All right, that had been the sweet side, overwhelming as the perfume of this flower in the dark, all of them there opening their arms.
But what truths lay ahead behind this door, about the child woman in the casket? For a long time, as they talked, voices splashing together like champagne, she had thought, Do any of you by any miracle know the name of my father?
“Carlotta will want to … well, have her say.”
“ … so young when you were born.”
“Father never actually told us … ”
From here, in the electric moonlight on the broken flags, she could not see the side gallery which Ryan and Bea had described to her, the gallery on which her mother had sat in a rocking chair for thirteen years. “I don’t think she suffered.”
But all she had to do now was open this iron gate, go up the marble steps, walk across the rotted boards, push back the door that had been left open. Why not? She wanted to taste the darkness inside so badly that she did not even miss Michael now. He couldn’t do this with her.
Suddenly, as if she’d dreamed it, she saw the light brighten behind the door. She saw the door itself moved back, and the figure of the old woman there, small and thin. Her voice sounded crisp and clear in the dark, with almost an Irish lilt to it, somber and low as it was:
“Are you coming in or not, Rowan Mayfair?”
She pushed at the gate, but it didn’t give, and so she moved past it. The steps were slippery, and she came up slowly and felt the soft boards of the wooden porch give ever so slightly under her.
Carlotta had disappeared, but as Rowan entered the hallway now she saw her small dim figure far, far away at the entrance to a large room where the lone light was shining that illuminated all of the dim high-ceilinged distance before her.
She walked slowly after the old woman.
She walked past a stairway, rising straight and impossibly high to a dark second floor of which she could see nothing, and on past doors to the right opening onto a vast living room. The lights of the street shone through the windows of this room beyond, making them smoky and lunar white, and revealing a long stretch of gleaming floor, and a few indefinable pieces of scattered furniture.
At last passing a closed door to the left, she moved on into the light and saw that she had come into a large dining room.
Two candles stood on the oval table, and it was their faintly dancing flames which gave the only interior illumination to everything. Amazingly even it seemed, rising thinly to reveal the murals on the walls, great rural scenes of moss-hung oaks, and furrowed farmland. The doors and the windows soared to some twelve feet above her head; indeed as she looked back down the long hallway, the front door seemed immense, its surrounding frame covering the entire wall to the shadowy ceiling.
She turned back, staring at the woman who sat at the end of the table. Her thick wavy hair looked very white in the dark, massed more softly around her face than before, and the candlelight made two distinct and frightening flames in her round glasses.
“Sit down, Rowan Mayfair,” she said. “I have many things to say to you.”
Was it stubbornness that caused her to take one last slow look around her, or merely her fascination which wouldn’t be interrupted? She saw that the velvet curtains were almost ragged in some places, and the floor was covered with threadbare carpet. A smell of dust or mold rose from the upholstered seats of the carved chairs. Or was it from the carpet, perhaps, or the sad draperies?
Did not matter. It was everywhere. But there was another smell, another delicious smell that made her think of wood and sunlight, and strangely, of Michael. It smelled good to her. And Michael, the carpenter, would understand that smell. The smell of the wood in the old house, and the heat which had built up in it all day long. Faintly blended with the whole was the smell of the wax candles.
The darkened chandelier above caught the candlelight, reflecting it in hundreds of crystal teardrops.
“It takes candles,” said the old woman. “I’m too old now to climb up to change them. And Eugenia is also too old. She can’t do it.” With a tiny gesture of her head, she pointed to the far corner.
With a start Rowan realized that a black woman was standing there, a wraith of a creature with scant hair and yellowed eyes and folded arms, seemingly very thin, though it was hard to tell in the dark. Nothing was visible of her clothes but a soiled apron.
“You can go now, dear,” said Carlotta to the black woman. “Unless my niece would like something to drink. But you don’t, do you, Rowan?”
“No. No thank you, Miss Mayfair.”
“Call me Carlotta, or Carl if you will. It doesn’t matter. There are a thousand Misses Mayfair.”
The old black woman moved away, past the fireplace, and around the table and out the door into the long hall. Carlotta watched her go, as if she wanted to be completely alone before she said another word.
Suddenly there was a clanging noise, oddly familiar yet completely undefinable to Rowan. And then the click of a door being shut, and a dull deep throb as of a great motor churning and straining within the depths of the house.
“It’s an elevator,” Rowan whispered.
The old woman appeared to be monitoring the sound. Her face looked shrunken and small beneath the thick cap of her hair. The dull clank of the elevator coming to a halt seemed to satisfy her. She looked up at Rowan, and then gestured to a lone chair on the long flank of the table.
Rowan moved towards it, and sat down, her back to the windows that opened on the yard. She turned the chair so that she might face Carlotta.
More of the murals became visible to her as she raised her eyes. A plantation house with white columns, and rolling hills beyond it.
She looked past the candles at the old woman and was relieved to see no reflection any more of the tiny flames in her glasses. Only the sunken face, and the glasses gleaming cleanly in the light, and the dark flowered fabric of the woman’s long-sleeved dress, and her thin hands emerging from the lace at the sleeves, holding with knotted fingers what seemed a velvet jewel box.
This she pushed forward sharply towards Rowan.
“It’s yours,” she said. “It’s an emerald necklace. It’s yours and this house is yours and the land upon which it stands, and everything of any significance contained in it. Beyond that, there is a fortune some fifty times beyond what you have now, perhaps a hundred times, though that is now beyond my reckoning. But listen to what I say before you lay claim to what is yours. Listen to all I have to tell you.”
She paused, studying Rowan’s face, and Rowan’s sense of the agelessness of the woman’s voice, indeed of her manner altogether, deepened. It was almost eerie, as if the spirit of some young person inhabited the old frame, and gave it a fierce contradictory animation.
“No,” said the woman. “I’m old, very old. What’s kept me alive is waiting for her death, and for the moment I feared above all, the moment of your coming here. I prayed that Ellie would live a long life, that Ellie would hold you close in those long years, until Deirdre had rotted in the grave, and until the chain was broken. But fate has dealt me another little surprise. Ellie’s death. Ellie’s death and not a word to tell me of it.”
“It was the way she wanted it,” Rowan said.
“I know.” The old woman sighed. “I know what you say is true. But it’s not the telling of it, it’s the death itself that was the blow. And it’s done, and couldn’t be prevented.”