He laughed, brushing one hand through his hair. “I fight for immigrant rights.”
“Oh, good.”
“Akin to being a hit man in this family.” As if he’d read my mind.
I took one last look up at the shooting stars.
“I’d like to stay,” he said wistfully, before swinging his foot back down into the open space in the floor. We made our way down the ladder carefully, his body just below my own, and, as I reached the bottom, he kissed the nape of my neck.
I spent the next few hours of the wedding reception dancing with Lu, oblivious to the adults who may or may not have been scrutinizing me. Ev had slipped off in the time I’d been with Galway, but even that I didn’t care about—I embraced the numb bravery brought on by intoxication.
The music finally ended at two in the morning. My feet ached from dancing, and I was drunk and alone—Lu had wandered off with Owen. I clomped to the Dining Hall and swayed up the steps to my attic lair. I was too drunk, too happy, to really work, but it felt cozy in there, just the place to collect myself and take stock: I had had my first kiss, and it had been with Galway Winslow. As I touched his family’s papers, I remembered all of it, his hands on my face, the taste of him, and I held still and closed my eyes, reliving each detail again and again.
My hands settled on the family tree we had looked at together, all the names of all the powerful men who’d passed this kingdom down to their firstborn sons. My eyes followed the bloodline of Samson Winslow and his wife, Bryndis Iansdottir, down to their firstborn son, Banning, and his wife, Mhairie Williams. Reading the family tree from the bottom up, the firstborns were again prominent: Athol had descended from Birch and Tilde; Birch had come from Bard and Kitty Spiegel.
But that was where the neat line of inheritance fell apart. For Birch’s father, Bard Winslow, the second generation born into Winloch, was not his family’s firstborn son. He’d had a brother older by two years. Gardener Winslow, born in 1905.
My first thought was that Gardener must have died as a child, a historically plausible explanation for altering the clear line of inheritance. I turned to the Winslow papers and searched for his name, almost giving up until I found a copy of a marriage certificate from 1938: Gardener Winslow and a girl named Melanie.
“So why didn’t the firstborn son inherit?” I mumbled aloud, looking again at Bard, his younger brother, shining from the family tree.
I turned back to the other documents—the bankruptcy papers from 1932, the abundant bank statement from 1934, the family tree that listed Samson Winslow’s death as 1931. They were telling me a story. According to the inheritance papers, Bard’s father, Banning, was head of Winloch for only five short years, from his father’s death in 1931 until 1936, and yet he remained alive well into the fifties.
What if—I thought, my heart pounding as the idea formed—what if Bard Winslow had done something so extraordinary to save his family’s fortune that it had not only brought the Winslows back from certain bankruptcy but allowed him to both supersede his older brother’s inheritance of the Winloch leadership, and depose his father decades early?
If Bard had done something tremendous to keep Winloch for his family, I wanted to find out what it was.
I bolted back down the stairs, into the great, empty hall. I raced for the phone. I found Galway’s Boston number in the family directory. I dialed. He would be back home by now, and I could hear his voice.
The phone rang five times. I nearly hung up before a groggy female voice answered: “Hello?”
“I’m sorry,” I said too enthusiastically for four in the morning, “I must have the wrong number, I’m calling for Galway Winslow.”
“He’s not home yet,” the half-asleep woman answered, at which point I promptly hung up.
“He’s not home yet.” Which meant it was her home too. Maybe he had a female roommate, or some other explanation. But the potential of what this meant itched at me. All at once, I felt exhausted and sad. The momentum I’d built dwindled. The connections my mind had made withered. I couldn’t remember what had so excited me when I’d been upstairs only a moment before. My limbs were leaden, my tongue dry. I was no longer drunk, but the alcohol was still infecting me, making the distance to Bittersweet seem vast. I swayed out into the night alone.
Was it still even night? It’s hard to remember, all these years later, but I can see myself picking my way to the road, as though I am a bird flying above myself, and I can make out my girlish limbs, my downtrodden form, without a flashlight, pressing toward the cottage, toward bed, so perhaps I was already touched by the good light of dawn.
