Page 58 of An Unwilling Earl
“I was told to forget it ever happened. My aunt even offered to buy me a new doll, but I didn’t want a doll that she had bought me. I wanted my mother’s doll.”
How odd that this miserly, stingy woman would offer to purchase Charlotte a new doll. Jacob highly doubted the woman felt badly for what her son had done. Or, had she thought it a bribe to keep Charlotte quiet?
“And so you went about your daily life even though Edmund had decapitated and stabbed your doll?”Just like those five women were decapitated and stabbed.
“Yes and no. Things returned to their type of normal. But the doll was only the first incident.”
She’d moved from the flowers to the window where she touched the curtain that was closed against the chilly, rainy night and let her fingers drift through the tassel on the tieback.
“It wasn’t until a few years later that I realized he’d moved on from inanimate objects.”
The brandy he had drunk boiled and roiled in his stomach, and he had to swallow a few times to keep it down. Hereallydidn’t want to hear more, but he wanted to help Charlotte, and the only way to do that was to listen to her story and help her decide what they should do.
“You mean he moved on to animate objects? Living objects?”
Chapter Seventeen
“Cats,” Charlotte said.
“Charlotte…” He reached for her, but she shied away.
“I stumbled upon it by accident. I went to the cellar on an errand for the cook. She liked me. I think she felt sorry for me, and when I appeared in her kitchen, which was frequently, she found things for me to do. That day it was to fetch a jar of preserves for our afternoon tea. She told me I could pick the flavor. I was thinking strawberry because that was my favorite. I was looking forward to her warm scones with strawberry preserves. She would always let me have one or two before she served them in the sitting room.” She paused, lost in her memories.
“So you went to the cellar,” he prompted.
“There was a small part of the cellar where extra furniture was stored. I never went over that way, but that day I heard a noise, like a cry, so I went to investigate.” She moved from the window to a side table against the wall where a silly figurine that Cora had purchased sat. A spur-of-the-moment purchase, but it was something she had cherished, and Jacob hadn’t been able to deny her such an extravagance even though they’d not had much money at the time.
As if she knew how precious the figurine was, Charlotte touched it only with the tip of her index finger before pulling away and wandering back to the couch where she sat on the edge, her knees and ankles pressed together, hands folded in her lap.
“Edmund was standing in front of a table. It was dusty, the table. It’d probably been there a long time. And on it. Sitting on the table. Lying there. Was a…” She licked her lips, and a shudder went through her body.
“Later I found out it was a cat, but at the time I hadn’t known what it was. Edmund had a knife in his hand. A long knife. And it was covered in blood. And there was a mass…a bloody mass of something on the table. I just stood there. I didn’t know what to do. It was like my feet wouldn’t work. He looked like he had the day he’d destroyed my doll. Like there was nothing behind his eyes. Like maybe the devil had taken over him. Finally my feet became unstuck and I ran. I ran upstairs and when cook asked me about the preserves I told her I couldn’t find the strawberry and I ran up to my room and didn’t leave all that day.”
It seemed that destroying dolls was not enough for Edmund, and he’d had to move on to animals. And was the next step humans? It seemed like a natural, albeit horrific, progression.
“He came to my room that night,” she whispered. “And he told me that if I told anyone, especially his mother, that I would be the next dead thing on that table.”
“Oh, Charlotte.” He put his hand on her rigid arm. Small tremors went through her.
“So I didn’t. Tell anyone. Except for you. I’ve now told you.” She drew in a shuddering breath. “After that, I started noticing disturbed dirt in our back garden. Aunt Martha hired a gardener but only to clip the bushes back and keep the grass from growing too thick. It was a rather plain garden. But I noticed these mounds of dirt, and one Sunday I told Aunt Martha that I had a headache and couldn’t possibly go to church. She wasn’t happy, but when I clutched my stomach and started gagging, she told me to stay at home and kneel by my bed and pray for the sickness to pass. Instead of praying I grabbed the gardener’s shovel and started digging up those mounds.”
He was beginning to wonder if America was far enough for her to escape. Monsters, she had said, lived in all of us. But Edmund was far worse than any monster Jacob had encountered.
“More cats?” he asked.
She nodded. “Some graves had more than one, sometimes three. Like he’d killed three cats in one day. Like one wasn’t enough anymore.”
Just like dolls hadn’t been enough anymore.
“There were dozens,” she whispered.
“What did you do?” he asked.
“Nothing. I covered them back up with the dirt and I said a prayer for each one and I never mentioned it to anyone.”
She closed her eyes, and a tear escaped from beneath her lid.
“Is that when you left?” he asked.
