Gilded Mountain, page 24
* * *
The next afternoon, as I turned a corner by the bank, there Jace was again, alone in a summer suit, checking a pocket watch. He looked up, startled. “Sylvie Pelletier! As I live and breathe.”
I could do neither. Run him through the throat with a fountain pen.
“I thought you had left town,” he lied out of his lying mouth. “I didn’t know where to find you.” He swayed, as if stirred by the breeze. “Didn’t you get my letters?”
“One letter arrived in February,” I said, wintry, “that you wrote before Christmas. You claimed you sent others, but—”
“You didn’t get…?” He scrambled. “The mail here is lousy. I plan to fix that. And you never wrote back, you marble-hearted jezebel.” His eyes were unfocused, squinting without glasses. He was plainly drunk at noon. “And here I thought you were a well-mannered girl. Turns out you were bent to break a man’s heart.”
He did not appear heartbroken. I examined him in the hard sunlight, his hair slicked down from a new center part. He was paler, thinner than before, his eyes hollow.
“You said were banished,” I said.
He made an actor’s face of exaggerated shock. “Did I say that?”
Scourge of a hot poker in your throat.
“And I did write back. I sent a letter to your college—”
“Aha. That’s the reason. A change of address. Apologies for any misunderstanding,” he said. “I finished my degree in January and went back to Belle Glade. I was ill. But I’ve now been—rehabilitated. Reinstated. My father has offered a chance at redemption.”
“Redemption commonly costs a penance,” I said.
“Penance, yep. I’m sentenced to run the Company, under the tutelage of Colonel Bowles. But the exciting part is that my father is allowing me to have free rein.”
“So they crowned you,” I said. “Free reign for King Jasper.”
“Ha-ha, Sylvie the wit. How’d ya make out this winter? Snowy, I betcha.”
Bloody, I betcha. Brains on the walls. My lip trembled.
“What is it?” he said, concern on his face. “Sylvie?”
Damn his damn kindness and his familiar touch on my arm.
“My father was killed in the quarry,” I said, watery.
“Your father? Frenchy?” The smile died off his face.
“It was in the papers.”
He looked away, stammering as the news settled on him. “It’s— What a terrible… I’m so very sorry. I didn’t know. I heard about—a fatality, but had I known… I had no idea who… I only arrived in town yesterday—” He swayed again, his sincere hand resting on my arm. His sympathy was like food for a starving person, only rotten. “I know how much you loved your father.”
A curdled noise escaped me.
“Oh, dear, Sylvie, I— Oh.” He massaged the crown of his head, reached in his pocket to remove a silver flask, offering it. “Here’s a tonic.”
“I don’t want your tonic.”
“What can I— What do you want?”
To bash your face in. For you to rest me on your shoulders hide me under your lapels feed me a walnut fight me in the river.
I said, “I want you to do one—just one—right thing.”
“One right thing?” He sipped his flask, looking utterly accused. “What… do you mean, one right thing?”
I let him ponder without answering while he twisted in discomfort.
“When do you go up to Elkhorne this summer?” he asked.
“There’s no position for me there.”
Jace turned red, seeming to remember the Lemon Drop. “I’ll talk to the Colonel,” he said. “I’m in charge now. I’ve got the authority. Leave it to Jace.” We walked down the lane uneasy. Twice he seemed about to utter some anguished word. Once it seemed he’d turn on his heel and run to escape my suffocating silence. We arrived at the mill.
“I’m meeting the Colonel now,” he said. “I’ll find you a position.”
I did not want a position.
In the loading yard across the way, a white stone block dangled in midair. In my mind’s eye, the chain snapped and the load fell to crush the men below.
“You ought to come to Elkhorne,” Jace said. “Say goodbye to our friend Inge.”
“Goodbye?”
“She’s going to Newport for the rest of the summer, then Europe. I don’t know why or when. You’ll have to ask her yourself. I don’t pretend to understand women.”
“What do you pretend, then?”
