The Ghosts of Kerfol (10 page)

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 fifties, 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.

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 announced, 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.”

The incline led down toward tall hedges and the shadowy avenue of trees that seemed to go on for miles at the estate entrance, and there was no one in sight, and no sound but the distant music from the band playing at the back of the house and the low hum of bees.

“We were just saying, Suze, you remind us of the princess in this old Breton folktale Tres was reading.” Peg looked at the lanky boy, ill dressed for this crowd if handsome in a brooding sort of way.

Suze took his free arm, the one Peg wasn’t affixed to, as Peg cooed, “That is your name, isn’t it? Tres?” then burst out laughing for no reason. Nerves. Everyone had flowed round the crisply carved hedges and through a gap in the border wall. They ducked under a terrace of wisteria into the mottled shadows of the avenue. It was lifeless and eerie under those regimental trees, with some half dozen other avenues radiating out. Even had someone been lurking there, they would be long gone now and could have taken any number of routes out. Or in.

Gerard smiled coyly. “Well, it looks as if your ghost has gone to bed, Dahut.”

Suze looked at him with all the scorn she had in her, without a blessed clue who Dahut was, fed up — for he’d been a rude bore since he came, aggressive too, which meant he wanted to sleep with her and knew full well in advance she’d turn him down — but before she could speak, the lanky boy, Tres, pulled the book out of his coat and flipped it open to the dog-eared page. Suze knew better than to scold him for abusing estate property when she herself was wearing a perhaps-priceless necklace borrowed from the safe in the master bedroom. Come to think of it, Tres seemed to take more than a passing interest in that necklace, glancing at it whenever he looked up, rarely meeting her eyes afterward, though when he did, it was with a brooding directness that pleased her.

“To recap,” he said, clearing his throat. “According to legend, the lost city of Ker-Ys was ruled by the good King Gradlon. The city was protected from the sea by a dike, and its gates could only be unlocked by a silver key in the keeping of the king.

“Gradlon had a spoiled daughter, Dahut, born to him of the beautiful fairy queen Malgven. He loved her well and provided for her even better, but Dahut grew up to be a young woman of, shall we say, loose morals.”

Someone snorted champagne through his nose, and a wave of snickering washed through the eleven or so assembled.

“She spent her time at balls, imbibing wine and mead, and leading the local youth astray.” Tres smiled, and suddenly Suze was sure that he had never been invited at all. He very likely was, as she’d suspected earlier, someone from town, who’d heard about their rental and the parties. The servants were different in every outpost. Some of those they borrowed or hired on from the owners were docile and willing, others begrudging and in need of discipline. Daddy rarely thought about the help or the movable household, except to provide for it, and urged her to speak up as necessary. But some buried part of her did not wish even a servant to think ill of her. No matter how entitled she was, she would never be entitled enough, evidently; a trait from her father’s side, she guessed, though his hardscrabble roots let him thumb his nose in the end.

The servants in such places always wagged their tongues, and it seemed as if every lowlife with something to buy or sell or mooch eventually found his way to her parties.

“One day a handsome prince arrived at the royal palace,” Tres continued. “Dahut fell hard and promised him whatever he desired.” The impostor met her eye for the first time, and when he whispered, it was as if the noisy group around them faded out and he were speaking only to her, and then she saw, behind the lanky storyteller, a shadow rounding the bed with clippers. Clipping the hedges, moving slowly.