Chapter Nine: Jules

CHAPTER NINEJules

“It’s wrong that I find this so hot, isn’t it?”

I’m standing in the doorway to one of the upstairs bathrooms, leaning against the wall as Cam looks over at me, safety goggles on, a sledgehammer in his hands. What was once a 1960s-era avocado green toilet is in pieces at his booted feet.

He grins at me, pushing the goggles up. “If I knew smashing outdated fixtures was your kink, I would’ve torn out that sink back in Golden.”

Ah, yes, the sink. The one in our master bathroom that had clearly been installed sometime in the mid-eighties and featured a truly bizarre red swirl in the marble, making it look like Lady Macbeth had just been washing her hands.

“You couldn’t have,” I remind him, “because that was a rental.”

His smile fades just the tiniest bit, and I hate it even as something in me wants to cross the bathroom and grab his face and say, That was never our home, and you knew it. We could’ve bought a house, but we never did. You always knew we’d be back here. To claim what’s yours.

What’s ours.

But that’s a little intense for a random Tuesday morning, so instead, I just step forward, kicking a stray piece of green porcelain. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but this wasn’t actually one of the bathrooms that was fucked up, right? I mean”—I gesture to the aggressively floral wallpaper—“ugly as sin, but technically functional.”

“The man’s a machine.”

I turn to see Ben just behind me in the hallway, smiling as usual. This morning, he’s wearing a pair of dark gray pants made of some kind of waterproof material, hiking boots replacing his usual expensive sneakers. A long-sleeved T-shirt in navy blue brings out his eyes, and I guess there are women who would appreciate how well it clings to his gym-toned torso, but I am definitely not one of them.

“He’s already replaced the floors in one of the third-floor bedrooms, and I hear we have a cement truck coming tomorrow?”

Ben has his hands in his pockets as he rocks back on his heels, and a muscle in Cam’s jaw ticks as he turns back to his work. “The terrace steps” is all he says, but Ben gives a hooting laugh.

“Shit, Camden. If I’d known you’d go this gung ho, I would’ve emailed you years ago.”

“I would’ve deleted it.”

He would have, I know. For the past decade, any communication with his family has gone straight in the trash, both virtual and real.

Ben chuckles, shaking his head. “Yeah, you would’ve. Still. Glad you’re here now, man.”

Cam doesn’t reply, but takes another swing at the half-destroyed toilet, and I feel it again, that tug of guilt low in my stomach.

“Mind if I steal your bride for the morning?” Ben asks, and Camden pauses, his knuckles white around the shaft of the sledgehammer.

I turn to Ben, surprised. “What for?”

He gives me a wink, one that I guess is meant to be charming, but just makes my skin crawl. “You’ve seen Ashby House, and it’s impressive, no doubt, this bathroom being an exception. But Ashby’s real worth is the land around it. Thought I’d give you a tour.”

I bite back a grimace. The land around Ashby is beautiful, I can’t argue that, but I like looking at it safely behind these walls. I’m not sure I actually want to go traipsing through the forest that once swallowed up “Baby Ruby.”

And it’s clear from Camden’s expression that he’s not too wild about that idea, either.

But I can’t think of any reason to object, and besides, I wouldn’t mind getting a better sense of what Camden, and therefore I, actually own.

“Works for me,” I say with a shrug. “Am I dressed for it?”

I’m wearing an old pair of jeans with a lightweight sweater and a pair of Converse sneakers, nothing too fancy, but also nothing too rugged, and Ben takes a little longer than I like looking me over.

“Yeah, we’re not gonna venture all that far,” he says, and then, looking past me, adds to Camden, “No farther than the falls. Does that sound okay?”

I almost scoff at that. Camden is not in charge of me, doesn’t get to say what I do or where I go, but when he doesn’t answer Ben right away, I feel my pulse kick up a beat.

We’re not in Colorado anymore. We’re no longer just a simple English teacher and his wife who works at the local tourist attraction. Here, Camden is a McTavish, the de facto owner of Ashby House, and maybe that means he could say no, and Ben would have to accept it. I would have to accept it.

I don’t know how to feel about that.

But in the end, Cam nods, swallowing hard as he meets my eyes. “Be careful,” he tells me, then steps forward, cuffing a hand around the nape of my neck and kissing my forehead. “And stay away from the edge.”

“Obviously,” I tell him, giving him a light shove, but he’s still watching Ben, his expression serious.

Something passes between them that I don’t quite understand, but then Ben is turning away, waving at me. “Let’s go, Mrs. McTavish!” he calls, and with one last lingering look at Cam, I follow.

