Blademage beastmaster a.., p.22
The Novice of Holloway Hall, page 22
He nodded his head. “In lots of them,” he said. “I couldn’t open some bottles, the new-looking ones. But I heard the pills when I shook them. That was before you came here. I put them in my schoolbag yesterday. To show you.”
“Did you tell Smack about them?”
“No. I knew it was Freda’s secret. Her hiding place. She must be sick. But they’re empty, so she might not be sick anymore.”
“O.K. When Freda gets here, don’t say anything about the bottles. That’s very important. You have to cross your heart and promise. Cross your heart.”
He did.
“We have to hurry, Ivan,” I said, taking his schoolbag from him and sweeping the pill bottles back into it.
I heard footsteps from upstairs and voices raised in argument. Freda and Byron. It must have been Byron who removed the pills. Removed them but left the bottles? What else could he have done with them, having spent the night in the house? He had no reason to believe that anyone but Freda knew they were there.
“Yesterday,” I said, “you told me you heard Freda and Byron arguing. Do you remember now what they said?”
“Uncle Byron said ‘tea with milk and sugar in it.’ He said it about ten times. About how it doesn’t send most people to the hospital.” The hospital. The Synodians must have wound up there and, perhaps, undergone tests. I’d heard of all the drugs whose names were on those labels, for my doctors, at one time or another, had, at Herself’s urging, either prescribed them or considered prescribing them for me.
I thought of Ivan’s sudden mood swings, his frequent drowsiness, and of Freda’s. I felt certain that she had been medicating herself and Ivan for years. The downers, sedatives, tranquilizers such as barbiturates, the uppers, the amphetamines, Benzedrine. The uppers would have allowed her to maintain the pace that she’d maintained for years. The sedatives would have put Ivan to sleep so that he didn’t bother her at night when she was working, and the amphetamines counteracted the sedatives so that he didn’t lie about the house all day in the midst of his uncomplaining minders. Then it occurred to me that she might even have—no, that she had—in the past four days, been drugging me to lessen the time-draining nuisance of having me in the house.
The bolt on the outer door slid open with a thud. “Not a word,” I whispered. I helped Ivan on with his schoolbag. He preceded me to the hallway, the straps of the bags absurdly criss-crossed on his chest. We stood, waiting, me behind him, for her to hurry away, but the doors began to open outward. I nudged Ivan forward.
“And so they emerge on this auspicious day from the Sequestration Room,” Freda said as if she was narrating a newsreel.
“You sound funny,” Ivan said. “How come you didn’t go upstairs before we came out, like always?”
A break in tradition because of Byron being here? She didn’t answer him.
Though she was not going to work, she was wearing her doctor’s coat. She hooked her hands in the pockets, appraising me as if she was at last confronting a friend who had long ago betrayed her.
“I’ve been required to take a leave of absence,” she said. “Diagnosed by Carter as suffering from exhaustion. A few weeks. By sheer chance, Uncle Byron started his winter holidays yesterday. He started them early because he’s a bit tired. He always spends part of his winter holidays with us, remember, Ivan? He lives all alone down there in Prominence House, and there’s not much to do when you’re all alone.”
Then Freda gave me a look as obviously meaningful as any I’d ever been given. It said, “I know you know about the pills. You know that Byron has been sent here by Carter to keep an eye on me. You’ve figured out that Ivan isn’t sick and what the drugs are really for. I don’t care that you know. You knowing anything about me is irrelevant because no one would believe a word you say.”
Hoping that my very posture did not betray the pounding of my heart, thankful, for once, that my face was hidden from the world, I gave the faintest nod—I understood and would play along.
“After you,” Freda said, waving both of us ahead of her with her hand, the mannerism as odd as her tone of voice. The awkwardness would not have been more excruciating if I had replied with a curtsy. She followed us through the Portrait Gallery and up the stairs to the kitchen, the three of us walking in what might have been a companionable silence, as if all was entirely normal, as if all was always entirely normal in this house of weird letters, Sequestration Rooms, secret drug addiction and the accidental poisoning of priests.
“Byron is in his room,” Freda said, meaning, I assumed, that Ivan and I should head upstairs and put the bottles back where he found them. I took him by the hand and led him across the Great Room. We climbed to the catwalk and I hurried him to the checkups room that, as far as I knew, was used as nothing else but a hiding place for Freda’s pills. Leaving the door open lest Byron hear me close it, I removed Ivan’s schoolbag and, as quietly as I could, took the pill bottles from it and, standing on a chair, put them as far back on the shelf in the closet as I could.
“Let’s go back downstairs,” I whispered as he helped me down from the chair.
As we crept along the catwalk, the door of one of the rooms that lay between us and the top of the stairs opened slowly, and Byron backed out and, ever so gently, drew the door shut behind him.
I cleared my throat and Byron, his hand still on the doorknob, froze. He let go of the knob and turned to face us. He wore a sullen, pouty expression as if he had read in mine an unflattering opinion of his appearance, especially his glittering round spectacles that, though he knew they didn’t suit him, he was stuck with. He’d always had about him a gloomy sense of grievance, as if he believed himself to be predestined to mockery by things he couldn’t help having, being, doing or saying.
