Strands of Bronze and Gold (6 page)

We crossed acres of floors of marble or polished wood with elaborate inlaid veneers. I marveled at mahogany furnishings, heavily carved and gilded, at rich upholsteries in scarlet or sapphire, emerald or gold, at urns and vases of ormolu or porcelain, at walls with white and gold paneling or with gloriously painted scenes.

Wide-eyed, I took in all the themed chambers decorated to display treasures from my godfather’s travels. I learned that it wasn’t just depictions of plump, puffy bare flesh that embarrassed me. I was also disturbed by spare, skinny, carved wooden African statues with exaggerated bits of their anatomy poking out. Or perhaps they weren’t exaggerated? How should I know?

Mrs. Duckworth was able to impart a good deal of information about many objects—their source, value, and history. “I ask Master Bernard about them. I like to know. It makes me care for them better somehow. He’s always patient, always ready to share his knowledge.”

Sometimes a housemaid would be laboring away in a room, scrubbing or dusting. When we walked in, she would glance up furtively without ever pausing in her task.

To one poor servant, Mrs. Duckworth barked out, “What are you about, girl? Are you stupid? You can’t use beeswax on a gilded
armoire.” How different the housekeeper’s voice sounded then—harsh and screeching.

The girl jumped and muttered, “I so sorry, Miz Duckworth.”

The only other time the housekeeper paid attention to a servant was when she introduced me to a woman named Daphne, who was putting the last touches on a vast, billowing flower arrangement on a hall table. Daphne was squat and toadlike and bright of eye, and she walked with the use of a knobby cane. She made me think of a homely fairy working her magic with blooms. She beamed at us and we beamed back. Later I learned she was the single slave the housekeeper entertained in her private apartments for tea. “Isn’t it peculiar to have people always about but to act as if they don’t exist?” I asked.

“It’s the true order of the world,” Mrs. Duckworth said complacently. “Don’t worry,” she added, patting my arm, “you’ll soon become used to the ways of the very genteel.”

In my family home we always spoke with friendly civility to Bridget and felt a mutual fondness between us. She took care of us and we took care of her. The world at Wyndriven Abbey was exalted far above my old life. Would I ever learn to practice the snobbery that would be expected of me here? I wouldn’t. I simply couldn’t. I was too interested in everyone and their stories to discount them as people.

“Don’t you wonder, though,” I asked Mrs. Duckworth, “what the servants are thinking?”

“Oh, they’re not thinking. They’re simple creatures. Not like us. But one can’t help knowing a few things. Charles is wooing Talitha, for instance. I’m forever finding them together and having to chase
him off. If it keeps up much longer, I shall have to speak to Master Bernard about it.”

“Can’t they marry? They’re old enough, surely.”

“Oh, they could jump the broom at Christmastime, if the master approves. That’s a slave custom they pretend means they’re husband and wife. Foolishness.”

From what I had seen of Charles and Talitha, they seemed a perfect match, both of them with natural grace and beauty. They would have such darling children. But who knew what heartaches and rebellious thoughts brooded inside them when confronted with such attitudes as Mrs. Duckworth’s? If I could, I would help Charles and Talitha.

“Is there a Mr. Duckworth?” I asked suddenly.

The housekeeper turned flustered, rattling her keys. “Why—why I never thought of marriage for myself. Too busy with more important things. The ‘Mrs.’ is an honorary title customarily given to housekeepers.”

As she spoke, we entered the section of the house that comprised the former abbey. An ancient, unclean smell met us as soon as we crossed the threshold, which was seven feet wide—the width of the medieval retaining walls. It reeked of dark, secret crevices—a mixture of mildew and fungus, rot and decay.

“I do my best,” Mrs. Duckworth complained when she saw my expression, “but try as I might, I can’t get rid of that stink. I’ve tried carbolic soap and turpentine and pomanders everywhere.”

“The cloves and cinnamon smell lovely,” I said, although they couldn’t hide the stench underneath.

