Chapter 6
“Ihave too many cannoli,” I announce, hoisting the basket onto Lucy’s kitchen counter. “This is a genuine crisis.”
“You have exactly the number of cannoli a person has when they’ve decided to drive them somewhere.” Lucy doesn’t look up from the negatives she’s holding to the window. “Say the somewhere out loud.”
“Penny.”
“What?”
“Say the somewhere.”
I fuss with the basket. I’ve lined it with a linen cloth, which is more effort than a neighborly gesture strictly requires, and I’ve picked out the best of everything—the cannoli, four of the little almond tarts, a half dozen of the rosewater shortbread that came out perfect this time.
It looks, if I’m honest, less like leftovers and more like an offering.
“Blackthorn House,” I say.
Lucy sets the negatives down.
“It’s neighborly,” I say, before she can. “He came to two of my things. It’s basic manners to reciprocate. With baked goods. That’s how the town works. You know that’s how the town works. Mabel brings people zucchini they didn’t ask for.”
“Mabel is seventy-five and brings zucchini to everyone. You’re thirty-two and you’ve lined a basket with your good linen for a man who doesn’t eat.”
I open my mouth, then close it again, because that’s the crack in the whole neighborly-gesture story, and Lucy’s put her thumb right on it.
He doesn’t eat. I’ve watched him decline everything through two meals and a coffee shop.
I’m driving a basket of pastries to a man who has never, in my presence, put food in his mouth.
“He doesn’t eat,” Lucy repeats, with enormous patience. “That’s the one confirmed fact about this man.”
“Then he can look at them.”
Lucy softens, which she does about four times a year and never when I’m ready for it.
“Pen. What are you actually doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yeah you do.”
“Fine.” I lean on the counter. “He sat at my table for five hours and wouldn’t take one thing off it, and he stayed until midnight and washed my grandmother’s glasses, and then he walked two miles home in the dark on his own.
And I’ve thought about that a lot since then.
It’s not a crush, it’s—” I hear how it sounds.
“It’s that he won’t eat anything I make and he still stays. ”
“I want pictures,” Lucy says after a long moment. “Do it for journalism.”
“There’s no journalism happening.”
“Do it for me, then. Because I’m nosy and I love you.” She points the lens at me and clicks before I can duck. “There. That’s the before. You, on your porch of poor decisions, holding a basket.”
“This is your kitchen.”
“Emotionally it’s a porch.”
The road up hasn’t improved.
I do the last quarter mile in second gear, beneath massive oaks that turn the light an underwater-green.
This time the gates are open. The drive curves up past old roses gone woody and enormous, box hedges taller than me, and a stone urn with lichen so thick it looks upholstered.
The hedges have been trimmed this year. The roses have not, and I’d put money on that being an argument somebody lost.
Most of the town thinks this place is haunted. Standing in the drive with my basket, engine ticking as it cools, I understand why. It’s not frightening. It’s just—old. Old in a way the rest of the town isn’t. Old the way a church is old, where the quiet has weight to it.
I’m still nine steps from the door when it opens.
Julian is in a charcoal sweater with the sleeves pushed up—I need to have a word with him about the sleeves, I really do—and no shoes, just socks.
There is a great deal of forearm, pale and smooth, and the sweater does nothing whatsoever to disguise what it’s covering, which is a chest and a set of shoulders on a scale that has no business standing in a doorway in Maine.
My breath goes and doesn’t come back for a second. There’s a warm hard pull low in my stomach that I haven’t felt about anyone in four years. I want to put the basket down. I want not to put the basket down, because the basket is the only thing keeping my hands honest.
I forget the entire speech I’ve prepared.
“Penny.”
“I have too many cannoli,” I say, which is not the speech.
He looks at the basket. Then at me. Something moves at the corner of his mouth.
“You’ve driven cannoli to my house.”
“I know you don’t eat these. I had leftovers and apparently I’m incapable of visiting another human being without bringing food, so here we are.” I hold the basket up between us like a shield or a peace treaty, I can’t decide which. “I’m not asking you to eat them.”
“Good.”
“I’m asking you to have them. Those are different verbs.”
That earns me a look.
“They are,” he agrees.
Then he steps back from the doorway and puts a hand out towards the hall behind him, palm up, and says it properly.
“Will you come in?”
