Wild Heart

Published by the Penguin Group

First published by Topaz, an imprint of Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.

First Printing, January, 1997

10 98765432 1

Copyright © Patricia Gaffney, 1997 All rights reserved

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

Printed in the United States of America

For the amazing Audrey LaFehr

Chapter 1

Sunfall. Shadows moving slow across the bar on the window. Wooden bar. The guard nailed it there, the day after he tried to escape.

Escape. Run fast and quiet, like a wolf. Run home.

The professor said he must think in words, not pictures. Sunfall, wolf, home. Bar.

Room. This was his room. The square in the wall was a painting. At first it looked like nothing to him, colors jumping, lines twisting in front of his eyes. But now he could make it hold still. It was people eating food outside on the grass. There were trees, and a white thing on the ground covered with apples and plates and things he didn't have names for. All the people looked happy and safe. He stared at the painting, because there was nothing else in his room to look at. He liked the yellow-haired lady and the little boy. The boy had his head on the lady's legs, and she was resting herself against a tree, smiling with her mouth closed, and her body curved like an S.

He knew
S
from his book. He knew all the letters. But most of the words made no sense to him now.
While visiting in your host's drawing room, do not shift your feet, drum your fingers, or play with tassels or knobs. Cultivate repose.

The sound of laughter came into his room on the breeze. A man's laughter, then a woman's under it, softer. What was the word he had used for
laugh
before he had learned it again? He'd already forgotten. It wasn't a word,
anyway; it was a thought in his head, not spoken. And smells and sounds and tastes—they all had words that went with them, and Dr. Winter wanted him to say them out loud.

But he would be one of them if he talked out loud. He would be a man.

The wind died. He smelled the odor of dead meat from the plate the guard, O'Fallon, had left on his table. "This is beef," Professor Winter said. "You must eat it like this, cooked." Now he could take a little bit and not get sick, but it still tasted like ashes, like dirt. He had stopped eating insects, even when no one was looking. But nothing could make him eat those yellow sticks or those dark green stalks, "vegetables," hot and still smoking, soft and slimy and disgusting. His stomach rolled at the thought.

Quiet now. Before, a sound had come from the big house, and he knew what it was but he couldn't capture the word. M. Like water flowing through his head, through his blood. He had jumped up and walked from the door to the window fast, back and forth, holding his ears to keep the noise out at first, but then letting it in as his fear went away. The sound tickled his chest and made him feel crazy, even though it was beautiful. What was it? M.

Night coming. Birds going to sleep. He could smell the water, heavy and dark. "The lake," Professor Winter called it. Not like the water at home, which was bright and light and full of fish to eat. At home, the days would be getting longer. Leaves would be making the forest dark, and the birds would be looking for partners. Food would be easy to find, and he would get fat and lie on a hill with the old wolf, watching the sun slide down the sky.

A memory floated just out of reach, something about the grass, the smell of it now, just cut. "New-mown grass." How did he know that saying? Something old, old, before the boat in the water, something he didn't even know he knew. He closed his eyes to breathe in the sweet green smell of the grass, stalky and raw—and when he
opened his eyes, a white angel was floating toward him through the trees, filling the night with her soft laughter.

* * * * *

"Come for a walk with me, Sydney."

Sydney Darrow looked up from the cards in her hand, avoiding her brother's eye. Just last night Philip had pointed out to her, "Charles is always ordering you around, Syd. Why do you put up with it?"

"Come, Sydney. While the sun's going down over the lake. Shall we?"

There,
she thought,
he asked me, he didn't order me.
"You don't mind, do you?" She smiled at Sam, her other brother. "You've already won all my money, plus a note for all the money I'll ever have for the rest of my life."

Sam grinned in triumph, showing the hole where his last baby tooth used to be. "I beat you, Sydney," he crowed, "I won and you lost."

"Don't gloat, Samuel," Aunt Estelle reproved from her terrace chair a good thirty feet away. "It's vulgar."

Sydney, Philip, and Sam made identical silent grimaces at each other, a family gesture that meant,
How could she
possibly
have heard that?

Sydney stood, and Charles put his hand on the small of her back, pressing firmly to get her going. "I'll play Flinch with you when we come back," she promised Sam over her shoulder.

"Dinner is in twenty minutes," Aunt Estelle said dampeningly, not looking up from her needlepoint. She didn't have to; she had eyes not only in the back but also the sides of her head. "You and Mr. West won't want to be late."

Out of sight of the house, presumably out of earshot, Sydney moaned, "Lord, she's
still
chaperoning me. She did it all over Europe."

"Ha. And did you need chaperoning?"

She slipped her hand through Charles's arm, pleased to think he might be jealous. "Oh my, yes, the men were everywhere, it was hard to walk in a straight line. In Rome we had to take hansoms, because the sidewalks were littered with the bodies of all my conquests." Finally he laughed, realizing she was teasing; sometimes her jokes were lost on Charles. "Aunt Estelle even chaperones me in church, you know. You'd think I was eighteen years old, innocent as a maid." Not a twenty-three-year-old widow, with so little interest in the attentions of the opposite sex it was laughable.

"I'm glad you're back, Sydney. I missed you."

"That's nice." She smiled, patting his arm.

"You seem happier." He put his head back and stared at her through the lower half of his bifocals. "Not quite so sad."

"Oh, we had a wonderful trip. Just what the doctor ordered."

Just what Aunt Estelle had ordered, anyway. "A year is long enough for a young woman to mourn a loved one," she'd decreed three months ago. "Continued moping beyond that point is not only unhealthy, it's unseemly."

