“Are you all right, Angus? What do you mean by that? Maybe you should lie down for a bit.”
He leaned in close to me and I tried not to wince at the smell. His face was covered in salt-and-pepper stubble, and if I didn’t know him, I would have thought a bum had somehow gotten onto the property.
“Just remember, Miss Ariel, the center of the maze is where the truth lies.”
“What?” Was he drunk? He was rank, but I couldn’t smell any alcohol on him.
“Remember.” He stepped back away from me and pointed a gnarled index finger at me. “Remember.”
He walked away from me, and I was too confused to say or do anything other than watch him disappear around the corner of the maze. I started walking slowly back toward the house, thinking, I need to talk to Peggy about Angus. It was unfortunate, but he was not in his right mind. Maybe he was just drunk? No one would care, so long as Angus was capable of doing his job, and clearly, the grounds at Sea Oats had never looked better.
I took out my phone again and started taking more pictures. No weeds to be seen anywhere, the grass a full lush green, the flowers budding in their meticulous beds. I went in the back door to the house and up the back staircase just off the kitchen. I could smell coffee and fresh pastries, heard the murmur of voices talking behind the closed door. I caught some French—so the tour group was now in the kitchen.
The back stairs were narrow and I hadn’t switched on the lights, so it was dark in there as well. The stairs were originally only for the use of the servants and had never been modernized; the family and guests used the main staircase in the front of the house, and as such the back stairs weren’t exactly the safest, easiest staircase to go up or down. The master bedroom suite I’d shared with Char when I lived here was much closer to these stairs, so I’d become well acquainted with them, going up and down them several times a day. The concept of having servants was alien to me. I was not to the manor born, and it took me a while to get used to having people pick up after me and cook and clean for me.
I’d be lying, though, if I said I didn’t miss that after I moved back to the city. There were so many times, as I washed dishes and vacuumed my little apartment, that I wished I had Maeve to do it for me! I worked long hours at my job, often grabbing takeout on my way home from the office, so exhausted both mentally and physically that I left everything for the weekend, switching on the television, binge-watching something on Netflix or Hulu to distract my mind from being so tired. And then, of course, that meant I spent the weekend getting caught up on things and before I knew it, Monday had rolled around again and it was time to get back to work.
I’d lost myself in my work, given myself to it completely, so I wouldn’t think about Char, wonder what she was doing, why she hadn’t come after me, why I was so lonely without her, why I had so stupidly ruined things, why I had just run away rather than fighting for our marriage.
And I was good at my job, very good at my job. The irony, of course, is that was how we’d met: Char had hired the firm I worked for to redecorate the offices at Swann corporate headquarters. It was my first big job. I was just out of the New York School of Interior Design. I’d managed to land an internship with Hollis Allman, one of the top designers in the city, and she’d liked my work enough to offer me a job when I graduated. It was a great opportunity, and I worked very hard for Hollis, who was not an easy boss. She didn’t put up with incompetence—hell, she didn’t put up with much of anything other than thorough professionalism. She’d given me the Swann job, and I was pretty determined to do a great job.
After that initial meeting, my contact with Charlotte was minimal. I primarily worked with her personal assistant, Carole Berry. Carole was a ruthlessly efficient woman in her fifties whose bluntness—to the point of rudeness—I gradually began to appreciate. There was nothing passive-aggressive about Carole Berry; she knew what her boss wanted and she refused to waste time not coming to the point. I soon learned to be direct with her, and to push back, earning her respect. I usually only saw Charlotte in passing—when she vacated her office so I could take some measurements, walking briskly through the office with files in hand, her glasses perched on top of her head. In those first few weeks, I found myself trying to arrange my time at Swann’s to when I could be reasonably sure she would be there. I was feeling a strong pull toward her. I’d never been drawn to older women before—the occasional mild crush on one of my professors in college was about it, and those had always passed relatively quickly—and I couldn’t help but notice there were no personal pictures in her office, nothing to make it more homey and less businesslike, no pictures of a husband or children or family.
I don’t remember how long it took me to start Googling Charlotte, trying to get an idea—any idea—of a personal life. I found out a lot about her family, the history of Swann’s, the big house out on Long Island, but very little about her. She’d never married, never been linked in gossip columns to anyone. That didn’t mean she was a lesbian, of course—it could just mean she was very private.
But I found myself fantasizing about her, daydreaming what it would be like to be with her, to see those grayish-blue eyes sparkle with delight when seeing me, walking through Central Park holding hands together, candlelit dinners and concerts and plays, cuddling in the backseat of a cab, wondering what it would feel like to be held in her strong arms, to be kissed by those full lips, how her mouth would feel on my body.
I tried to hide it, of course—it was the epitome of unprofessional. Hollis had a zero-tolerance policy for fraternizing with clients. And I figured so long as I never acted on my attraction, on my fantasies for her, everything would be fine. I mean, I was barely out of the closet. My first experience had been in college, when I was still dating men halfheartedly, allowing people to set me up with brothers and friends and roommates of friends and friends of cousins.
