The Other Eden

by Sarah Bryant

  “He’s only trying to be kind, Eleanor,” she said gently. “Why are you so suspicious of him?”

  “I’m not!”

  “You certainly seemed to be when he came to see you.”

  “Honestly, Mary!”

  She shrugged, sipped her coffee. “Will you accept?”

  I tossed the invitation back onto the table. “Would you let me do otherwise?”

  Mary laughed. “Eleanor, you’re impossible sometimes.” She leaned down to kiss my forehead on her way toward the door.

  “Mary, would you mind writing the acceptance? I’ve got some things to do before Alexander and I go out.”

  “I’ll have Colette or Marguerite write it,” she answered.

  “Are you busy, too?” I asked absently, glancing up from the other mail.

  “It’s not that,” she answered. “My eyes have been bothering me the last few days, and when I focus on small writing—”

  I dropped the newspaper, interrupting, “Why didn’t you tell me? We should have had the doctor look at you while he was in for Tasha.”

  “No, no.” She waved my protests aside. “I’ve been sewing, and the close work always makes my head ache.”

  “Mary—”

  “Don’t worry, Eleanor,” she said, and hurried out of the room before I could protest further.

  Tasha was outside in the garden when Mary and I arrived at the cottage later, with enough dolls and picture books and puzzles to entertain a princess. She was oblivious to the toys and games, trying to weave a wreath of flowers instead.

  “Oh, no, sweetheart, you can’t do it that way,” I told her. “And roses? You’ll prick yourself! Here, let me make the frame, and then you’ll have an easier time.”

  “We shouldn’t be gone more than a couple of hours,” Alexander told Mary.

  “Don’t worry about us,” she assured him, smiling down at Tasha.

  “You’ll promise to bring her in when the sun goes out of the garden? And don’t let her pester you otherwise?”

  “Dyadya!” Tasha protested.

  “Tasha, you’ll listen to what Mary says, please.” He raised a menacing eyebrow at her.

  The protest still lingered around her mouth, but she answered, “I will.”

  Alexander watched them for a moment, then turned to me. “Are you ready?”

  “As much as I ever will be,” I answered. I handed the ring of roses to Tasha, then waved good-bye to the two of them.

  FOURTEEN

  “THE first time, I went through the woods,” I told Alexander when we were beyond Mary and Tasha’s hearing. “I looked at the maps of the estate and all through the twins’ journals for any information about another way up there, but there wasn’t anything.”

  “Journals?” he asked sharply.

  “I suppose I never thought to tell you. Eve and my mother kept journals one summer and left them here. Mary and I found them around the time I first found out about Eve.”

  “Would you mind if I had a look at them?”

  “Of course not. I would have offered sooner if I’d thought of it. Though I’ll warn you, most of their contents are about a teenage love triangle.”

  “Involving whom?”

  I shrugged. “A young man called Louis Ducoeur—one of the Joyous Garde Ducoeurs. I asked Dorian about him, but they’ve never met.” I looked at Alexander, but he made no reply to this. After a moment, I continued, “At any rate, I went through the woods last time, but I came down by the old driveway. It joins Eden’s driveway near my house. It’s easy to miss unless you’re looking for it.”

  We continued in silence along the path by the water, through the topiary garden, and onto the driveway. The sun was brutally hot, but the trees shaded the road’s edges. I found the opening to the house’s driveway without too much difficulty.

  When we stepped onto the overgrown driveway, my head swam for a moment with a strong sense of déjà vu. The heat wreaked havoc on clear thought, leaving only a heightened capacity for sensation. Once again, I felt that Eden was pressing its own mentality onto me. However, I couldn’t turn back now. I stepped with Alexander out of the bright lane, into the deep green twilight of the forest.

  WHEN we reached the house, I walked boldly up to the front door. Alexander followed more slowly, studying the front of the house, as I had the previous time. I turned the doorknob, to no effect.

  “It can’t be locked!” I cried.

  “Let me try,” he said. I stepped out of the way, and Alexander satisfied himself that it was indeed locked.

  “Who could possibly have locked it?” I said, though I had at least one idea of who it could have been. Without thinking, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the key ring I had picked up on my first visit; I had brought it along as an afterthought.

  Alexander watched me incredulously. “Where did you get those?”

  I looked down at the keys again. “I found them the first time I was here.”

  “May I see them for a minute?” he asked, his mind clearly working on something. He took the keys from me, and a small smile, almost cynical, turned his lips upward. “I thought so,” he said softly.

  “You thought what?”

  “Look at this key. No, the little silver one. Don’t you recognize it?”

  “I suppose so,” I answered. “It’s the one from the dream. I’d forgotten about it, with all the other strange things that have been happening.”

  “Hmm. Let’s try the rest of them.” The third key he tried fit.

  Everything was precisely as I had left it, a new layer of dust already filling my footprints.

  “What now?” I asked.

  Alexander shook his head. “You choose what to show me.”

  He followed me out the door to the left, through the study room with the deer’s head, and into the ballroom. I brought him up to the library.

  “Did you look into any of the other drawers?” he asked, indicating the desk where I’d found the keys.

  “Just the top one.”

