Have you ever loved someone so much that you’d do anything for them?
When Dr Luke Findley turns up to his hospital shift in the small town of St Andrews, Maine, he’s expecting just another evening of minor injuries and domestic disputes. But instead, Lanore McIlvrae walks into his life – and changes it forever. For Lanny is a woman with a past …
Lanny McIlvrae is unlike anyone Luke has ever met. Hers is a story of love and betrayal that defies time and transcends mortality – and cannot end until Lanny’s demons are finally put to rest. Her two hundred years on this earth have seen her seduced by both decadence and brutality – but through it all she has stayed true to the one true love of her life. Until now.
An unforgettable novel about the power of unrequited love to elevate and sustain, but also to blind and ultimately destroy, The Taker is an immortal love story on an epic scale …
Alma has a BA in Writing from Brandeis University (where she studied under John Irving) and an MA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Program. She works in U.S. intelligence and lives with her husband in Virginia.
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Author’s Note
Part I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Part II
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Part III
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Part IV
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Acknowledgments
Copyright
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
AS THE TAKER is a work of fantasy, I don’t imagine readers come to it expecting historical authenticity, but there is one liberty I’ve taken with history that must be pointed out. While there is no town of St. Andrew in the state of Maine, if the reader attempts to triangulate the fictional village’s location based on clues in the text, you’ll see that if it were to exist, it would fall about where the town of Allagash stands today. Truth be told, this exact area of Maine wasn’t settled until the 1860s. However, the Acadian town of Madawaska, not far away, was settled in 1785, and so in my mind it didn’t seem too much of a stretch to have Charles St. Andrew found his outpost around this time.
GODDAMNED FREEZING COLD. Luke Findley’s breath hangs in the air, nearly a solid thing shaped like a frozen wasp’s nest, wrung of all its oxygen. His hands are heavy on the steering wheel; he is groggy, having woken just in time to make the drive to the hospital for the night shift. The snow-covered fields to either side of the road are ghostly sweeps of blue in the moonlight, the blue of lips about to go numb from hypothermia. The snow is so deep it covers all traces of the stumps of stalks and brambles that normally choke the fields, and gives the land a deceptively calm appearance. He often wonders why his neighbors remain in this northernmost corner of Maine. It’s lonely and frigid, a tough place to farm. Winter reigns half the year, snow piles to the windowsills, and a serious biting cold whips over the empty potato fields.
Occasionally, someone does freeze solid, and because Luke is one of the few doctors in the area, he’s seen a number of them. A drunk (and there is no shortage of them in St. Andrew) falls asleep against a snow-bank and by morning has become a human Popsicle. A boy, skating on the Allagash River, plunges through a weak spot in the ice. Sometimes the body is discovered halfway to Canada, at the junction where the Allagash meets up with the St. John. A hunter goes snow blind and can’t make his way out of the Great North Woods, his body found sitting with its back against a stump, shotgun lying uselessly across his lap.
That weren’t no accident, Joe Duchesne, the sheriff, told Luke in disgust when the hunter’s body was brought to the hospital. Old Ollie Ostergaard, he wanted to die. That’s just his way of committing suicide. But Luke suspects if this were true, Ostergaard would have shot himself in the head. Hypothermia is a slow way to go, plenty of time to think better of it.
Luke eases his truck into an empty parking space at the Aroostook County Hospital, cuts the engine, and promises himself, again, that he is going to get out of St. Andrew. He just has to sell his parents’ farm and then he is going to move, even if he’s not sure where. Luke sighs from habit, yanks the keys out of the ignition, and heads to the entrance to the emergency room.
The duty nurse nods as Luke walks in, pulling off his gloves. He hangs up his parka in the tiny doctors’ lounge and returns to the admitting area. Judy says, “Joe called. He’s bringing in a disorderly he wants you to look at. Should be here any minute.”
“Trucker?” When there is trouble, usually it involves one of the drivers for the logging companies. They are notorious for getting drunk and picking fights at the Blue Moon.
“No.” Judy is absorbed in something she’s doing on the computer. Light from the monitor glints off her bifocals.
Luke clears his throat for her attention. “Who is it then? Someone local?” Luke is tired of patching up his neighbors. It seems only fighters, drinkers, and misfits can tolerate the hard-bitten town.
Judy looks up from the monitor, fist planted on her hip. “No. A woman. And not from around here, either.”
That is unusual. Women are rarely brought in by the police except when they’re the victim. Occasionally a local wife will be brought in after a brawl with her husband, or in the summer, a female tourist may get out of hand at the Blue Moon. But this time of year, there’s not a tourist to be found.
Something different to look forward to tonight. He picks up a chart. “Okay. What else we got?” He half-listens as Judy runs down the activity from the previous shift. It was a fairly busy evening but right now, ten P.M., it’s quiet. Luke goes back to the lounge to wait for the sheriff. He can’t endure another update of Judy’s daughter’s impending wedding, an endless lecture on the cost of bridal gowns, caterers, florists. Tell her to elope, Luke said to Judy once, and she looked at him as though he’d professed to being a member of a terrorist organization. A girl’s wedding is the most important day of her life, Judy scoffed in reply. You don’t have a romantic bone in your body. No wonder Tricia divorced you. He has stopped retorting, Tricia didn’t divorce me, I divorced her, because nobody listens anymore.
