Sweetwater Creek (17 page)

The rutted road narrowed to a track that wound its way through vegetation so dense that it became a tunnel of black-green. Moss from great oaks brushed the truck; branches of shrubs and saplings whipped at it. The tunnel was lightless except where the headlights caught leaves. “Black as Egypt,” Cleta would have said.

Emily fell silent again, her heart dragging heavily with apprehension. Presently she said, in a strangled voice that sounded thin and mewling in her own ears, “I don’t want to do this, Lulu. I want to go home.”

“Too late,” Lulu said, and they rattled around a moss-shawled hummock and into a great cave of light.

ALWAYS AFTERWARD
, Emily remembered the end of that journey as you would an epiphany, a revelation, a lasting dream.

The dirt track widened into a graveled alleé of giant old live oaks, heavily shawled with moss, some of their branches resting on the ground. About halfway down strings of small white lights had been wound into the moss on each tree, making an otherworldly cocoon of light-misted moss that enveloped the truck as they rode on. Even farther down, the tree lights became tall torchières on either side of the drive, flickering in the small, soft wind. Behind them all lay the plantation house, shining in the dark of the woods like a great ship. Every window blazed with light; votive candles outlined the circular drive, and the formally trimmed boxwood around the house glowed like miniature Christmas trees. Lights traced strict, linear paths behind the house and the garden balustrades and terraces, leading, no doubt, to the river. Close around the house, paper lanterns had been hung in the lower branches of the sheltering oaks. Maybud Plantation was, on this night, a house made of light, shimmering in the dark woods like an enchanted castle out of Sir Thomas Malory, seeming to float in space.

Emily drew in an involuntary breath, and Lulu smiled.

“It cleans up pretty good, doesn’t it?” she said. “On an ordinary day you can see the patches of brown in the grass, and the mud in the turnaround, and the shutters that are shedding paint like fish scales. But when Mother goes all out, it’s a magical place. From the outside, anyway.”

They pulled onto the circular drive that looped around to the twin wrought-iron staircases leading up to the portico. The portico rose two stories high, on slender white columns that shone against the mellow old brick. Atop it rode a graceful gable, breaking the line of the roof, with a white oval medallion at its center.

Lulu pointed to an explosion of soft light spilling from behind the second-story portico balcony.

“That’s the ballroom,” she said, grinning. “Considered one of the finest in the Lowcountry and a great place to stay away from, in my book.”

Sweetwater had only an attic.

“Did you stay away from it?” Emily mumbled. It was not possible for her to raise her voice in this luminous place. If she did, who knew what cracks in the enchanted eggshell would snake swiftly from top to bottom? Who knew what creatures would come out of the yolk inside?

“Nope,” Lulu said, slowing the truck. “It got me once, for a Sweet Sixteen ball that was as ghastly an affair as I have ever attended. Did you ever read Edgar Allan Poe’s
The Masque of the Red Death
?”

Emily shook her head. Buddy had considered Poe an over-wrought pulp-fiction writer.

“It’s about these people at a grand ball in a castle in the woods,” Lulu said. “They’ve taken refuge there to escape a great plague that is decimating the countryside. They’re carousing while the populace dies. It’s a masquerade ball, so nobody knows who they’ve been dancing with. Well, they drink harder and dance longer and laugh louder, until midnight, when everybody unmasks. And when they do, they see that one of the dancers is Death himself, and they know that they’ve escaped nothing; they will die. My party was a little better than that, but not much. To me, at least.”

“That’s horrible,” Emily said. “Didn’t you ever like parties? Weren’t there some you enjoyed?”

She knew she was chattering, to put off the moment when Lulu would stop the truck and she would have to step out into all that swirling, pouring light. She knew that she would drown in it.

“No,” Lulu said. “There was never a party in this house that I enjoyed. There weren’t many anywhere, that I can remember. Maybe birthday parties at Miss Hanahan’s Little School, but I’m told I was a strange, unsociable child even then.”

She pulled the truck onto the grass bordering the drive and hauled the hand brake on. They were well into the curve of the circular drive, but not near the front portico, where young men in white shirts and black ties were politely decanting guests and taking their keys, and driving their shining, clifflike SUVs away. Emily did not see a single regular automobile in the lot. Maybe these guests had struggled through wild jungles and savannas and veldts to reach this blazing haven. Maybe they had bashed through herds of stampeding elephants and prides of snarling lions. Maybe they had outrun cheetahs and charging rhinos.

Lulu caught her thought.

