Thanksgiving is the only holiday when we eat food we never eat any other time of year. It’s also the only American holiday based entirely around everyone in the country dining on almost the exact same meal at almost the exact same time. And it is the annual lament of my cousin Dominique Gosselin, who owns the Michelin-starred Goose Creek Inn, that this national gastronomic eat-a-thon revolves around food that is neither healthy nor good for us.
I tended to agree with her about some of the more calorie-laden, artery-clogging food—candied yams with marshmallow topping being at the top of my list—but my most enduring memory of Thanksgiving is not food, but something my French mother said to me when I was a little girl.
“It is so uniquely American, ma chérie, for a country to give thanks once a year for its good fortune, its bounty and many resources, and to remember its origins,” she’d said. “We have no such holiday in France to express our gratitude for the beauty and richness of our land, for freedom, liberty, and justice, for friends, neighbors, and family, and for living in a country blessed with peace. I love Thanksgiving and I love that the very first Thanksgiving took place here in Virginia at Jamestown.”
And so did I. The warmth and good cheer as the holidays began, when it was not quite winter but definitely the waning days of fall, always tugged at my heartstrings. Harvest was over. A season was beginning that would be filled with parties, gift-giving, tree-decorating, caroling, peace on earth and goodwill to men, a new year and a fresh start. Leaves had been raked, trees were bare, and the vineyard had gone dormant for the year. My mother loved it when our house was full of guests, so we always hosted Thanksgiving for the rest of the family and any neighbors and friends who she’d learned would otherwise be alone that day. I remember when she would start baking and preparing everything the week before so the house had smelled of cinnamon, cloves, allspice, and nutmeg for days. When she brought home the turkey—always a freshly killed turkey from a local farm in Upperville—it had been a big occasion.
Tonight, after all the drama and tension of the past twenty-four hours, I wanted to eat Thanksgiving leftovers for dinner, comfort food that would be sure to induce a tryptophan drowsiness, send me off to sleep with no nightmares of bloody murders or bank vaults filled with long-buried secrets.
Quinn and I got bowls and platters out of the refrigerator, heating up casseroles and my family’s version of mashed potatoes—mixed with celeriac for a little zing—along with the last of my homemade orange-cranberry sauce. The envelope with the safe-deposit box keys in it was still in my pocket and every so often as I leaned against the counter I could feel it dig into my hipbone.
We ate in the kitchen, though I dimmed the lights and lit the candles we’d used in the dining room on Thursday. Quinn poured more of the Pomerol we’d opened earlier into our wineglasses.
We touched glasses and I said, “Happy End-of-Thanksgiving.”
“Happy End-of-Thanksgiving.”
He passed me the platter of turkey and speared a couple of pieces of dark meat for himself.
“Those Merlot vines in the south block don’t look good,” he said. “I know how you feel about trying to keep them, but I really think it would be better in the long run to tear them out, wait the three years until the new vines start producing, and start over.”
He saw my unhappy look in the flickering candlelight and brushed the top of my hand with his fingers. “I know you don’t want to do that and I understand your reason, sweetheart. But it doesn’t make financial sense to spend the time and money to see if we can salvage vines that are that far gone. Plus we need to keep the disease from spreading.”
Usually I was the one making the exact same arguments he was making. Time and money. Not sentiment. Of course he was right. But ripping out those particular vines would be like tearing out the heart of the vineyard and there was a psychological cost to that, at least for me. They were the very first vines my parents had planted and I suppose I thought they would always thrive, always produce good—even excellent—wine as they grew older. They would serve as a connection between the past and the present.
“What if we got some help?” I said. “There’s a woman living down in Charlottesville who advises a number of vineyards when they’ve got problems like ours. Not just in Virginia but also in California and overseas. She’s supposed to be a miracle worker.”
“Are you talking about Josephine Wilde?” he asked through a mouthful of turkey.
I nodded. “Josie Wilde. I’ve only heard great things about her.”
“And I’ve heard she’s not taking on new clients because she’s got more work than she can handle,” he said. “Plus she’s very particular about who she’ll work with. She expects you to do exactly what she says if you sign on with her.”
“To have someone with her expertise helping us, I’d be willing to do anything,” I said. “What about you?”
He bristled. “I don’t want someone else taking over the running of this vineyard.”
“Because you’d be outnumbered by women?”
He gave me a mock outraged look. “I can handle that. I’m very secure in my masculinity.”
