When Venus Fell (10 page)

“Sounds like a lot of melodrama and exaggerated history to me,” I said, when I finished. “If this is an example of how the Cameron family conducts itself, we’ll probably be locked in a room and
forced
to wait for our money.” Secretly I’d found the story enthralling, but the family history of high-handedness did raise my hackles.

Ella huffed in exasperation. “I believe every word of it. We can look right out the window here and imagine how Susan marched her captive Cameron, along the very same path that the modern road follows! It gives me goosebumps! They followed the same path we’re going to follow down the mountainside and into the Cameron valley. We are
part
of Cameron history now—just like Mom and Pop were when they came here. I feel connected. The same feeling I get when I think about Grandmother Akiko’s ancestors being descended from a samurai. We are connected to the spirits of
our
ancestors here, Vee.”

“And the spirits of our Japanese kin are probably toasting our mutt pedigree over a hibachi somewhere in the Buddhist hereafter. Because they sure don’t give a damn about us.” I arranged my braids in long, ropy masses front and back, buttoned a denim vest over my thin T-shirt, brushed cracker crumbs from a purplish cotton skirt, and put on some crimson lipstick. My sandaled feet were dirty. I washed them in a china-cup beautiful bathroom and dried them with towels embroidered with a Cameron crest.

I wiped my lipstick off. Who was I trying to impress? “Hold the fort,” I told Ella, “and fend off any large birds of prey. I’m going to do a drive-by look-see at the Hall. I’ll be
back in thirty minutes, tops.” I checked my purse for the pepper spray. Ella sighed.

“This is not a job, Vee. You don’t have to scope out the sound system or determine whether the manager is a lecherous pervert. You don’t have to be overprotective of me here.”

“I can’t change my obsessive habits. Why, without my obsessions I’d have no personality at all.”

“I feel secure in these Cameron Mountains. I feel peaceful. I wish you did, too.”

“I’ll feel better after I figure out more about these people. Not glorious tales in self-serving pamphlets. No babbling about mythic anniversaries. The facts.” I slipped downstairs and out a back door, then scurried to our car in the backyard.

I drove out of the yard and turned slowly up a twisting, narrow road hooded by steep hills, overgrown trees, and huge rhododendrons. I watched uneasily as New Inverness disappeared in my rearview mirror. Indian trail. Wilderness. The first Gilbert Cameron had been bought and paid for and unwillingly marched into this extravagantly Edenlike new territory. The latest Gib Cameron wanted me to believe Ella and I were welcome guests in a family as different from ours as Susan Macintosh’s had been from Gib’s ancestor.

Nobody was taking a piece of my hide that easily.

I might just as well have driven off the edge of the earth. The map failed to do justice to the jumble of Tennessee mountains with hairpin turns and spots where the tiny, two-lane road clung to overlooks that might launch my old hatchback car into the stratosphere.

The brake pedal began to give as the car careened down another steep descent. I managed to turn onto a fingerlet of paved road fronted by a staunch brass sign that said H
ISTORIC
C
AMERON
H
ALL
2 M
ILES
. I drove in low gear and prayed to Saint Christopher, even slipping his medal off the collection
dangling from the rearview mirror and clutching it in one hand.

Saint Chris, I only ask that the brakes and transmission hold out
.

I would have pulled over except that there was no shoulder on either side of the road; to the right was a perpendicular slab of mountain rock dripping misty water and lichen, and on the left was a wooded gully that dropped fifty feet into creek bottoms filled with ferns among huge gray boulders.

I swooped down the last half mile of road in breathtaking free-form. I’m sure the car never moved faster than thirty miles an hour, but steering it on a road that doubled back every hundred feet was an exercise in terror.

Suddenly I entered an enormous cove in the lap of queenly mountains. I stamped the brake one more time and the car skidded into a shallow ditch. The front bumper stopped inches from a tall, majestic, moss-speckled stone pillar. Its twin stood on the other side of a handsome gravel road bordered by wildflowers and a few white morning glories steadfastly blooming in the mountains’ afternoon shadows.