  He began to rummage through the others, while I looked at the titles in the nearest bookcase. When I turned around again, Alexander was holding a piece of water-stained paper, covered with close writing.

  “What is it?”

  “Do you read French?”

  “Well enough.”

  I put aside the book I had been holding. He laid the paper on the table. I leaned over it and began to read. At first I was confused by the formality of the language. When I realized what I was looking at, I could barely believe it. The paper was a death certificate for a woman named Elizabeth Ducoeur, née Fairfax, who had died of typhus fever in Paris in 1905.

  “But Elizabeth Fairfax was my mother,” I said, “and her married name was Rose. She didn’t die until 1907, and then it was consumption, not typhus, and she certainly wasn’t in Paris.”

  Alexander rubbed a corner of the paper between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s interesting,” he said speculatively.

  “But it’s false,” I reiterated. “My mother, Elizabeth Rose, was living in Massachusetts in 1905.”

  Finally Alexander looked at me. His eyes were serious and perhaps a little sad. “Something is certainly amiss; but we should not jump to conclusions. Are you certain, for instance, that your mother was married only once?”

  “She was twenty when she married my father. How could she have been married prior to that?”

  “It’s unlikely, but possible.” His tone was troubled, as though he was trying to work something out.

  “Even if the certificate is correct, why would it be hidden up here? It ought to be filed somewhere public—a courthouse, or a town hall.”

  “Unless it’s a copy.” He paused, then said, “Or if the death was factual, but not the identity.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you know why your aunt left her family?”

  “You know that I don’t.”

  A glint began in his eyes. “Do you remember when I asked you how
you knew that it was your aunt’s face in that dream, and not your mother’s? Are you still so certain that you dreamed of Eve?”

  The apparently rhetorical questions were beginning to irritate me. “As certain as I can be,” I began impatiently, “considering—” I stopped short, realizing the implication of what I had been about to say. Considering that they were twins. It all began to make a terrible kind of sense. “You think they switched.”

  Alexander was looking again at the certificate. “We have an official document stating that your mother died at a time and place which you know could not be correct. It appears senseless, unless you imagine that the woman who died was really Eve, posing as Elizabeth.”

  “Why would she do that?” I asked peevishly.

  “Come, Eleanor,” he said with a touch of impatience. “If you seek the truth, you must be willing to accept it.”

  I looked out the window, at the light trapped in the frowzy tangle of forest. He was right, of course, about all of it. I drew a breath, turned back to him and said, “Louis Ducoeur grew up in Europe. He was educated in France, so it’s quite possible that he would have returned to Paris if he married. Given that, I suppose the only reason Eve’s death certificate would have my mother’s name on it would be . . .” I found I was still unable to speak the words I knew I must accept.

  “Would be if she had adopted your mother’s identity so completely that even her husband believed she was Elizabeth,” Alexander finished for me.

  I thought of that sweet, bright face in the painting over Alexander’s piano. She didn’t seem capable of a plan so devious, to say nothing of my own mother’s part in it. And yet, to switch identities, preposterous as it might look to me now, might have seemed to the twins the only solution to their problems. Eve would have married the man she loved but couldn’t win honestly, and my mother would have been free to marry my father.

  “Something’s still wrong,” I said, nervous energy coiling in me until I had to begin pacing. I paid no heed to Alexander’s worried eyes. “I can understand why my grandfather would have disowned a daughter for running away with a poor musician. But he never talked about either of his daughters. If he believed that Elizabeth had married Louis Ducoeur as he wished, then it makes no sense that when she died, he effectively disowned her, too.”

  “Unless he discovered what the twins had done,” Alexander suggested.

  “But then he would have told someone.”

  “Do you think a father would want to disclose such a thing?”

  “Do you think he would have kept it from me?” I demanded.

  Alexander reached out and stopped me. “I don’t think we should stay here any longer,” he said. “I forget how close it all is to your life.”

  “We can’t stop now!” I cried, more vehemently than I meant to. “There’s a reason for the dreams, and it has something to do with all of this—with what happened to my mother and her sister. Maybe my grandmother, too.”

  “Your grandmother?”

  As soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t, but now it was too late. “She died of an undiagnosed illness,” I said, “which first came on her here. Some say . . . that is, I’ve heard rumors to the effect . . . that she was mad when she died.”

  “Eleanor,” Alexander said, taking the death certificate from my trembling hands, “I can’t speak for your grandmother’s mental state, but as for the rest, it’s all here. The twins switched identities and married, their father found out and disowned them, Eve unfortunately died of a common illness, and that’s the end of it.”

  “Then why am I dreaming of her?” I asked. “I dream of her only when something’s wrong. And then there’s all that happened to me here the other day. I have to know what it means!”

  Alexander sighed. “Well, I imagine we’ll find out easily enough who was here, if you’re determined. As for the rest, there’s only one thing to do.”

  I looked at him questioningly, and he answered, “Write to the hospital in Paris where she died. Locate the other copy of the certificate, or some other evidence of what happened. Prove to yourself that it was all as this paper claims . . .”

  I looked at him, and I was painfully, almost physically aware of the two obvious words that would complete the statement. Or not. But we both shied from that fraught possibility for the moment.

