Moonlight streamed through the dome windows, brightening the stars on its surface and filling the well of the house with silver light. My feet were bare and cold on the gallery floor and I was about to hurry back to my room when I noticed that the door to the yellow guest room, J.C.’s room, was standing open.
How horrid a thing jealousy is! I couldn’t help myself that my mind, rather than imagining that she’d gone down to the kitchen for something to eat or to the library for a book, went directly to the idea that she was in Press’s room. I’d seen nothing untoward passed between them that evening; but as the wine had worn off, my suspicions reasserted themselves. The idea of J.C. in any sort of sexual situation with my husband or anyone was repugnant to me. Hers would be like the embrace of a particularly feminine, but ghoulish, spider.
So do not blame me when I tell you that I went to my husband’s room as though I were being pulled there. I swear, I had no choice.
My hand trembled a bit as I touched the doorknob and rested my cheek against the wood. There was indeed a sound coming from the other side. As I turned the knob and let the door open of its own accord, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. Press was snoring in the shadows of his tall bed. The shadows were familiar, too: he was alone.
With his door safely closed, I went to stand at the top of the front stairs to listen for any sound that might come from downstairs. But I heard only the grandfather clock.
I should have gone straight back to bed, ashamed of my suspicions, or at least comforted. But I was awake and curious. There had been another girl very like J.C. at Burton Hall: the same razor-sharp limbs and aggressive laugh. We rarely spoke and never shared a class, but she had caught me staring at her once, in the library. Before I could look away, she flicked her tongue from between her lips and ran it slowly across her large white teeth. It was a strange, sensuous thing for her to do, and I couldn’t look away, and for a moment it was as though we were the only two people in the room. My breath caught in my chest. Then she turned back to her book, amusement plain in her callous smile, and the spell was broken.
Something about the stillness of the house, the heaviness of the air, made me give Olivia’s doorway a wide berth as I passed. Olivia’s room, like J.C., fascinated and repelled me at once. What other terrors waited inside for me? But Eva. Don’t forget Eva, I told myself.
I knew I shouldn’t go into the yellow room. I’m sure I gave myself some foolish excuse about her possibly being injured or too ill to close the door herself. And of course there was the possibility that she’d just wanted to leave the door open, tempting, suggesting, to someone that he—yes, of course he—should make his way inside.
I forced myself to breathe deeply to slow the beating of my heart. The anticipation I felt was inappropriate, surely, for a hostess who was only supposed to be checking on a guest’s welfare.
The moon was high enough that the yellow room stood in deep shadow. I had stayed in this room more than once before Press and I were married, tucked up safely beside Olivia as though she might keep an eye on me there and keep Press away from me. Although Olivia called it the yellow room, its wallpaper was truly gold and silvery white. Large flowers traced in silver-white against a rich gold field caught the bit of moonlight and shone, iridescent. The far windows looked directly down on the garden maze. I’d sat in the window seat beneath them before, wondering what my life here in Bliss House would be like. That night, I wondered if J.C. had also been imagining what her life might be like if she were the mistress of Bliss House.
The bed was empty and in disarray, but there were smells in the air that told me she hadn’t been gone too long. The peppery scent of Caron Poivre mixed strongly with flatulence and perhaps . . . what was it? Cognac.
There was light enough to see how her belongings lay about the room with surprising carelessness: yesterday’s dress over the top of a chair, a stream of lingerie flowing from the suitcase on its stand to the floor, two pairs of shoes trailing along the middle of the carpet toward the far windows. The sight of the clutter reassured me, somehow. Press didn’t like clutter, would comment even if the nursery were in too much disarray. He could never live with a woman like J.C.
I dipped my hand into the open suitcase, and its depths of silk and cotton and nylon released an invisible cloud of perfume. I lifted a slip to my cheek. It was fine silk, the lace at its bosom soft, not prickly, like the lace on so many of my undergarments. She, like Rachel, would pay attention to such things, I thought. The differences were often lost on me. How odd that the two women, so alike, disliked each other.