They Believed They Were Safe by Cordelia Frances Biddle

Author:Cordelia Frances Biddle [Biddle, Cordelia Frances]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-10-31T23:00:00+00:00

Ruth White Sleeps

Lying in wait on his unruffled bed, Henry heard the kitchen screen door swing open. The sound crept up the side of the house and tiptoed through the window sash, a noise terrified of scandal and confrontation.

He kept perfectly still, ignoring Ruth White’s snores and his own halting gasps. The door shivered on its hinges with the gentlest of squeaks, and softly closed again. Then he heard two voices whispering together, indulging in soft, merry sounds that seemed to mock the lateness of the hour and the darkness of the staid and tidy house. Henry wanted to turn on his bedside lamp, but something pinned him in place. It felt as though a creature larger and stronger than himself had control of his body. “If she brings him in here,” he muttered under his breath, “if she brings him up here …”

He couldn’t finish the threat. He had no idea what terrible deed he’d perform if Mabel and her young swain were to walk up the front hall stairs.

“At least I assume he’s young,” Henry mumbled. The possibility that his rival might be something other than a callow youth was suddenly terrifying. An older man wooing Mabel! The thought was intolerable.

He rasped out a few jerky gasps, and his hands fumbled confusedly across the sheets. But his ears stayed alert! Oh, his ears kept careful score.

Below the bedroom window, Mabel was laughing with a low and intimate gush that Henry had never heard. Then she leaned against the screen door; and he followed every move as his beloved’s body pressed itself into the copper netting. Her sultry slide caused the night-dampened paint of the doorframe to creak, and the dew-soaked hinges to whistle.

She’s kissing him! Henry told himself. Kissing the bastard right under my nose!

This was the first time in his life he’d used such vulgar language. He’d always been so careful around Ruth White, and before that, too—a line of circumscribed and careful years. Henry began to feel supremely cheated, a man who’d toed the line while others stepped blithely around it. “Bastard!” His chin jabbed skyward and his white hair bristled with electric rage.

“Mmmm?” Ruth White stopped snoring, although she didn’t fully waken. Decades of communal, if distant, living had attuned her ears and thoughts to Henry’s slightest whim. “Mmmm?” The sound was muzzy with dreams and pillow down.

“Nothing … Nothing dear.” In his mind, he pictured Ruth White awake and alert as a tigress protecting her young. She’d fly down the stairs, prepared to beat back the intruder, the despoiler of Mabel Gorne; and Henry realized he’d be horribly disappointed if she did. Despite every jealous anxiety, he knew he had to let Mabel and her lover continue. “Nothing at all.” The words fluttered soothing noises, the kind pigeons make, or nurses on a terminal ward.

Ruth White resumed her snoring.

A metronome in Henry’s brain counted the beat. Don’t come inside yet, he begged the invisible Mabel, please don’t wake the old bag up. Here again,

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