Mrs. Malvern was ranting. “I’ll send you to a school where they’ll cut your hair off and beat you when you disobey! I’ll throw you out with the whores if that’s what it takes to teach you the value of being respectable! You will learn to become a proper woman! You will!”
Charity rose to her full stature, head erect, spine straight, the way she stood before a canvas and paused for a moment before beginning a painting that came from the bottom of her heart. Molly had seen the look many times. A truly horrible honesty was about to follow.
At that instant, Molly saw her chance. “Charity, what happened to your arm!” Molly ran forward, not having to fake concern. A trail of blood ran from Charity’s elbow to her palm. It hadn’t been visible when she was sitting.
The question took a moment to penetrate Charity’s mind. She looked bewildered as if wondering where she was and what Molly was doing there.
After a moment of clumsy searching, Charity found the blood to which Molly referred. Now that everyone else was calming down, Molly found herself welling up into a hurt anger. This is insane! People can’t live like this. She snatched a whiskey bottle out of her father’s cabinet and, kneeling beside the Louis the XVI chair, tugged Charity down into it again.
The cut was ugly, almost to the bone, and it had painted Charity’s arm red. Molly ripped savagely at the hem of her nightgown, tearing it loose while tears stung her eyes. I’m gonna stop this no matter what it takes.
She made it a point never to say anything inflammatory to either her mother or Charity when they were angry at each other, but this time, the hurt pushed the words out of Molly’s mouth before she could stop them. “She’s cut bad, Mother! Didn’t you even notice?”
Her mother and father had relaxed out of their tangle. Her mother’s anger didn’t leave entirely, but shame replaced much of it.
“Keep her still, Antonia. I’ll get some bandages.” She turned to her husband, “Powell, get some clean water and call Dr. Bentley. That will need to be stitched.”
Both of their parents scurried from the room, leaving Molly and Charity alone, surrounded by thick leather and brass furnishings. A tear rolled off the end of Molly’s nose as she gently cleaned the wound with the whiskey-soaked hem. Charity cringed, but that was all. Molly wanted to ask what happened. She wanted to scold her sister for letting this happen to herself, but instead she said nothing. Molly felt Charity’s warm hand on her head, and then her big sister pulled her up into her arms. Molly cried. Charity didn’t, but Molly could feel Charity’s chest hitching as she fought to restrain it. Charity held her tight, as if Molly was all she had in the world.
Molly cried harder, but not for herself. The anguish had filled Charity like a black, oily lake. Molly could feel it leaking out her pores. Charity’s pride and their mother’s fears: together, they were taking her big sister away from her. They were destroying Charity, one piece at a time.
I’ll save you, Charity. I’ll find a way. I promise.
* * *
Journal Entry
Lauffen, Germany. March 19, 1900
I could not finish my entry last night. It is late, but I must give a more thorough account while the experience is newly with me. It is not a thing of logic, only need and desire. It does not think, at least not in a manner to which my psychology is accustomed, though oddly, I would not feel surprise to learn that It could speak to me, if It wished. It feels more deeply than a human, and this depth of emotion is Its overwhelming attribute, Its drive, and Its essence. When It touched me, It did not enter me fully, but It took a glance, as I might lean through a door to inspect a room. The barest finger of It wound through me, but I could not tolerate Its presence, like a pair of shears driven into my consciousness and forced open to tear me asunder.
Even in my log where no enforcer of the law will ever read, I am too humiliated to write what I did when It released me—what I wanted, and what I inflicted upon three innocents to relieve the shadow of Its desires.
I now have a deeper sympathy for those It takes. I will kill them all the more quickly. It is a small mercy, but oblivion is better than to be one with It.
— J.S.G.
Malvern Mansion. May, 1910.
“You are not leaving.”
Charity drew herself up and looked down on her mother with contempt. “Yes. I. Am.”
