I found the red clay roadway littered with beer cans, bottles, and discarded paper. At the remains of an old fence, a pile of abandoned appliance bodies and unidentifiable trash backed up a pool of stagnant water from which something small and furry scurried as my car approached, and I questioned the mentality and morality of anyone who would willingly desecrate such beauty.
Inside the fence, though, to my relief, I found no litter. Beneath the pines, a cool quiet reigned, broken only by the groaning engine of my little car as I shifted into a lower gear for the climb.
Not all of the trees in their bare winter drab were familiar to me. There were notable absences of those I had considered my particular favorites, and I had to remind myself that I was much farther south than I had ever been before. Still, I sensed that in the glory of fall, the colors here would be every bit as vibrant as those of central Ohio, with the added beauty of hills and gentle mountains. And even in January, the weather was mild. The gaily colored poncho, also bought in a moment of defiance, which I wore over slacks and a soft sweater, was more than adequate. It will do, I thought, surveying the few tan oak leaves clinging tenaciously to the gray-brown of their branches, the bleached silver heads of winter grasses, and the deep green of the pines that rose up along both sides of the roadway and which seemed to beckon me onward. It will do.
I also sensed an isolation, a feeling that could have been overwhelming had it not been so welcome. For years, Gran and I had lived in a second-floor walk-up apartment in a crumbling building, hearing our neighbors growing louder and less considerate as each year passed. Because of that, the idea of living in a single house far from human intrusion seemed like a private slice of heaven.
The winding road was little-used, enhancing the sense of isolation. Saplings and wild grasses encroached, claimed the roadbed as their own, and softened the once raw wound until all that remained to mark my way upward were the tall pines and two lines of bent grass showing me the path of another car.
Finally, though, I passed through two ornate iron gates, now streaked red and hanging heavily from bent hinges in a stone fence, then rounded an ancient elm with drooping branches, and I was there.
I don't know what I had expected; I really don't. A large house, yes. That much had been intimated in the letters. But not a miniature fairy-tale castle, turreted, many-windowed, outlined against the sky and the backdrop of distant mountains.
I felt a suspicious lump in my throat and fought back a flash of bitterness. "Oh, Gran," I whispered. "Why? Why did you try to keep me from this?" For a moment I was with her again, in the darkened apartment I had known all my life, where she allowed no sunshine for fear it would fade the already faded upholstery, a lonely little girl begging for her approval, which was as rare as sunshine in the place I had never called home.
Well, I had a home now. Across a broad lawn, waist high with grass and briars, the house stood, waiting, welcoming me. Silence surrounded me as I drank in the unexpected beauty and as, slowly, I began to see the ravages time had made on the house and the careless repairs that had followed. I released a shuddering breath and gripped the steering wheel. For a moment perfection had beckoned. For a moment I had been blinded by hope.
It made no sense, I thought as I eased my foot from the brake and once again followed the tracks through the weeds, past leaning outbuildings with gaping roofs, around two still substantial stone barns. There was money in the estate; that much had been made chillingly clear. Enough for seven other women to have tried to claim it. In addition to the house, the bequest included self-sustaining income properties to provide for me for the year I must live here, to provide maintenance for the house, to provide, as Mr. McCollum had informed me in that one telephone conversation I had with him, "more than adequate" financial recompense for someone who had once had no prospects or knowledge of the inheritance, and no true claim to it other than the accident of birth. Why then the waste? I wondered as I reached the back of the house and pulled to a stop in the shadow of a battered white sedan. Why the needless waste?
A woman opened the back door. She stood there and watched me as I parked. She was in her fifties, possibly even her sixties, around Gran's age when I had first been thrust upon her. Life had not been kind to her, but her hesitant, welcoming smile as she approached me destroyed forever any further comparison with my grandmother.
"Miss Richards?"
She wiped her hand on her apron and held it out, catching me just as I turned to take one of my two bags from the car. I turned back to her, clasping her work-worn hand in mine. I didn't know what to expect from her. I didn't even know who she was. But she had made an overture. Years of deeply ingrained habit took over. I smiled. "Yes."
