The Ghosts of Kerfol

by Deborah Noyes

  “Take me from here,” he begged. “Those dogs —”

  “We’ll take you . . . if you’ll stand up.”

  He did, and Mother held his sticky hands high for Michel to rub with turpentine. “What dogs, Victor?” She held him clear of her silks — not wishing to squander her newfound wealth so quickly — as Michel shoved and groped him with the rancid rag. “Hadn’t you better learn to control these fits? You’re an heir now.” She smiled at Michel, and together they led Victor blithering down the staircase, out into the empty yard, over the pebbled drive, into the waiting carriage. “A man of means.”

  He breathed the good smell of horses as Michel snapped the whip and Mother snatched a page from the coach seat, rattling it gleefully in his face. “The ink is dry, my boy. Rejoice.”

  He cast one last look down the avenue, growing smaller behind them, and knew he was forgetting something. Something he would not recover, and even as Mother stroked his pale forehead, it was already a dim memory.

  “My own little man.”

  THIS PARTY WAS A BORE, like so many parties, like so much of life after Stan — an ocean away from Stan. Heels stomping out the Charleston. The moat outside full of floating vomit and cigarette butts. Sinks full of shaved ice and French champagne, and a bathtub full of gin. They were in France, sure, but Prohibition was a hard habit to break. Half the fun of doing anything was knowing that you weren’t supposed to, and cathedrals and pretty gardens aside, you could take these wealthy sheiks and shebas off to Europe, but you weren’t going to get them far from the bathtub, really, and when they got there, they’d be pie-eyed and pissing on the lawn.

  Speaking of sheiks, the most momentous thing that had happened all day was the arrival of Emily’s telegram from Connecticut. Valentino was dead, and half the country —“the better half,” wrote earnest Emily in her telegram (it was comments like that that sometimes made Suze wonder if her prude of a cousin even liked boys) — was in mourning. More than one love-struck farm girl had actually hanged herself from the rafters of daddy’s barn. Over a movie actor. But what an actor. What a face. Sitting in the dark, no matter with whom, to watch Rudolph on the screen was to feel every fiber of your body awake and screaming for something, anything, and quick.

  Suze sat smoking in the garden among the bees, her hand shaking — nerves, coffee, too few meals — the music a distant buzz at the back of the big stone mansion. . . . The band was getting drunk. They were off-key. Young couples strolled along, enjoying the sun on their faces, and Suze did the same, steady on her feet for once because the last line of Emily’s telegram (“I heard Stan’s sailed off to the Caribbean again”) had knocked her sober. Anyway, Daddy was due back from business in Rennes tomorrow, and she had a lot of cleaning up to do — a lot of supervising from her garden chair, anyway.

  She thought of Stan on his little yacht under the Caribbean sun. The same sun now shining on her. She felt its warmth on her cheeks and bare shoulders, on her belly, still flat beneath summer linen, and she imagined Stan at sea, a nursery rhyme playing lazily through her thoughts:

  The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea

  In a beautiful pea-green boat.

  Like his father, Stan was a boatbuilder by trade, a craftsman who could carve and sand and stain wood to make it glow. Like gold, people said. Even her father said so. “An alchemist,” he’d joked once, “like me.” Daddy was a stockbroker, and making gold out of base metal was exactly what he and his kind did daily.

  Despite his disapproval — nay, forbiddance — of her relationship with Stan, Daddy liked him. Suze knew he did. But Stan was what her father called “a bad risk.” He was spontaneous at best and reckless the rest of the time, a gambler like his own father — losing sporadic if significant sums, which he earned catering to wealthy clients in New York and New England.

  “Maybe he just needs guidance, Daddy. Don’t you remember what that was like? You had help. You have to remember what it felt like . . . to have talent but need help.”

  “I remember, and I see what it’s cost me.”

  “But you don’t see.”

  “Here’s what I see, Susanna. Every time your grandfather looks at you, he’s not sure if it’s your mother looking back at him from those pretty doe eyes, or me. We need to make sure it’s her. Otherwise you’ll end up coming in the back door. Like I do.”

