But another, larger shadow cast itself over the whole garden, and Kiku looked up to see Randolph standing in the window from which she had seen Amelia fall. His presence made her angrier than she had ever felt before, and she flew to the window, certain she would break it, but, no, she melted through it, and through Randolph. When she turned back to find Randolph, he had run away into the darkest reaches of the house. She searched and searched the big house for him, spreading herself through it so that she could feel every grain of every wood panel, every satin surface of paint on the portraits. She couldn’t find him, couldn’t feel him, anywhere.
In frustration, she gripped the very foundations of the house, shaking it, making the enormous chandelier shudder and swing, and rattling the windows in their panes. But the house would not fall. Not yet. The time would come.
Kiku rested. Waiting. The air in the house thinned and filled with light, but despite the thinning of the air, she found that she could breathe more freely than she had ever before.
She had held her baby in her arms, felt the soft down of his hair against her lips. He was here, and so was she.
His name—which she had whispered in his ear when he was with her—emerged like a last sigh from her lips: Iwao. Without her, he would have to be strong, like stone.
Aaron held Kiku close against him for a long time before wrapping her stilled body comfortably, securely, in the quilt and placing it inside the wall. Remembering the bag, he retrieved the velvet-wrapped painting he had made for her and tucked it inside so it rested against the quilt.
He brought some bricks and the mortar from the corner of the room and began to fill in the hole. Little by little, the quilt was consumed by shadow, until it disappeared forever.
Chapter 45
LUCY
Walpurgisnacht 1924
Lucy ran barefoot into the woods.
How long had it been since she had left the confines of Bliss House after the moon had risen? Perhaps a year, maybe longer.
As the woods swallowed her, she thought of Tamora, Randolph’s daughter, dead in the hollow of a tree more than four decades earlier, and now a constant presence in the house. But Tamora had run into a bitter January night, and now it was almost May. May Day.
Minutes before, Lucy had been lying in her bed, floating and calm, her bedside light on because she had learned to hate the dark and its shadows. Terrance had just given her the medicine, the shot of morphine that helped her forget—for just a while each day—that her husband might have been her true father. But when she slept, her dreams were gray and flat, like newsreels, the people in them lifeless and distant. The medicine saved her, saved her dreams from plunging her into hell.
That Randolph’s figure was not distant had been her first clue that she was not dreaming. His face, framed against her own blank ceiling, loomed over her. At first he only stared, but when she screamed, his mouth broke into a partially toothless smile, and he lunged at her, unsteady on his feet.
Rolling away from him, she had clambered off the other side of the bed. Randolph was no ghost. The stench about him might have been death, or only uncleanliness, but he had surely come from the grave. She had seen the coffin lowered into the ground five years earlier. Five years!
He had stretched one arm after her, beseeching her, his voice gravelly with age and disuse. “Lucy! Lucy, don’t leave me!”
No ghost.
So many times she had thought back to the afternoon that Hannah Tanner had come to Bliss House, and the look on her father’s face when Randolph spoke quietly to him. Her father had looked suddenly ill, and had stalked from the room as though he might at any moment break into a run. That had surely been the day that Edward Searle had come to believe that she was Randolph’s daughter, and not his. And that Randolph would have her. Yet neither of her parents had worked very hard to prevent her from being with him. Had their fear of Randolph been so great that they had risked their daughter losing her very soul? Or was it simply the seed of doubt? Perhaps her mother had argued the lesser of two evils, that she had been wrong to accuse Randolph.
Although Randolph was frail enough that Lucy knew she might knock him over to escape him, she couldn’t bear the thought of touching him. To touch him would have been to touch death itself. But he moved so slowly that she had been able to run past him and out of her bedroom.
As she ran for the stairs, Terrance had shouted to her from the third-floor gallery, telling her not to run, that she should not be afraid.
He knows about Randolph. He knows that Randolph is alive.
She did not stop but kept running down the stairs, nearly falling in her panic. In the salon, she pulled open the doors to escape through the garden.
