The Poe Estate (8 page)

Learning to Fly

I
needed to know more about this broomstick. Andre had called it a Hawthorne broom—maybe he had more information. But how could I reach him? I remembered I had Elizabeth's phone number. When I got home from school, I dug out her business card and tried dialing the number on my dead desk phone, but it didn't work.

If I couldn't reach Elizabeth and Andre on the phone, maybe I could just fly down to the city. I had the address. That must have been what Andre had meant when he told me on the phone to pop over. But what if they weren't there? I had no idea what hours they worked. And anyway, I'd better practice some more before I tried to cover hundreds of miles on a saddleless broomstick.

• • •

I took the broom out to the field behind the patch of woods by the barn and tried it. It's not so easy keeping your balance on the round dowel handle of a broom. It dug into me uncomfortably when I sat astride, but when I tried sitting sideways I kept slipping off backward or forward. I found myself doing a lot of dangling. No wonder bicycles have saddles.

Still: flying!

I flew so far up that I could see the ocean stretched out flat
to the distant horizon.

Kitty didn't think I should go up so high. She didn't think I should be doing this at
all
, but I should at least keep down to about knee level, preferably with a pile of nice wet leaves underneath. No no NO! Was I crazy? Not above the trees! I better stop this, right
now
, or
else
!

“What are you going to do, Kitty, haunt me?”

Kitty didn't think that was funny.

“Come on, Kitty! Why should you be the only one who gets to fly?”

I'm sure Kitty thought it was a lot easier when I was little and she could just pick me up and carry me when I started to run off into danger.

Still, once I got the knack of balancing—it involved bending my knees back and looping my feet up behind me—she started to relax.

It took me a while to figure out how to guide the broom. Telling it out loud where to go turned out to be unnecessary. The broom was sort of between a horse and a bicycle, or maybe a mule and a toboggan; if you shifted your weight to match your intentions, you could usually get it to take the hint.

Kitty thought I was getting pretty good, but could I do
this
? She showed me a loop de loop.

I could, as it happened, although I had a little trouble
hauling myself up on top of the broom again after I slipped down under it.

After some practice, I could also do a vertical ascent, a five-point turn at least as good as Kitty's, and a pretty good backward spiral, even though it's hard to see where you're going when you're flying backward.

On my second circuit, a branch grabbed my hat. Kitty cracked up. Then we had another game of tag, a game of keep-away with the hat—try keeping a ghost away from a hat when she can control the wind—and more loop de loops, until I managed one without slipping under the broom. After that, we both flopped onto the ground and lay panting (me) and laughing (both of us) while the damp soaked through my jeans.

I hadn't had so much fun with my sister since before she died.

“See, Kitty? I didn't get hurt, not even a little bit.”

That, she let me know, was because she was here taking care of me.

• • •

After dinner, I filled half the divided sink with hot sudsy water and dumped the silverware and glasses in it. Yet another thing I missed from our old house: the dishwasher. Cousin Hepzibah pulled her chair over to the sink, picked up a dish towel, and dried the glasses as I finished rinsing them.

“Hey, Cousin Hepzibah,” I said, “that broom you gave me. Is there anything else you can tell me about it?”

Cousin Hepzibah nodded. “Best to wear trousers,” she said.

“Trousers?” I asked.

“Yes, long skirts tend to tangle and short skirts—well,
they're not very modest.” So she did know about the broom's powers! No wonder she didn't want to sell it.

“And it's best to stay beneath the tree line during the daytime. You're more visible than you think.”

“Did you use the broom a lot when you were younger?” I asked.

“Quite a bit, at one time. Not for years now, though.”

“Where did it come from?”

“Oh, it's been in our family for a very long time.”

“Do you know why the guy from that library in New York called it a Hawthorne broom?”

She considered. “Hawthorne . . . I don't think we're related to any Hawthornes. It's possible, of course, but I've never heard of any. Corys, Feltons, even an Usher. Toogoods, of course.”

“But Cousin Hepzibah—” I didn't even really know what to ask. “What is it about our family? I mean, ghosts and buried treasure and flying broomsticks . . .”

“It's true. Our family has some unusual history,” she said. “But I think most families do, if you look far enough back—or far enough forward. The world is a very strange place.”

I couldn't disagree, especially after everything that had happened since we moved to the Thorne Mansion.

