Don't Tell a Soul

by Kirsten Miller

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “Do you know who it was?” She seemed to be holding her breath as she awaited the answer.

  “It was a girl who looked just like Grace Louth,” I told her. “She was in the north wing last night—right before James showed up drunk. I saw her again this morning going into the woods, and I tried to follow her to see where she was going.”

  Miriam’s eyes darted toward her son. “You saw her in the house last night?”

  “Yes. She seemed to be looking for something.”

  “Looking for something?” Miriam’s face was ashen. “Are you sure?”

  I lost my patience at that point. “Of course I’m sure! I’m not crazy! Sam’s seen her, too.” I looked right at Sam. “Haven’t you? Tell your mom about the girl on the balcony!”

  “Calm down,” Sam whispered. “No one thinks you’re crazy. We both know you’re telling the truth.”

  “There’s something we need to share with you.” Miriam unsealed the envelope and pulled out an old black-and-white photograph, which she promptly handed to me.

  The photo showed two elderly ladies standing in front of Louth Manor. Judging by the style of their dresses, the photo had been taken in the 1940s or 1950s. The two of them were grinning at the camera as if they’d just pulled off the biggest heist in history. I couldn’t understand why they were supposed to interest me. I turned my attention to the manor instead, and scanned its windows for signs of ghosts.

  “I don’t get it,” I finally admitted. “What am I supposed to be looking at? Who are these people?”

  Miriam reached over and tapped one of the figures. “That’s my great-great-grandmother Edna. She was a maid at the manor when she was young.” Then Miriam slid her finger over to the second woman. “And that is her friend Grace Louth.”

  I couldn’t wrap my head around it. “No,” I insisted.

  “Yes,” Miriam countered. “Although, by that point, she’d been living under the name Flora Davis for most of her life.”

  I studied the photo more closely, recalling the photo of Grace Louth that Lark had pasted into her scrapbook. I could see that girl in the old woman’s eyes. She was the same badass she’d always been.

  “This photo was taken on Grace’s first visit to the manor in the sixty-two years since her father’s death,” Miriam told me. “She was eighty years old at the time. She’d waited until she knew that no one in town would recognize her.”

  “So Grace didn’t drown when she was eighteen?” I asked.

  “No,” Miriam said. “The night she jumped into the river, she simply stopped being Grace Louth.”

  I thought of the girl in the mural. For over a century, everyone had assumed the portrait showed Grace running to meet her death. I remembered the first moment I saw her—the morning after I’d arrived at the manor. To me, she’d looked fierce and free. Before I’d heard the stories, I’d gotten a glimpse of who Grace really was.

  * * *

  —

  As I learned from Miriam, there was some truth to the legend of Grace Louth—one little grain around which a grotesque pearl had formed. Grace had indeed fallen for someone her father considered unsuitable. Frederick had intercepted a letter which had made it clear that the two were intending to run away. When confronted, Grace refused to reveal the identity of the letter’s author. All that mattered to Frederick was that his daughter was in love with someone he hadn’t chosen. Girls like Grace didn’t get to pick for themselves.

  And yes, Grace was sent to the family’s country home. But it wasn’t to recover from a broken heart. When she’d refused to end her affair, she was imprisoned by her father. Men could do things like that back in those days. If a daughter vanished, her father’s explanation was almost always accepted.

  As soon as Grace arrived at the manor, she was locked in the rose room. The servant tasked with looking after her night and day was a twenty-year-old girl who would one day become Miriam Reinhart’s great-great-grandmother. She was Grace Louth’s keeper as well as her cellmate.

  According to the tale passed down in Miriam’s family, Frederick Louth considered Grace’s romance nothing more than a temporary nuisance. He’d broken Grace’s mother. He didn’t anticipate any trouble breaking their daughter as well. He assumed that a lover who was out of sight would soon be forgotten. But that wasn’t what happened. Grace spent her first week of captivity scheming to escape and the second week raging at her lack of success. By her third week in Louth, she had fallen into a funk. After a full month in the manor, she was a mere shadow of herself. Locked away day and night, her skin lost its color and Edna began to worry that Grace would disappear completely.

