by Carolyn Hart
She parked by the garden wall of Mrs. LeClerc’s house, then hesitated. Did she really want to know what this old lady could tell her? Then she recalled what her grandmother had said. The Devereaux had courage.
She walked through the garden and mounted the broad front steps.
Mrs. LeClerc herself answered the door. She looked for a long moment at Leah, then gestured for her to come inside and led the way to the drawing room.
“You’re pale, child.”
Leah looked away from Mrs. LeClerc’s shrewd brown eyes and glanced around the comfortable room. The walls were paneled in native cypress, the mellow tan wood rubbed to a high gloss.
Mrs. LeClerc followed her gaze. “It used to be painted blue,” she sniffed. “Natural wood wasn’t fine enough then. Now, everything the older, the better. My nephew spent two months sanding down the walls. The historical society takes tourists through just to see my walls.” Her eyes fastened on Leah again. “If you scrape down far enough, sometimes you find good wood. Then again, sometimes it’s rotten.”
“Bad blood and good blood,” Leah said abruptly. “What did you mean?”
The old lady sat down in a huge wing chair and hunched herself up like a battered bird, one shoulder higher than the other. But her brown eyes, so bright, didn’t waver.
“If you scrape away paint,” Mrs. LeClerc answered obliquely, “you expose the grain and, sometimes, a flaw or a weakness. Paint can be used to cover things up, you know.” Her bony head nodded rapidly. “Oh, yes, paint covers things up, and time and words do, too.”
Leah almost held her breath. She felt that Mrs. LeClerc was coming closer to what she wanted to say, yet Leah had a sense of caution. If she moved too quickly, spoke too sharply, the old lady would flutter away, out of touch, out of reach.
“You said mine was a fated face. Why did you say that, Mrs. LeClerc?”
The elderly woman struggled up out of her chair, using her cane as a fulcrum, and stumped rapidly across the room.
Leah was afraid she had lost her, that she was leaving, but Mrs. LeClerc went directly to an old Sheraton secretary and pulled down the lid. She opened a drawer on the left and lifted out a japanned box of brilliant ebony with a rose petal inlay. She also picked up a tiny key from the drawer.
“I found this box at the bottom of a horsehide trunk in the attic. The trunk belonged to Avery LeClerc. He was a lieutenant in Lee’s army and was killed at Gettysburg two months after Marthe died.” She inserted the key into the box, turned it and lifted the lid. Then she held the opened box out to Leah.
Leah gently lifted out a crumpled woman’s gray leather glove, still soft to the touch. It was finely sewn with an open-work design on the back and had tiny mother-of-pearl buttons at the wrist. She looked questioningly at Mrs. LeClerc, who nodded back at the box.
Beneath the glove was a folder, its edges yellow with age. Carefully, Leah lifted it out and opened it.
Mrs. LeClerc said eagerly, “They used to come in wagons so they could carry all their paraphernalia—the powder, the wet plates and all the chemicals they needed. They would come around to the different plantations. It was all the rage then because it was so new, and everybody wanted to have their pictures made. . . .”
She chattered on about how most of the early photographs had been lost during the war; and, of course, everyone knew that Randolph Devereaux had everything of Marthe’s destroyed by fire. This was the only photograph of Marthe. When Mrs. LeClerc found it, she felt that it had belonged to Avery and must have been important to him, and she decided to keep it in the LeClerc family. After all, Marthe’s family had turned against her. She didn’t know how or when Avery had obtained the picture, but he must have had it with him at Gettysburg. She thought there must have been a story there. And wasn’t Marthe a beautiful girl?
Leah couldn’t answer. She was staring at another very familiar face. A cold edge of fear rippled through her.
Marthe sat stiffly, formally, as was the custom, her hands folded primly in her lap, her head high, her slender throat emphasized by the decollete gown that fell away from her shoulders. She held a bouquet of daisies and forget-me-nots, tied with a thin velvet bow.
