The Aldrich Inheritance: What The House Remembers

The study smelled of beeswax and old paper, a combination Bram Aldrich had once loved and now found unbearable. He stood behind his father's desk, his broad hands resting on the mahogany, and watched the rain trace silver veins down the mullioned windows. Three in the afternoon, and the November sky had already surrendered to dusk. Beyond the glass, the yews lining the gravel drive bent under the wind, their black shapes trembling in the dark.

Vivian Crenshaw did not sit when she entered. She crossed the threshold and stopped precisely two feet inside the door, her heels silent on the Persian rug, her shoulders square beneath the charcoal wool of her coat. She removed her gloves one finger at a time, folding them into a small square of black leather.

"Close the door," she said.

He did. The latch caught with a soft click that sounded, in the hush of the room, like a small bone breaking.

"Vivian."

"Your father's last will and testament, Bram. The one I filed with the probate court last Tuesday. It is not the document you believe it to be."

His jaw tightened. He had been bracing for legal complication since the reading of the will. He had not been bracing for this.

"How so."

Vivian placed her gloves on the edge of the desk, aligned them with the corner, and did not look at him.

"Since February of this year, your father executed three separate testamentary instruments. The first, dated the fourteenth of February, left the entirety of the estate in trust for his three surviving children, with a discretionary annuity to his former housekeeper. The second, dated the ninth of May, reduced that annuity and introduced a new beneficiary, a Mr. Jonas Pryor of Portland, Maine, who was to receive a bequest of two hundred thousand pounds and a portion of the coastal land holdings. The third, dated the twenty-sixth of September, removed your sister Margot entirely and doubled the Pryor bequest. The final instrument, the one filed for probate, removed your brother Dominic and his children, and named this Jonas Pryor as the sole residuary beneficiary of the Aldrich estate."

Bram did not move. The grandfather clock in the corner marked the seconds with a thin, dry tick. He watched the second hand crawl past the Roman numeral III, pause, and continue.

"Pryor is not a relation."

"No."

"He is not a creditor."

"No."

"He has done nothing for my father."

"That," Vivian said, and for the first time her voice lost its courtroom sheen and became the voice of a woman who had known Cornelius Aldrich for thirty years, "is precisely what concerned your father."

She turned and faced him fully. Her eyes were the pale grey of washed slate, and they held the particular stillness of someone who has spent a career watching other people's grief.

"Cornelius believed someone in the family was betraying him."

The words fell into the room and lay there, heavy and still.

Bram lowered himself into his father's chair. The leather sighed under him. He was a large man, broad through the shoulders, and he filled the seat in a way Cornelius never had. Cornelius had been slight, precise, a man who had moved through his own house as though negotiating a minefield.

"On what basis?"

"That, Bram, I am not at liberty to disclose. Your father was my client. His reasoning was his own."

"He is dead."

"His privilege is not."

Bram looked up at her. The light from the desk lamp fell across her face in a yellow plane, and the lines at the corners of her mouth looked deeper than they had at the reading.

"Vivian. I am asking you, as someone who has known this family since before Margot was born. Is there evidence? Or is this the fancy of a dying man?"

She did not flinch at the word dying.

"There is evidence," she said. "There is a ledger."

He went still.

"A ledger."

"In Cornelius's private safe. I have not seen its contents. I have seen only its existence, and a single instruction he gave me in March, witnessed by your housekeeper. He said, and I quote, 'If anything happens to me before this is resolved, the ledger is to be delivered, unopened, to Mr. Jonas Pryor.'"

The rain intensified against the glass, a sudden hissing roar that swallowed the silence and then receded. Bram could hear the yews groaning under the gust.

"And who is Jonas Pryor?"

"I do not know."

"You have made inquiries."

"I have made inquiries." She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice had thinned. "Mr. Pryor is a marine archivist working for the Maine Historical Society. He is thirty-four years old. He was raised in foster care. He has no documented connection to the Aldrich family. His interest, insofar as I can determine, is in a shipwreck."

"A shipwreck."

"The SS Eleanor Vance, lost off the Maine coast in 1947 with a cargo of Aldrich shipping records."

