diff --git "a/data_all_eng_slimpj/shuffled/split2/finalzzqyet" "b/data_all_eng_slimpj/shuffled/split2/finalzzqyet" new file mode 100644--- /dev/null +++ "b/data_all_eng_slimpj/shuffled/split2/finalzzqyet" @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +{"text":" \nEvery town has its secrets...\n\nReturning to Cold Creek, Ohio, is an act of courage for Tess Lockwood. Abducted and held captive as a young girl, she is unable to remember anything about the crime that destroyed her childhood and tore her family apart. Now a grown woman with a bright future, she is certain she has put the past behind her. But when she inherits the family home, Tess must confront the demons that still haunt her and the town of Cold Creek.\n\nGabe McCord has always blamed himself for what happened to Tess. He had been a teenager when she was snatched from the group of children he was responsible for watching. Now Gabe has taken on the role of sheriff and hopes to shed new light on the cold case, especially given his growing feelings for Tess.\n\nTess isn't ready to recall what happened to her, and she has no intention of digging up any details that might remind her of the truth. But when another child in the town goes missing, she's certain it's related to her return to Cold Creek. Together,Tess and Gabe will have to work to unlock their painful memories in order to save another child and heal their damaged souls, for good....\nPraise for the novels of New York Times bestselling author Karen Harper\n\n\"Harper, a master of suspense, keeps readers guessing about crime and love until the very end, while detailed descriptions of the Amish community and the Ohio countryside add to the enjoyment of this thrilling tale.\" \n\u2014Booklist on Fall from Pride (starred review)\n\n\"Danger and romance find their way into Ohio Amish country in a lively and endearing first installment of the Amish Home Valley series.\" \n\u2014Publishers Weekly on Fall from Pride\n\n\"The author's likable, engaging characters and a strong plot lend additional strength to her ever-amazing descriptions of Amish life.\" \n\u2014RT Book Reviews on Return to Grace\n\n\"Harper's description of Lisa and Mitch fighting the river and braving the elements are so realistic the reader can almost feel the icy winds. A tale guaranteed to bring shivers to the spine, Down River will delight Harper's current fans and earn her many more.\" \n\u2014Booklist (starred review)\n\n\"Haunting suspense, tender romance and an evocative look at the complexities of Amish life\u2014Dark Angel is simply riveting!\" \n\u2014Tess Gerritsen, New York Times bestselling author\n\n\"A compelling story...intricate and fascinating details of Amish life.\" \n\u2014Tami Hoag, New York Times bestselling author, on Dark Road Home\n\n\"Well-researched and rich in detail... With its tantalizing buildup and well-developed characters, this offering is certain to earn Harper high marks.\" \n\u2014Publishers Weekly on Dark Angel, winner of the 2005 Mary Higgins Clark Award\nAlso available from New York Times bestselling author Karen Harper\n\nUPON A WINTER'S NIGHT \nDARK CROSSINGS (featuring \"The Covered Bridge\") \nFINDING MERCY \nRETURN TO GRACE \nFALL FROM PRIDE \nDOWN RIVER \nDEEP DOWN \nTHE HIDING PLACE \nBELOW THE SURFACE \nINFERNO \nHURRICANE \nDARK ANGEL \nDARK HARVEST \nDARK ROAD HOME \nTHE FALLS \nTHE STONE FOREST \nSHAKER RUN \nDOWN TO THE BONE \nTHE BABY FARM \nEMPTY CRADLE \nBLACK ORCHID\n\nLook for Karen Harper's next novel \nFORBIDDEN GROUND \nAvailable soon from Harlequin MIRA\n\nTo the staff and board of the Ohioana Library Association, which does so much to promote and preserve the work of Ohio authors. Especially to my friends, former director of Ohioana Linda Hengst and current Executive Director David Weaver. Don and I appreciate all you do.\nContents\n\nChapter 1\n\nChapter 2\n\nChapter 3\n\nChapter 4\n\nChapter 5\n\nChapter 6\n\nChapter 7\n\nChapter 8\n\nChapter 9\n\nChapter 10\n\nChapter 11\n\nChapter 12\n\nChapter 13\n\nChapter 14\n\nChapter 15\n\nChapter 16\n\nChapter 17\n\nChapter 18\n\nChapter 19\n\nChapter 20\n\nChapter 21\n\nChapter 22\n\nChapter 23\n\nChapter 24\n\nChapter 25\n\nChapter 26\n\nChapter 27\n\nChapter 28\n\nChapter 29\n\nChapter 30\n\nChapter 31\n\nBPA\n\nAuthor's Note\n1\n\nTess Lockwood drew in a sharp breath. She'd buried her memories deep, but the sign for Cold Creek, Ohio, brought the terror back. To face everything again\u2014to relive it\u2014no, she refused to do that. But they kept cropping up, tall as the cornstalks crowding the roads in this area.\n\nShe told herself that Cold Creek was a charming, quaint town but started to shake when she saw a sign stuck in the ground. Reelect Gabe McCord for Sheriff. It was with a few other local political ones, including a fancy poster to reelect Reese Owens, still mayor here after all these years. She'd tried to prepare herself for the fact that she was going to see people who reminded her of the past. But Gabe was the worst and she'd do everything possible to avoid him if she could.\n\nSelling the family house she'd recently inherited was her immediate goal or she wouldn't have come back at all, especially at this time of year. But the day care center she wanted to buy would go to someone else if she didn't get some money fast. Her life's desire was to purchase the Sunshine and Smiles Center for preschool kids in Jackson, Michigan, where she'd worked for years. She planned to live upstairs and redo a lot of the space downstairs where she would teach and protect her young charges. The timing was doubly right since her renters in Cold Creek, her cousin Lee and his family, were moving out. Her mother had wanted to sell their house years ago, but it had no fields attached, and people hesitated to buy a place where a tragedy had happened. They had managed to rent it though, and were relieved that their cousins could live there for a while.\n\n\"Wow, four traffic lights uptown instead of one,\" she said aloud, thumping a fist on the steering wheel while she was stopped at the first light near the gas station. She needed a fill-up, but it looked pretty busy right now and she wasn't ready to run into familiar faces. \"Like Gracie said, this place is so much bigger!\" It felt comforting to talk to herself, as if she had someone with her, someone who really cared what happened.\n\nOf course, she still had two sisters who cared about her, though Char and Kate were understandably upset that their mother had left the house only to her. On her deathbed Mom had said she owed Tess something for what had happened.\n\nThe Cold Creek Community Church they used to attend was at this end of the commercial district. She saw they had put on an addition. Piles of pumpkins adorned its lawn with a donation bucket out front for people to leave some money. Even in Jackson, you'd never seen something like that. Please Make Your Own Change, the hand-printed sign read. How she'd like to make a lot of changes in her life, banish the nightmares and the fear.\n\nWhen the light turned green, Tess drove slowly to read the store signs. The doctor's office was still there but with a new name stenciled on the window, not Dr. Marvin, who had tended to her immediately after her kidnapping. The tiny storefront library they used to visit between times the bookmobile stopped by was still crammed between the hardware store and the bank. On the other side of Main Street she saw the Kwik Shop, where they used to buy groceries. She'd brought milk and juice\u2014and two bottles of wine\u2014in her big cooler. She also had cereal, bread, peanut butter and jam, so she wouldn't have to stop anywhere, at least right now.\n\nCold Creek had seemed huge when she left at age six, but she knew that was just because everything seemed big to little kids. Still, from the keep-your-chin-up phone calls from Lee's wife, Gracie, over the past few years, Tess had heard all about the recent growth of the town and its influx of wealthy retirees and weekenders.\n\nShe wasn't sure how people would react to her return. Although eighteen years had passed since she'd set foot here, would people still stare and whisper? They might not recognize her at first, but how quickly would word get around? They might give her those looks so full of curiosity and pity it made her feel ashamed, despite the fact that her mother, Dr. Marvin, that investigator Agent Reingold and the sheriff had said over and over that what happened wasn't her fault.\n\nBut was it her fault? After all, she'd run into the back cornfield and tried to hide when Gabe, their teenage next-door neighbor and the sheriff's son, had told her to cut it out and called her a crazy tomboy. That was where and when it all began. And maybe Gabe was right, because she'd felt a little crazy ever since.\n\nIn the space where the sheriff's office had been, she saw a gift shop, Creekside Gifts, its windows decorated with Halloween costumes, wooden black cats and corn shocks. Farther on beyond the tiny town square, a brick sheriff's office had been built next to a new volunteer fire department. The American flag and the Ohio state flag flew from a big pole between the two buildings. A police vehicle with Sheriff emblazoned on the side was parked in the small lot, but she saw no one around. Rod McCord had been sheriff when she lived in Cold Creek and his son, Gabe, held that position now.\n\nHe would be thirty-one now, because he was thirteen when her family left town. Gracie said Gabe had bought his parents' house, directly across the roadside cornfield from the Lockwood homestead she now owned, so they'd be neighbors, just like when they were children.\n\nThe third traffic light turned red and she came to a stop again. Gracie had told her about \"the great divide,\" but now she saw it for herself. The west side of town belonged to the outsiders, the new folks who had invaded and kept pretty much separate from the townies, except on market day. Well, what did she care? Tess told herself as she frowned at a new restaurant, a tearoom, some shops\u2014and an English pub, no less, in rural Falls County.\n\nHer stomach clenched as she turned onto hilly Valley View Road. \"You can do this, Tess,\" she said.\n\nBut as she drove down the two-lane road lined with tall, thick cornfields, she wasn't so sure. Especially when she passed the McCord place as the sun began to set atop the darkening Appalachian foothills and her family's old farmhouse crept into view. It seemed to leap at her. Even with the car windows up and the doors locked, she was certain she could feel the cornstalks clutching at her, rustling, whispering. She suddenly recalled being told to be quiet or the ears of corn would hear her. Who had said that? Mom or Dad?\n\n\"You're fine,\" she told herself. \"You'll be just fine.\"\n\nBut she sat stock-still in the car at the bottom of the gravel driveway with the motor running until Gracie burst from the front door of the house and windmilled her arm to wave her in.\n\n* * *\n\nFalls County sheriff Gabe McCord left his cruiser about twenty yards outside the tall wooden gate of the Hear Ye Commune and walked closer. The place gave him the creeps, but the thirteen families of what he'd call a far-out religious sect had broken no laws and kept pretty much to themselves except on Saturdays when they had a big table of their produce at the farmers' market.\n\nHe'd received a complaint from Marian Bell that someone had seen a child at the Hear Ye market stall who resembled her lost daughter, Amanda, so he had to check it out. Gabe's theory was that the girl had been snatched by her father and taken abroad when the Bell marriage broke up, but Peter Bell had been impossible to trace. Amanda's disappearance didn't fit the pattern of the child kidnappings that had haunted his father and now him, but he was following all leads, desperate for any break in the long-standing case.\n\nAlthough no one had disappeared on his watch, he still got heartburn over it in more ways than one. Worse, he was convinced his father had suffered two heart attacks running himself into the ground over the abductions. The so-called cold case of Cold Creek was always on the front burner for Gabe.\n\n\"Lee, how you doing?\" Gabe greeted his former neighbor as he was walking across the grassy ground outside the fenced compound of meeting house, family buildings, school, gardens and workshops. Lee Lockwood was holding a forked willow branch straight out while pacing the grassy knoll. \"Looking for water\u2014or buried treasure?\" Gabe asked. Most folks in the area knew Lee was a water dowser, which some in the area called a water witcher, as if it was evil or demonic.\n\n\"Oh, hi, Sheriff. Didn't see you coming. Usually we got guards out. You know, greeters who watch for strangers or gawkers. Got a lot of kids here to protect, including my two, now. And I really get into dowsing when I do it. Yeah, looking for water. Don't you go believing that buried treasure stuff you hear, nor the old wives' tales about locating ancient graves with a dowsing branch neither. It's just we could use another well since the water pipes don't come out this far from town yet. Been looking most of the afternoon though, and no go so far. I figure when cousin Tess gets back, I'll have her help me. She's got the gift too, you know.\"\n\nHe pointed the tip of the willow wand toward Gabe. Lee looked really nervous about his presence, but then some people were. The usually reticent man was trying to cover his unease up with talk.\n\nLee rushed on, frowning so hard his forehead furrowed. \"Least Tess used to be good at it when she was a little kid. But I 'spose she don't want to be reminded of any of the old times.\"\n\n\"No. Me neither, but it's still an open case. Grace told me Teresa\u2014that is, Tess\u2014is coming back for a while to sell the old place. But aren't you going to miss living at the Lockwood house? Grace said your kids were doing fine in the public school, so why shift them here after only two months this year?\"\n\n\"There's lots of benefits here. Protection from the world. Closeness to God through Bright Star, other things.\"\n\nIt was getting dark as the sun sank behind the tops of the hills where rain clouds were gathering. Gabe wanted to get this over with, but he stared into the face of the earnest young man and hesitated to get him involved. He was a first cousin to Teresa, now called Tess, Lockwood, the first child taken in the two\u2014or maybe three\u2014kidnappings of young girls.\n\n\"Brice Monson has everyone here calling him Bright Star?\" Gabe asked.\n\n\"Those who trust his guidance. 'You do well to heed a light that shines in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.' That's the way we look at Brice. The bright morning star in a dark world.\"\n\nGabe decided not to get into it with his former neighbor, who had just moved out last week. He'd seen Grace was still there, sweeping the front porch, waiting for Tess at the very house where the first kidnapping had happened when his dad was sheriff. That afternoon Gabe was supposed to be watching several neighbor kids. Thank God Tess had come back alive, because the other two\u2014if Amanda was one\u2014had not come back at all.\n\n\"See you later,\" Gabe said. He headed for the gate to the compound.\n\n\"Oh, hey, forgot to tell you,\" Lee called after him. \"Everyone's down by the creek picking up walnuts to sell at the farmers' market, even Bright Star. He let me stay here because we need a new water well, like I said.\"\n\nThe compound did look deserted. Gabe walked back toward Lee. Was the man shaking or was that willow limb quivering in his hands of its own accord?\n\n\"You tell him I'll be back tomorrow morning a little after ten,\" Gabe said, hoping Lee was listening. He looked transfixed, staring at the ground where the stick seemed to point like a skinny, crooked finger. Was Lee putting on a show for him? Gabe didn't really believe in dowsing any more than he believed Brice Monson was some sort of modern-day messiah. But Lee looked so amazed that Gabe could only hope he'd remember to pass on his message.\n\nAs he strode back to the cruiser, Gabe couldn't help thinking Monson had picked a weird time to order everyone down by Cold Creek to pick up walnuts. Darkness setting in, a rainstorm coming. Gabe had helped his dad collect walnuts down there once. His hands were stained brown from it, and he'd run around the house pretending it was spattered, dried blood until he caught heck from his mother. \"Blood on someone's hands is not fun and games!\" she'd scolded him.\n\nDid Lee actually have to get Monson's permission to stay behind? he wondered. This place was starting to sound worse than boot camp. Gabe was glad he hadn't mentioned what he wanted here. Monson might not agree to bring all the girls about Amanda's age for a lineup to see if the girl in the photo Marian had given him resembled her lost child. But Gabe was hungry for anything to make progress on these kidnappings\u2014any lead, any hint, any clue.\n\nAs he got into his vehicle, he heard a rumble of thunder echo from the hills. It reminded him of things that made him uneasy when he needed to be in control, because it sounded like distant 155-millimeter howitzers, boom, thump, thump. Thunder often took him back to the day in Iraq when his Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit disarmed a huge bomb in a Kirkuk market before it could detonate. Even as they succeeded, other IEDs went off in the distance, echoing, killing some of the men he'd sent to another site.\n\nAfter he fastened his seat belt, his hand darted to his chest. Sometimes he almost thought he could feel his army-issued pistol in its cross-draw holster from his duty days. Today he wore his weapon on his equipment belt. From his inside jacket pocket he pulled out the pictures of Marian Bell's daughter and the Hear Ye girl. One was a close-up first-grade school photo, the other a grainy, more distant one of the child in question, standing by the commune's market booth. He stared at the photos side by side in the graying light. Again, he vowed he'd somehow finish what his dad had left undone: find the phantom Cold Creek kidnapper, who took little girls and, but for Tess Lockwood, made them disappear.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Ooh, I think it's raining, and I hate to drive in the rain,\" Gracie told Tess as she looked out the window toward the road. \"It's turning dark early. I had to get special permission to wait for you and I don't want to get back late.\"\n\nAfter an affectionate welcome from her cousin's wife, Tess had toured the house at Gracie's insistence. Tess had tried to buck herself up to face the place alone, but it was good to have her here. Tess and Gracie were almost the same height, though the similarities stopped there. Gracie had long red hair, amber eyes, a round face and plump body compared to Tess's blond, chin-length hair, blue eyes and lithe frame. She'd never questioned why Gracie had taken such a liking to her, as if she were the Lockwood cousin instead of Lee. But then they had all played together as children. Gracie was one of the distantly spaced neighborhood kids, and their mothers had been friends. Back then, everyone in Cold Creek had known each other, or at least had seemed to.\n\n\"I'm sorry we sold most of our furniture, but I hope we've left you enough to get by for the couple of weeks you're here,\" Gracie said. \"The houses in the commune are pretty well set up already.\"\n\n\"But your family will still be together, right?\" Tess asked as they stood inside the back door while the rain rattled against the windows and Gracie scrambled into her slicker and pulled up its hood.\n\n\"Together when it matters, though Kelsey and Ethan will now have lots of family, lots of mothers and cousins in the faith.\"\n\nGracie didn't notice, but Tess shook her head, surprised that her friend had accepted Lee's new religious ideas so easily. But Gracie had a kind, sweet personality. How many girls who married into a family would keep in touch with someone who had moved away when Lee himself didn't seem interested? How many young women\u2014Gracie was twenty-eight, four years older than Tess\u2014would care so deeply about her? Why, at times Gracie seemed more of a sister to her than Char or Kate. She'd seen more of Gracie over the past five years, before Lee turned into such a religious man and they stopped visiting her and Mom in Michigan. The last time she'd seen them was at her mother's funeral just last year.\n\n\"I can't wait to see how big Kelsey and Ethan are now,\" Tess told her. \"I love kids that age, same as the ones I work with. And just the ages I want to care for when I can sell this place and buy my child care center back home.\"\n\n\"Back home,\" Gracie said, giving Tess a quick goodbye hug. \"Isn't back home really here? Well, I know about the bad things, but you have the strength to put it all behind you, and we wish you'd stay around longer.\"\n\n\"One week, maybe two max, but we'll make each day count. And when I get my place back in Jackson, you can come visit.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Gracie drawled, \"don't know about that with our new commitments and all.\"\n\nTess frowned and looked out the kitchen window at the rain falling. The security light flooded the backyard with brightness. Her mother had put that in after Tess was taken, even before she found her way home.\n\nAs Gracie opened the back door she said, \"I'll bring the kids to see you tomorrow, if it's allowed.\"\n\n\"Why wouldn't it be allowed?\"\n\n\"Their school and work schedule. I'm not sure.\"\n\n\"Work? They're four and two years old.\"\n\n\"They learn to work during play!\"\n\n\"Okay, okay. I'd love to meet with their teachers. We can exchange ideas.\"\n\nGracie hesitated between the inside wooden door and the glass storm door. Tess sensed she wanted to change the subject. \"You still might want to rent out this place,\" Gracie said, her hand on the knob. \"Real estate's not moving well around here.\"\n\n\"Two things I've decided for sure. One, I'm going to advertise and sell it myself so I don't have to pay a Realtor commission. And two, I don't want to rent it. I want it gone with the bad memories because I'm making only good ones now. And you've helped a lot. Thanks for cleaning the place. And for the cider, cheese and apple crisp in the fridge. See you tomorrow!\"\n\nThey hugged again, and Gracie darted out into the rain. Tess watched the overhead light in her old black car pop on, then her headlights as they disappeared down the driveway. Slanting rain and gray gloom swallowed the two red taillights like a wild animal's eyes closing.\n\nTess glanced out the back window again at the place where the nightmare had started\u2014and at this time of year. She had to fight the memories. The cornfield lay so close, so vast at the edge of the backyard, then curled around the house to join the field between the Lockwood and McCord houses. The day she'd been taken was a sunny one but with rain clouds threatening from the distant fringe of blue-green hills.\n\nShe'd run into the field, hiding from Gabe, who'd agreed to watch her and two other kids when her mom had to pick up Kate and Char at school and take them to the dentist. They were all just playing in the backyard. Gabe had watched them before for short periods. There was no problem....\n\nTess stood frozen, lost in thought. Unlike her sisters, she'd always had perfect teeth and she was so young, they had not taken her that day. After her father left the family, there was never any money for things like an orthodontist. Both of her older sisters ended up paying for their own teeth straightening as adults.\n\n\"Lots of folks around here have natural teeth, Claire!\" she remembered her dad shouting at her mom. \"We come from good Appalachian stock,\" he'd said more than once, \"not those fancy folks starting to buy land over by Lake Azure who get their teeth fixed and face-lifts!\"\n\nStrange that the little Tess recalled of her father he was always shouting. She figured that bottled-up anger\u2014his blaming Mom for not taking his \"terrific, terrible Teresa\" with her the day she was kidnapped\u2014was the reason he'd left them. Several months after Tess came back home, he'd moved to Oregon, had remarried and hadn't seen his three Midwest daughters since. Char and Kate said he wasn't worth so much as a free weekend cell phone call or a Tweet, but Tess wasn't so sure.\n\nBefore she could keep a lid on the past from starting to spill out like worms from a can, she remembered another voice shouting. \"You darn little, crazy tomboy, get out of that corn, or you'll get lost!\" That's what Gabe McCord had bellowed at her that awful day. And then, even standing there, staring out at the field, her memories stopped, just like someone slamming the lid back on. Thank God, she thought. Because if her thoughts got loose, they turned to nightmares filled with monsters, turned to terror....\n\nTess strode from the back door to the front one, checking the locks again, then tested all the windows to be sure they were bolted. Her mom had had the locks installed to protect Char and Kate after Tess was taken, though nothing bad ever happened to them. Tess nearly stumbled over her suitcase, then remembered her food sacks and the cooler she and Gracie had carried in. She'd better unpack for her short stay.\n\nShe jumped as headlights slashed across the dining room windows from the driveway. Was Gracie back already?\n\nHer heart thudding to match the thunder outside, Tess peered out the dining room window. It was very dark for not being that late yet. A black car, not Gracie's, killed its lights. She certainly wasn't going to answer the door, but the man who got out had seen all the lights on, so she could hardly hide.\n\nShe gasped as she saw light catch the silver and gold printing on the car door as it opened. A man, broad-shouldered and tall with a brimmed black hat, got out. She heard the car door slam. She realized it must be the last man on earth she wanted to see.\n2\n\nThe badge on the man's jacket glinted silver in the outside floodlight as he approached the back door and knocked. The sound rattled Tess. But she stepped forward to unlock it, then opened only the inside door so the glass storm door was still fastened between them.\n\n\"Sheriff Gabe McCord, Tess. Just wanted to welcome you back,\" he said in a loud, deep voice that carried well over the rain and through the glass barrier between them. His big-brimmed hat shadowed his face, and his jacket was slick with rain.\n\nShe knew she should ask him in. But she had the feeling that if she opened the door, she'd be opening up so much more. No, she had to be sensible, stay sane. This was the here and now, not two decades ago. She unlatched and opened the storm door.\n\n\"I appreciate that,\" she told him, relieved her voice sounded steady. \"Do you want to step in?\"\n\n\"Thanks. Just for a sec. Grace mentioned you'd be here today. Sorry to lose them as neighbors,\" he said, sweeping his hat off his head as he entered the kitchen, making it seem so much smaller. \"I see you've got a sign up in the front yard already.\"\n\n\"Yes, I brought it with me. I put it up when Gracie and I were unloading my car.\"\n\nShe took two steps back. Gabriel McCord was so much taller and sturdier than the skinny kid she remembered. Unlike most people of Appalachian descent, Gabe was black-haired, although he was blue-eyed. She could see the young boy in his features but barely. He seemed all hard lines and tense angles\u2014the slash of his dark eyebrows; the sharp slant of his shadowed, clean-shaven cheekbones, his square chin with a scar, his broad nose, even his solidly built body. His hands, which held his hat, were big with blunt fingers. He had a deep, commanding voice that, even when he spoke quietly, reverberated through her.\n\nShe tried not to stare, to say something light and polite. As he quickly assessed her, she felt frozen, yet she turned hot under his steady, probing gaze. He probably saw her as exhibit number one, the girl who came back alive and yet could remember nothing of her ordeal.\n\n\"I heard you'd be fixing to sell this place,\" he said.\n\n\"Yes, I really need to. I need the money to open a day care center for preschoolers back in Michigan. That's home now.\"\n\n\"A day care center sounds great. That's something folks around here could use, both those whose kids need a head start, besides what the government provides, and the Lake Azure folks.\"\n\n\"They're not all retirees in that community?\"\n\n\"There are some well-to-do younger people who want to escape city stress, get back to nature, raise their kids away from crime and all that, though we have our share. Well, besides what happened to you, I mean. Meth labs, marijuana plots up in the hills, domestic disputes, drunks busting things up or shooting off guns. Especially this time of year, we get outsiders trespassing on the grounds of the old mental health asylum, vandalizing and worse. But I didn't mean to unload on you. I just wanted to say if you need anything while you're here, I'm just across the cornfield, at least at night. Don't hesitate to call the station or my phone next door. Grace said she'd leave the numbers for you on the fridge.\"\n\n\"Yes. Yes, she did,\" Tess said, glancing at the piece of paper under the magnet that advertised Gabe McCoy for Sheriff. \"Thank you,\" she added. \"So, how is your mother? Gracie said your father died.\"\n\n\"Yeah, at age seventy-two. A heart attack, though they had some good years living in Florida after they left here. She's still there. Sorry to hear your mother passed away so young.\"\n\n\"She had a hard life, working to take care of her three girls\u2014me especially, after everything. That's why she left this house to me. Kate and Char have more...high-powered careers than I do. Kate's a university professor in anthropology, and Char's a social worker. They both travel a lot, so I'm here on my own for this besides the fact that it's my house now.\" She hesitated. \"Listen, Gabe,\" she continued, unclasping her hands, which she didn't realize she was gripping so hard. \"I'm sure you know a lot of people here and I don't. Will you let me know if you can think of anyone who might want to buy an old house to fix up?\"\n\n\"Sure. If you don't mind people knowing you're back, I can ask around, have them contact you. If you put up any signs around town, better give your phone number, but maybe not your name, not say you'll be here for a while.\"\n\nShe could tell he'd tried to word that carefully, but it scared her. Actually she'd planned her for-sale posters that way. But was he thinking that since her abductor had never been found and she was an eyewitness\u2014maybe people didn't believe she couldn't recall a thing about her eight months away. Was she still in danger?\n\n\"Thanks,\" she repeated. \"I'll remember that.\"\n\nHe said goodbye, put his hat back on and went out into the rain. As she locked both doors behind him, she recalled that her mother had said some people blamed Gabe for not watching her better that day. There were whispers that her being taken was his fault, that he'd disobeyed orders to keep an eye on them. Tess had never told anyone but the truth was she was the one who had disobeyed him that dreadful day.\n\n\"Get back here, you crazy tomboy!\" he'd shouted at her when she stuck out her tongue and darted back into the cornfield where she was hiding from him. She'd always liked Gabe, liked to get attention from him.\n\nAnd with that mere thought, images came flying back at her. Someone was in the next row of corn, pushing stalks away, bumping the heavy ears. It must be Gabe. A terrible face jumped at her\u2014hit her. Had she smacked into a scarecrow? She turned to run, but a hard hand covered her mouth. Was the scarecrow alive?\n\nThe thing dragged her away from her friends' voices. She fought, went to her knees with the thing on top of her, pressing her down between two rows of stalks.\n\nShe tasted soil from the field, spit out straw. Something sharp stuck her in the side of her neck. It hurt more than a bee sting. Hard hands on her, pulling her up. She couldn't see. Something was shoved into her mouth, something pulled over her head. She wanted Mom. She wanted Dad! Dad loved her, his terrific, terrible Teresa. But there was no Mom, no Dad, no Gabe.\n\nReality struck her. No Gabe...of course there was no Gabe. He'd just left and she stood in the kitchen of her family's old house.\n\nShaking, heaving a huge sigh, she checked and relocked both doors and leaned against the kitchen counter until her heart stopped thudding. She shoved the waking nightmare away...had to get back to the here and now. She was going to put her things away but have a glass of wine before she washed up for bed. She'd take a shower in the morning when it was light. And pray she could go to sleep in this house at all.\n\n* * *\n\nThe rain on the roof\u2014and the fear of another nightmare\u2014kept Tess awake most of the night. She felt revved up from seeing Gabe after all these years. She couldn't help wondering if he became sheriff just to follow in his father's footsteps or because of guilt that she was abducted when he was watching her.\n\nGracie told her that another child, Jill Stillwell, had been taken about ten years ago from a tent where she was sleeping next to her brother in her backyard, no less. Could it be the same kidnapper who snatched me? Tess thought about what had happened. Gracie said there was a cornfield behind the house where the escape must have been made. Not until the next morning, when the boy woke up and found his sister hadn't gone inside to sleep, was she discovered missing. Another innocent young boy like Gabe, left to feel guilty, maybe even more so, since Jill Stillwell had never been found.\n\nTess also tossed and turned and agonized over the fact that Gabe joined the army and went to war straight out of high school. She could sympathize with him wanting to get out of Cold Creek. But maybe he went to escape the war going on inside him.\n\nA glass of wine before bed usually helped her to sleep, but her thoughts kept racing. She could tell Gabe had wanted to make her feel comfortable, yet she felt unsafe with him. She admitted to herself the reason was that he kind of got to her. He was really sexy and she hadn't been expecting that. With her thoughts on Gabe she finally fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.\n\n* * *\n\nTess had just finished a late breakfast of cereal, banana, juice and coffee when another surprise visitor showed up, this time at her front door. She didn't recognize the overweight woman at first because she'd changed so much, but the bright blue lettering on the side of her white van tipped Tess off. Thompson Veterinary and Pet Cemetery, Crown Crest Lane. Keep Your Beloved Pet For Life.\n\nAbout half a mile beyond the back cornfield was a big house, veterinary office and pet cemetery owned by longtime bachelor Dane Thompson. Grace had told Tess that Dane's widowed sister, Marva, who had lived in the area for years, had moved in with him not long ago. When Tess and her family left town, Marva Thompson Green had been trim and spry, very attractive. She'd been married to a small-field farmer. Tess remembered that Marva had cared for her and her sisters while her mother looked for a job after her father deserted them.\n\n\"Remember me, Teresa?\" Marva called through the storm door when Tess opened the wooden one.\n\nWith a smile, she extended a coffee cake with pecans and brown-sugar glaze. It touched Tess to realize Cold Creek hospitality still ruled here. Yet she hesitated a moment before opening the storm door. Dane Thompson had been under suspicion off and on for her kidnapping. Obviously, nothing had come of the gossip about him.\n\n\"Hello, Mrs. Green,\" Tess said as she opened the storm door. \"How kind of you. Can you step in?\"\n\n\"Why, surely will, for a spell. You're looking pretty, though you could put a little weight on. All three of you Lockwood girls were pretty, you especially. Now that you're all grown up, you call me Marva. I heard you'd be back soon from your cousin Lee. He did some work for us\u2014built a new fence around the cemetery since kids are always messing with things there, and Halloween's not far off. It's usually not us they bother but the old mental health asylum over on West Hill Road. Sitting derelict, you know, so the kids from far and wide break in there and scare each other, leave graffiti, you know what I mean, Teresa.\"\n\n\"I go by Tess now. But how is Dr. Thompson?\" Tess inquired as she put the coffee cake on the only table Grace had left in the living room. She gestured Marva toward the two rocking chairs, but the white-haired, very tan-looking woman just shook her head and plunged on.\n\n\"Busy like never before with the Lake Azure area getting so built up. Dane's been able to afford real upgrades in the cemetery. Why, you should see it. Using digital technology, Dane can offer having QR codes implanted on the tombstones. You know, those little black-and-white grids that can speak to smart phones. Presto! A person can see that pet buried there romping, playing like when alive, and can link to family Facebook websites too. Oh, I'm sure you know more about all that modern stuff than I do.\"\n\n\"Actually my preschool students knew more than I did about all that,\" Tess told her, forcing a smile. \"It's amazing all the things technology can do.\"\n\n\"Well, it's a lot better than Dane's taxidermist friend just stuffing dead dogs, if you ask me,\" Marva said with a little sniff. She brushed at the sleeves of her denim jacket as if there was dog hair there. \"But,\" she went on, \"I have to get the van back to Dane. He makes house calls at Lake Azure now, you see. I run the tanning parlor\u2014two shops beyond the English pub uptown. You'll love their fish-and-chips,\" Marva added as she headed for the door. \"The town has probably changed from what you recall\u2014if you do remember, I mean, because you left so young. And good luck selling your house and land, because my old place and the barn are still for sale. I don't know what I'd do if Dane didn't pay the taxes on it for me.\"\n\nThe state of property sales in the area depressed Tess, but she smiled and thanked Marva again for the coffee cake. It surprised her there was a tanning parlor in Cold Creek. She knew they were dangerous. And it was being run by Marva, the former farmer's wife. No way was this the Cold Creek Tess remembered. If the Lake Azure area folks had money to invest in having their dead pets stare at them from tombstones, maybe someone there would like to buy an old house, closer to town than Marva's, to fix up and flip or for an investment. Instead of avoiding the new area of town, Tess decided she'd better put some of the posters she'd had made over by Lake Azure too.\n\nShe waved as Marva drove off in the new-looking van. If only she could have kept her mother for life and not have to come back here to sell this place and face her fears alone.\n\n* * *\n\nStanding outside a run-down, old barn someone had made into a makeshift meth lab before clearing out, Gabe put through a call on his police radio to Jace Miller, his only deputy. There were a few places in the hills that even satellite communications didn't work, like odd no-man spots around here. The best sites were near the Lake Azure phone towers the residents had insisted be put in. Even some smart phones were too dumb to trust in these hills, but his call went through.\n\nHe'd figured that at least two people had been sleeping here, by the piles of smashed leaves on the floor of the barn. He'd found a scrap of old blanket once at another site and had sent it to a lab for fiber and DNA testing, but they'd found nothing except dog hairs, and he'd got nothing out of it but a four-month wait and a big bill.\n\n\"Jace, the place was another in-the-weeds meth lab,\" he said into his mouthpiece mounted on his shoulder. \"Looks like a mom-and-pop setup, but they've been cooking the stuff up here for sure. Same old story. They managed to keep ahead of us and cleared out, like they knew their time was up. Or someone warned them, but who? Over.\"\n\n\"Copy that. If it's that fly-by-night bunch we've been after, they're probably already using another deserted barn or old hunting cabin somewhere. You want me to call our cleanup contact to get rid of the toxic stuff? Over.\"\n\n\"For sure. Tell them it's the usual. Drain cleaner, rock salt spilled, jugs and bottles. At least there's no sign that anyone's been held here against their\u2014her\u2014will.\"\n\n\"Gabe, you can't be on the old kidnap cases day and night forever.\"\n\n\"The hell I can't. Something's going to turn up when we're looking at something else, I know it is. Speaking of which, I'm going back to the commune to insist on getting a look at those girls to see if anyone matches the photo Marian Bell gave me. Over.\"\n\n\"She'll have you lifting fingerprints off those girls in the Hear Ye sect next. She's obsessed when we both know her ex took that kid.\"\n\n\"We theorize he did. Any and every lead.\"\n\n\"And you'll probably drive by your place again today to see if vic number one's okay too, won't you? Teresa, the one you were almost an eyewitness to her being taken.\"\n\n\"She goes by Tess now, and you roll out the welcome mat for her if she drops by or calls in. Who knows what she'll be able to remember now that she's back here? Worse, who knows who she'll stir up from fear she will remember something?\"\n\n* * *\n\nTess took the stack of eight-by-eleven-inch posters she'd made at home from the office supply store and went uptown. She knew a few spots to post them in what she was now thinking of as \"Old Town,\" but she'd like to venture into some of the newer places too. The Lake Azure people no doubt had more money.\n\nEven before Gabe suggested it, she'd decided to keep her name out of this, though some folks would recognize the place being sold as the Lockwood house. The poster only gave information about the house and her cell phone number. She'd included the color reproduction of an old picture of the place she'd found in Mom's photo album. Tess liked the picture because it was taken in the early summer before the corn grew thick and tall. It looked more spacious\u2014almost safe.\n\nShe stopped for gas and they let her put a poster on the wall behind the cash register. The guy in charge tried to flirt with her, but she stayed all business. Without asking, she posted one on the crowded bulletin board at the Kwik Shop. She remembered standing there with her mother\u2014or was it with Kate or Char?\u2014reading signs about used bikes and a mini trampoline for sale. How they'd wanted any kind of trampoline.\n\nRelieved no one had recognized her as people went in and out pushing grocery carts, she walked a few doors down into the small, storefront library both Mom and Char had loved, though they all got books there. To her surprise, Etta Falls, one of the community pillars, was still behind the small checkout desk. Miss Etta came from the pioneer family in the area, once successful farmers who had money, compared to most around here. Miss Etta was obviously surprised to see her too, because she jumped right up, whipped off her reading glasses so they dangled by a cord and clapped her hands over her mouth for a second.\n\n\"Well, I'll be! Is it Teresa Lockwood? I heard your mother died and wondered if you girls might come back to sell the house.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you remember Kate and Charlene more than you do me, Miss Etta. They were older and more avid readers.\"\n\n\"Yes, my dear,\" she said, hurrying around the counter, \"but you were the one we were all pulling for, praying for.\" Still as thin and energetic as ever, she put her strong hands on Tess's shoulders and, stiff-armed, seemed to examine her. \"You look just fine, Teresa. You all live in Michigan, so I hear.\"\n\n\"After Mother's death, it's just me. Kate and Char have careers that call for travel.\" Then she blurted out a big lie: \"I don't think about the past, only the future.\"\n\n\"So good to hear. But, you know, it's hard to forget some things.... Now, I'll bet I could pull a few books for you to give you strength, cheer you up. I tried to give your kin Grace and Lee Lockwood self-help books on brainwashing and the like, but they are convinced that man who leads their group has all the answers\u2014and I'm not even sure anyone in the compound even knows the questions,\" she added with the hint of a smile as she released Tess's shoulders.\n\nTess had forgotten how low-pitched the woman's voice was, so perfect for a lifelong librarian. She remembered how Miss Etta always tried to help everyone by suggesting books that would fit their interests or problems. In a way, it was nice that, just like Old Town, the woman\u2014she was probably at least sixty-five now\u2014hadn't changed much. Yet this close up, Tess could see her brown hair was streaked with gray, and tiny wrinkles like spiderwebs perched at the corners of her eyes and mouth.\n\n\"Do you still take the bookmobile out?\" Tess asked. \"We all loved to see it coming when the weather was bad or we didn't have money for extra gas after Dad left.\"\n\n\"I take it out for several hours when things are slow here. It's still a one-woman show, because the Lake Azure party house has book clubs galore run by their social director, and so many of them prefer to order their books out of the air\u2014you know, online for digital readers,\" she said with a sniff and a roll of her eyes.\n\n\"And your mother?\"\n\nMiss Etta's head jerked in surprise. \"You remember my mother? But she's been a recluse for years, still is.\"\n\n\"I only remember about her, that you take good care of her and that you're from the Falls family that was the first to settle in this area.\"\n\n\"Yes, that's right. Most folks think this county is named for the waterfalls over by the quarry, but it was for my ancestors. My great-great-great-grandfather Elias Falls was the Daniel Boone of this area. As for my mother, she's doing as well as could be expected. You never met her, did you?\"\n\n\"I don't think so. Unless I was really young then. Oh, I came in to ask if I could post a for-sale sign about my house. And I go by Tess now, not Teresa. My mother didn't like it, but when I hit high school, she let me change it just to shut me up.\"\n\n\"And, no doubt,\" Miss Etta said, \"because she loved you dearly, especially once she got you back.\"\n\nWith a firm nod, Miss Etta took the poster and used four thumbtacks to align it perfectly with other announcements on the neatly kept bulletin board with signs recommending books of all kinds.\n\nSometimes Tess wished she was as book smart as her mother and sisters, especially Kate. Mostly, Tess liked to read out loud to little kids, not spend her time on adult books about crime and suspense, thrillers, not even family sagas or passionate love stories\u2014trouble, trouble, trouble. Children's books were so comforting, unless they were by Maurice Sendak, with all those grotesque, fanged night monsters, but she refused to read those to her kids.\n\nSuddenly there was a strange roaring in her ears. She was being dragged through the corn, then carried away from her house but closer to the noise. Dizzy, crazy, couldn't think, trying to stay awake because the scarecrow was going to feed her to the other, bigger monster. She knew it was in the field, big and green with a voice like the waterfall. It would chop her to pieces and eat her up like corn, but she was too scared to cry....\n\n\"Welcome home,\" Miss Etta said as Tess fought to thrust away the waking nightmare. The librarian brushed her hands together after hanging the poster and hurried to her desk to pump hand sanitizer on her hands from a big plastic bottle. Tess walked toward the front door and managed to wave to Miss Etta, who called out after her, \"Remember, my dear, I'd be happy to give you a temporary library card if you aren't staying long.\"\n\nOn the sidewalk, Tess stopped to steady herself and breathe in the crisp autumn air. She'd been afraid Cold Creek would magnify her day or night bad dreams. If only she could get the broken, terrifying memories out, maybe they'd all go away! Meanwhile, she knew she had to stay busy, had to stay on task.