Annie's Song (28 page)

Alex grinned. “I’ll bear that in mind.”

“I’d appreciate it. After all that candy I just plucked from her various orifices, she may expect me to go bootie hunting.”

Over the next two weeks, Alex found it incredibly easy to follow doctor’s orders and concentrate on Annie. As if he had a choice. From the time he opened his eyes each morning until he closed them at night, she was all he thought about. Other things he might buy her. Activities she might enjoy. About how her eyes lighted up when she smiled. He even began to contemplate building her a cage for her damnable pet mice.

Annie ... For the first time in his adult life, Alex had someone deserving to care about, someone who mattered to him more than his work. He quickly came to realize just how lonely and utterly meaningless
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his life had been before now. He found himself spending less and less time at the rock quarry and the stables. After lunch each day, he closeted himself in his study with books that Dr. Muir had acquired for him. For three hours, without fail, he pored over the pages, trying to memorize the manual alphabet and learn how to speak sign language. Then he spent a half hour speaking to his reflection in a hand mirror to practice lipreading. At precisely three-thirty each afternoon, he abandoned those pursuits to spend the rest of the afternoon and evening with his wife.

In the beginning, Annie seemed none too pleased to be blessed with his company, but after several days, she seemed to accept, if not to enjoy, his presence. If she was in the attic, he followed her there. If she was downstairs with Maddy, he spirited her away outdoors for long walks. In the evenings, he insisted that she join him at the supper table, where he made her pour tea, pass serving dishes, and practice good table manners. After the meal was finished, they adjourned to his study, where he taught her how to play simple games, such as jacks and checkers, both of which required a minimum of verbal communication.

During that time, the dressmaker came to take Annie’s measurements, and Alex ordered an entire new wardrobe for his wife, from the skin out. For a substantial bonus, Mrs. Grimes agreed to hire extra help so she could deliver at least three of the dresses within a week. Alex could scarcely wait to see Annie’s eyes when she first saw the clothing. Though he’d had to choose styles with her steadily increasing waistline in mind, he felt sure she would be thrilled. No more moldy dresses spirited from dusty trunks in the attic. From now on, she would have beautiful gowns of her very own.

Madness ... Alex seriously began to wonder if he wasn’t losing his mind. He was falling in love, wildly in love, with a child-woman who believed the baby growing inside her wore a ruffled bonnet. The carnal bent of his thoughts was indecent, he felt sure, but when he looked into Annie’s eyes, he wondered how anything that felt so right could possibly be wrong.

As luck would have it, Edie Trimble finally gathered the courage to come calling on the same afternoon that Mrs. Grimes arrived with the first finished garments of Annie’s new wardrobe. Alex, who had been left to cool his heels outside the nursery door while Annie tried on the dresses, heard Frederick speaking to someone in the hall and went to the landing to see who was there. When he saw Edie, he nearly ordered her out of his house. Only the anguish he saw on the woman’s face prevented him from doing exactly that.

“Mrs. Trimble,” he said coldly. “I’m surprised to see you here.”

Leaning her head back to meet his gaze, Edie wrung her hands, clearly afraid he would invite her to leave before she had a chance to say her piece. “I know you despise me, and perhaps with good reason, Mr. Montgomery. But, please, I’m begging you, let me see my daughter. I won’t stay long. I swear it.

And I won’t do anything to upset her. But, please, let me see her?’’

Alex curled his hands into fists over the banister rail, wanting nothing more than to tell the woman to go.

But in the end, the pain in her eyes swayed him. Maybe Dr. Muir was right. Bitterness toward the Trimbles, no matter how well deserved, would only cast a pall over Annie’s future. She loved her parents, he felt certain, despite their many faults, and she would probably be delighted to see them. He had no right to deny her that. Edie Trimble was and always would be the girl’s mother, even though she had failed, more times than not, to behave like one.

“Right now, she’s trying on new dresses,” Alex finally said. “Come on up. Maybe you can be of assistance in choosing appropriate accessories. The dressmaker brought quite a nice selection with her.”

