To tell the truth, I wasn’t all that used to eating in restaurants myself. The dining room had large plate-glass windows overlooking the sparkling river. Mr. Rathburn ordered a Shirley Temple with extra cherries for Maddy and a bottle of Pinot Grigio for the table.
“You’ll have some too?” he asked me. “You’re with me; they won’t card you.”
“Ice water, please,” I told the politest waitress I had ever been served by. The items on the menu were expensive. I ordered a bowl of clam chowder.
“You can have anything you want,” Mr. Rathburn told me. “Lobster? Clams on the half shell?”
“Chowder is fine,” I told the waitress.
Lunch passed quickly, in a whirl of silverware and white linen. Maddy was so happy to have her father’s full attention that she prattled on about the morning’s activities and about a field trip to an aquarium that would be coming up in a few weeks. Mr. Rathburn listened patiently. Once his cell phone rang, and he silenced it. And when Maddy pleaded for a second dessert, he told her no. She looked surprised and continued to whine for a few moments more. But he held firm, and she was smiling and holding his hand by the time we left the restaurant. Though the car ride back to the estate was only twenty minutes, she fell into a deep sleep before we were halfway home.
“How did I do?” Mr. Rathburn asked me.
“So far, so good,” I told him.
Rather than wake Maddy, he carried her inside. Lucia met us at the door and looked at us with some surprise. “I’ve been trying to reach you,” she told him. “The proofs are here for you to look over. Mitch is waiting for you in your office.”
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he told her, and he carried Maddy upstairs and laid her on the bed. I found an extra blanket in her drawer and spread it over her.
“Thank you,” I whispered to him.
He shot me a crooked smile, then slipped off.
I sat awhile, watching Maddy as she slept. It was true — she didn’t look like Mr. Rathburn in the slightest. Poor little thing, I thought. I dug out her favorite stuffed animals from the space between the bed and the wall and arranged them beside her pillow so they would be the first things she saw when she woke up. On some level, mustn’t she miss her mother, even as neglectful as she was? And wasn’t it likely she’d absorbed some of Mr. Rathburn’s early ambivalence toward her or his anger toward her mother? I resolved to take even better care of her now that I knew her story.
Mr. Rathburn stayed out of sight for the rest of that afternoon and evening. He again had a slew of dinner guests. In the kitchen, the cook was stuffing something elaborate into a pastry crust. The meal smelled wonderful, and the laughter from the dining room was enviable. But I didn’t mind sitting with Maddy in the playroom, off at the fringes of Thornfield Park. As I helped her cut out paper dolls — books of them, purchased by Lucia by mail order, had just arrived — I thought back fondly to that morning, and the memory made me smile. I had felt trusted, even important. And though I wasn’t quite important enough to Mr. Rathburn to be a part of his dinner party, I knew I was serving him and Maddy in a more essential way. I was right at the center of their lives, and I’d never felt at the center of anyone’s life before. These thoughts warmed me, making the rest of the evening pass quickly. After Maddy fell asleep, I retired to my room and, working from a picture in the liner notes of his second album, did a quick sketch of Mr. Rathburn. It came out pretty well, so I added color, careful to capture the exact pale pink of his lip, the peculiar smoke-gray color of his eyes. When the painting had dried — Not bad! I thought to myself — I borrowed some thumbtacks from Lucia, who was packing her briefcase to go home for the night, and pinned up the image above my desk. All along the wall, I hung the paintings I had done since coming to Thornfield Park. Lucia had told me I could decorate the room as I liked. Since I could be here for a while, I might as well make it my own.
That night, as I waited for sleep, the skin on my shoulders and back tingling with sunburn, I thought of Mr. Rathburn floating beside me in the pool, his hand moving toward my shoulder as though it might come to rest there. I even thought of things I could tell him when I saw him next — precocious things Maddy had said or done. I felt the warmth of my blanket traveling from the tips of my toes up through my legs, spreading through my torso until even the tips of my fingers tingled with it. Just as I was relaxing into a delicious slumber, I was struck by an unexpected thought. Mr. Rathburn would be leaving soon; he was planning a tour. Mitch had been booking dates for shows across America and Europe. The thought of the house returning to its prior state of quiet made me suddenly sad. I tried to think back to what Lucia had told me about the tour — would it really last from fall through next summer? That seemed like such a long time.
