by Denney, Hope
Somerset was on the arm of Demeter, about to take part in a polka, but was scanning the masses for Phillip Russell when the clock struck midnight.
The party seemed to sober up for a moment as they all paused their absurdities to listen to the hollow toll from the ancient Russell grandfather clock. Several whoops and yawps rose as the twelfth gong started.
“I have always hoped to carouse into a fresh day!” exclaimed Demeter. “What do you say, Miss Forrest? Shall we christen August eighth with a dance?”
Mrs. Russell, weary from party preparation and showing her tiredness, began ordering the servants to make ready beds and pallets for overnight guests. She suggested someone dispose of her old punch and freshen the bowl with new ice and drink. Then she silenced the band’s jaunty polka rhythm and, in hopes of winding the evening down, she requested “Auld Lang Syne” again. Laura and Eve scrambled to the piano to sing.
Somerset parted her lips to tell Demeter yes but stopped short as the echo of the last gong stopped vibrating the floor. Intuition told her something was wrong while unease permeated her. The reason behind it was just out of her mental grasp and she looked about the room as though it would appear to her.
“What is it?” asked Demeter with a sly smile.
“What day did you say it is?”
“My dear, midnight passed and it is August eighth.”
Laura’s and Eve’s very different sopranos warbled in tune but never harmonized.
“I’ve had the best time with you tonight,” she flung over her shoulder, “but I should have been home long ago.”
Demeter’s laughing dark eyes grew serious and his mouth asked questions she didn’t hear as she trotted to Joseph and Victoria.
“Joseph, come. Victoria, now,” she said as she sped by them.
Others were heading out the door as well, having realized the late hour. Somerset pushed past them as they loitered on the porch with unhurried good-byes and promises to see each other soon and headed for the wagon.
***
Chapter 11
Somerset climbed onto the wagon seat and waited as Jim went to retrieve their horse. Victoria was close behind, but Joseph hobbled out of the house looking annoyed.
“What is the rush?” he drawled, throwing his arms wide.
Sawyer appeared instead of Jim with the horse. He hitched the animal in minutes. He looked more sober and alert than earlier.
“Somerset, why did you come tearing out of the house?”
“I don’t have time to discuss it. I have to get home now and I’m not sharing why with the likes of a common—”
Somerset glanced around. People weren’t so occupied that they couldn’t enjoy a dramatic scene. A few people looked over at them in the darkness, interested by the intonation of her voice.
“You never mind,” she said between clenched teeth. “Let go of the reins now.”
Joseph pulled himself up beside her with a low groan.
“Hand her the reins, Sawyer. I shouldn’t drive. Somerset, what in the devil is the matter with you now?”
She beat the horse across its back with the reins.
“I’m following you home,” Sawyer shouted after them as they rolled away.
“I don’t understand,” said Victoria. “I was having the best time.”
Heat lightning flashed. It left a lingering red impression for a few seconds everywhere it flashed. Thunder pounded in the distance, and the wind kissed them with the foreshadowing of rain to come.
“What day is it?” asked Somerset.
Sweat moistened the bosom and underarms of her dress. Her back was sticky with perspiration and the basque of her dress felt about two sizes too small.
“It’s August eighth.”
“I don’t understand,” repeated Victoria.
“I refuse to believe I’m the only one in our home who keeps up with this, but worse than that, I can’t believe I left Mother at home tonight. It’s August eighth. Isn’t this the day Theodore died? Doesn’t it all make sense now? This night was a ruse. She’s been looking for her diary for months, and she was ill enough to call for the doctor on a night she’s looked forward to. I can’t believe I was so thoughtless.”
“She wanted us out of the house before she had hysterics,” inferred Victoria. “She wanted us out of the house when she lost it again.”
“I don’t want to go home then,” declared Joseph. “Who wants to listen to her wail all night? Papa stayed home with her. He can mark a calendar even if I can’t.”
