House of Glass

by Jen Christie

  Far away, I could hear the sound of a buoy, clanging in time with the waves. The ocean was a dark and somber twin to the sky, which was a million points of light, cast in all directions, like a net. The palm trees rustled in the wind. I stepped onto the grass, which was cool and damp beneath my feet, and I felt a freedom of spirit that had been missing since my father died.

  Maxie bolted toward the gardens. I followed her. I could smell the blooms. Already their perfumes were waning. They were past their nightly peak and would soon close their buds, like they did every day, and drop to the ground. I followed her to the fountain, past the magnolia trees and moonflowers and through the low hedges, until finally we had reached the heart of the garden. The fountain glowed white from the light of the moon.

  When I stepped into the clearing, I saw a figure already there. It was Lucas St. Claire and he was sitting on the bench next to the fountain. He was hunched over, with his head between his hands.

  He was a ravaged man. I saw that so clearly, and mourned for the man I saw only once, all those years ago. Since I had been employed here I had never seen joy in the man, only anguish. He must have had a love so deep for his wife in order to feel such despair. I watched him for only a few brief seconds, and when I heard a distant rumble of the storm, I knew that I must go.

  Maxie had disappeared and came bounding out again from somewhere in the bushes. She saw him and growled, her hackles raised and tail stiff.

  He shot up and hesitated, staring at me for a moment. In my white nightgown I must have looked like quite a fright.

  “Mr. St. Claire,” I said.

  It was an awkward predicament and I felt ashamed of my behavior, not just for going to the glass house, but now for crawling around the grounds at night, and I began to blabber. “I’m very sorry. Being out here, I mean. See, I try to feed the dog at night—”

  He came rushing over to me. His height blotted out the moon and he held up a hand to stop me from speaking.

  Maxie growled again, but I shushed her.

  He looked away. “It doesn’t matter.” He grabbed my arm and seemed almost surprised that it was solid. “Why have you become the ghost in my gardens? Why do you visit the house at night, roam the grounds at night?”

  The knowledge that he knew my curious habits made me flush. “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t help it.”

  The sound of thunder filled the air. It was a booming, vibrating sound.

  “Where did that dog come from?” he asked.

  “She’s a stray, and I guess that I’ve adopted her in a way. I feed her scraps at night. She comes to my window after everyone is asleep.”

  “So, you roam the grounds at night? Have you thought that you might be tempting danger?”

  “Not danger,” I said.

  “What then, if not a thrill?”

  I looked around. A gust of air blasted us with the cool air of the coming storm. “Beauty,” I said. “Life.” All around me the flowers danced in the wind. “What are you doing here?”

  A few cold drops of rain pelted against us.

  He gave a cynical sound. “I have a dark nature. It’s at peace here.”

  The skies opened up and rain drenched over us. Lucas St. Claire grabbed my arm. “You’re coming with me,” he said. He shooed the dog away, and Maxie disappeared into the bushes once more.

  He pulled me along in his halting gait. I was acutely aware that I wore only the thinnest barrier, a mere gown. When we arrived at the manor he threw open the door to the house and led me up the stairs to the second floor and to a back bedroom. He pulled open another door, and led me up another flight of stairs. We were in an attic.

  I could smell the dust. All around us, white sheets floated, covering the bulky, forgotten items of the house. There was an enormous arced window, wide enough to feature the whole sky, which was alight with the thunderstorm.

  Lucas dragged an old chair across the floor and placed it just beneath the window.

  “Sit.”

  I sat.

  “Stay here.” He disappeared.

  I was alone. Maxie was outside somewhere. I watched the storm, with its great veins of white heat that shattered the heavens into a thousand pieces. Strangely, I was not afraid, only breathless, waiting to see how the night would unfold.

