The Ghost in the Glass House (11 page)

Heat rushed to Clare's cheeks, but she quickly calculated that it was probably too dark for the others to see. Teddy was right. Until now, she'd never cared if she ever kissed anyone. But neither had anyone else.

“She didn't say that,” Bridget snapped.

Teddy didn't even glance at his sister. “Tell me I'm wrong, Clare,” he said, his gaze still fixed on Clare. “Tell us all the boys you've kissed.”

Even Denby watched Clare now with something approaching interest.

“Come on,” Teddy said. “Tell us what you've done with them.” He leaned forward, his legs spread wide, his elbows on his knees.

Suddenly, Bram was on his feet. “Leave her alone,” he said.

Bridget looked up at Bram, stricken.

Teddy eased back in his chair, his eyebrows high, his grin twisted.

“Sit down,” Denby ordered.

Bram watched Teddy for a long moment. Then he sat back down again.

Bridget's gaze shifted to Clare, where it hardened.

C
LARE'S MOTHER UNHOOKED THE
thread of tiny freshwater pearls from the back of her neck and hung it on one of the red lilies Tilda had brought up to her that morning. The strand hung down over her dressing table like a piece of loose rigging.

Clare shifted from one foot to the other in the doorway.

Her mother turned back with a smile. “Hello, love,” she said.

Clare took up a perch at the foot of her mother's bed.

“Adeline Lewis is hosting a bridge party on the beach,” her mother told her. “I doubt she was expecting children, but I also doubt the conversation will rise beyond a child's comprehension. Would you like to come along?”

Clare shook her head. “I just came home,” she said.

“Did you have a good time with Bridget?” her mother asked.

Clare hesitated.

Her mother rummaged through the velvet chambers of her jewelry case and pulled another necklace out. This one was an old-fashioned setting, blue topaz petals and emerald leaves on a white gold vine.

Clare knew immediately where it must have come from. Her mother's girlhood bangles were all paste, carved wood, hand-painted glass over butterfly wings. And the vine was too ornate to date from the past few years, when all the jewelry was made to look like airplanes or skyscrapers.

Her mother lifted her chin to show off the gems. “What do you think?” she asked.

Her mother's reflection was strange in the glass: her eyes familiar, but traded, the wrong side of her smile crooked, the wrong eyebrow arched.

It might have been this strangeness that gave Clare the courage to ask, “Did Daddy give you that?”

Her mother's hands froze above her head, like a dancer listening for the strains of the next movement. Then she turned around. Her eyes hadn't filled with tears, as Clare had feared. In fact, they seemed to have a kind of question in them. “He did,” she said.

“When?” Clare asked.

Her mother touched the jewels at her throat.

“The day we got married,” she said. To Clare's surprise, her mother's lips twisted as if she'd just heard a joke. “He told me he'd had it for weeks, but he waited until the deal was sealed so I couldn't raise enough money to run off before the wedding.”

Her smile broke into a grin at the memory.

Then she stood and gathered Clare into the sheer layers of fabric at her waist. Clare's hands found hiding spots in her mother's skirts. Her mother smoothed Clare's hair.

“He loved you so much,” her mother said.

This was a benediction her mother had said over Clare a hundred times since her father's death. It might even have been what Clare had come in search of. But for the first time since his death, the familiar words didn't settle her heart.

Her own memories of her father had long since worn thin, like faces in a photograph that faded a bit more each time she touched her finger down to point at them. And they had only ever been a child's memories. She had never been old enough to study him the way she now studied everyone she met. Even when her memories had been whole, they had never been enough to tell her what kind of man he'd been.

But the more Clare learned about other men and boys, the more she wished she knew about him. And despite the story her mother had just told her, Clare knew she couldn't learn what she wanted to know by asking. She needed to know things you could only learn if you watched and listened. But she would never see him again.

She breathed in the scent of talc and perfume from her mother's dress. Her mother kissed the top of Clare's head and pulled free.

