Jennifer Horseman (2 page)

Stella nodded guiltily. Juliet had begged her: "Stella, you don't know what 'tis like to own a passion for books and learning, to have the very best library in the whole county within the same roof, and to be forbidden to use it. Don't you see? Save for Tomas, I have nothing else now, nothing. He has taken everything from me, everything that means anything. ... I can't let him do this last to me, I just cant."

"Well, nought to be done now. What a sad house we live in, for sure. All the pain . . ." She cringed, shaking her head. "I can not imagine it. Come on, stand straight girl; she'll be needin' you now. Let's get the salve and warm water, some soup, too, not that she'll have a stomach for it. But Stella . . ." Bess stopped, then looked to Samuels for help.

Stella searched the elderly woman's face.

After a sigh, Bess removed a note from her apron pocket. "There couldn't be worse timin'. Tomas 'as come back, awaitin' at the river as we speak."

Stella took the piece of paper and, not knowing how to read, looked briefly at Samuels to see her own uncertainty reflected in his gaze. She sank into a chair. "Maybe Tomas can take 'er away this time. . . ."

"A fairy tale wish!" Bess said with uncharacteristic vehemence. "And don't you be givin' that girl any 'ope either. La! I've 'alf a mind not to give it to 'er this time, just to spare that poor child some grief."

The unspoken thought behind the words filled Stella with the fear that it was true. Juliet loved Tomas, and he loved her, but it did seem . . . wrong to make her wait in this house for another year until the time his father would allow him to marry, after he finished his studies at London's university, "ibm'll do right . . . 'e 'as to."

"And what will 'appen then? 'Tis a nightmare to dwell on what the master will do to 'er if 'e discovers she spoke to Tomas, much less planned to marry the boy."

'Twas enough to steal the hope . . . Bess shook her head but ventured no more. The words were merely poor vessels to carry them away from what was happening to a young girl anyway. "Go on now, miss," she finally said, feeling suddenly tired beyond her years. "The mistress will be needin' you now."

A short time later Stella knocked softly on Juliet's door. No answer came from within, but she didn't expect one. She quietly opened the door and stepped inside. The passing twilight had left the house in darkness. A single lamp shone over the bed where Juliet lay perfectly still on her stomach, her nightdress gathered at her small waist. The light reflected off the brilliance of her dark red hair, woven into a thick braid that cascaded off the bed and almost touched the floor. Stella approached with trepidation, and with a gasp she saw the bloody marks laid across the many scars of the past.

The terror always felt so much worse than the hot, stinging pain. Juliet tried to fight it the only way she knew: she slipped into the safe world of dreams. She tried to imagine the time when Tomas would take her away, but it seemed so far away ... so far away from the reality of her uncle and his hate, the helplessness of a fate she had no control over.

She wanted so desperately to feel safe again.

Tomas, I love you now and forever, I love you. . . .

He would be returning soon, very soon, perhaps this week. Each day of waiting seemed like an eternity. The length of their separations began to frighten her. She tried to justify and make sense of her fears. Considering her uncle and this house, it was reasonable she should be frightened of happiness, for her uncle would snatch it from . her if ever he had a chance. Tomas's reassurances played over and over in her mind: "My darling, darling, he can do nothing! 'Tis true we must sneak like common thieves to see each other, but that will soon be over. Listen to me," he spoke softly to her doubt, "if ever he tries to come between us, I'll marry you without waiting for the end of my studies. And tell me, Juliet, what could he do if you were my lawful wife?"

She closed her eyes tightly and thought of it now, trying to battle this fear, a dread she felt hanging on the horizon, a thing far worse than this beating. What could her uncle do to them? She tried to foresee it, to anticipate the workings of her uncle's malevolence, but how could she? How could she guess what harm he might do once they were married? Yet they would be married soon, they would! Once Tomas finished his term at the university, four months from two weeks past exactly, he would come for her and take her away from here.

It would be over; she would be safe. ... Stella exercised extreme gentleness as she carefully wiped the slender back with a cool cloth. Not once did Juliet cry out, though she shivered uncontrollably. "Oh, Juliet my poor, poor lady. How badly does it 'urt?" Juliet shook her head, unable to reply as she tensed, fighting the shivers and the searing hot sting as Stella now began to lay the salve to her wounds. "Oh, dear God, easy . . . easy. You're bound to get a fever from this. . . . Mercy, 'tis a wonder you can still draw breath." Trying to ease Juliet's attention from the sting of her ministrations, she asked angrily, "What did 'e say to you?"

