Hallow House - Part One Read online

  "It's a warning," she kept saying at breakfast.

  "My dear wife," Boris said. "Coming from San Francisco you surely became accustomed to these slight shakings."

  "You forget I was raised in Massachusetts, not California," she reminded him. "We had storms, hurricanes even, but never earthquakes. I tell you, this was a warning. I must spend the day in my room setting more wards."

  "Wards?" Boris frowned, an ominous sight.

  "I think she means prayers," Alicia said hastily. "She has a little room now between the two towers with a portrait of the Virgin and Child."

  His face cleared. "No harm ever came from prayer," he said. "But what is this room?"

  "It's mine!" Tabitha cried. "A place where I can be alone."

  "One of the workers built it for her while you were away, using the little alcove between the towers," Alicia told him.

  Metta, who'd been coming down for meals since Boris's return, said something to him in Russian and he nodded, smiling at his wife. "My great-aunt reminds me that twins run in our family. A woman carrying two children is entitled to her little fancies," he said. "If you need a special room to say your prayers, so be it."

  Boris, though, had not expected his wife to shut herself away for such long hours every day. Nor had he expected the room to be locked.

  Later in the week he came storming down the stairs and confronted Alicia in the parlor where she was doing her embroidery.

  "What the devil does she mean by locking herself away from me?" he demanded.

  "Tabitha did the same while you were gone," Alicia said, having dreaded this moment ever since his return. "She told me she needed to be alone."

  "She's not praying. I heard her chanting some heathen gibberish earlier," he said angrily. "She's missed both lunch and dinner and now she doesn't answer when I pound on that damned black door and order her to come out." He turned on his heel, tossing, "I'll take an ax to it," over his shoulder.

  "Wait!" Alicia cried. "I have a key." She handed over the brass key and they climbed to the third floor together. There was no sound at all from behind the black door as Boris rammed the key into the lock and turned it.

  The door opened, releasing the scent of bitter herbs. Alicia put her hand over her mouth to stifle a scream. Naked, Tabitha lay slumped inside a large circle drawn on the plank floor in what looked to be blood. As Boris knelt and scooped her into his arms, Alicia caught a glimpse of the red drapery that covered the religious picture. Following Boris as he rushed from the room, she paused briefly to pick Tabitha's key off the floor, apparently shoved from the lock by the insertion of the key from the outside, and dropped it into her pocket. She locked the door and collected the second key before hurrying downstairs after him.

  When she reached Tabitha's bedroom, Boris was just laying her cousin on the bed. He pulled a coverlet over her and said gruffly, "Tend to her." Seeing the key in her hand he plucked it from her fingers and headed for the door.

  "I locked the room," she called after him, then turned to Tabitha.

  Metta slipped in while she was trying to dress the unresponsive Tabitha in her nightgown and, wordlessly, set to work helping her, which was a blessing. They finally succeeded in getting her decently covered and properly into bed.

  "Hot bricks," Metta said. "She cold."

  Alicia remembered that soon after Ramos hung the red drapery for Tabitha, the servants had begun to seem shy of her, leading Alicia to believe Ramos must have said enough to frighten them. Now, she discovered, the maids wouldn't even enter Tabitha’s room.

  "Superstitious lot," Agnes said, carrying up a tray herself that evening for Tabitha.

  Though Tabitha neither moved on her own, nor spoke, she did take a small amount of food and drink if it was fed to her. Alicia prayed she'd improve by the next day.

  Her prayer was not answered. Tabitha remained exactly the same, day after day. Dr. Kames, called down from San Francisco by Boris, examined her, called it a trance state and was unable to offer any help.

  "She will come out of it on her own, likely enough, when the baby is born," the doctor said.

  "But that's over a month away," Alicia pointed out.

  Dr. Kames shrugged. "There's nothing that can be done," he repeated. "Keep her warm and clean and feed her as much as she will take."

  Which was very little. While her abdomen grew larger, Tabitha grew visibly thinner. Metta and Alicia attended to all her needs, with Alicia worrying that her cousin would die before the baby was born.

