“I want to show you the netsuke collection first of all this morning,” he told me. “You must have something to occupy your time, and I think I may be able to involve you in this work—if you’re willing.”
I brightened a little. I was more than willing to make any sort of plan that would keep me busy. One of the things I’d been dreading was too much idle time. I wanted to develop a purpose, a direction—something to engage my full and enthusiastic attention. When I’d been with Ysobel and Ian, there had always been so much to do that life progressed at a breathless pace. Perhaps I hadn’t been using me fully then, but now that they were gone, I seemed to be drifting and becalmed.
On the other hand, I knew all about the wives of wealthy men, who engaged fervently in work for charity, for one cause or another. All laudable enough as far as it went, but not for me. I wanted something that would use whatever talents and abilities I might have.
After breakfast, Ross needed to confer with Jarrett Nichols for a half hour or so, and I said I’d go for a walk.
“Just stay away from the cottages,” he directed. “We like to give them privacy, as we enjoy ours.”
I was glad enough to get off by myself for a little while. Ross’s company still left me uneasy this morning, though more and more I was trying to be reasonable about last night. The sick conclusion I’d jumped to must be wrong. It had to be. If it were true, the consequences to me would be more devastating than I knew how to face.
Outdoors, I gulped deep breaths of salty, invigorating air as I walked along. I stayed away from the beach this morning, since it would remind me of last night. Besides, there were other parts of the grounds that I wanted to explore.
Most of the plantings seemed old and well established, so Allegra must have had a hand in them, as she had in all else about Poinciana. Best of all I liked the great spreading tree that Ross had pointed out to me as a poinciana. Flowers came before the foliage, and I could see pink buds starting along graceful gray branches. Before long it would glow with red blossoms, its other name being the flame tree.
Paths of ground shell wound along and I followed them at random. Rounding a bed of tall Spanish flag, I found that my circling path had taken me after all in the direction of the cottages. I stopped to look toward them for a moment before turning back. Most were painted a clean white, with red-tiled roofs for contrast, and they were not set too close together. One, in particular, was remote from the others, and unlike the rest, its color was pale pink. Shutters had been the style in the day when these structures were built, and all the shutters on the pink cottage were closed, so perhaps it was unoccupied.
I wondered who had lived in this rather special little house that was set apart from the others. Palmetto, where Jarrett and his son lived, was closest to the house, while this was the farthest one of all. In the distance I could hear the sound of a riding mower being driven by one of the yardmen, but around the cottages no one moved. Probably the occupants were all busy with their duties by this time. Then, as I watched, the door of the pink cottage opened and a woman came out, to start along the shell path toward me.
Sheltered as I was by the flower bed, I hadn’t been seen, and I stood my ground, watching her. She was an arresting figure, moving with an authority and assurance that would make her notable anywhere. Though she was well into middle age, her hair was carefully brown, and she had pulled it into a knob on top of her head in a style that was fashionable, but not especially flattering. Though I suspected that wouldn’t matter to this particular woman. Her very wearing of the style gave it a certain elegance. Her well-cut jacket, vest, and trousers were of a deep lime color. She was anything but the jeans type.
As she came closer, she glanced in my direction, saw me, but did not slow her steps. Once, she must have been a strikingly beautiful woman, and she was still handsome, with eyes of an odd, dark violet, strongly carved features, and a skin that had suffered from too much sun.
“Good morning,” I said as she came closer. “I’m Sharon—”
“I know who you are,” she said with a touch of hauteur. “Good morning.” And she walked straight past me without troubling to introduce herself.
I watched in surprise as she strode off with a long, free swing that took her rapidly away from the direction of the house. In a few moments she disappeared around a grove of live oak, and didn’t come into view again. What lay over in that area, I had no idea, but there was no time to explore. I suspected that this woman was not one of Ross’s employees. Her air of authority was too evident; even her manner of dressing wouldn’t have been suitable for someone coming to work around a house or office. My curiosity was thoroughly aroused and I would have to find out who she was. But not right now. A glance at my watch told me I’d better get back to meet Ross.
