Chapter 2
While the boys donned their boots and gloves, coats, and scarves for tramping through the snow drifts, Sidney gathered the knives and baskets they would need to collect the greenery. Then, once they returned to the hall, Benjamin, showing a real talent for distributing men and supplies, gave them their various tasks. Kate and Ariel were disappointed that they were going to be relegated to stringing the apple slices, until Aunt Millicent agreed that they could borrow clothes from their brother and join the others in the snow. And Ophelia, jealous, ran up the staircase to borrow Sidney’s.
At the second landing, she turned down the hallway that led to their rooms. At the end of the hall, where the oldest part of the building met the newest, a woman, wearing ancient clothes, stood looking out the antique rose window. Ophelia stopped, startled, then realizing that the Aldersons were likely offering lodgings to the traveling actors, she called out.
The woman turned slowly, her face narrow and sad, and Ophelia felt the woman’s gaze deep into her bones. Her eyes met Ophelia’s for a long instant, then she disappeared into the darkness of the hall.
By the time that Ophelia reached the spot, the woman was gone. Wondering if the woman and the players were the source of the vague noises she’d heard in the night from the wing opposite theirs, Ophelia told herself to ask Judith.
She ran to their room, and sorting through Sidney’s clothes, she chose the ones he had worn the previous day to travel in—not yet laundered, the clothes still smelled of Sidney. She held the fabric up to her face and breathed it in. The son and grandson of a perfumer and himself the owner of a soap manufacture, Sidney wore a range of perfumes. This one was woody and crisp, with a hint of pine, but they all reminded her of him alone.
When she returned to the hall, her sisters—and her aunt Millicent—were brandishing knives and scissors, pretending to be Boadicea and her daughters preparing to fight the Romans. The three stopped when they saw her.
“Benjamin has assigned us the holly you saw in the woods!” fourteen-year-old Kate announced.
Thirteen-year-old Ariel and Aunt Millicent, a hearty sixty-three, carried cutting baskets to hold the leaves and berries. Sidney, assigned to keep the boys out of too much trouble, kissed her on the way out, and she felt his absence like the pull of a magnet.
The holly was a short walk from Coldmarsh House toward the village and easily seen from the carriage drive. As Alderson kept the drive clear for the arrival of the guests and it hadn’t snowed since the day before, the women were able to walk with ease. Ophelia suspected that had been Benjamin’s intention. While her sisters were enjoying the freedom of boys’ clothes on a relatively clear path, their cousins were already covered in snow.
Her sisters, refusing to limit themselves to the branches closest to the cleared drive, bounded into the thicket to trim the leaves and berries. Before joining them, Ophelia looked toward the dower house, where Sidney was directing the twins in tearing ivy off the old shed. She could hear the boys’ laughter as they pelted Sidney with snow, and she watched her husband return the attack, his snowballs rarely missing their target. Even at a distance, Sidney seemed to know she was watching, and he turned and waved before returning to his battle. His movements were precise, even graceful, and she joyed in each one. Soon, however, the battle moved out of sight. Sighing, Ophelia turned back to her task, the crisp scent of holly filling the air.
“Did you know that our Christmas feasts, games, and greenery are borrowed from the Roman Saturnalia?” Ariel clipped a pretty branch and placed it in her basket. “The Gentleman’s Magazine says that Pope Gregory—Gregory XIII, I think it was—encouraged missionaries to reuse pagan holidays to help people convert.”
“Gregory I, dear,” Millicent corrected Ariel. “We should include him in your reading of revolutionary historical figures. Gregory XIII changed the calendar to make the celebration of Easter conform generally to when it was celebrated by the early church.”
“I also read that the Druids collected mistletoe for their religious ceremonies. It was so reverenced that the priest cut it down with a golden knife and placed it on a white blanket,” Ariel added. “But I skipped the part about the sacrifices.”
“I read that part. Two white bulls, never before yoked. Sometimes virgin maidens.” Kate rolled her eyes.