The woods would hide her.
In the distance there was a light where there was not supposed to be a light. Stairs leading to a cottage that wasn’t supposed to exist.
Lucy opened the door.
It was the kind of room she had only seen in books about the Far East. At first glance it had appeared almost completely empty, but now she could make out the pale tatami mats spread across the floor, and the highly polished wooden cabinet against one wall. The light came from a pair of slender lanterns set atop either end of the cabinet. The room smelled of damp grass, reminding her of the long walks she had taken with Michael Searle before her accident.
“Is someone here?”
Still holding onto the polished doorframe, she took a tentative step inside. The woven mats were gentle on her bruised feet. What was this place, and why hadn’t she found it before? From the outside, it had looked like any other cottage, with a deep front porch, a pair of windows on each wall adjoining the front door, and a large transom over the door to keep air flowing in summer. This was not Odette and Mason’s old house, but was somehow built on the crumbled foundation of another place. Perhaps the cottage burned down by Aaron Fauquier?
She felt such an overwhelming sense of peace that she collapsed to her knees, covering her face with her hands to weep. Here was safety. Here was a promise of comfort she had never known. All thoughts of warning Michael Searle, of the horror that waited for her in the place that had been her home for most of her life, of the monster that was her (living!) husband, fled. She wept in great, heaving sobs that released the ache in her chest and covered her hands and face with mucus and tears. Her very life seemed to be flowing from her—how shocking that she had so much life left!—and she thought of her mother, who had so thoroughly disdained weeping and anyone who indulged in it. The thought of her mother made her cry harder. Not from love, but from recognition of Selina Searle’s weakness, her inability to love her. She wept for herself, and for who she was, and was not. She wept for the woman who had wasted so many months, years of freedom—yes, it had been freedom—not seeing it for what it was because she was living in a haze of half-life.
Finally, she lifted her face from her hands and breathed deeply of the room’s scent, letting it fill her lungs with warmth. If she, who had spent so much time in these woods, had not known of this place, then surely no one else would. She couldn’t stay here forever, but perhaps for just a while, until she could gather herself.
Across the room, something new rested between the candles on the cabinet. The flames wavered in the still spring air as though someone had just walked through the room, but when she looked around, she saw only her own shadow on the wall. It occurred to her to be afraid, but, strangely, she understood that nothing in the house would hurt her.
Too weak to stand, she crawled over to the cabinet and touched the small bundle of fabric. At her touch, it cascaded over the edge of the cabinet and slipped to the floor.
It was the most beautiful robe she had ever seen. Taking the length of silk in her arms, she let her hand play over the kimono-style sleeves, and the delicately stitched placket that had been carefully matched to the pattern of peonies embroidered onto the silk. In the pale flame of the lamps, the silk glowed ivory, but the flowers themselves were the purest white
, trimmed in a vibrant rose.
Kneeling, Lucy slipped her arms into the robe and let the silk settle over her. She had so many beautiful clothes of her own, but nothing felt like this, like warm rainwater pouring over her skin. The pain from the scratches and cuts she had suffered disappeared as she closed the robe and tied it carefully with the sash.
Was it the scent of the flowers on the robe that she smelled? No. There was a small ceramic cup on the cabinet, and she leaned forward to take it. It was warm, filled with some drink. Unafraid and very thirsty, she held it to her lips.
The tea was sweet with honey, and she drank greedily, so that a bit dribbled down her chin.
She laughed as she wiped it away with her fingertips, a little embarrassed, even though she was alone.
Yes, she was truly alone. So unlike Bliss House, which felt full to her. Full of people, of movement, of a kind of constant hum of being. She closed her eyes with a sigh and, setting the cup down, lay on her side, letting her cheek rest against the woven mat.
Whenever she lay down in Bliss House, she felt its vastness. There was no corner that didn’t feel distant, unconnected to the rest of the world. Only the morphine made her feel small and protected within herself. But now she felt no worry. The cottage was like a cocoon. When she woke again, would she have wings?
