Dragonwyck (2 page)

'You haven't a scrap of Van Ryn blood,' snorted Abigail, 'so you needn't go puffing like a peacock. The connection is only through the Gaansevants; Dutch farmers they were like ourselves. And it's just as well, for the Van Ryns are a wild, strange lot with some kind of a skeleton in their closet, for all their money and land and hoity-toity ways.'

'Truly, Ma?' cried Miranda, her hazel eyes sparkling. 'How vastly romantic! Do tell me, please.'

Abigail shifted the baby to the other arm. 'I don't know anything to tell. You and your "vastly romantic"! You've a head stuffed with nonsense now.'

'But you must know something about this Nicholas who writes the letter. I suppose he's quite an old man; it's a pity his birth date isn't in the Bible.'

'Oh, he's somewhere in middle life, I guess,' said Abigail. 'About my age. And I know nothing about him except that he has great estates and a town house in New York, and that four years ago, when Van Buren was President, Nicholas often visited at the White House, for I read about it in a newspaper.'

'Oh, Ma—' breathed Miranda, quite overcome. "He must be very grand indeed.' She considered these revelations for a moment, then she burst out, 'You haven't said a word about his letter, the invitation.'

She clasped her hands together in a suddenly childish gesture. 'Oh, but wouldn't I love to go!'

'And if we should send a daughter, which I think unlikely, why should it be you, miss?' asked Abigail. 'Why not Tibby, I'd like to know?'

Miranda frowned. Tabitha was sixteen and even now at the Academy finishing her last term. There was no reason why she should not be chosen except that Miranda felt that she could not bear it if she were.

'Tibby wouldn't want to go,' she said slowly. 'She's not like me. She doesn't—' Her voice trailed off. Impossible to explain that Tabitha did not hunger after romance, change, adventure, as Miranda did. That she actually enjoyed cooking and washing and housekeeping, that she asked for nothing better in life than to settle down on the next farm with young Obadiah Brown and likely have a parcel of babies right off. But I'm different. I
am,
thought Miranda passionately.

Abigail watched her daughter and read some of these thoughts on the downcast face. Though she would never have admitted it, her firstborn girl was closest of all to her heart. She secretly gloried in Miranda's delicate, small-boned beauty, in her fastidiousness and dainty ways. She thought her remarkably like one of those exquisite creatures in
Godey's Lady's Book,
the same graceful height, small nose, and full, pouting lips.

She pretended not to see when Miranda fussed over her complexion, guarding its pink and whiteness from freckles or sunburn with as much anxious care as might a fashionable New York lady. And she sympathized with the girl's restlessness and vague youthful dreams. Abigail had had them, too, long ago before she married the estimable Ephraim and life flattened into a monotony of never-ending work and baby-tending.

'So,' she said with her normal crispness, 'just like that, and with your usual lack of prudent thought, you "want to go." You don't consider whether I might be able to spare you, nor do you even seem to think that you might miss us here.'

Miranda looked up, stricken. She rushed across the room and put her arms around her mother's thin shoulders, resting her cheek on the brown head that was already finely threaded with gray. 'Oh, Ma, dear, of course I'd miss you. It's just that—that it seems so rarely exciting an opportunity.'

Abigail smiled faintly, and Miranda knew that, whether or not she would be allowed to go to Dragonwyck, there would be no real question of Tabitha's going.

Her mother straightened, buttoned her bodice, and placed the sleeping baby in the cradle. Then she seized the holystone and began scouring the oak drain board. 'We'll say no more about the matter now. Hurry up and kill that old white hen; she'll be a mite tough, but the others are laying well, and she'll have to do.' She glanced at the Seth Thomas banjo clock that was her great pride. 'We're shockingly behind with the work. The men will be in from the fields before supper's near ready.'

After the evening meal, the May night being warm, the family gathered in the parlor instead of die kitchen for Scripture reading and prayer.

Ephraim seated himself in the armed Windsor chair beside the cherry-wood center table. His open Bible lay before him and he kept one blunt finger in readiness on the chapter heading. Not a hair of his brown beard quivered. His eyes were stern and nearly motionless while he waited for each one's respectful attention. They were all there, his wife and five older children, seated on stiff chairs in a prim row. Only the baby, gurgling in her cradle by the kitchen fireplace, was exempt.

