The Mulberry Tree Read online

  When she finished, Matt’s eyes were wide, his mouth open. “You know, I don’t think I wanted Cassandra that much.”

  Smiling, Bailey lifted her spoon from the custard and held it out to him. “Taste this.”

  As Matt tasted the creamy substance, he closed his eyes. “How?” he whispered.

  “I used a whole vanilla bean. Makes the taste stronger. Enough of that. Now tell me your story.”

  “Okay, where was I?” He gave the spoon another lick. “I’d just graduated from school with a design in architecture. Top of my class.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “And said to impress you. But don’t be,” Matt said. “Maybe if I hadn’t been given so many awards and offered so many great jobs, I wouldn’t have been so full of myself. And if I hadn’t had so many offers, I wouldn’t have been so disdainful of them, so I might have taken one in St. Louis or Minneapolis. I would have worked in an office and learned something. But I didn’t take one of those jobs, and I didn’t learn anything—not anything about architecture, anyway. No, I wanted to set the world on fire with my designs for personal houses, domestic architecture. No office buildings for Matthew Longacre. In the end, I took a job with a very rich man, old money, generations of it, on Long Island. I was to build a jewel box of a house for his only child, his daughter Cassandra, who was marrying Carter Haverford Norcott the Third the following spring. I had the idea that if I made a truly beautiful house for him, and it was seen at a huge, rich wedding, I’d get more commissions, then more and more.”

  “But you ran off with the bride instead.”

  Matt took a while to answer. “The irony is that I didn’t really want her. In fact, I never really saw her. It was that life I wanted. My . . . ” He hesitated. “My mother came from a family like that one. When she ran off with my father, her family disinherited her. Years later, even after my father left her and my mother was waitressing and taking on any job she could get to support her two kids, she—” Matt looked away, and Bailey could see the anger on his face.

  “She had class,” Bailey said.

  “Yes. My mother had class.”

  Bailey watched him as he picked up his spoon and turned it about in his hands. “And you wanted that class back.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Bailey sat down across from him, a mug of tea in her hand, and picked up a slice of whole wheat toast from the stack on the table. The bread was plain, not buttered. “So when did you meet the daughter, Cassandra?”

  “On the third day I was there. She hit me with a tennis ball, and I fell into a fishpond.”

  Bailey drank three cups of tea while she listened to Matt’s story, and she filled his cup four times. She sliced strawberries and bananas, poured cream over them, and pushed the bowl toward Matt while he talked.

  She listened to his words, but she also listened to the intensity of what he said. He’s a man who feels things deeply, she thought. He was trying to make light of what had been years of his life, but his white knuckles on his coffee mug handle and the little white line at the left corner of his mouth betrayed him.

  He was telling how a tall, slim, blonde, patrician beauty wearing a set of tennis whites had snubbed him. She’d been having words on the tennis court with her overbred fiancé, Carter Haverford Norcott the Third, when she’d slammed the tennis ball into the back of the head of the architect for their new house, knocking Matt off balance and into a fishpond.

  “If she hadn’t been arguing with Carter,” Matt said, “I doubt if any of what happened would have taken place. But there I was, sitting in a fishpond, all of twenty-five years old, wearing a wet T-shirt, and I made skinny little Carter jealous.”

  Matt said that he saw something in Cassandra’s eyes that day, something that appealed to “way down deep inside me,” he said. “Years later I decided I’d imagined it all, but for a second, I thought I saw a spark in her eye that said—”

  “Please rescue me,” Bailey said.

  “Yes! How did—”

  “Been there, done that. So she was being married off to a man of her own class, a skinny little wimp, and she saw a big gorgeous hunk like you sitting in a fishpond in a wet T-shirt, and her eyes begged you to rescue her.”

  Smiling, Matt leaned back against his chair, puffing out his chest a bit at her having called him “a big gorgeous hunk.”

  “That’s what I thought she was saying. But in the next moment, she looked down her nose and said, ‘He doesn’t matter in the least. He’ll probably steal the fish and eat them for lunch.’ ”

  “What a nasty thing to say.”

  “After I got to know her, I found out that that was the kind of thing Cassandra said when she thought she was being amusing. I’m not sure how she came to believe that she was funny, since no one ever laughed at what she said, and heaven knows she never laughed at anything, but if you asked Cassandra, she’d tell you that she had a marvelous sense of humor.”

  “What did you do?” Bailey asked, picking up a strawberry and eating it.

  Matt ran his hand over his face as though to clear his thoughts. “We’re our own worst enemies, you know that? Nothing anybody else can do to us is as bad as what we do to ourselves. When I graduated from school, I pursued the job with Cassandra’s father with everything I had. He wanted one of my professors to design his daughter’s house, but I flooded him with my own designs and ideas and talked my way into the job. And that’s what I did with Cassandra. I went after her.”

  Bailey ate more strawberries as Matt told his extraordinary story of how he had pursued Miss Cassandra Beaumont. Bailey paused a couple of times with a strawberry on the way to her mouth as Matt told of his escapades. Like something in a fairy tale, he’d climbed up a rose trellis and entered her bedroom. Then, like a bad TV comedy, he’d hidden under her bed when the maid entered.

  “She must have been overwhelmed,” Bailey said. “She—”

  “She was fascinated with me. She looked at me like an anthropologist would look at an undiscovered tribe of natives, and she thought everything I did was strange. She’d sit there and coolly blink at me with her big blue eyes, fascinated, but not involved.”

  “So let me guess. The cooler she was, the harder you tried.”

  “You have heard this story before,” Matt said, making Bailey smile.

  “So how did you get her to agree to marry you?”

  For a moment, Matt looked down at his hands, then back up at Bailey. “Truthfully, I think she did it to make herself more interesting in her own social set. To me, raised by a single mother, dirt-poor, Cassandra was an exotic creature, but to her own set, she was as ordinary and as bland as skimmed milk. I think she imagined that a six-week marriage to me would make her the center of attention when she returned to her daddy and the Hunt Club.”

  “And what about you? What happened after you were married?” Bailey asked softly.

  “Nothing. We had nothing in common. I vainly thought that once I got her alone with me, she’d loosen up. You know, fire beneath the ice, that sort of thing.” Matt gave Bailey a one-sided grin. “But by the end of two weeks, even the bed passion was gone. The truth is, I saw the depth of my mistake the morning after the elopement. I woke up, rolled over to her, and said, ‘Good morning, Cassie,’ and she said, ‘Don’t call me that. It’s so common-sounding.’ ”

  Matt took a couple of deep breaths before he spoke again. “She genuinely couldn’t understand that I couldn’t afford to send her to a riding stable or even buy her a membership in a country club. And her father knew what I’d done. He said, ‘You wanted her so much, so now she’s yours.’ ” Matt looked away for a moment, then smiled at Bailey. “This is hard to admit to a woman I . . . I like as much as I like you, but the truth is, I think I had some pretty mercenary reasons for going after Cassandra. When I look back on it, I think I was prepared to play the insulted hero and say that I loved his daughter and not his money. But I also envisioned myself eventually accepting, say, a house—of my design,