Louise Ramsay’s proud head shifted fractionally in my direction, her dark blue eyes beaming astonishment. “This young woman is Philo’s guest? How extraordinary!”
Her tone of disbelief caused Philo to draw closer to me, and although he did not go so far as to clasp my hand, the solicitous tilt of his head toward mine conveyed a similar impression.
“I am Katharine Mackenzie, Mrs. Ramsay—you may have known my uncle, Vartan Avakian? I am here at Mr. Ramsay’s request to appraise and catalog the Hawkscliffe rug collection,” I volunteered.
Louise Ramsay raised her dark arch of eyebrows. “Ah! I knew it must be something like that.” Her smug, self-satisfied expression made me wish I had not been so quick to explain myself. “I remember your uncle well, Miss Mackenzie. He preferred my husband’s taste in rugs to mine, but of course Charles Quintus was paying for them, wasn’t he?”
“Perhaps they simply shared a similar taste, Mrs. Ramsay. My uncle spoke admiringly of those rugs to the end of his life, long after all accounts were settled. In fact, it is considered to be the finest collection in America—isn’t that so, Philo?”
Philo blinked at my cozy tone and the hand I settled on his arm, but he recovered admirably. “Indeed so, Kate,” he replied in kind, and for a moment we were chums again, joined in a common, if as yet undefined, cause.
The elegant woman eyed us suspiciously. “Perhaps then, considering Miss Mackenzie’s ... ah ... function here, she might be persuaded to relinquish her suite?”
“Really, Mother!” The youth, who until now had been standing by patiently as his elders jousted, shifted uncomfortably from one well-shod foot to the other.
“If the circumstances were ordinary, I would be happy to accommodate you, Mrs. Ramsay,” I countered smoothly. “Perhaps you are unaware that the suite in question remains furnished with its former occupant’s clothes and…adornments? I fear it would prove an unhappy choice for a sensitive woman like yourself.”
Mrs. Ramsay’s eyes flashed outrage. She was obviously not used to having her wishes challenged. Dismissing me with a withering glance and ignoring Cora and Philo, whom she knew were arrayed against her, she whirled on Thornton.
“Really, Thorn, I would have thought that by now you would have had that. . . that woman’s things cleared out!”
“She’s not dead quite yet. Lulu, not officially, anyway—after all, isn’t that why you’re here? In any event, I should think it unwise to house Miss Mackenzie on the same floor as this hot-blooded young man. Lance, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir! And very happy to meet you at last, Cousin Thornton,” Lance Ramsay replied, obviously delighted to be judged virile and sophisticated enough to have designs on an unmarried young woman several years his elder.
Thornton’s ploy, although I resented being made a part of it, worked. As expected, the lioness did not share her cub’s delight, and as the hideous suspicion that he might indeed be on the brink of sensual manhood impressed itself upon her doting heart, she uttered a shuddering sigh of resignation.
Harry Braunfels, loaded like a camel and looking quite as disagreeable, sensed a decision had been made. “Can we go up, then? All this talk’s getting us nowhere.”
“Now, Harry, don’t be such a bear,” Louise said, playfully tapping his arm with one kid-gloved hand.
I boggled at the sight of Harry Braunfels being treated like a naughty boy—could it be that there once had been, as Thorn had suggested, more than met the eye here?
“The birds expect their fresh meat at midday, if you’ll remember,” Harry grumbled.
“Ah, yes, the dear birds. Whatever happened to that lovely peregrine you trained for me. Harry? What good times we had....”
As they entered the house together, Louise Ramsay chirping pleasantries to the uncouth, unresponsive groundskeeper, I could not help but admire her resilience. But as she gained the stairs, still engaged in one-sided conversation, I became aware of her blue eyes darting here and there, recording every exotic detail to mull over later, in private and at leisure. Except for a long, icy stare at the portrait of Roxelana, there was no way to guess at her impression of Hawkscliffe: was she envious? Contemptuous? Or was she simply assigning little mental price tags, totting up the treasure so to speak, on her son’s behalf?
“Miss Mackenzie?”
It was Lance Ramsay, loitering behind, figurative cap in hand.
“Mr. Ramsay?”
“Oh, do call me Lance, Miss Mackenzie.” His smile was dazzling, and just practiced enough to make me suspect he was not quite as callow as I had assumed. “I just wanted to say ... I love my mother, truly I do, but she does deserve a check now and again.” His grin was boyish this time, and more in keeping with his tousled dark hair. “I think she sometimes fancies herself the Dowager Empress of China,” he confided.
“Surely she would not go so far as to strangle her adversaries. The Queen of England, perhaps?”
“Too dowdy by half.”
“The Czarina of all the Russias?” I suggested tentatively.
“Don’t know the first thing about her.”
“Neither do I,” I admitted, “but your mother certainly looks grand enough to be a czarina.”
“The very image,” he agreed solemnly.
“Lance? Lance, do come along!” Louise Ramsay’s rich voice spiraling down the staircase held a note of querulousness.
“Her Majesty calls,” he whispered. Another dazzling smile and he was off, bounding up the stairs two at a time. “At your service. Your Royal Highestness!” I heard him say to his mother, and somehow it pleased me his impudence was not reserved for conversations held behind her regal back.
A charming boy. His classic features and coloring was obviously his mother’s gift to him, but that slim, long-limbed and limber body—I recalled Lance’s lighthearted leap up the staircase—betrayed no trace of coarse blood in his veins. No, Harry could claim no credit for him.
“Well, if it isn’t our Miss Mackenzie, lost in reverie. If not one Ramsay, then another will do, eh?”
Thorn Ramsay had stolen up behind me, his footsteps muffled in the thick pile of the carpet. I shrank back to escape the magnetic aura of his easy grace. His rough-sculptured features were softened by wind-tousled hair that resisted taming by an impatient brown hand, and his lithe, long-legged body completed the illusion of youthfulness. So like Lance, I mused. So very like Lance.
I blinked to keep my dizziness at bay; I could not remember his question. “I beg your pardon?”
“Oh, please spare me your righteousness, Kate.” His drawled delivery emphasized his disdain. “I saw your little tête-à-tête with Louise’s boy—the little whispers and flirtatious smiles, gazing after him as if to lure him back to you, yet not fifteen minutes earlier you simpered and made sheep’s eyes at my dear cousin. ‘Isn’t that so, Philo?’ It was a cruelly accurate caricature. “All you lacked was the lacy fan of a ballroom belle to snap open under his nose.”
I stared at him unable to speak. If he had hit me with his fists he could not have hurt me more.
He looked at me intently, his green gaze no longer mocking. “Are the Hawkscliffe rugs that important to you, Kate?”
Appalled, I finally found my voice. “Is that what you think of me?” I asked in a disbelieving whisper. “Good Lord in heaven, is that what you really think?”
Pierced by my heartfelt cry. Thorn took an unsteady step back and threw his arms wide. “What am I to think? That you are genuinely attracted to a mere boy? That Philo’s bloodless presence sends your senses reeling? I know better than that, Kate!”
“Do you? Wasn’t it you who warned the mere boy’s mother of his hot-blooded threat to me? Wasn’t it you who said my pious heart betrayed the promise in my eyes?” I was on the offensive now, and determined to press my advantage. “But regardless of whether or not I find the boy charming and Philo gentlemanly in every respect, no rug, not the finest carpet in the world, is worth trading myself for!”
We st
ood for a long moment, shocked into silence. A muscle worked in Thorn’s jaw as he silently ground his teeth, and as I fought to control the heaving of my breast, a tightening in the back of my neck presaged the ache I knew would soon be mounting to my temples.
The sonorous bonging of the dinner bell shattered the tension between us like a flat stone skipped across the surface of a glassy pond. It is one of the triumphs of western civilization that as the rest of the household gathered we were able, without conscious effort, to transform our strained postures into convincing evidence that our interrupted chat was of no consequence, at most a bland passing of time by two persons of disparate age and gender brought together only by circumstance. The same cannot be said for the ensuing conversation at the dinner table which, like the unwary crossing of a mine field, was punctuated with unanticipated explosions.
