Legacy (21 page)

“Agnes Ainsworth.”

“Jonathan Carr.”

Jonathan was a popular guy, and the best carpenter in town. Maybe his coming into the Ainsworth family would help mend the rift between my relatives and the people who still blamed them for what my mother did to Eric Shaw.

But would they ever forgive me?

It was even harder for me to pretend that I was one of the Old Town gang since I’d discovered a new talent I was developing: It seemed that the longer I lived in Whitfield, the more sensitive I was becoming to people’s emotional states. Every object I touched had some sort of emotional signature that I could read. Fortunately, most of the time I had to concentrate on the object in order to feel anything.

But
people
—that was something new, another branch of my particular gift that was just beginning to show up. I’d always been able to read people’s emotions pretty well, but lately I’d been able to see more deeply into what they were really feeling, even if they couldn’t admit it to themselves.

I’d talked with Miss P about it after Becca Fowler tripped me in the hall at school. She’d been all apologetic, helping me retrieve my books and insisting on walking me to the nurse’s office, but I knew she’d done it on purpose.

That didn’t take any special gift—Becca had been shooting poisonous looks at me ever since the day Peter saved me from falling down the stairs. But what bothered me was what I felt when she took my arm to help me up. It was
anger,
anger of
such scope that it was hard for me to feel it, even secondhand.

It went beyond simple jealousy, although that was the first level of the anger in her. Past that was something colder and broader and far more confusing. It was about my mother and my relations, and the Ainsworth women in general. At the moment when I came in contact with her bare skin, her emotions were so strong that I could almost hear the exact words of her thoughts:
You’re bringing the Darkness again, the way your people always do.

“That sounds as if it were part of a collective memory, I’m afraid,” Miss P said. “Becca couldn’t really help it, if that makes you feel any better.”

“She couldn’t
help
it?” I asked. “She was practically boiling over.” That made me think. “Unless I misread her. Maybe I was just being paranoid because . . .” I was going to say
because of Peter
, but I didn’t want to get into that whole complicated relationship, at least not with the assistant headmistress, djinn or not. “. . . because she’s not usually friendly to me,” I fudged.

“It’s always hard to tell the difference between what we really perceive and what we want to see,” she said. “It’s doubly hard when one is dealing with a psychic gift. How do you know whether it’s the gift informing you, or your own desires and fears?”

“Right,” I agreed eagerly. “How do you know?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Great. A really, really helpful answer, Miss P. So glad I confided in you.
“But . . . you said that Becca was involved in some kind of collective memory,” I said.

“Yes.” She smiled sweetly. I wondered how many people Miss P had driven insane.

“What was that memory?” I prodded.

“That whenever the Darkness comes, the Ainsworth women are somehow involved.”

“What? Is that true?”

She held her hands palm-out in front of her. “That is the common talk, Katy,” she said. “It would be remiss of me to tell you otherwise. However, it has nothing to do with the truth, which is that the Ainsworths are such an old and direct line that they have, in fact, been involved with
everything
that has occurred in Whitfield ever since—”

“Excuse me, Miss P, but how are they—we—involved with the Darkness?”

“Well, let’s see,” she said, as if she were reciting the cafeteria lunch menu. “First there was Serenity, of course, who experienced two instances of the Darkness during the span of her long life. The first was when one of her friends . . .”

“Dorothea Lyttel,” I put in, hoping to get her moving a little faster.

“Ah, you know about that.”

“Serenity didn’t want it to happen,” I said trying to defend my ancestor.

“Quite. Many of the families, including the Fowlers, felt that Serenity used her considerable influence in the community to delay the inevitable.”

“Mrs. Lyttel’s murder,” I clarified.

Miss P looked at me levelly. “Now, Mrs. Lyttel lit the fire herself, Katy,” she said.

She was right. “But how do you know?” I asked. “How do you know all of this?”

She blushed. “Do you know what a Book of Secrets is?” she asked.

“Oh, right,” I said. “Mrs. Ainsworth told me about them. And I guess you’d know about everyone, being a . . .” I cleared my throat. Miss P blushed furiously. “. . . school official,” I finished lamely.