“She is in pain,” chided Victoria.
“So are we!” Joseph retorted. “I am sick of that woman’s vapors. How many sacred personal days does she need to remember? To think that this all started with some innocent boy’s drowning decades ago. Every other day of the year is a day she claims changed her life forever.”
“Her life did change forever. A single day can change your life forever.”
“Are you daft? Do you think I don’t know that? Do you not remember that I almost died on the Chickamauga? Have you already forgotten that I nearly lost my leg? We all have important dates in our lives, all of us, but we don’t get sick and weak just because an anniversary rolls around. I am done indulging her.”
Somerset didn’t utter a word as she sat between them, listening to them argue. She thought of herself as an amalgam of Victoria’s blind compassion and Joseph’s stark realism. She was neither too soft to exist on her own nor was she so strong that she could cast out all the help in her life.
Teddie might be the young god while Helen was the model sainted wife, and Joseph might be the black sheep while Victoria was the wronged sweet child. She was going to be more than the face that put Blanche back on the map. She had a long line of strengths and even weaknesses to draw on and cherish within her family. She lifted her shoulders and exhaled, hoping that she was going to be fine.
“Fine then,” Joseph was saying. His bitterness seemed to intensify the heat lightning. “How many family members does she have to sacrifice then to absolve herself of the sin that she didn’t get the life she wanted in the end? Because Papa is running himself ragged trying to accrue back every penny the Marshalls ever lost. Because Somerset has become the sacrificial lamb at Orchard Rest. She’s going to try to marry above us—not that that’s even possible—to put us back on the social pedestal that Mother regrets she declined. Because Teddie married and moved hundreds of miles away just so that he could be his own man instead of being forced to reinvent himself as the resurrection of Uncle Theodore. Who was he anyhow? Other than some good-looking, wealthy simpleton who drowned trying to save Aunt Muriel, who was he?”
“Stop, Joseph.”
“I will not. I’m too sober to push it all aside tonight. Because poor Helen will never look in a mirror without wincing. Her crime? Being merely ordinary. Because I am not my brother. There isn’t a Marshall bone in my body, and Mother desperately wanted a second chance with a son after she failed with Theodore. It wouldn’t have done any good, though, if I had been like him—I’d been ignored for almost two solid decades by the time she got around to acknowledging my existence. And you, Victoria—”
“Don’t you dare!”
“You made such a surprising nice end to the family. You didn’t generate all the attention Somerset did, but you didn’t disappoint like Helen. You were going to do some amazing thing for Mother’s standing until you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now you have a child who not only ruined the last of Mother’s campaign but forced her into the unforgiveable position of letting everyone wonder just whose child he is. I’m certain you hope Somerset marries very well or chances are, you’ll never make it out of Orchard Rest before you die. I am tempted to save you all the humiliation and say Warren is mine, begat on some family excursion to a place where we have no real connections.”
There was a shuffling noise behind Somerset as Victoria leaned across her back and then a sound as sharp as a pinecone falling in winter as she slapped Joseph
full in the face. A warm wet sound that was Victoria crying soon followed. Somerset shut her eyes for a moment, although it was dark, as if she could block his words from her mind. It was all true, each nasty word, and she wasn’t going to waste breath on Joseph to scold him for telling the truth, but the manner he had told it in was scalding. She didn’t even care that Sawyer was following somewhere behind them. He had fallen so far beneath her notice that she didn’t care anymore what he knew or didn’t know. She’d tried to tell him plenty of times, but he’d never seemed to read between the words of what she said. But then, he was not Eric. She exhaled to calm her mangled nerves, and a single lightning bolt dissected a cloud in a jagged jumble of fuzzy light.
“Disregarding all else, a bad thing occurred on this date,” she heard herself saying calmly. “Our place is not partying until dawn when a family member is in need. At least this time she tried to protect us by sending us away, and we all have to take care of each other for our own honor. Everything could be fine, too. She might have sent us out merely because she was ill.”
