The Ebony Swan

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  Alex winced as she always did when Susan referred to Juan Gabriel as her grandfather. She didn’t want to think about the swan, but Theresa must be confronted. She took too much upon herself.

  “Why did you give it to Hallie, Theresa?” she asked.

  Theresa shrugged. “I didn’t want to see you upset all over again by that ugly carving. I remember when Juan Gabriel showed it to you. Later you asked me if I knew anything about it.”

  “Do you remember what you said?” Alex asked.

  “I’ve forgotten. Anyway, I was too young to have much sense.”

  She would not repeat what Theresa had said—not with Susan listening—though she remembered very well. Theresa, looking almost as sly as the swan, had suggested that this was the way Juan Gabriel must really have seen the inner Alex Montoro. She had been stunned by Theresa’s words, even though Juan Gabriel himself had explained the source of his jealousy and it had all been forgiven. As Theresa said, she was older now, and a bit more considerate.

  Though her legs no longer wanted to obey her, Alex walked into the living room and sat down beside the telephone. She spoke to Theresa and Peter with an assurance she didn’t feel. “I will do whatever you want after I’ve called Tangier Island. I mean to take Susan there tomorrow, if Emily will have us.”

  “Why?” Theresa demanded. “Why must you go to Tangier?”

  “That is my affair,” Alex said. “Now I’d like to be alone.”

  Theresa looked as though she might object, but Peter led her firmly out to the kitchen.

  Gracie passed them in the hall and looked in on Alex. “You doing all right, Miss Alex?”

  Gracie was the one person Alex felt totally comfortable with at the moment. Probably Gracie knew her better than anyone else alive, and she could keep her own counsel. Alex had never been sure how much she might know or have guessed about the past, and it had never mattered. They had been young together, and a bond of affection and loyalty existed between them.

  “I’m fine, Gracie. Thank you for—everything.”

  Gracie’s smile was warm and understanding as she went away.

  For a moment longer Alex sat with her hand on the telephone. What excuse was she to give Emily for this urgency she felt? How could she possibly pretend that this was a casual visit?

  However, when Emily answered the phone she seemed to take it for granted that since John had wished this, of course they must please him, if it was possible.

  “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” Emily said. “We’ve worried about you, Alex. Of course you must come tomorrow. Fred Parks is here on a visit and has his plane with him. He’ll be around for a few days. I’m sure he will fly over to pick you up. When would you like him to be there?”

  Getting to the island wasn’t easy, so this was a good solution. “Would ten o’clock in the morning be all right? I’ll ask Peter Macklin to drive us over the bridge to the airport.”

  “That should be fine. If there’s any hitch, I’ll call you. We’re looking forward to seeing you and Susan on our island, Alex.”

  Our island, she had said. And of course that was the way Emily Gower would feel about the place after living there with John for all these years.

  Alex was about to hang up, when Emily continued, and Alex heard the change in her voice.

  “You really can’t postpone this any longer, Alex. The air needs to be cleared for all of us—while Susan is here. We’ll be looking for you, so please don’t cancel again. Good-bye for now.”

  Alex sat with the phone in her hand, as shocked as though an electric current had touched her. Emily’s words could mean only one thing. At some time or other John must have told her. But Alex had always felt that what had existed between her and John had belonged in a secret compartment of time. All that young love they had shared! If Emily knew, the enchantment was tarnished, and she could hardly endure such a thought, however foolish she might be.

  But she couldn’t think about any of this now, and she called for Theresa to come and help her to bed. She wanted only to rest and forget all the disturbing elements of the day. Among them the disappearance from Susan’s room of the ebony swan. She hated to think of it in Hallie’s hands—on the Townsend mantel for everyone to see. She had dismissed this to Susan, but it was there at the back of her mind—a humiliation, because Juan Gabriel had chosen to carve her face as sly and wicked—evil.

