“I want to see you,” he murmured as she looked down at him, and in truth, he didn’t know where to look first. His gaze lingered on the wild tumble of her hair, her dark eyes, her soft, parted lips. Her shoulders curved down to her full breasts, now bared to him, that rose and fell with a hitch as he focused, lifting his hands to cup the perfection of her body in his palms. He smoothed his hands over her waist and out along the flair of her hips, lifting her up just enough as she sighed in his grasp. As he eased himself inside her, he tightened his jaw, willing himself to remain in control, to not give himself over to the madness that was building inside him.
“Yes,” Marguerite breathed, and she slid down, seating herself firmly on his shaft and turning all his resolutions to water.
They moved as one person then, each giving when the other should take, then taking what the other would give, their bodies in perfect synch. Marguerite braced herself on his chest, her eyes wide as her gaze roved over his face and shoulders, as if she, too, were memorizing everything about him. Something in her intense stare felt wrong, terribly wrong, but Win couldn’t piece it together as the desire ebbed and flowed in his body, everything winding up toward an impossible height. He shifted his hand over her curves and down, to where her body met his, and his fingers added a new, subtle pressure to the mix, one that made her draw in a sharp breath and twine her own fingers in the hair above his temples.
Then she took control again, pulling Win up from his prison of pillows, bringing his chest to her breasts as they rolled together in the sheets, tasting, touching, exploring. Nothing about Marguerite would stop surprising him, Win thought, and then—well then, he gave up thinking at all. The hours ran into each other and moon shone down, time marked only by their quick, staccato breaths and the slow wash of the fan, circling lazily above.
Chapter Nineteen
“Back again, Miss Marguerite?”
Marguerite smiled at the librarian as she entered the tiny space of the Summerland County Library reading area, redolent of furniture polish and old books, and didn’t even try to dim her happiness.
“I just can’t bring myself to stay away, Mr. Mathers,” she said, earning her a beaming smile in reply.
“Well, you’re in luck. Our local author is in residence as well this morning, busily at work on his new book. As long as you’re quiet, I’m sure you won’t disturb him—and this is the only place I’ve known the boy not to say a word, so he shouldn’t disturb you either.”
Marguerite thanked him, then made her way curiously to the back room, picking up her usual stack of historical volumes where they lay in the cubby behind Mr. Mather’s desk. Who did the old gentleman consider their local author, she wondered—then she turned the corner, and smiled.
She almost spoke a greeting, then remembered Mather’s orders. Kit Wellingford looked up anyway, and when he recognized her blinked in apparent delight.
“Countess Saleri!” he exclaimed. “What a lovely surprise! And oh! Look at those books, let me help you.”
Kit stood and hurried over to Marguerite, taking the stack from her arms—and using the gesture to peruse each of the titles as he laid them out. “The Chronicle, Lowcountry Recorder, oh! This is a favorite, of course, and…” he fixed her with a concerned frown. “My dear Countess, are you still researching poor Priscilla and her terrible curse? I didn’t give you all the information you needed?”
“You did! You absolutely did,” Marguerite said as they sat again. “But no one seems to know what she did to start the curse, or who laid it upon her. It seems such a terrible and specific thing to ruin her happiness, taking away all her lovely flowers like that. And if I understood the why behind it, well…” She sighed. “I feel terrible for her. I know she was unhappy, she must have been with her husband leaving her and her son going off to war. But her tale is so tragic.”
Kit leaned back in his chair, studying her so intently that Marguerite felt self-conscious. This man was one of the most inveterate gossips in the county. Had she inadvertently revealed too much about her interest in her search? Had Kit somehow picked up on some telltale indicator of her own melancholy?
“Oh, I am sorry,” she said quickly. “I don’t mean to go on about it when you’ve got your own work to do.” She gestured to his writing, now apparently forgotten on the table behind them. “I’ve plenty of reading to do. I hope I don’t disturb you.”
