Young Woman in a Garden

by Delia Sherman

  Sir Arthur shrugged wearily. “I’ll listen.”

  The Cwmlech Treasure was hidden in a priest’s hole, tucked all cozy into the side of the chimney in the Long Gallery. In the reign of Harry VIII, masons had known their business, for the door fit so neatly into the stonework that we could not see it, even when Mistress Angharad traced its outline. Nor could all our prodding and pushing on the secret latch stir it so much as a hair’s breadth.

  “It’s rusted shut,” Sir Arthur said, rubbing a stubbed finger. “The wall will have to be knocked down, I expect.”

  Mistress Angharad put fists on her hips. Very odd it was to see her familiar gestures performed by a doll, especially one clad in an old sheet. It had been worse, though, without the sheet. Mute and inert, an automaton is simply unclothed. When it speaks to you in a friend’s voice, however, it is suddenly naked, and must be covered.

  “Heaven send me patience,” she said now. “Here is nothing that a man with an oil can and a chisel and a grain of sense cannot sort out.”

  “I’ll fetch Da, then,” I said. “But first, breakfast and coffee, or we’ll be asleep where we stand. And Mam must be wondering what’s become of me.”

  Indeed, Mam was in the kitchen, steeling herself to go upstairs and see whether Sir Arthur had been murdered in his bed and I stolen by Mr. Gotobed for immoral purposes. The truth, strange as it was, set her mind at ease, though she had a word to say about Mistress Angharad’s bedsheet. Automaton or not, she was the daughter of a Baronet, Mam said. She must come down by our house to be decently clothed, and explain things to Da while she was about it.

  High morning it was before we gathered in the Long Gallery, Da with his tools, Mam with the tea tray, and Mistress Angharad in my best Sunday costume with the triple row of braiding on the skirt and my Sunday bonnet covering her bald head.

  Da chipped and pried and oiled and coaxed the door open at last amid a great cloud of dust that set us all coughing like geese. When it settled, we were confronted with a low opening into a darkness like the nethermost pits of Hell, which breathed forth a dank odor of ancient drains and wet stone.

  Da looked at Sir Arthur, who bit his lip and looked at me.

  “God’s bones!” Mistress Angharad cried and, snatching up the lantern, set her foot on the steep stone stair that plunged down behind the chimney.

  Sir Arthur, shame faced, followed after, with me and Da behind him, feeling our way along the slick stone wall, taking our breath short in the musty air.

  It could not have been far, but the dark made the stair lengthen until we might have been in the bowels of the earth. It ended in a stone room furnished with a narrow bed and three banded boxes, all spotted with mold and rust. Da’s crowbar made short work of the locks. He lifted the lids one by one and then we looked upon the fabled Treasure of Cwmlech.

  A great deal of it there was, to be sure, but not beautiful nor rich to the eye. There were chargers and candlesticks and ewers and bowls, all gone black with tarnish. Even the gold coins in their strongbox and Mistress Angharad’s jewels were dull and plain with time and dirt.

  Mistress Angharad picked a ring out of the muddle and rubbed it on the skirt of my Sunday costume, revealing a flat-cut stone that winked and glowed like fire in the lantern-light.

  “What think you of your variant folk tale now?” she asked Sir Arthur.

  He laughed, free and frank. “I see I shall have to speak better of folk tales in the future.”

  All I recall of the rest of that day was the steady stream of police and masons and men from the village come to deal with the consequences of the night’s adventures. When Sir Arthur sat down to dinner in his parlor at last, Mr. Gotobed and his thugs were locked up tight as you please in the magistrate’s coal cellar and the treasure had been carried piecemeal from the priest’s hole and put in the old tack room with Ianto Evans and two others to guard it. Mam cooked the dinner, and served it, too, for I was in my bed at home, asleep until old Mrs. Phillips’s rooster woke me next morning, to walk to the manor in the soft dawn as usual, as if my world had not been turned upside down.

  First thing I saw when I came in the kitchen was Mistress Angharad, sitting on the settle in my Sunday costume.

