The Bone Key (10 page)

Mrs. Davenant produced a flash-light from beneath her cloak; by its light her smile was ghastly. “Come, Cousin Kyle,” she said, as merrily as if she were proposing a picnic.

I could not extricate myself from this nightmare; I followed Mrs. Davenant into the Resurrection Hill Cemetery, Mr. Ogilvy and Miss Locksley padding at my heels.

Apparently, Mrs. Davenant’s “spirits” had not deserted her, for she found her way unerringly to my parents’ graves. “Here,” she said to the assembled sheep-like cousins. “Dig
here
.”

Obediently, they dug.

Lit only by Mrs. Davenant’s flash-light and by two small lanterns the cousins had brought, the scene looked like a Goya portrait of Burke and Hare. I never knew, then or later, whether the cousins had brought their own spades or had appropriated the caretaker’s; if it was the latter, I could only be grateful that the caretaker did not appear in search of his property. I felt certain that Mrs. Davenant would have ordered the cousins to beat his brains in with his own shovel.

They dug lower and lower and I found myself flinching in anticipation of the moment when their spades would strike wood. And still, when it came, it shocked me. Mrs. Davenant was immediately there, standing on the edge of the grave. A muffled voice said something about “breaking open the casket.” It was like a horrible parody of my parents’ funeral, lacking only the presence of the Siddonses to complete the effect. I had to fight the impulse to search among the cousins for my twelve-year-old self.

I said to Mrs. Davenant, “She is your own kin.”

“But the fate of the body does not matter,” she said earnestly. “Truly, Cousin Kyle, this is nothing but clay.”

“
This
,” I said, gesturing wildly at the grave, “was my
mother
. I cannot stop you from desecrating her body, but I ask you at least to go about it decently.”

There was an uneasy murmur among the cousins at the word “desecrate.”

In Mrs. Davenant’s frown, I saw the spoiled little girl she must once have been. But she, too, was aware of our audience, for she grudgingly acquiesced, and we both fell back as the cousins levered the coffin out of the grave.

There was no difficulty in opening it—my mother’s coffin had been hastily and cheaply purchased by the Siddonses and the only wonder was that it had not broken of its own accord. Mrs. Davenant darted forward; I turned away, unwilling to have my memories of my mother, dim and troubled though they were, be replaced by an image of her as she looked after nearly twenty-four years in her grave.

I heard Mrs. Davenant’s cry of triumph and turned back to see her brandishing the bone key aloft, the only ornament beside her wedding ring my mother had ever worn.

My mother had strung the key on a black silk cord around her neck, an ivory rod the same length as her index finger, with stubby, almost vestigial wards. She had told me wonderful stories about it when I asked what it was and what it unlocked; it had been a kind of game between us, back in the days when my father had been well and my mother’s affection had overflowed like a fountain. She had never told me the truth.

I could see the broken ends of the cord trailing from Mrs. Davenant’s fist.

There was no bravery in what I did then, no thought, for if I had thought at all, I would surely have thought better of such rashness. I lunged forward—for once grateful for my gawky height—tore the key from Mrs. Davenant’s grasp, and before any of us realized that I meant to do it, broke the key in half.

It broke with a brittle snap, an absurdly small noise. For a moment, it seemed the only noise in the entire night-bedecked world, and then Mrs. Davenant screamed, a skull-piercing banshee wail, her hands stretching like claws indiscriminately between me and the pieces of bone I held, and the cloud-louring sky.

“Gone!” she shrieked, in a voice I would not have described as human had I not known it issued from a human mouth. “
Gone
!”

The cousins shuffled and murmured. Mr. Ogilvy and I looked at each other. After a moment, he said, very cautiously, “What’s gone, Mavis?”

“The power,” she wailed, sinking to her knees. “The power . . . the darkness . . . ”

“The curse?” said a cousin.

“The birthright?” said Miss Locksley.

