Chapter 11 Celeste's Chair

"Dr. Fairley," Ambrose announced at the dining-room door, and from somewhere inside a young woman's voice said, "Her?"

Beatrix didn't break stride. She came in ahead of me on her cane, tall and black-coated, and said to the room at large, "Dr. Margot Fairley. The surgeon who looked at my heart in Zurich. I have funded her work ever since. She is my guest, and you will all be charming." She handed Ambrose her gloves. "Sloane, close your mouth. You look like a cod."

The dining room at Whitlock Hall ran the width of the house, with three tall windows at the far end full of gray, bright sea. The table was long enough for twenty and laid for five. Silver, crystal, white tulips down the center.

Above the sideboard hung a seascape in a heavy frame, a ship going down in a storm with every sail set. I decided not to read anything into that.

At the end nearest the door, a man was rising to his feet.

"Dr. Fairley. What a pleasure. Philip Whitlock." He came around the table with his hand out. "I've heard so much."

He was sixty, silver-haired, tanned from a winter somewhere with a marina, in a navy blazer and an open-necked shirt. His handshake was warm and dry and went on exactly one second too long. His eyes were pale blue and friendly, and they went over my face once, quickly, the way a cashier's eyes go over a large bill.

"Thank you for having me," I said.

"Thank my mother. It's her house." He laughed. "I only carve."

Beside his place, next to the water glass, sat a small cut-glass dish of peppermints. Red and white, cellophane twisted at both ends.

---

He introduced the others. His wife, Juliet: fifty-seven, beautiful in a pale, expensive, motionless way, ash-blond hair, a cream silk blouse, a string of good pearls. She inclined her head to me and said nothing at all.

His daughter, Sloane: twenty-eight, sleek and dark-blond, in a camel sweater with a small gold heart pinned to it that said BRAMPORT HEARTS in enamel. She had her phone face up beside her plate and kept glancing at it.

"Sloane runs a children's heart charity," Philip said fondly. "You two will have so much to talk about."

Sloane considered me over the rim of her water glass. "I doubt it."

They'd set my place halfway down the table, beside Sloane, across from Juliet. Philip at the head. Beatrix at the foot, by the windows.

At the foot of the table, at Beatrix's right hand, was a sixth chair.

It was set back slightly from the table, not quite pulled in. There was no plate in front of it. No glass, no silver, no napkin. Just an empty space on the white linen and a carved chair with its back to the sea, and the light coming in around it.

Nobody looked at it. Nobody mentioned it. Ambrose served the soup around it. I looked at it once and then made myself stop, because Philip was watching me look.

---

The soup was a clear consommé with tiny vegetables cut into perfect cubes. It was excellent. I ate it and listened to Philip talk.

He talked well. He talked about the storm, the harbor, the new wing at the yacht club, a dinner he'd been to in Boston. He talked to me the whole time, warmly, asking questions and listening to the answers. How did I find Bramport after Zurich? Was St. Ansel treating me well? Where were we living?

"Old Harbor," I said. "My mother's house."

"Ah. Old Harbor." He said it the way people say Ah, Lourdes. "Charming. All those little streets."

Sloane put her spoon down.

"Grand-mère," she said, "I'm sorry, but I have to say something."

"No, you don't," said Beatrix.

"Somebody does." Sloane turned in her chair to face me. She smiled. It was a good smile; she'd practiced it on charity committees. "You know who she is, don't you? Everyone on the Heights knows. She was Rhys Calloway's wife. She's the one who poisoned old Edmund at his birthday party." She turned back to her grandmother. "You've brought Calloway's poisoner to Sunday lunch, Grand-mère. Should someone taste the soup?"

Juliet's spoon paused, halfway to her mouth. Philip said, "Sloane, really," in a tone of mild reproof that reproved nothing.

I put my own spoon down in the empty bowl.

I'd heard it before. I'd heard it in a hospital cafeteria, in a corridor, in the eyes of the woman at the badge office on Monday morning. It didn't land anywhere new.

"Thank you for your concern," I said. "The soup's fine. I had some."

Ambrose came around with the wine. A red, nearly black. Sloane held up her glass for him to fill.

Then, as she brought it back toward the table, her elbow came up and her wrist turned and the whole glass went over, in a long, deliberate arc, down the front of my white blouse.

It was cold. It soaked straight through to my skin.

"Oh my God," said Sloane. "I'm so sorry. I'm so clumsy. Ambrose, a cloth. Oh, it's ruined, isn't it? What a shame. White is so hard to keep clean."

I looked down at the stain. It went from my collarbone to my waist, purple-red, spreading as I watched. My blouse was from a shop in Zurich, plain and well cut, and it was the nicest thing I owned.

I'd stood in worse. I'd stood in a ballroom in a dress soaked from the hem to the waist with an old man's vomit while three hundred people decided I'd killed him.

