The Taker (46 page)

As the coach rattled down the snow-crusted road, I peeked out the curtained window to see if anyone in the house had heard us, but no one stirred. I imagined them waking to find me gone, wondering—heartbroken—why I would choose to leave this way, my departure as mysterious as my years of silence. I was doing a great injustice to my mother’s and sisters’ kind hearts, and it struck me to my core, but the truth was, it was easier to disappoint them than to lose Jonathan forever, or to disobey Adair.

Jonathan lay on the bench across from me, wrapped in his coat and a fur lap robe, my cloak balled into a pillow, his head propped at an awkward angle. He made no movement, there was no rise and fall of his chest with breath, nothing. His skin was pale as ice in the moonlight. I kept my eyes trained on his face, waiting for the first sign of life, but he was so still I began to wonder if I had failed.

THIRTY-EIGHT

W
e put miles between us and the village in the hours before dawn, the carriage rattling down the rough and lonesome forest trail as I sat vigil over Jonathan. It could have been a funeral trap, with me acting the widow accompanying her husband’s body on the journey to his final resting place.

The sun had been out for a while by the time Jonathan stirred. By then, I’d almost come to the conclusion that he was not coming back; I’d sat trembling and sweating for hours, on the verge of vomiting, hating myself. The first sign of life was a twitch of his right cheek, then a flutter of an eyelash. As he was still white as a corpse, I doubted my eyes for a moment, until I heard the low moan, saw his lips part, and then both eyes open.

“Where are we?” he asked in a barely audible rasp.

“In a carriage. Lie still. You’ll feel better in a bit.”

“A carriage? Where are we going?”

“To Boston.” I didn’t know what else to tell him.

“Boston! What happened? Did I”—his mind must have gone to
the last thing he could remember, the two of us at Daughtery’s—“did I lose a wager? Was I drunk, to agree to go with you—”

“There was no agreement about it,” I said, kneeling next to him to tuck the robe around him more tightly. “We are going because we must. You can no longer stay in St. Andrew.”

“What are you talking about, Lanny?” Jonathan was vexed and tried to push me away, though he was so weak he couldn’t make me budge. I felt something unpleasant under my knee, like a sharp pebble; reaching down, my fingers found a shot of lead.

The shot from Kolsted’s flintlock.

I held it up for Jonathan to see. “Do you recognize this?”

He tried hard to focus on the small dark form in my hand. I watched as the memory caught up to him, and he recalled the argument on the footpath and the flash of powder that had ended his life.

“I was shot,” he said, his chest heaving up and down. His hand went to his pectoral, the torn layers of shirt and waistcoat, stiff with dried blood. He felt his flesh under the clothing, but it was whole.

“No wound,” Jonathan said with relief. “Kolsted must have missed.”

“How could that be? You see the blood, the tears in your clothes. Kolsted didn’t miss you, Jonathan. He shot you in the heart and killed you.”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “You’re not making sense. I don’t understand.”

“It’s not something that can be understood,” I replied, taking his hand. “It’s a miracle.”

I tried to explain it all, though God knows I understood precious little myself. I told him my story and Adair’s story. I showed him the tiny vial, now empty, and let him sniff its last foul vapors. He listened, the whole time observing me as though I was a madwoman.

“Tell your driver to stop the carriage,” he said. “I’m going back to St. Andrew if I have to walk the whole way.”

“I can’t let you out.”

“Stop the carriage!” he thundered, rising to his feet and pounding a fist on the carriage’s roof. I tried to make him sit down, but the driver had heard him and pulled the horses up.

Jonathan flung open the tiny door and bounded out into the knee-deep virgin snow. The driver turned, looking down on us doubtfully from his high perch, his mustache frosted with his own breath. The horses shuddered for air, exhausted from pulling the carriage through the snow.

“We’ll be back. Melt some snow to water the horses,” I said in an attempt to distract the driver. I ran after Jonathan, my skirts slowing me in the snow, and grabbed his arm when I finally caught up to him.

“You’ve got to listen to me. You can’t go back to St. Andrew. You’ve changed.”

He pushed me away. “I don’t know what happened to you since you’ve been away, but I can only surmise that you’ve lost your mind …”

I held on to his cuff fiercely. “I’ll prove it to you. If I can make you see that I’m telling the truth, do you promise to come with me?”

He stopped but looked at me as though he expected a trick. “I promise you nothing.”

I held up my hand, releasing his sleeve, signaling for him to wait. With my other hand, I found a small but sturdy knife in the pocket of my overcoat. I tore open my bodice, exposing my corset to the frigidly crisp air, and then, grasping the knife’s handle in both hands, I plunged it into my chest to the hilt.

Jonathan nearly dropped to his knees, but his hands reached for me reflexively. “Good God! You
are
insane! What in God’s name are you doing—”

Blood welled around the hilt, quickly soaked up by my clothing, until a huge sunburst of deep crimson spread across the silk from my belly to my sternum. I pulled the blade out, then grabbed his hand and pressed his fingers to the wound. He tried to pull away but I held him fast.

