Within two weeks all of Maine’s summer society would be back in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Back home until the next June when Maine became home again, another Camelot to those legendary American names and bank accounts already living in a private world almost as fantastical as an Arthurian tale.
But Georgina wouldn’t be going home. The bank had taken the Bayard townhouse. Within three months she could lose this home too. In fact, unless John Cabot proposed tonight, Georgina would have no home here or in Boston. Once everyone went home they would know about the foreclosed townhouse, the broken business, the bonds gone bad, and the shipping losses. They would know about her foolish and frivolous brother. They would know that the Bayard fortune was no more.
A few minutes later a rosewood regulator clock chimed; its gong rang one... two... three... four times, before the shelf clock went off. Soon all twenty clocks were chiming at different moments and different hours as if they needed to mock the chaos in Georgina’s life. She stared at the clock wall where the Bayard collection was artfully displayed.
The first Bayard had been a clockmaker from the old country, a man who came to a new world and here he made his fortune and his name. Ironically, they were the things that were more timeless than his famous clocks, prized because they never lost even a minute’s time in an entire year. Elegant, rare, and some even whimsical, the clocks had always been a part of this house, part of Georgina’s heritage. Yet now, when her life was ready to fall apart, not one clock in the entire room kept the same time. No matter how often she wound them. No matter how often she reset them, the clocks would chime at different hours.
She gave the bell pull an angry yank. For one brief second a small rip sounded, then the other end of the bell pull fell to the floor, the old silken cord so rotten that it had just unraveled. She stared at the tattered end lying on the carpet and looking as if it had been chewed. In her right hand she still held the other end. She took two deep breaths, then hollered, “Mrs. Cartwright!”
Nothing.
“Miss-sus Cartwright!”
An older woman came scurrying into the room, wiping her hands on her apron. “Yes, Miss?”
“Please have someone fix the bell pull and check all the other pulls. Every single one of them. Tonight is too important. I want everything perfect.”
The old woman nodded and took the bell pull from her.
Georgina crossed the room just as a clock with a mother-of-pearl face like the moon chimed six.What time is it?she thought, then scowled at that clock. “And Mrs. Cartwright. Reset all the clocks. Every one of them is wrong.”
“But Miss Bayard, we did. We reset them this very morning and still they run at different times.”
“They are Bayard clocks. A Bayard clock never loses time. Everyone knows that. I said... reset them.” Georgina left the room and marched down the hallway, barking out orders to three maids before she stopped to fiddle with a bouquet of fresh flowers that sat atop a two-hundred-year-old French console table with gilt edges and three ink marks from Louis XIV. She plucked out a rose, then a lily, a chrysanthemum, and two fern leaves, then put them back exactly as they were. She eyed them critically and muttered, “Much better.”
A moment later she was inspecting the rooms, all twenty-eight of them. Before too long, maids with feather dusters and mops in tow were running this way and that like confused birds that had been locked in a small cage. They polished the heavy silver candlesticks that had belonged to emperors, cleaned imaginary spots off one of the fifteen crystal chandeliers, scrubbed off the small dark specks on the French carpet in the smoking room, and used thick beeswax and almond oil on the mahogany banister, stairs, and all the wood crown moldings—again.
Having snapped out her last order, Georgina stood in the middle of the foyer, her hands planted on her hips while she stared up three stories to the gallery above. She knew one thing for certain: she had to save this house. At her darkest moment, when Albert was dead, when she found out that everything was gone, that moment when she was completely alone and the undertow was threatening to drown her, the answer had come to her like knowledge from above—if she were to believe in such things, which she didn’t.
The house, this house and everything in it, stood for all she was. Within its walls of plaster and wood were the rhythms of life, all the Bayards were and ever had been. It stood for the survivors. With calculated desperation she had done whatever she had to do in order to save this house, because if she lost the house, she lost Georgina Bayard, she lost herself.
No one knew of her circumstances yet, and if John Cabot proposed, no one need ever know. Everything was ready. And tonight, if all went smoothly, she would have her marriage offer. Her future and her home and her name would be secure.
Georgina rearranged the flowers on the table for the fifth time that morning, while a constant litany ofTonight! Tonight! Tonight!rang through her head like the chiming of an overwound clock. Everything had to be perfect, absolutely perfect, especially when she felt as though she were swimming harder than ever before. Because for Georgina, tonight was swim... or sink.
Chapter Four
Now my brothers call from the bay,
Now the great winds shoreward blow,
Now the salt tide seawards flow;
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
—The Forsaken Mermen, Matthew Arnold
ARRANT ISLAND, MAINE
The rider burst over the crest of a lawny hill as if he were atop Pegasus. The August air, warm and quiet only seconds before, now trembled with the thundering sound of Eachann MacLachlan on his white stallion. Down the dirt road they flew, past a rocky island point where on a clear day like today, black shags stood spread-eagle atop the white crusted rocks and gulls screamed at the constantly shifting waves.
Eachann sailed over a fieldstone fence, down a lush glen where his horse splattered through a cool brook, then jumped another rock fence twice as high as the first one. They sped past a pond with harlequin ducks and white whooper swans gliding over the glassy surface toward a small wooden bridge that arched over the water like a rainbow.
When he rode like that, his horse’s hooves eating up the damp green earth, together, he and his white stallion looked like one unique beast of incredible grace and power, seeming to almost drink up the salty air. At the edge of a thick mossy forest of cat spruce and pumpkin pine, they dipped suddenly and turned down a trail lined with birch, maple, and aspen trees whose leaves had already begun to change color. Each year when those leaves fell to almost a foot deep, the trail turned red and orange as if it were on fire.
He slowed his horse as the trail wound downward toward the sea where a small inlet was hidden by an arm of rock that curled protectively around the northern edge of the cove. But once on the white sand, they took off again, pounding through the shallow rush of surf, the water spraying up behind them and sparkling in the brilliant sunlight like a trail of fireflies.