  Boris was underfoot at first, but after the doctor's visit rarely came to visit his wife.

  "I can't bear to look at her," he confessed to Alicia one evening as they sat on the front porch in the warmth of the gathering dusk. "She is nothing like the woman I married. Oh, I knew she might be frail, over bred women often are, but I never expected this." He glanced over at Alicia. "You, now, this would never happen to. You are clearly a healthy, robust young lady, like so many of our Russian women."

  She wasn't quite sure if he meant the words as a compliment, but she was pleased all the same--and ashamed that she was. While poor Tabitha lay perhaps dying upstairs, she should not be searching for compliments from Tabitha's husband.

  But, as Boris turned to her for companionship, she found herself more and more drawn to him, though she tried her best not to let him know how she'd begun to feel.

  Dr. Kames was due to return on the seventh of July, as he'd promised Boris, to remain at Hallow House until the baby came. On July sixth, a tremendous storm rolled in from the west, with blinding flashes of lightning and loud crashes of thunder.

  Alicia, sitting beside Tabitha's bed, saw her cousin begin to thrash around. Since Tabitha hadn't moved in weeks, she grew alarmed and called for Metta. When the old woman arrived, she pulled the covers down and placed a gnarled hand on Tabitha's grossly swollen abdomen.

  "Touch," she ordered.

  Alicia did so and was startled to find it hard as a rock.

  "Baby come," Metta told her.

  But Dr. Kames won't be here until tomorrow."

  “Baby no wait. You, me help."

  Terrified by being expected to do something she knew nothing about, Alicia realized she had no choice.

  “Two inside," Metta added.

  Dear God, twins! Tabitha had been right all along.

  Chapter 3

  Boris didn't come near the bedroom until much later, evidently roused by Tabitha's screams of pain. He stuck his head in the door, only to quickly withdraw when Alicia cried, "She's having the baby."

  "She need to push,” Metta said. “You tell her push”

  "Push, Tabitha," Alicia urged, only vaguely understanding why this was necessary. She knew absolutely nothing about how babies were born.

  What seemed to be an alarming amount of blood had already soaked the sheets but now another gush came and with it, the baby's head. Moments later Metta was holding a small, perfectly formed boy in her hands. The baby squalled. Another gush of blood and out came a dark red mound that was attached to the baby by a cord of flesh.

  "Afterbirth," Metta said with satisfaction. She laid both baby and afterbirth in the nest she'd had Alicia make by placing a blanket in an empty dresser drawer.

  She then put her hand on Tabitha's greatly reduced abdomen and begin rubbing it hard. "You do," she told Alicia, who obeyed.

  Metta returned to where she'd stood before, near the bottom of the bed. Under her fingers, Alicia felt Tabitha's abdomen grow rigid again.

  "No stop," Metta warned. "It comes."

  But what came out was not immediately identifiable as either baby or afterbirth. Alicia knew that whatever it was, it couldn't possibly be alive. Another, smaller, gush of blood and Metta nodded.

  "Done," she said. "One lives. One dead." She lifted the thing--a dead baby?--and laid it on a small table she'd pulled up near the bed, placed a clean towel between Tabitha's legs and pulled the covers up over her.

  Alicia watched in fascination as Metta tie
d the piece of back cotton thread she'd asked for tightly around the living baby's cord an inch or so from his skin. She then severed the cord on the other side of the thread with a knife.

  "Must bury," she muttered lifting the afterbirth with the severed cord from the blanket nest and laying it carefully into one of the basins she'd had the maids bring. Turning to what Alicia couldn't help thinking of as the "thing," Metta examined it carefully. As she held the dried, mummified remains in her hands, Alicia saw it had once been a very small, male baby. An equally dried cord connected it to a shriveled afterbirth.

  "Long time dead," Metta muttered.

  Since the time they'd encountered the Indian in the rose bed, Alicia couldn't help thinking with a shudder.

  "No tell." Metta jerked her head toward Tabitha, lying as though dead.

  "I won't tell her," Alicia promised. "Never." If she could hardly bear to look at the shriveled thing, how terribly poor Tabitha would be affected.