  11

  For the first time since Susan had come to her grandmother’s house, the stairs seemed steep and difficult to climb. For her these were haunted stairs, and she wanted only to be up them quickly and safely—in her room with the door closed. Whatever was happening to Alex seemed too distant at the moment for her to concentrate on. Only Peter filled her mind.

  When she reached the tower room she sat down and closed her eyes, reliving those moments with Peter when he had come so close to kissing her. Now she knew why he had drawn back and removed himself from anything that might have developed between them. On the way to find Alex, he had managed his explanation with a gentleness that brought tears to her eyes, but which left her with no way to tell him how strongly she felt about him or how much she opposed what he planned to do.

  As soon as possible, he’d told her, he was going away. He planned to move across Virginia and open a practice in a new place. Perhaps some country town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge where a doctor was needed. There were plenty of those, and perhaps he could make a difference.

  “It’s better for me to start over in a new place,” he said.

  “Just leave and let a murderer go free?” Susan said indignantly.

  “I don’t know who caused Marilyn’s death. I wish I did, but I don’t think that person will murder again. It wasn’t that sort of crime.”

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  He’d dismissed that. “Even though I was cleared, there will always be some doubt—whisperings. I don’t want to live with that, and I won’t draw anyone else into it.” She sensed a steely resolve in him, and even though she longed to say that she would want to be a part of anything that faced him, she did not dare. His moment of deliberate withdrawal on the ferry had indicated the finality of his decision. If he had felt as she did, perhaps he would never have chosen this course.

  There was nothing left to say. An uncomfortable silence remained between them until they reached Windmill Point. There they found Alex in a strangely withdrawn state, in which she would tell them nothing. Alex had asked Susan to drive her home, and it had been a relief to be away from Peter for a little while. She was glad for the chance to be quiet, for she meant to betray nothing. Only a sharp look now and then from her grandmother suggested that she wasn’t altogether successful.

  When Alex suddenly spoke, it startled her. “Don’t cry over him, Susan. You’ll go on with your life to something better. Peter has his own wounds to deal with.”

  What could anyone as old as Alexandrina Montoro know about love, Susan wondered? Young love, first love! Even though she could never admit it to him, Peter had always been her first love, even though she’d been such a small girl when she had first known him. Alex was far too removed in years from what her granddaughter was experiencing now.

  Susan looked about her room for something to occupy her mind. The notebook of her mother’s stories lay on the table where she’d left it. Perhaps reading them would distract her and carry her back to a more comforting time that was as lost in mist as all the rest.

  She began with the last story in the notebook, since that was the last one her mother had written and the one she was most likely to remember. The handwriting was not always as clear as in the earlier tales, as though some disturbing emotion had driven her mother’s hand.

  Of course the story began with Once upon a time. A time when there had been a splendid and powerful king, married to a beautiful wife. His queen was a singer of songs and she played
a mandolin. The king and queen had a daughter whom the king loved dearly—a daughter who worshiped her father. (Nothing about whether the mother and daughter had loved each other.)

  All this was simple enough—a story by which a little girl could fall asleep. But then everything changed, and the writing grew harder to read, almost flying off the page. The queen, it turned out, had fallen in love with a groom in the king’s stable. In a terrible revelation it developed that the princess had belonged to the groom and had not been the king’s daughter after all.

  Susan paused in her reading, feeling confused. What was truth and what was fiction? Susan read on feeling shaken and apprehensive. The king was furiously angry, but instead of punishing the queen, or having the groom executed, he was angry with the daughter he had always loved—who was not his own child. He was so angry that he wrote a terrible song about the evil queen and gave it to his wife to sing, so she would understand his anger. He had forced the queen to sing the song, though it nearly broke her heart. Now he could no longer bear the sight of the princess, who became so sad she didn’t want to live anymore.

  Susan set the notebook down and spoke aloud to the vanished writer, “No, no, no! It couldn’t have been like that. This is wrong! I know you were wrong!”

  But the story had never been finished, and the lines remained on the paper with all their tragic overtones. Translated into life, would it mean that Susan’s mother had taken her own life—flung herself down the stairs to her death? Was that the terrible act she herself had witnessed and wiped out of her memory? But if Dolores had wanted to die, surely she would have chosen a more certain means.

