The Legacy (40 page)

Beth opens the front door but I step back from the darkness inside. In the graphite glow of the moon, it looks like a grave mouth. Beth steps in, flicks on a blinding yellow light, and I turn away.

“Come on—you’re letting all the heat out,” she says at last.

I shake my head. “I’m going for a walk.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s half past one in the morning and it’s freezing. Come inside.”

“No. I’ll . . . stay in the gardens. I need to clear my head,” I tell her flatly, backing away. She is an outline in the doorway, faceless and black.

“I’ll wait for you to come in, then. Don’t be long.”

“Don’t wait. Go to bed. I won’t be long.”

“Erica!” she calls, as I turn away. “You’re . . . you’re not going to let it drop, are you? You’re not going to leave it alone.” Real fear in her voice now. It sounds as brittle as glass. I am frightened too, by this change in her, by her sudden vulnerability, the way she braces herself in the door frame as though she might fly apart. But I steel myself.

“No. I’m not,” I say, and I walk away from her.

I won’t let this evening end until I have something, until I have resolved something. Until I have remembered something. I stride across the choppy lawn, my legs running away with me, joints swinging, elastic. Under the trees, the dark is solid. I look up at the sky, put my hands in front of me to feel the way, continue. I know where I am going.

The dew pond is just more blackness at my feet. The stone-and-mud smell of the water rises to greet me. Above me the sky hangs motionless, and it seems unreal that the stars should not move, should not be swept away in the wind. Their stillness makes me dizzy. Here I sit in the dead of winter, in the dead of night, a woman with a head full of whisky trying to go back, trying to be a child full of fantasies under a hot summer sky. I stare at the water, I take myself there. My breathing slows and I notice the cold for the first time, the press of the ground through my jeans. I hug my knees into my chest.
Have you pissed yourself, Erica?
Henry laughing, Henry smiling that nasty smile of his. Henry bending down, looking around. What was he doing? What was he looking for? What was I doing? I went back into the water. I’m sure I did. It was a diversion—I was trying to break the tension. I turned and took a run up, and made as big a splash as I could, scrabbling under the surface because my knickers threatened to desert me. And when I came up . . . when I dashed the water from my eyes . . . had Henry found what he was looking for?

Before I know what I am doing, I am in. I have put myself there. I take a run up, I make as big a splash as I can; and then reality comes pouring all around me and my skin catches fire at the cold of the water. The pain is incredible. I have no idea which way is up, no idea where to go, what to do. I have no control over my body, which flails and contorts itself. The air has vanished from my lungs, they have collapsed, my ribs are crushed. I will die, I think. I am sinking like a stone. I will reach the bottom at last, just like I always strove to. The water has no surface, there is no sky any more. And I see Henry. My heart seems to stop. I see Henry. I see him, looking down at me from the bank, eyes wide and incredulous. I see him teetering, and I see blood running down into his eyes. So much blood. I see him start to fall. Then I am in the air again and it is a blessing—so warm, so full of life after the knife strike of the water. A gasp rushes air into my lungs; I cry out in pain.

I can see the bank. It tips and blurs in my view as my body threatens to sink again. I try to make my arms work, to kick my legs. Nothing will move as it is supposed to. My heart beats wildly now, too fast, too big in my chest. It’s trying to escape from me, from this leeching chill. I can’t get air to stay in my lungs. It whistles out as the water squeezes me. I am flayed alive; I am burning. One hand hits the bank and I can’t feel it on my skin, only the resistance of it. I claw at it, force my fingers into the mud, try to make my other hand reach it, try to pull myself out. I struggle. I am a rat in a barrel, a hedgehog in a pond. I am whimpering.

Then hands grab me, under my arms, pulling me further out until my knees are grounded. One more pull and I am out, water streaming from my clothes and hair and mouth. I cough and start to cry, so happy to be out, hurting so much.

