Monstrous Beauty (18 page)

He smiled and tipped his head down, looking up eagerly through his bushy eyebrows. “Seeing ghosts is unusual—do you no’ agree et must happen for a reason?” He lifted his crooked index finger. “Caerses can be lefted. Nothing es empossible. I can help you. The fact tha’ you can see Adeline means you can help haer. And help
yerself
.” He sat back in the chair.

Hester bit her lip. Help herself? What was that supposed to mean?

He was studying her, letting her process what he had said. It occurred to her that his patience smacked of knowing more than he let on. She frowned.

“What are you getting at?” she said.

“I know I can help you. Bu’, Hester.” He paused. He looked at the floor and raised his fist to his lips, thinking. He muttered to himself: “I dinnae know how to say this withou’ riskin’ everything.”

He sat up as straight as his bent back would allow and took a deep breath. “An’ so I’ll just say et outright, an’ pray I’ll not bollix et.

“Hester, you mus’ trust
me alone
, an’ stay away from the beach.”

Hester’s eyes widened.

“Et’s no’ good for you to go there, although I know the force drawin’ you es powerfully hard to resest, truly I do. Och, you mus’ trust me—he well no’ further your efforts to left the caerse, he well disastrously
emperil
them.”

Hester stood up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Aye, lass, y’do.”

There was a deep rumble of thunder. She picked up her bag.

“I have to go.”

He struggled to stand. She couldn’t bring herself to help him, though she knew she should.

When he was upright he said, “D’ye hear tha’? The sea es angry, an’ storming. She’s restless. She senses change. Bu’ I willnae stop. I cannae. You’re our hope. At long last. You’re here.”

“Honestly, you’re just babbling.”

“Stay away from him, Hester. Promise me.”

“I won’t promise that.”

“Please.” He was pleading now. “Dinnae go to the beach. Rely on
me
. Et’s no’ just you who well be haert. Adeline well be haert—forever. Thenk of Linnie.”

A crack of thunder.

“This is ridiculous.” She raised her voice, surprising herself with her sudden rage. “You’re … you’re a nutty old man who believes in ghosts! You can’t tell me what to do—I’ll go where I please. The beach has nothing to do with Linnie. It has nothing to do with anything!”

He touched her arm with affection, apparently impervious to her insults.

“Everything es entertwined, lamb.”

She ripped her arm away and ran up the stairs, out of the crypt. Heavy raindrops were already spattering the windows of the first floor.

Chapter 28

1873

E
ZRA RETURNED HOME
from the pub after a puzzlingly hasty departure on the part of the retired pastor. Poor old man, he was certainly suffering the beginnings of dementia in his advanced age. The house was quiet and smelled like roasting chicken and potato spice cake. Ezra took a deep breath. He hung up his jacket and his hat on the stand by the door.

“Sarah?” he called. He went into the library to find her. The fire had died to orange embers. His journal was on the table by the upholstered chair, stacked on top of Sarah’s most recent conquest,
Jane Eyre
. He picked the journal up and flipped through it. Many of the pages were blank. He smiled. Weeks ago his wife had solved the problem of how to hide the book in plain sight, and her sea companions had helped effect the plan with their unfathomable powers: Sarah was able to enjoy the book in its entirety, which she often did, but no one else could.

He went to the base of the stairs and called up, “Sarah?”

Mrs. Banks appeared at the top of the flight with sheets folded over her forearm. “Mr. Doyle, sir! Bless my soul, you’re well, thank heaven.”

“Of course I’m well, Annie. Where is Sarah?”

“Why, she’s gone to the church, at least half an hour ago, maybe more—to look for you.”

He frowned. “We moved on to the pub.”

He bolted out of sight as Mrs. Banks called out, “Someone sent a little girl saying you’d taken ill at the church—” She heard the door slam shut on the word “church.”

Ezra took loping strides with his long legs and reached Town Square in sixteen minutes. As he approached the church, a reflexive cry escaped from deep within him. He could hear a man screaming—desperate, bursting screams, like a confused, trapped animal.

He pulled the left handle of the front door of the church, but it was locked. As he tugged uselessly on the right handle, he heard a woman scream.