I felt a wakefulness, a need to glimpse the water. I was quiet, quieter than I might have been, padding down toward the cove for a chance to peek at the lake on that night one last time.
When I was halfway down, a purple sound froze me in my place. I thought, at first, it was the cry of a dying animal, that of something feral caught in a trap. A moan, a yelp. But then, as I listened, I realized it was laughter. Human laughter. A yawning. Then more moaning. As I crouched, and moved to get a better glimpse of what was below me, on the rock where I had met Lu, I realized what I was hearing.
There, below me, a nude Ev sat astride the face of a naked man. She raised herself up in the early light and ululated into the sky, her breasts heaving, then brushing against his belly, with her rocking movement. I knew what he was doing, but I had never seen that, and certainly never done it. Her pleasure was contagious as she bucked atop his mouth until her voice rose into a fevered pitch of expressed pleasure, whooping up and up and then breaking. She collapsed atop him.
They lay still for a moment, his hands caressing her back, until she disentangled herself. And that was when I saw his face. Not Eric, as I had feared, but John. He turned her onto her back, and right there, on the rock, for any passing boat to see, he fucked her.
I was the only one watching, and I watched John and Genevra until the end, until, as he came, her voice broke into throaty sobs, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, called his name, and told him she loved him. She seemed desperate. She seemed happy. He knelt before her and lifted her up into his arms, burying his face in her neck. They sat like that, nude, wrapped around each other, until I noticed that the day was truly upon us and, unless I wanted to be caught spying, I should make my way to bed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Secret
I swam like a fish that first week of July, as though my life depended upon it. What I was swimming from, or to, I wasn’t sure, but if the previous weekend’s events were any indication of what could happen in two short days, I could not imagine what the rest of the summer might bring.
Every day, I did the crawl out to the floating dock off Flat Rocks, stopping long enough to pull myself up into the warming sun and let my bathing suit dry. I’d count the welted mosquito bites on my thighs and calves. The pink bumps itched like the devil, but my willpower had grown in direct proportion to the liters of blood that had been sucked from me, and I felt pride in my fortitude as I tucked my hands under my legs. Every day, I looked back to shore over my knees—I hadn’t spent this much time with them since I was a child—blinking across the blinding, peaking water to watch those willowy Winslow bodies in profile.
Galway and I had not spoken since our time together on the platform in the tree. Periodically, I’d visit the murky sound of the woman’s voice answering his phone in the near dawn, even as I sought out the drowning press of exercise upon my tired limbs. I hadn’t dared call his number since, and by Tuesday afternoon, with my feet hanging off the gently rocking swimming platform into the sparkling lake, I had convinced myself that the kiss, and maybe even Galway himself, was a figment of my lonely imagination.
Then there was the lingering trace of Athol’s threatening tone, almost laughable in the light of day, especially as I sat on the edge of the floating dock, shielding my eyes and looking back toward the water’s edge, where Athol was teaching Ricky how to swim. The little
boy kicked and splashed, shrieking between terror and pleasure as his father, tanner with each passing day, held him afloat. Birch watched from shore, and I remembered his sharp admonishment to Gammy Pippa, insisting I was only Ev’s roommate when the old woman inexplicably took my face into her hands. In both interactions, I’d felt an unsettled strangeness in my gut, but I couldn’t pinpoint the reason.
Beyond Athol and Birch and Gammy Pippa and Galway and the groggy “Hello,” no matter how many watery meters I covered each day, I couldn’t wash off the memory of John and Ev conjoined. I’d always found the phrase “making love” so precious, but now I understood it. Even more, I longed for it. Was that normal? To watch people you knew mounting each other, riding each other, as though they were animals, and want what they had, even as you found yourself laughing at the mechanics of what one body was doing to the other? To feel a hand inside your most primal self grasping for what they had with a longing so deep you thought you might weep, or moan, or come yourself?