  Having spent countless hours together, the servant and the prisoner had grown fond of each other. One came from wealth, while the other’s family was desperately poor. But neither girl had a dime of her own. One was imprisoned, and the other remained technically free. But as young women, neither could control her own destiny. Edna wanted more than anything else to help the fiery girl whose light was dimming. Grace refused to allow her. If she escaped, her father would hold Edna responsible. And what men were able to do to their daughters paled in comparison to the cruelties they could inflict on their female servants.

  Edna prayed for an answer, and when she heard that Grace’s mother was coming to town, she was sure her prayers had been answered. Then she laid eyes on the woman, and her hopes drained away. Clara was tall, with a face that resembled her beautiful daughter’s. But though she wasn’t quite forty, everything about Clara Louth was gray. Her skin had turned sallow and her eyes were lifeless. She moved with painstaking caution, as if she were trying not to make ripples in the world around her. Her eyes trailed the ground and she rarely spoke. Marriage to Frederick Louth had left Clara little more than a wraith.

  Still, Edna knew she had to try. She begged to speak with Clara Louth concerning her daughter’s health. When she was granted an audience, Edna didn’t mince words. She informed the girl’s mother that Grace would not survive being locked away from the world. Clara said nothing, and Edna left with her spirits crushed. There was no way for her to know that Clara had immediately written to her husband who’d returned to Manhattan for business. She knew she’d never convince him to release their daughter, so she appealed to his common sense instead. A missing daughter was one thing, she wrote him. A dead daughter would be much harder to explain. She asked permission to hire a new servant to help keep Grace alive. A few days later, a young woman arrived at the manor’s door. She was an artist, she informed the staff. She’d been hired to bring the world to Grace’s bedroom.

  Frederick Louth had issued a strict order that his daughter was to see no one but Edna, so Grace left the rose room every morning when the artist arrived to paint. The young woman worked tirelessly, and within a few days, she’d begun to cover the walls of the room with a mural of the manor’s surroundings. Edna found the artist’s choice of subject bewildering. The artist could have transported Grace to exotic places or legendary lands. Instead she’d chosen to duplicate the world right outside the window. The first thing she’d painted was a wooden boat on the river.

  Edna may have thought it all very strange, but Grace was utterly captivated. Every evening when she returned to her bedroom, Grace would gleefully tour the chamber with a candle in her hand, studying the latest additions to the mural. It seemed as if the painting had worked some kind of magic. Grace’s color returned. She ate what the cooks made for her. She asked Edna to bring her books from the manor’s grand library on the movement of the stars and the currents of the Hudson River.

  At the beginning of June, the mural was complete and the artist vanished from Louth. On her last day in the house, she painted Grace into the picture. Given the fact that the two young women had never met, Edna thought it a remarkable likeness. After the artist was gone, Grace’s mood changed once more. Sh
e started chewing her nails to the quick and pacing the floorboards. At night she whispered to herself in the darkness. She seemed to have lost the desire to sleep.

  By midmonth, Grace had grown so frantic that Edna worried she might do herself harm. She begged Grace to say what had upset her so badly. Finally Grace confessed that she planned to escape the following night. She said the signs and stars in the mural had told her that was when it needed to be done. To Edna, it all sounded like the ravings of a madwoman. Grace was seeing things in the painting that couldn’t possibly be there.

  Then Grace pulled a book from her shelf and showed Edna a constellation that matched the one in the mural’s nighttime sky. It was always over Louth in the month of June. Then she handed Edna a magnifying glass, dragged her to the mural, and pointed to a small sign in the window of the town’s general store. river festival june 15. The clock outside the Louth town hall was stuck at two. And finally Grace tapped on the little boat—the first thing the artist had painted. Edna bent down with the magnifying glass and examined the small wooden vessel floating on the water. Painted on its side was the name of the boat. Patience.

