SHE WAS STILL restless the next morning, so she dressed early, and as she started to leave her room, she met Bessie.
"There now, you're awake already," Bessie said with a smile in her soft voice. "I was bringing you your morning wake up coffee."
Amelia thanked her, and smiling, turned back into her room, the thought of Bessie's kindness making the day seem better. Bessie put the tray down on the bedside table, but did not go. "I special wanted to talk to you this morning, Miss 'Melia," she said with great dignity as she clasped her hands over her plump stomach. "Old Grannie Salome said to tell you she didn't mean to scare you the other day. Seems like she didn't know who you was and somebody done told her you was out to bring trouble to the old Miss. Long years ago she belong to her, and she always got a soft spot for her, see. Thought like she'd scare you away from the house, is all."
"Grannie Salome, the old woman out in the field?"
"That's her. Now she knowns you the old Miss' own grandchild and wouldn't think to harm you. Said to say she was mighty sorry about it and give you this." Bessie reached into her apron pocket and brought forth a little packet which she thrust at Amelia with hasty fingers and a sidelong glance.
"What is it?" Amelia asked, accepting it automatically.
"It's a charm, she say. You wear it and it keep you safe and bring you luck, and if you want it to, it'll get you a man. Wear it inside your dress." Having completed her message, she swung around to the door.
"Wait!" Amelia said urgently. "Is Grannie Salome …" she stumbled over the strange name … "is she all right?"
"She's fine. She lives in the woods, but we all take care of her. She be fine."
"You said somebody told her I was going to bring Isabella harm? Who would do that?"
The woman's eyes slid away from Amelia. "I don't know. Just what Grannie say, but she ain't just right in the head. Sometime she hears voices. I got to go now. Miss Katherine find me up here she be powerful mad, I'm not supposed to be talking to you, but I promised Grannie. 'Sides, I don't have to take no orders I don't want to." And with a stiff back she went on out.
"Well, thank you for bringing it," Amelia said to the closing door. A puzzled frown was on her face as she hefted the small, white bag in her hand. A light, sweet fragrance came from it and it crackled pleasantly, feeling as though it might be filled with leaves and herbs. "Not supposed to talk to me," she said softly to herself and the trapped, closed-in feeling swept over her more strongly than before, and she shook her head distractedly. She put the charm on a silver chain that had been her mother's and dropped it down the front of her dress. Then, smiling wryly, she turned to go downstairs. She felt, somehow, that she could use all the luck charms she could get … and let the rest of the potion work if it would.
Just the exertion of leaving her room and going downstairs to the breakfast table surrounded her with delicious fragrance brought forth from the charm by the humid heat of the morning and the warmth of her body. Reba and Katherine sat at the table talking in low voices that ceased as she came toward them. Katherine smiled and wished her good morning and told her to help herself to the dishes that were laid out. Reba did not even look up.
After an uncomfortable moment, Katherine took up where she had obviously left off in her lecture. "Really, Reba, it seems to me to be a wife's duty to prevent her husband from deliberately destroying himself. You could hide the tobacco, couldn't you?"
"What if I did?" Reba said impatiently, toying with her biscuit and the ham on her plate. "What is it going to solve?"
"Perhaps, Sylvestor would come out of his dream world and help the rest of us make a living!" Katherine answered indignantly.
"Do you really think he would? I don't. He doesn't like the rest of us. He stayed home taking care of our precious home while boys like Nelville and men like his father rode off to become heros, and what did he get? Nothing. Not even a thank you. And he is never going to get a thank you from you, Katherine, much less the pleasure of being head of this household."
"You don't understand, Reba. He's wasting his life. He is an old man at forty-five, killing himself with that heathenish tobacco that sends him off into his heathenish dream world. I think it's your responsibility to see that he stops using it."
"Let him alone, Katherine. He escapes you and this house and everybody in it when he smokes his "heathenish" tobacco, as you call it. Let him have his peace. It's more than anybody else has." Her mouth was petulant and sullen, but her eyes were defiant.
"Are you going to stand by and let him kill himself?"
"If that is what he wants."
"If you loved him-"
"Love!" Reba said scornfully. "It's because I love him that I'm willing to concede him the right to live his own life as he wants. He's a man, not a child. I might be able to badger and push and talk him into doing and being what I want, but what good is that?"
