All My Love

The act of receiving gifts was something that Mrs. Wisteria Bancroft was no stranger to. Anymore it was the only thing that she delighted in. The arrival of parcels and packages gave her a small glimmer of hope to, even for a moment, fill the aching void that had threatened to consume her over the last year of her life. Her husband wanted her to forget about that afternoon on the lake. He wanted her to forget Andreas Cauldwell once and for all, and for them to move forward from this place to have a marriage that was at least bearable for the both of them.

Spencer Bancroft hadn’t killed Andreas by his own hand at all. In fact, it was Wisteria herself who had inadvertently delivered the blow that took her lover’s life on that ice-covered lake only the winter before. An elaborate plan to ensure that she ended up in this loveless marriage to secure her family’s wealth. A plan that Spencer went gladly along with because he did in some strange way love his wife. In fact, he sighed gladly as the man’s body slumped beneath the cracks of the ice to wash away from sight, even as his beloved shrieked in protest in his arms.

“I’ll do it, thank you,” Wisteria heard him say, accompanied with the clatter of her morning tray exchanging hands. She could hear his heavy footfall and he sighed as he dropped the tray on the table in front of the hearth. The curtains were drawn, and she blinked slowly in the rays that rushed over her bed. He sat down at the foot of it and she coiled away from him.

“You have to get out of here at some point, Wisteria,” he murmured and looked at the far wall of the bedroom. “Get up and get dressed. They’re expecting us at the club, and people have been asking about you for months.”

“I’ll never go back to that wretched place as long as I live,” she said breathlessly into her pillow, her hands instantly trembling at the thought of it. The crack of the ice, the striking red of blood spattering the jagged edges of it, the way they had loitered afterwards in that suffocating parlor.

~

Leighton struggled to get a flame from his lighter in hand and he swore softly as the flick continued on and on in the near darkness of the sitting room. His haughty features were thrown in and out of shadows as the flames grew larger in the grate. Olivette flicked her own lighter open and did him the honors. “God’s sake, Leighton,” she hissed as the tip ignited and his brow was hidden in smoke.

“What do we say happened to her face?” Jonathan asked, worriedly looking at Wisteria over the rim of his glass.

“That it was an accident, of course. That they were practicing, and she was leaning into the bow. You didn’t mean to maim your sister, did you, Leighton?” Olivette asked.

“Not entirely, no,” Leighton said with a shrug, exhaling a large cloud of smoke into the air. Wisteria felt her body tense with rage, and she cut her eyes at him through the dim. He smiled back at her before leaning back to enjoy his cigarette.

Spencer dabbed absently at the burn on her face where the string of the bow had struck her only half an hour prior. She slapped him away and he sighed and looked down at the wet cloth that dampened his hand. Murderers. Everyone that she held dear to her had murdered the one that she loved most. She would never see him again. Never smell the scent of his aftershave or be held in his arms that were warm and encompassing. They had taken everything from her.

“What if the lake doesn’t freeze over, Granny?” Jonathan asked. His hands were trembling; it caused the liquid in his glass to ripple and Wisteria saw.

“The three of you will all ride out tomorrow at first light around the lake to make sure that there’s no sign of him. The lake was meant to be ridden around. God knows that isn’t the only body that’s been dumped there with the intention to forget it.” The way her grandmother spoke made Wisteria’s blood turn. She shuddered and blinked back tears with a gasp. Olivette turned at the sound of it. “Oh Wisteria, darling, one day you will look back and this one will seem a distant memory. A harrowing bad dream. I’ve suffered much worse than this.” She blew a great cloud and watched the flames lap at the chainmail guard.

“Can a body decompose in a frozen lake?” Jonathan again asked, his voice quivered, and his eyes flicked between the rest of them.

“And who the fuck are you? Sherlock Holmes?” Leighton scoffed and shook his head. He pinched the bridge of his nose and stabbed his cigarette out in an ashtray. “I told you he shouldn’t have been involved.” He shot their older brother a look of disgust before he slammed his rocks glass down on the table. “God damn it! I told you. He’s worse than she is!” He jabbed a finger across the sitting arrangement and ran a hand through his hair as he fell back in his chair. Tears fell from Wisteria’s lashes as she watched him in horror. Her own brother.

“Leighton, compose yourself,” Olivette hissed, raising a hand to silence him.

“The question is one worth asking, surely,” Spencer finally spoke, looking up from the rag that dripped cold drops onto the thick oriental rug. He looked around the room at the rest of them. “Don’t fish freeze and…and reanimate come spring?”

