Fitcher's Brides

by Gregory Frost

  “Children play in there all the time. You can’t keep ’em off. Anyhow, he was trying to run away.”

  “Maybe so. Or maybe he saw it, too, maybe he saw it close up. If that thing cornered me, I’d a’ climbed to the moon to get away.”

  “Maybe it was just his time.”

  “It’s all our times soon enough, but if the creek don’t flood and the sky don’t fall, I’m for waiting till the day itself.”

  Another man behind them muttered, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”

  The two others twisted their heads around. One replied, “That’s for outside here, Benjamin. We’re supposed to be spared from all that. Fitcher’s said. Besides, vengeance for what? Notaro hadn’t done nothin’.”

  She barely caught Benjamin’s reply: “Unless the angel ain’t from the Lord,” he muttered.

  The men walked on awhile in silence as if pondering that. Amy followed, although they seemed to have stopped talking and the rest of the crowd had gone. She fixed upon the image, remembering a moment at the dance the night before when something gray and cold had swept between her and Michael. She’d thought it was just her imagination then, a dizzy moment in the dance.

  As they reached the back of the dormitory wing, one of the men added, “If you’re right, we got the devil in among us then.”

  “Always been so,” said the other. “Since the day Adam bit into the apple.”

  In her room, Amy lit a candle, then sat and tried to understand why Michael Notaro had been running away. She could only conclude with heavy guilt that he’d been running from her—from having to watch her with Fitcher. He’d lost weight, the man had said. He’d been escaping from his own desire for her.

  From there it was a short step to convincing herself that she had killed him. She hadn’t meant to, but that hardly mattered. Her marriage had put him in an impossible situation, where he had to look upon her every day in the possession of another man, and he had finally fled from it. Possibly it had driven him out of his mind. Nothing else really explained his trying to climb out of Harbinger. For Jesus’ sake, he held the keys to the gate! He could have walked out.

  He’d told her about it—it had only been weeks but seemed a lifetime ago. Fitcher had entrusted him with his own set of keys so he could bring in supplies. He could open any of the gates in any of the fences. He could open the village shops, the mills, most of the rooms in the house and dormitories. Why, if he had the keys, would he have felt compelled to climb out?

  Perhaps Fitcher had taken them away from him. She wanted to ask, but couldn’t think of a way to broach the subject that wouldn’t sound suspicious.

  But Fitcher hadn’t taken the keys.

  The discovery of their whereabouts occurred on the second day after the death of Michael Notaro, and in a manner she could never have anticipated.

  Amy had finished her kitchen duties. She wanted to change into fresh clothing before she walked to the village. The humid heat of the morning had made the kitchen an oven, and already what she wore was drenched with sweat.

  Upon reaching the second-floor landing, however, she encountered her husband with one foot on the second step up. He put a finger to his lips and gestured for her to proceed quietly. She stepped up and peered over his shoulder to her floor.

  A child of no more than six years stood halfway down the hall. He was at one of the doors on her side of the hall, but beyond her own room. At first she couldn’t tell what he was doing. The sound of clinking metal came to her, and his movements—even in shadow—made it abruptly clear. “He’s opening the door,” she whispered.

  Reverend Fitcher glanced back at her and smiled wickedly. “Indeed he is.” The door opened, throwing a wan light upon the boy and across the darkness of the hall. Fitcher said, “And I think that’s probably enough.”

  He climbed up the last few steps and walked boldly into the hall. Amy hurried after him.

  The child became aware of them almost at once. He frantically looked about, but finally just withdrew a couple of steps from the doorway and waited. There was nowhere to run. He put his hands behind his back.

  Fitcher began to laugh. “Look at this boy,” he cried, glancing back to her. “This boy. Why, if he found one plank on a beach, he would hunt until he found the whole ship!” He barked another laugh.

  He and Amy reached the child, who looked guilty of the worst crime in the world despite Fitcher’s good humor. “What is your name, lad?” Fitcher asked.

