“It’s violet,” I corrected automatically, then closed my eyes and nodded, afraid to display the depth of my gratitude.
“The violet bedroom, then.” Matthew moved toward the door. “You should try to get some sleep. We’ll find a way to reach your father in the morning.”
My stomach dropped as I watched him go, the shuffle of his feet, the cowlick at the back of his blond head. I didn’t think to guide him to the bathroom, find him clean towels, perform any of the tasks I knew from reading books of etiquette a good hostess should. I was pleased to have Matthew stay with me, unsure of what I would have done without his kindness. Still, I was anxious. His questions were reasonable, hardly disrespectful, yet there had been something about them that unhinged me. Of all that had occurred the past few days, all of the strangeness I’d encountered since Mrs. Blott’s death, Matthew was clearly the least of my troubles. And yet my body found him most unsettling.
The Dirtied Family Crest
Mary, 1708
As a young girl, Mary Blakely was quiet. Shy not in the alluring way of the prudish, those women whose reticence men sense and prod like a dog tracking fear, but rather gauche in her detachment. Chewing her fingernails and mumbling. Staring too intensely at those parts of her companions they would rather go unnoticed: a rector’s bursting pimple, a country gentleman’s long nose. What suitors her father found were not lured by her dowry, not even when increased by half.
Mary despised her own awkwardness, the sharpness of her elbows, the bulge of her gut. She watched her younger sisters married off and sent away. She watched her younger brother Frederick take a wife.
THE YEAR WAS 1707. Jane Mulhollan, now Jane Blakely, had been at Urizon six months but did not yet know how noises carried, the echoes allowed by the curvature of stairwells, the hollow panels that cradled small sounds, ferrying her words from where she sat in the library with Frederick to the place where Mary stood listening at the top of the front stairs.
“So you must find a way,” said Jane, a plump, dimpled thing in a blue sack-back gown, already secure in her role as head of household. Twenty years Mary’s junior, and given to ejecting sympathetic little sighs each time she settled in a chair or a divan. “We haven’t the money to keep her. And it is foolishness to think that at her age . . .”
A murmur as her husband, Frederick, spoke in an undertone. Then her reply:
“You’ve had years to look. She has had years to become ready. All women know the time will come when they must either—” A thump as the library door closed.
That night, Mary combed her hair one hundred strokes with the silver-backed hairbrush that had once been her mother’s, but belonged now to Jane. The furniture was Jane’s now, the table settings, the firewood, the old Blakely heirlooms. The flower beds in the garden. The chambermaid. The cook.
Soon, the house itself would be taken from Mary, given to Jane. All its thick walls, its firm foundations. The nursery, where she’d played with her young sisters. The kitchen garden she’d planted with such care. The turret, where she’d sat gazing out at the road, daydreaming of the prince who would see past her sallow face, her thinning hair, the wrinkles that framed her small eyes. All given to Jane.
That haughty girl of seventeen, waving a hand like a queen, as if she were the lady of some far finer house. Mary wished Jane a painful end, such suffering as she herself had suffered when watching Jane stand in the door of the church, listening to wedding bells knell, seeing Frederick touch Jane’s shoulder, hearing the moans they made at night. Mary could no longer breathe for the air that Jane sucked from Urizon. She sat daily with her needlework, waiting for Jane’s dress to tighten and Jane’s skin to flush, for the day Jane would announce that she was carrying Frederick’s child.
Jane dismissed the valet who had been with the Blakelys since before Mary’s birth. “He’s much too old,” the girl tutted. “Imagine him encountering our guests! He’d surely scare them.”
Jane cleared all the tallow candles out from the cellar. “That smell!” She giggled, unable to consider a future in which the family might need them for light.
Jane rearranged the front sitting room, removing the tasteful draperies Mary’s mother had chosen, installing gaudy replacements. She sent the settee out to become firewood, bringing in a hideous new piece painted to look as if it were made all of gold.
Mary watched the changes unfold—fists clenched, fingernails scarring her palms—unable to prevent them.
Without a husband, Mary’s choices were few. She might be a nursemaid to her brother’s children, live in a cold room at the back of the house, wear plain dresses and hide from the guests. She might go to the church and spend her days cloistered, praying to a God she did not trust. Perhaps one of her sisters would take her.
In the mirror, Mary’s face was so white with powder as to appear ghostly. The black with which she’d tried to paint her eyebrows in the fashion of the day, as Jane did hers, had smeared onto the bridge of her sharp nose. Lines creased her forehead, sliced the sides of her mouth. Old maid. Unwanted.
I should eat the child’s heart when Jane births it, thought Mary. I should seek out the waters of youth and drink my fill. Spin the years backward. Unfair, to have just one attempt at ripeness, a few brief years of possibility before sweetness turns to rot.
FREDERICK AND JANE did have a child, a little girl, golden and plump. Mary held her at the christening, and though Jane’s own sister was named godmother, it was Mary who knew instinctively to bounce the baby, whisper her to sleep, support her soft skull with a bent elbow. If dropped, that tiny skull would crack, its small brain spilling out onto the floor. Mary felt such power standing over the cradle, the ornate wood carved like a coffin, the infant swaddled so intensely she appeared to be embalmed.
Jane’s mother and sister came to live at Urizon, claiming that Jane needed help with mothering, though all of the unpalatable aspects of her role had been assumed by a girl from the village soon after the child’s birth. The Mulhollan family filled the estate with activity, and filled Jane with a greater sense of her own importance.
Frederick shared his sister’s lack of initiative, and had thus far avoided the unpleasant task of casting Mary out. Yet it was coming. Drawing her new motherhood as weapon, with the support of her nearest relations, Jane pressed Frederick to act.
Again, Mary stood at the top of the stairs, and heard the group of them gathered in the library.
“. . . enough of this silliness . . .”
“. . . propriety to think of . . .”
“It must happen at once, without delay.”
The trilling of one voice replaced by another, each new instrument taking up the tune so its fellow could rest. Mary heard Frederick yield, heard them formulate a plan.
She went to the wood.
SINCE JANE’S FAMILY had arrived at Urizon, making far more of a hassle than two medium-sized women had the right, Mary had taken to long walks out in the forest. That evening she kept to the edge of the tree line, nervous of losing her way in the dark. She debated her dwindling options. She did not speak out loud, but the wood heard.
8
The next was to be a day of disappointment—in myself, as I could not access Peter’s computer, and in Matthew, who, incurious the night prior, now struggled to focus on the task at hand. He appeared full of questions, but midway through would bite his lip and swallow each one down, casting me sidelong glances and a furrowed brow instead of further conversation.
“When you get sick, do you— Never mind.” He ducked his head, diving into a file cabinet.
“If you eat meat, does it— Sorry.” He scratched his neck.
“Has it been since birth—” Matthew stopped himself, punctuating the abrupt silence with the click of a pen cap.