Luke sits on the battered couch in the lounge and tries to distract himself with a Sudoku puzzle. He thinks instead of the drive to the hospital that evening, the houses he passed on the lonely roads, solitary lights burning into the night. What do people do, stuck inside their houses for long hours during the winter evenings? As the town doctor, there are no secrets kept from Luke. He knows all the vices: who beats his wife; who gets heavy-handed with his children; who drinks and ends up putting his truck into a snowbank; who is chronically depressed from another bad year for the crops and no prospects on the horizon. The woods of St. Andrew are thick and dark with secrets. It reminds Luke of why he wants to get away from this town; he’s tired of knowing their secrets and of them knowing his.
Then there is the other thing, the thing he thinks about every time he steps into the hospital lately. It hasn’t been so long since his mother died and he recalls vividly the night they moved her to the ward euphemistically called “the hospice,” the rooms for patients whose ends are too close to warrant moving them to the rehab center in Fort Kent. Her heart function had dropped below 10 percent and she fought for every breath, even wearing an oxygen mask. He sat with her that night, alone, because it was late and her other visitors had gone home. When she went into arrest for the last time, he was holding her hand. She was exhausted by then and stirred only a little, then her grip went slack and she slipped away as quietly as sunset falling into dusk. The patient monitor sounded its alarm at nearly the same time the duty nurse rushed in, but Luke hit the switch and waved off the nurse without even thinking. He took the stethoscope from around his neck and checked her pulse and breathing. She was gone.
The duty nurse asked if he wanted a minute alone and he said yes. Most of the week had been spent in intensive care with his mother, and it seemed inconceivable that he could just walk away now. So he sat at her bedside and stared at nothing, certainly not at the body, and tried to think of what he had to do next. Call the relatives; they were all farmers living in the southern part of the county … Call Father Lymon over at the Catholic church Luke couldn’t bring himself to attend … Pick out a coffin … So many details required his attention. He knew what needed to be done because he’d been through it all just seven months earlier when his father died, but the thought of going through this again was just exhausting. It was at times like these that he most missed his ex-wife. Tricia, a nurse, had been good to have around during difficult times. She wasn’t one to lose her head, practical even in the face of grief.
This was no time to wish things were different. He was alone now and would have to manage by himself. He blushed with embarrassment, knowing how his mother had wanted him and Tricia to stay together, how she lectured him for letting her go. He glanced at the dead woman, a guilty reflex.
Her eyes were open. They had been closed a minute ago. He felt his chest squeeze with hope even though he knew it meant nothing. Just an electrical impulse running through nerves as her synapses stopped firing, like a car sputtering as the last fumes of gas passed through the engine. He reached up and lowered her eyelids.
They opened a second time, naturally, as though his mother was waking up. Luke almost jumped backward but managed to control his fright. No, not fright—surprise. Instead, he slipped on his stethoscope and leaned over her, pressing the diaphragm to her chest. Silent, no sluicing of blood through veins, no rasp of breath. He picked up her wrist. No pulse. He checked his watch: fifteen minutes had passed since he had pronounced his mother dead. He lowered her cold hand, unable to stop watching her. He swore she was looking back at him, her eyes trained on him.
And then her hand lifted from the bedsheet and reached for him. Stretched toward him, palm up, beckoning him to take it. He did, calling her by name, but as soon as he grasped her hand, he dropped it. It was cold and lifeless. Luke took five paces away from the bed, rubbing his forehead, wondering if he was hallucinating. When he turned around, her eyes were closed and her body was still. He could scarcely breathe for his heart thumping in his throat.
It took three days before he could bring himself to talk to another doctor about what had happened. He chose old John Mueller, a pragmatic GP who was known for delivering calves for his rancher neighbor. Mueller had given him a skeptical look, as though he suspected Luke might have been drinking. Twitching of fingers and toes, yeah that happens, he’d said, but fifteen minutes later? Musculorskeletal movement? Mueller eyed Luke again, as though the fact that they were even talking about it was shameful. You think you saw it because you wanted to. You didn’t want her to be gone.
Luke knew that wasn’t it. But he wouldn’t raise it again, not among doctors.
Besides, Mueller had wanted to know, what difference does it make? So the body may have moved a little—you think she was trying to tell you something? You believe in that life-after-death stuff?
Thinking about it now, four months later, still gives Luke a slight chill, running down both arms. He puts the Sudoku book on the side table and works his fingers over his skull, trying to massage out the confusion. The door to the lounge pushes back a crack: it’s Judy. “Joe’s pulling in up front.”
