But Tilda remained her own locked room. Other maids liked to teach Clare a thing or two about the world, or confess their secrets to her. If Clare hung around long enough, they might even forget she was there. Not Tilda. She regarded Clare with a suspicion so deep it came as a kind of compliment. Clare’s useful poses never worked on her. But that was because, unlike all the other maids, Tilda seemed to realize that Clare had a mind of her own.
“The roses look nice,” Clare tried: an indirect approach to the topic of the glass house.
Tilda’s eyes narrowed for battle. At first Clare thought she’d made a tactical error to even touch on the subject. But Tilda was remembering a much older fight.
“She said roses would never climb that high,” she said, as if in retort to someone only she could see.
Clare struggled to keep the elation from her face. She hadn’t imagined she could lure Tilda so quickly into the past. But now that she was there, the trick was not to break the flow of her thoughts. “She should see it now,” Clare ventured.
“They wouldn’t even pay for the first plants,” Tilda said, her outrage at the old slight still fresh. “He had to bring cuttings from his mother’s garden.” She wiped a shining band across the belly of the platter in her hands. “You know what she told him? When they first came here from the city?”
Clare shook her head, but Tilda was past the need for encouragement.
“She only wanted a lawn,” Tilda said, with the glee of one believer repeating blasphemy to another. “She was tired of all the fuss about gardens.” Tilda paused to let the absurdity of this sink in as she rinsed the platter and set it aside. Then she picked up a squat teapot and stripped the tarnish from its handle with one sure stroke.
“So Mack would come in with a box of myrtle, or Star of Bethlehem. And he’d ask her, isn’t this pretty? He had to beg permission for every flower in that garden, one by one. She laughed at his rose cuttings. She only agreed to let him put them in because she didn’t think they’d survive the summer.”
Clare looked out at the garden, which now spread a good ten feet from the foundation, each plant a flag of victory. Her gaze traveled down to the glass house, now completely overgrown by Mack’s climbing roses.
“How long did it take them to get so high?” she asked.
Tilda rinsed the teapot and picked up a towel to wipe it dry.
“He forced a blossom the second year,” she said with pride. “He sent it up to her the day the boy was born.”
A chill ran over Clare’s skin. This was the first time anyone had admitted that another child had ever lived in the house, despite all the evidence of the room upstairs. But Clare also knew Tilda hadn’t trusted her with a confidence. She’d made a slip. Any moment now, she might come to her senses and retreat into stony silence. But if Clare could startle her with an unexpected fact, Tilda might give something else away.
“Jack?” Clare asked. “Jack Cunningham?”
It was a wild gamble, because to speak Jack’s name threw all Clare’s own cards on the table. But when Tilda turned around, there was no shock or sorrow on her face. Instead, she seemed bemused, with a faint new respect for Clare.
“Where on earth did you hear of Jack Cunningham?” Tilda asked.
Clare had thought Jack’s name would rattle Tilda. But in her rush not to lose the moment, she hadn’t considered the next obvious step: that she’d be asked how she learned it. She pressed back against the unforgiving curve of the wooden chair. “Around,” she said.
“And what do you hear about him?” Tilda said, her eyes now bright with amusement.
Clare shrugged.
“Well,” Tilda said. “You can meet him right now if you like. He just went by outside with Mack.”
Clare stared at her in shock.
“Well,” Tilda said, and nodded at the door to Mack’s shop. “Go on.” It was a command, not a suggestion.
Clare rose, unsteady. When she reached the door, she glanced back. Tilda’s face was set, her eyebrows raised, her chin jutting like the prow of a ship. Clare stepped through the door and pulled it shut behind her.
She waited for a few breaths at the top of the half flight of stairs that led down to Mack’s workshop. The unfinished walls were hung with a whole museum of curiosities: garden tools with handles rubbed smooth as driftwood, a pail full of the stubs of beeswax tapers, a few of Mack’s work shirts, soft with age, and a neat collection of herbs tied with scraps of ribbon and labeled. A sturdy shelf built into the slope of the stairs held jars of peaches, tomatoes, pickles, and wax beans. As Clare’s eyes adjusted, she realized the shadows beyond the jars were full of roses, dozens of them, dried and stacked bloom to bloom like the skulls Clare’s mother had taken her to see, packed cheek to cheek in the Paris catacombs.
Tilda’s tread on the other side of the door startled Clare into motion again. She clattered down the steps to the workshop. On the far side, the door to the yard stood slightly ajar. A thick band of sunshine fell through it, but she had no intention of going out there before she’d had a chance to collect her thoughts.
The forest, she calculated, began only a few yards from the shed door. She could listen to make sure the coast was clear, then dart out into the brambles, just beyond. From there, if she circled the yard through the woods, she might be able to catch sight of Mack and find out what Tilda had been talking about.
Clare crept to the door to listen. Besides a few birds trading scraps of song, the yard was quiet. She pushed the door wide and dashed out just as a pair of men came around the corner from the circle drive.
The first was Mack, in a faded plaid shirt, carrying a bucket full of onions and blue flowers. The other man was a bit younger, his hair darker than Mack’s, his face browned where Mack’s was red, his glance curious, while Mack’s was guarded. He stood almost a whole head taller than Mack, but like Mack he was dressed in dungarees, the sleeves of his blue shirt rolled up.
