Chapter 5 - The Walls of Highfield
The gates of Highfield were forged from six-inch charcoal iron, topped with four-foot fleur-de-lis spikes that had been gilded during the boom of the 1920s and never polished since.
It was ten o'clock on Friday morning when the hospital transport van brought me through the stone pillars. The river fog had lifted, leaving the lawn—two hundred acres of manicured rye grass running down to the salt marsh—covered in a brittle, sparkling skin of hoarfrost that cracked beneath the tires of the three state police cruisers escorting us.
The house sat on the ridge like a private fortress of dark gray granite, its thirty-two chimneys rising into the cold blue sky like the bayonets of an infantry square.
There were no flowers on the front terrace.
The calla lilies from the cathedral had been left behind in the chancel, but the front portico was blocked by two large, yellow moving vans from a commercial salvage firm in New Haven. Four men in canvas coveralls were carrying a long, mahogany side table down the limestone steps, its cabriole legs wrapped in gray moving blankets, its brass drawer pulls rattling with every step.
"What is that?" I asked, leaning against the window frame of the van, my right arm supported by a sling to take the pressure off my bruised ribs.
Arthur Sterling, sitting in the front passenger seat, turned his head.
"That is the English dining service," he said. "Acquired by Julian Whitmore from the Duke of Marlborough’s estate in 1934. Under the terms of the federal forfeiture lien filed by the Department of Justice at eight o'clock this morning, all personal property belonging to Eleanor Vance Whitmore is being removed to a bonded warehouse in Bridgeport for public appraisal."
The transport van stopped at the foot of the terrace.
Vance, who had spent the last twenty-four hours guarding the main house under an emergency contract with the probate court, opened the side door and lowered the hydraulic step. He held out his leather-gloved hand to assist me, his expression grave, his eyes fixed on the gravel.
"Mrs. Whitmore," he said. "The house is secure. The state troopers finished tagging the items in the master suite an hour ago."
"Where is she, Vance?"
"In the conservatory," he said. "She refused to leave the grounds until the personal effects warrant was served by the sheriff in person. She’s been in there since dawn, watching the men clear the drawing room."
I did not use a wheelchair.
My knees were stiff, wrapped in heavy elastic supports beneath my black wool trousers, and every step sent a dull, throbbing reminder of the cathedral floor through my pelvis, but I walked up the nine granite steps on my own two feet.
The great hall smelled of cold plaster and damp cardboard.
The portraits of the Whitmore ancestors—the sea captains, the railroad directors, the women with their pearl chokers and their pale, predatory eyes—had already been removed from the oak wainscoting, leaving bright, unfaded rectangles of gold-damask wallpaper behind them like empty graves.
I walked through the double doors into the conservatory.
The room was eighty feet long, walled with curved, cast-iron glass bays that looked out over the northern gardens and the river beyond. It was warm—too warm—heated by steam pipes that hissed and gurgled beneath the floorboards, the air thick with the smell of wet soil, rotting peat, and the white gardenias David had planted for my birthday two years ago.
Eleanor was sitting on a wicker chaise lounge near the central fountain.
She was wearing a faded wool cardigan over her silk nightgown, her feet tucked into sheepskin slippers that had lost their trim. She had no makeup on. Without the foundation and the carmine lipstick, her skin looked like old greaseproof paper that had been left in the sun, yellowed, creased around the mouth by seventy years of disdain.
She held an empty porcelain tea cup in her lap, turning it over and over with her spotted fingers.
When she heard the click of my shoes on the wet tiles, she did not look up.
"The bishop called this morning," she said. Her voice was cracked, thin, the cutting edge entirely gone, sounding like an old phonograph cylinder playing at the wrong speed. "He told me the diocese will not permit David to be interred in the family crypt. He said the scandal... he said the church council voted to revoke the burial license for the north chapel."
She raised her head slowly. Her eyes were sunken, bloodshot, the milky green clouded by the cataract that had begun to form in her left eye.
"A Whitmore," she whispered. "Refused burial on his own land. By a priest whose seminary was built with my husband’s money."
"It isn't your land, Eleanor," I said, stopping six feet from the wicker lounge.
She looked at my stomach—at the high, round swell beneath the black coat.
"You think you’ve won," she said, her mouth twisting into a grotesque caricature of her old smile. "You think because Arthur found some papers in an iron box, you are the mistress of Highfield. Look at these walls, girl. Look at the glass. It takes sixty tons of coal a month just to keep the frost off these ferns. It takes sixteen servants to keep the salt from eating the brass on the front windows. You are a clerk’s daughter from the valley. You don't know how to own this house. It will eat you alive within three seasons."
"I am not going to heat it, Eleanor," I said.
She blinked, her hands freezing on the porcelain cup. "What?"
"The demolition permits were filed with the town council at nine o'clock," I said, my voice dead, flat, and absolute. "The stone will be crushed for the new breakwater at the state harbor in New London. The gardens will be returned to the salt marsh. The trees will be cut for the timber preserve."
Eleanor rose from the chaise lounge with a sudden, horrifying speed, the porcelain cup shattering against the floor tiles into twenty pieces.
"No!" she shrieked, her hands clawing at her own gray hair. "You cannot destroy Highfield! It has stood for a hundred years! It is the monument to Julian Whitmore’s life!"
"It is a monument to a slaughterhouse," I said.
I pulled the 1924 ledger from my coat pocket and dropped it onto the glass-topped table beside her. It hit the surface with a loud, heavy crack that made the remaining tea plates jump.
"The girl from the textile settlement," I said. "Her name was Margaret. Her great-granddaughter is currently sitting in the probate clerk’s office in Norwich, signing the release for the state historical trust. She is twenty-four years old. She works the checkout at the grocery store on Main Street. And by five o'clock tonight, the land beneath your feet will belong to her foundation."
Eleanor stared at the book.
She did not reach for it. She looked at the foxed paper, the red seals, the spidery ink, as if the ghosts of the strikers her father-in-law had drowned in the lower canal were climbing out of the margins to pull her into the mud.
May you like
"You're a demon," she breathed, her chest heaving beneath the frayed wool of her cardigan. "David brought a demon into this house."
"David brought an adjuster into this house, Eleanor," I said, turning toward the double doors where the sheriff’s deputies were already waiting with the transport papers. "And when an adjuster finds a total constructive loss... she doesn't rebuild the wreck. She scraps it."