“Are you sure you don't want to come to Adeline's?” she asked. “She's promising chilled grapefruit with bowls of sugar to dip it in. Apparently Walter's workmen just uprooted an entire orchard to make way for another one of his Florida hotels. He had them send up a dozen crates, and now it's up to us to dispose of them.”

Clare shook her head.

“Once again, you're absolutely right,” her mother said. “I wouldn't go either if I still had the privileges of a child.” She gathered up a chiffon wrap, kissed Clare again, and went out. Her skirts whispered down the stairs with a shush like the end of a lullaby.

Clare found Tilda in the kitchen, surrounded by a queen's ransom of silver. The counter overlooking the circle drive was crowded with flatware, stacks of serving trays, pitchers, carving knives and ladles, the scrambled elements of several tea services, and a small army of bud vases massed at the foot of a gravy boat shaped like a goose. Most of these were arrayed to the right of the sink, their features shadowed by tarnish, but a small contingent stood to the left at high shine.

With white paste from a small mixing bowl, Tilda cut a gleaming path down the center of a broad oval platter. This one hadn't turned a uniform black: the delicate scrollwork was clouded with purple and copper, almost like the stains flame made on the stones of a hearth. In fact, all the tarnished silver looked as if it were coated in soot. It was hard to believe that all it had passed through was time, not some great blaze.

Clare padded over to the table by the window and sat down. At the scrape of the chair on tile, Tilda turned around.

By now, anywhere else, Clare would have heard the history of the house so many times she'd already be tired of it. Servants loved to talk about the families they served, and their stories were even better than serials in magazines, because each servant knew a different piece. This one had seen the young master bury something in the garden. This one had discovered the old mistress dressed up in a parade uniform from the last war. And then they could argue for hours about whether he'd been burying a gun or a book, or if the uniform belonged to her father or lover—and how all this fit with the other family secrets they'd collected over the years along with the soiled laundry and dirty plates.

But Tilda remained her own locked room. Other maids liked to teach Clare a thing or two about the world, or confess their secrets to her. If Clare hung around long enough, they might even forget she was there. Not Tilda. She regarded Clare with a suspicion so deep it came as a kind of compliment. Clare's useful poses never worked on her. But that was because, unlike all the other maids, Tilda seemed to realize that Clare had a mind of her own.

“The roses look nice,” Clare tried: an indirect approach to the topic of the glass house.

Tilda's eyes narrowed for battle. At first Clare thought she'd made a tactical error to even touch on the subject. But Tilda was remembering a much older fight.

“She said roses would never climb that high,” she said, as if in retort to someone only she could see.

Clare struggled to keep the elation from her face. She hadn't imagined she could lure Tilda so quickly into the past. But now that she was there, the trick was not to break the flow of her thoughts. “She should see it now,” Clare ventured.

“They wouldn't even pay for the first plants,” Tilda said, her outrage at the old slight still fresh. “He had to bring cuttings from his mother's garden.” She wiped a shining band across the belly of the platter in her hands. “You know what she told him? When they first came here from the city?”

Clare shook her head, but Tilda was past the need for encouragement.

“She only wanted a
lawn
,” Tilda said, with the glee of one believer repeating blasphemy to another. “She was tired of all the fuss about gardens.” Tilda paused to let the absurdity of this sink in as she rinsed the platter and set it aside. Then she picked up a squat teapot and stripped the tarnish from its handle with one sure stroke.

“So Mack would come in with a box of myrtle, or Star of Bethlehem. And he'd ask her, isn't this pretty? He had to beg permission for every flower in that garden, one by one. She laughed at his rose cuttings. She only agreed to let him put them in because she didn't think they'd survive the summer.”

Clare looked out at the garden, which now spread a good ten feet from the foundation, each plant a flag of victory. Her gaze traveled down to the glass house, now completely overgrown by Mack's climbing roses.

“How long did it take them to get so high?” she asked.

Tilda rinsed the teapot and picked up a towel to wipe it dry.

“He forced a blossom the second year,” she said with pride. “He sent it up to her the day the boy was born.”

