The Benedict Bastard (A Benedict Hall Novel) (8 page)

The murmuring grew clearer as he approached the open door. Once or twice a little gasp punctuated its flow, as if someone had been surprised. Or was weeping.

He eased the door open with his fingertips. It was Edith in Preston’s bedroom, whispering to herself as she opened and closed drawers in the bureau that stood opposite the window. The gasps were tiny, muffled sobs, which seemed to escape without her knowing it. Small tears lay on her cheeks, their flow obstructed by a thin layer of face powder. Her mouth, pale and trembling, was a little swollen, as if she had been crying for some time.

Frank spoke with all the gentleness he could muster. “Mother Benedict? Is everything all right?”

She looked up, her pale blue eyes widening and her cheeks flushing beneath her cosmetics. Her hand flew to her throat as if she had been caught doing something shameful. “Oh!” she said. “Oh! Major!”

Frank stepped into the room, but slowly. He felt as if she might startle and flee, like a doe caught nibbling rose hips in the garden. “Surely,” he said, “you could call me Frank now? I’d like that.”

“Oh!” she said again. Her eyes were unfocused, as if she had been someplace else entirely. She gazed at him as if she couldn’t quite place him or understand what he was saying.

Frank took in the small piles of clothes on the neatly made bed, and a brocade traveling bag lying beside them. “You must be sending some things to the sanitarium,” he said.

“Taking,” she said in a voice both faint and insistent. “I’m taking them.”

Frank couldn’t think what to say to her. He hadn’t heard anything of a trip, though the Sunset Highway across Snoqualmie Pass had been clear of snow for some weeks now. He said, awkwardly, “When are you going, Mother Benedict?”

“Soon,” she said. “I’m going very soon.”

“Will Blake be driving you?”

Her eyes, wide and blue, came up to his. “Blake? Oh, no. I don’t want to go with Blake.” Frank gave a little shake of his head, not understanding. She said, “Train. I’m going by train. Preston needs—” She gestured toward the suitcase. “He needs clothes. Brushes. Some things to make him more comfortable.”

“I see.” Frank thought it probably wasn’t his place to argue with her. In a way, it was good to see her with a bit of energy. He decided the best thing was to tell Margot, or even to speak to his father-in-law. “Do you need help?”

“Oh, no, dear, thank you.” She didn’t look up again, but opened another drawer. She took out a stack of linen collars, something Frank was sure Preston would have no use for where he was. Edith laid them on the bed beside the valise, and Frank, following her movements, saw the antique sapphire glimmering from the dark lining of the case.

He hadn’t seen it since the day he watched Margot bury it in the wet concrete of the footings of her clinic. He knew Preston had dug it out, taking a chunk of concrete with it. Preston had used it to send Margot the message that had almost gotten her killed.

Frank’s nerves jumped at the memory. Involuntarily, he glanced down at his left hand, the Carnes hand, where the scoring from the straight razor still showed in the hard fiber of the palm. He could have replaced the hand for an unmarked one, but he didn’t want to. He had said to Margot that bodies bear the scars of their experiences, and this hand—rubber and leather and metal—was part of his body now. It was part of his life.

He hadn’t seen the sapphire again, not then, nor in the year he had lived in Benedict Hall. He pointed to the valise, forgetting to speak gently to his mother-in-law. “Mother Benedict, you don’t want to take that thing to Preston. It’s better if he never sees it again.”

She was just turning back to the bureau, but she stopped. Her hands were empty, and they hung beside her as if she had forgotten what she meant to do. “That thing?” she whispered.

Frank took two long strides forward, and plucked the fist-sized scrap of cement out of the valise. The sapphire, half buried in its jagged surface, glowed in the afternoon light. “This,” Frank said tightly, “should be disposed of. Someplace where no one has to see it again.”

“Oh, no, dear,” Edith said faintly. “We can’t do that. Preston asked for it particularly.”

“Mother Benedict.” Frank drew a steadying breath, and forced himself to speak more quietly. “This isn’t good for Preston. He imagines it has—well, that it has—” He couldn’t think how to express it, though he knew well enough. Preston believed the sapphire—the
damned
sapphire, as Frank thought of it—had power. Magic, or something like it. It was part of his delusion, one of the symptoms of his derangement. Frank wished he had known the sapphire was here, in Preston’s bedroom. He would have happily stolen it, smashed it, made it disappear forever.

