by Daniel Mills
Beatrice’s confidence wavered. “I do not know, monsieur.”
“She won’t be angry with you,” Justice said. “I will make it perfectly plain that you followed her instructions to the letter.” He produced a coin from his waistcoat. “In consideration of your service. All women should have such maids to attend to them.”
Beatrice took the coin. She removed a brass key from her apron and placed it into Justice’s hand. “Monsieur,” she said and scurried off down the gallery.
Justice slotted the key to the lock.
“I’ll return at eleven?” I asked.
“That should be sufficient, yes.”
He turned the key, let himself in. The door closed, and I was alone in the half-light with the shadows like ghosts drawing near. Edward and Jane Feathering. Lily Stark. The girl was bones in the ground, nothing more, but she possessed a hold on Clemency I could not understand. Black shapes flitted down the gallery, and I recalled my own troubled dreams, and wondered, in a moment of fantasy, if these too were the influence of Lily’s restless spirit.
But there were no ghosts at Bittersweet Lodge: there was only pain. Lily had taken her own life at twenty while Jane Feathering had died slowly and in agony. My uncle had needed to believe her illness wasn’t meaningless, that it signified more than the world’s indifference, much as I would believe in any fiction, no matter how outlandish, if it proved Clemency to be sane.
I paced the house. In the library, I took down Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales and tried to read but could not fix my eyes upon the page. The lamp burned low and fitful and the windows were black and empty, openings to nowhere. The world beyond had vanished. No trees, no sky. My breath clouded on the glass and I wiped it away but did not move from the window until the clocks had struck eleven and I returned to Clemency’s room as arranged.
Justice was letting himself out. He appeared noticeably shaken, breathless, his face flushed. He saw me but only shook his head before hurrying away down the gallery. I called after him, but he didn’t look back.
The door was closed, locked. I heard movement from inside, then a sound like sobbing, but Clemency wouldn’t come to the door and her brother had the key.
“Let me in,” I pleaded but there was no response. My head fell forward, striking the door, and I listened, helpless, just as Clemency had listened at the grave of Lily Stark. But the door to her room—like that door into eternity—remained closed to me.
X.
Someone at the door. I stumbled out of bed and drew back the latch. Beatrice. The girl’s hair was a mess, her eyes wild. The light wavered in her hand.
“You must come,” she said. “Madame Clemency is ill.”
Blood in my ears, then, a feeling of falling. The sweat prickled on my forehead and I steadied myself against the doorframe as Beatrice continued, saying, “She screams like she is in pain, but her room it is locked, and I do not have my key.”
I swallowed, tasting bile. “Go and wake her brother,” I told her. “Tell him he is to meet me at her sitting room with the key. Then send Asaph for the doctor. Do you understand?”
Beatrice nodded. She lifted her skirts and hastened to the guest room where Justice slept. I did not pause to strike a light but threw myself down the staircase, stumbling at the landing then regaining my feet and sprinting down the gallery.
Screams from the sitting room: a shrill, wordless howling, as of a beast in a cage-trap. I rattled the handle and battered the latch, but the door held. “Step aside,” a voice said, and Justice was there beside me. He unlocked the door with Beatrice’s key and we went inside.
The room smelled of blood and sickness, loosened bowels. Clemency thrashed about on the daybed, moaning, the blankets wound about like a shroud. The furniture was disordered, the end-table upturned. A wineglass had shattered on the floor and there were dark streaks about her mouth as she gasped and clawed at her stomach. Her eyes rolled white in her skull.
I ran to the daybed. I took hold of her arms and pinned them to her sides, but she spasmed and writhed and rose from the soiled bedding, her body twisting back on itself like the limbs of a locust tree. I climbed on top of her. Her fists flew up to bruise my face and head, but I held her down, somehow, and whispered into her ear such soothing phrases as I could remember, as though words alone might dispel the nightmare into which we had fallen.
