House of Masques (3 page)

“Michael,” she cried, her hands burrowing gopher-like into the ground.

The sun. Where had the sun gone? A shadow lay across her body and her hands clenched. The earth squeezed between her fingers. She looked up. The Indian was naked except for a loincloth, his knife pointed at her breast. Kathleen twisted and felt the pebbles jabbing into her back. His face was angular and brown and his body was smeared a dull red, the same color as the blood on his knife.

She scrambled to her feet and ran. After a few paces her feet caught as though entangled in marsh grass. She reached down and pulled the sticky, entwining strands loose and tried to throw them aside, but they clung to her fingers and she looked and saw the blood and matted hair. The hair glistened in the sunlight. The color of gold.

She screamed, one long, hopeless scream. The Indian's bronze face bent close to hers and his hand grasped the neckline of her dress and she looked into his eyes and the panic ripped and tore at her.

One of his eyes was green, the other blue.

She woke gasping, sobbing. The window was a pale rectangle on the far wall. Her heart throbbed. “Michael?” she whispered, and she saw her brother run toward her across a green field of rippling grass, a bouquet of daisies in his hand, laughing, calling to her, “Kathy, Kathy.” His voice seemed to echo in the empty bedroom.

Kathleen shook the vision from her mind. She was weary. As tired as though she had never slept. The water from the basin felt tepid on her face and as she dressed her underclothes clung to her body. She drew on the gray dress.

The hall still held the shadows of the night and Kathleen groped ahead with one hand on the wall. How had she and Clarissa come the night before? She found the stairs and descended the two flights, hurried along the corridor, tried a door on her right. A gloom-filled room with the furniture shrouded beneath green drapes. Another door. An unused room, empty.

A clatter drew her to the end of the hallway and she pushed open the last door. A black coal stove crouched to her left. Cupboards clustered along one wall. A pump protruded over the sink. Josiah sat behind a bare wooden table sipping coffee.

He smiled.

“Good morning,” he said. “Are you ready to accept my proposal?”

Kathleen sighed. “Yes,” she said slowly. “I accept.”

Chapter Three

The room was quiet. From a great distance, Kathleen heard the faint warning cry of a steamboat whistle.

Josiah's chair scraped on the wood floor. Kathleen stepped back. He rose and held his cup aloft as he would a glass of wine, his slender fingers encircling the rim.

“I propose a toast,” he said. “To the forthcoming meeting of Miss Kathleen Donley and Captain Charles Worthington.” He raised the cup and drank. “May it prove to be both fateful and fatal.”

Again he lifted the cup. “Another toast. To the long and amicable association of Mr. Josiah Gorman and Miss Donley.”

He stared down at her and she found no warmth in his smile. “An association commenced today, the third of July, eighteen hundred and seventy one, and lasting…forever.”

He finished the coffee in a single swallow and hurled the cup against the stove where it shattered into a thousand pieces. She stared at him, open-mouthed, then stooped beside the stove.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“Picking up the china,” she told him.

“Leave the china,” he said. “You're not a servant girl any longer.”

She stood slowly.
How should I take this man?
she wondered. He was like no one she had ever known.

Josiah turned from her and walked to a shelf beside the window where five brass bells, no two alike, sat ranged in order of size. He grasped the largest, some six inches from lip to crown. The clapper clanged harshly in her ears.

“Donley,” he muttered. “Donley.” He repeated the word with distaste. “We must do something about your name.”

A heavy, gray-haired woman appeared in the doorway.
The first servant I've seen
, Kathleen realized.

“We leave early tomorrow morning,” Josiah told the woman. Kathleen's breathing quickened. “Tell Miss Clarissa,” he went on, “she will go and so will our guest, Miss Donley. To the Worthington Estate. I'll be traveling with them as far as Newburgh.” The woman nodded and left.

“We've very little time.” He faced Kathleen, and in the daylight she could see the lines around his mouth and eyes and the white strands curling amid his gray hair. “Eight days, Kathleen,” he told her. “You'll have the eight days I'm in Washington.”

“You won't be with me?”

“No. Impossible. I don't have the time.”

“An-and,” she stammered, “if I don't succeed in eight days?”

He shrugged. “I'll have kept my part of the bargain and I'll expect you to keep yours. But you will succeed. Somehow I'll find a way to have you meet Captain Worthington and let you get to know him. I don't yet know how, but I will.”

