The Magician's Lie (7 page)

There was only one thing I needed to do before leaving. I dashed across the grass toward the barn, shoving open the huge door and not, as I'd been warned a thousand times to do, sliding it shut behind me. I wanted to throw open the doors of every stall, sending our whole crew of mares, foals, and stallions sprinting out into the night, but the thought of my mother stopped me. If all the horses were gone, it would be too obvious what I'd done. Silas's wrath would come down on her. Instead, I walked directly to the stall of the mare I'd seen Ray attack. I could free one horse, at least. I could even ride to freedom on her back, if she let me.

I crouched down to open the door, but I hadn't foreseen her eagerness to break free, and I'd no sooner undone the latch than she charged the door, knocking me back. I fell to the ground, my head striking the floorboards with a thud, and then the horse was on me. I rolled, almost by instinct, hoping to shield my head. Hooves were all around, like thunder in my ears. I could only curl myself as small as I could and pray for luck. It was all over in a few moments. I had a distant awareness of retreating hoof beats, and on some level, that pleased me, but I was afraid to move and afraid to open my eyes. My body was frozen in shock, the blood so cold in my veins that I couldn't tell at first whether I'd been injured. Had I ruined my chance at escape?

As best I could, I stretched my body out to test its state, and a searing pain in my hand woke me from my trance. I held the hand out to look at it. It was clear that the outer two fingers had been caught under the horse's hoof, broken and possibly crushed, down to the first joint of each. At least it was my hand and not my foot, I told myself. I could still walk. And I didn't have time to indulge the pain. I had to get moving. So I sprinted north through the back field, skirting the edge of the neighbors' land. I rejoined the road on the other side of town, where there was no one to ask questions.

Where could I go? Not back to my grandparents' house, which was an unknown distance in an unknown direction. I doubted they would welcome me, child of an unknown lecher and a known cheat with whom they had explicitly cut all ties. I knew almost nothing else of the world, only stories, nothing real. I only knew one place to go, unsuited as it was, and so I went there. It took much longer to go on foot, but at least I had two strong legs under me this time.

I walked with my aching hand raised to keep it from filling with blood, a solitary young woman on a long road, one hand in the air as if she had the answer to a question.

Janesville, 1905

Half past one o'clock

“If I could, I'd show you what that looked like,” she says and twists her hands so the cuffs rattle against the wood of the chair.

“If I wanted to, I'm sure I could picture it,” he remarks dryly. She doesn't need to remind him that her hands are trapped. But the sound prompts him to circle behind her and examine her hands again. “Which hand was it?” he asks.

“The right.”

He kneels behind her so he can see clearly and leans in as close as he dares. The cut on her wrist stands out, although it seems less severe than he first thought. The fingers on both hands look straight and unblemished.

“This hand doesn't look like it's ever been broken.”

“It was a long time ago, officer,” she says.

He retrieves his chair and sits down across from her again. He leaves plenty of room between them, but he wants to be on her level. He wants to look at her; not up, not down, just at. Into those blue-and-brown fairy eyes.

“What year did you say?”

“I didn't say, I don't think. But it was 1895. Ten years ago.”

“And you were how old?”

“Fourteen. I was born in the summer. When were you born, officer?”

“Winter,” he says.

“And how old are you?”

“I'm not making conversation when I ask you these things,” he says, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “I'm trying to get the facts. What few facts there are in this story of yours.”

“And what's your opinion?” She cocks her head.

“Of your story?”

“Yes.”

“I think it's not true.”

“Well, it is true,” she says, sounding insulted.

“I think your story isn't true, and I think you're a murderer, and I think if someone put a knife in your hand, you'd stab me without a moment's pause.”

Her breath catches in her throat. He hears it, clear as anything. He knows what it means: weakness. So he presses.

He says, “You've stabbed someone, but you didn't like it.”

She doesn't say anything at first. When she speaks, her voice is soft and hesitant. “It's not a thing a person can like.”

“Some people do,” he says, trying to sound sympathetic.

“Those people are monsters,” she says. “I'm not.”

“I know you're not.” He'll flatter her, if that's what she wants. “You're sensitive and smart and you've had terrible things done to you, so I don't blame you for striking back.”

She eyes him, this time out of the all-blue eye, and says, “Oh, officer. Don't be obvious.”

His optimism disappears. He stands up and turns his back so she can't see his face. It isn't fair. He has all the power and none of it. The ceiling seems lower than it did an hour before, the room smaller, though he knows that's not possible. So much is riding on this night. He can't afford to lose control.

She breaks into his reverie, saying, “Now I want to ask you a question. When you didn't answer the telephone. Is it because you're not a police officer?”