---

THE AIR IS cool as we head out into the woods, autumn creeping up the mountain slowly but surely. It’s just a little past nine in the morning, and the sky is overcast, darker clouds gathering over the mountains in the distance. Below us, I can see a few yellowed leaves among the mist, and I shiver, shoving my hands deep into my pockets. Ben is just ahead of me, his stride confident, his chin lifted.

“So—” I start to say, but he cuts me off.

“Do you know how many people have died in these woods?”

I nearly stumble over an exposed root, but manage to right myself just in time, so that when Ben glances back over his shoulder, I’m sure-footed and casual.

“No, but I feel like you are absolutely about to tell me.”

A little of the glee bleeds out of his expression, which I appreciate.

“No one actually knows,” he says ominously, and overhead something rustles in the trees.

I make myself look as calm and collected as I can, stepping over a muddy puddle in the middle of the trail. “You should probably make up a number, then,” I say. “I mean, if you want this campfire scary story bullshit to be effective, concrete details are important. No Girl Scout ever wet her pants over, ‘And then this guy had … something on his hand. Maybe a hook? Could’ve been a can opener though. Or maybe he had a hand, but was wearing a weird bracelet that looked like a hook.’”

He turns around and fixes me with a glare.

I stop, tucking my hair behind my ears. “I’m just saying, if you wanna be creepy in the woods, I have notes.”

We’re not that far from the house, close enough that if I glance behind me, I can still see one of the chimneys over the trees, but I’m aware of just how quiet it is, how primeval this forest feels.

Still, I’d die before letting Benjamin Franklin McTavish know I’m a little freaked out.

And I must be doing a good job at convincing him I’m unbothered because he stares at me for one more beat before shaking his head. “Camden doesn’t deserve you,” he says.

“Trust me, it’s the other way around,” I reply, and he smirks at that.

“Maybe you’re right.”

More leaves crunch underfoot, the last remnants of the trail slowly merging back into the forest floor, and when I glance to my right, I realize there’s a pretty steep drop-off just a few feet away. If you weren’t paying close attention, it would be easy to slip right off the side of the mountain, especially with everything so wild and overgrown, the trees so thick together.

“So this trail is only, like, a hundred feet long?” I call out to Ben, and he looks over his shoulder at me, his sunglasses dangling from a cord around his neck.

“Ruby had the trails made and maintained,” he tells me. “Or one of her husbands did. Anyway, the money for that kind of thing is Cam’s, so maybe take it up with him.”

I don’t reply, but tuck that information away for later.

We’re quiet for the rest of the walk, the only sound our footsteps and the occasional birdcall. I pull out my phone to check how long we’ve been walking, and see that it’s been only about ten minutes, but the three bars of signal I had at the house have dwindled down to one, and when we take a downward turn on the trail, that one bar turns into an X.

For the first time, I realize just how isolated Ashby House really is. Once you’re just a few hundred feet away, there’s no way to call for help. Even if you could, help would take its time getting up the mountain.

Ben must have seen me check my phone because from just up ahead, he calls out, “I never get why people want to hike up here knowing that if something goes wrong, they’re dead. Even when the trail wasn’t this fucked up. We timed it once, me and Cam. Back when we were in high school. Hiked down to the falls, then I ran back to the house and called 911, saying Cam had fallen.”

I startle, almost tripping again, and Ben is suddenly there at my elbow, steadying me and smelling like expensive body wash and the detergent that clings to all the bedding at Ashby, a slightly sickly mix of sandalwood and vanilla.

“He hadn’t, of course,” Ben continues, his touch cold even through my sweater. “But we wanted to test how long it would take before help came.”

By now, I can hear the distant rumble of the falls. Hikers went missing up here not too long ago, I know. Camden mentioned it to me the other night, after he came back from town. And I know there have been others who have disappeared in these woods. A family from Kansas back in the eighties. A wannabe commune of hippies around 1970. Some college kid back in the fifties, his body never found after a fall from these cliffs.

Ruby herself, lost in these trees all those years ago.

“Forty-nine minutes,” Ben says, his face so close to mine that I can smell the toothpaste still on his breath. “Forty-nine minutes before the ambulance even crested the driveway. Probably at least an hour before it could get all the way out here.”

My breath sounds harsh in my ears, and Ben is still smiling, and Camden is only a short run away, but he might as well be on the moon.

“What are you doing?” I hear myself ask, taking a tentative step backward. But I’m not quick enough, because Ben jerks my arm, pulling me up tight against him.

“I did my part,” he says, his voice low even though there’s no chance of us being overheard. “I got him here. Now, Mrs. McTavish. When are you going to do yours?”

