The Hunger(74)

“No one would believe you if you did.” Knox started to rise from the floor, slowly and deliberately, watching him. “You’ve already made your bed, Charles. You may as well leave Lydia in hers. No one will take your word against mine, son. Not after how you’ve behaved, dogging my daughter over the years. Not after you already went ahead and took the blame.” Stanton nearly blacked out from anger.

He was on him, straddling him, his knuckles becoming as bloody as the old man’s face. Over and over again, pummeling that sick, smug grin. Wanting to make those gray eyes glaze over forever. Knox was death itself—he’d destroyed everything good in the world.

Herbert Knox would have met his maker that day, had it not been for the housekeeper, Mrs. Talley, running in and screaming. Her hollering drew the other servants, who pulled Stanton off the bruised and bloody mess Knox had become.

Stanton was heaving, crying, shaking. The servants stared at him in wonder and horror, and he was eventually dragged home to his grandfather in a cloak of fear and shame.

He was left in his bed for hours—maybe days. His grandfather didn’t come to him at all. Neither did his mother. No one came. He wondered if maybe he, Stanton, had died, and was caught in a kind of purgatory, a world defined by the edges of his bed and the boundaries of fitful, nightmarish sleep. Outside his window, a blizzard raged.

Finally, morning dawned, and his grandfather called him into his office. Stanton realized his whole body ached—from the struggle, no doubt. There were scabs on the backs of his hands.

Would his grandfather whip him? Beat him within an inch of his own life? Send him out into the streets? He couldn’t fathom the many ways in which Mr. Knox might try to ruin his life now, what sort of punishment he might devise.

He heard his mother weeping in her room, the door firmly locked. He didn’t blame her. She was powerless to help him.

Gingerly, he pushed open his grandfather’s study door with a creak.

His grandfather said nothing but nodded for him to take a seat. The room felt eerily silent—the snow had quieted the whole world.

What happened next floored Stanton.

It seemed, according to his grandfather, that Herbert Knox had “taken pity on the grief-stricken boy.” His grandfather produced a letter in a fat envelope. The sum of money inside it caused Stanton to rock backward in his chair.

“This,” his grandfather explained, “is to help you start over, to make a new life for yourself. Courtesy of the Knox family.” He paused. “On the condition that you never return.”

Stanton was frozen. He didn’t want Knox’s money. He didn’t want his so-called charity, the sum of which was so great it seemed clear evidence of Knox’s guilt. It was hush money. Stanton wasn’t a child; he could see that.

“Take it, boy,” his grandfather said. “You are no longer welcome here.”

Stanton may not have been a child, but still, he was young. If he had another choice, he didn’t know it. If there was a way to make things right, to reveal the truth, he didn’t see it.

The wad of money stared up at him. How could he have known that one day Knox would want it back—long after it had been spent?

How could he have foreseen the many ways—and many women—he would seek to drown out the memories of this time? Who could say if there was a specific point at which Stanton’s innocence in Lydia’s death no longer mattered, became subsumed in all the mistakes, and affairs, that were to follow . . .

Maybe he was na?ve, then. Maybe he was a child.

He couldn’t make it right for Lydia, could not bring her justice or peace. And neither could he continue to live in this town, next door to the man who had betrayed her trust and love. He would go mad or one day kill Knox, or both.

There was nothing he could do, it seemed, but take the money and leave.

A real hero would have known what to do, surely—would not have built his whole life on a foundation of rot and guilt and horror.

But Charles Stanton was no hero.

Forgive me, Lydia.





NOVEMBER 1846





CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE





The snow kept falling over Alder Creek: It was dainty, pretty, even. Unrelenting.

Often as her husband slept, fitfully, Tamsen would stare at him in wonder, remembering how she had once longed for his death—prayed it would come as a pleasant and nasty surprise: neat, tidy, over with quickly, as it had been with her first husband. How she fancied she’d find an improved opportunity elsewhere, that her beauty, like a fishing hook, would save her yet, fetching her a better catch than before. Those ideas seemed remarkably na?ve to her now, set as they’d been within the larger belief that life would be good to her, despite everything—that she would turn it all around, would carve out a space for happiness. That it was a thing you could get to by clawing at it.

She knew better now, though. And knowing it allowed her to forgive George, at least a little, for the terrible entrapment she felt their marriage had been. He’d given up his own safety for hers, for no good reason at all, except that she was the mother of his children. Except that he, unaccountably, adored her.

In a practical sense, she hardly needed him. George wasn’t good for much more than bluster and bright-eyed cajoling. No, what she did need, though, was that very adoration.

For someone to care.