A Drowned Maiden's Hair (31 page)

O
n the morning of the first day of October, Maud was picking through the potato bin, assisted by her former enemy, Polly Andrews.

It was a disagreeable task. By autumn, the bin was almost empty, and the remaining potatoes were sprouting and rotten. The reek of decay was powerful enough to make the children gag; Maud’s fingers were clamped firmly over her nostrils. Polly prodded a shriveled potato, agitating a swarm of tiny flies. She whimpered with dismay. “Oh, Maud, this is awful! I do so hate bugs!”

“I hate Miss Kitteridge,” said Maud, going to the heart of the matter.

Polly looked horror-stricken. She glanced over her shoulder, as if expecting Miss Kitteridge to materialize beside the potato bin. “Do help, Maud. I can’t fill the basket by myself.”

Maud took hold of a potato that squished between her fingers. She dropped it and wiped the ooze on her skirt. “This is horrible,” she announced. “I’m not going to do it.”

She sat down on the cellar steps. Polly regarded her with resentment, admiration, and fear. “You’ll be punished.”

“I’m always being punished,” retorted Maud.

It was true. Maud’s return to the Barbary Asylum had not been peaceful. The battle between herself and Miss Kitteridge had become a war. Maud had discovered that Hyacinth’s airs and graces had a powerful effect on Miss Kitteridge’s nerves. In the past weeks, Maud had spent whole nights in the outhouse. She had been assigned the dirtiest tasks the Asylum had to offer; she had been deprived of meals, spanked, slapped, scolded, shaken, pinched, whined at, and sent to Coventry. Often she wondered where it would end. She knew that in provoking Miss Kitteridge she was flirting with doom, but she kept on with it. There was something about hating Miss Kitteridge that made her feel she was getting back at a world that had wronged her.

Besides, she had a reputation to uphold. Maud had become the official black sheep of the Barbary Asylum, a position that gave her some status in life. The disgrace of being sent back was so dire that the other girls regarded her with a mixture of pity and awe. Maud took advantage of both. She dropped mysterious hints about her life with the Hawthorne sisters, managing to suggest that she had lived a life of terrible wickedness and luxury. The girls at the Barbary Asylum were fascinated. They became so interested in spiritualism that Maud was sorely tempted to hold a séance or two. Even without confederates, she reckoned she could hoodwink them; they were so naïve and so hungry for a little excitement.

Nevertheless, she held back. The memory of Mrs. Lambert’s stricken face was fresh in her mind. Maud kept to the truth on one point at least: the séances in which she had taken part were all shams.

There were other truths that she kept to herself. She didn’t talk about Muffet, not wanting to share her, and she held her tongue about her dreams of Caroline Lambert. She made much of the fire that had destroyed Victoria’s mansion — Maud had remodeled the cottage so that it closely resembled the Hotel Elysium — but she never told anyone that her guardians had abandoned her the night the house burned. Instead she embellished the glories of her brief adoption; she regaled hungry girls with descriptions of Muffet’s Floating Island pudding and shabby girls with accounts of the dresses she used to wear.

It was the tales of finery that had ensnared Polly Andrews. Maud had come to the conclusion that Polly wasn’t such a bad little thing; she simply lacked the gumption to misbehave. Even now, the younger girl went on trying to fill the potato basket, while Maud sat on the steps and watched.

“You might as well stop,” Maud advised her. “Just about every potato in that bin is rotten.”

Polly gave up. She sat on the step next to Maud. “Maud,” she said wistfully, “is it true that when you were adopted you wore velvet dresses every day?”

“No,” Maud said, with gentle condescension, “not velvet. Not in the summer. Mind you, if I’d’a stayed, I’d have had ’em. But silk’s what you wear in the summer. Tussore silk and marquisette.”

“And satin?” breathed Polly.

“Satin
is
silk,” Maud informed her. “Silk’s the kind of thread, and satin’s the way they weave it.”

Polly looked a little lost. “You had lace dresses, though, didn’t you?”

“Don’t say
dint,
” Maud counseled her. “
Did-ent.
It’s more refined. I had five or six lace dresses — I forget exactly how many — and not that tatty stuff Miss Kitteridge wears, either. Valenciennes.” Maud caressed the word with Hyacinth’s best French accent. “Valenciennes lace, that’s the kind I had.” She closed her eyes, as if envisioning a storehouse of lacy gowns. Polly sighed with envy.

A door slammed. There was the sound of approaching footsteps. Maud and Polly leaped to their feet and made a great show of sorting through the potato bin.