The name struck him like a slap. Eleanor Vance. His grandmother's name. He had not heard it spoken aloud in this house since he was a boy.

"Vivian," he said, and his voice had dropped, roughened, "what is happening in my father's house?"

She buttoned her coat with two precise movements.

"That, Bram, is the question."

She crossed to the door. He watched her, this woman who had held his family's secrets for three decades, and he saw, for the first time, that her composure was not the absence of fear but its disciplined management.

"The reading of the will is in three days," she said from the threshold. "The house will be full. I would counsel you, as your father's executor and as a friend of this household, to ensure that the ledger does not leave this property. And I would counsel you, as a man who has buried both parents in five years, to remember that grief makes liars of us all."

She did not wait for a response. The door closed behind her, and her footsteps receded down the corridor, swallowed by the carpet and the rain.

Bram sat alone in his father's chair. He could smell the beeswax and the paper, and beneath them, the faint ghost of pipe tobacco that had soaked into the curtains over forty years of evenings in this room. Cornelius had smoked a briar pipe, a bent apple shape he had bought in Edinburgh on his honeymoon. He had given it up in 1987 on a cardiologist's orders, and Bram had caught him, once, three years later, smoking it in the garden she'd at two in the morning, his hands shaking so badly he could not light the match.

Bram's own hands were steady on the desk. He stared at them as though they belonged to someone else.

Someone in the family. He turned the phrase over. Dominic, whose failed ventures had cost the family a small fortune over the years and whose charm masked a corroding resentment. Margot, who had not set foot in the house in seven years and whose letters home had grown shorter, more formal, until they had stopped entirely last winter. Cecily, who kept the family archives with a devotion that bordered on religion, and who had been the last person to see Cornelius alive.

He reached for the telephone on the desk, then withdrew his hand.

Not yet. Not until he had spoken to Mrs. Halloran. Mrs. Halloran had been in this house since before his birth. Mrs. Halloran had cleaned his father's shoes and pressed his mother's gowns and laid out the body of his grandmother in this very room, with the curtains drawn and a single candle burning on the mantel. Mrs. Halloran knew where the bodies were buried, metaphorically and otherwise.

He rose, and the chair rolled back on its castors with a sound like a whispered word.

He crossed the study, paused at the door, and listened. The house was quiet. The rain had settled into a steady, mechanical drumming on the roof. Somewhere in the east wing, a door closed softly. Somewhere below stairs, he could hear the muffled clatter of Mrs. Halloran preparing the evening meal, the rhythmic knock of a copper pot against an iron range.

He stepped out into the corridor. The oak panels rose around him, dark with age, carved with the initials of children who had played in these halls when this had still been a house of laughter. He passed the portrait of his grandfather, a severe man in a wing collar, and the portrait of his grandmother Eleanor, painted in 1912, her hair loose and dark against a sea background that was, he now realized, the coast of Maine.

She had been a Vance before she had been an Aldrich. She had grown up in Portland. She had married his grandfather in the spring of 1914, three months before the war began, and she had brought with her a dowry of ships and warehouses and a stretch of coastline that had been in her family since the time of the whalers.

The SS Eleanor Vance, lost in 1947. Named for her.

He stopped at the foot of the staircase and looked up into the dimwell above. The house was watching him. He could feel it, the way he had felt it as a boy, the patient attention of a structure that had held three generations of secrets and had not, in his experience, ever let one of them go.

He turned toward the kitchen.

The kitchen door was ajar, warm light spilling through the gap like something poured.

Bram pushed it open and found Mrs. Halloran at the long pine table, a bowl of peeled potatoes in front of her and a paring knife moving with the unhurried precision of a woman who had been doing this work since before his mother was born. She did not look up.

"Mr. Aldrich." The knife paused. "You'll be wanting tea, I'm thinking, and won't be accepting no for an answer."

"Sit down, Halloran."

She set the knife down slowly, deliberately, and turned on the bench to face him. The lamplight caught the deep web of lines at the corners of her eyes, the silver coil of hair at her temples, the flour-dusted apron she had worn every day of his life. She had been here when his mother ran crying from this room at the age of seven, clutching a burned finger. She had been here when his father came home from the war with a limp and a silence that never quite lifted. She had been here when Eleanor Vance Aldrich died in the upstairs bedroom in the autumn of 1987, with Bram holding one hand and the salt wind coming through the open window.

