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"Miss Lindsay," she whispered, following her intuition. "Ma'am."
The woman tilted her head. "I don't know you."
"My father heard you were looking for a girl," she replied hoarsely.
Henry swayed. Lucy forced herself to stay strong, to look him in the eye as her father had always said to do, that eyes were important when dealing with strangers, especially men.
He said, "She spoke to Mary. She spoke to Mary in the woods."
"Did she now?" said Miss Lindsay slowly, her gaze sharpening. She moved close, hips swaying gracefully. "Did you speak to someone in the woods, child?"
"No," Lucy said softly. "But the woman… the woman in the trees spoke to me. And I heard…"
She stopped. Miss Lindsay stood near, her golden gaze like fire: hot, burning. She reached out and touched Lucy's forehead with one finger, just between the eyes, and whispered, "What did you hear?"
"Voices," Lucy replied, compelled by those eyes, that searing touch. "Many voices."
"Mary," said Henry, in a broken voice. "Tell me what she said."
Lucy looked at him, and finally could see again the man from the road, lost and dull. She was sorry about that, and said, gently, "The woman asked me to help her. And then… then she said… someone was coming."
She's coming, echoed that urgent voice, inside her head. Lucy felt a chill race through her body. Miss Lindsay flinched, and moved away. She turned her head, until her hair shifted and Lucy could not see her eyes.
"You'll do," said the woman softly. "Yes, if you like, I'll hire you."
"If she wants to stay," said Henry, also turning away, his voice rough, his shoulders bowed. His hand was in his coat pocket, clutching the mirror. A wedding ring glinted on his finger.
Lucy stared at them all, helpless, unsure what to do. Her gaze finally fell on the one person who had said nothing at all—the young man, who was calm and steady, and who watched her with that same straightforward regard. Lucy imagined a clear pure tone when she looked at him, and it was an unexpected comfort.
"I'll stay," she found herself saying—two words that could have been a leap off a cliff for the falling sensation she felt on uttering them. It was dangerous, something was not right; there were ghosts in the woods and spirits unseen, and here, here, these people knew of such things. And she was joining them, would cook and clean for them.
But it was better than going home.
Lucy imagined a whisper on the wind. Miss Lindsay briefly closed her eyes, then held out her hand and gave the girl a long piercing look.
"Come," she said, in a voice gentler than her eyes. "I'll show you the house."
And that was that.
NOTHING HAPPENED THAT FIRST WEEK, EXCEPT FOR THE fact that afterward, Lucy's life felt irrevocably changed. The sensation crept on her slowly, nudged along by little things that she had never had a chance to experience: reading as a leisure activity, for starters (Miss Lindsay insisted on it, in the evenings); or being treated as a thinking person, something more than a girl or daughter or sister or future wife. Something beyond drudge. An equal, perhaps.
It was a fine house, much larger than anything Lucy was accustomed to, with a second floor and an actual parlor and fireplace just for sitting and warming the feet. There were books shelved against the walls, more than she had ever seen—a library of them, all around—as well as journals and odd paintings, and stacks of newspapers bound with string. Most of those were crumbling and yellow; Lucy was careful as she cleaned around them, gazing as she did upon faded images of President Lincoln, as well as cramped headlines about the War, some fifty years past.
Lucy had her own room with a lock on the door, just off the kitchen. Miss Lindsay slept upstairs, as did her brother, Henry. The young man, Barnabus, kept his bed and belongings in the work shed off the garden. He was like her—there for odd jobs—although unlike her, he was treated more like family, though Miss Lindsay explained that he was not. Or rather, not by blood.
"A child of the forest," the woman called him, that first night. "Found in the woods as a boy, living wild as the coyotes and foxes. Folks brought him here. It was that or the circus, with those men. So I raised him. Taught him. Oh, he's a good one, that Barnabus. Talk to him as you like—he's as smart as you and I—but don't expect a word from his mouth. He can't speak. Not like us. The forest stole his voice."
Given what Lucy had experienced, she thought that might be the literal—if not fantastical—truth. And it disturbed her greatly. She did not know what to make of it. The forest was dangerous—she knew that in her heart—and while it went unspoken that she should not walk near the tree line, ever, the others did so all the time.
No one ever explained the threat that she felt so keenly. She tried asking, but Miss Lindsay always managed to change the subject—so smoothly, Lucy hardly realized what she was doing until it was too late and she was off scrubbing a floor or cooking or weeding, and thinking hard about why she was here, and how Miss Lindsay had managed, yet again, to deflect a question about a situation that Lucy found dangerous and frightening and undeniably odd.
She dreamed of the woman at night, the woman in the wood, and listened to her pleas for help beneath a wail of wind and whispers, endless and cold and pained. Sometimes she sensed another voice beneath the other—Mary, Mary, she would hear Henry cry—and something else, bells and the pound of hooves, and music playing high and wild like a storm of thunder and fiddle strikes.
And sometimes in her dream she would open her eyes and Miss Lindsay would be sitting by her bed, with that cool hand pressed against her forehead and her golden eyes shining with unearthly light. And in those moments of fantasy Lucy would think of her mother, and stop feeling afraid, and slip into softer, gentler, dreams: buttercups and horses, and afternoons by the river with her feet in the sun-riddled water. Sometimes Barnabus was there, holding her hand. She liked that, though it scared her too. In a different way.
There were several surprises that first week, the biggest one being that Miss Lindsay had a cemetery on her land, only a short walk away along a narrow wagon track. Her family was buried there, but mostly other folk—from town, the surrounding areas—anyone who did not have the money to be planted in one of the church plots near the bigger towns. Miss Lindsay called it a service to the public, and several times Lucy saw strangers exit the trail through the forest bearing gifts of cloth and food. Payment served.
Folks never lingered, though. They visited the graveyard, then left quick, hardly looking around, as though afraid of what they would see. Lucy wondered how they managed to make it through the forest unmolested, and said as much to Henry, whom she found one afternoon in a rare moment of responsiveness—sitting in the sun, reading a book by someone with a long, rather familiar, name. Shakes Spear, or something of the kind. She settled down beside him with a pile of mending in her lap. Barnabus was nearby, chopping wood. His shirt was off, draped over a low tree branch.
"The forest has a mind of its own," Henry replied, after some deep thought. He gazed at the tree line, and his eyes began to glaze over, lost. Lucy pricked him—accidentally, of course—with her needle. He flinched, frowning, but his expression cleared.
"You were saying?" Lucy prodded.
"A mind, a spirit. This the forest primeval," murmured Henry, "darkened by shadows of earth." He looked at her. "Longfellow. Do you know him?"
"We never met," she said, and then blushed when she realized that was not at all what he meant. Henry smiled kindly, though, idly tapping the book in his hands. Lucy, in part to hide her embarrassment—but mostly because she was suddenly quite motivated to educate herself—pointed and said, "What are you reading?"