Her words jolted Holt and a shadow flashed over his face. “No. No, I see where you’re going with this but that’s absolutely out of the question. I’ve already told Mr. Masters this, and I’m not a fool, Countess Saleri. I know you have money too. I know that you both must feel poorly for me, having seen the property, imagined what it once was. But the house is cursed now, has been cursed for a long time. And I’ve tried. I’ve long since estranged both my children, with the money I’ve spent on the property. don’t think your money is going to change what’s fact, any more than mine did.”
“But you can’t let it go to Constance Gibbs. She won’t know how to restore it, I don’t think she’ll even try.”
Marguerite’s voice rang with something close to desperation, a tone Win recognized from his own pleas to Holt. The old man’s face collapsed into a dark scowl, but Win noticed he still didn’t stop caressing the tiny, withered petal. Marguerite’s idea was a good one, but…
“Sell the house to me,” he announced suddenly.
“What?” Both Marguerite and Holt looked up, equally confused.
“Sell the house to me, today. For a dollar.” Win lifted his hand and gestured vaguely toward the door. “You own the property outright, have owned it for generations. There are no banks to satisfy. I’ve a dozen lawyers in shouting distance who can draw up the contract. Sell it to me, and I’ll undertake the restoration of the grounds and exterior of the house. It’ll be ready by the property review date, as long as we can secure permission today to get started. A week from now, after the date, you want to buy it back, you can. For the same amount. The improvements we can simply chalk up to a bet I’m making with myself, to see the property in its full glory.”
“But it’s my house,” Holt said, and Win didn’t miss the way his fingers settled on the tattered bloom, pressing it now into the surface of the table. “I don’t want to sell it to anyone.”
“But you want it to live, don’t you?” Once again, Marguerite laid a gentle hand on Holt’s, her face imploring. The old man looked up, his bushy brows arcing high above his eyes. “You want to see those flowers bloom once more, see Holt House in all its glory? It would take so little to make it happen—and mean so much to bring all those memories back to life.”
“The memories…” Holt turned and looked out the large windows again, and Marguerite and Win exchanged a glance. Suddenly the old man’s decision had taken on an enormous weight between them, Marguerite’s bid to remove the curse that plagued Holt effectively ruined if he wouldn’t let them at least try to bring the grounds back to life.
And there was that bloom, after all, fragile and pale against the dark mahogany table.
In the end, it was the bloom that decided it for Holt.
He dropped his gaze from the window to stare down at the shreds of the petal, frail beside the withering leaves and wispy tendrils of Spanish Moss. He sighed deeply, and the edges of the petals lifted, setting the delicate fragments to flight for just a moment.
“Very well,” the old man barely whispered. “If you think…if you think it’s possible…”
“I know it is,” Marguerite put her arm around the old man and hugged him, even as his shoulders began to shake. “Your house is going to get its magic back, Mr. Holt. All it needs is for us to take a chance on it.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Stand back from there, now!”
Startled, Marguerite responded to the snap in Win’s voice even if she couldn’t fully understand his words. She jerked her head toward him and his arm slashed down again. He was waving her back from the large machine that was pulling the tree free from the gazebo roof.
As she looked around, Marguerite immediately realized the problem. Unlike everyone else standing around, she wasn’t wearing a hardhat. Fair enough.
She lifted her back pack higher on her shoulder and stepped back, well out of the way of the other workers. The lane back to Holt House had been barricaded with a manned temporary gate, and no one was able to get through if they weren’t on the list. She was, of course, but even with that she and Win’s houseman had to trek the nearly quarter mile on foot, keeping well out of the way of construction trucks and cargo vans. More equipment had been brought up by barge, from what John Merrick had told her, the entire crew working at breakneck speed.
Nerves danced in her stomach, and she glanced up to Holt House, its windows now opened to the world as another hive of workers hung from scaffolding and pounded and sanded away at the rose brick walls.
