That Elegy was able to manage the Collection as well as she did was owed not to her father but to a Harvard professor named Francis James Child.
The fact that he had been dead some 125 years was of little consequence.
As a child, she’d watched the way the Collection were drawn to the ballroom upon the rare occasions that Vivian took to the piano, wood brittle and broken with the years, the hammers having lost their suppleness, as though the instrument had been left to sit gathering dust for decades rather than being tuned twice a year without fail. But it was Calliope’s sweet, lilting voice they loved best of all, because she sang the old songs, songs they recognized even if they’d forgotten everything else.
Some Calliope had learned from her mother and grandmother, who’d brought them from the Scottish Highlands when America was new, but far more she’d heard within the walls of Thorne Hall over the long years, including the Child ballads, a collection of 305 stories lovingly gathered and meticulously preserved so that they would never be forgotten. Jasper’s second son, who had inherited the Collection owing to his older brother’s untimely demise, was beseeched by his wife to provide entertainment for their isolated household, shut away as they were with the war raging across the ocean and the pandemic at home nearing its second wave. And so, on a sweltering August evening in the year 1918, a woman named Ida Rose Pritchard arrived at Thorne Hall with a harp and two guitar players in tow. For two hours they performed for the beleaguered family and staff (and other unseen ears), but it was Calliope who was forever changed by that magical evening, so much in fact that while the musicians enjoyed a late supper before their journey back to the village, she rifled through their belongings until she found a folio of sheet music and hid the lot of it beneath a floorboard in the Honeysuckle Room.
One night when Elegy was all of seven years old and ravenous in the way all growing children were, she crept down to the kitchen once the house was abed, in search of the Dundee cake their cook, Clara, had made for tea. Cook was likely to be there, true, but she was more terrified of Elegy than Elegy was of her, and so Elegy cut herself a fat wedge of the rich, fruit-studded cake and sat at the large table in the center of the kitchen to eat it. She’d no sooner shoveled three enormous forkfuls into her mouth when a shadow fell upon her. She looked up, and her fork fell from her slackened fingers with a clatter.
The Shaker farmer with gashes upon his back stood in the doorway with his hands curled into fists, staring at her with his milky eyes narrowed.
She swallowed the cake that had become lodged in her throat and waited for him to pass on as they always did, disinclined to invite their master’s wrath by making mischief with his young heir. But rather than drift away down the corridor, he dragged one heavy foot into the kitchen and then another, a low growl rumbling in the great barrel of his chest.
He normally kept to the butler’s pantry and to the kitchen, but once she’d seen him at the foot of the staircase in the great hall as the sun was beginning to set, with his face titled upward, listening to the sound of Calliope’s voice drifting down from the third floor. And so Elegy took a deep breath and began to sing.
The effect upon him was both immediate and wondrous. He stopped moving toward her, and his fists uncurled until they hung limp and harmless at his sides. The menacing look in his eyes had vanished, and Elegy sagged in relief even as the rest of the cake lay forgotten upon the plate before her.
Cook had peered around the corner of the pantry as Elegy continued the tale of Tam Lin and his brave lover, and soon she’d floated all the way into the room, listening with the same rapt fascination as Bernard. Elegy had a lovely voice, low and clear and with a pleasing timbre well suited for such simple melodies, and soon others appeared: Nathan Bride, the kindly scholar who never left the library; The Mourning, who had once strangled a man deep in his cups who’d fallen asleep in the great hall; Adelaide and Reed, only children themselves, who dearly loved a story.
They watched Elegy until she’d sung the last verse and afterward, as she slid from her chair and saw to her plate. And as she left the kitchen, they slid into the shadows and let her pass with all the deference afforded her position, however young she might be, the mistress of Thorne Hall in miniature.
It was the first of thousands of such nights, when with her songs she did what her blood could not.
Once Reed had slid from her lap and wandered off in search of Adelaide, Elegy bolted to the bathroom nearest her chamber and slammed the door shut. She only just made it to the toilet.