“What?”

“Well, you could be an impostor. Maybe that's why you brought me here instead of taking me to the authorities in Waterloo. People do it, you know. They pretend.”

He walks over to his desk and grabs the nameplate, which he turns around to face her. “Officer Virgil Holt.”

“I don't doubt there is one. I just doubt you're him.”

He bristles. “You're not convinced by the gun?”

“The gun is a detail. Details can be misleading.”

“And the whole station?” He gestures at the room and its contents. A real desk, real walls, two real people. “Is the station a detail?”

“I never said it wouldn't take some doing.”

He says nothing. Let her wonder, he tells himself.

In silence, he kneels at her feet to check the cuffs around her ankles. He wishes he had more than five pairs of cuffs. It's not logical. If she knows how to escape from one pair, she knows how to escape, period. But still, six would be better. Or eight. Or ten. At least she can't enchant him. If she could, she would have done it already. Wouldn't she?

“It's interesting,” she says, raising her chin. “I still don't think you understand. Escapists use different equipment altogether. They'd have chains and not just the cuffs. Ropes too. A straitjacket. You think I'm Houdini?”

“Houdini is a genius,” says Holt. “And you're only a murderer.”

“Murderer? Not murderess? You deny me the badge of my sex.”

He gets an idea and grabs the heavy, glittering fabric of her stage dress at the hem. He folds it back on itself, exposing her legs fully several inches above the knee.

“Heavens! So forward!” she says, as if to make light, but there is a brittle, tense note in her voice.

At that moment, he smells her, the true her, underneath the wet silk and salt. She smells like burnt orange peel, is it? Or lime? Or both? He's tempted to lean closer but braces himself, reins himself in. He is a married man and an officer of the law.

“Which leg did you say you broke?”

“Did I say?” she asks. “It was the left.”

He inspects the left leg closely through the sheer stocking that veils it. An absolutely perfect leg. Pristine.

She goes on, “If a break heals cleanly, there's nothing to see.”

His hands come up to her knee as if of their own accord, and he runs them both down the sides of her calf. It is warm and smooth. Oranges, she smells like oranges. He exhales and feels her body stiffen under his touch.

Her voice even more tense, she says, “You should know that, and I suspect you do.”

Suddenly he realizes what's making her nervous. Him. He immediately lets the heavy beaded hem of her dress drop back into place, covering her legs, and settles back on his heels. “You don't have to be afraid of me. Not that way. I am married.”

She shrugs her shoulders as much as she can, given her restraints. “That wouldn't stop a lot of men.”

“It stops me.”

“Your wife is lucky she has you.”

“Your experience with marriage isn't as good, it seems.”

“No. I've never been happily married. What's your lovely wife's name, Virgil?”

“Does it matter?”

“I'm telling you everything about me. I told you where I came from and the name I was born with. I told you everything that happened to me, even the worst things. I told you—” Her voice catches but she plunges ahead. “I told you what Ray did. Tried to do. Every detail of my life, no matter how small, is open to you. I think you can tell me your wife's name.”

He swallows hard and says, “Her name is Iris.”

“Thank you.”

He doesn't know what to say after that. He knows he's given something up, but he doesn't see how it could do her any good to know it. His wife's name isn't a pass code. It isn't going to get her anywhere.

“Now, let's discuss the night of the crime,” he says. “If you didn't commit the murder, where were you? You cut the man in the box in half with an ax, you finished out the show, and then—what?”

She gapes at him.

He explains, “What came after is what I mean. Tell me that.”

In a voice of wonder, she says, “I don't believe it. You were there.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I use a saw. Always. I only used an ax once, and that was last night, in Waterloo.”

He's in trouble now. “Maybe I misspoke. Or misremembered. It was something sharp is all.”

“No. No, I don't think so.” She leans forward in her seat as far as she can, visibly excited. Life comes back to her face, color to her cheeks. “You were in Waterloo, to see my show, and you were heading north from there the same as I was, and that's what brought you to that restaurant. It's all so clear.”

Her air of triumph is irritating. It shouldn't matter that he was there, but he feels like it gives her some kind of power over him, to know that he's seen her in her element. Even now, she seems less a prisoner than before.

“I didn't go there to see your ridiculous
show
,” he spits.

“So why were you there?”

“Visiting a doctor.”

“Why? Because you were shot?”

Shock washes over him, through him. “How—how did you know that?”

“Lucky guess,” she says with a hint of a smile. “The stiffness I asked you about. It's partly in your legs, but not entirely. You carry it in your whole body—it has something to do with your back. Lower back, I think. Like you're protecting it. And you're a police officer, so guns are your business.”

