by Richard Peck
Then in May of 1915 America lurched nearer the war with the sinking of the British liner Lusitania. The country began to mobilize. I closed the curtains of our long front windows as the harbor of New York grew steadily more congested with ships painted a dull gray. Like so many wives, I saw the war cast a shadow across my husband’s face. He became preoccupied with that distant threat, and I longed to think he was past the age for soldiering. But I couldn’t be sure. At the darkest edges of my mind I saw him already dead in some foreign trench even before I saw him in a uniform.
In 1917 America entered the war. Gregory was commissioned captain in the army engineers. We had been married for five years. I felt my world shudder to a halt.
He was sent overseas in early autumn. During his last leave, his military boots, polished to glass, stood like sentinels in our room. All the brusque, mystical world of warring men invaded our house, so that even in those few days together we were not alone. But on the night before Gregory was to go, we stood together in the shadows of the nursery until Teddy drifted off to sleep. I stood very near his father, and in the faint glow of the nightlight we both gazed down at our son’s dark curls against the pillow, trying to extend that moment to eternity.
We had a late supper on trays before the living-room hearth. The curtains were drawn, and the only light came from the flames. As we sat before the fire, I lay within Gregory’s arms. The quiet and the nearness should have been enough. But I knew I could not let him go without telling him the truth. Surely it had been all the lies of the world that had brought civilization to this brink. My brave smiles in seeing my husband off to war were falsehood enough. I must clear my conscience of an older deceit, and a greater one.
When he sensed I was about to speak, his arms moved closer around me. But I could say nothing. I only closed my hands over his. He spoke instead. “What we have to do now will be a small enough price to pay for the five years of happiness we’ve had.”
I nodded, my eyes brimming.
“Have these years been as happy for you as they’ve been for me?”
“They have been the whole of my life,” I said.
“And there’ll be many more years after the war.”
“Gregory, when I say that our time together has been the whole of my life, I mean it literally. Before we were married, before in England, I was a stranger to you.”
“Two people are always strangers before they’re married. Friends rarely marry.”
“But few are ever such strangers as you and I were, Gregory.”
He waited, and his hands tensed beneath mine.
“We had scarcely even met before—before I came to America.”
Silence again, while he waited to hear me out. My head pitched forward. My shoulders drew in as I shuddered with every kind of fear. “Gregory, the young woman you fell in love with died in the sea. I’m not Amanda. I’m only her—”
Our fingers laced together. He drew me back to him. “You are everything I wanted in her,” he said, “and more.”
The fire crackled, throwing a fan of sparks against the screen. “You’ve known,” I said, but he seemed not to hear.
“A man is capable of falling in love any number of times,” he was saying. “Once I fell in love with a beautiful young vixen in a London drawing room who well knew how to make a young man suffer. Later I fell in love all over again, with a young woman lying very battered and very frightened in a hospital bed. Oh, I won’t say I saw through her at once.”
He loosed his hand from mine and slipped it into a pocket of his coat. “The day I brought you home from the hospital a nurse gave me your possessions, and among them was this.” He drew out of his pocket a slender gold chain. It gleamed in the firelight, swaying there before my eyes. And from it dangled an Indianhead penny. The Wisewoman’s coin.
“But I loved that girl in the hospital bed from the beginning, at first maybe because she needed it. Now I have other reasons. Each day I find a new one.”
The tears streamed down my face. I mourned for all the time I had spent—had misspent—in playing a role that had failed. Yet the tears were of relief too, for the role had become real, and in that it was no failure.
“And still you never told me,” I managed to say.
“Should I have?” Gregory asked. “It was your story—to tell or to keep. And if the past was painful for you, I wanted you to deal with it in your own way. After a while I rarely thought of it, though I think I knew all along that this evening would come.”
“But, Gregory, there’s more. I wasn’t free to marry you. There’s more you don’t know.”
“Don’t I?” His arms cradled me with certainty. “Are you going to tell me that we have no marriage—that it doesn’t exist? With our child asleep upstairs and all the world brandishing swords outside these walls, are you going to tell me we aren’t married?”
His voice had fallen to a husky whisper. “No,” I whispered back. “I couldn’t tell you that. It wouldn’t be true.”
* * *
In June of 1918, precisely three quarters of a year after that evening, I gave birth to our second child, a fair-skinned, flashing-eyed little daughter I named Eleanor. But her father didn’t hold her in his arms until she was six months old. And it was the most glorious Christmas of our lives, the Christmas after the war. We wept and we sang. The world was new-washed with freedom and peace and promise. And when my husband came home to me, I could not question the miracle. I could only hold him in wonder at his wholeness, looking beyond the lines the war had etched in his face.
The four of us made the much-postponed trip back to England in the summer of 1920. Sir Timothy had died in the first winter of peacetime. Lady Eleanor’s letters had a faded, forgetful quality in them now. She was growing older, and she longed to know the grandchildren she had never seen. This journey was the last test of my credibility as the woman who had once been Amanda Whitwell. But I was resigned to confessing the truth to the one person left who deserved my honesty.