The stone walls might be covered with rich paneling, but drops of moisture collected on surfaces, and in places a faint, fuzzy gray film grew. I shrugged. All part of the fascinating Gothic charm.

“My greatest fear is mushrooms sprouting in hidden corners,” Mrs. Duckworth confided.

I nodded sympathetically. Indoor fungus was truly fearsome.

Once there had been dormitories and cloisters, but long ago those areas had been converted to the usage of a secular household. Once this had been a sacred place, but it had long since been desecrated.

I remembered the heroine Catherine, in
Northanger Abbey
, questioning George about supernatural phenomena. I had always thought Catherine and I would have been good friends, and now we even had abbeys in common. I decided to try similar questions with the housekeeper.

“Does the house have a ghost, Mrs. Duckworth?” I asked.

“Certainly not!” she said.

“A vampire?” I couldn’t resist.

“Neither I nor the master would stand for such a thing.” She briskly swished her alpaca skirt as she entered the next room. I had offended her. I wondered, though; the stage here was clearly set for phantoms. How could there possibly not be one?

She began to puff and wheeze as she walked.

“Would you like to stop and rest?” I asked.

“No, Miss,” she said. “We’d never get through if I gave out when I felt a bit winded.”

Eventually she was too breathless to speak much.

On and on we explored. At first I had tried to mentally map out
the rooms in relation to one another, but I was soon hopelessly confused and gave up. The housekeeper pointed out various locked doors that she did not open. How was it that among all the glories of this place, those forbidden spaces interested me most? I was a goose.

She indicated the double doors closing off the east wing. “You’ll hear workmen hammering and sawing in there, but the connecting doors are kept locked.”

As we passed a door in an upstairs hall she said, “That leads to the attics.” She leaned in toward me. “They’re full of items that the master desired me to burn, but I can’t bear the waste. I have them taken up there and he’s no more the wiser.”

So, the faithful housekeeper had her secrets, and there were corners of Wyndriven Abbey of which its master was unaware.

The portrait gallery was lined with three hundred years’ worth of paintings of the abbey’s former owners. My godfather had “borrowed” all these ancestors. Next to M. Bernard’s portrait, however, a rectangular, faded patch gaped on the wall.

“Was that where Monsieur Bernard’s wife’s portrait hung?” I asked.

“Various ladies’ pictures have hung there,” Mrs. Duckworth said stiffly. “The master has been married more than once. He does not care to have painful memories thrust upon him, however, so the paintings have been removed.”

I would have asked more, but I saw from Mrs. Duckworth’s compressed lips that there would come no more information at this time.
More than once
, she had said. How many marriages? And if there were no ghosts, perhaps there was a mad wife shut up in one of the
locked places? Maybe in the east wing, allegedly under renovation? It would be amusing (albeit tragic) to imagine a suitably mad wife for M. Bernard. Hah! Secrets waiting to be uncovered. This house lent itself to mysteries. Eventually I hoped to poke about without Mrs. Duckworth.

It took us two hours to tour the house, moving constantly. By the end I was numb, except for my feet, which hurt from treading in tight slippers. I could no longer think up admiring comments.

There was such a thing as too many paintings composed of graphic scenes from the Old Testament and mythology. There was such a thing as too much grandeur, too much opulence and curlicues and gold leaf. Too many rooms to be the dwelling of one man and, now, one girl.

A swarthy, capable-looking woman with a surprisingly dark mustache burst through the doorway of my bedchamber in the late afternoon. Behind her staggered the footmen, bearing bolts of fabric, beading, ribbons, and laces, which they deposited on the wide ottoman.

The dressmaker nodded with satisfaction as she looked me up and down. “It will be a pleasure,” she said, “to create for a
demoiselle
such as Mademoiselle Petheram.”

Mme. Duclos spread out fashion plates from
Le Petit Courrier des Dames
and proceeded to make my head swim with all her plans for my wardrobe. I ran my fingers over the bolts of muslin, cambric, tarlatan, brocade, and silk.

