The Flowers in the Attic Series: The Dollangangers: Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and a New Excerpt! (160 page)

I began to notice details I’d missed before. The portico floor was made of mosaic tiles in three shades of red intricately laid to form a sunburst pattern that matched the glass sunburst over the double front doors. I looked at those sunburst windows and rejoiced. They hadn’t been here before. Perhaps it was just as Chris had predicted. It wouldn’t be the same, just as no two snowflakes were the same.

Then I was frowning, for to all intents and purposes, who ever saw the differences in falling snowflakes?

“Stop looking for something to steal the pleasure from this day, Catherine. I see it on your face, in your eyes. I vow on my word of honor that we will leave this house as soon as Bart has his party and fly on to Hawaii. If a hurricane comes and blows a tidal wave over our home once we’re there, it will be because you expect that to happen.”

He made me laugh. “Don’t forget the volcano,” I said with a small giggle. “It could hurl hot lava at us.” He grinned and playfully spanked my bottom.

“Quit! Please, please. August tenth will see us on our plane—but a hundred to one you’ll worry about Jory, about Bart, and wonder what he’s doing all alone in this house.”

That’s when I remembered something forgotten until
now. Waiting inside Foxworth Hall was the surprise Bart had promised would be there. How strangely he’d looked when he’d said that.

“Mother, it will blow your mind when you see—” He’d paused, smiled, and looked uneasy. “I’ve flown down there each summer just to check things over and see that the house wasn’t being neglected and left to mold and decay. I gave orders to interior decorators to make it look exactly as it used to, except for my office. I want that modern, with all the electronic conveniences I’ll need. But . . . if you want, you can do a few things to make it cozy.”

Cozy? How could a house such as this ever be cozy? I knew what it felt like to be enclosed inside, swallowed, trapped forever. I shivered as I heard the click of my high heels beside the dull thuds of Chris’s shoes as we neared the black doors with their escutcheons made decorative with heraldic shields. I wondered if Bart had looked up the Foxworth ancestry and found the titles of aristocracy and the coats of arms he desperately wanted and seemed to need. On each black door were heavy brass knockers, and in between the doors a small, almost unnoticeable button to ring a bell somewhere inside.

“I’m sure this house is full of modern gadgets that would shock genuine historical Virginia homes,” whispered Chris.

No doubt Chris was right.

Bart was in love with the past, but even more infatuated with the future. Not an electronic gadget came out that he didn’t buy.

Chris reached into his pocket for the door key Bart had given to me just before we flew from Boston. Chris smiled my way before he inserted the large brass key. Before he could complete the turning action, the door swung silently open.

Startled, I took a step backward.

Chris pulled me forward again, speaking politely to the old man who invitingly gestured us inside.

“Come in,” he said in a weak but raspy voice as he quickly looked us over. “Your son called and told me to expect you. I’m the hired help—so to speak.”

I stared at the lean old man who was bent forward so that his head projected unbecomingly, making him seem to be climbing hills even while standing on a flat surface. His hair was faded, not gray and not blond. His eyes were a watery pale blue, his cheeks gaunt, his eyes hollowed out, as if he’d suffered greatly for many, many years. There was something about him . . . something familiar.

My leaden legs didn’t want to move. The fierce wind whipped my white, full-skirted summer dress high enough to show my thighs as I put one foot inside the grand entrance foyer of the Phoenix called Foxworth Hall.

Chris stayed close at my side. He released my hand to put his arm around my shoulders. “Dr. and Mrs. Christopher Sheffield,” he introduced us in his kindly way, “and you?”

The wizened old man seemed reluctant to put out his right hand and shake Chris’s strong, tanned one. His thin old lips wore a cynical, crooked smile that duplicated the cock of one bushy eyebrow. “My pleasure to meet you, Dr. Sheffield.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off that bent old man with his watery blue eyes. Something about his smile, his thinning hair with broad streaks of silver, those eyes with startling dark lashes. Daddy!

He looked as our father might have looked if he’d lived to be as old as this man before us—and had suffered through every torment known to mankind.

My daddy, my beloved handsome father who’d been the joy of my youth. How I’d prayed to see him again some day.

The stringy old hand was grasped firmly by Chris, and only then did the old man tell us who he was. “Your long-lost uncle who was, ostensibly, lost in the Swiss Alps fifty-seven years ago.”

Q
uickly Chris said all the right words to cover the shock that obviously showed on both our faces. “You’ve startled my wife,” he politely explained. “You see, her maiden name was Foxworth . . . and she has believed until now that all her maternal family was dead.”

Several small, crooked smiles fleeted like shadows on “Uncle Joel’s” face before he pasted on the benign, pious look of the sublimely pure in heart. “I understand,” said the old man in his whispery voice that sounded like a faint wind rustling unpleasantly in dead, fallen leaves.

Deep in Joel’s watery cerulean eyes lingered shadows, dark, troubled shadows. I knew without speaking that Chris would tell me my imagination was working overtime again.

No shadows, no shadows, no shadows
. . . but those I created myself.

To lift myself above my suspicions of this old man who claimed to be one of my mother’s two older and dead brothers, I gazed with interest around the foyer that had often been used as a ballroom. I heard the wind pick up velocity as the
thunderclaps drew ever closer and closer together, indicating the storm was almost directly overhead.

Oh, sigh for the day when I’d been twelve and stared out at the rain, wanting to dance in this ballroom with the man who was my mother’s second husband and would later be the father of my second son, Bart.

Sigh for all that I’d been then, so young and full of faith, so hopeful that the world was a beautiful and benign place.

What had seemed to me impressive as a child should have shrunk in comparison to all I’d seen, since Chris and I had traveled all over Europe and had been to Asia, Egypt, and India. Even so, this foyer seemed to me twice as elegant and impressive as it had when I was twelve.

