“What?”
“You’re just determined to get that old Seven Years’ War in there somehow, aren’t you?”
I’d smiled. “I have a whole display space planned. You want to see it?”
We had gone downstairs so I could walk her through the room below my office, which, when we’d restored the kitchen to its former size, would still leave space for an exhibit on the early life of Captain Wilde; his childhood, and his family. And his sister. And her doomed, beloved French officer—assuming I could find sufficient proof that he’d existed, that the legend of their love affair was true, so Sharon and the board would let me tell the story.
From the floor above, a muffled thud had interrupted us. It had been light, not loud, a little like a footstep, but although we’d stopped and listened, there had been no other sound. Malaika had dismissed it. “Someone walking on the roof,” she’d said.
I’d been less sure.
When she had gone and I was left alone again, I’d climbed the stairs back to my office warily. I’d hovered in the doorway for a moment.
My desk had been just as I’d left it, all the papers in their semi-ordered piles, and through the window I’d seen Sam at work just as he’d been all morning, in his jeans and hooded sweatshirt. There’d been sunlight coming in my window, and the branches of the nearly leafless tree that grew beside it sent a lacy web of shadows slanting from the window ledge across the wall behind.
But the painting had been turned again so that its back was facing me, the way it had been earlier.
In the old part of the house, a door had slammed, and then another, and another, and I’d done a thing I almost never did: I swore, beneath my breath. In French, because the first swear words I’d learned in childhood in our house had been in French, and somehow they just always came more naturally. And then, because it struck me that the ghost, from all accounts, also spoke French, I’d kept speaking in that language and addressed him as I’d crossed the room to turn the painting so that it faced out again. “I like it this way, thank you.”
It had been a fleeting moment of bravado, nothing more. I wasn’t even sure why it had seemed important to me to assert myself against a force I couldn’t even see, much less control, and I’d felt foolish and self-conscious as I’d sat behind my desk again, determined not to look up from my papers, and yet equally determined not to be a coward.
For a long and stretching moment there’d been silence in my office.
Then I’d heard a lightly muffled thud, not loud. A little like a footstep.
It had taken me at least a minute before I had summoned up the nerve to look, but I’d already known what I would see. The painting leaned where I had left it, up against the wall. Except its back had, once again, been turned towards me.
? ? ?
At least the painting wasn’t heavy. I was grateful for that now as I leapt back in time to let the yellow taxi speed on past while I watched safely from the sidewalk’s edge. It was a busy Sunday afternoon, and though I’d found space in a garage up on East Twenty-Fourth Street, I still had a few blocks to walk to my cousin’s apartment at Gramercy Park.
To be honest, I didn’t mind. Gramercy Park was one of my favourite neighbourhoods in New York City. Built in the nineteenth century, it had retained the grandeur and the elegance of that lost age, its brownstones and mansions and trees like an echo of Europe a stone’s throw from midtown Manhattan.
At its centre was the park itself, a stately green garden enclosed by a fence of high wrought-iron bars that allowed you to see what you couldn’t enjoy, since the park was kept private for residents who paid a steep yearly key-rental fee. Even those who gained entry were restricted by the tidy iron posts strung with determined chains that kept people from straying off the neatly gravelled paths into the garden borders.
The lowly little sparrows, in a show of class rebellion, took no notice, hopping where they had a mind to, chirping noisily, in company with pigeons who strolled freely in defiance of the militant grey squirrels on patrol, tails up and bristling, who tried to chase them off. One squirrel doing lookout duty from the high branch of a tree that overhung the sidewalk watched me with suspicion, but when I got close it scrabbled down the roughly channelled bark and took off like a shot.
It was quieter here. I could hear the occasional honk of a car horn from farther up Lexington or farther still on Park Avenue South, and a siren passed by in the distance, but in Gramercy Park life moved slowly and gracefully. People walked dogs and pushed strollers. They sauntered.
The towering maidenhair trees in a line down the sidewalk were starting to let go of their golden, fan-like leaves, as were the willow oaks with branches like a lacy web of copper, and every time the breeze picked up it sent a swirling fall of jewel-like colour to the ground.
My cousin’s building held court like a grand old lady at the east end of the square, its soaring white facade a true Baroque Revival masterpiece, ornamented with arches and heraldic shields and scrolls, guarded by gargoyles, the entryway protected by two pedestals that held medieval-looking suits of shining armour.
The doorman didn’t recognize me even though I’d been here several times before. I wasn’t that surprised. We shared a surname, but my cousin Wendy and I moved in different spheres entirely.
Our grandfathers were brothers, born in Amsterdam just after World War I. The next world war had sent them separate ways. My own grandfather, Werner, had escaped the Nazi occupation of his homeland and come over to America. His older brother Anton, Wendy’s grandfather, had stayed behind and worked for the resistance as an art thief, stealing back paintings the Nazis had looted. He’d been good at it. When the war ended he’d had a small room filled with pieces he’d worked to return to their owners, or—as was more often the case, sadly—their rightful heirs. His son Martin, Wendy’s dad, had carried on this work, and in the process had discovered that he had an eye and passion for acquiring a collection of his own.
My father hadn’t talked about his family so I hadn’t known these stories as a child, but I had known my father’s cousin Martin. He had visited us in Toronto a few times, a handsome blond man with a much younger, very smart wife. And though Wendy, their only child, was six years older than me, on those visits we’d always been sent off together to play. She had been a good sport. We had played with my Barbie dolls, or we’d played Clue. And she’d once curled my hair with a curling iron, leaving an impressive accidental burn across my forehead that we’d hidden from the grown-ups. But the things that she had talked about were far outside my own realm of experience. Hers had been a world of riding lessons, tennis, summers in the Hamptons, trips to Paris and Vienna—wealth and privilege at a level I could barely comprehend.
“Can you imagine,” I’d said to my father once, “living like that?” Then, too late, I’d remembered those photos of Bridlemere, and I had realized he probably could. That his life had most likely been just like that before he’d followed his conscience to Canada. But the whole realm of the rich still seemed foreign to me.
Wendy’s apartment reminded me of the divide in our lives. It was so big it had its own foyer, with mirrors, a chandelier, plaster crown mouldings, and old original herringbone parquet wood floors. The table at the centre of the foyer held a vase with fresh-cut flowers, and in every direction were doors standing open to various hallways and rooms, so that as I came in I could see through the high-ceilinged living room, past the ornate plaster fireplace, to the bow windows that looked out on Gramercy Park.
Unsurprisingly, I had to sidestep suitcases.