“Now that I think of it, though,” Cousin Hepzibah went on, “have you ever read Nathaniel Hawthorne, the mid-nineteenth-century author? We're not related to him, as far as I know, but he has characters named Cory and Felton in some of his stories. I wonder if there's any connection.”

“You mean he knew our family, and that's where he got the
inspiration for those stories? He wrote about us?”

“I don't know. Maybe. The Ushers, too . . . they're not in any Hawthorne books, but there's ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,' that famous short story by Edgar Allan Poe.”

“I wonder whether Laetitia Flint knew our family too,” I said. “Lately I've been feeling like I'm living in a Flint novel, with all the ghosts and crows and bats and cliffs.”

“She may well have known the Thornes,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “And I often feel that way myself.”

• • •

We started our sheep-heart lab that week. The thing reeked of formaldehyde and squirted when you squeezed it—or, to be more precise, when Cole squeezed it—but it was pretty fascinating, actually. I loved the system of valves and chambers.

“Quit it, Cole,” I said. “You're getting disgusting heart juice all over everything.”

“I'm just demonstrating the pump action! See how it comes out the aorta?”

A spray of liquid pattered on Dolores's notebook. “Hey!” She scrubbed at it with a paper towel.

“Sorry, Lola.” He flashed his white-toothed smile at her, and she smiled back indulgently.

Why does everybody melt when he does that? I sliced into the heart with my scalpel, biting my tongue and thinking of all the jokes I could make about heart attacks and heartbreak.

Hepzibah Toogood's Story

A
few days later, I came home from practicing my flying skills to find a visitor in the parlor drinking tea with Cousin Hepzibah, his back to me.

“Oh, there you are, Sukie,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “Your friend's here.”

My friend?

The guest turned around. It was Cole Farley. “Hi, Sp— Hi, Sukie!” he said, grinning.

“Cole! What are you doing here?”

“I brought your lab book—you left it in class. Your cousin's been telling me about your family.”

“I'll just get you a cup of tea, child,” offered Cousin Hepzibah, leaning forward and feeling for her cane.

Cole put a hand on her arm. “No, you sit still, Miss Thorne.” He crossed the room to the china cabinet and took out a third cup and saucer. The cups were tiny white things without handles, as thin as eggshells, painted with little black flowers.

“No need to be so formal, dear. You can call me Hepzibah. I know, it's a mouthful. They used to call me Eppie when I was a girl.”

“Eppie!” I said. I couldn't quite picture it.

Cousin Hepzibah nodded. “You never called your sister Hepzibah Eppie?”

“No, just Kitty. Occasionally Happy, but only when she was in a very bad mood.”

“How do you get Kitty from Hepzibah?” asked Cole.

“Hepzibah, Hepcat, Kitty,” I explained.

“What's a hepcat? Is that like a hellcat?” He didn't wait for an answer. “It's so awesome—your cousin was just telling me about how your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was a pirate!” He rattled off the
greats
like a marble bouncing down stairs.

“Not our many-greats-grandfather, child, just our many-greats-uncle,” said Cousin Hepzibah.

“Oh, right. The many-greats-grandfather was the witch, right?”

Cousin Hepzibah nodded. “Accused. His accuser recanted and died the night before the execution, and the magistrate set our ancestor free. He lived the rest of his life under a shadow.”

I groaned inwardly. A witch! Now Cole would never, ever stop calling me Spooky. “Tell me about the pirate,” I said. “You mentioned him before, but you never really told me the whole story,” I said.

“You don't know about your pirate uncle? Tell her, Hepzibah!” said Cole.

Cousin Hepzibah took a long swig of tea, put down her cup, and began.

• • •

“It was way back in the eighteenth century. This house had passed into the hands of Obadiah Thorne, a wealthy ship owner. Obadiah had no sons, only two daughters, Hepzibah and Obedience—Windy and Beedie, they were called.”

“Obedience? That's a weird name,” said Cole.

“Not really, not back then. Lots of babies had names like that—Prudence and Experience and Preserved. Their mother was Patience. If Beedie had been a son, they would have called her Obadiah Junior, and Obedience sounds pretty close.”

“I guess so,” said Cole.

“Patience was a pretty, pale, delicate little thing,” Cousin Hepzibah went on. “Giving birth to Obedience almost killed her. Obadiah didn't think she would have any more children, so Obedience was the closest he would come to having a son named after him.”

“Did she?” I asked. “Their mother. Have any more children.”

