The Immortal American (The Immortal American Series) (18 page)

I wanted to break something. I wanted to break Kimball.

Five days from when Hannah had been assaulted, in the dark cocoon that night affords, she woke, sucking in air like she was drowning.

“Hannah,” I whispered. I lay next to her warm body in our shared bed, and braced myself on an elbow trying to see her face.

“Violet,” she croaked.

I began to sob, then twined my arms around her.

“Violet?”

“Hannah.”

“I knew you’d be here.”

“Yes. I’m here.”

“Sing me that song.”

I instantly thought of the song I’d invented when she was just born. When I had carried her around telling everyone she was my baby, that I was her mama.

“
Hannah, baby mine, how I love you.

Hannah, Hannah, love, precious one.

Hannah, baby mine, how I love you.

Hannah, Hannah, love, precious one
.”

It was a simple song; I was six when I made it. I cradled her to me then and now, singing it over and over. Finally, my quaking voice made me stop.

“Why are you crying, Vi?”

“I’ve missed you, Hannah.”

“It wasn’t a dream, was it?” Her voice wavered.

I cried in response.

Again she sucked in all the surrounding air. I twisted my body into hers. “I’ll make it all better, Hannah. I promise.”

She clutched onto me, her nails sinking into my skin while she fought for air.

“I’ll make it all better, like it never happened.”

“He . . . oh, he hurt me, Violet. He tore my dress, my pretty dress. I stood there like such a fool, astonished he would tear off my dress.”

“I’ll make it all better.”

“I stood and stared at him. I couldn’t believe he ripped my dress.”

“I’ll get all sorts of fabric. You can make–no,
I’ll
make you hundreds of better, prettier dresses.”

“It was my favorite.”

“I’ll make one just like it then.”

She laughed, and it felt as if the sun were breaking through a Northeastern storm–the black clouds cracked open, and the sun pelted its healing rays down on us. “I love you, Vi, but you can’t sew a straight line.”

“I’ll learn,” I choked.

She quit laughing and returned to crying. “He hurt me.”

“I know. I know.”

“You were there, weren’t you?”

“I—”

“You picked me up. I felt you. I thought I had died, and you picked me up and held me like a baby. Like when I was a baby. I thought it was heaven. I thought you were my guardian angel.”

“I should have done a better job as guardian for you. I’m so sorry.”

Hannah cried. “It was my fault. I never thought he’d—”

“No. It was my fault. I should have warned you, warned you there were men like that out there. My entire fault.”

“He killed me, Violet. He killed me.”

I wept and clutched at her. “No, he didn’t, my baby sister. I won’t let him.”

Each day Hannah woke with more color in her face and her smile grew. I showered her everyday with the wild flowers that were growing in the forest. I wrote her silly little notes and created stories, like I had when we were both children. I sang to her, which she might have regretted ever asking me to do, since my voice was nowhere as glorious as my sister’s or Mrs. Jones’s.

Mrs. Jones would spend hours with Hannah too, sewing and making lace and doing everything in her realm to make Hannah laugh.

A week after the incident, Hannah informed me that she wanted to go shopping for fabric, and if I wouldn’t mind going with her. Two hours after she’d asked, I had the horses ready with shining coats and a clean wagon with fresh straw for my sister. I had also laid out my father’s green and black plaids from Scotland, and wildflowers mixed with peach blossoms pinched into any crevice available. Waiting for my sister on our porch, I danced an antsy waltz in a green dress, while I waited for her to emerge from the house.

Hannah wore a dull brown gray dress she had once detested, but I wouldn’t argue with her about her choice. Not today. In time, she’d wear her pretty dresses again.

Jonah drove all of us, including his wife and my mother, to the general store in Concord that didn’t have a great selection of fabric, but would have to do. Both Mrs. Jones and I sat next to Hannah, one of us always keeping our hands on her while the cart jostled in time with the horses trot, and bounced even more from the holes in the highway dug from the heavy spring showers.