Clutching the ancient porcelain in both hands, she shook and retched until there was nothing left in her stomach, then slid down until her cheek rested upon the cold tile of the bathroom floor. There she stayed until she was certain that she could make the short journey to her bedroom without collapsing.
This was the way of it whenever she allowed any of them to touch her for too long.
According to Child, the Collection would be considered more revenant than ghost, what with the fact that they were corporeal at least some of the time, but the term was never used in any ballad she had uncovered from Ravenscroft to Sharpe, to say nothing of the London broadsides. Their touch was not an uncommon occurrence; fingers brushed against her own in the threading of needles, against her neck when there was no one else to see to her hair or to clasp a necklace, against her cheeks to wipe away her tears when darkness had fallen and there was no one else. But the effects of these were fleeting and easily managed: a cool cloth upon her face, an hour or two of solitude, a song for her and her alone.
But Reed often wished to be held, and she’d never been able to refuse him as often as she should have.
Perhaps it was that he’d lost his mother the day he’d gone into that lake, and she’d never known hers at all.
Perhaps it was guilt that she’d grown from midnight playmate to the cusp of adulthood when he never would.
Whatever the reason, she could no sooner deny him her touch than she could her song, and so she could be found hunched over a toilet at least twice a week.
And so, when Mrs. Griswold arrived with tea and scotch eggs for her breakfast the next morning, Elegy felt as limp as a dishcloth freshly wrung and cast aside. Alas, there would be no one to sing her ballads to distract her from the fact that Jeremiah Hart and his infuriatingly beautiful son were due at ten o’clock.
She’d no reason to select her attire for any other purpose than to avoid her father’s ire, and yet, on this morning, she found herself lingering overlong in her closet, pulling one dress after another from the rack only to find it wanting for some ridiculous reason or another and shoving it back.
In the end, she decided upon an ivory silk blouse with black piping, pearl buttons, and a high lace collar, and she paired it with a skirt of claret silk with only a minimal bustle. Elegy frowned at her reflection in the mirror, turning this way and that to examine her figure in a way she’d never desired to do before. She came to a rather depressing conclusion:
She looked like a librarian.
In the 1890s.
Elegy pinned her thick black hair in a proper chignon at her nape and tried on no less than a dozen pairs of earrings before she settled upon garnets set in gold, surrounded by a halo of tiny seed pearls.
What little makeup she possessed she’d been gifted by Floss for some Christmas or another, and it was likely too old to be considered sanitary, but she fumbled with it nonetheless, managing to poke herself in the eye only twice.
In the end it proved to be all for naught, because he did not come.
At precisely ten AM, Jeremiah strolled through the front door with two middle-aged men at his back and a smile upon his face.
“Good morning, Elegy.” Jeremiah greeted her with a tip of his tweed cap. “I do hope you and your household slept well.”
“Tolerably,” Elegy answered, her eyes flickering briefly past him to the empty doorway beyond. “I thought your son was meant to help you this fall.”
“Atticus? Oh, I expect he will when I’ve need of him,” Jeremiah answered. “I told him not to come all this way to bother with me—he’s got his own company, did you know?”
Elegy smiled agreeably, but inside she was positively seething. “Yes, he told me somewhat of it, but I was rather hoping he would come today. I wanted to ask him about sustainable improvements that might be made to the estate.”
She most certainly had not and only then remembered the idea as something Hugo had spoken of some years before in his fruitless quest to convince her father to modernize Thorne Hall. Thankfully, either she’d made a valid point or Jeremiah did not know enough about the subject to doubt her, for he nodded sagely. “I’ve been trying to convince your father of the same for years now. Maybe now that Atticus is here, he can finally change the old man’s mind!”
There was nothing more he could tell her regarding Atticus, and so she bid him a polite “Good day” and listened as he greeted her father in the butler’s pantry. Then, silence.