Ophelia smiled, loving the odd conversations that Aunt Millicent encouraged in her nieces. “Do we kiss under the mistletoe because of the Druids as well? If so, it’s a delightful custom—with the right partner, that is.”
Kate and Ariel both grimaced. “We don’t kiss.”
“At your ages, well you shouldn’t.” Aunt Millicent tsked at Ophelia.
The thicket was thick enough that, with judicious trimming, their harvest was barely noticeable. When all the baskets were full, the four turned back toward the house.
As her sisters chattered with Aunt Millicent about the origins of their Christmas traditions, Ophelia examined the lines of the odd house. Coldmarsh House had been fortified in its centuries-long transition from old, ruined monastery to manor home. Its battlements stood dark against the light of the sun. In some places, she could tell exactly where the old ruins ended and the house built upon them began. In others, the merging of old and new was more subtle. What she could easily tell, however, was how each addition had made the house larger and larger, until it dominated the valley. The portion they were staying in appeared to be the newest, but even that dated to sometime more than a hundred years ago. As they walked, her attention shifted to the older building closest to their rooms, and she wondered again at the strange noises she’d heard when Sidney was deep in sleep.
A movement on the old battlements caught her attention. A figure stood watching them. But the battlement itself seemed incomplete, as if the woman—for she was certain it was a woman—was standing in air.
Olivia was struck dumb for a moment. But before she could ask her sisters to confirm what she thought she saw, her foot caught on a branch, and she and her basket almost tumbled. By the time she’d righted herself, the woman was gone.
* * * *
Within an hour, all the harvesters had returned with their green bounty. Sidney and the twins—eleven-year-old Clive and Edmund—carried the ivy in long strands over their shoulders. They looked like the woods had come alive and were advancing on the house. When sixteen-year-old Tom and his cousins Aidan, Seth, and Colin, all between sixteen and thirteen, returned dragging a blanket filled with mistletoe, Ophelia caught the attention of Ariel, who looked both amused and wary.
“At least it’s not a white blanket. If it were, Kate and I would have to lock ourselves in our rooms until after the new year.”
“If the Druids were to come for virgins, I’m certain they would pick the Simms girls,” Ophelia whispered. “No one looks as unhappily chaste as those two. Besides, no self-respecting Druid priest would pick a girl who dresses as a boy.”
“A perfect reason always to wear trousers!” Ariel declared a bit too loudly, drawing the pinch-faced glare of Mrs. Simms, and Ophelia hugged her youngest sister tight as the pair fell into laughter together.
Soon the hall was filled with piles of ivy, mistletoe, and holly. With the arrival of Benjamin, who brought twine and a basket of apple rings, the group set to adorn the hall.
With the help of the servants, the group strung festoons of greenery in large swags across the lintels of the doors and windows. While the Somervilles and Gardiners hung the greenery, the Simms children strung the apple slices, spacing them so that they would appear intermittently along the swags of green. The blazing yule logs and the greenery—contrasting with the banks of snow beyond the windows—made even the large room cozy and warm.
* * * *
The village was joyful, the street-facing windows lit with candles in preparation for the procession to the church. Mummers in giant masks performed from door to door, enacting the old play of good against evil over and over. The villagers threw open their windows to them, letting out any evil spirits that might have found their way into the houses. For their service, the mummers were rewarded with food and sometimes with coin.
When the church bell called the people to worship, every resident in the village and manor, as was required by law, took a seat. The duke and his sons were seated at the front of the church, as was appropriate to his rank, along with Tom, who as Lord Wilmot, was the next-highest-ranked visitor. In the next pew were the Aldersons seated close with Aunt Millicent and the Gardiners, and, behind them, the Simms family, looking pious and restrained. Ophelia and Sidney—of no rank at all—sat next to the vicar’s wife against the far wall. Even bundled close together, Ophelia shivered against the cold that emanated from the stone slabs beneath their feet, and Sidney pulled her tightly into his side, distracting her from the sermon and the readings.
After the church service, the whole group, including the servants, walked the mile back to Coldmarsh House, singing carols. Benjamin served as their choir master. Ophelia, holding fast to Sidney’s hand, followed the line of his harmony, melding her mezzo with his rich bass. By the time the large group had exhausted much of their mental hymnal, they had reached the manor, lit bright.
