It seemed impossible that Uncle Wheeler was finally gone. He had arrived in our lives with such pomp and fanfare; for him just to slip out again, in the middle of the night…it was hard to credit. The Millhouse felt strangely empty without his lilac-scented presence, although he’d left his largest trunk and most of his fine clothing behind, and I found myself lingering in the parlor, or by the breakfast table, trying to convince myself that he had truly left us.
“Good riddance,” Rosie said, slamming the door to his room, as if that alone could blot out the memories of the last year. “We ought to have a holiday for it. Let’s build a bonfire and burn an effigy. I think there might still be a wig here.”
The idea struck too close to a chill place in my heart, so I made no response to the suggestion.
Rosie joined us up at the Grange, at least part time. She was still too young to live completely unchaperoned, although I doubted that even Shearing gossip would condemn such action overmuch. She happily took up my place in William’s nursery, allowing me to return to my marriage bed. When Randall left for Harrowgate, she and I were bedfellows once again, and very often William slept between us.
One of those nights, my sister’s voice whispered against my neck. “Do you think he’ll come back?”
I didn’t answer at first, stroking the unbearably soft skin of William’s tiny hand and staring into the darkness. “I don’t know,” I finally said.
“What do you think he’ll ask for?” she said, and then I understood.
“Jack Spinner? Don’t let’s speak of him.”
“We should be prepared. And you haven’t any more jewelry.”
William was very warm against my heart, his breath a damp sweetness on my skin. “No, that’s true. Do you think Uncle Wheeler left any of his cravat pins?”
For a moment, at least, Rosie and I giggled into our pillows until we nearly woke the baby.
We tried to settle back into our lives as if the auction had never happened. Stirwaters rejoiced in the news of its salvation, and as for Stirwaters’s heir? I could not help but feel some trepidation carrying him across the old threshold the first time, but when William jerked his downy head to view the gears passing by above, and his face melted into an expression of contentment, I had to smile.
“Yes, my sweet,” I whispered into the lace of his bonnet. “I feel quite the same.”
I fought the urge to peek into corners for something that might be lurking there, something that wished my son ill. I told myself it was ridiculous. My mother had never had the chance to bring Thomas here; if danger threatened my son, it could reach him anywhere.
And, truly, in that company that bright September morning, it was hard to believe in ghosts and curses. The Stirwaters family threw open its arms to William as if he belonged to all of them. As William was passed hand to hand for the better part of an hour, I watched grizzled old millworkers turn to putty in his baby fists. Jack Townley, who was about to become a father for at least the sixth time, looked fit to burst with pride as he lifted William aloft in one huge hand, allowing the new prince to survey his kingdom.
I held onto those moments, pressed them close to my breast. This is what it had all been for—all the last year’s struggles had been worth it. The wind whistling through the cracks in the walls was only wind; the splash of water hid no sinister whispers. William—my son—would be safe.
There came a morning late in the month, when I woke in my own bed at the Grange, and felt sure that everything would be all right. Randall was home, having gotten a full month off to spend with us.
Sunlight pricking at my eyelids, I rolled over lazily, and saw that Randall had gotten up already. I rose and slipped into a crewelwork dressing gown and padded easily down the hallway to the nursery. He was there, his long frame crammed into a rocking chair intended for someone of my size, our son tucked in his elbow. Colly grinned at me over a heap of William’s laundry as she slipped past. I hesitated in the doorway; it was such a pretty scene, the morning sun slanting over them both, broken into jewelled fragments by a ball of colored glass hung in the window.
“What’s this?” I said, walking over and lifting it before my face. The Woodstone clan had been inundating us with gifts, an almost daily shower of embroidered nappies, beribboned gowns, spoons, blocks, and a blue porcelain dog who watched William’s cradle with a vigilance that would do Pilot proud. The orb in the window was stuffed with swirls of ribbon, the blown glass twined through with streaks of blue and yellow. It was too strange a bauble to be an ordinary nursery toy.