\n\nShe decided to hit the barbershop and Hair Port beauty salon to leave posters. Then she'd visit the new part of town, even try the firehouse and police station, maybe drive out to Lake Azure just to look around. She liked the idea of some things being changed or new here, not like the parts of town that looked the same way as the year, the month, the very day she was taken. Tomorrow\u2014the anniversary of her kidnapping\u2014would be a tough day.\n3\n\n\"Of course we want to cooperate with the outside authorities, but please run that by me again before I say yay or nay about parading our young maidens before you, Sheriff McCord,\" Brice Monson insisted. He had agreed to meet with Gabe that morning in the deserted common room of the largest building in the Hear Ye compound. Monson raised one eyebrow as he examined the photo Gabe showed him.\n\nGabe had to admit that \"Bright Star\" Monson's looks alone could make someone think he was from another world. The man was pale with hair either bleached or prematurely white, and eyes the hue of water. His face was gaunt and his torso thin as though he lived on alien food in this area of homegrown goods. He always wore loose-fitting, draped outfits that reminded Gabe of something a swami would wear\u2014or was that a guru? It was hard to tell the man's age. His long hair was pulled straight back in a ponytail, which accentuated the shape of his skull. He wore a strip of leather tied around his forehead as if a dark halo had slipped.\n\n\"You're aware, Mr. Monson, of the abductions of two\u2014possibly three\u2014young girls from the area. The most recent loss was of a six-year-old, and that photo of a child in your group greatly resembles her. I'm accusing no one of anything and I realize blonde girls that age can look somewhat alike, but the mother of the missing child is adamant that I look into this, which I'm sure you understand.\"\n\n\"But all our young maidens are with families,\" Monson said, handing the photo back. \"I assure you, if someone in our flock had taken such a girl, we would be smitten with confusion and rebuke because we had forsaken the light. But yes, to comfort that mother's heart, we will allow you to step into the room where that child is, maiden Lorna Rogers. There are two other daughters, if you would like to meet with the parents or their other girls.\"\n\nIt suddenly seemed like such a wild-goose chase that Gabe almost backed off. But since he thought some sort of mind-control game was going on with the clever, charismatic Monson, he followed him into what looked like an old-fashioned schoolroom at the back of the building. About a dozen girls of the approximate age he'd requested were weaving baskets into which their adult mentors\u2014craft teachers?\u2014were placing bouquets of bloodred bittersweet boughs.\n\n\"For our market booth uptown on Saturday,\" Monson whispered. Darned if the guy's voice didn't make Gabe think of the serpent whispering to Eve in the garden. Did he command control of this place by talking in that low voice instead of yelling?\n\nOnce the teachers caught sight of them, they and their young charges stood and bowed slightly to Monson, because Gabe knew it sure wasn't to him. The girls were all dressed in similar navy blue or brown dresses and reminded him of reruns of Little House on the Prairie. All had long hair pulled straight back from their faces with black cords similar to the one around Monson's forehead.\n\n\"Please, return to your games,\" Monson intoned with a single sweep of his right arm. The girls, without a grin or giggle, settled back to their tasks.\n\nGames? Gabe thought. Right away he spotted the girl Marian Bell had been so riled up about. She did resemble Amanda Bell, but, this close, he noticed differences right away. Lorna Rogers was shorter and had not one freckle, while the Bell girl's nose and cheeks were dusted with them. Still, driven by his need to turn over every rock, he approached the child and the others with her.\n\n\"Is that weaving hard to do, Lorna?\" he asked.\n\nHer eyes widened as she looked up. She stared at his uniform, especially his badge.\n\n\"No, sir,\" she replied quietly, still not looking him in the eyes. \"It's lots of fun, and I want to make more baskets for the walnuts too.\"\n\nAside from her distinct freckles, Amanda Bell had green eyes and an obvious lisp. This girl had neither. Gabe nodded and stepped back, realizing Monson had sidled over to hear what was being said. Did everyone whisper around here?\n\n\"Thank you for your time and patience,\" he told Monson as he started out of the room. \"Sorry to have bothered you and the maidens.\"\n\n\"I'll see you clear out,\" Monson said, and Gabe noted the double meaning of that.\n\nAt least he'd learned some things today. Lee and Grace Lockwood were crazier than he thought for coming here to live, letting their boy and girl be part of this. And though Lorna was not Amanda, he definitely didn't trust Brice Monson.\n\n* * *\n\nTess drove around Lake Azure, where the Lockwoods used to picnic and play as kids, when they were a family. The wildness of it seemed tamed now with manicured lawns and earth-hued condos set back in landscaped plantings of trees and late-flowering foliage. None of the residences looked the same, some two-story, some ranch, some A-frame. Part of the lake was cordoned off for swimming and paddleboats. Canoes were pulled up on two man-made sand beaches edging the green water. A large, two-story lodge stood at the center of it all. This was a Cold Creek community?\n\nFeeling she didn't belong there, she drove back into town. She'd already wandered along the new part of Main Street, reading the handwritten menu on the Little Italy Restaurant sign, peeking in Miss Marple's Tearoom and the Lion's Head Pub. She'd gone inside the pub because she could see a bulletin board, where she put up one of her posters. That board was a twin to the dartboard that was just inside the door.\n\n\"Want a pint or a shandy, luv?\" came a very British male voice from inside. \"Fish-and-chips be ready straightaway!\"\n\nThat all sounded good, but she made an excuse and went back outside. No one recognized her at the fire department. The dispatcher was alone since it was all volunteer, but he said the only postings allowed were for duty shifts and schedules. She knew she'd be allowed to put a poster up at the sheriff's office, so she headed next door. Despite the fact that it wasn't in the same place and, no doubt, had different people from those who had staffed it years before, her feet began to drag.\n\nShe found herself both hoping and dreading that Gabe would be there. Her stomach did a weird little flip-flop at the thought of him.\n\nInside, a young, pretty brunette sat behind the front desk. \"Can I help you?\" she asked with a smile.\n\n\"I was just wondering if I could put up a poster for a house for sale if you have a public bulletin board. I told the sheriff I'd be putting some up around town.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" she said, rising. \"I'm his day dispatcher, Ann Simons. Are you Teresa Lockwood?\"\n\n\"Yes. I go by Tess now.\"\n\n\"Oh, right. So I heard. Sure, I got the idea Sheriff McCord wouldn't mind. You passed the board we use in the entryway there if you can find a place for your sign,\" she said, pointing. \"I don't keep it very up to date, and please ignore the Most Wanted posters on it. We're glad to have you back for a little while, Tess.\"\n\n\"Thanks. People have been very kind.\" She headed for the corkboard, then turned around. \"Ann, if you hear of anyone who needs a solidly built house just outside town, then\u2014\"\n\nThe front door banged open, barely missing Tess. A woman flipped her long blond hair back over her shoulder with a metallic clatter of bracelets. She wore knee-high boots with fringed cuffs, tight black leather pants and an orange brocade jacket. Her face looked too old for the hair or the clothes\u2014or was her rough complexion just the result of too much sun? Tess wondered if maybe she was a regular at Marva's tanning salon.\n\n\"Is he back yet?\" the woman demanded of Ann.\n\n\"No, but I'm sure you'll be the first to hear if there is anything to know,\" Ann replied calmly.\n\nThe woman huffed out a sigh as her shoulders drooped. \"I'll wait. That's all I do now, wait. And study the other cases and find similarities despite the differences the sheriff's been preaching to me.\"\n\nShe collapsed on the pine bench in the waiting area, hunched over and swung her suitcase-sized orange leather purse between her legs. Tess watched her out of the corner of her eye. The woman looked Tess's way and exploded again.\n\n\"You're Teresa Lockwood, aren't you?\" she cried, jumping to her feet. \"I mean, of course you've changed, but I've studied the old newspaper pictures and articles in the library so long and\u2014 You are, aren't you? I don't mean to startle you,\" she said as she hurried toward Tess, \"but my daughter's disappeared too. If you could just help me, I'm desperate for word of her. Here, let me show you her picture\u2014I mean, you were younger when you were taken, but you are both blonde, and the sheriff\u2014\"\n\n\"Marian,\" Ann said, stepping between the two of them, \"why don't you just sit down and wait for Sheriff McCord?\"\n\n\"Because I said I'm desperate and I am! Surely this woman can help me find my girl if she can just recall what happened to her years ago.\"\n\n\"Come on now,\" Ann cajoled, tugging on Marian's arm. \"Let's have some coffee and calm down. Deputy Miller or the sheriff will be back soon, and\u2014\"\n\n\"Calm down? I need to talk to her\u2014to you, Ms. Lockwood,\" she cried, peering over Ann's shoulder.\n\nTess was shaking. Had her own mother been this berserk when she was lost? Her heart went out to this woman\u2014Marian\u2014even though she wanted to flee. She finally found her voice.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she told the woman, \"but the sheriff, like his father before him, knows all I could tell. I came back, so I hope and pray your daughter will too, and then\u2014\"\n\n\"Amanda Bell. Her name is Amanda, and I'm Marian Bell. I live up in Lake Azure on Pinecrest if you recall anything at all\u2014where you were kept, anything!\"\n\n\"I don't,\" Tess whispered, more to herself than to the others. She didn't, did she? No, of course not. If she did, it would help find the other\u2014now two?\u2014missing girls. It could lead to Gabe's solving the case. It would end the horror that still haunted her like a monster just out of reach, trying to devour her. But, God help her, she could not recall a thing that would lead to anyone or any place.\n\nTess saw she still held the poster in her hand and quickly stuck it to the board between an announcement about a charity auction and a bank robbery in Chillicothe, the largest nearby city. She opened the door and went out into the brisk, sunny day, feeling assaulted, as though her soul had been shredded by that woman. Yet she forgave and understood her. Being recognized and interrogated like that\u2014it was one of her worst fears about coming back.\n\nTess had started for her car when she heard a voice behind her.\n\n\"Hey, Tess, I thought that was your car. How's it going, putting up posters?\"\n\nShe turned to face Gabe as he caught up with her.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" he demanded, his piercing eyes scanning her face. He put a gentle hand on her arm. He wasn't wearing his hat, and the wind ruffled his mussed hair. \"Were you in my office? Did Ann say something to upset you? I told her you might be in.\"\n\n\"Marian Bell recognized me. She's distraught, demanded I remember things I just can't.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. She gets out of control, but I\u2014\"\n\n\"Understand why,\" she finished with him. \"I guess I was thinking about how it must have been for my mother as well as me. One thing I'm sure of. I must have felt forsaken when I was abducted and gone so long, like I was abandoned. I never really thought how devastated my family must have been\u2014only that they didn't come for me. I guess that was selfish.\"\n\n\"Don't think that way. You were a little girl. You were so young you might not even have formed memories into words at that point, and so you can't recall things in words now.\"\n\n\"Sounds like you've been reading up on it.\"\n\n\"Over the years. Especially lately. I'm sorry you ran into Marian or vice versa. I'm going to have to break her heart again, set her off on another tirade. I followed a lead she gave me today that didn't pan out. Her daughter, an only child she had late in life, was taken about four months ago and ever since, she's been seeing her behind every tree, so to speak. But I'll be sure she leaves you alone. I should have prepped her for you being back. If worse comes to worst, I'll get a restraining order on her. Let me walk you to your car. Were you leaving?\"\n\n\"I am now. Thanks for everything, Gabe.\"\n\nShe unlocked her car door, and he opened it for her. \"Don't thank me for anything,\" he said, \"unless I get the bastard who's been doing this.\" Despite his words, his voice was deep and quiet, even soothing. She felt as if she almost stood in his protective embrace since he had one hand on the car roof and one on the open door while she stood there. She sank quickly into the driver's seat, and he leaned down toward her.\n\nNot looking at him but staring at her hands gripping the steering wheel, she spoke. \"I want you to know I don't blame you for my being...being lost that day. You told me not to run into the cornfield, but I didn't listen, didn't obey, even though my mother told me you were in charge. I just needed to say it, because I'm not sure I ever told you or your dad.\"\n\n\"You remember that? I do too, but I still shouldn't have been so angry that I paid no attention to the little scream you gave. Even when I decided to just ignore your antics and you didn't speak again, I thought that was just the little tomboy next door carrying on, bugging me more. Honestly, I don't think I've ever told anyone about our little argument either, including my dad.\"\n\n\"But\u2014 I did? I screamed? I don't recall a thing after you yelled at me and I ran through the corn rows.\"\n\n\"I'm not pressing you to remember more. Sorry, if Marian Bell's doing the yelling now. I'd better go in and break the bad news to her. Listen, call me if you need anything.\"\n\n\"And if I remember anything else?\"\n\n\"Yeah, of course, but no pressure from me. Keep in touch, okay? And good luck with selling the house. I'll mention it to the mayor, since he sees lots of folks every day. He's been in office for years now. He knows everyone.\"\n\nHe extended his hand. She took it, and they shook. Despite the stiff, brisk breeze, his skin was warm, his touch strong. She needed that and gravitated to it when she didn't want to. She had steered clear of romantic complications in her life because she just didn't want to get close to anyone that way. And, of all people, for many reasons, Gabe McCord was way out of bounds.\n\nHe stood back and closed her car door. She started the engine and rolled down her window to say goodbye, even though they'd probably said all there was to say. She heard the crackle of his radio as words came over it.\n\nHe gasped and stepped back. \"Gotta go. Marian Bell will have to wait,\" he said. She thought he'd head for his car, but he ran down the street toward the old part of town.\n\nTess sat stock-still, watching him in the rearview mirror. Tomorrow was the twentieth anniversary of the day she'd disappeared. And what she'd overheard made her want to cover her head, curl up and scream. \"Jace here, Gabe. Four-year-old Sandy Kenton's gone missing from her mother's gift shop!\"\n4\n\nGabe felt as if a bomb blast had gone off close to his head. His ears were ringing, his head felt as though it would split, his lungs ached. In Iraq, he'd been thrown ten yards and suffered torn nerve connections from an explosion. Now his own blast of fury and panic propelled him down the street to the Creekside Gifts shop. He almost hurtled through the door. Woo-ooo, a haunted house automatic recording went off, followed by witchlike cackling.\n\nHe didn't see Jace, but the store manager, Lindell Kenton, Sandy's mother, was slumped over the checkout desk halfway back in the store. Gabe brushed aside fake cobwebs and two suspended mannequins dressed as witches. Lindell sat on a tall stool behind the counter. Her tear-streaked face tilted toward Gabe.\n\n\"It can't be,\" she said, and started to sob. Her face was red, her eyes swollen. \"She was just playing in the back room, like always. She...she just disappeared when I answered the phone here. Win's on his way. This can't...can't be happening. Not now. Never!\"\n\nGabe knew she was referring to the time of year. The two previous kidnappings had also occurred in October, though ten years apart. Tomorrow was the date Tess had been taken. He'd been planning to keep an eye on her and things in town. He'd always treated October 13 as a day to be careful\u2014in short, be wary of copycats, protect people and places. But now this.\n\nJace appeared from the back room, shoving his way through two dangling ghosts made of sheets. \"I've been up and down the back alley,\" he called to Gabe. \"Next, I'll check all the stores and buildings on this side of the street.\"\n\n\"Go start that. I want Lindell to walk me through everything.\"\n\nBut he followed Jace to the back door, relieved to see he'd used rubber bands to fasten small paper sacks over both door handles to preserve possible prints. \"And, Jace,\" he called after him, \"check the alley Dumpsters and the creek out back. It's shallow enough there to see into. But we'll have to drag it to the east where it gets deep.\"\n\n\"Her mother says she wouldn't leave the building.\"\n\n\"But she did\u2014one way or the other.\"\n\nAs Gabe hurried back into the front room, Lindell started speaking. \"It was just a normal day.\" Her voice was nasally and thick with crying. Gabe put his hand over hers, gripped on the counter. \"Normal\u2014I mean that we do this two days a week when she's not at my sister's house with her kids. She plays here, helps me,\" she said, and dissolved into sucking sobs.\n\n\"Okay, Lindell, you've got to help me. We'll find her. Don't jump to conclusions,\" he insisted, though he was jumping to them too, despite the fact that the other girls had been taken more or less from their backyards. \"There's a lot of stuff in here for Halloween and probably more things in the back. Could she be hiding? Could she have hit her head and knocked herself out? Come on, take me to the last place you saw her and talk me through it. Don't leave anything out.\"\n\nStill shaking her head at his questions, she got up from the stool. Her cell phone on the counter rang. She jumped to answer it. Gabe moved closer to hear.\n\n\"Just a customer,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Tell them there's an emergency, and you're closed. Hang up but keep the phone on and with you.\"\n\nShe did what he said. Her voice quavered on the word emergency as she talked to the customer. \"Maybe we'll get a ransom call,\" she said when she hung up. \"I pray to God it's someone who wants to give her back for money.\"\n\nLooking dazed, Lindell led him into the back storage room. It was a maze of stacked boxes, costumes and masks laid out on a worktable. He knew a lot of local folks would buy their costumes and candy at the big Walmart on the highway, but this was a popular place too, even with the Lake Azure residents. They always had a huge costume party here for Halloween, so, no doubt, a lot of people could have been in here and seen Sandy, cute, blonde, friendly, probably trusting.\n\nIn another area he saw shelves with small Christmas trees, cloth Santas and carved manger scenes. Halloween isn't even here yet, Gabe thought as he concentrated on what she was saying and showing him.\n\nHe'd known Lindell and her husband, Winston, for as long as he could remember. Elementary school and beyond; they were three years ahead of him in school. The Kentons had been high school sweethearts, prom king and queen. Win worked for the state park system; Lindell ran this shop. They had two boys in middle school, then Sandy, their baby. Damn, if this was another of the abductions that had haunted this place for twenty years. The sign on the road into town that touted the scenic nature and friendly folks ought to also read Home of the Cold Creek Kidnapper.\n\n* * *\n\nTess knew she couldn't go home right away. Her thoughts were racing. It was almost the day she was taken. But if it was another of the abductions, this time it was from a gift shop in town. Perhaps this terrible event wasn't related to her abduction at all.\n\nShe forced herself to stop at the Kwik Shop, where she bought a sack of freshly baked donuts for Gracie and Lee, a box of chocolate chip cookies for Kelsey and animal crackers for Ethan. She had gifts for them at the house, but she'd have to deliver them later, because she could not face her house in the clutches of the cornfield right now. She didn't take the time to buy anything she needed for herself, but paid, got back in her car and drove straight past her house to the Hear Ye Commune about two miles down Valley View. She had to see little Kelsey and Ethan, put her arms around them, know that they were safe. That way, wouldn't she feel safer too?\n\nWhen she turned in at the compound, she saw a hand-carved wooden sign that read Hear Ye, While There Is Yet Time!\n\nA dirt lane led to a small parking lot outside the main fence. She turned in with the words echoing in her head. While there is yet time. If the young girl in town had been taken, how much time was left to find her before she was driven out of the area, spirited away to be gone for months, maybe forever? Gabe and his deputy must be looking for her in town, but wouldn't the girl's abductor flee for the hills or some rural place to hide her?\n\nWithout stopping, Tess turned the car around and drove right back out onto the road. There was surely safety in numbers inside the compound, where Kelsey and Ethan would be warm, watched, loved. But somewhere out on some road, there could be a child, taken away, hidden, a little girl, shivering and too scared to cry.\n\nTess knew she had to drive these roads looking for something\u2014anything! And she was going past Dane Thompson's house and pet cemetery first.\n\n* * *\n\nAs the minutes passed, Gabe could almost hear a clock in his head, one with an alarm clanging. Sandy's father, Win Kenton, had arrived and was pacing and shouting. Lindell was still crying. She'd gone berserk in the storage room when they found the Barbie doll Sandy always kept with her. Gabe had to physically remove her in case there were clues in the clutter.\n\nIn the past half hour, Gabe had called in the BCI, the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, from near London, Ohio, up by Columbus. They'd been helpful on the other cases, though they'd never found the abducted girls. But they could provide forensic help, which a small, rural district could not afford. He'd notified the State Highway Patrol, even though he had no clue what sort of vehicle might be involved.\n\nJace had said there was no sign of the girl in the creek, at least nearby. They had the volunteer fire department dragging the eastern part where it got deep. Jace was still talking to store owners and shoppers to find out if anyone had seen something suspicious. That helped to spread the word, including that the sheriff was forming a civilian search team of the area in one hour's time. The meeting place was the parking lot by the sheriff's office and fire department. It had not escaped Gabe that this abduction had taken place in the building that used to be the sheriff's office. Surely that had not been a perverted challenge or insult. But what if the kidnapper had chosen this site on purpose?\n\nHe walked away from the Kentons and called Ann on his radio. Before he could say a word, she blurted, \"Marian Bell wants to offer a huge reward for any information leading to the recovery of her daughter and or Sandy Kenton. She's still here, refuses to leave.\"\n\n\"Better there than here, but it's too early for a reward. Listen, call Peggy in too, wake her up. You two are going to have to help each other on the phones over the next twenty-four hours in case any info comes in. And a BCI unit is on their way. I'll talk to the FBI later, but I don't want them taking over, and there's never been a shred of proof anyone's been taken across state lines. Actually Tess Lockwood coming back alive only about seven miles from where she was taken weighs in against that.\"\n\n\"I'll call my brothers to help with the search as soon as I get to Peggy,\" Ann said.\n\nPeggy Barfield was Gabe's night dispatcher, an older woman than Ann. Poor Peggy had probably only gotten about four hours of sleep. But this was\u2014at least it could be\u2014war. He hated ordering Ann around so brusquely, and was reminded he'd done a dumb thing with her. They'd been dating, when he knew better than to mix business with pleasure. Worse, he wasn't that serious about Ann, but she\u2014and her three local, redneck brothers\u2014had it in their heads that Gabe should be proposing about now.\n\n\"Okay, Gabe, got it,\" Ann said. \"I'll start making lots of coffee. I've got the urns here for the charity auction. You take care of yourself, for the possible victim, the community\u2014and me.\"\n\n\"Talk to you later. Let people wait inside if they show up early for the volunteer search.\"\n\nFor the possible victim, the community\u2014and me, she'd said. Now there was a motto for a reelection poster, but that was the least of his worries right now. How about adding For the first victim too\u2014Tess Lockwood? When she heard about this would she be stoic or distraught? Would it trigger any memories? If only he could be there to comfort her when she eventually heard.\n\nDamn. He spotted Mayor Owens hustling across the street toward the store, looking really steamed. Having him around was the last thing Gabe needed.\n\n* * *\n\nTess slowed as she passed Dane Thompson's house and vet clinic. She could see the fenced-in pet cemetery beyond the back lawn with its separate drive. Of course, the size of the cemetery had grown a lot from what she recalled. Once, before she was abducted, Char and Kate had taken her the entire length through the cornfield to read the tombstones\u2014the names and quotes about the buried pets. There had been a few photos too, embedded into the marble monuments, but nothing like the electronic resurrection of pets Marva had mentioned.\n\nThough she was trembling already, Tess shuddered at the memory of pictures of dead pets\u2014some even after death, made to look natural, as if they were asleep. Or were they ones that had been stuffed and mounted by Dane's taxidermist friend? Pushing thoughts of dead pets aside, Tess wondered if the kidnapper was getting so desperate that he took a child from a store in town? And if Marian Bell's daughter was kidnapped only four months ago\u2014she didn't know any details of that abduction\u2014the crimes were a lot closer together than hers and the second girl, Jill Stillwell's, had been.\n\nAnd why pick on one little town, one small, rural area? It had to be because the kidnapper knew it well, probably lived here. So, did he keep his victims nearby? Why didn't he go to Chillicothe or Columbus, where there were more victims available and no one would recognize him? Her mother had said once that Gabe's dad had tried to check for similar kidnappings, but no other statewide or nationwide crimes had the same circumstances. Now, this missing girl's situation didn't match the first two either.\n\nTess saw that the same huge cornfield that backed up to her house still ended behind the Thompson property. Like many of the large fields nearby, it was owned and farmed by a wealthy local man using huge, mechanical planters and reapers. That deep, dark cornfield abutting the Lockwood property was one reason Dane had been on the list of persons of interest when Tess was taken. That and the fact that people just plain considered him a bit weird. He'd never married, had stayed out of public life and, with his close friend, a taxidermist named John Hillman, had always been fascinated by dead animals. And for some reason she could not explain, Tess admitted she had an instinctive dislike and fear of this place.\n\nShe didn't see the white van parked anywhere around, but she did see Marva raking leaves at the side of the house. Tess turned around at the next intersection and drove back. She wouldn't go into the house, the clinic, of course, especially not the cemetery, but she could drive in and chat with Marva. Indirectly, she could learn if Dane was home or where he was. It would be something to help Gabe, because she could never help him in the way everyone thought and hoped she could\u2014by remembering any details about what had happened to her.\n\nHer heart hammered in her chest as she drove slowly up the paved driveway. She reached for the sack of donuts she had bought for Gracie and Lee and got out.\n\n\"Oh, Teresa\u2014I mean Tess,\" Marva called, obviously surprised to see her. She stopped raking. \"Is this a return visit already, or do you have a pet who needs help? Dane's not here right now\u2014house calls at Lake Azure and someplace else.\"\n\nSo Dane was out in his van somewhere while a new girl was missing. Gripping the sack in front of her, Tess walked closer. Dried leaves rustled under her feet. Did she remember this place? The farmhouse, the garage and clinic building? No, but she did recall being pulled through the pet gravestones here, didn't she? Or was that the memory of when Dane yelled at her and her sisters and they fled? What a shock it would be if she'd spent the eight months of her captivity so close to home.\n\n\"You were just so kind to bring me that delicious coffee cake, and I saw these fresh-baked donuts in town, Marva. After all, we are neighbors of the same cornfield.\"\n\n\"Why, yes, we are. I didn't expect one thing back in kind, but I thank you.\" She peeked in the bag. \"Dane loves this kind, and coming from you, he'll be extra pleased.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\" Tess asked, annoyed her voice quavered.\n\n\"Didn't anyone tell you that some busybodies blamed him at first when you disappeared? This will mean to him that you certainly don't believe that false drivel and slander. Why, he's dedicated himself to protecting life, not harming anyone. Won't you step inside?\"\n\nTess shook her head and stepped back a bit. She considered telling Marva that another child was missing, just to see her reaction. She should probably agree to step into the house, even to wait to talk to Dane, but she was suddenly filled with the need to get out of here.\n\nShe'd have to tell Gabe what she'd done and learned. Marva was outside as if nothing had happened, but Dane was out somewhere\u2014and with his van. Perhaps someone had spotted him uptown today. Maybe he'd have an alibi. Guilt and fear aside, Tess knew deep down she'd be best staying out of all this, for her own safety and sanity. So what was she doing here on the property of the man many suspected was the Cold Creek kidnapper?\n\n\"See you later, Marva!\" Tess called as she got back in her car.\n\nShe turned down one country road and then another, just driving, thinking. Finally, she found herself stopping at the spot where a man in a pickup truck had seen her walking dazed along the road eight months after she'd disappeared. Eight months! And she couldn't really recall one thing about her time away.\n\nNo cars were coming from either direction. Tess stopped and, sitting in her car with tears in her eyes, thanked the Lord for letting her be found in this very place\u2014well, somewhere along here, Mom had said. And she prayed Sandy Kenton and the two other missing girls would be found safe and sound and soon.\n5\n\n\"Is it true? Another girl gone?\" Mayor Reese Owens shouted at Gabe as he ducked under the yellow police tape across the front door of the gift shop and exploded into the room. That's the way Gabe always thought of the man's entrances\u2014explosions. Reese would have made a great national politician with his dramatic actions and shoot-from-the-hip comments.\n\n\"Sandy Kenton is missing\u2014true,\" Gabe told him, gesturing for Reese to keep his voice down. \"But by the same kidnapper as the others, not sure yet because of the different M.O.\" He put his hands on Reese's shoulders and backed him up to keep him away from the Kentons, who were huddled together at the checkout desk. He didn't want Reese lecturing Lindell that this was her fault. Reese loved to play the blame game.\n\n\"Yeah, well,\" Reese said, not taking the hint to keep his voice down, \"besides being desperate to get his hands on another one, maybe he wants to make a point about Teresa Lockwood coming back\u2014like a warning to her to shut up or get out of here.\"\n\n\"It's been well publicized Tess\u2014she goes by Tess now\u2014has amnesia about her time away.\"\n\n\"So? People get over amnesia. She'll just draw media interviews\u2014especially when this gets out, which it has. I already got a call from my wife and a Columbus TV station. I want publicity for the town, but not this again.\"\n\nReese was out of breath, but he was also out of shape. At least eighty pounds too heavy, he was all swagger and stuffing. Years ago, Reese had married one of the richest women around, Lillian Montgomery, whose grandfather had once been governor of the state, and that gave him instant clout. He owned the hardware store and a lot of property in town, not to mention he was one of the first Lake Azure investors.\n\nIn his mid-fifties, Reese had thinning auburn hair and a rising forehead\u2014and usually a rising temper. Dealing with the man was one of the challenges of Gabe's job, enough to sometimes make him wish he still headed up a bomb squad in Kirkuk.\n\n\"Listen, Reese, I've called in outside help, and we'll have a civilian search party fanning out in about half an hour.\" He sat the man down on a bale of hay under an array of big yarn spiders and cobwebs, then perched beside him. \"If you can handle the media while I head up the search, that will be a big help.\"\n\n\"Nothing's going to help if this is that same SOB again. I mean, what are we, rural rubes, can't track someone who's struck more than once at the same time of year, then disappears until he wants another kid? I know you're young and partly riding on your pa's reputation, only in your first term, but\u2014\"\n\nGabe interrupted him before he heard the rest. The last thing he needed from this man was to be blamed for any of this. That cut too close to his own guilt feelings for losing Teresa all those years ago.\n\n\"That reminds me,\" Gabe said. \"I've got to call in Sam Jeffers and his hunting dog. I swear his hounds can follow any trail.\" He dug his phone out of his utility belt and started skimming through his phone book on it. \"Years ago, when Teresa was taken, the dog Sam had then got us partway across the field before the trail turned cold. And Sandy left a doll behind we can use to have him get the scent.\"\n\n\"I'll bet you and Jace have obscured that by now.\"\n\n\"Mr. Mayor\u2014how about you leave this to me and you handle the outsiders?\" Gabe said, trying to keep his own temper in check. He hit the phone number for Jeffers. No answer, no voice mail option. The guy was always out hunting this time of year. He'd probably turned his ringtone off so as not to scare his prey; so maybe he couldn't help. Gabe's gut fear was that maybe nothing could.\n\n* * *\n\nTess almost drove into the Hear Ye compound again on her way home but decided she was too upset to see her family right now, especially the little ones. To her surprise, her cousin Lee was sitting on the front steps of her house with a bicycle leaned against the porch pillar.\n\n\"Lee!\" she called as she got out and hurried toward him. He hugged her but didn't look her in the eye. He seemed distracted and upset.\n\n\"Is everyone all right?\" she asked. \"Did you hear what happened in town?\"\n\n\"That's partly why I came to see you were okay. Reverend Monson announced it at the end of the church service.\"\n\n\"A church service on a Tuesday?\"\n\n\"Whenever it's needed.\"\n\n\"I guess it would be good to have everyone together for an announcement like that, to pray for the child, comfort each other and all.\"\n\n\"Listen, you're invited to come visit us.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's great. I can't wait to see the kids. I almost stopped there today, you know, just to be with my family,\" she confessed as he pulled the bike away from the porch and held it between them. It was an old one with fat tires and scraped paint. He rode that here a couple of miles on these hills? She wondered why he didn't use their car, but she didn't want to seem to criticize.\n\n\"And if you do come, can you help me with some dowsing?\" he asked, his voice beseeching but his face worried. \"I think I have a find, but I want to be sure if we're going to drill for another well, and your power was always better than mine, even when you were so young. Both of us, a gift from our grandmother\u2014and the Lord, of course.\"\n\n\"But I haven't pursued water witching,\" Tess insisted. Tears sprang to her eyes. How could anyone talk about things other than the missing girl right now? How could life go on when she must be in mortal danger?\n\n\"Don't ever call it water witching,\" Lee said, giving his bike a shake when he probably wished he could shake her. \"Water dowsing or, better yet, water divining. Like I said, a divine gift and not to be taken lightly. Tess, both your father and mine had the gift.\"\n\n\"My father quit doing it before he left.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, it still meant something to him. His dried willow wands\u2014branches\u2014are still in a corner of the basement inside. That's like an omen, a sign from God, so quit stalling.\"\n\n\"They're downstairs? He kept them? But if I don't feel comfortable helping, does that mean I'm not to see your family?\" she challenged, finally realizing she felt hostile vibes. She always thought that Lee had wanted Gracie to steer clear of her as phone calls and visits had waned over the past few years. And as Lee had been more and more sucked into the religious group that Gracie had evidently, finally embraced too.\n\n\"Sure, you can visit anyway,\" he insisted, frowning. \"I just would appreciate your help with the willow wand, that's all. I'll still hold it if you just want to watch. A new well would benefit everyone, you know, Kelsey and Ethan too.\"\n\nHe knew her soft spot for kids. Even as she agreed to help him tomorrow afternoon, she thought again of the little Kenton girl she'd never met, but\u2014if she'd been taken\u2014Tess's heart and soul were right there with her.\n\n* * *\n\nWhen Tess heard on the radio that a citizen search team had fanned out from the gift shop until dark, she cursed herself that she'd fled the town so fast. She would have helped with that, even if people stared or whispered or\u2014like Marian Bell\u2014asked her what she remembered. Then again, the radio and television people, no doubt, newspaper reporters too, would be around by now. Only a few times over the years had a reporter or a true-crime author located her in Michigan and wanted an interview, which she and Mom had never agreed to, even though they could have used the money.\n\nAs dusk descended, Tess stayed inside her house using only a flashlight to get around even when strangers knocked on her door, rang the front bell or called her name.\n\nUnfortunately, her posters in town worked against her when word got out that her phone number was on them. Hoping it would be Gabe on the phone, she answered her cell only to hear it was a reporter from Live at Five News from as far away as Cincinnati. She hung up without a word.\n\nShe ate a cold dinner and drank cider\u2014nothing tasted good\u2014and sat with the curtains closed, huddled on the floor in a corner of the living room with her knees pulled up to her chin, ignoring the knocks on her front and back doors, her name being shouted by reporters. Then finally\u2014finally\u2014a voice she wanted to hear came from outside.\n\n\"Tess, it's Gabe! You in there? I've got everyone off your property. They went back into town! You're not answering your phone. Tess?\"\n\nShe ran to the back door but peered out before opening it.\n\nShe undid the bolt, the locks, and swung the door wide, only to have to unlock the storm door too.\n\n\"Did you find her?\" she asked as he came up the steps and entered. He closed and locked the door behind him. She leaned against the kitchen counter. She had almost done the unthinkable, throwing herself into his arms and holding on tight like a kid.\n\n\"Wish I could say yes. The search and dragging part of the creek turned up nothing. Same story. Girl vanishes into thin air.\"\n\n\"Like me and Jill Stillwell\u2014Amanda Bell too.\"\n\n\"Yeah. In broad daylight, without a cornfield, with her mother in the next room and while you and I were talking on Main Street.\"\n\n\"You...you don't think it was some sort of challenge or message to you or me. That someone else was taken so close to when I was?\" she asked.\n\n\"No, I didn't mean that. I've been comforting her family and getting the personnel we need here to find her fast. And it must have been someone she knew because she didn't make a peep, even if she was\u2014is\u2014a friendly kid. Tess,\" he said, stepping closer and taking her hands in his big, warm ones, \"I gotta level with you. The fact that you came back home after being away for almost eight months, even if it was years ago, gives me a bit of hope for Sandy Kenton\u2014Jill Stillwell too. There's a thing called a golden window, a very short period of time\u2014usually three hours, I'm afraid\u2014when young children are kidnapped that they are likely to be kept alive, but you came back after a long time away.\"\n\n\"Which is why people don't want to believe me that I can't recall anything to help. I wish I could, really, Gabe!\"\n\n\"I believe you. Maybe we should finally let it out that you had needle marks in your arms, that you were probably drugged, maybe with some sort of amnesiac drug.\"\n\nHer nostrils flared, and she sniffed hard. She was shocked. Why had she not been told that? In a way, it helped. She snatched her hands from his grasp and moved out into the living room, where she had all the curtains drawn. With Gabe here she felt safe enough to snap on a light, and then she collapsed, weak-kneed, into one of the rocking chairs.\n\n\"I should have been told about the drugs!\" she said when he followed her and sank wearily into the other rocker. Their feet almost touched, but neither of them moved their chairs except to tilt them closer together.\n\n\"The decision was made, with your mother's approval,\" he explained, \"to keep the drug thing quiet.\"\n\n\"And he was never caught, was he?\" she shouted when she hadn't meant to raise her voice. If you raised your voice, people got upset and you could be punished; she'd learned that from her father\u2014or was it from someone else?\n\n\"No, he was never caught,\" he said, tipping even farther forward in his chair with his elbows on his knees. \"It's the great regret of my father's life. He started having heart trouble about then. But the failure to find you and then Jill\u2014and the kidnapper\u2014now may be my fault as well as my father's.\"\n\n\"I said before I don't blame you.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I want you to know, I told Marian Bell to steer clear of you. If she so much as glares your way, let me know. And I admit it would help if you could recall anything, anything at all.\"\n\n\"About back then, nothing but being dragged off through the cornfield\u2014and yes, maybe that something stuck me in the neck. Maybe drugged, right away.\" She rubbed her arms through her sweater as if she could feel other needle marks there. She did remember tiny train tracks on her arms, that's what she used to call them, but Mom never explained, even when she could have taken the truth.\n\nIn a sudden surge of need to help this man and the lost girl, Tess said, \"I can tell you at least that Marva Thompson Green was home shortly after the abduction today, and Dane wasn't. He was out in his van making Lake Azure house calls, according to her.\"\n\nGabe sat up straight. His rocking chair jerked.\n\n\"How do you know that? Did you phone or see her? Did you see him or his van in town?\"\n\n\"No, I stopped to talk to Marva at their place before I drove the back roads. I told her I was just returning her earlier visit and gave her some donuts since she'd brought me some baked goods.\"\n\n\"Right when you came back Marva came to visit? To kind of feel out what you remembered?\"\n\n\"Maybe. At least my mother did tell me where I was found wandering around the day I was recovered\u2014and I've never really recovered,\" she said. She stood so fast her chair rocked and bumped the back of her legs. \"But I went there today.\"\n\n\"Look,\" Gabe said, rising too and stopping her with a strong grip on her elbow, \"I don't want you on deserted roads or around Dane's place or letting him or Marva in here. You do know he was the prime suspect for a long time, don't you?\"\n\n\"Yes, at least someone saw fit to tell me that.\"\n\n\"Tess, about the fact that you were drugged. It's common police procedure to hold back some vital evidence, some piece of insider information that will be valuable when questioning a person of interest or preparing a trial after an indictment.\"\n\n\"Don't you\u2014didn't my mother\u2014realize it would have helped me to know? If I was drugged, maybe that's why I can't remember, can't help Marian Bell, the Stillwells and Sandy's mother!\"\n\n\"I didn't\u2014and don't\u2014want you to use that as an excuse. There can still be things you can recall, anything at all.\"\n\n\"So you're saying your offer to help and protect me was just a cover so you could hang close and see what you could shake out of me? Even before this poor girl was taken today?\"\n\n\"I didn't say that. No, that's not true.\"\n\n\"Well, see, Sheriff McCord, here's my problem, one at least. I don't know what's true and what isn't about my nightmares. I have them, sometimes at night, but flashes of things when I'm awake too.\"\n\n\"What's in the nightmares and flashes?\"\n\n\"Feeling lost. A horrible feeling of dread. Like I have to flee something, but I don't know what. Some kind of big machine, sometimes maybe a dinosaur, I think, and what sense does that make? Nothing I can clearly recall, and that's worse than if there was some bogeyman I could face and try to fight or conquer!\"\n\nTo her amazement, though she wanted to strike out at him, hit him, instead she threw herself into his arms. Breathing hard, he held her close for a moment. Her belly pressed against his gun belt, her thighs against his. He felt strong and steady, but he must be using her. She pushed back so hard against his rock-solid chest that she almost fell.\n\n\"Tess, honestly,\" he said, grabbing for her arm again, though she shook him off. \"Besides getting rid of the media mavens outside, I just stopped by to tell you that, even though I'm going to be working this new case day and night, you are not forgotten. Anyone bothers you, you let me know. Or if you recall anything in a bad dream or broad daylight. If you can't get right through to me, call Ann or Peggy on the desk. If you call 911, you'll get them too, and they'll get me. Got that? Promise?\"\n\nTess nodded jerkily, kept nodding. She blinked back burning, unshed tears. The weight of having experienced things that could save others, things just out of reach, pressed hard on her heart. For one moment, she thought she heard a roaring noise, felt something awful flapping in her face, but then it was gone.\n\nAfter a quick squeeze of her shoulder, Gabe hurried toward the back door.\n\n\"Lock up behind me!\" he called back to her.\n\nWithout another word, she followed and did as he said. But could she really lock him out of her life anymore? The man meant a lot to her, much more than the boy ever had. She wanted to help him, but he stirred strange feelings in her that she feared almost as much as her buried memories. Need. Even desire. Instead of locking him out in any way, she longed to let him inside her defenses.