  Instead I answered, “I’ll do it right away,” seizing greedily on the task for its practicality and the means it gave me to occupy myself, if only for a little while, with something concrete in the midst of so much obscurity. “Now, let’s try to find out who was here the other day.”

  Again Alexander sighed. “If you’re certain.”

  “I am.”

  Alexander put the certificate back into the drawer, then took my hand. We walked out of the library and back down to the ballroom.

  “Have you been outside yet?” he asked, and I shook my head. We turned toward the French doors.

  The rose garden outside of the ballroom was a shadow of the one in the dream. Its fountain was dry and cracked, with tendrils of a honeysuckle vine dripping from basin to basin in place of the streams of water that had mesmerized my dreaming eyes. The bench next to the fountain was also broken: one half lay shattered on the ground, the other rested, lopsided, on top of it. Roses ran wild over the broken stones. I should not have expected it to be as I had dreamed it, but the extent of the ruin still came as a shock.

  I looked around the perimeter of the garden, which had not been visible in the dream’s night. To my left, a high stone wall overgrown with ivy converged with the far end of the ballroom, extended some ten or fifteen yards, then turned toward the nearer end of the ballroom, creating a kind of enclosed courtyard roughly the dimensions of the room it adjoined.

  We passed the broken fountain and moved to the ivied wall in front of us. The door was invisible beneath the shroud of vines, but Alexander moved them aside and found it just where it should have been, locked as it had been in the dream. He took the key I proffered and turned it in the lock. The ivy’s creepers gummed the hinges, but Alexander forced the door open and we stepped through.

  Though the jungle had encroached on the second garden, it had not marred its beauty. If anything, the dense trees and vines seemed to have drawn protective walls around it, sealing it from the ravages of time and elements that had destroyed the previous one. The tree in the centre was not in bloom, but the clusters of waxy leaves were thick and dark with life. The grass was knee-length and silvery green, sprinkled with buttercups, Queen Anne’s lace, and many more flowers I could not name. Wild roses had clambered over the evergreen hedge, choking out much of the original growth and replacing it with cascades of red and white.

  It was the statue, though, that captured my attention. He was encrusted with dark moss and pale blue lichen; in places he was water-stained. A tendril of ivy had begun to wind up his right leg. Other than that, the years had not touched him. He was not cracked or broken; his face as he raised the flute to his lips was as lovely and serene, his smile as melancholy, as I had dreamed it. I wondered what he would have played, if he had not been caught in stone.

  Standing in the hazy repose of that garden, I felt more than ever that I was missing a vital piece of information. I tried to think clearly, but the heat and strangeness of the surroundings made it impossible. I don’t know how long I stood there, but after a while something touched my shoulder. I whirled around, frightened until I realized that it was Alexander. I smiled at him uncertainly, then turned back to the statue. When I spoke, my voice sounded alien and jarring:

  “What is this for?”

  “The statue?”

  “The whole thing. Why is it here? What made us dream about something we’ve never seen until now?”

  He didn’t answer. I turned away from the statue. “Let’s go.”

  Alexander and I explored the rest of the house, both the parts I had looked at and those I hadn’t. The majority of the rooms were empty, and those that weren’t contained only
decaying pieces of furniture. As often as not, they gave no hint as to what the original purpose of the room had been.

  One or two, though, had once had obvious uses; among these was the observatory. It was small and square, with a window in each of its three outer walls. Next to these were metal stands fastened to the floor. It was Alexander who realized that they had once held telescopes. The walls still displayed a few water-stained star maps. There was also a trap door in the ceiling, with a ladder of iron pegs leading up to it. Alexander went first, hoisting himself through the hole, then pulled me up after him.

  We emerged on a platform built on a flat part of the roof. Moving to the railing, I looked out over the gardens where we had walked not long before. To the right was the ivied wall with its hidden door, the child flautist and the weeping tree. Now I could see that beyond that little round garden were others, running at parallels and perpendiculars to each other, all enclosed by overgrown, vine-strewn fir hedges. I was still trying to make sense of the jumble when Alexander said:

  “It’s a maze.”

  It was hard to believe I hadn’t seen it at once. I said, “I wonder what it’s for.”

  “What makes you think it’s for anything?”

  “Everything here seems to lead to something. I can’t stop feeling as though someone else is controlling what happens . . . as if we’re part of a play and we don’t know it.” The words sounded less ironic than I had meant them to.

  “Shakespeare did say that all the world’s a stage.”

  “Honestly.”

  “Honestly? This house is dead, and the dead leave nothing behind: no desires, no questions, no secrets. Certainly no answers.”

  I looked again at the gardens. “You don’t really believe that.”

  “Perhaps you are right.” He sat on the railing. “In fact, sometimes I wonder whether I believe anything. That anything is purposeful, at any rate.”

  His nearness to the edge of the roof made me uneasy. “Then why do anything at all? Why go on living?”

  He smiled wryly. “I don’t think you understand my meaning. I am not a nihilist. I suppose there are reasons why things happen, or happen the way they do. But the span of one life is so short, it seems senseless to spend it searching for meaning.”