Blue Willow

by Deborah Smith

  “That was a mistake. Maybe I thought … I’m not what you want me to be. You were writing to someone you believed in, and it wasn’t fair to you.”

  “Because you have a lover.”

  “Because there isn’t much innocence in my life anymore.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Just believe this—I care about you. I always have. I always will.”

  She started to say something, but it seemed to catch in her throat. Her face softened, not forgiving, but resigned. “I believe you,” she said, swallowing hard. She got to her feet and went to the forgotten cardboard box. Kneeling beside it, she shoved the flaps down and wrestled them shut. Her mouth was set; her hands moved swiftly.

  She pushed the box aside as if afraid he’d ask more questions about her reasons for keeping everything he’d ever sent her, then settled her hands in her lap and leveled a somber gaze at him. “The man who shot me is going to live here now.”

  When he didn’t say anything, her shoulders sagged, and she looked away. Artemas fought the emotion rusting his throat. “I’ll do everything I can to prevent that,” he told her.

  “You can’t stand losing, can you?”

  “No. And I doubt you can either.”

  “Maybe we’re two of a kind. Maybe that’s our worst problem.” She rose and hurried past him, then climbed swiftly down the ladder.

  Artemas moved to the edge of the loft door and watched her walk to the house. Two of a kind echoed in his thoughts.

  Thirteen

  Lily stood beside him in the shallow parking lot in front of a line of businesses in town, looking up grimly at the large, handsome old building that was Mr. Estes’s hardware and feed store.

  The vast whitewashed front porch was lined with gleaming new lawn mowers and wheelbarrows for sale. The pair of shallow steps that led up to the porch were made of gleaming marble blocks. Row after row of bedding plants—tomatoes, peppers, squash, cucumbers, and much more—were stacked on big bleachers at either end of the porch.

  The store’s shingled roof came to a peak above a pristine red-and-white sign that said, ESTES FARM AND HARDWARE SUPPLIES, ESTABLISHED 1946.

  The double wooden doors were shut. A large, hand-lettered sign hung on the screened doors in front of them: CLOSED—ILLNESS.

  Lily’s shoulders sagged with disappointment. Artemas had gotten her psyched up for victory, not this. He frowned at the sign, cursed under his breath, but squeezed her arm in reassurance. They looked at the half-dozen empty parking spaces on either side of her old Jeep. “We’ll try again tomorrow,” he said.

  Lily spotted Little Sis coming out of a small vacant shop up the street. Her brindled hair was done in a French braid. A brooch snugged a funky red-velvet jacket to her waist. A long print skirt billowed around her legs, and she tapped one earth-shoe-clad foot impatiently as she stopped to converse with her companion. Pudgy Mr. Ledbetter, the placid little man who’d owned the block of buildings as long as Lily could remember, shook Little Sis’s hand.

  “She’s making some kind of deal,” Lily said.

  “How can you tell?”

  “That’s how she dresses when she’s serious.”

  “My God.”

  “Come on. Maybe she knows what happened to Mr. Estes.”

  When they walked up, Little Sis squinted from Lily to Artemas and distractedly waved good-bye to Mr. Ledbetter, who drove off in an old yellow Cadillac. “I’m renting this shop,” she announced. “And I’m moving in with Maude and Big Sis.”

  Lily explained to Artemas. “Big Sis started living with Aunt Maude this past winter. Uncle Wesley died last year, and Aunt Maude was lonely.”

  “Wesley was never home anyway,” Little Sis interjected tartly. “He had a stroke and fell off his bass boat. Drowned with the bass swimming around him. I say it was poetic justice.” Little Sis tilted her head back and eyed Artemas.

  “Good morning,” he said politely.

  “May the Force be with you,” she shot back.

  Lily intervened quickly. “What are you going to do with this shop?”

  “Sell books and such. New Age. This town needs an alternative to reality There are a lot of tourists now. They’ll buy.” Little Sis waved her hands, dismissing the subject as if it were beside the point. “You came to town to see Mr. Estes?”

  “Yes. But his store’s closed. Do you know what’s going on?”

