A Lamentation of Swans

by Valerie Bronwen

  The good-looking people were, of course, unaware of these extra benefits of their beauty, of the subtle privileges that came with it, and often took these things for granted. Very few of them were conscious of how blessed they were, only about how they were envied.

  As the only boy and the youngest Swann, Sebastian had been spoiled almost from birth; fussed over by not only his parents but his adoring older sister and cousin. But unfortunately, the coddling had a negative effect on his personality. He was used to getting what he wanted, and when he was thwarted, he could be petty and spiteful and mean. He was arrogant, and could be caustic when the mood struck him. He expected people to cave in to him, to give him what he wanted without question, and woe to the fool who didn’t.

  I’d heard stories, of course, about girls from lower-class families he’d seduced, abortions Peggy had paid for, checks written to get those girls to vanish in the night. Sebastian spent money like there was an infinite supply of it, on clothes and gifts and cars. He had a lavish penthouse on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where hangers-on and lickspittles pretending to be his friends gathered for debauched parties where champagne flowed and drugs were in abundant supply. His exploits were detailed in gossip columns and tabloids; he’d gotten into fights with celebrities, had a celebrated feud with a young rising star who had once been a drinking buddy. He closed nightclubs, walked red carpets with a series of disposable beautiful women on his arm, and had broken thousands of hearts. He’d almost married a recording superstar, but the engagement ended when she caught him in her bed with her personal assistant.

  It should go without saying that they were both kicked out of her life, and the recording artist moved on quickly to another boy toy, and replaced the female PA with a gay man—no one could say she didn’t learn from her mistakes.

  The accepted story within the family was that he’d been kicked out of boarding schools and flunked out of numerous colleges because he was so clever and smart, he bored easily, and he acted out when he was bored. Peggy had explained this to me so many times I could recite the litany along with her. I’d even heard a version of it from Charlotte—but in fairness, it sounded rote when she said it, as though it was something she’d said so many times she didn’t even have to think about it. I wasn’t even certain she believed it herself anymore. God knows, Char had cleaned up enormous messes created by Sebastian’s carelessness and selfishness over the years. He was her brother and she loved him, but they were still siblings, and there was an element of competitiveness and rivalry between them.

  For me, it seemed like Sebastian was always trying to prove himself as smart and savvy as his sister. It always backfired on him, because he wasn’t. He wasn’t stupid by any means—he actually was quite clever and witty and smart—but he never used his intelligence to get ahead in the world.

  Rather, he used it for malice.

  And how well I knew that!

  He had his back to me as I stood in the doorway to the second drawing room, the one with the wet bar that the family used, with the connecting pocket doors to the dining room.

  This room had originally been the one, back when Arabella was mistress of the house, where the ladies had withdrawn after a sumptuous dinner, to sip their tasteful little crystal glasses of sherry and where they could gossip while the men had their brandy and cigars and talked about manly things in the other room, across the hall. If the other drawing room had been Samuel’s domain, and the décor matched his taste, then this one was all Arabella’s. She’d decorated it accordingly, and it was one of my favorite rooms in the house. Even so many years later, there was still a touch of the feminine in the room so sorely absent from the other drawing room. The color palette here was softer pastels, the furniture more about comfort and relaxation—nowhere in this room was the aggressive, masculine style that made the matching drawing room so unpleasant.

  The Sargent painting of Arabella in her later years over the fireplace, after years of widowhood, was one of my favorite paintings in the house. Her black widow’s weeds, the lines and the sagging chin of the older woman, were belied by the mischievous smile and youthful sparkle in her eyes. Her dress was a widow’s black, of course, but ropes of pearls hung around her neck and enormous diamonds flashed on her plump fingers. Her gray hair was long and worn down in the painting, given her a sense of informality unusual in Sargent’s paintings. She seemed almost alive and vibrant, like she was just about to join in the conversation with some bon mot that would have everyone laughing at her wit.

