“What did you do?”
I must have sounded stricken, because he propped himself up on his elbow and touched my cheek. “Thea, Thea. I didn’t do anything. My parents wanted me to be a certain person, and I wasn’t that person. I was a great disappointment. But—and this took me years to realize—they were a great disappointment to me as well.” He watched me. “Thea, I don’t know what you did, but you came here so that your family could forget. So that you could forget, so that when you leave here what happened will have disappeared.”
“I ruined my family.”
“I doubt that,” he said quietly. “If your family was ruined, it wasn’t because of you.”
“They trusted me.”
“Who?”
“My parents, my brother.”
“Your brother may have trusted you, but your parents never did. Parents never trust their children. I don’t know what happened exactly, and you don’t need to tell me. I believed for a long time that I had shamed my family. But it’s in a family’s best interest to make a child believe that.” He spoke quietly, but also firmly. He taught a single class at Yonahlossee, an advanced literature seminar that the senior girls took. I wondered if this was how he explained the characters in books to his class. It seemed so important to him that I understand what he meant.
I nodded, but said nothing.
“Do you really see? You’re sixteen years old. What your family thinks of you seems like everything. But it’s not. They have their own interests to protect. I wish I’d known that, how much a family has to protect, how sometimes a child interferes with that.”
“You know it now.”
“Was that a question? I do. Yes, I do.” He paused. “You have a brother, correct? Did they send him away, too?” But they weren’t really questions, none of them.
“I have a cousin, too,” I said.
“And where is he?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said finally.
The light was becoming dim behind the curtains. Mr. Holmes kissed my forehead and held me very close. “So your brother is home. Your cousin is some place unnamed. And you are here. With me.” He drew his finger across my lips. “They traded you, Thea. They sent you here and kept your brother.” I started to speak, but he shook his head. “Don’t believe them,” he said very softly. “Don’t ever believe what is said about you.”
I took his hand and put it in between my legs, and he looked at me uncertainly, and then he understood, and his fingers were cold at first. He knew better than Georgie what to do. He knew how to prop himself up on his elbow, so that he could watch me. He moved his fingers slowly, and I was not embarrassed, or shy to look at him, as I usually was.
“You’re very wet, Thea. And exceptional.”
There was something in his tone that I couldn’t quite place. “Faster, please.”
“Certainly.”
I touched my breasts, and closed my eyes. He knew how to lead me very carefully up this path; he would not go too quickly, or slowly. I moaned, which I could do because the house was empty. I bucked against his hand, and he pushed me down, gently. My eyes were closed but I saw anyway—in quick flashes I saw my mother, my brother, Sasi, and then Georgie, Georgie, Georgie—and his hand disappeared, everything disappeared, and there were only bright flashes and my cousin’s face.
I opened my eyes and stopped his hand. He was watching me very carefully. I pulled his head onto my chest, and we lay there like that for a while, until I heard the bell ring, and I tried to hold Georgie’s face in my mind. It was the first time in a long time I had thought of him and not felt pain.
—
S
o: I knew this would end, I knew Mrs. Holmes would return. It was the end of February. She would be back by mid-March. But I had always been expert at ignoring the unalterable. Sometimes it was as if God was watching, had narrowed His vision until Yonahlossee appeared, nestled in the mountains. I had wanted something very badly, and then I had gotten it, and the getting kept getting better.
Winter began to disappear. Lifted, like a second skin. Docey took away our comforters from the ends of our beds. Our yellow-and-blue scarves disappeared from our closets, along with our sweaters. We thawed, too; everyone seemed prettier, nicer, fresher in the spring air.
I spent every afternoon at Masters, and our days began to feel like years. It began to feel like we had known each other for a very long time. Mr. Holmes peeled away the layers of Yonahlossee in a way Sissy couldn’t. She was one of the girls, she didn’t have the vantage point he did. He told me Jettie’s drinking was a known problem, that Mrs. Holmes would have sent her away years ago but for Henny, who convinced her that keeping Jettie on was their Christian duty. He told me Yonahlossee was keeping King in exchange for Leona’s tuition, which hadn’t been paid in over a year. He told me Katherine Hayes’s father wasn’t doing as well as Katherine thought, that her grandfather had stepped in and paid her tuition; that her uncle had shot himself because he was about to be arrested. He liked the Kentucky girls best because they were the least mannered. And the Florida girls, he’d said, and grinned. I like them, too.
