Shorecliff (35 page)
Here I sit now, and at this point it seems futile not to admit that I am in my father’s study in my father’s chair, surrounded by my father’s books and writing at my father’s desk. I even have some of his clients. The younger ones like me better, but the older ones say I lack his standards. I know I have inherited his looks as well as his legal practice, but I maintain, with every ounce of my will, that it is not the same man sitting at this desk—not at all the same man. My trusty Victorian dictionary, which withstood Philip’s mockery so many times, sits at my elbow (I still prefer its definitions to any other’s), and that alone marks me as a different man. I will not go to my grave as Richard Killing II, dutiful son of his father. I am responsible for destroying Francesca’s beauty, a fact that put me in a cage of guilt. Even through the war, which I sweated out on various battleships, I could not escape from that cage. But before the war, before the accident, I was a carefree boy drunk on the rapture of living with ten older cousins, and I still hold the memories of that boy. I have tried to keep alive the joy I felt in my cousins’ world. For that reason I will close now, not with a reminder of Francesca’s injuries, but with a scene that has lasted in my memory, a brief snapshot unsullied by anything that happened afterward.
We were playing croquet one morning, not long after we had first come to Shorecliff, when Francesca was still lighthearted and full of mischief, when Yvette wasn’t gripped by jealousy, when the aunts chatted on the sidelines unaware of their husbands’ and brother’s deceit. It was a bright, warm, breezy day, and I was filled with ecstatic anticipation of the months to come. I glanced at Tom, whose turn it was to play, and saw him looking at Isabella, standing by his side. They were sharing some joke, one of their many sibling jokes that the rest of us never heard. Tom had an expression of shocked delight on his face, as if he were startled by the brilliance of whatever Isabella had said, and her face was gradually taken over by her wide, goofy grin. Then she roared with laughter, and Philip, behind her, watched her laugh with an affectionate, sardonic smile on his face. He shook his head, obviously thinking she was a lunatic—but back in those days we were all innocently lunatics, and we appreciated each other’s eccentricities. Tom caught Philip’s eye as Isabella howled, and he laughed again, saying something I couldn’t hear.
That is what I want to remember of my last summer at Shorecliff—not the flames and the tears and the terrifying emotions that ransacked our hearts, but the many moments in our jokes and games when the sunlight framed for an instant one shout, one smile, one off-kilter glance.
I would like to extend grateful thanks to Katherine Stirling, always my first reader; to Bill Hamilton, who helped in the early shaping of this book; to Andrea Walker, for her generous guidance into the publishing industry; to Lisa Grubka, my magnificent agent, and her colleagues; to Asya Muchnick, my equally magnificent editor at Little, Brown, and the many people there who helped bring this book to print; to Andrew Goulet, for agreeing to write the screenplay; to Ben Cosgrove, for introducing me to Maine; to Frank Kiley and Gill Stumpf, for countless games of Piggy (among other things); to my father, who bears no resemblance to the elder Richard Killing, and to my mother, who is just like Caroline; and finally, most importantly, to my siblings, Colin, Ghilly, and Sonia, to my sister-in-law, Valentine, and to my three cousins, Cicso, Austin, and Santiago, with all of whom I have spent many wonderful summers entirely devoid of drama.
Ursula DeYoung grew up in New England. She studied at Harvard and Oxford, and in 2011 her first book was published—a biography of nineteenth-century physicist John Tyndall called
A Vision of Modern Science.
She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Title Page
Welcome
The Hatfield Family in 1928
1: Arrival
2: Croquet
3: War Stories
4: Shore
5: A Day with Fisher
6: Pensbottom
7: Fox
8: New York
9: One Delia
10: Picnic
11: Hike
12: Aunt Edie’s Birthday
13: Phone Booth
14: Woods
15: Rattletrap
16: Aftermath
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Newsletters
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2013 by Ursula DeYoung
Cover design by Ploy Siripant
Cover photograph © ClassicStock/Masterfile
Cover copyright © 2013 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at
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. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Little, Brown and Company
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First ebook edition: July 2013
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ISBN: 978-0-316-21340-0