* * * *
By long tradition among the Somervilles for family dinners, the table was arranged by age and relation. The youngest sat at the bottom of the table, their elders at its head, foremost among them Judith’s father, the duke, and her husband, their host, Mr. Stuart Alderson. By virtue of her recent marriage, Ophelia had ascended to the adult end, with Mr. Simms to her left and her cousin Benjamin to her right. Sidney sat across the table, two chairs over. Periodically he would look her way and wink or smile, but mostly her husband kept the conversation around him moving smoothly, with a nudge here or an encouraging word here. Her husband, she thought, still relishing the word, would someday change the world, and he would do it one generous conversation at a time. As if he knew she was thinking of him, Sidney looked her way and raised a single eyebrow.
The dinner itself showed in every way that Judith was the daughter of a duke. To allow the servants their own celebration, the long table was covered once, making all eleven courses available from the first. Roast turkey and pig, sirloin of beef, and assorted other meats were set among soups and vegetables, minced pies, seasoned butters, and, of course, the plum pudding. More than anything else, plum pudding meant Christmas to Ophelia.
Dinner—as dinners always were when the Somerville brothers were in attendance—was raucous, though the laughter and ribbing centered at the children’s end of the table. The eldest Somerville, Sir Aaron, was a man of vicious temperaments. Judith had carefully placed him at the head of the table, sandwiched between Mrs. Simms and Ophelia’s aunt, Millicent, and across from Judith herself. Judith—born second—was the manager, attempting to keep all her brothers out of trouble; in this, she had the aid of Benjamin, who, third-born, was the natural peacemaker. From her new seat among the adults, Ophelia admired Judith’s care in arranging the table in such a way that she denied Aaron proximity to the unmarried girls and surveilled any attempts he might make to importune the female servants.
Each time her younger cousins laughed or teased, Ophelia wished she were still among them, except that it would mean that she would be still unmarried. And married life suited her, better than she’d ever imagined or even hoped. Though innately sociable, she’d dreaded the hours of social pleasantries that marriage to a man in public service required, and she’d feared that those obligations would mean the end to her chemical avocation. But marriage, she’d found—at Sidney’s insistence—allowed her to do both, and even to do both better than she had before. Life as Ophelia Mason fed both sides of her psyche.
Because the table was filled mostly with family, the conversation was allowed to ramble where it wished. Ophelia quickly learned that though the children’s end was openly amusing, the conversation at the top of the table was not as dry as she’d expected. Alderson told an engaging story about his early failures as an industrialist. Simms recounted his recent failure to outwit a squirrel. And the duke quickly intervened when Aaron—already well in his cups—decided to recount a game of “feed the dove” he’d played with his most recent mistress. The duke’s story—of his favorite dog in childhood who would not learn to fetch, until it did with disastrous results—reminded Ophelia of how kind the duke had been before the weight of his dukedom and Aaron’s repeated scrapes had made him difficult and taciturn.
While her Somerville cousins—again like locusts—cleared every plate of the eleven courses, Ophelia found herself simply watching Sidney with the giddy delight of a newlywed. Kind, generous, and charming, Sidney made himself at home in any company, whether talking to a duke or a fishwife. One of his great skills was his ability to forge common ground, even if that ground were nothing more than both parties enjoying the way that the sunlight reflected beneath Westminster Bridge. His hands, long and slender, were often the most restrained part of him, but when they were alone together, his hands spoke love as well as his words. She allowed herself to think about his hands, then his lips, then all his other parts, until, while Ophelia sat enjoying her last bites of plum pudding, Sidney caught her eye. With his hand still on the table, he moved one finger a mere inch, quietly directing her attention to the diffident man to her left.
“Mrs. Mason. Mrs. Mason.” Simms grew more insistent each time he repeated her name. “Mrs. Mason.”
Ophelia gave him a brilliant smile. “Forgive me, Mr. Simms, but I’ve just realize you were speaking to me. I’m still unused to my married name.”
