THE DOOR OPENED cautiously, and Mary Louise stood framed in it. "May I come in?" she asked.
"Of course," Amelia said, smiling.
She advanced into the room like a vessel in sail with her huge skirts billowing and her black masque rippling gently. "Are you feeling the thing, dear? Nelville told me about your fall. I feel … I feel so guilty, as if somehow I were to blame, as if you were taking my place in danger."
Amelia smiled wearily, "No, except for a few bruises, I'm fine, and of course you had nothing to do with it. At least, I don't think so. I can't imagine anyone wanting to harm me, but I suppose it had something to do with the inheritance, don't you think?"
"I don't know. Isn't that incredible!" Mary Louise said. "You would think by this time we would know." She shrugged, a gesture that made her seem foreign and unfamiliar and Amelia shivered, reminded of how little they had in common, how strange these people were.
With a quick nervousness, Mary Louise moved about the room, clenching and unclenching her hands.
Amelia dressed and straightened her room to the accompaniment of rolling thunder, barely able to see in the darkened room. "Do you know where Nelville went?" she asked after a silent interval.
"No, he only stopped by for a moment to tell me that we two should stay together until his return. I only hope he is making some sort of arrangement to leave."
Staring at her, Amelia said softly, "He asked me to marry him," and waited to see what she would say.
"Did he really? How extraordinary of him! I would never have thought it."
"Thought what?" Amelia asked quickly.
"That he would have felt it was necessary, I mean … he isn't the kind of man to toady to convention."
Amelia blushed a little as she realized Mary Louise, and probably the rest of the house, knew Nelville had spent the night in her room. "He said it was to save my life," she whispered.
"As to that, I could not say. It seems unlikely to me, but I suppose it might help. Knowing Nelville, I would say he was just as capable of protection by other means."
"Yes, but-" Amelia protested in perplexity.
"What I am trying to say, my dear," Mary Louise interjected smilingly, "is that I find it incredible that Nelville should ask any woman to be his wife unless he wanted her to fill that capacity very much, chivalry not withstanding."
Amelia turned away from the bright inquisitive eyes and went to the window, watching, without seeing, the approaching storm. In a lull in the nearly continuous thunder, she said, "I didn't say yes."
"Of course, you didn't. It was very badly done of him, I think. How dare he think that just because he, a mature man, has fallen in love at a moment's notice, you teach him a good lesson. He has had everything his own way far too long!"
"Do you think he does, love me, I mean?" Amelia asked, ignoring the rest of the spate.
"I think nothing else," Mary Louise said with wide eyes. "Do you?"
"Why didn't he say so, then? Why pretend?"
"Who knows? Though this is hardly the most romantic situation, and Nelville, despite his hardness, is a romanticist."
Amelia started to answer caustically, but her attention was caught by movement outside. Near the grove of pines that held the little love temple two people struggled. She called over her shoulder to Mary Louise, and they watched the curiously remote, soundless action of the fight.
A woman, her gown blowing in the rising wind and her dark hair flying from its pins, seemed to be arguing with the man who held her by the wrists. In a flash of lighting, they recognized Reba, and the man who held her wrists was James! Amelia glanced at Mary Louise, wondering whether the old woman was as startled as she was, but Mary Louise hadn't taken her eyes off the couple below them, so small in the distance.
Reba tried to break the grip on her wrists with a dipping twisting motion, but James would not let her go. He seemed to be speaking to her with an earnest, supplicating tilt to his head. Shaking her head violently, Reba jerked backward and James let her go so quickly that she fell and he towered above her with clenched fists. Scrabmbling on the ground, Reba crawfished away from him with the wind blowing her skirts inside out and her face pale and wild in the glow of the lightning flashes.
Coming to her feet, she ran, heading for the house. James lurched after her a few steps, but she outdistanced him quickly. He whirled away, smacking a fist into his palm; then, slowly his shoulders sagged, and with a bowed head, he turned and followed Reba to the house.
Mary Louise and Amelia stared at each other. "Poor James," Mary Louise said reflectively, "I have thought for some time that Reba was playing with him, out of boredom and neglect, you know. I was afraid she was starting something she could not stop; but, then she always loved the spice of danger, or she would never have married into this family." She smiled wryly and went on. "I suppose she loves Sylvestor, or else, after discovering how bereft of material wealth we all are, and how weak in other ways, she never would have stayed."