She smiled, falling into a dream.
Alone, yet not alone. Someone watched Lucy from the shadowed corner of the room with pity in her dark eyes. The smile on Lucy’s face faltered. She whimpered in her sleep, murmured her child’s name.
Lucy heard the crunching of leaves, the snap of a fallen twig underfoot, but they were the sounds of her dream: a tea party in Bliss House where she served Faye and her mother poppy seed cakes from the rigid body of a large, flat fish whose single eye had been replaced by a vortex of molten red that threatened to erupt all over the cakes.
“Careful. Take them all.” She pushed the fish at her mother, whose face kept turning into a man’s. He was someone Lucy had met, but she couldn’t remember where it had been.
Faye complained that she was cold, and worried her pocket handkerchief, which made crackling noises that Lucy thought sounded like dry leaves. Lucy’s mother snapped her jaws at the cakes, her changeable lips slathering.
“We must be warm! We must go to France, Lucy. Take me to France!”
Lucy wanted to tell her that France was impossible, that it was the scene of the first degradation, but Faye couldn’t know, and Lucy was anxious that her mother shouldn’t bite her hand.
Now Lucy herself was cold, colder than she had ever been before, and her hands shook as she retreated from her ravening mother, whose teeth had grown in her mouth and were now protruding slightly from her lips. Her tongue emerged, grotesquely lengthened, and probed the air lasciviously for the poppy seed cakes.
When Lucy retreated from her mother, she fell onto the settee, and it broke under her. She collapsed onto the floor.
But it was not the floor of Bliss House.
Lucy looked up to see Terrance standing over her. The leather medicine case whose appearance filled her simultaneously with euphoria and dread was open in his hands. The case was black in the darkness, which was disturbed only by the soft glow of a lantern a few feet away, but she knew it was red, red, red, the color of the drops of blood that sometimes came out of her arm as the needle went in.
“Get away from me! Get away!” She dug her bare heels into the dirt and leaves, but she was caught in a tangle of ivy and brush. The cottage had disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared, and she was in the woods again, surrounded by ruins.
I was never in the cottage. I was never safe. Tricked!
“Where is he?” She screamed Randolph’s name, her voice ringing through the woods. Screaming made her feel warm. The sound made her feel powerful. Why hadn’t she screamed more? Would the other servants hear her? Randolph would not have come out of the house. Something was keeping him there. She was certain he hadn’t left Bliss House since the day he had been found dead. She screamed again.
Terrance leaned forward and slapped her face. “You have to calm down. I won’t let him hurt you. I promise. He got out, but it won’t happen again.” Behind him, the lantern flickered, and a shadow darker than the shadows of the trees rose up behind him. Lucy watched it take shape, brighten.
“What is it?” Terrance glanced over his shoulder.
There was something—someone—there. Lucy saw the long, dark hair first, then the oval face and small eyes, black at their center. Where the eyes were supposed to be white, they were a fiery red. As red as the vortex of the fish’s eye. “Dear God.”
The girl’s gaze rested on Lucy, but then turned to Terrance. Even though her eyes were terrifying, Lucy saw something in them soften.
“Stop it!” Terrance took her chin in his hand. “Look at me.”
“She’s watching you. She knows you.”
The girl—a ghost, surely, because she definitely wasn’t real—reached out for Terrance, but her small hand didn’t quite reach him. Still, he shuddered, then quickly recovered himself.
Lucy had never heard him speak so sharply to her. They had almost become friends. He had been the one to help her when she needed more and more of the medicine. He hadn’t even asked why, he didn’t even know their true connection: that he might be her half-brother. When she looked at the girl’s face and back to Terrance, she suddenly saw the resemblance.
Was she a sister? The ghost—why use another name for it, for that’s what she was—was so young. Not more than a teenager, younger even than Lucy herself had been when she married Randolph. Her simple gown was not any style that Lucy had ever seen, and she could not make out much detail or color because the ghost was as insubstantial as steam from a boiling kettle.
