“Ah,” said Lyman, “yes, as a matter of fact. Checking the foundation. Very dirty and dusty down there. I cannot recommend it. So I will not invite you to witness it. Or anyone else for that matter. Everyone should stay out. Of the basement, I mean.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“The foundation? Is it sound?”
“Oh yes. Yes. Absolutely. Steady as Gibraltar. All the more reason no one should go down there. No point.”
Minerva’s perplexity was clear but fortunately for Lyman, the two stood in the early stages of infatuation in which any and all idiosyncrasies proved endearing. “Well, considering your situation so isolated from the rest of the farm, I thought it might be nice today if instead of you going to lunch, lunch should go to you.” She carried a basket under her arm. “Would now be a good time for a bit of a picnic, Mr. Lyman? If you are too involved in your work, I shouldn’t want to bother you —”
“No! I mean—yes,” said Lyman, “I mean, no, I’m not too busy and yes, I should very much like to have a picnic with you. Thank you, Miss Grosvenor.”
“Oh stop, Tom. Please address me by my given name.”
There was a clearing a short distance from the house which the sun, just past noon, bathed in speckled light through the leaves. From her basket Minerva unrolled a blanket and set out a lunch of ham sandwiches and cold boiled potatoes and a jar of sun tea. She poured him a glass.
“So I must ask,” she said, “have you met the Devil yet?”
Lyman looked at her. “Whatever do you mean?”
“The Devil. Have you heard him playing his fiddle in your basement?”
Lyman choked on his tea.
“That’s the legend, anyway,” said Minerva as Lyman hacked and coughed. “Passers-by swear they hear fiddling from the stone house late at night. It’s one of the reasons why no one has lived in the house for so long. The whole farm, in fact, is alleged to be haunted. That’s why my father was able to pick it up so cheaply.”
Lyman wiped his beard and said with a hoarse voice, “He told me it was because the farm was trapped in probate. That the original family, the Garricks, slowly extinguished until there were no more heirs.”
“So they did. But did he tell you how they extinguished?”
“Well, no.”
“Precisely. Because no one knows. They just vanished. Disappeared, one by one. No signs of evil intent among the survivors, just gone. As if they were swallowed into the earth.”
“Your father said some of them moved away, that the final Garrick died on the frontier.”
“Wouldn’t you depart a place if your siblings and parents and assorted relations kept mysteriously popping off into aether?”
Lyman had come to think of Bonaventure as a place to escape to, but upon reflection he supposed to others it might be a place to escape from. “More to the point: has anyone disappeared at Bonaventure since you moved here?”
“Not so much as an egg from the henhouse.”
“Well, there’s that. What about the elder Garrick, the one from England? He was said to have lived a long time.”
“And died of natural causes, apparently. If it was a family curse, I imagine it was on his wife’s side.”
“Or he was the one in the larder grinding the rest into sausage.”
“Tom! I do like a gentleman who isn’t all flowers and rainbows,” and she clinked her glass against his. “But I think there’s more than one mystery present here at Bonaventure. Namely: you.”
With great effort, Lyman kept the muscles of his face relaxed, his expression neutral. With deliberation he set his glass on the blanket and dabbed his mouth with the napkin. “All men contain an infinitude, isn’t that what Mr. Emerson tells us? An infinitude of depths, of mysteries and secrets.”
“Indeed. And yet in our conversations I’m given the impression that you have come lately to Emerson and philosophy, transcendental or otherwise, and that your passion for our project doesn’t burn as hotly as others’. I think you’ve come to Bonaventure for ulterior purposes. I think you’re running away from something and you’ve come here to hide.”
Lyman looked at her steadily. “You’re right, Minerva.”
“Aha!”
“I am running away.”
“Here it comes.”
Lyman breathed deeply, steeling himself. He had yet to tell the story to another living soul. “There was a girl—”
“I knew it.”
“—a very pretty girl, whom I courted. However, her family criticized my lack of means —”
“And when you proposed she said no and rejected you and full of despair you ran away and now here you are. I knew it!”
“The thing of it is,” said Lyman, a bit annoyed at the apparent cliché of his life’s story, “was that just before my proposal I inherited a good deal of money from an uncle, which I presented in cash to show to her—”
“To show off to her.”
“Well, yes. But even that was not enough. She said my inheritance was merely a unique event and questioned how I should support her in a proper manner when that money was gone. I told her I could invest it, grow it. And yet.”
“You’ll forgive me if I’m happy for her ingratitude, Tom. Had she accepted, you would not be here and the stone house would be as ruinous as ever. As it is, it is much improved.”
“Improved? All I’ve done is sweep the floors and roof.”
“More than that. I seem to recall as I knocked on the door seeing a very stout ladder against the wall.”
A strange sensation flushed through Lyman, spreading through and to the ends of him, not unlike a glass of whiskey after retreating indoors from a snowstorm.
“I dare say,” said Minerva, filling the space, “even Bitty Breadsticks would live at the house now, and she has always avoided it.” At Lyman’s blank expression, she added, “Bitty Breadsticks is an itinerant traveler, shall we say, who passes through from time to time. Anyway,” she said, “all of us at Bonaventure are better
