Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (7 page)

I stayed where I was, up to my elbows in lamp-oil and dirt, while Nanna creaked her way slowly across the hall. Nanna’s terrible arthritis does not change the fact that she is the ranking woman in the household. Gertrude hates that, but she loses the argument every time she starts it. Lane outranked Nanna, but it didn’t matter, with Lane lying there like a dead thing in her bedroom, without even the strength to turn her face to the wall.

Nanna wrestled the door open, and stuck her head out to shout at whoever it was. I could hear a mutter of explanations and apologies, but all of the greeting formulas got carried away by the wind, so I was completely unprepared for the man who stepped into the hall at Nanna’s gesture of invitation.

He screamed
Southerner
from head to foot, from his braided hair and long mustaches to the expensive but completely inadequate boots on his feet. They were soaked right through. I suppose he was handsome, if you go in for that sort of thing, though there was too much cheekbone for my taste—too much crag. Craggy-faced men always think far better of themselves than they need to.

He said to Nanna, slowly and distinctly, as if she were some kind of idiot, “May I see Madalane, please?”

I knew who he was. My hands—big, lumpy-knuckled hands, short-nailed and filthy—clenched so hard that the rag twisted between them tore. Nanna and the stranger both turned to stare at me; from the way his head jerked around, he hadn’t even realized I was there.

I stood up, conscious of my shabby dress, the strands of hair escaping from my hairpins. “You should not be here.”

“You must be Karlin,” he said, as if I’d said something normal and polite. “Madalane told me a great deal about you.”

If he thought that would make me like him, he could have spared his breath. “And you’re Gerard. Lane hasn’t said a word about you.”

His face darkened in hurt and anger. But I continued before he could find words: “Leave. Please. Leave Lane alone.”

“Lane can make her own choices, Karlin,” Nanna said, her pale eyes sharp for once. “You will not make them for her.” She turned and hobbled slowly out of the hall.

I stepped out from behind the table where I had been seated and approached Gerard. Prince Gerard of Hylfeneth, he was, and by Southern reckoning, Lane was his wife, although I wasn’t sure whether their marriage was binding under Northern laws. It was one of the many things Lane wouldn’t tell me.

“Please,” I said, though the word was dry and bitter in my mouth. “Just
go
.”

“I can’t,” he said, spreading his hands as if he expected me to understand.

“Haven’t you hurt her enough?”

“
Hurt
her?”

“If she dies,” I said, “it will be because you have killed her.”

For a minute, I thought he was going to hit me, and so did he. But he changed his mind, and ran his hand over his face instead. “Karlin,” he said at last, and if I could have liked him, I might have pitied the weariness in his voice, “I don’t know why you hate me, but I don’t think you have any idea of why Madalane left Hylfeneth.”

“Don’t I?”

“You don’t know what we went through.”

“You haven’t sat with her every night for a month of nightmares. You weren’t here when she came riding up the pass like something that had been dead for a week and was just too brute obstinate to admit it. You haven’t argued with her over ever single bite of food she eats—and had to give the half of her meals to the pigs anyway. I have. So don’t tell me what I don’t know.”

He looked as if each word was a separate nail being pounded into his flesh, and maybe he would have left then, maybe he would have gone and left Lane alone, except that a voice said, thin and shaky, “Gerard?”

We both turned. It was her.

I don’t know how she did it. She hadn’t been able to leave her room for weeks, even to escape from Father, but there she was, leaning in the doorway—white as a ghost but fully dressed.

“Lane,” I said. “Lane, you oughtn’t—”

“Gerard?” she said again, and then they were clinging together in the doorway, talking and laughing and crying all together in a horrible tangle, and I knew that she was going back. Going back to Hylfeneth, going back to him, going back to the life I’d thought and hoped and even prayed she’d renounced. I’d thought she’d begun to see me again, the way she’d seen me before some fool traveling peddler had infected her with dreams of Hylfeneth and she’d stopped seeing anything but the blood-red minarets and lace-spun bridges of the stories. I’d thought, when she came back, that the reality had cured her of the mindless dreams, that if we could just wait out the last throes of the fever, Lane would be back, my Lane who’d never laughed at me for being raw-boned and ugly and dark, who’d never called me goblin, who had shared with me things that this handsome hero would never understand. He didn’t know the Lane I did. I’d thought Lane had realized that, too, but the radiance on her face told me I was wrong.

