Enchanting Nicholette

by Dawn Crandall

Sylvie stood as well. “For what?”

  Lastly, I stood, although I didn’t know what Mabel was getting at.

  She put a finger to her lips. “Just follow me.”

  So we did, and she guided us through the large pocket door at the far end of the room into a back parlor, and through that room and another set of pocket doors to the dining room. There were just as many finely appointed pieces of furniture in this back parlor and dining room as there had been in the front parlor, including an upright piano. But unlike the first two rooms, the entire left side of the dining room was made up of a dark wood-paneled buffet and many built-in drawers and various sizes of cabinet doors. The dining room furniture rivaled that of my parents’, which was, again, so odd.

  To my surprise, Mabel headed straight for one of the tall cabinet doors and opened it. There were a number of coats hanging there, and I wondered what on earth Mabel was up to. She certainly didn’t need a coat in the middle of June.

  But then she lifted the hem of her shirt and squatted into the bottom of the opening, where I heard her moving a piece of shelving. Sylvie was immediately beside her, as close as she could be in the tiny space, and before I realized what was going on, Mabel moved out of the way and Sylvie squeezed past her, squatting down through the little hidden passage Mabel had just opened.

  With Sylvie already through, to who knew where, I had no choice but to follow, for so many reasons. And I was also uninterested in being left behind and perhaps having to tell Miss Abernathy about something I wasn’t even certain I understood. I crouched into the little space after Sylvie, which was just big enough for me to fit. I didn’t know where we were headed, but I knew Sylvie was in front of me in the cramped darkness, for her giggles were continuous.

  When I finally saw a dim light, I quickly realized it was from another cabinet door on the other side of the wall.

  Sylvie had pushed open the door of this other cabinet and climbed out before me, then helped me stand and step out, and then Mabel behind me.

  I realized, quite suddenly, that we’d just climbed out of an exact replica of the built-in cabinet and buffet we’d climbed into, only this room on the other side of the wall was set up with a dresser, a mirror standing in the corner, and a large, masculine four-poster canopy bed.

  And if my guess was correct, I was standing in Mr. Cal Hawthorne’s side of the double house. Which meant…

  “Is this your brother’s house? His bedchamber?” I asked.

  “But of course. He doesn’t use the upstairs, so he converted the dining room into his bedchamber,” Mabel replied, already searching the counter of the buffet in the dim light from the curtained-off windows, as if she’d lost something terribly important.

  “What are we doing here?” I asked, horrified at the thought of being found, especially in his dining room-turned-bedchamber. “We should go back.”

  “Oh, please stay. It will only take a minute, what I want to do, and…isn’t it adventurous?”

  “Oui!” Sylvie exclaimed from behind me. “And he’ll never know.”

  “But if he were to find out—”

  Mabel grabbed my hand and pressed her back to the closed door of the built-in cabinet. “Cal’s never home during the day, no matter what day it is. You have nothing to worry about.”

  “What cause could you possibly have to sneak into his house? And why is there a passage like that through the cabinet in the first place?”

  “I made it,” was her shocking answer. She guided me, by force, to the other side of the room, toward her brother’s bedside table, and began searching the titles of the books piled there.

  “What did you say?”

  “I finished digging it out last week, but I hadn’t the nerve to sneak through yet.”

  “C’est incroyable,” Sylvie uttered with a whisper from across the room.

  “What on earth did you dig through a wall with?”

  “A hammer and a tool called a wrecking bar. Isn’t that the most wonderful name for something that can tear a wall apart?”

  For the first time since sneaking through her secret passage into her brother’s side of the double house, I realized bits of chalky dust covered her dress. I looked down at my own and Sylvie’s. Yes, all three of us were covered with little particles of the destroyed wall. “And where did you get these…tools?” I asked.

  “They were in the barn. I didn’t know what they were at first, only that I needed something, and I figured they would work for what I needed to do. Some boy caught me trying to take them into the house and asked me what I was doing, and he told me what they were and how to use them. But even with that bit of instruction, it took me ages to accomplish.”