On the way, Keith Nichols crossed my path, school-books under one arm, red hair slicked neatly down.
“Hello,” I said. “Where do you go to school, and how do you get there?”
He grinned at me in friendly fashion, his red hair shining in the sun. “Albert takes me when he’s not busy. There’s always somebody around to drive me. I go to Palm Beach Day School.”
Perhaps Keith Nichols might give me an answer to what had been puzzling me.
“Can you tell me who lives in the pink cottage that is farthest from the others?” I asked as he fell into step beside me.
“That’s Coral Cottage,” he said, but his eyes evaded mine. “She stays there. But I’m not supposed to talk about her. Not ever. Mr. Logan says so.” He broke away from me and ran off toward the huge garage that housed the cars of Poinciana.
I walked on thoughtfully, and let myself in a side door. Another mystery! Poinciana seemed full of them. Now, more than ever, I wanted to learn the identity of that remarkable-looking woman. Yet at the same time I smiled and said to myself, “Mrs. Bluebeard, be careful.” For some reason—perhaps because of Keith’s words—I knew I wasn’t going to ask Ross who she was.
The room in which Ross kept his netsuke collection had been his mother’s morning room. It was a more intimate room than some, but still large enough so that shelves and cabinets didn’t seem to crowd it. Again, it was on the lake side, with long French doors that opened upon a little patio surrounded by potted plants. The desk at which Allegra had once worked on her plans for each day was now Ross’s, and manuscript papers were stacked upon it, presided over by a portable typewriter.
But what caught my attention, what drew me most were the rows of shelves with their marvelous display of Japanese Satsuma and cloisonné, ivory and lacquer. I stood open-mouthed until Ross came to me, pleased at my reaction.
“Yes, there are some remarkable pieces here. And I found every one of them myself. The rest of the house belongs to my parents, but these things are mine.”
I’d not heard such pride in his voice before, and I understood something new about Ross that gave me an unexpected feeling of tenderness. Both Allegra and Charles Maynard Logan must have been overpowering figures, and Ross had grown up in their shadow. So of course he would prize especially something he had created, brought together out of his own knowledge and taste. Some of my resistance toward him began to fade.
He had brought a stack of mail from his office to sort through, and he set the pile down on the desk. There were several invitations, and the office phones had already been ringing with calls from old friends, and with requests for interviews with both of us. But Ross was postponing all that for the moment, and letting Jarrett, with Myra’s assistance, handle anything that seemed urgent. Ross’s own secretary wasn’t due back from his holiday for several weeks, and Ross seemed to enjoy the freedom of being without him. Now his collection could have his full attention, and he wanted me to learn all about it.
“First,” he told me, “I’d like you to familiarize yourself with the netsuke pieces. There are over three hundred items on those shelves at the far end of the room, and they’ve never been properly catalogued. Perhaps that’s one job you can d
o for me, if you’d like. Of course, I have records of purchase of everything in the collection, but they should be numbered and identified in one journal. My manuscript is a narrative account and will cover some of them. I’ll want you to read what I’ve written and look carefully at Gretchen’s photographs.”
All of which I was happy and eager to do. At Ross’s direction I started at the far end of the room, where shelves covered the wall from waist height up, with cabinet doors below. Ross sat at the desk and began to work on his papers.
Fatefully—because I didn’t know then the role she would play in all our lives—the first netsuke I picked up was carved of pale pink coral, and represented a tiny mermaid, sleeping sweetly with her hands clasped under one cheek, and her tail curled up to shield her body. Again, there was the light touch of humor, of whimsy, lending reality to the fantasy. The mermaid was so exquisitely rendered in every tiniest detail that it seemed as though she might open her eyes at any moment and look up at me.
“How beautiful!” I said. “She’s absolutely exquisite!”
