The Splendour Falls

by Rosemary Clement-Moore

  ‘But I thought it was close by.’

  ‘Well, yes. About two miles from here.’

  Two miles used to be an easy jog. I could walk it, but I hadn’t tested my leg’s limits that far yet. I’d hate to get there and be unable to get back. But I hated feeling trapped more. ‘That’s not so far.’

  Paula slapped her hands on her knees and stood with the purposeful cheer of a cruise director. ‘I have a better idea.’

  My sigh rang with resignation. ‘I thought you might.’

  ‘Why don’t you get started painting the front bedrooms?’

  I stared at her like she’d suggested I start flying to the moon. ‘What?’

  ‘I think it would be good for you to do something active. The whole idea behind your coming here was to give you something to do besides languish around your apartment in that big, anonymous city.’

  ‘You mean, the idea was to use me for free labour?’ I struggled to my feet. ‘Is that how I’m earning my room and board?’

  Paula looked genuinely appalled at the idea. ‘Sylvie, this is your family home. We are kin. You don’t have to earn anything.’ But the steel overtook the magnolia in her voice as she squared her shoulders. ‘Which doesn’t mean I’m going to let you lie around the house in your pyjamas all day.’

  Our voices had roused Gigi, whose lump began writhing under the quilt, emitting little growls. Paula whirled at the sound, just as Gigi popped out from the covers, her fluff standing straight up around her head.

  ‘What did I say about that dog?’ Paula demanded.

  Gigi gave a winsome, playful bark, but my cousin was unmoved. I set my jaw stubbornly. ‘You said she couldn’t sleep with me at night. You didn’t say she had to stay in her crate all the time.’

  Paula pressed her hands to her eyes. ‘Get dressed and come down for lunch.’ She headed for the open door, muttering as she went. ‘This is why I never had children of my own.’

  I turned to Gigi when she was gone. ‘Why does everyone think I’m so high maintenance? I’d be no trouble to anyone if they had just let me stay in Manhattan.’

  If I was enough trouble, would Paula send me back? The thought didn’t spark the same hope that it had before I saw Bluestone Hill. Leaving would not be the same as never coming here. I couldn’t unlearn my father’s background, and I couldn’t unask my questions.

  Lunch consisted of a gargantuan salad, as if Clara was trying to make up the lack of carnivorous content in vegetable volume. She and Paula discussed business matters, since I didn’t try to make small talk. I felt obliged to sulk, and live up to expectations. Or down, as the case may be.

  After I’d finished my salad, I took the Davis history book and the bowl of leftover blackberry cobbler that Clara forced on me – to improve my mood, she said – and went out to the garden with Gigi.

  I meant to stay in the back yard, maybe even sit under the arbour, but Gigi headed again to the knot garden at the side of the house. I’d brought an old blanket I’d found on the side porch, one that had obviously done picnic duty before, and I spread it where the invading grass had made a soft spot in the out-of-control garden. Gigi sprawled in the centre of the quilt until I scooted her over so I could stretch out on my stomach, the sun on my back and warm through my clothes.

  Despite the overgrown disorder, I felt nature working its usual magic on me. The garden’s hedges hid me from the house – unless you were on the balcony upstairs – and by the time I finished the cobbler and Gigi finished the ice cream, I felt calm for the first time since Shawn Maddox had mentioned the word ‘ghost’.

  Well, maybe not calm. There was still that lilac piece of paper hidden in my desk. I didn’t need to look at it to know how close the score was. But in the garden, that seemed further away. The sun shone, bees flew, grass grew, and the whole thing would keep happening whether I was crazy or not.

  Setting aside the bowl, I pulled the book towards me and dove in. Twenty pages later, I decided that slapping up paint would be better than this. Hell, watching paint dry would be better than reading William S. Davis, Esq.

  I started skimming the text. On one hand, I began to understand why the Davis name was such a big deal here. The family had settled the area and been instrumental in just about everything that happened for two hundred years. But from this book, I didn’t get why anyone would be excited about meeting a Davis, living or dead. Old William S. had somehow managed to simultaneously make the family unbelievably grandiose and excruciatingly boring.

