“I got this,” Phoebe says. As she brings the box of booze to his car, it occurs to her that she is literally helping Gary and Lila get married with her own brute strength. But that is her job.
Back inside the car, her phone dings.
“It’s Geoffrey!” Phoebe says. “Craigslist isn’t just for murderers!!”
“Huh? Who is Geoffrey?”
“The mansion keeper,” she says. She hands him the phone. “The winter guy. Hey, can you read this aloud?”
“In any particular accent?” he asks.
“You do accents?”
“Only around total strangers.”
“What are my options?”
“New York,” he says. “Boston. Rhode Island. I’m limited regionally.”
“When in Rhode Island.”
“Hi, Phoebe,” he says, in a Rhode Island accent, which is just a more pronounced version of the way his mother talks. “Thank you for your interest in the Newcombe Mansion. I must say, I am keen to meet you, as I am very delighted to hear you have a PhD in nineteenth-century literature. As you know, the Newcombe Mansion was built in 1845 by a Civil War hero, Jonathan Newcombe, so this seems fortuitous. I hope I have the chance to meet an applicant with your level of expertise.”
“Wait, a winter keeper?” Gary asks, in his regular voice. “What are winter keepers?”
“People who caretake mansions. In the winter, when the owners are at their real homes. Turns out it’s a job in Newport.”
“Newcombe is a twenty-room property,” he reads again in his accent. “I would love to show you. I am available to meet you anytime this afternoon or tomorrow. I am hoping to have the matter settled before the end of the weekend.”
“Holy shit!” she says. “Tell him I can meet him later after I drop you off.”
“No, sorry,” he says. “I’m coming with you to see this mansion.”
“But we have to get your tux,” she says.
“That can wait.” He writes back to Geoffrey, and she puts the address in Waze.
“Wait, why don’t you have a Rhode Island accent?” she asks. “Aren’t you from Rhode Island?”
“I took a speech class at Yale, trained myself out of it.”
“Wow,” she says. “Traitor.”
THE NEWCOMBE MANSION is guarded by tall iron gates that someone painted blue. The gates open as they approach.
“Naturally,” Gary says.
Geoffrey waits for them in the front entrance. He is a small, Southern man wearing a light peach suit. He looks especially small next to the big house. The entrance is so formal, with giant gargoyles up on the roof, and when Phoebe says hello, she half expects Geoffrey to bow or curtsy. But he shakes her hand like any old American.
He welcomes her into the house and starts by telling her that this is a position exclusively for caretaking the interior.
“We have people for the grounds,” he says. “But our main interior caretaker of ten years just unexpectedly resigned.”
He asks what experience she has caretaking nineteenth-century mansions, and she tells him she has no experience, though researched many for her dissertation. She doesn’t harp on the fact that most of them were fictional estates, often discussed primarily as metaphors for colonialism.
“In my line of work, I research historical buildings a lot,” she says. “I have a chapter in my dissertation about Victorian domestic interiors. I study the way nineteenth-century novels portray domestic space as primarily female and the natural world as primarily male.”
She tells him about the years she spent in the basement archives, and it feels good to talk about her research again. All those hours in grad school she spent cataloging the effects of each room on the characters in Jane Eyre—she would sit in the library and look up and before she knew it, it would be dark. She loved those early days, when she didn’t know exactly what she was writing yet, when she was just on the cusp of figuring it out.
“Excellent,” Geoffrey says. “Because this is a job about research. Let’s say this fabric wallpaper from 1845 starts to tear. What do you do?”
“I don’t know,” Phoebe admits. “But I would research it until I found out.”
Geoffrey laughs.
“Somehow, I believe you,” he says. “Shall we?”
They turn to the door and Phoebe sees a face carved into the wood. “Is that Dante?”
“I’m really glad you know that,” Geoffrey says.
HE TAKES THEM through the grand courtyard. He tells them about the owner, how he built this house for his daughter, Elizabeth.
“You can see Elizabeth’s collection of Parisian art in the dining room,” Geoffrey says. “She ended up marrying a French banker, who is featured here in this painting. But they didn’t get along, and Elizabeth spent much of her time traveling the world, collecting the art and the vases you’ll see everywhere in this house.”
Then he gets a phone call.
“I need to take this,” Geoffrey says. “Why don’t you go through and look at the place on your own, let me know what you think?”
