Wild, Beautiful, and Free(70)

He was not who I’d thought, and I wanted to believe it didn’t matter, but it did. It mattered for all the people of Lower Knoll, and it mattered that he hadn’t told me any of this himself. He said he loved me. But my mother’s face on my mind made me think of how large a man’s love could be—that he would burn down a house to keep me near him. Her face said that when there was love so big, there was no room for your own. That was why she had looked the way she did in the locket—acquiescence. Because she’d had to carry her love small, like in a pocketbook, out of sight. Or worse—she’d had to carry the small love in her bare hands, the fingers gently clenched as though she were walking around holding two butterflies. With her hands like that, my mama couldn’t hold anything else. Not even me. For all I know, that’s why she died when I was born.

Now, standing there, suffocating in that too-full room, I got a sense of how small my love was. And I felt the stupid girl in me that Founder saw. Christian didn’t come to me through all those souls. He didn’t reach for me or try to hold me. I had no words. I thought of Madame. This was what it was to love and have the heart betrayed. This must have been what she’d felt when she’d realized Papa didn’t belong to her. A kind of crazy did open up inside you, and it would be easy to just fall into it. The crazy felt like it might be comforting, like I could scream and scream all day and no one would pay me no mind because they knew I had a right to do it. Madame had been screaming for years.

From the crazy I could find the right to be uncivil, then the right to be mean. Nothing would matter much after that—I could do any evil that came to mind and call it vengeance. Madame had gone that far.

Why didn’t I go that way? Because I felt what only could have been my mama’s hands, firm but kind, on my shoulders. The force of them turned me, turned me away from the awful I could have released into that room. She turned me away, and I ran.

In my room I sank into a chair and stared out the window. I dropped my head in my hands as his words of the past several months came back to me. How many times had he stressed our similarities? He’d already known: we were indeed exactly alike. But only I, not he, had been prepared to come to the altar on my own and free. He would have had an entire village on his back, and he had tried to hide this burden from me.

I don’t know how long I sat there. I didn’t eat; I didn’t drink. I watched the light shift and fade. I changed into my plain gray dress, removed the lily from my hair, and marveled over the change that had broken my life in only a few hours. I felt too tired and weak to cry. The shock wound its way through my body.

Finally there was a soft knock at the door.

“Come in, Christian,” I said.

His hand grazed my cheek, but I didn’t rise to greet him. He sat on the end of the bed, almost in the exact spot where Founder had been.

“Tell me one thing about Founder,” I said. “Why was she placée?”

“He didn’t have a white wife to complain.”

Like Madame, I thought.

“Neither do I.”

I looked at him sharply. “Do you expect that of me? And then what? You would marry Miss Chamberlain or someone like her?”

“It doesn’t have to be like that,” he said. “I love you.”

“My papa loved my mother.” I took the locket from my neck and placed the opened piece in his hands. “And she died with a white woman screaming over her body. Your father loved Founder, and she lives up there by herself and haunts this house like a ghost. Is that what love does to a life? I don’t want it.”

He closed the locket and returned it to me but held on to my hands. “Then come away.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere we’re not known. No one would have to know that you’re not white. You can pass as I do. You’ve done it before.”

“I did it to save my life,” I said. “My life. Not so that I could live as someone else.”

“What does it matter?”

“It matters. I knew what it was to live under another name and have no voice. And I lived in fear, every single day. I won’t live that way again. It would be like being enslaved, only from inside me.” I pulled away from him. “That’s the truth of why you haven’t married before, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“You were afraid of being found out by your wife! You knew you had to live with that possibility, even more so than you do now, and you’d have even more to lose.”

I stood and paced the room, the realizations coming quickly.

“That’s why you wanted to marry me. Because you knew if I did find out, I wouldn’t leave. I would have to stay. Stay attached to you. And I’d have to live on those terms because—oh my God, Christian—you thought I valued a white husband more than I valued you.”

I stopped in front of him.

“What about the fire?” I demanded.

His shoulders slumped. “I wanted to keep you close, to stay in the mansion. I didn’t intend for anyone to get hurt. I didn’t know the girl was in there.”

He lunged for me and gathered me in his arms. “Don’t you see? I couldn’t stand for you to be far from me. For the first time I felt a true connection with another human being—you. Without fear, without remorse. You loved me as I am. I couldn’t risk losing you.”