“You’d think they’d come from the Amazon rain forest, wouldn’t you? But most of them came out from downtown Charleston. I guess you need those things to plow through the tourists.”

She sat still in the darkness of the cab, taking slow, deep breaths. Emily noticed that the fine, birdlike tremor was back in her hands. Lulu did not want to go into her ancestral home any more than she did. The thought cheered her slightly, and then she felt a stab of guilt. How awful to be terrified of your own house.

“Where is everybody?” she said.

“In the ballroom. In the dining room. Out on the terrace and in the gardens, down by the river. Everywhere there’s food and liquor. Come on, Emily. Let’s go.”

Emily had turned to stone.

“I can’t go in there,” she whispered. “I can’t talk about anything but dogs.”

“We’re not going in there. We’re going around to Grand’s house. There’s a path around the house and back into the woods that leads to it. It’s dark, but I know the way.”

“Are you just going to leave the truck?”

“Yep,” Lulu said. “Give the place a little class.”

Emily got out of the car on wings of relief. Outside, she could hear faint music from the terrace behind the house, and laughter. She stood beside Lulu, staring at the conflagration of white light, and then Lulu turned and plunged off the grass into the deep shadows of the bearded live oaks.

“Follow me,” she said. “And watch these damned camellia bushes. They’re thick as a jungle now, but Grand planted them when she was first married, and she won’t let Mother have them cut.”

The little path was pitch black. The dissonant songs of katydids and crickets and the sweet slap of faraway water were the only links to the world she had left behind on the blacktop road when Lulu had turned toward Maybud. Dew-heavy leaves slapped her face, and more than once the ridiculous heels of her shoes caught in the gravel and she stumbled. She fixed her eyes on Lulu, a shimmering column of white silk ahead of her. It was like following a will-o’-the-wisp with no notion of what eerie place you might fetch up in. Emily liked this whole thing less and less.

“Are you sure this is the right way?” she called to Lulu, and flinched at the sound of her own voice cracking the silence. What sort of old lady was this who lived alone out in this black, haunted wood?

“Yep. And here we are,” Lulu said, and the path sloped abruptly down into a hollow ringed with live oaks and palmettos. In the center of the hollow stood a small stone house half-covered with vines, the crooked chimney on its steep slate roof sighing out sweet wood smoke, its deep-set, small-paned windows glowing with yellow light. Around it was a low piled-stone wall that enclosed a rioting cottage garden. Bowls of dried dog or cat food were set out in a ring at the edge of the tiny, neat lawn. Behind the house, just over the far lip of the hollow, the river gurgled and ran. It was the same sound Emily’s river made when the tide was full in. Something in her chest that had been cold and clenched loosened just a trifle.

“It’s just like Hansel and Gretel,” she breathed.

“It is, and aptly so,” Lulu said. “Everybody in these parts knows Grand is a witch.”

She knocked on the heavy, iron-bound wooden door and called out “Grand? You got room for two tired and hungry pilgrims?”

“Come on in this house,” called a tiny, silvery voice, that sounded like it might belong to a very old-fashioned china doll. “If I’d had to wait any longer I’d have eaten all this stuff myself.”

Lulu pushed the door open and ran into a big, low-beamed room to hug a tiny, silvery elfin creature who sat beside a blazing fire in a morris chair so large that it almost swallowed her. The hug lifted the elf half out of her chair, and Emily saw that her legs were withered and matchstick-thin, though she wore smart black satin slippers on her tiny, gnarled feet.

She hovered in the doorway, unsure of what she should do, until the old woman called out, “Come here into the light and let me get a look at you, young lady. I’ve wanted to meet you for a very long time.”

Emily wobbled slowly forward, teetering on the renegade heels. She would have given anything to be back in her own bed eating popcorn and watching
Stargate
with Elvis. When she reached the paper-thin oriental rug in front of the fire where the old woman sat, Lulu kneeling at her side, she stopped and simply waited.

Strange, light-blue eyes, so like Lulu’s, peered at her out of pouches and webs of wrinkles. She seemed to be made of wrinkles; her fine, thin skin was pleated with them. She had silver white hair piled high on her head, showing spots of pink scalp, and her nose was that of a Roman emperor. When she smiled her teeth were fine and white, set off by a gash of brilliant red lipstick. She was very tanned.

She held out both her hands to Emily, and Emily bent over her and took them, unsure what to do with them. There were rings on both the old hands, huge, dirty old diamonds set in gold; massive rubies and emeralds, threatening to slide off the fine-boned fingers. There were diamond teardrops in her tiny, webbed ears, and she wore a long black satin dress cut low enough to show a terrifying swath of spotted, wrinkled skin behind a necklace of diamonds that matched the earrings.

