Jean-Philippe acknowledged that would be a problem, with the younger son now gone, because the older one would hardly be a candidate—not with his history, and his troubled temperament. And Monsieur Wilde could not take time so easily away from all his work.
They were all looking at him now. Across the room, where Monsieur Ryder had been playing some strange sort of game with Lydia by passing her his wine cup and receiving it again above the armrests of their chairs, she had now straightened in her seat and was regarding Jean-Philippe directly with what seemed to be a purpose of her own.
And then she said, “I will.”
He understood those words, and knew their meaning.
But to make her purpose still more clear she looked towards her father and she told him, “I will go.”
De Brassart, unaware no translation was needed, turned the words to French and added, “There, you see? That ends your problem.”
Jean-Philippe was less convinced. While re-folding his letter on its creases with precision he looked carefully at Lydia and was inclined to think from how she held herself, so resolute, that she had business of her own to see to in New York. And that might prove a problem for them both.
Charley
“You’re on a mission,” said Malaika, watching from her front porch as I climbed the long flight of stone steps towards her, “I can tell.”
Her house was in an older part of Millbank on a street that wound uphill along the side of an embankment, with the houses sitting higher up amid the trees, so once you’d reached her sidewalk gate you had to turn and climb again. Her front steps had been landscaped very prettily, but there were twenty-two of them. You had to be intrepid.
Still, I liked the fact that she was within walking distance. Everything in town was within walking distance, really. I had left the car at home today, enjoying the perfection of the crisp fall afternoon, the sky a clear, pale blue against the mounds of trees with turning leaves that painted all the hillsides shades of gold and russet red.
Malaika’s lawn was still a vibrant green that nearly matched the shutters of her big white-painted house, its broad porch angled for a stunning view across the road and rooftops to the sunlit park and millpond at the centre of the town.
The porch had wicker chairs with deep inviting cushions, and I sat and caught my breath and told her, “I’ve been at the library.”
“Of course you have. How else would you spend Sunday afternoon on a long weekend when your boyfriend’s here?”
“He isn’t.”
“What?”
“He isn’t here. He left last night.” I set my weathered tote bag down and took the glass of water she had poured me from the pitcher on the glass-topped wicker table by her own chair. “And he’s not my boyfriend, anymore.”
“Oh, Charley. Well then, since you’re walking, let me fix you something stronger.” She stepped inside and came back in a minute with tall glasses of what looked like fruit juice.
“What’s in this?” I sipped experimentally. It tasted of tequila.
“Secret recipe.” She settled back. “You need to talk?”
If she had asked me that five minutes earlier, I might have told her no, that I was fine. But with the comfort of her presence and her front porch and the potent drink, I found myself unloading all the details. “I don’t know,” I said, in summing up, “Maybe I made a big mistake, but—”
“No, you didn’t.” She was very sure. “If he was right for you, you wouldn’t be so calm right now. You’d be curled up somewhere crying your eyes out.” With a long drink from her own glass she said, “When you find the right man, you’ll be devastated if he walks away.”
Dryly I said, “Something to look forward to.”
She smiled. “No, what I mean is, when it’s right, you really know. You feel it. There’s no ‘maybe’ anywhere.”
“Is that how you felt when you met Darryl?”
“Honey, when I first met Darryl he was dating my good friend. It didn’t take, it didn’t last long. He thought she was just too wild, and she liked her men more exciting. So did I, in those days,” she admitted. “But there was just something, and the more he came around, the more I noticed it. The more I liked it. When they called it quits it hit me hard. And then my friend told me, Malaika, just be honest with yourself. You know you want to call him, so go call him. So I did.” She took a drink, the ice cubes clinking in her glass. “Sometimes the right man just sneaks up on you.”
I couldn’t picture Darryl—six-foot-something, handsome—sneaking up on anyone, and told her so. “But if I find somebody half as nice as Darryl, I’ll be happy.”
“You will,” she assured me. “Like my friend said, you just have to keep it honest, with your man and with yourself. Men aren’t so complicated—what you see is what you get. But sometimes what we see is what we want to see, and not what’s really there. And that’s what gets us into trouble.”
I considered this, acknowledging that I’d been seeing Tyler for a long time through a filter that had blurred his imperfections.
All of us, Malaika had once told me, have our blind spots. And that made me suddenly remember why I’d come to see her in the first place.
As I reached down for my tote bag I could feel the faintest first effects of alcohol, reminding me I also should have eaten lunch. But this was more important.
“I found Violet,” I said, pulling out the sheaf of photocopied pages I’d been busy gathering. “Remember Violet, from the slave lease in Frank’s uncle’s files? Well, I had time this afternoon, you know, so I thought it would be a good thing before our next board meeting if I just went and looked through all the records from the Fishers’ store—the ones that Isaac Fisher said his family had donated to the library, to see, like Frank said, if we could find any account for Captain Benjamin that might show what he bought there. And I did.” I slid those papers from the pile to show her. “These are his accounts, they’re really interesting. They even tell us what his favourite kind of tea was. But,” I added, pulling out a second group of stapled sheets, “the Fishers kept a separate ledger at their store for black people who shopped there.” They were not the only storekeepers to keep a so-called “Negro register,” I’d come across them several times before while doing research, and I knew Malaika wouldn’t be surprised by its existence, but, “There’s Violet,” I said, pointing to the page. “Right there. See? ‘Violet, from Snug Cove.’ She shows up in 1754, and the last entry is 1760.”
Malaika took the papers from me, reading through them. “There’s a Phyllis here from Snug Cove, too.”
“I think that’s Violet’s mother. In the letter Reuben Wilde wrote his brother—wait, I’ve got that here as well.” I rummaged for my copy. Found it. “He says, ‘I have learned of the loss of my property’ and then he says he expects to be paid because she was ‘a skilled cook and not old.’ And then he goes on to talk about Violet and how she’s now twelve and he wants to be paid double or he’ll reclaim her. So I think it’s possible Violet was hired out here with her mother, and then when her mother died she was kept on. Phyllis,” I said, to bolster to my argument, “is in the Fishers’ store records beginning in 1742, but then she disappears in 1754, right when Violet starts turning up. And Reuben Wilde wrote this letter in April of 1754. So it would all tie in, if Phyllis was Violet’s mother, and that was the year that she died.”
“Have you shown this to Frank?”
“No. I’ve only just found it. I’m going to, though,” I said. “I’d like to bring it up at the next board meeting, but I think it’s only fair to let Frank know in private, before that.”
Malaika agreed. “Better you than me, though. He won’t like it. It’s part of the legend of Benjamin Wilde that he never held slaves, so to learn he grew up in a house with them will be a hard thing for Frank to accept.”
“Like you said, though, it comes back to honesty. Really, it—” I broke off, losing my train of thought as an animal streaked past the porch in a brown-and-white blur, plunging headlong into the tangle of flowering groundcover. “Is that Bandit?”