  The painting had always made me feel welcome in the room, even when Sea Oats hadn’t felt like my home. It was no wonder it was one of my favorites.

  The clink of ice in a rocks glass was unmistakable. It wasn’t even quite two in the afternoon and he was already making himself a drink.

  I stood, watching him silently, not saying anything, thinking, remembering. He looked much the same from behind as he had two years earlier. He was wearing a navy blue collared polo shirt that showed off his broad shoulders. His waist wasn’t quite as narrow as it had been two years earlier, and his jeans looked a bit too tight, like he needed to go up a size but his male vanity refused to admit it. His reddish blond hair looked a little brassy in the light, like it wasn’t natural anymore—he’d always worn it longer than I thought he should, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he was coloring it. Charlotte had started to gray much younger than he was now…

  He’d modeled for a while when he was in his early twenties, but had gotten bored with it quickly and given it up—like everything else he’d tried.

  What was it the gossip columns called him? Oh, yes, a playboy entrepreneur.

  Because they couldn’t say spoiled rich wastrel, which was more honest.

  He’d been very kind to me when Charlotte brought me home as her wife.

  Sea Oats had overwhelmed me. About three weeks before we were married, Charlotte had taken me out there for a weekend—which was when we’d seen the swans on the pond. That first visit to Sea Oats had been the capper to what I was already thinking of in terms of fairy tales: Charlotte was my Disney prince, Sea Oats was her castle, and I was the princess, born to a humble family but oh so deserving.

  Working for Hollis had made me a bit blasé about Manhattan wealth; I’d worked on any number of stunning apartments, condos, and brownstones all over the island, even though I was still relatively new to the interior design business. That first time I’d laid eyes on Sea Oats, I couldn’t stop myself from staring. I’d done as much research as I could on the Swann family and their company before I’d gone to work on Charlotte’s offices in the Swann building, and God knew I’d shopped at Swann’s enough times; Swann’s had been my first credit card. I knew there was money—the budget on the redesign of the offices alone was astronomical, and my commission was more than I’d made the previous year—but even when you know, you don’t until you can see it.

  Sea Oats was enormous, and no amount of Google searching online could have prepared me for the reality of the huge old Victorian house, with its scrollwork balconies and the round tower in the front with the peaked witch’s cap on top of it; the widow’s walk with the wrought-iron lace railing, the enormous windows, the rolling lawns, the fountains, and the hedge maze lurking behind the house. Riding in the big town car through the gates with Philip at the wheel and Char sitting next to me, holding my hand and beaming with pride at the look on my face when I saw her home for the first time, had been like something out of every rags-to-riches romantic comedy movie I’d ever watched repeatedly back in Kansas, dreaming of the day when that would become my reality.

  “Look, are those swans on the pond? You keep swans?” I said, looking out the car window as it went around the curve in the driveway, and Charlotte’s grip tightened on my hand.

  “No, we don’t,” she whispered, brushing my cheek with her lips. “There’s a legend about the pond and swans, you know. When Arabella first saw this property where Samuel meant to build her a house, there were swa
ns on the pond. They both saw it as a sign, and Arabella insisted the pond be kept.” She smiled. “Over the years, you know, we’ve kind of made a legend about the pond and swans. I’ve always thought it was silly, in a way.”

  “Why?” I asked as the car stopped.

  “Take our bags in, Philip, please,” she said as we climbed out of the car, giving me that brilliant smile that always made me warm inside. “Why don’t we walk down to the pond and watch the swans?”

  I smiled back at her, gripped her hand tightly as she led me down the flagstone path leading to the pond. “So, what’s the legend about the pond?”

  “And the swans,” she replied, pulling me closer and putting her arm around my waist. “There are rarely swans there, for some reason. We’ve never tried to keep swans, of course, because Arabella wanted wild swans to use the pond…like the wild swans there the first time she came here. So we’ve always considered it good luck whenever swans appear there. Good luck, or good fortune, or someone in the family is going to find love.”

