Bellewether Read online

  Over our heads the leaves rustled and danced as a breeze from the bay brushed my cheek like a sorrowful sigh, as though somehow the forest around us was listening, too, and recalling that long-ago loss.

  “Then this Frenchman arrived,” Frank said. “Handsome and charming. And Lydia, she fell in love with him. They kept it secret, of course. Had to. Zebulon wouldn’t have liked that his daughter was sneaking around with an enemy officer.”

  “Maybe he ought to have thought about that before bringing the officer into his house to begin with.”

  “Maybe.” The dryness was back. “But then we’d have no story to tell, would we?” Frank reached to take hold of a low-hanging whip of a branch that I otherwise would have walked into, because I was watching my feet on the path and not looking ahead. As he let it fall back into place he went on, “So the Frenchman and Lydia, they fell in love, and the plan was, she’d help him escape and they’d run off together. They had a boat waiting. But when the night came, there was no moon at all, so the officer, he took a lantern to light their way down to the water.”

  “And somebody saw them,” I guessed.

  “Are you telling this story?” asked Frank.

  “No.”

  “Okay, then.” The path took a turning and started a steeper descent and he waited to see that my footing was sure before going ahead as he picked up the thread of the story. “And somebody saw them. Her big brother Joseph, he saw that light passing his window, and he stopped them there on the path and he shot that French officer.”

  From all around us the trees sighed again as the breeze from the bay became stronger. The path here gave way to a series of wooden steps edged with a railing and softened with wind-drifted ridges of sand and old fallen leaves, and I followed Frank down to the second-last step, where I sat, as he did, with my feet only inches away from the clear shallow water.

  This little cove—Snug Cove—had been where the Wilde family’s ships had once ridden at anchor before setting off on their voyages to the West Indies, where one of the brothers had married and settled and managed their business of trade. That was all long ago and forgotten. The only sails now were the little white sails of the yachts skimming over the bay on their way to Cross Harbor’s marina.

  The tide had come in. By this evening, the half-moon of pale sandy beach would be partly exposed, with the reeds and a handful of rocks at its edges, but now reeds and rocks were submerged and the small waves came furling towards us and flattened themselves into nothing. I slipped my feet out of my sandals and edged my toes closer, enjoying the cool of the small strip of sand on the soles of my feet.

  “So, what happened to Lydia?”

  “Well now, they say since her lover had died, and her brother had killed him, she just turned her face to the wall and died, too, of a broken heart.”

  “And people think she’s still haunting the house, do they?” One of the incoming waves reached to roll itself over my feet, but I barely acknowledged the brief touch of cold. I was thinking of how, even without the ghost part, the legend itself made a pretty good story, and one we could possibly use in our museum programming.

  “Nope.” Frank’s short sideways look set me straight. “It’s the Frenchman supposedly doing the haunting. The tale that’s come down is, they buried him back in the family plot. Wanted to keep it a secret. No marker. No stone.”

  One more wave rolled in lightly and rose and surged over my feet, dragging sand from beneath them and tugging them deeper.

  “So that’s why some fools in this town think he still walks these woods with his lantern, the same as he did on the night he was killed,” Frank said. “Waiting for Lydia Wilde to come follow him, so he can light her way down to the water.”

  Lydia

  So this, she thought, was what she had been needing without knowing it. This one still, perfect moment when the whole world held in balance.

  If she breathed, she feared she’d spoil it, so she held her breath and closed her eyes and tried to make it last, to mark the feeling so it would not be forgotten.

  Round her knees, the water of the wide bay nudged her steadily with unseen currents, drawing in the tide, as though it sought to push her gently shoreward, but she held her footing firm against it and remained exactly where she was, her skirts drawn up and held within both hands, the tidy hemlines of her shift and cotton gown suspended just above the water.

  The clouds were thin across the searing sky and yet they held a heaviness that signalled storms approaching. She’d been feeling it all morning, both without doors and within, where with her father having gone out in the waggon before breakfast-time, her brothers had seen little need to temper their hostility.

  They showed it in small ways at first: a slamming door, a clipped command. But by the time the sun had climbed above the trees and made the air inside the house too hot and thick to breathe, her brothers’ sparring dance with one another had become an open argument.

  If Mother had been here, she would have ended it. She’d never stood for fighting. She had raised four boys and buried three and, as she’d liked to say, there was a reason why her first name had been Patience. But she’d had a gift for making peace, and when there’d been a gauntlet dropped between the brothers she had stepped between them, picked it up, and neatly sorted it away as though it were naught but another bit of linen wanting laundering.

  Their father had once said that had the English had the foresight to send Mother up to meet the French on the St. Lawrence, she’d have settled things so there’d have never been a war. She’d laughed at that, as had they all.

  But that had been before Oswego, and before the laughter in their house had died and she had died along with it, and now no matter how the gauntlets fell and hard words with them, she would not be coming back to keep things tidy anymore.

  A chilling wave slapped cold at Lydia’s bare leg and caught the hemline of her shift and so she gathered up the linen folds more tightly in her hands, still standing firm against the tide’s insistence she return to shore.

