by Daniel Mills
Near the top of the house, we happened upon an old nursery with bars across the windows. The wallpaper was black and crumpled, its pattern obscured, and there was no furniture inside except a child’s rocking horse.
“My uncle’s,” I said, guessing. “When he was a child.”
Clemency traced a line in the dust with her finger then drew another line across it to reveal the letter L scratched there by a child’s hand.
“He must have earned a whipping for that,” I said.
“A whipping?” Clemency said. “If she were lucky.”
Then swiped at the horse with her sleeve and cleared the dust from the saddle. The rest of the name was visible. “Lily,” I read, but Clemency wasn’t there: her footsteps retreated down the gallery. I hurried after her, following the sound of her footfalls into a narrow staircase that reeked of mold before emerging into my uncle’s study.
Clemency was at the window. She had unlatched the shutters, lifted the sash. Sunlight flooded the room. A pile of filthy china had accumulated near the desk and the chamber pot had not been emptied. It was obvious my uncle had taken to sleeping here during his last illness, burrowing into a nest of ragged blankets on the floor.
Edward’s desk was a mess of coffee stains and candle-stubs, papers tied off with twine. His study of the Teutoborg must have run to a thousand pages covered front-and-back in his spidery hand with a dedication page reading, simply, For J.F.
Jane Feathering. The study was a mess but her portrait alone was free of dust or cobwebs: its colors blazed as brightly as on the day it was painted. Edward must have tended to his late wife’s painting with a religious devotion though the rest of the house fell into decay.
The realization saddened me, as I thought only of my uncle’s pain, but the sun moved over the portrait and I became aware of an answering light inside the portrait that animated Jane’s features and leapt to her eyes as with the flaring of a candlewick.
She was dead, forty-four years gone, but in this portrait, she survived like a fragment of my uncle’s own Arcadia, fixed in amber, so that I understood why Edward had lavished such care upon the image. He was, after all, an historian.
Clemency stood beneath the painting, looking up. I joined her there. “I thought at first the portrait might be taken down,” I said. “But she belongs here, doesn’t she?”
“She does,” Clemency agreed and turned toward me, her hands in my hair as she drew me down to a kiss. “And so do we.”
That evening Asaph prepared the guest room for us. The night was warm, the windows open, and I fell asleep with Clemency beside me and the wind in the bittersweet whispering—a soothing sound, but my sleep proved uneasy.
I dreamt I was outside the nursery. The door was open, but I didn’t go in. Winter light streamed through the windows, glinting off wallpaper that was no longer black and crumpled but displayed a pattern of golden fleur-de-lis.
I closed the door and the world disappeared. Darkness surrounded me, a deadening cloud, in which I heard a woman sobbing, screeching, howling, her anguish like a disease that was catching until I, too, was sick with it. My throat burned, and I retched on the blackness that surrounded me, boiling out of my guts then spilling over, the same dark.
Until my vision cleared and I was in a different dream in an unused bedroom underneath the nursery. Everything was as I remembered, save that the bed was uncovered, the clothes kicked back to reveal a mess of dark stains. Old blood, I thought, and a jelly-like puddle had formed among the sheets, black and bottomless like the pupil of an eye.
VIII.
May became June. The lilacs withered into black husks as the bittersweet flowered and spilled its blossoms down the walls. We sent for masons and carpenters to repair the crumbling brickwork and hired day laborers to paint the interior and remove the damaged furniture.
Clemency had need of a sitting room, so I turned my attention to the second-floor bedroom of which I had dreamt. It was one of only a few habitable rooms on the upper floor and more suited to a sitting room than the old nursery. I examined the bed and found the sheets to be clean and quite unstained though the mattress teemed with vermin and could not be salvaged.
The workmen burned everything. They split the bedrails and piled them in the fire-pit with the featherbed then doused the lot with kerosene and set it alight. The smoke went up, a greasy plume, and I sent the men inside with instructions to whitewash the walls and floors and to paint the furniture and window-frames in the same brilliant shade.
They worked through the day and finished late in the afternoon when sun streamed through the south-facing windows and the white room caught its light and overflowed with it.
Clemency was in the garden. I opened the window and called down to her. She met me in the kitchen and followed me upstairs. I showed her into the sitting room then stood beside her in the light that filled the room, white and pure as the dawn after a snowfall.
She didn’t speak. The sun blazed across her features, shining from them, but her eyes were closed, and I realized she was crying. Her tears cut long shimmering lines in her cheeks and throat then spattered the floor as she covered her face and fled.
“I’m afraid I’m being rather silly,” she said, later, when I held her in my arms. “You mean well, I know, but you are far too kind to me.”
“We won’t speak of it,” I said, and we didn’t.
The summer drifted past: a dream of misty mornings and sweltering afternoons, of evening storms receding into nights of stars.
Late in August, I received a letter from Justice. Clemency was in Biddeford for the day and I was alone at the breakfast table when Asaph brought the mail. His letter was addressed to me, I noticed, rather than to Clemency, and I admit I delayed opening it until after luncheon for fear of what it might contain. I needn’t have worried.