—
I
came back early from French class because I didn’t feel well. My stomach was troubling me—cramps, it was that time of the month.
Docey was mopping the floors, her back turned. She was humming some tuneless melody, but I was certain she’d heard me. I waited for her to turn around, acknowledge me, but she drew the mop around and around, over the same spot. From the back she almost looked like one of us.
“Docey?”
She turned then, but said nothing.
“I’m going to lie down for a bit.” I stopped short of asking her if this was fine.
She nodded, and watched me while I stepped out of my boots, tiptoed across the damp floor. She didn’t offer to help. My stockings were wet, now. I lay back on my bed and peeled them off, surprised by the feel of my bare legs against the quilt. I closed my eyes and pretended to drift off.
Yesterday Mr. Holmes was melancholy, told me I’d forget this place. But I couldn’t imagine.
Mr. Holmes’s breath tasted like gin. Juniper berries, he’d told me, the perfume of the evergreens. If we had been married and a wedding portrait taken, we would not have seemed an unusual couple. Mr. Holmes was thirty-one. Women married men twice their age all the time. His hair was thick and glossy—Eva had joked she’d die for his hair—his carriage boyish, his lips very red. I carried my youth in the way I moved, in my speech and furtive gestures. But I didn’t look young when I stood still.
A sharp sound. I sat up, disoriented. My mouth was dry.
“You were saying things,” Docey said. She was cleaning under Mary Abbott’s desk.
“Was I?” I got up and poured myself a drink of water. “What?”
“Nonsense. Nonsense words.”
For a second I was frightened I’d revealed something. It had been a week since I’d seen Leona in the Square. Now we avoided each other, as if we had come to some mutual decision. I’d gone over and over my comings and goings from Masters. There was no possible way she knew anything. I’d thought of Emmy, too, but Leona wasn’t the kind of girl to ever talk to a servant. I liked to think that there was some sort of mutual understanding between the two of us, that she knew I knew about King, that I felt sorry for her, a pure form of pity. But Leona wouldn’t want to be pitied.
“Do you know Emmy, Docey? From Masters?”
She smiled, almost smirked. I was about to ask again when she answered: “She’s my sister.” She turned to face me, then looked me in the eye for the first time that day. Her lazy eye darted crazily.
“I didn’t know.”
Docey went back to her work. “I didn’t know,” I repeated. I should have known. I watched Docey drag her rag over the desk, carefully, paying attention to the finials and knobs—carefully, but quickly—and knew suddenly that they spoke of us.
“But your hair is brown.” I paused. “You don’t look alike.” And this was true: Emmy was pretty, and Docey wasn’t.
“Do you look like your sister?” Her tone was pointed.
“I don’t have a sister.”
“None?” She seemed surprised.
I shook my head. “I have a brother. And we do look alike, we’re twins.”
“A twin?” she asked. It was the first time I had ever heard her sound pleased. “What’s that like?”
I smiled. “It’s all I’ve ever known,” I said. “It’s like there’s another you, out there.”
“I don’t know if I’d like that.”
“You wouldn’t like it or not like it, if you had it. It would just be . . . how things are.”
Docey said nothing. I watched her lazy eye. I wondered if it could be fixed, if there was some corrective method available, or if people with lazy eyes simply had to live with them. I wondered what she saw, right now—did my face stay still? Did it move, wildly? But of course Docey would never be able to fix her eye.
I realized I’d been staring. “How many siblings do you have?” I asked, and then thought she might not know what that meant. I flushed. “Brothers—”
“Twelve,” she said. “Twelve,” she repeated.
I was astonished. I couldn’t even name twelve relations. Between Georgie’s family and mine, there were only seven.
Docey smiled at the shock on my face.
“What do they do?” I asked.
“What do they do?” she repeated. She shrugged, and I understood how vile Yonahlossee must appear to Emmy and Docey. Mary Abbott’s father, the preacher, had written of two little boys who lived not far from here, up in the mountains. They had died from eating poisonous berries. All the other girls thought they simply hadn’t known they were poisonous, but of course they had; in Florida I had known exactly which berries I could eat, which would send me straight to death. And surely these boys had spent as much time outside as I had, or more. They’d eaten them because they were starving. I wanted to apologize to Docey, but for what? Luck, fortune, fate.