“Touch it. Feel what is happening and tell me you still don’t believe me.”

I knew what would happen. It was a parlor trick Dona performed for us when we gathered in the kitchen to wind down after a night on the town. He would sit before the fire, toss his frock coat over the back of a chair and roll up his voluminous sleeves, and then cut deep into his forearms with a knife. Alejandro, Tilde, and I would watch as the two raw ends of red flesh would crawl toward each other, helpless as doomed lovers, and sew up in a seamless embrace. An impossible feat, done over and over, as sure as the sun rises. (Dona would laugh bitterly as he watched his own flesh re-join, but re-creating his trick myself, I saw that it had a sensation all its own. It was pain we sought but couldn’t re-create, not exactly. We came to want an approximation of suicide, and in its stead we would have the temporary pleasure of inflicting pain upon ourselves, but even that was denied us. How we hated ourselves, each in our own way!)

Jonathan’s face went pale as he felt the pulpy flesh move and shudder and close.

“What is this?” he whispered in horror. “The devil’s hand is there, surely.”

“I don’t know about that. I have no explanation. What’s done is done and there’s no running away from it. You’ll never be the same again and your place is no longer in St. Andrew. Now come with me,” I said. He went limp and stark white and he didn’t resist when I placed my hand on his arm and guided him back to the carriage.

Jonathan did not recover from shock for the entire trip. It made for an anxious time for me, as I was eager to know if I would get my friend—and my lover—back. Jonathan was always the confident one and it made me ill at ease to be the leader. It was foolish for me to expect anything different; after all, how long had I sulked in Adair’s house, withdrawing into myself and refusing to believe what had happened to me?

He kept to the tiny cabin during the sailing to Boston, not stepping
on deck once. That whetted the crew’s and other passengers’ curiosity to be sure, so even though the seas were smooth as well water, I told them that he had taken ill and did not trust his legs to be up and about. I brought him soup from the galley and his ration of beer, though he no longer had the need to eat and his appetite had deserted him. As Jonathan would soon learn, eating was something we did out of habit and for comfort, and to pretend that we were the same as ever.

By the time the ship arrived at the Boston harbor, Jonathan was a strange-looking creature from his many hours in the semidarkness of the cabin. Pale and nervous, with eyes rimmed pink from lack of sleep, he emerged from his cabin dressed in the set of ragtag clothes we had purchased back in Camden from a tiny shop that sold second hand goods. He stood on the deck, enduring the stares of the other passengers, who doubtless had wondered if the unseen passenger had died in his cabin during the journey. He watched the activity on the pier as the ship was secured in its berth, eyes widening at the crowds. His incredible beauty had been dampened by his ordeal, and for a moment, I wished that Adair would not see Jonathan looking so poorly for their first meeting. I wanted Adair to see that Jonathan was everything I’d promised—foolish vanity!

We disembarked and had gone not twenty feet up the pier when I saw Dona waiting for us with a couple of servants. Dona wore a funereal outfit, black ostrich plumes in his hat, and he was bundled in a black cape and leaned on his walking stick, towering over the ordinary people like the grim reaper himself. An evil leer crept over his face as he spied us.

“How did you know I was returning today? On this ship?” I demanded of him. “I sent no letter on ahead to tell you of my plans.”

“Oh, Lanore, you are laughably naive. Adair always knows such things. He felt your presence on the horizon and sent me to fetch you,” he said, brushing me off. He lavished all his attention on Jonathan, not attempting to disguise that he was inspecting him from head to toe and back again. “So, introduce me to your friend.”

“Jonathan, this is Donatello,” I said, curtly. Jonathan made no move to acknowledge him or return the greeting, though whether it was because of Dona’s bald appraisal or because he was still in shock I couldn’t say.

“Doesn’t he speak? Has he no manners?” Dona said. When Jonathan didn’t rise to the bait, Dona brushed off the snub by turning to me. “Where are your bags? The servants—”

“Would we be dressed like this if we had anything else to wear? I had to leave everything behind. I barely had the money to make it to Boston.” In my mind’s eye, I saw the trunk I’d left behind in my mother’s house, inconspicuously tucked in a corner. When they inspected it—waiting until curiosity got the best of them before they’d violate my privacy, even though they’d know I was not coming back—they would find the doeskin pouch fat with gold and silver coins. I was happy that the money pouch had been left behind; I felt I owed my family that much. I considered it Adair’s blood money, paying my family for the loss of me forever, much as he’d assuaged his guilt by leaving money for his family centuries earlier.

“How consistent of you. The first time, you came to us with nothing. Now you bring your friend, both of you with nothing.” Dona threw his hands in the air as though I was incorrigible, but I knew why he acted peevishly: even in Jonathan’s current state, his exceptional nature was obvious. He would become the apple of Adair’s eye, the friend and compatriot against whom Dona could never compete. Dona would fall from grace with Adair; there was nothing to be done for it and that was clear to Dona from the moment he laid eyes on Jonathan.

If only Dona had known, he wouldn’t have wasted his envy. Our arrival that day was the beginning of the end for all of us.