The Mirk and Midnight Hour (37 page)

“How is it your fault, Mama?” Sunny demanded. “You couldn’t know what that vermin was up to.”

“I spend so much of my time in a fog from my medicine. Maybe—maybe I would have seen something if I’d been lucid. I should never have left you to deal with him alone. And you didn’t even think you could tell me anything. I’m a terrible mother.”

“Don’t you dare blame yourself!” Sunny cried, throwing her arms around Miss Elsa and squeezing hard. “I won’t let you.”

“You were quick-thinking when you knew what to do with King and Dorian,” I said. I would never forget how my stepmother had acted in those moments when the rest of us were at a loss.

“I’ll try harder. I really will,” Miss Elsa said, sobbing. “I’ll take less and less until I stop completely. This time I will do it.”

Even Goblin was having a hard time. I had left Seeley with Laney in order to attend Miss Ruby Jewel’s funeral and brought home two cats—the least moth-eaten-looking ones—whom Goblin did not take to at all. They were to stay out in the barn. “Now, my kitty,” I had told Goblin, “you may not have wanted new cats around the place, but you may grow to love them. It happened to me.”

I should have had no time to worry over anything. I worked in the house and in the barn, sewed a new shirt to send to my father, and finished a pair of stockings.

Maybe I had given someone a promise. Someone who needed my help. Perhaps that was what caused the prickling sensation that wavered at the back of my brain.
Who is it?
I was on edge and weepy.

The unsettled feeling was soon compounded by the weather and an unpleasant discovery I made because of it. For three days, a violent storm raged, toppling trees and bombarding Scuppernong with sheets of black rain and flotsam and jetsam torn from the woods. We huddled inside and worried that shortly the wind might form a funnel and blow us clean away.

When the deluge finally stopped, the cotton fields looked battered and beaten, mushrooms had sprouted all over the yard, and a gray fungus, which grew back nearly as soon as I scrubbed it away with carbolic soap, clouded the walls of the parlor.

The river had topped its banks and gushed foaming brown, littered with roiling, swirling, tangled muck. We had been hauling branches and trash to a fire for burning when I took a break to stand on the edge of the bank, watching the endless flow and listening. Just barely, if I strained my ears, the faint, faraway booming of cannon sounded. The war crept closer.

Something pale caught my eye, wedged in a massive clump floating my way. At first I thought it was a child’s rubber ball, mud-spattered and trapped within the twisted debris. But as it approached, I realized with horror that what I had taken for muddy grass stuck to the ball was actually filthy hair and that a stiff hand reached through the sticks farther down. It bobbed closer and the face emerged, blanched, puffy, and swollen from a long time in water.

I screamed and screamed and screamed.

Michael came running and managed to snag the mass and pull it to shore. I fled to the house, sick and shaking, while Michael fetched help from town.

Somehow a part of me had feared the body was Dorian’s, come
back to torment us, but it turned out to be that of a stranger with a bullet hole in his belly. It was probably a soldier, but whether Southern or Northern could not be determined since his clothing had been torn away.

The sense grew that something terrible and unknown was brewing, waiting just around the corner. A vague and shapeless doom.

One morning I pulled my journal from its hiding place. Perhaps some clue might lie there as to what was nagging just below my consciousness. My most recent entry read:

June 18, 1862

I’m going to tell him I’m his if he still wants me. I don’t care. I don’t care if he loves me only for a month or a week or a day. I need to love him and let him love me as long as he can. If only I haven’t spoiled everything.

I riffled back through my other entries, and each was familiar, although some were a little puzzling. I wrote of secrets, but I could not imagine what I meant. And
this
entry …

It was my handwriting. I had written it ten days ago, just before Dorian and the fire, yet I had no idea who “he” was. I must have been imagining some pathetic daydream. Similar to practicing writing my name as “Violet Phillips” when Ben had been interested in me. How embarrassing. But why couldn’t I recall doing it? A new, nasty anxiety attached itself to my growing collection—that something was wrong with my mind. Crazy people lived in dreamworlds and had melancholic humors and experienced memory lapses. My nerves were taut as harp strings.

