“Edouard,” she said.
Theresa’s cheeks heated; her heart began a slow, deep, painful beating that turned her dizzy. She put her hand on the doorframe to steady herself just as Gascó surged up from floor and turned, magnificent in her rage and beauty, to confront the intruder. Her face shone from the thundercloud of her hair, its graceful planes sharpened and defined by the contemptuous curve of her red mouth, and the wide, proud defiance of her onyx eyes. Edouard released the doorframe and helplessly reached out his hand to her.
“Be a man, Edouard!” Gascó all but spat. “Don’t look like that. I knew this must come. It would have come sooner had you been less blind. No,” as Edouard winced, “I beg your pardon. It was not necessary to say that. Or the other. But you must not weep.”
Céleste had swung her legs to the floor and laid the sketch on the sofa back on top of the piled cushions. She looked composed, if a little pale, and her voice was even when she said, “Sit down, Luna. He has no intention of weeping. No, get us some brandy. We must talk, and we’d all be the better for something to steady us.”
“Talk?” said Edouard. “What is there for us to say to one another?”
Gascó swept to the sideboard, poured brandy into three snifters, and handed them around, meeting Edouard’s eyes defiantly when she put his into his hand.
“Drink, Edouard,” said Céleste gently. “And why don’t you sit down?”
He shook his head, but took a careful sip of his brandy. The liquor burned his throat.
“Doubtless you want us to leave La Roseraie,” said Céleste into a long silence.
“Oh, no, my heart,” said Gascó. “I’ll not run away like some criminal. This house is yours. If anyone is to leave, it must be Beauvoisin.”
“In law,” said Edouard mildly, “the house is mine. I will not leave it. Nor will you, Céleste. You are my wife.” His voice faltered. “I don’t want you to leave. I want things as they were before.”
“With your model your wife’s lover, and you as blind as a mole?”
Edouard set down his half-finished brandy and pinched the bridge of his nose. “That was not kind, Gascó. But then, I have always known that you are not kind.”
“No. I am honest. And I see what is there to be seen. It is you who must leave, Edouard.”
“And ruin us all?” Céleste sounded both annoyed and amused. “You cannot be thinking, my love. We may find some compromise, some way of saving Edouard’s face and our reputations, some way of living together.”
“Never!” said Gascó. “I will not. You cannot ask it of me.”
“My Claire de Lune. My Luna.” Céleste reached for Gascó’s hand and pulled her down on the sofa. “You do love me, do you not? Then you will help me. Edouard loves me too: we all love one another, do we not? Edouard. Come sit with us.”
Edouard set down his brandy snifter. Céleste was holding her hand to him, smiling affectionately. He stepped forward, took the hand, allowed it and the smile to draw him down beside her. At the edge of his vision, he saw the paper slide behind the cushions and turned to retrieve it. Céleste’s grip tightened on his hand.
“Never mind, my dear,” she said. “Now. Surely we can come to some agreement, some arrangement that will satisfy all of us?”
The taste in Theresa’s mouth said she’d been asleep. The tickle in her throat said the sofa was terribly dusty, and her nose said there had been mice in it, perhaps still were. The cushions were threadbare, the needlework pillows moth-eaten into woolen lace.
Without thinking what she was doing, Theresa scattered them broadcast and burrowed her hand down between sofa back and seat, grimacing a bit as she thought of the mice, grinning triumphantly as she touched a piece of paper. Carefully, she drew it out, creased and mildewed as it was, and smoothed it on her knees.
A few scrawled lines of text with a sketch beneath them. The hand was not Edouard’s. Nor was the sketch, though a dozen art historians would have staked their government grants that the style was his. The image was an early version of Young Woman in a Garden, a sketch of Gascó sitting against a tree with her hands around her knees, her pointed chin raised to display the long curve of her neck. Her hair was loose on her shoulders. Her blouse was open at the throat. She was laughing.
