Promise Me This (22 page)

Annie agreed and bid Mr. Sprague good-bye, but she could not think about his plan now. All the way home a mantra sang in her mind, over and over, to the rumbling of the wheels:
Aunt Eleanor knew. Owen could have waited. He need not have died. Aunt Eleanor knew. Owen could have waited. He need not have died.

When Annie and Jamison reached home, Jayne, a kitchen maid in a rumpled apron, hurried up the stairs bearing a pitcher of hot water. “What do you think?” she sputtered. “Her ladyship’s opened her eyes!”

Annie did not stop to remove her coat or hat, though Jamison repeatedly called after her, “Your coat, Miss Annie! Miss Annie!”

She took the stairs slowly at first, then determinedly. She pushed open the door to her aunt’s bedchamber but, owing to the dimness of the shuttered room, could barely see the frail form wrapped in sheets. Annie pulled the drapes and pushed back the wooden shutters, scattering dust mites and splaying sunshine across the floor, the bed.

“Argggh,” her aunt growled in protest.

Annie stood at the foot of the bed and stared but made no move to go near her. “I want to see what you look like, Aunt Eleanor.”

Her aunt half raised a withered hand toward her slackened face. But the feeble action fueled Annie’s anger, and she grabbed the mother-of-pearl looking glass from the dressing table, thrusting it before her aunt’s face. “And I want you to see what you look like. You are no longer beautiful. Do you see, Aunt Eleanor? Do you see?” she demanded. “Though you were never so beautiful as Mother. And you were never loved.”

Barbara, her aunt’s maid, gasped, nearly dropping the linens she carried into the room.

Annie picked up a flannel from atop the washstand and tossed it to Barbara. “Scrub her, Barbara—if you can bear to touch her. Scrub her clean.”

Alarm, mingled with something daring, almost smug, crossed her aunt’s eyes.

But Annie did not care. No matter if the woman in the bed recovered from her stroke—Owen was dead and gone. He could not recover.

Annie vowed to daily hold a mirror before her aunt—more than a reflection of her face. She would cry foul before the world for all the evil Aunt Eleanor had done and, through jealousy, had failed to do. She would paint her the vicious, piteous, spiteful, laughable spinster she saw her to be before the society whose good opinion she craved.

Annie nearly smirked at the expression in her aunt’s eyes. If all Aunt Eleanor feared from her was a good scrubbing, she had much to learn.

On her way from the room Annie passed her aunt’s prized vanity mirror and was momentarily surprised to see Aunt Eleanor’s haughty, young portrait staring from the glass. She had reached the hallway before her breath caught in her chest, before she realized that the hard and icy features reflected had been her own.

Annie could not speak past the weight in her heart, not to the staff at Hargrave House, not even when Barbara asked if she would like to read to her aunt in the afternoons. And though Annie carried her aunt’s breakfast tray of hot tea and thin gruel to her bedside each morning for three weeks, she turned her back on the dark and pleading orbs enlarging daily in the shriveled face.

What pity could Annie afford the woman who had never shown pity to her own family—her precious family whose lives and deaths could have been so eased and altered by the power of her goodwill?

Clipped discussion of her aunt’s health was limited to Dr. Welbourne and Nurse Sise, employed by Mr. Sprague to carry out the doctor’s detailed instructions. But as far as Annie could see, around-the-clock private nursing made no difference. Her aunt was dying, a little each day—and not fast enough to suit Annie.

“You’ll want to forgive her, Miss Annie.” Jamison spoke softly, matter-of-factly, one late afternoon as he lit the fire in the drawing room’s gas grate. Even June could not relieve the cold and damp of the old house. “You’ll want to forgive her for your own sake, before it is too late.”

“No,” Annie said. “I do not forgive her. I will not forgive her.” She closed the piano, stood, and walked evenly from the dim and somber room. How could Jamison or Mr. Sprague or Barbara or Jayne or anyone imagine she could forgive the witch in the bed upstairs?

Had God not struck Eleanor Hargrave, Annie had no doubt the woman would be dangling Annie’s life by a thread, just as she had dangled her mother’s, her father’s, and Owen’s. “I hate her,” Annie whispered to no one as she climbed the stairs to her room. “I cannot wait until she’s dead. God in heaven, make her die soon.”

The next morning Annie balanced her aunt’s breakfast tray on one hip as she reached to turn the latch on the bedroom door. But Nurse Sise opened it wide from the other side. “Your aunt spoke today.” The nurse smiled significantly and inclined her head. “That is a very good sign.”

Annie’s breath caught. Her hands trembled so that she nearly dropped the tea.

“You are overcome, my dear. Let me take that.” Nurse Sise, the model of efficiency and kindness, relieved Annie of the tray, setting it squarely on the table beside the bed. “You’ve been through so much, Miss Elisabeth Anne. But not to worry; your aunt is sleeping peacefully now.” She dusted her hands as if all was put to rights. “She had a rather restless night. Even so, just before dawn she distinctly said, ‘No.’”

Annie stared at the nurse without blinking, her mind screaming,
No! No! No!

Nurse Sise colored slightly at Annie’s blatant stare, then sat in her ladder-back chair beside the bed. “I know that is not an entire sentence, but it is a beginning. I believe your aunt will recover far more than any of us had anticipated.”

The nurse appeared hopeful to Annie, waiting, Annie knew, for her to sound pleased, to reassure her that her aunt’s recovery was all Annie wanted as well. But Annie wanted no such thing.

A bell rang belowstairs. Nurse Sise hesitated, clearly uncertain in the face of Annie’s unblinking stare. But she stood and smoothed her skirt. “Well, there is the breakfast bell. I shall be just belowstairs if you need me, Miss Elisabeth Anne.”