So I swam. I swam up and down, out and in, until I thought I could swim no more, and then I swam again. Sometimes Lu joined me, offering pointers about my arms or my foot placement, and I improved my form, grateful my hard work was beginning to show on my body. She talked of Owen in spurts of joy—they had kissed behind the tennis courts, he’d put his hand up her shirt and his fingers had felt like a promise. Then, on Wednesday, she whispered: “I touched his … you know,” just as Owen and the boys leapt off the floating dock, leaving it swaying below us.
“Has anyone talked to you about sex?” I asked as the boys raced back to shore, splashing Athol and Ricky with no regard.
Lu sighed. “Are you?”
“No, but you can get pregnant. You’re fourteen, Lu.”
I expected her to make a dismissive comment à la Ev, but instead she wrapped her wet arms around me and kissed me, unexpectedly, on the shoulder. “Thank you for worrying,” she said before cannon-balling into the water. I could feel the kiss twinkling long after she’d made it back to shore.
Ev had departed early that morning with her suitcase in hand; I’d opened my eyes and croaked a “Where are you going?” She’d replied, simply, “Don’t worry, it’s not like I’ll be having any fun.” But of course I had. I’d roused and fretted until I found the little note she left on the dining room table: “Mum’s kidnapped me for a ‘vacation’ in Canada. KILL ME NOW and pray it’s only tonight.” She’d been gone a few hours, and, while I felt liberated, missing her was another kind of trap.
Since there was no one waiting for me at home, I decided to stop by Indo’s on the way back to Bittersweet. She’d gone to Boston for a few days right after the weekend, but I’d heard the familiar chug of her old station wagon I-think-I-canning over the hill and into the great meadow the night before. I marched toward her cottage, heart beating faster, as I thought of telling her what I had discovered in the attic. But once I thought about it hard, what it even was that I had found seemed to slip through my grasp, just as Galway’s kiss had. Some papers about a long-ago bankruptcy? A subsequent positive financial statement? The revelation that Bard was second-born? These were details from a Nancy Drew mystery, probably not even news to the Winslows. Besides, I hadn’t run across anything like Indo’s manila folder. As a cool wind tousled my wet hair, I almost bypassed her cottage. She wasn’t going to give me Clover—according to what Galway had told me, she couldn’t.
But no, I thought, I want to see her, and ask her about the folder—there must be some detail I’m missing. Ever the optimist, Mabel Dagmar.
I was glad to find the station wagon parked before Clover. My hand fisted to knock when the door yawned open.
It was Birch. “Hello hello,” he said with a cheerful grin. “You here to see Indo?”
“Is she inside?”
“I’m afraid she just settled in for a nap.”
I heard the familiar scrape of nails across the floor as Fritz ran toward us, yapping like a lunatic, his compatriots at his heels. I knelt down, ready to scratch behind his ears. But when he was almost at the door, Birch’s boat shoe moved as though of its own accord, tucking under the dog’s low belly and sending him flying across the kitchen and into the cabinet below Indo’s sink. The dog yelped, landing like a rag doll, as Birch stepped out and slammed the door behind himself, smiling all the while. “Come to tea!” he said, adding, “You can stop by after she’s awoken,” clapping my bare shoulder and pressing me toward Trillium.
“You take milk? Sugar?” Birch asked as a woman carried a tea tray onto the sunny porch. One of the pair of water spaniels lying at the foot of Birch’s wicker chair lifted its head and growled at the rattle of the dishes, but the maid paid him no mind, setting the silver service down and leaving us as soon as she’d come. The tray was laden with homemade chocolate chip cookies, and though I was trying not to eat anything made of butter, sugar, or wheat, they sent up a glorious smell and I felt, for the woman’s sake, that I should taste at least one.
As I thought of Fritz sailing across Indo’s kitchen, I squirmed in apprehension. Had Birch been lying in wait for me at Indo’s? And if so, why? Had he discovered that Indo had offered me her house, that I was rooting around in his family’s history? Under the scrutiny of his gaze, I felt naked in my bathing suit. I crossed my arms over my chest and hoped if he was going to banish me he would do it soon.
“Have you heard from Ev and Tilde?” I asked, grateful she wasn’t here to scrutinize me too. I succumbed to a bite of cookie.
