The Last Camellia: A Novel (10 page)

I sat up quickly, tucking my arm behind my back. “Of course you’ve seen it.”

“Just the same,” he said, gently pulling my arm back to him. His intentions were romantic, playful, and yet they struck all the wrong chords. “Let’s take it off.” He fingered the clasp of the watch, pulling it away from my skin enough to reveal the scars I so desperately wanted to keep hidden. “My God,” he said, gasping. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” I said, snatching my hand back. “They’re . . . just chicken pox scars.”

“Oh,” he said, still taken aback. “I didn’t know you had the chicken pox.”

“Well, I did,” I said, grateful to see the waiter coming with our dinner. “And now you know.”

Flora

“K
nock, knock.” Mrs. Dilloway peered into my room. I’d left the door cracked, not wanting to appear reclusive. The children were busy with their lessons, so I decided to take the opportunity to write a letter home. Mama and Papa would be eager to hear that I’d arrived safely. I set my pen and stationery aside and looked up at the door.

“Oh, hi,” I said, tucking the pen and paper inside the desk drawer.

“Do you have everything you need?”

“Yes,” I replied, gathering courage to inquire about the gardens. “I was just wondering if . . . well . . . if I might gather some of the camellias for an arrangement,” I continued. “Before they’re finished blooming.”

“I’d advise against that,” she said quickly. Before I could offer a reply, she clasped her hands together. “Now, since our tour was interrupted, shall we continue?”

“Thank you,” I said. “Yes.”

Upstairs, Mrs. Dilloway led me past the drawing room, pointing out the broom closet, where she said Nicholas sometimes hid, and the dumbwaiter, where Janie was known to disappear to from time to time. We walked by the dining room, the parlor, the sitting room, and then made our way up the stairs to the nursery. It was a grand room, with enormous leaded glass windows overlooking the gardens and rolling hillside. I imagined them flung open in the summertime, with the floral scent of the gardens wafting in. I walked past a dollhouse as tall as Katherine, nearly tripping on a wooden block.

“Mind your step,” Mrs. Dilloway said. “The children are dreadful about picking up after themselves.”

I eyed a large bookcase to my right. “Do they like stories?”

“They used to,” she said.

I pulled a picture book from the shelf. “Oh, I adore Beatrix Potter,” I said. “Do you think they’d like me to read to them?”

Mrs. Dilloway shrugged. “You could try. But the last nanny didn’t have much luck.”

I sat down on the sofa near the bookshelf. “May I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Is there something I need to know, about what happened to their mother? Sadie said that—”

“You’d do well to not listen to housemaid gossip, Miss Lewis,” she said, frowning. “Rehashing the past will do nothing for the children. They’ve been through a lot this past year, more than children should have to endure.”

I nodded.

She turned to face me as I stood up. “Shall we continue on?”

“Yes,” I said, following her out the door.

We walked along a dark corridor. “These are the children’s bedrooms,” she said. “The girls’ rooms are here, and the boys occupy the rooms on the right.”

I counted five doors. “This other room,” I said, walking to the last room on the right and reaching for the doorknob. “Whose is this?”

Mrs. Dilloway’s hand reached the knob before mine. “Just a spare bedroom,” she said quickly, turning to another flight of stairs.

“But what about the hall down there?” I asked, pointing to a dark corridor ahead.

She looked thoughtful. “The east wing belonged to Lady Anna,” she said, appearing lost in memories. “Her bedroom, dressing room, and study.”

“Oh,” I said, embarrassed by my inquiry. “I, I—”

“It’s fine,” Mrs. Dilloway said. “You ought to know, for the children’s sake. They used to love to greet her there in the mornings. It used to drive his Lordship mad the way she’d let them jump on the bed. She was never formal like him.”

As she spoke, her eyes looked sad, distant. I longed to know more about Lady Anna. I peered down the corridor, feeling a magnetic pull. Before I could advance, I felt Mrs. Dilloway’s cold hand on my wrist.

“Please,” she said, indicating the staircase that led to the third floor. “There’s something I need to show you.”