  “You do not.”

  “In spirit. I do.”

  “Stan loves me.”

  “He loves your money.”

  “I don’t have any money.” She smiled gratefully. “You do.”

  He ran a light hand over his perfectly parted and oiled salt-and-pepper hair and straightened his bow tie, English driving cap in hand. “It’s your mother’s money, and she’s dead, so we may as well admit it’s your grandfather’s.” He was straining, she could tell, already on the move, though her pleadings held him here. For now. “I’ve learned how to invest it. That’s my contribution.”

  “That’s plenty.”

  “But I lack manners, says Gram, and yours leave a lot to be desired. I don’t want them to write you off as they have me. I don’t want you to disappoint them.”

  “Like I’ve disappointed you?”

  “You’ve had everything.”

  “On a silver platter. And you came up from nothing and resent me in advance for blowing it all to bits. Because that’s what I’ll do, Daddy, if you don’t let me have what I want, if you don’t let me have Stan. I want to go home to Stan. There’s nothing else you can give me anymore. I’m drowning in things.” She swallowed. “There’s nothing else I want.”

  He grinned that guileless grin of his — ill timed, Suze thought, as she was battling back fresh tears, but it usually had a gift attached, so she decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  “Not even this?”

  “This,” she saw, looking up through her lashes, sniffling, was a beautiful antique sapphire pendant set in an elaborate choker of waved white gold, inset with diamonds. The whole effect was worthy of Poseidon.

  She reached out, but he pulled it back, his grin wavering. “Now, this one’s not for keeps. It’s far too much for someone your age, but I know you like to play, and this holiday’s yours, so enjoy. It’s something from the estate safe. They let me use it, evidently forgetting they had a few things gathering dust in there. Shame to see it go to waste. But take care. I mean that, Suze. That’s a pretty penny there, and I have a few pennies, but I’ll bet that thing has a history if it’s languished this long.”

  Suze pouted.

  “I’ll make it OK. I always do — make it OK. Don’t I?”

  She hung her head, thrilled and humiliated by her own willingness, her vast good fortune. But she let him clasp it behind her neck, though it took dedication and prying of the chin to get her to look up and seal the compact with a smile. Yes, one more season would bring her to her senses. One more spin round the globe. One more shiny gemstone. “Thank you, Daddy.”

  “My pleasure.” He kissed her forehead. “I mean that. It brings me pleasure, you know, to make you smile. To see you happy. With everything I’ve got, it’s all I want.”

  Then why do you work so much?

  Suze fingered the jewels and let herself feel ashamed: not to admit a little shame made her an ingrate. There were things to be ashamed of, things she could only begin to contemplate this far from Stan, all this way round the world in a musty old castle in France.

  At least she’d had the sense to hold the party outdoors, apart from the stream of spilled gin and watery boot prints up and down the stairs and out to the back patio.

  Though she couldn’t see his face from this distance, she watched the gardener, a sturdy Breton in a straw hat, move deftly among the geometric maze of shrubs like the ones they’d toured at Versailles, only smaller, and then down to the briars along the edge of the old wall bordering the wood and avenue. She had seen him before, and he seemed to radiate easy purpose and competence. He was older than Daddy, say late f
ifties, with youthful, squinting eyes in a leathery face like the fishermen in postcards she’d bought while they were touring Lorient — when Daddy, intent on helping her forget Stan, had even spared a few days away from his accounts.

  Those eyes were experienced in a way the same-faced people indoors were not — of earth and the wild sea and babies. She absently caressed her belly, thinking that his sun-lined brown hands would have dirt under the nails. They would be as at ease gutting a goat or seasoning a bouillabaisse or bouncing a grand-bébé on his knee as they were coaxing things to grow. Emily would accuse her of romanticizing the poor out of guilt. But it was one of the things Suze loved about Stan; despite his breeding, people were people to him, plain and simple. Real. He made friends wherever he went, with busboys and sailors, cigarette girls and nurses, and she knew Stan would like this old gardener, too.