Once I was finished with school, I was finished with men, too. But I hadn’t had much luck since going to work for Hollis—I wouldn’t just have sex with someone for the sake of having sex, and none of the women I met, the women I dated—it just wasn’t there for me. I wasn’t sure if Charlotte was a lesbian, but I was attracted to her, fantasized about her when I daydreamed, but knew when the job was done I’d probably never see her again.
Charlotte waited until the job was finished before asking me out.
Three months later we were married.
Marry in haste, repent at leisure.
I walked down the hallway to the library. The library at Sea Oats had always been my favorite room in the house. It was two enormous rooms, one on top of the other, with a metal spiral staircase leading from the second floor library to the third. As I approached, the door opened and Maeve came out, shutting the door behind her.
I’d always liked Maeve. She was Angus’s cousin, I think—their family had been in service at Sea Oats going back decades. She was younger than Angus, and she smiled warmly at me, bowing her head slightly. “Nice to see you, Miss Ariel.”
I’d never gotten used to be calling Miss, but all the servants insisted and I’d long ago given up trying to get them to stop. “Maeve! You’re looking well.”
“I sent Joseph into town to collect your things and settle up your bill, Miss. Miss Peggy is waiting for you in the library. Had I known you were coming, I would have made some blueberry muffins.” She smiled. “But I’ll make some for your breakfast.”
“You’re too good to me, Maeve.” She was an incredible cook. I’d gained ten pounds living at Sea Oats—ten pounds that had been very hard to find the time to take off once I’d moved back to the city.
I’d be more careful this time.
I watched her walk down the hallway to the back stairs before I opened the library door and went inside to meet my fate.
Chapter Three
The library was always my favorite room in the house.
Samuel Swann had built Sea Oats to please his young second wife, Arabella Sturdevant. Arabella, the la
st of a long line of Sturdevants going back to the original Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, not only liked fine art but was also an avid reader and loved books. She’d also donated a lot of money to the New York Public Library and had provided the money for the creation and building of the Penobscot Library. Arabella’s passion for books, for literacy, was something she had passed along to her descendants. Every Swann’s department store had a book section, and ten percent of the book sales were earmarked for local library donations.
Like Arabella, I loved books and I loved reading. My earliest memories were of reading books, and the first time I saw the library at Sea Oats it was like one of my fondest dreams had come true. My little apartment in the city was, even now, crammed full of books, and I tried to spend at least an hour a day before bed reading.
The library at Sea Oats was enormous. It ran around the front corner of the house, encompassing the round tower with the witch’s hat atop, and the spiral staircase running up to the higher level was in a corner of the tower. There wasn’t a ceiling dividing the room into separate floors, but up on the third floor a wide gallery ran around the room. The tower had enormous windows, and there was also a skylight above, so there was plenty of natural sunlight in the room. Every inch of the walls where there was no window was covered with floor to ceiling bookshelves—and since the ceilings were sixteen feet high, there was a lot of room for a lot of books. On the second floor, there was plush, thick green carpeting and enormous wooden reading tables, as well as comfortable armchairs to sit in.
Above the fireplace on the second floor was an enormous John Singer Sargent painting of Arabella.
I’d always thought the painting belonged in a museum. It was worth a fortune, but the room would almost seem empty without it. There were other paintings of Arabella in the house, of course, but this was the only one that made her seem like an actual person who’d lived and breathed in the house.
I’d always felt a strange kinship with Arabella. We were nothing alike—she was a society heiress from New York City, had been given a remarkable education by her parents, and, of course, had married a man and been a wife and mother as well as a philanthropist.
I was born in the Midwest to middle-class parents and grew up in nondescript suburbs and went to public schools—managing to escape for college to New York.
I was also a lesbian.
But we’d both been Swann wives, and there was something about her kind face—a kindness present in all the paintings of her—that made me think we might have been friends had we known each other. She looked like the kind of woman who inspired confidences, was loyal and a good friend. Loving to read as I did, I spent a lot of time in Arabella’s library. None of Arabella’s books, of course, were still on the shelves—they were now valuable and the collection had been donated years ago to the New York Public Library, where her voluminous correspondence and diaries were also stored. Charlotte and Sebastian’s mother had also been a devotee of reading, and she was the one who’d cataloged and donated Arabella’s collections, as well as updated the Sea Oats library. The library was badly in need of another update—Charlotte didn’t have a lot of time to read anything besides sales reports and analyses, Bast didn’t read at all, and I don’t remember ever seeing Peggy with a book—and so there wasn’t anything on the shelves more recent than the early 1990s. Some of the older books were probably collector’s items, and many of them were signed first editions.
I’d considered taking on cataloging and updating the library when I’d lived here, but it was such an enormous project I’d been a little daunted. I’d mentioned it to Charlotte, who suggested hiring someone to do it, like a professional librarian or cataloger. She was probably right, but it still stung a little. I was insulted she didn’t think I was competent to do it myself, which in retrospect wasn’t what she’d been saying at all. But as a result I’d lost interest in the project—either doing it myself or hiring someone to do it—and in my absence it was safe to assume no one else had done it, either.
