by Carolyn Hart
Maybe she had imagined the faint frown on his face, because he quickly called out, “Come now, Leah, it’s time to meet the rest of the clan.” He led her across the room to stand in front of the redhaired woman. “This is Cissy.”
Cissy was not only the same woman who had been at the historical society but was also John Edward and Merrick’s sister.
“Yes, I saw you today.” Leah held out her hand.
Slowly, Cissy took her hand and shook it. The heavy gold bracelet on her arm glistened in the soft light from the nearby lamp. Her nails were long and blood-red. Tonight she wore a pale pink silk dress.
“Why did you come to the historical society?” Her voice was pleasant enough, but her eyes watched Leah sharply.
“I’d been to the cemetery, and I hoped to find out more about the Devereaux.”
“Do you actually intend to tell us that you had no idea about the family?”
“None.”
Cissy made no reply, but she looked skeptical.
Leah flushed and almost challenged her, then realized it would be rude, at the very least. To bridge the stiffness, she asked quickly, “Do you work for the historical society?”
Cissy drew herself up and lifted her chin. Her tone was icy. “I don’t work anywhere. I am a volunteer, of course. The members of Mefford’s finest families give their time to preserve our heritage and protect it from those who have no knowledge of the past and no appreciation for it.”
John Edward tried to put a good face on it. “Cissy’s our contribution to historical preservation.”
“And, of course, the Winfreys are one of the very oldest families in town,” Cissy continued coldly. “You haven’t met my husband.”
Leah turned toward the slender blond man who stood beside Cissy.
“This is my husband, Hal Winfrey. Hal, this is—Leah.”
As she held out her hand, Leah realized how much Cissy hated to accept her, to give her a name and a reality.
“I’m very glad to meet you,” she told Hal, whose hand was as limp as cooked cabbage.
He nodded, not so much in an unfriendly way as indifferently.
“It means everything to me to be here,” she said. “I thought I had no family in the world now, and to find you, Grandmother, and my cousins—it’s wonderful.”
“And wonderful for us, too,” Carrie said happily. Then, slowly, the joy seeped from her face. “But it does mean that we don’t know the truth of what happened when The New Star left here.”
Everyone seemed frozen for a moment in the sudden silence that descended. No one moved or spoke, and all eyes were fastened on Carrie Devereaux. The tiny old lady studied first Cissy and Hal, then John Edward, then Merrick.
“All of you were here that night,” she said finally.
Leah studied them, too. Cissy was sleekly lovely and expressionless. John Edward seemed more somber than usual. Merrick was sober-faced. Only Hal looked unaffected by Carrie’s words—and not terribly interested, either.
But her cousins were interested. And underneath that interest, Leah thought she detected a current of fear.
“Something dreadful must have happened,” Carrie said heavily.
John Edward pushed himself up from his chair and crossed the room to stand before her. “We don’t know that, Aunt Carrie. This girl’s come here with some cock-and-bull story—”
“John Edward,” the old lady interrupted sharply, “look at Leah. Just look at her.”
He shrugged. “All right. I see the family resemblance. But who knows what the truth is? Maybe the yacht broke apart, and Louisa and Leah were the only survivors. Maybe Louisa lost her memory. Maybe that’s why she ran off to Texas. Maybe she just went crazy.”
“My grandmother wasn’t crazy,” Leah said firmly. “Louisa was as sane as anybody I’ve ever known!”
“Then why don’t you know anything?” he demanded. “Why are you a stranger to us?”
“Hush, John Edward. Can’t you see the child is trembling?” Carrie took Leah’s hand.
Leah held her grandmother’s hand tightly, but she continued to stare at John Edward. “I don’t know why Louisa never told me, but whatever reason she had, she meant to help me. And in her last letter, the one to Grandmother Devereaux, she said she must have been wrong about what had happened that night.”
It was abruptly silent again. This time Leah felt herself shrink inside. Now the silence was dark and inimical and dangerous.
“What d’ you know!” Hal exclaimed wonderingly. “This is damned interesting. What did the old girl say in the letter?”
