by Jill Barnett
A few minutes later a rosewood regulator clock chimed; its gong rang one . . . two . . . three . . . four times, before the shelf clock went off. Soon all twenty clocks were chiming at different moments and different hours as if they needed to mock the chaos in Georgina’s life. She stared at the clock wall where the Bayard collection was artfully displayed.
The first Bayard had been a clockmaker from the old country, a man who came to a new world and here he made his fortune and his name. Ironically, they were the things that were more timeless than his famous clocks, prized because they never lost even a minute’s time in an entire year. Elegant, rare, and some even whimsical, the clocks had always been a part of this house, part of Georgina’s heritage. Yet now, when her life was ready to fall apart, not one clock in the entire room kept the same time. No matter how often she wound them. No matter how often she reset them, the clocks would chime at different hours.
She gave the bell pull an angry yank. For one brief second a small rip sounded, then the other end of the bell pull fell to the floor, the old silken cord so rotten that it had just unraveled. She stared at the tattered end lying on the carpet and looking as if it had been chewed. In her right hand she still held the other end. She took two deep breaths, then hollered, “Mrs. Cartwright!”
Nothing.
“Miss-sus Cartwright!”
An older woman came scurrying into the room, wiping her hands on her apron. “Yes, Miss?”
“Please have someone fix the bell pull and check all the other pulls. Every single one of them. Tonight is too important. I want everything perfect.”
The old woman nodded and took the bell pull from her.
Georgina crossed the room just as a clock with a mother-of-pearl face like the moon chimed six. What time is it? she thought, then scowled at that clock. “And Mrs. Cartwright. Reset all the clocks. Every one of them is wrong.”
“But Miss Bayard, we did. We reset them this very morning and still they run at different times.”
“They are Bayard clocks. A Bayard clock never loses time. Everyone knows that. I said . . . reset them.” Georgina left the room and marched down the hallway, barking out orders to three maids before she stopped to fiddle with a bouquet of fresh flowers that sat atop a two-hundred-year-old French console table with gilt edges and three ink marks from Louis XIV. She plucked out a rose, then a lily, a chrysanthemum, and two fern leaves, then put them back exactly as they were. She eyed them critically and muttered, “Much better.”
A moment later she was inspecting the rooms, all twenty-eight of them. Before too long, maids with feather dusters and mops in tow were running this way and that like confused birds that had been locked in a small cage. They polished the heavy silver candlesticks that had belonged to emperors, cleaned imaginary spots off one of the fifteen crystal chandeliers, scrubbed off the small dark specks on the French carpet in the smoking room, and used thick beeswax and almond oil on the mahogany banister, stairs, and all the wood crown moldings—again.
Having snapped out her last order, Georgina stood in the middle of the foyer, her hands planted on her hips while she stared up three stories to the gallery above. She knew one thing for certain: she had to save this house. At her darkest moment, when Albert was dead, when she found out that everything was gone, that moment when she was completely alone and the undertow was threatening to drown her, the answer had come to her like knowledge from above—if she were to believe in such things, which she didn’t.
The house, this house and everything in it, stood for all she was. Within its walls of plaster and wood were the rhythms of life, all the Bayards were and ever had been. It stood for the survivors. With calculated desperation she had done whatever she had to do in order to save this house, because if she lost the house, she lost Georgina Bayard, she lost herself.
No one knew of her circumstances yet, and if John Cabot proposed, no one need ever know. Everything was ready. And tonight, if all went smoothly, she would have her marriage offer. Her future and her home and her name would be secure.
Georgina rearranged the flowers on the table for the fifth time that morning, while a constant litany of Tonight! Tonight! Tonight! rang through her head like the chiming of an overwound clock. Everything had to be perfect, absolutely perfect, especially when she felt as though she were swimming harder than ever before. Because for Georgina, tonight was swim . . . or sink.
Chapter 4
Now my brothers call from the bay,
Now the great winds shoreward blow,
Now the salt tide seawards flow;
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
—The Forsaken Mermen, Matthew Arnold
ARRANT ISLAND, MAINE
The rider burst over the crest of a lawny hill as if he were atop Pegasus. The August air, warm and quiet only seconds before, now trembled with the thundering sound of Eachann MacLachlan on his white stallion. Down the dirt road they flew, past a rocky island point where on a clear day like today, black shags stood spread-eagle atop the white crusted rocks and gulls screamed at the constantly shifting waves.
Eachann sailed over a fieldstone fence, down a lush glen where his horse splattered through a cool brook, then jumped another rock fence twice as high as the first one. They sped past a pond with harlequin ducks and white whooper swans gliding over the glassy surface toward a small wooden bridge that arched over the water like a rainbow.
When he rode like that, his horse’s hooves eating up the damp green earth, together, he and his white stallion looked like one unique beast of incredible grace and power, seeming to almost drink up the salty air. At the edge of a thick mossy forest of cat spruce and pumpkin pine, they dipped suddenly and turned down a trail lined with birch, maple, and aspen trees whose leaves had already begun to change color. Each year when those leaves fell to almost a foot deep, the trail turned red and orange as if it were on fire.
He slowed his horse as the trail wound downward toward the sea where a small inlet was hidden by an arm of rock that curled protectively around the northern edge of the cove. But once on the white sand, they took off again, pounding through the shallow rush of surf, the water spraying up behind them and sparkling in the brilliant sunlight like a trail of fireflies.
At the squat wooden dock near the far end of Piper’s Cove, a coaster sat with its sail just being furled. But they didn’t ride toward the quay. Instead, they turned and rode swiftly up another circular trail, past a tall hemlock that stuck out from the rocks and hid the spot where the trail flattened and led toward a sprawling stone house.
From the cove the house below looked as if it were built right into the hillside. Along the rear entrances were a series of granite arches that scalloped the entire back of the house in a smooth sleek way that made the windows and doors look as if they had been cut out from one solid, mammoth piece of salmon-pink granite.
At the rear of the house, Eachann stopped. He was a tall brawny man with blond hair that gleamed gold in the sunlight and shoulders nearly as wide as the wingspread of an osprey. But he swung a long leg over the saddle with casual ease for one so large and slid to the ground.
For a moment his stallion tossed its head and pawed the ground as if it were still hungry for a run. But he clicked his tongue twice and the horse tossed its head once more, then stilled with an eerie acquiescence that for a brief second silenced everything around them but the distant rush of the sea.
For only the time it took a gull to scream, he stood as still as his horse, staring at the cove and at the coaster docked at the quay, then he disappeared into the deep dark shadow of a stone archway.
Chapter 5
Follow love and it will flee thee,
Flee love and it will follow thee.
—Old Scottish proverb
There were some things even Calum MacLachlan wouldn’t do for his name. Which was why he was hiding behind an island spruce in the forest that edged the north end of Piper’s Cove. The tr
ees on the forest rim were covered with fat burls that bulged from the trunks like Rip Van Winkle’s bowling balls. They hid him well, yet he had a clear view of the dock.
He watched five women step from the boat deck and walk up the quay. The women stopped abruptly when Fergus MacLachlan shouted to them from the deck.
There was no doubt; these women were the latest batch of brides. That stubborn old devil wanted Calum married.
When it came to Fergus MacLachlan, a distant cousin and constant thorn in the side, Calum had no say in what the old man did. Fergus did what he wanted, claiming that age, experience, and a close kinship to the old laird, Calum’s father, had always awarded him the freedom to do what he thought best for “the spawn of his guid friend, the auld laird, MacLachlan of MacLachlan, God-bless-him-in-spite-of-his-fasheous-sons. The fact that Fergus had been a surrogate father and helped raise both Calum and his younger brother Eachann only added to Fergus’s zeal.
And for the past few years, his zeal was to see Calum, laird of the clan MacLachlan, married. The old man started his matchmaking slowly at first, but when Calum refused to take him seriously, canny old Fergus began to lure women to the island with promises of winning a husband who was a “braw mon of property.”
To Calum, marriage was like death. He knew he had to do it someday, but he was certainly in no hurry to experience it.
Calum adjusted his spectacles, stuck his head out from behind the tree, and really looked at the women.
He had the sudden urge to run like hell.
Immediately he hid again, wiped off his spectacles, and polished the glass lenses on his shirt. He held them up to the sunlight, then polished them again. A few minutes later he put the glasses back on and peered out from behind the tree.
The first woman was so old her shoulders had begun to stoop. The second he couldn’t see because the third woman’s red hair was in the way. In fact, her red hair was in the way of everything within three feet of her head. It took him a minute or so to notice that every few seconds she would twitch. He strained his neck out a little farther. Still he could only see three of the five women.
“There he is!” a woman shouted from behind him.
“Ya! Das ist him!” screeched another one.
Calum whipped around. The two missing women, the two with the most man-hungry expressions, stood back in the pine trees. He heard the others on the dock scream, “Wait for us!”
An instant later in a flurry of pine needles and sand, of wild red hair and even wilder and determined expressions, they were all charging straight at him from three different directions.
He turned and ran like holy hell.
Chapter 6
When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws,
And maidens bleach their summer smocks,
The cuckoo then on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
Cuckoo . . .
—William Shakespeare
Calum slammed the library door closed and leaned against it for a moment, trying to catch his breath. Pine needles clung to his damp shirt and Spanish moss hung from his pants and belt. His spectacles dangled off one ear. He slipped the frame over his other ear, positioned the glasses on the crown of his nose, and the lenses immediately fogged from the heat of his sweaty face.
“I’m going to kill Fergus,” he muttered, cleaning his spectacles again, then picking needles, stringy gray moss, and damp leaves from his clothes. “With my bare hands . . . around his thick old neck . . . ”
“I take it Fergus brought you more brides.”
“Aye,” Calum said, plucking a dead maple leaf off his white shirt while he turned toward the sound of his brother’s voice.
Eachann sat sprawled in a leather wing chair near the windows; he had to sit sprawled, his size gave him no other choice. While Calum was considered tall at six feet and plenty brawny, Eachann was over half a foot taller, with wide shoulders, and hands so big that he could almost palm the base of a caber. He could throw the hammer farther than anyone Calum had ever seen, but he was nimble enough to skate like the wind when he held a shinty stick in his huge hands. Also, there were Eachann’s horses. Atop one of his prized white horses Eachann MacLachlan was a sight to see.