\n6\n\nThe first thing Tess thought when she woke from a fitful sleep was that it was the twentieth anniversary of the day she was taken. Most anniversaries were happy, but this one\u2014now that another girl was missing\u2014felt doubly cursed.\n\nAs soon as it was daylight and she'd eaten breakfast, she turned on the basement light, took a flashlight too and went downstairs. The basement stairs creaked as she went down. It smelled a bit dank down here. She thought she should buy an air freshener in case anyone came to look at the house. Should she accompany potential buyers down here, or could that be dangerous? Since her kidnapper might still be in the area, he could try to test her to learn if seeing his face again would trigger a memory. Or would he think she should be silenced?\n\nShe knew she had to be wary today, stay strong. But even if horrible memories came flooding back, it would be worth it if she recalled something to help the poor child who'd gone missing and the girls who had been taken before.\n\nLee hadn't exactly said where he'd seen her father's dowsing wands. She could picture his collection of green, slender willow tree boughs. She wondered why Lee had kept them, if they were dry. Since Dad had been so skilled at dowsing, maybe Lee thought they had some special power, or that it would be bad luck to trash them. And why hadn't Mom done that, especially after Dad deserted her?\n\nOver the years Mom, Kate and Char had tried to explain to Tess that Dad's leaving wasn't her fault, though Dad had blamed Mom for letting a boy keep an eye on her, even if he was the sheriff's son. She remembered their terrible arguments. But Kate and Char assured her that Dad was just looking for an excuse to leave, and it was cruel and wrong of him to blame their mother for something no one could predict or prevent. Could Gabe have prevented it?\n\nTess found a pile of six willow wands behind the furnace. She shone the flashlight on them. Of course, they were not supple and green anymore but dried and dusty. Lee's father and hers, twin brothers, had possessed the gift to locate underground water by walking with a Y-shaped willow branch held out in front of them until it quivered in their hands. And most of the time, freshwater lay beneath.\n\nShe recalled her mother telling her about a sunny day, the Fourth of July the year she was taken, when her family was picnicking at a friend's house. At age four, she had picked up the willow wand Dad had brought to show people. She had imitated him, walked with it toward their friend's barn and felt the pull, a magnetism, making it quiver and tremble in her hands. Other times in the weeks of that late summer, Dad had tested whether her finds with the wand matched his, and they always had.\n\nSo, was that very willow wand among these? She touched them, stroked the top one. Some people thought dowsing was mere superstition or fakery, just chance finds or playing the odds. But others, especially older folks, believed it could find not only water but buried treasure, even lodes of precious ores. Some said it could point to graves, especially if the corpse had been buried with metal jewelry. If only, like a dowsing wand, she could find the thing that would point toward her buried memories!\n\nShe heard the ringtone of her cell phone, which she'd left in the kitchen. Taking the top willow wand with her, she dashed upstairs and grabbed the phone from the table.\n\n\"Hello?\"\n\n\"Tess, it's Kate. I can't talk long. I've been making great progress on researching the Celts. I'm hopeful I can link their culture to the ancient Adenas of the American Midwest. Next time I'm home, I'm going to take a closer look at the burial mounds in our area because that could be another link to prove the Celts came to the eastern U.S. But I wanted to call you to see how you are. You know, especially today. I've been thinking about you. Are you back in Cold Creek to sell the house? How are you doing?\"\n\n\"I'm here, and it was okay at first. But another girl was taken yesterday, like my coming back was a curse!\"\n\n\"What? Taken from her backyard? Taken into the corn?\"\n\n\"Taken from the back room of a gift shop uptown while her mother worked in the next room. It's a shop on the site of the old police station.\"\n\n\"That's terrible. Listen now, you call Char and let her talk you through this. She's better at that than me. And don't you go blaming yourself, or fixin' to hang around there to help.\"\n\nTess bit her lip. Don't you go blaming yourself...fixin' to... Her big sister was calling from England. Kate Lockwood, high school valedictorian, full college scholarship recipient, Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, professor and published author, could travel the world to study and teach ancient anthropology, but when she got upset, she still sounded like a southern Ohioan from Cold Creek. And she wouldn't like to be reminded of that one bit.\n\n\"Tess, are you there? How'd you find the old place after Lee and Grace cleared out?\"\n\n\"It's pretty empty, but the ghosts are still here, if you know what I mean. I've got posters up all over town to advertise selling it. And I just found Dad's old willow wands in the basement.\"\n\n\"Witching wands, you mean?\" she said, her voice turning sharp. \"He should have taken them when he cleared out of our lives. You know, I looked up a lot about water divining once, even wrote an undergrad paper on it.\"\n\n\"So what did you find out?\" Tess asked, stroking the cracked wood of the old wand. At least that would get Kate off the subject of the house.\n\n\"You're interested in dowsing? Okay, here's what I recall...\"\n\nHere's what I recall... The words echoed in Tess's head. Again, she wished desperately she could recall who had taken her and where twenty years ago.\n\n\"So, besides dowsing appearing in artwork from ancient China and Egypt,\" Kate was saying, obviously in her lecture mode, \"some claim that when Moses and Aaron used a rod to locate water in the Bible, that was dowsing. Martin Luther called dowsing 'the work of the devil.' In more modern times, Albert Einstein believed in it, and during World War Two General George Patton\u2014well, he believed in the paranormal anyway\u2014had a willow tree flown to Morocco to find water to replace the wells the German army had blown up. And that reminds me, the Brits used dowsing in the Falklands, and in Vietnam the Americans used it to locate weapons and tunnels.\"\n\n\"Your memory always amazes me, Kate. I'll have to tell Lee about all that.\"\n\n\"If he's still so gung ho for that whacked-out religious cult, he probably couldn't care less. But one more thing. I read that from time to time, some have used dowsing to track criminals or find missing persons. But don't go telling the new Sheriff McCord about that, or he'll think you've gone off the deep end. What's he like all grown up?\"\n\n\"Very dedicated. Really intense.\"\n\n\"Intense? Tess, what does he look like?\"\n\n\"Tall, broad shoulders. Icy blue eyes but dark hair. Black uniform. Strong but gentle...\"\n\n\"Okay, okay. Intense about solving these crimes, you mean?\"\n\n\"Yes, that's what I mean,\" Tess said, realizing she was sounding a bit shrill, as if she had to defend Gabe.\n\n\"So, is the town as diverse economically and socially as Grace has been telling you?\" Kate blessedly changed the subject.\n\nTess explained the great divide in town and how that had changed things. But she told her how seeing Etta Falls at the old library made her feel as if she was in a time warp.\n\n\"She was so encouraging to me about reading and learning,\" Kate said. \"Especially the months you were\u2014were gone\u2014she tried hard to distract us with books Char and I would love, books for Mom on how to cope with loss, things like that. I remember our first-grade class went on a field trip to her house, because it still had one of the first pioneer cabins way out in the woods on their land. She showed us an old pistol and a family graveyard out back, but the tombstones were so old you couldn't read a thing on them. And that mother of hers is like a historic relic herself.\"\n\nThey talked too long, but Kate could probably afford it. Despite the great divide between her and her sisters\u2014in education and ambition\u2014she loved hearing their voices. Whatever her differences with them, she wished so much they were here to help and to hug.\n\n* * *\n\nGabe recognized the older of the two BCI agents the minute he got out of the plain black car that had pulled in next to the blue-and-white mobile crime lab truck in the police parking lot. Despite it being two decades later, Gabe saw it was Victor Reingold, the agent who had worked with his father on Teresa Lockwood's abduction, though he hadn't been back to help with the second abduction nor had Gabe brought him in on Amanda's case.\n\nGabe hurried over to meet the agents. Reingold's shock of unruly hair had gone white, but his brown, hooded eyes looked as sharp as ever. He walked with a slight limp, and almost always dressed in black, like Batman without a cape, Gabe used to think. The man in the lab truck was a lanky blond wearing rimless glasses and a dark blue jacket with BCI emblazoned on the back. He looked as uptight as Reingold looked at ease and in control. Gabe thought the younger guy might as well have Forensics Techie tattooed on his forehead.\n\n\"Glad the posse's here,\" Gabe told them, shaking first Reingold's hand and then the other man's. \"Sheriff Gabe McCord,\" he told them, though he guessed that was pretty obvious.\n\n\"Mike Morgan,\" the younger man said. \"I usually do lab forensics, so I'm glad to be out in the field, especially on this one. I have three young daughters, so I'm all in.\"\n\n\"Remember me, Gabe?\" Reingold said as Gabe led them toward the building.\n\n\"I sure do, Agent Reingold.\"\n\n\"You were pretty young on that first case and pretty upset about being so close to it. Tough on you and on your dad as sheriff. He was a very good man, Gabe. My sympathies on his death. Glad to be back on the job with you to get this longtime pervert, but sorry it happened again. I was on special assignment in Washington, D.C., on the second abduction, but I kept up on things. So let's do this. And call me Vic, okay?\"\n\n\"Thanks, Vic. Mike, you too,\" he said as he opened the door to the station for them. He knew the BCI agents liked to assess local facilities and staff before possibly calling for more help. He introduced them to Ann and Peggy, then, pointing things out, gave them a brief tour of the station.\n\nAs he walked them back to his office, he gave them the rundown. \"The crime scene's a cluttered storage room of a gift shop, where we bagged the doorknobs.\"\n\n\"Good work,\" Mike said. \"We can even track palm prints now. Ohio was the test case for that. And our databases for fingerprints use the automated APHIS system and are FBI connected.\"\n\n\"Outside of that storage room,\" Gabe told them, \"it's a long shot, but I've got a local guy coming in, a tracker with a good nose dog to sniff the child's doll and see what that gets us. But I figured you'd want to fine-tooth comb the crime scene first. We did an exterior search with local volunteers beyond the alley that runs behind the stores near the creek, and dragged the water where it's deep. We found nothing\u2014just like the other two or three takes.\"\n\n\"Or three?\" Vic demanded, scrutinizing the huge map taped on the wall of Gabe's office. It was a site map he'd inherited from his father and had been updating. \"I thought I'd read up on everything\u2014but three previous to this Sandy Kenton?\" Vic asked, turning to stare at Gabe.\n\n\"I think the possible number three, Amanda Bell, was a child snatched by her father, who left the country. He's hard to find but we think he's in South America. I've worked on the case, and the family has hired a private detective. The mother will probably be after you as soon as she hears you're around.\"\n\n\"Hard to believe it's been twenty years since that first abduction\u2014my case,\" Vic said, turning back to the map and thumping his index finger on the site of the Lockwood house. \"But Teresa Lockwood's surviving was pure chance, so I intend, just like you, to solve this fast.\"\n\n\"Teresa goes by Tess now and she's back in town briefly to sell her family homestead, the crime scene.\"\n\n\"Recall the place well, and her, when we finally got her back,\" Vic said, turning to look at him with narrowed eyes again. \"Traumatized, drugged, been beaten, a real pretty little girl. Were the others blonde and good-looking too?\"\n\n\"Not a common factor. I've got dossiers and all kinds of stuff on each victim you can look over.\"\n\n\"Great. You bet I will.\"\n\nGabe saw the man still had an unusual habit he remembered. He chewed wooden toothpicks to a wet pulp, then spit them out. If only these abducted kids had had some sort of habit where they left a trail, other than maybe a scent.\n\n\"Yeah, the dog on the scent trail's worth a try,\" Vic said as though he'd read Gabe's mind. \"We could call in a K-9 unit, but time's of the essence. We'll just have to make sure you're with the guy, step for step. But remember, he ain't nothing but a hound dog, and we've got two leads right under our own noses. Number one, the abduction scene. Let's see the gift shop storeroom, where Mike can start working, but then let's you and me, Gabe, go pay a call on our ace in the hole, Teresa Lockwood.\"\n\nGabe's head snapped around. \"She still has retrograde amnesia on the whole thing. Still delicate. I've been trying to establish a good relationship with her, but so far\u2014\"\n\n\"Then let's see if we can take it farther than so far,\" Vic said and spit a chewed-up toothpick into Gabe's wastebasket.\n\nGabe stared the man down. \"I think she'll bolt if we press her.\"\n\n\"You been trying another approach besides a frontal assault?\" Vic challenged, coming closer. \"You want one more try with her, using your method?\" he said, raising one eyebrow. \"If so, okay, but make it quick, before I go busting in. Ticktock, and you know it.\"\n\n\"Tess came back from her abduction after almost eight months away, so I'm hoping the others have been kept alive\u2014are still alive for all we know. Maybe someone just wants a little girl to raise.\"\n\n\"Odds are against that, but maybe. Still, if the kidnapper's local, where are the girls? And since you once told me you wished you'd have rescued Teresa when she was snatched, I don't know if you're still feeling guilty about her, handling her\u2014so to speak\u2014with kid gloves. Take a little time today to try again with her, okay? Just a suggestion, of course, 'cause we're here to work with you, and you know the situation best.\"\n\nGabe just nodded, though he got the undercurrent of what Vic had said. Maybe the man did read minds, did sense how protective he felt about Tess. \"I'll take you to the site, let you do your thing,\" Gabe told them. \"This is the twentieth anniversary of the day Tess was taken, and I wanted to see if she's all right anyway.\"\n\n\"You all right, Gabe?\" Vic asked. \"You got a lot at stake here for the community, your father's memory, yourself\u2014for Tess too, right?\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm fine, just obsessed with solving these cases.\"\n\n\"Good, 'cause once we get this prelim work done, I got some other info for you, but first go talk to vic number one, okay?\"\n\n* * *\n\nTess sat on the top of the old picnic table in the backyard and glared at the waving shocks of heavily laden corn. Trying to dispel the bogeyman of memories\u2014or lack of them\u2014was something she'd wanted to do for a while. Besides, the cornfield had always haunted her. Those dark green, deep and long, straight alleys between the blowing stalks... The way you could get lost in there, especially if you were small as she'd been back then. Any cornfield could be a maze to a child.\n\nShe nearly jumped off the table when a man's voice spoke nearby.\n\n\"Tess?\"\n\n\"Gabe! I didn't hear you. Did you find her? Any news?\"\n\n\"We've got help from the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation here\u2014a forensics expert and an agent. The bureau's a lot more sophisticated now than it was then. As a matter of fact,\" he said as he came closer, \"Victor Reingold, the same man who worked your case, is here.\"\n\n\"Really? But he seemed old then!\"\n\n\"Only to a young girl. Listen, I need to drive up to the falls to check on some graffiti there. It will only take an hour. I hear there's something written there that may relate to this case. I wondered if you'd like to go along\u2014to the falls. You could leave a for-sale poster for your house at the lodge there. I've got missing-child ones in the car that I'll leave.\"\n\n\"Oh, sure,\" she said, scooting off the tabletop. \"I always thought it was so pretty there. So, Agent Reingold's here. I do remember him and things that came after\u2014well, a while after I came back home. I should thank him for his help back then, even though it turned out I just came back on my own. If, that is, he understands I can't recall things to help with this case, but wish I could.\"\n\n\"Sure. I already told him that.\"\n\n\"I'll get my purse. Just a sec.\"\n\nShe darted inside. The old, dried-out willow wand lay on the kitchen counter, almost as if it was a gift from Dad to her on this day. He'd often done that\u2014left their birthday gifts somewhere and made them search for them, not just handed them over. But if she could recall things like that, why were other things so far out of reach? If only she could do what Kate had mentioned, which she figured was pretty impossible\u2014use that old dowsing stick to find the missing girl.\n7\n\nAfter they walked out of the rustic Falls Park Lodge, where they left posters on the community bulletin board, Tess noticed the distant roar of the waterfall again. It was a constant, breathless hum, partly blocked by the colorful autumn trees, yet it seemed to her a looming, unseen presence. It was kind of like her memories, muted, hovering, steady. It made her remember the howl of the local train on the edge of town, farm machinery in the fields. Was there something special about those sounds she should recall?\n\n\"You okay?\" Gabe asked as they approached the cruiser.\n\n\"As ever, yes and no,\" she told him with a little shrug. \"It's so strange to have places evoke so many memories. We had family picnics here. Yet other things I'm desperate to recall just won't come.\"\n\nHe opened the passenger door for her to get in, closed it and walked around to the driver's side. He closed that too but just sat there a moment, staring out through the windshield. \"In the service, I commanded a squad that disrupted bombs\u2014mostly erratic, homemade IEDs, at first in Afghanistan, mostly in Iraq. One went off when I was too close. The sound and shock waves stunned me, threw me twenty feet, whacked me out for a while. Most of my memories came back, but not when I was being hauled away by medics, then treated. And then in the hospital when I learned some of my guys had died\u2014men I'd assigned to go defuse another bomb that same day in the Kirkuk marketplace\u2014I kind of wished all the memories of sending them to their deaths were gone. They haunt me\u2014their faces, that I called the shots that day.\"\n\nThey both sat silent a moment. She was stunned by what he had just shared. So he understood her memory loss, some of it anyway. But since he'd gotten his memories back, he probably expected her to do the same.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Gabe. But you were doing your job. You couldn't know what would happen, but others telling you about it could fill in the blanks, even if that brought more pain. And here it's not knowing that haunts me, especially now that Sandy Kenton's missing and Jill Stillwell and Amanda Bell haven't been found yet.\"\n\nHe only nodded and started the cruiser, and they drove along the curving blacktopped road toward the falls, past picnic areas, a kiddie playground and open-sided shelters for cookouts. She heard him clear his throat. Was he going to confide more terrible war memories? And could she manage to comfort him when her own past tormented her?\n\n\"Since you feel that way, and we're desperate,\" he said, \"could you be brave enough to reenact the day you were taken? I mean, with me there, right beside you instead of across the backyard, beside you when we go into the corn. I got the feeling you were staring down that cornfield today. We could walk through it together the way you must have been taken. You just never know what that might trigger, and like I said, I'm desperate for leads. Tess?\"\n\nHe pulled over on the deserted road but kept the motor running. As he turned to her, their gazes held.\n\nTalk about bombs going off, she thought. Though his plan was enough to shock her, something huge leaped between them that had nothing to do with anything they were talking about. Once she'd stuck a fork into a toaster to try to get a piece of bread out and took such a jolt that her hair stood on end. It was crazy, but she felt that way now, like nothing she'd ever known.\n\n\"So, what do you think?\" he prompted.\n\n\"I'll try. I trust you, and I want to help. Not only to save Sandy and Jill\u2014maybe Amanda\u2014but my own sanity, as well. Talk about your being haunted by regret about your fellow soldiers. I regret the fate of any abducted child who did not come back like I did.\"\n\n\"Kind of like survivor's guilt\u2014like me.\" He reached over and put his hand on her knee, then withdrew it as if she'd burned him. He put the car in gear and drove around the next turn. The thirty-foot waterfall appeared with its frame of surrounding gray rock and trees hanging on to tiered ledges for dear life.\n\n\"See how people ruin beautiful things?\" he said, and pointed through the windshield.\n\nThe Falls falls, as locals jokingly called them, were still spectacular, but she saw what he meant. With orange spray paint someone had scrawled a message in very fat, outlined letters on the face of the stone next to the white-green water spewing over the cliff above. Tess sucked in a deep breath. GIVE BACK THOSE TOWNIE KIDS YOU PERV OR ELSE!!! Then off to the side, though in different paint and writing, was AZURE ROCKS!\n\n\"Well, Azure rocks is a good pun,\" Gabe said. \"Azure, referring to the new consolidated high school, not far from here. As for the threat about the 'perv,' a good thought, but delivered the wrong way.\"\n\n\"And in a different, more arty script.\"\n\nThey got out of the car and walked around the deep pool that was the source of Cold Creek and headed toward the cliffside path. The noise was so much louder outside the car that they had to raise their voices.\n\n\"I'd like to believe,\" he went on, \"that message was also done by some kid from the school, where the Lake Azure students don't get along very well with the locals. I want to walk closer, see if I can find any discarded paint cans or something else to nail anyone. It's going to take expensive, dangerous sandblasting to clear that off, so it will be a felony, not just a misdemeanor for defacing state property.\"\n\n\"I heard that Sandy Kenton's father is a park ranger, right? Maybe someone who knows him or his family did this to get even more attention paid to her being taken. And we can figure Marian Bell didn't do this, because it only mentions townie kids and she and Amanda lived in the Lake Azure area.\"\n\nGabe's eyes widened at that as they started on the path around the pool toward the foot of the falls. \"The mayor insists we can afford only one deputy, or I'd hire you,\" he told her. \"I think Amanda's father, Win Kenton, comes through here a lot, so who knows what a desperate dad will do? And it didn't hit me about Marian, but I'm putting nothing beyond her. Besides that, what's been worrying me is whether it meant anything that this latest victim was taken from the building that used to be the police station\u2014like a challenge to the police, namely me.\"\n\nThe spray was drifting here but it felt good, cooling her flushed face. Just being with Gabe made her feel warmer than the climb did. She skidded on the path, cried out, and he reached back for her.\n\nHe grabbed her arm hard, held her steady, then leaned back against the rock face and pulled her against him. With her body pressed to his side, her head fit perfectly under his chin. His grip was strong around her, and she clasped his upper arms. His leather jacket was wet. She leaned her hip against his and lifted her head to say something as he turned his head.\n\nThey kissed. Tentative, gentle, then strong and sure, mutual. She felt his slight beard stubble, his warm flesh against her chin and cheeks as they moved their heads. She held to him, opening her lips. Was the entire cliff face moving?\n\n\"Aha,\" he said when they finally broke the kiss. Lips still parted, both of them seemed to breathe in unison. In the noise of crashing water, she stared at his mouth to read his words. \"I didn't mean to do that, but...\"\n\n\"I know. Me neither.\"\n\nIt was like a dream. They still held to each other, not moving, not saying more, pressed back against the solid rock. Tess felt strangely content. She liked heights\u2014at least you could see everything around you. She sighed but that too was swallowed by the crash of the falls.\n\nFinally, Gabe spoke, putting his lips close to her ear. \"We're almost where the person with the paint must have stood.\"\n\n\"I can't believe I slipped,\" she said, almost shouting. Suddenly she had to fill the space between them with words, however loud the noise. \"Where we grew up\u2014after we left Ohio, I mean\u2014in Jackson, Michigan, the big attraction was not a natural waterfall but a man-made one called the Cascades. Big, tall stairs, tumbling water, lit by colored lights,\" she went on, gesturing grandly. \"You could go all the way up on side stairs. My sisters and I often did. But you'd get the spray if the wind was wrong, and the steps would be slippery running up and down.\"\n\n\"Tess,\" he said, turning back to face her. \"I'm not sorry it happened, though\u2014the kiss.\"\n\nShe nodded, maybe a bit too wildly. As he smiled, his features lifted, his eyebrows raised. His teeth were white and even.\n\nShe smiled back. For the first time in years, she felt good and\u2014even standing on a slippery, lofty cliff path with thoughts about kids being kidnapped\u2014almost safe.\n\n* * *\n\nAfter finding and bagging two discarded cans of spray paint and some wet cigarette butts, they headed back to town. Gabe didn't want to drop Tess off and chided himself for acting as if this was some date when it was a kidnapping investigation. He'd kissed her. Kissed her! And wanted more. Was he nuts? Mad-dog Vic would have a fit.\n\n\"I'll drop you off at your place,\" he told her. \"I'll check with things at the station and crime scene, and then I'll come back and we'll walk through what we can recall from twenty years ago to see if anything hits you.\"\n\n\"Don't say it that way. But I know what you mean. Who is that honking?\" she asked and looked out the back window. \"Oh! I know that van. It's Dane Thompson's.\"\n\n\"Right. I was going to talk to him later, and here he is.\"\n\n\"It's like he's making a traffic stop on you.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Sit tight.\"\n\nGabe pulled over and got out. Maybe there was some emergency, but Dane was always a problem. The guy obviously believed the best defense was a good offense, but he evidently also liked being offensive. Ever since Gabe's dad had Dane pegged as Tess's most likely kidnapper, the guy had been on his case as much as the other way around.\n\nNow Dane was yelling and shaking a fist at Gabe as they met partway between their vehicles.\n\n\"I hear that same state government agent's back in town!\" Dane shouted. His thin face was red clear to his hairline. Spittle flecked his lips. Didn't he realize his demeanor made people dislike him? The man got along best with animals, maybe because he acted like one himself.\n\n\"Word travels fast to those who have a vested interest in a case,\" Gabe said, fighting to keep calm, because, like Reese Owens, Dane always got him going.\n\n\"Of course I'm interested, and not only for some poor child. How about my own situation getting worse again? Police harassment. Local gossip. Slander that can hurt the business I've built. Years ago I should have gotten a restraining order on both Mr. Victor-BCI-agent and Sheriff McCord Senior! Now McCord Junior's going to use the pick-on-Dane plan where they left off, I'll bet!\"\n\n\"If I had any proof\u2014so far\u2014that you were involved, you'd be in the holding cell in the police station.\"\n\n\"So, have you got a suspect or a witness?\" Dane demanded, squinting into the sun toward Gabe's cruiser. \"You pick on me again, and you'll be sorry. Wait\u2014is that Teresa Lockwood? My sister said that she was back.\"\n\nDane started to walk closer. \"Hold it right there,\" Gabe said.\n\n\"What?\" Dane rounded on him. \"Like I'd hurt her now like I did before? Sheriff, if she got away from my place\u2014which was searched, thoroughly, more than once in the months she was gone\u2014would she have been found wandering a couple miles from town? No, she'd have been found closer. I just want to say hi, like my sister did. Teresa\u2014I guess it's Tess now\u2014reciprocated with donuts, just the kind I like. Come on, she and I are cornfield neighbors again, Sheriff, and I don't want any hard feelings, or wrong ones, between any of the three of us.\"\n\nAs Gabe and Dane approached the cruiser, Gabe saw Tess had rolled the window halfway down on her side, maybe to hear what was being said.\n\n\"Hello, Dr. Thompson,\" she said. She rolled the window the rest of the way down and stuck her hand out to shake his.\n\nLooking surprised, Dane shook her hand and leaned down to talk while Gabe hovered. Something useful could come of this. Maybe Tess's facing this guy would trigger something in her memory if Dane had anything to do with the initial crime years ago. He had to admire the firm front she was putting up when she'd seemed shaky to him at times.\n\n\"Teresa\u2014I mean Tess\u2014nice to have you back, even if it is to sell and move away for good,\" Dane said.\n\n\"If you hear any of your clients\u2014I won't say patients, because my place isn't ready to go to the dogs yet\u2014would like an old house, let me know,\" she told him.\n\n\"Oh, yeah, sure,\" he said, evidently undecided whether to laugh at her little joke or not. \"I'll keep that in mind. I see you're very well protected, but I just wanted you to know that you or the sheriff are welcome to visit our place anytime. Marva loves company. She never had children and lost her husband, so we're getting on as best we can.\"\n\n\"She's been very kind.\"\n\nGabe took it all in, amazed as Tess chatted about the fact that she didn't have a husband or children either, but loved to be around kids, care for them and teach them. And about how good animals could be for little kids who were shy or afraid. She had calmed Dane down by the time he walked to his van and drove away.\n\nBut when Gabe got back in the cruiser, he saw she was shaking. Her hands were gripped so hard in her lap that her fingers had gone white. And tears were coursing down her cheeks.\n\n\"You remember something bad about him?\" Gabe asked. \"You carried on like that so he wouldn't know?\"\n\nShe shook her head hard and sniffed twice sharply. \"It's just that I thought he might be the one, so I tried to jolt something loose in my brain. Maybe he or Marva loves kids and so they take them, I don't know. He gave me the creeps, but I can't recall one bad thing about him. Sorry, Gabe,\" she said, wiping her wet nose with the back of her hand, \"but I don't think I'm going to be any help at all, when I want to so bad. But maybe the cornfield trip will work.\"\n\nHe reached over to squeeze her shoulder. Then she got a tissue out of her purse and blew her nose. Tess's handling of Dane impressed him. Here he'd thought she was timid and broken, but the way she'd just dealt with a potential suspect\u2014what a gutsy girl! He'd joked about making her a deputy, but he needed her, now in more ways than one.\n8\n\nAfter he dropped Tess off, Gabe drove to the crime scene. He parked on the street because he'd put up police tape in the alley. He'd finally contacted Sam Jeffers, who was bringing his dog, Boo, to track Sandy's scent\u2014he glanced at his watch\u2014in around ten minutes.\n\nGoing in the front door, he had to wade through a crowd of about a dozen people, two with news cameras on their shoulders, others thrusting cell phone recorders at him. He'd assigned Jace to do follow-ups on various vans that used the alley, food delivery for the Kwik Shop, the garbage collection truck, even the security vehicle that picked up money from the bank. Not that he thought they'd taken the girl, but what had they seen? A particular vehicle? Someone who didn't belong?\n\nAs the small crowd started to pepper him with questions, he held up both hands. \"We're working on finding evidence and a suspect to lead us to the kidnapped girl. That's my only statement right now. There will be a press conference tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Anything different this time, since you've made no progress on finding the others? Is Teresa Lockwood back to help with your investigation?\" a woman with horn-rimmed glasses, crimson lipstick and a pen stuck behind her ear demanded as she thrust her cell phone in his face.\n\nDeciding not to give them a sound bite to broadcast, he said, \"I promise a press statement at the conference tomorrow morning. Excuse me please.\"\n\nThe questions didn't stop. Gabe scanned the faces. It was common cop wisdom that some criminals loved to hang around the scene, fed off it, got high on it, but he didn't see any locals. No, there was one woman, a good-looking redhead who held up a large poster that read Hug Your Kids More! She kept trying to move behind Gabe to get on camera. Her name was Erika something. She was the social director at the Lake Azure Community Lodge, who did a lot of activities for children there and was a friend of Marian Bell. He recalled that Erika drove in from Chillicothe every day.\n\n\"I know you don't have any kids of your own, Sheriff,\" she called to him. \"So do you really think you can feel what the parents of the kidnapped girls are going through? Thanks to no progress on this string of abductions, people are starting to think Cold Creek is not a good place to raise children. The mayor's concerned it will bring real estate prices down lower than they already are. Little Amanda Bell and now this child are both\u2014\"\n\n\"Both getting a lot of attention to locate them. Local law enforcement is working with the cooperation of the state Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, so, as I said, if you'll excuse me, we'll get back to that.\"\n\n\"Any new suspects this time\u2014\" a man's voice pursued Gabe as he ducked under his police tape, went inside, closed and locked the shop door. Ducking the flying witches, he saw Vic was sitting at the sales counter going through receipts.\n\nWithout looking up, Vic called to Gabe, \"I'm not above doing grunt work. Been going over the civilian tips coming into your office, including from some psychics, and those are usually off-the-wall, but got to weed them out. Right now I'm checking credit card names of recent shoppers who could have seen Sandy, going back a couple of weeks. Glad you got through running the gauntlet out there. Man, you'd think a rural place like this wouldn't attract so many media vultures, but we'll have the national big boys in here if we don't turn something up fast. Get anything from Tess Lockwood?\"\n\nGabe felt he'd gotten a lot from her, some professional, but a lot personal. \"In about an hour, we're going to reenact her abduction on-site, what led up to it, see if we can spring some memory loose. She's all in to help. Your old friend Dane Thompson flagged down the cruiser and challenged me to lay off before I even went near him. He also insisted on saying hi to Tess, but she handled him great, even though she admitted he shook her up bad.\"\n\nVic finally looked up from his pile of papers. \"Shook up because she recalled something about him?\"\n\n\"Because she didn't.\"\n\n\"I swear, I sometimes wonder if Dane and that taxidermist friend of his could be in cahoots\u2014John Hillman. I used to picture them mounting dead girls and hiding their bodies in one of those animal graves.\"\n\nGabe shuddered. \"You should see Dane's house and cemetery now. Lots of money poured in. State-of-the-art.\"\n\n\"Oh, I will see it.\"\n\nVic was shaking his head as he went back to skimming sales slips. \"I remembered that taxidermist's name because he was my number two like for Tess's kidnapper. So give me an update on Dane Thompson, your dad's top pick for the suspect.\"\n\n\"He's done really well since the Lake Azure community opened. Lots of pampered pets instead of outside-doghouse and barn cats to tend to, I guess. He's built a new vet clinic, redone his house inside and out, bought a new van, takes Caribbean cruises in the winter.\"\n\n\"That right?\" Vic said, looking up again.\n\n\"About two years ago he asked his younger sister, Marva, to move in with him when she was widowed. She keeps his house, I suppose, but works at the spa uptown, which he might have money in too. She probably thinks she's died and gone to heaven because she was married to a small-time farmer with an old house and a played-out piece of land, which hasn't sold yet, by the way.\"\n\n\"I'd completely forgotten about her. We also checked out her husband's old barn and their house. I remember now sneaking around there after dark. Don't know why that slipped my mind since we thought Dane might have stashed Teresa there. We nearly got caught\u2014maybe that's why I blocked it out.\"\n\n\"So all of us have memory problems, right?\" Gabe challenged.\n\n\"Yeah, well, just be careful walking through this crime scene if you're meeting that tracker and his dog out back. Mike's been taking prints all over the place. I'll be out in a bit to take a look at Jeffers. Kids like dogs, trust people with dogs, you know\u2014a real ploy to lure them away, then, zap.\"\n\n\"You're thinking Sam Jeffers could be involved?\"\n\n\"Gabe,\" he said, glaring up at him, \"I know you're part of this community, and that's your strength as well as your weakness here. I think anyone could be involved. Trust no one, okay? You said you couldn't reach Jeffers even on his phone right after Sandy disappeared, that he was out hunting in the woods somewhere. And he's a loner, right? Hangs out who knows where?\"\n\n\"I know where. You want to go, I'll take you.\"\n\nGabe and his father had known Sam for a long time. Vic must have looked into him years ago, because it sounded as though he knew the man had several camping spots and crude hunting cabins. Over the years, Gabe's dad, Gabe and friends of his had been out hunting with Sam and he had always seemed like a stand-up guy. Gabe wanted to argue with Vic, but instead he stalked into the back room. He recalled now how Vic really annoyed his father sometimes. Hell, he might as well drag Pastor Snell in for questioning or longtime Mayor Owens, the little old librarian\u2014his deputy or himself!\n\nIn the storage area, Mike Morgan was kneeling on the floor taking photos. If not for the strobe flash, Gabe wouldn't have located him among the piles of boxes and the table, masks and costumes.\n\n\"Hey, Gabe,\" he said, peering over the top of a carton. \"I followed up on your deputy's Dumpster-diving in the alley, but they'd all just been emptied before she went missing, so not much to see. I called the waste management company that runs the trucks and told them the situation. I also processed and printed the Barbie doll if you want to let the dog sniff that. Hey, you look steamed. Vic lay his latest hunch on you?\"\n\n\"Yeah, but I think it's crazy. Anything helpful here yet?\"\n\n\"Lots of prints, probably mostly hers. I think she'd made a little dollhouse or play spot back here. Oh, yeah, I heard the dog out back a minute ago.\"\n\n\"Good. Here's hoping I'm not clutching at straws and his hound will turn something up.\"\n\n\"Speaking of straws, there's a really beat-up scarecrow thrown on the floor back here. Unlike the other decorations and figures, it's old-looking and dusty as heck. Can you phone Sandy's mother, ask her if it should be here? Everything else looks...well, better, like it could be for decoration or for sale, but not this.\"\n\n\"She may have just wanted something authentic-looking. But will do as soon as I see Jeffers work his dog.\"\n\n\"Sandy's Barbie doll is on the box by the back door.\" As Gabe took it in its plastic bag and went out, he saw Mike had debagged the doorknobs. \"Hey, Sam, thanks for coming with Boo,\" Gabe greeted the man, and they shook hands.\n\n\"Always willing to try again,\" Sam said, but Gabe decided not to dwell on the fact that this tactic had not panned out when Tess was taken.\n\nGabe's mom had always said Sam looked like how she imagined Johnny Appleseed. And she'd said he was ageless, as old as the hills. Maybe now Gabe would have to check him out, age, background, possible motives, though he thought Vic was really overstepping with that theory. Sam was lanky with a full, graying beard that made him look older than he was. He wore boots, patched jeans and a dirty green-and-white Ohio University baseball cap on backward. His sharp blue eyes assessed Gabe as did the hound's sad-looking eyes.\n\n\"So, how's the hunting?\" Gabe asked.\n\n\"Lots of deer. Trapping season too. Hope Boo don't smell like skunk. Last few days, we got us otters, beavers, coons, even coyotes, but old Boo got him a skunk this morning. Sorry it took me a while to get your message.\"\n\nBoo, who did smell slightly of skunk, sniffed the doll Gabe took from the bag and held out to him. The hound was eager to be off from the back door of the shop. Gabe's hopes rose. The dog was following what must be a clear path, tugging Sam along on the leash. Gabe quickly followed, scanning the ground in case something had been dropped. There'd be no footprints on this blacktop.\n\nAfter heading down the alley about twenty feet, the dog stopped behind the hardware store. Nose to ground, Boo went in circles, snorting, sniffing, then sat down and barked twice.\n\n\"What's that mean?\" Gabe asked.\n\n\"Her scent ends here,\" Sam said.\n\nDamn, Gabe thought. Just like when his dad used a tracker dog of Sam's in the cornfield and it lost the trail. \"Can you move him out a bit, see if he picks it up again?\"\n\nThey worked at that for nearly an hour, up, down the alley, near the creek. Nothing. Gabe swore under his breath, but they had learned something. The girl had walked\u2014unless she'd been dragged, but not carried\u2014out the back door and then had evidently climbed or been lifted into a vehicle behind the hardware store. Gabe wished that, like in big cities, there had been roof or pole cameras, but no such luck here. As he scanned the familiar area again, he saw Vic had come out and was watching, leaning against the gift shop door, arms crossed over his chest. How long had he been there?\n\nGabe thanked Sam and let him and Boo go. Sam ducked under the police tape, which Gabe went over to yank down in frustration.\n\n\"The dog's actions tell us something,\" Vic said, coming up behind him.\n\n\"Yeah, Sandy either knew the attacker and walked out a ways with him, or was intrigued by something enough to go outside without telling her mother and may have gotten in a vehicle parked out back\u2014with or without help. So now I'll get Jace to focus on interviewing in more depth the hardware store staff and their customers that day.\"\n\n\"Good. Hardware stores are a magnet for men. Ordinarily, any hardware store customers park out back here?\"\n\n\"Sure, especially if they want to load something into a truck or car.\"\n\n\"So there we go. I'll look through their sales slips that day too, see if I hit any matches with gift shop customers. Mike says you're going to ask Lindell Kenton about that scarecrow. Ask her if she'll come in and help me with matching hardware store names with her customers that day. And you, for now, focus on Tess Lockwood.\"\n\nGabe nodded. He was focusing on Tess Lockwood and not all for official reasons. It annoyed him that he couldn't get her out of his head.\n\nGabe and Vic watched Sam put Boo in his old pickup truck and drive away from down the alley where it hadn't been roped off. Then Vic helped him drag yards of yellow police tape toward the empty Dumpster behind the gift shop.\n\n\"I'll look into Sam too, but I'd vouch for him,\" Gabe told Vic. \"You're thinking of him as a possible perp, with Tess's abduction too, right?\"\n\n\"I didn't even consider Jeffers last time. It's bigger than that.\"\n\n\"So tell me,\" Gabe prodded when Vic seemed to hesitate.\n\n\"Don't like to admit this, but your illustrious mayor irritated me so much years ago when I was here on the Lockwood case I was tempted to slap him with obstruction of justice. Demanding things, ordering me around. Even told me to get out of town because I was 'bad PR.' So I ran a check on him. Not back then, but just a couple of days ago when I knew I was coming back here and found out he was still in office. Thought I might turn up a drunk driving charge, whatever. He annoyed your dad, and I'll bet he does you too.\"\n\n\"Got to admit he does.\"\n\n\"I'll show you the printout. Years ago, when he lived in Chillicothe, in his late teens, he was arrested for lewd acts on a minor child\u2014a five-year-old girl\u2014but the charges were dismissed.\"\n\n\"What? Man, you are reaching\u2014but...\"\n\n\"Yeah, but. Thought you might want to go yourself or send Deputy Miller to Reese Owens's old neighborhood where it happened, see if someone recalls the circumstances, because except for this item I stumbled onto, other references to it seemed just gone. I only found a memo where a court clerk had jotted down notes, including a notation that Owens's arrest and court records were either lost or sealed. They're still missing, Gabe. Reese Owens may be mayor of a small town, but he's got some big political heft and money ties through his marriage. Look, right now I'll stay here with Mike till he gets done so you can get back to Teresa\u2014Tess. What's locked inside that pretty head of hers is exactly what we need.\"\n\n* * *\n\nTess sat on the picnic table again, waiting, until she heard a car pull in the driveway. To her surprise Gabe was not in his sheriff uniform but jeans and a red-and-black flannel shirt. That's right. He'd been wearing something like that when it happened. She remembered that much. She hopped off the table, suddenly afraid, but still wanting to do this.\n\n\"You okay?\" he asked, and waited until she nodded. \"When we go into the field, we don't have to go clear over toward Dane's.\"\n\n\"I didn't know you meant to go really far.\"\n\n\"Let's just do what you think is best\u2014is right\u2014once we get going. Okay, so I was over there where there used to be a swing set, just sitting on a swing, keeping an eye on you and three other kids. I think it rusted out before Lee and Grace's kids got to use it. Anyway, you kept running past me, giving me a good shove in the back so I swung when I was trying to sit still. The other kids were playing in the sandbox like I asked, but\u2014\"\n\n\"But I didn't and even heaved a handful of sand your way.\"\n\nHe nodded but a slight grin lifted the corner of his lips. \"I'll bet, even then, you were just trying to get my attention.\"\n\n\"So then,\" she said, wanting to tease him back but wishing even more to get this over with, \"I started darting through the corn. I remember hitting the stalks to rock them, bounce them out of my way.\"\n\n\"I yelled at you about being a tomboy, to get back out here.\"\n\n\"A crazy tomboy,\" she added.\n\n\"I yelled so loud that the other kids quit playing and turned around to look at me.\"\n\n\"I think I went deeper in then, thinking you might come after me.