  “And your mother doesn’t know a thing about it? What about your maid?”

  “They haven’t a clue. Sally doesn’t use the far cabinet much, only for our winter coats. And Mother is always abed in her room upstairs, toward the front of the house, and never heard a thing.”

  What an odd girl Mabel was. She was almost as fascinating as her brother, but in such a different way.

  “You must swear to secrecy not to tell a soul. I think Cal’s been hiding something from me for the last year or so. I can tell something’s going on. I just haven’t figured out what yet.”

  “Perhaps he has a very good reason for hiding whatever it is from you. Sometimes, it is best that we not know all the details about everything.”

  “I promise,” Sylvie said.

  “And what about you, Nicholette?” Mabel asked, disregarding the fact that I’d yet to allow her to use my Christian name.

  “Fine. I promise,” I muttered.

  “I’m going to find his journal, or his calendar, or something.” Mabel hurried across the room again and opened the glass-faced cabinets above the buffet counter, beginning her search. “It’s the whole reason I dug that hole through the wall in the first place. He keeps his house locked up and won’t give anyone a key. Not even Mother, or Sally, so she can clean. Not that he’s here much, or that the kitchen is used at all…but still. He has his valet do everything for him.”

  “Your brother has a valet?” Sylvie asked.

  “Oh…I forgot. I wasn’t supposed to say anything about that.”

  I took a step closer to the built-in cabinet, thinking it would be best if we all just went back to Mabel’s mother’s house as quickly as possible. “Is it possible that his valet could be home right now—downstairs, or possibly upstairs?”

  “No. Bowers has Saturdays off.” Mabel flipped through a small leather-bound book. “Just let me do this little thing, and we’ll head back soon, I promise.”

  I truly wished I’d had this conversation—about the tools, the valet, the secrets—with her before thoughtlessly crawling through for Sylvie’s sake. It would have given me so much insight to what kind of shenanigans Mabel Hawthorne was apt to create, and I would never have followed Sylvie without question.

  But then again, I was glad I had.

  Taking a step back, I took a moment to look around the semi-darkened room. Neither Mr. Hawthorne nor his valet were home, after all. And truly, once I took a look around at his house, I couldn’t help but take it all in.

  It was the opposite floor plan of his mother’s house next door, but decorated so differently, as if he’d actually cared to take the time to decorate the rooms in this new house he’d built for himself in a much different fashion than his mother had wanted hers. Everything was dark, wood paneling halfway up the walls, and pleasant beige willow leaf wallpaper from the paneling to the crown molding at the eleven-foot ceilings. His furnishings were also dark. His four-poster bed had a red canopy top. My gaze traveled down to the bed, to the messy, half-undone covers revealing vibrant white sheets.

  Embarrassed, I darted my attention to the next room. The opened pocket doors revealed a library with a huge carved desk situated in the middle, the back of his chair tucked into a space created by a large curtain-less bay window. The four corners of the room were lined with ta
ll, floor-to-ceiling bookcases.

  It was far too tempting not to want to step in, to look at his books, his things. Not that I thought he was hiding anything substantial from his sister. She was likely imagining something far more adventurous than what he was about.

  As Mabel and Sylvie continued to snoop around Mr. Hawthorne’s bedchamber, I crept into the small library, being sure not to move the pocket doors any wider than they’d been.

  I immediately noticed the front parlor through another set of half-opened pocket doors, and that it was just as exquisitely decorated. Wallpapered walls, lush carpet covering the floor where two brown leather tufted chairs were set at either side of the fireplace, and a light brown chaise set in front of the windows facing the street.

  He certainly did have good taste, but the more I learned about Mr. Hawthorne and his mother and sister, the more I realized what a strange conundrum their life seemed. And why were they there in Boston anyway? I knew, from what Bram and Evangeline Everstone had disclosed on the subject of Violet’s cousin, that the family was originally from somewhere west of Boston, but they’d been living here in this house in South Boston for a number of years. And it was so odd that they lived as they did. Did not Miss Abernathy think so as well?

