Prologue
LIKE MOST ANY other girl my age, I was afraid of the darkness when I was alone. I was afraid of mysterious sounds, curious shadows, and all the other assorted Halloween creatures that populate our nightmares. More important, perhaps, I was not afraid of admitting to those fears. It was comforting to know that so many others my age shared them with me and so few would deny it. But I did have one fear that I was ashamed to admit or reveal to my friends, or anyone, for that matter, and I did the best I could to hide it, even though, at times, that seemed impossible to do.
I had always been afraid of my older sister, Cassie. As long as I can remember, Cassie made me tremble inside when she looked hard at me or came toward me quickly as someone angry might. There was nothing grotesque or immediately frightening about Cassie, either. Anyone who heard me say I was afraid of her would surely tilt his or her head and smile with some skepticism. But none of them was her younger sister, and none of them lived with her.
Mother once told me that she thought Cassie, even though she was only about three at the time, deliberately caused me to fall off the diaper-changing table, which resulted in a fracture in my right leg. To this day, Cassie denies it and insists that Mother was just not watching me properly and had put me too close to the edge. Although Mother blamed her, she excused it with something called sibling rivalry. She even made it sound okay.
“Until the day you were born, Cassie was the precious princess in the family, especially for your father, and then you came along and nudged her off the throne. It’s only natural that she would have been terribly jealous and disappointed, but smother your worries. Sisters grow out of such things as soon as they are confident about themselves,” Mother told me, and then ran her fingers through my long golden-brown hair, which she said was softer than silk. I could see the pleasure in her face, and I was happy that I could bring that look of pleasure into her speckled green-blue eyes simply by being me.
Unfortunately, I would immediately wonder if she had felt that way about Cassie’s hair when she was my age. Cassie didn’t take as much pride in her hair as I did, and she certainly wouldn’t let Mother run her fingers through it that way anymore, if she ever had. She always hated Mother touching her and especially hated her hair being brushed or changed from how she wanted it. Still, I was afraid she would be envious of how much attention Mother or Daddy paid me, whether it was because of my hair or my clothes or some clever thing I had said.
Maybe Mother could see that fear in my face. She leaned down to whisper, her lips tickling my earlobe, and added, “And you and I know, Semantha, that Cassie is the most self-confident girl her age for miles and miles and miles around us. She doesn’t have to be jealous of anyone anymore. There are few her age or even older who are as intelligent and as competent as Cassie. Cassie is a born leader. She’ll make us all very p
roud someday. I’m sure of it.”
There was always a lot of whispering going on in our house. Soft words flew through our rooms on butterfly wings. Our parents whispered to each other often, even if we were too far away to hear their exact words. However, Cassie was the champion whisperer. That was because whenever she wanted to impress me with something, she would whisper it. It was a way of stamping it Secret, just the way a letter or a package might be stamped Priority Mail.
And there was no greater sin in Cassie’s Ten Commandments than her First Commandment: Thou shalt never reveal a secret, especially if it was a Cassie Secret.
Over time, her other commandments would come raining down upon me as if from the lips of some deity. Eventually, I came to believe that Cassie had her own private religion, her own personal god. I watched her carefully in church and saw how her eyes would blaze with defiance whenever we were asked to speak directly to God. She wouldn’t speak. She wouldn’t sing a hymn or chant a prayer. She wouldn’t even bow her head. Neither Mother nor Daddy ever seemed to notice, or if they did, they didn’t seem to care, and ours was a very religious community.
We lived in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky, because that was where Daddy’s ancestors had come to live when they left England. Our triple great-grandfather, as Cassie liked to call him, built the Gothic Revival mansion in which we lived. Daddy, being the oldest son, inherited it. He had one brother who was five years younger, Perry. He worked in the Heavenstone company, but he lived in Lexington. He was a bachelor and lived alone in a townhouse.