In the portrait in the Devereaux dining room, Mary Ellen’s dress was the soft white of a debutante’s gown. The bodice of Marthe’s dark dress was paneled with lace, the waist cinched with a sash; the background of the photograph was a swag of velvet between two imitation marble columns. But Marthe’s face was interchangeable with that of Mary Ellen—and with Leah’s. She had known from what everyone said that she and Marthe looked alike, but the old photograph made it all so clear.
“A fated face.” Leah said it faintly.
Marthe Devereaux, dead by her own hand. Mary Ellen Devereaux Shaw . . .
Leah turned to Mrs. LeClerc. “You said there was love and hate and no one knew the truth of it. What did you mean? What do you think happened to my mother and father?”
“I knew Mary Ellen from the time she was a tiny girl,” Mrs. LeClerc said slowly. “There was always a wildness about her. She would ride alone for hours. She would sail a tiny boat down the river and into the sound and laugh when Carrie worried. She was never afraid of anything. Never.” Mrs. LeClerc reached out and touched Leah with a clawlike hand. “It’s too dangerous, my dear, to be without fear.”
Without fear. Was that the key to her mother’s fate? Or was the truth darker than that?
“John Edward said my mother was a hellcat when she was crossed,” Leah said.
“I wouldn’t have wished to face her when she was angry,” Mrs. LeClerc said. She took the picture of Marthe and gently replaced it in the japanned box. “There were whispers after The New Star was lost. Some said there had been a quarrel. An old friend of mine said her maid told her that lights had been seen that night, flashing through the rain from the tower, and there was the clank of shovels and a wailing sound. The maid could only have heard about that from some of the servants at Devereaux Plantation.” Mrs. LeClerc sighed, her shoulders slumped. “They’re all gone now, those old friends. I’ll be gone soon.”
Leah left her resting in the wing chair, lost in a reverie. After the dimness of the cypress-paneled drawing room, she blinked when she stepped out into the high sunshine of midday and the pulsating heat. Deep within, she carried with her the chill of the old house and that somber interview.
Was it the uncanny resemblance that haunted her? Or the uneasiness of recalling long-past emotions? She felt a deep sense of dread. Would she regret it if she discovered the truth of what had really happened?
Leah parked the Vega in the same spot outside the historical society where she’d left it the first time. But she wasn’t the same person who had parked there then. She was going to the newspaper office. Already she was beginning to recognize landmarks. She paused outside the door to the Courier and saw her face reflected in the plate glass. Her face, Marthe’s, Mary Ellen’s. The three of them were so inextricably linked. She yanked the door toward her, and the reflection wavered and was gone.
A polite girl from behind the counter led her upstairs to the second floor and a back room that held the old files. There were mounds of material on the Devereaux.
She read very carefully the stories on the disappearance of The New Star and the obituaries of her parents, Louisa and herself. A search for the boat hadn’t begun until almost a week after the hurricane, when Louisa’s sister in Atlanta had raised an inquiry. When no trace had been found of the boat or its passengers, The New Star was presumed lost and all aboard drowned.
It wouldn’t have been hard for Louisa to disappear. Perhaps she’d sailed the boat to New Orleans and found a buyer who had not heard of the search or who had welcomed a bargain and hadn’t inquired too closely into the circumstances. The sale would have brought a modest sum of money, enough for Louisa to slip quietly into a small Texas town and begin a new life as an antiques dealer. How pressing, how utterly compelling must have been her reason!
A
t every turn, Leah faced a warning to stop probing, to leave the past alone for fear she might find an ugliness she wouldn’t want to face. She replaced the clippings, then walked slowly down the stairs and out into the heat.
All the way back to Devereaux Plantation, she struggled with nightmarish conjectures. Had her mother and father quarreled bitterly? Those pistols missing from the library—had Mary Ellen taken them?
Leah turned the car up the narrow, dusty road, plunging into the vivid green depths. The sudden chill in the dank tunnel of vegetation matched the chill in her heart. When she braked beside the immense garage, which was the former carriage house, she wondered if she should make some excuse to leave Devereaux Plantation, to escape from her doubts and fears.
