“Your father has very little time left,” she said. “I won’t have him bothered.”
“I wasn’t bothering him.”
“I think I know when he’s tired.”
Lydia felt like saying, Heed the woman before you. He’ll treat you as badly as he treated her. In fact her father had disappeared for over a week after her mother’s funeral. People said it was sorrow that had caused his absence, but now Lydia wasn’t so sure. Surely there was another woman, most likely one of his friends’ wives. That was the way such things were done. Affairs were kept quiet, and maintained within a single circle, people of the same standing and faith. The nurse was not of their faith; any relationship with her would not be serious, so it was absurd for her to act as if she were the woman of the house. It was unlikely her father would leave anything to his nurse in his will if that was what this was all about. And then she saw it as she was leaving the room. A flash of red at Marie’s throat. The ruby from India that had belonged to her mother.
Lydia turned and left, grief-stricken. After a while she saw the boy following her through the streets. She hadn’t thought of him for days. Perhaps she should have been frightened, but it was otherwise. She felt grateful not to be alone. She liked the idea of having a companion. Once she dropped a glove purposely, and when she retrieved it she turned her head in order see him more clearly. He was no ghost, and was clearly flesh, perhaps sixteen or so, as tall as Henri, quite serious in his demeanor. He looked like a man, but there was something boyish about his posture. He ran a hand through his long, dark hair. He stopped when she did and turned to study a garden, overgrown with lime trees and weeds, then he gazed at her again. She gestured to him, but he looked panicked and backed away.
Soon after, her father died. His death was a hollow thud. Lydia went to the service and to the burial but remembered little. Only the ice-cold air as the men took turns shoveling dirt over the coffin. The sobs of the nurse. A nightingale in a tree bringing forth a ribbon of song, even though it was daylight, the wrong hour for such a creature to sing. The house was sold quickly. Although the money from the sale came to Lydia and Henri, when they went to close up the house most of the belongings were gone, the walls stripped of their paintings, and all of Lydia’s mother’s jewelry, the cameos and gold necklaces and, of course, the ruby, had disappeared. The rooms echoed.
“We can go to a solicitor,” Henri said. “Track down this Marie.”
“No,” Lydia told him. “Let her be.”
She stood at the glass doors to the garden while Henri went through her father’s desk. Later that evening, when they had gone home, Lydia was awakened by the scent of something burning. She crept down the stairs, on which there was soft red Oriental carpeting. Her husband was burning documents in a large copper pan in the kitchen, the window open to ensure that the smoke would escape. A wind blew through the house. Unless Lydia was mistaken the smoke was tinted blue.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“He wrote poetry,” Henri said. “To some woman. I didn’t think you’d want to see. They’re not particularly good.”
Some of it was burned, but she told him to stop and took up the sheaves of paper. She went to the pantry, a small wooden corridor where they stored flour and spices, and sat on a stool. She read them all and afterward felt as if she had swallowed stones. He loved someone, that much was clear. He called her a red flower, a star in the sky, a woman who could swim with turtles, who would never let him go, not that he wanted his freedom, not that he had ever wanted anything but her.
IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS Lydia searched through her memories, but they were hazy, bursts of events she’d experienced as a child and then as a young woman—lessons, parties, dinners, and finally meeting Henri, the moment when everything became brighter. At night, however, stranger images came into her dreams. She managed to catch bits and pieces, and she arose from her bed with peculiar tableaus in her mind: fields of tall yellow grass, a pool of tiny fish, the sound of the sea, red flowers tumbling down a hillside, her little girls with their eyes turned silver, a boy who tracked her in his black coat. She asked the maid if she’d ever been aware of someone following when she took the children to the park.
“It began two years ago,” the maid confided. “I didn’t wish to upset you. I shooed him away, but twice he had the nerve to come to the door. I told him never to return, but then he came again, to the back door, like a servant. He apologized for using the front door, and for trailing after us.”