A Lamentation of Swans

by Valerie Bronwen

  She hadn’t filed for divorce because…well, I didn’t know why, but it wasn’t because she was hoping I’d come back.

  That, at least, was clear.

  I glanced over at Peggy, who was apparently not going to throw me a bone and confess to inviting me. She was doing some weird thing with her eyes, standing just behind Charlotte who couldn’t see what she was doing, and I assumed she meant Don’t tell her I emailed you.

  Same old Peggy. Two years might have passed, but not a damned thing around here had changed.

  I shrugged. “I came in with the tour, but got bored and wandered off. I mean, I’ve already heard everything the tour guide had to say about Sea Oats.” I gestured limply around. “Nothing ever changes around here, does it?” I smiled at Peggy, who had the decency to blush.

  “I told you,” Charlotte said out of the side of her mouth to Peggy, “we’d regret letting those tours in the house.”

  That seemed to break whatever spell Peggy had been under. She laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous, Char.” Peggy held out her hands to me. “It’s great to see you again, Ariel, and if you’re with the tour, then we owe you some pastry and coffee, at the very least. It’s included in the cost of the tour.” She stepped toward me, and once Charlotte could no longer see her face she made an impossible to miss follow my lead, please look. She laughed again. “What a pleasant surprise, Ariel. I’ve missed you.” She took my hands and helped me get to my feet, then whispered, “Play along,” as she tucked my arm inside hers.

  “I wouldn’t want to impose.” I glanced at Charlotte. Her face was, as always, unreadable, her arms crossed in front of her.

  “No trouble at all!” Peggy said gaily, which was finally too much for Charlotte. She huffed angrily and spun on her heel, walking quickly away in the direction of the house. Once she was out of earshot, Peggy rolled her eyes. “Thanks for covering for me, Ariel.”

  “Well, I didn’t think she’d approve of you getting in touch with me.” I sighed. “Why did you email me, Peggy?”

  “Why didn’t you email me back? Or call? Let me know you were coming?”

  I bit my lower lip. I didn’t want to tell her that on one of those awful Saturday nights, after too much wine, I’d defiantly deleted the phone numbers for everyone at Sea Oats from my phone. And when I’d tried to call the main number for Sea Oats, I always hung up before anyone could answer.

  “But I did email you,” I replied as we started walking slowly. Peggy was a short woman, so I had to narrow my own steps to walk beside her. She was barely five feet tall, and although I knew her to be in her late forties, she looked much younger than her age. She was dressed casually, in a gray windbreaker thrown over her jeans and sweater. “I thought it was odd you never responded. I got concerned and decided to just come out here. You made it sound important. Was I wrong? Did I make a mistake in coming here?”

  “No, I’m glad you’re here.” She smiled at me. “Charlotte won’t admit it but I’m sure she’s glad to see you, too.”

  “I wouldn’t bet money on that,” I replied, and we both laughed.

  “There’s a storm coming.” She looked back over her shoulder. The wind from the ocean was getting stronger. “You came in with the tour? Did you leave your car in the village?”

  “No, I live in the city. I don’t have a car. I took the train, and checked in to the inn,” I replied. “You made it sound urgent. Was it not?”

  It was the second time I’d asked, and the second time she didn’t answer.

  “How long can you stay?”

  “I’m on vacation—I don’t have to be back in the office until next week—”

  “Oh, good, so you can stay awhile. I’ll send someone to check you out and get your things.” Peggy sounded absolutely thrilled, and she was smiling. “And when it’s time to head home, Philip can drive you into the city, no need for you to take the train.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll stay that long,” I said carefully. “Coming out here was more of an impulse than anything else.”

  “Oh, but you’re here now, Ariel, and that’s wonderful! Wonderful! More than I could have hoped for.” She stopped and beamed at me, then gave me a big hug. She’d always given the best hugs. I closed my eyes. The smell of her perfume—Opium—brought back so many memories. “I’m so glad you’re here, really, I am. You shouldn’t have left, you know.”

