Ironwood

They went in June: Ray and Nina Duval, the three children, Sylvie, and Hollis, in a rented van with a roof rack, for two weeks in a house with a dock on a lake outside Lenox.

The Berkshires in June were green in a way that Ashford was not green, with the hills folded up behind each other and the water flat and bright at seven in the morning. The children learned to swim. Ray fished badly. Nina read four novels on the dock. Sylvie, who had come because Hollis had insisted and because there was nothing left in Ashford to wait for, slept ten hours a night and began, slowly, to look like herself.

On the fourth day Nina said it was the day for Ironwood.

Hollis had prepared a whole argument and did not use it. She got into the van.

The house was a mile beyond the village, at the end of a road under beeches, built of grey stone with a long facade and two wings, and it stood on a rise above its own lake with lawns going down to the water in three terraces. A sign at the gate said the grounds were open Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, ten to four, and the house by ticket, and the car park had eleven cars in it.

They bought tickets. The housekeeper who let them in was a woman of sixty named Mrs. Quist who had been at Ironwood for thirty-one years and who conducted them through eleven rooms with the cheerful, undiscriminating pride of a person who has decided that everything in a house is remarkable.

Hollis went through the rooms with the children making noise ahead of her and Nina exclaiming behind her, counting the windows on her left without looking at them, keeping her eyes on the skirting boards and on the back of Mrs. Quist's head, and listened.

Her nephew, said Mrs. Quist, gesturing at the portrait over the drawing room mantel, painted when he was twenty-two, three years before his father died — a young man in a black coat, standing, with his hand on a chair. He had been a different person then, said Mrs. Quist, and everyone said so. "He was always a serious boy," she said. "Serious and then shy and then serious again. He has had the property since he was eight-and-twenty and the firm since the same week, and it broke something in him, or it made something in him, and I have known him since he was born and I will say this: there is not a tenant on this estate, and there are two hundred and six of them, who has ever been turned out of a house, and not a man in the village who has ever asked him for a thing and been refused where it was in his power to give it. His sister is the same. Miss Imogen is nineteen and she plays the harp and she has been in that conservatory every morning of her life since she was six."

"Is he here?" said Nina, brightly.

"No, madam. He is expected in August. The family is in the city until then."

They walked the gardens. They walked down through the three terraces to the lake, and along the water's edge, and back up through the beeches, and the children ran ahead on the lawn, and they came round the corner of the west wing into the rose garden, and there was a man walking up from the boathouse in a wet shirt.

He was wet to the waist and barefoot, carrying shoes, with his sleeves rolled, and he had been swimming or rowing or both, and he had not expected company, and he stopped dead on the path with water running off him and said, "Miss Arden."

The children, who had been shouting, stopped too. Nina said, "Mr. Ashcroft," in the tone of a woman who has been handed the best possible afternoon.

He said he had come up the day before and had not told anyone. He said the housekeeper would have said he was in the city because the housekeeper had been told to say so. He said, to Nina, that they must see the conservatory, which was not on the ticket, and he walked them back across the lawn in his bare feet and opened it himself, and the children ran in among the citrus trees and screamed, and Imogen Ashcroft was there with a book.

She was nineteen. She had Roman's eyes and her mother's fragility and a manner so quiet it seemed like a decision. She had been told who they were. She said to Hollis, "I am very glad you have come," with a simplicity that would have been impossible in anyone who had not spent a year being protected, and Hollis, who had read a four-page letter about this girl and had believed a four-page letter about this girl, felt the back of her neck go hot and said, "I am very glad to be here."

They stayed four hours. Roman Ashcroft walked them to the gate. He talked to Ray Duval about shipping containers for twenty minutes with real interest, and about the apple crop, and about hard cider, and he asked Hollis what the tank gauge had said in February and she told him, and he said, "You should not be losing money on fruit like that," and she said, "We are not losing money on fruit, we are losing money on a trust," and he said, "Yes," and then he said, "I would like to look at it if I may. I have a man who does nothing but orchards."

He asked permission to call. He asked it formally, of Nina.

And he wrote to Ray Duval twice after that, about a cidery in western Massachusetts and about a distributor in Albany, and Ray reported, with the solemnity of a man delivering a verdict, "He is the best correspondent I have had in twenty years of business, and he is either trying to buy apples off me or he is trying to get into your family, and I have decided it is the second one and I approve.