I followed her up the stairs, gazing up at the domed ceiling, with its ornate trim work and painted murals depicting angels, animals, and the countryside in bloom.
What must it be like for the children, to live in a veritable museum?

Mrs. Dilloway indicated a door ahead. “Miss Lewis, can I trust you with a secret?”

“Of course,” I said, a little confused.

When we got to the door, she produced a brass key from the pocket of her dress and inserted it into the lock. “It’s a bit stiff,” she said. The lock released and she turned the knob. The door creaked loudly as she opened it. “The hinges have gotten a little rusty over the years.” Her voice was thick with disappointment. “It’s this blasted country air. It’s a wonder we’re not all rusted to our cores.”

I stared ahead, beyond the doorway and Mrs. Dilloway. “Come in, Miss Lewis,” she said, sensing my hesitation.

A ray of light beamed into the dim hallway, and she looked both ways, cautiously. “Quickly,” she said. “We mustn’t be seen.”

As soon as I stepped inside the space, Mrs. Dilloway closed the door behind us with a hurried click. Light streamed down through the glass roof overhead. I followed her into the space, pushing a wayward vine from my view. It immediately sprung back and cheekily smacked me in the face. “What is this place?” I asked, in awe.

“The conservatory,” she said, then lowered her voice. “Lady Anna’s conservatory.” She walked a few paces farther. “It’s quite a sight, isn’t it?”

I was too awestruck to speak. Vines of bright pink flowers danced over a wrought-iron arbor. I recognized them immediately as the very same variety, bougainvillea, that grew in Greenhouse No. 4 at the New York Botanical Garden. Just beyond, two potted trees stood at attention—a lemon, its shiny yellow globes glistening in the sunlight, and what looked like an orange, studded with the tiniest fruit I’d ever seen.

“What is this?” I asked, fascinated.

“A kumquat,” she said. “Lady Anna used to pick them for the children.” She reached out to pluck one of the tiny oranges from the tree. “Here, try for yourself.”

I held it in my hand, admiring its smooth, shiny skin.

I sank my teeth into the flesh of the fruit. Its thin skin disintegrated in my mouth, releasing a burst of sweet and sour that made my eyes shoot open and a smile spread across my face. “Oh, my,” I said. “I’ve never had anything like it.”

Mrs. Dilloway nodded. “You should try the clementines, then. They’re Persian.”

I walked a few paces farther, admiring the potted orchids—at least a hundred specimens, so exquisite they looked like Southern belles in hoop skirts. On the far wall were variegated ferns, bleeding hearts, and a lilac tree I could smell from the other end of the room.

Mrs. Dilloway watched me quietly. “She would have liked you,” she said. “Lady Anna.”

I gave her a quizzical look.

“She didn’t care for most of the nannies,” she said. “It’s why I’ve brought you here,” she continued. “I need your help.”

“With what?”

“Sit,” she said, indicating a stone bench to our left. I obeyed, and she sat next to me. “You see,” she continued, looking around at the expansive conservatory. “After her death, Lord Livingston hasn’t been able to face this place. He gave all of the servants strict instructions to leave it be.”

“But the plants,” I said, covering my mouth, “they’ll all die.”

She nodded. “I couldn’t live with myself knowing that Lady Anna’s prized flowers and plants were perishing right above our heads. Besides, I made Lady Anna a promise, and I’m bound to that.”

“What did you promise?”

She smiled to herself, a sad, private smile. “To look after her gardens.” She sighed. “It hasn’t been easy.” She placed her hand over her heart. “Do you know anything about flowers, Miss Lewis?”

“Yes,” I said quickly, before worrying that I might sound too eager. “I mean, a little.”

“Good,” she said, sighing.

I followed a vine with my eyes. It had crept along the wall up to the glass ceiling. “Passionflower?” I said, pointing up at it.

Mrs. Dilloway nodded. “She loved to see it in bloom.”

“I can’t understand why Lord Livingston would want to be rid of all this beauty,” I said, entranced.

She clasped her hands together. “Sometimes I think that when Lady Anna passed, his Lordship felt that all the beauty in the world had died with her. He can’t so much as look at a flower in the garden these days. He asked Mr. Humphrey to take out the tulips, and I fear that the camellias are next.”

I gasped. “He wouldn’t destroy them, would he?” I said, picking a yellowed leaf from the ground and crinkling it between my fingers.

“I don’t know,” she said, standing up. “But I haven’t the time to tend to it anymore with the pressing needs of this household. I need you to look after it. Water the plants. See to it that weeds don’t take over. Prune back the branches now and then, that sort of thing.”

My eyes widened. In some ways, it was a dream come true. A conservatory filled with exotic plants at my disposal? But the responsibility was too great. I stood up, shaking my head in polite protest. “Mrs. Dilloway, I’m really not suited for the job. I only have an amateur knowledge of plants.”

She ran her hand along the edge of a light green fern, so delicate it looked like a swath of French lace. “Lady Anna didn’t have a stitch of botanical training either,” she said. “But she loved these plants like they were her children. She listened to them. She let them teach her. That’s all you need to do.” She turned to me. “Can I count on you?”

I took a deep breath. “Well, I—”

“Good,” she said. “The water spigot is over there. Pruning shears are in the closet. Careful not to bang about. His Lordship could hear you. His bedroom and terrace are directly below.”

My heart beat faster at the thought of being found skulking around his dead wife’s forbidden garden. “Maybe I shouldn’t—”

“Oh,” Mrs. Dilloway continued, “there’s one more thing. One of Lady Anna’s necklaces, a locket, has been missing since her death. I always thought I’d find it here, but it hasn’t turned up. If you see it, well, bring it to me immediately.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, of course.”

She turned back toward the door, and I followed as she walked past the citrus trees, which gave off a sweet, heady scent in the sunlight. She paused to pluck a few kumquats before passing through the flower-covered archway and continuing on to the door. As she reached for the doorknob, I tapped her shoulder. “The necklace,” I whispered, sensing that there might be more to the story, perhaps much more. “Why is it so important?”

She looked at me for a long moment. “It’s not so much the necklace itself,” she said, “but what’s inside it.”

I nodded.

“Here,” she said, reaching and tucking the kumquats into the pocket of my dress. “For later.”

I smiled.

“Don’t speak a word of this, now,” she said. “To anyone.”

I followed her down the staircase, where Mr. Beardsley stood in the foyer. “Mrs. Dilloway,” he said, wiping his brow with a handkerchief. “Come quick. There’s been a
situation
.”

Addison

M
y eyes shot open at two a.m. I sat up, gasping for breath. In my dream, I saw Sean again. I looked over at Rex, sleeping peacefully beside me.
It’s just a dream. It’s only a dream.
But when I closed my eyes, all I could see was his face.

Fifteen Years Prior

My aunt Jean lit a cigarette in the car and blew a cloud of smoke toward me. “You don’t say much, do you?”

I folded my arms, gazing through the smoky air out the window at the trees along the roadside.

“Well,” she said, “you’ll like New York City.” She wore a blue bandanna around her head. Turquoise earrings dangled from her ears. Before she died, Mama had called her older sister a hippie. She took another puff of her cigarette and smiled. “The apartment’s small,” she continued, “but it’ll grow on you in time.”

She meant well, I knew that. She hadn’t had to take me in when the caseworker discovered the situation at home. After Mama had died, Daddy started drinking.

“I heard what he did to you,” Jean said cautiously. “Sweet child. You’ve been through so much.”

“He didn’t mean it,” I said quickly, touching the scar on my temple. “It was the booze.”

“Well,” she said. “Nobody’s going to hurt you anymore.”

I nodded, wondering about New York City. I’d never ventured far from our home in the Adirondack Mountains. Mama had been afraid of the city and the people who lived there. I studied the tattoo on Jean’s forearm, a butterfly. They were as different as two sisters could be.