She went limp. Her face relaxed, her eyes closed, and she was quiet. I inclined my ear to her breast and heard the flutter of a heartbeat.
“My God,” Justice said, “she isn’t…?”
“No.”
“What is to be done?”
“Asaph is going for the doctor.”
Justice nodded but appeared uncomfortable. “I’ll see if he needs help.” He excused himself. An hour passed, more, and he didn’t return. The clocks struck three and the candlelight flickered on the wall, transforming the sparsely furnished sitting room into a shadow-play of swaying tree-limbs and blowing leaves, the silhouette of a woman leaning over the daybed: she touched her lips to Clemency’s forehead.
“Henry.”
Clemency was awake. The light made sparks of her eyes.
“Clem, I—”
“Don’t,” she said.
“Why did we ever come here? If only we had stayed away…”
“No,” she said. “Your uncle was mistaken. He didn’t know her, couldn’t see—”
The breath failed her.
“Whom do you mean? I don’t understand.”
“No,” she said, gently, and she was smiling. “I know you don’t. Do you recall that day in the grove, what you said to me? That we could know each other. Face to face, as in Arcadia.”
“I remember.”
“This world,” she said, still smiling. “It asks too much of us. Takes even more. But I regret nothing, Henry. You mustn’t, either. Promise me.”
I promised.
The doctor bustled in at dawn. He had been out on a call, attending to a birth in a neighboring village and guzzled a cup of strong coffee before performing his examination.
“Enteritis,” he said. “Very bad, I’m afraid. There is nothing to be done.”
Clemency died at ten past eight. The doctor closed her eyes, opened the curtains. Sunlight poured into the sitting room, white and blinding, an annihilating purity.
I ran. I fled to the library, but even there, her absence pursued me. The last dance at our wedding, how we whirled together with our faces in each other’s eyes. The letters we exchanged, promises we made, and Clemency’s arms about my neck, encircling like a halter. A woman in white, her lifted hand. Her face in death, its awful stillness.
An image, I thought. She would never be anything more.
The pain landed like a howitzer shell, punching through my chest and torching the blood that surged to my brain so body and mind were all one fire, one darkness, as in my nightmares of the house from which I could not awaken, even now, though I tore at my clothes and hair and hurled myself into the nearest bookcase. The shelf groaned and toppled over, shattering the window behind it. Glass was everywhere and blood on my bare feet as I kicked at the volumes, cracking their spines and splitting the binding. Cold air pushed into the room, sweeping the scattered pages from the rug and raining them over me, white and flapping, a storm of lilies.
Justice appeared.
His eyes were red, his skin ashen. We stood face to face with the torn leaves drifting between us, an illustration from “Ligea” of a woman reborn with hair blacker than the raven wings of midnight. The page twitched and lifted, catching the wind then floating away.
“Phyllis and Edith are here,” he said.
“I cannot see them,” I said. “Not now.”
He nodded. “I will find something for them to do.”
The two old women quickly proved themselves indispensable. They laid out Clemency in the parlor and sent word of her death to Concord while I was indisposed with grief and irrational. I wouldn’t leave the library but spent the day
gathering up glass in my hands and piecing together the books I had ruined. Sometime after midnight I collapsed in a chair by the fireplace and drifted into a dreamless sleep as night bayed and shrieked at the broken window.
Edith found me there in the morning.
“We must discuss the burial,” she said, and I nodded. “As you know, your uncle is buried with his late wife in the village. The plot is wide and would suffice for Clemency as well, though Justice has also expressed an interest in removing the body to Concord.”
“No,” I said. “She must be buried here.”
“In the village.”
“In the locust grove.”
“But that is unconsecrated ground—”
“Then find someone to consecrate it!”
Edith turned and left. I feared I had offended her, but she did exactly as I had asked, traveling by train to Biddeford where she found a minister willing to preside at the burial, returning with him on the morning of the wake. Clemency lay in the parlor as the mourners came and went, but I waited outside, wishing to remember her only as she was in life, not death, and because I had no likeness of her: no portrait, not even a photograph.
