Midnight Harvest (2 page)

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
May 2002

part one

D
OÑA
I
SABEL
I
NEZ
V
EDANCHO Y
N
UÑEZ

T
EXT OF A LETTER FROM
R
OWENA
S
AXON IN
S
AN
F
RANCISCO
, C
ALIFORNIA, TO
C
OUNT
F
RANCHOT
R
AGOCZY, CARE OF HIS
L
ONDON SOLICITOR
, M
ILES
S
UNBURY OF
S
UNBURY
D
RAUGHTON
H
OLLIS
& C
ARNFORD; FORWARDED TO THE
H
OTEL DELLA
L
UNA
N
UEVA IN
C
ÁDIZ
, S
PAIN
.

San Francisco, California, USA

October 21, 1935

Franchot Ragoczy

c/o Sunbury Draughton Hollis and Carnford

New Court

City of London, England

My dear Count,

I suppose I may still address you as such, though it has been a long time since I took pen in hand to write to you, a decade at least, and I am fully aware that you may have gone far beyond my ability to reach you via any address I have in my records. I trust your solicitors may still find you, wherever you are, and whatever name you are using now, for I must assume you have changed that as well as your address.

As you may guess from the letterhead, I am still in California, and still living in the magnificent fifteen-room house my grandfather bequeathed to me, and I am still painting. I employ a housekeeper-cum-cook—a sensible woman named Clara Powell, whose husband is incarcerated for bootlegging and whose three children are being raised by his parents in Michigan—and a gardener—Cedric McMannus, a Canadian from Saskatchewan who came here fifteen years ago to work at the Ralston Mansion—neither of whom live in; occasionally I hire a carpenter-handyman for more strenuous work, a great change from the staff of servants at Longacres. I have turned two of the parlors into a large studio where I work, and I have added a north-facing bay window to it; I have also improved the bathrooms and the kitchen. To hear my English relatives’ reaction, you would think I were living in a tent in the middle of the wilderness. Yet, all in all, I have become, in my own way, quite staid in my life, though it is not the life my family would have chosen for me. They all thought me hopelessly wild when I came here, back in 1911, and nothing I have done since has changed their view of me, since I am continuing to pursue art instead of establishing myself as someone’s wife and someone else’s mother. In fact, my work has developed a fairly good reputation in the West, and I have had several shows, a few of them one-woman shows, the result of which has been that I have recently been approached by a gallery in New York to handle my work. I am giving their offer close consideration, for although I am fortunate enough not to have to worry about money—my grandfather left me handsomely provided for, and not even the Great Depression has diminished my holdings to a marked degree—I do have to consider the realities of the artistic world and make some accommodations. So it may be that I shall have to journey East and do the pretty to the ever-so-cultured New Yorkers. I am not wholly resigned to the prospect, as should be apparent I left England to get away from just the kind of snobbery that the New Englanders have determined to enshrine, and I am disinclined to deal with such aggrandizement unless it becomes absolutely necessary.

You may be surprised to learn that I have become an American citizen, taken Saxon as my legal name, and voted for President Roosevelt, all much to the distress of my sister. Do you remember her? She was a precocious child when you met her. Penelope achieved her dearest wish and married Rupert Bowen in 1922, and I know you must remember him. She is a widow now, and living at Longacres, with her two children. I have seen my nephews three times—once in England, twice here in America—but not in the last five years; they were very young then, now they are eight and eleven. Rupert died in 1931, quite suddenly, and Penelope has made his memory into a hallowed one. You would scarcely recognize him in the paragon he has become in Penelope’s remembrance. I have ceased to try to remedy her fiction, for it brings me nothing but her rancor and I already have a quantity of that to deal with.

