The Necklace Page 12

  THE REMEDY

  Ambrose walked into the sunny breakfast room where May sat slumped at a stick-wicker desk facing the wall, the telephone at her ear, an overwatered violet in a cachepot suffocating slowly at her elbow. Arabella was the sole occupant of a ransacked breakfast table, sitting before an untouched dish of gray oatmeal swimming in cream, the sight of which made Ambrose want to heave. Her hair was unkempt, and she had dark rings of old makeup under her eyes. She was unabashedly dressed in her spangled dress from the night before.

  “Take this,” Arabella said, sliding the dish toward Ambrose. “The smell is killing me.”

  He was glad that he’d gone straight to his corner room last night and fallen into bed alone. She’d been quite drunk the night before.

  May hung up the phone and turned. “Your parents are sending the car. It should be here within the hour.”

  Arabella stood then in her remarkable state of dishabille. “I know I’m in the way.” She smoothed her dress as Ethan came in the room and raised his eyebrows.

  “Cousin Ethan,” she said. Though no relation, Arabella had known the Quincy family all her life. Her parents had known the Quincys far longer. She waved a hand, her wrist still encircled in diamonds—gaudy now in the morning light. “Thanks for the party,” she said, sequins sparkling on her dress with a dull twinkle. And then to Ambrose, so only he could hear, “I’ll see you at the club this afternoon.” She pursed her lips and blew him a silent kiss, unseen by anyone else as she walked by.

  The maid entered the room and set a silver toast rack in front of Ambrose and placed a small pot of homemade marmalade beside it. His brother’s favorite, he noted. Ambrose had the briefest flash of desire to get up and follow Arabella, to leave and never come back.

  “That girl,” Ethan said, fondly shaking his head as he sat down. “A real speed.”

  “I heard that,” came Arabella’s reply from halfway up the stairs.

  “They’re all like that nowadays,” Ethan faux-whispered.

  “And that,” she called.

  Ambrose bit into a piece of cold toast with marmalade, bitter and cloyingly sweet at the same time.

  Sitting up so straight in May’s ladder-back chairs and eating something unappetizing seemed appropriate penance, along with his pounding head, his roiling stomach.

  “Not feeling so well?” Before Ambrose could answer, Ethan went on. “I must say I feel great today. I’d like coffee. Nothing more for me, Dorothy,” he said, addressing the maid. For the first time Ambrose noted the bluish lines around his brother’s eyes, the rigid set of his mouth. “Also an egg yolk,” he was calling. “And Worcestershire and a little cayenne for my brother here. He seems to have caught a bug last night.”

  “Just tea, please,” Ambrose tried to revise the order.

  But the maid had disappeared through the swinging door to the kitchen.

  May was scratching on paper with a little gold screw-top pencil, instructions for the gardener or perhaps revisions to the cook’s daily menu. She was as competent in these tasks as anyone would have imagined her to be, including Ambrose.

  She joined them then, sitting on Ethan’s left, his bad side.

  “What shall we do this morning?” May asked with too-bright cheer as the maid cracked an egg in a glass, separated it at the table, and discreetly put the shells in a bowl for disposal. She added the requisite condiments and set the concoction at Ambrose’s place. Her deft delivery of this remedy gave credence to the rumored decadence of May’s household. Giving a sly sideways glance at Ambrose, May said, “If you’re feeling up to it, doing something, that is.”

  She was dressed in crisp hacking clothes, fit for walking or riding, and Ambrose was pleased to see his necklace winking from inside the neckline of the starched broadcloth shirt she wore. Her breeches cinched at the waist, and the pale moleskin eased over her hip and thigh. Her dark hair was sharp with water or pomade against her cheek, and her eyes flashed with darkness, too, when she said, “I’d like to get out and about before the gymkhana.”

  Ethan laid the newspaper at his place one-handed, but the thin paper bunched as he tried to turn the page. May reached over and smoothed it for him, as if she’d done it a hundred times, and then turned the page. Watching them, Ambrose realized she likely did this every morning. “Maybe you can convince Ambrose to go with you on one of your tramps. I’ll save my energy,” he said, leaning over an article.