She's gotten close enough to the truth on her own that he doesn't see the point of hiding the rest of it. “And so it was.”

“Who shot you?”

“I interrupted a robbery at the bank. Three months back.” He doesn't want to relive it. He tells the story as if it happened to someone else. “Got the man to lay down his weapon and the money. Didn't see his accomplice, who shot me from behind. Twice.”

“But you survived. That's close to a miracle.”

He lets himself sit, lowering his body onto the desk facing her, leaning forward. “Is it? They got the one in my leg but the one in my back is still there. Next to the spine. The doctor in Waterloo is the best for miles around. I wanted him to take it out. He said it was too risky. Too close to the nerve. If he goes after it, there's a good chance of paralyzing me, so he won't operate. Flat out refused.”

“It still seems like a happy ending. Isn't it? Aren't you better off alive with a bullet in your back than dead, with or without one?”

“You'd think so, but no,” he says grimly. “The human body isn't like a block of ice or wood, holding steady. Over days or weeks or years, the bullet could move. If it moves too far toward my spine, I'll lose the use of my legs. Or if it migrates—that's the word he used—toward a major organ, I could bleed to death from the inside.”

“Oh,” she breathes.

She sounds sincere. She sounds like she pities him. It brings him up short for a moment. Her pity for him is wrong, so wrong, when he is the one with the gun and the cuffs and the power to put her on the gallows, and she is alone and weak and handcuffed, still, to a chair. He doesn't want to be pitied. He wants to be whole.

“That's my story,” he says. “Now tell me yours. Tell me what comes next. How did you turn from a girl who liked to dance into a living scandal onstage every night, cutting grown men in pieces?”

“I'm getting to that,” she says.

He says, “I'm listening.”

It's only after she begins her story again, her voice as smooth and warm as a pillow, that his eyes come to rest on her throat. And he notices, with some surprise, that the bruise that piqued his curiosity earlier is gone, as if it had never been there at all.

1895

Lady to Tiger

At night I went. And along the way, for the first time in a long time, I thought of my father. Who had he been? What had he bequeathed me? Right now I didn't need my mother's elegance and grace. Both were useless. I needed determination and confidence. And in the absence of my father, I assigned him those qualities so they would be mine too. My mother had called him weak, but I chose not to believe what she'd said. She had been searching for a way to justify her own choices. It was the first time I realized that we all bend and shape our stories to fit our own ends. It was certainly not the last.

To say I climbed over mountains would give the wrong impression, but still, it was true. And those are different on foot than they are in a carriage. But you go over a mountain the same way you go over any road in the end. Step by careful step. As long and dark as that walk was, there was still a joy to it, because I was making my own way. No one would stop me, no one would hold me down, no one would be using me for their own ends. Whenever I thought I might fall down from exhaustion, I breathed in the sharp pine-scented air and reminded myself that whatever else I was or wasn't, I was free.

At last, the road sloping down under my weary feet and the sun a white ball of fire in the clear blue sky, I arrived at the land surrounding the Biltmore and saw the castle itself rising up against that selfsame sky like a fortress. I'd reached it. The building's pale stone walls rose so high and so steep that they took my breath away, what little breath I had remaining.

Even from half a mile away, I could see the differences from the last time I had visited. They had built more rooms onto the back, wedging a new great wide wall of stone against the others. The seams were invisible, but I knew the old shape from memory. The west wing too had shifted its shape and was finished with a graceful turret. There were more statues in the nearby courtyard, cherubs and horses and a marble Diana. I could see curtains in windows that had previously been bare. Everywhere I looked, the place was different. I was different too, of course. I avoided looking to the west, where I knew the barn must be finished by now and in use. This was a place where my life had been changed forever. I hoped it would be so again, this time for the better.

I waited for nightfall. The plan I had in mind would be easier to manage in the dark. In the meantime, I retreated deeper into the forest, hunching next to a burbling stream. I let my aching, swollen fingers trail in the cool water, wishing they would heal, and either the coldness of the stream or the power of my imagination dulled the ache until it was no longer the only thing I could think of. Something tickled at my brain—a half-formed idea that maybe the wishing really did make a difference, as I had wished my broken leg healed and my recovery did seem surprisingly quick—but I wasn't thinking entirely clearly. The bread had run out long before, and I was so hungry I felt my stomach might touch my spine.

Darkness came. I edged closer to the house, lingering where the trees were thinner, and watched the sun set behind the massive stone walls. At first, I could see light glowing from windows in every part of the house, but as the evening wore on, the glow broke into scattered spheres, lesser by the hour. Once the sky turned from dark blue to utter black, only a few small pale lights flickered in the highest and lowest windows as the servants finished the last of the evening's work and carried their candles up to bed. I watched as the final light in the final window went dark.

