He threw the skull away from him. It rolled a few feet into the drifts of hay, facedown, only the unspeakable matted hair visible. Reisden clenched his jaw, tasting coffee at the back of his throat.
If he didn’t get away from it he would be sick. “Come out,” he said to her. They stumbled down the stairs together.
Out away from the barn, by the elm trees, they stopped, both leaning against a tree, arms around each other. Perdita was shaking and he could feel her heart pounding as hard as his own.
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know.”
She hesitated. “Is it Richard?”
“I don’t know."
No. Yes. Who else’s body would it be?
For a few hours he had had some of Richard Knight’s memories, and they had made him sane.
It can’t be Richard.
He held on to her. He could still smell on both of them the artificial pink-powder odor of decay. He wanted to cry out, pound his fists against a tree, go back inside, and rip that skull apart to know whose it was.
“Perdita. Get Roy Daugherty. ” No. Roy had gone off fishing. He needed help and information and somebody else to be in the barn while he looked at that horror again. “Get Gilbert.” He added, “Keep Harry out of our way.”
The light was fading rapidly in the barn. While he waited for Gilbert, Reisden looked for a lantern among the litter of Shakespeare. It took him five tries to strike a match; his hands were shaking. He stared at the lantern flame, not thinking, until he heard Gilbert at the door.
“Bring the light.”
Reisden went up the stairs ahead of Gilbert, looking back to see his long, distressed face lit by the lantern. This lantern is the moon. And this dog my dog. This is Washington a Dog. What was the blood on Gilbert’s hands? Gilbert held the lantern high, looking, not sure where or what to find, and Reisden stepped out of his way.
Gilbert’s eyes widened past the diameter of their irises, white on every side. He put the lantern down next to the horrible black thing and knelt beside it. His mouth turned down in a perfect Greek tragic mask. Moved to his soul, distressed, revolted, Gilbert looked up from the horror. The two men’s eyes met: and there was no guilt in Gilbert’s face at all.
“What is this?” Reisden asked.
“Is it Jay?” Richard’s uncle asked.
Gilbert got slowly to his feet. The skull was still where it had rolled. Gilbert held the lantern near it and the light cut raggedly into matted black hair and the old-tea color of bone. Shadows for eyes and nose, some of the front teeth gone, and one side of the head matted with what it had lain in. Gilbert set the lantern down carefully, well away from the hay, took his handkerchief out of his pocket, and wrapped it around the skull before he picked it up and gently set it down where it belonged. He left the handkerchief over the head, as if the man had been newly killed, and the outline wavered and became what it must have been. A man curled up in agony, legs drawn up, arms crossed over his side.
“Yes,” said Reisden dully, “that’s Jay and he is dead.”
Gilbert knelt in the hay beside the dead man. His lips moved.
Reisden knelt beside Gilbert. Jay’s body. Not Richard’s. He didn’t know anything. Only that.
“Gilbert. Now you are going to tell me everything you thought you had better keep from me.”
🙚🙚🙚
“We were happy once,” said Gilbert. “All of us boys and sister Isabella, all of the Knights.”
He said it half defiantly, half wistfully, as if there needed to be some great fall to explain the horror of what had happened later.
Harry was not in the house, the servants were gone for the night; the two men were alone in the library. One of the lights in the electric chandelier was buzzing; Gilbert got up and turned it off, then went around the room turning on other lights. He sat down in a chair not too close to Reisden, not too far away, and sat looking at the carpet.
In his childhood, Gilbert said, the Knights all lived by the sea. Gilbert was the youngest, a little boy in kilts and long stockings. When Father came home from his office in Boston he would bring presents, carved pieces of whalebone, China fishbowls with beautiful multicolored fish painted on them, tin toy sleds and toy stoves from England, wooden goblin masks with great staring eyes. Father would march his sons down to the wharf—“all my sons! Look at ’em!”—and show them around to his captains, and then they would all stop in at the doughnut shop on the way home. Father looked something like a goblin mask himself, long-faced, with staring eyes, coming among them like Jove in broadcloth, in a shower of presents. At the end of the day they would all cry in pleasure and exhaustion; and then Father would go back to Boston for another two weeks or three to make money, so that all of them would be rich. Gilbert never wondered why Father was so seldom there, and never knew to this day whether, so long ago, there had been reason for the children to be kept away from him.
