Lantern [Part V]
Don't you hear your lover moan?
Eyes of glass and feet of stone
When she began feeling ill, Mariana thought perhaps it was because she'd fallen in love, and now had to suffer her love's absence. It would be inconvenient, certainly, if this were to happen every time he were away, forever after. She didn't regret loving him, but this was not an effect she had anticipated. And he'd only been gone a few weeks. So far, at least, it was confined to the mornings, but if the sickness worsened, she might not last six months.
But when she told her mother, expecting some kind of advice or sympathy, her mother went pale.
"Did you lie with him?" she asked, her voice harsh. She almost never spoke to her daughter so; Mariana shrank back.
"He said we'd be married," she answered, as defiantly as she could.
"Much difference it makes," her mother said. "I thought you knew better, Mariana, I truly did. To think my daughter would be with child on her wedding day."
Mariana could not get another word out of her. Stung, she took her sewing outside and sat and looked over the green fields in the hot August sunlight, setting in sleeves and basting trim with tears in her eyes.
Late in the afternoon, Mariana's mother came out and sat by her.
"We'll cut your dress with a high waist," she said. "No telling how you'll carry, so we'll cut the skirt generously. We'll begin in November; by then I'll see better how you've grown."
Mariana nodded.
"Folk will talk," she went on. "I'll stand by my daughter, but they will. You'll have to stiffen your spine and hold your head up, for you've no father any longer, to stand between you and shame."
"I can bear my own shame."
"So you can." Mariana felt her mother's hand on her back and leaned in to be comforted. She was seventeen, but sometimes, she thought, a girl needs her mother.
Summer passed into autumn and Mariana's baby grew. None of the neighbours would speak to her; they only spoke about her. Except for the minister's wife, Mrs. Grange, and that was worse than being ignored, for Mrs. Grange, who thought she was being loving and kindly admonishing, had absolutely nothing of use to say, and only made Mariana feel like an unwanted insect, or a spot of dirt that needed cleaning.
"Sinners are always welcome in the Lord's house," she said one day, and Mariana nearly screamed at her.
She stopped going to church after that. The pitying, curious stares were more than she could bear. And then, too, there were the other kinds of looks, the ones from some of the men; looks that made her more uncomfortable than almost anything else. Speculative; avaricious. They frightened her, but she couldn't speak of them, even to her mother. What would she say? They were Christian men, married, devoted to their wives and children, and if they looked at her as a man might look at newly roasted meat, what could she say that would be believed? Her credibility was gone with her virtue.
So Mariana avoided them. She avoided everyone. She stopped going into town, remaining in the cottage to work while her mother did the errands.
At least the illness had passed. It was not comfortable, carrying a child, but it was a discomfort that could be managed. It did not disrupt her work, and since she never went anywhere, it did not hamper her mobility.
In actuality, Mariana walked almost more than she had before. She took to walking early in the morning, when the baby woke her up, and into the evening, wandering through the low hills and out along the shore. The sea reminded her of Daniel, and the more she missed him, the more she walked the beaches, climbing along the low cliffs and rocks when the weather and tide allowed it. The doctor said that too much exertion was dangerous for the baby, but her balance was still excellent, and she could not stay penned up in the cottage. Once in a vicious autumn squall they were housebound for three days and Mariana nearly paced a hole in the floor. So she continued to go out walking, and her mother did not stop her, even as autumn turned to winter and the snow began to fall.
_____
THEN
It's not like it came totally out of the blue. He's been talking about it for a while now, not just with her but among their friends, when they go out, talking about how everybody needs to do what they're good at and he feels like he might have a responsibility to help make the world suck less. That was always the point at which everyone (Amelia) laughed, and it's not like she didn't take him seriously; she just... didn't think he was serious.
But he was apparently deadly serious, and she's not thinking about that phrasing because she's already upset.
"I just can't believe you didn't even talk to me about this," she says, incredulous.
"I did!" he says, just as incredulous. "Were you seriously not listening all those times we talked about exactly this? Haven't I been saying I need to pull my weight around this country?"