"I saw her meeting someone in the grove a few weeks ago," Amelia volunteered.
"A breathless adventure for both of them, I'm sure," Mary Louise answered with irony. "The temple of love has seen a great deal in the way of assignations, but it was only a flirtation, I think."
"Did it seem to you that she was afraid of him?" Amelia asked thoughtfully.
Mary Louise looked at her sharply. "Possibly. Why?"
When Amelia shook her head unable to explain, but plagued by a feeling of unease, Mary Louise tilted her head and smiled saying, "Ah, dear, it is a dangerous thing, to play with a man. She might well be frightened."
Outside, the wind whipped around the house with a wintery whining unlike the usual summer storm. Somewhere a jalousie came loose and banged against the house, and clasping her arms, Amelia shivered, suddenly chilled.
"I wish we could light the lamp," Mary Louise said fretfully, "and I expect we had better close the jalousies and windows. It will be raining soon … at least I think it will." She cast a worried gaze out at the gray sky with its sluggishly toiling, yellow-tinted clouds.
But, when they had fastened the jalousies and closed the windows, the close air of the room was stifling and smelled of old walls and stale linen and mice brought out by the sulphurous odor of the approaching storm. They heard Reba come down the hall and their eyes met. Then, Mary Louise continued her pacing, a habit of hers when agitated. They both felt the weight of the waiting, not really knowing for what, or for whom, they waited.
"I've just realized, I haven't had breakfast," Amelia said ruefully, to break the tension.
"I suppose you haven't," Mary Louise said. "Why don't you-"she was interrupted by a knock on the door, followed by Katherine's entrance.
"How are you this morning, Amelia?" she asked brightly, then stopped as she saw Mary Louise.
Defiantly Mary Louise stood her ground and Katherine's mouth tightened before she went on, determinedly ignoring her. "We were all worried about you, Amelia."
"I'll live, thank you," Amelia said dryly.
"Are you sure you are all right? You were quite shaken up last night. I suppose it's just as well that you are going to have a husband to look after you, if you are going to keep having alarms."
"What?" Amelia answered stupidly, thinking she meant Nelville and wondering how she could possibly have known.
"James was quite ecstatic when I told him that you had decided to accept him. Of course, I knew you would when you had had a chance to think about it. I suppose you would rather have told him yourself, but I couldn't resist, seeing the poor boy so dejected."
Amelia looked to Mary Louise for help, but she was watching Katherine with a closed-in secretiveness on her face.
"But, Katherine," she tried to interrupt the flow of words, tried to object. Katherine disregarded her.
"Few girls know their minds about these things. Respect and liking count far more than all your possessions, I have observed. Don't you agree?" She looked to Mary Louise for support, a tactical mistake.
"No," Mary Louise said stonily, checking the rush of words.
"I did not say I would marry James," Amelia said positively, if shakily, in the brief silence.
"But, you did, last night," Katherine said with obvious patience.
"I couldn't have. I don't remember it."
"Remember it or not, you certainly did," Katherine said tightly, insistently, "and you can't back out now."
"But, I never had any intention of marrying James, so I couldn't have said such a thing. I don't know where you get the idea, but regardless of anything I may or may not have said, you must understand that I cannot marry James." Panic caused the words to tumble from her lips as she felt the pressure of Katherine's will and could see the determination that compressed her lips. Then, a faint scraping sound in the hall caught her attention, and she saw James standing in the doorway, his face white and his pale blue eyes in frozen accusation on her.
"Oh, but why? Why?" Katherine asked a little distraughtly as she saw James in the door.
Feeling hemmed in, cornered by their strangely intense emotions, Amelia searched her mind for something to say, some shield to hold between herself and the strong pull of Katherine's will and James's hurt face. "I cannot marry James because I am going to marry Nelville," she said loudly.
There was a sudden silence, James turned to Katherine. "But, you said she was going to marry me," he said, in a voice of angry reproach. His eyes sparkled with glints of light and his hands were clenched into fists. "She would be happy to marry you, you said," he mocked with a touch of infantile sarcasm in his voice.
"Oh, Jamie," Katherine said, "I really thought she would. I didn't mean to mislead you. I just didn't know." Her hands fluttered helplessly toward him, but he turned on his heel and left her, dragging his leg behind him like a little boy drags a forgotten toy, and Katherine called after him in desperate tones, "Jamie! Wait, James!"
