The Tale of Halcyon Crane (16 page)

Dressed, I went down the back stairs to the kitchen, where the smell of brewing coffee told me Iris had already arrived.

“Morning, miss.” She smiled. “I’ve made scones, started the laundry, and picked up the living room.”

Already? How long had she been here? It was a bit odd, knowing she had let herself in and was scurrying around the house while I was sleeping or showering.

But I shrugged it off; it was her job. Besides, one look at the fresh coffee and the plate of warm scones, and I was charmed by the idea of having a housekeeper.

“Thank you for all of this, Iris.” I yawned and poured a cup of coffee. “It’s wonderful, it really is. Care to join me for some coffee and a scone?”

“Perhaps after I finish my work, miss,” she said curtly. “I still have the windows to do.”

While Iris shuffled about, dusting, cleaning the windows
with vinegar, sweeping, finishing the wash, and rubbing down the woodwork with Murphy’s Oil Soap, I hung around feeling guilty. It goes without saying that I had not had the luxury of a housekeeper growing up. Now here I was, an able-bodied young woman, sitting around on my ever-widening rear end while poor decrepit Iris slaved away in her long black dress and sensible shoes. More than once I tried to give her a hand, but I was rebuffed in the iciest of tones.

“This is my job, miss. I’ve been taking care of this house for more years than you’ve been alive. Let me do things my own way.”

Fine.
I retreated to the master suite. Iris could clean house all day long if she wanted. I didn’t have to watch her.

I started a fire in the bedroom fireplace and spent the morning curled up in the window seat with a good book, watching the sleet continue to fall on the angry water. It was exactly the sort of morning I love best, nothing to do but indulge myself, the blustery weather preventing me from doing anything productive like exercise orgardening.

The phone rang. “I found out who your mystery man is,” Jonah told me.

“You mean the guy in the carriage who tried to run me down?”

“John Stroud. And he wasn’t trying to run you down. He was one of the men here the other morning when you came in. And he was here this morning, talking about what happened. He didn’t see you in the dark until it was almost too late. You gave him quite a fright, apparently. His blood pressure went through the roof.”

“
I
gave
him
a fright?”

“He asked me to tell you how sorry he was.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Anyway, Hallie, the mystery is solved. He wasn’t deliberately trying to hurt you. It was an honest mistake. Just drop it and move on.”

I wished the islanders would do the same. Would they hate me forever, or was I perceiving their disapproval because of the guilt I felt about somehow being a party to Julie Sutton’s death? Did I feel it on my father’s behalf?

I didn’t mention any of these thoughts to Jonah. Instead, we made small talk for a bit before he ended the conversation with an invitation for me to stop by the shop soon. “I’ll buy you a latte,” he said, before hanging up.

I heard a crackling coming from the other side of the room and then a voice. “Miss? Lunch is served.” I looked around in the direction of the voice and noticed a small intercom on the wall. I hurried over to it and pressed one of the buttons. “Um, thank you?” I said into it, too loudly. “I’ll be right down.”

As I slipped down the back stairs, I could smell something wonderful wafting from the kitchen. I found a thick stew simmering on the stove and Iris taking a fresh loaf of crusty bread out of the oven. One place was set at the table.

“Won’t you join me?” I asked her as I sat down. “You must be hungry after all of your work this morning.”

“I’ve already eaten, miss,” she said to me, ladling the stew into a small earthenware crock and setting it, with a basket containing several slices of fresh hot bread and a butter dish, in front of me. “This lunch is for you. But I will join you for a cup of tea. It occurs to me that you might like to hear about
your family now. I’m the only one left alive to tell you their story. If you don’t hear it from me, you won’t hear it. And they—the stories of your people—will be lost forever.”

As sleet continued to hit the windowpanes behind us, and I lifted a steaming spoonful of stew from its crock, Iris began to tell me a tale.

