Christmas Spirit

by Amy Garvey

  But she knew her curiosity would get the better of her when it came to the diary that Constance Prescott had kept. When Lillian finally lifted out the small, clothbound book and put it in her hands, Charlie sat for a moment just holding it.

  An unmistakable energy flowed from it, but she didn’t want to tell Lillian that. The sensation she got was of swirling emotion, entirely female, as if a lifetime of feelings had been poured into the diary, then closed away. Whoever had donated it might not have been a Prescott or even married to a Prescott. Just someone clearing out their attic who’d seen a box of old papers and thought to donate it to the historical society.

  “It wasn’t with all this material to begin with,” Lillian was saying. “They had found it in another box when they were cataloging its contents. Quite recently, too. Mr. Bridge happened to remember that it had been set aside so it could be returned to the Prescott papers. He brought it over to Iris right away.”

  “Do they find many diaries?”

  Lillian gave her a thoughtful look. “Do you know, I asked him the same thing. He said they didn’t. Or that the few they did get tended to be terse records of daily life. Valuable to historians, of course.” She winked. “But to people like us, who love a good story, not as interesting. Constance’s diary was her confidante, I think.”

  Did she dare open it and read? It seemed in an odd way like a violation of someone’s privacy. Charlie touched the cover with her fingertips, noting the worn edges and the cracked spine. But it had been well-made, bound in limp leather with sewn-in pages. She didn’t see any missing ones or torn-out parts when she riffled through it without reading and then closed it again, looking at the edges.

  Whatever story it told was complete in its way. Still she hesitated, not wanting to tell Lillian why. If she hadn’t been a direct descendant of the author’s family, she might feel differently, Charlie thought.

  This little island cherished its past and made every effort to preserve it—but maybe, Charlie mused, sometimes doing that made it hard for the past to be over.

  She gave an almost inaudible sigh and opened it to the first entry. The handwriting was girlish, but there was something narrow and mean about it. Charlie pored over the faded writing, thinking that the diarist revealed more about herself than she did about the people in her life. Reading more rapidly, Charlie picked up many mentions of Temperance. Constance, who was evidently plain by her own estimation, had been jealous of her sister, who was beautiful and had many suitors to her sister’s one.

  “Interesting, isn’t it? Are you finding out more about Temperance?”

  “Not very much, unfortunately. But it’s clear that her sister didn’t like her.”

  “How sad,” Lillian murmured, absorbed in her own task.

  Charlie continued to read while Lillian looked through the Prescott papers once more and then moving on to a different box. “I want to find those tintypes,” she murmured, humming to herself while she searched through that box, closed it up and chose a third.

  Charlie’s eyes widened. Bingo. Halfway through, Constance had launched into exactly what they were looking for: an account of her sister’s elopement with a young man who was identified only as D.

  “Daniel,” she whispered to herself.

  “What?” Lillian asked absently.

  “Nothing. Just talking to myself. How much of the diary did you read?”

  “Only a little. I would love to transcribe it but it would take weeks. Maybe you could do it, dear. Here, of course. I don’t think Mr. Bridge would let you take it home.”

  “I wouldn’t want to.”

  She was absorbed in the story of the elopement. It was difficult to read the fine, fading script, but it went quickly once she got the hang of it.

  Even though Constance’s tone was spiteful, the details seemed accurate enough. The affair between Temperance and Daniel had begun in fall and continued into winter—a moderate winter, something like the one they were having now, but the year had ended with a howling three-day blizzard that left the town buried in snow. Apparently the lovers had run away on Christmas Eve, from what she could tell—Constance had not dated every entry and Charlie wasn’t sure her count was right. Had they been lost in the storm?

  Charlie flipped back and forth in the diary. Constance had a tendency to ramble and digress, but then she wasn’t writing a book. This and that caught her eye—many of the descriptions of Edgartown still fit, for one. But those were brief. It was marriage that preoccupied Constance Prescott, who was nervous about her chances and had filled the previous pages with details of the modest weddings of friends. But Temperance, her sister noted, was too impetuous and passionate to make a match to a suitable man.

