I moved swiftly through the kitchen, ignoring the shouts now coming from Lars in the basement, and opened the back door. Carroll and Josh were in sight, about a hundred feet from the house, examining something in the grass.
“Hey, you two! Get over here!” I waved my arms over my head in what I hoped was a universal signal of distress, and they started running toward me. From the corner of my eye, I saw another figure approaching—Morgan, in his stained coveralls and old green cap, was just turning the back corner of the house and heading my way. He met my gaze, looking surprised.
“Miz Kate, are you all right?”
“Morgan, what are you doing here? I didn’t give you permission to start working again.”
“I know—I hope I haven’t overstepped. But things have been stressful, what with Steve’s death. And this place … it calms me. I thought I’d just walk the fields for a bit. But what’s going on? I heard you yelling. Do you need help?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. Lars is trapped in the basement. He just admitted to pushing Steve down the stairs.” Morgan’s weathered face blanched at this. “The police are on their way, but I need to keep him in there until they arrive. So—you’ll have to sit here.” I indicated the slanting double door that opened from the cellar onto the back lawn. In my panicked state, the thought drifted into my mind that this door was like the tornado cellar from which Dorothy Gale emerges in The Wizard of Oz, into a new and confusing world. Except right now, the tornado was inside the cellar. And we had to keep it there. Carroll and Josh arrived from the other side of the lawn. “You two—I need you to get on top of that door. Keep your weight there, don’t let it open.”
They all did as I asked, climbing onto the rough wood and balancing there uncertainly. Carroll sat balled up with her knees against her chest, while Morgan and Josh braced against the surface, preparing for impact. I climbed up too. An eerie silence hung over the scene as the honey-colored sun began sinking over the hill in the distance ahead of us.
And then the banging started. Lars was a slight man but strong, and was clearly demented enough in his inebriated state to throw his full weight against the doors. But he was coming at the task from below, and we had gravity on our side; we could hold on to our position by merely sitting in place. Still, we all held our breaths as the repeated thuds shook the doors beneath us. In another minute, the peal of sirens broke into our strange scene, and I faintly heard Detective Reynolds enter through the house’s front door.
“We’re back here!” I called out, and soon the detective and his crew were upon us.
Half an hour later, the fields behind the Barton mansion were quiet again, the day beginning to turn blue and darken. Reynolds had extracted Lars from the basement, and I’d relayed to the detective what Lars had told me inside. As he was led away in handcuffs, Lars had seemed sorrowful but also angry—betrayed by me in his casual confession, and perhaps also by himself. I wished he had found a way to just leave the house when his brother harangued him, instead of fighting back. But that couldn’t be changed now.
Carroll, feeling shaken, had gone back to the B&B with Josh. They had taken my car, but Morgan said he’d give me a ride back to town when the scene was clear. Now that everything was quiet again, we looked at each other, baffled but relieved. I realized there was something I needed to tell him.
I gestured for Morgan to follow me, and he did. We walked together over the bumpy ground that was once a household orchard, up the swell of hill toward the carriage house and past it, beyond the gazebo, all the way over to the busted-up old wood fence and chain-link remnants that marked the property line. I stopped just short of the tangle of greenery where Henry and Mary were interred. The spot didn’t look like much if you didn’t know it was there. Morgan looked at me quizzically. Now or never. I dug my heels into the soft turf beneath us and started to speak.
“The first time Carroll and I came out here to walk the grounds of the estate together, we just sort of wandered. And we ended up here. But I’ll get back to that in a minute. It’s been hard to come by much personal information on Henry Barton, but we knew that he died without heirs. That’s how the town came to own this place. Henry and his wife were both very private people, it seems—they didn’t socialize, throw parties, or have many friends. What they did have, after the first few years living here, was a maid and a general handyman to tend the grounds and the horses. Two people to take care of everything. We were curious about that. We didn’t know anything about them at first, but—”
“The maid’s name was Florence,” Morgan said quietly.
“What? How do you know that?” Morgan was watching my reaction with a faintly amused expression.
“Florence was my great-great-grandmother. She died before I came around, obviously, so I never knew her. But my grandmother remembered her telling some wonderful stories about the great Barton house.”
“So you knew you had a personal connection to this place? Why didn’t you mention it to me?”
“I didn’t want you to think I was asking for special treatment, honestly. If I was the right man for the job, it shouldn’t have mattered where I came from, who my people were. And it’s not much of a connection. I’d never been here before you called me up to get a quote—it was only an old family story. I had heard that Florence worked there, but it never dawned on me there were only two house servants for the whole place. As far as I knew, Florence was one among many. And as I said, I never knew the woman myself. Though I would’ve liked to.”
“So, Florence had a child,” I said, proceeding cautiously. I still didn’t know how much of the story Morgan knew. “Do you know who the father was?”
