House of Masques (7 page)

“Railroad travel?” they asked almost in unison.

“Yes. I point out that the velocity with which a train moves through the air is very refreshing where the run is for some miles. The vibratory, or rather oscillatory motion communicated to the human frame is very different from the swinging and jolting motions of the stagecoach, and is productive of more salutary effects. It equalizes the circulation, promotes digestion, tranquilizes the nerves, and often causes sound sleep during the succeeding night. In my humble opinion, the railroad bids fair to be a powerful remedial agent for many ailments to which metropolitan inhabitants are subject.”

Doctor Gunn was standing by the door with the open-mouthed Mrs. Lewis to one side. Did Kathleen see him wink at her? No, she must be mistaken. He held his hat aloft and bowed and was gone.

“My,” Mrs. Lewis said, “he seems a very learned gentleman. I'll make sure his advice is followed.”

“He reminds me of someone,” Kathleen said. “A picture in a book I once read, I think. An author, not a doctor, though. Someone else. I can't remember.”

Mrs. Lewis held the curtain aside and again Kathleen could see the giant elm. “Ah, poor Mr. Charles,” Mrs. Lewis said, shaking her head. “Walking across the lawn, with your aunt, hands behind his back, head down, like a great sadness is upon him. If only I could help. If only he'd let me.”

Mrs. Lewis's curls were like those of a young girl, Kathleen thought, yet when she turned from the window the harsh light of midday exposed the folds and wrinkles in her neck and the web of lines around her eyes. The contrast between the hair and the face made her seem even older than she was.

“I'm sorry,” Kathleen said, not sure whether she referred to the Captain or to Mrs. Lewis herself.

“Sorry? Being sorry does no good. There is evil in this house where evil never existed before. Nothing goes as it should anymore. Is there a gypsy curse on all of us?” She shook her head. “I don't know. I don't know.”

Mrs. Lewis walked to the door and looked back at Kathleen who drew the covers higher about her neck. Did she see distress in Mrs. Lewis's face? Or was hatred there as well?

“Yes, a curse is on this house,” Mrs. Lewis said. She opened the door, and as she left she muttered as though to herself, but loud enough for Kathleen to hear. “And that curse,” she added, “was what brought you among us.”

Chapter Seven

Kathleen survived Dr. Gunn's treatment for inflammation of the lungs.

After inhaling the steaming vapor and drinking hot tea, she returned to bed to lie between two rows of hot bricks wrapped in cloth. She perspired. She gasped for air. She wished she had never seen the doctor nor listened to his advice. But then, after a supper of chicken broth, crackers, and warm milk, Clarissa removed the bricks and Kathleen felt a warm glow envelop her.

She had been purged. Physically the alien substances had drained from her body. Emotionally she found herself ready to begin anew. Her fears and uncertainties of the last few days seemed to have washed away. As she waited for sleep to come she no longer feared, as she had for the last three nights, a recurrence of her dream of death.

“I'm all right today,” she announced to Clarissa on Friday morning. Her confidence of the night before remained; she was eager to discover what the day would offer. She had not dreamed, the air was still cool, and she had a strange new world to explore.
I must wear exactly the right dress
, she thought, without knowing why the selection was so important.

She examined her new dresses hanging in the wardrobe, the muslin, the dimity, the silk, considered and rejected each in turn before she chose the India lawn, a soft gray with yellow lace edging the square neckline and the long sleeves. Standing before the mirror, she ran her hands down her sides and adjusted the narrow black sash. She smiled at the reflection of her dark hair and pale complexion.

“Captain Worthington asked after you,” Clarissa said as they left the bedroom. Going down the stairs, Kathleen hummed a gay tune. The plight of the unfortunate Charley Ross, supposed victim of wandering gypsies, was forgotten.

“Delightful,” the Captain said when he found them on the side porch after breakfast. “You both look delightful.” His face was somber and his brown eyes seemed tired. “Come with me, Miss Stuart, let me show you the Estate.” Kathleen nodded while admiring the Captain's town clothes—the gray jacket, matching trousers, and black boots.

He paused beside Clarissa. “Won't you come, too?” he asked.

“Thank you, no,” Clarissa said without looking up from the knitting in her lap. “I must go on with my work.”

Kathleen thought she saw the Captain's mouth tighten as he looked down at Clarissa, but he offered Kathleen his arm without comment. They crossed the lawn and followed a path through the trees. “Your aunt suggested I show you the grounds first, then the house,” he said.

She stopped. Clarissa again. The Captain looked at her with surprise. “Is something the matter?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

She felt as she had long before when she waited with high expectations for her father to take her on a promised picnic to the walnut grove, only to find him unable to go because of his condition.
His condition? Am I still a child
, she asked herself,
to need these evasions? He had had too much to drink. Face the fact. My father was drunk. At least I can be truthful with myself.