I know I presume overmuch in writing to you but feel it is my duty to apologize for my behavior of the last year. My relationship with Clem has always been close. Our mother died & Father retreated from the world so that we were together, always, the closest of companions. The prospect of losing her proved unbearable. Months later I realize my eyes were clouded by fear & that this same terror prevented me from wishing you the happiness you deserve. I only hope it is not too late to salvage something of our friendship & that you might once more consider me
Your friend and brother
Justice St. James
His letter moved me, and I wasted no time in penning my response, extending forgiveness to him in no uncertain terms and inviting him to stay at the Lodge. I gave the letter to Asaph to mail then went outside with my notebook to roam over the property, sketching rows of trees we had not yet planted, a summerhouse we planned to build.
Clemency was late in returning. I was in the library, smoking my pipe and pacing the Turkish rug with Edwin Drood to hand when I heard the clop of hooves from outside and hastened to extinguish my pipe. Clemency disliked tobacco, the smell of it, and I had just emptied the bowl into the grate when she entered the library in her hat and coat and crossed the room to my chair. She perched herself on the arm.
“Smoking again,” she teased.
I could hardly deny it.
“While your sainted wife was forced to tramp the dusty streets of Biddeford with only Beatrice for company. The dear girl is devoted but hardly an adequate conversationalist. Yes, Madame. No, Madame. Always the same two phrases. She has been in this country two years and I am not certain her knowledge of English extends much beyond them.”
I withdrew Justice’s letter from my pocket. “This came today.”
“From Father?”
“No,” I said. “But it is from Concord.”
She unfolded the letter and began to read. She reached the end and folded the paper back upon itself before sliding from the chair and standing at the hearth with her back to me.
Dusk waned into darkness. The crickets sang.
At last she spoke. “Was there no message for me?”
“He sent only this letter which he addressed to me.”
“Yes,” she said, removing an iron from the rack. “I saw.”
“You appear unsettled.”
“Not at all,” she said. “I am quite well.” Then turned toward me, forcing a smile, saying, “but you must leave my brother to me. I will write a suitable response.”
“I have already written to him, I’m afraid.”
The smile disappeared. “And what did you tell him?”
“I—I invited him to stay.”
She said nothing. Her knuckles knit fast about the iron.
“I hoped it would be a surprise,” I said. “An agreeable one, that is.”
The blood was in her throat and cheeks. The grate smoked behind her, where my tobacco remained alight. Blue wisps curled out of the ash, clawing upward.
“I thought you would be pleased,” I said.
“Pleased,” she repeated, dully, then swung the iron over her head, bringing it down hard upon the grate. The noise was dreadful, metal on metal. Ash whirled up about her and billowed into the room as she struck at the grate again and again until the rage went out of her. Her hands shook at her sides. The iron dropped to the rug and she wouldn’t look at me.
“I will send another letter,” I said. “I will say he cannot visit, that we are going away.”
“No, you mustn’t.”
“Why ever not?”
“He cannot think—”
“What does it matter what he thinks?”
“He is my brother.”
The ash settled, staining her skirts and the rug at her feet. She stooped and picked up the fireiron. “I have been very happy here,” she said, replacing it in the rack, “but the world is such it cannot be ignored forever… as much as I wish it were otherwise.”
Summer was spent, our Arcadia in ruin.
The next day, Clemency slipped from the house at dawn and I did not ask where she had gone. In truth, I hadn’t the opportunity. She spent the evening in her sitting room and didn’t come to bed until midnight or later when I was already asleep.
Justice’s response arrived during breakfast. He had arranged with his employers to be away during the first week of October and hoped he might call on us in Westerly. I showed the letter to Clemency, who read it slowly, showing no emotion.
“He must come,” she said. “If not now, then later—and better it be now.”
Her footsteps echoed, fading. The front door opened, closed, and I went after her.
I followed her across the fields and through the birch trees to the locust grove where I had not been since my proposal of the previous year. The transformation was profound. Lily Stark’s headstone was righted, no longer leaning, and ringed about with hundreds of white lilies in an arrangement recalling a cathedral labyrinth. Their blossoms shone.
A debt repaid, Clemency had said. This was unhallowed ground, the grave of a suicide, but by force of beauty alone had it been consecrated.
Early September: wind in the locusts, the lilies rippling, and Clemency kneeling over a dead girl’s grave. She wrapped her arms about the stone and pressed her forehead to the inscription, an attitude of prayer. Et in Arcadia Ego.
I went to her. She showed no surprise at my presence and made no protest though I helped her to her feet. “Henry,” she said, only that, and we walked back to the house.
IX.
I fell into a nightmare. No sound, no light, and again, the burning swam into my throat. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t vomit. Blood like fire collected in my gut then burst the sphincter and spilled out from the orifice. I was choking, drowning in my own juices. A rush of hot fluid forced open my lips and streamed from my mouth, a darkness poured out endlessly.
Then a flicker of candlelight, the soft shaking into wakefulness. Clemency cradled my head in her lap and repeated the same three words over me like a spell of protection.
“Only a dream,” she said. “Only a dream.”