Luke goes outside without his parka so the cold will slap him awake. He watches Duchesne pull up to the curb in a big SUV painted black and white, a decal of the Maine state seal on the front doors and a low-profile light bar strapped to the roof. Luke has known Duchesne since they were boys. They were not in the same grade but they overlapped at school, so he’s seen Duchesne’s narrow, ferret-like face with the beady eyes and the slightly sinister nose for more than twenty years.
Hands tucked into his armpits for warmth, Luke watches Duchesne open the back door and reach for the prisoner’s arm. He’s curious to see the disorderly. He’s expecting a big, mannish biker woman, red-faced and with a split lip, and is surprised to see that the woman is small and young. She could be a teenager. Slender and boyish except for the pretty face and mass of yellow corkscrew curls, a cherub’s hair.
Looking at the woman (girl?) Luke feels a strange tingle, a buzz behind his eyes. His pulse picks up with something almost like—recognition. I know you, he thinks. Not her name, perhaps, but something more fundamental. What is it? Luke squints, studying her more closely. Have I seen her somewhere before? No, he realizes he’s mistaken.
As Duchesne pulls the woman along by the elbow, her hands tied together with a flexicuff, a second police vehicle pulls up and a deputy, Clay Henderson, gets out and takes over escorting the prisoner into the emergency ward. As they pass, Luke sees the prisoner’s shirt is wet, stained black, and she smells of a familiar blend of iron and salt, the smell of blood.
Duchesne steps close to Luke, nodding in the pair’s direction. “We found her like that walking along the logging road to Fort Kent.”
“No coat?” Coatless in this weather? She couldn’t have been out for long.
“Nope. Listen, I need you to tell me if she’s hurt, or if I can take her back to the station and lock her up.”
As far as law enforcement officers went, Luke’s always suspected Duchesne of being heavy-handed; he’s seen too many drunks brought in with lumps on their skulls or facial bruising. This girl, she’s only a kid—what in the world could she have done? “Why is she in custody? For not wearing a coat in this weather?”
Duchesne gives Luke a sharp look, unaccustomed to being mocked. “That girl is a killer. She told us she stabbed a man to death and left his body out in the woods.”
Luke goes through the motions of examining the prisoner, but he can barely think for the strange pulsing in his head. He shines a penlight into her eyes—they are the palest blue eyes he’s ever seen, like two shards of compressed ice—to see if her pupils are dilated. Her skin is clammy to the touch, her pulse low and her breathing ragged.
“She’s very pale,” he says to Duchesne as they step away from the gurney to which the prisoner has been strapped at the wrists. “That could mean she’s going cyanotic. Going into shock.”
“Does that mean she’s injured?” Duchesne asks, skeptical.
“Not necessarily. She could be in psychological trauma. Could be from an argument. Maybe from fighting with this man she says she killed. How do you know it’s not self-defense?”
Duchesne, hands on hips, stares at the prisoner on the gurney as though he can discern the truth just by looking at her. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “We don’t know anything … she hasn’t said much. Can’t you tell if she’s wounded? ’Cause if she’s not hurt I’ll just take her in …”
“I have to get that shirt off, clean off the blood …”
“Get to it. I can’t stay here all night. I left Boucher in the woods, looking for that body.”
Even with the full moon, the woods are dark and vast, and Luke knows the deputy, Boucher, has little chance of finding a body by himself.
Luke picks at the edge of his latex glove. “So go help Boucher while I do the examination …”
“I can’t leave the prisoner here.”
“For Chrissakes,” Luke says, jerking his head in the slight young woman’s direction. “She’s hardly going to overpower me and escape. If you’re that worried about it, have Henderson stay.” They both glance at Henderson tentatively. The big deputy leans against a counter, leafing through an old Sports Illustrated left in the waiting room, a cup of vending machine coffee in his hand. He’s shaped like a cartoon bear and is, appropriately, amicably dim. “He won’t be of much help to you in the woods … Nothing is going to happen,” Luke says impatiently, turning away from the sheriff as though the matter is already settled. He feels Duchesne’s stare bore into his back, unsure if he should argue with Luke.
And then the sheriff lurches away, heading for the double set of sliding doors. “Stay here with the prisoner,” he yells at Henderson as he jams the heavy, fur-lined hat onto his head. “I’m going back to help Boucher. Idiot couldn’t find his own ass with both hands and a map.”
Luke and the nurse attend to the woman strapped to the gurney. He hefts a pair of scissors. “I’m going to have to cut your shirt away,” he warns her.
“You might as well. It’s ruined,” she says in a soft voice with an accent Luke can’t place. The shirt is obviously expensive. It’s the kind of clothing you see in fashion magazines and that you would never find someone wearing in St. Andrew.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” Luke says, small talk to loosen her up.
She studies his face, evaluating whether to trust him—or so Luke assumes. “I was born here, actually. That was a long time ago.”
Luke snorts. “A long time ago for you, maybe. If you were born here, I’d know you. I’ve lived in this area almost my entire life. What’s your name?”
She doesn’t fall for his little trick. “You don’t know me,” she says flatly.
