Hannah: Daughters of the Sea #1 (8 page)

“I
S THIS THE NEW
fashion, eh? Something from Paris, Edwina?” the elderly, rumpled gentleman asked.

Edwina Hawley smiled. “I have never liked this custom of the men going off to smoke cigars and the women withdrawing to a different location. This is 1899, the last year of the nineteenth century. Believe me, in the next century this habit will be gone. Out the window!” She laughed gaily. “Now into the music room. We shall serve coffee there, and after-dinner cordials with a bit of music.”

When all the guests had been served, Edwina Hawley stood up. “And now I have begged Auntie Alice to play us a tune on the harp.” She looked toward the old lady with the crepey skin.

Every morning since Hannah had been at number 18, she had come into the music room to stand in front of the harp and wonder what sounds could be drawn from it. Even in its silence, she could almost catch the elusive, fluid notes. Now finally she was about to hear it. A quietness settled upon her as the elderly woman took her place on the stool and tipped the lovely instrument back so it rested on her shoulder. The first chords shimmered in the candlelit glow of the room.

Water! This is the music of water. Not sky, not heaven, not angels, but water
. The sounds of the harp spilled like liquid into the room. But it was not simply water, there was color as well. Hannah watched the woman’s long fingers coaxing music from the strings. She knew the woman was good, but could she not draw out an even more delicate sound? If she would only let the string vibrate a second longer. Unconsciously Hannah started moving her own fingers over the edges of her apron. The liquid shadows of this music filled her.

There were only two people whose eyes were not on the harpist. Stannish Whitman Wheeler saw again
what he had suspected when he first glimpsed Hannah in this room. He could not tear his eyes away from her, as if she had a resonance more powerful than any harp. He remembered the way the light had caught her hair that first morning he had come across her in this very room.
Could she be?
he asked himself for perhaps the twentieth time. It was impossible. But…

“What’s wrong with Lila?” Daze whispered to Florrie. “Look at her staring at Mr. Wheeler.” Florrie turned her head and inhaled sharply. Lila Hawley’s face had been transformed into a peculiar mask as she watched Stannish Whitman Wheeler’s rapturous gaze fall upon Hannah.

“W
HAT WOULD
M
R
. W
HEELER
call the truth?” Lila Hawley buried her nose in Jade’s fur as she stood before the oval mirror in her bedroom and admired herself. She was wearing just her underclothes and she slipped off the straps of her camisole to bare her shoulders.

“What is the truth about these shoulders, Mr. Wheeler?” she asked the mirror, angling first one way and then the other. There was only the flickering light of a candle. She made coy little gestures, winking at her reflection, casting sly looks over her shoulder, puckering up her lips into a little rosebud for an imaginary kiss. “Shoulders like these don’t need to be flattered by your brush, do they? They’re perfect.
Why, the no-count count, as Mama called that man who came to call in Paris, compared my complexion to a Greek goddess’s. But now come to think of it, where has he ever met one? They’re just made up. And why would I want anything to do with that old count? He had hair growing out of his ears! Why would I, Jade?”

She drew the cat close to her face. The cat and the girl peered into the mirror. Lila could see her reflection in the polished gemstone eyes of her cat, and Jade could see her reflection in her mistress’s eyes.

“No, of course we don’t want him. We want you know who!” She giggled softly and the cat purred. “He talks about truth, but what is truth? Is truth that stupid new scullery girl? I don’t know.” Lila sighed. “She does make me nervous. Now, with Dotty, you could trust her. Very docile. Remember the time when Mrs. Partridge lost her diamond clip and we found it? Well, Dotty, I guess, really found it but we kept it and I made her swear never to tell. And she didn’t. Dotty was a good secret keeper. And now
we have the clip. Oh, I’m going to get it from its hidey-hole. Let’s play dress up, Jade!”

Lila put the cat down and walked over to the chimney where the porcelain stove’s pipe connected. Lila crouched and slipped in her fingers to find a loose brick. Jade walked about the room as if patrolling it, defending the mistress’s territories.

“Ah! Still here!” Lila drew out a small tissue-paper bundle. Jade walked over and began nosing the paper. “Patience, dear, patience!” After a few seconds Lila lifted from the nest of tissue a dazzling diamond clip that spiraled like a swirl of stars.

“Here, dear, you can wear it first.” She took a thick tuft of the fur that grew between Jade’s ears and snapped on the clip. “Oh, my! Don’t you look absolutely beautiful!”