He shook his head. “You know how girl time is. Too much shopping to call home.” I knew that Ev would rather do just about anything than spend time alone with her mother; what had her note said? “Kill me now.” I wondered if Tilde had discovered Ev and John’s dalliance. Maybe that was why I was in trouble. If I was in trouble.
As if an internal timer had gone off, Birch deliberately poured our tea from the pot. He set a silver strainer atop paper-thin porcelain cups. The liquid was black and steaming. His hands worked methodically, ritually, always at a task. He rested only after he had taken his first sip.
“You know, my dear,” he said, settling back into his wicker chair, “I don’t think we’ve properly expressed how much we appreciate you looking out for our Genevra.”
“We look out for each other,” I said, nervously downing another cookie. “She’s a great friend.”
“You are the great friend.”
I sipped my tea. It was bitter. But I had already turned down the sugar.
“In fact …” He put down his cup. “I hesitate to mention this, because I can’t imagine creating tension between you two. You seem to have such fun together.”
I set my cup down too.
“At our first dinner of the summer, you mentioned something to me called, what was it, the ‘inspection’?”
“Yes,” I clarified, “the Winslow tradition of making sure that when someone has inherited their house, they’re doing the proper upkeep and—”
He held his hand up. “I’m going to stop you right there. You see, my dear, there is no such thing as an ‘inspection’ in the Winslow tradition. Once a home is passed to someone, we don’t check over her shoulder. It’s her private home, to decorate and care for however she pleases. Certainly you’ve seen Indo’s hovel. I doubt it would pass any inspection, familial or safety or what have you, were such a bylaw in place.”
“But Ev told me …” My mind was trying to gather up the bits of what Ev had told me about the inspection. She’d first mentioned it on our arrival at the Plattsburgh train station.
Birch frowned. “My dear, I’m afraid …” He sighed. “You are an honest girl, I can tell that. Not used to people manipulating you to get what they want. We adore Genevra, but she’s had her … troubles over the years. With honesty, among other things.”
My face felt hot. “You’re saying she made up the inspection? She tricked me? But why would she do that?”
Birch leaned forward. He put his fingers together against his
lips and closed his eyes for a moment. “Genevra is about to come into a good bit of money. Her personal trust. She turned eighteen, after all. But before she gets it, the transfer has to be approved by, well, the board, and then, as head of this family, by me. It’s my belief that she meant you no harm. She simply wanted to put her best foot forward, to impress Tilde and myself with a beautiful home. And she believed that if she made up some elaborate tale about an inspection, it would … motivate you. Get you to work as hard as possible. So that when I saw the house I would see, once and for all, that she is ready to inherit what she believes she is due.”
I sat back in my chair.
“If it makes you feel any better, she’s done something similar to just about everyone she loves. It’s her nature. Although it doesn’t make the experience any less painful.”
“I don’t know what to say.” My mind was replaying every aspect of my friendship with Ev. Rekindling the suspicion my mother had encouraged me to undertake at the beginning of it. Reprimanding myself for brushing off my mother’s warnings as paranoia. I couldn’t believe that Ev could have just lied to me so effortlessly and threatened me with being sent home. But then, that was exactly what had motivated me to spend a week on my hands and knees scrubbing, wasn’t it?
Birch went on. “I fear this will sound overly permissive, but lying to you is really quite irrelevant in terms of the finances. I can’t exactly stop my daughter’s trust from coming in just because she made up a story. But that doesn’t mean what she did doesn’t have personal ramifications. Mabel, I want to extend an apology on behalf of my daughter. She is … a challenge, and I would understand completely if you wanted to pack your bags.”
“No,” I said quickly, panicked he was sending me away. “No, I’m hurt, I’ll need to work it out with her, but—”
“And this is the other bit of it,” he interrupted. “I’m going to ask something, well; perhaps you’ll think me too forgiving, but … you see, Mabel, I’m going to ask if we could keep this revelation of her dissembling between ourselves. Not because I believe Genevra’s behavior is excusable. But because it worries me.”
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