Chapter 1: The Engagement Party
The Ashford house on East Battery Street had been lit like a wedding cake since six o'clock, every window glowing gold against the Charleston dusk, every palm in the garden strung with lights that trembled a little in the harbor breeze. By eight, the long rooms were full: women in silk the color of oysters and champagne, men in dinner jackets talking about marinas and mergers, a string quartet sawing politely in the corner of the ballroom where no one quite listened. It was, Vivian Ashford had told three separate guests within Clara Bennett's hearing, only an engagement party. One shuddered to think what the wedding would require.
Clara stood near the French doors with a glass she had not drunk from and tried to look like a woman to whom all of this was natural. She was thirty-two, an archivist at the Charleston Historical Society, a person whose happiest hours were spent in cool, quiet rooms coaxing brittle paper back to legibility. Nothing in her professional training had prepared her for becoming, in the space of one spring, the future Mrs. Julian Ashford.
"You are hiding," Priya Shah said, appearing at her elbow with two canapΓ©s and no shame at all. Priya had been Clara's best friend since they were eleven, and she treated Ashford grandeur the way she treated weather: interesting, but not to be obeyed. "Your future mother-in-law has asked for you twice. The second time, she called you 'our Clara,' which in Vivian is practically a blood oath."
"I am not hiding. I am observing. It is a professional skill."
"You are standing behind a fern."
"It is a very large fern. It was here first. I respect its seniority."
Priya's eyes dropped, as everyone's eyes had been dropping all evening, to the locket at Clara's throat. "You actually wore it."
Clara's hand rose, unthinking, and closed around it. The gold heart was warm from her skin, heavier than it looked, smooth as a river stone from years against her mother's breast. Rose Sinclair Bennett had worn this locket every day of Clara's conscious life β over housedresses and evening gowns, in the garden, in the hospital β and she had never, not once, opened it in front of her daughter. Five years after the cancer took her, the locket had come to Clara in a velvet box with the rest of Rose's jewelry, and Clara had put the box in a drawer and left it there, because some inheritances are too much like conversations you are not ready to finish.
Tonight she had opened the drawer. Tonight, with her hair pinned up by a stranger and Julian's ring β an Ashford sapphire in a setting older than the house β heavy on her hand, she had wanted her mother in the room by whatever means remained. So she had lifted the chain over her head, and the heart had settled at the base of her throat as if it had been waiting, patient as grief, to be worn again.
That afternoon, alone in the flat on Church Street, she had held it up to the light from the bedroom window and tried, not for the first time, to work the clasp with her thumbnail. It had not yielded. It had never yielded, not to the curious child she had been, sitting at her mother's dressing table among the perfume bottles, nor to the grieving woman of twenty-seven who had turned it over and over the night after the funeral, certain that grief entitled her to something. Under the conservator's lamp she kept at home, the seam had shown as a hairline only, the hinge dark with age, the catch on the chain worn to a crescent of bright metal where Rose's own fingers had worried it, year after year, in some gesture Clara could suddenly picture entire: her mother at a window, at a stove, at a graveside, touching the heart at her throat the way other women touch a wedding ring in moments of decision. Clara had understood, standing there with the dress zipped halfway and the hairdresser waiting downstairs, that she was not really choosing jewelry. She was asking permission from a woman who could no longer give it, and then, because Rose had raised her, she had given it to herself.
"It suits you," Priya said, more gently. "She would have liked seeing it tonight. Even if she would have made that face about the quartet."
"She hated string quartets. She said they sounded like rich people apologizing."
Across the room Julian caught her eye and smiled, and Clara felt the familiar, treacherous calm that Julian produced in her β the sense of a large, well-built life opening its doors. Julian Ashford, thirty-four, heir to hotels and half the renovated waterfront, was kind in the ways that cost him nothing and in a few ways that cost him a great deal, and Clara did not deceive herself about which of those facts had made her say yes under the magnolias in April. She loved him. She also knew that loving him meant marrying a surname, a board of trustees, and Vivian.
Julian crossed to her then, as if her glance had been a hand on his sleeve, and took her champagne glass away and set it, with the ease of a man who had been rescuing women from furniture all his life, on a passing tray. "Five minutes," he said. "Walk the gallery with me before Mother arranges us like silverware." The gallery was a corridor of Ashford dead, oil-dark and gilt-framed, and Julian slowed before a admiral with his own jaw. "He lost two ships and a fortune and still got a portrait. There's hope for all of us." Clara laughed, and some true thing in her settled. This was the Julian she had chosen in April, under the magnolias, when he had taken off his jacket for an old woman whose car had stalled and had come back to Clara with his cuffs ruined, apologizing for keeping her waiting. "Your mother called me 'our Clara' tonight," she told him. "Priya says it's a blood oath." "In Mother, it's a treaty," Julian said. "Ratification's still pending in committee, but I have hopes." He kissed her knuckles, briefly, where the sapphire sat. "You look like you belong here," he said, and Clara, who did not, smiled and let the kind lie carry her back toward the lights.
Vivian herself was approaching now, parting the crowd without appearing to move anyone, a tall woman of sixty in midnight blue whose smile had welcomed Clara for a year and had never once reached any deeper than courtesy. "There you are, darling. The Post and Courier photographer wants the family by the staircase, and your father has been cornered by Judge Hollis near the bar, poor man." Her gaze traveled down, professionally, checking Clara the way one checks a painting before auction. It stopped at the locket. Something minute changed in her face β not surprise, exactly; something older and less tidy. "What a handsome piece. A family thing?"
"My mother's," Clara said. "She never took it off."
"Rose always did have β distinctive taste." Vivian recovered her smile. "Come. Family by the staircase."
Only a family thing, Clara told herself, following. Only a heart of scratched gold on a chain so fine it had twice that evening snagged on the lace at her neckline, the old clasp worrying at its hinge whenever she turned her head. She had noticed it in the car: the little catch, worn thin, flexing when it should have held firm. She had meant to mention it to Julian. Then the house and the lights and the fern had happened.
At the staircase they were arranged by height and importance: Vivian at the center like a keystone, Julian beside her, Clara tucked under Julian's arm, and Henry Bennett brought in from the bar to stand at Clara's other side. Her father, sixty-five, retired from the bench and unretired from every argument in Charleston, was a silver, straight-backed man whose respectability was so complete it had become a climate. He kissed Clara's cheek. Then he saw the locket.
Clara had seen her father sentence men without altering his breathing. She had seen him receive the news of Rose's diagnosis at a kitchen table and fold it, visibly, into some interior order. She had never seen him look the way he looked at that small gold heart: as if a door he had personally nailed shut forty years ago had just, politely, in a ballroom, begun to open.
"Dad?" she said.
Henry arranged his face with an effort she could feel in the hand that tightened on her shoulder. "You shouldn't wear old jewelry with a gown like that, Clara," he said, for the photographer, for Vivian, for anyone listening. "The chains go. Your mother β" He stopped. The camera flashed. "Smile, darling," Henry said, and smiled himself, and it was perfect, and it was false, and Clara's locket swung once against her collarbone and caught, faintly, on nothing at all.