  She longed to talk with someone about this, but there was no one she could talk to. Certainly not her grandmother, and now not even Peter. She felt too restless to sit here and think, and she went out to the top of the stairs to listen. A soft murmur of voices came from below. Theresa and Gracie in the kitchen, perhaps? Or was Peter still here? She wanted to see none of them.

  Outside on the deck that circled the tower, the August sun was hot. She went around to the outside stairs and ran down them to the ground. She hoped no one would see her, or note where she was going. Her goal was not Juan Gabriel’s study—she wanted no more of that place. Instead, she crossed the lawn above the water to approach the more shabby structure of the shed where Lawrence Prentice had once worked. This was a part of her father she had never known. In their days in Santa Fe he had created nothing with his hands—perhaps he felt he must reject everything that had been part of his life in Virginia.

  The door was unlocked and creaked on its hinges as she stepped into a large space that still smelled of sawdust and raw wood. Obviously no one had tended this place, apparently using it as a storeroom for discarded possessions. She moved carefully in thick, dusty shadows, searching for some evidence of the father she suddenly needed to find. Not the stern, remote man she had grown up with, but someone who might have been more loving when she was small.

  What she saw told her that he must have walked out of this place for the last time without putting his tools away. They lay rusting upon a workbench, while the back of a chair he had been working on rested across a sawhorse. So no one else had bothered to clear the place. Juan Gabriel had carved minutely, while Lawrence had built large, handsome pieces intended for practical use. Yet those two had once been friends. Her father had admired Juan Gabriel Montoro tremendously as a writer. He had collected all of his novels—except for The Black Swan. How significant was that omission? What had caused him to leave so soon after her mother’s death, and why had he been so angry with her grandmother? There was also the unexplained fight between the two men.

  Susan moved across the shed until she stumbled over some large, solid object in her path. When she bent to examine what it was, she saw that she had blundered into—a great brass pot. For an instant she recoiled, knowing that this was the instrument that had killed her mother. Yet a terrible fascination held her. She dropped to her knees and startled herself by circling the pot with her arms. She leaned her forehead against the cold, tarnished metal and began to cry.

  Part of her adult brain knew what was happening. The child in her had gone back to the time of her mother’s death, when she had kept vigil beside her body, perhaps leaning against this very piece of brass. There was nothing evil about a brass pot—not as there had been in Juan Gabriel’s ebony carving of a swan. This was simply an inanimate object that had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. A fall had killed her mother—not this jardiniere.

  With one arm resting on the circling brass lip, and her head upon her arm, she wept softly, making hardly a sound, releasing long pent-up emotions. Her tears were for her mother and Peter—grieving for lost companions whom she could never find again. Her tears were for her grandmother as well—a woman in whom she could never find again the loving presence she’d known as a child. There were even tears for her father from whom she’d wanted a love he’d never shown her, and with whom she’d been bitterly angry as she grew up. But most of all, at this moment, her grief was for the mother whose death she had witnessed, whose blood had stained her clothes—and who yet remained a veiled presence she could not recall.

  Listening with some inner ear, she could almost hear angry voices at the top of the stairs, but they never came clear and she could not identify them. In her mother’s story the king had been furiously angry and had rejected the queen’s daughter, who was not his. Was there some hidden meaning here? Only her grandmother could tell her, and Susan wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  Juan Gabriel Montoro, that brilliant, creative man, had been lovingly kind to his small granddaughter. Something in her remembered that and knew he would never have harmed her mother. Nor could she believe, as Theresa had claimed, that Susan herself might have pushed her mother in some moment of temper. There was more—something hidden that would not come clear.

  Outside the windows of the shed, sunlight glared intermittently as clouds shifted in. This place was baking hot, and she could not stay here beside this instrument of death, however innocent the brass pot might be. Nothing had been solved by coming here. She got to her feet to stretch and became suddenly aware that a figure stood silhouetted in the open door of the shed. For an instant fear was colder than the touch of brass—appalling, unreasonable fear.

