The House on Primrose Pond

by Yona Zeldis McDonough

  The largest of the lot showed the stylized prow of a ship slicing through the water. TO NEW YORK ran the sans serif type across the top; HAMBURG-AMERICAN LINE was printed along the bottom. There were others too, advertising skiing in the Alps, a sparkling Italian wine, candy, a racing bike—that one was very hard to look at—films first seen sixty years ago. As an illustrator, Charlie had appreciated the quality of their draftsmanship, their sophisticated graphics. They had hung on the walls of his studio, interspersed with some of his own drawings and other pieces of ephemera he’d never bothered to frame but had tacked up with pushpins in an ever evolving arrangement. The posters had monetary value, but they represented almost two decades of Charlie’s collecting, and Susannah had been unable to part with a single one.

  They should be hanging, she decided. Right here, in these rooms where they would be seen every day. But she did not have a hammer or nails. Somehow these essential items had gone missing from the toolbox; they had probably been left behind and were still buried somewhere in the basement of what had been her home. Well, she could fix that.

  “Jack?” she called out. He was still in the kitchen, texting. “I have to run an errand.”

  A pause. “When are you coming back?”

  “Soon.” She had already started gathering her parka and her bag. If she could find a hammer and a box of nails before dinner, she could hang the posters tonight; tomorrow morning, this little bit of Charlie would be there to greet her. And she needed a shovel: she had looked around but had not found one.

  Driving down the road, Susannah wondered whether Bailey’s Home, Garden, and Lawn was still in business. That would be the closest place. Was either Trevor or Corbin—and hadn’t there been a sister too?—still in the area? She didn’t know, but she had not made any attempt to keep up with any of them after that summer.

  The store was on the edge of town, or at least that’s what she vaguely recalled; she’d gone there with Trevor once or twice. Susannah drove to the corner where she’d remembered the store. It was gone, replaced by the Sunny Skies Day Care Center. She felt oddly disappointed and supposed she would just have to drive back toward Concord, to the Home Depot that was on Route 4. Bailey’s was just one more mom-and-pop establishment that had succumbed to the might of the chain store.

  But instead of turning right at the light, she turned left. She was still finding her way here and taking a detour down an unfamiliar street was a good way to become oriented. The street sloped down rather sharply. On one side was a narrow house whose dark green paint was peeling in great spiral strips; on the other, a rambling white house that appeared to be empty. Clearly this was the less tony part of town.

  When she got to the bottom of the street, Susannah first saw a small parking lot and then, to her surprise, a low-rise building with the sign BAILEY’S HOME, GARDEN, AND LAWN—ESTABLISHED 1957 out front. So it was still in business; it had just moved. She got out of the car and walked into the store. A small silver bell announced her arrival; cute. A fortyish black woman with elegant cheekbones, mahogany lip gloss, and a very friendly manner was at the counter; she asked if Susannah needed help. The place was well stocked and seemed busy enough for a weekday afternoon in January; clearly Bailey’s was holding its own against the onslaught of the big-box stores. And then, surrounded by the snowblowers, deicing agents, and several boxes of marked-down Christmas lights, Susannah found herself face-to-face with Trevor’s older brother, Corbin Bailey.

  Her first thought was, He hasn’t changed. Her next thought was, Oh, yes, he has, and he’s better looking than ever. He’d filled out some, seemingly all lean, hard muscle. His hair was shorter, and threaded with a few filaments of silver; they made his electric blue eyes seem even more dazzling. God, how could she even be thinking this way?

  “Are you finding everything all right?” In his red apron with the words BAILEY’S—SINCE 1957 emblazoned across the front, he was all business.

  Susannah glanced down at her list. Clearly he did not remember her. She wasn’t sure if she felt relieved or disappointed. Corbin was patiently standing there, pencil stub behind his ear, waiting for her reply. It was only when she looked back up at him that his expression changed and she saw the recognition settle in. “You were Trevor’s girl,” he said.