  “Good morning, Tacy,” she said.

  A weight dropped from me I had not known I carried. I whooped joyfully and threw my arms around her. Like hugging a dress form it was, but I did not mind.

  “This is a greeting after a long parting, Tacy my little one,” she said, laughing. “Only yesterday it was you saw me.”

  “And did not think to see you again. Is it not a rule of ghosts, to disappear when their task on earth is done?”

  The automaton’s face was not expressive, and yet I would swear Mistress Angharad looked sly. “Yet here I am.”

  I sat back on my heels. “Is it giving eternity the slip you are, then? The truth now.”

  “The truth?” She shrugged stiffly. “I am as surprised as you. Perhaps there’s no eternal rule about a ghost that haunts a machine. Perhaps I am outside all rules now, and can make my own for a change. Perhaps”—she rose from the settle and began her favorite pacing—“I can wear what I like and go where I will. Would you like to be trained as a mechanic, Tacy, and be my lady’s maid to keep me wound and oiled?”

  “If you are no longer a lady,” I said, with a chill that surprised even me, “you will not need a lady’s maid. I would prefer to train as an engineer, but if I must be a servant, I’d rather be a housekeeper with a great house to run, than a mechanic, which is only a scullery maid with an oilcan.”

  A man’s laugh startled us both. “Well said, Tacy,” said Sir Arthur from the kitchen door where he’d been listening. “Only I have in mind to make your mother housekeeper, if she will do it, with a gaggle of housemaids under her to keep the place tidy. You I need to design a voice for my humanatron. You will learn engineering. Which means I must command tutors and books from London. And new tools and a new automaton from France, of course. Perhaps more than one. I suppose I must write my lawyers first, and finish work on the pipe. And the foundation needs work, the masons say.” He sighed. “There’s so much to do, I do not know where to begin.”

  “Breakfast first,” I said. “And then we’ll talk about the rest.”

  There is a ghost in Cwmlech Manor.

  She may be seen by anyone who writes a letter that interests her. Mr. Whitney came all the way from Pittsburgh to talk to her. He stayed a month and Sir Arthur persuaded him to invest in the humanatron.

  She travels often, accompanied by her mechanic and sometimes by me, when I can spare the time from my engineering studies and my experiments. Last summer, we went to London and Sir Arthur presented us to Queen Victoria, who shook our hands and said she had never spoken to a ghost before, or a female engineer, and that she was delightfully amused.

  The Red Piano

  My university colleagues think of me as a calm woman. Whatever’s going on, they say, I can be counted on to keep my head, to make plans, to calculate the cost and consequences, and then to act. If they also say that I live too much in my head, that I lack passion and, perhaps, compassion, that is the price I must pay for being one of those still waters that runs deep and perhaps a little cold.

  It’s not that I don’t have friends. In graduate school, there were men who like to debate with me over endless cups of coffee and too-sweet muffins in smoky little cafés near the university. My discipline was archaeology, my area of concentration the burial customs of long-dead societies, my obsession the notion of a corporeal afterlife, rich with exotic foods and elaborate furniture, jewels and art and books and servants to wait upon the deceased as they had in life. Wherever they began, all conversations circled back to the same ever-fascinating questions: whether such preparations reflected some post-mortem reality, or whether all the elaborated pomp of preservation and entombment were nothing but a glorified whistling in the dark of eternity.

  In the course of these debates, I gained a reputat
ion for an intensity of focus that discouraged my café companions from seeking more intimate bonds of friendship or romance. I did not mind; my own silent communion with dead worlds and languages gave me intimacy enough.

  Thanks to my attention to my studies, I throve in my field, finally rising in my thirties to the position of a full professor of archeology at a prominent university situated in a great city. Armed with the income this position offered me and a comfortable sum left to me by a great-aunt, I set out to look for a house to buy.

  It was not an easy quest. In a city of apartment buildings and bland new construction, a detached dwelling of historical interest and aesthetic character is not easy to come by. At last, my Realtor showed me an old stable that had been renovated as a townhouse late in the last century by an eccentric developer. It had sat on the market for some time before going to an equally eccentric ballerina, recently retired from the stage. After she had suffered a crippling accident on the circular iron staircase, the stable came back on the market, where it had remained ever since.