  Flipping forward, I looked for mention of the Colonel. There was indeed a lengthy chapter on Josiah Davis, and it was as dry as the rest of the book. Blah blah blah Battle of This, Siege of That, yadda yadda yadda Reconstruction … But nothing about the man’s personality. I had to infer what I could from his study, and the formal portrait in the book.

  It was a bad print of an old photograph. One of those where the subject had to sit still for about fifteen minutes while the image developed. It was hard to see anything other than a man in a high-collared shirt and double-breasted coat sitting ramrod straight in a chair, a young woman with a baby in her arms standing beside him.

  I thought she might be his daughter, but the caption underneath said: Colonel Josiah Davis and his second wife, Mary Maddox Davis, holding their son, Joshua. She didn’t look much older than me. And her expression definitely didn’t say it was a love match.

  Was Mary Maddox Davis my multiple-great-grandmother? And the maiden name – did that make her Shawn’s however-many-great-aunt?

  I couldn’t tell much from the dark, blurry photograph and the stiff, sober look on her face. She didn’t look very nice, though I wouldn’t either if I had to marry a man old enough to be my father. I knew girls got married young back then, and a lot of the men her age would have died in the war, limiting her choices. But still. Not a pleasant prospect.

  What happened to the Colonel’s first wife? I flipped back a few pages and scanned the text. Ah, died in childbirth with her sixth kid. So where were all the offspring? Even allowing for infant mortality, there should be a few to surround dear old dad and their stepmother. Did the sons die in battle? Had the girls all been married off by the time the photo was taken?

  I tried to find the answers in the chapter, but the prosaic writing was useless. William S. Davis managed to record every boring detail about the Colonel’s charge at the Battle of Chickamanga, and nothing I wanted to know.

  To judge by the book, not only had my ancestors been devoid of personality, they apparently bred only boys. There were almost no wives or daughters or sisters mentioned, at least as far as I’d gotten. I rolled over, contemplating the house, and what things would have been like for a Davis daughter in the mansion’s heyday, when Bluestone Hill had been full of life and activity.

  From where I lay, I couldn’t see the satellite dish, or the cars parked by the garage. Lulled by the garden, I indulged my imagination this time, purposefully trying to picture what the place would have looked like in the Colonel’s time. Instead of overgrown and weedy, the hedges were neatly trimmed, and the herbs and plantings cut back so that the geometric pattern was clear. I could smell lavender and geranium, crisp and green.

  Instead of a quilt, my skirt was spread around me, the hoop carefully collapsed so it wouldn’t flip up. My corset stays pressed into my ribs, and I could take only shallow breaths. Not a comfortable position, but I wanted to watch the sun crawl across the sky, marking time while I waited for—

  For what? The question nudged me out of a doze, where my creative visualization had gone off-script, undirected. The character I’d created in my head was waiting for someone.

  My shrink would call this projection. It irritated me, though, that my imagination couldn’t supply an identity.

  A shadow fell across my face, and I squinted blearily into the sun. Gigi gave a sleepy growl and nestled closer to my side. ‘Is it you?’ I asked, not sure what, or who, I meant, still caught in the sticky web of dreaming.

  ‘I
t depends on whom you’re expecting.’ The accent was lilting and droll. Rhys. Of course.

  I rubbed my eyes and sat up. ‘Do people really say “whom” where you’re from? Outside of the BBC, I mean.’

  ‘Sometimes.’ He looked down at me, one eyebrow raised. ‘Did you have a nice nap?’

  Even with the sun warm on my face, my blush was hot. ‘I wasn’t sleeping; I was thinking.’

  Rhys moved a step over so I didn’t have to squint into the light. ‘Thinking about what?’

  ‘About my great-great-grandmothers and -aunts, and what it would have been like to live here when this place was new.’ Pulling my knees up, I propped my folded arms on top of them. ‘Back in the bad old days.’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t have been bad for you, princess.’ He wasn’t scornful exactly, but his tone was pitched to poke holes in any pretences of hardship I had. ‘Being the daughter of the house and all.’

  ‘Yeah. I’d have had it better than most women.’ I glared up at him, irritated I had to crane my neck to do so. ‘But I’d still have no rights, have to marry whoever they told me to and have babies until I dropped dead.’

