Twain's End (40 page)

“Isabel, what are you doing here?”

Isabel did not mention that it was her own house. “Mother, please get the bandages that I keep in the pantry. Mr. Gabrilowitsch has hurt himself.”

“No!”

Isabel squinted at her mother, who was wringing her handkerchief. Her face was flushed, and the cameo pin on her collar had been knocked sideways. “Mother, are you ill?”

“No. Yes!” Mrs. Lyon put a hand to her belly. “My stomach.”

“Go lie down, then.” She gently pushed past her mother with Ralph and the limping pianist.

Mrs. Lyon trotted next to Isabel. “Put him on the davenport! Mr. Clemens, you sit right here.” She patted the rocker turned to the fire.

The King was breathing hard—harder than the short walk up to the house should have provoked. “Damn it, Georgiana, we don't have time for social hour. Have you seen my daughter?”

She blinked at him. The fringe on the green velvet sofa shook as Ossip was eased onto it.

“I'll go get the bandages,” said Isabel.

“No!” yelped Mrs. Lyon. “I've—I've moved them. I know where they are.” She bustled from the room.

Isabel saw that beneath the upswept flaps of his fur crown, The King's face had turned the color of old ashes. Fine purple veins webbed his cheeks.

“Sam, sit down.” She swept a batch of pincushions from an armchair into the mending basket.

The King lowered himself, panting. “You're still making pincushions?” he managed to say.

“Yes.”

“I take care of you that badly,” he stated, “that you still need to make pincushions.” His crown listed when he laid his head on the back of the chair. “Is there anyone's life that I have not bungled?”

Mrs. Lyon trundled back in and shoved the paper box of bandages and a bottle of iodine at Isabel. “It's so late,” she fretted. “Shouldn't all of you go back home? Isn't it time for dinner?”

The King rested, his eyes closed, as Giuseppe stood shedding snow by the doorway, blocked by Mrs. Lyon from retreating to the kitchen. Isabel cleaned and dressed Ossip's wound, assisted by Ralph, for whose silence she was grateful—the better that she could monitor the sound of The King's labored breathing. She was tying off the bandage when a thump came from the back bedroom. The King's eyes opened.

“Is someone here?” asked Ralph.

“Who would be here?” Mrs. Lyon clapped her hands. “Who would like cocoa?”

Isabel pulled Ossip's cuff over her handiwork. “Let me get it.” She pushed up and strode toward the kitchen before anyone could stop her.

Mrs. Lyon bowled after her. “Isabel! Let me help!”

Isabel continued down the hall and flung open her mother's bedroom
door. Upon the blue and cream field of Mrs. Lyon's coverlet, Clara leaned into the muscular embrace of Will Wark.

• • •

Isabel had the presence of mind to shut the door behind her. “What are you doing here?”

Mr. Wark spoke up first. “I came to the house but Sam turned me away.” He tightened his hold on Clara. “We're getting married.”

Isabel glanced at her mother, who smiled lopsidedly. “Did you get a divorce?”

“I'm working on it,” said Mr. Wark. “Edith is being stubborn.”

“Perhaps she's thinking of your two children.”

“Aw, Nana. How can I be a good dad to them when my heart is with someone else?”

Isabel half-laughed. “Plenty of people have sacrificed their hearts for those who depend on them.”

Clara lowered her head in defiance. “We don't care.”

“Where do you plan to go? What do you plan to do? There's not a concert hall in America that would book a couple in your situation. I can promise you that your father will cut you off.”

“Fine. Let him. I'll tell the world about you two. See how he likes that.”

“Everyone already has their suspicions about you and Mr. Clemens,” Will said. “You ought to hear them talk about it in town.”

The door opened. The King towered and swayed in the entrance like a titan ready to topple.

Clara cringed against Wark. “Papa!”

The King stared mutely, his face a horrifying magenta-streaked yellow now, his skin papery, his eyes bulging beneath the lightning strokes of his brows.

