The ruined sheets went onto the back porch in a pile. What did it matter? Their scent might draw animals, but someone would eventually come and burn them. Perhaps the next girl that Randolph brought to live there.
Aaron had brought some bread and cheese and milk with him, but she had only eaten a bit of the bread. The fever had stolen her appetite. She drank only water, grateful that the well pump had not frozen as Mason had once said it might.
She slept curled on the sofa, exhausted.
The door opened with a gust of wind that stirred the fire and cooled Kiku’s burning skin. She gasped, overwhelmed with such joy that she could not speak. Morning had come while she slept, and Odette stood framed in sunlight, holding Kiku’s son in her strong arms.
“I’m here as soon as I could get here.” Kiku had never seen Odette looking so worried. Aaron ushered her inside and closed the door.
When Kiku tried to stand, she felt lightheaded, as though she would fall, and sank back onto the sofa.
“Stay there. Let me get him out of this wrap. It’s colder than yesterday, and I was almost afraid to bring him out.” She cast a glance at Aaron, who was trying to help her with the small bundle.
“I knew you would come, Odette. They told me you would come.”
If Odette wondered who “they” might be, she chose not to ask. She demurred when Aaron tried to take the unwrapped baby from her and bent slightly to put the baby in Kiku’s arms.
Kiku’s arms were weak, and she had been almost afraid to hold him, but once he was against her, she felt new strength surge into her body.
She murmured to him, words that neither Aaron nor Odette could understand, putting her warm lips against his warm forehead. He opened his eyes at her touch. He could not focus easily, as all newborn babies cannot, but she saw the depths of his dark eyes, and recognized him, and knew he recognized her. She memorized the shape of his tiny nose, and his delicate brow, and kissed his hair again and again, breathing against his skin, wanting to be sure he was warm and that he would know her scent.
How proud her mother would be. He was a tiny but strong baby. Now that she had seen him, she knew he would live.
He opened his mouth, and Kiku thought he was going to cry, but he only yawned and blinked and worked his mouth a bit. The fingers of one of his hands were wrapped tightly around her finger. She had never felt such happiness. When he turned his face to her chest as though looking to nurse, she felt the numbness in her breasts increase, and then the milk started to come. The baby began to fidget, as though he could sense it through the thick bodice of her dress. There was nothing she could do for him but hold him tighter and begin to rock him in her arms.
Odette sat at the other end of the sofa. Aaron paced, stopping every so often to look out the window. They all knew Randolph might show up at any moment, though Aaron had said he was in Lynchburg, making special arrangements for Amelia’s funeral, which was to be held two days hence. Many people were coming from New York and other states to attend.
“When he came to our house, he had the baby wrapped up in a quilt. He didn’t even give me time to pack a bag, but said I was to come and stay at the big house and take care of the baby.” Odette sighed. “I couldn’t say no, Kiku. I didn’t want to say no. Not when I saw how fragile he looked. He didn’t look like a baby who was ready to come out, and Randolph was running him around here like he was the fittest baby ever to be born. I just wanted to get him inside, and so I grabbed my coat and got in the carriage. I didn’t even get to talk to Mason about it the next day. Mister Bliss has him moving into the house, too.”
Kiku kissed the baby’s head again. He had calmed and seemed to be falling asleep.
“My son was not ready. After I drank the tea that the doctor sent with him, and it made me ill, I feared that Randolph meant something terrible to happen. Please do not worry, Odette. You did what was right. I am happy that he will live, and I will watch over him.”
Aaron, who had been pacing between the windows, came to the sofa.
“Odette and I must take him back. Randolph can’t be trusted. He may have been waiting to see if we would take this chance. I’m sorry, Kiku. I promise I’ll come back.”
There would be no more holding her son. This she knew. Brushing her lips against his hair one final time, she whispered in his tiny ear and he turned his face to meet her cheek in his sleep as though he might kiss her good-bye. Odette made a sound that she might have claimed was a cough, but it was full of emotion.
“Keep him warm. Keep him safe. Tell him every day how much I loved him.”
“I’ll bring him. Every day that I can.” Odette lifted him gently from Kiku’s arms, and she and Aaron put the warm blankets back around him.
Kiku nodded, confident that Odette believed her own words.
“Let Aaron bring the woman I know to help you. She will make your fever go, and you’ll be strong again. I’ll tell her about the tea, but I’m madder than hell at you, Kiku, for drinking it. That was the stupidest thing you could have done.”
“I will talk to Aaron when he returns. I’m too tired to see anyone right now.”
“I will bring this child back to you. You get strong, do you hear me? If you don’t, I’ll come feed you myself.”
Aaron opened the door. “We need to hurry.” But in spite of his words, he strode over to Kiku and kissed her too-warm cheek. “I’m coming back. Sleep if you can.”
As the door began to close, Kiku heard her son’s tiny voice calling to her, but there were no words. Only a lonely cry.
Aaron returned within the hour, and after assuring her that the baby was well settled and nursing with the wet nurse, a woman whom Odette knew well from church, he made her some peppermint tea and heated some broth he had brought from Bliss House’s kitchen. He had also brought more blankets.