For a few minutes there’s only the sound of wet fabric being cut and it is hard going, the scissors’ tiny beak moving sluggishly through the sodden material. After it’s done, Luke stands back to let Judy swab the girl with gauze soaked in warm water. The bloody red streaks dissolve, revealing a pale, thin chest without a scratch on it. The nurse drops the forceps holding the gauze into a metal pan noisily and hustles out of the examination room as though she knew all along that they’d find nothing, and yet again, Luke has proven his incompetence.
He averts his eyes as he drapes a paper sheet over the girl’s naked torso.
“I’d have told you I wasn’t hurt if you’d asked,” she says to Luke in a low whisper.
“You didn’t tell the sheriff though,” Luke says, reaching for a stool.
“No. But I’d have told you.” She nods at the doctor. “Do you have a cigarette? I’m dying for a smoke.”
“I’m sorry. Don’t have any. I don’t smoke,” Luke replies.
The girl looks at him, those ice blue eyes scanning his face. “You gave them up a while ago, but you started again. Not that I blame you, given everything you’ve been through lately. But you have a couple of cigarettes in your lab coat, if I’m not mistaken.”
His hand goes to the pocket, out of instinct, and he feels the papery touch of the cigarettes right where he had left them. Was that a lucky guess, or did she see them in his pocket?
And what did she mean by given everything you’ve been through lately? She’s just pretending to read his mind, trying to get inside his head like any clever girl who finds herself in a fix would do. He has been wearing his troubles on his face lately. He just hasn’t seen a way to fix his life yet; his problems are interconnected, all stacked up. He’d have to know how to fix all of them to take care of even one.
“There’s no smoking in the building, and in case you’ve forgotten, you’re strapped to a gurney.” Luke clicks the top of his pen and reaches for a clipboard. “We’re a little shorthanded tonight, so I’m going to need to get some information from you for the hospital records. Name?”
She regards the clipboard warily. “I’d rather not say.”
“Why? Are you a runaway? Is that why you don’t want to give me your name?” He studies her: she’s tense, guarded, but under control. He’s been around patients involved in accidental deaths and they’re usually hysterical—crying, shaking, screaming. This young woman is trembling slightly under the paper sheet and she jiggles her legs nervously, but by her face Luke can tell she’s in shock.
He feels, too, that she is warming toward him; he senses a chemistry between them, as though she is willing him to ask her about the terrible thing that happened in the forest. “Do you want to tell me what went on tonight?” he asks, rolling closer to the gurney. “Were you hitchhiking? Maybe you got picked up by someone, the guy in the woods … He attacks you, you defend yourself?”
She sighs and presses back into the pillow, staring at the ceiling. “It was nothing like that. We knew each other. We came to town together. He”—she stops, choking on the words—“he asked me to help him die.”
“Euthanasia? Was he already dying? Cancer?” Luke is skeptical. The ones looking to kill themselves usually pick something quiet and surefire: poison, pills, an idling car engine and a length of garden hose. They don’t ask to be stabbed to death. If this friend really wanted to die, he could have just sat under the stars all night until he froze.
He glances at the woman, trembling under the paper sheet. “Let me get a hospital gown and a blanket for you. You must be cold.”
“Thank you,” she says, dropping her gaze.
He comes back with a much-laundered flannel gown edged in pink and a pilling acrylic blanket, baby blue. Maternity colors. He looks down at her hands, bound to the gurney with nylon strap restraints. “Here, we’ll do this one hand at a time,” Luke says, undoing the restraint on the hand closest to the side table where the examination tools are laid out: forceps, bloodied scissors, scalpel.
Quick as a rabbit, she lunges for the scalpel, her slender hand closing around it. She points it at him, wild eyed, her nostrils pink and flaring.
“Take it easy,” Luke says, stepping backward off the stool, out of her arm’s reach. “There’s a deputy just down the hall. If I call for him, it’s over, you know? You can’t get both of us with that little knife. So why don’t you put down the scalpel—”
“Don’t call him,” she says, but her arm is still outstretched. “I need you to listen to me.”
“I’m listening.” The gurney is between Luke and the door. She can cut her other hand free in the time it takes him to make it across the room.
“I need your help. I can’t let him arrest me. You have to help me escape.”
“Escape?” Suddenly, Luke isn’t worried that the young woman with the scalpel will hurt him. He’s feeling embarrassed for having let his guard down, allowing her to get the drop on him. “Are you out of your mind? I’m not going to help you escape.”
“Listen to me—”
“You killed someone tonight. You said so yourself.”
“It wasn’t murder. He wanted to die, I told you that.”
“And he came here to die because he grew up here, too?”
“Yes,” she says, a little relieved.
“Then tell me who he is. Maybe I know him …”
She shakes her head. “I told you—you don’t know us. Nobody here knows us.”
“You don’t know that for sure. Maybe some of your relatives …” Luke’s obstinacy comes out when he gets angry.
“My family hasn’t lived in St. Andrew for a long, long time.” She sounds tired. Then she snaps, “You think you know, do you? Okay—my name is McIlvrae. Do you know that name? And the man in the woods? His name is St. Andrew.”