Our house had ten rooms. Five were downstairs: the large living room with the original fieldstone fireplace with stone up to the ceiling, a large dining room with a grand teardrop chandelier that had been imported years ago from France, a kitchen that had been renovated five times to provide for more modern appliances, twice alone after Daddy and Mother married, a dark oak den that was our entertainment center, and Daddy’s home office with a library with leather-bound first editions. Behind his large desk, built from the same dark oak that was used to make the library shelves, were bay windows that looked south on our property, so he was never bothered by the direct sunlight. His office had a slate floor and an alcove that housed all the modern machinery any business office would have.
There were ancestral portraits everywhere. Daddy’s favorite was of one of our triple great-grandfather’s son, Asa Heavenstone. Asa was a hero in the Civil War who was killed only a week before the war ended. His portrait with him wearing his Confederate uniform still hangs in the living room next to portraits of our great-cousins, -uncles, and -aunts, as well as Grandfather and Grandmother Heavenstone. The people in Kentucky weren’t all in favor of the Confederacy, so we had cousins who were in the Union Army as well—only none of their portraits were hung on our walls. Daddy told us his grandparents were always terrified that someday, the family would learn that one of those in the Union Army had killed Asa.
Daddy has a large portrait of his father in the office, angled so that it always seems he’s looking down at him. I have often seen Daddy looking up at his father and nodding slightly, as if they had just had a serious conversation about the business. He often looked at Asa’s portrait the same way.
Mother often said that if one of us had been a boy, she would have named him Asa. When Asa was killed, our triple great-grandfather went into a very deep depression from which he never recovered. Even though he had two other sons and a daughter, he never got over Asa’s death, because Asa was his oldest and his favorite. His own death was a deep, dark secret. Mother feels confident that he drank himself to death in this very house. She envisioned him spending hours looking up at Asa’s portrait as his heart continued to shatter. Maybe that great sadness was what Daddy felt when he looked up at the portrait. I thought he imagined himself in Asa’s father’s shoes and tried to feel what he might have felt.
Many times, I have stood in front of Asa’s portrait, studying it for any possible resemblances to my father or myself and Cassie. Daddy had a similar beard, but other than that, I didn’t see much similarity. I could see some resemblances in our other relatives but none in him. Cassie says that was because Asa looked too much like his mother. She says his father loved him the most because he looked so much like his mother, “and after all, that was where his father’s romantic love had gone. Husbands favor the child who looks the most like their wives.”
The Heavenstone family lost much of its land and wealth after the Civil War, but Great-grandfather Patton Heavenstone restored much of it through the fortune he made with his general stores, which eventually became the Heavenstone Department Stores our family now owned. There are ten throughout the state, with an eleventh being developed in Lexington. There is a statue of Great-grandfather Patton Heavenstone in the lobby of the first Heavenstone Department Store in Danville. His first two wives died, one of typhoid and one because of a heart defect, but his third wife outlived him.
I knew all this because Daddy said learning our family history was more important than learning the history of our state and country.
“What is a country if not for its families?” he emphasized. “And what is a family without children?”
We weren’t expected to answer any of these questions. It used to be difficult to tell the difference between questions Daddy wanted us to answer and questions he wanted to ask and answer himself. Even questions about us weren’t necessarily the ones we were to answer, so his pausing for a moment after asking meant nothing.
“Why are you not working harder and being as good a student as Cassie, Semantha? I’ll tell you why you’re not,” he would say before I had a chance to protest and tell him that I really was working hard at being a good student. It was just impossible for me to be as perfect as Cassie. I know I spent more time on my homework than she did. Whatever I would say wouldn’t matter anyway, I supposed. What Daddy believed was already, as Cassie would say with one of her dramatic gestures, “a fait accompli.”
Because Cassie could frighten me, she could easily command and hold my attention. Besides, it was fascinating to watch her parade about with her mother-perfect posture and cast her deep and serious pronouncements at me, as would someone tossing flower petals while riding in a parade. Cassie was always either in a parade or on a stage, and I was always on the sidelines or in the audience.