The Bone Key (13 page)

It was the day of the annual Episcopalian Youth Circle picnic, as young people from all the parishes in the diocese gathered together to flirt, and to play croquet, and to paddle on the river if they were so inclined. Georgiana had been excited about it for weeks because it meant a whole new crop of boys for her to flirt with. She had been particularly bumptious all morning—”bumptious” was Nanny’s word and Nanny had been the only person who could deal with Georgiana when she was like that. Mother murmured ineffectually; Father all but encouraged her. She and I fought like cats and dogs.

But that June 9th she provoked Father at lunch. I can’t remember what she said; I have merely this shatteringly clear memory of the expression on her face, that bright, sparkling look she got when she knew she was being naughty and was going to get away with it—because she
always
got away with it.

Except that time she didn’t. She must have said something that Father felt threatened his authority—I wish I could remember what she said, but I just
can’t.
He became towering in his wrath—a pose he was fond of but usually only got to exercise on me—and forbade Georgiana to go to the Youth Circle picnic.

Georgiana was almost never punished or scolded, and she was never forbidden things. She went white with shock, and then she exploded. She pitched the worst tantrum she’d ever pitched, but Father was practically in a tantrum himself, and the upshot of it all was Father locking her in her room “to think about her behavior.” By the time I came upstairs to change my dress, she had quit screaming.

As I passed her bedroom door, she said, “Milly?”

“What?”

“Don’t go yet. If you wait an hour, Father will change his mind.”

She spoke with absolute confidence, and although I wish I didn’t, I still remember how angry it made me. “And let you wiggle out of a richly deserved punishment
again
?” I said. “I’m not waiting.”

As I went into my own room, I could hear her calling after me, “Milly, wait for me! You have to! Milly, please, wait for me!”

She tried again when I went back downstairs to leave, but that time I didn’t even answer. I drew on my gloves in the front hall, collected my sunshade, and went out to the pony-trap, feeling a spiteful, self-righteous satisfaction that this time Georgiana would not get what she wanted.

Patrick had clucked the pony into motion when we heard Georgiana shriek, “Wait for me, Milly!”

I turned around and saw her halfway out her window. I think it was something she had done before; she did not seem the least bit awkward, and she even had her petticoats under control. I remember wondering, outraged, what she had been sneaking out of the house to do. We never found out.

Patrick and I were both staring as if we had been turned to stone. I have tried and tried to think of something we could have done, some way I could have saved her. But I know that the only thing I could have done was wait for her when she asked me to. The accident was beyond my power to stop, governed only by the simple brutality of physics. All at once, Georgiana’s body tipped outward. I think she must have been balanced on her vanity while she worked her skirts through the aperture, and it simply shifted like a seesaw. She scrabbled for a moment, but it was already too late. She fell.

My poet’s brain wants to say she fell like Icarus, fell like Lucifer, both of whom fell because of their pride. But the truth is simply that she fell like a fourteen-year-old girl. She broke her neck and died.

I have never forgiven my father for saying I should have waited as she wanted me to—for admitting, in effect, that she was right and the erection of his wrath would simply have collapsed in another hour. But maybe he was right. Perhaps my resentment of his words is nothing more than spite and selfishness. Maybe that is why Georgiana haunted me. Maybe that is why she is still in the house, why she is now haunting Amelia.

I cannot delude myself any longer. The voice Amelia complains of belongs to neither of her sisters. And I am terribly afraid she mishears it. Georgiana isn’t saying, “Wait for me, Melly.” She is still, all these years later, saying, “Wait for me, Milly.” But she no longer recognizes me as her sister, I suppose because I did not wait for her. I am a grown woman now and Georgiana is still and immutably fourteen, left behind for all eternity.

I have all three keys to Georgiana’s room, and I have hidden them where I used to hide my diary from Georgiana. She never found it, although I know she looked, so I feel reasonably confident that if Amelia ever takes it into her head to look, she will not find the keys. She is safe from the vanity.