Leah felt a wave of revulsion. Up to this moment, Hal had been so ineffectual, such a handsome nonentity, that she’d ignored him. But now his air of bored indifference was gone. He looked brightly curious, the kind of ghoulish curiosity that passersby exhibit when tragedy strikes.
But she answered him because the others waited, too, waited with a taut intensity to hear what she would say.
“Louisa saw that article on Southern ghosts, the one that described The Whispering Lady. Then she sat down at her desk and started a letter to Grandmother.” Leah nodded toward Carrie Devereaux. “She wrote that if the ghost had been seen again, then she was wrong about what had happened that night. It meant there was evil at Devereaux Plantation.”
Evil at Devereaux Plantation. The words hung, stark and ugly, in the air.
Cissy leaned forward, one hand gripping the edge of her chair. “Then what?”
“That’s all. She must have had her heart attack while she was writing the letter, because the pen scrawled off the page. . . .” Tears burned in Leah’s eyes. She could imagine the sudden wrenching pain, the moment of knowledge, then nothingness.
“How dreadful,” Cissy said faintly.
John Edward was shaking his head. The skeptical look in his eyes angered Leah, but she kept quiet. It would do no good to quarrel with her newfound cousins. Then she glanced at Merrick. He didn’t look hostile or angry or worried. He looked kind.
“So you see,” Carrie Devereaux said in a dry, brittle voice, “we must try and discover what really happened that night.”
Cissy turned toward her. “But, Aunt Carrie, how can we? That was nineteen years ago.”
“I know that,” the old lady said stubbornly. “But all of you were here then. I want each one of you to think back, to remember exactly what happened. Tomorrow night after dinner, we will work it out together. Tomorrow night we will remember.” She lifted her chin. “But tonight we will celebrate Leah’s return.”
Carrie led the procession into the dining room, leaning on Merrick’s arm. Cissy and Hal came next. Leah noticed the almost imperceptible check on herself that Cissy made as she turned to take the seat at the head of the table. Leah was beginning to sort information out in her mind, picking up one fact here, another there. Cissy and Hal had lived at Devereaux Plantation ever since their marriage, and Cissy had been mistress of the house during her aunt’s long sojourn in Nice.
The dining room was of a piece with the rest of the house. A centerpiece of yellow roses adorned the elegant Sheraton table. A matching sideboard was resplendent with shining inlays of satinwood and ash. A chandelier hung from the center of a huge plasterwork medallion set into the high ceiling. Its crystals glistened and swayed in the light breeze coming in from the open windows.
There was no air conditioning at Devereaux Plantation. The house was designed, with its broad main hallway, to catch the prevailing breezes. The huge windows on either side of the dining room fireplace were bare, their velvet drapes taken down for the summer. Above the mantel hung a portrait of Mary Ellen, a young and smiling Mary Ellen with dark brown eyes and black hair blowing in the wind. She wore a white decollete dress and the same pearls that Leah wore this night. What kind of evil had troubled that smiling, carefree face? Leah wondered.
It was an awkward meal, despite the excellent and unobstrusive service and the wonderful shrimp creole with red rice. But they all watched one another wit
hout seeming to.
Leah was fascinated by her three cousins, especially by Merrick. She liked the way he tilted his head when he listened, the hearty burst of his laughter, the blunt firmness of his chin and the softness in his dark blue eyes when he looked at her. She thought he was extraordinarily attractive.
He talked to her throughout dinner, and she felt much the same as when she drank champagne—excited, happy and a little bit dizzy.
“Tell us about Texas,” he urged.
She laughed. “No one can describe Texas in an evening.”
“The wide-open spaces and all that?” John Edward prompted.
Leah didn’t like his tone. She looked at him coolly. “I’m a Texan by adoption, I guess. In Texas, it matters more what kind of person you are than who you are.” Then she looked uneasily at her grandmother. She didn’t want to offend, and she’d realized in only one day in Mefford that here it mattered terribly who you were.
But Carrie Devereaux was smiling.
