The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,37
part of her ongoing plan to match Oliver with his assistant outside the office as well as in. When Jules suggested that perhaps Oliver and Lois spent enough time together at the Chronicle, Madeline had given him the kind of wifely look that informed him very clearly that while his banking skills might be excellent, he knew nothing about matchmaking.
“Lois and Oliver are perfect for each other,” she’d said. “They just don’t know it.”
Though Jules suspected Oliver’s interest in Lois ended at the office door, he’d kept his own counsel, just as he had when his wife decided to invite Janice Anderson to fill the seat across from Bill McGuire. Not that Jules didn’t like Janice. With a perfect combination of business acumen and a winning personality that made her immediately seem like everyone’s best friend, Janice had built her antique shop into a business strong enough to bring people to Blackstone from hundreds of miles around. It had been Bill McGuire who convinced her to move her shop into Blackstone Center as soon as the new complex was completed.
Tonight, though, even Janice’s sunny disposition didn’t seem to be working on Bill. The poor man appeared to Jules to have taken on an unhealthy gauntness since Elizabeth’s death two months ago. Still, he seemed glad he’d come, and on balance, Jules decided that Madeline had been right: if anyone would be able to take Bill’s mind off his troubles for a little while, it would be Janice.
“Shall we take the port into the library?” Madeline asked as the butler finished filling the glasses. “We found something in the attic last week that we’ve been dying to show off.”
“So that accounts for the library door being closed when we came in,” Oliver Metcalf said. He’d risen to his feet to help Lois Martin move her heavy chair back from the huge marble-topped table. The guests all followed their hostess out of the dining room and through the reception room where they’d gathered for drinks—then across the great entry hall that was dominated by a sweeping staircase that led to the second floor mezzanine.
While the dining room had always been Jules’s favorite, the library was Madeline’s. Its ceiling vaulted up two full floors, and the walls, save for the areas where family portraits hung, were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, their upper shelves so high that to reach them required the use of a wheeled ladder hung from a polished brass guide rail at the top. For Madeline, though, the bookcases were not the room’s most distinguishing feature.
Directly above the double doors through which she had just led her guests was a minstrel’s gallery large enough to hold a string quartet, and paneled in mahogany linenfold. Tonight, in honor of her daughter’s engagement, she had hired a quartet, which was already playing softly when the company entered the room.
“Fabulous,” Janice Anderson told Madeline. “It’s like going back in time. I truly feel as if I’ve stepped into another century.”
“Just wait till you see what we found in the attic—something amazing from yesteryear,” Madeline promised her. “When the Center is done, of course we’re going to donate it, but for now we just couldn’t resist hanging it in here.”
She led them to the far end of the room, where a picture, covered by a black cloth, had been hung. When everyone had gathered around, she signaled to Jules to lower the lights until the only illumination in the room was provided by a spotlight on the picture. As an expectant hush fell, Madeline pulled a cord and the picture’s covering fell away.
From an ornately gilded frame, an aristocratic woman of perhaps forty gazed down on the room. She was wearing a dark blue dress of shimmering silk. Despite her elegant bearing and expensive clothing, her eyes gazed out from the canvas accusingly, as if she had resented having her portrait painted. Her hair was pulled severely back from her high forehead, apparently done in an elaborate twist at the back, and she stood beside a chair. The fingers of one hand clutched tightly to the back of the chair, while the other hand, though hanging at her side, appeared to be clenched in a fist.
“It’s your mother, isn’t it, Jules?” Janice Anderson asked. “But what a strange costume to have a portrait painted in. What is that she’s wearing?” Indeed, though the woman in the portrait wore an elegant blue dress, over it was a pale gray apronlike affair that looked to be made