There were to be day dresses and evening dresses in tulle and grenadine, trimmed with ribbons, an outdoor frock in gooseberry green and black taffeta with wide stripes, a riding habit in russet surah. Madame rattled off descriptions of pagoda sleeves and engageantes. There were to be Norwich shawls and paisley shawls
and lace shawls and jackets and mantelets and cloaks. If Mademoiselle would permit, Mme. Duclos would arrange with a milliner she knew, of wonderful taste and artistry, to create for Mademoiselle such bonnets and hats that would set off her coloring
extraordinaire
.

She took my measurements, and I held up this fabric to see how it hung and ran my hand over that one to see how it felt. So many options. I did request an emerald green silk evening gown with jet beads stitched in the skirt, but other than that, I mostly let Madame do the choosing. Who would have thought that I, Sophia Petheram, could feel almost ill at the thought of so many dresses, as from a surfeit of sweets? I was sure to recover quickly, however, and be sorry later that I hadn’t expressed more opinions.

After the dressmaker left, I sat on the ottoman and brushed the crushed white velvet with my hand. Without the pearls stitched in, it would have felt so soft—like a pet to stroke. Pure, pure white. My pet polar bear ottoman. I grinned, but stopped smiling as I peered closer.

Something was wound around the base of a pearl. A thread from one of the bolts of cloth? I worked at it with my fingernails, then drew out the small scissors I always carried in a sewing kit in my pocket. I managed to snip an end. Carefully I unwound a two-foot length of hair. Because that’s what it was—a fine, thin strand of reddish hair. Not my shade. I lay the strand on the white velvet. It was more of a strawberry blond, the pale pinky gold of this morning’s sunrise. Tatiana?

Or Adele?

Now, why did that name spring to mind?

I opened and closed the scissors in my hand. The strand could
not, of course, belong to a Negro maid. And besides, a maid wouldn’t have dared to scrape her name into the paint of the bed. Could Adele have been one of my godfather’s wives—the French one my father had mentioned—and she had scratched her name in order to leave her mark? But no, the timing was wrong. For Adele to have etched her name there, she would have had to have been here
after
Tatiana decorated the room, eleven years ago. My father had mentioned M. Bernard having a French wife back when he met him twenty years earlier. How many wives had my godfather outlived?

If I were to jump to conclusions, as I often dared to do, it seemed at least three. M. Bernard indeed was unlucky in his marriages. Sadly, early deaths happened all too often. Why, in Boston my father knew a man who lost four wives one after the other, all in childbirth, and another whose five children were all taken with cholera in a single month’s time.

Of course, the hair might have been left by a guest. Adele might also have been a guest. I didn’t actually have a smidgen of knowledge of any facts. But naturally that didn’t stop me.

The hair might have circled around the pearl accidentally, in some odd fluke of a way. Or had someone—this mysterious redheaded lady—absentmindedly wound the strand around the button with her fingers? Or she might have done it on purpose, winding it round and round, so that, like the person who had scratched her name into the bedpost, something of herself would be left behind.

Without knowing why, except that I had always felt a sense of kinship with other redheaded people, I placed the single hair into an envelope and tucked it beneath the blotter on the desk.

Although it was not yet five o’clock, I unfastened and removed
my hoop and my dress, sponged myself with cool water, dragged back the coverlet on the bed, and slipped inside, pulling the sheets over my head.

How strange that I should feel so … strange. It was silly to be disturbed by finding the hair. After all, generations of women had lived and died in Wyndriven Abbey in its various phases of existence. I knew that, of course. What bothered me was the fact that my godfather’s wives were so recent—and the strand was a shade of red.

However, the hair wasn’t the only reason for my disquiet. Knowing my past predilection for luxury, I should be in raptures to reside in such surroundings, showered with lovely things. But everything was too much. It was as if the world here were coated with glamour, as in some fairy tales, with nothing really as it seemed.