“I'm sorry,” she said to Captain Worthington as she walked on. “I'm fine just daydreaming.” The Captain led the way now, for shrubs crowded in on the path from both sides. When he turned to make sure she followed, he seemed preoccupied and only perfunctorily polite.

Am I being honest about my feelings toward the Captain?
she wondered.
Am I deceiving myself in this, too?

They climbed the steps of the gazebo to an upper deck where Kathleen placed both hands on the railing and looked over the valley. Below her the river narrowed as it curled northward, reminding her of a jester's cap. At the spot where the cap's bell would have been the river disappeared in the haze. To her right Storm King Mountain rose in terrace-like formations, heavily wooded except for the outcropping of rock at the summit. The trees near the crest were scraggly and wind-bent.

As they stood side by side without speaking, Kathleen found her thoughts coming back time and again to the Captain.
I know I am jealous of Clarissa
, she told herself.
I detest this man for what he did, while I resent the attentions he pays another woman. Am I warped in some way? How can I have both feelings at the same time?

On the way back to the house the Captain took her along a different trail which twisted and turned down a short, steep hill. Halfway to the bottom an unshaven man with a rifle under his arm stepped aside to let them pass. One of the guards, she supposed. She saw Charles nod and look quickly away.

The path crossed a gully to a field in which countless stumps were all that remained of what must have been a thick woods. Two men walked among the stumps, carrying water buckets suspended from yokes over their shoulders.

“I've ended lumbering on our land,” the Captain said. “We're replanting with seedlings from the woods.” He kicked a severed root buried in the earth and she watched dust puff into the air. “We have to bring water in or they'll die. I've had enough of death.”

They left the path and climbed a hill where the pine needles made the forest floor feel soft beneath her feet. Bushes barred the way until the Captain held the branches to one side and Kathleen stepped through to find herself but a few feet from the Worthington house. She held her hand to her mouth, startled, the three stories of the mansion looming over her, the chimneys on the outside of the walls leading her eyes up and up, past the multitude of windows, up to the steep-pitched roofs where pointed lightning rods thrust into azure sky.

“We've never used the whole house,” he said, coming to her side. “My grandfather added rooms and towers and turrets, year after year, for no apparent reason except to build. To create. I never knew him, he was killed before I was born, and I used to think him foolish, one of the
nouveaux riches
. The kind of man who likes a metal deer on the front lawn. Now I'm not sure. In a way I'd like to leave behind more than I receive, leave the Estate better than I found it.” He motioned back along the way they had come. “Like planting the trees,” he said.

They walked past the kitchen with its fresh bread smells to the side yard where two upstairs maids used looped metal beaters to send dust rising from a rug hanging over a clothesline.

“You have so many servants,” Kathleen said.

“I know. Five years ago my father left Blasingame in charge. His solution to every problem is to hire more people. We have servants, servants, and more servants. What can I do?”

“You might let some of them go.”

“I couldn't. My father makes those decisions.” Kathleen held her tongue.

“At least they'll be busy this weekend,” he told her. “See where the stone balustrade makes a half-circle behind the house? Those French windows open from the ballroom where we'll have more than a hundred guests at the masquerade tomorrow night. They're coming from all over the State, from New York City, Albany and Poughkeepsie. A few cadets from the summer encampment at the Point. I had to go to Newburgh to hire the musicians.” He spoke rapidly, and for the first time an excitement entered his voice. She wondered if he was speaking to her or thinking aloud. “I'll make this house come alive, perhaps for the last time for me and perhaps only for one night. But alive.”

They entered the house and passed curtsying maids on long curving stairs, walked down corridors lined with portraits, explored dusty attics piled haphazardly with trunks and boxes filled with clothes and toys from long ago. A steep stairway descended into the old section of the house. The Captain pointed to the beams in an ill-lighted bedroom. “My great-grandfather built this himself at the turn of the century,” he told her. The past must have been a narrow, rough-hewn place, Kathleen thought.

He showed her the library last. A young girl finished flicking a feather duster over the books and hurried from the room. “When I was young,” the Captain said, “this room was my favorite. If there's a secret passage anywhere in the house, I think it must be here. But no matter how I searched, I never found one.”

“I didn't know you grew up on the Estate.”

“I wasn't born here. My parents moved from the West when I was five and I lived in this house for ten years. The happiest years of my life.” He leaned with his back against a table while his hand idly spun a globe. She remembered the globe at Gleneden.
What is Josiah doing now?
she wondered.
When will I see him again?