“I don’t think he’ll be reanimating, Spencer,” Leighton said with a wrinkle of his nose and a “Tsk!” of his teeth. Wisteria’s hands violently shook now, and she tried to rise from her seat, but Spencer placed a hand softly on her shoulder to push her down.

“And what if he doesn’t decompose over the winter? He’ll bob up on some little wharf and no one will be the wiser of who he was or where he came from,” Olivette said with a shrug. “We have nothing to worry about.”

“The club’s arrows are specially made…we…we didn’t think this through!” Jonathan leaped up from his seat to clutch either side of his head and pace the room. At this everyone paused. Even the two most wicked in the room’s eyes shifted side to side in thought. It was true. The club’s wooden arrows were adorned with two dark green bands top and bottom with “Dalloway Farms” in gold letters between them.

Wisteria put a hand to her mouth and laughed a maniacal laugh at the look on their expressions. Everyone turned to her in muted shock. The tears glistening on her cheeks and her left cheek red and bloodied, she looked as if she had gone completely mad the way she rocked and laughed. “You all are going to burn for this,” she said once her laughter subsided and she wiped the tears on the back of her hand. “I can’t wait to pass them the fucking torch.”

“Watch your mouth, you wretch. If you had kept your wits and your virtue about you, none of this would have happened. And who was it that held the bow? Dear granddaughter? Did you think I would leave you to chance, to be an innocent bystander? If we rot, you’ll rot alongside us. All of our words against yours. Get her out of my sight!” Her grandmother waved her hand, cigarette smoke trailing along, and Spencer took her softly by the arm and helped her from the sofa. “Tell everyone she got a chill from practicing in the cold. The air went to her head. She needs to be home and in bed. Don’t speak a word to anyone if you don’t have to, with her around.” Jonathan made eyes with his sister and tears glistened in both of them as she was led from the room.

“I’ll hate you all until the day that I die,” Wisteria spat into the room as enormous tears rolled down her cheeks.

“Oh, I’ll hold you to that, my love,” Olivette retorted.

The boys found nothing of Andreas on their morning ride, and come spring, when the lake thawed, there was no mention of a body of any sort rising from the lake to wash ashore. Questions were raised when he didn’t show for work at the club and his home was immaculate, just the way he had left it. Someone made mention of his time in the war and his frantic nature with the sounds of the guns on the skeet courts. He probably fled, they said. Wisteria could say nothing. They all watched her closely. She married Spencer and her life became a disjointed blur of misery and mourning and longing.

She thought of the fires that burned in the parlor that night as they all sealed her fate around her. Every day that passed she waited for his body to be pulled from the water, for justice to be served, but nothing came, and the world went on around them. Jonathan “fled” the country the summer after she was married, and no one had heard much of him since. Leighton kept his vile ways as he always had. Nothing changed for those who had dealt so much pain.

Winter had come again and with it, the freezing of the lake. The grave of her love. She watched the snow fall through a window from her chair in front of the fire when there was a knock at the door. “Ma’am…” She looked up and ushered the girl into the room. She held in her hands a large box wrapped in brown parchment paper. “Ma’am a package for you.” Wisteria’s brow furrowed as she rose from her chair and smoothed out her dress.

“A bit late for the mail to run, no? I didn’t hear the postman.” The maid shook her head as she sat the box on a table full of photographs.

“Wasn’t in the post, ma’am. It was left on the doorstep. They knocked and were gone. Like a spirit in the snow, ma’am. There weren’t even any footprints on the stairs. But it’s addressed to you. Or…well, look,” She pushed the box forward and Wisteria looked down at the crumbled brown paper. “The Lady of the House,” was written in quick penmanship overtop the wrappings.

“How odd...” Wisteria undid the poor wrapping and the paper fell down around a just as unassuming brown box. She lifted the lid and her heart stopped for innumerable seconds. Her breath caught in her throat and she shrieked and stumbled back from the box, clutching her heart.

“What is it ma’am?” the maid exclaimed, reaching out for her. Wisteria waved her frantically away as she tried to regain breath.

“Call up to the club immediately and summon my husband home...NOW!” Wisteria sobbed. The maid ran from the room in a mad dash. Wisteria crept back to the box as her heart pounded in her ears. Her hands trembled madly as she pulled the box back to her. On a bed of straw was a broken arrow from the club covered in crusted blood. On a torn piece of paper nested beside it was written, “All my love, Andreas.”