“Not at all,” Kit said, but he didn’t move. In fact, he continued staring at her.
Nervously, she tried again. “Your family has lived here in the county for nearly two hundred years, isn’t that right?” At his soulful nod, she continued. “Have you ever thought of leaving?”
“Never once.” Still more staring.
“Has it been a good place then, for your family?”
“Alternatively breathtaking in its delights and horrifying in its degradations,” Kit declared, with such a flourish to the statement that Marguerite felt certain the line had made it into one of his notebooks lining the table behind him.
“Oh. Well, that must be absolutely fascinating as you work to preserve those memories and present them to new generations, I’m sure—”
“You’re going to force me to tell you all my secrets, aren’t you,” he said almost fiercely, slapping his hands on the table, the outburst so sudden Marguerite was struck mute. “You can! You can, you know, I am weak—weak against the impulse to put these stories to a new ear, to educate a fresh, untutored soul to the intricacies of the south. It is my vice! And also my calling, one so strong that I cannot bear to stand against it.”
“I…see,” Marguerite said into the ensuing silence, flailing about for something more to say as Kit regarded her with such earnestness she feared his eyes might fall out of his head. “I should be happy to hear whatever it is you would like to tell me.”
“First—dear Priscilla. It all must start there. You’ll forgive me for this, I’m sure, but…” he gave a surreptitious glance to the far door, straightening in his seat. “I’m afraid my family has some rather dark inclinations.”
“Dark?” Marguerite eyed the door as well, but in her case, it was for avenues of escape. Would this community of eccentrics never cease surprising her in the most disconcerting ways?
“Dark,” Kit said emphatically. “We are quite unabashed thieves. No, no, it’s true,” he laid a hand on his breast and effected a desolate expression. “We’ve done it for generations, but our intentions are pure. There are far too few souls like you, willing to seek out information—true information—from its native source, from first-hand accounts of those worthies whose footsteps we follow even today.”
Once again, that sounded like a line culled from a journal, and Marguerite tilted her head, beginning to get an inkling of where this was going. “You’ve…hidden away some of the volumes from this repository,” she guessed.
“Temporarily only!” Kit exclaimed, lifting a hand as if he was going to swear his statement out. “My grandfather and my father after him lived through fires and floods and the ravages of war, society and the plagues of generations who’d rather get their information from the internet than from the voices of our past. And so those very special volumes—journals, books of poetry, first-hand histories of families, well…” he gestured to the books before her. “You understand our first interest was only to preserve them.”
Preserve them so you could cull their stories for your own literary aspirations, Marguerite thought. But, truly, she didn’t care. Some of the books in the historical library’s collection were in a terrible state. If the Wellingfords had kept better care of the ones they’d pilfered…
“And there is something in one of your books about Priscilla?”
“About her,” Kit leaned forward conspiratorially. “It’s by her. I can’t show you directly, of course. Not yet. My agent is waiting even now for my manuscript, and I simply can’t—”
“Oh, of course not!” Marguerite continued, straining to modulate her voice. “But, if yo
u know anything to set my mind at ease—anything at all…”
“Well,” Kit fairly pounced. “I know this. You have it all backward. No one outside the family put a curse on Priscilla’s beautiful flowers. She dropped it on herself.” He grinned almost maniacally. “Quite literally, in fact.”
Marguerite sat back, incredulous. “Herself! But…how? Why? Who does that?”
“A miserable old woman does that, but that’s not what’s important,” Kit waved his hand. “I told you she’d run off her child and husband, but that’s not the whole of the story. Young Master Holt was eighteen years old, and as passionate and impetuous as his parents before him. He…well, as I told you, he fell in love.”
Marguerite nodded. Kit had mentioned this before. “And?”