  “Love?” I said, half teasingly.

  “My entire life,” she said, sinking to one knee in front of me as I watched the swans paddling about the surface of the murky water, “I’ve never seen a swan on the pond. And the day I bring you here for the first time, there they are. It’s like it was meant to be.” And she produced the box with my engagement ring, and asked me to marry her there, on the shoreline of the pond as the swan family glided over the top of the water.

  And I’d said yes, of course, even though I’d known her for such a short time, even though I had no idea of what being her wife would entail.

  It was my Disney cartoon come to life, after all, and who was I to argue with fate?

  The swans were a sign. They had to be, right?

  I was so young and naïve.

  I was terrified that entire weekend I would break something, or do something incredibly gauche that would embarrass Charlotte, cause her to take back the ring and break up with me once we got back to the city. Peggy couldn’t have been lovelier on that visit, but Bast was on the West Coast, involved in a relationship with a volatile and deeply troubled former child star that was splashed all over the tabloids and the entertainment news. We didn’t talk about Bast much that weekend, or before we were married; Charlotte would just sigh when his name came up and would say, “You’ll understand when you meet him,” and change the subject.

  After that weekend and its surprise proposal, we decided we didn’t need a big wedding—I’d dreamed about my wedding as a little girl, but as an adult it didn’t seem that important to me. Instead, we rushed down to City Hall a few weeks later to marry in haste, and after tying up all the odds and ends the sudden marriage created—letting my roommates know I was giving up the apartment, giving Hollis proper notice, boxing up my stuff in both my office and home—we’d gone off to Italy for a two-week honeymoon in Venice and Florence and Rome, where I was blown away by the beauty of the art and the cities, and I fell in love with all three cities, as millions before me had done.

  But if the romance and honeymoon had been a Disney movie, the marriage was anything but. There’s a reason you don’t ever see Beauty and her Beast after the end of the movie; the day-to-day life of a married couple is anticlimactic after all the obstacles they overcame to find love with each other.

  Charlotte and I hadn’t had any obstacles to overcome before we were married.

  After the honeymoon, though—well, that was a different story.

  Bast had been at Sea Oats when we returned from Italy. I was still floating on a cloud of radiance, in love with Charlotte and Italy and life itself. I was going to be the best wife Charlotte could have ever dreamed about having, I decided. She didn’t go with me to Sea Oats from the airport—there’d been some emergency with Swann’s, so Charlotte had gone directly to the office from JFK. “Sorry,” she’d said to me as she kissed me on the cheek as I got into the backseat of the town car, “I’ll take a cab to the office. Philip, come back into the city after you get her to Sea Oats, all right? I’m so sorry.”

  “You don’t ever need to apologize to me, we’re married,” I said to her, melting a little inside at the pleased smile on her face, and then the door was shut and we were pulling away from the curb. I was content, and happy.

  Had I only known.

  I don’t know how Bast could have known we were on our way—maybe Charlotte had called him—but he was waiting for me on the front gallery when the car pulled up. I wasn’t expecting to see him there, though I should have suspected he might be there.

  There had been a final showdown with the crashing star, who’d wound up going into rehab after an arrest for public intoxication and possession of cocaine. It was all over the tabloids—even in Italy, we hadn’t been able to escape Bast’s latest scandal. Charlotte refused to talk about it, just saying, “You’ll learn about Bast soon enough.”

  Bast had, as always, returned to Sea Oats after getting off the roller coaster. He very graciously—or so I’d thought at the time—befriended me, made me feel at home. Peggy did as well, but she was often busy seeing to the house and to the numerous charity boards she worked on. So it fell to Bast to fill my time, keep me company, take me on walks around the estate, tell me family history, gossip, and lore, to be my friend—and of course, fill me in on Charlotte’s troubled past with Lindsay Moore.

