The Glass House

by Beatrice Colin

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  Prologue

  Argyll, Scotland. June 1911

  It was so still on the day of the funeral that you could hear the church bell echo back from the other side of the loch. The light was soft, diffuse, as if the sun itself had been wrapped in a white mourning veil. While fields of wheat whispered consolation to themselves, the hedgerows were filled with the bright shout of buttercups and campion, bluebells and cow parsley. Even in the shade the air was warm. It would be a good year for honey.

  Edward Pick was buried in the plot he had reserved, at the edge of the graveyard with a view over the water. His coffin was unadorned, his committal brief; he had paid in advance for sandwiches and beer for anyone who came. Not many did. Afterward they walked back to the estate, to Balmarra, the small group of mourners, mainly employees, a calligraphy of indigo dashes against the great ocher mountains beyond. Most of them had been expecting—some hoping—that he would die months, even years, earlier. Although his family had made their fortune in sugar, the truth was that prosperity had turned him sour. He was stubborn, too, determined that he would not be finished off by freezing temperatures or influenza or inertia, and he clung to life until it suited him to leave.

  Pick was a man, as so many are, of contradictions. The mourners fell silent as they headed up the driveway to the main house. Here were gardens first dug seven hundred years ago by monks from Burgundy, France. But the beds of dill, shallots, and chervil, the apple and pear orchards beneath which so many of the order had been interred, were long gone. Now late rhododendrons, their flowers circus pirouettes of pink or lilac or purple or apricot, bloomed with abandon. The scent of azaleas lingered in the air like perfume on a woman’s wrist, while the tiny petals of a Japanese wisteria shivered modestly as they passed.

  The glass house lay to the left of the drive, a vast wheel of glazing and decorative ironwork that housed the most precious of Pick’s plants: palms, orchids, orange trees, and roses. And when the wind changed that night and the clouds burst, the sound of rain hitting the glazed roof was louder than thunder. The noise, the temporary opacity, the water streaming down the panes to flood the gravel paths seemed to suggest a curtain call, a final flourish, perhaps, with an explosion of rose petals. But that, as only Edward Pick knew, was yet to come.

  1

  Glasgow, June 1912

  At the taxi rank on Gordon Street there was a small queue: three old ladies who fussed over a cat in a basket, a man with a wooden cane that he tapped on the curb to some music he alone could hear, and a woman and a young girl with a trolley stacked high with bags and suitcases.

  “Won’t be too long now,” a porter told the woman as a taxi drew up and the three old ladies with the cat climbed inside.

  The man with the cane turned and gave them a curious look. The woman closed her eyes, hoping to avert any attempt at conversation. London the night before had been dark, rain-soaked, and chaotic. They had almost missed their connection, and the memory of their hands clutched tight as she pulled her daughter through crowds of people all pushing in the opposite direction still filled her with a sense of swallowed panic. On the journey north in their compartment in the first-class sleeping car, the feeling didn’t subside: She had the overwhelming sense that something had been forgotten and had to resist the urge to check, for what could she do if it had?

  The train from London had arrived in Glasgow after seeming to meander around northern Britain, skirting small mountains, chugging across sluggish black rivers, and stopping at remote stations where no one climbed on or off. As they stood on the empty platform, Cicely Pick looked around for assistance. What on earth was one to do, where should one start, who was there to ask? All she had was an address with no idea how far away their destination was or how they should get there. And then she noticed the conductor, collecting his belongings from the mail van.

  “Excuse me,” she called out. “We are in need of a little advice.”

  After he had frowned at her piece of paper, the conductor blew his whistle, summoned a porter, and instructed him to take them to the taxi rank. Now the porter stood staring into the middle distance, his watch frequently checked. How much did one tip?

  A fine rain began to fall, beading their hair, their faces, their coats with tiny droplets. The umbrella had been left on the train, of course. She turned her face skyward. Travel made one feel so dirty, so squalid. Her clothes were stiff with coal smoke and crumpled with sleep, the skin on her ankles itching with bites from fleas or mosquitoes or maybe both. She hoped they had not picked anything up, she prayed they would not be sick, she wished she had not fought with her husband the day before they left.

  The man with the cane was squinting to read the shipping address on their luggage tag. She had written it herself in blue ink, which was beginning to run in the rain: “Mrs. George Pick Esquire, Darjeeling, India.”

  “Nice weather for ducks,” he said.

  She cocked her head. Was he talking to her?

  “I said, Nice weather for ducks,” the man said louder and more slowly. “Speak English?”

  “I do indeed,” Cicely Pick replied with a smile. “And I’m not hard of hearing either, in case you were wondering.”

  He opened his mouth as if to reply and then closed it again. Thankfully at just that moment another cab drew up. He climbed in without a backward glance. Even without the luggage tag it was obvious that they were not local. She was sure he could tell from a single glance at their clothes, their manner, their skin. Almost every single person she had seen since they arrived in Britain had been pale, so pale their skin looked almost blue. It was probably the light. There was barely any of it. She checked her watch. Despite the gloom it was already 11:15 a.m.

