precipitously steep and decorated with the blank eyes of attic windows which looked like nothing so much as observation posts in some fortress. The house was painted in those familiarly reversed colors that one sees along the New England seacoast: predominately royal blue, with a bright white trim rather than mostly white. This gave it a rich — and a decidedly sinister — look.
The driveway edged the cliff from the moment it turned off the public road half a mile behind her, and it fed directly into the loop before the mansion's large oaken doors. On the right as she faced the house the lawn sloped down and came to the cliff where it stopped without guard rails or wall. She could see from here that a set of steps had been carved into the cliff to give the people in the house easy access to the beach. To the left of the house, the Barnaby estate thickly forested, ran on out of sight.
Gwyn had lived in a mansion herself, when her parents were still alive and she was accustomed to money and what money could buy. However, even she was quite impressed with Barnaby Manor, impressed by its formidable dimensions and by the well-kept, ornately planted grounds around it. If the house were not so brooding, so foreboding —
But then she told herself, she was being foolish. A house was not a living and breathing entity. A house was merely a house. It could not have about it a mood, could project no aura, neither good nor bad. Rather, she was seeing in the house a projection of her own doubts and her own fears. Would her Uncle William be as pleasant in person as he had sounded in his letter? Would he really have forgotten all those years of enmity, and would he truly be sorry for the way he had treated his sister, Gwyn's mother? Because she had no concrete answers to any of these questions, she was seeing only danger in the lines of the perfectly harmless old house. It was she who was to blame, then, not the inanimate dwelling.
She put the car in gear, pulled onto the driveway, accelerated up along the cliffs edge toward the mansion. She stopped before the massive oaken doors and was surprised to see them open even before the sound of the car's engine had died away.
As she stepped out of the car she saw a thin wiry man walking toward her. He was sixty years old perhaps, with a leathery face that might have done well for the captain of an ancient sailing ship: all creases and lines, darkly tanned, grizzled. He was wearing a dark suit, blue shirt and dark tie and looked not unlike a funeral director.
“Miss Keller?” he asked rounding the front of her car, his gait swift but stiff-legged.
“Yes?”
“Fritz Helman,” he said, introducing himself with an incomplete bow in her direction. She thought that she detected the slightest trace of an accent in his precise voice, though he had obviously made English his native language decades ago. He said, “I'm the family's houseman. I serve as butler, official greeter, secretary to Mr. Barnaby — and in half a dozen other capacities. Welcome to the manor.”
He smiled at her warmly, though he seemed to be holding something back, keeping some other expression locked behind that smile. It was not quite that the smile was insincere, just that it did not completely show what he was feeling.
She said, 'Thank you, Mr. Helman.”
“Please call me Fritz.”
“Fritz, then. And you call me Gwyn.”
He nodded, still smiling, still withholding part of himself from her. “Your luggage?” he asked.
“Two suitcases in the trunk, and two on the back seat.”
“I'll have Ben get them shortly,” he said.
“Ben?”
“The handyman and chauffeur.” He took her arm in a very courtly manner and escorted her to the open doors, through them into a marble-floored entrance foyer where the walls were starkly white and hung with two flaring oil paintings by an artist she felt she should recognize but could not.
“Mr. and Mrs. Barnaby were hoping that you might arrive in time for lunch,” Fritz said. “They delayed as long as they reasonably could, and they've both only just finished.”
“I'm sorry if I held things up with—”
“Not at all,” he said quickly. “But would you like me to see about putting together a plate of leftovers for you?”
“I stopped for something on the way,” she said. “But thank you just the same, Fritz.”
She had taken two days for the drive, and she had enjoyed stopping at restaurants along the way — even those that had a decidedly plastic atmosphere and served food that she found barely passable and not always digestible. No matter what the quality of the meal, she was at least out among other people once more, away from the familiar academic background which had been the only place she had been able to function for quite some time. Now, free from school for a few months, no longer bothered by a need for excessive sleep, with some excitement for the summer ahead, she felt as if she were a jigsaw puzzle that had finally been put together. All of the missing pieces were in place, and she was again a complete woman.
While her thoughts were wandering, Fritz had led her down a darkly paneled corridor laid with a deep wine- colored carpet. Other original oil paintings hung on both sides. He stopped before a heavy, handcarved door decorated with wooden fruit and leaves, and told her: “Mr. and Mrs. Barnaby are in the library having a bit of brandy to help settle their lunch.”
He rapped once, shortly and sharply.
A man's voice, strong, even, and resonant, said, “Come in, please.”
Fritz opened the door and ushered Gwyn in before him.
He said, “Miss Keller has arrived, sir.” He sounded genuinely pleased to bring the news.
In the same instant he turned, rather abruptly, and left the room, closing the fruit bedecked door behind him and leaving her alone with the Barnabys.
The library was lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, and all of them were filled with hardbound volumes tooled in expensive leather or in good, sturdy cloth. A mammoth desk rested at one end of the room, and three large easy chairs at the other. In between was open carpet, a sort of no-man's land into which Fritz had led her and abandoned her. Though she had been feeling quite secure and competent moments earlier, she now felt full of doubts, uneasy, waiting for some indefinable disaster…
In two of the reading chairs, beneath the antique floor lamps, sat William and Elaine Barnaby. He was a large man, though lean, dressed in gray slacks, a burgundy blazer and a blue shirt with a dark blue ascot at his neck. His hair was gray and combed full at the sides in British fashion, and he had about him a look of near nobility. His face was somewhat soft, but not so little lined as to appear weak. His wife, Elaine, was younger than he, no more than forty, and quite beautiful in a cold, high-fashion way. She was dressed in a floor-length skirt and a ruffled blouse, holding a brandy snifter in her hand with the casual elegance that bespoke good breeding and the finest preparatory schools. She was brunette, with a dark complexion and huge, dark eyes that seemed to penetrate straight through Gwyn like twin knives.
No one spoke.
It was as if time had stopped flowing.
Gwyn felt awkward and clumsy as she compared herself to the older woman, though she knew she was neither of these things. Her bright blonde hair now seemed brassy and cheap next to Elaine's dark locks, and she felt that her pale complexion — from so many months as a recluse — made her look sickly and unattractive. She was certain that, if she took but a single step toward them, she would stumble and fall, making a complete fool of herself.
Putting his brandy snifter down on the table beside his chair, William Barnaby stood; he was well over six feet tall and even more impressive than he had been sitting down.
Gwyn waited.
She knew she should say something, but she could not. She was sure anything she could say would seem childish and frivolous.
He took a step toward her.
Behind him, Elaine stood too.
“Gwyn?”
Somehow, she managed to find her voice. “Hello, Uncle William.”
They were only half a dozen steps apart now, but neither of them moved to close the gap. The reunion was not going to be so easy as she had anticipated, for they both had too much past to reject to manage intimacy in the
