Twain's End (39 page)

Isabel closed the chiffonier drawer. “It's modern times. No one can force anyone to do something they don't want to.”

Clara laughed. “You must be joking. It's medieval times here at Stormfield. King Twain rules from his throne. Don't you see? He can get away with anything. The world thinks he's a humorist, a clever champion for the downtrodden—”

“He
is
those things.”

“He's also a tyrant and a bully at home, and you know it.”

Isabel looked out the window, at the dark blue snowy fields, which dissolved into the black wall of the night. It seemed that she could hear her own isolation howling in her ears. “I'm sorry about Will, Clara, but you cannot blame your father for wanting you to part. Will is married.”

“So is Papa.”

Isabel gave an incredulous laugh. “No, he's not. Not anymore.”

“You didn't let that stop you when he was married.”

“You can't compare our situations. I never did anything improper when your mother was alive.”

Even as she said them, her words rang false. No, she and her King had never physically sealed their love while Mrs. Clemens was alive, but Isabel had encouraged his attention. She had tried to make him love her as she loved him.

“Just don't let him make me marry Ossip. Please.”

Isabel sighed, then shook her head. “How am I to help you?”

Clara threw her arms around Isabel. “You'll know how.”

• • •

Ralph stood up when Isabel reentered the library, Clara trailing her with arms sulkily crossed. “Here we are, some blindfolds.”

The King put out his cigar in his teacup. “Give me one for Mrs. Macy. Macy, you can put on your own. Clärchen, put one on your Gabby-Love-Itch.”

As with children preparing to play a game, the mood lightened while all donned their blindfolds. “Should we play blindman's bluff?” said Ralph, securing his.

“What is that?” asked Ossip, his voice muffled. Clara had cruelly tied his handkerchief around both eyes and nose.

The King sat still for Helen to blindfold him, then Isabel, seeing that everyone was taken care of, put on her own. Her last sight was of Mr. Macy slipping his hand in Helen's.

“What are we supposed to do now?” snuffled Ossip.

“The exercise was to be able to experience the world as Miss Keller does,” said Ralph, “not having vision or hearing to filter it through.”

“But I can hear,” said Ossip.

“Then count your blessings, boy,” said The King.

There was a silence.

“Well,” said Mr. Macy, “this is odd. What next?”

“This is Brazierres's damn game,” said The King. “Brazierres, you tell us.”

Isabel heard the swish of Ralph's jacket as he shrugged. “Let's just talk.”

There was another silence, then several of them talked at once, followed by a subsequent strained silence.

“It seems,” Ralph said after a further awkward collision of words, “that we rely on our sight to know when to speak. We need cues that we're not even aware of.”

They sat quietly. Isabel could hear the soft hiss of fingers against a human palm—someone signing to Helen.

Across the room from the signing hands, Mrs. Macy spoke up. “I was essentially blind for most of my childhood, from six to eighteen, but I had been part of the seeing world long enough to know that I was missing an unspoken element of communication when I could no longer see. I knew I was missing
something
that my hearing
and smelling, my touch, couldn't make up for, and it frightened me—although I'm afraid that my fear looked more like fury. Having lost her hearing and vision as a nineteen-month-old, Helen had never experienced these things when I came to her, and I have never been able to explain them. How do you explain something that has no words? Helen,” she said stiffly, “Helen, I am sorry for failing you.”

The hand that was spelling went still.

A quiet descended. Isabel became aware of every little sound—a ticking somewhere in the bowels of the furnace, The King's slow breathing. As she strained to listen, she felt something else: the reaching out of another person to her, not by movement of his body but with his very will.

Without speaking, she knew to take off her blindfold. Ralph was waiting for her, his brown eyes intense.
Marry me,
he mouthed.

She blinked with surprise.

Marry me,
he repeated, and smiled.

The King pushed up his blindfold, uncovering one shining gray eye. It narrowed as it took in Isabel and Ralph.

Say something, Sam,
she wanted to howl.
Fight for me.

At that moment, Mr. Macy, still blinded, leaned in to Helen. He pressed his lips against her neck, then stayed there as a silent smile bloomed across her face.

Across the room, his wife sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes bound like Lady Justice, waiting for the game to end.

The King watched, crimson swarming over his face.

Mr. Macy drew back when he heard Ossip peeling off his handkerchief. Squinting with pain, the pianist held his ear as he scanned the library. “Where is Clara?”

January 8, 1909

Stormfield,
Redding, Connecticut

A
SEARCH THROUGH THE HOUSE
turned up nothing. Calls to the village were placed. Torches were lit. Tracks were examined in the snow around the mansion. Isabel summoned Giuseppe from the coach house for a report, and the rest of staff was questioned. No one had seen Clara, not even Katy, who would not look Isabel in the eye when she denied knowing anything about her disappearance.

Ralph, carrying a torch, caught up with Isabel when she was out on the terrace, coatless and scanning the rear grounds.

“Where do you think she went?” The flames groaned as he held up the torch, bathing the steps and the distant empty fountain, bereft of its Cupid, in its yellow light.

“I don't know.” Isabel rubbed her arms against the cold. “She couldn't have gone far in this dark. She's probably holed up in the barn, enjoying the fuss being made over her.”

Ralph's face looked young and earnest in the firelight. “Isabel, I was serious before. I do want you to marry me. It's no use pretending that I could just go away. I'm in love with you. I'll fight for you if that's what it takes.”

She caught her breath. “You'd fight for me?”

“Of course I would.” He laughed. “I
am
fighting for you. Every day—against
that old lion in there, and damn it, he's winning. But I've got something on my side that he doesn't have: time.”