"I'm Martha Wilson," she said, as though that explained everything. "Let me get that bag for you." Competently, she reached into the car and dragged out my heaviest suitcase. "I imagine it's quite a shock for you," she said, nodding toward the house. "You ought to be prepared. It's no better inside."
When we reached the back step, she bumped the door open with her hip and took from me the suitcase I was carrying. "I expect you're ready for a rest and some coffee after your trip. We can get these later," she said, setting Gran's ancient luggage on the floor. "Did you have any trouble finding your way from Fairview?"
"I haven't been there yet," I told her. "I came directly here." I stood in the doorway looking around the cavernous kitchen, at the pair of massive ranges, antiques now, that lined one wall, at the door to what had to be a walk-in cooler, at the sunlight playing over the glass-fronted cabinets, paint-blistered and empty except for a few dishes in one corner. The room was clean; every available surface had been scrubbed regularly and frequently, but an air of disuse and a hushed expectancy seemed to hover over everything. I stepped into the room.
"I'd like to see the house."
"Of course. Just a few minutes won't hurt, though. You look like the trip wore you out, and I've already got the coffee made, and a cake. I hope you like apple spice—"
"Now," I said, prompted by something beyond my conscious knowledge, but at Martha's hastily concealed look of disappointment, I did add, "Please."
Silently she led me through the large, empty rooms, and I, as silent as she, surveyed the crumbling varnish of the rich, delicately carved woods, the stains on imported marble mantels, and bare electrical wires hanging from the high ceilings. The only noise was the click of my heels on the spotless hardwood floors. And with each step, I felt the house enveloping me, wrapping itself around me. Not unpleasantly. Oh, no, far from unpleasantly.
I leaned against a wide, multipaned window and looked out over the valley to the south, trying to absorb the feeling, and trying to absorb the magnitude of the neglect. The window I looked through sparkled. Absently I ran my finger along the frame. The varnish had bubbled with age, but it was clean and recently oiled.
I looked at the woman standing by my side. She stuffed her hands into the pockets of her apron and stared at the floor.
"No, it isn't," I said, sighing.
"What?" she asked.
"As bad inside. It is bad," I told her, "and disappointing, although I really didn't know what to expect, but at least inside someone cared." I caught the glimmer of pride in her pale eyes before she masked it. "You?"
Martha caressed the window facing with roughened fingers. "I do the best I can," she admitted reluctantly.
"Who are you, Martha Wilson?" I asked. "You're not the housekeeper, are you?"
"Not . . . not officially."
I felt the chill inside the house for the first time and rubbed my arms beneath the poncho. Martha might have shown me a genuine welcome, she might have food and coffee waiting for me, but I saw that she wasn't the type to spew forth information, not unless it was carefully solicited, and not unless she thought the information was needed. Seeing the rest of the house could wait, at least for a little while longer.
"Apple spice cake?" I asked.
She nodded a yes.
"I love it. And I'm starved," I admitted.
She seemed to accept that I knew so much more than I did. About the house. About the entire bizarre chain of events that had brought me to an abandoned hilltop. About the family I had never even known I had. That would help in freeing her tongue, but not as much, I realized, as my being honest would.
The cake was wonderful, an elusive blending of spices and textures that almost melted in my mouth and left me longing for more. The coffee was rich, black, and strong, the way I had only recently begun brewing it. But sitting with Martha Wilson at the scarred kitchen table was a strange experience, if only one of the many that day. Because I had the strongest sense of having done it, time and again, for all my life. Maybe that feeling was what finally freed my tongue.
"When you say you're not officially the housekeeper, what do you mean?"
"You don't know, do you? They let you come into this with no idea of what you were getting into?"
"I don't know anything," I admitted, "except what was in two letters in my grandmother's lockbox and the little bit of information Mr. McCollum revealed. And who David Richards was, of course. And I understand even less. Especially why, if he went to such great pains about providing for this house in his will, it has been neglected like it has."