  “Jonathan, sir,” the boy replied. “Jonathan Hollings.” He had short blond hair, and smeared red lines across his cheeks and forehead: war paint.

  “Ah, yes, I know your family. And what have you been up to, Jonathan?” He was looking past the boy as he asked. Amy came up behind him, and peered around him into the opened room. It was dimly lit, and virtually identical to her own. The light came from a window beyond the bed. A chest of clothing stood half-opened to one side, in front of an armoire. A dressing table stood opposite the bed. Fitcher stepped into the recess to close the door, but as he did, Amy saw, lying across the table, a folded parasol.

  Fitcher shut the door, then held out his hand. “You’d best give those to me now,” he insisted.

  Jonathan sighed and brought his hands into view. He was holding a ring of keys that Amy recognized immediately as Michael Notaro’s. He’d shown them to her while bragging about his position at Harbinger. Fitcher knew them, too. He nodded to himself as he asked, “And you found these where?”

  “In the woods, sir. We were playing, and I was being the Mohawk and hiding out. I got down behind a big log by the fence, and my foot kicked ’em.”

  “I see. And so you had to find out what you could do with them. No, don’t worry, it’s nothing at all. I’d been looking for these awhile, and you’ve recovered them. So you’re owed a reward.” He fished in his pocket and came up with a gold half-dollar. The boy’s eyes grew the size of saucers. “There, now. You find anything else in the woods, you will tell me right away, won’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, sir.” The boy stared at the coin in his palm.

  “One more thing. This was not good, what you did. You snooped in other people’s rooms, and that’s wrong. Your Lord doesn’t like nosy meddlers, Jonathan. To stay in good with God, you must stay in good with me. You understand?”

  “I do, sir, yes, I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t—”

  “Yes, I know. You found something exciting. A treasure hunt you were on. But we’ll have no more of those, will we?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good. Now run along.” He pushed the boy out of the doorway, closing the door after him.

  Jonathan ran down the hall and leaped the stairs to the landing. Fitcher laughed again and said, “That boy!”

  Carefully, Amy ventured, “You’d lost your keys, husband?”

  “I? No, no. These belonged to our late Mr. Notaro.” He turned and dangled them before her. “He and I shared access to so many things. They surely fell from his pocket as he attempted to scale the fence and no one noticed them in the leaves—we came upon him at night, after all. Frankly, I was of the opinion that we’d buried them with him. I’d quite forgotten them.” He pocketed the keys. “Now it’s time to go to work. I have a field to inspect and you must have some candles to dip.”

  “I wanted to change first. It was so terribly hot in the kitchen.”

  “The midsummer heat is like a blast from Satan’s furnace, isn’t it?” He patted her shoulder, then walked off down the hall. She heard him say again, “That boy.”

  Amy stood in place. She listened to his footsteps descending, heard them cross the foyer floor. A door closed, and then there was silence. She crept back to the room the boy had opened. Fitcher had closed the door, but her question had sidetracked him before he could lock it.

  She opened the door and carefully sneaked inside and shut it behind her. She stood in the dimness a moment before crossing to the dressing table. The parasol was pink with a few dangling tassels, and a
white handle. Its identity could not be mistaken: Vern had carried it with her almost like a talisman when she went out. Likewise, the hairbrush lying there was too familiar. She pulled a few strands of her sister’s hair out of the bristles, then set it down.

  She walked around the bed to the armoire and pulled open one of the doors. Clothes hung inside, and she could identify most of them, one dress in particular: her mother’s wedding dress, the one Vern had worn. None of the Charter girls owned many outfits. Amy knew Vern’s wardrobe. There might have been one or two dresses missing, but surely Vernelia would never have run off to Henri in Boston without her clothes or her hairbrush, and never ever without her parasol.

  Amy looked through the bottom drawers for anything to explain this. There was nothing. Vern had left no writing behind, no diary or journal—it hadn’t been her nature to record things.