  One drunken night of late, she’d even had a funny urge to sneak up behind the old guy, turn him her way, and kiss him square on the lips just to see those crinkly, kind eyes light up. She liked him. A man like that had something to teach her, she imagined, unlike Daddy, who kept the better part of his wisdom to himself.

  She primped her bob and crossed the moat, then sashayed down the vast hedge garden toward the exit and the radiating avenues, where he had disappeared, assuming it was him. She hadn’t had a good look at him this go, after all, but the straw hat was a giveaway.

  The music grew dim and distant the farther she got from the house, and she had the unreal feeling she often had at parties, that she was an invisible specter passing among the living. She half-believed she could pass through them sometimes — the girls with their bare heads still wet from the ride in on a running board, frenetic, dancing in beads and flapping galoshes. The boys with oiled hair and baggy pants and love me looks.

  Sometimes she wandered through a whole party without speaking to a soul, apart from squeezing someone’s elbow in greeting or feeling a light ginny kiss on the back of her neck, some furtive flirt wanting to take Stan’s place. But who would take Stan’s place? Who could? Especially now. Now, she thought, over and over, an incantation. But that was as far as she got. Thinking was overrated. Without Emily on hand to scold her, she would just rest in how unreal it all seemed. Ever. Always. Now.

  O let us be married! Too long have we tarried:

  But what shall we do for a ring?

  She would lose herself among shadowy laughers and dancers and lovers leaning close to whisper and tease, blowing smoke into the air like the stranded at sea sending up rescue flares. Bumped by the frenzied dancers, her world went fuzzy, and ironically, she drank to bring the edges back. Drinking did that, briefly — she had once tried to explain this to Emily (of all people) — and then things went all fuzzy again, worse than before. But for a moment, in between, there was clarity. This was that moment.

  As the earth leveled out and the gardener came into view, she half imagined he might save her. She could befriend him as Stan might do, and he would advise her. At the least, like some fortune-teller, he could look once into her eyes and read her shallow future. “Beware of water,” he might say, “or strangers with dark eyes.” She heard the under-music of the bees, saw the covert swooping of a bird here, there, and felt the innocence of bright sun, and was as glad as she’d been in months.

  “Sir,” she called when she knew she was in hearing distance, but he kept moving along the hedges, serenely clipping, as if listening to music of his own, a slower, richer sound. She called out again, and this time he turned, almost reluctantly, and set down the clippers. He rose slowly, as if it pained him, and then clasped his hands behind his back like a priest, but she saw at once that she’d been wrong. It was not the gardener.

  He was roughly the same height, squat but sturdy with fearsome eyes and a fierce-boned face framed by a pointy gray beard. His skin was coarse and pallid. He brought his hands back, wringing them once in a restless gesture that undermined his air of patience. His nails were not blunt and dirty, but long and perfectly filed on large powerful hands with dark hair that made them glow almost paler. The simple gardening tool looked strange in his grasp, like a sparrow in the mane of a lion.

  “Mademoiselle?” He did not smile, and Suze felt suddenly ashamed, as if she had done something wrong, something dirty. (She did wrong things on principle, whenever she got the chance, though she kept it clean, also on principle. Would Stan have her back otherwise?)

  “I thought you were the gardener.” She glanced curiously at the clippers in his powerful hand.

  He nodded, his eyes not exactly downcast. Noncommittal.

  “Do you work for him?” she blurted, looking away from that hawk’s stare. “The moat needs tending. It’s full of slop.”

  He nodded pleasantly enough, but it was clear that he either did not understand her French — it had never come naturally to her, as Mother would have liked, and she knew no Breton — or that he was holding something back, his mouth clenched in the effort not to sneer. “The moat,” he mimicked absently, in a thick accent. And then he grinned, looking her up and down: from the butterscotch silk dress and seamed stockings she had so coveted in Chicago last year, wanting them so much, so desperately — why did she want things so much and have so little in the end? — to the borrowed necklace, and it was a cruel grin, candid in a way that unnerved her.

