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It was an early June day, the heady scent of apple blossoms wafting across the strait from Orchard Island mingled with the musk of a tremulous tide, and Mrs. Dolores Radcliffe strode down Main Street. She was out doing her once-monthly errands the way she had always done them, slim boot-heels clipping on the sidewalk. The gentlemen tipped their hats as she went, the ladies gave her indulgent smiles, the youths stepped aside to let her pass.
Dolores Radcliffe wore her finest peacock-blue, her long coat and gloves, her white hair swept up under her black silk hat just-so. And the people of Port George watched her fascinated, the only woman in town who could dress so old-fashioned and still turn heads.
Mrs. Radcliffe doesn’t read the newspaper or the fashion magazines, they murmured among themselves. She doesn’t know or care that it’s 1918, a new century, that we haven’t worn those styles in years. And what would it matter? She’s an institution, a fixture. She can do as she likes.
She followed her usual route through town, to the post office, the grocer, the bank, the butcher. You could set your watch by her, and many did.
But this time, when she stepped off the sidewalk to pass the alley between the butcher and the milliner, a shape emerged and impeded her progress. The shape of a person, bowed low, clothing in tatters. A man, all gray beard and pallid skin, who removed his flat cap and held out his hand.
“Please, ma’am,” he said, his voice rough and toneless from too much tobacco and cheap homemade liquor. “A few pennies. Please.”
And Mrs. Radcliffe—aware, perhaps, of the eyes of Port George—did not hesitate, but opened her coin purse and slipped a shiny quarter into his calloused hand.
He looked up, then, to thank her, and froze.
“The eye of God is on you,” he said, softly. And that was all, before he limped back into the alley and disappeared around a far brick corner.
Mrs. Dolores Radcliffe closed her coin purse with a snap, staring down the alley for a breath or two before she carried on her way.
It should have been like every other time before, but as she walked back to the place at the end of the street where her driver waited by the parked forest-green Pierce-Arrow motorcar, a shiver of wind through the trees filtered in from the harbor, pulled her thoughts away. To the garden. Her garden.
The scent of peonies filled her nostrils, though she cast about—looking left, looking right—and there were none nearby.
“Ma’am?” said Chester, the driver, looking up from polishing the motorcar’s wide, staring headlamps with a rag. “Everything alright?”
And Mrs. Radcliffe nodded, numb, and let him open the rear door to help her in. She settled herself, arranged her peacock-blue coat and skirts more comfortably, and found that her hands were shaking. Leaves in a breeze.
“Home, Chester,” she said, and sat back as he cranked the engine and they were off. Back to her white-painted house on the bluff overlooking the strait, one of the biggest in the neighborhood, a testament to her late husband’s fortune.
The eye of God is on you.
Whatever could he have meant by that?
Mrs. Radcliffe tumbled the portentous words around in her mind, trying to see them from every angle. Just a drunk man, a poor man, in desperate need, grateful for a quarter. Could his words have been anything more than the ravings of an addled mind? Or, perhaps, he had simply mistaken her for someone else. She could still feel his rheumy gaze upon her, smog-yellow eyes, unfocused. Certainly, certainly he could not have known who she was.
“Chester,” Dolores Radcliffe said, suddenly. “Do you smell peonies?”
But the driver shook his head. “Wouldn’t know a peony’s smell from any other bloom, ma’am,” he replied. “Could be. There’s an awfully nice smell in the air, these days. Could be peonies, for all I know.”
Mrs. Radcliffe nodded, looked out the window as the trees parted along the strait-side road and the June sun shimmered on the water like the quarter in the pauper’s hand, summer-bright.
The Radcliffe house was alone on the bluff like a watchtower, floral gardens spreading out from it like a skirt. Dolores had always been justifiably proud of that garden; she had worked hard to protect the more delicate plants against the salt-spray winds, the island storms. In her younger days, her garden parties had been the stuff of legend. Not so anymore. Once Fred had passed on, only eight years previous, the parties had ceased.
Chester pulled the Pierce-Arrow up the circular carriage-drive and helped her out. She thanked him and went inside, locking the front door against nothing in particular. She took off her long coat and her hat, went to the parlour to sit at her desk and sift through her letters. The parlour windows looked out into the rear of the garden, a riot of early summer color.
It was June, and the peony bush—the one Fred had given her for her forty-third birthday—had grown to monstrous heights over the decades against the odds, leaning against the potting shed, heavy with crimson blooms the size of cabbages.
Mrs. Radcliffe avoided looking at it. Admired the soft pink clematis climbing the garden gate, instead.
*******
It was a restless night. Unsettled dreams plagued her, the voice of the pauper rising up from the space under her canopied bed:
The eye of God is on you.