“All of it,” moaned Mrs. Davenant, folding forward, her hands covering her face. “All of it gone.” Her voice spiraled up again into a howl, “
Gone
!”

“There, there, Mavis,” Mr. Ogilvy said uselessly.

I put the broken pieces of the key in my pocket; it would not do to leave them where Mrs. Davenant could get her hands on them again. The key’s magic might be gone, but that did not mean it could not be put to other uses by a determined enough witch; I had a mortar and pestle, and I had thrown viler things than a handful of bone dust into the river that ran through the city like its mortal blood. After a moment, I took the velvet-wrapped daguerreotype out of my coat and tossed it into the coffin on top of the moldered, rotting remains of Thekla Murchison Booth.

The cousins stared at me dumbly. Mrs. Davenant keened, a crumpled heap of darkness, Miss Locksley and Mr. Ogilvy hovering over her like ineffective asylum-nurses.

“Put her back,” I said, with a weary gesture at the coffin, turning my back on my mother’s family, starting toward the cemetery gates. “Let her rest.”

I returned to Resurrection Hill Cemetery a week later. Alone. The streetcar’s tracks ran through the neighborhood in which I had grown up. From the streetcar, I could just make out the scalloped shingles of the roof that had been ours, a distant glance rendered antiseptic by the dirty glass through which I stared and by the ladies’ hats which framed my view.

I extricated myself from the streetcar at Callum Street and began walking, eastward and uphill, the sharp, bitter December wind blowing my coat out behind me.

I had never made a regular habit of visiting my parents’ graves. Mrs. Siddons had forbidden it, stigmatizing my desire to do so as morbid and self-indulgent. I had always been afraid in college that my friend and roommate Augustus Blaine would agree with Mrs. Siddons and mock me for it. And then it had seemed too far and the journey too painful.

I turned up the cemetery’s broad driveway, past the tiny chapel, and began picking my way through the tombstones and obelisks. I had come here once in the summer, and the trees that stood around my parents’ graves had been covered in tiny, sweet, white flowers whose petals wept like snow across the graves lying beneath.

My parents had been buried side by side beneath a single tombstone. Its austerity had been my father’s choice: nothing more than their names and dates. He might have loved my mother to the point of madness and beyond, but it was not a love he had chosen to show to the rest of the world. Such had been his nature, secretive and ascetic, holding even his passions at arm’s length. It had been my mother who had filled the house with her easy affection; even now I could remember the warmth of her hugs, the gentle touch of her hand on my hair.

But the truth, the burning core, of her love had been revealed in her death. If I closed my eyes, I knew, I would see her face again, as she had looked when she walked past me on the way to her death. I did not want to remember her like that, but I could not help it, that terrible ruthlessness that had looked at me and only seen that I was not him.

She had loved in the same way that Alabaster Whalen Murchison had hated. Like John Whalen Murchison, I had been to my mother only a token of my father. And when that love was gone, when my father was dead, the token was useless to her. I could not . . . even if I had been able to face the idea of murdering a woman by marrying her, I could not abide the thought of inflicting that fate on another child, a child such as I had been.

I stood for a long time. The cousins had done a good job of repairing the damage they had done, and I thought I would not hurt myself by choosing to believe it was a gesture of respect, of apology. The graves lay silently before me. The sleepers within the quiet earth did not rise up to speak to me, and I was grateful. This was my family now, and they made no demands I could not meet.

W
AIT FOR
M
E

I have never been quite sure how it happened that I ended up with Mildred Truelove Stapleton’s diaries. I remember having a long, distracted conversation with Mr. Lucent, after our return from the Stapleton house, about how we should “divvy up our loot,” as he persisted in phrasing it. And it made sense that I should have the sad collection of children’s books, just as he rightly and properly took the poet’s working manuscripts and correspondence. But when I try to remember why he did not also take her diaries, I rack my brains to no avail. My suspicion is that we were both too unnerved to know what we were doing.

