The earth must be there under the snow. Dirt and gravel and marl, root-bound soil, tubers and bulbs frozen in loam, and farther down, below the frost, damp clay, water, chalk, granite, molten lava, fire. It’s probably easier to imagine the fire at the earth’s center from this wintery landscape than from a more temperate location, a Tuscany vineyard, say, where the caressing sun soothes curiosity to sleep and the earth seems no more than a richly decorated surface, reliably abundant. In contrast, the winter landscape of western New York hides its abundance beneath the endlessly accumulating snow and draws attention downward to the secrets of the land. Snow is like the white sheet pulled over a recently expired body. Just like the corpse, the land’s contours are always visible in winter. The center of the earth is implied in a landscape transformed by snow, just as the secrets of a life are implied by the shrouded body.
As Lore clambers across a pasture on Christmas Day, he thinks about the earth hidden beneath the snow and all the burrowing animals hibernating there, a few feet below his boots. It’s a small comfort to him—the thought of their comfort—what with the snow falling more heavily now and the trail disappearing before his eyes. He’s not even sure he’s following a man’s footprints anymore; the vague depressions and scuffs in the snow might have been sculpted by wind.
A frozen stalk cracks as Lore presses it with his boot, and the sound is so similar to the snap of a whip that his mind fills with the image of Emily bleeding to death in the straw. After Lore destroyed her, Peter and Sylva returned to their cabin, Lore sent Junket back to the gatehouse, and he himself left the barn and wandered off across the pasture, unsure of his purpose, feeling only that he wanted to be alone for a time. But as soon as he spotted the tracks in the snow, he knew he had to follow them.
By the time he reaches Hadley Road, however, the tracks have been buried by new snow, and Lore can’t tell which direction to take. To the left lies Millworth; twelve miles to the east is the town of Kettling. Lore decides to head toward Millworth, figuring that the closer destination would be the more likely refuge.
The weather sides with the criminal today—there will be no justice. The snow completely obscures Lore’s own print as soon as he lifts his boot. And the brooding black sky in the north is sure to bring more severe snow within the hour.
Lore stops to catch his breath, squinting into the smoky storm while he considers the situation. Unlike Peter, he doesn’t believe the attack had anything to do with Hal Craxton. Rather, he’s convinced that the message was directed at himself: Lore Bennett, groundskeeper. Lore has plenty of enemies in these parts, since he’s the one who gives and denies permission to hunt on Craxton land. More often than not he denies, and in the past he’s been quick to fire over a poacher’s head in warning. Here’s the warning turned against him: some poacher’s revenge. Now the stakes have escalated. He might have to shoot the man if he catches him. But he won’t catch him, not in this weather. Of course he won’t catch him. He’s been wasting his time. If he turns back now, his breakfast might still be warm. Yes, he’ll let the man go—sooner or later, the brute will have to face up to what he did. Not insanity, not even God, can save him from the retribution of his own conscience.
Impulsively, Lore scoops up a gloveful of snow and holds it to his lips. The ice crystals burn his tongue before they melt. He drinks with a rising thirst, fills his glove a second time, holds himself perfectly still so he may hear, behind the wind, the hiss of falling snow. The hemlocks stand like his impatient friends on either side of the blank stretch of road, waiting for Lore to join them before they hurry home. He leans back on his heels, and the snow crunches beneath his boots. He remembers how the cold of the lake nearly killed him when he went in after Junket’s Maynard. The liquid cold of a blizzard can kill too, with more finesse. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the body gives in, the blood thickens, the pulse grows faint. He wouldn’t wish such an easy fate upon the man who slashed Emily. Lore hopes that the brute, whoever he is, suffers a far worse punishment, and the hope itself gives him meager satisfaction.
But then he remembers the next duty in front of him: hauling the horse’s remains to the pit where they dump and burn their garbage, a dry ravine about a quarter of a mile from the house. Lore heads back toward the Manikin, stepping gently so as not to wake the hibernating animals. The pine branches scrape and squeak overhead, the sound uncannily like muffled laughter, though he hardly notices the similarity and doesn’t pause again in his journey home. He’s too familiar with the antics of trees to be fooled.
