“Are they all people you know?” Fel asked.
“Sort of,” Reid said. “If our family had a charter, it would have a line about every Briar getting their portrait painted before they die. A few are here, but most are scattered around the other estates.”
Scattered around? Fel imagined paintings left at odd angles like pieces of a shipwreck on a shore.
Reid stood next to Fel, eyes joining his on a painting of a standing woman. Against the wine red of her dress, her neckline looked pale as a pitcher of milk. Her fingers rested on a dark wood table. Her chin tipped up, like her eyes were following a bird the painter did not show.
“It’s an old tradition,” Reid said. “But I guess there’s something charming about it. Thank goodness for pictures, right? Can you imagine the days when you had to stand there that long?”
Reid’s words rushed past Fel. He couldn’t imagine any of this, a family with enough money that every son and daughter was painted onto canvas as tall as they were. He thought most families could not afford a single photograph of themselves, or even mirrors to see their faces in.
He could not remember any photographs he had seen before La Pradera. He could not remember the details of faces caught in shades of brown. But he remembered how rare they were, the silver-plated copper, the flashbulb. And here, on these walls, in every space not covered with portraits or paintings of ships, there were photographs. Dozens just in this hallway.
“Is the one of Bay here?” Fel asked.
Reid’s eyes left the portrait. “Bay?”
“The woman who—”
“I know who she is,” Reid cut him off, the laugh coming back into his words. “Why do you ask?”
Fel shuddered under the feeling that he’d just failed some test of how well he was listening. “I thought you said you all had your pictures painted.”
“Nobody told you?” Reid asked. “She’s not a real Briar.”
He said it without cruelty.
“But I thought,” Fel started, and then paused. “Her last name.”
“Her last name is Briar,” Reid said. “She has some of our blood. But she’s not one of us.”
It was a plain correction, a statement of fact as simple as naming the woman in the dark red dress.
“She acts like she owns this place,” Reid said. “But don’t let her tell you what to do.” He set a palm on Fel’s back. “She has no business ordering anyone around.”
The force of that hand made the hallway seem like it was folding in on itself. The dark walls were crumbling and collapsing toward them, the paintings scattering like shards of a broken window.
Fel shuddered away from it before he could stop himself.
“Okay,” Reid said, lifting his hands as though to promise he would not touch Fel again. “You’re all right.”
This man was lying. Fel wanted to tell the old women this, show it to them like a lost, shining thing he’d found in the grass. But he didn’t know what this man was lying about, and he had no way to prove it other than his own body acting faster than he could think. So the glittering thing he wanted to give the old women evaporated from his hands.
ELEVEN
They decided they would scare him off, this man who did not know these gardens. In the cupboards of the Briar house, Azalea grew green leaves that crowded the space between plates and bowls. Gloria’s vines clung to the inner walls, dense as mulch. Dalia’s fingers left flowers in the colors of fall trees, spilling off bookshelves and rising out of Reid’s dresser drawers. Calla crowded his marble sink and enamel bathtub with lilies, their whirls of white shielding yellow centers.
They hid flowers in their mouths, parting their lips when Reid passed and showing the petals like white or blue tongues. When he turned his back, Estrella planted starflowers in his food. Pink blossoms poked up between the ice cubes in his drinks. White blooms dotted a plate of dry-sherry scrambled eggs. They drew vines up through the floor of his bedroom. The starflower stems, fuzzy and purple, came in so fast and thick they buckled the aged wood.
But he drank the coffee, ate the eggs. From their hiding places in the hall, Estrella and her cousins saw him crouch to the split floorboards, pinching stems between his fingers and shaking his head as though witnessing a wonder. When they flashed the flowers hidden under their tongues, he said, “Extraordinary,” with the half-breathed reverence of seeing a saint’s relic.
They had not frightened him.
They had impressed him. Each flower that grew where it did not belong, each petal flashed between their teeth, deepened his interest.
Marjorie had loved seeing princes and ambassadors stride onto La Pradera, sure that no country gardens could match their own walled grounds. She loved watching them struck silent by the sunken garden opening in front of them, a ravine of flowering color and rich green.
Now that wonder worked against Estrella and her cousins.
That night, Estrella flopped down onto Azalea’s bed. “Now what?”
“We try something else,” Gloria said.
Azalea sat at her mirror, brushing pins out of her hair. “Like what?”
“Can we send him back to whatever corner of the world the Briars threw him out of?” Dalia said.
Calla’s shape appeared in the doorway, outlined by the hall’s light. “That might be harder than we thought.”
Estrella sat up. Gloria, Azalea, and Dalia shifted toward the door.
“We might have a legal problem.” Calla sat on the edge of the bed. “Well, Bay might.”
“What are you talking about?” Azalea asked.
Calla sighed. “Marjorie’s will.”
“Marjorie left La Pradera to Bay,” Estrella said.
“It might not have been hers to leave to anyone,” Calla said.
“How do you know that?” Azalea said.
“I read the deed.”
“When?”
Calla shrugged. “When Reid wasn’t looking.”
She gave them the words, assuming they would recognize them. Fee tail. Devise. Line of succession. Some Estrella caught. Others slipped from her hands. She felt herself settling between her cousins. She was not Azalea, who was too bored to listen and so skipped to being outraged. Nor was she Gloria, her lips pressed together in a way that meant she registered all this a little faster than the rest of them.
But Estrella understood enough for her worry to gather with her cousins’. It was so thick in the air they were breathing it.
“If it’s a legal problem, why can’t Bay go to court?” Dalia asked.
“Yeah.” Azalea nodded into the mirror. “If we can’t get him out of here, a judge can.”
“It’s not just that,” Gloria said, and that look, that apprehension over the things she understood that they did not, drew their faces toward her like trumpet flowers finding the moon. “It’s that Reid and the rest of the Briars decided she’s not one of them.”
“But she is,” Estrella said. “It’s her last name, too. Her blood.”
“The Briars consider her illegitimate,” Gloria said. “Because she was conceived in an adulterous union.”