Well, we’ve had that time. From Wednesday to now. If it was Wednesday when I awoke. Nothing I know can be taken as the absolute truth.
Jesus.
I bring a hand to my forehead and close my eyes. My thoughts are going round in circles. Paranoia is exerting its hold on me. I’m going to go crazy if I’m cooped up here for much longer.
I set out to find Jeremy and demand he take us home.
But he’s not where I would expect to find him at this time of day. I scour the entire first story, calling out his name. There is no response.
I climb the stairs to the second level and try again. He’s not there, either.
“Where did the dratted man get to?” I mutter to myself.
Then I see a small doorway, expertly hidden in a nook in the wall. It’s been left slightly ajar. I never noticed it before.
I push it open. There is a small set of dark, curling stairs leading up. I feel a tiny bit of radiant warmth, as if from a fire, coming from up there.
“Jeremy?” I call out, one hand on the railing. “Are you there?”
I don’t get a response but I head up anyway.
The staircase seems to circle forever. As I climb higher, the heat becomes more pronounced.
At the top, I emerge into an unfurnished hallway. There are no rugs on the floors, no paintings decorating the walls. Just a long, empty stretch of wooden floorboards and cedar walls leading to what must be the attic.
I walk forward, curious yet cautious. “Jeremy?”
I turn a corner, and see the source of the heat.
There is an enormous fireplace on the far wall. It’s bigger, even, than any of the ones downstairs. By the looks of it, it was part of the original house.
There is a single armchair in the room. It looks tattered and old. A set of closed French doors on the opposite side complete the scene.
Jeremy is in the armchair. He does not look at me when I enter. He does speak.
“Come here, Lilly. Sit in my lap.”
I do.
“What are you doing up here?” I ask.
“Thinking,” he says solemnly. The flames crackle and burn before us. “Reminiscing.”
“About what?”
“Many things,” he sighs. He sounds both contemplative and morose. I’ve never seen him in such a state.
“Do you know what’s behind those doors, Lilly?” he asks, tilting his head in their direction.
“No,” I say. “How could I?”
“It’s nothing frightening, I assure you. Come.” He stands and takes my hand. “We’ll face it together.”
“Face what together, Jeremy?” I begin. But he’s already halfway across the room.
He brings me in front of the doors. He places one hand on them, almost reverently. “These haven’t been opened for nearly twenty years,” he admits. His voice is so low I’m not sure I was intended to hear.
“Why?” I ask. I’m not scared. Not really. I can read the situation, and I don’t think there’s a nasty surprise waiting for me on the other side.
This is about Jeremy. Something about these doors, and whatever room they lead to, holds meaning for him.
“Because,” he says, tightening his grip on my hand, “they lead to my mother’s sanctuary.”
With that, his free hand falls to the handles, and he presses them down to push one door inward.
Unlike the bare room behind us, this one is fully furnished. There are, however, large white sheets thrown over everything. The air is stuffy, yet somehow not stale.
I see the impression of a bed in the middle. Drawers, closets, standing wardrobes on the side. Something that might be a vanity, with a large oval shape, reminiscent of a mirror behind it.
The light from the fire behind us reaches into the room. Our shadows are thrown on the floor like those of haunted spirits. Even with Jeremy at my side, even with him taking the lead, it feels like I’m trespassing. Worse than when I stumbled into Jeremy’s secret surveillance room thinking it was his office.
It feels like I’m intruding on a sacred place. Almost like this is a temple in which I don’t belong.
“Jeremy…” I say.
“I would never have done this without you,” he tells me. He takes a step forward, and—for a moment—seems almost to stagger.
It passes in less than the time it takes to blink. But Jeremy—Jeremy Stonehart, always so firm and sure of himself—actually misplaced his step.
He releases my hand and strides across the dust-covered floor. Almost as if to make up for the momentary weakness.
He stops before a long set of drapes and flings them open.
Dust flies everywhere with the disturbance. And suddenly we have pale moonlight shining in, clashing and contrasting with the warm orange glow of the fire.
Jeremy opens the window, and a draft immediately blows past him. The cool air sweeps through and cleanses the room.
And then Jeremy turns around, and begins to methodically, silently, take the sheets off the furniture.
I move to help him. We work in an understanding silence, neither of us saying a word, but neither of us needing to, either. Knowing his mother’s influence on him, I can only begin to imagine what coming here must mean. I wasn’t even aware this was his family’s house, and not something he bought only after he became Stonehart.
It takes us a good half hour to restore the room to its former grace. Jeremy does not just throw the sheets on the floor after he’s uncovered the furniture. He folds them all, in tight, compact squares.
I don’t know why he does it. But I’m not about to interrupt his reverie. There is an undeniable softness to his motions. A gentle tenderness. He functions in an almost dream-like state.
Finally, there is only one white sheet left. It covers the mantle of what must be another fireplace. I noticed Jeremy purposefully avoiding it before. Now that it’s the only one remaining, it cannot be ignored.
He stops before it and regards it for a moment. “Come here, Lilly.” Those are the first words he’s spoken since we entered. “This is something I want to do with you.”