* * *
The problem with Hal, Mrs. Craxton thinks, gazing somewhat blankly at her husband’s collection of dead animals, is not that he neglects his mother. Rather, neglect is engendered by a perpetual boredom. He can’t stand to remain in one place for longer than a month, so he keeps circling the globe, oblivious to scenery or art or the exotic tribes and animals that populate a region, interested only in his own mood. He travels simply because it is something to do.
Her only son. Throughout Hal’s childhood, Mary Craxton thought of him as a mild, manageable child, and she spent the little energy left over from her parties and luncheons on her elder son, George, a more excitable and sensitive boy. And after George died at the age of twenty-two, she hardly remembered that she still had a son. Two lost boys—the injustice of this made her bitter, and bitterness settled into a constant irritation. She was grateful when Hal went off to college and she could bask in the attention of her solicitous friends. But the mildness that characterized him in his youth has transformed into ennui in his middle age. He reminds his mother of the Irish wolfhound her husband kept, a purebred so satiated by the simple business of living that it yawned as often as other dogs would bark. Henry Senior loved the dog better than any other pet and upon its death sent it to his taxidermy department. He kept the stuffed dog in his library for years, reason enough for Mary Craxton to avoid that room altogether, and soon after her husband was killed she donated the animal to a small midwestern college.
Now there are more donations to make, a lifetime’s worth of donations, and in the process she’ll teach her son the importance of money! He’s spent his adult years indulging himself and wasting the family fortune. Well, he’s going to lose what’s left of that fortune, and sooner than he might expect! Hal won’t be able to laugh and yawn his way free of this fate. He can’t be droll about poverty. Just wait, Hal. She’ll teach her lazy son the importance of an industrious life. She doesn’t mean to punish him for his neglect—she knows she could have been a better mother—but to force him to spend his remaining decades engaged in some constructive activity. In short, by denying him the inheritance that he expects upon her death, she will force her son to find a job.
Partly influenced by her son’s inconstancy, partly motivated by her own compunction, Mrs. Craxton decided shortly after Thanksgiving to revise her will and force Hal to earn his keep. She raised a parasite—he lives off the wealth that his father accumulated, without increasing or even renewing the capital. If he were a woman, unmarried and unattractive, it would be one thing, and Mary Craxton would have taken pity. But he has all the advantages of the male sex and uses none of them.
Just wait, Hal. She wishes she could stick around to watch her son’s face change shades as Mr. Watts reads the document—Mary Craxton’s last will and testament. She is sorry to have to disappoint her son but is convinced that over time he’ll be improved by this harsh lesson. He assumes that all the assets, diminished as they are, will go to him. He doesn’t have any reason to suspect otherwise.
No one knows about her plan except her lawyer, his assistant, and the gardener, Sid, who witnessed the signing of the will. At one point Mrs. Craxton had had a vague inclination to consult with Lilian Stone, but she’d quickly come to recognize the girl for what she is and stopped gushing with hospitality. Lily would have tried to benefit from Mrs. Craxton’s brief affection. Now no one will benefit. Upon her death, Mary Craxton’s entire savings and securities will be given to charity, and the bank will foreclose swiftly. Henry Craxton Junior, the only surviving heir of the great natural history entrepreneur, will have to start from scratch.
An old lady’s final act of grace, she mouths, solely for the benefit of the stuffed animals this time. She’s felt since she entered the room—almost imperceptibly at first, and now with powerful insistence—that the animals are poised in some kind of awful expectation, waiting for her to perform. The dik-dik, the bats, the monkeys, the peacock, the snarling cougar—their dimension seems almost magical, as though they had emerged from the wallpaper or from the pages of her husband’s books in order to keep her company today. They make her feel prepared for her last feat.
What time is it? She can’t see the hands on the mantel clock across the room, and the little brass monkeys haven’t clapped their cymbals for what seems like hours. No matter. She’s had enough time in her life, more time than she ever knew what to do with, and only a routine packed full of distractions has kept her sane. It’s time, whatever the hour, to put her routine behind her—as good a time as any. Time to stop wasting time, she tells herself, turning her face toward the window. Better to throw off the weight of life than to be crushed by it. Her revised will is in her lawyer’s vault, her son is home, it’s Christmas Day …
Why not now?
The question arises almost accidentally from the muck of wonder and folds itself around her consciousness. Why not now, Mrs. Craxton? She sits with a straight back, her expression as impatiently expectant as if she were waiting for a hairdresser to set her hair in rollers.
