3 Elle To Lie
Elle
To Lie
I sit beside the doused fireplace ashes, Liney’s frightened face lingering in my mind. She’s cowering above among jellies and cured meats while I sit in her dress to play pretend. I tuck the fillet knife carefully into the fold of my armchair. There’s a charge in the air—my nerves or the storm?
This quiet island has tricked me out of my necessary fear.
I’ve failed her. Did this interloper spot me on my last supply run?
Followed me, unseen, to where I hid the boat?
What are his connections? I’ll cancel the next trip if we survive this.
We’ll last on fish and preserves through the winter.
Liney will miss her comforts, but this is a small sacrifice.
“He may be a friend of mine,” the lighthouse keeper says, peering out the kitchen window. I hadn’t noticed he’d returned.
“All the more reason to gut him,” I mutter.
“Are you satisfied with staying?” he asks. His tone carries so much condescension and disgust that I can’t tell if it’s a genuine question. “I don’t know why I thought you might do the brave thing and leave. You’re a mouse trapped in a corner.”
“A mouse that killed you,” I remind him.
“What a triumph to kill an unarmed man turned around and making you tea,” he says, shaking his head. “You’re a coward, girl. Don’t forget.”
He’s got no idea. If it were as simple as the ghost believes, I’d move on to another city. We’d go to Boston or book a crossing to England. The Forsyth tragedy may not have made the papers in London. We were a new-world family with no connections to the English gentry.
Mr. Pratterman makes any dream of leaving impossible. The landlord of the lighthouse and wielder of the power stored below. I can’t leave while I’m still indebted. The lighthouse keeper knows bits and pieces but not the full picture of my bargain. Would he dare to speak to me if he did?
The ghost has never found a pamphlet on his father’s desk, out in plain sight as though meant for anyone to sneak in and see.
An advertisement for the Mount Hope Asylum for the Insane, a new facility across the harbor.
On the front, in a script I recognized, were the words Charles—A suggestion should you have trouble. Yours, TS
This was the moment, hands shaking, that I lost all faith in my parents. They were in Thomas’s pocket, while I’d become a problem to be dealt with.
I’d heard of a girl who went to Mount Hope.
She was a few years older than I, from a less fortunate family.
She’d complained of headaches and intense nightmares.
The details were kept to whispers after she stopped showing up to events.
She’d refused to be shipped out west to be wed in a homesteading program and attempted to escape at the last moment from the train station.
Her parents had found a physician willing to diagnose her with temporary insanity.
Sent for enough time in overcrowded, unclean, brutal conditions to soften her fortitude.
She never returned, either rotting in Mount Hope or sent off in another train car. Or worse.
An act was passed a few years ago that allows any person to be incarcerated in the asylum if they can be proven insane, unsafe, or under unnecessary duress.
With some greased palms and favors, a young woman disrupting her sister’s engagement could easily be found in need of correcting.
And once committed, I’d have no chance at freedom again.
Either I’d die in a dozen-person cell meant for four, or I’d forever have the noose of another visit to the asylum around my neck.
And if they were willing to sacrifice me, why wouldn’t they eventually do the same to Liney should she ever prove an issue?
It smarts like a bruise that I would’ve been committed for speaking the truth too loud.
How delicate was their alliance, that a few words from me were a threat?
The letters in my father’s writing desk told it plainly.
The Seymours and the Forsyths would reap the benefits of our shipbuilding docks and their coal mines across the east coast. They’d secure a future for themselves—all at the cost of their daughters’ happiness.
The lighthouse keeper will never understand. No one was going to save us. I had to. I shove my hand into the chair and grip the knife like a life preserver. I won’t hesitate if the man proves a threat.
“Perhaps he didn’t intend to come to the island,” I say after an excruciatingly quiet moment.
Where else could he go, though? From the city, there’s no other island after this.
If he was going up or down the coast, he’d have already begun hugging the shoreline.
Does he know about the storm? Raindrops patter against the window beside my chair, light but promising more.
It’s the window whose shutters the ghost had closed, now open again.
“She’s shaking,” he whispers, much more tenderly than any words spoken about me. I hate that he can sense her better than I do, a floor above us.
