The Hundred-Year House (20 page)

After a long while, Max and the witch strolled together out of the coach house, behind the big house, and straight into the garden shed. They emerged twenty minutes later, and so did Ludo
and Beatrice, the gardeners. Max and the witch walked them to their car and kissed their cheeks before the gardeners drove off, done for the day. The witch took Max’s arm, quite formally, and they disappeared back into the coach house.

The sun was setting, and she ought to head down for dinner before they sent a search party.

Amy reappeared. She was a figurine from a cuckoo clock, circling forever in and out: coach house, big house, coach house, big house. But this time, as she crossed the lawn toward the kitchen door, the earth seemed to move behind her. No, it was rabbits. Grace counted at least seven of them, hopping along behind Amy as if out of Hamelin. She didn’t seem aware in the slightest. And what irony! Seven cottontails, and not a bit of good luck for Amy—sad little, odd little, hungry-eyed Amy, who thought she was desired because George pinned her to a tree. The kind of girl to whom misfortune clung like moss. Grace stood and brushed the attic dust from her lap.

So it was two strange things now, two omens. If she only kept watching, tomorrow and the next day and the next, the third thing would come. And the third was always biggest.

—

She felt the house waking around her in the morning before she herself was fully awake. Windows opening, Ludo’s rhythmic clippers outside, feet in the hall, wheels on the gravel drive. It was the same everywhere she’d ever lived: at home at Bealey Hall, with so many more servants than here, and her brothers shouting, and later her brothers’ children shouting; in the college dormitory, where some girls were always up and running baths at the crack of dawn; in hotels, where someone had been up all night at the desk, where the maids arrived at four in the morning. She wondered what it was like to awaken alone in a little cottage on a quiet street, where nothing would stir until she did. Maybe a sleeping cat at the foot of the bed, and that would be all. But here
at Laurelfield, there was something more in the mornings, a buzzing sensation about the whole house, as if it weren’t the servants keeping it running but some other energy. As if the house had roots and leaves and was busy photosynthesizing and sending sap up and down, and the people running through were as insignificant as burrowing beetles.

She sat at the breakfast table with a book. George wasn’t there yet. He’d begun sleeping in the small bedroom with the four-poster on nights when he returned home closer to dawn than sunset. He was either up there asleep or he wasn’t, but wondering wouldn’t accomplish much. She asked for eggs and toast, no meat, and opened her book to the middle. A romance. A college friend had sent six of them as a joke wedding gift—the whole
Ancient Passions
set, tied with pink ribbon, a calligraphed note:
For when that flame flickers!
—and Grace had ripped through two just since Paris. This one was set in an English manor house in the reign of Henry VIII. The poor servant girl and the second son were madly in love with little hope of marriage. She’d have imagined it finished badly for all, were this not the type of book that guaranteed a happy ending. How funny it would have been, what a great trick on the poor lonelyheart readers, if one of these stories ended terribly. Abandonment, shame, an accidental baby with six fingers on each hand. The heroine taking to the streets.

George arrived, unshaven. His hair a mat of black curls, his eyebrows mirrored by the dark circles beneath. He was even more beautiful like this than neatly groomed. She closed the book, but didn’t bother hiding it under her napkin. He snorted at the cover and asked where the cook was. Grace forked some eggs onto her saucer and slid it across the table to him, and she poured half her coffee into his cup.

She said, “Do you know anything about Max’s new guest, in the coach house?” She’d been going to ask him last night at
dinner, but he’d taken a phone call and she ended up eating alone. “A woman.”

He scratched behind his ears. “It’s your house, Duck. Tell me what you want. You want me to bark at him?”

She considered. “No. I can handle it, certainly. I just wondered if he’d cleared it with you.”

George laughed and tried to catch the cook’s attention through the open kitchen door. “I think the fellow’s smart enough to know I’m not the one to clear it.”

“Well. In any case, there’s a guest. A distinguished sort of witch, all dressed in black. Just so long as you don’t go mangling her bosom.”

George lifted a thick eyebrow, but the look on his face was all amusement. No denial, and certainly no apology. If he’d already been drunk for the day, he might have thrown his coffee cup at her face. As it was, he seemed on the verge of saying something slick and snide, but just then Rosamund, strapping, gray-eyed Rosamund, strode through the door with the coffee and a heaping plate of eggs.

