The Ghost in the Glass House (13 page)

Clare shoved him away with all her strength. Teddy laughed as if she'd just told a spectacular joke. “I didn't interrupt, did I?” he asked. “You two seemed to be having such a
good time
.”

“We weren't—” Clare began, then struggled for words. “—doing anything,” she finished.

The flash of pain in Bram's eyes only lasted an instant, but it was so clear that Clare felt an answering pain in her own chest. He knelt and began to roll the rug up over the sand.

Clare turned back to Teddy to see if the lie had at least convinced him, but Teddy had already lost interest. He tottered down the beach toward the rocks.

Bram hoisted the rug over his shoulder and stood. The roll of wool and jute drooped over his shoulder. Clare reached to help but couldn't get a good hold.

“I've got it,” Bram told her.

She couldn't see his face beyond the bulk of the rug, so she circled to his other side as he went down the beach.

“Bram,” she began.

“You don't have to explain anything to me,” he said.

A
HANDFUL OF PLAYING CARDS
erupted from a deck on the carpet beside the sea-foam divan as Clare stepped into the glass house.

“Where have you been?” Jack demanded.

Clare threaded the maze of mismatched furniture to the divan, where she settled down, let her shoes fall from her feet, and pulled her legs up under her.

Jack's voice came from above her now, as if he had stood while she sat.

“What's this?” he asked.

“What?” Clare said.

On the floor, one of her shoes spun around like the hand of a watch being wound, and stopped with its toe pointing back at her, so that the bloodstain from the day she cut her foot, still a fresh dark red, stood out plainly on the pink satin lining. The edges of the stain were blurred by salt water. “
That,”
Jack said.

This was not how Clare had imagined the conversation would go. She tried to dismiss the question with a curt answer. “I cut my foot,” she said.

“When?” he asked.

“Before,” Clare said. “On some rocks at the beach.”

“Let me see,” Jack said.

The command rankled Clare, but his concern softened her. She untucked her foot and turned the sole up. The cut was worse than she remembered, a narrow trench between the ball and heel, so deep that the scab inside only filled it partway.

She heard a sharp intake of breath. When Jack spoke, his voice was indignant.

“They didn't give you a bandage?” he asked.

“There was no one there but us,” Clare said.

“Us?” he repeated.

“My friends,” Clare told him. “None of us had bandages.”

“They should have gone and got someone.”

“We were going to a hidden cave,” Clare said. “We didn't want anyone to find us.” As that excuse hung in the air it seemed to weaken, even to her. “Bram helped me,” she added, to ward off a growing sense of foolishness.

“Who's Bram?” Jack asked.

“One of my friends,” she said. But she had hesitated.

Her shoe toppled from an invisible kick. It listed on its side against its twin. “Your boyfriend?” Jack asked.

Clare fought the same sensation of drifting into unknown waters she always felt when these questions arose. She shook her head, half in answer, half against the feeling.

“Does he want to be?” Jack demanded.

“I don't know,” Clare said.

Apparently her confession of ignorance was not the answer he wanted. The deck of cards splayed out over the carpet in a tantrum of suits and faces. Then the room went silent.

In the silence, Clare recalled her own cause for indignation.

“I met Jack Cunningham the other day,” she said.

Jack's voice, usually so cocksure, was suddenly cautious. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“An old man named Jack Cunningham,” she went on. “He used to work here.”

Overhead, a gust of wind blew the sheltering leaves aside. Light poured down through the vines. Clare raised her hand against it. When the wind died and the shade returned, Jack still hadn't spoken.

“Jack?” Clare said.

“I'm here,” he answered, from the floor.

His tone was so subdued that Clare felt a twinge of remorse. But it didn't overcome her outrage at his lie.

“Do you know him?” she asked.

A card rose from the floor, one edge still buried in the carpet, as if, at a tense moment in the game, Jack wanted to double-check what he held in his hand. It was a face card, the royal heads turned at unnatural angles on their gaudy necks.

“What's your name?” Clare asked.

The card fell over on its back. Its faces gazed up unblinking through the glass.

