The priory had extensive if unorganized records that dated to the colonial period, and Cal’s curiosity about the Swanns and their home had prompted him to sniff out some intriguing details about their history. While Ben had gained a valuable perspective by attending the Preservation Society meetings, Cal’s research had proven just as useful. As arresting as Chief Stanton’s ancestor’s account of the Winter Siege was, the ones shared in later meetings of the Preservation Society were very similar. Terrible strife and losses followed by faith, cooperation, and—ultimately—salvation. The story had a pleasing arc, but there was something missing from it. Ben had sensed this same weakness in his own book. He didn’t know how to fix it.
“That’s very flattering,” the priest said.
“I mean it,” Ben said.
Cal waved him away, but Ben knew the older man was pleased.
They stopped in front of the mosaic of St. Michael and the dragon. With the bite in the air and waning forests all around, Ben thought that today the dragon might hold the advantage.
“Yesterday I was in the archives to see if there was any mention of the railroad that passed through Swannhaven in the nineteenth century. Jamison Swann had been one of the railroad’s founders in the 1840s. It was an exceedingly lucrative venture until the railroad collapsed in the 1870s. Does this ring a bell for you?”
“Of course. It’s all anyone talks about.”
“Those were tough times, and I was genuinely surprised to discover amidst the priory’s accounts of good works that one of our chapter’s favorite bits of lore is more fiction than fact. When I first showed this mosaic to you, I was under the impression that it had been created by a talented brother who’d lived here.”
“And?”
“Most artists sign their work, don’t they?”
Ben dutifully moved closer to the mural to examine the edge of the mosaic. The tiles that made up the piece were exquisitely fitted. In order to achieve such a sense of dimension against such a dark palette, the artist must have expended great effort to make use of every nuance of color.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Anything out of place?”
“The Socratic method, is it?” He panned the shadows of the wall twice before he found it in the right corner of the foreground: a curved neck and ebony beak, the carefully wrought texture of feathers. “Is that…”
“A swan,” Cal said. “A black swan. A perplexing addition to the scene, until you realize it’s also a signature.”
Ben stepped back and looked at the mosaic again. In the slanted winter light, the ripple of gray mountains lined up behind the beast like waves approaching the shore. A swan?
“Joseph Swann, age sixteen, begged hospitality from the brothers at St. Michael’s soon after his family’s railroad went bankrupt,” Cal said.
“Why?” Ben couldn’t imagine what would bring a Protestant heir to a Catholic monastery.
“Family troubles of some sort. His older brother had passed away, and the two of them had apparently been very close. He remained at the priory until he matriculated at Harvard. After graduation, he moved to New York, where he became an artist quite in demand among the city’s gilded class. He returned here later in his career, creating the mosaic as a gift to the priory.”
Ben moved closer to the mosaic. His eyes ran along the contours of the land, and a knot began to tighten in his chest.
“It certainly is something, isn’t it? Perhaps there’s another novel in his story. Perhaps a sequel to your tale of troubled Swanns?”
Ben hardly heard him. A chill slid down his neck as he traced the lines Joseph Swann had crafted to form the unbroken ranges of distant mountains. He squinted at the way he had articulated the slow slope of the land that fell into the valley beyond the dragon. The way he had placed a single great tree in the mural’s foreground.
Ben agreed with Father Cal that Joseph Swann had possessed rare talent. He had captured the vista perfectly. Ben knew this because he woke up to that precise view every morning.
24
In the car, Ben attempted conversation with Charlie. He asked him questions about his day, about his vocabulary words, about the owl pellet his class had found in the forest. He asked his son questions because that’s what he was supposed to do. Charlie answered them for the same reason. For the most part, Charlie stared out his window as intensely as Ben stared ahead.
The first time Ben had seen the mosaic in the monks’ garden, he’d assumed it depicted the valley upon which the priory perched. It made sense that the artist would portray the brothers as St. Michael, their patron, combating the dragon. But the view Joseph Swann had perfectly captured was of Swannhaven’s valley as seen from the Crofts. The infernal creature that he’d given such power rose from where the village stood, poised to strike out at the Drop.
