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  PROLOGUE

  The first time I had entered Foxworth Hall as Mrs. Garland Foxworth, I had to pause to catch my breath as if I had been racing through the entire wedding ceremony and reception. I was still a little dazed and couldn’t help but imagine myself having been scooped up by a gallant, handsome, and powerful knight on a white horse who had carried me away swiftly from my carefree youthful life too soon and deposited me here at Foxworth Hall, an estate that was another world unto itself.

  The grand house was surrounded by acres and acres of prime Virginia woods and fields, situated in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. There was a mile-long lake on the property, less than a quarter of a mile from the house, a stopover for Canada geese at the start of spring. It had a dock and rowboats. At night when the moon was out, it looked like a large platter of glittering liquid silver. In the valley below the estate were rows of much smaller houses. From this height they resembled toy homes. How could anyone living in Foxworth Hall not feel like an aristocrat, almost godlike, looking down on the far less wealthy inhabitants, some of whom were employed in Foxworth Enterprises and paid meager salaries?

  I had been in the great mansion nearly ten days ahead of the ceremony preparing, which included having Garland’s mother’s wedding dress adjusted to fit me. I hated it but I wore it to please him and slip on the Foxworth name the way you might slip on a pair of too-tight shoes. Every one of Garland’s parents’ friends who attended told me his father especially would have been so pleased. The older men who had known him implied that he was quite aware of attractive women, maybe too aware. How many times during the reception had I heard “You are the most beautiful Foxworth ever” or “We never thought Garland would settle down, but seeing you, we understand why he has chosen to do so”?

  “And so quickly! He was obviously afraid of losing you.”

  The leering men laughed in chorus, but I did feel like I was on a pedestal, unable to move from right to left or vice versa without all eyes turning to me as if anything and everything I did was to be noted for posterity. Foxworths made history in Virginia, and I was now part of that heritage and the future. I had every reason to be happy, ecstatic, floating on a cloud.

  But suddenly that day, the Foxworth ancestors, who were frozen in portraits high up on the walls, were glaring down at me with eyes swimming in condescension and disapproval. It was as if they knew what most would consider the sordid events that had brought me here. No one would be surprised at my reaction to these paintings and the fears I had read into them.

  None of the artists had captured anyone with even the wisp of a smile on his or her lips. If anything, the relatives portrayed wore fixed, piercing scowls. Those arrogant eyes followed me late in the afternoon of our wedding reception when I decided to go in to repair my hair and freshen up. As I crossed the huge entryway toward the two flights of stairs, I felt a chill at the back of my neck. In the hall above, flickering lanterns struggled to push back the thickening shadows spreading like spilled India ink. Despite the size of the mansion, the walls seemed closer, intimidating, now that they were my walls, too.

  Standing at the top of the second stairway above the enormous entryway, I could hear the echo of the help’s footsteps and their voices and laughter as they walked through the rear of the great house, carrying out what was needed at the wedding reception. Yet the music sounded far off, as if it had already become a distant memory. I had to pause to catch my breath and swallow back the anxiety that rose from the soles of my feet to wash over my breasts and soak my tender heart.

  I was, after all, barely more than sixteen, and I was married. I was Garland Foxworth’s wife, and even though it was our main purpose for my being here these ten days, we had barely grown to know much more about each other. There was a great deal to do and Garland never stopped working at his businesses. Some days, we didn’t see each other until dinner. So much of his personal past was yet to be discovered. He was handsome, charming, and wealthy, yes, but there was a great deal I didn’t know about my new husband, and much I feared that I might never get to know.

  It was like a chant resonating in my head: Who really is this man you married? You have seen his loving and tender smile, you have tasted his salty, demanding lips, and you have heard him pronounce his vows with firmness in his voice that old fire-and-brimstone preachers would envy, but who is he?

  Now, after living here nearly five years and being known as the mistress of Foxworth Hall, I was often haunted by the memory of those moments passing the wall of portraits on my wedding day. I still saw myself as a stranger. It was as if the house would accept only the marriage of Foxworths. Indeed, cousins had married cousins. I could see the resemblances to each other in the paintings of the ancestors. Like some English royal family, they guarded their lineage. The house demanded it. Diluted family blood was unwelcomed in its veins. Garland’s father had married his second cousin.

  I never really felt the expected warmth of a new home; I never felt cozy and comfortable here. Surely most people would understand why not. None of the furniture or artifacts reflected my taste or interest even after all these years. I hadn’t bought a new picture or changed a curtain or a rug, much less an ashtray or a candlestick holder. The only place I saw myself was in a mirror.

  There were rooms I still had barely glimpsed and doors I couldn’t recall having seen when I was in that hallway the first or even second time. It was as if the walls in that section of the mansion I rarely walked gave birth to new entrances that opened to places born out of the black, muted darkness that flooded them once the sun went down and all light, like some unwanted guest, fled.