  Finally, fearful that Fitcher would remember he’d left the door unlocked, Amy crept out of the room and back to her own. She changed her clothes hastily and then set out for Harbinger village; all the while her mind tumbled with the elements of what she had learned. If Vern hadn’t run off to Boston, then where had she gone?

  Twenty-five

  THE BOY HAD OPENED ALL THE rooms.

  Amy didn’t realize it until the next evening, when she took a candle and crept to Vern’s room again to see if it had been locked in the interim. The door opened at her touch. She closed it again, pausing to glance the length of the hall. She pattered to the next room along and tried that door, and was surprised when it opened, too.

  She pushed only a little, enough to peer around the frame.

  The room looked more uninhabited than Vern’s, if identically furnished. The armoire was closed and the smell was musty. She entered and closed the door carefully behind her.

  A layer of dust coated the top of the small table against the wall, but there was a lopsided candle in a pewter holder there and it spat and took the flame from her own, casting enough yellowish light that she could see about her.

  Cobwebs stretched across the bedposts. It wasn’t a canopy bed like hers and Vern’s, and it was off to the side rather than under the window. A scar in the floorboards suggested that at some point the bed had been dragged closer to the hearth. She snooped in the armoire, where as in Vern’s room clothes were hung—a dark poke bonnet, a blue Princess dress, a whalebone corset, and a burnouse above the unmentionables and stockings. In the drawers at the bottom she found, folded in lace, a silver cameo with a woman’s hand-painted portrait and a name, “Adele,” written beneath it. She put it in her pocket to take it, but her fingers brushed the egg there, which reminded her that she must delve into the pocket each night for Fitcher. She knew sooner or later she would inadvertently grab the cameo by accident, and he would know where she’d been. Better to leave everything undisturbed. She folded the lace back up around the cameo and replaced it in the drawer, closed up the armoire, then blew out the crooked table candle. It had dripped onto the wood but there was nothing for it. If she tried to wipe up the grease, she would only clear the dust and make her intrusion the more obvious.

  She left the room. Awhile she stood outside the door, glancing toward the stairs, debating what to do next. It was too early for Fitcher to arrive. He came to her at the same hour each night. She had time to look at a few more rooms, provided they were open, which they were. She made a cursory inspection of the next two, then hastily looked in upon the rest.

  Five rooms proved to be identical to hers, the dressers and armoires containing women’s apparel and belongings. Of the others, two were empty, unused, the bed frames bare; and two others had been converted into storage, full of trunks, boxes, and additional furnishings piled up, no doubt from the latest arrivals to Harbinger.

  One small door at the very back of the hallway opened onto a narrow stairwell. But where, she wondered, was her husband’s room? It appeared that they didn’t even share the same floor.

  She’d just determined that the last room was open when she heard her husband’s voice below in the foyer. He laughed once, then spoke softly. Amy hurried across the hall to her own room and slipped inside.

  Fitcher did not arrive for another quarter hour. He had gone to his chambers, wherever they were, and changed out of his clothes and into his silver dressing gown. He entered her room noiselessly as always. Amy was lying on her bed, pretending to be engrossed in reading her Bible, and wearing only her chemise as if she had been waiting for him since supper. The marble egg lay beside her on the bed. He always wanted to see it first.

  Fitcher strode to the armoire and retrieved the whip. Amy closed her Bible and stood to remove her last item of clothing. As she knelt, she spoke from the psalm she’d just read: “‘It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord, and to sing praises unto thy name, O Most High.’” The nightly ritual of the mortification of her flesh began.

  When he was finished, and the whip’s venom had been drawn out of her back through the magical, ecstasy-producing touch of the egg, she lay in a transported dreaminess, her thoughts flying like a released spirit through the rooms she’d penetrated, the strange dusty sanctums she’d violated. She felt neither guilty nor sinful for what she’d done, only confused by the complexity of the mystery of five women’s chambers containing no women. Had they all, like Vern, “run away”? And where was his room? The question threaded its way in. Where did Fitcher himself stay? In her lucid dream, she saw him flip through his ring of keys until he came to the strange glass one. That key must surely answer the mystery for her. There was no such key on Notaro’s key ring. She could think of only one reason why that should be the case. She couldn’t very well ask for the keys, but she had the scent now. She would find out, and when she did, she would…

  What would she do?