Her mother didn’t seem to hear. Mrs. Malvern went on, so sure of her authority that she began filing her nails while she spoke. “No daughter of mine will sit for a vagrant’s eyes to crawl over her body.”
Charity’s hands shook, balled against her thighs. “I’m through talking to you.”
Her mother had moved on to powdering her cheeks in the huge bathroom mirror with the gold surround. “I’m through as well. Do not set foot outside this mansion.”
I hate you. You’re a lace-covered pig. But what came out was merely, “I’ve outgrown you, Mother.” Charity turned on her heel.
“Have you now,” Mrs. Malvern asked darkly, retrieving something from her side pocket.
Charity was walking away, but when she glanced back to throw a contemptuous look, she saw what was in her mother’s hand, and hovering very near the lamp flame from which Mrs. Malvern had just removed the glass.
Charity turned slowly, as if facing a dangerous animal that might pounce. Someone else might have said, “You wouldn’t dare,” or something similar, but Charity knew just how cruel her mother was. Mrs. Malvern would indeed dare.
Charity stared daggers at her mother, who held the two railway tickets close to the open flame.
“I bought those with my own money,” Charity said.
Mrs. Malvern raised an eyebrow. “The money you received from where?”
Charity shut her mouth and felt nothing but spite.
“The money your father gave you, I believe,” Mrs. Malvern rejoined. “So no, Charity, they were not purchased with your money. You did not earn them. You have never earned a thing you have. All of it, even your life was a gift from your father and I. You have nothing I did not provide.”
Charity and Darcy had been planning their excursion to Boston for over a year. Charity could no longer see her mother as anything but a witch. Something in Charity broke, but it wasn’t because of the cruelty. She broke simply because it was so unfair.
“Mr. Sedaris is a nice man,” she said, half pleading, tears starting. She hadn’t cried in front of her mother in years. “He’s just a nice old man, and he’s so good with charcoal and pencil. The portrait will cost a dollar Mama. A dollar! It will make him so happy, and I’ll get to learn so much from watching him do it. He’s promised to tell me about perspective and lighting and all kinds of things. Just let me go!”
Then, the worst thing that could possibly have happened, did. Mrs. Malvern didn’t burn the tickets. She didn’t lash out in anger. She didn’t relent. She allowed the slightest touch of a victorious smile to cross her face.
Charity flew into a rage and lunged at her mother’s outstretched hand. Charity’s fingers, her arms, her face even—she didn’t care what she had to sacrifice, as long as it meant wresting the tickets and everything they represented from her mother’s clutches.
Mother and daughter crashed into the marble vanity like a couple of squalling cats, tearing at each other, flinging sterling cosmetic holders everywhere. Maybe it was Charity’s elbow, maybe it was her mother’s hand, but somehow, the lamp was knocked from the vanity and hit the rug.
It shattered as they grappled. The wick fell into the oil and flames licked along the run.
Charity had her mother’s wrist in both hands, trying to force it open. Her mother’s other hand was twisting Charity’s ear until it hurt around into the back of her head. Suddenly her mother released Charity and the tickets and disappeared.
Charity stumbled back, clutching the tickets, groping for the way out.
Her mother was on her hands and knees, trying to snuff the spreading flames with a hand towel.
“Charity, wet a towel!” she ordered.
<
br /> Charity walked away, but stopped at the door because she thought of something to say. “Your house burns down one way or another, Mother.” It wasn’t perfectly what she meant, but judging by the infuriated gleam in her mother’s eye, it hit home well enough.
“Charity!” her mother barked from behind a rising wall of flame.
“Dearest mother,” Charity said lightly as she walked away. “Do fuck off.”
Her mother was screaming her name, then screaming for the servants, who were already pounding up the stairs.
They sprinted past Charity. She watched them go, her head tilted to the side in consideration. She ran her fingers playfully over the bannister and started down the stairs. Mother was occupied so she had time to change before sitting for the portrait Mr. Sedaris had promised her. What would she like most to wear?