  “No, Susannah Gilmore,” she said. She had never been Trevor’s girl, not really.

  “Of course,” he said without missing a beat. “Nice to see you back in town.”

  Susannah bought the things she’d come for, was told to “have a very nice day,” and left the store.

  There had been an evening that summer when they had all gathered down by the water and were sharing lobster rolls and French fries from Gilly’s Lobster Shack. Corbin had showed up with a couple of six-packs. He yanked the cans from their plastic holders and began passing them around. Not wanting to appear prissy, Susannah had taken a few tentative sips. She did not like the taste but she certainly liked Corbin. He wasn’t quite as tall as his younger brother, but while Trevor was kind of gangly, Corbin was compactly built and deeply tanned besides; in addition to helping his dad at the store, he had a summer job working as a lifeguard at Wallis Sands. With his startling blue eyes and black hair, he was the sexiest boy she had ever seen; she wished she had been dating him, and not Trevor. When the evening wound down, she managed to fall into step with him as they all walked up the embankment toward the house. “You’re new,” he said. “I’ve never seen you around before.”

  “My parents used to live here but they moved away when I was a baby. We’re just back for summer.”

  He said nothing but stopped and brushed a bit of hair from her face; even now, standing in the gray, snow-pocked parking lot, Susannah could remember how the slightest grazing of his fingertips against her skin had electrified her in a way that all of Trevor’s earnest pawing had not.

  A week or so later, her father had been painting the floor of the porch and run out of paint, so Susannah had gone down to pick up a gallon. Corbin had been there and he’d waited on her.

  “Here you go, Trevor’s girl,” he said, adding a couple of wooden stirrers to the bag that held the paint.

  “It’s Susannah,” she said. “Susannah Gilmore.”

  “Right.” His eyes held hers for a few charged seconds. “I’ll remember that.”

  “Susannah!” The sound of her name made her turn. There was Corbin, the present-day, still sexier-than-life Corbin, walking across the parking lot carrying a bag in one hand, a shovel in the other. “Here.” He handed it to her. “You forgot something.”

  No, she wanted to say. I haven’t forgotten a thing.

  SIX

  Susannah was sitting at her desk in her bedroom, laptop open and ready. There were only three rooms up here—not enough for her to claim a separate study, but that was all right. And since she had put the desk in front of the window—it fit so nicely, as if it had been made for the spot—she was able to look out at Primrose Pond while she worked.

  Except she wasn’t working. Not exactly. Not, if she cared to be honest with herself, at all. She got up from the desk and began to run in place. Outside the window, the frozen layer of ice on the pond glittered in the January sun; she kept her eyes on the brightness as she pumped her arms. After several minutes of stationary running, she switched to jumping jacks. The pond continued to glitter. When she’d hit thirty, she sat down, mildly winded, but no more inclined to work than she had been ten minutes earlier. Coffee, she thought, even though she had had a cup earlier that morning, and went downstairs to make it.

  Susannah’s novels were always set in Europe, and always about women. She dabbled in different centuries, and apart from the occasional queen or empress, she tended to stick to minor royalty. Archduchess Gisela of Austria and Duchess Marie Gabrielle of Bavaria were two of her more recent subjects—she had studied German at Vassar—and she’d also written on Margaret, Countess of Pembroke and Ma
ria Cristina Pia Anna Isabella Natalia Elisa di Borbone delle Due Sicilie, more commonly known as Maria Cristina of the Two Sicilies, for which she’d had to take a crash course in Italian.

  She had stumbled into her métier by chance. After the small educational publisher was swallowed up by a bigger company and she lost her job, she answered an ad for an editorial/administrative assistant at Out of the Past Press. She was good at the work, and often made editorial suggestions that pleased her boss, Tasha Clurman, enormously. Once, during a long and drawn-out rewrite, Tasha had said in exasperation, “I wish you’d take a stab at this chapter! I think you’d do a better job.” Susannah took the chapter home to work on it; the result was so good that she’d been asked to start writing the novels instead of editing them.