  With so little time to read it, Charlie tried to memorize a few lines to share with Sam. My sister’s clothes are too showy, Mother says. Temperance is the talk of the town. She wears red too often. That would be a cause for scandal in a small, isolated community. Temperance has angered Father most extremely—he vows to lock her in her room if she contradicts him again. That was the first entry that gave a clue as to why Temperance might be haunting the Prescott house. Charlie straightened up and read more that seemed to have been in haste. The page was marred with drops and splotches of ink and the pen nib had left scratches. His name is D—! I dare not write it out. And she has vowed to meet him in some secret place—I have found her diary, though I put it back in its place of concealment.

  Why hadn’t she dared to write the young man’s name? It seemed that nothing else had been sacred. Had Constance tattled? The Prescott sisters had been young women at the time, but her dislike and distrust of Temperance seemed close to an obsession.

  Charlie didn’t know what had ultimately happened, but she was dying to find out. The time frame of that part of the diary was the same as theirs in the present day—the weeks leading up to Christmas. Like the weddings, that too had been celebrated in a much more modest way back then. But some of the traditions were familiar.

  Interspersed with the other December entries were pages devoted to the making of sweets like pulled taffy and peppermints. And pudding, including a list of ingredients. Flour. Eggs. Raisins and other preserved fruits. Suet. Charlie made a face. Sugar. Cheesecloth to roll the doughy lump in so it could be hung to steam over boiling water for hours. She didn’t envy the Prescott cook.

  Looking for more bits about Temperance, she kept reading as if caught in a spell, feeling somehow protected by the maternal presence of Lillian, who was carefully opening the lid of a flat, longish tin.

  “Eureka!” she cried. “Charlie, look!”

  “What?” Charlie closed the diary and set it aside and leaned over the tin, seeing the names written in a delicate hand under small oval tintypes.

  There was the paterfamilias, Cyrus Prescott, a middle-aged man with a stern look and bristling muttonchops. His wife. Their children taken as a trio and separately. As young children and when they were grown. Constance. Merit. And Temperance.

  The paper that framed them, printed with a calligraphic equivalent of a gilt frame, was fragile and crumbling, but the images themselves were remarkably clear, as sharp as digital photos. Charlie almost didn’t want to look at Temperance.

  Holding the tintype with great care, Lillian held that one up.

  “Oh my,” she said almost reverently. “Look at those eyes. She really was beautiful.”

  Charlie looked, relieved to see that there was no resemblance between them. But Lillian was right about her eyes. They held all the passion her sister wrote of so bitterly and intelligence as well.

  For her portrait sitting, Temperance wore a buttoned-up, high-necked dress that fit like a second skin over what looked like an incredible figure, even perched stiffly on an ornate chair as she was. Leave it to the Victorians to show what was underneath without revealing an inch of skin, Charlie thought. Was this the woman she’d seen entangled in red velvet in her waking dream?

  “Would you like a closer look?” Lillian e
xtended the small tintype to Charlie so that she could take it if she wanted to.

  She shook her head. “It’s probably best if we don’t handle this stuff too much,” she said. But she was memorizing every detail of Temperance’s lovely face—and, most of all, her manner. There was grace even in her conventional pose, and one silk-shod foot peeped out from under her voluminous skirts, as if she were on the verge of standing up and running away. Charlie told herself not to be so fanciful. But it was true enough that Temperance looked just as alive now as she had been when the tintype was taken.

  “Oh, of course. I’ll just put Tempy by you so you can see it better.” Lillian put the tintype down on the table and held up the one of Cyrus. “Now he has a severe expression, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes.” Charlie did think that Lillian seemed determined to have her look closely at the image of Temperance. Her gaze moved from the young beauty to her stern father, and she could see why Temperance would have to elope.

