A little to her surprise, Aunt Letty came down for breakfast, looking somewhat subdued.
“I’m sorry you were upset about my riding,” Camilla said.
Letty smiled at her with forced brightness. “You mustn’t let my foolish fears spoil your plans. This will be a good day for riding—a safe day.” She paused to tell Grace she would have just a little toast and a cup of coffee.
“What do you mean—a safe day?” Camilla asked.
“It’s not storming,” Letty said. “You must never go riding in a storm.”
Clearly she was thinking of the horse that had thrown her sister—the horse that had been afraid of thunderstorms. If the idea had become an obsession with Letty, there was no point in trying to argue her out of the notion.
“I love storms,” Camilla said. “I even like to be out in them. But I don’t think I’d deliberately go riding in a thunderstorm, if that’s what you mean.”
Letty was staring at her with a wide, misty gaze. “You’re so much like your mother. I hope you haven’t an affinity for thunderstorms, as your mother had.”
The fey quality was evident in Letty again this morning. Her delicate, fine-skinned face had a faraway look about it, as if she moved in wreaths of mist in spite of the sunlight. It might be just as well to call her back to more earthly considerations, Camilla thought, and asked about her garden.
“The nasturtiums are thriving this year,” Letty said, rising readily to the bait. “Perhaps they’re not really herbs, but I love the way they brighten the garden all summer long. In the fall I can use the seeds for pickling. And have you seen my honeywort? The yellow buds are already blooming, though they never really open, you know. Not that it matters, when the leaves are so shining and beautiful.”
When she walked about her garden, she was shining and beautiful herself, Camilla thought. One forgot the twisted arm, the ugly scar hidden by her sleeve.
When breakfast was over, Camilla went upstairs to dress for her ride. She put on her mother’s habit and boots. The gray top hat with its floating streamers of veiling was as fetching as ever, and she liked the look of it on her dark hair. When she was ready, she opened a drawer and took out the little black riding crop, with its polished silver head. This would make the final perfect touch. Today she would carry it when she went riding, just as her mother had once done.
She went into the hall, to find Hortense at the top of the stairs, filling the cinnabar stair lamp with oil. She had drawn the great bowl down on its pulley, and Camilla waited until the lamp had been filled and returned to place beneath the carved canopy high over the stairwell. Hortense heard her and turned, her greenish eyes venomous this morning.
When Camilla would have passed her to go downstairs, Hortense put out an arresting hand. “I suppose you heard Letty playing her harp last night?” she asked in a whisper.
“I heard her,” Camilla said.
“Hush! She’s waiting for you at the foot of the stairs. I don’t want her to hear. I hope you realize that the harp playing was your fault. She only plays at night when she’s unhappy and upset. You’ve treated her with a complete lack of consideration.”
Hortense was hardly the one to accuse others of a lack of consideration, but Camilla did not point out the fact as she started downstairs. And this was not the time to mention the sleepwalking.
“Aunt Letty and I had breakfast together,” Camilla said. “She seemed quite all right then.”
“We can expect more sleepwalking,” Hortense persisted. “That will be your doing too.”
“I’m sorry,” Camilla said and would have continued on her way, if Hortense had not suddenly seen the riding crop in her hands.
“Where did you get that?” she demanded.
Before Camilla could answer, or knew what she intended, Hortense snatched at the crop. She only succeeded in knocking it out of Camilla’s hand, and it went over the banister to fall with a clatter to the floor below. Hortense looked after it in dismay for a moment, then shrugged and went back to her own room.
Camilla ran down the stairs to find that Letty had picked up the crop and was holding it as she watched Camilla descend. She stood tapping the ragged end of the leather thong across her palm in a nervous gesture.
“You look lovely,” she said. “Have a wonderful ride, dear. I’m sure everything will be fine this morning.”
“Thank you, Aunt Letty,” Camilla said, and held out her hand for the crop.
Letty did not give it up. “Will you leave this with me, please? I’d rather you didn’t carry it, dear.”
“But—why not?” Camilla asked.
“Perhaps—” Letty hesitated, “—perhaps I’m more sentimental about this little riding crop than I am about the other things. Leave it with me, Camilla.”
Puzzled though she was, Camilla gave in. Letty held the door open, and Camilla went out into the bright morning.
“Have a nice ride,” Letty repeated softly, and closed the door behind her.
Moved by an increasing sense of uneasiness, Camilla stood on the steps, waiting for Ross. She heard the neighing of a horse, and a moment later he appeared, coming up from the river path and around the house, riding a roan mare and leading Diamond, saddled and bridled. Nora’s favorite mount was a dappled gray—a handsome, high-stepping creature, with a white diamond blaze on his forehead.
“I hope you can manage this fellow,” Ross said. “Grays are supposed to be unsuitable mounts for ladies because their dispositions are unstable. Though I’m not sure I hold with the legend. Nora handles him beautifully.”
His words sounded like a challenge, and Camilla felt quite willing to pick it up. She fed Diamond a lump of sugar, stroked his nose and talked to him for a few moments. He seemed to accept her readily enough, and from the mounting block she put her left foot into the stirrup, turning her body so that she went lightly up to hook her right knee over the horn of the sidesaddle. Diamond took a skittish step or two and then, sensing firmness in her hands, did as she wished him to. She smiled at Ross from the saddle, feeling pleased and triumphant.
