Blue Willow (12 page)

“You go to hell.” Terrified of his smile, she whipped around and tried to run. His arms snaked around her neck, and one hand clamped over her mouth.

Screaming uselessly, she was dragged down.

Artemas was preparing to come home for Christmas. Her last letter reached him the same day her body was discovered in the bathroom of the apartment she shared with several other girls. She had tried to abort the baby with a knitting needle sterilized in liquor.

He raped me
,
Artemas. I’m pregnant. I love you. I don’t know what to do. I’ll never get over this
.

He found his parents at a lavish Christmas party at the apartment of a film producer in the city. Before the irate butler could stop him, he was shoving his way through the entrance hall and running into the midst of the glittering crowd. His father’s tall form, lounging by a baby grand with a drink in one hand, was easy to spot.

Artemas had his hands around his throat in an instant. They went down in a fierce jumble, scattering a silver candelabra and an arrangement of poinsettias in a crystal vase. People were screaming. Somewhere among them was Mother’s voice, a shriek of disbelief.

His father slammed a fist into his face, and Artemas fell back, blood from his mouth spattering the jacket of his cadet’s uniform. Deadly silent and blind with fury, Artemas felt the base of the candelabra against his hand and swung the implement viciously. Blood spurted from his father’s
nose as they both struggled to rise. Artemas hit him again, and there was the sharp crunch of a heavy jawbone breaking. His father’s knees buckled. Artemas half stood and drew back his arm once more, but men were clawing at him, falling on top of him and knocking him backward.

In the stunned silence following the halt of violence, his arms held by grown men struggling to keep his wild fury still, Alternas stared into his father’s shocked, broken face. “I’ll kill you,” he told his father softly. “I should have done it a long time ago.”

His mother appeared between them, falling to her knees with a long red gown bunched around her. “Artemas, how
could
you?” she cried.

“He raped Susan de Gude. She killed herself because of him.”

Mother’s mouth opened in a wail of shock. There was chaos around them—people gasping and talking excitedly—but his father’s eyes only flickered with hatred and denial. Mother turned to him and leaned delicately against his bloody dinner jacket, collapsing with her head on his shoulder. She pierced Artemas with a look of disgust. “I’ll
never
forgive you for accusing your father this way. And in public!”

The New York courts ordered Artemas’s younger siblings placed in state custody until their father’s trial. Mother complained mildly, protesting a judge’s opinion of her competence, then withdrew into her parasitic circle of friends. Only the lingering influence of the Colebrook name, combined with Grandmother’s shrewd lawyers and Uncle Charles’s grudging bribes, circumvented the court order. For the first time since coming to their uncle’s estate, they were allowed to move from the cottage into the shabby Tudor mansion.

Artemas refused his grandmother’s entreaty that he go to Aunt Lucille’s ranch in Texas. He stayed with his distraught brothers and sisters, who cloaked him in their loyalty. Father was released on bail. He and Mother went to the Schulhorns’.

Susan’s parents were moneyed and respected in the ways the Colebrooks no longer were. They barred outsiders, including Artemas, from their daughter’s funeral, and when he stood in silent honor and grief outside the sanctuary on a crowded New York sidewalk, he was hounded by reporters. They fed greedily on the lurid drama between the well-known old families, and the rest of New York fed with them.

He went to the De Gudes’ house repeatedly but was turned away by the hired guards, until finally Susan’s father came out to meet him in the courtyard. A big, sturdy man with Susan’s auburn hair, he spit on Artemas and backhanded him across the face. “Between you and that animal who fathered you, you killed my little girl. That murdering S.O.B. will pay for it. And you’ll never escape the shame.” Artemas murmured an agonized apology and left.

January crawled by in a maddening haze of grief and frustration. He withdrew from West Point. A career in the military had no meaning for him anymore; he had loved the order and discipline of West Point, not the prestige. He lived for revenge and spent hours with his stunned siblings trying to make them believe that their lives had not come to some terrible end.

Grandmother, queenly in her blue dressing gown, her white hair knotted, crownlike, around the top of her head, called him to the parlor in her suite every day. He stood by a window, pretending to listen as she talked vaguely of fate and the future.