  “I—”

  “I’ll let Karen know you’re not going back with the tour and ask Maeve to bring up some pastries and coffee to the library, and let her know we’ll have an extra at dinner and you’ll be staying.”

  I hesitated. Charlotte hadn’t exactly been encouraging. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” I couldn’t trust Peggy Glaven completely. I’d made that mistake before. She was a lovely person, and I liked her a lot—but the family always came first with her.

  And the family was Charlotte and her brother Sebastian.

  “Charlotte—”

  “Was caught off guard.” She gave me yet another hug. “I know her, Ariel, and while she may not be willing to admit it just yet, she was glad to see you. Trust me.”

  Trust me.

  What was I getting myself into?

  If I was smart, I’d have gotten a cab and headed straight for the train station and never looked back.

  “Give me a few minutes, and meet me in the library?” She started walking away, and then turned and looked back. “You do remember where the library is, don’t you?” She winked before disappearing around the edge of the maze.

  The wind was getting stronger, so I put my hood back up. I wasn’t in a hurry to get back to the house—or to run into Charlotte again. I walked back to the fountain and sat down on the edge again with a sigh.

  The storm was moving in quickly from out at sea, and the wind felt damp. It was going to pour, and just as I thought that I saw lightning flash in the distance.

  I looked at my reflection in the water. Peggy didn’t mention whether Bast was here or not.

  Bast.

  Bast was Sebastian, Charlotte’s younger brother.

  I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it, I said to myself.

  My mother always used to say “worrying was just borrowing trouble.”

  I shivered. But I had to face him, too.

  And if my first encounter with Charlotte hadn’t been encouraging, it hadn’t exactly been discouraging, either. She hadn’t ordered me off the property, and she’d seemed…preoccupied? What was it they’d been talking about? She’d been saying someone had searched her office, and someone was trying to take over Swann’s? Like me, she could be single-minded about work. She’d been caught off guard, her mind was somewhere else, and she couldn’t deal with me just then if something was going on with Swann’s.

  Yes, that would be her biggest concern. Swann’s always came first with Charlotte. I hadn’t liked taking a back seat to her company, especially after giving up my own career to come out to Sea Oats. I’d been stupid, yes, and not thinking clearly—running a worldwide company like Swann’s wasn’t easy, and I should have known it was going to take up a great deal of her time. And it wasn’t fair for me to blame her for my decision to give up my career. She hadn’t asked me to, had even, when I told her I was going to quit my job, asked me if I was sure I’d be happy not working. No, she’d been understanding—understood me even better than I understood myself.

  There was probably some compromise that could have been made so I could have kept working. The thought had crossed my mind more than a few times over the last few years, if I was going to be honest with myself. Hollis had hated me resigning, and had been thrilled when I came back. So, no, she would have been willing to work something out with me.

  God, what a fool I’d been.

  I should have been more understanding.

  The childish little voice in my head replied, But she wasn’t exactly very understanding of my needs, was she?

  I sighed and rolled my eyes. Maybe she hadn’t been, but she had t
ried sometimes.

  Which was more than I could say. I never tried. I was a willful, spoiled brat who wanted what I wanted and if Charlotte didn’t give in I pouted and cried and acted like…like a child.

  Not a wife.

  How had she put up with me and my immaturities for so long?

  It didn’t take a psychologist to see that our marriage had been destined to fail from the beginning.

  And if our marriage had worked out, I wouldn’t have my current career. And I was pretty happy with where it was at right now. My future was promising. Soon to be a full partner, with all that entailed, with profit sharing and more of a support staff to handle the day-to-day, interns to train, new designers to mentor. And I had an eye for design, Hollis certainly thought so.

  Yeah, terrific. My career couldn’t hold me while I fell asleep at night, couldn’t go with me to a movie, couldn’t keep me company at dinner.

  Hollis had been divorced three times. Her current husband was my age and she was putting him through medical school.

  But if my personal life was a disaster, I was a success professionally, and well on my way to becoming one of the best interior designers in the country, if not the world, and that was something. I was the youngest interior designer to ever be featured in the New York Times, and that piece had brought in a lot of commissions for me and Hollis Allman Interior Designs.

