The Warlock's Curse (6 page)

“But I have a letter from him!” she added brightly, as if that made up for everything. Which it didn’t, but Ben was great at writing letters: breezy, fascinating and suggestive. Ben wrote very interestingly about things that weren’t very interesting. His letters were like cotton-candy. They were thrilling and sweet, and you could eat a whole lot, but when you got right down to it there really wasn’t much there. And if you ate too much, you’d probably get sick.

Of course, Will had been able to form his opinions only from the bits and pieces of Ben’s letters that other family members shared with him, because Ben had never written him. Not a single solitary word. Ever.

Will, on the other hand, wrote to Ben quite often, in care of the famous Stanton Institute in New York City, where Ben had been employed for many years. He wrote him about his life, his disappointments, his hopes. He came to think of his letters to Ben almost like a kind of diary. You wrote in it, you shared secrets with it, but you never expected it to give anything in return. Still, Will had asked Ma’am about it once, asked why she reckoned Ben never wrote him back.

“He’s probably just thinking of what to say,” she’d said. “Someday you’ll hear from him.”

Will doubted it. And Ben’s failure to show up at Thanksgiving seemed only to confirm that suspicion. Even so, writing to Ben had become an ingrained habit, and Will was already thinking of what he would write about the girl who was rolling biscuits. Ma’am smiled slyly when she saw how scrupulously Will was avoiding looking at their guest.

“Don’t you two remember each other?” she asked, adopting a very proper tone. “I guess it
has
been a long time. William Edwards, this is Miss Jenny Hansen. Miss Jenny Hansen, this is my youngest son, William.”

Jenny Hansen smirked, dusting flour off her hands so she could extend one in his direction. Suddenly, Will felt even more suckered than he had by Argus’ car. At least Argus’ car wouldn’t laugh at him.

“Jenny Hansen?” he squeaked. Holy Moses. He
should
have lit out for Pask’s! He wondered if there was still time to escape.

“Of course he doesn’t remember me, Mrs. Edwards,” Jenny said, withdrawing her hand when Will failed to take it. “It’s all those rocks I shied at his head when we were kids.”

“I remember you,
Scuff.
” He used the nickname he’d given her years ago, a testament to her perpetually scraped knees. “It’s just I remember you all scrawny and homely and knock-kneed, and now, well ...” Will trailed off irritably. Damn it, he’d meant it as a dig and it hadn’t come out right at all.

“Hasn’t she gotten pretty?” Ma’am put an arm around Jenny and pressed a little kiss to the side of her forehead. “She and her dad came down from San Francisco with Argus and Laddie.”

Will’s mouth went dry. So
that
was who’d been crammed in the middle seat of Argus’ car—of course! Mr. Dagmar Hansen, one of Ma’am’s oldest friends. How could he have failed to recognize him? He was, after all, probably the largest man Will had ever seen in his life.

It was one thing to see a cute girl and want to get her number; it was quite another to discover that the cute girl was Jenny Hansen, and that her enormous father was on the scene to keep a sharp eye on her interests. Or a sharp eye on anyone else who had his eye on her interests.

“Will, take these out to the table,” Ma’am said, shoving a bowl of mixed nuts into his hands. “Then go say hello to Mr. Hansen. Jenny, finish up those biscuits and then you can run along too, we’ve got plenty of help ...”

Ma’am’s last words were lost as Will made his escape from the kitchen. He sullenly deposited the bowl of nuts onto the groaning table, then braced himself to be sacrificed upon the altar of the Edwards’ family gaiety. His entrance into the family room would be heralded with baying cries of welcome; the joyous cries of predators having sighted a small animal they could harry. Will’s brothers took harrying Will very seriously. They had elevated it to an art form. A late baby, Will was much younger than all of them—Laddie was the closest to him in age, but even he was a whole decade older than Will—so they all felt justified in taking a very stern fatherly tone toward him at the drop of a hat. Having all suffered under their Father’s stern paternal tone, they found it great fun to use on their baby brother. It was like being trapped in a house with multiple Fathers, each of whom could whip him.