His brown eyes held hers and she nodded. She believed in him. “You will,” she said.

Motioning Kathleen to follow, he strode from the room and down a back stairs to a door at the rear of the house opening onto a flatland by the river. He led her along a path through an apple orchard, the trees old and untended, the fruit small, misshapen.

The horses skittered uneasily when they entered the stable, neighing, hooves clattering on the wooden floor. Josiah found the hostler in the tack room and ordered the coach readied for the next morning. He swung about without waiting for a reply and hurried back to the house. Kathleen ran to keep up. He was excited, she sensed, almost exultant.

A woman carrying an armload of bedclothes stepped aside on the stairs. “I didn't notice any servants before,” Kathleen said when they reached the landing.

“I have but a few and those I like to be unobtrusive. The Worthingtons, I understand, are quite different. Decidedly so. Their estate is staffed with more servants than any similar establishment on the Eastern seaboard.”

What would it be like to have servants? she wondered, picturing herself being waited on by grooms and butlers, footmen and serving women and ladies' maids.

They sat in Josiah's office. “If you're going to stalk Captain Worthington on his home territory,” he said, “you'll need help. One man to accompany you. One only—more would arouse their suspicions. But if there's to be only one, he must be very special.” Josiah spun the globe and the continents and oceans whirled into a fluid blur. “He's somewhere on this earth and we must find him.”

My mind is spinning like the globe
, she thought. The sphere slowed—Asia, Europe, the Atlantic. It stopped—the United States, the West. “
The Great American Desert
,” she read.

Michael. Must my thoughts return time and again to Michael?
Buried somewhere on those barren plains. Forever gone. Her throat tightened as she murmured his name to herself. Michael, Michael, Michael.

Josiah thumped a box of cards on the desk and once more she noticed the holes and notches along their edges. From a drawer he took a metal rod as long as a knitting needle but thinner.

“A system of my own devising.” He nodded at the cards. “Years ahead of its time.”

Josiah pushed the needle through the upper right hand corner of the stack of cards and lifted. “First of all,” he said, “this person, this accomplice, must be a man.” More than half of the cards remained impaled on the needle while the remainder fell back into the box.

“I've had a card made for each available person,” he told her. “Each section of the card has a different meaning. This right hand corner is the sex. The men have a hole punched there and stay on the rod while the women have notches and when I lift they drop aside.

“Next we have to eliminate anyone too far away. Our man will have to be within a day's travel.” Two more thrusts removed more than half of the remaining cards from the pack. Josiah grinned. Like a child, Kathleen thought, playing a favorite game.

“He must be daring,” Josiah went on. “Unafraid and willing to take a chance when the odds are right. A gambler, an uncommon gambler who wins much more often than he loses.” More cards dropped aside.

“Intelligent. But not from book-learning. We need a man of the world.” He thrust again. “And versatile. A man of many parts.” Only three cards dangled from the rod.

“And finally, the most important attribute: he must be so committed to me, or so vulnerable because of what I know of him, that his allegiance is unquestioned.” Two cards fell to the desk. One remained. Josiah read from the card and nodded.

“I should have known.” He tapped the card with his forefinger. “What does he call himself? Edward Allen? As good a name as any. Resourceful, ingenious, daring—all the qualities we need. Lives in New York City. Good. And he carries with him a secret so terrible, and as a consequence owes me a debt so great, he'll do whatever I demand.”

“A secret?” she repeated.

“Never ask. Never try to find out. The secret is mine, and his, and must die with him.”

She shivered. Death, death, death. So much talk of death.

Josiah looked back at the card. “Faults, certainly. Who hasn't faults? He's erratic. A womanizer. Likes his brandy neat and drinks too much.”

“How old is he?”

“Let's see. When I knew him he was just twenty-seven. Makes him thirty-three or -four now.”

He scribbled on the spiral pad and tore off the sheet of paper. “The address,” he explained. “I'll have him meet us downriver in Newburgh.” She watched Josiah walk to the window where he leaned facing away from her, both hands on the sill. She looked past him over the tops of the apple trees to the river where the mist shimmered in the early morning sun.

“Later today Clarissa will take you to Poughkeepsie for clothes,” he said. “And tomorrow, Miss Donley, we'll be on our way. Donley, what a dreadful name!” He frowned and ran his fingernail across the back of a row of books before selecting one and leafing through the pages.