  “Thoughtless, pretty thing,” he said, and the words sounded garbled in his throat. “If you were my . . . daughter,” he added furtively, and she craned toward the missing words, that tide of unreality washing over her. His eyes no longer appeared watery but a dark and brutal blue, like black ice. “I’d beat you senseless.”

  Suze turned on her heel, stumbled, ran without looking up the sloping lawn, across the polluted moat that yesterday had been a placid black ribbon sprinkled with moss-green pollen.

  “Where, love?” crooned Gerard, who was loitering in the great hall when she burst in and announced an intruder. Gerard was the ill-mannered English friend of a cousin of a friend of somebody’s French relation. Who knew what was going to show up at a private party anymore? Was there such a thing as a private party anymore? A private moment? She pointed toward the front avenue. “Out there.” Weary and shaken, Suze could not remember the last time she’d been alone and content to be, except while dressing in the mirror, and even then the glass seemed to tease and deceive or shine with disappointment.

  No longer shaky inside, she wondered, had Gerard and friends hired that man in the garden to frighten her for their own amusement? She imagined them in an unheated upstairs bathroom somewhere in the vast château, powdering and painting dark circles round his horrible eyes. Nice Halloween prank, were it Halloween. Or was the old man yet another indolent stranger, some village hanger-on here for free gin and good champagne?

  No. Gerard So-and-So had not read her thoughts or engineered anything, she realized; he was just contemplating the stains on her dress. “Who’s the lucky jazzbo who got to roll in the green grass with that?”

  That?

  “Why are you in here?” She struck an imperious pose. “Didn’t I ask Peg to keep the party outdoors? Daddy doesn’t —”

  “Daddy,” Gerard purred, “does what Suze tells Daddy to do. No worries there.”

  “Shut up.”

  He blinked as if stung. “But that’s discourteous, Susanna.” For a moment his affront, subtle and blistering, was so convincing that she didn’t know what to think. Suze was about to reach out and pat his shoulder in apology — ever the mindful hostess at barely eighteen years old — when Gerard puffed out his cheeks and sprayed her with warm champagne, laughing as he preceded her down the unlit hallway.

  When she strayed into the library after him, she found a petting party in progress, with the few who weren’t going at it in shadows gathered round a lanky, good-looking boy whose name she couldn’t recall. He was stretched out on silk pillows on the floor, reading to them from an old book.

  “There’s a man in the garden,” she announ
ced, and only one or two in the crowd looked up, bleary-eyed and smiling politely.

  “What sort of man?” asked the lanky boy, eyeing her strangely. His accent let on that he was a local. Was the man in the garden related to him somehow? Were they plotting something?

  “Not old exactly, but in any case, he doesn’t belong here. He said things —”

  “What sort of things?” asked Peg, Suze’s old standby, a rich acquaintance whose parents had been only too happy to send her away in Suze’s untender care. Peg had an arm draped over the lanky boy and clearly wanted to hear the rest of the story he was reading.

  “Things. I don’t want him here. I want him out of here.”

  “Where’s your driver?” one of the men asked. “Where’s Saul? He’ll make quick work of him.”

  “He’s gone to town for more ice.” Suze was aware that her voice had climbed to high and whiny and that she was losing her audience to the lanky boy, who had flipped ahead a page and was peering wide-eyed at the page to generate suspense.

  “I’ll show you,” Suze insisted. “Come with me.”

  “She just wants us back outside,” murmured someone.

  Grumbling ensued.

  But Gerard, more curious perhaps than concerned, helped herd them up and out. They all trekked, stumbled, or sashayed down the grassy hill on the west side of the mansion with Suze at the lead — feeling vindicated, safe, restored to her throne once more. The girls took off their heels and swung them with abandon and began to moan about Valentino and bicker about which film was best.

  “Four Horsemen, hands down!”

  “No, no, Blood and Sand. That tight little matador number was to die for —”

  “You’d think he was some kind of Chicago gangster or something,” Gerard complained, “with a funeral like that. I read that a hundred thousand people filed past his coffin.”