The Hunger

  But when Stanton first told her of this dream, she started acting coldly. It was sheer torture. He became sick with worry, thinking he’d disappointed her or overstepped the bounds of their friendship. Or worse: that she’d found someone else.

  The fall of 1831 flew by, and Stanton hadn’t seen Lydia for months, other than a curt nod in the market or across the aisle at church. It was approaching the holidays by then and they were having a terribly cold winter, when he finally pulled her away after church one Sunday. Her father had taken ill and she’d come to the service alone. Stanton noticed her hands were icy and pale, and he wondered where her gloves had gone.

  She led him back toward the woods, where they fought angrily. She told him to leave her alone, that she’d never wanted his advances. He was crushed, the years of their friendship and the flashes of heated intimacy between them racing through his mind in a confused blur. Where had he misstepped?

  He begged her to explain, to help him understand, didn’t want to push her or make demands and yet refused to accept her dismissal outright. There was something she wasn’t telling him, and he simply had to know it. She owed it to him to give him a reason why she would never be his. Give him one reason, and he would take it, and go away forever.

  Finally, she relented, and gave him the reason—one he’d know soon enough, anyway.

  She was pregnant.

  He stuttered in confusion and embarrassment, the cold suddenly creeping through the threads of his good wool coat—the one he saved for Sundays. “But . . . how?” He felt the burn of his cheeks. He might have been inexperienced, but he was not stupid. He knew where babies came from. He understood: There had been someone else.

  His jealousy, his fury and hurt, were tempered by worry. “Who is it? Are you to be married?”

  It was then that she began to cry—at first faintly, so that he thought perhaps a light snow had begun to fall again. But then harder. She wouldn’t say a word.

  He got down on his knees. Her hands were too cold, and he clutched them between his own, rubbing them vigorously even as she wept. Maybe by restoring warmth to her, he would restore the Lydia he knew—or thought he’d known. “Whoever it is, it doesn’t matter to me,” he said through her tears. “I have always loved you and I always will. Please marry me, Lydia, if you love me back.”

  She finally stopped crying—the tears left tiny tracks through her wind-chapped skin, and she seemed to him like a painting in danger of blurring until its true form became lost forever.

  “Do I know him? Has the cad gone and left you, Lydia?”

  She shook her head. “He has not left. He . . . I . . . I cannot ever escape him, Charles.”

  His concern had reached a peak now. “I will not let a monster ruin your life, Lydia. We will go to your father. He will make whoever it is pay.”

  At this she cried again, in broken, heaving sobs, and pulled away. She ran toward the woods and he followed, calling out to her, finally grabbing her arm and twirling her around. She fell into him, saying something over and over again and even as his ears finally began to comprehend it, his mind refused to.

  ItwashimitwashimitwasHIM. It was Father.

  The secret fell like a blanket over the woods. Even the birds were silent as the details, slowly and painfully, emerged: Mr. Knox had been forcing his daughter into his bed for nearly two years.

  Sickened, shaken, Stanton held on to her, panic and nausea coursing through him in equal measures. All this time he had stood by, not seeing, not helping. Could he ever forgive himself? Ever be worthy of another woman’s trust?

  “I will make it better,” he kept saying, though he had no idea how.

  She begged him never to let anyone know of the shame she had experienced, saying she couldn’t live with the notion that anyone might find out. In some dreadful, twisted way, she wanted to protect her father. Eventually she pulled herself away, wiped off her face, insisted she had to be home before her absence was noticed.

  That was when he made the promise: “Meet me here tomorrow. I will make it right.”

  She nodded once, and said, “Please don’t tell anyone.” Then she flew from him.

  He stalked the woods for hours after their conversation, shivering as the afternoon dove rapidly toward night. His legs had to keep moving, or the horror would somehow suffocate him.

  At last he returned home and went straight to his grandfather’s study. He had a problem, he knew; his grandfather was a good friend of Knox’s. Stern and unforgiving as he was, the chances of him believing Stanton’s story seemed slim to none. But that didn’t matter. The truth didn’t matter, so long as he could fix it.

  And so he wove the tale: He told his grandfather that the baby was his. He asked to do the honorable thing and marry her immediately. In his young mind, he thought permission, and means, would follow, no matter the quantity of stern lectures he might receive.

  But that wasn’t what happened. Instead of granting them permission to marry, his grandfather threatened to disown Stanton. Lydia’s father had already cast him as the playboy and villain, and Stanton had no choice but to play along—no one would have believed him. Money was power—he was beginning to see that—and Knox was able to buy his own version of the truth.

  Stanton only realized the worst of it later: that Knox never wanted him for a son-in-law—not when he knew the man’s terrible secret. Not when he considered him below their station.

  Not when he still wanted her for himself.

  If permission was not an option, it didn’t matter. They would run. There was no plan in place but there didn’t have to be. Love, and the truth, would carry them, would set them free.

  That was what he believed.

  * * *

  • • •

  TINY FLECKS OF SNOW swirled around Stanton’s head as he entered the Knox house several days later for the funeral. He looked up at the sky, white flannel stretched across the horizon. A storm was coming.