She studied me silently for a moment, the signs of an inner debate evident in her pale eyes. "There hasn't been hired help in this house for seven years," she said finally. "Longer than that, from the looks of things when I moved in, just someone here drawing a paycheck. I did apply, though." She threw her head back, letting what I suspected was an inherent pride show itself for a moment. "Got myself up in my Sunday best, made an appointment, and drove into Fairview, to the bank. With my Jim gone, well, I just didn't have enough income to keep the place we had then, didn't have enough to keep from being a drain on what family I had left. And there always had been someone up here before, you see. Always.
"Stanley McCollum was a tightfisted, mean little boy. And he's a tightfisted, mean little man."
She looked at me and smiled, a smile at odds with her words. "I'm not telling you anything to prejudice you against him," she said. "It's something you'll find out, if you haven't already. He treats that money like it's his own, and like he's down to the last two nickels. And he has since his daddy died and he took over as trustee; that's when things started going downhill. If it wasn't for John Richards looking over his shoulder, no telling what he'd have done up here. Of course, he couldn't have done much less.
"I went to him looking for a job," she said, her voice quivering with remembered indignation, "and he treated me like I'd gone asking for charity. And it was charity he finally offered me—not then, but weeks later. To give the devil his due, it was probably John who persuaded him to do it. To protect the house from vandals, Stanley said." She snorted in derision. "I could live here in the servants' quarters to protect the house from vandals."
"He doesn't want you here?" I leaned my chin on my first and felt a bubble of unexpected laughter as I remembered his frosty and tenuous acceptance of me. "He doesn't want me here, either. You and I ought to get along just fine."
"That's what I had hoped." A warm, generous smile lighted her face.
There were other questions to be asked, other answers to be gleaned. About the house. About the family. Who, for example, was John Richards? McCollum had never mentioned him. Gran certainly hadn't. Because of the age of the probate, I had assumed I was probably the last of the family; a distant last, I discovered as I sat with Martha in cozy intimacy in the cavernous room. There were two of us remaining, me and John Richards, the only living descendants of David Richards's two nephews.
"What's the upstairs like?" I asked when she filled my cup still another time.
"I don't know. Except for the quarters, I've never been up there."
"You haven't?" I stopped, speechless. "But you—I'm sorry. I realize it isn't your job, but you've taken such loving care of the downstairs, I just thought—"
"It wasn't for not wanting to," she said. She pushed her cup away and stood up. "Come with me. I guess you might as well know the rest of it."
I followed her through the house, retracing our earlier steps but going farther, into the front hall, dim in the fading afternoon light, to the huge curving staircase. Halfway up, barely visible in the shadows, a metal grate—the old, strap-metal type once used in jails—had been bolted into the walls. In the center of the grate was a small door secured by a massive padlock.
"Why?" I asked.
She studied her hands, work-roughened and worn, then stuffed them into the pockets of her apron. "You're not the first, you know."
The first? The first to ask why? And then I realized what she meant. The first to try to claim the inheritance. "No. That much I do know. I'm the eighth."
She nodded brusquely. "I'd made up my mind if you were like the last one, the only one I ever met, all hard and grasping and demanding, I was going to pack up and leave you with it. I have places I can go. Now. But you're not."
She nodded toward the grate. "Everything of value is upstairs. They put it there after the last caretakers left. Patched up the storm damage and put that grate in and locked the upstairs doors off the servants' stairway. Said it was to protect it from vandals, too. Vandals!" She repeated the word with the same derision she had voiced earlier, in the kitchen. "By then most of the county had heard about that fool girl running down the hill, pounding on Frank's door in the middle of the night, screaming about ghosts."
"Ghosts?" I asked weakly. I had sensed a presence in the house since entering; not until that moment had I considered it threatening. Now I felt a chill along the back of my neck.
"Real quiet ones," Martha said. "So quiet that in all the time I've been here, by myself, I've never heard them. But they sure do keep the superstitious thieves and the curious away. That's the reason I never bothered to deny the rumors. Until now."
