Angelique sought out Ben Stokes on the bright, clear morning. She found him nearby in the woods between the family home and the new house under construction up the hill. The large man swung a long-handled axe to chop logs into firewood. Whack, the sound clapped an echo like a lightning strike. Angelique approached him from the side, giving a wide clearing so as not to startle him while he had an axe in his hands.
"Ugh… you," he grunted. The next swing of the axe came down with greater force. "I figger you must be pretty pleased with yourself."
Angelique sat down on a large fallen tree. Thick layers of skirts and wool cloak made a cushion against the oak's rough bark and the chill of frost in the crevasses. She looked to the east. A cold and distant colorless sun shined pale through the leafless black trees.
He asked, "Have you come to force me to help you bury the bodies?"
"Josette is not dead," she told him. "She and Jeremiah are happily married."
"Even worse."
"They spent their wedding night in the Collinsport Inn. She belongs to him, now." Angelique spoke wistfully to the blue shadows beneath the trees, to the uncaring, unseeing eyes of spirits who had dwelled in this forest long ago before there were white men. The spirits of the old ones saw her too, and they turned their shirtless backs to her.
"But you haven't won." Ben Stokes chuckled as he tossed a few fireplace logs into the wheelbarrow. "You don't have what you want. Mister Barnabas isn't yours."
"He will be, when he learns the news of their betrayal. His heart will break, and I will be there to mend it."
Ben chopped into another log. The wood screamed as it split; the tree still remembered being felled. "He'll kill her, and the blood will be on your hands."
She laughed a merry, chirping cackle. "Don't be silly! Barnabas doesn't have a violent bone in his body."
"Any man can turn into a killer if you push him hard enough."
Ben Stokes raised the axe and carefully crept toward her. His boots were sinking into the soft powder soundlessly. As she faced the morning sun, he did not cast a shadow. Yet she knew of his approach and his intent. She could see the whole scene from the viewpoint of a crow in the tree above. Outside of herself, saw the golden haired woman sitting on a log and the brawny servant sneaking toward her with an upraised axe.
A flick of her wrist, and the axe yanked out of his hands. It twirled in the air, whoop whoop, and thudded into a trunk.
She rose to her feet, calmly, and brushed the flakes of ice from her cloak. She gave him just a roll of the eyes before she strolled away. He stood there, his shoulders hunched, his arms limp at his sides.
#
Returning to the house, she found Barnabas asleep in the chair by the fire. He still wore the same clothes from the night before—his best wedding coat and silk cravat. His boots were slathered with pale mud. He sagged sideways in the chair, his cheek resting against the upholstery. Bruise-colored hollows darkened the pouches under his eyes, weary and pathetic.
Angelique knelt at his feet. She put a log into the smoldering ashes and gently fanned the sparks to resuscitate the dying fire.
His arm draped off the side of the chair. Even asleep, he kept hold of the stained and torn wedding veil that he had found last night discarded in the forest.
Moving behind his chair, Angelique soothed and stroked his forehead. Softly her fingers combed out the locks of his thick hair.
Dozing, he whispered in his sleep, "Don't leave me."
Angelique so kindly bent over and inhaled deeply of him. A faint aroma of soap and lavender water was overpowered by the woodsy scent of the forest where he had been tromping about for most of the night. He carried in his scalp the traces of pine and oak, of dry leaves and ice, of the winds of darkness.
Kissing the top of his head, tasting his hair, she murmured, "I won't ever leave you, mon cheri."
Barnabas snapped awake. "Angelique! Don't touch me."
She stroked the back of his chair. "I'm only trying to comfort you."
He launched to his feet. In a few quick broad strides, he crossed to the bay window. There he stood, still holding the ragged and soiled wedding veil. He stared forlornly out the glass panes. "It's morning. The skies are clear. I can resume the search."
"Why bother?" Angelique said. "You know you won't find her in the forest."
"No, I probably won't. But I can't give up! Where could she be?"