“I guess I came back here last winter because of the way I felt when I was a boy living in this house,” he went on. “To try to recapture the feeling I had then.” He stopped the globe with a slap of his hand. “I found you can't.” He turned to her. “I'm sorry,” he said. “Here, take a novel with you, I must see to the horses.” He handed her
The Curse of Clifton
and
Little Women.

Kathleen climbed the back stairs. At the top she opened the door, expecting to find the hall to her bedroom, but after going several steps she stopped, realizing she was in a sewing room instead, a room so small it was almost filled by a frame upon which stretched a partially completed patchwork quilt. A faint scent of lavender filled the air.

“Come in, child.” A woman's voice from near the one small window. The room still hoarded the shadows of night and Kathleen was forced to look closely before she found a shadow blacker than the rest. As her eyes accustomed themselves to the dark, the shadow became an old woman in a rocking chair, a chair which moved to and fro so slowly that the motion was more a suggestion than a fact.

“I'm so sorry,” Kathleen said, backing toward the door. “I'm afraid I was wool-gathering. Can you tell me the way to the main hall?”

“The main hall?” The blank tone told Kathleen she might as well have asked the route to Zanzibar. “My eyes get tired,” the old woman said with a nod in the direction of the quilt. “Yours will too when you're as old as I am. I was eighty-four last May. When I weary of sewing I sit by my window. Come here beside me.” Her voice had become sharp, imperious. Kathleen maneuvered around the frame to stand by the rocker.

“Look,” the old woman nodded to the window. “See, down there, the kitchen and the whole yard on this side of the house. And to the west.” Kathleen saw the driveway disappearing into the woods. Beyond the cluster of trees ribbons of smoke rose from the village to merge with the overcast.

“Yes, yes, you have a pleasant view,” Kathleen said impatiently.

“I don't see many folks these days,” the woman told her. “Not since Becky married last summer and moved to Connecticut. I hope someone cares more about you when you're eighty-four. Did you know that's how old I was last May? On the twelfth. A body doesn't much feel like gallivanting about when it's my age.”

“I really must go,” Kathleen said.

“Just a few minutes? For old Grandma Ehrman?” Her voice was querulous. “Push them clothes aside and sit down. Always something to mend. And I must finish the quilt. Been too long on that quilt. I have so much to do.”

Kathleen glanced to the door with the vain hope of rescue. Finding none, she resigned herself to spend a few minutes making the best of Grandma Ehrman. She moved the clothes to the floor so she could sit on the edge of the chair.

“In all my life I've never traveled more than ten miles from Cornwall,” Mrs. Ehrman said. “Can you imagine, no further than ten miles in eighty-four years?” She paused. “Except once.” The old woman leaned toward Kathleen, her voice quick and quavering. “Did they tell you? About my trip?”

“No, not a word.”

The old woman leaned back. “They get tired of listening to me. ‘Old Grandma Ehrman at it again,' they say. Think I'm simple because I'm old. Did you know I was…yes, I told you. Do I seem like someone who's simple?” Kathleen shook her head. The room was lighter now, and she saw that the old woman had thin white hair and a face creased like an old letter which had been folded and refolded many times.

“When the War began,” Mrs. Ehrman said in a monotonous, high-pitched voice, “my grandson Stephen, my only grandson, who was just nineteen, joined the Union Army. Wanted to fight, he did. Left his father, Ephraim, and his father's wife Becky, and me to run the farm. Near the forest we lived, not two miles from here. Ephraim worked harder than ever, he was used to work, had worked hard all his life, but he was older and it told on him, yet for a time we got along all right.”

The old woman pulled a shawl fringed with tassels from her shoulders, held it in her lap, fingers kneading the material as she talked. “Then in '64, in March, the fourth year of the War, Ephraim went hunting rabbits in the Black Rock Forest. He'd been going into the Forest since he was a boy. Only this day he left at six in the morning and he didn't come back. We waited, Becky and me, all day, expecting him any minute, and dark came and then, as the time went by, the worry came creeping in on us like the night mist from the bogs.”

“Did he come back? What happened?” Kathleen held the edges of her chair with her hands.

“We never knew. The men from the village searched and found nothing. Some folks said he'd just left like Floyd Potter did the year before, but I never credited the idea. Weeks passed, then months, then years. Last October two boys hiked into the Forest and found a skeleton near one of the ponds. Sitting against a huge black rock with the rusted rifle across him. Ephraim it was.”

“How horrible,” Kathleen said. She grimaced with distaste. “And you were left alone with your daughter-in-law.”

“Becky could do a lot and me some. Yet we couldn't manage, not by half. What with the War we couldn't get help. So I wrote the letter, packed my bag and took the train, the first time in my life I'd set foot in one. And the last. Faster than the wind, it was. I'd never been more than ten miles from Cornwall before.”