Evergreen Falls (30 page)

“What was your grandmother like?” I asked. “Flora? In the letters he calls her Sissy, and he seems to think she’s a bit stern and moralistic.”

“She was the sweetest, happiest old lady you could imagine,” Terri-Anne said with tenderness. “Though she refused to speak of Sam, and became very distressed when I turned up the medical records that showed her father had died of pneumonia but made no mention of Sam. That was my first hint that something was amiss. It didn’t take much to find out it had all been a lie. But I couldn’t investigate it until Grandma died; it would have upset her too much. I’ve been wondering my whole adult life about it.”

We chatted for a few more minutes, and it occurred to me that these people about whom I’d been speculating for weeks were real, and not characters in a book. I liked Terri-Anne: she wore her heart on her sleeve. I organized to send all the letters down to her by courier—at her expense—and she gave me permission to make copies for myself, and begged me to keep poking around for her.

The whole conversation made me feel better about having been caught in the act that day, and as soon as I hung up I took out the 1926 letter book from my bag.

Rain settled in overhead as I curled up on the couch. I didn’t bother starting at the beginning. The love affair had taken place in winter, so I started on the first of June, flicking through page after page looking at the addressee of each letter. It took me less than a minute to reach August, to a letter addressed to Mrs. Thelma Honeychurch-Black, who I knew from my investigations was Sam and Flora’s mother.

Dear Madam,

I acknowledge your correspondence and will keep this letter brief, the sooner to assuage your anxiety. In short, madam, you have nothing to fear from me. I have always taken pride in my discretion, and the personal knowledge I have of all my guests, past and future, will accompany me to my grave. I respect your wishes, and assure you that all involved are committed for their own pressing reasons never to speak of it again. The events were tragic; their repercussions ought not be felt more widely, lest that tragedy magnify. We are of one mind on this.

Yours faithfully,

Eugenia Zander

I read the letter over and over, and each time my skin shivered.
Never speak of it again. The events were tragic.
What exactly had I uncovered? And what did it have to do with Sam and Violet?

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

1926

T
he snow came, as predicted, but not in great thick drifts that made travel impossible. Rather it floated down two nights in a row, soft and light as though spun from crystalline spiderwebs. In both cases, it had melted away by morning. Violet was enchanted with this kind of weather; she had never seen it before, and even though she found being out in it stark and unbearable, she loved to watch it through the windows, prompting Hansel to become very cross with her when she was supposed to be collecting meals to deliver. But not as cross as he used to be. The quiet seemed to make everybody calm, almost cavalier. Winter was here, and they were a handful of humans sharing a big, empty space. The mood was light, collegial. Even the guests, including the ordinarily caustic Cordelia Wright, were friendlier.

Mind you, Violet had now seen inside Cordelia Wright’s room, when she’d gone in to polish the furniture and change the linen, and had decided the opera singer had no reason to be cranky. Beautiful dresses and furs were flung over the bed or hung haphazardly in the wardrobe, and dazzling jewels were crammed in the jewel case. Of course, Violet shouldn’t have seen any of this, but alone in their rooms, she succumbed to curiosity. Flora’s room was immaculately
tidy, her desk neatly arranged with pens and inkwell and note paper. Lord and Lady Powell’s bed always looked as though they’d been wrestling in it all night (she couldn’t bring herself to believe that they’d been making wild love for hours). Miss Sydney’s dresser was crammed with more beauty products than Violet had known existed in the world: creams and potions and pills, and even a soap labeled
DOCTOR POTTER’S SLIMMING SOAP
whose packet promised to melt away fat
and
age at the same time. Tony’s and Sweetie’s rooms were exactly as she’d expected: messy and with a pervasive musty male scent. Not like Sam’s room, with its scent of sweet maple, damp earth, and plant clippings. Even though she knew it was the smell of opium steam, she didn’t mind, because it was the smell of his happiness and hers. Her first week of chambermaid work was fascinating, but thereafter it became merely tedious and, she believed, beneath her.

