Road to Folly
Copyright © 1940, renewed 1967, by Zenith Brown.
All rights reserved.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
1
Phyllis Lattimer slipped a few inches further down on her elegant spine and lifted her jodhpurred feet neatly if inelegantly to the Villa Margherita’s gleaming white balustrade.
“It doesn’t matter what I want them for,” she said. “I want them, and you’re going to get them for me, darling. That’s that I asked you down for.”
I started to say something . . . I don’t remember what.
“Look, Diane.—Strawberry Hill hasn’t been touched. It’s going to rack and ruin. You remember I tried to buy it when I bought Darien.”
“And the old chatelaine wouldn’t sell,” I said. I remembered all of it. “Is she still alive?”
Phyllis nodded. “She’s eighty-two, and she still won’t sell. But that’s not bothering me. I’ll get it some day. It’s what’s in the house that I want . . . and that I’m going to get if it kills me.”
“I see,” I said.
She tossed her cigarette over the white balustrade into the masses of purple and pink and yellow stock and flame-colored snapdragons, and sat silently for a moment, a hard little line creasing the corners of her soft mouth.
“Diane,” she said. “—That place is full of utterly priceless Charleston pieces! I’ve seen the inventory, and the bill. There’s a ribband back Chippendale settee and eight chairs made by Simms in his shop in Queen Street. It’s supposed to be like the settee the Boylstons have in New York—you’ve seen that. And just think of eight chairs and a settee! They’re in the downstairs drawing room. And there’s a satinwood secretary that’s better than the Charleston one in the Cleveland Museum. My dear, it’s a treasure house!”
Then, as if conscious that the set of her pointed jaw and the line of her scarlet mouth were too obstinately determined to be attractive, she turned her full face toward me and smiled.
“Don’t go stuffy and . . . well, Charleston on me, my pet, will you?” she said lightly.
An elderly obviously Boston Back Bay dowager with a malacca stick, an obese Pekinese and a face of virgin granite, coming up the steps between the high white columns of Charleston’s most exclusive caravanserie, glowered at her neat slim legs, at her feet profaning the white stone, and turned a perfect cyclamen red. Phyllis waved her hand airily without removing her bespoke English boots.
“Tourists utterly ruin Charleston, Diane. You wouldn’t believe how enchanting it is before the season . . . and how unutterably foul it is during it.”
The Back Bay voice grated pure corduroy. “—Who is that young woman? Is she stopping here?”
Pinckney, the Villa’s hall boy with the soft warm voice, grinned as he took the ancient Pekinese. “No’m, she ain’ stayin’ here. She Miz’ Russell Lattimer. She owns Darien Plantation.”
The old lady grunted. “Oh. Oh, yes. Philadelphia.” Even the screen door closed with a mollified thump.
Phyllis raised her shiny perfectly arched black brows and twisted one corner of her red mouth in a faintly ironic smile.
“So anything’s quite all right, you see, Diane.”
I looked at her. “It can’t be very comfortable though, actually. Or doesn’t that matter if it annoys the tourists enough?”
She groaned. “Lord, I knew you’d be difficult. That’s why I didn’t take time to change—so I could tell you about Strawberry Hill before anybody else got hold of you and headed you off.”
“But if they don’t want to sell their furniture, darling,” I began.
“Oh, that’s stupid,” Phyllis said sharply. “It isn’t ‘they’ in the first place, it’s old Miss Caroline Reid. The chatelaine, as you call her. Which is just what she is, because she owns every stick of it, the plantation and the Charleston house too. She’s the one who won’t sell. Her daughter-in-law Mrs. Atwell Reid . . . she’d give her head to unload the whole business.”
“But if it doesn’t belong to her . . .”
“It does, really. I mean, to her and her two children, Colleton and Jennifer. They’re not children, of course. Colleton’s twenty-eight and Jennifer’s twenty-two. Colleton lives in town with his mother, Jennifer’s stuck out there at Strawberry Hill with old Miss Caroline—she not only won’t sell, she won’t move in to town. It just doesn’t make sense, darling. I don’t think people have any right to ruin other people’s lives just because they hold the purse strings.”
I glanced at her. For any one who had as strong a sense of the power that comes from holding the purse strings, it was as sardonic as it was inconsistent. But Phyllis was blissfully unaware of it, concerned only with justifying her own ends. Which was unusual. The only justification she’d ever needed in all the years I’d known her was that Phyllis wanted it and Phyllis was going to have it.
“Well, I suppose you’ll explain, eventually,” I said, with patience.
Phyllis Lattimer and I had been born and brought up next door to each other in town and country, and went to school together. I’d been a bridesmaid at her first wedding, and gone through a modified inferno with her family when she decided to divorce to marry Brad Porter. Bradley was handsome, well born, well connected, completely charming and totally worthless. Everybody knew it, even Phyllis until the day she decided to marry him. I’d been in at the death on that too, after it had lasted three years. In fact, it was Brad I’d felt sorry for then . . . just the sheer pace of trying to keep up with Phyllis had begun to put some iron into his soul. Then she met Rusty Lattimer, who was as different from Brad, and the people they tore from North to South to Europe to South America with, as any one could imagine. Meantime I’d married an architect, and when ’32 came I did what so many young women had done who hadn’t any training except that they’d been brought up with old furniture and had been to the Flea Fair in Paris, and turned decorator.
Phyllis and Brad’s place in Middleburg was my first job, their house on Long Island my second, their ranch house in Wyoming my third, and when she divorced Brad in Reno and bought Darien Plantation on the Ashley near Charleston, I did that too. She’d met Rusty Lattimer one January when she and Brad were down in Charleston shooting wild turkey at a plantation near Walterboro. That was when she decided to marry him . . . without either his knowledge or consent. Just why was a little hard to figure out—or maybe not. He was frightfully good looking, blond with crisp sunburned hair and serious grey eyes and a hard lean suntanned face. Brad Porter was suntanned too, but too flabby from too much ease. Rusty’s family was Charleston’s finest and oldest and probably poorest. He’d worked, and gone to the University in Virginia, and come back apparently with a passion for seeing the lush subtropical land of his native Low Country produce something beside wild turkey and quail and camellias. A New York millionaire with half a dozen or so plantations on the Ashepoo got interested too, and Rusty had a free hand and a lot of money, and was doing a pretty swell job of it when Phyllis met him there at lunch.