Oh, the pity of that, to still be overwhelmed! I gazed with reluctant awe, a strange aching beginning in my heart, making it thud louder, making my blood race fast and hot. I stared at the three chandeliers of crystal and gold that held real candles. Each was fully fifteen feet in diameter, with seven tiers of candles. How many tiers had there been before? Five? Three? I couldn’t remember. I stared at the huge mirrors with gold frames that lined the foyer, reflecting the elegant Louis XIV furniture where those who didn’t dance could sit and watch and converse.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way! Things remembered never lived up to expectations—why was this second Foxworth Hall overwhelming me even more than the original?

Then I saw something else—something I didn’t expect to see.

Those dual curving staircases, one on the right, the other on the left of the vast expanse of red and white checkered marble. Weren’t they the same stairs? Refurbished, but the same? Hadn’t I watched the fire that had burned Foxworth Hall until it was only red embers and smoke? All eight of the chimneys had stood; so had the marble staircases. The intricately designed banisters and rosewood railing must have
burned and been replaced. I swallowed over the hard lump that lodged in my throat. I’d wanted the house to be new, all new . . . nothing left of the old.

Joel was watching me, telling me my face revealed more than Chris’s. When our eyes locked, he quickly looked away before he gestured that we were to follow him. Joel showed us through all the beautiful first-floor rooms as I remained numb and speechless, and Chris asked all the questions, before at last we settled down in one of the salons and Joel began telling his own story.

Along the way he’d paused in the enormous kitchen long enough to put together a snack for our lunch. Refusing Chris’s offer to help, he had carried in a tray with tea and dainty sandwiches. My appetite was small, but as was to be expected, Chris was ravenous and in a few minutes had dispatched six of the tiny sandwiches and was reaching for another as Joel poured him a second cup of tea. I ate but one of the miniature tasteless sandwiches and sipped twice from the tea, which was steaming hot and very strong, expectantly anticipating the tale Joel would tell.

His voice was frail, with those gritty undertones that made it seem he had a cold and speaking was difficult. Yet soon I forgot the unpleasant sound of his voice as he began to relate so much of what I’d always wanted to know about our grandparents and our mother when she was a child. In no time at all it became clear that he’d hated his father very much, and only then could I begin to warm up to him.

“You called your father by his Christian name?” My first question since he’d begun his story, my voice an intimidated whisper, as if Malcolm himself might be hovering somewhere within hearing.

His thin lips moved to twist into a grotesque mockery of a smile. “Of course. My brother Mel was four years older than I, and we’d always referred to our father by his given name, but never in his presence. We didn’t have that kind of nerve.
Calling him Daddy seemed ridiculous. We couldn’t call him Father because he wasn’t a real father. ‘Dad’ would have indicated a warm relationship, which we didn’t have and didn’t want. When we had to, we called him Father. In fact, we both tried not to be seen or heard by him. We’d disappear when he was due home. He had an office in town from which he conducted most of his business and another office here. He was always working, seated behind a massive desk that was to us a barrier. Even when he was home, he managed to keep himself remote, untouchable. He was never idle, always jumping up to take long distance calls in his office so we couldn’t overhear his business transactions. He seldom talked to our mother. She didn’t seem to mind. On rare occasions we’d seen him holding our baby sister on his lap, and we’d hide and watch, with strange yearnings in our chests.

“We’d talk about it afterward, wondering why we’d feel jealous of Corrine, when Corrine was often just as severely punished as we were. But always our father was sorry when he punished
her
. To make up for some humiliation, some beating, or being locked in the attic, which was one of his favorite ways to punish us, he’d bring Corrine a costly piece of jewelry, or an expensive doll or toy. She had everything any little girl could desire—but if she did one wrong thing, he took from her what she loved most and gave it to the church he patronized. She’d cry and try to win back his affection, but he could turn against her as easily as he could turn toward her.

“When Mel and I tried to win gifts of consolation from him, he’d turn his back and tell us to act like men, not children. Mel and I used to think your mother knew how to work our father very well to get what she wanted. We didn’t know how to act sweet, or how to be beguiling, or demure.”

Behind my eyes I could see my mother as a child, running through this beautiful but sinister home, growing accustomed to having everything lavish and expensive, so that later on when she married Daddy, who had earned a modest salary,
she still didn’t think about how much she paid for anything.

I sat there with wide eyes as Joel went on. “Corrine and our mother didn’t like each other. As we grew up, we recognized the fact that our mother was jealous of her own daughter’s beauty, and the many charms that enabled her to twist any man around her fingers. Corrine was exceptionally beautiful. Even as her brothers we could sense the power she would be able to wield one day.” Joel spread his thin, pale hands on his legs. His hands were gnarled and knotted, but somehow they still maintained a remnant of elegance, perhaps because he used them gracefully, or perhaps because they were so pale. “Look around at all this grandeur and beauty—and picture a household of tormented people, all struggling to be free of the chains Malcolm put on us. Even our mother, who’d inherited a fortune from her own parents, was kept under stringent control.

“Mel escaped the banking business, which he hated and had been forced into by Malcolm, by jumping onto his motorcycle and racing away into the mountains, where he’d stay in a log cabin he and I had constructed together. We would invite our girlfriends there, and we did everything we knew our father would disapprove of deliberately, out of defiance for his absolute authority.

“One terrible summer day Mel went over a precipice; they had to dig his body out of the ravine. He was only twenty-one. I was seventeen. I felt half dead myself, so empty and alone with my brother gone. My father came to me after Mel’s funeral and said I’d have to take the place of my older brother and work in one of his banks to learn about the financial world. He might as well have told me I’d have to cut off my hands and feet. I ran away that very night.”