Edith lifted her gaze to Frank’s face. “He needs it. He says it helps him, and I promised.”

“Why would he need it? Have you told Margot?”

Her eyes narrowed, and he saw determination in the set of her delicate chin, in the drawing together of her painted eyebrows. “Of course I haven’t told Margot. She opposes anything Preston wants.” She glanced away then, as if recalling to whom she was speaking. “They never got along,” she murmured, “not even as children. I tried to help, but it was no good.”

Frank could see she was attempting to be diplomatic. He did his best to respond in kind. “Yes. It’s in the past now, though. I wish we could just get rid of this thing. I don’t think it’s any help to anyone.”

She moved to the bureau, keeping her face averted. She ran her slender fingers across the things arranged on its top, Preston’s things, kept in perfect order, just as he had left them. “I don’t know why it helps him, Major, but if he thinks so, then . . .”

“It’s just a stone, Mother Benedict. An old, old jewel.”

“Yes. He told me the story.”

“Story?” Frank hadn’t heard a story, and he didn’t think Margot had, either.

“The sapphire belonged to a queen, hundreds of years ago. Someone Preston studied, I think. She was a slave who became the wife of the sultan. Preston said the sapphire was her power, and he believes it kept him safe through the war.” She glanced at him over her shoulder, her chin slightly dropped, looking up from beneath her brows in a way that made her look sly. “You know what the war was like, Frank.”

“I do.” He was careful to speak without inflection, but even thinking of it made the stump of his arm throb.

“For Preston, it was terrible. He’s always been sensitive.”

Frank tried to keep the disbelief from his face. Preston had never been sensitive, except perhaps in the case of his mother. He was—there was only one word in Frank’s vocabulary to describe Preston Benedict—a monster.

His mother-in-law sniffed once, dismissively. “I don’t expect you to understand. I may be the only person in his whole life who understands him.”

Obliquely, not sure what else he could say, Frank said, “I’m sorry.”

“Yes.” She opened another drawer, scanned it, and closed it again. “Yes, I’m sorry, too.”

At a loss, Frank moved back to the door, and stood a moment watching as Edith began packing things neatly into the leather valise, smoothing and folding and tucking. She appeared to have forgotten all about him, and not knowing what else he could do, he left her to it.

Frank hadn’t made the trip to Walla Walla when Preston was transferred there from Steilacoom. Margot had gone, and her father. Margot reported the place was quite respectable, clean, even attractive. It wasn’t meant to be a mental hospital, much less a prison, but Dickson brooked no arguments about it. He had declared that he couldn’t live with the idea of his son spending the rest of his life in a state asylum. He paid a staggering price to ensure that Preston was kept safe, never allowed out of his room without a guard, never permitted to mingle with other patients.

Edith, evidently, didn’t see Preston’s confinement as a punishment. As Frank retreated down the corridor, he heard her whispered monologue resume, about dressing for dinner, about cuff links and tiepins, about handkerchiefs. He heard a single sob as he went into his own rooms. He paused, and glanced back, but he couldn’t think of anything he could do that would help her.

The only good thing about Edith knowing where Preston was, he thought, was that it had stopped her visiting the cemetery. In the year she had believed her son was dead, she had made regular trips to kneel on Preston’s empty grave, to lay flowers before the headstone engraved with his name.

It was like something out of Poe. Imagining the scene made Frank shudder. He was happier than ever to be headed out to Sand Point to fly an airplane.

C
HAPTER
8

Iris presented Bronwyn with a new dress, ordered in secret from Frederick & Nelson in Seattle. It was prêt-à-porter, but Bronwyn was so slender now—at least five pounds lighter than she had been when she first met Preston—that it fit like a glove. It was a pretty peach organdy over a cream silk slip, with a white taffeta sash that skimmed her narrow hips. The bodice was loose, with transparent puff sleeves, and Iris had ordered peach cotton gloves to match. There was a cream straw hat with a drooping brim and one small, elegant, peach-colored rosette on the band. Iris was so delighted with the whole ensemble, and so eager to see Bronwyn wear it, that Bronwyn couldn’t refuse her. She accepted Clara’s invitation despite her misgivings.

