Unwept (15 page)

She thought of the dream she had of the man in her room the night before. It was, she reminded herself, only a dream, a fantasy woven out of her own imaginings. Maybe Merrick's counsel was right; perhaps she did need to leave her unpleasant dreams behind.

“A play! A play!” Silenus burst from the doorway leading to the aft cabins dragging something heavy behind him. “We must have a play!”

“Oh yes!” Martha exclaimed.

“What is that?” Alicia asked, trying to peer around Silenus.

The young man swung the bulky object scraping across the deck planks to rest in front of him.

It was a large steamer chest. A number of shipping labels stood affixed to its leather exterior, as well as several identification tags.

“I found it inside,” the young man replied. “There are more in the cabins … surely enough for everyone!”

Martha clapped her hands merrily and hurried toward the aft doorway. Alicia followed her almost at once, pulling down her parasol and laying it against a rack of belaying pins on the far rail. Jenny smiled and hurried to join them. Ely shrugged and followed, although with notable reluctance.

“Mr. Bacchus!” Ellis said. Her outrage drove her from the rail toward the patron. “You must put a stop to this!”

“Whatever do you mean?” Merrick asked, looking down at her.

Silenus flipped open the dual latches, raising the lid. He pulled out a jacket and an embroidered shawl, smiled and then wrapped himself in both.

“These are someone's private possessions!” Ellis said.

“Yes,” Merrick agreed. “And as I do not see anyone present to lay claim to them, at this moment they are
my
private possessions to do with as I please. And I think a play sounds most pleasing indeed.”

Alicia emerged from the cabin door wearing a plain print dress and an apron. Dark, foul stains ran down one side of the dress around a long tear in the fabric. She was followed at once by Martha in an ill-fitting silk dress with a wide skirt. It, too, was stained from the neckline down to the waist. She held a doll dangling by one foot at her side. Jenny emerged a moment later in a black mourning dress and a lace cap. Last came Ely, wearing a captain's peacoat and cap with a pipe in his hand.

“Most excellent,” Merrick proclaimed. “What shall be your play, Mr. Tune?”

“Oh, I should think ‘The Tragic End of the
Mary Celeste.
'” Silenus grinned. “Alicia, how do you die?”

“I shall be murdered by my husband who was driven mad during the storm,” Alicia proclaimed as she clasped her hands to her chest. “I haven't decided quite yet how, but I'm sure it will come to me.”

“Oh, and me, too,” Jenny enthused, waving her crippled hand in the hopes of being acknowledged. “I caught him in the act and he murdered me, too!”

“Oh, that is good.” Merrick smiled.

Jenny beamed at his attentions.

“Well, I suppose that makes me the murderous husband,” Silenus acknowledged with his own bow. “I'll have to have killed the crew, as well, I suppose.”

“Except for me,” Ely said.

“Why except for you?” Silenus demanded. “Why should you be different?”

“Because I'm the one who drove you into the storm,” Ely affirmed. “I had hopes of killing you in the storm before you killed me.”

Silenus frowned. “But I was driven mad
by
the storm.”

“And what about me?” Martha demanded, stamping her foot. The doll twisted, barely noticed in her grip.

“You are why I drove the ship into the storm,” Ely proclaimed. “You can be my wife and you were going to run away from me with Silenus.”

“But what do I do with
this
?” Martha asked.

He held the doll up in front of her, dangling from the single foot by which she gripped it, its face turned away from Ellis.

“Where did you get that?” Ellis demanded.

“It was just sitting on the bunk in one of the cabins,” Martha said. “It didn't belong to anyone.”

“There was a
child
on board?” Ellis was aghast. “Give it to me!”

“It's broken,” Martha said, holding out the doll. “I didn't think you wanted to play.”

Ellis snatched the doll from Martha's grasp and turned it over.

“No!” Ellis breathed in horror.

Everyone stopped at once, staring at her.

The doll's porcelain face was broken. A curved section of her forehead was missing, dropping down over where her right eye had been.