  She wondered whether Daniel, whoever he was, had gone to her father to ask for her hand and been refused. The diary was bound to mention if so. She thought to look at it again, but Lillian had picked it up from where Charlie had set it aside and was putting it back in the first box.

  She set the lid on top and closed it with a thoughtful pat.

  “I have to go,” she said regretfully. “I’m not sure if you can stay, but Mr. Bridge probably wouldn’t mind—”

  “No,” Charlie said quickly. She was glad the diary and the tintypes were back in their boxes. If Temperance and Daniel had appeared in her house and on her computer, she had the strangest feeling that the process might happen in reverse and she would be drawn into the pages of this diary, never to be seen again.

  The ghosts in her house hadn’t gone away, she was sure of it. They were just waiting for Sam to return. The parallel story that had begun so long ago still had no ending in her mind. Just processing all that she’d read and seen on this table was going to take her a while.

  If only he were here to hug her ... she thought of him with a warmth that suffused her and chased away the odd, chilly uncomfortableness of prying that reading the diary had given her. There was no doubt in her mind that Constance had been the sort of person who peered through keyholes and listened at doors.

  “I mean, no thanks. I’ll come with you. Mind if I stay at the store and walk home with you?”

  “Not at all,” Lillian said, rising. “I think the Prescott archive is more than history to you, Charlie. Am I right?”

  “Yes,” Charlie admitted reluctantly.

  “I almost forgot to ask,” Lillian continued. “Of course, we didn’t have much time, but did you find anything that would explain why Temperance might be our restless ghost?”

  Charlie nodded. “I think so, but I really have to come back and finish reading. I just might transcribe it—do you think Mr. Bridge would let me?”

  “Of course,” Lillian said warmly. “He’d be thrilled. Nobody uses the archives except old ladies and the occasional genealogical researcher. He’d be delighted to meet the last of the Prescotts—oh dear. I shouldn’t put it that way, Charlie, it sounds so grim. I’m sorry.”

  “But I’m not the last, not by a long shot.” Charlie walked with Lillian to where they’d left their coats and warm things. “Don’t forget the cousins.”

  “Of course,” Lillian said absently. “I just never did connect with them the way I’ve connected with you—I mean, they didn’t talk to me when they did live here, except in passing. And they haven’t come back to the Vineyard for years. I don’t know if anyone’s heard from them.”

  Probably not, unless the whole town read each other’s mail, Charlie thought.

  And, for a fleeting second, Charlie considered the thought that Lillian Bing had a history of her own. She’d ask her about it some other time, though. For now, they had to leave everything as they’d found it.

  They put everything back where it had come from and left all five boxes on the table.

  Sam Landry shut off his mini recorder after listening to the playback, rubbing his eyes. The ectoplasm thing had been a bust, just as he’d expected. The goofy guy who’d found it oozing from his cellar wall had even dared him to touch it.

  Not feeling big and bold, Sam had poked a finger at it. Who the hell knew what it was? He just couldn’t get excited. It felt like a blob, was all. He’d snapped a few photos that weren’t going to make page one of Scoop. Blobs just didn’t cut it. Blondes with big boobs always had, always would. Mafia guys, sometimes. But these days, they’d been elbowed aside by former CEOs and disgraced hedge fund kings doing the perp walk. If you could get one of those guys with a boobalicious blonde pleading for her man while she socked a cop with her Gucci bag, you’d hit pay dirt and a syndication sale.

  He wondered who Kevin had assigned to all of the above, while he was relegated to this ridiculous gig, then realized that he actually didn’t care.

  Charlie Prescott was a lot more pleasant to think about. And to come home to, when he was done with the weeping ghost. He shook himself like a big cat, as if to rid himself of the whole damn circus of specters and hauntings and ectoplasmic whatevers.

  He couldn’t wait to drop off his rental car, which reeked of cigarette smoke anyway, and hop on the earliest ferry he could get back to the Vineyard.