  “Save it for the bidding,” she said.

  “May, don’t start.” He touched his temple gingerly.

  “Does your head hurt?” Her tone immediately softened. In a quiet voice she asked, “Do you need your pills?”

  “No.” Ethan’s petulant tone, as if they’d discussed this numberless times, convinced Ambrose more than anything that his brother had been in pain for a while. “But I will if you go on about this.”

  May turned to Ambrose. “I think he ought to buy all the horses this afternoon, don’t you? One grand gesture to help those poor families.”

  At the gymkhana all proceeds, entry fees, and the money raised from a horse auction would go to a fund for the families of those who had died in the mine fire. May had wrangled most of her friends into donating the horses.

  “There’s already been money distributed. There’s a relief fund, the community chest.”

  “The community chest!”

  “Yes.” Ethan’s voice was rising. “What’s wrong with the community chest?”

  “Nothing, if it buys you a little peace of mind,” May said.

  Ambrose watched his brother visibly compose himself. “I’m not the only one making the decision about that,” he said in a controlled voice. “And besides, we don’t have room for twenty extra horses, darling.” He nodded at the paper and May reached over and turned the page for him.

  Then her hand fluttered to her neck, where she fiddled with the necklace, looking sideways at Ambrose as if waiting for him to join the argument. If Ethan did buy all the horses in a show of atonement, the gesture would end up in the newspapers, and not just the society column. Ambrose thought such a public display, his brother buying up polo ponies at the country club, would look more Marie Antoinette than Robin Hood—a tone-deaf gesture. Though he supposed he understood May’s desire. Just yesterday there’d been an editorial in the paper calling the fire a slaughter and speculating that shortcuts had been taken in constructing the secondary mine shaft.

  “I can’t stop thinking about them,” May said. “About those families.”

  Ambrose felt the need to come to his brother’s defense, to his whole family’s defense, really. “I don’t mean to be cruel, but those men, they knew the risk.” When she didn’t look up, he added, “Their wives, their families did, too.”

  “Not you,” she said to Ambrose, and then turned fully in her seat, edging him out of the conversation so she could face Ethan. “You can give the horses away,” she said. “Or we’ll give them back to the families they came from and donate the money where it belongs.”

  “Do I have to keep on paying?” Ethan asked quietly, stopping both May and Ambrose for a moment. “There are better ways to go about helping.” He reached up and smoothly turned the page for himself.

  “It’s dangerous work and they’re paid accordingly,” Ambrose said to May, wanting her to see reason.

  She turned on him then. “They were trapped underground and burned alive. You’re telling me it’s possible to pay someone for that?”

  “No one forced them to take the risk. It’s a calculation they made.” He hesitated before he added, “They probably went unconscious from the smoke before the fire reached them.” Though it sounded hard, Ambrose truly thought there was some consolation in the idea of the men not suffering.

  “You sound just like your brother,” she said, getting up. “Your father will be so pleased.”

  Ambrose had seen enough of the world now to know that men took all sorts of risks to make money, to survive. Ditch diggers in India, pearl diver
s in Japan, tanners, garbage haulers, and every sort of unsavory work, he’d seen it and understood it. Still, it didn’t mean he’d changed into his father, or Ethan for that matter.

  “Sometimes those are the risks men are willing to take to see their children eat.”

  “Or to see the owner’s son travel around the world, I suppose,” May said.

  Stunned silence enveloped the table. Even the kitchen was quiet. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting—sisterly camaraderie, a joshing, easy sort of intimacy like he had with Loulou?

  May rubbed the starched cuff on her shirt. “My comments were made from worry. I apologize,” she said from rote, as if she’d had outbursts before on this topic and had memorized an appeasing apology. She rose, her hobnail boots echoing across the hall and out the front door.

  Ambrose’s head swam with her reverberating acerbity. Ethan managed to fold the last page of the newspaper closed. The egg yolk jiggled in its brown broth when Ambrose pushed back from the table and bolted into the gunroom. He made it to the bathroom just in time to be sick in the toilet.

