The Wednesday Daughters Read online

  “She told me that, too,” Anna Page said. Then to Graham, “Aunt Ally thought Hope and I both would have loved to see the power of the falls.”

  “You’ll mean Stock Ghyll Force, out beyond Ambleside,” Graham said. “John Ruskin called it ‘the loveliest rock-scenery, chased with silver waterfalls, that I have ever set foot or heart upon.’ ” Then to me, “We ought not to have ventured out in all that weather, your mum and me, and yet it was irresistible.” He and Anna Page both taking this single memory I’d been able to call up about my mother’s time here, and wresting it from me.

  From the Journals of Ally Tantry

  12.5.2009, Ambleside, on Lake Windermere. We spent a bleak afternoon yesterday at the Armitt Library, Bea a bit put out by anything that distracted me from her mushroom drawings. I do want to know all about her, but I was more interested in what the archivist told me about Ainsley’s End, where Mother’s fiancé had lived. It is across the lake after all, not far from Beatrix Potter’s tarn. So this morning I shared with Bea my idea that we might find someone to rent us a boat to take up to her pond. I didn’t mention Ainsley’s End or my mother and the fiancé.

  —Moss Eccles Tarn? Bea asked. But you needn’t rent a boat. Mr. Heelis and I keep one there.

  That was years ago, I explained to her, but Bea is quite stubborn when she gets an idea in her head.

  —I prefer to have my own boat, I said, trying another tack.

  —You might have said so, she responded snippily. Then you ought to talk to the gentleman in Bowness who straps a boat to his motorcar and takes it across on the ferry, and all the distance up the hill. There isn’t a soul in Hawkshead will do that for you.

  —Heavens to Betsy, Bea, why didn’t you say so earlier?

  —You were standing right beside me when that archivist mentioned him. You simply didn’t register it. You were too busy getting all wrought up about Ainsley’s End being across the lake even though you couldn’t find it.

  —I wasn’t getting “all wrought up.”

  —You must pay more attention, Allison. There isn’t a thing I know that you don’t know as well.

  As we crossed the lake with the grizzled old boatman, Bea talked about the many times she’d taken this same ferry across from Near Sawrey to Lindeth Howe.

  —My brother, Bertram, used to say Mother was the sort to push you around in a perambulator until you got out and said you would rather walk, Ben said. But Mother never sent a perambulator for me, much less the motorcar. She forever left me to hike the whole long uphill on some excuse, generally having to do with the car having just been varnished.

  Like with her sheep, you don’t want to get Bea started on her mother, but there was so much sadness in her squishy face that I let it go.

  —The squishiness, that’s in your face, Allison, when the subject of our mothers comes up, she said.

  I set my face to something less squishy and settled into a conversation with the boatman. Oh, how he could talk, that way people have of talking up here, as if every sentence ought to be structured as a question, and with the most delightful expressions. “Yan, tan, tethera,” he taught me. “One, two, three.” It’s the way shepherds counted sheep not that long ago, a last remnant of ancient Cumbrian language. I learned all about fell racing and hound trailing, too, and about Wordsworth and his sister wandering upon a nearby field of daffodils that inspired his iconic poem. The boatman also had stories about Bea, who denied the truth of every one of them, and about Donald Campbell setting the water speed record here on Lake Windermere only to crash his boat and die on the dining room table at a nearby estate.

  —At Ainsley’s End? I asked.

  —At Belle Grange, miss. ’Course, Ainsley’s End has a story of its own, some says. That’s the place what was once belonging to the Crier of Claife, who wanders the woods that side with his lantern. A haint.

  I studied the submerged cable on which the car ferry is pulled across the lake, trying to mask my disappointment. Just an old ghost story.

  —Some says he’s a-looking for his wife, for she did disappear. Some says she disappeared of his hand and he be checking each night that her bones isn’t coming up to trouble him. I likes that one: the haint not wanting to be spooked his own self.

  He laughed warmly, and I laughed with him, because I could tell he wanted company.

  —The hills? I asked, hoping at least to get some better idea where Ainsley’s End might be.

