Beneath the Black Moon (Root Sisters) (5 page)

Cam
stopped at that point and put her aunt out of her mind, because she was truly
starting to feel sorry for her. It was a little disturbing to feel such pity
for the woman who had raised her. Within a few minutes the music began, and Cam
could hear the sounds of dancing and conversation floating up the main
staircase and down the hall to her bedroom, where it slipped under the door and
mingled with the sounds that drifted in Cam's open window. The cheeriest of
waltzes was accompanied by the hum of the cicadas and with every bout of
laughter from downstairs she could hear the shrill of a cricket from some
corner of her room.

Downstairs
girls like Marianne were at their best, and Helen probably at her fair share of
admirers too, for all that she had embarrassed the family by climbing over a
wall in her haste to reach the barbecue. No one but the gossips would miss Cam,
which was fine by her. She was comfortable with being the shadow upstairs.

Or
in the kitchen, as the case may be
, Cam thought. She
stood and crossed her room to unlatch her bedroom window. The balcony that
graced the front of the house could only be accessed by the three front
bedrooms, which were inhabited by Cam and her sisters. With Cam’s bedroom door
locked no one would know that she was missing. Aunt Beth and Helen were
downstairs, preoccupied with the dance, and Diana was likely still brooding.
Cam opened her window, carefully swung one leg over the sill, and then climbed
out onto the balcony. Night had fallen outside, so it was unlikely that she
would be seen, but Cam kept her head down anyway as she crept across the balcony.

***

The
middle Johnson sister was not at the ball. Brent was surprised by how
disappointed he was. He'd been rather interested to see her at a ball: how she
behaved, how she danced, how many men she danced with. . . He'd been especially
curious about the men. As it was there were only been the usual suspects there,
the same girls that he had been dancing with for two months. There were plenty
of girls who were interested and just as many mothers trying to foist off their
daughters on him. He managed to avoid Marianne, which was a miracle in itself,
because for a girl who liked to act silly and scatterbrained she was as
tenacious as a bulldog.

He
did dance once with Helen Johnson. Meeting Cam had made him curious about her
sisters. The eldest one was nowhere to be found, but Helen was actually quite
popular. She reminded him strongly of Cam in some ways, but was very different in
others. She had the same carefully balanced gaze, and her answers came readily,
almost too easily. It was as if she expected to be interrogated and so already
had a very detailed cover story planned. She smiled more than Cam and was a
little shyer. She lacked the challenge that Cam had in her eyes, but when she
laughed, she laughed heartily, especially when Brent inquired about her sister.

“I've
heard that Miss Camilla is indisposed?” He asked. It was a little improper to
inquire about a lady's indisposition, but Cam hadn't looked like the sickly
sort and he was curious.

“Oh?”
Helen's eyes danced, “Well, I'm sure that's the story,” she laughed, and Brent
wondered if Cam sounded that way when she laughed. It was hard to imagine her
laughing, but he'd like to see it.

Yes,
well, you'd also like to know what they're hiding,
he reminded himself,
but you're going to have to settle for one or the
other, and your brother...

The
thought of his brother at home, hovering over his dying wife, was enough to put
him out of the dancing mood. He excused himself in between the fourth and fifth
dance and stepped out onto the porch. It was still hot enough to snatch the
breath from his lungs, though the sun had been down for more than an hour, but
there was a warm wind, and that was better than the stifling interior of the
ballroom.

He
had only been out on the porch for a minute when he heard an unidentifiable
scraping sound. He couldn't pinpoint where it came from at first, until there
was a more distinct sound, a soft footstep from above his head. It was at that
moment that he realized what the scraping sound had been. Someone had opened a
window on the second floor and climbed out onto the balcony. His first thought,
as inside of the house a bright tune began playing, was that someone was trying
to steal from the Johnsons. He took a few steps back into the shadowy corner of
the porch, out of the light that streamed from the windows, as whoever was
above walked to the other side of the balcony, where a twisted oak that was
probably older than the house grew.

He
could hear branches rustling as the intruder climbed into the tree, and a
suspicion began to grow in his mind. When he was able to see a stockinged leg
and the hem of a striped skirt, he knew that it was Cam.

Her
sister was right
, he thought,
not so indisposed after
all
.

Where
was she going? What had her out and about at this hour? His first theory was a
lover, but the dress she wore was even plainer that the one she'd been wearing
at the barbecue, and her hair had come loose and fallen around her shoulders.
She hadn't taken much care with her appearance, which made him doubt that she
had taken a leaf out of her sister Diana's book and taken a lover. What then?
Tales of young ladies misbehaving usually involved young men. If there was no
young man, what could she be up to?

She
moved with an almost catlike grace through the branches of the tree, which was
remarkable given that even a simple dress seemed remarkably constricting to a
woman's movement. She landed softly and froze, listening. He could see the
gentle rise and fall of her chest. The light of the half-moon illuminated her
face, darkening her eyes to jet and giving her skin a silvery gleam. He caught
his breath and held it, while she listened to make sure that she had not been
observed. The corner where he stood was shadowed by a stand of trees. She
couldn't see him, and he didn't make a sound. In a minute her skirt twirled as
she vanished down the porch steps and around the side of the house.

Brent
didn't even need to debate with himself. He just followed her.

***

Cam
could smell the smoke on the air as she walked through the darkness to the
kitchen. Caro and Grandma must have already started lighting the candles. She
could identify every herb they burned and knew what each one was for. She
smelled one herb for protection, one for peace, one for strength, and three for
secrecy. It was always that way. Secrecy was all-important. It had been since
she was a little girl and she had first taken the path to the kitchen. She had
been searching for someone to replace her mother and had found instead a family
secret that was truly a matter of life and death.