Then she saw Merrick striding down the path toward her, carrying a basket in one hand. He wore a pale blue polo shirt, khakis and loafers. He waved and smiled, and her heart pounded. The way he smiled made her forget her doubts and fears.
“Did you forget?” he called out. “We’re going to Ashwood today! I packed a picnic lunch.”
“Did you really?”
“Actually, Henry did it with the cook’s help. It will be good. Come on, Leah, let’s go.” He stowed the basket into the back of his station wagon.
As they drove, she studied his firm profile. He had such a strong face. She felt safe with him, secure. But could she tell him what she had learned this morning? She didn’t want to now. She wanted to push the ugliness away and enjoy the afternoon.
“It’s over the next rise,” he said, and his eagerness was infectious.
She, too, looked ahead expectantly.
He gave her a sudden, swift look full of hopefulness, and she knew instinctively that this wasn’t just another stop on the tourist trail. For some reason, it was terribly important to Merrick that she be pleased.
She leaned forward and caught the first glimpse of the house as the station wagon topped the hill. He slowed the car and brought it to a stop.
The white frame house stood on a high foundation and faced southwest. Like Devereaux Plantation, it, too, looked down a sloping hill to the river. Deep verandas extended along the front of the house on both the first and second stories. Sturdy Ionic columns supported the verandas.
“It’s beautiful,” Leah said softly. “Even lovelier than Devereaux House.”
Merrick reached out and took her hand. “Do you really think so?” he asked, a note of anxiety in his voice.
“Oh, Merrick, I love it. It’s a perfect house.”
“Wait until you see the inside.”
He started the car and drove downhill, then up again, pulling to a stop in a graveled turnaround in front of the double front steps. “We’ll come back and get our lunch later. I want to show you Ashwood first.”
They got out of the station wagon and went up the steps. Merrick unlocked the immense, hand-carved front door. An ornamental fanlight above the door spewed golden sunlight into the wide entry hall. A muted Persian rug, all browns and golds and tans, covered much of the hand-cut wooden floor. A delicate, free-standing stairway curved upward out of sight.
He took her into every room including a music room with an eighteenth-century spinet and his office with an antique roll top desk.
Finally, breathless, she climbed with him up narrow back steps to a cupola that looked down on a sweep of garden as lovely in its own way as any at Devereaux Plantation. Ferns, oleanders, wisteria and honeysuckle grew in ordered profusion.
Leah leaned forward, holding tight to the low railing. “Merrick, it’s all so incredibly lovely!”
“You really do like it,” he said in delight.
“Yes.”
“I knew you would.”
“So this is your home.”
He nodded. “It was a ramshackle ruin fifteen years ago. I started work on it than, and I’ve restored every bit of it myself.”
He told her of his efforts as they walked downstairs. She listened, but mostly she was terribly aware of his nearness.
They carried the picnic basket to the garden and settled in a wood-roofed gazebo that offered a view of the river.
“A glass of wine, Leah?”
She accepted the slender glass of chilled Chardonnay with a smile and felt a surge of excitement when his hand touched hers.
As they ate the fresh chicken sandwiches and finished them off with a light peach pastry, Leah tried so hard to control her feelings that she fell silent and had nothing to say.
When they were packing up the hamper and he stood so near, she realized that he, too, had nothing to say.
Abruptly, he reached for her and drew her into his arms. His mouth pressed against her cheek, and he spoke softly. The breath of his words touched her like flame.
“Leah, Leah, I’ve wanted to hold you ever since I first saw you. You’ll think I’m crazy. You’ve known me for such a short time, but I knew I wanted you when I first saw you.”
Her arms slipped up his back, and she lifted her face to look into his eyes. “Merrick . . .” Then there was no more time for thought or words. His mouth covered hers in a deep, satisfying kiss. Nothing existed in the world but the two of them and the growing desire that flamed between them.
Finally, feeling that she teetered on the edge of an emotional abyss, Leah drew gently back. She wanted to stay in his arms, but she knew she must have more time. She couldn’t let herself be swept completely out of control. Not yet. No matter how much her body ached for his.
