Penn's Woodland Read online

  Penn's Woodland

  By David Connor

  Published by JMS Books LLC

  Visit jms-books.com for more information.

  Copyright 2019 David Connor

  ISBN 9781646560738

  Cover Design: London Burden

  Image(s) used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.

  All rights reserved.

  WARNING: This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If it is sold, shared, or given away, it is an infringement of the copyright of this work and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

  No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of review.

  This book is for ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It may contain sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which might be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published in the United States of America.

  * * * *

  Penn's Woodland

  By David Connor

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  Ewan Parish

  Of all the mail awaiting my return to my Parisian apartment, it was the simple white envelope from the U.S. that grabbed my attention first. I opened the missive on my way to the bedroom, where my fiancée, Fiona, was lounging diagonally across rumpled white linens.

  “You are home barely a moment, Ewan Parish, and already your attention is elsewhere,” she complained, scolding me like a schoolmarm may a naughty lad. She was right. I was not focused on her. Though I had noted she wore not a single stitch of clothing.

  The two-page note was dated several months prior. International correspondence was still slow in the 1920s. Plus, I had been away several weeks, enduring the celebrity that came along with my latest work in Athens. I was an architect—an artist—who created masterworks in iron, concrete, brick, and glass, in which wealthy people dwelled, shopped, or dined on decadent meals.

  “It’s from an American woman named Georgia Dupree,” I said. “And she wants…”

  “She wants what?” Fiona snatched the top page right out of my hands.

  “An enclosure. A pen for her and someone or something called Pennsylvania in order to wander the woods inclusive in their massive estate. Some sort of…protection, I suppose, that would run from the dwelling through much of the unkempt part of the property. A fenced-in passageway longer than some roads I’ve traveled, constructed in ornamental iron scrolls with a damned cage at the end that she is calling a gazebo.”

  “Such a thing sounds preposterous,” Fiona exclaimed. “If the woods are that dangerous, shouldn’t one avoid them?”

  Preposterous, yet intriguing, to someone of my creativity and drive. To most, the sample scrollwork drawing enclosed would have appeared simply as squiggles in ink. Something about it moved me, though, something I could not quite identify. “I must go.” I sat beside Fiona and kissed her once on her tiny, exposed breast. “I must travel to the United States, to the heart of Dixie, as they say there, to at least meet Miss Dupree face to face.”

  Fiona had obviously planned a night of lovemaking to welcome me home from my travails. Candles flickered, champagne fizzed in two crystal goblets, and I could enjoy none of it once I had opened the post from abroad. “Will you be gone so long again?” Fiona asked me. “Cannot you design it from here and have someone else build?”

  “I shall follow my heart, Fiona, as I always have. And the profits shall be worth the strife.”

  “But we need no more money. We have all we could wish for.”

  “In material possessions, perhaps. But I am not yet fulfilled.”

  I was oft referred to as arrogant and roguish, also charming and attractive, but never humble. I’d been labeled a perpetual bachelor in many a society page. Fiona had to figure, despite the shiny ring on her finger, the chances of her becoming my missus were slim.

  “I thought we were connected at our souls, my love.” Fiona unfastened my trousers, released my manhood from my breaches, and then kissed the tip. “I do not fulfill you?” The lack of response should have been her answer. “May I come along?” she asked hopefully.

  “You’d be bored there, Fiona. America is very much not Paris,” I told her.

  “Is it that easy to leave me behind, Ewan?” Fiona frowned.

  Far removed from the limelight and prestige I was accustomed to, this project would be more for my psyche than my money clip. I still enjoyed the challenge and imagination each new endeavor required; it was the fame I’d quickly grown tired of. The pressure to outdo my last work, the need to make an audience gasp, with eyes wide and cheeks puffed from smiling, it all made me feel like a performer, as fake as the snake oil some swifty always hocked on the sidelines. I was long proud regarding my aptitude for fakery. Only recently, had I come to loathe it.

  Fiona and I spent the night entangled in the sheets. By morning, I had set off alone. Leaving Fiona had been no great hardship. As I had said, I always followed my heart. And though my body may have eventually reacted to Fiona’s touch, my heart would never hold her special. At least I’d felt badly about it. That, I figured, signified progress.

  Chapter 1

  Pennsylvania Aloysius Dupree

  I am Pennsylvania Aloysius Dupree, the someone—or something—Ewan Parish had read about in the letter from the United States. Quite some time later, to my surprise, and also my sister Georgia’s, apparently, he had arrived on our doorstep.

  “Why me, Miss Dupree?” They sat at the kitchen table. Georgia seemed flustered and Ewan Parish’s haughtiness was as thick as his Scottish accent.

  “I saw your latest work in the newspaper,” Georgia answered. “Some hotel in Spain.”

  “It was Greece. And so, what? You thought that made me the perfect candidate to design your dog kennel? Or is it a bloody prison yard?”

  “If you’re disinterested or insulted, why cross ocean to meet with me, Mr. Parish?”