As he drove down the empty county road, Ben imagined a giant beast galloping alongside the Escape, just beyond the tree line.
The light had faded. The clouds were stygian streaks above them. It had been getting dark early, but Ben must have spoken with Father Cal longer than he’d realized. He could see the outline of the Crofts up on the Drop. Caroline would be in the kitchen now, but Ben couldn’t see that side of the house from here. The unlit towers and soaring roofs looked black against the purpling sky.
Ben felt a grip on his shoulder: Charlie had grabbed him. He looked forward and saw a figure standing in the road. Ben slammed on the brakes and spun the wheel. The car screamed to a stop when they were abreast of the person in the road.
“You okay?” he asked Charlie.
“Yes.”
“Stay here.” Ben got out of the car.
The figure hadn’t moved from its position in the middle of the road, but in the dusk it seemed to have turned to them. In the flash of the headlights, Ben had thought he saw a woman, but he wasn’t sure.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Ma’am?” He walked around the car to where the figure still stood. He was sure it was a woman now; a breeze had caught the wisps of her white hair.
Ben came alongside her. She wore a breezy housedress that was too thin for the cold day, and she still hadn’t acknowledged him.
“Do you need help?” he asked. It was only then that he realized it was Mrs. White. He hadn’t seen her in a few weeks. In the past her hair had been tied tight behind her head, but now it billowed around her like white flames.
Her mouth moved, but Ben couldn’t hear what she was saying. Finally, he reached out to touch her shoulder and saw her face clearly for the first time. He wanted to let go, but instead his grip on her shoulder tightened. She had wide almond eyes and a face that had grown gaunt enough to erase her wrinkles. For a second she looked so much like his grandmother that he couldn’t breathe.
“Get your hands off her.” A man’s voice came from the woods.
Ben pulled his arm back. He heard footsteps along the side of the road, and soon he saw the man attached to them. He was about Ben’s height and in his sixties, powerfully built. A shotgun was slung across his chest.
“You’re going to scare her,” the man said.
“She was standing in the middle of the road,” Ben said.
“All right now, Mama?” the man asked the old woman. “Wandered away, didn’t you?” The man slid his shotgun so that it hung across his back and gently picked the woman up in his arms. The man looked strong, but from the ease with which he did this, it was clear Mrs. White was nothing but skin and bones.
“It was a miracle I didn’t hit her,” Ben said.
“I’d kill you,” the man said. He said it evenly enough for Ben to believe him.
Ben knew enough to back down from a confrontation with an upset stranger, but he had his son in the car, and now he was angry, too. He stalked back to his car door. “If you’re so attached to your mother, keep her from walking in the middle of the road in the dark. Not everyone’s going to stop.”
He got into the Escape, slammed the door, and too
k the road as fast as it would let him. He watched the figures in his rearview until they melted into the dark.
“Sorry about that,” he told Charlie after he’d calmed down. He slowed the car to the limit.
“She shouldn’t have been in the road,” Charlie said.
“No, she shouldn’t have been. But she’s a nice old lady. She’s Mom’s friend, the one who gives her that tea she likes. She must have gotten lost.” They were almost to the Crofts. The county road ascended just before their turnoff.
“She looked sick like Grams,” Charlie said. “She looked hungry.”
Midway up the gravel drive, Ben saw the lights from the south end of the house. For the first time, the place almost felt like home.
The kitchen was warm and smelled of the soup Caroline had simmered through the afternoon. Jake sat by Bub, trying to coax a spoonful into the baby’s mouth. Ben was relieved to see the young man there. The Wolf rarely made an appearance when they had company.
“Bub tired himself out with a meltdown, and I wanted to get some food into him before putting him to bed,” Caroline said. “What took so long?”
“We watched soccer practice for a while,” Ben said. “And almost hit Mrs. White. She was wandering down the middle of the street.”
