maids coming and going, going mainly because of something my mother sees them do or not do that upsets her, like forgetting to dust one of the grandfather clocks,” he added with a smirk. I couldn’t help but wonder how he really did feel about his mother.
The door opened farther, and Samantha looked in at us.
“Oh. Have you come to fetch her, Harrison? That’s so sweet. When he’s a mind to, Harrison can be a wonderful host, even for his mother’s guests,” she said, and Dr. Davenport laughed.
Then he did something that really surprised me. He held out his arms.
“Can I escort the two most beautiful women to ever grace the halls of Wyndemere to dinner?”
Samantha took his arm quickly and then looked at me. “That dress looks better on you than it did on me. Doesn’t it, Harrison?”
I hesitated to question whether she had ever worn it besides trying it on to buy. Could she have and not noticed the tag?
“Better? It looks very nice,” he said, carefully negotiating a diplomatic reply. If he knew she hadn’t worn it, he was keeping that to himself.
He continued to hold up his arm for me to take.
I did, and the three of us walked down the long, wide corridor toward the stairway. However, before we reached it, Mrs. Cohen came hurrying toward us from the opposite direction. Dr. Davenport stopped.
“He’s had a cardiac event,” she said as she drew closer.
Dr. Davenport took his arms away from ours quickly. “You two go down, Samantha. I’ll come as soon as I can.”
Samantha took my hand. “Don’t be frightened,” she said.
Coming from the young woman who was supposed to be quite a bit more delicate than I was, her words of comfort during what was obviously a family crisis nearly brought a smile to my face.
We started down the stairs. I looked back.
“He’s had a number of those episodes lately. Harrison wanted him taken to the cardiac ICU, but his mother insisted his father could have just as good care here. She hates going to the hospital and vows she will die in her own bed, so her husband should, too. There are all sorts of medical equipment and things in his room, and there’s a specialty nurse around the clock. Someone comes in later to relieve Mrs. Cohen.”
“So he’s very, very sick,” I said. Fatally ill was what I really meant.
“Oh, I think so. I really don’t know any details aside from his being diagnosed as a severe diabetic. Harrison is like a police detective,” she said when we reached the bottom of the stairway and paused, now both of us looking back up.
“A police detective?”
“You know. Someone who doesn’t want to bring the ugliness of his work home to his family.”
But this is your family, I thought.
“I don’t hear about a patient of his dying until weeks afterward or when I read it in the newspaper, if I do. I don’t like reading the obituary section, do you?”
“Come to think of it, I don’t recall ever reading it, even in England.”
“See? We think alike,” she said, smiling. “Let’s see what light dinner Mrs. Marlene has made for us.”
She led us down the hallway to the dining room. It was grand, with its high ceilings and large chandelier centered over the long, elegant dark maple-wood table with its floral-patterned cushioned chairs. It did indeed seat twenty. The wall to the left was almost all windows that provided a view of the lake below the grounds as they sloped toward it. The lights of some homes surrounding the lake twinkled like falling stars. Now the water itself was a dark silver splashed like an immense tablespoon of tungsten on this picture-postcard view of the valley and the mountains.
On the opposite dining-room wall hung a large oil painting of what was obviously Wyndemere. It was done in a romantic style, with the background dark, the night sky light, and the figures of a man and a woman in a horse-drawn carriage being brought to the front. The contrast and texture in the painting highlighted them. The picture was quite big, leaving barely a foot or so on each side of the wall.
“That’s very beautiful in an almost mysterious sort of way,” I said.
“Supposedly, the people in the carriage are ancestors of the original family. The artist wasn’t someone important. The story is he was the son of the Jamesons’ best friends, a man who died before he was twenty-five. He had tuberculosis and lived in