“And, it was a relationship that Priscilla Holt could not rightly condone.” Kit sniffed. “Remember, she never did divulge with whom the poor boy was enamored. It could have been a coachman, for all we know, or a servant girl. The problem could have been class or race or money—we have no clue. There is nothing in her most private of journals to indicate who so unfortunately attracted her son’s admiration. But she forbade that love so strenuously, and the boy was so heartbroken, that off he went to the service, and then to war.”
A chill coursed through Marguerite. “And her husband?”
“Gone, when the confrontation happened, but not because Priscilla had rushed him off. He was doing business in New York, used to being away for long periods of time. When Priscilla came to her senses, she was frantic that he not discover her perfidy before she could set everything to rights. She soon realized she couldn’t, of course. Her son was gone, her husband would never forgive her, and the flowers, she reasoned, were wholly to blame.”
Kit leaned forward then, tapping his temple. “Priscilla had a…delicate temperament.”
“And so she…cursed her own gardens?”
“You must understand, she’d come to Holt House as a young girl and fallen completely in love with Mr. Holt under those idyllic blooms. For her, they were the height of romantic love, their beginning and their end. They were passion’s very promise. And if they hadn’t ever bloomed that fateful night that her son had first met his clandestine lover, if the boy hadn’t been caught in their sway…” Kit let the statement linger in the air, then shrugged. “In the end, it was easier to believe that, then that her own terrible prejudice had so estranged her son that he fled into the very jaws of Hitler.”
“And a curse killed all those flowers.”
“Well, lye killed all those flowers, not to put too fine a point on it.”
“Lye!” Marguerite looked at him in horror, and Kit shrugged.
“Oh, yes. It’s all in her private journal. She poisoned them all true, enough. But after that, they never came back, even when she tried to replant. Hence,” he ended with a flourish. “The curse.”
“That’s…terrible,” Marguerite whispered. Terrible, and yet it all made sense, too. Priscilla’s rapidly declining health, the cancellation of the garden parties, the devastated gardens. Her husband returning not from abandoning his wife but to a world that had been blighted in his absence. “The father must have been heartbroken.”
“Never did return except to the funeral, that part is true enough,” nodded Kit. He straightened then, surveying Marguerite with satisfaction. “That is merely one chapter in my book, as well. There are others—so many others. You will be aghast, I assure you.”
“I…” Marguerite began stacking her own books almost in slow motion. It was a preposterous story and yet…she could almost believe it. “The marker,” she said.
“Hmm?” Kit had clearly gone on to fantasizing over the next salacious story.
“The marker in the garden, the one the father left. Love Conquers All. We found it.”
“Oh!” Kit’s eyes rounded. “You mustn’t move it! You must let me photograph it.”
“Of course,” Marguerite waved him off. “But who did he leave it for, do you have any record of that? Priscilla was already dead.”
“Why, don’t be silly,” Kit said, frowning at her. “He left it for the house. It was his family home, after all, even if he could no longer bear it. But enough of that, let me tell you another piece of information you must absolutely know, now that you’ve stayed at the Grand. It is really a quite delicious secret, and I’m certain Win hasn’t told you, he’s always been so outraged about it, poor boy.”
Marguerite frowned, a sudden panic skittering through her. “I don’t think…”
“Oh, but you must know!” Kit fairly cried. “Their whole ridiculous wealth started, it was always whispered—on the back of a charlatan.”
Win strode through the outer office of the historical society, recognizing the shrill overtones of Kit Wellingford with an almost feral awareness. The man had no doubt trapped Marguerite into a long-winded dissertation on the history of indigo production in Summerland County or some such nonsense. He’d almost reached the door to the reading room when Kit’s voice rang out with scandalized gusto.
“—on the back of a charlatan!”
In that one moment, all of Win’s carefully constructed happiness came crashing down. As of course, he’d known it would.
He flashed back to when he’d first heard the whole story of his family’s despicable past, the horror of it unfolding before him in revolting, indelible memory. He’d been ten, up far past his bedtime, sitting on the open porch—hiding really—as the adults talked inside. He’d climbed up the banister from the rear garden as he always did, desperate to know everything they did, no matter what the subject. Business, politics, farm management, and in this case—history.