“Vivian,” he said, acknowledging Ivan with nothing but a momentary glance.
“Freda says you’re going to be spending your very early winter holidays with us,” I said. “A nice change from drafty old Prominence House.”
“Yes,” Byron mumbled. I could tell he knew that Annette and Freda had told me the day before what he had done to me.
“That will be nice, won’t it, Ivan?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Ivan said, examining the balustrade with seeming fascination.
Once a Jesuit, Byron had been a missionary in the Congo for a time, then left the priesthood shortly after his return. He was fifteen years older than me, still in his early forties, but, except for his face, looked more like sixty. He walked with a stoop, was bald but for some seemingly never-combed grey hair at the sides, and was forever adjusting the thread-thin wire rims of his spectacles. He was pale and sweating. I wondered if he was still feeling the effects of whatever he’d ingested at the Synod.
“Was that your room when you were growing up?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said as if I had accused him of breaking into it.
I felt like telling him that, if he had brought his white coat with him from Prominence House, he should wear it at all times, because Freda was in the habit of forever asserting her authority by wearing hers and, over the next three weeks, he would need to assert his as he never had before or else be steamrolled by her and be put in the position of having to explain to Carter why nothing at Holloway Hall had changed.
I assumed he was in possession of the pills. Medically speaking, how and when did he plan to proceed to keep an eye on Freda?
“Ivan,” I said, “I’d like to speak with Uncle Byron for a while. When we’re through, you and I can go out and see what the storm did, alright? We’re going to talk about grownup things—”
“You’re going to talk about me,” Ivan said. “I’m not a grownup thing. I’m a sitting duck. A special member of the family. Smack can’t believe I fell for that one. The oldest trick in the book. Some special. I’m just run of the mill. A leftover on the plate of life. I was gone off when Freda found me. Rotten. You can be a high and mighty Holloway and still make mistakes. She made one when she took me home. It took her five years to admit it. It’s off to Mount Cashel for me. Maybe they can set me straight.”
He began to cry, hiccupping as tears ran down his cheeks.
“You just wait for me in your room and we’ll find your snowsuit after I talk to Uncle Byron, O.K.?”
“What will you wear? I bet you still haven’t got a coat. You lived indoors for eight years like a potted plant.”
“Just go to your room and I’ll come get you soon, O.K.?”
“O.K.” He ran along the catwalk to his room, went inside and slammed the door.
“Can we talk in your room?” I said to Byron, glancing down the catwalk at the closed door of Freda’s office. “She won’t hear us from in there.”
“Out here is fine,” Byron said, looking as if he thought I meant to have it out with him. “I gave Freda something. She’s asleep.”
“So, what’s the plan, Byron?”
“She doesn’t like me checking up on her, so I’ll be laying very low.”
I was mystified. “Byron, what are you, what is someone, going to do about all those pills she’s taking?”
“I’m here in case she needs me,” he said, barely audibly. “That’s all. What did you think I was here for?”
“To help her quit, or make sure she quits, or at least cuts back. I don’t know.”
“Most of the time, she keeps her dosages the same. She’s a doctor. But, sometimes, when she’s especially stressed, such as she is now, she takes a little extra.”
He motioned as if to adjust his spectacles but didn’t touch them.
“My good Lord ex-Father Doctor George Gordon Byron Norby Little Fauntleroy, your sister isn’t taking a little extra. She is completely—”
“I’ve seen her far worse.”
“And have done nothing about it.”
“Carter warned me you’d try to start something.”
“Freda gives drugs to Ivan to put him to sleep when it suits her, to energize him when it suits her—”
“You can’t prove that. He doesn’t show any signs of having been on drugs for a long period of time.”
“What would those signs be?”
“You’re not a doctor. It would be hard to explain. I’ll keep an eye on him while I’m here. I can’t do more than that.”
“Where are all those pills that were in those bottles? Do you have them?”
“No. I’m not here to interfere but merely to observe her and pitch in if she needs medical help, although she never has.”
“All those pills in some new hiding place,” I said, “in half a dozen places, maybe, that she’ll go to long after you’re asleep, long after we all are. She should be in a hospital.”
“If she were,” he said, “where do you think you and the boy would be?”
It must have been going on for years, this propping up of Freda with whatever drugs Byron and who knew how many other doctors could get their hands on, Byron sent here time after time, not to help Freda kick her habit but to make sure she did not become so burnt-out as to require conspicuous hospitalization.
“What are you going to do, wait until she tells you that you can stop hiding in that room and go home? You’re here in case of an emergency that might otherwise cause a scandal, aren’t you? ”
“Everyone thinks that, between them, Maynard, Carter and Freda run the whole show.”
“They do run the whole show,” I said. “God knows I have nothing to do with it. The rest of you are just bit players. Backstage hands. Expendable crew members.”
“We’ll see—”
“SHUT UP YOU BLOODY FOOL.”
Freda was already striding toward us, the trademark forefinger of one hand pointed at Byron. He managed to maintain a look of defiance until her face was inches from his.
“The Brothers might have made a man of you if Mother had sent you to Mount Cashel for three years instead of three months,” Freda said. “Boys with problems come back from there shipshape. Some of them, anyway.”
