The Clarrington Heritage Page 4

  “If he would like, he might bring those by. If he hasn’t the time, he might mail them. Either is fine.”

  “But I understood that you don’t go outside the front door. How do you get your mail?” There was no excuse for the question except sheer curiosity.

  But Marise had learned patience in a hard school. “I had a revolving mailbox installed, so I can pick up the mail without opening the door. Do be sure to give him my message, Mrs. Fisk.”

  Gertrude Fisk’s voice came again. “Of course, Mrs. Clarrington. Is there anything else? Do you need anything special that needs a woman’s touch? Cosmetics, for instance? I’d be glad to oblige.”

  Marise almost laughed aloud. “A hermit doesn’t need to look beautiful, my dear. But thank you. Some month you might like to bring the papers for me to sign, yourself, and we can meet. Then you can tell your friends that you have actually seen the recluse of Myrtle Avenue.” And now she laughed lightly, trying to take the sting out of her words.

  But she was left with an odd taste in her mouth. There was more to Gertrude Fisk than had heretofore met the eye.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Father Clarrington’s Study

  Only twice a year did Marise enter the study that had belonged so intimately to Emanuel Clarrington. Even now, it breathed with his presence, the scent of his pipe tobacco lingering still. It had been ten years since he left it for the last time, but she felt him in the room with an intensity that was almost pain.

  The big mahogany desk still held his gold-trimmed blotter, the pen holder, the gold wire of the open file where his most pressing correspondence was kept. She had left his leather volume of King Lear open on the corner of his desk, as he had left it. She dusted under it on her twice-yearly visits and then returned it carefully, still open to the page on which Lear’s madness was made so plain.

  That was probably a sign of her own lack of mental balance, she often thought. Such minute attention to preserving the last remnants of the past should not be possible to a healthy mind.

  She could still remember the many long talks she had shared here with the man who became a second father to her. His rich voice seemed to season the very covers of the law books and reference volumes that lined the book cases. She had never expected to find in a father-in-law who was so much an integral part of her life.

  Emanuel Clarrington had been, in a way, her mentor. He had led her into philosophical fields that she had never considered before, and he had coached her as she tackled endeavors she had never thought she would have the chance to try. She measured her physical adulthood from her marriage to Ben. Her intellectual maturity stemmed from her father-in-law.

  He had been very strong and very gentle. As she had promised Hildy she would do, she had come to him with her questions about that upstairs room. He had gone even paler than usual when she asked about it.

  “Sit down, Marise,” he had said softly. “Did you close the door? Yes, I see you did. Would you like a sherry?”

  “This early? Not quite, Father Clarrington!” She remembered laughing at his expression.

  Then she sobered as he replied, “Well, I would. I have to have something to brace me up when I think about...certain things.” He poured a generous slosh from the cut glass decanter, and she saw that his hand was unsteady. Then, holding the delicate glass, he went to earth behind the big desk, as if seeking refuge.

  Already, Marise felt guilty for troubling him with her intrusive question. This must really be a painful subject for him.

  “Really, Father, if it distresses you I can live without knowing. I’m getting to be fanciful, I think, partly because of the baby, I suspect. And I’m not used to so much leisure. Idleness seems to be bad for my character.” She had smiled then and said, “Don’t feel awkward about telling me that there are some things I don’t need to know. I didn’t really realize what I was asking you to do.”

  “No,” he agreed, his voice sad. “But why should you be expected to? You are, for better or worse, one of us now. It is your right to know, and we should have told you at once and had this painful thing behind us. But I hated to do anything to upset the balance of things.

  “Ben seemed so happy and fulfilled and relaxed that I hesitated to do or say anything to upset you. It might have affected him. We’re not a demonstrative family, Marise. But we do care very deeply for each other.”

  “There simply cannot be that big a skeleton in the Clarrington closet,” she said, keeping her tone light. “I can’t think of anything that would make me leave Clarrington House.”

  “You don’t know, child. You don’t know,” he said. His long, thin hand shook again as he lifted the glass to his lips. Then he said, “You can’t know until I tell you, and I’m finding it hard to begin.”

  Again he lifted the glass, draining it as if for courage. When he set it down, he clasped his fingers together and began, “You must allow me to go back a bit in time. More than a bit, actually, for our problems as a family began in England.

  “Our people were very well to do, baronets in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Like most of their peers, they laid a lot of emphasis on material wealth—land, houses, horses, money. They held onto those things with an energy that deserved a worthier focus. For three generations, cousins married cousins, so the estate might grow to add adjacent holdings.

  “You, being a nurse, must know that inbreeding is a matter deserving of caution. Strong genes can reinforce each other and make for strong people, but defective ones can also double up. And there was a flawed gene in our line. It didn’t show up for quite a long time. It seemed for a while that the Clarringtons were going to get away with their game of genetic roulette.

  “They had many children, bright, forceful, aggressive young men and women who were ornaments to the breed. Some went into the army and won medals. Some went into Parliament and made several significant changes for the betterment of the common people. My ancestors began to feel they were a favored race, invincible and invulnerable.”