Somehow, though, the box of diaries ended up in the corner of my office, along with the complete set of Lefevre first editions with the extra plates hand-colored by the author; Muriel Wilderhith’s six-volume biography of her uncle—
Sir Cuthbert Wilderhith: A Life Spent Dreaming
—inscribed by Miss Wilderhith to Samuel Mather Parrington; and a herd of rather battered file-boxes in which reposed the entire, explicit, and scandalous correspondence between the poet Gillian Mowbray Thorne and Dorothea, Viscountess Sain-ver, including the notorious account of the even more notorious funeral of Judge Lemarys.

Although I fully intended to examine the Stapleton diaries, catalogue them, and send them into the stacks which housed the rest of the Parrington’s collection of diaries, a sudden spate of acquisitions in the Department of Rare Books, and certain affairs of my own, left me with neither time nor energy to spare. And since the box of Stapleton diaries looked very much like the boxes containing the Thorne-Sainver correspondence, giving it the protective coloration of an Arctic fox against snow, and since I had developed a slight aversion to Mildred Truelove Stapleton after the unpleasant things which had happened in her house, I am afraid I would have entirely forgotten about the diaries if it had not been for a small and unsettling coincidence.

It was one of the nights when my insomnia was particularly abysmal, and rather than drift comfortlessly from room to room of my apartment, I had come down to the Parrington in hopes of removing at least a few of the papers, books, and other assorted objects which stood between me and the surface of my desk.

I had dealt with a job lot of routine paperwork, cleared up a thorny question of provenance and dating which had entangled three of the junior archivists, and was peacefully sorting through a miscellany of bound pamphlets which Mr. Sullivan had bought for five cents in a thrift shop, “just in case it turned out to be interesting.” Mr. Sullivan was young, but eager, and he had a good eye. These seemed to be mostly seventeenth century English religious tracts and printed sermons, none of them already among the museum’s collection. I was noting the usual fiery denunciations of the atheistical, the disobedient, and those swollen with the sin of unrighteous pride—for the pamphlets were all staunchly Laudian, itself an interesting characteristic—when my eye was caught by a marginal gloss, “
Of Spirits and mirrours.
”

Instantly, and with a force like being hit by a bolt of lightning, I remembered Miss Stapleton, lying on the floor of that bedroom saying,
The girl in the mirror. The girl with no eyes.

Mechanically, my eyes moved to the text before my protesting brain could articulate the objection that I did not want to know anything about Caroline beliefs concerning ghosts and mirrors. It was already too late.

I read:

As the Eyes are the Mirrours of the
soul
, so it is that Spirits have none, for their
soules
being departed it is but a husk that remaineth, like mindless
Ecchoe
in the pagan tale. And yet it is not true that Spirits are frighted by mirrours or that they do shun them. They appeare to the living in mirrours, and in a forme of their own chusing, so that one who was a wicked Sinner in life may appear a fair young man and thus cosen the Unwary. Truly, as
Pride
is the snare of the
devil
, so again do mirrours perform the Behests of the Ungodly and provide a Conduit for the
devil
to afflict Man and lead him from the path of
Belief
.

And then the author, like a hound abandoning a false scent, was off and running again, baying the necessity of obeying king, church, and priest, and the troubling matter of ghosts and mirrors was left behind.

Except that for me it had awakened those memories: that small, stifling room on the third floor of the Stapleton house, the dust, the brooding vanity, those battered books . . . and the sound of Miss Stapleton’s screams.

Mr. Lucent and I, the senior archivists of the Department of Rare Books, had been sent to the Stapleton house to take possession of the bequest which Mildred Truelove Stapleton, the eminent poet, had left to the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum upon her death the previous winter. There had been a good deal of dissent and contention among Mrs. Stapleton’s four adult children about every clause of her will, and thus Dr. Starkweather had felt it better not to take any chances with the Museum’s new property, namely Mildred Truelove Stapleton’s library and papers.