  Mr. St. Claire returned carrying a handful of candles. He lit one and placed it on the floor beside me. Then, he went to a table and lit two more. A soft, warm light filled the attic. I saw much better and I could even discern the shapes beneath some of the covered items. A piano, draped over and piled high with boxes filled an entire corner. There were silver candelabras on top. Furniture was everywhere. I saw a dining table and chairs, their wooden legs visible beneath the skirt of linen. A spiral staircase that led straight to the roof, covered by a door. There was so much that my eyes couldn’t take it all in.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  He was pulling huge papers out of a box and when he was done, he dragged another chair close to mine, and then he sat down. He held a pencil in his hand.

  “I am going to draw you.”

  A strange feeling of pleasure overcame me. “Me? Why?”

  “Don’t you know the answer to that? I believe you just gave it a while back in the garden. What was that you said? Beauty? Life?”

  He stood and came over to me. “I’m going to pose you.”

  His fingers grazed my chin, moving it ever so slightly toward the window. Everything slowed down for me, the sound of him moving, the storm outside. My breathing came faster and I couldn’t help but open my eyes and look at him.

  I could hear the quick inhalation of his breath. “No,” he said, “don’t look at me like that.” There was an anger in him that I had not heard before. “Never like that when I draw you,” he said, and he brushed his fingers over my eyelids, closing my eyes, and my vision went dark, though my world was drenched in sounds and smells.

  “Remember that moment when I found you? When you had fallen into the jungle?” he asked.

  “Yes.” I was whispering.

  “Think of that moment.” He removed his hands, and I felt a cold rush of air and knew that he had left my side. “Open your eyes.”

  As soon as I opened my eyes, I was no longer in the dusty attic. I was back there, in that awful place, and it was only he and I in a tumbling world of vines and earth that threatened to overtake us.

  “Yes,” he said. “That.” There was a charcoal pencil in his hand and it was darting furiously, angrily over the paper. His dark brows were furrowed and his eyes were greedy and came to my face again and again. There was brusqueness to his movements, almost as if his hand couldn’t move fast enough.

  He stared at me, and I in turn stared at him. The candles painted him in shadows and then small flickers of light chased them away. He looked eerie and beautiful.

  I wondered about him, about that dark nature he referred to, because it seemed more intense than dark to me at that moment. To see him in front of me, he was an artist, not an heir, or a criminal, or a scandal. The set of his eyes, the way he gripped the charcoal and his muscles flexed with a determined grace, I knew that he was a man who would coax what he wanted from the world and if it didn’t comply, he would force it.

  “You are staring, Reyna.” The sound of his voice, deep and resonating, surprised me.

  “I was. But you are, as well.”

  An enormous bolt of lightning exploded just outside the window and we were illuminated in a brilliant whiteness. Goose bumps rose on my skin, drawing my nipples to tight points, and I felt exposed with just a thin cotton gown covering me. His eyes roved over me, and I was suddenly aware that only a thin layer of cotton lay between my skin and his eyes. My thoughts returned to the other night, when I was so wild. I wished that same woman would leap out of me right then and there, but I only turned my head away slightly, flushing in the darkness.

  He laughed quietly. “I can’t figure you out, Reyna. How is it that you are innocent
one moment, and a wanton the next?”

  There was no explanation that I could put into words. How could I explain the effect of the glass house? The fact that it gave me a confidence, a relentlessness? What could I even attribute it to? “I think that I am one and the same,” I offered hesitantly, “but my bravery comes and goes, and sometimes I have a hesitation, almost as if I don’t know how to go about getting what I want most.”

  “What is it that you want most?”

  I took a deep breath. There were two answers to his question, one that I could reveal inside the glass house, and one that I was too tentative to say. “I don’t know,” I whispered. “Lots of things. What everyone wants, I suppose.”

  He reflected on my words for a moment. “What? Love?” He laughed cynically. “Tell me, have you ever had a broken heart? Have you ever known despair?”

  “I’ve known despair.” I spoke the words simply, quietly.

  “Really?” Something had changed in him; I could feel the anger. “Have you known the pain of losing someone? To go day in and day out and not know if they are alive or dead? Or suffering?” He snorted. “You don’t know a damned thing about that.”