“Listen,” she said, extinguishing her cigarette on the dash. An ember of ash rolled onto the carpet. I pushed the tip of my shoe against it. “You know you can talk to me, don’t you? About anything.”

I bit my lip and nodded.

We passed cow pastures, a church, and a junkyard with hundreds of rusted-out cars splayed out along the road. “My sister and I weren’t close,” she said. “You know that, of course. God, to think of what she must have told you about me.” She sighed. “Well, that’s all behind us. Now I only hope that we can be friends.” She turned her eyes from the road to me briefly and smiled.

I turned back to the window. We drove for another hour, maybe more. I must have dozed off, because when I opened my eyes, tall buildings stood outside the car window. “We’re almost home,” Jean said. “I’m glad you got some shut-eye.”

She pulled the car in front of a brick building. A shirtless man sat on a stoop smoking a cigarette. He shouted something at a woman walking by. A dog barked in the distance.

I reached for my backpack on the floor and clutched it tightly as I stepped out of the car, following Jean up the steps in front of the building to a stairwell, where a crushed Coke can lay in the corner next to a crumpled bag from McDonald’s. A fly buzzed around me, and I swatted it away. The smell of urine lingered.

“We’re six floors up,” Jean said. “The elevator’s been out for a year. It’s a hike, but you’ll get used to it in time.”

Out of breath, I followed Jean out of the stairwell onto the sixth floor. She stopped at a door halfway down the hall and inserted a key. “Mama’s home,” she called into the apartment. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that Aunt Jean ever had children. If she had, my mother had never spoken of them.

A cat leapt off of the back of a couch, and Jean scooped the ball of fur into her arms. Near the door, the contents of a plastic grocery bag spilled out onto the floor—disposable baby diapers and a bag of apples. “Sean!” she screamed. “Where are you?” I heard heavy metal music coming from a back bedroom. “That boy,” Jean said under breath. “I told him to watch Miles.” A toddler sat, wearing only a soggy diaper, in front of the TV. She knelt beside him. “You OK, sweetie?” He didn’t break his gaze from the TV screen.

She laid the boy down on the rug and changed his diaper before wiping his dirty mouth with a baby wipe. “I take in foster kids from time to time,” she said. “I see it as a calling. That, and the extra one hundred and thirty dollars a month helps pay the bills.” She scooped the boy up from the floor and plopped him in her lap. “This is Miles. He doesn’t talk much. He came from a terrible home situation. He’s three, small for his age.”

I nodded.

Jean picked up a teddy bear a few feet away. The head had been torn off. She looked at Miles before frowning in the direction of the back bedroom. “Did Sean do this?”

The child nodded, then looked down at his lap.

“Sean!” Jean shouted. “I tell you,” she said to me, “I’m at my wits’ end with that boy. I thought I could change him, but you know, I think that some kids are just born mean.”

A moment later a boy a year or two older than I, at least sixteen, maybe seventeen, appeared. His greasy, long dark hair hung around his face. He wore dark jeans and an AC/DC T-shirt.

“Another?” he smirked.

“This is Amanda,” Jean said. “My
niece
. She’s come to live with us. And, Sean, you will treat her with respect, do you hear?”

Sean didn’t say anything. He just looked at me and smiled, a smile that frightened me to my core.

The next morning at breakfast, Mrs. Dilloway set out a tray with eggs, bacon, fruit, and scones in the dining room. “I hope this will be sufficient for you,” she said stiffly, turning to look at me. “Mrs. Klein isn’t used to cooking for Americans.”

“I beg your pardon,” Rex said playfully. “I may live in the U.S., but I’m a Brit through and through.”

I cleared my throat. “What he means is the food is fine, thank you.” I admired the array of fruit in the crystal bowl and helped myself to a scoop, before pointing to what looked like a tiny orange. “Is that a—”

“A kumquat,” Mrs. Dilloway replied, looking at me curiously.

I stabbed the little fruit with my fork and took a bite, filling my mouth with its tart juice before turning back to my book.

“What are you reading?” Rex asked.

“
The Years
,” I replied. “The book I found in the drawing room.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Mrs. Dilloway?”