All three of them stopped short.
Clare composed her face in what she hoped were lines of innocence. Mack gave her his ready smile, but with a trace of consternation at discovering her in the door of his workshop. The other man looked at her with mild curiosity.
Clare collected herself first, with the swift realization that if she dove in now, she could head off any awkward questions. “I’m Clare,” she said, and held her hand out to the other man.
He shook it.
“Jack,” he said.
The pang that sounded in Clare’s chest echoed out through her shoulders and the back of her head. She was used to masking these pangs. She’d had to learn, in the months after her father’s death, when well-meaning strangers asked her about him again and again. She couldn’t weep every time she was forced to explain that he was gone, so she’d learned to wall off her heart and steady her face so it didn’t give anything away. Still, the effort always left her slightly deaf.
“Clare’s staying with us for the summer,” Mack explained to the other Jack. “Jack has the farm just down the road,” he told Clare. “He came over to bring us a few things.”
“Well, I remember how Tilda loves delphiniums,” the other Jack said. “And that you could never make them grow for love or money after I left.”
“I’m not sure I’d put it that way,” Mack said.
“Then you’ve got some this year?” the other Jack said. “Let’s see them.”
“Not every garden needs delphiniums,” Mack retorted.
Clare studied the other Jack’s face, listening for any echo of the Jack she knew. Aside from the slight coastal lilt in both their voices, she didn’t hear one. Did turning into a man completely erase a boy? And if the man stood here in front of her, what was the boy doing in the glass house?
“Jack Cunningham?” Clare asked.
The question was uncalculated, a graceless attempt to cut through her own confusion. But it had an immediate effect.
The other Jack glanced at her in surprise.
Mack’s eyebrow
s drew together. “Clare,” he said, still with a servant’s deference but a note of warning in his voice. “How do you happen to know Mr. Cunningham?”
“Tilda told me you were in the yard,” Clare said. Before either of them could realize that this didn’t really answer the question, she pressed on with one of her own.
“You used to work here?” she asked.
The other Jack nodded. “When I was a boy,” he said.
“Did you help Mack plant the roses down by the glass house?”
The other Jack laughed. “Afraid not,” he said, looking at Mack. “You had those in years before I came on the place.”
Mack nodded.
“You see, Mack here is much older than me,” the other Jack said, in a tone clearly meant not to teach her, but to tease Mack. “He was a grown man when I was only fifteen.”
Mack stifled a grin and took a friendly swipe at him.
The other Jack eluded him with a step. “But I can’t take any credit for the gardens,” the other Jack went on. “Unless you find a delphinium Mack hasn’t managed to kill. I was only here one summer, until—” A glance passed between the two men. Clare wouldn’t have recognized it if she hadn’t seen it so often after her father’s death: a silent agreement between men not to talk about something that had hurt them. “Until summer’s end,” the other Jack finished.
The ground under her feet seemed to roll gently, like the deck of a ship. Clare kept her balance, with effort. “Well,” she said. “I was just going out to take a walk.”
“Careful on the east side of the house,” Mack called as she started down the hill. “All my tools are still lying out.”
Clare nodded to show she’d heard. Then, without making any attempt at concealment, she cut across the lawn into the grove of young maples that shaded the glass house. When she reached it she looked back. Both of the men were gone.
On the mossy flagstone, she stared so hard through the door of the glass house that the vines and reflections blurred with the furniture in the room, and all of them began to reel. As she glared, the glass rattled: a sound that might have been a finger tap, or might have been the wind.
Then she turned on her heel and strode back up the hill.
Fifteen
NO ONE ELSE HAD arrived yet at the switchback steps that led down to the beach.
Clare checked up the cliff, toward Bram’s and Denby’s houses, and down the coast, toward Bridget and Teddy’s, but the shell road that ran along the bluff was deserted. No one else had arrived yet at the switchback steps that led down to the beach. So she started down the shifting sand of the hairpin path alone, with lurches and long slides she would never have allowed herself if anyone else were there to see. On the last turn, the sand gave way beneath her heels and carried her in a sifting flume several yards toward the shoreline.
“Hey!” someone said behind her, his voice loud with alarm. “Careful!”
Clare turned, still unsteady from the descent.
Bram sat in the narrow strip of shade at the foot of the cliff, on a small rug. He had risen up on his haunches, probably as she skidded onto the sand, but when she turned, he eased back. “You all right?” he said.
Clare nodded. The giddiness of the fall had faded, but the discovery that she was not alone left her off-balance. Despite the obvious explanations, Bram’s sudden appearance, with the rug on the sand, had all the force of magic.
Bram patted the carpet beside him, where there was just room for one more person. “Come sit,” he said.
Clare climbed the slight rise into the shade and sat beside him. The rug was so small that their bare arms brushed.
“Denby wanted a rug,” Bram told her. “They’ve got half a dozen of them rolled up in the back room of his place, but he says the rugs in my house are actual Persian. He wanted me to take the one from the sunroom, but they’d miss it the second I did. I got this from the bar downstairs,” he said, patting the low nap. “He’s just going to have to live with it.” But the defensive note in his voice betrayed him. He was already steeling himself against Denby’s wrath.
