She turned to him, inviting him silently to draw closer, her face imploring and almost sad. A split second of dread shocked him, and left him empty. The love he felt for her was so precious to him, and yet he was afraid, actually afraid.
“What are we going to do, Michael?” she said. And suddenly she smiled, a very beautiful and warm smile.
He laughed softly. “I don’t know, honey.” He shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“You know what I want from you right now?”
“No. But whatever it is, you can have it.”
She reached out for his hand. “Tell me about this house,” she said, looking up into his eyes. “Tell me everything you know about a house like this, and tell me if it really can be saved.”
“Honey, it’s just waiting for that, just waiting. It’s solid as any castle in Montcleve or Donnelaith.”
“Could you do it? I don’t mean with your own hands … ”
“-I’d love to do it with my own hands.” He looked at them suddenly, these wretched gloved hands. How long since he’d held a hammer and nails, or the handle of a saw, or laid a plane to wood. And then he looked up at the painted arch above them, at the long sweep of the ceiling with its fractured and peeling paint. “Oh, how I’d love to,” he said.
“What if you had carte blanche, what if you could hire anybody and everybody you wanted-plasterers, painters, roofers, people to bring it all back, to restore every nook and cranny … ”
Her words went on, slow yet exuberant. But he knew everything she was saying, he understood. And he wondered if she could possibly understand all that it really meant to him. To work on a house like this had always been his greatest dream, but it wasn’t merely a house like this, it was this house. And back and back he traveled in memory, until he was a boy again, outside at the gate, a boy who went off to the library to pull down off the shelves the old picture books which had this house inside them, this very room and that hallway, because he never dreamed he would see these rooms except in books.
And in the vision the woman had said,
“Michael? You want to do it?”
Through a veil, he saw her face had lighted up like the face of a child. But she seemed so far away, so brilliant and happy and far away.
“Michael, take off the gloves,” Rowan said, her sudden sharpness startling him. “Go back to work! Go back to being you. For fifty years nobody’s been happy in this house, nobody’s loved in this house, nobody’s won! It’s time for us to love here and to win here, it’s time for us to win the house back itself. I knew that when I finished the File on the Mayfair Witches. Michael, this is our house.”
“Michael, answer me.”
But they were gone, just as if they’d never come near, and here he stood, with Rowan, in the sunshine and on the warm amber-colored floor, and she was waiting for him to answer.
And the house waited, the beautiful house, beneath its layers of rust and soil, beneath its shadows and its tangled ragged vines, and in its heat and its dampness, it waited.
“Oh, yes, honey, yes,” he said as if waking from a dream, his senses flooded suddenly with the fragrance of the honeysuckle on the screens, and the singing of the birds outside, and the warmth of the sun itself coming in on them.
He turned around in the middle of the long room. “The light, Rowan, we have to let in the light. Come on,” he said, taking her hand. “Let’s see if these old shutters still open.”
Thirty-one
QUIETLY, REVERENTLY, THEY began to explore the house. At first it was as if they had crept away from the guards in a museum, and dared not abuse their accidental freedom.
They were too respectful to touch the personal belongings of those who had once lived here. A coffee cup lying on a glass table in the sun room. A magazine folded on a chair.
Rather they traveled the rooms and the hallways, opening the drapes and shutters, merely peeking now and then into closets and cabinets and drawers, with the greatest care.
But slowly, as the shadowy warmth became more and more familiar, they grew bolder.
In the library alone, they browsed for an hour, examining the spines of the leather-bound classics and the old plantation ledgers from Riverbend, saddened when they saw the pages were spongy and ruined. Almost nothing of the old accounts could be read.
They did not touch the papers on the desk which Ryan Mayfair would collect and examine. They studied the framed portraits on the walls.
“That’s Julien, it has to be.” Darkly handsome, smiling at them as they stood in the hallway. “What is that in the background?” It had darkened so badly Michael couldn’t make it out. Then he realized. Julien was standing on the front porch of this house.
“Yes, and there, that old photograph, that’s apparently Julien with his sons. The one closest to Julien is Cortland. That’s my father.” Once again, they were grouped on the porch, smiling through the faded sepia, and how cheerful, even vivacious, they seemed.
He turned away quickly. He wanted to follow Rowan. He loved the way Rowan walked, her long loose strides, the way her hair swayed with the rhythm. She turned in the dining room doorway and smiled back at him. Coming?
In the small high-ceilinged pantry, they discovered shelves on top of shelves of gorgeous china: Minton, Lenox, Wedgwood, Royal Doulton-flowered patterns, Oriental patterns, patterns bordered in silver and gold. Old white ware and Oriental porcelain, antique Blue Willow, and old Spode.
There were chests upon chests of sterling, heavy ornate pieces by the hundreds, nestled in felt, including very old sets with the English marks and the initial M in the European style engraved on the back.
Michael was the one who knew such things; his long love affair with Victoriana in all forms stood him well. He could identify the fish knives and the oyster forks and the jelly spoons, and dozens of other tiny special items, of which there were a countless number in a dozen different ornate patterns.
Sterling candlesticks they found, elaborate punch bowls and serving platters, bread plates and butter dishes and old water pitchers, and coffee urns and teapots and carafes. Exquisite chasing. Magically the darkest tarnish gave way to a hard rub of the finger, revealing the old luster of pure silver beneath.
Cut-glass bowls of all sizes were pushed to the back of the cabinets, leaded crystal dishes and plates.
Only the tablecloths and the piles of old napkins were too far gone, the fine linen and lace having rotted in the inevitable damp, the letter M showing proudly still here and there beneath the dark stain of mildew.
Yet even a few of these had been carefully preserved in a dry cedar-lined drawer, wrapped in blue paper. Heavy old lace that had yellowed beautifully. And tumbled among them were napkin rings of bone and silver and gold.
Touch them? Did the MBM stand for Mary Beth Mayfair? And here, here is a ring with the letters JM and you know to whom that must have belonged. He put it back, gloved fingers now as agile as bare fingers, though his hands were hot and uncomfortable, and the cross as she called it was biting into him with its weight.
The late afternoon sun came in long slanting rays through the dining room windows. Look at her again in this setting. Rowan Mayfair. The murals sprang to life, revealing a whole population of little figures lost in the dreamy plantation fields. The great oblong table stood sturdy and fine as it had perhaps for a century. The Chippendale chairs, with their intricately carved backs, lined the walls.
Shall we dine here together soon with high flickering candles?
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes!”
Then in the butler’s pantry they found the delicate glassware, enough for a royal banquet. They found thin
