Enchanted August (4 page)

L
ottie was almost afraid to get out of bed when she finally opened her eyes the next morning. What would she see out the window? A shining paradise or a muddy hillside? But it would be amazing. Whatever it was would be amazing. She could barely bring herself to look.

There were Swiss dot curtains on the windows and a dim light was coming through shutters behind them—was the sun even up yet? She looked around for a clock and didn't find one. She had no idea what time it was. Her cell phone had stopped getting service somewhere north of Ellsworth, and there didn't seem to be a working outlet in her small room.

Lottie felt as if she had slept a very long time—she hadn't woken up so rested in ages. She thought of Ethan. She had been able to connect to Jon and him for a minute on Rose's phone from Bangor. Would they know she was fine? Would they believe she was thinking about them? But what a joy to sleep so soundly, and by herself!

Other than her eyelids, Lottie hadn't moved a muscle since she woke up. She wanted to take it all in. The air was different here. It was thinner and clearer. It smelled sweet—from the promised roses outside her window? Or maybe from the old pine of the house itself? She hesitated to go to the window and look out. Could the view be as sweet as this little room? She had a double bed, but it was a double bed for very small people, a couple from a different age. You'd have to be very close to sleep with another person in this bed. But that suited her fine.

Her sheets were crisp and white, as if someone had ironed them by hand. Lottie put them up to her face and inhaled. “They smell like sunshine,” she said to the room. She pulled off the bedclothes and placed her bare feet on the warm, worn, unfinished floorboards, flinging her arms out and throwing off her T-shirt with a single gesture. She was naked in the warm half-light of this tiny bedroom and she could feel everything waking up again—her skin, the soles of her feet, the tips of her ears. She pushed up her generous breasts dramatically. “Va-va-voom!” she said, actually laughing.

And then she opened the shutters.

The first things her eyes lit on were flowers, a riot of flowers—orange gold with black centers; delicate white blossoms; full-blown lilies; and everywhere, wild roses. Even though she was on the ground floor of the cottage she was perched high enough to see that the garden of flowers soon fell off, and next came a view of the dazzling water, and out on the horizon, the curving edge of the sea. She breathed in the cool, clean fresh air, which smelled like the ocean. The sun hit her skin and she felt as if she could hardly stay inside herself. It was as if she were too small to hold so much beauty, as if she were washed through with light.

 • • • 

Rose, who had risen not much earlier, was seated on a huge flat rock in the cottage garden. The sun poured onto her skin. The sea before her lay asleep, hardly stirring and yet somehow breathing, alive. You could see for miles, all the way out to the Atlantic. Across the narrow bay the mountains—each one a different color—were materializing from the mist, and at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from which the cottage arose she saw a great horse chestnut tree, cutting through the deep blues and the heather of the mountains with its canopy of brilliant green.

Her gaze turned to the garden. She had no idea what most of these flowers were called. I'll learn the names of the flowers here! she thought. Black-eyed Susans she knew. And hydrangeas and roses, of course. She recognized spruce trees, or maybe pine trees, but there were so many kinds just in this one spot, this huge old box of a cottage she would call home for one whole month. When Rose had awakened, she had been elated with the view from her room—tall grass, geraniums, a winding path down to what she hoped would be a rocky beach—but she and Lottie were down on the ground floor, and Rose wanted to see more. Usually her first impulse would be to explore the house, but the outdoors called to her.

Just stepping out onto the warm wet grass with her bare feet changed her outlook on everything that had happened last night. Of course it was hard to get here, she thought. It should be hard to get here. And thank God it rained all last night—it made every leaf greener, every branch darker, every fragrant flower more brilliant.

“Rose!” Lottie called to her. Rose turned and saw her haloed by the rising light. Even she could see that Lottie—whom she had only seen burdened by bags, jackets, stroller—was now something different. She was aglow. Rose smiled at her as she ran down the path in her bare feet. “Oh, Rose, can you believe it? Can you stand it?” She was wearing just an oversize T-shirt and her hair was twice its usual volume. She looked like she belonged here. Rose wondered if the place could already have had the same effect on her.