"She has betrayed you." Angelique approached him from behind, reaching out to the empty air that spanned between them. "She has run away with her lover, Jeremiah."
He sucked up a sharp breath. "Her aunt has made such insinuations as well. She tells me, now, that Josette was confused before the wedding, but she kept it a secret because she'd assumed that Josette had made her decision. I refuse to believe a word of it. Even if it were possible that I misjudged Josette's affections, my uncle… Jeremiah is the closest thing to an older brother that I've ever known. He would never… never..."
"I don't presume to know a man's heart." She inched a little closer, side-stepping around the small lamp table that held an ornate silver candelabra and half a dozen twinkling blue candles. "But perhaps Jeremiah has been secretly jealous of you."
"Jealous?" he repeated.
"Yes, have you not observed his interest in designing and building the new mansion on the hill? Knowing full well that you will inherit this place, this 'old house' as he has come to call it recently. Think of it, Barnabas, when your father passes on—and being so much older, he will no doubt reach the end of his days before Jeremiah will—then the younger brother will inherit the grand mansion. Will he live there alone? No, he desires to regain what he lost so tragically when his first wife Laura died."
"How did you hear about that?"
"Oh, I must have heard someone mention it." Angelique shrugged off the lie to change the subject back to the poisonous seeds she was planting in his mind. "Jeremiah clearly has ambitions for becoming the master of the largest estate in the province of Maine, to have a beautiful wife at his side, to father the next generation of Collinses to carry on the family business. He has concealed his greed all these years. He has fooled you! Like a second-tail dog fighting to be leader of the pack, he will push you aside. You will be the runt of the litter, if he has his way."
"You have no evidence for what you're saying. Jeremiah and I are equal partners in the family business."
Angelique came nearer and stood alongside the maroon curtains. She was close enough to touch his sleeve. Yet she withheld a little longer. "Last night, did he not say that he wanted to leave town to attend to some business venture? What was that about?"
"I don't know."
"He was not happy at your wedding. If he loves you like a brother, he should have been proud and overjoyed. Why was he not?"
"Stop it, please. You're just saying these things because you're the one who is jealous."
Now she rested her hand on his arm. He allowed the touch. "I'm only thinking of you. Whether you believe it or not, my only concern is your well-being."
Outside, there was the sound of horse hooves clopping and the rattle of a buggy's wheels on the slush and gravel. Barnabas rubbed his sleeve cuff against the window pane to clear the frost. He peered outside. "Who could that be?"
Barnabas started for the foyer at the same time his father came from upstairs. All three went outside with Angelique trailing in their wake. They crossed the slate flagstones of the porch and passed through the towering Grecian columns. Down the broad steps, they came to stand in the semi-circular gravel carriage road.
A black buggy for two arrived, pulled by a pair of brown horses with white fetlocks. The coachman, in a plain wool coat and a simple felt hat, did not get down from his bench. He held the reins as if ready to crack the whip and be off as soon as his passengers disembarked.
The little door opened. Jeremiah emerged first, still dressed in the fine long coat he had worn the night before. His cravat was tied a bit sloppily and off center. He had a slumped posture of defeat and dread like a man ascending to the gallows.
Barnabas asked, "Where have you been?"
Joshua Collins, leaning on his walking cane, scolded his younger brother, "We've all been frantic for the whole night long. You'd best have a good explanation for this irresponsible disappearance."
"I do… I have… That is, we have…" Jeremiah avoided looking at either of them. With his head cast down, he reached to the buggy's oval door.
The hand of a lady emerged. By the velvet glove and dainty cuff of lace sleeve, Angelique knew her at once.
Barnabas gasped, "Josette! You found Josette!"
She emerged from the coach, holding Jeremiah's hand for balance. Her skirts swooshed out and settled down into a cone. It was a newly purchased dress in the plain style chintz to be found in the shops in Collinsport. A smart-looking tailored suit coat flared over a single layer gathered skirt. Her hat was a tiny velvet canoe holding a bouquet of silk florettes.
