Annie's Song (29 page)

Alex remembered that all too clearly.

“It was nothing personal,” she rushed to explain. “From the beginning, I could see you had a kindly nature, and that you felt sorry for Annie. I was afraid that, in a misguided attempt to make retribution for what Douglas had done, you might indulge her.”

Alex smiled slightly. “Spoil her rotten, in other words?’’

“Yes,” she admitted. “I hoped that strangers who knew nothing of the circumstances would be more likely to follow my wishes and be regimental with her.” She closed her eyes. “All I could think about was James learning the truth and sending her away. Someplace awful, where she’d be confused and alone, possibly mistreated.”

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Alex tightened his hand over her shoulder, understanding all too well now what had driven the woman.

After several minutes of silence, during which she grew calmer, he said, “You did what you thought was best for your daughter, Edie. It’s terrible that it happened the way it did, yes. But for all of that, I believe she was reasonably happy in her own simple way. Now that part of her life’s over. We have to put the past behind us and concentrate on her future. She can have a wonderful, reasonably normal life from here on out, if we all work together to make it happen. A moment ago, you expressed a fear that I might indulge her. I’m doing my level best to live up to your worst expectations. Care to lend me a hand?”

She fastened a hopeful gaze on his. “Oh, Alex, will you allow me that? To be a part of things? I have so much to make up for. So very much.”

Relinquishing the last traces of his anger, Alex sighed. “Edie, your daughter loves you. I’m sure she wants to see you. I think it’s time that all of us start paying attention to Annie’s wishes for a change.

Don’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Oh, yes.”

Drawing a handkerchief from his trouser pocket, Alex set himself to the task of cleaning up her face, a service he seemed to be providing to females frequently of late. Until now, he’d never realized the woman wore paint. A subtle amount, to be sure, but there were definite traces of kohl on her cheeks.

“May I take the liberty of giving you a bit of well-intended advice, madam?’’

“Not to cry in front of my daughter again?”

“That, too,” he said with a half smile. “But I was thinking more along the lines of some marital advice.

After you leave here, you need to go home and have an honest discussion with your husband. He is as much to blame for this tragedy as you are, if not more so.”

“Oh, but I can’t!” she said shrilly. “James—he doesn’t know! About my uncle, I mean. When he asked me to marry him, I neglected to tell him. And, later, I couldn’t find the courage.” She gave her head a decisive shake. “You don’t know James. If he even suspected that madness runs in my family, he’d divorce me. If he did that, I don’t know what I’d do! Where would I live? How would I earn my keep?”

Alex pushed to his feet. “Edie, if the man tosses you out, you can always come to me. You are my wife’s mother. I would see to it you had the necessary funds to get by.”

She stared at him incredulously. “You would?”

He gave a startled laugh. “Yes, madam, I would. But I assure you, it won’t come to that. For all his faults, and I could list a host of them, James cares for you. You say that I don’t know him. I think it may be more accurate to say that you don’t. And it’s high time you do. Talk to him. Tell him everything you’ve told me. I think you may be surprised by what he says.”

“You know something I don’t.”

“Let’s just say that as much as I dislike the man, I understand how he thinks.” With that, Alex helped her up from the chair. “Now, let’s go upstairs and share in a special moment, shall we?”

She nodded.

“No more histrionics?”

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“None, I assure you.”

Alex could only hope.

After Edie and the dressmaker had departed, curiosity prompted Alex to bring one of the barn cats into the house. Seeking his wife, he found her in the kitchen with Maddy, who was overseeing the preparations for supper. Looking lovely in a pink, high-waisted gown, her hair caught up in a cascade of sable curls at her crown, Annie was perched on a stool at the counter. In the crook of one arm, she held a green crockery bowl from which she was scraping bits of cookie dough with a long-handled spoon.

When she spotted Alex, she froze, the spoon partway to her mouth, her eyes fixed on the cat.

At her obvious fascination, Alex couldn’t help but grin. The girl didn’t just like animals, she adored them.

