The Magician's Lie (10 page)

On another day, he might have shocked me. In the current case, it wasn't the worst news I had heard that day, or even that hour. “You really are?”

“Yes. I'm going to New York,” he said.

“But you do good work here.”

He said, “I can do more and better in New York. You of all people should know.”

“Me?”

“I've seen you dance.”

“Just the once,” I scoffed. “And months ago.”

“No,” he said. I realized what he meant. He'd watched me, some stolen moment, when I didn't know he was there. It was both terrifying and exciting to know.

Looking down at me, something changed in his face. “My God, those eyes of yours,” he said. “I've never seen eyes as beautiful.”

“You haven't seen enough eyes.”

“Trust me. I've seen plenty of eyes.”

I suddenly realized how alone we were, how close we were, how dark the shed was. If we wanted to seek comfort in each other's bodies, we could. Having him this close brought back all those buried feelings in force. I forced out a question. “Do you have enough money for the train?”

“No,” he said, “but the train isn't the only way.”

“It's not?”

“There are ways. There are always ways, if you know them. The cook needs fresh crabs from Washington for Mr. Vanderbilt, and I've done enough favors for her that she'll send me along in the cart, no questions.”

“Washington isn't New York.”

“Let me finish. From Washington to Baltimore, that's almost no distance at all. I could even go on foot. I have cousins, my mother's cousins, who can house me in Baltimore while I work to build up more money. If I have enough money, there are trains and steamships to New York, and if I don't have enough money, I can stow away.”

“You've thought about this.”

“I don't do anything without a plan.”

My muddled brain clearing at last, I was beginning to develop a plan of my own. Quietly I asked, “When are you leaving?”

“Tonight,” he said.

“I'm coming with you.”

He looked at me in a way I didn't think anyone had looked at me before. Certainly not in the way Ray had, not like an animal to be subdued or an object he had a right to possess. Almost the way Mrs. Severson did after I managed to repair a crack in a teapot that she had said she didn't think could be repaired.

He said earnestly, “Do you mean it? You'll come?”

I drew back. His earnestness made me uncomfortable, and it was too much all at once. He hadn't forgotten me, as I hadn't forgotten him, and now we were thinking of the very same thing—escape—each for our own reasons.

“Yes,” I said.

Whatever his plans, the choice was a simple one for me. Stay and be caught by Ray, or leave and be one step ahead. And on my own, I had little chance of making my way much of anywhere, not before the next day's sunrise. I knew too little of the world. Clyde knew more. That would be valuable.

We nodded at each other like dumb puppets, and he told me where to meet him and when, and I walked back to the house a changed girl once more. Twice during the evening as I was packing my bag, I heard a soft knock on my door, but I knew it must be Mrs. Severson, and I ignored it. I wouldn't tell her that I was leaving. I would simply go. All unknowing, she had done enough harm with my secrets already.

That night, we climbed up into the cart behind the cook, and when the horses lurched forward, I felt my heart rise up. I was headed into the unknown once more, but at least I wouldn't be there when Ray arrived. No one would know where I'd gone; no one could give up my secret. I took the feeling as a sign that I was making the right choice after all. That what I was leaving behind would be a fair trade for what was to come. Time would tell, in any case.

1896

The Phantom Bride

The journey took more than a month, and it was both comfortable and uncomfortable, right and wrong, tense and lovely.

In Washington, we posed as brother and sister, assigned to separate rooms in a travelers' house, seated together only at dinner. Quietly, when no one else could hear, we told each other our stories. He'd cared for his three younger brothers after his mother had died in childbirth with the youngest one, and his father didn't care if anyone was happy or sad or in pain or hungry as long as they kept themselves quiet. He'd lived in North Carolina all his life and taken many jobs to make money, but when he found his talent for tending growing things, Mr. Vanderbilt had actually found him by reputation and asked him to come to Biltmore. He'd been at Biltmore for a year when the great landscape architect Mr. Olmsted, who had designed the grounds, had come to survey his handiwork and was so impressed he praised him and shook his hand.

That was the day Clyde had decided to leave Biltmore and go to New York. Mr. Olmsted was working on a project there, a great park, and could certainly use one more pair of talented hands. Clyde would have followed him immediately, but he feared running out of money more than anything else on earth. Growing up so poor had taught him what it meant to decide which brother would go hungry on a given day, and he could never live that close to the bone again. He couldn't let it happen. Not to his family, should he ever chance to have one, and in the meantime, not to him. He stayed at Biltmore another year to set aside some savings, and the rest I knew.

When he asked for my story in return, I told him almost everything. My invisible father, my early childhood in my grandparents' house, my mother's marriage, life on the farm in Tennessee. Why I danced. How I'd come to the Biltmore for work. I left out any mention of Ray. It thrilled me to realize I could pretend Ray never existed and no one would be the wiser. So from that day forward, I never spoke of him out loud to anyone.

