John Manning - The Killing Room

“He’ll tell my father that he saw us here,” Howard fretted.

“I can take care of Clem,” Beatrice said. “He’s a simple man, not right in the head. But he’s in love with me. He’ll do whatever I tell him.”

“Then tell him to keep quiet.”

“I shall.” She tried to smile, to connect with Howard’s eyes. “Oh, my love. Your father will have to accept us now.”

Howard sighed and looked away. “It’s impossible. He’s not a man who changes his mind.”

“But he will-he must!-when he hears that I am carrying his grandchild.”

Howard spun around to look at her.

Beatrice smiled. “It’s true, my love. I am pregnant.”

“No,” he uttered.

“Yes! Oh, please, you must be happy!” She patted her belly. “I know it will be a son. A son-born of our love!”

Howard turned away from her.

If I find you with her again, Howard, I will cut your allowance by half, and the trust that is waiting for you will be reduced. I will take a third and give it to your brother Douglas.

“I…I can’t marry you,” Howard stammered.

Beatrice’s eyes grew wide. “But you must! Otherwise I’ll be ruined!”

“I…I’ll find some way to get you money. You can go away. Far away.”

“No! I love you, Howard! I love you!”

He rushed out of the barn, unable to think. The air slapping against his face was cold as he ran along the cliffs. Below him the waves crashed in a frothy spray against the rocks. He could smell the salt. He had an urge to just jump over the cliffs, crashing into the sea beyond, letting the tide take him wherever it might.

Over the next few days, he avoided Beatrice as much as possible. He knew her parents were dead, that she had noplace to go. For a fleeting second he wondered if maybe he should marry her, if maybe his father would indeed melt when he learned she was pregnant. But sitting in the parlor with his brother Douglas and sister-in-law Ruth, hearing them describe the assets that Ruth had brought with her to the marriage, Howard knew that Beatrice Swan would never make an acceptable Young bride. Taking out his bankbook, Howard calculated that he could pull together a hundred dollars and send Beatrice to Bangor or maybe even Boston. He’d follow that with regular monthly payments. She’d have to accept that.

“I’m not going to destroy my future for some scullery maid,” he said out loud, looking at himself in the mirror.

But Beatrice wouldn’t leave. She wouldn’t take his money. She insisted that she loved him and that she would never leave. When she began to show signs of her pregnancy, the household began to whisper. One night his father summoned Howard into his study.

“What do you know about Beatrice’s condition?” Desmond Young asked.

“Nothing, sir. The child is not mine.”

He could see that his father didn’t believe him. But the patriarch seemed pleased with what would be the official family line. “We will keep her on,” he pronounced. “As Christian people, we cannot cast her out for her unfortunate sin. We will keep her with us, where she cannot be the subject of gossip and innuendo.”

There were nights when Beatrice’s sobs echoed up from the basement and through the house. Howard’s brothers smirked in his direction. Nothing had ever been admitted, but it seemed everyone knew, even Howard’s mother, who nonetheless presented a placid demeanor. An elaborate pretense was maintained. No one ever commented on Beatrice’s pregnancy. She got bigger and bigger, but no one ever said a word.

And through it all, whenever they passed in the hall, Beatrice would pass Howard little notes. I know you love me, she wrote. I know you will marry me when I bear you a son.

When the time came late the following spring, a midwife from the village was summoned by Clem. The family sat in the parlor, listening to Beatrice’s screams from below. But they said not a word, uttered not a single comment-not even when they heard the cries of the newborn. Finally the midwife came upstairs to give the master of the house the news that his servant girl had given birth to a boy. His name was Malcolm. Desmond Young paid the woman, and she left without another word between them.

But in the months that followed, the careful façade they’d all been maintaining crumbled.

The child simply looked too much like Howard. He had the same blond hair, the same cleft to his baby chin. Howard’s mother even removed the baby photograph of her son from the mantelpiece, so uncanny was the resemblance to the child downstairs in the servants’ quarters. As the summer progressed, the resemblance only became more apparent. It was the eyes that clinched it. As Beatrice performed her chores, the infant strapped to her back like an Indian papoose, family members had to look away. It was as if Howard himself were staring at them from the child’s eyes.

Finally someone had to say something.

“I suspect,” Desmond Young intoned one day toward the end of the summer, calling Howard once again into his study, “if I asked Beatrice to show me the child’s foot he’d have a similar crescent birthmark to the one you have yourself.”

Howard could no longer deny such an obvious reality. The child was his. Everyone knew it. He remained silent, his chin on his chest, standing in front of his father’s desk.

“You will have to marry her, you know,” Mr. Young said.

Douglas’s eyes darted up to his father. “You mean…you’d accept her as my wife?”

“What choice do I have?” The older man let out an impatient sigh. “The child will grow up, announcing his paternity simply by walking into a room. The girl will have all the ammunition she needs if she decides to blackmail you-or me-simply by showing people her son.”

“But if I marry her-”

Desmond Young frowned. “It is not a case of ‘if.’ You will marry her, Howard. But you will have forfeited your place in this family.”

“What do you mean?” Howard asked. Desperation was surging up his throat.

“I will find you a house in Bangor,” his father told him. “But that is where my largesse will end. You will need to get a job to support the family you have made for yourself. I know jobs are difficult to come by these days. There’s a Depression out there for people less fortunate than us. You’ll have to find your way best you can.”

“You mean…you’re disinheriting me?”

“That is precisely what I mean.”

“Please, no, Papa. I have such plans. I have great ambition…”

His father scowled. “You should have thought of that before you started sniffing around the scullery.”

“Please, Papa! Don’t do this!”

But pleading was useless. His father ordered him out of the study. Howard walked down the corridor, stunned. He tried to force his brain to work, to find a way out of this terrible predicament.

I’ve got to make Beatrice go away, he thought to himself.

He pulled open the doorway to the basement and headed down the stairs into the servants’ quarters.

He spotted Beatrice heading into her room with the child. He watched through the open door as she laid him in his crib. He’d never so much as held the child. He had kept his distance. Beatrice had fallen quiet around him. The notes had ended. She had either accepted the situation or was simply biding her time, waiting until the moment was right to make her demands of him.

But he had come to make a demand of her.

“Beatrice,” he said, standing in her doorway.

“Howard!” she said, her eyes lighting up at the sight of him. She still loved him. He could see that.

He entered the room, closing the door behind him. What they had to discuss was private. Very private.

“I have missed you so much,” she told him. “But I have tried to be discreet.”