The Hunger(73)

That was what he believed.



* * *



? ? ?

TINY FLECKS OF SNOW swirled around Stanton’s head as he entered the Knox house several days later for the funeral. He looked up at the sky, white flannel stretched across the horizon. A storm was coming.

Inside, the parlor room had changed overnight. The furniture had been pulled out to accommodate the coffin, as dainty as its occupant, standing on trestles in front of the fireplace. After a push from behind, Stanton went up and peered inside. There was Lydia, his Lydia. He recognized the dress they had put on her, cream flannel with a tiny rosebud print; she had hated it, thought it made her look like a child. He’d heard Mr. Knox had the female servants prepare the body and they hadn’t bothered to curl and fix her hair the way she normally wore it. Instead, they’d left it long and combed it out over her shoulders. She didn’t look at all the way he remembered her.

Worst of all was her skin, white and chalky. Her eyes were closed, her face slack and inanimate. She was not Lydia as he’d known her.

That made it slightly easier.

He tried not to hear the muffled sobs of Lydia’s father, but they were everywhere, muffled and yet stifling somehow, like a heavy snow. Stanton could hardly breathe, trapped in the weight of that sound.

Afterward, he spent the day fitfully, so preoccupied and moody that his grandfather sent him out to chop wood in what was now a heavy snow. He chopped until he had raised a healthy sweat under his clothes and his mind had finally been able to forget his worries, at least for moments at a time. But no sooner had Stanton stepped inside the house than his grandfather ordered him to take a wheelbarrow of firewood to Knox as a neighborly gesture.

He stacked the firewood outside the kitchen entrance. He was too numb to protest.

The door opened in his face and there stood Herbert Knox looking down at him. His cravat had been loosened and his starched collar unbuttoned. His gray-streaked hair was mussed. He was in his cups, Stanton judged.

He insisted that Stanton come inside. He sat next to Mr. Knox in a dining room chair that had been placed in the parlor for the viewing. He stared ahead at the coffin, not wishing to speak for fear of betraying Lydia.

“Do you know why I’ve asked you in?” Herbert Knox’s voice boomed, echoing off the high ceiling.

Stanton gave one tight shake of his head.

Knox waved his hand. “You can speak freely. I gave the servants the afternoon off. There’s no one in the house except you and I.” When Stanton still said nothing, Knox leaned toward him and Stanton smelled alcohol on his breath. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.” He paused, his gaze sweeping over Stanton’s face. “You were close to my daughter. I want to know—did she tell you her secrets?”

Don’t tell anyone, please, she’d begged.

He began to sweat.

Herbert Knox rose to pace around the room. “Because I know my little girl had secrets, Charles. Secrets even you don’t know. Do you believe that? There are things about my daughter you know nothing about.”

“I imagine everyone has secrets,” Stanton said, finally, though he felt like he was choking on his own saliva.

“My daughter was pregnant, Charles. Did you know that?” Stanton started, but tried to hide his surprise. “Don’t think she didn’t tell me. I know who the father was.”

He once again felt how the air seemed to refuse to come into his lungs. He heaved a breath.

Mr. Knox plunged ahead. “You needn’t act so guilty, Charles. Your attraction to my daughter was understandable. It’s your behavior that was not.” So he was going to persist in his denial. Stanton thought he was going to be sick, though he didn’t know which would have been worse—Mr. Knox accusing him of being the father, or confessing to be the one at fault himself. The room seemed to be shrinking. Stanton’s head pounded. “Lydia and I were very close,” Knox went on, a distant look on his face. As if he were somewhere else. “Much closer than most fathers and daughters. She was all I had after my wife died, all the family left to me in the world. She told me everything.”

Stanton jumped to his feet, repulsion like a poison flooding his veins, his mind. He had to flee from the house, flee this abomination.

The sudden movement seemed to snap Herbert Knox out of his strange reverie. His stare was cold and reptilian now. He knows that I know, Stanton realized. Inebriated or not.

Please don’t tell anyone. Lydia’s pleading voice wrapped around his throat like a noose.

Herbert Knox, wrapped in a stink of alcohol and sweat, suddenly had him by the arm in a wild man’s grip. He pulled Stanton close so he could search his eyes, to know what he was thinking. “You think you know the truth, but you don’t understand. You thought my daughter loved you, but you were a child to her. She pitied you, following her around like a lovesick puppy. You don’t know what love is, son . . .”

The next thing Stanton knew, Knox was sprawled on the floor, rubbing his jaw in surprise. Stanton had punched the man so quickly that he had no memory of it except the soreness of his knuckles.

Knox gazed up at Stanton, his glazed look quickly replaced by something steelier. “If you really love Lydia, Charles, you’ll protect her memory. She would hate being gossiped about. You know that.”

“You think I won’t tell anyone . . .”