Clare craned her neck to see up the hill. “Where’s everyone else?”
Bram shrugged. “Maybe they got stuck at a séance.”
Clare felt herself flush, as if he’d just walked past a place where she had hidden something. She took a sideways glance at him, hoping to find he had been looking out to sea and missed it. But he watched her steadily.
“Have you ever been to one?” she asked in confusion, then frowned at herself. This would have been polite conversation at the captain’s table, but somehow it didn’t seem to fit here with Bram.
“A séance?” he said.
Clare nodded.
Bram scooped up dry sand with a nearby shell and let it pour in a veil over the shell’s serrated edge. He gave an almost imperceptible nod.
“You have?” Clare said, surprised.
“My dad,” Bram said. “He wanted to talk with my mother.”
This struck Clare as a serious error in judgment. The spirits of Bridget’s mother’s séances, she knew, were only a new variety of entertainment: more animated than dolls, more absorbing than a carnival, but weaker and less menacing than actual people. But Clare’s longing for her father cut so deep that she required a heaven to hide him, and a God to keep that heaven. The difference between the sham magic of a séance and the dark grave she’d seen her father’s casket lowered into was so profound that they had never seemed to have anything to do with one another. But now an almost ungovernable hope stirred in the roots of her heart.
“What did she say?” she asked.
Bram shook his head. “It wasn’t her,” he said.
“She didn’t come?”
“Someone came,” Bram said. “It wasn’t her.”
He ducked his head, obviously unwilling to continue this thread of the conversation. But Clare’s hope made her greedy. “How do you know?” she pressed.
Bram stared out at the bright line of the horizon. “My father told me to put on a jacket and trousers,” he said. “But I wasn’t wearing socks, and there was butter on the jacket. She never noticed. My mother would have.”
“Maybe,” Clare suggested, “she was thinking about something else. Something more important.”
Bram shook his head.
Clare’s own jaw set. The hope of speaking with her father was too strong to let him dismiss.
“But did it sound like her?” she asked. “The things she did say?”
“It didn’t sound like anything,” Bram said. “Just an old lady talking in a dark room.”
“Well, the Sensitive speaks,” Clare said, but even as she fell into Bridget’s mother’s familiar vocabulary, she realized that no Sensitive was required for Jack to speak to her. “But what did she say to you?”
“It wasn’t my mother,” Bram said again, his voice as sharp as she’d ever heard it.
Stung, Clare snapped back. “I heard you before. But how do you know?” Her voice rose as she spoke, and broke high on the last word at something dangerously close to tears.
Instantly, Bram’s face softened. “Hey,” he said, in the voice she knew. “I’m sorry.”
In return, Clare swallowed some of her own hope. “Maybe it wasn’t her,” she admitted. “I just don’t see how you can be so sure.”
Bram’s blue eyes traveled over her face like a pilot checking the wind and the horizon.
“Because she came back,” he said.
“Came back?” she repeated. A storm broke in her heart: hope, that if Bram’s mother had come to him, her father could come back too, and hurt, that Bram’s mother had returned to him, but her father had never come for her.
But when she searched Bram’s face for an answer, she only saw defiance and shame, as if he’d just confessed a dirty secret.
“Where did she find you?” Clare demanded. “When did she come?”
“She was just waiting outside the house,” Bram said. “One day when I came out.
”
“You were by yourself?”
Bram nodded. “She told me she’d been waiting,” he said. “Until I was alone.”
“What did she tell you?” Clare asked.
“She said she didn’t want to leave,” he said. “She said one day I’d understand.” At the thought of those words from her own father, comfort settled over Clare. But Bram’s lip curled in anger, like a man’s did when he’d been tricked.
“Are you sure it was her?” Clare asked. “How did you know?”
“She’s my mother,” Bram said, with faint surprise that this required explanation.
If Bram could see his mother, Clare wondered, why couldn’t she see Jack? “She looked just like anyone on the street?” she said. In that case, she thought, ghosts might walk among them all the time, and nobody could ever tell the difference.
“She looked the same as she always did,” Bram said. “But she was wearing a new dress.” Anger rose in his voice at this.
Clare had felt the same anger since her father’s death. But even though she still wasn’t sure who deserved it, she’d learned enough to know it wasn’t him. “It’s not their fault,” she said gently. “No one can help when they die.”
Bram glanced up, his eyes wary and confused. Then understanding dawned in them. “No,” he told her. “She’s not dead. She never died.”
The death of Bram’s mother was such an established fact in Clare’s world that she couldn’t take this in at once. To accept it meant all the other facts she knew had to strain and shift, and all other truths suddenly became precarious. It took a long, dizzy moment for her to even form a question.
“Does your father know?” she asked.
Bram nodded. “He didn’t want to tell me she left,” he said. “I guess he didn’t know where she went. He might have thought she really died. Or maybe he wished she did. We were in Italy. It wouldn’t be hard to get papers.”
The Ghost in the Glass House Page 9