“Tssch. Sylveeee…”
My name in his mouth was a reproach, as if he had never murmured it at my neck or confessed his desires in writing, those acts of carnal abandon in his bourbon-soaked letter. “Inge would like to see you.” He touched my arm again, with his coupable lopsided face of sympathy, and fled inside the offices.
I would roast him in a stone pit and turn the spit myself. Mine were the thoughts of a jealous woman, and I do believe now that jealousy was responsible for the ill-advised decisions I was about to make, along with lust and avarice. All those. And love. Even now I cling to the idea that amour fou, curdled as it was, still had me in its grip. I want to believe this. If you do not act out of some form of love, then who are you in the world?
Chapter Twenty-Four
TWO DAYS LATER, SPURRED BY vague and reckless intention, I went up the drive and between the stone pillars guarding Elkhorne Manor. I roared at the lions as I passed them frozen in their stony snarls. I had an idea to present my father’s case, to argue for compensation. I wished all Padgetts to grovel in apology but would settle for payment. How to effect satisfactory resolution, I didn’t know. Jace had invited me to say goodbye to Inge when what I wanted to say to all of them was Go to hell.
Mixed up with my wounded pride was a contradictory idea that I’d somehow reinstate myself in the castle. In the affections of the Prince. Exile from the fantastical pays de Cockaigne with its sugar swans was unbearable. Unfair. I was a friend! The favorite of the summer. What had I done to deserve indifference? Perhaps I would at least get some orange juice.
At the kitchen door, Easter answered without her former cheer, a grayness to her skin. Her hair had gone silver and she was too thin, a hollow below her cheekbones.
“Easter? I didn’t expect you would be here. I thought—”
“Well, these folks just can’t seem to live without me.”
“Jasper said you were in Weld County—”
“Don’t listen to whatever a Padgett say, it’s what they do.” She went back to the stove. “Me and Grady went out there to Dearfield, sure, and J.C. said he was going to send a supply wagon, and did it arrive? No, it did not. What arrived was snow like the Devil sent it.” She held up her left hand to show two fingers missing their tips to the first knuckle. “Frostbit.”
“Oh, no, Easter,” I said. “How terrible. Let me help you.”
She pointed me to a boiling pot full of eggs. “Peel these, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I lifted the scalding pot to the sink.
“How you people live up here in this unnatural cold, I don’t know,” Easter said, and described how she was caught in a blizzard on the road from Fort Morgan to Dearfield. “This country here is mean as Lucifer’s dog.”
I drained the pot in a blast of steam and started in cracking and peeling, fifty eggs at least and more boiling on the stove.
“That’ll keep you busy till Mrs. Nugent gets back.”
“I’ve come to see Mrs. Padgett,” I said, because it wouldn’t do to say I had come to smash the statuary.
“Good luck with that.” Easter laughed. “Remind me your name again? Gets so you all’s alike, all you summer girls. Can’t remember one year to the next year.”
By summer girls she meant white, and I saw I was just one in an indistinguishable parade through her kitchen, not special to her, as she’d been to me, teaching me sauces and history. What had I taught her? Nothing.
“Sylvie! Right?” She smiled. “I remember now. From Louisiana with the French name—whatchamacallit? But I do recollect you was a good hand in the kitchen, shucking eggs like that.” With a small knife, she cored the stem off a strawberry. “Colorado winter just about shucked all the skin off me here, and I’m still not white enough to vote.”
“Women do have the vote since 1893, well, at least in Colorado—my boss at the paper says we will soon get it in all the states, and—”
She rewarded my optimistic know-it-all-ism with one of her stares.
“Anyway, I thought you’d gone home to Richmond?”
“Richmond.” She exploded the word. “Nossir. I’m only back in this house because Jasper wrote my son Caleb, begged us here to cook. Promised me good money, now his daddy put him in the boss seat. One more summer, okay? Marcus stays in Dearfield with my husband, building the lunchroom. I call it the Sunshine Café, ’cause we need as much sunshine as we can get.” She laughed. “And Caleb’s gonna start a college. Yessir. So me and Cal is here now for the money.”
