Praise for A Desperate Fortune
“Fascinating, immersive, and twisty—twists not only of plot, but of character and time. I love a novel that deals with codes and ciphers, and the other ways in which people keep their secrets.”
Diana Gabaldon, New York Times bestselling author of the Outlander series
“Within a few paragraphs, you realize you are in the hands of a master storyteller: Kearsley’s novels are accessible but challenging, narratively propulsive but thoughtful . . . This is smart historical fiction which isn’t afraid to assume the best of its readers.”
The Toronto Star
“Educates as it entertains, and manages to be wonderfully romantic at the same time.”
The Globe and Mail
“Her prose is beautifully crafted and evocative of character, time, and place.”
The Vancouver Sun
Praise for The Firebird
“Kearsley brings historical figures and events to life in this artfully crafted, exquisitely detailed tale laced with a heady mix of intrigue and romance.”
Chatelaine.com
“Kearsley deftly interweaves a compelling contemporary romance with a sweeping historical drama, and the fantastic with the realistic, to create a richly nuanced, delicately balanced novel that will not only satisfy her regular readers but seems well-positioned to win new converts to her unique approach to fiction . . . the sort of book one wants to curl up within and savour.”
The Globe and Mail
“An enchanting story told with wit and dexterity . . . The Firebird has it all: love, intrigue, twists, betrayal, and unexpected outcomes . . . This is a book to remember.”
The Toronto Star
“The latest historical romance from acclaimed Ontario author Susanna Kearsley crackles with imagination . . .With intrigue and verve, Kearsley has penned what is sure to become another bestseller.”
Winnipeg Free Press
Praise for The Shadowy Horses
“Part ghost story and part romance . . . beautifully imaginative with a dream-like quality.”
The Bookseller
Praise for Season of Storms
“If you liked The French Lieutenant’s Woman, you’ll love this.”
Romantic Times
“The romance is subtle, and the prose is lovely, evoking the charm and elegance of the Italian countryside.”
sliceoflife.com
This is for Violet, Newport, Cesar, Crown, Dinah, Boston, Dick, and Jack; and all the other women, men, and children—held in slavery by my ancestors—whose names I’ve not yet learned. I can’t repair the damage done, nor wipe the ledger clean, but with my whole heart I apologize, and honour you in memory.
Wilde House Museum
Ground Floor
1. Board Room
2. Staff Kitchen
3. Public Washroom
4. Future Gift Shop
5. Exhibit Space (originally French Officers’ Chamber & part of Colonial Kitchen)
6. Colonial Kitchen
7. Buttery
8. Parlour
9. Keeping Room
Upper Floor
10. Archives
11. Collections Storage
12. Staff Washroom
13. Collections Storage
14. Curator’s Office (originally Joseph’s Chamber)
15. Storage Room
16. Violet & Phyllis’s Chamber
17. Parlour Chamber
18. Lydia’s Chamber
All houses wherein men have lived and died
Are haunted houses. Through the open doors
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,
With feet that make no sound upon the floors.
We meet them at the door-way, on the stair,
Along the passages they come and go,
Impalpable impressions on the air,
A sense of something moving to and fro.
There are more guests at table than the hosts
Invited; the illuminated hall
Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts,
As silent as the pictures on the wall.
The stranger at my fireside cannot see
The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear;
He but perceives what is; while unto me
All that has been is visible and clear.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Haunted Houses”
Threshold
Some houses seem to want to hold their secrets.
The Wilde House, standing silent in its clearing in the woodlands on the eastern shore of Messaquamik Bay, Long Island, holds more secrets than most houses.
From the start, in 1682, when Jacob Wilde came across from England and first chose the rise of land above a small cove of the bay to build his house on, it was rumoured he was fleeing a dark scandal in his family. There were whispers he had killed his only brother in a rage, and so had fled to the Americas by way of doing penance. What the truth was, Jacob never said, and if the hands that laid the first square timbers of the Wilde House had indeed been stained by blood, the house stood stoic in that knowledge and concealed it.
Like most houses of its time and place, it started as a basic square with two large rooms—a ground-floor hall or “keeping room” and one great chamber on the floor above—and a stone fireplace on the eastern wall. Beneath the rafters was a garret used for storage, and below the hall, reached by a trap door, was a cellar lined with dry-laid fieldstone.
In defiance of the rumours, or perhaps to show his soul was blameless, Jacob painted his house white. A pure and blinding white.
And yet the whispers held, and grew.
They grew when Jacob’s firstborn son, a boy he had named Samuel—for his brother, it was said—breathed only one brief hour and then no more, becoming the first Wilde to be buried in the private family graveyard at the forest’s edge, above the cove. They grew still more when Jacob’s barn was struck by lightning in a storm and burned until it scorched the ground. He built another in its place. And when the living children started coming—first two daughters, then a son he christened Reuben—Jacob took his tools in hand again and made his small house larger in the customary way, doubling its size with the addition of a second downstairs room and upstairs chamber on the east side of the great stone chimney stack, which now became the central warming heart of this expanded dwelling.