“Sadly, no. She died of a fever when Windy was twelve and Beedie only five. An elderly cousin, Annabel Thorne, came to look after the little girls. When the weather was good, they used to sit on the widow's walk under an awning, sewing their samplers and watching the sails come up over the horizon. There's Beedie's sampler, hanging over the card table.”

I crossed the parlor to examine it more closely. A border of faded red yarn roses twined around a background of plain brownish linen. In the center stood a house with one gigantic black wool crow perched on the left chimney and another about to land on the right one. The chimneys didn't look big enough to hold them. Above the crows flew a fleet of ships with tiny white sails. The ships were the same size as the birds,
and the left-hand crow glared at them with his cross-stitched eye, as if warning them to stay off his roof.

Under the house stood a man in a yellow coat, a white-haired old lady, two little girls with pointy shoes showing under their dresses, and a little dog, who was sniffing at a capital
A
. The rest of the alphabet followed in tidy rows of capital and lowercase letters, each a different color. It looked as though a family of gardeners was getting ready to weed its letter patch.

In an oval frame at the bottom, I read the verse. “Obedience Thorne is my name & with my Needle I wrought the same.” Apparently Beedie had embroidered the frame first and run out of space; the
me
of
same
spilled out.

“Is this a real house?” asked Cole, pointing.

“Of course! That's
this
house, before they built most of the additions,” said Cousin Hepzibah.

“Wow, that's so cool!” I wondered whether the crows on the roof were the ancestors of the ones that cawed outside my window.

“What about Windy's sampler?” I asked. “Do you have that one, too?”

“She never finished it. She had no discipline, that aunt of ours. That's how she got her nickname—she was always gusting off in different directions. Until she met Phineas Toogood, that is.”

“The pirate?”

“Not at first. He was an honest sailor when they met—second mate on one of Obadiah's ships, the
Sandpiper
. Obadiah sent the girls and Miss Annabel on the
Sandpiper
to visit cousins
in Portland the summer Windy was seventeen. When Windy's little dog, Tiber, was swept off deck in a swell, Phinny Toogood dived in and rescued him. That was how it began.

“Whenever the
Sandpiper
docked in North Harbor, Phinny would find a way to see Windy. He brought her gifts—a Chinese comb, a South Sea shell, a thimble he carved from the tip of a walrus tusk, with “
Sandpiper
” scribed in black and their initials twined together. She gave him a silk handkerchief that she'd embroidered with a dolphin. That was the first sewing project she managed to finish, so you can imagine how she must have loved him.

“Phinny and Windy agreed to marry as soon as Phinny had saved up enough to build a little house in Newport. But Obadiah had other plans for his daughter. He wanted his property to stay in the hands of the Thornes. A second cousin of Obadiah's, Japhet Thorne, had inherited the adjoining parcel—that's the land between the carriage house and the bottom of the hill where your school bus stops. Obadiah ordered Windy to marry Japhet and forget Phinny.

“Japhet was considered an excellent catch. He was tall and handsome, with good manners, if a little stiff. He had plenty of money. But Windy didn't like him, and she loved Phinny. She told her father she would rather stay single her whole life long. He threatened to cut her off without a shilling, but she told him she didn't care.

“Then one Sunday Phinny had a friend slip a note into Windy's prayer book at church, telling her the little house was ready and he was waiting for her in the village. That night she climbed out her window. They were married in the little white
church on Oak Street, the one next to that new yoga place. They exchanged silver rings engraved with the motto ‘Your Heart is my Home.'

“When her father heard the news, he fell back into his chair, twitching and clutching at his throat. Miss Annabel sent for the doctor, who bled Obadiah and put him to bed. With careful nursing, he recovered somewhat, but his right side was paralyzed and he never spoke again.”

“Was it a stroke?” Cole asked.

“Yes, an apoplectic fit, the doctor said. That's what they called strokes back then. Beedie wrote to her sister begging her to come home, but Windy responded that if the news of her marriage had half killed her father, the sight of her wedding ring would likely finish him off.

“A few months later, though, Beedie wrote again and this time Windy came. Phinny had shipped out as first mate on the schooner
Oracle
, and Windy was lonely in the little house without him. Besides, by then she was expecting a child. She wanted to be near her family.