  The Realtor showed me this property with some reluctance, evincing considerable surprise when I told him that I would take it. Like a man in the grip of leprosy obsessively checking each limb for infections, he pointed out the inconvenient kitchen, the Pompeian master bath, the unfinished roof deck with its unpromising view of a back alley and the sheer brick sides of the adjoining houses, and, worst of all, the grand piano that was attached to the sale and could not, by deed, be destroyed or removed from its position in the darkly paneled living room. Enchanted with the very eccentricities that had scuttled all previous negotiations, I made my offer, arranged for a mortgage, and hired a lawyer to draw up the papers.

  I well remember the day I took possession. I’d thought my Realtor the kind of small, dark, narrow man who shivers on even the hottest days. But as he handed me the key to the front door, he stopped shivering and smiled the first genuine smile I’d seen on his face.

  “Here you are, Dr. Waters,” he said. “I sure hope you know what you’re getting into.”

  I thought this an odd thing to say, but I was too dazed with legal complexities to comment on his choice of words. Not that it would have done any good. Once the papers were signed, my fate was sealed.

  I have said my new house was flanked by larger houses—two mansions of ancient aspect and noble proportions that had shared, in their vanished youth, the stable I now called home. One of these had been refurbished, renovated, and repurposed to a glossy fare-thee-well, losing much of its character in the process. The other was infinitely more charming. There was a vagueness about its soot-streaked brownstone facade and clouded windows, an aura of fogs and mists that spoke of gaslight and the clop of horses’ hooves on cobblestones, as if it somehow occupied an ancient lacuna in the roar and clatter of the modern city.

  Accustomed as I am to keeping to myself and mindful of the ancient urban habit of never acknowledging that one has neighbors at all, I did not knock on either door. I moved into my stable, arranged my books and my great-aunt’s antique furniture, my Egyptian canopic jars and Roman armbands, my Columbian breastplates and Hellenic funerary steles in the wide wooden spaces where the horses of my neighbors’ predecessors had drowsed and fed.

  I also had the piano tuned. It was of a manufacture unknown to me, an unusual instrument made of close-grained wood stained a deep, oxblood red, its keys fashioned of a uniform polished ebony. Its tone was resonant and full, more akin to an organ than the tinkling parlor uprights I had played as a girl. It was intricately carved with a myriad of identical faces clustered around its legs and above its pedals and around the music stand. I had lost all interest in practicing the piano when I discovered archeology. But I could not feel settled in my new home until I had not only dusted and waxed all the many whorls and complexities of its ornamentation, but also restored its inner workings to their original state.

  In short, I did my utmost to set my stamp on the piano. Yet it continued to unsettle me. Waking in the small hours of the night, grading papers or reading or laboring over my comprehensive analysis of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, I sometimes fancied that I heard it playing a melancholy and meditative concerto. More than once I crept downstairs, my heart in my throat and a sturdy brass candlestick in my hand, intent on surprising the midnight musician. On each occasion, I found the living room empty and dark, the piano silent. After a month or more of increasingly disturbed and sleepless nights, I formed the idea that the sounds haunting me must come from the house next door, the house whose antique air had so enchanted me. I decided to break the habit of years and introduce myself to my neighbor with the intention of asking him to remove his piano from the wall it must share with my study, or failing that, to confine his playing to daylight hours.

  Accordingly, on my return next day from a seminar in reading papyri, I mounted the six steps of the ancient brownstone and tugged the rusted bell-pull hanging beside the banded oaken door. Deep within the house, a bell tolled, followed by a listening silence. Again I rang, determined to rouse the inhabitants, from sleep if need be, as they had so often roused me. The echoes of the third and last ring had not yet died away when the door opened.