“I’ll apologize sincerely to both of you if that is indeed the case, but when each one of us found out the date, we wore the selfsame expressions. We thought the world was ending, and when Mother wakes up in the morning it might.”
The muffled fluid noise that was Victoria’s crying continued on as Somerset continued to drive. Joseph’s expression was veering toward repentance.
“I didn’t say anything ugly about any of us, only Mother,” he sighed.
Somerset made a sound of irritation.
“When you tell the truth, you make it sound so—so—”
“Unbearable?” finished Joseph.
Somerset pulled up the gravel drive and came to a stop near the front porch. She didn’t bother unhitching the horse. She tied him to Blanche’s burgeoning forsythia bush and clattered up the steps. Victoria wiped her eyes angrily and followed her. Joseph fished a key out of his trouser pockets, and in the flickering weak light from the moon he managed to get the door unlocked. Somerset and Victoria filed past him into the entryway while he pulled the door to and relocked it. Bess had left some candles burning downstairs in anticipation of their late arrival home. They cast their three shadows as tall and slender giants in a doll-sized house across the scuffed wood floor.
“All is quiet,” whispered Somerset. “We’ll each take a candle up and go to bed.”
The sound of the front door being tested made everyone jump.
“Sawyer,” explained Joseph. “He followed after us.”
Joseph unlocked the door to admit Sawyer entrance. His hair was wet and clinging to his head.
The rain must have started as soon as they made it in the house, reflected Somerset, as she dragged a rag rug with her foot over beside him to catch some of the water he was dripping.
“What happened?” He looked around him.
“Nothing whatsoever, Mr. Russell. I was under the false impression that we were needed at home. I apologize if we alarmed any of your guests tonight. You may sit here in the entryway until the worst of the rain passes before you take leave.”
“He doesn’t need to go out in the early hours of the morning,” protested Joseph. “He came to our aid and can stay until morning.”
Somerset was about to argue when a door opened upstairs. The patter of bare feet slapping wood floors met their ears.
“Leave me alone!”
“Blanche, get back here.”
“I will not! Leave! I don’t know why you came home!”
“I came home because I’m your husband. You needed me and I support you. Now put that down and go back to your room. The children are liable to come home at any time. Do you really want them to come in on this when we tried to spare them this once?”
There was a sound of more running along the landing and then some panting as Blanche struggled to take something off its hooks in the wall.
“No!” yelled Thomas. “Put that back, too! What do you think you’re going to do with that?”
“Will someone explain to me what is happening?” complained Sawyer as he looked for another candle.
“What was that? Who is there?” called Blanche above them.
“I tried to tell you so many times,” replied Somerset as she held her candle up to try to make out what was happening above them. “I never lied to you once although I wanted to.”
“The children are home,” warned Thomas. “It isn’t too late to make a better decision. Put those things down and come to bed.”
“Don’t touch me, dog.”
“I have to be able to see.” Sawyer dug through his trouser pockets and came up with a book of matches. Somerset doubted they would light, he was so soaked, but bitter smoke from a lit one soon wafted through the downstairs as he succeeded in lighting a lamp.
“Don’t!” cried Thomas.
Somerset thought he yelled at Sawyer not to light the lamps, but the crash of glass splintering against the wall upstairs confirmed that he had called out to Blanche not to throw something at him. A shard of glass flew over the upstairs railing and landed at Somerset’s feet. She picked up the cranberry curved shell and remembered the translucent hurricane lamp that her Mother had protected like a child through the war.
“Don’t what?” shrieked Blanche. “Let everyone know how you all manipulate me? How you silence me so that no one knows what I’ve suffered?”
“What’s goin’ on here?” came Bess’s concerned voice from upstairs. “Has she lost her mind? That lamp came from ’cross the sea!”
Victoria ran to the foot of the staircase, strengthened by the sight of Bess’s frame in the half dark.