  The city smelled of coffee grounds underlined by the faint whiff of drains. An omnibus passed on the road in front, a horse and cart close behind. From somewhere nearby a church bell struck a single note. Finally another taxi drew up. The porter gave the destination, and the driver quoted a price. At least she guessed he did. His words were incomprehensible. Maybe the man with the cane had asked her the right question, maybe the English she spoke wasn’t the right kind of English. The driver glanced at the porter and repeated the price louder this time, his voice raised above the noise of the traffic. She gave a decisive nod of agreement even though she did not know what she was actually agreeing to. The driver looked pleased and helped the porter stack their luggage in the taxi’s boot. Cicely handed the latter a coin—more than enough, judging by the upturn of his mouth—and climbed in after her daughter. Once they had both settled into the sagging leather, the doors were slammed, the engine cranked, and with a puff of gray smoke and a grind of the gears, they were off.

  Almost immediately Kitty yawned and rubbed her eyes.

  “Tired?” Cicely asked.

  “Not really,” the child replied.

  She blinked several times and sat up straight, as she had been taught. W
ithin moments, however, her head nodded forward and she had fallen asleep. A folded blanket lay on a rack for cold days and drafty journeys. Cicely removed her daughter’s straw hat, undid the buttons of her coat, and tucked the blanket carefully around her lap. But even while sleeping Kitty threw it off.

  “Leave me be, Mother,” she murmured.

  Cicely’s eyes burned. If only she could doze as easily as her daughter, if only she could throw off complications as easily as a rug. It seemed as if she hadn’t slept for days, lying wide awake all night in her bunk on the train and in her cabin on the boat before that, her blood thickening, her mind a tangle of what-ifs and how-coulds and should-nots. And even now her ears roared with the rumble and grind of the steamship and the rhythm and clang of the train, and she longed to be still, to be quiet, to be clean again, but most of all finally to sink into the careless oblivion of sleep.

  They passed along a canyon of masonry, deep red, pale gray, and charry black, the left side of the street lit by the morning sun, the right still in shadow. In India, she calculated, it would already be late afternoon. She pictured their house on the side of the mountain, the empty rooms, the furniture swathed in dust sheets, and the daylight falling in stripes through the locked shutters. It would all be the same when she returned, she told herself, nothing changed but the season. And yet she imagined cracks in the plasterwork and doors banging in the wind, an absence, a shift, that manifested itself in fallen slates and cracked tiles, a profusion of weeds and the blocking of sinks, the house punishing her for leaving.

  She hoped she had labeled their trunks correctly; she willed that the railway company’s delivery system was efficient but not overly so. It would be embarrassing if the trunks arrived before they did, but even worse if they were lost on the way.

  By the time they reached the outskirts of the city the air seemed cleaner, the smog and coal dust blown away. The taxi crested a hill and a view unrolled before them, water surrounding the hills as if the world had flooded and remained that way—the mountains and moors, the forests and the rocky shores all reflected back at the sky in the rippled mirror of the river Clyde.

  Kitty opened her eyes and gazed out at the view in silence.

  “So I’m Scottish too?” she asked after a moment.

  “Half, if it’s just the father.”

  “And you’re not?”

  She shook her head no.

  In India it often felt as if nearly everyone but her had roots in the old country, as her husband liked to call it. At Christmas the air reeked of mothballs and cloves as Paisley shawls and tartan kilts were brought out of cedar wardrobes or mahogany chests, shaken, pressed, then worn with unself-conscious aplomb. Every Saturday the whole year round, the local bagpipe band played “Scotland the Brave” and “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean” on the covered terrace of the Darjeeling Planters Club, and increasingly, she had noticed, the newspapers were full of birth announcements for babies named Angus, Hamish, or Fiona. With brighter colors, louder instruments, and stronger accents, Scotland, even from thousands of miles away, seemed to be capable of drowning out the local habitat by sheer volume.

  As they drove west, the river widened. A dozen small boats, their sails filled, scudded along the surface. A few miles farther they arrived at a bigger town, the roadside lined with ugly buildings, refineries, warehouses, factories, and a customshouse. The air again turned foul with the smell of charcoal, molasses, and something else—glue, perhaps? Between buildings Cicely caught a glimpse of a harbor, the quays piled high with sacks and wooden crates, the air hazy with smoke from the funnels of ships and the spray of the paddle steamers.

  The night before they left home, Cicely had consulted her husband’s collection of maps, fragile parchments that he cataloged by continent. Once spread out, the Indian maps were mostly pale pink, dirty yellow, or maroon, all spidered with train lines, but the maps of Argyll, Strathclyde, and the Western Isles were made up of patches of pure color: green, brown, and the most exquisite shades of blue. They were old, however, and had been folded so many times that they had begun to crack and split, the names of some places rendered illegible, as if forgotten halfway through the telling. She had shown the maps to Kitty, pointing out Glenrannoch School near Stirling, and the child had placed her finger on the tiny square set in a rectangle of green to make it disappear.