“Me too,” I said, and didn’t mention my other notions, of triumph and revenge. “Jasper is not here?” I asked casually.
“Still asleep. At this hour? I worry about that boy. You tell me how he’s gonna be boss when he don’t even—you know how he is. I saw you was sweet on him last year. But what can anybody do? He’s grown. What I’m saying is, Jasper’s good to Easter. I raised him. He got a heart where it should be. But his head is… hmmp. Trouble every second day, drinking liquor with Miss Helene.”
The Lemon Drop. I rolled an egg along, myself cracked same as the shell.
“He supposed to be running the business,” Easter said. “Not running around with such women. Like father, like son.” She took the bowl of peeled eggs. “I have to mash these yolks. A hundred devil eggs for one hundred devils.”
“What devils?” Her frank talk struck me as new, as if she were somehow unchecked.
“I should bite my tongue,” Easter said. “But I won’t. It’s the Company picnic. Monument Dealers of America or some such. All hundred of ’em up this morning on the railroad. Bunch of grave sellers. These folks care more about the dead than they do about the living, ain’t that right?”
“Don’t much care about the dead either,” I said, bitter. Easter noticed. We had a moment there when she saw me and likewise I saw her, the cracks of red in her eyes. “My father was killed in the quarry,” I told her, chin wobbling.
She put down her paring knife and touched my hand with a brush of her blunted fingers. “That is a hard sorrow,” she said. “You can’t let it eat you, because it will, and don’t I know.” Her sympathy undid me, and I nearly fell against her, to put my head on her shoulder and weep. “I’m sorry, Easter,” I said, “that you know hard sorrow like that.”
Just then Mrs. Nugent swung through the door, followed by a rabbity-looking pair of girls in new uniforms. She halted at the sight of me. “Why on earth are you here? We don’t need anyone else this summer.”
“I came to see Mrs. Padgett,” I said. “Only to say hello.”
“You’re just in time to say goodbye,” said Nugent.
* * *
I went along the back passages and heard Inge’s voice before I got to the Greenery. Outside the door I stopped, queasy at the sight of a butter-haired woman in my chair with a notebook, listening to Inge’s lilting French. This would be Hélène. The Lemon Drop. I pictured taking the bottle of ink that sat on the desk—my desk—and pouring it over her head.
“Madame,” I said, scarlet with nerves.
“Sylvie! C’est toi!” Inge jumped up. She kissed my cheeks, left, right, left, and introduced me to her companion. “Hélène DuLac? Voilà, I present you Mademoiselle Sylvie Pelletier. Hélène is my dear copine from Brussels.”
Hélène looked me over, her eyes the summer blue of lupines. “Lovely to meet you,” she said. “Enchantée.”
I would enchant her if I could, into a hop toad. Warts on her chin.
Hélène excused herself, tootling her fingers in a wave identical to Inge’s.
“Sit, please, Sylvie, chouchou, tell me.” Inge patted the chaise. “Tell everything. The winter? La famille? Your lovers?” She watched me swallow and halt. “Sylvie?”
“My father,” I said, and told her.
“Ah, non.” She covered her mouth in shock. “Oh, poor child.” She wrapped me in her lilac arms, murmuring sympathy, so now I did wilt, against her bony shoulder, and forgot to say Murder, justice, apology. A strange peace descended between us because of her kindness, and some new sadness clinging to her, not only to me. We sat together, listening to a fly buzz angrily against the windowpane.
“I understand, Sylvie. You see. Bisou also, has died. I cry for him every day.” The little dog was crushed by a taxicab on the streets of New York. “How I wish I could help you. But you can’t imagine how terrible it’s been for us. The finance collapse. The banks.” She waved at the air to fan herself. “My husband, he—maybe on va divorcer.”
“Madame?”
“I am a scandal. I know you heard it. Everybody hears.”
“Non, Madame. I came to see about work.” It was not what I’d intended to say, but I enjoyed the squirm of discomfort on Inge’s face.