The weight of a terrible loss fell on me, so that I sank to the bed. Maybe it was myself that was misplaced. Here I was in my own well-loved, familiar home, and I was hopelessly lost. I pulled at my hair as if I could yank the forgotten thing from my foggy brain. A physical pain exploded in my head.

I lay, moaning, until the agony subsided. Slowly I rose, dabbed my drawn face with water from the basin, and threw on one of my black gowns. I had begun wearing mourning again. These dreary days demanded it.

A sewing circle was being held in town today and I planned to attend. Seeley had done all right with Laney when I’d gone to the funeral, and I hadn’t been to the circle in ages. Other people, the latest gossip, and war news might help take me out of myself. I had urged Sunny and Miss Elsa to come as well.

My stepsister troubled me. She had lost her sparkle. Today she came downstairs in a faded cambric gown much too large for her. Her hair was stuffed into a snood, and even her green eyes seemed dull, as if a dusty film coated them.

“No, Sunny,” I said. “You can’t go out in public wearing that.”

She rallied enough to flash back, “You should talk. Look at what you’ve got on.”

“I’ll change if you will.”

She shrugged and trudged upstairs. I followed.

In my room I took the china-blue taffeta off its hook. It hadn’t been worn since the bazaar. I shook out the folds and saw how the skirt had been snagged and how much dirt and how many burs and bits of grass clung to it. Had I rolled in a field of weeds? I didn’t deserve nice things. I spread it out on the bed and brushed
my hands over the fabric. As I did so, I bumped a hard bulge in the pocket. Puzzled, I reached in and drew out an amulet. My amulet of raw amber.

That was where it had got to. I remembered now—Sunny wouldn’t let me wear the thing since it showed above the gown’s neckline, so I had stuffed it in the pocket. I held it up by the leather thong. The honey gold spun and glowed translucent in the light pouring in from the window. I squeezed my other hand around the stone and dropped it immediately to the floor with a cry.

Thomas!

The amber had burned my skin as if it were a living coal. Before it had left my fingers, his name flamed through my mind. And everything about him, every detail, flooded over me like lava—the warm, steady look in his gray eyes, the way his shirt set on his still-bony shoulders, his expressive hands, and his smile just for me.
He
was what had been flickering in the back of my brain. It was him. Of all the people in all the world whom I might have forgotten, how could it have been him? I staggered against the wall.

The words Laney had once said when we were speaking of hoodoo came back to me: “There are ways you can make folks forget things you don’t want them to remember.”

They
had done this to me.

I gave a little hiccoughing half sob, threw the amulet over my head, not caring if it still burned, and dashed down the stairs. In the kitchen I hastily wrapped a bandage around my scorched fingers, snatched up a burlap sack, and stuffed in corn bread and ham.
I stammered excuses to Sunny and Miss Elsa. They stared after me in amazement as I tore away, frantic and wild-eyed, down the river and through sticky, shifting, stirring greenness to the Lodge.

He might have asked where I had been with his food for the past two weeks. He might have asked, “How could you have left me so long to the untender mercies of the VanZeldts?” He might have said, “You needn’t have bothered to return after what you said last time.” He could have said any number of well-deserved and terrible things, but he did not.

Instead he swept his long, dark hair back from his face and gazed as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Then he held out his arms. I cried into his chest and told him almost all that had happened. He drew in his breath with horror at our close escape. He held me and told me I was valiant and strong and clever to have handled such challenges as I had. His voice was rough with emotion when he called me his “sweet girl.”

A burden lifted off my shoulders because he was all right and because he had not only forgiven me but understood exactly why I had done all that I had done. He assured me that, under the circumstances, I had been right not to call in the marshal with Dorian. He listened for a good long while. I did not tell him I had forgotten him. I couldn’t bear him to know this.

