Darkness at Morning Star

by Joyce C. Ware

  The tool I borrowed weighed heavily in my pocket as I crossed the dusty yard to the bunkhouse, but I sensed even before I used it to pry off the top of the sill that I would find nothing of interest. Indeed, the hollowed stone contained nothing at all, not even the dried husks of insects, so tightly had it been fitted. True, the coating of dust on the bottom held a faint shimmer, which could possibly be a residue of gold long since removed, but even if so, this tantalizing hint provided no clue to its present whereabouts. If anything, it made it all the more likely that any gold secreted at Morning Star had been long since spent.

  I made my way slowly back to the house to make my discouraging report. As I topped the rise and viewed the Morning Star manse against its rolling prairie setting, the cyclopean pillars flanking the entrance might have been the pagan gods I had fancifully evoked, eyes and all. Unlike the barn knothole, no light beamed dazzingly through them, but if it did ...

  In my mind’s eye I suddenly saw, with the clarity of a fine steel engraving, the rising sun’s rays thusly focused, as dazzling as a faceted diamond. But the pillars were differently proportioned. There were more of them, too, some of which, unlike these, were topped with massive stone crosspieces. The picture was much too vivid to be a product of my imagination; it was a memory, but a memory of what?

  I stood there as if rooted, staring at the pillars before me, willing my mind to bridge the gap between their reality and the vision in my mind. It must have been something Malcolm Wilcox had described to me, or something he showed me... something that had been niggling at the back of my mind, on and off, ever since I arrived....

  All at once it flooded back: the illustrated books Malcolm brought back from England after his last trip there and his account of a visit to the temple of great stones raised, some said, to the ancient Druid gods of Britain....

  Hadn’t Bazz said the architect who designed Morning Star was English? He would have known about that prehistoric circle of stone. The name played hide-and-seek in my head. Stone circle... stone hemicircle . .. stone henge . .. that was it! Stonehenge. A circle of stones whose pillar-flanked altar—bloodied, some believed, by human sacrifice—was intended by ancient worshippers to mark the rising of the sun on the morning of the summer solstice.

  I looked up at the six limestone pillars. A semicircle, not a circle, and the pierced pair framed the entrance of the great stone house instead of an altar heelstone, but the similarity of the concept was striking. It was just the sort of thing that would have appealed to the hard and unforgiving man Belle and Basil had described to me. Ross Cooper would have enjoyed the challenge of having those huge pillars cut and erected on this bloody ground, and relished even more what they represented: the revengeful defiling of a sacrificial site sacred to the tribe who had murdered his parents, coupled with an arrogant adaptation of the powerful symbolism of the summer solstice to his own ends.

  Elsewhere, spring heralded the renewal of life. At Morning Star, Cobby had intimated, it more often than not ushered in a season of sickness and death. Was this the price exacted for the defiance of gods whose favors were bought by the blood of innocents? I shuddered.

  I stared at the two blind-eyed stone monoliths, guardians of a secret revealed but once a year. I knew where the gold was now, or at least I would at the moment of sunrise the morning of the summer solstice.

  Which one, I wondered, would point the way to where it lay hidden?

  My discovery should have lent wings to my heels, but as I approached the kitchen entrance my footsteps dragged. Why should I be reluctant to share my discovery? Was it because Belle and Bazz might think me daft? Even if they did, wouldn’t they be ready by now to clutch at anything offering a glimmer of promise? And yet, the more I thought of it, the more far-fetched my idea seemed. I pictured Basil’s raised eyebrows and Belle’s derisive smile as I spun a theory arrived at by linking a ray of sun through a knothole with an uncertain memory of ancient stones and pagan rituals.

  My mouth went dry. Perhaps I had better take another look at the architect’s drawings before saying anything, to make sure it was rooted more in fact than fancy. We had all but ignored the sheets depicting the facade, assuming its ornamentation had no relevance to our search for the gold’s hiding place, but I remembered them as being quite detailed. Yes, I told myself, that was the only prudent thing to do.

