have to go down there?”
Jarvis looked at his watch.
“Forty-seven minutes. The summons expires after that, and you could end up in Purgatory for failure to comply with a direct order from a minion of Hell,” Jarvis added quickly.
“Good thing I came to visit when I did,” I said, curious at the way fate seemed to work these things out.
“Yes,” Jarvis said, eyeing me like I was some alien creature whose actions he could just not comprehend. “ Good thing , as you say.”
I spent the next forty-three minutes sitting in one of my favorite spots in all the grounds at Sea Verge. It wasn’t overlooking the water, or ensconced in the English rose garden. No, it was a simple little spot, just a small stone chair really, nestled between a pair of spindly pink tulip trees, but it had always felt special to me. Like it was my place.
Next to the chair was a small stone statue of a little girl kneeling beside a tiny rabbit, her fingers tentatively reaching out to touch the quivering bunny’s flank. I had no idea who the girl was, but she always seemed very sad to me. The idea of forever reaching out to touch something that you could never reach . . . Well, it was just really depressing.
I guess that was why I liked the spot so much. It reminded me of me a little bit. I was always reaching out to be human but remaining immortal for as long as my dad saw fit to keep me that way.
I looked out past the water, the sound of its foaming bulk gently crashing against the rocks acting like a lullaby to my frayed nerves. Finally, I turned my attention back to Sea Verge itself.
The hands of men may have built our house, but its origins were entirely the brainchild of a woman, the shipping heiress Sophia Miles-Stanton. The legend went that she had drawn up the architectural plans herself in a frenzy of creativity one night and just presented them to her architect the way the Goddess Athena had burst fully grown from her father Zeus’s forehead.
The construction of the house took the better part of two years to finish, but while she waited for her dream home to be completed, Sophia was anything but idle. She hired a young man named Edwin Bell, formerly of the landscape design firm Olmstead and Vaux—the very firm that had designed Brooklyn’s jewel, Prospect Park—to help her conceive of the gardens that would surround the house.
It was during the course of their collaboration that the upstart young landscape artist fell in love with Sophia, a fact you can see directly in the small tokens of his affection that are interspersed throughout the gardens. Only pink roses—Sophia’s favorite—bloom in the delicately sculpted English rose garden; forget-me-nots pop up like clockwork every spring with a pugnacious vitality; summer sweet and wild honeysuckle proliferate along the stone pathways and in the pink tulip tree-shaded overlooks that dot the edge of Sea Verge’s grounds.
At the lip of the most northerly cliffs, there are three small stone benches overlooking the water. The benches, all three made from the same polished white marble, are overgrown with a strain of Virginia creeper whose leaves turn a dusty shade of rose at the first sign of autumn, making the benches appear as if they’re upholstered in pink fabric. That same vine has become so prolific that it’s made its way back up to the main house and has slowly been taking over the entire north side of Sea Verge for as long as I can remember.
One summer my sister Clio and I discovered an inscription hidden underneath the middlemost of the three benches. Time and the salty ocean air had almost destroyed the words, but if you looked closely enough, you could still make them out: “My love lingers here always—EB.”
Clio and I thought it was the most romantic thing we’d ever seen . . . until we discovered that Edwin Bell, heartsick over his unrequited love for Sophia Miles-Stanton, had purportedly leapt to his death from that very spot. The official story was