  Or perhaps she knew more concerning the Hawthorne family than she wanted to let on.

  As I walked around the perimeter of the sun-filled library, my sense of caution lightened a little, and I was able to look at everything through a new scope. This was Mr. Hawthorne’s world, and I had been given a chance to study it, and a little bit of him, without disclosure.

  At the center of his desk, a large, leather-bound Bible was open. I leaned closer to get a better look and found that it was opened to the book of Psalms. I smiled. It was the same book of the Bible I’d been reading through lately, and I recalled reading the verses he’d underlined:

  “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?”

  Was Mr. Hawthorne also consumed by the idea of God’s grace for us? That God cared for insignificant humans such as us, who could ultimately do so little for the realm of the Kingdom of God?

  Walking around the desk, I found, to my surprise, a huge orange cat curled up on the seat of the padded desk chair. I stroked his head, and his eyes opened. “Hello there, pretty kitty.”

  The cat immediately stood and stretched, and then climbed onto the desk, rubbing his nose, head, and body against any part of me he could reach.

  What a sweet cat. I smiled at the fact that Mr. Hawthorne had such a pet. I’d had cats as a child, but I hadn’t had any kind of pet for a long time.

  Mabel parted the pocket doors a little more and strolled into the room. “Oh, Pumpkin.”

  The cat hissed as Mabel walked toward the desk.

  “He doesn’t like me. He’d hiss at me all day long if he had the opportunity.”

  “What on earth did you do to make him hate you?”

  “I tickled him when he was a kitten. I thought all kittens liked belly tickles, but apparently Pumpkin is the exception, and he has hated me ever since.”

  Pumpkin meowed and leapt from the desk onto my shoulder, surprising me by how very heavy he was. As I wrapped my arms around Pumpkin, I heard a terrifying sound from the front of the house—the echo of a key turn in the lock at the front door.

  “Oh, my goodness, he’s home,” I whispered, carrying the cat to Mr. Hawthorne’s darkened bedchamber. “Where is Sylvie?”

  Mabel followed, closing the pocket door behind us, except for the last quarter inch, where it stuck. “She’s already gone back through. Snooping around for so long made her nervous.”

  Well, she wasn’t the only one.

  5

  Secrets

  “One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth the doing is what we do for others.”

  —Lewis Carroll, The Letters of Lewis Carroll

  I wished I’d had the forethought to listen to my nerves upon realizing where Mabel had taken me. Now there I was, with Mr. Hawthorne about to come through his front door, and wouldn’t he hear us if we tried to sneak back through now?

  The front door closed, and we heard voices; Mr. Hawthorne’s contagious laugh and that of another man. At least, I thought there were only two of them. I couldn’t tell how many there were or what they were saying. The door from the bedchamber to the hall was, fortunately closed, and the noises from the front of the house were muffled as their voices traveled to us from the open doors of the library.

  I dropped the cat onto the bed and headed to the cabinet we’d climbed through, which Sylvie had left ajar. Mabel came up behind me, reached around me, and forced it closed. “Please don’t go. This is perfection. I’ll be able to listen in on their conversation, and maybe find out what’s going on. And you’d make too much noise getting back through. We’d be caught, for sure.”

  The men’s footsteps on the wood floor sounded from the hall, and Mabel grabbed my hand, pulling me to the other side of the room and flinging me behind the tall canopy bed. “Hide here. He won’t see us, if he even comes back here.”

  Goodness, I hoped he wouldn’t! I wouldn’t know how to face him ever again.

  Mabel joined me on the floor in the shadowy corner, but I didn’t feel we were nearly as hidden as I would’ve liked.

  The wheels of the desk chair squeaked as they rolled across the floor in the next room.

  “That’s odd. Pumpkin is almost always sleeping on this chair,” Mr. Hawthorne said from the library. But then he asked, “Do you want tea?”