Morning came, and autumn too. The bittersweet turned dark. The rain proved unrelenting, and we were trapped inside. I prowled the house like an animal, scuttling down rain-dim galleries to shelter in the library or in my uncle’s study with his dead wife’s portrait on the wall and the cool light playing over it.
Jane Feathering had died at twenty, the same age as Lily Stark. My uncle believed Lily had taken possession of his wife, somehow, causing her illness, and I thought of Clemency, who was twenty-one, and of her daily pilgrimages to the locust grove, where she stayed for hours before returning to her sitting room and closing the door.
I went inside once, though I knew I wasn’t wanted, and discovered her seated upright on the daybed with her knees at her chest. Her hair was tangled, unwashed, and she stared past me to the wall with its bars of shadow on sun. She didn’t speak but gathered the silence about her like another room into which no words or light could penetrate.
September was a month of such silences: the days passed too slowly, and I longed for Justice’s arrival. On October the fourth, he wired from Portsmouth and I arranged for Asaph to collect him from the station. He reached the Lodge at five o’clock. Asaph showed him into my uncle’s study, but he halted in the doorway, as if afraid to approach.
Less than six months had elapsed since our wedding, but he appeared much older than in May. His clothing was dirty, unkempt, and he was terribly thin, besides. He stank of wine and shag tobacco and hadn’t shaved in days.
“I am grateful to you for seeing me,” he said. “My conduct toward you has been—unforgivable.”
I rose and crossed the room and embraced him as a brother. “All is forgiven,” I said, and meant it. “Thank God you have come.”
We went outside. The day was cold and gray and deepening into twilight as we passed beneath the cedar-trees. I had thought to walk to the locust grove, but something stopped me. I do not know what. Instead we descended the drive, our footsteps crunching into the uneasy quiet that settled over us with the dusk as we reached the highway and turned back toward the house, and Justice spoke. “Tell me,” he said, and I did.
I told him of the locust grove and of Lily Stark’s suicide. He was already familiar with her story, which surprised me, until I recalled the afternoon he had spent with my uncle in the library. Edward had blamed Lily for his wife’s illness, I explained, and recounted his final words of warning: Remember Lily.
“We were to sell the Lodge,” I said.
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“My sister’s doing, I expect.”
He was right, of course. I told him of Clemency’s interest in Lily Stark and of her walks to the locust grove, of the hours she had spent there and the transformation that resulted. Her melancholia. Her anger.
Justice interrupted me. “As if she, too, were under the influence of Lily’s spirit?
“Perhaps,” I said, slightly embarrassed.
“May I speak plainly?”
“By all means.”
“Your uncle may have believed in ghosts, Henry, but I do not, and neither should you. Where he might have seen actions of a malevolent spirit, I see instead the fevered workings of a disordered brain, that of a man broken by grief and decades of isolation.”
“And Clemency?”
He exhaled heavily.
“My sister has long been disquieted in mind. You must have realized this. Consider her fascination with the strange, the ghoulish. Like your uncle she would see a ghost’s influence where there is only illness. Unlike your uncle, however, she is not alone in her affliction.”
I did not reply but thought of Poe’s “Alone,” which we had quoted to one another, and of the final lines that went unspoken.
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
“Once,” Justice continued, “when we were children, my mother came into the nursery where I was seated in the window-seat. She dragged me to the floor by my collar and
thrashed me about the bottom while I blubbered and protested that I had done nothing wrong. I hadn’t seen Clem in hours, but she had gone to our mother in tears and told her she had hidden from me in a cupboard and that I had broken the door to get to her. All lies, as it happens, but the cupboard was indeed broken. Clem had taken a hammer to it.”
“Good Lord.”
“She was a fantasist, Henry, as we all are in childhood. But a child’s fantasy is madness in an adult. And Clemency is no longer a child.”
“Madness,” I said.
Wind, and the cedars rattling, raining down needles.
My voice was hoarse when I spoke again. “What is to be done?”
“I would speak with her,” Justice said. “As her brother.”
“Of course,” I said.
“Alone,” he said, and I nodded.
We returned to the house and a table laid for dinner. The cook struck the bell, but Clemency didn’t join us, and Asaph admitted he hadn’t seen her since the morning. I sent him upstairs to her sitting room, and he returned alone.
“Beatrice is there,” he said. “She wouldn’t let me in.”
“Beatrice?” Justice asked.
“Clemency’s maid,” I explained.
“She told me the missus wasn’t hungry. That she won’t be coming down.”
I waved him away. The cook entered with a platter of oysters and Justice and I passed a pleasant evening together. We did not talk of Clemency but of politics and philosophy until the last of the wine was poured. I sipped mine slowly, making it last, but the inevitable could not be delayed. Our cigars burned down, and we went upstairs.
Beatrice met us outside Clemency’s sitting room. My wife’s maid was a French-Canadian girl of about sixteen.
“Very sorry,” she said. “No one is to enter, not even Monsieur Henry.”
Justice spoke. “It’s Beatrice, isn’t it? Your loyalty to your mistress is to be commended, but I am Mrs. Feathering’s brother. We have not been together since before the wedding. She is anxious to see me, no doubt, and would not wish for you to create further delay.”
