Persuasion (12 page)

Pru wasn’t in the kitchen when Barrie rushed through the door. That relieved Barrie only slightly more than it disappointed her. She couldn’t mention Obadiah, but there was no alternative to confessing what she’d done at Cassie’s hearing.

After checking the butler’s pantry, she peered into the silent tearoom and found that empty, too. The shining glass of the windows caught the sunlight, but fallen petals and a dusting of pollen lay scattered around the cut-glass bowls on the starched white tablecloths, as if Pru hadn’t had the heart to remove the dying flowers yet.

Barrie turned away. She hastened through the kitchen and out into the corridor, where the door swinging shut behind her gave a deep and echoing groan.

“Is that you, Barrie? I’m in the library.” Pru’s voice drifted toward her.

Pausing on the threshold of the room a few moments later, Barrie found her aunt rifling through the contents of several drawers, which appeared to have been emptied onto the surface of the desk.

“Are you looking for something in particular?” Barrie asked. “Maybe I could help.”

“You haven’t seen the keys that were in the top drawer here, have you?” Curled wisps of Pru’s hair had escaped her ponytail, and she brushed a hand back distractedly to smooth it. “I’ve arranged for a local auction company to come out to take what you and I sorted from the attic, along with the furniture that we’re going to replace with Lula’s pieces that the movers are bringing out from California. But there are bound to be things on the trucks that we won’t have room to keep. Walking past the stable building last night reminded me that it might be the perfect place for temporary storage. I’m pretty sure the key was on that ring.”

Barrie’s cheeks heated at the thought of how she and Eight had distracted each other while he’d still had the keys in his hand. “Eight must have forgotten and slipped the ring into his pocket after we put Mark’s ashes in the cabinet,” she said.

She and Pru both glanced at the blue-and-gold
kintsugi
urn on the shelf, and grief crept into the room. Then Pru rammed the desk drawer shut.

“You know, I’m tired of waiting for Beauforts. There’s bound to be a way to open the padlock. I probably have something in the toolbox that will break it.”

She carried the whole toolbox out, and Barrie followed her around the corner of the house, peering into the shadows for any sign of Obadiah and checking the trees for ravens. For the moment, at least, everything was quiet.

Even the
yunwi
didn’t seem concerned. They hung back while Pru tried to find a way to break open the heart-shaped iron lock holding the arched doors to the stables in place, but once Barrie simply removed the screws and threw it—hasp and all—into the toolbox, they cheerfully pushed open the door and surged inside.

Daylight swept in to flood the wide concrete aisle. A closed room on either side preceded neat rows of polished mahogany stalls with wooden doors carved into graceful reverse arches at shoulder height.

Pru looked around with an expression that reminded Barrie of Mark talking about his drag-queen glory days, and then she stopped beside the nearest stall and traced the empty name plate. “Some of my happiest moments were spent in here,” she said. “Here and on the back of a horse.”

Her shoulders had hollowed, but she stiffened when Barrie
went to hug her, as if she didn’t want to be touched. Crossing briskly to the door on the right, she threw it open to reveal what had clearly been a tack room. Neatly buckled bridles coated in thick layers of dust hung beside a few cloth-covered saddles that still sat on racks mounted to the wall. Beneath each saddle, a tack trunk held the name of a long-dead horse engraved in large script letters:
Cordelia
,
Yorick
,
Claudius
,
Orlando
,
Hermione
 . . .

Barrie smiled at that. “Hermione?” she asked.

“From
The Winter’s Tale
,” Pru said. “Watsons have been naming their horses after Shakespeare’s characters since before the American Revolution, so my choices were limited. But she was a wonderful mare. I wish I’d had her longer.”

Barrie braced herself for an answer she wouldn’t want to hear, but she couldn’t help asking. “What happened to her?”

