Daughters of the Lake(40)

But they weren’t listening closely enough to discern it. They were immersed in the present.

“The first step,” Simon was saying as they trotted down the turret stairs to the ballroom, “is going through the trunks to see what’s here, what we can use, and what we should just pack away into the attic.”

“Let’s get started then,” Kate said, pulling a sheet off an old, wooden trunk with a brass clasp. “Is this thing locked?” she wondered aloud, but a bit of fidgeting with the lock answered her question. It popped open with a little effort.

Under a burgundy-colored blanket, Kate saw that the trunk was stuffed full of scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, aging photographs, and memorabilia of a life gone by. She sank down on the floor next to the trunk and peered inside.

“What are we looking for, exactly?” Kate wondered. If all the trunks were this full of items, they’d be there sifting through them for a good, long while.

“I’m thinking about family photos and other memorabilia from Harrison and Celeste’s time,” Simon said. “We’re renovating this house back to its original glory, if you will, so I thought that accenting it with items from that period would give guests a real sense of the past.”

“I see,” Kate said, fingering the items in her trunk. “You want to duplicate the feel of the main floor throughout the house.”

“Exactly,” Simon said. “We’ve got some photos and other things, old books and such, on the second floor, but I want more of them for the guest rooms and to adorn the walls of this ballroom. What I’d really love are photos from galas and balls that Harrison and Celeste hosted here, but I don’t suppose we’ll get that lucky.”

“Who knows?” Kate said. “All we can do is look and see what’s here.”

“I can see right away that this trunk isn’t going to have what we need,” Simon said, gesturing to the trunk in front of him. “Look at this.” He pulled out an old toy, a child’s telephone. “This looks like it was made in the forties. These are probably our dads’ toys. I’ll bet everything in here is from that period.”

“My trunk looks more promising,” Kate said. Simon walked across the room and came to sit on the other side of it. The two sifted through the belongings of their ancestors, taking hold of items with enormous sentimental value to Celeste and Harrison but which meant little to these two cousins today. Among the relics, they found a baby’s baptism gown, a delicate crocheted blanket, a tiny silver cup.

Kate held them up and examined them, murmuring comments like, “Oh, how beautiful,” and “I wonder who wore this?” not knowing that Celeste had carefully laid these items away with a crippling grief and longing in her heart.

“Harrison!” Celeste’s screams had echoed through the enormous, empty house in the middle of a windy autumn night. “She’s not breathing! Clementine is not breathing!”

His wife’s cries awoke the new father, who rushed, horrified, to the side of his first daughter’s crib in the nursery, an alcove just off what was now the master bedroom that Simon and Jonathan had renovated into a spectacular master bath, complete with a steam shower and Jacuzzi tub. It was Simon’s favorite thing, lazing in the scented water, enjoying a glass of wine and a good book. He had no idea that his great-grandmother had begun to lose her sanity in the exact spot where numerous water jets now massaged the kinks in his back. Although he had told Kate that he had never heard messages from the other side, if he had listened keenly enough during any one of his baths, he would have heard the soft weeping of a woman cradling her dead child, her first child. Clementine.

Harrison had burst into the room to find a horrific scene. Celeste realized her beloved infant was dead—surely, she must’ve realized it—but Harrison could not convince her to let go of the tiny body. She sat in the nursery’s rocking chair, singing and cooing to the dead child in her arms. “Why won’t she go to sleep? Why won’t she stop crying?”

Harrison ran to Cook’s room and rapped at the door until she answered, disheveled in her nightclothes.

“Mrs. Connor is unwell,” he whispered to her. “Run and get the doctor, will you?”

Cook bundled up against the cold and ran down the hill into town, knocking for what seemed like an eternity on the doctor’s back door. When he finally answered, the two of them sped off for the house and climbed the stairs to the master bedroom to find an ashen-faced Harrison staring out of the window. His wife, rocking a dead baby in her arms, was singing a lullaby.

“This child simply will not sleep if she’s not in my arms,” Celeste said as she smiled at the doctor. “Every time I attempt to put her into her crib, she cries so terribly! Hush now, baby, don’t you cry . . .”

Harrison looked at the doctor imploringly.

“Let me take her to the hospital, Mrs. Connor,” the doctor suggested, holding out his hands. “We can care for her there. We can determine why she is crying so.”

Celeste could see the wisdom of this; the child was obviously ill. She handed the tiny, stiffening body over to the doctor, who in return handed her the hot drink laced with something to help her sleep that Cook had brought up from the kitchen.

“You have been through quite an ordeal, Mrs. Connor,” he said. “Get some sleep now while I tend to your daughter. I will take care of things from here.”