Lavender Morning (Edilean 1)

“Who said anything about school?” Rams asked. “Just put up the shingle. Luke here will carve it or paint it or whatever for you.”

“And you’ll draw up a contract and charge her more than she makes in a year,” Luke shot back.

“If you two start going at each other tonight I’ll walk out,” Sara warned. “I want a nice, quiet dinner without you two playing one-upmanship.”

When all three men were quiet and looking as though they planned to stay that way, Sara shook her head. “All right, go to it. Tear each other up for all I care. Charlie, order me another one of these drinks.”

“You sure?” Charlie asked. “You’ve never been one to hold your liquor.”

“Then one of you will have to hold my hair while I throw up, and another one will have to carry me to the car.”

Luke pulled a quarter from his pocket and looked at Ramsey. “Heads and I get the hair. Tails and you get the rest of her. She’s put on too much weight for me.”

“You two are disgusting,” Sara said, but she was laughing.

Now, Luke sharpened the blades of the lawn mower on the whetstone as he looked out through the little round window in the brick wall. He was in what used to be the stables of the old house, but most of it had fallen down long ago. While old Bertrand lived there, the house had been taken care of, as per Miss Edi’s instructions, but the outbuildings had been allowed to fall into ruin.

“You didn’t put the care of them in the contract?” Luke asked Ramsey. “You just took care of the house and not the grounds?”

“Are you implying that I made out the contract in 1946?”

“Okay, then your dad.”

“He was one year old.”

“Whoever, whenever, it is your job to look after the place,” Luke said when he’d returned to Edilean and seen the state of the outbuildings.

“Maybe you should have stayed here and taken care of them,” Ramsey said, unperturbed by his cousin’s anger. “Maybe you shouldn’t have run off to the far ends of the earth and done whatever it is that’s made you so damned angry.”

Luke opened his mouth to say something, but closed it. “Go away. Go do whatever you do in your little office and let me take care of this.”

It had taken Luke months to restore the old buildings. He only rebuilt part of the stables, but he used materials from the time the house was built. He dug old bricks out of the ground, even dug up a well that had been filled in with bricks that had been handmade and fired when Edilean Manor was the center of a plantation.

It had been hard, physical labor, something that Luke needed at the time, and he’d enjoyed the solitude of working alone. No one was living in the house then, as old Bertrand had died. There was a housekeeper who came every day, but she was so old she could hardly climb the stairs. When Luke saw her hobbling about, too feeble to accomplish much, he’d taken over. He got her a fat chair and a radio, and he set her up in the living room. When Ramsey, as the lawyer in charge of Miss Edi’s estate, saw what he’d done, he said he’d write Miss Edi and tell her the housekeeper should be put out to pasture. But Rams looked hard at Luke as he said it. They both knew the woman’s family needed the money, so she was kept on, and Luke did the work. He kept the house in repair, and when the furniture arrived, it was Luke who saw to its placement. One Saturday with cousins and beer and pizza got the larger pieces up the stairs.

Except for the tenants, in essence, the house had been Luke’s for the past few years. He was the one who repaired the roof and got the dead pigeon out of the wall. And he rebuilt the top of the chimney when it was hit by lightning.

When he was told that Miss Edi had died and left the house to some girl who’d never seen the place, Luke had an urge to burn it down. Better that than let someone who didn’t appreciate it have it.

“Maybe she’s a historian,” Ramsey said. “Or maybe she’s an architect—or even a building contractor. We don’t know what she is.”

Luke didn’t like the way his cousin was defending this unknown woman who was going to take over what most people thought of as the heart of Edilean. All his life he’d heard people say that if Edilean Manor was destroyed, the town wouldn’t live a year.

But Ramsey had been so happy about the new inheritor that Luke knew he was up to something. One day after work he went to Tess. She answered his knock but didn’t invite him in. “What’s he up to about this new owner?” Luke asked, not bothering with preliminaries. And there was no need to explain who “he” was.

Tess was a woman of few words. “Edilean Harcourt sent him a photo of her. In a bikini.”

Luke understood immediately. If he knew his cousin, Rams planned to make a play for her. He loved Edilean Manor almost as much as Luke did. “Got it,” Luke said.

Tess stepped to the side and opened the screen door wider. “You want a beer?”

“Love one.”

Now, “she” had arrived, and Luke watched her as she sat and talked with Sara. She was pretty, but not strikingly so. She was a little above average height, and her hair looked like the girls’ used to get in the summer. It would turn from brown to sun-streaked over the months, and he wondered if hers was natural or if she spent hours in a salon.

She was dressed as old-fashioned as Sara, and that made him smile. Sara loved to wear dresses with long sleeves even in the heat of summer. But then she knew they looked good on her. She was as pretty and as delicate as a flower, and when she wore something like a bright red tank top and jeans she looked almost odd.

Luke thought that if he had a camera with him he would have taken their photo. There was Sara in her prim little dress, her sewing on her lap, and across from her was this new woman wearing something like in an illustration in Alice in Wonderland. He thought the headband was an especially perfect touch.