  Nearly five years ago, I had given birth at Foxworth Hall in my bedroom, a room known as the Swan Room because the headboard of the bed had a swan in ivory turned in profile, looking like it was ready to plunge its head under the ruffled underside of a lifted wing. Whatever angels I had brought to comfort me had been locked out of the house and left fluttering helplessly in the icy night. That was an evening so cold that stars couldn’t twinkle. The heavens were numb, expectant, as if the universe itself was holding its breath. A new Foxworth was coming through me to enter the world. Everyone was to be told he was born premature. I quickly discovered that the richer and more powerful you are, the quicker and easier people will accept your lies or at least pretend they do.

  According to my mother’s descriptions, she had suffered a terribly difficult pregnancy with me, but my labor was almost a mere inconvenience compared to hers. She was unable to hide her jealousy and be joyful and grateful her daughter had less suffering. My son, Malcolm, had left my womb like a child fleeing. Anyone hearing me that day would agree that some of my final cries could have been cries of surprise and not pain, especially if they looked at my face.

  It was over?

  Already?

  My water had broken and in less than thirty minutes, Malcolm had been born. Dr. Ross lifted him above his head, afterbirth and all, resembling some heathen warrior with bloodied hands holding up the heart of his conquered foe so that Garland, standing in the doorway like some indifferent passerby, could glance in and see his son.

  “Thank God it’s a boy and it’s done,” Garland had said, and then had gone downstairs to announce the birth of his son to three of his business
associates who had been waiting in the library, smoking cigars as if they were all expectant fathers or gamblers who had bet on my baby’s sex. I’m sure he had brought out his cache of limoncello to make a toast. He saved it for the most special of occasions. I had no idea whether or not he ever had shared the secret of my seduction with them in explaining why a well-known, wealthy playboy had married so soon and so young. I know he made himself seem gallant and noble any chance he had. Growing up in this house as a member of this family, he did believe and often behaved as if he was a prince who wore a crown invisible to anyone but him.

  Dora Clifford, my personal maid, had assisted Dr. Ross in cutting the umbilical cord and washing Malcolm, so named for Garland’s mother’s father. He hadn’t cried while they cared for him, not even uttering a small wail. Perhaps he had expected to be treated like a sun god who was immediately wrapped in his soft blue wool blanket and laid comfortably in the bassinet. Instantly he had known that he didn’t have to depend on my heartbeat anymore.

  Malcolm had not been placed on my body, close to my breast, the way babies often were placed soon after they were born. The wet nurse, Mrs. Cotter, had been waiting in his nursery, where she had her own bed. At the time I was still a bit dazzled over my being pregnant and Garland had made a wet nurse one of his promises to ease the impact on me, lustfully whispering that he didn’t want to damage my perfect breasts. Dr. Ross, who was in his eighties and had delivered Garland, had thought it would be better if Malcolm was immediately attached to the woman who would feed him for months.

  “We can’t confuse those suckling lips, now, can we? Too many nipples spoil the kitchen,” he had added, and had choked on his own laughter, coughing and sputtering like some steamboat on the Shenandoah. If he had died on the spot and fallen over me, I would have considered it divine intervention. As soon as he could, he left my birthing so he could go imbibe with Garland and his friends. Most likely Lucas, our carriage driver, would take him home passed out on the seat, snoring so loudly and hard he’d frighten the horses.

  Neither Dora nor I ever liked Dr. Ross. There was nothing gentle about him, especially when he had female patients. No man felt more superior to a woman than her doctor in 1891, and none like Dr. Ross let her know it as clearly, too. There was no sense complaining about him to Garland, either. He was the Foxworth family doctor and that was that. He was something else the Foxworths owned. Sometimes I imagined the family crest stamped on the physician’s wrinkled, pale-lily forehead with those dull-brown milky orbs below rimmed in faded rose. His fingers inside me felt like thorns and caused my nausea along the way as much as anything.

  “That’s that,” he had said after washing his hands.

  The moment he was gone, Dora had attended to me, her face full of don’t pay attention to him.

  I turned away and closed my eyes, trying to shut all of it out.

  I’m a mother, I had realized, but I didn’t seem to care right at that moment.

  And I wondered back then and still do now if I ever would.

  Something unusual was happening in the Swan Room today.

  I could hear the unexpected noise resonating in the hallway, unexpected because Dora looked after my bedroom as soon as she could in the morning, so no one should be in it this late in the day. It should be deadly silent. I knew Garland wasn’t yet home from his recent business venture, and he wouldn’t be in the Swan Room without me anyway. Even when I was in my bedroom and he could visit me, he was rarely there. To make love I had to go to his bedroom; I had to go there even to talk privately in the later evening sometimes. Aside from one occasion when we had made love in a rowboat on our lake, his bedroom had become the only love nest for us in this grand mansion and on this large estate. We had lost the magic of spontaneity years ago. If he didn’t plan it, nothing happened.

  “Come to me tonight,” he would say.

  When I first hesitated and demanded to know why it had to be his bedroom and not mine, he said he wanted it to feel more like a discreet rendezvous because that made it more romantic and we must never lose the romance. How could I argue against that?