They’d laughed about it. Laughed.
He hadn’t. He simply couldn’t understand someone being so cold…so heartless. Instead he’d carried the shame with him for the next decade, and it colored everything he did, driving him to succeed in school, in college, and in his fledgling businesses. He didn’t know how he would ever pay back the debt his family had incurred here in Charleston, but he had to try.
Marguerite was protesting, and Kit drew in a deep breath, no doubt to share every sordid detail of Win’s long-held shame. But Win couldn’t let him. In this, he had to take full blame, and full responsibility. It was, most assuredly, his story to tell….and not his only one.
He stepped inside the room. “Kit’s quite right,” he said quietly, and it was a testament to the power of Wellingford’s oratorical style that both he and Marguerite spun around toward him, shocked at the interruption.
He continued on without further preamble. “I told you that the Masters family came to this county in the months before the Civil War. We never had slaves despite building quarters for them—war was already brewing. The property was available for a song, and we bought up several plantations, began destroying what was there almost immediately, trampling over history in the process.”
“Pulling all the materials together for the new house,” Kit interjected, but Win barely heard him.
“Even then, we were too proud to use anything but skilled labor, and no one in the family was anything close to being a farmer. We’d made our money in commerce, the buying and selling of textiles, not the production of them. We expected to do the same in South Carolina, undercutting the competition by providing a closer point of contact. But that was the patriarch of the family’s passion, not the son’s or daughters’. The daughters remained in the North, shocked at the idea of leaving their New York society, and the son, James, was in Europe, with the intention of studying to become a doctor.”
He leveled his gaze at Kit, who’d now gone stock still. He could feel Marguerite’s gaze on him, but he couldn’t look at her, not yet. “Studying, as Mr. Wellingford I’m sure was about to point out, but not completing those studies. How could he? He was barely twenty, had been on the continent for several months, if that, and in the long tradition of the Masters progeny, he’d been spending his time and money on entertaining
himself, not paying any attention to his training. Then the war came, and there seemed even more reason to lose himself in gambling and drink. And, yes, along the way, he did start to learn the trade for which he was on the continent, but he was never certified. Far from it, in fact. When in the waning days of the war he was finally summoned home, he went.”
Marguerite gave a small, quiet moan, as if she knew what was coming.
“By the time he arrived, South Carolina was no longer the site of much in the way of battles, but there was still a need for trained doctors. Apparently on a lark, James answered the call, beginning work at one of the state’s prisoner of war camps in Charleston before, eventually, returning to the Grand. At that point, he began charging for his services. Exorbitantly. During the war, when all the money of the Masters’ neighbors could not save them from their sons and neighbors coming back broken, shattered, next to dead. But James Masters was there to take their money and with his highly questionable skills, to patch up what was left of their boys.”
Win’s voice was shaking now, but he forced himself to push on. “If he was merely another Northerner intent on making money off the backs of others’ misery, that would be bad enough. But, of course, he wasn’t.”
“But Mr. Masters, surely you don’t—”
“Shut up, Kit,” Win nearly snarled, shocked by the emotion in his own voice. Kit’s eyes flared wide and true alarm now showed on his face, but Win didn’t care. This truly was the worst of it, and even saying it aloud now dredged up all the childhood horror he’d felt that long ago night in the Grand, hiding in a corner of an enormous settee.
“James Masters learned his craft by operating without training. He simply—bluffed his way through, making up what he didn’t know and knowing that most of the men he worked on were already half mad with pain and infection and illness that they wouldn’t be able to gainsay him. He operated on soldiers shipped in from the front, and he treated far less lucky souls, the sick and wounded in POW camps. He started in Charleston but all too soon he went to Florence. Florence.”
Chosen: Gowns & Crowns, Book 7 Page 19