Merrick smiled happily, and she watched the dimple move at the corner of his mouth. She wanted to touch that corner with her tongue, then trace his lips and explore his mouth.
She steeled her face and her will.
“Leah, you do care. You do,” he murmured.
“Merrick, let’s take our time. Let’s get to know each other.”
His smile deepened. “I want to know you. All of you.”
A tiny flush strained her cheeks, and she lowered her eyes.
Then his smile faded, and he looked serious and uncertain. “Leah . . .” He released her from his embrace. “Leah, let’s walk in the garden. There is something I have to tell you.”
They walked arm in arm, and she delighted in the feeling of companionship, the touching warmth.
He cleared his throat and took a deep breath. “Leah, I was married once.”
She drew away from him just a little. Some of the glory seeped out of the afternoon.
Suddenly he looked tired and vulnerable. “Does it matter too much?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “Tell me about her.”
They began to walk again. “We met in college. After we married, it turned out she wanted to live in Atlanta and be a model. She hated Ashwood.”
Leah half turned to look at the house up on the hill. “Did you love Ashwood more than you loved her?”
Merrick winced at that. “I’d told her about Ashwood before we got married. And then when we came here, she said it was a hideous old wreck and we should get a new house in town.” He kicked at a loose stone, and it popped into a small pool nearby and sank. “Ashwood is part of me. Don’t you see that?” He shook his head wearily. “We were too young, I guess. We both knew it was a mistake. It only lasted a year.”
He reached for her hands and held them tight. His vivid blue eyes implored her. “Leah, until I saw you, I’d never had any desire to marry again.”
She wanted to interrupt, to say this was too much too soon, but he rushed on.
“We’re meant for each other, you and I. I’ve known it from the first moment I saw you. You and I together, here at Ashwood.”
Leah knew it was madness, but she didn’t care. To be in the circle of his arms was enough for the moment. And she wanted it to be so; she wanted it to be true that she and Merrick were meant for each other.
Was this how her mother and father had felt when they met? If so, how had that love ended?
Merrick pulled her close, held her tight for a long moment
, then eased his embrace to smile down at her. “Tell me what you are thinking.”
Leah looked up into his face and the eyes that fascinated her. Then she sighed. “I’m thinking of my parents.” She swallowed and glanced away. “And of Marthe and Timothy.”
Gently, his hand tilted her chin around until their eyes met again. “Why?”
She veered away from that question. “Mrs. LeClerc said I had a fated face. She said that blood tells. Oh, Merrick, do you think it does?”
He caressed her cheek with his knuckles, and the touch inflamed her. “You have a lovely face. That’s all I know and all I need to know.”
She drew her breath in sharply. “You believe it, don’t you?”
Now it was he who didn’t meet her gaze. “Leah, leave it alone.”
“You think my mother killed my father?” Anguish throbbed in her voice.
His hands gripped her shoulders. Hard. “It was nineteen years ago. No one can ever know what really happened.”
“But that’s what you believe,” she said emptily.
Slowly, the pressure of his hands eased. “I don’t know what I believe. But to think anything else . . .”
They still stood close together, but the closeness they had shared so recently was gone.
Each of them, Leah realized, had private fears and secret horrors. She grappled with the monstrous idea that her mother had slain her father, for why else had Louisa fled, taking her to Texas? But Merrick had his fears, too. If Louisa had been mistaken that night, then what had become of Mary Ellen and Tom?
Merrick reached out and pulled her back into his arms, almost roughly. “Leah, it doesn’t matter what happened then. What matters to us is now.” His lips touched hers hungrily. After only a moment’s pause, she began to kiss him in return, welcoming the heat of their passion against the coldness in her mind.
Finally, as before, it was she who broke them apart. “Let’s walk, Merrick,” she said shakily.
They didn’t refer to her parents again. Instead, they strolled through the gardens and later drove down winding roads and took a rowboat out on the river. They talked about themselves and made important discoveries. She hated beer. He liked skydiving. She read American writers. He didn’t like ballet. They both loved the symphony. And their eyes said so much more than their words.