She looked up from a tray she was about to shuttle back to the kitchen. “Yes?”

“Do you know if there was ever a woman by the name of Flora who lived at the manor?”

The carafe of orange juice teetered on the tray, and she set it down quickly before it fell to the floor. “Why do you ask, Mr. Sinclair?”

Rex pointed to the book in my hands. “Her name is written here,” he said.

Mrs. Dilloway looked out the window, as if envisioning a scene from the manor’s past.

“Was she one of the Livingston children?” Rex asked.

She shook her head. “She was employed as a nanny here a very long time ago,” she finally said. “Now if you’ll excuse me,” she continued, wiping a spot of orange juice on the table with a cloth from her dress pocket, “I’ll just step out to get the tea.”

“So Flora was the nanny,” Rex whispered after Mrs. Dilloway had gone. “Adds a whole new dimension, don’t you think?”

I nodded. “It’s odd that Mrs. Dilloway seems so affected by the recollection of her.”

After breakfast, we went back upstairs, and I fanned the pages of the book again, which is when I noticed something I had missed in the upper corner of the inside cover. “F. Lewis,” written in blue ink. Now I had Flora’s last name. I pulled out my laptop and, on a whim, began searching for a Flora Lewis from the 1940s. A needle in a haystack, I knew that, but maybe I’d get a lucky break.

I scrolled through a list of search results, getting nowhere, until a Wikipedia “Unsolved Mysteries” link caught my eye.

“Find anything?” Rex asked, leaning over the laptop.

“Look at this,” I said, pointing to the screen. Partway down the page, a headline read,
AMERICAN NANNY VANISHES IN ENGLAND
. I clicked it and read a scanned copy of a
New York Sun
article dated November 13, 1940.

New York resident Flora Lewis, 24, was last seen at Livingston Manor in Clivebrook, England, where she’d been hired to care for the children of Lord Livingston, a widower and London businessman. Her parents, who could not be reached for comment, own a bakery in the Bronx. Local woman Georgia Hillman remembers Flora as a bright, kind young woman. “I met her on the ship to England,” she said. “I’ll never forget her.” Anyone with details of Lewis’s whereabouts are urged to contact the New York Police or notify the authorities in England immediately.

So Flora went missing? I remembered Lila Hertzberg and shook my head. “This isn’t good, Rex,” I said. “What the heck do you think happened to these women?”

He leaned back against the pillows, staring into his notebook. “Wait, what did you say the friend’s name was—the one quoted in the article?”

I turned back to the screen. “Georgia Hillman.”

Rex’s eyes lit up. “It’s the same name in the book,” he said, reaching for
The Years
and turning to the first page. “See, she wrote the inscription.”

“Hmmm,” I said, turning back to the laptop. “Maybe I can find her.” I googled the name and keyed through the search results until I found a woman with the same name quoted in an article about the opening of a retirement home in Manhattan. I searched for the number of the retirement home, then called it on my cell phone, waiting for two rings, then three, and four.

“Roosevelt Senior Living,” a woman’s voice chirped.

“Yes, hello, I’m calling to see if a Ms. Georgia Hillman lives at your facility.”

“We don’t give out resident information,” she said, sounding a little annoyed.

“Oh, of course,” I said. “Then can you simply pass along a message?”

“Sure,” she said.

“I’m hoping that Ms. Hillman can call me,” I continued. “I need to speak to her about something important.” I gave her my cell phone number before hanging up.
What are the chances that she’ll even call? That she even lives there? The newspaper article is seven years old.
“So much for that,” I said. “She’s probably deceased.”

I turned to my laptop when I heard the chime of an incoming e-mail. I didn’t recognize the sender. Not at first. Then I clicked the message open and my heart sank.

I saw your husband in the village at a café. I almost told him everything. But I’m going to be patient, Amanda. I understand that your in-laws are in Asia. It takes time to wire that kind of money, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. But not for long.

Rex lay beside me, peacefully thumbing through a history book as my heart raced.
Dear Lord. He’s here. He’s really here.