She turned, and I followed her back through the darkening house. "I think she was unbalanced when she came here," Martha continued. "I know she was when she left. Stanley wasn't any more welcoming to her than he's going to be with you. The caretakers at that time weren't too bright and they were a whole lot greedy. And to top it all off, the one night she tried to stay, we had the worst storm this county's ever seen since statehood. A tornado took out half of Richards Spur, and winds knocked down trees and power lines and took off roofs from here to Fort Smith.
The hardest part was removing the boards that covered the door from the servants' stairwell. Rationally I knew I should listen to Martha's request that I wait until morning. Rationally I knew that at some point McCollum would have to give me keys. I was tired from the drive, confused by the strange experiences of the day, disappointed beyond any reason at what I had found, and frustrated. But above that, something else was urging me on. I didn't consider myself much of a lock-picker—my one experience had been with a dime store lockbox—but for some reason I knew I had to try.
Martha brought me her small supply of tools, and I worked carefully at prying each of the large nails out of the underlying woodwork. The old lock stood firm. None of Martha's pitifully few keys even fit the opening. But the hinges were on our side of the door. I removed the top hinge pin and started tapping on the bottom one. Martha put her hand on my shoulder.
"You may think I'm unbalanced, too," I told her, "but this is something I have to do."
"Do you want me to come with you?"
I shook my head. "Not this time. Do you mind?"
She almost laughed but disguised it with a cough, then shook her head and helped me lift out the door. She took a flashlight from her toolbox and handed it to me. She didn't say be careful, but I felt the weight of those words as she put her hand on my shoulder, passed me her keys, and then stood back out of my way.
Inside, an expectant silence surrounded me as I threaded my way through piles of boxes and furniture, past doors, all locked, through the gentle restraint of gossamer webs, deeper into the heart of the house.
A dim beam of light from the main stairwell penetrated the gloom of the upper hall, and I at last found my bearings and headed toward the light. A door stood at the top of the landing, a door like all the other doors I had passed, but I felt drawn to this one.
The door was locked, as the others had been locked. Against what? Martha's story about that other woman's one night in this house echoed in my mind, and I wondered, were they all locked to keep someone out? Or something in? I pushed those thoughts away as I knelt by the lock with the small ring of keys. I found a key that would fit into the opening and forced it, first one direction, then the other, until I recognized the words I now heard: my words, my voice. "Please. Please. Please."
"Oh, please open," I said, and as I did, the lock gave and the door eased open.
The room was empty. Oh, there was furniture there, carelessly shrouded against dust as though whoever had done it had spent no more time than necessary within the circular walls, but to me it was empty. Alone, I walked through the room, avoiding the covered rolls I recognized as carpets and mattresses, only glancing at the brighter places on the faded walls where paintings had hung, to the boarded window. Angrily I tore the weather-warped plywood from the window and looked down into the jungle the terrace had become. The magnolia growing by the gate passed the window where I stood and grew still taller. In the distance, a line of trees marked the meandering river. Between the river and the base of the hill lay farmland, rich, reddish brown, waiting for its new crop. Beyond, smoky in the fading light, were the mountains. To the east, on the hilltop, sprawled what was left of an orchard.
Through filming eyes I looked back to the lonely room. Gently I removed a canvas drape from the headboard of the bed and ran my fingers over carved rosewood. I threw the cover on the floor and sank onto it, leaning against the bed, looking at the grayness of it all—the twilight filtering through coated windows to touch the grime that covered the fireplace in front of me.
"Why?" I whispered. Why had the deterioration been allowed? And why did I feel so much pain that it had? And then—then I felt it happening again.
She opened her eyes slowly. She felt a curious tightness around her chest, but except for a dull throbbing in her head, she was at last free of pain. Her hand flew to her stomach. Then, sighing, she sank more deeply into the pillows and looked around the room.