Afterward Asaph screwed down the coffin lid, and Edith’s minister led the procession to the locust grove, where Clemency’s gravesite had been prepared beside that of Lily Stark. The day was fine and warm for autumn. Dead lilies rustled under our feet, brown and trodden where they had once been white. Words were said, the body consigned. The first shovelfuls of dirt were cast into the grave and the mourners returned to the house.
I did not join them.
“It’s a pretty spot,” Phyllis said.
Her presence surprised me. I had thought I was alone.
She continued, “My dear sister had doubts concerning the place you had chosen for our cousin to rest, and Justice, too, had hoped to bring his sister home. But being here now I believe this was the right decision.”
“I asked her to be my wife here.”
“Is that so? I didn’t realize.”
“We were walking and chanced to stumble on this place. Her grave.”
“Lily Stark,” Phyllis said.
“You know her story, don’t you? Clemency mentioned you had told it to her.”
Phyllis pulled her shawl about her shoulders. “I do,” she said.
“Will you tell it to me?”
“It’s a sad story,” she said. “Could we leave it for another day?”
“Please,” I said, and she relented.
“Long before your uncle lived here,” she said, “this house was owned by a family called Stark. The father, Cyrus, was a brute, who had earned his money in the slave trade and subjected his family and servants to the same treatment he had learned at sea. His wife died of consumption as did his three eldest children. Only Lily survived to adulthood. He loved her, it was said, but there is no doubt that he was cruel to her. There were rumors of abuse and, really, the most shocking things were said.
“All of this I heard from my mother, who was a young girl at the time. Her father was a doctor here in town and a frequent guest of the Lodge and my mother had met the older Lily on many occasions. I believe she admired her—worshiped her, even—and Lily was unquestionably a remarkable girl, blessed with a talent for living things. She kept the kitchen garden where she grew all manner of exotic plants and even built a hothouse round the back where she cultivated flowers, seedlings, fruit trees.”
“My uncle told me she had planted the bittersweet.”
“A gift for life, as I said. Perhaps that’s why it happened.”
“Pardon?”
“She fell in love. Hard, the way some girls do. The man worked on a neighboring farm. He was young and undoubtedly poor. A freedman, I have also heard, and maybe that was true, because Cyrus put an end to it. Most say he bought the boy off, though some believed they fought and the boy fled only for fear of his life. He left, anyway, and Cyrus arranged for his daughter to marry a business partner. But it never happened.”
“She killed herself,” I said.
Phyllis nodded. “If the girl had any sense, she would have cut her own throat or drowned herself in the ocean. But, no, she mixed up a poison from such plants as she grew and drank down the bottle. It burned up her insides. Her father found her in her bedroom with the blood pouring out of her. He sent for my grandfather, the doctor, who was also Justice of the Peace, but Lily was dead when he arrived. He couldn’t help her but was able to determine what had happened, how she’d done it. Cyrus blamed himself, naturally, and died soon afterward. A cousin inherited the property and sold it to your uncle, who lost his wife to illness, and now Miss Clemency…”
Phyllis shivered, adjusted her shawl. “This place has seen too much tragedy.”
“Yes,” I said.
She took me by the elbow. “Come along,” she said. “I believe the weather’s turning cold.”
Justice was dead by March. His father heard a gunshot and rushed to the nursery of the house in Concord where he discovered his son curled up inside a broken cupboard. The revolver was still in his hand, smoking, but he left no note and no indication as to motive.
Edward Feathering’s study of the Teutoborg appeared in print the following month. Notices weren’t kind. My uncle’s knowledge was described as superficial, his style tedious, but in publishing the book, I had secured my freedom: I sold Bittersweet Lodge to a New York banker and returned to Boston, the life of a bachelor.
