Apple peeling forgotten, I leaned forward onto my elbows. “What happened to her?”
Margaret opened her mouth to answer, but Abigail cut her off. “She died. Nurse Gray was tending to her before it happened. We recommended her to Charles before Catherine even gave birth in case he would need to call on a nurse. Luckily, she has been able to be there for Catherine while she has been ill.”
“How is Catherine doing?” Margaret asked. “Charles doesn’t talk about her much, and we don’t want to press.”
“Catherine is…” I didn’t know how to answer. I could lie, which was what Charles, and maybe even Catherine, would want me to do, but I wanted to reveal the truth. If only so I could ask the Wilds outright whether Nurse Gray could be trusted. In the end, I settled on an answer similar to the one Charles had given me. “Catherine is doing physically well.”
“Good, good,” Margaret breathed, nodding. “When we found her out on the moors, I couldn’t believe it was her. She was covered in mud and blood and…it was a horrible sight.”
The information took a few seconds to settle over me. I froze, repeating the words in my mind to be sure I’d understood. “You found Catherine?”
“Did you not know that?” Abigail held her apple bowl under the rim of the table and swiped a large pile of apples into it with her forearm. “This time of year, the astronomical alignment brings us closer to the ghostly realm than any other time, so we are often out on the moors.”
“In fact, there is a full moon coming later this week. Sunday, I believe,” Margaret added.
Abigail nodded in agreement and continued. “Catherine had been out there for an hour or more by the time we found her. Luckily, it wasn’t as cold as it is now.”
“Charles would have found her if we hadn’t,” Margaret said. “By the time we got Catherine to the house, he’d already been growing nervous and was restless to go and find her.”
Abigail stood up and walked around the table, dumping all of the apple slices into one large pot, while Margaret brought out a woven basket full of mismatched glass jars with different lids. Abigail motioned for me to stand and join them at the end of the table, and she showed me how to fill a jar with apple slices. When I was done with the first one, I slid the jar to Margaret, who ladled in hot sugar syrup to cover the apples.
My mind worked as quickly as my hands.
Catherine claimed to see spirits and to have been attacked by a ghost while, next door, her neighbors believed they communicated with the dead. It seemed too strange to be a coincidence, which led me to believe it wasn’t.
Maybe one visit to the Wilds’ home had been enough to make Catherine paranoid and convince her that ghosts existed and she was surrounded by them.
“Screw the lids on as tight as you can,” Abigail instructed for the third time. Once it became clear I was not paying attention to her commands, she sent me over to the fireplace to watch the jars boiling over the fire. The boiling water pressurized the jars, and when they were done, the metal lid popped up with a firm clicking sound. My only job was to pull the jars from the water once this was done.
The job was simple, and when Margaret and Abigail got into an argument about how high to fill the jars with apples, I let my mind wander.
I stepped away from the hearth and studied the shelves and picture frames that hung on the walls of the crumbling house. Much like everything else in the home, the shelves and frames needed a good dusting, but they gave me a look into exactly how eccentric the two women really were.
Small picture frames were filled with hand drawings of the moon and its different cycles, portraits of the sisters with colorful auras painted around their heads, and bits of poetry written out in ink that spoke of nature. One of them I recognized. It was a poem by Robert Frost. I remembered my mother fawning over him when he won some award when I was just a little girl. I still didn’t have much of an appreciation for poetry, but it seemed the Wilds did. Every other part of their life was self-reliant and separate from society, except for their contemporary tastes in poetry.
The quartet was drawn in the center of a white piece of paper with hand-painted leaves falling from the branches of a tree and gathering on the ground. The quartet read:
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Just next to the poem in a matching frame was a formal portrait of a young woman.
When I first saw the picture, I shook my head, not understanding what I was looking at. The girl had long blonde hair that was pinned back over her ears, and the artist had given her piercing blue eyes. She had a pointed chin, rosy cheeks, and a sly smile pulled up to one side that made the viewer feel as though the woman knew a secret she had not revealed.
The woman in the picture, as far as I could tell, was my sister, Catherine.
I stepped back and opened my mouth to say something to Margaret and Abigail, to get some kind of explanation, when I looked at the bottom of the picture and saw the name written there: Dorothea.
The woman in the painting was Dorothea Wilds.
I could see now that the painting was yellowed with age and spotted from water damage. It was probably older than my sister, so therefore could not be her.
And yet…the likeness was shocking.
“Alice,” Margaret said just over my shoulder.
I jumped, bumping into the woman. She grabbed my shoulders and steadied me.
“Sorry, dear, but the jars.” She pointed to