Isabel rushed to him. “Sam!”

He flung her off.

“It's not what it looks like,” Clara cried. “We have honorable intentions.”

“Mr. Clemens—” Will began.

“You're trying to punish me,” bit off The King. “You picked the worst possible man so you can bring me down. Your piano player! He's married! Soon as people find out, you'll be hated. I'll be hated. We'll be despised as scum. But you would do this to yourself, because the revenge will be so sweet.”

“Papa! That's not true.”

“I know about vengeance. I wrote the book! Didn't I tell upon my own father, hoping to get revenge?”

“Tell who?” Clara whispered. “Tell what?”

“But Jennie was the one who got hurt—I didn't think of that. It killed me enough to see my father whip her, but when Mother made Father sell her—” He forked his hand through his violence of hair. “They sold her to the worst slave dealer in town. The one who sold all his ‘merchandise' to the death fields outside New Orleans. A house slave like Jennie wouldn't last a year! They sold her to her death.” He dropped his hand. “See why I wrote so many stories in which the slave sold down the river was saved? Huck Finn, Pudd'nhead Wilson, Aunt Rachel, all of them—wishful thinking.” The color drained from his face until it was the white of cooked bone. “My parents never got a penny for her. That dealer, the cheat, never paid them. She was sold to her death for nothing.”

Isabel broke the horrified silence. “You were a boy. Whatever it is that you think you did, it wasn't your fault.”

“The guests are waiting!” Mrs. Lyon cried.

The King stilled her with a look, then swung back, swaying, to Clara. “I got my revenge. By telling on my father, I made Mother hate him so badly that when he died five years later, she sold his body to the medical college. No families sell their loved ones to science. It's too shameful. Only unclaimed paupers and criminals become cadavers. But Mother sold him. And not just for the money. Oh, sure, we needed the cash—Father had a way of
repelling
money, Christ, we were broke!—but there were other ways to get it. I could go to work, my brother Orion could work, my sister, Pamela, could teach
piano. No, it was because Mother hated him that badly. And she made me watch. Made little Sammy see it all. Every last knife cut, every slice into my father's flesh, I saw through the keyhole of his bedroom door.” He laughed bitterly. “My mother knew a thing or two about revenge herself.”

Clara hid her face in her hands.

His eyes reddened as he looked down upon his weeping daughter. “You've always been the most like me of all my girls. Always gave me the most trouble. Jean does whatever I want her to. Susy, high-spirited as she was, never gave me grief, either. If I asked her to put on a play for me, she whipped the whole neighborhood into the production. If I mentioned that no one had written my biography, she wrote one herself, though she was just thirteen. If I asked her to leave college at Bryn Mawr and swear off her lady friend, she packed up that day and went with me to Europe. She never saw that lady friend again, or any lady friend. I thought she did these things because she loved me. But no. It was because she was terrified of me.” He let out a long, weary breath, his life force going with it. “Why didn't the girl ever fight me? I asked her to give up the love of her life, and she didn't even fight.”

“No one can fight you, Papa.”

“You do. Look at you. You're every bit as spiteful and mean and spoiling for revenge as I ever was.”

A knock sounded on the door, then Ralph Ashcroft leaned in. He drew back when he saw the expressions in the room. Loud voices came from the parlor.

“Who's out there?” growled The King.

“Reporters. With Miss Keller.”

“At night?”

“They got wind about Clara. Someone telephoned them. They went back to the house for a story, and Miss Keller told them you'd gone.”

“Helen is with them?” Isabel asked.

“She insisted on coming with them to find her teacher. They
said she made an absolute fuss until they agreed to bring her, something about making a terrible mistake. She was pretty keen on leaving Mr. Macy, it appears.” Ralph caught Isabel's arm. “Darling, you don't look well.”