One day he came at her request to find two unfamiliar men in her company. Both were well dressed in dark business suits; both carried themselves with formal, straight-backed dignity Both had the first featherings of gray hair at their temples.

But one was tall and stocky, with a short Afro and skin the color of dark mahogany; the other was small and lithe, fair-skinned, with sandy, thinning hair combed sideways over a high forehead. Grandmother gestured toward them gracefully. “I’d like you to meet Edward Tamberlaine and
Leson LaMieux. Gentlemen, this is my grandson. The young man for whom you’ll be working someday.”

Artemas was too stunned to say anything. Tamberlaine came to him and held out a broad, dark hand; LaMieux, a slender, pale one. Artemas shook their hands and looked at his grandmother for an explanation. She nodded. “Mr. Tamberlaine is an accounts manager for the company. Mr. LaMieux is your uncles secretary. Both are highly qualified and quite trustworthy.” She paused, her bright little eyes boring into Artemas’s bewildered ones. “Quite trustworthy in
my
service, that
is.
”

The implications of her conspiracy against Uncle Charles sank into Artemas with a resounding sense of the inevitable. His future had always been an unspoken assumption between Grandmother and him. His surprise faded quickly, replaced by a stark feeling of having reached a destination he’d always expected. And wanted.

Studying his face, Grandmother smiled. “There will come a day when their knowledge of Colebrook China will be invaluable to you.”

He looked at Tamberlaine and LaMieux with a composure that drew respect to their shrewd, assessing eyes. “You’ll never regret being associated with my family’s name. I can’t say that’s true now, but it will be. I swear to you.”

“I take you at your word,” Tamberlaine answered.

“Myself as well,” LaMieux added.

Grandmother came into his room as he was working at the desk there, reading company reports Tamberlaine and LaMieux had given him. Artemas stood and carefully helped her into a thickly upholstered chair across from the desk, then sat on the desk’s edge. She looked up at him somberly. “The time for you to take your rightful place will come soon enough. Until then, you must do everything you can to prepare.”

“In what way?”

“College. Ceramic engineering would be appropriate, don’t you think?”

He and she shared a look filled with portent. “What will you tell Uncle Charles about our plans?”

She smiled grimly. “Whatever inventive lies will best soothe his fear of you. When he eventually realizes the cold truth, there won’t be anything he can do to change it.” She took Artemas’s hands in hers. “I’ve waited so many years—decades—to see your grandfather’s pride restored.”

“I
will
do that, Grandmother.”

Tears came to her eyes. “Then all my sorrow and loneliness will have been worth it. But there’s one other thing. The old estate, Blue Willow, meant so much to him—”

“It won’t be forgotten. It won’t be lost. Someday it will be as wonderful as it was when you and he lived there together.” Artemas knelt by her chair and put an arm around her. He’d never told anyone about the correspondence between him and Lily. He’d always felt a little awkward about it—admitting that he’d been, God, a
pen pal
to a child all these years. And that her whimsical adoration and encouragement meant so much to him.

“Let me tell you about Lily MacKenzie,” he said now. “Believe me, Grandmother, Blue Willow has been in
very
good hands.”

There came a frigid February day when Father returned from Philadelphia and came to the house. Uncle Charles was in New York, at the company offices. Artemas sat in his room, poring over company files. His brothers and sisters were at school.

He heard Father yelling obscenities at the housekeeper. As he sprang to his feet, Grandmother came to his door, leaning heavily on her cane but as unmovable as a force of nature. “If you go down, who knows what will happen?”

“I have to go. Sooner or later, we have to finish it.”

She hissed derisively. “Do you want to ruin the rest of your life? Or do you want to survive this for the sake of your brothers and sisters? Be a better man than your father. Be better than your frivolous, foolish mother. You’re only eighteen years old—you have your life ahead of you.
All my hopes are set on you. I can’t change what my sons are, but I can make certain you don’t become like them.”

“Then please don’t ask me to hide like a coward, because that would be very much like them.”

