April of Enchantment (Sweetly Contemporary Collection) (8 page)

“Justin, then. If I am able to locate any of the Roman furniture or other pieces I think might interest you, I will tell Laura, and she will let you know.”

There was no need for her to leave them, however. On the landing, Laura’s mother met the person who had rung the bell.

“Anybody home?” Laura heard Russ Masters ask in jovial tones before he entered the room with her mother. “Laura,” he went on, “am I glad to see you! I came by to see if you made it home all right, and make my peace with you after leaving you in the lurch like that.”

Laura smiled over the back of the couch. “As you can see, there was no problem. We were just having coffee. Won’t you join us?”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

“I’ll get it,” Mrs. Nichols said, waving Laura back into her place, smiling a little as she watched Russ lounge into the room and drop down on the couch beside Laura. The two men spoke, then Russ placed his arm along the back of the couch, cupping Laura’s shoulder, giving her a brief hug.

“What about you, Justin? Would you care for a refill?” Laura’s mother asked.

“Thank you, no, Mrs. Nichols. It’s time I was going.”

“Don’t let me run you off,” Russ said as the other man got to his feet.

Justin Roman smiled, a slight softness in his manner. “If I meant to stay, you couldn’t budge me.”

“That’s a matter of opinion, old man,” Russ said, laughing in a mock challenge.

Justin shook his head, a smile tugging at his lips, before he turned to his hostess, thanking her for the coffee. Saying he could find his own way out, he left the room, though Mrs. Nichols followed him, on her way to the kitchen. Their voices continued, muffled by the door, for several minutes, then died away.

Laura sat staring at the closed panel for long moments. Justin had not said good-bye to her. It was not necessary, of course; she would be seeing him again soon.

Russ cleared his throat. “I’m not in your bad books, am I — I mean really and truly?”

Laura faced him with a smile, ready to be distracted. “Should you be?”

“It’s possible, since I left you stranded with Justin.”

“I told you it didn’t matter.”

“I hated doing it, but when he offered to take you home, I could hardly say I didn’t think you would care to go with him.”

“No,” she agreed musingly, “that wouldn’t have been too wise.”

“I wouldn’t have minded that, but as owner of Crapemyrtle, he had a perfect right to consult with his historical consultant.”

“Oh, perfect,” she said, sending him a glance from under her lashes.

He frowned with pretended fierceness. “You can joke if you like, but I know Justin can be blunt to the point of roughshod tactics. I hope I didn’t let you in for anything unpleasant.”

“As a matter of fact, we had an interesting conversation, all about paint and the different levels of possible restoration.”

Russ shook his head. Reaching out, he took her hand in his. “You can’t fool me. Something is bothering you, and I suspect it has to do with Justin and the house. If you don’t want to go on with this, Laura love, you have only to say the word.”

“Back out, now, after you went to the trouble of arranging a trial for me?” she asked.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, not quite meeting her gaze, “that was no problem. It was Justin himself who suggested it.”

Laura stared at him. “But you said it took you an hour to persuade him.”

“A figure of speech. We talked for an hour, but that was only one of the things we discussed, that and the conditions attached to the trial. He had made up his mind already.”

“I don’t understand. He was so positive at first about not having me on the project.” In her agitation, Laura hardly noticed the caressing movement of Russ’s thumb upon her wrist.

“I know. That’s what worries me.”

“Worries you?”

He shrugged. “Forget I said that. The man’s engaged, and to a mighty jealous and headstrong woman, from the look of her, something that could be another problem for you.”

“Yes,” Laura agreed with a rueful smile, and gave him a brief description of what had passed between her and Myra Devol.

“You see what I mean? Nothing but problems. Between Justin and Myra, and what they will do to Crapemyrtle, I’m afraid the two of them will break your heart.”

Laura lifted her chin, a faint color rising to her cheekbones. “My heart is not as fragile as all that. They’ll have a fight on their hands if they try to ruin Crapemyrtle.”

“That may be,” Russ said, “but you know they’ll have might on their side, which translates to money and legal right.”

“Then they certainly won’t be allowed to do it without learning what kind of crime they are committing.”

“Yes, but can you bear to stand by and watch them do it anyway? It was a mistake to ask you to work on this; you are too emotionally involved.”

“Are you trying to tell me you are taking me off the project?”

“You know better,” Russ protested, a hint of concern in his brown eyes. “I’m only trying to make you see that it might be better to remove yourself.”

“I couldn’t do that,” Laura began.

There was no time for more. Mrs. Nichols returned then with the fresh coffee, and the conversation was deflected into a lighter vein. Laura’s mother invited Russ to stay for a late lunch of soup and a sandwich, and he agreed. The afternoon was far gone when he finally took his leave. Laura walked with Russ along the upper hall, going ahead of him down the stairs.

At the front door, he paused with his hand on the knob. “You’ll think about what I said, Laura love, about quitting the project?”

“Oh, Russ,” she said, “I told you —”

“Just think about it — that’s all I ask.”

“You know it’s impossible,” she said, her voice soft.

He gazed down at her a long moment, then gave an abrupt nod. “I suppose it is. At least it was worth a try.”