"This is something you must do for his own good."
"You are mistaken!" Reba said, her eyes flashing angrily as she got to her feet. "There is nothing I must do. I'm not a child either. I'm a woman, something you should remember, Katherine, and I won't be pushed any further than I care to go!" With an emphatic gesture that made the dishes rattle, she pushed her chair under the table and strode away, her riding skirts flapping around her ankles.
"You don't want him to come out of his dreams! He might see you as you really are!" Katherine called after her spitefully.
"Which is?" Reba asked, stopping and looking around with a softly inquiring gaze; but, Katherine pretended not to hear, her eyes on her plate as she fussed with her food, and her back straight with anger, and Reba turned and went on out the door.
James put his head out the door of the front parlor. "Is it safe to come out?" he asked with a grin, then came toward the table with his limp and his self-consciousness that made Amelia want to spare his pride and look in some other direction until he was seated.
"It isn't a joking matter," Katherine said severely.
"Oh, come, Katherine," he answered, "don't you think you are exaggerating just a little. Leave Reba alone, why don't you. She can't help Sylvestor. He's my brother and I'm as concerned as you are, but you know he hasn't been himself in years. Why pretend he can be any more?" There was a boyish earnestness in his voice, but he reached for a biscuit with an almost callous disregard that went against his words.
"Are you suggesting we give him up?"
"Why not? He did, years ago. If you want to help someone, help Reba. For her, he's not just given up and gone his way, he has never been there."
"Don't be ridiculous. Why did he ever marry her, then?"
"Don't you know? Don't you remember, Katherine? Or, don't you want to remember? You wanted him to. You thought it would be the very thing for us all." He stared at her coldly over the biscuit he was buttering.
She turned a deep, mottled red and put her hand to her heart while her lips went white. "James, I never …"
"Leave it, Katherine, just leave it. I didn't intend to quarrel with you this morning, and I'm sure Amelia is tired of our family squabbles, interesting though they may be to us."
Surprised to see Katherine fall silent, Amelia stared at James. Before he had always seemed gay and smiling. It was a little disconcerting to find that he could be hard. She smiled nervously in answer to his smile of gentle commiseration, but she said nothing.
After breakfast, Amelia wandered out into the backyard. The sun beamed down, bathing everything in its rich, blinding white light, but it was cool in the shade of the lane of crepe myrtles. Drawn by the winding beaten path that neatly divided the lane, Amelia walked down it, feeling the coolness of the dew-damp earth through her slippers.
So on edge were her nerves, and so quietly did he overtake her, that she whipped around with wide eyes when Nelville spoke up behind her. "Rested, breakfasted, and none the worse for last night?" he asked with a trace of laughter beneath his voice.
She smiled warily. Would he say something cutting and embarrassing about the night before and change from friendliness to what she referred to in her thoughts as his wild fox look? "Yes, thank you," she answered.
"You never did really see the fields before, did you?" he continued in a companionable way, falling into step beside her. "Care to walk that way now?"
She nodded, still wary, but he had already taken her acceptance for granted. Soon they stood in the wagon track beyond the tumble-down slave cabins, and he waved a hand out over the fields green with row after row of cotton. "Another week and all that will be in bloom if it rains, if I can find enough hands to pick it, a million ifs and we will be back on the road to prosperity. Cotton is still king. We have proved that here in the South."
"Does that mean you will be rich again?"
He laughed. "Hardly that. We may be able to pay for the seed and fertilizer, pay off the taxes and clean up the place a little. With luck and a good market, we might buy back some of the furniture that had to go."
"Even that much is wonderful," she said enthusiastically.
"That all depends on the rain. I try not to think about it much because this drought seems to go on and on, and it begins to look as if we will be lucky to get enough out of this dried up field to pay the interest on the loan I didn't have any right to make. Then, we begin again next year by mortgaging the house, instead of just the acreage, in order to plant another crop. The prospects are bleak, wouldn't you say."
But, Amelia was not paying attention, for her thoughts had stopped on part of his words. "What do you mean 'a loan you didn't have the right to make'?"
His eyes slid over her face and a bland look came into his face. "It gets complicated," he evaded.
"Did you mean because Mirror House doesn't belong to you?"
He stared at her sharply. "Why so interested?"
