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With utmost gentleness, he gathered my body to his, shushing me.
“May we have a lifetime for me to beg your forgiveness.”
I cried against his bare shoulder, letting the anxiety and the sorrow of my worries rack my body. He held me as I shook, spilling my grief.
“You don’t really know anything about me,” I sobbed.
“Then tell me everything, my love.”
So I did.
***
My parents, Thomas and Laura, had been married in their teens, my grandparents on both sides hoping to consolidate their wealth with the union. My mother had grown up in a strict house and had high tempers, so people, including my father, tended to care for her at a distance. He showered her with as much luxury as he could afford but didn’t offer any true affection no matter how much she asked for it. When I was born, the little attention my father paid to her shifted to me, and I think that’s what made her hate me.
I was abandoned to nannies until I was five and the expense was considered unnecessary. Then, aside from required schooling by a spiritless private tutor, I was left to my own devices. I remained mostly in the kitchen with the only person in the house who loved me, the cook, Ms. Reeves.
It would’ve been best for me if my mother had forgotten I existed, but sometimes, she’d search me out and try to be a mother after all, but the encounters always ended poorly. I said the wrong thing, looked the wrong way, or had manners she disapproved of. I was slapped, pinched, and screamed at for minor trespasses, and the worst of all were the times she came to me already in a rage, already beyond mercy. It meant there’d be nothing I could do to please her, and inevitably she’d lock me in my wardrobe as punishment. Sometimes she’d leave me there for a full day until Ms. Reeves or my father knew she’d fallen asleep and could release me. I learned to be quiet. Crying and screaming only made me hoarse, and no one dared try to save me and provoke the wrath of Laura Foxboro.
When I turned thirteen, my troubles multiplied as her friends started wondering why I wasn’t at family dinners and parties. My presence was suddenly expected. To prevent my embarrassing her, she drilled me endlessly on etiquette, conversation topics, and politics. She hit me with a brush if I gave the wrong answer and pricked my fingers with pins if my hair wasn’t curled at night.
My saving grace, but also my greatest mortification, was when I began wandering the house at night, asleep and chasing dreams, opening doors and windows, rifling through drawers, pulling down plates from the kitchen and towels from the cupboards. I’d wake in the middle of the chaos I’d created not knowing how I’d gotten there. At first, my mother took it only as an opportunity to laugh at me and criticize my weak mind, but one night I made it to her room, rummaging through her makeup. When she woke to yell at me and I continued to only knock bottles and powders to the floor, my father told me she’d slapped my face, and in retaliation I’d attacked her, beating her about the head with the same brush she often used on me. It left her unfit to be seen for weeks. I don’t remember any of it, though I’m glad it happened. I’m happy I hurt her. When I asked my father later why he hadn’t stopped me, his only answer had been a hug. It was the last one he ever gave me.
Following this, Mother was scared of me, of what I might do at night, and my room was locked from the outside whenever the sun went down. She told her friends I was a lunatic and should be sent to a sanatorium for my safety. My father intervened and sent me to St. Mary’s boarding school instead. I was never welcomed home. I spent winter and summer holidays in the dormitories, and when I attended the ladies’ college in New York City, I stayed in a tenement with four other girls working as a telephone operator at night.
When at last I graduated, my mother decided I was enough of a success to be a boon to her and called me back. Her letter demanded I return so she could prepare me for life as an educated wife to a man she’d already chosen, a divorced older gentleman I knew from childhood with a bad temper and deep pockets. My father sent a separate letter begging me not to come and enclosed money enough for me to go anywhere to start my life on my own. But Iwantedto go back, at least to look my mother in the eye and defy her by saying goodbye, to see her face when I spurned her plans, when I proved to her I couldn’t be bullied and beaten into submission. I’d lived years without her, but I burned with the need to serve her the rejection she’d always given me. It was all that filled my thoughts.
When I arrived, the house was empty. No staff anywhere. I learned later from Ms. Reeves that everyone had been fired, kicked onto the street with no sorry or severance pay. I wandered around, calling their names, searching foranyone. At last, I looked in my mother’s room, her vanity perfectly arranged, a dress pressed and hung on the changing screen, prepared for a party, and her white rug soaked in blood from the heap of her lifeless body, half of her face destroyed by a gunshot wound. My father lay nearby on the bed, pistol still in his hand. He’d shot himself as well.
In a haze, I covered him with a cashmere blanket from the foot of the bed, ignoring the shell of my mother, and walked downstairs to call the police. When they moved my parents’ bodies they found the tragedy’s catalyst: the letter declaring my return, tucked in my father’s pocket. It had been delayed, and was delivered only that morning mere hours before I arrived. As soon as their funeral was over, I sold the house, took the little money left over after my parents’ debts were paid, and bought a train ticket to California. I boarded that train with no plan, no more money, and woke up in Massachusetts four years laer.
***
Callum held me through the confession of my life, and when I was finished, having said out loud the most essential parts, it was fully night, leaving us in only the shadows of the firelight.
“I lost so many years,” I whispered. “I’ve got a terrible temper, and I’m haunted by my mother’s voice, and by nightmares of weeping women jumping out of windows.”
I couldn’t help the sardonic laugh, shaking my head at my own derangements, but he remained silent. At last, I spoke the fear I’d never revealed to another soul.
“I killed my parents, Callum. They’re dead because of me and my pride.”
“No,” he replied, his tone uncompromising. “Your father made his own decisions.”
“To protect me from myself.”
“To protect you from your mother. But he didn’t know you very well, Millicent Foxboro. You would have had the courage to leave just as you’d planned. His ignorance of his own daughter’s strength drove him to make his final mistakes. None of that is your fault.”
“Don’t be insincere,” I murmured, uninterested in counterfeit admiration even if it was given to soothe my pain.
“You must stop always thinking the worst of me.” He lifted my chin, his eyes wandering over my face as though memorizing every line, every hollow and dimple. “And yourself. You’re a force of nature, and despite your trials, you’ve survived with a spirit worthy of its own folklore. Up to now you’ve made your way through hell all alone, but you’re not on your own anymore, Millie. Never again.”
I began to weep anew, and he kissed my forehead, drawing me back to his body, whispering his sweet, comforting words. When all my tears were spent, we made love in the peaceful glow of the dying fire.
Chapter 18
In the early morning hours, I untangled myself from Callum. He’d insisted it didn’t matter if everyone knew I hadn’t slept in my room, but I thought we should enjoy the secret awhile longer. For the first time, I ran through the halls of Willowfield with a light step, unafraid of the gloom. There was a glow to the world, a new magic making the once-sinister corridors radiant and full of possibility.
The following days, at my request, were busy with attempts to keep the others from suspicion. It wasn’t too difficult a task as the professor had sought to renew the renovations on Willowfield, requiring him to often be out meeting with companies who’d contract the work. He hoped to have time to organize the spring fete, welcome the community back to the house, and, as he said, “Hopefully, put all the nonsense about haunts to rest.”