  “Who is it?” she cried.

  Gracie came toward her making sounds of reassurance. “I’m sorry, Miss Susan. I didn’t mean to scare you. I saw you come out here awhile ago, and when you didn’t come back for so long, I got worried. You all right?”

  Susan moved toward her, weak with relief. Gracie saw the tear stains on her cheeks and opened her arms as she must have done long ago to a small child. Susan went into them, to be held and comforted.

  “It’s all right, honey. Good for you to cry. Sometimes I wish Miss Alex would break down and bawl real hard.”

  But tears and being held were not enough. “I need to talk with you, Gracie. There’s nobody I can talk to. Please help me,” Susan pleaded.

  “Sure enough—if I can. But let’s get out of this hot, creepy place. It’s getting cloudy and we can sit on the bench by the water. Out there we can talk all you want, and nobody but us can hear.”

  The house dreamed in summer warmth, normal and unthreatening. The tower poked into a cloudy sky—solid and steady, as it had stood since the last century. They sat together on the wooden bench with their feet near the creek’s thin strip of sand.

  “Miss Alex is asleep,” Gracie said. “I looked in on her. And Miss Theresa’s sitting nearby, in case your gramma wakes up and wants something. Mr. Peter’s gone. I hear you’re visiting Tangier Island tomorrow with your grandmother?”

  “Am I? I don’t know.”

  If she had any further thoughts on that subject, Gracie didn’t express them. “You wanted to ask me something, child?”

  Child! How good that word sounded—a word th
at encouraged her to give up her burden and place it in loving older hands. But she was no longer a child—or even a young girl. There were some problems she could share with no one. What was it Peter had told her one time? That what he wanted was to make a difference? In her own way that was what she wanted as well. Not only as a nurse, but as a woman who refused to shrink from a past she had shut away as too terrible to contemplate.

  She spoke hesitantly. “I don’t know the right questions to ask, Gracie. So tell me whatever comes into your mind. Is there anything at all you can tell me that might help me now?”

  Gracie didn’t ask in what way Susan needed to be helped. She stared off toward the workshed they’d just left. “That place makes me remember the fight your daddy had out here with Mr. Juan Gabriel.”

  “Tell me about it, please.”

  “Trouble is, nobody knows what they fought about. Your granddaddy went out there where Mr. Lawrence was sawing up a piece of wood for a chair he was making. And I guess he told your granddaddy something that made him mad. I saw them both when they came through that door. Mr. Lawrence was cussing and yelling. I’m sorry, Miss Susan, but I never did like your daddy much. So I was glad when Mr. Juan Gabriel just up and punched him a good one in the mouth, so he flew out through the door. Your daddy was pretty surprised, I reckon. He never expected that from an old man, and he went down on his back right out there on the grass.”

  Gracie smiled at the picture in her mind, and then grew solemn.

  “But Mr. Lawrence was a whole lot younger and stronger, so when he hit your granddaddy back real hard, he crumpled and just lay there. Mr. Lawrence didn’t even care if he was hurt. He went back in the shed and banged the door. Mr. Peter was a young boy, and he saw what happened and called for help. George and him carried Mr. Juan Gabriel into the house. Old Doc Hazeltine came over when Miss Alex phoned him. The next day your granddaddy had a stroke.

  “Your gramma was so mad at Mr. Lawrence that she hardly talked to him. After Miss Dolores was gone, she told him to get out of her house. She didn’t want him around. So Mr. Lawrence fixed her real good. He went real far away and took you with him. Maybe your gramma never expected that to happen. Guess she always thought Miss Dolores’s little girl belonged to her. When she woke up to not always getting her own way, it was too late. Mr. Lawrence hated everybody who was left in this house—even Miss Theresa, who was still a young girl and didn’t do anything bad I know about. Though I don’t much like what she’s up to these days. But never mind that. Your gramma can handle her.”