There was barely a sliver of moon and a speckled pattern of distant stars high above. I crossed the dark lawn until I reached the lowest, smallest door. No noise, no movement. There was only silence in the great house.

I opened the door slowly and stepped inside.

The room I entered was the laundry room, hot and dark and damp like I imagined jungle air must be. The water in the vats was still warm, but the fires were out. In the dim light from the window, there was just enough light to make out shapes and edges, and along one wall, I saw what I'd come for.

The uniforms hung there, all in a line, identical. Black and white. White and black. One after another after another. Because they were all the same, it was impossible to tell one from the next.

That was what I needed and wanted. To blend in.

Thankful for the warmth of the room, I stepped out of my dark homespun dress, moving in haste. I slipped the white blouse over my head and the jumper over the blouse. I smoothed my tangled hair as best I could and tucked it up under the cap. The water of the stream had carried off the dirt from under my fingernails, but broken fingers were not so easy to wash away, so I also pulled on a pair of clean white gloves, gritting my teeth against the pain. My own clothes I tucked into a bundle, and after exploring a warren of bins and cabinets, I found what I hoped was the safest corner, and there I squirreled the bundle away.

Once I had the uniform on, I took a candle from a shelf near the doorway and lit it with a long match. I could hide better in the dark, but because a real servant would have a candle, I needed to have one too. I could hide best in plain sight. So I put on my most correct posture and walked down the hall to find a task to keep busy at.

As hungry as I was, I avoided the kitchen, fearing that once I started eating, I might never stop. I couldn't be discovered there, where I clearly wouldn't belong. I knew from my grandparents' house how closely cooks kept an eye on things. Anywhere else in the house would be better.

Almost as soon as I began exploring, I was lost. Even with the candle, I could only see a few feet in any direction, and the place was an utter maze of doors and halls and stairs. I had remembered the impression from my last visit that the place was simply too large to be comprehended, but this time it was truer and more frightening. Every step was fraught. There was no way to know if I was moving away from danger or into it.

The first hallway I followed dead-ended in the vegetable pantry, a room that smelled overwhelmingly of earth, and I had no choice but to double back the way I'd come. I thought I was headed back toward the laundry, but the next door I opened took me into the unfinished swimming pool, an absolutely cavernous room lined with gleaming white tile where my every footstep echoed like a gunshot. I hustled up the nearest staircase and down a carpeted hall to escape, trying to move quickly but not too quickly, my heart hammering underneath the stolen uniform. After this, I carried my shoes in my hand, trying my best to move soundlessly. I wanted to pause and savor the beauty of the carpets, plush and lovely under my feet, but instead I only gave thanks that they muffled my footfalls and kept moving.

On the third floor, I tiptoed down long hallways full of identical doors, like something from a storybook, and had to choose at random which to open. My breath caught in my throat each time. The way the moonlight streaked across the bed in one of the guest rooms tickled the back of my brain, but I wasn't sure whether it was the room I had slept in after my accident or just another indistinguishable in its luxury. My leg gave a twinge, and I quickly backed out of the door and shut it tight.

When I finally found the front of the house, I knew I was in the right place at last. These were the most formal rooms; it made sense to fuss over them. Here there were stone fireplaces half a head taller than my own head, carved with intricate stone acorns and branches and a thousand other dust-collecting places. There were chimneypieces and side tables and cabinetry. Here, there was work to do. I applied myself with great relief. When it felt like there was no more to do in one room, I moved slowly to the next.

What with straightening furniture and shaking out curtains and squaring carpets, I spent several hours at labor, and before I was found, the sun had come up. After the uncertainty of scrambling around this huge house in the night's nerve-racking darkness, there was something reassuring about the light.

The one who found me was a round-faced woman with her hair pulled back in a perfectly formed bun. Her dress was plain but didn't match the uniforms from the laundry. Clearly she was in charge. I tried not to meet her gaze, but she pinned me like a butterfly in a box. I hovered on a high ladder, my good hand on a thick braided cord holding back a sunshade from a huge, spotless window.

“You. Come here. I don't know you,” she said.

“Of course you do.”

“No, miss. I do not know you because I did not hire you, and no one I did not hire works here. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“So how did you get here, Miss…?”

Hastily I said, “I can be of use. Please don't send me away.”

She sized me up again.

“Get down from there,” she said, and so I did. Standing face-to-face with her, I found her a full two inches shorter than I was, a fact which did not make her even a mote less intimidating.