  Reassured by my decision, I pulled open the screen door and was immediately enveloped by the pungent aroma arising from herbs brewing in kettles boiling furiously on the big black range. Belle and Bazz, steam-wreathed, seemed like figures in a shadow play. Bazz was sitting slumped on Belle’s high stool, his face pale and drawn, his skin scratched and bleeding. My sister was applying salve to his wounds none too tenderly, all the while muttering what were clearly angry reproaches.

  “Good heavens, Bazz,” I cried. “You look as if someone tied you up in a sack full of cats. Whatever happened?”

  Belle looked up, startled. She frowned. “Well, it’s about time! I could’ve searched the bunkhouse three times over by now.”

  “I just wanted to be sure I didn’t overlook anything,” I protested. Stung by her criticism, I saw no reason to mention my interlude with the kittens in the hayloft.

  Belle paused in her ministrations. “And ... ?”

  I shook my head. “I looked everywhere, inside and out.”

  “Damn!” Belle applied a last swipe of salve to a long, deep scratch, still beaded with blood, on Bazz’s neck. He winced.

  “Bazz?”

  He slanted a sullen look at me, then turned his head away.

  “Please, Bazz,” I persisted, “tell me what happened?”

  “You guessed about right,” Belle supplied, ‘“cept it wasn’t a sackful of cats—all it took was one big old tom. He finished with Quinn’s quarters sooner than he expected, so he decided to search the barn. To spare us the trouble, he said.” Her voice had taken on the false brightness of a Sunday school teacher trying to compensate for the listlessness of her pupils. “One of those cussed barn cats didn’t take kindly to his trespass in’.”

  “I’m ... I’m sorry, Bazz.” I had been going to say I was surprised I hadn’t seen him in the barn, but I had already piously claimed to have spent my time searching the bunkhouse. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “If you’re handy with a needle, you might sew up his shirt later.”

  I looked closer. Bazz’s head was still turned away from me, but I could see several long rents in the front of his bloodied shirt. “Of course,” I said, wondering at the fury of the attack. The only cats I had seen in the barn were the kittens, but if they were nursing when Bazz came in and the mother thought he posed a threat to her babies.... Yes, that could, account for it.

  Belle ruffled Basil’s auburn hair. “This young feller needs a nursemaid. Fact is, he needs something else even more, don’t you, Bazz?”

  Basil hunched lower to escape Belle’s hand. She clasped his shoulders and gave a little shake. “C’mon, Bazzy, you can’t expect me to ask her for you.”

  Already unsettled by Belle’s rapid shifts in tone, this new, falsely playful one set my teeth on edge. “Ask me what?” I demanded.

  I saw Belle give Bazz a surreptitious nudge. He sighed, drew himself up, and slowly turned his head. His gray eyes, dulled, expressionless, stared out at me above pale cheeks slashed with crimson. He looked dreadful. “Serena—” His voice broke; he swallowed, hard. “Serena, will you do me the honor of becoming ...”

  The words, run together, dropped, off into a whisper.

  I stared back at him. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Speak up, Bazz!” Belle hissed.

  He shut his eyes for a long moment. When he opened them, they were once again alert and focused. “Serena, will you ... will you marry me?” This time, his voice gathered strength at the end.

  Belle’s beaming smile faltered as I stood there dumbly. I could feel hot tears welling in my eyes. Angry tears. I didn’t trust myself to speak.
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  “Reenie? Cat got your tongue?”

  I whirled on my sister. “I don’t recall asking you to act as my matchmaker. Belle. Is that why you invited me to Morning Star? As a convenient mail-order bride for your chum?”

  Belle’s eyes went blank with shock. “Reenie, darling! I never—”

  “Maybe, if he had asked on his own, with no prodding from you, I might have considered answering, but this ... this is demeaning. Even Ernest treated me with more respect.” Defiance did not come easily to me. My mouth felt cottony; pulses of pain traveled up the taut cords on my neck into my skull. I drew a deep, shaky breath. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to my room. I’ve developed a frightful headache.”

  “You’ll be coming down for supper?” Belle asked.

