Strands of Bronze and Gold

there lived a very powerful lord, the owner of estates, farms and a great splendid castle, and his name was Bluebeard.… He was very handsome and charming, but, if the truth be told, there was something about him that made you feel respect, and a little uneasy.

FROM
“
BLUEBEARD
”
IN
TALES FROM THE BROTHERS GRIMM

You see, I had a fabulously wealthy godfather. That was why anything was possible for me.

I couldn’t remember a time when thoughts of him didn’t send a silvery little thrill through my body. He was a mystery and a magician and all my family’s hopes for the future rolled into one. Soon, when the carriage covered the last miles of our journey, I would meet him at last—my godfather and guardian, Monsieur Bernard de Cressac.

And his wife, of course, but I tended to forget about her.

The wildwood we had plunged into might easily have been the setting for the thief’s lair in “The Robber Bridegroom,” so tangled and murky and haunted it seemed. However—I smashed a mosquito against my neck and my own blood spurted out—fairy-tale forests would never have been this itchy or this sweltering. Perspiration dripped off my nose before my handkerchief could catch it. Inside my bonnet my curls were plastered to my head.

My godfather had referred to my hair as “bronze” in one of his
letters when I was younger—a letter featuring a delightfully spun story about a princess with tresses the shade of my own,
strands of bronze and gold.…

M. de Cressac’s last letter lay in my lap, its ivory paper limp from much handling. As always, at sight of the bold black handwriting, my chest tightened. A few months earlier, while my family had been going about the sad business of mourning the death of our father, M. de Cressac had been thinking of me, had been penning this invitation to his home, Wyndriven Abbey. Telling me he could not return to his “solemn duties” until he had asked me to come to him so I might “sweeten the atmosphere of an old man’s dwelling” with my “companionship, youth, and beauty.”

My brother Harry had snorted at that last part.

In that letter M. de Cressac called himself an old man. This conflicted with the image I had always held of the saint, soldier, explorer. The adventurer I had fantasized about had been old, of course, since he was a friend of my father’s—forty at least—but muscular and hearty. Well, shortly I would know everything. Shortly my godfather would take his place in my life as a real, solid person, rather than a misty figure of daydreams.

On and on we twisted and snaked beneath arched branches in dim green leaf light, swallowed whole by trees. My eyes grew tired of the sporadic, flickering patches of pale sunshine. It was getting late, but evidently in Mississippi, summer heat didn’t fade with the day.

Surely we’d get there soon.

I pulled down my bonnet’s crinkly mourning crape veil and
shoved down my long, tight sleeves just as the trees thinned. We rounded a curve—and there it stood.

The magnificence of the building whooshed at me like a blast of icy wind. Wyndriven Abbey loomed in the center of spreading lawns and gardens and terraces as though it had stood in that spot for centuries. The drive widened as it approached the great edifice, which seemed more of a town than a house. It was toothed with crenellations and spiky with pinnacles and spires and turrets, the setting sun rosily staining the stone and lighting fires in a myriad of mullioned windows.

It was ridiculously vast and grim and terrifying. I loved it already.

As we drove down a gravel driveway edged with dark cedars, though, we passed an eyesore—an ancient, gnarled oak thrust among the cedars, pressing close overhead. It was shrouded with poison ivy (leaves of three, let them be!) and diseased with great misshapen nodules bulging on the trunk. A flock of crows burst out of the branches in a cacophony of cawing and beating wings.

It was not an ill omen.

The carriage pulled into a courtyard, and the very tall footman jumped down to help me alight. The coachman and the footman were both Africans, but they seemed elegantly European in their coats of resplendent sapphire velvet.

Surely I wasn’t actually shrinking as I climbed stone steps to massive, iron-shod doors. As per habit, I pinched my cheeks and bit my lips to bring on more color, forgetting that I was probably already flushed from the heat. The de Cressacs must be pleased with my appearance, or at least not appalled.

I tugged at the rope of an iron bell. The echoes of its clanging still sounded when the door was answered by another very young, very tall footman.

“I am Miss Sophia Petheram,” I said in a tight little voice, “come to stay with the de Cressac family.”

“Yes,” the footman said, opening the door wider and gesturing with a flourish for me to enter. “You’re expected, Miss.”

He spoke formally, but I must have looked frightened because he flashed a reassuring grin. He was young enough that he had not yet learned to be perfectly impassive.

In the lofty hall, whose arched and vaulted ceiling disappeared into shadows, candles already glittered in sconces and an immense candelabra blazed away on a center table. Beeswax tapers, they must be, from the clear, clean light. Of course gaslight would not yet have reached this place, so deep in the wilds. An expanse of black-and-white marble led to the grand staircase, wide and splendidly balustraded, seemingly hung in space. In the gloom the brilliant trompe l’œil decorations painted on the wall behind deceived me for a moment into thinking the staircase was a mere painting as well.

The footman’s eyes went past my shoulder. “Mr. Ling, the butler, will take you to the master.”

Outwardly I barely flinched when a figure glided forward from the wall just behind me.

“I hope I did not startle you,” said a deep, quiet voice.

My chest still thudded. Yes, definitely startled.

Mr. Ling was a Chinese man, the first I had ever met, wrinkled like a walnut shell and with a long gray beard, wearing a high-collared black brocade tunic and skirt. Something to tell my
siblings. His eyes were incredibly weary. He bowed. I flipped back my veil and curtsied, not caring that one probably shouldn’t curtsy to servants. He was so very old, and his eyes …