On May 10, I turned fifty, and I have spent the last five months thinking over my life, and I have found myself recalling the time we spent together, your many kindnesses to me, and your love. Since my parents are dead, and my brother, and I find I cannot discuss these matters with my sister, I am appealing to you to read this with the compassion you have always extended to me, and which I am persuaded you must still possess. I hope I have not erred in this conviction, and that I do not intrude upon you in sending you this letter, but I am certain that you are cognizant of all I am presently encountering. You, of all people, must know the weight of mortality, as well as the burden living imposes. How capricious it all seems to me, the twists and turns of events, the bizarre whims of what some would call fate, but I can find no word to express. I thought the Great War had inured me to the uncertainty of life, but now I realize that there is another understanding that is part of age and comes only when one’s contemporaries begin to fall away. In the last two years, my mother has died—which was painful but not unexpected—a childhood friend has succumbed to cancer, and a couple who have been my close friends here have been killed in a terrible automobile accident. Now I am distressed to learn that a longtime associate has suffered a stroke and is bedridden, unable to speak or walk. I went to see him yesterday, and I was shocked and saddened, he was so changed, like an echo of himself. I begin to feel the shadows gathering, as my grandfather used to say. He died in the Influenza Epidemic, early in 1919, when so many others perished. That was a dreadful calamity, coming as it did in the wake of the Great War. How much suffering shaped those years! At the time, I could not mourn for my grandfather, there being so many others dying all around me, and the grief of war still fresh. So I shut it away as best I could and decided that I would not be overwhelmed by the losses I had sustained—as so many others had elected to do, too. Only since the more recent deaths and misfortunes I mentioned have I come to appreciate how much I miss my grandfather, and to understand what I have lost. I begin to wonder if I shall ever reach a point when the mourning is eased, and I begin to suspect that I shall not. If I find myself so haunted by a mere five decades, I cannot imagine how it must be for you.

Your letters, though few, have been treasured. I regard each one as precious. I apologize again for my long silence, but after the death of your ward, I could think of nothing to say to you that would offer even a modicum of comfort, so I took the coward’s way and said nothing, for which I am most heartily ashamed of myself. It was unconscionable of me to turn away from you in your grief, and I am distressed still that I could not summon up sufficient courage to extend you my sympathy at such a terrible time. You never treated me in any way that deserved such shabby behavior on my part, nor can I offer any explanation for my lacking that doesn’t sound paltry. At the time, I told myself it was the Great War and my father’s death that made it too difficult for me to try to console you, but over time I have realized that I felt inadequate to the task, and yielded to my qualms as a means of sparing myself pain. As I look at this paragraph, my chagrin returns in full force. I hope you can find it within you to forgive me, and that you will permit me to write to you as time goes on.

Recently I did some watercolor studies of the Golden Gate Bridge. It is being built across the mouth of the bay, a splendid enterprise that changes day by day. You would find it fascinating, I would think. Everyone in the area is excited about it. It will connect the north counties of the bay—Marin and Sonoma most particularly, and the highway that runs into Oregon and Washington—with San Francisco, and allow much of the traffic to travel by road instead of ferry. They say it will be finished in two years, but that seems impossible to me. There is so much more to be done, I cannot see how it can all be accomplished in two years. Nevertheless, it is an awe-inspiring enterprise, no matter how long it takes to complete. To see those tremendous cables looming out of the fog between those tall towers is a most impressive experience, and one I have tried to capture in my work, not nearly so successfully as I would like. I haven’t yet decided if I will show these works or not. They are somehow too personal, as are the two sketches I did of you, all those years ago, in Amsterdam, after your oil portrait was destroyed. I still have those sketches, and the watercolor study I did after I arrived here. I keep them on the wall of my library. I could never bring myself to send one on to you, as I said I would do. So they remain as my private icons: you and a fine bridge—what a perplexing combination. I don’t suppose I’ll ever part with any of them, unless, of course, you should want one of them, in which case you may choose which one you prefer, for, even after all these years, I cannot.