The process of transferral had taken several days and had been, on that Thursday, almost complete. All that remained were what Miss Amelia Stapleton, the eldest of the four children, referred to as “Mother’s junk,” being the poet’s diaries, her working manuscripts, and that portion of her library which in her last, frail years she had insisted on keeping in her bedroom.

Miss Stapleton was a tall, bony spinster with an unfortunate predilection for ruffles, floral prints, and soft colors suited to schoolgirls. Her voice was high, childlike, and yet unforgivingly hard; it had become clear on the first day that she considered Mr. Lucent and myself personally to blame for the “desecration” of her mother’s belongings. We had both developed the habit of avoiding her, and so my heart had sunk when I rang the bell on that last morning and was answered by her shrill demand to know who I was and what I wanted.

But she had let me in, and even agreed to conduct me to the spare room in which the last oddments were kept. I climbed the stairs in her wake, one set, then a second. Two doors down the third floor hallway, she stopped and said, “This, Mr. Booth, is the haunted room.”

“The, er, what?” I said.

“Oh, that’s what we call it. My mother insisted it was haunted and never used it. I don’t believe in ghosts. We’ve been using it for storage, and Mother’s junk is in there. I
will
warn you to wedge the door. It locks itself if you’re not careful.”

“Oh,” I said. “Thank you.”

The room revealed when Miss Stapleton opened the door did not look haunted. It was dusty and cluttered; clearly no one had lived in this room for many years. The appurtenances of a girl’s bedroom were bundled into one corner: a lace-swagged canopy for the disassembled four-poster, a vanity with a dried and withered posy still stuck in the frame, attesting, like the pale flowered wallpaper, to the life this room had once held. In another corner, following Miss Stapleton’s pointing finger, I found the last of what was to become the Mildred Truelove Stapleton Collection.

I understood immediately why the poet had not left her books and papers to her children. The papers were at least in boxes, although they looked as if they had merely been dumped in by the armful; the books, including her diaries, had been thrown into the corner, a careless heap like a child’s discarded playthings. It seemed horrible to me that a poet’s children could take out their anger at their mother on her innocent and helpless books.

“That’s funny,” said Miss Stapleton. “We didn’t leave them like that.” But there was no outrage, or even concern, in her voice, and I felt no compulsion to believe her.

I said, “When my colleague gets here, could you . . . that is, I would be grateful if you would show him up.” Mr. Lucent, dilatory as always, was now nearly an hour late.

“Of course,” said Miss Stapleton without warmth. “Don’t forget about the door.” And she left.

I wedged the door firmly open and settled in to work.

Cataloguing the books took very little time; there were only twenty-three of them. Oddly, for a woman whose tastes in literature, as represented by the rest of her library, were both catholic and sophisticated, the books Mildred Truelove Stapleton had clung to in her last years were all cheap popular editions of children’s books: the Lambs’
Tales from Shakespeare
,
Robinson Crusoe
,
Pilgrim’s Progress
, Marigold’s
Prayers for the Young
,
Gulliver’s Travels
, collections of fairy tales and poems. All of them were inscribed on the flyleaf
Georgiana Beatrice Truelove
in a schoolgirl’s copperplate. Clearly, from the printing dates of the books, Mrs. Stapleton’s sister, but why had Mildred ended up with Georgiana’s books? I made a note to give these books to Mr. Forsythe, who was embroiled in a massive and quixotic study of children’s books of the previous century, and moved on to the manuscripts and diaries which were properly Mr. Lucent’s domain, except that Mr. Lucent was not here.

Aside from being thick with dust, the room was unpleasantly stuffy even with the door open; I was aware of sweat trickling down my collar and dampening my shirt. A cursory glance was enough to show that the situation pertaining among the manuscripts, diaries, and correspondence was vastly more complicated than that among the books. I groaned in spirit, loosened my tie slightly, and stood up, knowing that if I did not stretch at least occasionally, my joints would stiffen and I would have to be helped to my feet—and once I got involved in the labyrinth of Mrs. Stapleton’s papers, I would very likely forget to move at all.