But Georgiana is not confined to the vanity. I remember her appearing in my bedroom mirror. How am I to answer when Amelia tells me there is a blonde girl with no eyes smiling at her in her mirror?

And then there is this newest development.

I have not slept tonight; I have felt feverishly, painfully alert since dinner this evening, when Amelia demanded indignantly that I make Martha and Charlotte stay out of her room. They denied the allegation, and I feel sure that they are telling the truth, because when I asked Amelia why she thought they had been trespassing, she said, with that withering scorn she has such a gift for: “They left
this
on my bed,” and gave me Georgiana’s copy of
Robinson Crusoe
, which has been on her bookshelf for twenty years, in her room, behind her locked door.

I cannot sacrifice Amelia to Georgiana’s haunting persecution. And there are Martha and Charlotte; I
cannot
wait passively for them to cross Georgiana’s personal Rubicon. I think that I should sell the house, but I cannot do it. We cannot afford a new house of the necessary size. And I could never explain to Vincent and the children why I want to leave a house which they all love. And what would I say to the buyers?

I am making excuses. The truth is that Georgiana is my sister, and I bear responsibility for her death. I must protect my daughters from her, but I cannot abandon her. Mirelle Forbes sends her daughters to a boarding school with which she is very pleased. Tomorrow—later this morning—I will ask her for its address. Martin can bear me company; she will not care about him, either.

And maybe if I am very patient, Georgy will speak to me again, and I can tell her I am sorry I did not wait.

I put Mildred Truelove Stapleton’s diaries carefully back in their box, carefully put the box back in the corner, and walked home in a daze of sleeplessness and nerves.

I showered, shaved, forced down a piece of dry toast I did not want, and drank two cups of strong tea. Then I walked back to the Parrington, and in the intervals of trying to conduct the museum’s business properly, I drafted a letter to Martin Stapleton.

Mr. Stapleton’s reply to my letter was prompt and courteous, and two weeks after I stayed up all night with his mother’s diaries, we were seated together in the library of the Stapleton house.

He offered me a drink, which I declined, and said, “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand your purpose here, Mr. Booth. You said you found something in my mother’s diaries?”

“Yes. Er, are you using that room for anything?”

“The room where Amelia . . . No. I find that I have inherited my mother’s antipathy to it.”

“Good. I think it would be simplest . . . that is, would you read the marked entry?” I handed him his mother’s diary, with the last entry I had read marked by an old index card.

His quizzical expression said that he was humoring me, but he opened the diary and began to read.

After the first few lines, he looked up at me.

“Go on,” I said.

He did, frowning, and read the rest of the entry in silence. Then he closed the diary gently and handed it back to me.

“That’s very interesting,” he said, with only the slightest hint of shrillness in his voice.

“Do you believe it?”

“Amelia is still in a rest home in Vermont. She is in many ways a silly woman, but she has always had nerves of steel and no imagination to speak of. She has not altered her story. So, yes, I am prepared—if not quite willing—to believe that this house is haunted.”

“There’s an earlier entry . . . your mother describes the same thing happening to her except . . . that is, she ran out of the room before it, er—”

“Toppled?”

“Yes. But . . . your mother seemed positive that the ghost only noticed girls of a certain age. So it’s odd that your sister . . . ”

“Ah, yes,” said Mr. Stapleton with a twisted smile. “Amelia Stapleton, the Girl who Never Grew Up.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking of Miss Stapleton’s hair and clothes and demeanor. “So you think . . . ?”

“Amelia never really recovered from being sent away to school—and so suddenly, although now at least I understand why Mother did it. Martha and Charlotte were no trouble—they loved that school—but Amelia . . . Amelia seems to have viewed being sent to school as a tragedy comparable to the expulsion from Eden, and she has spent most of her life trying to reinvoke her prelapsarian state. In her own mind, Amelia
is
a teenage girl. I told you she was a silly woman.”