Throwing a look of malignant hate at Amelia, she followed him and they could hear her calling his name, her voice echoing in the wide, dark hall above the sound of the wind.
After a long moment, Amelia turned to Mary Louise. "What do you think of that,?" she asked in bewilderment.
"Poor James, two women jilting him in one morning, and yet I can not feel sorry for him, really. He wears his martyrdom so bravely, yet so conspicuously. There. I am being typically French and typically female, vicious on both counts. Forgive me for burdening you with my thoughts. But, do not worry about James; he has Katherine, he has always had Katherine."
"I didn't mean to hurt him."
"Certainly not. You would be a very unfeeling person if you did. But, you have only hurt his pride, his image of himself. He will recover."
Amelia smiled at the ironic tone of Mary Louise's voice; but then her smiled died, as in a flicker of lightning, she saw plainly the frown of doubt and the wondering dark eyes above her masque.
"Well!" Mary Louise said briskly before Amelia could speak, "I suppose you realize you have committed yourself to marriage now, regardless of what you did or did not intend before?"
"Oh no, I only wanted to stop them, to make them go away and leave me alone," she said, even as she wondered if, strictly speaking, that was true. "You don't think Nelville will hold me to it, do you?"
"Not if you did not mean it. I only thought, well, I thought perhaps you did mean it."
Amelia smiled and shook her head.
"You were hungry, I think," Mary Louise said with a laugh, "and so am I. Cassie, my maid, has been so demoralized by the storm and what she calls her second sight of the future that I have had only coffee this morning. Why don't you see if Bessie has come and we can have breakfast here? I think that will be best, until Nelville returns."
Glad to have something to do, Amelia nodded and turned to go, but as she went out she glanced back and saw Mary Louise with her hands to her eyes and her shoulders hunched inward as if over some secret pain. For a moment, she hesitated, then went. Everyone was entitled to his secret sorrow.
Pausing in the hall, she looked out through the door glass, attracted by the sight of the storm. Bits of trash and torn leaves and small branches and fine dust whirled before the wind with now and then a frantic bird caught for a moment in the whirlwind. A huge clap of thunder, like the cracking slap of a giant's hand, shook the house, and forked lightning sprang in fiery lace across the gray-black sky. Shivering, yet fascinated, Amelia stared out as the thunder crashed again. Then, she remembered her errand and stepped away from the door and continued downstairs.
At the foot of the stairs, a gust of wind swirled under her skirts, causing them to rise, and dirt stung her eyes. Holding her skirts down, she ran down the last few steps and into the front parlor where a lighter gloom and noise of wildly flapping drapes showed an open window. Squinting against the flying dust, she pulled the jalousies, closed and locked them, slammed the window down, and turned to look at the room. Papers still eddied, settling to the floor, while on the desk the journal from which they had come lay open, a large book such as plantation entries were often kept in. Amelia picked up the papers one by one and carried them to the desk. Wondering how they should go back since they seemed to be unnumbered, she turned the binder cover up and saw printed: MY HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR, BY JAMES HARVESTON in a childishly cramped hand. She smiled, thinking it was the diary James had spoken of that he had kept of the earlier Civil War years. Turning a few pages and seeing the scraggly, uneven writing of a young boy, she was sure of it. The writing ended with several blank pages and then began again. A date caught her eye. She turned back, mildly curious to read it again.
The date was the day before, laboriously written at the top of a page filled with small cramped words. There could be no mistake, even though the boyish handwriting continued.
Amelia read a few words almost automatically, as she glanced at the page. Then, she went back, afraid that, somehow, she had missed the sense of it; but, no. There was no sense. An endless procession of words marched across the page, words Amelia was unfamiliar with, yet which leapt to her eyes for what they were, endless filth. Sometimes a single word would be repeated, another paragraph would contain variations on the theme of human and animal nastiness, all the more horrible somehow because it was meticulously recorded in the unformed childish hand. Quickly, Amelia flipped through the book, but all the pages, after that first small attempt at a diary dated during the war years, were the same.
Dropping the book like a contaminated thing, Amelia backed away, then whirled as the door behind her banged violently against the wall and James stood there.
"What are you doing?" he shouted, his face contorted with mingled rage and pain. His eyes were distraught, red-rimmed, and his hair was wildly tangled. He held his arms away from his body, slightly curved, with the hand hooked into claws.