  Little Sis looked dejected. “He went home to take his wife to the doctor. She was having chest pains. He’s a stiff-lipped old stud—I feel sorry for him. Frail wife. Lousy son.” Gently laying a hand on Lily’s arm, Little Sis added, “Maude talked to him this morning, honey. He said he won’t sell.”

  Lily was unprepared for that sudden crash of hope. She stood there numbly, the morning sunlight stabbing her eyes. Suddenly Artemas’s arm was around her shoulder, and his deep voice was near her ear. “We’ll talk to him again. Don’t you dare give up.”

  She raised her chin and looked at him gratefully. She wasn’t giving up on anything, him included.

  The mansion at Blue Willow was sinking into a green ocean of greedy pines and young hardwoods, hemmed in a web of thorny vines. Ragged ivy climbed the walls. The gabled roofs of weathered blue slate rose bravely against a dark blue sky. Gothic and Victorian, the house had a cathedral-like dignity. It whispered of the gilded age when Gatsbyesque industrial barons made outlandish fortunes and spent them building estates to rival those of Europe’s landed gentry.

  To Artemas, it was a proud symbol of dreams that had been too good to last. Reality had returned with the Depression, overextended investments, modern taxation, and the mismanagement of a fortune and a legacy by Artemas’s ancestors. Blue Willow had been their victim.

  All the lower windows and doors were covered in large sheets of tin anchored by bolts in the stone. Rust marks streaked them. The upper windows, with their peaked cornices and delicate little panes of glass, reflected silver light from the afternoon sun. In places the panes were broken—a whole set missing in several—and they made dark holes in the light, like a gap-toothed smile.

  Shadows engulfed the vast, empty spaces under a loggia that anchored the mansion’s base. He’d spent countless hours on that windswept veranda, sailing balsa-wood airplanes Mrs. MacKenzie helped him construct. If he closed his eyes, he could see himself dodging among islands of white wicker furniture as he chased them.

  Below the loggia was a terrace bounded in a stone balustrade. The spires of three tall fountains peeked over the pines that had taken over where Mr. MacKenzie had kept a neat lawn and flower beds. Artemas had never seen the fountains work; their plumbing had fallen into disrepair before his birth.

  The house’s pearl-gray stone walls were softened by the overgrown patches of ivy; the majesty and solemn grandeur were, somehow, unforbidding. To Artemas the house was a part of the mountains beyond, and just as majestic.

  He stood beside Lily at the edge of the lake below, filled with the disastrous sense that he was sharing this view with the only person beside himself who appreciated it.

  Their clothes were damp with the sweet, muggy air. She was close enough to bump against him, something they both avoided awkwardly. Standing with her head thrown back, she latched her hands in the back pockets of loose jeans. A faded blue T-shirt clung to the rise and fall of her breasts. Her sturdy work shoes sank into the soft soil as she braced her feet apart. Her attitude said she was strong enough to endure his company without saying any more about past or future, hopes or disappointments.

  But the unspoken tension was there, a bleak force between them.

  “To me, the house always looks friendly,” she said, her voice mingling with the soft lapping of the lake. “Every kid in the county grows up telling ghost stories about it. I made some up myself. I decided if people were scared of it, they’d leave it alone. You can see from the broken windows that a lot of them prowled around.”

  She pointed to the palm court jutting from the left end of the
house. Its soaring green-glass structure was banded with sheets of plywood at the bottom. “When I was little, someone tore off some of the plywood and broke a big hole in the glass. I used to climb inside and sit by the fountain, with a book to read. After I got shot wandering around up there, Daddy covered the hole. I thought I’d never forgive him. I lost my private hideaway.”

  Artemas wanted to tell her that he’d restore the place someday. He wanted to say she’d be welcome to visit. And that he’d buy her land back for her, even if it took years of patient assaults on Mr. Estes’s strange stubbornness. But she wouldn’t believe him right now.

  He walked past her, following a narrow path that curved around the lake’s northern end, then up the ridge to the house. She hurried after him.

