“But I don’t know anyone,” I said, clutching feebly at her as she helped me stand up.
“Well, they can introduce themselves if they want to,” she said. “There ain’t no monsters hereabouts, Mr. Booth. They’re all nice folks.”
I was unconvinced and uncomforted, but by that time Molly had started for the door, and it was either go with her or collapse to the floor where I was. My legs were terribly weak and wobbly; I felt as ungainly and defenseless as a newborn giraffe struggling to learn how to manage its knees.
My room had not been remarkable for personality, having sturdy, functional furniture, and walls of a clean, white, pleasing coolness. I was therefore entirely unprepared for the hallways of the hotel, with their brooding gas fixtures and glowering mahogany paneling. The carpets were all of a queer Indian design, like paisley seen in a fever-dream, and I kept having the impression that the shapes were moving just outside the edges of my peripheral vision. I clung to Molly’s arm, and though I was nearly a foot taller than she, she seemed to find no difficulty in holding me up.
The hotel’s back terrace was not really very far from my room, although that afternoon the pilgrimage felt like walking the Great Wall of China from one end to the other. We walked to the end of the hallway, where Molly summoned the elevator, a wrought-iron cage that I hated on sight.
“Come along, Mr. Booth,” Molly said. I wanted to balk, but I did not have the strength. If Molly had led me into the jaws of hell, I would have had no choice but to follow her, and really, I told myself sternly, this elevator is not the jaws of hell, and Molly would not expect me to get into it if there were any danger. My clutch on her arm may have tightened slightly, but other than that I controlled myself and neither screamed nor fainted nor wept, though I hated the elevator no less from the inside than I had from the outside. I did not mind enclosed spaces particularly, but there was something about that elevator which felt unclean, like invisible bloodstains.
We emerged on the ground floor in good order, although Molly was essentially carrying me. The floor here was a parquet in dark and light woods, an interlocked pattern of squares that was elegant but dizzying. “Come on, Mr. Booth,” Molly said and lugged me, ungainly and useless as a bundle of wet sheets, down the hall and out a pair of french doors, onto the terrace of the Hotel Chrysalis.
The terrace was a long granite-flagged affair, with a low balustrade stretching its entire length; decorative urns stood at the corners and flanked the three steps down into the garden proper. There were a number of deck chairs set about in twos and threes; Molly guided me to the nearest and almost literally dropped me onto it, not by intent but because my legs could not take the descent slowly.
“You all right, Mr. Booth?” she said.
“Yes,” I said, although my heart was thudding up in my throat and I felt as if my head were a balloon filled with helium.
“Here.” She helped me swing my legs up onto the chair. “I’ll go get you a blanket.” Because she was an essentially humorless young woman, she did not add, Don’t go anywhere.
I lay back in the deck chair and shut my eyes, hearing my heart pounding in my ears and wishing feebly to be well. Molly returned quickly with a huge knitted blanket, the size to keep a giant warm, in which she proceeded to festoon me like an obscure and elaborate parcel. I was grateful for the warmth; although the day was a nice one, the breeze blowing seemed like ice against my skin.
“Now, I’ll be back in half an hour, Mr. Booth,” Molly said. “You just lie quiet and enjoy the sun.”
“Thank you, Molly,” I said and shut my eyes again.
I may have dozed; I do not know. I think that there was a gap of time before I heard a voice whispering, “That’s the man from 315, the one who’s been so sick.”
Oh God, I thought and did not reveal by so much as a twitch that I was awake.
“I had no idea he was so old,” another voice said.
“Rosemary Hunter says he’s not. She says that he’s a young man, really. It’s just that his hair is white.”
“Do you suppose the illness did it? Mr. Marten says he’s never seen a man so ill.”
“It’s happened before. Why, I remember my Aunt Seraphina—my mother’s eldest sister—she had a nervous breakdown when her first husband died, and her hair went white as white. All in a week, my mother said.”
“That’s nothing. The wife of my grandmother’s brother, my Great-Aunt Lucille, a year after my great-uncle died, she dreamed that she saw him and he told her he knew she’d poisoned him. When she woke up in the morning her hair, that’d been black as pitch the night before, was pure white, except for one streak of black right down the middle of her head.”
