Cupids (13 page)

At last I feel it coming. From the back of my neck, a rising squeal, not a human sound at all but a breaking seam in the thousand-ton silence which oppresses me. The pressure in my lungs breaks; my jaws fly open, parting my lips. Every sinew, muscle, and nerve — every hair and every nail of my fingers and toes — launches into the same black tunnel of sound.

Counter-swirls dance upon the main thrust of the roar, circling and reforming, frothing into an unnamable, husky, throat-ripping shriek. I did not plan for a word, but the word that emerges is one I recognize once it has resounded and echoed beyond my own body:
Eliza
!

Then I am awake. The sound, it seems, was enough to propel me from one world to another, to shatter the coffin and dissolve its constituent parts, to blow away the ghostly Eliza and her candle, to turn night into day.

I push myself up from the breakfast table, the orange lights of morning swirling before me. A string of drool hangs from my chin, and my ears sing from the extraordinary noise I have just emitted.

Bartholomew and the maid stand before me, startled.

I quickly dab my chin with my sleeve.

“Well?” I ask, my voice strained and husky.

“Well?” Bartholomew echoes.

“What news?”

Bartholomew and Helen look at each other. I see no smirks, but a thousand meanings dance somewhere beneath their expressions. The easy nuance between them irks me. Everything beneath the surface is subversive, and collectively they know far too much about me.

“I caught her in time,” Bartholomew says. “I didn't tell her it was a joke. I thought you might want to explain that part yourself.”

I think of standing. I feel a fresh roar of anger gathering and my legs twitch in preparation. But a moisture nestling among the hairs of my thigh persuades me it might be unwise, and that the terror of my nightmare might well have unmanned me in ways I would not have exposed.

“A joke?” asks Helen.

“I'm afraid we might have lacked the courage of our convictions,” Bartholomew tells her. “And that we have worked too hard to cover our tracks.”

“I don't know what you mean by that, young man,” I tell him hoarsely. Frustrated in anger, I feel my energies settling rather upon pride. No more delegating. No more hiding. “It was not my plan to involve the Egrets' own household, that's all. Young woman, this is not your concern.”

Something fires in the maid's eyes, not quite anger, but a quality harder and less warm. “Pardon me, sir,” she says, moving a step sideways from Bartholomew, “but it is my concern, and between you, you have made it so.”

“I don't understand,” I tell her. “What is it that you want?”

She pauses, in hesitation it seems, but then her shoulders move forward like those of a hawk spotting its prey. “To have done the thing I meant to do this morning. To have it done, sir, not to say, or plan, or change our minds and plan again, to go through tortures of rethinking, and doubt, and after it all leave the thing itself undone. To do it and have it done!”

Silence hangs in the room. I see dust specks tumble in the late winter light, and suddenly it makes sense. I can see how Bartholomew and I, like incompetent hunters, might well slip once, twice, and slip yet again and let our quarry free. Failure, once established, would be the easier course, one that requires so little in the way of change. With this young woman — whatever her motives might be — we may be forced to succeed.

Bartholomew shifts his rather mournful gaze from Helen to me.

“We believe we have the method.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN
Helen

W
ILL YOU BE THE
one?
These are the words the hemp fibres murmur as I pull the rope tighter around my waist.

It's odd that we are back to three again, the mystic number, it seems, when it comes to murder. I wonder whether some clause exists in the great book of damnation through which the third-part assassin may plead for mercy. If it is me, at least I can share my crime with Bartholomew. If it is him, at least he can share his guilt with me. The fact there is another still, that Mr. Guy may have to perform his own assassination, is a hope upon which I daren't dwell.

Mr. Guy's house is so silent. I hear the softest of creakings beneath my own sandals in this loft, but the moan of the wind beyond the tiny window causes no yelp of beam, no skittering of stones or pebbles from the roof, and I hear no voices from below. Each of my companions in crime must be dressing alone without words. I find myself longing for Bartholomew, longing for time not spent upon the tightrope of danger, but of languid, slow hours spent at nature's pace, walking upon emerald hills in spring, fingers skimming across the furry heads of dandelions. Does our future hold any such promise? I try to imagine the tremulous void of the present giving way to days of sunshine and laughter and it hardly seems possible.