  “Yes, I do know.” My voice was small and faraway and my throat was tight to even have to say those words. I swallowed. Once. Twice. “My father was lost at sea. So I know the kind of loss you speak of. I know the pain of a loss that never resolves itself.” I peeked at him and found him standing still, holding a pencil in the air, listening to me. “No one can understand that pain, only someone who has been through it. Only we know the pain of never knowing the end. Of that loose end hanging.”

  He put the pencil down and looked at me. For the first time I saw a flicker of something—what was it? Hope? Understanding? Attraction perhaps? “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought—I didn’t know—”

  “You couldn’t have known.”

  “What happened?”

  “My father was a fisherman and one evening he didn’t return home. There wasn’t a storm or anything. I stayed awake for three days waiting for him. The other fishermen took me in their boats and we roamed the waters for any sign of him or his boat. When they couldn’t look me in the eye anymore, I knew it was hopeless.”

  “That’s a terrible thing.” He looked at me, briefly, a glance above the paper, and again I saw that flicker of emotion in his eyes.

  “It is a terrible thing,” I agreed. “I sat and wondered if his boat was floating in the ocean, broken, and that he was alive, clinging to life, waiting for help that never came. It is the worst thing to wonder about.”

  He sighed and his body shrank away from me, just slightly, but I noticed it. He rubbed his eyes and his face. I could see how tired he was. “I’ve been trying for so damned long. I know she’s dead, of course, but the guilt, all these years the guilt has plagued me. Sometimes I think if I move fast enough and wild enough, it can’t keep up. That’s enough for tonight.”

  “Fine, Mr. St. Claire,” I said, remembering how things would be in the morning.

  “Don’t be foolish after all that has passed between us,” he said. “Call me Lucas.”

  “Okay. Lucas.” His name was heaven to say out loud.

  Chapter Five

  He sought me out the next day, knocked on my door after lunch. “You’ll come tonight?”

  I tried to hide my excitement. “I will.”

  “I’ll wait for you in the garden.”

  Later Annie approached that afternoon while we worked. “I saw you last night. I just want you to know. You are on your last days.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was bluffing or not; her eyes didn’t quite glitter with the same triumph of information that she had possessed before.

  “Prove it,” I said, taking a risk.

  “I will. You’ll see. Soon.”

  Anger welled inside me. If only she weren’t here there wouldn’t be any complications. I could meet Lucas and no one would ever know. But I wasn’t completely certain that she did know, and either way I was too far gone to stop.

  After everyone had gone to bed, I slipped out again. Maxie found me before long and was at my side.

  Lucas was waiting, as promised, and before he sketched my likeness we walked along the cliff until we came to the stone stairs, the torches burning like a necklace of fire. We watched the flames for a long time.

  Finally, Lucas broke the silence. “Reyna, do you know why we light the fires at night?”

  We began to move again, to amble back to the mansion.

  I answered him in a whisper. “To show your wife a way home?”

  He stopped walking. “Is that what you think?” He gave a sound that was close to a laugh, but angrier. “We have always lit fires on the cliff. Long ago the St. Claires did it to draw boats off course. It’s very treacherous at night, you know. When the boats would wreck on the shoals, we headed out.”

  “To pirate them?” I asked.

  He chuckled. “No. Not pirate. Negotiate. They negotiated with them for a portion of the cargo. The cost of saving them. The St. Claires had an advantageous position and pressed it for all it was worth. It wasn’t a nice thing to do, but it did make us very wealthy. Nowadays, we have turned the corner to legitimate trade, but now you know our sordid history, and why we light the fires every night. In a way, it’s because it has always been done.”

  He turned and took me by the shoulders. “And my wife is dead. Have no doubt about that.” He seemed utterly, bitterly certain about that fact.

  “Then why do you walk the grounds?” I couldn’t help but persist.

