Darkest Hour (Cutler 5)

"Don't you go making wild accusations, Lillian. Don't you go saying anything outrageous, hear, or . . ."

"Or what, Papa?"

"Or I'll have you horsewhipped. I know how you got yourself in a woman's way. It was that boy that night. That's what it was; that's when it happened," he decided, nodding after he spoke.

"That's a lie, Papa, and you know it. You had Mrs. Coons here. You heard what she said."

"She said she wasn't sure," Papa lied. "That's right, that's right, that's what she said. And now we know why she wasn't sure. You're a disgrace, a shame on the Booth household and name and I won't permit anyone to shame this family! No one's going to know. That's right," he said, nodding again.

"What is it? What's wrong, Papa?" Emily said, coming up behind him. "Why are you shouting at Lillian now?"

"Why am I shouting? She's pregnant with that dead boy's baby. That's why," he said quickly.

"It's not true, Emily. It wasn't Niles," I said.

"Shut up," Emily said. "Of course it was Niles. You had him in your room and you did a sinful thing. Now you're going to suffer for it."

"There's no reason to let anyone else know," Papa said. "We'll keep her hidden until afterward."

"And then what will you do, Papa? What about the baby?"

"The baby . . . the baby . . ."

"It'll be Mamma's baby," Emily said quickly.

"Yes," Papa said, quickly agreeing. "Of course. No one sees Georgia these days. Everyone will believe it. That's good, Emily. At least we'll save the Booths' good name."

"That's a horrid lie to tell," I said.

"Quiet," Papa said. "March yourself upstairs. You'll not come down again until . . . until it's born. Go on."

"Do what Papa says," Emily ordered.

"Move!" Papa shouted. He stepped toward me. "Or I'll beat you like I promised.

"

I closed the book and hurried out of the office. Papa didn't have to whip me. I wanted to hide the shame and the sin; I wanted to crawl into a dark corner and die. Now, that didn't seem so terrible. I would rather be with my lost little sister Eugenia and the love of my life Niles than live in this horrid world anyway, I thought, and prayed my heart would simply stop.

12

MY CONFINEMENT

While I lay on my bed staring up at the ceiling, Papa and Emily were downstairs in his office planning out the great deception. At the moment I didn't care what they did or what they said. I no longer believed that I had any control over my destiny anyway. I probably never had. When I was younger and I sat around planning all the wonderful things I would do with my life, I was simply dreaming, fooling myself, I thought. I now realized that poor souls like me were put on this earth to serve as illustrations of what terrible things could happen if God's commandments were disobeyed. It mattered not who in the line of your ancestry disobeyed the commandments. The sins of the fathers were, as Emily often quoted, visited on the heads of the children. Surely I was living proof of that.

Yet why God had listened to someone as cruel and horrid as Emily and turned a deaf ear to someone as soft and gentle as Eugenia or Mamma or as sincere as me was confusing and frightening. I had prayed for Eugenia, I had prayed for Mamma, and I had prayed for myself, but none of those prayers were answered.

Somehow, for some mysterious reason, Emily was put on this earth to judge us and lord it over all of us. So far, it seemed to me, all her prophecies, all her threats, all her predictions came true. The devil had seized hold of my soul even before I was born and he had tainted me with evil so effectively that I had brought about my mother's death. Just as Emily had said many times, I was a Jonah. As I lay on my bed with my hand on my stomach and realized that inside me an unwanted child was forming, I did feel as if I had been swallowed by a whale and hovered now within the dark walls of another prison.

That's what my room was to become as far as Papa and Emily were concerned, a prison. They marched into it together, armed with their Biblical words of justification, and pronounced sentence on me like the judges of Salem, Massachusetts glaring down hatefully at a woman suspected of being a witch. Before they spoke, Emily offered a prayer and read a psalm. Papa stood beside her, his head bowed. When she was finished, he raised his head and his dark eyes hardened to rivet on me.

"Lillian," he declared in a booming voice, "you will remain in this room under lock and key until the baby is born. Until then, Emily and only Emily will be your contact with the outside world. She will bring you your food and see to your needs, bodily and spiritually."

He stepped closer, expecting me to object, but my tongue stayed glued to the roof of my mouth.

"I don't want to hear any complaints, no whining and crying, no pounding on the door, no screaming from the windows, hear? If you do, I'll have you taken up to the attic and chained to the wall until it's time for the baby to be born. I mean it," he said with firmness behind his threat. "Understand?"

"But what about Mamma," I asked. "I want to see her every day and she will want to see me."