I glide up to him. While we were working, I’d intentionally averted my eyes from any personal belongings. The figurines on the shelves, the items inside the drawers and the paintings on the walls would be pointed out to me by Jeremy, in time, if he so chose. I did not want to spoil the first impression by reading anything into them.
“This is important to you?” I state, more than ask.
“Very,” Jeremy says. “I did not think I would be capable of returning here, ever again. This room…holds so much meaning. There was so much pain. These walls have known so much suffering. But there was also good. There was love. And kindness. It could not overcome the darkness, Lilly. But it made it just a little more tolerable.” He looks at me. “Does that make any sense?”
“Of course,” I answer him, slipping my fingers through his. “But whose pain, Jeremy? Yours, or…”
“Hers,” he says. With that, he pulls down the last remaining sheet.
It flutters to the floor slowly, like a silk ribbon caught on a breeze. I understand immediately why Jeremy left this sheet for last.
Above the fireplace, atop the mantle, is a glorious portrait of a beautiful woman. She looks a queen, sitting straight-backed in a gilded chair. Long black curls fall just past her shoulders. The ebony tresses cover the bit of skin exposed by a low-cut dress.
It’s impossible to guess her age. She might have been no older than I am when this was painted. Or she might have been fifteen, twenty years older. The fine lines around her eyes, so expertly painted, do not provide clues. Rather, they make her seem elevated. Elegant. Transcendent, somehow of both time and space.
I don’t need to look at Jeremy to see the resemblance. It stands out right away.
The eyes, I think. It’s the eyes that are the same.
I thought—assumed, quite rightly—that Jeremy had inherited his eyes from his father. I thought so because of the way
he spoke of Hugh, because of how powerful he made him sound. I could not imagine a strong man with a tepid stare.
I should have realized this was not the case after I’d met Hugh. He has small, sneaking, darting eyes. The eyes of a con man. The eyes of a trickster.
The eyes of a foul, dirty rat.
Jeremy’s eyes, on the other hand, are magnificent. Just like his mother’s. They are full of pride and strength and knowledge. Knowledge in a sense of self, not knowledge of useless facts and figures. Knowledge of who you are as a person. Knowledge of your place in the world, and confidence in the scope of your abilities.
“She’s beautiful,” I breathe. I wince and immediately regret my choice of words. Beauty is so transient, so passing. So meaningless even, if it is not backed up by anything more. Beautiful sounds like an empty, hollow word to describe the radiance of the woman in the portrait before me.
But Jeremy seems not to mind. In fact, I think he’s shifted to some deep, faraway place. “Yes,” he mutters, only half-aware of me anymore. “Yes, she is. Isn’t she?”
He reaches out and touches the border of the painting with one hand.
So many questions come to mind. How did a woman with such obvious strength succumb to a man like Hugh? How far must she have fallen to give in to the same drugs that claimed my father’s mind? How bad must her life have become? How desperate?
All of a sudden, a great swell of pity rises up inside me. Pity, mixed with something else, something I try to deny but cannot. Something dark, sharp, and very dangerous:
Resentment.
This was the woman who caused me so much pain. This was the woman who made Jeremy seek me out. She lies at the heart of all this, at the very core of the nightmares I’ve had to endure.
But she also led you to some good places, a voice reminds me. She led you to Jeremy—not to Stonehart—and all the good that that brought.
Yes, something counters, but without her, my life would still be my own.
I have an almost irrepressible urge to claw at the painting and fling it into the fire. To erase Jeremy’s mother’s confident, self-assured smugness.
Then I catch myself envisioning that very scene. I stop, and shudder. It is not who I am. I am not vain or stupid enough to feel threatened by the painting of a woman who has been dead for twenty years.
The depth of emotions conjured by looking at this woman surprise me. And if those are but a tenth of what Jeremy feels, relating to her…then all of his actions make perfect sense.
Resentment rears its ugly head again.
Is this the woman I am competing with? Is this the one who has such a strong hold over Jeremy’s mind? How is it fair to be compared to someone whose beauty is everlasting, captured forever in a painting like this?
Yet that is precisely the struggle going on inside Jeremy’s mind. He’d said so himself. There were only two women he’d ever truly loved: his mother, and me.
Does he in some sick, deprived, and twisted way, view me as a…as a replacement for her?
Goosebumps rise on my skin. I can do nothing to cast away the icky unpleasantness of that thought.
I’d heard it said that boys, when they grow up, want to marry women who remind them of their mothers. I never considered the veracity of that thought. I’d imagined maybe the opposite is true: Girls want to find someone who reminds them of their father. However, having no such figure in my life, I could never judge for myself whether that was true.
And yet everything that Jeremy’s done, all that’s led him to me, seems to have emanated from the woman I am looking at now. Perhaps it’s even worse. All that Jeremy’s done stems from his memories of her. Memories that have doubtlessly made her seem more perfect than she ever was. More perfect than anybody could be.
Jeremy has this perfect image of her in his head. An image shaped by the childhood he spent by her side. Charles told me she was the only one to ever show him affection. That made her all the more precious to him.
Memories formed in childhood are the hardest to cast away. Impossible, really. They come from a time when you are most impressionable, when your view of the world is not your own but that of your parents.