"James," Amelia whispered, shocked at his appearance and the look of maniacal rage on his face as he advanced on her. She backed away. Then, seeing his eyes on the papers she had kept in her hand when she dropped the journal, she held them out to him. He snatched at them, and with a curiously gentle motion laid them in the journal and closed the cover. Then, he began to stalk Amelia. She backed away from his animal-like limping progress. Above the sound of the storm, his breathing could be heard, harsh and painfully rough, followed by the dragging scrape of his foot.
Her heart pounding with fright, Amelia spoke to him. "What is it, what's the matter?"
She was answered by a string of words, some taken from the Bible, some from the stable heap, that described, in explicit detail, who and what he considered her to be. Somehow having the confirmation of what she had seen in the book was terrifying, and in haste, she stumbled away from him, trying to circle around the furniture toward the door. But, with a animal cunning shining in his over-bright eyes, he stayed between her and the door.
"Why? What have I done?" she asked, a rising note of hysteria in her voice. But, the sound seemed to infuriate him and he moved faster. Putting the long plush sofa between them, Amelia thought frantically, he's mad, completely insane. In one of those queer insights around the squat, fat sofa, and for an instant, she felt like laughing helplessly.
Suddenly, it was no laughing matter. He feinted to the left, she adjusted too quickly, hampered by her skirt where it trailed over the sofa, whirled there by quickness of her turn. He was upon her. A hand clutched away and he grasped the material at the neck of her dress. With a ripping sound, loud amid their frantic breathing, it came loose in his hand, and for a moment, she thought she was free. Then, his fingers were at her throat.
Though her fists beat frantically at him, she was helpless against the frenzied strength of his thin sinewy arms, and she screamed, a hopeless, despairing cry unlikely to be heard above the wind and thunder. She closed her eyes, shutting out the sight of his thin face, so close, contorted with lust and murder and grief.
Suddenly, she was thrown away, and she stumbled against the couch and clutched at it for support. Wide-eyed, she stared at James who backed away from her, pale and trembling, his mouth round with woe and a shaking finger pointing at the amulet around her neck. "The witch's charm, the witch's charm," he whispered in a strained monotone. "I should have known, the witch's charm."
With her own trembling fingers, Amelia pulled the chain off over her head and held it out before her, and in a reversal of their earlier macabre dance, he backed away from her, shaking his head, his face like a troubled child's,
A flash of movement at the door revealed Katherine hurrying into the room to take James into her arms. "I thought I heard a scream," she said to Amelia. "What it is? What is going on?" Then, glancing at her and the amulet she held, Katherine said sharply, "Put that thing away. Can't you see you're frightening him?"
"He tried to kill me," Amelia said, her voice rising at the thought of it. "He would have, except for this." She dangled the love charm.
James shuddered and shrank against Katherine. "Make her stop," he said, turning his face into Katherine's hair and speaking in the injured tones of a small boy with an absurd lisp in his voice. "She's bad, bad."
"She says you have been bad," Katherine said softly to him. Amelia drew in her breath in amazement at the mild words that could be used for attempted murder.
"No, no," James said, "she was bad first. She didn't keep her promise, nor Reba either. She's going to run away and sell our house, her and the old lady, I heard them say so. The old lady's been someone else all the time, did you know that, Katie? Did you, huh?"
"Oh, Jamie," Katherine whispered brokenly, and patted his head.
Suddenly, the room seemed filled with people. Sylvestor and Reba and Mary Louise clustered around them, asking excited questions, but Amelia only shook her head, unable to answer.
Then, the wind whipped into the room as the front door was flung open and the sound of thunder reminded them of the storm. Silence, a curious, waiting silence, fell as everyone waited to see who had come. Faint footsteps were heard crossing the hall and returning; and then a light glimmered and the outer perimeter of its glow began to move over the floor, pushing the storm darkness into the corners.
Nelville appeared in the door with the light behind him. "What could be better?" he said with a triumphant smile spreading grimly across his face, and he moved with his slender grace into the room, and a woman stood where he had been in the doorway. High above her head she held a lamp that shone down on her grizzled silver hair like a benediction. Her old eyes gleamed maliciously as she advanced into the room and darted quickly from face to face, as if she would see what effect she was having. Clearly, she was enjoying herself, to judge from the wide, wicked grin that showed her toothless old gums.
Utter silence, except for the storm, fell, then James said in a toneless tenor of fear, "The witch, the witch!"
"Grannie Salome," Katherine said, while Reba moved closer to Sylvestor in a gesture of protection, or the need for protection.