There is so much I want to tell you, but I don’t want to fling everything at you at once, although I think I may have done just that, for which I apologize. I’d never realized until now how much I had pent up within me. So I will close for now, and hope that when your solicitor forwards this to you, you will read it kindheartedly, and tell me where I can find you without going through Sunbury Draughton Hollis & Carnford. If you cannot do this, I will understand, although I will be saddened.

Let me send you my love with this, and my thanks for all you did for me, when I was still too young to fully value it, and assure you that I no longer take such kindness as my right, but a treasured privilege.

Rowena Saxon

P.S.

If it isn’t presumptuous for me to say so, my house is always open to you, and in the event that you ever come to San Francisco, it will be my pleasure to have you as my guest for as long as you wish to stay. I continue to keep those crates of Transylvanian earth that you sent at the outbreak of the Great War; they are in my basement, untouched, and at your disposal should you ever fetch up in this city.

chapter one

One of the shutters banged open, buffeted by the wind; it left a wedge of brilliant sunlight across the bed, making the sheet celestially luminous in the cool, shadowed room. On the bed, Saint-Germain moved out of the brightness, leaving Doña Isabel Inez Vedancho y Nuñez wrapped in the sheets. He rose and went to secure the shutter and looked out at the shining Atlantic edging the city of Cádiz. From here he had a view of the harbor, and he saw the clusters of soldiers near the warehouses and customs sheds, seemingly small as mice and as busy. In the bright, chilly winter sunlight they appeared preternaturally sharp and defined.

“Amor, come back to bed,” murmured Doña Isabel. She rolled onto her back and stretched out her arm. Her face was still softened by the aftermath of passion and her dark auburn hair was a glorious tangle.

“In a moment,” Saint-Germain said as he fastened the latch, restoring the dimness that had made their time together so private. Unlike the naked Doña Isabel, Saint-Germain was still dressed in slacks and an open silk shirt, though his feet were bare; he made his way across the lotus-patterned carpet, his movements measured, almost as if he were pacing out an ancient dance. “We still have an hour more before siesta is over. There is no reason to hurry.”

“No, not to hurry, but I don’t want to”—she let the sheet slide down her body, exposing more of her flesh—“neglect anything we might enjoy.”

He smiled fleetingly. “Nor would I,” he said softly.

“And I have no wish to waste this opportunity,” said Doña Isabel, who was known as Isis to her friends for her love of all things Egyptian as well as the slightly exotic cast of her features. Her room reflected her taste with a pair of golden sphinxes flanking the door, a chair upholstered in appliqué linen that was a copy of a temple frieze at Luxor, and a small statue of a crowned Pharaoh on her nightstand—she called him Rameses, but Saint-Germain read his name in the cartouche as Khafre—as well as golden hieroglyphic motifs in her wallpaper. “It isn’t just that siesta won’t last forever: I have to attend a reception at the British Consul’s residence this evening, and I’ll need two hours to get ready. It’s very formal—white-tie.” She continued to watch him. “Will I see you there?”

“Very likely,” said Saint-Germain. “But probably not until midnight; I doubt I’ll appear at the beginning of the evening.”

“You aren’t going to attend the dinner, then, just the concert to follow,” she said shrewdly; at thirty-two she considered herself very much a woman of the world, and in the last two months had become accustomed to Saint-Germain’s eccentricities. “You don’t like to have to avoid the food.”

“A sad necessity, hermosa, or at least an exercise in forethought; you know how awkward it can be to have to account for such quirks,” he said as he came back to the bed. “In any case, I prefer not to draw anyone’s attention to it.”

“It’s probably for the best, though I would truly welcome your escort.” She sighed, wrapping a stray tendril of hair around her finger. “I would be the envy of half the women there, I daresay, but I don’t want tongues to wag about us.”

“Nor I,” he said, knowing his reticence was for vastly different reasons than hers. “So we must continue to be circumspect. And not simply because I do not dine as most others do.” He sat on the edge of the bed and leaned over her, kissing her deeply and slowly, feeling her desire reawaken as her lips parted.