Ellis screamed, dropping the doll on the deck. The porcelain head shattered against the planking. She knelt on the rough wood of the deck and, choking back tears she didn't understand, began gingerly picking up the china shards.

The party froze as all eyes turned upon Ellis.

“Ellie, stop. It's not worth fixing.” Merrick's hand was firmly under her elbow, pulling her up.

“But some little child will be so heartbroken.” Ellis gestured to the broken doll.

“A child?”

“Yes, like the little boy at the lighthouse.” Ellis heard the gasps of those about her.

Merrick's grip bit sharply into the flesh of her arm. “That's not possible,” he told her in low tones.

“Whatever can you mean?” She looked up and saw on his face concern warring with irritation.

“Disgusting,” spat Alicia. Martha, next to her, shivered and looked away.

“I don't understand. Did something happen to the children? Where are they? Ellis's features tightened into a ball of perplexity as Merrick held her gaze. “Please, please help me,” she begged.

Merrick drew himself up as if to answer, but Silenus stepped between Ellis and Merrick, causing Merrick to release his grip on Ellis's arm. “It's quite simple really. There are no children in Gamin. Never have been. Never will be. Guess we're as close as it gets. It's for the best, you see.”

But Ellis did not see. She spun on her heel till her gaze fell on Jenny, who silently shook her head in agreement. Ellis realized the only child she'd seen since her arrival was the boy at the lighthouse and now had been told that even that was impossible.

She desperately wanted to tell Silenus, Merrick and all of them that they were mad but held her tongue, knowing that she was the one who'd been brought here to get well. She swallowed and once again found herself desperate for air, for escape.

Ellis fled to the rail and down the ladder, desperate to get away from the doll, from the ship and the voices that spoke to her as she ran across the sands and back toward Summersend.

As she blindly stumbled forward the image of a young woman floated up from her memory. “It's just down at the harbor.… Come, see!”

And the girl smiled the moment before she died.…

 

 

Jenny's bell jar of pinned moths stood on a small table near the entrance to Summersend. Ellis paused as she noted that Jenny had added more to her collection. The specimens were becoming quite crowded, though Jenny would never admit to adding any. Ellis thought she saw the wings of the great lunar moth inside twitch.

It was too much. Ellis lunged toward the stairs, grabbed the railing and ran up the steps two at a time.

The sound of the ocean against the shore and a lazy pool of sunlight greeted her as she crossed the threshold of her room.

Sanctuary.

She shook uncontrollably, weeping. It must have all been a dream—
had
to have been a dream. The man in her room with the paisley mark over his face, the terrible thrill of his touch, they were both things of her imagination. She could not have seen the artist in the train station—she had died at least a week before. It all had to be in Ellis's dreams.

She looked about her, fighting to control her breathing.

The room was real. The French doors were real. The trunk and the closet were both real. The dresser, the vanity, the bed …
The bed is real. I saw the girl die. There are no children here. Are these real?
She needed to touch the solid furniture pieces, to reassure herself that something was real and that she could tell the difference between her waking days and her nightmares.

She kicked off her shoes and crossed toward the bed, tears already blurring her vision.

As she stepped next to the bed, something sharp bit into her foot through her stockings.

Gasping at the sharp little shock of pain, she picked up her foot and found a thorny limp white rose clinging to it. She reached down with a shaky hand and pulled out three thorns from the bottom of her foot through her stocking. A droplet of blood spread in a small circle on the bottom of her snagged stocking.

Ellis began to scream.

13

THE MANOR

An unseasonably cold wind spun the leaves in a small cyclone around the two women huddled together against the squall gathering in the late afternoon over Penobscot Bay. The previously clear skies had darkened with the onset of the thunderstorm rolling in from the sea. Lightning was already lancing across the sky as the pair approached the towering façade of the Norembega mansion. The stonework of its walls was bathed in a deepening red of a sunset retreating before the second storm while the black of its curved and clapboard woodwork seemed almost silhouetted against the fury approaching from beyond its massive shape.

