A Beautiful Dare

by Natasha Lester

  Kneeling between Rose’s legs, she put her hands on the baby’s head.

  ‘Evie! What is it? Are you hurt?’ Charlie’s voice sounded panicked and Evelyn was glad he was there: he would help her while Viola fetched Father.

  The baby’s shoulders began to move into Evelyn’s hands and she forgot about feeling scared. If she could get the child out, perhaps Rose would wake up. She pulled gently and felt a surge of wonder as more of the baby appeared.

  Then Evelyn found herself cradling a child. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Look at you.’

  She wanted to hug the baby, hold it close, but some instinct told her to wrap it in her skirts and rub it. It was so blue and it hadn’t made a sound. ‘Cry,’ Evelyn whispered. ‘Please cry.’

  Charlie’s face appeared above the reeds, followed by Viola’s.

  Viola’s hands flew to her mouth and she said, ‘Oh. Oh,’ before turning away and holding onto a tree.

  ‘She had a baby,’ Evelyn said, needlessly, but what else was there to say? Help us, we need help, I don’t know what to do. What if I hurt the baby?

  Charlie grabbed Evelyn’s arm and pulled her, heedless of the child.

  ‘Careful,’ Evelyn said. ‘Hold the baby while I check on Rose.’ As she spoke, the baby began to cry. Thank God. ‘Get Father,’ she called to Viola. ‘Tell him to bring his medical bag. He still has it somewhere.’

  But Charlie didn’t take the baby from her. ‘You need to leave. Now. Take Viola with you,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t leave. I have to help. Viola can go by herself.’ Evelyn realised that her sister was still standing there, her back turned to them. ‘Viola!’ she called again. ‘Hurry up!’ She cradled the baby in one arm so she could help Rose with the other.

  ‘This woman doesn’t deserve your help,’ Charlie said. He tightened his grip on her arm and tried to force her to stand.

  Evelyn dug her shoes into the soil. ‘Stop it!’ she cried. ‘You’ll hurt the baby. Let me go!’ She tugged her arm away but Charlie was strong, stronger than she’d realised. The baby was wailing now, as if it sensed danger, and Evelyn wanted nothing more than to soothe it, to see if Rose had revived, but Charlie would not let go. She tried pleading. ‘You can’t expect me to leave them here. If you’ve ever felt anything for me you’ll let me help. Please!’

  Her last word was a frantic scream. She could no longer hear the baby crying, had no idea where Viola was. All she could see was Charlie’s face, so close to her own that she could not mistake the hard flash of anger in his eyes, and the curl of disgust on his lip at Rose’s plight. Damn you! she wanted to shout. Damn everybody and their stuffy rules that said she couldn’t help someone who might be dying, just because there was a whiff of scandal. She would not move. She would not stand up. And short of dragging her up the riverbank, she knew there was nothing Charlie could do.

  He let go of her arm suddenly and Evelyn tipped backwards onto her elbow, desperate to keep the child safe. Charlie stormed up the riverbank, not bothering to help Viola, who stumbled after him, crying.

  Evelyn could only hope that he would be back soon with her father and that her father’s long-retired skills as a doctor would somehow revive Rose, whose eyes were closed, her face devoid of colour, her limbs lifeless. What should Evelyn do? She had no idea. Nothing she had ever learned at Concord’s Ladies’ Academy or at Radcliffe had taught her anything about saving someone’s life. What good were French and dancing to her now?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered to Rose as the tears ran down her cheeks. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Her father and Charlie found her like that, sobbing, the baby held close to her chest, her body curved around Rose as if she could will life into her.

  ‘Evelyn!’ her father snapped. ‘Stand up at once!’ Mr Lockhart’s face showed the same look of horror as Charlie’s had.

  ‘You’ll help her?’ she asked, unwilling to move until she had secured his promise.

  ‘Go straight back to the house,’ her father bellowed. ‘Only then will I help her.’

  Evelyn scrambled to her feet and gave the baby to her father. He glared at her and she reluctantly walked away.