After that, I tossed and turned. I may have slept a bit, but my mind was churning. And then — it might have been minutes or hours later — I startled awake to the sound of a faint murmur coming from the room just above mine, which until then had been unoccupied and silent. It didn’t seem like a conversation. It was a single voice, babbling. I couldn’t make out any words. I sat up in bed and listened more intently, and the noise stopped abruptly.
I waited awhile longer, still listening, but the house was silent. There was nothing to do but sleep. I lay back on the pillow, but my heart beat anxiously. Far down the hall, the clock struck two. Just then, I heard a sound, a different one, this time much closer. It seemed as though my bedroom door had been touched, as if fingers had brushed it as someone groped down the hallway.
“Who is it?” I said into my dark room. Nobody answered. I froze in place, too frightened to even click on the light.
Then I realized the sound might have been Copilot. He almost always slept in Mr. Rathburn’s room, but occasionally he nosed his way out and wandered the house, finding his way back to the rug in front of the living room fireplace. Of course, it must have been him, bumping against the door, trying to find a bed to sleep on. The thought calmed me a little.
Once again, the house was silent, and I felt myself drifting back to sleep. I had just started dreaming when another sound startled me awake. This time it was a laugh — low, suppressed, and deep — that seemed to be coming through the keyhole of my bedroom door. I bolted upright. The room was pitch-dark; the only light would have come in between the slats of the window blinds, but tonight there was no moon. I sat perfectly still, waiting for my eyes to adjust. Had I dreamed that laugh? Had my sleeping mind taken a distant sound — a loon’s cry, maybe? — and distorted it?
“Is somebody there?” I whispered, and heard a floorboard creak just outside my door. Then I noticed something that made my heart pound even faster — a faint aroma of sulfur. I switched on the light, crept to the door, and yanked it open. On the carpet, at the top of the stairs, I saw a match smoldering. The air was thick with smoke, but the blue billows seemed to be coming from Mr. Rathburn’s wing, on the opposite side of the house. Smoke alarms began screeching all over the house. Without thinking, I ran toward the source of the smoke. I felt my way to the last door on Mr. Rathburn’s wing and pounded on it. No answer. What if it was locked? But it wasn’t. I pushed it open.
Tongues of flame licked the ceiling inside Mr. Rathburn’s dressing room. Beyond that, not twenty feet away, practically in the middle of it all, he lay stretched out, asleep on his high four-post bed. Or maybe he was unconscious?
“Wake up! Wake up!” I screamed. He murmured and rolled over. I didn’t have a moment to waste. The heat was intense, unbearable. Flames shot out viciously, coming dangerously close to the drapes that ran around the perimeter of the room. All of Mr. Rathburn’s expensive clothes must be ruined, I thought, though that was the last thing I should have been worried about. I remembered how in grade school I’d learned to stop, drop to the floor, and crawl under the smoke, but who had time for that? I grabbed Mr. Rathburn’s arm and tried to pull him up, but he was dead weight. I needed to wake him somehow. I took a glass of water from his bedside table and splashed the water
on his face. While he sputtered, I noticed a bathroom just beyond the bed. I tore the towels off the rack and soaked them in water, then ran back to the dressing room’s open door and tossed them into the heart of the flame. In a trunk at the foot of the bed, I found a heavy blanket that I used to pound out the rest of the fire. By then, Mr. Rathburn was wide-awake. Though the smoke obscured him, I could hear him swearing violently. “What the fuck?” he said once, twice.
“There’s been a fire,” I told him. “Come on. Get up.” The smoke alarms were still shrieking all around us. I groped along the wall for a light switch and flipped it on.
“Jane? Is that you?” He didn’t seem quite alert yet.
“Yes. You have to get up right now.” My voice sounded strange, high-pitched with barely contained hysteria. “This fire wasn’t an accident. The person who set it may still be in the house.” I helped him to his feet. “But first — Maddy. I’ll be right back.”