“Are you serious?” Caroline asked. Her hand went to her heart.
“Yeah. It was close. She must have gotten disoriented. A guy—her son, I guess—is taking care of her.”
“She seemed a little off this morning,” Caroline said. “I thought maybe she was coming down with something. She’d told me she gets confused at night. But wandering in the dark and cold—and on the road!”
Charlie hoisted his backpack off his shoulders and onto the floor. As he neared the table, Hudson let out a low growl.
“Hudson, do I need to put you in the hallway again?” Ben asked him. Hudson bared his teeth for moment, then settled back down to the floor. “She put you on dribble detail?” Ben asked Jake.
“I think some of it’s going to the right place,” Jake said.
Caroline ladled soup into bowls, while Ben began sawing through a loaf of peasant bread. She’d made potato-leek and garnished it with rashers of bacon.
“Did you ask your dad about dinner?” Caroline asked Jake. From the brittle smile stretched across her face, Ben knew she was trying to change the subject from poor Mrs. White.
“He was tickled. Said he hasn’t been up here in years.”
“Tell him that we’re really excited to have him,” Caroline said. Their dining room furniture was arriving any day now, and Caroline felt obligated to invite some of the locals up to the Crofts for dinner. She’d never taken to many of the villagers, other than Mrs. White, but she thought showing them the renovations and treating them to a nice meal would be a smart way to strengthen their ties to Swannhaven.
“Is he feeling better?” Ben asked. Jake’s widower father often seemed to be ailing.
“His back doesn’t seem as bad. Was down at the Picket place last week, helping with the cleanup.”
“Would you take him some soup from us?” Caroline asked.
“Thanks; it’s real good,” Jake said. “And the shed should be finished tomorrow for sure. Got to get that roof on before the weather turns.”
“Then what? Back to the orchard?” The pained smile was still on Caroline’s face, and she had bolted her soup with frightening speed. Still, it was good to see her eat.
“Better leave that till spring. I cleared the big brush, and the cold should take the fight out of the rest. I’ll clear what’s left after the snowmelt. You gotta decide what to replace the dead trees with. Got about twenty that are still kicking.”
“And the lake?” Caroline asked. She never let up, but it didn’t seem to bother Jake.
“Don’t really know where to begin with the lake, is the honest truth. But you could lay the lines for the herb garden. Could take a look at some of the outbuildings, too,” Jake said. “See if anything can be saved. The old stables could be fixed up if they’re not too bad off. Maybe the shed by the road, too. Probably too late for the others, though. The cider house and the chapel were wrecks last I saw them, but that was when I was a kid.”
“There’s a chapel?” Caroline asked.
“What’s left of it is pretty deep in the woods now, north of the cemetery,” Jake said. “Visited it once in school, back when the Swanns were here.”
Ben remembered stumbling upon the ruins of the chapel over the summer. When he thought of the terrible creature he’d found carved on the plaque there, it reminded him of the man in the smoke from Charlie’s drawing.
“Did you know the Swanns well?” Ben asked Jake. The young man had been a good source of information about Swannhaven, but Ben had learned to spread his questions around. The villagers tended to clam up in the face of too much curiosity.
“The aunties?” Jake asked. “They were good women. Eleanor, the younger one, was still beautiful, right to the end. And Miranda was so old you’d think she was born that way. Used to deliver their groceries,” Jake said. “Didn’t leave the Crofts too much, not after the fire.” He stood up to clear his dishes.
“When the Swann boys died,” Ben told Caroline. “Mark and Liam.”
“Horrible,” Caroline said. Ben had told her Father Cal’s story about the night of the fire. “They had foster children, too, right? What happened to them?”
“Moved to other homes, I think—I only heard, because I wasn’t even born yet. Then there was that one that was sent away.”
He meant the boy who’d set the fire.
“What happened to him?” Ben asked.
Jake shrugged. “Wherever they put the bad ones, I guess. A hard lot the Swanns had to shoulder,” he said. “Real saints, though. Were always nice to me.”