  Everything in the mural had convinced Grace that a vessel would be on the river at two in the morning on June fifteenth, waiting to ferry her to freedom. But the only way out of the manor was to jump from her bedroom’s balcony, and it was unlikely she’d survive such a fall uninjured. Anything Grace might have used to make a rope had been confiscated, and the rose room was searched twice every day. There were too many locked doors and too many servants between Grace’s room and the boat on the river. The two girls agreed—escape seemed impossible.

  That evening, a servant delivered a package from Grace’s mother. The contents had been thoroughly inspected by Frederick Louth’s men. He didn’t trust his wife more than any other female. But there was nothing inside the box other than a collection of family photographs, a book in which to glue them, and a handwritten note from Clara Louth.

  Dearest Grace,

  I hope you don’t mind if I borrow your girl this evening. My own maid has come down with a fever, and I’m feeling poorly as well. I feel terrible taking your one source of solace, so I’ve enclosed a diversion. I know this has been a difficult time for you, darling. You must have patience, and everything will work out well in the end.

  Love, Mother

  Grace was beaming when she read the last line of the letter aloud. You must have patience. Edna knew that Patience was the name of the boat in the mural, but the servant girl found it hard to believe that Clara Louth could know that. When she left Grace alone that evening, she feared the worst. The girl had pinned all her hopes on escaping. What would happen when those dreams were crushed?

  That night, Edna was asleep on the floor beside Clara Louth’s bed when one of Frederick Louth’s men burst into the chamber with an urgent message. Word had come from the town that Grace had broken free and run down to the river. She wasn’t wearing a wedding dress—just a long, white nightgown. But the story of her cruel romantic abandonment had been the talk of Louth, and the three people who witnessed her run through the town saw what they expected to see. When one of her shoes was discovered at the end of a dock, everyone assumed she’d jumped in and drowned. No one ever stopped to consider if Grace Louth knew how to swim.

  Edna’s whereabouts that night were well known. Clara Louth herself vouched for the servant girl’s innocence. The truth was, Edna had no idea how Grace had escaped. But when news of Grace’s death reached Frederick Louth, Edna still bore the brunt of his wrath. Despite Clara’s best efforts to protect her, the girl was beaten mercilessly—and demoted to scullery maid. Leaving the manor was never an option. Her mother was crippled and depended on Edna’s earnings to survive. The other servants were just as helpless in the face of Frederick Louth’s cruelty. There were no other jobs in Louth.

  As Edna spent the next day on her knees, scrubbing the manor floors, she began to hear whispers about the mural. Another maid had spotted the image of Grace running down the hill. The servants all agreed that the mural was either haunted or bewitched, and they refused to step foot in the rose room. Edna didn’t tell anyone that Grace had believed the painting was a message—and she remained silent when she began to hear about the ghost.

  While the entire town of Louth was gathered at the graveyard for Grace’s funeral, a newspaper photographer snuck onto the grounds and snapped a picture of the manor. Though the house was empty, the image showed what many believed was a girl dressed in a white gown and veil standing behind the rose room’s windows. The servants agreed that the hazy figure was Grace’s ghost. But Frederick Louth was a rational man with no time for supernatural nonsense. He insisted the photograph was a hoax and ordered the servants to be on the lookout for trespassers.

  Yet the sightings continued. A maid passing by the open door of the rose room one evening saw a girl in white on the balcony. When the maid returned with backup, the girl had vanished. Others swore they saw the ghost on the grounds of the manor or in the warren of dark rooms in the basement. All the indoor sightings took place when the mansion was sealed tight. There was no way a flesh-and-blood girl could have gotten inside.

