"No, no, help me! Help me!" Sarah's high pitched voice squealed in terror. Her small feet pattered on the hardwood boards of the corridor.
Angelique, with a broomstick in her hand, looked up from her chore. She was crouched to reach underneath the hallway table. Her broomstick's stiff bristles were in the middle of jabbing at the fluffs of dust gathering at the baseboard. The Countess duPres had complained of a congestion in her nose and blamed her malaise on the laziness of the Collins household servants. So Angelique was charged with the monumental task of eradicating every flake of dust in the vicinity of the countess's bedroom. She did not mind so much that the chore fell to her; she understood that the servants had better things to do.
A week had passed since Jeremiah's funeral. His personal belongings—his books, his clothes, his hairbrush and straight razor, his walking cane that he never used, the keepsake trinkets and artwork collected in his travels—all had to be packed into trunks. The sum total of a middle-aged man's lifetime, accumulated for nothing, for no one, just making work for those whose job it was to clean up. Servants made a caravan on foot, trudging knee deep in crunchy snow. They spent the whole week hauling trunks uphill to the basement of the newly constructed mansion. By Saturday they still had not finished.
"Help!" Closer and closer, the little girl rushed wildly towards Angelique and away from whoever chased her. Sarah's long pink skirt stirred up the piles of dust and crumbs that had just been swept. Her arms in ruffled sleeves flapped like a flightless bird's wings.
By chance, Sarah slapped a porcelain vase brought from China. The vase tipped over. Angelique with a broom in her hands did not have time to catch it the ordinary way. Her eyes flared widely, and her mind filled with a single word, NO! The vase wobbled on its base and then raised itself back upright.
"Angelique, save me!" The little girl crashed into the woman and clutched onto her slender waist.
"Sarah, whatever is the matter?" Angelique propped her broomstick against the wall.
"She's chasing me! She wants to hurt me!"
Heavier footsteps thundered up the stairs, hard soled shoes pounded by furious legs. "Where are you? Where'd you go, you little vixen?"
That was the stern voice of Phyllis Wick the little girl's governess. Sarah squeezed tighter. Angelique draped a protective arm around her shivering shoulders.
Phyllis Wick blocked off Sarah's escape to the stairway. Not an imposing woman, physically, she managed to convey menace by the illusion of size. Her walnut-brown hair was styled in heavy ringlets of curls. She wore a working woman's dress of muslin and linen in several overlapping layers of skirts. Though she was hardly twenty-five years old, she behaved like a stern spinster aunt.
"There you are, you naughty little brat." Phyllis aimed a sharp finger at Sarah like the point of a pistol. "Come here, so I can give you another spanking."
Sarah squealed and buried her face against Angelique's small breasts.
Angelique fluttered her eyes and ventured to smile. "What has the child done, Phyllis?"
"I caught her downstairs in the basement, playing her flute in the stronghold room."
"I'm sorry, 'the stronghold room'?" she asked.
"It's a brick room with a locked iron door. Mister Collins said no one is to go down there, especially not her. He keeps his old militia guns and barrels of gunpowder. It's not safe for a child! If he hears that I let her go down there, he'll have me discharged or whipped."
Sarah wept freely, now. Her tears and her drool soaked into Angelique's thin dress. A very old memory resurfaced in Angelique's mind, of being a small child herself about this age and clinging to the skirts of her nursemaid Veronique as the gentle woman patted her back and told her everything would be all right. It was a sweet memory she treasured in a secret locked box in her mind all these years. To recall it was like reopening an old wound.
Angelique gripped Sarah's shoulders and yanked her away at arm's length. "Sarah, why on earth would you think of going down into such a place alone?"
"I had a dream," the little girl blubbered, her pale blue eyes encircled with swollen scarlet lids. "I had a friend—a special grown-up lady—who wanted to play with my doll. She was in that room in the basement. She was lonely and scared and crying. But when I got downstairs, there was nobody there."
"It was just a dream," Angelique told her. "It wasn't real. No one is locked in the basement."
"But I saw her!" Sarah insisted. "I was going to share my doll with her."
"This doll?" Phyllis held up the figurine with a round wooden head and plain dress of blue cotton. "Why would anyone want to play with this ugly thing?"
"It's mine! Give it back!"
