“Yes, isn’t it?” wailed the far voice. “Go back to the library. Stand in the middle of the room. See the Gainsborough Maidens and Flowers you always loved?”
“It’s there.”
“It’s not. See the silver Florentine humidor?”
“I see it.”
“You don’t. See the great maroon leather chair where you drank sherry with Father?”
“Yes.”
“No,” sighed the voice.
“Yes, no? Do, don’t? Nora, enough!”
“More than enough. Will. Can’t you guess? Don’t you feel what happened to Grynwood?”
I ached, turning. I sniffed the strange air.
“William,” said Nora, far out by the open front door. “Four years ago,” she said faintly, “four years ago … Grynwood burned completely to the ground.”
I ran.
I found Nora pale at the door.
“It what!?” I shouted.
“Burned to the ground,” she said. “Utterly. Four years ago.”
I took three long steps outside and looked up at the walls and windows.
“Nora, it’s standing, it’s all here!”
“No, it isn’t, Will. That’s not Grynwood.”
I touched the gray stone, the red brick, the green ivy. I ran my hand over the carved Spanish front door. I exhaled. “It can’t be.”
“Is,” said Nora. “All new. Everything from the cellar stones up. New, Will. New, Willie. New.”
“This door!”
“Sent up from Madrid last year.”
“This pavement?”
“Quarried near Dublin fourteen months ago. The windows from Waterford last spring.”
I stepped through the front door.
“The parqueting?”
“Finished in France and shipped over autumn last.”
“But … but that tapestry!?”
“Woven near Paris, hung in April.”
“But it’s all the same, Nora!”
“Yes, isn’t it? I traveled to Greece to duplicate the marble relics. The crystal case I had made too, in Rheims.”
“The library!”
“Every book, all bound the same way, stamped in similar gold, put back on similar shelves. The library alone cost one hundred thousand pounds to reproduce.”
“The same, the same, Nora,” I cried, in wonder, “oh God, the same,” and we were in the library and I pointed at the silver Florentine humidor. “That, of course, was saved out of the fire?”
“No, no, I’m an artist. I remembered. I sketched, I took the drawings to Florence. They finished the fraudulent fake in July.”
“The Gainsborough Maidens and Flowers!?”
“Fritzi’s work! Fritzi, that horrible drip-dry beatnik painter in Montmartre? Who threw paint on canvas and flew them as kites over Paris so the wind and rain patterned beauty for him, which he sold for exorbitant prices? Well, Fritzi, it turns out, is a secret Gainsborough fanatic. He’d kill me if he knew I told. He painted this Maidens from memory. Isn’t it fine?”
“Fine, fine—oh God, Nora, are you telling the truth?”
“I wish I weren’t. Do you think I’ve been mentally ill, William? Naturally you might think. Do you believe in good and evil, Willie? I didn’t used. But now, quite suddenly, I have turned old and rain-dowdy. I have hit forty, forty has hit me, like a locomotive. Do you know what I think? The house destroyed itself.”
“It what!”
She went to peer into the halls, where shadows gathered now, coming in from the gray day.
“When I first came into my money, at eighteen, when people said Guilt, I said Bosh. They cried Conscience. I cried Crapulous Nonsense! But in those days the rain barrel was empty. A lot of strange rain has fallen since and gathered in me, and to my cold surprise I find me to the brim with old sin and know there is conscience and guilt.
“There are a thousand young men in me, William.
“They thrust and buried themselves there. When they withdrew, William, I thought they withdrew. But no, no, now I’m sure there is not a single one whose barb, whose lovely poisoned thorn, is not caught in my flesh, one place or another. God, God, how I loved their barbs, their thorns. God, how I loved to be pinned and bruised. I thought the medicines of time and travel might heal the grip marks.
But now I know I am all fingerprints. There lives no inch of my flesh, Will, that is not FBI file systems of palm print and Egyptian whorl of finger stigmata. I have been stabbed by a thousand lovely boys and thought I did not bleed, but God, I do bleed now.
I have bled all over this house. And my friends who denied guilt and conscience, in a great subway heave of flesh, have trammeled through here and jounced and mouthed each other and sweat upon floors and buckshot the walls with their agonies and descents, each from the other’s crosses. The house has been stormed by assassins, Willie, each seeking to kill the other’s loneliness with their short swords, no one finding surcease, only a momentary groaning out of release.