"Here's a tip," says Amelia. "Maybe if you want to have a serious conversation with your wife about enlisting in the Army, you should actually sit down and have a serious conversation about exactly that, not just general patriotic sentiments. You talk like that all the time, Don. About everything, did you know that? Everything you've ever been interested in, it's your next big cause. And nothing goes anywhere because you're a realist. Or I thought you were. So don't give me the 'we talked about this' bullshit, because we fucking didn't."
He's hurt. She can see it. She didn't quite mean to dig so harshly at him, but, seriously, there was not a conversation about this. They never had that conversation. And he doesn't seem to understand why that's a problem.
"I thought you got it," he says, and, oh, no, he doesn't.
"I can't read your mind."
"I thought I was being clear."
"You can't read my mind!" Her voice is rising again and she deliberately turns off the part of her that cares. "I thought we already went through this after the Dakota fiasco."
He flinches. "That's low."
"No, it's relevant," she counters. "We decided to talk about important stuff until we're both on the same page or we agree to disagree, remember? And we have always done that. And now you enlist without discussing it with me and you think that's okay? That's so not okay, Don."
"You agreed with me," he insists, but he sounds a lot less sure now.
"In theory. That's not- no, you know what? We're talking in circles. Can we come back to this in an hour?"
Don looks at his watch. "Can we make it two? I have a meeting in half an hour, but it shouldn't take very long."
Amelia closes her eyes. "Okay, two hours."
She goes out to the garden and does some digging. They moved into the house a month back and it's too late in the season to get any serious yield, but it's not too soon to start planning for next year, and if she wants vegetables the plot needs to be bigger.
It's soothing work, fairly rhythmic, and it requires just enough thought that she can distract herself from thinking about the fight.
They fight pretty frequently, honestly, mostly small blow-ups about stupid things, and she'd rather have it that way than let things fester and simmer and either explode later or quietly erode their marriage until there's nothing left to stay for. As long as they care enough to give each other grief, they're in good shape.
This one's different, though. They haven't fought about anything this big since they were married, actually. The situation with Dakota happened when they were engaged, and was basically a case of miscommunication fomenting a whole lot of bad feelings and blaming and nastiness. No one even did anything wrong, or nothing major, anyway. It was a series of unexamined misunderstandings.
Which is how their whole strategy of clear communication came about, and why Amelia feels so-
betrayed?
Betrayed.
She works through that one for a bit before she tackles Don's side. To be fair, maybe he got complacent. Maybe they both did. They haven't fought over anything major in so long. And- yeah, she remembers all that talk, and how proud and fond and amused she was, and how she egged him on. Because she believed was sincere, but she never once thought he was serious. She never thought he'd actually enlist. But she encouraged him.
Maybe he's not completely in the wrong here.
After two hours, they meet back in the kitchen, designated site of all dispute resolution. When she gets there, wet hair in a bun after a quick shower, he's pulling things out of the fridge and getting dinner started. She goes to join in.
The knives actually help them stay calm. Neither of them wants to actually wound the other, so they keep their actions peaceful, which keeps their talking peaceful. This is standard operating procedure: flare up, yell for a bit, cool off, resolve in the kitchen.
"I'm sorry," is the first thing Don says, when they're about halfway through the food prep. Amelia makes a noncommittal noise. "I made assumptions and we agreed not to do that."
"I'm sorry too," Amelia says after a short pause. "I let you think we had an understanding that we didn't." It's not an admission of wrongdoing; neither of them did this deliberately. It's an acceptance of responsibility.
Don nods. "I can't just un-enlist, though," he says, emptying the frying pan full of leeks into the soup pot.
"No, I get that." Amelia dumps in the bacon. "I'm still upset," she adds. "It'll probably take a while."
"I thought so, yeah." He puts the lid on and leaves it to simmer.
They look at each other for a moment.
"I'm going to set the table," says Amelia.
"Hang on." Don steps in. "Are we okay for now?"
"For now, yeah." She turns up her face and lets him kiss her.
"I can work with that."
_____
NOW
Dean barges back into the motel room with coffee at eight or so. Sam snaps out of yet another fitful doze and sits up reluctantly.
"Hey, that coffee actually smells good." He sniffs appreciatively.
"Yeah, found a different coffee place, that other one sucked." Sam takes this to mean that Dean didn't care to risk bumping into Amelia again so soon. Not that Sam can blame him.
