Under this blanketing velvet dark containing its faraway men and cigars, I yearned for color, a bright sweep of red flames to flare into being. It wasn’t clarity or vision I wanted, no—say instead that I had come to perceive there was something I lacked. That year, I had begun to read books as though begging entry, leaning to the pages as if pressing my ear to a door. Then it seemed the pages would sing out some strange song and, slight music that it was, I’d feel an answering swell of dim comprehension, though I knew that mine was the echo of the song, not the song itself. Sorrow; Rage; even a high, vaunting Gladness—these were foreign breezes from countries to which I had never voyaged, so each book became my little craft, each page a sail set out to catch those distant winds upon which Brontë, Pliny, Chapman, Ovid, all, indiscriminate, seemed to play. And I would sit at my window and strain into the dark behind the glass, longing to see through into the heat of my life, into the knowledge that I, too, would possess something at the heart of me to tell; that there was a promise held out for me. For me alone.

“Good night, Miss Maisie Thomas.” Miss Grange’s soft voice stole around the column, a kind of tired laughter underneath the sound. I felt caught out. I turned to my friend.

“Good night, Miss Grange.”

But she had already vanished through the dark doorway, and I could just hear Papa’s muffled voice inside, pausing in his conversation to bid her good night as she passed by. In my mind’s eye, I followed the tidy figure as she mounted slowly to her room, imagining the light on her table rising, seeing her draw back the curtain to stand at her window. And my eyes refocused with hers, staring out at the white collars pocking the dark lawn. One separated from the crowd with a casual laugh backward over his shoulder. It appeared he had a meeting. My heart throbbed. I strained my eyes into the dark, but the lights from inside the house cast an obscuring perimeter. I stepped around to the corner of the piazza, which ran in front of the now-darkened dining room, and peered out.

There! There was a white dress.

It waited. The collar approached. I could hear the long legs of the man switch through the grasses. The two were meeting in a near corner of one of the fields that stretched by the side of the front lawn. I watched the collar bend, like a star gliding down to the waiting sea. I watched the two white arms rise.

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO