My heart skips a beat. “He means well by me. He’ll set things right,” I say, though new doubts shake awake in my head. Does Quinn want me gone? With a new pair of boots for the journey out?
Mavis still looks shy. “Missus Sullivan’s holding your breakfast. You better claim it before she gives it to Lotty.”
I nod. My mind is a whirl. It will be impossible to get to Geist today. It had been all I wanted to do after last night’s revelations the arrow marked in a wreath of irises that had led me to Will’s scrap of letter.
Before I dash to rescue my meal, I open my scrapbook again and rub my fingers against the stained paper. The ink is blotted, the handwriting looks weak. I can almost feel the ache and fatigue in his words, so different from the determined cheerfulness of his other letters.
In bold daylight I am better able to register that Will’s last letter is in fact a confession. He had killed. He had stolen. He wrote of suffering and injuries. His last days were not as I’d imagined, cut down in the heat of battle. He died a prisoner. His story is a cry of shame.
Nate carries part of this secret. And so, I am sure, does Quinn.
Something is not right here. I must make sense of the confusion. What sort of raging monster had Will become in the end? What does Quinn intend to protect in his silences and lies? I yank so hard at my bootlaces that my feet feel the pinch as I hasten down the back stairs to the kitchen.
For of course Quinn is protecting his brother. Will’s end must have been so wretched that Quinn had to pretend he fell in battle. Quinn didn’t see his brother die otherwise Will surely would’ve given him my locket. I’m speculating, but I’m on the trail of the truth. And I want all of it.
Yet today I’m tasked with servant’s chores. There’s nothing I can do until they’re done. Under Mrs. Sullivan’s regime, the polishing of the brass and silver is a tedious matter, set in motion when every item is carried into the dining room and placed on the table. Each object is checked against her ledger before bowl, candlestick, or piece of tea service is transported down to the kitchen, where the day girl, Lotty, is given the lowest job of all: tarnish scrubber.
The scrubbed silver is then rinsed and re-rinsed, polished and buffed, carried upstairs, and set back upon the table for Mrs. Sullivan to inspect before it’s all replaced, safe and sparkling, in its designated position on whatever dreary sideboard, table, or corner cupboard. No amount of sparkle could lighten the gloom that lies over Pritchett House.
We work steady as carpenter ants, the mood of the morning’s fight lingering like an acrid burning after the fire’s stamped out. Aunt Clara has slunk off to her rooms, and Quinn has locked himself in his. I catch nobody’s eye for fear I might blurt out the whole incredible business of the last twelve hours.
Later in the afternoon, as I am replacing the bone-handled carving knives in their chest and Mrs. Sullivan has moved on to dinner preparations, I hear her call for the hired man to kill a chicken for supper.
“He’s up on the roof. I’ll do it.” Quinn’s voice. He has left his room, likely creeping down for a cup of bouillon that Mrs. Sullivan, a great believer in the healing powers of bouillon, keeps in a spare kettle on the hearth.
I hear the clatter of cups. “No, no, Mister Quinn, let me pour ”
“It’s no trouble. I did quite a bit of hostess duty for the corps.” I recognize the old coaxing charm in Quinn’s voice that these days he reserves for the servants. It always works. Sure enough, Mrs. Sullivan giggles.
I hear Quinn pass through the kitchen door. I pull on my cloak and hide my tarnished palms in a pair of mittens before I join him in step as he heads out to the yard.
“The almanac promises an early spring,” I begin amiably, but Quinn’s in no temper to chat.
“Jennie, you should leave here,” he says. “Put us out of your life, one and all.”
“Where would I go?” I feel a sting my eyes. I think of Nate, trapped at his window.
“There are opportunities.” Gracefully, Quinn swoops underhand to catch a speckled guinea, thrusting it into my arms in a single motion. A lock of his hair falls forward, and I resist the impulse to smooth it back into place. We head for the tree stump. La guillotine, Toby had called it. “You’re very clever.”
I can’t remember if Quinn has ever outright complimented me before. In light of that kiss, and Nate Dearborn’s words he’s sweet on you,
too I wonder if he continues to harbor feelings, or if he ever truly did.
“Clever at what?”
His expression is neutral. “You’ve got a calming way. You could be a nurse, or a governess, even.”
“I’m sorely uneducated.” I stroke the guinea beneath its gullet to subdue it. Other chickens, sensing danger, are clucking and scuttling around us, clawing up the cold earth. “You know I quit Putterham when Papa died. Besides, I never took to it, not really. I could tell you everything about Prometheus and Epimetheus, thanks to Papa. But I can’t multiply higher than ten times ten.” I feel the bird go heavy in my arms.
Quinn shrugs. “A pity. I wish I’d got to know your father. History will remember him with respect, as one of the first men to enlist in this war.”
“And to get killed in it.” Four years ago. It seems another lifetime since the beginning of the fighting. “Toby always said it was suicide. That Papa was never right in his head after our mother passed.”
“He wouldn’t be the first to go mad with grief. Some days I think I am mad, with what I’ve seen.” Quinn shakes his head as if to displace his thoughts. “The new reports say that the South is bankrupt, and I know firsthand that most of it’s destroyed, with a Union victory all but guaranteed. However it ends, I fear it’ll be many years we’ll be wiping up the blood of our memories.”
“Your experiences have left you bitter, Quinn. I’m sure we’ll be happy again. That’s what Will and Toby would have wanted.”
But Quinn doesn’t answer. He disappears into the henhouse, and when he returns he has knotted on the blood-rusted butcher’s apron and is carrying the axe. He pulls the limp bird from my arms, positions it on the stump, and then with one sure hand and a single stroke he severs its neck.
There’s a chorus of squawking as the headless chicken begins a jerking death-dance around the yard. Other livestock scatter.
“You used your left hand,” I note.
“I favored it as a child,” he says, opening his fingers, then closing them into a fist. “Then I was retrained properly at school. Wasn’t until I needed to shoot a gun that I went cack-handed again. Now I use my left for everything. It seems to have retained an intuitive skill.” He wipes the blood of the blade on his apron before wedging it into the stump. “S’pose I needed any natural advantage for survival.”