A Year on Ladybug Farm #1 (2 page)

“She is,” Lindsay said

“She is,” Cici said.

Bridget apologized, “We’re really just looking.”

Maggie’s professional smile barely wavered. “Well then. Shall we go inside?”

Lindsay was already snapping the shutter of her digital camera. “Is it okay to take pictures?”

“Of course. You won’t see anything like this anytime soon. Sixteen acres, fenced and cross fenced, plus outbuildings, livestock, and attachments, as we say in the business.” She turned what looked like an old-fashioned skeleton key in the brass-faced lock of a tall set of carved mahogany doors and stepped aside to usher them in, her arm flung wide like a game show host. “Here we are!”

“We’re really just looking,” Bridget began as she stepped inside, and then didn’t say anything else. Neither did Cici, as she followed her over the threshold, and even Lindsay lowered the camera and just stood there, looking around.

The central feature was a curved staircase, easily wide enough for four people to pass at once, that swept into the room from a landing twenty feet high. On the landing was a round window of blue stained glass. A matching window was on the ground floor, at the opposite end of the room. There were tall clerestory windows and a walk-in fireplace surrounded by antique brick in a fan arch. The ceiling, Cici noted, looked like pressed tin, and the floor was wide heart pine. The view through the windows was of rolling green and blue purple mountains, and the smell was of aged wood and sunshine . . . and dust, of course. Lots and lots of dust.

“I’m afraid you won’t find the place exactly spic-and-span,” apologized Maggie. “It’s been closed up for over a year while the lawyers tried to decide what to do with it after the death of the owner, Mr. Blackwell. He was ninety-two, bless his heart, and lived here all his life. They did an initial cleanup when they cleared out the house, but I don’t think anyone has been back in here since then. No living relatives, you know, and the will stated the proceeds of the property sale will go to various charities and local churches.”

Something crunched underfoot as they moved forward, and Bridget looked down. “What’s that?”

The floor was littered with hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny shelled corpses. “Ladybugs,” explained Maggie matter-of-factly. “They’ve just been horrible the past couple of years. Somebody told me the university released them to try to control some kind of aphid problem, and they started breeding out of control until they became more of a problem than the aphids! They’re just everywhere.”

Bridget made a face and tried to step around the bodies, but with no success. She moved toward the window, where a flock of ladybugs took flight as she passed. Bridget gasped and ducked, covering her platinum bob with her hands. “The warm weather causes them to be more active,” Maggie observed, “but we get them all year long, even in the dead of winter. So, are you ladies on vacation?”

“Hmm,” Cici agreed, moving around the room. The ceiling had to be fourteen feet high, and the windows had the wavy look of leaded glass. “We drove up through Lancaster, and are taking the scenic route back home.”

“Oh, Amish Country. Don’t you just love it? All the floors are heart pine,” Maggie pointed out, “and the wainscoting on the walls is wood, not framed plaster. That’s one thing about these old houses. They didn’t take any shortcuts.”

Lindsay raised the camera and started snapping shots of the staircase. “Isn’t that gorgeous?” Maggie said. “Can’t you just see ladies in big hoopskirts going up and down those stairs—just like Tara!”

“How old is the house?”

“Well, probably not as old as Tara,” admitted Maggie. “I think it was built around 1900 by Abraham Blackwell, and it never left the family. The Blackwells were in phosphates, quite well-to-do. The house was a real landmark in its day. Copper pipes, gaslights, indoor bathrooms, all the best of everything. Hear tell, it even has its own ghost! Don’t you just love those glass doorknobs?”

Cici grasped the doorknob of a glass-inset door that led to a small enclosed porch, and the knob came off in her hand. Maggie looked dismayed, but Cici shrugged. “I can fix that,” she said, and loosely pushed the knob back into its opening.

“Well,” declared Maggie cheerfully, “shall we go upstairs?”

Six sun-filled, high-ceilinged, wide-plank-floored bedrooms and several thousand ladybugs later, they descended the staircase. Bridget kept absently brushing at her shoulders and hair, as though trying to rid them of ladybug scales. Lindsay snapped a shot of the stained glass window and of the big, dust-fogged chandelier overhead.