The large family room was a ground floor suite just off the garden, originally designed for a resident mother-in-law. There were no mothers-in-law in the Edwards family, but it was said the suite of rooms had been inhabited once by a superannuated Grandpap—the one Nate had been named for. But that old man died long before Will was born, and of him Will knew only that he’d come from up the mountains, and had brought a lot of cats with him, the descendents of which still hunted mice under the grain bins in the barn. After his death, the suite’s sitting room had been set up with sofas and tables, lamps and a piano (usually plied by one of Ma’am’s charity cases, as none of the Edwards family were at all musical)—all the comforts required for a cozy family evening. Books were conspicuous in their absence, but that was because all the books were kept in the next room, Father’s study. The high walls of that sumptuous cave were lined with them, floor to ceiling.

But the door to the study was closed, which meant that Father was presiding within. In the family room, Laddie and Lillian were making themselves comfortable. The only liquor in the Edwards’ house was Father’s old scotch kept under lock and key, so Laddie had withdrawn his own capacious silver flask and was mixing up impromptu cocktails for himself and Lillie. It was whispered among Ma’am’s girls that Lillie was “fast”—she drank and smoked and wore cosmetics (“And not just powder either!” Will remembered one girl’s shocked assertion.) And while Argus was her husband, rumor had it that Laddie was the only one who could keep her in line. Will wondered how a fast, unmanageable wife was supposed to fit into Argus’ expansive political plans; but on the other hand she
was
rich, and her family well-connected, so maybe that outweighed everything else.

“Good afternoon, William!” Laddie drawled, tapping a cigarette against the gold case. “Turned yourself in, have you?”

Laddie was unquestionably the handsomest of the Edward boys, dark and slim and elegant. As usual, he was dressed exquisitely—not in honor of the holiday, but because looking good seemed to be the sole moral imperative he upheld.

“Hullo,” Will mumbled. “Where’s Argus?”

“He’s in with the
men
,” Laddie said archly, nodding toward the library door. By “men,” of course, Laddie meant Father and Mr. Hansen and Uncle Royce. It was clear Laddie did not include himself in that description, nor Nate (whom Will had completely failed to notice brooding in the corner). And certainly not Will.

Will wondered where Ben would stand in that equation. Ben would likely stand outside the equation entirely. Not a man, not a boy ... Ben was like a different species.

“We waited for Ben at Union Station,” Laddie said. He had the most disquieting talent for knowing the drift of his brothers’ thoughts, and voicing them when they otherwise would not have. “But he wasn’t on the train. I suppose he decided against it at the last minute. I must say, I was really hoping for a reconciliation, at least a temporary one. Watching them fight it all out again would have been
such
fun.”

Will said nothing. Ben’s fight with Father was legendary within the family for its rancorous protraction, and in comparison, Will’s own fight with Father was merely a candle held up to the sun. Ma’am had traveled to New York a few times, hoping to effect a reconciliation, but even she had ultimately given up. Ben now existed within the family only on paper, in the extended letters he wrote to everyone but Father and Will.

“Of course, I hear you’re doing your best to step into Ben’s shoes and give us all a wonderful show,” Laddie said, as he handed a freshly-mixed cocktail to Lillie. “I hope you thought up some really good cutting remarks while you were hiding out at Pask de la Guerra’s house. I’m expecting nothing but the best.”

Will didn’t say anything. He knew that the best defense against his brothers was surly silence.

“Speaking of Ben, I had a letter from him just the other day,” Laddie said. “Full of the most scandalous gossip about people I’ve never heard of. He managed to make it more fascinating than scandalous gossip about people I know intimately. I call that quite a skill.”

“Hi, Nate.” Will turned his attention to his brooding brother in the corner. Nate’s arms were crossed and he was staring at the floor, frowning deeply. Nate loved only one thing—horses. Everything else he hated. He hated being inside, he hated wearing clothes that weren’t soiled with manure, and he especially hated being taken away from his chores for something as unproductive as a family gathering.

Nate did not answer, didn’t even look up. After a pause, Will said, “Sorrel mare again?”