“When her father saw her so round and rosy, the left side of his mouth lifted in half a smile and he reached out his left hand, the tears streaming down his face. Windy threw herself into his arms, weeping. But she had been right to worry: The joy of the reconciliation was too much for the old man. He didn't live long enough to hold his grandson.

“They say little Jack was a fat, smiling baby, with his mother's blue eyes and his father's black hair. His aunt Beedie, who had only recently put away her dolls and started wearing long skirts like a lady, couldn't get enough of him. She sewed him
bonnets and dresses and fed him his porridge with her own little spoon.

“Although Obadiah had threatened to change his will, his apoplexy had robbed him of speech before he'd had time to call for his lawyer. Except for Beedie's dowry and a handful of bequests to servants, Windy inherited everything: the Thorne Mansion, the land it stood on, everything in it, the ships, and the money.

“Japhet Thorne was beside himself with rage when he heard. From his bedroom window, he could look up the hill to the grand house that he'd believed would be his. Now not only had his promised bride married someone else, but the Thorne Mansion would pass out of Thorne hands.

“So Japhet sought out the infamous Captain Tempest of the
Pretty Polly
, the most notorious pirate on the coast, and offered him a hundred pounds in gold to kill Windy's husband, Phineas, and bring his head back as proof.

“Red Tom Tempest readily agreed. ‘A proposition worthy of the
Polly
,' laughed Red Tom, showing off his three gold teeth. They sealed their bargain with rum.”

I objected. “Wait, hang on! What's this Red Tom Tempest person doing in the story? I thought
Phinny
was supposed to be the pirate!”

Cousin Hepzibah patted my hand. “I'm getting there, dear.”

“There can be more than one pirate, silly,” said Cole. “Me hearties,” he added as an afterthought.

Cousin Hepzibah continued, “The storms were strong that year, and many a fortune was smashed into driftwood up and down the coast. News came that the
Oracle
had gone down
with all hands. Phineas Toogood was no more.

“Japhet went to his cousin and asked her again to marry him. ‘A widow needs a protector and a boy needs a father,' he said. But Windy refused to believe her husband was really dead. ‘My boy
has
a father,' she told Japhet.

“Then word came—from a trader who had heard a story in a tavern on Jamaica—that what had sunk the
Oracle
was not a storm, but pirates.

“Windy maintained that no pirates would kill such a fine sailor. They must have taken him prisoner to help sail their ship, she insisted. Phinny would escape and come home to her.

“When Japhet heard this he waited eagerly for Red Tom Tempest to deliver on his promise and bring him Phinny's head. But when the pirate captain finally came, he brought bad news. Though wounded, Phineas had escaped on the
Oracle
's lifeboat. ‘But I did bring you this,' said Red Tom, handing Japhet a small brandy cask.”

“What was in it?” asked Cole, bouncing in his chair and spilling a little tea into his saucer.

“I'm just getting to that,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “Japhet brought the cask to Windy. He told her, ‘I'm afraid I have some painful news. A sailor of my acquaintance has a brother who is cook aboard the
Pretty Polly
. He saw your husband fall in the fight, mortally wounded. It grieves me to tell you that the pirates threw him overboard and the cook saw a pair of sharks fighting over his body. Nothing remains of him but this.' He handed Windy the cask. ‘I deeply regret the pain this must be causing you, but I know that unless you see it with your own
eyes, you will persist in your unfortunate refusal to accept your husband's demise.'

“Windy opened the cask, shrieked, and fell back in a swoon. Inside the cask was Phinny's left hand, pickled in brandy. She couldn't mistake it—it was wearing the wedding ring that she had given him.”

Cole and I spoke at once.

“Cool!” he said.

“Eww!” I said.

“What did Windy do then?” I asked.

“At last she believed Japhet that Phinny was dead. She buried his hand in the little graveyard at the top of the hill—you can still see the gravestone, the one with the rose climbing on it. She fell into a decline. The only thing that would bring her out of herself was little Jack, who had grown into a fine, strong child.

“Now that Phinny was out of the way, Japhet hoped she would be persuaded to marry him. It was what her father had wanted, after all. But little Jack still stood between him and the Thorne property. So he waited until one day, when old Cousin Annabel, who was watching the little boy, had nodded into a doze. The little boy was never seen again after that day. Japhet told Windy little Jack had wandered off and fallen from the cliff into the sea. ‘I saw him at the edge, and then I saw him slip. I ran, but I was too late to catch him,' he told Windy.