Dragonwyck (15 page)

Miranda, watching from the window, saw Johanna emerge first from the house, a huge figure like a hogshead in purple velvet, her plumed hat awry, her ears, fingers, and chest all blazing with the Van Ryn diamonds. With the help of the liveried groom she clambered into the coach, which tilted violently and swayed on its springs. Mrs. Beeckman and Mrs. Philipse followed with their husbands. But Nicholas mounted the box and sat beside the coachman.

Why doesn't he go inside with the others? thought Miranda, pressing against the glass to get a last glimpse. From deep inside her the answer came. He never gets any nearer to Johanna than he can possibly help. Startled, she considered this. It was a new idea, and yet it seemed as though she had known it for a long time. Still, even if it's true what difference does it make? she thought, and turned listlessly from the window. The great silent house pressed down about her. She felt vanquished—dwarfed. She might go to her room and write to Abigail, she might try to pick out music on the piano, to which lately she had not had access since the guests were always in the way; but neither of these occupations attracted her. Suddenly and desperately she wanted to talk to someone, anyone. And she thought of Zélie. She had not seen the old woman again, but Miranda knew through Katrine that she lived down somewhere in the kitchen quarters. Perhaps Nicholas wouldn't like it but it would at least be something to do and Zélie though she had been silly and mysterious had also been interesting!

On impulse Miranda went downstairs,'moving with a frightened quietness because the deserted house seemed full of whispering shadows. The door to die basement stairs led off from the pantry behind the dining-room and she had never before used it. The family, except of course Katrine, never penetrated into the sub-world. The stairs ended in the servants' hall and a dozen faces gaped at her in astonishment. Tompkins, in shirt sleeves and with a foaming mug in his hand, half-rose and then sat down again. 'What can I do for you, miss?' he said resentfully.

'I—I wanted to see Zélie, please.'

The butler shrugged. 'In the corner of the far kitchen as usual.' He pointed, having no intention except under Nicholas' eye of putting himself out for this little nonentity.

Miranda passed through two kitchens lined with cook stoves, ovens, and shelves full of gleaming copper pans. In a farther room there was a fireplace. Over the hickory logs a spitted pig rotated slowly while a small boy turned the crank. In a corner by this fireplace sat old Zélie, rocking. Across the room by a spinning wheel sat a placid Dutch woman, also rocking. This was Annetje, the head cook, and on her capacious lap she held Katrine while she sang to the child an old Dutch lullaby.

Trip a trop a tronjes
De vaarken in de boonjes—

The purring flames, the homely smell of roasting meat, the motherly voice singing and the two women rocking, sent a pang to Miranda's heart. No wonder the child preferred it down here. She smiled at Katrine, who smiled back sleepily but did not move.

Zélie raised her wrinkled face and her chair stilled. 'You want me,
petite.'
It was a statement not a question. She motioned to a hassock beside her, and the girl obediently sat down.

Across the room the foolish little song began again more softly.

Trip a trop a tronjes—

"What you want with me?' said Zélie. You no listen.' She shook her head sadly. 'Azilde will laugh. I tol' you before.'

'Oh, don't start that again, please!' cried Miranda, exasperated. 'I didn't come down to hear that claptrap. I don't know why I came. I guess I was sort of lonely.'

'Lonely!' Zélie spat the word out. You not knowing what lonely is—yet.—Why you not go home where you belong?'

Miranda's eyes dropped, she clasped her hands tight on her lap. Home, yes. Back to Abigail and safety. Back to the cosiness of fire like this. But never to see Nicholas again—to abandon all hope that someday, somehow—Further than this she never went. There was neither reason nor possibility in that formless hope.

Zélie watched the girl's downcast face and she gave a sharp, grim laugh. 'The Devil reads your soul. When you want a thing so much, it make that thing happen
sure.
Always if we want thing bad enough it happen.'

Miranda shook her head. 'That's nonsense, Zélie.'

The old woman stiffened, she jerked forward, her glittering eyes angry and threatening; but as quickly as it came her anger passed. She sighed and slumped back. She fell to rocking again.

The kitchen was quiet except for the hissing noises made by the hot grease on the fire. Katrine slipped off the cook's lap; clutching her doll she stole over to Zélie and laid her hand coaxingly on the bony old knee. 'Tell a story about the old time, Zélie,' she begged. 'Tell about Azilde. M'randa'd like to hear too. Wouldn't you, M'randa?'