W
hen Hannah and Simeon Hill, your great-grandparents, came to this island, it was just after the turn of the last century and they were newly married. Hannah was nothing more than a girl, just seventeen years old; Simeon was thirty, thirty-five, perhaps. Maybe more. They’re both buried in the cemetery on the other side of the island. Have you seen it?”

“I have indeed. We drove by it the other day.”

Iris went on. “Good. You can find the exact birth and death dates on their headstones, but he was a good deal older than his bride. By the time they married, Simeon was already quite a wealthy man. He had started a logging company with his brothers a decade earlier and now he owned the company outright. Much of what you have inherited was initially earned by Simeon Hill and invested wisely over time.”

I looked around the magnificent kitchen and gave silent thanks for my great-grandfather’s industrious nature. Iris took a sip of her tea and continued, her eyes hazy and unfocused, staring off into nothingness as she spoke.

“Simeon brought his new bride here to this island, which had been an important fur trading outpost for more than a hundred years. By 1900, most of the trappers had gone and Grand Manitou was fast becoming a playground for the wealthy from Chicago and Minneapolis and elsewhere. Simeon had been here several times on business, fell in love with the island, and built a fine house for his young wife.”

“What was the island like back then?” I asked.

“Much the same as it is now,” Iris replied. “Grand homes, wealthy people, horses and carriages. Not much has changed in a hundred years. The island is charmed in that way. Time passes here, of course, but not like it does elsewhere.”

She cleared her throat, took a long sip of tea, and continued.

“By all accounts, Simeon and Hannah had a good marriage, despite the difference in their ages. It is widely known how devoted they were to each other. He was very handsome—tall, dark-haired, eyes as inky as the lake on a November day—and although Hannah was no great beauty, she possessed a certain air about her that drew people in. It was youth and exuberance, certainly, but she also had the most magnificent head of hair on the island—thick, wavy, and auburn just like your mother’s—and she usually wore it long and free instead of piled on top of her head as was the style for most women of the day.”

Iris turned her eyes toward mine, squinting. “Can you see them, child? Can you see Hannah and Simeon?”

Could I
see
them? What was that supposed to mean? “I can imagine them, yes,” I said, not knowing exactly what she was after.

“Good, good.” Iris nodded. “Happy as they were, they didn’t have the one thing that would make their family complete: a child. One year passed with no children, then another, and another, and soon tongues began to wag around town, with women providing all sorts of advice for poor Hannah.

“ ‘Eat more salty foods,’ a woman whispered to her after church one Sunday.

“ ‘Make sure to go to him when the moon is full,’ said another.

“None of these silly remedies had any effect at all, of course, and Hannah was becoming desperate. She knew Simeon was eager to sire a new generation of Hills, a family to take over the house and the business someday. But as more and more time passed with no baby, Hannah grew afraid that Simeon would find another way to produce heirs to the family fortune—a new wife.

“She had seen it herself, right there on the island. Three years earlier she had watched in horror as Sandra Harrington boarded the ferry, bags in hand, a veil covering her face. She never returned. A few months later her husband brought a new young wife to live in the house he had built for Sandra, and they set about the business of starting a family.”

“That’s horrible!” I said, imagining the humiliation of poor barren Sandra, sent away.

“Believe me, worse has happened to women who couldn’t produce heirs.” Iris clucked. “Sandra was lucky to wind up with a generous stipend to live on instead of a mysterious death.”

I shuddered. “Why couldn’t they just adopt?”

“Oh, child, that wasn’t done in those days. Wealthy men wanted blood heirs and were not forgiving to women who could not produce them. Hannah wasn’t about to let that happen to her—she loved her husband too much—so she decided to take drastic measures.”

Iris’s tone became low and conspiratorial, as though she were telling me something she shouldn’t. “One afternoon when Simeon was away on the mainland, Hannah went to the other side of the island and knocked on the door of a local medicine woman, Martine Bertrand, a French Canadian who had come here fifty years earlier with her fur trader husband.

