The
Secret Bliss of Calliope Ipswich
by
Marcia Lynn McClure
“Oh!
Do link arms with me, Calliope,” Blanche whispered, her brown eyes widening
with apprehension. She took Calliope’s arm, tightly linking it with her own.
“The old Mulholland house still gives me the willies every time I walk past it.
I hate to think on what might have gone on inside. It’s truly terrifyin’!”
“Oh, don’t be silly, Blanche,” Calliope said, feigning calm. “Poor Prudence’s lunacy…it’s sad. And besides, her fiendish acts were not committed inside the house. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just…it’s just a sad, empty building.” Calliope Ipswich felt the hypocrite, however, as an uncomfortable shiver of residual dread and unease shuttered down her spine.
More
than six months had passed since the All Hollow’s Eve when the dangerous state
of Prudence Mulholland’s fracturing mind had been revealed to the townsfolk of
Meadowlark Lake. And now, each time Calliope thought of poor Prudence and her
family, not only did her heart ache for their family’s unhappy lot but a chill
of lingering horror rippled through her being.
In truth, at times
Calliope wondered if it had all been simply a bad dream—a nightmare. But it
hadn’t. It really had happened—all of it.
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Blanche’s pretty forehead puckered with a slight frown. “You don’t like Fox as much as he likes you, do you, Calliope? You’re not in love with him.”
Calliope silently scolded herself for having let her countenance
and words reveal her secret to Blanche. The truth was that she was not as sweet
on Fox Montrose as he was on her. Yet there were secrets in her heart that
could never be revealed to anyone—not even to Blanche, not even to Calliope’s
own sisters.
Therefore, she chose a counter maneuver with which to distract
Blanche and said, “Oh, I adore Fox! I just think these things may take time, you
know, for me to…to…”
“To really fall in love with him, you mean,” Blanche finished.
“Yes. Perhaps that is what I mean,” Calliope responded.
Yet as they neared the Montrose house, trepidation welled up in
Calliope’s bosom, for she knew that if she hadn’t fallen in love with Fox
Montrose by now, she never would. Furthermore, she didn’t want to.
A secret bliss was nestled deep inside Calliope Ipswich. It had
been nestled there from nearly the moment the Ipswich family had arrived in
Meadowlark Lake all those months past. And though it was a bliss she owned in
knowing something about herself that even her own sisters did not know, it
likewise brought her pain at times—for it was the very reason she knew she
would never fall in love with Fox Montrose. Calliope’s love was already spoken
for—and no one in all the wide world, save Calliope Ipswich herself, would ever
know it.
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