V.C. Andrews - Gates of Paradise (Casteel Saga)

For as long as I could remember, the only person I could share my deepest secrets with was Luke Casteel, Jr. It was as if it were truly alive only when he was with me, and in my secret putaway heart, I knew he felt the same way, even though he had never dared say anything about it. I wanted to look at him, look into his soft dark sapphire eyes forever and ever and tell him what I really felt, but the words were forbidden. He was my half brother.

But there was one way I could look continually at him and he at me without either of us being self-conscious about it or feeling someone would discover our secret, and that was whenever I painted him. He was always a willing subject. With the easel between us and my world of art serving as a window, I could stare closely at his perfectly shaped, high-cheeked, bronze face and I could capture the way those unruly, jet-black strands of hair always fell over his forehead.

Luke had my aunt Fanny's hair, but my father's deep blue eyes and perfect nose. There was strength in the lines of his mouth and in his sharp, smooth jawline. I couldn't help seeing the clear resemblances to my father, and even to myself. He had the same tall, lean build Daddy had and kept his shoulders back the same way. The resemblances always saddened me because they reminded me that Luke wasn't simply my half brother; he was my illegitimate half brother, born out of a passionate indiscretion between Daddy and my aunt Fanny, my mother's sister, something we all understood was best kept unmentioned.

We tried to leave it behind us, stuffed away in the shadows, even though we both knew people whispered and gossiped about us in Winnerrow. Although my family was the most prominent in Winnerrow, we were a very odd family indeed. Luke, Jr. lived with his mother, who had been married twice: once to a man much older who had died, and once to a man much younger, who had divorced her.

Everyone in Winnerrow remembered the court hearing over who would win custody of Mommy's and Aunt Fanny's half brother Drake, after their father Luke and his new wife Stacie were killed in a car accident. Drake was only about five at the time. The argument was settled out of court, with Mommy getting custody and Aunt Fanny getting a lot of money. Drake hated to hear about it, and more than once got into a fight at school when some boy teased him about "being bought and paid for." Mother said Drake had her father's temper anyway. He was handsome, muscular, and very athletic, as well as very bright and determined. Now he was a student getting his M.B.A. at Harvard Business College. Even though he was really my uncle, I always thought of him as a big brother. Mommy and Daddy raised him as they would raise a son.

Most everyone in Winnerrow knew about Mommy, how she was born and raised in the Willies, how her mother had died giving birth to her, how she had lived in a shack most of her young life, and then gone off to live with her mother's rich family, the Tattertons.

She lived at Farthinggale Manor, or "Farthy," as she often called it whenever I could get her to talk about it, which wasn't very often.

But Luke and I talked about it.

Farthinggale Manor... it loomed high in our imaginations... this magical, yet sinister place, a castle filled with a thousand secrets, some of which we just knew had to do with us. It was still the home of the mysterious Tony Tatterton, the man who had married my great-grandmother and who still ran the great Tatterton Toy empire , now only loosely associated with our Willies Toy factory. For reasons Mother would not discuss, she refused to have anything to do with him, even though he never failed to send us all birthday and Christmas cards. He had sent me dolls from everywhere in the world every birthday for as long as I could remember. At least she let me keep them... precious little Chinese dolls that had long, straight black hair, and dolls from Holland and Norway and Ireland with colorful costumes and beautiful, sparkling faces.

Luke and I wanted to know more about Tony Tatterton and Farthy. Even Drake was very curious, although he didn't talk about it half as much as Luke and I did. If only our home, Hasbrouck House, was as open and revealing about the family's past as it was on holidays when Mommy and Daddy's friends and their families wandered freely through it. There were so many lingering questions. What finally had brought my parents back here from the rich, lavish world of Farthinggale Manor? Why did my mother want so much to return to Winnerrow where she had been considered lower than everyone because she was a Casteel from the Willies? Even when she had been a teacher here, she hadn't been fully accepted by the rich, snobby townspeople.

So many secrets haunted the shadows around us, hanging in the corners of our minds like old cobwebs. For as long as I could remember, I felt something was supposed to be told to me about myself, but no one had told it not my mother, not my father, and not my uncle Drake. I sensed it in the silences that sometimes fell between my parents and between them and me, especially between my mother and me. wished I could come to a clear, clean canvas and lift my paintbrush and pull the truth out of the blank white sheet before me. Maybe that was why I had always been obsessed with my painting. Hardly a day passed when I didn't paint something. It was as much a part of me as breathing.