“Warren!” she called out piteously.
Bess leaned over the top of the bannister and looked down in horror at the group of youths at the bottom of the steps.
“Don’t you worry, Miss Victoria! I slept with that child in his nursery tonight. I’m not lettin’ nothin’ happen to any of y’all.”
Victoria’s whole frame shook even as she clutched the newel post. Somerset thought she looked petrified, unsure of whether to run upstairs, wake her sleeping child, and flee or to stay on the bottom floor as far from Blanche as possible. Somerset went to Victoria’s side and slipped her hand into Victoria’s free one and tried to communicate some of her own strength to her sister.
“All I wanted was my diary,” sobbed Blanche. She was clutching something as large as herself that Somerset couldn’t make out. “If I just had my diary, none of this would have happened tonight.”
Somerset faced Joseph. He stood transfixed in the center of the floor staring up at the tableau above him.
“What did you do with it?” asked Somerset. “Give it back to her before she does something we can’t fix.”
Joseph’s look of distraction faded.
“I don’t have it.”
“Joseph, now!” Somerset slapped her leg through her dress in frustration.
“I don’t have it,” he repeated in earnest.
“You!” Blanche turned on Bess with fury. “You took it, didn’t you, you miserable creature. Your life is worthless so you wanted to spy on mine.”
“I don’t have it. It’s not legal for me to read.”
Calm filled Bess’s voice, a byproduct of over twenty-five years of dealing with minor conniptions and genuine catastrophes.
“Are you all going to stand there and let her be insolent with me?”
No one answered.
Bess lit a lamp upstairs, and dim light crept through upstairs and downstairs.
“No one cares. That’s why I am the way I am,” wept Blanche. “If anyone had just shown me a modicum of concern, things wouldn’t have to end the way they’re going to end tonight.”
“Mrs. Forrest?” called Sawyer, approaching the staircase, holding his light high. “Mrs. Forrest, it’s Sawyer Russell. I saw your children home tonight to be assured they made it safely. They are most worried about your well-being. Please tell me what is caus
ing you distress.”
Blanche’s hummingbird step brought her closer. Her face hovered over the railing many feet above them.
“Mr. Russell?”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s Sawyer. I can’t possibly ride home in this torrential downpour so I came in. I am bothered by what you’re saying and I want to help you.”
Blanche’s voice wavered.
“No one can help me.”
“I feel that way about certain events in my own life. Since I served, there are people and places that have trickled away from me like a stream breaks on the rocks. I know loneliness and hurt, too, but I also know there will never be any justice for your pain if you won’t say what’s hurting you.”
There was a stirring noise above them as Blanche got her own candle and placed it on the railing so she could better see Sawyer. The light from it illuminated Thomas, who was half-crouched, either to avoid more missiles or to spring and take his wife down, if necessary. The light showed that Bess was guarding the door to Warren’s nursery. She looked grim and immoveable.
Blanche’s appearance was unkempt. She’d removed her hair pins because they always worsened her headaches. Her hair spilled over her shoulders, draped over her petite frame, and hit just under her waist in gold waves. Somerset thought that her hair was the only part of her that looked alive. Her face looked young but waxen in the dim candlelight. The purplish circles around her eyes were enormous, and her mouth hung slack in her face. Her famous Marshall eyes had the bright but lusterless, vacant look of someone who drank all the time. With all the pride of a young child showing off a beloved toy, she hefted up the massive object she held.
Somerset and Victoria gasped and Joseph made a small noise that conveyed he knew it all along.
Blanche held the Cumberland oil portrait of Teddie before he marched off to fight for the Confederacy. She’d had it commissioned about a month before the war began and invited Amelia and Teddie to stay with her for a month that spring. Amelia had been more than ready to depart for Charleston but then, she was a young wealthy widow when she met Teddie and used to having things her own way.
Somerset knew the painting brush stroke by brush stroke and didn’t need to look at it hard to see all it contained.
