April of Enchantment (Sweetly Contemporary Collection) (6 page)

“Are you hurt?” he repeated.

“N-no,” she answered. To prove it, she pushed away from him, standing on her own feet. He did not release her at once, but held her steady, his hands resting on her forearms as if reluctant to relinquish their grasp.

“Good,” was all he said.

Laura managed a shaky smile. “I knew you would be handy as an assistant.”

Slow amusement rose into his eyes. “At least you seem to have a good idea of exactly what you might need.”

He was an attractive man when he was frowning; when he smiled, he was devastating. Laura permitted her lashes to shield her expression. “Yes, wasn’t that lucky?”

Without waiting for a reply, she swung away, glancing at her wristwatch. The half-hour he had suggested before they parted was over. It must have taken her longer than she had thought to arrange the ladder in position. She picked up the snapshot she had dropped, as well as her camera. Moving to push them into her tote, she said, “I’m ready to go when you are.”

The tightness was back in his voice as he indicated the door. “I’ve already locked up. Shall we?”

Three

Justin’s classic car purred like a powerful cat. It was impressively luxurious, with seats of buttery-soft leather and whipcord, and fittings of a gold-colored metal. If he was conscious of the uniqueness of the automobile he drove, however, he gave no sign, using neither greater nor lesser care than he might have with any other. He lounged behind the wheel with relaxed control, his strong brown hands firm upon its leather cover, and his eyes on the road ahead.

“What kind of car is this?” she asked, as much for something to say as from curiosity.

He sent her a brief glance. “A 1940 Lincoln Zephyr Continental.”

“I’ve never ridden in one quite like it before.”

“There were only a little over four hundred of them built.”

There was nothing in his manner to suggest that he expected her to be impressed by that statistic; still, she was. “It’s fabulous.”

He did not answer. They rode a short distance in silence, then he sent her a searching glance.

“I believe I mentioned that we needed to talk. There are one or two things that should be set straight.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but what I suggested is a trial for you, and when I say a trial, I mean just that.”

“If you are saying that you reserve the right to ask for my dismissal if I don’t prove satisfactory, I understand.”

She had been expecting something similar. There was no point in arguing with him any longer. He held the whip hand according to Russ, and she might as well recognize it.

“There is another point. I am also going to ask that if you run into special problems, anything that causes you the least doubt, you will call in qualified experts.”

“I don’t mind that at all. As a matter of fact, I’ve already arranged for professional analysts to come in and record the layers of paint all over the house.”

“The paint?” His eyes narrowed as he turned his head to consider what she was saying.

“That’s right. Samples will be taken and important colors recorded by the Munsell system.”

“Is that important?”

“It’s crucial,” she said seriously. “Removing the paint layers before analysis can be a disaster on a restoration. Actually, the more layers that encrust a building, the better. Analyzing them can not only show the original colors, but can determine later additions to a house or verify a puzzling point in its architecture.”

“How so?”

“There have been definite vogues in paint colors over the years, and in paint compounds. Before the Industrial Revolution, in the Southern United States that means before the Civil War, there were limited pigments in use, and most of them were in subdued shades. Afterward, there was a much wider and more vivid variety of colors, since they could be compounded from chemicals and prepared with machines.”

He thought a moment. “Say the rooms in a house were originally painted a soft shade, maybe a gray, then later the house was remodeled and a storage cabinet, for instance, added in a back room and the whole thing painted yellow. Now, eighty or ninety years later, we see that the storage cabinet never had a coat of gray, and we know it wasn’t original, regardless of how many more times the entire room has been painted over.”

“That’s the idea.”

“On the question of dating structural changes, I wanted to ask your opinion of the loggia on the back of the house. At present it’s enclosed with window walls and a set of French windows that gives access to the back steps. Do you think it was always like that?”

“I would doubt it,” Laura answered slowly, “though it’s hard to be certain. The Greek Revival style was an early influence in the South, and elsewhere, of course; there are examples that date back to the eighteenth century, an attempt by our ancestors to copy the ideals of ancient Greece, as set forth by the new Constitution, in their homes. The temple look, however, was grafted onto a Georgian interior in most cases.”

“A floor plan where all rooms open off wide central halls both upstairs and down?”

“Exactly. The fanlighted doors on both floors are also Georgian details. Then, in this area, this Greek Revival-Georgian hybrid ran into the French-Creole style of building, or what some people call the West Indies Planter’s style. The main difference between them is the floor plan. In the French-Creole style, there are no hallways. All rooms, both upstairs and down, open into each other, and each in turn has access to the outside galleries. If every door in the house is thrown open, hurricane-strength winds to the slightest summer breeze can blow through it. There are other differences, but like Crapemyrtle, the galleries extended around the front and both sides, while the back was enclosed on each end, sometimes by small rooms, sometimes by no more than an arrangement of blinds to create sleeping porches. This left an open space in the middle that was called a loggia. Since it was enclosed on all but one side, it had greater protection from the elements, and was used as a winter sitting area on bright days.”

“You think that the loggia at Crapemyrtle was a French-Creole influence, then, and was originally open?”

