Chapter 14
Beatrix waited for church to end with what could not properly be called impatience, because she didn’t want to talk to Mrs. Price. It wasn’t a question of wanting. She had to know.
She left her sister, Ella and Rosemarie with a murmured excuse as the closing hymn faded, working her way to the front of the sanctuary as everyone else tried to get to the coffee. She caught a glimpse of Blackwell in the outward crush, looking haggard. Then she saw her target, in black as always.
“Mrs. Price—could I have a word? There’s something I must ask you.”
“Oh?” the widow said.
There was a great deal of meaning in that oh.
It suggested, at minimum, that Mrs. Price couldn’t imagine the conversation would be satisfying.
She’d said hardly anything to the surviving members of the Harper line since Lydia extricated the county chapter of the League from her grasp.
After years of being tsk’d by the woman for offenses to polite society, Beatrix had counted this as an unexpected bonus.
Now it merely made a bad situation worse.
“Please,” she said. “It’s about my mother.”
Mrs. Price pursed her lips. “Well—we’d better sit, then.”
“Thank you,” Beatrix said, grateful it hadn’t been harder.
She looked over her shoulder, confirmed that the last stragglers were filing out, and aimed one degree shy of what she actually wanted to know. “Did you and my mother ever address the possibility of giving Peter Blackwell a high school scholarship? Before he passed the wizarding exam, I mean.”
“That’s an odd question. Why would you want to know that?”
“Did my mother say she would never consider him for a scholarship?” she pressed, gripping the seat of the pew with both hands.
“Ah.” Mrs. Price sighed. “Yes, she did.”
Beatrix tried to swallow but couldn’t. Her “why?” came out as a croak.
The sanctuary was empty save for them, but Mrs. Price lowered her voice anyway. “She was concerned about the effect his, ah, background would have on the reputation of this town and our scholarship effort.”
The urge to rage and scream overwhelmed her. It couldn’t be. It simply couldn’t be.
But Mrs. Price, though disagreeable in many ways, was not a liar. She was far too interested in telling everyone the truth as she saw it.
“I shared her concern, naturally,” the grande dame added. “But I really did think a mind as sharp as his should not be allowed to go to waste.”
“Why would she do something so—so horrible?”
She didn’t expect a substantive answer. But she’d forgotten that Mrs. Price had known her mother a long time. Far longer than she herself had.
“When your mother was ten,” the widow said, “your grandfather sired an illegitimate son in Baltimore.”
Beatrix gasped. “What?”
“He always wanted a boy, and he doted on the child—lavished attention on him, left him a substantial legacy. More than he left your mother. She never forgave either of them.”
Beatrix stared at nothing, shocked silent by this abrupt rearranging of her family history. “What happened to him?” she asked finally. “My uncle, I mean?”
“He went to college somewhere out West, if memory serves.” Mrs. Price made a sharp sound that was almost a laugh. “I suppose he wanted to put as many miles between himself and Cecilia as he could.”
What this suggested about her mother made her heart constrict.
Mrs. Price, perhaps recollecting to whom she was talking, laid a hand on her arm in a way that was clearly intended to be comforting. “You must understand how she would view a boy like Peter Blackwell.”
Beatrix had on many occasions wished that her mother could be returned to her briefly—for advice, for consolation, for a tight hug. Never before had she wanted her back to rebuke her.
“Peter Blackwell,” she said, voice trembling, “had no one to lavish money on him. His situation was entirely different.”
“True—but she wasn’t really seeing him.”
Yes. And that boy had grown up to subjugate her as payback. Did he see her at all when he looked at her, or just her mother?
“I suppose you must have heard about this from our omnimancer, though how he knew—” Mrs. Price stopped, tapping two fingers to her lips.
“Your father hired him to clean Cedarlawn around that time. I don’t think the arrangement lasted more than a few weeks, but he could have been in the house when we were discussing the matter. ”
Beatrix stared at her. “Over pineapple upside-down cake?”
“Well, I—I suppose so, now that you mention it,” Mrs. Price said, cocking her head. “Your mother did love to make it.”
Beatrix’s anger abruptly took a new turn. Coincidence could not explain how her dream was accurate to the smallest detail. It took an eyewitness’ touch. Blackwell, promising he wouldn’t speak to her about her mother, had found an exponentially more vindictive way to communicate.
She found her trio—sister, friend, roommate—in the fellowship hall and waited without comment until they were ready to be driven home, church being the one regular occasion worthy of putting her father’s decrepit Studebaker on the road.
