4. #3
Apparently the houses were lived in, but there was no one in the yards, no one on the beach. The town car took a turn, switchbacking up the slope of the island, bringing them close to the house on the corner.
Something glimmered in the house’s window. It was gone before Claire could get a good look, but for a moment, she thought she saw steel bars segmenting the glass.
The houses petered out once they left the beach, the white road stretching between rock and the occasional scrubby pine. Around another turn, a large, pale barn sat on a flat stretch of field, as incongruously green as the yards.
“You do livestock, too?”
Audrey tittered, digging in her bag without looking out the window. “Sometimes.”
But if there were any animals on the property, Claire couldn’t see them. The island was a ghost town.
Once they reached the top and she actually saw Harrow Point, though, her mind was too full of shock to spare much thought for cows or interns.
Huge didn’t even begin to cover it. Harrow Point was a sprawling gothic monstrosity of a house, turreted and gabled and dark against the blue sky behind.
It appeared to be built into the side of the island, the spires of it artfully emerging from the ground as if they’d grown there.
Below the spires, facing the open ocean, windows pocked the rock face of the cliff, the tide line lapping against the topmost sills.
Were it nighttime instead of midday, Claire was sure she’d see more windows below the water’s surface, the house descending into the sea.
Another, smaller cliff jutted out from the side of the well-manicured lawn, overlooking the ocean.
The rock of it was bright white, like it was kept purposefully clean, and glittered with pockets of mica.
Claire found herself wanting to break off a piece of that cliff, carry it around in her pocket. Or her new Chanel.
“Wow,” Claire breathed.
Audrey glanced at her, eyes as bright a blue as the sky outside the car.
She blushed, as if she was both ashamed and extremely proud of the opulence of her home.
“It’s ancestral,” she said, like it was an excuse.
“Built by my husband’s great-great-grandfather.
He settled the island, too, bringing in employees when he started his oceanography research, before he went into engineering.
There was no one else here when he bought the island, of course—he didn’t take it from anyone, didn’t colonize it or anything like that.
” A high, nervous laugh. “Just a completely empty island off the coast of Maine, and he got it for cheap. Began building the house into the cliff mostly to save money on materials.” She nodded to the house in question, crouching over them now.
The shadows of the top portion, the part not half-constructed in the cliff, cast long divots of darkness over the car as they drove closer.
“The upper part—what Wellsley refers to, in jest, as the castle—was built by his father, Wellington Ashbury the Fourth.”
Wellsley. That must be Elias’s father, a nickname for Wellington.
No wonder his older brother went by Ash. Wellington was, apparently, a very hard name to shorten to something that didn’t sound like it belonged to a golden retriever.
“Doesn’t really need to be in jest,” Claire said, pressing her forehead against the glass and craning her neck to try to see all the way to the top of the dark-stone turrets, half expecting gargoyles. “It looks exactly like a castle.”
Audrey made a small noise of amusement as her only reply.
A filigree iron gate blocked the driveway from the road, part of a larger, ornate fence that ringed the main property.
Besides the house, Claire could see what looked like a huge garage off to one side of the driveway, and another building whose use she couldn’t guess at on the other side. Labs, maybe?
The driver, still silent, parked the car and opened the door in one fluid motion, walking up to the keypad embedded by the gate.
His fingers flew over the buttons, and the gate opened soundlessly.
He turned back to the car and slid in behind the steering wheel, smiling in a way that didn’t show his teeth.
“Thank you, Alton,” Audrey said, in a bright tone that said she prided herself on always being kind to the help.
Alton inclined his head, but stayed silent, mouth still closed.
The car glided through the gate, onto the smoothly paved drive.
It was circular, the widest part of it looping away from the gate and back again, with a smaller lane branching off to the left that led to the garage.
There was no path to the other building—Claire assumed it had a private drive.
The Ashburys probably didn’t want interns swarming their yard.
Alton swerved right, bringing them around to the main entrance, passing the promontory jutting out over the beach below. Behind stone pillars bracing a deep porch, the double doors of Harrow Point soared higher than three people stacked on top of each other.
Alton opened the car door for Audrey first, then Claire, her suitcase already in his hand.
Something was wrong with his wrist. Claire couldn’t tell what, exactly, though her assumption was either a break that had healed poorly or scar tissue from a burn—the skin around the bone seemed lumped and misshapen.
She took her suitcase, not wanting him to carry it on the off chance the injury hurt. “Thanks, Alton.”
No reply, but another closed-lipped smile. Alton got back in the car and spun it smoothly toward the small lane leading to the garage, off to tuck it in among its luxurious fellows.
Claire squared her shoulders and turned to face Harrow Point.
The pillars by the doors were strange. From far away, they looked like any other pillars that might hold up the porch of any other mansion, ionic or doric or whatever. But up close, the lines were slightly wavering, like ripples in a tide.
“Come on.” Audrey pushed open the door to Harrow Point, sending a sunny grin over her shoulder that was entirely at odds with the darkness inside the house. “We’ve all been so excited to meet you.”