stared across the water. “Wouldn’cha know.”
To Maddy’s alarm, a red MG crawled along the causeway above the dunes.
“I was hoping the dumb regatta would keep him busy all day,” Violet said.
A man in chinos and tennis shirt emerged from the MG and stood on the dunes looking across at them, hand shading his eyes from the sun. “Water nice and toasty?” he called, his voice staccato and mocking, uncannily close across the channel. Maddy tried to hunch her body out of existence.
“Come on in,” Violet called back.
“Think I’m nuts like you?”
“Crazier,” Violet shot back. She stood, raised her arms high in a pantherine stretch, looked around with studied indifference, and sloshed into the water.
Maddy watched in dismay, praying the interloper would drive off. He turned toward the squabbling in the osprey nest. The set of his head and ears like Violet’s. Then he reached into a shirt pocket and put on sunglasses and continued to watch them from the dune. Aviator glasses, she saw; so he, too, could make out details. How would she navigate the space from sand to water? Slither belly-down, a sea turtle returning to its element?
From the bay rose a silvery peal of laughter. “You mustn’t mind old Nicholas,” Violet called. “He’s used to a lot of nude prancing about. Oh, excuse me, how rude,” she added, treading water. “Nick, I’d like you to meet Madeleine Shaye.” She gestured at the islet. “Maddy, my brother, Nicholas Ashcroft.” A salute toward the bluff. Then she kicked for the mainland in her slow, powerful crawl, feet churning up an aqueous chuckle.
Maddy had made a decision. Abruptly she stood. Nicholas Ashcroft remained stonily facing her. She braved the gaze behind the sunglasses a beat longer than was quite necessary. Then waded calmly into the water.
After the burn of nakedness, she welcomed the ice. What kind of crazy family was this? They certainly played by their own rules. Today a milestone, she thought, eyes open in the green water: she’d been seen. Then came a sense of injury. Had she been one of his fancy debutantes, Nicholas Ashcroft would have had the delicacy to turn away.
She tread water for a moment, arrested by a new idea. She’d been almost as troubled “prancing about” naked in front of Violet as in front of her brother.
WHAT COULD HAVE prepared her for the house? She sights it first as they curve down a road hugging a grand sweep of lawn; catches it next through the red-black leaves of a giant weeping hemlock. Now it comes into the clear, a greystone apparition rising on the bluffs above Weymouth Bay against the copper sun. Before it stands a single shell-pink dogwood.
“My God, it’s a castle.”
An assemblage of greystone peaks and towers, an actual crenellated tower with four upthrust parapets, ogival windows, mullioned bay windows—a Gothic fairy-tale vision, pure folly. “Great-Granddad Gus kept building onto the place to house his huge, I’m sure despicably behaved, brood. He needed to do something with his money. Please don’t disappoint me by being awed.”
“And please don’t pull that snotty rich-kid number.”
Violet stops the car and stares straight ahead, the diesel motor idling loudly. “Listen”—twisting her head this way and that—“how can I explain? I’m so used to—fending off. Christian and the others. I scarcely know how to do anything else. But I want”—she sighs mightily—“I so want you to like Conscience Point.”
Like me, she means.
Violet looks through her for a long moment, beset by some idea, while Maddy takes in her dazzled gaze, her features of a young czar.
“Friends?” Violet sticks out a beringed hand.
Maddy squeezes the hand and closes her heart against Violet. She distrusts this instant unearned devotion. Distrusts the whole setup. The rich walk through the world collecting amusements, then toss them when they’re bored.
“Isn’t a neo-Gothic castle a little out of place by the sea?” Maddy says coolly. Eyes opaque. Yielding nothing.
“I’m afraid they got their geography rather m-m-muddled.” In her eagerness to please, the stutter Violet affects sounds real. “The house was originally designed to overlook the Hudson River, but then old Gus decided to build it on Long Island ’cause the sailing’s better out this way. Islesford’s founding fathers wanted it razed. It’s awfully Hollywood, don’t you think? A back-lot heap from Ivanhoe.”
She parks carelessly under the porte cochere. In the vaulted ceiling adorned with blue fleurs-de-lis, four faces grimace down from each corner. The bronze door to the entrance is flanked by two Roman busts. Violet tosses her beige duster over one.
“No one’s here, thank God. Probably tying one on at the Weymouth Yacht Club. Look, it’s all fake,” she says with a kind of disgusted admiration. She taps the door: “Bronze is really wood.” Flicks the marble trim with her nail: “Faux marbre. Whole joint’s really a wood-and-brick house faced in stone. There’s a faux finish on almost everything. Just like our family,” she adds with a joyless laugh. “But some materials are real, which really mixes things up good.”
They enter a dim reception room with rose silk walls and a bear rug. “Let me show you around so you won’t trip over some carcass on your way to the john.” Violet places her hand in the small of Maddy’s back in a manner distinctly masculine and steers her left. “Here’s the music room, your room. Muthuh calls it the conservatory.”
At the entrance looms a white marble winged Cupid sorrowfully taking leave of a reclining Psyche with raised arms. Maddy bends to read the inscription: “Love cannot dwell with suspicion.” Her eyes sweep over a rose velvet couch with carved mahogany back. Ceilings vaulted in gold—wood posing as stone, she guesses. Leaded stained-glass windows running floor to ceiling, depicting scenes with a phoenix or peacock. And parked by the windows, the Bösendorfer, ebony splendor belying its anemic tone.
Linking her arm through Maddy’s, Violet draws her into a library with green velvet chairs, a table covered in green felt, a bookcase with ogival moldings. The house silent but for the ticking of a giant floor clock in the hall, which makes the place seem all the more an unmoored stage set.
Violet bounds up a sweeping staircase with curved white marble banister—real marble, Maddy judges from its chill. “Come see my little pictures,” Violet calls behind her. They enter a Uffizilike gallery with barrel-vault ceiling hung with family portraits. In a section by the windows, Maddy recognizes paintings by Violet similar to ones exhibited at Barnard: rectangular slabs applied with palette knife of marigold orange, cobalt blue, cadmium yellow. Maddy admires Violet’s pastels of what she now recognizes as the idyllic beach they just left: greens in spring, russet in autumn. Violet is a gifted colorist, moving with ease from abstraction to landscape.
She stops before an oil painting lit by sun burning through the stained-glass window: a portrait of a young man of surpassing beauty, a Brahmin version of Pan. Fair hair, impudent nose, dreaming eyes, helplessly self-infatuated.
“That could be Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover,” Maddy says.
“Linton? Yes, but Linny preferred women. Me at any rate. I painted him from a photo. He never would sit for me. Now he’s with the angels in Green Glen,” she says with sneering piety. “Left for a swim
