When they dragged themselves into the reception area covered in dust and flushed from outrunning Mabel’s ghost, Anthony knew they probably looked like madmen. Teag clutched the old suitcase like a drowning man with a life preserver, and he had a white-knuckled grip on the salt canister. Anthony had the presence of mind to lower the fireplace poker before heading into public areas to avoid scaring anyone.
Priscilla ushered them into a meeting room before their appearance could raise eyebrows in the lobby and promised to be back with hot tea and sandwiches. When she returned, Teag and Anthony had spread the contents of Lillian’s suitcase across one half of the large table.
“What’s all this?” Priscilla asked, setting down the tray of food at the other end.
“Something Mable really didn’t want us to see,” Teag replied. He brushed dust out of his hair, but Anthony knew they would never be rid of it until they showered. “If it’s all right with you, I figured we’d hole up in here and read.”
“Did you figure out any more about her needlework and the…magic?” Priscilla looked curious, not fearful.
Teag nodded. “Yes. I found the book she took the spells from, and I’m sure I can undo them and set her soul free. But first, I think we need to figure out what’s got Mabel riled up before someone else gets hurt.”
“All right,” Priscilla replied. “I have to be up front, but if you need anything, just let me know. Lunch and dinner are on me. You’re doing us a great service.” She cleared her throat. “When you’ve got everything figured out, at some point, we need to brief the Earl.”
“Understood. Do you have any idea how he’ll take it?” Teag asked.
She shrugged. “He knows Mr. Sorren, doesn’t he? I imagine he’ll deal with it just fine.” With that, she headed back to her post.
They settled down to eat and found a pot of hot Earl Gray tea, a variety of tea sandwiches, a box of scones and tarts, and a slab of cake for each of them. “I’m going to be so spoiled by the time we get home,” Teag said, polishing off the last of his cake. “Is there a tea room in Charleston? If not, we should start one. This food is too good to give up!”
“I’m sure we can find one,” Anthony replied. “But I agree—aside from being chased by screaming ghosts, this is all a pretty great adventure.”
Teag smiled at him, and Anthony felt his insides turn to jelly with the emotions in Teag’s eyes. Love, gratitude, and acceptance. Figuring out a century-old mystery wasn’t the worst way to spend part of their vacation, and Anthony had plenty of plans for their time after they stopped the ghost problem.
“Divide and conquer,” Teag said once they had finished their lunch and washed their hands to avoid leaving marks on any of the old documents. “Do you want letters or journals?”
“Letters,” Anthony replied. “And if I get finished first, I can help with the journals that are left.”
“I’ve got a hunch that what we want is from 1916 forward,” Teag said. “Let’s start with that.”
They each took a stack of papers and sat across the table from each other, engrossed in their reading. Anthony squinted to make out the neat cursive script in faded ink.
“I feel like a peeping Tom,” Anthony said. “These are love letters, written to Lillian from Bertram—Bertie Granville. Why is that name familiar?”
Teag looked up from the journal he was reading. “It’s the name that guy in the pub mentioned and Mr. Porter in the bookstore. Landed gentry, country manor outside of town.”
Anthony nodded. “Okay. I knew I’d heard it from somewhere. It looks like Mr. Porter had the story right. Bertie and Lillian were very much in love. He even wrote out a proposal and signed it.” He couldn’t help tearing up a bit. “But I guess he never came home from the war.”
Teag went back to reading through Lillian’s journals, and the squinch between his eyebrows told Anthony his fiancé was fully immersed in what he was doing. Anthony hadn’t been completely kidding about feeling like a voyeur reading the old love letters. He knew that people in past generations were just regular folks who loved and laughed and cried, but it was one thing to try to imagine an elderly couple as being young and in love, and entirely another to read the intimate endearments between two lovers from a prior generation.
An hour passed in silence as they worked their way through the letters and diaries. Teag’s sudden outburst made Anthony startle.
“Holy shit!”
Anthony looked up. Teag was staring at the journal as if it had bit him. “What?”
“It’s all here. In TMI detail,” he added, his cheeks coloring a bit. “Bertie didn’t just propose to Lillian. They had a ‘last night on earth’ lovemaking session before he got sent off to war. She, uh, noted all the details,” he added, looking adorably flustered.
“And?” Anthony nudged, having a feeling where this might be going.
“The war was going full tilt, and not well for the Triple Entente—Great Britain, France, and Russia,” Teag said. “So Bertie got rushed through training and sent off to the front in short order. He died almost as soon as he was deployed, in the Battle of the Somme,” Teag said. “Of course, there was a lag between when Bertie died and when his family was notified and a few days more before Lillian heard. A couple of months. Long enough for Lillian to realize she was pregnant. She sent Bertie a letter, but it sounds like it didn’t reach him until it was too late.”
“That poor woman couldn’t catch a break,” Anthony said, feeling fresh grief for a loss suffered more than a century ago.
“Mabel was furious,” Teag said, flipping journal pages to keep up with the story. “The Earl and Countess were off helping the war effort, so Mabel was in charge, like the man at the antique store told us. And Mabel couldn’t stand the thought of the family reputation being sullied by an out-of-wedlock pregnancy.”