  He pointed uplake to a small pier jutting into the water.

  —Them chimneys above the wee pier, they be the Ainsley’s End chimneys, where the beauty what was Mrs. Wyndham used to warm her hands.

  I started at the sound of the name. Wyndham. The groom’s name on my mother’s marriage license.

  —Mrs. Martin Wyndham?

  —Rich as Croesus, was old man Wyndham, but crazy from the Indian war. Lots was crazy from the war, though, that war and ever’ t’other. Cain’t blame a man for that.

  “How do you do, Mr. Jackson? Deary me, you have got very wet!”

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mrs. Tittlemouse! I’ll sit awhile and dry myself,” said Mr. Jackson.

  He sat and smiled, and the water dripped off his coat tails.

  Mrs. Tittlemouse went round with a mop.

  —FROM The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse BY BEATRIX POTTER

  “HEAVENS TO BETSY!” ANNA PAGE SAID IN A VOICE THAT MIMICKED MY mom’s as we ducked out of the thunder-and-lightning downpour into a house back near the cottage. Inside, our rain gear poured slippery pools all over an old stone kitchen floor. I sank my fingers into my mother’s ashes in my pocket—if any of Mom was lost in the dash through the rain, I couldn’t tell—wondering if that tarn was where she meant me to leave her. I had the idea she wanted her ashes spread wherever Beatrix Potter’s were, but where was that? One source said they were scattered on the banks of Esthwaite Water, where she and her husband often walked when they were courting. Another said the secret of where she rested had died with the farmhand tasked with reuniting the couple after Heelis died.

  Graham hung our jackets from pegs in a low-ceilinged kitchen and turned on an electric kettle. He poked the fire back to life in a fireplace with a cast-iron insert like the one in the cottage and a geometric tile surround. “The house is a bit of a sprawl, but I’m happy to give you a show-around,” he said as we crowded up to the warmth. “We’re at the end of the line—quite literally—and the power does blinker out in weather, so I can’t promise the old place won’t go dim. But travelers to the Lakes always do seem enamored of the old homes here: Hutton-in-the-Forest, Sizergh Castle, Levens Hall. Abbot Hall as well, although that’s now an art gallery.”

  As he and Julie chatted about some of the writers’ homes in the area—John Ruskin’s Brantwood, Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount—I wondered at his comparing this shabby kitchen to a castle.

  He scalded the teapot before filling it with leaves and steaming water, the way Mom always did. “Would you care to see the library?” he asked Julie. “We could perhaps tell ghost stories there, or in the Prospect. I’ll have Mrs. Anders bring the tea.” He opened a door at the far end of the kitchen, into a cabineted and countered hallway—the butler’s pantry—opening into a high-ceilinged formal dining room that seated thirty, with fireplaces at either end, crystal chandeliers, and views out to a rose garden put to bed for the winter, a geometric herb garden, stone walls and paths and steps and a large fountain. He toed a floor button at the end of the table, then escorted us through sitting rooms of various sizes, from intimate to grand. We were in the library—two stories of floor-to-ceiling books—when a stern gray-haired woman came to ask where he wanted the tea served. “In the Prospect, please, Mrs. Anders,” he told her. “And you might towel the mackintoshes as well.”

  I’d lost count of the rooms by the time we’d finished the tour, in a bathroom bigger than Mom’s entire cottage, with a slipper tub and a fireplace and wide-plank floors that Graham was delighted to poin
t out had been patched with squares of leather and nails a century ago. We hadn’t even seen the bedrooms, most of which were closed up; Graham didn’t like having underfoot the kind of staff necessary to keep the whole house open. “Mrs. Anders arranges help from the village when it’s needed,” he said, leaving me to think of those English novels Aunt Kath was forever urging us to read, in which the downstairs servant classes seemed forever to be leading more proper lives than the aristocracy.

  The tea was waiting for us when we arrived in the Prospect, an upstairs sitting room that was all fireplaces and wood paneling and huge arched windows, a downlake view stretching to my mother’s cottage while, uplake, high square towers and round turrets loomed in bleak gray stone adorned with medieval crosses and buttresses.