Grace said, “I’ll manage it all.” Though she had no idea how to speak to Max, no desire to put her authority to the test.

George paused his bite in front of his mouth and said, “Your dear departed grandmother is staring me down. Can’t we move her?”

She glanced over her shoulder at the portrait. “She’s beautiful, I think.”

“She makes my skin crawl.”

“We can change seats.”

“I’d rather have a ghost look me in the eye than look down the back of my neck.”

“We can’t take it down. Father would be mortified.”

“You think he’s going to see? You think he’s going to visit us?
Grace. They’re never going to visit. Don’t you understand that yet?”

—

Back in the attic, she considered how to spend her day. Her favorite corner, the northwest one, was a most comfortable nest. She had covered an old, splitting Morris chair with a green blanket, and pushed it over to the file cabinets that formed a little cove by the dormer. She’d found a half-finished painting on a piece of rolled linen, and she’d carefully unrolled it and cleaned it of dust, and tacked it to the wall below the window. It was maybe meant to be an oak leaf, in intense close-up. She put a board across the arms of the Morris chair, and this became her desk for drawing and writing letters. It was exactly like an artist’s garret in Paris in the nineties, she decided, somewhere on Île Saint-Louis, and when Amy crunched by on the path Grace pretended it was a fishmonger.

Today she would plan her greenhouse. Ludo was thrilled at the idea, and he’d promised to learn orchids. She sketched it out on the back of an empty folder from the cabinets—not the architecture of it, which was already determined, but the placement of the plants—and she used a second folder as a ruler. She penciled in the neat little shelves and pots. Here, along the eastern windows, tomatoes and lettuces. How heavenly, in January, to eat a soft, ripe tomato. There should be spinach, as well. She thought of a hot vegetable pie. African violets along the inner wall by the house, unless there wasn’t shade enough. Phalaenopsis along the west, framing the view of the back lawn: white, purple, pink. Yellow lady’s slipper, the small ones. Ferns all over the middle, a jungle of ferns, and a little copper mister. Ferns hanging from the ceiling, as well, and other things that would lilt down with soft tendrils and green threads of hair.

In another life, she’d have been a botanist, or a painter of plants. In college she took a whole course on the plant kingdom.
The professor, an ancient British woman, had cut an apple in half the wrong way—down its equator—and turned the halves out to face the girls, to show them the stars that had been hiding there, the carpels, the seeds cut through and leaking arsenic. Stars! In the apples she’d been eating for twenty years! Suddenly, that year, every tree had a name. When boys sent her flowers, she’d sit at her dormitory desk dissecting each one, pulling daisies apart into disc flowers and ray flowers, splitting the bases of lilies with her thumbnail to find the rows of neat, white ovules.

And what was she to do with all that information now? The French literature, too, and the appreciation for Dutch art, and the ability to write a theme on Chaucer. What were those skills but silent companions in the attic, ways to keep her mind from digesting itself over the next fifty years? She imagined her classmates amusing their husbands with their intelligence. When she’d tried talking to George in Paris about the architecture of the bridges on the Seine, he’d accused her of humiliating him.

Her boredom wasn’t his fault. What had she done with herself from college to the age of twenty-eight? Precisely nothing. She’d traveled to Italy with her mother (educational, but none of the Italian stuck), she’d answered telephones in her father’s office, she’d been engaged, or pretended to be, to two boys, which took a great deal of time and energy but little creativity. She’d been sick for an entire winter with pneumonia. She’d organized blood drives for the Canadian Red Cross. Never, in that time, had she impressed anyone with her knowledge of Chaucer.

Here came Amy, crossing the drive, arms empty for once. She walked with her nose down, as if someone had forbidden her from seeing anything beautiful in the world. Grace was not ready yet to confront Max, but she could talk to Amy. She could get her bearings.

By the time Grace got downstairs, Amy had disappeared. She looked for her in the kitchen (no Amy, but Rosamund had a
question about what vegetables Mr. Grant would accept in his stew) and down by the linen closets. She finally looked out the dining room windows and spotted her standing under the catalpa tree, the same one where George had manhandled her. But she was facing the tree, staring at its bark, and George was nowhere around. So Grace walked outside despite the cold, and came up slowly beside her.