When Clyde and I left Washington, we agreed to walk to Baltimore to stay with his mother's family, hoarding our meager funds. Our sole topic while walking was pure mathematics: how could we stretch our pennies to feed ourselves each day for the absolute minimum? If we slept on the ground every night, would we have enough money for steamship passage up the coast? We haggled over nickels, cents, even half cents. The weather remained muggy and hot even as the sun began to set, and our bags, sparse as they were, grew heavy. When we came across a grand old pine as big around as the Biltmore's greenhouse, we agreed to spend the night under its low, sheltering branches. During this pause, we finally broached the subject that had been simmering under all our conversations, so far unspoken.

He knelt carefully and unrolled a blanket on the ground under the side of the tree that was farthest from the road. I joined him on the blanket, but at the far edge. As the sun set the rest of the way and darkness descended around us, I felt smothered in layers of dust and grime, which I could do nothing to scrub off. Instead I reached up to unbraid and rebraid my hair slowly and with great care.

We didn't speak, but even in the blackness, I could hear his breath and sense his nearness. When I was almost done with my braid, I could tell he had made his way halfway across the blanket, then closer and closer yet. I set one hand on the blanket to steady myself, and he found it with his own hand. I knew what he would do next, and I neither scooted away to make it harder nor leaned in to make it easier. I felt his other hand reach out for me. He lightly stroked the line of my jaw and brought my face to his for a kiss. The kiss was sweet and soft, a tender reminder, and it was hard for me to break contact. But I did.

“I'm not certain we should start that again,” I said.

“Why did we ever stop?”

“I didn't know if I could trust you,” I said and realized I meant it. “I didn't know your intentions.”

“My intentions were that we enjoy each other's company.”

“And?”

“I like how kissing you and touching you feels,” he said, his voice a soft deep rumble in the darkness. “I can tell you like it too. Isn't that enough?”

In the darkness, unable to see each other's faces or bodies, we had only our words to do all the work for us. I let my silence speak for me.

He said then, “Maybe it's not enough, I suppose, for a girl like you. But I can't make any pledges.”

“I never asked for that.”

“I'm eighteen years old,” he said. “I need to make my name, build my career, before I'm fit to make any promises for a future together.”

“I didn't ask for a future.”

“But don't you want to take some pleasure in the present?” he asked.

I answered honestly. Maybe I shouldn't have. “I don't know.”

“Look, Ada,” he said, reaching for my hand again, entwining his fingers with mine. I let him. “You're a charming and wonderful girl.”

“Flatterer.”

“I mean it. I enjoy your company. Very much. Why did you agree to come with me, if you don't enjoy mine?”

I was glad I could tell part of the truth. “I do enjoy you. I do. But I agreed to come with you because it's the fastest way to get where I need to be. Not to snatch some thrills along the roadside.”

He chuckled quietly. “At least you agree that I'm thrilling.”

I laughed at his confidence.

He went on, “I hold you in very high esteem and I would never hurt you. You can count on that.”

“Can I?” But his answer had charmed me, and the question was gentle, not pointed.

“I can at least say this,” he said. “I'll never keep my sentiments a secret.”

Those words sprung immediately to my mind three nights later in Baltimore, where he sank to his knee in front of his mother's cousins and asked me for my hand in marriage.

We had all gathered in the parlor after the evening meal, under the pretext that we'd be listening to one of the young ladies practice a new song on the piano. I walked toward the sofa but was ushered toward the room's finest and most well-padded chair instead, a place of honor usually reserved for the hostess, and I should have known then that there was a reason. Instead I took my seat, as did the others, and I was still watching the empty piano bench and waiting for our songstress to begin when Clyde Garber placed a small decorative pillow on the ground in front of me with great deliberation.

Once he had settled his knee on the pillow and taken my hand in both of his, he swallowed twice and squared his shoulders. Then he said, in a voice that trembled just a little, “Miss Bates, it would make me the happiest man in the world if you would do me the honor of becoming my wife.”

It was almost like falling from the hayloft again, with my breath crushed out of my body, only instead of exploding with pain, I exploded with joy. He wanted me. He was offering me his whole self, for the rest of our lives. All he wanted in return was my whole self. I gave it.

Looking up at me with those blue eyes, his hands clutching my hand, sincerity plain on his face, he was utterly irresistible. I didn't even hesitate.

“Yes! I'll marry you,” I said.

The cousins broke out into applause, and he got to his feet and chastely kissed my cheek.

“I'm sorry there's no ring,” he said.

“I don't need a ring.”

“Nonsense,” piped up the eldest cousin. “You'll borrow mine.” She slid a worn gold ring off her own finger and handed it to my new fiancé, and he slid it onto the fourth finger of my left hand, and tears sprang to my eyes.

They applauded again, and he beamed at me, and it was like sunshine.

The next morning, we decided to look at the garden, and when the cousin whose garden it was realized she needed to post a letter instead, it transpired that the two of us were alone together. He held my hand lightly as we walked until we were out of sight of the house. Once we were safely alone with no one in earshot, I turned to him and flashed my newly ringed finger and said, grinning, “I can't believe you did this.”