  They looked to her now, and she knew it.

  “You are so like Mother,” Benjamin would say—sometimes in praise, sometimes in irritation—and she knew that he and Joseph and their father and her older brothers looked to her to steady them. And so she tried.

  But some days, such as this one, it felt too much of a burden to be shouldered, and she feared that she would stumble if she did not find her balance.

  “I am trying,” she said quietly, though none stood by to hear her, for she knew her mother’s grave amid the trees above the cove would have been echoing all morning with the angry voices warring in the house, and with the hard and ringing sounds of Joseph’s axe as he released that anger into action, stubbornly retreating, as he did these days, to silence.

  There was no one there to give her any answer.

  She stood her ground and raised her face, and waited for the storm.

  Jean-Philippe

  There was a woman in the water.

  He had seen her for the first time when the waggon’s nearside wheels had caught another rut along the road as they came round the headland, and the jolt had been enough to shift him from his frowning contemplation of the trees, and in that moment he had glimpsed the cool blue of what looked to be a bay.

  The woman wore a yellow gown, and stood some little distance from the shore. That had seemed strange enough to warrant his attention.

  Of the three men in the waggon, it appeared he was the only one who’d noticed her at all.

  The heavy-shouldered driver who was now to be their gaoler—or their “host,” by the polite terms of this war—had for some time now been in conversation with the other officer, de Brassart, who seemed able to speak comfortably in English.

  Jean-Philippe, who knew no English save for “Lay your weapons on the ground” and “Do not move” and knowing neither phrase would be of use in present circumstances, had found these few hours of their journey nothing but a waste of time.
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  He’d occupied himself in the beginning with a study of the man who had collected them. The English magistrate who’d been in charge of them at first had introduced the man as “Monsieur Wilde,” a man of reputation in this colony. A man to be respected.

  He was older, and the hair beneath his hat showed thickly white, his face more lined than Jean-Philippe’s own father’s, though his strong frame looked to be more powerful.

  Whatever work he did, he used his hands. They had the calluses and strong veins of a man who did not use them just to hold a pen or glass of wine. And there was something in the man’s straightforward, level gaze that Jean-Philippe suspected might be honesty.

  Which made a striking contrast to de Brassart.

  In their time at Fort Niagara he had seen de Brassart many times, but never once in battle. Such a man knew well the ways to keep behind the men in his command so that he never shared their danger, while yet standing so his shadow blotted out their claim to any part of victory. A man who used his charm the way another man might use his sword, and with as deadly an effect.

  In his years of military service, Jean-Philippe had learned the workings of a man like that so thoroughly de Brassart did not hold his interest long, and when the day’s heat had begun to hang more thickly in the forest his attention had begun to drift among the shaded places on the narrow road between the trees.

  Until those trees had parted, and he’d seen the woman in the water.

  Now each time the trees grew thin, he looked for her, first idly then with growing curiosity.

  Each glimpse, however brief, gave him a chance to add new details to his former observations.

  She was slender. She had gathered up her skirts above the waterline. Her hair—what little he could see of it beneath her plain white cap—was dark. She might have been the age, he thought, of any of his sisters; he was too far off to tell.

  She stood more still and for a longer time than any woman he could call to memory, as though she were fixed in place by some force yet invisible, within that clear blue water.

  By the fifth time he caught sight of her, he had begun to envy her that stillness. He had never learned the way of it, himself.

  “This one,” he still recalled his uncle saying to his father once, “will never settle long enough to be a man of leisure. He was born to be a soldier.” And like that, his course in life had been decided. In the year of his tenth birthday he’d been taken on as a cadet within his uncle’s company, where many of the officers were, like himself, Canadian. “We are not like the officers in Old France,” he’d been warned. “There, men can pay to buy advancement through the ranks. Here, you must earn it. You must prove that you deserve to be promoted, on your merit.”

  He had proven it. His rise had been a steady one, helped by the European wars that cast their ripples over here and by the hard campaigns along the changeable frontiers that gave him countless opportunities to show his worth. He’d made full ensign by eighteen and now, at twenty-seven, he’d been two years a lieutenant in command of his own men, and in that time he could not call to mind a single day—not one—in which he’d had no task to focus on, no work to do, no orders needing action.

  Until this day.

  The English had removed him from his men. They’d had no right to. In the journey down from Fort Niagara to New York his English captors, holding to the terms of the surrender, kept the officers together with their men. But once he’d signed the paper giving his parole of honour at New York, the English all at once had broken faith, forgetting both the laws of war and their own word, and sent his men in one direction and him in another, over all of his objections. Not that any of his arguments had been of use. The only man within that room, besides his fellow prisoners, who’d understood a word he’d said had been an English captain who did not have the authority to alter what was ordered, but who’d merely passed him to the keeping of a New York magistrate, who in his turn had brought him, with de Brassart, to this wild part of Long Island and this morning had delivered them into the care of Monsieur Wilde.

