I moved slowly, incapable of walking faster, as though it was my body and not my soul that had been injured—and no doubt I was still feeling the aftereffects of the herbs I had taken.
I did not want to go home to face Brom, this man I had married and lived with and begun to trust and, oh God, felt affection for. I had reveled in his touch, let him make love to me and pleasure me, and all this time he had been the cause of my greatest sorrow. I almost could not breathe past the pain.
Yet I had nowhere else to go. I could not seek refuge at Charlotte’s cottage, not tonight. Nor could I walk to my parents’ house. I would never make it there, not in my current state, and even if I could have, I did not want to see those rooms where Ichabod and I had first met and fallen in love.
So I went home, knowing that what would come would come.
When I walked into the house, the clock on the mantelpiece struck three o’clock in the morning. It was All Hallows’ Eve again.
I climbed the stairs to my bedchamber and pushed open the door. All I wanted was to collapse into bed and never wake. Yet this was not to be.
Brom was seated in a chair by the window, a single lamp lighting the room. He brought a whiskey bottle to his lips and took a swig. “There you are,” he said, though his voice was not as slurred as I would have expected at this hour. “Where have you been?”
I slammed the door behind me, shutting out Nox, who had trailed me anxiously up the stairs. At the sight of Brom, the sound of his voice, my lethargy vanished and was replaced by blinding, crippling rage. I stared at his hands, one draped over the arm of the chair and the other clutching the neck of the bottle. Those hands had been soaked with Ichabod Crane’s blood … and he had touched me with them, and I had let him …
With a scream worthy of a banshee, I launched myself across the room at him, wanting to gouge his eyes out with my fingers; rip his hair out; hurt him as much as I possibly could with my bare hands. Brom Bones, if you knew what was good for you, you would never have come home this night, I wanted to scream.
Jumping up, he caught my wrists in his strong hands, holding me away from him. I struggled, but I was no match for his brute strength. Just as Ichabod had not been. “Katrina, damn it,” he said, his tone a mix of anger and bewilderment. “What in hell has gotten into you?”
I laughed then, laughed so hysterically I knew I sounded like a madwoman. Brom still did not release me, but I could feel him staring at me quizzically. “What the…”
I wrenched away from him violently. “You,” I hissed, my voice low and venomous. “You monster. You monster.”
“What the devil are you talking about?” he demanded.
This caused me to laugh maniacally again. “What the devil,” I gasped between gales of laughter. “The devil, indeed.”
“Katrina, have you gone mad?”
“I must have, to have ever married you,” I cried, shoving against his shoulders hard enough that he stumbled back.
“What the–”
“I know what you did, Brom Van Brunt!” I shrieked. “I know what you did!”
Fear briefly flickered across his face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, but he could not hide the tremor of panic in his voice.
“You do!” I screeched. “You do! Or must I tell you? Must I speak the words aloud and accuse you? Have you forgotten?”
He went very still.
“You murdered Ichabod Crane!” I screamed.
Complete, utter silence fell over the house. Nox did not bark or whimper outside the door; even Anneke, in the next room, did not make a peep, though I did not see how she could have slept through the racket I was making.
I suppose I expected Brom to deny it; expected him to hide behind the haughty, untouchable arrogance that was always his refuge. I had not imagined that he would, or could, do anything else. Yet his shoulders slumped forward. “You know,” he said softly.
I was flabbergasted he would admit it. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I know.”
He looked back up at me, hatred smoldering in his eyes. “And how is it you came to know, or needn’t I ask? I suppose the witch has everything to do with it.”
“Not that it makes any difference, but Charlotte told me nothing,” I said. Brom could not know how deeply rang the truth of those words, how much they hurt, how much it cost me to say them aloud. “I discovered the truth all on my own.” Charlotte was exactly right: being able to speak those words was exactly what I had wanted all along. But I could not admit it yet.
Brom hung his head wearily. “I suppose I always knew you would find out sooner or later. That someone would find out.”
“So you do not deny it?” I spat.
“No. What good would that do me?” he asked.
My horror and rage returned in a fresh wave. “You … you are a monster who murdered an innocent man,” I said. “The man I loved! How could you? How could you?”
“How could I not?” he burst out. “It didn’t seem to me like I had any other choice.”
I was speechless, gaping at him.
“I … nothing else had worked,” he said. “I had challenged him to a duel, had won, even. Wounded him. But he lived, and you wouldn’t see him for the weakling he was. I … I didn’t know what else to do.” He curled his hands into fists. “He had taken the woman I loved, the woman I had always loved. The one thing I had ever wanted. I knew he would never leave you of his own free will. I … I lost my head. I figured he had asked your father for your hand that night, at the All Hallows’ Eve feast, and it seemed your father had said no. I couldn’t take the chance that you would run away with him. And so I followed him, meaning to scare him off by making him think I was the Headless Horseman. But then I … I got carried away. I was angry, so angry that you loved him and not me. I got angrier and angrier, thinking of him touching you, kissing you. I was drunk, too, and I kept chasing him, and once I got my hands on him I … I snapped.” He looked up at me, eyes pleading. “I didn’t set out to kill him, Katrina. I swear to you.”
There was earnestness in his gaze, which perhaps shocked me most of all. That he would tell me this truth, and think his honesty would endear him to me. “Do you think that absolves you of your crime?” I demanded.
