The Abandoned Heart

by Laura Benedict

  “Hello, Mother.” Lucy tried on a smile as she hurried down the stairs. Her mother liked it when people smiled at her. But when she saw her mother’s frown, she slowed her step. The desire to have her mother’s forgiveness dimmed.

  Quickly, surprisingly, her mother’s frown changed to a bright smile that lighted up her lovely face. It was always a kind of revelation to see how truly beautiful her mother was. In her pearl gray silk skirt and jacket—cinched fashionably at her waist, so that you would never know she had two grown children—she looked only about thirty-five years old, rather than almost fifty. The rich hues of her reddish-pink blouse and the roses on the hat that crowned her full, still-blond hair, put a bloom of health on her cheeks. Lucy had inherited the broader features of her father; she had always envied her mother’s sculpted cheekbones, and slender nose with its neat tip and well-defined nostrils. Though one of Lucy’s friends had confided that she thought Selina looked like she was always smelling something she didn’t much care for.

  Did her own mother like her? A part of her suspected that she did not, and she certainly didn’t love her as much as she loved Juliet. It was a truth she knew she should try not to forget.

  But now her mother was here. And she was smiling.

  They drank tea in the salon, the air heavy with the scent of summer roses. Randolph had planted the roses for his first wife, Amelia, and while they had not been carefully tended in the decades he had been away from Bliss House, they still bloomed madly. Lucy had a plan to replant the entire garden and make it glorious again.

  “This room is like a mausoleum with all this hideous dark furniture. I suppose Randolph won’t let you change it? He would cling to the past. Amelia’s things. Doesn’t it bother you, Lucinda?”

  Her mother hadn’t spoken to her since her elopement, and now she was complaining about the furniture. Lucy might have laughed if she weren’t already worried out of her mind. She didn’t say so to her mother, but of course she had changes planned. Though she had no quarrel with Amelia.

  She poured the tea, feeling the heavy ache in her breasts. If Michael Searle were to cry, the milk would come, and in front of her mother! Surely her mother hadn’t breastfed her or her sister. There had always been nurses and a nanny.

  Suddenly Lucy felt six years old again, afraid of the woman sitting in front of her.

  “Your hands are shaking, Lucinda. You’re spilling the tea.”

  Lucy set the pot on the tray and tried to breathe. She tried to formulate words in her head, to say the many things she desperately wanted to say, but she was overcome. Finally she put her face in her hands, and wept.

  “Lucinda, what in the world is wrong with you? Compose yourself, please. The servants—that dreadful Terrance—will hear.”

  Selina sounded irritated, but there was a sharp edge of anguish in her voice.

  “For heaven’s sake.” She stood up and came around the table to stand beside Lucy. Feeling her near, Lucy reached for the gray silk of her skirt and clutched it in her hand.

  Selina started to brush her away, but then seemed to think better of it. She rested a hand on Lucy’s shoulder.

  “Bearing children makes a woman ridiculous. You’ve got to get control of yourself.” She squeezed Lucy’s shoulder lightly, and her voice softened. “You’re obviously doing too much. I can’t imagine what it must have been to travel so long with an infant. What was Randolph thinking? Where is he?”

  Lucy wiped her eyes to try to stop the tears. Other girls had their mothers nearby when they gave birth. Mothers who came to stay to at least supervise the servants. But her mother had been an ocean away, and now she was here. Though her passages were full of tears, she could smell the lemon verbena from her mother’s closet, where her dresses were stored. How she had loved to hide in that closet when her mother was out, burying herself in the beautiful dresses, pretending her mother was in them.

  “Something’s wrong with Michael Searle.” She took her mother’s hand. “I want you to see. Please come with me to see.”

  Selina tore her hand away. “Stop. Don’t be excessive. I know you think I don’t care, Lucinda, but I did ask after him. Faye told her mother that he looked very well.”

  When Lucy took her mother’s hand again—and this time she did not pull away—she found it cold and trembling.

  Lucy dropped her voice to a whisper. “Those first days, I think Randolph wanted to kill him. Our own son. He said he was a monster.”