Ambrose was beside me with a white napkin. I took it from him and dabbed at the stain, slowly, once, twice, as if I were swabbing a field before an incision. Then I folded the napkin and laid it beside my plate and looked at Sloane.

"Interesting," I said. "Your pour's better than your aim."

There was a sound from Philip's end that might have been a laugh. Juliet's spoon was back in her bowl. I hadn't heard it go.

Sloane's face went pink from the throat up.

---

Beatrix stood.

She did it slowly, because she was eighty-one, but there was nothing slow about the way her cane came down on the parquet. One crack, sharp enough to ring off the windows. Everyone at the table stopped moving.

She didn't look at Sloane. She didn't look at Philip. She turned to her right, to the empty chair at the end of the table by the windows, and she put her free hand on its carved back, and pulled it out.

The legs scraped on the floor.

"Sit here, chérie," she said to me.

Nobody breathed.

I didn't understand, not entirely. I understood enough. I understood from the way Juliet's hand had gone to her pearls, and from the way Sloane's mouth had dropped open, and above all from Philip.

He'd been reaching for a peppermint. His hand had stopped in the air above the dish, and his fork, in his other hand, had stopped too, and for a second his warm, tanned, friendly face went blank as an unsigned check.

I got up, in my wine-soaked blouse, and walked the length of the table, and sat down in the chair.

It was hard and old and had been made for someone my size. Through the tall window at my back I could hear the sea working at the foot of the cliffs, unhurried. It had been at them since long before anyone built a house up here to watch it.

Beatrix lowered herself back into her own seat beside me. She picked up her napkin and shook it out.

Sloane found her voice. "Grand-mère, that's—"

"Tais-toi." It came out of Beatrix hard and flat. Then, in English, so that no one could pretend they hadn't understood:

"Be quiet. The next person at this table who speaks one word that is not about the weather or the fish will leave my house and will not come back to it. That includes my family. That especially includes my family." She lifted a finger to Ambrose. "Dr. Fairley will need a plate."

Ambrose brought one. He brought silver, a glass, a napkin. He set them in front of me with great care and great dignity, and I could have sworn that when he leaned over to lay the fork beside my hand, something twitched under all that composure.

Nobody spoke for the rest of the fish course except to say the sole was excellent.

Juliet ate nothing. I saw it because I was watching her watch.

Her eyes went to me in my chair, and then to Philip at the far end of the table, and then past him, out through the open double doors into the hall, to the portrait at the foot of the stairs: Celeste Whitlock at twenty-three, painted in a blue dress on a window seat, a book on her knee.

Then back to me. Then back to the portrait. Then down at her plate.

---

Philip recovered first. I suspected he always did.

Over coffee in the drawing room he was charm itself. He talked about St. Ansel as if he'd built it, which in a sense, he told me with a modest laugh, he had: he'd chaired the Foundation board for twelve years.

He talked about the new cardiac imaging suite, the endowment, the residents' scholarships. He talked about "my old friend Winston Okafor" with great affection, and said how thrilled Winston was to have me, how thrilled they all were.

"If there's ever anything you need," he said, "anything at all, you'll come to me first. The Foundation looks after its own."

"That's kind of you."

"Not at all." He set his cup down. "Not at all."

He crossed one leg over the other and laced his fingers on his knee. "And you have children, I hear. Bramport is a village, I'm afraid. Twins?"

"Yes."

"How lovely. How old?"

"Four."

"Four. The best age. Sloane at four was a holy terror." He laughed. "Boys or girls?"

"One of each."

"And they're settling in? New country, new school, new everything. It must be a great deal for them." He shook his head with sympathy. "And for you. Alone, with a new post. If they ever need anything, a doctor, a school, a word in the right ear, you must tell me. I know everyone. It's my one talent."

"We're managing."

"Of course you are." He let his eyes rest on me a moment longer, pleasantly. "You strike me as a woman who manages."

By the fire, Juliet set her cup down on its saucer. It made a small, distinct click, and Philip glanced at her, and she was watching the flames.

Sloane had gone. She'd left before the coffee, without saying goodbye to anyone, her phone pressed to her ear.

At four o'clock I said I had to get back to my children.

Philip insisted on walking me to the door. Beatrix let him, which surprised me, until I saw that she'd come too, a few steps behind on her cane, and that she didn't take her eyes off him once.

In the hall, under the portrait, he stopped.

He'd brought the little cut-glass dish with him from the dining room. I hadn't noticed him pick it up. He held it out to me now, on the flat of his palm, the peppermints heaped in it, red and white, crackling faintly in their wrappers.

"For the drive," he said. "I'm never without them. A terrible habit. My father's, really."

I looked at the dish, and then at him. Behind his head, in her gilt frame, the painted Celeste sat on her window seat with her finger in her book, waiting for everyone to finish.

Philip smiled at me. Up close his eyes were very pale, and very friendly, and they did not blink.

"You have my sister's eyes," he said.