I think of Newfoundland, the shimmer of mermaids under the summer moon, the kiss of spiced air. I am aware that Bartholomew's silver tongue deceived when he spoke of the place. Still the very name promises a new beginning, and this is where life will likely take us after the deed is accomplished. Surely murder cannot follow so far.

I know it is we who carry our crimes, but I know also the human form can expand and change. Imagination can engender plays and music, the green leaves of poetry, societies both make-believe and real. Man and woman can quite literally spill new lives upon the earth. Why should a minus one cancel out a plus five or six? And five or six, in generations to come, will expand in the general pool to five or six hundred. “More common than you think,” Bartholomew said when he spoke of murder. And it may be true. Murder is common enough in the Bible. Did not Abraham mean to sacrifice Isaac? Did not Cain dispose of Abel, his brother? Yet the descendants are not damned, but blessed. From the distance of history, crime is nothing more than the price we pay to fate.

A shuffle sounds upon the stairs and I listen sharply to the flop of sandals outside the door. Three knocks sound upon the wood.

“I'm ready,” I call out, breathless. “Come in.”

The robed form that enters is myself. I realize Bartholomew has chosen our costumes well. He pulls back his monk's hood and stands before me, shoulders slumped and eyes bleary and red. Still, there is a hint of humour in his expression as he regards me.

“We're ready to draw lots,” he says.

I nod and move toward him, surprised at the nerves which dance along my limbs as though in tune to the itch of the sackcloth.

“I want you out of the draw,” he says as I reach him. “It should be either me or Guy.” I'm surprised by the paleness of his face, the darkness under his eyes. The very breath that reaches me, though soft and moist, seems tinged with sudden care.

“For the last time, Bartholomew,” I tell him, “I am in.”

His left eye twitches and the heavy lids blink.

“Why?” The question comes in a breath.

“I want to share the reward of your success,” I tell him, feeling the sting of mendacity on my cheek. I wonder if I will ever tell him about Mr. Egret and my mother, about my likely parentage. “I'm returning with you to Newfoundland.” Now the heat in my face intensifies, but for the opposite reason; I am naming my true desire. “To do so in conscience, I must share the inherent dangers of the task to the full.”

He nods weakly and raises his hand to my elbow. The fingers drop before they make contact with the sackcloth, but it feels like enough. He turns slowly to the door and I with him. We pass into the landing and together descend the narrow staircase.

CHAPTER TWENTY
Bartholomew

T
HE TRUST OF THE
girl touches me so deeply it hurts. What have I given her but the shadow of criminality? What have I promised? Even my lustful advances dissolved into an assassin's blade. How low must be her expectations, how desperate her need to escape!

With the double pat of sandal against stone — a timorous heartbeat under the high ceiling of Guy's main parlour — I feel a change within me, a feeling that the true meaning of the ceremony we are about to undertake has inverted. This is a pact deeper than any marriage vow. Guy, who stands motionless and hooded before the table, is our witness and priest. The spoken intent between Helen and I — to share our dangers and riches, fortune and misfortune — echoes perfectly the very essence of union between woman and man. Only the element of sacrifice stands out as a pagan smear. But, then again, these are trying times, and in such times the nerve must tighten to prepare for an assault on the tender senses. Has not growth, renewal, and hope always been connected with the spilling of blood? Does not the egg perish after the hatching of the chick? I try to envision the new life that this strange union between Helen and I will produce. The most usual image — bawling infant with tight-closed eyes and clamped, pink fists — comes into my seeing and leaves just as quickly. I remember the Crossroads Tavern, how my hands pulled at the folds of her nightdress, gathering the fabric into my palms, and how the seduction was cut short. Or were my hands exploring because they knew I would not have to deliver their suggested intent, that weightier matters would intervene? The whispers of Cupers Cove return, and I listen to all the taunts —
think you're
something, better than us
— along with the suggestion that my presence alone was a temptation beyond enduring and that I inflamed evil desire without ever quenching its thirst. Will I ever be able to deliver the promises I have made to Helen?