  Michael Searle was sleeping. Odette got up from her chair and nodded to them as she went out.

  “Why isn’t he in a nursery of his own?” Selina leaned over the cradle to look at Michael Searle, but Lucy couldn’t read her face. Was she pleased, or disappointed? At least she was whispering. She said nothing about the way he looked, his mild, rounded features that looked so very like a Searle’s.

  “The furniture is too old. I’m having the room next to mine redone.” Lucy didn’t mention the animals or the sense she had that the room belonged to someone or something she couldn’t see.

  “Fine. Now, Lucy. I’ve seen him. He’s a charming baby. May I go?”

  Lucy bent to the cradle and lifted Michael Searle as gently as she could, not wanting to wake him. Though the cradle was lovely, it didn’t suit their needs, and she had written cabinetmakers in Pennsylvania for a new, taller crib. She laid him on her bed and carefully adjusted his gown to expose the diaper.

  “Lucy, this is unnatural. I don’t understand.” Selina began to pace, her voice louder. “I don’t know why I agreed to come here. You wouldn’t listen. In God’s name why didn’t you listen to me?”

  Unnatural. The doctor had used the same word.

  Lucy opened the diaper to find it was wet. She hadn’t thought to lay out another, so consumed had she been with showing her mother. Michael Searle stirred.

  “You must, Mother. You must. Please. I can’t bear it alone anymore.”

  Though the afternoon had been beautifully clear, a cloud passed over the sun, darkening the room. She looked for shock on her mother’s face, but found only sadness.

  “I didn’t understand at first. Then the doctor explained that Michael Searle is like a boy, but also a girl. He’s not a monster. Randolph thinks he’s a monster, but he’s just a baby. Do you see?”

  Michael Searle’s face crumpled as he began to wake, unhappy.

  “Cover him. Please.”

  Her mother stood at the window looking out at the garden.

  “She was so proud of these gardens, as though she’d gone out there herself and planted them. I suppose when you don’t know someone well, you talk about things like gardens. I never saw a woman so pale. The child, too. She had a strange name. Jewish. What was it?” She paused a moment, tapped on the window as though asking for an answer. “Tamora. That was it. Such a strange, un-Christian name for a little girl.”

  “You could at least say something, Mother.”

  Selina turned from the window. She looked sad, now. Not angry. “Randolph was right. It would’ve been a kindness to kill it.”

  Lucy’s arms stiffened around her child.

  “Why would you say such a thing? You’re my mother. Look at him. He’s a baby.”

  “He’s your judgment for marrying that man. A judgment on all of us. You had to do the first thing that came into your foolish head. You never would listen to me. Sometimes I think you hated me.” She gave an unpleasant laugh. “Even as a baby, you’d turn your head from me, preferring the nurse or your father. Why couldn’t you be like Juliet? Why did you have to punish me every day just because you were born?”

  Lucy crossed the room to where her mother stood, her head full of her mother’s accusations.

  “Hold him. Just take him. He needs you.” Michael Searle felt unbearably warm in her arms. If only her mother would take him, she would love him.

  “I’ve seen him. You have what you wanted. His life will be a misery, and you, his mother, are responsible. I won’t be coming back here to this
godforsaken house. I don’t care what you convince your father to do.” Her lip wore a sheen of perspiration, and a strand of hair hung in an untidy curl at her temple.

  Lucy had a sudden image of bright green grass all around her, and her mother standing over a two-year-old Juliet, helping her hold a miniature croquet mallet. They laughed in the sunshine, their faces glowing with happiness. She remembered the desperate joy she had felt at seeing her mother’s smile, the feeling of yearning for her. “I have never hated you. How could I hate you?”

  “Don’t make me stay here, Lucinda. I have nothing for you. I’m sorry, but I can’t stay here.”

  “It was always Juliet. Father loves Juliet, and he loves me. But you won’t.”

  Michael Searle began to fret again. The rubber teat Lucy had given him fell from his mouth and onto the floor, but neither of them noticed.