“No, obviously it does not!” He took another deep swig from the bottle. “Obviously it does not,” he repeated. He laughed harshly, and I could hear the drink beginning to creep into his voice. “For I got what I wanted, did I not? I wed you, as I always wanted, as I always promised you I would. As I always promised myself I would. And what has it gotten me? What good has it done me?” He took another long drink and laughed bitterly again. “I cannot look at you without seeing his face. I cannot touch you without feeling his blood on my hands. I cannot get into bed with you without remembering the look on your face the first time I saw you after he disappeared—after I killed him. That look in your eyes when I knew it had all been for naught; that this sin which stained my soul was for nothing, for you would never love another man except for him.” He shook his head. “I am like the king in that tale you told us when we were children—the king whose touch turned everything to gold, even his food, so that it was cold and metallic in his mouth and could not nourish him. Why do you think I have been drinking so much?”
I was speechless. Whatever I had expected him to say when I confronted him, it was not this. Instead of the unrepentant sinner I had believed him to be since the moment I learned the truth, I found that he had instead been suffering all along. He had done this horrible thing and it was eating him alive from within. It had made him an impotent drunk.
A fitting punishment, though not all he deserved.
I remembered, pain ripping at my heart anew, that evening months ago when we’d had our picnic in the garden, and he’d confessed his fear that he would lose everything, lose our family. Now I knew why he was afraid. And I knew that what I, too, had wanted to hold on to that night had only ever been a lie.
“And yet you married me,” I pointed out. “In spite of this remorse you claim to feel, you married me all the same, and quite happily, too. You married me knowing you had slaughtered the one man I truly loved.”
He laughed, a hollow sound. “How could I not, after what I had done to win you? I thought, at first, that it would be worth it. It would become worth it. To the winner went the spoils, I told myself. I would become happy again, once I finally had you. And I was, at moments. But it never lasted.” He shook his head. “How wrong I was.”
“And you never took my feelings into consideration, obviously,” I raged. “How I would feel if—when—I found out. Your supposed guilt, your regret, is all focused on you, and how this horrible thing you did has ruined your life. You wish you had not done it so that you could be happy again. What of me? What of the happiness and peace I had begun to find? Oh God…” I broke off, literally choking on my words. I wanted to vomit.
“I wish I had not done it for every possible reason there is!” Brom protested. “Every minute of every day. But it is done. I cannot go back. Cannot take it back, though God, how I wish I could.”
“And what did you do with … with his body?” I forced myself to ask. “And Gunpowder? Did you … oh, God.” I felt the blood drain from my face. “That body they pulled from the Hudson. The man who had been stabbed. That … that…”
Brom nodded grimly, done keeping any secrets. “Yes. That was him. It must have been, in any case. After he was … after, I took his body to the Hudson and dumped it in. I could not think what else to do.” He took another deep drink. “The horse I hid in my father’s barn until I could sell him off to a man who was passing through. My father never noticed.”
“And all of the villagers thought Ichabod had been carried away by the Headless Horseman,” I whispered. “No one thought any more of it, except as a frightening tale to tell by the fire on an autumn evening. They all but gave you a safeguard.”
Brom laughed mockingly. “There is no Headless Horseman. I am what haunted those woods on All Hallows’ Eve. I am the Headless Horseman.”
I see blood in your future, Brom Van Brunt. Blood and death. The Headless Horseman is your fate. The Headless Horseman is your end.
I shivered. It had come true. It had all come true, every word.
“Thank God for this village and its superstitions,” he added, putting the bottle again to his mouth.
“I do not think God has anything to do with this endeavor,” I said. “And you…” I began to laugh, the sound sharp and shrill. “Before I agreed to marry you, I asked if you had done anything to scare off Ichabod Crane. And you swore to me you had not. You liar. You liar.” It seemed such an inconsequential thing to get angry about, after everything, but for some reason it mattered to me just then.
He grinned, a ghost of his old cocky grin. “I did not lie. I did not scare him off, after all. I did much more than that.”
I wanted to fly into a rage at him again, at the ghastly way he played with the definition of truth, but I could not. Suddenly, the wrath drained from me, and I felt tears shoving their way out of my eyes again.
Outside Nox, weary of scratching at the door to be let in, howled.
Ichabod was dead. Murdered. He was dead, really and truly gone.
And I was married to his murderer. I had betrayed him threefold.
The sobs wracked my body, and I did not think they would ever stop.
Brom, still drinking determinedly from his bottle, did not seem to notice. “I see him every time I look at you,” he said again, his voice flat. “I see him every time I look into Anneke’s face.”
I froze. Did he know? Or had his guilt simply poisoned his love for the child he thought his own?
I wasn’t to know.
I drew myself up to my full height, though I couldn’t have made much of an imposing sight with my tear-streaked face and swollen eyes and muddy dress. “Get out, Brom,” I said. “Get out of this house.”
“Where do you expect me to go?”
“I do not know, nor do I care!” I shrieked. “Go to hell, where you belong! Just get out, and do not come back!”
I expected him to argue, to protest that this was his house, and I his wife, bought and paid for in blood, and he would not leave. Instead, he staggered out the door on drunken, unsteady legs. I heard him clomp down the stairs, and held my breath until I heard the front door open and slam behind him. Only then did I exhale.
Anneke began to wail in the next room, and Nox started barking, adding to the cacophony. My eyes welled again and, my whole body trembling, I moved, shakily, to the nursery next door. “Mama, Mama!” she cried when she saw me, reaching her little arms up for me. I picked her up out of her crib and sat down in the chair with her, clutching her tightly, shaking. I did not feed or change her. I could do nothing except hold her, with all my might, until her crying, and my own, ceased.