The Residence Read online

  The only thing she could play was an improvisation. Once begun it came to her easily. More than easily—it was like she wasn’t playing at all. The tune started out buoyantly, like a march. As it went along, it fell apart. The major chords interrupted by minor-key digressions, bass thuds breaking the melody into fragments. To Jane’s ear, it was like the failure of music more than music itself, the revelation that it was only ever hammers striking wires.

  You are the instrument, Jeannie.

  Sir whispered this so close it was as if he was sharing the bench with her. She lurched to the side, but the broken tune continued. Her fingers kept playing even when she tried to pull them away.

  She pushed against the pedal struts with her feet, threw her head back, any part of her that responded to the command to break free. For a moment her arms were stretched so far from the keyboard she felt a pop in her shoulders, first left then right, following by a searing pain in both. If she pushed any harder she could imagine her arms ripping away. But she couldn’t listen anymore. There was madness in the music. That, and terrible pain, a wordless history of it.

  She knew she was free when she opened her eyes and found herself on the floor. The bench tipped onto its side. The piano’s lid shut.

  No one had come to investigate either the music or the sound of her fall. Jane knew that the staff did their best to avoid her. If they attributed the piano playing to her it was probable they would have stayed away no matter what other sounds came out of the room.

  She rose, rubbing her shoulders, and made her way to the hallway without looking back into the parlor. There was a worry that something would be there if she did. The same smudge she sensed in the private dining room, or maybe a different one. A whole number of the dead showing themselves, finding a way to be seen through her.

  She paused in the hallway and thought of returning to her room. But she was no more protected there than anywhere else. And if she went back upstairs now she would be compelled to check on Bennie, something she could avoid so long as she remained shuffling along down here.

  At the Cross Hall’s end the oversize doors to the East Room stood closed. Jane remembered looking inside when she first arrived and being astonished by the size of it. A ballroom that could accommodate hundreds. She wondered, as she pulled one of the double doors open, if they would come spilling out, trampling her in their rush to escape.

  The room was empty except for the woman.

  Standing across the forty feet of floor, wearing a mourning dress, starved and with eyes yellow as custard. Jane waited for the witch to come at her. The woman matched her stillness, studying her, working out where she’d seen her before.

  The otherness.

  Her father’s deathbed phrase came to her, and with it the recognition that the witch was Jane herself. A reflection standing at the threshold in the great gilt-framed mirror on the opposite wall.

  She stepped inside. Her eyes moved to her feet, as if she was crossing a flood-rushed river while balancing atop a fallen tree. The darkness around her widening into pools. Bottomless, but not unpeopled.

  In what she guessed was the middle of the ballroom she stopped. Looked up into the mirror.

  The dead lay around her in piles. Not in neat stacks like firewood, but a chaos of limbs and heads that came up high as her knees. Unlike the smudges she had glimpsed earlier, these were exclusively the casualties of war. Those that had already occurred, as well as those to come.

  The more Jane watched through the mirror, the more she could make out the individual men lying around her. Not all of them were still. Some shuddered, or writhed about, or raised a hand for help—all dead but for these final reflexes.

  There were soldiers of the Revolutionary War wearing red waistcoats over their chests, their white pants soiled by blood or dirt or human filth. There were also bodies dressed as soldiers but wearing colors and garb she’d never seen before. Hats of smaller size, gray and blue, some shaped like boxes on their heads. These men made up the greatest number by far. Jane had the idea that they were those lost in a conflict yet to take place. Their torn bodies entwined with the dead that came decades or centuries before in an indistinguishable mass.

  Some of them had more life left in them than others. Missing arms or legs or blinking through the blood that streamed into their eyes yet still fighting to crawl over the bodies beneath them. Their movements made Jane think of the bugs she’d watched her older sisters burn with a magnifying glass. Not to kill—not right away—but to scorch with disfiguring heat. Ants, wasps, beetles, spiders. They all died differently. That’s what made her sisters laugh. Jane never used the magnifying glass herself. Yet she couldn’t pull herself away from watching each of the insects curl or leap or drag themselves over the ground, a pointless struggle to find a hiding place she saw as akin to her own.

  One of the soldiers found her leg.

  She looked down. Saw nothing there. But in the mirror’s glass he had pulled himself out of the vines of bodies to claw at her. He was one of the ones wearing a uniform she didn’t recognize, a navy sack coat with yellow buttons undone as far as his heart. He was young, pimpled, weasel-snouted—an ugly boy made uglier in his terror. His hands wrapped around her thigh and attempted to pull himself up but the blood was too plentiful to find a dry holding. Each time he would slide down, his cheek resting on the side of her knee. On the third try he went down and stayed there, his eyes fixed on hers.

  Someone was screaming.

  She assumed it was herself. Then she heard it as a man, though none of the ones lying on the floor of the East Room. It was coming from the floor above. The voice familiar but its shrieking distortion new to her ears.

  Her husband.

  There was a pause for the intake of breath, then screaming again. Over and over until his voice broke and Jane was alone once more in the silent tide of the dead.

