Later in the afternoon, as I am replacing the bone-handled carving knives in their chest and Mrs. Sullivan has moved on to dinner preparations, I hear her call for the hired man to kill a chicken for supper.
“He’s up on the roof. I’ll do it.” Quinn’s voice. He has left his room, likely creeping down for a cup of bouillon that Mrs. Sullivan, a great believer in the healing powers of bouillon, keeps in a spare kettle on the hearth.
I hear the clatter of cups. “No, no, Mister Quinn, let me pour ”
“It’s no trouble. I did quite a bit of hostess duty for the corps.” I recognize the old coaxing charm in Quinn’s voice that these days he reserves for the servants. It always works. Sure enough, Mrs. Sullivan giggles.
I hear Quinn pass through the kitchen door. I pull on my cloak and hide my tarnished palms in a pair of mittens before I join him in step as he heads out to the yard.
“The almanac promises an early spring,” I begin amiably, but Quinn’s in no temper to chat.
“Jennie, you should leave here,” he says. “Put us out of your life, one and all.”
“Where would I go?” I feel a sting my eyes. I think of Nate, trapped at his window.
“There are opportunities.” Gracefully, Quinn swoops underhand to catch a speckled guinea, thrusting it into my arms in a single motion. A lock of his hair falls forward, and I resist the impulse to smooth it back into place. We head for the tree stump. La guillotine, Toby had called it. “You’re very clever.”
I can’t remember if Quinn has ever outright complimented me before. In light of that kiss, and Nate Dearborn’s words he’s sweet on you,
too I wonder if he continues to harbor feelings, or if he ever truly did.
“Clever at what?”
His expression is neutral. “You’ve got a calming way. You could be a nurse, or a governess, even.”
“I’m sorely uneducated.” I stroke the guinea beneath its gullet to subdue it. Other chickens, sensing danger, are clucking and scuttling around us, clawing up the cold earth. “You know I quit Putterham when Papa died. Besides, I never took to it, not really. I could tell you everything about Prometheus and Epimetheus, thanks to Papa. But I can’t multiply higher than ten times ten.” I feel the bird go heavy in my arms.
Quinn shrugs. “A pity. I wish I’d got to know your father. History will remember him with respect, as one of the first men to enlist in this war.”
“And to get killed in it.” Four years ago. It seems another lifetime since the beginning of the fighting. “Toby always said it was suicide. That Papa was never right in his head after our mother passed.”
“He wouldn’t be the first to go mad with grief. Some days I think I am mad, with what I’ve seen.” Quinn shakes his head as if to displace his thoughts. “The new reports say that the South is bankrupt, and I know firsthand that most of it’s destroyed, with a Union victory all but guaranteed. However it ends, I fear it’ll be many years we’ll be wiping up the blood of our memories.”
“Your experiences have left you bitter, Quinn. I’m sure we’ll be happy again. That’s what Will and Toby would have wanted.”
But Quinn doesn’t answer. He disappears into the henhouse, and when he returns he has knotted on the blood-rusted butcher’s apron and is carrying the axe. He pulls the limp bird from my arms, positions it on the stump, and then with one sure hand and a single stroke he severs its neck.
There’s a chorus of squawking as the headless chicken begins a jerking death-dance around the yard. Other livestock scatter.
“You used your left hand,” I note.
“I favored it as a child,” he says, opening his fingers, then closing them into a fist. “Then I was retrained properly at school. Wasn’t until I needed to shoot a gun that I went cack-handed again. Now I use my left for everything. It seems to have retained an intuitive skill.” He wipes the blood of the blade on his apron before wedging it into the stump. “S’pose I needed any natural advantage for survival.”
Doubtless there will never be an easy time to confront Quinn, but the question has been so long on the tip of my tongue, it almost has a taste. I plunge ahead. “Will you tell me what Will met up against before he was killed? I want to know it. He was in trouble, wasn’t he?”
“Trouble? He was a hero.” Quinn raises his eye patch for a moment and wipes his forehead with the sleeve of his coat. The eye, though less raw, is thickly ridged with scar tissue. Queasy, I look away. “Don’t we have a telegram from Captain Fleming? Don’t we have a respectable service planned for Will come spring?”
“I deserve better from you, Quinn,” I say. “The truth, for example. I know there’s more to this story.” I don’t dare risk telling him about Nate and the letter. Not now.
A spy’s sixth sense is timing.
In the barbed silence, we stare at each other, faced with the unassailable wall built of what Quinn refuses to confess.
“And after that service,” he says, his voice level, “it might be best for you to leave this house. As I mentioned, there is nothing for you here.”
“Except you,” I murmur, glancing down at my blood-spattered boots.
“Don’t say that, Jennie,” His voice breaks. “Not when you don’t mean it.”
“I’m sorry.” Didn’t I mean it? I’m confused myself and unable to tear my gaze from his.
By now Mrs. Sullivan has come lumbering across the yard. She scoops the lifeless bird to bleed and pluck, oblivious to what, if anything, has just passed between Quinn and me. “Thank you, Mister Quinn,” she says, but he has already turned away.
“Wait! Quinn! I’ll walk with you!” I call after him.
His strides are too long for me to keep up. I stop following. Still in his bloodied apron, Quinn crosses under the trellis that leads from the kitchen garden down to the crab apple orchard.
Dismal by winter afternoon, it appears as a trek of starved gray trees and hard-packed soil. Along its path, Quinn moves steady, casting a long shadow that is wafer-thin and lonely as a reaper against the gray sky.
16.
Although Quinn doesn’t bring up my leaving Pritchett House, he has injected the fear into me. Where would I go? What would I do? Over the next few days, I am a mouse in search of a new flowerpot under which to hide.
Homing in on what she (rightly) perceives as my insecurity, Mrs. Sullivan starts to give me lists, misspelled commands on scraps of brown butcher paper, and though she hasn’t assigned me the charwoman’s work yet my hours are spent sweeping, mending, and so much dusting that my lungs ache from sneezes. But I do everything she asks, afraid to raise a fuss.
But by the week’s end, when Uncle mentions that he’ll be going into town for an early meeting at the bank, I’m resolute. This Saturday is my only chance, for it’s when Mrs. Sullivan takes a half day to commiserate with her elder sister, Millicent, over tea in Fort Hill. She flourishes a newly printed carte de visite that she’d ordered expressly for the occasion though it seems a bit of a pretension, considering Millie has been receiving her sister every other Saturday for the past thirty years.
But Mrs. Sullivan has a dozen and surely won’t miss one, so a I spirit it into the folds of my apron while she checks her hat in the mirror.
She hurries out, lugging her basket that is no doubt stocked with stolen wares from our pantry. But she doesn’t open the carriage door, however, without burdening me with yet another list, this one for items to pick up from Kirke & Sons.
Battleship clouds glower in the sky that morning. I stay downstairs to ensure I’ll catch Uncle as he departs. My photograph and letter are hidden in my pocket, and my excuse is writ firm in my head.