Scenting her prey, Grannie Salome bore down on Katherine and James, waving the lamp like a banner of fire and smoke, while their faces, turned up to the light, mirrored a combined fear and fascination. Suddenly, something, some irrational fear born of the courage of madness rippled across James's face, shining in his too-light eyes. Letting go of Katherine, he rushed toward the lamp.
Before anyone could move or sound, their horror, he had grasped the lamp in his up flung hand and sent it hurtling across the room straight at Amelia. Then, he turned and ran out of the room. Nelville crashed into Amelia, sending her stumbling out of the path of the lamp and its trailing comet of burning oil. The lamp splintered into a dozen pieces as it struck the floor, sending spatters of oil in every direction.
Fire sprouted simultaneously in three or four spots, and one blaze touched the dust-dry old drapes, consuming them with a windy whoosh of sound. Burning fragments of cloth drifted in the air, touching the couch and the glistening spots of oil to flame.
Amelia stared in still horror, and then turned her head to see Nelville moving swiftly after James to the accompaniment of James's falsetto laugh, which seemed unreal in the din of fire and storm as James clumsily, but quickly negotiated the stairs. When she turned back to the room, it seemed a solid wall of flame as the old, dry timber and the intense, baking heat combined to make starting pine out of the house.
Katherine beat uselessly at a spreading pool of fire with a throw pillow that smoked, while the rug Sylvestor was using to flail at the wall was itself afire. Tiny tongues of flame licked across the ceiling, waving in the sudden draft as the window glass shattered in the heat, letting in the force of wind from the storm.
Smoke filled the room and Reba coughed constantly as she tugged at Sylvestor's arm. "Let it go!" she shouted above the roaring and crackling. "Let it go! It's not worth it!"
Mary Louise was the first to stumble from the room and the rest followed quickly, with Katherine shouting, "Perhaps, we could get some men and buckets!"
But, Sylvestor shook his head, pointing at the smoke already seeping in little curls and eddies from the boards of the hallway ceiling. With frantic eyes, Katherine stared at him and the fire-filled room behind them. Then, she ran to tug at the hideous hatrack beside the front door, as if determined to save something.
Wearily, Sylvestor joined her while Amelia and the others, after one glance at the smoke-filled staircase with its fire glow at the top of the stairs, left the house and went out into the yard. Grannie Salome, without a backward glance, faded away into the woods from which she had come.
A terrible roar split the sky above them and instinctively they cowered; then, the first raindrops came splatting down into the grass at their feet. With anxious faces, but hopeless eyes they looked into the sky and then at the burning house. No one needed the shake of Sylvestor's head to see that the rain would be too late.
"Look! Look!" came a sharp cry from Mary Louise to call their attention to two figures on the second-story gallery. Dimly seen because of the smoke and rain, they struggled across the width of the house, now in darkness, outlined in the fire behind them.
With a great frozen lump of fear in her throat, Amelia watched them, seeing first one, and then the other, uppermost in the struggle, unable to tell which was James and which Nelville. Silently, she prayed a simple "Please God, please God," while one end of the gallery sagged, eaten away by flames.
Suddenly, the two figures clasped in a deathly embrace, bending slowly over the railing. Back and forth they rocked, neither able to subdue the other, while smoke whirled around them until it seemed they must not be breathing. Then, one man, the one on the bottom, went limp and sagged to the floor. The other man slowly stood erect and looked around as if suddenly noticing the enormous advance of the fire. While his back was turned, the man on the floor sprang up, James, plainly outlined in the ever-increasing firelight. He caught up the wicker peacock chair and half shoved, half threw it at Nelville!
As Nelville staggered against the railing, the chair crashed into him again, sending him over the railing, and though for one brief moment he hung by the fingers of one hand, James smashed them with the chair, and Nelville fell to the ground with an audible thud.
Amelia ran to the fallen figure and dropped to her knees beside him. Crying without being aware of it, she wiped his face with her handkerchief, knowing it was Nelville, but needing the assurance of seeing his face beneath the smoke grime.
At a burst of cackling laughter above her, she looked up to see James, his face distorted with soot into a grinning gargoyle, a dream demon gazing down on his handiwork, mouthing words that mercifully Amelia could not understand in the roar of the fire and the drum of the rain that was fast soaking them all. Then, the face disappeared, retreated back into the burning house, a scream of defiance ringing above the noise.