“What the
fucking hell
are you
doing
?” It’s Dinny. His voice echoes oddly in my ears and I can’t look up at him yet, can’t move my heavy head on my wooden neck. “Are you trying to kill yourself, for fuck’s sake?” He is rough, furious.

“I’m . . . not sure,” I croak, and concentrate on coughing again. Behind his head the stars judder and wheel.

“Get up!” he commands. He sounds so angry, and the last of my will leaves me. I give up. Lying down on the ground, I turn my head away from him. I can’t feel my body, can’t feel my heart.

“Just leave me alone,” I say. I think I say. I’m not sure if I have formed words, or just exhaled. He turns me over, stands behind my head and pulls me up by my armpits.

“Come on. You need to warm up before you can lie down and have a rest.”

“I am warm. I’m boiling hot,” I say, but tremors are starting to come, from my feet to my fingertips, convulsing every muscle. My head pounds.

“Come on, walk now. It’s not far.”

A short time later I become aware of myself, of the peeled feeling of my skin, the ache in my ribs and arms and skull. My fingers and toes are throbbing, agonizing. I am sitting in wet underwear in Dinny’s van. Wrapped in a blanket. There’s hot tea beside me. Dinny pours in sugar by the heaped spoonful, instructs me to drink it. I sip it, burn my tongue. I’m shaking still, but less now. The inside of the ambulance is warmer than I’d imagined. The embers in the stove light our faces. Narrow bunks along one side, cupboards and shelves and a counter along the other. A space for billycans. A kettle on the stove top, pans hanging on hooks.

“How come you were at the dew pond?” I ask. My voice has an unhealthy rattle to it.

“I wasn’t. I was going home when I heard the bloody great splash you made. You’re just lucky the wind’s blowing in from the east or I wouldn’t have heard it. I wouldn’t have come. Do you know what could have happened if I hadn’t? Even if you’d managed to get out and then lain on the bank for half an hour . . . do you understand?”

“Yes.” I am contrite, embarrassed. There is no trace of the whisky in me now. My swim has washed it all away.

“So what were you doing?” He sits opposite me on a folding stool, rests one ankle on the opposite knee, crosses his arms. All barriers. I shrug.

“I was trying to remember. That day. The day Henry died.”
Died
, I say. Not
disappeared
. I wait to see if Dinny will correct me. He doesn’t.

“Why would you want to remember?”

“Because I
don’t
, Dinny. I don’t remember it. And I have to. I need to.” He doesn’t answer for a long time. He sits and he considers me with hooded eyes.

“Why? Why do you have to? If you really don’t remember, then—”

“Don’t tell me I’m better off! That’s what Beth says and it’s not true! I am not better off. There’s a bit missing . . . I can’t stop thinking about it . . .”

“Try.”

“I know he’s dead. I know we killed him.” As I speak I shudder again, scattering drops of tea onto my legs.

“
We
killed him?” Dinny glares at me suddenly, his eyes alight. “No.
We
didn’t kill him.”

“What does that mean? What
happened
, Dinny? Where did he go?”

The question hangs between us for a long moment. I think he will tell me. I think he will. The silence stretches.

“These are not my secrets to tell,” Dinny says, his face troubled.

“I just want things to be as they were,” I say quietly. “Not things—people. I want Beth to grow up the way she should have grown up, if it hadn’t happened. It all starts there, I know it does. And I want for us to be friends, like we were . . .”

“We could have been, perhaps.” His voice is flat. I look up for an explanation. “You just stopped coming!” he exclaims, eyes widening. “How do you think that felt, after everything I—”

“After everything you what?”

“After all the time we’d spent, all the growing up. . . . You just stopped coming.”

“We were kids! Our parents stopped bringing us . . . there wasn’t much we could do about it . . .”