“Oh, Ralph, don't say that.”

“I'm sorry. But it's the truth. You need a full man, Isabel. You deserve one.” He saw her wince.

He put his arm around her. “I'm sorry, darling. This is no way to win you over. It's freezing. Let's go in.”

Reeling, Isabel returned to the library to apprise the guests of the situation. They listened, their faces pinched with apprehension, until The King lumbered in, his skin an increasingly frightening shade of red.

Mr. Macy stood. “I'm sorry about your concerns for your daughter, Mark. Unless there is some way in which we can help, I think we had better leave.”

“You can't,” The King said. “There's no train this late.” He plunked down in his chair.

Mr. Macy ran his hand through his lank black hair. “Surely we can do something, then—go over to the village, ask around, see if—”

“Don't you think you've done enough harm, Macy?” The King said.

Mr. Macy held up his million-dollar chin. “And what harm is that?”

Sheltered within his private musical world and therefore unaware of The King's impending roar, Ossip jumped up from the edge of the chaise longue. “I am looking for her outside. No one is looking for her outside.”

“I did,” said Isabel. “With Mr. Ashcroft.”

The King raised his shaggy head.

“Out back,” she continued. “We didn't see any new tracks in the snow, although admittedly, it was hard to tell in the dark with all the various other footprints.”

“She might take walk,” said Ossip. “I told her an important thing. Maybe she need to think. But maybe she get lost and now is cold.
Now she is very frightened. And it is my fault.” He pounded his fist on his hand. “I must find her. Now.”

“It is possible that she went for a walk”—Ralph paused, acknowledging the ludicrousness of the thought—“and stopped in at one of the farmhouses around here when she got cold. Few of the farmers have phones to let us know.”

Ossip's too-large pants unfurled around his legs as he strode for the door.

“Hold up!” bellowed The King. “Don't go off all cockeyed. I'm not losing two of you tonight. Isabel, ring Giuseppe to bring around the sleigh. We'll do this right.”

Isabel went to the phone closet as the men in the party, save Mr. Macy, put on their overcoats and galoshes. Isabel was jamming herself into her wrap when Mrs. Macy stumped into the hall. “I'd like to come.”

The red in The King's face intensified to purple as he bent down to buckle his boot. “You'd better stay.”

“Do you have some galoshes I might borrow?” she asked Isabel.

The King straightened. “Annie. Dear. You've got to stay. I hate to tell you, but damn it, you've got a tiger by the tail in there.”

Cold air swept in as Ossip opened the door and went out onto the porch. Ralph, pulling on his gloves, dashed after him, then banged the door closed with a whoosh of cold.

“I'd like to go,” Mrs. Macy said firmly.

The King clapped on the Russian fur cap given to him by Ossip. It stood from his head like a crown. “Annie, I don't think you should leave those two alone.”

She sighed deeply. “In some ways Helen is still a child.”

Buttoning her coat, Isabel glanced at her King.

“She does not know when she does wrong.” Mrs. Macy looked at Isabel. “I know what you're thinking: that John knows.”

The King's icy words hung in the cold hall: “Want me to kill him?”

“I won't leave Helen. I won't. She's everything to me. As intensely
as I hate her right now, I love her even more. But that doesn't mean that she won't leave me. I won't stop her if she wants to go.”

He snorted as he helped her on with her coat. “So you do want me to kill him.”

“No.” She put an arm into a sleeve. “I want her to decide. Me or John.” She slipped in her other arm, then shrugged into her coat. “And then, after that, I will decide if I can forgive her.”

• • •

Soon they were huddled within the black leather shell of the sleigh, The King, Mrs. Macy, and Isabel sharing the buffalo robe, Ralph and Ossip holding lanterns, crouched on either side as Giuseppe drove through the bitter cold. The sleigh bells jingled, incongruously cheery in the frozen darkness. Golden lamplight melted over the trees, creating monster shadows that reared up and threatened, only to fall away with the retreat of the shishing sleigh. The stream revealed itself as a pane of sheer gold glass under which something trapped bubbled and thrashed.

When they broke from cover, the firelight spread over a snowy field stubbled with severed cornstalks, turning all a dark molten gold. A golden buck foraging in the snow raised its head, then bounded after two golden does fleeing.

Isabel asked Mrs. Macy, “Have you thought of leaving him?”

The night swallowed Mrs. Macy's short laugh. “Dozens of times.”

Across the field, the lanterns illuminated Isabel's cedar-shingled saltbox house, where smoke was drifting from her chimney and lamplight flicked in the parlor window. What an expert her mother had become in making a fire, Isabel thought, she who'd had servants tending to them for half of her life. What it was like for her mother, a child of privilege, to be isolated in a cottage in the middle of the Connecticut countryside, having to cook and clean and do for herself, with nothing to keep her company but her frilly pincushions. How stifling life must be for her.

“Stop there,” The King shouted to the coachman. “The old lady might have seen Clara.”

When they drew nearer the house, Ossip leaped from the sleigh. He cried out in pain as he hit the snow. His lamp tumbled across the crust of white and went out.

The sleigh stopped. The rest of the party gathered around where he sat on the ground, his coattails splayed over the snow. He raised his trouser leg as Ralph held a light over him. Blood pooled in a dime-sized gouge.

“You must have hit a rock,” said Isabel. “They're a hazard here—these hills are studded with them. Well, come inside. I can bandage you up.”

She and Ralph were helping him up when the door swung open, sending out a yellow swath of light. “Isabel!” Mrs. Lyon bleated.

The group picked their way toward her down the path trampled in the snow.