The house, for those few years, appeared content.
Until his younger daughter died of ague and his wife fell ill, and Jacob shuttered up the white house on the cove and moved his family west along the island to the settled farms at Newtown, where he deemed the air more healthful. Another son, named Zebulon, was born there. And in time, when Jacob died, the house at Newtown passing to the elder of his sons, it was this Zebulon who brought his wife, Patience, and their own two small boys back to Messaquamik Bay, and to the little wooded cove, and to the solid four-roomed house that had, for all those years between, stood silently amid the trees and waited.
It was not an easy homecoming. His first two children grew and thrived but three more sons were born and lost and buried in the private family graveyard, and through these years of tribulation Zebulon, a carpenter by trade, enlarged the house yet further, stubbornly improving it by building a lean-to along the back wall, thus creating a kitchen and pantry and one more small chamber downstairs, with a steeply sloped garret above.
At last another son was born, and lived. And then another. And a daughter, Lydia.
It seemed for a time that the Wilde House, at last, would know happiness. But there were locals who still nodded sagely and said there’d been blood on the hands of the man who had built it, and blood would have blood, they warned. Blood would have blood.
In truth there were few who
were truly surprised by what happened next; for in the mid-eighteenth century, with one war winding its way to a close and another about to begin, it was not such an uncommon thing to find families dividing and splintering under the strain. And if one of the bodies that found its way into the Wilde family graveyard was that of an outsider . . . well, there was violence that happened, sometimes.
It was then, in those years, that the light in the forest first started to shine.
Sailors on the ships that came to anchor off the cove in Messaquamik Bay would often claim they saw the light within the trees, much like a lantern swinging from an unseen hand. The British officers who occupied the Wilde House in the Revolution swore they’d seen it also, and a young spy for the Patriots had written in his journal of the light that seemed to guide him safely round the posted sentries and which, having seen it first at dusk, he’d fancied had been carried by a soldier in French uniform.
The British officers told other tales, of steps that trod the stairs by night, and doors that opened by themselves when no breeze blew to move them, but those tales were told with ale in hand, to test each other’s courage, and when they were gone the old house closed again upon its secrets.
As the years passed, its remote location and lack of amenities reduced it to a summer home for Zebulon’s descendants, who by then had relocated to the city of New York. In due time, one of these descendants—Lawrence Wilde, a poet of some reputation—chose to take the money he had earned through publication and invest it in what he desired to be a grand retreat, away from civilized distractions, so in 1854 he had the Wilde House enlarged a final time with a new Victorian addition that amounted to a second complete house, overlapping the footprint of the original and indeed attached to the first by means of opening up a part of the lean-to wall.
The house, in this condition, carried down the generations, and the light within the trees still beckoned to the ships offshore.
Who held the light, and why, and what that spirit’s purpose might be in the forest, no one knew, though locals often fell to speculating, nodding just as sagely as their forebears had when telling stories of the secrets held within the Wilde House.
The house, when I first saw it, seemed intent on guarding what it knew within its walls as long as it stayed standing; but we all learned, by the end of it, that secrets aren’t such easy things to keep.
Charley
Routines, my mother claimed, could help you get through almost anything.
No matter what calamity occurred, she rose and made the bed and made my father’s coffee and her tea and read the morning paper, in that order. Life, she’d taught me, ran more smoothly when you tamed it with these rituals and kept it in control.
I tried; I really did. But even though I was, in many ways, my mother’s daughter, I’d lived almost thirty years now without settling on a pattern that would keep my own life organized.
And that was why, although I had been working for a week now at the Wilde House, in this little upstairs room that was assigned to be my office in the new museum, and although I’d known for all that time the local paper would be sending a reporter out on Saturday to interview me, I had waited until Saturday to start to clean.
I’d brought my breakfast with me and had made a bit of progress. When I’d started, it had looked as though a paper bomb had detonated on my desk, but now its sturdy dark oak breadth was almost tidy, with the papers split between the stacks of those I’d dealt with and the ones still needing my attention. My computer, which had started off half buried by those papers, had a small desk of its own now in the corner just behind me, by the window.
But that left me with a pile of things that didn’t have a place to go.
I tried to fit a few of them on shelves, to fill the bare spots, but they cluttered. In the end I simply opened the big empty bottom file drawer of my desk and swept the spare things into there, and slid it shut.
That, too, was something I’d been taught at home: whatever parts of life you couldn’t organize, you hid.
And that I could do.
• • •
I’d been waiting for the question, so it came as no surprise. The elephant, as some might say, had been there in the room since the beginning of the interview and both of us could see it, but it still took the reporter from the local paper several minutes before she acknowledged it.
“Your last name’s kind of famous in this area.” Her smile was bright. “I take it you’re a relative?”
I found a smile—not quite as bright, but nearly natural—to answer with. “Yes, I am. Werner Van Hoek was my grandfather.”
