Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Evangeline
I have burned the dress.
Not the wedding dress. That is downstairs on its form in the sewing room where Mother left it, and it will be there in the morning, and I will not be.
The other one. The grey one, that I wore Thursday.
I took it down to the kitchen at two o’clock this morning when the house was asleep and I put it in the stove a piece at a time and stood there until it was gone, and then I washed my hands and came back up here and I have been sitting at this desk since.
I have started this next part four times and put my pen through all of it. I am going to do it properly now, because if I do not write it down then it did not happen, and I have watched enough of this island’s business get settled that way to know better.
Thursday. The blue room. After my father went up.
Charles came in behind me and shut the door and turned the key in it.
I heard him turn it. I said something — I do not know what, I have tried to recover it and cannot — and he crossed the room and put his hand over my mouth and said that we would be married in eleven days and that I was being a child about it.
I told him to stop. I know I said the word. I said it more than once, and he heard me, because he answered me. He said he didn’t have to stop. This was his right as my future husband.
He held me down on my mother’s settee, and he violated me.
There. It is on the page. My hand is shaking so badly I have had to write that in three attempts and I do not care, and I am not putting my pen through it.
Afterward he stood and put himself right and said that I would feel differently once we were settled. He said it kindly. Then he unlocked the door and went to find his coat, and I heard him in the hall telling Milly it had turned cold and to have the trap brought round.
I lay there and listened to a man ask my mother’s housemaid about the weather.
I want him to pay for it.
I want that written in my own hand so that it is somewhere in this world in ink. I want him ruined. I want him in a court with his fine coat on, answering for it in front of every man whose good opinion he has spent his life collecting. I want his mother to hear it read aloud.
It will not happen.
I already know precisely how it would go.
I would tell my father. My father would be grieved— I have to believe he would be.
Despite what others say about him, Lemuel Merrick is not a monster.
He would put his hand over his eyes and sit down heavily.
And then he would ask me whether I was quite certain.
And whether anyone had heard. And whether I had perhaps been careless to be alone in a room with a man I am shortly to marry.
And what precisely I imagined he was to do about it now, eleven days out, with the settlement paid and the announcements sent and Charles Fairchild’s father expecting to unite two business empires.
And by the end of that conversation I would be a girl who got frightened before her wedding, and it would be arranged that we should marry quietly and quickly and say no more about it, and I would spend the rest of my life pouring that man’s tea.
No. I refuse that life.
I am leaving before the wedding.
I have thought about this for six days with more clarity than I have brought to anything in my life.
I want that on the page, because there will be people who say I was a madwoman, and I would like there to be one document in the world that says I sat at a desk on a Friday night and reasoned it out like a person doing sums.
I am taking the box from the safe in Father’s study.
Instead of a traditional dowry, Charles Fairchild paid my father a handsome bride price in gold and jewels for the use of our name, and my father accepted it.
The treasure has sat in that safe while I have been fitted for a dress.
I have the combination because I have had the combination since Father’s hands began to trouble him and he required assistance opening the safe.
As far as I’m concerned, it is not stealing. Part of that price was always meant for me.
Thomas is taking me across.
I did not go to him. I want that clear. I had every intention of leaving this island without his knowing, and I had got as far as composing a letter I meant to send from Anacortes.
He found me Saturday, on the north pier.
I have gone down there twice a week since I was fifteen, and it did not occur to me that anybody had noticed the pattern. He had noticed the pattern. He said afterward that he had gone down every day since Thursday because I had not come, and that when I did come.
He knew something was wrong before he had come within twenty feet of me.
I do not know what my face was doing. I had thought I had it in hand. I have had it in hand in front of my mother, my father, two dressmakers, and Charles Fairchild himself, who came to dinner on Friday and ate a good deal of lamb.
Thomas took one look at me and asked who hurt me.
I did not answer him. That was answer enough, apparently, because he said the name himself, and then he sat down on a crate and put his head in his hands and did not speak for a long time.
When he stood up, he was somebody I have never met.
I have known Thomas Haven since I was eleven years old.
I have seen him hurt and I have seen him grieving.
I stood at the back of his father’s funeral three years ago and watched him hold his mother up.
I have never once seen him look the way he looked on that pier, and I am not going to write down what he said, because he was not in his right mind when he said it, and because it is the only thing in this entire business that frightens me.
He would do it.
He is not a violent man, and he would do it, and he would not run afterward. There is not a jury on this island that would trouble itself over hanging a fisherman who killed a Fairchild.
I told him no. I told him he was to do nothing. If he did anything I would never forgive him, and I made him say it back to me.
He said it back to me. He was a long time about it.
So that is the second reason I am going, and it is nearly as large as the first. If I stay on this island, Charles Fairchild will be in the same rooms as Thomas Haven for the rest of both their lives.
Every Sunday church service. Every town festival.
And I will always be stuck between them until Thomas finally breaks.
I have watched that good, honorable man hold his own mother up at a graveside. I am not going to be the reason his mother stands at his.
I would have walked to Anacortes over the water if it came to it, but Thomas insisted on taking me on the morning tide. From there, I will take the train, and from there, I have not decided, and I find that I like not having decided.
He is not coming with me.
I asked him to. I asked him plainly, and I will carry the sorrow of his expression for the rest of my life.
He said, “I would go tomorrow if it were only me.”
But it isn’t only him. He has his mother to think of. His family. He cannot leave them.
We stood there a while, and neither of us said the other thing, and I have thought since that I would not have wanted him if he had been a man who could leave them. That is the whole cruelty of it. The reason he cannot come is the reason I want him to.
Tomorrow I will be gone, and there will be a wedding with no bride, and Charles Fairchild will stand in my father’s house and undoubtedly be very pleasant about it. By summer there will be a story about me on this island that I will not be here to correct.