  “No, I don’t want you to bother. I know Bowers isn’t here today.”

  Mabel couldn’t seem to resist getting closer to the pocket door to listen better, so she crawled nearer to the opening, as quietly as possible, taking long moments between her every move, the skirt of her pink afternoon dress dragging behind her.

  After imagining the view she would gain by doing so, simply picturing Mr. Hawthorne in the next room wasn’t enough for me either. I found myself tiptoeing across the carpeted floor to join Mabel as she listened at the pocket doors. With the lights still out in the bedchamber and the heavy curtains covering the windows, I had nothing to worry about concerning them seeing a shadow through the crack between the doors. Mabel crouched on the floor while I stood above her, squinting, trying my best to get a glimpse of Mr. Hawthorne again.

  Through the crack, I could see that he sat at the corner edge of his desk, and watching him, taking my fill of his tall form put to such relief, and for as long as I liked through that tiny crack between the doors, had a most satisfying effect on me. And it was still odd to feel such things. Since when had I ever been attracted to or paid attention, so acutely, to one specific man?

  Never. Never in my life.

  Mr. Hawthorne’s friend sat in one of the upholstered chairs facing him, but I couldn’t tell much about him since he was farther across the room. “We’re running out of fresh, willing bait. Everyone we’ve used would surely be recognized.”

  “We’ll get him this time.” Mr. Hawthorne rubbed both hands down his face, seeming a bit exasperated. “We have to.”

  “We can always hope, but I know what you mean. Daring young women willing to pose as hapless girls for the sake of such a case aren’t easy to come by. But you have to admit, we’ve learned a lot from our failed attempts.”

  Their words didn’t make sense to me. Who did they need to get? Failed attempts at what? And what did fresh bait mean?

  “How much longer do you think we have until the next try?” Mr. Hawthorne asked. “A few weeks perhaps?”

  “What has you in such a sure-fire hurry to be done with it now, after all this time?” the man in the chair asked.

  Mr. Hawthorne didn’t answer, but he looked to the ceiling and blew out a long breath through his nose.

  “If I had my guess, which I suppose
you’re going to let me have since you’re not talking, this would be about a woman.”

  “I have a lot going on that wasn’t there before, from so many directions, it seems…my family, this case, and yes….”

  “A woman,” his friend supplied.

  “Yes, a certain very fine young lady.”

  Mabel tapped her finger on the toe of my boot and whispered, “He means you.”

  I couldn’t help but smile, thinking it had to be true. But what did everything else they were discussing mean?

  “And you want things to be cleared up so you—”

  “For a multitude of reasons, like I said.” Mr. Hawthorne picked up a white marble, ball-shaped paperweight from the desk and tossed it from hand to hand. “Her father and I are, well, you could consider us friends…at least, now…again….”

  Mr. Hawthorne knew her father?

  No matter what Mabel believed, he couldn’t have been speaking about me, and the disappointment I felt—deep in my chest—crushed everything I thought had happened between us at the bookshop. The flirting must have indeed meant nothing to him, which further proved that I had no idea what I was doing and absolutely no grasp on the matters of courting.

  He wouldn’t have known my father, and they certainly weren’t friends. I would have known of that, surely.

  “I don’t think he’d be too keen on my pursuing her while also dealing with this case.” Mr. Hawthorne continued to focus on the paperweight, staring at it intently.

  Did he mean a case concerning the police? Why had he anything to do with the police?

  “We’ve caught enough of Ezra’s henchmen,” Mr. Hawthorne added. “He’s got to feel the pressure, as well as feel the need to come take care of things himself.”

  “I think there’s a high probability we’ll apprehend him soon, though I have a feeling my soon wouldn’t be considered soon enough for you. Do you know for certain if this very fine young lady is interested in being pursued by the likes of Cal Hawthorne?”

  “If her response to me so far is any indication, and considering the connections between our families, then yes, I do think it has a fair chance of working out. It’s just this case….”