Ever Bound (2 page)

That hadn’t worked, either.

At dinner, Mom and Pop were quiet until we unfolded our napkins and said grace.

After I picked up my fork, Pop’s fierce glare bore through me. Even at the table, he was taller than me. “Son, did you ask that girl to go to her father and request that you go away to school?”

“No, sir.” I fumbled with my napkin. “She asked me if I would go, but I didn’t give an answer.”

“I don’t think leaving the property is a safe—good idea.” His stare was stern.

It had been a long time since I’d heard him talk of our safety. Had I insulted him?

“Charles, do you really think that after all this time…” Mama pressed back loose strands of hair from her temple.

“Sir, I promise I had nothing to do with that. Grace has this idea in her head.”

“She’s taken with our son. Going off to school together would be romantic if she weren’t so persistent. There’s just something about her.” Mama gave me a worried look.

“You have nothing to worry about. I don’t return her affections.”

“Tell her. Even if it hurts her. She’ll appreciate it later,” Mama said.

“I have told her. At least in my actions. She doesn’t get it.”

“Sometimes girls need words. When we get attached to something or someone, we tend to be determined. Just ask your father.” Mama’s smile was born from more than humor.

Had I missed something?

“Elizabeth, I’ll handle this. We don’t need to make the house owner mad. There aren’t a lot of other places we can go that my father and that hag can’t find us. You’ve never met my side of the family for a reason.” Pop’s salt and pepper hair looked a little more gray today. His strong jaw twitched as he regarded me.

I put my fork down. He never talked about his past, and when he did, I made it a point to listen.

Pop’s broad shoulders sagged and the circles under his very serious eyes were more prominent. “Your mother and I withheld the story of how we met and what brought us here. We’ve kept it secret for a reason. It’s something we bring up scarcely in our own conversations because it upsets your mother that I would leave my life to be with her.” Daddy regarded her with a softer look and took her hand. “If we are to stay hidden, we have to stay here. Just tell that girl that your presence is needed at home. We’ve let you go to grade school. You’ve almost paid Mr. Rollins for the clothes and supplies, so I think that’s plenty enough debt on your shoulders.”

I nodded as a cold feeling iced over in my stomach.

Mama was quite a beauty. Her soft brown eyes and high cheeks bones would have made for a looker in her day. Her wavy brown hair was streaked with a few sprigs of white. Though she had trouble keeping it pinned up, it always looked pretty. She wasn’t from high society and never acted proud, but she held her posture as if she were groomed from the finest of ladies. I could see why Pop would fight a whole family to love her.

It looked like we were destined to spend our lives running, never really belonging anywhere.

* * * *

I woke at 4:30 AM, ate a fast breakfast with Mama and Pop, and then Pop and I were off to whatever part of the land we had to work that day. Hay fields, apple orchards, endless grass fields. There was always something to be done. Though Mr. Rollins never really assigned any of it to our family, my father took it on as his job to find things to do to feel worthy of his keep.

After I helped Pop in the catacombs, I rounded up some string and a hook. With a small tin can, I carried some worms. There was nothing like tying your fishing line to your toe, and lying back with a piece of straw in your mouth and a hat over your face.

Napping off and on, I waited until a tug came at my toe. When I got a bite, I always jumped to catch the line and pull the fish in. On the evenings I had a good catch, Mama fried up an amazing fish dinner.

A jerk came from my toe, and I shot up.

“Now that was funny.” A girl laughed as my hat fell to the ground and the sunlight bombarded my eyes. Annabeth, who had somehow silently sat beside me, plopped a rock into the water. “You should have seen the look on your face.”

There went all my fish.

“Aren’t you supposed to be playing with a dolly somewhere?” I untangled the line from my toe. I may have spoken six words to her since she’d been small enough to play with a doll.

She definitely wasn’t a little girl anymore.

“Aren’t you supposed to be plowing a field?” Her eyes widened and she immediately recoiled. “I didn’t mean it like that. Like I think you are only a farmhand. You just—oh, never mind.”

“What is it with you and your sister, meandering all over the woods by yourselves?”

“I’m not all by myself. Unless you’re a ghost?” An innocent sparkle lit up her eyes. “So, you catch anything?”