Clara’s little house was nearly invisible behind huge rhododendrons and sprawling hydrangeas. Bronwyn and her mother knocked on the blue-painted door, and were admitted by the maid, Clara’s only servant.

“I like it that way,” Clara had told Bronwyn, after she was first married. “I can trust Lola not to tell Robert every single thing that happens.” Lola curtsied as she admitted the two Morgan ladies into the small, airy hallway, and gestured toward the back of the house, where the tea was taking place on the narrow brick patio.

Clara was sitting at a round table covered with a white linen cloth, with a plate of finger sandwiches and a pitcher of lemonade in the center. She was pouring tea from a silver pot, but she jumped up when she saw them, nearly upsetting the tea service. “Bronwyn! Mrs. Morgan!” she cried. “I’m so glad you could come!”

As if nothing had ever changed, as if they were still equals, Clara flew across the patio in a flutter of champagne lace, one hand on her wide-brimmed hat to keep it from falling off. She shook Iris’s hand, then embraced Bronwyn, and kissed her cheek. Bronwyn smiled at her, and blinked away the sting of tears at her friend’s show of loyalty. Clara took her hand as she led them both toward the table, where several other Port Townsend matrons were seated. They wore pastel dresses and straw hats in every shape and color, and against the backdrop of green shrubbery they looked like flowers arranged to catch the sun.

“Look, everyone!” Clara exclaimed, drawing Bronwyn forward. “You remember Mrs. Iris Morgan, don’t you? She has that marvelous house on Monroe, the one at the top of the hill. And her daughter, Bronwyn, one of my oldest friends.”

Two of the young women had begun to smile, and lift their gloved hands in greeting, but when Clara spoke Bronwyn’s name, their smiles faded. Their hands dropped hastily to their laps like fluttering birds. An older woman, perhaps Iris’s age, made a noise in her throat, and turned her head away. Bessie and her mother were present, but neither gave any greeting, nor did Bessie show in any way that she recognized her old chum.

It was every bit as bad as Bronwyn had feared. None of the women spoke. They stared at them, both Iris and Bronwyn, as if they were aliens. As if poor Clara, with the best of intentions, had invited two of the soiled doves who worked the alleys of Water Street to sit down to tea.

Bronwyn’s stomach clenched beneath her taffeta sash. She felt her mother stiffen beside her, and she wanted to seize her arm and drag her away, but Clara was not giving in. She pulled out chairs for them, sent Lola to fetch more plates, brightly pressed them to have tea or lemonade, and commenced a stream of chatter, doing her heroic best to disguise the unfriendly atmosphere.

Bronwyn’s embarrassment transformed, in the face of her friend’s efforts, to cold anger. Perhaps she deserved this treatment, but her mother didn’t, nor did Clara. It was unfair. It was rude. Every woman at this table had been brought up to be courteous, no matter what. She knew that, because her own upbringing had taught her the same.

Bronwyn fixed Bessie with an icy stare. She said, when Clara paused for breath in her brave monologue, “Bessie. Clara tells me you and Frederick are engaged. Congratulations.”

There was little Bessie could do when addressed so directly. She said, “Thank you.”

Bronwyn persisted. “Have you set the wedding date? Chosen your dress?”

“No.”

A chill silence settled over the gathering, at odds with the brilliant sunshine, the cheerful birdsong from the surrounding trees, the bright gleam of the water in the distance. Lola came back with a fresh pitcher of lemonade, and spent a few moments refilling glasses. An older woman spoke to another woman, but their conversation lagged, and soon it was quiet again.

Bronwyn’s heart began to pound as if she had run all the way from Monroe Street. She pressed her hand to her chest, where she could feel the racing of her heartbeat beneath her fingers. She said, very clearly, “Clara, it was kind of you to invite us. I’ve missed you.” She rose, lifting her chair from the back so it wouldn’t catch on the bricks of the patio. Iris, her face bleak with shame, stood up as well. Her lips trembled, and she pressed one gloved hand over her mouth.

