Sleeping Helena (3 page)

“I still believe it to be a bad idea. We could at least take up residence in the city. We have no real need to be that close to Kitty.” Eva knew, even as she spoke, that she was wrong.

The sisters fell silent. Even Hope momentarily stopped what she was doing and waited to see who would answer.

“But we do,” said Zilli sadly. “She has the advantage.”

“Still, she won’t trouble us again, will she?” Elfrieda tucked one of her curls behind her ear. As the youngest, she was used to being treated somewhat differently than the others
—
more gently, as though she were still a child. She was shocked by their honesty.

“Yes.” All of the others drew out the word, as though they each had the same thought at the same time, but only grudgingly voiced it.

“You can be sure of it,” Eva added.

Ingeburg stabbed the cutting board with the knife, embedding it into the wood upright like a soldier standing at attention. The women jumped and put hands to hearts or mouths as their eyes snapped to the blade. The roses the twins had gathered shook briefly. A moment of quiet descended as one crimson petal fell, through sun and through shadow, gracefully onto the table.

“We will just have to do our best to protect our own,” Ingeburg said. “Like it or not, we are going.”

Eva frowned at the flowers. She might not remember much about their old home, but one thing could not be forgotten. A fearsome thicket of roses, black and bare, wrapped the house in a net of decay. The family had tried to cut them out and destroy them, but the land would not let them die. They grew back—blackened and grasping, but never blooming— every time. Eva shuddered and pulled her robe tightly around her.

“Hope, what do you know of roses?” Eva wondered how Hope would react when she saw them.

Hope believed Eva’s question to be rhetorical, but she answered her anyway. “I know how to grow them and I know how to cut them back.”

“We may have use for that knowledge, I’m afraid. Especially when it comes to the cutting.” Eva tapped her fingers on the table. “May I ask you something, Ingeburg?”

“Of course you may.”

“Is it possible?”

Ingeburg sighed. “Anything is possible, Eva. If you are asking me if it is probable, I have to say no, it is not. You know how these things operate. No future is fixed as the present unfolds, but the past has been fossilized.”

Yes
, Eva thought,
but Kitty’s gift was
time.

Kitty was not fond of flying. She preferred to walk when she had to travel, though for Kitty
travel
more often meant moving from her bed to a comfortable seat. She swore never to board an aircraft again, and was very glad when her feet had touched the solid ground of home. She gratefully settled her aching bones into her favorite plush chair as Karl, her friend and attendant, carried her bag upstairs. She took a moment and stretched it out until it met forever, then turned her mind toward the preparations. When Karl returned, she explained what was happening. He shook his head.

“You’ve invited your family here?” He could not believe it. Fifteen years he’d worked for Katza, and not once had a single soul come to call.

“I didn’t invite them, young man. I simply know they are coming.” She winked as he took a notepad and pen from his pocket and began to commit her instructions to paper.

The family’s ancestral home had remained mostly untended after Mama had sailed off with Kitty’s sisters. When Kitty, alone, had returned to the house, she found she could not live in it. She instead had the old coach house refurbished and transformed into a home. It lay on the far side of the courtyard and was now neatly hidden behind saplings, brush, and old trees whose branches should have been pruned years ago. The stable nearby had fallen into ruin.

Gone were the days when the whole family had gathered, and parties and balls had been held almost weekly in summer months. The courtyard, once full of coaches and horses and grooms running to contain them, was a lonely and silent place where weeds grew in the cracks between flagstones. Birds nested where tack had once hung in the stable, and the main kitchen garden was fully overgrown.

Karl kept the lawns trimmed and the flowers watered, but there was no reason to maintain a large garden with no one there to use it. That would soon change.

The interior of the great house had faded over time and its muslin-draped furniture was layered with decades of dust. Kitty could not bear to enter the house; it held too many reminders of Louis, her long-dead brother. The house had been asleep these many years. It would be good to have life restored to it.

“We have a great deal of work ahead of us,” Kitty said as Karl held his pen at the ready. “And not much time to do it in. You’ll have to call the agency, have them send you some help. Have the cellar swept and one wine-rack filled. The first and second floors must be dusted and swept and the furniture uncovered. All of the silver must be polished
—
I won’t have them thinking I’ve not taken care of Mother’s things. And that kitchen is a disgrace. They’ll want one of those American refrigerators, I’m sure. And don’t forget to weed and turn the soil in the kitchen garden, and cut back the hedge. That should do it. If they want to plant there, they can do it themselves.”

There was nothing they could do about the roses. Her sisters would just have to live with them, as she did.

Kitty, finished with this bit of business, tiredly climbed the narrow stair and passed through a dim hall until she reached the large bedroom at its end. There she pushed the switch and sighed as the familiar sight of her linens, pulled smartly around the edge of the mattress, appeared in the light. The worst thing about traveling was sleeping in an unfamiliar bed.

The long hours of the flight, spent cramped amidst plastic and impatient strangers, had taken their toll. Kitty pulled back the sheets with a whoosh and inhaled the pinching scent of starch like a breath of clean air.