“Where would you like to ride, Miss King?” he inquired formally, holding to the role of one who had been given a task to perform and meant to carry it out correctly to the letter.
Camilla turned Diamond away from the river, her smile stiffening. “Let’s go up Thunder Mountain. I’ve been wanting to get to the top. Do you know the way?”
“Of course.” He went ahead along the drive toward the road, accepting the suggestion as an order which gave him no choice.
She touched Diamond with her heel to catch up, and they rode out side by side between the stone lions that marked the gate in the great privet hedge.
The air was brilliantly clear, with a bright blue sky overhead, but not too warm for comfort. Camilla loved being on a horse again. This high seat above the world, with the feeling of Diamond’s smooth-flowing strength beneath her, gave her a heady sense of power.
They overtook an elderly farmer driving a cartload of vegetables to market, and he looked up at them. For an instant he gave Camilla a shocked stare and then touched a finger to his forelock in recognition. Camilla almost laughed out loud in delight as they rode past. Surely he remembered Althea Judd, and he must have been carried back through the years at the sight of her daughter.
She urged Diamond into a canter, and Ross kept pace with her, though now he rode a tail’s length behind, still acting the role of groom. He did not take the lead again until they neared the opening to a narrow road up the mountain, when he called to her and trotted ahead.
SEVENTEEN
They went single file beneath the trees, winding upward at a gradual pace. Riding along with branches interlacing just above her head, and the river, blue as the sky, sometimes glimpsed below, she could almost forget Ross in sheer physical happiness.
Once he turned his head and spoke to her over his shoulder. “Here’s something for you to see.”
She followed him into the wide scar of an ope
n place which had once been cleared through the woods. It dropped away in a steep slope of mountain to a rushing stream below. The stretch was overgrown with scrub now, and along the edges of the scar mountain laurel glowed in the bright pink and white blooming of spring.
Ross reined in the mare as Camilla drew up beside him. “When your grandfather was young and worked in lumber, this was a pitching place,” he said.
“Pitching place?” Camilla repeated the unfamiliar term.
“They used to snake the logs down the old road and get them started on this slope, where they could pitch them to the stream below and send them down to the river.”
Camilla sat very still in the saddle, breathing the spicy scent of the woods about her, listening to the noisy voice of the stream. She could almost see Orrin Judd as he must have been in the strength of his youth—a young man who belonged to the forests and the hills, reveling in this outdoor work.
“Let’s go on,” Ross said abruptly.
The path wound back into the woods behind the rocky eminence of the mountain, and the climb grew steeper. When they emerged suddenly upon an open space at the top, Camilla had not realized they were so high. She rode eagerly toward the stony head of the mountain, where it towered above the river, dropping steeply away in a face of rocky cliff.
Ross put a hand on Diamond’s bridle. “Not too near the edge,” he warned. “Sometimes he takes notions into his head.”
“I want to stand near the edge,” Camilla said, and she slipped out of the saddle without waiting for Ross’s help, and let him take the reins from her. While he walked the horses back toward the trees to tether them, she climbed a slope of rock and sat down on a boulder near the very lip of the cliff.
Up here the wind blew strong and free, whipping out the streamers of her gray veil. Below and a little to the north lay the village, its white church steeple like a toy tower on a child’s house of blocks. Across the river the unknown town opposite seemed a world away and beyond it rolled the hills clear to the blue haze of New England mountains. When she turned toward the north she could see the outline of the Catskills far away on her left. At her feet the sheer face of the cliff dropped toward the river.
“Can we see Thunder Heights from here?” she asked Ross as he came to the foot of the rocky incline where she stood.
He shook his head. “Not from this spot. Only the face of the cliff can be seen from below. The trees jut out lower down to hide everything else.”
“It must have been near here that my mother was thrown from her horse,” Camilla said softly.
“This was the place,” Ross admitted, and said nothing more.
He climbed up to stand at the edge of the precipice, looking over the dizzy drop to the river. She could study him now, as she had done that day on the river boat, before she had ever spoken to him. He had seemed less remote from her then than he did today.
Suddenly he pointed. “Do you see the long white boat coming down from Albany? That’s the Mary Powell. She’s not young anymore, but she’s still queen of the river boats. Listen—you can hear her whistle.”
A clear, silvery sound reached them from the river, and Camilla watched the white boat move past their prominence, gliding smoothly as a queen of swans.
“I worked aboard her once when I was a boy,” Ross said. “She always seems like a member of my family. It will be a sad day when they take her off the river.”
“You love the river, don’t you?” Camilla watched his face, forgetting the boat.
“I belong to the river,” he said simply. His eyes followed the Mary Powell as she disappeared around a bend. “Do you see the place downriver where opposite banks seem to reach out to each other?”
Camilla looked in the direction of his pointing finger. “Yes, I see it.”
“That’s where your grandfather meant to build his bridge,” Ross said. “When he was keen about it in the beginning.”
