Nick was right, the family seemed to have kept everything. Surely we should have expected the house and anything inside it Amelia was looking for to be destroyed—nothing survived that long, did it? But here we were, in a country where a two-hundred-year-old building was on the young side.
We crowded into the attic, lingering by the door while Cormac went to one end and counted off boards in the framework, then stopped and counted again. Giving a curt nod, he hauled a large travel trunk, almost as big as he was, away from the wall. The thing must have been full of more artifacts, and my hands itched, wanting to dig through it. But he ignored it. Kneeling, he felt around the floorboards, searching by touch.
The heat closed in; the air was thick, ripe, and didn’t move at all. I wanted to pace, but there was no room. Claustrophobia threatened; Ben and Nick blocked the stairs. Nick was fidgeting, tapping fingers on the edge of the open trapdoor.
He whispered, “If this has been a mistake—”
A tiny click sounded, and a square of the floor—flush with the other boards and invisible—lifted out. From the cavity, Cormac drew out a polished wooden case the size of a shoebox and bound in brass, coated with a film of dust. He set it aside, put back the section of the floor, and pushed the trunk back in place. Tucking the treasure box under his arm, he returned to the trapdoor.
Nick looked wonderingly at the box. “I had no idea. No one did.”
“That was the point,” Cormac said and gestured down the stairs—he couldn’t exit until they did.
Nick guided us back to the kitchen and offered a place on a stainless steel prep table.
I imagined a situation where the box had a key that Cormac and Amelia would now have to hunt down, but it didn’t. It did have a trick to unlocking it, though, and Amelia remembered. It was a kind of puzzle box; he ran his fingers over it, sliding a brass knob at each of the corners until the latch at the front of the box clicked, and the lid opened. We all leaned forward.
He took out four small leather-bound journals, wrapped shut with twine; a small stack of loose pages with smudged colored drawings on them; an embroidered handkerchief; and a collection of small artifacts: tiny yellowed envelopes, metal amulets on knotted cords, a carved stick, a star woven out of grass.
“This is what you were looking for?” I said.
“Yes,” he said, and sighed. He looked at Nick. “Thank you.”
He was staring, expression slack. “You’re welcome, I think.”
Cormac returned the items to the box, business-like, focused. Mission accomplished.
Nick was still gaping. “I have so many questions—about the family, the history of it all.”
Pausing, Cormac looked at him, impatient. I couldn’t tell if the expression was his or Amelia’s. “What do you want to know?”
Faced with the question, he seemed at a loss. “What was the family really like? I’ve heard stories about my great-great-grandfather, that he could be quite the tyrant. What was the house like then? Why did Amelia leave? Where did she go? What really happened to her—how is any of this possible?”
Cormac seemed to gather himself, looking into the distance, the corners of the room, considering what to say. He wasn’t used to explaining himself. But this wasn’t about him. “Amelia left because she didn’t feel welcome. It’s a little weird for her thinking she’s got family that might be interested in her after all this time.”
“As you say, it’s been a long time. The family’s not what it was.”
As he sealed the box again, Cormac looked around at the kitchen, lips pursed and thoughtful. “She’d been expected to marry a friend of the family, but she turned him down. Her parents—and her brother, I think—never forgave her, so she left because she figured she might as well. She couldn’t do anything more scandalous than she already had. She assumed they’d be happy to get rid of her.”
Nick turned up a wry smile. “If you’d come to the parlor, there’s something I’d like to show you.”
We left the kitchen and entered a wood-paneled hallway that led past several doorways with polished molding. Through them I saw dimly lit, sparsely furnished rooms.
In the parlor, though, chairs, sofas, and tables crowded around. When the family did come to visit, this must have been where they spent their time.
Nick brought us to the far wall, decorated with faded red wallpaper in a floral pattern. A couple dozen portraits and photos hung on display—obviously of the family. The square, dark painting of a stern gentleman puffed out in his cravat might have been of Amelia’s father or grandfather. There were paintings of women in luxurious Victorian gowns, their hair perfectly curled and their faces as dainty as dolls. Most of the photographs were black-and-white, and must have been more than a hundred years old. They rested safe in wood and gold-colored frames.
Nick pointed to one of a young woman, stern and unhappy looking in the way that people always seemed in old photographs. She wore a dark, fitted dress, and her hair was coiled under a simple hat. Her face was pale, and the way she looked at something just past the camera seemed particularly sad.
“That’s her, Lady Amelia,” Nick said. “They never took her picture down, even after word came of her trouble in Colorado. The stories I heard of her—she was a black sheep, the skeleton in the closet that every family has. I’m not sure they understood her. But they never disowned her. Now—it’s old history, I think.”
Cormac studied the picture for a long time, finally reaching out to brush a finger on the bottom of the frame. He turned his gaze to the rest of the pictures, then the rest of the room, and his smile was tired. “Yeah,” he said. “Old history.”
Nick made apologies—he had an appointment in the village that afternoon and needed to shut up the house again. We made our way back to the front porch.
He said, “How much longer are you in London for? Perhaps we could meet for lunch or dinner—I’d like to introduce you to my wife and children. I’m not sure they’ll believe you any more than I did at first, but … I want to give them the chance.”
I looked at Cormac, who had insisted that Amelia didn’t need her family, just her things. He pursed his lips, his brow furrowed.