Their trip, designed to cheer Sydney up whether she wanted to be or not, had been as pleasant as possible, considering that her aunt treated her at all times like an incompetent child. It had taken her mind off Spencer, though, and that had been the point. And now it was good to be home. She'd missed Sam terribly, and Philip. And Papa.

They had come to the bottom of the lawn. Through the trees that bordered their strip of beach, the setting sun dazzled on the smooth blue of Lake Michigan, sail-dotted and serene, a scene as old as her earliest memories. With new eyes, she regarded the green-trimmed, white clapboard-sided guest house on the far side of the path. "So that's where your 'lost man' lives."

Charles said, "Yes," in a curiously hushed voice.

"My father says he'll make your fortune."

He nodded slowly, eyes slitted, gaze still focused intently on the small, one-story bungalow. Then he came out of his trance to chuckle self-consciously. "Not
my
fortune. I'm only your father's assistant."

Sydney knew false self-deprecation when she heard it.

"Yes, but if this man turns out to be as important as Father hopes, I should think you'd both be quite famous one day. A couple of American Darwins."

Charles turned a telltale pink, and she knew she'd struck a chord even though he made scoffing sounds. He tried to hide his secret hopes, but they were always there, guiding his life, defining him. In that way, he wasn't like Papa. For all his other flaws, her father had never been ruled by ambition; his passion for anthropology was pure and devoted, practically a religious vocation. Superfluous things—family, for instance; growing children—had never been able to compete with it.

They stepped off the path, and Sydney sat down on an iron bench under the trees, making room for Charles to sit beside her. "Sam said he saw the lost man walking along the shore yesterday with his jailer."

"His what? Oh, you mean O'Fallon. He used to be a custodian at the university; now he keeps a watch on our man."

"Does he need a keeper? Is he dangerous?" She didn't believe he could be; surely Papa wouldn't have brought him home if he were.

"He was aggressive in the beginning, at times. But he's never been physically violent toward people. Only things—his cage, his clothing."

"His
cage!"

Charles nodded matter-of-factly. "They kept him in a sort of cage at first. Had to—he was wild; they didn't know what he might do. But he's settled down since then. In fact, if anything," he added, frowning, "it's his listless-ness that's threatening our experiments now. You can't get much data from a completely passive subject. All he does that you could label aggressive nowadays is try to escape." He pointed. "Three nights ago he tried to climb out that window."

Sydney noticed the wooden bar splitting the smallish window in two, a grim addition to the pretty white house. "How old is he?" she asked faintly.

"Since he doesn't speak, we can't be sure. In his twenties, we think."

"He doesn't talk? Not at all? Even though you've had him in—in captivity for three months?" How horrid, she thought, to be speaking of this man as if he were a zoo animal.

Charles lifted a professorial index finger. "The anthropology department had him for three months," he corrected. "I—that is, your father and I—have had him to ourselves for less than a week."

"And now you've got him for the whole summer. To experiment on. Do you think you can teach him to talk?"

"Possibly. But of course, that won't be our focus."

"Oh, that's right. You're going to use him to find out if we humans are naturally good or naturally vicious."

He frowned; he preferred his anthropological jargon. "Your father and I are biological ethicists. The man in that cottage is as close to the state of raw, uncivilized nature as a human subject can get and still be scientifically useful. He's unique; there hasn't been a find like him in almost a century."

Sydney glanced past Charles's shoulder at the barred window, arrested for a second by what she had thought was a movement. But the black glass was blank; she must have seen the reflection of a tree branch bowing in the breeze.

She looked away, pensive. What would it be like to live without human society for the first twenty years or so of your life? Could you ever be a man after that, or would you be biologically predestined to live like an animal until you died, forever incapable of being "civilized"? It was an intriguing question, and one she could easily imagine obsessing her father.

"I feel sorry for him," she said quietly. "You call him a 'find'—not even a man. It might've been better if he'd never been found."

Charles only smiled.

"Philip told me he was wounded when he first came to the university, that he'd been shot."

"Yes, it was a freakish thing. A group from the Audubon Society was on expedition in Canada to photograph the winter birds. Every day they'd come back to camp to find that their food supplies had been raided. The footprints in the snow confused them—as you can imagine— so they decided it was a bear."

"Naturally."

"One night one of the birdwatchers heard something and shot at it, blind. The thing escaped, but the next day they followed its bloody trail to a cave. Imagine their surprise." Charles permitted himself a small smile. "They couldn't believe their eyes—it was a man, and he was half dead from blood loss. It took two weeks to get him to Chicago, and another two before they knew he wouldn't die."

"Welcome to the civilized world," Sydney murmured, staring again at the black window.

The sun had set, leaving behind long streamers of pinkish cloud. A gust of wind off the lake made her pull her shawl closer. "I guess we'd better go up."

"Wait." Charles touched her elbow to keep her from rising. "There's something I have to tell you." But after that, he hesitated. He looked very serious.

"What is it, Charles?"

"Your father's asked me to live with you."

She laughed. "I beg your pardon?"

"Because of the convenience. Our work with the Ontario Man will be intensive, because our time frame is so brief. We'll be—"

"The what? The Ontario Man?"

"We call him that for lack of anything better. They found him somewhere above Echo Bay."

"I thought he was called the 'lost man.' "

He sniffed. "That's what the newspapers named him— romantic drivel. The birdwatchers started it, claiming he kept saying 'lost' when he was delirious."

"But if he can't talk—"

"Exactly. Just feverish mumbling on his part, and wishful thinking on theirs." He shook his head impatiently.

"Anyway, Sydney, Dr. Winter has kindly suggested that I move into the house. Just for the summer. We'll be working very closely together," he said importantly, "so it makes sense to eliminate as much wasted time as possible. Coming out here every day on the train-—it's just easier if I'm permanently on the premises, don't you see?"