  The climb up the riverbank was like a hallucination. The woods were still awash with peach blossoms and buttercups. And she was in Concord, home of girlish delights and Little Women, not death and scandal and secrets. There was no longer any blood, except that covering Evelyn’s hands and soaking her skirt. There was no crying or screaming, just the rustle of Evelyn’s feet and the constant drip of tears from her face. The sense of stupor intensified when she reached the house. As she stood in the doorway of the sitting room, surrounded by the warmth of mahogany wood, gilt lamp stands and the ochre velvet of the chaise longue, what she had witnessed seemed unreal. Had it really happened?

  ‘Viola?’ Evelyn said.

  Viola, who was collapsed on the lounge, uttered a groan that Evelyn knew came from no real affliction, so she said it aloud, trying to make it real again. ‘She had a baby.’

  ‘Evelyn!’ It was the nutcracker snap of her mother’s voice. ‘Your dress!’

  Evelyn stepped aside to let her mother pass. ‘There was a woman by the river,’ she said. ‘I tried to help her.’

  Mrs Lockhart held up her hand. ‘I know what happened. I heard Charles tell your father. This is the last time it will be discussed. A woman like that has fallen in the eyes of God and in the eyes of man and her fate is not a subject for young ladies.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘No. Besides being filthy, your skirts are pulled up so high I can almost see your knees. Go and change now.’

  ‘They’re just knees, Mother.’

  ‘And that attitude is how women end up in disgrace by the river.’ Mrs Lockhart moved over to Viola, to smooth her brow and murmur consolation in her ear, as if Viola, not Rose, had been the wretched one.

  Evelyn understood that the incident had been swept away like breakfast crumbs, discarded and forgotten. Nobody would speak of it again. All of Evelyn’s questions would remain unanswered. But they clamoured in her mind nonetheless: was Rose alive? Was the baby? Had Evelyn helped it or hurt it?

  She took off her hat and laid it on the hall stand. She suddenly realised she hated that stand, with its gold Minton tiles and gold-plated drip trays. Who really needed their umbrella to drip into a gold tray? Society did. A society that thought Evelyn was not supposed to sit in the dirt and let a labouring mother bleed all over her. She was supposed to run away, aghast, and then faint like a lady. Because an unmarried woman having a baby alone by the river was a position never to be recovered from; it guaranteed invisibility and revulsion, so that every time hereafter, when Rose went to the grocer’s store and was ignored, she would know she was also being mocked and judged and declared repugnant, like the cow’s feet the butcher threw away because even the poor wouldn’t eat them.

  Evelyn remembered the baby’s eyes, how they’d stared at her. It was helpless and trusting, yet she’d abandoned it. For its whole life, everyone would treat that baby the way Evelyn had, turning their backs. How could she have left Rose and her baby to the mercies of Charlie and her father? And would she ever be able to make amends?

  Chapter Two

  ‘Evie!’

  As the Lockharts stepped inside the ballroom of the Whitmans’ enormous home that evening, Charlie rushed over to greet them. He took Evelyn’s hand eagerly and kissed it, eyes fixed on her face, but the ache in her arm where he’d gripped it that morning and the memory of his concern for decorum over compassion made her look away.

  ‘I hope you’ll dance every dance with me,’ Charlie said. When Evelyn didn’t reply, he turned to her mother. ‘You won’t mind if I monopolise Evelyn tonight?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Mrs Lockhart replied, staring at her daughter, trying with the power of her eyebrows to make her respond to Charlie with gratitude and a smile.

  Charlie held out his arm. Evelyn was aware that people were watching them, having heard Charlie call out
her name and kiss her hand, noting that he’d singled her out above all the other ladies in the room. She had no choice but to take his arm. But she held back her smile.