  "Bury," Metta said, placing it in another of the basins and covering it with a cloth.

  The mattress on the bed was soaked with blood. Ruined. Together they carried Tabitha, who seemed to weigh almost nothing, through the connecting door and deposited her in the bed that once had been Boris'. He'd moved from the room during his wife’s illness so Alicia could sleep closer to Tabitha.

  Alicia washed the blood from her, patted her dry and, under Metta's direction, fashioned a sling to hold folded towels to absorb the "more blood come" that Metta predicted. All the time she worried that Tabitha, so still and pale, was dying.

  "I wash baby. You bring Boris," Metta then told her. After quickly cleaning herself, Alicia went in search of Boris and found him pacing up and down in the library.

  "You have a son," she told him.

  He caught her in his arms, hugging her, almost as though she had been the one who bore the child.

  When he freed her, she said, "Come and visit your wife and son."

  "How is Tabitha?" .

  "Low," she said truthfully, aware he'd see that for himself in a minute or two.

  He stood by his wife's bedside for a moment, touched her cheek with the back of his hand and shook his head. Metta motioned from the connecting door for him to come into the other room. Alicia followed.

  The baby was dressed in the tiny clothes that had been prepared for him and wrapped in one of the baby blankets. Metta deposited him in Boris's arms, obviously startling him. "You name," she ordered.

  "Micah Ivan Gregory." The name rolled so readily off his tongue, that Alicia knew he must have chosen it long ago.

  Plucking the wrapped bundle from him, Metta handed it to Alicia. "Micah need suck." She touched her own covered breast. "Tabitha no milk. He need milk. Find woman." Turning to Boris, she rattled off Russian words, presumably insuring he understood he must find a wet nurse for Micah. Then she led him to the covered basin. Alicia stayed where she was, cuddling the live baby to her, with no wish to look again at his shriveled twin.

  Again Metta spoke in Russian. Boris replied, she shook her head and said more, going on until at last he nodded, picked up the covered basin and left the room.

  Alicia took Micah in to his mother, hoping Tabitha would rouse enough to see her son, but she did not.

  By the time Dr. Kames arrived the next day, Boris had located a wet nurse for Micah and the boy was eagerly nursing. The doctor nodded his head approvingly, but, when he went in to examine Tabitha, he began shaking his head instead.

  When he finished, Alicia followed him into the hall where Boris was waiting. "The birth hasn't injured her," Dr. Kames said to Boris, "but her general condition has deteriorated so severely since I last saw her that I'm surprised she lived long enough to deliver the baby. I wish I could offer hope, but it seems clear to me your wife is dying. Take what consolation you find in the healthy son she gave you."

  After the doctor was gone, the household settled down to wait for the inevitable--Tabitha's death. Boris sought Alicia's company, which she readily gave him, aware of what he must be going through. They sat once more on the porch that night, the smell of carnations from a nearby bed drifting on the warm breeze.

  "I buried it, the way Metta told me," he said at last, breaking the silence between them. "She told me I must not give the pitiful little thing a name because it had died long before it would have been able to live. That seemed wrong to me, but I did as she said. She has lived long and is a wise woman."

  "She told me I must tell never Tabitha about the second baby," Alicia said, tears coming to her eyes. "Even if I wanted to, I fear I wouldn't have the chance. My poor cousin may die without even being aware she has this beautiful little son."

  "That is sad, I agree. To make it worse, if Tabitha lingers beyond a week, I shall have to leave you to cope with what is to come. The letter that arrived today from my business partner calls for an urgent decision I must make in person. I can't delay more than one week."

  Boris was going to leave? To Alicia's consternation she burst into tears.

  He jumped from his chair, pulled her up and into his arms, speaking soothing words in Russian while he rubbed her back. "You have been strong, when strength was needed," he said softly in English as her tears ebbed. "You have been Tabitha's strength, now you must be strong for me."

  When he first held her, his arms had been comforting, but now she began to feel a much stronger and wilder emotion welling up from deep inside her. Without realizing what she intended to do, she found herself pressing closer to him.