“For the record, the Beans were on Serenity’s side on that matter,” she said softly. “That is how I know about the dispute. From my own family’s
Book of Secrets
.”

“Oh,” I said.
And now Katy will attempt to extract her foot from her gigantic mouth.
“Of course.”

“The second occasion was, naturally, when she and Ola’ea Olokun created the Meadow to protect the community from the insanity of the Darkness-infested cowen raiders.”

“But how could anyone say that was Serenity’s fault?” I demanded. “She saved all of Old Town.”

“A lot of people felt that the cowen wouldn’t have come after them at all if Serenity hadn’t been living with Ola’ea.”

“They were living together?”

“After her arrival in Whitfield, Ola’ea became a kind of adopted daughter to Serenity, whose own children had grown and married, and who was long since a widow. This didn’t sit well with the other settlers, as you may appreciate. They might have accepted Ola’ea as a servant, but not as their equal. However, neither Serenity nor Ola’ea would permit anything other than the truth to be believed. Nor would Ola’ea accept less than equal status in the community.”

“So what happened?”

“They remained friends, steadfastly and without excuses. As a result, though, the two of them were obliged to spend many years as outcasts. It says a lot for both of them that when the witch-hunters came, they allowed the whole town into their meadow.”

“All the witches, anyway,” I said.

“Yes. And because of their good works—the establishment of the school, the creation of the Meadow as a place to celebrate the holidays in the witches’ Wheel of the Year—the Ainsworths and Ola’ea’s descendents always held a place of prominence in Old Town. But they were never really part of the gang, if you know what I mean. And then there was Constance Ainsworth, who naturally—”

“Constance?”

“A cousin of your great-grandmother’s. She was high priestess of the community during another reappearance of the Darkness just before the Great Depression in 1929. She . . .”

“Burned herself at the stake,” I finished. “So I’m related to her, too.”

“Constance took her life after the Darkness had claimed a number of other women. The families of those women blamed her, as high priestess, for not having acted sooner.”

“But she was trying to save them.”

“I know,” Miss P said kindly. “But they almost couldn’t help it, the way Becca Fowler almost couldn’t help blaming you for the fear spreading around Old Town now. I say
almost
because people can become bigger than themselves, their habits, their families.” She gave me a half-smile that left her eyes sad. “They can, but they rarely do.”

“And then there was my mother,” I said. “The monster of Whitfield.”

She took my hand. A sensation like warm ginger ale spread slowly through me. “Just because we don’t understand something doesn’t mean it’s evil. Or even wrong,” she said.

She was trying to be kind, but honestly, how could anyone
who knew what my mother did to Eric Shaw not believe she was evil? “And now here I come, just in time for the Darkness to make its next appearance,” I said.

Miss P nodded. “So you understand the fear underlying Becca’s anger.”

“Are there a lot of people who feel that way about me?” I asked quietly.

She smiled. “There are a lot of people who don’t,” she said. “Let’s see it that way.”

“And my . . . this gift . . .”

“Try not to use it,” Miss P said, suddenly hard. “For your own sake, for your sanity, don’t give in to it, or you’ll find it’s not a gift at all, but a curse you’ll wish you’d never heard of.”

Everyone in Old Town expected Eric to die from his head injury. It was as if they were waiting for it to happen, for the tragedy to be complete. And now it seemed that the time was coming, along with the harbingers of the Darkness.

I’d tried to see Eric, but Hattie wouldn’t let me. She said that he needed rest and quiet. Maybe she was beginning to feel like the rest of them. Maybe she was afraid that I’d go crazy one day and harm Eric the way my mother did.

I didn’t believe that Hattie would turn against me like that, but I had to admit that if she did, no one—probably not even I—could blame her.

As the crowd shouted and applauded for Agnes and Jonathan, I walked toward the woods.

I had thought that Beltane would be fun, but I guess I was just too selfish. All I could see was people in love.