She scooped up the cat and walked over to the mirror and held her up. The candlelight was caught by the innumerable facets of the diamonds that cast reflections all about the room until the walls and ceiling danced with swirling galaxies of light. Lila began to turn slowly.

“My own heaven. I have made my own heaven right here. I am the goddess of it all”—she paused—“and my shoulders are flawless!” She stopped suddenly, cocked her head, and looked at the mirror. “You know what? I bet that stupid girl’s shoulders have freckles. She’s a redhead. Redheads always have freckles. Someday I’ll find out. What would Mr. Wheeler think of that—a girl with ugly freckles all over her?” She began to giggle and her giggles erupted into shrill, high-pitched laughter. It ricocheted in her brain so loudly she thought her head might split and she put down the cat to clamp her hands over her mouth so no one would hear. She was laughing so hard tears squeezed out from her slitted eyes. Jade purred deeply and rubbed up against her leg.

H
ANNAH HAD TRIED
her best not to think about Mr. Wheeler. And then there he was at dinner that evening, and made that stunning remark, “I don’t flatter. I only tell the truth.” He had been answering Lila but looking directly at Hannah.

It was as if Wheeler knew a truth about her she did not. The feeling grew in her during the after-dinner entertainment in the music room. She did not have to look at him to feel the peculiar sensation of his attention focused on her. It was as if that current she had experienced the first time she had met him tugged on her like those liquid shadows of the music.

That night Hannah dreamed of the harp’s music. In her sleep, she touched the strings she had longed
for. Her fingertips played a dream harp as real as the one three floors below. She knew instinctively how to persuade the strings to yield the notes, how to let the vibrations travel so that music, spinning like gold, wove through the air. Her body ached with this music. It wrapped around her like shimmering liquid shadows in her sleep. She felt the timeless rhythms of water, of tides, of the currents that stirred in the depths of the ocean. And when she was in the deepest part of sleep, beyond the reaches of the conscious world, where one’s spirit can rise in the night air, she felt a rumble stream through her being. She woke up.

Outside a spring storm raged. The small window of her room rattled and she knew immediately that it must be a nor’easter. Usually these storms came in the winter with heavy wet snow but this was a spring one. Thunder shook the roof, but amidst the cracks of lightning and the rumbling of thunder, there was another sound. A vibration separate yet seemingly responding to the cacophony of the storm, a resonance that rose through the house like a single silver thread. No, not a thread—a string!

Hannah had a clear mental image, as if the reverberating object were right before her in the darkness of her room. It was the harp. She threw back the covers, swung her bare feet to the floor, and left her room.

For the second time she had violated one of the most important rules of the house, but she barely gave it a thought as she entered the music room. There was a loud crack and a filigree of lightning was framed in the panes of glass behind the harp. Hannah could see the strings quivering. The very air around the harp seemed to flutter as if stoked by hundreds of invisible midnight butterflies. As if in a trance, Hannah walked toward the harp.
I can make music
, she thought.
I can!

She sat down on the stool. Very gently she eased the harp back so it rested on top of her right shoulder. As Hannah closed her eyes, the memory of the woman’s fingers on the strings came to her. She curled her hand so the fingers rested lightly against her palm and her thumb lay on top of them. The strings of the harp grazed her knuckles. Then very
slowly she opened her hand and placed her fingers, except for the smallest, on four strings and lightly plucked them. The harp’s subtle vibrations became something else—a pattern, a wave of motion with depth and texture. Swirls of sound floated through the air.

She had played for less than a full minute when suddenly she was aware of a presence. There was a tiny sharp click that pricked the sounds swirling through the room and shattered the brief harmonies. She felt a tingle go up her spine. A crack of lightning illuminated the room, and the grotesque shadow of a cat sprang across the hot flash of white, followed by a strident ringing as Jade leapt onto the piano, unleashing a wild crash of notes. Hannah froze. The cat bared her fangs and screeched.

Jumping from the stool, Hannah raced from the room. She was not sure if the cat was following or not. She took the stairs two at a time. The skies opened up and a raucous roll of thunder obliterated the sound of her footsteps. She finally reached her room and slammed the door.

