The Benedict Bastard (A Benedict Hall Novel) (6 page)

Margot had ordered Blake to avoid climbing stairs unless it was necessary, but she knew he still climbed the staircase every day to supervise. He also had the gardeners and the handymen under his direction, to say nothing of the serving of meals and his duties as chauffeur, but he seemed to manage all of it effortlessly, almost invisibly. It was a marvel, the way he had returned to full service. Only the lion-headed cane, never far from his hand, betrayed the disability he had suffered.

Margot let her head drop back, and though she had barely been out of bed an hour, her eyelids grew heavy once again. She was more tired than she had realized. She should take more free days, perhaps, but her clinic had a steady stream of patients now, and her hospital duties demanded her almost daily presence. The Women and Infants Clinic filled an entire afternoon every week, and tomorrow she was due to return to the Ryther Child Home with Sarah to examine and vaccinate the rest of the children. There was an asthma case there, and she had to convince Mrs. Ryther to stop using asthma cigarettes and accept a nebulizer for epinephrine treatments. She was reasonably confident she could do it. Government money, it turned out, was a decisive factor for Olive Ryther.

Behind Margot, in the kitchen, Hattie raised her rich, tremulous voice in one of the hymns she loved. Margot allowed her eyes to close, letting the swirl of household activity soothe her. She pulled her cardigan a little tighter, and with a sigh, she drowsed.

She barely heard the series of thumps when they came, muffled as they were by closed doors. She was more aware of the abrupt breaking off of Hattie’s singing, and the sudden cry of alarm. It was Nurse, her usual calm shattered, crying out for help. A heartbeat later, before Margot had even pushed herself up from her chair, she heard Ramona screaming, and shouts of alarm from Hattie and from one of the maids. Piercing all of it was the shrill wailing of a one-year-old.

Margot, acting on instinct, was halfway through the kitchen before she was fully awake, striding toward the hall where the noise was. Preparations for luncheon were underway, with a board full of chopped vegetables on the counter, the scent of something roasting in the oven, and trays of flatware and crystal laid out. Margot hurried past all of it and pushed through the swinging door into the hall.

She found a knot of women around Ramona, who was seated on the bottom stair with a red-faced Louisa shrieking on her lap. Ramona was clutching the baby so hard Margot thought it was no wonder the child was screaming. Nurse’s craggy face was a study in horror, and Hattie was kneeling beside Ramona, tears streaming down her plump cheeks. The twins stood back, pale-faced, their freckles standing out in dotted swiss patterns. Thelma, the third maid, gaped from the top of the stairs. If she made a sound, Margot couldn’t tell. The sheer volume of voices, echoing in the big hall, was confounding.

Ramona caught sight of her. “Oh, Margot! She fell! Louisa fell down the stairs!”

Leona said, “Miss Margot, she just did three somersaults, right from the top! I thought she musta broke her neck doing it!”

Her twin elbowed her, and she covered her mouth with a freckled hand, as Ramona burst into frightened tears.

Margot assessed the baby with a glance. Her face was scarlet, mouth open to show six pearly milk teeth. All four limbs milled with fury as she heaved a breath to squall again. Margot pushed past the twins to sit beside Ramona on the stair. Gently, she extricated the toddler from her mother’s grasp, and drew her into her own lap. At the same moment Blake arrived, his cane loose in his hand, his face furrowed with concern.

“Mr. Blake!” Leona hissed. “Baby fell down the stairs!” Blake’s eyes met Margot’s, and a dark, painful memory passed swiftly between them before she turned her attention back to Louisa.

Margot cradled the little girl in her arms, passing her hand over the child’s forehead, shushing her under her breath while the other women gasped and wept. “Louisa,” Margot said, in a low, firm tone. “Louisa. Listen to Auntie Margot.”

Margot could feel the small, hot body tense for another wail. “Louisa, shush. You’re all right. You did a somersault!”

