Katherine Keenum (30 page)

From a distance, Mrs. Drummond saw Emily gesture and raised her lorgnette to scrutinize the party. At closer sight of the strange young persons’ garb and the happiness in flighty Miss Palmer’s face, she made up her mind: If Cornelia Renick invited such persons onto her grounds, so be it. It was now her duty as a mother to protect Zenobia from questionable influences. Without need for consultation, the Drummonds turned their backs as one and continued a stately progress toward the refreshment tent.

“B’gad, I do believe we’ve been cut!” cried Robbie. Chin down, lower lip set sternly, he puffed out the cheeks of his long, slender face and turned a slow quarter circle away from Jeanette. When she let go to cover giggles with both hands, he completed the turn to meet his sister’s eyes. His clown’s stern stare shifted to an invitation, and Emily allowed herself to be enfolded, smiling vaguely at him from far away. Edward relinquished her, doubtful of Dolson’s care of her, but more than glad to bring Miss Palmer to himself. The change was as smooth as dancers changing partners.

Jeanette looked up at Edward, tentative about just how much pressure to exert with her hand when she rested it on his arm. It was suddenly very important to her to play neither the hoyden nor the flirt but instead to express just the right degree of familiarity, no more. The hand settled; her fingers registered the lean firmness that lay under his silky sleeve. She looked down shyly but stole glances to study his face. He must be about Carolus’s age (by her second or third week in his atelier, she, like all his pupils, had come to think of the master as Carolus). Dr. Murer had more gray in his brown, neatly barbered beard and hair, hair that was thinning at the temples. More lines of pain were etched around his eyes, and there was something ravaged about the hollow of his concave cheek. He lacked Carolus’s obvious magnetism, yet in his darkness she felt something stubborn lie hidden.

The foursome circled the central fountain and continued along the main axis away from the house to look down on the clipped hedges that occupied much of the third tier and gave the Maze Tier its name. The rectangular confines of the maze itself were flanked at either end by conical topiary from which diagonal paths rayed out in
étoiles
to beds edged in box.

“Anyone fancy frustration?” asked Robbie, the warning edge of his easily aroused boredom creeping into his voice. He stared down to where a few guests in flights of high spirits were attempting the maze.

“Not I,” said Edward. He pointed with his cane farther out. “What do you say we continue down onto the open lawn? We should get a handsome view back up at the house from there.”

Upon her return from exile in England, the duchess had struggled to restore the complicated gardens after decades of destruction and neglect. Despite her best efforts, she was forced into retreat after retreat. When the Renicks took over the grounds, they honored her wishes; and by great good luck, old plans were rediscovered in a garden shed. A crew of twenty workmen pulled out tangles and brush; they dug deep and manured; they replanted scraggly bushes and clipped them into shape. They rolled lawns, relaid gravel paths, mended walls, and fixed the fountain. The result was a handsome anachronism, as rigidly perfect as it had been a hundred years earlier. But then Cornelia had asserted herself against the duchess.

At the back of the property, where fruit trees had been left untended too long, she gave orders for dead trunks to be removed, along with worthless volunteers and any tree that could not be pruned or fed back into bearing. Only some picturesquely hollowed-out hulks and decrepit snags were spared for their looks or the few disfigured fruits they put forth every year, lost flavors from another era. With gaps left mostly unfilled, the orchard became an irregular grove in a wild, grassy meadow. The children played games in it and rode a little Shetland pony there when they were small. Within the surrounding estate wall, it was carefree and romantic, much despised by the duchess and more than equally loved by the Renicks. In late April, most of the buds were still tightly closed, but a spattering of cherry blossoms opened on a few branches.

“Good lord,” breathed Robbie, with a note of wonder and longing in his voice. “Tretower.” He unconsciously pulled Emily closer to him; she laid her head on his shoulder. With the smell of new-mown grass rising around them, they both looked out past the bud-laden branches into somewhere far away.

“Tretower?” asked Edward.

“In Wales. A childhood home,” said Robbie, without shifting his gaze from the trees. “Not ours to claim, strictly speaking, but we lived there on sufferance, for a while.”

“The land claims its own,” said Emily, softly.

“The laws of nature and the laws of man do not always accord,” said Robbie. He turned to Edward; a glint of challenge came into his eye. “It was why I turned poacher.”

