“They’ve stolen our thunder,” Paul said.
The invitation to celebrate Finn and Marta’s elopement arrived as Paul and Callie were composing the announcement of their own engagement. Paul had proposed more formally after his first awkward approach, producing soft music and champagne, and then kneeling, silhouetted by the moonrise over Salem Sound. They would live in Matera as planned. “Happily ever after,” Paul had said as he put the ring on her finger. It was a perfect fit.
It had been a magical few days. Then the invitation to celebrate Finn and Marta’s elopement arrived.
Paul pretended to shrug it off. “They got married. What a surprise.”
It had been less than eight weeks since Emily’s passing.
Callie had not been raised with the kind of social protocol that dictated prescribed periods of mourning; still, even she understood that this was scandalous. She could just imagine what people were thinking. Finn and Marta hadn’t said a word to them about their intentions. “I just—I don’t know why they couldn’t have waited,” she told him, grasping for something reasonable to say.
“Perhaps she’s pregnant,” Paul scoffed.
His attempt at humor fell flat.
Callie looked at the invitation again:
Mr. and Mrs. Paul Finnian Whiting
request the pleasure of your company at Pride’s Heart on July 18, 2015, at one P.M.
in celebration of their recent marriage
The accompanying note said that they had left Pride’s Crossing several days earlier and that they would be traveling in Europe for the next month.
“Here’s the thing,” Paul said. “All the land that our family wrested away from the Hathornes in 1692? With one ‘I do,’ Marta just managed to erase that land grab.”
“Paul—”
“You don’t understand. All the property is in a trust. All the houses, all the outbuildings. My whole inheritance.”
“How can she erase a trust?”
“With my mother gone, my father’s now the only trustee—Marta can convince him to dissolve it. People dissolve trusts every day. Or he can sell everything out of it.”
Callie shook her head, horrified. “He wouldn’t.”
“I’m not so sure. At the reading of my mother’s will I asked the lawyer a question about the trust. My father said—and I’m quoting him—‘You’d better simmer down or I’ll dissolve the damned thing.’?”
Paul hadn’t told her that.
“It’s been a difficult time,” Callie said, trying to hide her shock. “No one is quite themselves…”
Paul made a disgusted sound.
“Why don’t we skip the wedding celebration? We don’t have to stay here until July. Or we could come back for it. Why don’t we just go back to Italy now?”
“And make things easier for Marta?” He was quiet for a long moment. “My mother was getting better, wasn’t she?” he asked. “You told me you thought she was getting better.”
Callie took a moment to absorb the implication. “She seemed better, yes,” she answered carefully. But sometimes a surge of life happened just before the end. She’d seen it at the nursing home many times, only to end up grief stricken. “But sometimes—”
“So maybe Dad and Marta just got tired of waiting, and decided to hurry things along,” he said, interrupting her.
She stared at him. “You don’t mean that.”
They looked at each other in silence.
“I guess not. But I have to tell you, Callie. I want to kill them both right now.”
The song of the banshee varies with the listener. The dying hear the music of the spheres. Those left behind hear something else entirely.
—ROSE’S Book of Trees
“You’re drinking too much,” Callie accused. “You need to slow it down.”
“You refuse to understand how serious this is,” Paul shouted. “How far back it goes!”
“Paul, I’ve heard enough.”
In the month and a half since they received the wedding announcement, Paul had become obsessed, determined to trace his mother’s death to the land the Whitings had taken from Marta’s family so many generations back.
There had been no talk of returning to Matera.
“You don’t get it. Sarah Hathorne’s accusation of my ancestor was cruel and murderous religious intolerance! If the witch trials hadn’t ended, my relative would have hanged.”
“I get it! I do. But Sarah would also have been hanged. Your Whiting ancestor made a counteraccusation against Sarah Hathorne, remember?” Callie recalled what she’d heard the tour guide explaining in Marta’s house months earlier. “For the crime of using a love potion to bewitch her husband. They’d have hanged her as well.”
He took a sip of his brandy. “Okay, they might have,” he conceded. “But here’s the point I’m trying to make you understand.” He tilted his crystal tumbler in Callie’s direction, not even noticing as a bit spilled over the rim. “Sarah Hathorne was related to one of the hanging judges. As a Puritan, things would have gone far easier for her than for my Catholic relative.”
Callie stopped short of stating the obvious: History had already proven that Sarah Hathorne had suffered the most. She had gone to jail and, having no means to pay for her jail time, been rendered penniless, losing her land to the Whitings. “It all happened so long ago,” she said, to end the conversation. “Who knows what would have happened? Let’s move on.”
“Move on?” Paul snapped. “I know Marta pretty well, and I guarantee you she’ll have us ‘moved on’ out of the boathouse and off her property by Christmas.”
“So what? So we’ll go back to Italy. It’s what we both want. It’s what I want anyway.”
He didn’t comment.
“I’m not sure I know what you want anymore.”
Paul still didn’t comment. He was too obsessed with his “inheritance” to think about anything else.
Callie hummed the calming tone and counted to ten. Paul wasn’t amused, and she hadn’t meant for him to be. The tone was as much to calm her fraying nerves as his.
He shot her a look and walked out of the room, slamming the door.
It was difficult to reconcile the changes Callie had seen in Paul in the short time they’d been back. Certainly the loss of Emily had taken its toll. Her absence was felt in every corner of the empty mansion on the other side of the woods, a house Paul had taken to spending time in while his father and Marta were away. Callie could sometimes see him sitting alone in the orangerie, Emily’s favorite room.