  And I had to face the truth about romance. My old ideas of what a relationship meant, what it was supposed to be, had been unrealistic and unworkable. I’d dreamed of a relationship like something out of the Disney cartoons my parents showed me when I was a kid. Charlotte was no Beast, I was no Belle, and Sea Oats wasn’t an enchanted castle.

  I was too young to give up on ever having a true partnership with another woman, but if it never happened for me—well, that was fine, too. I liked my apartment, I liked living alone, and I loved my job.

  Anything else on top of that was just gravy.

  But wanting some gravy wasn’t asking too much, was it?

  The way the sun was casting light underneath the dark clouds out at sea was gorgeous; the way it molded shadows from the bushes and even the fountain’s waters triggered something in my creativity. I’d recently taken a commission to decorate an apartment on the Upper West Side, an enormous old place that the new owner wanted to completely modernize. The way the shadows, and the light, were combining to create patterns was something that just might work in the big living room with its big windowed river view, that would look gorgeous in the light from the setting sun.

  I grabbed my phone out of my bag and unlocked it with the passcode quickly. I glanced over my apps—no text messages, forty-six new emails, but nothing on my social media. I took a moment to glance through the emails to make sure nothing pressing was there, and then switched over to my camera app.

  I don’t know what designers and artists used to do before the invention of the smartphone. I found myself taking pictures of furniture, color combinations, patterns and landscaping and crown moldings all the time. Whenever I was stuck on a project, I could scan through the thousands of images on my computer and find something that would trigger my creativity.

  And the grounds at Sea Oats were spectacular—even that damned maze.

  I stood up and started snapping pictures, turning a full 360 degrees in panorama mode, the screen on my phone whirring and clicking as picture after picture was taken. The clouds of the coming storm—there was a flash of lightning, forking down to the gray water—were also spectacular, and I kept turning, my finger snapping away. When I finished, I turned the phone back to sleep mode and dropped it back into my purse. I started walking back toward the house, wondering why precisely Peggy had wanted me to come.

  Why now, after two years, had Peggy sent for me? What could possibly be going on around here that Peggy could have thought I could help the Swanns with?

  Peggy was a cousin of sorts to Charlotte and her younger brother Bast. Her grandmother had been a Swann, which made them what? First cousins once removed? Second cousins? I’ve never figured out how to sort that sort of thing out, but that was how Peggy was related to them. She’d lived at Sea Oats for most of her life. Peggy was ten years older than Charlotte and had come to live with them when her own mother had died. In the nineteenth century, she would have been referred to as a poor relation. Charlotte and Bast were small children when Peggy arrived, and neither of them could remember a time when she hadn’t been there. Peggy had devoted herself to both Charlotte and Bast from the moment she’d arrived. There was never any question about where her loyalties lay.

  If she thought a reconciliation between Charlotte and me was the best thing for Charlotte, she would fight tooth and nail for us to make it work. If she thought Char was better off without me, she’d show me the door without a second thought, wipe off her hands and say good riddance, and I would cease to exist, as far as she was concerned.

  Any expectations I might have about Peggy, and what she was up to, had to start with that unfortunate truth—I could only trust her to do what she thought was best for them. She’d never married, hadn’t even gone to college. She’d stayed on at Sea Oats and helped raise them when their own mother had died only a few years after she arrived.

  While I always saw her as more of a sister-like figure to Char and Bast, she kind of saw them as her own children—and I wasn’t completely convinced they didn’t think of her as a mother.

  With all that went along with that kind of feeling.

  Charlotte had sometimes let it slip that she felt Peggy had spoiled Bast, made it possible for him to never grow up by making excuses for him—and excuses had always been necessary for Bast. I thought Charlotte had also probably spoiled Bast as much, if not more, than Peggy had. He was six years younger, so she’d always looked out for him and indulged him a little too much. There had been trouble with him in boarding school—I know he’d been kicked out of Phillips Exeter, and Charlotte always seemed to find an excuse for him. He’d flunked out of numerous colleges before finally giving up, and had never shown the least bit of interest in doing anything remotely resembling work for anyone, let alone Swann’s. That had to disappoint Charlotte, who loved that department store chain like it was her own child. She couldn’t understand why anyone else, especially a Swann, wouldn’t feel the same way.