I gasped. I’d been dropped neatly at the entrance to the Cameron Valley. The entrance to Cameron Hall.

Taking deep breaths and wiping cold sweat from my eyes, I staggered out of the car. Everything was so quiet. I gazed around me at the cloud-shadowed, humpbacked old mountains. I inhaled the smell of lush forest. The only sounds I heard were the wind and distant water trickling down a small outcropping of rock.

I walked to the stone posts. Carved in a smooth stone plate on the front of one were the weathered words W
ELCOME
, F
RIEND
. On the other post, greetings of some sort were carved in symbols I couldn’t decipher. Cherokee, maybe?

But elaborate and forbidding wrought-iron gates closed the road to me. They were padlocked at the center. “Some welcome,” I accused loudly. The words echoed back at me
and I shrank a little, as if I’d shouted during mass. Suddenly nervous, I wandered across an area of mown grass. Four large brass historical placards stood like proud sentinels in a glen. I made myself breathe calmly and concentrate on the inscriptions. The first one began:

The second sign began:

The third began:

The fourth marker related the Cameron clan’s local heroics in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. Apparently, Camerons collected historical markers the way old people in New Orleans collected Virgin Mary statues and pink yard-flamingos. I tilted my head back and gazed around at the wild, green bowl of the valley, most of it hidden behind tantalizing forest. If a kilt-wearing Scotsman and a buckskinned half-Cherokee woman had stepped out of the woods, or a stagecoach
had rumbled around the bend behind me, I would have curtsied and felt at home.

At home. What a useless thing to imagine. “George Washington probably slept here,” I muttered wearily. I sidestepped the gate, stumbling over a low, crude wall of field stones. And now I, Venus Arinelli, the mingled essence of Asian aristocrats, Mediterranean troubadours, and Nordic ne’er-do-wells, former pampered Catholic schoolgirl piano prodigy, a grown woman fallen from grace as the daughter of a man the founding fathers would have hanged from the nearest tree, I dared to traipse where Washington had slept.

I raised my chin and went to a spring near the foundation I’d tripped over. The spring was crystal clear but warm, so warm it steamed on a hot late-summer day.

Suddenly I realized where I was.

The spring. This was the hot spring Mom told me about. This was where my quartz rock came from. This was the “magic pond” Mom always mentioned in her story. Where the evening star made promises come true
.

I sat down slowly. Trembling, I pressed the water to my face. The earth gave off gentle heat. No wonder the valley was considered sacred. Its veins pulsed understanding and comfort. No one could take my parents’ best memories from me here.

“I am losing my mind,” I told myself sternly as I walked up the entrance road, trespassing. The car belched smoke from underneath and wouldn’t crank. The cellular phone I stored under the front seat couldn’t locate a carrier signal. I didn’t have much choice.

My own pride had trapped me. Gib Cameron would come home and find me sitting on the Hall’s doorstep like a fool. I dragged a sweaty forearm across my eyes, then strode up the curving lane between shadowy woods.

A minute later I entered a vast open area of pastures on either side. There the road was lined with magnificent crape myrtles; each tall shrub was still bursting with clusters of white, late-summer blooms. Crowded along the fences were lingering cleome, the long green stems nodding their topknots of tiny blue-purple flowers in a warm breeze.

The pastures were dotted with giant rolls of baled hay and backed by towering, mist-draped mountains. I stared as a dozen wild deer raised their heads to watch me from the pasture. Some of the does had spotted fawns beside them. None even bothered to run from me. Grazing nearby was a mingled herd of horses, ponies, several mules, black cattle, and shaggy buffalo.

Buffalo.

Not wild. I hoped.

“Hello, cows,” I called out with as much humor as I could muster. And to the buffalo, because I felt giddy, “Hello, cows with fur.”

I walked past pastures for what seemed like a mile, my head throbbing and my knees weak. The woods closed in again. I began to think about being out there alone, with Ella not knowing I was stranded, and no one home at Cameron Hall. There were still plenty of bears in these mountains. I hurried up the next knoll.