"Something Reba said about Sylvestor never owning it," she said, determined not to be made nervous by his intense gaze.
He laughed shortly and walked on without answering. After a moment, Amelia followed with anger fighting amusement at his incomprehensible ways. Some people have a habit of cracking their knuckles; Nelville was mysterious. She watched him as he walked beside her, kicking at the soil to judge the need for rain and frowning blackly at the dust that spurted up from the sun-hot earth. "You must love all this very much," she said conversationally.
"Love? I think I hate it." His voice was calm and dispassionate.
"But, why?" she asked, emboldened by her new formed view of his character to ignore his forbidding gaze.
"Love … hate. You sound as if you think it matters. It doesn't, except in that it effects your peace of mind." He stopped to pull up a weed and stood stripping it idly through his long fingers-with the fine red hairs on them gleaming in the sun. He half turned to flip the weed back toward and house towering behind them. "It has never been, what you might call, a house of love. By the house, I guess, I really mean the whole thing, the entire plantation. When old Juan Phillipe built the house for his brother, he didn't build it that way. Did you ever notice that houses have to be built with love to be happy homes? No, forget I asked that. It was only an idea."
Amelia only shook her head, seeing that he didn't really expect an answer.
"It was Charles Harveston who named the place," he went on. "One day he had had too much to drink and some friends asked him why his brother built the houses just alike. Charles answered it was the closest thing his brother could get to a mirror for his house. Then, there was the business of Charles' wife and daughter having to accept Phillipe's mistress as a social equal at family parties-not in real society of course. The situation caused bad blood between the women, since Katherine's mother and Katherine also, naturally, were such strait-laced persons of churchly virtues. Not that there is anything wrong with churchly virtues, except that in some mysterious manner an excess of virtue seems to leave no room for tolerance."
"Some people might say an excess of tolerance leaves no room for virtue," Amelia said daringly.
"Better and better," he said looking down at her with an unreadable expression. Then, he looked quickly away and went on, just as if he were answering her question without extra comment, "They might, but why shouldn't we be tolerant of other people's sins? They aren't ours to live with and pay for. They do not affect us if we are all we should be. Why should we condemn them for having them, except for the satisfaction we get from congratulating ourselves that we don't have them? Self-satisfaction, that's the reason for condemning sinners."
"Yes," she said, absently agreeing, but following thoughts of her own that had reverted to the previous topic. "But, where did Isabella fit in, if everything was so open and obvious that the mistress attended family parties?"
"She didn't. By her own request, she was left out. She had her own rooms, her own servants, and her own sources of entertainment. If she was jealous, or even disapproving, nobody knew it. If she cared, if she loved or hated, she did so in private. She was not a parader of griefs and humiliations."
"I wonder why she didn't go back to her own people when her husband died?" Amelia said.
"You are rather hard, aren't you?" Nelville said without answering her question. "The 'mistress' was your grandmother and Isabella's husband was your grandfather."
Amelia colored slightly, but managed to say evenly, "I didn't mean to be, it's just that they seem more like people in a book or something than my relatives."
He looked at her, his face impassive. Then, he reverted to her question in his disconcerting way. "Isabella was caught, like everybody else here. We are trapped by the great need of Mirror House. It is a squatting monster, trading on souls, without even beauty or grandeur, ancient tradition or an obligation for past happiness to recommend it. It drags the youth and laughter out of our defenseless bodies by the tenuous hooks of duty. None of us escape."
"Why don't you just go away if you hate it so?" Amelia asked, a little shocked by his bitterness. "There are always James and Sylvestor to take over?"
He laughed. "James and Sylvestor? They are useless, nursing their wounds and endlessly remembering. They are gentlemen, don't you know? They have spent fifteen summers on this damn plantation since the war and couldn't even show a green hand how to hoe a straight row. Katherine could, but Katherine won't. She knows the uses of a fool."
"Aren't you being hard on them now?"
"You mean ungrateful, since they gave me a home?"
"Something like that."
"Here's something to remember when you start thinking that. They never gave anyone anything; beginning with Charles they have taken things as if they thought it was their right. Juan Phillipe gave me the roof, but Mary Louise, the mistress, made it a home. The rest only found it expedient to let it stand. Katherine likes to pretend I'm one of the family. It soothes her conscience when I pretend also, though I pretend none too well." He threw back his head and breathed deep, staring around at the endless blue of the sky bounded by the trees on the horizons. "Outside you can live.… I've always thought I would like to go to the land the Indians call the 'far reach of home'; no collection of rooms and fields, but the far reaches of space, land beyond sight."
