A Drowned Maiden's Hair_ A Melodrama - Laura Amy Schlitz [71]
“How can we tell Muffet?” asked Judith. “We can’t leave her in charge of an empty house, with no one to tell her what to do. How will she know we’re coming back?”
“I can tell her,” Maud said. She was tired of hearing the Hawthorne sisters talk about the hired woman as if she were some kind of animal. “Muffet understands me.”
“There, do you see?” Hyacinth smiled radiantly. “Maud and Muffet will do very well together — and a week isn’t long. Why, it’s no time at all!” Her face clouded. “I wonder if I should buy a new dress. I daresay they will all be very fashionable — my silver moiré is quite —”
“No,” Judith said grimly. “You’ve already spent a fortune on clothes.”
“My dear Judith, if one wants to go among fashionable people, it is essential —”
Maud scowled. They were forgetting her again. “What about Mrs. Lambert?”
Judith looked uneasy. “Oh, gracious, that’s right. We had promised —”
“Yes, but we can put her off.”
“A bird in the hand —”
Hyacinth shook her head. “Now, don’t fuss, Judith! Delay increases desire — you know that. I can tell Eleanor that Mrs. Fortescue needs my help — urgently — she will quite understand if I do it properly, and we’ll have the séance as soon as we come back. Provided” — she inclined her head — “provided our darling Maud practices her lines every day. Will you, Maud?”
“I know my lines,” Maud said gruffly.
“Every day,” Hyacinth said sweetly. She clasped the letter to her breast. “It won’t be long, Maudy. Just a week. Will you miss me so terribly, terribly much?”
Maud stood up. Her eyes met Hyacinth’s. “Actually,” she said slowly, “I don’t expect to miss you at all.”
There was a brief, dreadful pause, during which Maud quailed, certain that she had gone too far. But Hyacinth did not take offense. Her eyes did not even flicker. She ran one finger down Maud’s cheek. “Oh, well said, Maudy!” The whispered words trembled on the brink of laughter. Without another word, she rose from her chair and glided out of the room, leaving Maud torn between relief and something like fear.
Three days later Judith and Hyacinth took the steamer to Philadelphia, leaving Maud to the freedom she craved. It was, Maud found, a limited and disappointing freedom. She had the run of the house, but the front rooms were shuttered and still; though she would not admit it to herself, the silence made her nervous. She walked through the house on tiptoe and whispered when she played. After a day or so, she withdrew to the rooms that had never been forbidden: the attic and Muffet’s kitchen.
She never left the house in the daytime. She had been a secret child long enough to develop a fear of being conspicuous; she could not imagine going out in full sunlight. Instead, she waited until the dinner hour, watching the neighbors’ yards from an upstairs window. Stealthily she crept to the kitchen, opened the screen door, and ran barefoot across the grass.
Then the world was hers, and she was off to the ocean. Each night, it was different: warmer or colder, more or less rough; it changed color as the light changed in the sky. Maud could not resist it. In spite of her promise to Muffet, she waded in the shallows, taking care not to get her skirt wet. Once she followed the shore till she came to the rock wall that stretched from the sand to the horizon. Two boys were out on the rocks, wrestling and shoving each other. Maud watched them until their mother shouted at them to come off that jetty before they broke their necks.
So. The rock wall was called a jetty. Maud was intrigued. Something about the jetty struck her as vaguely familiar. She pictured herself walking on it, striding to the very end, with the sunset around her and the frenzied waves lashing her feet. She would feel like a heroine; people