“St. Andrew, like the town?” Luke asks.
“Exactly, like the town,” she replies almost smugly.
Luke feels funny bubbles percolating behind his eyes. Not recognition, exactly … where has he seen that name, McIlvrae? He knows he has seen it or heard it somewhere, but that knowledge is just out of reach.
“There hasn’t been a St. Andrew in this town for, oh, at least a hundred years,” Luke says, matter-of-fact, stung at being upbraided by a girl pretending to have been born here, lying about a meaningless fact that won’t do her a bit of good. “Since the Civil War. Or so I’ve been told.”
She jabs the scalpel at him to get his attention. “Look—it’s not like I’m dangerous. If you help me get away, I’m not going to hurt anyone else.” She speaks to him as though he’s the one being unreasonable. “Let me show you something.”
Then, with no warning, she points the scalpel at herself and cuts into her chest. A long, broad line that catches her left breast and runs all the way to the rib area under her right breast. Luke is frozen in place for a moment as the line blooms red across her white skin. Blood oozes from the cut, pulpy red tissue starting to peep from the opening.
“Oh my god!” he says. What the hell is wrong with this girl—is she crazy? Does she have some kind of death wish? He snaps out of his baffled inertia and starts toward the gurney.
“Stay back!” she says, jabbing the scalpel at him again. “Just watch. Look.”
She lifts her chest, arms outstretched, as though to give him a better view, but Luke can see fine, only he can’t believe what he is seeing. The two sides of the cut are creeping toward each other like the tendrils of a plant, rejoining, knitting together. The cut has stopped bleeding and is starting to heal. Through it, the girl’s breathing is rough but she betrays no sign of pain.
Luke can’t be sure his feet are on the floor. He is watching the impossible—the impossible! What is he supposed to think? Has he gone crazy, or is he dreaming, asleep on the couch in the doctors’ lounge? Whatever he’s seen, his mind refuses to accept it and starts to shut down.
“What the hell—,” he says, barely a whisper. Now he is breathing again, his chest heaving up and down, his face flushing. He feels like he is going to vomit.
“Don’t call for the policeman. I’ll explain it to you, I swear, just don’t yell for help. Okay?”
As Luke sways on his feet, it strikes him that the ER has fallen silent. Is there even anyone around to hear him if he did call out? Where is Judy, where is the deputy? It’s as if Sleeping Beauty’s fairy godmother drifted into the ward and cast a spell, putting everyone to sleep. Outside the door to the examination room, it’s dark, lights dimmed as usual for the night shift. The habitual noises—the far-off laugh track of a television program, the metallic ticking from inside the soda vending machine—have disappeared. There is no whir from a floor buffer wending its way laboriously down the empty halls. It’s just Luke and his patient and the muffled sound of the wind beating against the side of the hospital, trying to get in.
“What was that? How did you do that?” Luke asks, unable to keep the horror from his voice. He slides back onto the stool to keep from dropping to the floor. “What are you?”
The last question seems to hit her like a punch to the sternum. She hangs her head, flossy blond curls covering her face. “That—that’s the one thing I can’t tell you. I don’t know what I am anymore. I have no idea.”
This is impossible. Things like this don’t happen. There is no explanation—what, is she a mutant? Made of synthetic self-healing materials? Is she some kind of monster?
And yet she looks normal, the doctor thinks, as his heart rate picks up again and blood pounds in his ears. The linoleum tiles start to sway underfoot.
“We came back—he and I—because we missed the place. We knew everything here would be different—everyone would be gone—but we missed what we once had,” the young woman says wistfully, staring past the doctor, speaking to no one in particular.
The feeling he had when he first saw her this evening—the tingle, the buzz—arcs between them, thin and electric. He wants to know. “Okay,” he says, shakily, hands on his knees. “This is crazy—but go ahead. I’m listening.”
She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes momentarily, like she is about to dive underwater. And then she begins.
I’LL START AT the beginning, because that is the part that makes sense to me and which I’ve inscribed in my memory, afraid that otherwise it will be lost in the course of my journey, in the endless unraveling of time.
My first clear, vivid memory of Jonathan St. Andrew is of a bright Sunday morning in church. He was sitting at the end of his family’s box at the front of the congregation hall. He was fourteen years old at the time and already as tall as any man in the village. Nearly as tall as his father, Charles, the man who had founded our little settlement. Charles St. Andrew was once a dashing militia captain, I was told, but at the time was middle-aged, with a patrician’s soft belly.
Jonathan wasn’t paying attention to the service, but then again, probably few of us in attendance were. A Sunday service could be counted on to run for four hours—up to eight if the minister fancied himself an elocutionist—so who could honestly say they remained fixed on the preacher’s every word? Jonathan’s mother, Ruth, perhaps, who sat next to him on the plain, upright bench. She came from a line of Boston theologians and would give Pastor Gilbert a good dressing-down if she felt his service wasn’t rigorous enough. Souls were at stake, and no doubt she felt the souls in this isolated wilderness town, far from civilizing influences, were at particular risk. Gilbert was no fanatic, however, and four hours was generally his limit, so we all knew we would be released soon to the glory of a beautiful afternoon.
