A Curse Dark as Gold (4 page)

I paused outside the parlor doorway to smooth the wrinkles in my dress and adjust my cap. "I do hope you find your room comfortable, Uncle Wheeler," I said, swinging open the door. "It's not the biggest, but it's our warmest, and it has a lovely view of the mill."

Uncle Wheeler had risen, circling through the parlor and finding all its flaws and inadequacies. He closed the drop-front of Mam's cherry secretary, which stuck and had to be wiggled into place; stroked a finger down the window-pane; cast his gaze over the tarnished candlesticks, the chipped china lamp, the faded rag rug. When he saw me, his smooth face crumpled with sympathy. "Oh, my dear girl," he said, holding his arms wide. "My poor, dear niece."

I hung back, not certain I welcomed an embrace from this sparkling stranger; but it seemed rude, so in the end I leaned in, and he briefly draped his arms about me and brushed my cheek with a whisper of a kiss. His hands were very soft, as if he rarely doffed those gloves, and I was very conscious of my own callused and ink-stained fingers. The powder on his wig smelled of lilacs, sweet and peculiar.

"I should have come sooner," he said. "But my business in Harrowgate detained me, and -- no matter. I'm here now. You girls have grown into such lovely young women. I'm sure your father must have been bursting with pride."

I flushed, willing it to be true. "Thank you, Uncle. And I'm so sorry that you --" I'd been about to say,
that you've missed him,
but realized with a stabbing pain how foolish it should sound. "I wish Father could have been here; I know he would have loved to see you. He'd have wanted -- things just weren't the same after Mam died."

Uncle Wheeler gave a cluck of sympathy. "Such sadness you girls have known. And such responsibility
you
have had to assume, as the eldest. How like your mother." He smiled sadly and brushed a strand of hair from my cheek. It was suddenly too intimate; the last man to stand beside me at these windows had smelled of engine grease and lanolin, and I could not bear to think of that, not with my uncle looking at me with such kindness I might weep. I pulled away.

"I'm sorry, Uncle, I --"

A sudden rattle of china broke the stillness of the moment. I seized on the sound with relief. "That's Rosie. I'd better help. You must be wanting to freshen up, sir, after your long journey," I added rather belatedly.

He gave me a thoughtful look. "Yes, thank you, my dear, I think I shall."

With that I fled into the familiar warmth and clatter of my kitchen.

"Look at this!" Rosie cried, waving a wooden spoon at the pots hung over the fire. "Egg and barley stew? Turnips?" She jabbed brutally with the spoon at the mixing bowl cradled in her arm. "There was a roast at the butcher's, a beautiful six-pound standing rib roast. And a rack of lamb you would have wept over!"

I looked at the meat turning on the spit. "Well, what did you buy?"

"Rabbit!"

"Oh."

"I have a trout,'' she said a little wildly. "I could make a cream sauce and stuff it with raisins --"

"No --" I said, maybe a bit too hastily. "That trout's showing its age. We'll do better with the rabbit." I saw the pie she'd been rolling out. "What's that, then?"

"Currant."

"Well, there you go. We have lovely currants."

"We have lovely currants in June, when they're ripe! Those are dried currants!"

"Rosie, it will do." I put a hand on her shoulder and made her look at me. "Mam's brother?" I said gently.

She looked unconvinced, but finally nodded. "Mam's brother."

I watched her shake off the bad humor in the way only Rosie can manage. With a savage thrust, she gave the spit a turn that almost shook those poor rabbits into the flames, but we finished the cooking in a state of relative calm.

While we waited on the pies and whipped the dining room into a splendor seldom witnessed in Shearing village (Rosie unearthed three crystal goblets that almost matched, and even found a tablecloth that hadn't been attacked by moths since its last public appearance), our uncle retired upstairs to dress for dinner. Rosie and I had barely managed to take off our bonnets and pat back our hair, but Uncle Wheeler was elegant in black velvet and silver, a lace cravat foaming at his throat. Our uncle's conversation was lively and intimate; he shared stories of his childhood with Mam in Haymarket, though I confess it was difficult to imagine this fancy gentleman as a boy.