“Had she?”
“Had she what?”
“Poisoned him.”
“Well, I don’t know. My grandmother always said there was never a man who deserved it more. And he did die uncommon quick and uncommon painful. The doctor wanted to do an autopsy, but Great-Aunt Lucille’s father wouldn’t hear of it, and he was the judge.”
“Oh my.”
“She had to leave town, of course.”
“Well naturally. People are so unkind. When my cousin Mattie had her trouble, there was nothing more rude than the way people spoke to her in the street. You’d think it wasn’t in the Declaration of Independence that somebody’s innocent until proven guilty. And they never proved that Mattie did anything.”
“Mmm, I’m not sure that is in the Declaration.”
“Well, it’s somewhere. They had no right to say those cruel things about Mattie.”
“People never have the right to be cruel, but I can’t say as how that ever stops them. Not unless someone else stops them first. My sister Susannah’s husband was a dreadful cruel man, but she stopped him all right.”
I could not stand it any longer, more and more convinced that they were playing some strange, warped joke on me. I shifted position conspicuously and opened my eyes.
“He’s awake.”
“We’d best introduce ourselves then. No sense in rudeness.”
I heard the clicking of heels, like the tapping of tiny hooves, and there appeared in front of me two tiny, withered crones. I thought I had to be dreaming still, for they were identical, dressed in the same dark red, with small, black, cunning eyes in their pale, wrinkled faces. They looked as if they put up their silvery-white hair in its coiled braids using each other as a mirror, and they wore long, dangling earrings of marcasite and jet.
“I’m Doris,” said one.
“I’m Kerenhappuch,” said the other, “but most folks call me Carrie, and I hope you will, too.”
“Kyle Murchison Booth,” I said faintly; even if I were dreaming—which seemed less and less likely all the time—that was no excuse to be rude. “Do you live at the hotel?”
“Oh yes,” said Doris.
“For years and years,” said Carrie. “We came here for a bit of a rest after my youngest grandniece Cecilia got married, and we liked it so much we’ve just never left.” This was evidently a joke of long standing, for they both tittered, a thin, brittle sound like sparrows arguing.
“We just take little trips,” Doris said.
“For weddings.”
“And christenings.”
“And funerals.”
They cocked their heads, Carrie to the left, Doris to the right. “It’s nice to see you out taking the air, Mr. Booth,” said Doris.
“Everyone’s been ever so worried,” Carrie said. “Mr. Marten was quite gray with thinking that someone might die in his hotel. Not that it hasn’t happened before, of course.”
“Oh gracious no. Why there was that nice Mr. Ampleforth, just last year.”
“And the woman who came here after her baby was born—was that two years ago, Doris, or three?”
“I don’t remember, but anyone could see she was dying from the moment she got here. I’ve never seen a face so white.”
“You’d think from the way her husband carr
ied on that someone here had murdered her.”
“Oh, I don’t hold that against him. The poor man was half-distracted with grief, and that’s apt to make anybody a bit wild. You wouldn’t believe the things my aunt Charlotte’s husband did when she died, but then he insisted first to last, right up to the moment they had him committed, that she wasn’t really dead. I’m afraid he wasn’t very stable, poor man.”
“But I do think people shouldn’t be encouraged to give way to their grief. I mean, my father’s sister Lavinia, when her husband died, and their son with him, she got up the next day and went right on taking care of her two little girls like nothing had happened. I do think she cried at the funeral though.”
“And that’s no more than natural, and I’m sure there’s not a soul in the world could object to it. My dearest school friend, Millicent Carter, when she died her husband didn’t so much as shed a tear at the service, and it came out not two months later that he’d smothered her himself. I don’t stand with hard-heartedness and never have.”
If they were joking, it was clearly a charade that they had been carrying on for years and was nothing to do with me. While that was at least some comfort, the two old ladies were frightening me, and I felt the same relief at hearing Molly Sefton’s voice as one feels at seeing the first light of dawn after a night of nightmares.