“I don’t. I’ve never taken a hard look at the family tree, beyond what my relatives said. But no husband was ever mentioned. My great-grandfather was raised by Florence along with other family members. It was one of those stories that children hear and remember but don’t quite understand. We’ve had a long line of unusual family structures through the generations—widows going it alone, sisters who lived together and raised their children that way. But why are you asking about this?”
“Well … Let me back up. There are a few things I want you to know. First of all, Mary Barton kept diaries. Bethany found them concealed in the floor of her bedroom. And they contained a lot. Like, the fact that Bill—the dead man in the wall, who had been the handyman here—didn’t just fall. He was pushed.”
“Oh my,” Morgan said softly. “Pushed by whom?”
“Mary. Or possibly Mary and … Florence. It sounds like Bill had tried to rape Florence. Mary came out of her room to see what the commotion was, and there was a struggle. And Bill … went down the stairs.”
“Oh … my,” Morgan said again. “History repeats itself.”
“Endlessly,” I said. “But here’s the other thing: Florence was pregnant, with the child who would become your great-grandfather.”
“She was? Already? I thought she gave birth to that child at home, at her mother’s place?”
“She did. She left the Barton house after that incident, and Henry boarded up Bill’s body in the wall—possibly with the help of his brother, who visited the house around that time. I’m not sure about that part—but maybe that’s why the brother never came back again, and didn’t want to take ownership of the house after Henry passed. Carroll’s still working on the details of the time line. But there’s one more thing you need to know. The baby Florence was pregnant with—it was Henry’s.”
“Excuse me?” Morgan sputtered, looking stunned. “Henry Barton?”
“Yes. Henry and Mary had three children—a fact the town lore seems to have lost track of—but they all died quite young, possibly of cholera. So Mary, who was sick after that and never quite recovered, gave her blessing to Henry and Florence, whom she quite liked, to conceive a child together. And they did. An unconventional setup, to say the least. It sounds like Mary would have publicly raised the baby as her own, but she died not long after the incident with Bill. So Florence went home, rather than stay in the Barton house—as a worker or otherwise.”
“That sounds like a difficult choice.”
“I’m sure it was. Henry probably could have gotten away with marrying the maid, given how rich and powerful he was in the town. But it seems he respected Florence’s choice to go home and live with her family. And he provided money for her and the baby to live on.”
“That’s good of him. And it must have been enough for them to buy the small farm they lived on,” Morgan said quietly. “I always wondered about that—there’s never been much money in my family, but somehow they acquired that piece of land. Made a big difference in their lives. My brother-in-law and I still work that land today, and plan to pass it on to his daughter and son when we’re gone.”
“There’s something else to discuss here, Morgan.” I wanted to tread carefully, as I was uncertain what Morgan would make of this—or how it would affect the nonprofit and all our plans for the mansion going forward. “Henry died without an heir, officially, since all his children with Mary were gone, and he never remarried. But now, with this new information, it looks like there was an heir to the fortune, and the bloodline continued into the present day. To put it bluntly: it’s you. You might have a claim on this property, Morgan, if you want to pursue it. I don’t know what you’ll think of that idea—heck, I don’t know what I think about it yet—but I wanted you to know. It could derail my whole plan, honestly, if our working group no longer owns the building we’re working on, but I couldn’t hide this from you, ethically or legally. You would’ve figured it out when the diaries were made public, even if I’d tried to keep it from you. And you deserve to know.”
“I see, Kate. That’s … a lot to take in, you know.” He stared off at the horizon beyond us, and then his eyes came to rest on the tangle of vines and small trees behind me. “Say, why did you bring me here? Is there something you wanted me to see?”
I had almost forgotten. The graves. I nodded to Morgan and waved for him to follow me. We approached the copse, and I parted the greenery as best I could, in the spot where Carroll and I had first entered only a week ago—though it felt like a century. Morgan stepped through the opening, and I dropped the vines back into place and stood outside the circle, looking off toward the soft swells of land beyond the mansion’s grounds. Time seemed to stand still as Morgan regarded the graves silently in the waning afternoon light. Perhaps ten minutes passed, and then he came back out, a pale figure emerging from a tangle of green and woody stems.
“Thank you, Kate,” he said to me. “It was good to meet them, if I can call it that. And as far as what you said—about making me king of the castle around here—thank you, but no. It’s news to me that I have any relation to this place other than being descended from ‘the help,’ but even so, I don’t feel an urge to possess this property. I’m happy to work on it. That’s what I do—I love these houses, and I want to see them respected. And I see that you have a vision for what this place can be. I want to honor that too. So if you’d like to make some kind of gesture, in light of the past and what we know now, perhaps you could put me on the board. I know you’ll be doing more work on the buildings in town once this place is up and running, and I think I could be of help with that too. Anyway, if you need to draw up some paperwork with that lawyer fellow, I can officially abdicate my familial claim, or what have you. But if you’re asking what’s important to me, here and now, it’s not money or a grand estate all to myself—it’s the work. And I’d like to keep doing it.”