Still Annie did not, could not, speak.

Nurse Sise, her brow momentarily wrinkled, walked quickly from the room.

Annie stared at her aunt’s sleeping form and willed herself to breathe.
She could be dead. She could so easily be dead.

And then she thought,
Why not? Why shouldn’t she be dead?
Annie stepped nearer the headboard. Smells of camphor and witch hazel, of things that evoked sickrooms, pervaded her aunt’s linens. Only the tea from the pot on the tray smelled of life and earth and daily routines.

Annie lifted the tea cozy and removed the lid. She picked up the steaming pot with a towel, then stepped closer to her aunt’s face.
It would be so easy to drop it, to watch this scalding liquid burn and flood her eyes, pour across her crooked mouth. I could hold her down. I could burn away forever those hateful orifices. I could drown her as Owen drowned. I would be rid of her forever.

She straightened, considering.
Who would accuse me? I could say that she startled me, that I was pouring her tea—to let it cool for her—and that she startled me. An accident.
Annie breathed and waited. She smiled. She drew one more short and ragged breath, then hefted the pot.

Aunt Eleanor’s black eyes snapped open. Annie jumped. The swaddled pot wobbled in her hands. Fear and rage raced through Eleanor Hargrave’s eyes as a steaming trickle of pungent, reddish-brown tea narrowly missed her neck. “No!” she gasped distinctly.

Annie barely caught the precarious pot. Hot tea sloshed, scalding her hand, just the way she had imagined scalding Aunt Eleanor, and she cried out.

In that moment Annie knew she was defeated. She saw her aunt look into her mind, comprehend her calculation, sense the evil intent in Annie—evil as familiar to her aunt as her own name. Annie gasped at the superiority of knowing in her aunt’s expression, at the power it instantly bequeathed her.

Fear eclipsed Annie’s fury as she knew, beyond a doubt, that Aunt Eleanor would recover and again reign supreme. And Annie knew she could not return to such a servile life—not now, not ever again.

She dropped the pot awkwardly onto the tray and stumbled from the room, groping her way to the staircase. The low wail she heard came not from the withered woman in the bed but from someplace deep inside herself.

Annie’s temples throbbed, two beating drums. Her jaw and neck and shoulders ached; her limbs tingled. Her heart raced so she feared it might burst through her chest, speed toward the parlor, smash the bay window, and tear through the streets of London. She gripped the railing, forcing her feet to stop on the grand staircase landing. “I am mad,” Annie whispered, silently laughing and crying at the realization.

Quietly, deliberately, as if the stairs might tear themselves from the wall and run away, Annie centered her foot on each one, climbing to her room at the top of the house. Quietly, deliberately, she closed the door and slid the bolt.

Annie’s lips parted. From her deep center came a soft, low moan. The moan spread; the volume grew—a bleeding, mortal wound in the making. She grabbed her hair by its roots and jerked and jerked until tears sprang from her eyes. If only the pain of her scalp could distract her from the living, crawling, writhing pain in her chest. But it was not enough. There was not enough pain in all the world for that. And so she keened, beyond the power of her lungs, her anger and venom and loss—the grating, throbbing, screeching pain she had carried silently for weeks. She heard Jamison call her name, heard him pound the door, but she pushed back all thought until she listened only to the voice inside her head, the one that would not go away.

Alone. I’m alone. They’re all dead. They’re dead because of her. I’ll be next. She will rise and walk and kill me next. She would not have hesitated had it been me in that bed. I should have done it. I should have . . .

When Annie finally sat up, she saw that the light had changed. Her dampened pillow slip, her rumpled bed, the rose and yellow flowers stamped across her comforter, the pale-yellow wash of her walls turned gold, the heavy chintz of her drapes—all came into vivid focus.

Of course,
she thought.
It’s simple. Why did I not see it before?

Annie unbolted the shutters and pushed wide the window. She heard but did not heed the firm but even knocking at her door. She pulled her desk chair across the floor to the window.

One step to the chair. One step to the window. One step to the street,
Annie thought.
And I shall be free. I shall be with Owen and with Mother and Father. She cannot hurt me there, not ever again.

“Elisabeth Anne,” came a voice from beyond Annie’s door. “Annie, listen to me. This is Mrs. Sprague, Betty Sprague. I want you to open the door. I have come to take you home with me.”

Annie heard the strange voice and in the background the pleading of Jamison, but the voice in her head spoke louder and would not be stilled.
Owen is waiting. Mother is waiting. Father is waiting, waiting for me.
Annie stepped onto the seat of the chair.

“Annie, I know you miss Owen. I know you want to leave this house, and you should leave; you can leave. You may come home with me, with me and with Mr. Sprague and with our daughter, Constance. Constance needs a friend. She needs a sister. It was so long before I could have a child. I need another daughter, just like you. I need you, Annie. Open the door.”

Owen is waiting. Mother is waiting. Father is—

“Open the door, Annie. Open it now. We’ll pack your things and you will come home with me for as long as you like.”

Owen is waiting. Moth—

“Open the door, Annie. Let me take you home, dear.”

Owen is—

“Dear?” Annie asked.

“Yes, dear Annie!” The voice came again, firm but loving in a way Annie had not heard for so long that it hurt her heart to remember.

Annie stepped back. “What?”

“Open the door, dear Annie! Open the door, sweet child.”

Annie stepped down from the chair. Her head swam, so she steadied herself against the chair’s back. The moment she unbolted the door, arms swept her into an embrace so unexpected that Annie choked and coughed.