Our uncle's polished manners put Rosie's and my country graces to shame, and nothing we could do seemed right. In her anxiety, Rosie had burnt the rabbits, and the stew had a skin that no amount of stirring would dissolve. The turnips were turnips, and I don't know what happened to the pies after I got hold of them, but they certainly didn't turn out like currant pie is meant to. Finally, long after Rosie and I had given up on the food, Uncle Wheeler took one last sip of wine, wiped his knife on his napkin, and pushed his chair back from the table.

"Splendid, girls," he pronounced. "One gets so tired of the rich food abroad and in the city. It's so novel to have good simple country fare every now and again."

Rosie sprang up from the table as if she'd been cut free from a trap. "I'd better do the washing up," she said, but Uncle Wheeler caught her by the hand.

"Nonsense, Rosie, that can wait. Let me show you both what I've brought you."

We adjourned into the parlor, where Uncle Wheeler opened up one of the portmanteaux. It was like something from a fairy story -- treasures we could scarcely imagine: a painted silk fan for me, depicting a gentleman dressed quite like our uncle, reclining on a settee with a matching young lady and a frolicking dog. A pink
peau de soie
gown in a flurry of lace and ribbon, sized for a girl half Rosie's age. Delicate kid slippers. A pot of rose-petal jam that Rosie seized upon with appalling relish. I beheld the trove with some bewilderment; what on Earth would we
do
with these precious things? But I recovered myself, I hope in time: "Thank you, Uncle. Everything is truly lovely. I'm sure we've never seen their like before."

He smiled and shrugged briefly. "Ah, mere trifles. Just a few things I picked up here and there, as I saw them. I know how young ladies like pretty things." He gave a small cough. "Although it seems I may have miscalculated Rosellen's age by a bit.... No matter, no matter. But look here -- I have something special for each of you." He dipped into the bag once more, and brought out two very different items.

Rosie's was a porcelain miniature of Mam, delicately done and barely recognizable as the mother I had known -- a young woman with cascading curls and lace at her bodice, hands crossed genteelly in her lap. She gave a cry and pressed it to her breast, as if the painted Mam could feel her heart beating through the glass. We had no other picture of her, and I'm sure Rosie could barely remember her face. This was a treasure indeed.

"And Charlotte." Uncle Wheeler produced a small leather album and passed it over to me. I undid the ribbon and let the case fall open in my lap.

Inside was a letter from my father. I knew his hand immediately, the slant of the lines down the page, the blots of ink at the end of words, the threadlike scrawl of the script. I could almost reach out and hold that hand, the long fingers -- just like mine -- spotted with ink from gripping too close to the nib. But his hand hadn't held pen to this paper for more than ten years; it was an old letter, written just after our mother died.

Dear Wheeler,

I cannot believe she has gone -- and the boy as well. Even with the girls here the silence in this house is unbearable. I seem to hear her voice in every room, only to enter and find nothing but emptiness. I don't know what we'll do without her, and but for the children I should not care. She has left two small angels behind her,
Motherless babes now. I don't know how much they understand. Charlotte is silent and somber, but Rosie cries constantly and asks where her Mam has gone. Gods! This is no place for children, not without a mother. But my girls are all I have left now. I fear for them, Wheeler; how can I raise them alone? And if something should happen to me ...

You are the only family they have left now. Errie would want you to care for them should they be left alone. Promise me you won't forsake them -- promise me you'll look after my girls.

Yours in sorrow,

James

I held the album with tight fingers and bit my lip. I would not cry now, before a virtual stranger. But Father's grief -- still fresh, as if the leather case had preserved it all these years -- struck me with such force it was hard not to weep for his pain. What sort of gift was this, I wondered. What was my uncle trying to do, by sharing this letter with me now?