  “You may call me Ewan.”

  “If you’re refusing, Ewan, would not a letter have been more efficient? Or you simply could have told me when you phoned from the inn.”

  Georgia had not been as surprised by Mr. Parish’s arrival as she’d apparently seemed after all. Maybe her earlier demeanor had been all nerves?

  “Will I be meeting Pennsylvania?” Ewan asked.

  Georgia visibly blanched, but recovered. She poured herself a second glass of sweet tea, then moved the pitcher to hover over Ewan’s, still nearly full. He put his hand over it.

  “Mr. Parish, Pennsylvania is—”

  “Dangerous? Deformed? Demented, delirious, dumb? All have been used by the townsfolk to describe him.”

  My heart leapt to my throat. Georgia set the pitcher down hard.

  “I am not used to such forceful discourtesy, Mr. Parish,” she said. “Your job is to create the walkway and gazebo, not to become acquainted with family matters that are none of your concern.”

  “People talk, Miss Dupree. A few questions uncovered much information. Some knew who I was. Some did not,” Ewan said. “But everyone knew of Pennsylvania and hi
s legacy. Is he the beast many claim him to be? This labyrinth, this…fancy jail cell, it is for him, yes? Or because of him, perhaps. Another way to keep him confined?”

  “Unfounded tittle-tattle, Mr. Parish. In polite society, we do not repeat it,” Georgia answered.

  “Come on, lassie! You had to know I would ask. You had to know damned well there’d be innuendo throughout the town.”

  “Yes,” Georgia said simply.

  “I shall take on the project.”

  “You will?”

  “You’d hoped I would refuse?”

  “Part of me was certain you would.” Georgia patted her forehead with a linen napkin.

  “I’ve drawn up some preliminary—”

  “The gaps in the ironwork must be smaller.” The page was barely in her hand. “More…”

  “Secure?”

  “Yes.”

  “The complicated ironwork will take time to shape,” Ewan said. “The original drawing you sent, who produced it?”

  “I would rather not say.”

  “Then that is my answer, isn’t it? It was Pennsylvania.” Ewan patted his pocket. I wondered if my drawing was inside, a rendering which had nothing to do with iron scrolls, but was simply a doodle made one rather sad day many years ago. Georgia had taken it from me. I wondered why she’d saved it.

  “When can you begin, Mr. Parish?” Georgia asked.

  “Immediately. I shall fashion the first scrollwork piece myself, then have it replicated. That will take a week or so. There is much digging and such to do in the meantime. If we work both ends and meet in the middle, for expedience—”

  “You must not tamper with the home itself until absolutely necessary,” Georgia insisted. “As not to upset Pennsylvania unduly.”

  Ewan shrugged. “Fine. I shall return tomorrow.” He stood. “If you have not changed your mind by then.”

  “Let’s hope I do not.”

  As I listened, sequestered in my room, I rather wished she would. I’d have been all too happy to inform Mr. Ewan Parish of all there was to tell right then and there about the family Dupree. I’d have recounted the entire sordid history for him—if only I’d been able.

  Georgia was my caretaker, not only my sister. She had broached the topic months ago, about a way I could return to the woods. I’d declined. Those woods frightened me, like little else ever had. She had agreed to abandon the notion, or so I had thought.

  I had another sister called Virginia. Our mother was Carolina, and Delaware, our sire. We came from wealth: a wealth of money, but sadly not of morals or sanity, as it seemed the innkeeper’s wife had already told the handsome stranger suddenly in our midst. My sisters were older. I came over half a generation later, almost to the day of their birth, making them seventeen the year I arrived and mother died.

  I’d resided with Georgia, the spinster, my entire life, in our ancestral antebellum home, a literal prisoner in my own chamber. My world extended no further than my eyes could see into the back yard. This was my punishment, or my salvation, depending upon who was asked. Though my visual perspective of any goings-on within the home was limited to a lens the size of my thumbnail—a hole recently created in the wall between my room and the kitchen—listening through the heat vent, I heard every word of nearly every conversation.

  I rarely engaged in verbal exchanges myself. Many of my thoughts I did put to paper. For I had pen and parchment in hand when the knock came upon the door, and I held them both, still. Just as oft, however, I created such narratives only within my mind, mute conversations to keep it sharp. Though this is the spin I sometimes attached to talking to myself, it is also possible I spoke inwardly simply due to loneliness; company was rare. The most likely reason I did it, however, the rationale man would attribute, was simply because I was mad.

  I strained to look out the side of my tiny window as Ewan Parish departed. A gasp escaped my chest with my paper pressed to it, as he paused just below it and glanced in my direction. I moved to the side and stood flat against the wall. My body was still, except for the pounding of my heart. I even held my breath. Had he seen me?