I tried to imagine in what state Ivan would come back.
“Too bad there wasn’t an equivalent for girls,” Freda said, turning to me.
“It might have made a man of me,” I said. “I wonder if I could succeed with Byron where Mount Cashel failed. Perhaps I should lead him around the house in a headlock while he observes you with a physician’s detachment and Ivan smacks his backside with a Ping-Pong paddle. This is a fun-filled house, Byron. I like to wheelbarrow Freda around the Great Room. I hold her feet and she walks on her hands. It’s a game I learned in the convent. It’s what the nuns do to limber up in the morning.”
“Stop it,” Freda said. “This is what you do, reduce everything to the nonsense that that damaged head of yours is filled with. I fend for myself and tend to myself. I know when to take a drug and how much of it to take. My dosages are not only meticulously titrated but carefully noted in the records in my office.”
“You have been daily manipulating Ivan’s personality and his very consciousness these past five years, running the risk of overdosing him, putting him to sleep and waking him, all in the name of maximizing your ability to do your best work for as long as possible.”
She tilted her head and smiled. “You know no more about this family now than you did when you rode all alone in that back seat as one of the priests drove you to school when you were five. How happy and excited and eager to make your auspicious debut in the world you must have been as you were driven to your doom in your new uniform, the certain-to-be-last-born of the Holloways, the second girl, your hair even more beribboned than mine had been on my first day, your new leather schoolbag on your back, inside it the school supplies I bet you loved the smell of just as much as you did the smell of that new leather, the newly sharpened pencils, the never-used rubber erasers, the notebooks with their unmarked perfect pages. How could you have known that time would soon stand still? Someone knew, but how could you have known? A long-dreamed-of revenge was about to be exacted, a debt long overdue about to be made good on. Riddles, you’re thinking. All anyone ever does is speak in riddles of the past. But, to those of us who know the past, as Byron and I do, there are no riddles in this house. The answers are everywhere. The truth is everywhere. But you were erased from the House, and the House, its past, present and future, were erased from you.”
I touched my veil. “You are telling me that this could have been prevented?”
“It’s just the drugs talking, Vivian,” Byron said.
“It seems it always is,” I said.
Byron stood beside me and faced Freda.
“Word is spreading fast, Freda,” I said. “Freda Holloway’s motto is the same as her mother’s and father’s: Spare the cod and boil the child. If you knew what a doctor does after work, you’d never go to see one. The Holloways. The Divine Ryans. Eric’s Clerics. Where do they go when they’re sick? The best place money can buy, and that will never be in Newfoundland. You can’t blame them, really. You wouldn’t die just to impress a socialist, would you? Dr. Holloway will get away with it. Her family built the hospital. Her money keeps it going. The busboys can’t fire the chef, no matter what the food tastes like. She’ll ride this out, you mark my words…”
“To. Your. ROOM!”
“Nothing you say or do can hurt me anymore.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised.”
“Try me. What did you mean by revenge and the repaying of a debt? Who, by the age of five—” I paused to point at my veil. “—owes this much to anyone?”
“You may think you see where this is going, but you don’t. I’ve never known anyone whose pennies take so long to drop. I’ll make it short. Have you never wondered—”
“FREDA,” Byron protested.
“Have you never wondered how what happened to you affected Mother?” Freda asked me.
“Jeromeo told me—”
“He doesn’t know the half of it. It almost killed her. She moved heaven and earth to try to help you. You were too badly hurt to travel to the States, so she brought the States to you. She had your file sent to many American hospitals, your X-rays and photographs, the prognoses of your local doctors. She paid for the very best doctors to come here, to live here for months because she was told that, with the most advanced corrective and plastic surgery, you could be, well, corrected. Almost entirely so. Doctors from Harvard, Johns Hopkins. She didn’t care that the cost would be, as one specialist put it, prohibitive. Prohibitive. At first, everyone in the family agreed when she said that no amount of money was too much to spend on her little girl, our little sister. But she would have liquidated Holloway Incorporated if, at the urging of Father and your older brothers, she hadn’t finally sent those American doctors back home for good. Afterward, she often said that the money she was talked out of spending on the hopeless dream of fixing you caused good things to happen that, otherwise, would not have happened. In balance, the world was better, she said, because of what she finally wised up to doing. Would you have made a full, or better, recovery if she had stood her ground? I guess we’ll never know.”
“That’s not true,” I managed to say. “It isn’t, is it, Byron?”
He stared at the floor.
“Why am I asking you? How could the brother who came by to read to me when I was as good as blind be the same one who—”
“As Freda said, there’s no way of knowing what might have happened,” Byron told me. “The only certain thing is that, medically speaking, it’s far too late to—start again.”
I felt as dizzy as I had on the night of the Synod.
I covered my ears with my hands and took a step toward Freda. “Let me explain something to you,” I said. “You are one person. I am one person. Byron is one person. Ivan is one person. Everyone you’ve ever met or heard of is one person. Like you, each of them has feelings, preferences, hopes, dreams, ambitions. I have them. If you tie my tubes, am I not violated? If I am told such things as you just told me—”