Watching Jonathan was a favorite pastime of the girls in the village, but on that particular Sunday it was Jonathan who was the one watching—he made no secret of staring at Tenebraes Poirier. His gaze hadn’t wavered from her for a good ten minutes, his sly brown eyes fixated on Tenebraes’s lovely face and her swanlike neck, but mostly on her bosom, pressing against the tight calico of her bodice with every breath. Apparently it didn’t matter to him that Tenebraes was several years his senior and had been betrothed to Matthew Comstock since she was six.
Was it love? I wondered as I watched him from high up in the loft, where my father and I sat with the other poor families. That Sunday it was just me and my father, the balance of my family at the Catholic church on the other side of town, practicing the faith of my mother, who came from an Acadian colony to the northeast. Resting my cheek against my forearm, I watched Jonathan intently, as only a lovesick young girl will do. At one point, Jonathan looked as though he was ill, swallowing with difficulty and finally turning away from Tenebraes, who seemed oblivious to the effect she was having on the town’s favorite son.
If Jonathan was in love with Tenebraes, then I might as well throw myself from the balcony of the congregation hall in full sight of everyone in town. Because I knew with absolute clarity at age twelve that I loved Jonathan with all my heart and that if I could not spend my life with him, I might as well be dead. I sat next to my father through the end of the service, my heart hammering in my throat, tears welling behind my eyes even though I told myself I was a ninny to get carried away over something that was probably meaningless.
When the service ended, my father, Kieran, took my hand and led me down the stairs to join our neighbors on the common green. This was the reward for sitting through the service: the opportunity to talk to your neighbors, to have some relief after six days of hard, tedious work. For some, it was the only contact they’d had outside their family in a week, the only chance to hear the latest news and any bits of gossip. I stood behind my father as he spoke to a couple of our neighbors, peeking from behind him to find Jonathan, hoping he would not be with Tenebraes. He was standing behind his parents, alone, staring stonily into the backs of their heads. He clearly wished to leave, but he might as well have wished for snow in July: socializing after services typically lasted for at least an hour, more if the weather was as pleasant as it was that day, and the stalwarts would practically have to be carried away. His father was doubly encumbered because there were plenty of men in town who saw Sundays as an opportunity to speak to the man who was their landlord or in a position to improve their fortune in some way. Poor Charles St. Andrew; I didn’t realize till many years later the burden he had to endure.
Where did I find the courage to do what I did next? Maybe it was desperation and the determination not to lose Jonathan to Tenebraes that compelled me to slip away from my father. Once I was sure he hadn’t noticed my absence, I made haste across the lawn, toward Jonathan, weaving between the knots of adults talking. I was a tiny thing at that age, easily hidden from my father’s view by the voluminous skirts of the ladies, until I went up to Jonathan.
“Jonathan. Jonathan St. Andrew,” I said but my voice came out as a squeak.
Those beautiful dark eyes looked on me and me alone for the first time and my heart did a little flip. “Yes? What do you want?”
What did I want? Now that I had his attention, I had no idea what to say.
“You’re one of the McIlvraes, aren’t you?” Jonathan said, suspiciously. “Nevin is your brother.”
My cheeks colored as I remembered the incident. Why hadn’t I thought of the incident before I came over? Last spring, Nevin had ambushed Jonathan outside the provisioner’s store and bloodied his nose before adults pulled them apart. Nevin had an abiding hatred of Jonathan, for reasons unknown to all but Nevin. My father apologized to Charles St. Andrew for what was seen as nothing more than the sort of skirmish boys get into routinely, nothing sinister attached to it. What neither father knew was that Nevin would undoubtedly kill Jonathan if he ever saw the chance.
“What do you want? Is this one of Nevin’s tricks?”
I blinked at him. “I—I have something I wish to ask you.” But I couldn’t speak in the presence of all these adults. It was only a matter of time before Jonathan’s parents realized there was a girl in their midst, and they would wonder what the devil Kieran McIlvrae’s oldest daughter was doing, if indeed the McIlvrae children harbored some strange intent toward their son.
I took his hand in both of mine. “Come with me.” I led him through the crowd, back into the empty vestibule of the church, and, for reasons I will never know, he obeyed me. Strangely, no one noticed our exit, no one cried out to stop us from going off together by ourselves. No one broke away to chaperone us. It was as though fate conspired, too, for Jonathan and I to have our first moment together.
We went into the cloakroom with its cool slate floor and darkened recess. The sound of voices seemed a long way off, only murmurs and snippets of talk drifting in from the common. Jonathan fidgeted, confused.
“So—what is it you wish to tell me?” he asked, an edge of impatience in his tone.
I had intended to ask him about Tenebraes. I wanted to ask him about all the girls in the village and which ones he cared for and if he had been promised to one of them. But I couldn’t; these questions choked in my throat and brought me to the edge of tears.
