“He just kept right on, inviting people back to parties and such. Missus Bliss tried to keep to her room, but he made her come out and be with them.” Mason had shaken his head. “He’s not a kind man, Mister Bliss.”
Now their poor daughter was dead, and Kiku suspected the same fate for her child.
But my child will be perfect. Randolph will not be ashamed.
She fell back asleep, warm in the bed, and when she woke again, the house was empty.
There was no butsudan in the house, so she could not offer traditional prayers for the little girl. Odette and Mason often prayed to their god together, standing in the kitchen, and she hoped that the gods of her home would understand when she prayed with them.
When she had dressed and prayed and eaten, she put on her warmest clothes and borrowed Mason’s second coat, one that had belonged to Randolph and did not fit Mason very well. It was enormously big on her, but it covered her belly.
The baby was still today. It had shifted greatly in the night, waking her for a few moments, but now its movements were subtle, as though it had gotten itself comfortable. Kiku, though, had to remove the coat again so she could relieve her tortured bladder before she went into the woods.
It had been weeks since she had watched the big house from the woods, because the cold had kept her inside. She had to walk for ten minutes to make her way from the orchards to the woods near the cottage. Beneath her feet, the brown dirt peeked through the sun-melted snow. The bare trees were punctuated with bright red cardinals and their mates. Odette had said that cardinals were souls visiting from heaven, and she put out breadcrumbs to attract them to her yard, though more often the crows came and chased the cardinals away and ate the bread.
The drive in front of the big house was filled with carriages and their drivers, and a few individual horses, which stood tethered to a pair of posts. She guessed that she was late, because she only saw two sets of guests arrive, all swathed in black. No one looked her way. Everyone was focused on the house.
Her hands were cold, and her feet were numb in her boots. There was no coffin or corpse for her to see. She had already seen it. By now Tamora was buried in the graveyard of a church in town. It was Amelia she had wanted to see, but of course she would be inside the house, not outside in the cold.
But what was there, in front of the garden wall? Something had moved, catching her eye. Unlike a human or animal it seemed to drift, like smoke. As it took shape, becoming real in color and form, she sucked in the frigid air. It saw her. It watched her.
Kiku felt her belly contract. Was the baby afraid? A child in the womb, so close to the world of spirits, might be able to sense their presence.
The figure near the garden stayed where it was.
Kiku turned to go back to Odette and Mason’s house, feeling the eyes of the dead girl watching her back as she walked.
Chapter 36
AMELIA
January 1879
After seeing Randolph in the hall, Amelia had run past him, up to the nursery, and found Tamora—the real Tamora—laid out on her nursery bed. The ghost or demon or whatever it was had been a shock, but that shock was nothing compared to the brutal ache that rose in her when she put her arm beneath her limp child’s shoulders and held her to her.
When Randolph came to the door, she screamed for him to get out. They left her there, alone, for the rest of the day and night. It was the kindest thing he had ever done for her.
She emerged at seven the next morning, closing the door calmly behind her.
It was Clayton Poole who let it slip where Tamora had been found. She had dragged herself down to the kitchen, thirsty, and he hadn’t known she was behind him, listening. It was as though everyone had thought that she had been the one who died, the one who could not hear or see or talk. Randolph and Terrance and Aaron were nowhere in sight.
“Poor little bugger was in a tree, half naked and curled up like some animal. It was a terrible thing, Mister Aaron said. It was the girl, the squinty-eyed one, who found her,” he said, talking to the man who delivered milk to the house. The man had shaken his head vigorously to try to warn him that Amelia was behind him, but Clayton kept talking, enamored with the strange story. “They brought her back here, but it was the girl who found her. Took her into that cottage.”
The deliveryman coughed, and Clayton finally turned around.
“Missus. I didn’t see you there.” He faltered. “Can I do something for you, ma’am?”
She left the kitchen without answering.