\"\n\n\"I should have,\" he said, moving closer. \"How about you go into the field, but I'll go with you, right behind you?\"\n\nShe nodded but hesitated. What had crushed the full-of-life girl in her? Whoever had done it made her angry. They had no right to ruin her life, hurt her family, torment Gabe. Had there been a \"they\" or just one person? And who? Who?\n\nShe shouldered her way into the corn, ripe and heavy with ears that bumped her shoulders and hips. It was still taller than her but not sky-high as it had seemed then. Gracie had said the same man, Aaron Kurtz, who lived down the road, still owned and farmed it. He'd been appalled, Tess remembered hearing, that she'd been snatched from his land. He'd sent Christmas gifts to them the year Dad deserted them. Oh, thank you, Lord, she prayed. Detailed memories were coming quicker, surer.\n\nThe rows of green leaves, some turning tan and dry, went straight away from the house at first, then curved to fit the contour of the distant, slight hill before leveling out again, reaching toward Dane Thompson's property. She heard Gabe right behind, his size making rustling noises louder than hers.\n\nSo that day, had her abductor been waiting, standing still in the corn, and she ran toward him? Was he tracking her through the corn by where she moved the stalks? Should she have heard him as she heard Gabe now? Had someone driven past the house and heard or seen they were playing in the backyard and come into the field to take one of the girls\u2014any one of them? Or had she been the target?\n\nIt had to be a random choice of victim, didn't it? A crime of opportunity, as they called it? Or worse, had someone taken her because of something she'd done or who she was?\n\n\"Wait,\" she said, turning back to Gabe. \"I'm going to stoop down, like it would have looked to me then.\"\n\n\"Missing, four-year-old Teresa Lockwood, blond hair in a single, long braid, wearing denim jeans and a yellow sweatshirt,\" Gabe recited. \"That was the wording on your missing-child posters. Pink plastic Princess Leia watch on left wrist. Blue-eyed, weight thirty-six pounds, height three and one-half feet.\"\n\nShe shivered. This memory probe might be as important to him as it was to her. She crouched a bit, her back to Gabe, staring up through the corn at the vast sky....\n\nShe heard the monster sound from decades of dreams. A muted roar, this time, not so close\u2014but real! She stood, turned and threw herself against Gabe, holding tight. His arms came hard around her.\n\n\"What?\" he demanded. \"Tell me!\"\n\n\"That's the sound. The monster!\" she told him, blinking back tears. \"Hear that?\"\n\n\"Tess, it's only Aaron Kurtz's big harvester\u2014his reaper. He's in the field beyond my house. He won't come roaring through here now, so\u2014\"\n\n\"No, I mean I heard that sound in this field that day!\"\n\nHe held her tight. \"And it scared you, and you ran farther from the house? Maybe toward Dane Thompson's or the side road?\"\n\n\"The reaper\u2014in my dreams, I turned it into a dinosaur or some sort of monster. But the reaper cutting in this field that day was louder. I think he sat so high in the cab that I saw his head go past. Yes, I do recall that now.\"\n\n\"My father questioned him, but he said he saw nothing unusual. You don't mean that he took you?\"\n\n\"No! I mean, I don't think so. I must have ducked down, or got pulled down when he went past. When I screamed\u2014more than the one time you mentioned\u2014no one could hear me. Then I was too scared to scream at all. But I dreamed a warped memory of that for years, a big monster cutting and chopping me apart and taking me away.\"\n\n\"Away to where? Which way?\"\n\nShe pulled from his grasp and looked around. She turned in a circle, again, again, trying to figure it out, until she got dizzy and Gabe grabbed her elbows to hold her up. She slapped her hand to the side of her neck as if something had bitten her there.\n\n\"I...I just don't know. Gabe, I still just don't know!\"\n9\n\nTess had just closed the curtains over the window facing the cornfield when someone knocked on her front door. Dusk had fallen. Gabe couldn't be back already. Besides, he used the back door.\n\nPeeking out the front porch window, she saw a pretty, red-haired woman she did not recognize. Alone. She didn't look like a reporter. Her blue-green sports car was parked far down the driveway. Maybe she was lost. Tess opened only the inside door and kept the storm door locked.\n\n\"May I help you?\"\n\n\"If you're Tess Lockwood, yes. I'm here to inquire about buying your house. I'm Erika Petersen, the social director at the Lake Azure Community Lodge. I drive back and forth to Chillicothe every day and I'd like a closer place.\"\n\nTess's stomach cartwheeled. To sell this place and be able to buy her own back in Michigan was just what she'd hoped for.\n\n\"Yes, won't you come in?\" She unlocked the outer door for the woman. Erika brought a waft of scented powder with her that made Tess want to sneeze. When Erika took off her suede jacket, her emerald-green cashmere sweater was stunning. Her knee-high boots were fringed, just as Marian Bell's had been. This woman must be in her late forties, but her cosmetics were so carefully and subtly applied she looked years younger. She wore a big rock of a diamond ring next to her wedding band.\n\n\"Have you seen our Lake Azure area? So lovely there,\" Erika said as her eyes scanned the room before she sat in the rocking chair Tess indicated.\n\n\"Just to drive through. It was barely begun when I left the area. I suppose you know why my family left?\"\n\n\"Yes. As I'm a friend of Marian Bell's, I can totally empathize and sympathize with what you and your family went through.\"\n\nTess doubted that, but at least this woman seemed reasonable, not distraught like Marian. And she was interested in the house.\n\nErika went on, \"I don't mind the daily commute to Chillicothe when the weather's nice, but now that it's autumn again I've finally talked my husband into letting me get a place nearby just for the weekdays, when I'm here\u2014social director at the lodge, great job, demanding...\"\n\nThis was the woman, Tess thought, biting back a smile, Miss Etta didn't like because she ran book clubs that competed with the Cold Creek Library. Clubs, as the longtime librarian put it, where people got their books \"out of the air.\"\n\n\"I'm sure that career keeps you busy and on your toes,\" Tess said.\n\n\"Oh, it does. Even though I have an assistant, there are a lot of weekends I need to be here too. I'd fix this place up, of course, my country pied-\u00e0-terre....\"\n\nTess noted that, for a woman who worked with people all the time, Erika didn't look her directly in the eye. Her gaze darted around the room, but she probably wanted a tour of the house or was already imagining how she'd decorate it. Erika also had a habit of dropping her voice at the end of a sentence as if there were more to say, but it was a secret.\n\n\"May I give you a tour?\" Tess asked.\n\n\"Oh, yes\u2014but let's schedule that for another time, and I'll bring a friend with me. I need to head home. Promised I'd meet my husband for dinner at seven. There is something I need to tell you up front, a couple of things. I have a financial backer of sorts and it's not my husband. If you sell this property to me\u2014for a very healthy price, I promise, cash up front\u2014you would need to meet in private and in confidence with my friend Marian Bell to help her find her daughter.\"\n\nTess's hopes crashed. She almost burst into tears. Marian Bell was behind this and had sent a go-between this time. The bait was Marian's money. And the \"in confidence\" part of the bargain was, no doubt, to go behind Gabe's back. Why couldn't people believe she was telling the truth about not recalling her childhood trauma?\n\n\"Please tell Ms. Bell,\" Tess said, \"that I would love to sell but not with strings attached, especially ones tied in knots. I do not recall my abduction details, my captivity or my captor. As you put it, I sympathize and empathize, but I cannot help her as she wishes, even for a bribe I would love to take.\"\n\nErika's back stiffened. \"A bribe? Hardly that! Marian is kind enough to help me buy this house, that's all.\"\n\n\"Then, until either of you buys it straight-out with no hidden agenda,\" Tess said, standing, \"tell her I'm so sorry about Amanda, but that's all I can offer her.\"\n\nErika didn't even put her jacket back on, grabbing it from the back of her chair and walking out. Had Gabe gotten a restraining order against Marian for bothering Tess so she had to send her friend? God forgive her, but it had entered Tess's mind that a few lies to Marian could help Tess have her dream and get out of here for good, but think how much damage that would do. No, she had to stay here longer to help Gabe, maybe even help find Amanda, Jill and Sandy.\n\nAs Erika's car roared off down the road\u2014how could that small thing make so much noise?\u2014Tess saw a vehicle she did recognize. The old white square truck marked CC Library Bookmobile pulled into her drive.\n\nThough she was wiping away tears of disappointment, Tess almost smiled. It looked as if Miss Etta Falls had been stalking her book club competition.\n\n\"Miss Etta,\" she called, going out to meet her. \"Do you know who that was?\"\n\n\"By her license plate, CLBQN,\" she said with a nod and a sniff.\n\n\"What's that stand for?\"\n\n\"Club Queen. Oh, I've had more than one discussion with that woman when she came in to see if we had the latest books\u2014without a library card of her own. Not always the latest, but the greatest books, I told her.\"\n\n\"She was considering buying the house, but I turned down her offer.\"\n\n\"Good for you. You see I haven't changed the bookmobile one bit, don't you? Does it bring back memories of reading with your mother and sisters? Your father, I think, was interested in other things,\" she said with another sniff.\n\n\"Yes, I have those memories, at least.\"\n\n\"Well, I came by with several books I thought you might like. Can't say 'enjoy,' but they might help you. Not to recall the past, but just to cope with the present.\"\n\nShe pulled a book bag from the back of the van, slammed its door and started for the house. Tess, touched but hesitant to take on any books, followed. No one ever crossed Miss Etta, in the library or out.\n\n\"Now, these are books you can skim-read until something strikes you as helpful or personal,\" Miss Etta was saying as Tess held the door open for her. \"Oh, my, bare bones in here, so you will have time to read\u2014no need to be fussing with other things. And a rocking chair is the perfect place, right by a window.\"\n\nTess sat, feeling she was the preschool child and Miss Etta the teacher. The woman hauled out three books and gave a little summary of each, and as she spoke, Tess became more interested. One was Too Scared to Cry, another Psychic Trauma in Childhood, both by a woman psychiatrist. The third was Unchained Memories: True Stories of Traumatic Memories Lost and Found.\n\n\"If any of these help you\u2014bounce something loose in that sharp brain of yours\u2014you let me know. I've read all of these, just out of interest. So, if you need advice, I could talk you through some things, maybe go with you to the sheriff. You are working with him, aren't you?\"\n\n\"I'd like to but I really can't help much.\"\n\n\"Well, don't fret. That specialist he has here from the BCI will find the girls, if they are to be found. And steer clear of Dane Thompson,\" she added as she got to her feet and picked up the now empty book bag. \"He reads true crime,\" she said in a whisper. \"And that cemetery of his is an abomination. Oh, here in the bottom of the bag\u2014your temporary library card. I know you don't intend to stay long, so just bring that back with the books. I am sure you'll be more amenable to thinking about your situation than your cousin Lee and his wife were about theirs,\" she added with a shake of her head.\n\nTess waved to her from the front porch as the spry woman climbed up into the van, honked and drove away. One of the taillights on the old vehicle was out. She wondered if Gabe would ever dare to pull Miss Etta over for that.\n\nAt least some things never changed around here\u2014good things\u2014Tess thought. Maybe she'd take a look at those books. And Miss Etta's mentioning Lee and Gracie made her remember she still hadn't taken their kids the gifts she'd brought. First thing in the morning she was heading for the Hear Ye Commune. Seeing her cousin's family would cheer her up, after getting her hopes dashed for the sale of the house. And she'd have to tell Gabe about that.\n\n* * *\n\nTess was surprised she had to wait in an anteroom at the Hear Ye compound to see if Gracie, Lee or the children were available. After about a quarter of an hour\u2014she was getting bad vibes about this place\u2014Gracie came in with Kelsey and Ethan. Four-year-old Kelsey, her blond braid bobbing, ran to give Tess a hug, but Ethan hung back until Gracie brought him over for hugs all around. It was only after chatting with the kids and reaching for the gift sack that Tess saw another woman had come in behind them and stood by the door. She was tall and big-boned. Her arms were crossed over her breasts.\n\n\"Oh, hello,\" Tess said, wondering if the woman could be a preschool teacher here. If so, she had a much too serious expression to encourage kids.\n\n\"Forgot to tell you,\" Gracie said. \"This is Naomi, a friend. Since you mentioned you have personal presents for Kelsey and Ethan, she'll help distribute them.\"\n\n\"To whom? I brought gifts for them.\"\n\n\"To the others\u2014their friends. I'm sure you teach your pupils to share, and we're real big on that here. You know, Give unto others.\"\n\n\"I suppose the LEGOs could go far, but a doll\u2014\"\n\n\"A doll is wonderful,\" Naomi cut in, \"to teach all the young sisters to care for others.\"\n\nTo Tess's further amazement and unease, even before she could lift the gifts from the sack, Gracie took it and handed it to Naomi.\n\n\"The children have to head back to school now,\" Gracie said, twisting the bottom of her denim jacket in her hands. Except for that, she wore the same style of dress as Naomi, though they were in different dark colors.\n\n\"Back to school? Preschool? But I just got here,\" Tess insisted. \"Well, can I see their schoolroom, then?\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" Gracie said, and rolled her eyes, either in an effort to subtly criticize Naomi and this place, or\u2014was that some sort of warning? But about what? To agree to this? To back off?\n\nTess kneeled again to hug the children goodbye. It wasn't her imagination that Kelsey clung to her. The little girl no doubt recalled earlier gifts, the phone calls and recent visit for Mom's funeral. Maybe she'd even been told about or seen photos of the earlier visits to Michigan before Lee got completely swept up by all this.\n\n\"Don't worry about us\u2014or think about us anymore. We're fine. Just fine,\" Gracie whispered, and, pulling Ethan along, followed the others out. Hurt and shocked, Tess stood there with tears in her eyes. They had left the door open as if she was to find her own way out.\n\nAs she strode from the room, down the hall she'd come in, she almost felt as if Kelsey and little Ethan\u2014even Gracie\u2014had been abducted. Her sadness mingled with sharp anger. Was that what the families of the victims of the Cold Creek kidnapper felt too? She could not recall her emotions when she was taken besides feeling so very lost.\n\nOnce she was outside, Tess saw she was being watched. The man at the gate who had let her in was still standing there, staring at her as she walked toward her car.\n\nA scream pierced the air, carried on the chill wind. A woman's? A girl's? Where? Could that be Gracie, screaming for her to come back? Someone in pain or in trouble?\n\nIt came again, shrill, sudden. Tess turned back and started to run in the direction of the sound. She heard the man at the gate running after her. What if these strange people took in extra children by force? What if Gracie's rolling her eyes like that was some sort of signal? What if a woman or a child, maybe a young girl, kidnapped and new to this place, one who had not yet been brainwashed, was screaming for help?\n\n\"Wait! Hold it right there!\" the man behind her shouted, but she kept going.\n\nShe heard no more screams, but she could see the building they must have come from. If she discovered an imprisoned child, wouldn't that put her in danger too? Maybe she should get Gabe's help, come back. But what if they had hidden or hurt the child by then?\n\nThis religious compound had not even been here when Tess was taken, though their leader, Brice Monson, had had a house here twenty years ago. She couldn't recall much about him, except people thought he was weird. Had they ever looked at him as a possibility for the kidnapper? He seemed to take people in by seducing them mentally, not taking them physically.\n\nThe guard snagged her arm and spun her around.\n\n\"Let me go! I heard someone scream!\"\n\nHe released her but blocked her way toward the house. \"I know who you are,\" he said, not yelling, but in a quiet, controlled tone she had not expected. \"I'm Brother Silas. I can see why you'd react, but some children protest at first when disciplined.\"\n\n\"Disciplined? She sounded like...like she was being tortured.\"\n\n\"Look, this is none of your business. Chastisement is the only way to correct a wayward child, and it will deliver his or her soul from hell.\"\n\nWere they crazy here? Her own cousin Lee and her dear friend Gracie? As if she'd summoned him, Lee came running.\n\n\"Sorry, I was busy when you met with Grace and the kids,\" he told her. He was out of breath; his face was red. \"And don't get all upset,\" he said, throwing an arm around her shoulders and propelling her away from Silas and back toward the gate. \"That child has stolen things, and she was spanked by her own father.\"\n\nTess pulled away. \"In front of others, to keep them in line?\"\n\n\"Only in the presence of Bright Star, our leader and guide.\"\n\n\"Did she supposedly steal things that maybe once were given to her and taken away by everyone else?\" Tess challenged, hands on her hips. Even if Silas and Lee had spoken softly, she was still shouting.\n\n\"Tess, listen to me. It's a good lesson, sharing. Caring for others. If we let kids run wild, they turn out wild.\"\n\nBlinking back tears, Tess headed back toward her car. The gate guard had backed off. It was almost as if Lee was her guard now. And, curse it, she was going to tell Gabe about this and come back here. After all, Lee wanted her help with dowsing. Of course, if she told Gabe everything\u2014anything about today\u2014he might not let her return. He and Vic Reingold might come in here with force, and the Hear Ye people might hide or punish her family\u2014and maybe Sandy Kenton, if they had her.\n\n\"Okay,\" she said to Lee. \"You're right about discipline for kids. Sorry I overreacted.\"\n\n\"Sure. I understand your protective instincts\u2014being a preschool teacher and all. So, can you help me with the dowsing while you're here? The site is that knoll over there above the creek,\" he said, pointing. \"We can use my willow wand.\"\n\nThat was her perfect excuse to stay right now or come back, and he'd set it up, she thought. \"I have to leave, but I can come back later today,\" she said. \"Besides, I want to try one of my father's old wands\u2014and maybe yours too.\"\n\n\"Great. Appreciate it, Tess, and so will everyone.\"\n\nMaybe not everyone, she thought as she waved and walked away, past Silas, through the gate to her car, hoping she hadn't seemed to agree too easily. Too bad that knoll was not in the compound itself, but maybe she could convince Lee to let her dowse the grounds inside too.\n\nTess knew Gabe would have a fit if she tried to check out this place without telling him first. Besides, she wanted to go uptown to see how they were coming with Sandy's case and whether she could learn the circumstances of Amanda Bell's abduction. She had to find the key to unlock her memories, even if those might make things worse than not remembering at all.\n10\n\nTess ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for an early lunch, then did something she knew she shouldn't. While pacing from the kitchen to the living room as she had while she'd eaten, she poured herself a glass of wine and downed it fast. Then she realized Gabe would smell it on her breath, or if she drove erratically and he or his deputy picked her up\u2014but no, they must be busy with the Kenton case.\n\nShe drove carefully, wondering whether to try the gift shop or the police station first. She should have called Gabe and let him come to her, but she didn't want him to think she'd remembered something big. Maybe the books Miss Etta had left would trigger something.\n\nAbout ten media people more or less camped out near the gazebo on the town square with two satellite trucks parked nearby. It was enough to make her turn back, but she only ducked her head and hurried into the station\u2014unnoticed, she hoped.\n\nShe saw Ann on the front desk again. Three strapping men in jeans and flannel shirts waited nearby, talking among themselves. Had Gabe found a suspect, or arranged some sort of lineup? Not for her to view, she hoped, but then they were all too young to have had anything to do with her abduction.\n\nAnn got off the phone and spoke to the men. \"You'll have to go without me, bros. Too much going on here. Hi, Tess. The sheriff's in the conference room if you need to see him again. How was the waterfall? It's one of Gabe's and my favorite places.\"\n\nTess could have fallen through the floor. Ann and Gabe\u2014together\u2014that way? She'd had no idea, but she could tell the three men did. Ann's brothers might be triplets since they looked like clones of each other. She overheard a few teasing remarks about Ann and Gabe, including something about \"the sheriff of Hot Creek.\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" Tess said, suddenly having trouble forming her thoughts. \"Did the sheriff tell you about the graffiti we went to see? If you would tell him I'm here, I'd appreciate it.\"\n\nAnn nodded but narrowed her eyes. \"These are my brothers, triple trouble. They work at the lumber mill just outside town, and they can't get it through their wooden heads I'm totally tied up with this case right now and have to miss our weekly pub lunch. Just ignore them.\"\n\nAnn's brothers resembled Paul Bunyan\u2013type lumberjacks. They hardly seemed the type for the English pub, but then appearances were often deceiving.\n\nTess nodded, but she could hardly ignore what she'd just learned. Gabe and Ann were seeing each other. Yet he'd kissed her, held her. Some sort of magnetic force pulled them together. But\u2014had that just been her imagination? Or had Gabe been cleverly coercing information from her?\n\nFrowning, Ann punched a button and spoke into the phone. \"Tess Lockwood's here. Want me to send her back or have her wait? I figured. He's coming out to get you,\" Ann said even as Gabe appeared in the hall and gestured for her to come back. He met her partway and took her elbow.\n\n\"You okay?\" he asked.\n\n\"I just wondered what you'd uncovered so far\u2014if that might spark something in my molasses-thick thoughts. And Marian Bell's friend Erika Petersen stopped by with a cash offer for my house\u2014if I meet with Marian to help her find her daughter.\"\n\n\"Clever move since I told Marian to steer clear of you. I didn't take out a restraining order but threatened to. But I still can't blame\u2014\"\n\n\"Me either. Blame her. I guess I'd move heaven and earth to get my girl back.\"\n\nTess thought again of Lee and Gracie in that religious group. They wanted to help their kids, but as far as she was concerned, they were actually endangering them.\n\n\"I kind of got the idea just now that Ann considers you her very close friend,\" Tess blurted out.\n\n\"We've dated, but I'm not as close to any next steps as she\u2014and her band of brothers\u2014like to think.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" she said, sounding stupid to herself. This was not only the wrong time and place for that talk, but truly none of her business. Except for that kiss.\n\n\"Want to see Victor Reingold after all this time?\" Gabe asked. \"We were just going over things, so maybe you can help\u2014and if not, fine. Anything else new?\"\n\n\"I'll see him. Like I said before, though his hard work didn't locate me, I've always been grateful to him, and Mom was too. But nothing else is new.\"\n\nShe almost told Gabe about the screams at the Hear Ye compound. It was like lying to him not to, but she'd tell him later, if she was sure he and Agent Reingold wouldn't go in there like gangbusters. Or maybe they'd tell her something so that she could explain her suspicions to them. Maybe it would be better if she went back in there without law enforcement.\n\nGabe walked her down the hall, past his deputy's office and his own to the last room before the door that said Detention. It had a big lock and a grated window high on the door, so it must be the jail cell.\n\n\"Vic, you remember Tess Lockwood,\" Gabe said as they entered a big conference room.\n\n\"Sure do, but not looking like that,\" Vic said as he got up to come around the table.\n\nIt was what Tess could only call a war room. Kate had taken her to London for a week a few years ago, and they'd seen Winston Churchill's World War II war rooms deep underground. This was similar to what they'd seen there\u2014wall maps with lines of yarn stuck in with pins on bulletin boards, piles of papers, strewn photos. But here, two laptops sat on the table.\n\nAgent Reingold walked closer, limping. Had he always limped?\n\n\"Hey, my favorite survivor,\" he said, his voice gruff. The man had tears in his eyes. He held her at arm's length with his hands on her shoulders and studied her. \"You look great, Ter\u2014Tess.\"\n\n\"You too, Agent Reingold.\"\n\n\"Hey, no little white lies now,\" he said, making her feel guilty again as he pulled out a chair for her and Gabe sat beside her. Agent Reingold made his way back around the table. \"We appreciate your trying with Gabe\u2014to remember anything,\" he added hastily. \"And you can call me Vic, since we go way back, okay?\"\n\n\"Okay, sure. I don't mean to intrude, but I thought if I knew about Sandy Kenton's clues\u2014disappearance\u2014it might make me remember something, if, that is, it's not privileged information.\"\n\n\"What is privileged, we'll keep quiet,\" Gabe said, \"but we've scheduled a news conference in about half an hour in the town square. You might want to keep a low profile until the media scatter\u2014if that even gets rid of them. Then we could walk down the alley if you want to see the storage room the girl disappeared from, but it's a far cry from a cornfield.\"\n\nA far cry, echoed in Tess's head. She heard again that girl's screams from that Hear Ye building, even heard her own scream years ago before the monster came and darkness descended.\n\n\"That would be fine,\" she said.\n\n\"You can just wait here,\" Gabe said. \"It does appear Sandy might have known her abductor, because she evidently walked a ways outside with him\u2014or her\u2014before getting in a vehicle. We figured that out from using a tracker and his dog. I'm not sure you ever knew this, Tess, but when you were taken, Sam Jeffers and one of his tracking dogs followed your scent through the cornfield. When the hound lost the trail, we tried to go by where the corn looked pushed aside or disturbed.\"\n\nDisturbed. Why hadn't Gabe, her mother\u2014someone\u2014ever told her they'd tried to track her before? They'd tried to protect her when facing memories might have been better. She was desperate to face\u2014and recall\u2014them now.\n\n\"Also,\" Vic said, \"when the dog lost your scent\u2014probably because you were then being carried\u2014we tried to lift the hound to see if he could catch your scent off cornstalks or hanging ears you might have brushed against. No go.\"\n\n\"A minute ago you referred to my abductor as him or her. Do you think it could have been a woman?\"\n\n\"Standard procedure,\" Vic said. \"We assume it's a man, but we don't know for sure. A young girl's taken, then people jump to conclusions. But you came back physically intact, Tess, and that's hardly ever the case if a man takes a young girl.\"\n\nNot raped, he meant. Yet she'd been drugged and beaten. But how that happened or by whom was long gone.\n\nLeaning closer to her, Gabe said, \"You've got to realize if you sit in with us\u2014which we both want you to\u2014the talk gets tough at times.\"\n\n\"I understand. And you handled that very carefully\u2014I was returned intact.\" But I still feel like I'm in a million pieces sometimes, she told herself. Then she recalled the reason she came.\n\n\"Gabe, about dealing with Marian Bell. Was there anything in her daughter's disappearance that could be a tie-in to me or the others who went missing?\"\n\n\"Only that she was taken from her backyard, which Marian says is a big enough link,\" Gabe explained. Vic looked up from writing something down, longhand, when a laptop was right beside him.\n\nGabe went on, \"She was out there with her pet cat, which was left behind. Not a peep, not a sound. Did take her jacket though, which she'd earlier discarded. It was as if the abductor cared that she stayed warm and was not in a total rush to grab and go. No drag marks, tire marks, no trace, no witnesses, so basically that's the same.\"\n\n\"So why aren't you convinced Amanda could have been taken by the same person?\"\n\n\"Her father took flights from Columbus to Miami to Rio the next day. No child was with him, but there was one who matched Amanda's description with a woman on an earlier flight to Rio. The child had a passport, of course, but not with Amanda's name. And then, even though her father had done business in Rio and had contacts there, the trail\u2014Amanda's father, Peter Bell, the woman's and the child's\u2014grows completely cold.\"\n\n\"Poor Marian.\"\n\n\"First we worked with the police in Rio. Now Marian's hired a private detective. I'd bet my house Amanda's father is down there under an assumed name with his daughter and the woman he loves. He and Marian were going through a bitter divorce and they both wanted custody of their only child.\"\n\nA bitter divorce, like my parents, Tess thought, though that similarity obviously ended there. The order of her being taken and Dad's leaving was the reverse of what had happened to Marian and her daughter. But, because Tess was a tomboy when she was small and her older sisters were more like Mom, Tess had always felt\u2014Kate and Char had too\u2014Dad favored Tess. But there was no way her own father would have taken her, even if Amanda's did.\n\n\"Jill Stillwell, the second girl who was taken, and then Sandy\u2014no problems between the parents, right?\" she asked.\n\n\"Not a factor,\" Gabe and Vic said, almost in unison.\n\n\"Good head on your shoulders though, Tess,\" Vic said. He looked back to what she assumed were his notes for the news conference.\n\nGabe, elbows on the cluttered table, said, \"Let me go over with you what we do know and can share about Sandy's disappearance.\"\n\nHe talked about the child's play area in the back room of the store. He mentioned a well-timed phone call her mother took from a customer, which might have been part of a setup\u2014a call they were trying to trace. The fact that the girl had never strayed on her own was noted. The chaos of the crime scene. The Barbie doll and the soiled, tattered scarecrow they couldn't account for.\n\nTess gasped. \"A scarecrow?\" Now, why, she thought, did that mere word make her stomach cramp? Had she seen one in the cornfield the day she was taken?\n\n\"Yeah,\" Gabe said as Vic looked up again. \"One Sandy's mother said had never been in the shop anywhere, though she had ordered some small ones that had not arrived.\"\n\n\"A scarecrow?\" Tess repeated, frowning.\n\n\"So?\" Gabe prompted.\n\n\"Nothing. It just seems weird. Maybe it's just the word scare I'm reacting to. Even though all this happened to me years ago, and I know I'm safe now, the whole thing still scares me.\"\n\n\"Let's get the scarecrow from the forensics lab in the truck and unbag it, get Mike to drive back here,\" Vic said. \"He's only been on the road to headquarters about fifteen minutes. I agree the scarecrow's weird, but so is all of this.\"\n\n\"I'll have Ann call Mike,\" Gabe said. \"He ought to make it back right after the news conference. Tess, you want to wait here for us? There's a smaller conference room, empty, that might be better next door.\"\n\n\"Yes, fine. You know, I was afraid I'd be spotted coming in.\"\n\n\"I'll have Ann tell Mike not to bring the scarecrow in until you and I are back,\" Gabe told Vic as he escorted Tess out.\n\nHe walked Tess next door to a much smaller room with a regular door, a narrow table and two chairs facing each other. There was no evidence of the investigation in here.\n\n\"An interview room?\" she asked.\n\n\"Multipurpose, but yes.\"\n\n\"With all those reporters out there, I feel like it's my safe room.\"\n\n\"I don't want you to feel that way\u2014as if you're under attack, or we're grilling you.\" He put his arm around her waist as he pulled out a straight-backed chair for her and she sat down. One hand on the table, he bent closer to her. She could tell he'd had pizza or something Italian for lunch, but on his breath, it was enticing. She leaned slightly toward him.\n\n\"You really reacted to the mere mention of a scarecrow, Tess. Anything else that comes to mind then?\"\n\n\"Fear. Something flapping in my face. Maybe being hit\u2014smackings.\"\n\n\"Smackings? Is that a word your parents used with you?\"\n\n\"I don't think so. I can ask my sisters.\"\n\n\"If not, your using that term would not relate to anything in your own family, like a punishment or spanking paddle.\"\n\n\"Right. I really don't think my parents had anything like that.\"\n\n\"So that could be a memory of your time away that popped out. And once there's a trickle of memory, there could be a gush of it. Well, I read that in a book somewhere.\"\n\n\"Oh, Miss Etta gave me some books on childhood trauma I'm going to read.\"\n\n\"Let me know if something stands out.\"\n\nShe did think then of hearing that a Hear Ye girl was being spanked for stealing. Should she tell Gabe right now that she was determined to learn all she could about that girl, maybe to help her if she was imprisoned at the compound?\n\n\"Gabe, let's go!\" Vic's voice came from down the hall.\n\nGabe squeezed her shoulder. When he moved away, his hand brushed through her hair, almost like a caress. But this was no time to imagine things, not about the past or the present. Especially since it seemed Gabe and Ann had something going on. And what did it matter to her? She wanted to sell her house and get out of here just as fast as she could, but if she could help herself or others in the short time she was here, then\u2014\n\nA voice interrupted her agonizing. Ann.\n\n\"Gabe said to bring you coffee and a donut,\" she said as she put the mug and a powdered sugar donut in front of her. \"I'm going out to watch the news conference. My brothers are gone, but Peggy, our night dispatcher's, out front if you need anything.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Ann.\"\n\n\"Think nothing of it. But think about this,\" she said, her tone hardening. \"Gabe's obsessed with this case\u2014yours and the others, of course. But if you can't help him, you should clear out so having you around doesn't keep reminding him of his father's failures. You know what I mean. Maybe you should talk to Aaron Kurtz, who owns all those fields around your place. Maybe he'd want to buy your property, demolish the house and garage for more arable land. He's always trying to expand his holdings. You know, think outside the box to sell your house fast.\"\n\nAnd get away from Gabe fast, was the rest of the message.\n\n\"Thanks for the suggestion,\" Tess said, gripping the hot mug between her hands.\n\n\"Yeah. Sure,\" Ann said. She almost ran from the room.\n\nThink outside the box. Someone was still taking little girls, someone local, maybe right under their noses. So she was definitely going to take a closer look at the goings-on at Hear Ye. And maybe she should go talk to Aaron Kurtz, although, obviously, Gabe and Vic had crossed him off their list long ago. Both of those decisions scared her.\n\nBut what really churned up long-buried terror was the mere mention of a scarecrow.\n11\n\nTime crawled for Tess. One of those big, round schoolroom-type clocks glared down from the opposite wall of the tiny office. Not only did the minutes seem too slow, but the clock hands jerked with a strange sound not quite a ticktock.\n\nHalf an hour passed. Wasn't the press conference in the town square over yet?\n\nShe heard footsteps in the hall. Good! Gabe was back, but did he have the scarecrow? Surely it wasn't just that she'd seen a scarecrow the day she was abducted. No, it was something more than that.\n\nShe stood, facing the door, bracing her thighs against the edge of the table. When the door opened, it wasn't Gabe, but a man she knew even after all these years, though he was heavier than she recalled.\n\nMayor Reese Owens paused at the door, as if to see if she recognized him.\n\n\"Mayor Owens.\"\n\n\"Nothing amiss, Teresa. Or it's Tess now, I hear. The sheriff and Agent Reingold are still taking questions at the press conference. I made an opening statement. Ann told me you were in here, and I wanted to both welcome you back and suggest\u2014 Just a minute,\" he said, holding up a hand. He was out of breath and leaned over to prop his fists on the table. \"Suggest you not stay long,\" he rushed on as he seemed to get his breath again. \"Not stay long in town and the area, I mean. I know that sounds terrible here in friendly Cold Creek, but it's for your own good as well as the community's. You showed sound judgment in not attending the press conference. I hear your presence here has already stirred up reporters, and that doesn't do anyone any good. I'm thinking of you too.\"\n\n\"Then perhaps you've heard I don't intend to stay long. I only want to spend time with my cousin's family, sell my house and head back home. If I'm such a liability, you could buy my house and land\u2014take up a community offering\u2014to get me out of here quickly.\"\n\n\"Now, I know you've been through the mill, your family too. But as mayor, I'm charged with protecting the greater good. Sorry I came on so strong.\"\n\nHe edged around the table toward her. \"I knew your father, you see. The day you disappeared he should have been sticking closer to home.\"\n\n\"He was working that day. Out of town.\"\n\nHe made a snorting sound. \"I don't want you and Gabe to get so close you start thinking you're on this case too. Bad enough having Agent Reingold back in everyone's hair. Just keep clear of the investigation and Gabe. Those who don't pay attention to history are condemned to repeat it. This is police business and mine too.\"\n\n\"I see you make it your business to know everyone's business. And why, if you want this case\u2014cases\u2014solved, don't you want all the help you can get, Agent Reingold's, mine, anyone's?\"\n\n\"Don't you go getting snippy with me,\" he said, shaking a finger at her. \"Like I said, I'm thinking of you too. In other words, don't you and Gabe go repeating the sins of the parents, if you know what I mean.\"\n\n\"No, I don't know what you mean.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, here's your daddy's phone number out Oregon way if you're so big on reunions,\" he said, digging in his jacket pocket. \"And speaking of that, here's hoping that crazy Bright Star Monson doesn't suck you into his cult like he did your cousins.\"\n\nBefore she could tell him that he ought to find a way to get the Hear Ye community out of the area instead of her, he stopped shuffling toward her, cocked his head and backtracked.\n\n\"I hear the others coming and I want to know how they did,\" he said, and hurried from the room.\n\nTess slumped back in her chair. How had that man been elected, over and over, for at least two decades? He was obnoxious and kind of creepy.\n\nShe picked up the small piece of lined paper the mayor had tossed on the table. The phone number had her father's name, Jack Lockwood, scribbled in big, loopy writing.\n\nWhy did the mayor want her to call her father? Maybe her father wanted her to contact him because he was afraid to approach her after everything that had happened. Maybe he knew something that could help. But had the mayor suggested her father had done something wrong? Sins of the parents?\n\nShe heard muted voices down the hall and sat in her chair, waiting. Waiting for the scarecrow.\n\n* * *\n\nIt was barely five minutes later when Gabe came into the room. He carried a large, clear plastic bag with him, but he kept it behind his hip. She gripped the edge of her chair seat and shifted back in it.\n\n\"Sorry if Mayor Owens bothered you. He says you were defiant and sassy\u2014I like the sound of that.\"\n\nTess looked at him instead of what he held. She knew he was teasing\u2014was he flirting?\u2014but she was too upset to respond to that.\n\n\"He did bother me,\" she admitted. \"I think he was implying my father knows more than has been said about the day I disappeared. He gave me his phone number.\"\n\n\"I have it and may use it. But if the man hasn't contacted any of you for years...\"\n\n\"I just might let you call him, though I've thought of doing it myself many times. I'll talk to my sister Char. She's a social worker, good at those kinds of things...counseling and comforting. I meant to call her anyway.\"\n\n\"Tess, Mike brought the scarecrow back. Want to have a look?\"\n\n\"Not really. But it's something important, I know it is. And I'm doing it for Sandy, Amanda, that second victim, Jill Stillwell too. It's not just for me.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" he said. He closed the door behind him. Maybe he didn't want the mayor or even Vic Reingold to hear her comments for some reason.\n\nHe came around the table and put the nearly two-foot-long bag down on it. Weren't field scarecrows a lot bigger than that?\n\nHe smoothed the plastic to show the scarecrow clearly. He watched her face. She bucked back so hard her chair nearly tipped over. \"It's him! It's him!\" she shouted.\n\nGabe put a firm hand on her shoulder. \"It's who, Tess? Who?\"\n\n\"Mr. Mean,\" she said, and burst into tears. \"See his face? See how awful he is? It's not me that's bad, it's him!\"\n\nGabe grabbed the thing, threw it facedown on the floor and kneeled beside her chair. He pulled her into his arms, and held her.\n\n\"It's all right,\" he said, rocking her as if she were a child. And that's what she felt like. A frightened child. The face on that thing\u2014glaring eyes, frowning face, teeth showing. But not huge teeth like on the green monster.\n\n\"Tell me more about Mr. Mean,\" Gabe said, his voice gentle. \"He's the one who hit you?\"\n\n\"Yes. Yes!\"\n\n\"But who made him hit you?\"\n\n\"I did. If I was bad.\"\n\n\"Tess, are you sure it wasn't your mother or father who had Mr. Mean?\"\n\n\"No\u2014ask Kate and Char.\"\n\n\"Okay, okay. But tell me about Mr. Mean.\" His voice was soothing, coaxing. \"I won't let him hurt you ever again.\"\n\nSuddenly, though she felt safe in his arms, she also felt silly. Exploding in tears like that. Almost using baby talk. Clinging to Gabe the way little Kelsey had clung to her at the Hear Ye compound earlier. She was acting like an idiot, when she had to keep control.\n\n\"Tess, are you seeing or hearing anything else? Did the scarecrow trigger any other memories?\" Gabe asked.\n\nShe shook her head, then sniffed and sat up straight, wiping her wet cheeks with the palms of both hands. She wriggled out of his arms, and he helped her stand. Keeping her back to the thing on the floor, she moved a few steps away, fumbled in her purse for a tissue and blew her nose.\n\n\"Sorry I acted like a kid,\" she said.\n\n\"I'll bet you need to get back to that again to remember.\"\n\n\"Like I said\u2014it's all I can recall.\"\n\n\"Smackings and Mr. Mean. It's a start. I know I'm asking you to go to a place you don't want to face, Tess.\"\n\n\"A place I can't face, not from fear, but because I just can't remember more. The helplessness, feeling abandoned by my family\u2014I can't get more than that. But why was that thing left when the kidnapper took Sandy? Surely not to scare or warn me.\"\n\n\"I'd hate to think so. Maybe in hustling Sandy out the door, it was dropped, not deliberately,\" he said. \"I swear, we'll go over this dirty, crude scarecrow with a fine-tooth comb.\"\n\n\"I can't believe I blurted that out\u2014Mr. Mean,\" she said, wiping under her eyes. \"I don't think it's the monster from my dreams. That one is bigger, louder\u2014more like that corn reaper.\"\n\n\"How about you go with me to Aaron Kurtz's to take a close-up look at his harvester?\"\n\n\"But he'd get suspicious. What if he did see something, if those presents he sent all of us that next Christmas were because of guilt? Besides, I was thinking of seeing him on my own. You might spook him.\"\n\n\"Tess, that's not a good idea.\"\n\n\"All I know right now,\" she said, \"is that I need to head home. I'm glad you're going to take that scarecrow apart and maybe trace something.\"\n\n\"About Aaron,\" Gabe continued, \"I usually have good instincts about people and I think he's a good guy. Vic and my dad looked at him, interviewed him years ago.\"\n\n\"Years ago...\" she echoed as she headed for the door, giving the scarecrow a wide berth. \"I'm going to get it all back, Gabe, whatever it costs.\"\n\n* * *\n\nAfter Tess left the room, Gabe picked up the scarecrow and looked at it closely. He knew it might take days for the BCI lab to check this out, and he needed something now. Tess's reaction when she saw the scarecrow had reminded him of soldiers with blast-induced trauma. In her cry, \"It's him! It's him!\" he'd heard shouts of \"Incoming fire!\"\n\nThe scarecrow had an orange, pointed cap. He might be crazy, but the stitching on it looked done by hand, not a machine. There was no tag on the cap. He squeezed the hemp-cloth head, tied with frayed cord at the neck. Nothing seemed to be secreted within except the stick it was on, spearing the body crotch to head. The hair was yellow yarn, the outfit black cotton, but even that color didn't keep the dirt from showing. The thing looked really old. And it was far smaller than the scarecrows he'd seen used to keep birds out of a garden or field.\n\nIt had no resemblance to the friendly-looking scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz movie that ran on TV every year. Yeah, Mr. Mean did look scary, as if he was made specifically for Halloween, perfect for this time of year. Some of the straw from the stuffed body stuck out where the wrists and ankles would be. It had no arms or legs, only smaller pieces of gray wood to simulate limbs that must be nailed to its wooden backbone. Swung hard, it could definitely hurt a child, be used as a paddle or weapon.\n\nLooking closely, he thought that the pieces of straw stuffing poking out of the body looked fresh. But the wooden stick backbone looked old.\n\nAnd then he saw what he was looking for\u2014anywhere to start a search, find a link.\n\nJust showing under the cloth of the body was a price tag still stuck to the wood. The machine printing was smudged, and there was no bar code, so the purchase couldn't be too recent. At the top of the tag, he could barely read the words. Mason's Mill. The local lumber mill, owned by his friend Grant Mason, was just outside town.\n\n* * *\n\nTess was more determined than ever to get inside the Hear Ye compound. They had lots of gardens there, so maybe they had scarecrows too. Tess took her father's old dowsing wand and drove down the road to the small parking lot. What luck that Lee had said he'd needed her to give a second opinion on his dowsing site, so she had an excuse to come back. Even if she did not locate the girl who had screamed\u2014and she knew how they guarded everyone here\u2014maybe she could at least get more information and then tell Gabe.