Though she was tired from the events of the last few days, she felt hyperalert and ready to run. She had to massage away a tic that began hitching her shoulder up and down, and her hands kneaded her wrists like a pair of small, frightened animals trying to comfort each other.
No, she couldn't manage that halhvay or the master bedroom. Not yet. It would have to be somewhere the boar-headed ghost was not likely to manifest. As she and Lila had regrouped in the car yesterday, Cree had painstakingly questioned Lila about every moment of her ordeal and had verified that she'd encountered him only on the second floor of the main block and east wing; he appeared to be spatially restricted. Some relief there.
Of course, with this ghost, you couldn't be sure of anything.
She went to the library, opened its curtains, and sat for a time, hoping she'd find a reprise of the keening feeling she'd felt before and hoping it would prove to be the strangely absent perimortem side of the upstairs ghost. But aside from the same mood, maybe the faint smell of almonds, she didn't come up with anything. The library wasn't the right place today.
What, then? There was still the lingering question of Lila's anomalous vital signs; she'd be wise to explore every point in the house where those had occurred.
She headed to the back of the house and went up the rear stairs, a shorter flight leading to the former slave quarters that occupied the north wing. After a moment of claustrophobia in the darkness of the narrow stairwell, she emerged onto a landing and then went out onto the long balcony that fronted the three second-floor rooms. In town, it had been a convention of the era to provide slaves with quarters on the second floor, each room accessed only by the narrow, outside gallery, like the balcony that served second-floor motel rooms.
This was the only part of the house where the sun came directly into the windows, and though the rooms were far smaller here, Cree found them very pleasant. Richard Beauforte had done a good job of remodeling back in 1948. The rooms retained much of their rustic simplicity, with homey furnishings and details: rough, white plaster walls and dark, wide-board floors; an antique cast-iron woodstove for heat, a wooden chest of drawers, patchwork quilts on the beds. Hand-tinted lithographs of nineteenth-century plantation scenes and anonymous portraits decorated the walls, and each bureau held a bone-china washbasin and water pitcher. But Richard had wired the rooms for electricity and converted a storage room along the row to a bathroom, making the whole wing a functional, comfortable dormitory for servants or guests.
Cree sat on the bed in the first room, leaving the door wide to the sunshine. When they'd toured the house that first time, Lila had said only that this had been the bedroom of Josephine, the housemaid and nanny the Beaufortes had retained throughout her childhood. Why had her vital signs shown so much subconscious agitation here? She spoke of Josephine with great affection. And it was a wonderful room. Two squares of sunlight on the floor gave it a homey feel; through the open door, beyond the balcony rail, Cree could see the lawn and some bright flower beds, and then the hedge and the wall of the next house. To the left, the partially sunlit rear facade of Beauforte House seemed to glow.
In the pleasant room and buttery sunlight, Cree felt safely removed from the malevolent presence in the main house. She was increasingly sure he was spatially contained. Lulled by the serenity here, she found the fatigue of the past week stealing over her. She let it come.
Back here, surrounded by the yard and trees, there was no visible clue to what century this was. No phone lines, streetlights, or parked cars. She savored the feeling. It occurred to her that this feeling was more the norm of human experience: For most of human history, really, past and present hadn't been so different, the past was more evident. In the era before farms and neighborhoods were so quickly replaced with malls and highways, they often stayed more or less the same for centuries. People awoke in the rooms they'd been born in, walked past their ancestors'graves as they went to work, ate supper off the same plates their grandparents had eaten from. When things did change, they tended to do so gradually and incrementally, their essence enduring despite physical changes. Cree knew she'd absorbed some Eastern thinking in that regard, but it was by no means only an Asian philosophy. Even back in New Hampshire, she had found the same basic idea in a telling bit of Yankee folk humor: 'Ayuh,' the old timer says, 'that there's a fine ax, had that same one all my life. Changed the handle four times, changed the head twicet, always been a good ax.'
Funny, but so true: Things changed utterly yet continued perpetually.