“I have thought a great deal about those masks, Richard. Father never took a ship to Africa, nor dealt with Africans as one man to another. I don’t believe he respected the African, or thought of them as—anything more than labor.” When the war came, most of Boston was Abolitionist. Father publicly believed as his business friends believed, of course. But Father was a Southern sympathizer.
“All us boys were old enough to fight in the War (all but your father, Richard, who was just a baby then). My brothers fought. I believed the cause was right, Richard, but I saw so much death in it. . . ’’ He held out his hands in front of him, half as if to stop something coming toward him, a tiny gesture, quickly suppressed. “I was with the ambulances. I got splinters in my fingers from the stretcher poles, and that was all my war wounds.
“My brothers died. Three of us five brothers. Billy, John, and Al.
“My last brother, Clem, came home from the war before me. He was a hero, decorated all over. He walked down from Park Street, in his uniform with his medals, but no one would speak to him; shamefaced, as if they didn’t know whether to say something or not; and he said someone asked him where he was going, but when he said ‘Home’ they told him not to go there. People used to throw garbage on the steps of our house. Father had helped the rebels.
“When Clem heard what Father had done, he moved down to New York and drank himself to death. He wrote me to come to him, at the end—I was still down in Washington, working at a hospital—and I moved up there with him in New York. I didn’t stop him, I couldn’t.
“I came to Boston afterward. Forty years ago this spring. Father was alone in the house. I told Father that Clem had died.” Gilbert took off his glasses as if not having them on would help him see better. He turned them in his hands, staring at them with a lost, unfocused look. “Father took his cane and whipped me out of the house.”
He had a little dismayed twist around his mouth, as though he were still a grown man being caned from parlor to door.
“What was I to do?” he said finally, gently. “He wasn’t well. I could have nursed him. But I—I don’t suppose I wanted to. Not after Clem. So . . . But it was more cowardly than not having fought.
“I had a little money, and I wanted to see the country, so I bought a wagon and some stock and began trading in things. I had some pots and some pans, needles and thread, fishhooks, things not worth going to town for. I always had some books. I didn’t paint my name on my wagon, and Knight’s a common enough name anyway, so I was just Bert the bookseller: It was a very good time, Richard! Your father was at school and I’d stop by whenever I could. When I’d leave, Tom would ride on the wagon with me for two or three miles down the road. He always wanted to go on the road with me. Tom thought being a peddler-man, why, that was as good as a circus.
“Tom said Father was peculiar. But of course Father always had been. I didn’t know any more,” Gilbert said with a strange intensity, “because I didn’t ask him. He must have thought I knew.
“Tom had a sort of a temper, like Father, but nothing near as bad. And he was the sort of man who—” Gilbert paused and pinkened slightly “—ought to get married young. He fell in love with Sophie when he was sixteen and she fourteen, and told me then that he was going to marry her. Sophie Hilary from New York . . . She was a beautiful girl at a dance. Tom wrote me just after he was eighteen and said I was to come up to Boston because he and Sophie were getting married. I hope I don’t shock you: there was a real necessity for them to be married. I have to say that, because, Richard, Tom spoke to me of you.”
This time, a pause so long that Reisden thought of prompting him. Gilbert stared straight in front of him. The glasses hung unnoticed from Gilbert’s hands.
“Richard,” Gilbert said suddenly, anguished, “he told me, if anything ever happened to him, not to let Father have you.”
He stopped as if all his confession had been finished in the single sentence. Reisden waited.
“The evening before he was married, Tom said that he wanted me to take you and raise you, if it should ever come up. He said it was important. I said I would. And he wrote to me about it after too, but I didn’t keep the letter. And I didn’t think anything about it, Richard!”