"So this thing that tried to snatch Amelia," Dean begins as soon as Sam is partially caffeinated.
"It seems awfully coincidental that we'd see the Lantern Woman right beforehand if it weren't connected," Sam hazards, and Dean nods, but looks thoughtful.
"Yeah, here's the thing, though," he says. "It didn't really look like her at all."
"I thought you didn't get a good look?"
"I didn't, but what I saw... it just didn't seem her style."
"Her style. Okay." Sam sits back and smirks. "'Cause one sighting totally makes you an expert. One sketchy sighting, at that."
"Yeah, well." Dean frowns. "I don't want to assume it was her. I didn't get the vengeful vibe from her, you know what I'm saying?"
"Yeah." Sam agrees, actually. As many ghosts as they've seen, there's an instinct that gets built, and sometimes they just know things.
"I was thinking, though, the way it snatched Amelia? She said it actually reached out and pulled her into the pool. That sounds like some kind of Jenny Greenteeth business."
"Didn't Jenny mostly take children, though?" Sam reaches for the pages Dean slides over to him. "Like, cautionary tale kind of thing?"
"Yeah, mostly children and the elderly, but what if she's just the really famous one? Or, like, some kind of aggregate legend of a bunch of different water monsters that all do the same kind of thing? Like, some kind of general snatching-people-into-the-water thing."
"Well," Sam says, "but are we sure this isn't some variant of a rusalka?"
"No, but that's my point," Dean says patiently. "Maybe rusalkas are related to Jenny Greenteeth and whatever this is is related to the both of them."
"Okay, fair enough. But how do we find this one, and, more importantly, how do we kill it?"
"There were some indications in a couple of sources I found that Jenny Greenteeth started out human." Dean shuffles through the papers upside-down and points to a relevant sentence.
"Great." Sam huffs out a sigh. "Well, at least that probably means it's vulnerable to one of the standard things, anyway."
"Do you think it matters who this one was?" Dean muses. "I mean, it doesn't for wendigos and werewolves and- and vampires." Sam pretends not to notice Dean tripping over that. The Benny conversation is one he's putting off having again for as long as possible. "Not really. But if they're at all like ghosts or demons, it might help us to know something about the person it used to be. Give us an edge. 'Cause for damn sure it's not going to be vulnerable to fire."
"Which is kind of our default for this type of thing, yeah," Sam agrees. "Okay. But I'm seeing a huge roadblock here."
"We have no idea where to even start figuring out this thing's identity? Yeah." Dean scrubs a hand down his face. "Unless- wait, wait, wait." He shuffles through papers. "All the deaths have been within a mile of the Lantern Woman's walk. Even if it's not her, there might still be a connection."
"It's a leap," says Sam slowly, "but it's actually not that big of one."
"Right?" Dean is starting to look excited for the first time since they found this case. "Dude. She had a lover. In all the stories, she had a lover who drowned. If we can find out who she was, we should be able to find out who he was."
"We know who she was, actually." Sam rummages a bit and unearths the sheaf of notebook pages that he hasn't gotten around to putting back in the rings yet. He thumbs through until he finds the one with the deep crimson edge and flips it over. "Back of the very first page. 'Probably Mariana Bolton, 1794-1811.'" He passes it to Dean, who reads it and looks back up at Sam with a grin.
"We got the son of a bitch."
A full morning of library work produces the name Daniel Farrier, whose family was apparently a big deal in Maryland. He seems to have been a bit of a disgrace, though, and they packed him off to sea to keep him out of trouble.
"His ship was lost," Dean says triumphantly. "What did I tell you."
"Wait, though, hang on," Sam says. "He's buried in the cemetery in Annapolis."
"What?" Dean grabs Sam's book and looks for himself. "What."
"Says he died abroad, had his remains shipped back because his family didn't want him buried on foreign soil."
"I do not envy the crew on that ship," Dean says absently, skimming through. "Wow. Okay. So he... drowned, inland, in Spain, they recovered his body and he's buried here?"
"Yeah. Bizarre."
"Understatement." He looks up. "You know what this means."
"Possibly vulnerable to fire after all?" Sam feels his face split into a grin. "Worth a try."
Part VI