Little more is left to say. My story is ended, but I can offer no explanation for the events I have related. Lily Stark’s grave. My aunt’s long illness. Clemency’s death and Justice’s suicide. These are to me like the strands of a story that can never be knitted, but I have learned to accept this. Life, as it is lived, rarely conforms to the shapes prescribed by literature.
Forty-four years later and Clemency hasn’t left me. I live alone but for the lack of her, married to her absence. Her voice I hear only in dreams and faint for the gulf which divides us, which always separated us, even in life.
I regret nothing, she says. You mustn’t, either.
I am sixty-six years old.
I have not kept my promise.
The Lake
August 1997. Samuel is twelve, almost thirteen, but looks younger. He despises himself, his thin limbs, hairless body. His best friend Jason is a Boy Scout and an athlete, pitcher for the town’s Little League team. The boys are neighbors, have known each other for years.
It’s early evening, not yet suppertime. Most days in summer the boys ride bikes to the dam, but tonight, they are waiting for Nick, watching for him from the windows of Samuel’s living room. Nick lives in the next town and attends a different middle school. He met the other boys at church camp, where Samuel’s father is pastor.
A truck pulls up outside. The red body gleams, waxed and shining, its hubcaps like silver sunbursts. The driver is visible through the windshield, dark glasses hiding his eyes. Nick’s father. His skin is shockingly pale, his hands white where they grip the steering wheel.
Nick dismounts from the cabin and totters up the lawn. He is pale and heavy, asthmatic. He wheezes when he runs, breasts bouncing in the shirts he wears to swim.
His father pulls out, gunning the engine, and the boys dash outside. They meet Nick on the porch and set off with him, following the road along the lakeshore with its floating docks and ranks of summer cottages. Samuel and Jason go first, nearly running, while Nick trails behind, panting, pleading with them to slow down, to wait.
They reach the dam. The site is long disused, its sluices blocked with rust, concrete chipped and pitted. The boys remove their shoes and socks. They scale the hemlock which overhangs the dam and lower themselves to the ledge.
Jason goes first, then Samuel, then Nick, who trembles as he releases his grip on the hemlock and stands unsupported on the dam. A motorboat passes, startling the gulls from a nearby thicket. The noise of the engine tails off to a drone then silence though the waves con
tinue to move in its absence, spreading over the lake like the cracks in a mirror.
The ledge is slick, wet with spray from the lake five feet below. Samuel, cautious, steps carefully over the dam, hooking his toes in the crumbling concrete. He goes from pockmark to crater, listening all the while for Nick’s breath behind him: the catch in the other boy’s throat, the occasional wheeze.
Jason is far ahead of them. He walks the ledge with an acrobat’s grace, slowing only as he nears the center of the dam. Samuel has not been out so far, has never dared, but Nick is behind him and he doesn’t want to appear afraid, says nothing.
They reach the dam’s center where the ledge is highest. Behind them an old streambed runs downhill past a shuttered cottage before bending out of sight beyond a stand of hemlocks. The dark trees shimmer. The day’s rain webs their foliage, hangs from branch and needle. The lake is calm, all waves dissipated. Samuel looks down at his reflection far below.
Jason strips off his shirt. The muscles show in his arms and shoulders as he raises his hands, joining them together over his head. He turns his wrists one against the other and stretches, bending himself from side to side.
Samuel asks: “What are you doing?”
“Limbering up.”
“Why?”
“We’re going to dive.”
“Here? It’s too high.”
“Ten feet, maybe. No more than that. Same as the diving board at the Y.”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t dive, then. I’ll do it alone.”
Jason drops to a squat. His legs tense. He straightens, readying himself for the jump.
Nick says: “Wait.”
Samuel wheels around. He watches dumbly as Nick snorts from his inhaler and shuffles forward past him. The fat bunches at his elbows. His nipples show through his tee shirt.
He says: “I’ll jump with you.”
Jason grins. “Okay, then,” he says.