  As Charlie led the family through the room, Evelyn began to feel hot. Her dress was one that suited her mother’s idea of modesty: the full skirt fell to her ankles and the sleeves finished below her elbows. Her hair was up, the long, blonde length of it sitting heavily on her head, pressing down on her like the imperious hand of God. The room was crammed with the important families of Concord, men from Harvard, and couples from New York, where the Whitman bank was located. Thomas, Charlie’s brother, moved through the crowd, introducing Alberta, the prim-looking girl on his arm who Evelyn assumed was his intended fiancée. It was all very elegant, from the lovely turquoise gown that Mrs Whitman wore – which Mrs Lockhart, with her preference for the drabness of the peahen, whispered was shockingly bold – to the six-piece band playing on the terrace outside, to the abundance of cut crystal glasses filled with impossible-to-get French champagne, handed out by waiters who pretended never to have heard of Prohibition. But it was also stiff and constrained; everyone smiled and said how lovely Alberta was, even though Evelyn thought she looked wintry, as if chatter and spontaneity were unknown to her. She longed for someone to dance the Breakaway across the room to relieve the monotony of it all, but that would be almost as scandalous as what had happened this morning.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she whispered to Charlie, retrieving her arm and moving away.

  Before she could escape, her mother squeezed Evelyn’s left ring finger and hissed, ‘Remember why you’re here.’

  But Evelyn wasn’t in the mood to smile until she got the engagement ring her mother wanted for her. She needed some air. As she walked out onto the terrace, she heard her name; it had been spoken by one of a group of men who were clouding the air with cigarette smoke just inside the door. She quickly moved against the wall, hidden from their view, and listened.

  ‘Yes, she’s a looker,’ said another man. ‘Charlie isn’t all brag and no substance this time.’

  ‘He’d better get her down the middle aisle before somebody else does,’ said the first man. ‘I wouldn’t make a girl who looked like that wait too long.’

  ‘But Charlie isn’t renowned for his smarts,’ sniggered another. ‘Besides, a pretty girl like that wouldn’t be marrying him for anything other than the dollar bills lining his pockets.’

  Evelyn’s cheeks burned brighter than the full moon shining outside. She couldn’t bear to hear any more, so she hurried down the steps of the terrace and crossed the lawn, then stopped in front of a tree. She remembered herself as a child sitting astride a branch of this old apple tree in the Whitmans’ garden, bouncing up and down, riding a pretend horse. Life was so uncomplicated then. Charlie was her friend. Nobody knew anything about marrying well or how babies were born, and nobody boasted about anything other than how many spots they had had when they caught the measles. Back then, Charlie would sit on the branch opposite, racing Evelyn across the fields of their imaginations. If her mother saw her, she would send Viola to tell Evelyn to get down at once as it wasn’t ladylike, but Evelyn ignored her, knowing that nobody would climb up and fetch her, knowing she had the power because she was up high and out of reach. She’d be sent to her room later for her disobedience, but she didn’t care; the fun was worth every bit of her mother’s scolding.

  Now Evelyn pulled up her skirt, feeling the breeze rub against her stockinged legs. She slipped off her shoes and tossed them onto the ground, grabbed hold of the tree, gaining a foothold on the lowest branch and then the next. Being tall, she quickly reached the branch that had always been her horse, Sunny. To sit astride it she had to hitch her dress higher, so she looked like a girl from a Fitzgerald novel – except then she would have been sitting in the back seat of an automobile, not on the limb of a tree. The ground seemed so much closer than it had when she was a child. In her memory, the distance between Sunny and the lawn was celestial; the fields she’d traversed were the vast plains of the sky, splashing through cloud lakes and jumping over rainbow bridges. She pulled an apple off a branch and bit into it; it tasted like summer and devil-may-care. The apple was gone in a minute and she threw the core down with satisfaction, just as she used to, imagining that Viola was beneath, never expecting a direct hit even though one got her every time she came to take Evelyn home.

  ‘Ouch!’

  Shocked, Evelyn peeped through the branches and saw Thomas Whitman staring up at her. ‘Oh no!’ She blushed. ‘I’m sorry.’ She hurriedly swung her leg around so that she was balancing side-saddle on the branch, and tugged down her skirt.

  ‘I thought everyone was inside,’ Thomas said. ‘May I ask what you’re doing?’

  ‘Riding a pretend horse like I used to with Charlie, and stealing your apples,’ Evelyn said quietly. Her mother would be mortified: young ladies who were meant to be pursuing engagement rings didn’t climb trees and attack men with apple cores. She blushed again and sought to explain. ‘Trying to steal back a moment I’m probably too old for.’