The woods were dank and moist, smelling of moss, tree bark, and rain. A canopy of brilliant stars and a full moon stood out against the silhouetted trees. For a while I could hear the roar of the handfasting celebration, but soon I was in almost complete silence, broken only by the sound of my own footfalls and the occasional hooting of a barn owl.

From between the trees I could see eyes staring at me—foxes, deer, mice—and hear the night songs of insects and frogs. The witches’ world is a natural world. We do not fear living things, except for people . . .

Which is what made me stop in my tracks.

I sensed something. Someone. A human. I breathed in slowly, silently, listening, extending all my senses outward into the darkness. I’d never been in these woods before, but I had the sense that I was being drawn toward . . . what? A
scent? A feeling? I didn’t know, but something was calling to me, directing my feet where they took me. The very weight of the air seemed to have changed. It was thicker now, heavy.

No harm
. Whoever I was sensing was not waiting to hurt me. But there was sadness there, such profound sadness that I could almost feel my own heart breaking under its terrible burden. I breathed in deeper. The scent was familiar, comforting.

“Peter,” I whispered.

From the shadows came his voice: “Katy.” He stood up abruptly. He’d been sitting on the bare roots of a tree a few feet away.

I walked over to him. “Why are you here?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

He backed away.

“Peter, I’m—”

“Don’t,” he said, holding up his hands. He looked at me with the wild eyes of a trapped animal.

“Okay.” I stopped where I was. “I guess you’re not grounded anymore.”

He looked flustered. “I’ve had to help Hattie settle into the new house,” he said, twirling a leaf in his hand.

Oh, yes. Right. So very, very busy. “Sure,” I said, trying to sound more neutral than I felt.

“But I needed to get away for a while.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry if I disturbed you,” I said, moving away. “I’ll just . . .”

“Please don’t go.” He crumpled the leaf he was holding and stood facing me, the dappled moonlight illuminating his troubled gray eyes and the smooth skin of his cheek.

I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood there, looking at my feet.

“It’s Eric,” he said finally.

“Is he worse?”

Peter looked at me as if he wanted to tell me something. He sighed and leaned against the tree where he’d been sitting. “Yes,” he said. “Much worse.”

“Maybe I can do something useful,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know anything about medicine, but I could sit with him, or change his sheets and things, or even help out around the house while—”

“No!” he shouted. “You’re not to come to the house, do you understand?”

He looked so angry that he scared me. “Okay,” I whispered in a voice so small I could barely hear myself. “I was just trying to help.”

“You can’t help!” His voice cracked. He covered his face with one hand. “You can only get hurt.”

“What are you talking about?”

He looked around frantically.

“I swear, Peter Shaw, if you run away from me, I’ll never talk to you again!”

He sighed, deflated. “That’s the smartest thing you’ve said so far.” He took my arm. “Come on, I’ll walk you home.” At his touch, a feeling like pinpricks shot up my arm and into my chest. I gasped and doubled over.

“Katy?”

“I’m okay,” I said, staggering to my feet. I pretended to pick something out of my eye so that I could disconnect from him. The pinpricks disappeared.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“I’ve been picking up . . . well, vibes, I guess you’d say. Feelings, emotional states.”

“From people you touch.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re reading me.”

“Not exactly. It was just . . .” I couldn’t find the words. “Strange,” I said.

“You need to be getting home.”

“Peter—”

“Get out of my skin, Katy!” he snapped. “You can’t do anything for Eric, and you can’t do anything for me, do you understand? You have to stay away from us!”

“All right, all right!” I shouted. I put my hands over my face.

For a long time afterward the whole forest seemed to reverberate with the silence. I just stood there, unable to move, feeling as if a knife was stuck into my heart.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “You scare me, that’s all.”

“I scare
you
?” I squeaked. “Because I’m a
freak
, is that it?”

“You know that’s not what you are.” He put his hand over his mouth, as if to contain himself. “You’re the best friend I ever had, Katy. But there are things I can’t let you know about me.”

I felt tears begin to form. “Is that what you’re worried about? That I’ll read your thoughts or something? That I’ll find out all your dirty little secrets and use them against you?”