I was in a funny mood after Austin went home around nine—emotionally exhausted, but too keyed up for sleep. I tried watching television, reading, I even took a long hot bath, but nothing worked.
At midnight I went downstairs to the studio and sat at my drawing board for a long time, playing with my box of colored pencils. I switched on the CD player, which was loaded with Gloria’s idea of good listening. My aunt has wildly eclectic musical taste—everything from show tunes to sixties rock to old school rap to country.
Lately she’d been on a Sinatra kick. With the rain still beating down on the sidewalk outside, I discovered I was in a Sinatra mood my ownself.
With Old Blue Eyes crooning to Nelson Riddle’s lush orchestrations, I picked up a pencil and started sketching. At first I was just doing stream-of-consciousness doodles around the edges of my sketch pad. Gothic armchairs, fragments of window treatments, even a small still life of Gloria’s coffee mug and a peach she’d left sitting on a paper towel beside it.
Without really thinking about it, I started sketching the front of a house. It was a grand Greek Revival house with seven two-story-tall Corinthian columns, and a pair of rounded porches extending off to each side of the house. I did a thumbnail sketch of a carved pilaster and pediment doorway and a richly detailed front door. I cocked my head and gave the drawing a critical look. No. The house was too grand. It needed a human touch. I sketched a pair of muddy boots hastily discarded by the door, and a battered little teddy bear propped up in a rocking chair. At one corner of the porch, I drew in the tail fins of an old Caddy. Better. But it needed something more. First a head—big, with a muzzle propped on its feet, and ears flopped back. This dog wasn’t any specific breed. It was just a dog. A dog waiting patiently to be fed and petted and loved.
Like the house. Without thinking, I’d sketched Mulberry Hill. Not as it was—battered and abandoned—but as it should be one day. With a family to love it and pet it.
I put my pencil down and went to the bookshelves on the far wall of the studio. We keep fabric samples in woven rush baskets on the shelves, all colorized and sorted by manufacturer and type—florals here, plaids there, solids, wovens, stripes, heavyweight upholstery separated from lightweight drapery sheers.
I pulled out one basket after another, extracting any sample that caught my eye and lit my imagination. When I had three swatches, I knew I’d found my theme color. Yellow. Not gold, not saffron. A clear, sunny yellow. It was a happy, canary color, just what Mulberry Hill needed to make it cheerful and timeless, but contemporary enough to please someone like Stephanie. I took a couple of baskets of yellow fabrics over to the worktable and plunged my hands in—like lowering a dipper into a bucket of sunshine.
With the yellows selected, I branched out into other colors, lots of bright, willow blues—to go with a fabulous Peking blue Oriental rug, which would then cry out for Chinese red accents. I’d seen a photo of just the right rug in the catalog for the upcoming Southgate gallery auction. I found the catalog in the in basket on my desk and quickly leafed through it. Good, it was a huge rug and would work perfectly in the dining room. Nothing looks worse than a dinky rug in a grand room. If I got the rug, I decided, the dining room could go red—Benjamin Moore has a great red called Chili Pepper. And maybe we’d do a glaze finish, if Will was as adventurous as I hoped. And mirrors. I smiled. Stephanie would want mirrors everywhere.
The twin parlors and the dining rooms could go fairly formal—but in an overstuffed, friendly kind of way—nothing that wouldn’t stand up to that big dog I’d sketched on the front porch. The memory of that dog made me frown. How would such a beast get along with neurotic little Erwin? Wait. In reality, there was no big dog. My job was to design a house, I reminded myself—not a life.
Back to the dining room. I tapped my pencil against my teeth. A big oval or rectangular table would be de rigueur. But what if we did something different—something unexpected? Maybe two round tables, with leaves to seat twelve apiece? But no. There was only one Waterford chandelier, and clearly the dining room cried out for it. I would just have to find a wonderful table and maybe get more creative with the seating.
I found my mind wandering back to Stephanie’s closet. I’d seen a suit jacket there, beautifully tailored in a taupe-colored linen, with black topstitching, cut close and long, with unusual tortoiseshell buttons and self-covered buttonholes. It had that expensive couture look.
What if I turned the look of that jacket around? I doodled around with chair backs, finally settling on a square-backed chair with satiny ebony legs with X-shaped stretchers. The chairs could be custom built, then slipcovered in a variety of fabrics, maybe a Schumacher chintz in deep reds and blues, and for a more casual feeling, something close to that linen, with the black topstitching and tortoiseshell buttons down the back of the chair.
Which gave me another idea. I hunted through a stack of copies of Veranda magazines until I found the issue I wanted. The cover shot was of a dining room—with chair backs like the ones I was envisioning. But these had been slipcovered with exquisite heirloom French damask banquet napkins, each embroidered with elaborate monograms centered on the chair front. Unlike the designer who’d done that dining room, I didn’t have a stack of a dozen such antique napkins at hand. But there was an antiques dealer in Madison who always had vintage damask linens, and my upholstery woman, Vinh, had a cousin who did amazing hand—not machine—embroidery and monogramming.
Oh yes. Monograms would be just the ticket for Miss Stephanie Scofield.
I was off to the races. Sinatra crooned, and I sketched like a fiend, ripping illustrations from magazines and catalogs, clipping fabric and carpet samples, holding paint swatches up to the light, then up against the fabrics.
For once I didn’t bother to consider costs. Time was the only enemy on this job—and I knew that if I had to budget extra for express shipping or custom orders with drop-dead deadlines, Will Mahoney would be more than happy to pay the freight.
I was just sketching the window treatment for the den—a handsome glen plaid in deep golds and greens, when the front door opened.
I yawned and looked up. It was light outside. Gloria stood inside the doorway with a white bakery bag in one hand and her briefcase in the other.
“Good Lord,” she said, glancing around at the avalanche of fabrics and wallpaper samples littering the tabletops and floor. “What happened in here?”
I stood up and stretched and caught sight of the clock on my desk. It was eight o’clock. I’d sketched and worked through the night, and never once given a thought to A. J. Jernigan. I’d gotten totally lost in the work. I was exhausted, starved, gritty-eyed, and dry-mouthed. I felt fabulous.
“I’m healed,” I told my aunt.
She smiled and handed me the bakery bag. “Praise the Lord and pass the decaf.”