A wave of relief washed over me. The words I’d heard up in that dim attic room came back to me: Here am I, send me. Here was a man who saw the project laid out before him, and said yes. And I remembered something I had taken from the house to give Morgan. I withdrew from an envelope inside my bag the dog-eared old Bible from Florence’s room and handed it to him.
“I think you should have this. I’m sure Florence meant to take it with her when she left, but it sounds like things were intense in that moment, and she just had to get out. But it belongs with your family—with you.”
“Thank you, Kate,” he said, cradling the book’s flaking leather cover in his hands. “Now, is that all? Because the wife is expecting me back home, unless you’ve got any more stunning revelations for today.”
“Yes, Morgan,” I said with a smile. “Let’s get going. We can talk more tomorrow morning about the next steps. I want to get back to work too.”
“I appreciate it,” he said, tipping his cap. “Now, let’s skedaddle.” He turned and began walking back toward his truck, over the gently sloping grounds of the Barton estate, Florence’s Bible tucked under one arm.
I felt an unusual lightness in my step. Had I been getting more exercise lately than I did in my usual city life, going from condo to car to office and back again? Probably. I’d been climbing the steep Victorian stairs of the Barton mansion, striding across these fields as I imagined what they might be in the coming months, taking walks through the old town I used to call my home, once upon a time. My legs felt strong beneath me.
I picked a few grapes off the vines on the rear side of the carriage house, and as I rounded its corner, popping the sweet fruits into my mouth, the mansion came into view in the honeyed light of late afternoon. It really was a handsome thing, even with its peeling paint, its shingles missing here and there. We’d fix that, in time.
Morgan and I were silent as he drove, and only when he dropped me in front of the B&B and I stepped out into the evening did the weight of the day’s events hit me. I walked into the house feeling shell-shocked, and found Carroll sitting alone in the front parlor. Josh was evidently upstairs taking a nap. When Carroll turned to look at me, her eyes were red.
“Kate, I’m so glad you’re back. I found something. Can I read it to you?”
“Sure, you can read it to me. What is it?”
In her hand was a volume from Mary’s diaries. It was the blank one we’d come to at the end of the stack. She cradled it gingerly between her hands.
“I was wondering if this blank diary could be of some use to a historian—maybe Josh knows somebody who studies antiquarian book materials at Johns Hopkins? But then I noticed something. It’s not blank. Or, it’s not completely blank. There’s one little entry toward the end—on a random page, it seems like.”
“So Mary wrote one last entry in an empty diary?”
“No, not Mary. Henry.”
“What?” My breath quickened. We had found box upon box of Henry Barton’s business correspondence, financial records, patents for light bulbs he experimented with—but never something so personal as a diary. He and Mary didn’t even write love letters. I hardly had a clue as to what the man was like on a human level, beyond being a shrewd businessman and something of a recluse. “Read it to me.”
I put away my keys and sat down across from Carroll as she began to read. The entry said:
Mary—You have been gone some three months now. I sit on the west lawn of our home, and in the setting sun, your face sinks beyond the hill, and in the next day’s sunshine, your visage beams back to me, a daily blessing. Every morning at my prayers, you are with me, and every evening. In the bright light of day, I recall your freckled nose, your dove-gray eyes, the chestnut hair loosing at your temples. It pains me to walk the halls of this house each day without you, but I know too that you are with our Maker, and you are reunited with Winifred, Elizabeth Ann, and David, whom you so faithfully carried, and then lost. You are in His eternal light now and I must find solace in the end of your earthly pain. Your troubles are ended, the frailty of your body no longer a weight upon you. I remain yours for the rest of my lonely days, here in our valley. Each day at dusk I visit you in the small grove we planted for the children, where you now lie with them in Eternity. I will join you when my time arrives. My life’s work—the war, the tools, and the instruments of light—now seems a distant memory. How shall I continue? I love you, and I will forever. Your Henry.
Carroll finished reading and fell silent, but I heard a little sniffle as she turned her head from me. So I had been right, in my freewheeling and hopeful guessing about Henry and Mary—it had been a love match, a joyful union cut short by Mary’s early death. I pictured Henry walking the grounds of his estate, his head bowed, hands clasped behind his back, alone, pacing the rows of fruit trees just to pass the empty hours. Poor Henry, poor Mary. They hadn’t had enough time. We now knew another little piece of who they had been, though it meant something to only a few of us. How would we show the broader world the private and enduring love we had discovered between the inhabitants of this place, along with the majestic structure they had built to live in as a family?
I walked upstairs, knocked on the bedroom door, and waited for the handsome face of Josh Wainwright to appear. I would fill him in on our latest news with Carroll, over dinner.