\n\nShe parked and walked up the gentle hill Lee had pointed out. From there, she gazed out over the fenced-in buildings to the fields beyond, stretched out above Cold Creek. Not a scarecrow in sight in the pumpkin patches or gardens with late tomatoes or dying pepper plants tied to wooden stakes. There was a small cornfield, probably just for the use of the community, since so many booths at the Saturday farmers' market uptown had corn. No scarecrows there either, though she did see a couple of tin pans attached to stakes by strings, dancing in the breeze to keep the birds or raccoons away.\n\nShe noticed a more distant field, where they had erected what some around here called hoop houses, plastic-draped tunnels that were unheated but could extend the growing season as if they were little greenhouses. No scarecrows were needed there, though the crops, hidden beneath what looked like long gravestones, would have to be watered.\n\nThe dried dowsing wand in her hand made her think of what Mayor Owens had said about her father. She'd wanted to call him for years, but she knew it would upset her mother and sisters. The mayor had warned her and Gabe not to repeat the sins of their fathers. For Gabe, perhaps he meant that he'd better not fail to solve the abductions as his father had. But for her, the warning made no sense.\n\n\"Hey, Tess!\" Lee's voice interrupted her thoughts. He was running up the knoll, waving a dowsing wand. She'd figured the guard at the gate had announced her presence. As old-fashioned as the Hear Ye cult people dressed, did they carry cell phones or walkie-talkies to be able to communicate so fast?\n\n\"How is everyone?\" she asked. \"I hope Kelsey and Ethan at least get some time with the gifts I brought them.\"\n\n\"Oh, sure. Sure, they will.\"\n\nIt scared her to realize she didn't believe him, didn't trust her own cousin. Had Sandy Kenton learned the hard way not to trust the person who must have approached her in the familiar back room of the store, where she played so happily with her mother nearby? Had Tess herself known her abductor and was the shock so awful that she'd forgotten who it was? Maybe the drugs the kidnapper gave her also caused amnesia. But when the drugs wore off, why didn't her memories come back?\n\n\"Tess, don't look so upset. I'll see that the kids play with the things and remember who they came from. You'll see us all again. How about we do a family picnic down by the creek before it gets real cold?\"\n\n\"That would be great. Lee, I was thinking it would be optimal if you had the well inside the compound,\" she said, hoping to get him to take her there. \"I see a lot of land there. How about we pace that off, then check out here after? If the same water source you think you've found up here could be located on lower ground, then\u2014\"\n\n\"My task is to be certain there is water here so we can drill outside the fence, not bring in outsiders to drill within.\"\n\nWell, she thought, that ploy didn't work, but then she'd been naive to think walking around with this wand inside the fence would get her inside the building where she'd heard the screams. Annoyed at herself for her desperation, she held her father's old wand out straight-armed and began to walk the area. This wasn't what she'd wanted to do, to get back into something she considered kind of...well, esoteric, paranormal, despite Kate's lecture to her about people like Einstein believing in it. But maybe her try at dowsing for the first time in years would give her an excuse to phone her father, as if to ask for advice.\n\n\"I don't think this old wand is worth much,\" she called over her shoulder to Lee.\n\n\"Here, use mine,\" he said, and brought it toward her. \"I don't want to influence you with what I found, but try toward me just a bit more.\"\n\nWith his wand, she walked the contour of the hill closer to where he'd stood. Nothing happened. Her arms began to tire. Perhaps as a child, when this came so naturally to her, she believed in it, but now\u2014\n\nThe wand jerked downward, even pulled her hands down. She stopped, went back. It happened again. Chills raced through her, the nape of her neck to her stomach. She glanced toward Lee, who looked excited. Then she saw a pale man dressed in light blue, loose, flowing clothes coming up the gentle slope of hill toward them. His hair was stark white, and it seemed he had no eyes at all. Then she saw they were pale gray-blue.\n\n\"Bright Star,\" Lee said with a nod of his head that was almost like a bow. \"This is my cousin Tess Lockwood and I believe she's verified the water source I've found. Tess, our guide and leader, Bright Star Monson.\"\n\nUp close, the man seemed to suck all the air toward himself despite the fact that they stood on a windy hill under open sky.\n\n\"Tess, the lost sheep who has been delivered,\" he greeted her. He extended his hand. She clung to the wand, then pulled one hand away to shake his. Dry, papery skin, cool to the touch. He held her hand. She pulled it back.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, \"I think Lee has found water here, but on a knoll it might take a deep well.\"\n\n\"I have been told by experts we are on a large shelf of shale here, but I know deep wells are the best for living water,\" Brice Monson replied with a smile. \"And how wonderful to have that gift. Believe me, I understand a special gift from God. And I hear you were distressed by the cries from the justice session yesterday. I assure you the child is the better for correction. I can see, though, how that would deeply move a young woman who has suffered much. But we are all one family here, content in whatever state we find ourselves. Of course, we would be delighted should you join us for a worship service someday. Sheriff McCord has been to visit, and all are welcome who have pure intent.\"\n\nBrice Monson's eyes seemed to bore into hers. Could he read her thoughts? Did he know her intent wasn't pure? Tess shuddered, but hoped the two men thought it was just the breeze. She had a strong urge to flee, but she tried not to show how repulsive Monson seemed to her. Surely she was not reacting to him the way she had done with the scarecrow earlier. Her instant, instinctive aversion to this man must be because she felt he was ruining Lee's family's future, not that she recalled him from her own past.\n\n\"Thank you for the invitation,\" she said. \"And I wish you well with your drilling of the well.\"\n\nAs if she'd said something wildly clever, Monson laughed, displaying large white teeth and a pale tongue. Lee joined in. Tess said goodbye and made herself walk away slowly, but she really wanted to run.\n12\n\nWith the scarecrow hidden inside two brown paper bags overlapping end to end, Gabe got out of his cruiser and strode from the parking lot toward the main entrance to Mason's Lumber Mill. The large, loud place was a fourth-generation, family-owned business. It employed a lot of locals and he knew there were plans to expand and hire more.\n\nThe sprawling sawmill was now owned and operated by Grant Mason, who had been a good friend of Gabe's since childhood. In second grade at the Cold Creek Elementary School, their teacher, Miss Sanders, had seated the kids alphabetically by first names, and he and Grant had been buddies ever since. Grant thought Gabe was nuts when he joined the service and was sent overseas and it had been a long time since the two of them had just cut out of town and chilled out somewhere together. They were both working way too hard without women or kids in their lives.\n\nGabe knew this place well since he'd had summer jobs here when Grant's father owned it. He'd swept up sawdust after everyone from scalers to debarkers to the guys who ran the big frame saw. He was familiar with the huge lumberyard with tall piles of stockpiled timber and stacked pallets of wood out back waiting to be processed after the big trucks hauled their loads in. Ann's brothers worked here now, three men he was determined more than ever lately would never be his brothers-in-law.\n\nWith a screech, screech, screech warning signal, a huge logging forklift started backing up in the parking lot. Gabe gave it a wide berth as he headed into the mill. He thought of Tess mentioning the corn harvester again. She might be right that it was a bad idea for both of them to go charging into Aaron Kurtz's place to look at the machine. Besides, the guy was a deacon at the community church and had been a solid family man for years. Gabe couldn't fathom Aaron not reporting seeing something strange in a cornfield, let alone snatching kids.\n\nBut then, since more obvious suspects like Dane Thompson, even Sam Jeffers and that taxidermist loner, John Hillman, hadn't panned out before, maybe it was also time to start looking at long shots, including Kurtz and even Mayor Owens. Was Reese really a nervous wreck each time a kidnap case was investigated by local and state law officers just because of bad PR for the town?\n\n\"Yo, Gabe!\" Ann's brother Jonas shouted from his elevated position above the cutting line that fed logs into the debarker. He wore industrial earplugs that looked like earmuffs. A dust mask partly covered his face, but his voice was so loud the mask hardly muted it. \"What's happ'nin', man?\" Jonas shouted over the earsplitting din of the machine.\n\nGabe just waved and headed up the metal steps toward Grant's elevated office from which he could keep an eye on the entire floor of conveyor belts and moving parts.\n\nGrant was sitting on his desk, feet in his chair, working on a laptop balanced on his knees, probably so he could look farther down through his office's glass windows. How things had changed since Grant's dad used to oversee things with a pencil stuck behind his ear and a scratch pad in his shirt pocket.\n\nDespite his dad's wishes he stay home and learn the business after college, Grant had gone out to northern California and Oregon, hung out with loggers, taken a job operating a big debarker in the field, not a mill. When Grant took over the business, his father had finally admitted a couple of years of roughing it was the right thing to do. It allowed Grant to mingle easily with everyone from environmentally minded CEOs to senators in D.C. to brush cat loggers in these hills.\n\nGrant looked up as Gabe closed the office door to mute the noise. \"Got something I want you to see\u2014to ID,\" he told Grant, who put the laptop down and got up to shake his hand.\n\n\"Good to see you too,\" Grant said, his tone part teasing, part critical. \"But I know you've been nose to the grindstone over this latest abduction. Anything I can do to help?\"\n\n\"Help's exactly what I need,\" Gabe said.\n\nIn junior high and high school, they'd been so close they'd either finished each other's sentences or just answered without the other's question being asked. Though they were both tall, Grant was lanky and blond with blue eyes\u2014the marauding Viking look\u2014whereas Gabe was broader and dark-haired, but they used to feel like twins anyway.\n\n\"Could this have been made or sold here at the mill?\" Gabe asked, dragging the scarecrow out of the sacks. \"This center piece of wood was sold here.\"\n\n\"Yeah, for sure, that's our sticker,\" Grant said, looking through the plastic. \"But it's obviously old. Dad used to sell those scarecrows years ago, but we don't carry anything like that now. We do, though, have bins by the door in the spring and winter of those squared-off stakes. People use them for staking up tomatoes, peppers, garden crops like that. In the winter, they string them together with wire to make snow fences. But the intact scarecrow for sale\u2014not since about the time I was in college.\n\n\"But, you know,\" Grant went on, cocking his head, \"this outfit\u2014I have seen that too. I'm thinking my mom used to sew these for decorative scarecrows, other homemade figures with wooden bodies too, like Christmas angels that people could put in their yards, wooden Easter bunnies\u2014her mad money back then, I guess. Some friends from church helped her make the outfits.\"\n\n\"Like who? Do you remember?\"\n\n\"Ah, Marva Green, I think. Wanda Kurtz, for sure. Those two among all her friends were always tight. They used to kid about their names rhyming, and both were close to Mom. They did almost all the food at Dad's and Mom's funerals.\"\n\n\"Wanda\u2014Aaron Kurtz's wife.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but we're talking at least twenty years ago. Sorry I can't help you more. So, what's the deal with the scarecrow?\"\n\n\"Tell you later. You've been a big help.\"\n\n\"Don't tell me the idiots cooking up meth or getting high on bath salts are bootlegging them in old scarecrows.\"\n\n\"All right, I won't tell you that. Thanks, bud. See you,\" he said, clapping Grant on the shoulder, and made for the door, already stuffing Mr. Mean back into the paper sacks, top and bottom.\n\n\"If it's that important you have to take off,\" Grant called after him, \"you owe me a beer somewhere!\"\n\nGabe turned back as he opened the door, and the noise from the mill floor hit him again. It was louder than the rotor wash of a helicopter. \"I may owe you more than that.\"\n\nAs he went down the stairs, he saw Ann's two other brothers staring at him from the catwalk across the big-toothed circular saw as it ripped into a huge log.\n\n* * *\n\nTess drove directly from the Here Ye compound toward Aaron Kurtz's farm. She did not see or hear the big reaper in the surrounding fields, though Aaron owned or leased land far and wide, so he might be elsewhere. Perhaps Ann's pointed suggestion that Tess should sell her land to Aaron wasn't such a bad idea.\n\nTess was hoping the big-time farmer had gone home for a late lunch or early dinner. She passed fields he'd harvested, the cornstalks slashed low to the ground, leaving only stubble. As much as she didn't want to hear or see the big machine near her house, she wished those fields could be cut soon so she could see far out from her windows again, even if that brought Dane Thompson's pet cemetery into view. The thought of those huge projecting teeth that funneled the rows of corn into the belly of the beast, shooting cobs out into an open truck bed and chaff out the other way, really bothered her. Was she remembering that correctly? Had she somehow memory-merged the reaper's metal teeth that protruded out the front with Mr. Mean's toothy grin? Memory merge\u2014it was a term she'd seen skimming through one of the books Miss Etta had left with her.\n\nShe drove past the Kurtz driveway, turned around at the next intersection and drove back. Their place had always been so well kept and beautiful. The old white farmhouse sported neat black trim. The big red barn and other back buildings looked freshly painted, and tall twin silos stood like guards over it all. The yard displayed brick-lined flower beds and a spacious stretch of grass before the endless cornfields began. The wide-set property lines were edged by white fences.\n\nDriving slowly, she turned in the paved drive, lined with corn shocks and pumpkins. She did not want to go out to one of those back buildings to see the reaper since they stood so close to the corn. But this had to be done. If Gabe was with her, it would look too official, too fishy. And besides, by asking Aaron if he wanted to buy her land, maybe she could suggest he cut the cornfields surrounding her house soon.\n\nAgain, as each time she drove past a farmhouse, even those abandoned and vandalized, lived in by poor people, or palatial like this, she asked herself if she recalled anything about it. The yard, the front of the house, the view\u2014anything. But here, even with all those back buildings, she sensed nothing.\n\nThere it was!\n\nThe green John Deere harvester sat outside the barn next to a wagon hitched to a tractor. The wagon was full of shelled corn. She recalled it well, although she must have turned it into a monster of nightmares later. She viewed the elevated, glassed-in cab where the driver sat; the huge double wheels with yellow metal hubs; and the eight extensions thrust out in front that went between the rows so the cornstalks and cobs would feed in to be cut and shelled while the stalks were shredded for silage. She could see now why she thought of them as teeth when she was small, but at least she had clearly recalled something from the day she was taken.\n\nShe knew for sure that Aaron Kurtz and a machine like this one\u2014or maybe this very one\u2014had been in the field that day. So, had he seen someone or something amiss he had covered up for some reason? She knew he had been questioned about that years ago. Or had he done something he didn't want known?\n\n\"You don't listen, do you?\" came a hard voice behind her. \"Or can't obey orders for your own good.\"\n\nShe jumped and spun around, expecting Aaron. It was Gabe. Why hadn't she heard him drive in? She realized then she'd been hearing in her head the sounds of the reaper\u2014this grim reaper\u2014when here it sat, still and quiet.\n\n\"There's no law against my looking at this,\" she told Gabe.\n\n\"How about trespassing?\"\n\n\"They wouldn't press charges\u2014\"\n\n\"How about impeding an investigation when I told you not to come here alone?\"\n\nHe took her arm and steered her toward her car.\n\n\"Gabe, let go! Your presence will tip him off that something's wrong.\"\n\n\"Something is wrong! You are not formally on this case. We don't know who's responsible. Someone may get spooked or desperate if you're running around here and\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, Sheriff, hello!\" a woman's voice called out from the back porch of the farmhouse. \"Is there a problem?\"\n\n\"Hi, Mrs. Kurtz. No, there's no problem. I was just telling Tess Lockwood\u2014she's a preschool teacher\u2014that I thought a field trip for little kids to see some big, noisy farm machinery wasn't very smart, that she ought to stick to taking them to the firehouse to see an engine. Besides, they'd get a lecture from the fire guys about fire safety.\"\n\nTess was amazed at how quickly and smoothly he'd come up with those lies. Wasn't the job of a law enforcement officer to deal in the truth?\n\nWanda Kurtz came closer, wiping her hands on an apron. \"Tess Lockwood,\" she said, squinting into the afternoon sun. \"Why, I heard you were back. And you're welcome here anytime. Are you helping teach the religious sect children down the road? Of course, we'd be happy to have them visit, if that's what you mean. I could have Aaron cut one of our back fields into a real easy maze for them to run though. He's not here right now, though. Had a doctor's appointment in Chillicothe.\"\n\nTess hemmed and hawed a bit to get out of the corner Gabe had backed her into. He might be angry with her, but she was angry too. She quickly said goodbye and started for her car. As she got in, she could see Gabe was showing Mr. Mean to Wanda Kurtz. What was he thinking? If Aaron was somehow guilty, wouldn't that tip him off?\n\nTalk about a corn maze! She felt she was running through one, searching for someone or something hiding barely out of reach. She just hoped her desperation didn't trap her in a dead end.\n\n* * *\n\nDrinking some wine from the last bottle she'd brought from home and pacing from her kitchen to the living room, Tess was even more furious when Gabe didn't call or stop by to explain why he was showing the scarecrow to Wanda Kurtz. What had he learned? She knew she should tell him about the girl's screams at the Hear Ye compound. But she had to admit there was no way Brice Monson, however controlling and strange he was, could abduct a girl and keep her there with all those people around. And Monson had mentioned that Gabe had visited there, so he must be watching the compound too, and Gabe hadn't shared that with her. She thought that he'd wanted her help, but now he was critical and cold.\n\nShe wondered if she should get a Realtor to take over selling the house so she could get out of town faster. Yet, she'd started to harbor the hope that not only could she help Gabe solve the abductions, but that she might get her memories back too\u2014and be able to deal with them.\n\nShe considered her options now, since Gabe seemed to have turned hostile. She could call Char for some of her wise and warm sisterly advice. Call her father out west and try to learn if he knew something he hadn't told anyone about her being taken. They were her personal contacts, so Gabe could not object to family phone calls. She had to do something to keep from doing nothing, from just worrying and getting more upset. What time would it be in New Mexico and on the West Coast now? Char was usually out in some traditional hogan working with Navajo children, and Tess didn't want to talk to her dad's wife\u2014she'd never met the woman\u2014if he was at work.\n\nShe looked at the three library books Miss Etta had brought, which were piled in the rocking chair by the window. Maybe she should take another look at them to see if that triggered more memories. If she remembered anything, she'd just call Vic Reingold and tell him instead of Gabe.\n\nShe knew she was absolutely, stark-raving crazy to have feelings for the sheriff, the son of the man who couldn't solve her case years ago. And even when she was so angry with him and couldn't wait to get out of Cold Creek, it was insanity to want to see him. It was terrifying. She shivered every time he looked at her. And when he'd kissed her, she'd felt she was not only looking at a waterfall, but going over it.\n\n* * *\n\nGabe felt silly walking into the tanning salon Marva Green managed. It was feminine inside, but that figured. He couldn't think of too many guys around here who would patronize a place like this. Probably not many of the local women would use it either. Not that the Lake Azure women weren't local now, he reminded himself. It was just that, his having grown up here in the foothills of Appalachia, it was sometimes hard to get used to the more affluent lifestyle of the newer residents. But then, the Lake Azure folks had voted strong for him at their polling place at the community lodge, so he had no beef with them, unless they broke the law.\n\n\"Why, Sheriff McCord, what brings you here?\" Marva asked, looking up from reading a magazine. Maybe it was a downtime for her, but that was good. He didn't need anyone but Wanda and Marva seeing this scarecrow right now. He was hoping it indirectly roiled the waters with Aaron or Dane, if they were involved with the kidnappings. He wanted to get someone real nervous so they'd make a rash move or a mistake and come out of hiding, though that was a risk too. He wanted them to make a move toward him, not Tess.\n\n\"I just came from Wanda Kurtz's, and she says you and my mother used to make these and sell them at Mason's Mill,\" he said, pulling the scarecrow out of the sacks. Come on, Mr. Mean, he thought, rattle someone's cage besides Tess's.\n\nMarva gave a little gasp, then smiled. \"Why, yes, we did, back in the old days when a job at an upscale tanning salon in Cold Creek would have been like something from that old TV show The Twilight Zone. The three of us cut and stitched those little outfits, stuffed the bodies and sold them at the mill and split the money. I wouldn't be surprised if more than one of your Christmas presents was bought with our profits when you were a boy. But why are you asking?\"\n\n\"I can't say more than that it's part of the kidnapping investigation.\"\n\n\"Why, how can that be? But...\" She paused and took a deep breath. \"If it helps to clear Dane of the suspicion some folks still have of him, just because that cornfield joins his property with the Lockwood house, I'll be glad to help in any way I can. And thank you, Sheriff, for not rushing to bring him in or question him right away as your father did, because Dane has absolutely nothing to do with those horrible disappearances of any of those girls!\"\n\n\"I hope to prove that's true, Marva. But let him know I will need a statement from him and he should sit tight.\"\n\n\"Oh. Well, he's gone hunting with Sam Jeffers and John Hillman\u2014but only for overnight. Of course, I'll tell him. Actually,\" she said, leaning closer to him and whispering as the street door opened and a slender woman walked in, \"Dane only went along because Sam said there was a wounded stag he could tend to that had a broken leg. Dane may tranquilize it and get the others to help him bring it back here. My brother is so tenderhearted, Sheriff. And if they find the stag dead\u2014I'm surprised Sam didn't just shoot it, but he penned it in instead\u2014John will mount it.\"\n\n\"That's quite a trio, isn't it?\" Gabe said as he quickly stuffed the scarecrow back into its sacks. \"An animal healer, an animal hunter and a dead-animal preserver.\"\n\n\"Well, yes, but they've been friends for years.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Marva,\" he said, and touched the brim of his hat to her and the customer, who already looked so tan her skin was leathery. Of everything Marva had said to try to put him off suspecting her brother, she'd actually given him a lot to go on.\n\n* * *\n\nTess was engrossed in the books Miss Etta had left for her and was making notes while lying in bed. She learned that memories of traumatic events could change over time, so machines could become monsters in dreams, when the monsters were really humans. And suppression was a common coping mechanism for someone with childhood trauma. She read about terror dreams, which were not recalled on waking, something she could have written a book on. But what really grabbed her attention was the story of one child victim who blamed himself for later kidnappings that were patterned after his.\n\n\"Do I do that?\" she asked aloud. \"Is that why I want to help Gabe so much even though I'm upset with him? I got away so the kidnapper is taking others?\"\n\nShe heard something outside, and went to her bedroom window to see what caused the sudden noise. It didn't quite sound like car tires crunching gravel in the driveway. She'd instantly hoped Gabe was driving in, but she saw no headlights or vehicle below.\n\nThe outside safety lights went off and it was pitch-black. Just as she gasped, she heard a pop and the interior house lights went dark too.\n\nTess fumbled her way to the side window to see if Gabe's house lights were out. No, she could see light coming from his place.\n\nWanting to call Gabe, she shuffled to the back window and felt for her purse on the small dresser. It wasn't there. She knew there was a flashlight downstairs, but she'd have to be careful on the stairs. What if this blackout was set up by someone? She needed that phone now, needed Gabe! Why had she ever been angry with him?\n\nAs she dropped to her knees to feel for her purse on the floor, she glanced out the window. She could see a light outside, moving through the rows of corn below, coming closer.\n13\n\nTess stared at the single light flickering through the corn. It moved steadily along the back of her yard, maybe only a couple of rows in. She tried to concentrate on the dark form carrying it. The person was holding the light low, maybe thinking it was hidden or so it wouldn't reveal a face. It was hard to tell the person's height from this high up. She was so scared for a moment she just stared, mouth open.\n\nThen she scrambled to action, fumbling for her purse. She found it and reached inside for her phone. Its dim light almost blinded her. She had to ransack her purse, looking for her billfold, where she'd tucked the paper with both of Gabe's numbers written on it.\n\nHer hand shook so much as she punched in Gabe's home phone number she misdialed and had to do it again. He had to be there. He could get in his cruiser, scare away or catch whoever that was. Could it be someone related to the kidnappings, who wanted to chase her away? Or worse, to silence her?\n\nGabe's number rang and rang. He told her if she dialed 911, his night dispatcher could reach him, so maybe she should do that. As his home phone was still ringing, she peeked out the window. The light in the corn was moving right through the area where she'd been snatched. She heard a voice.\n\n\"Gabe McCord.\"\n\n\"Gabe, it's Tess. Someone made all my lights go out, both inside and out. And someone's out in the corn in back with a light, kind of moving around, out by where I was taken.\"\n\n\"I'm looking out the window. Yeah, you're pitch-dark. Stay put in the house, and I'll be right there. I'm going to get a stun gun as well as my pistol and come through the cornfield between us on foot, see if I can surprise your visitor.\"\n\n\"But I want him gone! Can't you run the siren on the cruiser?\"\n\n\"Tess, we want to catch this guy. I'll be right there, sweetheart, so don't be afraid.\"\n\nSweetheart? That word both comforted and frightened her, just like his plan. She crawled from the back window to the side one and crouched under the window, staring through the darkness toward Gabe's place.\n\nShe felt a sudden surge of anger. She couldn't just cower here, had to do something to help. Rather than just watch for Gabe, she returned to the back window so she could look at the light and maybe signal with her phone or shout to Gabe which way it went.\n\nShe couldn't let this monster control her. And she'd never forgive herself if something happened to Gabe.\n\n* * *\n\nGabe strapped on his gun belt and grabbed the stun gun and a flashlight but didn't take time to throw on a jacket. Thank heavens he was here, not in town, not in the shower or in bed. It was only a little after ten. He'd been exhausted, planning to hit the rack for a couple of hours, but now adrenaline surged through him.\n\nHe raced out the side door, cursed taking the time to lock it, but he didn't want anyone to get inside to see what he had hidden in his spare bedroom. He tore past his parked cruiser into the field that stretched to Tess's house. He pushed himself hard. Ears of corn bounced against his shoulders and hips. He told himself to keep his toes pointed in, concentrate on not tripping over roots. Surely Aaron was going to cut these fields soon, though they'd been planted later than most in the area. At least asking when they'd be cut would be an excuse to interview the man. He didn't want someone being able to sneak up on Tess or him either like this.\n\nCompared to when he used to run miles each day, he felt out of shape, sucking air. He slowed to avoid giving himself away with noise. It was so different from the way they'd handled problems in Iraq. They'd go in with a heavily armed convoy accompanying his blast-resistant Humvee with its four-hundred-pound doors. That let people know they were coming, that they could handle things, that the U.S. had power and might. But he'd also used remote-controlled cameras and robots to defuse danger. Here in Cold Creek it was hands-on and in-your-face.\n\nAs he neared the Lockwood edge of the field, he raised his flashlight and blinked it at the side of Tess's house, once, twice, just to let her know he was here. He strained to listen a moment to see if he had spooked the intruder. If the guy ran, he'd hear him rustle the corn, wouldn't he? Who among the suspects had the know-how to cut off the power to Tess's place?\n\nGabe heard her open her window above him. Did she think his signal meant she must answer? If the guy had a gun, she was about to make herself a target.\n\nHe vaulted out from the corn to yell up at her, but she called down, \"He's moving away, toward Dane's place! I think he's almost halfway across, but I can't see his light now. He was in a row about where the swing set used to be, but he could have doubled back. Be careful!\"\n\n\"Stay in there!\" he shouted. He turned on his flashlight and, holding the stun gun, ran across the small backyard and crashed back into the rows of corn. Marva had said Dane, John and Sam were out in the hills tonight, but were they really? If there were three of them, he could be running right into a trap where he was outnumbered.\n\nHe switched off his light and went around to another row far from the area Tess had indicated. If this was a ploy to lure him away from Tess, to make sure he was out of the way so someone could not just scare her but hurt her, he wouldn't allow it.\n\nMoving out of the field onto the side road, he headed back toward her house. Close to her property, he saw why her lights had gone out. A vehicle had hit the pole that carried those wires, and the whole thing was atilt. It was no accident, he'd bet, as there was no vehicle in sight. He'd have to notify gas stations and body shops in the area to watch for dents in fenders or crumpled hoods. Maybe Mike could get paint scrapings off the pole.\n\nHe cut across Tess's backyard, playing his light on the ground before him. Two eyes gleamed at him from the picnic table. He jumped back, transferred the stun gun to his left hand and went for his pistol.\n\nBut the thing\u2014a dog\u2014didn't move. Glassy-eyed. Dead. Mounted. Again, memories of Iraq haunted him. There had always been dead dogs in the streets, but what did this one mean? The scarecrow, now this. Either someone was leaving him clues, or this was meant to scare Tess away.\n\nHe shone the light on the dog. The shadows made it look even more frightening. This could be John Hillman's taxidermy work. But he'd never be so stupid as to leave it here, like a calling card, a come-haul-me-in-for-questioning sign. So who had left it here?\n\nThrough the back door, Gabe told Tess to stay inside, then he slumped on the picnic table seat. He called Vic.\n\nVic was staying in a motel out on Route 23 almost to Chillicothe. Gabe updated him. Vic said Mike had gone to BCI headquarters, but he'd get him back to look at the taxidermy work on the dog. Mike would also check for paint on the telephone pole. He said he'd see him first thing in the morning at the sheriff's office.\n\nGabe called Jace and asked him to call body shops in a wide area to ask that they be notified if someone came in with a staved-in or even dented fender. Then Gabe called the emergency line at the power company to get Tess's power restored.\n\n\"Can I come out now?\" she called from the back door.\n\n\"No, I'll come in.\"\n\nHe didn't want her to see the dog. It was a pit bull, snarling and looking ready to leap, which was how he felt. As soon as he was done with the staff meeting in the morning, he was going to question John Hillman, Dane Thompson, even Sam Jeffers. They'd better have brought that stag back dead or alive to prove they weren't around Tess's place during the night. Could all three guys\u2014loners and eccentrics, though the woods was full of them around here\u2014have colluded on abductions over the years? Hillman was divorced, Sam a longtime widower and Dane a bachelor, so there were no mates or children in their lives.\n\n\"Oh! Gabe, what's that?\" Tess cried, coming up behind him.\n\n\"I told you to stay inside.\"\n\n\"A stuffed dog! One that looks like it wants to attack. Obviously a warning to me.\"\n\n\"I called to get your lights back on, but it may not happen until early morning,\" he told her, getting up and facing her to put himself between her and the back cornfield. He snared her wrist with one hand to pull her away from staring at that dog. \"Tess, please go in your house, grab a couple of things to spend the night at my place. You got any big plastic trash bags in there? Damn, I'm tired of hauling weird stuff around to show people.\"\n\n\"I saw you showing the scarecrow to Wanda Kurtz and wondered why. Yes, I have a trash bag. But can't you stay here instead?\"\n\n\"We'd be sitting ducks in the dark. We're going to my place. I've got an extra room, a spare bed. You'll be safer there.\"\n\n\"We're going through the cornfield? What if that's his plan?\"\n\n\"I think he\u2014or they\u2014only wanted to give you a good scare or warning. Just do as I say, okay?\"\n\n\"All right, but you haven't confided in me, and not only about Wanda Kurtz. I hear you've been to the Hear Ye Commune, but then I guess I didn't tell you something too. I heard a woman or girl scream at the compound, but I kind of checked it out and got a reasonable explanation\u2014if reason is any part of that place.\"\n\n\"What are you, my other deputy? Here, take my flashlight, go in the house, get your things now, or I swear, I'll arrest you for something and put you in the detention cell in town for safekeeping. I checked out Amanda's possibly being held at the compound. Brice Monson's weird, but he's got too many people around to be hiding Amanda, Jill or Sandy there. Now, do what I say!\"\n\nObviously as frustrated with him as he was her, Tess grabbed the flashlight from him, went in, slammed both doors, came out, threw a trash bag at him and banged inside the house again. That all infuriated him too, but for one thing. She was not whimpering in a corner. It was kind of the spunky, younger Teresa again, animated, defiant, a fearless tomboy before trauma had crushed her.\n\nTrying to keep his temper in check\u2014it riled him especially that he wanted to put his hands all over her even when she was defying him\u2014he worked the dog into the bag so he could carry it upright.\n\nTess came out with a full paper sack and her purse and thrust the flashlight back at him. \"See, you've turned me into a bag lady,\" she said. \"Like one you're taking off the streets because she can't care for herself. But I wasn't going through that field with my suitcase.\"\n\n\"Let's go. We'll set a timer and argue for an hour, then hit the rack, or since you're a bag lady, hit the sack. We're both exhausted, and I can't believe you'd even consider staying here alone tonight after this.\"\n\n\"Let's see, how to put this...\" she said, her tone still sarcastic, as they walked toward the cornfield with him leading. \"You can't teach an old, scared and traumatized dog new tricks, so Tess is going to ruin things if she tries to think on her own to help you out. She was misled at first because you said you wanted her to help, so\u2014\"\n\n\"I wanted you to remember what happened to you when you were taken twenty years ago, not take over now! Did you lock up the house?\"\n\n\"Of course. Did you lock yours in your rush?\"\n\n\"You bet I did. Look, I know you're upset and scared, but keep quiet right now. There's another saying that I've seen on signs in yards around here for years\u2014Beware of Dog\u2014and I think that's the message here.\"\n\n\"From that stuffed, dead dog or from the top-dog sheriff?\"\n\nHe turned back to face her. \"Stop fighting me! Someone wants you to leave town or worse. Or if this dead dog is a message for me, I'm not sure what it means.\"\n\n\"I was just...just trying to keep my courage up, I think.\"\n\n\"Stick close, okay? Right behind me.\"\n\nAs he turned away to head into the field, he heard her sniff back tears. He knew he shouldn't have been so rough, but she really got to him. Maybe she was right on the edge of hysteria. Actually he knew the feeling. How many times had he beat down a screaming fit of fear when he'd had to dismantle a bomb by hand when the robot just wouldn't work?\n\n\"Yes, I'm staying close,\" she told him in a suddenly quiet voice that caught on a half-smothered sob as they headed into the tall, thick corn between their houses.\n\n* * *\n\nTess drank the hot chocolate he fixed for them in his kitchen. She remembered how it had once looked, but it had all been updated, even to stainless-steel appliances. If she could recall what a kitchen looked like from two decades ago, why couldn't she recall more important things? She looked around. It was neat, not even dishes in the sink or drain rack. He'd pulled down all the blinds so no one could see in. She felt safe from anything outside now, but sealed in with him, newly alert as they faced each other across the wooden kitchen table.\n\n\"I can't take you to the early-morning meeting at the station with me,\" he told her. \"But since you're so involved\u2014and I didn't mean to shut you out except to keep you safe\u2014I'll call you right after and tell you what the three of us have decided.\"\n\n\"I'd appreciate that.\"\n\n\"But I want you to stay here until the power is restored at your place.\"\n\nShe nodded. She was so exhausted her eyes almost crossed.\n\nHe went on, sounding nervous, \"I'd better open up the extra bedroom for you so it heats up in there. I keep both extra rooms upstairs closed in the heating season. There's just one bath upstairs\u2014a half bath down here, but you're welcome to take a shower or whatever. I'll get some towels out.\"\n\n\"Your mother would be proud of your hospitality and how great this place looks. She was always a good hostess.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Still is in the trailer park where she lives in Florida. Too good a hostess at times, I guess.\"\n\nShe didn't know what he meant, but a bath and bed sounded so good. And to sleep at night in security, to feel safe, as she never quite had in the old house the three nights she'd been back, would be great\u2014safe from everything except her feelings for Gabe.\n\nShe followed him upstairs as he opened the door to a plainly furnished bedroom. It was his boyhood one, she was sure of that, though it had been redone. It was a bit feminine, maybe in case his mother visited. So he must sleep in his parents' larger one across the front of the house. But no, he tossed his windbreaker into the room at the back end of the hall.\n\n\"Don't you sleep in front?\" she asked, suddenly feeling awkward again as his eyes swept her. Oh, no, that over-the-waterfall sensation again. She'd been fighting it, but feelings flew between them like pounding spray.\n\n\"No, I keep that for my home office,\" he said, but he didn't open the door to give her a glimpse. \"It's bigger. I'm down the hall. I can use the bathroom downstairs, so you just go ahead.\"\n\nHe got a set of towels and an extra blanket from a hall linen closet and piled them in her arms. \"I'll be getting up early,\" he said. \"Probably before six. If you want to join me for breakfast that's fine. Otherwise just get what you want, and don't go back to your house until you're sure the power's on,\" he repeated. \"Don't answer the phone here either. Only use your cell.\"\n\nHe was so close she could see how thick his eyelashes were. Little flecks of gold swam in the blue irises of his eyes. He had a slight scar on his chin\u2014from the war?\n\n\"I can't thank you enough,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Maybe sometime,\" he said. Then before she knew it was coming, he leaned forward to kiss her.\n\nAt first it was just closed lips, controlled, kind of sweet. But suddenly they crushed the stack of towels and the blanket between them, holding tight, clinging. When she clasped her arms around his neck, everything cascaded to the floor. They pressed together, chest to breasts, hips and thighs. His hands raced over her waist and back as they opened their mouths in a devouring kiss. He cupped her bottom with his hands, lifted her up against him, before setting her back, almost roughly. Both dazed and shaky, they stared wide-eyed at each other, standing a few feet apart.\n\n\"I don't mean to take advantage of the situation,\" he said, his voice raspy. \"You have to be able to trust me. I made a big mistake once, mixing business with...with pleasure.\"\n\nShe was breathless too, but she managed to speak. \"Dating Ann or someone else?\"\n\n\"Yes, Ann. I should have considered her hair-trigger-temper brothers, as well as the fact that I wasn't that crazy about her. Besides, it hit me a few minutes ago that one of them\u2014Jonas\u2014raises pit bulls. I've been wanting to bust him for illegal dogfights. I think they have some sites in the woods, but I've never found the locations. And they're very protective of Ann. I've been trying to back off, even before you came back, but they all think I should be full steam ahead\u2014like just now\u2014between us.\"\n\nThey stared into each other's eyes for a long moment. Despite all those words\u2014information\u2014he'd put out between them like a barrier, she almost threw herself into his arms again. Instead she bent to gather the linens from the floor.\n\n\"Thanks for taking me in,\" she said as she forced herself to head for the bedroom he'd given her. He had taken her in, heart and soul, as the old song said. But she had to fight that sweeping need for him with all her might.\n\n* * *\n\nAs exhausted as Tess was and as good as she felt after a hot bath in Gabe's big bathtub, she couldn't sleep. She prayed she would not dream of that dog, nor of the monster in the cornfield. If she screamed out in the night, would Gabe come running? She tossed and turned, thinking of her father, her sisters, the missing girls, Gabe.\n\nShe heard a voice, a young girl's voice, muted but close. Was she dreaming? No.\n\nShe sat straight up in bed. She heard a girl's voice coming from out in the hall.\n\nTess got up and wrapped the extra blanket around her like a robe. She was wearing her nightgown, but she'd forgotten her slippers. Her feet were cold on the wooden floor. Tiptoeing to the door, she opened it a crack.\n\nLight bled from under the door of the room Gabe had said was his home office. And that's where the voice came from, definitely a young girl's. Could he have a TV on in there? Maybe he couldn't sleep either.\n\nTiptoeing closer, she put her ear to the door.\n\nShe could hear the words clearly now. \"My name is Jill Stillwell. I love puppies and to camp out with my family. I love to read books. I can read now all by myself if the books are elentory, I mean easy enough, like in elentory school. I have an older brother, Jeff, who is nice to me mostly...\"\n\nThe high, sweet, little voice went on. But...but Jill Stillwell was the name of the second girl who had been abducted, taken years after Tess's family had moved to Michigan. She sounded so real, as if she was just on the other side of this door!\n\nCarefully, quietly, Tess turned the doorknob. She only meant to open the door a crack, but it swung inward with a loud creak. She gasped and gave a little cry at what she saw, just as Gabe turned around to glare at her.\n14\n\n\"Tess!\" Gabe cried as he jumped to his feet. He killed the sound track\u2014he'd been sitting at a laptop\u2014and came at her as if to block her from seeing what was here. Or was he going to grab her?\n\n\"I heard\u2014I heard a girl's voice,\" she said, retreating into the hall. \"Jill Stillwell's, one of the kidnapped\u2014\"\n\nHe grasped her shoulders in hard hands. \"It's a recording her family gave me from their Facebook page. It helps me to remember.\"\n\nIt scared her how she recalled that some murderers kept relics of their victims. In the brief glance into the room, she wondered if it could be like a big memory box, a memorial to the lost girls. She'd glimpsed a large blown-up picture of a child who must be Amanda Bell, next to a map with all kinds of lines and other pictures. Were there things in there about her too?\n\nGabe gave a huge sigh that seemed to deflate his body. His broad shoulders slumped. \"You're not dressed,\" he said as his eyes went over her. \"And it's cold tonight. Go get something on so you don't distract me even more, and I'll show you what I've never shared with anyone. I do have some stuff like this at the office, but I've got more here\u2014maybe it will jog something loose for you.\"\n\nHurrying, shaking, she did as he said and joined him in the big room that had been his parents' master bedroom. Two walls seemed dedicated to the two earliest victims, Teresa Lockwood and Jill Stillwell. He'd posted photographs of the kidnap victims and their families, with lines drawn out to what he explained was \"a circle of acquaintances.\" On the next wall, narrower because of windows, he'd started to put up things about the Sandy Kenton kidnapping.\n\nEach wall was a collage of evidence. He'd written in times, places, even things like height and weight of the victims. For each, he'd posted an age-advanced photo of what she might look like now. Tess was amazed at how close to reality the one of her came.\n\nAmanda Bell's area covered only the double-closet doors, but it included a big map of Brazil with cities and roads highlighted with a black pen. Sandy Kenton's wall shared space with a four-by-four-foot bulletin board with a map of Iraq. It was marked where, as Gabe put it, \"those sites had victims too. We worked hard to disrupt bombs.