Lavender Morning

by Jude Deveraux

  When Ramsey looked at her, she could see that he was still burdened by what he saw as terrible news.

  “So tell me the whole story,” Joce said. “Why did your grandfather support a woman he wasn’t related to?”

  “I don’t know, and neither does my dad. All we know is that Miss Edi’s family was the most prestigious in town, but Alex McDowell’s family was the wealthiest. We know that something bad…awful happened in 1941, and Miss Edi helped my grandfather Alex, but we don’t know the details. For most of her life, Miss Edi worked—”

  “With burn patients all over the world,” Jocelyn said.

  “Right, and she supported her brother and paid for the upkeep of Edilean Manor. When she retired, she moved to Boca Raton.”

  “In a house near us.” Jocelyn had her knees drawn up, her arms around them, and she was listening to him intently. “Owned by your grandfather.”

  “Yes. Between supporting her brother and keeping up the Manor, plus all she gave to people in need along the way, Miss Edi had nothing. My grandfather bought that house, and she lived in it rent free.”

  “Why didn’t she go back to Edilean?” Joce asked.

  “That’s part of the Great Mystery,” Rams said. “Dad said that Bertrand wanted to go to Florida to live with her, but Miss Edi said he had to stay in Edilean and look after the house. He had to keep it intact for the future. But neither of them married, and they left no heirs.”

  “So he didn’t gamble the family fortune away?” Joce asked.

  “No,” Ramsey said. “My dad said that Bertrand liked that people thought he was a compulsive gambler who spent everything on the ponies. Bertrand said it was much better than being known to be just plain broke.”

  “So Miss Edi left me a white elephant.”

  “Pretty much, yes. But the good news is that the house is yours, free and clear, so you can sell it if you want. It would probably bring in a million or so.”

  “A million or so?” She sat still, hugging her knees to her chin, and looking at the water. “What about Luke? You said you pay his check. Weren’t you to be reimbursed when I inherited the money?”

  Ramsey shrugged. “He doesn’t earn much, so I pay it out of…”

  “Your own money,” Joce said flatly.

  “Look, don’t worry about Luke. He’s not poor by any means. He has…other income.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Telling you my cousin’s business is not something I’ll do. Let’s just say that Luke hasn’t had an easy life, but money isn’t his problem.”

  She could tell that Ramsey wasn’t going to say any more about that. “What I don’t understand is how Miss Edi lived as she did if she had no money of her own. We went to the opera. She attended charity meetings, and I know she contributed. We did all this together. How could she do that if she had no money?”

  “That was her job,” Ramsey said. “My grandfather set up a trust, and Miss Edi administered it. He knew his son, my father, would hate having to deal with all those meetings, so he left it to Miss Edi to do.”

  “From a house in Boca?” Joce said. “Does that sound odd to you?”

  “Yes and no. I think my grandfather trusted Miss Edi more than anyone else, and since she didn’t want to return to Edilean, where people still talked about the fact that she was an ‘old maid,’ it worked out well. And Dad said he thought she didn’t want to live with her brother.”

  “And the cold hurt her legs.”

  “I’m sure there were a thousand reasons for it all. I think my grandfather and Miss Edi worked it out so they were both happy with everything. My dad said she did a great job at administering the trust.”

  “She spent a lot of money on me,” Joce said softly.

  “Last night Dad told me that my grandfather and your grandparents were friends. I think that’s why he bought that house, so she could be near them.”

  Jocelyn gave a sigh. “Yet another lie. Or something that was hidden. Miss Edi never told me that my grandparents were friends of her friend.” She took a breath. “So many secrets.” She looked at him. “Does the whole town know that the Harcourt family was destitute?”