He seemed to be pleading for himself, and then made an impatient gesture and put his glasses back on. He didn’t look at Reisden; he was still looking inside himself, where he had been judged and found wanting all those years ago. He didn’t want forgiveness from Richard; Reisden could not have given it to him; forgiveness would have hurt Gilbert. His pale old eyes blazed; he was the Angel of Judgment in a mirror, staring at a foolish old man and telling him that, once, he should have been strong.
“I thought Tom was talking nonsense,” he said finally. “He was just eighteen.
“So Father got you when Tom and Sophie died.
“People don’t remember where money comes from, do they, Richard? By the time you went to him, no one seemed to mind that Father had grown so rich from the War. Father was so very well off. He was eccentric, of course. He would hold prayer meetings in his office and read out of the Bible for quite long periods at a time. All the professional staff could sit, but the clerks had to kneel. He prospered so much, Richard, that I heard several other firms held prayer meetings too! But no one could bring it off like Father.”
Gilbert said it in a sad sort of way, almost proudly.
“I didn’t see him, of course. . . . I heard Father was training you to take over the business. I sent you books, but never a letter. You wouldn’t have remembered me anyway, you were too young. I hoped Father would send you away to school, then I could come and see you there. But Father was raising you under his hand.” Gilbert’s shoulders squared as if he had shivered. “Raising you himself.
“One evening in March, a man came to the lodging house where I was staying and asked me if I were Richard Knight’s uncle. He was a very elegant young man, a doctor with curly red Dundreary whiskers—Charlie was grand in those days. He said he was Richard Knight’s doctor, and he needed my help, because something was very wrong with Father Gilbert’s voice abruptly trembled. “With Father’s mind. Charlie gave me to understand, that evening, that what—”
Gilbert’s voice stopped abruptly.
“What Father had done to me, when I told him about Clem…”
Gilbert’s throat closed up entirely. He got up and paced around the room. The box of books was downstairs again, here in the library. Gilbert stopped at it and rummaged through it until he found the big book, Eric, or Little by Little, that Reisden had read that morning. He brought it over to Reisden and let it fall open. “This!” Gilbert said in a choked whisper, and tapped the text underneath. “He did this!” The blows fell on him like rain, and the child screamed and writhed . . . Reisden reached out and took the book, and read, and kept it open a minute, because, after all, it was truth at last.
Flogged him, F. X. Farrar-style. Exactly.
“He beat—” Reisden could not say me. “He beat Richard.”
“Richard,” said Gilbert, “he would have beaten you to death.”
He thought of Gilbert, the day after they had arrived, taking down all of William Knight’s mottoes from the walls, THOU GOD SEEST ME. I DEPEND ON THY MERCY ALONE. There was one, he remembered, BE YE PERFECT. Charles Adair cared for children at the Clinic, where battering was as common as dirt. Richard Knight’s doctor. Gilbert was afraid of physical harm to anyone out of his sight. Gilbert had washed blood off his hands, horrified, in Richard Knight’s presence.
He thought of himself.
Reisden had gone to an English school, where the headmaster beat the boys who got in trouble; and since he’d never been very good at staying out of trouble, his time had come to be caned. He had given the headmaster a black eye. One didn’t fight back, ever, it was a cowardly and vulgar display; the headmaster had right, such as it was, on his side; but— “I never let anyone hit me again,” he told Gilbert. It was that moment when the evidence shifted and he felt he had been Richard all along; through something meaningless; through something he said.
“Oh,” said Gilbert, and looked at him as if he had said something utterly characteristic. Reisden gritted his teeth, flooded with more than he could feel, anger and desolation.
Gilbert took a long shaky breath. “Proving harm against children is very difficult. Against a relative, in possession of the child…and Father was very well off…very devout. Charlie and I talked about what to do. You and I would have gone very far away. That was our only chance, to run away someplace where Father couldn’t find us.” Gilbert smiled sadly. “Charlie sent me telegrams every week. He told me that he had talked to you, that you were willing to run away…. You thought it would be an adventure. Richard, you were very much like Tom.”
“What did you do?”
Gilbert shook his head. “I didn’t do anything. Father died. And we were so glad.”
“Yes,” said Reisden. “Of course we were.”