My eye went to the arch of the window frame, which was decked with bunches of herbs and flowers. They had been there for weeks; I had thought them decoration, or to make the air smell sweet. But as I looked closer I recognized the plants—henbane, nightshade, keyflower. Those weren’t ordinary herbs; they were the sort that grew in Biddy Tom’s garden, away from the cooking greens.
I cast my gaze around the room. How had I not noticed this before? Above William’s bed there now hung a jumbled collection of oddments—iron nails, a burnt-down candle, a pair of shears splayed wide.
“What is all this?” I strode to the bed and had to cross a circle of soot scribed on the green-and-yellow checked floor. “Iron above the bed, herbs by the window? What’s next, dark incantations by moonlight?”
“It’s just some old country charms,” Randall said, rising. “I didn’t think you’d mind.” The easy way he shifted tiny William to his broad shoulder belied his scant weeks’ experience with babies. I wanted to hold that image forever, like a picture—of Randall with his son in his arms. I didn’t want to live in a world where babies had to have circles drawn round them to keep bad air from their sleep, wear silver to keep from drowning, fear for curses that threatened their lives.
I yanked down the candles, pulled the nails free, used the scissors to snip down all the ribbons and flowers. “I do not see how hanging sharp objects above my sleeping child makes him safer,” I said. “I love my sister, and I know she means well—but there are days I could just shake her.”
“Rosie? But—” Randall said, frowning slightly. After a moment, he nodded. “I’ll—I’ll talk to her.”
I went to take William from his arms. Randall watched me, an odd look in his eyes. “Charlotte?”
“What?” I busied myself dressing William in the most complicated concoction of ribbons and lace I could find in his wardrobe. My fingers shook on one of the tiny knots.
Randall strode over and put his arms round us both. “What’s wrong? Why does this scare you?”
“It doesn’t,” I said stoutly. “It’s just foolishness, and I don’t see why we must expose William to superstition in the cradle. He’ll see enough—”
“You don’t have to lie to me.”
I paused. “I don’t know what you mean.” But my heart quickened in my breast, and the hand that Randall caught was damp.
“Charlotte, I love you,” he said. “And I know something’s bothering you. You don’t have to tell me. But I wish you would.”
His great eyes were on me, soft and probing, and I should probably have crumbled completely if I stood there long enough. Instead I whisked William up from his bed and patted him on the back.
“Oh, nothing—it’s just that Mrs. Tom said the Townley baby came down with a grippe, and I hope that William doesn’t get it.” It was true—it was certainly true, but it was hardly the whole truth, and I’m sure Randall knew it. Still, what good could come of telling Randall what did worry me? He would only want to help somehow, which would bring him closer to Stirwaters…It was not to be thought of.
He reached for us, tried to reel us into his embrace, but I stepped into the hallway. I was halfway down the corridor when I heard him say, very softly, “Is it me?”
I turned back, to see him silhouetted in the doorframe, his head cocked to the side, as if that were a perfectly natural question.
“How can you think that?”
He shrugged. “What else can I think? You won’t talk to me, you pull away when I touch you. You don’t include me in anything. I had hoped, once the baby was born…Charlotte, do you know that everyone in this village treats me as though I belong here, except you?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I—I didn’t mean to. I’ll do better—” I had no idea what I meant by that, and I was still standing there, gripping William as if he were the only thing holding me together, when Randall bundled us up in his arms again.
“Oh, Charlotte,” he breathed into my hair, “why did you marry me?”
My damp face pressed against his shirt, I told the truth. “You made me feel safe.”
He pulled back slightly, his face set. “Well,” he said. “That’s more than I hoped.”
Something shifted between Randall and me that morning, and I’m not sure either of us knew what. Perhaps it was inevitable—like a split in floorboards, growing wider with each passing season. I did not know how to reach past the gap between us, and Randall did not seem to know if he wanted to. His weeks in Harrowgate grew longer and longer, and I was seldom certain whether I would find him at home when I returned every evening—as return I did. Stirwaters at night now had too many shadows I did not wish to fall on William. Often as not I brought Rosie with me, and we would look through Stirwaters’s records or rapture over the baby together.