“That’s right. It makes sense, doesn’t it, considering the nationality of your ancestors?”

He gave a slow nod. “The question is, when was it enclosed?”

“That one isn’t so easy,” Laura admitted. “Until we get the result of the paint analysis, it will be difficult to tell. It’s remotely possible that the wife of the builder was sensitive to drafts and that it was closed in from the beginning. Or it may happen that the improvement was added later, during a good year for crops. There was a bumper sugarcane harvest in this part of Louisiana in the 1858-59 season, and then again in 1861-62. Like people today, the planters were seldom satisfied with a house once it was built.”

“If we find that the loggia was enclosed fifteen years or more after initial construction, what then?”

“It depends on what you want,” Laura said, her violet eyes serious. “Restoration can be approached from several different angles. A house can be put back exactly as it was the day the original builder left the site, which means that all bathrooms and kitchens have to be torn out, every later addition stripped away, and the original colors and details replaced. What remains may be accurate and of great historical interest both for scholars and for tourists, a museum piece, but according to modern standards, it won’t be livable, much less comfortable. On the other hand, a house can be redone to reflect its most opulent or beautiful period. San Francisco, a famous restoration a few miles from here, was restored to the period, not of the original construction, but of fifteen to twenty years later, when several marvelous painted ceilings were added.”

“That’s all very interesting,” he drawled, “but it doesn’t tell me what you think I should do with my loggia.”

Laura smiled in wry agreement. “I’m trying to tell you that it’s a value judgment, one only you can make. The loggia is structurally sound. The window wall doesn’t distract from the aesthetic appeal of the house, and it does add a certain protection for the gallery floor there and for the rear wall of the house, plus an insulation factor for the rooms on the back. The only question is what you, as the owner, want.”

“I’m anxious to retain as much as possible of the historical integrity of the house, but again, it’s supposed to be a home, a place where I can raise my family, not a tourist attraction.”

“In that case, perhaps your fiancée should have a say in the decision,” Laura said carefully.

“Myra? I doubt it will matter to her one way or the other.”

“Isn’t she interested?” Laura slanted him a quick glance, surprised at the indifference of his tone, wondering if he really had so little idea of what the other woman was planning.

“I’ve seen no sign of it.”

“When I spoke to her earlier, she mentioned a few ideas she had for changes.”

“Did she?”

Silence descended, underscored by the rich hum of the car’s engine. Laura stared ahead through the windshield. She could not make up her mind whether to mention the game room and pool to him. Myra had said she had told him about them, but either he did not remember or else the woman had lied. Regardless, until she heard his opinion of the plans, she would be no closer to knowing what he meant to do about the modern additions Myra wanted.

“If it was your house, your preference,” Justin said, his dark gaze intent, “what would you do?”

Laura considered, her head tilted to one side. “I think I would prefer to have the loggia open. It would give more light in the hallways and allow air to sweep down them the way I am almost certain it did originally. According to the diary, the women of the house used to sit in the upper loggia in the fall and watch the crops being harvested in the fields. Nothing was mentioned about watching through the windows.”

“I see. This diary sounds more interesting all the time. Now that we have settled the question of your staying on, I wonder if you would mind letting me see it.”

“I expect you would find it boring. It was written by a young girl, and the few bits of usable information have to be sifted out of descriptions of balls, gowns, tea parties, and endless paragraphs of gossip about people who are represented only by their first names.”

“Sounds fascinating. I suppose it belonged to an ancestress of yours?”

“My great-great-grandmother,” she admitted.

“A family heirloom, then; I can’t really blame you for not wanting to trust me with it.”

“It isn’t that I don’t trust you,” she protested, then went on as he lifted a quizzical brow. “I don’t have it with me just now,”

To her relief, he seemed to accept that. After a moment, he changed the subject. “I also wanted to know what you think of the kitchen addition. I suppose you looked over the plans while they were being drawn up?”

She inclined her head. “I see no reason why they shouldn’t be compatible. Finding enough pecky cypress wood in the outbuildings to build the cabinet fronts was lucky. As to attaching the building to the older construction at the back, the kitchens of quite a few of the houses constructed on this plan were built that way in the beginning.”

“I thought they were usually separated from the house to decrease the likelihood of fires?”

“So they were, and the earlier examples usually did have a breezeway between the house and the kitchen wing just for that purpose. But with the fire-prevention system that you are installing, and with today’s more fire-resistant materials and techniques, that won’t be such a great danger.”

“There are some who think I’m crazy for not converting one of the downstairs rooms into a more convenient kitchen.” He slanted her a quick look.

“The kitchen, as it’s planned, is convenient to the dining room, and that’s what is important. If the builders of these old places had opted for convenience years ago, most of them wouldn’t be nearly as well preserved as they are today. The problem is not only with fires, but with smoke, steam, the fumes and grease of cooking. It destroys wall covering, distorts the colors of paints, and disintegrates fabrics. In some houses where families have continued living in them for generations, they still have the original drapes and curtains at the windows after more than a hundred and fifty years. That would have been impossible if there had been a kitchen inside the house.”