I paced back and forth in the narrow aisle of clear space, which brought me face to face with the old vanity at the end of each circuit. After the third or fourth time, I realized that I was avoiding my reflection and stopped, puzzled. It is true that I am homely and do not care to spend hours admiring myself in all convenient reflective surfaces, but I am not the Elephant Man or the Hunchback of Nôtre Dame, to shun my reflection as abhorrent and monstrous.

I looked at the mirror. It was dusty, of course, and the glass was old and wavery. It was not a noticeably nice vanity—not a good example of any school of furniture and a little spindly for my taste—but it was not loathsome, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with the mirror . . . except that there was. There was something about the way the room was reflected which set my teeth on edge. I realized I was staring at my reflection and had to make a conscious effort to look away from the mirror, as if I were pulling a piece of iron away from a magnet.

Do
try
to control your imagination, Mr. Booth, said the voice of one of my prep-school teachers, long dead, in my mind. I shook myself away from contemplation of the vanity, sat down again, and addressed myself to the task of creating order among Mrs. Stapleton’s papers.

I began by sorting into categories: correspondence, manuscripts, diaries (which were at least easily identifiable by virtue of being in bound volumes). I was working on the chronology of the letters when Mr. Lucent waltzed in.

“You’re late,” I said without looking up.

“Yes, I know.
So
sorry. I was just on the way out the door when—”

“Don’t bother.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t bother. I’m not interested in your excuses.”

“Are you all right, Mr. Booth? You don’t—” Then his voice sharpened. “What are you doing?”

“Your job,” I said, securing together, with a paper-clip from my vest pocket, the three pages of a letter from the novelist Clemence Bradstreet.

“You have no right.”

I stood up to face him. “I had no assurance that you would make an appearance today, and if you recall, we promised the Stapleton heirs not to take more than a week. What else was I supposed to do?”

Mr. Lucent had gone beet-red with indignation. “Let me remind you, Mr. Booth, that you are
not
my superior and you have
no
right to tell me how to do my job.”

“Someone ought to.”

“Well, it’s not going to be you, you pinch-faced stick!”

A voice said mildly from the doorway, “Excuse me.”

Mr. Lucent and I whipped around like stags at bay, and the oppressive, resentful anger in the room shattered into sticky fragments like a dropped egg.

It was Martin Stapleton, Mildred Truelove Stapleton’s principal heir and only son. He was a quiet, decisive man, far gentler and more thoughtful than his sisters. “Is anything wrong?”

Mr. Lucent and I looked at each other. “No,” Mr. Lucent said doubtfully. “We were just . . . ” And then he trailed off, clearly no more certain of what had just happened than I was.

I made a desperate effort to pull myself together. “It’s the, er, the heat. Can we do something for you, Mr. Stapleton?”

“Shoe’s on the other foot. I was just looking in to see if there was anything you needed.”

“No, thank you,” I said.

“We’re quite all right,” chimed in Mr. Lucent.

“Although,” I said because I did not want Mr. Stapleton to think we were getting rid of him in order to continue our quarrel in peace, “there was one thing . . . I noticed, I was wondering, er . . . that is, can you tell me who Georgiana Truelove was?”

“Mother’s younger sister. She died when they were girls. Why?”

“Oh, these books,” I said and waved at them. “They were hers.”

“Ah,” he said. “So was this room. Mother disliked it very deeply, and I am not sure I care for it myself. In any event, if you need anything, just let one of us know. We should be around most of the day.”

He left.

Mr. Lucent and I stared at each other in dismal, appalled silence.

Finally, I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

“No, honestly, I don’t know what got
into
me. You’re far more qualified than I am any day of the week.”