  I’m sure he could have countered by pointing out how spoiled I was, or how I took my relative lack of hardship for granted. Instead, after a thoughtful beat, he just said, ‘Whomever they told you to.’

  I laughed, even though I’d been irked a moment before. Rhys looked startled, and my frown snapped back. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, sounding bemused. ‘You have a nice laugh. Sitting there in your bare feet and your hair all mussed, you don’t look like the same girl who got off the plane yesterday.’

  ‘Well, I am.’ Uncertainty made me grumpy. I pulled the rubber band from the tangled remnants of my ponytail, and gestured to my jeans and T-shirt. ‘This is the real me.’

  His gaze went to my feet. ‘Do you have something against shoes? That’s playing against type, isn’t it?’

  I tucked my feet under my knees, sitting crosslegged, and scowled for good measure. I’m sure he meant that no self-respecting socialite would be caught dead with feet like mine – calloused, boxy, knobby in the toe joints. Mother had taken me for a pedicure when the cast came off, and the aesthetician had been happy to enumerate the ways in which pointe shoes had given me the feet of an ogre.

  ‘I’m not a type.’ I would have been angrier, if I didn’t suspect he was needling me, as usual.

  Gigi got up, stretched and tottered over sleepily to fall into the well of my folded legs. Rhys took the room I’d made on the quilt for an invitation, and lowered himself onto it. I pulled my bare toes in closer, because proximity to Rhys was making them tingle.

  He picked up the book I’d set aside. ‘What are you reading? Davis on Davis?’

  I nodded. ‘It works better than Ambien. The author must have had real talent to make so much aggrandizement that boring.’ I scrubbed my scalp where the ponytail had pressed in my sleep, and let my hair fall around my shoulders. It felt good, like loosening my bun after long hours of rehearsal or taking off a too-tight pair of jeans. I almost felt like I really had been wearing a corset and hoops for the length of my dream. In my head I could hear the creak of the whalebone stays, the rustle of layers and layers of underwear.

  Was the image too vivid? I’d had to wear a hoopskirt once for The Nutcracker, so I knew how it felt and the trick to sitting in one. But that was my own memory. Did it need to go on the list?

  While I debated, Rhys flipped the pages of the book. Specks of paper lint drifted in the sunlight. ‘Did you learn anything, or was that suffering for nothing?’

  I curled a strand of Gigi’s ear fluff around my fin-gers as she slept. ‘I found out we’re cousins.’

  ‘Cousins?’

  ‘Owen Davis came to the United States from Wales in the late seventeen hundreds and claimed this property by the sweat of his brow. William S. makes it sound very noble, but I think it just means that Davis came here without any money.’

  ‘He wouldn’t be the first person to come to America fleeing something,’ said Rhys casually. ‘Religious persecution, potato famine. Debt. Prison.’

  ‘What about you?’ The question popped out, startling me.

  ‘Me?’ he asked. It startled him, too, apparently.

  ‘Yes, you.’ I wasn’t sure where it had come from, but the shuttering of his expression confirmed the lucky guess. ‘What are you running away from?’

  His eyes – very green, very direct – met mine in a challenge. ‘What makes you think I’m running away from anything?’

  I didn’t back down, but ran an assessing glance over him. He was work-dirty: knees of his khakis grimy, tails of his shirt streaked where he’d wiped his hands. ‘You’re, what, twenty? Twenty-one? Handsome, not fashion-impaired – despite grubbing around in the dirt for some reason. Not too socially maladjusted. You seriously have nothing better to do with your summer than follow your dad around and type his notes?’

  He rose to his feet in one fluid move, the better to look down at me. ‘You don’t know me, princess. Some people have reasons for doing things, and don’t just go wherever they’re told or drift whichever way they’re pushed.’

  My teeth clenched. Point to him, but it was a low blow. Since I couldn’t parry that, I pursued the opening he’d given me. ‘So you do have a reason for being here.’

  His mouth opened, worked for a moment trying to block the thrust of my question, then closed as he narrowed his eyes at me. ‘Yes. I’m helping my father with his research. But I’m also working on something of my own.’