  They made their way up the hill through pine thickets where a vast lawn had stretched from the back terrace to the lake. Sunlight dappled the ground, and the only sounds were the soft rustle of their feet on a mat of pine needles. The sensation of entering a lost, enchanted world enveloped him.

  A set of stone steps, nearly submerged in the soil, marked the rise to the terrace. They grew out of the ground, becoming steeper, until they ended at an entrance in the terrace’s balustrade. It was unsettling to walk in a forest where he remembered open lawn. The terrace fountains loomed in the thicket, looking eerie and displaced.

  Suddenly he and Lily emerged at the grand stone steps to the loggia. They were several dozen feet wide, and tall stone urns marked each side. Artemas halted on the lowest step, and Lily moved up beside him. Her arm brushed his, moist and hot, a kiss of skin on skin. She seemed oblivious to the startling contact, or determined to ignore it.

  Gazing up at the cavernous veranda and its tall stone columns, she said softly, “My grandmother told stories about the Christmas pageants that were held here. She said your grandparents invited everyone for miles. They brought in a choir—at least a hundred singers, she said—and if the weather was warm that year, the choir would stand outdoors on these stairs. She said it felt as if they were singing to the mountains.”

  She bounded up the stairs and turned. Artemas watched her look out over the pines, her head held up proudly. For a moment the sorrow that always hovered in her expression was replaced by contentment.

  He followed quickly and stood beside her. His vivid memory of the view had not been a child’s fantasy; the panorama of rounded mountains and deep sky was breathtaking. “I envy you,” he said gruffly. “You’ve had so many years to enjoy this. I only had a few.”

  “But you have the rest of your life. This all belongs to you.” Her temporary enchantment faded; her face became somber, and a little angry. Artemas grasped her hand and pulled her up the rest of the steps. “Show me how you got to the opening in the palm court.”

  She shot a startled glance at him. “I climbed up on the foundation. A ledge runs along the bottom of the glass walls.”

  “Lead the way.”

  They strode across the loggia’s echoing marble floor, leaving footprints in the thick dust. At the far end a narrow set of stone stairs led down to what had been rose gardens, now a jungle of pines capped in wisteria. The house loomed over them as they pushed through the undergrowth. The stone wall gave way to the palm-court wing. Soaring glass panels rose out of the girdle of warped gray plywood. The mansion’s foundation formed a ledge, just as she’d said.

  Her head back, she searched for something midway down the long expanse. “Here it is.” They stopped under a sheet of wood that was less colored with age. Artemas studied the vertical rows of corroded nailheads sinking into the dilapidated wood. “I think we can pull that sheet off,” he said.

  She looked at him with glowing eyes. “All right.”

  Before he could help her—as if she needed or wanted it—she lodged a toe into the deep crevices between the blocks of stone and boosted herself onto the wide lip at their top. By the time Artemas climbed up beside her, she was standing by the plywood panel and eagerly tugging at its edge. He took the other side.

  The wood groaned as they jerked outward, caving in around the heavy nails. “Let go of it, old girl,” Lily said under her breath, talking to the mansion with comfortable intimacy. “We’ll put your patch back on when we leave.”

  Earthy-smelling air gusted from the palm courts interior as the sheet came loose. Artemas glimpsed a shadowy world of genteel ruin inside, and his heart twisted with recognition as a ray of sunlight fell on the fountain at its center. They set the wooden panel aside. The missing section of glass left an entrance easily large enough for them to step through without bending.

  “It looks almost like I remember,” Lily said, as the soft greenish light surrounded them. She nodded in satisfaction at the ruins of palm trunks scattered around the floor, the fountain with its girlish cherub stained with years of rainwater from the broken panes overhead, and the huge, cracked ceramic containers leaning haphazardly on the floor. She dropped to her heels and brushed dirt from white tiles decorated with delicate blue willows.

  Artemas looked at the place with a dull ache rising in his chest. “I remember it filled with plants and wrought-iron garden furniture, and the palms reaching the ceiling, and the fountain—it was the only one that still worked. My grandmother kept goldfish in it. And she had parakeets. They were tame, and they’d light on my hands. It was heaven.”