“Miss Doris, Miss Carrie.”
“Hello, Molly,” the old ladies chirped in unison.
“It’s time for Mr. Booth to go back to his room,” Molly said.
“Oh what a pity,” one of them said, but I had lost track of which one was which.
“We’ve been having such a nice conversation,” said the other.
“Such a polite young man.”
“You don’t often meet someone these days who listens well.”
“Be that as it may, he’s got to rest,” Molly said. “Are you ready to get up, Mr. Booth?”
“Yes, I think so,” I said.
“Well, we’ll leave you to it,” said Carrie or Doris.
“But we’ll hope to see you again soon, Mr. Booth,” said Doris or Carrie. “It’s always nice to see new faces and talk to new people.” Mercifully, they pattered away.
“They’re nice ladies, Miss Doris and Miss Carrie,” Molly said as she hauled me out of the chair.
“They seemed very, er, talkative. Is there any particular reason they’re here, Molly?”
“Reason? I don’t quite know what you mean, Mr. Booth.”
“Well,” I said, floundering, “that is, this is a convalescent hotel, and they don’t seem . . . physically ill, so I wondered . . . ”
“They like the company. And they’re quite wealthy ladies, I believe. Now here’s the elevator, Mr. Booth, and we’ll have you back to your room in a brace of shakes. I think the fresh air did you good.”
“Yes, Molly,” I said, and I was so relieved to get back to my familiar room and the soft warmth of my bed, that I put Doris and Carrie out of my mind. But I heard them twittering all night long in my dreams.
Over the next several days, Molly continued stubbornly with her program of getting me fresh air, and I was passed under review by all the population of the Hotel Chrysalis that was not actually bedridden. Aside from Doris and Carrie, I was introduced to Madame Vlaranskaya, an emigrée lady at the hotel on account of “nerves”; Mr. Ormont, a harmless, portly gentleman who happened to be a poet of no small skill and reputation—also here for “nerves”; Major Berinford, an exceedingly ancient gentleman whose vital forces had apparently been sustained for the last decade by the Chrysalis waters alone; Mrs. Stepney and Mrs. Langtry, invalids of vague but convincing symptoms; and of course I renewed my acquaintance with Mrs. Terpenning and her niece. There were other inhabitants, whom I saw on the terrace or in the halls, but they did not introduce themselves to me, and I did not seek out their company. There was nothing I could do to prevent Mrs. Langtry or Major Berinford from settling down next to me and telling me lengthy stories about campaigns (the Major) or children (Mrs. Langtry), but insofar as I could avoid social interaction, I did.
Molly thought this was unhealthy, and she encouraged me relentlessly as I grew stronger to “enjoy” myself, by which she apparently meant joining one of the interminable games of bridge in the Small Library or the equally interminable conversations in the conservatory or the Brocade Room. I did not know how to tell her that there would be no way in which I could enjoy myself less, and so I simply disobeyed her, with the same guilty feelings with which I had disobeyed my mother and my nurse as a child. Once I was on my feet again, I spent as much time walking in the gardens as I could, an activity which was at least less disobedient than hiding in my room.
The gardens of the Hotel Chrysalis were extensive. Directly west of the hotel and about a tenth of a mile away were the hot springs, which had their own enormous and marvelous building, like a vast, fossilized Victorian greenhouse. The path from hotel to chalybeate was broad and paved in mellow red sandstone, for the better progress of the halt and the lame. I took that path once daily myself, both because Molly had an unswerving belief in the sovereign powers of the springs and because I felt a need to propitiate Mr. Marten. I knew that he approved of people taking the waters.
The water of the Chrysalis springs was not unspeakably vile. It tasted strongly of metal, and I found it unpleasantly warm, but compared to Mrs. Stepney’s stories of the waters she had drunk in England and Switzerland and in other parts of the United States, I was aware that I was getting off lightly. But still I drank off my draft as quickly as possible and lingered no longer in the Chalybeate than was strictly necessary.