The bridge again. As always it stood between them, as if it were indeed a steel barrier already built. But she did not want to bicker today.
“Why do you care so much about that bridge?” she asked.
He did not answer her directly. “When I was a little boy my father took me on a trip to see Niagara Falls. But it wasn’t the falls I looked at, once I was there. It was the railroad bridge John Roebling had built across the gorge. I thought it the most miraculous and beautiful thing I’d ever seen. While I stood there staring with all my eyes, a locomotive pulled a train of freight cars across the span and it stood under all the immense weight without a quiver. And yet to me it looked as fine as though it were strung of cobwebs, instead of great suspension wires. I fell in love with a bridge that day, and it’s a love I’ve never gotten over. I suppose that’s something no woman could ever understand.”
She was beginning to understand a little as she listened to him and watched the light that had come into his face. She had not dreamed that he felt like this.
“I grew up knowing I would build bridges someday,” he went on. “Little bridges, at first—and one day a big one. With a design and innovations of my own. Of course John Roebling made it easier for all bridge engineers when he invented the wire rope that strings the great suspension bridges. He did what had never been done before, and we’ve been using his method of making wire cables ever since. His methods of anchorage too. He did a lot for bridge-building long before he designed his masterpiece—the Brooklyn Bridge.”
“My grandfather knew how you felt about all this?” Camilla asked.
“Of course. That’s why I care so much about a bridge here across the Hudson—because he meant to give me the job of building it. When I was ready. He set me at smaller projects in the meantime—I’ve one good-sized bridge to my credit upstate, but it’s not across the Hudson. With this bridge behind me, I’d be ready to build bridges anywhere. I’ve even built a working model here in these hills. You’ll see it in the woods up there if you go back a little way. I’ve tried some innovations of my own there. With workmen to help me, of course. It’s a real bridge, though small.”
Camilla listened in growing surprise. Why hadn’t he told her these things in the beginning? Why had he always presented the project of the bridge as a business proposition alone?
“Those designs you showed me,” she said, “—are they of your making?”
“They are,” he answered curtly. “But I shouldn’t have expected you to understand them, or have the vision your grandfather had.”
“Tell me something else,” she went on. “In what way did you want Grandfather to change his will? What was the thing you wanted in opposition to what Hortense wanted?”
His tone was cool as he answered her. “I wanted to see everything left in a trust, where the family couldn’t get their hands on the money and tear down everything he’d built.”
“With you as executor?”
Anger flashed in his eyes. “That wouldn’t be a job to my taste. There were men in New York he could have chosen. That way perhaps the building of the bridge would have been assured, and the continuation of the construction empire he had built. When he wanted to leave something to me, I told him I’d not accept it. I wanted only this, and I might have won him over if he hadn’t begun to think sentimentally of his lost granddaughter.”
“I see,” she said soberly. “I won’t oppose you any longer. Build your bridge. Do as you like about it.”
He stepped down from the rock with a violent movement, as if he wanted solid ground beneath his feet. Anger blazed through him.
“Do you know why I’m going down to New York as soon as possible?”
She could only stare at him, seeing no reason for this sudden anger.
“I’m going to find a job of the sort that I can stomach,” he told her. “I’ve had enough of Thunder Heights and working for women. I’ll be back to wind up my work here. Then I want to get away.”
She scrambled down from the rock a little awkwardly in her boots. “But why do you want to leave when I�
��ve just said you can build your bridge? Build a dozen bridges, if you like!”
He looked as if he wanted to shake her. “Do you think the building of bridges is something you can toss out as a sort of largess? ‘Build a bridge, if you like. Build a dozen bridges!’ Because you have the money to pay for them? As if a bridge were a toy! As if you could buy me with a bridge. Because I was foolish enough to—” He broke off and walked back to the horses with a long angry stride, leaving her to follow if she pleased.
What had he been going to say? Because he had been foolish enough to kiss her? She was suddenly angry herself. When he cupped his hands to help her into the saddle, she accepted his touch icily, but she liked it no better than he liked touching her.
Diamond started at the flick of her heel and took off in a dash for the woods. She turned him in the direction of home as they reached the path, but she did not look back to see whether or not Ross Granger was following. She could give Diamond his head now, since he knew the way, and she kept well in advance of her companion. Sometimes she heard the mare’s hoofs on the trail just behind, but not once did she turn her head.
Diamond disliked taking the turn to the Judd house, and Ross went past her on the driveway. He dismounted first and came to help her from the saddle. She dropped down into his arms, and for an instant she was as close to him as she had been that day beneath the beech tree. Her heart thudded wildly, but he let her go and stepped back as if he disliked all contact with her. She ran up the steps and beat a tattoo with the knocker on the front door. He was gone before Grace came to let her in, and Camilla walked into the house feeling keyed to a furious pitch.
Hortense came out of her room as she climbed the stairs.
“I see you’ve broken no bones,” she said.
Camilla went by her without a word, not wanting to betray the intensity of feeling that shook her.
Hortense spoke to her retreating back. “I was in the village this morning, and Mr. Berton at the livery stable tells me he has a bay mare for sale.”
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