Edie pressed a hand to her throat and closed her eyes, clearly overcome with relief. For a moment, Alex
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thought she might disintegrate into tears where she stood. But she finally managed to regain control. After handing her cloak to Frederick, she lifted her skirt and ascended the stairs. When she reached Alex on the landing, she met his gaze squarely.

“Thank you,” she said shakily. “I know you’d much rather that I never see my little girl again and if you’re correct about the deafness, I don’t suppose that I can blame you.”

“I’m absolutely correct,” Alex couldn’t resist saying. “I’ve had her examined. Dr. Muir concurs with my diagnosis completely.”

Tears welled in Edie’s eyes, and her mouth began to quiver. “Deaf,” she whispered. “All these years, and she was only deaf? God forgive me.”

It was those last three words, spoken with such heartrending regret, that softened Alex. For totally different reasons, he had felt much the same way himself a few times over the years because of Douglas.

“We all make mistakes, Edie,” he said huskily. “Some worse than others, but the bottom line is that we can only do our best. Given the fact that Annie can register certain pitches of sound, I’m willing to concede that it may have appeared to you that she could hear. You acted out of ignorance, and in doing so, you made some grave errors. Let’s leave it at that and move forward from here. Shall we?’’

She gave a tearful nod and wiped her cheeks with tremulous fingers, making a visible effort to gather her composure. Alex waited until she had calmed down before he showed her to the nursery. Mrs. Grimes called out to him when she glimpsed him outside the door.

“Do come in, Mr. Montgomery, and tell us what you think.”

Alex pushed the door farther open and preceded Edie into the room. The sight that greeted him brought him to a dead stop. Annie ... only not the Annie he had come to know. Maddy and the dressmaker had combined their respective talents, finishing off her outfit with complementary accessories and styling her hair. The tousled child had disappeared. A lovely young woman had taken her place.

She stood in the center of the room, a vision in sapphire-blue. Her gown had a fitted bodice, just as Alex had specified, with a softly gathered skirt that fell gracefully from just beneath her breasts to the floor.

Lace of a darker shade of blue edged the low scoop neckline, enough to draw the eye to her face, but not so much as to overwhelm her delicate features. Her large, luminous eyes clung to his, silently seeking his approval.

“Oh, Annie,” Alex said softly. “You look absolutely beautiful.”

A blush flooded to her face, flagging her cheeks with two bright spots of color. Alex gave her a slow grin, then motioned with his hand for her to turn in a complete circle. Catching the skirt to hold it wide, she turned on one toe, craning her neck so she might watch his reaction. It surprised and pleased Alex that she cared so much about what he thought. That told him more than she could know, and undoubtedly far more than she might wish—namely that his deepening feelings toward her weren’t completely unreciprocated. He took more pleasure from that discovery than he did from the transformation the clothing had wrought.

Edie, who until that moment had lingered in the hall, finally entered the room. Upon seeing her daughter, she halted abruptly and stood there in frozen silence.

A joyous expression swept across Annie’s face. Clearly eager to embrace her mother, she started
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forward, but before she could take more than a few steps, Edie clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle a sob, then whirled and fled from the room. The stricken expression that crossed Annie’s face nearly broke Alex’s heart.

“Annie love, she’s crying because she’s happy,” Alex assured her. Closing the distance between them, he cupped her chin in his hand, determined that this moment was not going to be ruined for her. Forcing her gaze from the door to him, he looked deeply into her eyes. “She didn’t know, sweetheart. She never knew that you were deaf. Seeing you like this makes her feel sad because she knows you should have had pretty dresses all along. Do you understand? She feels guilty. In a few minutes, she’ll come back, and the two of you can have a lovely visit.”

Tears filled her beautiful eyes. Alex gave her a confident smile. “I’ll go get her, all right? Meanwhile, you put on another dress so we can see how beautiful you look in it when we come back.”

Chin atremble, she gave a halfhearted nod. Alex shot a meaningful glance at Maddy, then quit the room.

He found Edie downstairs in the hall, clinging to her cloak, which hung from the coat tree, her face buried in its black folds.