Trembling, Theresa read the note:
My Claire de Lune:
How wicked I feel, how abandoned, writing you like this, where anyone could read how I love you, my maja. I want to write about your neck and breasts and hair—oh, your hair like black silk across my body. But the only words that come to my mind are stale when they are not comic, and I’d not have you laugh at me. So here is my memory of yesterday afternoon, and your place in it, and in my heart always.
Céleste
Theresa closed her eyes, opened them again. The room she sat in was gloomy, musty, and falling into ruin, very different from the bright, comfortably shabby parlor she remembered. One of the French doors was ajar; afternoon sun spilled through it, reflecting from a thousand swirling dust-motes, raising the ghosts of flowers from the faded carpet. Out in the garden, a bird whistled. Theresa went to the door, looked out over a wilderness of weedy paths and rosebushes grown into a thorny, woody tangle.
Céleste’s letter to Luz Gascó crackled in her hand, reassuringly solid. There was clearly a lot of work to be done.
The Ghost of Cwmlech Manor
There was a ghost at Cwmlech Manor.
Everybody knew it, although nobody had seen her, not with their own eyes, for years and years.
“Ghosts have to abide by the rules,” I remember Mrs. Bando the housekeeper explaining as she poured us out a cup of tea at the manor’s great oak kitchen table. She’d been parlormaid at the manor when Mam was a kitchen maid there. Fast friends they were, and fast friends they’d stayed, even when Mam left domestic service to marry. Mrs. Bando was my godmother and we went to her most Sunday afternoons.
I was ten or thereabouts and I was mad for wonders. Da had told me of the new clockwork motor that was going to change everything from the mining of coal to the herding of sheep. Above all things, I liked to hear about horseless carriages and self-powered mechanicals, but I’d settle for ghosts at a pinch.
So, “How do ghosts know the rules?” I asked. “Is there a ghost school, think you, on the other side?”
Mam laughed and said there was never such a child for asking questions that had no answer. She’d wager I’d ask the same of the ghost myself, if I saw her.
“And so I would, Mam. But first I’d ask her where she’d hid the treasure.”
“And she’d likely disappear on the spot,” Mrs. Bando scolded. “That knowledge is for Cwmlech ears only, look you. Not that it’s needed, may the dear Lord be thanked.”
Sir Owen indeed had treasure of his own, with a big house in London and any number of mechanicals and horseless carriages at his beck and call. It was generally agreed that it was no fault of his that the roof of Cwmlech Manor was all in holes and the beetle had gotten into the library paneling, but only the miserly ways of his factor, who would not part with so much as a farthing bit for the maintenance of a house his master did not care for.
Which made me think very much the less of Sir Owen Cwmlech, for Cwmlech Manor was the most beautiful house on the Welsh Borders. I loved everything about it from its peaked slate roofs and tiny-paned windows to the peacocks caterwauling in its yew trees. Best of all, I loved the story that went with it—very romantic, and a girl as the hero—a rare enough thing in romantic tales, where the young girls always act like ninnies and end up dead of a broken heart as often as not.
Mistress Angharad Cwmlech of Cwmlech Manor was not a ninny. When she was only seventeen, the Civil War broke out, and her father and brothers, Royalists to a man, left home to join the King’s army, leaving Mistress Cwmlech safe, they thought, at home. But in 1642 the Parliamentarians invaded the Borders, whereupon Mistress Cwmlech hid her jewels, as well her father’s strongbox and the family plate, dating, some of i
t, from the days of Edward II and very precious.
The night the Roundheads broke into the manor, they found her on the stairs, clad in her nightdress, armed with her grandfather’s sword. They slew her where she stood, but not a gold coin did they find or a silver spoon, though they turned the house upside down with looking.
It was a sad homecoming her brothers had, I was thinking, to find their sister dead and in her silent grave with the family wealth safely—and permanently—hidden away.
Her portrait hung in the great hall over the mantel where her grandfather’s swords had once hung. It must have been painted not long before her death—a portrait of a solemn young woman, her dark hair curling over her temples like a spaniel’s ears and her gown like a flowered silk tea cozy all trimmed with lace and ribbon-knots. A sapphire sparkled on her bosom, brilliants at her neck and ears, and on her finger, a great square ruby set in gold. There is pity, I always thought, that her ghost must appear barefoot and clad in her nightshift instead of in that grand flowered gown.