Back in her room, Elegy unbuttoned her blouse with shaking hands and thrust it back on the rack, followed by the skirt, slamming the dressing room door with far more force than she’d meant to, but it felt so wonderfully good that she did it again, and then once more. Then she pulled on a dressing gown made of pale-coral velvet and lace and threw herself onto the window seat and took up Northanger Abbey once more.
She turned one page, then two, cut herself upon the third, and thrust her smarting fingertip into her sullen mouth.
Why had he not come? She could not claim to be particularly riveting, and the longer she perched in her window and stared up at the patterned plaster of her ceiling, the more certain she was that his curious behavior upon touching her hand was a product of her febrile imagination.
But was she really so very dull as to be avoided entirely?
She turned her attention once more to the page.
Honestly, the infuriating man and his stupid thumb had done her a great service. She had thought of little else since he’d come to Thorne Hall, and it was not to be borne. Fletcher’s party was but a week away, and there was the dreadful inconvenience of the kitchen, to say nothing of the darkening circles beneath her father’s eyes and his threats of some sort of test …
She must keep her wits about her, and Atticus Hart was a dangerous creature indeed as far as her wits were concerned.
Better to think upon Northanger Abbey instead. A handful of pages became a chapter, then another, and after an hour passed and she’d had to chastise herself for her thoughts drifting toward a certain engineer from Seattle only eight times, she congratulated herself upon such a successful diversion.
Too soon, as it were, for she’d only just come to the part where Henry Tilney seemingly jilted Catherine with regard to the walk he’d invited her on.
And now Catherine would allow herself to be taken in by John Thorpe rather than give Mr. Tilney the opportunity to explain himself. Or at least give him a well-deserved piece of her mind.
Yes, Mr. Tilney deserved one or the other, if not both, and so back into her dressing room Elegy went, and the blouse and skirt were pulled once more from the rack.
At the garden door near the servant’s staircase, Elegy laced her feet into a pair of black leather boots and took a black beaded reticule trimmed in sterling that she kept on a nearby shelf to hold the few possessions she needed when she left the house.
She found Mr. Griswold outside the garage, tinkering with an ancient lawn mower, his pants covered in oil.
“I require the car,” she told him. “If you would be so kind.”
His eyes widened and his mouth went slack before he remembered himself. “Y-yes, Mistress. Give me a moment … she hasn’t been out and about in a spell.”
The she in question was her great-grandfather Raymond Thorne’s Rolls-Royce Phantom, purchased in the latter half of 1938 and kept running only by the grace of a man in Boston whom Jasper brought out twice a year to the tune of several months’ worth of electricity bills.
She waited ten minutes for Arthur to bring the car around and then slid into the driver’s seat with the same shock followed by the same thrill that always accompanied time away from the manor.
The day was a pleasant one, temperate and sweet, the air smelling of golden leaves and loam and promise; the very best moments of autumn before the peak gave way to the fade, when the dense morning fog would refuse to burn off altogether, settling heavy and low in the valleys and fields.
Elegy slipped on a pair of aviators her grandmother had prized and hummed to herself as she savored the three miles between Thorne Hall and Lenox, already planning which roads she would travel on her way home so as to make the trip as long as possible without arousing suspicion. Her freedom was a rare, precious thing indeed, and she was determined to enjoy every minute of it.
Lenox was a small town boasting just over five thousand residents, but as Atticus was not staying with his father, she would be forced to ask around as to his whereabouts.
There would be the inevitable stares, the whispers behind cupped hands that she was, indeed, every bit as small and strange as those who had visited the mansion (however few and far between they happened to be) had claimed.
She would ignore them as she’d always done.
Then would come the louder voices, the questions about her father’s health and the state of the manor and, when she was master of Thorne Hall, would she make an effort to better manicure the drive and perhaps host one of the city council’s fund-raising events?
Those she would deflect with a somber smile and a suggestion, presented ever so demurely, to contact her father, which they would not do, for they knew by now he would not answer.