“There are already several people who’ve come for the funeral. Did you know Amelia was dead? Did Randolph tell you?”
“I have not seen Randolph, but I knew she was dead. I saw her fall from the window.”
“That’s not possible.”
Kiku nodded. The fog of the fever had returned and she was weary. “I saw her with Tamora. By the garden. She will not leave Randolph’s house because her child will always be there.”
“No, Kiku. She’s gone, and Tamora’s gone. Perhaps Randolph will want to bring you to the house now. He’s already taken in the child. I would understand if that’s what you wanted. It would mean leaving the child behind if you come away with me. Randolph says it will not leave the house without him, and I believe he means it.”
Kiku touched his face, but did not speak for a moment. He was trying to be brave, she knew. But he would need to be even more brave. “I would like some broth. Would you help me drink it?”
Afterward, he fortified the fires in both the parlor and the bedroom and put another blanket around her when she began to shiver violently. “Tonight I’ll bring Odette’s friend. She’ll help the fever go so you can be strong. We will leave here, Kiku, and you will be my wife.”
When her shivering subsided, she held out her arms to Aaron, and he caressed her.
“If I am to be your wife, you must take me to bed now.”
He gave her a weary smile. “There will be time for that. Right now you must recover.”
Kiku shook her head. “We must hurry. You’ll have to carry me. I think I will not be too heavy for you.”
Aaron picked her up in his arms as though she were a child, and of course she was still much of a child, so fine-limbed and slender even after the birth of the boy. It was with some difficulty that she convinced him to remove his clothes and come to her beneath the blankets. He seemed shy to stand naked before her, but his desire for her, even in her fragile state, was clear.
“My love.”
He kissed her then, and held her, and they listened to the fire in the grate and the silence from the woods. She lay pressed against his chest and spoke to him softly of what she needed him to do. Only t
hen did she pull away a bit to look into his eyes.
When she saw the disbelief there, the horror, she was sorry for him. But not sorry enough to take back the words.
“I won’t do it.”
His handsome face was now so dear to her. It was a kind face. Though she knew he was almost two decades older than she, she felt very old. Old, old, old. He had refused what she asked, but she knew he would eventually agree. If only he could look through her eyes and see the future as she saw it. Then he would know that there was no other future but the one she could see. It was a future filled with people, with the house. He was afraid that she would be alone in the dark, but she would never be alone again. Her son was there. She would watch him grow. She touched the prickly curve of Aaron’s jaw and stroked his cheek with her forefinger.
“There is no other way. I am dying and I cannot leave here. He will not let me have my son.”
She had never seen such pain in a man’s face before. Every man she had known—who had known her—had worn either a mask of self-assurance or a look of childlike vulnerability. In Randolph’s face she had sometimes seen momentary tenderness, but it had been the fleeting tenderness of the butcher for a favorite lamb. She had been the continual sacrifice, and nothing more.
“I wish it could be different. I wish that we had met on the shore near my home. I wish that we could have had many children together, with bright green eyes and perfect teeth.”
At this she saw a flickering of pleasure in his eyes, but it quickly melted into a glaze of tears.
She put an arm around his neck and again rested her head against his chest. She began to sob, pressing her face to his skin, wishing with her whole being that she could make herself leave with him that very night. But she hadn’t the strength and never would again. Even if she were strong, she knew she couldn’t leave her son, couldn’t leave this hot countryside with its bitter winters and sun-soaked, humid summer days, and torpid nights. She couldn’t leave her son alone with Randolph, unprotected and unloved.
For so long she had lived unprotected, but now she knew that she was loved. Her son would be loved. If he was to have to live in that terrible yellow house, she would fill it with her love. But everyone else who lived there would feel her rage. Kiku’s eyes squeezed tightly against her own hot tears.
Tears are for children and the weakest of women. Her uncle, her father’s brother who had never married, had said that to her when she cried because a baby turtle she had captured and put in a small enclosure in the garden had been eaten by one of the village cats. She hadn’t cried more than a tiny dish of tears since she had last seen her home, and she had long ago ceased to be a child, no matter that Randolph and sometimes Odette treated her like one. It would never matter that she had been weak at this moment. Her son would never know. He would grow up strong and protected and only know her strength.
Aaron shook with his own grief, and Kiku was humbled by his emotion.
She touched his brow.
“Husband.”
He touched her wet cheek, wiping some of the tears away, then wiped his own, and their tears mingled together.
“Wife.”
Aaron’s kiss was tender. So tender, yet as certain as his footsteps on the cottage floor, as certain as the firm lines of brick that formed the yellow house. He was like a man who had found a rare and great treasure, and wanted to explore it, celebrate it. Cherish it. There were no more tears, even when they later opened their eyes to the encroaching darkness of the winter evening that meant they would never lie together again.
Chapter 42
LUCY
May 1922
“Lucy, I hope you’re not thinking of getting back on a horse once you heal. You always were a dreadful jumper. You try to control the horse too much.” It was Faye’s first visit to the house since Lucy had come home from the hospital, and she had promised Michael Searle that she would come every day until Lucy was able to get out of bed.