  When she rose and filled his glass from the decanter, he nodded absently, locked into that sad old history. He sipped again, and the wine seemed to bring a bit of color back into his thin cheeks. “They were wrong, of course. In the third generation, all hell broke loose.

  “Of six children in that generation, four were eccentric almost to the point of madness. One was normal. One was quite dangerously insane. According to the tradition brought to us by our own ancestor, the one seemingly normal child in that brood, the sixth child, managed at a very early age to murder two of the four children who were merely odd and unusual. All were older than she.”

  “She?” Marise felt horrified fascination as the tale unfolded.

  “She. A lovely little girl with the face of an angel, my father’s grandfather used to say. But she had the soul of an imp from hell. Her agonized parents would not send her to Bedlam, for they couldn’t bear to send her into such squalid and terrible conditions.

  “At times she could be so adorable they could never quite bring themselves to believe her guilty of the horrible incident that took the lives of her two brothers. It had to be some sort of accident, they kept insisting.” He sighed and looked down at his blotter, then up at Marise.

  “My ancestor, fearful of what might happen, gave up his inheritance and came to the new world. That was just as well for the continuance of the line, for two years after he left, Clarrington Hall burned to the ground with everyone in the family, including servants, trapped inside. Nobody had any theories as to how the conflagration happened or why the outer doors were all stuck fast, but he had his own dreadful suspicions.”

  Marise shivered but managed to keep herself from looking appalled. “But that’s several generations in the past, Father. Surely there has been enough admixture of genes by now to eliminate any taint there might have been.”

  “You would think so,” he agreed. “
You would not be correct. My own father had a twin brother. He was brilliant, a musician and a mathematician in the exciting combination that happens from time to time.

  “When he was ten he made his debut at Carnegie Hall. The Juilliard accepted him as a student instructor when he was twenty. When he was twenty-two, the arson squad in New York found that he had been setting fires in the tenement districts in the city on the nights when he wasn’t otherwise occupied with music.”

  That was too close for comfort, but Marise still managed to control her reactions. “What happened to him? Was he sent into a mental home?”

  “He killed himself before his sanity could be examined,” said Emanuel. His fingers were pressed against the blotter so hard that even the nails had turned white.

  “Still, this was a couple of generations back. It’s hardly an immediate cause for alarm. And how does that connect with the third floor of this house?” she asked.

  “One of those rooms was his. He equipped it himself, with bars over the windows, for he was terrified of intruders, prowlers, burglars. His door was studded with locks, and he killed himself there. His family had to shatter the door to bits to get to him, afterward. Too late, of course.”

  She studied his face, now drawn and dreadfully weary. “There’s something else. I can see it in your eyes.”

  He drew a deep breath. “Yes, and that is the worst of all. I had a sister, Clara. I always thought it a terrible name, Clara Clarrington. But she was lovely, with long brown hair, the black Clarrington eyes. She was quick, talented, impish. I adored her.”

  He turned to stare out of the window beside his desk, into the sunlight angled across the garden. His face was lined with pain.

  “Looking back, it seems she grew up in constant sunlight. I always see her, when I remember, dancing in the garden, round and round the rockery with the sundial in the middle. Round and round and round.

  “I went to join her, and when I took her hands to swing her around, as she loved for me to do, I found that she had pounded the head of one of my pups with a rock and laid the little smashed body on the sundial. She was dancing around her victim. Her sacrifice?”

  He looked down again as if avoiding that dreadful sunlight outside. “People lie to themselves, you know. I told myself this was something children often do. Abuse of animals is by no means rare in the very young. They grow out of it, I insisted to myself.

  “But I always had a niggling doubt. I remembered those old tales my grandfather told about his family, and they made me nervous.

  “Until then I did not properly appreciate my other sister, Angelina. Lina. She was not pretty. Her talents were practical, unspectacular ones. She gardened productively. She could make a room glow with beauty and comfort, and she could make anyone talking with her feel as if he were brilliant, witty, sophisticated.

  “She still does that. And she was the only one I told about the incident with the pup. We promised each other we would never marry and carry on the taint we felt was living inside our little sister. We watched her closely. Indeed, we were so careful of her that she grew into her mid-teens without another problem coming to light.

  “We conveniently ignored the fact that pets in our neighborhood tended to disappear frequently. One of the servants died, but we assured ourselves it was of natural causes. The boy who helped the gardener became very ill, and to this day I have no idea whether that was natural or not, but he died in the little cottage that used to stand beside the coach house. The incident frightened us, rightly or wrongly.”

  Softly, Marise asked, “You never told your parents?”

  He shook his white head. “You see, we couldn’t actually prove anything. Not even that she had been the one who killed my puppy, all those years ago. We just felt in our blood and bones that the family defect had come down in Clara.

  “We forgot we must grow up and go away to live lives of our own. She was still very young when Lina went away to school. I was sent to Harvard Law School. We left her here with our parents and the servants and her governess.”

  “So she wasn’t sent away to school.”