Hannah closed her eyes and leaned her head against Mrs. Jones’s small shoulder. Spying across my sister, I cracked a smile at Mrs. Jones. She grinned back, yet I knew her smile, like my own, like my mother’s and Jonah’s too was a facial exercise to force our faces to show exactly what we dared not: impotent desperation. Around my sister I reached out for Mrs. Jones’s hand. We clutched onto each other through my sister, holding our breath.

My mother hadn’t stopped crying for a week, but now tried everything in her power to stop her tears on this trip, resulting in her trembling shoulders, quivering chin, and clutching at her handkerchief. She covered her emotions with a feigned sneeze or cough, but Hannah wasn’t fooled. She pointedly looked at my mother and asked if she was coming down with a cold. Midway to Concord, my mother nodded and said she thought she was coming down with something.

“Do you think this is pretty, Violet?”

I nodded enthusiastically at the fabric Hannah extended to me.

She frowned. “Don’t lie, sister. Besides, I want this to be for you.”

I smiled. “Actually, I do like it. It’s the prettiest gray. It’s not really gray, is it? It’s almost silver, like the breast of a pigeon.”

“Nice description. That was lovely. You should be writer, Vi. And yes, it’s a great blend, this fabric. It’s a silk blend, so it’s not as expensive as pure silk. It doesn’t quite have the sheen of pure silk, but still, it’s lovely, hmm? You can see in the sheen, an almost pearly shine of peachy-pink, don’t you think?”

“Yes, yes I do. Now, that was a lovely description. Perhaps we both should be writers.”

My sister’s grin vanished. Hannah fingered the gray fabric then looked up at me, scowling. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what? I was just worried I’d said something to offend you.”

Hannah shook her head. “I hate it that you all keep looking at me like I’m about to break.”

I left my mouth open, gauging what my expression was and how to change it. “I—I don’t think you’re about to break.”

She studied my eyes. “No, you don’t. You think I’m already broken.”

“No. Never.”

She stepped closer to me, clutching the silver cloth. “Well, then you’re the only one. I know there’s not one man who will marry me now. I know I’ll never have the children I wanted. I know my life as I knew it is over. I
am
broken. I am only a burden to everyone from here on out.”

“No. No, Hannah,” I cried. I tried to whisper, but the tears, I didn’t try to cover. “That’s not true. There are good men out there who would die to marry such a beautiful, talented woman–”

“I’m tainted now. I see it on everyone’s faces.”

“No.” I struggled with my voice. It sounded thick and warbled, but I fought through to say, “You’re not a burden nor will you ever be a burden to me. You’re all I have in this life.”

“You have Mathew.”

I looked around the store while wiping away my tears. Mother and Mrs. Jones were a few yards away, talking about an orange swath of cloth. I swallowed and lowered my voice. “I’d give him up. I’d give it all up for you. Say the word, and we can venture to Paris where you can become a world-renown dress maker. Or—or—Africa, I’ve heard the fields somewhere around Ethiopia have these five foot tall purple flowers. We could live in the purple flowers. Or Egypt, we could see the pyramids. We have the whole world, Hannah. We could storm this world and take it by force, if we wanted.” I was clumsily jesting, smiling up into my sister’s forlorn face.

“And go somewhere where no one would know my name or that I was . . .” Hannah looked deeply into the gray fabric. Her shoulders slumped and one lone tear trekked down her recently hollowed cheek.

“Yes.” I clutched at one of her hands. “We could go anywhere you’d want.”

She sniffed and smiled slightly as she looked back at me. “Is there a reason you picked Paris first?”

“For dress making, fashion. ‘Tis the city of fashion, I assumed. But I don’t know. Is there another place where a dress maker could make money?”

Hannah’s blonde eyebrows drew together tightly. “For fashion? That’s why you picked Paris? Not because of Monsieur Beaumont?”

“He lives in Marseille, not Paris.” I grimaced and swallowed. I shouldn’t have revealed so much.