Barnabas stepped towards her, reaching out his arms to his beloved. Josette cringed away and squeezed into Jeremiah's embrace. The sight of it stopped Barnabas dead in his tracks. He gawked at them standing so close as if glued together down the middle.
"I'm so… so sorry," Jeremiah mumbled with his arm around her. Josette's cheek rested on his shoulder. "We got married last night."
"Married!" Joshua exclaimed. "Did you say 'married'?"
"Yes."
Barnabas stood there, his mouth open, numb, unable to speak. Josette turned her face into the lapel of Jeremiah's coat to avoid the staring eyes, the shocked faces.
Joshua sputtered in outrage, "How did this happen? Why?"
"We've, uh, been feeling… this way for a while, but we tried to fight it. Last night, it was too much. We couldn't fight it anymore." Jeremiah finally raised his shameful gaze and looked straight at his nephew. "I'm sorry. I tried to tell you so many times, but I didn't have the courage."
Barnabas exhaled a long slow sigh, his breath in vapors like tobacco smoke.
"We didn't want it to be this way. It just, well, it just… just happened." Jeremiah waited for a reaction. No sound came from anyone except the caw of a raven in the birch trees. "Barnabas, please say something. I'll understand if you're angry."
Barnabas reached under his coat to his belt. He pulled out a pair of lambskin gloves. He swung his whole arm, backhanded, and slapped the gloves across Jeremiah's cheek.
"A duel, sir!" he shouted into his uncle's face. "Tonight, at sunset, you will meet me on the field of honor."
Jeremiah slouched forward in acceptance. "At sunset it is, then."
#
Hardly had the challenge been issued than Joshua Collins grabbed his son by the coat lapels, and dragged him half-staggering into the house. He hurled him stumbling into the parlor. If he were a younger boy, Barnabas would have fallen to the floor.
Joshua fumed at him, "Have you completely lost your senses?" in the tone of a man ready to give his naughty son a spanking.
"This is my affair, father. Stay out of it!" Barnabas had a powerful voice when he chose to use it. His roar blasted the walls, resounding in the boards. Angelique in the foyer thrilled to the booming thunder of his rage.
"I will not! He is my brother. Whatever quarrel you may have with him..."
"Quarrel? What an inadequate word." Barnabas paced wildly around the room. He pawed at the upholstered chairs. He kicked the legs of the straight-backed desk chair. "That son of a bitch has raped by betrothed!"
"You'll settle this like gentlemen."
"We are, father. We are."
Joshua Collins tapped the floor sharply with his walking stick. "I will not have this nonsense in my house. Do you hear me, son?"
Barnabas seized a handful of the curtains. He flung the fabric into a wide, flaring billows for no reason at all. "We don't plan to do it in the house."
Josette exploded into the house like a wind storm. "Aunt Natalie!" she screamed, gathering her skirts in her arms and galloping up the stairs.
The gentleman Jeremiah lingered on the threshold but did not come in. He gestured to Angelique, while the father and son continued to shout at each other in the parlor. She crossed the foyer and came near to him, the only one who would.
"Tell him," Jeremiah began, and then hesitated. His brown eyes moistened with sorrow and guilt and most of all confusion.
"Yes?" she prompted.
"Tell him that I'll be up at the new house. I need to be sure if the workers are properly installing the Franklin stove in the kitchen. I'll probably be there for most of the day." Jeremiah looked past her left shoulder to the empty stairway where Josette had gone. Then he looked over her right shoulder to the parlor where the two men continued to shout, talking rapidly on top of each other so that they did not even hear themselves anymore. "Sunset comes early these days. Tell him that I'll be back around, let's say, the hour of five o' clock to make our appointment."
She curtseyed a bow. "I'll tell him, sir."
After Jeremiah had gone, Barnabas launched out of the parlor. He stomped into the dark hallway and bellowed, "Ben! Ben Stokes, where are you!"
Joshua leaning on his walking cane, limped after him—the gout in his bad knee acting up even worse today. "Don't you turn your back on me, son."