“I can't either. I'm sorry I didn't warn you beforehand, but I didn't really plan it—the idea just came to me, and I knew it would be perfect. I'm so glad you went along. That money will be all we need to get the rest of the way.”

It dawned on me, slowly and powerfully like a poison in my blood, what he was saying.

“Ada?” he probed.

I didn't want to ask. I didn't want to know the answer. But I had to. “Went along? So you don't—”

“Oh,” was all he said.

I watched the realization dawn on his face, and I was ashamed. He thought I'd know it wasn't real. He started to stammer an explanation, an apology, something. I didn't need to hear it. The look on his face, the single word
Oh
, told the whole story. He reached for my shoulder, and I stepped aside. I didn't want to be comforted. Not by the person who'd hurt me, not that way.

“I understand,” I said. “For the money.”

“For the money.”

We didn't talk any more about it. Not one word.

I hated myself those two weeks in Baltimore. We were both trying on a life that wasn't ours, but he seemed at peace with it, and I couldn't stop thinking how I'd been duped. How wholeheartedly amazed I'd been when he spoke those words, and how quickly I'd agreed to yoke myself for life to someone who was such a mystery to me that I hadn't realized how deep his layers of untruth went.

But what I hated myself for wasn't just the initial foolishness. It was the ongoing lie, and that even as I knew it was all unreal, how I delighted deep down in the untrue things we said. He addressed me as “dear” and gazed upon me with a fond expression. Every time, my heart nearly exploded in my chest. He committed himself so wholly to the lie that it was too easy to believe he meant every word. And when I responded with “thank you, love,” or “see you tomorrow, my darling,” on some level, I wasn't pretending. He didn't love me. He wasn't my darling. And yet I lay in bed every night a wakeful and aching creature, seeing what I wanted so close by, pretending I had it, but knowing it wasn't really mine.

When at last it was time to keep moving north, I saw the slim envelope pass from the cousin's hand to my false fiancé's, and I pasted on an empty smile. I gave her back her ring. I felt bad that we had deceived them—they all seemed so kind—but things were working out exactly as we needed them to. With the dollars in that envelope, we wouldn't starve. It was enough to get us to New York within the week, and it would house, clothe, and feed us once we were there. We didn't discuss the fact that we'd lied in order to get it. In a way, things that weren't said out loud didn't happen. If we didn't acknowledge things we didn't want to be true, we could keep them hidden in the dark. I'd learned that at my mother's knee, after all.

***

New York City, our destination, had only been a distant, hazy image in my mind. As we rode down Houston Street on a horse cart, it became utterly, astoundingly real.

The city was immense. The buildings were so tall and the streets so wide that I couldn't take them in. And the people. So many people, everywhere, beyond counting. Like grains of salt in a shaker or the blades of grass on the Biltmore lawn.

“How do you like it?” Clyde asked me, sitting stiffly only inches away. Since we'd left Baltimore, each day had been like a summer storm—one minute warm, the next cold. He would crack jokes and then fall silent for hours. He smiled too much for no reason. I would hold my body apart from his deliberately but then, when we were close together like this, find myself staring at his lower lip, fighting with all I had not to lean over and press my lips there. If his skin brushed mine by accident, I jumped like a flea. There was no peace with him.

But now, the city demanded my full attention. There were too many sights and sounds flooding my senses. So many people, such tall buildings, the smoke and the rails and the hats and skirts and horses. So much black silk. So much marble and stone. So much of everything.

“It's too much,” I blurted. “It's too big.”

“It's not. You haven't even seen a fraction.”

“There's more?”

“There's always more,” he said. “It's New York.”

“How much do you know of New York? I thought you lived in North Carolina all your life.”

He shrugged. “I may have been here once or twice.”

“When?”

“A while ago,” he said. “That's not important.”

It was then that I started to wonder if any of the stories he'd told me were real. I'd been in his sight every single day for a month and he in mine. I'd met his family. I'd pretended to be his betrothed. When he lied, I shared his lies, and we had made up our own untrue story together. But he'd betrayed me, shocking me with the fake betrothal, and the fact that I'd shared his lies didn't make them more forgivable. He couldn't be trusted. I would need to act accordingly.

We edged down a noisy, tight street. Carriages whizzed past us, all too near, and I shrank away from them at first. I made myself get used to it. I tried to focus on specific, small things. The man with the fruit cart and his pile of oranges. The storefront with the striped awning advertising NOTIONS. When we turned the corner onto a narrower street, the pattern of the cobblestones changed, and the sound of the horses' hooves changed into a different rhythm, each clop-clop ringing out more clearly, which I could hear above all the voices and noise if I concentrated my attention.

The hooves slowed and stopped. I looked at the house ahead of us. Red brick, three stories, with five steps up to a solid front door. The whole block of houses was identical except for the color of the brick. They were neither grand nor miserable, but they were town houses, linked one to the next like paper dolls with no space between. The only sky was up; the only green was a single, sad tree on the other side of the street, halfway down. So many doors and so many windows, but the feeling was still one of being closed in.