April of Enchantment (Sweetly Contemporary Collection) (13 page)

The limbs of the live oaks thrashed, their leaves streaming in the wind that roared with the sound of a rushing train. Lightning lit the sky in a silver shimmer, while thunder rolled and rumbled. Justin and Laura did not waste time watching.

“Open the windows,” Justin said tersely, “front and back, those that are under the galleries.”

Laura did not have to be told twice. She knew as well as any that under these weather conditions, the air pressure inside the house had to be equal with that outside. The sudden drop in air pressure preceding a tornado could actually make the windows and doors of a tightly built structure burst outward like an overblown balloon. There was not so much danger in this old house, where the openings had not yet been fitted with tight weather-stripping; still, they could take no chances. In addition, it was as well to provide as little resistance as possible to the wind, allowing it to sweep through the house, dissipating its force instead of beating against the walls. The overhanging galleries and loggias, so much a part of the design of the houses built for this storm-prone climate, would protect the interior from the blowing rain that must come.

Come it did. It surged toward them in a solid sheet, splashing, splattering, thrumming with the incredible, penetrating wetness of the semitropical Deep South. It poured from the roof in a thousand silver-shot streams, rushed down the gutters, spattered on the floors of the galleries, its fury nearly drowning the sound of the wind.

Darkness closed in completely, relieved only by the flicker of lightning. A clammy dampness filled the house that, combined with the wind and a sudden drop in the temperature, struck chill to the bone.

Justin and Laura retreated to the sitting room. They stood at one of the windows; it was twelve feet tall, with the lower sash pushed up to an opening fully tall enough for a man to walk through.

Staring out into the night, Justin spoke. Laura heard the sound of his voice, but though she was less than four feet away, she could not make out what he said over the sound of the storm. She moved closer.

“What?”

He leaned toward her, speaking against her hair. “I said if we had any sense, we would take ourselves back to the pantry. At least it has no outside windows.”

Laura nodded, but neither of them moved from their places. Laura felt little real fear. The old house had withstood the storms of so many years; surely it would weather one more. After a moment she said, “Do you really think we should?”

He gave a slow shake of his head, a movement she felt rather than saw. “I think the wind is dying down now.”

It seemed to be so, though the thunder still shook the heavens and lightning sent its sullen glow around the horizon. A blown gust sent fine, misting rain across the lower gallery toward them. As it touched Laura, she shivered.

“Cold?”

Laura hugged her arms. “A little. I — I have a sweater in my tote bag, wherever it is.”

“We’ll find it in a minute,” he answered, his voice low, coming from close beside her. An instant later, she felt the encompassing warmth of his arm around her.

She stood stiff, but his hold remained impersonal, an offer of his own body heat, nothing more. By degrees she relaxed against him. There was no need to be silly about it or to make a big thing out of nothing. Still, she — more aware than she liked of his nearness, of his lean muscular length against her and the steady rise and fall of his breathing.

“Laura?” he said, a quiet note of inquiry in his voice, his warm breath stirring her hair.

She turned her head slightly and felt the gentle brush of his lips against her temple, as though in accidental contact. “Yes?”

He drew back slightly. The seconds ticked past. A muscle corded in his arm, then his clasp loosened. “I think,” he said evenly, “that we can close the windows now.”

That was not what he had been going to say, of that she was certain. Whether she should be glad or sorry that he had discarded his original intent, she could not decide.

In the hallway, Laura found her tote and drew out her sweater, slipping it on. Then, piling everything onto the floor, she dug out the small flashlight she bad learned to carry for seeing into the dark nooks and crannies of these old houses. Using its thin yellow beam, they moved upstairs and secured the windows and doors once more, then returned to the lower floor to do the same there.

The storm did not abate, but seemed to come in waves, the thunder and lightning rising to a crescendo, then falling away again and again. And through it all, the rain pounded down.

“It would have been nice,” Justin said, as he turned from locking the last window, “if I had had the foresight to install at least one phone when the telephone company ran the service lines. We could have called someone, told them where we were, even if our cars can’t be gotten out of here until something has been done about that tree tomorrow morning.”

Laura nodded in unhappy agreement. “My mother will be getting worried, especially with the storm. She knew where I was going, but I’m usually home before dark.”

“The nearest house is about three miles back toward town, I think.”

“That’s right,” Laura said. There was nothing any closer in the other direction.

“I could walk back there and use their phone if it didn’t mean leaving you alone here.”

“I don’t mind,” Laura told him, “but there’s no point in you going out into this. It could be dangerous. When the rain stops, we’ll both go.”

They argued the question back and forth, but Laura finally prevailed, primarily because Justin was reluctant to leave her in the house alone, she thought, and because he was just as reluctant to let her come with him into the wind and rain.

To counteract the growing coolness while they waited for the weather to clear, he built a small fire in the sitting-room fireplace, and they sat on the floor in front of it. The cheerful blaze not only took the dampness from their clothing and warmed them, but allowed them to turn off the flashlight, saving the batteries for when they might need them more, later on during the long walk for help.

The fire did not give a bright light, by any means. The yellow-orange flames sent flickering shadows over the walls and reflected in the glass of the uncovered windows, but it left the corners of the room in darkness and failed entirely to reach into the black, echoing emptiness of the hallway. It narrowed their world to the small semicircle in front of it, creating a soft and insidious intimacy.