We sailed from New York on the Olympic, sister ship of the Titanic. I dreaded the voyage, and the sea. But aboard ship the mother of two small, active children has little time to indulge the ghosts of her memories. Although we included the nanny, Miss MacIntosh, in our party, by the time we disembarked at Southampton, both Eleanor and Teddy had reached the outer limits of their patience with traveling.
It was on the last leg of the journey, on the little train that ran across the Isle of Wight from Ryde to Shanklin, that I made myself remember this place that had once been all the world to me. The lonely cottages so like the Wisewoman’s. The huts so like the one where my own parents—Mary Cooke’s parents—might still be living. I gazed out of the train window while Gregory sat with his hand over mine, offering his strength in whatever role I was to play at Whitwell Hall, as the daughter of the house.
At Shanklin station, a beardless, stringy boy—too young to have died in the war—met us with a car hired for the occasion.
Here was the first ghost laid, for no rugged chauffeur steered a family limousine. I turned in relief to find Gregory’s eyes on me, and I knew he followed my every thought.
It was evening when we drove up the avenue of black Italian pines and stopped beneath the portico of Whitwell Hall. We stood there in our jumble of luggage, our two small children staggering in fatigue, clinging to Miss MacIntosh. When at last the door slowly opened, an elderly man stood there in a familiar coat grown loose on his frame. He was—what had she once said? “Quite as gray as an old rat.” It was Mr. Finley—Finley.
His eyes had grown watery, imprecise; his movements slow and painful. Yet there was a whisper of the old authority in his shoulders and a hint of pride that must speak now of his being the only man of the house.
“Miss Amanda,” he said. “It’s Miss Amanda come home to us.”
* * *
Lady Eleanor used a cane now. Her beauty, grown nearly transparent, echoed an earlier time. The choker of pearls at her neck called back to h
er Edwardian heyday and hid what time had put there since. I’d schooled myself over and over to call her Mother. Yet in that first moment we could only embrace. I buried my face that might betray me too soon against her shoulder as we held each other. I must be for her what she most wanted me to be.
But soon she had put me aside for a first look at the children, who were awed at the sight of this lady. She was a study in silver and pale blue, leaning on her silver-mounted cane. She led them inside and sat down at once to have small Eleanor in her lap and Teddy at her side. If their father and I had crept away in the twilight, we would not have been missed.
I had braced myself against Lady Eleanor’s memories. But in her conversation she did not often draw us back to the days of the other Amanda. The war and time and the children stood between us and then. She was content to sit with me or the children. Often the only sound was the clinking of the tea things. I drank from cups I had never used, but their pattern was familiar, for I had washed them often enough.
And so, as those deep-summer days unfolded, I grew almost easy there. I awoke each morning to a world vivid with birdsong in the room where once I had brought in an early-morning tea tray. In the room where I had once found John Thorne beside Amanda Whitwell. Little about that room had changed, though the lavender hangings were paler now. But I had changed enough to sleep peacefully there with my husband at my side. As the passing days made me braver, I even dared explore the house and the grounds in the early-morning hours.
War had taken its toll, and taxes—later—would take the rest. I walked the grounds more freely than I had ever dreamed I could. For I knew this place would never be mine. When it was left to me, I knew that I would sell it. So I looked at it with the intensity of one who knew she would never see it again.
The lawns and flower beds were now the relics of wartime vegetable gardens, and a natural wilderness had begun to creep in. I walked down to the curious circle of stone beasts and found them mostly toppled. I followed the path through the grove. But I only stood at the edge of the clearing. I would go no nearer Smuggler’s Cottage, the place where that serving girl had once been mocked by a false marriage. Nor would anyone have greeted me at the door. Granny Thorne was dead. And it was said, by Finley himself, that her grandson John had gone off to America and had seemed to vanish from the face of the earth.
In my exploring of Whitwell Hall itself, I was slow to mount the narrow steps to the attics. But I was finally drawn to the room where Betty had once lived briefly during her brief life. In this emptiest, loneliest outpost of the house, I met the past face to face, for the garrets where Betty and I had slept were the least changed.
In her room the small chest of drawers, too ample for Betty’s few possessions, still stood by the bed. Something led me to the battered chest, and I opened a drawer. It seemed empty, but my hand discovered a bit of cardboard. I drew it out and held it to the light. It was a yellowed photograph. I could make out the two figures, one with an absurd, top-heavy hat. A look of bright, bleak eagerness played about their faces. And I remembered the day when Betty and I had set off for Ventnor in pursuit of an afternoon of freedom for ourselves and a chance at Hubert Sampson for her.
I searched for more in those faces, but they seemed to fade as I scanned them, retreating into the past. Then I shed my only tears over the past.
* * *
Whether Lady Eleanor was able to join us or not, Gregory and I dined in some state in the dining room each evening. Finley served us with the averted eyes of an earlier era. I was not to be unmasked by him, for he saw no more than it was his place to see.
This led finally to my doing what Amanda Whitwell would never have thought to do. I paid a visit to the kitchens, drawn there to know who was still there, and who was gone. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find Mrs. Buckle and Mrs. Creeth, still locked in battle. But the kitchens were quieter now, in the charge of two vast, matronly figures dressed in identical black beneath their aprons.