I had been through all the records I had found at the mill, and still the picture they created was incomplete. The dead sons, the Wheeler millwheel, the drowning no one could remember. What did it all mean? I could not ignore it; I could not pretend I did not feel some sort of spectral hand tightening around us. What dark dealings in Miller past? Whatever they were, they were well hidden, and why in the world didn’t I have sense enough to let them stay that way?
One evening I had the memorandum books and journals spread before me on the dining table at the Grange. William was in my lap, and I was bent awkwardly over him to study papers I had already memorized. Randall strolled in, looking roadworn and a bit dusty, and kissed me briefly on the top of my head. I looked up, waiting for him to say something, straining to reach past the gap between us, and not knowing how. He sat beside me, and lifted William into his own lap.
“What’s this, then?” Randall turned one of the old ledgers face-to—but I snapped it shut before he could read anything.
“You and your secrets,” he said. He was smiling, but there was an element of seriousness in his voice.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said crossly. It was patently unfair—I was secretive, and why shouldn’t Randall notice that? So I relented a little and passed him Father’s atlas instead.
“Now, this is interesting,” he said, turning past the map of Shearing to the schematic of Stirwaters. “Your father drew these? See—that’s what I’m talking about. We’ve been married almost a year now and there’s still so much about you I don’t know.” He reached for my hand, but I pulled it back.
“Gods, Charlotte! Why do you do that? You never talk to me like you used to—I thought…” He shook his head and lapsed into silence. William made a fussy little cry, and Randall bounced him gently on his knees, saying nothing.
“Look.” Randall sighed and traced his finger along the binding of an old journal. “I’ve tried to be what I thought you wanted—I don’t interfere at Stirwaters, I’m not home too much, I tried not to pry into that madhouse where you kept your uncle.” He put out a long hand to stroke William’s cheek. “But in return, I guess I’d like just a hint of what goes on behind those grey eyes of yours. I can’t read your mind, Charlotte.”
I sat in stony silence—a crack in my foundations growing wider and wider by the moment. What would I tell him? There was nothing to me but Stirwaters and its secrets, and keeping safe everything I cared about.
Randall reached for his hair—the long shock of bronze he had cut away months ago—and, finding nothing, made a frustrated gesture in the air with his hand. “Aren’t you going to say anything? No, never mind—I don’t know why I expected you to.” He tapped his finger thoughtfully on Father’s book. “You’re like the mill building, you know—this wall here. There’s no reason for it, but you’ve built it up anyway.” Shaking his head, he rose with William. “It’s late,” he said. “I’m tired, and William should be in bed.” He left, heading upstairs.
I let him go; I was no longer listening. I was staring at my father’s schematic of Stirwaters. Randall had seen it—why hadn’t I? Had my father realized what he’d recorded? Had he never thought it strange? There was a foot’s difference in the depth of the second floor—the floor with the hex sign on its back wall.
Father’s atlas clamped in my arm, I practically threw myself outside and down the hill to Stirwaters. Pounding up the stairs, I paused only to grab a hammer from the shop table and the lamp from my office. I hit the spinning room at a dead run and dropped the atlas with a bang on the floor. My heart crashed against my ribcage, but I don’t think it was all from running.
The hex sign, in all its blue and yellow fire, was clearly illuminated by the full moon streaming in the windows. I cast a black shadow over it as I stared hard, studying the wall. This wall was plaster—but it was the back of the mill and ought to have been stone. The same wall, on the floor above and below, had never even been painted. Suddenly I was sure my suspicions were correct. The hex sign wasn’t protecting us from anything—it was hiding something.