“Of course, my dear, of course. It takes married ladies some time to get used to a new name. Mrs. Simms, however, adapted quite easily. Her maiden name was Stimpson, so the conversion was easy. But from Somerville to Mason, that would take some adjustment.”
“Lady Judith and her Somerville brothers are my cousins. My family name was Gardiner. Lord Wilmot, there at the end of the table, is my younger brother, and my sisters are Kate—there to the left of your son—and Ariel, to his right.”
“Right. Right. I’m having a bit of trouble keeping the dramatis personae straight. How do you and your siblings fit into the Somerville hierarchy?”
“We fill in the gaps between the Somerville children. I’m younger than Sir Aaron but older than Lord Benjamin and Lady Judith. Likewise, my sisters are older than the twins, but one is younger and the other older than Seth, who is the youngest of the middle brothers.”
“We were surprised when Stuart—Mr. Alderson, I mean—choose such a young woman for his second wife. But then we met your cousin, and she is a very mature nineteen. We became friends with Alderson when his first wife was still alive. Lovely woman. She loved this house, for all its decay and degradation. Then it killed her. Such a shame.”
Ophelia forced herself not to react. Pitching her voice so no one else could hear, she asked, “The house killed her?”
Simms looked around furtively, much like a cornered rabbit, before whispering, “Yes, I would have thought you knew. Please don’t speak of it to Stuart. It still pains him. She was so young, so beautiful.”
“If I might ask, what happened?”
“One of the gargoyles on the front of the house fell and knocked her dead.” He glanced furtively up the table at Anderson, who was paying them no attention. “The magistrate said that she was killed instantly.”
“The magistrate?”
“Of course. Suspicious death. One must call the magistrate. But he determined there was nothing nefarious about it. No sign of the gargoyle being pushed. Just the poor condition of the house. Falling to ruin, it was.”
Ophelia thought of the window frame in their bedroom, rotted almost through, but said nothing.
Mr. Simms was still whispering. “Terrible thing. Terrible. Such a young thing too. Two children. But, of course, Stuart—Mr. Alderson, I mean—was younger then too.”
“Of course.” Ophelia repeated his phrase, stealing a glance at Alderson, an energetic man at almost sixty. “How old were they when they married?” Shortly before her marriage, Judith had confided in Ophelia that the relations between her and her husband were distant at best.
“Ah, she was a little older than your cousin, twenty-two, twenty-five. He was just thirty.”
Ophelia looked at her cousin with concern. Months before Ophelia’s wedding, Judith had said she believed Alderson had grown unhappy in his new marriage. Ophelia wondered if the intervening months had changed Alderson’s mind. “I’ve never met his sons, but I hear they are expected tonight or tomorrow.”
“Yes, handsome young men, little older than your cousin. Nigel is twenty. Percival, twenty-two. Nigel’s soft like his mother, but Percival is Alderson’s true heir. Perhaps the curse of the place will skip them.”
“The curse?” Ophelia felt cold on the back of her neck as she thought of the sad-faced woman in the hall that morning.
At that moment, Alderson raised his glass to signal quiet. And the room hushed, save for Aaron who had to be elbowed into attention by Aunt Millicent.
“I acquired these lands more than twenty years ago, and this manor house had stood empty for decades before that. The local villagers believed it haunted because at night they would often see strange lights and hear—if they ventured close enough—strange sounds. I am not a man of that sort of sensibility, so none of the old ghosts have ever attempted to appear to me, or if they did, I would be inclined to think it the product of indigestion. I have instead thought that the claims of ghosts were a convenient fiction to make the house a more suitable retreat for smugglers and highwaymen. When I purchased the estate, the roof in the oldest parts was mostly collapsed, leaving the stone walls to mold and mildew.
“The window glass was long ago broken out. Most of the rooms were entirely empty, and what furniture remained dated only to the end of our last century. I intended to raze the old manor and build anew, but my wife—God rest her soul—wished for me to repair rather than replace, and I foolishly conceded. And I have regretted that decision every time the roof leaks, or the plaster falls off of its lath, or…” Alderson paused, his eyes focused past the company.