“They brought you here the summer after. And the one after that. I saw you, even if you didn’t see me. But you never came down to the camp. My family were turned
inside out
by the police, looking for that boy. Everybody treated us like criminals! I bet they didn’t turn the manor upside down, did they? I bet they didn’t keep looking in the herb garden for a grave.” I stare at him. I can’t think what to say. I try to remember the police searching the house, but I can’t. “At first I thought you’d been forbidden to come down here. But you’d always been forbidden before and that had never stopped you. Then I thought perhaps you were scared, perhaps you didn’t want to talk about what had happened. Then I finally hit on it. You just didn’t care.”

“That’s not true! We were just children, Dinny! What happened was . . . too big. We didn’t know
what
to do with it—”

“
You
were just a child, Erica. Beth and I were twelve. That’s old enough. Old enough to know where your loyalties lie. Would it have killed you to come? Just once? To write down your address, to write a letter?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know what happened. I . . . watched Beth for all my cues. Even now I can’t tell if I knew what we’d done, what had happened. I don’t know when it went out of my head. I can hardly remember anything I thought or did in those summers afterwards. And then we stopped coming.”

“Well, no wonder. If you were both acting so vacant, your mother must have thought it was damaging you.”

“It
was
damaging us, Dinny.”

“Well, there you go. What happened, happened. There’s no changing it now, even if you want to.”

“I
do
want to,” I murmur. “I want Beth back. I want
you
back.”

“You’re lonely, Erica. I was too, for a long time. Nobody to talk to about it all. I guess we have to take what’s due to us.”

“Whose secrets are they, Dinny, if they’re not yours or mine?”

“I never said they weren’t yours.”

“Mine and Beth’s?” He stares at me, says nothing. I can feel tears in my eyes, feel them start to run, impossibly hot.

“But I don’t
know
!” I say quietly.

“Yes. You do.” Dinny leans toward me. In the low light I can see every dark eyelash, outlined by the orange glow from the stove. “It’s time you went home to bed, I think,” he says.

“I don’t want to go.” But he is on his feet. I wipe my face, notice that my hands are red and angry, mud under the nails.

“You can keep the blanket for now. Give it back to me whenever.” He rolls my wet clothes into a bundle, hands them to me. “I’ll walk you back.”

“Dinny!” I stand up, stagger slightly. In the small space we are inches apart, but that is too far. He stops, turns to face me. I can’t think of any words to say. I clasp the blanket close to me and lean toward him, tilt my head so my forehead can touch his cheek. I take one step closer, shut my eyes, put one hand on his shoulder, curling my thumb into the hard jut of his collarbone. I stay that way for three heartbeats, until I feel his arms circle me. I lift my chin, feel his lips brush mine, and I lean into his kiss, clumsy with desire. His arms tighten around me, chase my breath away. I would halt the world, if I could; stop it spinning, make it so I could stay here for ever, in this dark space with Dinny’s mouth against mine.

He walks me back to the manor’s ponderous front door and as I shut it behind me, I hear a sound that makes me pause. Water running. The sound of it echoes faintly down the stairs; and in the walls, the corresponding wrenching of the pipes.

“Beth?” I call out, my teeth chattering. I struggle out of my soaked boots, make my way to the kitchen, where the light is on. Beth is not there. “Beth! Are you still up?” I shout, flinching from the glare of the lights, my head thumping. The water running still, drenching my thoughts with nauseating unease. I fight to focus my eyes, because there is something not right in here, in the kitchen. Something that makes the blood beat in my temples, dries my throat. The knife block, knocked roughly over and lying on its side on the worktop, and several of the knives pulled out, discarded beside it. For the second time on this black night, I cannot breathe. I turn, race to the stairs on legs that won’t move fast enough.