He leaned then to kiss her, his lips cool and smooth, their pressure brief. In that fleeting instant Laura was too self-consciously aware of the placement of his hands, the angle of his mouth, and the realization that there was no excitement to transcend such considerations. Her pulse remained steady, and though the friendliness she felt toward him did not change, neither did the even tempo of her breathing.

He was gone, striding away down the sidewalk toward his brown sedan parked at the curb. She watched him for a moment, then turned away to mount the stairs once more with a look of dark concentration in her violet eyes. She trailed her fingers along the banister, thinking not of the embrace just past, but of another she had endured in a tumult of the senses the evening before, and of another man.

Four

The work at Crapemyrtle progressed as the weeks of January wore away, passing into February, and in turn, giving way to March. Men swarmed over the house. It was decided to substitute water sprinklers for the more complicated Halon-gas fire-extinguishing system, and they were installed, along with the climate control. The electrical wiring was reworked to carry the heavier loads of a modern household and the plumbing was redone to conceal all pipes from view. In the process, Laura had to veto an enormous bathtub Myra wanted to install, primarily because its great size and purple-black color were unsuited to the dressing room where the woman wanted it put, which was going to be finished in a pale salmon and white paper, though the practical reason given to persuade her was that the flooring in the upstairs room would not support its weight.

On the exterior of the house, the brick paths were uncovered and, in some cases, taken up and relaid, as were the steps that descended from the back loggia. The loggia itself was opened up with the removal of the window walls and French windows, leaving only the supporting columns, with the same railing that lined the upper galleries between them. During this operation, a pair of brick-lined underground cisterns, once used for the collection of water for the house, were discovered. Laura, with diligent effort, had been slowly collecting pictures taken during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, showing different views of the house. In one of these, the cisterns were shown with brick ledges and domed copper covers. By great good fortune, these cisterns were located on the opposite side of the backyard area from where the kitchen was going up, and so were carefully restored with duplicates of their original domes.

It was a tribute to the skill of the brick masons who had constructed them that the cisterns still held water, though they were no longer in use, of course. At some time in the past twenty years a deep well had been drilled near the house. Orders were given now for it to be cleaned out and the water tested for human consumption. The pump to force the water through the pipes in the house had rusted from disuse. When the water was declared pure, much more so than most city systems, a new pump was installed of a size guaranteed to provide more than adequate water pressure.

On the great house itself, the shutters — real blinds with movable louvers and the hinges and latches that would allow them to be closed over the windows as protection in high winds or insulation against the cold — were removed. The thick paint layers of years were stripped away, exposing their hard, perfectly preserved cypress wood. These received a new coat of paint and were set aside. In the windows, a number of panes were replaced, using antique glass found at the wrecking yards. Some people did not like the distorted view they gave, resorting to clear, modern glass in the upper sashes, but Justin had declined such a suggestion from the contractor.

The brick columns that lined the galleries were straightened to stand plumb, coated with plaster, and painted a dazzling white. The dentil work around the entablature was replaced where sections were missing, and this too was cleaned and painted. The sandblasting crew then turned their attention to the brick walls, carefully blowing away the crazed, cracked, and peeling finish without disturbing the soft, handmade brick that had been burned on the place when the house was built, or the crumbling, hand-mixed mortar. The painters moved in quickly behind them to cover everything with white once more, preventing deterioration from the damp spring weather.

Stripping the paint from whatever they came across seemed to become a compulsion, however. One day after the paint crew had moved inside, Laura came upon them just beginning to chip away the muddy-looking grime on the baseboards of the library.

“No!” she exclaimed. “Stop!”         

The men turned to her in amazement. It was only after she brought soap, water, and a polishing cloth, and got down on her knees to scrub at the boards, that they were able to recognize what she had seen all along. Once cleaned, the paint revealed itself to be a fine example of faux bois, literally translated as “false wood.” Original to the house, the baseboards had been carefully painted by a talented artist to represent marble, with the same shadings of color and swirling pattern. Similar detailed work had been done on the cornices, with a lighter blend on the convex molding and a darker shading on the concave moldings for a remarkable three-dimensional effect. Though at the time it was done the artist’s efforts had been intended to pass for the more expensive marble material, at the present time the uniqueness of the artistic expression made it more valuable than the real thing would have been.

After that incident, Laura began to spend more and more time at the house, staying from before the moment the carpenters and painters arrived until after they left again, busying herself scraping paint, cleaning, running errands, or poring over some of the hundreds of catalogs that she had collected containing period wall coverings and draperies, paint chips, and hand-loomed rugs.

She was often joined for brief stretches of time by Justin Roman. He was interested in everything she had to show him, quickly becoming submerged in the smallest detail. And yet, his attitude was businesslike, distant. He took great pains not to be alone with her, and never stayed long. Sometimes Laura found evidence, tracks on the drive, fingerprints in the fine dusting of sand that settled everywhere, footsteps in the mud, which showed he had been there after everyone else had gone. They did not talk a great deal, especially when he brought his fiancée with him to check on the progress, but slowly Laura gained confidence that he meant to return Crapemyrtle to its former splendor with no more jarring modern adjuncts than were absolutely necessary.