Dear Mr. and Mrs. Tyler,
I regret to inform you that your son has been wounded. I hasten to say that he is still alive! And yet, he is gravely injured. Without further preamble, let me tell you my story.
It was the 17th of January and we were marching cross-country in the Sudan to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum when we were set upon by Mahdists. We fought back mightily, and successfully turned back the attack, but not two days later we were set upon again as we approached Metemma. Once again, we were successful … and this, despite there were merely fifteen hundred of us to twelve thousand of them!
But then the tide turned against us.
It is amazing to think how much the world can change, how much can be lost in just fifteen minutes. In fifteen minutes, eleven hundred Mahdists died, an astonishing number. In fifteen minutes, nine British officers and sixty-five men of other ranks were killed. In fifteen minutes, over a hundred additional British soldiers were wounded, including my best friend in the desert, Kit Tyler, who was stabbed with a spear and shot.
It is an understatement to say that when he threw his body in front of mine, he saved my miserable life.
After that, I could no longer remember what we were all fighting for. Our column was too late to save Khartoum. Just a few days after Kit was wounded in battle, Khartoum was taken by the Mahdists. If I ever knew what we were fighting for, I know it no longer.
Normally, I do not write such long letters to people I have never met, but Kit asked me to explain everything and, as I say, he is my best friend here. Indeed, he is the finest man I have ever known. God willing and the surgeon’s hand steady, your boy will be returned home to you soon, hopefully even in one piece.
With deepest regrets and fervent prayers for a bright outcome,
Lieutenant Luke Thackeray
P.S. Kit requests that you pass along a message to one Miss Lucy Sexton, a young woman he has spoken of fondly on more than one occasion. Indeed, every day since we have been here. “Please tell Lucy,” he says, “the camel died.”
. . . . .
“What do you make of this?” Victoria Tyler asked me.
“Well, for one thing, I think Lieutenant Thackeray is overly fond of adverbs.”
My attempt at bluff humor did not fool even me.
“This was written in January?” I said, looking back at the top of the letter as panic overtook me. “But that is so long ago now. Anything might have happened since then!”
“ ‘God willing and the surgeon’s hand steady’?” Victoria Tyler cried. “What can Lieutenant Thackeray possibly mean by that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But at least we know one thing.”
“And what is that?”
I took hold of her hands, crushing the letter between my hand and hers as I gazed steadily into her eyes as though I had the force to make the world as I willed it.
“When this letter was written,” I said, “Kit was still alive.”
. . . . .
I waited.
Daily and nightly, as though keeping watch would ensure Kit’s safe arrival home, I sat at the window in the front parlor, my eyes on the street.
I don’t know why I thought this vigil would help. It had taken Lieutenant Thackeray’s letter such a long time to reach us. Surely it could take Kit any length of time to return.
Or not at all, the thought arose unbidden, a thought that taunted me with alarming frequency, inciting me to tamp it back down, down, down.
I did not go out, nor did I entertain visitors in. Yes, I did leave my spot to go to the bathroom, and I even cleaned myself up occasionally. Sometimes, my eyes drifted shut in sleep, although I did not want them to. The servants became concerned, then alarmed, and finally tired of entreating me to leave off my vigil and sleep in a real bed. I would not listen. I ate in that position and when I grew sore on one side I would switch to the other. My elbows wore marks into the back of the sofa. The servants took to draping a blanket around my shoulders before closing the house for the night.
I sat like that, watching the street for two weeks.
In that time, I had discovered that there was a gap period, about an hour between when the lights from the lampposts were extinguished and the street began to stir with the activity of a new day.
It was during that gap period one day—not yet morning, no longer night—that I glimpsed a pinpoint of gold penetrate the thick mist at the end of the street.
I raced to the door in bare feet, raced outside to see what it was, the blanket falling away from my shoulders.
Whatever it was, it remained stopped at the end of the street. The golden pinpoint of light was a lantern on a carriage, I decided.
Then I heard an odd constellation of sounds—step, tap, clack—and then a moment later the golden light extinguished away from me as I heard the horses clip-clopping their way back out of the street.
But the peculiar constellation of sounds continued:
Step, tap, clack. Step, tap, clack.
It was faint at first, but as I stood in the middle of the street, hearing the sounds draw ever nearer to me, they grew in volume and speed.
Step, tap, clack. Step, tap, clack. Steptapclack.
He had left me in the mist. He returned to me from the mist.
He was exactly the same. He was changed.
“They killed the foot to save the man,” Kit said with a rueful shrug.
These words, the first words I had heard from his mouth in over a year, stopped me dead.
Where his left foot should have been, a wooden peg rested against the street; in his left hand, a cane he leaned against now.
There was a film of fine sweat on his handsome brow, as though he had run a long race. And he looked so much older, as though he had seen the whole world.
“Gangrene,” he said with another rueful shrug, as if the explanation mattered.