Uncle Wheeler wore a strange smile as I looked up at last to meet his gaze. Did my mother have those green, green eyes? I thought she did.

"So you see, my dears, why I
had
to come. I swore to your father that I would look after you. It was the only thing he ever asked of me." He slid closer to me on the sofa.

I nodded, a heaviness welling up in my breast. There were a dozen questions I wanted to ask him -- we knew
nothing
about him, after all -- but they all seemed rude and ignorant, and I could not think how to pose them. I closed the little album and turned the fan over in my hand, spreading then collapsing its gilded ribs. "Is this what girls in the city are used to? These dresses and -- and fine things?"

"Oh, and more," he said. "The balls, the young men, mixing with the finest society. Why, they --"

"I don't suppose there are many who --" I swallowed hard. "Who run businesses, are there? Or who ..." I trailed off. I knew there were girls who worked, of course, but I did not think their prospects ran quite to silk and kidskin. I was suddenly not certain where in the order of the world Rosie and I fit in.

"Run businesses?" Uncle Wheeler looked confused. "My dear, what an odd notion."

Rosie broke in. "What she means is --"

"Never mind, Uncle. It was a foolish thing to say. "

Uncle Wheeler nodded with understanding and squeezed my hand. "My dear girls, you must have no fear that what became of my sister and I will befall you -- that you'll be left to fend for yourselves in the wide world. I have put my own interests aside while I come to tend to you girls."

"What does that mean?" Rosie said. I stared fiercely at her, as if the strength of my gaze alone could make her behave.

"Oh, Rosellen, we shan't worry about that now. We'll just concern ourselves with the immediate crisis, and get on from there."

"Well, the immediate crisis is we haven't any money."

"Rosie!" I could have smacked her, but Uncle Wheeler took it in stride.

"No, no, Charlotte -- it's quite all right. Rosellen's ingenuousness is one of her many charming assets." He withdrew a beaded purse from his jacket and popped it open. "Now, I haven't brought much cash, of course, but what I do have is yours. What do you think you'll need, by way of pin money, housekeeping, that sort of thing?"

I stared at the purse, glittering amethyst and silver in the lamplight, and tried to reason how much money such a man might carry. The fan, the slippers ... his ostrich-plumed hat alone would have been more than two weeks' wages for my best-paid workers. His very pocket change might well see me through the month -- or more.

Still ... he was my uncle, and he had just lavished us with gifts. I bit my tongue and asked for half of what I wanted. "I think, perhaps, sir, five pounds?" It was a small fortune, and awfully brazen to expect anything near that much --

"Done." Uncle Wheeler counted out the coins and pressed them into my hand. "And don't hesitate to ask, my dear. You shan't worry about money any longer."

Chapter Three
The
next day, one last icy winter blast escaped the hills and swept down the Valley, shuddering through town and ripping up thatch and shingles and spring bonnets brought out too early. Up in Stirwaters, the glass rattled in the sash and lamps would not stay lit. Though the calendar read April, winter still had us in her grip and was slow to let go.

It was bad luck all around -- nothing more -- that Harte was working a fitting on the other side of the wall, just as the tail end of that cold wind flung round the corner of the mill and caught the edge of the old, faded stirwaters sign. At the same moment, Paddy Eagan was trotting past from the dyeshed, tucked into the lee of the building for protection from the wind. With a tug from the wind and a bang from Harte, the old plank -- twelve feet of hard, weathered elm -- swung down off the stones and struck young Paddy in the head, knocking him to the hard, cold earth.

I heard the screech and creak as the wood pulled free, Pilot's frantic barking, and the shouts as the millhands ran for Paddy. I ran out into the yard as they were lifting him from the ground. He was pale as wool, a trickle of blood from his hair, but awake.

"Good Lord!" I cried. "Bring him inside. Janet, fetch something to cover him with." I yanked off my apron and pressed a corner of it to Paddy's scalp. He winced, but gave me a weak smile.