Water was splashing behind her, people were yelling.
She’d borrow Grandma’s pearls again, but what else? Why Grandma’s wedding dress of course! It was strung with real pearls and had a diamond tiara to match. It was quite out of fashion, but that wasn’t the point, now was it? Charity descended the stairs, happy as a lark. If larks savored revenge, that was.
“Charity!” her mother shrieked from upstairs. The arrogant domination in her voice had fractured, leaving only a desperate grasp for something over which she finally had to admit she had no control.
Charity sighed. “Nor will you, Mother. Ever again.”
Her mother shrieked her name. It was the sweetest sound Charity had heard in years.
* * *
Several hours later, Charity strode through the cold air, up the front steps to the door, her own charcoal portrait rolled neatly in hand. She kept her chin high, the better to show off both her neckline and Grandma’s pearls. Charity took hold of the brass knocker and rapped it against the plate. It boomed out inside the house.
Charity quivered in anticipation of her mother opening the door, but when the door swung open, the angry face of the butler, Bramley, was there instead, blooming out of his stiff white collar like a swollen tomato. The faint smell of smoke lingered in the air.
“You nearly burned down the house, Ms. Malvern.”
“Did I?” Charity asked, catching the hem of her dress to sweep dismissively past him. It was her favorite dress, blue satin, and far more flowing than was the current stiff style.
She had stood before the open doors of Grandma’s old armoire for several minutes, trying to make herself take down Grandma’s wedding dress and put it on. She wanted to do it to spite Mother, but Grandma was so sweet, and Charity still missed her a great deal. She remembered how Grandma used to set Charity on her lap, run her knobby old hands along the folds of the dress, and tell her what it felt like to marry Grandpa Adler.
The streets were dirty, and no matter how much she hated her mother, Charity would feel horrible if she ruined the dress her Grandma loved so much. So she’d settled for her own favorite, and Grandma’s pearls, which Grandma had given her permission to wear before her tyrant Mother had…
The silence in the house brought Charity out of her reverie. Bramley still stood behind her, holding the door open. No one else was in sight. Where was Mother to yell in her face, to call her an ingrate, a worthless sloth, maybe a whore, depending on how much of the bathroom had been destroyed? Where was Father to intervene? Where was Molly to float into the middle of it like a perfect little mote of dandelion fuzz?
Where was everybody?
Bramley closed the door quietly and strode away towards the kitchen. Charity stood for an uncertain second. A knot began to form inside her. She headed for the steps towards her bedroom, driven by an instinctive foreboding. The house was silent other than her footfalls on the wool carpet.
By the time she reached the top of the swept staircase, she was running. Down the hall, right turn, down another hall, left turn, into her bedroom.
Charity stopped and her head began to spin. She crumpled to her knees. Around the room, leaning against her bed, the walls, her bookshelves, her armoire, her dressing table, her makeup table, her bureau, were all of her paintings. Every painting she had carefully hidden all over the house and grounds. Her mother had not failed to find a single one. Charity had hidden them in the rafters, hidden them behind her mother’s own larger paintings, hidden them in the galley, hidden them in the ceiling.
Some of them had been slashed to ribbons with a knife. Some had their centers burned out with fire. Some had been defaced with angry splashes of paint and then burned or cut or ripped or crushed.
Charity sank down against the door facing. All of her work, everything she’d poured her heart into, was gone. Destroyed. It was like looking at the broken bodies of her children, thrown around like so much trash. It was her own soul, branded like an animal, then gutted, left for dead.
It was everything. Now everything was gone.
Charity crawled to the corner where lay the remains of a painting in which her mother had seemed to take a particularly demented interest. It had been shredded with some sort of three-pronged tool, perhaps a garden claw, and the strips soaked in paint thinner. Oranges and browns and greys ran from the canvas strips onto the floor. Charity cried then, but it was an empty cry. Tears without healing.