Lasting

1904–1905

T
he stationmaster at Dodge City was most sympathetic. He listened patiently to Caroline’s tale of her lost ticket and allowed her to pay there and then for her whole journey, from Woodward to New York. She spent the long days of the train ride watching out of the window, at gray storm skies and blistering white skies and china-blue skies so pretty they hurt her head. She thought of nothing, but tested the kernel of grief inside herself from time to time, to see if it would diminish with distance when it hadn’t with time. William, still recovering from his fever, slept a great deal, whimpering fretfully when he awoke. But he knew Caroline and allowed her to soothe him. She sacrificed lunch at the Harvey Hotel in Kansas City to shop instead for clean napkins, blankets and a bottle for the baby, hurrying back to the train with her heart fluttering anxiously, in case it left without her. The train was the only home she had at that moment. It was her only plan, the only thing she knew.

“Oh, he is just
beautiful
! What’s his name?” a woman exclaimed one evening, pausing on her way through the carriage to bend over the carrycot and clasp her hands together over her heart.

“William,” Caroline told her, swallowing; her throat suddenly, painfully, dry.

“That’s a handsome name, too. Such dark hair!”

“Oh, yes, he takes after his father in that respect,” Caroline smiled. She could not keep the sorrow from her voice as she spoke, though, and the woman glanced at her quickly, saw her red-rimmed eyes and the paleness of her face.

“Just you and William now, is it?” the woman asked kindly. Caroline nodded, amazed by how easily the lie came to her.

“I’m taking him to live with my family,” she said, smiling a wan smile. The woman nodded in sympathy.

“My name’s Mary Russell. I’m sitting in the third car and if you need anything—even if it’s just company—you come and find my husband Leslie and me. Agreed?”

“Agreed. Thank you.” Caroline smiled again as Mary moved away, wishing that she could accept the offer, wishing that she could seek out some company. But that could only be in another world, where Corin was not dead and they were just visiting his family in New York, perhaps, and with a baby that Caroline had carried in her womb, not just in her arms. She returned to her quiet study of the landscape, and William returned to sleep.

New York was impossibly loud and huge. The buildings seemed to lean over from their vast heights, casting deep, murky shadows, and the noise was like a tidal wave, crashing and foaming into every corner of every street. Heavy with fatigue, and with her mind wound tight with nerves, Caroline hailed a hansom cab and climbed aboard. Her clothes were travel-stained and smelt stale.

“Where to, madam?” the driver asked. Caroline blinked, and her face grew hot. She had no idea where to go. There were girls whose addresses she knew, whom she would once have called her friends, but she could not think of calling on them after more than two years without a word, with a black-eyed baby and her face dirty with smuts from the train. She thought briefly of Corin’s family, but William squirmed in her arms and she blinked back tears. There was no way she could have carried and borne them a grandson without Corin having written to them about it. And she did not want to be anywhere she might be found. This knowledge came like a sluice of cold water. She
could
not go anywhere somebody might look to find her.

“A . . . um, a hotel. The Westchester, thank you,” she answered at length, naming a place where she had once had lunch with Bathilda. The driver flicked the reins and the horse started forward, narrowly missing a motorcar that drew to a halt to let them go ahead, tooting its horn impatiently.

Bathilda
. Caroline had not thought of her, had deliberately not thought of her in months and months. She knew what her aunt would have made of her fears, and of the wreck that life had become out in Woodward County. Now Caroline shut her eyes and at once she could see Bathilda’s knowing look, her scathing expression. She could imagine Bathilda hearing of Caroline’s plight and responding with a weighty, sanctimonious
Well
. . . She would not have gone to her, even if the woman had remained in New York, Caroline told herself defiantly. She would not have gone to Bathilda even now, now that she knew nobody and had no idea where to go, or what to do. She suppressed the treacherous longing she felt just to see a familiar face, even if it was not a friendly one. For whose faces would remain friendly to her now? She thought of Magpie, waiting in the dugout—but only for a second. The thought was too terrible. She thought of Hutch, of what emotions his face would register when he rode back in from the ranges, found White Cloud dead, maybe others too, and she and William gone without a word. Her insides seemed to burn her, seemed to writhe around themselves, and pain snapped behind her eyes. With a small cry she buried her face in her hands and concentrated hard on staying upright on the cab’s padded bench.