So whatever Jeremy might expect from me, I can never come close to matching her perfection, her splendor. It exists in a void that time and events cannot touch. It exists solely in Jeremy’s mind.
I don’t want to be here anymore.
I pull Jeremy’s hand. “Darling, come away,” I say. The voice that emerges is scarcely my own. “Come with me. Let’s go to bed.”
Jeremy, transfixed by the painting, does not even hear me.
“She’s just as I remember,” he says, his speech far away and distant. “This is who she was.”
A little bit of wild terror comes to life inside me, hearing the old bitterness of his words.
“My sweet…”
“No!” Jeremy rips his hand from mine. It’s a savage motion. “You can go if you want, Lilly. Leave me be. You cannot imagine the courage it’s taken for me to show her to you. If you cannot appreciate that…” He turns his head to me, and finishes in a viscous snarl, “then you’re no better than him.”
I do not need to ask to know who “him” is. It’s obvious.
Jeremy’s father.
I want to leave. But, I can feel that this is a pivotal moment for me and Jeremy. Whatever happens now, whatever either of us will do next, will remain firmly planted in his head and define the relationship that we have until the very end.
So I swallow my fear, fight past my own discomfort, and do what I would want him to do for me, were I in his shoes.
I step up to Jeremy and place my hands on his back. I rub his shoulders, slowly, and lean my head against his arm.
And to my immense gratification, I feel him soften beneath me.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s just—emotions, Lilly. Emotions I have no experience dealing with. They’re all coming up, now. I cannot stop them.”
“Then don’t,” I tell him slowly. “Just know that, whatever happens, I won’t abandon you. I won’t leave you be.”
He places his hand over mine. “Thank you,” he says.
We stay like that, together yet apart, content in the silence wrapping us like two glaciers floating by each other in an otherwise empty sea. It’s only when Jeremy stirs, with no provocation from me, that the spell is finally lifted.
“Come then,” he says, brushing a kiss over my knuckles. “Let me tell you about her.”
Chapter Three
Downstairs, Jeremy begins his tale.
“This house once belonged to my father,” he says, leading me down the steps. “It was our winter home. We would come here every year for the holidays.
“I always loved the trip. Something about the vastness of the castle called to me. We lived lavishly at home. But home was…well, it was ordinary. It was familiar. Coming here for a few weeks in December was like a trip to fantasyland.
“It was magical, Lilly, when viewed through the eyes of a young boy. My best memories are from when I was five, six, or seven. They’re just fragments, of course. But I can feel the warmth. I still remember the sensation that seeing the castle rise up in the distance evoked.
“That was when I still had a flawed and partial understanding of the world.
“I was born last, as I told you before. The age gap between me and my older brothers was enormous. It was an unnavigable gulf. I did not see it as such at the time, but they did.
“They did not feel attached to me the way I did them. I was a nuisance—a cat to spit upon when I came too close. Naïve as I was and yet still hopeful, I could never fault my brothers for what they did. I loved them, and their behavior toward me was simply…ordinary. I thought it was normal.
“Of course, much of their resentment stemmed from my father. He had no qualms telling them quite clearly how little he thought of me. That is where they learned their behavior.
“My mother, as all good mothers do, shielded m
e from the worst. In fact, for the first seven or eight years of my life, I did not know anything was truly wrong.
“But my brothers’ cruelty became worse as the years passed. They did it with full immunity because my father did not mind. If anything, I think he praised them for it. He thought it would help me grow up tough.
“It might be hard to imagine, Lilly. But I was small, and scrawny, growing up. Physical grace and a strong presence did not come naturally to me.” He gives a humorless laugh. “They are things I had to learn.”
I think back to all Charles had told me—all the things Jeremy does not know I know—and have a more complete picture of Jeremy Stonehart, as a young boy.
“But that is not what I want to tell you about. It is not my struggle that matters. It is hers. Besides…“ He pauses to pour himself a glass of scotch. “…I endured much, much worse in my teenage years.”
There’s that allusion again. The mere mention of something having gone horribly wrong before he was a man. He spoke of it once before, when he warned me about suppressing the feelings I have about my time by the pillar. It has since stood out in my mind as something very central to who he became as a man.
I want to ask him about it. I intend to ask him about it. But not now. Now, the best thing for me to do is simply listen.
“This home has good memories,” he says, “and bad. It is here where I first witnessed my mother’s abuse at my father’s hands.
“I heard him yelling through the walls. It frightened me. When my father yelled, it meant he was truly angry. There was no telling what he might do.
“He took pleasure inflicting pain on living things, I think. It is a trait he’s carried his whole life. He passed it on to my brothers. But, unlike them—and despite what you might think—it did not pass onto me.
“Sometimes things like that are…” Jeremy’s lips twitch. “…necessary. Unfortunately so, but necessary nonetheless. Don’t get me wrong, Lilly. I’m well aware of what I’ve done. But let’s just say that if, instead, you had found yourself in the hands of either of my older brothers, or Hugh…“ His voice takes on a grave severity. “…you would not be alive today.”
Uncovering You: The Complete Series (Mega Box Set) Page 84