Louise Ramsay, for example, sallied forth with questions about why Charles Quintus had engaged Thornton to draw the will that had left his entire estate to Roxelana.
“Wasn’t that an unusual thing to do, Thorn?”
“Which, Louise? Asking me to draw his will or leaving everything to his mistress?”
Louise laughed and rolled her eyes, as if to convey to the rest of us that it was Thorn who insisted upon being blunt, not she. “Well, both, really. After all, the ink was hardly dry on your degree, and for Charles Quintus to disinherit his own flesh and blood …most unusual. Why, Theodore Bailey refused to have any part in it, even though Bailey and Fernstrom had always handled the Ramsay family affairs. Something to do with undue influence, I believe.”
Thorn looked up at her from the rosy, clove-studded ham he was carving. “Since you seem to already know all the answers, Louise, why ask me?” If he was annoyed, one could not tell it from his agreeable expression or from the precise slices that fell away from his knife.
Trite though it may be, injured innocence is the only term that fairly describes Louise’s little shrug and artful widening of blue eyes. “Really, Thorn, I only thought—”
“In the first place, what C.Q. asked me to do was entirely legal; in the second place, I needed the money—more, apparently, than Theo Bailey did at the time. It was not my place to point out to C.Q. his lack of common sense or instruct him in the finer points of family loyalty.
“Besides, if you will remember,” he added in a mutter as he deftly transferred the ham slices to the warmed platter Mary Rose held for him, “I was not overburdened with common sense at the time myself, and I had no particular reason to care about a family whose loyalties stopped short of me.”
Boom.
Louise Ramsay colored deeply. A palpable hit, but I had no idea of the where or how of it.
The passing of the ham and accompanying vegetables gave time for the smoke to clear. Then, undaunted, Louise sought another target.
“I understand, Philo, that you are seeking a change. Philadelphia’s loss will be New York’s gain, I’m sure. Your…ah… professional qualifications are impeccable.”
It was very clear to all of us, especially Philo, that other qualifications were decidedly in question.
“How ... I’ve told no one ... where did you…. ?”
Louise Ramsay’s expression as she watched Philo wriggle on the end of the hook she had set in him was not pretty.
“Elizabeth Van Rensselaer has been asked to serve on the Metropolitan’s board.” Louise leaned toward Philo confidingly. “She couldn’t be less suited to the sophisticated world of the arts, poor dear, but of course you of all people know how desperate museums of art are for wealthy patrons—especially a new and ambitious undertaking like the Metropolitan—and if there is anything Elizabeth has to recommend her, it’s money. Why, she’s the veritable pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!”
As Louise chattered on and on, the pace of our eating slowed. When, we all wondered, would Philo be given the coup de grace, and what form would it take?
“Dear Elizabeth and I have known each other forever. She confides in me and asks my advice, and it really is quite a responsibility, because here she is, suddenly a person of influence, blessed with no aesthetic sensibility at all, and so very proper, that anything the least little bit out of the ordinary….”
Louise allowed the sentence to drift off in a way that emphasized it more than if she had shouted. Then she continued, “A cousin of hers is on your board, Philo, and you simply wouldn’t believe their correspondence. Elizabeth insists they share a common interest in maintaining standards, but if you ask me, what they’re really sharing is nothing more nor less than common gossip…Philo? Are you all right?”
Philo had gone quite white. I leaned toward him to urge a sip of water.
“Miss Mackenzie, I do wish you had seen Philo when he was Lance’s age,” Louise continued relentlessly. “Such a romantic-looking young man, my dear. Oh, he is still tres sympathique, but then, he was a veritable angel. All the prettiest girls set their caps for him, but he would have none of it. When all the other boys were rowing young ladies in the park or playing at football or whatever it is vigorous lads do, Philo could be seen painting on his easel, or watching my late husband painting on his. I sometimes wondered at his patience with you, Philo. Hour after hour…I must say I found it puzzling.”
Philo, recovered from his earlier distress, eyed her coldly.