Unconsciously, Amelia stared at the enclosing trees, trying to see what he saw, an endless reach of home. For an instant, she felt free of the crowding worries, the half-understood fears waiting in the house behind her; then, they flooded back, trebled in size, and through the surge of turgid despair that swept in with them, she felt a closeness to the man beside her, the man with his far-flung dreams and flamboyant expressions camouflaging his own despair.
"So much for the impossibilities," he said on a short laugh. "We remain, changeless future, we remain, in spite of our invocations to the gods of fate." Turning away from the fields, he started back toward the house. "We have an appointment with a lady," he said, indicating with a sweep of his arm that Amelia was to precede him.
As they entered the house, he asked, "Are you a normal woman, or are you as incurious as you pretend?"
"What do you mean?" she asked, glancing back at him as she passed through the door.
"Most women would be overflowing with questions after the opening I gave you."
"I'll learn in good time, won't it?"
"Yes, but wouldn't you like to be prepared?"
She only laughed as she went before him up the stairs as he indicated. At the landing, she looked back down at him and said lightly, "I suspect I know."
"I thought so," he said maddeningly.
Silently, they moved to the room across the hall from Amelia's, and her heart began to beat faster as she saw that they were indeed going to see Isabella. Isabella-of-the-silver-bell who rang for her henchman, Nelville. Nelville-of-the-masque.
Nelville knocked softly. A scuffing sound moved to the door and it opened a crack. An eye popped out and then the colored woman moved aside and the door opened wide. When they entered, she closed the door behind them and moved slowly out of the room.
Here, in this room, there was no sign of the hard times that had come to the rest of the house. A huge bed of dark wood surmounted by a soaring canopy stood to one side with its hangings and spread of rose silk glinting in the light that flooded the room. Rose drapes were looped back from the windows, while panels of lace filtered the light pouring through. Carpets in mellow old rose, gold, and green covered the polished boards, while the dark highboy and wardrobe of the furnishings and the turned bedposts and headboard showed the gleaming patina only hand rubbing can give.
The walls were papered with a soft, cool green and hung with tapestries, while beside a needlework frame sat a white-haired lady dressed.
As they advanced into the room, the lady rose with a smile in her eyes that went no further because of her masque.
"Amelia," Nelville said simply by way of presentation.
"I am so very glad to meet you," came the musical voice, soft and sweet, from behind the masque. She turned an inquisitive glance to Nelville, and when he nodded slightly, she continued, "I am your grandmother, Mary Louise."
"What?" Amelia said stupidly, "what?"
"Are you shocked? I am terribly sorry," her grandmother said with an accusing look at Nelville. "Please sit down and let us explain."
"I thought … I thought …," she murmured, trying to recover her wits as she accepted the chair Nelville pulled up for her.
"That I was poor Isabella? It is what you were meant to think, of course. You and everyone else, except Nelville, though I will admit I have often wondered just how successful we have been."
"But, why? I don't see-"
"No. I am sure you don't," Mary Louise said softly as she resumed her seat and Nelville went to stand beside her in a protective gesture that was unconsciously endearing.
"In the beginning, there was no thought of concealment," she began, leaning forward in her eagerness to make Amelia understand. "Salome, the one they call Grannie Salome now, was a maid at Harvest Hall and it was she who pulled me out of the fire. I was a pitiable sight. My clothes were charred ruins, I had no hair or lashes or brows, and I was burned, so terribly burned, especially around the face and neck. Salome carried me to a cabin she had built in the woods and everyone thought me dead along with Isabella and Juan, your grandfather. They buried what was found of the bodies, but they were, of course, virtually unidentifiable." She stopped and took a deep breath, then went quickly on. "After several days, I do not know how many, I came to my senses. I was plastered with swamp mud until I was mummified in the dried mess, but I was alive thanks to Salome who had always fancied herself something of a witch doctor, a juju priestess of some sort. I never inquired too closely. But, I did remember what had happened. I sent Salome for Nelville and it was his idea that I pretend to be Isabella."
