So it was with some reluctance that she turned her face away from the warm sunshine and looked out at the sea, blue-green and calm. In the distance, the northernmost island stood silhouetted against that cornflower blue sky. For just an instant that hard craggy island looked like a castle in a fairy tale, tall and gray and majestic. She could imagine knights on white horses riding over the island in search of dragons to slay for the heart of a lady.
However, the only dragons in Amy’s life were the bright lacy-winged dragonflies that buzzed around her. They darted in and out of the August air, then shot down the hillside toward a copse of wild blueberry bushes. She followed them past the vine roses that laced themselves into the thickets, waving away the honeybees that hovered before her in bright specks.
Nearby in the tall willow trees whose papery trunks were thick with clinging ivy, she heard the lyrical song of a starling and indigo buntings flew from branch to branch, their bright blue feathers melting into that wonderful sky.
Humming her own light tune, she knelt down beside those high bushes where the wild blueberries were so ripe and heavy with juice that one could touch them with the tip of a finger and they would tumble right into a cupped palm. She poked a couple of berry clusters.
Like pearls falling from a strand, the blueberries with their dark and frosted skins cascaded into her hand. They lay there for only a second before she weakened and popped them into her mouth, chewing so her cheeks bulged like a mouse that had found the Christmas pudding.
She was starved because, in her rush to go berry picking, a rush she’d had to make so the others would have no opportunity to leave her behind, she had not eaten even a bite of breakfast.
Her knees sinking in the soft brown dirt, she picked more berries and let them roll off her palm into a wicker basket that sat next to her forgotten shoes and stockings. Within a few minutes, the basket was half full and Amy had burrowed into the thicket, her bare and muddy toes the only thing showing from beneath the bushes.
Male voices and the crunching sound of boots on gravel drowned out the starling’s song and the faint buzz of the dragonflies and honeybees. Amy froze at the sound of that laughter, unsure if she should say something or just stay still. Through the leaves of the bushes, she could see nothing but a few pairs of trousers.
“I doubt anything could be that bad, Drew. Even I haven’t the stomach for such a sacrifice.”
Jonathan Winthrop had a sharp and distinctive voice she immediately recognized and “Drew” was Andrew Beale. Both were friends of her William. She listened quietly as she counted legs through the leaves. There were six men.
“’Tis a far, far better thing you do... for all that money,” quoted one of them, and the men laughed again.
“I’d rather exile myself out on Arrant Island with that band of mad Scots than shackle myself to that one.”
“Plaids have never been your best suiting, Drew.” There was more laughter. “And your family doesn’t need those millions.”
“Even if my family did, I doubt I’d become the sacrificial lamb.”
“You’d do it. If you needed the money as badly as William does.”
Amy froze the moment she understood they were talking about her. She held her breath and listened.
“When does the sacrificial lamb, or should I say ram, go to slaughter?”
There was more laughter. “Sometime in December.”
“December.” Someone laughed. “December is the doom and devastation of the De Pysters.”
“Say that six times quickly.”
Amy sat there and could almost feel her insides shrivel up, as if her hopes and happiness were just sucked from her until she was nothing more than an empty being. The men laughed again and made a word game of that last insult. She flushed with embarrassment.
“You know what they say, you can marry a woman for money and sex and still have love... Spend her money, spend her body, and love every minute of it!”
With each burst of laughter, each joke that continued, her cheeks grew hotter, her eyes burned with humiliation. She sat there hidden away and crying silently as she listened to William’s friends making fun of her. These were people who didn’t stop to watch a bird fly, to see a sunset, or to smell a rose. Handsewn doll clothes wouldn’t do for them. Things needed an expensive price tag or “a name.”
Amy didn’t have the right name, just enough money to cover any price tag they’d ever encounter. It was almost as if right there in the blueberry bushes she had changed from a person into not even half of a person, or a bad person, but something much worse: a bank account.
She closed her eyes and, for what seemed like the thousandth time in the past three years, she wished her parents were alive. She wished her mother were there with that lace handkerchief, not to wipe away the fog from a window, but to wipe away the tears she couldn’t stop.
She wished she could feel her mother’s arms around her, just once more, just this time, to make her feel whole, like a person again. She wished her father were alive so she could look in his eyes and see to someone, shewasspecial. She wished she were anywhere but there, and she wished she had William’s strong arm to hang on to.
When the men stopped laughing, she opened her eyes and stared at the blurry expanse of blueberry leaves around her. She realized then that she really wouldn’t want William, the only man who cared for her, to hear his friends’ jests and the laughter. She couldn’t bear for him to see the shame she was feeling. Shame she didn’t know how to overcome, shame she carried because she wasn’t born with the right name.
A few more moments of cruel and cutting jokes and the men moved on down the path toward the Cabot house, where anal frescomeal would be served in Chassy Cabot’s formal rose gardens before everyone would leave to attend the last event of the summer, the annual gala at the Bayard Estate.
Amy moved out of the bushes and stood slowly, not caring that leaves, dirt, and crushed blueberries clung to her blond hair and to the welts of her silk skirt, or that mud oozed up between her bare toes. A deep male voice carried back to her—something about deserving a medal of valor for the sacrifice.
She turned quickly, stunned and unbelieving, and stared at the curly brown hair and broad back of William De Pysters, the one man Amy had thought cared for her. She felt as if she were having one of those lucid and horrid moments just before you fall, the moment when the revelation of what’s happening smacks you in the face.