It’s an ordinary thing to say. People say it constantly, in doorways, all over the world, usually with a phone in the other hand while already walking away. He doesn’t say it like that. He says it like a sentence with a load-bearing wall in it.
“Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”
Blackthorn House is not what I expected.
I expected cold. I expected dust sheets and a smell like a church basement, because that’s what this town decided years ago and I have never once questioned it.
Fern Tibbetts has dined out for thirty years on a light she saw in the third-floor window in 1994, and she describes it, every time, as baleful.
It’s nothing like that. It’s lived in. Deeply, strangely, permanently lived in.
The entrance hall is dark-paneled and smells like beeswax, but underneath it is the scent of the sea, as though the house has been breathing it in for centuries.
A long-case clock ticks somewhere out of sight.
There’s a coat stand of black wood with, incongruously, a very ordinary modern rain jacket hanging on it next to a caped wool coat that belongs in a museum.
“You can leave your shoes or not,” he says. “The floors are original. They’ve survived worse than shoes.”
I leave my shoes at the door. It feels like the kind of house you take your shoes off in.
“Come through. I’ll—” He glances at the basket, and I watch him decide something. “I’ll put these in the kitchen.”
I follow him through. And what gets me isn’t the antiques, although there are antiques. It’s how they’re used. A nineteenth-century marquetry side table by the stairs with a phone charger on it. An antique Chinese bowl on the hall shelf with keys in it.
The library stops me in my tracks. It has two stories, a spiral iron stair, more books than the Harbor Books shop and the town library put together, and half of them so old their spines have gone to that soft brown suede that means leather and time.
It holds a wing chair I’d put at two hundred years old, the arms worn pale down to the wood, a book lying face down on the seat with the spine cracked.
There are four other chairs in that room. Not one of them has a mark on it.
I look at that for slightly too long. Five chairs and one of them worn through to the wood. I don’t say a word about it, and I couldn’t tell you why, except that it feels like walking in on something. There’s a soft ache starting up behind my ribs that I don’t want to examine in front of him.
The kitchen is beautiful. Someone has spent real money in here. There’s a slate floor, a huge scrubbed table, an imported French range, and a modern fridge humming quietly in the corner.
And it’s wrong.
I know kitchens the way Wendell knows a hull. A working kitchen has a smell in the walls—old oil, onion, coffee, the ghost of every stock anyone ever reduced in it. There’s a film on top of the cupboards you can only take off with a knife. The spoons go dark at the handle.
This kitchen smells like nothing at all.
“How long since anyone cooked in here?”
“Some time.”
“That’s not a number.”
“No. It is not.”
The copper on the wall is perfect. The board by the range has never had a knife on it.
And the range is spotless in the particular way that only ever means unused, because a clean range is a range someone polished recently, and a polished range has faint rings on the enamel where the pans go. There are no rings.
I have spent my whole working life in kitchens that hold the memory of every meal anyone ever cooked in them. This one is holding nothing at all. It’s the loneliest room I have ever stood in, and it’s beautiful, and I want to fill it so badly my hands hurt.
He sets my basket on a scrubbed wooden table that looks like it’s been scrubbed for longer than the United States has existed.
“Thank you,” he says, and he means it. He looks at the pastries, and then he does the thing I’ve been waiting weeks to see him do, and it breaks my heart a little, because he does it so carefully.
He reaches into the basket and picks up a piece of the rosewater shortbread.
He turns it in his fingers and looks at it like it’s a small precious artifact from a dig.
He doesn’t eat it. He sets it back down, gently, on the linen.
“They’re beautiful,” he says. “You made these.”
“I made these.”
“I can tell.” He doesn’t explain how he can tell. He looks at me instead, and there’s something almost apologetic in it. I get the sudden, dizzy sense that we are both standing very carefully around the same unspoken thing, the way you’d stand around a hole in the floor.
“Would you like to see the house?” he asks, and I understand it’s a change of subject. I let it be one, because I would like to see the house more than I’ve wanted almost anything.
“Yes,” I say. “God, yes.”
He shows me the house.
There’s a long gallery on the seaward side. The whole wall is windows, and past them the Atlantic goes on forever, iron-grey and endless, and the light coming in is that specific silver you only get over water.