“You should know better than to lie,” she said. “That eye of yours gives you away. Makes you memorable. Never pretend you're someone I wouldn't remember.”

“Yes, ma'am.” And yet if she had seen me last time I was here, she didn't seem to recognize me. It gave me a thrill of confidence, which I certainly needed.

“Tell me your name.”

“Ada Bates.” No need to carry a lie if the truth would do.

“Miss Bates,” she said, “this is your lucky day.”

She didn't tell me why and I didn't ask. I found out later one of the servant girls had caught her arm in the mangler not ten hours before, while doing the evening's wash, and could no longer do her assigned work. More help was needed. The angels were smiling on me, in their way.

The woman in charge said, “Report to the laundry room and tell Miss Fischer, the one with the long black braid, that Mrs. Severson sent you.”

“Yes ma'am!”

“If you do a bad job, I will dismiss you.”

“Yes ma'am. If that happens, I'll dismiss myself first.”

I almost caught her starting to smile before I turned to go. It took me half an hour to find the laundry room again.

***

I wondered if perhaps I should have lied about my name, but it quickly seemed it wouldn't matter. First names, in this household, went unspoken. I was always Miss Bates. Same went for the others. It was always Miss Godwin and Mr. Madison, Mrs. Severson and Mr. Shelby.

The servants in my grandparents' house had shared rooms, but here we each had our own, and I couldn't believe my luck. Each morning, I rose in silence, alone, and had a few moments to myself to work through my exercises, keeping my arms and legs in their accustomed condition, reaching gracefully up to a ceiling higher than I'd ever had at home, though it was less than half the height of some of the rooms on the first floor. On occasion, I was able to steal a few morning moments to dance elsewhere in the house, and they were a great blessing. Executing a blazing fast string of thirty turns across the long open floor of a ballroom let me imagine for the first time that I was on a real stage, and the feeling was intoxicating.

My dancer's body came in handy. I was stronger than the typical girl of my age, and after my hand healed, I was the most able of all the girls at Biltmore. In the laundry, we repeated many movements over and over—dunking the sheets into the hot vat, stirring them around and around and around in the soap, lifting them out, heaving them into a different vat of cleaner water, stirring again and again and again. Even when we used the mechanical drum washer, it took strength to lift and spread the linens over the racks in the drying room and to fold and carry the dried sheets to closets on every floor. Repetition was nothing new for me. It was almost as if this was what I had spent my life practicing for. I knew it wasn't, not really. But I also knew that for now, it was good enough.

I found that my strength was not the only thing that set me apart, although I held the secret close. One day, another girl and I reached out for an iron at the same time, believing it cold, but it had already been left on the stove to heat, hot enough to burn. We both seared our fingertips, and they rose up in bright red blisters. Almost out of habit, I wished my fingers would heal quickly. The next day, I was surprised to see the blisters on her fingertips just as red and angry as the day before, while my blisters were already starting to fade. The next day, hers were slightly less red; mine were gone completely. I knew it made no sense that a wish had made the difference, yet I couldn't see any other explanation. I certainly couldn't tell anyone. If it sounded impossible to me, to others it would sound like insanity.

It was weeks before I thought to wonder how my deserted family felt back in Tennessee, how worried they probably were about me, and after that brief fleeting thought, I went right back to not thinking about them again. I was convinced I'd been right to go. The bones I'd broken had healed, but that didn't mean that I'd never been injured in the first place. I didn't forget that. I never would.

At Biltmore, I discovered I was a quick learner when it counted. Not only did I learn how to use lemon juice to bleach wine stains from a tablecloth and to iron velvet with the nap, never against it, I learned all about people.

All of them kept secrets, and nearly all of them had bad habits. It fascinated me how many people thought they'd managed to keep their vices secret when to the rest of us they were as plain as day. I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but people were careless. I learned who had been sent here after dismissal from a convent and who had a brother in prison back in Ireland who she sent all her wages to. I also learned things by observing—happening to notice when certain people tended to absent themselves from company and where they went when they did. Miss Godwin had a weakness for nicking canned peaches from the pantry. Mr. Carlisle snuck cigarettes behind the garden shed.

A few months into my life at the Biltmore, it was because of Mr. Carlisle that I made another important discovery. Mrs. Severson was shouting her cap off for him, swearing he'd promised to make a delivery that very afternoon. I knew of his cigarette habit, and so I snuck off to fetch him. He was, of course, behind the shed, and as soon as I told him the situation, he took off like a shot. I stayed outside and didn't run after him. Partly because I wasn't the one in trouble, and partly because I wanted to stand in the sun for a moment and drink in the smell of green spring plants growing.