  Cicely had always loved the musical quality of Scottish places. Skye, Ayr, Troon, towns named in songs, the sound of each lingering in the mouth like sugar pebbles. It was strange, therefore, to arrive in a land she thought she knew only to find it otherwise. She had pictured mountains and wild seas, pretty villages and harbors, not factories, cranes, and a river full of barges.

  “Excuse me,” she called to the driver. “Where are we?”

  “Tail of the Bank,” he enunciated carefully. “Greenock.”

  This was the town her husband’s family wealth had sprung from, where their ships had set sail for the West Indies and where they had opened their warehouses and refineries, first for tobacco and then for sugar. There were some fine villas and a few grand civic buildings, but the streets were narrow and the houses old, many looking on the brink of collapse. Cicely took in the people as they passed: three men in caps and dark jackets sheltering in a doorway to smoke their cigarettes, a woman leaning out of a window to shout at some children below, a group of girls with baskets hanging out sheets on a line. Cicely stared and they stared right back. They looked so thin, so undernourished. It was a strange thing, to her at least, to see such poverty among people with white skin. It was equally novel, so she gathered, to see a woman and child alone in the back of a taxi.

  They turned right onto a wide esplanade, elegant mansions on one side and the chop of the river on the other. A light wind blew in from the hills, lifting hats and blowing skirts around the ankles of the ladies who strolled along the waterfront. The driver pointed out a thick seam of land between the water and the sky, the Cowal peninsula, their destination. They would take the steamer, she thought he said, across the water and drive the last few remaining miles. Finally they pulled into a narrow harbor with a small pier and drew to a halt. There was already a small queue of motorcars, horses and carts, and bicycles. Cicely wound down the window just as the sun came out and lit up the view with a golden light. The colors of the hills, the water, the sky, the rocks seemed to deepen and intensify as if a layer had been lifted, a glass washed, and she was sure she had never seen a bluer blue or a blacker black.

  She was turning to Kitty to point it out when the sun dipped behind a cloud, and the whole scene—the sky, the water, the rocks on the beach—grew dim and gray, the only color that remained the faded blue paint around the window of the ticket office. A spitting rain began to fall as she wound the window back up again. Although it was supposed to be the height of summer, Cicely’s feet felt cold. Her body, though cocooned in her coat, was chilled right through. How could one get used to such weather? How did one stay warm?

  A steamer was approaching. It docked and released a stream of vehicles and foot passengers from its decks, their heads covered with newspapers or baskets as they ran for cover. They were close to their destination now, but she was suddenly filled with dread. Would the boat sail in such a downpour? Perhaps they might be delayed? Would their driver turn around and take them back to the station in the city if she paid him double? Before she could ask, the taxi started its engine and followed the other motorcars down the ramp. There would be no delay, no opportunity to change her mind. In eight weeks Kitty would start boarding school, but in the meantime they were heading to an estate called Balmarra with neither prior warning nor an invitation.

  * * *

   At the point where the Clyde widened into an estuary and ran into the Atlantic, several sea lochs, deep and black as molasses, joined the river as it turned from freshwater to brine. It was on the shores of one of these, Loch Long, that Balmarra House was situated, facing east and looking out toward the village of Cove on the other side.
Constructed in the 1760s in the Palladian style, the house had a wide shallow staircase flanked by two stone lions, which led to a porch on the main floor. Three stories high with two side wings, it had been built to look bigger than it actually was.

  The first sign of the motorcar’s approach was the rise of a couple of black crows into the pale summer sky. And then the faintest rumble of wheels on the driveway, the crunch of gears, and the grumble of an engine. The gardener’s dog began to bark.

  “Are we expecting anyone?” Antonia asked Cook.

  Cook shrugged and placed a kettle on the range to boil.

  “Just two for dinner as far as I know,” she replied. “But then again, no one tells me anything.”

  Antonia glanced over the accounts once more, then took off her spectacles.

  “Now about the tea,” she continued.

  “It’s the best I can get on our budget,” Cook replied. “Maybe not the best there is. Depends on what you’re used to, I suppose. Your father never complained.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  Cook, whose name was Edith but who preferred to be addressed thus, sucked in her cheeks, no doubt storing her outrage for later where she would repeat their exchange word for word to anyone who would listen, picking over it for morsels of insult. She was a woman who seemed to lack the muscles for smiling. There was a stiffness about her, not limited to her joints, as if she kept herself boxed in for fear of revealing something unbecoming. But Antonia’s father had liked her; he had praised her cooking—plain and wholesome, nothing fancy or foreign—and she had worked for the family for as long as Antonia could remember. It couldn’t be much of a life, Antonia reminded herself, serving mediocre food to people who only pretended to appreciate it.

  The doorbell rang. Antonia turned her head in an effort to hear. But the mutter of voices was too low to make anything out.