If You Fall I Will Catch You

C.P. Hudson

Illustrations by John Schmelzer

Photos by Bob Williamson

1923

            Christmas was John Steele’s favorite time of year. His servants had come to Brighton Shores a week earlier to decorate the house. They had hung a holly wreath on the front door to welcome him and his new wife home from their long trip. The tree in the parlor blazed with colored lights and delicate glass ornaments. Fresh cut boughs were woven into the banister of the central foyer’s staircase giving the house a clean, pine smell.

That evening Steele sat at the desk in his second floor study and opened the book Madeline had bought for him on their first day in Paris. It was in French; its title translated to The Book of Lives. That seemed ironic to him. He took his Parker Duofold pen from his vest pocket and wrote Ex Libris John Paul Steele on the flyleaf in his clear, steady hand. He blotted the ink and closed the cover. He would enter the book into his inventory tomorrow and find a place for it on the shelves.

He went to one of the tall windows and looked out. The front lawn sloped down to Lambert Avenue, named after his late father. The wide sandy beach on the other side of Lambert was empty except for a few laughing gulls scavenging on the shoreline. The clouds above the Gulfstream were going from pink to gray in the fading winter light.

Steele had read every volume in the floor-to-ceiling bookcases behind him. His father, George Lambert Steele, Jr., had bought the wide partners’ desk in the middle of the room on a business trip to New Orleans. John and his two brothers had inherited a fortune from their father. John had made another fortune working long days and nights at that old desk.

He went back across the room, sat in his leather desk chair, and filled his old Meerschaum pipe with a fragrant burley tobacco. This was his real home. This was the home he had built. This was his place, not Steele Away, the family’s winter home down at the south tip of the island, and certainly not that old brick monstrosity his grandfather had built in Cleveland.

Steele tamped down the tobacco, took a match, struck it, and drew the flame into the pipe’s bowl. He had bought the pipe in Salzburg 25 years earlier during a Grand Tour of Europe with his first wife. She had conceived their son Johnny on that trip. On the way home they had stopped at Brighton in the south of England. He knew at once he had to have a home like the Royal Pavilion with its dazzling white exterior, onion dome roof, and minarets. He didn’t care that everybody in town hated it. He didn’t want his home to look like every other prissy white gingerbread Victorian on the island. Three wives had come, and three wives had gone, as the house slowly rose on a knoll overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. When construction was done, he named his house Babur, the “Tiger,” after the 16^th century Persian conqueror of India whose Mughal style he had copied.

He went to a side chair near the fireplace, found that morning’s copy of The West Brighton Shores Star, puffed on his pipe, and tried to distract himself.

The Great War was five years in the past but the stench of death had lingered in Europe. Steele had left Madeline to continue her shopping in Paris, hired a car, and was driven to the Bois Belleau where Johnny, a Marine in the Second Corps, had died. His chauffeur, an old man with a few unruly wisps of white hair, had lost all three of his sons to the trenches. The old man had been unable to leave the car when Steele had put flowers on a mass grave.

Steele and the old man could not speak on the drive back to Paris.

Still, Steele and his new wife had enjoyed their honeymoon. Madeline, much younger than he, had never been to the Middle East or Europe. For her the sights of Jerusalem, Cairo, Vienna, Rome, Paris and London were a great adventure. For him they brought back memories of times and places far in the past whose existence he tried to deny.

He got up and put another log on the fire. A thought that had crossed his mind many times since he had first read The Book of Lives came back. Was Johnny’s death the price for sins of the past? Maybe that book should go into the fire instead of onto his shelves.

Steele was restless from the enforced confinement of the long trip home from Europe. He walked across the broad upstairs hall to Madeline’s dressing room and knocked at her door.

“Is that you, John?”

The enchanting drawl of New Orleans still stirred him. “Yes, my dear.” He opened the door and slipped in.

His new wife smiled and stood up from her dressing table. “You look so handsome in evening wear.” She had just emerged from a long bath that had washed off the dusty ride on Mr. Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railroad. The only towel she wore was around her long black hair.

John put his hand on her rounding belly. “And you look so beautiful wearing nothing at all.” He reached to pull her closer.

She gave him a playful shove away. “Go downstairs and cut some roses.” She patted her stomach. “Don’t you think you’ve done quite enough already?” A smile - so bewitching. A promise - not now my love, but later.

Steele found hand pruning sheers and a garden basket in the butler’s pantry. He went out the back door, down the steps, and across the lawn to his garden. A rapidly moving front had brought a badly needed afternoon rain and cool weather to South Florida.

Their guests would be arriving within the hour for a small welcome home dinner and a chance to see his new wife. Madeline had created a stir both in Cleveland and here in Brighton Shores. She was a young, beautiful woman, thirty years younger than Steele, but that alone would not have been counted against her. Men of John’s class and age often had pretty young mistresses. They even occasionally divorced their wives and married these women. It was true that Madeline was his fourth wife, but the stir, the scandal, was that she had dark golden skin, a long striking exotic face, and blazing black eyes.

The roses were still damp from the rain. They would look good in the tall Sèvres vase Madeline had found in a small shop in the Latin Quarter on the Rue St. Jacques.

John grew annoyed as he worked. His gardener never trimmed the rose bushes correctly. His agent in Ireland had sent him a new variety only last year called Betty Uprichard. The flowers were a beautiful salmon pink, but if the man didn’t take better care, as hardy as they were, they might not survive another season. He would have to talk to his estate manager about this. Perhaps it was time to let the man go.

Steele selected the best flowers and carefully trimmed their stems. The wicker basket filled slowly.

There was a garden shed at the back of his property. Steele hadn’t been able to resist the temptation of another poke at his conservative neighbors before Babur’s construction was complete. He had shoved his architect aside and personally designed the shed to look like a miniature Taj Mahal complete with an onion dome roof and a tiny pond in the front.

He didn’t hear the person coming from behind the shed. It was only when he caught a glint of light on the blade of an ax that he looked up. It happened so quickly that he didn’t have time to raise a hand to defend himself. “It’s you,” was all he could say before the blade tore into the left side of his neck.