“It’s a northern catalpa,” she said, and Amy jumped and gave a rough little shriek.

“Mrs. Grant,” she said. “I’m sorry. I thought—maybe you were an animal or something.”

“Well, I suppose I am. And that’s a northern catalpa. It can’t be as impressive to you, coming from the south. But up here, it’s got the largest leaves of any tree, by quite a lot. It isn’t always so ugly.” In early summer, it had been sublime in its inflorescence: white flowers hanging like bridal trains, foot-long seed pods, leaves as big as dinner plates. But now the leaves were sickly yellow, the pods brown and distressingly phallic.

“No, it’s very pretty,” Amy said. “It is.”

“Don’t lie.”

“Oh.”

Amy looked as if she might cry. Grace was tempted to push her further, to see if she would, but instead she said, “Come sit with me a minute.” She led her to the bench by the koi pond. She’d have to ask Max soon what was to be done with the fish once the weather fully turned. She didn’t know if they’d be brought indoors, or if they continued to live here, sealed beneath a sheet of ice. They sat, and Amy immediately buried the toes of her saddle shoes in the leaves. She was a child, Grace reminded herself. Max said she was eighteen, and she looked it, but there was something much younger about her, something stuck at seven. Grace said, “Your uncle has a visitor.”

There was just the shortest flicker of confusion before Amy
said “Yes.” Of course. Because Max, Grace had figured out weeks ago, was not Amy’s uncle. Max had been flawless in his story, introducing Amy back in July with a proud hand on her shoulder, including just the right number of details: “the daughter of my sister Ellen,” and “took the train all the way from Florida by herself,” and “planned to stay with friends but it’s all fallen through.” Grace had bought it completely. Why wouldn’t she? She’d said Amy could stay as long as she needed. And in August, when he’d come to her again and said that Amy would really love to work, that she could use the experience, Grace had thought of what her own mother would do, the manners and generosity she’d seen modeled for years before she learned, in history class, to call it
noblesse oblige
. The housekeeper, Mrs. Carmichael, was ancient and nearsighted and gouty, and Grace had been sure she wouldn’t mind the help. Amy could fill in wherever needed, Grace had said, and Amy had broken her own outpouring of gratitude only to say that she didn’t have a green thumb at all, that she could clean and help in the kitchen, but the gardeners would be better off without her.

Then certain details started to needle Grace. There was something so raw and low about Amy, a harshness to her vowels that was separate from her southern accent. Her teeth were crooked, she didn’t know what a sideboard was, she bit her nails. In asking Mrs. Carmichael how to reshelve the records in the library, she pronounced “Mozart” with a soft Z. Whereas Max was a true Brahmin. Grace had no idea of his background, besides his long attachment to the colony, but the man spoke fluent French and subscribed to
Harper’s
. It didn’t fit that his sister would be Amy’s mother. And so Grace had devised a test. She found Max in the garage one day in September, and said, “I’m thinking already about Christmas. I know, here we are roasting to death—but it’s my first Christmas as a married woman. How did you celebrate, Max? When you were growing up? I need inspiration.” And he’d
told her about sticking cloves into oranges, about opening gifts by candlelight on the Eve, church service at nine in the morning, duck for dinner, carols and eggnog after. And then, the next day, Grace had come into the kitchen and asked the same thing of both Amy and the cook. Amy had swallowed hard and said, “Well, we always had bowls of nuts on the coffee table. That was a real treat.” Grace pressed further and heard about turkey the night before, leftovers for Christmas dinner itself, a mad rush for gifts at dawn.

Grace was certain, then: There was no way a woman who’d grown up in the house Max had described would invent Amy’s Christmas for her own children. It answered her question, but it raised many more: Who in heaven was this Amy Hall, and why did Max want her here, and what did she want from Laurelfield? There was something about her weakness that made Grace want to hurt her, to test how long she could hold herself together. Perhaps it was the same instinct that had led George to pin Amy to the tree. She and George were so similar, after all.