I had wondered what that wild scream was that Kingsley had heard the night he killed his father and now I know, it was Faith Reddman Shaw’s agonized cry as she saw her husband embrace the pregnant Poole daughter and realize that it was he who was the girl’s secret lover, the father of her child. How lost she must have been to withhold that fact from her diary, how pathetic to be unable to admit the truths of her life even in her most private world. I wonder if she learned the tools of self-deception from her father just as she learned from him to pursue any and all means to satisfy her ends.
“So your father’s letter didn’t mute your hatred at all?” I ask.
“Not a yard, not an inch. I don’t go in for that spiritual crap. And it is not as if his paeans to love would turn me around. I found my true love and still it paled next to the ecstasies of my family’s revenge. But do you know who those letters actually affected? Mrs. Shaw.”
“Faith Shaw?”
“None other. Changed her life, she said. Took her years to get the courage to go into her husband’s room after his death. Years. But when she finally did, there she discovered the key. Eventually she thought to fit the key into the locked breakfront drawer at the Poole house, where she found the letters. The love letters from my mother and the letter addressed to me from my father. They had an enormous effect on her. They turned her heart inside out. I can’t imagine, Victor, that mere words could have such an effect on a soul. She said she saw the emptiness in all her prior yearnings and crimes and sought to live from then on a life of repentance. I suppose she was ripe for something, still mourning all she had done and all her father had done before her.
“They were a pair, the two of them, two peas in a pod. You know, it wasn’t just the one sister she killed, she killed the other, too. Poisoned her, to be sure that her son would be the only heir to the Reddman fortune. She called him Kingsley, which was a joke in itself, and before his birth made sure to destroy all possible pretenders to his throne. She put the poison in the broth she cooked her dying sister each morning. She had learned her father’s lessons well and so, when it was time for repentance, she had much to be forgiven for. She pursued repentance as devotedly as she pursued her husband and her son’s inheritance. Conciliation, expiation, redemption: that’s what she was after. How unfortunate for her that the only path to what she sought with such desperation led through me.”
“I had wondered how you got onto the estate.”
“Yes, it was Mrs. Shaw who brought me home to Veritas. My mother had a difficult delivery from which she never recovered. She tried to raise me but had no money and no strength and so she sent me off for adoption. She didn’t know where I was when Mrs. Shaw came looking for me shortly after finding the letters. It took her detectives nine years to find me. My adoptive parents were fine people. It was as happy a home as could be expected, but their fortunes had declined and they couldn’t afford to turn down Mrs. Shaw’s blandishments. So I was brought to Veritas to become her ward, her gardener, her servant. That was how she made it up to me, the stealing of my birthright and the killing of my father; she made me her gardener. She thought she was doing good, and I would have thought so too, I suppose, except she made a singular mistake. She also brought back my mother and put her in that apartment on Rittenhouse Square so that I could visit her and learn the truth of what had been done to me and my family.”
“I thought your mother was beyond the hatred.”
“Maybe once, but not after they killed my father. When we were reunited, God bless her, there was nothing left of the woman who had loved Christian Shaw, there was only the pain in her broken body and the bitterness. She was a wicked little thing and I loved her for it. She was the one who told me exactly how to decorate my half-brother’s room. He would have nothing to do with his mother and so it was left to me to be his friend and companion. I was the one who moved in that wonderful painting of his mother. He didn’t have the strength to say no and so she has stared down at him every day of his life. No wonder he jumped. But that wasn’t all my mother wanted; toying with Kingsley was mere sport. She told me over and over how the Poole fortune was stolen, repeating all the stories her mother had told her. About how Claudius Reddman had doctored the books to steal his fortune. About how he had turned his friend Elisha Poole into a drunkard so his treachery would go unnoticed.”
“I didn’t know that’s how he did it.”
“My great-grandfather, singed with a mark similar to mine around his eye, was a fierce alcoholic and Claudius figured it wouldn’t take much to get the teetotaling Elisha off the wagon. A drink here in friendship. A drink there in celebration. A bottle late at night after all the employees had gone home. It wasn’t long before my grandfather was so sodden he couldn’t see what was being ripped from him, from his family, from his legacy. ‘Get it back, Nat,’ I remember my mother telling me from her bed, her eyes steeped with hatred. ‘Get back every cent.’ ”
When his mother’s words come from his lips they have a rasping resonance as if she is still here, the broken old woman holed up in the luxury apartment on Rittenhouse Square, mouthing commands of revenge to her son.
“I think every young person needs inspiration in his life,” continues Nat. “My mother was mine. I like to think I’ve done amazingly well following her wishes, but it wasn’t as hard as it may seem, what with Mrs. Shaw so desperate to make amends for all she had done. Step by step I took it back.
“I was just returned from the war in the Pacific when Mrs. Shaw gave me the letter from my father and told me what she would do for me. Money, she said, she would give me all the money I wanted. A half a million dollars, she said. I took it right off and left. Half a million was something then and I went through it in five years. That was living, yep. Girls in Hollywood, girls in Paris. I rented a villa in Tuscany and threw wild parties. It was right out of Fellini. When I was broke I came back and demanded more. Another half-million pissed away in less time than the first. By the time I came back it was 1952. I was broke again and half a million wasn’t going to do it anymore. I wanted the whole thing. ‘Get it back, Nat.’ I will, Momma, I will. That was when I convinced Mrs. Shaw to set up the Wergeld Trust.
“It started out modestly enough. Just a million at first, but I kept on coming back for more and she kept on giving it. More money, more of the Reddman fortune. I was constantly tempted to leave and live high off what was in the trust but my mother was always there to implore me not to take a portion when I could have it all. So I stayed by Mrs. Shaw’s side, pruning her garden, accompanying her on her walks, telling her I needed more and more and more as recompense. And with the weakness of the redeemed she kept giving in. But it wasn’t enough. Some things can’t be bought with just money.
“There was a maid that worked the house, a sweet thing, innocent, really, until I was through with her. She was sent away when her pregnancy was unmistakable but I ordered Mrs. Shaw to bring the child to the estate and raise him to be my heir. Franklin. I didn’t want him to know I was his father but we worked together on the gardens and though he didn’t know, I knew that he was a Poole and that he would inherit the whole of the Wergeld Trust and become as rich as he would have been had not our fortune been stolen from us. But it wasn’t enough.
“He was still just a bastard, rich now, but not a Reddman. So I told Mrs. Shaw I needed one more thing, the most delicious thing of all. She said no and I insisted and she said no and I demanded and finally she gave in. She set it up for me, like a pimp. It wasn’t so hard to arrange, really. D. H. Lawrence did most of the work.
“Summer nights, sneaking into the Poole house, the two of us. I’d place garlands of flowers atop her head and drop rose petals on her sharp breasts. Now she is a pitiful wreck, Selma Shaw, but then she was different, earnest and beautiful. I loved those nights, our brutal strivings, loud enough so Kingsley could hear it all from his window. That was a gift in itself, but there was more. I loved her. Truly. Imagine that, finding love in the course of revenge. When she found herself pregnant she talked of running off with me, but then our child would have been a bastard and not an heir. I loved her, Victor, but what power does love have next to imperatives of the blood. So I turned her away and instead of running off with me she stayed at Veritas and bore Kingsley’s fourth child, a miracle child considering his operation, and, finally, the Pooles had burrowed their way directly into the Reddman line.”