“I like my name,” Kathleen said, surprised at this, her first failure to defer to him.

“Hardly an important consideration. Do you want my help or not?” She nodded.

“Then we must choose a new and more suitable surname for you. Captain Worthington will certainly look askance at the arrival of a Donley. I'm sure we can do better.” He laid the book on the desk. “The English royalty. Their names have a certain ring to them. Plantaganet. How would you like to be Kathleen Plantagenet?”

“No,” she said.

“You're right. Too European, too French. Lancaster? York? How does Kathleen York sound to you?”

“No,” she said. She was reminded of the boys who had courted her last year and the year before in Ashtabula and how she had imagined her name combined with theirs. As one of the town's few Catholics, and with her father the way he was, and being in service beside, she had had very few names to reckon with.

“Tudor? Hanover?” Josiah asked impatiently.

She tested the names on her tongue and found them strange and alien. She shook her head.

“Stuart? Kathleen Stuart?”

“Kathleen Stuart,” she said. “Stuart. All right, I like Stuart. Kathleen Stuart.”

“I quite agree. We'll inter Kathleen Donley with appropriate ceremonies in an unmarked resting place.”

And Michael Donley? Had the headboard on his grave long since rotted away?

“Are you ready, Kathleen Stuart?” he asked.

She bit her lip and tried to smile. “Kathleen Stuart is ready,” she replied.

They left early the next morning. “Today's the Fourth and I want to ride through the villages before the parades begin,” Josiah said as he took Clarissa's arm.

Kathleen followed them to the driveway beside the river. “We'll go by way of the Shore Road,” Josiah told her over his shoulder. “Makes the drive to Poughkeepsie a mile shorter than if we took the upper road.”

The branches of the apple trees interlaced above her head in dark, grotesque patterns. At the end of the path she saw the coach and heard the two horses snorting and pawing the ground. A stableboy helped Clarissa into the coach before offering his hand to Kathleen.

“Let me ride on top,” she said and Josiah, already in the driver's seat, reached down and she felt his firm grip as he lifted her to sit beside him. He gathered the reins in his hands and without a glance to right or left called, “Hi-eee,” and the coach jerked ahead.

On her right she could make out the dark and silent river. To her left the trees swayed in the pale light of early dawn, their leaves whispering in the breeze off the water.

Kathleen looked behind her and made sure her new portmanteau and worn carpetbag were lashed to the roof. Someone had wound red-white-and-blue bunting on the railing; she remembered other Fourths in Ashtabula with the parades followed by speeches and a picnic in the town square.

This day, this Fourth of July, she knew, was already dawning to the east. She imagined the earth turning slowly into the sunlight, pictured the whalers putting out from Boston on the tide, the farms and churches of New England, the homesteads of the West where the settlers were already awakening, the lights of the steamboats reflected on the Mississippi, and farther west the tall grass of the plains undulating under the moon's soft glow, the great restless herds of buffalo, and the railroad tracks probing westward, always westward, toward the passes through the snow-tipped Rockies.

She was proud of her country, the greatest on earth, expanding from the Atlantic to the Pacific, her forty million people going forward, bringing civilization and Christianity to the savage Indians. The people had confidence in General Grant, now in his third year in the White House, and the nation grew and prospered, a nation with a future as limitless as the American West. Being an American made Kathleen feel warm and assured.

The coach swayed into a bend; she looked back, and for an instant glimpsed the chimneys of Gleneden thrusting into the pale sky and far, far below saw a single light shining from a window. She shut her eyes and listened to the pounding hooves, and in her mind saw a cavalry company, guidons high, trotting single file into a valley.

The sides of the valley sloped upward gently at first, the ground covered with boulders higher than a man's head, then the sides steepened and became cliff-like. On a bluff above the valley a lone Indian on horseback gazed down at the file of soldiers. His face was expressionless. Only his eyes moved as he watched and waited.

Without warning a tremor ran along Kathleen's legs and spine. She looked to Josiah, wanted to reach to him, to touch him, but he hunched silently beside her, his thoughts his own, and her assurance evaporated as quickly as would the mist on the river. She knew she was more alone than she had ever been before in her life, driving through the dawn with a man she feared and a woman she did not understand, toward a future she could not foresee.

Independence Day, 1871.
The first of my eight allotted days
, Kathleen thought. She pulled her new shawl tighter about her shoulders and waited for the warmth of morning.