Ophelia waited for him to add falling gargoyles, but he didn’t.
After a moment, Judith intervened. “In addition to the claims of ghosts, the local villagers believe that Coldmarsh House hides a treasure. And though searchers have failed to locate it for over a hundred years, Mr. Alderson and I believe it might be an amusing holiday pastime to try to find it, especially since we have so many resourceful young people with us.”
“By that she means that her younger brothers need a focus for their animal spirits.” The Duke of Forster stared down the table at his brood, where Clive and Edmund, only eleven, sat still as rabbits under the eye of a predator.
“While I have not paid much attention to such rumors, I can tell you the history of the place.” Alderson spread his arms to draw the company’s attention to the room. “The oldest parts of Coldmarsh House date to an old abbey closed under the reign of Henry VIII. Given to a crony who ignored it, then sold when it was falling into ruin, the abbey eventually came into the possession of a wealthy Catholic merchant by the name of Jason Thorpe. Charming and handsome, Thorpe contracted a love match, and he bought the old abbey as a wedding gift to his wife, who had fallen in love with the ruins—and with him. By all accounts a devoted and attentive husband, Thorpe built on the ruins of the old abbey a fortified house to rival the splendors of the wealthy aristocrats of his time.”
“He should have spent the money on a mistress instead.” Aaron slurred his words slightly, the effect of too much wine.
Judith gave her eldest brother a hard look, while Alderson continued. “But as his house grew, so too did the jealousy of one of his childhood friends, Laurence Sneyd. Thorpe was also—as many Cavaliers were—a bit of a poet, known for satirical poems on a variety of subjects. A petty bureaucrat under Cromwell, Sneyd accused Thorpe of having written a tract critical of the Commonwealth. Thorpe denied the authorship, but, as a Catholic and a cavalier, he was tricked into surrendering to the Parliamentary forces. Thorpe was imprisoned and sentenced to death, though he appealed. From here the story veers into legend, so I trust my wife to tell you that part of the tale.”
Alderson took his seat, as Judith rose. Aaron coughed loudly into his cup in derision.
“They had only been married for a year. Thorpe was often away serving in the Parliamentary army on behalf of his king, and Thorpe’s wife weathered more than one siege, waiting for her husband to return. When he was imprisoned, his family fled to France, but she remained behind in this house that she loved.” Judith held out her hand, pointing their attention to the dining hall itself. “Perhaps she wished to rally support for her husband’s release. Perhaps she hoped the estate was so far distant from London that their lands would not be seized immediately. But Sneyd’s machinations at court soon reached here.”
Kate raised her hand.
“Yes, Kate?” Judith stopped to entertain the thirteen-year-old’s question.
“What’s her name? Thorpe’s wife.”
Judith shook her head in commiseration. “Sadly, it’s been lost. Any documents I’ve found simply call her Mistress Thorpe.”
Kate harrumphed. “That’s why she haunts the house: she wants her name back.” Kate, at thirteen, had already read her way through most of the treatises arguing for women’s education.
Judith smiled in agreement. “Sneyd ensured that Thorpe’s lands were to be seized and sold, but somehow he convinced the Commonwealth authorities to give him Thorpe’s lands. Thorpe, awaiting the hearing on his appeal, still had friends in London, and one rode through the night to warn Mistress Thorpe. She had less than an hour to hide whatever property she could and to escape into Monmouthshire countryside and from there to France. She instructed the remaining servants to bring several caskets filled with gold and silver into this dining hall while she collected her greatest treasure and brought it to the hall. Since the servants were Catholic as well, she instructed them to flee, locking the dining hall and the house behind them. When Sneyd arrived with his forces, the house and this room were still locked. A fire was blazing in the hearth as it is now, before it a pile of clay, still wet. But the lady was gone.”
“And the treasure has never been found!” Fourteen-year-old Ariel, who loved Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novels, clapped in delight.
“And the treasure has never been found,” Judith confirmed. “Nor was the lady ever heard from again.”