It was 1922, and Randolph had been dead more than three years. They had been a good two years. Lucy had gotten back out into Old Gate society, had even had a few small parties of her own at the house, and had traveled to Boston to see old friends. The ghosts had been quiet. Michael Searle had been happier at the university than either of them had thought he might be. She and Terrance had come to a functional understanding: He preferred to keep his role as manager of the house, yet sometimes sat down with her at lunch so they could discuss servants and other things that came up, but otherwise he kept to himself. If the kitchen servants thought it odd, they didn’t say, and Lucy was enough of her own woman not to care about their gossip. They were a long way from the last century. Then came the accident.
Lucy tried to make a joke about Faye’s own horsemanship because Faye hadn’t ridden a horse since the twins were in diapers, but it felt as though time had slowed, and her tongue was heavy in her mouth. Her leg was broken in two places, her knee shattered. The horse had gotten right up—she remembered that much—and galloped back to the gate to wait to be led into the stable. She had been practicing the jumps alone, which she knew was foolish. But the groom had been within shouting distance, and had come running when he heard her cries. Terrance had called Josiah Beard, and he had arrived just before the ambulance from Lynchburg. Old Gate had no hospital, and the doctors in Lynchburg had kept her there for two weeks, but Michael Searle had finally been allowed to bring her home.
It was high summer. Michael Searle was home from the university at Charlottesville, and up to the day of the accident they had enjoyed a pleasant routine. He worked in the orchard operation for the cooler part of the day, one sleeve of his chambray shirt punctuated by the black mourning armband that he had sworn to wear for five years, as though to prove to the world that he loved his father, as though to prove to himself that his father had loved him. Lucy practiced in the expansive riding ring she’d had installed the year after Randolph died. Later, they would have iced tea and cake together and read before it was time for dinner. If it wasn’t too hot, they ate on the patio while the sun set around them. After the accident, Michael Searle went back to the orchards only after they had hired a qualified nurse, who, along with Terrance, took care of Lucy. A part of Lucy felt helpless and deeply foolish, but the morphine drops that Josiah had prescribed made her worry less about it.
Faye had protested that she could certainly do the day nurse’s job, but Josiah and Michael Searle had convinced her that an hour or two in the late afternoon, after the nurse was off duty, would be perfect.
“There’s a new doctor in Lynchburg, Lucy. His last name is Collins. First name Frederick. He’s a widower, and, oh, is he handsome! As soon as you’re healed, I’m going to throw you a party, and he’ll be invited. I don’t know what he’d make of this place.” She waved a hand, indicating all of Bliss House. “But maybe he likes houses with history. Have you seen any ghosts since you’ve been taking that medicine? Josiah says it puts some people right out of their heads.”
Faye chatted on, and Lucy simply nodded. Faye had gotten sillier as she’d gotten older: perpetually girlish. Even her two teenaged daughters seemed slightly more mature and conservative than she.
The ghosts of the house had left Lucy alone, for the most part. There were sounds in the night, sometimes on the third floor, but Terrance said that the theater door had sometimes been found opened. He suspected boys from town coming up the stairs on a dare, or even inside, and suggested that they put a lock on the door.
How strange to think of locks on the outer doors of Bliss House.
The housemaid had complained of seeing lights in the orchard at night and figures out near the springhouse, but there was no evidence of vandalism or tampering in the daylight.
“Unreliable,” Terrance had said. He let the housemaid go, saying he believed she was a secret drinker. Randolph had indeed left him a considerable amount of money, which Lucy did not begrudge him, and had put in his will that it was his wish that she provide Terrance a home at Bliss
House for as long as he wanted. (There had been no other bequests to errant children, as Randolph had hinted. Surely the will had been made before the madness took hold.)
“I am hopeless with this.” Faye held up a piece of finished satin about two inches wide and a foot long. Even Faye, who had been very adventurous as a teenager—it had been she, after all, who had insisted that they go to Randolph’s Walpurgisnacht ball—bemoaned her daughters’ fondness for all things modern. Flapper was a word she used with distaste, though Lucy had noticed that she had had her hair cut in a curly bob, despite being well over forty years old. “You are so lucky not to have a daughter to drive you mad with begging you to do ridiculous things like sewing tiny beads on headbands. And I’ve left my embroidery scissors at home. Do you have any?”
Lucy caught the question about scissors but little else.
“I keep all my stitching things down in the salon now. The light is better. But I think I have some scissors in the bedside drawer.”
Faye opened the top drawer and rummaged. “Who would think you were so untidy behind closed drawers?” She giggled at her joke. “Behind closed doors?”
Lucy smiled.
“No scissors there.” She opened the lower drawer. “Wait. Here they are.” She set the scissors on the table. “Here’s an envelope, too, with your name on it. Look at the tiny writing! Why didn’t you ever open this?”
Lucy turned her head to see the envelope Faye was fluttering at her. The envelope had yellowed, but she recognized Odette’s perfect, tiny script.
“Odette.”
The Abandoned Heart Page 35
