Burnt Mountain by Anne Rivers Siddons

Author:Anne Rivers Siddons [Siddons, Anne Rivers]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 0446527890
Google: JpNSEtTE9L8C
Amazon: B00495ZCRS
Goodreads: 11432225
Publisher: Hachette Digital, Inc.
Published: 2009-01-02T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

On the first morning of our honeymoon we slept late. It was nearing noon when we woke fully, and for a long time we simply lay entwined and still, tangled in Grand’s silky sheets.

“Porthault,” I said lazily. “At least one-thousand thread count. What a way to start a honeymoon.”

“I don’t know about thread counts,” Aengus said. “All I know about sheets is that the widow’s are made of something you could strike a match on. Well, you know.”

“The higher the thread count the more expensive the sheets. Look, you can almost see through these. Fine French linen.”

“Well, then,” he said comfortably. “It’s almost lunchtime. Do you want to get some lunch at the Beach Club, or would you rather…”

We were in Grand’s big old house on the beach on Sea Island, Georgia. Besides the residential homes that ran the length of the island, set in groves of live oaks and palms facing the sea, there was only the fabled old Cloister hotel on Sea Island. I loved the Cloister. Every time we visited Grand’s house, we took some of our meals there, eating huge breakfasts and listening at dinner to the string trio. I loved the spectacular Spanish room, with its towering stained-glass windows and cages of singing birds. There were graham crackers and milk set out for you in the entrance lobby at bedtime, and the vast green lawns were carpet smooth, bordered with blooming flowers and overhung by ancient, twisted live oaks scarved in Spanish moss that sometimes touched the grass. There were stables, sailing, outdoor Plantation Suppers, cycling, skeet shooting, tennis, deep-sea fishing, two ocean-side pools, and numerous small patios tucked away for alfresco dining. The Cloister always seemed an enchanted kingdom to me. Grand’s house was almost as good.

It rose two stories of stucco above its emerald seaside lawn. In her second-floor bedroom we were in the treetops; you could touch the Spanish moss from her balcony. A hedge of roses along the shorefront opened to the path down to the beach, and someone had set up an umbrella table and little wrought-iron chairs on the highest shelf on the beach. The low dunes ran down to wet, hard-packed beach and then into the water, slow and gentle and dark green, toy waves ruffling on the sand. Pelicans and gulls rode the thermals over the water, but we saw no people. Most of them, I thought, would be at lunch, or perhaps swimming in the pools that lay behind the dunes. We had had a midnight swim in Grand’s. My hair still smelled of chlorine and sulfur. I could not imagine that it did not gag Aengus, but he buried his face deep in it and said it had an exotic kind of beachy smell. Grand’s bedroom was papered in a soft peach satin-stripe wallpaper, and in the glow from that and the flare of the June sun off the balcony his face, dark stubbled as it was, was lit like an excited child’s.

“I’m not hungry right now,” I said.

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