“It's like a dream,” said Lottie. “Like a dream, but so . . . solid.”

“I know!” Rose said. “These flowers. They just
grow
!” She bent down and covered her face in something shocking pink, a flower she would have thought was fake in Brooklyn. Here it looked almost humble compared to all the brightness surrounding it.

“It's so odd to say it,” said Lottie, “but I can't wait till Caroline Dester gets here. She is going to be blown away. And Beverly Fisher too. It's heaven here, Rose, isn't it? And nobody doesn't like heaven.”

“It's heaven,” said Rose. “It's heaven outside. And it's so sweet inside.”

“Sweet and sort of huge. I can't believe they call this a cottage.”

“We need to explore,” said Rose. “The big bedrooms are upstairs. I bet you can see all the way across the Atlantic from the top floor.”

Lottie had turned her face up to catch the sun's morning light. “I don't even think I packed sunscreen,” she said. “I thought there'd be so much fog!”

“I did,” said Rose. “Come on. We'll check out the rest of the house. We should decide which tower we want before the others come.” She paused. The sun, the warmth, the color, the light were working on her. “Maybe we should even give the best rooms to Caroline and poor color-blind Beverly. They might need them more than we do.”

“Maybe we should!”

Rose's tender feet smarted as they walked along the stone path back to the cottage. They'll toughen up, she thought.

“Can you believe that somebody who plays the lute for a living owns this place?” said Lottie. “I'm not even sure what a lute is.”

“It's like a guitar, only an older version,” said Rose. “They're always cropping up in sonnets.” Maybe while I'm here I'll write about a lute, Rose thought. Didn't Campion write about lutes? I'll Google it. But then, a rush of anxiety and pleasure: no Google.

“I see you writing here. You should write a sonnet about a lute,” said Lottie. “I looked you up online.” She stopped to smell a giant yellow-flowering tree. “Gorgeous.”

“Whatever you read is years old,” said Rose. “And let's give the writing a little time.”

“Oh, I think you will write,” said Lottie. “I see it.”

“You see a lot,” said Rose. “Let's go up to the house and check out whether Robert SanSouci laid in coffee for our house tour.”

They found their way to the kitchen, which was happily not filled with modern conveniences. Rose had hoped the place would be spare and frugal. It was. Like most summer places, it had an unruly collection of kitchenware: a vast array of unmatched mugs; some chipped Fiestaware; dozens of unmatched silver-plate knives and forks and spoons that had been through the dishwasher. There were too many spatulas and colanders, no sharp knives, rusted lobster crackers, and an elaborate, expensive corkscrew, still in a dusty box. Charmed as she was by the place, she was a bit disappointed not to find a coffeemaker.

“Look!” said Lottie. “Here's a note, addressed to you.”

She handed Rose a light blue envelope with her name on the outside. Pleased to see the heavy rag envelope was tucked closed, not sealed, she opened it up. The writing was old-fashioned, with calligraphic
d
's and
&
's, and she was fairly certain it had been written with a fountain pen.

Dear Rose
, it said.
Welcome to Hopewell Cottage.

“He says welcome to Hopewell.”

“To both of us?” asked Lottie.

“Just to me so far,” said Rose.

“I thought so.”

Rose blushed a little, and read the letter aloud.

I hope your journey was not too trying, & that you are reading this on the first of many crystal clear days. Please consider this your home for the month. I took the liberty of stocking the fridge with milk & eggs & a few things I thought you might need. I hope it is not too forward to say that I take pleasure in imagining that the house will please you, & that you—& your friends—will return to it.

Yours,

Robert SanSouci.

“He sounds like he grew up a hundred years ago,” said Lottie. “And also like he has a little crush on you.”

“I'm not very crushable,” said Rose quickly. No one had had a crush on her since the twins were born. But standing here, the lady of the cottage, with the light and the air so bountiful, she realized that she might be crushable. Or she might develop a crush.