After seeing her with the mice, he couldn’t believe, even for an instant, that she would ever inflict harm on any small creature, at least not deliberately.

“This is Mama Kitty, queen of the barnyard cats,” Alex told her. “If not for her, we’d be overrun by”—catching himself just in time, he finished with—”grasshoppers.”

Maddy slanted him a look, then shook her head. Annie, thank goodness, didn’t seem to notice his sudden change of words. She was gazing in fascination at the tabby, the cookie dough forgotten. Alex gestured with a nod. “Sit at the table, Annie love, and I’ll let you hold her.”

She didn’t need to be told twice. Setting the crockery bowl on the counter with a resounding thunk that made everyone else in the kitchen wince, she slid off the stool and hurried to the table where she enthroned herself on a straight-backed chair. Scratching Mama Kitty behind an ear to keep her calm, Alex strode across the room. Annie reached for the cat with welcoming arms. With a smile, he relinquished his burden to her and took a seat nearby so he might observe her behavior with the animal.

Her small face aglow with pleasure, Annie immediately began stroking the cat’s silken fur. Mama Kitty, unaccustomed to such loving attention, arched her back and rubbed a whiskered cheek against Annie’s bodice. Then, so loudly that Alex could hear her, the tabby began to purr. Feeling the vibration, Annie ran her hands more firmly over the cat’s body. A wondrous expression entered her eyes, and she glanced up at Alex, clearly amazed.

“She’s purring,” he explained. “Cats usually do when they’re petted.”

A maid bustled by with a tray of unbaked bread, her destination the oven. “All of them usually shed as well,” she commented. “If there’s hair in your soup tonight, don’t be blaming me.”

Alex chuckled. Then he returned his attention to Annie. What he saw made his heart catch. She hugged the tabby close to her breast, one cheek pressed against its ribs, her expression one of bedazzlement.

Alex realized immediately that she was utterly captivated by the cat’s purring, a sound she could feel even though she was unable to hear it.

The mystery of Annie and the suffocated kittens was solved. Alex could almost see her as a very young child, deaf and utterly captivated by the vibrations she felt when she held the kittens, her small hands and arms squeezing too tightly, her curiosity and elation making her forget to be careful. The kittens hadn’t been killed with malicious intent, but by a deaf child’s unbridled affection. Older now and more in control, she was being incredibly gentle with this cat, taking care not to hug it too tightly or to touch it too roughly.

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Watching her with the cat brought home to Alex just how easily this girl was seduced by any sound that she could faintly hear or from which she could detect vibrations. And it explained so much. Her love of the woods, where she felt the wind on her skin. Her fascination with the waterfall, where she no doubt could feel the vibrations made by the water plunging against the rocks. Annie and the kittens. Annie and the church organ. All along, there had been so many signs of her deafness.

His throat suddenly tight with emotion, Alex swallowed and looked away for a moment. Funny that.

Before meeting Annie, he hadn’t felt close to tears since early childhood. Now it seemed to him that he was blinking away suspicious moisture or gulping back a lump in his throat more often than not. Watching her ... coming to understand what her life had been like ... Alex supposed that it would take someone with a heart of stone not to be affected, and when it came to this girl, his heart was definitely not made of stone.

In that moment, Alex accepted intellectually what his heart had been telling him for over two weeks. He was in love with her. Impossibly, hopelessly in love. He found her too incredibly sweet and precious to resist. If that was lecherous ... if it was an unforgivable sin ... well, then, he guessed he was doomed.

Contrary to the old saying, he wasn’t entirely sure he’d go to hell with a smile on his face. Given Annie’s effect on him, there was every possibility he’d have tears in his eyes when the moment of reckoning came. His only consolation was that they would definitely be tears of joy, not sorrow.

Time. . . For Annie, time, at least as it was interpreted by others, was a concept she didn’t understand.

For her, there were no clocks, no schedules, no calendars by which she could mark off the days, the weeks, the months. She only knew that the long, lazy days of butterfly season had grown shorter, that the leaves on the trees were beginning to turn color, and that the air had become cooler.

