The library’s heavy walnut doors opened with a soft click, and there he was—tall and lean, elegant in a black silk-faced, four-button cutaway. The light from the wall sconces, with their shades of yellow silk, gilded his hair and cast his shadow out long in front of him.
Maddie hunched down in her chair, hoping he wouldn’t see her
hiding among the books and wine velvet curtains. If only, if only, if only she could still run.
But his eyes had always been sharp. His gray-water eyes. “Why are you hiding away in here?” he said.
He came right up to her, moving with the prowling grace that had always been the way of him. He’d been home, on and off, since the last fox hunt of the season, and yet this was the first visit he’d paid to The Birches. She had been wanting him to come and not wanting him to come and now he was here. She waited for him to say something about her chair, about her crippled body and ruined life, but he didn’t.
The last time she’d seen him was at a garden party at the mansion on Hope Street. She’d been twelve at the time and still able to run. She was also Bethel Tremayne’s daughter and able to recognize a Disgraceful Scene when it was being created before her eyes. Stu Alcott, inebriated on brandy and champagne cocktails, had sailed the ice sculpture across the lawn—it happened to be a swan boat that summer. He’d sailed it across the lawn, and then launched it and himself into the fountain.
His father and brother had said not a word—indeed, they’d behaved as if they weren’t aware of his bad form. For such public breaches of etiquette were best ignored, as all unpleasantnesses were to be ignored. Recriminations would come later, in private.
Stu had stood in the middle of the fountain with the water lapping around the tails of his frock coat and his finely checked trousers. His hair dripping, his face white, and a queer look in his eyes that were for once fixed on her. “Maddie?” he’d said, and there’d been something desperate in his voice. “
You
are angry with me, aren’t you, Maddie?”
“Of course I’m angry with you, Stuart Alcott,” she’d shouted at him, not understanding why he was asking her such a thing. Why he seemed to be
wanting
her disapproval. “You are wicked and nasty, and I hate you.”
Tears of shame had burned hot in her eyes, shame and
disappointment. She felt shame for him, for his behavior, and she was disappointed in herself. For a part of her had understood already that the kind of girl he would one day come to love would have waded right into the fountain to join him, and Maddie Tremayne was never going to be that kind of girl.
The very next day his father had had him carried by force up to the insane asylum in Warren, and there he’d been locked up for nearly a year. And when they let him out, he had not come home.
He’d been nineteen that year of his disgrace. She had thought him a man at the time, but she understood now that in many ways he’d still been a boy. A boy crying out, so desperate just to be
noticed
by someone, anyone, that he’d even sought that attention from a twelve-year-old child.
She looked up at him now. He was taller than she remembered, his chest deeper, his shoulders broader. The caring had been stamped out of his narrow face, along with the laughter. But the wildness was still there.
She realized that not only was she staring at him but he was returning the compliment. Her gaze fell to her lap, where she gripped her hands together in a tight fist. She knew he was looking at the whole of her now, her wasted legs and the chair, and still he said nothing.
When she dared at last to look up at him again, she saw no pity in his eyes. Only a weariness, and a tender wariness, that he seemed to be trying hard not to show.
“Well, if I’m doing it,” she said, “then so are you.”
A dazzling smile flashed across his face. “Really?” He flipped up the tails of his coat and sat down on the window seat. Leaning back, he rested one arm on the sill and crossed his legs. “Enlighten me, dear child. What precisely are we doing? And please tell me that we’re having fun at it.”
“Hiding away in here.”
He pretended to be disappointed. “Oh, that . . . The thing is, I seem to have committed the unpardonable sins of not only
arriving late but without the pearl-gray gloves requisite for attending a dinner party.”
He lifted his hands to show her that they were indeed gloveless. But although he might have left them off deliberately, just to be perverse, she doubted he had forgotten them.
“Geoffrey was scowling so fiercely at me,” he elaborated, “that he was not only endangering his handsome features, but my tender feelings were taking quite a bruising as well, and so . . .” He sent another grin her way that was all boyish wickedness. “Here I am.”
“Here you are,” she echoed, trying to sound bright and cheerful, trying to smile, and no doubt impressing him as a pathetic fool instead. So now here he was, here she was, and here they were all back together again. Of them all, she was the one who’d changed the most. And Willie. Willie had changed by disappearing entirely.
As for Stu and Geoffrey—they had never gotten along as boys, and things were hardly likely to improve between them now that they were men and their papa had left Geoffrey all the money.
She’d heard that Stu wasn’t living at the Hope Street mansion but rather at the Belvedere Hotel. Maddie’s memories of the place were of crumbling brick steps and a pair of green-lacquered doors that were buckling and peeling and smelled of stale beer. But perhaps she didn’t remember it right. She never left home now. At first she hadn’t been allowed to leave. She still wasn’t allowed to leave, but she no longer wanted to.
“Well,” he said. “You’ve had your vulgar curiosity satisfied. Now it’s my turn.”
She jerked hard in her chair, as if he’d reached over and slapped her awake. Her mind had wandered. That seemed to be happening more and more often lately. The white gauze of her dreams slipped over her eyes sometimes, even when she was awake.
She could feel herself staring at him now, wide-eyed and blinking, like an owl caught in a wash of light.
“Why are you skulking here in the library?” he repeated.
She gripped the edges of the rug that covered her lap. “Mama
says my wheelchair calls undue attention to me and my unfortunate affliction and draws shame down upon the family.” She lifted a hand out of her lap, then let it fall back down, helplessly. “Hence, the guests are made to feel uncomfortable . . . by being party to our own discomfort, I suppose. Anyway, it won’t do.”
He seemed to go strangely tight and still, and she realized she had committed a social error by mentioning her unfortunate affliction at all.
