Conscience Point. Erica Abeel

belying its anemic tone.

      Linking her arm through Maddy’s, Violet draws her into a library with green velvet chairs, a table covered in green felt, a bookcase with ogival moldings. The house silent but for the ticking of a giant floor clock in the hall, which makes the place seem all the more an unmoored stage set.

      Violet bounds up a sweeping staircase with curved white marble banister—real marble, Maddy judges from its chill. “Come see my little pictures,” Violet calls behind her. They enter a Uffizilike gallery with barrel-vault ceiling hung with family portraits. In a section by the windows, Maddy recognizes paintings by Violet similar to ones exhibited at Barnard: rectangular slabs applied with palette knife of marigold orange, cobalt blue, cadmium yellow. Maddy admires Violet’s pastels of what she now recognizes as the idyllic beach they just left: greens in spring, russet in autumn. Violet is a gifted colorist, moving with ease from abstraction to landscape.

      She stops before an oil painting lit by sun burning through the stained-glass window: a portrait of a young man of surpassing beauty, a Brahmin version of Pan. Fair hair, impudent nose, dreaming eyes, helplessly self-infatuated.

      “That could be Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover,” Maddy says.

      “Linton? Yes, but Linny preferred women. Me at any rate. I painted him from a photo. He never would sit for me. Now he’s with the angels in Green Glen,” she says with sneering piety. “Left for a swim in the ocean one day and—”

      Her eyes have a mad shine and Maddy wonders if all the Ashcrofts have a screw loose.

      “Gotta watch the water in these parts,” Violet says. She taps Maddy on the shoulder and nods solemnly. “Last year a flood tide washed out Eggleston Bridge. A local contractor tried to cross it at night and drowned in his car. C’mon, let’s find you a room.”

      She scoots up three small stairs to a pink-and-gold room. The bed’s carved wood headboard rises to a peaked dome and mimics a Gothic church. Above it an enormous lozenge-shaped window of pink glass. The dark-blue ceiling is seeded with gold—or are they silver—stars.

      “Decor’s a bit overwrought, but I hope you’ll be okay here. Bath.” She nods toward a tub with claw feet. Maddy’s eye falls on a section of bathroom wall that seems to be spilling out its guts: plaster, sand, what looks like horsehair. “Oh, well, never mind thaht,” Violet says. “When you’re ready, come down for martoonies in the library. Unfortunately they might be here, though mother practically lives in the aviary. Maybe you’ll play something for us before dinner? That sublime piece you were practicing at the college . . .”

      “Chopin’s Harp Étude.”

      “That one, yes. Oh, would you play it again?”

      Maddy frowns. “I don’t know. I’d feel I was earning my keep.”

      Violet pauses at the threshold, fair hair and one grey eye glinting in a ray of sun. “He hates me, you know,” she says abruptly.

      “Who?”

      “Nicholas the Vain.”

      “Why?”

      “Because he’s as phony as the materials in this house. And I’m on to him. And he knows it.” She draws closer and narrows her eyes. Maddy aware of her musk through the flowered blouse of jasmine cut with BO; the down above her retroussé upper lip like milkweed silk. For a second she’s tempted to reach over and touch her finger to the downy place. Her arms hang leaden by her sides.

      “Promise me something,” Violet says, scratchy voice pleading. “That harebrained fiancée of Nick’s should be a deterrent, but—promise you won’t go and fall in love with my goddamn brother. Like everyone else.”

      WHAT HAD SHE SAID? And how would it have mattered?