"Sit down," he said again, and this time he pulled out the chair opposite hers.

Mrs. Halloran looked at the chair. She looked at the potatoes. She looked at Bram. Then she folded her hands in her lap, a small surrender, and waited.

"It's about Cornelius," he said.

"Aye." She said it quietly. "I wondered when someone would come to ask."

"You're not surprised."

"No, Mr. Aldrich. I'm not surprised at all."

He studied her face. She was not a woman given to performances, and yet there was something in the set of her mouth that he could not quite read, a carefulness that had not been there that morning, or the morning before, or in the whole long decade he had been coming back to this house to bury the people he loved.

"Tell me what you saw."

"What I saw." She considered the words as if weighing them on her own ancient scales. "I saw a man who stopped sleeping. I saw a man who took to walking the cliffs after dark, and before that to walking the corridors, and before that to sitting in the library until the candles guttered in their own wax. I saw a man who ate his dinner and tasted nothing, and who would sit for an hour after the plate was cleared, staring at the wall above the sideboard as if he expected something to step out of the plaster."

"The lighthouse," Bram said. "Mrs. Kowalski told me he'd been going up to the lighthouse."

Mrs. Halloran's eyes flicked toward the window. Beyond the glass, the dark shape of the cape rose against a sky that had gone the color of old iron, and at its edge the lighthouse stood against the clouds, the lantern unlit.

"Every night," she said. "For six weeks. I'd hear him go past my door at eleven, sometimes later, and I'd hear his boots on the gravel path, and I'd hear the iron door at the base of the tower groan on its hinges. And then I'd hear nothing. Not a sound until three or four in the morning, when he'd come back again, and his boots on the gravel would wake me, and I'd lie there and listen to him go to his room, and I'd hear him not sleeping."

"Were you ever curious what he was doing up there?"

"I knew what he was doing." She said it without emphasis, and Bram felt something cold move through the room that was not the draft from the window. "He was talking."

"To whom?"

She did not answer at once. Her hands tightened in her lap, the knuckles going pale, and Bram saw, for the first time in his memory, that Mrs. Halloran was afraid.

"To the lady," she said. "The one in the portrait. The one with the dark hair."

The portrait in the upstairs corridor. Eleanor Vance, painted in 1912, her face turned three-quarters toward the viewer, her eyes fixed on something beyond the frame. The woman who had brought the coastline into the family, and whose name had been carried by a ship that had gone down in a winter storm off the Isles of Shoals in the year that Bram's own mother was born.

"You saw her," he said. It was not a question.

"No." The word came out sharp, almost angry. "I never saw her. I heard her. I heard voices, Mr. Aldrich. His voice, and another voice answering, and the other voice was not a voice I had ever heard in this house before, and I have been in this house for fifty-three years."

"Halloran."

"Sir."

"Look at me."

She raised her eyes. They were very bright, and very steady, and there was a small tremor at the corner of her mouth that she was trying, with the discipline of a lifetime, to suppress.

"I am not going to laugh at you," Bram said quietly. "I am not going to send for a doctor. I am asking you, as one adult to another, what you think was happening in that lighthouse."

She was silent for a long time. The clock on the mantel ticked. The potatoes sat in their bowl, going brown at the edges. Somewhere outside, a shutter banged against the side of the house, and Bram made a mental note to have someone see to it, and then he thought, with a clarity that felt almost like grief, that there might not be anyone left in this house to see to the shutters a year from now.

"I think," Mrs. Halloran said at last, "that your grandfather was a haunted man. I think he had been a haunted man for longer than I have been in this house. And I think that whatever it was that had its hold on him, he finally went to meet it. I think he went up to the lighthouse because it was the oldest thing on the property, and because it stood where the land ended and the sea began, and because he believed, in whatever part of a man believes such things, that he could make a deal with it."

"A deal."

"Aye. A deal. The way his grandmother made a deal, if the stories are true."