The wail came out as a whimper, and then a sniffle. Loena leaned forward, and offered Margot a handkerchief. Margot used it to wipe the child’s nose, though Louisa tried to wriggle away from it. Surreptitiously, while her niece wrestled with the handkerchief, Margot felt each of her arms and legs, and ran her fingers up her back. She pressed on Louisa’s slender neck, and ran her fingertips through her shock of fair hair. There were no bumps or lumps on her scalp, and already her sobs were subsiding into shudders.

Margot lifted her to her shoulder, and patted her back. “Ramona, she’s fine,” she said. “Babies are flexible, thank goodness. But look, no bruises, not even a scratch.”

“She just—I turned my back for a moment, and she was out of her crib!” Nurse said in a wretched tone. She sounded close to tears herself. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Benedict, but—”

Ramona, who was wiping her own face with a lace-edged handkerchief, dropped it, and turned blazing eyes to the hapless woman. “It’s your
job!
” she cried. “What were you doing?”

Margot felt the child quiver anew in her arms. “Ramona, you’ll set her off again. Louisa isn’t hurt, but she knows you’re upset.”

“Of course I’m upset!” Ramona said. “She—she could have—”

“Yes,” Margot said quietly. “But she didn’t. She’s all right, and we’ll keep a closer eye on her now, right? She’s an active little thing.”

“I will, Dr. Benedict,” Nurse assured her. “I will! I do, really, but this time—”

“I understand. It can happen in a flash.” Margot stood up, Louisa still in her arms. Hattie straightened, and wiped her cheeks with the hem of her apron. The twins drew back into the kitchen, though Margot sensed their intent listening as if they had ear horns extending into the hall. Ramona, weeping openly, rose to her feet, and the nurse stepped forward to take Louisa.

“I’ll just keep her for a bit, Nurse,” Margot said. “Why don’t you go and rinse your face, Ramona? Nurse, you take a moment, too. I’ll take Louisa out into the garden for a few minutes and let her calm down.”

It took a bit of persuasion, but soon Margot was able to carry her niece out through the kitchen, where Louisa reached for a wooden spoon lying on the counter. Hattie, chuckling and sniffling at the same time, wiped the spoon with a dishcloth and handed it over to her. Margot carried the toddler out to the porch and down to the damp grass that stretched between the garage and the house. She set the child down, and Louisa, though her face was still red and her eyes swollen from crying, began batting at a sodden dandelion with the wooden spoon.

Margot crouched beside her in the thin sunshine, watching, and remembering.

She had been older, of course. Ten years old, and not as resilient as a one-year-old. Preston had pushed her, and she had careened down the stairs, banging her head, bruising both knees, wrenching her back. It wasn’t the first time her brother had hurt her, but she had been really frightened that day, trembling and crying. Blake had swept her up into his strong arms and carried her up to her bedroom. She saw, on his face, that he understood how dangerous it could have been. Blake was frightened, too, and deeply angry, but he was as powerless as Margot herself.

Her younger brother had been a constant shadow over her childhood. In her adulthood, just the year before, he had tried and almost succeeded in killing her. For this offense he would spend his life in confinement.

Little Louisa Benedict, with her pale hair and ice-blue eyes, looked so much like Preston had as a child that it made Margot’s heart ache with remembered misery.

Louisa glanced up at that moment, and smiled at her aunt. It was such a comical expression, at odds with her puffy eyes and tearstained cheeks, that Margot laughed, and put out her hand to caress the child’s towhead. “Darling girl,” she murmured. “Auntie Margot loves you. And so does Uncle Frank.”

“Fa!” the child proclaimed.

“Yes, Fa,” Margot agreed. She pulled her skirt up over her knees so she could settle cross-legged onto the grass to savor the sunshine, the scent of roses, and the company of pure innocence. Her skirt would be wet, but she didn’t care. “What will you call me, I wonder, when you get around to it?”

“Fa!” Louisa announced again.