“Won’t it do?” he said, his voice tight as well. His boiled shirt-front crackled as he leaned back, the better to survey her. He raised one pale eyebrow. “Yet I had no trouble securing an invitation. For certain, then, I shall have to test the bounds of their comfort tonight—indeed, it has now become my veritable obligation. I believe I will get pie-eyed drunk, throw up into the Roman punch, and pee on the piano.”
“And afterward?”
“After what?”
“After you ruin Mama’s dinner party by making her guests uncomfortable, will you go away again?”
“As soon as I can pry more money out of my parsimonious brother I will indeed go away again.” He waved his hand, fluttering it like a bird’s wing. “Far, far away.”
A movement through the windows caught Maddie’s eye. Emma and Geoffrey walked together along the flagstone garden path, her arm linked with his. Light from the drawing-room doors fell across them in a wash of gold. Trellises of Chinese wisteria framed them like a wedding bower.
Then, as Maddie watched, Geoffrey took Emma’s hand off his arm and turned so that they were face to face and he was holding her hand in both of his. He was looking down at her, and she was looking up at him, and although all Maddie could really see was the white oval of her sister’s face, she was sure it was filled with adoration. And, as always, was stunningly beautiful.
A burning envy spread through Maddie and ate at her like acid.
She wanted, wanted, wanted . . . She wanted Emma’s face and Emma’s legs. Oh, especially Emma’s legs, which could still stroll with a man through a garden of a summer’s evening, still dance with him at a betrothal ball, still walk down the church aisle to meet him at the altar as his bride. She wanted the life Emma would have: the mansion on Hope Street, the adoring, wealthy husband, Society breathless with admiration and prostrate at her feet.
It didn’t matter that she loved her sister—and she did, truly she did. But her love didn’t stop the consuming, burning envy. She wanted all that Emma had, and she could have none of it.
Stu had turned his head to look at them as well, at Emma and his brother. She wondered what he felt at seeing them together, so blissful in their perfect lives. If he was envious, or resigned, or pleased.
But then he took his attention off of the adoring couple and turned back to her, and Maddie was suddenly afraid he could read her bitter and aching heart.
“They look made for each other, don’t they?” she said, her voice a little too loud, so that it echoed in the wood-paneled room.
He widened his eyes in mock wonderment. “Ah, but are they mad for each other?”
“They love each other, surely?”
“He loves her, or so he says, and for once I do believe him.” This time the smile he gave her had a touch of boyish whimsicality about it, and Maddie’s eyes blurred with a wash of tears. “Indeed, his love appears to be very much of the maddening variety, both literally and figuratively.”
He fell quiet a moment, then he lifted his shoulders in an elegant shrug. “But does
she
love him—desperately, wantonly, passionately? Because if you can’t inspire passion in the woman you are mad for, then that is a killing thing for the both of you.”
But not, Maddie thought, as killing a thing as possessing a wasted, useless body that could inspire the man you loved to nothing
but pity. Or perhaps, if you’d ever mattered to him at all, a touch of regret.
More tears crowded her eyes. She averted her face from him and looked down at the toes of her kid slippers peeking out from under her lap rug. She felt the gauzy white haze begin to settle over her mind again, and this time she welcomed it.
She came back to herself with another start when he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, leaned quite close to her, so that their faces were nearly touching. “Have you been smoking dry booze?” he said.
“What?”
“Your eyes are nothing but two black holes, as if they’ve been swallowed up. And you keep nodding off, drifting.”
He leaned farther in to her, so close now his hair brushed her cheek. He sniffed. “Chloral hydrate, by Christ. I suppose that quack Uncle Stanton of yours doles it out to you like candy pills.”
She tried to pull away from him but she was pinned to the back of her chair. “It’s the medicine I take for the pain in my legs,” she said, her voice breaking. “You make it sound as though . . . There’s nothing wrong with it.”
He shook his head. “I know all about chloral hydrate, Maddie child. They gave it to me when I was in the madhouse.” He pulled back from her a little, then, but he still kept her pinned in place with his hard-edged gaze. “And such is its nature that when I left that place I graduated to finer and sweeter dreams. Perhaps next time I come visit you, I’ll bring along my pipe and we can float away together on clouds of white joy.”
She wasn’t sure what he was talking about, except that it was certainly something wicked. She looked up at him, frightened of him, loving him. And then, for just an instant, she saw a break in the shadows that hovered within the pale gray flatness of his eyes, and her own heart broke all over again to see what lived inside Stu Alcott. The hurt and emptiness and defeat.
It was the same look she’d seen in Willie’s eyes before he’d killed
himself, before she had
driven
him to kill himself. Because they hadn’t ever been able to speak aloud of what had happened that terrible icy winter’s day. Because, although they hadn’t spoken of it, still Willie must have looked into her heart and seen the ugly truth: that she couldn’t forgive him for what he’d done to her.
Willie was gone, lost to her forever, but Stu was close enough to touch, and so she did. She laid her hand on his thigh. She could feel the hardness of his flesh, his manly heat, through the fine material of his trousers.
“Why are you this way? What’s happened, Stu?” she said, not sure of what she was asking him. If she wasn’t really asking him what had happened to her, what had happened to them all.
His hand covered hers. She felt her own hand tremble as if it were something separate from her, with a will of its own. He gave it a gentle squeeze. “I fell down, Maddie, just like you. I fell down and hurt myself very, very badly.”
“You . . .” The tears were coming now. She felt them, warm like summer raindrops, on her cheeks. “But you could try getting back up.”
He stood and started to walk past her, but he stopped next to her chair. His hand hovered over her head for a moment, as if he would touch her hair, then it drifted lower and he brushed, lightly, ever so lightly, the tips of his fingers across her cheek.