  De Brassart was using his charm to his benefit, but Jean-Philippe felt no call to be charming. He felt like a bundle of pelts being traded from one person on to the next without having a say in the matter or knowing his end destination. Uncertainty, he’d learned to deal with. Life was an uncertain thing. But he had never done well when deprived of all control.

  He had kept what he could of it. Worn his full uniform, even the long white wool justacorps, though if he’d been on patrol in this heat he’d have shed that fine coat first of all and gone just in his long-sleeved blue waistcoat. He’d shaved and he’d tied back his hair and he’d fitted his hat on as smartly as if he had been on parade, for wherever he ended up next he’d be damned if they’d see him dishevelled. Nor would he allow them to break what control he yet had over his own emotions and drive him to anger.

  The woman in the water was a welcome point to focus on at first.

  But he could sense the subtle changes in the air within the woods and in the chatter of the birds that were the herald of a turning of the weather, and beyond the bay, above the strip of mainland, he saw darker clouds begin to roll and gather in a coming storm.

  The woman stood unmoving.

  Someone needed to call out to her, to warn her that the water was no safe place to be standing when the weather turned, but Jean-Philippe from his position knew he could do nothing.

  In that moment, as the trees began to close again upon his view, the woman in the yellow gown became a vivid symbol of his myriad frustrations. He was powerless.

  De Brassart turned and said, in French, “He says we’re nearly there.” De Brassart’s smile, as always, did not touch his eyes, so Jean-Philippe felt no compulsion to return it.

  “Good,” was all he said. “Let’s hope we beat the rain.”

  They didn’t.

  Charley

  I hadn’t expected the rain. I’d been checking the forecasts for days now and keeping my fingers crossed there would be sun for the groundbreaking, and all the weather reports had assured me there would be, and they had been right. Any chance of a rainfall, they’d promised, was scant—only twenty percent—and if rain came at all it would be late tonight.

  But the rain, having not read the weather reports, came exactly when it wanted to: just after five o’clock, when all the clean-up had been done and everybody else had gone and I was getting set to lock up the museum.

  I liked to be the last one out. I’d always liked the ritual of locking-up. Routines again, I guessed—my mother’s influence. But there was something calming in the simple act of passing in an ordered way from room to room and making sure that everything was in its proper place, secure and safe.

  Nothing in my life right now was any of those things, so it was good to feel, however briefly, I was in control of something.

  I’d devised a route that took me through both conjoined houses in a logical progression, starting in the empty corner room downstairs, just underneath my office, in the Colonial side of the house. From there I went through the big square room that had, in the old days, been known as the “keeping room”; passed from that into the front lobby with its broad door and big dog-leg staircase, then into the other square downstairs room we called the parlour, and having now made sure the front of the house was locked tightly, I crossed through the parlour’s back doorway into the Colonial kitchen and buttery and up the narrow back stairs to the second floor. Here, in the two little storerooms set under the steeply sloped roof of the kitchen addition below, there was not much to check on or see, but the space opened up again as I stepped through into Benjamin Wilde’s chamber and made my way—careful to step to the side of the one springy floorboard I didn’t trust—over the landing and into my favourite room, where for a moment I stood and enjoyed the peace, liking the sound of the rain on the roof and the play of the rivulets chasing their way down the window-glass.

  The records from Benjamin’s time had suggested
that this was the room where his daughters had slept—he’d had three of them—and that was how we had planned to interpret it, but now I wondered if we couldn’t maybe expand that to make space for Lydia Wilde’s story, too. This was already going to be the most notably feminine room in the finished museum, and since we had nothing to tell us where Benjamin’s sister had actually slept, we could speculate he might have given her room to his daughters. We’d still tell their stories, of course, but because they’d all lived quiet lives it might not be a bad thing to add in the tale of their aunt’s tragic romance. The only thing people liked more than a ghost story was a good love story. This one was both.

  It was just an idea, of course, and the trustees would have to approve it, but still, as I passed through my office and carried on fastening windows and turning off lights in the newer, Victorian side of the house, I was thinking of all the ways we could use Lydia’s story—not only for Halloween, as the reporter had said, but for Valentine’s Day.

  I became so absorbed in exploring the possible angles that, by the time I came downstairs to the staff kitchen where the main back entrance was—the door I usually went out by—I was unaware of just how hard the rain was coming down until I realized that I couldn’t see a thing beyond the windows. The sight of water sluicing at an angle down the window-panes made me rethink my options.

  There were spare umbrellas hanging from the coat rack, so that wouldn’t be a problem, but umbrellas offered limited protection when the rain was coming furious and sideways, and since my car was parked out at the far end of the parking lot, closer to the front door of the old part of the house, it made more sense to go out that way and make a dash from there. I’d still get wet, but wet was preferable to soaked.

  I locked the back door, switched the kitchen light off, and unhooked a pink umbrella from the rack, before starting over where I had begun—moving through what would be the exhibit space, under my office, and into the ground-floor Colonial rooms. This time, though, while crossing the large keeping room, I heard something I hadn’t before: a steady, repetitive squeaking of floorboards above me that sounded, in that empty, echoing space, just like footsteps.