As I take my place at the table's head, Guy doesn't oppose me. My head still buzzes with his most recent attempt to shirk the crime of his ambitions, and I check his posture to see if he's wavering again.

“I've been thinking,” he told me less than half of an hour ago as I proffered him one of the monk's robes I found by raiding the theatre's storage room. He did not take the garment and straightaway I knew there was trouble.

“Sir?” As I spoke the word, weariness, as well as impatience, burned upon my lips. We were in Guy's study. Helen had already gone upstairs without a word of complaint. My arm ached under the weight of the sackcloth.

“The course you have mapped out is too treacherous, too uncertain. Egret's death does not guarantee permanent success for the colony.”

I kept my arm extended, but his eyes would not drop from my face to his disguise. His hands remained on his desk as though the level oak steadied his thoughts.

“But, sir,” I told him, “it does guarantee you control of real wealth for one and a half years, and such influence over her fortune that Eliza will surely see you as the very wellspring of pleasure. True affection will surely follow comfort.”

He straightened his back and sighed, still gripping the corners of the desk. The action, suggesting as it did the weight of the world, made my lips tremble with inchoate rage.
You coward!
I wanted to yell at him. Instead I tipped my head to one side politely as though to elicit a response.

“I don't know that for sure,” he murmured.

“Sir,” I said with a calmness belied only by the splash of a tear on my lower lash, the moisture of pure fatigue. “The young do not look beyond the season they are in.” I took a step toward him so that the monk's costume rumpled against his arm. “And in any case, everything is arranged. We have the costumes. We have the means to inflict his death. I have even hired actors and musicians to join us also in disguise. Our real purpose, known only to we three, will be buried under wave upon wave of deception.”

He sighed again, eyes in movement. I knew him well enough by now, I'd been here often enough. He was almost persuaded but required one last argument.

“Sir,” I whispered. “Success is a ladder. The rungs are climbed not in foreknowledge of all consequences, but one at a time and in ever-increasing hope. If your mind stays upon the present, the future will look after itself.”

He looked down at the costume, at the thick rope dangling upon his rug. And slowly, reluctantly, with a sigh, he moved to take it at last. And Guy's plan, Guy's ambition, Guy's infatuation with the Egret daughter, became once more
my
idea.

HOW SWEET HELEN SEEMS to me now — a woman who takes my own darkness upon herself and carries it with such conviction — as she stands eyes intent on the slates before me.

“I will chalk the letter ‘M' upon one of these three slates,” I say, looking first at Helen and then at Guy. Launching into the explanation, I feel a tingle in my shoulders, a late realization perhaps that I could have backed out when Guy expressed his latest doubt, and with puzzlement at myself that I did not even consider this. Like so many times before, I allowed another's expectations of me to take over. I am the tempter, and Guy must feel as though he has been talked into it.

“All three slates,” I continue, “will be turned over so the letter will not be seen. I will change their positions when your backs are turned. Then each of you will pick a slate, and I will take the last. He or she who picks the letter ‘M' is the one who must perform the deed.”

Guy pulls back his hood, revealing a face knotted with suspicion.

“It is the safest, fairest method I know, Mr. Guy.”

Suspicion fades to a lip-twitching fear, and he gives a slight nod. What a fool the man is!

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Matilda

A
LL DAY AND ALL
evening I've been listening for them, hardly knowing what sound might herald their coming. For the last hour rainless thunder has growled over Bristol like a warning from some colossal dog. Only during the last few minutes has nature's fury been joined by another, even less welcome, noise — the crackle of hot fluid as my brother-in-law sucks the gruel from his spoon. The steady, rhythmic tremble of the bauble which hangs from Mr. Egret's silk nightcap ticks away relentlessly at the last minutes of his waking. I look hard upon my knitting, at the busy hands that have spun the plot, and wonder if my conspirators have left it too late.