Phyllis smacked the doll against a support beam of the wall. She swung her whole arm, full force. The doll's wooden head cracked audibly. Sarah screamed a high-pitched wail as if she herself had been stabbed.
Then the governess hurled the broken thing at her. "Here is your doll, Sarah! No one's going to want to play with it now!"
"I hate you, I hate you! I want my other governess, the nice one with the black hair."
Phyllis's flat face twisted a sneer. "Stop pretending, you wicked little liar. There is no other governess but me."
For a moment, Angelique noticed a wavering in the shadow cast by the candlelight. In that brief glimpse in the corner of her eye, a faint translucent figure passed in and out of sight. A tall slender woman with long black hair, in a rouge house dress, strolled by. Angelique blinked and it was gone. She inhaled surprise at the peculiar vision; not a ghost or a demon spirit, no, it was more like the house had a memory of someone else who had walked before, or who had not walked here yet. By now, she fully accepted that Sarah's dreams were not all foolishness and imagination. The child clearly had a keen perception of the spirit world that pervaded Collinwood, and certainly more so than this dull-witted Phyllis.
Sarah sank to the floor, her soft skirts pooling around her thin legs. She picked up her doll and lovingly cradled it in her arms. Sniffling and shuddering from sobs, she softly sang to it, "London Bridge is falling down, falling down..."
"Oh that infernal song again!" Phyllis cried.
A man's boot steps ascended the stairs. Angelique's heart thumped. She knew the cadence of those footfalls, the weight of that body, the rhythm of his movement. Before he made his appearance at the top of the corridor, she knew that he had come... but not for her.
Barnabas rushed to his little sister and dropped to one knee beside her. Today, he wore his maroon velvet coat with a green satin waistcoat underneath. The ruffled cuffs of his sleeves were perfectly pressed into crisp pleats. His blue cravat was neatly tied into a bundled bow under his chin. The onyx ring was the only spot of blackness in his apparel.
"Sarah, what's wrong? Why are you crying?"
"My doll is broken."
"Let me see... Oh, yes." Barnabas received the injured party into the palms of his hands with all the tenderness of a battlefield doctor. "How did this happen?"
Phyllis's wide mouth gaped open. Angelique smiled at the woman's delicious fear. Confess to him, she commanded in her thoughts. Provoke his rage. Let me see his dark eyes alight with fire. He is never more terribly wonderful than when he is enraged.
"I... I..." Phyllis stammered.
Sarah said, "I dropped it."
"Now, Sarah, you must be more careful with your things. I purchased this for you in Philadelphia. I don't anticipate going back there anytime soon."
"I'm sorry."
"That's quite all right." He plucked a pale blue handkerchief from the cuff of his sleeve and used it to dab at the little girl's cheeks. "Now, let's dry those tears. Everything's going to be all right. Come with me."
"Where?"
"I'm going to fix your doll."
Sarah sprang to her feet. He rose to stand alongside her. Once again, the extreme disparity in their ages was clear. His sister's height barely topped the second button of his waistcoat. Angelique gazed at the two of them, a mismatched pair, and yearned to penetrate into the memories of the man's pain so that she could comfort him. He was the first born and the eldest. Surely he would remember the many times that his lovely mother Naomi had suffered in her birthing bed. The stillbirths... the miscarriages... the false starts of pregnancies... the infants who perished of diphtheria in their cribs... a chain of failures that drove Naomi to embrace the crystal decanters of Spanish sherry more frequently than she embraced her husband. It was a miracle that Sarah was born, and survived childhood, and stood before them now.
Angelique saw the innocent affection in Barnabas's gaze, the sort of saintly love that he had never shown to her or even to Josette. At that moment, she realized, He will do anything for his sister's sake. Yes, anything.
Phyllis said, "Excuse me, sir, but I should take her back to the nursery for her nap. It's past the hour. I'm afraid I've been too lenient with her."
Sarah stomped her foot. "I don't want to take a nap!"
Barnabas patted her gently on the lace cap. "You go ahead to the nursery. I'll fix your doll while you're sleeping, and I'll bring it back to you."
Sarah pouted. "Promise?"
"I promise."
#
Angelique hurriedly brought the earthenware cruet to Barnabas who waited for her in the parlor. "Here is the glue!" she exclaimed upon rushing into the room.
