Chapter 2 - The Fifth Carpet
The fifth carpet had been rolled out in the center of the library, displacing three rolling ladders and a shelf of nineteenth-century agricultural reports. It was an antique Ushak, heavy with lanolin and the smell of ancient dust, but the pattern had been defaced. Someone—or several people, judging by the varying depths of the cuts—had taken a pair of curved surgical scissors and slit the wool longitudinally every six inches, creating five distinct channels like the rows of a freshly plowed field.
Inside each channel lay a stack of glossy, high-contrast photographs.
Marta didn't touch them at first. She kept her hands buried deep in the pockets of her skirt, her fingers curling into tight fists against the cotton lining.
“Five before me,” she said, her gaze fixed on the edge of the rug where a patch of faded madder red met the floorboards. “You said five women agreed to marry the old man before my name went on the banns.”
“Five women from the district who were desperate enough, or greedy enough, to trade their youth for a line of credit,” Julian corrected, leaning his hips against the edge of the mahogany desk. He picked up one of the photographs from the nearest stack. It showed a young woman with bleached-blonde hair and heavy eyeliner standing on the very terrace where Marta now lived, holding up a glass of champagne with a smile that reached her teeth but didn't touch her pupils. “That’s Chloe. From the dry cleaner’s down on 4th Street. She lasted four days before she found out the ‘mansion’ was mortgaged to the hilt and the only thing in the safe was a collection of unpaid promissory notes signed by my father.”
“And the others?”
“Clara. Beatrice. Siobhan. A girl named Mariette who thought she was marrying an eccentric philanthropist and found out she was marrying a ghost.” Julian dropped the photograph back into its slot with a dry slap. “They all asked the same question before the wedding breakfast was even cleared. How much is left? Which account is the liquid cash in? Can we sell the art? When they realized there was nothing to inherit except twenty thousand acres of depleted timberland and a lawsuit from the state environmental agency, they packed their designer luggage and took the bus back to the city.”
Marta took a slow step toward the carpet, her boot heel clicking against the parquet. The silence in the room was heavy, insulated by three thousand volumes of leather-bound law and theology that no one had opened since the Truman administration.
“And you stayed,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. “Why?”
“Because you didn't ask about the money,” Julian said, his eyes locking onto hers with a sudden, fierce intensity that made her breath hitch. “You didn't ask about the offshore accounts, or the art collection, or the shares in the shipping line. You walked into this house with mud on your sensible shoes, looked my dying father in his cloudy glass eye, and said: ‘If I sign the register today, do the children get to keep the roof over their heads until they turn eighteen?’”
May you like
He pushed off the desk and walked toward her, his movements lithe and silent despite the heavy boots he wore. When he stopped only a foot away, Marta could smell the cedar and the sharp, clean scent of rain on his wool jacket.
“My father told you yes,” Julian whispered. “He lied. There is no money for the orphanage. But there is something else behind that wall.” He pointed a long, square-fingered hand toward the far corner of the library, where a heavy velvet drapery hung across a shallow alcove. “Something my father spent forty years keeping away from the county commissioners, the tax collectors, and the women who came before you.”
