She’d known about the girl in Lubbock. It would have been fine if Ethan had chosen to keep her and be discreet. But she was in the family way, and Ethan had suddenly developed romantic notions of chivalry. He meant to leave Mary for the girl. Mary would be scandalized. No more could she sit in the lordly tier at the opera house, peering down at all the little people looking back up at her, envying her life. They’d regard her with pity. Pity, Mary White could not abide. She’d fought with Ethan, pleaded with him even—Mary never pleaded, and even now, in her bed wet with the morphine sweats, she tightened her lips against the distasteful memory—but he was resolute. He would go to the lawyers first thing and draw up the papers. She would be well cared for as long as she kept her mouth shut and didn’t make a fuss.
Mary had no intention of becoming the object of gossip.
Ethan always took a glass of sherry in the evening to calm his nerves. Mary had the maid bring the sherry, as always. To this, Mary added the arsenic they kept on hand for the field mice who tried to make a home in the root cellar. In the dark of the bedroom, she’d sat in her rocking chair with a volume of John Donne’s poetry while her husband writhed and shook on the bed, one clawed hand reaching toward her as she calmly flipped the pages. At twenty-four, Mary White became a very wealthy widow. She packed her mourning veil along with everything of value and moved to the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.
A creaking sound roused Mary from her memories and she lay listening, alert, until she was satisfied that it was only the wind and rain lashing the bungalow.
It was on a stormy night that she’d first met Johnny. It was six months after she’d gone to hear the great Theosophist Madame Blavatsky speak at Cooper Union. Mary was captivated by the Russian lady, with her ideas of ever-evolving mankind, of union with the divine and the spirit realm. She met privately with the great woman, offering funding in exchange for esoteric knowledge. “You will meet a man who will offer you a door into another world,” Madame Blavatsky told her, and the very next day, during a downpour in which she was without a hansom, an imposing man with mesmerizing blue eyes offered her a ride. His name was John Hobbes, and he shared her fascination with the mystical. He was descendant, he confessed, of a holy tribe called the Brethren, favored by God, and had been chosen among them to fulfill their sacred mission on earth. He showed her wonders she could not explain and shared knowledge she never dreamed possible. He converted her to his faith and promised her a shining path, for she would be his Lady Sun.
It was this sense of destiny, of self-importance, that joined Mary and John. They were above all rules. They existed on a higher plane and for a higher purpose. Before her adventures in the spirit world, Mary had been haunted by occasional doubts about what she’d done to Ethan. But with John’s help she saw that it had the sense of rightness about it, a plan preordained: Had she not punished Ethan’s wickedness and inherited his money, she would not have been able to help John in his mission. Therefore, it was good and right and meant to be that she’d killed her husband that night in his bed.
A floorboard creaked in the house, but Mary was only vaguely aware of it; she was lost to her reverie. She thought back on John showing her the old book with its eleven offerings, explaining what he meant to do—what he had been chosen to do. At first, she’d admit, she’d had reservations. Fear, even. But he’d kissed her sweetly, then fiercely, overpowering her in the way she liked, the way she craved, and she was utterly his. He was a golden god. And she, Mary White, was his sacred consort. The Beast would rise. The world would burn. A new society would evolve from the ashes. They would rule it as king and queen. She, little Mary White, who came from nothing. And when John saw that he would be taken, a sacrifice like a lesser one two thousand years before, she’d followed his instructions, paying off the guards and a driver, secreting his body through New York’s cobblestone streets in the night. She’d had him buried up in the hills behind the ruins of the old village, and, as promised, she’d kept Knowles’ End from the wrecking ball or new owners, paying the taxes every month even though she’d had to spend down her fortune and live in a shack to do it. He’d been very specific about that, and when she’d asked why, he’d never answered. It was the one mystery he would not share with her.
The floorboards groaned loudly.
“Who is it? Who’s there?” She drew the bedsheets up to her neck. “I’m an old woman! What do you want?”
The creaking came again. It was not the wind playing havoc with a shutter. It was definitely inside, definitely a floorboard. Oh, why had she told Eleanor she could go out tonight?