I trailed a hand in the water. “You can learn.”
“With the right teacher, I could,” he said. “I’m not as hopeless as I probably —” He stopped midsentence and pushed up onto his elbows. “You’re getting a sunburn,” he said. “Across your nose. And on your shoulders.”
I sat up, the raft lurching beneath me. The sun was high in the sky. “Maddy!” I squinted in the direction of the pool house, hoping to find a clock on the wall, but there was none. “It must be noon, at least. I’m so sorry, Mr. Rathburn. I’ll be late picking her up.”
“I’m the one who lured you out here and distracted you with my story,” he said. “Come on, let’s get dry.” He slipped from his raft into the water and began towing me toward shore. “I’ll call and let
them know you’re running a little late. They won’t give you a hard time.”
Back on the deck, I zipped up my sweatshirt and tugged on my shorts, which were instantly soaking wet.
“Dammit, I left my cell phone back at the house.” Mr. Rathburn draped the towel over his shoulders. “Here’s a thought. Why don’t you throw on some dry clothes, and I’ll drive you there myself?”
He did, in a silver Maserati convertible with the top down. Maddy looked thrilled when he strode into the classroom and scooped her up in his arms, and her teachers were all politeness and smiles. “No need to apologize,” one of them assured him. “We know how busy you must be.”
Mr. Rathburn turned and winked at me, then shook her hand. “Miss Matthews,” he said to her. “Maddy just loves you to pieces, and I can see why.” He held her hand a moment longer than was strictly necessary, and she turned scarlet. She even giggled.
Instead of driving back to the estate, Mr. Rathburn brought us to a little seafood restaurant in the next town; it overlooked a river that smelled of salt. Between the parking lot and the restaurant, he was stopped by a burly man in a baseball cap. The man strode over. “Nico?” he said, hesitating. “Nico Rathburn? I’m sorry to disturb you. I know you must get this all the time. But I just have to thank you. For how much your music has meant to me — since I was twenty-five, the year my mother died…”
I led Maddy to the lobby and distracted her with crayons and a color-by-number place mat while we waited for her father to catch up. It took a while. When he entered the lobby, I saw the
pretty young hostess’s jaw drop. Then she looked me up and down, from my cheap sneakers to my still-damp hair. I read something like disbelief in her eyes just before they took on a more professional, neutral expression.
Mr. Rathburn beckoned her to the side, and they spoke in hushed tones. When they returned, she led us to an empty dining room. “No one will disturb you here,” she told him. “Your waitress will be in shortly.”
“I…
love
… restaurants,” Maddy was singing softly to a tune of her own invention. “I…
love
… restaurants. Why don’t we eat out more, Daddy?”
He put a hand on her head. “I didn’t know you liked to eat out so much.”
“Read me the menu.” Maddy thrust her place mat at me. “Please, Miss Jane.”
“Since you said please,” I told her.
To tell the truth, I wasn’t all that used to eating in restaurants myself. The dining room had large plate-glass windows overlooking the sparkling river. Mr. Rathburn ordered a Shirley Temple with extra cherries for Maddy and a bottle of Pinot Grigio for the table.
“You’ll have some too?” he asked me. “You’re with me; they won’t card you.”
“Ice water, please,” I told the politest waitress I had ever been served by. The items on the menu were expensive. I ordered a bowl of clam chowder.
“You can have anything you want,” Mr. Rathburn told me. “Lobster? Clams on the half shell?”
“Chowder is fine,” I told the waitress.
Lunch passed quickly, in a whirl of silverware and white linen. Maddy was so happy to have her father’s full attention that she prattled on about the morning’s activities and about a field trip to an aquarium that would be coming up in a few weeks. Mr. Rathburn listened patiently. Once his cell phone rang, and he silenced it. And when Maddy pleaded for a second dessert, he told her no. She looked surprised and continued to whine for a few moments more. But he held firm, and she was smiling and holding his hand by the time we left the restaurant. Though the car ride back to the estate was only twenty minutes, she fell into a deep sleep before we were halfway home.
“How did I do?” Mr. Rathburn asked me.
“So far, so good,” I told him.
Rather than wake Maddy, he carried her inside. Lucia met us at the door and looked at us with some surprise. “I’ve been trying to reach you,” she told him. “The proofs are here for you to look over. Mitch is waiting for you in your office.”
