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By Root 751 0

beyond her reach, and finds, to one side of the house, a table such as might be used for gardening. With considerable effort (but, oh, how her arms and legs have been toughened by her work at Hastings, work she cannot bear now even to think about), she drags the worktable beneath the window. She climbs onto its rough surface and, with a series of abrupt wrenching pulls, loosens the wayward shutter, finally tearing it free of its remaining hinge and flinging it to the ground. She brushes the rust off her fingers. She bangs on the frame of the window with the heel of her hand to dislodge it from its damp-swollen lock, and when the window gives, she cannot suppress a cry of triumph. She hitches herself over the ledge of the window, balancing for a moment on its sill and then falling to the stone flooring below.

She stands and looks at the interior of the chapel and is flooded almost at once by grief, a torrent of seawater filling a tide pool. She sees the altar and her last desperate moments with Haskell; she observes a young girl sketching by a window without a single troubling thought in her head; she sees a boy, a small child she has never known, who might have come here to play. Alone finally, with no witnesses, she sits upon the marble bench and gives in to this grief, fatigue fueling her intermittent sobs. Tears make rivulets upon her road-dusted cheek, and she wipes her nose with the hem of her skirt. After a while, she sits up, certain she is through the worst of it, and unfastens the first two buttons of her blouse. But this gesture, this innocent fumbling, triggers a memory so sharp and so sweet, she is once again shaken by small aftershocks of longing, ripples that force their way through her body.

After a time, she removes her hands from her face and glances around her. Vandals have been in this chapel and have written with charcoal or with black ink on the marble and on the walls. Waxed papers, such as fried fish might be wrapped in, are balled in a corner. A cloth hangs from a wooden bench, and when she gets up to investigate, she discovers it is a woman’s undervest, its cheap muslin stained with something blue. She drops the garment onto the floor. She feels oddly violated. Though was it not she and Haskell who first desecrated this chamber? Or was that not a desecration, but rather the holiest of human sacraments? She does not know, though she has pondered this question for years. Even so, she thinks this new violation worse. The waxed papers, the scrawls, and the undervest are for her a desecration of memory, now the most dear of all her possessions.

She leaves the chapel and moves into the narrow passageway that connects the house itself, unlocking shutters and opening windows and doors as she goes, so that though there is only darkness ahead, there is light behind. The heels of her boots clicking satisfyingly on the slate floor, she passes through the kitchen with its bare cupboards and empty tables. Mice have skittered upon their surfaces, and rust has formed in the sink. She moves through the swinging door that once brought her unbidden to Josiah and Lisette. She makes her way through the paneled passageway where she last saw Haskell’s face, through the dining room where they dined together, and finally into the parlor, ghostly with white shapes, undisturbed, untouched. It is, she thinks, a spectral chamber, its memories waiting to be uncovered with the sheets. A salt spray on the windows seems like a frost, and though she can hear the sea in its relentless draw and spill, she cannot see it clearly. She stands in the center of the room, which smells heavily of mildew, unties her bonnet, and lets it float to the floor. She sheds her cloak and the tie at her neck, and then bends and unfastens the cracked boots she has been wearing for weeks. She unbuttons the cuffs of the shirt she has on and rolls the sleeves to the elbow.

With a theatrical sweep, she draws off a sheet that covers a red and cream silk chair. Mice have been at the upholstery, or was it always frayed just so? She tugs off another sheet