Beyond the window, the stars shone down upon the main house. They illuminated, just barely, the briars wrapped around its foundation, where for almost one hundred years not a single rose had bloomed.

The following weeks were pleasantly warm and the breeze carried daily the scent of the lake that bordered the grounds to the west. Kitty reclined in a wicker chair, her thick braids wrapped around the top of her head and her hands folded in her lap, waiting. Her eyes were closed, but in the deep dark behind her lids she saw the lake as it had been in her youth, before the cross was placed in the water, as if a reminder of suffering could somehow give them all ease.

A memory surfaced; she was kneeling in the grass, spreading a quilt below the limbs of a tree. It was her birthday. Standing beside her, a young man with an Alpine face and tight, black curls held a basket of wine and bread. It was Louis.

She felt a spider of fear cross the nape of her neck, as though it were happening again. She reached up and repositioned her braids, touched the pins to establish their whereabouts and then dropped her hands back into her lap.

She had loved him so much. Quiet, self-assured, polite: he was everything a girl could want in a brother and she never dreamed she would live her life without him. Kitty could relive the day of his death at any time. She choked, gasped quietly for air, and clung to the wicker arms of the chair to steady herself. Her Sight had failed her
—she
had failed to See it coming. The blame for his death lay on her shoulders like a lead shawl that could not be shrugged off. Kitty exhaled and forced herself to relax. She would not need her Sight now. Now she had hindsight, the clearest vision of all.

Louis had been born to Magdalena and Louis the elder in the year 1868, the first of nine children and their only boy. Two years later, on a fine day in June, blind Katza had been born and the pair became instantly inseparable. When Katza began to crawl on her knees, Louis had stayed by her side, guiding her away from furniture and stairs. When she began to walk, it had been Louis who held her hand and led her through the gardens, plucked flowers from their stems and held them to her nose. It was Louis who had first sat her on the back of a horse and climbed up behind to hold her in place. He had been a gentle boy who seemed to know that his small sister could not see the world as he did.

When Katza fell from the horse on that dreadful day, he had been the one to carry her into the house. As she had slept in her weeklong coma, Louis had remained by her bed. When she opened her eyes, his face had been the first thing she saw. By the time Magdalena bore Thekla, one year later, Katza and Louis had been tangled together like vines.

Their childhood had been framed by the seasons. When winter swarmed over the forest the two had stayed inside the great house. There they had explored each hallway and closet they could find. It was an old house; the wood was dark and thick and mysterious swirls rippled up the paneling like waves. The floors were of marble or stone or covered in carpets from the east. They had hidden from each other in the tall curtains and were delighted to find behind one a secret stair. It led to a small room with a thin, boarded-up window, and a single mirror hanging on the wall. They had spent hours guessing at its purpose, or peering into the mist of its silver surface to see what might come out of its tarnished depths.

In summer they had stolen away from lessons and wandered the forest, run through the fields, and laid in the shade by the lake, beneath the old oak that stretched lopsided over the water. It seemed even then he’d been drawn to the water, as though he somehow understood that his destiny lay beneath the waves. Papa had built a swing on the tree’s thickest limb and Louis had spent hours sending Katza into the sky.

Louis would bring Katza roses plucked from the bushes surrounding the house, great falling armloads of them, red and lush, and string the petals in her hair. She would wrinkle her nose to pretend annoyance, but he’d been her sun and moon.

Things had changed as they grew. Louis had begun to hide from Katza; he turned his face from her and spent all of his time alone. Sometimes, as she had walked the garden paths, she would see him in the distance, a cold and solitary figure stalking the hills or riding hard down the lane. It had cut her deeply; for two long years Katza ate the pain of abandonment. Her special Sight had offered no clues to his behavior, only visions of her brother riding through the woods and away. She had waited for him to return to her, until at last she could stand no more.

“Where have you gone?” she had asked him, trapping him neatly by the door to the stable where the scent of fresh hay filled the air. The horses had shuffled and blew hot breath out of black nostrils, disturbing the mounds of dirt in the corners of their stalls. “I won’t leave until I get an answer.”

At the look on his face, she had flung herself into his arms.

“Katza,” he’d said as he stroked her hair, and she had known all would be well again. Two years of silence interrupted by the sound of her name.

“Louis,” she wept, “why do you hide from me?”

“Oh Katza,” he’d whispered into her hair, “I am in love.”

She had tensed in his arms as something folded up inside of her.

“But surely this is a good thing,” she had said, once the shock subsided.

“It is no thing,” he’d replied. “It is not a love that can ever be fulfilled.”

“Why not?” Katza, then and now, believed that anything should be possible. “Don’t worry, Mama will arrange matters.”

Louis had almost laughed at the innocent comment. “No, in this matter I’m afraid even Mama’s connections won’t help.”

“Who is it?” she had asked, drawing away from him, glancing at him from the corner of her eye, looking for subtle changes she may have missed. May have seen and misunderstood.

He shrugged and let his arms fall to his sides. “It doesn’t matter. My love cannot be returned.”

She had taken a step toward him and tried to put her hand on his lapel.

Louis had backed away from her. “Let us not speak of it. It is a fancy of mine, nothing more.” He crossed his arms over his chest.