"At first nothing," Juliet whispered, her normally melodic voice changed with fear or pain or both. "Stella, Stella, I didn't know he was to do this to me. Not with all his financial woes, the worry of losing the house ... I knew he was angry when he discovered the book missing from his library, but when the bankers came today, I thought he had forgotten. So when he appeared in my room and I saw the whip, I, I was so frightened ... I couldn't bear it and I ran to the window," her voice lifted with the emotion, falling to a whisper of defeat, "And . . . and he struck me then—"

Stella cautiously slipped around the side of the bed to see her mistress's face. "Oh mercy in 'eavens . . ."

The bruise marked her face just as the fear marked her eyes, and Stella slowly reached out to touch it. Juliet winced slightly. Stella stopped her tears, crying when Juliet no longer could, and returned to applying salve to the wounds on Juliet's back, waiting until she was done before revealing the news of Tomas's return.

Stella's thoughts kept turning through circles of helplessness. "She's tried to run away twice now," her husband had summed it up the other night. "Think of those mad dogs, Stella! 'E said the next time he'd kill 'er and !e would at that, I 'ave no doubt. 'E'd watch as those dogs tore 'er to pieces, along with anyone who tried to 'elp 'er. Nay, 'er only 'ope is that boy she loves. . . ."

Juliet managed to overcome the stinging pain long enough to reveal her own confused thoughts: "He told me he would purge the stain of my mother's wickedness from his house if it was the last thing he ever did, and that it was for disobedience as much as for stealing his book that he beat me. He said he would beat servitude and obedience into me nightly if he had to."

Why did he hate her mother so? Why did his hate still burn "seven years after her mother's death? For trading England for France? For falling in love with a Frenchman? For bearing a child without benefit of matrimony?

It was as if her uncle kept punishing her for something her mother had done, without ever telling her what this might be. Assuming, of course, there was a rationale behind his cruelty, however demented and unjust. Yet all Juliet knew of her parents came before her mother's death just before she entered her tenth year. Before she was born, her father had been murdered in the post-revolutionary struggles of the Committee of Public Safety, in which he had been a participant. He had dedicated his life to the committee and had lost it in the service of their exalted cause. He had died before she was born, but he lived on in the colorful pictures her mother painted of him for her. He had been a hero: brave, moral, and handsome . . .

Yet her father died leaving them no inheritance, and any other time but now Juliet would have smiled when she thought of the story her mother had made up to explain his neglect. With the wisdom of a seventeen-year-old, she knew now many heroes were simply poor. Yet her mother could not bear to leave such a plain truth alone, so she adorned it with her imagination, turning it into something exciting and lively, something worthy of telling over and over again. Still, because they had no inheritance, her mother had to work in a flower shop across the city, leaving her to the loving care of Madame Gaston, an elderly widow with whom she lived over a bakery shop in Montparnasse.

How she missed the old woman, too, her tender loving care, the warmth and happiness of Monsieur Rovere's small bakery, his teasing and laughter and generosity. She missed these simple and good people terribly. What happened to them? She sent hundreds of letters through Tomas with careful instructions to return the post to him, but she never got a reply. Sometimes she worried that they, too, had left her. . . .

Mamma, I miss you most of all . . .

Her mother arrived on the sabbath and stayed with her until TUesday. Each hour they were together was a holiday filled with joy and laughter and frivolity: they went to parks, cafes, museums, theaters, and music halls. They talked and sang, laughed and pretended Tuesday would never come. Her mother told her so many things, fanciful tales about people and places, love and life. . . . Her mamma was so terribly beautiful, yet even as a young child Juliet had seen a strange sadness hidden beneath her smile and laughter. . . .

What was it mamma? What secret did you keep from me? It's as if you knew what would happen to us, parted by death and me forced into my uncle's cruel hands. That letter sitting on the nightstand the night you unwound our hair and died, the letter that made you weep with fear. Was it from him? The uncle you never told me about?