Tamora/not-Tamora was standing on the stairs. “What will you do, Mother? Will you kill the little Japanese whore, Mother?”
Amelia was no longer startled to see her, but now she ignored her. She went to the library.
“Do you want that girl in my place, Randolph? Did you kill our daughter so you can start over with that girl and her bastard?” Her voice was loud and angry. She didn’t care who heard her.
Randolph stood up and came around the front of his desk. “I’ve made the arrangements with the church and sent a telegram to your parents. You’re distraught. Let me get some of the medicine that Cyrus left for you.”
“Did you plan it with her? Did you send our daughter to that cottage so she would die?”
“You don’t know what you’re saying, Amelia. Please let me take you upstairs.”
“Stop it! Tell me the truth!”
Randolph dropped his air of concern and assumed his usual cool, patronizing tone. “You give me too much credit. I would not take such a woman for my wife even if you were dead, Amelia. And my bastard? This is not England or Europe where bastards are recognized so easily. Our puritanical friends are not forgiving, and even I wish to live in society.”
His words were almost a relief. Randolph had no need for murder and subterfuge. If he had wanted to have the girl in Bliss House, he would simply have sent her and Tamora back to North Hempstead and done as he wished in Virginia. She would have gone, happily, especially after her humiliation in front of Aaron.
Tamora had no doubt gone in search of the cottage, and, indeed, had found it. It was certainly the girl who had killed her, jealous of her birthright and anxious to be the mistress of Bliss House. She imagined the Japanese girl—if she were Japanese, as Tamora/not-Tamora had said—walking through the halls, her tiny, slippered feet silent on the well-joined wood.
“She’s the one who should be dead. Not my daughter! I will kill her, Randolph.”
When she saw the alarm in his eyes, she knew he had lied to her. He actually cared for the girl. It struck her as a remarkable thing. She had never known Randolph to truly care about anyone but himself. She thought of the wallpaper in the ballroom. All the pretty Oriental girls, reminding him of his whore.
He approached her and tried to grab her by the shoulders, but she slipped away. “Now you’re being ridiculous, Amelia. Kiku has done nothing to you. Listen to yourself. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Oh, I very much know what I’m saying.” They faced each other and for once she saw him as she suspected he truly was: a vulnerable, ugly bully. Not so much evil as manipulative and weak-minded. Cruel because he didn’t really understand how to be anything else.
“We’ll get you away from here, Amelia. Cyrus will help. I’ll take care of you.”
She left before he could say any more.
Tamora/not-Tamora stood at the gallery railing, silent and watchful, as Amelia ascended the stairs, but Amelia said nothing to her. If she were to be a murderess, she wanted to say a final good-bye to the child lying dead inside the nursery, and ask God’s forgiveness.
Amelia carried nothing with her when she left for the cottage, creeping up to the third-floor theater first to get to the outer door unseen. There was snow, but she didn’t notice the cold. She could only see the girl—Kiku—before her, could only feel rage.
No longer would the girl live in her charming cottage in the woods like a fairy-tale princess.
The
woods seemed empty and silent, too, though she knew that they were as full of winter life as they had been on the day that Aaron and she had been in the woods gathering evergreens for the house. The day that Tamora had pounded on the door of the cottage, wanting it to open.
Tamora/not-Tamora was somewhere behind her. At the edge of the woods, Amelia turned and saw her by the garden wall. A chill wind was shaking melted snow from the branches of the pine trees, but the wraith’s untamed hair did not move.
Amelia didn’t pound on the cottage door as Tamora had, but put her hand on the doorknob and turned it.
The normalcy of the place struck her like a blow. She had had an idea of gambling room decadence, with tawdry satins and flocking on the walls and crude furniture of the sort one might see in a cheap restaurant in New York. Such was the image she had of a mistress’s lair. But it might have been a parlor in any small Virginia house, with a sofa and two chairs, and a smoking stand that contained the remains of a cigar. There were books on the shelves, books that she recognized from Randolph’s library on Long Island. Did this woman read? She had no idea if she even spoke English.