Amber and Linda hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for word from Mr. Rathburn. I ran past, ignoring their questions, to Maddy’s room. She was awake, screaming, scared out of her wits by the smoke alarms. I scooped her up and ran. “It’s okay, everything’s okay,” I reassured her, then carried her downstairs and deposited her with an astonished-looking Linda. “Could you watch her?” I asked. “Don’t leave her alone for a second. Take her to the living room and wait for me there.” I had reservations about leaving Maddy with anyone; in my eyes they all were suspect. But I had a very strong instinct about who had started the fire, and I noticed that Brenda was nowhere to be seen. “I’ll be right back.”
Mr. Rathburn was on the phone when I reached him. He’d thrown open the windows of his room, and the smoke had begun to clear. “A false alarm,” I heard him say. “You can call back the fire truck. No, no. We’re all fine. Sorry to have bothered you.” He put the phone back into its cradle.
“Don’t you want the fire department to come and investigate?” I asked, astonished. “It was arson. I’m sure of it.” I told him about the match.
Mr. Rathburn blinked at me, his face and hands smudged with soot. He seemed to be collecting his thoughts.
“That’s all I would need,” he said finally. “The papers would pick it up, and the local news. Maybe even the national news. I’m already this character to them.” He rubbed his eyelids with the backs of his hands, spreading more soot across his face. “Is Maddy okay? Is everyone accounted for?”
“They’re all downstairs,” I told him. “Everyone except Brenda.”
He thought a moment. “Go to Maddy. Tell everyone I’m okay. You can tell them I left a lit candle in my dressing room, and my shirts caught on fire. Tell them I was meditating or something like that. Do you think you can? Lie on my behalf, I mean. I wouldn’t ask you to if it wasn’t important. Can you make it convincing?”
I nodded.
“I have to check out the third floor. I want you to send everyone back to bed. Then take Maddy to her room; get her back to sleep. Stay in there with her. And don’t leave until I come to get you.”
He went. I switched off the bedroom light and ran to retrieve Maddy, detouring on my way only to pick up the match and conceal it in my palm. The staff readily accepted my explanation of the fire. I didn’t have to try very hard to sell the story, and they seemed eager to get back to sleep. I was relieved; I’d never been a convincing liar.
Maddy, though, was full of questions. “Is Daddy okay? What’s meditation? Is the house always going to smell? Can I go see him?” I answered her as noncommittally as I could and made her lie back down. In her little pink-and-blue tiled bathroom, I flushed the match out of sight and scrubbed the soot from my face and hands. On my knees beside Maddy’s bathtub, I washed the acrid smoke out of my hair with her bubble-gum-scented shampoo. My nightgown was ruined, streaked with black smoke, but there was nothing I could do about that now. By the time I’d neatened myself up, she was snoring gently. I watched her from the white rocking chair beside her bed. A very long time passed.
Finally, there was a soft knock at Maddy’s door. I inhaled sharply. What if it wasn’t Mr. Rathburn? But then I heard his voice whispering urgently, “Jane? Jane?” I opened the door to find him looking pale and very unhappy. Then he beckoned me out into the hallway and shut the door behind me.
“Did you find out who set the fire?” I whispered.
He nodded. “It’s all taken care of. There’s nothing more to worry about.” I waited for him to say more, but he was silent.
“Who would want to burn your clothes?” I asked him. “They must have been trying to kill you.… They almost did.”
Instead of answering, he stood a minute with his arms folded, staring down at the rug. Then, he asked, in a whisper, “Did you see anything between your room and mine?”
“Just the match I told you about,” I told him. “I got rid of it.”
“Good. Did you hear anything?”
“A laugh. It seemed to come from the third floor. And then fingers brushing my door. The laugh sounded like Brenda.” Come to think of it, what had she been doing on my wing of the house? I pushed the question out of my mind for now.
“Brenda,” he repeated. “You guessed it. You’ve probably noticed that she’s peculiar. But I’ve dealt with her, so everything should be fine from now on.” He wiped some of the soot from his eyes. “Did the others believe our story? About the candle?”