  23

  Franklin fought to stay awake. He wanted to see what Abby meant in the orangery.

  Perhaps I’ll see you tonight?

  He lay there, waiting, his thoughts alternating between guilt and his rebuttals to it. He’d been abandoned by his wife. He was on the verge of collapse. He had never felt more alone in his life. The most persuasive excuse was the one he least wanted to dwell on: there were no rules in this house. Behind the whitewashed columns there lived a corruption, something secret and alive and ready to compensate his public propriety with private debasements.

  He tried to push back against his shame by remembering Jane. It often helped to go back to the same night in his mind. Dancing together at the barn-smelling church annex in Peterborough. The vivid conjuring of her: the combination of voice and body that charmed him then, but that now offered him the sense of direction he had lost.

  At some point he must have slipped into sleep because when he rose back into consciousness he wasn’t alone in his bed.

  Next to him was a warm body. It slid up against him, the fingers unbuttoning his nightshirt, laying the two halves aside, stroking a hand down from his throat to his stomach.

  “Abigail,” he said, and heard it as unnecessary. It was her. His gratitude and excitement made clear by his body. He resolved not to speak again.

  Twice he attempted to rise up on his elbows to touch her as she was touching him, and twice she pressed him back down. She had intentions for him. It felt—what would the word be?—ungentlemanly to be so passive as this. Yet once her movements revealed a clear plan he was happy to submit to it and let her show him what she wished him to.

  Abby was smaller than he was expecting, smaller even than Jane. And swifter too, her hands and fingers scrambling over him in a way that felt beyond the capacities of one person. He momentarily wondered at the source of her expertise. Did it matter? No. He couldn’t think of a single thing that did.

  He felt a heat between his legs and lay fixed by astonishment. His hardness had been taken in her mouth. It was indescribably lovely. In place of words, it brought a cascade of sensory memorie
s: the mist from a waterfall in the woods behind the Bowdoin campus, a March snow he let fall on his upturned face, the first spoon of soup for supper after missing lunch on a long hike. What was happening had never happened to him before.

  Her mouth held him and stroked him for some time before he noticed the music.

  A jaunty march he didn’t recognize being played on the piano. It sounded like it was coming from a keyboard rolled up to the grass outside his window. He wasn’t really listening. As if to gain his attention, the melody soured, morphing into discordant plinks and chords of distant thunder. It sounded to Franklin like the music of nausea.

  He fought to ignore it. It wasn’t difficult, given the wondrous distraction Abby was providing. Even the fleeting consideration that it was Jane’s playing failed to pull him out of the moment. Soon the music ended entirely—abruptly, with a thud he felt come up through the floorboards—and his mind returned to the sensations of waterfall mist and hunger.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  The knocks at the door lacked the urgency that Webster or a messenger would bring to it if there was an emergency. He lay there hoping he hadn’t heard it at all.

  Tap.

  A delicate knuckle against the wood.

  Abby had retreated under the bedsheet, leaving him slippery and cold. He almost asked her who she thought could be outside, but worried even their whispers would be detectable from the hallway.

  That’s when he calculated the time between the end of the piano playing from downstairs and the knocking. Enough, he thought, for someone to make their way from the Crimson Parlor to his room.

  He swept the covers off and pulled his trousers on. With the blankets piled on one side of the bed he didn’t think it would be immediately obvious that someone lay hidden beneath them. His concern was that Abby wouldn’t be able to breathe under their weight for too long.

  It took him three strides to reach the door. Each step bringing with it a conclusion built upon the one that came before.

  It was Jane.

  She had come to ensure he was alone.

  He couldn’t let her inside.

  At the door he wondered if the thing that had been done to him in his bed could be smelled, or read on his face. Too late either way. Because he was pulling it open and she was there.

  “Forgive me. I know it’s late, but— Franklin? Are you all right?”

  Abigail stood there.

  “I don’t—”

  “I was on my way out when I heard the music,” she said. “It was Jane playing. Did you hear it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I went to see if I could provide her company and saw her go into the East Room. She’s down there alone. I’m worried that—”

  “I will see to it.”

  “It’s just as I said earlier. There’s something—”

  “I will see to it, Abby. Good evening.”

  He closed the door before she had turned away. He pivoted on his heel, looking back across the three-step distance between himself and the bed.

  The blankets shifted. They had been moving as he stood there, and now, with his eyes on the bed, they continued to rise and roll for the length of a hiccup before they went still.

  He took a step. Another, and another. Each unveiling a new horror in his thoughts.

  It is Jane lost to madness.

  It is something dead.

  It is the thing—not alive, but from a place deeper than the grave—they’d felt in the house.

  He was about to leave, to start the long negotiation with his rational mind that he hadn’t seen or felt anything over the past minutes that bad dreaming couldn’t explain, when a spot in the blankets bulged upward.

  His hand grasped the top of it. Threw the covers back over the vacant half of the bed.

  The tin soldier lay on its back. He recognized it as one of Bennie’s. The general. The toy’s medals and uniform and bodily features the same as Franklin recollected. All except for the mouth. Closed in stern determination before, it was now open, the lips reddened as if with fresh paint. Glistening.

