From what I could remember of Frank’s family tree, his uncle Walt’s great-grandfather had been the poet Lawrence Wilde, who’d likely told a decent story.
“Back before the Revolution,” Frank began, in the same tone he always used when starting on a story, “back when we were fighting on the same side as the English, in the French and Indian War, Zebulon Wilde and his family took in a French officer, captured and sent to these parts as a prisoner.”
“Zebulon Wilde,” I said, checking my memory, “was Benjamin Wilde’s father, right?”
“That’s right. Benjamin was barely out of his teens at the time—twenty-two, twenty-three maybe—still a bit reckless, so his father kept him at work on the farm. Didn’t want him to run off and join the militia. The one brother, Joseph, had already been halfway ruined by the war. Nearly killed, so they say, in the raid on Oswego, and never quite right in the head after that.”
There were so many names to remember. I asked him, “Was Joseph the brother who went to the West Indies or the one who was a merchant in New York?”
“Neither. Joseph was the one who turned a traitor in the Revolution, and went up to Canada.”
“A Loyalist? I don’t remember hearing about him.”
“Well, we don’t talk about him much.” Frank’s voice turned dry, but when I glanced at him he winked. He knew that I was half Canadian. “Anyhow, here was this Frenchman, this officer, living right here in the old house with Zebulon Wilde and his sons. And his daughter.”
I thought I could see where the story was going, but I let Frank tell it.
“The daughter,” he said, “was a lonely young lady. She’d been set to marry a neighbour boy, one of the friends of her big brother Joseph, but he had gone up with her brother to work on the fort at Oswego, and when the French attacked them he was killed. That’s what drove Joseph over the edge, they say: seeing his best friend get butchered in front of him. So Joseph came home half crazy, and his sister—Lydia, that was her name—lost her fiancé.”
Over our heads the leaves rustled and danced as a breeze from the bay brushed my cheek like a sorrowful sigh, as though somehow the forest around us was listening, too, and recalling that long-ago loss.
“Then this Frenchman arrived,” Frank said. “Handsome and charming. And Lydia, she fell in love with him. They kept it secret, of course. Had to. Zebulon wouldn’t have liked that his daughter was sneaking around with an enemy officer.”
“Maybe he ought to have thought about that before bringing the officer into his house to begin with.”
“Maybe.” The dryness was back. “But then we’d have no story to tell, would we?” Frank reached to take hold of a low-hanging whip of a branch that I otherwise would have walked into, because I was watching my feet on the path and not looking ahead. As he let it fall back into place he went on, “So the Frenchman and Lydia, they fell in love, and the plan was, she’d help him escape and they’d run off together. They had a boat waiting. But when the night came, there was no moon at all, so the officer, he took a lantern to light their way down to the water.”
“And somebody saw them,” I guessed.
“Are you telling this story?” asked Frank.
“No.”
“Okay, then.” The path took a turning and started a steeper descent and he waited to see that my footing was sure before going ahead as he picked up the thread of the story. “And somebody saw them. Her big brother Joseph, he saw that light passing his window, and he stopped them there on the path and he shot that French officer.”
From all around us the trees sighed again as the breeze from the bay became stronger. The path here gave way to a series of wooden steps edged with a railing and softened with wind-drifted ridges of sand and old fallen leaves, and I followed Frank down to the second-last step, where I sat, as he did, with my feet only inches away from the clear shallow water.
This little cove—Snug Cove—had been where the Wilde family’s ships had once ridden at anchor before setting off on their voyages to the West Indies, where one of the brothers had married and settled and managed their business of trade. That was all long ago and forgotten. The only sails now were the little white sails of the yachts skimming over the bay on their way to Cross Harbor’s marina.
The tide had come in. By this evening, the half-moon of pale sandy beach would be partly exposed, with the reeds and a handful of rocks at its edges, but now reeds and rocks were submerged and the small waves came furling towards us and flattened themselves into nothing. I slipped my feet out of my sandals and edged my toes closer, enjoying the cool of the small strip of sand on the soles of my feet.
“So, what happened to Lydia?”
“Well now, they say since her lover had died, and her brother had killed him, she just turned her face to the wall and died, too, of a broken heart.”
“And people think she’s still haunting the house, do they?” One of the incoming waves reached to roll itself over my feet, but I barely acknowledged the brief touch of cold. I was thinking of how, even without the ghost part, the legend itself made a pretty good story, and one we could possibly use in our museum programming.
“Nope.” Frank’s short sideways look set me straight. “It’s the Frenchman supposedly doing the haunting. The tale that’s come down is, they buried him back in the family plot. Wanted to keep it a secret. No marker. No stone.”
One more wave rolled in lightly and rose and surged over my feet, dragging sand from beneath them and tugging them deeper.
“So that’s why some fools in this town think he still walks these woods with his lantern, the same as he did on the night he was killed,” Frank said. “Waiting for Lydia Wilde to come follow him, so he can light her way down to the water.”
Lydia
So this, she thought, was what she had been needing without knowing it. This one still, perfect moment when the whole world held in balance.
If she breathed, she feared she’d spoil it, so she held her breath and closed her eyes and tried to make it last, to mark the feeling so it would not be forgotten.
Round her knees, the water of the wide bay nudged her steadily with unseen currents, drawing in the tide, as though it sought to push her gently shoreward, but she held her footing firm against it and remained exactly where she was, her skirts drawn up and held within both hands, the tidy hemlines of her shift and cotton gown suspended just above the water.
The clouds were thin across the searing sky and yet they held a heaviness that signalled storms approaching. She’d been feeling it all morning, both without doors and within, where with her father having gone out in the waggon before breakfast-time, her brothers had seen little need to temper their hostility.
They showed it in small ways at first: a slamming door, a clipped command. But by the time the sun had climbed above the trees and made the air inside the house too hot and thick to breathe, her brothers’ sparring dance with one another had become an open argument.
If Mother had been here, she would have ended it. She’d never stood for fighting. She had raised four boys and buried three and, as she’d liked to say, there was a reason why her first name had been Patience. But she’d had a gift for making peace, and when there’d been a gauntlet dropped between the brothers she had stepped between them, picked it up, and neatly sorted it away as though it were naught but another bit of linen wanting laundering.
Their father had once said that had the English had the foresight to send Mother up to meet the French on the St. Lawrence, she’d have settled things so there’d have never been a war. She’d laughed at that, as had they all.