Beneath the Black Moon (Root Sisters) (22 page)

Cam
opened her mouth, but she wasn’t sure what to say, as Aunt Beth plowed on.
“I’ve tried, Cam. I’ve tried to be understanding; I’ve tried to cater to you.
But after this I think I have to be honest. You don’t have options. You may be
pretty, but it takes more than that, my girl. The reputation of this family has
suffered one blow after another, and there weren’t a line of men at your door
when you were sixteen. After four years of ostracizing yourself, how many more
suitors do you expect to have? The pick of the county is obviously infatuated
with you, and this is how you treat him?”

“It
was just a little disagreement,” Cam interrupted quickly, shock making her
voice tremble.

“I
don’t understand,” her Aunt Beth said. “I just don’t understand. I’ve tried so
hard, Cam. You girls aren’t anything like the girl I used to be, but I’ve
tried
.
The only one who ever obliges me is Helen, and only when it suits her. You shun
me, and Diana despises me. I’ve known for years that she blames me for her
scandal, but it’s not fair. She wanted freedom and I gave it to her. It wasn’t
my fault what she chose to do with that freedom.” Aunt Beth sounded as though
she was trying to convince herself. “If I could go back and rein her in, I
would, but…”

“Diana
doesn’t blame you,” Cam interrupted.

Aunt
Beth stared at her for a moment, and Cam was taken aback by the anger in her
eyes.

“Just
sort things out with Mr. Anderson... I don’t care how.” Aunt Beth said quickly,
and then she opened the kitchen door and was gone.

Cam
was staring open-mouthed after her Aunt when her grandmother hurried to close
the door.

“What
happened?” Caro asked. Her eyebrows were drawn together, and in the glow from
the fire she looked like a warrior, fierce and unyielding.

“Cam?”
Her grandmother asked, but her tone was not full of pity. Instead, there was a
silent command, an order to answer truthfully and accept the inevitable.

“He
just started asking the right questions,” Cam said finally, and her voice was
hollow and broken, but it did not falter. “He knows about the argument between
Mama and Kat Varennes. He asked about the fire. If he hasn’t already put the
pieces together, he will soon.”

“Dear
Lord.” Caro pressed a hand to her temple. She closed her eyes and took a deep
breath. Of them all, she had the most to lose. 

“No…”
Grandma stepped back, sinking into a chair. “That can’t be.”

“We
knew this would happen,” Cam said, softly, but neither of them looked at her,
and Cam realized, suddenly, that while they might have predicted it rationally,
emotionally none of them were prepared for what might follow.

“Mary?”
Caro asked, and her voice was a little raspy. “Does he know anything about my
Mary?”

Cam
shook her head, relieved that there was some good news. “No. How could he? No
one knows about Mary.”

“Good.”
Caro nodded slowly. “They can do what they want with me, but I can’t let them
hurt Mary.”

“No
one is going to touch you!” Grandma said, and Cam had never heard such
conviction in the old woman’s voice. Grandma stood as she spoke, knocking the
chair back several feet. “No one is going to touch any of us. And anyway, we
don’t know that he has anything to gain by exposing us.”

“He
doesn’t have anything to lose, either,” Caro said.

“He
cares about Cam!” Grandma said, but she sounded like she was grasping at
straws.

“Last
week you accused him of trying to drown me,” Cam said, and she couldn’t
disguise the hurt in her voice.

“Last
week was last week,” Grandma said in a tone that brooked no argument. “This
week I want to believe in Mr. Anderson’s benevolence.”

Caro
snorted. “If he has any.”

“He
is a good man.” They all jumped at the unexpected voice, but it was only Mary,
a basket of laundry in her arms.

“You
saw it?” Cam’s heart leapt. She had complete faith in Mary’s talent; the girl
had never been wrong before. If Mary said that Brent meant them no harm, Cam
would believe it and trust him implicitly.

