The Vespertine (22 page)

Amelia,
the wind murmured, and I, shameless, awful monster, walked into the night to meet it.

Nathaniel stepped from the shadows, his hands on me, bare and hot. They framed my face, the curve of my throat. He opened my wrap to stare at the wide stain that stole the sheen from mourning satin.

I had, I was certain, splashes of it on my skin. The police said I couldn't wash it off yet. And I was sure that even if I used steel wool and lye to scrub, that blood would mark me 'til my last.

"You should not have come."

"Where else would I be?" He jumped to the top step, looking indoors at the mass of gawkers that stomped through Dr. Rea's row house. None noticed that the back door stood open. Not one eye turned toward the two of us standing in shadows in the yard.

Made certain of that, Nathaniel came down again and caught my arms, pulling me toward seclusion. "Come away, Amelia."

I can't.

Nathaniel frowned. "Why not?"

A hook pulled viciously through my numbness, a red hot wound through my chest that put me close to tears again. "I can't leave Zora alone! I can't leave at all. Nathaniel, I've killed someone tonight."

"Did You?" Nathaniel stepped closer, his voice urgent. "Did You fire the gun?"

I wanted to slap or scream. Instead, I swayed toward his heat and murmured. "It was meant for me. It was mine; I should be the one lying in there. Would You want to draw me? Isn't that how you met Thomas, over an autopsy? If it were me..."

"Amelia, stop it."

I begged mercy with myself, when the spice of Nathaniel's cologne mingled with Thomas' blood, and resisted. Pulling away from him, I whispered, "Go away. I've got to give my account."

Incredulous, Nathaniel caught my hand and pulled me near. "What difference will your accounting make? Does it bring Thomas back?"

"Don't handle me!" I cried, too loud.

With another jerk, I pulled away, insensible and dizzy, then threw myself against him. Pressing my ear to his chest, I listened to his heart beat when mine did not.

One wretched sob spilled out, murdered when I clapped my hand to my mouth. He murmured nothing sounds against my ear, binding me close in his arms, warm there, safe there, if only in that moment.

When I caught my breath again, I told him, "There are better things for you. I wish you'd go."

"I won't," he said. "You haunt me. You alone. You're my fire. I'm your air."

And there, longing for it, needing it, I rose up to kiss him. Because I refused to see, I didn't know what would come in the days soon to follow. I needed him, imprinted on my lips, and in my heart, to help me bear the awful possibilities.

Pressing my hands to his cheeks, I drew my touch down to memorize the shape of him, murmuring as I broke away. "Come for me if I call."

"As ever," he said.

With two fingers, I smeared my kiss across his lips, then my own. Turning away so I would not see him go, I marched toward the house and slipped inside, I thought at first unnoticed. But when I raised my head to steal a glance back, to see the yard empty, I tangled first in blue eyes.

Mattie clung to Mrs. Stewart's arm. And Mrs. Stewart cut through me with a steel gaze.

"Didn't I say he beguiled her?" Mattie asked, and she dared—she dared! To give
me
a look, equal measures pity and sympathy. "I had to tell her, Amelia. I couldn't let you be blamed. You've been under his hand since the Sons of Apollo—we both know it."

"What have you done?" I demanded, clutching at a world that started to slip away.

"I only tried to save you," she said.

Then for me, all went black.

***

To put me on the first boat back to Maine, Mrs. Stewart paid the difference in my ticket from her own pin money and hired a cab to take me immediately to the docks.

It was the only way she could be sure I wouldn't see Zora again. Zora, fragile and empty as an eggshell—she deserved better than me, everyone agreed. My games killed Thomas. Then I was caught kissing in the garden with his blood still on my skin.

I was the monster. They saw it very clearly. They hadn't even needed the sunset for it.

Before I boarded, I turned back to look at the city of my summer. All the huddled row houses clung together, making blocks of streets, and neighborhoods of blocks. Horse cars rang their merry bells, and Arabers called—
apples apples apples and an orange! oranges!
All the color of it seared on my skin, red brick, white marble, blue skies.

Though I felt water beneath my feet, breathing in nothing but the fish and salt flavor of it from the docks, I called to Nathaniel all the same. I stood there long minutes, til at last the porter touched my shoulder and bade me board straightaway.

