Bittersweet by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore Read Free Book Online

memories, for her, it was a point of pride—for the first time in her life, she was eating what she had earned.

CHAPTER EIGHT
The Stroll
    O n the fourth day, it rained. The constant patter was comforting, the best memory I’d brought from the Pacific Northwest. Though the cottage uttered small complaints against the gusts buffeting up from the cove, the roof did not leak (save for a spot in the bathroom, but that was nothing a rusty, pinging Sanka can couldn’t fix), and the damp air wafting in from the screen porch somehow made our cleaning feel all the more appreciated.
    It was good to roll up my sleeves and see results. But it wasn’t lost on me that part of why I was burrowing, so gamely, into the cleaning—beyond the time alone with Ev and what my elbow grease might secure for me—was that it gave me a reason to hide. I could taste the humiliation anew every time I thought of Ev’s brother’s face in the window. Saturday loomed, when Birch would descend and give us the thumbs-up or -down. As the week drew to a close, I comforted myself in knowing I wouldn’t have to step beyond the walls of Bittersweet at least until after our inspector arrived.
    But on the fifth day, after Ev tromped in from her morning walk and declared, “I’ve decided that I’m much better as an early bird than a night owl, so from now on, I shall go to bed at ten o’clock sharp” (which we both knew was a lie but which we nodded at together in fiendish denial), she further announced, “And I’m going to scrapethe porch on my own today, so you’re free, free, free!” I realized that what she was saying in her Ev way was that she wanted the cottage to herself, and, although I took the news somewhat grudgingly, I had known all along that I’d have to leave Bittersweet someday. It was Friday morning. If Ev was right about Galway only coming up on weekends, then he wasn’t at Winloch yet. A stroll through the woods wouldn’t do me any harm, and I’d get to finally explore the place I’d been dreaming of and, yes, researching, for months.
    Although Vermont is frigid in the winter, its summertime shimmers. That’s stating the obvious to anyone who knows New England, but it was my brave new world. The mud season that begins in March and lasts well through May buffers one’s mind from winter’s ravages, so that, by the glorious day when neon-green leaf buds first appear on every tree, one can barely remember the bitter February winds streaming off the lake in great, frigid sloughs. Every year, the lake freezes solid around the shoreline, groaning and cracking under the push of the shifting wind, but, in the century-long life of Winloch, the winter had been heard only by the workingmen, men called in to plow the roads, or plumb frozen pipes, men who had the north country in their blood and the dried-up curl of French Canadian on their tongues. Winloch was a summer place, built of pine and screen and not much else, and the Winslows its only, rarefied, inhabitants.
    It had been that way for over a century. Ev’s great-great-grandfather Samson Winslow, 1850–1931, paterfamilias—captured in black-and-white photographs, arms akimbo, on the deck of a sloop, in front of a bank, beside his blushing bride—looked at once a dinosaur and a modern man. Only the clothes set him back. The shape of his face—high cheekbones, wry smile—was full of twentieth-century vigor. His mother was Scottish, his father a Brit, and his was iron money, invested in coal money, invested in oil money. Once Samson had made himself a good fortune, he moved his young family to a grand manse in Burlington proper, washed the coal dust and sticky oil fromhis hands in the limpid lake, and bought himself a tract of farmland that stretched beside its waters. The lake, laid out at the foot of the Green Mountains that gave Vermont its name, reminded him of the lochs of his mother’s homeland. He married that name with his own, and called his paradise Winloch.
    Even