Mary
nodded, and for a minute Cam felt euphoric. Then Mary added, “On his face, the
night he carried you out of the woods.”

Cam’s
heart sank. “Not a vision?”

“I
have never had a vision of Mr. Anderson,” Mary said. “But I believe that he is
good.” She sat down calmly at the fireplace and reached for the socks she was
darning. The serenity on her face contrasted sharply with the anxiety on
Caro’s.

“Family
is family,” Caro said. “His sister-in-law is dying. Even if he is a good man,
who can say what he would do for her?”

“For
his brother,” Mary corrected.

“John?”
Cam asked.

“They
are very close,” Mary paused in her work to flex her hand, as though her
fingers ached. “John loves his wife more than his life, and her illness is
destroying him. Each day that her sickness progresses, he loses more of his
will to live.”

“Mr.
Anderson won’t choose us over his brother.” Caro said.

“He
doesn’t have to choose us over John,” Cam protested. “We aren’t the ones who
are making Hattie sick. If anything, we should be allies. Whoever is making her
sick is probably the same person who tried to kill me.”

“There
is something ugly in that house,” Grandma said. “Something malicious. Perhaps
it is one of the brothers, perhaps one of their servants or someone else who is
associated with them, but the root of it is there. For all our sakes, and
especially yours,” she said to Cam, “I would like to believe that Mr. Anderson
is not is involved, but somehow, he is. We have to take precautions.”

Silence
fell at her words. Caro exhaled deeply, and Cam could feel the woman watching
her. Mary put down her work and reached for Cam’s hand. Cam flinched away from
her, too distraught to be comforted. She knew exactly what her grandmother
meant, and it chilled her.

“I
don’t want to,” she said quietly. Her voice sounded brittle, like thin glass
webbed with cracks.

“I
know.” Her grandmother said simply, and the rest was unspoken. That none of
them wanted this, that none of them had asked for this, and that they all had
to make sacrifices. Compared to the loss that Cam had suffered before, giving
up Brent shouldn’t have been hard. But it was. Oh Lord, it was.

“We
have to do this, Cam,” Grandma said. “We won’t use it yet, but we need it on
hand.” Cam nodded, but as Caro and Grandma worked quietly together, their practiced
hands shaping cloth and straw into a doll, Cam felt sick guilt curling in her
gut and tears of shame gathering in her eyes.

More
often than not poppets were used to ward off evil, not inflict it. But if Brent
proved to be a threat, the poppet would be their last resort, and Cam knew that
they could be chillingly effective.

She
could feel nausea rising in her, and a dull aching between her eyes as she
stared down at the doll that suddenly had such power over Brent’s life.

I
don’t want to do this.

I
want no part of this.

This
is wrong.

But
if Brent betrayed them, their world would collapse. Cam didn’t know what would
happen to her grandmother- what was done with white murderesses that were
seventy years old? But she knew what they would do to Caro. She knew that the
unkind whispers about her mother would seem like nothing compared to the
stories that would circulate when people learned that Solange Johnson had been
involved in what the county would doubtlessly label ‘witchcraft’. She couldn’t
imagine what it would do to her father. And what of Diana? Since her scandal
people had often remarked that she took after her mother. The whole family
would be driven from the county, possibly imprisoned. Her father would be
ruined, and Caro would be hanged, perhaps Mary too.

But
what will happen to Brent?

As
easy as it should have been to banish thoughts of the man when the lives of all
of her loved ones hung in the balance, Cam couldn’t seem to force his image
from her mind.

This
has to be done,
she told herself. But when Caro handed
her the finished doll, which was to be placed on that top shelf with the bone
of the black cat, Cam hesitated. She stood under the shelf with the heat of the
stove turning her cheeks pink, and when Caro and Grandma turned their backs,
she slipped the doll into her pocket instead.