  The last thing she expected was that Thomas Whitman would reach out to one of the lower branches and pull himself up, with a grace that suggested he’d been climbing trees since long before she could walk. She barely knew Thomas; he was five years older than Charlie, and when the family came to Concord he’d always been away at school, or off on holidays with friends, and, lately, in New York helping his father run the bank. He sat down on the branch that had once been the horse Charlie rode.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be inside?’ Evelyn asked.

  He nodded. ‘I should. But I haven’t climbed this tree in years. I taught Charlie.’

  ‘No, you didn’t. I dared him to climb it one day and we raced to see who won.’

  ‘Who won?’

  ‘Charlie.’

  ‘Of course.’ But she could tell he didn’t mean that of course Charlie won because he was a boy, he meant of course Charlie won because he’d known what he was doing all along.

  She shook her head and turned the conversation to something more conventional. ‘Alberta seems lovely.’

  ‘She is lovely.’ His voice was lacklustre and Evelyn hoped that if ever a man called her lovely, he’d say it with more passion than Thomas had mustered.

  They were both quiet a moment. The sounds of laughter and conversation waltzed demurely out of the house and away with the breeze, along with the strains of ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart’, a song to whose dated schmaltz Evelyn had a particular aversion. She leaned her cheek against the tree trunk, remembering Rose and the baby among the reeds. The garden was dark. She couldn’t see Thomas’s face. All day she’d held back what she wanted to say. She was tired of holding her tongue, and there was nobody else to ask. ‘Did you hear about … what happened this morning?’ she said.

  Thomas didn’t reply straight away. He probably had more pressing things to think about, like proposing to Alberta. Evelyn was about to climb down from the tree when he moved and sat on the branch beside her.

  ‘At the river?’ he asked.

  ‘Did Charlie tell you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Charles was concerned about your clothes. He said he’d helped your father with a woman in trouble.’

  ‘You mean he was cross with me for not fainting like Viola. And that’s a very polite way of putting it. In trouble. It’s like the woman’s a haunting or a curse, the way everybody avoids speaking about her.’

  ‘Perhaps they think they’re protecting you.’

  ‘Perhaps I’m old enough to look after myself.’

  ‘I didn’t say you weren’t. I said they might think they’re protecting you.’

  ‘Do you know what happened to the woman? And the baby?’

  ‘My mother went to the hospital this afternoon with a box of things for the baby. Apparently the woman died. But the baby survived. I expect it’ll go to an orphanage, because nobody will tak
e in an illegitimate child. It’ll probably be dead too, within five years.’

  Evelyn closed her eyes. She’d always thought she knew what kind of world she lived in. But this world of death and disgrace, of a woman she knew dying by the river, was not a place where one galloped on a tree-horse through sunshine and sky. She could still hear Rose’s groans, still feel the moment when her body went limp. She wondered if she should say any more; her mother would send her to a convent if she knew what they were discussing. But Thomas was listening to her, apparently without outrage; he actually seemed nice, not the stuffy older brother Charlie had always made him out to be.

  She opened her eyes. ‘I held the baby. I helped it out. It was … incredible.’ And then the question she needed to say aloud even though she knew the answer. ‘Why wasn’t she at home? Or in a hospital? Why was she out there alone?’

  ‘I expect nobody knew she was carrying a child. Perhaps she thought if she went to the river she could make the child disappear.’

  Disappear. Vanish – drown, perhaps. What would it be like to think you had to kill your own child in order to survive? ‘She could have gone to New York, or another city far away, to a hospital where nobody knew her, and had the baby and pretended she had a husband.’

  ‘Who would she ask for the money to travel? Would you go to an unfamiliar city and expose your predicament to a doctor who’d probably scorn you for it?’ Thomas didn’t ask the questions in an interrogating manner, the way her father spoke to her when he was doubting her judgement about something like college. Thomas asked the questions as if they deserved thought rather than anger, and at the same time he was provoking her to take her mind to places it had never been before.

  ‘No,’ Evelyn whispered. Now that she’d seen what childbirth looked like, it was hard to imagine doing it in front of anyone. But that was the point. Rose had literally been brought to her knees by bodily function and shame, and everybody was too polite and well bred to help her. ‘I knew her. She was a Radcliffe girl. And now she’s dead.’