Charity couldn’t think about how it had happened, but neither could she avoid the truth. Mother had no idea where the paintings were hidden and she was so heavy that she could barely walk from the carriage to the front door without help. The servants must have collected them on her mother’s orders. Only the servants could have found them, only they could have guessed where Charity would choose to hide them. The servants could have left her one. Could have left her half a dozen and her mother would never have known. But they had collected them all. Every single one.
There was one painting, however, which everyone knew where to find. It was one of Charity’s few works of realism. It had shown a little girl, kneeling in the forest, while a fawn stretched out its neck to cautiously touch the girl’s knees. The painting now lay, dismembered, beside Charity’s bed. Everyone knew where to find it because it hung in plain sight in her Daddy’s study. She had given it to him for his birthday two years ago, and he adored it.
Here it was, burned and slashed with the others. The servants obeyed her mother, but they knew from whom their employment came. They would touch nothing in her Daddy’s study without his permission.
He had given her up. They had all given her up.
Chapter 3
Journal Entry
Besigheim, Germany. October 17, 1901
I have lost It again. I used an iron banded strong box this time. It took three days to escape, but It succeeded. Perhaps I gained the upper hand for a time, or perhaps It merely toys with me. I only know It is gone, doubtless looking again for another victim, another host. I must kill them as well, for everyone’s sake. I am beginning to think It cannot be contained, only delayed. I am shaming myself now, writing sentence after sentence here, trying to avoid the single sentence I sat down to write.
I am afraid. I begin to think It cannot die.
— J.S.G.
The Appalachian Mountains. May, 1910
Charity arched her back in ecstasy, savoring the warmth of William’s love-making. His hands were so gentle, caressing, supporting, holding her together with himself. Becoming one with her as though he’d waited all his life to do it. He rolled atop her in a smooth motion, his weight holding her beneath him with a firm possessiveness. More caressing.
Despite what Charity’s mother and the town gossips would have everyone believe, Charity had never before lain with a man. She had saved it for William. Through all the time she had made him wait, he had never been impatient with her. His kindness always played hide and seek behind his reserve, but she knew what kind of man he was. She felt it every time he’d called on her, standing at the door in his suit and his perfectly greased-back hair. Tall and handsome and aloof.
She’d fallen in love through the letters h
e’d written after her mother had refused to allow him into the house. He had promised that he would make ways to see her, if she was willing. She was.
She pressed her hands to his bare hips, feeling his muscles contract.
He had never left her, no matter what her mother had threatened to do to his practice or his reputation. He had found a way. He thought Charity was worth it. He slowed, cradled her neck in one hand, her lower back in the other.
He had found a way to make it work, and now Charity would find a way. As the pleasure coursed through her, and the need to stay with this man, she allowed herself to wonder if his love could bring her art back to life again. The day her mother had destroyed her paintings, the desire to create had died with them, but William had said he would not stop coaxing her until she picked up a paint brush again. He said he would stay with her while she healed, and he did not care how much time it required, or to what far country it might take them.
She believed him, and it brought tears to her eyes. At that moment, making love in the fire light, she knew she could not lose him. She vowed she would not, no matter what it cost. She had lost too much already. Her mother’s face filled Charity’s mind again. Ungrateful whore! The words barked from her mother’s mouth, and Charity watched her slash canvas after canvas, her imagination painting more and more glee and spite on her mother’s face until Satan’s own horns curled back from her mother’s brow.
Charity knew that hatred was the core of her mother’s being. So only one question remained: what was Charity going to do about it? What could one do to avenge the ruination of one’s heart? What action would prove, once and for all, that Charity was her own woman, and her mother had no control over her? How could she make her mother feel the emptiness and helplessness that Charity herself had felt?
She needed to make her mother see what she had done. She needed her to feel it. She had to force her mother to confront the simple truth that she was nothing more than an ugly, powerless child, inside and out. More importantly, she needed to show the whole world what her mother truly was.
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