  Ewan Parish was much handsomer in person than he had been in magazines. His clothing hung loose on his rugged physique and he had the appearance of someone who worked, rather than one who bossed others around. His dark and messy hair was longer than any respectable man would keep it—nearly as long as mine, the least respectable man in Rabun County, most would attest. Despite the distance between us, Ewan’s eyes were radiant; I found myself taken by the olive-green hue that caught every ray and bounced it back. His nose was crooked, his brows bushy and untidy. His face was covered in at least a day’s worth of stubble, unremoved after travel, and his lips, the dark pink of them, shone like his eyes when he licked them over and over, against the parching winds of late March in the south. It was an image all too fleeting, and one I wished to store and recall.

  For what purpose, though, truly, I asked myself, as I considered writing or drawing what my eyes have taken in. The joy I once got from reading about interesting people I might meet and far-off places I might one day travel, those illusions continued to wane. Why even keep up with the news, I wondered. What difference could it make what was happening right outside my door, let alone around the globe? Still, whether or not there be a useful point to it in the end, I always looked forward to reading those sections of The Courier selected as appropriate that arrived each morning in the dumbwaiter. Since I was on the bottom floor, it was more precisely just a pass-through. A thin, wooden panel on my side with a thick, metal gate on the other offered evidence that it was not I who needed protection, but rather others who required it from me. Had Ewan been offered a tour of the surroundings, he may have drawn such conclusions himself.

  As for this pathway he’d been brought in to construct, though I saw the little rabbits, the foxes, and the squirrels, and truly wanted to run amongst them, though I wanted to touch the velvety moss and the rough bark of old trees, though, yes, I even yearned for the prickle of brambles, I feared I did not deserve such pleasure. Why should I revel in any kind of beauty, I asked myself, even in a cage, when because of my doing, my dearest, most beautiful, kind, and gentle Judah Mobley no longer could?

  Once again, alone with my thoughts and a feeling I needed to describe, I recorded them. I hear the wheels on the gravel and I know you have departed. I remain against the wall. Though there is no chance you can see me, I dare not move from this spot. The motion of my hand as I write seems even dangerous. This entire day—your visit and what it has done to me specifically—is so beyond the norm, I feel as if I am caught in a lurid dream. My heart does not slow and my breathing is not yet right. It is a stirring far below my chest, however, lower in my body and oh so very deep, that has most of my attention.

  I looked at what I had scrawled across white paper. My innermost feelings had long frightened me. I rarely transcribed them so boldly anymore, but when I did, be it as a single sentence or an entire page, I would deposit the parchment between the plasterwork and the back of the bricks that made up the exterior of the home. Said fate would befall those very words, the lustful ones written to Mr. Parish, and so would be the same for all that followed. If only my “repulsive,” “appalling,” and “aberrant” thoughts were so easy to destroyed, I told myself. If only I could have discarded them, from their earliest revelation, to the part of the cellar constantly flooded from runoff to rot in the muck as if never existent. I’d reveled in them instead at one time, and hence they became the very thing that destroyed me.

  I was first admonished for such stirrings—innocent though they were—quite young. I was playing with Judah and Abee Mobley. Abee, pronounced like “baby” without the “b,” called so after her father, Abel. She and Judah belonged to Celia, one of the help. It was six-year-old Judah’s hand I often wanted to hold. It was Judah to whom I had proposed, not Abee, with a ring made from a buttercup, which lead to us becoming playhouse spouses. It had all seemed so natural to me.
But my hand was slapped right out of his one day in the kitchen and my cheek was reddened by a swift whack when I dared ask why in my slow and stuttering words.

  It was the summer before I would have started lessons that this, and my first spell, occurred. I had so been looking forward to kindergarten, completely enamored with the notion of mingling and frolicking with children my own age rather than stoic adults like my sisters. Alas, I never got to go.

  “Pennsylvania’s fits and impedances will not serve him well in such an environment,” Auntie Virginia had said. “He would not only prove himself an embarrassment to the name Dupree, but his proclivities may very well render him a criminal.” As young as I may have been when I’d heard it, I forever recalled her scathing indictment.

  Unlike Georgia, Auntie Virginia was always a sporadic presence in my life. It was her idea that I call her “Auntie,” even though she is my sister. Perhaps she felt it gave her more gravitas. Auntie Virginia was the smart one. According to Georgia, everyone said so. She had gone off to study to become a nurse sometime while mother carried me, but had allegedly returned to be present at my birth. I knew firsthand that Auntie Virginia had come home to stay, married and pregnant, that summer when I was barely five. I remembered her moodiness as being even more intense and hoped she would deliver quickly, to squelch it some, and also so I might find myself with a male cousin with whom I could eventually bond. Back when I had been allowed free run of the house and the woods behind it, Judah was the only playmate I’d had of my gender. Judah was older and had already started school. I loved summer back then, because it meant he could be at the house far more often. Abee was the only female I ever saw, not counting my sisters and the women who tended to the house. Abee thought herself so mature at only ten. She followed my Auntie Virginia around like a hungry housecat. Some days she was pleasant, sometimes she was not. Most often, she was completely disinterested in me, because I was a “retard.”

  “Why…do you call…me that?” I’d once asked.