The Giver of Stars(65)

‘They were heirlooms! They were for Bennett’s children!’

Her mouth opened before she could stop it. ‘Well, Bennett isn’t having any children, is he?’

She looked up and saw Annie in the doorway, her eyes wide with delight at this turn of events.

‘What did you just say?’

‘Bennett isn’t going to have any wretched children. Because … we are not involved in that way.’

‘If you’re not involved in that way, girl, it’s because of your disgusting notions.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Annie began to put the plates down. Her ears had gone quite pink.

Van Cleve leaned forward over the table, his jaw jutting. ‘Bennett told me.’

‘Pa –’ Bennett’s voice held a warning.

‘Oh, yes. He’s told me about your filthy book and the depraved things you tried to do to him.’

Annie’s plate dropped in front of Alice with a clatter. She skittered back to the kitchen.

Alice blanched. She turned to look at Bennett. ‘You talked to your father about what goes on in our bed?’

Bennett rubbed at his cheek. ‘You … I didn’t know what to do, Alice. You … kinda shocked me.’

Mr Van Cleve threw his chair back from the table and stomped round to where Alice was sitting. She flinched involuntarily as he towered over her, spraying saliva as he spoke. ‘Oh, yes, I know all about that book and your so-called library. You know that book has been banned in this country? That’s how degraded it is!’

‘Yes, and I know that a federal judge overturned that same ban. I know just as much as you do, Mr Van Cleve. I read the facts.’

‘You are a snake! You have been corrupted by Margery O’Hare and now you are trying to corrupt my son!’

‘I was trying to be a wife to him! And there’s more to being a wife than arranging dolls and stupid china birds!’

Annie peered around the doorway with the last plate, immobile.

‘Don’t you dare criticize my Dolores’s precious things, you ungrateful wretch! You aren’t fit to touch the heel of that woman’s shoes! And tomorrow morning you’re going to go up those mountains and fetch my dolls back.’

‘I will not. I’m not taking those dolls away from two motherless children.’

Van Cleve raised a stubby finger and jabbed it at her face. ‘Then you’re banned from that damned library from now on, you hear me?’

‘No.’ She didn’t blink.

‘What do you mean, no?’

‘I told you before. I’m a grown woman. You don’t get to ban me from anything.’

Afterwards she remembered thinking distantly that old man Van Cleve’s face had grown so crimson that she feared his heart might give out. But instead he lifted his arm, and before she realized what was happening a white-hot pain exploded at the side of her head, and she collapsed against the table, her knees buckling under her.

Everything went black. Her hands gripped the tablecloth, the plates collapsing towards her as her fingers closed around the white damask, pulling it down until her knees hit the floor.

‘Pa!’

‘I’m doing what you should have done a long time ago! Knocking some sense into this wife of yours!’ Van Cleve roared, his fat fist banging down on the tablecloth so that everything in the room seemed to shudder. Then, before she could gather her thoughts, her hair was pulled back sharply, and another blow, this time her temple, so that her head bounced off the edge of the table, and as the room spun, she was dimly aware of movement, shouting, the clatter of plates hitting the floor. Alice lifted an arm, tried to shield herself, braced for the next. But from the corner of her eye, she glimpsed Bennett in front of his father, an exchange of voices she could barely make out over the ringing in her ears.

She climbed heavily to her feet, pain clouding her thoughts, and staggered. As the room bucked around her she was dimly aware of Annie’s shocked face at the kitchen door. The taste of iron flooded the back of her throat.

She heard distant shouting, Bennett’s ‘No … No, Pa!’ Alice realized that her napkin was still balled in her fist. She looked down. It was spattered with blood. She stared at it, blinking, trying to register what she was seeing. She straightened up, took a moment for the room to stop spinning, then placed it neatly on the table.

And then, without stopping to pick up her coat, Alice walked unsteadily past the two men into the hallway, opened the front door, and continued walking all the way up the snow-covered drive.

An hour and twenty-five minutes later, Margery opened the door a crack, her eyes narrowed in the dark, and found not McCullough or one of his clan, but the thin figure of Alice Van Cleve, shivering in a pale blue dress, her stockings ripped and her shoes crusted with snow. Her teeth chattered and the side of her head was bloodied, her left eye pursed into a livid purple bruise. Blood leached rust and scarlet into the neckline of her dress, and what looked like gravy spattered her lap. They stared at each other as Bluey barked furiously at the window.

Alice’s voice, when it came, was thick, as though her tongue was swollen. ‘You … said we were friends?’

Margery un-cocked her rifle and placed it against the doorframe. She opened the door and took her friend’s elbow. ‘Come on in. You come on in.’ She glanced around at the darkened mountainside, then closed and bolted the door behind her.