“My father.” Pru backed out of the room. “He sold all the horses after Lula left.” Standing in the aisle again, she hugged her arms around her waist and stood staring longingly at the rows of empty stalls. “I shouldn’t have let him do that. I should have stood up to him, stopped him. You know, I watch you and the way you quietly go do whatever you think needs doing . . . It’s frustrating to think that sneaking out with Seven on a few dates was the biggest act of rebellion in my entire life, and I stopped even that when Lula left. Maybe if I hadn’t . . .” She shook her head once, slowly, and then looked hard at Barrie.
“On the other hand, maybe I need to be a little bit more like my father.”

There was no way in which Pru wanting to be more like Emmett could ever bode well. “What do you mean?” Barrie asked.

“Isn’t there something you want to tell me?” Pru crossed her arms, and her expression was closer to stern and implacable than Barrie had ever envisioned it could appear.

“Seven told you about Cassie’s hearing,” Barrie said, closing her eyes. She didn’t even bother to pretend it was a question. Of course Seven was going to call Pru the second Barrie’s back was turned.

“The question is, why didn’t
you
tell me? I’ve been waiting for you to bring it up, to explain. Or better yet, you could have tried talking to Seven about it before you went and said something to the judge. Or spoken to me. Honestly, we’re not trying to smother you. I don’t want you to feel like that, but it is our job to keep you safe. I’m not your mother, and Lord knows I don’t have any experience mothering anyone, but I thought we were friends. I hoped you knew that you could come and talk to me if you were trying to work something out for yourself.”

The sunlight slanting in through the open doorway suddenly felt too bright, too revealing. Something small and cold hardened in Barrie’s chest, as if the lump in her throat
had sunk down to her heart when she swallowed, because Pru’s voice had trembled when she’d said she wasn’t Barrie’s mother. And it occurred to Barrie that Emmett’s refusal to let Pru see anyone after Lula had run away had cost Pru not only the chance of a future with Seven, it had taken away any children that Pru and Seven might have had together.

Her first instinct was to tell Pru everything. Tell her about what Seven had done to Eight, and about Obadiah and the lodestones, and the chance that maybe Obadiah could remove the Beaufort gift and set both Eight and Seven free. But Obadiah’s instructions had been very clear. Even the thought of mentioning Obadiah made Barrie’s mouth feel oddly dry.

“Did you know that Seven gets the migraines, too?” she asked softly instead. “So does Cassie. That’s why I did it.”

“I’m sure you meant well—that’s not the point.” Pru went to the door across the aisle and pushed it open into a room that held nothing but dust, a few dried wisps of hay, and a stack of empty burlap feed sacks. “But one way or another, you’re letting your cousin rope you in again, and that’s going to land you right back in trouble. I can already see it coming.”

Barrie shook her head emphatically. “I promise that I’m not falling for any more of Cassie’s sob stories, but this is a question of fairness. It’s not fair for her to suffer from migraines every day she’s in jail. That would be a bigger punishment than a judge or jury knew they were giving her.”

“How is it
fair
for her to get away with what she did?”

“She’s not getting away with it. She still has to make amends in the pretrial intervention program.” Casting a smile at Pru, Barrie tried to coax her to see the humor in the situation. “Honestly, can you picture Cassie in an orange jumpsuit, picking up trash on the side of the road? For her, that will be a worse punishment than just about anything else they could give her.”

“You’d be safer with her in jail.” Pru refused to be distracted. Without waiting for Barrie to answer, she closed the door on the empty room and walked out of the stable building with her back as stiff as an exclamation point. Barrie shut the double doors outside and retrieved the toolbox before running to catch up.

On the front steps of the house, Pru stopped and turned abruptly. “I’ve been trying my hardest not to be upset with you ever since Seven called and told me what you did. I’ve tried, and I’m failing. What upsets me most is that being mad makes me a lesser person than I hoped I was. Logically, I understand that having Cassie out of jail doesn’t necessarily mean she’ll have an opportunity to hurt you again. But I know how that family winds people around their fingers.” With a sigh, she rubbed her hands together, coming about as close to wringing her hands as anyone Barrie had ever seen. “I admire you for trying to be fair, but at least promise me you won’t have anything to do with her. Can you do that much?”

