She cocks her chin, observing me like an experiment. Her eyes, too dark for me to read their color out here, sparkle mischievously. “Oh, Jude. Come now. Let’s not play games.”
I stand stupefied. How could this woman think I’m playing at anything? Especially if she knows me so well. “Games?”
She nods and arches a brow. “We don’t invite justanyone.”
“Right,” I whisper, completely dumbfounded.
She smiles, a languid, feline gesture as she runs the feather through her fingers. I’m boring her. “You already know us,” she insists.
“I do?” There are mice who squeak louder than me at this point. I shake my head. “You’re wrong. I don’t know you at all.”
Her grin widens like the Cheshire Cat’s fromAlice in Wonderland, a little terrifying, a little mad. She reaches forward, drags the feather down my cheek. “We call ourselves the Fathom.”
Something comes spinning from the air above as if dropped from the bridge. I look up and see a raven roosting in the iron scaffolding overhead. When I look back to the woman, she is gone—she and her cohorts. The night is quiet again, thinner than it was when she was here, runny like watered-down gravy. Shockingly ordinary.
At my feet lies another black envelope.
3THE DEVIL’S OFFERING
There are two places I must never go.
The bluffs that overlook the sea where the wind reaches up like a cat’s paw to bat at my hair and eyes and skirt. And the room at the end of the west hall with a brass door handle shaped like a cone snail—beautiful but venomous—that always stays locked. The one where I hear her pacing through the night. It was my grandmother’s room once, when she was as alive and radiant as the goldenrod outside, a mercurial heavenly body so dazzling there wasn’t a man she couldn’t have. Except the one she married.
It’s opposite the room at the end of the east hall where Grandfather always sits before the fireplace. It is sculpted from the same Cremino marble as hers, but with simpler, softer rococo flourishes, the scallop of shells. It lacks the torment of the one in her room, the semblance of nightmares. But he stares into the flames as if looking for messages from her, even when it’s high summer outside and the flowers bloom before the house in a blanket of sunlight.
My grandfather is as dedicated to her in death as he was in life, though he is a man without a heart. Even I know that much, despite Nina’s protests. It is a truth my mother has pounded into me since the day I was born.
“Never has a man loved a woman the way he loved yourgrandmother Aurelia,” Nina insists when she talks about my grandfather.
But my mother’s words are closer to the truth: “Some things simply don’t fit in cages.”
She meant it about the man my grandmother trapped into marriage with her magic, and the woman my grandfather trapped in this house with his money.
Whatever he feels for her, it was never love. Love has give, it flexes like muscle, tissue. And my grandfather is as rigid as a pillar of quartz.
I stand outside the forbidden door and place my ear to the cool wood. It’s late in the day, but still light out. Too early for her to be walking. It’s the night when she grows restless, moving through the unreachable corners of the house like wind, and the early morning hours when she stands alone on the cliffs, her back to us, flaxen hair waving like a banner. Perhaps I’m the only one who sees her. Perhaps she knows I’m watching.
The first time I saw her was in the portrait over the fireplace mantel the day we came to live at Solidago, when my mother brought me into this room. By then, the woman herself was long dead. Even just the rendering of her was almost too much to look at. The square fix of her jaw and the slant of her celestial eyes bore down upon us like a bad omen, a portent of more to come, as if she were saying,Someday you, too, will be reduced to a painting, a photograph, a memory. A story told only at night.There was power in her gaze, a power I recognized in myself and in my mother’s strong arms and soft smile. A smile that had withered with my father’s passing and under the hard glare of my grandfather’s eyes.
I shouldn’t be here. Everything at Solidago groans with protest as the wind blows, setting my heart into a flutter of panic. But it’s been eight years since I came to this place, since I saw inside this room, and I barely know more about it than I did the day I arrived. Even Nina presses her secrets between her lips like wine when I dare to ask questions, though she was here in my grandmother’slifetime, hired as little more than a schoolgirl when my grandfather built this house. And my mother has grown taciturn at her father’s side, silent as the portrait that lies beyond this door.
I pull my hand from my pocket, loosening a white-knuckled grip to reveal a key. If Grandfather knew I had this, he’d throw me to the bears. I hardly know why he hasn’t already. The man makes it evident consistently that he has little taste for me and even less time. My mother forbade me to be in his presence before we arrived, making sure I knew how scarce I was to make myself. And she’s reinforced that rule ever since, locking me away for days when I disobeyed, mistakenly or otherwise. But it seems like overkill. The man clearly has no stomach for children, for anyone really but her.