“One of those trusted servants likely murdered her. Kill the lady. Steal the treasure. That’s what anyone would do,” Aaron slurred, pouring himself more wine.
Ophelia watched dismay flit across her cousin’s face, but they all knew better than to respond: Aaron was mean sober. He was unreasonable drunk.
Simms chimed in. “Or Sneyd didn’t wish to let it be known that he killed her.”
The conversation swelled as each of the guests added his or her theory. As the din subsided, Judith resumed her story. “Neighbor Sneyd didn’t live long to enjoy his spoils. He caught the pox and died some weeks later, so if he were the villain and had the Thorpe treasure, there should be some record of it. This house passed to new occupants, then was eventually abandoned. Alderson’s first wife, by chance, was very distantly related to the original Mistress Thorpe through a cousin’s line.” Alderson nodded approvingly. “When his first wife discovered this, she decided they should return the house to its former splendor.”
“So we are to find Mistress Thorpe’s treasure trove?” Aidan grinned widely.
“If you are willing,” Judith said. “Though the house has been well searched for more than a hundred years, I trust that my brothers and cousins are more diligent and resourceful than the other searchers.”
“You said she collected her greatest treasure. Do we know what that was?” Tom asked, always the most analytical of the cousins.
“It’s uncertain. Some versions of the legend say rubies given the diary’s reference to the scripture that a good woman’s worth is above rubies. Others say her wedding jewels. In the gallery, a portrait of her—or at least we think it’s her—shows her wearing her wedding jewels.”
“Her greatest treasure may have been seeds,” Seth, a budding agriculturist, proposed. “Without seeds to grow crops, you starve. That’s a treasure beyond riches in the right season.”
“It’s her love letters,” Kate predicted confidently. “If she were a newlywed separated from her love, then the letters would be her most prized possession.”
“Certainly, it may be any of those things—or all of them. To find her treasure, you will need to be alert and curious, not letting yourself hold to any particular idea of what she might have hidden. But we will begin the hunt tomorrow. Tonight we have our Christmas celebrations. And since I know it’s my youngest brother’s favorite, we will begin with blind man’s bluff.”
Clive and Edmund whooped from the end of the table, and, at Judith’s direction, all the guests pulled their chairs against the walls to make a large open space before the fireplace. Sidney found his way immediately to Ophelia’s side.
“How is my darling girl? Dinner was a torment, so close to you, but so far apart.”
“My charming Sidney.” Ophelia slipped her hand into his, delighting in the warmth of his touch.
“Did you learn anything interesting? Alderson’s partner seemed quite confidential.”
Ophelia pulled Sidney back from the group, though with all the noise of the guests moving to the fireplace, she had little fear of being overheard. “He says that Alderson’s first wife died under suspicious circumstances—part of the house’s facade fell on her.”
“Darling, have you looked closely at this place? All the public rooms are well furnished and appear to be in fine condition, but the family rooms are in desperate need of repair, and the rest is falling to ruin—and not just from recent neglect.” Sidney paused, and Ophelia knew he was seeing the concern she couldn’t hide. “But I’ll see what I can learn from other sources. Do you fear that your cousin may be in danger?”
“I’m not certain.”
“But you have suspicions.”
“I always have suspicions, and you always investigate them for me.”
He brushed a kiss into her hair. “Always, my sweet, always. Is that all?”
Ophelia dropped her voice even lower to ensure that they weren’t overheard. “He also said the whole place is cursed.”
“Ah, a curse. I suppose that and the ill repair could go together.” His thumb traced a gentle circle on the back of her hand, and just that touch made her wish to fold herself into his arms. “What’s the story there?”
“I haven’t a clue. Just that the house is cursed, and that’s why the first wife died.”
“Curses, ghosts, hidden treasure—it sounds like just the sort of story one would tell on a cold winter’s night while bundled in front of the fire. Perhaps you can convince him to share the rest of it.”
At that moment, Ariel ran to their side, “Come, come, you must also play—otherwise there won’t be enough girls. Tom is the first blind man.”