Family Vault Read Online Free Page B

comforts, Sarah had devised herself a garment especially for these affairs, long-sleeved, long skirted, cut simply as a paper doll’s dress from thick, soft blanket material in a blue the exact shade of Alexander’s eyes. She needed something more dramatic to set it off than her grandmother’s amethyst brooch and the little string of pearls Alexander had given her when they were married, but those were all she had, so she put them on.
    Some day, she’d possess more jewels than any one woman could possibly wear. It was ridiculous that she mightn’t be allowed to enjoy a few of the pieces now. What a ghastly life, hanging around waiting for Aunt Caroline to die!
    Was that what they were doing? Startled by a thought she had never allowed to enter her head before, Sarah stared, with no sense of identification, at the face reflected in the greenish, speckled mirror. It was only some young woman with light brown hair and gray brown eyes, one set a tiny bit higher than the other in a pale, square face. She dabbed a little color on the lips, grabbed up the amethyst eardrops that went with the brooch, and ran downstairs, fastening them in her ears as she went.
    Alexander was still waiting. He had the shiny, balding muskrat cape that had been her mother’s ready to throw over her shoulders.
    “You mustn’t hurry so in that long skirt,” he chided gently. “You might trip and fall.”
    “But you said to rush,” she snapped back. “Where’s Aunt Caroline?”
    “Out on the front steps. Mother likes to take her time going down, you know.”
    Of course Sarah knew. There was not one quirk or whim of her mother-in-law’s that she hadn’t had drilled into her during the past seven years. This was still Caroline Kelling’s house, and around Caroline it still revolved. Who could object to that, when common sense dictated that everything be left where it always had been so that a blind woman could find her way about the rooms without having to be guided, and common decency decreed that somebody doubly afflicted be given every consideration? Could a wife begrudge her husband’s spending most of his waking hours with his mother, when it was only through Alexander that Caroline was able to lead anything like a normal life?
    Not even if helping Caroline live as she wished meant that Sarah and Alexander had no life at all? They hardly even talked to each other any more. They’d had a more satisfying relationship back when Sarah was six years old and Cousin Alexander a godlike young man in Brooks Brothers flannels who took her for walks in the Public Garden on Sunday afternoons while his mother played chess with Sarah’s father. She’d adored him then. She supposed she still did. Anyway, there wasn’t much she could do about it now.
    Hugging the inadequate wrap around her shoulders, Sarah tagged after her husband and the white-haired woman who was almost as tall as he. Caroline Kelling kept one hand on her son’s arm because the sidewalk had an almost precipitous pitch, but she held her back straight as the white cane she carried, and never once stumbled on the uneven bricks.
    The Lackridges lived on the water side of Beacon Hill, in a smart town house converted from what had once been Leila’s grandparents’ carriage house. What was originally the family mansion now housed a prestigious but not always lucrative publishing business that Leila’s family had established and Harry Lackridge had married his way into.
    When Leila and Harry were married, they’d scouted their respective families’ attics and storerooms for whatever oddments of furniture they could lay their hands on. Leila had then called in an interior decorator and bullied her into making visual sense of the hodgepodge. Now she had a cleaning service in once a week, and every six or eight years she had the place repainted and papered in much the same patterns and colors as before. Over the years, the rooms had taken on a curious quality of being embalmed. Leila