***
I fell fast and landed like a stone.
The heavy thump of my limp body landing echoed hollowly off the walls of the empty barn.
The first breath into my screaming lungs was heaven. Then came the pain. All over at first. Eventually it focused into a sharp, vicious ache in one leg, all the way from ankle to waist. I knew then how I’d landed, and what I’d broken.
I bit the inside of my mouth so I wouldn’t scream. Not that I thought silence would save me, but it felt important. I needed to control something. I couldn’t control how far I had just fallen. Not just fallen, but been thrown. And the person who had thrown me was still above me, still here, and we were as alone as we could be.
I could hear him coming down the ladder.
He walked across the bare wood floor toward me. I tuned him out. I focused on the pain instead and felt the worst of it radiating from the ankle, howling.
Past the pain, I could hear his footsteps until they slowed and stopped right next to me.
I forced my eyes open and looked up. His eyes met mine.
“If you tell them, I’ll kill you,” he said and stepped over me on his way to the door.
I lay on my back on the bare wood and thanked God for my life, even through the pain. Because it would only hurt for now. Because he could have done more, and I stopped him. Because a bone is just a bone, even broken.
***
I lay there on my back a long time. It felt like hours, though it couldn’t have been. I got up when I realized my options: I could lie down in pain with a broken leg or I could stand up in pain with a broken leg. So I stood. The pain washed over me again, draining my will, and I made fists of my hands and forced myself to remain upright. Under my breath, I chanted to myself, I will heal, I will heal, I will heal. I wished it to be true. I needed it to be true.
Slowly, I began to work my way back toward the house. What had been a few minutes’ dash before was now a torturous, slow progress. The pain still roared at me, not allowing me to forget it for even a moment. I was taking a small joy in having made it so far across the green lawn when I looked up, and what I saw brought me to a complete halt. Off in the distance, a handful of figures reclined in chairs under a broad white tent. I wanted to collapse into the earth and disappear.
I saw myself with their eyes. Had everything gone as planned, I would have strode across the lawn toward them in a spotless shirtwaist, my arms and legs elegant, the picture of confidence and grace. Instead I was limping, half hopping, doing my best to keep the weight of my body from resting on the injured side at all. My pale satin shoes were smeared with green streaks. I was soiled and poor and deeply flawed. Had I been able to run away, I would have. Instead I continued, doomed, until I was close enough to see their faces and for them to see mine.
A man’s figure detached itself from the group and hurtled toward me, and my heart seized up until I realized it wasn’t Ray. The man picked me up and carried me back to the group without a word. Whoever he was, I was grateful to him.
Then I saw Mother, looking horrified, and Ray, who had no doubt found a way to insinuate himself in the group and make it seem like he’d been there the whole time. But my eyes locked on a hook-nosed woman with a gold-tipped cane. Her black hair was shot through with steel gray. She could be no one but Madama Bonfanti. Her dress was high-necked and dark, and she looked as solid and graceful as a grand piano.
There was one awful moment of silence while they took me in, looking, seeing, despairing. Unbelievingly they stared, and there was nothing to say, until there was.
“No!” Madama Bonfanti cried. “What is this? You have brought me a broken girl!”
“The pain is less already,” I said, but no one was listening to me. I was an object to be handled, not heeded. The man lowered me into a chair. Another voice explained that there was no doctor on the estate, and the village physician was of little use, but the cook would bring laudanum, which would take some of the pain away. Another chair was settled next to mine, and Mother sat down in it. She exclaimed over me, her voice pinched and shrill.
“Dear God in heaven! What happened?”
“I fell.”
“From where? What did you do?”
I planned to answer her, but then the hands exploring my ankle twisted it to the side, and I yelped in pain, trying to pull it away.
Under her breath, Mother hissed, “Stay still, you little fool.”
I was stunned dumb by her anger, which had never before been directed at me. I wanted to look at her face, but I was afraid. I despaired that I’d failed her so completely.
“I can’t—this—this is awful,” she said. “Where’s Ray? Ray, come here!”
“What?”
He appeared. I couldn’t shrink any smaller than I already had, but I looked away from him. It was all I could do.
I was invisible to my mother anyway, who was peppering Ray with questions. “Didn’t you set that horse’s broken leg last month? Don’t you know about these things?”
“I am not a horse, Mother,” I whispered, and my heart was hammering again. Because Victor had noted how good Ray was at identifying which horses were healthy and which were prone to accidents, and I had never thought much about it before, but maybe he was doing more than observing. If this boy could intentionally injure a person—a girl—he was certainly capable of doing the same to a horse. Not to mention the damage he’d done himself. Suddenly I couldn’t get the image of his scars out of my head. That ghostly rib cage hovering over the real one, present with him everywhere.