  “I wish I could have seen it. But I love it even the way it looks now.”

  He knelt beside her and brushed his fingertips over the tiles. One of them wobbled under the pressure; he pried it loose. “Would you like to keep this?”

  She looked at him with tenderness darkening her eyes, as blue as the color on the tile. In that second the invisible distance between them faded; they were close in a way they hadn’t been before. “No, it belongs here,” she answered softly.

  So do you, he wanted to say. But she took the tile from him and carefully put it back in its place. “Do you remember the story my mother told about the willows? About how things started?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ve read all about Colebrook Blue Willow. I got books about china makers from the library. They said the Blue Willow pattern was well known. The great English potters had been adapting it and other designs from the Orient for years. Old Artemas must have known that Americans couldn’t get enough of it.”

  Artemas shrugged. “By all accounts, he was ambitious and smart.”

  “He was real ambitious,” Lily corrected. “He saw that Americans wanted Imported’ Blue Willow because that sounded fancier, so he stamped ‘England’ under his trademark and worked out a scheme to have his china carried by English ship captains up north, where it was sold at prices that undercut the real McCoy. He fooled people for years.”

  Artemas frowned at her accusing tone. “The public thought it was buying fine English china at a reasonable price. He was English. It was fine china. That’s not much of a deception.”

  “I’ve always wanted to believe that Old Artemas got the inspiration to make the Blue Willow pattern from my great-great-great-grandmother and her willow trees. But maybe he was just looking for a smart business opportunity. Maybe it wasn’t sentimental at all.”

  “No,” Artemas said firmly. “They were married. She died having their child. Those are historical facts. If he loved her, he must have wanted to honor her. My grandmother always said that Colebrook China owed its beginnings to Elspeth MacKenzie’s influence.”

  “But it’s just legend. Like believing that the willow trees were a gift from a dangerous mountain spirit disguised as an old man. They’re botanical mutants, and Elspeth probably bartered with some scruffy peddler to get ’em.”

  “I prefer your mother’s version of the story.”

  “Why? It’s pretty corny for a tough character like you.”

  He stood, angry and restless, glaring down at her. “I have my fantasies.” Striding to the fountain, he stepped up on the basin’s wide rim, then turned slowly, taking everything in, finally inc
luding her again. She had risen to her feet and was watching him with uncertain, melancholy admiration. “This place needs a caretaker,” he said slowly. “Someone to keep the ghosts in line. There used to be some guest cottages on the front side, beyond the old stables and greenhouses. Are any of them still standing?”

  “The roofs have fallen in, and all the windows are gone. The stone walls are still there though.”

  “I should have one of them restored. Lily, I could give it to you. You could live there. It would be yours—I’d deed it to you. And some land—”

  “No.” She ran over and halted at the fountain’s base with her head tilted back. Her cheeks flushed darkly, and her eyes gleamed with tears. “That would make me feel like a servant here. My parents were Colebrook servants, but I won’t ever be.”

  “I swear I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “I know.” She sank to the fountain’s rim, staring into space, her back rigid with pride. Artemas dropped down beside her. “I only want to make things right for you,” he said. “For everything our families have shared, for what you’ve lost, for what our friendship means to me.”

  She glanced at him, then studied the toe of her shoe, stirring up the years of fine dust that had settled in her private sanctuary. “Maybe you already have, just by coming back.”

  Artemas cleared his throat. “I want you here—I want you to live here. Somehow.”

  “Even if I have to leave, I’ll come back for good someday To my place. And you will too. To yours.”

  Always separate. With other people in their lives. She would find someone, love someone, marry. There was nothing he could do to change that. The words he wanted to say were locked inside him. He massaged his temples, trying to drive away the frustration pounding there. He imagined himself snatching her into his arms. Stay here for me. I’ll hide what we have together. I’ll come to see you every chance I get. No one has to know.

  Except Lily. Lily would know. He’d tell her why he wasn’t free, and she might understand, but she’d despise him for it too. “Are you all right?” she asked, touching his arm. “You look like you feel awful.”