Chapter 7 - The House on Round Hill Road
The sun came up over the Sound on Friday morning like an orange cut in half by a grey knife.
The rain was gone, but the trees along the driveway were stripped bare of their early buds, the gravel washed into long, yellow ruts where the police cars had turned in the dark.
Naomi stood in the kitchen at Blackwood.
She had her apron on—the clean one with the blue check that she kept for baking days. The Aga was humming its low, comfortable note, the iron top hot enough that a drop of water would skip three times before vanishing into steam.
The silver tray was on the center table.
It had been polished. Naomi had spent an hour with the Goddard’s paste and an old flannel shirt, taking out the gray smudge where the rim had struck Celeste’s arm, rubbing the silver until the Sheffield mark—the little crown and the five-petaled rose—showed clear and sharp against the sterling.
Adrian Vale sat on the wooden stool by the bread crocks.
He had not been home to change his clothes. He was wearing the same trousers from Wednesday night, the knees bagged, his linen shirt gray with the smoke of the three packs of cigarettes he had smoked on the hospital steps while the federal men were searching his office in Stamford.
He had a mug of black coffee in his hands. He hadn't touched it; the grease had formed a thin, iridescent film over the surface.
“She’s going to live, Naomi,” he said.
“I know she’s going to live,” Naomi said. She was measuring flour into the big yellow bowl—four cups of King Arthur, two teaspoons of salt, the lard she had rendered herself from the pigs in Amenia. “Your mother’s made of hickory, Adrian. Her people were building schooners in Essex when the Vales were still selling salt pork out of a cellar in Brooklyn.”
Adrian looked down at his shoes. “The papers are calling it the 'Greenwich Society Conspiracy.' They’ve got Julian’s mugshot on the front page of the Courant. Celeste’s too.”
“They’ll forget it by the time the leaves come out,” Naomi said. “The people who read those papers don't have memories longer than a dog’s tail. They only care about who’s going to jail and who’s going to pay for the lawyers.”
“I gave her twelve million dollars, Naomi,” Adrian whispered. He didn't look up. His voice had the dry, broken rasp of a boy who had fallen out of an apple tree and had the wind knocked out of his ribs. “I bought her that house in St. Bart’s. I put her on the committee for the Morgan Library. I thought… I thought she looked at me the way my mother never did.”
Naomi stopped her hand in the flour.
She looked at him over her spectacles—not with pity, because pity was like water in an open wound, but with the hard, steady patience of a woman who had seen sixty years of men make fools of themselves for women who didn't know the difference between a husband and a line of credit.
“Your mother looked at you every day of your life, Adrian,” Naomi said. “She looked at you and she saw your father’s weakness. Marcus always thought he could buy the truth from people. He thought if he gave the boys from the union enough scotch, they wouldn't check the manifests on the freight cars. He thought if he gave me that cottage, I wouldn't notice when he had the woman from the bank in the library on Thursday afternoons.”
Adrian’s head came up. “My father?”
“Your father was no saint, Adrian,” Naomi said, her voice dropping into that deep, flat cadence that made the kitchen feel smaller, tighter, safer. “He was just a man with a lot of money and a great deal of fear. And you’re the same. You took that girl because she was easy to look at and she didn't ask you why you weren't happy. But your mother knew. She knew the day you brought her into the garden that she was a stoat in the hen house.”
Adrian swallowed. The sound was loud in the cold room. “What do I do now?”
“You go upstairs,” Naomi said, pointing the wooden spoon toward the service door. “You take your bath. You put on a clean shirt—the white one with the single cuffs that I ironed on Tuesday—and you drive back down to that hospital. You sit by that bed until she opens her eyes. And when she asks you why the tea is late, you tell her that Naomi is making the biscuits.”
Adrian looked at the tray.
Then he looked at Naomi’s hands—the flour white in the wrinkles of her knuckles, the nails short and clean, the gold band she had worn since nineteen-eighty-one worn down to a wire against her third finger.
He stood up from the stool. He was thirty-eight years old, six feet tall, with two billion dollars left in the bank after the guarantees were cleared, but he stood before her with his head down like an eight-year-old who had come home with torn knees from the gravel path.
“Thank you, Naomi,” he said.
“Don't thank me,” Naomi said, turning back to the dough. “Just tell the boy from the nursery to bring two yards of leaf mold for the asparagus bed on Monday. And tell him if he dumps it on the boxwood again, I’ll take the skin off his shins with the flat of the spade.”
Adrian turned and went up the back stairs. His boots were light on the treads now—not like Voss’s, not like Julian’s, but the hesitant, careful step of a man who was learning how to walk through his own house for the first time.
Naomi waited until she heard the water running in the master bath on the second floor.
May you like
Then she reached into her apron pocket, took out the three-by-five blue slip of paper that had been under her left heel for two days, and dropped it into the red heart of the Aga.
The laid paper curled once, turned the color of an old leaf, and vanished in a tiny, pale puff of blue smoke that smelled of linen and old ink.