“But they were engaged,” Anthony protested. “Didn’t Lillian tell her that?”
“Lillian says in her journal that Bertie got a hero’s funeral, and she didn’t want to ‘besmirch’ his name,” Teag replied, sighing. “So she kept quiet.”
“So what about the baby?”
“Here’s where I think Lillian has more of a reason to haunt Mabel than the other way around. Lillian had a difficult birth. By the time she was really coherent, Mabel had given the baby to a cousin who had suffered a miscarriage, to raise as their own.”
“But the baby wasn’t really a Mortimer,” Anthony protested. “He’s a Granville. Oh, shit.”
Teag and Anthony’s gazes locked. “He’s the heir to the Granville estate—or at least, his descendant is,” Teag breathed. “That’s what the men at the pub were talking about, how Old Man Granville was the last of his family and when he died, the estate would revert to the Crown. Remember?”
“Wow. What else does it say?” Anthony prompted.
“Obviously, Lillian didn’t take it well, that Mabel gave away her baby, which was all she had left of Bertie. She had a ‘bout of hysteria’—a nervous breakdown. That just made Mabel more angry, because she didn’t want anyone saying the Mortimers were ‘weak minded.’ So she locked Lillian up.”
“She sounds like a real peach,” Anthony growled.
“But Lillian wasn’t as weak as Mable thought,” Teag went on, and Anthony felt like he’d been dropped into a soap opera. “Before she gave birth, she’d begged the midwife to have the child baptized and make sure there was a certificate. And there is—for Archer Mortimer Granville,” he said, with a gleam of triumph in his eyes. “Mabel never found out.”
“But the cousins still took him, right?”
Teag nodded. “Yeah. Lillian never saw him again. Her later journals are really bleak. She got depressed—no big surprise. She said her loom and her needle were her only companions, and she wove or sewed until she was too exhausted to sit up.”
“All those ‘archer’ designs,” Anthony supplied.
“Yeah. That strain probably broke her health, and then when a TB epidemic came through, she was vulnerable. She was twenty-two when she died.”
“Jesus,” Anthony murmured. “While Mabel lived into her nineties, inherited everything, and had a husband and family. That’s just all kinds of wrong.” He thought for a moment. “But no one’s reported seeing either of the sisters’ ghosts until now.”
“I think that somehow, Lilian knows about the Granville estate. And she wants her son’s descendants to have their rightful inheritance.”
Anthony drummed his fingers on the table. “I’m a lawyer, not a barrister. All I know about English law I learned from watching BBC crime dramas. So how do we do right by Lillian and Archer?”
Teag’s eyes were alight, and it was clear he enjoyed playing ghost detective. “First, I think we need to figure out which ‘cousins’ took Archer and then try to find out who his direct descendants are.”
“I think there was a Mortimer family tree on the website,” Anthony said.
“Let me run back for my tablet, and we can look it up—assuming we’ve got Wi-Fi in here,” Teag replied. He left and came back quickly, flushed from running in the cold air.
“I kept the tablet inside my coat, so it shouldn’t be too cold to boot up,” he said. Anthony pulled his chair closer, and Teag turned on the tablet, crossing his fingers until they found a signal. A few clicks got them to the right page on the website.
“So we have to go back to who would have been the Earl during World War I—Mabel and Lillian’s father,” Anthony murmured, thinking aloud.
“Okay. That’s here,” Teag pointed to the family tree. “Earl Charles Mortimer is the grandfather of the current Earl. Charles had a brother and a sister. The brother had three children. The sister had four.”
“All right,” Anthony replied. “Charles’s brother and sister would have been Mabel and Lillian’s uncle and aunt. So baby Archer was given to one of their children—someone who would have been Mabel and Lillian’s cousins. So which of those cousins had a male child in 1917?”
Teag did his best to enlarge the small writing. “Charles’s sister’s son, Elliott, had three children. A daughter, Elizabeth; a son, Reginald who died as a baby. And look—there’s a third ‘son’ named Archibald.”
“Archibald. Archer,” Anthony said quietly, meeting Teag’s gaze. “Do you think it’s the same child?”
Teag squinted to see the birth and death dates. “Let me do a little math. We know when Lillian and Bertie spent their night of passion together. So nine months from then should have been…yeah. It’s gotta be Archibald. The similarity in the names might be a coincidence.”
“Or perhaps Mabel mentioned the Archer name, and they did their own twist on it.”
“Maybe.” Teag leaned closer, trying to see better. “The type gets fuzzy when you blow it up too much. If Archer was born in 1917, he’s probably dead by now. So let’s look at his descendants. Okay, he would have been just the right age to end up serving in WWII. So that explains why his kids weren’t born until after 1945. And he’s got three—a son in 1945, a daughter in 1946, and another son in 1947. The oldest son died four years ago, and the daughter died in her forties. But the youngest son…” He trailed off, then raised his head, triumphant.
