T
hree evenings later, as she stood in front of the full-length mirror just delivered that morning, she saw herself as she wanted to be, without the lines of strain that had threatened to mar her face. There was a knocking at the door. She frowned and turned down the bedroom lantern, moved to the head of the stairs and waited until the knocking came again. It was late, she knew, easily past nine, and the only one she could think of who would be calling on her would be Kevin. And she had seen enough of him over the past few days to last her quite some time. She considered not answering, then sighed and changed her mind. Whoever it was, was persistent and at least deserved some sort of response.
She refused to allow herself to think of Eric.
Quickly she moved down the stairs, her right hand touching at the fall of dark hair on her shoulders, her left smoothing the bodice of her unadorned brown dress.
And when she opened the door, she almost screamed.
He was dressed in black trousers and frock coat, his blazing white shirt fronted with an elegant fall of ruffled lace. He wore one black leather glove and a top hat of gleaming beaver pelt, and in his left hand he carried a walking stick whose head was carved in the image of a wolf. In fact, the only color about him was the bright red patch that covered his left eye.
His right arm was unnaturally stiff, and from the laced cuff protruded a blue-black hook.
“My God,” Cass said, stumbling backward as Geoffrey Hawkins stepped over the threshold and closed the door behind him. “Oh, my God, it can’t be.”
“But you knew I was alive, m’dear,” he said, pacing her into the living room, waiting as she half-fell, half-slumped onto the divan. “Surely Mr. Forrester gave you my message.”
Her hand went immediately to her cheek, and Hawkins laughed. It was a hollow sound, a well-deep echo devoid of mirth that perfectly matched the funereal clothes he had chosen to wear.
“Geoffrey—” she stammered.
“I thought it would be best to let you know my Mr. Forrester was not attempting some sort of … scheme,” he said. “I wanted you to know it was still me out there, whom you left to die.”
She could not think. She was scarcely able to breathe. She tried telling herself she was watching a ghost wandering slowly about the room, touching with his stick the shelves, the vases, the edge of the hearth. It had to be a ghost. Except for the arm and the patch nothing had changed; his hair was still that soft white-blond that curled at his shoulders, his chest was broad, his face unlined. She wanted to weep for what had been done to him, wanted to throw herself at him and welcome him home. But there was the patch, and the arm, and the unnervingly steady gaze his one good eye kept sending her way.
The air grew warm, and despite the open windows there was no breeze to absorb August’s humid heat.
Hawkins positioned himself behind the divan facing her, his good hand gripping the ribbed wooden back.
“Geoffrey,” she said, fighting against a quaver that weakened her voice, “I want you to know—I want you to know you’re wrong. About everything. It isn’t—”
“You left me there to die,” he said calmly.
“—the way you think it is. I was taken from the house by the men who attacked it. Father was already dead, and the place was burning down when they came in and grabbed me.” She leaned forward earnestly. “My God, Geoffrey, don’t you see? They took me all the way to Virginia! They—they raped me, Geoffrey, and if it hadn’t been for a man named Martingale—” She stopped suddenly, realizing too late the mistake she had made. Hawkins’s face darkened, the muscles of his neck bulging with suppressed fury. His tongue moved to his lips, licking them dryly, and he stiffened to look down at her as though from a hillside.
And his eye, she thought in terrified despair; once sharply blue, she could not understand how it could fill so with hate.
“Geoffrey,” she said, “I thought you were dead.” And the sadness of her tone became a weight on her chest, made her throat raw, brimmed her eyes with tears. “Geoffrey, why don’t you listen to me?”
“You’re doing very well,” he said mockingly, each word a hissing release of the tension draining from his features. “Very well indeed.”
She didn’t know what to say. For a moment there was a flash of the man he had once been, the next he was someone she had never known. She felt a tear break across her cheek and she wiped it absently with the back of a hand. Hawkins smiled, and for a moment the blue eye softened, and she wanted to rouse some anger within her, something to fight back with and break through the veil that had fogged his mind; but she was afraid, not for her physical well-being, but for the confusion that roiled reason in her mind: I loved him, I fear him, there’s something there that used to be, and my God, how can it be? He’s not the same man!
“I want to see your bedroom, Cassandra,” he said quietly.
