The Heiress(15)

“No one does,” I said.

I didn’t say it to be cute. It was just the truth.

No one knew what to make of me. I was a rich man’s daughter who hid at parties rather than flirt with available bachelors. I was pretty enough, but there were other more beautiful girls. I did well enough in school, but wasn’t a brain.

And there was this darkness that seemed to cling to me, a past that people only ever spoke about in whispers. A suspicion, even inside my own heart, that I had been placed in the wrong life, living out a role written for someone else.

Maybe it was the darkness that Duke liked.

He had his own streak of it, I’d learn, hidden beneath that smooth, implacable sheen.

But let’s leave that for the next letter. For now, let me leave us here in the dim light of my father’s office, the low murmur of voices and muffled music from the band downstairs the soundtrack to a kiss that would change my life and end his.

You’ll let me do that, won’t you?

-R





BABY RUBY A BRIDE!

She stole hearts around the nation as the famous “Baby Ruby” during the 1940s, but now, Ruby McTavish has captured one heart in particular––that of tobacco heir and man-about-town Duke Edward Callahan.

The bride, daughter of Mr. Mason McTavish and the late Anna McTavish of Tavistock, North Carolina, walked down the aisle this past Saturday, April 22, on the grounds of her family home, Ashby House. Wearing her mother’s wedding gown from 1937 (altered and updated by Mme. Durand of Paris, a personal friend of the groom’s father, Edward Alton Callahan), Miss McTavish carried a bouquet of white roses, pink camellias, and the crested iris native to her home state. Her maid of honor was her younger sister, Miss Eleanor McTavish, and the rest of her bridal party consisted of friends from childhood and her school chums from Agnes Scott College in Atlanta where, up until her engagement, Miss McTavish had been studying literature.

The couple plan on settling in the groom’s hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, after a lengthy European honeymoon that will see them sail to Paris before moving on to Nice, the Loire Valley, Rome, Milan, and finally London.

Congratulations, and bon voyage to Mr. and Mrs. Duke Callahan!

—Society Chatter Newsletter (Southeastern Region), Spring 1961





CHAPTER FOUR

Camden

I feel the house before I see it.

That probably sounds stupid to you, and if I had grown up in anything resembling a normal family, I’m pretty sure it would have seemed stupid to me, too.

But as our car winds its way up the mountain, my fingers tighten around the steering wheel, and cold sweat breaks out on my upper lip, my lower back. The trees here are still green, leafy and huge, their roots burrowing into the dirt and the rocks, and the blacktop cuts a dark ribbon in front of me as we go up, up, up.

It’s impossible not to think about the last time I was on this road.

Back then, I was headed down, down, down, away from Ashby House, away from the McTavishes, away from memories that I couldn’t bear to recall. I remember turning up the radio so loud that it made my back teeth ache, the drums and the bass crashing through my brain, the kind of noise that would have made Ruby say, “Turn that down, for goodness’ sake, Camden! I can’t hear myself think!”

That’s what I was going for, a sound so loud that thoughts were impossible.

But it turns out there are some thoughts that no amount of noise can silence, and I’d made that drive down the mountain with nausea coiled in my stomach and my face wet with tears.

I swore I’d never go back.

So it feels slightly unreal to make that last turn, that place where the asphalt becomes dirt for just a few yards, pitted with holes, thick tree roots bumping us along hard enough that Jules grabs what she calls the “Oh Shit Handle” above her head.

Nelle wanted to pave this part of the road, but Ruby said that would make it too easy for people to come and gawk at the gates of the house. I always thought she overestimated just how much people wanted to see a random chimney or the hint of a window, but there had been several times I’d driven out of those gates as a teenager to see a family in a rented Subaru pulled over on the side of the road near the gate, phones in hand, standing up on their tiptoes in bright white sneakers as they strained to catch a glimpse.

Personally, I couldn’t give a shit if tourists came to look—isn’t that why people build places like this, anyway?—but I agreed with Ruby that we shouldn’t make the road smooth. Let all these bumps and jostles and the fear of a blown tire serve as a warning of what they’d find at the top of this mountain.

A haunted house where the ghosts hadn’t had the courtesy to die yet.

I clench my teeth.

This is why I didn’t want to come back here. I don’t think shit like that in Colorado. There, I’m mostly focused on work, on things I need to do around the house, on Jules. I like that version of myself—a normal guy, with a normal life––and I had started to believe that, maybe, that’s who I was now.

But apparently not. Put me on the road to Ashby, and I’m that Cam again. Ruby’s project, heir to the McTavish estate, the “Luckiest Boy in North Carolina.”

That was a real thing someone wrote about me. It was for some magazine profile Ruby did when I was twelve. I remember the photographers coming to the house, the scratchy suit Ruby made me wear. The photographer took a picture of me in my bedroom, a massive suite on the west side of the house that had gorgeous sunset views, but was decorated like it belonged to one of the Golden Girls. All chintz and florals, a big canopy bed (every twelve-year-old boy’s dream, a canopy bed).