They were deciding to leave as I watched them. I could see it on their faces. They would go riding off into the clouds together, and Lane wouldn’t have to face Father or explain herself to Gertrude or confront any of the remnants of a life she didn’t want. She didn’t even see me when she said goodbye, only her faithful half-sister—every heroine has one.

I don’t know if there was something I could have said, some way I could have reached her. I lie awake nights, wondering. But there was nothing I could have told her that she didn’t already know, and if what she knew was not enough to keep her here, then what use would any words of mine be?

She strode out ahead of Gerard, eager for the next adventure I suppose, and I caught his cloak and said, “When she dies, don’t bring her body here.”

I don’t think he understood me, not really, but he understood something, because he nodded and said, a little awkwardly, as if he wasn’t used to it, “Karlin, I’m sorry.”

I shook my head. “She’s made her choice.”

He left then, following her as he would follow her anywhere, and I stayed behind, as I had stayed behind the first time she left. Stayed behind to keep the lamps clean and lit, to keep the household running, to keep carrying the responsibilities Lane had let fall.

I’m no heroine. I don’t have a story. And Lane’s story is not mine to tell, except for this:
she made her choice
.

Snow fell from the gray sky like ashes.

I stood at the window, defying the weather to affect my mood. After months of restoration and renovation, we were finally moving into the house where my husband had spent his childhood summers, the house of the grandmother he loved, who had died when he was fifteen. The house had been standing vacant ever since, and for a time we had despaired of rendering it liveable at all.

I wanted our success to be greeted with dazzling sunlight, but instead we had gray louring clouds and snow.

Martin came up behind me, his arms sliding around my waist, and kissed the back of my neck. “Penny for your thoughts, beloved.”

“I was just watching the snow,” I said. I turned in the circle of his arms and stood up on tip-toe to kiss him. “And thinking how glad I am to be here.”

He smiled, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners. “Grandmother Louise would be happy. Do you want to take a walk?”

“Yes, I’d like that,” I said. “Show me where you used to play.” I let him help me with my coat.

The snow was falling slowly, big wet flakes that melted like kisses as they touched the ground. We chose a path that led down into the woods behind the house; I held closely to Martin’s arm. The doctor had said I did not need to treat myself as if I were made of glass, but I could remember my grandmother and her sisters trading their cautionary tales whenever one of their daughters or daughters-in-law or granddaughters announced she was pregnant. I was determined to be careful, more than willing to let Martin coddle me as if I were his child rather than his wife.

We followed the narrow path through the trees, our shoes rustling damply among the dead leaves.

“This must be lovely in the spring,” I said.

“You don’t find it lovely now?”

“Oh, it’s pretty enough, I guess, but . . . I don’t know. It’s awfully bleak.”
Barren,
I thought, but it was not a word I was prepared to say. Not now. Instead, I smiled up at him and said, “I like my landscapes brightly colored.”

“I’ll plant you roses,” he promised, smiling back.

I heard the voices first as no more than the wind among the crumbling dead leaves. But they were voices, children’s voices, and after a moment I could understand their words.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down . . . ashes, ashes, we all fall down
 . . .

“Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?” said Martin.

“Those children.”

“Children? What are you talking about?”

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down . . . ashes, ashes, we all fall down . . .

“Don’t you hear them?”

We had both stopped in the middle of the path. I was holding onto Martin’s arm with both hands. He was frowning, head cocked, listening but—I realized, my stomach tightening into a cold knot—not hearing.

“Just the wind, beloved.” He started walking again; numbly, I followed suit. But I could still hear those small, thin voices, that dreary singsong chant:
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. . .
And I heard it all the way back to the house.