John Edward and Cissy weren’t smiling.
Leah knew they resented her. She wasn’t welcome at Devereaux Plantation, despite her grandmother’s smile and Merrick’s warmth.
However, Cissy did make an effort to be polite toward the end of the meal. “Do you ride, Leah?”
“I haven’t for a while.”
“We still have several good horses. We’ll plan a ride one day soon.”
Again, discomfort swept over Leah. Did they all assume she’d come to stay? She hadn’t had that in mind at all when she’d left Texas. But what did she have to return to? A house emptied by Louisa’s death; a job in a travel agency. Yet what would hold her here? Her newly found grandmother, of course. Somehow she couldn’t imagine eating in this magnificent dining room night after night, talking to people she didn’t really know, becoming part of a life so different from what she’d known.
But Carrie Devereaux was her grandmother, and Merrick, John Edward and Cissy were her cousins.
She looked at them again—at Cissy with her glorious red hair, at John Edward with his Scandinavian fairness, at Merrick with his deep blue eyes and richly auburn hair. Then, as she had done so often during the meal, she looked up at the portrait of her mother. Studying it, she understood Mrs. LeClerc’s shock when she had seen Leah in her garden. The portrait might have been of Leah herself.
Leah wasn’t paying any attention to Hal, Cissy’s husband, who sat across the table from her. Despite his good looks, Hal seemed to fade quickly from his surroundings. So she was startled when he spoke to her. “It really is amazing.”
Leah understood at once what he meant. He had noticed her staring at the portrait. He looked over his shoulder at it and said again, “It really is amazing.”
Everyone at the table glanced at the portrait, then at Leah, whose face flushed with embarrassment.
“It’s an incredible likeness,” Hal prattled on. “Blood lines are like that, you know. Why, I’ve got a bitch now who’s whelped two champions that look just like her. Blood tells.”
That was what Mrs. LeClerc had told Leah.
No one said anything. The silence, a tense, brittle silence, unnerved Leah, and she hurried to fill it.
“Thank you,” she said quickly. Then she added, “She was so pretty.” She flushed a deeper red because she realized that it sounded as if she were complimenting herself. She stumbled on. “But I wasn’t thinking about whether I look like her. I was fascinated by the resemblance between this portrait and the one of Julian Devereaux in the library. You can tell we all belong to the same family. Yet it’s interesting how the same family can have such decided differences.”
They all looked at her blankly.
“I mean, I’m so dark, and my mother was too, and Grandmother. We all have eyes that are almost black. Yet the three of you—” she meant John Edward, Cissy and Merrick “—are so much fairer and have light eyes.”
She knew she’d said something terribly wrong. They looked stricken, appalled. The makeup on Cissy’s face stood out in purplish splotches. John Edward’s mouth was a thin, hard line.
Merrick came to Leah’s rescue. “You’ve mentioned the unmentionable.” But he said it gently. “No one ever alludes to the fact that we are Devereaux through adoption, not blood. Andrew Devereaux, the younger brother of your grandfather, married our mother after she’d been widowed. So that’s why none of us has the Devereaux coloring.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Leah said quickly. Then she flushed again when she realized how that sounded. “I mean, it doesn’t make any difference.”
“Of course it doesn’t make any difference,” Carrie Devereaux said emphatically.
Oh, but it did. It took all of Leah’s willpower not to laugh, not to jump up and clap her hands. Merrick was not her cousin. By law, by his place in the family, yes, he was her cousin. But he was not a blood relation. The delight she took in his nearness, the happiness that welled within her when their eyes caught and held—they were right.
The awkward moment that followed was smoothed over when her grandmother began a long description of the fall gala held annually at Devereaux Plantation and how Cissy managed it so well.
Leah listened and nodded and spoke occasionally, but all the while she was thinking. Of course it made a difference—in another way, too. After Mary Ellen’s death, her adopted cousins would have become the heirs of Devereaux Plantation. Now that she, Leah, was back from the grave, what would her grandmother do? Surely that question had occurred to them. They couldn’t know that she had no designs on their inheritance.
