“You’ll be riding up front. With me,” he says curtly. He opens the side door for me, and I slide in, uncomfortably wet. “You’re lucky Ihad to go to town for the groceries this morning. The roads are likely to wash out with the storm. Should have let us know you were coming. Miss Thorne doesn’t take kindly to unannounced visitors.”
“I’m sorry. I really don’t mean to be a bother.” I turn to him, smiling tightly. “I appreciate the courtesy you’ve shown me, Mr. ...”
“Beckett. Just Beckett.”
“I assume you’re Aunt Marguerite’s chauffeur?”
“Her gardener. Among other things.”
“I see. Well, I’m Sadie. Just Sadie. Very pleased to meet you.”
He merely grunts and pulls onto the street, windshield wiper slapping steadily back and forth. So much for Southern hospitality.
As we pass the hotels, restaurants, and spas lining Main Street, I remember the last time Mama and I came here, when I was twelve. Marguerite seemed so young then, her auburn hair faintly streaked with gray and her skin freckled from a recent European holiday. Her daring Paul Poiret ensemble turned heads up and down the boulevard. She’d spoiled me with sweet pastries and cocoa as she and Mama sipped aperitifs on a sun-drenched balcony and talked about things I found boring at the time but wish I could remember now.
As the car sweeps up the steep hillside leading to Blackberry Grange, I wonder just how much she’s changed. If she’ll even recognize me.
“Has Aunt Marguerite found a companion yet?” I ask the question directly, as “Just Beckett” seems to be a man with little patience for social graces. “My cousin mentioned she’s in need of one.”
“No. And she won’t, most likely. She’s already been through three nurses and two maids this year.”
“Why is that?”
“You haven’t kept in touch with your aunt, have you, Miss Halloran?”
I flinch at his judgmental tone. I turn my head to look out at the trees whipping in the wind, their leaves an incandescent, bright green against the gray sky. “I regret I haven’t.”
“You’ll soon see for yourself why we can’t keep staff.” He retreats into stony silence as he shifts gears and maneuvers the curving road, his long-fingered hands flexing on the steering wheel.
The rain slows to a soft patter, and then ceases altogether, the sun breaking through the clouds. When the turreted roof of Blackberry Grange appears, I sigh in relief, eager to be free of the car and its surly driver. As Beckett brings the Duesenberg around in a slow circle before the elevated veranda, I take in the house with eager eyes. It’s smaller than I remember, but still larger than any other house in our family by far. While the yellow clapboards and intricate abacus-chain millwork bear signs of genteel decay, the house, at least from the outside, wears its years with grace. The neatly manicured front gardens, dotted with evergreen topiaries, a trimmed lawn, and an espaliered blackberry thicket, show evidence of Beckett’s diligent hand. I glance at him and consider complimenting his work but have the feeling my words would be met with icy disregard.
A short, solidly built woman comes out onto the porch, dressed in a modest gray frock. She waves as I step from the car, opening my own door this time. “Hello!” I walk confidently up the front steps and extend my hand. “I’m Sadie Halloran. Miss Thorne’s great-niece.”
The woman takes my hand briefly, then drops it, patting at her wren-brown hair nervously. “I’m Melva Percy. Miss Thorne’s maid. I’m so sorry. If I’d known you were coming, I’d have laid something out ...”
“I understand. It was rude of me to just turn up. Please don’t make a fuss on my account.”
As Melva leads me into the house, I wonder how long it’s been since the last maid left. Though the house is neat enough, there’s a faint veil of dust over everything. Memories wrap themselves around me as I enter the front parlor. Mama trailing down the hall from the library, a stack of books in hand. My brothers and I chasing fireflies through the yard. Marguerite and Louise dancing a soft-shoe routine before the piano. Coming here feels like being embraced by time—a halcyon time, before my life became what it is now, colored by loss after loss.
I turn in a circle, admiring the plasterwork cornices, the flocked-velvet wallpaper—a sun-bleached shade of bronze shot through with green, like aged copper. Portraits of my great-grandparents hang from the picture rail. Bram Thorne glares down at me stoically, next to his young French bride, Adeline. I see something of myself in her long, straight nose and downturned mouth.
“Would you like tea? Or perhaps coffee, miss?” Melva stands in the arched doorway separating the parlor from the entry hall, wringing her hands.
“Coffee sounds lovely.”
She nods and leaves me. I remove my lace gloves and walk slowly through the room, gazing upon the array of old photographs arranged on the mantelpiece and sideboards. There’s a portrait of my aunt Grace as a baby dressed in a ruffled gown, and another next to it, picturing her children, my towheaded cousins—cheeky Louise and Pauline—perched on a Shetland pony with their brother, Beau, holding the reins. Beau had died, taken by the Spanish flu, just like my little brother, Henry, pictured as a baby on a gilt-edge cabinet card. This room is a paean to loss. A family tomb full of bittersweet memories.
In the largest photograph, given a place of honor atop the tall parlor grand, my grandmother Florence stands in a church doorway, dressed in her wedding gown, flanked by a young Marguerite and their middle sister, Claire. Claire had also died young—in her early twenties—of the measles. My great-grandmother Adeline spent a year in a sanitorium after her death, stricken by the loss.
She wasn’t the only one who had fragile nerves. Madness ran in our family, right alongside our proclivity toward liquor and a tragically young demise.
“I blame Florence, you know. For all of it.”
I startle at the sound of a familiar alto voice and turn to see Marguerite at the foot of the stairs, dressed in a sheer emerald-green peignoir with not a stitch of clothing beneath it. I throttle my gaspbefore it leaves my throat. She eyes me suspiciously. “Who are you? The new help?”
“No. I . . . I’m Sadie.”
“Sadie.” Confusion laces her brows together. “Sadie.”