Clara jumped up. “Oh, Bronwyn—Mrs. Morgan—don’t go yet, please! Surely . . .” Her voice trailed off, and her cheeks flared scarlet. “I wish . . .” she tried, but again, the words wouldn’t come.

Bronwyn embraced her. “Never mind, darling,” she said. She spoke lightly, but in a voice meant to carry. “You can’t be responsible for other people’s behavior.”

As Clara hugged her back, Bronwyn reflected that her words could be interpreted in different ways. No doubt some of the ladies present would think it was her own behavior she was apologizing for. She put her hand under her mother’s arm. Side by side, they crossed the patio to the back door. Lola met them, holding the door open for them to pass through, frowning in confusion at their early departure.

From the shadow of the hallway, Bronwyn turned, and blew a kiss to Clara as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Not until she and her mother were safely away, walking through the hot sunshine toward the haven of their own home, did she let her tears fall. Her mother’s did, too, and the two of them arrived home weeping helplessly into their handkerchiefs.

 

“You see how it is, Mother,” Bronwyn said tiredly.

“It will pass,” Iris said, but even her dogged hopefulness was beginning to fade. “They’ll forget, and things can go back—”

“Mother!” Bronwyn leaned forward to cover her mother’s hand with hers. They had changed places, Bronwyn reflected. Her mother was now the child and she, Bronwyn, the adult. She was the one who could no longer deny the harsh ways of the world. Her mother still clung to the illusions created by her wealth and her position. She maintained her faith in the rules of society, no matter how dismally they had failed her.

They were alone in their own garden now, safe behind a hedge of rhododendrons. The blooms were spent, but the boughs were thick and dark, with glossy green leaves. Snapdragons and fuchsias crowded a border at the edge of the garden, and hummingbirds, gay and industrious, flashed in and out of their blossoms. Bronwyn watched the tiny birds, but she was oblivious to their charm. “Mother, things will never go back. You have to know that by now.”

“Oh, Bronwyn. Sweetheart.” Fresh tears, the tears Bronwyn thought were past for the day, darkened Iris’s eyes, muddying their flecks of gold. “I just can’t bear it!” she sobbed.

“You’ve been wonderful,” Bronwyn said. She pressed her hand over her mother’s. “No daughter could have hoped for a better mother through all of this.”

Iris cried, “I still don’t understand! I thought he was a
gentleman
.”

“A gentleman would have answered my letter. And whatever he might have intended, he’s gone now.”

Iris sniffled, and wiped her eyes. “I still think, if the Benedicts knew—if they understood that there was going to be—”

“A baby. You might as well say it. There was a baby.”

“Yes. A baby.” She blew her nose delicately. “Your father had decided he should write to them himself, but then we read about the fire. There seemed to be no point.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” Bronwyn said.

“I wanted to keep him,” Iris said, so softly Bronwyn wasn’t sure she had heard properly.

“What?” Iris shook her head, but Bronwyn pressed her. “Mother? What did you say?”

Iris looked away, and for long moments she was silent. Then, as if giving in to an impulse, she blurted, “I wanted to keep the baby.”

“You did?
My
baby?”

Her mother nodded, still not meeting her gaze. “I thought we could say he was mine.”

“You never told me this!”

“I mentioned it to Chesley once. He was so angry I thought he might actually—well, he probably wouldn’t have, but I . . .” She broke off, shaking her head, dabbing again at her eyes.

Bronwyn sagged back against the scrolled iron bench, so that a trailing branch of rhododendron caught at her hair. She brushed it away, and closed her eyes. “I know what Daddy’s like when he’s angry.”

“Yes. But he knows best, of course.”

“Does he, Mother?”

“Of course he does, Bronwyn! You’ll understand that when you have a husband of your own, a family—”

“Why should the husband make all the decisions? It’s not fair. It’s not even logical!”

“It’s just the way it is, dear. And so I had to—that is, we had to—let him go.”

“He might have been with us all this time. Growing. Happy!”

“Chesley said people would never believe he was ours. That they would know.”

“They know anyway! So what good did that do?”