"It was only to be for a little while," Nelville said quietly, "a month or so, until she was able to travel. But, then New Orleans was captured and travel became impractical, if not impossible."
"No one seemed suspicious. Salome sent her daughter Cassie with me to care for me. My hair came back white as snow and I Adopted Isabella's masques and manner of dress, and since she had always been seclusive no one was surprised when I continued the habit."
"But, why was it necessary?" Amelia protested.
"Because someone, either James, Katherine or Sylvestor, tried to kill me."
Amelia stared at her. "Are you sure?" she asked when Mary Louise did not continue.
"It happened like this. Your grandfather was in bed upstairs with a stroke. The war news had been very upsetting and there were other personal things that disturbed him. He sent for his lawyer and he came about dark. There was something, some small thing, he wanted to add to his will. He was worried that his son, Phillip, would die in battle and he wanted to word the will so that there was no mistaking what should be done with his property in such a case."
"They were finishing when Katherine, who was always curious about our visitors, arrived. She had recognized Lawyer Mason's carriage on the drive and told Sylvestor and James. Thinking that Juan Phillipe might be worse, they all came, but Katherine was in time to hear the will being read back by Mr. Mason for Juan's approval. After Mr. Mason left, they came into the room and she quite brazenly admitted she had eavesdropped. She was outraged. Juan had left everything, even Mirror House and its acreage, to Phillip and his heirs. Isabella and I were to have permanent homes in the houses in our lifetimes, but beyond a cash settlement, his brother and his brother's children received nothing. I am afraid it was a petty thing on Juan's part, but he had put up with much and gotten nothing, not even respect in return. All was accepted as though it was due. He was very incensed, especially, I'm afraid, with their treatment of me, and of their failure to welcome our son's bride, your mother, Amelia, into the family and introduce the young couple into the plantation society. They could have done so easily. In fact, very few people would have recalled Phillip's parent age so often if Charles and his wife had not lamented it with such breast beatings at every opportunity, despite the fact that he was adopted by his father and his legal wife as a baby, so that in the eyes of the law he was legitimate." Her fine eyes misted with hurt tears, and in an effort to hide them, she looked at her hands in her lap.
After a moment, she continued. "There was a terrible scene. Katherine was enraged. James was very white, though he had little to say, but Sylvestor backed up Katherine's every word. That is hard to imagine now, isn't it? Juan was not at his best. He also said some unforgivable things. I tried to calm them, but it only made matters worse. Things were said, names, accusations, things they must have thought, heard their parents say, and harbored against me all their lives. Then, Katherine bumped into the table near the bed and the candle fell over and went out. I went to the top of the stairs and called down for Salome to bring up a lamp, and then I went back into the room."
"I was very upset and worried about your grandfather who was too excited for a man in his condition. It was dark in the room when I entered and I could hear them breathing and someone whispering. I asked them to please go, as they were making their uncle ill, but no one answered and I felt suddenly that there was danger in the dark, like one of the queer feelings of menace you get in the middle of the night and which nearly always proves false. But, this one wasn't false." She shivered a little remembering, her eyes far away and her mind back in that darkened room. "Just then I saw Salome approaching with the lamp. You could see the glow of moving light coming nearer. Just as she came through the door, a figure rushed toward her, and then, before I could move or think, the lamp came hurtling across the room toward me! It hit my chest pouring oil down the front of my dress and fell to the floor rolling across the carpet, igniting the oil as it rolled and the flames whooshed up my dress before I knew! I was so dazed and shocked that the rest is a blur. I can remember the smell of the burning oil and hair and flesh and feel the pain and the smoke stinging my eyes and hear them running down the stairs. They were young, James was the youngest, about fifteen. I suppose they panicked when they saw what they had done."
"There is always the possibility that it was planned that way," Nelville said in a hard voice.
"I have thought of that, and it is one reason I continue this masquerade; the other being, of course, that they would never let me live in this house if they knew who I really was. And I want so much to live here. After so many years, where else could I go? And now, I can look out my window toward Harvest Hall and remember it as it was, or perhaps better than it was; that's an old lady's prerogative."
"But, what of Isabella? Couldn't she have escaped the fire?" Amelia asked.