For
a few days Cam avoided the kitchen, choosing instead to remain in her room. It
wasn’t that she enjoyed being secluded up there with no one to talk to and
nothing to do; frankly she couldn’t imagine how Diana did it for weeks at a
time. No, Cam stayed in her room because she couldn’t face her grandmother, or
Caro, or even Mary. She couldn’t help herself, but there was a terrible
resentment towards them welling up inside of her. She knew it was unreasonable.
It wasn’t as though any of them had asked to be trapped in this nightmare land
of fear and deceit. But try as she might, she couldn’t quite forgive her
grandmother and Caro for creating that poppet of Brent. She knew where her
loyalties were due, and she knew that she had to protect her family at all
costs, but she couldn’t quite control the faint tingle of anger— no,
rage
—
that filled her when she thought of someone hurting Brent.

That
was another reason why Cam needed to be the one who kept the poppet. If
anything ever needed to be done to Brent then Cam had to be the one to do it.
If someone else did it she would never forgive them. Necessary or not, she
would hate the one who cursed him forever, and she couldn’t bear to feel that
way about one of her loved ones.

Cam
didn’t want to see Diana either, who had been against Brent from the start. She
wouldn’t have minded receiving a visit or two from Helen. But in the three days
that Cam spent alone in her room her younger sister didn’t knock on her door
once. That was only another source of anger. Cam had always been attentive of
her younger sister. She didn’t always have time for Helen, but if she thought
that something was wrong with her younger sister, she always made time. So
where was Helen? Where was she during Cam’s self-imposed exile? What
was
Helen doing with her time these days?

Unfortunately,
Aunt Beth seemed to have interpreted Cam’s retreat to her room as a sulk following
the dressing-down that she had received at Elizabeth’s hands, and so Beth also
chose not to visit her niece.

Finally,
on Cam’s fourth day alone in her room, there was a knock on her door. Cam rose,
expecting anyone but the person she saw when she opened the door.

“Father.”
She was so surprised that she had no control over her tone, so she wasn’t sure
whether she sounded surprised, concerned or disappointed. Perhaps all three.

“Camilla,”
he said, and as Cam stared into his eyes she wondered when her father had last come
up to see her. Peculiarly enough, all she could think of was one time when she
was young, she couldn’t have been more than seven, and she’d been having a tea
party with her dolls. She’d run downstairs to find her father and ask him to
attend the party at exactly a quarter to two. Then she’d hurried back upstairs
and sat on the floor in nerve-wracking anticipation, watching the clock on her
mantel closely. At exactly one-forty-five there had been a knock on the door
and there her father had been, in the flesh and ready for his tea. Cam could
still remember her delight as he took his seat on the floor, across from her
and in between her dolls Millie and Molly. He had stayed for three imaginary
cups of tea, all of which she had poured with care from a chipped teapot that
her Aunt Beth had given her once it was no longer suitable for use in the
kitchen. He had even waited for each imaginary serving to cool before carefully
sipping from the teacup.

Cam
hadn’t thought of that day in years, and it was strange to remember, because
within a few years she had become more aware of the slaves, of her father’s
role as slaveholder, and she had come to strongly dislike him, much as it
pained her. Now, she felt as though she had gone straight back to that day when
she was seven, standing at the door hardly able to believe that her father had
come to visit her.

Some
of her surprise must have shown on her face, because her father smiled, and
Cam, unused to really
looking
at her father, was surprised by the
wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.
My God, he’s getting old
, she
thought, and surprisingly enough, the thought made her want to cry.

“I
am going for a walk,” he told her, “and I think you should join me.”

Cam
opened her mouth to refuse, but then she realized that she couldn’t remember the
last time she’d been on a walk with her father. And anyway, if she stayed in
her room any longer she would go crazy. “Then I will,” she said finally and
glanced down at herself to make sure that she was presentable, in case they
encountered anyone while they walked.

“You
look fine,” her father assured her.

Thankfully
they didn’t pass anyone on the stairs, though Cam could hear Aunt Beth and
Helen talking in the drawing room.