Bram felt the floor tilt slightly under his chair, though he knew perfectly well it had not moved. He thought of the dowry. He thought of the ships. He thought of the stretch of coastline that had been in the Vance family since the time of the whalers, and of the smaller stretch that had, at some point in the long and unrecorded history of the family, ceased to be Vance and become Aldrich.

"What stories," he said, "would those be, Halloran?"

She looked at him for a moment, and something in her face closed like a door.

"The kind," she said, "that are not told to the master of the house on the night his grandfather is laid out in the library. Excuse me, Mr. Aldrich. I have a dinner to see to."

She stood up, picked up her knife, and went back to her potatoes as if the conversation had never happened. The paring blade whispered against the white flesh. Outside, the shutter banged again, and this time Bram did not make a note to mend it. He sat for a while in the warm kitchen, listening to the rain and the knife and the slow, mechanical beating of his own heart, and then he got up and went out through the scullery door to find Tomás Reyes.

The groundskeeper was in the stable yard, currying a gray mare that had been in the family longer than any of the living Aldriches. The rain had stopped, but the air was thick with the smell of wet stone and horse and the faintly mineral tang of the sea. Reyes worked without hurry, the brush moving in long, even strokes, and he did not look up as Bram came across the cobbles, though Bram was certain he had heard him coming.

"Reyes."

"Mr. Aldrich." The brush paused, then resumed. "You should be inside. The damp is bad for you, I'm told."

"I'm told a great many things." Bram stopped a few feet from the stall door. "I was told my grandfather was locking himself in the lighthouse at night."

The brush stopped.

"Who told you that."

"Mrs. Kowalski. And Mrs. Halloran has just confirmed it."

Reyes set the brush down on the edge of the manger with a care that suggested he was buying himself time. The mare turned her head and lipped at his sleeve, and he patted her neck absently, his eyes on a point somewhere in the middle distance of the stable.

"I don't work the upper property," he said at last. "My remit is the stable yard, the kitchen garden, the paddocks, the drive. The lighthouse is Mr. Halloran's concern, and the cliff paths above the cove. I'm not supposed to go up there after dark."

"But you did."

Reyes was quiet for a moment. Then he reached into his jacket and produced a small, battered notebook, the kind a working man carries to tally feed and farrier's bills. He flipped it open to a page near the middle and held it out to Bram without a word.

Bram took it. The page was densely covered in a small, neat hand, dates running down the left margin in chronological order, and beside each date a short entry. Eleven March. Two seventeen a.m. Light visible in lantern room. No movement at ground level. Fourteen March. Eleven forty p.m. Lantern lit. Shadow at window, single figure. Eighteen March. Two a.m. Voice audible from base of tower. Two voices.

He turned the page. The entries continued, every two or three nights, with meticulous regularity, growing more detailed as they went. Twenty-two March. Voices audible. Lower voice male, presumed Mr. Aldrich. Higher voice female, not identified. Twenty-five March. Three a.m. Crying audible from tower. Duration approximately four minutes. Single voice.

"You were watching him," Bram said.

"I was watching the lighthouse." Reyes took the notebook back and tucked it into his jacket. "I am paid to watch the property. The lighthouse is part of the property. The fact that your grandfather had taken to spending his nights in it did not strike me as something I should ignore, particularly given the terms of Mr. Pryor's letter."

"You've read it."

"I've been employed to verify the claims against the estate. The claims include, if I am not mistaken, certain allegations about the conduct of the late Mr. Aldrich that touch on the integrity of the property line and the disposition of the coastal acreage. I have read the letter. I have read the supporting documents. I have spoken to Mrs. Halloran, who has been kind enough to answer my questions, and I have not spoken to the late Mr. Aldrich, who is no longer in a position to answer anyone's questions."

"Did he know you were watching him?"

"I would not be much of an investigator if he did, Mr. Aldrich."

Bram looked at the young man for a long moment. The mare shifted in her stall, the leather of her halter creaking softly. The smell of the stable was warm and close, and Bram thought, with a sudden and unexpected pang, of a boy he had once been, standing in this same yard, watching his grandfather saddle this same horse for a ride along the cliffs.