She turned onto Church Street and immediately saw Harvey ambling out of the pâtisserie with a croissant in her mouth. If anyone could help her, it would be Harvey.
Thaddeus, obsessed as he was with appearances, loathed Harvey. She was a woman in her sixties with wiry gray hair cut short who always wore matte red lipstick and looked as though she’d allowed a blind child to pick her clothing. Today she was wearing a navy-blue coverall with what appeared to be a rack of military ribbons affixed to her breast, along with a floral blouse beneath and yellow Wellingtons on her feet.
Elegy pulled the car into a vacant spot a few feet away, stretched herself across the passenger seat, and battled with the crank until she’d rolled the window halfway down.
“Harvey!” she called.
Harvey caught sight of her and grunted around the croissant. “Well, hello, Miss Thorne. It’s been a while.”
“Have you seen Mr. Hart today?”
“Senior?” Harvey jammed her hand against her forehead and peered into the Rolls-Royce with undisguised curiosity.
“The son.”
“Visited Hallowed Grounds earlier this morning for coffee. Takes it with a splash of oat milk, if you’re wondering. How the fuck does one milk an oat?”
“The same way one milks an almond, I expect.”
Harvey knew everything about everyone in Lenox, whether they wished her to or no, and had made it her business to do so for the last forty years. She wasn’t a gossip; she did not traffic in speculation or exaggeration. Her word was gospel, for better or worse.
Needless to say, she had never been invited to Thorne Hall and had given up begging sometime around 1987.
“Why are you so interested anyway?” Harvey prodded like the old brute that she was.
“Never you mind. Did you see him after that?”
“Went to Parchment and Quill last I saw. Maybe he’s still there.”
The small, cozy bookstore was just around the corner. Elegy thanked her, then drove the short distance and parked across the street. Inquisitive eyes noted the presence of the familiar ostentatious vehicle and the wraithlike woman emerging from it, but no one waved or smiled in greeting. They gave her the same wide berth that she did many of the spirits that belonged to her family. It was not respect.
It was fear.
Elegy straightened the hem of her skirt and was about to cross the street when the door of Parchment and Quill opened, and there he was. She stopped as their eyes met.
As recognition dawned, his brow rose and his eyes lit with mischief, and all thoughts of giving him a piece of her mind vanished and instead she wondered if she ought to throw herself into oncoming traffic. It was inconceivable that anyone could be so handsome. He’d made a deal with some devil or another for the privilege, no doubt.
“Mr. Hart,” she greeted him politely.
“Miss Thorne.”
“Why were you not at the house this morning? You said you intended to help your father with the project.”
His gaze traveled slowly from her to the Rolls and back, and an absolutely beautiful and utterly infuriating smile spread across his face. “Did you come here looking for me?”
“No!” she answered, too quickly. “Of course not.”
“Why are you here, then?”
“Books.”
“Books,” he repeated.
“Yes, you know, the things you read?”
He gestured to the bag at his side. “I’m aware. Don’t you have thousands of those already?”
“Tens of thousands, actually,” she sniffed. “But I wanted something in particular.”
“Oh really?”
“Yes, really.”
“What’s the name of the book?”
And damn it all if Elegy couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Research into this particular venture she had not expected to be necessary. The jig, it appeared, was up.
Atticus did not seem to mind in the slightest. “Admit you came looking for me, and let’s go have a drink.”
“I most certainly did not come looking for you.”
“Right.”
“And I most certainly do not want to have a drink with you.”
He scraped his hand across his jaw. “There’s a wine bar, I think, about a block that way.”
Elegy shook her head. “Not in public.”
“My place, then. It isn’t far.”
People were starting to take pictures of her car, and so Elegy slid into the driver’s seat and jerked her head for Atticus to slip into the passenger’s seat. For one brief, terrifying moment she feared it would not start without Arthur’s ministrations, but to her very great relief, the engine roared to life, and she took off down the street upon a great plume of exhaust.