A tall girl in brown gingham came down the stairs. “Maud Flynn, you’re wanted in Miss Kitteridge’s office.”

“Oh,” said Polly, in terror.

Maud wiped her hands on her skirt. “Don’t worry,” she told Polly. “She can’t kill me. I won’t tell her you didn’t do any work, either.”

Polly looked indignant. “I like that! You’re the one who didn’t work, Maud Flynn!”

“That’s what I said,” Maud said. She made a hideous face at the potato bin. Polly giggled and copied it, sticking out her tongue. There was no doubt about it. Maud was a bad influence on Polly.

“Hurry up,” snapped the older girl.

Maud followed the girl up the stairs, mentally preparing for battle. The door of Miss Kitteridge’s office was shut. Maud hesitated, squared her shoulders, and turned the knob.

Miss Kitteridge was not in the room. A woman in a light wool suit stood with her back to the door. Maud looked past her to a short, square figure in a plum-colored jacket and a hat lavishly trimmed with artificial cherries. Maud gasped with joy and cried out. “Muffet!”

She leaped forward. Muffet shoved a crutch under her arm, pivoted in her chair, and got to her feet. Maud knocked over the crutch and hugged her with all her strength.

When she looked up, she saw Muffet grinning. The hired woman took her arms away from Maud and began to gesticulate, her fingers moving rapidly. Maud turned to look behind her and saw that the second woman was Mrs. Lambert.

Mrs. Lambert had changed. She was no longer in half-mourning, and her hat was pinned on properly. Moreover, she no longer looked at Maud with accusing eyes. There was laughter in her face as she answered Muffet’s flying fingers with gestures of her own.

“What’s that?” Maud asked, watching Muffet’s hands. “What’s she doing?”

“She’s talking,” Mrs. Lambert answered. “She says you’ve lost weight and your hair wants washing. She’s not happy about it.”

Maud turned to Muffet for confirmation. The hired woman plucked at Maud’s brown gingham and made a face. Maud couldn’t read what she said with her fingers, but she gathered that Muffet didn’t think much of the uniform.

“There’s a language for deaf people,” Mrs. Lambert explained. “More and more people are learning to use it. I hired a tutor — he’s teaching both of us. He says Anna’s the quickest student he’s ever had.”

Maud could well believe it. She bestowed a glowing smile on Muffet. Muffet pointed toward the floor.
Pick up my crutch. You knocked it over.

Maud stooped to obey. Muffet sat back down, holding the crutch in the crook of her elbow as if it were a scepter.

“Her leg is healing,” Mrs. Lambert said. “Properly, this time.”

Maud feasted her eyes on Muffet. Someone had persuaded her to lengthen her skirts so that the tops of her boots didn’t show. Her clothes fitted as if they had been made by a good dressmaker. If it weren’t for all the cherries on her hat, she would have looked quite stylish. “You’ve taken good care of her.”

“I love Anna,” Mrs. Lambert said simply. “She takes care of me, too. She’s teaching me to draw.”

For some reason, the simple statement brought a lump to Maud’s throat. Muffet lifted her hands and signed again.

“She says I ought to tell you,” Mrs. Lambert said to Maud, “that you are to come home with us.”

Maud raised a startled face. “Why?” She remembered her wretched stay at the Hotel Elysium and stammered, “Where?”

“Home,” repeated Mrs. Lambert. She added apologetically, “I have several houses. There’s one in Boston and another in Washington. I thought Washington would be best for the present, as Anna is going to attend school there.”

“What will Miss Kitteridge say?” For the first time, it struck Maud as odd that Miss Kitteridge was not present. “Where’s Miss Kitteridge?”

“I told her we wished to speak privately,” Mrs. Lambert said composedly. “I have offered — and she has accepted — a large donation for the Asylum. I don’t wish to sound arrogant, but Miss Kitteridge will say whatever I want her to say.”

Maud cupped her fingers around her thumbs and hid her hands behind her back. She knew she ought to feel elated. “But — that day at the Hotel Elysium —”

“I was very angry with you. Yes.” Mrs. Lambert swept aside the papers on Miss Kitteridge’s desk and sat down on it. “As I told you, I have something of a temper.”

Maud nodded fervently.

“There was so much I didn’t understand that day. When you talked to me, Maud, you spoke of the ‘family business’ and referred to Judith and Victoria as your aunts. That’s one of the reasons I offered them an allowance — I thought they had a child to provide for. I told Judith that some of the money I gave her should be used to send you to school.”

