Embers (50 page)

"No," she said, surprised. "Why should I?"

"Well, good. Now. Let's have a look at these dolls. It's quite an interesting collection," he said in a strangely controlled voice. "Quite interesting."

He picked up the master doll
, a mustachioed fellow in late-
nineteenth-century dinner dress that Meg had positioned in the billiard room with a soldier doll and another gentleman doll. "Yes
...
the head is of unglazed bisque
...
quite common, really."

Peterson picked up each of the two other man dolls, examined it, and put it back in place. "The soldier doll is different from the other two
...
what we call a blond bisque. The bisque is tinted, you see. Yes
...
hard to find, especially in a man doll. The sword is a nice touch."

The mistress doll was next, plucked from the dining room where she'd been supervising the laying of the dinner table. Mr. Peterson could not suppress a sigh of pleasure as he turned the doll this way and that and examined its green-velvet gown. He returned the doll to her spot on the twelve-inch Oriental rug.

"Very
fine," he said. "You understand that it's rare to find inset glass eyes in a bisque of this type. Ah, and the pierced ears. A truly fine — although, as I say, unglazed bisques for dollhouses were very common and continued to be made well into the 1920's."

It was obvious to Meg that Peterson was excited about the dolls themselves and was struggling mightily not to show it. When he stumbled in delight on the white-haired lady doll tucked in a four-poster bed and suffering from a doll cold, he said breathlessly, "Tell me
...
does she have a mate?"

"No," said Meg dryly. "She's a widow."

He let out a disappointed groan.
"Tragic."
He went on to examine every one of the other dolls: the four ladies in the stucco-ceilinged drawing room who were so stunningly dressed in satin and taffeta; the young man doll, dressed like a dandy, who attended them there; the cook in the kitchen and the butler in the pantry (papier mâché, Peterson said, barely interested); the wooden chore-girl doll, which he considered crude but quite charming; the wax-headed maid dolls turning down the beds and cleaning the hearths of the guest bedrooms; the boy bisque, the baby bisque. He loved them all.

"Do you have
any
idea what you have here?" he asked Meg when he was finished. When she looked at him blankly he said impatiently, "You have virtually a complete family of bisques. It's rare to find a doll family intact; if you had the grandfather, the collection would be of even more value. The family itself is probably German. The bodies are excellently made."

"Ah," Meg said politely.

"The lady guests are undoubtedly French. You can see that their faces are nothing much, although a brown-eyed porcelain head is admittedly rare — but look at the clothes. Magnificent! Definitely French. Some of the poured-wax maid dolls are English; they're of excellent quality, but the limbs are almost all replacements, so naturally the value will be low. But of course you knew that," he said in a cutting voice.

"It's obvious that I didn't," Meg admitted. "I haven't had the time to research."

"I suppose not," he said snappishly, "or you'd be taking better care of it all."

He pressed the tips of his fingers together and eyed the dollhouse thoughtfully. The house positively glowed, as if it were doing its best to bring him under its spell. Meg was absurdly, irrationally proud of it, as if
she
were the one who'd carved the staircase and crocheted the mantel cloth and upholstered the chaise longue; as if
she
were the one who'd hand blocked the wallpaper and gilded the mirrors and lacquered the piano.

She wasn't. The simple truth was, she was merely the house's caretaker, and apparently not a very good one at that. But she was connected to this exquisite toy in a way that Mr. Peterson's particular gentleman could never be. Her soul hummed to a strange, mystical vibration when anyone else got near her dollhouse. It was that simple.

Peterson began one more turn around the outside of the house—like a burglar who's trying to figure out where the silver is, Meg thought — and his eye fell on the one doll that wasn't inside the house. Meg
had removed the nursemaid doll
—
the Margaret Mary Atwells doll — on the night before. She wasn't sure why; she still didn't know. In some strange way, she was probably hoping to give her grandmother's spirit a break from haunting.

He picked the doll up at once, his curiosity piqued. "Another poured-wax doll," he said, "but nothing like the others. How very odd."

Immediately Meg felt something tense inside of her. She said, "How is it different?"

"It's clearly not from the same dollmaker as the English maid dolls. Obviously this doll was done in multiple pourings. Look at the cheeks, the lifelike blush in them. The color was put in before the last pouring of wax. It's a superb finish: no seams, excellent detail, complete realism. This is an example of remarkable skill."

He motioned Meg, who had begun hanging back, to come closer. "But look at the face," he mused, "at all the fine crazing in it. This doll has been played with — or manhandled — much more than the other wax dolls."

Some meaning behind his innocently spoken words made Meg begin to tremble. Her heart took off at a flyaway beat; she shook her head at the doll expert, declining to come near.

But he insisted. "And come — look at this," he said, holding his magnifying glass over the doll's chestnut-colored hair for her to see. "You can see that the original hair, which was laboriously inserted strand by strand and then sealed over — that hair has been cut away. And this hair, human hair, has been inserted in a similar way, probably with a hot instrument as in the original, and then sealed over again. Not as expertly as in the original, but not at all a bad redo. Extraordinary."

"Your hair is very beautiful, Margaret
...
thick, silky, pleasing to the touch. Don't bundle it up. Let it hang loose
...
like so."

"Mrs. Hazard? Can you see what I mean?"

Meg shuddered and said, "I didn't know that it was human hair."

"Oh, yes. That's not unusual. Perhaps the original hair was black—an unpopular color—or perhaps some little girl donated a lock of her own hair to replace the original. In fact, this hair is very much like yours in texture, although your hair has more highlights to it. Still, it
is
too bad; naturally the alteration devalues the doll."

"Naturally," said Meg faintly.