At the Westchester she paid for a respectable room, and enquired after a nursemaid for William, explaining that her own maid had been taken seriously ill and been forced to return to her family’s care. One was found without delay, a pug-faced girl with bright ginger hair, called Luella, who looked nothing but terrified when Caroline handed William to her. William took one look at the strange girl’s frightened eyes and garish hair and began to wail. Holding the child awkwardly, Luella backed out of the room. Caroline went into the bathroom and, realizing in a way she never had before just how miraculous indoor plumbing was, she ran herself a hot bath, sank into it and tried to quiet her mind, which rang with unanswered questions and thoughts and fears, and threatened at any moment to tip her into panic.

In the end she did not stay more than a week in the city where she had been born and raised. It no longer felt any more like home than the ranch house, or Woodward, or the railway car that had brought her back. The oily fumes of the motorcars that had proliferated in her absence stuck in the back of her throat, and the throng of people made her feel every bit as invisible as she had felt out on the prairie. The buildings were too close, too solid, like the cliff walls of some labyrinth from which escape was impossible.
There’s nowhere I belong
, Caroline thought, as she walked William in his new perambulator down streets she had never seen before, had never heard of before, hoping in this way to reduce the risk of anybody recognizing her. She paused on a corner and looked up, high above, to where a crane was swinging a steel girder that looked like a toothpick into the waiting arms of a gang of workmen. The men stood at the edge of this unfinished tower with nothing to keep them but their balance. Caroline felt a sympathetic clench in her stomach for the danger they were in, for the nearness of the fall. But she soon walked on again, recognizing the feeling as one she had herself, one she’d had for a long time. The creeping knowledge of life’s precariousness, of the transience of it.

Passing a photographic studio, with a handsome gilt sign that read
Gilbert Beaufort & Son,
Caroline paused. Inside the cluttered, stuffy shop she recoiled from the vinegar stench of the developing chemicals. Not quite finding a smile for the camera, she commissioned several portraits of herself and William, arranging to have them delivered to the Westchester when they were ready.

Her fingers shook as she opened the package. She had hoped to create something permanent, to prove to herself, in some way, that she existed; and that even though she was widowed, she had Corin’s child, the child that was rightly hers, to show for her marriage. She was part of a family. She would have some record of herself and of her life, which she was so unsure of that she sometimes wondered if she might still be lying out on the prairie somewhere, dreaming everything that had happened since. But in nearly every picture William had moved, blurring the image of himself so that his face was tantalizingly obscured; and in nearly every picture Caroline, to her own eyes, stared out from the paper every bit as ghostly and insubstantial looking as she felt. One photo alone had captured an intangible trace of what she’d hoped to see—in one shot she looked like a mother, proud and calm and possessive. She slid this picture into her case and threw the rest into the grate.

On the fourth day she saw Joe. She was walking with William in search of a park or a garden, a green space of some kind to feel a breeze and, she hoped, to calm the child. Fully recovered from his illness and returned to his strength, William was loud and unsettled. He cried in the night and snatched his arms away when Caroline tried to comfort him, squirming in her embrace as she rocked him and tried to sing to him as Magpie had done. But she could no more capture the Ponca girl’s odd melodies than she could howl like a coyote, and her efforts were drowned out by William’s shouts. Thinking it was the open prairie he missed, Caroline walked him most of the day, growing increasingly aware of how different the noises and smells and sights must be for the child, and how heavy the unclean air must feel in his tiny lungs. This was not his home, any more than it was hers, she realized; but unlike herself, William did have a home. She should take him back. The thought stung her like a slap to the face. Even if he was Corin’s, even if he should have been hers, he belonged in Woodward County. She stood rooted to the spot, knocked senseless by this realization, while pedestrians flowed around her like a river. But how could she? How could she explain—how could she be forgiven? She could see the pain, the accusation in Hutch’s eyes, the anger and fear in Magpie’s. All the times they had helped her, all the times they had encouraged her. And this was how she had repaid their belief in her—she was an outrage, a despicable failure. It was not possible. She could not face them. There
was
no going back.