* * *
From the outside looking in, Ellen sees a short-tempered old woman collecting her thoughts into a mass of fury. Her immediate interpretation of Mrs. Craxton’s meditative scowl is this: She will wait until her son is sitting across from her; she will watch his eyes idly skim the pages of a magazine; she will give him one more chance and invite him to stay for her birthday in February—or maybe she will simply ask him what his plans are for the coming months. She will wait for him to disappoint her. And then, without warning, she will explode into a tirade. It will be as simple as lighting a match. One moment she will be as quiet as Ellen herself, the next moment she will be screeching like a lunatic.
How annoying, Ellen thinks, that in this house so removed from time, her mind keeps wandering into the future, while the past, even the past as recent as last night, hovers over her like some great carnivorous beast. Where was her daughter last night? She didn’t come back to her room until long after midnight. What does this mean? But Ellen would prefer not to ponder the question. Attend to the present! she tells herself. The here-and-now: wrinkles fanning out from an old woman’s eyes; a split nail on Mrs. Craxton’s ring finger; fat pearls clipped to her ears and draped across her bosom; the click as the pendulum in the grandfather clock in the hall reaches its summit and falls back; the fainter tick of the mantel clock.
There is so much Ellen does not want to know. To others she seems a firm, practical-minded woman, but in truth she would be too timid to leave her bed in the morning if she indulged her fears. Fortunately, she learned long ago that self-sacrifice is more profitable, at least for a woman of her station, than self-indulgence. Responsibility gets her up each morning, greets her like a blast of fresh winter air, and keeps her concentrating all day long on the task at hand.
She didn’t wake with such diligent energy this morning, though, since she hadn’t let herself fall asleep until long after midnight. She’d tried to wait up for her daughter, and as the hour grew late and her annoyance turned to fury, she’d started to plan a strategy of discipline. At the risk of estranging Peg, Ellen decided to assert her powers as a parent and forbid her daughter from associating with Mrs. Craxton’s guest. Like should mix with like; trouble arises when different classes mingle, and Ellen intended to make Peg understand this. But the confrontation never took place—Ellen inadvertently succumbed to sleep, and when she woke an hour later than usual, her daughter was deeply, irreproachably asleep in her own bed. Where had she gone off to last night in her bangled dress and heels? Ellen would bet that Lilian Stone could tell her where.
Ellen dressed quickly and hurried downstairs. She entered Mrs. Craxton’s room within minutes after she rang, so her late rising went unnoticed. Ellen and Sylva are the only ones expected to work today—by eight o’clock, though, Sylva hadn’t come up to the kitchen yet, and Ellen had to prepare Mrs. Craxton’s cocoa herself.
The Christmas holiday will be Sylva’s excuse, Ellen thinks as she stands beside Mrs. Craxton’s chair in the living room, her arms folded across her apron, her chin raised to imply a steady, dignified attention. Holidays confuse schedules, make reliable servants lazy, disrupt an orderly household. If it were up to Ellen she would do away with holidays entirely. Think of Henry Junior—that’s what fun will do to you, turn you into a good-for-nothing scamp who treats every day as a vacation. Fine for a man who has the means, but for a woman as poor as Ellen, fun would land her in the gutter. Here’s a future she isn’t even tempted to imagine, since she dreads the misery of homelessness more than her own death.
And here’s the present finally making itself felt with selfish insistence. A woman’s body has its needs. Ellen’s flow always comes as a surprise, often at the most inconvenient times—now, for instance, so she has no choice but to leave Mrs. Craxton alone for a few minutes. Strange, the old woman appears pleased when Ellen asks to be excused. She nods her permission, and Ellen notices that her brown irises have nearly been eclipsed by her pupils, though the light in the room is adequate. It could be she’s still feeling the effects of last night’s champagne. No doubt she’ll be as keen as ever when her son comes down for breakfast.
A trip to the toilet, and upstairs to the bedroom, where Peg is still asleep, to secure a pad with safety pins. At first, Ellen feels comforted by the reminder of life’s repetitions, its cyclical patterns: the snow collecting on the ground and in the crooks of branches will melt; a clean room gets dirty over time and must be cleaned again; a woman bleeds; a girl sleeps; a mother and daughter will be reconciled.
