The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [16]
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll try not to drive myself mad. In the mean time, you’ll help me build my manor?”
“Imagine I could lend a hand from time to time.”
“And that portrait? You’ll help me get it back?” She saw no need to mention the papers, for how could she trust this man she’d just met? Such a treasure might cause a good man to change direction. As he said, power changes a man.
When she looked up at him, his affable demeanor had darkened.
“Might as well take a knife to both our throats.”
“I want it back.”
“If that portrait went missing he’d search ever inch of this island until he turned it up. He’d catch you, and he’d kill you.”
“It’s all I’ve got from before.”
Whaley handed over her breakfast.
“You got lots from before.” He tapped his temple with a forefinger. “Way more important than paint on a canvas.”
“I don’t know. I don’t trust myself to remember. Not here, not as hard as it is to live.”
“That only makes a memory stronger,” he said.
Again she sensed some untold story. It was in his delivery at times, his sudden demonstrative surges, so noticeably impassioned given his phlegmatic demeanor. But now was not the time to press. It would take time, talking him into helping her get to her father’s papers. And it wasn’t as if she did not understand the danger. She had witnessed Daniels at what, for all she knew, might have been a routine Tuesday on the job, and it was as bloody and deeply evil a day as she’d ever hoped to witness. She stiffened at the thought of it and despite her attempts to push the memory away, it was as Whaley said: something about the island only made stronger that moment on the ship, when the door to her berth gave way and she tried hard to take her eyes off the woman in the portrait she thrust in front of her like a shield. But that woman would not break her stare, would not let her look away as her sweet French maidservant Eleanor, inches away, became two people, two sets of legs, one set unskirted from waist to knees, another bare from buttocks to boot tops. Theo did not look; she was not allowed to move her eyes from the gaze of the woman in the painting and still she could see everything, the man jerking atop Eleanor as he slapped her face and pried open her mouth to spit into it. Two sets of hands trying to pull the portrait from her arms. Her strength godly and omnipotent so long as she did not break the gaze. Finally three men pushed the two of them—herself and the woman in the portrait—topside.
Daniels had stood calmly among the carnage on deck. He was bare to the waist and there was an epaulet of blood on his shoulder.
“She won’t let go her picture,” said one of the men.
“Did you not try cutting off her arms?”
“We figured you’d want a taste first.”
The bloody-shouldered leader reached out to her. She said to the woman in the portrait, I am the daughter of Aaron Burr.
“What’d she say?” one of the men behind her whispered.
“Said she’s Aaron Burr’s daughter,” said the leader.
“The one what killed that fellow in a duel?”
The leader put a bloody hand on her shoulder. He said as he drew his sword that he did not care if she was the queen of bloody England.
She smiled at the woman in the portrait who said, Stay with me, Theo. I will not let them harm you.
I will stay with you, she said. Past the woman, beyond the gray horizon, a blue line of hills arose and in the middle distance the lushly treed forest lining the bank across the Hudson came slowly into focus. Smoke rose from the chimneys of Richmond Hill. Under a canopy of linden trees in the garden, she dined with her father.
I brought you this gift, she said to him. I’ve come home to be with you now. Never again will we be parted. She extended the portrait to her father.
“Let her go,” said Daniels. A creaking as his sword found refuge in its leather sheath. She felt the fingers on her shoulder loosen and fall away.
“Go where?” said a voice behind.
“Take her ashore,” he said.