Nathaniel didn't answer—not on the waves nor the rocky shore of Maine, where I came in after dark. Neither brother nor sister-in-law had come to claim me—they hadn't even sent a dowager to be my chaperone on the long road from Portland to Broken Tooth.

As the driver packed my trunk away, I stood on solid earth and begged, with voice and all, to the wind. "Please, Nathaniel, please."

I even, in all madness, took his glove from my pocket and rubbed it against my face as I called. It smelled still of him, of bay rum, of the Maryland winds that had once carried us both.

Unimpressed by my madness, the driver stalked round to open the rockaway's door for me. For having seen one so close, so recently, I cared not to climb into this hearse; I didn't wish to let it carry me to my tomb on the rock. A prickling breeze came off the water, and I spun toward it.

"Please," I begged, tears starting to fall when I saw naught but the desolate pier behind me.

Clearing his throat, the driver said, "If You're waiting for Witherspoon, miss, your brother gave me a message."

I forgot myself. I clutched his lapels. I begged, "What is it?"

"It came down on the wire," the driver said. He unfolded a scrap produced from his jacket pocket and read it bloodlessly. "Fire in Mount Vernon Place. Stop. Mr. C. Grey arrested. Stop."

Struggling to keep my feet beneath me, I snatched the telegram and read the last line on my own.

WITHERSPOON DEAD.

I
N SPITE OF
the cold sweeping between branches and across our precarious cliff, Lizzy scrubbed at shirts on the back porch. In spite of the cold that had filled up my heart, I let myself onto the porch and forced myself to meet Lizzy's eyes.

"I could do that," I offered.

"Thank You, no." She shook her head, a curl escaping to bob against her brow. Her raw hands clutched the scrub brush. Steam drifted from the tub, water boiled on the stove that she'd carried out—cleft to her schedule as she always had been.

Before I went to Baltimore, I'd found her precision disconcerting. Each day was a day for something: Monday mending, Tuesday sewing, Wednesday washing.

How endlessly she toiled; how endlessly she taught me to do the same. She was sentenced to drudgery under my idiot brother's watch and cursed to raise his feral, backwoods sister into some good sort of woman.

I'd had no sympathy before. How viciously innocent I was, to think there was nothing more to Lizzy than ironing on Thursday and canning on Friday. There, watching her shiver and scrub, her head full of ugly words I'd put there—I had a realization.

It was no vision, no sending from another time or another place. The elements came into it not at all. It was simply my own head, and my own new shame, reminding me that what destruction I brought on myself and all those around me had no need to continue. I could end myself or go forward, and that was the truth of it.

Rubbing my throat to warm it, I coaxed my voice out again. "I wish I could undo it, Lizzy."

She scrubbed a moment more, then stopped. Resting her arms on the top of the washboard, she turned her slow gaze on me. "Which part?"

Caught short, I considered a moment. "Everything that embarrassed you. Or hurt you. Only some of the things troubling August. For a man of leisure, he's entirely too tense." My brief flare of humor guttered out as I went on. "Every disaster I visited on Zora."

Her expression turned keen. "And that's all?"

Closing my mouth, I stood there; I dug into the remains of my summer in Baltimore. And though I could list a hundred petty shames and failures, I had already named to her the ones I truly regretted.

I no longer cared that I couldn't be a good, quiet girl, satisfied with a comfortable life and a pleasant-enough husband. It hardly mattered that I was ruined and alone. For one sunlit season, I had laughed and I had loved and I had been extraordinary. It was a glorious ruination—my madness was mine—and for that, I was
not
sorry.

Pulling my shoulders back, I nodded. "That's all."

"I see," Lizzy said. She returned to her wash, brushing damp curls from her cheek before starting to scrub again. She didn't look at me again. But as she ground lye soap into paste, she did warn me, "The sun's setting. You should hurry inside now."

Out of penance or piety, I did as she said.

***

When I woke to my name, it was no mystery who spoke it. Lizzy stood over me, lit by the stub of a candle she'd fixed in a teacup. The thick weight of her hair coiled over her shoulder in a braid, and she clutched at the front of her dressing gown. "Are you awake?"