He ran around to the back, his heart hammering in his chest, his breath rapid, his hair clinging to the sweat on his scalp. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed a little girl huddled in the dark, among the gravestones, clutching a wad of blanket and sobbing at the sounds coming from inside the church.

“Oh, sir!” he heard her say.

Mrs. Banks’s words rang in the background of his mind: “A little girl said you were ill.”

He ignored the girl and flung the door open. The light flooded out, and he heard the man scream again, muffled but with discernible words this time. “You’re kellin’ her!” It was coming from the crypt.

He leaped down the stairs three at a time, and the situation unfolded before him as he did. Sarah was on her knees in a sarcophagus, drenched in water and blood, and Michael McKee—the very man whose health he had toasted one hour ago—had a bloody knife in his hand.

Ezra ran at full speed, grabbed the pastor’s collar, and wrenched him away from his wife. The old man toppled backward to the floor. Sarah looked at Ezra, and in the span of only a second her eyes showed concern—for herself, for him—and then a primal resignation before she collapsed into the water, face-first. Ezra reached for her. Now the sarcophagus appeared to be filled solely with blood—so thick and opaque that he couldn’t identify the body beneath his wife—and he instantly saw why. One of the old man’s blows had pierced Sarah’s neck. Her carotid artery was gushing. It was a catastrophic injury.

“No!” he shouted, pushing his fingers into the wound, trying to stanch the flow of blood. The blood continued to gush, covering his hand and trickling down his wrist to his elbow. He struggled to turn her on her side. Her skin was no longer pale, it was gray. She was not breathing. The flood of crimson pulsing from her neck slowed as her blood volume dropped and her heart failed. He put his mouth on hers. He blew air into her lungs.

The old man climbed to his feet and reeled toward the sarcophagus, weeping uncontrollably.

“She drowned Mrs. Ontstaan,” he said, gasping between sobs.

Ezra blew into Sarah’s mouth frantically, knowing it was hopeless, but unwilling to admit it to himself. If he stopped breathing for her, he would have to begin life without her.

“I tried to stop haer … I didnae wan’ to haert haer!” The pastor looked at the weapon in his hand.

“This is no’ my knife! Wha’ have I done?”

Ezra pulled away from Sarah. Her lids were closed and her face was composed. She looked peaceful in death.

In death.

He turned on McKee then. His eyes were wild.

He grabbed the pastor around the neck and shook his head forward and back, squeezing as he did. The old man’s face turned deep pink. A gurgling sound escaped his mouth. His eyes bulged. Ezra’s hands fit around the pastor’s throat with fingertips overlapping, his neck was so thin. That frail body—all bones and skin and cloth—seemed to melt beneath him, and he found he was holding up the old man’s full weight of what could not be more than one hundred thirty pounds. It was grotesque that this wispy nothing of a being had taken Sarah off this earth; McKee was pitiful. Now Ezra’s eyes were shadowed with torment. He must loosen his grip before the old man lost consciousness. He must do it now, or there would be no turning back.

But it was too late for mercy. The knife that was in the pastor’s hand sank deep into the left side of Ezra’s chest.

It was pressure Ezra felt first, not pain. He looked down at the bizarre sight of the handle sticking out of his body.

His thumbs were over the pastor’s Adam’s apple. He pressed hard and felt it dislocate and then fracture. He crushed the windpipe against the vertebrae. And then he dropped him. McKee fell to the ground, purple-faced, with a high-pitched noise coming from his throat as he tried in vain to breathe. He was suffocating.

Ezra bellowed with grief. Sarah was dead.

The old man was dying.

And now he was dying, too.

The knife burned in him, and he felt an ominous weight on his chest, but very little blood escaped from the wound. He wanted to pull the knife out, but his instinct told him it was sealing the wound and holding him in a fleeting stasis.

There wasn’t much time.

He thought quickly. He would not be able to carry Sarah in front of him without disturbing the knife, perhaps hastening his death. He turned his back to the coffin and lifted her right arm over his left shoulder, leaving her left arm dangling. He looped his right arm between her legs and lifted her so that her torso draped across his shoulders. Her body was still warm. Her face rested heavily against his left upper arm, as if she were asleep.