The extra work made her tired; tired so deep in her muscles that, by the third week, she could only get through the day if she napped for a half hour in the afternoon. Keeping her eyes open during Sam’s nocturnal visits also became a problem, and more than once she nodded off while he was telling her some grand story about his great-great-uncle who fought in a war with Spain or his mad great-grandmother who kept a hundred cats in a manor home and fed them all cream. He could still bring her alive with his touch, but the imperative to sleep weighed on her more and more heavily.

“You’re bored with me, I can tell,” he said one night, as they lay side by side in her narrow bed in the dark.

“No, never,” she said.

“Sometimes I feel as though you aren’t even listening to me.”

“I’m tired, Sam, that’s all. It must be after midnight. The rest of the hotel is asleep.”

“Asleep. Asleep and empty. We could do whatever we wanted.”

She propped herself up on her elbow and looked at him. There was too little light for clarity; he was dark gray and indistinct, his black eyes the only thing she could fix upon. “What do you mean?”

“Have you ever danced in the grand ballroom?”

“Of course not. I carry plates around in there.”

He flicked back the edge of the cover. “Come along, then.”

“You’re not serious.” A golden thrill beckoned, the same thrill she’d had at the start when everything seemed to be made liquid and sparkling by his presence.

“I’m serious.”

“I’ll get dressed.”

“Nobody is going to see us. You said yourself: it’s after midnight. They’re all sleeping. You can dance in your nightgown. In fact, I insist on it.”

She rose, giggling. “We must be careful and quiet.”

“I have no intention of being discovered,” he said in an urgent voice, picking up his dressing gown from the floor. “Discovery would ruin us.” He moved to the door, opened it, and listened into the hallway. “All clear,” he said.

She pulled on her wool nightgown and snuggled up behind him, breathing in his scent. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

“It’s a stupendous idea,” he asserted, grasping her hand. “Let’s go.”

They hurried on silent feet along the hallway and up the stairs, then down to the end of the next corridor. Sam opened the door that led into the next wing, and soon the dining room door stood before them. Sam tried it.

“It’s locked,” he whispered.

Disappointment. She sagged against him for a moment, until she remembered. “Hansel has a key. It’s in the kitchen.”

“Show me the way.”

They retraced their footsteps until they came to the kitchen,
where Violet took down a hurricane lamp from the top of the pantry and lit it. She opened the top drawer and found the key nestled among ingredients lists and old recipes written on scraps of paper. Sam seized the lamp in one hand, Violet’s hand in the other, and they raced back to the ballroom.

Violet unlocked the door, her pulse thudding hard at her throat. She would be in so much trouble . . . but then, would it really matter now? At the end of winter she’d either be engaged to Sam or heading home to find a new job. In that moment she felt completely free as she threw open the door.

The tables, all empty of linen and cutlery, sat mute in the dark. Sam walked to the middle of the dance floor and put down the hurricane lamp, while Violet closed the door behind them.

“We have no music,” Violet said.

He pulled her close and placed her hand upon his chest. She smiled as she felt his heartbeat through the soft silk of his dressing gown.

“My blood is the music,” he said. “I can hear it. Can’t you?”

She couldn’t hear a thing, but she said yes anyway, because the moment was hot and dense, and she wanted it to be perfect. He began to dance, and she fell into step with him. At a sedate pace at first, but then faster, he spun her around and around the dance floor, while the hurricane lamp flickered at the center. She watched their whirling, flickering shadows as they danced, madly, long after she was too tired to continue. Finally, she begged him to stop, and he stopped abruptly and pressed his mouth over hers, inflamed to a level of excitement she hadn’t seen since that first night they’d made love.

“I want you,” he breathed into her mouth.

“Not here.”

“No?”

“Back to my bed.”

Hurricane lamp in hand, they returned the key and made their way back to the staff quarters, where Sam made love to her with bruising force.

Afterwards, before he dropped off to sleep, she said to him, “Sam, you do love me, don’t you? Real love that lasts forever?”

“Real love that can move the stars,” he said.

“Real love that endures illness and old age?”