  What was so hard about that? I nodded to the dirt on his khakis. ‘Does it have to do with your rock hunting?’

  Again, I’d managed to knock his feet out from under him. ‘How did you know about that?’

  My eyebrows shot up in surprise. ‘Clara thought you were joking. What are you doing, working on a merit badge?’

  He pressed his lips together in offended dignity. ‘As it happens, I’m a geologist.’ Then the starch ran out of him, and he admitted, ‘Or I will be, when I go back to finish at university.’

  ‘You mean you really are looking for rocks?’ I felt stupid sitting on the ground while he was standing, but I knew I’d look as graceful as a three-legged foal if I tried to get up, so I stayed where I was.

  There was a pause while he seemed to edit his answer. ‘I’m also doing some volunteer work at a dig at Old Cahawba.’

  ‘Old Cahawba? What’s that?’

  ‘The archaeological park up the river.’ His brows drew down in a perplexed V. ‘How do you not know any of this?’

  ‘Why should I? I’ve never been here before.’

  ‘But this is your’ – he searched for the appropriate word – ’ your legacy.’

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sake.’ Aggravation wouldn’t let me keep still. I didn’t care how it looked. I moved Gigi out of my lap and climbed to my feet. ‘I had to look my family up in a book. I’m hardly the lost heir returned to claim a birthright. For one thing, it’s not mine, it’s Paula’s.’

  Rhys caught my hand when I wobbled, an instinctive move, I think. But he didn’t let go. He grasped my fingers and looked hard into my eyes, as if trying to read my thoughts.

  ‘You’re serious,’ he said with a note of discovery, a statement of whatever he saw in my gaze. ‘You didn’t know anything about Bluestone Hill when you came here.’

  ‘Have we not established that I have an all-day pass for the clueless bus?’ My utter frustration almost made me miss the emphasis he put on ‘anything’, as though there was something I should know but didn’t. ‘What is it I’m supposed to have known?’

  He let my hand go and straightened. ‘I thought … Well, never mind what I thought.’

  I glared at him. ‘What? That I’d come to finagle my way in here? Somehow take the property from Paula? My dad left me well provided for. An antique mansion in the middle of nowhere isn’t a huge temptation.’

  I heard how the words sou
nded as soon as they left my mouth, and wished I could snatch them back. But life was like a live performance: There were no retakes. Dad left me money, but I didn’t know or care about the details. All I’d cared about was that it kept me in toe shoes. The money was all in a trust I’d never planned to touch because I was going to be a famous ballerina.

  And now Rhys was looking down his nose at me like I’d crawled out from under one of his rocks. ‘Thanks for clearing that up,’ he said coldly. ‘I think I have your measure now.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ I said hotly, and it wasn’t about the money or my snooty words. ‘Nobody here does. I don’t even know what kind of person I am any more.’

  I picked up Gigi and turned, the grass cool under my bare feet, but not enough to cool my emotions. I hadn’t gone five steps when Rhys called my name.

  ‘What?’ I snapped, turning back.

  He looked at me as if he would have said something else. An explanation or apology would be nice. But he just tightened his jaw and held out the Davis family history to me. ‘Here’s your book.’

  ‘Thanks so much,’ I ground through my teeth, and headed for the house.

  I went in through the side porch to the den, not wanting to go upstairs and have to decide what, if anything, of this afternoon’s events I needed to add to the crazy list. Flopping on the couch, I grabbed the remote and clicked on the television, just for the modern inanity of it. Gigi jumped up beside me and regally crossed her paws as if she were claiming her rightful place.

  That was the undertone of Rhys’s comments. He seemed to expect me to view Bluestone Hill as my rightful place. Which was stupid. No matter how seamlessly I’d slipped into the role of my imaginary ancestress while I was in the garden, I was not here to reclaim anything. I wasn’t even here by choice.

  I flipped channels without really paying attention, and finally settled on a mindless syndicated sitcom.

  A movement in the foyer made me jerk guiltily forwards, hiding Gigi from view. When no one descended to tell me to get the dog off the furniture, I called tentatively, ‘Paula?’