  “No.” Ramsey grimaced. “It was such a secret that until last night, even I didn’t know. My dad said he used to go to Bertrand twice a year, and they’d drink fifty-year-old brandy and laugh about the poverty of the Harcourt family. Jocelyn, you have to understand that I knew nothing about this. I believed the papers I saw and thought you were inheriting about three million dollars plus the house. Before you even came here, you asked me on the phone about the money, and I told you the truth as I knew it. I would never have—”

  She could hear the pleading in his voice, hear that he didn’t want her to think badly of him. She didn’t, but she thought she’d save him from humiliation by saying nothing. “Whatever did she do to make your grandfather take care of her and her brother for so many years?”

  “I don’t know. And neither does Dad. Last night he told me that when his father turned the Harcourt account over to him, he asked him that very question, but Gramps wouldn’t tell him. Dad said that over the years he asked a hundred times, but Gramps refused to confide in him. All Gramps would say was that Edi believed in him when no one else did, and if she hadn’t, his life would have been hell. He said he owed everything he had to Miss Edi.”

  “What does that mean?” Joce asked. “Did she advise him to buy U.S. Steel at ten cents a share? He bought it, the stock went up, and voilà! He’s rich. Maybe it was something like that.”

  “No, it couldn’t have been that simple. If it was something like that, Gramps could have set up a trust for her in the open. It would have become a town legend, and everyone would have agreed that Gramps owed her. But this was something that was done in secrecy. Whatever Miss Edi did for my grandfather, it was done without the town knowing about it.”

  “In this town?! Two men visited Tess on a Saturday night and the next morning everyone knew about it.”

  “Exactly. But something happened, something big, and because of that, after Miss Edi retired, my grandfather took care of her and her brother.”

  “I’m beginning to think that everything she told me was a lie.”

  “She didn’t lie when she said she loved you. She wrote Gramps that you were a gift from God, something for her old age. Jocelyn,” Ramsey said as he reached out and put his hand on her arm. “I’ll help you. I really will.”

  “You mean that you’ll give me charity like your grandfather did? Your family are the true owners of Edilean Manor.”

  “Then Luke would work for me?” Ramsey said, and there was so much glee in his voice that Jocelyn laughed.

  “What would he say if he knew you were paying him?”

  “Probably hit me in the face. He has the meanest left hook I’ve ever seen. I think my eyes were black half my childhood.”

  “And what wounds did he carry?”

  “None,” Ramsey said. “I turned the other cheek.”

  She laughed again, only this time it was genuine. She looked back at the water. “Okay, so I have to find a job. Hey! I know. Why don’t you fire Tess and let me work for you?”

  When Ramsey looked at her with eyes wide with horror, she grinned.

  “Why not? I’ll wear dresses. They’ll have skirts down to my knees, and there won’t be any cowboy boots.”

  “If you don’t quit saying these things I’m going to tell Tess on you.”

  Jocelyn put her hands up, as though to shield her face from blows. “Did I tell you what she said to me when I first met her?”

  “No,” he said, “but I heard what you said back to her. Something about honey catching more flies than a beautiful face?”

  “Good synopsis.” She began to pack up the basket, but Ramsey sat where he was.

  “I have something else to tell you.”

  Jocelyn sat back down on the quilt. “What else could you have to say to me? That I’m in debt? Please don’t tell me there’s s
ome debt I’ve inherited and I have to pay it or I’ll be dragged off to debtors’ prison.”

  He looked at her in astonishment. “Do you read the same books that Sara does?”

  “Pretty much. So what else do you have to tell me?”

  “I planned to keep this a secret.” He took a breath. “The truth is that I arranged this, and I wasn’t going to tell you, but last night when I found out the lies you’d been told…Well, I can’t bring myself to tell you even the tiniest lie to add to all the others.”

  “That could be useful,” she said, but he didn’t smile.

  “Look,” Ramsey said, “there’s going to be a trick played on you this afternoon.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You know?”

  “Luke told me. He’s picking me up at two—or at least he’s supposed to pick me up then. He said you always took women to The Trellis restaurant for the second date, so he said he’d pick me up there.”