The quality of light seemed to sharpen; I blinked slowly, in wonder, aware of some clarity I couldn’t pinpoint, a sense of destiny that raised goosebumps on my arms and set a warm tingle in my stomach. It was the feeling you get walking into a place of spectacular, profound beauty or a place that provokes instant memories. That you’ve been there before, or wish you had. It speaks to some memory or desire deeper than your conscious mind.

At the top of the knoll I looked across endless pasture-land stretching over rolling terrain. In the distance sat a broad stone mansion with long wings on either side, glistening in the sunshine with rows of tall, white-shuttered windows,
fronted by a circular carriage drive, and topped by stately brick chimneys.

Cameron Hall.
Surrounded by flower gardens, grand without being pretentious, shaded by enormous, gnarled oaks, the manor house and its lawns had a charm unlike any place I’d seen. Nearby were handsome gray-weathered barns and outbuildings. A split-rail fence wound across the lower front yard. A distant field was lush and green with late-summer corn. The shallow channel of a small river curled below the front lawns. A small stone bridge crossed it. The scene reminded me of a softly mystical, ethereal eighteenth-century painting—a Gainsborough, maybe.

Suddenly I heard rustling noises and a chorus of low growls. I froze, looked around frantically, then started for the nearest low tree limb. A dozen dogs surrounded me, some barking and wagging their tails madly, a couple growling; two shaggy, large, calico-colored dogs with china-blue eyes stared at me as intensely as judges.

I eased one hand into my skirt pocket and retrieved my pepper spray. I slipped forward on the balls of my feet, twisting from side to side in slow arcs, my arm extended stiffly with the pepper spray ready. “Let’s all chill out,” I warned in a low voice. I stared at the blue-eyed dogs. They looked like the dog in my parents’ wedding picture. “Hello, China Eyes,” I said tentatively. “Your pop or grandpop played best dog at my parents’ nuptials.”

One of the dogs wagged his tail. Then the other joined in. Of course they were only responding to my tone of voice. Ridiculous tears rose in my eyes, regardless. “You know I’m a friend,” I said. The first dog wagged harder. I caught myself smiling at him. The blue-eyed dogs padded along with their eerie, ice-blue gazes on me, but they were wagging their tails.

As I hurried up the lane, the house disappeared as forest surrounded me again. Sweat trickled down my throat. I was tuned in to every crunch of my sandals on the gravel, to every flicker of canine eyes. But suddenly the dogs deserted me and
bounded into the woods on my left, and even the blue-eyed dogs, as if more dignified, gave me dismissive glances as they, too, turned their backs and trotted lazily into the forest.

Wavering in the middle of the lane, sucking down deep, relieved breaths, I peered into the woods.

And saw the chapel.

It rose among the trees in a sunlit grassy clearing maybe a hundred yards from where I stood. The front faced away from me; I was looking at one ivy-covered stone wall along the side, but I could see the peaked, shingled roof and the delicate copper cupola, weathered green, above the trees.

The chapel sat about fifty feet higher than the clearing, built on the flat-topped mound, that man-made pedestal of earth and native sacraments. The sides of the mound were covered in soft, shaggy grass. The chapel’s steeple prodded gently into the blue sky above the trees.

An old cemetery spread out around the base of the mound. Weathered, old-fashioned tombstones mingled with modern ones. Some of the older graves were covered in large stone crypts. Others were marked only by slabs no larger than a writing tablet. The cemetery was neatly mowed and scattered with handsome shrubs. The remnants of sawed-off stumps showed where older generations of plantings had grown large and died and been removed. I didn’t want to look too closely. I might spot the graves of Gilbert and Susan. Or the grave of the beloved, mysteriously tragic Simon.

The Camerons were obviously a family who honored their dead—or couldn’t bear to ignore their ghosts. I understood that sentiment all too well. The elaborate cemeteries in New Orleans had frightened and fascinated me after Mom died.

I glimpsed a winding path that linked the chapel to the gravel lane. Every other thought faded. I had come on a mission of pride—for all that we Arinellis had been and for all that my father had desperately wanted us to become.