Following
their mother's death, each of the girls had sought her own refuge. Helen had
been little more than a baby when their mother had died, and she had grown up
with the sadness imprinted on her soul. She couldn't remember the mother that
she was mourning, but she would mourn her forever nonetheless. Helen had
escaped into her books, her studies and her prolific diary-keeping. Cam didn't
think that her younger sister had missed a daily diary entry since she was
seven or eight.

Diana
searched in the wrong places for a love to replace the love she had lost.
People still gossiped about her scandal, whispered that she was a wanton woman.
Cam hated them for it. She couldn't forgive society for its harsh judgment of
her sister, not when she knew that loneliness and sadness were to blame, not
wantonness.

Cam
had found peace in the kitchen, away from her melancholy father, strict aunt
and sisters who were as distant and emotionally crippled as she. After her
mother's death she had felt constantly, inexplicably cold. She was constantly
falling ill and shivered her way through several months before she discovered
the kitchen. Winter, spring, summer and autumn, the kitchen was sweltering and
full of life. Despite the strange things that went on there was also a sense of
normalcy. Potatoes were peeled, the bones were cast, butter was churned and
graveyard dirt was kept in a jar behind the jellies and jams. Cam had listened
to Grandma and Caro, learning all that they would teach her. In time she found
that their presence chased the cold away.

Cam
knew every step of the path that she walked, and so even in the dark she could
avoid the spot where the old carriage house had once stood. In the years after
his wife's death, Cam's father had tried more than once to grow new grass over
the spot where Solange and Sam had burned to death. Eventually, almost reluctantly,
the grass had taken root. Since then they'd had storms. Wind that tore through
like the devil himself, rain that fell until the Mississippi itself was
drowning under the deluge. The ash had washed away, but Cam could still
discern, with perfect precision, the outline of the carriage house. The ash may
not have been there, but traces of the evil that had ended Solange’s life
remained. In Cam’s family it was called rootwork, but it was known by other
names: conjure, the evil eye, hoodoo. Whatever you termed it, however you
practiced it, there was a distinction, a line that wasn’t meant to be crossed.
A line that had been trampled that day in 1839, when the carriage house had
burst into unnatural flames and consumed two lives. 

Solange
had been a practitioner, a rootworker, just as Caro and Grandma were. Cam
wasn’t entirely sure when her family had first been introduced to rootwork.
Perhaps when they first settled in Haiti, perhaps before then. Cam had never
asked.

Like
so many things in life, it could be used for good purpose or ill. Cam had never
had cause to hurt anyone with her conjure, but she knew how. She knew how to
defend herself with it, even how to kill with it. Though in light of her
mother’s death, the very thought made her ill.

It
was her secret, hers, Grandma’s and Caro’s. Her sisters knew too, though as far
as Cam knew neither of them practiced. She frequently wondered about Diana.
Grandma certainly hadn’t trained Diana, but Diana had been older when their
mother had died, almost nine years old. Solange might have begun training her
before she died. Cam frequently wanted to ask, but there never seemed to be a
right time to discuss their mother.

The
scent of herbs grew stronger as she drew closer to the kitchen, and Cam caught
the faint sound of their voices. She heard Caro's voice first, heard her
speaking softly and steadily. Her grandmother's voice was higher, cracking with
age, but they both sounded calm. Her foot creaked on the step and they both
fell silent. There was a rustling sound at the window and then Caro opened the
door, and warm, flickering candlelight spilled out, illuminating Cam's face and
casting a narrow circle of light on the weathered steps beneath her feet. “It's
the child,” she told Daphne, shaking her head slightly. “I told you she wouldn't
be at that ball.”

“Oh,
Cam,” her grandmother said, but she didn't sound terribly bothered. She had
reached the age where one ball blended into the other and became
indistinguishable from barbecues and weddings, and she didn't much care if Cam
attended any of them.

Grandma
was seated at the hearth, which was not lit, with Mary, Caro's niece. Mary had
come to Cypress Hall as a young child, and Caro had raised her since then. She
was delicately built and her face was attractive, with big eyes and small,
perfect white teeth. She had recently turned eighteen, but something in her
face looked younger, perhaps fifteen or sixteen. She stared up at Cam pensively
as though trying to read her expression and then smiled when Cam did. The table
in front of her was scattered with various roots, a pocket-sized bible, some
polished bones and a set of playing cards.

“And
Elizabeth?” Grandma asked, giving a weary sigh. She was probably the only one
in the county who didn't think Aunt Beth was a saint for moving in with them to
raise three children who weren't hers. In fact, Cam was fairly certain that her
grandmother wished Aunt Beth had just minded her own business and stayed in
Jackson.

“I
told her I was indisposed.” Cam said.

“How
that works every time I will never know.” Mary said, without looking up from
her sewing. “Did she never lie as a child?”

“What
of the Anderson boy?” Cam's grandmother asked. It was a little strange to hear
him called the ‘Anderson boy’ because there was nothing boyish about him, but
she supposed that at her grandmother's age almost any man seemed like a boy.

“He
doesn't know anything,” Cam said confidently, taking a seat at the cold hearth.
Caro remained standing at the window, her fingers on the curtain.

“I
had a dream last night,” Mary said. She had a low, sweet voice. “I dreamt that
I stood beneath a great oak tree at dusk. There was a house in the distance,
with dark empty windows and doors locked against the coming night. It was
Cypress Hall. I watched it for hours. I was waiting for something. The right
time, I think.”

Mary
was unusual. She had been for as long as Cam could remember. She had visions, heard
whispers of what was to come. She wasn’t all-seeing; sometimes things came to
pass and she received no warning at all. The visions themselves were often hard
to read. They usually came to her in fragments, as strange, distorted flashes. No
one could explain her gift. Caro knew of no one else in her family who received
such visions.