Maud’s mouth opened in a silent O.

Mrs. Lambert answered her unspoken question. “Judith never told me she planned to bring you back here. We spoke very briefly. She was mortified when I offered her money — I admit I didn’t offer it very graciously. The next morning she took you away. I thought you’d gone back to Hawthorne Grove. I had no idea you were an orphan.”

Maud looked back at Muffet. The hired woman was following the conversation intently. From time to time, Mrs. Lambert accompanied her speech with a gesture or spelled out a word. Muffet caught Maud’s eye and nodded meaningfully.

“After you were gone, Anna asked for you, and I had to tell her you weren’t there. I was sure she’d fracture her leg again, trying to get up so that she could hunt for you. She was furious when I kept pushing her back into bed. We had a dreadful quarrel without speaking a word.”

Maud could imagine. “I’ve fought with her like that.”

“Then Rory Hugelick came to see me. That day when he brought you to the hotel, I forgot all about him — I left him in the lobby. But he came back. He wanted to make sure you’d told me the truth.”

“I did,” Maud insisted, aggrieved. “After the fire, everything I told you was true. Even about Caroline.”

At the sound of her daughter’s name, Mrs. Lambert’s face softened. “I know that now. Since that night, I’ve had my own dreams of Caroline. I believe what you told me that morning.”

Maud shivered. So Caroline had left Maud’s dreams to inhabit her mother’s.

Muffet interrupted with one of her odd noises. The short, square fingers moved restlessly. Mrs. Lambert exclaimed, “Oh, dear, Anna says I’m taking too long with this! After I spoke to Rory, I began to worry about you. It seemed to me that the Hawthorne sisters were wholly unfit to raise a child — but there didn’t seem to be any way I could interfere. I left Cape Calypso and went back to Boston. It wasn’t until Victoria Hawthorne came to see me —”

“Aunt Victoria came to see you?”

Mrs. Lambert smiled at Maud’s wonderment. “All the way to Boston. I own I was surprised to see her. I never expected to speak to any of the Hawthorne sisters again. At first, I refused to see her. But she persisted. She wouldn’t go away until I listened. At last, I agreed — and she told me the whole story.” Mrs. Lambert paused and corrected herself. “
Your
whole story, Maud. She made me see how much you longed for a home — and how Hyacinth took advantage of your longing. Then she told me you’d been sent back here.” Mrs. Lambert’s eyes swept the office, condemning the scuffed linoleum and Miss Kitteridge’s taste in art. “I thought it was the cruelest thing I ever heard. That was when I thought of adopting you.”

Adopting you.
The words rang in Maud’s ears. She tried to imagine living with Mrs. Lambert. Her imagination hung fire. All she could think of was the surprisingly neutral fact that Mrs. Lambert was rich. She supposed that Mrs. Lambert would buy her lovely clothes and new books and pretty things. The prospect gave her little pleasure. It reminded her of Hyacinth. She must be wary of anything that reminded her of Hyacinth.

Mrs. Lambert seemed to have fallen back into her former shyness. She removed one glove and drew it through her fingers. She went on, “At first I thought I was foolish to consider such a thing. I told myself it wouldn’t work. But I couldn’t forget you. I wanted you.”

Maud opened her mouth. Her chin was trembling, and she couldn’t think of anything to say. An image flashed before her mind’s eye: Muffet and Mrs. Lambert and herself, strolling down the boardwalk in broad daylight, with the wind blowing and the seagulls wheeling overhead.

“That night on the shore, when we made the crocodile — do you remember that night, Maud?”

Maud nodded.

“I think I wanted you then.” Mrs. Lambert’s voice was tender. “It felt so sweet to be with a little girl again.” She slid off the desk and stepped forward, laying her palm against Maud’s cheek. Once again, Maud was reminded of Hyacinth. She laced her fingers together behind her back, as if she could hold on to her heart by keeping her fingers locked.

“What is it, Maud? Don’t you want to come with me?”

Maud tried to find her tongue. “I won’t be Caroline.” She was surprised by how loud and rude her voice sounded. “I haven’t got curly hair and I’d never pick up a snake.”

Mrs. Lambert smiled. “Maud,” she said gently, “I’ve thought this over. I don’t want to go through the rest of my life without loving anyone. I know you won’t be Caroline, but I believe I will love Maud. I want you to come and live with me.”

Maud’s teeth were chattering. She wondered what would happen if Mrs. Lambert found out she couldn’t love Maud, after all. She didn’t know if she could survive the heartbreak of being sent back again.