“This is Grand,” Lulu said from the arm of the old woman’s chair. “I told you she was a witch. Grand, this is my friend Emily Parmenter.”

“Yes,” the old lady said, still holding Emily’s hands. “She certainly is a Parmenter. Or a Carter, I should say. Child, you are the very image of your mother when she was a young girl, although I imagine you are tired of hearing that. When I first met her, she had her hair up just like that. A Renoir, just as you are.”

“Did you know my mother?” Emily breathed out of flaccid lungs. There was nothing about this night that was not alien to her. Down deep, very faintly, Buddy said, “Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.”

She smiled involuntarily, and the old lady smiled back.

“Sit down beside me and after a while I’ll tell you how I knew her,” she said. “Lulu, bring the tea tray. I had Rusky bring out a little of everything they’re having at the house. It’s enough to stun an elephant.”

Lulu brought a heavy old silver tray and set it on a small table next to her grandmother’s chair. She poured out three cups of tea into thin white porcelain cups and handed them to Emily and her grandmother, and made up three plates of food and handed them around, also. She handled the tea things as if she had been born doing it. Well, Emily thought, she had.

She looked at her plate. There were enormous pink pickled shrimp; tiny biscuits with rosy ham in them; a minute, glossy brown bird she identified as a dove, sauced in something thick and purple; candied, sugared fruit; cheese straws; benné biscuits; a slice of just-pink roast beef; slender stalks of white asparagus dripping velvety gold sauce. On another tray waited elaborately carved pastries filled with swirls of creamy yellow and deep red and ivory, slices of seed cake, and something she had never seen before, tiny puffs filled with whipped cream and covered with chocolate.

“Profiteroles,” Lulu said. “Rusky makes them better than anybody in three counties. Every bakery in Charleston has tried to hire her. Lemon and sugar, Emily?”

“Yes,” Emily mumbled. “Please.”

She looked around her for somewhere to put the cup and plate down; the spindly mahogany chair the old lady had indicated for her had no arms, and there were no small tables near.

“Lulu, the lap trays,” the old lady said. “Have you forgotten all your manners in a measly three months?”

Lulu brought beautiful, thin, gold-and-ivory inlaid trays of some very dark wood and slipped one onto Emily’s lap.

“This ought to do it,” she said.

They ate in silence for a few minutes, old Mrs. Foxworth with gusto, Lulu nibbling at this and that, Emily watching Lulu and only taking bites of what Lulu did. She finished some of the beef tenderloin and several benné biscuits and cheese straws, but the rest was unfamiliar to her, and she was absurdly frightened that she would spit it out on her plate.

“What in God’s name is this on the doves?” Lulu said querulously. “It tastes like cough syrup.”

“It’s port and prune sauce,” her grandmother said gleefully. “Your mother and I made a deal: she gets to try out new things on each of my birthdays without my permission, and in exchange she doesn’t just pop in with this person or that who ‘just couldn’t bear to leave without saying hello.’ I’d never even met the last batch of pop-ins.”

“Well, she should have stuck to the champagne sauce. This is terrifying,” Lulu said, pushing her plate away.

“Actually, I’d have liked it better if she’d stuck to a quail stew and venison chili, like I had for the first few birthday parties, before they turned into obligatory audiences with the Queen Mother.”

“You haven’t given anybody an audience in years, unless you specifically asked them, and you know it,” Lulu said comfortably, stretching her long legs in toward the fire.

“Well, the parties aren’t about me anymore. They’re about Maybelle’s obsessive need for her friends to come and listen to a crazy old lady shoot off a shotgun at midnight. I understand it’s considered a great coup to be invited to stand on the terrace and listen for the shots and drink champagne. Lots of people say they were actually here with me when I did it, I’m told. I’m a Lowcountry legend. Maybelle wouldn’t give up one of those for a membership in the Colonial Dames. Only the very oldest and best Lowcountry families have living legends. People write me up in tour guide books, I think. It’s been almost ten years since I actually came to the party at the big house.”

Emily grinned. She couldn’t help it. This was power; not the trappings of plantations and Christmas hunts and debutante balls and the Saint Cecilia Society. This was the power to refuse the lot of it and live as you pleased. She thought old Mrs. Foxworth had been born with that power. She thought Lulu might be reaching for it now, with her refusal to come home to Maybud for her season. She’d make it, too; Emily would bet on that. She’d bet that Lulu would ultimately do anything she wanted, and pay no price at all.