The love was an ache of the heart in the woman inside the child, a shaft of longing and of envy for that uncomplicated and complete love. She loved the man who sat behind the enormous desk with his cigar and his shot glass and his ledgers.

Here the circling shelves were jammed full with books and treasures. She loved this room, with its rounded walls and big, heavy chairs with leather the color of the port her papa sometimes drank after supper. Up the sharp, winding curves of the stairs to her father's study. Now the loblolly pine floors with their coating of paste wax felt slick and smooth under the young girl's bare feet as she wandered out, down the hall with its panels of bald cypress and paintings in thick frames of dull gold.

Mama had the hall runners taken up and rolled into the attic every June. It was the heat she wanted, and the adventure, but she kept those thoughts inside as she kissed Mama good night. Heat pressed its damp fingers against the glass, but inside the house the air was cool, and her cotton nightgown stayed so crisp it crackled when she moved. The windows and French doors were closed because it was high summer. Always gardenia for Mama.Īnd in the mirror, by lamplight, she could see the pale oval of her face, so young, so pretty, with those thoughtful blue eyes and smooth skin. She remembered the scent of the room, smelled it even now. How the light slanted over the pin boxes and the bottles of crystal and cobalt, and struck the silver back of the brush as it flashed over her hair. The child's body remembered this, felt this, each long, sustained beat with the brush and how it made her imagine herself a cat being petted. Her mother loved to brush it every night, one hundred strokes with the soft-bristled, silver-backed brush that sat on the graceful cherrywood vanity. Her hair was the color of corn silk, and slid prettily down her narrow back. She was eight, tall for her age, fragile of bone, delicate of feature. To me, fair friend, you never can be For as you were when first your eye I eyed, Such seems your beauty still.

Carolina moon novel