Alice At Heart (14 page)

She left the mansion angrily with her subdued sisters following her. They went out into the bright blue late-winter day, down the pathway that led from the great house, past the statuary and tables and winter gardens and draping, massive oaks. Barret waited on the main dock, beside the
Lorelei
with its handsome cabin containing fine and sumptuous accommodations.

Standing with him, dwarfed by the aged German’s height and heft, two cherubic, silky blond men and a woman waved their hands in concern. The middle-aged Tanglewoods—brothers and sister— were plump and asexual, all dressed in pale, baggy trousers and cashmere sweaters dyed various shades of delicate gold and white. Like overgrown Renaissance angels, the employees hurried up the path, invisibly winged and gentle and alarmed. Loyal Tanglewoods had fluttered around Bonavendiers for two centuries.

Kasen, the eldest and leader, drawled breathlessly, “Oh, here now, we’ve filled the boat with vodka and flowers and gifts, yeah, Lady Lilith, but look, look, something’s happenin’; look out in the cove.”

Even the unflappable Barret was frowning at the cove, his hands shoved in his trousers, his thick fur coat pushed back behind them. Dignified and Teutonic, he had once been as handsome as a young Schwarzenegger and even now conveyed gentle brute strength, though his back was twisted and he walked with a shuffling limp. He turned to watch Pearl with adoring concern as she, Lilith, and Mara walked out onto the dock. “The dolphins are singing to you, my ladies.”

The dolphins crisscrossed the small cove in exuberant flashes of blue-gray choreography, churning the water. When Lilith reached the edge of the dock, their matriarch thrust her head from the water. She and Lilith regarded each other in singing silence. Lilith gasped lightly, raised a hand to her throat, and gazed out at the edge of the cove, where the surf broke on the cove’s narrow mouth. “Alice,” she said.

There, indeed, was Alice, looking back at all of them from the water. Steam misted around her boyish hair and large-eyed face. She seemed uncertain, nervous, a little lost. Yet she’d just managed two miles of unfamiliar water littered with small sharks, jellyfish, and treacherous currents. And Lilith had never heard her coming.

Remarkable. Troublesome.

“
Alice!
” Pearl echoed. And then to her eldest sister, with bewildered alarm, “Lilith, how did she swim the bay without any of us suspecting it?”

“She’s a show-off,” Mara said loudly. “And a sneak.”

“Ock! I would have fetched her in style,” Barret complained. “She doesn’t even trust us for transportation?”

“The Alice!” all three Tanglewoods chorused, using one of several peculiar titles their family had assigned to Bonavendiers over many generations of spellbound service. “She is a most forward person, isn’t she, Lady Lilith?” one drawled worriedly. “To appear out there, just appear, without tellin’ you.”

Lilith raised a hand for silence. Alice’s misery reached her like a ripple. She was distraught, tired, embarrassed. Lilith held out her arms and called loudly. “Welcome home, Alice. What an extraordinary entrance you’re making. One for the Bonavendier history books.”

Pearl began to cry and applaud. Mara sulked. The Tanglewoods cheered. Alice swam toward them slowly, clearly none too eager to believe it was all right to show up this way. The dolphins swept around her like joyous heralds, with pristine gulls dipping and screeching above and the slanted sunlight raising diamonds like unreal promises on the harboring cove of Sainte’s Point.

Lilith stripped off the silks she wore and dived in naked to greet her father’s lost daughter. Pearl followed enthusiastically, and Mara, reluctantly. Alice gasped, then plunged out of sight. Lilith feared she had deserted them out of modesty, then felt her movement in the water. As Lilith and her sisters frowned and treaded in place, Alice circled their bare lower bodies. Her hands darted out, examining their naked thighs, their knees, their feet, even prodding their buttocks. Pearl yipped. Mara kicked at her. Lilith was compliant. This strange affront continued for several minutes.

When Alice surfaced, Mara gave her a furious look. “How rude.”

Alice said nothing but heaved a sound that might be relief, disappointment, or both.

Lilith heard the explanation in that breath and said gently, “Don’t confuse fantasy with the glorious mysteries of the truth, my dear. And don’t assume we’re lunatics because you didn’t discover the type of proof you
expected
. Realize that subtle facts are far more precious than fairy-tale theatrics.” She gently touched Alice’s bristly auburn hair. “Become your own proud self. That is the transformation you should expect now that you’re here, where you belong.”