Laura sat with her legs curled beneath her skirts, resting on one arm as she stared into the glowing heart of the fire. Outside, the rain lashed at the house, streaming down the windows. In the streaks of lightning, they could see the water that sheeted the lawn, turning the driveway into a millrace that flowed beneath the fallen oak and tumbled into the deep brimming ditches beside the blacktop road. Still, the storm showed no sign of letting up.

Laura glanced at the man beside her, sitting with one elbow resting on his drawn-up knee. The firelight touched his face with a reddish glow that accented the brooding lines of his features. He was a quiet, self-contained person, with something in his makeup of the protective instincts and the formality of another era. Despite a certain autocratic behavior that went with it, she found these qualities attractive. Were they inbred, or was it simply that he was a man who had made his own way in the world, rather like the early planters who had carved their fortunes out of the lush lands of the South? They had risked everything for the prospect of riches, something that required the same traits of strength, courage, and humanity whatever the time period.

It would be a mistake to romanticize his character, she told herself. Her interest was not personal. He was only a man, and one who was engaged to marry another woman at that.

To deflect the unwelcome direction of her thoughts, she said, “I hate that the oak was blown down after so many years.”

“As long as the others on either side weren’t damaged, it doesn’t make a great deal of difference. The row on that side was uneven.”

“Yes, I know, but still —”

“It will be even now, the way it was in the beginning.”

She sent him a curious glance. “I’ve always wondered about that.”

“When my great-great-grandfather planted the oaks the year the house was built, there were eighteen, the same number as the columns around the house. The one on the end on the left side fell victim to a pony cart driven by his oldest son in 1853, a boy of ten at the time.”

“I didn’t know that,” she exclaimed in delight.

“There were a few things that happened at Crapemyrtle, bits and pieces of family history handed down by word of mouth, that aren’t mentioned in your diary.”

Laura shook her head, smiling. “I should hope so. The diary only covers a few months. But I’ve often wondered what became of your great-great-grandfather, why he let the house go.”

“He was killed in the war. He fell with his eldest son at Chancellorsville. Luckily there were several daughters and a second son who survived him, though they didn’t consider themselves so lucky when they had to leave Crapemyrtle in the late sixties.”

“Yes,” Laura said, though the look in her eyes was reflective. Jean Bienvenu Roman, dead at Chancellorsville at the age of — what? His middle fifties? Not a young age for a soldier, but in the South, as the war crept along, the supply of men of the correct youthfulness had been depleted. They had been forced to rely on men both older and younger than usual until, at the last, only the gray beards and the beardless were left. And when the war was over, the scavengers had fallen upon the rich land. There were no people left to work the thousands of fallow acres. Confederate money, which most had converted to from gold, was worthless; there was little means to pay the taxes that had accumulated over the years. And so all but a few of the big houses went out of the hands of their owners, were passed from one uncaring tenant to the next. Some finally fell into decay, some were torn down and the lumber used for other things, some were ravaged by fire. A few were restored by wealthy patrons who thought to borrow from their past grandeur, a few became schools, museums, boarding-houses. There were not many that returned to the ownership of descendants of the original builders.

It was Justin who broke the silence. “You aren’t the nervous type, are you?”

Laura turned her head to look at him, the fireglow catching in her hair. “Should I be?”

“Most women would have been at least a little afraid of the wind and lightning.”

“I can’t say I enjoyed the wind. As for lightning, it doesn’t bother me particularly, as long as I’m inside.”

“That’s something else. There are people, men and women alike, who would just as soon be out in the rain as to stay here in the dark with this house and its ghosts.”

She shook her head with a smile. “Surely you don’t believe in ghosts?”

“I don’t know about that. It was Longfellow, I think, who said: ‘All houses wherein men have lived and died; Are haunted houses.’“

“Are you trying to frighten me?” she asked, tilting her head to one side. Hard upon her words there came a creak from the direction of the staircase in the hallway behind them.

“Could I, I wonder?”

“It would be easy,” Laura said frankly. “I’m half inclined to people the house with its former occupants anyway.”

“I suspected as much, but surely you don’t think they would harm you?”

“No, not really. I don’t see how they could, even if they would. Whatever passion or anger moved them no longer has meaning, or at least none that has anything to do with me. And there’s something a little forlorn about spirits watching from the shadows, spying on the living for any other reason.”

“Maybe they don’t spy? Maybe they go about their own business, repeating the same scenes over and over that made them happy or sad.”

“Life on another plane? Time as an unstructured thing that might flow backward as well as forward, or even stack up in layers that sometimes overlap? I don’t quite buy that.”

“And yet?”

“And yet so many people, for so many hundreds of years, couldn’t all have been victims of overactive imaginations, could they?”

“So if there are spirits, you expect them to be benevolent, or at the very least, harmless?”

“Something like that,” she agreed, then sent him an expressive glance. “I’m not the one who’s going to be taking up residence with the spirits here.”

“I won’t bother them, if they don’t bother me,” he declared. “The nearest thing I’ve seen to a ghost was you, that first evening.”

She stared at him, an uncertain light in her violet eyes. “You must be joking.”

“I assure you I’m not.”

“But I was wearing jeans, the best I remember, and you accused me of being a teenage vandal.”

“That was later. As to what you were wearing, I noticed, finally. But there for a split second I saw only your long hair floating around you, and the expression on your face, as if I were the intruder in your domain.”

Laura did not know what to say. There was an odd undercurrent in his voice, as if there was more he could have said if he had been willing. “You were angry.”

“Was I?” he asked, a smile rising to his eyes. “I must have known even then what a problem you were going to be.”