Nate nodded, keeping his dark steady gaze fixed on the carpet at his feet. “One of the hands left the bar off the stable again. I swear to God, if I find the man who did it, I’ll have his hide for a new pair of mucking boots. She got down into the south pasture and ate a bellyful of clover and now she’s got the slobbers.”

“I thought clover was good for them,” Lillie said, but her tone indicated that she couldn’t be less interested if she tried.

“Most horses tolerate it fine,” Nate allowed. “But one bite and that poor sorrel goes crazy. We have to put up hay for her special with no clover in it.”

“My goodness, I wish Cook would take that kind of care with our dinners!” Lillie smirked sidelong at Laddie. “I believe she goes out of her way to miss the bones in the fish she serves us.”

If he was Argus and Lillie’s cook, Will mused, he’d probably put extra bones in their fish in the hopes that they’d choke on one. But he refrained from giving voice to this sentiment.

“And no matter how much care Nate takes with that sorrel mare, she still gets into the clover every time,” Laddie looked at Lillie over the rim of his highball glass. “One might come to the conclusion that she hasn’t the slightest idea what’s good for her.”

“Stupid beast,” Lillie said, giving the words strange emphasis. Will had no idea what to make of it. Laddie, on the other hand, knew exactly, and he and Lillie punctuated whatever opaque joke they’d made by clinking their glasses together. Will had never really understood what kind of relationship existed between his two brothers and this woman. Honestly, he was kind of glad he didn’t.

“She’s not stupid,” Nate flared, but not at anyone in particular. Once he’d said it, he turned his eyes back to the carpet and sank deeper into his own thoughts, from which, Will knew, it would be nearly impossible to pull him. Of all his brothers—the brothers he knew, the brothers who were more to him than mere abstraction—Will felt most akin to Nate. They both understood what it was to live with an overwhelming, obsessive interest—Nate for horses, Will for mechanical devices. How those obsessions were received, however, could not have been more different. Because while Nate’s passion was in neat alignment with the family’s interests (or, more to the point,
Father’s
interests, as his renown as a breeder of the finest Morgans on the West Coast was largely due to Nate’s zealous efforts) Father had been able to find no similar value in Will.

“Have you seen Jenny?” Lillie pinned Will with her suggestive green eyes. They were indeed, Will noticed, faintly rimmed with kohl. She rattled the ice in her glass, which was Laddie’s cue to quickly take it from her hand and begin mixing her another.

“Yes, I saw her,” Will said carefully. There was a trap in that question, and he wanted to be ready to jump out of the way.

“She was
so
excited to see you,” Lillie purred. “The little chatterbox was positively bursting with questions about you on the way out.”

“Questions about
me?
” Will frowned, determined not to reveal his interest. If they suspected he cared, the information was sure to be withheld.

“Oh yes,” Lillie said. “But honestly, Will, you mustn’t get your hopes up. She really has to hold out for a partner in a brokerage, at
least
.” She lowered her voice a conspiratorial shade. “Her father has done all right by her, given that he’s just one corked boot out of the mountains. He’s put her into Miss Murison’s, you know, and everyone there seems to just love her. They find her so sprightly and queer and interesting. And so full of
opinions
.” She dangled this last word in front of Laddie with a tantalizing smirk; he rolled his eyes and released an extravagant sigh.

At that moment the door to Father’s library opened, and the men came rumbling out. First through the door were Argus and Uncle Royce, engaged in brisk, close conversation about a political rally scheduled to be held in San Francisco that Sunday—a rally Argus was going to give a speech at, or sell peanuts at, or something. Mr. Hansen and Father followed behind. Mr. Hansen moved with the slow dignity of the rich, amiable, and well fed, still smoking one of the cigars that the “men” had clearly been enjoying in the library. Father limped alongside him with his customary stiffness, his game leg (injured in a long-ago riding accident and never properly healed) making a faint scuffing sound on the carpet. Mr. Hansen and Father were of a height, but where Father was stick-slim, Mr. Hansen loomed like one of the enormous hundred-year trees his fortune had been built on, the old giants that took fifteen men to saw down.