Comfort Me With Apples(11)

His head whips round toward her. He lowers his voice to a half-growl and engulfs her upper arm in his inexorable hand. “Who told you about her?” he asks urgently. “Who?”

“No one,” she insists. She tries to get free of his grip, but she is only small compared to him. “No one, it was only a bit of gossip.”

He storms off toward Semengelof. His handprint flushes pink and harsh on her skin. The two men speak urgently, but Sophia cannot hear; too many other voices swarm up toward her, a protective wall against whatever is happening down there in the front rows.

“Come on, kittens,” Mrs. Lyon chortles loudly, and shuffles her brood toward Sophia, trailing the other ladies behind her like an ellipsis. “Where’s your better half, my dear?” she asks, stretching languidly and plopping herself down on the rough-hewn stone slab beside her friend.

And he appears again at her back, arms full, as though he only left to get treats.

“Right here, Mrs. Lyon,” booms the voice of Sophia’s beloved, her devotion, who could never hurt anyone, not really, not ever. She understands that so completely now, seeing him in the firefly-light, among the throng of their little village where they both belong, the color high and happy in his cheeks, his hair combed until it shone, just for her, just for her to love a little better than if it were tangled. He hands her a slab of honeycomb wrapped in Mrs. Orpington’s greasepaper and keeps a bottle of sweet, cold wine from the Guernseys’ vineyard for himself. “The life of the party, reporting for duty!”

He loves her. He will love her until the end of always. The bone and the hair are nothing in the face of all that he’s given her. A bit of sheep’s foot that didn’t make it into the stockpot. A scrap of horsehair to make into rope. Or perhaps it was a test, to see if she would doubt him. Yes, yes, that had to be the answer. A test. And Sophia would never fail.

But in her mind she sees the spiderweb of broken glass irising out from the hole the heron smashed into her house. Each thin thread of silver slowly growing, reaching through the perfect, clear, smooth pane, until soon, there would be nothing left unbroken.

No. No.

She would have tonight and nothing would spoil it.

The footlights dim, several throats clear, Mr. Rook taps his baton on a tree stump. The pantomime begins. Sophia glances at her program.

Memories of Bliss to Come.

Could anything match her life more perfectly?

Mrs. Palfrey and Mr. Silverback enter the stage, gesturing broadly. Mrs. Wolfe and Mrs. Moray and Mrs. Hart and Mrs. Rose and Mrs. Flye all crowd on to meet them, embracing, dancing and singing with joy. Mr. Silverback squeezes Mrs. Palfrey tight and introduces her to each of the other actors one by one by one.

Sophia weeps again. Her whole body shakes and shivers. What’s gotten into her, weeping so much in so few days? But she cannot stop. Memories of Bliss to Come unfolds onstage as it unfolded in her own life—it is her own life. Sophia watches in bashful bewilderment as her friends perform the day Sophia and her husband came to Arcadia Gardens. The day they moved into their beautiful house, the first time the neighbors asked her to tea. Mrs. Hayre plays Mrs. Lyon with exaggerated exuberance and everyone giggles along, as the lady Lyon is as ample as the lady Hayre petite.

“Why are they doing this?” Sophia whispers to her husband. “Why me? I’m no sort of subject for a play!”

But her mate does not answer. He watches the stage without moving. Not a hair on his forearm so much as shifts in the breeze. His heavy hand grips the stone seat, knuckles bloodless and tight.

Mrs. Palfrey sits at a papier maché vanity and makes a great show of primping. She laughs and shakes her long, black, coarse hair in the limelight—a wig, of course. Mrs. Palfrey has quite a lemony colored mane.

The wig is very long, and very black, and as coarse as dead wheat stalks.

It is nothing like Sophia’s hair, even though this is Sophia’s house on the amphitheater stage, Sophia’s vanity, Sophia’s first day. Mrs. Palfrey tugs an oversized prop brush through her hair and ties it with a wide white ribbon. She holds the brush in her hand for a long moment, then tucks it into the left-hand drawer and locks it away. She glances sidelong at the audience through her lashes as she turns the key, and it seems to Sophia that the actress playing her on the happiest day of her life is looking right at her, at her and through her, past her skin and into her blood and her bones.

Sophia drags her eyes away, only to see Mrs. Lyon and Mrs. Fische and Mrs. Minke trying to flay her alive with their gazes too. And not only them. Everyone is watching her. The whole amphitheater, every eye turned up and down and sideways toward her. Their horrible eyes prodding her, testing her, trying to see to the core of her, like the heron, like the field mouse, like Mr. Semengelof. All except her husband, glaring straight ahead, hardly breathing.

Mrs. Palfrey turns to kiss Mr. Silverback dramatically as he makes his entrance into the scene and dances happily through her onstage life as though nothing unusual has occurred. At the end, she twirls away stage right in an explosion of flowers and only the dressing table remains, lonely and dark on the boards.

The crowd shifts in their seats and applauds wildly, cheering and hooting and braying and yelping and roaring.

Sophia’s husband slumps back, exhausted, the tension seeping out of him slowly.

“Are you all right, darling?” Sophia whispers.

“I’m fine. Don’t fuss over me,” he snaps abruptly.