“They’re all exquisite,” Ross agreed, sounding faintly impatient at my interruption. However, he did look at the tiny object on my palm and his tone changed. “Oh—the Sleeping Mermaid. That was my mother’s favorite of the entire collection. Sometimes she used to carry it up to the tower with her. For a ‘visit,’ she used to say—so the mermaid could see her home in the ocean. Of course, I never approved of any of the collection’s being taken out of this room. We can’t have them scattered about the house. They’re always here to be admired and enjoyed, but let’s keep them here.”
I hadn’t proposed keeping them anywhere else, except for my frogs, but I was glad that Allegra had been capable of her own little conceit about the mermaid.
As I went on along the shelves, pausing to pick up a piece now and then, I came upon one that caught my interest especially. It was hardly more than two inches long—the crouching figure of a man in a pointed straw hat and grass cape, with every blade of straw visible in the carving. His head was turned so that he looked backward watchfully, his large eyes rolled, his mouth sly. Again I was enchanted.
Ross saw my face and relented to come and stand beside me.
“Oh, all right. I’d better introduce you—or at least make a start. They won’t mean much to you otherwise. That little fellow is probably a ronin disguised as a farmer. You can just glimpse the sword hidden beneath his body. Do you know about the ronin?”
I remembered them from my reading and nodded. A ronin was a masterless samurai turned robber, and this one was undoubtedly waiting to ambush some helpless passerby.
“He was carved from a whale tooth,” Ross pointed out. “Unsigned, as so many of the netsuke are, unfortunately, because, as you know, so humble an art was thought not worth signing.”
He pointed out others among his favorites. A Lion Dancer in a gold lacquer kimono, no more than an inch and a half in height—a No dancer wearing the mask for the lion dance. This one was signed with characters that Ross translated as the Koma Bunsai. Next Ross pointed out a snail carved of wood, with the shell and soft part of the body clearly distinguished by the texture of the carving. The body actually looked damp and shiny, in contrast to the shell.
I was particularly taken by the Fox Priest—a taller figure than most, being nearly four inches. The pointed fox head and feet contrasted with human hands and the body of a man dressed in a flowing kimono. Often the figures illustrated some legend, and these, Ross said, I must learn from books he would give me to read.
He had just picked up a tiny temple dog when Jarrett Nichols looked in the door.
“Good morning. Ross, there’s a Japanese friend of yours on the phone from New York, if you’d like to talk to him. A Mr. Yakata.”
“I’ll take the call in my office,” Ross said, and went out of the room.
Jarrett looked around. “So he’s breaking you in?”
Again I seemed to hear a hint of derision in his words, and I bristled inwardly. “There’s so much to see that I hardly know where to begin. Ross wants me to learn about the collection so that I can help catalogue it.”
“That should keep you busy.”
I didn’t like his tone, and I changed the subject. “I want to learn about Allegra too. She was Poinciana and her mark is on everything in the house. Are there any pictures of her when she was young?”
Jarrett opened a cabinet door beneath a netsuke shelf. “Those are Allegra Logan’s scrapbooks. She kept them faithfully over the years.” He pulled out a fat, leather-bound volume and laid it on the desk, turning its pages. “There you are. That’s a color photo of the famous Sargent portrait that hangs in the Metropolitan.”
The period was early in the century and she wore an evening dress of summery blue, cut with a round neck that showed her beautiful throat. No jewels were needed to add to such shining beauty. Though perhaps not beauty in a conventional sense. Not prettiness. One became aware of an overpowering strength of personality that attracted and held. She wore her dark hair puffed over her forehead and there was an eagerness for life in the eyes that looked out at the world. Her chin still wore the soft curves of a very young woman, and there was a certain willfulness about the mouth that hinted of a lady accustomed to having her own way. The only ornament in the painting was the rose she held in her hand.
“Did you know her?” I asked.
“Not until she was in her late seventies. She was the one who picked me out of law school and told Ross he could use me. A marvelous lady—always.”
