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He circled around me to block me from leaving. It was only then that I realized I had been moving away, trying to evade the pain his candor was causing me. “Listen,” he said. “I kind of know what it’s like. Ginny looked down on me too. She thought that Iris had made a mistake in marrying me, and that I didn’t carry enough power to be a good match. The old bag cut me off at the knees and embarrassed me about my limits every chance she got. I know that she joked about me with the extended family. But you,” he said, and the expression on his face told me that he had never fully understood what he was about to relate, “she hated you, Mercy. I’m sorry to say it, but we all knew it was true.”
“I always knew it too,” I said. “But why did she bother putting up protective charms for me if she hated me so much?”
“Pride,” Connor said. “The old bitch wasn’t going to let you be the weak link in her armor. If someone had harmed you, it would have been an affront to her dignity.” He reached out for me again, placing his hand on my shoulder. I let him, and then he surprised me by tilting my chin up so that I was looking him in the eyes. “There are things I want to share with you. Some that I’ve only recently figured out, and some that I’ve known all along and should have told you about years ago. But I can’t just tell you. I have to show you. I need you to come with me,” he said, his eyes pleading.
“Where?” I asked, knowing the answer before he even replied.
“To Ginny’s,” he said, confirming my suspicion. “If you’ll go with me, I’ll be able to explain everything.”
“I’ll go,” I said, hoping that the show would be worth the price of admission. I had intended never to set foot in Ginny’s house again.
“Thank you,” he said again, relief flooding his face. “But first, let’s get you cleaned up a bit.” He pointed at my ruined shirtfront. He started to work his magic, but I held up a hand to stop him. I ran my right hand down the front of my shirt, and the dried blood that would have been impossible to remove by any other means instantly erased itself. That being done, we crossed over Drayton and walked into Forsyth Park, taking the center path past the Confederate Monument with its four rebel angels. Darkness was taking hold, and I watched as the last of the wholesome families evacuated Forsyth, their departure acknowledging that at nighttime the park belonged to the drug dealers and thugs that never seemed to get mentioned in the visitors’ bureau’s brochures.
As we drew near Park Avenue, the park’s lower boundary, my attention was captured by the monument memorializing those who had fought in the Spanish American War. I stopped dead in my tracks when I looked at the southern-oriented soldier’s face. I’d seen it a million times or more, but today, with the way the dying light was caressing it, I recognized an unmistakable resemblance to Jackson. My feelings for him washed over me like a tidal wave, aggravating my anger at Peter and my guilt for whatever role I had played in crushing Maisie’s dreams of a happy marriage. The temptation to run away with Jackson was strong, but I knew that if I gave in we’d both someday regret it.
“You okay?” Connor asked. I said nothing; I simply nodded and crossed the street. We turned left onto Barnard Street and then carried on to Duffy. Sooner than I would have liked, Ginny’s house stood before us. The house had stood vacant since the murder, and that’s more than likely how it would remain, a museum to the life and death of one Virginia Francis Taylor. I knew Connor and Iris had spent a lot of time there lately, sorting through Ginny’s belongings, which were few, and cataloging her magics, which were much more numerous. I started to ask him whether or not he had found anything interesting, but he raised his hand to stop me. “Inside,” he said and held the door open for me.
The first thing I noticed was that Connor must have removed the battery from Ginny’s clock—its annoying strumming had stopped. I let my witch senses kick in, trying to pry any secrets they could from my surroundings.
Connor seemed to understand what I was doing. “There’s nothing down here,” he said. “Ginny kept the important stuff upstairs.” He left me at the foot of the stairs and slowly made his way to the upper story.
I was filled with a giddy uncertainty. Ginny had never allowed me on the second floor. Never. I put my foot on the first step, applying gentle pressure as if I expected it to be booby-trapped. It took my weight without any objections, and the next step beckoned me. Each step I took felt like an act of retribution against the old woman who had done her best to alienate me from my family because I didn’t share their gifts.
A door stood open at the end of the hall. Sensing that it had been Ginny’s room, I crossed the threshold, running my hands over her dressing table, bed, and nightstand, trying to pick up any remaining vibrations. All I felt was Ginny’s absence. Emboldened, I flipped on the light, only to see pictures of Maisie at various stages in her development staring back at me. One of them had originally been a photo of the two of us, but Ginny had cut the picture in half and used thick matting to hide the part of my presence that couldn’t be easily excised. I tried to convince myself that it didn’t hurt, that it didn’t matter. Ginny was gone. Truth was, it hurt like hell.