And then she saw Joe, coming around the corner toward her, his face set into a grimace of hard fury, his black hair flying behind him as he strode toward her, knife ready in his hand to kill her. Caroline went cold from her head to her toes and stood petrified as the man walked past her, the black hair in fact a scarf, the knife a piece of rolled up paper, the face not Joe’s at all but belonging to a swarthy, Mexican-looking man who was late for something and hurrying. Shaking uncontrollably, Caroline sank onto a nearby bench, the din of the city receding as a strange, muffled thumping invaded her head. Black speckles swirled like flies at the edges of her vision, and when she shut her eyes to be rid of them they turned brilliant white and danced on undeterred. In the distance, a passenger liner sounded its whistle as it slid gracefully into the docks. The deep blast echoed all around and brought Caroline back to herself, and to William’s cries. Swallowing, she stroked his cheek, made some broken, soothing sounds, and then she stood up, turning to cast her eyes southward toward the docks, the ship, and the sea. Five hours later she was aboard a steamer, bound for Southampton.

J
oe was indeed in New York, but not on that very day. He and Hutch arrived two days after Caroline’s ship had departed, where they made their way directly to the home of Mrs. Massey, Corin’s twice-bereaved mother, ignoring the stares that their country clothes and Joe’s Indian blood elicited. No trace of Caroline or William had been found since she had been seen taking breakfast at the hotel, the morning after she’d left Woodward. The manager of Gerlach’s Bank confirmed that there had been no transactions on the Massey account since the recent wages withdrawal. Word was sent out with every passing traveller, and to every outlying rancher, to report any sighting or signs of her; and although the ticket office clerk at the station swore that no fair-haired women carrying babies had bought a ticket for any train from him that day, or indeed that week, Hutch followed a hunch of his and took Joe and himself to New York, making fruitless enquiries at each station after a Mrs. Massey.

Mrs. Massey Senior had not, of course, seen or heard anything of her daughter-in-law, and was most distressed to hear that she and a young child had vanished. She was able to supply the men with Caroline’s maiden name and former address, but their enquiries in the city after Miss Fitzpatrick were every bit as fruitless. They retraced their steps, trying the name Fitzpatrick instead of Massey, and then had little choice but to return to the ranch, to where Magpie had fallen into a trance, at times tearing at her hair and making long cuts down her arms with a blade that sent rivulets of bright blood to drip from her fingertips. Joe let his wife mourn in this way; he was impassive, the rage had burned from him, and his own heart was empty without his son. Between them, the men raised the money to pay a Pinkerton man for one month, but this was just enough time for the detective to follow the same path that Joe and Hutch had, and he finished the term unable even to say whether Caroline and William had been abducted or had run away. Hutch lay awake night after night, mystified and suspicious at once; scared for Caroline and for the ranch, which, having no owner, no longer had a future either.

D
reading her arrival more with each mile that passed, Caroline took the train from Southampton to London, and upon arriving found a hotel she could afford once the shrinking packet of dollars from Gerlach’s Bank had been converted into pounds sterling. William was heavy in her arms and his cries made her ears wince, as if withdrawing inside her skull to protect themselves. During the long days of the sea crossing she had felt sick, distracted by a pounding at her temples that made it hard to think. William had cried for hours at a time, seemingly without pause, and although Caroline told herself that he must be feeling the same sickness as she, the same pain in his head, she could not shake the belief that he somehow knew he was being carried further and further from home, and that his cries were of rage at her for doing it. She saw an accusation in his face each time she looked at him. She stopped trying to quiet him, to sing to him or to hold him, leaving him instead to cry in the carrycot that he was rapidly outgrowing, so that she herself could remain in bed, curled against the cabin wall in misery.