Cree's thoughts spiraled and looped, and she let them lead where they might. The gentle whisper and buzz grew, not so much a sound or even a thought but a sensation around her heart and stomach. Buzzle buzz zuzz. The quiet, breathy, subliminal voices of times and people past, fascinating, lulling. No sign of the boar-headed man.
Nearly drowsing and a little sun dazzled, she stared out the open door into the yard. In a minute, she really should get up and go back to the library, get back to work. But this was so nice.
Really, she had always been fascinated with the Deep South, had intuitively felt it in some mysterious way all her life – had known it, known the rhythms of life and the cadence of Southern voices. The humid blossom scent, the heat of the days, fanning yourself as you sat in the shade of the gallery. The way an ankle-length skirt buoyed by layers of petticoats felt, broad and sweeping, the way you moved with it and tucked the folds when you sat.
During the Civil War period, when the house was young, there'd have been fewer neighbors – from here you'd have a longer view, across gardens and a small field that still remained from the original plantation. Immediately behind the kitchen, there'd be the vegetable gardens and cistern. The day the Union Army first occupied this house: the men gathered around the cistern, seeking the relief of a cool drink with jackets off, blue caps tipped back, shirtsleeves rolled and circles of sweat under their arms – not used to the heat here. Their manner was half the swagger of conquerors and half the uncertainty of strangers in a foreign clime, hostiles deep within the enemy's domain. And the Beauforte slaves, too, walked uncertainly, ambivalent: inspired by the prospect of the freedom the Yankees claimed to grant them but frightened at having nowhere to go, no confidence their liberty would endure. Not sure how to act around the family – to obey, still, or to disdain their former masters? Because everyone knew the war was far from decided, these soldiers could be gone in a day or a month, and what would become of the slaves then? Everything was coming apart and uncertain. No one really knew where to go, where they would end up – not the slaves, not the family, not the neighbors.
Beyond the cistern, on the far side of the kitchen garden, the officers'horses stirred in their makeshift paddock, and farther still, wavery in the rising heat, another unit of blue soldiers stood in loose formation at the side of the next house. Their rifles rested long on their shoulders as they watched the wife and the two children mount their carriage – evicted, their house seized, just like this one. It was too far to see their faces, but they would be crying or sad and defiant beyond crying. And soon it would be time for the Beaufortes to leave, too, and it might be the last time any of them would ever see the house again in this life, and it was too poignant and sad to bear.
Cree startled as she heard a door slam in the central block of the house. Reflexively, she leapt up and started to bolt for the door, then caught herself. Her legs were bare, no petticoats, and the skirt she wore rode above her knees, little more than a chemise – she couldn't go out of the room like this, virtually undressed! And then she was shocked to see that there was no cistern, no vegetable garden, no paddock or horses. The yard was thick with green, enclosed, with neighboring houses right on its borders.
The present broke suddenly over her with the colors and shapes of the early twenty-first century. Right, 2002. Cree Black, right.
She'd been daydreaming, indulging the kind of drowsing fantasy of the past she'd been having so often since arriving in New Orleans – so vivid, so real. She took a deep breath and shook her head to dispel it.
Faint sounds of movement came from the main house.
She walked stealthily along the gallery, opened the door, and paused to listen. Above the thud of her pulse, she heard voices – several people.
A man. And a woman, maybe two women. In a moment, with a mix of relief and distaste, she recognized the male voice: Ronald Beauforte.
Cree went inside and made her way to the top of the stairs.
'Hello? Mr. Beauforte?'
Ronald Beauforte appeared at the bottom of the stairwell, looking up, startled. But he recovered quickly. 'I'll be damned. I was wondering who opened up the drapes. Well, Ms. Black, I'm giving a little house tour. You're welcome to join us.' His welcome sounded strained.
Cree went downstairs, where Ronald introduced her to three elderly ladies who he said were representatives of the New Orleans Historical Preservation Society. 'And this is Lucretia Black, who's doin' us the honor of visiting from Seattle,' he told them. He shot a dark glance at Cree. 'Ms. Black's visit is an unexpected pleasure today.'
The three women looked at her with poorly concealed expressions of distrust.