“I don't know,” he said.

This possibility had never even crossed Clare's mind. But the instant he admitted it, her memories dropped into place the way a deck of cards fell together in a dealer's hands: his sidesteps when she pressed for details, his retreats into pranks and plans, his reticence about the past. Still, she couldn't quite believe it.

She had woken up in dozens of strange rooms, not certain what country she had slept in, or what season it was beyond the new window. She'd forgotten things she desperately wanted to remember, like the sound of her father's voice as he promised her a good night. But no matter how far she'd traveled or how deep her fatigue, she'd never forgotten her own name.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I remember other things,” Jack offered. “I used to live in the big house. I know all the rooms. When the light comes on above the workshop, I know it's Tilda.”

Clare glanced up the hill. She had never thought to wonder where Tilda went each night. The red roof over Mack's workshop did form a peak high enough to hide a good-sized room, with a pair of windows that overlooked the garden. But all this could be just another story, like his name.

“But there's no door,” she said.

“There is,” Jack said. “By the stairs down from the kitchen. There's another set of stairs next to them, side by side. They go up to her room.”

Clare had never spent any time in that dark corner of the shop. There might be a hidden staircase there, or there might not.

“What about your mother?” she pressed.

One of the playing cards twitched at her feet. “I know where I want to go,” Jack insisted. “I know what a boat looks like when it leaves harbor.”

“Do you know her name?” Clare asked.

“No,” Jack admitted.

“Or your father's?” Clare asked.

The strain was clear now in his voice. “I think I used to know,” he said. “I think it's getting worse.”

“How could you forget?” Clare asked.

“I don't know,” Jack said again.

The lace hem of her skirt shifted, as if a faint wind had stirred it.

“I don't forget you,” he said.

Clare felt a touch, light but undeniable, on her fingers. She drew her hand back, startled.

“Could you feel that?” Jack asked, his voice high with surprise.

Clare nodded.

“Wait,” Jack said. This time the touch was more deliberate: a fingertip drawn across her knuckles, then traced over the back of her hand in a spiral that wound tighter with each revolution. She shivered.

“I'm sorry,” Jack said. His voice had gone soft in wonder. “I never tried to touch anyone before. I didn't know I could.”

A faint weight covered her entire hand now, as if a leaf had fallen onto it from a tree above. It had none of the heat of Bram's hand, but warmth spread through her from it, as if a tide had turned in her blood, drawing it all toward that place with stronger and stronger waves.

Then the touch was gone.

Clare glanced around the glass house, but her eyes were no help.

“Don't be scared,” Jack said. His voice came from above now, as if he'd stood up but stayed close.

She felt faint pressure against the side of her leg as he settled beside her on the divan. Then something like a shawl settled over her bare shoulders.

Clare's balance deserted her. She felt as if, with the slightest move, she might begin to drift and tilt like a feather in the breeze.

Another touch guided her head toward Jack's unseen shoulder. At first she held back, not certain it could support her. But it did, not with the steady warmth of her mother's breastbone, but like a pillow that first sank and then lifted her head. The faint weight of his hand covered her own again.

She took a shaky breath and closed her eyes.

T
ILDA CUT A THICK
daub from the cloud of raw meringue and transferred the sweet foam grimly to the pastry bag beside the metal trays that waited on the counter.

A few weeks earlier, Clare's mother had taken it into her head to cook something in Tilda's kitchen. Commandeering the kitchen of their current residence had become one of her favorite pastimes over the last few years. When they first began, Clare had hoped these occasional flurries of domestic activity might indicate a buried longing for home, but so far they had resulted in nothing but an eclectic series of culinary experiments, all accomplished with her mother's characteristic stubbornness and excess: sleepy errand boys sent out at midnight in search of saffron or white pepper, clouds of flour billowing from broken sacks, fine water glasses pressed into service as measuring cups or mixing bowls, and of course, all the kitchen's finest ingredients devoted to a dish that up to that minute had been on no one's menu but her own.

