The Winters(20)

We finally broke out of the forested part of the drive and came upon an open road that seemed to come to a dead end at the beach. There, instead of stopping, Max sped up. We were heading straight into the water.

“Max! Stop!” I screamed, bracing for impact.

“Whoa! It’s okay!” Max said, guiding my torso back against the seat as the car made a sudden transition from bumpy to smooth, the road becoming the causeway that connected Long Island to Winter’s Island. My hand remained over my heart.

“Did you think I was going to drive us into the bay?”

“No . . . I couldn’t see the road.”

Beyond the windshield, water churned and splashed angrily against the stone shoulders of the raised road. Max glanced over at me, mindful now of my nerves. He slowed as we exited the causeway and pulled up to a set of iron gates, easily ten feet high, with thick pickets spiked at the top, Asherley forged in an ornate cutout. Thinner pickets of descending size extended fifty feet to the left and right of the gates, blending into the black trees. The fence didn’t circumnavigate the island, Max told me. White-tailed deer lived there, and beavers and swans, but the gate kept cars from making easy passage to the house, unless you walked, braving the rocky shores before traversing the forest and its thick undergrowth. Max hit a button under his seat and the gates swung open, shoving great wings of snow out of their way.

“Looks like Gus got the plow out in time,” Max said as he inched the car along another densely forested mile before Asherley. Now there was little to see out the window, just the dark shadows of tree trunks lining our narrow path. There were no streetlights, no porch lights flickering through the trees, indicating life nearby should our car skid off the road. I’d been prepared for Asherley to be secluded, but the near blackness made it feel even more remote. My fears took on a different flavor now, more primal. I thought of Rebekah careening around the narrow bends and I understood how dangerous this drive would be at high speeds, and how a fire could flatten several acres before anyone spotted the smoke. If something happened out here, who would know?

At a final bend, Max made a hard right and we abruptly left the forest and drove into a smattering of fat snowflakes the trees had been shielding us from. Before us lay acres of rolling expanse, which, reflected off the dusk sky, painted the snow a pale indigo. In the distance I spotted Asherley, its massive silhouette pocked with a dozen blazing windows. This must have been the vantage point from which Max took the picture he had shown me on the boat so many weeks ago, the day he took one of me. It occurred to me then that he hadn’t taken another one, not even in New York.

“Home,” Max said.

We inched into the long oval drive, and I sunk a little as the entirety of Asherley emerged, its windows glowing orange with lights or fires, giving the house the appearance of a ghostly barge closing in on us.

Because the snow and glass were the same milky-blue color, the greenhouse, at first, was camouflaged. Now here it was, too, looking as though a strange starship had crashed neatly into the side of the stone porch. This isn’t a place where a person lives, I thought; here you reign. And in that moment, wearing wool socks, jeans, and a comfy flannel shirt, I couldn’t have felt less regal. Max shut off the car and my ears pounded with my own heartbeat. When I saw celebrities in the Caymans I was always struck by how plain and diminutive many were without the accoutrements of fame. This was the opposite sensation.

“Ready?”

I nodded and swallowed, my eyes trailing up the side of the highest turret, where a low light glowed from within. Out of the front door a man came running towards us, using a coat as a shield against the snow blowing off the eaves.

“Ah, Elias!” Max exclaimed. “My left-and right-hand man.”

Elias came around to open my door. We yelled our introductions over the weather.

“Take her,” said Max. “I’ll put the car away.”

I ducked under Elias’s temporary tarp and we scrambled up the porch steps together, through the double doors, twice as high as me, and into a wall of warm air laced with the velvety smell of roses wafting from a massive bouquet of red ones on a table near the staircase. There Elias introduced me to a young man named Gus who had thick brows and was wearing a heavy coat. When I stuck out my hand, he ignored it in lieu of a brisk nod before running out the door to help Max.

“I hope I didn’t frighten him,” I said.

“He’s shy at first, but he’s a good guy,” Elias said, taking my coat and disappearing into the anteroom off the foyer.

From my earlier Internet searches, I knew an unsettling number of details that made Asherley so extraordinary, like the fact that the marble floor my boots were dripping onto had been sliced out of a quarry in the Hudson Valley, and Rebekah had them refurbished by an expert who used only diamond grit pads from Italy. I also knew that the rounded, hand-carved walls of the anteroom hid two tall cabinets that had been shipped from Brussels, one housing coats and boots and the other rifles and guns, some antique, some modern. I also recognized the stained-glass crescent window above the entry door, depicting a pack of dogs leaping after a dove that once hung in a sixteenth-century monastery. I thought knowing these facts from my snooping might tamp down my sense of fraudulence, but I was wrong. I stood stunned by a grandeur not truly captured in pictures.

Elias came bounding back into the foyer. “When Max told me about your engagement I was quite surprised. And, of course, thrilled.”