And so in desperation I leaned forward and pressed my lips against his. I could tell he was surprised by the way he drew back, slightly, before regaining his wits. And then he did something unexpected: he returned the kiss. He leaned into me, groping for my lips with his mouth, feeding his breath into me. It was a forceful kiss, hungry and clumsy and so much more than I knew to expect. Before I had the chance to be frightened, he backed me against the wall, his mouth still over mine, and pressed into me until I bumped against the spot hidden beneath the front of his breeches and below the folds of his jacket. A moan escaped him, the first time I heard a moan of pleasure come from another person. Without a word, he took my hand and brought it to the front of his breeches and I felt a shudder run through him as he uttered another moan.
I drew my hand back. It tingled. I could still feel his hardness in my palm.
He was panting, trying to get himself under control, confused that I’d pulled away from him. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” he asked, studying my face, more than a little worried. “You did kiss me.”
“I did …” Words tumbled out of me. “I meant to ask … Tenebraes …”
“Tenebraes?” He stood back, smoothing the front of his waistcoat. “What of Tenebraes? What difference—” He trailed off, perhaps realizing he had been watched in church. He shook his head as though brushing aside the very notion of Tenebraes Poirier. “And what is your name? Which McIlvrae sister are you?”
I couldn’t blame him for being uncertain: there were three of us. “Lanore,” I answered.
“Not a very pretty name, is it?” he said, not realizing that every little word can bruise a young girl’s heart. “I will call you Lanny, if you don’t mind. Now, Lanny, you know you are a very wicked girl.” There was a playfulness in his voice to let me know he wasn’t seriously angry with me. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you should not tease a boy so, especially boys you do not know?”
“But I know you. Everyone knows you,” I said, somewhat alarmed that he would think me frivolous. He was the eldest son of the wealthiest man in town, the owner of the logging business around which the entire settlement revolved—of course everyone knew who he was. “And—and I believe that I love you. I mean to be your wife one day.”
Jonathan lifted a cynical eyebrow. “To know my name is one thing, but how can you possibly know you love me? How can you set your heart on me? You don’t know me at all, Lanny, and yet you’ve declared yourself mine.” He smoothed his jacket one more time. “We should go back outside before someone comes looking for us. It would be best if we were not seen together, don’t you agree? You should go first.”
I stood there for a second, shocked. I was confused, still possessed of phantom traces of his desire, his kiss and the memory of his hardness in my hand. In any case, he’d misunderstood me: I hadn’t given myself to him. I had declared that he was mine. “All right,” I said, and the disappointment must have been evident in my voice because Jonathan gave me his handsomest smile.
“Don’t worry, Lanny. There is next Sunday—we will see each other after service, I promise. Perhaps I can persuade you to give me another kiss.”
Shall I tell you about Jonathan, my Jonathan, and then you will understand how I could be so sure of my devotion? He was the firstborn of Charles and Ruth St. Andrew and they were so thrilled to have a son that they named him on the spot, had him christened within the month, recklessly exulting in him in an age when most parents would not even name a child until it had lived for some time and proved it had a chance of survival. His father threw a great party while Ruth was still recuperating in her bed; had everyone from the town come in for rum punch and sugared tea, plum cake and molasses cookies; hired an Acadian fiddler, had laughter and music so close after the boy’s birth, it seemed the father was daring the devil—just try to come and take my boy! Just try and see what you will get!
It was apparent, from the earliest days, that Jonathan was uncommon: he was exceptionally clever, exceptionally strong, exceptionally healthy, and above all, exceptionally beautiful. Women would sit rapt beside the cradle, beg for turns to hold him and pretend that the well-formed bundle of flesh and swirling tendrils of black gossamer was their own. Even men, down to the hardiest axman working for St. Andrew in the logging operation, would get uncharacteristically misty when brought in proximity to the babe.
By the time Jonathan reached his twelfth birthday, there was no denying that there was something preternatural about him, and it seemed just as obvious to attribute this to his beauty. He was a wonder. He was perfection. That could not be said of many at the time; it was an age in which people were disfigured by any number of causes—smallpox or accident, burned at the hearth, spindly from malnutrition, toothless by thirty, lumpy from a broken bone set improperly, scarified, palsied, scabbed from lack of hygiene, and, in our stretch of the woods, missing parts from frostbite. But there wasn’t a disfiguring mark on Jonathan. He’d grown tall, straight, and broad shouldered, as majestic as the trees on his property. His skin was as flawless as poured cream. He had straight black hair as glossy as a raven’s wing and his eyes were dark and bottomless, like the deepest recess of the Allagash. He was simply beautiful to look upon.