  I’d wondered a few times—usually deep into a bottle of wine—whether things might have worked out differently if I’d asked her to give me a job at Swann’s. I was an excellent designer, if still unproven at the time, and there had to be something I could have done with Swann’s.

  Even if I had just been designing the window displays, the work might have tied us closer together.

  Instead of driving us further apart.

  Yes, I’d been immature enough to be jealous of Swann’s.

  What a hopeless idiot I’d been.

  I started walking back to the house. It would be strange staying at Sea Oats again, but I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t hoped Peggy would invite me to stay. That also meant Peggy knew Char wouldn’t object too strenuously to my staying, which had to be a good sign, right?

  Which also meant I had to admit I was still in love with her.

  You’re an idiot, I said to myself. The storm was getting closer. I could feel the rain in the air and smell it. I needed to get back to the house before it broke.

  I’d used to love thunderstorms at Sea Oats, climbing to the top of the tower and sitting up there as rain raged and lightning flashed around me. It was probably not the smartest thing to do, but there were lightning rods on top of the house. One of our first arguments after I’d come here to live had been about watching a storm up there. Lightning made Charlotte uncomfortable—the theory was being struck by lightning was what caused the small plane her parents were on to crash—but I, of course, in my youth and insensitivity thought she was being overly cautious and ridiculous. Now I realize I should have humored her regardless of my own opinion—she was genuinely wo
rried—but winning that small victory over her, asserting my independence, had seemed terribly important at the time. And she’d learned to live with my storm watching.

  Or at least stopped bringing it up.

  I had been insufferable. How had she put up with me?

  “Miss Ariel! Miss Ariel!”

  Startled, I jumped, my heart racing. Old Angus had emerged from the hedge maze without warning, and I’d been so lost in thought I didn’t notice him until he spoke. “Angus! How are you?”

  He looked…well, he didn’t look good. He was old, maybe in his late sixties? He’d worked for the Swanns since he was a young man, just as his father had before him. The hedge maze was, of course, his pride and joy. I never let on to him how uncomfortable it made me, and he had taken a liking to me when I first came to Sea Oats, always bringing me fresh flowers he thought I’d like. But now he looked…well, not good. His eyes were bloodshot and bulging, and years of working in the sun and in the sea wind had worn deep creases in his darkened skin. He’d been balding when I’d lived here, and now his hair was all gone on the top, the pinkish skin burned by the sun and peeling. The hair on the sides of his head had gone completely white, and he was more bent over than he’d been before. His blue eyes looked wild, and he smelled slightly of stale tobacco and whiskey.

  “Are you back for good, Miss Ariel?” He grabbed my arm with a dirty hand, the nails chewed down to the quick and lined with grime. His hand was strong, and I got a strong whiff of body odor.

  “Just for a visit, Angus.” I gently freed my arm from his grip. “Maybe a week or so. Are you all right?”

  He grimaced at me. “You need to come back to stay, Miss Ariel. This is your home. This is where you belong.” His eyes were darting back and forth nervously, like he was afraid we’d be overheard. “Although it’s not as safe as it was.”

  “As safe?”

  I stared at him. Angus had always liked a nip of whiskey now and then—no one minded, as long as his work didn’t slip. He’d been around so long he was like a part of the family—no, that wasn’t quite right. People always say that about servants, but people who work for you aren’t like family. It was hard to imagine Sea Oats without Angus working on the grounds. He was a part of Sea Oats like Poseidon’s Fountain, the swan pond, and the hedge maze. But clearly he was drinking more than he had, and maybe it was time for someone to have a word with him about it. Maybe I should ask Peggy. She ran Sea Oats so Char and Bast didn’t have to be bothered with any of those pesky housekeeping details.