For most of the day I could avoid other people. I was not the only person who walked in the gardens, but the gardens were extensive enough and their paths torturous enough that it was no great feat to avoid the other walkers. I glimpsed Dr. Bollivar occasionally in the distance, but he avoided me as assiduously as I avoided him. I did frequently encounter Miss Hunter, coming down a path as I was coming up, standing in an arbor as I passed, seated in contemplation of the lily pond around which I liked to walk. She would say, “Hello, Mr. Booth,” in her soft polite voice, and I would answer, “Hello, Miss Hunter,” and hold my breath against the possibility that she would wish to converse until I was safely out of earshot. But it seemed that all she wished was to escape Mrs. Terpenning, for she never made any further conversational gambits.
The worst torment were the meals. Mr. Marten believed in communal dining, with small gracious tables reminiscent of the first class dining room on a ocean liner. At lunch people were allowed to sit where they chose, and by coming early I could claim one of the small, dim tables along the wall, where I was unlikely to accumulate companions. When I did, they tended to be persons as adverse to conversation as myself, and we could proceed with our meal in harmonious silence.
Dinners were infinitely worse. At dinner, Mr. Marten produced his elegant place cards and assigned us places with the arbitrary ruthlessness of a dictator. I was swept from the Scylla of Doris and Carrie one night to the Charybdis of Mrs. Terpenning the next. I preferred Doris and Carrie, for they were perfectly happy to do all of the talking themselves, their voices weaving in and out like a large and complicated tapestry of malevolence that they had been working on for decades. Mrs. Terpenning insisted on trying to “bring me out.” She put questions, about my parents, about my schooling, about my employment. I answered in desperate monosyllables and mumbles, and after a night or two she gave me up as a bad job and turned her greedy eyes elsewhere.
For Mrs. Terpenning collected people. I witnessed her casting her barbed nets toward Madame Vlaranskaya and Mr. Ormont, but the most blatant example was her niece, Miss Hunter. I heard about Miss Hunter’s history at interminable length one evening, while Miss Hunter sat and pushed infinitesimal amounts of chicken around on her plate, her soft pale face becoming redder and redder. Once started, Mrs. Terpenning’s monologues were like juggernauts; trying to stop them would only get you
flattened.
Miss Hunter was Mrs. Terpenning’s niece merely by marriage, the only child of Mr. Terpenning’s only sister. Lydia Terpenning Hunter had apparently been one of those fragile, exquisite beauties like an overblown rose. She had been a poet—Mrs. Terpenning seemed to imagine that this put her herself on a footing of equality and intimacy with Mr. Ormont, whose manners were too good to permit him to repudiate that suggestion with the loathing it deserved. Lydia Terpenning had taken intellectual society by storm at the age of nineteen; she had enjoyed a meteoric courtship with the brave and dashing Captain Cornelius Hunter. They had married; Lydia had borne her child and died of it; Captain Hunter had, in the most romantic way possible, renounced all civilized pleasures and gone off to Africa to hunt big game, where he had been killed by a lioness when his daughter was five.
The combined Terpenning-Hunter fortune was considerable, but Captain Hunter had, with execrable judgment, placed his finances in the hands of his dearest friend, one Captain Warren Starling, in trust for Miss Hunter, and Captain Starling had contrived to lose it all. I could not tell from Mrs. Terpenning’s dark and delphic conversation exactly what the wretched Starling had done, and I did not like to ask for clarification. Regardless, Miss Hunter was left a pauper at the age of twelve; her kind and generous uncle had taken her into his household. He had died scarcely a year later, and Mrs. Terpenning, knowing that “it was what Mr. Terpenning would want,” had continued to allow the child to make her home with her, asking in return for the money lavished on her education, her clothes, and all her other expenses, only that she keep a poor, lonely old lady company until such time as she should find a husband. For which last phrase, read “forever.” I felt desperately sorry for Miss Hunter.
It was a day or two after that ghastly dinner that Mr. Marten came to me with a proposal. He caught me on my way out of the dining room after lunch and said, “Mr. Booth, I understand that you are a curator of some kind.”
“Yes,” I said, wondering, a little uneasily, where this was going. “I work for the Parrington.”
The Bone Key Page 19