She’d turned away from me anyway, bent down, and wound up the woven rug beneath the desk into a tight roll. She seemed to linger. I helped Mother clean, I was familiar with the desperation it entailed, born of futility. It was a fixed system of entropy, like Father had explained by tossing a coin.
“Do you like to clean?”
Docey laughed. It was a stupid question. Mother liked to clean, enjoyed ordering her world like that. But this wasn’t Docey’s world; it was ours. I turned to slip my shoes on and then leave, but then she spoke.
“I don’t mind it.” But she was lying, we both knew that.
—
H
e was quiet today, sat almost mournfully with his gin. His shirt was buttoned crookedly, and though Mr. Holmes was somber, his shirt made him seem playful.
“Let’s go out back.” I rose and Mr. Holmes followed. I knew he would, he was in his passive mood.
It was a little bit thrilling to walk through the parts of the house I’d never seen—the dining room, to a formal sitting room whose French doors opened onto the porch. There was a table next to the window, heavy with glass bottles, their necks slender. I went to it. The sight, up close, was a marvel—various exotic plants that I’d never seen before, growing in bottles like model ships.
“Beth’s.” Mr. Holmes had come up behind me. I remembered that Mrs. Holmes loved to garden. He picked one up. “She sends away for the seeds.”
I imagined all the attention they must require, the special tools, the careful nurturing. I had not thought Mrs. Holmes capable of magic like this.
The back porch was clearly built for entertaining—there was a bar in the corner, and clusters of small tables surrounded by chairs. I imagined fathers of alumna who came out here with Mr. Holmes to admire the view and talk—about what? The purpose of a place like this. The goal of women’s education. Things that none of us girls ever spoke about.
I didn’t want to be here anymore, where fathers came and spoke of their daughters with Mr. Holmes. “Let’s go outside,” I said.
“I have such a headache.”
“The fresh air will help,” I said.
He opened the screen door to the woods that lay beyond the porch. Outside, the footing was rocky, but it was fine because Mr. Holmes had to offer me his hand, and he seemed reluctant to touch me, today.
“I come up here sometimes on Naari,” I said. Mr. Holmes said nothing. I was still careful about mentioning horses around him. “It’s easier when she does the climbing.”
He laughed.
“Are you feeling better?” I asked hopefully.
“It’s not a horrible one. When I was a boy I had to lie in a dark room on the floor. Always the floor, for some reason it felt better, and wait until it went away. There was no logic to it. Sometimes it went away immediately, and other times it took days.”
“And you had to lie on the floor for days?”
“Mostly, yes.” He stopped, and leaned against a tree. “My governess would sit outside the door and forbid anyone to come close. I couldn’t stand any noise.”
I closed my eyes and pictured a small Mr. Holmes, laid flat by pain, his English governess barring the door.
“You had a governess?”
“Yes. You sound surprised. My family was very wealthy. Is very wealthy. Well, less wealthy than they used to be, I imagine, but I’m sure they’ve survived.” He gave a hard little laugh.
I hadn’t been surprised. I knew he came from money.
“My family was very wealthy, my mother and father lived in Europe for most of the year, I had a governess. I failed out of Harvard, twice. Then I met Beth.” I opened my eyes. “And the rest, they say, is history.” His voice had changed, was stiff and distant.
“And the rest, they say . . .” I trailed off.
“Is history,” Mr. Holmes finished. “I was very disappointing to my parents.”
“So was I,” I said.
“Yes. But there are worse things.”
I was silent.
“Thea, when you’re young, disappointing your parents seems like the worst thing in the world. But it’s not. Believe me, it’s not.”
I nodded. We walked in silence for a moment. The air was warm, felt like spring. Sometimes I resented always having to wear a skirt—I could never play as wildly as Georgie and Sam—but right now a skirt was convenient, allowed me to take giant steps to keep up with Mr. Holmes. I thought pants—especially wool pants, like Mr. Holmes was wearing—would have constricted me, been too hot and smothering.