Connor’s voice called to me from another room, so I extinguished the light and went down the hall. He was standing in the doorway of a pink and girly room that was obviously Maisie’s home away from home. He stepped aside to let me enter.
One full wall was taken up by a built-in bookcase, filled from one end to the other with modern journals and ancient texts. I opened one of the newest looking ones to find notes Maisie had made during a lesson she had received at Ginny’s feet. The idea of Ginny happily training my sister while forcing me to wait downstairs staring at a blank wall angered me. I threw the notebook to the floor and pulled another one out at random. The handwriting in this one was more mature, the spells more complex. Diagrams I couldn’t even begin to understand were traced along the margins, composed of geometric shapes that seemed to defy Euclid’s wildest imaginings and strange symbols that I had never seen before, some of them seemingly astrological. I almost returned it to its shelf, but instead tossed it to the floor in another gust of temper.
Connor sat on the foot of Maisie’s bed, and with a casual gesture of his hand, the chair from her dresser pulled up next to me. “I think you’ll want to sit for the next part,” he said, his voice breaking nervously. I complied without protest. “These books, the knowledge in them, I never wanted to hide any of it from you. Not really. But as long as Ginny had her hands on the reins, none of us dared to defy her, not even Maisie. Now that Ginny’s gone, I’m glad that the families support your education. I never wanted to keep you in the dark. Do you believe me? Do you believe everything I’ve been telling you?” His desire for me to say yes buzzed around him as brightly as a pawnshop’s neon sign.
“Yes, I guess I do at that,” I said, wondering why it mattered to him so much.
He smiled at me again, and seemed to be struggling with how to express what he wanted to say. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, Mercy. A lot of mistakes with you for sure, but a lot of mistakes in general.” He hesitated for a moment, then just dove in. “I married your Aunt Iris for my parents’ sake. I never loved her,” he said, scanning my face for a reaction. I didn’t give him one, but I felt betrayed, not only on Iris’s behalf, but on my own as well. That he could have implicated us all in his lie made my blood boil. I stayed silent, and after a few moments he continued. “My parents were proud that a Taylor woman would have me. They were proud that I was marrying above my station. Iris was beautiful and wealthy and a much more powerful witch than I’d ever be. And she loved me. I thought it would be enough.”
He got up from the bed and began pacing the small room, filling it up with his bulk. “Your Aunt Ellen had just become a teenager when Iris and I married. Your mother was still only a redheaded pipsqueak, skinny as a string bean and as willful as a…” He hesitated and faced me. “Well, as an I don’t know what.”
He returned to the foot of the bed. “You know that Iris and I lived away from Savannah the better part of a decade. We visited often enough, but I never really connected with your grandparents or Iris’s siblings. It was only after Iris’s last miscarriage that your grandparents insisted we come back to Savannah. Iris had almost died in our last attempt to have a baby, and, well, your grandparents decided they wanted their girl home. They held the power, and Iris held the purse strings, so home we came.”
I watched his hand as it alternately worried and smoothed the pink bedspread. “By then your mama was all grown up, and the truth of the matter was that she was more educated about the world than I was in a lot of ways. She knew that I was unfulfilled. She had joined a kind of club here in Savannah,” he said.
My stomach started churning as I anticipated his next words. I wanted to stop him from speaking, but all I could do was listen.
“You see, it was Emily who first started up with Tillandsia, and she brought me into it, with Iris’s acceptance, if that matters to you. After that last miscarriage, Iris wasn’t much interested in marital relations anymore. But I was a normal man, in the prime of life. I had a normal man’s needs, and Iris accepted that.” He patted his stomach. “I know you can’t see it now, but a couple of decades ago, there were plenty of women who wanted to be with me.”
“I don’t care,” I spat out. I was embarrassed beyond belief. The very last thing I wanted to think of was Connor as a sexual being, and I definitely didn’t want to think about him getting his thrills as my mother watched on.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should stick to what’s important.”
“And what is important?” I asked, my patience wearing thin.
“What is important is that I loved your mother. I loved Emily. Completely and with all my soul.”
“I see,” I said. “And do you think she loved you?”
“She gave her life to have my children,” he said and the earth stopped moving in the heavens.
