The Ghost in the Glass House (9 page)

“They're threepenny each,” the woman warned.

Bridget didn't blink.

The woman pushed her thinning red hair out of her eyes. “You care what kind?”

“Whatever's best,” Bridget said.

The woman filled a plate with an assortment of the meringues, each about the size of the silver dollar that still lay on the counter. She pushed the plate at Bridget. Bridget collected it and looked at Clare. “Don't you want anything?” she asked.

Clare, who had assumed the plate was to share, started to draw her own dollar from her pocket. But Bridget nodded impatiently at the one on the counter. “Don't be stupid,” she said.

The fisherman's wife frowned at Bridget, but her frown didn't fade when she turned to Clare.

“Two, please,” Clare said quickly.

“What kind?”

“Almond,” Clare said, reading from the handwritten cards. “And rose.”

The woman served them to her in a small white bowl. She poured water from a ceramic pitcher into two short glasses and set them on the counter as well. Then she scrawled several sums on a scrap of paper, took the silver dollar, and replaced it with a pile of smaller coins.

Bridget collected her change and pastries and headed for the best seat in the house, a spindly table for two at the only window, which overlooked the ocean at the back of the shop.

“I think Bram is one of these men who doesn't know how much he loves a girl until he loses her,” Bridget said as Clare set her dish down on the table.

Clare knew better than to offer an opinion of her own. Between the two of them, Bridget was the undisputed expert in matters of the heart. Furthermore, it wasn't territory Clare was eager to claim. She knew the boundaries of childhood. But the region of the heart was dark and uncharted, and she wasn't convinced she stood to gain by crossing into it.

“So I have a plan,” Bridget said. She paused to select a macaron, then leaned forward to narrow the distance her secret would have to travel.

“I'm going to make Denby love me,” she said. “Well, I think he might already,” she admitted. “I'm going to make him say it.”

“Denby?” Clare repeated. She'd seen the way Denby acted around Bridget: how he watched like a hawk for her reactions and brooded when her attention turned to someone else. But despite Clare's deliberate ignorance on the subject, she wasn't sure this was love. And she didn't see why wringing a confession of love from Denby should lead to one from Bram. In fact, it seemed like a step that could only complicate the situation.

“Of course, we couldn't be together,” Bridget went on. “Since I'll never love him. But then Bram will have to do something, because he'll see what it would mean to lose me.” She selected another macaron, popped it into her mouth, and leaned back.

It was clear to Clare that Bridget expected more than a nod in response. But Clare also knew that questioning the plan would only result in recrimination. So she settled on a tactic that was almost always safe: asking Bridget to expand on her vision.

“What will you do then?” Clare asked.

Bridget nodded as if this were a sensible question, and one which she'd already given some thought to.

“Well, we'll be married,” she said. “They'll say we're too young, but I know I love him. And if they resist, we'll run away.”

This, Clare knew, was impossible. Bridget might be the expert in love, but Clare knew the rules of the world. “Where will you get money?” she asked.

Bridget pulled a handful of coins from her pocket and let them scatter over the table. “There's money everywhere you look,” she said.

“Where will you live?”

“We don't have to worry about that yet,” Bridget said. “We just need to go away together. Then they'll have to let us be married.”

Deep inside Clare, a warning bell rang. She'd seen her mother kiss a handful of men, but there was something else her mother refused them, something that had to do with nights spent in hotel rooms. The details weren't clear to Clare. But she could see they weren't clear to Bridget, either. And from the glimpses of greed, anger, and agony Clare had seen when men argued about it with her mother, Clare knew it couldn't be the simple prank Bridget seemed to think it was.

“But don't you want a wedding?” Clare asked, in an attempt to protect her friend through an appeal to a competing desire. She garnished the dream with a pair of Bridget's particular weaknesses. “With French lace? And peonies?”

A shadow crossed Bridget's face, but it only took her a moment to fold Clare's offering into her own larger fantasy. “Of course,” she said. “When we come back, we'll have all that.”