I had been about to launch myself at him when he told me about the foot. Now I took a step back. It was not that I was repulsed. Oh, no. Not that. Never that. But I did worry about hurting him.
“Oh, no,” he said, shaking his head back and forth vehemently. “I have waited, I have dreamed”—and here his voice caught on a sob—“I cannot remember how long or how often for this moment. I will not be denied.” As he held his arms wide, letting the cane drop from his hand, letting it clatter to the road, I saw the gleam in his eye, saw the tear decorate his lash like a diamond. “Fly at me, Lucy.”
I flew.
The force of my flight knocked him to the earth with me coming to rest on top of him.
“Did I hurt you?” I asked anxiously, my first words.
He put his arms around me, buried his face in my neck. I heard him inhale deeply, holding the breath for a long moment before releasing it with a sigh. “I have suffered worse.”
“How is Lieutenant Thackeray?” I thought to ask, not wanting to think, not yet, of what he had suffered. “It was from him that we knew you might be coming home.”
“He died,” Kit said.
“Died? Did the Dervishes get him?” I asked, as if I knew what I was talking about when, clearly, I did not.
“No. It was one of our own men. You would be surprised how often mistakes like that happen, when you have a lot of people running around with guns, but no one likes to talk about it.”
“I am sorry.”
“And I.”
After a moment’s silence:
“We are in the middle of the street,” I could not help but point out. “People might see us.”
“I do not care,” he said. “Do you know—you still smell like the rain?”
“If you do not care about being seen, if my modesty means nothing to you, then what about a carriage? A carriage could come through here at any moment, crushing us both to death.”
“I will save you, Lucy. I will never let any harm come to you.”
With a great show of force, more than one would imagine possible from a man who had recently lost a foot, he r
olled himself on top of me, and then rolled me over him, then him over me, over and over until he had rolled us onto the safety of the pavement.
He was changed. He was exactly the same.
He looked up at me, mischief sparking his eyes. “I say, I think you have grown taller since I went away!”
“Maybe just a bit,” I conceded. “Why? Did you imagine that I would stay frozen as you left me?”
I did not wait for his answer.
“Shut up, Kit,” I said, “and let me kiss you.”
• Thirty-seven •
During the time since my revelation that the woman I had thought to be Mother was in reality Aunt Helen, I had thought often of that New Year’s Day when I found them lashed side by side, one murdered. The new information had caused me to revise history as I knew it.
I thought now that there had never been any red-haired monster, which explained why Aunt Helen had refused to identify the man Chief Inspector Daniels arrested as being the murderer: he wasn’t, and she could not bear to see an innocent man charged with the crime, knowing full well the red-haired monster was her own invention, part of the fiction she created when she had seen her chance at a better life and seized upon it.
The only possible explanation, I saw now, was that it had been a common robbery gone bad; the intruder having Mother remove her ring, only to drop it in his haste to escape, bore this out. He must have heard me at the door, panicked, and killed her, had not had time to kill Aunt Helen too. The fire at the Carsons’? Pure coincidence.
After all, why would anybody want to deliberately murder Mother?
Aunt Helen might have had enemies from her past. But Mother?
It made no sense.
. . . . .
Of course, Kit was not exactly the same; there were things about his time in the Sudan he refused to discuss with anyone, even me.
None of us were the same, especially not Aunt Helen, who returned from her honeymoon to make the announcement that she was with child.
“So soon?” I said.
Richard had taken himself off, I knew not where.
“It only takes once,” Aunt Helen said. I thought it an unseemly thing for her to say to me, the offense made graver when she added with a proud smile, “And when it is many, many times …”
Aunt Helen eyed me shrewdly. “You are not jealous of me having another child, are you? Perhaps you feel you will be displaced?”
“No.” I colored at the notion, immediately damning myself for that blush. When I was younger, much younger, I might have felt such a negative emotion. But not now. “Are you sure it is healthy for you?” Since I wanted her to believe that I still believed her to be Mother, I added, “After the two you lost?”
“That was a long time ago.” Aunt Helen waved a dismissive hand, as if those had really been her own twin losses. “This time will be different. I just know it will.”
“Yes, but you are so newly married. Would it not have been better to get used to the new husband before adding someone else?”
I confess this was my own true selfish feeling. Every time Richard came into the house or entered a room, I felt jarred by it, as though an artist had introduced a new figure that hadn’t been there before to a picture I’d grown used to. It was enough to get accustomed to the idea of a new man in the house without almost instantly having to get accustomed to the idea of a new baby.
“I appreciate your concerns, Lucy, truly I do.” Aunt Helen patted her flat abdomen complacently. “But this pregnancy will progress without complications. And it will not end like the others. It will end perfectly, just as I always intended.”
I think it was the news of Aunt Helen’s pregnant condition that killed Aunt Martha. I know that is impossible. The two could not be connected, and yet it seemed so in my mind. A week after Aunt Martha was informed of it by letter we heard from Father’s parents that she was dead.