  Franklin reached out his hand, expecting to be bitten, or have his fingers slashed by the general’s sword, or have it utter a laugh at the string of spit swinging from his chin that he dared not wipe away for fear of losing his balance and falling forward.

  It didn’t move.

  But when Franklin touched its metal cheek, it was warm as flesh.

  24

  Webster came to Jane’s room in the morning.

  “The president would like a meeting, ma’am,” he said. “Franklin, that is.”

  “A meeting?”

  “In the Blue Room. If you would be so kind.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as you’re able.”

  Webster continued to stand there with brows raised in what may have been an acknowledgment of his errand’s strangeness. After an awkward stretch, Jane realized he was waiting to accompany her downstairs.

  “I’ll need to wash,” she said.

  “He’s made a space in the calendar. This present space.”

  Jane considered making a remark, something to lower those furry brows of his, but saw there was no point. Webster was doing his job. In this building, in the whole of Washington, when someone took precedence over the will of another, it was only someone doing their job. And she was aware of her place in things. The First Lady. The wife.

  Ever since she was a child Jane felt that she alone among the Appleton women saw the full injustice of being born a girl. Her sisters never seemed to notice it, or if they did, they embraced the rules and excelled within them, “getting along” as her sister Mary liked to put it. Her mother did her best to instill her daughters with a sternness that might preserve them. But whether through getting along or a cold heart, Jane didn’t see a way of escaping the constraints of womanhood, at least not in the outside world. So she moved inward. Reading. Music. Daydreaming. She built a wall with a single door around herself.

  This is how, as she grew older, Jane came to see love the same way she’d seen the occult: it was a way through the door. She lived inside her mind so much yet longed for the world, its exchanges and caresses. For a boy, such passing between the mind and the body was not only possible but cultivated. For a girl, it would require sorcery.

  “Very well,” she said now, tying her hair back in a tail and following Webster to the first floor, where he admitted her into the oval sitting room. Once she was inside, Webster shut the door with a firmness she heard as resentment at not being a party to the discussion about to occur.

  A couple of things struck Jane at the same time.

  The first was that Franklin stood opposite the door, as far from her as the dimensions of the chamber allowed, yet even from this distance she saw how bloodless his cheeks were, his hair a greasy nest atop his head.

  The second was that he stood next to a walnut chair in which sat one of Bennie’s toy soldiers. The general.

  She started toward her husband but he raised his hand, as if there was something about himself he wished for her not to observe in any greater detail than she already had.

  “Do you remember this?” he asked, and glanced down at the toy.

  Jane glanced at it too. The crimson-jacketed assembly of hammered steel and bolts, propped up with its legs out straight, sword raised. Had it been in that position when she first entered? It must have only been the clarity brought by the few steps nearer she’d taken. Yet she believed she could see it grinning now. The slightest curls at the edges of its lips that were stern points before.

  “It’s Bennie’s,” she said.

  “This may strike you as an odd thing for me to ask, but did you have a hand in putting it in my room?”

  “Your room?”

  “I found it in my bed. As whoever put it there intended I would.”

  “Your bed?”

  “Stop parroting me and answer.”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “Do you know who it was?�
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  Yes, she wished to say, practicing it in her mind. It was a spirit I’ve called Sir, and whom others have called Splitfoot, others still something else, though it has no true name. It brought Bennie back. It showed me dead soldiers in the East Room mirror, but what it really wanted was to show me the dead to come. It cannot enact change on its own, but it can change people if they let it. As it’s changed me. Changing you now too.

  “No,” she said.

  He cast his eyes over the ceiling, raised his foot as if to advance, then brought both eyes and foot back to where they had been.

  “I’m having the most miserable dreams,” he said.

  “Funny you say so.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not dreaming at all.”

  “None that you can recollect in the morning.”

  “There is nothing to recollect. My worst dreams are real here.”

  It came out sounding like wifely misgiving and Jane moved closer to him, not stopping this time when he brought up both his hands to hold her back. As she approached she shifted her gaze between her husband and the general, the former losing color with each footfall as the latter grew in vividness, the little face obscenely rouged and eyelashed as one of the whores of unguessable age that Jane had to walk past outside the theater at the end of a play.

  “Oh, Jeannie,” he said when she was close enough to be held, though he made no move to do so.

  “You’re spent.”

  “Do I look so poorly? It’s true that the mirror is not my ally.”

  “And after a lifetime of such favorable judgment.”

  Once more her comment came out in a tone she hadn’t intended, but Franklin let it go with something akin to a low chortle.

  He shuffled backward to take one end of a settee that Walter, the designer, had reupholstered in blue velvet. Franklin’s body sank into the cushions as if they were stuffed with water.

  “Come,” he said.

  She sat next to him. As it appeared he was unwilling to reach out to her, she thought of putting her hands aside his face to show that she wanted to connect with him, not repeat their old quarrels. But at her approach he involuntarily leaned away and she saw how shaken he was. How he felt unsafe at the idea of her touching him.