"What did you make of it?" he said at last. "The voices. The light. The rest of it. What did you make of it?"

Reyes considered the question. He had a habit, Bram was beginning to notice, of treating questions as objects to be examined from several angles before being put down.

"I am a man," he said slowly, "who was taught, in the course of a former career, to attend to what is in front of me and to record it as accurately as I am able. What was in front of me, over the course of six weeks, was a man spending the small hours of every night alone in a building that is not, in any practical sense, habitable, in conversation with a person whom I could hear and could not see. I am not in a position to tell you what that means. I am in a position to tell you that it happened, and that it did not stop happening until the night he died."

"And after."

"After, Mr. Aldrich, the lighthouse has been dark. And quiet. And empty, as far as I have been able to determine. Whatever it was he was meeting up there, he appears to have taken it with him."

The mare blew softly through her nostrils, and the sound was very loud in the stillness of the yard. Bram thought of the dark hair in the portrait. He thought of the ship that had gone down in 1947. He thought of the smaller stretch of coastline, the one that had once been Vance and was now, if the will was to be believed, no longer Aldrich at all.

"Thank you, Mr. Reyes," he said. "That will be all for the moment."

"Of course, sir." Reyes picked up his brush. "I'm in the cottage by the kitchen garden if you need me. Though I would not, if I were you, go up to the lighthouse tonight."

Bram turned to go. He had taken three steps toward the house when Reyes spoke again, quietly, almost to himself.

"Mr. Aldrich."

"Yes."

"The night he died. I was in the yard. I heard him come down off the cape. I heard him cross the gravel. I heard him go into the house. And I heard him, a few minutes later, go into the library. He was not alone. There were two sets of footsteps, and only one of them was his."

Bram stood very still.

"And the other?"

"Light," Reyes said. "Very light. And quick. Like someone who had not used stairs in a long time."

Bram did not move for what felt like a long while, though the clock in the stable loft marked it at no more than a few seconds. The mare shifted behind him, hooves quiet on the straw, and somewhere in the eaves a swallow clicked and resettled. Then he turned his head, slowly, so that he could see the young man over his shoulder.

"Quick," he said. "You said quick."

"Yes, sir."

"Quick like a child. Or quick like something that had learned to move without being heard."

Reyes considered this. He set the brush down on the lip of the water bucket and folded his hands around the handle, the way a man does when he is trying to keep them still.

"Quick like something that had stopped being in any hurry," he said, at last, "because hurrying was no longer the point."

Bram looked at him a moment longer. Then he inclined his head, very slightly, and walked out of the stable into the thin rain.

The evening came down grey and then darker, and the wind rose with it, finding the cracks in the old stone and singing through them in a voice that was almost articulate. By seven the windows were rattling in the music room, and by eight the corridor on the first floor smelled of wet wool and candle wax, and the family, in stages, drew together toward the small sitting room at the back of the house, the one that had a fireplace small enough to heat and furniture shabby enough that no one mourned it when the damp crept in.

Mrs. Halloran lit the candles. She did it with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had done it a thousand times, the long matches flaring, the wicks catching, her lips moving slightly in what might have been a prayer or might have been a tally. She had laid a fire in the grate, but the wind kept dragging the flame sideways, and the room was never quite warm. Outside, the storm had thickened into something purposeful, and the rain struck the glass in sheets rather than drops.

Dominic came in first, his boots leaving dark prints on the rug, a glass of whisky already in his hand, though where he had found it no one asked. He lowered himself into the chair by the fire with the care of a man whose back was troubling him, and he did not speak. Cecily followed, wrapped in a cardigan two sizes too large, her hair loose and uncombed, a notebook tucked under her arm. She sat on the floor with her back against the sofa, her knees drawn up, and she watched the door.

Margot came in last. She had changed out of her riding things and into something softer, a loose jumper the colour of unbleached linen, and she had let her hair down so that it fell around her face in the way it had when she was small. In her hand she carried a single sheet of paper, folded once, and she held it as though she had not yet decided what to do with it.

"Where is Father?" Cecily asked.

"In the study," Mrs. Halloran said. "He asked to be excused for ten minutes."