“All the wardrobes stay,” Maggie pointed out, “since the one thing they didn’t tend to do in the 1900s was build walk-in closets. There’s some other furniture stored in one of the attics, too, I think, but all of the good stuff was sold at auction.”

“There’s nothing to putting in a closet,” Cici said, “and the rooms are definitely big enough.”

“You could take that little hallway that connects the two rooms at the back and turn it into two nice-size closets,” Lindsay pointed out, adjusting her lens for another shot. “One for each room.”

“Of course the wardrobes are beautiful,” Maggie said. “They add a lot of character.”

“We’re really just looking,” Bridget insisted gently, as though she felt she needed to soften the blow.

“Can you imagine the work it would take just to keep this place clean?” observed Lindsay. “How would you even dust that chandelier?”

“Mr. Blackwell had a woman live in, but you could probably get away with having somebody come in a couple of days a week. It’s really not that hard to find household help around here.”

“Not to mention the heating bill,” Cici said. “What is it, an oil furnace?”

“Actually, no. It’s quite ingenious, really—a wood burning furnace in the cellar heats this whole house. With the fireplaces, of course.”

“So as long as you don’t run out of trees you’re all set,” Bridget said, and Maggie chuckled.

“To tell the truth, the first thing I would do is put in central heat and air,” she admitted.

Lindsay turned on the bottom step to get a shot of the landing, catching the newel post with her hand as she did. The carved pineapple post cap came off in her hand and she flailed for balance. Maggie gave a little cry and lunged toward Lindsay as the pineapple flew from her hand. Bridget ducked, and Cici caught the cap in midair. Lindsay saved herself, and her camera, by grabbing the newel post, which gave an ominous crack, but held. Maggie breathed an audible sigh of relief. Bridget exchanged a wide-eyed look with Lindsay. Cici raised an eyebrow, gave the carved pineapple a little toss in her hand, and said, “I can fix that.”

Maggie displayed a brave, rather forced smile, and tried to summon enthusiasm by rubbing her hands together. “Well then. Shall we have a look at the kitchen?”

They passed through an elegant dining room with a medallioned ceiling, twin built-in, custom-made china cabinets, and an enormous, elaborately carved walnut table. “The table stays,” Maggie pointed out. “Isn’t it gorgeous? It was built for this house, and to tell the truth, it’s so heavy no one could figure out how to move it.” She paused and smiled apologetically. “I don’t know what happened to the chairs.”

She pointed out the French doors that opened onto the broad wraparound porch. Lindsay admired the pale green paint and the matching silk wallpaper below the wainscoting—a historic color, Maggie told them. She pushed open a set of old-fashioned swinging doors to the kitchen.

Bridget walked to the center of the enormous room, drew in a breath, and pressed both hands to her cheeks, turning full circle. “Oh, my goodness,” she said.

The floor was paved in brick worn smooth by time, and the antique brick on the walls was oiled to a sheen. There was a raised cooking fireplace at one end of the enormous room where they could imagine placing a downy sofa and a couple of chairs for cozy winter evenings. The center island was soapstone, and the countertops were tiled in cottage white and delft blue. The backsplash behind the deep farmer’s sink was a mural in the blue willow pattern. There were two big stoves, two dishwashers, a giant refrigerator, and an upright freezer. “Obviously, the kitchen has been upgraded over the years, and the appliances are industrial grade,” Maggie said. “The Blackwells did a lot of entertaining in their prime.”

Bridget touched one of the stoves reverently. “Oh my God,” she said. “This is a Viking.”

“Bet you could whip up a casserole or two on that, huh Bridge?” said Lindsay with a grin.

“Of course all appliances are included,” Maggie said. “And there’s a butler’s pantry.”

Bridget dashed off to explore it, and in a moment they heard a muffled squeal of delight.

“I hate the tile,” Cici said, but she was grinning, too. It had been a long time since either of them had seen their friend this happy.

In a moment Bridget returned, breathless with excitement. “Unbelievable,” she said. “The silverware drawers are lined with blue velvet. There’s a pie safe with a lock! And just outside there’s a walled herb garden. Some of the herbs are still growing. There’s a rosemary bush as big as a tree!”