  For years Susannah had enjoyed her work, the detective-like uncovering of the factual elements, the artful embroidering of the fictional ones. She was not a biographer, so she did not have to adhere as closely to the facts, but the facts were the scaffolding. She started with primary source material where and when she could get it—letters, journals, firsthand accounts. Some of the items had major historical import, but others were more personal, like the itemized list of the garments in the trousseau of a duchess on the eve of her wedding; another list, just a year later, of the members of court who’d attended that same duchess’s funeral when she died of childbed fever.

  Once she had a feel for whatever primary material there was, Susannah could move on to secondary sources. Often, since the subjects she chose were not the most well known, there might not be too many of these. Still, she diligently hunted down what she could and added those later interpretations to her file. It was only when she’d built this edifice of names, dates, places, and events that she could begin to shape the material. A life made coherent and comprehensible, even through the long lens of time.

  Her publisher was happy with her output and had her on a schedule of one book every eighteen months. Readers populated her Facebook page and left enthusiastic comments on her blog. She had a decent following on Twitter, and by many people’s standards, including her own, she was a modest success in a highly circumscribed category. Except that, lately, something had soured inside her, making the act of writing seem stale, repetitive, and flat-out dull. Was it just the aftermath of Charlie’s death that had taken the savor out of everything? Could be. But she suspected there was more to it than that. With mug of coffee in hand, she mounted the stairs, determined to try again.

  The darkened computer screen bloomed when she touched the keypad. Her editor had suggested Jane Seymour, the third wife of Henry VIII, who had borne him a son and then conveniently expired before he had time to grow bored with her. Jane was one of his least famous wives; there had been others with more dramatic—and gory—endings that tended to fascinate. Susannah had agreed to write the novel and began the research. She consulted books and Internet sources, and looked for the usual letters and diaries—documents that would give her an insight into character and motivation as well as a feel for the period. But as she probed and read, she found herself increasingly drawn to Jane’s immediate predecessor, Anne Boleyn.

  Anne was intelligent and well educated; she spoke French and was known as an accomplished archer and horsewoman. Singular and captivating, she had straight dark hair, a long neck, and a double nail on the pinkie of one hand. She designed trailing sleeves that she had her dressmaker execute, turning her perceived flaw into a fashion trope—Cally would have approved. Anne—who refused to sleep with Henry without a ring and a crown—in holding out got them both. Henry had his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, annulled and wed Anne in a secret, private ceremony. The commoner had succeeded in becoming a queen.

  But Anne’s triumph was short-lived. She bore a girl and then a stillborn boy. Henry’s perpetually lustful eye began wandering. Infuriated that he had moved heaven and earth to marry yet another woman who could not bear him a son, Henry decided he needed to get rid of her. No long, drawn-out, messy divorce this time, though. He accused her of sleeping with several of her favorite courtiers, including her own brother. On a beautiful day in May, she was beheaded at the age of thirty-three. But it was Elizabeth, Anne’s daughter Elizabeth, and not Jane’s son, who ruled England with acumen and grace for fifty or so years.

  Staring at the screen, Susannah realized that Anne was so much more interesting than Jane, whom she had aptly called “a whey-faced bitch.” She did not want to write a novel about Jane. Anne’s ghost would have haunted her for the rest of her days. Unfortunately, Out of the Past Press had published a novel about Anne only two years before; it was called Brief, Gaudy Hour and it was quite good. Two years was not long enough in historical fiction land to occasion another book from the same publisher. If Susannah wanted her turn with Anne, she would have to wait.

  She stood up, leaving the barely touched coffee to cool on her desk. Before she could change directions, she’d have to come up with someone better, someone so interesting and irresistible that dull-as-days-old-porridge Jane wouldn’t matter anymore. It would have been easy to troll the Internet, looking for other ideas, other possibilities. But she had an urge to get out and explore her new surroundings. There was a library in town, wasn’t there? And libraries had librarians. Susannah loved librarians and considered them pillars of civilization; it was time she met the one in Eastwood. And on the way home, she could stop at the supermarket and the hardware store, taking care of three errands in a single trip.