His heart ached at the sight.

He carried her up the stairs and out the back door, with tears and sweat blinding him.

“Oh! Poor Mrs. Doyle! Whatever is happening?” It was the voice of the little girl, somewhere at his feet. As he passed her, she followed after him and the toe of her boot stepped on the back of his shoe. His foot levered out of the shoe and he stumbled, nearly falling forward from the precious weight on his shoulders. A searing pain shot through his chest. He felt dizzy. His eyesight went black for a moment.

“Please help me, sir,” the little girl said. “I want to go home. I want my mum.”

He righted himself and took the time to slide out of his other shoe to even his gait. He was becoming alarmingly short of breath. This delay might cost him what little hope he had.

The little girl had circled around him and stood in front of him. Her eyes were puffed and red from crying. He saw that a baby was wrapped in the blanket in her arms.

“Out of my way!” he sputtered.

“But, sir, she’s so
heavy.
”

He was light-headed. His legs were trembling. He tried to skirt around her, but she sidestepped in front of him.

“Get out of my way!”

“I won’t,” Adeline said, stamping a foot, summoning disobedience from her fear. “I don’t know what to do with the baby!”

“I can’t help you!” he shouted, and he let Sarah’s right arm loose for a second as he shoved the little girl aside. He gasped with the pain of it, and began his march down Leyden Street to the ocean.

But Adeline was small for her age, and the baby was heavy. The shove sent her flying. She staggered sideways, with each step missing its foothold, picking up momentum until she knew that she’d fall against a tombstone, with the baby’s fragile head to hit first. Instinctively, she twisted her torso in mid-fall and squeezed the child against her. As a result, the back of her own head slammed onto the sharp edge of a new granite gravestone. Her scalp split, her skull cracked. Her body crumpled, limp. As she slid to the ground, her head left a streak of blood down the epitaph on the front of the stone:

Remember me as you pass by,

As you are now so once was I;

As I am now so you must be,

Prepare for death to follow me

The baby had landed safely on her stomach and began to wail.

Chapter 29

H
ESTER LEFT FOR WORK
the next morning with a confusing, crushing urge to drop everything and run to the beach. She almost couldn’t bear it when she remembered that it was the Fourth of July—one of the busiest tourist days at the village—and truancy was not an option.

She soon found that the only way she could concentrate on her job was to overburden herself. In a single day she did the chores that the curator had told her to nurse over the course of the week: she weeded the Howland vegetable garden, she picked medicinal herbs and tied them with twine for drying, she made a root stew for dinner, she mended the canopy of the bed, she beat the rugs, and then, having no assigned tasks remaining, she borrowed a hammer and nails from the men who were thatching Governor Bradford’s house to repair a broken footstool.

She was pounding a nail into the hard wood when her co-worker Betsy walked up, carrying a bucket of water from the stream. A young family had gathered, watching Hester, but they were too shy to ask questions, which suited her mood fine. It violated her training not to volunteer conversation in that circumstance, but she didn’t care—the rhythmic thumping of the hammer soothed her.

“How now, Elizabeth,” Betsy called over the noise.

“What cheer, Priscilla.” She set down the hammer reluctantly.

“Excuse me,” the father said, emboldened now that they were speaking. “Would a woman be doing this sort of work?—I mean, during that time. Your time, that is, in 1627?”

“I do all that is required to keep my house and my family, sir, all that God gives me the strength to complete,” Hester said. She motioned to the fire pit. “My husband’s pottage is well boiling, is it not? The house is goodly swept. The children are fed and weeding in the fields. Have I not completed the duties of a wife? Shall I squander the remaining daylight dreaming and sighing? For t’would be a sin against God if that be what you suggest.”

“I … no, I…”

Betsy laughed to interrupt. “Pay her no mind, sir. ’Tis true that a woman’s labor honors God, however t’day I daresay Goodwife Howland’s industry exceeds even Divine expectation.” And then she said in a hushed voice to Hester, “Methinks the fire from that industry has caused a surplus of yellow bile and made you somewhat choleric, Eliza.”

“Thank ’ee for your concern, dear Priscilla. I shall endeavor to find something cold and moist to eat, so that my temperament may please you better.”