Once again, a celebration of sorts—Aunt Helen’s announcement of her condition—had been followed by a death.
I mourned Aunt Martha’s passing. I am fairly certain I was the only person who did.
. . . . .
Step, tap, clack.
The first time Kit was introduced to Richard, he reacted in a way I’d never seen him react to anybody.
True, upon first acquaintance with Kit, I had thought of him as “that bored boy.” But that impression had soon changed, cemented over the years by the knowledge that he was a far kinder soul than I could ever dream to be. If a person had a good quality, he would find it. If they did not, he would imagine one into existence.
And yet, as I watched him accept Richard’s offered hand, watched the shake turn into a steely grip, a look of coldness entered his eyes.
“Ah,” Richard said, “Lucy’s soldier boy at last. Her mother has told me so much about you. How was the Sudan?”
“Have you ever been in the military?” Kit asked.
“I am afraid I never had that honor.”
“Then I will tell you how it was and then you will know. People died. It was ugly. Is there anything else you’d care to ask me about it?”
“Um … no.” Richard gave an affable shrug. “Thank you for saving me the need to enlist in order to find out for myself.” He turned to Aunt Helen. “Shall we have tea now, my dear?”
. . . . .
“I do not trust your mother’s new husband,” Kit said to me when we were alone a few weeks later.
I had not told Kit about my revelation that the woman I had previously believed to be Mother was in reality Aunt Helen. I had debated long and hard over this—there had never been any secrets between Kit and me in the past—but I had finally concluded that I simply could not tell him. Kit was the most moral and ethical human being I had ever known, and I knew that however well he might sympathize with the reasons behind my desire not to expose Aunt Helen—my own sympathy toward her coupled with my desire to remain in the only home I had ever known, which would be doubly impossible now that Aunt Martha was dead too—he would feel compelled to do the right thing, which for Kit always meant telling the truth.
“I cannot say I care for the man very much either,” I observed dryly. “But I also cannot see that there is anything to be done about it.”
I had come to accept Richard as a part of life, although I was not happy about it. Many were the hours I had spent trying to figure out what exactly the history was between him and Aunt Helen, how long had they loved each other. Of course, there was no one I could ask about this, and so I had drawn my own conclusions. Based on the roughness around his edges, I thought he must have been from Aunt Helen’s distant past, perhaps even as far back as her days in the workhouse. I did think that he loved her at least, and she him, but that did not improve my own feelings for him.
“There is something about him,” Kit said. “He reminds me of an actor upon the stage, reading lines that someone else has written for him. And … what does he do all day?”
“Do?”
“Yes, do. Whenever I come to call, no matter the day of the week or the time of day, he is always here. Has he no work to go to?”
Indeed.
. . . . .
Despite that I already had some vague sense of who Richard was, a man from Aunt Helen’s murky past, Kit’s reaction to him, his distrust, had caused in me a desire to learn more about this man who had usurped Father’s place at the table.
“Richard?” I asked the following morning as he lingered over a late breakfast and the morning papers.
Aunt Helen had not come down yet.
Often now in the mornings it would just be Richard and me at breakfast, for Aunt Helen said that her condition made her want to sleep longer hours.
“Yes, daughter?”
This was something Richard had taken to doing whenever Aunt Helen wasn’t around, calling me “daughter” as though it were a taunt.
It was.
“Shouldn’t you be returning to work?”
“Work?” he echoed, as though
it were a new word for his vocabulary.
“Yes,” I said. “You know, that thing one does to earn a living? I thought you said you were a merchant. Now here you have been on a month-long honeymoon, followed by nearly another month since you have been back. Doesn’t your business need attending to?”
“My business?” He tossed the papers aside, drained the last of his coffee, threw down his napkin. “Why, yes, daughter. You are exactly right!”
From then on, most days, unless I was up very early, Richard was gone by the time I came down, and he stayed gone through most of the day.
This was a relief, in so many ways.
But then Kit told me a peculiar thing.
“I have been following him.”
“Following who?”
“Why, Richard, of course.”
“You’ve been following Richard?”
“Well, as best I can. There are two problems, you see. One, with only one good leg, I can’t move as quickly as he does. And two”—here he tapped his peg with his cane—“if I follow too closely, I make a telltale sound.”
“But you have seen something?”
“Oh, yes. Every day, he goes in an entirely different direction from the day before.”
“Perhaps he is visiting different clients?” I suggested vaguely, not wholly certain what a merchant’s day might consist of.
“Yes, but you would think there would be some main office or somewhere he would go to regularly, wouldn’t you?”
I did think that.
“I tell you, Lucy, I don’t think he goes to work each day at all! Who knows where the man goes?”
. . . . .
Aunt Helen was wrong.
She had said that her condition would pass without complications and yet, from where I stood, it appeared to be nothing but complications. I suppose it was all “normal,” but daily it appeared to me there was a supernatural being that had taken over her body, causing that body to change its shape and do things it had never done: like vomit every morning, sometimes several times a day.
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