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Instead of arguing, Mr. Keats merely shrugged. “That’s no hardship. There’s plenty up there.”
She tilted her head toward the sky, where his arm stretched to indicate the peaceful clouds of a spring afternoon.
“Do you miss it?” she found herself asking, knowing he would understand her meaning.
“Every day.” His response was immediate, and his expression so wistful it could break your heart. “Not all of it. Not the fighting or the constant giving and taking of orders. But the feeling of being up there ... free.” He touched the eyepatch covering the wound that had sent him home. “It’s hard, knowing I’ll never pilot a plane again. That others are carrying on the work without me.”
I’m sorry.That’s what Louise ought to say, and that she, too, knew the pain of a dream dying, feeling tethered to one place when you longed to be part of something meaningful. Her disappointment was from the first world war, not the second, but she could still remember the sting.
But it wouldn’t be fitting to say all that, not to the hired help. “We are deeply indebted to you for your sacrifice.”
He acknowledged the comment with a tip of his head, then threw himself into digging again. “It’ll pass in time, I bet. With a little hard work.”
“I look forward to seeing the results of your labor.” She turned to go inside but stopped when Frederick’s shovel clunked against something in the dirt.
“Biggest stone yet. Might’ve dented my shovel,” he said, kneeling to work the soil around the rock to pry it free—then let out a yelp of surprise.
She jerked her attention to a chunk of familiar white stone peering out at her.
And for a moment, she was a child chasing butterflies, an adolescent suffering through tea-etiquette lessons, a young woman looking over her shoulder to see if anyone was watching as she reached for the statue’s base.
All under the cold, distant eyes of the virgin Greek goddess of spring.
It can’t be.
But a step closer assured her it was. The face was half the size of human proportions, with dirt-smeared curls and a long, elegant neck, cracked jaggedly at the base.
Persephone, protector of her father’s garden.
Mr. Keats’s voice pulled her out of the memories. “Scared the daylights out of me. It looked for all the world like a skull.”
“It’s not possible.” Her voice, a whisper, seemed to come from one of the old nightmares from just after Father’s death.
“Don’t worry, it’s not human remains. Only some kind of statue. Part of one, anyway.” He looked up and sobered at her expression. “What’s wrong?”
“I . . . I ordered it torn down and taken away.” She’d watched the workers smash the stone with their sledgehammers twenty-three years ago. Oh, the triumph she’d felt, bringing down a goddess—and the past along with it.
The deed done, she’d walked away, trusting that Delphie and the other servants would see Persephone loaded into wheelbarrows and taken far, far away.
If Mr. Keats found that odd, he let it pass without comment. “Maybe someone didn’t feel like hauling, so they buried it under a few feet of dirt and called it a day.” He heaved the shovel into the soil nearby, where it clanked again. “There’s more of it, I think.”
Gather yourself, Louise.Memories aside, the statue was merely a piece of rock.
“Dig it up. The whole body. Then get rid of it.”
“Well,” Mr. Keats said, leaning against his spade, “that’ll be quite the”—his eye glinted again—“undertaking.”
Anger flared, hot and sudden. “Donotjoke about this.”
He flinched at the sharpness in her voice, the way Jeeves did when Delphie shouted at him to get out of her kitchen. “I’m sorry.”
It wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t know. Louise brought her voice under control. “Do you promise to dispose of it properly?”
“I promise.” After a breath of hesitation, before she could make an excuse to leave, he added, “What’s so terrible about it?”
It wasn’t spoken out of bald curiosity, the kind she could reprimand with a curt“It’s none of your concern.”His voice was hushed, like he was worried he’d uncovered an ancient curse.
“I don’t condone pagan images on my property. It’s sacrilege.” The half-truth she’d used before was dusty from age but still functional.