Her frail shoulders slumped. She reached into a brocaded pocket of her gown. A small silver revolver emerged in her gnarled hand. She offered it to Artemas on her palm. “Take it. I won’t have you killed or maimed as a result of Creighton’s rage. But you won’t be at peace until you decide whether your future—this family’s future—is worth more than your revenge.”

Artemas tucked the gun into the belt of his trousers and covered it with the tail of his white sweater, then stepped past her. He went downstairs. Father was pacing in the library. His black overcoat hung open to reveal a rumpled suit. His dark hair was disheveled, his face florid. Artemas walked in and shut the doors. Father wheeled to face him. “You vindictive young bastard. How dare you agree to testify against me at the trial?”

With calculated and swift certainty Artemas slipped the pistol from his belt, clicked the safety off with his thumb, and raised the gun at arm’s length. He sighted unerringly at a point on his father’s forehead. His father’s expression stiffened in shock. “This is the only way I can live with what you did and what you are,” Artemas said softly.

He held his father’s astonished gaze. He saw uncertainty, disgust, but also fear. Artemas continued in the same low, deadly tone. “Why does Mother love you? That’s the strangest part, to me. She’s as sick as you are. How could anyone love you? How could anyone bring children into the world knowing that you’re their father?
Six
of us. When neither of you is capable of caring about anyone but yourselves.”

“Don’t do this,” Father said, his voice cracking. “You’re our son.”

“I can’t change that fact. I can only try to forget it.”

“What do you want from me? An admission that I’m selfish? Hell, boy, that’s a right people such as we have
earned
. The fortune this family created helped build this
country. We made it what it is. We deserve the status and the power. Don’t you understand that ordinary rules don’t apply to us?”

“You never built anything.”

“I inherited power. It’s in my blood. And yours. And girls like that one we screwed—they don’t mean anything. We can have a thousand like her. Don’t you understand?
If we can have anything we want, why shouldn’t we take it
?”

Contempt made an acrid taste in Artemas’s mouth. He trembled from the black hatred rising up inside his chest. Between gritted teeth he said, “If you have to take what you want that way, it doesn’t belong to you. You don’t deserve it.” He latched his thumb on the revolver’s hammer and slowly pulled it back.

His father gaped at him. “You want me to beg for mercy? Hell, I don’t mind.” He sank to his knees; he was trembling. Artemas tracked him with the pistol, lowering it, keeping the sight on the ashen, mottled skin between his father’s dark eyes. Grandmother’s words rang in his ears:
You’re better than this
.

Here was the proof he’d needed. Domination. Superiority. In form as well as spirit. Artemas dropped his hand to his side. “I don’t need to kill you. You’re dead to me already. Get out.”

Creighton Colebrook staggered to his feet. “I knew you couldn’t do it,” he said, his voice shaking. “You haven’t got the guts.”

Artemas smiled and went to the doors. “You haven’t got the guts,” his father called bitterly. “Your mother will agree with me.” Artemas opened the doors and walked out. He was free.

The next day, a cold weekend morning with the sun glinting on a fresh layer of snow outside, they had the house to themselves. With Uncle Charles, his mousy little wife, and their two taunting daughters away in the city, life seemed almost peaceful.

James secluded himself in Uncle Charles’s gym, forbidden to him ordinarily, punching a boxing bag with endless
anger. Elizabeth was tucked into a corner of the tiny bedroom she shared with Cassandra and Julia, playing with dolls she called “my poor babies.” They were always being threatened by imaginary monsters, from whom she protected them. Her favorite warning to the monsters, delivered in a soft, fervent voice when she thought no one was listening, was, “I’ll go get Artemas.”

Cassandra was hidden somewhere, feeding on a gallon of ice cream she’d stolen from the kitchen. Julia stood in front of a television set in the housekeeper’s office downstairs, jumping up and down to a cartoon-show theme song. Artemas began rounding his siblings up for lunch. He couldn’t find Michael.

When the other four were gathered in the dining room, Artemas held out a copy of
Swiss Family Robinson
. They stared at it dolefully. “Do we have to take turns reading again?” James demanded.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because this book is about a happy family, dammit.” Softening, he added, “Because it’s good for us to do things together. Where’s Michael?”