Barrie wanted so much to promise. Her head felt too
heavy on her neck as she shook it. “I’m sorry, but I think I need to go to Wyatt’s funeral, Aunt Pru.”

Pru stared blankly, and then looked up at the sky, as if Barrie had exhausted her patience. “What in heaven’s name
for
?”

“I need . . .” Barrie let her voice trail off. Various possible answers swirled around like kaleidoscope images while Barrie searched for a way to answer without actually uttering a lie. What
did
she need?

She needed to convince Cassie to let Obadiah do whatever he wanted to do at Colesworth Place, but the more she thought about that, the more she realized she still didn’t know exactly what that would be. She needed time to talk to Cassie, which Cassie wasn’t likely to give her on the phone. She also needed to convince Cassie to listen, which wasn’t Cassie’s strength at the best of times.

“Before Cassie locked us in the tunnel,” Barrie said, “she told me that no matter what I did in my life, people would always forgive me because I’m a Watson, like they would always blame her because she’s a Colesworth. She was right. People were still nice to me in town today.” The image of Ryder Colesworth knocking into their table surfaced, but she pushed it firmly away. “I’m not saying I can forgive Cassie, but we can’t keep fueling the feud without expecting the fire to burn us all to pieces.”

“You can’t be the only one trying to make peace, either,” Pru said. “People like Cassie take advantage of that.”

“Wyatt and Emmett are both dead,” Barrie said, and her lips felt stiff on the word. “They were the ones who hung on to the feud. Don’t you see? Going to the funeral would be a gesture for Cassie and Sydney. A chance to show the whole town that we can forgive and we don’t have to go on the way the Watsons and the Colesworths have for the past three hundred years.”

“I could ground you.” Pru snatched the toolbox away from Barrie.

“You could. But I hope you won’t.”

“You’re not playing fair. How am I supposed to argue against kindness?”

“Hopefully, you’re not supposed to,” Barrie said.

A faint smile squeezed the corners of Pru’s eyes for a moment before it died. “Cassie and her mother aren’t likely to want you at the funeral.”

“I know, but at least I’ll have made a gesture.”

Pru walked through the foyer and stopped at the closet beneath the stairs. She set the toolbox back inside, then closed the door hard enough for the sound to echo off the ceiling before she turned back to Barrie.

“All right,” she said. “On one condition. If you’re going to insist on going, I’ll take you myself. Unless you want to see more of that smothering in action, I also suggest we don’t mention the funeral to either one of the Beauforts until well after it is over.”

At the entrance to Colesworth Place, Pru swerved to avoid a pothole the size of a swimming pool. The black Mercedes groaned and quivered in its old age, and Pru’s hands tightened on the wheel.

“Not to speak ill of the dead,” she said, “but you’d think with all the drug money Wyatt Colesworth spent fixing up the plantation outbuildings, he could have spent a little to fix the road.”

“Different things matter to different people,” Barrie said, staring out the window.

“What on earth possessed him to put in an asphalt driveway in the first place? It was criminally stupid. Not to mention historically inaccurate. Hubris, that’s all it was, you mark my words. Every Colesworth has more than enough of that to go around.”

“Maybe it had something to do with smuggling drugs. Gravel makes noise and dust. Asphalt is quieter. I’d guess he’d have to have been thinking about those kinds of things.”

Pru sent her a worried glance. “Are you positive you want to do this?”

“Of course,” Barrie fibbed. But thanks to Obadiah, she had no choice.

Just being at Colesworth Place scraped her nerves. Driving through the open gate with its oak canopy of weeping moss, she couldn’t help remembering being there to watch Cassie’s performance of
Gone with the Wind
, after which Eight had peeled out onto the main road as if the devil were behind him. That had been the first time Wyatt had threatened Barrie.