Rainy season was coming; she felt it in her bones. But for the first time in her memory, the thought didn’t depress her. Alex’s house, unlike that of her parents, was a place of excitement and discovery. She spent hours sitting on her bed each day, blowing on her flute. When she grew bored with that, she could sketch to her heart’s content, for Alex had discovered her penchant for drawing and supplied her with charcoal pencils and sketchpads. In addition to that, her mother visited every few days, usually of an afternoon.

She was trying to learn how to lip-read, and for the first time in years, Annie could actually communicate with her a little. With so much to occupy her time, she didn’t dread being confined indoors as she once had.

Not that she would be confined. In addition to drawing supplies, Alex had also given her an odd-looking contraption he called an umbrella, which Annie likened to a roof with a handle. According to him, when it rained, one opened the umbrella and held it over one’s head, the result being that it rained all around a person but not on him. With the umbrella, she would be free to go walking in the rain whenever she wished without becoming wet.

If she was still able to walk by the time the rainy season arrived. Her stomach was growing so enormous she already felt as if she waddled like a duck. Going down the stairs worried her the most. Being front heavy as she was, she had to lean slightly backward to keep from losing her balance on the steps. It was
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ever so troublesome.

It was also becoming worrisome. Because of what Alex had told her—about babies being born in a different way than chicks—she no longer believed she might lay an egg. But, even so, there was no question in her mind that there was a baby growing inside her. Sometimes she could even feel it wiggling around, as though it were becoming anxious to get out. Given its size, Annie was beginning to wonder how it would ever manage. Not through her bellybutton, that was a certainty.

She wished she could ask someone how human babies were born, but for the life of her, she couldn’t think how. Her mother was only just beginning to lip-read. Alex was much more accomplished at it, but not so much that he could grasp everything she said yet. Those few times when she had tried to act out her questions about babies for him, he didn’t seem to understand. In fact, sometimes Annie got the feeling he didn’t want to understand. That troubled her and gave her cause to wonder if having a baby wasn’t a rather awful experience for the mother. Not that it mattered. She wanted a baby, and if she had to go through a bit of unpleasantness to get one, she was prepared to do whatever was necessary.

Late one afternoon, a time that Annie usually spent with Alex, he received a message requesting his immediate presence down at the stable. Shortly after he left the house, Annie grew bored and, since she’d been allowed more freedom of late to venture outside alone, she decided to take a stroll around the property. In her wandering, she ended up at the stable.

Immediately upon entering, she came to an abrupt stop and tipped her head, held in thrall by a faint sound that broke through the silence that always surrounded her. Since she was so seldom able to detect noise, this was not only a novelty but also a curiosity. It was a shrill sound, unlike anything she could recall ever having heard. Drawn to it, she moved hesitantly through the stable, her footsteps picking up pace slightly as it became louder and easier to follow.

Halfway down the shadowy alleyway that ran through the stable, Annie came to an intersecting corridor.

To her left, she saw a bright dome of lantern light, men milling about in its nimbus. Fascinated, she moved toward them. As she drew close enough to see, she realized they were gathered outside a horse stall.

Craning her neck to look past them, she saw Alex kneeling beside a prostrate mare inside the enclosure.

The shrill, piercing noise was coming from the horse. The poor animal was screaming, throwing its head, and trying frantically to gain her feet. Alex, face contorted and neck veins bulging, was straining to help the mare stand. During those intervals when the horse fell limp with exhaustion, he stroked her swollen belly and said, over and over, “It’ll be okay, girl. It’ll be okay.”

Following the movements of his hands, Annie noticed that his arms were smeared with blood to his shirt sleeves, which had been shoved back to his elbows. Concern etched the chiseled lines of his dark face, and when she caught a glimpse of his eyes, she saw they were filled with sorrow. Her gaze moved to the horse. Something was terribly wrong with the poor thing, Annie realized. Judging by the blood, she guessed that the mare had been injured somehow.