if it was my fault.”

  “Your fault?” I echoed, my guilt multiplying.

  “I know I’ve been difficult since that night at dinner. I even—” She turned and swallowed hard but still wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I told you to choose between me and Byron. Oh, Luella, I’ve been so ungrateful.”

  I watched her realize the lessons I’d learned years ago, lessons that come from broken dreams. Be grateful because life owes you nothing. Hope for the possible, not the beautiful. A useful person still has worth. These were the distinctions that formed the haggard expressions of the loveless.

  How could I explain to her that she was the jewel of my life? Her ultimatum against Byron had not been unwelcome, just an affirmation that my heart did not truly belong to him anymore than it belonged to the old, boring articles I wrote for him.

  Anna was trying very hard to be strong in front of me. What demons she must have faced these past weeks. I had only compounded her difficulties with the heavy mantle of my withdrawal. The true weight of secrets is born by our loved ones.

  I sprang up and embraced her with both of my arms. She was surprised at first but, after just a moment, hugged me back tightly. I didn’t want to let go. Her warmth swam through me. My sister loved me. What other magic could I need? I wanted to tell her everything, wished I could.

  “There, there,” she whispered, stroking my hair. “Everything’s alright. I just missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you, too. Please, don’t think that you have been the cause of any significant divide between Byron and me.” I finally found the strength to separate from her and pulled her down into the seat adjacent to mine. “Oh, Anna, you’re all grown up now.”
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  “Grown up? I’ve been reeling from the fear of losing a man like a sixteen-year-old.”

  “But if you were sixteen, then you’d be foolish, because you were still so young. There is nothing girlish about fearing to lose a man with whom there was a true chance at forming a family.”

  “You don’t seem afraid, though! I know that things aren’t well with your fiancé, and it is all my fault!”

  I took her hand in the way we used to do when telling secrets as younger girls.

  “I’m not afraid, because I’m not in love with Byron,” I said.

  “Well, perhaps not in the way I was going on about Jacob, but I always thought that love changed when people got older.”

  “I believed that as well,” I whispered. “Then, I met someone.”

  Anna’s eyes went large as saucers.

  “Tell me you haven’t done anything rash. I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation with Mrs. Crow last night.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve done enough to break an engagement, though, perhaps not so much as to scandalize the neighborhood. At least not if they heard the full story. Last night, for example, I was home late because I had been working on a story. The man who escorted me home was my writing partner.”

  “Writing stories with other men! Byron will be heartbroken. He’d have preferred if you kissed him. But, who is he? Is he the man to cause you to rethink your commitment?”

  “In part,” I said with a small smile. My resolve solidified as I spoke to her, such was the value of a sister. After yesterday’s experience, I knew there would be no easy way to exit my career as a writer. The pen had a firm grip on me, and only Bram would know how to start breaking me free of it. At any rate, he seemed to know of a temporary solution, whatever it was that he threw in the fire last night. But, could this story propel me toward the Golden Inkwell? I could feel my father’s sacrifice, like a debt on a ledger. The weight of it crushed me, and I couldn’t tell how long the burden had been with me. If I could just win, my father’s sacrifice would have been for something. The fact that he spent his money on my education instead of his medicine—I’d finally prove to him it was worth it. And yet, what price might it cost me?