As slowly as a gashed lion near death, The King brought his gaze back to Clara. “Don't you see? I'm giving you a way out. People are ready to believe that you were never with a married man, that you were sweet on Ossip all along—and he actually does love you, God help him. He's got as miserable a life ahead of him as poor Livy had with me, but damn fool, he wants it. Take it, Clärchen. Take his love. Take everyone's love—take the whole world's. Because they will love you. They will love that damn Mark Twain and everything about him, including his daughter, as long as they believe he's real. Wallow in their love, Clärchen. I can tell you, it makes up for a lot.” He sagged, his hand to his heart, then dragged his gaze to Isabel. “What are you waiting for? Go tell those damn reporters. Tell them Clara's marrying Ossip.”

Clara stared at him, her face contorted with hatred. “It's too late. Your offer's no good anymore. Don't you hear what they're saying on the streets? You're living in sin with Isabel. Mark Twain's halo is in pieces.”

Isabel looked into the drained yellow eyes of her dying Sam. She cherished him and all the parts of him—the boy, the man, the aging King. Her fellow outsider. She would not fail him.

“Mark Twain's halo is perfectly intact. How can he be living in sin with me when I am planning to marry Ralph? All I am”—she clung to his gaze, willing life into him—“is Mr. Clemens's secretary.”

May 1909

Stormfield,
Redding, Connecticut

I
SABEL SAT NEXT TO
her husband in the train car. She had on the same velvet jacket she'd worn to her wedding two months earlier, the same broad-crowned boater tied down with a veil, the same ripe-plum dress. She looked at her hands in their netting gloves, then curled them closed.

Ralph, watching her, picked up a hand and kissed it. “Are you all right, darling?”

She soaked in the voice of her new husband, so earnest and so very young—he was only thirty-four. Already tall, he seemed to have shot up a few more inches since their marriage. Since proving himself in the marital bed, he strutted like an English Adonis. She smiled in spite of her straining nerves. That part of marriage was nice. “I'm fine.”

He didn't seem convinced. “Are you sure you don't want me to take care of Mark myself? I don't have a good feeling about this meeting. God knows what Clara has put him up to. The little witch has gone off her nut—running to H. H. Rogers to have him audit the household accounts, accusing you of embezzling. She's spewing her venom all over town, you know, hinting of your crimes.”

“I've not embezzled. There are no crimes. I've given that family every ounce of my devotion for the past seven years for fifty dollars a month and no more.”

“I know, but—”

“How can she possibly hurt me when I have truth on my side? Surely people will see through her.”

“Already she got him to fire us. We look like a couple of crooks.”

“That's temporary. You'll see. He'll vindicate us.”

His mouth tightened with doubt. He squeezed her hand.

She turned her face to the window as the train clattered through the rocky Connecticut woods. How had it come to this? Her destiny was entwined with her King; she'd known it from the start. She could no more pull away from him than could a river resist its surge to the sea.

Maybe that was why he'd called this meeting. He felt this, too. Maybe he wanted to fight for her. She drew in a breath. Could he finally want to fight for her? She didn't know what she'd do if he did. She was married now.

“I can't see what more Clara wants,” said Ralph. “Why is she so determined to ruin you? Mark fired you; she gave up Wark. Everything is even.”

“Clara likes things decidedly uneven—tipped in her favor.”

He laughed grimly. “That's for certain.”

“Deep down, she's not really after me. But I make a less dangerous target than her father.”

“Well, she had better stop her antics soon.” He pressed her hand once more. “No one is hurting my wife.”

Grazing cows; farmyards where women hung up wash; new-leafed trees flashed by. Her hand still entrapped within Ralph's, Isabel's heart pounded at the thought of seeing her King. The last time she'd been with him was on her wedding day, in the city. What a windy day it had been, yet weirdly balmy for March. The sky above the redbrick city was blue, although the paving stones and sidewalks of Fifth Avenue were wet with rain when she'd left her hotel with her mother.