CHAPTER 9 The Study Where Nobody Lies

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Nobody was ever summoned to Odalys Hale's study alone and came out the same. Julian had said so on the second day, as a joke. He had not been joking.

The summons came on the stroke of noon, delivered by Mrs. Pruitt with a face of stone and a plate of shortbread.

"Madam would like a word," she said. "In the study. Alone."

Elodie's stomach dropped to her boots. She glanced across the hall. Julian was deep in conversation with his lawyers, his back to her, and she did not call out. This one, she understood, was hers to walk into.

Odalys Hale's study was at the top of the east stair, a round room in the old tower, lined with books and maps and the brass instruments of a hundred sea voyages. A fire burned low. A great desk of black walnut stood in the window, and on it, set carefully in a silver frame, was a photograph that Elodie knew at once, though she had never seen it. A man and a woman on a ship's deck, laughing, windblown, her hand on his arm. The man had Julian's jaw. The woman had his dark, deep-set eyes.

"Sit," said Odalys. She did not turn from the window. "You will find the chair by the fire is the only one that doesn't wobble. Everything in this house is older than it looks."

Elodie sat. The old woman came slowly across the room, leaning on her cane, and lowered herself into the opposite chair with a small, controlled breath that Elodie realized was pain. She had not noticed, before. Odalys had hidden it all this time.

"I will tell you a thing about myself," said Odalys, "and then I will ask you a thing about yourself. I find it's fairer." Her gray eyes were very bright. "When I was nineteen, I crossed the sea with one suitcase and a berth I had earned scrubbing a captain's floor. I married a man who was not rich, and we became rich, and I discovered that money is a very efficient way of being lonely. It tells everyone you're important and no one that you are tired."

She stopped. The fire popped.

"My grandson is tired," she said. "He has been tired since the day his parents drowned. I have watched him build walls around himself, and I have put my hands on those walls for nine years, and I have not found a door."

"Every port he has ever visited, he has sent me a postcard. Weather fine. Cargo delivered. J. I have kept all of them in a biscuit tin." Her mouth trembled and was mastered. "It is the only way he knows to say that he is alive and thinking of me. I have been reading love in the weather report for nine years."

"Madam..."

"Odalys. Please. I am too old for 'madam.' It makes me feel I should be giving someone orders." A dry flicker. "I wrote that trust clause. I wrote it after the funeral, in a rage, on a very bad night. I thought: if the boy will not look for a wife, I will force the house to hold his place until he does. It was wrong. It was cruel and clumsy. But I was frightened that I would die and leave him alone in a building full of portraits."

Elodie sat very still. In the photograph, the laughing woman had flour on her sleeve. Or perhaps it was only the light.

From a desk drawer Odalys drew a single folded page, yellowed, with a Hale Meridian seal. "The trust. The vote is mine, you understand. Tobias thinks it belongs to the lawyers, and Winifred thinks it belongs to Tobias. It is mine, and I have not decided how to cast it." She laid the page on her knee. "I have decided nothing, Miss Marchetti, except that I will not be lied to by someone I have already begun to like."

The words were so dry and so exact that it took Elodie a moment to realize she had been paid a compliment and threatened in the same breath.

"I am an old woman," Odalys went on, "but I am not a fool. I do not know what you and my grandson have agreed to. I do not wish to. I only observe that he is not the same man who walked up my steps four days ago." She leaned forward, both hands on her cane. "So I shall ask you a plain question, and you will not insult me with a pretty answer. Do you love him?"

The words fell into the room like a stone into a well.

Elodie opened her mouth to say yes, the easy lie, the performance, the sentence that fit the contract. And nothing came out. Because it was the only question, in all this month, that she had not rehearsed. Because she was sitting in a tower with the woman who had raised him, and the fire was warm, and the photograph watched her from the desk.

"I don't know how to answer that honestly," she said at last. Her voice shook. "I know that he eats cinnamon rolls at two in the morning. I know he hung a glass ship on a tree with his hand over mine and didn't let go. I know he told me the worst thing he's ever done, and waited for me to look at him differently, and I couldn't." She drew a breath. "If that's love, then I'm in trouble. If it isn't, then I don't have a word for it."

Odalys regarded her for a very long time.

Then, with the slow, careful movement of a woman who had stopped trusting her own knees, she reached out and laid her thin, dry hand over Elodie's.

"That," she said, "is the first honest thing anyone has said in this house in nine years."

Tears pricked at Elodie's eyes, to her great surprise. "Please don't tell him I said it."

"Child, I will tell him nothing. He would never forgive me for interfering. I shall merely sit at the head of my table tonight and pass the potatoes." The gray eyes were suddenly wet, too, though the old mouth stayed firm. "I will ask one promise. Just one."

"What?"

"Do not hurt him."

It was so small a request. And Elodie, who had signed seven pages in a lawyer's office without a tremor, felt the whole weight of it come down.

"I can't promise that," she said slowly. "I'm sorry. I'd like to. I just don't think a person can promise not to hurt someone they love." She swallowed. "I can promise I'll never do it on purpose."

Odalys closed her eyes. A faint smile touched her mouth, strange and tender and very tired.

"Yes," she said. "That is what his mother said to me, the first time I asked her."

In the silence, the clock on the mantel struck the quarter hour. Outside, faintly, from the lane beyond the trees, came the sound of tires on snow, and then a car door, and then another.

Odalys opened her eyes. They were dry again, and fierce, and entirely her own.

"Well," she said. "It appears your father has arrived early. How very like him."

Elodie went to the window. Down in the drive, a camel coat was stepping out of a long black car, and behind it, brushing snow from his shoulders as if all of Vermont had been arranged for his convenience, came a second man in a coat that cost more than a car.

Her hand closed on the sill.

"Child," said Odalys quietly behind her, "do not let them hurt you, either."