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In spite of her hurry, Alexa felt herself hesitate; and then, not quite knowing why she suddenly felt impelled to do so, she began to unfold the parchment. How creased it had become! And slightly yellowed at the edges as well. All the creases made it difficult to read at first, and even the ink had faded from what must have been black to a brownish shade. But it was still quite legible, especially when she held it closer to the lamp.
“Certificate of Marriage,” she read. At least that was printed clearly enough. Her mama’s marriage certificate?
But what a place to keep it! “Victorine Angelique Bouvard, seventeen years of age.” Only seventeen? But there must have been a mistake. This wasn’t Papa’s name at all! Perhaps the clerk at the registry had not heard right and had had to draw up yet another Certificate of Marriage; and Mama had kept this as a joke. Alexa read it over again. “Gavin Edward Dameron, aged twenty-two.” But how could there have been a mistake when there were the two signatures at the bottom? And the signatures of two witnesses as well, one of them... This was surely a day of surprises! Surely that was Sir John’s familiar signature?
Alexa sat back on her heels, beginning to feel numb. In January, eighteen hundred and twenty-one, her mother had married— not Martin Howard, her papa, but an utter stranger whose name she had never heard mentioned before. Gavin Edward Dameron. This same creased piece of paper she held in her hand had made those two man and wife. And in August of eighteen twenty-one Victorine had borne a daughter who had been named Alexandra Victoria. Not Dameron, but Howard. But how could that be possible?
Gavin Edward Dameron. Alexa remembered the scrawled initial that could have stood for almost any letter in the alphabet; but now, with his signature under her eyes, she knew that that initial had been a G. Almost without her own volition Alexa’s cold hands rummaged in the trunk and brought out the slim volume of poetry, opening it at the flyleaf. “To my Dearest and Only Love, from One whose Heart is Forever Yours!” Passionate, if rather flamboyant, sentiments, scrawled in Gavin Edward’s sprawling hand. Her... Even though her mind hesitated over the word, she had to think it. Her real father? It would account for so many half-finished sentences, so many other hints she had not noticed before. “Daughter? I have no daughter. Stillborn—both of them.”
“Victorine! God, how I loved her. Would have taken her under any conditions.”
What had Martin Howard meant? Was he her father after all? If Gavin Dameron had died in the wars or in some tragic accident soon after their marriage, then her mother could very well have turned to Martin Howard who had “always loved her” for comfort and solace.
But I have to know, Alexa thought fiercely. I won’t be able to rest now until I know everything. Now she understood Harriet’s warning about Pandora’s box and the intent way Harriet had studied her face for a while. Harriet had been afraid she might find something. But why did they not want her to know the truth?
With a cunning that was quite foreign to her nature, Alexa folded up the precious document carefully and returned it to its hiding place before she carefully closed and locked the lid of the trunk. They must not know yet. And for the sake of her own peace of mind, she must somehow find out whose daughter she really was.
Strengthened now by her feeling of resolution, Alexa began to strip off her yellow dress with a shudder of distaste. She hated that particular shade of yellow! And all those ruffles, row after row of them, had made her look and feel like a china doll. Fragile, docile, and abo
ve all, virtuous, because that was what every young lady’s dear papa expected of her, was it not? And what would he do if he knew how very close his pure and innocent little Alexa had come to losing her so-called virtue to a dark visaged stranger on a moonlit night?
“Alexa, my dear, why do you shut me out? Didn’t I make you understand why I said all those things I said? It is because I care for you so much—because I could not bear to see my Victorine’s innocent child tarnished and besmirched. You won’t stay angry at me, will you? Please, my dearest...”
Alexa could feel an involuntary shudder coursing up her spine again, and she had to close her eyes tightly before she could answer that pleading voice. “I—am not dressed. You tore my pretty new gown, you know.”