Alice bowed her head, blushing, acknowledging the ludicrous idea she’d needed to set aside right away.

In the water, no one had grown a mermaid’s tail.

During the darkness
of that eventful March night, Griffin poured his liquor into the drains of the cottage sinks and flushed pain pills down aged toilets gurgling below porcelain water tanks high on the cottage’s ornate plaster walls. At the last moment, he looked hard at a row of soda bottles, opened them, and poured them out, too.

Sweating with exertion, he stripped and sank himself in the tepid water of a claw-footed tub, propping his sodden cast on the rim. The wind sang melancholy warnings he ignored. Methodically, he soaped and washed the stink of defeat from his skin. He lingered in the soapy water even when every overused muscle cried out for bed. Armed with scissors and a package of disposable razors, he shaved off his ragged beard and cut his hair.

It was after midnight when he finished drying and dressing himself in faded gray sweats bearing the logo of a catamaran race he’d won years earlier, when his simpler obsessions included dominating the sea with speed as well as depth. He limped to a small temporary kitchen C.A. had installed in a corner of his upstairs bedroom, where he drank a pint of thick cream and ate several cans of tuna.

Finally, he went to bed, straightening the careless covers, aligning himself with staunch, painful discipline instead of drugged chaos, lying in the dark with his gaze trained on the vista of black ocean, cold white stars, and thoughts of Alice Riley. She was out there, on Sainte’s Point, her solemn, stunning face turned up to this same sky. If he could unravel Alice’s mysteries, he might unlock the secrets he was now convinced that Lilith Bonavendier and her sisters had kept from him. He might understand their relationship with his mother and what they knew about her and his father’s deaths, about his own survival, then and now. There was something,
something
he had to find out—he couldn’t name it but could now identify the longing at least. Alice might piece it out, help him, be persuaded to tell what she learned from her new kin. Alice could be used.

I only want what I deserve
, he told himself.

The hard course of desire rose in him at that thought, and he realized he wanted answers but he also wanted Alice Riley, or even Alice Bonavendier, whoever and whatever she was, whether he deserved her or not. He laid a cool, strong hand on himself.

He intended to recover, to grow stronger, to go to Sainte’s Point with a plan in mind—to put facts with the faces that floated before him in his memories. Because if Alice Riley could do what he’d seen her do today, and the communication he shared with her was not a mutual delusion, then anything was possible. The hard truth about the Bonavendiers and his parents could be uncovered.

He lived tonight because of Alice Riley.

Ali
, he decided to call her, changing her just as she’d changed him, owning her gently, by a new given name.

13

The Celts called him The Waterman and said he was once a sea-god named Dewi. In Christian times, he became Saint David. By any name, he was reported to be irresistible when playing the harp and singing. No doubt, since he was one of us.

—Lilith

If the sisters suspected I had met their Randolph neighbor, they said nothing and neither did I. I tried to put him out of my mind and intended to keep him out, if possible. Everything was too confusing.

I have come to Paradise. My first few days on Sainte’s Point have been spent in dazed silence. I’m drunk with the beauty. The ancient island lies along Georgia’s sultry coastline among a slender chain of its sister isles, many of which have names as rich as a lover’s sigh—Ossabaw, Wassaw, Sapelo, and grand, majestic Cumberland, home of the Carnegies. Tiny Sainte’s Point is the least known to the curious public, the most private, the most ethereal. An island of misty forests, long beaches, moss-draped oaks, ancient shell middens, and the peculiar, elegant old estate of the notorious, elusive, mysterious, and very rich Bonavendiers, descended from a French pirate and his wife, Melasine, a woman of origins and rumors too wild to be true.

I swim; I walk the shady island trails, exploring brackish, enchanted pools, the lighthouse at the island’s southern tip, and even the coquina remnants of a sixteenth-century Spanish monastery. I study fanciful books written about long-dead Bonavendiers
by
long-dead Bonavendiers, and I gaze at pictures of my father. Sometimes I stand for an hour before the foyer portrait of him and his wife.