  The air felt hot and thick to Lucy, and the ache in her breasts increased, tightening with Michael Searle’s whimpers. Beads of sweat glistened on her mother’s forehead. Her mother, her always careful, spotless mother. If you could see yourself! How mortified you would be. Was it the sun, beating through the windows? No. It was more than that. The very air seemed ready to ignite.

  “I must go!” Selina was also breathless.

  Lucy hardly knew what she was doing as she stepped in front of her mother. Her movements felt alarmingly slow and painful, as though she were trying to walk through boiling syrup.

  “You won’t stop me.” Selina pushed at Lucy’s shoulder, causing her to stumble. The blanket in which she’d wrapped Michael Searle unfurled, and before either of them knew what was happening, he lay, stunned and silent, on the carpet between them.

  They stared at him for a moment that seemed to last a lifetime.

  Lucy sank to the floor and quickly gathered Michael Searle into her arms. He stared up at her, his eyes wide and focused on her as though asking why, and it broke her heart.

  “Lucy, what have you done?” Selina whispered.

  Michael Searle squeezed his eyes shut and began to scream.

  Selina dropped her gaze and turned to leave the room.

  Holding Michael Searle close against her shoulder, the errant blanket laid over him, Lucy followed. Her own gown clung to her with perspiration, and Michael Searle burned against her. But she would not let him go again. No, she would not ever!

  At the doorway to her room, she stopped. The wood floor was hot through the fine leather soles of her satin morning shoes. Across the gallery, Lucy saw two familiar shadows for the briefest of moments, but then they disappeared.

  The vast hall trembled with waves of heat, like those off of a summer lake at noon. Overhead, the chandelier swayed like an uncertain pendulum. Selina gripped the gallery railing just outside the room and seemed to propel herself to the head of the stairs. Lucy couldn’t hear the sound her mother’s fashionable black boots made on the floor, but only Michael Searle’s cries. She wanted to shout to her mother to stay off of the stairs, but she was inchoate. Why couldn’t she speak?

  Then she heard something else through the waves of heat. A voice that blended with Michael Searle’s cries, like a whisper in a storm.

  “Selina.”

  Where had she heard that voice before? It was feminine, commanding. It was a voice that frightened her, a voice that might come in the night to awaken you, unbidden, from a dream. She caressed the back of Michael Searle’s head, touching him gently, wanting to give him all the comfort he needed.

  Her mother started for the stairs, unsteady, holding tightly to the railing. She had just reached the top of the stairs when the voice came again, filling the hall.

  “Selina!”

  Now her mother heard, and she looked back at Lucy. The fear written on her face told Lucy that she knew it wasn’t she who spoke. Lucy shook her head. This had nothing to do with her.

  When Selina looked away, down at the front door, Lucy could see her mother’s desperation, her need to reach that door to leave the house and never return. But her foot slipped as it reached for the step, and her mouth twisted with surprise and then pain. It was the slowness with which it all happened that let Lucy see, as though it were some kind of terrible gift.

  Why had this thought come to her? That she should be celebrating what was happening in front of her, that she should consider it a gift? She would remember that thought. The shame of it.

  In the seconds it took for her mother to tumble and slide her way down to the landing, Lucy felt the air clear. Michael Searle’s tiny scream was pure and sharp in her ears, and her mother lay, unmoving, on the landing.

  Somewhere above Lucy—or was it behind her or around her?—someone was laughing. There, above, on the landing outside the ballroom, a shadow without face or form quivered with what Lucy could only describe as delight.

  Chapter 21

  AMELIA

  December 1878

  Randolph was determined to have a party between Thanksgiving and Christmas that would formally introduce both Amelia and Bliss House to the neighborhood, and presented Amelia with a guest list so she could write out the invitations. There wouldn’t be all that much more for her to do. He had set the household operations in motion long before she’d arrived.