Pressing my forehead and palms to the wall, I whispered, “Oh, please forgive me,” and then, before I could talk myself out of it, struck the head of the hammer deep into the plaster. It hit something soft, resistant—not the stone wall behind it. Bracing my heel against the wall, I pulled out the hammer and struck again, forcing open a hole big enough for my hand. Frantically, I pulled apart plaster and lathing, crumbling into dust with age and air. The gap, like every other wall in Stirwaters, was stuffed with paper. I took a deep breath that almost didn’t make it past my throat and reached inside.
What came out first was mostly tattered ruins, shreds of worthless packing. I let it spill to the floor without a second glance, scrabbling deep in the hole I’d made. At last my fingers found whole papers—a stack here, a scrap there. I pulled the first one out and knelt into the lamplight to read it.
Hours later, moonlight had turned to morning, and I was still crouched beside the ruined wall, surrounded by a sea of papers. There in the dim light, I had pieced together a grim impression of Stirwaters’s early days. Out of all the tattered remnants of our past, a picture emerged: of Harlan Miller, ambitious, ruthless, driven and driving. His stamp was all over the mill, in the blueprint and footprint, the engineering of the dam, raceways, pond, and powertrain. His wife, five daughters, and son Josiah seemed an afterthought.
An old map of the Valley, before there was a Shearing village, showed the undammed Stowe tumbling free through a golden landscape. Notations in red—Harlan Miller’s hand; I knew it well by then—had scratched out the spot where he would build his mill: a circle, a sketch, initials. One word did the map bear: SIMPLE, in block capitals spaced wide across the Miller land. I shook my head sadly; nothing would be simple about Stirwaters.
Another stack of papers, once bound together with a ribbon that fell to bits when I went to untie it, revealed itself to be an age-old journal in an unknown hand. Most was illegible—the pages stuck together and crumbled when I separated them; age and mildew had obscured the writing, none-too-readable to begin with. Here and there I found a phrase I could make out: building continues slowly; money owed, Miller impatient for something-something Wheel. I spent hours carefully peeling those pages apart and trying to understand them; here was the account of the building of Stirwaters, from some anonymous workman perhaps? One of my ancestors? But the more I read, the less clear the journal became. Words leapt out: fighting, delay, boy, rain, hanging, Wheeler, and, close to the end and most ominous: drown’d in Pit.
I felt as if I’d plunged into the icy millpond myself. Who was drowned? But nothing else on that page was legible, the writer made no more mention of any such incident, and the journal ended a few pages later. One page looked promising, but in my haste I pulled too forcefully, and it scattered to the floor, hopelessly lost. The back of the old book was blank; the author had abandoned his account—but stuck inside the mildewed binding was a fragile scrap of broadside, bearing a brief newspaper account on one side, a recipe for slug repellant on the other. I’d have tossed it aside with the other miscellany, but for five bold words marching across the page: WITCHCRAFT IN THE GOLD VALLEY, blazed the headline.
A late instance in this neighborhood has shewn that the primitive and wicked practise of witchcraft still lingers in the rural places, near for instance to the town of Haymarket, where Friday last was arrested a man for the same. The unhappy incident arose when one Mr. M—, of Shearing, made claim against a townsfellow, that the latter had endeavored to act against him in a manner not befitting a godly man, namely that he had schemed against his health and prosperity and likewise those of his family, by means of foul Poison, graven Images, and curses—
Curses! I read and reread the account, trying to make sense of it. Mr. M—Harlan Miller? Involved in a witch hunt? Such an act seemed almost too far-fetched to credit, coming from my kinsman, and yet wasn’t the evidence of his superstition all around me? A burst of night wind howled around the mill and hit the windows with a shudder I felt in my very bones. “I know,” I whispered back. “You’re trying to tell me something. But what?”
Knowing I still did not have the full story, I reached again into the wall. Deep in a stack of receipts and correspondence regarding the construction, I found part of a letter, torn at the fold:
…did not take you for a squeamish man. I know you feel pity for that sorry fellow, but forget that dirty business at the crossroads and put your mind back to work. I am not a patient man, and I expect to see a profit from my investment by year’s end. If the mill is not up and running by then, do not doubt I will have my money from this enterprise, one way or another.