Calum didn’t have his brother’s skill with animals. But he could run. He ran so fast he could race any one of Eachann’s horses down the beach. As children, it was Calum who won every foot race. It was Calum who could change direction and never lose an inch of ground.
Eachann used to brag that his older brother could wheel about in a blink. And he was right. Calum never skirted anything. He would run right into the woods and never break stride, even where the birch trunks were so thick that anyone else would have to sidle through. Calum ran like Eachann rode—with every ounce of skill that God had given him.
However Fergus’s brides were giving him more practice running than he wanted, or than he had time for.
“How many women this time?”
“Five.” Calum picked the last of the forest from his shirt and dropped the moss and needles into an empty brass ash can that sat near the fireplace. He thought he heard Eachann give a quiet snicker and Calum looked up.
His brother was grinning at him the way be always did when Calum was cleaning up.
“I like things neat,” Calum said defensively, then walked over to his desk and started to sit down, but he stopped and picked some lint balls from the chair.
“Aye, that you do.” Eachann paused and stared at Calum’s head with that same smirk. “You might want to take that pine cone out of your hair. Makes you look like a boarhound with one ear cropped.”
While Eachann was laughing at him, Calum patted his hair and a small pine cone fell onto the neat stack of papers on his desk. He was just cleaning up the mess when a hollow clop . . . clop . . . clop came down the hallway.
Both brothers looked up. Eachann’s horse trotted into the library, stopped, looked at Eachann, and then tossed its head.
Calum groaned and sank into his chair. “Can’t you keep that damn horse of yours out of the house?”
Eachann shrugged. “He doesn’t hurt anything.”
Calum watched the stallion’s long tail sweep back and forth, just missing a crystal and silver whisky decanter. “Not yet he hasn’t,” Calum muttered to himself and watched his brother stroke the horse’s muzzle. “That beast thinks it’s a lapdog.”
A sudden loud and furious pounding came from both the back and front doors.
The women called out, “Let us in!”
“Let us in!”
The brothers exchanged a knowing look.
“I’ll take care of the women.” Eachann unfolded himself from the chair and stood.
“Be sure to bring Fergus back with you.”
“Aye. I’d already planned on it.” Eachann crossed the room in a few long strides, a trail of grass and dirt crumbling onto the carpet from his crusty riding boots. His horse whickered, then pranced after him.
Calum opened the bottom desk drawer and took out a whisk broom and dustpan. A minute later he was on his knees sweeping up the grass and dirt and mud clumps in the shape of horseshoes from the carpet. He emptied the dust pan, shook out the whisk broom, and while he polished the pan with a dust cloth he critically eyed the dark carpet. Satisfied, he turned and checked the tall polished red oak bookshelves that his great-grandfather had built into two walls of the room.
Each leather-bound volume was aligned perfectly with the next. No dust. No lint, and every piece of crystal and brass in the entire room, from the decanters to the walnut bowl, sparkled brightly. The windowpanes were so clean that if it weren’t for the frames and the slight waves in the glass you would think there was nothing there at all.
Calum put the broom and dusters away in their drawer and he sat down at his desk. He restacked his papers three times, and when he decided they were perfect he took a deep breath and leaned back in the chair. Everything was in its place.
A few minutes
later the door blasted open and slammed against the wall with enough force to dent the crown molding. Calum’s papers flew all over the desk.
Eachann strolled through the doorway in his usual careless fashion. “All taken care of,” he said, as if handling women were as easy as breathing.
Calum was lying atop the desk with his arms spread out like a cormorant and his hands clamped to the desk edges so his chest held down his paperwork. He looked up, his spectacles perched on the edge of his nose. His younger brother looked as if he had just done something as easy as take an exhilarating ride through the meadows.
Calum straightened, pushed his glasses back up his nose, and scooped up the papers into his arms. He began to restack them into neat and precise piles while his brother sprawled into his favorite chair again as if nothing was wrong with the world. He supposed that for Eachann, handling those women was that easy.
It wasn’t that easy for Calum. Women scared the hell out of him. He and Eachann were opposites, but their differences never made Calum feel uncomfortable. With women, Calum felt as if he were in another world, one he didn’t understand, one that didn’t make any sense at all.
Women were just too complicated for him, the way they would say one thing and do another. He never knew what to believe: what they said, or what they did . . . or worse yet, what they never said and what they wanted you to know you should do. They were completely illogical, and whenever he was around them he became irritable and crusty, the same way he reacted to Fergus’s matchmaking.
He finished tidying up, then stared pointedly at his brother’s muddy boots. “There are boot jacks by all the doors.”
“I know. I keep having to step over the blasted things. Damn nuisance if you ask me.” Eachann picked up a walnut from the bowl by the chair and cracked it with his huge hand. He picked out the nut meat and let the shells fall on the table and chair. A second later, clop . . . clop . . . clop, and his horse moseyed back into the room.