"I don't suppose we will ever know," Mary Louise said, leaning her head back and shutting her eyes. "I have often thought that she loved Juan Phillipe as much as I. He did rescue her from disgrace and seclusion as a sort of freak in her family. I think she may have tried to save Juan. I hope so. As much as I envy her common grave with him-does that sound morbid-I cannot help but think that she earned that grace by staying with him and easing his way to death. I am sure that is what happened. She was his wife, and without him, she had no meaning. I have always regretted that my love had to diminish her life, but it could not be helped, and she bore me no grudge for it."
"How do you know it wasn't Isabella who threw the lamp?" Nelville wondered pensively, not as if he wanted to know, but as if he wanted to help Amelia grasp the situation.
"I don't." Her answer seemed to hang in the air, another piece of the misery that hung around the house. Another unanswered question.
"But, why? The will was made," Amelia said.
"Because they knew-their father Charles Harveston who was away in the army at the time had written them-that Phillip was dead. Your mother had left and told no one where she was going or that she was expecting a child. If Juan died without an heir, Charles would inherit, of course. But all this is just guessing. I have never given up hope that the entire tragedy was the result of an unthinking act of anger."
"It came as a distinct shock when they discovered that Phillip had left an heir. The buzzing in a hornet's nest is a valid comparison," Nelville said, walking to the window and looking out.
"Yes, I enjoyed that very much," Mary Louise said with the ghost of a smile in her eyes. "I keep up with the things that go on in the house, even though they never come near me. They have sat back all these years and let time go by, never doing anything about the legal side of the inheritance, but now time is catching up with them. I would not have missed this for the world." She sobered. "But, you must be careful my dear, we cannot be sure that someone might not try to see that Phillip's heir does not inherit."
"Are you trying to say that someone may try to kill me?" Amelia asked, watching her with steady brown eyes.
"Not now. Not right away, while they hope you will marry into the family. But, I am afraid you may be in danger if you let them suspect that you are not going to." She shook her head, then said, as if reluctant to voice the words, "Perhaps, you should marry one of them, James or Nelville. I believe it would end the danger."
Amelia looked from her to Nelville to find him watching her with the hard expressionless glare of the red stuffed fox, and suddenly a suspicion burgeoned in her mind that the whole tale was a fabrication directed at her for the purpose of persuading her to marry Nelville, the elaborate tale, the carefully tempered suggestion of danger seemed a ruse to throw suspicion on James, to slight him as a suitor. In that house, nothing seemed too fantastic to be believed.
"Don't you understand?" Nelville said. "Aren't you going to gloat? You are the heir. This all belongs to you." He gestured widely, flamboyantly, taking in the house and land and lake and land beyond in one encompassing sweep.
"I can't seem to make myself believe it," Amelia said in a guarded tone as she dropped her eyes from his fierce gaze.
"Why not? Is your imagination so poor?"
"It is not as real for her as it is for us," Mary Louise said gently, her soft voice cutting across his angry one.
"I'm sorry," Amelia said with a small smile of apology for Mary Louise, a token of thankfulness for her understanding. "I didn't mean I doubted your story."
"It would not be surprising if you did."
"I only meant that I can't quite accept it as something that really happened. It seems so unreal."
"It was real enough," Nelville said harshly, and his arm shot out to catch Mary Louise's masque and rip it away!
What he exposed did not go with the sweet eyes and smooth forehead. The flesh was twisted and crisped like bacon fried too quickly, with deep pits and little runnels that looked like mice burrows. The skin of her neck that disappeared beneath a ruff of lace, was red and wattled with flame-shaped scars running upward.
"Don't!" she cried out in the anguish of a once pretty woman exposed in ugliness, and she began to cry as she reached blindly with entreating fingers to Nelville for the return of her masque and her self-respect.
He stepped in front of her to shield her from Amelia's stunned gaze, and with tender hands helped her adjust her masque again while he murmured his apology.
"Do you see?" he asked Amelia over his shoulder as he held the white head against his chest and rocked her gently as he would a child. "This is real, not some silly schoolgirl dream. This is as real as death, and as ugly."
"I … I don't know what to say," Amelia managed to sound composed by an effort of will.
Suddenly, he seemed to sag, to be weighted by years of defeats. "Just go away," he said softly, but with an undertone of command, "go away and leave us alone."
She rose swiftly, turned silently, and left the room.