“Ah, such a pity, Sylvie. C’est impossible. I leave soon for Europe. It’s finished. All of it. The King—our friend Leopold—does not put his money down. He does not invest. Enfin, the stone company is over for mon mari. No more rocks. Duke has only the coal business now. Twenty coal camps to run from New Mexico to Montana.”
“But the quarry? The mill?”
“Pfft. Marble stone is not for the profit. Only for beauty. It’s a toy for the son to play with. His father gives Jasper the operations here, a half share with the Colonel. He wants to make a go of it. The supervisors will show him the cords.”
“The ropes.”
“Cords, ropes.” She shrugged. “The same.”
Other restraints still held me back, of law and propriety. I did not rampage through the house or steal valuables as payback. Instead, I listened as Inge tried to guide me along the paths of forgiveness.
“The stone is a hard business,” she said. “So we wish good luck to Monsieur Jace. This winter he has become my friend. We passed some months in Virginia while he recovered from his illness—you knew it?”
She saw I did not. Perhaps it was true that he hadn’t received my letter at college, because he had left. “He recovers at Belle Glade. Enfin, I’m the one who suggests him to own the company. Jace et moi—we have the same philosophy. He likes my sociological design ever since—well, let’s say that Jasper is more happy now, better, since Hélène—” She saw my face. “Oh, merde. I forget how you have the amour fou for that boy.”
“No,” I said, “I never—”
“Écoutes-moi: Forget him. That is what I do. I forget, I move along. There are ten million men. I find another. And so will you. This one is neurotique. Very angry to himself. To his father. He is extreme in politics. Bizarre. Extreme in the temperament.”
“What was wrong with him? What sickness?”
“He loves too much—the whiskey. He drinks, you know. He had the blackouts of memory. Also he is obsessif. Too much in his books.”
A thread off my sleeve dangled. I pulled it, unraveling.
“Ah, petite, don’t worry about Hélène. She only plays with him. I warned him, she has other fishes to catch. For her, he’s the summer adventure. She never will stay to this town. In August she joins me in Newport. Bruxelles for winter. She rests a few weeks here to help settle mes affaires. Hélène et moi, we are sisters, from the years at château Laeken. You see?”
What I saw was the mosaic pattern of the marble floor, the sugar-lump tiles, how the sun fell through the glass, lit up the motes of the air. The blood of severed fingers, exploded men, was nowhere. It was just a fancy floor. I started toward the exits.
“Sylvie. Wait,” Inge said. “Another advice for you. Because lately I read your newspaper. And I wish for—to warn you. It’s a danger. Do you know?”
“What danger?”
“They do not like that woman. Miss Redwitch.”
“Redmond.”
“They have a meeting to stop her. Colonel Bowles and my husband. They order Jace to kick her off the town.”
“They can’t. How would they?”
“I tell him not to do it. But—” She shrugged. “Bowles, he does what he wants. Please, you will be careful.”
“Thank you,” I said, “for your kindness.”
“C’est tout pour le mieux,” she called after me. “All for the best, you will see.”
It was the last time I saw her. During the war, in 1914, I heard she’d gone to the front at Ypres to feed starving Belgian children, the angel of the camps, and that she was killed in a Flanders field hospital bombed by a battalion of Huns.
* * *
“The Company wants you out of town,” I told K.T. “Mrs. Padgett said they had a meeting to discuss it.”
“What else is new?” She shrugged.
“Word is the Duke and the Countess are divorcing.”
“Really?” She was thirsty for the scandal.
“For all I care, the whole pile of Padgetts can jump in the lake,” I said.
“Well, that’s a change of tune.”
My new tune, of spite and indifference, drowned out the truth: that I’d mistaken the burn of jealousy for love. The heart wants what it is most denied, a hard lesson. I could not seem to drop my torch for Jace, wishing half the time to scorch him with it, but still hoping the Lemon Drop would jilt him, as Inge said she would. I twisted that old handkerchief with the initials JCP, as if those letters did not spell l’amour perdu. Lost love is still love, isn’t it.
* * *
Within days, K.T. announced her findings: “Our Lady Bountiful is said to have had an affair with a riding instructor.”