  He responded by wrapping both arms tightly about her and, when she lifted her head to look at him, he kissed her. With the feel of his mouth on hers, Alicia's world dissolved, narrowing down to Boris. Only Boris. No one else existed.

  A long time later, he loosened his hold to whisper to her. "This has been growing between us for many months. You are what I want, what I need. How I've longed to hold you like this, to feel your softness against me."

  Her knees feeling like they might give way at any minute, she clung to him, breathless. "I tried not to feel this for you," she murmured, "but it has been there for a long time."

  "Yes," he said, "yes." Then he kissed her again.

  By the time they went inside, Alicia wasn't sure if she could manage to climb the stairs. She and Metta had been taking turns watching over Tabitha. Tonight would have been hers, but, along with the wet nurse for Micah, Boris had brought back the girl’s widowed mother to take care of Tabitha.

  Tonight both she and Metta could sleep in their own beds, knowing Tabitha was being watched over. Alicia slipped into the room where Tabitha was for a final check before she retired. The Mexican woman, Juana, was sitting beside the bed, fingering her rosary. She smiled at Alicia.

  Tabitha lay so still it was difficult to believe she lived until Alicia saw the slight rise and fall of her chest. Truly the flame of life flickered low within her. Alicia bent and kissed her cold cheek before leaving.

  In her own room, she undressed, donned a summer nightgown and threw back the covers to lay without them. Even with the windows open, the nights stayed almost too warm inside the house. Before she had time to relive the moments with Boris, or to blame herself for allowing them, she slipped into a profound sleep.

  At first she thought she dreamed the warm body pressed against her back, the hands caressing her breast, the nibbling kisses at her nape, at her ear, each touch increasing her need for more. But then a voice whispered her name and she knew it wasn't a dream. Boris had come to her, he was in her bed with her.

  She turned toward him, dazed with sleep and desire. Already past the point where she could consider right and wrong, she eased into his embrace. Her fingers touched the warm smoothness of his naked skin, pulling him closer, wanting to be a part of him.

  As if by magic her gown was gone and, for the first time in her life, she felt the wonder of male flesh against her nakedness. His kisses thrilled her, his caressing hands made her ache for something she knew only he could provide.
<
br />   When they joined together, she thought she'd die of her love for him.

  When she woke in the morning, he was not in her bed. But she was well aware his being with her had been no dream. And now there was time for guilt.

  As the week passed, Tabitha clung to her thread of life. Boris spent every night in Alicia's bed, making love to her, and neither spoke of how wrong it was. She was certain he felt as much guilt as she did, but what they had together was too strong to be stopped.

  At the end of the week, he left. "I wish I could take you with me," he told her privately, "but that's not possible. Watch over Hallow House and wait for my return."

  Two days after Boris's departure, almost as though she'd been waiting for him to leave, Tabitha opened her eyes and whispered Alicia's name. In a matter of days she was feeding herself and soon walking with help. But she was by no means the old Tabitha. Physically she'd come back, but mentally was another story.

  For one thing, she took little interest in her son, Micah, leaving his care to Benita, the wet nurse, or to Alicia. Juana had to be kept on, as Tabitha showed an increasing tendency to wake at night and wander unsteadily through the house.

  "Where is he?" she kept asking. "Where is my baby?" It soon became clear she didn't mean Micah, for she shook her head when he was brought to her. "Not him the other. What have you done with him?"

  "There is no other," Alicia felt forced to say, hating to lie to her cousin. And, yet, in a way, it was true--the other had never really lived.

  She couldn't understand how Tabitha knew about a second child. Perhaps some of Metta's words during and after the birth had lodged somehow in her cousin's brain, despite her seeming oblivion. Or maybe her conviction there'd been two babies growing inside her was still fixed in her mind.

  However she knew, it made for complications because Tabitha was determined to find "the other."

  When Boris returned, he'd have to summon Dr. Kames, Alicia knew, because Tabitha was growing increasingly hard to manage and soon all the pills Mr. Woodward had given her for his daughter would be gone.