Or will they?
Where does Peg go when she disappears for hours? There is one place Ellen would be sure to find the answer. She has considered it before, but never so impulsively—the temptation to have a look at her daughter’s diary is stronger than ever this morning. Peg is her only daughter, after all, her own flesh and blood, and has fallen under a witch’s spell. Where was Peg last night? What is she dreaming of now?
Peg keeps the diary in her top bureau drawer, a worthless hiding place, since she puts it there so casually, in her mother’s full view. By opening the diary, Ellen will break the pact that exists between them. But Peg need never know about her mother’s intrusion. Ellen checks her watch—only five minutes have passed since she left Mrs. Craxton alone. Surely she can delay her return for another five minutes. She can’t be blamed for wanting reassurance. But her daughter assumes that her mother will respect her privacy. Then why, Ellen asks herself as she reaches into the drawer, why is she going to take advantage of her daughter’s trust while she’s asleep and read her secrets?
Peg’s diary, like most of her possessions, is secondhand—she has taken one of her mother’s leather-bound planning books and replaced the calendar with blank paper punched at either end. See how clever the girl is to have bettered this old book, how smoothly the cover opens and how readily the pages turn. How innocent Peg is in sleep. And oh, how quickly her secrets reveal themselves to her mother’s prying eyes.
Even as she reads, flipping backward from yesterday’s entry, Ellen regrets opening the diary. Yes, she could have learned everything simply by observing her daughter, by examining her sleeping face. She could have confirmed what she’d suspected without reading the diary at all. Perhaps if she’d waited up for Peg last night she would have guessed the truth. Yes, this is the way it should have happened, the way she wishes it had happened: Ellen would be sitting on Peg’s bed gazing out into the night. The door would open slowly, as though of its own accord, and Peg would be standing on the threshold, disheveled, pale with fatigue, her hair hanging like an oriole’s deep nest from the back of her head, one ribbon still tied at the bottom of the bundle, Lilian’s evening dress looking as spent as the body that it clothed. But it wouldn’t be Peg’s appearance that would give her away—it would be the guilty slide of her gaze away from Ellen.
So that’s what you’ve been doing, Ellen thinks, finding the truth in Peg’s diary as surely as if she had witnessed it herself, and yet still disbelieving. No, tell me it’s not true, tell me that you don’t love her, not in that way, you don’t go to her room at night, instead you go out hunting in the snow, foolish girl, or you sneak around with Junket, you saucy thing, but that’s all right, young people make mistakes. But I forgive you. I forgive you. No. Where have you been, Peg?
I’m sorry, Mother. I fell asleep in Lilian’s room. She invited me up after the party for a game of rummy. It was a wonderful party, wasn’t it? The best ever. Too bad Mr. Craxton had to come home and spoil the fun.
Tell me the truth, Peg.
Ellen does know her daughter. She’s always known her. She can read her mind. And she would have been able to smell Peg’s last encounter on her breath, if she’d been standing in the room: whiskey and love. No, not love—you can’t call that love.
The truth?
What have you been doing, Peg?
Sleeping, Mother.
In her bed. In her arms.
How can Ellen be so sure? Her certainty keeps faltering. Maybe this diary is full of dirty lies written down to trap Ellen. Maybe she has jumped too hastily to unkind conclusions. She tries to draw back into a less violent doubt—she’d rather blame herself for her wicked imagination. Peg and Lilian? Never! Yes, indignation feels better. That Ellen could have presumed such a thing … indeed! Indeed. There can be no doubt. Ellen knows what her daughter would reluctantly admit if Ellen woke her and shoved the diary before her face. Unnatural love.
So this is what modern girls do for fun.
Suddenly Ellen sees through another deception: Peg is only feigning sleep. The girl is lying on her side, her face to the wall, a position in itself revealing since Peg usually sleeps sprawled on her back, arms and legs tangled in the blankets. This, along with the tension of her breathing, reveals the truth. Peg is awake and in all likelihood aware of her mother’s decision to plunder her secrets. For a long minute Ellen cannot move. Then she hears a distant chime, checks her watch, and realizes with a start that she has been gone from Mrs. Craxton for over twenty minutes. The lapse fills her with a shame close to horror, and she jumps up and rushes from the room. She won’t remember until hours later that she’d left the diary open on her bed, and by then it will be too late. But perhaps she meant to leave it out. Perhaps, without realizing it, she believed that her brazen curiosity must have consequences.