Clare crossed her arms over her belly.

Bridget frowned. “I thought you'd be happy for me,” she said.

“I am,” Clare insisted. “It's just—”

“You don't understand how things have been,” Bridget interrupted. The desperation in her voice was the first true note in her performance all morning. “It's impossible to live with them.”

Clare reached across the table and laid her hand on Bridget's.

Bridget tolerated the gesture for only a moment before she shook it off.

“There's no need for dramatics,” she said. “It's not like I'm one of those orphans from the war.”

Clare's fingers closed around her almond macaron.

Bridget regarded Clare, her expression now magnanimous.

“Who are you going to marry?” she asked.

On guard, Clare shrugged.

“Well, who are you in love with?” Bridget asked patiently.

Clare shook her head.

Bridget raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. “That may be for the best,” she said. “Love matches don't always end in happiness. Of course, if you love someone like I love Bram, you have no choice.” She glanced out to sea. “What about Denby?” she suggested.

“Denby?” Clare repeated.

Bridget nodded. “After Bram and I go away,” she said. “He'll be brokenhearted, but you can tend to him in his hour of need.”

“I don't love Denby,” Clare tried. But her appeal to the strange logic of the heart was amateur, and came too late. Her refusal to deal with it before had left her exposed.

“But you don't love anybody,” Bridget insisted. “And what's wrong with poor Denby?”

The sheer number of answers Clare could give to this question made her feel defensive for Denby, the way she did when other children mocked him for his air of command and his bad temper when challenged. They saw him as ridiculous because they'd never benefited from his leadership: never enjoyed stolen cake on a roped-off balcony, never discovered a new cave instead of dawdling on the beach. She wouldn't have let someone else list his faults in front of her, and she rebelled at the thought of reeling them off herself.

Instead, she shrugged again.

“Then that's settled,” Bridget said, with a brisk nod.

The ease with which Bridget had dispensed with Clare's whole future nettled Clare. She might not be an expert on love, but she wasn't willing to be disposed of so neatly.

“What about Teddy?” she asked.

“What about him?” Bridget demanded, her expression suddenly fierce.

Clare had meant to put up resistance, but she didn't want to start a war. She retreated into innocence. “Who do you think he'll marry?” she asked.

Bridget's features softened to their customary worldliness. “Well, that hardly matters, does it?” she said. “He'll always do what he wants.

“It's not the same for us,” she went on, in the low, urgent voice usually reserved for telling weird stories at night. “Once a girl gives her heart away, we can never love again.”

T
HAT AFTERNOON, WHEN
C
LARE
returned to the glass house, half a dozen pale pink tulips lay on the mossy flagstone.

They had been yanked out near the root, not neatly clipped. Their broken stems were white and fleshy. A few of the petals bore the telltale creases of careless handling. Clare glanced at the nearest garden, just beyond the glade. A whole corner of it had been denuded, giving the planting a lopsided effect, like a preening bird with a missing tail feather.

Clare knelt over the flowers on the stone.

“Do you like them?” Jack asked.

His voice came from a few steps away, but a current ran over her skin when she heard it, like the strands of blue electricity that raced silently over the face of a glass globe she'd seen at an exhibition in Paris the previous summer. The globe had been fashioned with relief maps of the continents and oceans. The adults around her saw it as whimsy, but Clare's mind had filled with the havoc that kind of lightning would wreak on the tiny world: mountains split, steeples smoking, ships splintered. The thought of a similar current playing over her own skin made her uneasy. But the flowers fading on the stone filled her with tenderness. Without water, they'd be nothing but dry grass in a few hours.

This, unlike the other feeling, she could do something about. She collected the pulpy stems into the crook of her arm, careful not to crush the blossoms.

“Do you?” Jack asked again, but his voice rose with satisfaction.

Clare stood with the tulips and scanned the yard. Along the fieldstone foundation that supported the white brick of the house, she saw the glint of a faucet and below it, black loops of rubber hose.

