Torsade Literary Space The Mirrors (part twenty-eight)
The Mirrors
(part twenty-eight)
“I was thinking of Carolee. I can’t interview her.”
“Hmm…maybe you can. But ask me first.”
“I wonder about Charleton. If he was depressed over the work, felt coerced, Old Dumain would have been gleeful… It’s a funny word, I guess. But gleeful, making his grandson do something repugnant. He, Charleton…he was sick and heartbroken, it would have seemed to him there was no hope for anything. Being expected to pull organs out of people and put them up in jars! They were close cousins, were they? Or…I’d better just say. I found a letter in Dr. Rothesay’s house. The writer felt bad about telling Charleton a lie, a story he’d believed. She wrote like she knew her cruelty was…surgical, if you’ll forgive me.”
“Do tell! I never heard that one.” Veronica, if she’d had Sir Christopher’s whiskers, would have twitched them.
“The Metropolitan Cultural Institute.”
William came under the roof and sat on a window ledge. “There’s a stamp on the back page of the books in there. If all that belongs to you, why don’t you take it? Why don’t you…” He stopped Veronica’s answer. “Call what you do by the right name?”
“Why don’t I tell you a little story? No, a very short little story. It’s about me.”
Veronica smiled. William did not…but he gave way.
“When I was fifteen, William, maybe twenty years ago…maybe not…”
And Veronica, never-to-be-repressed, shook that playful finger. “When I was fifteen, my mother and I sat down, and we made a choice together, one of those things you understand so well you don’t have to say it in words. I wrote a letter to the president of Saint Philomene’s Academy for Young Women—Janet Sampson Howe, if you like… You’ve never heard of her.” She laughed, pleased they hadn’t. “I said, which was true, I have been educated at home. True, and a good thing. Mrs. Howe sent an appointment card. I took the train up…the school’s in Virginia…with a family friend as chaperone. That friend was Carolee, my father’s niece. We call each other cousin.”
“You’re saying it was a white school. You rode up on a white car, with a white woman to sponsor you, or reassure Mrs. Howe…”
“Oh, exactly, Charmante. A good education’s everything, isn’t it? No, I’m here and I’m not going back. And don’t you worry, William. I visit my mother all the time.”
“All I said was, nice work if you can get it.”
“Ha! The institute is funded by my grandfather, his legacy… I take the one thing back. A good education is helpful, but if you don’t have the wherewithal, try getting clear away. I started my training when the old horror still stalked the halls on occasion. He knew very well who I was. He scared me silly coming in where they had me typing, bringing along one of the doctors by the buttonhole, talking nasty little ailments over my shoulder. Not once did he say Veronica to me. The thing is, William, the institute does real work, those studies the name implies. We get requests for our data from all over the world.”
“Who was that woman?”
“You don’t have records on…” Charmante intervened. “On two boys, Harold Wright, and Rance…?”
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“Goodson.”
“They were helping her with a study, the year of the riot. They disappeared.”
Veronica’s face was commiserating, musing, dodgy at last. “I don’t really know. You think I’m lying.”
“You don’t really know,” William said. “But you got an idea.”
“I can’t tell you why anyone would disappear. I can tell you the work hasn’t been all good. We do good, and we have done bad. But you see, without the trust funding us, the bad past would still be harm done, and the good that might mitigate it, impossible. That’s part of the answer…the sophistic part, if you like. William, I can make a little project of searching the archives. I’ll put a girl onto it.”
It was her wanting them not to assign him, the entity that appeared to be Dumain, too much power, Veronica’s reason for letting them look over the cellar. “I could have yelled out, hurry on back you two, and you’d be none the wiser. But what seems gruesome has an explanation not very shocking. Distasteful to some, sad… I, at least, feel sad so many died with no family to claim them. They must have joined the army just to have a place to be.”
They reached the front stairs, where Carolee and Marian waited. The weather was calm. Through the trees the river looked choppy.
“We’ll walk on to the boat. Somewhere around here is a lantern.”
“Let me,” Veronica said.
“No. Leonce is in there. I know where we put them, and it won’t take a minute. Why should I be afraid of the old place?”
But hand on the rail, Carolee paused. “I’ll ask you, all of you, not to be afraid for me. I feel emotional states are open doors to the mirror people. The old preacher who came to give our services had a saying. On frosty ground no evil thing takes root.”
They could not speak, as they watched her climb the stairs and enter the dark front hall.
“Carolee will tell you on the way back about our family arrangement, and how we found Rothesay. But I’ll say this much. When he came to claim the house, he told us he planned to reopen the clinic. My idea was making him agree to house the specimens. You’ll say there’s no clinic, just an empty lot. Well, if we had got around to sitting down at the institute…over the blueprints…”
Veronica’s chatter died, as a wave of unease took them all. Marian lit a cigarette. William circled to put his back to them, and Charmante, thinking she’d read this once, of pioneers and their wagons, turned herself at an angle to William.
Her view was of the island’s parklike grounds, of fog rising…
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The Mirrors
The Mirrors (part twenty-nine)
(2020, Stephanie Foster)