From the Desk of Ruby A. McTavish

March 24, 2013

In my last letter, I said I didn’t want to talk about Hugh Woodward because he was so damn boring. And now we’ve come to the least boring man I ever met, Andrew Miller.

I don’t want to talk about him, either, but for different reasons. Sadder ones.

I married Duke out of lust, and Hugh out of obligation, but Andrew? Andrew, I married for love.

And he loved me, too. I think you can see it in the portrait he painted of me, the one that hangs over the stairs at Ashby House. It was a bit of a scandal at the time, that portrait. My hair down and loose, the hint of bare feet underneath that Dior gown, that smile on my face.

Of course, I myself was a bit of a scandal by then. While I’d taken great care to ensure that Hugh’s death was a true accident, it seems you really cannot lose two husbands prematurely without people beginning to whisper. And not just strangers. I could have handled that.

No, it was the way I sometimes caught Daddy looking at me, his eyes dark and sad—so sad—and the way Nelle’s mouth seemed to draw in tighter whenever I entered a room.

She and Alan were having a rough go of it by then. He’d been sleeping with Violet, Daddy’s secretary, and despite Nelle’s insistence that she’d fill the halls of Ashby House with babies, there was only Howell, a little boy with her light hair, Alan’s round face, and my father’s temper.

So, as you can imagine, the time had seemed right to take myself abroad for a bit.

Paris was out, naturally, but I decided that I’d like to see the other great cities of Europe that Duke had deprived me of. So I spent a few weeks in Rome, then on to Milan. I’d thought about Madrid next, maybe Barcelona, but then I got an invitation to visit one of my old friends from Agnes Scott, Betty-Ruth. She’d done quite well for herself, marrying a Scottish laird and settling into some medieval fortress in the Highlands, so when she suggested I come stay with them while I was overseas, I leapt at the chance.

A thing about castles: they’re actually terribly drafty and cold, and the hallways from the kitchens are so long that by the time food reaches the table, it’s barely lukewarm.

My first night there, Betty-Ruth’s husband, Hamish, had poured me a generous draft of whiskey and said, “How does it feel to be home?”

I’d been shivering in an uncomfortable armchair that smelled like horses, and I’d looked at him, puzzled. “Home?”

“Aye,” he’d said, nodding toward the windows. “Yer a McTavish. They come from not far from here. Just the next glen over.”

I had known that my ancestors came from Scotland. Daddy was very proud of that fact, and I’d felt a familiar tug of grief as I thought about how much he would have loved to be here. He had died not long after Hugh, and that was another reason I’d decided to travel, hoping to shake off some of the sadness that had begun to settle over Ashby House.

And so, for Daddy, every morning I put on the ugliest jacket and a pair of Wellingtons, and tried to summon up the appropriate amount of familial pride as I strode around the grounds of Hamish’s castle. I came from these hills, I would tell myself, waiting to feel some sort of tug, some remembered past deep in my blood.

I must’ve walked for miles every day, looking for some sign that my ancestors had once called this place home.

All I felt was cold. And vaguely damp.

This is the part where I should tell you that even before I came to Scotland, sometime around Hugh’s death, my thoughts had begun to turn, more and more frequently, to that old fear of mine.

That I was not Ruby McTavish at all, but Dora Darnell, stolen from her poor family and raised in the lap of luxury. That the real Ruby McTavish’s bones were somewhere in the forests surrounding Ashby House, and that everything that was wrong with me—because once you’ve killed two men, you really must begin to suspect you’re not quite right—was because I came from some other, cursed bloodline.

Sometimes, I thought it might be a relief to find out that was the case. Maybe it would explain why, when Hugh had begun to grate on me so, my mind had immediately gone to his death.

Now, I know that nature versus nurture is a subject that fascinates people these days, but I was a rich woman from North Carolina in the 1960s. Our kind didn’t exactly stay current on the latest psychological research.

So I only had my own thoughts to consult, and those thoughts were growing increasingly loud when I met Andrew Miller.

He was already fairly well known as a painter then, popular for his relaxed, natural portraits of various aristocrats, and when Hamish mentioned he was coming to stay, I was curious to meet him. I’d never met an artist before, and yes, I was already thinking it might be nice to have him paint my picture.

Andrew arrived on a Saturday, harried because the train had been late, which meant the car sent to pick him up had had to wait, and by the time they made their way up to Hamish’s, a torrential downpour had started.

When he and the driver entered, Andrew had mud up to his knees, a hole in his jacket pocket, and his dark hair, streaked with gray even though he was only in his midthirties, was plastered unflatteringly to his face.