“God damn you,” Alex ground out at her shaking back. “For once, just once, can’t you put that girl before yourself? This is the very first time in her entire life that she’s been given some beautiful clothes—something other girls take for granted, I might add—and you have to ruin the moment for her?”

Edie hunched her shoulders, sobbing wildly. Between ragged breaths, she managed to cry, “I’m sorry.

I’m sorry! Seeing h-her like that. Oh, dear God, what have I done? My little girl... What have I done?”

Alex hauled in a deep breath, fighting to control his anger, acutely conscious and deeply grateful, for once, that Annie couldn’t hear. “Mrs. Trimble, I realize that this must be difficult for you, but this is not the time to purge yourself. That girl is standing up there in the first pretty new gown she’s ever owned and tears are streaming down her cheeks. Get a hold of yourself.”

“You d-don’t underst-stand,” she cried. “I thought—oh, God, I thought she had inherited Uncle Maxwell’s madness. All these years! All the w-wasted years!”

Alex sighed, partly in exasperation, partly in sympathy. Taking the woman’s arm, he guided her to his study, where she might at least weep in private. She sank weakly onto a chair, her face pressed to her knees. After a few minutes, when she had sobbed herself dry, she began to speak in a hushed, tremulous voice.

“I truly believed she was mad,” she told him.

“I know you did,” Alex admitted, sitting on the arm of her chair so he might place a hand on her shoulder. “I realized it from the first. Why you thought that, I’m not sure, but I believe you honestly did.”

“I thought it for a hundred different reasons,” she said shrilly. “The awful sounds she made. My uncle made sounds almost exactly like them, animallike utterances and grunts. My aunt had to have him bound to a tree until attendants from a madhouse could come and get him!” She pressed her hands over her face. “And the kittens. Oh, God, the kittens.”

“What kittens?”

“She strangled and crushed two kittens,” Edie said raggedly.

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After having witnessed Annie’s incredible gentleness with the mice in the attic, Alex found this story difficult to believe, but he didn’t interrupt the woman.

“It was horrible. Horrible! I only left her alone with the litter for a little while, never dreaming she might hurt them. She seemed to love them so! And when I came back, she’d killed two of them. Killed them!”

She looked up, pinning Alex with an agonized gaze. “I was terrified that James would find out what she’d done. Absolutely terrified! I lied and told him a tomcat had sneaked into the house. After that, I encouraged Annie to play in the woods, as was her wont, for I reasoned that the less she was about the house where he might accidentally witness her mean streak, the better. He would have sent her away.

Don’t you see? To one of those nightmarish places! I realized if I didn’t restrict her activities, if I wasn’t very, very stern, that she’d very likely end up living out the rest of her life in a cell. I couldn’t bear for that to happen. Not to my little girl.

“That’s why I wouldn’t allow her to be examined by a physician. That’s why I was so secretive about her activities in the attic, stressing that no one else could ever know. Don’t you see? She’s incredibly talented at sketching. And then there were the make-believe games and her pretending to talk. That wasn’t the behavior of an imbecile! And because she seemed to hear when I called to her, I didn’t believe she was deaf. What other explanation was there for her strangeness, if not that she was mad like my uncle?”

For the first time, Alex could begin to see things as Edie must have. A beautiful girl who behaved abnormally, who seemed unable to grasp the simplest concepts, whose ability to speak had steadily deteriorated. Yet in the attic, in her make-believe world, that same girl exhibited signs of keen intelligence.

“Now I realize that my fear made me blind, that if I’d only listened to Dr. Muir, we might have learned the truth years ago. But I couldn’t take that chance. I was convinced she had inherited the illness from my uncle and that it would eventually progress to a point that I could no longer keep it from James. The way I saw it, the only thing I could do was delay that from happening for as long as possible.”

A burning sensation came up the back of Alex’s throat. “Which is why you stressed to me that I should enforce your rules while Annie was here,” he said softly. “You thought if I didn’t, that I’d soon realize the truth and tell James she was crazy.”

“If you’ll recall, I originally didn’t want her to come here at all.”