folds of terra-cotta. She apparently did without underpants.
Maddy couldn’t pull her eyes off Violet, her broadish shoulders, round Indian breasts, horsewoman’s legs. Her beauty clothed her, she seemed the human extension of this place. She turned, a cello flare of hips and ass, sun glinting off the gold down on her back, and stepped over the pebbly sand toward the water. The tide had risen high on the beach as if coveting the land.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” Violet called over her shoulder.
More than the prospect of icy water, Maddy shrank at the thought of getting naked. With a backward glance to check for voyeurs, she quickly shucked her plaid Ship’n Shore blouse and stern unnecessary bra; stepped, tripping, out of her pedal pushers. She was slim-chested and hairy and bony-kneed, she would die of mortification. Alongside Violet, a pink-and-gold nymph, she was the dark, ill-favored changeling left in a basket on the farmer’s doorstep.
Violet was already striding, laughing excitedly, into the water. She splashed her arms and chest and face, gave a little yip, and plunged in.
Maddy mimicked her. The water delivered an icy smack. She dolphin-dove and stroked and kicked, and the sting subsided. Violet swam over. The water had slicked back her hair, turning it dark yellow, exposing her finely shaped ears. Their feet kneaded the khaki gloom below, water buoyed their breasts.
“Race you to the island!” Violet said.
She cut through the dazzled water in a racing crawl. Maddy paddled in her wake. The bay abruptly turned shallow where the dredged channel ended; her fingers struck bottom and she was knee-deep.
They sat on the putty-colored sand, legs drawn up, warming themselves in the sun. “Y’know, there’s a little beach over there I’ve never been to”—Violet looked over her shoulder toward the far green island. “It’s on the other side, you can’t see it from here. We must go there one day. To the other side of the island.”
She pointed out holes in the sand from which clams spit miniature geysers of water. Maddy was aware of Violet’s small tortured hand, beringed and nicotine-stained, lying beside her haunch on the sand. The wine, the bracing water and sun kissing her skin; Violet so close, her twin, almost touching, though they wouldn’t, of course—had tipped Maddy into a rapture roused only by music. She’d drunk too much Gewürzt—
“Oh, goddamn.” Violet stared across the water. “Wouldn’cha know.”
To Maddy’s alarm, a red MG crawled along the causeway above the dunes.
“I was hoping the dumb regatta would keep him busy all day,” Violet said.
A man in chinos and tennis shirt emerged from the MG and stood on the dunes looking across at them, hand shading his eyes from the sun. “Water nice and toasty?” he called, his voice staccato and mocking, uncannily close across the channel. Maddy tried to hunch her body out of existence.
“Come on in,” Violet called back.
“Think I’m nuts like you?”
“Crazier,” Violet shot back. She stood, raised her arms high in a pantherine stretch, looked around with studied indifference, and sloshed into the water.
Maddy watched in dismay, praying the interloper would drive off. He turned toward the squabbling in the osprey nest. The set of his head and ears like Violet’s. Then he reached into a shirt pocket and put on sunglasses and continued to watch them from the dune. Aviator glasses, she saw; so he, too, could make out details. How would she navigate the space from sand to water? Slither belly-down, a sea turtle returning to its element?
From the bay rose a silvery peal of laughter. “You mustn’t mind old Nicholas,” Violet called. “He’s used to a lot of nude prancing about. Oh, excuse me, how rude,” she added, treading water. “Nick, I’d like you to meet Madeleine Shaye.” She gestured at the islet. “Maddy, my brother, Nicholas Ashcroft.” A salute toward the bluff. Then she kicked for the mainland in her slow, powerful crawl, feet churning up an aqueous chuckle.
Maddy had made a decision. Abruptly she stood. Nicholas Ashcroft remained stonily facing her. She braved the gaze behind the sunglasses a beat longer than was quite necessary. Then waded calmly into the water.
After the burn of nakedness, she welcomed the ice. What kind of crazy family was this? They certainly played by their own rules. Today a milestone, she thought, eyes open in the green water: she’d been seen. Then came a sense of injury. Had she been one of his fancy debutantes, Nicholas Ashcroft would have had the delicacy to turn away.
She tread water for a moment, arrested by a new idea. She’d been almost as troubled “prancing about” naked in front of Violet as in front of her brother.
WHAT COULD HAVE prepared her for the house? She sights it first as they curve down a road hugging a grand sweep of lawn; catches it next through the red-black leaves of a giant weeping hemlock. Now it comes into the clear, a greystone apparition rising on the bluffs above Weymouth Bay against the copper sun. Before it stands a single shell-pink dogwood.
“My God, it’s a castle.”
An assemblage of greystone peaks and towers, an actual crenellated tower with four upthrust parapets, ogival windows, mullioned bay windows—a Gothic fairy-tale vision, pure folly. “Great-Granddad Gus kept building onto the place to house his huge, I’m sure despicably behaved, brood. He needed to do something with his money. Please don’t disappoint me by being awed.”
“And please don’t pull that snotty rich-kid number.”
Violet stops the car and stares straight ahead, the diesel motor idling loudly. “Listen”—twisting her head this way and that—“how can I explain? I’m so used to—fending off. Christian and the others. I scarcely know how to do anything else. But I want”—she sighs mightily—“I so want you to like Conscience Point.”
Like me, she means.
Violet looks through her for a long moment, beset by some idea, while Maddy takes in her dazzled gaze, her features of a young czar.
“Friends?” Violet sticks out a beringed hand.
Maddy squeezes the hand and closes her heart against Violet. She distrusts this instant unearned devotion. Distrusts the whole setup. The rich walk through the world collecting amusements, then toss them when they’re bored.
“Isn’t a neo-Gothic castle a little out of place by the sea?” Maddy says coolly. Eyes opaque. Yielding nothing.
“I’m afraid they got their geography rather m-m-muddled.” In her eagerness to please, the stutter Violet affects sounds real. “The house was originally designed to overlook the Hudson River, but then old Gus decided to build it on Long Island ’cause the sailing’s better out this way. Islesford’s founding fathers wanted it razed. It’s awfully Hollywood, don’t you think? A back-lot heap from Ivanhoe.”
She parks carelessly under the porte cochere. In the vaulted ceiling adorned with blue fleurs-de-lis, four faces grimace down from each corner. The bronze door to the entrance is flanked by two Roman busts. Violet tosses her beige duster over one.
“No one’s here, thank God. Probably tying one on at the Weymouth Yacht Club. Look, it’s all fake,” she says with a kind of disgusted admiration. She taps the door: “Bronze is really wood.” Flicks the marble trim with her nail: “Faux marbre. Whole joint’s really a wood-and-brick house faced in stone. There’s a faux finish on almost everything. Just like our family,” she adds with a joyless laugh. “But some materials are real, which really mixes things up good.”
They enter a dim reception room with rose silk walls and a bear rug. “Let me show you around so you won’t trip over some carcass on your way to the john.” Violet places her hand in the small of Maddy’s back in a manner distinctly masculine and steers her left. “Here’s the music room, your room. Muthuh calls it the conservatory.”
At the entrance looms a white marble winged Cupid