“It wasn’t revenge at all, I think. It was only justice.”
“Of course it was revenge. Or some sort of insurance, if you like. Either way, they mean the same thing. Justice is a beautiful word, a damned noble word, but it’s just revenge, all dressed up for legal purposes. He had no right to rob me like that. My father’s business. No right at all.” She grows a little passionate now, tossing the cigarette into the dirt and smashing it with her heel. “Thank God he’s dead now. What a favor you’ve done me.”
“It was Samuel who pulled the trigger.”
Samuel says nothing to this. He stands apart, hands braced in his pockets, staring east as if to haul the sun above the horizon by the power of his gaze. Or else to smash it back down. To go back. I can see the edge of his cheek, a piece of his nose. The dark hair curling around his neck.
“My hero,” Lydia says, not following my gaze. She’s looking instead at the Ford. Her eyes are still fierce—penetrating the metal skin to my daughter sleeping within—but the smile’s disappeared into a round, speculative knot. What a sharp little figure she makes, what a contrast to the soft-edged fairy who danced into my bedroom last month. As if she’s taken the blade of a razor and applied it to her boundaries, trimming away the excess. In the silent, deserted morning, she might be a figurine on somebody’s desk. But no. Now her hand forms a fist. Her voice bites the air. “I hope he suffered. Do you think he suffered, Samuel?”
“I blew his brains out, Lydia.”
“Don’t sound so bitter, darling. Remember what he did to you. Remember what he did to me. Stuck in that fetid basement for weeks. Do you know what I had to do to escape? I had to seduce one of my own guards. Lousy, stinking, ugly little chap. His breath, my God, like the stink of hell.”
“Good,” I say. “You’ll be used to it, then.”
Samuel whips around. “Be quiet!”
“You know I’m right, Samuel. You know what she is. My God, listen to her! Don’t be such a fool.”
“Samuel understands the truth,” Lydia snaps.
He’s breathing hard. I can see the movement of his chest beneath his shirt, the flex of his fingers.
“Samuel, please,” I say. “Don’t let her do this. You know what she’s capable of. You know she won’t be satisfied with money. She’ll have to kill me afterward, because she knows I can destroy her now. She knows I know the truth.”
“Oh, nonsense. All I want is what’s mine. What belonged to my father and now belongs to me. I’m a terribly reasonable person, aren’t I, Samuel?”
I raise my voice to a bark. “Your father ran that company into the ground, and Simon built it up again by his own effort. A thing you couldn’t have done in a thousand years. You just take, that’s all you do. You take things and chew them up and spit them out again, when they’ve given up all their flavor. If I gave you every penny I own, you wouldn’t try to buy more orchards or invest in more ships. Oh, no. You’d just spend it all on hotels and dresses and jewelry and leave everything to rot.”
Lydia smiles faintly and turns to Samuel. Her small, elegant hands make a cradle in the air. “Well, darling? Aren’t you going to defend me?”
“I have stood by you through everything,” he says hoarsely.
“Of course you have. As I’ve stood by you, haven’t I? I’ve never asked a single thing of you that wasn’t just and right. And I’ve suffered so much for your sake.”
It’s the strangest thing. As she speaks to him, supplicating, her soft edges have returned, blurring the outline of her in the sunrise, and I realize that she’s wearing the same dress she wore when I first met her. That blue dress with the innocent white polka dots. Samuel gazes at her, his feet buried in the dirt, his hands clenched beside his enormous thighs. Utterly absorbed in the sight of her and the cadence of her voice.
“Your own brother took me like an animal in the garden,” she says, “and you weren’t there to help me. You were gone. I had come round to comfort your poor mother, and he was drunk, as ever, and he lured me outside and he took me in the grass—”
“Quiet!” Samuel says in anguish.
“—and he must have liked it well enough, because he came to visit me at my house the next day, and you know my father, he always turned to jelly with Simon, he adored him, he practically threw me at him. What could I do? You were gone!” She’s sobbing now, actually sobbing in her throat. “He used to take me in the conservatory, that was his favorite spot, on the chaise, he would make me take off my dress—”
“She’s lying,” I say.
“Am I? Did Simon tell you that? That I was to blame somehow for his taking my innocence? I seduced him? Did he say—oh, let me guess—did he say we only did it once? Because just once is enough, you know, to start a baby—”
Samuel seizes her by the shoulders. “My God! Enough!”
“You see? You see why I couldn’t ever bear to go to bed with you? I wasn’t being cruel, oh darling, I just couldn’t, not after the way your brother defiled me—look out!”
I’m sprinting for the Ford, throwing open the driver’s door, trying to scramble inside. But Samuel—large, lumbering Samuel—takes on the agility of a tennis player. A tennis player chasing the deciding ball. He lunges for me. Catches me by the ribs, by the neck, drags me from the car into the dirt. I hear Evelyn’s wail in the air above me, sailing over Samuel’s angry head.
“Let me go,” I whisper. “You’ve had your revenge. You’ve killed him. Just let me go, for God’s sake.”
“He’s got to pay.”
“He has paid.”
“Just give her the money.”
“She can have the money. Whatever she wants. Just let us go, please, let us—”
Samuel starts up suddenly, drawing me with him.
“Do you hear that?” says Lydia in a low voice.
I can’t hear anything, next to Samuel’s thick arm and his beating heart, except for Evelyn’s hysterical cries. I would hear her voice through anything, through a stone wall, through an artillery barrage. My name. Mama, Mama, Mama. Her small arms, reaching toward me. Her red, wet, crumpled face.
Right here. Mama’s right here. I strain against Samuel’s arm, kick him, pound him, Mama, Mama, she calls, streaming tears, and a shadow moves between us and swoops her out of the Ford’s open seat.
“Darling,” Lydia coos. Cuddling my daughter close. Nuzzling her neck. “Sweetest darling love. It’s all right. Auntie’s here.”
Evelyn cries, Mama, Mama. But with less conviction.
Lydia settles Evelyn on her hip, cradling that delicate, writhing, damp little body, humming and smiling. Her eyes are half-lidded, as if in bliss. “Auntie’s here, sweetheart. Mama’s busy with Uncle Samuel.”
“Give her to me,” I say in a terribly low voice. “Samuel, for God’s sake, let me go.”
“Quiet!”
“She’s my daughter!”
“She’s not going to hurt her.”