“I don’t think there has ever been a happy person in this house. Will, I see that now.
“Oh, it all looked happy. When you hear so much laughter and see so much drink and find human sandwiches in every bed, pink and white morsels to munch on, you think: what joy! how happy-fine!
“But it is a lie, Willie, you and I know that, and the house drank the lie in my generation and Father’s before me and Grandfather’s beyond. It was always a happy house, which means a dreadful estate. The assassins have wounded each other here for long over two hundred years. The walls dripped. The doorknobs were gummy. Summer turned old in the Gainsborough frame. So the assassins came and went, Will, and left sins and memories of sins, which the house kept.
“And when you have caught up just so much darkness, Willie, you must vomit, musn’t you?
“My life is my emetic. I choke on my own past. So did this house.
“And finally, guilt-ridden, terribly sad, one night I heard the friction of old sins rubbing together in attic beds. And with this spontaneous combustion the house smoldered ablaze. I heard the fire first as it sat in the library, devouring books.
Then I heard it in the cellar drinking wine. By that time I was out the window and down the ivy and on the lawn with the servants. We picnicked on the lakeshore at four in the morning with champagne and biscuits from the gatekeeper’s lodge.
The fire brigade arrived from town at five to see the roofs collapse and vast fire founts of spark fly over the clouds and the sinking moon. We gave them champagne also and watched Grynwood die finally, at last, so at dawn there was nothing.
“It had to destroy itself, didn’t it, William, it was so evil from all my people and from me?”
We stood in the cold hall. At last I stirred myself and said, “I guess so, Nora.”
We walked into the library where Nora drew forth blueprints and a score of notebooks.
“It was then, William, I got my inspiration. Build Grynwood again. A gray jigsaw puzzle put back together! Phoenix reborn from the soot bin. So no one would know of its death through sickness.
Not you, Willie, or any friends off in the world; let all remain ignorant. My guilt over its destruction was immense. How fortunate to be rich. You can buy a fire brigade with champagne and the village newspapers with four cases of gin.
The news never got a mile out that Grynwood was strewn sackcloth and ashes. Time later to tell the world. Now to work! And off I raced to my Dublin solicitor’s, where my father had filed architectural plans and interior details.
I sat for months with a secretary, word-associating to summon up Grecian lamps, Roman tiles. I shut my eyes to recall every hairy inch of carpeting, every fringe, every rococo ceiling oddment, all brasswork decor, firedog, switchplates, log bucket, and doorknob.
And when the list of thirty thousand items was compounded, I flew in carpenters from Edinburgh, tile setters from Sienna, stonecutters from Perugia, and they hammered, nailed, thrived, carved, and set for four years, Willie, and I loitered at the factory outside Paris to watch spiders weave my tapestry and floor the rugs. I rode to hounds at Waterford while watching them blow my glass.
“Oh, Will, I don’t think it has ever happened, has it in history, that anyone ever put a destroyed thing back the way it was? Forget the past, let the bones cease! Well, not for me, I thought, no: Grynwood shall rise and be as ever it was.
But while looking like the old Grynwood, it would have the advantage of being really new. A fresh start, I thought, and while building it I led such a quiet life, William. The work was adventure enough.
“As I did the house over, I thought I did myself over. While I favored it with rebirth, I favored myself with joy. At long last, I thought, a happy person comes and goes at Grynwood.
“And it was finished and done, the last stone cut, the last tile placed, two weeks ago.
“And I sent invitations across the world, Willie, and last night they all arrived, a pride of lion-men from New York, smelling of Saint John’s bread, the staff of life. A team of lightfoot Athens boys. A Negro corps de ballet from Johannesburg.
Three Sicilian bandits, or were they actors? Seventeen lady violinists who might be ravished as they laid down their violins and picked up their skirts. Four champion polo players. One tennis pro to restring my guts.
A darling French poet. Oh, God, Will, it was to be a swell grand fine reopening of the Phoenix from the Fire Estates, Nora Gryndon, proprietress. How did I know, or guess, the house would not want us here?”
“Can a house want or not want?”
“Yes, when it is very