Is it a blessing or a curse to have a boy like Jonathan living in your midst? Pity us girls, I say; consider the effect a boy like Jonathan can have on the girls in a small village, in a town so limited there are few other distractions and it is impossible to avoid all contact with him. He was a constant, inescapable temptation. There was always the chance you might see him, coming out of the provisioner’s shop or as he rode across a field seemingly on some errand but really sent by the devil to weaken our reserve. He didn’t even have to be present to dominate our thoughts: as you sat with your sisters or friends to take up needlework, one of them would whisper about a recent glimpse of Jonathan, and then, he would be all we could talk about. Perhaps we had a part in our own bedevilment, for the girls could not stop obsessing about him, whether on the occasion of a casual meeting (did he speak to you, the girls would want to know; what did he say?), or a mere sighting in town, when even a detail as trifling as the color of his waistcoat was discussed. But what we were really thinking, all of us, was: how he could look you over with an impertinent eye or the way the very corner of his mouth turned up in speculation, and how any of us would die to be in his arms, just once. And it was not just the young girls who felt this way about him; especially as he reached his teenage years, fifteen, sixteen, he already made the other men in the village seem spent, coarse, overfed, or scrawny, and the good wives started to consider Jonathan differently. You could tell by the way they’d stare at him, their feverish looks, flushed cheeks, bitten lips, and the eternal hope in a quick drawing in of breath.
There was the aspect about him of slight danger, too, of wanting to touch him the way a mad voice in your head tells you to touch a hot iron. You know you cannot help but be hurt, but you cannot resist. You must just experience it for yourself. You ignore what you know will come next, the unbearable pain of seared flesh, the sharp bite of the burn all over again every time the wound is touched. The scar you will carry for the rest of your life. The scar that will mark your heart. Inured to love, you will never be quite so foolish in the same way again.
In that respect, I was envied and ridiculed at the same time: envied for all the time I spent in Jonathan’s presence, ridiculed because I had made it plain that there was no romance of any sort between us. This only confirmed in the eyes of the other girls that I lacked the necessary feminine wiles to pique a man’s interest. But I was no different from them. I knew Jonathan had the ability to burn me up with the brilliance of his attention, like a flame to paper. A girl could be destroyed in an instant of divine love. The question was, was it worth it?
You might ask if I loved Jonathan for his beauty, and I would answer: that is a pointless question, for his great, uncommon beauty was an irreducible part of the whole. It gave him his quiet confidence—which some might have called aloof arrogance—and his easy, disarming way with the fairer sex. And if his beauty drew my eye from the first, I’ll not apologize for it, nor will I apologize for my desire to claim Jonathan for my own. To behold such beauty is to wish to possess it; it’s desire that drives every collector. And I was hardly alone. Nearly every person who came to know Jonathan tried to possess him. This was his curse, and the curse of every person who loved him. But it was like being in love with the sun: brilliant and intoxicating to be near, but impossible to keep to oneself. It was hopeless to love him and yet it was hopeless not to.
And so I was afflicted by Jonathan’s curse, caught up in his terrible attraction, and both of us were doomed to suffer for it.
A FRIENDSHIP PROGRESSED between us—Jonathan and I—in this way through childhood. We met after services on Sundays and at social events such as weddings and even funerals, whispering together on the fringe of the mourners, or giving up on propriety altogether and wandering off to the woods so we could concentrate all our attention on each other. Heads shook in disapproval, and without a doubt, some tongues gave in to gossip, but our families did nothing to stop our friendship—at least, I was not made aware of it if they had.
It was during this time that I realized that Jonathan was lonelier than I imagined. The other boys sought his company far less than I’d assumed and, for Jonathan’s part, when a group approached us at a social, he often skirted them. I recall one time, at a spring church gathering, that Jonathan steered me to another path when he saw a group of boys his age heading in our direction. I had no idea what to make of it and, after a few minutes of anxious contemplation, decided to ask.
“Why is it that you choose to walk this way?” I asked. “Is it because you are embarrassed to be seen with me?”
He made a derisive sound. “Don’t be daft, Lanny. I am seen with you now. Anyone can see us walking together.”
That was true enough, and a relief. But I could not give up my inquiry. “Then is it because you don’t like them, those boys?”
“I don’t dislike them,” he said, peevishly.
“Then why—”
He cut me off. “Why are you questioning me? Take my word for it: it’s different for boys, Lanny, and that’s all there is to it.” He began to walk faster, and I had to lift my skirts a bit to keep up with him. He hadn’t explained what the mysterious “it” was that he referred to: what was different for boys? I wondered. Nearly everything, from what I could see. Boys were allowed to go to school, if their families could afford to pay the tutor’s fee, whereas girls got no more schooling than their mothers could impart—the household arts of sewing, cleaning, and cooking, maybe a little reading from the Bible. Boys could tussle with each other for amusement, run and play tag without the encumbrance of long skirts, ride horseback. True, they drew hard chores and had to master all manner of skills—once, Jonathan told me, his father made him repair the foundation of their icehouse, stone and mortar, just so he would know a bit about masonry—but to my way of thinking, a boy’s life was much freer. And here Jonathan was complaining about it.
“I wish I were a boy,” I muttered, nearly out of breath from trying to keep up with him.
“No, you don’t,” he said over his shoulder.
“I don’t see what—”