She almost spoke up to say she hadn’t come to Devereaux Plantation to make any kind of claim. But even to bring it up would sound forward and grasping. She would have to make it clear to her grandmother in some appropriate way, that under no circumstances would she come between her adopted cousins and what they had been led to believe was rightfully theirs.
Leah was grateful when dinner finally ended and they went into the drawing room for coffee. Despite the grandeur of the moldings and the center medallion, the room was made cheerful by the light and graceful chairs, mostly Chippendale, and by the cream-colored wallpaper with its blue forget-me-not pattern. She found the atmosphere relaxing and welcoming.
When she sat down with her coffee in a corner of the room, next to an eighteenth-century secretary, Merrick joined her.
“Don’t be upset,” he said with a smile. “It really doesn’t matter.”
“I didn’t mean to say the wrong thing.”
“You didn’t, Leah, believe me.”
She felt a glow of pleasure, different from any she’d ever known. His eyes were deep-set, and she knew she could lose herself in them completely. With an effort, she looked down at her cup and took a sip. Then she asked, “What do you do, Merrick?” and was proud of how casual she sounded.
“I’m a farmer. Mostly, I take care of all of Aunt Carrie’s land.”
“Do you enjoy it?”
For an instant, his easy smile slipped away, and he looked very serious, almost grim. “It’s the only life I’ve ever wanted.” He stared down at her, his brows drawn close together. Then, slowly, his expression smoothed out. “Would you like to see the plantations, Leah?” He asked it almost hesitantly. “I’d like to show you everything—if you’d be interested.”
“Of course I’d be interested.”
Pleased, he leaned forward. “Do you like it here?” When she didn’t answer immediately, he shook his head. “Sorry. That was a dumb question. You’ve been here less than twenty-four hours, so—”
“I love it,” she said firmly. The strength of her answer surprised her.
He looked delighted. “You feel the magic, don’t you?”
She nodded. “I think I do, Merrick, I think I do. It’s a sense of time, a feeling of peace. I feel . . . I feel at home.” She looked around the stately room. “It’s so different from anything I’ve ever known, yet it seems so familiar, so right.”
“That’s because you do belong
here. And now that you’ve come home, you’re going to stay for always.”
His gaze held hers, and once again she felt that sweep of emotion. She wondered what it would be like to touch his hair, to hold his face in her hands. The thought both shocked and delighted her. And, her heart sang, Merrick was her cousin by adoption, not by blood at all. That gave her the license to enjoy this new and exciting feeling.
He held out his hand. “Come on, Leah, let’s go look at the gardens.” She must have looked a little startled, for he continued quickly. “They’re famous, you know, and they’re at their loveliest in the moonlight.”
She put down her cup and saucer, accepted his hand and smiled up at him. “I’d like to see them very much.”
Chapter Five
A bright harvest moon hung low and full in the sky, touching the house and gardens with a milky light, illuminating the oyster-shell paths that wound among the rosebushes and silvering the glass-rimmed top of the old tower. The sweet scent of honeysuckle mingled with the rich, loamy odor of freshly turned earth and the heady smell of red roses.
Devereaux House stood on the crest of the hill, facing the river. The ground, thick with pines, fell away toward the water’s edge. The only break in the evergreens was the curving avenue of live oaks that marked the driveway.
The tower rose to the west of the house at the highest point of the hill. Leah recalled from the guidebook that an early-day bride had had the tower built so she could watch for the return of her husband’s ship.
As Leah and Merrick walked along the length of the west veranda, she realized that the two-story verandas circled the house and that screen doors gave easy access to them from each room. She and Merrick went down the central steps and entered the garden.
Yew hedges shaped in triangles and squares formed an intricate pattern around the base of the tower. Oyster shells crunched beneath Leah and Merrick’s feet. A nightingale trilled its melody, each note clear and liquid and perfect. The air still held the heat of the day, but a shimmering breeze swept cooler air up from the river; with it came the smell of water and pine and something darker, heavier: a musky scent of age, old wood, old earth.