  My first impression of Roderick Hawthorne was that he was very beautiful. He was tall, over six feet, and slender as a reed, with long, prominent bones. His forehead was broad and domed under an unruly mass of bronze-dark curls like chrysanthemum petals that rioted over his head and down his long and hollow jaw in an equally unruly beard. His nose was Egyptian in the spring of its nostrils, pure Greek in its high-arched bridge; his eyes were large and dark and liquid behind round gold-rimmed spectacles. His gaze, mildly startled at first, sharpened when it fell upon me, rendering me sufficiently self-conscious that I hardly knew how to begin my complaint.

  “Your piano,” I said at last, and was startled when he laughed. He had a laugh as beautiful as his person, deep and musical as an organ’s Vox Humana. Then he said, “At its old tricks again, is it?” and I was lost. His voice was oboe and recorder, warm milk and honey. I could have listened to that voice reading the phone book with undiminished pleasure and attention. He spoke again: “Do come in, Miss . . . ?”

  I realized that I was staring at him with my mouth ajar, more like a cinema fan in the presence of a celluloid celebrity than a professor of archeology at a major American university. “It’s Doctor, actually. Dr. Arantxa Waters.”

  “Dr. Waters.” He held out a long hand, the fingers pale and smooth as marble, delicately veined with blue. Cold as marble, too, when I laid my own within it. “I am Roderick Hawthorne,” he said. “Welcome to Hawthorne House.”

  The interior of Hawthorne House was as untouched by the modern world as its exterior. The walls were hung with richly figured papers and the windows with draperies of velvet and brocade in crimson, ultramarine, and the mossy green of a forest floor. The furniture was massive, dark, ornamented with every kind of bird and fruit and animal known to the carver’s art. Precious carpets covered the floors, and precious objects crowded every surface not claimed by piles of books. Everything was illuminated by the soft yellow glow of gaslights hissing behind etched glass shades. It would have been perfect, if it hadn’t been for the dust and neglect that lay over it all like a pall. Still, I complimented him on the beauty of his home with complete sincerity.

  “Do you like it?” he asked, a touch anxiously. “It’s gone woefully to seed, I’m afraid, since my wife’s death. I suppose I could hire a housekeeper, but the truth is, I hardly notice the mess. And I do value my privacy.”

  I felt an unaccustomed color climb my cheeks, shame and irritation combined. “I shall conclude my business quickly,” I said, and explained that his piano playing at night was disturbing my studies. As I spoke, it seemed to me that the intensity of his gaze grew ever more concentrated, so that I could almost imagine my blush rather ignited by the fire of his eye than by my own self-consciousness.

  “I understand,” he said when I fell silent. “A
lthough I am somewhat at a loss as to the remedy. Come, see for yourself.”

  He led me from the parlor, where we had been talking, up a wide and sweeping staircase to the floor above, where he turned away from the direction in which my own house and its study lay, into a room across the landing, illuminated, like the parlor, by gas and oil lamps. The soft golden light showed me a formal music room, furnished with a gilded floor-harp and a cello as well as a brocade sofa, a gallery of shadowy pictures under much-smeared glass—and a piano, the precise twin of mine, down to the carved heads and the unusual deep crimson stain.

  “As you can see,” he said as I stared at the piano, “the sound of my playing is unlikely to carry across the landing and through two brick walls to disturb you in your study. But I do believe that you have been so disturbed.” Observing my look of bewilderment, he gestured toward the sofa. “Sit down, please, and I shall tell you the story.

  “You have noticed, of course, that our pianos are a matched pair. Your piano was, in fact, made for the wife of the Hawthorne who built Hawthorne House, not long after she entered it as a bride. In this very room they played duets until her untimely death caused him, in the extremity of his grief, to banish her piano to the stable.”

  Feeling I should make some observation, I said, “A very natural response, under the circumstances.”

  “Oh no,” Hawthorne said seriously, “he was quite mad. And went madder with time. A sane man might have given the piano to charity or sold it or even caused it to be destroyed. The founder of Hawthorne House had his lawyers draw up an addition to the deed preventing the piano from being moved from the stable or destroyed, in perpetuity, no matter who might come to own the stable or what might be done to it.”