True Love Read online

  “This is it?” Alix whispered from behind Izzy. “Where I’m to live for a whole year?”

  “I think so,” Izzy said. “It’s the right number.”

  “Remind me to send my mother orchids.”

  Alix fumbled in her big Fendi bag in search of the keys her mother had sent. She found them and made it to the door, but her hands were shaking so much she couldn’t get the key into the lock.

  Izzy took the key and unlocked the door. They walked into a big hallway with a staircase going up on the left. To the right was a living room, to the left a dining room.

  “I think …” Izzy began.

  “That we just traveled even further back into time,” Alix finished for her. She hadn’t given much thought to how such an old house would be furnished, but she’d assumed it would be rather formal, done by some decorator’s idea of how the house should look. But this house had been occupied by the same family for centuries. Everything was a mixture of old and new—and new meant no later than about the 1930s.

  The hallway had a tall secretary desk and a trunk inlaid with what looked to be ivory. In the corner was a big Chinese porcelain umbrella stand painted with branches of cherry blossoms.

  They peeked into the living room to see furniture upholstered in striped silk, the arms showing wear. The rug was a pink Aubusson with walking patterns worn into it. There were tables, ornaments, and portraits of distinguished-looking people.

  The two young women looked at each other and started laughing.

  “It’s a museum!” Izzy said.

  “A living museum.”

  “And it’s yours,” Izzy said.

  In the next second they started running from one room to another, exploring and yelling comments.

  There was a small room behind the living area, which held a television.

  “What do you think of that TV?” Alix asked. “Circa 1964?”

  “Send that one to the Smithsonian and get your mom to buy you a flat screen.”

  “Top of my list.”

  All the way to the back was a large, light, airy room with bookshelves on two walls. Two chintz-covered couches flanked a huge fireplace; a wing chair and a club completed the picture.

  “This is where she lived,” Alix whispered. “Tea was served to the ladies in the more formal front parlor. But family stayed in here.”

  “You want to stop that?” Izzy said. “It was fun at first but now you’re beginning to creep me out.”

  “Just memories,” Alix said. “I wonder why Mom never brought me back here?”

  “Miss Kingsley’s gorgeous nephew probably had the hots for your gorgeous mother. That would have been awkward.”

  “If I was four, then that nephew was just a teenager.”

  “My point exactly,” Izzy said. “Race you upstairs!”

  Izzy beat her, but that was because Alix slowed down to look at the framed cutout silhouettes hung on the wall. There was one of a lady wearing a big hat with feathers in it. “I remember you,” she whispered so Izzy couldn’t hear. “You look like my mother.”

  “I found him!” Izzy yelled over the railing. “And I’m going to get into bed with him.”

  There was no need to ask who “he” was.

  Alix ran up the stairs and looked for Izzy in the bedroom on her left. It was a pretty room, all chintz and gauzy muslin—but no Izzy.

  Across the hall was a truly beautiful room, quite large, and done all in blue, from a pale creamy shade to deep and dark. In the middle was a four-poster bed with damask hangings. To the left was a big fireplace and beside it was a portrait, but she couldn’t see all of the picture for the draperies on the bed.

  “Here,” Izzy said as she crawled to the end of the bed. “Get in and look at his royal highness, Jared Montgomery. Or Kingsley, as he’s known here in the country of Nantucket.”

  Alix climbed onto the bed, which was rather high off the floor, and looked where Izzy was pointing. There on the wall to the right of the fireplace was a life-sized portrait of what looked to be Jared Montgomery. Maybe the man was a few inches shorter and he was dressed like some sea captain in a period drama, but it was him—or more precisely, his ancestor. The face was clean shaven, the way Jared Montgomery’s had been when she and Izzy had seen him years ago at one of his rare lectures. The hair was shorter and curled a bit by his ears. The strong jaw and those eyes that seemed to look through a person were there.

  Alix turned onto her back and flung her arms out. “Dibs.”

  “Only because you live here,” Izzy said as she put her hands behind her head and looked up. The underside of the big canopy had pale blue silk pleated into a sunburst pattern with a rose in the middle. “Do you think Miss Kingsley lay here when she was in her nineties and drooled over that man’s picture?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “If I wasn’t about to get married …” Izzy began but didn’t finish because she knew it wasn’t true. She wouldn’t trade Glenn for any man, famous or not.

  Izzy rolled off the bed and went to do more exploring, but Alix turned over to look at the portrait. The man in the picture intrigued her. When she was four had she snuggled on this bed and looked at that portrait while Aunt Addy—as she was beginning to call her in her mind—read her a story? Had she made up her own stories about him? Or did Aunt Addy tell her about this man?

  Whatever happened back then, Alix could almost imagine him moving about, almost hear him talking. And his laugh! Loud and deep, a roar, really. Like the sea.

  There was a little plaque at the bottom of the picture and she got off the bed to look at it. CAPTAIN CALEB JARED KINGSLEY 1776 TO 1809, it said. Only thirty-three years old when he died.

  She straightened to look up at his face. Yes, it looked like the man she’d seen years ago and again today on the wharf, but something else about the picture stirred a memory deep within her. It was there but she couldn’t quite get hold of it.

  “I found your mother’s room,” Izzy shouted down the hall.

  Alix turned to leave but then stopped and looked back at the portrait. “You were a beautiful man, Caleb Kingsley,” she said, then on impulse, she kissed her fingertips and put them on his lips.

  For a second, less than a second, she thought she felt breath on her cheek, then a touch. Very soft, very quick, then gone.

  “Come on!” Izzy said from the doorway. “You have a whole year to lust after that man and the one in the guesthouse. Come see the room your mother’s done.”

  Alix thought about saying that maybe the man in the picture had kissed her, but she didn’t. She took her hand from her cheek and went to the door. “How can my mother have a room here? And how do you know for sure it’s hers?” she asked, following Izzy down the hall, past the stairs, to another bedroom.

  But the instant Alix saw it, she knew her mother had decorated it. It was done in shades of green, ranging from a dark forest color to a pale yellowish shade. One of her mother’s vanities was her green eyes; she often dressed to match them and nearly always chose colors for her house to complement her eyes.

  The bed was covered in a dark green silk with tiny honeybees woven into it. The pillows, a full dozen of them, were subtlety monogrammed with her distinctive, intertwined VM.

  “Think it’s hers?” Izzy asked sarcastically.

  “Could be,” Alix said. “Or maybe Miss Kingsley was a great fan of Mom’s books.”

  “Could I …? You know … tonight?”

  Alix had teased Izzy that she was her mom’s biggest fan, and with every book, one of the first copies off the presses was given to Izzy. “Sure. Just as long as you also don’t sleep in the nude.” Alix left to explore the other rooms.

  “What?” Izzy asked, following her. “Your mother sleeps naked?”

  “Shouldn’t have said that,” Alix muttered as she looked in the fourth bedroom. It was pretty but didn’t look as though anything new had been put in it for about fifty years. “It wasn’t me who told you,” Alix said.