I would have liked to see her, nightdress and all.
But I did not, and life jogged on between school and Mam’s kitchen, where I learned to cook and bake, and Da’s forge, where I learned the properties of metal and listened to him talk of the wonderful machines he’d invent, did he only have the gold. On Sundays, Mrs. Bando told me stories of the parties and hunting meets of Sir Owen’s youth, with dancing in the Long Gallery and dinners in the Great Hall for fifty or more.
Sometimes I thought I could hear an echo of their feet, but Mrs. Bando said it was only rats.
Still, I felt that Cwmlech Manor slept lightly, biding its time until its master returned and brought it back to life. But he did not come, and he did not come, and then, when I was fifteen, he died.
A bright autumn morning it was, warm as September often is, when Mrs. Bando knocked on the door in her apron with her round, comfortable face all blubbered with weeping. She’d not drawn a breath before Mam had her by the fire with a cup of milky tea in her hand.
“There then, Susan Bando,” she said, brisk and kind. “Tell us what’s amiss. You look as if you’ve seen the Cwmlech ghost.”
Mrs. Bando took a gulp of tea. “In a manner of speaking, I have. The House of Cwmlech is laid in the dirt, look you. Sir Owen’s fortune is dead, and his fortune all gambled away. The house in London is sold to pay his creditors and the manor’s to be shut up and all the staff turned away. And what will I do for employment, at my age?” And she began to weep again while Mam patted her hand.
Me, I ran out of our house, down the lane, and across the stone bridge and spent the afternoon in the formal garden, weeping while the peacocks grieved among the pines for Cwmlech Manor, that was now dying.
As autumn wore on, I wondered more and more why Mistress Cwmlech did not appear and reveal where she’d hidden the treasure. Surely the ruinous state of the place must be as much a grief to her as to me. Was she lingering in the empty house, waiting for someone to come and hear her? Must that someone be a Cwmlech of Cwmlech Manor? Or could it be anyone with a will to see her and the wit to hear her?
Could it be me?
One Sunday after Chapel, I collected crowbar, magnet, and candle, determined to settle the question. Within an hour, I stood in the Great Hall with a torn petticoat and a bruised elbow, watching the shadows tremble in the candlelight. It was November, and the house cold and damp as a slate cavern. I slunk from room to room, past sheet-shrouded tables and presses and dressers and chairs and curtains furry with dust drawn tight across the windows. A perfect haven for ghosts it looked, and filthy to break my heart—and surely Mistress Cwmlech’s as well. But though I stood on the very step where she was slain and called her name three times aloud, she did not appear to me.
I did not venture inside again, but the softer weather of spring brought me back to sit in the overgrown gardens when I could snatch an hour from my chores. There’s dreams I had boiling in me, beyond the dreams of my friends, who were all for a husband and a little house and babies on the hearth. After many tears, I’d more or less accepted the hard fact that a blacksmith’s daughter with no education beyond the village school could never be an engineer. So I cheered myself with my ability to play any wind instrument put into my hand, though I’d only a recorder to practice on, and it the property of the chapel.
Practice I did that summer, in the gardens of Cwmlech Manor, to set the peacocks screaming, and dreamed of somehow acquiring a mechanical that could play the piano and performing with it before Queen Victoria herself. Such dreams, however foolish in the village, seemed perfectly reasonable at Cwmlech Manor.
Summer passed, and autumn came on, with cold rain and food to put by for winter; my practicing and my visits to Cwmlech fell away to nothing. Sixteen I was now, with my hair coiled up and skirts down to my boot tops and little time to dream. I’d enough to do getting through my chores without fretting after what could not be or thinking about an old ghost who could not be bothered to save her own house. Mam said I was growing up. I felt that I was dying.
One bright morning in early spring, a mighty roaring and coughing in the lane shattered the calm like a mirror. Upstairs I was, sweeping, so a clear view I had, looking down from the front bedroom window, of a horseless carriage driving down by the lane.
I’d not have been more astonished to see Queen Victoria herself.
I knew all about horseless carriages, mind. The inventor of the Patent Steam Carriage was a Welshman, and all the best carriages were made in Blaenarvon, down in the Valley. But a horseless carriage was costly to buy and costly to keep. Hereabouts, only Mr. Iestyn Thomas who owned the wool mill drove a horseless carriage.
And here was a pair of them, black smoke belching from their smokestacks: a traveling coach followed by a closed wain, heading toward Cwmlech Manor.
Without thinking whether it was a good idea or a bad one, I dropped my broom and hotfooted after, ducking through the gap in the hedge just as the traveling coach drove under the stone arch and into the weed-clogged courtyard.
Loud enough to raise the dead it was, with the peacocks screaming and the engines clattering and the wheels of the wain crunching on the gravel drive. I slipped behind the west wing and peeked out through the branches of a shaggy yew just in time to see the coach door open and a man climb out.
I was too far to see him clearly, only that he was dressed in a brown tweed suit, with a scarlet muffler wound around his neck and hanging down behind and before. He looked around the yard, the sun flashing from the lenses that covered his eyes, then raised an instrument to his lips and commenced to play.
There was no tune in it, just notes running fast as water over rocks in spring. It made my ears ache to hear it; I would have run away, except that the back of the wain opened and a ramp rolled out to the ground. And down that ramp, to my joy and delight, trundled a dozen mechanicals.
I recognized them at once from Da’s journals: Porter models, designed to fetch and carry, a polished metal canister with a battery bolted on behind like a knapsack and a ball at the top fitted with glass oculars. They ran on treads—much better than the wheels of older models, which slid on sand and stuck in the mud. Anglepoise arms hefted crates and boxes as though they were filled with feathers. Some had been modified with extra arms, and were those legs on that one there?
The notes that were not music fell silent. “Hullo,” said a diffident voice. “Can I help you? I am Arthur Cwmlech, Sir Arthur now, I suppose.”
In my fascination I had drifted all the way from the hedge to the yard, and was standing not a stone’s throw from the young man with the pipe. Who was, apparently, the new Baronet of Cwmlech. And me in a dusty old apron, my hair raveling down my back and my boots caked with mud.
If the earth had opened up and swallowed me where I stood, I would have been well content.
I curtsied, blushing hot as fire. “Tacy Gof I am, daughter of William Gof the Smith. Be welcome to the home of your fathers, Sir Arthur.”
He blinked. “Thank you,” he said. “It’s not much to look at, is it?”
To my mind, he had no right to complain of the state of the house. Thin as a rake he was, with knobby wrists and sandy hair straggling over the collar of his shirt, which would have been the better for a wash and an iron.
“Closed up too long it is, that’s all,” I said, with knives in, “and no one to look after it. A new roof is all it needs, and the ivy cut back, to be the most beautiful house on the Borders.”
Solemn as a judge, he gave the house a second look, long and considering, then back to me. “I say, do you cook?”
It was my turn to blink. “What?”
“I need a housekeeper,” he said, all business. “But she’d need to cook as well. No mechanical can produce an edible meal, and while I can subsist on sandwiches, I’d rather not.”
I goggled, not knowing if he was in earnest or only teasing, or how I felt about it in either case.
“You’d be perfect,” he went on. “You love the house and you know what it needs to make it fit to live in. Best of all, you’re not afraid of mechanicals. At least I don’t think you are. Are you?” he ended anxiously.
I put up my chin. “A smith’s daughter, me. I am familiar with mechanicals from my cradle.” Only pictures, but no need to tell him that.
“Well.” He smiled, and I realized he was not so much older than I. “That’s settled then.”
“It is not,” I protested. “I have not said I will do it, and even if I do, the choice is not mine to make.”
“Whose, then?”
“My da and mam,” I said. “And they will never say yes.”
He thrust his pipe into his pocket, made a dive into the coach, fetched out a bowler hat, and crammed it onto his head. “Lead on.”
Young Woman in a Garden Page 4