And all the while, the reaching arms of the monstrous peony bush stretched away from the potting shed toward the house, like vines, like something unnatural, each red flower like a bloodshot eye, searching her out. Mrs. Radcliffe could feel them climbing the wall, slipping in through the window, holding her down, strangling the life out of her.
Strangling the life out of her. Strangling…strangling…
She woke, rose with a cry, hands clutched around her neck, eyes brimming with tears.
How could he know? Her thoughts thundered with every beat of her old heart, fluttering like a bird’s wings. How could he possibly know?
Dolores Radcliffe climbed out of bed on shaking legs and crossed to the window. The moon was new, the garden was shrouded in complete darkness. She could see nothing. But she could feel it, out there. A watchfulness. A pulsing, as the roots of the monstrous peony consumed and consumed, drawing the spirit out of the corpse that lay there and turning it to growth.
No, no, that was foolish. It had been decades. What had been buried there had certainly disappeared into the earth long ago, with nothing left. Not even bones. Certainly not even bones. Not even a rumor remained. Not even the girl’s name. A traveler looking for work, no references. Seventeen and stupid. And Dolores Radcliffe had been an angrier woman, back then, but in secret; a searing rage had smoldered deeply under her diaphragm, needing very little to fuel it. An anger born of quiet, perhaps, or solitude, or boredom.
It had been an accident. At least, that’s what she told herself, and what she had told Fred. Just an unfortunate thing, but no one had to know. No family came looking for the girl. After all, a place in the garden was just as good as any fate for a drifter like that.
Mrs. Radcliffe stood by the window for a long, long time, staring out into a darkness that seemed to stare back.
******
The next morning dawned under roiling clouds, and Mrs. Radcliffe called for Chester, told him to get the Pierce-Arrow ready. She was going back into town.
He was surprised, and did not hide it.
“Did you forget something, ma’am?”
“No,” she said. “I’ll be ready in an hour.”
The ride back into town was silent, Chester keeping his uneasy thoughts to himself, Dolores Radcliffe thinking through what she would say to the pauper, as soon as she found him again. She wanted to know how he knew. She wanted to know if he knew.
She arrived in town to find the atmosphere strained, somehow, as if the pauper had been busy at his business and spreading gossip all over Main Street. There were less souls around, and there was an odd electricity in the air. A readiness, but for what?
The clouds tumbled by on lofty winds. Mrs. Dolores Radcliffe walked straight down the sidewalk, boot-heels clipping steadily, toward the alley where she had met the pauper. When she got there, he was nowhere to be seen. She looked around her, but the streets were strangely empty for this time of day.
The eye of God is on you.
A particularly heavy bank of cloud began its slow passage over the face of the sun, dimming the world, a hand slipping over the heavenly stare.
But it was not a cloud, not really.
Mrs. Radcliffe stepped off the sidewalk, casting about for any sign of the pauper, for any sign of anyone who could help her to search for him. He could not be allowed to spread her secrets, those lies, around this town. To sully her good name. It would not stand.
But the darkness only deepened, an unnatural cold sweeping through the streets, a shiver as a hellish gloom fell, a surprised flutter as birds took to the air, believing it to be night. The world seemed to hold its breath.
And Mrs. Radcliffe looked up, looked up, and there it was.
An eye. A great black eye, peering down at her from heaven. An eye that sees all, that knows all, looking down upon Mrs. Dolores Radcliffe.
Murderer! Murderer!
The old woman cried out, seized by a terrible agony of fear, the scent of peonies filling her lungs as if to drown them, surrounded by the crimson eyes of accusation.
And she fell down dead, there on the sidewalk.
When the darkness faded and the light returned, the people of Port George found Mrs. Dolores Radcliffe lifeless where she fell, clutching her throat, gray eyes wide as though watching the clouds for a sign, her old heart having failed her.
A sad thing, they said. What a sorrow. But Mrs. Radcliffe doesn’t read the newspaper. Mrs. Radcliffe couldn’t have known, they said, about the solar eclipse. A rare thing. A cosmic wonder.
She couldn’t have known, poor old thing.
END
Author’s Note:
Inspired by the solar eclipse event earlier this week, I did a bit of digging to find out the last time that Washington State (and therefore Ferris Island) was in the path of totality, and as far as I could tell it was June 8th, 1918. I thought about all the people back then who probably had no idea that an eclipse was even coming until they saw it happen, and Mrs. Radcliffe’s tale was born.
The painting—yes, a painting!—below was made by Howard Russell Butler, who was tasked with recording the eclipse after only looking at it for a few seconds. He recorded the event from Baker, Oregon, where it was assumed he would have the best view, unobscured by clouds.
You write/paint such cinematic scenes. Me again, thinking I’m in a Twilight Zone episode 😳 Just perfectly imagined (and the goosebumps along with it).
Stunning as usual! Took me a second to realize it was an eclipse--inspiration strikes at the most interesting times!