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he told her, and he carried Maddy upstairs and laid her on the bed. I found an extra blanket in her drawer and spread it over her.
“Thank you,” I whispered to him.
He shot me a crooked smile, then slipped off.
I sat awhile, watching Maddy as she slept. It was true — she didn’t look like Mr. Rathburn in the slightest.
Poor little thing,
I thought. I dug out her favorite stuffed animals from the space between the bed and the wall and arranged them beside her pillow so they would be the first things she saw when she woke up. On
some level, mustn’t she miss her mother, even as neglectful as she was? And wasn’t it likely she’d absorbed some of Mr. Rathburn’s early ambivalence toward her or his anger toward her mother? I resolved to take even better care of her now that I knew her story.
Mr. Rathburn stayed out of sight for the rest of that afternoon and evening. He again had a slew of dinner guests. In the kitchen, the cook was stuffing something elaborate into a pastry crust. The meal smelled wonderful, and the laughter from the dining room was enviable. But I didn’t mind sitting with Maddy in the playroom, off at the fringes of Thornfield Park. As I helped her cut out paper dolls — books of them, purchased by Lucia by mail order, had just arrived — I thought back fondly to that morning, and the memory made me smile. I had felt trusted, even important. And though I wasn’t quite important enough to Mr. Rathburn to be a part of his dinner party, I knew I was serving him and Maddy in a more essential way. I was right at the center of their lives, and I’d never felt at the center of anyone’s life before. These thoughts warmed me, making the rest of the evening pass quickly. After Maddy fell asleep, I retired to my room and, working from a picture in the liner notes of his second album, did a quick sketch of Mr. Rathburn. It came out pretty well, so I added color, careful to capture the exact pale pink of his lip, the peculiar smoke-gray color of his eyes. When the painting had dried —
Not bad!
I thought to myself — I borrowed some thumbtacks from Lucia, who was packing her briefcase to go home for the night, and pinned up the image above my desk. All along the wall, I hung the paintings I had done since coming to Thornfield Park. Lucia had told me I could
decorate the room as I liked. Since I could be here for a while, I might as well make it my own.
That night, as I waited for sleep, the skin on my shoulders and back tingling with sunburn, I thought of Mr. Rathburn floating beside me in the pool, his hand moving toward my shoulder as though it might come to rest there. I even thought of things I could tell him when I saw him next — precocious things Maddy had said or done. I felt the warmth of my blanket traveling from the tips of my toes up through my legs, spreading through my torso until even the tips of my fingers tingled with it. Just as I was relaxing into a delicious slumber, I was struck by an unexpected thought. Mr. Rathburn would be leaving soon; he was planning a tour. Mitch had been booking dates for shows across America and Europe. The thought of the house returning to its prior state of quiet made me suddenly sad. I tried to think back to what Lucia had told me about the tour — would it really last from fall through next summer? That seemed like such a long time.
After that, I tossed and turned. I may have slept a bit, but my mind was churning. And then — it might have been minutes or hours later — I startled awake to the sound of a faint murmur coming from the room just above mine, which until then had been unoccupied and silent. It didn’t seem like a conversation. It was a single voice, babbling. I couldn’t make out any words. I sat up in bed and listened more intently, and the noise stopped abruptly.
I waited awhile longer, still listening, but the house was silent. There was nothing to do but sleep. I lay back on the pillow, but my heart beat anxiously. Far down the hall, the clock struck two. Just then, I heard a sound, a different one, this time much closer. It
seemed as though my bedroom door had been touched, as if fingers had brushed it as someone groped down the hallway.
“Who is it?” I said into my dark room. Nobody answered. I froze in place, too frightened to even click on the light.
Then I realized the sound might have been Copilot. He almost always slept in Mr. Rathburn’s room, but occasionally he nosed his way out and wandered the house, finding his way back to the rug in front of the living room fireplace. Of course, it must have been him, bumping against the door, trying to find a bed to sleep on. The thought calmed me a little.
Once again, the house was silent, and I felt myself drifting back to sleep. I had just started dreaming when another sound startled me awake. This time it was a laugh — low, suppressed, and deep — that seemed to be coming through the keyhole of my bedroom door. I bolted upright. The room was pitch-dark; the only light would have come in between the slats of the window blinds, but tonight there was no moon. I sat perfectly still, waiting for my eyes to adjust. Had I dreamed that laugh? Had my sleeping mind taken a distant sound — a loon’s cry, maybe? — and distorted it?