“But you can have two new gowns— three more, if you like—to replace that one. You know how sorry I am, and that I did not mean anything I said. Surely you know it? Don’t—don’t draw away from me now! I need you, don’t you know that? Would never hurt you—only protect you! Please, my dear, won’t you let me come in?”
“I told you, Papa—I am—I am not dressed. I am trying to pick out something to wear...”
“You’re alone, my dear? Got the curtains tightly drawn? Well it doesn’t matter if it’s your papa who comes in, does it? You’ll still be in private, won’t you? Know you’re a good child, my dear. Modest too. But you mustn’t feel that way with me, you know. Little Victorine...”
I am going to be sick! Oh God, I know he is drunk from the way his words slur and run together, but I cannot stand anything more! If he...
“Martin!” Oh—Alexa thought, almost abruptly—oh thank God Aunt Harriet had come! “Martin, what do you think you are about? You are making such a racket that I could hear you halfway down the stairs. And you are quite intoxicated again, aren’t you? You had better come back to your room with me before you make a complete fool of yourself.”
“But I have to talk to her, Harry. She’s angry with me now. Can’t have her staying that way— Victorine never stayed angry! Why isn’t she more like my Victorine? Victorine trusted me with her, didn’t she? Must make sure Alexa won’t be led astray. Women—so weak!”
“You can tell me about the weakness of women when we have both arrived in your room, Martin. And in the meantime, you mustn’t frighten Alexa with all these wild, drunken speeches. Come along, Martin, you can talk to Alexa later. Isn’t that so, my dear?”
“Yes—and thank you, Aunt Harriet. We will talk later, won’t we? After I have found clothes to put on.”
Through the door she heard protesting mumbles that were drowned out by Harriet’s sharp, imperative tones; and at last, while she held her breath, footsteps that moved away—followed within a minute or so by the slamming of a door.
It was only then that all the stiffness left her body, and Alexa crumpled where she stood like a rag doll with the sawdust running out of it.
Chapter 22
Dreams were such pleasant escapes, like fairy tales one chose to believe in as a child; all peopled with pretty spangled princesses and handsome princes. And in dreams, as in fairy tales, everyone lived happily ever after. Why, then, were dreams as tenuous as those little wispy swirls of mist that clung for such short moments around the hilltops before they vanished as if they had never existed? Why did nightmares never seem to end but go on and on? Dreams seldom came back, but the nightmares did—forcing her to relive everything, hear everything over and over again until there were words and phrases that seemed scorched onto the very tissues of her brain.
In all of Alexa’s nightmares there were doors. Long, dark passageways and doors. Voices behind doors—calling, crying out, quarreling. “Alexa! Alexa, don’t shut me out! It is only your loving Papa, my dear! You can be quite private with Papa, can’t you? No one shall defile you, my good, innocent child. No one but...” Papa?
Voices tearing away veils, opening up Pandora’s box that was so pretty on the outside to reveal all the ugly hidden things inside. Secrets, covered up and put away in a box, but always lurking there beneath the pleasant stage set facade.
The nightmare had already begun, although she hadn’t known it at first. She had been puzzled, she had been angry, she had been almost frantic with frustration and an almost unreasoning kind of fear that urged her to run— run barefoot and alone into the night and keep running anywhere at all as long as it was away. But no, she had always been used to facing her fears instead of running away. And that was why she had opened her own safely bolted door and walked barefoot along that wood-floored passageway that led past Harriet’s room and what had been Freddy’s room, past the empty space that had been her mother’s and to the next door, which was the very last.
She had been wearing a white cotton gown that needed pressing, but it was not one of the new doll-dresses that were so pretty and ruffled and laced. White for purity, she remembered thinking. And again and again in her nightmares she would feel under her bare feet the worn place in the thin coconut fiber matting and see the line of yellow lamplight that crept from under the door. Hear the voices, holding her there a listener, silent and motionless.
“Martin, for God’s sake, come back to your senses! She’s Victorine’s daughter, not Victorine! She looks on you as her father, not...”