There was a fire going in the fireplace when I opened the door and walked in. Sea Oats was, like many old houses, drafty and hard to keep warm, so the fire was welcome as the temperature was dropping because of the incoming storm.
The enormous heavy green velvet draperies were pulled back from the windows in the tower, held in place with gold braid ending in enormous tassels. The sky was darkening and filling with dark clouds—the storm would break over the house soon. I involuntarily shivered. Two matching wingback beige chairs had been arranged in front of the fireplace, and the silver coffee service was set up on one of the antique side tables placed between the two chairs. There was a plate piled high with pastries, a butter dish, and a small china bowl of raspberry jam. My stomach growled. I hadn’t eaten anything other than a couple of glazed doughnuts I’d grabbed to have with my coffee that morning at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Penn Station, and had skipped lunch.
Peggy was already sipping coffee from a delicate china cup. I plopped down in the other wingback chair and reached for a croissant, liberally smeared it with both butter and jam. I poured myself a cup of coffee and wolfed down the croissant. The pastry was still warm.
No one made croissants better than Maeve’s.
“It must feel strange to be back here,” Peggy observed as I started working on a second croissant. “I sent Joseph in to settle your bill and collect your things. I’m going to put you in the green room, if that’s all right with you?”
The green room was on the third floor, just down the hall from the tower. The family bedrooms were all on the second floor, and while I certainly hadn’t expected to be put back in the suite I’d shared with Charlotte, being put up on the guest floor made my status at Sea Oats clear.
I was a guest, no longer family.
“That’s fine,” I replied, hoping my hurt feelings didn’t show, while chiding myself inwardly for being hurt. You aren’t a part of the family anymore, get over it. You walked out two years ago, what do you expect? Only a legal technicality keeps you tethered to the Swanns. “Why did you send for me? Why am I here, Peggy?”
“Don’t you think it’s time you dealt with things?” Peggy didn’t look at me, kept her eyes focused on the flames. “Both you and Charlotte have been avoiding dealing with your situation for far too long. You both need to decide what you’re going to do.” She waved a hand. “This stasis you’re both in—it’s not productive for either of you.”
“But why now?” I was curious. Peggy’s loyalties were always going to lie with Charlotte and Sebastian. “I left two years ago, and not a word from you, from anyone. So what’s so special about now?”
This time Peggy looked me in the eyes. “Charlotte has been seeing Lindsay Moore again.”
I inhaled sharply.
Lindsay Moore.
I might have known.
Lindsay Moore was an ex of Charlotte’s—the ex, really. Lindsay and Charlotte had grown up together, had known each other all their lives. Lindsay’s family wasn’t quite as moneyed as the Swanns—not many are—but it was old money, just the same. It was Lindsay’s ancestor who’d suggested to Samuel that he build his new wife a house outside of Penobscot. The Moores and the Swanns went hand in hand, had even intermarried a few times, but never in the direct line, so Lindsay and Charlotte weren’t related. I think the Moores made their money in textiles, but the businesses were long gone. Lindsay was the last of her family, and she was a lady who lunched rather than worked. I think she might have tried being a real estate agent, maybe even still was. I’d never gotten to know her well.
She’d hated me on sight, of course.
Charlotte and Lindsay had been romantically involved when they were teenagers at the same boarding school, and had even gone to Vassar together. I never really knew the whole story—Charlotte wouldn’t talk about her, which I always took as a bad sign—so most of what I knew about Lindsay came from Bast and Peggy. Peggy wasn’t a fan, since she’d hurt Charlotte, and I could never be certain t
hat Bast was telling me the truth about anything; he lied as easily as he breathed.
Whatever the truth was, something happened the summer after they graduated from college, and Lindsay had married a man, a soap actor. That marriage had been an utter disaster, and only lasted a few years. Once she was safely divorced and back living in her house on the other side of Penobscot, Lindsay and Charlotte had gotten back together again. But she had also married twice more—both times to men—and the volatility of the Lindsay-Charlotte dynamic was one of those love / hate on-again / off-again things movies and television shows make look like the real thing, true love.
Because of course everyone falls in love with someone they can’t stand.
Then again, the divorce rate is over fifty percent.
Lindsay had divorced her most recent husband, according to Bast, about six or seven months before Charlotte met me, and had been desperately trying to get things patched up with her again—sending her flowers, little gifts, dropping in at Sea Oats on the weekends unannounced and uninvited. Nothing seemed to work this time, though—Charlotte was wise to all the little tricks Lindsay had always used to get her back, and she wasn’t falling for them again.
And then she married me.
I couldn’t blame Lindsay for hating me. I knew if I were in her place, it would be hard for me to be pleasant to the person who’d married the person I considered my true love.
A Lamentation of Swans Page 4