Margot rested her elbows on her knees, and her chin on her hands. It was lovely to be doing nothing but watch a child trying to dig a dandelion out of the lawn. “Louisa,” Margot said.

The child looked up, her eyes as merry now as if nothing untoward had taken place. “Sa!” she agreed. She held up the wooden spoon. “Poon! Sa, poon!”

Margot chuckled. “Close enough, darling. Before you know it you’ll be ordering us all about, I imagine, and we’ll yearn for the days when your vocabulary consisted of ten words.”

She felt, rather than heard, Blake’s approach. He stood a short distance away, not speaking, until she said, without looking away from the child, “Has everything settled down in there?”

“Yes, Dr. Margot, I think so,” he said, a smile in his voice. “But Nurse is terribly worried.”

“For Louisa, or for her job?”

“I feel confident it’s for the baby. In my observation, she seems devoted to the little one.”

“That’s good. I gather the maids aren’t fond of Nurse.”

“No, she’s not a friendly sort. She keeps mostly to the nursery, but that’s her job, isn’t it? And it’s why she’s so upset now.”

“You can reassure her. Louisa’s in perfect health.” She sighed, and pushed herself up to stand. “As you can see!”

Louisa, her face intent, had reversed the spoon to try working on the dandelion with its handle. Blake said, “Miss Louisa, the roses need weeding, if you’re in the mood.”

The little girl looked up at him, and said, very seriously, “Bake.”

“Yes, miss,” he answered gravely, only the twitch of his lips giving away his amusement. “Bake.” He bowed from the waist. “At your service.”

She nodded, accepting this, and went back to her task. Blake said, “You used to call me Bake, Dr. Margot. Until you were about three, I think. Once you realized there was a missing letter, you never did that again.” He twinkled at her. “I miss that.”

She smiled. “So now you have another child to fuss over.”

“A great blessing,” he said. “But children always are.”

“Oh, Blake,” Margot said, shaking her head. “I wish that were true.”

“You’re thinking of the Ryther Home.”

“All those orphans and abandoned children! It’s unthinkable.”

“Mrs. Ryther is an astonishing woman.”

“Yes, she is,” Margot said fervently. “Difficult, and cantankerous, but astonishing.”

She watched Louisa push herself up, first sticking her diapered bottom in the air, then coming unsteadily to her feet. Her plump hands grasped Margot’s skirt, and she felt the waistband stretch until she feared the button would pop off. She bent to pick up the child, and as she settled her on one hip, she thought she understood now why mothers did that. Frank held Louisa differently, high on his chest, cradling her with his prosthetic arm.

Louisa grasped a strand of her hair, and tugged on it as if she didn’t know it was attached. Wincing, Margot laughed. “I think this little rascal could come inside now.”

“I’ll let Nurse know.” Blake turned, and preceded them up onto the porch and through the back door into the kitchen. Margot, following, noticed how little weight he was putting on his cane. Perhaps, she thought, he could lay it aside soon. The thought of his full recovery, when he had been so terribly ill, filled her with pride. He had saved her so many times. He had been her rock through adversity. It was deeply satisfying to have helped him in return.

Margot stood at the bottom of the stairs to watch the nurse, still pale with worry, carry Louisa off. Louisa peeked over the nurse’s shoulder, her blue eyes full of light and life, and Margot gave her a farewell wave. When the two of them reached the landing and disappeared down the corridor, Margot stood a moment longer, gazing into empty space. She had just remembered the little boy at the Ryther Home.

Impatiently, she shook her head. The child’s resemblance to Louisa—and thus to Preston—was purely coincidental. It had to be.

C
HAPTER
6

Bronwyn dreamed, as she so often had in the past three years, of Preston, and of the magical summer night she had met him in the garden behind Morgan House. The gentle lapping of the waves on the beach and the chittering of invisible night birds created the perfect accompaniment for their assignation. It had all felt preordained. Natural. Inevitable.