  Ramsey snorted. “He’s trying to make you think I’m a stick-in-the-mud and that I have a routine for ‘my women.’ The truth is that I don’t have a set routine and I don’t have many dates. But Luke isn’t what I was talking about. A cupcake trick is going to be played on you.”

  “A cupcake trick? It that some Southern slang that I don’t know about?”

  “No, it’s my big mouth. After I left you on Saturday evening I went next door to Tess’s apartment.”

  “And talked about me,” Jocelyn said. “You told me.”

  Ramsey gave her a quick look, as though trying to figure out her tone. “I told her that…” He waved his hand in dismissal. “It doesn’t matter what and why, but I told her that you mentioned that you can make cupcakes, and she said I should make a ‘cupcake crisis.’”

  “A cupcake crisis? What is that?”

  “She meant I should get someone to pretend that he or she needs cupcakes more than life itself and you are the only one who can make them.”

  Joce looked at him in consternation. “I think I’m missing the point here. Why would someone need for me to make cupcakes?”

  “The truth?”

  “That would be nice.”

  “It started out as a way for me to get to know you better, a way for us to spend more time together. After our first date, I felt that we…”

  “Ran out of things to talk about?”

  “Exactly,” he said.

  “So after you left me, you went to Tess to ask her female opinion about what to do to get you and me more involved with each other?”

  “Yes,” he said sheepishly. “Sorry, I—”

  She cut him off because she leaned across the quilt and kissed him on the lips. It wasn’t a kiss of great passion, but it was a kiss that let him know she wasn’t displeased with what he’d said.

  “Wow,” he said, blinking at her. “Was that for…I mean, was that because I told the truth?”

  She didn’t want to tell him why she’d kissed him. Maybe it was just relief that he really had gone to Tess to talk about her, Jocelyn. She knew it was stupid, but Miss Edi said that Ramsey was the perfect man for her, and in a way, she felt like he was hers.

  She leaned back on the quilt and looked up at the leaves of the tree overhead. “So tell me about this cupcakes crisis.”

  Ramsey moved toward her. “I’d rather talk about kissing.”

  “No, not now,” she said as she looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “I think I have other things in my life to resolve before serious kissing.”

  Ramsey gave an ostentatious sigh and lay back on the quilt, the picnic basket between them. “Tess took care of it. The cupcake crisis, that is.”

  “So even before she met me, she knew that I needed something to occupy myself.”

  “Yes,” Ramsey said as he put his hands behind his head and looked at the tree leaves. “But she doesn’t know the truth about the money. Joce, I know that everyone probably tells you that Tess—”

  “Warns me that Tess—”

  “Right, warns you that Tess takes care of my entire life, but it’s not true. Yes, I’ve learned to play dumb so she does the work—she is a workhorse if there ever was one—but there are many aspects about me that she knows nothing about. And you are at the head of that list. I’m sure this has to do with my having heard about you since I was a kid, and I know this is early, but, Jocelyn, I like you a great deal. You’re smart and funny, and I enjoy being with you. You make me feel good. Is that enough to base something between us on?”

  “Yes.” Every word he said made her feel better. She didn’t want to think she’d been jealous of Tess, but it was nice to be reassured that there was no reason to be.

  She sat up on the quilt and looked in the basket. “Did you eat all of that pâté?”

  “Every bite of it.” He turned onto his side, his head on his hand; his eyes on her were warm.

  She had to make herself look away from him. Too soon, she thought. Much, much too soon. Miss Edi said that women who attached themselves to one man right away spent their lives regretting that there’d been no courtship. She said that David had courted her “ardently.” “It was a long time before I agreed to…to be his girlfriend.” When she said the word, she always blushed.

  Jocelyn didn’t like to think how that “ardent” courtship had turned out. Miss Edi had come home from World War II, her legs a mass of scars, and found her beloved David married to another woman.

  “So tell me about the cupcakes,” Jocelyn said again as she spread cheese on a cracker.