A fire was dying in the grate. The girl had not been gone long.
In the bedroom she found the large bed neatly made with blankets and quilts. She walked quietly, almost reverently. This was where Randolph did the things with his mistress that he had begun whispering to Amelia in the dark not long after Thanksgiving. He had told her of the suppleness of the girl’s young body, her submissiveness.
“She is utterly mine. She has no will but to please me. You are incapable of such submission, Amelia. You are not made for that.”
No. She was not made for that sort of submission. But submitted she had. Submitted in ways that a modern wife must submit to her husband: in things financial and geographical. He held the strings of the family purse, and if she did not want to live in penury, alone, or with her disagreeable parents, she had to submit to his will. It was not slavery, but a contract.
Randolph had always been free to break that contract, but she had not. She had tried with Aaron, but he had betrayed her. God, how she had wanted him. If only she had been able to have him for a day, it would have been some confirmation that she was alive, and not some automaton who was bought to be a set piece for a house and life she understood but did not care for.
She touched the bed and felt the strength of the girl’s presence, felt her power. Her very presence had stolen Tamora and left behind the mocking thing that now pretended to be her daughter.
There were clothes in the wardrobe. Summer clothes that were simpler than she had imagined the girl might wear. But also two dresses that confirmed her occupation: a bright green dress trimmed in black with tiers and tiers of machine-made lace. The second dress was purple. Not a royal purple, but the vulgar purple of the theater. The purple of shop girls out for a night of fun, a night of drinking too much and attracting men. Not fine wine, but ale. She took the dress from the hanger and inspected it as though she were going to wear it herself. It was tiny—almost as small as a dress that Tamora might have worn. (Though not purple, never purple.) The shabby fabric was badly soiled, particularly around the hem and neck, and there were artless seams indicating that it had been quickly altered for the girl to wear. She held the dress to her nose. It smelled of body odor and layers of faded perfume. Leaving the wardrobe open, she let the dress drop to the floor.
On the dresser sat two pathetic hats on cheap stands. She tried to imagine the delicate girl—yes, Kiku was delicate, she had seen that—wearing such atrocities. She suspected that the simpler clothes in the wardrobe were ones she had acquired since coming to the cottage. The hats, and the hideous dresses, were the wares of a true whore, and did not seem to suit the girl she had seen in the doorway.
There was murder in Amelia’s heart, but the reality of the girl was that she was just a girl who was not that much older than Tamora. She told herself that it didn’t matter. Even the youngest women were capable of deceit, and anyone that Randolph had taken as a lover—a lover who had full knowledge that he had a wife and daughter—was probably capable of even worse. The sort of person who didn’t care whom she hurt.
She had come into the cottage with rage. If the girl had been there, would she truly have been able to murder her with her own hands? She had no gun, no knife, no other weapon. The goal had been to face her, to make her pay for what she had done. Her life for Tamora’s life. But now that she was here, in the girl’s very bedroom, she knew she would have hesitated. Aaron had been right when he had told her she was weak. The thought deflated her.
Randolph was everywhere: a shirt over the back of a chair, the books, the cigar stub in the front room. Soon, Randolph himself would surely come in search of her.
“Tamora, were you here?” There was no answer.
But as she started from the room, something fell to the floor with a thump. Nothing was immediately evident, and she bent to look beneath the bed.
There. Beside the oak dresser. The shabby tail of some animal protruded from a corner near the dresser’s leg. At first she thought it might be a cheap fur piece of the kind that low women wore with their evening clothes. But it was no fur piece. It was a squirrel’s tail.
She snatched Brownkin from the floor. One side of his fur was matted and flattened. Tamora had kept him well brushed. In fact so well brushed that what was left of his fur was quickly falling out.
Brownkin.