“She interests me even more than the netsuke,” I confessed. “Everything she was is stamped somewhere in this house, and I want to learn about her, about what she was like and what she wanted. Ross feels that some restoring should be done, but I hope he’ll keep the house the way she planned it.”
Jarrett’s look softened a little. “Good for you. I was afraid you’d want to bring everything up to date.”
“Of course not! I wish I could have known her—Allegra Logan.”
“You’d better get acquainted with the netsuke first,” Jarrett said curtly.
“Oh, I shall. It’s an exciting art. And of course it must be recorded, preserved. But I’ve already studied Japanese art a bit and I’m used to it. It’s not alive—not any more.”
“And you think Poinciana is?”
I warmed to the subject. “Of course! After all, it’s the creation of a woman who is still close to us in time. Lives have been lived here. People have died and been born and suffered and laughed—as it is with any old house.”
“It belongs to the past, nevertheless,” Jarrett said. “A museum piece, and I hope it will be cared for as such.”
“I’m not so sure of that. From the little I’ve seen, the present is shaking its walls right now. But I expect they’ve withstood storms before this.”
He knew what I meant. “Yes—Gretchen and Vasily. Sometimes Gretchen reminds me of her grandmother. The way she digs in and won’t be budged, once she has an idea between her teeth. Of course, that’s Ross too. You’ll need to understand that.”
The faint resentment toward this man that I had felt before rose in me again. He had no right to tell me about my husband. As though I were a stranger whom he needed to instruct. He presumed far too much.
Again I changed topics with an abruptness that I hoped would show him my displeasure. “This morning when I went for a walk, I saw a woman coming from the direction of the pink cottage that is farthest away. Quite a striking woman. Perhaps in her fifties. With her hair in a knot on top of her head, and very well dressed. I tried to introduce myself, but she barely acknowledged me and hurried off right away. Rather rudely, I thought. Do you know who she could have been?”
Jarrett sighed. “I’m afraid I do. That must have been Brett Inness, Gretchen’s mother. I haven’t told Ross yet, since he has enough problems on his hands with Vasily. Brett has been around regularly, and Gretchen has given her a key to the north gate so she can co
me and go as she pleases. The guards have been told not to interfere with her. If Ross stops this, there will be an explosion from Gretchen. But he must be told. He won’t want her around.”
I felt decidedly upset. I hadn’t expected a former wife of Ross’s to have such easy access to Poinciana—especially when this was a woman he seemed to detest.
“I’ve talked to your son a couple of times, and I liked him very much. This morning he told me that the woman I saw lives in the pink cottage. He called it Coral Cottage.”
Jarrett’s answer was firm. “You must have misunderstood him. Of course she doesn’t live there. She must have been visiting, that’s all.”
I let the matter go, and sat down on the floor before the shelf of scrapbooks, with the one he’d opened for me on my lap.
Jarrett said, “I’ll see you later,” and went out of the room.
Relieved to be alone, I began to turn the pages. There were numerous news clippings of elaborate affairs held at Poinciana, and I found I could pick Allegra out of any group in which she had been photographed. Even as styles changed, she had kept that puff of hair above her forehead—her own distinctive hairdo—and she was always the most imposing woman around, for all that she hadn’t been very tall. Seen alone, she looked tall because of the proud way she held her head, her shoulders, and I could well imagine that she had made a formidable impression.
One page showed the Logan yacht, in which she had been sailing the Mediterranean, visiting the Isle of Rhodes. There was a delightful picture of her in the ruins of Lindos, where I had been long ago with Ysobel and Ian on one of those rare times when they had taken me with them on a holiday. Allegra looked almost Grecian herself in her flowing scarves. Of course the yacht, bought for her by Charlie Logan, had been called Allegra.
So engrossed was I in these accounts of Ross’s mother that I didn’t hear his return.
“I thought you’d be going through the netsuke,” he said. “Not mooning over dead history.”
He bent to take the scrapbook from my knees and returned it to its place on the shelf. Once more, a hint of resentment sparked in me, but I managed to suppress it.
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