  “Because I have nightmares. Only the wind from the ocean can chase them away.”

  “What are your nightmares?”

  “They’re too horrible for your ears.”

  “I want to hear.”

  “Do you want to know what happened?” he asked.

  I looked at him and nodded, too nervous to trust my voice.

  “We had a fight. No. We had many fights. On that night we had an unbelievable row. She accused me of not loving her enough. Of not giving her the things she needed. I screamed at her about the glass house. She had an obsession with it.”

  An image of Celeste rose in my mind, on that fateful morning when I met her. She appeared to me as a blur of beauty under a pink parasol and then either carelessly or thoughtlessly, bumped against me, pushing me toward that awful water… I pulled back my memory and focused on Lucas again.

  He continued on, a grim expression on his face. “The fight lasted through dinner and she called me horrible things. Said terrible lies about me. I told her that she was possessed, that she had lost her sanity, I said that I should have her sent away.” A bitter, harsh laugh escaped him. “And you know what her first words to me were? She laughed and said, ‘I’ll leave you and live in the house of glass.’”

  His story was a shock of cold water over me. I glanced briefly over the cliff, at the glass house, but it was shrouded in darkness. “What happened then?” I asked. There was such a deep trepidation in my voice that he reached out and touched me gently with his hand.

  “She stood up from the dinner table and walked out of the front door. I thought she was only going to the cottage. But, later, when I went to find her, she wasn’t there. She simply vanished. The only reason I wasn’t hauled off to jail is that Mrs. Amber and Annie witnessed the whole thing, and were with me every second as we looked for her. They were my alibis.”

  Later that night, when we returned to his house, I sat in the chair beneath the window and he sketched me again.

  When he left to get more pencils, I stood and looked at the sketching.

  It made me feel funny to see myself the way Lucas did. My hair a tangle of dark curls, my eyes, wide and seeking, looking out, needing something. Lucas came and stood just behind me.

  “Is that how you see me?”

  “One part of you. Yes.”

  “I’m not so innocent as that.”

  “Oh yes you are.”

&
nbsp; “I have had…experiences,” she lied.

  He sighed. “Reyna, you should be wary of me—I could corrupt you in a thousand different ways.”

  I was silent.

  He reached over me, and traced his hand along the drawing, around my eyes. “See here, the way you raise your brow? Your eyes do all the talking. When you see something new or surprising or different or even that scares you—your eyes give it all away. Your whole body slows down and every part of you betrays your curiosity. It’s like you’ve never seen the world.”

  I turned to him.

  He lifted his hand from the paper and put it to my face. He traced his finger along the ridge of my cheek. “Just like now. Innocent. Thirsty.” He leaned close and whispered in my ear. “And I think to myself that you should run far away from me. But, when I see you in the house of glass, you are very a very different woman.”

  At that moment, I barely knew the other woman, couldn’t imagine that she even existed.

  After a bit, I stood and stretched my legs, wandering about the room. There was a pile of boxes, loosely draped in a white sheet. I went and lifted the sheet. Jewels and silver glinted back at me. The wealth of this man was beyond me, beyond measure. I dipped my hand into a box and came up with a diamond necklace dangling from my fingers.

  “Look what I caught,” I said, laughing. I took a few steps in wonder, thinking of all the riches buried and forgotten. “All this treasure you have, just casually lying around.”

  “All from the terrible St. Claires,” he said in a mock-serious voice.

  I stood before the iron stairs that curled into the ceiling. They reminded me of a strand of seaweed dangling from the ocean’s surface. “What’s up there?” I asked.

  He took me by the hand, and the diamond necklace scraped between us. He pulled on me gently. “Heaven,” he said. “Come and see.”

  He led the way up the stairs, and each fall of his step rang out in the dusty, dark attic. At the top he gave a heave and with a groan a board swung wide open and landed with a thud. Stars twinkled down at us. Lucas stepped up and over the roof and disappeared into the night sky.

  I followed.