Not only had Tamora been in the house, but she had had Brownkin with her. There could be no other explanation but that the woman had lured her here and then killed her by stripping her and putting her out in the snow to die.
Amelia lost all reason. Cradling Brownkin in one arm, she used the other to sweep the ugly hats and jewelry and hairbrush and mirror to the floor, screaming with rage. The only things that remained were a peacock feather and a grubby rag doll. Holding the doll by its legs, she tried to tear it in two, but it would not rip. Dropping it to the floor, she crushed it beneath her shoe and left the room. In the parlor, Randolph’s books were first, and the ones she didn’t throw across the room she piled into the fireplace willynilly like some strange fuel. She jerked down the simple curtains and picked up the smoking stand and swung it at one of the front windows, shattering it. After pitching the cigar stand onto the porch, she found a knife in the kitchen and returned to the parlor to slice the cushions of the furniture. As the fabric tore, she pulled out the horsehair and wool stuffing, strewing it on the floor like the entrails of a gutted animal.
Aaron found her on the freezing porch, holding Brownkin and weeping. Her rage had all been spent, and she didn’t pull away when he said softly, “Amelia,” and helped her up from where she sat on the step. They walked through the same woods through which they had passed together only a few weeks earlier. She saw nothing but her feet moving through the melting snow, heard nothing but the crack of twigs as they crunched underfoot.
“Kiku didn’t kill her. I swear she didn’t kill her. She tried to help her.”
Her heart and mind resisted his words, but she knew they were true. The girl who lived in the cottage was not who had killed Tamora. She herself was responsible. She had left Tamora in the house with a father who didn’t love her. With her father, a drunken nurse, and a stranger named Missus Williams. If Amelia had put Tamora out in the snow and locked the door behind her, she couldn’t have done more to kill her.
“She must have gone out in the very early morning when everyone was asleep. I wasn’t here. I’m so sorry I wasn’t here, Amelia.”
Weeks earlier she would have thrilled to the tenderness in his voice, but now she only heard the words. Everyone was so sorry.
They would all be sorry for a long, long time.
At the wake, mourners clustered around Amelia like so many black-feathered turkey vultures. The soft noises they made might have been words, but Amelia couldn’t make them out. She nodded and let them take her hands, noted that some of the faces around her
were tearful. She saw Pinky Archer in her ostentatiously unadorned black hat and wondered who might make such a hideous thing. She herself wore no hat and couldn’t even recall if she had worn one inside the church, though she knew she must have, because women were required to cover their heads in church, and she had been, in her life, obedient.
The mourners whispered among themselves. They ate. Maud had covered the tables in food and Odette and the hired girls, also in black, hurried back and forth from the kitchen. Amelia could not eat. Could not remember eating.
Tamora/not-Tamora watched from the third floor, her unkempt hair around her face, grinning like she was watching a very funny play. Amelia had never seen such a look on her true daughter’s face in life. This was Tamora reborn. The winter had stolen away her sweet, inchoate girl and replaced her with a devil-child. Tamora/not-Tamora was a cruel imp who leapt about the railings of the gallery and disappeared through closed doors. She moved things: lamps and pieces of furniture. She stole Maud’s spoons in the kitchen. Amelia saw Randolph in her then. Amelia knew she had sometimes been thoughtless, but—with the exception of what she had done at the cottage—she had never been intentionally cruel.
Except to Randolph. But her words could not touch him. Randolph wore his own cruelty like medieval armor, and he was well covered.
She watched him on the other side of the room. His face was mockingly somber.
False face! Liar! Look at your new daughter! Do you see her, Randolph?
He hadn’t believed her when she told him about Tamora/not-Tamora. He claimed not to have noticed that things had been moved or the running footsteps in the night. Tamora’s footsteps. Tamora’s laughter.
Sitting in the salon, with the vultures clustered around her, she could not make out their words, but she could hear Tamora/not-Tamora taunting her from the hall.
The Abandoned Heart Page 30