  “I don’t know the details. You’ll get a call from somebody, probably my sister and probably tonight, and she’ll ask if you know how to make a cupcake.”

  “This will be the children’s party you invited me to?”

  Ramsey took the cracker she handed him. “Yes.”

  “Have you seen my kitchen?”

  “Sure,” he said, chewing. “It’s—” He looked at her. “It’s bare. So how do you make cupcakes without…without whatever it takes to make cupcakes?”

  “I thought you could cook.”

  “My sister taught me how to make that pasta dish. It’s the only thing I can cook.”

  Jocelyn made a cheese cracker for herself and ate it while she thought. “I guess your sister’s doing this to get her poor unmarried brother hitched with the woman she thinks is rich and lives in the biggest, oldest house in town.”

  “Sure. My mother has despaired of my ever marrying, and it looks like my sister is also about to give up on me.”

  “So I’m your last chance.”

  “Very last.” He was smiling bigger by the minute. “I’m getting the idea that you have something in mind.”

  “Do you know what the latest thing in children’s food is?”

  “Dying it purple?”

  “That’s so old school,” she said. “No, the latest thing is to dump a batch of puréed spinach in with the chocolate.”

  Ramsey gave her a look of such horror that she laughed. “It just sounds bad. Actually, it tastes good. You put squash in their mac and cheese, zucchini in their hot dogs. Of course the kids grow up never having actually eaten broccoli, but that’s neither here nor there. The thing is to get them big and strong. When they go to college, they’re on their own.”

  “A whole generation of children is going to grow up not knowing what real chocolate tastes like,” Ramsey said, still looking as though this were the worst idea he’d ever heard.

  “Does your sister have any money? If she’s part of your family, then she must be rich.”

  “What?” Ramsey looked at her as though he couldn’t believe what she was saying.

  “If your sister had called me this morning and asked me to bake a few dozen cupcakes for a kids’ party, I would have made them for her for free. But then, I’d been led to believe that I’d inherited a fortune with the house, not just a money pit that’s going to take everything I earn just to keep the termites at bay. What I want to know is if your sister can afford to pay me
for the cupcakes.”

  “Yeah, she can afford them. Her husband works at Busch, and he makes good money.”

  “And of course there’s the trust fund from your grandfather.”

  “And there’s the trust fund from my grandfather,” Ramsey said, smiling. “What’s going on in that pretty little mind of yours?”

  “I don’t think I want to spend my life making cupcakes, but for now, I can’t think of anything else I can do. Sara said there weren’t any good jobs in Edilean.”

  “None that I know of. People either work elsewhere or they open their own businesses. Maybe you and Sara could do something together.”

  “Open a dress shop where I serve the customers cupcakes? I don’t think so. Besides, if I started doing this baking full-time and started making money at it—”

  “You’d have the health inspector down your neck,” Ramsey said.

  “Right. Sometimes I almost forget that you’re a lawyer.”

  “Is there a compliment in that?”

  Jocelyn was looking at the stream and thinking hard. “Okay, so I’ll have one chance to show the world, meaning Edilean and the surrounding area, what I can do. If I do a good enough job, maybe I can earn enough money to feed myself until…until…”

  “This is making me feel bad,” Ramsey said. “I’m the one who steamrollered you into quitting your job and coming here. I told you there was money with the house.”

  “Please hang on to that guilt. I may use it if I need a loan.” In the distance, she heard a horn blow. “What time is it?”

  Ramsey grimaced. “I don’t need a watch to know it’s two o’clock. Why are you going out with Luke?”

  She was tossing things into the basket. “Plants. We have to buy lavender.”

  “What for?” He picked up one end of the quilt and Jocelyn the other.

  “Cookies. I can make those too.”

  “You certainly don’t seem upset to hear that you’re broke.”

  “I think maybe someone just lit a fire under me.” When the horn blew again, she looked at him.

  “Go on,” he said. “I’ll get this.”