After I had talked myself out, he kissed me—a gentle, tender embrace. It was nothing like our passionate kisses by the bonfire, but still it made me glow clear through, partly because it showed that all was mended between us.

The two weeks had left him noticeably thinner. His eyes were
shadowed and his cheeks hollow. His every movement was slower, as if each took an effort. I pushed the sack toward him. “Please eat now. I should have given you the food first thing.”

After he ate, he demonstrated that he could walk without his sticks. He had to swing one leg out a bit, but not much.

“This last week,” he said, “when I began to think you might not return, I figured I’d better speed up my departure. I’ve worked at the walking every day. Are you suitably impressed?”

I nodded, but my mouth went dry. “This means you must leave soon.”

“Are you so eager for me to run off?”

“You know I’m not. It will break my heart. But it’s time. The sooner you’re away from the VanZeldts, the better. I’m grateful to the doctor for healing Seeley, and I really do like Amenze—the girl—but they scare me. That last time I was here, Amenze caught Seeley and me leaving the Lodge. She said she wouldn’t tell the doctor, but … Very soon I’ll bring Seeley so he can say goodbye, and I’ll have some of my brother’s clothes for you. That last time, we won’t come by river. We’ll bring Star and a map so you can ride to the nearest Federal camp.”

“You’re right,” Thomas said soberly. “Even though I don’t want to leave, it’s best I go soon. They’ve caught me awake a few times lately and it seems as if their attitude has changed. They used to be completely detached, but now the girl looks at me with pity and the young man sneers. At least they don’t know I can walk, thank goodness, so my escape will be a surprise.”

“They have powers we can’t comprehend,” I said, shivering. “You
should have seen their place: there was a human skull on the floor of the shed.”

“You don’t suppose they’re vampires, do you?” Thomas gave a mischievous smile.

I couldn’t make light of such a thing. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were. I’ve also wondered if they’re fairies—not tinkly, floaty ones but dark, deadly ones. For sure, though, they’re practitioners of some strange religion that worships a snake god all mixed together with hoodoo.”

Thomas squeezed my hand. “Good old down-home hoodoo—wish I knew more about it. Skull aside, though, maybe there’s nothing so bad about what the VanZeldts believe. Maybe it’s just dissimilar from what our Western culture understands. Our scientific knowledge covers only a fraction of the forces at play in the universe. You know, a few hundred years ago the electric telegraph would have been considered witchcraft. Why can’t we take the good that comes from different sources and leave the bad? Why do we accept the miracles of our Christianity but deny other cultures’ beliefs?”

I didn’t remind him of the evil of the VanZeldts’ magic where Jorgenson had been concerned. Instead I reached out and brushed the hair from his eyes as if I had all the right in the world to touch him whenever I wanted to. An amazing assumption. “Do you believe people can communicate with creatures in—in odd ways?”

“I think I experienced it sometimes during those first weeks I lay here. Those animals that poked around inside.”

“Well, I have a funny sort of talent. If people only knew, I expect they would be shocked. Maybe even scared.”

“Really? What is it?”

Within the triangle of his legs, I leaned back against his chest, encircled by his arms. “My gift involves bees.…”

And so we spent an enjoyable hour informing each other of things we should have divulged before and never had.

It was time to go, but I couldn’t bear it.

“Thomas,” I said urgently.

“Yes?”

“Oh … nothing.”

“Just ‘Thomas.’ ”

“Yes.”

He smiled, but in a wistful sort of way, and I knew he understood. He pulled the carnelian signet ring from his pinkie and slipped it onto my ring finger. “When I’m gone, this will reassure you that I’m coming back. It came to me from my grandfather and is my most precious possession.”

I shook my head. “No. You don’t need to make promises like that. Neither of us knows what the next months will bring. You don’t—”

He put his fingers lightly over my lips. “I am promising.”