I was starting to feel light-headed. “The hat?”
She laughed. “I’ll send it to you. Every family needs its own historian, someone to guard the stories, yes? Or else they will be lost. But now I’m eighty-six,” she said, “and have no children of my own, so someone else must guard the pieces I have gathered.” She looked up, towards the newly restored ceiling and the beautifully replastered walls, and told me, “This is nice. It’s very good, what you have done here, with this house. The love of Lydia and Jean-Philippe, this is where it began, so it is right that what remains of them returns here.”
? ? ?
“Eighty-six,” said Rachel. “Wow.”
I looked around from where I sat, beside Sam on my brother’s porch, and asked her, “Really? That’s your takeaway from everything I just got finished telling you?”
“Of course. The woman’s eighty-six and French and still flies over every year from Paris. That’s the life I want.”
I admitted she had made it look pretty fabulous. “But I don’t think I’ll look that good at eighty-six.”
“Sure you will,” Rachel said. “Sam loves to keep old things looking like new.”
“Ha ha.”
Sam stretched his legs out, feet propped on the porch railing, and said, “It’s true.”
“Partly true,” I corrected him, as Rachel left us alone. He was proving my point, moving one foot just slightly to test how far the railing wobbled. I said, “You like fixing things. Broken things.”
I hadn’t meant for the tone to creep into my voice, but it did, and he heard it. “Hey.”
“No, it’s okay. It’s just . . .”
“What?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s what you do, I know. Just like the houses. You fix things. And people. And beagles.” I couldn’t help smiling a little because he was pushing his boot on the railing again, nonchalantly. “I guess I’m messed up enough that I’ll stay interesting.”
“You think I’m with you because you need fixing?” He looked at me, serious. “Charley, I’m with you because when I came down that staircase last summer and saw you, it messed me up. I haven’t been the same since. Okay?”
He had the best eyes. “Okay.”
“Now, come here.”
And of course that was when the porch railing decided to fall off entirely, right to the gravel. Of course I looked up and saw my parents’ car pulling in at the front, unannounced, unexpected.
Sam grinned. Held my face in his hands. Held my gaze. “Breathe,” he told me. And kissed me.
And that, as it turned out, made everything right.
Postern
Some houses seem to want to hold their secrets. The Wilde House seemed to have decided that the time had come to let them go.
One morning Willie, working on the massive kitchen hearth, pulled out a flintlock pistol, in four pieces, from a hollow in the stones. “There’ll be a story goes with that, I’m sure,” he said, and Lara’s youngest boys had started coming up with story possibilities.
“I bet it was a bank robber.”
“I bet it was a rogue assassin.”
“Rogue assassin?”
“Yeah. He had a job to do here in the house, and when he finished he broke up the gun so nobody could trace it to him.”
Willie looked at me and winked. “That’s how it starts,” he told me.
I’d decided that I liked the story of the French soldier and Lydia much better now I knew they both survived and had a happy-ever-after ending.
And when the box from France arrived, it felt like Christmas morning.
It came wrapped up like a sculpture, thickly padded, but when all the packing layers had been peeled away they left a simple deal-box, three feet long by two by one and made of pine, with old forged hinges neatly inset so they would be more secure, and iron loops that once had held a lock.
There was a note to say the box itself had been made here for Jean-Philippe when he’d arrived, so he would have a place to keep his things, and that he’d liked it so much he had kept it all his life, and it had been passed down the family as a relic of their ancestor’s captivity.
And in the box, she’d sent the promised treasures.
A cocked tricorn hat of black wool felt with trim that had once been bright gilt. A square of faded yellow silk, much treasured from the look of it. And under those, shielded between sheets of acid-free cardboard, protected by Mylar, she’d sent us the drawings by Lydia Wilde.
I’d hoped there might be a self-portrait. There wasn’t.
But there were the drawings she’d done of her husband, and they were worth all of the rest. I could see why she’d fallen in love with him. Not just his looks, but the warmth of his eyes and the way that he seemed to be smiling privately, only for her.
There were two drawings of a much older man, kind-eyed and heavy-jawed, who had been labelled as Zebulon Wilde. And labelled or not, there was no way I could miss Benjamin—I’d seen enough of his portraits in oils to be able to know him as soon as I saw his face. Benjamin Wilde as a teenager was my particular favourite, because of the flow of his hair and the glint in his eye that seemed ready to take on the world.
There was also a young man resembling Benjamin but with more serious eyes, and I’d guessed his identity even before I had read the name: Joseph. The brother who’d taken the blame for a murder that never occurred. We could fix that.
I had plans to have quality copies made of these Wilde portraits; to frame them and hang them throughout the house, telling the stories of those who had lived here and helping them come back to life for our visitors.
So it was almost a mystical moment when, out of the bundle of drawings, I lifted the portraits of Phyllis and Violet.
Two drawings of each of them, beautifully rendered—rare representations of African American women of Benjamin Wilde’s time.
And then, at the bottom, below several drawings of children, was Patience Wilde. Lydia’s mother. Her eyes seemed to follow me, smiling, no matter which angle I viewed her from.
“Maybe,” I said to Sam, later that afternoon, “Lydia looked like her mother.”
He agreed it was possible. “Where am I putting this chair?”
We were starting to furnish the keeping room, now that the walls had been panelled and plastered and painted the soft grey-green colour they had been in Benjamin’s day.
Sam was holding the Spanish chair, carefully, waiting for me to direct him.
I said, “By the fireplace, right there. It’s a nice, cozy spot for it.”
He set it down.
As we stood watching, the chair began moving of its own accord. Sliding over the planks of the floor on a perfect diagonal, it came to a stop by the large window right at the front of the room, before pivoting slightly to rest at an angle.
I looked at Sam and he looked back at me. I’d expected him to look incredulous, even alarmed, but he didn’t. In fact, he appeared to be taking it all in stride.
“Well,” he said, “I guess that’s where she wants it.”
“Where who wants it?”
“You know. Our resident ghost.”
“He’s a man.”
Sam said, “Nah, she’s a woman. I’ve seen her.”
“You’ve seen her? When?”
“Couple of times. Just her shape, not her face, but she’s clearly a woman.” When he looked at my face, he asked, “What?”
It was such a relief to be able to tell him the things that had happened to me in this house, without worrying whether he’d think I was crazy. I couldn’t help adding, “But you’re awfully calm about this, for a guy who can’t watch scary movies.”
He shrugged. “She’s not trying to hurt anyone. She’s a comfortable ghost, if you know what I mean.”
It was not a bad word for her: comfortable. Really, the things she had done were designed to protect me, to show me my way in the dark, help me find things, remind me I ought to be patient. Unless . . .
“Oh,” I said.
“What?”
“Sam, I think I know who she is.” All the pieces began to connect, and the final one fell into place with the sermon. The one in the Tillotson book in my office: The patience of God. Not advice, but a name.
Her name.