The Ghosts of Kerfol

The Ghosts of Kerfol by Deborah Noyes Page A

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Authors: Deborah Noyes
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they were visiting the residence hall at Wellesley that would become their new home in the fall. The need to tell someone was pressing so hard, Suze wondered if the baby hadn’t become a mind, grown beyond its mere two-month shape, taking her over from within. Despite Emily’s grouchy ranting about marriage and the college marriage market, Suze took solace in her own eyes in the powder room mirror and began to shape her announcement. “Stan,” she said, because it all began there, didn’t it? It began with Stan.
    But she hardly got his name out.
    “Oh, get over him, Suze.” Dour Emily rolled her eyes. “He’s done nothing but lead you on and leave you at the curb. If this is what it means to be in love, then hang love.” She smacked her just-rouged lips and pinched her cheeks to color them, as if her appearance mattered to anyone. “Love undoes you,” she badgered. “Love makes you different. Makes you weak. You used to be a real person. I used to be able to talk to you.”
    Had Suze expected mercy?
    “Now you make me sick.”
    Suze had felt the sting of this rant on two levels. Eager to be relieved of her secret, she had also let down her guard, left herself open to Emily’s envy. It was weak, and it was thoughtless, and she felt something inside close to Emily forever. Perhaps it was the place the baby now inhabited. Private knowledge she as a woman had been initiated into and Emily had not, and couldn’t fathom, much less sympathize with.
    Repairing the grave arch of her brows with a tweezers from her handbag, Suze had countered, “You’ve always been a little sickly, Emily, with your chills and sniffles and meek ways. A little
wet,
you know.” Suze snapped her compact closed. “You’re all wet. So get out and find someone else to rain on.”
    It began to rain on Wednesday, and by the time Daddy departed again and the weekend parties could begin, the moat was swollen, and the vast, sculpted lawn was a swamp.
    Suze had not told Daddy about the mean man in the garden any more than she had told him about Tres or the others, the worldly and parasitic array that always knew when to show up and usually had the money to blend in. For all her father knew, it was just Suze and Peg, playing croquet on the big lawn and sipping lemonade.
    When the crowd began to merge into one form, a screaming harpy in beads and tweed, she whispered to Tres, “Let me show you my favorite room in the house.”
    “Oh? Why your favorite?”
    “It’s quiet and looks out on the back patio. It feels a little haunted somehow. I’ve never had the nerve to go in daylight. When I wasn’t drunk.”
    He reached into the fray for a passing bottle and topped off her champagne. “Well, don’t let’s break with tradition now.”
    They toasted, drank, drifted apart from the others. Their heels made no sound, even when the music became muted and distant, when the laughter came in traces.
    When they reached the room and slipped inside, Suze asked, “So whatever happened to that princess? In that story of yours?” Tracing Tres’s ear with her tongue, she led him to the daybed under the darkened portrait of the woman in the necklace. She had come to think of it as
her
necklace.
    “‘If you truly love me,’ the stranger said”— Tres stroked her bare neck — for mindful of Daddy’s warnings, she had thought to remove the treasure and place it in a drawer before she got too drunk. Hidden it. It was one thing to pretend Tres was Stan while he was kissing her, but did she trust this local boy? She did not. She let her sable stole fall as he began to recite his folktale, the rain making light music on the old-fashioned lead windows, a slanting in the wind.
    Conjuring Stan was something she did often, at the petting parties her older college friends had invited her to and later at her own parties. (
She’s the
queen
of parties,
blowhard Peg always said.)
    “‘. . . if you love me, you will make me a gift’”— Tres yanked the dusty

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