  Inside, the parlor room had changed overnight. The furniture had been pulled out to accommodate the coffin, as dainty as its occupant, standing on trestles in front of the fireplace. After a push from behind, Stanton went up and peered inside. There was Lydia, his Lydia. He recognized the dress they had put on her, cream flannel with a tiny rosebud print; she had hated it, thought it made her look like a child. He’d heard Mr. Knox had the female servants prepare the body and they hadn’t bothered to curl and fix her hair the way she normally wore it. Instead, they’d left it long and combed it out over her shoulders. She didn’t look at all the way he remembered her.

  Worst of all was her skin, white and chalky. Her eyes were closed, her face slack and inanimate. She was not Lydia as he’d known her.

  That made it slightly easier.

  He tried not to hear the muffled sobs of Lydia’s father, but they were everywhere, muffled and yet stifling somehow, like a heavy snow. Stanton could hardly breathe, trapped in the weight of that sound.

  Afterward, he spent the day fitfully, so preoccupied and moody that his grandfather sent him out to chop wood in what was now a heavy snow. He chopped until he had raised a healthy sweat under his clothes and his mind had finally been able to forget his worries, at least for moments at a time. But no sooner had Stanton stepped inside the house than his grandfather ordered him to take a wheelbarrow of firewood to Knox as a neighborly gesture.

  He stacked the firewood outside the kitchen entrance. He was too numb to protest.

  The door opened in his face and there stood Herbert Knox looking down at him. His cravat had been loosened and his starched collar unbuttoned. His gray-streaked hair was mussed. He was in his cups, Stanton judged.

  He insisted that Stanton come inside. He sat next to Mr. Knox in a dining room chair that had been placed in the parlor for the viewing. He stared ahead at the coffin, not wishing to speak for fear of betraying Lydia.

  “Do
you know why I’ve asked you in?” Herbert Knox’s voice boomed, echoing off the high ceiling.

  Stanton gave one tight shake of his head.

  Knox waved his hand. “You can speak freely. I gave the servants the afternoon off. There’s no one in the house except you and I.” When Stanton still said nothing, Knox leaned toward him and Stanton smelled alcohol on his breath. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.” He paused, his gaze sweeping over Stanton’s face. “You were close to my daughter. I want to know—did she tell you her secrets?”

  Don’t tell anyone, please, she’d begged.

  He began to sweat.

  Herbert Knox rose to pace around the room. “Because I know my little girl had secrets, Charles. Secrets even you don’t know. Do you believe that? There are things about my daughter you know nothing about.”

  “I imagine everyone has secrets,” Stanton said, finally, though he felt like he was choking on his own saliva.

  “My daughter was pregnant, Charles. Did you know that?” Stanton started, but tried to hide his surprise. “Don’t think she didn’t tell me. I know who the father was.”

  He once again felt how the air seemed to refuse to come into his lungs. He heaved a breath.

  Mr. Knox plunged ahead. “You needn’t act so guilty, Charles. Your attraction to my daughter was understandable. It’s your behavior that was not.” So he was going to persist in his denial. Stanton thought he was going to be sick, though he didn’t know which would have been worse—Mr. Knox accusing him of being the father, or confessing to be the one at fault himself. The room seemed to be shrinking. Stanton’s head pounded. “Lydia and I were very close,” Knox went on, a distant look on his face. As if he were somewhere else. “Much closer than most fathers and daughters. She was all I had after my wife died, all the family left to me in the world. She told me everything.”

  Stanton jumped to his feet, repulsion like a poison flooding his veins, his mind. He had to flee from the house, flee this abomination.

  The sudden movement seemed to snap Herbert Knox out of his strange reverie. His stare was cold and reptilian now. He knows that I know, Stanton realized. Inebriated or not.

  Please don’t tell anyone. Lydia’s pleading voice wrapped around his throat like a noose.

  Herbert Knox, wrapped in a stink of alcohol and sweat, suddenly had him by the arm in a wild man’s grip. He pulled Stanton close so he could search his eyes, to know what he was thinking. “You think you know the truth, but you don’t understand. You thought my daughter loved you, but you were a child to her. She pitied you, following her around like a lovesick puppy. You don’t know what love is, son . . .”

  The next thing Stanton knew, Knox was sprawled on the floor, rubbing his jaw in surprise. Stanton had punched the man so quickly that he had no memory of it except the soreness of his knuckles.

  Knox gazed up at Stanton, his glazed look quickly replaced by something steelier. “If you really love Lydia, Charles, you’ll protect her memory. She would hate being gossiped about. You know that.”

  “You think I won’t tell anyone . . .”

  “No one would believe you if you did.” Knox started to rise from the floor, slowly and deliberately, watching him. “You’ve already made your bed, Charles. You may as well leave Lydia in hers. No one will take your word against mine, son. Not after how you’ve behaved, dogging my daughter over the years. Not after you already went ahead and took the blame.” Stanton nearly blacked out from anger.

  He was on him, straddling him, his knuckles becoming as bloody as the old man’s face. Over and over again, pummeling that sick, smug grin. Wanting to make those gray eyes glaze over forever. Knox was death itself—he’d destroyed everything good in the world.

