… To hell with being good.
The thought was dizzying, intoxicating—I’d already broken so many rules tonight, left them smashed and glittering in my wake—what was one more?
Then I pictured Mr. Locke’s face as I’d swept from the smoking room—the stiff lines of outrage around his mouth, the disappointment in his chilled gray eyes—and my stomach went cold. My father was gone, and without Mr. Locke I would have nothing at all in the world.
I cast my eyes to the ground and stepped away, shivering a little in the cooling night. I thought I heard Samuel exhale.
There was a short silence while I relearned the trick of breathing. Then Samuel asked, lightly, “If you could go somewhere else right now, where would it be?”
“Anywhere. Another world.” I was thinking of the blue Door and the smell of the sea when I said it. I hadn’t thought of it in years, but Adelaide’s story had dragged it back to the surface of my memory.
Samuel didn’t laugh at me. “My family has a cabin on the north end of Champlain. We used to go every summer for a whole week, but my father’s health, and the shop… We have not gone in years.” I pictured Samuel as I’d known him before, young and wiry-armed and so tanned he seemed to emanate secondhand light. “It is not a very large or very nice cabin—just a cedar-shake box with a rusted stovepipe sticking out—but it is very alone, at the edge of its own island. When you look out the windows there is nothing but lake water and sky and pine trees.
“When I get sick of all this”—he waved his hand so widely it seemed to include not only Locke House, but everything inside it, every expensive bottle of imported wine, every stolen treasure, every trilling banker’s wife taking a glass from Samuel’s tray without ever seeing him—“I think of that cabin. Far away from bow ties and suit coats, from rich men and poor men and the space between them. That’s where I would go, if I could.” He smiled. “Another world.”
I was suddenly very certain he still read his story papers and adventure novels, still kept his eyes on the distant horizons.
It’s a profoundly strange feeling, to stumble across someone whose desires are shaped so closely to your own, like reaching toward your reflection in a mirror and finding warm flesh under your fingertips. If you should ever be lucky enough to find that magical, fearful symmetry, I hope you’re brave enough to grab it with both hands and not let go.
I wasn’t. Then.
“It’s late. I’m going in,” I announced, and the harshness of it erased the miraculous circle we’d drawn around ourselves like a shoe smudging away a chalk line. Samuel stiffened. I couldn’t bring myself to look at his face—would I have seen regret or recrimination? Desire or desperation to match my own?—but merely whistled to Bad and turned away.
I hesitated at the door. “Good night, Samuel,” I whispered, and went in.
The room was dark. Moonlight drew pale edges around the ivory gown now crumpled on the floor, the burr of Jane’s hair against her pillow, the curve of Bad’s spine pressed against me.
I lay in bed, feeling the champagne tide retreating and leaving me beached, like some unfortunate sea creature. In its absence the Thing—heavy, black, suffocating—returned, as if it had been waiting all evening for the two of us to be alone. It slid oil-slick over my skin, filled my nostrils, pooled at the back of my throat. It whispered in my ear, stories about loss and loneliness and little orphan girls.
Once upon a time there was a girl named January who had no mother and no father.
The weight of Locke House, red stone and copper and all those precious, secret, stolen things, pressed down on me. After twenty or thirty years beneath that weight, what would be left of me?
I wanted to run away and keep running until I was out of this sad, ugly fairy tale. There’s only one way to run away from your own story, and that’s to sneak into someone else’s. I unwedged the leather-bound book from beneath my mattress and breathed in the ink-and-adventure smell of it.
I walked through it into another world.
Chapter Two
On Miss Larson’s Discovery of Further Doors and Her Departure from Documented History
A timely death—The boo hags of St. Ours—The hungry years and their conclusion
Mama Larson died in the bitter March of 1885, a week after the early-rising daffodils had been felled by a hard frost and eight days before her granddaughter turned nineteen. For the Larson aunts their mother’s death was a tragedy on par with the falling of a great empire or the collapse of a mountain range, almost beyond understanding, and for a time the household degraded into scattered, aimless mourning.
Mourning is a self-absorbed business; it should not therefore surprise us that the Larson women failed to pay much attention to Adelaide Lee. Ade was grateful for their inattention—for if her aunts had considered her countenance, they would have found it very far from despair or sadness.
Standing beside her grandmother’s deathbed, woolen dress still smelling of black logwood dye, Ade had felt the way a sapling might as it watched one of the old forest giants come crashing magnificently to rest: awed, and perhaps a little frightened. But when Mama Larson’s final breath rattled from her ribs, Ade discovered the same thing the young sapling would have: in the absence of the old tree, there was a hole in the canopy above her.
Ade began to suspect that, for the first time in her life, she was free.
It wasn’t true that she’d been unfree for the previous several years. Indeed, compared to other young women in those times, she led an unfettered and feckless life. She was permitted to wear canvas trousers and men’s work hats, primarily because her aunts eventually despaired of keeping her skirts presentable; she was not expected to ensnare any eligible young bachelors, because her aunts shared a collectively dim view of men; she was not forced to attend school or find employment; and while her wandering habit was not encouraged, her aunts were at least resigned to it.
But Ade still felt as if an invisible collar rested around her throat, its leash leading back to the Larson farm. She might disappear for two or four or six days, riding a train north and sleeping in strangers’ tobacco barns, but in the end she always circled back home. Mama Larson would wail about fallen women, her aunts would purse their lips, and Ade would go to sleep heartsick and dream of doors.
Her leash grew loose and frayed over the years, until it was just a single thread of love and familial loyalty. With Mama Larson’s death, the thread snapped.
As happens with many caged creatures and half-domesticated young girls, it took some weeks for Ade to realize she could truly leave. She stayed for her grandmother’s burial in the lumpy, ivy-eaten plot on the far side of the farm, and paid Mr. Tullsen to engrave a limestone marker (HERE LIES ADA LARSON, 1813–1885, A MOTHER MOST DEAR), and three weeks later she woke with her pulse beating a marching rhythm in her throat. It was a bright spring morning, full of promise. Most travelers are familiar with this kind of weather—when the wind blows westward and warm but the ground still chills the soles of your feet, when the tree buds have begun to unfurl and scent the air with secret springtime madness—and they know those days are made for leaving.
Ade left.
Each of her aunts received a kiss on the cheek that morning in order from oldest to youngest. If the kisses were more sincere than usual, and if their niece’s eyes had a feverish glow, they did not notice. Only Aunt Lizzie looked up from her boiled egg.