  He had hired Maud Poole as a cook, and her husband, Clayton, as a driver and houseman, a housemaid, and a groundskeeper who worked with Mason on the orchard operation when there wasn’t much to do in the gardens. Maud had worked for a local judge who had died as Bliss House was being built, and had a heavy hand with sauces, but made excellent biscuits, which, Randolph said, was a skill highly prized in the neighborhood. When Amelia gave her the recipes she’d brought from Long Island, Maud had sniffed and said that she didn’t like fish, and, besides, trout was about the only kind of fish they were likely to get when the weather warmed, and they certainly wouldn’t be getting any crabs this far from an ocean. The way she said it made Amelia think that Maud didn’t quite believe in oceans. Her husband, Clayton, shuffled audibly from room to room, coughing frequently from his former job in the mines. He was far less recalcitrant than his wife, who bullied him, though she was—to Amelia’s shock—nearly twenty years younger than her fifty-year-old husband, despite the streaks of gray in her hair and the faded blue eyes in her plump face.

  A laundress came to the house three times a week; she was the sister of the housemaid. Both were some kin to Maud and Clayton, but when Maud tried to tell her of the connection, Amelia listened politely for a few moments, then changed the subject back to the menu. Her own mother had long ago warned her about getting too involved in servants’ lives.

  “If you’re so close that you know the names of their children, then you’re too involved. They’ll take advantage and you’ll never be able to let them go unless they start stealing from you. Your heart is too tender, Amelia.”

  Because it was such a struggle to make the house her own, she was afraid that she was coming to despise it, despite its beauty. Or was it that she had begun to despise Randolph?

  More than anything she missed their house on Long Island with its many smaller rooms, and stuffy but dear furniture she had inherited from her D’Jarnette grandmother. She missed having neighbors nearby. She missed walking to her dressmaker’s shop, and her mother’s house, and the quaint tearoom where she could meet her sister for lunch. At least she wasn’t completely alone, though she hadn’t made what anyone could call friends.

  A few of the neighborhood women had called on her: heavily pregnant Selina Searle, the wife of the local priest, and Katharine “Pinky” Archer, who seemed to consider herself the most important of the local gentry, dropping names that Amelia understood she was supposed to know and be impressed by. Reluctantly, Amelia had returned their calls, and had even been taken to a garden party at the house of Pinky Archer’s mother-in-law. She, too, had been a name-dropper. There were several of those names on the list that Randolph had given her.

  Parties filled her with dread. Yes, she knew well how to th
row them. But Tamora was her Achilles’ heel.

  Randolph was pacing in the library.

  “The first party, Amelia. We’ve waited so long. I’ve waited so long.” His face held a longing that she hardly recognized. He looked young. Vulnerable. He had never in his life looked so vulnerable. Not even on the day their daughter was born.

  “A hundred years from now, this will be the best-known house in the county. And it begins tonight. Just think!” He turned to Aaron. “It’s the most remarkable house in the county, don’t you agree?”

  “Absolutely.” Aaron also looked pleased, like an admiring brother.

  Amelia had come to count on Aaron’s calm presence. Randolph was always busy: planning, writing, walking the nascent orchards, giving Mason orders though there was little to do in these cold months. Aaron sat sometimes with her in her morning room when Tamora was calm. He read to them from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Through the Looking Glass, while Tamora would sit on her mother’s lap, plucking at Brownkin’s fur, or chewing on her thumb. But she was calm when Aaron was around. Always calm.

  “Let’s drink to the evening! Amelia, you, too.” Randolph poured them each a glass of whiskey. The one he held out to Amelia had much less than the other two.

  “Oh, I can’t. It’s whiskey. I’ve never had whiskey.” Amelia made a face, and Aaron and Randolph both laughed.

  “Go on. You can do it. There’s no one here to see.” It made her feel better that Aaron understood her hesitation. Randolph seemed to think it was a great joke.

  “All at once, now.” Randolph pressed the glass forward.

  She sighed. “I suppose it won’t hurt.”

  But it did hurt. Her tongue and throat felt scalded with the harsh, woody taste and it caught painfully going down. There seemed to be something hard in the whiskey. Not wanting to rudely spit something out with the men watching, she swallowed but then began to cough. She took out her handkerchief. The inside of her lips burned unlike anything she had felt before.