  Herbert Knox would have met his maker that day, had it not been for the housekeeper, Mrs. Talley, running in and screaming. Her hollering drew the other servants, who pulled Stanton off the bruised and bloody mess Knox had become.

  Stanton was heaving, crying, shaking. The servants stared at him in wonder and horror, and he was eventually dragged home to his grandfather in a cloak of fear and shame.

  He was left in his bed for hours—maybe days. His grandfather didn’t come to him at all. Neither did his mother. No one came. He wondered if maybe he, Stanton, had died, and was caught in a kind of purgatory, a world defined by the edges of his bed and the boundaries of fitful, nightmarish sleep. Outside his window, a blizzard raged.

  Finally, morning dawned, and his grandfather called him into his office. Stanton realized his whole body ached—from the struggle, no doubt. There were scabs on the backs of his hands.

  Would his grandfather whip him? Beat him within an inch of his own life? Send him out into the streets? He couldn’t fathom the many ways in which Mr. Knox might try to ruin his life now, what sort of punishment he might devise.

  He heard his mother weeping in her room, the door firmly locked. He didn’t blame her. She was powerless to help him.

  Gingerly, he pushed open his grandfather’s study door with a creak.

  His grandfather said nothing but nodded for him to take a seat. The room felt eerily silent—the snow had quieted the whole world.

  What happened next floored Stanton.

  It seemed, according to his grandfather, that Herbert Knox had “taken pity on the grief-stricken boy.” His grandfather produced a letter in a fat envelope. The sum of money inside it caused Stanton to rock backward in his chair.

  “This,” his grandfather explained, “is to help you start over, to make a new life for yourself. Courtesy of the Knox family.” He paused. “On the condition that you never return.”

  Stanton was frozen. He didn’t want Knox’s money. He didn’t want his so-called charity, the sum of which was so great it seemed clear evidence of Knox’s guilt. It was hush money. Stanton wasn’t a child; he could see that.

  “Take it, boy,” his grandfather said. “You are no longer welcome here.”

  Stanton may not have been a child, but still, he was young. If he had another choice, he didn’t know it. If there was a way to make things right, to reveal the truth, he didn’t see it.

  The wad of money stared up at him. How could he have known that one day Knox would want it back—long after it had been spent?

  How could he have foreseen the many ways—and many women—he would seek to drown out the memories of this time? Who could say if there was a specific point at which Stanton’s innocence in Lydia’s death no longer mattered, became subsumed in all the mistakes, and affairs, that were to follow . . .

  Maybe he was naïve, then. Maybe he was a child.

  He couldn’t make it right for Lydia, could not bring her justice or peace. And neither could he continue to live in this town, next door to the man who had betrayed her trust and love. He would go mad or one day kill Knox, or both.

  There was nothing he could do, it seemed, but take the money and leave.

  A real hero would have known what to do, surely—would not have built his whole life on a foundation of rot and guilt and horror.

  But Charles Stanton was no hero.

  Forgive me, Lydia.

  NOVEMBER 1846

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The snow kept falling over Alder Creek: It was dainty, pretty, even. Unrelenting.

  Often as her husband slept, fitfully, Tamsen would stare at him in wonder, remembering how she had once longed for his death—prayed it would come as a pleasant and nasty surprise: neat, tidy, over with quickly, as it had been with her first husband. How she fancied she’d find an improved opportunity elsewhere, that her beauty, like a fishing hook, would save her yet, fetching her a better catch than before. Those ideas seemed remarkably naïve to her now, set as they’d been within the larger belief that life would be good to her, despite everything—that she would turn it all around, would carve out a space for happiness. That it was a thin
g you could get to by clawing at it.

  She knew better now, though. And knowing it allowed her to forgive George, at least a little, for the terrible entrapment she felt their marriage had been. He’d given up his own safety for hers, for no good reason at all, except that she was the mother of his children. Except that he, unaccountably, adored her.

  In a practical sense, she hardly needed him. George wasn’t good for much more than bluster and bright-eyed cajoling. No, what she did need, though, was that very adoration.

  For someone to care.

  * * *

  • • •

  TEMPERATURES DROPPED.

  Two days now they’d been hunkered inside the tents. The snow came up to their knees and obscured the way ahead in a thick blanket of white. It had begun to harden in place. Everyone shivered together, fully dressed, under quilts and blankets. George was delirious and feverish. His skin burned but was as pale as the snow. Every time he cried out in pain in his sleep, the girls whimpered, terrified. Tamsen made him drink tea made with ginger, bee balm, and cinnamon, good for infection.

  It was late. She slept now only in snatches—an hour, maybe two if she was lucky. Burger and Shoemaker had eventually made it back, during a break in the snowfall, but only with the bitter news that Eddy had refused help. They had no choice but to wait out the weather now. They were as good as stuck.

  She was sitting at George’s side, sleepless, when she heard a sound outside the tent: a gentle schussing, as though someone was gliding by on runners. A sleigh, that was what they needed, but a sleigh out here in the wilderness? Impossible. She was so desperate to be rescued that she was hallucinating.