“Geoffrey, listen—”
“Your bedroom!” he thundered, and she was out of her seat and to the stairs before she could think, knowing only that she had to get away from this man and have time to think. To think! Meanwhile she was climbing the stairs slowly, Hawkins confidently behind her, urging her upward with light pokes of his stick in the small of her back. The anger came now, but she was powerless to vent it; one move, she thought, and he would club her with the jaws of the wolf. But he wasn’t mad, she refused to believe it (refused to remember the look in his eyes after Gettysburg, the three days of thundering cannon—a hell of a way to celebrate our Independence, he had said—before the look in his eyes, before the battle, before the house and ground had buried him alive).
She stepped into the room and turned quickly. Hawkins stood on the threshold, his eye sweeping the furniture, the flooring, stopping at the coverlet she had not yet straightened. He grinned briefly, and she wondered if Forrester had told him what he’d done. A flash of warmth covered her face and vanished, leaving behind it a chill she could not shake. He nodded.
“We made love outdoors,” he said softly, and the familiar tenderness in the words made her lift a hand toward him, drop it when he glared and his lips grew taut. “Much less innocent in here, isn’t it, you whore!” And before she could move he was across the floor. His mutilated arm shot out, the hook catching the neck of her dress and yanking it downward, the cloth tearing and exposing her breasts. She didn’t cover herself; she dared not move while the flash of blue-black metal shredded the dress from her shoulders, her waist, tore her undergarments into pieces until she was naked from neck to hips. Then, while she pressed back against the bed, the hook touched her skin. She gasped.
The metal had been polished feather smooth, had been sharpened so that its entire inner curve was razor thin. And it was cold. Her flesh grew taut, and she closed her eyes, not wanting to see the weapon-hand drift slowly from the hollow of her throat, down between her breasts to the flat of her stomach. Her ears picked up a faint roaring that became, in time, the quickening of his breath.
“I’m going to make love to you,” Hawkins whispered.
Cass reached behind her and gripped the footboard tightly so that she wouldn’t fall, her breasts thrusting outward, her hips tilting forward. The touch of his hands was only a memory, but she felt them gently prodding, stroking.
The hook passed her navel, and she felt her knees trembling.
“But not tonight.”
She did not move. The icy hook rose again and circled her nipples, eased back to her throat and drew an imaginary gash from ear to ear. Then it withdrew. She heard his retreating footsteps. The door closed. Five minutes passed, ten, and finally she allowed her legs to buckle and she collapsed, sobbing dryly and retching, acid spilling from her mouth until, at last, she permitted herself one short scream.
S
he said nothing to anyone. And when it was apparent that she would not be seeing either Geoffrey or Forrester again soon, she understood completely their game of nerves, their war to break her down to Hawkins’s satisfaction. And in realizing that, she found within herself a reserve of strength she had thought long dead; and as the next few weeks passed on the back of the wind that drew off the heat and replaced it with the slight breath of autumn, she submerged herself in the rudiments of maintaining a successful Philadelphia household. She grew to accept the deference of the tradesmen as her due, nodded with more assurance when meeting her neighbors on the street, and was saved from more than a few drastic blunders by Mrs. Amanda Hamilton, the housekeeper Kevin had engaged for her. She was a middle-aged woman nearly as big around as she was tall, not above taking a glass of port when the day’s work was done, possessing the most remarkable culinary skills Cass had ever seen. The woman intimidated her mightily, her face in a perpetual scowl amid more folds and wrinkles than anyone had a right to have; but with Kevin’s help, she understood that the housekeeper was laying a test for her, examining her new mistress from behind her shield of blustering for signs of flaws that would make the relationship an impossible one. And when she passed—a moment signaled by a rare smile and a grunt—Cass was relieved, and more; she was delighted.
“Cassandra, don’t you think you’re going a little overboard?” Kevin asked her once, standing in the midst of extreme confusion while several apprentices and a journeyman bustled about the living room measuring for the new furniture, Mrs. Hamilton bellowed from the kitchen at a delivery boy in rags, and a wizened, bad-tempered seamstress complained about her refusal to stand still for a fitting.
“Kevin,” she said, nearly shouting to make herself heard, “if this is my house now, then I want it the way I want it, all right?”
In October he was with her when she spoke with a representative from the Pinkerton Company.
