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“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
CHAPTER TENCamden
It’s unreal how quickly I slide back into place here.
A decade of not thinking about Ashby House or the McTavishes, a decade of building a whole new life for myself, and within three days, it’s like I’ve never left.
I’m eating Cecilia’s cooking, avoiding Nelle, walking the woods surrounding the house, driving into town for groceries…
It’s like there was always a Camden-shaped hole here, just waiting for me to slip back into.
Jules loves it.
I can see it in her face every day, the way she grins when she gets out of bed, how eager she is to curl up in that one chair on the veranda she likes so much and watch the world wake up around her. She’s content to do that for hours, to just take in the views, or wander the rooms.
I’d been worried about letting her go off with Ben, remembering other hikes through the woods with him, my feet skidding on pebbles, his laugh in my ear.
But Jules had come back with rosy cheeks and a bright smile, proclaiming the hike “exactly what I needed.”
If anything, Ben had been the one looking a little spooked, and I’d reminded myself yet again that I had an invaluable ally in my wife.
Today when I go looking for her, I find her in what used to be Ruby’s office, sitting on the floor and going through an old photo album.
“I’m snooping,” she says, unrepentant, not even looking up, and I laugh, crouching down next to her.
“Well, I hope you’re enjoying a tour of Dead White People because I’m pretty sure that’s all that’s in these albums.”
“Au contraire,” she objects, flipping to a page near the back. “One very alive Camden McTavish, aged fifteen!”
And there I am, standing next to Ruby in the den. It’s Christmas, clearly, the tree stretching up behind us, too tall to fit into the picture. Stockings and tinsel, a crystal glass of eggnog in Ruby’s hand, and I look…
Happy.
No tight smile, no faking it for the camera. It’s a real, goofy smile as I look lovingly at Ruby—I’d grown taller than her by then, and my arm is slung around her shoulders, her head just reaching my collarbone.
I don’t remember that picture. Don’t remember taking it––hell, I don’t even remember being that kid. But there I am, and there’s Ruby’s neat handwriting on the little card next to the photo with my name and age, just like Jules said.
“I bet Christmas here is something else,” she says, her voice gone slightly dreamy.
She’s picturing it, no doubt. That same huge tree, the twinkling lights. The snow that falls gently outside, locking the house into its own winter wonderland.
And in that moment, I want so badly to give her the fairy tale. I want to take back every horrible thing that happened here, take back what I did, just so she can have that.