And picklock? retorted Edward, silently. Very little that he knew about Dolson redounded to the man’s credit—less since what he had seen of Miss Dolson this afternoon. Yet a deeper part of his mind jeered at himself: Ever stolen a starving man’s filthy ration? it whispered. Who was he to pass judgment on anyone? His flash of enmity died away.

At the unspoken antagonism between the two men, Jeanette tensed.

“Emily, my dear,” said Robbie, “on closer inspection, your shoes are unsuitable for leas and meadows. What say we repair to more formal ground? Don’t let our retreat spoil your ramble in Arcadia,” he added with a bow to Jeanette and Edward and a sweep of his arm outward.

“B’gad, I think we’ve been cut,” said Jeanette, staring after Robbie as he maneuvered Emily back up the stairs.

“I don’t mind if you don’t mind. Are your shoes—?”

“Quite up to any path the gardeners have cut through the Renicks’ lawn, thank you!”

An unmarried couple at a big garden party could stroll a few turns unattended, like partners during a dance. Edward and Jeanette took their time as they walked the looping path through the grass.

By the time they reached the lowest tier of the garden again, some two dozen visitors were trying to thread their way through the maze. Most trooped along, calling good-natured advice of dubious value to each other across the low hedges; but among them, a scowling Sonja stalked just behind Count and Countess Witkiewicz, whose children’s portraits she had painted. She was watched by Amy from the perimeter.

“Thank goodness, a rescue party,” said Amy. “Behold, poor Sonja, the Painter Ensnared. I always knew there were drawbacks to patronage.”

“You don’t mean for us to lead her out, do you?” asked Jeanette.

“Not her. Me. Whisk me away; I’ve had enough. There’s no need to linger watching while she attempts to play the good sport—at which, incidentally, she seems about to fail signally.”

Rocking a little from side to side, Amy caught Sonja’s attention and pointed toward the end of the parterre. Sonja mimed shooting herself in the head.

“Come along, my dears,” said Amy, “there is rumored to be punch over there.”

From the orchestra on the level above, the
ONE
-two-three,
ONE
-two-three pulse of a waltz floated down. A particularly lilting melody rippled out as they reached a diagonal ray. Jeanette minced a dance step. Edward caught up her hand and twirled her onto the new path. Setting her loose with only the slightest squeeze of her fingers, he clamped his cane to his chest and bowed Amy forward, too. People around them smiled; Jeanette sparkled. In the circumstances, Amy’s presence restrained her from taking Edward’s arm again—what a declaration that would be!—but not from feeling a little flutter of the heart. It showed in her face.

*   *   *

Oh, lord, thought Amy, not another one lost to Cupid’s bow. Pesky winged brat.

“Look!” she said, catching up Jeanette chummily and leaning in to direct her gaze without catching the attention of others nearby. “Do you see that natty gent with the faded red hair and beard? That’s Edouard Manet. He’s a good friend of Carolus, so they say, a bit older. Back when he showed a painting of a Spaniard with a guitar, Carolus is reported to have exclaimed, ‘I thought Velázquez was my discovery!’ and gone around to pay a congratulatory call with some other admiring lads.” She looked around to include Edward. “Full marks to Mrs. Renick for knowing to invite him. Do you know whether she has bought anything from him?”

“Should she? I thought his work was much reviled.”

“Well, it is very peculiar in subject and technique. Not to everyone’s taste; certainly not to mine. He sends something to the Salon jury each year, and opinion is always divided about whether he means to offend them or does so inadvertently. Still, he has his supporters.
They
say he’s the all-in-all.”

Eventually, Sonja and the Witkiewiczes freed themselves from the maze and came looking for Amy. Somewhat intimidated by the Witkiewiczes’ aristocratic worldliness, Jeanette stood as though she had a book on her head and hoped she did not look too much like a girl from Circleville, Ohio. A couple who knew the Witkiewiczes stopped to chat. The Misses Reade found the group and recommended refreshments. Everyone began moving toward the Fountain Tier. There, the party swirled the Witkiewiczes off toward the orchestra. The Reades drew in some English acquaintances; the babble in the refreshment marquee as they neared it was deafening. In spite of himself, Edward balked.