The girl started. 'Why, yes, I suppose so,' she said unenthusiastically. She was no longer curious about Azilde, who seemed to be connected with nothing but superstitious fear and disaster. But the prospect of leaving the warm kitchen and even this tepid companionship for the silence of the great house upstairs was less inviting.

'The patroon don't like that I tell about Azilde,' said Zélie. 'It make him afraid.'

'Oh, how ridiculous!' said Miranda, smiling. 'He's not afraid of anything,'

'Ah—' Zélie sighed with a weary patience. 'How the young are blind! Everyone is afraid of something,
p'tite.
Yes, I think I tell you the story. Listen well.' She was silent for several minutes and then she began to speak in a flat, chanting voice as though she repeated words learned by heart long ago. 'Marie Azilde de la Courbet was mos' beautiful girl in New Orleans, always she singing and laughing and lighting flames in the heart with her so big so soft black eyes.'

While Zélie talked, Miranda at first listened absently, finding the high inflected speech hard to follow; but gradually as the old voice went on it evoked a hypnotic power. Azilde grew real and Miranda forgot that she was hearing of a girl who lived in an unknown city a hundred years ago, or that Zélie was recounting a tragedy which she knew only at second hand through her mother's stories—the black Titine who had been Azilde's body servant.

The past was vivified by intimate details until it seemed that she stood on the scrubbed kitchen flags beside them—Azilde with her breathless gaiety, and her dark curls powdered white and piled high. In these curls she always wore a golden flower—jasmine or a rose. Her elaborate panniered gowns were usually yellow too, for Azilde bred the color of sunshine and laughter. 'All day long she sing like a mockingbird,' said Zélie. And all night long she dance at the Governor's Palace with fine French gentlemen in white perukes.'

Azilde had loved a handsome Creole youth, aide to the Marquis de Vaudreuil, and there had been many a stolen meeting beside the fountain in the de la Courbets' palm-fringed courtyard behind their house on Royal Street.

Until Pieter Van Ryn came to New Orleans on an October day in 1752. He had come on his own brig to buy a cargo of Louisiana indigo which he could sell at immense profit in New York. Theoretically the French colonials were forbidden to sell produce to any but the mother country; still there were ways of getting around that. Pieter's flat blue eyes, his square stolidity, above all his cold persistency unrelieved by a single smile or conventional compliment, disconcerted the gay colonials. He got his indigo, and he got Azilde too.

'You mean he fell in love with her?' asked Miranda eagerly.

Zélie hunched her shoulders. "There was no love in the patroon. He wanted her. He prove to her parents he was rich man, great lord, he took her with only a tiny dot. They think they make fine bargain.'

Even Titine had never known what actually happened on the long, stormy voyage to the North. But she had seen her mistress transformed overnight into a faded little wraith whose dark eyes now held but two expressions: a glassy blankness which changed when her husband was near to bewildered terror. There were no more songs or laughter. Day after day through the harsh snowbound winter Azilde crouched beside a tiny fireplace, her hair no longer powdered, its curls strained back under the Dutch matron's white cap, her delicate body shivering under the shapeless black dress.

The next fall Adriaen was born. The patroon had been momentarily pleased with his wife for having produced the requisite heir. In all other matters she had sorely disappointed him. The beauty and gaiety which had first attracted him had not survived her outward metamorphosis into Lady of the Manor and Dutch housewife. But he overlooked her shortcomings upon the birth of Adriaen, presented her with a diamond necklace and the little harpsichord which stood in the Red Parlor. Azilde never wore the necklace. After the baby's birth even the patroon could not fail to see that it was not Azilde's body alone that shrank from him. Her spirit had retired into a misty far-off land from which she never tried to return.

'All day she sit and stare out the window,' said Zeiie. 'She no answer when people speak. Only sometimes she go down to Red Room and play on the harpsichord when the patroon is out. Always she pky a little Creole song she learn as a child. The patroon hate that, it make him savage. Then one day—'

Zélie paused. She glanced down at the child by her knee, but Katrine had lost interest. She was bent over her china doll, frowning a little with concentration as her pudgy fingers unbuttoned one of Cristabel's starched petticoats.