“Jenny, please,” Ellis said over the wind. “We shouldn't have come.”

“I won't hear it,” Jenny said in a voice that would brook no contradiction. “Look at you! Your hands won't stop shaking and you haven't been able to stop crying since I found you after returning from the shipwreck.”

“I'll be all right,” Ellis said though she was, in fact, not sure at all. What she knew was that the house they were approaching filled her with a sense both of the familiar and of foreboding. “Just take me home.”

“You have to see the doctor and that's all there is to it,” Jenny replied, pulling her toward the gravel-paved drive and the stairs of the enclosed entry. Fitted stone pillars supported the ornate woodwork of the steeply gabled roof, the glass-filled arch of the window over the entry doors dark and staring down on them. Ellis shuddered under its gaze, but Jenny pulled her up the steps, pushing open the dull black doors with their own dark panes of glass and drawing her into its maw.

Ellis could not stop shaking. Jenny had tried to console her throughout the afternoon, but the vision of the white rose and the thorns staining her stocking with her blood surfaced again and again in her mind. It was real, but it could not be real. She tried again and again to rationalize the presence of the thorny rose in her room, thinking that perhaps someone else had put it there or that in a fit she had brought it herself and forgotten about it … but try as she might her mind could not accept those explanations and she was left with a horror that her mind could not resolve. Either madness was happening about her or she was mad herself … and both divergent realities frightened every part of her being.

Jenny reached up for the bell chain and pulled it. A distant, muted metallic trilling sounded from somewhere beyond the heavy door. They stood in the vestibule for long moments.

“Oh, bother!” Jenny did not hesitate. She gripped the latch and pushed through the heavy oak door into the house.

“Jenny! No!” Ellis begged.

The entry room beyond was dim. The sudden onset of the thunderclouds outside had prematurely darkened the interior and the lamps had not yet been lit. The ornate parquet floor and the oak wood paneling up to the wainscoting, as well as the wooden coffered ceiling overhead, made the space feel darker still. Two alcoves were set into the far corners of the room, both closed off with doors that led deeper into the house. On Ellis's left was an ornate oak staircase. A short flight of stairs there led up to a small landing featuring a caller's sitting area with its own fireplace before the stairs doubled back and rose up through the coffered ceiling to the upper reaches of the house. To Ellis's right, a large set of double doors were open to a long sitting room and, through an arched opening past a cornered fireplace, what appeared to be the rounded interior wall of a turret.

“Jenny, please,” Ellis said under her breath. “I'm not well.”

“Which is precisely why you need to see the doctor,” Jenny affirmed.

“We haven't been invited in!” Ellis choked out the words, trying desperately not to start sobbing again.

“Merrick said we were to come and so we have,” Jenny said. “I've been here many times, Ellis, and we are perfectly welcome. I don't understand why Merrick has not come to greet us. Listen, you wait here for me and I'll go find the doctor for you.”

“No,” Ellis breathed. “Please stay with me.”

“I'll only be a moment,” Jenny insisted, prying Ellis's grip off her arm. “Two shakes of a dead lamb's tail and I'll be right back with the doctor.”

Jenny patted Ellis's hand and then disappeared through the left-hand door at the end of the entry hall, closing the door behind her.

Ellis drew in a long, shuddering breath. She glanced at the chairs on the landing and considered for a moment availing herself of them but somehow could not bring herself to climb up even those three short steps. She did not want to think about this place or the terrible haunting things that were drifting unbidden into her mind. The rumble of distant thunder beyond the walls made the intermediate silences all the more unbearable.

She was desperate for something to distract her.

A flash of lightning stabbed through the windows, casting the parlor into bright relief. Faces stared back at her from paintings on the wall. The stone carvings of griffins on either side of the fireplace glared menacingly at her. They all receded once more into obscurity, but in that moment she could clearly see the round-walled room beyond the parlor, its high windows set into the curve of the thick wall and something beneath them that brought a smile to the corners of her mouth.