“I think so,” I said. “They seemed to.”
“I’m glad it was you who came to help me. You won’t talk about this with anyone, will you?”
I promised that I wouldn’t. “But where will you sleep tonight?”
“I’m not so high and mighty that I can’t spend the night on the living room couch,” he told me. “What’s left of the night, that is.”
“Okay, then. Good night.” I turned to go.
“Wait.” He seemed surprised. “Are you really going to leave me so quickly?”
“I thought you wanted to get some sleep.”
“But not without saying good night. Not without thanking you.” He looked at me, urgency in his eyes. “Jane, you saved my life tonight.”
“It was nothing,” I told him.
“Nothing?” He brushed back his hair. “You can be a bit strange, you know that?”
I nodded. I did know.
“At least give me a hug, Jane.” He opened up his arms, and I stepped into them. “A hug between friends.” For a moment, I felt the warmth of his body and the strength of his arms clasped around me. When he released me I took a step back so I could see him better. “If anyone had to save my life, I’m glad it was you.” His eyes were softer, darker, than I’d seen them before.
“I’m glad I could help.”
“The minute I saw you, I knew you were different. That you’d do me good in some way. I knew…” — he paused — “I knew we’d be friends.”
My heart skipped a beat. Unsure of what I should do or say, I took another step back. “Well. Good night, Mr. Rathburn.”
“Even now, you won’t call me Nico?” A flicker of an emotion I couldn’t identify crossed his face, but then he surprised me by laughing. “Go get some sleep, Jane.”
When I was back in bed, my thoughts kept racing. One moment I was swept aloft by a wave of happiness, the next grabbed by an undertow of foreboding. What new and strange events would the next day bring? I could barely shut my eyes for wondering.
CHAPTER 8
In the morning, I drove Maddy to a playdate across town, but even though I more or less had the day off, I returned straight home to Thornfield Park, unsure what to do next. I hoped to see Mr. Rathburn, but I didn’t know what I should say to him or how I should act, especially after what had happened the night before. And I worried that Lucia and the others would ask me questions about my part in the postfire tumult. What would I say to them? I’d never had such a big secret to keep before. I decided that I would answer their questions — and Maddy’s — simply, in as few words as
possible. With Maddy, this tactic worked well. She seemed satisfied with the explanation I had given her, and more than anything else she was excited because she’d been up in the middle of the night.
As it turned out, I didn’t run into Mr. Rathburn that morning. He had gotten up unusually early and had already gone out somewhere. Something unsettling happened with the others, though. I got back to the house, punched in the security code, hung the car key on its hook, and slipped into the kitchen for coffee and toast. There I bumped into Lucia, who looked a bit frazzled, her reading glasses pushed back absently on her head. “I hear you had some excitement here last night,” she said.
“Yes. There was a fire.”
She poured herself a mug of coffee, stirred in a packet of Sweet’n Low, and headed back to her office, saying over her shoulder, “I know. Who do you think has to order a whole new wardrobe for Nico and call in the carpet cleaners?”
Did I detect blame in her voice? But what sense would that have made?
As for Amber and Linda, neither said hello to me when I passed by the laundry room, where they were folding towels. They had been chatting, as usual, but when they saw me, they stopped talking. It was almost as though they suspected me of something. Most startling of all was the moment, midmorning, when I returned to the kitchen with my coffee cup and happened to see, as I walked by the laundry room, Brenda loading clothes into the washer.
Our eyes met. I had thought Mr. Rathburn fired her early that morning, but there she was: her eyes a bit puffy, her plain, broad face shiny as if it had been vigorously scrubbed, her dull hair pulled tightly back. She looked the way she always did, not the least bit guilty. “Good morning, Miss Jane,” she said in her usual matter-of-fact way, and poured blue laundry detergent into a measuring cup.
This was almost more than I could take. “Good morning, Brenda,” I said. “Last night was something else, wasn’t it?”
“Last night?” Her tone was casual. “You mean the fire in Nico’s dressing room?”
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