  * * *

  After he’d composed himself, he returned to an empty breakfast table—no sign of Ethan, and a void left by May.

  His stomach felt tender and a headache lingered on the edge of his vision. He’d never felt it more keenly, the desire to flee. Movement, to be going anywhere, calmed him, provided fresh air to blow out the cobwebs from his brain. He decided then that a walk was what he most needed.

  His spirits rallied just a bit when he walked under the blackbuck hanging in his brother’s grand entrance. Here was evidence of adventuring, not of reading about it in newspapers, but of hunting in general for truth, for knowledge, for a way to live.

  Once out the door and on the lawn, he took the small path lined with pea gravel to the edge of the tall hay fields.

  The path now led to a tennis pavilion, blindingly white, in the distance. Plunked down, really, in the middle of working fields and the bordering woods. The pale ochre clay tennis court baked in the sun. Since when did either Ethan or May play tennis? The unnatural gaudiness of the thing made him suspect it was a gift from Israel, who considered exercise wholesome.

  As Ambrose approached the little tennis Parthenon, he saw May sitting on an open ledge of the pavilion, in what would have been a window, pondering the open views. He thought he should apologize. He’d been making the reasonable argument, but she’d seen it as callous. He hazily thought she wouldn’t have done that before, would have given him the benefit of the doubt, wouldn’t have tried so hard to read malevolence into his words. He suspected she’d take offense at anything he said now, as if she were confirming the new slot he’d hold in her life. One booted foot dangled down and kicked out into space, the other stretched out along the length of the ledge.

  She didn’t see him as he approached, and he found himself hurrying at the opportunity to talk to her privately. They hadn’t actually been alone since his return. There were always people around, always someone listening.

  Her leg stopped kicking when she saw him, and he watched her eyeing exit routes from the pavilion, but then she must have realized there was no escaping him, unless she blatantly ran off.

  “What’s wrong?” she called when he was near. “Were you sent after me?”

  “Nothing. Get far?” he asked, knowing she hadn’t. Teasing had been his familiar shorthand with her when he’d left.

  She looked at him sideways and said, “It was fine.” He’d need to find a new shorthand between them.

  “I wanted to say,” he started, but found that somehow her mere presence had managed to turn the tables. She seemed in the right; he, the crass industrialist. “I don’t think it’s perfect,” he said. “I agree it was a tragedy.”

  She kept her eyes on the view as she said, “I know you do.”

  It was quiet, no breeze, a burning, cloudless sky and the sound of cicadas in the trees.

  “I snapped,” she said, slumping. “It gets to me.” He could see her pulse beating next to his necklace. “And I guess I was surprised. You were so above all the grubbing,” she said, almost to herself. “I always liked that about you. That you were above everything.” Her words reminded him of those days before he left.

  Looking back, he could see that in those brief moments everything had been his to judge and choose. He felt a faint beat of that pulse through his blood now. His surety during that time had been the most comforting thing in the world. He’d not realized how fleeting it would be—a moment when he felt a real and tangible certainty. Since coming home, since seeing his father, since May’s decision, since Ethan’s accident—it seemed like he hadn’t known anything at all. To have that firm conviction back for a minute—he’d forgotten how alluring it was. Forgotten how appealing it was to see himself through May’s eyes.

  “Not that I know what I’m talking about, according to your brother.” She said this with no small amount of bitterness for a woman who’d been married so shortly. She kicked off her perch and came to stand next to him. “Double-edged sword, I guess. That you used to think for yourself.”

  “I did. I’m not sure—” he started, noting she’d used the past tense, but she interrupted him.

  “It makes no sense if we’re not friends. We—” Here she turned toward him, looking over his left ear, as if intent on something in the field behind them. “We knew each other so well before. It seems a waste for that to all just—” She made a fist and released it, as if to say “poof,” and then turned to walk toward the house.

  He had to hustle after her.