Sinking against the door, Hannah could hear nothing but the pounding of her own heart wild with fear. She shut her eyes tightly. How could she have been so reckless? But how wonderful it was—just those few seconds when the notes had been released into the air. It was as if she had crossed over into another world—a liquid, floating world where she fit. She latched the door and was determined to banish the horrid cat from her thoughts. She would go to bed and remember those few notes and her fingers—yes, the wonderful feeling of her fingertips on the strings. Hannah was amazed by that brief moment, and yet it had felt very natural, as if this music, those few notes were a gift that had always been within her but of which she had never been aware.

By the time the storm pushed out to sea, Hannah was sound asleep, and even when she woke the next morning she still felt wrapped in the harp’s music. The rest of the Hawley household was in a less than harmonious state.

“Miss Lila be having one of her fits,” Daze reported as she came in from the breakfast room with a tray.
“She says that she won’t come downstairs when Mr. Wheeler comes to paint the portrait. Ran back upstairs right after breakfast.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. What is it this time?” Mrs. Bletchley huffed over a pot of oatmeal.

“The cat?” Susie asked.

“Yes, the cat.” Miss Horton entered the kitchen. “Seems that Mr. Wheeler does not like the idea of painting Jade any better than Mr. and Mrs. Hawley do. He says it will throw off what he calls ‘the chromatic balance of the painting.’” She sighed. “Whatever that means.”

“I think, Miss Horton,” said Mr. Marston as he came into the kitchen. “The word ‘chromatic’ is most often used in terms of music, the notes that belong to a scale of the key in which it is written.” Mr. Marston enjoyed indulging in lengthy, professorial disquisitions on subjects. It gave him particular pleasure to do this in front of Miss Horton, who of all the servants in the household was closest to him in terms of rank or status. “But Stannish Whitman Wheeler is remarkable for the subtle, nuanced layering of color
in his painting. The girls, have they not all been dressed in rather dark shades of mauve, gray, and violet? The vases themselves loom tall and alabaster white with their fine filigree of blue figure painting. Now throw a big, fat, snowy white cat into that palette…well, it is going to spoil all that. Unbalance things.”

Miss Horton gave him a look of undisguised contempt. “That’s a lovely theory, Mr. Marston. But you and I know we’ve got trouble brewing.”

Mr. Marston at once looked chastised. His face turned grim. “You’re right, Miss Horton. Forgive my digression.”

Hannah spoke up now. She felt a bit sorry for Mr. Marston, and his theory sounded very learned to her. “I remember, sir, last night in the dining room Miss Lila asking Mr. Wheeler about the dress she was wearing and him saying that she should talk with her sisters about what they were wearing because it was appropriate to have a balance of color in the painting.”

A slight frown creased Mr. Marston’s brow. “Yes, very astute of you to understand this essential
balance, but, Hannah, it is not appropriate that you listen in quite so carefully to the dinner table conversation and repeat it with commentary.”

Hannah’s face swam with confusion. “I don’t understand, sir. I was only doing the same thing you were when you talked about the big, fat cat spoiling the chroma…” Her voice dwindled away.

“Not quite the same, Hannah, but you will learn. Now, don’t worry too much. It’s a rather chilly morning. So make sure the fires in the drawing room are lit well before Mr. Wheeler arrives.”

“Yes, sir,” Hannah muttered.
Some thanks I get for trying to defend him against Miss Horton
. The stupid rules of Mr. Marston! If he had only known what she had been up to last night in the music salon before that loathsome cat had appeared. Suddenly the entire household seemed so silly to her. It dawned on her in this moment that what she had loved so much when she heard the harp’s music and then began to play in the midst of the storm was this sense or suggestion of a place, a world without such rules. A place where boundaries simply did not exist, but living things
moved freely, in a limitless space, and yet were still connected to everything in much the same way the harp’s music enveloped all the people in the music room last night. But there was something else, she thought. She shut her eyes, trying to remember. In the few brief moments she had played—those notes, the fragments of the harmony, the slips of melody were like remnants, shreds from a song she could almost recall.

A report came down from upstairs that a deal had been brokered between Lila and Mrs. Hawley. If Lila would cooperate with the requirements for the portrait, she could have an off-the-shoulder gown for her debut like the one she craved from the House of Worth. “All is well for now.” Daze sighed as she sank down onto a kitchen stool, exhausted. “I tell you, that girl is the devil herself.”

When Hannah had cleaned and prepared the drawing room, she had left the door that led off the back of the room open just a slot. She planned to take a peek when she could during the painting of the girls’ portraits. Daze and Florrie and Roseanne were charged
with preparing the girls in their portrait dresses. So Hannah had no chance of glimpsing them any other way.