If she could have handed the keys over and walked home, she would have.
But Lydia was too young for a license—she had nearly a year to go before she hit the minimum age for “lady drivers”—and Rosemarie became too old when she turned sixty that spring.
Ella’s three attempts to get a license ended about as well as such efforts usually went, and she hadn’t had the time to try again.
Beatrix started the car and hoped everyone would talk to each other—not to her—until she could escape to the forest. But the car was quiet, save for the customary sputtering of the engine. Lydia, sitting next to her, kept glancing her way.
Finally, Rosemarie spoke up from the back. “What’s wrong? And don’t say ‘nothing’—it’s clear as day that it’s something. You haven’t been right all weekend.”
“We’re worried about you,” said Ella, who had more reason than the rest to be anxious.
Beatrix didn’t know what to say. Blackwell had seen to it that she was physically incapable of answering the question.
Lydia laid a hand on her shoulder. “Bee, please ...”
She opened her mouth to try to deflect. Then it occurred to her that the newest development in what was wrong fell largely outside the constraints of the Vow.
“I’ve discovered that my mother—our mother,” she amended, glancing at Lydia, “had a burning hatred of illegitimate children. She was prepared to let Peter Blackwell rot in Ellicott Mills rather than allow the scholarship foundation to cover his high school tuition.”
She regretted the words as soon as she heard Lydia’s breath catch in her throat. Her sister had grown up on stories of the mother she’d never known. She’d preferred them to fairy tales.
“No—no.” Lydia’s voice was low and pleading. “That doesn’t sound like her at all.”
What good did it do to knock their mother off the pedestal she’d built? But she couldn’t take it back now. Turning the sedan up their long driveway, she said, “It’s true. I had it from Mrs. Price.”
Lydia made a dismissive noise. “Oh, Mrs. Price—”
“He knows, doesn’t he?” Ella leaned forward, her face visible in the rearview mirror. “You heard it from Omnimancer Blackwell first.”
Beatrix couldn’t say. That fell under his broad “don’t communicate about anything that happens in this house except for brewing” rule. But the women took the choked sound she made when the pomegranate coated her throat as confirmation.
“Oh no.” Ella sounded horrified. “Is that the reason he strong-armed you into working for him?”
“It would seem so” came out with no difficulty at all. And it was probably true—not the reason he needed a female assistant, but the reason he picked her.
She pulled the car into the garage and they sat for a moment in silence. How much she had wanted to explain her situation to everyone, to Lydia, and how terrible this bit of it proved. Her sister’s eyes were shut tight, mouth screwed up in a grimace.
“I’m mailing a complaint to the wizard ethics board tomorrow,” Ella said. “It’s worth a try.”
“No,” she heard herself say.
“No? Why?”
Because saying anything else—or even nothing at all—would be actively trying to get him into trouble, and the Vow wasn’t having it.
“Because ... because it’s not going to get him removed,” she said, settling on another true answer. “It would just make my situation worse.”
“Bee,” Lydia said, “I want you to quit.”
Beatrix gasped. Rosemarie, quicker to the mark, said, “Lydia, think! If she quits, you might have to drop out one semester short of earning your degree!”
“That’s exactly what I did think of at first.” There was disgust there, and bitterness, too. Lydia took Beatrix’s hand. “I just assumed you’d want me to finish at all costs, and like an idiot I never asked.”
Beatrix’s throat clogged again, but this time the Vow had nothing to do with it. She squeezed her sister’s hand. “I’m all right. We’ll get through this. I’ll be damned if I let him rob you of your degree.”
The expletive did what she hoped and broke the tension. Rosemarie snorted. Ella laughed. Only Lydia did not look entertained.
Just then, Miss Massey—who had stayed home with a headache—came rushing into the garage. Beatrix opened her door, concerned.
“Are you coming in?” Her boarder was so excited or agitated—hard to tell which—that the volume of her voice was nearly equal to a normal conversation. “There’s a wizard waiting for you in the sitting room!”
“Omnimancer Blackwell?” Beatrix grasped the doorframe, wondering what new horrors he had in store.
“No! Come in, come in! I’ve been sitting with him for fifteen minutes and I can’t take the strain for another moment!”
They piled out of the car. It was all Beatrix could do not to run. She caught sight of their visitor through the picture window, sitting with one of the good-china teacups in his hands—the striking-looking wizard who’d chauffeured the general to town the week before.
Except he was almost certainly not a chauffeur if he’d been sent here to question them.