Her mother had never once mentioned her uncle—she had told a completely different story about their lost English family: a century of barristers, her grandparents passing in the terrible influenza epidemic that left her mother an orphan. Juliet still remembered the day when, as a young ten-year-old girl still lost to her grief at her mother's death, her uncle's agent arrived at the bakery in Paris, literally pulling her from Madame Gaston's arms. She remembered the crying and screaming and monsieur's threats, and it seemed the terror started that very day. . . .

"There, 'tis done," Stella finished, but, "Lord, Juliet, you're shiverin' with the fever. Let me fix this blanket around you." No cloth could touch her skin, but Stella carefully covered her legs and padded a blanket around her sides.

"Stella," she whispered the name and said, not for the first time, "I don't know what I'd do if not for your comfort."

As if it were enough, Stella sighed and rose to fetch a brush from the vanity. A soft knock sounded on her door. Both young ladies tensed. Juliet flinched as she looked up to stare at Stella in alarm. Would he come back at this hour? Or did Bess sneak back into the house to see her?

"Who's there?" she asked in a whisper.

" Tis me, Clarissa . . . Please do hurry, I must speak with you. ..."

Juliet watched as Stella moved swiftly to the door, opening it to Clarissa. "Clarissa . . ." The young lady was tall and quite lovely, though for reasons not clear-to Juliet, she refused to see the similarity between her older cousin and herself. . . . "They kin pass for sisters," she once overheard Samuels say. "Save for the eyes . . ." The likeness stemmed from their hair, like her mother's, the same burnt red color that must run in the family, though Clarissa wore hers at a fashionable length, just off the shoulders and ironed into tight ringlets that took hours to make. The likeness stopped there; where Juliet's eyes were dark blue, Clarissa's were pale like her father's, and where Juliet's face was oval, thin, almost angular, Clarissa's was all rounded, plump, whimsical. Even Clarissa's figure, the sloping shoulders and voluptuous curves, enhanced her look of extreme delicacy and whimsy. She wore a white silk nightdress that swept the floor as she stepped inside the dim light of the modest room, ignoring Stella in the way that she had with servants. Juliet carefully tried to sit up to face her cousin. This was the first time Clarissa had ever entered her small attic room. Trepidation marked her cousin's steps. Her pale blue eyes considered her but briefly before they anxiously swept to either side. The revulsion quickly disappeared, changing to a fear that shocked Juliet. Now her cousin, too, was afraid of something, as if fear were indeed a contagious disease running rampant in the household.

Juliet could not guess why, for as far as anyone knew, Clarissa reigned as the only living being her father loved since his wife's death at Clarissa's birth. He treated her like a princess, showering her with presents and affection. To see his face when Clarissa was in the room was to see a changed man. Of the entire household, though, only Juliet knew Clarissa's secret: that she returned her father's love with a carefully concealed hatred. Yet she had never shared the reason for her hatred, and, perhaps unkindly, Juliet suspected it had naught a thing to do with his malevolence toward others.

She had never been close to Clarissa. Until last year, Clarissa had been away at boarding schools where wealthy English families of position sent their daughters. She returned to Fairwoods only for holidays, appearing as a brief interruption of the pattern of days, leaving only the faint scent of perfume in her wake. Except for those holidays,

Clarissa might never had existed at all. Even now, they saw each other infrequently, taking care to honor the inexplicable antipathy Clarissa felt toward her, the tension put between them for no reason beyond an extension of her uncle's hatred. Those few times they were together, for church and Sunday supper, they were painfully civil to each other, rarely talking and then only on the most superficial of levels: the weather or the Sunday sermon, the tepidness of the stew, for her uncle had expressly forbidden their friendship on a day Juliet would never forget, the day after her arrival from France.

On that day her uncle sat her down in his great study to paint the picture of her life for the next long years: "Your mother never wanted me to see you. She had reason to fear. Now she is finally in the hell she so justly deserves. And now my poor, poor Anna can not stop me from fulfilling my ... ah, Christian duty to at least care for you, her precious daughter. A duty that upon my word," he swallowed the drink whole, "will make you pay for your mother's slutting wickedness before I at last join her in the grave. This duty extends to seeing you housed, fed, and raised within the strictest orthodoxy of Christian life. Though make no mistake, each time I look into your eyes and see hers, I will be reminded of the despicable circumstances surrounding your birth. I will not pretend otherwise."