I grinned. “Then it’s settled. I’d be willing to put my faith one hundred percent in what she says. I’ve seen her reports. She puts together a big, thick notebook that’s an exhaustive, comprehensive examination of every aspect of the grapes, vines, and soil. She uses drones to take aerial shots so she can show you exactly what’s going on in every single block of grapevines. Plus she does a row-by-row calculation of the canopy of each block to determine how much shade a particular row will cast on the next one, depending on the geography of the terrain.”
Quinn whistled softly. “Sounds like you’ve been thinking of contacting her for a while.”
“I think our wine is getting better and better. Why not make it great?”
“I’d like to meet her first,” he said, “before we decide.”
“Oh-ho,” I said. “You’ve got this the wrong way around, my darling. She would want to meet us first before she decides if she’s willing to take us on. And apparently just getting that first meeting is a huge step. Then we’d have to have a compelling, intriguing reason for her to say yes because, as you said, she already has a full plate with her current clients, her research, and her travel schedule.”
Quinn squinted at me. “Do you want to call her and sweet-talk her or should I?”
“I’ll do it,” I said. “Not that I don’t think you aren’t utterly charming, especially when you want to be, but—”
“Don’t finish that sentence,” he said. “And you call Ms. Plays-Hard-to-Get.”
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG to clean up after dinner. He washed, I dried.
“I thought I might have a cigar tonight,” he said. “You mind?”
House rules: no smelly cigars indoors. He smoked on the veranda, or elsewhere depending on the weather.
“Of course not,” I said, “except it’s chilly out.”
“It’s also a really clear night. The wind this afternoon blew away the clouds so I thought I’d do a bit of stargazing. Want to come?”
Of all the things I’d learned about my fiancé over the years, the one that surprised me the most was his love of astronomy. The first summer Quinn came to Montgomery Estate Vineyard, he’d asked my father for permission to set up a telescope in our backyard next to our old summerhouse because it sat on the crest of a hill. There the unobstructed view of rolling hills, checkerboard fields, and horse farms below and the star-studded night sky above went on for miles, all the way to the distant Blue Ridge Mountains.
Later it was our practice, especially on warm evenings, to take the last of the dinner wine and two glasses outside where we sat in Adirondack chairs that overlooked the valley and he would explain to me the stars, planets, comets, meteor showers, and other celestial objects that appeared in the nighttime sky at that time of year. Then he would set up his telescope and point out everything to me, until I grew to look forward to our nocturnal stargazing sessions as much as he did.
“I’ll come with you,” I said. “What are we looking for tonight?”
“Jupiter,” he said. “Did I read you that article in Sky & Telescope a few months ago about the twelve new moons they just found?”
I nodded. “What about it?”
“Come on,” he said, “let’s get our coats and I’ll tell you.”
We brought flashlights with red filters over the lights so we wouldn’t ruin our night vision. The Adirondack chairs were cold—it would feel like sitting on a large block of ice—so I got two heavy quilts out of the summerhouse and bundled up in mine while he set up the telescope and smoked his cigar, its tip glowing like an orange mini-moon in the quiet darkness.
“I found Jupiter,” he said. “Come on over and take a look. Tonight you can really see the Galilean moons so clearly.”
Quinn had told me long ago that Jupiter’s four biggest moons, which collectively were named after their discoverer Galileo Galilei, were eventually named Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, after the lovers of the Greek god Zeus—a small irony since the ancient Romans worshipped Jupiter as their equivalent of Zeus.
I got up and dragged my quilt over to the telescope like it was a royal robe. “What about the twelve new moons? Can you see them?”
“They’re tiny,” he said. “Maybe as small as a mile or two wide. More like ‘moonlets.’ They’re probably the result of collisions and what was left over after the giant planets formed.”
“You mean like space debris?” I bent down and looked through the eyepiece and there it was. Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, a dazzling, non-twinkling silvery star. “How many moons are there in all now?”
“Seventy-nine, counting the new ones,” he said. “They’re thinking of naming one them Valetudo. It’s sort of an odd duck, an outlier because it’s orbiting an outer belt of moons that are traveling retrograde around Jupiter.”
“Valetudo. What an odd name. Who was he—or she? Another Greek god?” I leaned down and looked at Jupiter one more time. Quinn had told me that it was the fourth brightest object in the sky after the sun, moon, and Venus. Mostly made up of gas, two and a half times larger than all the other planets in the solar system combined. First discovered by the Babylonians in the seventh or eighth century B.C. Now just a bright silver disk the size of a small bead through the lens of the telescope.
“You’re almost right,” Quinn said. “Valetudo was the Roman goddess of health and hygiene, plus she was the great-granddaughter of Jupiter, who, of course, was Zeus to the Greeks. Anyway, Valetudo fits with all the other names since the IAU requires Jupiter’s moons to have mythological names that relate to … well, Jupiter. Valetudo may not be around long,” he added. “Since it’s going the wrong way, it might end up colliding with one of the other moons.”