What kind of man were you, and what did you do to my mother
? I whisper.

But neither he nor the sisters can adequately answer that question for me. Their own lives and loves appear just as enigmatic. Apparently, none of the sisters have children, and I don’t understand why only Pearl—via Barret, the mysterious German—enjoys a lusty, permanent paramour. I passed by the half-open doors to Pearl and Barret’s suite one afternoon and heard undeniable murmurs and sighs of passion, with tender words called out by both. I hurried away for fear they would catch me listening, though to say the sisters aren’t prudish is an understatement.

The old mansion is conducive to trysts and secrets without a doubt. It is huge and gothic and luxurious and stunning—a jigsaw puzzle of stone, wood, fine metals, porcelains, and sweeping vistas hooded by hoary maritime oaks balanced like spiders on limbs that dip nearly to the ground. One limb curves like a natural seat beneath my own main-floor bedroom window. My bedroom is a seduction in vibrant aquamarines, silvers, and antique white, a nest of silks and fine cottons and cashmere, with an enormous four-poster bedstead that Lilith says came from an early nineteenth century English ship. She makes no apologies regarding the family’s talent for found goods. Maritime law allowed a bounty to those who rescued human lives.

“Were you pirates?” I asked. I’m careful to refer to Bonavendiers as separate from my own lineage. I simply do not feel I am, at heart, one of them.

“We were
privateers
in service to the government, my dear,” Lilith answered without a shred of irony over such a small distinction.

At any rate, the bedstead must have belonged to some princess or high courtesan, at least. I have equally stunning armoires, lamp tables, and bookcases, which are filled with first-person accounts of sea-going adventure and texts on oceanography. Lilith surmised my favorite topics, of course. I have a writing desk stacked with stationary bearing the Bonavendier crest, and a cache of old-fashioned gold and silver fountain pens that produce script with the fluid grace of a sloop skimming the ocean. I have a sitting room, where an antique Italian cabinet offers a disarmingly high-tech music system, including a collection of my favorite operatic and instrumental music on CDs. In a pearl-hued bathroom, I dry myself with thick white towels from a cabinet smelling of fine soaps; I indulge in canisters of fragrant bath salts and slide a hand around the carved edge of a white marble tub so smooth it is like my own skin. Above me, of all things, a chandelier scatters dewdrop rainbows on my face, just as stained-glass transoms fill all the rooms with lyrical light.

My suite leads into the main house through double doors with scrolling gold Bonavendier crests inlaid in some fine wood. The crest, I note, is a traditional coat of arms but is bordered by two controversial figures in honor of Simon Sainte Bonavendier and his supposedly fin-endowed wife, Melasine—a naked man with his genitals discreetly covered by a twining sash and a classic mermaid. The two curve toward each other around opposite sides of the crest, clasping hands at the top. At the bottom, the mermaid’s elaborate, swirling tailfin curves possessively around the man’s feet. A phrase in Latin, scrolling beneath the pair, says the rest.

Hidden Between Water And Earth Await Miracles
.

“What are you doing?”
Pearl asked me when she found me reading on the beach. “Reading? Thinking? Oh, now stop that.
Feel
your way along, Alice.
Sing
your way. That’s what we mermaids do. We sing out, and we sing inside ourselves. Don’t let all the nasty tales of evil
sirens
color your idea of our kind. We are the keepers of the waters. And all the other creatures and forms and beings and even the ordinary people cannot resist our joy.”

I smiled indulgently. She had discovered that I sat on the chilly spring beach every day, perusing books Lilith had loaned me from her vast library. I told Pearl patiently that I’d learned Sainte’s Point was approximately twenty-five thousand years old in geologic age, that the warm waters of the Gulf Stream flow south to north about one hundred miles east of these shores, that the island was perched on a broad continental shelf that sloped out to that Gulf Stream current, then plunged toward the Atlantic’s abyss. I told her that the windward side of the island was dangerously endowed with fast currents and shoals, including a limestone reef, and that ten miles out, the Point Trench formed a large, undersea valley that was once an ancient riverbed. I told her the climate is sub-tropical, the fishing excellent, that all manner of small mammals roamed the forests, that terns and skimmers nested behind the dunes, that loggerhead turtles hatched their eggs on the beaches.