And besides, I didn’t want to just be standing there outside when Sam drove up. I didn’t want to be that girl you danced with once in high school who decided on her own that you were dating and kept getting in the way.
We’d danced. And it had altered everything for me, but Sam was . . . Sam. A steady, certain presence in my life who worked close by me in the daytime and some evenings turned up at the house, helped Rachel with the kayak, hung a shelf here, fixed a baseboard there, and sometimes stayed for popcorn and a movie.
He liked science fiction thrillers. But not horror. Rachel tried to show him the same movie she’d been watching on the morning after Gianni took her out to see the ghost light in the woods—the old haunted house thriller that gave me the creeps. Sam had tapped out after twenty minutes. “Nope,” he’d said.
Rachel had used the same argument she’d used with me. “But the ghost isn’t trying to hurt anybody, he’s trying to right an old wrong. He just wants them to listen.”
But Sam had held firm. Handing her the remote, he’d said, “Find me a movie where something blows up.”
She’d obliged him, and while we were watching he’d stretched his arm out on the back of the sofa and I’d leaned into it and we had stayed like that the next two hours, comfortable.
But if someone had strapped me to a lie detector and asked, “Are you dating him?” I wouldn’t have known what to answer.
By the time I heard his truck pull up outside, I was upstairs inside the carriage house. The walls were old, the windows were uninsulated, so I caught most of Malaika’s sales pitch as she told him all the features of the property and showed him how the carriage bay was perfect for his workshop. And I felt a little tug within me, wanting him to buy it, and yet wishing that he wouldn’t, because every step I took across the floorboards made me feel more strongly this house wanted to be mine.
It wasn’t something I could put in words, it was just that—a feeling. Folding slowly over me the way a blanket wraps you in its warmth, it drew me deeper into it as I moved through the big room at the back.
It had no furniture, but it would be a bedroom. Where the ordinary window looked out now, across the shaded grass that rolled towards the millpond, with the deep green trees along the moraine ridge stretched out against the cloud-flecked sky, there I would put the huge round window Sam had taken from Malaika’s shed, and it would be a perfect fit.
I was half lost in daydreams when I felt the nudge of Bandit’s nose.
I heard Sam’s work boots on the stairs, and turned to find him looking at me.
“Come and see,” I told him. “Look at this.”
He came across, and stood beside me.
“Can you just imagine waking up to this,” I asked him, “every day?”
He looked, and didn’t speak at first. And then he told me, “Yeah.”
And then he kissed me.
Everything just stopped. And then it spun, and when he slowly raised his head I felt like everything was different. Better. Just as when we’d danced, I felt that sense of total rightness. Of belonging. As though I had been away for a long time, and had just found my way back home.
“Sam?”
His forehead lowered till it rested warm on mine.
“Do that again,” I said, and with a smile, he did.
Malaika was outside and waiting when we came downstairs. She didn’t comment on the fact that we were holding hands, or that it must have been completely obvious what we’d been up to.
But she looked a little smug. She asked Sam, “Well? Did I deliver? Does this one have everything you’re looking for?”
Indulgently, he let her score the point. He turned my hand in his and interlaced our fingers. And said, “Yeah. I think it does.”
? ? ?
I was ridiculously happy when I stopped by the museum Sunday morning to pick up my work boots. Sam had told me if I wanted to be upstairs in the carriage house, I’d have to wear my proper footgear because he’d found loose nails on the floors.
I’d only meant to grab my boots and go, but as I bent to pick the boots up from the floor beside my desk my office door swung shut. And when I went to open it, the doorknob wouldn’t turn.
I tried the door that led into the old part of the house, but it, too, wouldn’t budge.
“Okay,” I said, in French. “Joke over. Let me out.”
I’d become used to him, by now. I knew deep down he wouldn’t hurt me. But the feeling, being held there in my office, was uncomfortable.
“I mean it. Let me out.”
I tried the doors again. No luck. Reached for my cell phone, and discovered I had left it in the car.
I sighed. And sat down at my desk. Because there really wasn’t anything else I could do.
I waited.
Half an hour, maybe more, had passed before I figured maybe he’d get bored if I ignored him, so I started doing work. Against my wall I saw the box of books that Dave had bought at auction. All the sermons of the Reverend Tillotson, twelve volumes, that still needed to be properly accessioned. So I hauled the box across and started dealing with them, one by one.
And while I worked, I talked to him, because it made me feel a little braver.
But he didn’t let me leave the room.
I closed the cover of a book and set it to the side. “You really are the most infuriating man, you know? If you have something that you want to tell me, maybe try just telling me, instead of doing all this hocus pocus stuff.”
He must have heard me, because when I looked down at the book I had just closed, it had reopened to the first page of a sermon with the title printed crisply in italics: The patience of God.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll be patient.”
I finished with all twelve books, noting their details and carefully writing the number in pencil to enter them in our collection. I cleaned out the drawers of my desk. I was closing the last one when, all of a sudden, the door leading into the old house swung quietly open.
I picked up my work boots again, told him, “Thank you,” and would have slipped into the big upstairs bedchamber I always thought of as Lydia Wilde’s. Except I could hear footsteps now, climbing the stairs at the front of the house, from the entrance.
Light footsteps, not heavy.
I stood there half frozen and watched as a woman appeared in the bedchamber doorway. An elderly woman. And to my relief, not a ghost.
“I am sorry,” she said, in a lovely, French-accented voice. “I did knock, but your front door was already open. I hope I don’t trouble you?”
I found my voice and said, “No, not at all.”
“I can see you’re not ready for visitors, but I have only this day left before I go home, and I hoped—” With a smile she paused, starting again as though wanting to place the words in a more logical order. “For me it’s a pilgrimage, you understand, every time I am here in America. I like to pay my respects. But the young lady tells me they no longer have it, they’ve loaned it to you. So I wonder, if it’s not a great inconvenience,” she asked, “may I please see the sword of Lieutenant de Sabran?”
Lydia
Her father was building a coffin.
She watched him at work, his head bent, his hands sure. She’d watched him countless times like this, but now she saw the concentrated effort he was making to shave every piece of roughness from the wood, to keep it smooth. She knew the cost of such an effort.
The dew-wet grass had bent where she had walked across it, and her feet had made so little sound he had not heard her, so she stood a moment longer in the open doorway of the shed, while he was unaware.
Last night had aged him. He looked weary. And she did not want to cause him more distress, but in the end she cleared her throat and wished her father a good morning, and she told him. “Violet’s gone.”
His hands stayed steady in their movements. “Is she?”
“Yes. On the Bellewether, it seems, with Mr. Ramírez. She left a note.”
“That’s thoughtful of her.”
She looked more closely at his face. “You knew.”
He raised one shoulder in what might have been a shrug, and her suspicion became certainty.