Two nights ago Quinn and I had been together. The next night he’d traded me for Brooke. I punched Delete harder than I needed to, knocking over the mail that had accumulated on the hall table while I was away.
Noah’s slick-looking brochure had landed on top of the pile of bills, catalogs, and credit card offers that skidded across the floor. It was chock-full of news about what he’d been doing on behalf of the good people in our part of the Commonwealth of Virginia as our newly elected state senator in Richmond. There was also a survey, because my opinion mattered to him. I’d set it on the table to fill out later, but that brochure jogged something in my memory this afternoon as we left the Inn after the meeting with Charles.
During World War II, Noah had worked as a government researcher before joining the family business. He’d been in intelligence. It was a long shot, but maybe he knew Charles back then.
I brought it up with Pépé as we were finishing off another bottle of wine and watching the moonrise over the mountains.
I couldn’t recall ever seeing my grandfather drunk—he could hold his liquor better than anyone I knew—but tonight he’d set out to get good and stewed and I left him to it. Hope was upstairs asleep and Eli had gone out to the carriage house to finish some drawings for a client, so the two of us sat there, while the flickering candlelight from the hurricane lamps cast a viscous glow over us like a spell as Pépé smoked cigarette after cigarette, refilling his wineglass as soon as it was empty. Later he switched to cognac. I quit keeping pace with him long before then.
“Maybe Noah knew some of the members of the Mandrake Society,” I said. “He was also involved in the kind of hush-hush medical research they were.”
“Lucie, when you’re part of the intelligence community, the unbreakable rule you learn from day one is that everything is absolutely need to know,” he said. “Even if Noah had the same top-secret clearance Charles and the others did, you don’t discuss your latest project in the staff cafeteria over lunch. In English, it’s called SCI, sensitive compartmented information.”
“Fair enough, but I don’t care who you are and how many walled-off secrets you keep, who is sleeping with whom—especially if one of the people involved is married—is definitely fodder for gossip. And that does get discussed in the cafeteria or around the office coffeepot or in the bar after work.”
“It was a long time ago.” He stared into his wineglass. “And you can be sure Charles did his absolute best to keep it quiet. Even Theo didn’t know about him and Maggie.”
The wine was making him morose, melancholy.
“It’s worth asking Noah.”
“If you like.”
He was lost in his own thoughts, barely aware of my presence.
I dropped the subject and went to bed at midnight, planting a kiss on his head and telling him with as much tact as I could that I hoped he wouldn’t be up too late. At two I came back downstairs to check on him. From the doorway I could see his elongated shadow in the diminished light of the guttering candles and the white curl of smoke from yet another Gauloise. A glass clinked against another glass and I knew he was probably pouring more cognac. I nearly went outside to try to coax him into calling it a night, but I wasn’t sure I could bear seeing him as anything less than my strong, resolute grandfather—not shattered and grieving as he was now. Not for Charles, for whom I think he now had nothing but angry contempt, but for Juliette whom he loved but couldn’t—wouldn’t—tell her what he knew about her husband.
Much later I heard the creaky treads on the spiral staircase—only Eli, Mia, and I knew how to avoid the noisy ones, a skill honed as teenagers sneaking in or out after our curfews—and the faint crack the walnut banister made when someone leaned too heavily on it, as he slowly climbed the stairs in the dark. I lifted my head off my pillow so I could see the clock on my bedside table: four fifteen. Then I heard the click of his bedroom door closing, and not even the thinnest blade of light shining through the cracks into the hall.
After that, silence.
I drove over to Seely’s Garden Center Friday morning first thing after breakfast, hoping to catch Noah in his rabbit-warren office in the alcove behind the customer service desk. Later he’d probably join up with the Romeos for lunch or happy hour at one of their many watering holes, and in between he’d drop by a senior citizens’ center or visit some local business in his post-retirement job as our state senator. But I needed to talk to him when he was alone, not knee-deep in Romeos or constituents.
Virginia is a state that invokes the death penalty, and I’m not going to go into the politics and morality of how and why my home state—the place I grew up in and love fiercer than anywhere on earth—got there; it just is what it is. Noah was staunchly against capital punishment; an integral part of his campaign platform had been his promise to work to get it revoked in the Commonwealth.
I didn’t find out the real reason behind his passion and commitment until a couple of the Romeos explained it one night in the bar of the Goose Creek Inn. During the war, Noah’s research had involved testing the effectiveness of newly discovered antibiotics on human subjects. It later came out that some of the “volunteers”—prisoners and inmates in mental institutions—had been deliberately infected with awful diseases and, in the case of sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis, prostitutes had been used in the government’s service.
Noah finally couldn’t take it anymore—playing God and sacrificing one life to save others was wrong to him, whatever the noble motivation, so he left to take over the nursery from his father, a world of plants and trees and flowers that grew and flourished with the seasons, things that lived and brought beauty and pleasure. At Christmas, he dressed up as Santa Claus for as long as anyone could remember. Everyone under the age of fifty who lived in Atoka, Middleburg, and Leesburg, including Eli, Mia, me, and now Hope, had sat on his lap as a child, confiding our wished-for gifts, promising we’d been good all year.
Seely’s Garden Center is a sprawling, luxurious place located at the intersection of Sam Fred Road and the Snickersville Turnpike in Middleburg, not far from where Goose Creek continues its meandering path toward the Potomac River. Even at nine o’clock in the morning, it was alive and busy with a few early-bird customers and staff taking care of the ritual morning chores of watering and dead-heading bedding plants, weeding display gardens, and sweeping the flagstone patios and walkways.
The main building looked like a cross between a log cabin and a barn, a big airy place that smelled of the tang of fertilizer and the steamy, vaguely tropical odor of hundreds of hothouse plants in the large adjacent greenhouse. A young girl working at a cash register told me Noah was in his office doing paperwork. His door was ajar so I knocked.
“Come!”
He pushed up a pair of reading glasses so they rested on his tanned, bald head and sat back in his chair as I walked in. “Lucie, my dear, how nice to see you. It’s been awhile. What can I do for you?”
Noah and my mother had worked closely together many years ago when she set out to restore the blighted gardens at Highland House, and later when she tackled more substantial landscaping projects at the vineyard and the Ruins. With the tens of thousands of dollars we’d spent at Seely’s over the years, anytime anyone in my family or a vineyard employee came by, we got VIP treatment. But asking Noah to talk about the painful subject of his involvement in carrying out gruesome lab experiments on prisoners, albeit in the name of medical advancement that would prevent future deaths and suffering, wasn’t the same as asking for advice on the color palette for the summer flowers in the courtyard.
There was no point being coy with Noah, and I hadn’t rehearsed how I was going to bring this up, anyway.
“I got your latest brochure about the spring legislative session in Richmond,” I said.
He sat up and folded his hands on top of what looked like a daunting pile of constituent mail and paperwork spread out across his old metal desk. Noah’s office was even more cluttered than it had been when he ran the nursery full-time, with stacks of papers heaped in a semicircle on the floor around him and shoved into empty corners on the tiered shelf where he grew his prize collection of African violets.
“You fill out that survey, you hear? I presume you want to talk about my vote on the transportation bill?” he asked. “Believe me, I’ve been hearing about it.”
I smiled. “I’ll fill it out and no, it’s nothing like that. I came to ask if you knew Charles Thiessman when you both worked for the government.”
I waited for his reaction, which I figured could range from telling me he didn’t discuss that period of his life anymore, so mind my own business, to stunned silence.