  “I was thinking you and Arabella make quite a good match,” she said when he caught up, her hands behind her back like a marching general. “I believe she sees things very much the way you do.” Though just last night he would have agreed with her, today the comment rankled. She’d compared him to a flighty debutante, and yet again a line was drawn in the sand. You are on this side. I am over here. “I saw you kissing her last night.”

  They were at the bottom of the field, about to enter the garden, still a good way from the house.

  “Kissed, not kissing,” he said.

  Just then Ethan, in a light-colored suit, fashionable in the early summer, stepped out under the dark portico.

  “Darling, you’ll make us late. We’re due there now,” he called, his voice rising over the lawn.

  “May,” Ambrose said, taking her hand before they reached the lawn. “I want to be friends, too.”

  Her arm went limp and slipped out of his grasp. She hopped up into a lilting jog toward the library doors, her boots shuffling in the wet grass, the morning dew just burning off. She reached up to give Ethan a kiss on the left cheek, his bad side. She didn’t hesitate. Then she dashed inside and up the stairs to change.

  Ethan held the door for his brother, the scars on his hand looking more pronounced against the heavy wood. “She’ll be right down.” Then Ethan shut all three of them quietly in the house.

  THE IMPROMPTU PICNIC

  Lake Erie looks brighter next to the Shoreway as Nell’s driving away from the museum. She’d put the Moon on in the parking lot right after she’d left Reema Patel, talk of loan and acquisition and the maharaja ringing in her head. It’s safer on her. She’s convinced of that.

  She parks near the service entrance to the farm and checks her hair in the rearview mirror. Even in the shade, the Moon sparkles outrageously, and she’s having a hard time hiding it inside her neckline. Now that she knows what it is, her father’s advice comes back to her. She heads inside and pounds up the rickety back stairs to Loulou’s bedroom, intent on stashing the Moon in her luggage until she can decide on a truly safe place to store it.

  It takes Nell one look at her suitcase to realize that someone’s been up here, been through her things. The back door slams, and Pansy’s shrill, nasal voice calls out, “Yooo-hoooo.”

  “Hey.” Pansy’s voice is controlled to the point of suspicion when Nell walks in the kitchen. �
�Where’ve you been?”

  “Upstairs,” Nell says. Her antennae rise at her cousin’s presence at the farm in the middle of the day. Shouldn’t she be at her house in the Heights, or running after-school activities, or meeting clients in town for coaching? Nell wonders briefly if any of the Loulou lessons updated for a new century have made it into those sessions.

  Pansy nods and goes directly to what she cares about. “Reema Patel called me.”

  Nell’s face turns pink. She can’t help feeling betrayed by Patel; then again, there’s no confidential relationship between them, just savvy and politics.

  “She told me a relative had just been to see her. Wanted to know if I knew anything about our family harboring a potentially stolen necklace of importance.”

  Stolen—really? Nell didn’t peg Reema Patel as one for drama.

  “Of course I had to cover,” Pansy continues. “Had to pretend I knew all about it. That my family doesn’t hide things from one another.”

  “There’s no hiding. You saw it.”

  “Can I see it again?” Pansy asks, eyes on Nell’s neck.

  Nell wants to exercise another right as executor and say no. “You tried it on yesterday.”

  “Yeah.” Pansy’s palm is out flat, like “Hand it over.” And some ancient authority Pansy has over her makes Nell untie it, then drag it over her head and off. For the second time today, she offers the jewel up for scrutiny.

  “Reema said it was important,” Pansy says, hefting it.

  “How do you know Reema Patel?”

  “One of her boys is in the same grade as Andrew. How’d you know to go to the museum with it?”

  “You passed on it,” Nell says, suddenly wary. “I thought the museum could shed some light.”

  “Well, it’s a jewel, and yeah, I mean . . .You offered it to me. Still stand?”

  Pansy laughs like this is a little joke, but it feels ominous to Nell. “Oh, look, it’s exciting, okay?” Pansy says with a sparkle in her eye as she hands it back to Nell. “Can’t I be excited?”