  She drove the short distance to the town center. In daylight, she could better see the neat houses—saltbox, Cape Cod, a Georgian or two—that dotted the streets and the big trees that framed and embraced them. There was a main street lined with shops and anchored by a pair of churches—one Catholic, the other Presbyterian—that culminated in a small town square. The square was surrounded by an iron fence, and in its center stood a gazebo. Beyond that was a big open field, frozen over now, but she remembered it was used for kids’ baseball and soccer games in warmer months.

  The Eastwood library, which she found easily enough, was a modest, two-story brick building with three slate steps leading up to a dark green door on which a Christmas wreath still hung. Susannah parked and went in. Fiction was housed on the right side of the circulation desk and biography on the other; a children’s area, designated by a colorful checkerboard rug, made up the entire back of the space. There was a bank of computers near the fiction area, but the multipaned windows, oak shelves, and green-shaded lighting fixtures all looked as if they had not been changed in more than fifty years. The librarian, a small, plump wren of a woman with cropped silver hair and big tortoiseshell glasses, looked up immediately. “Can I help you?”

  “I hope so,” Susannah said. “I’m looking for something but I don’t quite know what it is.”

  “Is there a particular area you’re interested in?”

  Susannah explained her purpose: writer, historical fiction, in search of a female subject, possibly with a local slant.

  “We have a local history section upstairs.” The librarian came out from behind the desk and gestured for Susannah to follow. “It’s not as big as the one in Portsmouth, but it’s surprisingly good for a library this size. There was a pair of Harvard professors, both in American history, who had a summer place in Eastwood, and they left their entire personal collection to us. Such a nice couple.” She led Susannah to a wooden card catalog whose drawers had worn brass pulls. Susannah must have looked surprised, because she added, “We’re still raising the money to have the collection digitized; for now, we have to make do with this.”

  “I don’t mind.” Susannah opened a random drawer. Cards hand-printed in blue ink hinted at possible scenarios, intriguing new characters, the tight coil of a well-crafted plot. “I don’t mind at all.”

  “Good. I’m downstairs if you need me.”

  For the next hour, Susannah riffled through the drawers in search of s
omething or someone that would get her tail wagging. She read about a nineteenth-century landscape painter in Maine who went off to live with the Eskimos in Alaska for a time, and a wealthy thread factory owner’s daughter in Massachusetts who organized her father’s workers into a union; both were interesting, neither was riveting. Weak winter light played across the library table and her stomach rumbled; she hadn’t eaten much breakfast and it was past the time for lunch. Soon the kids would be home, dropped off by the school bus that stopped down the road from the house. Although they both had keys, she still wanted to be there when they got back. Especially Jack. He still got panicky if he didn’t find her at home. She would return to the library tomorrow.

  Just as she was gathering her laptop and getting ready to go, she spied a book, face out, in a section marked “Portsmouth.” It was called Hanging Ruth Blay: An Eighteenth-Century New Hampshire Tragedy. Susannah plucked it from the shelf and began to read. Within minutes, she was drawn into the story of the thirty-one-year-old schoolteacher who, in December 1768, climbed the steps to the gallows that had been erected on the high ground of what was now Portsmouth’s old South Cemetery. Blay had had a child out of wedlock and maintained the infant was stillborn. Though she was suspected of murder, the crime she was convicted of was concealment of the baby, which, shockingly, carried the death penalty. There had been several appeals, two stays of execution, but no pardon; she was condemned to die by hanging, the last woman to be executed in the state.

  Susannah closed the book. If she’d had the time, she would have read the whole thing right here—it wasn’t all that long. But she could check it out and finish it at home. Downstairs, she realized she did not yet have a library card and she began to complete the form taken from a stack on the counter. As she printed the information, the librarian looked at the book. “Oh, Ruth Blay. What a sad story. But fascinating. And an important part of our local history, even if not the most exemplary one.”