I tried to put it out of my mind, tried to concentrate on our house, our child, the life Martin and I were building together. I found myself avoiding the windows that looked out on the woods, found myself stopped, listening, at odd times of day, for voices that I did not hear. One afternoon, while Martin was teaching, I walked down to the woods by myself, and the voices came rushing to meet me, as if I were a playmate they had been waiting for.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down
 . . . 
ashes, ashes, we all fall down
 . . . I fled back to the house, but even a long, hot shower could not entirely dispel my shivering.

That Saturday, I suggested to Martin that we go walking in the woods again. He was agreeable, and we started down the path together. It was snowing, and I was glad to have his arm to hold to.

The voices sobbed in my head from the moment we passed the first line of trees. When we’d safely reached the bottom of the hill, I stopped Martin and said, my voice unnaturally casual, “There they are again.”

“What?”

“Martin, please. You really don’t hear them?”

“Hear
what
?”

“The children. Singing.” And I joined in: “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down . . . ashes, ashes—”

“I don’t hear anything of the sort,” Martin said, but his face had gone pale and his mouth was tight. “Come on. We’d better go home.” He turned and all but dragged me back the way we had come; we were halfway up the hill before I could brace my feet and pull free of him.

“Martin.”

For a moment, I thought he would simply keep walking, head down like an angry bull. Then he stopped, sighed heavily, and turned. “What?”

Nothing,
I almost said.
You’re right. I was imagining things.
But for once I stood my ground. “You know something.”

“About your imaginary voices? No. But I’m starting to think I should call Dr. Baines when we get back to the house.”

The cruelty in his voice took my breath away. He had never spoken to me like that before. “You think I’m hysterical,” I said. “Pregnant women have their fancies, right?” It was another topic on which my grandmother and great-aunts could hold forth for hours.

“I didn’t mean—”

“Go on back to the house then,” I said, my voice high and shaking with anger. “Go call Dr. Baines. I’m going to take a walk.” I turned and started away, half-blind with tears, but whether of fury or hurt I did not know.

I followed the voices, ignoring the path and Martin’s voice behind me. Branches caught in my hair, snagged my stockings. I skidded down into a dry creek bed and only kept upright by scraping my hands raw on a half-dead tree. The voices did not get louder or clearer, but they were closer. I could feel them, like cold, cold fingers on the back of my neck. And all the while the snow fell, soft and silent, disappearing against the black branches, the gray and brown of the dead leaves and stones.
Barren,
I thought again and shivered.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down
 . . . Children’s voices, but not
young
children, not young enough still to enjoy that particular game. They sounded breathless, almost scared, and I thought for no reason of the wicked stepmother in the fairytale, who was forced to dance in red-hot shoes until she fell down dead.

And then I fell myself, landing awkwardly on one knee and my already abraded palms. I thought—a panic-stricken lightning bolt—of the baby, and became as still as if I had been turned to stone, all my attention focused inward. But there was no pain, no sense of slippage or loss, none of the wrongness I was sure I would feel, and after a moment I began to breathe again.

Cautiously, not yet ready to try to stand up, I looked around, seeing the tangle of dead tree branches and grape-vines leaning over one side of the creek bed (which was now becoming more like a ravine), the jumbled stones underfoot—it was no wonder I had fallen, and I was lucky not to have broken anything. The other bank had a decided overhang; I could see the interlaced tree roots holding it up. And near where I was crouched, there was a place where the roots had not held, and the bank had caved in, a long, ugly spill of rocks and red clay.

And something that was neither red clay nor rock.

I did not want to see, and yet I found myself moving closer, in a painful sideways hobble. It was the shape that caught my attention first, the smooth rounded curve that could never be the shape of a rock. And then I was crouched in front of that treacherous grade, snowflakes wet against my face and neck and the cold whisper of the voices making me shiver:
ashes, ashes, we all fall down
 . . . I reached out, my hand shaking, and brushed dirt away from that smooth, strangely vulnerable curve.