David stood at the fireplace, his back to her, one slender brown hand gripping the mantel. His knuckles showed white against the pale pink veining of the marble. She saw his reflection n the mirror in front of him, and his dark, brooding scowl sent a shudder through her.
"David?" she whispered.
Instantly he was beside her, only tenderness showing in his eyes as he caressed her face. He bent to her and kissed her forehead. She reached for him, but her pushed her down gently. "You mustn't move."
Fear returned to her then. "The child?"
"The doctor doesn't know yet." The calm in his voice broke. "Eliza, why didn't you tell me?"
"I wanted to." She turned her face from him. "But at first I wanted to be sure before I said anything, and when I was, you were so worried about what was happening to your nation and about leaving me to meet with the council that I couldn't put any more on your shoulders." She felt tears gathering in her eyes and willed them not to fall. "I've made such a mess of things for you."
"No." He silenced her with a kiss. "Never you."
She lay quietly, drinking in the comfort of his presence, and he sat beside her, caressing her with the tenderness she had learned to expect from this strong, willful man.
"What were you staring at?" she murmured drowsily. "While you were standing the mantel?"
A grim smile crossed his face as he held out a long lock of raven hair. "It seems your savage has finally scalped you."
She reached for her head, but he caught her hand. "Lie still," he said. "Not all of it. Just where necessary."
His mood changed abruptly. "It was Owen, wasn't it? Tell me what happened."
"David," she said, searching the stern mask his face had become, "you must promise me something."
"It was Owen," he repeated. "You've told me that much."
"You must swear to me that you will never cause him any harm because of me."
"Tell me what happened," he insisted in a dull monotone.
"Swear," she said, as firm as he on this point. "It could only bring destruction to you and the nation if you seek revenge. Swear to me."
His eyes met hers and held them. He gave a quick, curt nod. "Now tell me what happened."
He had never lied to her before; his silence now was eloquent. She knew she could never tell him the whole of what had happened. "He found me," she said. "We always knew that was a possibility. I—I got careless."
David rose from the bed, his face blanched of color, and stalked across the room. At the mantel he stood poised.
"David," she said softly, "you swore."
"I swore." He whirled to face the fireplace. "I swear." He clenched his fist and beat at the mantel with enough force to overturn a candlestick. "Damn his soul!"
A light tap sounded at the door and Jane entered. "Reverend Smith is downstairs."
David turned his dazed eyes toward Eliza. "Give us a few minutes, Jane. Then send him up."
Methodically he righted the candlestick. Methodically he walked to the far end of the fireplace and stood there, his back once again to her. He seemed to be struggling with something. She sensed his hands moving on the mantel but could not see them. She saw his shoulders slump, then straighten. He threw his head back.
"Since you cannot be moved, I've asked the minister to perform the service here. If you still wish to marry me."
She stared at his rigid back. "Can you doubt that I do?" she whispered.
He turned to her, his eyes still troubled. "No, but I can wonder at it." He crossed to her. "As I can wonder at you and the love you have given me so selflessly."
She raised her hand to his face. "We were meant to love each other."
The minister looked as though he had never had to suffer the hardships of life in Indian Territory. He was pale but well fed, a tall man, though not as tall as David. Eliza felt the stirrings of fear when he entered the room and spoke brusquely to David, not looking at her. "The doctor gave me your message, Colonel Richards."
David had pulled a chair to the bedside and seated himself there, clasping her hand reassuringly. "I'm glad you could come so quickly."
"Colonel, I'd like to speak with you a moment."
She felt David's hand tense on hers at the command implied in the man's tone.
"What is it?" David asked.
The minister looked toward her for the first time. She recognized in his eyes an emotion she had seen too often: zeal, misguided or otherwise, driving him. The fear within her flared.
"Privately," he insisted.
David's hand clenched hers.
"What is it?"
For the first time the man faltered. He looked at the ceiling above their heads before taking a deep breath. "Is the lady divorced?"
"Yes." She heard David's reply, clipped and cold in the silence of the room. Don't! she pleaded silently, without knowing whether the plea was for the minister or for David.