“According to local legend, Martine was a witch.” Iris’s eyes sparkled. “The Witch of Summer Glen, the children used to call her. Deep within the cedar forest on the other side of the island is a clearing with a small creek running through it that became known as Summer Glen. This fur trader, Jacques Bertrand, built a small cottage there for himself and his wife. But that was long, long ago, fifty years before Hannah herself came to the island. Martine was now an old woman who had been living alone in Summer Glen for decades.

“Plenty of tales exist about her, local legends made more exciting over time, no doubt. Children would sneak through the woods to get a look at the old woman, despite their terror that she would spirit them away. They say she was a vindictive, evil old witch, casting spells against the high society that had turned her rustic island home into an enclave for the wealthy.”

“A witch, Iris? Come on. You’re not about to tell me you think she actually was a witch.”

Iris smiled. “Of course not, child. All those rumors are nothing but hysterical nonsense. Martine was a healer, a medicine woman, someone who knew how to make potions and poultices with ingredients she found in the earth and the water. She possessed much knowledge, ancient knowledge. Though nobody would readily admit it, and certainly wouldn’t talk about it outright, many of the society ladies would steal across the island, wearing cloaks to disguise themselves, and knock on Martine’s back door. Some sought love potions for indifferent men, others a cure for a recurring cough. Some wanted the right combination of herbs to break a child’s fever; others wanted teas that would ease female complaints. Martine always gave them what they were looking for and never asked for anything in return—no payment, no acknowledgment on the street, not even a kind word.

“Rumor had it, however, that Martine exacted her own price. They say she sometimes laced her potions with malevolence and magic, curing and cursing at the same time. A man would recover from fever only to find his voice mysteriously gone. An always sickly child would become hale and hearty enough to play outside, only to die in a fall from the first tree he ever climbed.”

“But that can’t be true,” I murmured, feeling physically cold at the thought of my great-grandmother going to such a woman for help. This story was beginning to sound suspiciously dark and gloomy. Was it true or was Iris embellishing a local legend?

“I don’t know whether to believe those stories or not.” Iris eyed me suspiciously, as if reading my thoughts. “I only know what happened to Hannah.

“When all else had failed, when doctors could do nothing but encourage her to pray, and when hope of ever having a child was seeping away, Hannah wrapped her crimson cloak around her, stole out to the stable, saddled her horse—your great-grandmother was an accomplished horse woman in her day—rode to Summer Glen, and knocked on Martine’s back door.”

Iris’s eyes were deep and dark now, filled with excitement and thrill. “Martine was waiting in the kitchen. She ushered her visitor inside—the doorway was so small your great-grandmother had to stoop to make her way under the lintel. Hannah found herself in a tiny kitchen, dominated by a big cast-iron pot bubbling away on the stove.

“ ‘So you have finally come to Summer Glen, Hannah Hill,’ the old woman said to her. ‘What is it you want of me?’

“ ‘Please,’ Hannah begged in a low whisper. ‘All I want is to give my husband a child.’

“ ‘Is that all you want? You want no more than that?’

“Hannah bowed her head. ‘Please. I’ve come to you because of what people say, and I believe you have the power to give me what I seek. I want to be able to give my husband a child.’

“ ‘You do not need me for that,’ Martine said to her. ‘You are fully capable of giving your husband a child. It is he who cannot give a child to you.’

“Hannah was speechless.

“ ‘But I can help you help him.’ Martine smiled slyly and crossed the room. She returned, holding a small cloth bag. She opened it and Hannah saw it contained dried leaves and herbs she could not identify.

“ ‘Your husband is a tea drinker, yes?’ she asked. Hannah nodded. Simeon liked freshly brewed tea in the mornings and afternoons, a habit he had picked up from his British mother.

“ ‘Mix a spoonful of this with his tea leaves for three mornings,’ Martine instructed. ‘He will not be able to smell it or taste it. On the third evening, go to him and you will conceive.’