Maids on several continents had tolerated this behavior. Her mother had made cucumber sandwiches in Venice, cinnamon toast in the Antilles, and mint lemonade for two dozen guests of a visiting rajah she'd befriended in Greece. She had fried chicken in California, and spent an entire morning straining her own mozzarella to top half a dozen pizzas on the coast of Maine.

But when she'd swept into Tilda's kitchen one morning with the blithe announcement that she just felt like whipping up a little something, Tilda had stopped her cold.

“I'm afraid that's impossible,” Tilda had said.

“Impossible?” Clare's mother had repeated. This was the same word that had triggered the exodus from Clare's childhood home, and when Clare, who had followed her mother into the kitchen, heard it, she retreated to the chair by the window, certain a storm would follow.

But Tilda's rough-hewn features bore a resolution the servant girl at Clare's childhood home had lacked. And Tilda hadn't lost track of the fact that, despite any claims she might make to her own domain, she was still a servant. “This is hardly the kind of kitchen where you'd like to cook,” she said, to excuse her refusal. “I spent the last forty years working on that stove, and it still singed the lace off my best apron last winter. Just when you think you know all its tricks, it learns another one.”

“Well, I wasn't thinking of anything too fancy,” Clare's mother began, starting for the icebox. “I'm sure if I just look at what we have here, I can find—”

Tilda had planted herself between Clare's mother and the white enamel cabinet. “There's nothing in there but the beets and the butter beans for dinner,” she said. “I order it fresh every day.”

Clare knew the expression on her mother's face: a bemusement that could turn, with the faintest provocation, into either laughter or a tantrum.

Tilda tipped the balance by phrasing her next salvo as a request. “Why don't you just let me know what you'd like, and I'll take care of it?” she suggested.

“Well, I wouldn't expect you to know how to make anything quite like this,” Clare's mother returned.

Tilda arched her eyebrows, which was almost as startling as watching the same expression cross the face of a stone figure who presided over the entrance to a hall of justice. “You might be surprised,” she said.

Outmatched, Clare's mother still proved a tough negotiator on the terms of her surrender. “I was just remembering a crème brûlée I had this spring in Paris,” she said. “It's just a simple custard, except that I believe it's finished with a torch. Do you think you could come up with something like that?”

Tilda nodded, unflinching.

“The restaurant flavored it with lavender,” Clare's mother had mused. “But I was thinking it might be delicious with rosewater. So perhaps you could just make us some of both.”

The next morning, an iron tank with a merry red hose had appeared in the corner of the kitchen, and that evening Tilda laid a pair of perfectly glazed crèmes brûlées at each of their places, one garnished with a sprig of lavender, one with the spiky oval leaf of a rose.

But Clare's mother had not accepted a quiet defeat. Since then, every few days, she'd appeared in the kitchen, craving a catalog of sweets that veered quickly from actual memory to pure fabrication. Clare had, in fact, shared a lavender crème brûlée with her mother the day before they left Paris, but she had no recollection of the dozen-layer cake of jelly and lady fingers, sliced paper thin, that her mother ordered next. And Clare knew she'd never seen the flock of swan-shaped meringues her mother had opined about this morning, allegedly glimpsed through the window of a tiny bakery on a side street in Bruges, or was it Amsterdam, with anise seeds for eyes and a dust of peach sugar to color their bellies.

Tilda touched the metal tip of the pastry bag to the wax paper that lined the first cookie sheet. A bud of meringue blossomed into the solid body of a swan, the curve of its breast swept back to the point of a delicate tail. Then she placed the tip of the pastry bag against the half-formed creature's breast and, in a single graceful motion, drew its long neck and drooping head. But it was only after she provided the new swan with a pair of neatly folded wings that she looked up at Clare and broke into a smile.

This was the first time Clare had seen Tilda smile. The effect was jarring, because it was beautiful. It was a child's smile, with none of the self-consciousness of a woman who offered her smile as a weapon or gift, and none of the calculation of a man who smiled to win his point or seal a deal. Tilda's smile was so innocent that Clare felt ashamed for her, and protective, the way she felt about younger children who hadn't yet learned the things she already knew.