\"\n\n\"Those red dots?\" she asked, mesmerized by all that he was sharing, and still hesitant to look too closely at her own wall.\n\n\"No, the black ones. The red ones show where we didn't get there in time. Where the bomb went off. This one,\" he said, pointing at a dot nearly obscured by men's first names, \"was where I...I lost my friends\u2014and I was in charge.\"\n\nShe touched his arm, slid her hand down to hold his. He gripped her fingers so hard it hurt, but he didn't look at her, only at the names.\n\nFinally, she steadied herself to turn away and move closer to the wall dedicated to her. There were newspaper articles about her abduction, all laminated. From somewhere, probably her mom years ago, he'd gotten four photos of her, one alone, two with her sisters, one with the whole family. She stared at her parents, so young. What did her father look like now? And her mother was gone. Gabe had also posted a photo of his father in his sheriff's uniform. And down by the floorboard a map of the area with Dane Thompson's house and grounds diagrammed and labeled. She bent down to look at it closely. \"So Dane really was your father's number-one suspect?\"\n\n\"But he couldn't make it stick.\"\n\n\"Dane had an alibi?\"\n\n\"That he was out of town at the time of the abduction, heading for a meeting in Chillicothe.\"\n\n\"A meeting?\"\n\nGabe squatted beside her. \"Yeah, with a woman, a colleague who still has a vet clinic there. She covered for him with a lie\u2014at least Dad thought so. I have copies here of all the affidavits filed, the investigation files. I go over them, go over everything. It's kind of like looking for the missing link.\"\n\n\"But Sandy's and Amanda's disappearances are different from...from mine and Jill's,\" she said as they stood.\n\n\"Yep. No cornfield escape. But Jill was taken right out of a small tent she was sharing with her brother, near the cornfield that abutted their backyard. Why she didn't wake up and scream, we never figured out.\" He got up, walked across the room and pointed to a picture of a boy. \"Mrs. Stillwell said both Jill and her brother were light sleepers.\"\n\n\"Maybe the kidnapper gagged her right away.\"\n\n\"Or used chloroform or some drug\u2014jabbed her with a needle, since you'd been given shots of some sort. If we'd gotten you back in this day and age, they'd have run tests to pinpoint exactly what you had in your system instead of just having you treated by the small-town doctor your father insisted on.\"\n\n\"So the answers are still out there. And that's why this memory room.\"\n\n\"My real war room. I just didn't realize I had the recording with Jill's voice up so loud.\"\n\n\"You probably didn't. I have excellent\u2014sometimes too-good\u2014hearing. Sounds seem to stick with me.\"\n\n\"Like the harvesting machine sound you mentioned.\"\n\n\"Do you have the others'\u2014our voices recorded?\"\n\n\"All but yours. But yours, I remember. I was there not only when you were taken, but also when they got you back. I rode my bike into town when I heard they'd taken you to Dr. Marvin's office. I blamed myself for what happened to you. I had to see you, so I waited, but your father came out and told me to leave, to stay away from you. But then he saw my mother in the little crowd gathering, and he told her he was sorry for what he'd said to me, that he knew what happened wasn't my fault. They...hugged each other\u2014hard.\"\n\nTess put her arm around his waist. He put one hard-muscled arm around her shoulders. \"As I said a couple of days ago, Gabe, I don't blame you. And I understand you're partly so...so into this\u2014\"\n\n\"Say it. Obsessed.\"\n\n\"\u2014because you're trying to finish what your dad started. You drive yourself hard for the victims, for his memory and for yourself too. But if you don't get some rest, you won't be any good to anyone.\"\n\nHe hugged her to him, sideways, hip to hip. When he spoke, his deep voice vibrated through her. \"My mother would love you. 'Are you eating well, Gabe? Be sure you get your sleep and exercise even with all that's going on.'\"\n\n\"Then she's still a good mother. She saw your father work so hard and tried to help him any way she could and now you.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" he said, his voice hard again, but he sounded exhausted instead of intense. \"She was a good mother, but he was gone a lot and that was hard\u2014too hard for her sometimes as a wife, I guess. Let's get some rack time before the sun comes up, okay? And I'd appreciate it if you don't tell anyone about this room, including Vic Reingold or Deputy Miller.\"\n\n\"Right. I understand.\"\n\n\"You know,\" Gabe said, turning her to face him, \"you do understand.\"\n\nHis blue eyes shimmered with unshed tears. Was he falling apart under the strain? She understood that too. He'd made a memorial here to all his tough times, his failures\u2014including the bulletin board with his battle against bombs.\n\nMaybe she should see if Miss Etta had a book that would help him\u2014though she wouldn't say who it was for. Something about pressure on the job, stress, handling hardship. She desperately wanted to do anything possible, not only to help him solve the abductions, but to help him stay stable and strong. Strange, but worrying about him actually made her feel a little better about herself.\n\n* * *\n\nThe next morning, Tess and Gabe had breakfast together, then she offered to clean up as he rushed out the door to head for his meeting with Vic and Jace. He also intended to have Ann check the stuffed pit bull into evidence. Washing up their dishes by hand, she thought about the difficulties of being married to a sheriff or any law enforcement agent. He might always be rushing out the door. Did Vic Reingold have a wife? If so, he had been gone from her for days. Jace Miller was a newlywed, so how hard was his job on his marriage?\n\nAnd standing in Gabe's mom's kitchen she wondered about those long days alone when Gabe's father was working on her abduction case and then Jill's. It was a lonely life, but Gabe had explained at breakfast that his mother had friends, including Marva Green, no less, and Wanda Kurtz too. They'd even worked together sewing those small scarecrows to earn extra cash. Did the wives of law enforcement men ever hear about their cases the way Gabe had shared with her last night?\n\nShe went up to make her bed and looked out the window across the cornfield toward her house. There was an AEP electrical truck in the driveway. She'd promised Gabe she wouldn't leave until he called, but she couldn't wait to tell him that.\n\nShe cleaned up the room, then walked through the downstairs. Despite how tidy things looked, except for the kitchen, things were really dusty. So Gabe kept things neat\u2014or had cleaned up the place once\u2014but didn't manage the upkeep.\n\nAt seven-thirty, Tess got her cell phone out. She wanted to call Char in New Mexico and knew she'd have to phone her before she went out among the Navajos in their distant houses, some of them traditional hogans, which she visited as a social worker. But it was only five-thirty out there and she hesitated to punch in the numbers. Char would console her but question her too. She'd figure out how close she and Gabe were, then lecture her that she was crazy.\n\nHolding her phone, Tess continued to pace in a big circle, through the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, around again. Surely, if she could just find the spot she'd been held prisoner, she would recognize it somehow, the house, at least. But the numerous places she'd driven past already, slowing down, staring, had not rung a bell. Even if she'd been kept inside all that time, she'd surely have looked out the windows. She must be able to recognize things outside, a barn, a field, a road\u2014something. Maybe if she drove more of the roads around here, something would strike her as familiar.\n\nTess jolted when her cell phone rang.\n\n\"Tess, it's me.\" Gabe's familiar voice seemed to fill the house, to warm her, even though he sounded all business now. \"I'm going to talk to Sam Jeffers, John Hillman and Dane Thompson, separately and on my own, so Vic won't spook them. I want you to stay put until you get your power restored and\u2014\"\n\n\"I see the repair truck in my driveway.\"\n\n\"Good. Jace is on his way to take paint scrapings from the telephone pole for Mike\u2014he's coming back here today\u2014before the repairmen handle it or climb it if they put it back up.\"\n\n\"Gabe, I think I should go with you to see those three men. If not, I'll drive to their places on my own, just to see if anything jogs my memory.\"\n\n\"What? No way you're heading alone to their properties! Tess, I'm not going for a good-time chat. I'm checking to see if they have alibis, at least for the time you were harassed last night, not to mention when Sandy was taken.\"\n\n\"Well, if I shouldn't go alone, I should go with you. We'll tell Sam Jeffers that I just learned he tried to track me with whatever dog he had twenty years ago and wanted to thank him. I assume you're going to show John Hillman the stuffed dog that was on my property, so I'd have a natural stake in that.\"\n\n\"Tess, I don't\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course, you're probably right that I shouldn't go with you to see Dane, so we can compromise on that, and I'll just go on the first two visits with you.\"\n\n\"I'm trying to keep you safe and\u2014\"\n\n\"But last night shows I'm really not safe, not until we find whoever took me, Jill, Sandy\u2014maybe Amanda. It's hardly some high school kids, even if they are the ones who put graffiti on the rocks near the waterfall. And I don't think my lights out and a dead dog are just someone's sick idea of an early Halloween prank.\"\n\nShe heard him muttering something. To himself? To Vic?\n\nTo Vic, she realized, as she heard his voice in the background. \"Then let her go. Something's got to unlock her memory. She's still the best chance we've got.\"\n\nGabe sounded really mad\u2014but controlled\u2014as he spoke again. \"I'll pick you up in about fifteen minutes. We'll stop to talk to the electrical guys, then head for Jeffers's place so you can 'thank him,' and we'll see how that goes. Then maybe you'll go with me to Hillman's taxidermy shop, his little house of horrors. You won't like it there, Tess.\"\n\n\"I may not recall where I was held when I was kidnapped, but it was a house of horrors. I'm sure it was, but I'm desperate to remember it\u2014and I will! I'll be waiting for you here.\"\n\nHe didn't even say goodbye. He was angry with her, trapped into letting her help today, probably because of Vic rather than her arguments, but she thought she'd done okay standing up to him.\n\nShe got her things together in case he just dropped her at her house later, went to the bathroom, then paced in big circles again, waiting for him. Despite having her warm jacket on, Tess shivered. Had Gabe's mother paced just like this, right here, waiting for her husband? This house, any one where the family had loneliness and conflict, could be a house of horrors.\n\n* * *\n\n\"About Sam Jeffers's place,\" Gabe said. They were heading out of town toward the southeastern foothills after confirming that her power would be back on line soon. \"Other than his cell phone, the guy lives like the early settlers. His Appalachian roots run deep. He's here, he's there, he's everywhere around, has several small, old lean-to-type cabins in the woods, where he camps and hunts.\"\n\n\"I'm pretty sure I was kept in a house, not at some campsite,\" Tess said.\n\n\"We'll look at his main place, where he breeds and trains his hounds. He'll be there, I think, because, according to Marva, he, Hillman and Dane just got back from the woods, where they were looking at a wounded stag Sam had cornered but not killed.\"\n\n\"Cornered but not killed,\" she repeated. \"I...I hope Sandy Kenton's being kept alive like I was. Jill too, of course\u2014and Amanda, if she was kidnapped instead of snatched by her father. But why would someone take a third child if Jill was still...\"\n\n\"Yeah. Assuming, of course, that whoever took Sandy out of the shop uptown in broad daylight is the same person who took you and Jill. But a copycat crime like this seems unlikely. I think we're still after one person, maybe with an accomplice. So far, no real leads from Jace's questioning folks who were in and out of that back alley when Sandy disappeared. Even our all-seeing, all-knowing veteran librarian didn't see anything unusual. It's almost like Sandy vanished into thin air.\"\n\n\"And, in exchange, someone left that scarecrow.\"\n\nGabe turned the cruiser into a narrow lane lined by buckeye trees. They always dropped their leaves early, so the bright autumn colors of the hills were muted to dry, brown foliage here. Some of the trees were even stripped of leaves, so it seemed their naked, crooked arms reached out. The narrow dirt lane twisted, climbed a bit.\n\n\"Oh, perfect,\" Tess said. \"Like a scene in a scary movie. A mailman comes up here every day?\"\n\n\"No, there's a box we passed down on the road. And, I'm surprised to see, a place for the Chillicothe newspaper. Can't believe a loner and wanderer like Sam keeps up with the news.\"\n\n\"Unless he likes to read about his handiwork.\"\n\n\"You know, you and Vic would get along real well. He suspects everyone, probably even the mailman and paperboy.\"\n\nA one-story house with peeling paint came into view. It had a long side section that looked added on and was painted such a clean, new white it made the house itself look even dingier.\n\n\"That painted part is the canine wing,\" Gabe said. \"Sam keeps his dogs under a roof. Sometimes I think he treats them better than people.\"\n\nHe pulled into a small, turnaround loop and killed the engine. The minute Tess opened her door, she heard barking. \"I hope there's not a guard dog loose,\" she said.\n\n\"Hasn't been before. And probably not so a visitor doesn't get hurt, but one of his dogs. He's real fussy about who buys and adopts them.\"\n\nJust as Tess closed the passenger door, she glimpsed the garbage bag with the mounted pit bull Gabe had put on the floor of the backseat. She imagined it was barking too. She knew he planned to show it to John Hillman but not Sam.\n\n\"Maybe he's asleep or not here,\" she said, surprised Sam didn't realize he had visitors with all the noise.\n\n\"I see his truck's in the old barn over there, but that doesn't mean\u2014\"\n\nSam came to the door and walked out with a single hound behind him. Tess was relieved to see he was unarmed. She had the funniest feeling about this place, even though it wasn't familiar to her.\n\n\"Hey, Sheriff. Heard you drive in. How you doin'? And that you, Miss Lockwood?\"\n\nThey all shook hands and went through the usual greetings and small talk. In the old days in the hills, to \"set a spell and get caught up\" was essential before getting down to business.\n\n\"Tess wanted to come along just to say thanks for trying to track her years ago,\" Gabe explained since the talk had mostly been between the two men\u2014also hill-country custom. \"And I sure appreciate the effort with Boo the other day,\" he said, patting the dog on the head. \"Hear you found a wounded stag up yonder.\"\n\n\"Did. Took John and Dane with me, but it died. John won out to claim it, though I get the venison. It was hurtin' real bad when we got there, so Dane used some of that pain med stuff to get it to stop thrashing around. You know, what he uses on people's pets in agony so he can set a leg and such.\"\n\nAs they talked, Tess glanced around. Surely she would have recalled yelping dogs if she'd ever been kept here. But was it at all suspicious that it took Sam a while to come out to greet them, as if maybe he had to hide someone or something first? He and Gabe were talking about trapping, but Gabe managed to get the conversation around to when Sam left the area with John and Dane and when they came back. He was probably going to ask the other two men the same to see if their information matched.\n\n\"You got time to come in and set a spell?\" Sam asked Gabe, as if she weren't even there. At least that meant he had nothing to hide inside, didn't it?\n\nGabe turned him down, saying he had to get Tess home. \"Someone hit her utility pole last night and her place went dark,\" Gabe said. \"You old boys weren't out on the road after drinking last night, were you?\"\n\nHow Sam found that amusing, she wasn't sure, but somehow Gabe conned his way into looking at the bumper of Sam's beat-up old truck out in the doorless shed he used as a garage.\n\nGlad the hound Boo didn't show any interest in her, Tess didn't go with them but walked closer to the house. A slant-door of an old-fashioned root cellar with a padlock on it caught her interest. In this refrigerator age, root cellars were outdated, and people never locked them.\n\nChecking to be sure the men weren't looking, Tess bent and knocked on the wood. The root cellar had been repaired with new boards, one with Mason's Mill stamped on it. She knocked on the wood again. Nothing. No answer, but what did she expect? Sandy Kenton to scream out that she needed help?\n\n\"Now, Miss Lockwood,\" Sam said when the men ambled back over, \"I never would 'spect you trying to get to my best moonshine.\"\n\nTess blushed. He'd seen her. She'd made a mess of this, probably was wrong to insist Gabe bring her.\n\n\"I thought it was another place for dogs,\" she blurted, probably making herself look even more stupid.\n\n\"Bad dogs, you mean?\" he said with a wink and a shake of his shaggy head. \"Naw, it's not really moonshine, Sheriff, but I don't think you came lookin' for that. Keeps my beer cool, though. Want one, I'll bet, eh, Sheriff, but not when you're on duty?\"\n\nThere was more small talk, all between Gabe and Sam, followed by some back-slapping. Tess walked ahead and got in the cruiser.\n\n\"Sorry I screwed that up,\" she said the minute Gabe got back in.\n\n\"Almost.\"\n\n\"No marks or dents on his truck, right?\"\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\n\"Do you really think he uses that old root cellar for storing beer?\"\n\n\"No way to know without a search warrant, and the Falls County judge I use would never give me one on what I know.\"\n\n\"I promise to keep even quieter\u2014that is, say next to nothing\u2014at Hillman's place.\"\n\n\"Tess, you did fine. But didn't you hear what Sam divulged about Dane? I can't believe it didn't occur to me before. The man uses veterinarian drugs. They not only cover pain, but could cause amnesia, I'll bet. Somehow I've got to find out what Dane uses, check into that.\"\n\nHe pulled out of the crooked driveway, and they started down the hill. \"I see what you mean,\" she said. \"A long shot, but\u2014\"\n\n\"But I'm desperate. And maybe it's not just that you were too young or traumatized so you didn't recall details of your captivity. I had a friend who had a colonoscopy\u2014he was dreading it\u2014but they gave him an IV that didn't knock him out so that he could follow orders, but it kept him from recalling the details of the unpleasant procedure afterward.\"\n\n\"And those needle marks on my arms, like I was some kind of junkie.\"\n\nAt the bottom of the hill, she almost thought she heard the barking of those dogs again. But there was some other sound, more muted and distant than her memory of the corn harvester, but\u2014\n\nShe turned toward him, twisting in her seat belt.\n\n\"What's that?\" she asked.\n\n\"What's what? That sound? It's just a train. Coal trains come through here real regular, you know that. Why? You look upset.\"\n\n\"Scared. I feel scared, and it's just a distant train. Sounds really stick with me, even when I can't get any visual memories. One of the books Miss Etta gave me about childhood traumas said smells or sounds could trigger a buried memory. Gabe, I think I remember the sounds of a train, and there's no tracks in earshot of my house here or where I live in Michigan. But I don't think the sounds from a train carry to Dane's place either.\"\n\n\"I'm starting to think we need a field trip to Chillicothe,\" he said as they turned out onto a paved road. \"I need to talk to the vet who gave Dane the initial alibi, because I remember my dad saying she lived near a train track. I could ask her about vet drugs without quizzing Dane. And I've got something else to check on there too, looking into someone's past who has a record of molesting little girls.\"\n\n\"Someone who lives here now?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Let's just save that until later. I don't want you to go to Dane's with me, Tess, but let's go see what Hillman has to say about that stuffed dog in the backseat. Just don't wander off if you see any buried rooms with padlocks and new wood, okay? Hearing the train narrows down where you might have been held around here to about fifty square miles instead of a hundred. Something's going to break these cases loose. I only hope it's not too late for the other girls.\"\n15\n\nTess was relieved to see that John Hillman's driveway and house were a far cry from the creepiness of Sam's. Everything looked well kept and newly painted. The driveway was a short, straight one off State Route 104 to Chillicothe. A neatly lettered sign read Hillman's Taxidermy and had a stag's head on it. She wondered if Mr. Hillman would sell the new stag's head or keep it. Thoughts of mounted stag heads with those liquid eyes and that rack of pointed antlers made her uncomfortable.\n\nBut where had she seen mounted stag heads? She couldn't recall anything specific.\n\n\"When you said I wouldn't like this place\u2014that it was a house of horrors\u2014I pictured it back in the woods like Sam Jeffers's house,\" she told Gabe.\n\n\"I didn't mean horrors linked to you. I just meant you might not like what you see inside, depending on what he's working on. Even though he hangs around with some of the backwoods boys, Hillman's a modern businessman. He advertises in the Chillicothe Gazette, and this location on a busy road helps promote his services too. People are in and out of here all the time.\"\n\nGabe took the mounted pit bull out of the backseat, got rid of the plastic bag, then held the dog under his arm as they went up to the side door with another Taxidermy sign hanging over it. He rang the bell. Tess jumped when the sound of it was not a chime but an animal's roar.\n\n\"Black bear recording,\" Gabe said as John Hillman, wearing a leather apron and goggles shoved up on his forehead, opened the door.\n\n\"Hey, Sheriff. And, Ann\u2014oh, sorry, guess not,\" he said, squinting at Tess. \"Hey\u2014I was wondering what happened to that pit bull!\" He reached out and stroked the dog's head. \"Some jerk stole that right off my back porch when I had it out so the glue could dry. Glad you got it back for me. Come on in, both of you.\"\n\n\"John, this is Tess Lockwood,\" Gabe said, and made formal introductions, though the man seemed more interested in the mounted dog than her. \"Someone left this in her backyard.\"\n\n\"That right?\" he said, leading them into a large workroom. \"It belongs to Jonas Simons, Ann's brother. It's one of his favorite dogs, named Sikkem, died real sudden.\"\n\n\"Sic 'em, huh?\" Gabe said. \"I don't see a mark on his fur. I'll bet you did a good job patching him up. One of his fighting dogs?\"\n\n\"Fighting dogs?\" Hillman echoed, looking overly dramatic, Tess thought. \"Don't know a thing about that. But why would someone leave it in your yard, Tess?\" he said, turning to her and narrowing his eyes.\n\n\"That's what we'd like to find out,\" she said, keeping her attention on him rather than looking around as she had done at first.\n\nThis place smelled strange, sharp, like turpentine, and the heads of dead animals peered down from all four walls. A large vat behind Hillman was making strange sounds, and he had a big, bloody pelt stretched out on the worktable behind him. Worse, a collection of what must be glass eyes stared at her from a clear vase on the table. Around the room, plastic carvings of different animals were displayed in great detail\u2014including veins and muscle ridges\u2014with various stages of their own hides pinned to them.\n\nShe had not expected to see carvings that looked almost like works of art. Nor was John Hillman what she'd expected. He was slim with a closely clipped beard unlike his friend Sam Jeffers's long one. He was younger than she'd expected too, maybe in his late thirties. Unlike Sam, he didn't \"talk country\" but sounded educated with a touch of a Southern drawl. What a weird trio of friends Dane, Sam and John made. Was the foundation of their friendship animals, dead or alive?\n\n\"So this dog belongs to Jonas,\" Gabe said. \"Those Simons boys are pretty antsy about my relationship with Ann. All I need is them siccing a dog like this on me.\"\n\n\"Better watch crossing that trio of bubbas,\" Hillman said with a laugh. He looked at Tess again just as she noticed a shelf with a row of animal skulls, including one that looked newly scraped and cleaned. Either still wet or polished, it seemed to gleam.\n\n\"You don't use the real skulls,\" she observed.\n\n\"No. Even if there are antlers, they're preserved and screwed onto a plastic skull. Not to brag, but there's a lot of workmanship and even artistry that goes into shaping and carving the underlying forms. A lot of planning and care not to make a mistake. You're only as good as your last carcass, like we say. In sheriff lingo, that's you're only as good as your last case or capture, right, Gabe?\"\n\nHillman sounded as though he was goading Gabe. Or rubbing it in that here he was, running down a stolen, stuffed pit bull instead of tracking lost girls. Or was she reading this all wrong?\n\n\"This is a piece of evidence, so I need to keep it for a while,\" Gabe said, when Hillman reached for it. \"If someone's harassing Tess, I need to know who and why. I'll have Jonas stop around and fill out a stolen property form to get it back.\"\n\n\"He owes me for the work on it, and if he doesn't get it back, I bet he won't pay,\" Hillman said, sounding upset.\n\n\"Got you,\" Gabe said, and started for the door with Tess right behind him.\n\nShe was surprised to feel the tension between the two men when she had expected them to get along. Yet Gabe had acted as if it were old home week with Sam. Did he just play different men\u2014suspects\u2014different ways? Since he hadn't asked this man about his alibi for last night, she figured he must consider that new stag carcass proof of where he'd been.\n\nAt the door Gabe turned to Hillman. \"Next time someone steals your property, report it, will you, John? Otherwise I have to assume you're the last one in possession of it when it turns up where it shouldn't be.\"\n\n\"I just got home this morning from a trip with Sam Jeffers and Dane Thompson,\" the taxidermist said.\n\n\"And that's when you saw this pit bull was gone?\"\n\n\"No, it was gone a few days before, but the fact that I was on the overnight trip was why I didn't report it earlier. You got some agenda besides this dead dog, Sheriff? Like maybe kidnap victim number one here?\" he said with a glance at Tess.\n\n\"When a kidnap case has never been solved, you trace any trail, whether one with a hound dog on it or a stuffed pit bull. I'll keep this until I talk to Jonas and then you two can work out the payment for the dog.\"\n\nHillman said something Tess didn't catch and closed the door pretty loud and fast behind them.\n\n\"Sorry that got kind of tense,\" Gabe said as he put the dog in the back of the cruiser again and they got in. \"I needed to rattle a couple of cages, flush someone out by making myself the target, not you. Jonas may have taken his dog back without paying so that he could scare you off. If so, maybe it's because he thinks I'm more interested in you than Ann.\"\n\n\"As they see it, Ann's in love with you and the three of them are her protectors.\"\n\n\"Yeah. They aren't the brightest guys around here, but I don't want them bothering you or screwing things up. I almost hope one of the three musketeers put it there to get you away from here, instead of the kidnapper\u2014yet I don't want to use you for bait.\"\n\n\"At least the Simons brothers are too young to have had anything to do with my abduction,\" Tess said as she fastened her seat belt. \"Besides, I'm not to blame if they see you stepping away from Ann, because it's not that way between you and me.\"\n\n\"No?\" Gabe said. It was not so much a question, more a challenge.\n\nGabe backed the cruiser out and headed toward the road. He was frowning, but she was getting used to his moods now. She figured he wasn't angry but worried. Maybe just thinking. As she was. About them, but she couldn't face talking about that now. Until things were settled, a relationship was impossible. Even if the case was solved, the abductor found, it was still impossible. She just wanted to head home to Michigan.\n\nDesperate for a change of subject when he kept shooting sharp looks at her that she felt clear down in the pit of her belly, she spoke. \"Don't you think John Hillman is too young to have been involved in my abduction?\"\n\n\"He's deceptive in more ways than one. I swear he's financing the floating dogfight ring the Simons boys run in the hills. I'd have found it by now if they didn't have someone with brains behind it, who keeps moving its location. Hillman's over fifty, just doesn't look his age, like he's been preserving his own skin and shape. He was a drinking buddy of your dad's way back when. He was such a ladies' man you wouldn't believe it.\"\n\n\"Hillman, you mean, not my father?\"\n\n\"Yeah, right.\"\n\n\"But Hillman's being a ladies' man doesn't tie into kidnapping young girls, does it?\"\n\n\"Nope. It's just that I don't trust him\u2014or Sam, or Dane\u2014and it really ticks me off I can't nail them on anything. I'm going to drop you at home, look around the place again before I leave you to head on over to Dane's. Later this afternoon, I'm heading to Chillicothe to call on Dane's lady-friend vet. I won't even fight you and Vic about not taking you. Her place is near the railroad tracks, and you have some memory of that, so I'll let you look around while I talk to her, see if her house jogs any memories. Then I'll drop you off at a restaurant or someplace safe while I do another interview I don't want you involved in. Deal?\"\n\n\"Yes. Anything to help. And I feel safest when I'm with you.\"\n\nHe looked at her. Their gazes locked for a moment until he turned back to the road again. He started to say something, then evidently changed him mind as they passed Dane's house and headed for hers.\n\nTess glanced in the rearview mirror at the pet cemetery, but her gaze caught the snarling expression of the dead pit bull on the backseat as if it were chasing them.\n\n* * *\n\nGabe didn't like leaving Tess alone, even in broad daylight, but after dropping her off and looking around her house inside and out, he drove alone to Dane's. After he parked, he had to wait for him to finish with a client. Jim Cargrove, the town banker, had brought in his new Great Dane pup to be neutered.\n\n\"Best breed around, Great Danes,\" Dane said, making a lame joke when he saw Gabe sitting in his waiting room after Jim had left. But Dane's eyes widened and his head jerked when he saw the stuffed pit bull in the next seat.\n\n\"Got a few minutes?\" Gabe asked.\n\n\"A few. Busy day. My office is just down the hall where\u2014\"\n\n\"Mind if I just step in here with you instead?\" Gabe asked and, without permission, the dog under his arm, entered an examining room. He quickly scanned the open shelves, but most were hidden behind cabinet doors.\n\n\"Just curious, Dane. When you knock a dog out for something like neutering, what do you use? Just straight ether or something else?\"\n\n\"Things are a little more sophisticated than that today. Ether use began in the Victorian age. A variety of anesthetics are available now for animals, and certainly for people.\"\n\n\"I had a friend who just had a colonoscopy, and they gave him Versed, some kind of amnesiac. I guess with animals you wouldn't use something like that.\"\n\n\"Hardly. It was probably a sophisticated cocktail of drugs your friend had, and Versed was a part of it. We don't need or use such drugs for animals, only painkillers, not ones that kill the memory. So, where is this going?\"\n\n\"Obviously nowhere,\" Gabe said, noting that Dane showed no particular reaction to the mention of an amnesia drug. \"I actually came today to tell you someone's been harassing Tess Lockwood by putting one of John Hillman's taxidermy dogs on her back porch. It belonged to Jonas Simons. I just wondered if you ever treated this dog.\"\n\n\"The Simons boys\u2014all three of them\u2014don't get their dogs treated, neutered, nothing, though I have sewn up a couple of wounds from fights they had with coons.\"\n\n\"Or fights with each other?\"\n\nDane shrugged and looked away. He started to straighten items on his counter, dropping scissors into some sort of sterile bath, his rubber gloves into a waste bin he opened with a foot pedal. He let the bin slam closed.\n\n\"I don't know about the dogs fighting each other,\" Dane said, obviously trying to keep his temper in check. That's the way Gabe liked it: let them get riled.\n\n\"But,\" Dane went on, gesturing more broadly as if that would convince him, \"I did not harass Tess Lockwood by putting a mounted pit bull on her back porch, if that's what you're implying. Sheriff, are you still on a mission to pull me into her case, or any of the others? You know I had an alibi from when Teresa Lockwood was taken, so give it up.\"\n\n\"I know both you and Dr. Linda Stevens said you were going to see her and that you arrived, visited awhile and headed back. A single witness, a friend or more than a friend.\"\n\n\"Just leave her out of this! And Marva said you went to see her at the spa. Make a case, Sheriff, or get out of my life. Unless you have a search warrant, and want to go looking for lost little girls in these drawers or cupboards, get out of my examining room!\"\n\n\"Thanks for your cooperation, Dane. I'll be seeing you,\" he said, and walked out.\n\n* * *\n\nAfter Gabe called Tess to tell her to be ready in half an hour, he walked into the police station with the pit bull in his arms. He put the dog down on Ann's desk.\n\n\"You tagged this and entered it in evidence,\" he said, \"but forgot to tell me who owned it.\"\n\nHer cheeks colored. She didn't meet his eyes, staring at her computer screen as if she'd read her next words there.\n\n\"If you mean it might belong to my brother, I wasn't sure. Lots of people have pit bulls.\"\n\n\"Recently dead ones mounted by a local taxidermist? I hear his name was Sikkem.\"\n\n\"I thought it might be, but I wasn't sure. You don't hire me to solve cases. You didn't ask. You haven't asked me anything of importance lately.\"\n\nHe ignored that barb. All he needed was her brothers tampering with Tess's confidence, complicating his investigation by leaving terror presents on her back porch.\n\n\"Are we adversaries now, when I need my entire staff to pull together at this time\u2014all times, Ann?\"\n\n\"I don't want to be your enemy. You're the one backing off, getting confused, getting too close to a witness and victim.\"\n\n\"She's helping me. I have to be able to trust you.\"\n\nAnn started to say something else but shut her mouth and bit her lower lip.\n\nKeeping his voice calm, Gabe gave her instructions. \"Please phone Jonas and tell him I'd like him to stop by my office before work tomorrow morning. Ann,\" he added, putting his hand around her wrist as she started to write that down as if she would not remember it, \"I'd like for us to be friends.\"\n\n\"Strange how that word can hurt\u2014friends. And please take that dog off my desk. I hate dogs. I've always hated their dogs.\"\n\n\"It must have been painful to watch your brothers pit their dogs against each other.\"\n\n\"I don't know what you mean. And if I did ever see a dogfight, it wasn't as bad as when people fight.\"\n\nHe picked up the dog. \"Tell Jonas he still owes John Hillman for his work, but, if he wants it, he has to pick up the dog here.\"\n\nGabe ignored whatever Ann was muttering as he walked back to his office with the dead dog in his arms. He felt he was getting nowhere fast, but at least he hadn't turned up any human bodies\u2014yet.\n16\n\nOn the highway to Chillicothe, Tess started to realize what else it meant to be a law enforcement officer, besides being on call all the time. Cars slowed down when they saw Gabe's vehicle, though they were going the speed limit. Even huge semis moved out of their way, as if Gabe had the siren and light bar on. It was a strange kind of power she'd never experienced, though she was familiar with the feeling that people were looking at her. Yet everything about being with this man seemed new and amazing. Since she felt safe bouncing her deepest fears off him, she'd decided to share something else she was agonizing over.\n\n\"Gabe, I found something disturbing in one of the books Miss Etta loaned me. It's called Stockholm syndrome. It means that sometimes hostages express sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors. They're so grateful to be fed and kept alive that they come to need and like\u2014even love\u2014their abductors. Is that insane or what?\"\n\n\"Sounds crazy, but it happens. Do you think it figures in what happened to you?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure, but it makes me wonder if that could be a reason I can't remember things. Could there be someone I think well of now who took me and hurt me years ago? I like almost everyone in Cold Creek except Dane and Bright Star Monson\u2014which I realize doesn't narrow suspects down one bit for you. And,\" she added, eager not to dwell on the subject, \"I meant to tell you I called my sister Char out in New Mexico and asked her if Mom and Dad ever used the word smacking when they punished us. She'd never heard it and had no memory of a scarecrow either. She about had a fit when I admitted I'd been thinking of calling our father.\"\n\n\"I'm sure your mother and sisters were hurt by his desertion. As the youngest, you maybe don't remember too much about it.\"\n\n\"We were all devastated. I remember that. He must have been really upset or bitter about something to leave. I know he partly blamed Mom for not keeping me with her the day I was taken, but Kate and Char hinted it was more. I know all the jokes about traveling salesmen, but I never heard he had someone else. He met the woman he married out west after he moved there.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Well, it might be rough to talk to him after all this time. You might want to put it off.\"\n\nShe pulled her seat belt out a bit and turned toward him. \"Gabe, he was never under suspicion for taking me himself to get back at my mother for something, right?\"\n\nGabe looked as if she'd hit him. His eyes widened, his nostrils flared. He didn't look at her but kept his eyes on the road. \"Vic Reingold and my father considered it. But they decided no.\"\n\n\"He had an alibi?\"\n\n\"There were rumors he'd been out of town, but he'd gone for a walk near the falls. He took off work that day and wasn't traveling. He told Vic, who interviewed him, he had some tough things to decide about his marriage. The parents are always looked at immediately in abuse or kidnap cases, but Vic believed him.\"\n\n\"Your father did too?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\nAn awkward silence stretched between them. She thought he was going to say something more, but he didn't, so she continued, \"Anyway, it was great to talk to Char. She's always good at calming me down. It's the social worker in her. Kate says she's a bleeding heart. Kate's a lot more ticked off that Mom left the house to me alone, but they're both still supportive in their way.\"\n\n\"There are advantages and disadvantages to being an only child, like me. The youngest kid, the middle kid, the oldest and in between can all have problems, but when you're the only kid, it's all on you. You're the firstborn, but you're always the baby too.\"\n\n\"You and your mother must miss each other.\"\n\n\"We're getting close now,\" he said, as if he'd had enough family talk. He turned the cruiser onto the ramp to downtown Chillicothe. \"Let's go over this again. I'll drive past Dr. Stevens's house, then her vet clinic. They're not in the same area. The clinic's off Bridge Street near the hospital. Just take a good look at both places to see if anything prompts a memory. Behind her vet clinic, near the train tracks, she had an extension built out the back that's evidently not used. It's something my dad discovered and I've checked on periodically since. I'll interview her while you look around, and if you see anything at all suspicious, just meet me back where I drop you off, and we'll check it out together. Tess, are you okay? Got that?\"\n\n\"I hear you. Agreed. It's all a long shot, isn't it? You have to just keep unraveling threads and hope that something really frays or tears loose.\"\n\n\"That's a sad way to look at police work, but I guess, at least in the case of the Cold Creek kidnapper, that's right.\"\n\nShe reached over to squeeze his shoulder. He covered her hand with his. At that smallest touch, her heart soared.\n\n* * *\n\n\"This is certainly a surprise and, quite frankly, not a welcome one,\" Dr. Linda Stevens told Gabe as she sat across her desk from him. \"I was barely beginning my practice here when your father came calling with cloaked innuendoes that I might have something to do with a kidnapped child when I only had contact with Dane Thompson for business.\"\n\nThe vet going on the offensive reminded Gabe of Dane's attitude earlier. He felt deflated that Tess had not recognized this woman's house or clinic from their drive-by, but he wasn't giving up on this interview. He kept thinking his only chance without a solid lead was to rattle each possible suspect's cage. It bothered him when there were so many caged animals nearby. He could hear the muted cries of dogs and cats, even with the office door closed. But he'd give about anything to hear a young girl's cries from her place of imprisonment, so he could rescue her.\n\n\"Each time there's another abduction,\" he told her, \"we need to go back over all former evidence. These crimes may well be linked.\"\n\n\"But I gave no evidence, per se. I merely gave a deposition that Dane Thompson visited me the day of that first abduction for which he was wrongly suspected.\"\n\nThe woman lit a cigarette then inhaled deeply. It surprised him, but then he knew all kinds of doctors smoked. He took it that she was nervous enough to light up in front of him without asking if he'd mind.\n\nLinda Stevens was a good-looking woman in an icy way. Her blond hair was pulled away from her face into a twist. A face he'd call classic or aristocratic with high cheekbones and arched eyebrows. He could see why it was his father's theory that Dane Thompson was interested in her for more than business reasons.\n\n\"So, what can I do to get rid of you?\" she asked, tapping nonexistent ash from the end of her newly lit cigarette into a cut-glass ashtray.\n\n\"Make my day. Admit you covered for Dane by giving him a false alibi that he wasn't in Cold Creek when Teresa Lockwood was abducted. You certainly won't be prosecuted for misleading statements to my father from twenty years ago, whereas withholding information now that would be useful\u2014that could be a different story.\"\n\n\"All right, so I was seeing Dane socially at that time and didn't want people to think I was dating a possible kidnapper.\"\n\n\"I believe that much.\"\n\n\"But I don't think he was\u2014a kidnapper.\"\n\n\"I should tell you, however, that all kinds of law enforcement, even media, may be swooping in here with our new emphasis on the investigation. And one way to stop that is to level with me about the drugs you and Dane use to sedate animals.\"\n\n\"What? Now, wasn't that a non sequitur!\"\n\nHe hoped she'd be upset enough to go for his bait-and-switch tactic. Maybe she'd want to get him off the topic of her earlier lies in her deposition and instead give him info about sedation drugs available to vets. He saw her quick mind follow exactly what he'd implied. She stubbed out her barely smoked cigarette with such vehemence that her long fingernails went rat-a-tat against the ashtray.\n\n\"Drugs?\" she said. \"Ask him. Besides, all vets use sedation drugs. And yes, some are the same or similar to what would be used by doctors of Homo sapiens, if that's where this is going.\"\n\n\"A drug like Versed, for example?\"\n\n\"You mean midazolam? That's for humans. It's an amnestic. With a dog or cat, unlike with a person, it isn't necessary to suppress memories of a medical procedure. We use pain or knockout meds for animals. However, I will say one other thing, if you keep it off the record.\" She hesitated, frowning.\n\nHe shifted slightly forward in his chair. \"So far, this is all off the record.\"\n\n\"Dane, at that time, not now, was my source for drugs. Vet drugs, not recreational drugs or medical drugs for humans like midazolam. He had some source on the East Coast, got them cheap from some clearing house, nothing illegal.\"\n\nThat was intriguing, perhaps useful. But he decided to go for another quick change in topic. \"Did he phone you to say I might be visiting today?\"\n\nShe blinked, once, twice. \"I don't see him anymore. Haven't for years.\"\n\n\"That's not what I asked. You want me out of here right now, answer the question.\"\n\nShe pushed the ashtray away. Her hand was shaking. He heard a distant train coming closer and thought of Tess. The tracks were barely a block from here. Would that sound trigger a memory that she'd been kept near here, even for a short while? He wanted to be with her in case her memories came back. The problem was, he wanted to be with her more and more.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, not looking at him. \"He phoned earlier to give me a heads-up you might stop by or that Reingold might. Look, Sheriff, I had nothing to do with the first abduction or this latest one of Sandy Kenton or anything!\"\n\nHe stood. Maybe that was why Dane was so confrontational. He was afraid Gabe would uncover his drug pipeline, whether for animals\u2014or young girls.\n\n\"I see you're keeping up with details of the latest kidnapping,\" he said. \"You know Sandy Kenton's name.\"\n\n\"It's been in the papers for several days, for heaven's sake!\"\n\n\"Thanks for the information. I'll show myself out. And even though Dane phoned you, I'd advise you not to report this interview to him or take more of his calls, or it will look like current collusion, as well as twenty years ago. I'd advise you to steer clear of him.\"\n\nHe walked away and opened the door, then turned back. She looked as if she was going to cry. He'd probably overstepped, but learning Dane was a drug supplier was important. And that search warrant he was going to apply for would give him the power to comb the man's house and clinic for any trace of amnestic drugs.\n17\n\n\"You won't like this,\" Tess told Gabe as he picked her up down the block from the vet clinic. \"Despite that train going by\u2014much closer than my memory of it\u2014I looked in the windows of that wing she has built out the back.\"\n\n\"Tess, I told you\u2014\"\n\n\"I know, I know, but I want to help, and we've got to find those girls. I think it's meant to be a kennel for boarding dogs, but it's empty. Maybe she built it, then decided not to expand that way. Did she say anything to help?\"\n\n\"She gave me a lead on some drugs Dane might have access to.\"\n\nTess rubbed her arms through her jacket until she realized she was trying to soothe the memory of injections she'd once had there. Gabe went on, \"It will help me get a search warrant if there's any problem with that. Since the guy's supposedly such an upstanding member of society, the judge may balk. Would you do me a favor while I drive, partner, and look up a drug called Versed or midazolam on your phone, then read me the specs on it?\" He spelled it out for her.\n\n\"She told you Dane uses that drug?\" Tess asked as she leaned down to fish her phone out of her purse.