Miranda leaned forward. 'Do go on, Zélie—' she urged.

The old woman nodded slowly. 'One day a disaster happen. The patroon's ship went on the reefs. All the hands were lost and all the cargo. Titine was sitting with Azilde trying to make her look at her baby, when the patroon came roaring in like a bull. He grab Azilde by the shoulders and shake her. "You won't understand—you witless thing—" he shout at her. "But I am ruined."

'At first Azilde just stare at him, and then very softly she start to laugh. Titine say the sound make her hair creep. The patroon's hands drop. He back away. "Why are you laughing?" he whisper.

And she answer him for the first time in months. "Because—" she say still laughing, "misfortune has come to this house of hatred. Always I will laugh at that."'

Zélie's chanting voice stopped abruptly. In the fireplace one of the hickory logs fell apart and a shower of sparks flew into the kitchen. Miranda drew a deep breath. 'What a horrible thing for her to say—she was crazy then, poor thing?'

'Crazy with fear and misery,
p'tite.
A tropic flower cannot live without sun. A soul cannot live without love.'

'But she had her baby,' protested Miranda.

Yes, but it was too late. The madness had come. One week after the patroon tell her about the ship, she creep downstairs in the night. She play her little Creole tune and she laugh to herself. Titine heard. She come running to Red Room, but not in time. Azilde had taken knife from dining-room drawer.' Zélie raised her hand and made an eloquent gesture toward her throat.

Miranda swallowed, staring at the grim old face.

'And still she laugh—' said Zélie calmly in her ordinary voice, 'when badness come to Dragonwyck. Only those of her blood can hear, but sometimes others feel warning though they cannot hear her. I have felt—and you too, I think.'

The girl was silent. For a moment she almost believed, as she thought of the two occasions on which she had battled the nameless mounting fear, but since then she had sat a score of times in the Red Room with no eerie sensations at all; and both her common sense and her reverence for Nicholas, who had expressed the greatest scorn for Zeiie's superstition, decided her.

'That's a shocking story,' she said, feeling reasonable and mature. 'But it all happened a long time ago. One should forget old tragedies. I quite agree with Mr. Van Ryn that the story shouldn't be repeated.'

Zélie, apparently not listening, pulled a clay pipe and a nubbin of tobacco from her pocket. She thrust a broom straw into the fire and, lighting the pipe, shut her wrinkled eyelids while she inhaled a mouthful of smoke.

'You know there couldn't really be "badness" at Dragonwyck,' went on Miranda, a trifle disconcerted. 'It's a beautiful place and I love it—why I only wish—' She stopped.

Zélie opened her eyes, the shiny black pupils fixed themselves on the girl. 'Aha!' she said with malice. You only wish—' She crossed her skinny shanks and inhaled again. 'Go back upstairs. I'm tired, I want to rest.' She turned her face away.

Discomforted and annoyed, Miranda got up. She should never have encouraged the daft old thing in the first place. She walked over to Katrine, who was now playing with a litter of kittens in the corner behind the spinning wheel. 'Let's go upstairs, dear,' she said, 'and I'll read to you.'

The child shook her head mutinously. 'I want to stay here. Annetje's making me a gingerbread man.'

There was nothing for Miranda to do but retrace her way through the kitchens and the hall full of servants, alone.

In her absence all the tapers had been lighted. The house was no longer dark and threatening. It was filled with the scent of flowers mingled with the aromatic smoke of the cedar-wood fires. She walked through the downstairs rooms, her head high in a mood of defiance.

It seemed to her that they all welcomed her, the gilded and carved furnishings, the moss-thick carpets, the marble statues, the porcelains from China and Dresden, the tapestries and brocade draperies. All the intoxicating perfume of luxury.

I
do
belong here, she thought angrily. I'm Nicholas' cousin. How dare that old hag try to frighten me away!

She came last to the Red Room. It was as quiet and fragrant as the others, except that as usual its smallness and the warm crimson of its curtains made it cosier. She walked to the harpsichord and threw back its cover. She hesitated, then quickly touched one of the yellowed keys. A thin tinkling note responded. Her heart beat faster and she waited. Nothing happened. No queer sensations, no warning chill. Nothing. And I never had any either, she thought. So much for Zélie.