  What he wanted more than anything else was to lie next to her sweet warmth and silken skin. Whisper whatever it was she wanted to hear, listen to her soft voice responding with all the passion she hid under that demure manner of hers.

  Wow. She had fire and it wasn’t all that deep down. All he had to do was touch her just right and—bring it on. He could handle her, give her the utmost in pleasure, love her back ...

  Shut up, he told himself angrily.

  Charlie hit the local history section at Pages, browsing through the titles one by one, looking for more information about Edgartown during the time of the diary. She had several books open on the shelves, going back and forth and comparing them with her mental notes, amused to find names that she’d seen in the diary, of shopkeepers and tradespeople, ministers and congregations, and those hauled into court by the constable. Apparently people were stealing lobster pots even then. Gossipy Constance must have read the newspapers of the day avidly. She seemed to love ferreting out sin and wickedness wherever she found it . But Charlie found no references at all to Temperance Prescott.

  Had her father somehow managed to expunge her from the records of the town once she had eloped?

  Charlie was also looking for information about the unknown Daniel. Around here it was a common enough name, but she suspected he hadn’t been from Edgartown or anywhere near it.

  She imagined him as a New York dandy, up to the Vineyard for a seaside vacation in the summer to clear a lingering catarrh—she loved the word, because it sounded exactly like what it was, a bad cold. Catarrrrrrrrrrrrh. You could clear your throat just by saying it. She flipped through the books she’d set out as if she might find Daniel in the insert pages of old images, from early tintypes to the more newfangled photography on glass plates.

  The beach photos showed fishermen and strollers, none of whom were named in the captions. And there were many images of the townsfolk, stacked up like firewood for group shots. The Ladies Auxiliary. The Edgartown Rowers. The ragtag but indomitable-looking soldiers who’d volunteered to defend the Union, and sadly, a lone image of the cemetery that some of them had returned to. There was no way she’d be able to pick out Temperance or Daniel in that sea of faces.

  He’d probably seen her on the street somewhere and tipped his hat, starting a conversation with a small-town beauty who longed for a different life—oh, stop writing their story, she told herself silently.

  If only they could tell it to her themselves.

  Charlie closed up the books one by one, and put them back on the shelves. She was just too restless to stay at Pages any longer, and she slipped out while Lillian was talking to the sales re
p in the back room, leaving her a note. She walked around Edgartown, thinking about Temperance and her sister doing the same thing. Carriages instead of cars, painted signs and no neon—it was easy to put herself in their shoes.

  She distracted herself by looking in shop windows, grateful to hear instrumental arrangements of Christmas carols so they wouldn’t get stuck in her head too soon in the season.

  An antique store featured an old oil painting in the window of a young woman with a swan neck and piled-up hair. It wasn’t Temperance, of course, though something about the pose made Charlie think of her. She felt a slight, rueful smile curve her lips. That tempestuous person was back inside the flat tin box safely hidden away at the historical society.

  She thrust her mittened hands deeper in her pockets and walked on. She was going to have to go back, but she would bring Sam along the next time if that was all right with Mr. Bridge. She was sure Sam would be intrigued by the tintype of the beautiful Temperance, as notorious in her way as a misbehaving starlet, although only for wanting to marry the man she loved.

  Daniel remained a mystery. But Charlie wasn’t sure if Sam would be as interested in him.

  Then an unexpected fragment of a melody floated through the air to Charlie, a few stanzas from a Christmas carol she loved and remembered the words to. She imagined Temperance hearing the same song when she ran away with her Daniel on Christmas Eve.

  . . . the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight ...

  She sang it under her breath as she hurried back to Lillian’s house.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Was she ever glad to see Sam. Charlie went straight into his arms when Lillian let him in. And how wonderful it was that he’d come over on an early morning ferry after dropping off his rental car in Falmouth. They would have the whole day alone together. Lillian was on her way to Pages and she already had her coat on.

  “Hi, sonny,” she said to Sam, pinching his cheek. She wrapped a handwoven scarf around her head until she became mostly a nose. “How do I look?”