\n\n\"Not exactly. It's another of my wild-goose chases, I suppose.\"\n\nShe selected Wikipedia, since it always covered the basics, while they drove through downtown Chillicothe, a city large enough to swallow twenty Cold Creeks. As she read aloud to him, she began to shiver.\n\n\"Midazolam is not a pain medication. The main effects are amnesia and patient compliance. Patients lose touch with reality, not knowing where they are or what is really occurring. Patients do not recall pain or a bad experience. Under the drug's influence they can carry on a conversation but will remember nothing once it wears off. It can open the door to abuse!\" she went on, her voice getting louder. \"Some patients, during a procedure or later, experience a distorted, nightmarish version of actual events and later feel abandonment and panic. Gabe, that's it! That's how I felt! Abandoned. I've felt panic, deep inside for years, especially when I hear or see certain things.\"\n\n\"Calm down. You're okay now, safe with me,\" he said, gripping her knee with his hand. \"It's still a stab in the dark, but maybe one that will find its mark. Dr. Stevens said Dane had easy access to and sold vet drugs, which do not need the property of amnesia, but who knows what else he had access to?\"\n\nHe put his hand back on the steering wheel, then thumped it with one fist while he spoke. \"Tess, as long as I'm here in Chillicothe, I still need to check into something else.\"\n\n\"And this is about someone other than Dane, right?\"\n\n\"When Mayor Owens talked to you at the police station, how did he seem to you? Glad to see you? Upset?\"\n\n\"In a hurry to get me out of town. At first he acted kind of creepy, almost like he wanted to scare me away. Is this something about Reese Owens?\"\n\n\"He is alleged to have molested a young girl years ago when he was a teenager and the girl was five.\"\n\nTess gasped. \"And when he started walking toward me in your conference room, I felt so...so oppressed. In danger. But how could he run for public office, even in such a small town?\"\n\n\"Well, here's the strange part. As far as Vic Reingold can tell, the records for the crime have disappeared, except for one he found that someone had missed expunging. But I need to get corroborating evidence of what happened years ago before I question him on this. I'm heading to the neighborhood where he grew up. I'm going to ask around, see what people recall.\"\n\n\"Well, he did marry the former governor's granddaughter, so that might be why it was erased, not just so he could run for mayor. Friends in high places\u2014at least as high as that hill near Lake Azure with the mayor's beautiful house on it,\" she said.\n\n\"My thoughts exactly.\"\n\nHe pulled onto a side street in an area that had seen better times, where the houses were night and day from the Owens mansion outside Cold Creek. In the distance the big paper mill loomed with its smokestacks stabbing the sky. The yards were small, the buildings close together. No garages, cars parked on the street. A couple of places had Halloween decorations, ghosts or a black cat cutout. A few garbage cans sat on the curb. Near dinnertime, it was almost deserted except for a couple of boys shooting baskets at a bare metal hoop attached to a pole. The moment the boys spotted the police cruiser, they disappeared.\n\n\"You weren't going to bring me with you here at first, or even tell me you were checking into Mayor Owens, were you?\" she asked.\n\nHe was leaning forward over the steering wheel, reading house numbers as he slowed even more, then parallel parked under a ghost tied to an old tree. It was made of a dirty sheet with a noose around his neck to make its head.\n\n\"I didn't want to spook you,\" Gabe said, \"though I hate to put it that way, considering what's hanging over us. It reminds me of the gift shop where Sandy was taken.\"\n\nHe leaned toward her and looked at the dark green house out her side window. \"Hard to believe Reese Owens grew up here,\" he muttered, and turned off the engine. \"As much as his wife's a snob, I'm surprised he didn't have someone erase records of this old address too. Sit tight. I'm going to see if anyone's at his boyhood home, ask if there's someone in the neighborhood who's lived here a long time. Lock yourself in.\"\n\nTess watched as he went up to the door, rang the bell, then talked to a young woman whose face was obscured behind the torn screen. He came back out to the car, unlocked and opened her door. Arms on the roof of the car, he leaned down toward her.\n\n\"Maybe things are finally going our way,\" he said. \"Mrs. Bowes, who lives right across the street, has been here for thirty years. The problem is, this woman says she's a bit of a gossip, so isn't that too bad?\"\n\n\"I have a feeling I should not go with you,\" she said.\n\n\"Be right back. And I'm not sure it's a good thing you're reading my mind,\" he said, and winked at her. He closed the door, then motioned that she should lock herself in again.\n\nIt was a good thing, she thought, he wasn't reading her mind. No man had ever gotten to her the way he did. His glance, his voice, his touch, made her tingle and tremble and in the most delicious way\u2014even when things were supposed to be strictly business, maybe life-and-death business.\n\n* * *\n\nThe two-story, gray house had tired-looking lace curtains in the windows, upstairs and down. The narrow sidewalk was sunken and cracked, and the porch boards creaked under Gabe's feet. The two-seat swing on chains was atilt and moving slightly in the breeze as if ghosts sat there.\n\nWhen he rang the bell, he saw the curtains twitch as someone looked out. He could hear a TV program blaring from inside. A short, elderly lady with some of her white hair on end and some matted down opened the door. The TV got louder. It sounded like some game show with a lot of applause. She must be hard of hearing. Gabe raised his voice.\n\n\"Mrs. Bowes, I'm Sheriff McCord from over in Falls County, just checking up on someone who grew up in this neighborhood. I understand you've lived here for years.\"\n\n\"Thirty-five with my husband, Bob, who worked at the paper mill, but he passed. My daughter says I'm getting forgetful, but not about the past, no, sir. Want to come in? I'm watchin' a rerun of Family Feud, but I can turn it down.\"\n\nHe didn't want to leave Tess alone, even locked in a police car. \"If you don't mind, I'll just ask you a question or two from here. It concerns the Owens family, and the boy was named Reese.\"\n\n\"Oh, him. Did real well for hisself, married up, he did. He's even a mayor now in some little town down yonder.\"\n\nGabe heard applause from the TV in the dim room behind her. It hit him that Reese might resent having to run such a small town, but in a way, he might be hiding out there. If Reese was mayor of a big town, that would bring more media attention, maybe a check of his past, hidden records or not. Maybe that's why he ate too much, taking out his frustrations that way. And maybe Reese took little girls to prove he was clever, or to feed his sick fantasies that had started here in his teens. There were no doubt plenty of places in that huge house on the hill to hide a child. The Owenses were childless. Maybe they wanted a compliant, sweet little girl\u2014several of them.\n\n\"Yes, that's the man,\" Gabe said. \"Mrs. Bowes, do you recall anything about Reese Owens getting in trouble with the law?\"\n\n\"Well,\" she said, drawling her words and rolling her eyes. \"They tried to cover it up then and after.\"\n\n\"Who did?\"\n\n\"His family at first. Then I'll bet his wife's people. You know who her granddaddy was, don't you?\"\n\n\"Yes, I do. What sort of trouble was he in years ago?\"\n\n\"I'll tell you, young man, but I don't want what I say showin' up in the papers or on TV. My Bob took good money for promisin' to keep quiet 'bout it once, though I was shopping at Kmart that day and never promised a thing. Just don't you go getting poor little Reese in trouble for something bad he did long ago. People change, you know.\"\n\n\"I won't get him in trouble for that. This is about something that happened more recently.\"\n\n\"Well,\" she said, leaning closer to the screen and glancing past him as if there might be others hovering. \"He got hisself accused of lewd acts on a minor, a kindergarten girl lived over on the next block back then, Ginger Pickett. I remember her name, all right. The evidence was iffy, least we thought so. At first we heard he could be sentenced up to two years in juvie prison. Then we heard eighteen months. Then he got nothing for it, but they moved away. And that's the last we heard of him till his marriage\u2014oh, not countin' when a man came here to talk to Bob and the neighbors to keep quiet and handed out good money for it too. We spent it on fixin' up things around the house here. You sure you don't want to come in? I'll turn the sound down.\"\n\n\"I really can't, Mrs. Bowes, but you've been very helpful.\"\n\n\"And what you're askin', I'll bet you couldn't look it up in the old court records, right? I mean, if they're gonna spend good money on the neighbors keeping a tight lip, they prob'ly wiped the record clean.\"\n\n\"Please tell your daughter that I think you are sharp not only about the past but about the present,\" Gabe said, touching his hand to his hat. She waved and smiled, showing one prominent gold tooth before the door closed behind her and the voices shouting on the TV stopped.\n\nThis was a good little field trip, he told himself as he walked toward the cruiser. Although he now had enough information to confront Reese Owens, he was going to target Dane again after all these years, just as his dad had done, but with new evidence. The drug connection was tenuous, what his father would have called \"a blind hog finding an acorn.\" It was sheer, dumb luck. He'd like to believe it was a gift from God, but anyway, he was going to run with it.\n\nAs for Reese, if the powerful, political family he'd married into could wipe out court records, who knew what else they could hide? Vic would be pleased they now had two persons of more than interest to pursue.\n\n* * *\n\nIt was dark when Gabe dropped Tess off at her house, so he went in with her and looked all over, including the attic and basement, before walking around the perimeter of the place, especially the backyard. Tess could tell he was anxious to see Agent Reingold, whom he'd called from the car to set up a meeting at the police station in town.\n\n\"I'll be home later,\" he told her at the back door. \"Lock up. Get a good night's sleep, take it easy tomorrow, and I'll see you at the farmers' market on Saturday. Meanwhile, I'm going to serve Dane with the search warrant as soon as I can get my hands on it.\"\n\nShe looked at his strong, big hands on the doorknob. Feeling awkward, wanting to kiss him goodbye, she just nodded and closed the door after his quick exit.\n\nMissing him already, feeling drained, she poured herself a predinner, calm-down glass of wine from the new bottle she'd purchased with some other supplies at the Kwik Shop. She sipped the wine as she walked through the house, checking again to see that the curtains were tightly closed. The glass of Chardonnay went down well, so she poured a second. It had been quite a day, not only turning up information Gabe could use but helping him, being with him for several hours. Even if it was strictly business, she loved just breathing the same air he did.\n\nShe grabbed a few crackers and cut some skinny slices of the cheese Gracie had left for her. She figured she needed some food with the wine because it was going to her head. She was starting to feel funny. Not dizzy but floaty, and it was more than infatuation with Gabe. She'd better fix some proper food.\n\nWhen she bent to look in the small refrigerator to get more food, a wave of dizziness slammed into her. How strange! Even though the refrigerator was fairly empty, it seemed to be full of corn leaves.\n\nShe knew something was wrong. Should she call Gabe? No, she'd better call her mother. She must be upstairs. \"Mom? Mom!\" a woman's voice called nearby. Then she remembered her mother was dead. She'd seen her last alive sitting in a wheelchair in the hospital, waving after Tess had spent the afternoon with her.\n\nTess staggered against the wall, slid to the floor. The door to the cornfield was still open, wafting out cold air. She had to hide, had to hide or they'd find her, take her back to the house, smack her with Mr. Mean.\n\nTess sprawled flat on the floor, moving her hands from her eyes to over her ears. She heard the howl of a train coming closer. A monster roaring. She screamed and cried. She could not breathe. She saw bodies in graves, tear-streaked, muddy faces staring up at her, gesturing with their dirty hands.\n\n\"Help us. Find us,\" they cried.\n\nWhen the soil covered her face, Tess cried too.\n18\n\nTess heard glass shatter. Shards clattered in the sink and flew across the kitchen floor to where she huddled under the table.\n\n\"Tess! Tess, are you all right?\"\n\nDad was home. She'd meant to call him.\n\nA man climbed through the broken window over the sink, stepped right in the sink! He moved the chair by her head, bent down and touched the side of her neck with two fingers. He kicked broken glass away, then gently lifted her out from under the table. It was Gabe. Why did he break her window? She would have let him in.\n\nHe sat on a kitchen chair and pulled her into his lap. She clung to him.\n\n\"Tess, what happened? Was someone here?\"\n\nHe'd closed the refrigerator door, but the ceiling light was on. It was bright and hurt her eyes, but she was so glad to see him.\n\n\"I've got to get you to the doctor. I'm calling him,\" he said. He suddenly had a phone and started punching in numbers. She remembered that Gabe\u2014no, it was his father then\u2014had called for the doctor to look her over when she was found. But that wasn't now. She didn't recall anything except nightmares, wasn't sure why she was here on the floor. She must have fallen and hit her head.\n\nHe talked into the phone while she cuddled against him. He steadied her with his free arm. \"Yeah, no, not poison, Jeff. She's conscious, looking a little better than she did a minute ago. It would take too long to get a squad out here to take her into the Chillicothe E.R. I know it's nearly ten, but can you meet us at your office? Yeah, her pupils are dilated. Keep her alert, right, okay. Listen, we'll need blood and urine samples, because there's an open bottle of wine on the counter, and she might have been drugged by something. Yeah, we'll be there in fifteen minutes. She can't just be drunk.\"\n\n\"I'm not drunk,\" she protested, but he ignored her as he called Vic and told him to get Mike over to take prints in the kitchen. She was able to concentrate a little better as he spoke. \"No, I'll bag the bottle, take it with me, and we'll have the contents checked later. Can't let it out of my sight or someone could get in here before Mike does, try to remove the evidence. I know tox tests take a lot of time, but it's important we know what's in her since we might be dealing with Dane's drugs now.\"\n\nIt's important we know what's in her. The words floated through her brain as he kept talking. Tess thought about what was in her. Sadness and regret. Memories that would not shake loose. Fear because someone had done this to her. And the need and desire for this man was in her. She might have been back here only five days, but had she cared for Gabe for years? Wanted his attention even when she was little? Felt sorry he was blamed when she was taken? But taken where? Would she ever remember who did this to her?\n\n\"Okay, Tess, we're going to take another ride in my cruiser,\" Gabe said. \"Talk to me, sweetheart. Stay awake,\" he insisted, rubbing her hands, one at a time, then lightly slapping her cheeks.\n\n\"The sheriff broke into a house,\" she said suddenly with the urge to giggle. \"And now I'm going in his police car, under arrest, under duress...I don't know.\"\n\n\"How much wine did you drink or what else?\" he asked, getting them both up, then sitting her in the chair while he found the top for the bottle, put a paper napkin over it and screwed it on. Still touching the bottle only with the napkin, he put it on the table. She didn't want to look at it, only at him.\n\n\"I can't exactly remember,\" she said, slurring her words. \"I think I had bad dreams. So, what's new, right?\"\n\n\"I want you to tell me every one of your dreams.\"\n\nShe felt giddy. \"It means a lot when a gentleman caller asks a lady to share her dreams with him.\"\n\n\"Keep talking.\"\n\n\"Gabe, don't leave me!\" she cried when he walked out of the room, but he came right back with her jacket and helped her put it on.\n\n\"Don't nod off,\" he ordered when she yawned. \"Did you get the door locks changed when you took this place over from Lee and Grace?\"\n\nShe tried to remember. She felt spaced out. Her thoughts were all gummy. \"No,\" she managed to say, \"but Mom changed them all after I was taken and then again after Dad left. I didn't think to do it.\"\n\n\"My fault not to ask earlier. You should have. Who knows who had keys when Lee and Grace were living here, including their dictator Monson? I'll have to ask them.\"\n\n\"If you can get near them. They have guards at Hear Ye.\" She was pleased her thoughts were clearing, but it almost hurt to think.\n\n\"I know. But they'll probably be at the farmer's market uptown Saturday. Okay, now hang on to me. Upsa-daisy,\" he said as he lifted her to her feet and steadied her with his hands on her waist.\n\nUpsa-daisy? Why did he say that? She didn't like that. It made her think she was a kid again and...and she did not want to remember that, even though she knew she had to.\n\n\"What good will it do to lock the door?\" she asked as he made her take steps while he propped her up. He took the bottle along too. Maybe she should give up wine, at least in Cold Creek. Her legs were a little wobbly, but she was walking. \"Someone could come in that window,\" she added as if he didn't get what she meant.\n\n\"I'll put police tape over it, and we'll get it fixed\u2014and your locks changed\u2014first thing in the morning. We're going to Dr. Nelson's. Then you'll stay with me again.\"\n\nThat sounded good to her. Though her head was clearing, her thoughts were dark. Whoever had done this wanted to scare and hurt her, maybe even worse than that.\n\n* * *\n\nTess woke with a jolt. It was light. She saw an unfamiliar ceiling and room. She realized she was under a quilt on Gabe's couch, and he was slumped in a chair he'd pulled up close. She had no shoes on but was dressed in her clothes, which must be a wrinkled mess. She started to remember. She'd been to the doctor last night after...after she'd blacked out and then Gabe came. He wasn't dressed in his uniform now but jeans and a sweatshirt.\n\n\"You awake?\" he asked the obvious when she looked at him. \"It's eight. Friday morning. How do you feel?\" His voice was gravelly, and his beard stubble made his face look dirty. His usually police-sharp hair was mussed.\n\n\"I feel tired. That train I hear in my head sometimes\u2014I think it hit me.\" She scooted herself up to a sitting position, pulling the quilt up higher too.\n\n\"Dizzy, nauseated? Doc Nelson said you might be.\"\n\n\"Just hungry, I think. Wow, don't buy cheap wine at the Kwik Shop.\"\n\n\"You giggled and cried last night. Talked in your sleep too. I would have taken notes, but you weren't making any sense.\"\n\n\"Nothing makes sense anymore.\"\n\n\"Can you remember anything after you drank the wine or during the night?\"\n\n\"No. Maybe it was another amnesia drug. Maybe my kidnapper came calling again,\" she said with a shiver. \"Did you get the search warrant for Dane's place?\"\n\n\"At least your head's okay on what happened before you got blasted. Not yet. The judge was holding it up until she heard new evidence, but the fact that Dr. Stevens has perjured herself in a deposition means I should get it soon. The judge is obviously reluctant since the warrant my dad, 'the previous Sheriff McCord,' as she puts it, failed to pin anything on Dane when he served him with a search warrant twenty years ago. I told her double jeopardy should not figure in here, since Dane wasn't arraigned or tried before. She took offense since I was lecturing her about a legal matter, but I think she'll get me the warrant. The case is too hot not to.\"\n\n\"And are you going to talk to Reese Owens?\"\n\n\"Thank God you're all right. We just have to keep drugs and booze out of your system. Stay right there while I fix us some juice and coffee. Oh, yeah, I'll talk to Reese,\" he said as he stretched his big frame, then went into the kitchen. \"He's in Cincinnati until tomorrow morning, and I'm not doing that over the phone.\"\n\n\"I hope I feel better by tomorrow,\" she said, rubbing both eyes. \"I'd like to go to the farmers' market. I want to see my family if they come with the Hear Ye people.\"\n\n\"Let's just see how you do with food and walking on your own today\u2014you need some rest. Doc Nelson thought you might have ingested something like a date rape drug. They're short-term but made worse by being mixed with any kind of alcohol. I'll take you over to your house to pack up some things but you're staying here.\"\n\nHe came back with two huge glasses of orange juice. A date rape drug? And then she'd spent the night here with him....\n\nThank God she could trust Gabe. Because there was obviously someone in Cold Creek who'd been watching her, who wanted her out of here one way or another. That terrified her but made her angry enough not to leave until they found Sandy Kenton.\n\n* * *\n\nAfter breakfast, Gabe shaved and changed into his uniform, they picked up some things at her house and he checked everything there again. Nothing else seemed amiss. He called the hardware store to order new locks and a window. He took her back to his house and left, returning for lunch, still stewing he didn't have his search warrant yet.\n\n\"You'd think there's someone pulling the strings for Dane, just like for Reese,\" he groused as he quickly ate the lunch she'd made, before heading back to the office. She felt as if she was married to him\u2014and spending most of the time on her own. He said Vic was going to want to talk to her, but right now he was busy trying to locate a housekeeper who had recently worked for Reese Owens and his wife.\n\nTess locked up after Gabe left each time. She'd asked his permission to go up to his war room to look it all over again, hoping, as ever, to recall something useful. But she sat up there, studying the walls for an hour, while the wind kicked up and the house creaked. Feeling haunted, not by the house or even what had happened to her yesterday, but by the faces\u2014her own and her family's included\u2014staring at her from the walls, she went back downstairs to wait for him.\n\nHe called and said he'd be there in a while, just a little late. It got dark so early now. Though she hadn't heard his car, she jumped up to greet him when she heard him at the back door. She started to open it for him, then hesitated. No footsteps, no key turning in the lock.\n\nWhen she tried to look out the window in the door, she saw it was blocked by a piece of cardboard or paper. She wondered if Gabe had done that to keep someone from looking in. But no, a crude drawing and printed words faced inward. Done in crayon, it depicted figures of three girls. Big tears dropped from the eyes of the smallest one. It looked so familiar. Suddenly she was certain she had drawn it. Was she hallucinating again? Were more memories coming back?\n\nShe read the words under the figures. YOU BAD GIRL! YOU CAN'T HIDE FROM ME!\n\nShe heard a voice from the past. She wanted to hide, had to hide! She rushed toward the closet in the hall, opened it to throw herself behind the hanging coats before she realized where she was. She took a deep breath. She was an adult, not a terrified child! She tried to recall more than her terror, but nothing else came, and she collapsed to her knees in tears.\n\n* * *\n\nTess and Gabe stared at the drawing with the note he'd brought inside. \"At first, I thought I might be hallucinating again,\" Tess said. \"But I'm okay now, and I'm positive I drew that. I do remember drawing Kate, Char and me many times, but since I'm crying here\u2014I must have drawn that during my time away or just after.\"\n\n\"So you did drawings like this while you were in captivity?\" he asked as they huddled over the paper at the kitchen table. \"Your abductor evidently let you draw, gave you crayons and paper.\"\n\nThey had both collapsed in kitchen chairs. He'd scooted his so close to hers that their heads almost touched. She could hear him breathe, feel his deep voice when he spoke.\n\n\"Yes, I think so. But this possibly could have been done when I got back home. Mom got me some counseling through the church, and they had me draw what I remembered\u2014which was only this. Me so sad and scared and missing my sisters.\"\n\n\"I didn't know about the counseling. Maybe we can find out who worked with you, contact them for memories. Can you recall anything else connected with this?\"\n\n\"I sure as heck didn't write that message. Mike's going to have to get prints off this too.\"\n\n\"And I'd bet we're dealing with someone who's too clever to leave prints. Mike found none on the wine bottle but yours.\"\n\n\"And to think I could have seen who it was if I'd just looked outside at the right time!\"\n\n\"Or if I'd driven in earlier. But it was already dark outside. Tess, don't keep beating yourself up,\" he said, putting an arm around her shoulders, \"because someone else is trying to do it. I'm just grateful you didn't open the door when you thought it was me.\"\n\n\"Whoever it was probably comes out of the cornfield, does his dirty work in your backyard or mine, like he did twenty years ago, then runs back home, maybe with that light I saw moving through the corn the previous night. Can we beg or demand that Aaron Kurtz cut the field early?\"\n\nGabe slumped back in his chair and sighed as his gaze met hers. \"You know Aaron Kurtz's visit to the doctor his wife mentioned to us? It wasn't to Jeff Nelson here in town. He went into Columbus to see what the pain in his legs was, and he's flat on his back there for a while with a blood clot.\"\n\n\"So we can't bother him with that right now. Doesn't he have others working for him who could cut the field?\"\n\n\"Other farmers will step in to help, but we've got this field for at least a week or so. It was planted late anyway, and Aaron's going to need the yield from it. Doc Nelson says he's always been so independent and in good health that he doesn't have much insurance. But listen, now that my place isn't even a safe house anymore, I'll understand if you want to leave town. You're not remembering what we need, and you're obviously in danger. I'll try to sell the house for you so you won't have to pay a middleman. Maybe you should head home\u2014to Michigan\u2014until this is all over,\" he said, taking her hand. Their grips tightened as their fingers entwined.\n\n\"I don't know. I'm scared, but I'm really angry now. You have enough to do without worrying about watching a house you're trying to sell. And who knows if the person who did this is desperate enough to follow me, where I wouldn't have you around. I want to stay at least over the weekend to think it over, go to the farmers' market to see my family, if I can get to them without Bright Star hovering.\"\n\n\"In that case, starting tomorrow, I'm going to ask Vic Reingold to move in here too. He has to drive too far to get here fast anyway. Taking turns, with my deputy's help, we can keep a better eye on you.\"\n\n\"And I still might remember something, even if I need to be jolted, like seeing that drawing. And those words\u2014the 'bad girl' part. I know I was called that and I think it ties to being smacked with that stupid scarecrow.\"\n\nStanding, then pulling her to her feet, he put both arms around her. She clung to him hard, her arms around his waist, her cheek pressed to his shoulder. Whatever horrors had happened before or were to come, his tenderness, his touch right now, made all that almost worth it.\n19\n\nSaturday morning, Gabe followed Tess as she drove into town and parked. He went to check in at the station before he walked down to mingle with the crowd at the farmers' market. Jace Miller was working traffic in the area and making an occasional sweep of the roads farther out, including driving by Dane's house now and then. Vic was moving his things into Gabe's, then coming to the market. In the BCI lab van in the police station parking lot, Mike was checking for fingerprints on the paper that had been taped to Gabe's back door. With all those allies around and in the crowd, Tess almost felt safe.\n\nShe was happy that a man from the hardware store had already put in a new kitchen window, changed the locks on her doors and given her the new keys. When Gabe spoke around here, people jumped.\n\nOn Main Street, Tess strolled through the rows of tables and booths. They had sprouted overnight while through traffic was diverted a block away. It was quite a sight with autumn bounty piled high. A mix of townsfolk of all ages, some who must be Lake Azure residents and many outsiders who'd driven in for the market, were strolling and buying. Some ate baked goods or apples right on the spot. It seemed everyone was carrying cups or plastic jugs of cider. People walked their dogs while they shopped. Tess was glad to see that kids young enough to be in strollers were pushed by their parents while preschool and elementary kids were kept within close reach. Even in a crowd like this, children needed to be watched. The bustle almost made her forget how wobbly her legs had been yesterday and how much she had slept. Her thoughts were still a little fuzzy at times.\n\nThe earthy sights and smells helped her settle down, that was, until she saw the mayor glad-handing everyone who walked past. He'd plunked himself down on a bench that she did not recall being there before. She saw his wife, Lillian, too. What a mismatch they were. She always looked so put-together and stylish, despite the fact that she'd gained weight over the years. Marian Bell was standing over them, talking and gesturing. Tess wondered if Marian sensed they knew something about her child's disappearance.\n\nTess walked behind the bench so she wouldn't have to face them and strolled past tables with pyramids of gold and red apples and piles of squash. The Community Church had a small mountain of pumpkins set up for this event. She smiled when she read the sign. All You Can Carry, $2. Globes of red and white onions, brown and reddish potatoes, even braided garlic, smelled of garden-rich loam from being buried in the ground.\n\nShe stopped walking. The movement, the buzz of noise around her, seemed to stop. That thought\u2014buried in the ground\u2014almost triggered a memory in her, but it flew just out of reach. She looked around to see if anyone was watching. Blessedly, no. Everything was normal, busy. It felt so good just to be part of the crowd.\n\nShe strolled past a booth that offered late-blooming herbs, another with gleaming glass jars identified by handwritten labels: honey, maple syrup, molasses and sorghum. Several booths offered bakery goods, home-baked pies, donuts, cakes and loaves of bread. She bought some eight-grain bread, then couldn't wait to get home to eat it, so she tore off a chunk and started chewing.\n\nShe took a wide berth around the next table. Sam Jeffers was selling animal pelts he had spread on a table with a few attached to a Peg-Board with a crudely printed sign showing his prices. She found it hard to believe, but he had buyers too.\n\nTess studied the man's printing on the sign, but it seemed cruder than that on the stick figure drawing. Still, she walked even faster to get several tables away from him and those pelts.\n\nShe saw Dane's sister, Marva, had a table promoting her tanning salon. It looked as if she was giving out nail files, which Tess could use, but she just wasn't up to talking to Marva. As soon as Gabe got his warrant, she figured Marva's friendship as well as Dane's phony kindness to her would go up in smoke anyway.\n\nTo her surprise, Miss Etta had a table with books and magazines spread out on it, though ever so neatly. And she had a huge plastic pump bottle there for browsers\u2014and no doubt, herself\u2014to sanitize their hands.\n\n\"Oh, Tess, come over here,\" she called, gesturing her closer. \"This is just another of my endeavors to make learning part of this community, to get others to read. With some of the folks around here, if they so much as read a newspaper or a store coupon, it makes my day, but those little phones and tablets with picture screens are killing all sorts of real books. Now, most of these are discards, but if I give them away in trade for a new library card\u2014\" she leaned forward to tap a pile of temporary, paper ones \"\u2014maybe it will make a difference in someone's life. By the way,\" she added, gesturing for Tess to sit in the second chair she had behind the table. \"How were those books I loaned you? Help ring any bells?\"\n\n\"A few. They made me think, if not remember. I can't stop right now though, Miss Etta. I want to find my cousins if they're here with the commune people.\"\n\n\"They are, though I didn't see their children with them. It's all business on Saturdays for them to sell things, but how that group makes ends meet beyond those sales is a puzzle, though I heard a rumor they might sell their land for some sort of oil drilling. Their illustrious ruler,\" she added with a roll of her eyes, \"doesn't like his subjects holding regular jobs.\"\n\nThe wiry woman turned away to extend a magazine with a motorcycle on it toward a couple of teenage boys slouching past. She tapped the sign, Free Reads for a Temp Card, and the boys stepped forward to sign up. Not much Miss Etta didn't think of. It seemed as easy as baiting a hook and fishing.\n\n\"You look peaked, Tess. Are you all right?\" she asked when the boys drifted off, and the woman quickly pumped gel sanitizer on her hands.\n\n\"Just not sleeping like I should yet.\"\n\n\"Yet? I hope you don't mean since the tragedy twenty years ago. Well, you just stop by\u2014or I'll bring the bookmobile past\u2014and you can get a nonfiction book on relaxation techniques. You know, medical research has been proving that everything from weight loss to resistance to illnesses depends on getting a good night's sleep. On the other hand, dependence on something like sleeping pills can create new problems.\"\n\nTess made her escape when Miss Etta started to talk to two women about scrapbooking. She passed a man selling handmade birdhouses, and then, at the end of the row of vendors, she saw the Hear Ye people behind a series of oilcloth-covered tables.\n\nLooking for Lee and Gracie, she skimmed over those working. Miss Etta had said they were here, but, with the Hear Ye members all having similar clothing and hairstyles, they seemed to blur together. So much for American individuality, Tess thought, although the bounty of their offerings was diverse. Beautifully woven baskets were filled with bittersweet, walnuts or wildflowers. Mesh sacks contained walnuts in the shell and there were glass jars of them already shelled. She looked at painted wooden plaques with sayings on them like It is more blessed to give than to receive. Tess wondered if that was a hint that people should give them a tip when they purchased something.\n\n\"Looking for Lee and Grace?\" a voice behind her said.\n\nShe turned. Bright Star Monson seemed to have materialized from the crowd.\n\n\"Yes, I am.\"\n\n\"It's their turn to carry sacks of things to people's cars, a kindly gesture, going the extra mile. Now, let's see,\" he said, smiling as his eyes went over her, and he tapped an index finger against his chin. \"If I ordered a plaque made expressly for you, it would say something like For the Lord has called you like a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit. And should you continue to feel that way, Tess Lockwood, you will always have a place with your cousins and with all the brothers and sisters of our flock.\"\n\nShe stood mute for a moment. Not only because he'd dared to think she would ever join them but because he'd spoken about a woman forsaken and grieved. Could he read her so well in the little time she'd been near him? Had Lee or Gracie told him much about her?\n\nThis man gave her the chills. If Dane Thompson or Reese Owens did not pan out as suspects, Bright Star Monson should be number three on Gabe's list, just for the bad vibe he gave off.\n\n\"I'll look for them later,\" she said, eager to get away from him. \"I hope you have a good day selling things.\"\n\n\"Always,\" he intoned as she turned and walked away. In the crowd, she nearly bumped into Vic Reingold, who took her elbow and steered her along.\n\n\"I was keeping an eye on the mayor and him,\" Vic told her. \"I can tell Monson bugs you. Is it because of the here and now, or does he ring any bells?\"\n\n\"If he does, they're not conscious ones,\" she said, remembering how Miss Etta had used the same phrase about ringing bells a few minutes ago. \"No one really rings my bell, and that's my problem.\"\n\n\"And ours too,\" he said. \"Gabe's around here somewhere\u2014everywhere, actually, he's good at mingling\u2014but I don't think he'd mind if I got you off your feet for a while, after your bad experience Thursday night. How about the English pub while we get something to eat and drink\u2014no booze for you. You, my girl, are on the wine wagon.\"\n\nShe forced a little smile. \"All right. I was hoping to talk to my cousins, but it would be just like Bright Star to have hidden them from me. I'm still tired after what happened\u2014being drugged, I mean,\" she said, wondering if he knew she'd spent that night at Gabe's house.\n\nThe man was chewing on a toothpick, which he spit out into a trash can as they walked past the police station toward the pub. If Vic thought he was going to get something out of her, she was hoping to turn the tables on him.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Of course I'll be at the prayer vigil for Sandy at the church tomorrow night,\" Gabe told Pastor Snell. \"Deputy Miller and I will be glad to provide security too. And my prayer is we'll have Sandy back by then. I've been meaning to ask you something, Pastor.\"\n\n\"Of course. If I can help with anything...\"\n\n\"Tess Lockwood only recalled recently that after she returned from her kidnap ordeal, her mother got her some sort of counseling through your church. Would you know who spent time with her?\"\n\n\"If I recall, it was Melanie Parkinson, not a child psychiatrist but she had a psychology background. Unfortunately she moved to Columbus a good time ago when her husband took a job there. I'm afraid I've lost contact with the Parkinsons, but I can inquire if others who knew her still have ties.\"\n\n\"I'd really appreciate that. And as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"I understand time is of the essence, if this ties at all to getting Sandy back\u2014maybe the other girls\u2014the way we were blessed to have Teresa returned. I'll try to locate Melanie as soon as I can and get back to you.\"\n\nWhen they parted, Gabe walked through the cars parked in the church lot and spotted Grace and Lee Lockwood. He had no intention of telling them what sort of harassment Tess had suffered lately, but he did want to ask them who might have had keys to her house. As he got closer, he saw they were loading sacks of produce into an SUV for someone who looked like an outsider. He waited a row of cars over until the SUV drove out and Grace and Lee walked back his way.\n\n\"Hey,\" Gabe said, greeting them. \"How are things going at the Hear Ye tables today?\"\n\n\"Great,\" Grace said with a tentative smile. She immediately looked toward Lee rather than saying more. She used to be quite a talker, he recalled.\n\nWhen Lee only nodded and started in about the beautiful autumn weather, Gabe directed the conversation where he wanted it to go. \"Listen, I told Tess for safety's sake when she sold the house she'd have to tell the buyers to get all the locks rekeyed. But for now, do either of you still have keys you could give her, or does anyone else have them? She'll need some extras if she decides to use a Realtor so she can get back home to Michigan.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" Grace said. \"If she's having trouble selling, I hope she doesn't leave early. I...I know she feels she hasn't had enough time with us, the children, especially. We probably do have an extra key, just in case she needed me again to clean, or whatever. I know I lost one once, but we had another one made. Lee must still have his.\"\n\n\"I think I threw it away when we left. After all, you gave her your set of keys. As for someone else\u2014don't think so,\" Lee said.\n\nGabe sensed he wasn't going to get any further than that with them. And he wasn't sure he believed them. They were edging back toward the market, so he strolled along. He wondered if one of them had been asked to give a key to Monson. If so, they'd protect him at any price\u2014maybe even before worrying about Tess's safety.\n\n\"I see Brice Monson's here himself today,\" Gabe said, still trying to sound conversational. \"I never figured someone who chose the name Bright Star would be an early-morning person, unless he's the Hollywood kind of star instead of the night one.\"\n\nGrace giggled until Lee glared at her. \"He's someone who is available at any time if we have questions or need guidance. He prays and watches over us day or night,\" Lee said.\n\n\"But he takes his night walks alone when he prays for us all,\" Grace put in, and this time Lee nodded.\n\n\"Walks down by the creek?\" Gabe asked, his mind spinning with possibilities of Monson taking walks at night. The Lockwood house was only about four miles down the road, fewer with cut-throughs across the fields.\n\n\"Oh, I don't know,\" Lee admitted. \"No one goes but him, under the stars, communing with the Great Star whose name he bears. We've got to get back now, Sheriff. Good to see you. Come on over to our tables and buy something.\"\n\nThey scurried off. Gabe leaned against a tree, thinking that if Dane didn't pan out, weirdo Brice \"Bright Star\" Monson deserved to be in a dead heat with Reese Owens for the next suspect. Tess said she'd heard a young girl scream at the compound, but where could Monson be stashing kidnap victims? Where could anyone be kept hidden in this tight-knit area, even if there were lots of hills and hollers and abandoned buildings? He'd been checking such places over the years, around and around, until he was dizzy with it all. He couldn't even find that damn floating meth lab.\n\nLike a kid who'd been punished for something he didn't do, he kicked the tree, then walked back into the crowd.\n\n* * *\n\nAs Tess and Vic walked down the busy street toward the pub, she noticed a table she hadn't seen before, maybe because she'd skirted around the mayor. Neither he nor his bench was there now, so had he spirited it and himself away? More likely, he'd hired a couple of guys to move it for him so he could hold court somewhere else in the market. Or maybe the buyers there were so thick she just hadn't seen it. The table she was surprised she hadn't noticed had piles of Halloween costumes, with others hanging from racks. The table also had decorations for sale under a sign that read Creekside Gifts.\n\n\"Oh,\" she said, \"I'm surprised the Kentons came.\"\n\n\"They didn't. Friends offered to take care of it for them. Mrs. Kenton's not doing well, and the father, Win, is understandably mad as heck.\"\n\n\"I think that's how my father must have reacted, and at my mother.\"\n\n\"Yeah. I think you're right.\"\n\nTess noticed they'd also displayed baseball caps with bills that looked like tombstones. She suddenly imagined herself looking out a window, down at a small cemetery, the stones gray in the day or at dusk....\n\nShe must have been looking out a high window, maybe from the attic in Dane's house at the animal graves. And hadn't she had some nightmare about seeing people in open graves, maybe ones crying like in the drawing she'd done? Could Dane have threatened her by saying he'd bury her out there if she didn't behave, didn't stop being a bad girl? Had he terrorized her so that she, amnesia drugs aside, couldn't clearly recall much else?\n\n\"Sometimes I think I do remember Dane's house,\" she told Vic as they passed the police station. \"I hope Gabe gets that search warrant soon. But the thing is, since Dane seemed the obvious culprit before, I don't want that to influence my memories. That can happen, you know. A child's memories become warped to fit something not understood. The big, noisy reaping machine turns into a monster, for example. I read about displacement in a book from the library here.\"\n\nHe held the pub door for her and waited until they were seated to answer her. \"So the cemetery of your buried\u2014pardon the pun\u2014memory would be of a cemetery much smaller than what Dane Thompson has now, since he's really expanded over the years.\"\n\n\"Yes. Yes, exactly. I picture a smaller one.\"\n\n\"Then maybe we're getting somewhere, the beginning of a breakthrough. But Gabe and I'd better find something in his place like drugs that cause amnesia\u2014or something like Rohypnol or Scopolamine, the so-called date rape drugs. I call them predator drugs, and that's exactly what we're dealing with in these abductions\u2014a predator. Still, I don't think an interrogation and especially a court case can turn on vague, traumatic memories buried this long.\n\n\"But listen,\" he went on, after they'd ordered Reuben sandwiches and soft drinks, \"you haven't phoned your father yet, have you?\"\n\n\"No, but Reese Owens told me to and gave me Dad's phone number, which I didn't have before. Their connection over the years strikes me as strange. So you're thinking I should call him?\"\n\n\"Well, yeah, maybe with Gabe or me on the line in case he says something about Reese we can use.\"\n\n\"Or about himself? Vic, his phone number is burning not only a hole in my pocket but a hole in my heart.\"\n\n\"It's hard to forgive someone for desertion on top of unfaithfulness.\"\n\n\"Yes, he was unfaithful to leave us like that.\"\n\n\"I'll bet your mother partly blamed herself.\"\n\n\"For not watching me better that day. He accused her of that.\"\n\n\"He should have blamed himself for being gone so much for their marital troubles. Your dad must have thought your mother or Rod McCord wouldn't find out about the affair between him and the sheriff's wife.\"\n\nHer stomach cartwheeled. And then all the missing pieces of things Gabe had said\u2014and mostly hadn't said\u2014slammed into place for her. He'd come so close to telling her more than once but had always changed the subject. Her mother had begun to tell her once that there was another reason her dad had left besides Tess's abduction. No doubt it was the elephant in the room her sisters knew about but never explained.\n\nNow Tess understood some things. That her mother had tried to protect her too much. That Vic had assumed she knew about the affair because he felt she should be treated like an adult and not some child to be coddled. But Gabe didn't. He could not be trusted to tell her the truth she needed to know even if it hurt. It was almost as if he'd lied to her. She was going to tell him off and then go it alone. And if it came to it, she'd just sell the property long-distance.\n\n\"Vic, I'm sorry to be rude, but I need to go find Gabe and talk to him right now. I'll cancel my order on the way out.\"\n\n\"Tell him about the memory of looking out at Dane's pet cemetery?\"\n\n\"Yes. Those little tombstone hats back at the gift shop table...\"\n\nShe was afraid she wasn't making sense, that he would see the hurt and anger on her face, but maybe she looked like that all the time. Except now she'd been betrayed not by a stranger, not even by her long-gone father, but by Mom, Kate, Char and the man she'd stupidly imagined she loved.\n20\n\nBlinking back tears, Tess stormed out of the pub and headed for Gabe's office. As she walked in, Ann looked up and frowned at her. \"I wouldn't advise that you bother him.