After Alice Fell(63)
By spring the ground will be filled with new growth, whether water reeds or garden flowers, who’s to know? Either way, Cathy will have erased another bit of the past and decorated it to her tastes.
Once there was a boathouse and a rowboat painted white with red stripes. Lionel fished and I dozed in the bow, head to the sun.
Come along, he’d shout to Alice on the shore. Come along.
But she’d just wave and return to her drawing pad. Sometimes she sat, still as a statue, only her eyes casting along with the twists and turns of the little boat in the breeze. And other times she took to the glass house for the day, not minding the heaving heat of the sun beating the windows. Once I found her there in a faint, red cheeked and sodden with sweat, a trowel and the shards of a shattered pot by her head. Soil scattered and the seedlings too fragile to replant. It was my birthday. My twenty-seventh. Benjamin had come to call, and he sat with Father and Lionel in the dining room while the candles dripped wax on the ginger cake.
I stood and gave my apologies. “I’ll find her.”
Father gave a puff of annoyance. “She’s too old for this.”
“Yes,” I said and took my leave to find the spoiled eighteen-year-old child.
“Get up.” I toed her leg and kept my fists to myself.
She sat then, eyes glazed, hair matted and tangled in its torn hairnet.
“Why do you do this?” I jerked forward. Grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “You’re my prison. Everything I’ve wanted has been ruined by you. You’ve taken it all.”
I yanked her to her feet. All the while she kept silent, just a high, strange wheeze she stopped with a clamp of her mouth.
Then her fingers were on my cheeks, her palms pressed along my jaw, and she kissed me on the ridge of my brow, her chapped lips against the skin. She stepped past me, head down and hands holding her skirts, docile and alone as she walked the path. Slowed at the stairs and waited for me. Took my hand in hers as we walked up. She sat in her chair and ate a piece of cake. Smiled at Benjamin when he stood and blustered on. Raised her glass of sherry when Father toasted my health and Benjamin’s and our soon-to-be married life. Then she stood without warning and walked from the room, her arm slipping away as I reached for her to stay.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. But she made no motion she’d heard.
That night, she didn’t crawl into bed with me. She returned to the glass house. And then, when we’d all moved to the cottage, she kept to her own bed in the room with the robins that wanted so much to be free.
I turn from my window. There should be the tick of the mantel clock. But it is still, the hands at three and twenty. I pace from one corner to another. Pick at the ties on the splint.
The cotton cover smells of lavender; earlier, Saoirse slipped some in the cotton rolls and padding before tying the whole together. “Good as new in a few weeks,” she said.
The room is lit now only with the one oil lamp on my desk. I stare at the box I’ve stolen from Cathy’s secretary. The top is a burnt image of a sleigh. Two horses, a man and woman, the White Mountains behind them and a scatter of pines.
I struggle with the latch, the box slipping from under my splinted arm and clattering to the floor. I reach for it and pinch it between my knees. Dig my thumbnail to the top to open it and lift out the velvet pouch. I clasp the satin string in my mouth, working the knot until it loosens and I can dig my finger into the bag. The sharp tip of a pin pokes my skin. With a quick glance at the door—locked, is it locked?—turn the pouch and let the jewelry slide to my lap.
It is a brooch. A peacock of scrolled rose gold. Obsidian eyes. A shellac of blue at the breast. Chips of glass dyed garnet and emerald for the tail. I turn it over, looking for an inscription, find nothing but a cheaply set clasp.
It is familiar, in the way of something seen once, perhaps commented on, and then forgotten. Not mine. Not Alice’s. Certainly not Cathy’s, whose gems were real.
I drop it to the desk and flop back in the chair. Stare at the ceiling and the glow of the candle. When I blow out a breath, the light wavers, then steadies.
My arm throbs. The cut on my lip has scabbed over and itches. My head aches—from lack of sleep, from the fall—from my sister dying.
On the bed stand is the tonic Cathy has generously poured in my mouth and dripped into my tea. A brown glass bottle without a label, a laudanum more opium than brandy.
I grab it up and push the cork against the edge of the table to open it. If I drink it, I will sleep. If I drink it, I will lose myself in terrible dreams. The liquid sloshes against the glass. I unlatch the shutter and pour the medicine to spatter the ground below.
There’s an orange dot out near the far side of the pond. I turn down the oil lamp and pull the shutter just enough to watch. The light jigs and lifts. A cigarette or pipe. Yes. There’s the flare as it’s lifted to someone’s lips and the smoke dragged in. Amos. He stands in one place and smokes. That orange light lifting and dropping and then tamped out.
As if he’s watching us.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Cathy startles me awake. “You need to get up.”
She grips the back of the rocking chair I’d fallen asleep in sometime during the night and stares at me. She’s dressed in a hurry, in a summer chintz that hangs loose around her hips. No petticoats. A button missed at her waist. Her hair twisted into a knot.