“Shit. He could still be alive,” Teag said, with a look on his face as if he’d just discovered King Tut’s tomb. “The youngest one, Theodore, would be seventy-two. This says he had two children, Ben and Helena, who are probably in their late forties, and they had children whose names aren’t listed, probably for privacy reasons.”
“Want to bet Priscilla could fill in the blanks?” Anthony asked with a grin.
“I bet she could!” Teag headed toward the lobby, where Priscilla was just finishing up with a guest. She saw him in the doorway to the meeting room, and he gestured for her to come over.
“We need to pick your brain for a moment,” Teag said, bringing her over to the tablet. “You said you were a Mortimer cousin. How much do you know about the family tree?”
Priscilla grinned. “I’m a total genealogy nerd.”
Anthony held out a chair for her. “Sit down. We’ve got a story to tell you.”
“And that, my lord, is how you ended up with a ghost in the sitting room and the lost heir to the Granville estate as your extended cousin,” Teag recapped, sitting back in his chair and waiting for the Earl’s reaction. Priscilla stood nearby and seemed to be making a real effort to keep from bouncing on her toes in excitement.
“That’s quite a tale,” the Earl said. “And please, call me Ward.”
“All the documents are right here,” Teag replied. “The signed proposal from Bertie Granville to Lillian, his letters to her, her diaries—and the baptismal certificate.”
“And these were all under a bed in a room people forgot about up in Bride’s Tower?” the Earl said, looking a bit gobsmacked at the revelation.
“Yes, my lord, er, Ward,” Teag replied. “We just found the room and the suitcase earlier today and brought them here to read through.”
“Well, that’s a very interesting turn of events,” the Earl replied. “I’ve known Hollister Granville all my life—he was a friend of my father’s—and he’s been most distressed about the lack of an heir. It wasn’t for lack of trying—he had three children and outlived them all. No grandchildren. I think he’ll be relieved, finding there is a blood heir to his estate. And if he accepts the evidence you’ve found—and I think he will—he can acknowledge Theodore Mortimer as actually being Theodore Granville,” the Earl said, shaking his head as if it was all too much to take in.
“Hollister doesn’t just dislike the idea of having his manor and estate all revert to the Crown; he hates to see the family name disappear and all its history with it,” he added.
“Now it doesn’t have to,” Anthony responded, and part of him couldn’t believe he was talking to a real, live Earl.
“I’ll have to ring up my barrister, and he’ll need to look everything over, authenticate it, of course,” the Earl said, “so that when Hollister Granville turns in documents to acknowledge Theodore and leave him the Granville estate, there’s no trouble. And I guess that means I’d better call ‘cousin’ Theodore as well and let him know he’s the descendant of Lillian’s love child.” He shook his head. “Theodore never did care much for Mabel. There’ll be no living with him if he ends up foxing her plans to keep Lillian’s child a secret.” His tone was resigned, but his smile suggested otherwise.
“Is there time?” Teag asked, then looked chagrined. “I mean, we overheard some of the locals down at the Boar and Knight talking, and they sounded like Mr. Granville wasn’t long for this world.”
The Earl let out a roar of laughter. “Oh, I’ll have to tell Hollister. He’ll get a kick out of that. Hollister Granville might be close to one hundred years old, but I assure you—the reports of his death are greatly exaggerated.”
“What about the ghosts?” Priscilla asked. “And why did Mabel fuss at both of you in the bedroom and not at me when I was in the hallway?”
Anthony shrugged. “You’re a Mortimer. She might have respected the family connection. We were strangers, about to reveal what she thought was a shameful secret.”
The Earl cleared his throat. “Yes, well. About that. A good bit has changed since those days. It sounds to me like Lillian and Bertie were very much in love and married in all but technicality.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “Not to speak ill of the dead, but just between us—I never liked Mabel, either.”
“It might be as simple as having you go up to the fifth floor of Bride’s Tower and telling Mabel that the jig is up,” Teag replied. “That you know the secret and don’t care—and that Lillian’s son will get his due.”
“You think it could be that easy?” the Earl asked.
Teag nodded. “Sometimes, it is. These ghosts are aware. They’ve been here all this time without causing problems. Lillian ‘woke up’ because, in her mind, Archer was about to lose his inheritance. And Mabel became active to protect the family name. Unfinished business is a powerful tether for spirits. But now that the matter is settled, they can both move on—and hopefully, find peace.”
“I do hope, when it’s all said and done, that more of Lillian’s handiwork can be displayed somehow,” Anthony said wistfully. “The pieces are beautiful, and it’s a shame they’ve been hidden away for so long.”
“I think that can be arranged,” the Earl replied.
“You know, Uncle, when the dust settles, and everything is official with Theodore and the Granvilles, this would make for marvelous publicity,” Priscilla said. “Interest is still high in the Great War, with the centennial so recent. And the story has it all—a tragic love affair, a secret baby, all set against the backdrop of world war, and then redemption. The BBC might even want to make it into a miniseries,” she added with a wink.
“Saints preserve us,” the Earl said with a shudder, but Anthony didn’t get the feeling he really objected to the idea.