“What? You would have told me to say no?”
“No. No, I—” He had broken off again to rake a hand through his endearingly unruly hair. “I just don’t think you’re thinking about us.”
And he was right. I hadn’t been. But in reply I’d only told him, “Ty, I have to go.”
“But two years? Really? That’s a hell of a long time.”
“I’ll still be in New York, and you can drive there in five hours. We can make it work.”
He’d looked at me with open irritation. “Do you want to make it work?”
“Of course I do.” My face had probably displayed some irritation, too, because I’d thought it crazy he would even ask. “Of course I want to make it work.”
I hated arguing. We’d almost never argued, from the time six months before when we’d been introduced by friends at a reception. Our relationship so far had been a relatively calm one, free of drama, so this recent patch of turbulence had left us both off balance.
I restored my balance now by briefly fixing on the broader world that showed beyond my window, which looked out across the mossy shingles of the older section of the house and gave a peaceful green view of the branches of the nearer trees.
Their shade was welcome. Even with the window-mounted air conditioner along the hall, it was still August, and the morning sun would otherwise have made this room an oven.
As it was, the young reporter had begun to use her notepad as a fan.
I sent her a small smile as I acknowledged this, apologizing for the heat. “We can finish this downstairs, if you’d like? And there’s no air conditioning in the Colonial part of the house, so if you still want that tour we should probably go while the sun’s where it is.”
She still wanted the tour. She had gathered her notebook and pen and recorder and stood in the time that it took me to push back my chair, and by the time I’d crossed to join her she had flipped the stapled pages I had given her when we’d begun our interview, to look more closely at the page of floor plans for the house.
She said, “So this room, your office, is actually in the Colonial part of the house.”
“Well, it is and it isn’t. This would originally have been one of the garret rooms in the Colonial house, but then in the mid-1800s they opened up this corner of the back wall and the roof so they could build on the Victorian addition, so now this room is kind of half-and-half.” Like the rooms of the Victorian addition, it had undergone a total renovation in the 1980s, with the painted woodwork and the wallpaper to prove it; but the floor, though painted, was still the same wide-planked floor that had been here when this was just a garret room in the back corner of the old house, and I still got that wonderful walking-through-a-wardrobe-into-Narnia feeling every time I opened the old-fashioned panelled door in the wall behind my desk and stepped through into what felt like another century.
The spacious upstairs bedchamber that lay beyond that door had not seen many changes since Colonial times. Large and square, it had a lovely feel to it with all its windows opened wide to let in the faint breeze that danced and rustled through the leaves outside, casting shadows over the floorboards and the dusty fireplace hearth. The air was fresh, the room was quiet, and I felt myself relax. In the older part of the Wilde House, this room was my favourite.
I was about to launch into a proper description of how this first house had been built, and what things had been altered, and how our new project was going to restore them, when the young reporter, studying her floor plan, cut me off with, “Which room was Benjamin Wilde’s?”
From her tone, anyone would have thought him a living celebrity—someone with legions of fans who would line up to see where he’d slept.
I was still getting used to that.
Benjamin Wilde, I had learned, was our museum’s claim to fame. A daring privateer, a dashing hero of the Revolution, and—if one could trust the portraits—devilishly handsome, he was largely why the Wilde House had been designated a historic building to begin with, and why funds had been donated for its restoration. Benjamin’s descendant, Lawrence Wilde, may have become a fairly famous poet of his day and dined with presidents, but all these years afterwards, Benjamin’s was the name everyone knew. The man everyone wanted to hear about.
I smiled and told her, “Over here.” We crossed the landing to the other upstairs bedchamber. This one was essentially the mirror image of the first—a square with two windows at the front and another in the side wall overlooking the green clearing at the forest’s edge, where guests would soon be gathering to hear the speeches and take part in the official groundbreaking ceremony.
The room was plain, with nothing in it I would call remarkable, but still the young reporter seemed to revel in its atmosphere. She crossed the floor with reverence. But I thought I caught, within her voice, a hint of disappointment. “There’s no furniture.”
“It’s all been put in storage. There’s a bedstead that’s original, and two chairs and a table that we know belonged to Benjamin, because during the Revolution, while he was away fighting and the British came to occupy his house, his wife wrote down a careful inventory of what was in each room. She must have thought the British officers would damage things, or steal them.”
“Did they?”
“Not that we can tell. Most of the furniture that left the house left in the usual way,” I said. “Sold off by later descendants who didn’t want old-fashioned things.” And who would have most likely been shocked by the prices Colonial furniture fetched these days in fine antiques stores. “We know where some pieces went, and we’re working to get them back. But what we can’t track down, we can at least replace, thanks to the records of Benjamin’s wife.”
She made a note of this, then looked around appreciatively at the peeling plaster walls and scarred wood of the panelling surrounding the room’s fireplace. “So you’re going to have this whole house restored to the way it looked when he was living here?”
“That’s the plan, yes. With luck, we’ll be able to have the museum officially open for visitors sometime next summer,” I said, “but we have some ideas for special events in the meantime, so people can follow along with the project: a Christmas open house, maybe, and a plastering party in the spring.”
“And ghost tours at Halloween?” Seeing my blank face, she said, “There’s a ghost here, right?”
I couldn’t tell from her tone of voice if she was being serious, so I kept my reply neutral. “I’m not aware of one.”
“Oh. Well, you’re new here. I’m new here myself, I just moved here last winter, but I’ve had lots of people tell me things about the ghost.”
I waited politely, but she showed little interest herself in sharing the tales she’d been told, so I agreed with her it might be fun to do a Halloween event, and on that note we moved on with our tour.
She didn’t show much interest in that either, though in fairness it was getting close to noon and with the sun directly overhead the upstairs rooms were growing hotter. She began to fan herself again, and seemed content to briefly peek into the downstairs rooms and take a picture of me standing posed beside the massive old stone fireplace in the kitchen before we went out to join the others on the lawn.
The crowd, though small, was starting to assemble.
At its centre stood the town of Millbank’s mayor, a handsome man in his mid-forties with broad shoulders and a smile designed to charm. The young reporter fixed her sights upon him, shook my hand and thanked me for my time, and left so quickly that I doubt she was aware of my relief.