“I’ve learned a lot about the village from the Preservation Society, but I still feel like there’s so much I don’t know.” The more Ben found out about Swannhaven, the more he realized how much remained to be discovered.
“I’d guess Lisbeth Goode and the Preservation folks know all there is to know,” Jake said. “The Goodes have kept the records for this place as long as there’ve been records to keep. Lisbeth’s father, old August Goode, ran the Swannhaven Dispatch until he died.”
“Right, the Dispatch.” Before he’d decided that his book would focus on the Revolutionary War period, Ben had been interested in tracking down back issues of the old town paper. “She must have an archive or something. I’ll have to ask her about that.”
“The village’s history means a lot to us,” Caroline told Jake. “I think its backstory will really help distinguish the Crofts from the inns and hotels in Exton. It’ll make great copy on the website and in promotional materials. And it’s exactly the kind of thing that appeals to travel magazines.”
“Sounds good,” Jake said, putting on his jacket.
If that was the pitch she planned to use on the villagers at dinner, Ben thought it could use some work.
“It must have been shocking for the village when the sisters died, what, two winters ago now?” Ben said. “Had they been sick?” Ben and Caroline had speculated about this since they first visited the Crofts.
“Nothing like that,” Jake said. “That winter was colder than most, and the whole house couldn’t be heated. Such a big old place. That’s why you had to go and get a new furnace and all the rest. The aunties spent most of their time in the kitchen.” He pointed to the stone fireplace on the far wall. “Story is that one night the fire wasn’t enough.”
“What do you mean it wasn’t enough?” Caroline asked.
“The cold,” Ben said. He leaned back in his chair. They’d imagined a dozen scenarios but nothing like that. “They both froze right here in this room.”
25
Ben had been in bed for an hour, and still sleep did not come.
When he closed his eyes, he saw the face of Mrs. White. Her lips mouthing something he could not discern. The news t
hat the Swann sisters had died in the kitchen also troubled him. He’d assumed that they’d died in their home; that was where old women died. But to think that this family had survived sieges and depressions, wars and pandemics, only to be finished by a cold night…
He threw himself onto his side and tried to stave off thoughts of the old sisters, imagining in their place Swannhaven against the blank slate of fresh snowfall near the end of the blood-soaked year of 1777.
At the time of the Revolution, there had been no more than a handful of buildings clustered around the village square and a dozen farmhouses spread throughout the valley. The snow on the fallow fields gave the view from the Crofts an unfinished look, as if the artist had been retained only to depict the valley’s human contributions.
Just before dawn, the air cold and still, the Iroquois came from the south. Most arrived on foot, but some rode horseback along the flanks. By the time the sky had ripened, a group had detached for the southmost farmhouse, while the rest surged for the village. The snow began to mirror the amber sky. A beautiful morning.
Ben decided that the Swanns had woken at first light. By then, two of the farmhouses had been set alight. The Iroquois went from building to building along the village square, their guns shattering the morning. Up at the Crofts, where they could see but not hear the attack, the Swanns stood at their windows and watched their valley burn. The only daughter at home, Elizabeth, would have comforted the twins, James and Emmett, while Jack, the eldest son, would have grabbed his musket and run to rouse the tenant families on the Drop.
Their father, Henry Swann, had woken in the still of that morning knowing something of the day that awaited him. His grandfather Aldrich Swann had once told him that he had seen the Drop in a dream and known from that moment the wealth of land and family that God would grant him. Henry Swann had also dreamed in the restlessness of the night, but it had been no vision of comfort. And so he sat on the edge of his bed in his nightclothes for a time, feet stung by the floor’s cold, praying for the courage to stand and walk to the window. He peered beyond the rime of ice and saw dark figures walking across the stark white fields with otherworldly grace. In a moment Henry imagined the full arc of the thing. He knew the horrors that flashed through him were a promise. The bill for his grandfather’s dream had come due, and Henry wondered if God had played any part in it.
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