“Real love that is brighter than the sun.”

“Real love that overcomes obstacles and finds a way?” She willed him to answer her sensibly. His passion was compelling and beautiful, but she was certain that Sam had not yet communicated with his father about her—and she wasn’t sure if he ever would.

“Blazing love,” he said instead, covering her face with kisses. “Incandescent love. Mad, mad love.”

Mad, mad love. That’s what it was. That’s what it always had been.

*  *  *

Violet’s least favorite job was boiling the sheets, which she had to do once a week in the laundry at the end of the east wing. She took all the sheets up the long corridor in a trolley, then had to wrestle them down a set of stone steps outside in the cold, then back into the laundry where she lit and boiled the copper. Perspiration sheeted off her as she used a long wooden paddle to stir the linen among the soap flakes, her arms aching and her hands turning red. Afterwards, she had to drag them out into the laundry tub to rinse, then feed them through a mangler to squeeze as much of the water from them as she could. Only then could she hang them out, which involved moving from the hot, sweaty laundry into the frigid air outside. Her breath fogged the air and she could see steam rising off her arms as she shook and pegged the sheets. The cold wind caught them, making them flap madly. In the open space between laundry and
workshop, even where the sun was brightest, there was no warmth. Her fingers grew raw. In and out of the cold and heat.

As she pegged out the second load, Clive called out to her from his workshop, and she gave him a brief wave and then kept working, wanting the task to be over as soon as possible. Back inside, her head felt light from the heat again. Sheets through the mangle. She wiped her forehead with the back of her arm. Her head swam a little and she steadied herself on the rough edge of the stone sink. Outside, she shook the sheet and reached up to peg it, and suddenly everything around her went gray and a whistling noise rose in her ears.

The next thing she knew, she was lying on the dewy morning grass with Clive bent over, saying her name over and over again.

She tried to speak, but only a whimper came out.

“Wait here and don’t move,” he commanded, and she wanted to say that it wasn’t possible for her to move, that all her limbs were lined with lead and her head screeched with pain. Clive raced off, and she could see a sheet lying on the ground and all she could think was,
I’ll have to wash that again.
But then she closed her eyes and listened to her own breathing a few moments because thinking was too hard.

Within two minutes, Clive was back and Miss Zander was with him. She knelt over Violet with an expression of concern.

“Violet, can you hear me?”

“Yes, I’m feeling a little better. It was just the heat.”

“Don’t try to get up; I don’t want you to faint again. Clive, can you carry her?”

“I think so.”

“Bring her to her room. I’m going to go ahead and telephone Dr. Dalloway. I don’t think Karl will be much help here.”

“Violet,” Clive said in a gentle voice, not meeting her eye, “could you put your arms around my neck?”

“I can walk,” she protested.

“You’re not walking,” Miss Zander said in an authoritative tone. “Do as you’re told.”

Violet put her arms around Clive’s neck and he lifted her easily. She could feel his heart thudding where she was pressed against him as he carried her across the lawn and back inside. Miss Zander hurried ahead, her heels clicking on the wooden floor. Clive carried Violet around the ballroom where only last night Sam had danced with her until her head spun, and then down the corridor and the stairs to the ladies’ staff wing.

“Which room is yours?” Clive asked.

“Fourth on the left. Really, I can walk.”

He checked that Miss Zander was gone, then set her carefully on her feet, keeping a steadying hand under her elbow. “All right, but I’m going to stay with you until Miss Zander arrives.”

“Fine.”

She opened her bedroom door and gratefully sank onto her bed. Her knees were weak. Clive sat opposite, on the bare mattress that was once Myrtle’s bed, his hands folded together between his knees.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“My head hurts.”

“You fell on your side.”

Violet became aware of a throb in her right arm. “My elbow hurts, too. I get so tired, Clive. Don’t you? The extra shifts are killing me. The laundry, the bed making, the polishing. I know that meals are quicker and easier to serve, but—” She stopped herself before tears started. “I’m just so tired.”

“Are you eating properly? Getting enough sleep?”