"The dress is also not original, of course," he said. "Every other doll in this collection is dressed in late-nineteenth-century. This one alone seems to be wearing a dress from the mid-twentieth. What a shame."

"Yes
...
a shame," she said over the thunder of her pounding heart.

"That's a pretty frock you're wearing. Lavender suits you. But you deserve silk. Silk, and fine jewels
...
I lied about the earrings, Margaret Mary. The pearls are real. How could I give you less? Let me touch you. Please
...
"

"Ah, but the good news is that the limbs are original to the doll. They're poured, not dipped. Look at the tinting of the skin; the color matches the head perfectly. Oh, this is excellent." His voice was hoarse with pleasure.
"Excellent.
Wax limbs are so easily broken. Think of some angry child, hurling a wax-limb doll across a bed." Peterson rolled his eyes. "One shudders to imagine."

"Yes," Meg said, tears slipping down her cheeks.

"Let me! Let me touch you. Let me hold you. Please
...
I won't be long. I can't think of anything else
...
just this once, let me. The fire? What do I care about the fire? I'll burn either way—if you have me or if you don't. Damn you, Margaret!"

"I wonder
...
would you mind if I undressed this doll? I'd like to go over it for a manufacturer's mark. There's little hope I'll find one, but I'm deathly curious to know."

"Oh, Mr. Peterson," Meg said in a low voice, "please don't."

"Don't tell me 'don't'! You want me
...
you know it!"

"Well, if you really don't want me to," Peterson said, puzzled. "But I wish you would. Please?"

Dizzy, Meg said, "No
...
I don't know
...
"

"It won't take long. It won't take long. No
one will ever know. Let me ...
let me, Margaret.
Let me t
ake off your dress. Take it off."

"Ah, good," said Peterson. "I'll just slip this over
...
"

"
...
your head. Ah-h
...
you have a beautiful body, Margaret. I've wanted you
...
God, how I've wanted you
...
Hey! Don't fight me, goddammit, don't! Not now. You bitch, not now!"

Peterson held the limp, undressed doll in his hands and went over every inch of it. He lifted its arms, spread apart its legs, turned it over, and then turned it over again. He pulled the chestnut hair up off its neck and studied its face, and pored over the fine white linen of its torso. He ran his fingers up and down every seam. He studied every stitch, every finger, every toe.

And when it was over, he said in a voice thick with satisfaction: "Very good. Thank you." He left the doll, still undressed, on the desk where he had found it.

Meg was sitting in a chair now, unable to move, the tears flowing freely down her face. She made no effort to hide them; she couldn't if she tried. Mr. Peterson, awakened from his daze, was surprised to see her emotional state.

"There were no marks of any kind," he said, looking away awkwardly. "Absolutely no proof who made it."

"I know that," Meg mumbled through her tears, which surprised him still more.
No proof, nothing at all.

"Really, Mrs. Hazard — you don't seem ready to sell. Nonetheless, you have a valuable artifact here, and I'll be recommending an offer to my client. As you may have guessed, I'm more knowledgeable about dolls than dolls' houses. I can tell you this, though: if you really care about the fate of the house as well as the dolls in it, you'll do something about these deplorable storage conditions. Because
this,"
he said, tapping the chest of the wax nursemaid doll, "cannot go on."

Doing his best to ignore her tears, he bade her a very pleasant good-night. Meg, who could only nod, remained where she was.

After what seemed like the span of two lifetimes, Meg rose shakily to her feet. She was utterly numb, and it showed: she stumbled and fell forward into the dollhouse, jarring it from its custom pedestal and knocking some of the contents over. Horrified that she might just have accomplished what a vandal could not, she slid the house back into place and checked the rooms hastily for damage. Once again she was fortunate; nothing was broken.

But this time, she was twice blessed. Apparently in her effort to keep from falling, her hand had slammed into the staircase between the first and second floors of the dollhouse. The stairs were covered in a two-inch-wide Oriental runner — with little brass retaining rods on each tread — which disguised a secret spring-loaded mechanism. Once the mechanism was tripped by the pressure on the steps from the palm of Meg's hand, a side door on the wall of the stairwell had popped open, revealing a secret closet, paneled over to match the rest of the walls in the dollhouse foyer.

Meg's first thought was,
Orel
Tremblay never told me about this.
But neither had he told her that he'd replaced the hair on the nursemaid doll with a lock of her grandmother's hair, so she shouldn't have been surprised. She took a mini-flashlight that she kept handy and beamed it into the hidden closet. There, shoved into the farthest corner, she found a folded piece of paper. She reached in for it, scissoring the paper between her forefinger and middle finger, and pulled it out.

The writing was bold and hurried, a man's:

Dearest Margaret,

It's a form of madness that makes me write this, but the moon is full and I am moonstruck. I sit in my library, alone and in the middle of the night, writing to you by the light of the moonbeams that spill over my desk. This is a love letter, dearest. God help me f I am caught writing it, but the night is long, and I am lonely for the nearness of you. Since you will not be persuaded to leave your sons for the summer and become a sleep-in nurse here, I must be content to commune with you in whatever way I can.

I want you so much: all night long, all day long, in the blink of time between sleep and awake. You are all I ever think about. I have never wanted any woman so much as I want you. I have read about men obsessed, and pitied them; I did not think it could happen to me.

Perhaps I should not be surprised that it has. You know I am a gaming man. I am a man who will not — who cannot — leave a roulette table while the wheel still spins. But that ardor, that hunger, is nothing at all compared to how I feel when I am near you. It seems obscene to mention both in the same breath. I have risked everything at the wheel; I would do at least that much for you.