No. That wasn’t a sister’s love in her burning eyes, and neither was it a lover’s. Lucy had caught that look in her own eyes in a mirror once, when she was with Michael Searle.
It was Randolph’s mistress. Terrance’s mother.
When the leather strap jerked tight around her left arm, Lucy cried out. So hypnotized had she been, staring at the girl, that she hadn’t realized what Terrance was doing.
“This will help you. If I give you more, it will help you forget.”
Distressed as she was, she didn’t struggle. More morphine was a good thing, yes? Then she could face the knowledge, listen to Terrance. So many questions. But she was in the woods, not her bedroom. She couldn’t go back there. Randolph was there.
“Why, Terrance? Why isn’t he dead? I saw him. Why isn’t he dead?”
Terrance turned back slightly so the light shone on the syringe as he filled it. “I’ve kept him from you these past five years. The rooms underground. I’ve kept him down there. He’s my prisoner. Our prisoner.”
“What do you mean? Tell me.”
Behind him, the ghost watched Terrance, a look of hunger on her face.
“Everything he did. To me, to you, to everyone who knew him. He deserved worse than death. Did you know he built this house on the scene of a vicious murder? He chose evil. He chose it. Odette told me he killed my mother, and they never even found her body.”
Lucy was silent. She was freezing cold. She prayed the morphine would warm her. Nothing Terrance could say now could surprise her. She felt she had gone mad.
“He built rooms underneath the house. He was going to keep women there, just to see what it was like to use them and watch them die. Now he has to live there with his own insanity. I never meant for him to escape.”
You are as mad as he is. Mad. Poor Terrance. What did he do to you?
“The funeral?”
“A drug. Like this one. The undertaker is a friend.”
“Terrance, she’s watching us.” Lucy fixed on the ghost—whose hair and dress moved with a breeze that Lucy couldn’t feel.
Terrance lifted her banded arm. She couldn’t wait to be warm again. “You will feel much better in a minute. I have put more t
han usual in the syringe.” Drawing the lantern closer, he prodded her arm gently until he found a vein, and asked if she was ready.
Lucy nodded, holding her breath as he inserted the needle. “Thank you, Terrance.” She closed her eyes.
He let her fall back slightly onto the brush.
“She’s here. Your mother is here.”
Startled, Terrance looked behind him. “There’s no one here.”
The night wood was at rest around them. When Lucy opened her eyes again, the ghost had dropped back and was now watching them both.
“She looks like you.”
“You’re dreaming. You can sleep now. I will take care of you.”
The lantern light illuminated one side of his bald head. Lucy remembered getting off the train when they’d returned from Paris to see that he had shaved all his hair off. Randolph had lost much of his hair after they married, but he was vain and had added powders and pomades that he thought no one knew about to make it look thicker. She forced the most recent image of him out of her mind: the sagging skin, the fine, lank strands of icy white hair. His mottled cheeks and neck. A monster.
“When you wake up, he will be gone. I can control him. I promise I’ll help you forget.”
Lucy didn’t know how much later it was—a few seconds, maybe. Or hours. The memory of something unpleasant pricked her. In her mind she could see it, and knew it existed, but it had little or nothing to do with her. She heard the rustle of leaves. She smelled the leaves. Woodsmoke.
“Michael Searle?”
When she opened her eyes again, she could hardly breathe. She might have been submerged in deep water, struggling frantically upward, looking for the light. There was darkness above her, a tangle of tree branches. Thrashing to one side, she saw the girl-ghost, her bloodied eyes searching Lucy’s own. Was that pity in them? Lucy tried desperately to form a thought. But beyond the girl, through her, a bright orb of white light bobbed through the trees, moving away from them, leaving her behind. When full darkness came, it closed neatly, and finally, like the shutter of the camera of the man on the Rue de Rivoli.
The Abandoned Heart Page 37
