The Vespertine (11 page)

She passed my chair to retrieve hers. When she did, I saw an envelope in her hand—paper of the finest sort, closed with a seal of verdigris green. Would that I could see through parchment!

Mrs. Stewart sat, stiff and formal. "Let it not be said that I came into this agreement to keep you, Amelia, with blinders. I expected a measure of frivolity. I was young once. I anticipated the delights you'd both find in taking license."

My hands stilled.

"Convention may stifle, but it protects young women from their foolish whims."

"Mama," Zora dared, then shut up on receipt of a hard look.

Fanning herself in the heat of the kitchen, Mrs. Stewart became mortal again as she sighed. "You have good natures, and it's man's nature to take advantage of that. There's no boy who ever walked this earth with only selfless intention."

"What about the Lord?" Zora mumbled.

Mrs. Stewart squinted at her. "Do You really wish me to nip your bud, Zora Pauline?"

For me, I wished that this dreadful conversation would fade away. It was clear. The postmaster had mentioned my visit. Or Thomas himself felt honor-bound to report how closely I had danced with Nathaniel. God save me, perhaps both. I swallowed back a sour taste and trembled.

"Against my best judgment," Mrs. Stewart said, producing the letter, "this shall be the first, and only, time I acknowledge attentions made toward either of you out of turn."

Zora swelled in anticipation of taking it. Surprise plucked her brows when Mrs. Stewart instead delivered it to me.

"Wills is a fine boy who knows better," Mrs. Stewart said, reaching for the basin and her knife again. "I bade Thomas tell him he would carry no more entreaties. He can leave his card of a morning, the same as any other caller."

Confusion broke the tensioned air. I hadn't been found out, and apparently I had been called out for a total mystery. Why would Wills go to such trouble for me? We had barely met, and all that stirred me was his fine taste in papers.

Disappointed, Zora tossed a potato in the basin and reached for another. "What's that great auk have to say for himself?" She stared pointedly until I unfolded the letter.

"'Dear Miss van den Broek, forgive me for being so bold, but I've never enjoyed a dance so much as I did the one at Judge Bonds','" I read, a blush starting to light on my skin. "'If it pleases you and Miss Stewart, Mr. Rea and I shall number ourselves among those attending the public ball held by the Sons of Apollo in Annapolis, date and time listed below. The cause is the arts, and I appeal to the philanthropic nature so inborn in ladies of your stature, to humbly beg your kind consideration, should there be none other engagement of previous obligation on this occasion.'"

Mrs. Stewart said to no one in particular, "Fancy that. Who knew Wills could pen such a pretty letter?"

I shuffled the pages, and a sharp breath caught in my chest when I found not a closing, but an epigraph, written in a fine hand in the middle of the page. At once, the richness of bay rum cologne rushed up to torment me, stirred into the ink.

"And he signs his name, that's all," I lied, stuffing them into my polonaise. The letter needed no signature for me to understand. Thomas would no doubt attend the Sons of Apollo ball, but I would not find Wills there in search of me.

"Please, Mama," Zora said, already begging.

Whatever Mrs. Stewart's answer, I didn't hear it. Her voice drifted away from me—Zora's, too. I heard nothing but the echo of my own name. Pressing my hand to my breast, to the letter safely tucked away, I burned knowing how the letter truly ended.

Was it enough to wear the night with me just once, Amelia? I am unsatisfied.

Yours, obediently
—
Nathaniel Witherspoon

H
AS SHE BEEN
at that window all day?" August asked when he came in.

He brought autumn with him, a crisp scent of dried leaves and fires burned down in the village. Once the scent of wood smoke had delighted me, but no longer. Now it brought a low, slow throbbing to my brow.

Lizzy deflected the question. "She went out and picked morels this morning."

"She's gone mad," I said, stretching my arm across the windowsill, "not deaf."

The floor shook beneath August's boots. Bending down, he came so very close that I could see nothing but the reflection of my eyes in his. Catching my chin, he refused to let me look away. "I'm quite determined to put you straight, Amelia."

