“You are telling me that…?”
“Yes, Jennie. Will was a Raider.”
“‘One broken neck, an example to others,’” I repeat the words of Will’s letter.
“Six broken necks,” Quinn corrects. “There was a trial in July. Where six men were hanged, including Curtis and Will. Somehow Dearborn paid off a jailer and escaped. Well, except they got him in the end.”
In my mind’s eye I see Will, steadfast in his military brass and buttons. The clean scent of Pears soap on his skin as he held me close and whispered his love, promising his heart and his safe return. My image is awash in light and hope and resists the shadow that is falling over it; that of a confused young man, ill prepared for the trials and darkness of war. Disenchanted, exhausted, witness to slaughter, and then a murderer himself. Did I ever know this Will? Do I sense him in the worried tug and rattle of my disturbed senses, as I try to press on without him?
Our conversation has drained us both. I sense that Quinn has retreated from me.
We walk until the roof of Pritchett House is visible beyond the trees. I hate the house on sight. Hate its monolithic walls and windows. If only I could have predicted what sorrows awaited me, I’d have fought like a dog before I passed through its doors.
“You were right, I should leave,” I tell him. “There’s nothing for me here.”
I can’t continue. Not one more step. But Quinn has stayed on my elbow.
“That’s not true,” he says, and the catch in his voice makes me look up. “I didn’t kiss you back there to hush you, Jennie. I kissed you to be heard. I’ve wanted you to leave here for selfish reasons. My brother didn’t deserve his death, but he didn’t deserve you either.”
Quinn’s hand catches my fingers, which are so cold that it is only a pressure. I pause a moment, but when I step forward he pulls me in so tight his arms near wrap double around the small of my back. He falls against my body, and my hands slip around his neck as his head sinks to find purchase on my shoulder. The weight of his unburdening nearly crushes me. “I’ll look after you now, Fleur,” he whispers. “I promise. I will. If you think you can look after me?”
His flinted face is a map I’ve known since childhood. And yet my eyes have never traveled it so intently. Toby and I always thought that it was Quinn who was the cold one, holding himself apart from us. We judged him swiftly, as children do, without wisdom or compassion. Now I stare at this young man who has endured so much and has asked so little. Quinn’s eyes are incandescent, guarded but hopeful.
“Of course I will, Quinn,” I tell him. “You’re all I have.”
23.
We’d each left the house that morning alone, weighted by our private afflictions. Fingers laced and feet in step, we return to Pritchett House together. We have made a promise to each other, and our bond needs to be as strong as the stone and mortar that holds us here.
In a first act of faith, Quinn begins to collapse his smokescreens for me. He is relieved to show me the few articles on the Raiders that he has folded into brittle squares and slipped into the pages of his books. I secret one away for my scrapbook before advising him what to do with the rest.
“Dispose of these,” I advise, and though I sense he cannot, I do have his ear on many other aspects of the household.
“You should take Mrs. Sullivan’s key ring” is my first practical suggestion. “As long as she guards our cellar and larder, it is difficult to take inventory.”
“That seems wise.” And not a day later he presents me with the keys like a waggling retriever who has fetched a stick. It is not his only gift to me. One day I find a box of chocolate-covered almonds in my knitting basket. The next day it’s a silky hair ribbon on my dresser. On my pillow that night is a poem clipped from the Atlantic Monthly, with a nosegay. Such devoted attentions and such a wealth of consideration after so little are an unbridled pleasure.
Still, the moments I wait for are not made of flowers and chocolates but our stolen, heated moments in the hall and at the banister, behind the library door, and once in the scullery, when Quinn sweeps me up so that only the tips of my toes touch the ground. His mouth hungry on mine as if seeking something extra, hidden, and secret, past my lips, my name whispered like some kind of elixir. What I had thought was arrogance I now know to be nothing but reserve, and not even much of that anymore.
“You won’t leave me, will you, Fleur?” He often speaks this refrain into my ear as he presses against me.
“Never,” I whisper back, so sure in my answer that I don’t know why he continues to doubt and to ask.
I am no longer a spy. Toby’s ghostly instructions were nothing but my own childish whims. I don’t even care when Mavis shyly reports that she saw us kissing in the corridor.
“See? You’ll be the Missus of the house yet, just as I always said,” she declares. “Though I’m sorry to lose your company, Miss Jennie, it’s the right order of things.”
“As long as Mrs. Sullivan isn’t boxing your ears. Now that I’ve got her precious keys, she’s been in a foul temper.”
Mavis shrugs, and I know that some things haven’t changed.
To my face Mrs. Sullivan is all sullen deference. Re-affixing the Miss to my name and not so quick to serve me the burnt bits of toast or end pieces of meat. But I know that the housekeeper’s resentment brews and that Mavis takes the brunt. There is nothing I can do. As long as Aunt Clara wields the official title of Mrs. Pritchett, Mrs. Sullivan’s position here is all but guaranteed.
But I am gaining strength.
I put my past behind me. I salve my hands with cream twice a day to soften my calluses. Buff my nails and take time with my hair, twisting it into modern styles that I copy from a page in Aunt’s Godey’s Lady’s Book. The day girls carry my washtub to my room again and fill it with steaming hot water and scented salts for my private bath. I don’t protest. I want to look like a lady. For myself and for Quinn. His eyes on me sharpen my senses, and when he is near I feel my blush blooming, heat rising like spring sap in my blood after this long and harrowing winter.
At Quinn’s urging, nights at Pritchett House take on a compatible pattern. Uncle at his desk while Aunt picks her butterfingers over her crewel and Quinn and I sit at the card table, where he teaches me gin, rummy, and as many variations of poker as there are days in the year. In no time I’m skilled in all the daredevil hands from four-card draw to deuces wild. Quinn also shows me tricks he learned from other soldiers how to make a coin disappear, how to fold a paper swan.