"What for?" said Dominic, without turning his head.

"He did not say, Mr. Dominic. He is the master of the house. He is not required to say."

Dominic made a sound that was not quite a laugh. He drank. The fire popped, and a log settled, sending up a fountain of sparks that the draught pulled toward the window and then, finding no egress, scattered across the hearth.

For a while no one spoke. The candles guttered. The wind found a new crack higher up and began to keen through it, and the sound was so like a voice that Cecily looked up sharply, her eyes wide, before she caught herself and looked down again at her notebook, where she had been drawing, without seeing it, a small repeating pattern of squares.

Then Mrs. Halloran straightened. She had been standing by the sideboard, her hands folded, and she had been watching the doorway with the particular attention of a woman who knows exactly when a particular pair of feet is about to appear upon a particular floor. She did not say, He is coming, but something in the quality of her attention changed, and a moment later Bram came in, closing the door behind him with both hands, as if he were shutting out something that was trying to follow him.

He crossed to the fire and stood with his back to it, warming himself, though the gesture had the look of a man gathering himself rather than a man gathering heat. His face in the candlelight was composed, but the skin over his cheekbones was tight, and his eyes, when they moved from one of his children to the next, were the eyes of a man taking a reckoning.

"I am told," he said, "that the generator is unlikely to last the night. The wind has brought a branch down on the line by the gate, and Mr. Harland cannot reach it in this. We have the candles, and we have the fire, and we have each other, and for the moment that will have to be enough."

No one answered. He looked at Margot.

"Have you something for us," he said, "or have you come only to keep us company?"

Margot's colour rose. She looked down at the paper in her hand, and her thumb moved across the fold as though she were testing the texture of it. Then she held it out, not to her father, but to the centre of the room, the way one holds out a thing one is not certain ought to be touched.

"It was under my door," she said. "I do not know when. I have not been in my room since this morning. I found it when I went up to change."

Cecily reached for it. Dominic said, "Leave it," and then, when she did not, "For God's sake, Cecily, leave it," and she left it, and Margot, after a pause, opened the fold and read aloud, in a voice that shook only once.

"The second one falls tonight."

The fire settled. The wind rose, and the flame in the nearest candle leaned, recovered, leaned again.

Bram did not sit down. He stood quite still, his hands at his sides, and he looked at the paper in his daughter's hand as though it were a thing he had been expecting and had hoped, in some quiet part of himself, would not come.

"The second," he said.

"Yes, Father."

"There was a first."

It was not a question. Cecily's hand went to her mouth. Dominic set down his glass, and the click of it on the table was very precise.

"I am not a fool," Bram said, and his voice had changed, the warmth gone out of it, and what was left was something colder and older and more careful. "I have read my brother's papers. I have read the inquest. I have read the depositions of the men who were on the cliffs that night. I have not spoken of it because I did not see what good it would do to speak of it, and because I was not certain, until this evening, that the matter had not been laid to rest with him."

He looked at the note.

"It has not been laid to rest," he said. "It is here, in this house, and it is awake."

Mrs. Halloran moved. She did not go to the door. She went to the sideboard, and she took from a drawer a candle snuffer and a long taper, and she began, methodically, to extinguish the candles on the far side of the room, one by one, as though she were clearing a field.

"Mr. Aldrich," she said, without turning, "if there is to be a second, there is no sense in leaving the windows lit for it to find its way in by."

No one answered her. She went on, snuffing, and the room darkened by degrees, the fire taking over, throwing long unsteady shadows that reached up the walls and over the ceiling and back down again.

"What do we do?" Cecily said, and her voice was very small.

"We stay together," Bram said. "We lock the doors. We do not answer any door after dark. And we do not go, any of us, to the lighthouse."

The wind struck the house a blow that made the panes in the nearest window shiver, and somewhere above them, in the attic, a door that had been propped open swung shut with a bang that echoed down through the floors, and was quiet, and then was not quiet, for the knocking went on, three times, four, as though someone on the other side were growing impatient.

Margot's hand had found her sister's, on the floor. She gripped it, and Cecily gripped back, and the fire burned, and the house, around them, began to remember.