  “That’s Wray Castle, which isn’t a real castle, of course,” Graham explained. “It was built in 1840 by a Liverpool surgeon in want of squandering his wife’s gin fortune. She never did set foot in the thing. It says something, doesn’t it, that the sorry old beast is too tacky for a liquor heiress?” He turned to me and said, “That’s where your mum was the day I first met her. She shared tea with me after the skies opened up, as you are now.”

  Julie said, “And the guy who lives there, he’s the one people say is the Crier of Claife?”

  Graham stared out at the faux castle. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” he said. “Wray Castle is quite empty, and it has been for years.”

  Graham’s house was originally a “traditional firehouse-type plan”—a single rectangular room with a fireplace—according to a National Trust history he showed us. Roofs had been raised, rooms and floors and whole wings added over almost four centuries, the kitchen built in a separate building “so that if the thing caught fire, only the kitchen staff would perish.” Graham and Julie and I sat in an alcove with a love seat and two chairs centered on a fireplace, a needlepointed screen and two family crests over its mantel, while Anna Page wandered the room like a Jane Austen character taking a turn around. No pianoforte, although there was a table in one corner where you could play whist if you knew how to do such a thing.

  A second fireplace—one big enough to dance in—anchored the room, and portraits hung everywhere: a lady with thin eyelids and a double chin in an oval frame, an older gent with a goofy abundance of curls, two siblings who seemed to have inherited the same unfortunate hair. The ceiling beams bowed, leaving me wondering what was overhead.

  Anna Page fingered her hair—still wet around her face, despite her jacket hood—as she studied a collection of silver trinkets. Then (was she doing this?) she picked something up and stuck it in a pocket of her pants. It was such a smooth move that I wasn’t quite sure I’d seen it. It seemed so improbable.

  “Your family has lived here for generations, Graham?” Julie asked. “And your offices are here in the Lake District?”

  “The corporate offices are not,” Graham said, “but the chap who runs the show hasn’t much need for me to be around.”

  “I see,” Julie said, her tone thick with admonition: if he had nothing better to do with his time, surely there was a library nearby where he might volunteer to shelve books.

  Across the room, Anna Page picked up another something and studied it, but this time she set it back down and came to join us. She stood by the chair closest to the “fine marble fireplace with hob grate” listed with the bell pulls and cornice as having been added in an 1830s remodel. “We have our first cooking lesson tomorrow,” she said.

  “ ‘Cookery’ lesson,” Julie corrected. “And it’s not until Saturday, Anna Page.”

  Anna Page touched her pocket where I thought I’d seen her tuck the trinket, as if she were the thieving upstairs or downstairs scoundrel who would, in the end, receive her just deserts. She settled into the chair by the fire and asked where Napoleon was.

  “Napoleon doesn’t come above the main floor,” Graham said, “and he sleeps in his cage.”

  It was less comforting than he meant it to be.

  “And your ghosts, where do you keep them?” Anna Page asked. “You did promise ghosts.”

  “Ghost stories, I believe was the offer. Muncaster Castle claims to have several: An eleven-year-old girl who died of screaming fits in the Tapestry Room. A jester. A carpenter who had the misfortune of falling for the daughter of the house. A servant girl who fancied a handsome young footman.”

  Muncaster. Wasn’t that where my grandmother was from? Mom’s mother, whom I never met.

  “That was Mary Bragg,” Graham said. “The stories about her agree only on the idea that she was found drowned. The version I favor has an older servant fancying the same footman, and paying two others to cosh poor Mary on the head as she walked the road to the back gates. The body was hidden in a boggy field, then dumped in the river below the castle, but she kept reappearing.”

  “I find it hard to believe a woman would be so set on a footman that she’d have her competition snuffed,” Anna Page said.