Barnabas half turned to shoot him a stare of pure fury. "May I be excused, father?" he said with a sneer of sarcasm.
"I forbid you to carry on with this absurd duel. Do you hear me? I forbid it."
The two were silent for a long moment as they stared at each other. Angelique held her breath, waiting for one of them to speak. Barnabas's dark eyes glistened in the firelight like the old ones in her dream. His eyes widened as he made a slow survey of his father from head to toe.
"Until now," Barnabas said. "I never realized what a pathetic, bitter man you are. You never loved my mother. You've never known a love worth fighting for... worth dying for..."
"Worth killing for?" Joshua added.
Barnabas whirled about and stomped away down the hall, shouting, "Ben! Ben Stokes! Come to me, I need you."
Angelique fingered the ruffled frill at her collar. This was not at all what she expected. Barnabas was not heart-broken, he was a thunderstorm of rage and wrath. He was in no mood to be consoled or embraced.
"You there, girl."
She flinched to find Joshua Collins so close at her shoulder. His mousey little eyes fixed into hers. "Yes sir?"
"Go and brew a pot of coffee. Make it strong." Joshua hobbled past her and started up the stairs. He paused to wince each time his right knee had to bend. "Bring it to the master bedroom. Let's get his besotted mother on her feet and see if Naomi can talk some sense into that pig-headed boy of hers."
"Yes sir."
#
Naomi Collins spent half an hour in Barnabas's bedroom, pleading, crying, and sometimes shouting at her son. "Can't you find it in your heart to forgive him? He is your uncle!"
The floor boards creaked as he paced the room, back and forth, from his library shelf to the window overlooking the carriage road.
"No more," Barnabas growled. "He is my uncle no more. He is a stranger to me."
Naomi fled the room, sobbing and not bothering to wipe the tears that twinkled on her cheeks. She pushed past Angelique standing in the hallway and hardly seemed to notice her there.
From farther down the hall, Angelique could hear Josette in her room wailing and screaming as Natalie duPres tried to talk to her. "Why did you do it?" she asked in French, but got no answer.
Why doesn't he hate her, Angelique wondered. She's the one who betrayed him. Why is all his fury concentrated on Jeremiah?
"Witchcraft!" Aunt Abigail walked down the hallway and passed behind Angelique. "It must be witchcraft that made her turn against him."
"Miss Collins," said Angelique, trotting after the woman's plain dark skirts. "Perhaps if you try talking to Barnabas about this duel?"
"He's beyond talk. He is possessed of the devil and under a spell of murderous rage."
She sighed through a weak smile and pretended to agree. "Of course, that's obvious." What else could she say? Of all the spells she had wrought since coming to this house, Barnabas's rage was entirely of his own doing.
Abigail carried a folded envelope in her hands. "I'm writing a letter to my friend in Salem. He'll know what to do!"
"Who?" Angelique followed her to the top of the stairs.
"Reverend Trask will help us. He knows about these things. It must be a plot against Jeremiah... Perhaps he made an enemy of some heathen in his travels. It's all a witch's evil scheme to destroy us all."
As Abigail made her way down the stairs, the front door blew open on a gust of winter wind. Angelique shivered at the wave of frosty air that splashed over her.
Lieutenant Nathan Forbes strolled inside. His full-length cape billowed around his tall physique, his crisp blue and white uniform with shiny brass buttons. He saw her immediately. From the base of the stairs he turned on his predatory, charming smile. "Well, hello again, Miss Bouchard. May I say, you are looking particularly-"
"Not her," Ben Stokes grumbled, entering behind the Navy man.
"Oh?" Nathan revolved to make a quick observation of the burly servant's scowl. "Oh, I see. My apologies, Ben. You sly ol' dog, you."
Ben started up the stairs. "This way, lieutenant. Mister Barnabas is waiting."
Angelique curtseyed aside and let the Navy man saunter past her. Even though he assumed her to be involved with Ben Stokes, he still let his blue eyes flash an appraisal of her. He winked a promise as if to say, Anytime you're bored with him, sweetheart, I'll be available.