  Finally, her dream spirit settled back into her body. As it did, the answer came to her: “I shall tell Kate.”

  After the morning sermon and breakfast, Amy tracked Fitcher’s movements. He’d worked the past few days in the fields, and as she’d hoped, he set out for them again. She stood on the porch and watched until he disappeared into the orchard. The hot, steamy morning gave her an excuse to freshen up before going to the village, but no one was paying much attention. Like her, they had tasks to perform.

  For perhaps ten minutes she stood in the doorway of her room, listening to the sounds of the house. She heard people walk in and out of the foyer; then a door closed and all was silent.

  Amy hurried to the far end of the hall. The narrow door was still unlocked, and she climbed into the stairwell. The stairs curved around the wall as if inside a turret. Over the railing she peered into darkness below.

  She reached a landing that contained a door. She pressed her ear to the door, but could hear nothing on the other side. Nevertheless, she took great care in turning the handle—all for nothing. The door wouldn’t open. The little boy hadn’t made it this far with his stolen keys. It hardly mattered, since she didn’t need to creep onto the third floor—she could just walk up the main staircase some other time.

  The source of light in the stairwell came from somewhere above her. Amy crept up the circling stairs one entire circuit of the spiral to reach another landing and small archway. On the far side of it was a straight, steep flight of steps gleaming in the light. Amy ducked beneath the arch and, at the bottom of the steps, found herself peering up into the glass pyramid at the top of the house. She had reached the roof.

  The pyramid threw a spray of colors across the space. The glass doubled as a prismatic surface, and the sunlight pouring in split into crisscrossing rays. Amy climbed through splashes of violet, blue, green, and red. There was a railing at the top, and she crouched against it, reluctant to stand at first for fear someone in the yard or the orchards would be able to see her. She crept to the side and looked out over the rooftop.

  On either side chimneys shielded the pyramid, impeding anyone’s view. Amy could see only the last few windows at the ends of the dormitories.
Surely no one could see her within the intersecting colors.

  She rose and stepped into the center of the room, with her back to the rail. She could see the forests on every side. To the north she could make out the shimmer of the lake on which they’d steamed to Jekyll’s Glen, the cleared land on the hillsides, orderly rows of planted crops, and the town itself. She thought of her home, and there it was, clearly visible, right down to the pole across the road and her father in his box, awaiting the next pilgrim. Then the impossible displacement swept over her like a wave of vertigo so intense that she had to cling to the rail and close her eyes.

  When she opened them, she was looking straight down upon her house. She muttered, “Papa,” and he appeared in the glass before her, seated idly in the sentry box, passing the time by reading his Bible. She was close enough to see the stubble on his cheek. Now her view hovered just above the pole. She said, “Kate,” and it was as if she had become a bird. She flew from the sentry box, straight at the house, the vision so overwhelming that she recoiled as it penetrated the wall, sped up the stairs and into her room, where Kate was sweeping around the furniture. Kate was barefoot and dressed only in her chemise; but of course she wasn’t expecting company, no one was going to see her, and it was enervatingly hot. Amy walked to the canted glass, pressing her hand to it as if she could simply pass through it and into the room. Distantly, she seemed to hear the whisk of the broom. “Kate,” she called. Her sister went right on sweeping. “Katie, can you hear me?”

  It was as if she were a ghost, a spirit hovering beside her sister. Amy wanted to grab the broom out of Kate’s hands—that would shake her to her soul. Before she could, she saw the wall above Kate’s bed. A shadow was etched in it, a slender faceless shade, like smoke made solid. Amy recalled what the men in the crowd had said after Notaro’s impalement, and she knew she was looking at the Angel of Death. Even as she watched it, the shadow withdrew into the wall again. Had it been observing Kate or herself?