Mr. Wheeler arrived at ten o’clock sharp. A servant of his had already delivered his easel and materials. It was not until almost eleven that Hannah was able to steal upstairs and peep through the crack in the door.

They were apparently having a break, and Ettie was regaling Mr. Wheeler with a story about how she had witnessed the birth of a baby elephant at the Paris zoo. There was much laughter and many giggles.

“Well, I didn’t actually see
the
moment. But I was so happy Miss Ardmore was sick that day and Annabelle, our French parlor maid, took me.”

“Annabelle used to dance in the Folies Bergère,” Clarice added. “But don’t tell Mummy or she could get fired and she’s our favorite Paris maid.”

“Anyway, Annabelle took me and it had just been born. They get born standing up.”

“
No!
” Stannish Wheeler exclaimed.

“Well, not quite standing up,” Clarice corrected. “I looked it up in the
Le Livre d’Histoire Naturelle des Animaux Exotiques
, and it said that within an hour of being born a baby elephant usually stands.”

“But it still had some bloody stuff on it, and its belly button cord hanging down.” Ettie spoke in a hushed awe.

Lila looked entirely bored. “Can we get back to the painting?” Lila yawned. “I have heard this elephant story a thousand times.”

“No, you haven’t,” Ettie said staunchly. “Because nobody ever lets me tell it.”

“Why is that, Ettie?” Mr. Wheeler asked as he crouched down and pulled at the hem of her skirt. Surreptitiously he slowly turned his head toward Hannah’s door, and winked. Hannah felt the blood rush to her face and began to draw back, but he shook his head. The current had begun to flow again. She felt it.
He must have sensed me even before he saw me
.

“They say it’s inappropriate to talk about such matters,” Ettie replied to Mr. Wheeler’s question. “But
it’s about getting born. I mean, if it’s inappropriate to get born, where would we all be?” Hannah clapped a hand over her mouth to prevent herself from laughing out loud. She noticed that the corners of Mr. Wheeler’s eyes crinkled up and there was a flash of white teeth. He looked at her again. There was something utterly delicious in sharing a joke in this clandestine way.

The painter had arranged the girls in an interesting tableau. Clarice and Ettie were in the foreground. Ettie was the closest but sitting on the floor. Her legs were straight out and she was holding one of her stuffed animals. Clarice was a few steps behind her, and then in the background Lila leaned languidly against an immense vase. Hannah almost experienced a feeling of envy as she saw that the top of Lila’s head grazed that cresting wave from which the fish tail broke.

She knew it was silly. It was not as if Lila were in the sea. But in her casual posture she seemed to be claiming it in some way. She was the only one not facing the painter. All three girls were wearing rather young-looking frocks in shades of rose and lavender
with fresh white pinafores. It was almost as if they were to be frozen in time at an age that represented the delicate cusp between little girl and young maiden. Hannah realized that she, too, was on this same edge, but how different her life was. She was expected to work and to learn how to negotiate the harsh realities of life.

The painting proceeded with the girls posing for the next few days. But there was a noticeable tension that had settled on number 18 Louisburg Square. It was as if the entire household was holding its breath…waiting…waiting, but Hannah was not sure exactly what for. Mr. and Mrs. Hawley would often drop their voices suddenly when servants entered the room. On the fifth morning after the painting had begun, Lila boldly sailed into the drawing room with Jade cradled in her arms.

Hannah crept back into the hallway, out of sight, but able to hear. Ettie’s voice scratched the air with a slight whine that Hannah had never heard from her before.

“Lila, why’d you bring Jade?”

Hannah hated how Lila was standing there nuzzling the cat, so satisfied, so smug. Lila buried her nose in its thick white fur while the top of her head almost brushed the tail of the sea creature painted on the vase, the precise spot where Hannah had held up the tiny crystal to the teardrop-shaped scales. She actually had to push down an urge to rush out from behind the door and shove Lila away from the vase.

“You don’t like cats, Mr. Wheeler?” asked Lila.

“Now, I never said that, Lila.”

“You don’t have to say it. I know it. It’s against your nature. But natures can change.”

He laughed nervously. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m sure you don’t,” Lila replied in a husky whisper.

Her words sent a chill through Hannah. It almost seemed like a threat.

“Mr. Wheeler doesn’t have to paint Jade. I just want to hold my dear kitty.” Lila paused. “It calms me,” she said pointedly.