Maggie was looking very pleased with herself, and Cici knew what she was thinking, what any real estate agent worth her commission would think: The kitchen sells the house.

Unfortunately, not in this case.

“Let me show you around the grounds,” Maggie said cheerfully, and led the way.

She did a lot of chatting about an overgrown rose garden, which would take nothing, simply nothing, to bring back to glory, and Lindsay, who was Queen of the Roses back on Huntington Lane, identified several antique species. She seemed duly impressed.

“Do you ride?” asked Maggie, gesturing toward a big barn with a sagging shed and a rusted-out metal roof. “This is a great place to keep horses.”

“Don’t know one end of a horse from the other,” Cici said, stepping high over tangled knots of fescue grass. She shaded her eyes toward a stone building set in a sunny tangle of wisteria vines behind the house. “What’s that?”

Maggie led the way. “It’s an old dairy,” she said. “This place is just full of history. They used to make their own butter and cheese, and up until the 1950s, actually sold it. People used to come from as far away as DC to buy Blackwell cheese.”

She pushed open the recalcitrant wooden door of the building and gestured them inside. “Isn’t it adorable?”

The interior was cool and smelled faintly of milk products and sweet grass. Sunlight poured in from two overhead skylights and from the rows of windows that lined either side of the building, catching dust motes and soaring ladybugs in its beams and bleaching squares and rectangles on the flagstone floor. The building apparently had once been divided into partitioned sections, like stalls or small enclosed rooms, but some of the walls had fallen over and had been dragged to a pile in a far corner; others were sagging on their supports.

“It would take some work,” admitted Maggie, “but wouldn’t this make a darling guesthouse? And it’s solid as a rock. Well, it is rock, through and through!”

Lindsay walked carefully around the rubble, turning this way and that to observe the fall of light, and her face was filled with wonder. Both Cici and Bridget knew what she was thinking, but Bridget said it aloud.

“Well, here’s your art studio, Linds.”

Cici said, “You’d have to get electricity down here, but it probably already has plumbing. The dairy operators would have had to have some way to hose the place out.” She moved to test the sturdiness of one of the upright posts that had once framed an interior doorway, giving it a little shake. It crashed to the floor in a cloud of dust, causing everyone to jump back. “Not a problem,” said Cici, brushing off her jeans.

“You can fix that,” finished Bridget and Lindsay in chorus, and all three women shared a grin.

They walked back toward the house, intending to thank Maggie for her time and veer off toward the car. Instead, they started wandering, separately and together, around the overgrown lawn, through the house, over the porch. They peeked into the decrepit barn and pried open the door on an old potting shed. Standing on a slight rise behind the house, Maggie pointed out an orchard of peach, pear, and apple trees, now in such bad need of pruning they were practically unrecognizable, as well as a tangled hill of grapevines that had overgrown their support posts.

They found a wrought iron fence that enclosed absolutely nothing, and a moss-covered statue of a girl with a flower basket standing beside a black reflecting pool. They imagined white wicker furniture on the wide covered porch and a gazebo in the garden, and painted iron chairs with colorful cushions underneath the spreading oak tree. They meandered through the warren of downstairs rooms and the big sunny bedrooms upstairs, and speculated in wondering tones about the time in history when people could afford to lead such lives. Cici even went down to the cellar and came back, peeling cobwebs off her eyelashes, to report that not only were there copper pipes throughout, but the wiring wasn’t nearly as antiquated as one might expect. Morever, there was a stone wine cellar, and several other rooms that had no doubt been used for storage. The heating system, however, remained a mystery.

When they finally were ready to move back to the car, the sun was low on the late-summer horizon, and they spent a good ten minutes apologizing to Maggie for taking up her Sunday afternoon. “It’s a wonderful house,” Cici assured her. “But none of us is ready to buy yet, and even if we were, it’s way out of our price range.”

“Not a problem,” Maggie insisted. “You just remember what I said about referrals. I’m sure there are lots of people in Baltimore who are looking for the perfect family getaway.”

“Well, exactly,” said Bridget. “This is really a family house, isn’t it? No place for a single woman.”

“It’s so far away from everything,” agreed Lindsay.