“Three brim, a snapping turtle, and an irritating sixteen-year-old.” I smirked.

“What did you do with them?” She looked behind me and wrinkled her nose.

“Oh, the smell. That’s the dead ones from last Saturday. I throw out everything that’s not cat fish, and I let the turtles loose.”

“Gross.” She jerked her hands into her lap as if the ground was somehow dirtier now. Grass and dirt from the rocks fell on her pink and black dress. “You kill them?”

“There’s no use for them to be in there tugging at my toe all the time. That’s what I do to little irritating things that pull on my line.” Now that I’d gotten over the initial embarrassment, she really wasn’t such a bother. But her reactions were funny.

“Wow, you really know how to treat a lady.” She sighed, looking out at the water. “So, do you eat the fish you catch?”

“Yep. After Mama chops their heads off and cleans out their guts.” I took out my pocket knife and began whittling a stick. “You ever put a worm on a hook?”

Annabeth looked at the worms pulsating through the dirt. “No, but I’d try anything once.”

“Well, then.” I took out a hook and a worm. Grinning, I held them in front of her angelic, surprised face.

Up close, she had smoother skin and a more innocent smile than Grace. Looking a little green, Annabeth took the worm with her forefinger and thumb.

“You just stab it into its head and push it through, like this.” I used a hook and worm for demonstration.

She turned greener but set her jaw. With precision, Annabeth stabbed the hook right through the worm. Who’da thought?

“You have potential.” There was something about a girl who could wear a dress like that and didn’t mind a little dirt.

Her eyes settled on my face as she batted her eyelashes. Not coyly. None of her movements seemed planned. She was genuine. When she looked back up to me, I had to look like an idiot, staring.

For a moment the air was thick around us.

Something strange heated my stomach, and my fingertips tingled to touch her cheek. So I did. I leaned closer, not minding if my lips touched a girl.

“Potential for what?” Grace’s icy voice shattered the moment. “Mama is looking for you.”

“Is she now?” Annabeth turned to look at her sister.

Grace stood at the top of the bank with her hands on her hips and a fierce glare in her eyes.

“She is. And I promise Daddy won’t be happy to know you’re down here doing God knows what with a young man.”

Annabeth tossed a piece of grass into the pond. “There’s plenty about you I don’t tell.”

Sure that a ball of snakes had begun writhing in my stomach, I stared at the water. I shouldn’t have felt nervous that Grace had found me talking to her sister, but I did.

Grace scaled the embankment and slipped a time or two.

“Maybe you can teach me how to cast next time?” Annabeth patted my arm and got up.

Grace’s face turned bright red. “Oh, I’m telling all right.”

“Well, you can finish what I started, then. Here.” Annabeth put the impaled worm in Grace’s hand.

Grace shrieked and tossed it to the ground. “Ugh. You little…”

“Ah, ah, ah. No foul language. Remember Mrs. Cobb’s lesson.” Annabeth sauntered to the easier path to the house and made it up the incline with ease.

As she stared after her sister, Grace’s knuckles were white on her clenched fists. “You can’t get a good husband if you don’t carry yourself properly. And rolling around in dirt, playing with worms is nowhere on Mrs. Cobb’s etiquette list.”

Annabeth sang her way through the woods.

Oddly, the air was thicker when Grace was close, making it harder to breathe. A fleeting urge to gather my things passed. I wouldn’t let her run me off from what I enjoyed most. I dug my fingers into the dirt. With them soiled, maybe she wouldn’t try to hold my hand.

“So what were you two doing?” Grace had a weird tone in her voice.

“I showed her how to put a worm on a hook.”

“How disgusting. She’ll never be a lady.”

“I think it’s good that your sister isn’t scared to try new things.” I don’t know where the courage to say it came from.

“New things? Then you and I can try something new.” Grace spun toward me, shoved me back on the grass, and put her mouth all over my face. After a series of odd caresses and sucking noises, she finished the kiss.

I hadn’t moved my mouth.

“You need a little practice is all. Now that you’ve kissed me, father will be ecstatic. He’s always wanted me to court a strong, capable young man.”