Iris tried to stifle the sob that rose in her throat. In a choking voice, she said, “I did the best I could, Bronwyn. I was raised to respect my husband’s wishes, and so I always have.”

Bronwyn knew she should let it go, that it did no good to hurt her mother any more, but she couldn’t help herself. She opened her eyes, and gazed sorrowfully at the bright water below the hill. “Poor little baby. Out there in the world, and we have no idea what became of him.”

“Oh, we do. At least I think we do.”

Bronwyn started, and turned to stare at her mother. “We do?
You
do?”

Iris was plucking at a rhododendron leaf, tearing it into shreds and flicking the bits from her lap. “He’s my grandson, Bronwyn,” she said softly. “I couldn’t bear sending him off without some—some accommodation for his welfare.”

“Accommodation?”

Iris lifted her eyes, and Bronwyn nearly gasped at the pain in her face. “I knew there was a good orphanage in Seattle. Run by this wonderful woman; everyone knows about her. Your father made a big contribution to their new building—buying bricks, they called it, but really, it’s part of the building fund—in exchange for their promise to take the baby in.”

There was a click as Mrs. Andrew opened the kitchen window above their heads, but Bronwyn paid no attention. She was gazing in breathless shock at her mother’s pained expression. “Mother! My baby’s in Seattle?”

“Well, he was. As an infant, at least.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Chesley said you didn’t need to know. That it was better if you didn’t.”

“But all this time—I’ve worried and worried . . .”

“I don’t think you have to worry,” Iris said, but doubtfully. “Mrs. Ryther is supposed to be very good about placing children in loving homes.”

“Who’s Mrs. Ryther?”

“She runs the orphanage.”

“In Seattle.”

Iris crumbled the remains of the leaf, and let them drop from her fingers. “Yes. The baby might not be there anymore, though. He’s probably been adopted by a wonderful family.”

“Or an awful one,” Bronwyn said.

Iris shuddered. “Don’t say that, Bronwyn. Oh, please, please don’t say that. I have to think the best.”

Bronwyn didn’t answer. From the open kitchen window came a clatter of china bowls being carelessly stacked. Bronwyn tipped her head back to look up and caught sight of Mrs. Andrew’s dour face peeking out at the two of them. “She’s listening to us, Mother,” she said. “Mrs. Andrew. Snooping again.”

“It doesn’t matter, Bronwyn. She knows all about it.”

Bronwyn brought her gaze back to her mother’s face. “Why? Why should she know?”

“There were letters. Telephone calls. It was just easier to tell her.”

“She bullies you.”

Iris breathed a long sigh, and her eyes reddened again. “I know.”

“So does Daddy.”

Iris, pressing her lips together to hold back a fresh sob, just shrugged.

Bronwyn looked away, down to the green, restless waters of the Sound. An idea was forming in her mind. It was the first clear idea, the only real desire, she had had in a very long time, but she couldn’t share it with her mother. She didn’t dare.

 

The railroad meant to connect Port Townsend with Olympia, and thereby Portland and Seattle, had progressed no more than a mile before the funds ran out. That failure left the city at the mercy of the private boats known as the Mosquito Fleet. The bigger ones, especially those that carried automobiles, offered regular service three days a week. Smaller ones mostly showed up at the docks when it pleased them, unless someone of importance booked passage. When Bronwyn went to Seattle with her mother to shop, they rode in comfort on one of the big boats. Now she would have to take one of the little ones, but they frightened her.

She lived in a seacoast town, and she had been listening to tales of sea disasters since she was a tiny girl. Steamers sank, wood-fueled boilers caused fires, the new diesel engines exploded. Only a few years before, the Colman Dock in Seattle had collapsed, plunging ferry passengers into Elliott Bay. A child and a woman had drowned.

Bronwyn told herself drowning could hardly be worse than childbirth, and laid her plans.

She pulled her old valise down from the top of her wardrobe. A musty smell emanated from its stained interior, and she found a handkerchief and a shawl she had left there from her trip to Vancouver. It stunned her to think she had gone nowhere since then, not taken a single journey that required her to pack a bag. While she rummaged in her bureau for the things she would need, she set the valise beneath the open window to air.