  However, years ago I realized that the real reason wasn’t the romance in him or the Foxworth arrogance showing its face; it was something else, something far worse that I would have to learn how to ignore and to live with, just like so many other dark and twisted secrets that dwelled in this mansion with its whispers and fading footsteps. Did all great families by nature have so many mysteries lingering? Should I have expected it and not been surprised?

  Most girls think when they say “I do” to a man, they are saying it to him, to their new life together, but I had said it to a history captured and embedded so deeply in Foxworth Hall that opening a window didn’t do much to let in new, fresher air or release the captured cries and mournful sighs one could easily imagine having been sounded over the years here. It was as if every birth in this house and certainly every death left indelible shadows on the walls, shadows sunlight couldn’t push aside.

  Right now I paused to listen harder on the stairway, barely breathing even though I had started up quickly, eager to bathe and change my clothes. I was nearly up to the second landing after returning from a midday shopping spree at Miller and Rhoads on High Street in Charlottesville, Virginia. I was going to send Dora down to bring up the packages. As usual, there were quite a few.

  The department store had become my opium den. Buying new things and following what the salesladies called the recent fashions lifted me out of the doldrums these days. Garland was gone so often and for longer periods of time. It wasn’t like that during the first few years. Suddenly, he claimed that he no longer trusted his managers and there were all sorts of new marketing problems almost everywhere.

  “I caught one manager embezzling from me,” he declared before charging out one time. It was never “embezzling from us.”

  Whenever he left now, the house would darken even more and silence flowed in everywhere, flowed in waves, a tide of stillness. As time went by, the absence of music and laughter, almost any joviality, gave the mansion a cemetery atmosphere. Eventually, I half-expected everyone who worked here always to be dressed in black. The grandfather’s clock bonged out the hours like a drummer accompanying a funeral procession.

  There were some good reasons for depression and unhappiness these days, however.

  Garland’s factories and other investments really were struggling to stay profitable since the Panic of 1893. Whenever I complained about his leaving me so frequently and us doing so little when it came to having fun and enjoying the gay life he had promised, he went into a rant, weaving details about the overbuilt railroads and the stupid politicians who had driven the economy into shambles with the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. If I so much as groaned over these boring facts, his face would redden even more and he would pound the table after every complaint about the depleted federal gold reserves, blaming everything on stupid bankers and shortsighted investors. It wasn’t lost on me that my father was a banker who often guided investors.

  “We were almost better off during the Civil War,” he had claimed at a recent dinner. “Not that we’re not still wealthy,” he quickly had added in a calmer tone. He never lost his pride. Foxworths didn’t grovel; Foxworths didn’t whine. “I’m not asking you to make any economies. Just understand my needs and how much harder I have to work to protect what we have.”

  Before that evening had ended, I was expected to demonstrate how I sympathized and understood. That was the only way to bring us back at least to a semblance of a happy marriage. Too often, especially lately, I saw myself more like a temporary wife, winding down her allotted days of matrimony and family until some other young woman captured her husband’s fancy and she was sent out to pasture like a beautiful racehorse that had outlived its prime.

  Perhaps some of this was my fault. I knew I resembled a girlfriend rather than a wife, even after all this time. Right from the beginning, I was willing to accept my freedom from domestic an
d motherly responsibilities. But that wasn’t completely my selfish doing. According to my mother, it was something I had to accept if I wanted to enjoy what she called “being part of the aristocracy.” I was a woman of wealth and position now. I couldn’t dirty my hands with the work and obligations ordinary married women and mothers performed. I admittedly wasn’t looking forward to any of that anyway. I barely did my share of housework when I was living at home, and becoming a mother so young had been so far off in my young imagination that it was barely a thought. Back then the possibility was right up there with flying to the moon.

  But what my mother didn’t tell me about my “aristocratic life” was that I would have no separate identity and rarely be called Corrine instead of Mrs. Garland Foxworth. Gradually, I would lose contact with all those who knew me as anyone else. I was deposited into a world of strangers. And yet my mother insisted that love, romance, and marriage were merely baby steps taking you to a life in which you compromised; you sacrificed and your husband provided. When I complained, she nodded and with a bitter smirk said, “Of course this would happen. What did you expect? From the moment you say ‘I do’ until the day you take your final breath, you no longer have a different shadow. Get used to it.”

  How depressing, but how true that was. Sometimes I did feel like a ghost, especially here in a house that was becoming more of a museum than a home for me. Our servants looked through me, walked around me, and rarely said more than the formal greeting unless I asked a question.

  At first I thought I would take care of Malcolm right after Mrs. Cotter left. I really had intended to do that, and Garland must have believed it, too. He permitted me to have a carpenter create an infant’s swan bed. However, Malcolm didn’t sleep through a single night after he had been brought to the Swan Room. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the room or not having someone practically hovering over him constantly, which was something I wasn’t going to do. His incessant crying exhausted me, and I finally gave in to Dora taking over. The bed was left in my room since it had the swan embossed on the small headboard, and a new nursery was created.