“The International Astronomical Union is that strict about controlling the naming of moons?”
He nodded. “They’re strict about controlling the naming of any astronomical object. There has to be some order, some system,” he said. “And they’re not all named after characters from mythology. Uranus’s moons have names of characters from Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. All twenty-seven of them.”
“I think Shakespearean moons sounds so poetic.”
He relit his cigar and the tip glowed again. “That’s why they picked poetic names. Titania and Oberon were the fairy king and queen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Most of the other names came from The Tempest, which is also all about magic.” He started ticking them off on the fingers of his non-cigar hand. “Miranda, Caliban, Prospero, Ferdinand … I forget the others, but there were seven in all.”
“Miranda and Ferdinand were characters in The Tempest?”
“That’s right. Why?”
“I saw a painting in Prescott’s wine cellar the other day. It was called Ferdinand Courting Miranda. The artist was someone named William Hogarth.”
“I saw that painting, too,” he said. “The old man in the painting was Prospero and the ugly creature was Caliban, Prospero’s slave and a witch’s son. I thought it seemed odd among all those black-and-white photographs that were hanging on the wall.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” I said. “Do you know anything about the plot of The Tempest?”
“Actually, I do. After I found out about the IAU and the naming thing I bought a copy of Shakespeare’s plays so I could figure out who all the characters were.”
He had brought the book with him when he moved his otherwise spartan collection of possessions into my house after we got engaged.
“Miranda was the daughter of Prospero, who was a magician, and Ferdinand was the duke’s son who wanted to marry her. The duke was sailing back to his country after attending a wedding when Prospero used his magic to shipwreck their boat so it ended up on the island where he and Miranda were living.” He paused. “Hey, you don’t seem interested in this.”
“Sorry, I am. But I’m still thinking about that painting.”
“What about it?”
“It covered a hidden keypad. When Prescott moved it aside and keyed in the code, the bookcase next to the painting slid to one side and there was a door behind it.”
“To that Masonic room you told me about?”
“Yup. Do you know what was even more odd about that painting?”
“Besides covering a keypad that opened a door to a secret room? Not really.”
“It was a copy.”
“So?”
“The Averys don’t collect copies. They collect originals.”
“Maybe they loaned the original to an art gallery and Prescott hung a copy there as a placeholder.”
It was possible. “Maybe.”
“You don’t seem convinced and you look like you’re freezing. Go on, I’ll pack up the telescope and meet you in the house,” he said. “Besides, I’ve got to finish smoking my stinky cigar.”
I blew him a kiss and started to leave. “Hey,” I said and he turned around. “Would you mind if I borrow your copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare?”
“It’s our copy now,” he said. “Of course not.”
I’d made space for his books on the library bookshelves when he’d moved in, plus he kept other books, as I did, on a bookshelf in the little sitting room off our bedroom that had once been my mother’s office. The Shakespeare was in the library. I found it and sat down on the sofa, opening it to the table of contents. The comedies were listed before the tragedies and The Tempest was the very first play. I found a more detailed summary of the play than the one Quinn had given me after a quick search on my phone.
Prospero, a magician, conjured up a storm at sea in order to cause a shipwreck that would bring a king and his entourage sailing from Africa home to Italy to the island where he lived with his beautiful daughter Miranda. It was a story of revenge and control—through magic—but in the end all worked out well. Ferdinand, the king’s son, would marry Miranda and everyone would return to Italy together. There hadn’t been a shipwreck after all—more of Prospero’s magic—and Prospero, who had lived on the island for years among his vast collection of magic books, was willing to give up his library to return to civilization. The play ended with him asking the other characters and the audience to forgive the mischief he’d caused.
Prescott and Rose’s daughter had been named Miranda and Prescott had always referred to his crystal cane as his magic wand. Were they just coincidences or did Prescott consider himself a magician of some sort who could control others? Had he and Rose named Miranda after the beautiful young woman in The Tempest?
Maybe they just liked the name. Maybe I was reading too much into this and there was nothing at all special concerning Prescott and Shakespeare’s play.
Somehow, though, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a connection somewhere. It was no accident the Hogarth painting—a copy, no less—hung in his wine cellar and that it was tied to his secret Masonic room. But how did it relate to his daughter who died more than thirty years ago?
Because I also had a feeling the answer had something to do with Prescott’s secret, his lost treasure. And more than ever, I wanted to know what it was.