In her dreams she was sixteen again, melting with desire. Preston was golden, his eyes luminous in the starlight. She had sneaked out of her bedroom in haste, wearing only her nightdress and dressing gown, summoned by a dash of pebbles against her window. In a pair of soft slippers, she crept through the sleeping house. The kitchen door creaked once, but it was the only betraying sound, and no one roused.

Preston was waiting for her on the stone bench beneath the climbing rose, and when she appeared, he rose, and gazed at her for a long moment. She stood very still, aware of starlight on her cheeks and her freshly brushed hair lifting in the salt-scented breeze. Her heartbeat fluttered in her throat, and her breathing was quick and shallow.

She imagined this was the moment he would step forward, take her hand, and drop to one knee. He would beg her to be his bride, and then, when she gave tearful assent, he would rise and kiss her, embrace her tenderly, carefully, as if she were almost too fragile to touch.

It hadn’t been like that, of course. He had certainly taken her hand. He had drawn her to him and kissed her, his mouth firm and warm on hers. He hadn’t knelt, nor had he spoken a single word. He pulled her tight against him, surprising her with the pressure of his body against hers. He kissed her throat, and pulled her nightdress aside to kiss her shoulder, and then, his mouth more demanding at every moment, her breast.

Bronwyn had trembled with longing, though she didn’t know what it was she longed for. When he drew her down to the damp grass, and ran his hands oh-so-gently beneath her nightdress, touching parts of her body she had never exposed to anyone in her life, she gasped in surprise and confusion.

She didn’t understand what was happening, but whatever it was, it was exquisite. Intoxicating. Her flesh was eager, unresisting. She had never been kissed beyond a peck on the cheek. She had never seen—much less felt—a man’s unclothed body. It was both awful and wonderful, terrifying and irresistible. She was shocked, and at the same time overwhelmed by the sweetness, the luxuriousness of indulging her body’s wishes.

The one moment of pain, a sharp tearing within her body, was quickly lost in other sensations, all of them new, all of them compelling. She couldn’t have stopped if she had wanted to. Her body was in control, urging her on. This, she thought, was love, and it stunned her with its power. Every moment was a new discovery, an unexpected delight, and the culmination swept her up in its perfect sense of completion.

It was no wonder no one spoke of this great mystery. It must be natural to guard a secret so profound, a pleasure so vast and splendid. When it was over, she lay in Preston’s embrace, tears of release on her cheeks. Her hair tangled in the grass, and as her breathing slowed and eased, she gazed up into a meadow of stars, and thought that no night could be more perfect than this enchanted one.

In her dreams, Bronwyn relived that night in aching detail, right up until the moment of fulfillment. That was when she invariably woke, frustrated, burning with hunger for something now denied to her forever.

She lay staring out past her lacy curtains at the marine layer building above the Sound. Why did she dream so often of a single night? Why didn’t she have nightmares about all that followed?

She had been certain, after that night in the summer darkness, that Preston would come to speak to her father. Surely no one could share such moments, bare themselves so completely to each other, without being truly in love. She pictured her suitor on the doorstep with roses in his hands. She fantasized about showing off her engagement ring to her friends, the first of their circle to be betrothed. She waited for Preston all the next day, and then the next. She turned to the window a thousand times, watching the street for his black motorcar.

A week passed, and when he didn’t come, she bought issues of the
Seattle Daily Times,
searching for clues in “Seattle Razz.” She learned only that he was busy, going to parties and teas and fashion shows at Frederick & Nelson, reporting on styles, gossip, society events.

Her engagement hadn’t materialized. The week turned into two, then three. She wrestled with herself, wondering if he had somehow forgotten where she lived. Perhaps he didn’t know she had a telephone in her house. If he were ill, would the paper report it?

It wasn’t possible that he didn’t long to see her as she longed to see him. It was beyond her comprehension, after what had passed between them, that she should be forgotten.

