Chapter 8 - The Cliff Walk
The winter passed into spring not with warmth, but with fog.
By April, the account at the Narragansett Trust showed a balance of zero. The final payment—six hundred and forty dollars for the conservation of a set of six Queen Anne chairs—had been stamped with the red seal on a Friday morning.
That evening, the green Scout arrived at the curb on Wickenden Street.
"Get your coat," Keller said through the open window.
"I have three orders for a wedding on the hill tomorrow," Megan said, wiping her hands on her apron.
"Moren’s got the orders covered," Keller replied. "She sent two girls from the parish down to handle the wire work. Mr. Vance wants you in Newport."
Megan looked up at the second-floor windows. The light was fading, the slate roofs turning violet against the evening sky. She took off her apron, hung it on the brass peg behind the door, and took her dark wool coat from the hook.
The drive to Newport was silent. The fog was rolling in from the Atlantic in thick, gray banks that blurred the headlights of the oncoming traffic on Route 114. By the time they passed the limestone pillars of the Black Point estate, the world had shrunk to thirty feet of gravel drive and the black silhouettes of the cedar trees.
The house was dark.
Only two windows on the ground floor showed light—the library windows that looked out over the southern cliffs.
Megan did not ring the bell. She pushed the heavy oak door open; it was unlocked, the latch oiled so thoroughly it made no sound. She walked through the grand foyer, her boots quiet on the marble, toward the library.
Julian Vance was standing by the French doors that opened onto the terrace.
He had his back to her, a glass of water in his hand, looking out into the white blankness of the fog where the sound of the Atlantic rose like the breathing of a sleeping beast. The room was lined with books from floor to ceiling—thousands of volumes bound in calfskin and buckram, smelling of paper and dried leather.
In the center of the room, beneath a green-shaded banker’s lamp, sat her architect’s bench.
The birch top had been rubbed with oil until it looked like honey. Her old drafting stool was tucked beneath the iron apron, its leather seat worn in the exact place where her hip had rested during her third year of school.
"You finished the chairs," Julian said without turning around.
"Keller took them this morning," she said.
"They are in the dining room," he said. "The joinery is correct. My grandfather’s people were shipwrights; they understood that when you join two pieces of timber, you must leave room for the wood to breathe when the weather turns wet. You left room."
"Wood is alive," she said, stepping to the edge of the desk. "If you force it, it splits."
Julian turned. He was wearing an unbuttoned cardigan over his linen shirt, his dark hair slightly long at the temples, his face showing the strain of four months of litigation and shipping negotiations. But his eyes were clear, steady, and fixed upon her.
"Rick Delaney was sentenced this morning," he said.
Megan felt her throat tighten, but she did not drop her gaze. "How long?"
"Four years," Julian said. "At the state facility in Cranston. He will be eligible for parole in twenty-eight months."
"He will come to Wickenden Street when he gets out."
"He will not," Julian said.
"You can't control what a man does when he leaves prison, Mr. Vance."
Julian walked to the desk, set his glass down on a cork coaster, and picked up a thin slip of paper. It was the final deposit receipt from the Narragansett Trust, stamped with Mrs. Aris’s red ink.
"I can," Julian said simply. "Mr. Delaney’s remaining assets were purchased by a liquidation firm in Boston that answers to my office. His father's warehouse has been leased to a marine salvage outfit from New Bedford. If Rick Delaney sets foot in the city of Providence during the five years of his probation, his parole officer will receive an anonymous notification regarding certain transactions he executed in 2020 that were not included in the federal indictment."
He looked at her, his expression entirely devoid of triumph.
"He is an empty account, Miss Walsh. You may close the ledger."
Megan looked down at her drafting table. She touched the birch surface, her fingertips finding the small, familiar dent where her compass had slipped during her final portfolio review eight years ago.
"The twenty thousand dollars is paid," she said.
"It is."
"Then why am I here?"
Julian did not answer immediately. He walked back to the French doors, looking out into the fog where the lighthouse at Castle Hill was sounding its long, mournful horn—two beats, then silence, then two beats.
"When I was twelve," Julian said, his voice quiet in the vast room, "my father took me to the docks to watch them scrap a five-hundred-foot tanker that had run aground on Brenton Reef. The ship was intact, except for a twelve-foot tear in the double bottom where the granite had bitten through the plates. The owners calculated it would cost sixty thousand dollars to weld the steel and two hundred thousand to refloat her. The scrap value was three hundred thousand."
He turned back to her, the lamplight catching the silver in his hair.
"They cut her apart with torches while she was still floating," he said. "Men who couldn't build a skiff were tearing thirty years of Scottish steel into six-foot squares to sell to a foundry in Pennsylvania. My father told me that the easiest way to make money in this world is to find something wounded and sell the pieces."
Megan watched his hands. They were long, steady, and still.
"He did that for forty years," Julian continued. "He found broken companies, broken ships, broken men, and he took their scraps. When he died, I spent ten years trying to convince myself that I was different because I used accountants instead of torches."
He took two steps toward her, stopping on the other side of the birch table.
"That night in the dining room," he said, "I intended to buy Delaney’s scrap. I intended to take his warehouse, take his leases, and let him throw you onto the street so I could purchase your shop from the Kostas heirs for twenty cents on the dollar."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because you didn't cry," Julian said. "You were sitting on three inches of frozen marble with your ribs cracked and your skin bleeding into your clothes, and you were holding your breath so a fool wouldn't hear you."
May you like
He reached out, his hand hesitating for a fraction of a second above the birch wood, before his long fingers rested flat on the timber, four inches from hers.
"I have enough scrap iron, Miss Walsh," Julian said, his voice dropping into that deep, iron-bell resonance. "I am interested in what can be built."