I thought I understood. Amelia Stapleton had frozen herself in a kind of artificial girlhood which apparently resonated with the ghost of Georgiana Truelove. In fact, I saw a dreadful symmetry between the two: both of them unable to grow up, both of them preserved like insects in amber at this point of trauma, where their lives ended—Miss Stapleton’s only metaphorically, but Georgiana Truelove’s with a most dreadful literality.

“In any event,” Mr. Stapleton said, shaking me out of this unsettling reverie, “all that sordid arguing over the will started because Amelia was infuriated that Mother didn’t leave her the house. I wonder if Mother guessed.”

“Surely she would have . . . ”

“Said something? Mother was in her right mind up until the end, but after her first stroke, she became increasingly secretive, poor woman, and after her second stroke, it became very difficult for her to talk. But she’d kept that secret so long, I don’t think there’s a power on Earth that could have made her confess it.”

I heard an echo of his mother in his speech. “What do you want to do?”

“Refuse entry to all teenage girls,” he said promptly.

“Hardly practicable as, er, a long-term solution.”

“No,” he said and quoted his mother softly, “ ‘What would I tell the buyers?’ ”

I did not know how to answer him and so remained awkwardly silent.

Mr. Stapleton sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “May I keep this diary a while? I shall have to tell Martha and Charlotte, and I very much fear that they will not accept my unsupported word.”

I thought of Mrs. Hilliard and Mr. Stapleton arguing in the front hall. “Yes, of course.”

“And I think . . . Mr. Booth, will you help me do something?”

“Of course.”

“I have been thinking for months that I ought to get rid of that vanity, but I haven’t been able to think of anyone who would take it off my hands. But suddenly I find that has ceased to be a consideration. I would not pass this monstrosity on even to my worst enemy. I’ll need some help getting it down the stairs.”

“It would, er, be my pleasure,” I said, and he laughed at my feeble joke.

He took the keys to the bedroom out of his desk drawer—I noticed that like his mother he had collected all three of them—and we went upstairs.

Maybe it was only because now I knew, but I still believe I felt Georgiana in the hallway. That fretful anger, that smoldering resentment—that was what was left of Georgiana Truelove.

“I’m glad you’re with me,” said Mr. Stapleton, and unlocked the door.

The atmosphere in the room was much worse, stifling with dust and rage. By mutual consent, achieved in a glance, Mr. Stapleton and I did not speak, knowing that if we opened our mouths, it would only be to quarrel.

As I had remembered, the vanity was not terribly heavy, only tremendously awkward. It pinched our fingers and barked our shins. It took us nearly fifteen minutes to get it through the doorway, and we were both bruised and exasperated by the time we managed it. And although I am and admit myself to be clumsy, this time it was not my fault.

We wrestled the vanity down the hall, banging against the walls and rucking up the rug. We stopped a moment at the top of the stairs to catch our breath, then hefted the vanity again and started down.

The first set of stairs posed no particular problem, although the vanity showed a perverse genius for catching its legs in the posts of the bannister. We were about a third of the way down the stairs from the second to first floors, trying to get the vanity around the curve of the staircase, when it simply wallowed out of our hands, slamming me against the wall so hard that I saw stars, and Mr. Stapleton against the bannister hard enough to knock the wind out of him. We watched helplessly as it careened down the stairs, caroming off the bannister and denting the walls, and smashed itself to kindling on the floor of the front hall. I thought how lucky we were that it had not taken either of us with it.

There was a long silence, in which we waited for something to happen and nothing did.

“Flimsy,” Mr. Stapleton gasped.

“Yes.” I rubbed the back of my head. “I fancy your mother was right about the, er—”

“Yes. I think so, too.”

Slowly, like veterans of some obscure and arcane war, we hobbled down the stairs and stood looking at the splintered wreckage of Georgiana Truelove’s vanity.

“I shall do as my mother did and keep that room locked.”

“I think that would be wise.”

“And I shall be very careful of my nieces when they come to visit. Martha and Charlotte will help—they are . . . nicer than your exposure to them may have led you to believe.”