“Is somebody there?” I whispered, and heard a floorboard creak just outside my door. Then I noticed something that made my heart pound even faster — a faint aroma of sulfur. I switched on the light, crept to the door, and yanked it open. On the carpet, at the top of the stairs, I saw a match smoldering. The air was thick with smoke, but the blue billows seemed to be coming from Mr. Rathburn’s wing, on the opposite side of the house. Smoke alarms began screeching all over the house. Without thinking, I ran toward the source of the smoke. I felt my way to the last door on
Mr. Rathburn’s wing and pounded on it. No answer. What if it was locked? But it wasn’t. I pushed it open.
Tongues of flame licked the ceiling inside Mr. Rathburn’s dressing room. Beyond that, not twenty feet away, practically in the middle of it all, he lay stretched out, asleep on his high four-post bed. Or maybe he was unconscious?
“Wake up! Wake up!” I screamed. He murmured and rolled over. I didn’t have a moment to waste. The heat was intense, unbearable. Flames shot out viciously, coming dangerously close to the drapes that ran around the perimeter of the room.
All of Mr. Rathburn’s expensive clothes must be ruined,
I thought, though that was the last thing I should have been worried about. I remembered how in grade school I’d learned to stop, drop to the floor, and crawl under the smoke, but who had time for that? I grabbed Mr. Rathburn’s arm and tried to pull him up, but he was dead weight. I needed to wake him somehow. I took a glass of water from his bedside table and splashed the water on his face. While he sputtered, I noticed a bathroom just beyond the bed. I tore the towels off the rack and soaked them in water, then ran back to the dressing room’s open door and tossed them into the heart of the flame. In a trunk at the foot of the bed, I found a heavy blanket that I used to pound out the rest of the fire. By then, Mr. Rathburn was wide-awake. Though the smoke obscured him, I could hear him swearing violently. “What the fuck?” he said once, twice.
“There’s been a fire,” I told him. “Come on. Get up.” The smoke alarms were still shrieking all around us. I groped along the wall for a light switch and flipped it on.
“Jane? Is that you?” He didn’t seem quite alert yet.
“Yes. You have to get up right now.” My voice sounded strange, high-pitched with barely contained hysteria. “This fire wasn’t an accident. The person who set it may still be in the house.” I helped him to his feet. “But first — Maddy. I’ll be right back.”
Amber and Linda hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for word from Mr. Rathburn. I ran past, ignoring their questions, to Maddy’s room. She was awake, screaming, scared out of her wits by the smoke alarms. I scooped her up and ran. “It’s okay, everything’s okay,” I reassured her, then carried her downstairs and deposited her with an astonished-looking Linda. “Could you watch her?” I asked. “Don’t leave her alone for a second. Take her to the living room and wait for me there.” I had reservations about leaving Maddy with anyone; in my eyes they all were suspect. But I had a very strong instinct about who had started the fire, and I noticed that Brenda was nowhere to be seen. “I’ll be right back.”
Mr. Rathburn was on the phone when I reached him. He’d thrown
open
the windows of his room, and the smoke had begun to clear. “A false alarm,” I heard him say. “You can call back the fire truck. No, no. We’re all fine. Sorry to have bothered you.” He put the phone back into its cradle.
“Don’t you want the fire department to come and investigate?” I asked, astonished. “It was arson. I’m sure of it.” I told him about the match.
Mr. Rathburn blinked at me, his face and hands smudged with soot. He seemed to be collecting his thoughts.
“That’s all I would need,” he said finally. “The papers would pick it up, and the local news. Maybe even the national news. I’m already this character to them.” He rubbed his eyelids with the
backs of his hands, spreading more soot across his face. “Is Maddy okay? Is everyone accounted for?”
“They’re all downstairs,” I told him. “Everyone except Brenda.”
He thought a moment. “Go to Maddy. Tell everyone I’m okay. You can tell them I left a lit candle in my dressing room, and my shirts caught on fire. Tell them I was meditating or something like that. Do you think you can? Lie on my behalf, I mean. I wouldn’t ask you to if it wasn’t important. Can you make it convincing?”