A chill ran over Clare's skin. This was the first time anyone had admitted that another child had ever lived in the house, despite all the evidence of the room upstairs. But Clare also knew Tilda hadn't trusted her with a confidence. She'd made a slip. Any moment now, she might come to her senses and retreat into stony silence. But if Clare could startle her with an unexpected fact, Tilda might give something else away.

“Jack?” Clare asked. “Jack Cunningham?”

It was a wild gamble, because to speak Jack's name threw all Clare's own cards on the table. But when Tilda turned around, there was no shock or sorrow on her face. Instead, she seemed bemused, with a faint new respect for Clare.

“Where on earth did you hear of Jack Cunningham?” Tilda asked.

Clare had thought Jack's name would rattle Tilda. But in her rush not to lose the moment, she hadn't considered the next obvious step: that she'd be asked how she learned it. She pressed back against the unforgiving curve of the wooden chair. “Around,” she said.

“And what do you hear about him?” Tilda said, her eyes now bright with amusement.

Clare shrugged.

“Well,” Tilda said. “You can meet him right now if you like. He just went by outside with Mack.”

Clare stared at her in shock.

“Well,” Tilda said, and nodded at the door to Mack's shop. “Go on.” It was a command, not a suggestion.

Clare rose, unsteady. When she reached the door, she glanced back. Tilda's face was set, her eyebrows raised, her chin jutting like the prow of a ship. Clare stepped through the door and pulled it shut behind her.

She waited for a few breaths at the top of the half flight of stairs that led down to Mack's workshop. The unfinished walls were hung with a whole museum of curiosities: garden tools with handles rubbed smooth as driftwood, a pail full of the stubs of beeswax tapers, a few of Mack's work shirts, soft with age, and a neat collection of herbs tied with scraps of ribbon and labeled. A sturdy shelf built into the slope of the stairs held jars of peaches, tomatoes, pickles, and wax beans. As Clare's eyes adjusted, she realized the shadows beyond the jars were full of roses, dozens of them, dried and stacked bloom to bloom like the skulls Clare's mother had taken her to see, packed cheek to cheek in the Paris catacombs.

Tilda's tread on the other side of the door startled Clare into motion again. She clattered down the steps to the workshop. On the far side, the door to the yard stood slightly ajar. A thick band of sunshine fell through it, but she had no intention of going out there before she'd had a chance to collect her thoughts.

The forest, she calculated, began only a few yards from the shed door. She could listen to make sure the coast was clear, then dart out into the brambles, just beyond. From there, if she circled the yard through the woods, she might be able to catch sight of Mack and find out what Tilda had been talking about.

Clare crept to the door to listen. Besides a few birds trading scraps of song, the yard was quiet. She pushed the door wide and dashed out just as a pair of men came around the corner from the circle drive.

The first was Mack, in a faded plaid shirt, carrying a bucket full of onions and blue flowers. The other man was a bit younger, his hair darker than Mack's, his face browned where Mack's was red, his glance curious, while Mack's was guarded. He stood almost a whole head taller than Mack, but like Mack he was dressed in dungarees, the sleeves of his blue shirt rolled up.

All three of them stopped short.

Clare composed her face in what she hoped were lines of innocence. Mack gave her his ready smile, but with a trace of consternation at discovering her in the door of his workshop. The other man looked at her with mild curiosity.

Clare collected herself first, with the swift realization that if she dove in now, she could head off any awkward questions. “I'm Clare,” she said, and held her hand out to the other man.

He shook it.

“Jack,” he said.

The pang that sounded in Clare's chest echoed out through her shoulders and the back of her head. She was used to masking these pangs. She'd had to learn, in the months after her father's death, when well-meaning strangers asked her about him again and again. She couldn't weep every time she was forced to explain that he was gone, so she'd learned to wall off her heart and steady her face so it didn't give anything away. Still, the effort always left her slightly deaf.

“Clare's staying with us for the summer,” Mack explained to the other Jack. “Jack has the farm just down the road,” he told Clare. “He came over to bring us a few things.”