Rachel went rigid. “No,” she echoed. Her legs gave way and she collapsed to the ground in a spicy flush of Lanvin’s My Sin.
Before I could kneel down, Jack appeared seemingly from nowhere and gently pushed me aside so he could revive her. The concern on his face was very real. As much as Rachel complained about him, he was always solicitous of her. He carried her back to my Cadillac, which was closer than their car, and drove ahead to the house to get her out of the heat.
I probably should have gone with them. But Jack was a doctor and could do more for her than I could. Once again falling back on my training—to be polite and, yes, an obedient wife—I recovered myself and encouraged the crowd to move toward the house.
Chapter 4
Bliss House
Bliss House sits at the end of its lane, restful, like a journey’s end. Tall and straight, yellow-bricked and black against the sky, it wears its soft slate mansard roof as a man in a formal summer suit might wear a comfortable cap. The two shallow wings off either side of the house aren’t wide enough to imply any welcoming embrace. Press had told me it had been a wildly expensive house when it was built by his grandfather, Randolph Bliss, in the 1870s, designed by a black Frenchman named Hulot, whom he’d hired as a kind of slap in the face to his defeated neighbors. It’s very unlike the other grand houses in the area, having both a ballroom and a full theater on the third floor, and no columns or sweet porticoes or climbing ivy. When he first saw it, my father called it one of the ugliest houses he’d ever seen, but fortunately not in front of Press or his mother.
I don’t think of Bliss House as ugly.
I empathize with Bliss House. It is tall and ungainly, and a bit unsuited to its watercolor rural surroundings, just like me. It’s not that I’m not at home in the country. But Old Gate is a kind of gateway to the wilds of western Virginia, and Bliss House might have been a happier house if it had been built on the eastern side of the state, where I was born. A region filled with people of wider experience, more sophisticated tastes.
There is romance at Bliss House. Its gardens are formal, but lush. Even the herb garden tucked around the back, with its circle on circle of tightly pressed stones and thick rings of soil filled with flowering herbs, was designed with an eye toward beauty, as well as usefulness. And then there is the dome set high in the center of the three-story front hall: a scene of the starry sky, just before full dark, as though the architect had left the roof off. Depending on the light outside, the stars may seem to almost disappear; but in the evening, even in the reflected light of the great chandelier, the stars emerge bearing their own vibrant light. Press and Olivia and even the servants never seemed to notice the stars change, which annoyed me. But I know what I have seen.
I have said that it is tradition for anyone from the town to be allowed to call at the house after a funeral, but the tradition didn’t just apply to funerals. Olivia had held a garden party every late spring when the azaleas bloomed, and another at the New Year. Guests always arrived with a cautious air of excitement and barely disguised curiosity. For a while, I was like them, but once I moved in, I began to resent their crude interest. We were not creatures on display for their prurient observation. Bliss House has a reputation for unnatural death and for the supposed presence of the lingering dead, but most of what people imagine and gossip about is untrue (yet what they don’t know is far more horrific). The family has seen more than its share of tragedy. Rachel had even prodded me about it, telling me that everyone in Old Gate believed that Randolph Bliss, who had come to Virginia from Long Island, had committed some crime and caused the house to be cursed before the first brick was laid.
“It’s infamous,” she said. “When you’re married, we can have fabulous séances and talk to all the people who died there.” We’d both been a little drunk on the crème de menthe she’d brought from her parents’ house after Thanksgiving break—the break during which I’d met Press. But after the wedding, she never mentioned it, let alone suggested a séance.
I believed in ghosts long before I moved into Bliss House.