Lavender Morning Read online

  “You two are disgusting,” Sara said, but she was laughing.

  Now, Luke sharpened the blades of the lawn mower on the whetstone as he looked out through the little round window in the brick wall. He was in what used to be the stables of the old house, but most of it had fallen down long ago. While old Bertrand lived there, the house had been taken care of, as per Miss Edi’s instructions, but the outbuildings had been allowed to fall into ruin.

  “You didn’t put the care of them in the contract?” Luke asked Ramsey. “You just took care of the house and not the grounds?”

  “Are you implying that I made out the contract in 1946?”

  “Okay, then your dad.”

  “He was one year old.”

  “Whoever, whenever, it is your job to look after the place,” Luke said when he’d returned to Edilean and seen the state of the outbuildings.

  “Maybe you should have stayed here and taken care of them,” Ramsey said, unperturbed by his cousin’s anger. “Maybe you shouldn’t have run off to the far ends of the earth and done whatever it is that’s made you so damned angry.”

  Luke opened his mouth to say something, but closed it. “Go away. Go do whatever you do in your little office and let me take care of this.”

  It had taken Luke months to restore the old buildings. He only rebuilt part of the stables, but he used materials from the time the house was built. He dug old bricks out of the ground, even dug up a well that had been filled in with bricks that had been handmade and fired when Edilean Manor was the center of a plantation.

  It had been hard, physical labor, something that Luke needed at the time, and he’d enjoyed the solitude of working alone. No one was living in the house then, as old Bertrand had died. There was a housekeeper who came every day, but she was so old she could hardly climb the stairs. When Luke saw her hobbling about, too feeble to accomplish much, he’d taken over. He got her a fat chair and a radio, and he set her up in the living room. When Ramsey, as the lawyer in charge of Miss Edi’s estate, saw what he’d done, he said he’d write Miss Edi and tell her the housekeeper should be put out to pasture. But Rams looked hard at Luke as he said it. They both knew the woman’s family needed the money, so she was kept on, and Luke did the work. He kept the house in repair, and when the furniture arrived, it was Luke who saw to its placement. One Saturday with cousins and beer and pizza got the larger pieces up the stairs.

  Except for the tenants, in essence, the house had been Luke’s for the past few years. He was the one who repaired the roof and got the dead pigeon out of the wall. And he rebuilt the top of the chimney when it was hit by lightning.

  When he was told that Miss Edi had died and left the house to some girl who’d never seen the place, Luke had an urge to burn it down. Better that than let someone who didn’t appreciate it have it.

  “Maybe she’s a historian,” Ramsey said. “Or maybe she’s an architect—or even a building contractor. We don’t know what she is.”

  Luke didn’t like the way his cousin was defending this unknown woman who was going to take over what most people thought of as the heart of Edilean. All his life he’d heard people say that if Edilean Manor was destroyed, the town wouldn’t live a year.

  But Ramsey had been so happy about the new inheritor that Luke knew he was up to something. One day after work he went to Tess. She answered his knock but didn’t invite him in. “What’s he up to about this new owner?” Luke asked, not bothering with preliminaries. And there was no need to explain who “he” was.

  Tess was a woman of few words. “Edilean Harcourt sent him a photo of her. In a bikini.”

  Luke understood immediately. If he knew his cousin, Rams planned to make a play for her. He loved Edilean Manor almost as much as Luke did. “Got it,” Luke said.

  Tess stepped to the side and opened the screen door wider. “You want a beer?”

  “Love one.”

  Now, “she” had arrived, and Luke watched her as she sat and talked with Sara. She was pretty, but not strikingly so. She was a little above average height, and her hair looked like the girls’ used to get in the summer. It would turn from brown to sun-streaked over the months, and he wondered if hers was natural or if she spent hours in a salon.

  She was dressed as old-fashioned as Sara, and that made him smile. Sara loved to wear dresses with long sleeves even in the heat of summer. But then she knew they looked good on her. She was as pretty and as delicate as a flower, and when she wore something like a bright red tank top and jeans she looked almost odd.

  Luke thought that if he had a camera with him he would have taken their photo. There was Sara in her prim little dress, her sewing on her lap, and across from her was this new woman wearing something like in an illustration in Alice in Wonderland. He thought the headband was an especially perfect touch.

  A priss and a prude, he thought. That’s who Miss Edi had left the house to. A woman heading toward spinsterhood who would probably dedicate her entire life to the house. No doubt she’d work hard to find furniture of exactly the right time period and within a few months she’d make Edilean Manor into a museum.

  He’d made up his mind about her within minutes of first seeing her, and if it hadn’t been for his mother, he would have told her he quit. Let Ramsey have her, he thought. Let him ooze charm all over her and have her fall for him. Of course he’d probably do what he always did and find some little thing wrong with her, then dump her. But maybe it would backfire and she’d be so heartbroken she’d put the house up for sale.

  Yeah, he thought, smiling to himself. Maybe she’d sell the place.

  But his mother’s voice was in his head, so he stayed where he was in the old stables and watched Sara and the new owner.

  He knew something was up when his mother appeared at his door at six this morning with a covered plate of blueberry pancakes. Luke smiled. “So what’s Dad done this time that you’re bringing me his breakfast?” Luke’s father had retired a year ago, and since then he’d nearly driven his wife insane with his puttering around the house.

  “Nothing. I talked him into going to a tractor show.”

  “Without you?”

  “In case he asks, I have the worst headache you’ve ever seen. That’s enough about me. Miss Edi’s girl comes today and I want you to promise that you’ll be nice to her.” While she talked, she was heating up the pancakes for her son and cleaning his kitchen as she moved about his house.

  Luke groaned. “What is it you want me to do this time? Take her out to dinner? Show her the sights? It’s too early for the water parks, so do I have to take her to some fife and drum concert?”

  “I want you to leave her alone. She belongs to Ramsey.”

  Luke’s eyes widened.

  “No, you don’t,” Helen said as she put the pancakes in front of him. “You’re not going to take this as a challenge. She’s already talked to Rams and she likes him.”

  “Didn’t waste any time, did he? But then I hear there was a bikini shot of her that he liked before he ever talked to her.”

  “Men are like that,” Helen said in dismissal.

  “Are we?” Luke’s mouth was full.

  “Do you understand me? Be nice and stay away from her. Keep to the gardening.”

  “What if I like her?” He told himself he was a grown man and it didn’t matter that his own mother was taking the side of his cousin, but he couldn’t help feeling betrayed.

  “You won’t. She was trained by Miss Edi, which means she likes men in tuxedos, not in…” She glared at his tattered jeans and dirty T-shirt. “Do we have everything clear between us?”

  “Sure,” Luke said. The last thing he wanted was female trouble. “Let Ramsey have her. Let them move into Edilean Manor and raise a dozen kids. What do I care?”

  But now, Luke kept watching Sara and the woman…What was her name? Jocelyn. An old-fashioned name that suited her. As he watched the two of them, he was beginning to change his opinion of her. She laughed easily and often. And w