She’d almost made it to the back porch when Win caught up with her. He motioned her inside and they stepped up on the broad planking. The old screens had been ripped down and new screens lay rolled on the floor, but that would be one of the last jobs of the renovation. For now, the old porch lay open to the elements, but still provided a welcome respite from the heat.
Win pointed to her pack. “More research?”
“Cindy gave me a laptop and a portable scanner,” she nodded, hitching up her bag again. “I gave up trying to read everything at the library and just scanned as much of it as I could stand. But I haven’t found anything yet.” She’d even expanded her search parameters to all the houses in the district, though she didn’t tell Win that. Of all their work together on Holt’s curse, her historical research seemed to make him the touchiest. That was the problem with countries that had only been around for a few hundred years, she supposed. They were a lot more sensitive about what little history they had. “I figured I could sort through more of it inside but still be close enough if something happened.”
He grinned down at her and, as always, the dichotomy of the man took her breath away. Wyndham Masters III was one of the most sophisticated hoteliers she’d ever met—photographed the world over on the most luxurious resort properties money could buy. But here, with his hardhat and his rolled-up sleeves, he looked truly happy. . . in a way she would never have expected. He looked like he was at home. Not at Holt House, maybe—even with the restoration the place would never hold a candle to the opulence at the Grand—but in this place. In the South Carolina Lowcountry.
He belonged to the land in a way she’d never belonged to anything.
“Is the work going well?” she asked.
He gave a wry laugh. “Too well, honestly. Trees we thought would be a bear to uproot had already been loosened by storms over the years, and the ground we thought would be like chipping through concrete is soft and moist. You could see why all this brush grew up and choked everything else out.
“So why did the flowers die?”
“No clue. We found shoots all over the place of the flowers Holt told us about—moonflowers and jessamine, all of it. At least at a distance from the house, where we think the original periphery of the gardens were, the plants are all there. Granted, we haven’t seen any more blooms—not even where you stumbled into the bushes—so that’s kind of strange, but the stalks are there. They’re just—leaves. We’ve cut a few out of the ground and crated up some soil samples to see if we can find anything out from the county exchange agency. They’re going to run some tests, see if they can work out what might have happened. There could be an excess amount of mineral in the soil or something in the pond water, maybe some sort of blight…”
“That affected only the flowers?”
“They were exotic flowers, remember. Maybe they carried some sort of invasive disease.” Win tilted his hardhat back on his forehead, shrugged. “I don’t know. With as thick as everything’s growing, I just can’t see it. But Holt swears they tried reseeding and replanting several times over the years. Nothing ever stuck. They’d plant, go away for awhile, come back, and even if there were a few blooms on some of the plants, they’d never open. It’s like they were held fast.”
He shook his head, gestured toward the house. “You good in there by yourself? We’ve had cleaners in once, but it’s still pretty musty. Better than out here, though, even with the fans they set up on the porch. Thank God Holt House has electr
icity, is all I can say.”
She nodded and began to turn away, but Win reached for her hand, lifting it to his mouth. Marguerite shivered as he brushed the inside of her wrist with his lips. “I’m coated in dust and grime or I’d do more than this, but…later?”
His smile was almost bashful and Marguerite didn’t hide her grin as she nodded, feeling almost giddy herself. What was it about this place that seemed to make all her sophisticated veneer fall away, leaving nothing but raw, unvarnished emotion?
Whatever it was, it seemed to be affecting Win too. He grinned back at her, staring a moment longer, then squeezed her hand. “I better get back. Let me know what you find?”
“Of course.” Almost too quickly then, he dropped her hand and strode away, leaving Marguerite to stare after him moony eyed until she caught herself.
Laughing, she turned toward the house, making her way inside past the rolls of screening and stacks of trim work.