She waited for the two men to enter Barnabas's room and close the door. Then she cautiously crept back down the length of the hallway. She put her ear to the frame and listened.
"What do you need pistols for?" Nathan asked.
"I'm fighting a duel this evening."
Nathan laughed merrily. "A duel? No, no, you're serious?"
Various objects rattled and clicked, metallic and heavy by the sound of them. Pistols! Angelique put a hand to her throat. She had hoped for rapiers or sabers; they were easier to control. A musket ball was too small to see and flew too fast. She would not be able to catch it with her sights so easily.
"Jeremiah eloped with my Josette last night," Barnabas said in a low, quiet grumble.
"The scumbag! I hope you blow the shit out of him."
More clicking and clattering of metal parts on a wooden table. "Thank you for bringing the pistols, Nathan. My father won't lend me any of his collection."
"Can't say I blame him," Nathan said. "It's his brother, after all, but then... What's between a man and a man is nobody else's business."
"Exactly."
Ben Stokes said, "Mister Barnabas, if I could say something? Maybe what they did, well... That is, maybe it's not all their own fault."
"Not their fault!" Barnabas blasted at him. "How do you reach that conclusion? Did pirates kidnap them and force them at the point of a cutlass? No! My so-called best man left me standing at the altar. He saddled a horse. He sneaked around the back of my house. He put a ladder to her bedroom window and stole my bride from me. How is any of that 'not his fault', Ben?"
"I'm trying to tell you, Mister Barnabas. Maybe you should talk to your, ah... Ah..." Angelique heard the name of Abigail choke up in his throat. She imagined his piggish eyes squinting shut, and his large jaw chewing at the air to struggle to form words that would not come. And she smiled with a tilt of her eyebrow. You can't utter the slightest hint about me, Ben, not even in a roundabout way.
"I'm done talking," Barnabas said. "There's nothing that anyone can say to change my mind. At sunset, I will face that son of a bitch with a pistol in my hand, and I will have my satisfaction."
"Whoa!" Nathan's boots clomped hard and fast on the floor boards. "Don't pour in so much gunpowder or you'll blow your damned fingers off. Christ! Let me help you lock 'n load them. Have you ever handled a pistol before?"
"Of course I have," Barnabas answered with a lilt of indignation. "When I've sailed the Atlantic to the Caribbean, I've carried pistols to guard against buccaneers."
"Have you ever actually fired one at someone, not in practice?"
Barnabas walked away to the window. Angelique felt the rhythm of his gait in the creak of the floor boards. His body moved farther away from her. "Well, no... Actually, we were quite lucky. The occasion never presented itself."
"You've never killed a man?" Nathan asked.
"No."
"Damn." Nathan whistled a long slow note. "I didn't know. Thought you had."
"Will you still help me or not?"
"Sure I will, if that's what you want."
"It is."
Ben Stokes said, "Mister Barnabas, can I beg you once more? I wish you'd take a few hours, or a day or two, to cool off."
"Thank you bringing Lieutenant Forbes to me. Now, that will be all, Ben."
"But Mister Barnabas..."
"I said, that will be all."
Angelique skipped away from the door as she felt Ben's weighty lumbering steps creak the floor boards. She ducked into Abigail's room—that she knew to be empty—and waited for the servant to shuffle past in defeat.
There in the dark of the spinster's room, Angelique resolved to weave her most complicated spell yet. She had not been able to protect Josette's mother from death, but she would protect Barnabas before it was too late. If she failed and he went to the grave, she would never dare to raise him up again. She had learned her lesson with zombies! She needed a powerful spell that would thwart the scissors of the wicked blind sisters of Fate, to deflect the scythe of the Grim Reaper, or Le Diable, or whatever guise the Angel of Death might use to prey upon her beloved. She would concoct a brew of hellish ingredients and enchant a charm that no man should have the right to wear. She would give Barnabas Collins the ultimate power to ward off death itself.
#