Jeanette’s hand touched his sleeve. Without saying anything, she looked up toward the quieter Rose Parterre and smiled inquisitively. A momentary elation flooded him like the rush of emotion that sometimes disgraced him with tears but expanded into a wordless understanding too quickly to betray him. They veered away from their companions and moved off together. It was the most peace he had felt since a golden summer’s afternoon spent with Marie. Not that long-ago thoughts of Marie more than brushed his conscious mind; he had never been more utterly aware of the present moment. No, it was instead that he recognized this tender happiness as coming into the kingdom again, coming home to the world as it was meant to be and always would be at its truest. Jeanette’s feelings included a sense of daring (it was
she
who had caught
his
eye), of naughtiness at slipping away, of pleasure at being seen with an admirer, of pride that she had guessed right about his discomfort and what to do—and yet the more they walked, the more all of that subsided, leaving only a settled sense of rightness.

A gong from the house sounded, a signal that the hour for the unveiling approached.

Jeanette stiffened and turned momentarily. “We should go up,” she said, with some regret at breaking off their conversation but no intention of missing the main event.

“They’ll give time for people to wend their way back to the house,” said Edward. “Shall we make a detour through Mrs. Renick’s secret garden?”

“Her secret garden?”

“I’ll show you. From there, we can go into the house through the library.” He did not miss, nor mistake, a flash of excitement in her eyes.

The gardener’s service stairs at the end of the Rose Parterre led up onto the terrace beside a brick wall that was largely obscured by the overhanging branches of a beech tree. A low, arched door in the wall led into a roofless bay enclosed on the southern side of the house. Once upon a time, its shelter combined with an openness to long daily hours of sunlight had made it perfect for pampering delicate rarities and prolonging hardy blooms; but by the time the duchess reclaimed the mansion, the copper beech had established itself and shaded out most of the old plantings. It was a handsome tree; and with much else to think about and pay for, instead of having it cut down, she had installed a bench around its trunk and forgotten about it. Cornelia admired the tree, kept the bench, and made the side garden her retreat. In midsummer, the leaf cover was so dense that it was possible to sit under it even during a shower. In early spring, the light, dappled shade was almost as coral as the leaf buds were purple.

As Edward and Jeanette closed out the drone of the party, the tiny warble of a chaffinch,
tswee-tswee-tsit-tsit-tick
, sounded out distinctly from a branch overhead, but they and the bird did not have the garden to themselves. Near the library door, surrounded by four men, glimmered the thinnest woman Jeanette had ever seen. She was dressed in silvery white pongee, its nubbly paleness dim beside the lunar sheen of her skin. A dramatic, fluted collar climbed her long throat to frame a pointed chin and meet wings of crinkled, Titian-red hair. Above a fringe across her forehead sat a cunning velvet cap, like something a medieval Venetian gentleman might have worn, adorned with an ornament of pearls and emeralds. Emily in her homespun pea-green folds would look dull beside the exoticism of this woman: She might be a dragonfly, a jeweled lizard, a fairy of the most dangerous sort. An acute sensitivity to her surroundings must have alerted her to their approach; for in the instant that they became aware of her, she turned her superb falcon’s profile to fix them full face with extraordinary blue-gray eyes.

“
Entrez, entrez
,” she commanded in a tone that was crystalline without being loud. Her hand wove a gesture as compelling as the look she gave them before she turned her full attention back to the men around her.

Jeanette and Edward tiptoed forward obediently and slid onto the bench under the beech tree as quietly and carefully as if they were taking seats in a theater after the curtain had gone up. It was Sarah Bernhardt, and they would never be seated closer. But they had not watched long before, to their further astonishment, they were forced to shift their attention. A woman of high coloring dressed in richest blue came briskly to the doorway and paused. Like Bernhardt, she had a nose too large for conventional prettiness; unlike Bernhardt, hers was offset, not by her eyes, but by a full-lipped, expressive mouth set in a highly contoured face. Her chin and cheeks were rounded and her figure buxom. It was Sophie Croizette. Edward thought her curvaceousness more comely than Bernhardt’s sylphlike flame. It made him pleasantly aware of the plumpness beside him, aware also of how much younger Jeanette was than these two formidable actresses at the height of their powers. Either of them could play a mere girl on stage, but in person they had left all girlishness behind at least a decade ago. The one was a rare white camellia or orchid, the other an opulent hothouse rose or peony; Miss Palmer was daffodils and daisies.