The back door was unlocked, and she stepped into the broad kitchen, surprised to find it nearly identical to the way she and Win had seen it a few days earlier except—brighter. Much brighter. The wooden shutters had all been cleared away, and the room was large and open, the ceilings tall, with the air conditioning keeping everything cool and dry. She dropped her laptop bag on the counter, and kept moving, irresistibly drawn to see what else Holt House held in the bright light of day.
The place was a revelation. The walls had been dusted and the floors and carpeting swept and vacuumed, everything had been polished to a high sheen. The paint was old and faded but in surprisingly good shape for how old it was and the paintings and photographs behind their now-polished glass showed off generations of quiet, almost quaint splendor. There were paintings of stage coaches perched before the house’s broad porch, others depicting a robust dock with animals being led off a barge. One of the paintings showed three squat buildings with open roofs, the hint of a fire within, and Marguerite wondered again at the metalworking and blacksmith activities of the Holts’ former tenants, whether they’d been freedmen or slaves.
She frowned, moving past the paintings to mount the elegant stairway. Slavery had never been a part of Garronia’s past, but there was no denying it had helped shaped the United States and still deeply affected its people, especially in the south. Even in those cases where the owners were caring and humane, they still owned another life—sometimes hundreds of lives. She couldn’t wrap her head around a culture that found that an acceptable practice.
Topping the stairs, she grimaced—the upstairs of Holt House may have technically been air conditioned, but it wasn’t quite doing the job. Whoever bought this house would have do something about that—historical significance be damned. Not even tourists would be able to stay up here for long the way it was currently. Marguerite walked through the empty rooms, peaking into bedrooms she hadn’t seen during her first perusal, until finally she came to the master.
“Hello, Priscilla,” Marguerite murmured, pushing open the door. The room hadn’t been changed since the grand dame herself had passed away. In all the research Marguerite had done, it still wasn’t clear how Priscilla had died, exactly. Her books had been pored over by local historians of the time, and eventually removed altogether. Had she died of a broken heart? Or was her death part of the curse on the house, or…
Marguerite stepped into the room, feeling the space around her with her fingers. She wasn’t a sensitive by any stretch of the imagination, but the space felt…like a simple, ordinary room to her. There were no whispers of ghosts in the corners, no presence of gloom or joy. Marguerite could have been standing in a room at a Sofitel, for all the sense of history this place had.
She was no closer to removing the Holt House curse than she’d been when they’d started. Which meant she had a lot of work to do.
Win finally pushed his way into the kitchen of the Holt House, wearier than he’d been in months—maybe years. Over the past four days, the workers had accomplished miracles—clearing brush and laying down sod, creating pathways with crushed shells and stones that followed the same lines as the old photographs they’d found lining the central hallway of the house. They’d cleaned off the façade of the house and patched the crumbling mortar. They’d even cleared out six more spider nests found in several outbuildings that the brush had been hiding. The house was more than shaping up, it was coming to life…and that was what bothered him.
Marguerite looked up from her position at the kitchen table and immediately frowned. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“You got a minute?”
“Of course.” Marguerite powered down her laptop and slid it into her bag, along with a stack of printouts. It was past six p.m., and they were, remarkably, ahead of schedule. Some of the concrete they’d poured for the new patio and walkways needed to cure, and most of the landscaping wasn’t planned for a few days, but they were getting there. Tomorrow would be a lot of cleanup but, push to shove, they could have the inspection now and Win knew he would pass it.
“Let me show you something.” With Marguerite by his side, Win already felt better, but that didn’t hold off the sense of unease the job had begun to hold for him. And Marguerite’s reaction when she stepped off the porch confirmed it.
“Oh, my God, Win—it’s magnificent!”
The gazebo in the center of the back yard looked like something out of a Victorian amusement park. It gleamed in the sunlight, the freshly cleaned wrought iron burnished to a high sheen, the custom woodwork of the local carpenters adding an otherworldly grace to the structure.
“All those vines—that tree…” Marguerite couldn’t stop staring, and only moved forward because he grabbed her hand with his and was now tugging her along. They stepped down one of the myriad walkways that wound through the back yard, the land turned over and prepared, waiting for the flowers that would follow the original landscape plans of the house. “How did you get the wood in there so quickly?”
“It was all precut, measured before-hand. Turns out, the main builder in Charleston had these plans in his drawers—it was one of their first big jobs. He heard about the project, gave me a call.” Yet another thing that fell in place quickly. Too quickly. “Once we cleared the tree and gutted the rotting wood, slotting in the new was like putting together a puzzle.”
“It’s perfect.” Marguerite gazed at it in awe, then hesitated as he moved her up the lane. “We can’t step on it though, right? Doesn’t it need to—dry or something?
“Steps haven’t been fixed yet. We’ll be standing on the old wood.”
They did, too, mounting the stairs to see the wonder of the intricate would work. Heavy beams bisected the circle like the spokes of a wheel, while the metal work and wood cutouts made a dizzying design of swirling stars. “Wow,” she managed. “It’s—I can’t believe you’ve already gotten so much done.”
“That’s…sort of the problem,” Win said. Now that he was right up on the issue, though, he didn’t know how to proceed without sounding like an idiot.
Marguerite looked up at him. “What do you mean?”
“Holt’s been out here a half dozen times since we started, since, as he puts it, the house isn’t technically his anymore…and all he can do is cry and mutter to himself. But once I get him away from the house, the work, he’s tried to tell me why he’s so upset. This—” Win waved around. “This isn’t difficult. This is a lot of workers moving a lot of debris, but the underlying grounds are in incredibly good shape.”
Marguerite frowned. “That’s good, though, isn’t it? Doesn’t that make your job easier?”
“That’s kind of the point. It would have made anyone’s job easier, at any time. Over the past, what, seventy years. Do you see what I’m saying?”
She looked around, clearly at a loss. “Um…no?”
Win sighed, rubbing his neck in frustration. “In all the construction projects I’ve overseen, whether on the ground or reviewing plans in some high-rise a thousand miles away, I’ve never had
a job go this easily. Hell, I’ve had bed and breakfasts that have had more problems than this place, and it’s a house that’s been all but abandoned for over seventy years.”
Marguerite wrinkled her forehead. “And you’re upset because…it’s not more difficult?”
“I’m upset because I’m not some sort of miracle overseer. There are about fifty men in this county alone who could run a construction job better than I can, and that’s a conservative estimate. Meaning that anyone could have come in here, Marguerite, at any time over the past seventy years, and fixed this poor house up, returning it to its former self. Holt could have done it. Maybe not all in a week, like we are, but certainly over the course of a summer—and he would have gotten the funding too, if he’d looked for it. There are people in this state who would have loved nothing more than to have another antebellum mansion to go stare at, and setting up foundations for that kind of thing isn’t all that hard.”
She was looking intently at him now. Him, and the almost perfectly renovated grounds. There was still much work to be done, of course, but—he could see she understood what he was saying. “So you’re wondering…why now?” she said. “Why us?”
“Holt swears up and down he tried to renovate before, and his father before him. It’s not like they didn’t have the money, especially in the early going. But it was always the same story. Machines broke down, storms blew through, money got tight or workers just didn’t show up when they were supposed to. Cost overruns and accidents ran rife with every attempt, red tape and squabbles with everyone from suppliers to hired help.”
“And none of that’s happening now.”
“Hell, I have volunteers,” Win said. “That Bess Hilty with the alpacas has brought her animals over three separate times to visit with the workers on lunch, while she fed the men—fed them! And told them to bring their kids around to her farm after the job was finished. I talked to her about the other renovation attempts, and she swears she’s never seen anyone give it a go—and she’s run that farm across the river for more than twenty years. Holt said he’d given up long before that. It’s like the whole place beat them down, but they couldn’t part with it.”
Chosen: Gowns & Crowns, Book 7 Page 14