What a shabby-looking fellow,I thought, but that’s artists for you.

When he introduced himself to me, his hand was cold, and I remember thinking that he had the saddest eyes I’d ever seen, and not much past that.

As you can see, a very different first impression than the one I had of Duke, the man I thought was the love of my life.

I had no idea this tragic, sodden person in front of me was the real thing.

Darling, you’ll have to forgive me, but I have to get through this part quickly or I won’t be able to get through it at all.

I tumbled into love with Duke, a violent upheaval that left me breathless, dizzy in its wake.

It was nothing like that with Andrew. I sat next to him at dinner, and he joined me on my morning walks, and we talked about everything and nothing. I told him about North Carolina, and he talked about growing up in Yorkshire and the life he now led in London, surrounded by other artistic types. He mentioned a wife from years ago, when he was barely twenty, how she had gotten tired of the starving artist’s life and left him, going back to her family in Glasgow, and oh, darling, how casual I thought I sounded when I asked if there was any woman in his life now.

How relieved I was when he said no.

He offered to paint my portrait, and I said I’d like that.

We talked as he painted, and one afternoon, sitting in the chilly library of Hamish’s castle, me perched on that chair in my Dior gown, Andrew studying his canvas, his brush moving so quickly, flecks of green paint dotting his shirtfront, I said, “It must be hard painting my mouth when I’m chatting away like this.”

Andrew didn’t speak for a moment, focused on the canvas. And then: “I could paint your mouth from memory alone.”

He looked up at me with those sad dark eyes, and I felt as though there were an audible click when our gazes met. “From my dreams.”

What else could I do after that but marry him?

-R

Andrew Miller is the first to admit that he never saw himself “ending up in the wilds of America, married to an heiress. It’s like something out of a novel, isn’t it?”

He says those words with a slight twinkle in his eye as we walk around the grounds of his wife’s family home, the magnificent Ashby House in Tavistock, North Carolina. There is no shortage of natural beauty to be found here, from the pines, oak, and chestnut trees that surround the home to the mist-shrouded views down to the valley floor, and Miller muses that if he were a landscape painter rather than a portraitist, he would never lack for inspiration.

“It changes all the time,” he tells me, gesturing at our surroundings. “The light’s always shifting, the colors changing. It’s fascinating.”

I mention his wife, then, Ruby McTavish, and he gives me that same twinkly look as he says, “Oh, she’s fascinating, too.”

That is one word for it.

Miller is her third husband, her first having been killed in a robbery in Paris on their honeymoon, the second falling victim to an electrical accident here on the grounds of Ashby House.

She and Miller were introduced by Sir Hamish Ogilvy in 1969, and married the next year in a small ceremony in Miller’s native Yorkshire. When it came time to decide where to settle as a married couple, Miller says there was no question of living anywhere else but here, in the house Ruby’s grandfather built, high above the townhisfather founded, Tavistock.

“I worried I might become bored up here,” Miller tells me. “Or lazy. A fatted calf and all that, drowning in excess. But here we are, six years later, and I don’t feel as though I’m seconds away from the slaughterhouse.If anything, this place has been good for me and my work. New faces, new people.”

Miller is endlessly interested in people. Who they are, what they think,whythey think it. Several times in this interview, I feel he’s asking me more questions about myself than I am about him, and he admits that his wife teases him about his insatiable curiosity all the time.

In Tavistock, Ruby McTavish is talked about the way some ancient people must have discussed deities— a distant figure, mysterious and unknowable, but benevolent, a magnanimous provider, and when I mention this to Miller, he laughs.

“I assure you, she’s flesh and blood,” he tells me, and later, when she joins us for tea on the spectacular back veranda of Ashby House, I find her to be surprisingly warm and clearly besotted with her husband.

They’re an odd match, the heiress and the painter, but as they sit side by side in matching Adirondack chairs, hands loosely joined, I can see why Miller has said that Ruby “saved my life, really. I’m not sure I fully came alive until I took her hand in that dreary Scottish castle.”

Mrs. Miller remembers that moment differently.

“He looked like a drowned rat, and I thought it was no wonder he was an artist. He had that sort of tragic air about him.”

Miller laughs again at that, raising her hand to kiss the back of it. “And then the fair maiden rescued me and swept me away to her own castle,” he says. “Tragedy averted.”

And looking at them there, gazing fondly at one another as the sun sets over the mountain, Ashby House rising behind us, I do indeed feel as though I’ve stepped into a fairy tale.

A happy ending to believe in.

—“At Home with Andrew Miller,” by Ethan Lorimer,

Painter’s Quarterly, Autumn 1976