Forcibly, I broke his gaze and applied myself to the study of the seasons again.

Funny how our trees usually burst out in shades of flame come fall, but this year they had nothing but endless shades of dun and dark. I wondered if some tragedy had stolen all their colors, too.

"So they're not enough for stew," Lizzy said, picking up her thought as easily as she picked up her next stitch. "But perhaps dressing, if we've got any oysters. Or maybe you could bring some home tomorrow, Gus."

"What difference does it make," August asked, the question trailing behind him down the hall, "if she refuses to eat dressing or refuses to eat stew? I should like stew myself. It's my house, isn't it?"

"Spoiled," Lizzy murmured, an indulgent tone meant to curry my agreement, but I had no answer.

Every day felt like drowning to me. I woke and took a single, useless breath, then sank into the deep again. Every shape was shadows;every flavor, dust. What did it matter if I spent my days at the window or beneath the ground? I'd still destroyed Zora. I'd still burned Baltimore to the ground.

In the end, it was all the same.

Except the wonderful detonations that came when I crossed August. He shouted from his study, and soon thereafter he carried his storm back to the kitchen.

"What is this?" he demanded, slapping papers on the table. He raised his voice when I failed to raise my head. "I will have an explanation, and I will have it now!"

Reaching for one of the sheets that had drifted to the floor, Lizzy kept silent as she read. I traced her figure in the glass, the tips of my fingers marking the pretty curve of her cheeks as they turned from blush to ash.

August tapped a finger against the page. "Now You see, Elizabeth. Now You see, don't you?"

"That's enough," Lizzy murmured. But she folded the paper in half and fed it to the old iron stove. At once, she gathered her sewing and swept from the kitchen. For all the effort it took me to look after her, I only managed to see the hem of her skirt disappear around the corner.

I slipped my fingers in my hair, twisting and twisting at the braids looped there. "Oh, Gus, for shame. Look what you've done."

"Burn them all," he told me. And then, admirably, he went after his wife.

I didn't leave the chair so much as slip from it. Unboned and weak-muscled, I melted across the floor and came to sit against the wall. When I strained, I caught a few scattered pages. Straightening them in my lap to consider, I sighed. My handwriting drifted in a slope across the page.

Today in the vespers, I hear two boys drowning when the current calls them to sea.

Today in the vespers, I see a physician with winding cloths walking to the pastor's house.

Today in the vespers, I'm blind. I taste blood in my mouth, and I know not whose it is.

The smoke smelled no sweeter when it was premonitions burned. The paper turned to white ash before collapsing into the flames. Page after page, I destroyed, and I could well imagine the one Lizzy burned first:

Today in the vespers, I see my brothers wife, weeping tears and milk for the stillborn babe they put in the ground.

S
HOULD YOU WISH
to continue classes throughout the summer," Miss Burnside said, sweeping down the rows between our desks. "Please ask that your parents engage me before the last of the month to guarantee placement."

In spite of the kind offer, I felt quite certain that Zora and I would be spending our days in teas and callings instead of lessons. Summer broke over the city in the most pleasing way.

The harbor, for the moment, settled the heat to a suggestion. It gave us a season warm enough to go about without a wrapper, wearing light
chinoise
gowns instead of heavy brocade. It gave us a barbecue season to parade in the park and make eyes at any who pleased us.

Miss Burnside moved through the room as a barge through the harbor. She touched students to promote them to their next grade. Out of spite, she started at the last chair and worked her way forward.

"Give way," Zora mouthed to me.

Sitting as I did between her and Thomas, I had to tip back so they could exchange looks. It had become so regular that I was once tempted to fail an exam, just to let Thomas win my seat. My pride overwhelmed temptation, however, so I spent a good deal of time trailing my ribbons on the desk behind me so they could moon.

"Thank You, Miss Harrison; I shall see you again to begin sixth-form lessons," Miss Burnside sang behind me.

"Has your mother talked to Mrs. Castillo?" Thomas asked.