She started up the hill.

“Wait!” Jack exclaimed, startled. “Where are you going?”

“They need water,” Clare said.

Jack kept pace alongside her. “But you just got here,” he protested.

“Well, come with me,” Clare said, somewhat impatiently. She crested the hill and darted across the upper lawn to the lip of the garden. There, she felt a faint remorse over her sharp tone.

“They're so pretty,” she explained. “They just shouldn't go without water for long.”

Jack didn't answer. She glanced around, halfexpecting to catch sight of some new prank: yards of ribbon streaming from the branches of the oak tree, a stand of daisies dancing under his invisible hand.

“Jack?” she asked.

Still nothing.

She glanced up at the windows of the house. Each of them reflected its own shard of the yard. Anybody might be inside, looking out. She didn't have time to play whatever game Jack was up to now.

She darted around the corner to the wide door of Mack's workshop. It stood ajar. Clare slipped in.

A few glass jars glinted temptingly on the shelves above Mack's cluttered workbench, but they were filled with nails or sand or seeds, and Clare knew she couldn't empty one of them without him noticing. But on the floor by the door was a promising jumble of buckets. One of those, she guessed, would be hard to miss.

When she turned the faucet on, the black hose twitched as if it had come alive. Warm water coughed out of the spout. One-handed, still cradling the tulips in her other arm, Clare twisted the end of the hose into the bucket she'd commandeered. Water rose against the silver walls. When it neared the top, she twisted the faucet off. Then she hurried down the hill.

Annoyed by whatever prank he'd just tried to play, Clare stalked into the glass house in silence. If Jack wanted to disappear like that, he could think what to say next.

And the torn white ends of the tulip stems still needed to be cut if the blooms were going to last. She set the pail down on a rug and began to investigate the buffet.

The first drawer she pulled open revealed a collection of mismatched tapers wrapped in crushed tissue. As she pushed the paper aside, the drawer above it stuttered open of its own accord. She started, then slapped it back into place.

It stuttered open again. “What are you looking for?” Jack asked.

“A knife,” Clare said.

The haunted drawer rattled shut. “What for?” A hint of excitement had crept into Jack's voice, as if he welcomed the possibility of stripping branches or fending off bandits, or anything else a boy might do with a knife.

“The flowers,” Clare told him. “I need to cut the stems.”

“We don't have an actual knife,” Jack admitted. “But there's a letter opener under the buffet.”

The buffet was made of dark mahogany with a low arch, only about two inches high, between its solid feet. Clare got to her knees, but hesitated to reach in to the darkness. “What's it doing there?”

“I wanted it for a sword, but it was too heavy to hold,” Jack said. “And then I couldn't lift it after it fell.”

Something skittered in the shadows. Clare jerked back.

“It's okay,” Jack said. Another skitter, and the small face of a bird emerged from under the buffet. The bird's head was made from translucent white stone, with a tiny red gem for an eye. “There,” Jack said.

Clare picked up the letter opener. The bird's head curved into wings, gilded with gold and crusted with other tiny gems: blue, black, and green. Its figure formed the handle of a dull brass blade.

“Will it work?” Jack asked.

“Let's see,” Clare said. She took a metal serving tray from the clutter on the buffet, pulled a stem from the bucket, laid it on the tray, and neatly sliced off the bruised end of the stalk. Instantly, she replaced it in the water.

“That works!” Jack crowed beside her. The discarded end of the stalk began to roll merrily on the metal tray in celebration.

Clare pulled another stem from the water. A few minutes later all the tulips were neatly trimmed, and Clare had disposed of the broken ends in the myrtle outside the door.

She settled down on the rug near the divan, beside the bucket of tulips, which she'd placed on the low table. Her anxiety for their survival quelled, she could finally take in how beautiful the blossoms were. No self-respecting florist would ever have delivered such a meager bouquet. But because there were so few blooms, each one seemed to have a life of its own: this one was pale enough to faint; that one's petal had been forked by a blow.