  “No. We persuaded Father and Mother it was better to have her taught at home because she was too brilliant to waste time with standard teaching methods. And that was true. She was incredibly apt at everything, music, math, writing, dancing.

  “I managed to hint to Father that it would be wise to watch her closely, but he misunderstood. I realized that too late. He thought I was an overfond brother, jealous of possible suitors.” He almost managed a smile.

  “And her room, too, was on the third floor?” Marise asked.

  “Eventually, once it was obvious that she was too dangerous to allow her to mix with other people. By the time my father realized it, by the time I was mature enough to tell him frankly what I feared, a neighbor’s child had died. Beaten to death with a rock.”

  “Not near the sundial!” Marise gasped.

  “No, in the garden of the house next door, where the vacant lot is now. He lived in the house beyond that, and children often played in the garden, for the old couple who lived there loved to have youngsters around them. I knew at once it had been no chance intruder who killed him. Clara had mentioned him often, before I left for college.

  “That was when I flew home and confronted Father with everything I knew and feared and suspected. By then, he had some fears of his own, but it took both of us to convince Mother that Clara had to be confined.”

  Marise sat up straight, understanding at once. “In your uncle’s room, of course. It was already barred, and the door wouldn’t be hard to replace, even more strongly than it was at first. Oh, my dear man! What a tragedy for you and your family!”

  He nodded. “Much worse than a burden. Mother never accepted the fact that her youngest and most beautiful child was a monster. Not until entirely too late did she believe her lovely Clara was dangerously demented. We learned she used to visit her secretly, though Father warned her never to go into the room without someone else there.

  “Mother was small, frail, much like you. Clara was tall and slender and very strong. The strength of madness? I’ve often wondered.” He stood abruptly and fetched the decanter again to refill his glass.

  “You mean...she killed her own mother?” Marise’s whisper was filled with horror.

  “It wasn’t that neat and tidy,” he said, his tone bitter. “She always behaved well when Mother came to see her. She made Mother believe we accused her unjustly and confined her for some strange, sick reason of our own. She convinced Mother that she was an innocent, imprisoned without cause, and Mother bought it.

  “She wanted to believe that, and she connived with Clara to get her out of the house with money enough to take her to our aunt in Charlottesville, where she could take refuge. She went up one night, when Father was asleep, with cash, a traveling bag all packed, and a bus ticket to Charlottesville. She intended to save this persecuted daughter.” He shuddered.

  “I have envisioned that night many times, when I couldn’t sleep. I know Clara must have met her with smiles and kisses. But Father must have waked for some unknown reason. Perhaps his intuition was working overtime, but however it was he went upstairs to make certain things were secure. He found Clara standing over Mother’s body, still holding onto the stocking with which she had strangled her.

  “Father was big, like Hannibal, not just tall but bulky and tough and strong. He told me she came at him like a she bear. He broke her neck with one chop. Then he called the police chief, who was his old friend and schoolmate. He told him everything and offered to go to jail right then if Nate Rivers thought it was right.

  “Nate didn’t. He got hold of the District Attorney and he and the police chief got together downstairs and fixed up an ‘accident.’ It’s mighty convenient to have pots of old money and an influential family background. There were friends in the right places to cover up a
family scandal.

  “Sometimes I think it’s entirely too easy. If it had all come out then, maybe we wouldn’t be haunted by those old deaths even up to the present. Madness and murder, that’s our skeleton. It’s a big one, don’t you think?” He looked intently at Marise.

  She deliberately relaxed the tension in her neck and arms and back. She thought she must have been holding her breath.

  “I see. No wonder you hate the thought of that room up there. Logical or not, those psychological ghosts are haunting the whole area, and I can see why Aunt Lina warned me about having children, too. But surely we’re far enough away by now so it’s not such a threat?” She asked the question almost pleadingly.

  “I devoutly hope so,” he said. He turned the glass in his fine fingers. “The burden of such a heritage can be devastating, and I know it better than most. Lina has never understood how I could forget that and marry Elizabeth. But I need not tell you falling in love erases a lot of things from your mind.

  “I wanted Elizabeth, needed her more than air or water or even life. Our sons are the finest men I know, even if having Ben did mean a lifetime of invalidism for my wife. We didn’t know until Ben that the strain on her heart was going to be so drastic. But I am not sure that, even knowing what we know now, we would not make the same choices again.”

  Marise rose and put her hand on his shoulder, patting it softly. “I cannot be sorry you had Ben,” she said. “Or Hannibal, either. He’s like one of my own brothers. I was an orphan when I met Ben, and you have given me a family to love. We’ll think positively. Ben’s baby and mine can’t be anything but sound and strong, now can he?”

  He had patted her hand then, but his eyes did not meet hers. “Surely your child must be. So much love and so many good wishes are going to accompany him into the world. We hoped to spare you the worry of this old tragedy. We felt it wouldn’t be good for you to have to deal with it at this point.

  “We never meant to exclude you from family secrets or to make you feel like an outsider. Concern, not secretiveness, kept you from the third floor rooms,” he said, but she could see his fingers gripping the glass still.