* * *
A house that should have been a museum from the start. An eccentric house. An extravagant house, massive and obstinate. Too many corridors and closets. Empty bedrooms. A conservatory with frosted windows, abandoned to the cold. An oak-and-leather library. A dining room with painted wallpaper. An étagère cluttered with fossils, snake skulls, shark’s teeth, and butterflies. A dining table seventeen feet in length. A brass candelabrum. A living room carpeted with Persian rugs. Satin drapes. Moose-hoof ashtrays. Mossy antlers sprouting from the walls. Wild animals wearing their own flayed skins. Beetles and bones, seashells and coral. A cup of hot cocoa, cold now. A wheelchair. An old woman in a wheelchair. Mary Alicia Weber Craxton. Mrs. Henry Craxton, widow. Mother. Invalid. Lapsed Episcopalian. A mind shutting down. A slow, voluntary abatement. A magical diminishment. All the clutter that the mind contains. Its history and personality and useless skills. A house. A chair. An old woman with a bad hip. Old Mary Craxton, expert at patience. The mind at work. An ancient machine applying itself to the hardest task, grinding, coughing, sputtering. Everything else put aside, to be sold or given to charity. Only the mind working toward its own dissolution. Driving itself into the darkness. Nothing worth saving. No fear. Secondhand beliefs, useless now. The mind forcing itself beyond life. Old Mary Craxton, expert in confinement. A mind locked inside a body. A body locked inside a house. Snow outside. A gradual slowing. The pit. The barrow. Winter. Three quarters of a century. An old woman with one magnificent trick up her sleeve.
* * *
Her head still full of her daughter’s terrible secret, Ellen enters the living room with uncharacteristic haste and stops abruptly, as though blocked from Mrs. Craxton by an invisible barrier. It doesn’t take more than a fraction of a second to realize what the slumped body signifies. And though she wants to reach out and touch Mrs. Craxton’s shoulder, she remains frozen, feeling in some primordial way that the scene is sacred and mustn’t be disturbed by bumbling human hands or the sound of her voice. So she doesn’t immediately call for help. As soon as Ellen sets life in motion again, the furnishings in the room will fall into place around her, her mundane sensibility will dominate. She hangs back, preferring to extend this moment for as long as possible, to let shy death settle cozily on the body of Mrs. Craxton. It is like sneaking up on some rare animal in the wild and watching as the unsuspecting creature grooms itself. For this brief yet strangely endless moment, Ellen feels privileged, like the only living thing in a museum, the sole witness.
Perhaps the privilege isn’t in observing this scene but in watching without any sense of loss. Years ago, when Ellen read the telegram informing her of her husband’s death in an unnamed skirmish outside Bruges, emotion had overwhelmed her. She’d already closed the door to the messenger, so there was no one to catch her when she collapsed. Four-year-old Peg had done nothing but stare wide-eyed from the farthest corner of the room while her mother howled, and when Ellen finally regained some control over herself and saw her little girl watching her, she felt embarrassed by her demonstration, as though her bereavement was just a show put on for her audience of one. The child’s amazement seemed a more authentic response to the news.
Ellen observes Mrs. Craxton’s unmoving body with a similar amazement, wondering how such a quiet thing as death could be so powerful. But her reverence passes swiftly—the clocks start ticking again, wind gusts against the windows, and Ellen is reminded that she must resume her role. She is the Manikin’s housekeeper, and her mistress is dead. Is she? Ellen squeezes the puffy, shawled shoulder and becomes aware of the smell of soiled underclothes. She bends over to look into Mrs. Craxton’s face and sees the stain of gray already spreading across her lips. She looks into her eyes, the heavy lids half closed, the whites showing like bone beneath split skin. As though she were moving backward in time, she feels a rising panic, the same panic she’s been expecting to feel for months, and she responds as convention dictates: she is the Manikin’s housekeeper, her mistress is dead, and the world must be informed.
Dead! Dead! Dead! chimes Mrs. Craxton’s copper bell. Ellen shakes it fiercely right next to the old woman’s ear in a desperate attempt to wake her.