  “I find it hard to imagine a corpse that surfaces so determinedly wouldn’t find justice,” Graham replied with unexpected humor. “A white-clothed lady now haunts the roads around the castle, though, or so they say at Muncaster—which does, I’m sorry to report, charge admission for their tour, not that that would have anything to do with claiming to have so many ghosts.”

  “And the carpenter?” Anna Page asked.

  “He had his head cut off and is said to be looking for it still, isn’t he?”

  “Or for his long-lost love?” Anna Page suggested with the faintest lift of brow. “When it comes down to it, aren’t all tragic stories about love?”

  When we left Graham’s not much later—armed with an invitation to return for dinner the following evening—we looked back through the high stone posts to leaded-glass windows, a square tower that was five stories high surrounded by slate roofs, copper-blue gutters and gardens and winding paths. Each section of the mansion was a slightly different hue, although the patterns and sizes of the stones were indistinguishable. A keystone over the windows to the left of the door read “1629 RWK.” The top of a downspout on the wing to the right read “MW 1765,” and one with a golden angel read “MW 1752.”

  “If the castle is abandoned,” Julie said, “that has to be the big house.”

  “Good Lord, Jules,” Anna Page replied, “you didn’t buy Robbie’s nonsense about local gentry killing their wives, did you? Tell me you believe that stuff about the ghost of the girl who died in fits, too. Tell me you believe some poor carpenter is out looking for his dang head!”

  My mom would have, though. Mom would have believed in all those ghosts.

  “I’m afraid my mom may have gone batty before she died,” I said, although I didn’t manage to get the words out until we’d stepped through the blue door back into my mother’s tiny cottage. Before I could change my mind, I retrieved the journal I’d been worrying over all day and showed them:

  7.0.1999, ehqrs mhfgs zs sgd bnsszfd. adz hr lzjhmh gdqrdke bnlenqszakd hm sgd rkhoodq sta, mdudq lhme sgzs sgdqd hr tmozbjhmf sn ad cnmd.

  —xntc ad lnqd bnlenqszakd hm sgd ahf gntrd, rgd rzxr.…

  Julie took the journal and flipped forward a page, and another and another. “Was your mom coming here in 1999?”

  “Is that a date? July zero?” Anna Page asked. “And anyway, the fact that the journal is here now doesn’t mean she wrote it here. Are they all like this?” She took another journal from the desk and opened it. She didn’t say anything.

  “Maybe it’s a cipher?” Julie suggested. “Like those puzzles we used to do as kids?”

  “It appears to be some kind of list,” Anna Page said with a cautionary glance at Julie that had me wondering which would be crazier: Mom writing lists of gibberish or taking the time to transpose every single letter she wrote into a different one.

  “But why would Mom bring her old journals here? And where are the newer ones?”

  Julie said, “Aunt Frankie burned them. They have a deal w
ith each other that they’ll burn their journals after they die, before even our dads can see them.” She’d overheard her mom asking Aunt Frankie if they should talk to Sam and me first, but Aunt Frankie had already done it. “ ‘If you don’t burn mine if I go first, Linda,’ Aunt Frankie said, ‘I’m coming back to haunt you.’ And they had a laugh about there being no decent place for a ghost to settle in the neighborhood anymore, with that old mansion that used to be in the park torn down.”

  “That mansion was torn down the day you came home from the hospital, Hope,” Anna Page said. “Remember that, Jules? Would you ever have guessed back then that—”

  She stopped abruptly and suggested she would make us some pasta for dinner; she’d seen a bag of penne and some olive oil in the cupboard.

  “What?” I said, because if Anna Page is offering to cook, something is up.

  Anna Page said if we didn’t want pasta, she could find something else.

  “Anna Page thinks your mother was having an affair,” Julie said.

  “Julie!” Anna Page said. “Not in 1999, for God’s sake.”

  She opened the bin by the fireplace and began building a coal fire. Julie opened the drawer of the cabinet that hid Mom’s desk, peered into the small rectangular emptiness, and closed it again, wood exhaling against wood accompanied by the almost musical note of the brass handle rattling its backplate.

  “It doesn’t make your ma a different person, Hope,” Anna Page said.