I pray God delivers your son from this terrible illness.
I remain your partner in this affair,
Malton Wheeler
I traced my fingers along the name of Wheeler, scribed there among the records of the building of Stirwaters. I should have felt surprised, but I did not. It seemed the Wheelers had contributed more than just the millwheel; our very foundations were built upon Wheeler money as well as Miller will. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that Uncle Wheeler had come here, and it had taken a reunion of the two Stirwaters founding families to stir up all the old ghosts of this mill.
But something in that letter did chill me. What was the “dirty business” Malton alluded to? What had Harlan Miller and Malton Wheeler done—what was the secret so dark it had to be boarded up into a wall, guarded by a hex symbol? I laid the broadside and the letter side by side in the lamplight, trying to trace the threads that wove them together.
I tapped my fingers along the torn edge of the broadside. I could not imagine accusations of witchcraft were often resolved happily. Dark dealings in Miller past, Biddy Tom had said: Anger, pain…
Violent death.
“Oh, mercy,” I breathed aloud. “What did you two do?”
I fell back on my heels, as the threads twisted tighter and tighter together, binding us all in a web of violence and revenge. Was there blood—innocent blood—on Miller hands? If we were cursed, then surely we deserved it. And perhaps doubly so—for were Rosie and William and I not just Millers, but Wheelers as well?
Something still troubled me. I found myself peering back into the wall, as if it would yield up more dark secrets, but I had fair emptied it. If there was a death on Harlan Miller’s conscience—something that had happened far from here, in Haymarket—who, then, had drowned in the wheelpit? Why show me a vision of Randall drowning? And why had our curse taken the form it did: that no Miller would ever raise a son to inherit after him?
I pray God delivers your son…
Suddenly, the distance between me and William was too much. I left the crumbled plaster, the hammer, and the scraps there on the spinning-room floor, gathered up my evidence, and fled back to the Grange. Randall was standing at the top of the stairs when I got home. The look he gave me was almost as terrible as anything I’d read that night. I swallowed hard, watched my husband, and—as always, waited for him to speak first. His eyes were shadowed, his hair a straggled mess where his hand must have passed through it over and over.
“I spent the night packing—I’m supposed to be in Harrowgate later this week, but I need know if you want me to come back again.”
I stared at him. What was he saying?
“Are—are you leaving?” It was somehow the only thing I could get out.
He nodded wearily. I had never seen him so exhausted. “Where did you go, Charlotte? What were you doing, running about in the middle of the night? What’s that all over your clothes, or are you even going to tell me?” There was no expression in his voice—he knew already that this was another secret I would not divulge. I wanted to run to him, throw my arms around him, weep on his shoulder and beg for his help. But what would that do but bind him tighter to a cursed family and their inevitable doom? I could not take the chance. Randall was a good man. He did not deserve to be tainted forever by the hand of Miller luck.
Randall left us later that morning, and I don’t think we exchanged another word. I watched him drag his valise down the hill to the village, felt myself crumble away, stone by stone, and knew that Stirwaters was taking away another man I loved.
Randall’s departure raised a few eyebrows in the village, and I did not even try to explain it. Occasionally Rosie would mumble something about the busy season for banking, but the sympathetic clucks William and I received told me that Shearing gossip, as usual, had gotten the better of the Millers. Randall wrote, at first—painful, hesitant letters asking after William, Rosie, me…but my answers grew less frequent, lest I give away something that should have him bolting back to Shearing—until at last his stopped, as well. Thus autumn waned toward winter, with none of last year’s hope and promise.
One of those dreary mornings I sat in my office, my back to the ruined wall, listening to the roar of water below my feet. I had done the right thing. I had done the right thing. I turned the words over and over in my mind, but the water drowned them out, every time.
Rosie was with us, bent over William, cooing and tickling him. Even my son’s laughter, the latest in a list of infant miracles his father would never witness, could not cheer me.
The door swung open, and the very world stopped turning.
Jack Spinner was back.