Barnabas said, "Thank you," but did not look up from his task. He had spread a few layers of kerchiefs on the writing table for the broken doll to lay upon. Its little blue bonnet off to the side, its knob of a head revealed to all the world. The crack was a jagged gouge at the doll's left-hand cheek, splitting down through one painted-on eye. Angelique briefly thought it a strange coincidence that the injury to Sarah's doll was the same as the musket ball that had torn Jeremiah's skull in half.
Angelique stood close by his chair. She held forth the cruet and expected him to take it from her hand. Perhaps, for a brief moment, their fingers might touch.
"Put it down on the desk, please." Barnabas rapidly opened and closed the desk's small drawers until he found a silver-plated letter opener.
She obeyed but choreographed the placement of the cruet so that her wrist crossed over his sleeve's cuff. In withdrawing she allowed a brush of her own fingers across the back of his hand. So soft, she thought with a shudder. His skin was like rose petals on a warm summer day.
Barnabas startled at her touch and fumbled with the doll. "That... that, uh, will be all. Thank you, Angelique."
She leaned toward him, about to say so much more. She choked back on the speech that she ached to scream into his ear. My touch still arouses you, doesn't it, my love? Why do you deny the feelings that so obviously rage inside of you? Touch me again, as you so earnestly wish to do, and you'll never be able to let me go, and I'll never want you to.
Barnabas uncorked the glue. He dipped in the letter opener. He scooped up a dripping dab of the honey-colored resin. Gently, he smeared the resin into the doll's cracked head. Again and again, he dipped and dabbed. His long slender fingers poised over his work with an uncommon grace. The sight of those hands at their delicate task weakened her knees. Her thoughts filled with the last time those hands had touched her. All the hidden places where he had kissed, during those hot nights in Martinique, her skin now prickled and tingled under the confines of her dress.
He wrapped the doll's head with a bit of string. "It will need a few hours to dry."
"You did excellent work, Doctor Collins." Angelique picked up the tiny blue bonnet and fiddled with tugging straight the lace trim. "I'll take it to her when she's finished with her nap."
He looked up at her. "You would do that?"
"Of course, why wouldn't I?"
He corked the resin. "I apologize. It was wrong of me to assume."
"Assume what?"
He turned in his chair to avoid her direct gaze and occupied his hands with wiping off the letter opener. He kept wiping it long after all traces of resin were clean. "Regardless of what our relationship may be, I should remember that it has no bearing on your compassion for my sister. Obviously, you've been kind to her. She likes you very much."
"She's a very sweet child."
"I only wish her governess felt the same way as you do. That dreadful woman! Such a stern and bitter shrew! But it's my father who pays her salary. I have nothing to say about it." He tossed the letter opener into the desk's drawer and slammed it. The drawer being so tiny, it made a very small rattle, insufficient for the glorious rage that was building up inside him.
"She spanks her with a wooden spoon," Angelique told him.
Barnabas curled his hands into fists. "I know. My father encourages it."
"It pains you to see anything hurt her, doesn't it?"
He sprang to his feet and swiftly crossed the room. He gripped the fireplace mantle and gazed down into the flames that lapped the logs. "My father used to whip my legs with a willow switch when I was a boy, but I understand why he did it. I was a rude and defiant little scamp."
"You?" She giggled softly to imagine him as a mischievous boy.
"Sarah is nothing but a tender soul of sweetness and light. How anyone could perceive the least inkling of misbehavior in her is beyond my comprehension. Moreover, I cannot fathom how anyone would have the heart to inflict pain upon her. Surely someone like that has no heart at all."
Angelique quavered on her feet, longing to rush across the room into his arms, to consume his deep frown with her kisses. But she had tried that before and he had rejected her. No, he needed a reason to come to her willingly. The desires of his body were not powerful enough to overcome the turmoil in his heart. Josette had betrayed him and abandoned him, and yet he did not seek comfort in Angelique's embrace. He tormented himself with solitude and had closed off that part of his heart that could love anyone. He needs me to cure him of this obsession for Josette or he will wallow in self-pity for the rest of his life! I can't allow him to waste himself over her. What I must do, however painful, is for his own good.
Gazing aside to the doll on the desk, Angelique saw a fresh path open in the dark woods. Sweet little Sarah.
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