I nodded, though I hadn't quite left all haze of sleep behind. "What's the matter?"

With a gentle firmness, Lizzy pulled me to sit, then turned away. Leaving the candle on my bedside table, she swept through the dark to pick up a bundle that she had left on the foot of the bed. "Get up."

Like a clockwork machine, I found my feet and stepped into the silver pool made by moonlight through my window.

"Out of that gown," Lizzy said, as if I were a child. She even came over to help, tossing froth and lace into a bed still warm with the impression of my body. "Here, these should fit."

She pressed a muslin shirt into my hands, then a wool coat and pants. I frowned at their cut, raising my head to peer at her. Had she taken leave of herself? Had my prediction plunged her into insanity? They had me, so it wouldn't have surprised me in the least.

"Aren't these August's?"

"Mmm," she agreed, pulling a key from her pocket to unlock my trunk. "Dress, Amelia. I don't want to ask you again."

I found it obscene, how quickly I could put on a man's clothes. A few buttons, a few hooks, and nothing clasping me beneath all those layers but a loose night corset.

When I came around the bed, I nearly fell over my own feet. I knew best how to walk against the weight of bustles and petticoats, skirts and overskirts, polonaise aprons and wrappers—my legs felt entirely unclad and too unencumbered to bear.

"Shoes," she said, pushing a pair toward me as she retrieved the pack again.

"Lizzy," I said, a wavering spark of humanity lighting in my chest. She'd petted me, comforted me, and I had given her none but grief in return. She hadn't let me apologize before—though, to be fair, I hadn't tried. I'd only wished to undo things. I hadn't been brave enough to kneel before her and beg forgiveness. "About the things I wrote..."

Shushing me, Lizzy reached back for my hand and led me to the stairs. Quick down them—she so light on her feet, it reminded me of Zora—we came to the front door quick apace, and then she slipped the satchel from her arm to mine.

"There's fifty dollars tucked in the front," she said. She came across to me clear as water, not even unkind as she opened the door. "That should do for a train ticket or ship's passage, if you don't want to roam far."

I caught my laughter before it rose up, before it woke the house. "You're turning me out. Good girl, Lizzy."

With all her grace, Lizzy summoned herself, shorter by inches, but managing to stand taller all the same. Clasping my face between her hands, she made me look at her. She made me still and hear her, when she spoke, for her voice was gentle and made softer in deference to the night.

"I would never turn my sister out," she said.

I interrupted. "And yet?"

"I've been told all along that I could no more conceive than I could taste the cheese on the moon. You're selfish right now and cruel, but I'm not turning you out for my hurt feelings."

"Then what is this?"

Lizzy caressed my cheek, tracing the round of it with her thumb before stepping back inside. "If I can miscarry, I can conceive. That's hope."

"Lizzy..."

"For you, freedom. Be the woman you long to be, Amelia." She waved a hand at me, shooing me away as we might the hens from the back door. "I'll tell August I woke in the night to find you missing. He'll not come for you, I promise that. But you should go."

Plaintive, I clung to my place. I had no home anywhere, neither Maryland or Maine, not Kestrels, not Oakhaven. My parents were long dead; the Stewarts would never have me. August was the only family I had. Clinging bereft to the satchel she gave me, I asked, "But where?"

"That's the price of it. It's your future. Do what you like. " With a smile and a shrug, Lizzy closed the door between us.

The heavy bolt turned, punctuating her point that I was free to go—anywhere but here. I almost preferred my coldness, my madness, and I wondered what would happen if I laid on the step and waited for morning.

Just then a wind came up. It kissed the back of my neck, cool and sweet with the scent of bay rum. Its fingers slipped into my collar, across my throat, tugging at the sunset charm. Consumed, I spun blindly and fell—into the black and gold glimmer of going on the wind, into strong arms.

"Could you have possibly put more water between us?" Nathaniel asked.

Everything moved within me, my rusted machinery grinding once more to life. I felt magic again; the air sparked with wonder. I could not take in enough of him, his round face and narrow eyes unmarred, his dark hair fallen in a careless wave across his brow. Nathaniel Witherspoon was whole and real and warm. And yet he'd seemed so many things in a vision, and wasn't madness a kind of vision?