The Ghosts of Kerfol by Deborah Noyes

—”
    “You’ll have that chance after I’m dead. Only then, my boy —”
    The servant heaved him up with that drab, knowing expression Victor hated. Michel, who had lifted him before, seemed especially despicable now, with his strong forearms hooking Victor’s armpits.
    “Take me from here,” he begged. “Those dogs —”
    “We’ll take you . . . if you’ll stand
up.
”
    He did, and Mother held his sticky hands high for Michel to rub with turpentine. “What dogs, Victor?” She held him clear of her silks — not wishing to squander her newfound wealth so quickly — as Michel shoved and groped him with the rancid rag. “Hadn’t you better learn to control these fits? You’re an heir now.” She smiled at Michel, and together they led Victor blithering down the staircase, out into the empty yard, over the pebbled drive, into the waiting carriage. “A man of means.”
    He breathed the good smell of horses as Michel snapped the whip and Mother snatched a page from the coach seat, rattling it gleefully in his face. “The ink is dry, my boy. Rejoice.”
    He cast one last look down the avenue, growing smaller behind them, and knew he was forgetting something. Something he would not recover, and even as Mother stroked his pale forehead, it was already a dim memory.
    “My own little man.”

T HIS PARTY WAS A BORE , like so many parties, like so much of life after Stan — an ocean away from Stan. Heels stomping out the Charleston. The moat outside full of floating vomit and cigarette butts. Sinks full of shaved ice and French champagne, and a bathtub full of gin. They were in France, sure, but Prohibition was a hard habit to break. Half the fun of doing
anything
was knowing that you weren’t supposed to, and cathedrals and pretty gardens aside, you could take these wealthy sheiks and shebas off to Europe, but you weren’t going to get them far from the bathtub, really, and when they got there, they’d be pie-eyed and pissing on the lawn.
    Speaking of sheiks, the most momentous thing that had happened all day was the arrival of Emily’s telegram from Connecticut. Valentino was dead, and half the country —“the better half,” wrote earnest Emily in her telegram (it was comments like that that sometimes made Suze wonder if her prude of a cousin even
liked
boys) — was in mourning. More than one love-struck farm girl had actually hanged herself from the rafters of daddy’s barn. Over a movie actor. But what an actor. What a face. Sitting in the dark, no matter with whom, to watch Rudolph on the screen was to feel every fiber of your body awake and screaming for something, anything, and quick.
    Suze sat smoking in the garden among the bees, her hand shaking — nerves, coffee, too few meals — the music a distant buzz at the back of the big stone mansion. . . . The band was getting drunk. They were off-key. Young couples strolled along, enjoying the sun on their faces, and Suze did the same, steady on her feet for once because the last line of Emily’s telegram (“I heard Stan’s sailed off to the Caribbean again”) had knocked her sober. Anyway, Daddy was due back from business in Rennes tomorrow, and she had a lot of cleaning up to do — a lot of supervising from her garden chair, anyway.
    She thought of Stan on his little yacht under the Caribbean sun. The same sun now shining on her. She felt its warmth on her cheeks and bare shoulders, on her belly, still flat beneath summer linen, and she imagined Stan at sea, a nursery rhyme playing lazily through her thoughts:
    The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
    In a beautiful pea-green boat.
    Like his father, Stan was a boatbuilder by trade, a craftsman who could carve and sand and stain wood to make it glow. Like gold, people said. Even her father said so. “An alchemist,” he’d joked once, “like me.” Daddy was a stockbroker, and making gold out of base metal was exactly what he and his kind did daily.
    Despite his disapproval — nay,