Lost in my private hell, I paid no attention while he barked instructions to the servants and bound my leg up in a makeshift splint. If I thought about what was happening, I might shatter like a china cup flung against stone. Instead I retreated into my mind, leaving the broken body for others to deal with in my absence.
The promised laudanum arrived, mixed into a cup of sweetened milk, and I was pressed to drink the whole thing. It helped me retreat even further into myself, wrapping me in a soft cushion of a haze.
When I looked up, Madama and the others were gone. The visit was over even though we were still here. After that, the estate’s hospitality was generous but curt. No one can provide bounty while withholding approval in the same way as the rich. I had forgotten it from my childhood, but I never would again.
After some time—the hours became liquid, flowing, impossible to grasp—we were informed that it was unsafe to go on the roads in the dark, and we would be staying overnight. We were led by silent servants down long, silent hallways to our rooms. There was a pale, beribboned nightdress laid out on my enormous bed. The freckled face of my servant guide reminded me of my old nursemaid Colleen, but I couldn’t muster a thing to say to her, and she remained stern. She spoke one sentence, to ask if I’d like assistance undressing. I could only shake my head from side to side. She backed through the door and pulled it shut.
As soon as she was gone, I exploded in inappropriate laughter. I was light-headed from the pain and its remedy, nearly out of my mind at the absurdity of the entire situation. A room this sumptuous, a bed so large laid with such rich linens, a wardrobe larger than the pie safe at home, and all just for me. And I didn’t deserve any of it. My laughter became hysterical. I plastered both hands over my mouth to try to contain it, frightened of being heard and labeled ungrateful, and finally knelt on the floor next to the bed to smother my laughter in the thick cotton coverlet. I kept my face down until the hysteria subsided. When I had mastered myself again, I left my own dress laid out on the floor in the shape of my body, pulled the soft nightdress over my head, and climbed up into the bed like a mountaineer making the summit.
My head heavy with shame and my leg aching in its brace, I wouldn’t have slept a wink, except that the feather bed was more comfortable than I would have ever thought possible. Even as my head hit the pillow and I was cursing myself out for a foolish girl, listing off ways I could have avoided letting matters come to this, my thoughts were cut short by a deep blessed unconsciousness as dark and soft as a panther’s fur.
In the morning, Madama Bonfanti was not there to bid us farewell. White-aproned women brought us our breakfast, thick slices of warmed ham on featherlight biscuits so delicious I struggled not to wolf them down like a savage. Black-coated men hefted our bags and showed us out. Ray climbed up into the driver’s seat of the borrowed coach. Because of my leg, Mother put me across the long seat in the back, so I didn’t even have to look at him. It was a small mercy, considering.
The road was long and rough, and every bump on it shot through my leg like fire. I’d asked for another dose of laudanum but was given barely a drop, with the lecture that sometimes people who took too much of it simply stopped breathing, not that I had any way of knowing such a thing. Despite the burning pain, I kept my mouth firmly shut the whole ride home. I wouldn’t scare Mother by moaning, and I wouldn’t give Ray the satisfaction of knowing how badly I was hurt. If not for him, I would have danced. If not for him, I might have found a way out, been taken to the school in New York, had a new life to live. I couldn’t let the fury take me over, so I couldn’t open the door to it, not even an inch. I only let my mind go blank, for myself. That was all I wanted. To forget.
***
After the first night’s dinner back at home, eaten in near silence, Mother suggested Ray inspect my leg to see how it was healing. I didn’t dare speak against her, knowing how angry she must be with me for my failure. So I sat in our best chair and endured the humiliation of Ray’s wordless inspection, his hands roaming over me with full license while my parents looked on. Ray’s obvious joy was more painful to me than the injury itself. I knew he was indulging his secret fantasy of being a healer, imagining somehow that he was knitting my bones back together with the power of his mind. When he suggested it again the next evening, I said, “No, thank you, I feel entirely healed.” That night, it was a lie, but it was the truth soon enough. After only a few weeks, I’d regained the use of my leg. Mother exclaimed over how quickly it had healed and credited Cecchetti with keeping me in such good health.
My body made a complete recovery, but there was a permanent change to my mind. There were so many what-ifs. If my mother hadn’t fallen in love with Victor. If we hadn’t come to Jeansville. If I hadn’t started dancing in the evenings. If we’d never been invited to Biltmore. Without all these, I never would have practiced my balance on the beam, and I never would have let myself be broken in pieces. Things would be so different. There were so many other lives I wasn’t leading, all because of a handful of choices, mostly made by others. I swore to myself that in the future, I’d make my own choices, right or wrong. Then at least when things went haywire, I’d know exactly who was to blame.