From there it was a simple thing to work out the connection. Of my grandparents’ two children, both conveniently born boys to carry down the family name, only one had survived long enough to marry and have children. But she asked me, all the same, “So then your father would be . . . ?”
“Theo. Theo Van Hoek.” I waited to see if she’d take it a step further, and if so, which term she’d use. My father called himself a draft resister, though most other people, I had learned, preferred the more alliterative “draft dodger.”
The reporter was younger than me. Not by much, though, and people of our generation weren’t all that concerned with the Vietnam War or the draft or the men who had dodged it, but even so, I’d heard my father called other names, too: Coward. Traitor.
I could see her take a moment to consider, then she simply asked, “And he lives up in Canada?”
“In Toronto, yes.”
“That’s where you were born?”
I’d actually been born in Montreal, as had my brother, but my parents had moved to Toronto just a few months afterwards, so in the interest of simplicity I just said, “Yes.”
“So you’re a Canadian?”
I didn’t see the point of getting into the complexities of what I was on each side of the border. There were many who believed my father should have lost his right to be American when he tore up his draft card and refused to fight in Vietnam, but immigration laws relied on facts and dates and, in the case of both my brother and myself, they’d made it possible for us to claim our citizenship in the States and cross that border back again. I said, “I’m an American, too. At least, that’s what the IRS thinks. They keep taking my taxes.”
The young reporter smiled. She clearly felt that we were back on safer ground now, and it showed in how she settled much more comfortably within her chair, the tricky question over.
I was starting to get used to people asking it. Even when I’d lived upstate the name “Van Hoek” had opened doors, spurring some of the more socially minded to ask whether my brother Niels and I were “of the Long Island Van Hoeks”—a question we’d never known quite how to answer, in honesty, because we were, and we weren’t. But down here, in this part of Long Island’s north shore, with my grandparents’ mansion set off in its own gated park looking over the bay, a short drive from where I was now sitting, I couldn’t just walk around town with a name like Van Hoek and expect people not to remark on it.
Usually, after the “Are you a relative?” question, came the inevitable ones about my father, and then a final one aimed more directly, with a pointed barb: “And what does your grandmother think about you coming back here to live?”
I could have answered that I wasn’t “coming back,” since I had never lived here to begin with. But I didn’t. I could have answered simply it was none of their damn business. But I didn’t do that, either. I had learned to simply shrug and smile and tell them they would have to ask my grandmother.
Truth was, I didn’t know. I’d never met her. Never seen her, save in photographs. She’d never taken notice of my brother, Niels, the whole time he had lived here, and she hadn’t bothered coming to his funeral in the spring.
To be fair, my father hadn’t been there either, but that hadn’t been his fault. He’d been stuck in the hospital, recovering from surgery to fix his stubborn heart. The doctors hadn’t told him about Niels for several days
—not out of fear the shock would do him in, but out of fear he’d rip his tubes out, rise up from his bed, and take the next flight to LaGuardia. He would have, too, but by the time he’d learned his only son had died, my mother had arranged a second service in memoriam, at their church in Toronto.
I had gone to that one, also, even though I never found much comfort in the ritual of eulogising. Niels, I knew, had hated it. I hadn’t told my parents that. I’d stood there and supported them as I’d supported Niels’s daughter, Rachel, who had looked so lost. And when they’d asked a favour of me, I had told them yes, of course. Of course I will. No hesitation.
The reporter asked me, “How long were you with the . . . Hall-McPhail Museum, was it?”
I regrouped my thoughts and did the math and told her, “Almost seven years.” The Hall-McPhail was not a large museum and a lot of people didn’t recognize the name, so she wasn’t alone. “It’s a historic house, a lot like this one, only our focus was all on the Seven Years’ War. The French and Indian War,” I explained, when she looked at me blankly.
“Oh,” she said. “Like Last of the Mohicans.”
“Yes.”
“And what did you do there?”
The board of trustees who had hired me here as curator two weeks ago had asked me that same question. I’d sat at the end of the table downstairs and I’d faced them and dutifully detailed the various titles I’d held at the museum—a succession of positions that had seen me doing everything from being a museum guide to managing the interns and the volunteers; from dealing with the paperwork to helping manage budgets. I’d assisted with the conservation of historic texts and then translated those same texts from French. I’d helped to handle documents and weaponry and textiles. I’d created exhibitions and installed them. I had—
“Well, a bit of everything,” I said. “But for the past two years I’ve been assistant to the curator.”
“They must,” she offered, friendly, “have been sad to see you go.”
They’d wished me well, in fact. I told her that, and showed her what they’d given me my last day as a parting gift—a reproduction powder horn designed to look like many of the ones I’d catalogued for the collection, and engraved: CHARLOTTE VAN HOEK HER POWDER HORNE, and during the whole time that I was doing this I tried to keep in mind the cheerful voices of the party on that last day, and not dwell on Tyler’s more reproachful comments as he’d watched me packing up my car.