On the second floor the light comes softly through drawn curtains, and every surface in the hallway has that undisturbed, held-breath stillness, like a room in a photograph. Not dusty. Just untouched. Like time got to the threshold and was politely turned away.
The painting is in the front room, over the fireplace, and I stop dead in front of it.
An oil, four feet across, in a frame gone almost black with age.
Black Harbor from the water at dusk with a dozen vessels at anchor, and behind them a working shoreline with sheds, drying racks, and a church tower exactly where the church tower still is.
There’s a small brass plate on the frame. Black Harbor, 1831.
“Oh,” I say.
I know this view. The shape of the headland is precisely right, and everything else in the picture has been gone for two hundred years.
“That is a Fitzhugh,” Julian says behind me. “He was not very good.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“It is accurate, which is better.” He comes and stands close enough beside me that I can feel exactly how much of the room he’s taking up, close enough that a warm and entirely unhelpful part of my brain starts calculating the distance between his sleeve and my shoulder.
I make myself keep looking at the boats.
I’d love to report that my attention is entirely on the boats.
“He painted the light wrong. He worked it up in a room in Boston from a sketch and made it a September light, and the ice on the north shed is January. But the ships are right. That is the Ellen Rood, second from the left. She burned in 1844 off Portsmouth with no one aboard, which was the only lucky thing that ever happened to her.”
“Rood. Like—”
“Her family, yes.”
“That building.” He nods at a squat structure near the water.
“That’s where the Salt & Sage stands now.
It was a chandlery then—rope, tar, sailcloth.
It also burned in the forties.” A pause.
“The eighteen forties. There was ice on the water that winter, all the way out past the point. You could walk to the Sisters. Some fool did, and made it back, and never let anyone forget it.”
“That yellow house was blue,” he says, pointing to the left side of the picture.
“It stayed blue until the eighties. The eighteen eighties. And there was a wharf there, past the edge of the frame, on the north side. It is not in the painting because it burned in the winter of 1806 and they never rebuilt it.”
I turn my head.
“You found it. The wharf. In Pratt’s journal.”
“I did.”
“What happened to it?”
“Two men were drying nets over a brazier,” he says. “In a shed in February. Which tells you everything you will ever need to know about the men of this town.”
I laugh, and then I stop because of how he said it. Not the words—the words were fine. But there was none of the hesitation a person builds around a fact they got out of a book. He said it the way Wendell says things about 1978. He said it like a man who had been annoyed about it.
The room is very quiet. The fire is doing something small in the grate.
He was there.
The thought arrives with enough certainty that I don’t immediately dismiss it. Which is a problem all by itself, and I decide to leave it for another day.
“You know a stupid amount about this town.”
“I read a great deal. There is not a great deal else to do up here.”
“Who else lives here?”
He doesn’t answer for a beat too long.
“No one,” Julian says.
I don’t push. I’m getting horribly good at not pushing. I stand in front of a painting of a two-hundred-year-old harbor with my hands in my coat pockets and let the moment close over. Something in me hurts on his behalf in a way I have no right to at all.
A man alone in a house this size is a lonely man, and everyone in Black Harbor knows that and says it kindly at the post office. But that isn’t quite what I see. What I see is someone who’s been alone so long he’s stopped expecting anything else.
“You could get someone in,” I say instead. “For the kitchen. Just to make it smell like a kitchen.”
“Could I?”
“I know a woman. She’s very reasonable and she talks constantly and she’d bring her own pans.”
“I am aware of her,” Julian says, in a tone that does something to my knees I intend to deny under oath.
He walks me out to the car. The wind’s come up and the light’s going fast, and he stands out in it with his sleeves pushed up like a man standing in a summer breeze.
I look back at the house from the gravel, and I finally realize what’s been bothering me for an hour.
The house doesn’t look like his. My cottage is mine.
I bought curtains and I put a stupid blue kettle in it.
I did things to it on purpose. But this house hasn’t been decorated.
It hasn’t been furnished, exactly. Every room had precisely the furniture it needed and every piece had settled down into the floorboards.
It doesn’t look owned. It looks grown around him, the way a shell is grown around the thing inside it.
“Penny.”
“Yes?”
“Thank you,” Julian says. “For coming up the hill.”
“It was pastry.”
“It was not,” he says, quietly, and I have to get into the car quite quickly after that.