Next to Abigail sat Tom, the oldest of her brood. He was staid and responsible, already despite his scant twenty years a duplicate of his father whom he greatly admired.

Seth and Nathaniel, the two other boys, aged fourteen and twelve, cast longing looks out the window and wondered if the light would hold long enough for a game of Run Sheep Run with the Reynolds boys. But they knew better than to wriggle. Many a strapping in the woodshed had taught them that.

At the other end of the row, beside Miranda, sat Tabitha. Her hands were folded demurely in her lap, her plump freckled face was set to the proper expression of piety.

Only Miranda found it nearly impossible to restrain her fidgets. She knew that Ephraim had read the startling letter, and knew also that any discussion of it was impossible until evening worship was concluded.

During the fifteen of her eighteen years that Miranda had taken part in family worship, she had heard the Bible read through six times; and though Ephraim read well, rolling the sonorous phrases and giving considered emphasis to every word, she had long ago perfected a method of enjoying her own thoughts from which she emerged only to say 'Amen' with the others at the end of each chapter.

And yet, in spite of herself, she had soaked in a great deal of the poetry and imagery. Sometimes certain phrases mingled with her daydreams, and seemed to touch off delightful little explosions in her mind. It was so tonight, despite—or perhaps because of—her preoccupation with the letter from Dragonwyck.

Ephraim read from the twenty-sixth chapter of Ezekiel, and her attention was caught by verses which meant nothing to her consciously, though they had power to strike through mist and show her glimpses of a dim, enchanted country.

'Then all the princes of the sea shall come down from their thrones ... they shall clothe themselves with trembling,' said Ephraim's measured voice. It didn't make much sense, thought Miranda, but somehow it was beautiful.

Ephraim dropped to a lower, menacing note. 'How art thou destroyed, that wast inhabited of seafaring men, the renowned city, which wast strong in the sea, she and her inhabitants, which cause their terror to be on all that haunt it.'

A little shiver ran through her, and a sensation of strangeness. She would not have dared move her head, but her eyes roamed round the familiar room. There was the wide, seldom-lit fireplace with the pewter candlesticks on the mantel. There on the whitewashed walls hung the sampler her Grandmother Finch had worked, and the silhouette profiles of her mother and father which had been cut on their wedding day.

On the oak plank floor lay the hooked rugs that she and Tabitha had labored through many a winter's evening to finish. There in the west window through which glanced the last red rays of the setting sun was the cracked pane, result of an impulsive snowball thrown by Tom years ago.

Everything was commonplace and dull. What had they all to do with 'princes of the sea, renowned cities, terror or hauntings'?

'Fine linen with broidered work from Egypt ... blue and purple from the Isles of Elisha,' intoned Ephraim, now well into the next chapter...'occupied in thy fairs with chief of all spices, and with all precious stones, and gold.'

Miranda felt a wave of sharp yearning. She saw them heaped about her in a marble courtyard, the fine embroidered linens from Egypt, the spices, the precious stones and the gold. She looked at her parents, at her brothers' and sister's expressionless faces. How could they listen so calmly! Even the Bible admitted that the world was full of mystery and beauty and golden perfumed luxury. How then could they be content with sweaty homespun, with the odors of stable and barnyard, and with no gold but potatoes and little spring onions?

The low room was full of the smell of onions. The boys had been pulling them all day, and the white and green shoots lay neatly stacked in open crates outside the kitchen windows waiting for the dawn, when Tom would pile them in the wagon and drive them to the Mianus docks for shipment to New York.

There was a small scuffle, and Miranda fell to her knees with the rest of the family as her father shut his Bible and began to pray.

He always talked to God in much the manner of a senior member of the faculty reporting progress to a respected principal. He touched on the faults of each one of the family, not excepting himself sometimes. He occasionally reported some commendable act (though this honor was usually reserved for Tabitha), and he finished with an intimate and entirely confident request for guidance. Tonight there was an added clause.

'This day, O Lord,' said Ephraim, 'there has come to me a matter of some slight perplexity. Deliver us, we pray, from the pitfalls of rashness or hankering after the fleshpots.' Here he looked briefly at Miranda. 'And deliver us from the sins of arrogance and false pride.' This time Ephraim's stern gaze rested upon his wife.

The situation was therefore clear to Miranda. Her father did not approve of the letter. Disappointment overwhelmed her, nor was it lessened by Ephraim's final words. 'However, O God, Thy will be done, and whatsoever Thou decidest for Thy servants we shall try to do with all our might. Bless and preserve us through the night. Amen.'

God's will usually seemed to coincide with her father's, and against this partnership there was no hope of appeal.

But I'm not going to give up, thought Miranda hotly. During the hours since she had first seen the letter, its invitation had grown from a delightful possibility into an obsession. She had never in her life had a desire that approached this one in intensity. The fantastic name 'Dragonwyck' enchanted her. She repeated it over and over to herself and it was as though it pulled her to it, and beckoned.

Ephraim rose, and her spirits revived a little, for apparently there was at least to be a conference. Usually at the conclusion of evening worship her father went straight to his black cherry desk, where he entered items in the leather account book: so many bushels of potatoes from the north held, so many heads of cabbage or pecks of peas; wharfage charges, wholesale prices in New York. His cramped figures accounted for every penny while he squinted painfully. His far-sighted eyes blurred on close application.

But now he remained standing behind the table and said: 'Abby and Ranny, ye'll stay in here, I want to speak to you. Tom, water the stock and look to Whiteface, she's freshening. Tibby, is that young spark Obadiah likely to come mooning around again tonight?'

Tabitha cast down her eyes, and her round face was suffused with a peony blush. 'Oh, Pa!' she said in tones of demure horror. 'I'm sure I've no notion of his plans, and I can't see why they should concern me, anyway.'

A grim twinkle appeared in Ephraim's eyes. "Well, if he should happen to turn up, you may sit on the steps where your mother can keep an eye on you. Though I must say that Ob is steady enough, and you, praise be, aren't the flighty kind.'

'Thank you, Pa,' said Tibby, and from between her pale lashes she flung Miranda the tiniest complacent glance. Tabitha was perfectly aware that her piety and domesticity pleased her father, and that she never gave him a moment's anxiety as Miranda did.

Seth and Nat did not wait to see if their father had directions for them; they sidled through the door and pelted away down the road toward the Reynolds Farm.

Ephraim reseated himself and indicated with a gesture that his wife and Miranda might do likewise. He pulled the Van Ryn letter from his pocket.

'I don't like this letter at all,' he said heavily. 'And I'd see no reason even to discuss it, if it wasn't that you two foolish women read it and Abby acts like it was important.' He frowned at his wife. 'Far as I can see there's only one answer.'

Abigail very seldom disagreed with her husband, indeed in most matters her opinions coincided with his. But now her firm mouth compressed. 'It is important, Ephraim,' she said. 'Mr. Van Ryn is my cousin, and seems to me he's making a generous offer. Might be a good thing for Ranny to live for a while in a great house, learn something of the world outside this farm.'

Miranda threw her mother a grateful look. 'I'd like to go, Pa,' she said temperately, knowing that emotion of any kind always annoyed him.

Ephraim snorted. 'Your opinion is of no consequence whatsoever, miss. You're always hankering after new, foolish things. You haven't the sense of a tom-tit. You should be thinking only of helping your mother until you settle down with one of the young sparks hereabouts. You're past eighteen and comely enough in a namby-pamby way, I suppose. I don't know what's the matter with you. There's Zach Wilson, now. He'd make a fine husband and he seemed to fancy you. And how did you treat him!' Ephraim suddenly empurpled, banged his hand on the table, and Miranda's heart sank. She knew what was coming.

'I've seen you many a time,' growled Ephraim, 'mincing around, your nose in the air and crying, "Oh, Zach, don't come so near, you smell of the stable. Oh, Zach, don't play that vulgar dance on your fiddle, can we not have 'Love's Sweet Bloom' or some ree-fined ballad?" Faugh! No wonder he had his fill of your ladyship and is courting Mead's girl.'

Miranda stirred unhappily. Zach's interest in her and her discouragement of it had been a sore subject for weeks.

She had never liked Zach. He had coarse red hair and pudgy hands, and his idea of love-making had been scuffling in dark corners, a moist smacking kiss on the cheek, and on one occasion a playful pinch on that portion of her body that, even to herself, Miranda designated only as 'the sitting-down place.' Not one of the neighbors' sons, no man she had ever seen, had stirred in her any emotion but distaste. This realization made her feel guilty.