  I paused in the doorway. “You’ll have to do the best you can with whatever’s in the larder,” I said over my shoulder, guessing from her querulous tone she was more anxious about the meal than the loss of my companionship. “I would have prepared something earlier, but I knew you didn’t want me to take the time.”

  There was no reply; I hadn’t expected one. We all knew the truth of it: first things first, which in this case was Ross Cooper’s cursed gold.

  My room, thanks to its position on the eastern back side of the house, was dim and cool. When I closed the door behind me, I was on a private little planet of my own; my only connection with the everyday world were the wide windows, which offered breezy refreshment by the simple action of lifting up the sash. I leaned on the broad stone sill and inhaled the grassy fragrance of the sunbaked prairie. The tightness in the back of my neck eased, the pain seeming to flow out over the sill into the long shadows thrown by the eclipsing bulk of the great stone house. If only my heart and soul could be refreshed as simply!

  I lay down upon the bed, drew over me a shawl I had left folded at its foot, and closed my eyes, hoping that drowsiness would overtake me. As I did so, a bird flew in the open window. Wings beating against the walls, beak opened wide in panic, it made a single erratic tour before arrowing out again into the sky’s wide blueness. Startled into wakefulness, I stared after it, wondering if my stay here at Morning Star might not be fairly represented by that bird’s sudden, unplanned detour from its life’s expected course.

  Sudden? How else describe my flight from marriage to a man I did not love and from foster parents who did not love me? Unplanned? Except for my arrival here—it seemed so long ago!—nothing had happened as expected. Bazz’s awkward, reluctant proposal was only the latest in a series of unsettling surprises: There was the hardness I detected in Belle—less surprising now in light of her subsequent heartbreaking revelations. Quinn’s explosive arrival and the relish with which he unfolded the bloody history of the ground on which this house had been built, transforming Morning Star from a place offering a new life of promise to one blighted by revenge and greed. And the garden.... No, I would not think of that! I would not allow myself to reflect upon those obscene plants and Belle’s baffling, prideful attachment to them.

  You’re forgetting the good things, I chided myself. What about Belle’s generosity? Dear Bingo and our carefree jaunts across the prairie? The love of music and books shared with Bazz? Our singing together, closely harmonizing, had a warm and happy energy....

  My troubled thoughts eased; my mind drifted pleasurably along the slow, eddying currents of recall. Wildflowers and morning bird song ... distant thunderheads spreading like inkblots across the wide blue sky ... the pond and its sheltering willow ... the pond where Quinn kissed me....

  A rapping at my door roused me from a dream of whirlwinds. Bingo and I, retreating from a threatening scud of clouds, raced across the prairie, our course twisting tortuously to escape the dark, roaring corkscrews that appeared from nowhere to block our progress, now here, now there....

  Heart pounding, thinking at first I was hearing distant thunder, I sat up as the door quietly opened.

  “Serena?” It was Bazz, carrying a tray. He entered hesitantly; his eyebrows had an anxious tilt. “I hope I haven’t disturbed you. I’ve brought you something to eat... and an apology.” His eyes flicked around the room, seeking a place to set the tray.

  I removed books from the table by my bed. “You can put it here, Bazz.” I considered scooting my legs over to give him room to perch beside me, but thought better of it. “And bring over the chair next to the bureau for yourself.”

  As he did so, I inspected the contents of the tray. Except for the cup of tea and tin of milk that accompanied it, my appetite was not tempted by the plate containing two slices of cold, greasy meat— hacked no doubt from the ham Rita had fed us for several nights before her disappearance—a portion of charred beans and half of the heel of the stale loaf I had eaten for breakfast.

  “I’m not very hungry, Bazz, but I appreciate the thought.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not much of a cook,“ he said with a rueful smile as I edged the plate to one side and added milk to the tea.

  I raised my eyebrows at him over the edge of the tea cup. Belle herself had mentioned his need of a nursemaid.

  “But that’s not why I asked you to marry me,” he added.

  “Then, why did you, Bazz? You don’t love me.” My challenge caught him by surprise. He flushed and dropped his eyes. “My mother loved my father; it didn’t bring her much happiness, but a man ought to be married.