“Violet . . .” Her face changed dramatically. She had been so bitterly sad and angry, but now she looked at me with such fierce affection. “Will you do me a favor?”

“Of course.”

“There will be a time, soon, when . . . No. How do I say it?” Her eyebrows puckered. “You have always been so sound with reasoning. I never envied you for it. I’m sorry, but I pitied you instead—how you were always the most pragmatic person I’d ever known.” She checked around the store, as if to assure no one listened. “You love him, don’t you? You’re in love with Monsieur Beaumont.”

I began to shake my head, but I stopped. Heat blazed my cheeks, and I felt it drop down into my chest. I nodded.

“Do you love Mathew too?”

I nodded again. “I’m an evil woman. I don’t know what’s wrong with me to—”

“You aren’t evil, sissy. You’re human, after all. It makes me like you all the more, honestly. You’ve been like the–what are they called?–the Brahmin? Yes? Yes, like those people, almost inhuman with how you carried on after Da passed away—doing the work of three men on the farm, still spinning for Mother, and your only vice was reading your books until the early morning hours, going through candles like they were kindling. Not much of a vice, if you ask me. You weren’t even reading any romances. Anyway, so you fell in love with a couple of wonderful men. What of it? Just—this is what I want of you—I want you to listen to your heart. Stop being so practical and start living your life with your heart. I know that may sound like especially poor advice, coming from me . . .”

“I would never think that,” I blubbered.

Hannah smiled while tilting her head toward me. “I’m sure everyone else thinks I’m such an idiot, wandering off in the woods in the middle of the night to convince a man to marry me. But I have to tell you, it wasn’t my heart that led me on that night. No, it was . . . impetuosity. That letter he’d written about reconsidering our marriage, well, I panicked after receiving it, and promised to do his bidding, which included meeting him secretly. I knew better, my heart was telling me
not
to go, but I so wanted to be married. Damn the consequences, I was getting married. Now, I’m not fit to be married.”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“There are wonderful men out there,” I pleaded. “I know it. Some men wouldn’t care about . . . Some man out there would take one look at you and only think to himself what a wonderful, bright and funny woman you are.”

Hannah let a soft ironic smile capture her face. “I always knew you were a dreamer, underneath all the responsibility which you wear so nobly, underneath the breeches and the mud–under all of that is a girl who dreams of better days, of Fae people, and of men who wouldn’t care that I’ve been soiled.”

I choked and gripped her hand firmly. “You are not soiled. God damn it!”

Bless me, she actually laughed then. “We do have to do something about the swearing though.” 

I knew then that I’d have to figure out, even if it was constantly at my own expense, how to get my sister laughing for the rest of her life.

Short, quick days passed as Hannah made the silver-gray dress for me. A few years ago, she had stopped using fashion plates and only employed her imagination and me as her mannequin. She made the bodice painstakingly, lovingly. The center was the silver-gray silk blend with black for sleeves and the minutest of light peachy pink details. The neckline opened and was filled with a gauzy pink stomacher—the piece of fluff that would surround my breasts. The pinks were a matching color that reflected silver in the right light.

Pink-silver rosebuds interlaced around the hem of the sleeves and all the ruffles and around the neckline. Its sleeves ended just above my elbows where Hannah had the light silver fabric ruffle. It looked like a summer dress, a dark summer dress.

In a couple more days’ time the skirt was developed. Usually, Hannah made the skirts full and wide with panniers–the overskirt that would create a gigantic rounded expansion within a gown. But she had a different plan for my dress. She smiled vibrantly (and my heart rejoiced) as she explained that she was creating something that would revolutionize the fashion industry. The skirt flowed from the tight boned waist, but instead of puffing about, it slid down my body with fluid form. It was predominately black, but two silver-gray triangles washed down the center, the slender points of the triangles met at my waist. The pink rosebuds pierced the skirt’s silver-gray with a criss-cross pattern in the center.