“Are you sure?” she was asking the man.
“Miss, there’s not a board on them docks I ain’t looked under. The whole damned fleet’s gettin’ rich on my account, and I’ve drunk so much I’m seen things. Don’t help much that the
Gull’s Wing
was a Limey barge, either. Can’t talk to none o’ them ’less I swim. Which I can’t, and won’t.”
“And the woman?”
He shrugged. “There’s lots o’ women down there, Miss.”
“Will you keep on trying?” Kevin asked.
He shrugged again. “Your money, mister, not mine.”
“Then do it. Nobody vanishes off the earth like that.”
“These days, mister, you can’t be sure of anything.”
By November the house had quieted, and was operating in an almost automatic routine. She paid scant attention to her neighbors, wasting no time worrying about introducing herself into Philadelphia society. The business of finding a pattern of comfortable living, the seamstresses and the carpenters, Mrs. Hamilton in the kitchen, all served to keep her mind from dwelling on much of anything, particularly the one thing that mattered the most: none of the Pinkerton’s investigations had turned up anything about Eric that would convince her he was still alive. The mysterious woman seemed a phantom.
It came to her, then, on the ninth day of November, that she would have to admit to herself that Eric was gone from her life. Not just vanished with an unknown lover, but irrevocably gone; and as she lay in her bed, listening to the stir of the first winter winds, hearing the leaves torn from their branches and scrabbling against the panes, she allowed herself the single word most damned in her vocabulary: “Dead.”
And she wept, silently and long, drenching her pillow until there were no more tears to come and the sobs no longer tore like claws at her throat, She stared wide-eyed into the darkness, into the collection of shadows under the four-poster’s canopy. She felt drained, as if some hellish night creature had stolen into her dreams and sucked her dry of the life-force that had kept her on her feet since her flight from the farm. And as she lay there, her hatred of those who had persecuted her surged, settled, and became a stone that lodged in her chest where her heart should have been. There was no longer the urge to race out into the night, dagger and pistol in hand; she knew now the value of patience, and knew, too, that while the war still raged in the South, she had no choice but to wait until the day she would be free to travel there. On that day, on that day alone, she would live again.
Chapter Fourteen
T
he carriage was small enough to be a pony cart, and very nearly was with its low sides, single entry in the back, and sideways seats that forced the driver to sit at an angle to properly handle the reins. Several miles beyond the last of the city’s homes and warehouses, it lurched off the edge of the road and came to a halt beneath an ancient hickory, one of a tight line of trees that crowded the slope leading in gentle decline to the river. The water was bright and cool, reflecting the summer sky darkly and giving it the refreshing touch of winter that Cass felt she needed after the sun’s heat had baked her for what seemed like hours. She was alone, and worried, and the stifling enclosure of the house had bothered her, making her feel as though a cage had been erected around her while she’d slept. Mrs. Hamilton had been gone three days, having crossed the river to visit an ailing sister living on the outskirts of Camden, in the pine barrens that stretched all the way across New Jersey to the sea. With the woman’s ribald laughter absent, Cass quickly grew to hate Jordan Lane; and that morning she’d ordered the carriage from Gerber’s stables, refusing a young boy’s offer to drive her, and had taken the fastest possible way out of Philadelphia. She drove north, parallel to the Delaware, until the houses had dropped away, the traffic had faded to virtually nothing, and she was able to locate a familiar narrow path that took her closer to the water.
She brought the cart to a stop, then clambered out and wrapped the reins around the nearest stout branch.
She fed a handful of sugar to the horse, slung the feedbag over its muzzle, and made her way carefully under the trees to a large flat boulder jutting like a stage over the water. Buttercup and jack-in-the-pulpit, violet and berry splashed islands of new color through the high grass; cattails and reeds marked the passage of the breeze, and she savored it all as she picked out scents and listened to the bees that droned lazily. She stretched, hiked up her blue-and-white skirts, and walked out onto the rock, kicking aside a small pile of twigs before she sat, dangling her shoes over the edge not a hand’s breadth above the river. She clasped her hands in her lap, changed her mind, and balancing herself carefully, leaned to one side and snatched a dead branch from the weeds. She used it to poke at the shallows below her, staring at the silt rising in brown clouds that swirled and were washed swiftly away.