“I thought that Rule of Robert's Sign meant he never rented it to anyone twice.”

“Not so far,” said Rose. She folded the letter carefully and put it in the pocket of her bathrobe. “How about some coffee?”

They found instant in a canister on the counter, and there was fresh milk in the fridge. Rose went to fill the kettle with water. The water from the tap was noisy. And rusty.

“It's brown,” said Lottie. “Should we drink it?”

“If we boil it, it might be okay to drink,” said Rose. “But I can't imagine it will taste any good.”

Lottie made no reply. She was deep into a binder called
Cottage Visitor's Guide
, written in Robert's hand.

“This tells everything!” she said. “What the flowers are, where to get groceries—there's a market
boat
every Monday! He also tells how to get the generator going if there's a power outage. Oh, I hope there'll be a power outage!”

“I don't.”

“Here's the social calendar. Can you imagine, a social calendar? There's so much stuff going on this month. A cocktail party and a kids' play! Robert SanSouci is adorable. Maybe he's gay?”

Rose remembered how he'd looked at her at the City Bakery. “I don't think so,” she said. She reached up to the high shelves to see if there was a hidden coffeemaker somewhere. There was not.

Lottie consulted the book. “‘The water from the springs is the water you should drink. There will be springwater in the cooler in the pantry.'” She wandered into a little room off the kitchen. “He's got everything in here. He must have come right before we arrived. Use this water, Rose.”

They filled the kettle with crystal clear water. “From our own spring.”

“Either he was just up here, or he asked someone to get it all prepped for us. Maybe our mysterious ferry driver,” said Rose. That would make more sense than Robert's traveling to Maine to put milk in the fridge, surely. The stove was about thirty years old but the electricity was working again and it ticked to life. Lottie picked at blueberries in the fridge as the kettle boiled. “They're so tiny. Is this what everyone raves about?”

Rose tried a small handful. “They taste like blueberry jam.” She picked up the kettle before it started to screech. She could tell it would be an aggressive whistle.

“Come on. Let's go upstairs.”

They walked up the wide staircase, mugs in hand. She hadn't drunk this kind of instant coffee since she was in grad school. It was better than she thought it would be. When they got to the top they found themselves in a dark hallway with at least a dozen doors, all closed.

“This is so incredible,” said Lottie. “Which one do we open first?” She tried a door at the near end of the hall. “Look, Rose, this is the turret!” she cried. “It's round!”

As she walked through the rounded bedroom, Rose was a little surprised that the bed was so haphazardly made up, especially as her little room downstairs was immaculate. But she forgave all when she stepped onto the room's tiny porch, some six feet by four. This vista was much broader; you could see more islands and a gray obscurity far away—a distant island, or a storm way out at sea? She and Lottie stood there, drinking in the sun, the heat, the scent, the million diamonds on the water. And almost at the same time, they noticed that they were not alone.

“Welcome to Hopewell Cottage,” said Caroline Dester.

 • • • 

It was a little disconcerting that Rose and Lottie had burst through Caroline's bedroom and onto her porch without even a knock. But Caroline supposed she could forgive them this once, as they might not have realized she was already in residence. She was surprised to see them looking so much younger than she had imagined them, though perhaps that was just because they were not in Park Slope clothes. In fact, they were barely dressed at all.

Caroline herself was having a violent reaction against beautiful clothes and the tyranny they imposed on her. You don't take your clothes to events in her line of business; they take you. When she got to the cottage, she realized, to her relief, that here she could wear her favorite French linen shift and nothing else. It was what she had on right now. She instinctively turned to catch her best light and the sun etched her elegant profile.

“Gosh, I didn't realize you were
so
pretty,” said Lottie.

Caroline shut that line of conversation down. “Our plane was heading this way yesterday,” she said; not a lie, since the plane was headed this way, but only because she had chartered it to do so. “So I took the liberty of coming early. It was so thoughtful of the owner not to be here. I chose this room because it has such a charming little porch, don't you think?”