"Then I'm afraid, sir, in view of that and the lady's advanced—" he paused, hesitant only in his choice of a word, "confinement, I cannot be a party to this sacrilege."
Unaware of his strength, David grasped her hand, holding it until it numbed in his. "You what?"
"I cannot officiate at any wedding ceremony between the two of you," he said with more determination.
"The child is mine, Smith," David said in a tone Eliza had never heard him use, soft but with the promise of power behind it, one which countenanced no argument. "And Eliza will be my wife. Do you understand?"
"Yes," Smith told him, his voice rising slightly, as though to overcome or deny what she had heard in David's. "And I understand that you'll have to find some other way to make that so. This mission is just getting started in the community. There is a great deal of dissatisfaction being expressed against the church sanctifying your relationship with this woman. Your own people have reminded me of your law, not the church's, which forbids marriage between a citizen of the Choctaw Nation and a white man—" once again he glanced at her, and Eliza read condemnation in his eyes, "and a white man of poor character. I have been assured by members of my congregation that this law also applies to white women. I cannot risk the integrity of my church by defying public sentiment in this matter."
"And what about the integrity of your God?" David asked coldly.
"The one whose laws you flaunted?" Smith asked.
David released her hand. His voice was low, but it chilled her with its deadly calm. "Get out."
Smith's eyes glowed and his face was flushed, but he stood firmly planted at the foot of the bed. "Richards, you are a powerful man, but you are not above God."
"And you, sir," David said, "are not of Him. Get out," he repeated softly. "Out of my house, off my land, out of this nation. Because I promise you that you will have no church to pastor here. When I have finished what was started today, there will be no community to need your church."
Eliza stared at Smith's back as he left the room, at the finality of the door closing behind him. But his words remained to mock her. She should have known.
"He doesn't matter," David said. "None of them do. We'll find another minister. We'll have a civil ceremony if necessary."
"You can't marry me," she said dully.
"What are you saying?"
"I'm not worthy of you."
"Eliza, look at me."
"That's what they are saying," she told him, still staring at the door. "Your people. And if you do find someone who will perform the ceremony, that is what they will say the rest of your life —that you married a divorced woman with child, and unclean. . . ." She felt her voice break and stopped until the tightness eased. She began to tremble and fought against it. "I will leave as soon as I can."
He caught her face in his hand and turned her toward him, forcing her to look at him. "Eliza, you are my wife," he told her, "the wife of my soul. You have been for many years. I don't need a minister to say the words to make it so."
"All your plans," she began, "all you've worked for—"
Placing his fingers on her lips, he silenced her. "For years we've been separated because of those plans. For years you've suffered because of them. You've given so much for them, can't you give some for me now?"
Eliza stared into his eyes, not daring to hope.
"I need you," he told her. "The nation can do without me, but I can't do without you. Not any longer."
She felt moisture gathering in her eyes and knew that she should turn away from him while she still had the strength to do so.
"Stay with me," he whispered.
Her resolve faded. The emotion that had possessed her since meeting him, that had grown ever stronger with each separation, once again controlled her. She nodded silently.
He drew something from his pocket, took her hand, and placed a wide, filigreed gold band on her finger, saying as he did so, "I, David, take thee, Eliza . . ."
As though in a trance, unable to look away from him, Eliza repeated the vows with him to the final words. His eyes held her mesmerized. His voice hardened. "Nor death will us part.
"Say it, Eliza," he whispered. "Make the vow."
"Nor death will us part," she swore.
"Miss Richards?"
I heard Martha's voice as the glow from the flashlight flickered into the now dark room. "Are you in here?"
I clutched the edge of the bed as I felt a shudder of pain and regret run through me. What in God's name was going on?
"Miss Richards?"
I found my voice and the strength to answer her.
"Over here, Martha."
"Are you all right?" she asked, searching my face as I rose to meet her, "Did something happen?"
"No," I told her, feeling drained, alone, and too confused to say anything. To anyone. "Nothing happened."