Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [104]
A sound escapes her, and the driver looks over at her.
The windows and doors of the cottage are shuttered, so that the house seems a face with its eyes and mouth tightly closed, betraying no secrets.
“You can’t mean here, miss,” the driver says with alarm in his accent of broad vowels.
She cannot, for the moment, answer the man. Does she mean here? Is this the place where women in white linen once dined in mirrored lights with glissandi of Chopin in the background? Is this the cottage that John Haskell and his wife and children fatefully visited, none of them capable of even imagining the calamity that awaited? Paint is peeling from the clapboards and the grass is two feet tall, but in the cottage of her memories, light flooded through windows and slippered feet glided silently upon polished floors.
“Yes, this is the place,” she says to the driver beside her.
No houses have sprung up near to her father’s cottage, and she wonders why that is. Does her father own all the land adjacent? Was this land perhaps deeded to the convent years ago? The nearest neighbor, she sees, is still the lifesaving station, its fresh white paint and red trim gleaming in the sun and causing her father’s cottage to appear particularly shabby. At the shoreline, she can see many figures in varying states of undress. She remembers — the memory now bolstered by the sight of the actual landscape and thus more vivid than it has been in years — her slow walk from the bathhouse to the shoreline four summers ago, while Haskell, a man unknown to her then, watched her tentative steps.
Olympia pays the reluctant driver the fare and waits as he fetches her trunk down from the carriage. He bends with its weight. Though he offers to carry it into the house, she asks him to leave the luggage at the back door, for she does not want to reveal the fact that she has no key and cannot open that door or any other. She stands on the doorstep and watches as the driver pulls away. She waves once, hoping that she appears merely to be waiting for an unseen, if lazy, caretaker to throw open the door and invite her in.
But no such caretaker can or does emerge. When Olympia is certain that the driver has gone on, she begins to circle the house, looking for some means of entry. In her urgency to leave the Berkshires and travel to Fortune’s Rocks, she has missed several meals and has hardly slept. She tries the shutters (faded now and peeling) and is not surprised to discover that they are locked from the inside. A bulkhead leading to the cellar is similarly fastened, as are all of the four doors of the cottage. She would gladly break a window if only she could gain access to one, but she cannot at first see any opening in the house’s formidable armor. She does not want to summon help, for to seek aid is to announce her presence; and though she knows she will not be able to keep her residency a secret for long, she would at least like to be inside the cottage before she is assaulted by the curious.
Out by the chapel, she stands back from the house and surveys it from the lawn. Wild grasses poke beneath her skirts and tickle her legs. Shingles have come loose from the roof, she sees, and the clapboards are badly in need of paint. The porch railing has been battered by a storm, perhaps the same tempest that has denuded the dormers of their trim. There are, in fact, many repairs that should be attended to, repairs she herself cannot make, and she surprises herself with the sudden realization that she is looking at these failings of the house — a crack in a newel post, a doorframe that has warped from the damp, bricks from the chimney that have come loose — in a way she has not before, which is to say, in a proprietary manner. And it is then, during this inspection, that she sees the broken hinge.
She searches for something to stand on, for the shuttered window is just