She agonized over everything that had happened, turning over the details in her mind, struggling to understand. Had she done something wrong, something that disappointed him? She couldn’t talk to Bessie or Clara, because they didn’t know any more than she did about such matters. She couldn’t talk to her mother, because Iris would only scold her for slipping out to meet her young man without a chaperone.

Bronwyn took to walking endlessly along the beach below her house, yearning across the waters of the Sound, where the steamships chugged majestically toward Seattle. Somewhere, there, Preston lived in Benedict Hall, the finest mansion on Millionaire’s Row. She pictured it as a castle, with turrets and towers and a great hall. There, across the water, he was being driven around by his Negro chauffeur, going to the newspaper offices to write his witty pieces, being served tea and cakes in the parlors of elegant women.

As the weeks wore away, Bronwyn felt her dream fading into the distance, the way the steamships grew smaller and smaller until they disappeared over the horizon. Nothing gave her joy, neither her dance classes nor her friends’ company, neither shopping outings with her mother, nor the copies of
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar
that arrived in the mail. When she started being sick in the mornings, she thought it must be heartbreak that made her stomach churn. She hid her morning bouts of vomiting from her mother as best she could. The maid, Betty Jones, eyed her oddly, but Bronwyn ordered her out of her room, and told no one anything.

When her breasts began to swell and grow tender, she thought she must be really ill. It wasn’t until she realized she hadn’t had her curse in three months that she began to suspect. Bronwyn was ignorant, but she wasn’t stupid. Such symptoms meant something.

On a hot September morning, as she was dressing before her mirror, she froze, gazing in horror at her midsection. Her tummy was no longer flat. It curved outward, as if she had swallowed something enormous. It reminded her of a picture she had seen once of a python that had swallowed a rat, thin along its whole length except for the place the rat was stuck. She knew very little about how bodies worked, but she had seen pregnant women. Was that what the sweetness was about? Was it because of this swelling of the belly, and the dreadful outcome, that it was kept secret?

She had never gone to a doctor on her own. Her mother always took her, and stayed beside her during the examination. Her mother answered the doctor’s questions for her, and accepted medicine on her behalf. It was no different for Bessie and Clara. None of them had ever questioned it. If she tried to go on her own, now, the doctor would only insist on talking to her parents.

What was she to do? She pulled on her chemise to cover the swelling of her belly, and dressed herself in a loose cotton frock and her lightest stockings. She didn’t feel sick this morning, but hungry, ravenously hungry, hungry enough to put aside, for the moment, the anxiety that made her heart race. She felt as if a battle were going on in her body, her stomach and her heart at odds, a battle she was going to lose no matter what she did. She took up a hat and a pair of summer-weight gloves, and set off down the stairs for breakfast. Whatever it was that had taken over her stomach would have it no other way.

Cook had made a summer meal of soft-boiled eggs, fresh rolls, and a huge bowl of blackberries. Even looking at the blackberries made Bronwyn’s mouth water. She felt as if she couldn’t get enough of them, refilling her cut-glass bowl twice before she was done.

“Goodness, dear,” her mother said. “Be careful of too much fruit. You know what it does to you.”

“Yes, Mother,” Bronwyn said. She pushed the bowl aside, and replaced it with her eggcup.

Her mother eyed the gloves and hat waiting on the sideboard. “Are you going somewhere, dear?”

Bronwyn, as she cracked the eggshell with her spoon, said, “Yes. The library.”

Iris nodded approval. “Excellent idea. It’s going to be so hot today, and it’s always cool in the library.”

To forestall her mother’s deciding to come along, Bronwyn said, “Bessie and Clara are going to meet me there.”

“Oh, good. That sounds very nice, dear. Let me give you some money, and you girls can go to the soda fountain afterward.”

Bronwyn felt a quiver of compunction at her mother’s generosity, but it was nothing to the fear that gripped her anew now that her hunger was appeased. She accepted fifty cents, and dropped it into her little cloth handbag before she gathered up her gloves and hat, kissed her mother’s cheek, and set off down the hill.