I turned and stared at her with incredulity.

“We can get married, but between now and then I won’t lose you to someone else. Men have needs. I understand that more than anyone. Just know, before you turn your eyes on to anyone else, I’d be glad to oblige. There’s no use for you to look at another female.”

It was time to go to the cottage.

“We make the best match. It only makes sense that we’d end up married after courting for so long.”

“We’ve never—I mean. I don’t know. We need to slow down.” I didn’t want to say too much, but I didn’t want to say too little, either. I couldn’t have her going home and telling her father I wanted to marry her.

“Oh, Colby! I knew you felt the same.” Grace acted as if I had just proposed to her, not the other way around. She threw me back on the ground and kissed me again.

This time, I rolled her safely off me and gathered my things. “I think I need a little time to myself and some space, if that’s okay.”

Fear and rage flashed through her eyes, but the rage was gone before it was really there.

She grabbed my hand with both of hers and walked with her head on my arm most of the way back to the main house. Grace clung so tightly to my arm it was as if another body had attached itself to me.

I had to talk to Mama.

She’d know what to do.

At the clearing between the house and the pond, Grace let go and almost skipped to her house. It was the first time my breathing was normal since she’d made her weird claim on me at the pond.

I ran to my back door. After I was safely inside, I flipped the little latch and leaned against the door.

“Why are you locking us in so early?” Mama’s confused smile met me as she wiped her hands on her apron.

“Hold on. I gotta get the front one too.” I rushed through the house, then came back to Mama. “We need to talk. I think I’m in trouble.”

Mama put a towel through her apron and motioned me to the table. With a laugh, she pulled out a chair. “It’s got to be the Kinsley good looks, and though you can’t help it, your charm seeps through even when you’re trying to send that girl in the other direction. You don’t have a mean bone in your body.”

I plopped into the wooden chair and put my forehead on the table. “I don’t want to hurt her, but I don’t know what else to do. She’s so…”

“Persistent?” Mama said.

“Yes.” I looked up. “I feel like I can’t breathe without asking her permission, and I don’t know how it got this way.”

Mama pulled out a chair and sat down. With her hand on my arm, she sighed. “You have to tell her exactly how you feel.”

“But Pop will be furious if I do something to make us have to leave.”

“He should understand more than anyone what you’re going through. Charles’s father tried to give him money, but there was a stipulation. He had to marry a girl he didn’t love. An arranged marriage. If Charles married her, it made your grandfather’s family richer. He was convinced that Eliza was the perfect woman for your father. She was a lunatic, so when your father met me, and we fell in love, he began to fear for my life. That’s why we move when he thinks she’s found us.”

“What does Grandfather have to do with it?”

“He probably stopped looking for Charles years ago, but according to Charles, Eliza will never give up. She’s found us one time before, but we left before anything could happen.”

“So, I need to keep us here as long as we can possibly hold out?”

“I’m not going to put the weight of our problems on your shoulders anymore. You’ve been the victim of your father’s ghosts long enough. It’s time you lived your own life. Tell her how you feel. If that doesn’t work, we’ll leave.” Mama got up, hugged me, and wrung her hands as she went to the stove to start dinner.

I would find a way get Grace to leave me alone without involving them in it, if at all possible.

* * * *

A few nights later, at ten o’clock, I woke to light tapping on my window. Behind the linen curtain, Grace’s face popped up.

I stumbled back and almost knocked over my washbowl. I righted it and held in a curse word.

She motioned for me to come out.

I’d done well to avoid her the last few days. When I knew she didn’t have lessons of some girly sort, I made sure I was off in the woods as far from the house as possible. Wise to my plan, Mama rarely called for me, and Pop had asked few questions.

I opened my window. “What on earth are you doing out there?”

“I wanted to see you. Everyone’s asleep at the house, and Daddy’s out drinking again. I didn’t want to be there when he got home, and I know your parents go to sleep at nine.”

“Well, here I am.”

Grace’s smile fell away.

“I’ll be out in a minute.” I slapped the curtains shut and pulled on my britches and shirt.

Grace stood waiting under my window. As I approached, she jerked my hand into hers. In the other, she had an unlit lantern.