I blinked and saw they were Hilda and Hannah. Though not old, they were strangely subdued, and oddly dignified.
At last, one of them noticed me and gasped, “Oh, ’tis Miss Amanda—Mrs. Forrest, as I should say!” She dropped a curtsy, which nearly broke my composure. The other turned and dropped a curtsy too, though which was Hilda and which Hannah, I couldn’t tell or remember. That would have been very like the Miss Amanda of old.
Flattered by a visit from the young lady of the house, they soon warmed to local gossip, and in dribs and drabs the familiar names emerged. Mrs. Creeth, “done in” by running a wartime household, had been pensioned off to a cottage in Nettlecombe, where she lived just a turning away from her old enemy, Mrs. Buckle. The pair of them had made it up in their dotage and were now great comforts to each other.
Abel, the footman, had been killed in the war, and I could not remember which of them, Hilda or Hannah, had loved him. Their sober black uniforms might have meant they mourned him equally.
The kitchens were spotless and hung with copper pans that glowed like suns. Hilda and Hannah had left their skittish youth and settled to lifetimes of sober work. And if one was a maiden and the other a widow, it little mattered to them now.
When I bade them good-bye, one of them stopped me to say, “Oh, miss, it was ever such a terrible thing about poor Miranda. The sea takin’ her and all. Why, it seems no longer than yesterday when we got the word and couldn’t hardly credit it. Gave us the shivers, Miranda’s passing did. And Lady Eleanor, she put up ever such a lovely tablet on the church wall, all devoted to Miranda’s memory. Wonderful bit of carving it is too. You ought really to see it, miss.”
It was perhaps the only thing that would have shaken me. “No,” I said, “I don’t think I should be able to look at it. It would only sadden me.”
They nodded knowingly. “Miranda’s happy now, I daresay,” one of them sighed.
And I could only nod, agreeing to that, and make my escape. But not before they both dropped final curtsies.
* * *
As the time for parting drew near, Lady Eleanor pushed herself beyond her limits to make each fleeting day count against the empty ones to come. We sat on the terrace one day in the last week of our visit so that she could watch the children playing at croquet on the lawn. Throughout the game, Lady Eleanor’s white hands, spotted with age, gripped the arms of her chair as her spirit seemed to struggle out of her body to join the children at their play.
This was the time. I couldn’t leave my confession to the hurried agony of the last leave-taking. I must tell her the truth, whether or not she knew it already. I must tear away the last veil of deceit so that I would not finally be a liar in her eyes, if she knew. There would be no better time than now for such a task.
I’d planned—rehearsed—nothing, and so there was no proper way to begin. I was not even sure of gaining her attention. Yet I had to begin.
“There is something I must tell you before we leave.”
She seemed not to hear me, though her head twitched in slight impatience.
“I cannot go away without—”
“Oh, just look at little Eleanor!” she cut in. “Just see how she has managed to get a ball right through a hoop and is fairly crowing with glee!”
I could not quite give up. I must try once more. “You must hear me out,” I said to Lady Eleanor gently. “You must—”
“Hush,” she said, and her hand reached across to grip mine. “Hush, my dearest Amanda, for don’t you see? I am quite intent upon my grandchildren.”
Turn the page for a preview of Richard Peck’s classic thriller
are you in
the house alone?
PROLOGUE
From the first warm night of spring until autumn, Steve and I would slip out to the Pastorinis’ cottage on the lake, Powdermill Lake. How often? Ten times? Twelve? I don’t remember now. I kept no diary. We left no clues.
All our fantasies, Steve’s and mine, seemed to come true in that little dark corner o
f time. We thought that making love was being in love. I never wanted to imagine what might come next. That would have spoiled everything. The best part was the way we seemed to be absolutely alone together. And now I know we weren’t alone out there at all. Someone was watching us, maybe every time.
We’d leave our clothes in a heap before the cold stove in the cottage. Then we’d bang back the screen door and pound down the sloping lawn to the pier, our footsteps rumbling on the boards like thunder. And then we’d dive into the lake.
I remember one October night when it was still as warm as August. I remember it because it was nearly the last time. There was sheet lightning over the Connecticut hills to the north, and the steamy mist rolled off the center of the lake. The surface of the water wrinkled with rain-drops all around the white circle of Steve’s head, and his arms wavered just below the surface. I stood with my toes hooked around the end of the pier, wet already from the rain. But I hung there, almost overbalanced, before I plunged into the black water.
For some reason I’d grabbed up my yellow slicker and held it over my head all the way to the end of the pier. Then I let it drop, and it collapsed there at my feet like a parachute. Steve floated farther out on his back, and I could see the length of his body luminous in the darkness. The lake was shallow a hundred yards out. It was always exciting, never dangerous. Before I dropped into the water, Steve called my name and laughed, waving me in.
My name, Gail, carried in waves across the lake and probably up above the treetops.
There was a big stand of rock up there, just above the cottage. It was like a watchtower, and the top of it was as flat as a table, weathered smooth. Everybody knew the path that led up to it. On clear nights sometimes Steve and I climbed up there to count the stars—or just to sit together, very close and quiet, pretending we could read each other’s thoughts.