It was terribly hot already, though it was only midmorning. The blackberries settled, heavy and cold, deep into her belly, but her head felt light and far above the rest of her body, as if it might disengage from her shoulders and go floating off into the blazing blue sky. She walked slowly, reluctance dragging at her steps. She trudged up the stone stairs of the Carnegie Library and pulled open the heavy door.

She moved gingerly through the shadowed stacks, passing the fiction sections she was accustomed to, peering at the titles in aisles she had never visited before. The shelves were packed with dusty tomes in forbidding colors of brown and burgundy and rusty black. Their titles made little sense to her, long names with words she barely recognized.

She didn’t dare ask the librarian for assistance. Miss Claymore kept a critical eye on the selections Bronwyn and her friends made, and refused to check out anything she deemed inappropriate. Any book that explained the mystery Bronwyn was trying to solve was certain not to meet with Miss Claymore’s approval.

Bronwyn understood that the Dewey decimal system organized books by topic, but she wasn’t sure how to refine her search. Wandering, frowning up at the shelves, she stumbled upon a section that appeared to contain medical texts. For twenty minutes she browsed in that area, pulling down a text here and there to try to make sense of the table of contents, but without success. At the end of one shelf was a stack of yellowing pamphlets, and she leafed through them, reading titles like
Social Hygiene
and
Path to Purity, a Handbook for Young People
. She opened one or two, encouraged by their covers, but the language inside was so oblique that they told her very little.

She tidied the stack, and replaced it. She felt bleary from breathing dust, and after feeling heated by the walk up Lawrence Street, she now felt as chilled as if she had walked into Aldrich’s meat locker. She stood for a moment, one trembling hand pressed to her swelling stomach, and told herself it didn’t matter. Books weren’t going to help her. Though she was mystified by exactly how it had happened, she was In Trouble.

It was the way they spoke of it, she and Bessie and Clara, and their mothers, too. Being In Trouble meant that a girl would disappear for a time, always with a lame excuse of visiting family or going abroad, explanations no one believed. It meant older women whispering behind their hands, falling silent when young girls came into the room. Once Bronwyn had asked her mother about it, and Iris Morgan had said firmly, “Nice girls don’t need to know about such things.”

“Wasn’t Patricia a nice girl?”

“I thought so once,” Iris had said primly. “Not anymore.”

Patricia was the eldest daughter of the baker in Port Townsend, someone who had often served Bronwyn and her mother from behind the counter. Bronwyn had admired her masses of black hair and her plump cheeks, always rosy from the ovens. One day Patricia had mysteriously vanished from the town, and Bronwyn had been forbidden to ask about her when she and her mother stopped to buy cinnamon rolls.

Bronwyn never learned what changed Patricia from a Nice Girl to one who was In Trouble, but Clara whispered that she was sent away because she was going to have a baby. The two of them had wondered how that could come about, since Patricia wasn’t married. Neither of them knew the answer, and they had no one they could ask.

Bronwyn realized, on that burning September day, that it was she who was no longer a Nice Girl. Her dreams were not coming true after all. Rather, the opposite had happened. She was ruined.

The mystery now, almost three years later, was why she didn’t dream of all of that. She remembered it clearly enough. There were those awful moments of understanding, of confession, of her mother’s stunned tears and her father’s outrage. She had thought she might die of misery when her father ruled that she would not be allowed—not even after it was all over—to study dance at the Cornish School. She was allowed to write a single letter to Preston Benedict. She received no reply.

Reading of Preston’s death, in the fire that destroyed his sister’s medical clinic, was a waking nightmare. She couldn’t bear to read the tragic reports in the
Times,
although her mother did, and told her all about them. She spent most of her pregnancy in a Vancouver hotel, facing her mother’s disappointment every single day. She suffered a long, difficult delivery, and when it was over, nothing was left to her.