  I’d thought Bast was my friend.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d trusted the wrong person.

  “Hello, Bast,” I said calmly. “How nice to see you, after all this time.”

  He finished pouring his whiskey and turned around, a big smile on his florid face. “Darling Ariel, I’d heard you’d come back. I didn’t think I would ever see you again, you know, after you ran away screaming into the night.” He took a drink, his eyes still on me, glittering malevolently.

  The two years I’d been gone hadn’t been kind to Bast. Another one of my mother’s favorite sayings was, The young are all beautiful, but when you get older you get the face you deserve. I’d always thought it kind of a harsh thing to say, but the effortless beauty Bast had been blessed with since birth was beginning to fade. His body had started to go to seed, and it was clear he didn’t care much. His body, once toned and muscled from hours of work in the gym with trainers, looked soft from the front, and there was a bit of a paunch to his stomach. His reddish-gold hair, always so thick and full, like Charlotte’s, was thinner in the front and the bangs were grown longer and brushed across his forehead in a vain attempt to make it look smaller. There were bags, angry and purplish, under the reddened eyes, and a second chin was starting to sprout just below his once strong jawline. The years of long nights spent partying and doing whatever drug was readily available were now showing on his face. It wasn’t too late—if he stopped drinking and staying up all night, and instead started going to the gym more regularly, he could get it all back.

  But I suspected Bast didn’t want to work hard. He never had before, so why would he start now?

  It was a pity, because Sebastian had been so handsome, still had been when I’d last seen him. I always looked away when I saw him in tabloids or magazines, turning the page quickly or putting the publication away because seeing him reopened the wounds I was trying to heal. Had his decline been sudden? Had this already started when I’d been at Sea Oats before, and had I just not noticed because I was so dazzled by everything, so insecure and afraid of everything?

  “You look good.” He toasted me with the glass, now half empty. “When I saw you in the style section a couple of weeks ago, I thought, damn, getting away from the Swanns has done her a world of good. Smartest decision you ever made, wasn’t it?” He finished the whiskey and poured another.

  “You could say that.” I sat down on one of the couches, never taking my eyes off him. “Your current girl is lovely. I like her.”

  He sat down on the couch facing mine, put the glass down on the coffee table without a coaster. Peggy would have had a f
it. When I’d lived here, I would have said something, but it wasn’t my house anymore and it wasn’t my problem. His face lit up with a smile, and for a moment he seemed younger, his old self, again. “Kayla’s great, isn’t she?”

  I crossed my legs. “She tells me you’re getting married. Once your current misfortune is handled, of course.”

  He glowered at me. “My situation isn’t any of your business.”

  “I suppose not.” I looked at him, trying to find any trace of remorse. I couldn’t see any, of course, which didn’t surprise me. Bast had always been amoral. What Bast had done to me and Charlotte—he probably hadn’t given it a second thought once I’d left Sea Oats. He’d wrecked our lives, our marriage, and done it deliberately. I’d been an idiot to trust him, to think he was my friend, when the entire time he was also feeding lies to Charlotte about me, hints and insinuations, so that final night, when she’d caught him kissing me on the mouth—well, she’d seen something else entirely than what it was, an unwanted kiss from a man. There was nothing I could say that could change her mind, make her understand that Bast was just a friend to me, would never be anything more than that, couldn’t be. I wasn’t wired that way, to be attracted to men.

  I thought she’d known that.

  But her experiences with Lindsay Moore—those hurts, wounds, had run far deeper than I could have imagined. I thought Charlotte was strong and believed in my love for her.

  It hurt that she didn’t believe me. It hurt that she thought I could do such a thing.

  And the hurt had turned into anger.

  But we’d done nothing but fight those last few weeks. A lot of it was my fault, my insecurities—which Bast had also been playing on. I knew now Lindsay had meant nothing to Charlotte back then, but I’d been jealous. Bast knew how to twist the knife without me even being aware I’d been stabbed yet.