  “You’re really not making much sense, Bazz,” I said gently.

  “Yes, I am,” he protested. “I’m saying that love isn’t everything. I’m saying that I... I like you better than any girl I know....”

  I suspected he knew too few to make that much of a recommendation. “You and Belle are very close,” I pointed out.

  “That’s different,” he said with a flat certainty that puzzled me. “We share ... memories, not interests. You and I... we like the same books and poetry, we even know the same songs, and you must admit our voices blend well together.” His eyes brightened. “Why, with a little practice, we could give concerts in the towns along our route! Most people like music, and Belle could use the opportunity to sell her elixirs to the audiences we’d attract. I could even write duets especially for us and—”

  “We could do that without being married, Bazz.” He looked stricken. “I’m sure I’d grow to love you, Serena, you’re so good and sweet.”

  How perverse the human heart was! I liked Bazz. I enjoyed his company, and he was a paragon of virtue compared to his renegade brother, and yet... and yet I had a sense of something missing, something hollow. I thought of the gray kitten’s hiss and clawed reproof when I ruffled its fur. Did I perversely yearn for the excitement of loving against the grain? All I knew was that Quinn, against all reason, stirred my senses, and although I did not know what that signified, I was unwilling to settle for anything less.

  I reached out to pat his hand. “There’s no need to rush into anything, Bazz. I have no doubt there’ll be a preacher in every town we pass through.”

  “Belle won’t like it,” he said in a tone of near desperation. “People will talk!”

  “I’m not about to get married to please my sister, Bazz! People will probably take you for our brother, and if they don’t, why should we care what strangers we’re unlikely to ever see again might say about us?”

  Bazz got up from his chair and walked over to the window. He stood there for a long moment, staring out in silence at the empty prairie. The sun had set; shadows had begun to darken the corners of my room. When he turned back, his face was indistinct in the gloom.

  “So that’s that, eh?” His low voice expressed resignation, but I noticed a slight relaxation in the set of his shoulders.

  “It’s for the best, Bazz, you’ll see. And if we change our minds later...” I shrugged and lifted up the tray. I had drained the tea, but could eat no more than a few bites of the ham and bread.

  He stepped forward to relieve me of it. “As you said, it shouldn’t be hard to find a preacher happy
to do the honors.” He paused at the door.

  “Can you manage it?” I called.

  He glanced over his shoulder. “Are you referring to the door or your sister?” His tone was flat, almost bitter.

  Oh dear. “Bazz, if it would make it easier ... just tell Belle I decided to sleep on it.”

  “Thank you, Serena.” He rested the tray on his hip. “Who knows, maybe your dreams will bring you a change of mind.”

  He backed out smiling. As the door drifted shut behind him, I lay back with a relieved sigh. If my hunch about the stone pillars proved right, Belle would have more interesting things to think about tomorrow than marrying me off to Basil Cooper.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Up before dawn, my stomach protesting its emptiness, a search of the pantry revealed that if someone didn’t set about replenishing the larder, there would soon be nothing to eat. Except for a hambone, some dried beef and a dozen or so cans of milk, the staples—beans and peas, sugar, coffee, cornmeal, flour—were all in short supply. Bazz was supposed to have gone to town for that very purpose, but obviously other errands had taken precedence. I sighed. Didn’t anyone but me give a fig about food? Cobby would have to set out with the wagon for town as soon as he returned from Nebraska, and if the men returned from their holiday first....

  But that was no concern of mine, I assured myself. My responsibility began and ended with the preparation of enough food for the next couple of days and to start us off on our journey. At least there was enough for that; the men would just have to catch themselves a cow.

  By the time my bread dough was ready to set aside to rise, the big pot of soup I’d prepared earlier had begun to simmer. I gave the hambone, peas and chopped onion a last vigorous stir before putting on the lid and damping down the heat. I had already prepared a new batch of sourdough starter, collected eggs, watered and fed the hens, and pulled onions, beets and carrots from the kitchen garden.