  Then, one night, the entire household was awakened by unearthly screams in the rose room. The cries weren’t those of a female, living or dead. When the servants gathered outside the room, they found the door locked. The keys to the rose room were nowhere to be found. Neither was the master of the house, and it quickly became clear that the person in the room was Frederick Louth.

  Three of the burliest servants hurled themselves at the thick wooden door. It had been reinforced when Frederick Louth had turned the room into a prison, and fifteen minutes passed before the servants heard the first crack. By that time, the cries from within had already ceased.

  They found Frederick Louth on the floor of his dead daughter’s bedroom, his face purple and one hand clutched to his chest. In the other was a hammer he’d been using to pry plaster off the walls. There was no one else in the room, but the balcony doors stood wide open. One of the servants went to close them and saw a girl in white running down the hill.

  Miriam paused, and I waited eagerly while she reached back into the manila envelope and retrieved a yellowing sheet of paper, which she passed to me.

  “The evening after Frederick Louth died, my great-great-grandmother discovered this note under her pillow.”

  I unfolded the paper. On it were a few short lines scribbled in a hurried hand.

  I’m sorry you suffered. He won’t hurt any of us again. Your loyalty will be rewarded. You have our eternal gratitude.

  I looked up from the letter. “And?”

  “The next day, Clara Louth gave my great-great-grandmother five hundred dollars. That was a fortune in those days. Edna used it to purchase the land I now live on. When Clara said goodbye to Louth, she left my great-great-grandmother in charge of the manor. Edna never saw her again. It wasn’t until sixty years later that she heard from Grace. For all those years, Edna never breathed a word of what had happened to anyone but her own daughter. That daughter passed the truth along to her own daughter. And then my mother told the story to me.”

  “So Clara Louth was in on it all?” I asked. “She helped Grace escape?”

  “She must have. She hired the artist, and she was responsible for my great-great-grandmother’s alibi.”

  “Does this mean Grace killed her own father?”

  “I don’t know,” Miriam admitted. “Edna never asked. She said she liked to believe that he died of fright.”

  “But Grace was inside the rose room with him the night he died?”

  “Edna was sure of it,” Miriam said. “But no one saw Grace come out. They just saw her running down the hill after they broke through the door.”

  “If she was in the rose room, how did she escape?” I asked.

  “That’s another myste
ry,” Miriam said. “My great-great-grandmother examined every photo in the box Clara Louth had delivered to Grace on the night of June fifteenth. Edna was convinced Clara had slipped secret instructions inside, but she was never able to find them.”

  The three of us sat there in the hospital waiting room while I let it all sink in.

  “Grace lived a wonderful life,” Miriam said. “Her mother was right. Patience was all she needed.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t get it.”

  “ ‘Patience’ wasn’t the name of the boat. It was the signature of the artist. Grace knew it was the name of the person who was coming to rescue her.”

  I had to laugh at my foolishness. “That’s amazing!” I said, finally understanding. I’d been fed so many cookie-cutter romances that I’d managed to listen to Grace’s story without ever considering that her beloved might have been another girl.

  “So, do you see, Bram? There is no curse and there is no ghost. Grace died a happy woman.”

  “Then who’s the girl in white?” I asked. “I swear I’ve seen her with my own eyes.”

  Sam cleared his throat. “It’s not Grace Louth. We think it’s Lark. And we think we know what she’s trying to find.”

  In the moments that followed, I ran through all the encounters I’d had with the girl in white. The night she’d appeared after I’d woken up screaming. The furniture she’d stacked against the door of my room after the sheriff had warned me. Her moonlight search of the mansion’s north wing. After so many strange happenings, a ghost had started to seem like the only explanation. The manor was always locked up too tightly for a flesh-and-blood girl to sneak in at night. Now I realized that Lark must have discovered Grace Louth’s secret escape route.

  “You told us you thought the girl was looking for something.” Miriam fished around in her handbag and produced a mobile phone. She passed it to me. “I found it shortly after I came to work at the manor. It had fallen into a heating vent. It must have happened the night of the fire.”