Zora leaned into the aisle to whisper back, "She sent a letter with Papa, and he'll return tomorrow with the answer, I expect. But she's never said no before now—like as not, she'll agree this time, too."

With a smile, I pointed out between them, "She only had to take three of you before. You've got an extra this year."

"Three, four, what's the difference?" Zora asked, and we all corrected our posture when Miss Burnside cracked her stick on a desk behind us.

"I'm sorry to say you'll need to repeat your fourth term," Miss Burnside told little Joey Dobbs.

When Miss Burnside drifted to the other side of the room, I craned back again.

Arms curled on the desk, Zora told Thomas, "In any case, it shouldn't matter. If we must, Sarah and Mattie could stay with Sarah's aunt. We'll prevail upon Mrs. Castillo's good nature to take the two of us."

"Where will you stay?" I asked, then colored for my shamelessness. Of the myriad of things not meant for young ladies to contemplate, a bachelor's sleeping arrangements was chief among them.

And, alas, it was not so much that I cared to know Thomas' particulars, but that I hoped he would divulge Nathaniel's in the telling.

"I thought to ride back that night," Thomas said, though that sounded entirely unlikely to me.

To Zora as well, for she hummed a note that called him a liar. Then, as if her trickery would go unnoticed, she asked, "Did Dr. Rea buy another horse of late?"

"He didn't," Thomas said, rising in his seat, bemused. "I planned to borrow one."

"And ride it hard on, thirty miles in the morning, then thirty more after the ball?" Clicking her tongue against her teeth, Zora sighed. "Poor borrowed beast."

Reaching across to my desk, Thomas tapped his finger on the edge of it. "Mind yourself, and let me save your country friend from herself."

"Oh, noble Mr. Rea," Zora teased, then jerked upright when Miss Burnside rapped her across the shoulders.

The willow stick was not thick enough to wreak damage, but it hurt. Not that any would know it from Zora's reaction. She bit her lips, swallowing laughter as desperately as ginger water on a hot day.

"I'm happy," Miss Burnside said, her teeth gritted in such a way that we could hardly believe her happy at all, "to graduate you, Miss Stewart. I wish you all the best at the new girls' High School next year."

Zora took to her feet and dipped low in an exquisite court bow. As we had no royalty in Baltimore, Zora's audacity astounded me, truly. "I am ever humbly in your debt, good lady Burnside."

Miss Burnside's expression never changed. But, oh, there was so much motion in that nothing. In a frosted silence, she waited for Zora to walk away before passing my desk. Everyone knew my half season of school was the end of my schooling entirely.

It would be quite rude to say outright that I should hurry off now to find a respectable man to keep me—ruder still for Miss Burnside to point out that she thought that as likely as my learning to fly. But she had to graduate me in some way, so she lit her fingers on my shoulder and said, "Good luck to you in all your endeavors, Miss van den Broek."

"Thank you," I murmured, and slipped away without further incident.

***

Of all the souls I thought
might
run down the street at us, I never expected Mattie Corey.

Yet there she came, skirts in one hand, her bonnet pressed flat with the other. Her lips parted and closed, and it looked like she called to us, though no sound came out. The running, it seemed, was the full extent of her ability to be ill-mannered.

"What's the matter?" Zora asked, very nearly pulled down when Mattie tipped and lost her balance before her.

Thomas held out hands to catch them, tipping them both aright with a single, subtle push.

And then he stood a little straighter—perhaps pride for his gallantry, but more likely to prove his propriety. No one would claim he was prissy, but he clung, with weary determination, to etiquette when we let him.

"Amelia's vision," Mattie said breathlessly, slapping at her mint batiste suit. She hurried to smooth herself. "It's true—it came true! You saved her, Amelia."

"How do you mean?" I asked, stunned once that she claimed it true—stunned twice that there was any saving to be had.

Mattie slipped her arm into mine, pulling me down the street. "This morning at practice, one of Sarah's arrows exploded as she drew!"