“No puzzle that I can see in it, Aunt Louise. I simply knew when to keep my mouth shut.”
This time the explosion had originated from an unexpected quarter, and although none of us went so far as to express our satisfaction, Louise Ramsay sensed she was deep in hostile territory. So did her bewildered son, who initiated a hasty retreat.
“Aren’t you the director of the Philadelphia Museum, cousin?”
“Yes, Lance.”
“So, if they already have a director at the Metropolitan—they do, don’t they?—what I mean is….” It was clear from young Lance’s earnest expression that his confusion, unlike his mother’s, was genuine.
Philo smiled. “But you see, I applied to the Metropolitan for a curatorship. It was of course an honor to be appointed director of the Philadelphia, but for several years now I’ve been anxious to return to my field. There’s so much research waiting to be done. Then, too, relief from administrative duties and being situated in New York would allow me more time to—” He paused abruptly. To manage Hawkscliffe, is what I am sure he had been about to say; “to pursue other interests,” is how he diplomatically concluded. No point in stirring up Louise again.
“Have you always been interested in art?”
“As your mother indicated, ever since I can remember.”
“It must be…satisfying.”
“The study of art?”
“Well, yes, art of course, but what I meant was the study of anything. To care that much about anything.”
The longing in his voice gave us all pause. It is only the very young who can express envy untinged by jealousy or bitterness. Forced thereby to view the preceding petty snipings in the proper perspective, even Louise looked shamefaced.
Thornton cleared his throat. “You’re quite right about the satisfaction,” he said gruffly, sounding more like an uncle than a cousin. “Philo’s profession has its problems, of course, but I daresay he would not trade his study of art to be free of them. I find the law endlessly fascinating despite the attendant disillusionments, and I’m sure Miss Mackenzie prefers the challenge of buying and selling tine carpets to driving around town leaving calling cards in silver salvers.”
The compliment—at least I assumed that was what he had intended—caught me unprepared. Startled, I looked across at Thorn to find my assumption confirmed by his admiring green gaze upon me. Feeling a betraying warmth rise in my cheeks, I dropped my head and pretended to find something of enormous interest in the folds of my napkin.
“And what about you, Lance?” It was Philo this time, and from his tone and guarded expression I judged his question anything but casual. “What plans have you f
or your future?”
As Lance colored and shrugged, his mother reached over to pat his arm reassuringly. “Such a solemn crew!” She laughed musically. “Lance’s nose is much too handsome to be applied to your grindstone just yet. There’s time enough for him to learn how real and earnest life is.”
“One would think work and pleasure were mutually exclusive terms. Lulu,” Thorn said. How nice that his sardonic smile was meant for someone else, for a change. “But then, I fail to see how satisfaction can be found in an endless round of social duties dictated by a book of etiquette. At least the Ten Commandments originated with God.”
There was a gasp and clink of china from Mary Rose, whose instinctive effort to cross herself was frustrated by the dishes she held in both hands.
Louise’s mouth pursed. “Are you suggesting we would be better off conducting ourselves like savages?”
“Not at all. I am aware, more than most I think, of the terrifyingly thin line separating us all—men, women, even young Lance here—from the life of tooth and claw. But for women of your class, who are otherwise largely powerless, the meticulous observance of socially correct behavior too often becomes an obsession. How else can a woman exert influence on her husband’s life except through instruction in social arts he hasn’t the time to acquire for himself? Sex is essentially the same game, you know—the femme fatale is an otherwise impotent person who has perfected her one strength to an unusual degree.”
Cora rose abruptly, her mouth compressed to a thin, disapproving line. “Really, Thorn! I must question the suitability of this…this topic at the dinner table.”
Louise followed suit, albeit more gracefully. “I’m forced to agree, although in your case, Cora, I question the suitability of the topic wherever it may be met. I’ll have you know, Miss Mackenzie, that Miss Banks’s sterling virtue is an example to us all.”
Startled to be addressed in an admonitory tone by a person in no way entitled to do so, I was on the verge of an indignant retort when her next words made it clear I was merely a convenient way station.
The Lost Heiress of Hawkscliffe Page 10