“Check if he’s landed on the dock yet,” I hiss back. The ghost rarely leaves the lighthouse, but every second of preparation I can grasp could help.
The lighthouse keeper turns to me in a fluid motion without joints or muscles. His eyes had been so soft before I drove a knife into his neck. A trusting man who opened his home to a poor girl lost in a storm. Now they stare, disdain attempting to pierce me back.
“Show an ounce of decorum if he arrives. For her sake.” He leaves without waiting for a reply.
He floats through the kitchen window and across the field, then disappears in the trees. I lay the knife carefully on my lap to not puncture Liney’s dress. It’s one of the few personal effects I allowed her the night we escaped.
I turn again to the window. A delicate web of frost has spread across the bottom edges, infecting the clinging droplets.
Too soon. We weathered blizzards last year, but never before at least mid-November.
We’re still in hurricane season. I haven’t even repaired some of the shingles from the last tropical storm.
The unseasonable weather brings forth an issue I’ve been ignoring.
While our food will last us through the cold months ahead, my quota has run dry for too long.
Mr. Pratterman will soon notice. Or has he forgotten us?
It’s been months since his last visit. He congratulated me on my punctuality.
Polite, removed. We’ve had no contact since.
No messages on the wind, no face of flames in the fireplace, no dreams of a man in a coat of ash.
Perhaps he’s moved on to other desperate, fallen women. Am I sacrificing innocents to nothing now? Was my payment quietly fulfilled? Would he announce the end of our contract, or leave me drowning ships for nothing?
The papers in town have taken notice of my work, but there’s been no connection made to the lighthouse. Ships go missing all the time. Rough waves and rocky shores. There’s no witness but this island.
I always remove sections on missing and dead locals before giving the papers to Liney, especially about our family.
It used to be frequent, as the mystery stirred minds.
Barely a mention of the demise of our parents after the funeral.
I used to chuckle at the wording they would use to suggest there was still hope for our retrieval.
Miss Forsyth and Miss Caroline have been missing since October.
Officers are certain their whereabouts will be discovered promptly with help from citizens across the county.
These girls are scared, orphaned, and looking for shelter.
If you have any information, contact the city patrol immediately.
They got two out of three facts correct. We have all the shelter we need here, so long as I can keep it.
“He’s nearly here,” the lighthouse keeper calls as he floats through the door. “He’s been traipsing through the forest, yelling into the wind. It’s picking up.”
A whistle at the window confirms it. Some of the maples may fall. The shore itself could change shape with violent enough tides. How far off is the storm?
“Don’t interfere.” I move to the kitchen counter.
The cod lies covered to dry in the sink basin.
I remove a piece and place it on the cutting board along with the knife as though the man has interrupted the final steps of my process.
I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt as thanks for the ghost’s cooperation.
The frantic knock on the door makes me jump. Twenty-four, hardened by salt spray and a wickie’s toiling, and I’m still a scared girl underneath. I open the door, which nearly slams back my hand against the side wall with a gust of wind, and begin the act.
He’s an unremarkable man in a thick wool coat. Only a few inches taller than I with a trim brown beard and blue-nothing eyes. A nobody to me, anonymous as a droplet in the sea. He places a hand against the frame of the door, breathing hard.
I lean back but don’t give him room to enter. The wind has no regard for manners, ruffling my hair uncomfortably against my neck.
“Miss, I apologize,” he says between wheezes. Not athletic. Good. “I have come to call on the lighthouse keeper here.”
The ghost’s presence behind me prickles my neck worse than the wind.
“I don’t know this man,” he whispers. He’s close to my shoulder, leaning down until his beard would’ve nearly touched me had it been corporeal. “Do not act rashly. You know you can’t take it back.”
A splash of blood falls on Liney’s dress. It won’t stain and she’ll never know, yet it’s hard not to recoil. He’s miscalculated, though. Reminding me of his murder doesn’t dissolve my resolve to keep the man before us from my sister. It hardens it.
“May I ask who’s calling?” I pitch my voice higher than my normal husky tone. I nearly sound like Liney.