It’s hardly the first thing I’ve stolen. My room is studded with secret treasures—a ceramic button featuring a spray of roses I found in a bedroom drawer, Nina’s favorite gingham apron under my bed, one of my mother’s pearl earrings wrapped in a scrap of silk at the bottom of my closet. Nothing at Solidago is truly mine unless I take it.
I slide the key into the lock and twist. It gives over with an audible click, one that I hope doesn’t echo past the grand staircase to the room at the end of the opposing wing. My mother and grandfather returned from their travels just this morning. I had hoped to get in here before they arrived, but Nina kept me in the kitchen helping her make enough cream tarts to fill a bus. The old man has insisted on a dinner party at the estate for a few top executives of his steel conglomerate. An occurrence so rare as to be unthinkable. My chest constricts at the mere thought of a house full of party guests, something I’ve both ardently longed for and desperately feared. I’ve grown so used to my isolation that I’m not sure I’ll know what to say or how to behave. But the girl in me is eager to pull on a satin dress and wind a ribbon through my hair, to feel pretty. And Dara has promised to come. I plan to sneak her in through the little door beside the back stairs.
I could wait until they’re distracted or asleep, but I wouldnever dream of coming here at night. And I’m too afraid to hang on to the key for long. My grandfather will surely realize it’s missing from the lacquered box on his desk where I took it three days ago. Maybe not right away, but in a day or two. I would steal from anyone else in this house and not think twice about getting caught, but I wouldn’t provoke the old man’s wrath for the world. And nothing would incense him more than someone taking a piece of my grandmother for themselves. As far as he’s concerned, she belongs to him, dead or alive. Every last bit.
I grip the contours of the handle and turn, slowly pushing the door open. Before me, the room lies in slumber, a haze of sunlight filtering through pulled drapes, washing everything pale. I make out an enormous bed to my right, a spread of muted, plum-colored silk stretched across it and a headboard twice its width in taupe velvet. On the western wall, that accursed twist of marble waits, the mantel like sea spray, a torment of creatures trapped within the whorls of seawater and fins, suckered arms and scales, rendered in cold, unfeeling stone, its firebox dark and empty as a cave. Above it, her face is a proud watchman, an indifferent blaze. I look away.
Who are you?I want to ask.What really happened?
I know the story my mom has told, and I’ve heard the whispers when staff think I’m not listening. That she drowned. That she flung herself from the cliffs outside, driven to despair by her confinement. That they pulled her from the sea, lifeless yet no less beautiful. That she was a troubled woman, difficult, melancholy, hard to love and harder to please. But there are pauses between their words where the truth hides. Things they leave unsaid. And once, when Nina brought her daughter, Mira, to the house to help with laundry after the new maid called in sick, I heard her whisper that my grandmother nearly set the house on fire one night burning something in “that damned fireplace.” Mira had responded with a familiar tsk and shake of the head that everyone displayed when my grandmother was mentioned. “Aurelia may have been many things,” Nina said then, “but, take it from me, she was notmad like the townspeople claim. She was haunted.” And they both spat three times over their left shoulders.
I close the door behind me and take a turn around the room. There is a dresser inlaid with mother-of-pearl and a vanity crowded with handblown perfume bottles, like a collection of pastel stalagmites. An open door leads to a pale flush of a bathroom, and chiffon-draped windows look out to the sea. There is a cream divan against one wall, curling away from itself like an unrolled parchment. I perch on its edge and let my eyes creep over the fine details before me, empty as an unwritten book.
I rise and cross to the vanity, sliding open a drawer. Inside are brushes of fox hair for her makeup and a comb made of white jade. An enamel pillbox with a water lily design is still dusted with residue. And a brass hairpin topped with a cormorant lies against the bottom, a single strand of hair like gold thread caught between its prongs. But it’s the lipstick case that I reach for, a shiny bronze tube etched with a light filigree design. When I slip the top off and turn the base, a striking column of coral rises, worn down from use. I stare at it, transfixed. In the mirror, I see the contours of my face light up, the color held before it brightening my skin. I lean in, imagining she is there behind my eyes.