\"\n\n\"So he's here?\" Tess demanded. \"Alone?\"\n\n\"Yes, but I'll just have you wait for him and let him know,\" Ann said, and moved to pick up her desk phone.\n\n\"I'm not waiting for him anymore,\" Tess said.\n\n\"Hey, just a minute!\" Ann shouted as Tess strode back to Gabe's office. The door was ajar. He was on the phone, arguing with someone.\n\nShe pushed the door open just as he hung up. \"That judge has dragged her feet too long,\" he muttered as he looked up at her. \"Did you see Grace and Lee and their\u2014\"\n\nTess slammed the door in Ann's face. \"Don't blame Vic for this, blame yourself!\" she shouted.\n\n\"For wh\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, it's my fault, of course! For thinking you were treating me like an adult. Vic let slip about our parents' love affair. Your bored, lonely mother, my angry, supersalesman father, right? Right? And you wouldn't tell me, not little Tess, who still can't think things through for herself. If I'm willing to face what happened to me when I was kidnapped, don't you think I can handle a family hardship?\"\n\nHe put up his hands as if to hold her off, though she stayed on the other side of the desk. She was not getting near this man again, in any way.\n\n\"I was honoring your family's wishes,\" he insisted. \"Since they hadn't told you, why should I? You're delicate enough, and I needed to protect\u2014\"\n\n\"Needed to use me to get what you wanted and needed! How can I trust you? Though I sometimes feel trapped in my past, I'm not a child, Sheriff McCord!\"\n\n\"That's obvious to me in more ways than one. My eyes\u2014my entire body\u2014are fully aware you are not a child, Tess. I thought protecting you from something that would upset you was the best way to go. And I guess I should have clued in Vic that you didn't know about our parents.\"\n\n\"No, you should have clued me in! Before you kissed me at the falls and at your house! Before you made me think you cared about me as more than just an eyewitness who could not remember one stupid thing! But now I'm starting to recall sounds and sights.\"\n\n\"Sights, like what?\"\n\n\"See, that's all you care about! Like seeing a small graveyard out an attic or upper-level window.\"\n\n\"Dane.\"\n\n\"Probably. And I'm remembering what an idiot I was to think you cared about me.\"\n\n\"Tess,\" he said, slowly coming around the desk. \"It's the wrong time to say this, but I not only need you to help me solve this\u2014your case\u2014but I need you in other wa\u2014\"\n\n\"No!\" she shouted, moving out of his reach. \"You need to find Sandy Kenton and Jill Stillwell, Amanda Bell too\u2014so if I think of anything that will help, I'll let you know. Probably through Vic or Deputy Miller. Don't worry about me. I'll stay locked in my house at night until I decide if I'm staying or going from your Cold Creek kingdom!\" She yanked open his office door.\n\nAnn stood in the hall. She jumped back, knowing she'd been caught listening. Tess glared at her and walked out into the hall. No way was she going to run like a child.\n\n\"Gabe,\" Ann said. \"Jace called, but I told him you were...occupied. He said Dane's driven his van into the Lake Azure area, but he didn't follow him farther since he'd be spotted. And a fax is coming in for you from Judge Wilson's office.\"\n\n\"Thanks. Call Vic for me and get him back here pronto.\"\n\nTess slowed to hear what was happening. She knew Gabe probably wanted to chase her, but he wouldn't with his precious search warrant waiting. She hesitated in the empty outer office, tempted for one moment to go back.\n\n\"And tell Vic,\" she heard Gabe call out to Ann, \"as soon as Dane gets back on his property, we're going in. I want to shake him up when we serve the warrant and start to take the place apart. Who knows what he'll admit then?\"\n\nTess went outside. She was working on her own now. It was nearly noon, and the farmers' market was winding down. Shoppers were leaving; a few tables were being carried by vendors to their cars.\n\nShe went to her car and drove away, thoughts racing. Dane wasn't home and Marva was still at her market booth. Gabe wouldn't be on Dane's property until the vet got back from Lake Azure.\n\nShe was going to go there herself on foot, through the cornfield, to take a look at the pet cemetery. It just had to trigger memories. And from now on, she was going to dig up her past not for the sheriff, not for herself, but for those lost girls. And any risk was worth that.\n\n* * *\n\nTess dumped the contents of her purse onto her kitchen table, then took her new house keys and phone out of the pile of items. She put the two items in the child's backpack she'd brought from home, mostly because it reminded her of her students. She'd stenciled SUNSHINE AND SMILES on packs for each of her kids last year.\n\nFor the first time, she analyzed the real reason she was so dedicated to her job as a preschool teacher. She realized she'd been trying to recover from her lost, damaged childhood through her students. She needed to protect and comfort them. She desperately wanted to have her own day care center, to make the lives of children better, sweeter, safer.\n\nShe went to use the bathroom, threw on her dark windbreaker, pulled a scarf over her head and knotted it. As she slung the little backpack over one shoulder, her phone rang. She dug it out and checked the caller ID. Gabe. She let it go to voice mail.\n\nShe had to get this done quickly before Dane returned to his place or Gabe showed up.\n\nShe locked the back door and ran across her yard and into the corn. No more room for fear. No more clinging to Gabe or calling Char for counseling or hoping Kate called her again. As she shoved her way through the tall stalks and bumped into the ears, she thought she might phone her father once she calmed down. But how could she ever forgive him for having an affair with Gabe's mother, for daring to blame Mom for not keeping an eternal eye on his \"terrific, terrible Teresa,\" then deserting all of them?\n\nHow many people in Cold Creek knew her father had been unfaithful with Mrs. McCord? She realized Miss Etta had alluded to it when Tess had first come back to town, but she hadn't caught on. \"Your father was interested in other things,\" Miss Etta had said with a disapproving tone.\n\nOut of breath, Tess stopped several rows from Dane's property. She was proud of herself for coming right through the field full of anger instead of fear. And she was just where she thought she would emerge, behind the pet cemetery with the east side of his large, old house in view. She stared up at the second floor and attic windows. Had she been held there for the eight months she was gone? Had she gazed out those small attic windows toward the then much smaller graveyard? She realized she would have seen her own house from those windows. Why couldn't she recall gazing out toward home?\n\nShe wanted to get closer to the house to see if it triggered any new memories. There were old buildings out behind Marva's abandoned, derelict farmhouse. Could she have been kept there?\n\nTess crept out of the cornfield and strode through the tombstones. Some of them were small, but most were square or rectangular, nearly the size of those in a human cemetery. But wasn't she picturing narrow, rounded stones? Embedded in these polished marble ones, pictures of dogs, and a few cats, caught her eye. She saw the little QR codes Marva had mentioned. If only there was some way to access stored images from her past.\n\nMany epitaphs were sad, some funny. She was amazed that people had money for these elaborate memorials when so many others\u2014kids especially\u2014were starving or homeless. She paused before heading out into the open again. After looking around carefully, then glancing out onto the road, she ran across the driveway and pressed her back to the house between two windows. She looked back at the graveyard.\n\nVic was right, of course. It would have been much smaller twenty years ago, the stones not so elaborate or technology-enhanced. She did see a few toward the front, probably early ones, that were more modest. But she experienced no flood of thoughts, no buried fears unearthed. The cemetery triggered no memories.\n\nShe decided to check the death dates on the smaller stones to be sure they would have been here twenty years ago. She darted away from the house and into a row of them just as she heard the sound of a vehicle approaching. Dane's van turned into the driveway and parked in front of the vet clinic.\n\nTess ducked behind a gravestone and huddled there, waiting for him to go inside. When he got out of the van, he was talking on the phone. She heard him say something about a meeting. He carried a satchel with him, probably a vet bag with medical supplies. To her surprise, he didn't go into the clinic or his house but walked into the cemetery just a few rows from her.\n\nShe crawled behind another stone and put her back to it, sitting on the ground with her knees up to her chest. Not talking, but with the phone still to his ear, he walked past the spot where he could glance down and see her. Tess scolded herself for wishing Gabe was with her. He said he'd be waiting when Dane returned ready to serve him with the warrant and search his house, so where was he? Not that she wanted him to find her here meddling in his plans.\n\nShe wondered if Dane was heading for the cornfield. Could he be meeting someone there? Or what if he had something in his satchel to take through the field and leave in her yard? No, probably not in broad daylight.\n\nShe wasn't sure where he was. He could double back and see her. She debated making a run for the cornfield but it was a tall maze in there if she didn't go in the direction toward home.\n\nShe knew she should phone Gabe to tell him that Dane was here, but she was done working with Gabe.\n\nShe heard Dane speaking again. He sounded upset, but he was far enough away that she couldn't catch his words until he shouted, \"No!\"\n\nA single bang sounded. Tess jumped so hard she hit her head on the stone she was pressed against.\n\nTess knew she shouldn't have come here on her own. She wanted to get out of here. Let Gabe and Vic take over. Dane's voice had stopped, so he must have ended the call, but that didn't help her pinpoint where he was. She decided she was going to make a break for it.\n\nShe got to her feet carefully and yanked the child's backpack up on her shoulder. Bent over so her head didn't show above the stones, she started toward the field, glancing at each cross row to be sure Dane didn't see her.\n\nShe'd made it to the last row of tombstones before the field when something caught her eye. Dane Thompson was sprawled on the ground with no one else in sight. Was it a trick to get her to come closer?\n\nShe tiptoed two steps nearer. It looked as though he'd hit his head. She saw blood on the corner of a tombstone. Could that have caused the sound she'd heard?\n\n\"Dr. Thompson, are you all right?\" she asked from about ten feet away. When there was no response she crept closer.\n\nThere was blood on the bottom corner of the stone, but as she looked carefully she saw it was spattered all over it, even in the grass!\n\nHorrified, she moved closer. A gun\u2014some sort of old pistol\u2014was in his outstretched hand. She didn't see his cell phone, but a scarlet-speckled note lay on the slick grass. As she moved around the bloody stone, she saw blood on his neck and shoulders, and half his head was gone.\n21\n\nTess's hands shook so hard she could barely dial Gabe's cell number. After she'd said she was on her own, she needed him. Now. He picked up on the first ring.\n\n\"Tess? I tried to call you earlier. You home? Vic and I are almost to Dane's place to serve him w\u2014\"\n\n\"I came to look at the pet graveyard from his house. I'm here. He\u2014he\u2014 I think he killed himself\u2014in the tombstones by the cornfield. Gabe, there's blood everywhere.\"\n\n\"Don't move. We're close.\"\n\nAs tears poured down her cheeks, she heard a siren. Thank God they were nearby.\n\nAlthough she'd declared her independence from Gabe, she did as he said and stood her ground, though she couldn't bear to wait near Dane's body. She'd disliked and feared him but had never wished for this.\n\nThe siren came closer and stopped. Two doors slammed, bang, bang, but not as loud as the gunshot. Why didn't she know it was a gunshot?\n\nGabe's distant voice called out. \"Tess!\"\n\n\"Over here!\"\n\nHe and Vic came running but went straight to Dane. Vic bent over to look closely but neither man touched him.\n\n\"One shot through the forehead,\" Vic said. \"Look at that old weapon. He collect them or something?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Gabe said, \"but we've got the warrant to find out. Suicide? He must have thought we were going to arrest him this time. But who could have told him about the warrant?\"\n\n\"Stay here. I've got to check his house. Nobody move!\" Vic said, then ran toward Dane's house and kicked in the front door. He returned moments later. \"No sign of any girls inside, but we need to do a thorough search of the property.\"\n\n\"I've called in help,\" Gabe said. \"See if you can read that note without touching it while I talk to Tess.\"\n\n\"Yeah, Tess,\" Vic said. \"She's got some explaining to do.\"\n\nGabe approached Tess, who was frozen in shock. He put his arm around her waist and walked her a few tombstones away from the gruesome scene.\n\n\"It was suicide, wasn't it?\" she asked them, her voice shaky, as she sat down on the edge of a tombstone.\n\n\"Gun's in his hand, but first impressions are never good enough,\" Vic said. \"Got to be sure. The angle of the wound looks unusual for a suicide.\"\n\nGabe stooped beside her, his elbows on his bent knees. \"Are you okay?\" he asked.\n\n\"You need to tell Marva,\" she said.\n\n\"I know. But I don't want her to see him this way. I'll notify her, but it should be in person. Tess, tell me everything you saw. Did he see you, confront you?\"\n\n\"No!\" she insisted as he took out a small notepad and pen. \"I looked at these tombstones from over by his house, trying to remember if I'd seen that view years ago, but nothing clicked. I saw him drive in, talking to someone on the phone when he got out of his van. He was carrying a satchel, like a medical bag.\"\n\n\"You sure?\" Gabe asked. \"There's not one near him.\"\n\n\"There isn't?\" she said, craning her neck to look past him. Vic was still hovering near the body, but he stood and came closer. \"Maybe he dropped it or hid it. But yes, I'm sure. That is, I thought that's what it was, but maybe it was a case for his pistol. The only thing I could pick up from his distant voice was something about meeting someone.\"\n\n\"Now? Later?\"\n\n\"I don't know. He shouted 'No!' right before I heard the shot, but I didn't realize what the sound was at the time.\"\n\nGabe and Vic exchanged looks. They were both furiously making notes. Her stomach went into freefall. Surely they didn't think she had something to do with Dane's death\u2014that she came here to confront him.\n\nGabe sat beside her on the edge of the tombstone. She wished she could hold Gabe's hand, but when she reached out to him, he didn't touch her. \"Just keep calm,\" he said. \"We'll have to test your hands\u2014standard procedure. Go ahead. Anything else you remember?\"\n\nShe shook her head and blinked back tears she dared not brush away. \"That's all. Oh, after the shot, when I didn't hear him anymore, I was going to sneak back into the cornfield to go home. That's when I glanced down a row and saw him slumped. I went closer\u2014blood, his head...\" She gasped and started to hyperventilate. \"But\u2014about my hands,\" she said, \"I didn't touch him, don't have blood on them.\"\n\n\"We see that,\" Gabe said. \"It's for gunpowder residue.\"\n\nIt was like a punch to the stomach. More standard procedure, but it scared her, until she realized her hands would be clean. But she couldn't bear it if either of these men\u2014especially Gabe\u2014believed she could have killed Dane. Killed anyone.\n\nVic broke the tense silence. \"I managed to read the note without touching it.\"\n\n\"What did it say?\" Gabe asked, looking up at Vic.\n\n\"I got it exactly.\" Vic flipped back a page in his notepad. \"Sorry this is late. I know you won't forget, but can you forgive? Dane. The bottom of the note's trimmed off as if there was something else. Now, who could he be apologizing to?\" Vic asked. \"Was he hoping someone would forgive him, someone who came here to meet him?\"\n\nTess saw Gabe stiffen at that suggestion, but she wasn't waiting for him to stand up for her. \"Not me!\" she insisted. \"I was angry with Gabe for not telling me about our parents' affair. I decided to come over here on my own, only to see if looking at this cemetery reminded me that I was kept here. Not to settle anything with Dane. I'd overheard Gabe say he wasn't here, so that's why I came.\"\n\n\"If he surprised you and you struggled with him and his gun, it would be self-defense,\" Vic said.\n\n\"Damn it, Vic!\" Gabe exploded. \"Don't try to put words in her mouth!\"\n\n\"Sure, fine, but you both need someone who isn't emotionally caught up in this\u2014and each other.\"\n\nTess jolted at that. Was it so obvious?\n\n\"And,\" Vic plunged on, \"Tess took off from her meeting with me\u2014and evidently you too, Gabe\u2014angry and upset.\"\n\n\"At you two, not at Dane!\" Tess countered.\n\nGabe stood, then helped Tess up, keeping his hand on her elbow. \"Mike's got a lot of work to do here. But if he says Tess's hands are clean, we have her statement and she can go home.\"\n\n\"For now,\" Vic agreed. \"I gotta admit, 'Kidnapper Kills Self in Remorse' sounds like a good headline for the papers. But the placement of that head wound tells me someone else shot that gun.\"\n\nTess cleared her throat. \"Write this down, both of you. If someone shot him, it wasn't me. He did yell 'No!' and probably not at himself.\"\n\nVic finally nodded, instead of frowning at her. \"I didn't see any sign of his phone,\" he said, his voice not so strident. \"Unless it's under the body or in his pocket. Tess, you mind if we take a look at what's in your backpack?\"\n\n\"Be my guest,\" she said. She turned so she could shrug out of it without touching it. Vic looked through it, shook his head but didn't give it back.\n\n\"Maybe he called to say goodbye to his sister,\" Gabe said. \"She tried to talk him out of it, he yelled 'No!' and bang. But you're right about the bullet placement. Male suicides often 'eat' the gun, and if not, shoot the side of their head, not their forehead and at an upward angle. I saw some suicides when I was in Iraq.\"\n\nDespite the fact that Tess was still angry, her heart went out to him again. \"If there's no phone and no sign of the satchel I swear I saw, maybe the meeting with the person on the phone was at the edge of the cornfield. When that person killed Dane, he or she took both items and ran into the field,\" she said, almost whispering.\n\n\"We'll have it searched as well as this graveyard,\" Gabe said. \"So, who has the motive to point a pistol point-blank at a man's forehead, stare him right in the eye and blow his skull apart? I say, not Tess Lockwood.\"\n\n\"Is his sister shorter than him?\" Vic asked. \"Tess was here\u2014and if she suddenly remembered he was the kidnapper\u2014she has motive.\"\n\n\"I said I didn't and I don't!\" she shouted. \"There are other suspects, and I wouldn't do something to keep us from finding the other girls if he's the one who had them stashed somewhere!\"\n\n\"Maybe Mike will get prints off the gun,\" Gabe said. \"But things like wine bottles and doorknobs have been wiped clean so far. As soon as we get this scene turned over to others, we'll hit the house. We'll have to ask Marva if he was talking to her and if she's seen that antique pistol before.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Vic agreed. \"After Mike checks Tess's hands, let's get her out of here until we get a formal deposition. The forensics posse will be here soon. I don't figure you for a flight risk, Tess, but we need your word you won't leave the area. Gabe and I have a lot to do, and I don't want to be fighting him on insisting we hold you for further questioning right now.\"\n\nTess looked Vic straight in the eye. \"As scared as I've been ever since I've been back here, I'm not leaving the area. I'm in this to find out what happened to me twenty years ago, who is trying to scare me away now and more important, to help find those girls.\"\n\n\"I admire your courage, Tess. I just always check every angle.\" Vic turned toward Gabe. \"After Mike dusts the weapon, I'm gonna take it and run it down\u2014type, provenance.\"\n\nTess was amazed to realize that, despite Dane's bloody body and the grilling she just experienced, she was feeling stronger.\n\nVic tilted his head and craned his neck. \"Two vehicles just drove in. Mike and your deputy. No, three. A silver car right behind them.\"\n\n\"That's probably Marva,\" Gabe said. \"You brief Mike so he can check Tess's hands, and I'll talk to Marva, tell her she can't go in now because of the warrant. It's best she not see Dane.\"\n\n\"Gabe,\" Tess said as he started to move away. \"Maybe I can help you break it to Marva. She's been good to me lately, friendly when I came back.\"\n\n\"Let's see how she does first,\" he said as he broke into a run. Vic went to brief Deputy Miller and Mike, who was toting a lot of gear. Tess leaned against the tombstone until Mike approached her. He explained that it was standard procedure to test her hands for residue\u2014in case she'd picked up the gun. He produced what he called adhesive tabs and took samplings of her hands and wrists.\n\n\"I'll check these out in the van with my scanning electron microscope,\" he told her. \"But I've got to photograph and deal with the body first.\"\n\nA scream pierced the air. \"No! No! He wouldn't!\"\n\nTess hurried down a row of tombstones toward the driveway. Gabe was talking to Marva, bracing her with both hands on her shoulders. \"If he's dead, someone killed him!\" she screamed.\n\nGabe's low, steady voice sounded, followed by more shouting from Marva. \"He wouldn't do that, he had lots to live for! Yes, he bought a few old guns lately, Civil War ones, a couple older. No, I didn't talk to him on the phone, haven't since this morning, and he seemed fine.\"\n\nMarva saw Tess over Gabe's shoulder. Tess stepped forward, hoping to find words of comfort.\n\n\"What's she doing here?\" Marva screeched, pointing at her. \"Dane had nothing to do with her kidnapping, and this latest one's made it worse! All he did was live across the field!\"\n\nStartled, Tess stopped walking. Gabe kept his voice low as he spoke to Marva again, but she cried out, \"I don't believe her! She's the one who put you up to this\u2014new suspicions, a search warrant. She came here to spy on or accuse Dane, and who knows she didn't kill him?\"\n\n* * *\n\nIt was late afternoon and, exhausted and frustrated, Gabe and Vic sat silent in Gabe's cruiser. They had searched Dane's house. Mike had run the test to be sure Tess's hands were clear of gunpowder residue before they'd let her go. They were still waiting for the body to be taken to the morgue for an autopsy. They planned to have volunteers search the entire cornfield for Dane's satchel and phone, but nothing had turned up nearby.\n\nMike had helped with the search of Dane's property; Jace too, after he had run Tess home and the coroner had taken over the crime scene. Gabe had been tempted to send Tess to the police station for safekeeping, but he didn't want her there alone with Ann. Marva's reaction to her had been tense enough, although the woman wasn't responsible for what she said right now. She'd been taken to a friend's house, and Dr. Nelson had sedated her.\n\nAnd that, Gabe thought, was a good one, because they could probably have just taken a sedation drug from Dane's cache of them hidden in his attic. They'd scoured it and the basement for forensics evidence of Sandy Kenton, coming up with nothing. But they had discovered two key things. They found a lot of drugs, including a few for humans like amnestics and hallucinogens, all neatly labeled. It would take Mike and the BCI lab days to do the tox tests on all of them, maybe match one of them to what was in Tess's system when she drank the wine. They also found that Dane did have a small collection of antique American guns, two rifles and four pistols. When they'd shown the pistol in question to Marva, she hadn't recognized it as Dane's. But they could find no formal paperwork on it or on two of the other pistols, so it was impossible to know how many he'd had.\n\nGabe glanced in the rearview mirror again. He had it angled so he could watch for the body bag to be placed on a gurney to be wheeled out of the cemetery to the E.R. vehicle. It was starting to rain, perfect weather for this tragedy. Usually he loved the rain because he'd missed it when he was in Iraq, but today it only depressed him more. A handy place to die, a cemetery, Gabe thought. Marva said Dane had wanted to be buried there so it did make sense he'd kill himself there.\n\nBut the missing cell phone and satchel meant there had been someone else in the cemetery. It was looking like murder, not suicide, and that would complicate his investigation into the missing girls.\n\n\"They're finally done with the body,\" Gabe said when he saw movement. He and Vic got out to stand by their vehicle as the body bag was loaded, the doors slammed shut on a man's life. The E.R. vehicle pulled past them and drove out.\n\n\"Even if his death stops future abductions, we still don't have Sandy or the others back,\" Gabe stated the obvious as they got back in the car. They pulled out, following the E.R. vehicle at a distance.\n\n\"Yeah.\" Vic sounded as tired and discouraged as he felt. \"Gut instinct\u2014you think it was him who took the girls? Maybe in cahoots with someone else, like his sister?\"\n\n\"You know that old saying, 'Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.' Someone would have let something slip over these years. I heard Marva always wanted children, but that's proof of nothing.\"\n\n\"Yeah. And in this case, I don't buy the copycat thing. I'm sorry I told Tess about your mother and her father. Honest, I thought she knew.\"\n\n\"She should have. I should have told her, since they didn't. I just have a thing\u2014an instinct to protect her like I didn't do when she was taken.\"\n\n\"So I noticed. You definitely have a thing for her.\"\n\n\"I get what you're saying, but I'd stake everything that she was telling us the truth. She was furious with me, she runs over to see if Dane's house and graveyard come back to her and is just there at the wrong time.\"\n\n\"No coincidences in police work, remember? You're getting emotionally involved with her, Gabe, and\u2014\"\n\n\"And that's another reason I'm going to solve this. Hell, Vic, I'm emotionally tied to each of the kidnapped girls, even the ones I never met! You know, when I was assigned to defusing bombs, I had to have someone dress me in state-of-the-art armor every time. Eighty-pound Kevlar bomb suit, helmet with a shield over my face. But I'm feeling vulnerable on this case, terrified the bomb's going to blow in my face\u2014that another girl will go missing or we'll find a body.... And Tess. I care deeply for the woman, and that traumatized, scared little girl still inside her\u2014I've got to get back in her good graces so she can remember more, help herself and help me.\"\n\n\"Look,\" Vic said, gripping his shoulder hard, \"it's gonna be dark soon. Drive me to the station. I'll get my car, go back to Dane's house, work with Mike on the forensics and look for more possible evidence inside. You eat something solid, get a couple of hours' rack time. I know you're gonna see if Tess is all right. Swear to me you'll take care of yourself, or you're gonna lose it\u2014lose objectivity and control.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I hear you, about keeping my head on straight about Tess too. I promise,\" Gabe said, grateful for the support. So why didn't he believe he'd keep that promise to Vic?\n22\n\nAfter Jace Miller dropped her off at home, Tess refused to just collapse. In a way that was what she'd been doing for years, either falling apart or hiding. So what if she was upset by Gabe and Vic's interrogation and by Marva's accusation? It was nothing next to what Sandy Kenton, Jill Stillwell, even Amanda Bell, might be going through.\n\nIf the kidnapper had been Dane, maybe Marva had helped him. Dane could have given the Greens money to keep them going over the years before Marva's husband died. Maybe money to keep their mouths shut or to house a kidnapped girl. Had Marva been faking her friendliness from the first just to keep an eye on Tess and what she remembered? Tess had been shocked at how quickly the woman had turned on her. But that seemed somehow familiar in the dark depths of her mind\u2014someone who coddled her, then struck out at her.\n\nTess certainly wasn't leaving the area, as she'd promised Gabe and Vic, but she was going to pursue any memories that could help find the lost girls. One of the library books talked about cascading flashbacks. Once they start to emerge from the buried past, they supposedly couldn't be stopped, like a waterfall.\n\nSince everyone was investigating at Dane's place she decided she was going to look at Marva's old place. If she saw the house, maybe she'd remember it. In case Gabe stopped by, she'd leave him a note explaining where she'd gone. She had agreed to give him an extra key when her locks were all changed, so she put the note on the kitchen counter, where he'd see it right away.\n\n* * *\n\nAs she drove past the Hear Ye property heading for Marva's place, Tess tried to ignore the fact that it was starting to rain and getting dark. This would not take long.\n\nShe was amazed she could hear the muted roar of the Falls waterfall when she rolled down her car window near Marva's. She hadn't realized the sound would carry this far.\n\nTess pulled off Blackberry Road. The old Green farmhouse sat on a fairly sharp curve in the road. She drove past once. There was a light on in the place! Or was that the reflection of her own headlights on the turn?\n\nThe house was supposed to be deserted. She turned around and drove back but saw no lights this time. Surely that hadn't been her imagination. She'd have to go closer to be sure. There was no point getting Gabe or Vic out here on a wild-goose chase. They'd have her head for sure. What if it was kids or someone homeless passing through? She'd just peek in a window, then decide.\n\nSo she couldn't be spotted from the road, she parked in a narrow, grassy lane that had been a farmer's tractor entry to a field that was unplanted now. She knew Miss Etta and her handicapped mother lived a mile or so farther down the road in their historic home, but she couldn't recall ever being out there. Behind the small woodlot between where she stood and the Green acreage stretched a barren, single field where Marva's husband had grown vegetables. He'd done odd jobs in the winter, hunted with Sam Jeffers sometimes, but that was about all she knew. That and the fact that the Greens had never quite made ends meet, so their house and outbuildings were in bad shape. They'd gone derelict after Marva left.\n\nTess muted her cell phone and got out of the car, carefully locking it, then securing her keys in her backpack. Again, she heard the roar of the falls, but, in a way, it was comforting, like white noise blocking out other sounds. She would take a closer peek at the house, then phone Gabe if anything looked suspicious.\n\nShe hiked off the road, going through the woodlot. The tree cover stopped the rain but made it darker. Such a place would have terrified her just days ago, but that had all changed now. She was willing to take risks for the stolen girls. And, despite her own denials, Gabe.\n\nJust as she came to the fringe of woods, she saw a distant light move through the trees along the lot line. The light seemed to be dancing since branches were blowing in the wind. She sucked in a breath and pressed her back to a tree trunk. The light she'd seen when she drove by was not her imagination.\n\nShe looked carefully. The light itself was not moving, only the trees. Despite the fact that the rain pattered down when she emerged from cover, she crossed the grassy field and stood on the gravel driveway. The light was closer than she thought.\n\nDarting from tree to tree, she approached the derelict house. The outside had been marred with graffiti. She wasn't sure, but the style looked similar to the graffiti that had defaced the rock wall at the falls. That was only about a mile away. Maybe whoever was inside was putting their handiwork there too or just getting out of the rain.\n\nShe stopped by a leafless bush near the front porch. The windows were boarded up. She'd have to go around to the side or the back of the house to try to see in. She looked at the floor of the porch. It would probably creak or cave in if she stepped on it. Even with the steady, muted roar of the falls, she couldn't risk that.\n\nHer heart beat faster and faster. The run-down house looked like a decrepit face with blank eyes and tattoos. She tried to picture how it must have looked years ago. Did it seem familiar? She knew Gabe had checked the place more than once and found nothing. But she knew someone was here and now she could hear voices\u2014up this close, she heard at least one man's and one was high pitched like a girl's.\n\nHer gut instinct was to back off and phone Gabe. But if someone had Sandy, Jill or Amanda here, she wanted to know for sure.\n\n* * *\n\nIt was bad enough that Tess still wasn't taking his phone calls, Gabe thought as he pulled into her place. He saw there were no lights on in the house, though the outside safety lights were on. Her car was gone and it was getting dark and raining. Could she have driven to see her family at the Hear Ye compound? It seemed unlikely. Maybe she'd gone over to his house. He'd given her a key.\n\nHe drove past the cornfield and into his own driveway. The house was dark. There was no car outside. Vic wasn't even back yet.\n\nWhat if Tess had decided to head for Michigan? If so, he'd call the State Highway Patrol, have her arrested for disobeying their order to stay in the area. He knew she'd been through a lot, but he'd been impressed at how she'd stood up to Vic's accusations. Gabe knew Vic had agreed to let her go home mostly because of her sticking to her story\u2014and the fact that they both had soft spots for her. He didn't really believe she would take off.\n\nHe drove right back out of his driveway, turned on his bar light but not the siren and headed toward town. He auto-dialed Tess again and got her voice mail. He swore and pulled into his parking spot at the station. Vic's car was here; Ann's too.\n\nInside, he found both of his 911 dispatchers chatting over fast food at the front desk. Maybe Ann just didn't want to go home in the rain. With Dane's death, they'd had a lot to handle, especially with him and Vic out in the field. No doubt, the media mavens had sniffed the news out already.\n\n\"Too bad about Dane,\" Ann said. \"Oh, the mayor called about five times and insisted he talk to you ASAP.\" She handed him a call slip. The neat way she'd cut it off across the bottom made him think of Dane's so-called suicide note. \"I guess you left him a message you wanted to see him, but he's really upset about Dane's death. A couple of newspapers and TV stations called, so they may be back in town tomorrow. Agent Reingold's in your office. We've got an extra cheeseburger here if you're hungry.\"\n\n\"Yeah, thanks. I promised Vic I'd eat and rest. I appreciate both of you working overtime through all this.\"\n\nIn a way he thought he shouldn't take the burger from Ann\u2014take anything from her right now\u2014but he suddenly realized he was starving. He'd last eaten at breakfast, hadn't thought of food when it was all around him at the farmers' market. Ann handed him the wrapped burger; it was still warm. He started to unwrap it and headed to talk to Vic.\n\n\"I told Agent Reingold the person in town to see about that antique pistol is the librarian, and not just because she knows everything,\" Ann said. \"Just a couple of months ago, she had a small display in the library that had some of Dane's old pistols and some of hers. Hers, I'll bet, are ones her family owned\u2014pioneer relics. Sometimes I think she's a relic. Ebook is a dirty word to her.\"\n\n\"I remember all that stuff about her pioneer family,\" Peggy said. \"Sheriff, did you ever take that field trip to her place when you were in elementary school?\"\n\n\"I must have missed that day.\" He took a big bite of the burger.\n\n\"Well, I didn't miss it,\" Peggy went on. \"She talked about her ancestors knowing Daniel Boone or something like that. You know, 'Kilt him a bar when he was only three.'\"\n\n\"You sure that wasn't Davy Crockett, that Disney show?\" Ann said, dipping her French fries in ketchup that reminded him of the crime scene. He quit chewing the burger. Couldn't they cut the chatter? A man had been killed today.\n\n\"Okay, thanks again for the food,\" Gabe said. \"I'll talk to Miss Etta about that and get back to the mayor. And before I head home tonight, I'm going to drive out to Blackberry Road to take a look at Marva Green's old place.\"\n\nVic had evidently heard their voices and walked in from his lair down the hall. \"So far, all I have on the gun is that it's an 1842 lock pistol by Derringer, no less. Made in Philadelphia, curved wooden handle, the whole nine yards\u2014except who owned it and who fired it. Mike's driven back to BCI to use the lab facilities there instead of the ones in the truck, so I'm waiting until tomorrow to go back to Dane's house.\"\n\nThe desk phone rang, and Peggy answered it. Gabe said a silent prayer it was Tess. Peggy handed him the phone.\n\n\"Sheriff Gabe McCord here.\"\n\nHe heard a woman's excited voice, though not the one he wanted to hear. It was Marian Bell.\n\n\"Sheriff, you were right all along! Thank God\u2014and you\u2014I just got a call from the private detective we hired! He's located Amanda with Peter and the home-wrecker slut he's been living with in South America! I'm going to get a lawyer, and I'm going to get her back, but she's alive! She wasn't kidnapped here like the others!\"\n\n\"That's great, Marian! Let's get our congressman and the state department involved. You'll need other kinds of help now. Call me if you need assistance from this office.\"\n\nHe was relieved, happy for her, but he still felt the loss of the others pulling him down. After he hung up, Ann and Peggy cheered. Vic even cracked a smile. But Gabe knew he was the one who needed other kinds of help now. When he was in Iraq, his team had a superstition: if you got a gift when one bomb was a dud, you really had to fear what happened next.\n\n* * *\n\nTess had to go clear around to the back of the old farmhouse in the rain. The side windows on the first floor were too high to look into without climbing on something.\n\nThe tall windows made her feel like a small child again. Was this place getting to her in another way\u2014subconscious memories? Fighting that fear, she decided to move her position so she could hear more than a blur of voices muted by the sound of rain and the waterfall.\n\nHer stomach cramped, but she'd come this far and she was going to look in. One peek, assess the situation, catch something said, more than what she'd overheard from Dane. Then she'd back off and phone Gabe, if there was more to report than kids who had to put their thoughts in black spray paint on places they shouldn't.\n\nUnder a sagging porch ceiling held up by two crooked pillars, the back door was open! Maybe they wanted fresh air or just hadn't thought to close it. Again, she heard a female voice and maybe more than one man's. There was a sharp, acrid smell drifting out the back door. Holding her breath, she edged closer and peered inside. She saw a kind of mudroom. The kitchen must be down a short hall beyond where the people were. To the right, she saw back stairs that went upward.\n\nThe voices were clear now, though she couldn't really follow what was being said\u2014until she heard Gabe's name.\n\n\"Far's I'm concerned, McCord might as well be Barney Fife with one bullet in his gun,\" a man said with a kind of hee-haw laugh. \"This whole place is like that old TV show Mayberry R.F.D. He's been lookin' for us for years, his daddy too, but we keep movin' the goods.\"\n\n\"Who's your daddy?\" another male voice said. \"If he ain't the sheriff out chasin' lost little chicks, he ain't nothin' around here.\"\n\nTess's stomach cramped. Could these voices belong to the kidnappers? Was that what they were mocking Gabe about? But what were they doing here? And why didn't the girl or woman speak again? Had they gagged her, drugged her? Tess could almost picture that as if it was happening to her.\n\nShe edged in the door, sidling toward the staircase in case she had to hide. Then, on the stairs above her, she saw a small circle of light. Maybe there was a window into the kitchen, a vent perhaps.\n\nHolding her breath, she tiptoed up a step, then another. In the kitchen, they were making so much noise they didn't hear the stairs creak, and she had the waterfall and rain to thank for that too. The hole was where a vent must have come out into these narrow back stairs years ago, when there were wood fires in potbellied stoves.\n\nKeeping her face as far back from the opening as she could, she peered into the kitchen. It looked as though they were cooking something on the counter and on a beat-up table. She saw no stove or refrigerator, but of course the appliances had been stripped out years ago. They were using a small generator that was making a low buzzing noise. No doubt the electricity in this place had been turned off when Marva left. These weren't homeless people making dinner somewhere they could find shelter. They'd said Gabe had looked for them for years, and they knew about the kidnappings.\n\nShe glimpsed bottles, a big funnel, Pyrex-type dishes and a blender. She gasped. These people were mixing and cooking up meth. It could blow sky-high if something went wrong. A petite but tough-looking woman moved into view. Tess glimpsed two men; she heard a third.\n\n\"We oughta go to the one-pot method,\" the girl said. She had dirty-looking hair pulled straight back in a long ponytail. \"You know, shake-and-bake, toss the bottle out of the car when we're done with it.\"\n\n\"Too damn dangerous. You think this stuff can't blow? One wrong shake of the bottle, a little air gets in and fireball.\" The man clapped his hands together, and Tess jumped.\n\nShe had to get out of here. She'd call Gabe, but not about finding kidnappers. She was sure these people didn't have the finesse, the smarts, to pull that off. But this old house, the sound of the falls, even the back stairs, seemed somehow familiar, and she'd have to tell Gabe that.\n\nHolding her breath, she began to creep down the steps to get out the back door. She froze when a phone rang, but it wasn't hers. She'd muted her ring, and that phone played \"Dixie.\" One of the men stepped into the mudroom to take the call, blocking her escape.\n\n\"Yo, Jonas. What? She thinks he might be coming here? Now? Okay, we're outta here! Hey,\" the man shouted to everyone as he went back into the kitchen, \"leave it cookin', grab what you can, 'cause we gotta go. Tip from Jonas that the law might be comin'. Chop, chop! Maybe this stuff will blow up in his face. I'm sick of him always being on our tails.\"\n\nThe light source went off. Tess heard them run like rats off a ship as she huddled in the darkness on the stairs. At least Gabe was on his way. Terrified the stuff would explode, she counted to ten and tore out behind them right into the rough embrace of a big man.\n\n\"You want in on the action, honey?\" he goaded, grabbing her arm and swinging her around toward him hard. He was the one who had taken the call. \"You thinkin' to turn us in?\"\n\n\"Hank, come now!\" the woman shouted, running back toward them. Someone was driving a car out of the old barn. The headlights slashed across them. He held Tess in such a crushing grip her feet dangled off the ground.\n\n\"Let's take her with us,\" he yelled, starting to drag her toward the car. \"Who knows what she heard or saw? I saw her shadow on the stairs and figured she'd bail out right behind us. This has been so clean before, and I don't want witnesses.\"\n\n\"No, you're not taking her!\" the girl insisted, tugging at his arm.\n\n\"She can ID us!\"\n\n\"Wait! I think I know who she is. That first one got taken by the Cold Creek kidnapper. Remember, Jonas told us about her.\"\n\nThe man swore a string of oaths, then put Tess down and yanked one arm up behind her back. \"Yeah, we don't need in on that. Turn off them headlights, and I'll be just a sec. Gimme that flashlight,\" he shouted, grabbing a large one from the girl and turning it on. He checked Tess's pockets, then ripped her backpack from her and flung it into the darkness. He half shoved, half carried her toward the house. \"The place goes up, good riddance to her and the sheriff if he's coming too,\" he yelled back at the girl.\n\nTess struggled as the man named Hank forced her back inside. He shoved her to the floor and tied her with rope and netting they must have used to carry their gear in. Her hands were behind her back secured to a table leg with the cooker hissing over her head.\n\n\"Hard way to learn a lesson, honey,\" he said. \"Better say your prayers.\"\n\nHe patted her head, got to his feet and ran. Tess heard the car roar past the house, the squeal of brakes as it turned onto the road. Then there was only the sound of the gurgling, steaming stuff on the table over her head, which blended with the muted rush of the distant waterfall.\n23\n\nTess soon gave up struggling to get free. The rope and netting were so tight they cut into her wrists. She was scared to try to kneel under the table, then try to lift it with her shoulder or back to maneuver her ties off the table leg. She might tip it over, make it explode even faster than it would on its own. At least Gabe was coming, but if he did, she couldn't let him be blown to bits too.\n\nShe could not believe her life could end with all her dreams and hopes up in flames. She would never know who had abducted her and ruined her life. Still, except for her father, she'd had a good family. No romantic love of her own, at least before Gabe gave her hope. And children\u2014how she wanted children of her own.\n\nSay your prayers, that horrible man had told her when he left. Would she be reunited with her mother in heaven? She wished she had called her father. She thought about Kate and Char. She loved them. She missed and needed them.\n\nShe tried sawing her wrist ties up and down against the edge of the table leg, but it would take hours to get free. She kept at it, however exhausted her shoulders and arms were, all the while picturing herself reading to her most recent class of preschoolers at the Sunshine and Smiles Center while they sat cross-legged on the floor and she used a low stool, so she could show them the pictures. Wouldn't Miss Etta have been proud of her for that? Little Cristelle wasn't paying attention, but her twin, Nanette, was. Those girls were as different as Tess, Kate and Char. Jacob and Ashley were really into the story of the pioneer boy's life.\n\nShe was about to lose her life. Her mind almost went blank with fear, but she forced herself to remember happier times. Her little redheaded student Jacob's name reminded her of hearing Jonas's name in this room. Ann's brother? Was he the one tipping off drug-cooking criminals that Gabe was coming? If so, was Ann his source of information? Would Gabe ever know what had happened to her? She should have told him that she cared deeply for him.\n\nTess was angry with herself for getting caught. The cooker over her head was rattling so fast and hard that it might explode at any time and her life too, just another girl gone.\n\n* * *\n\nSince it was dark, Gabe decided he could park fairly close to Marva's old place. He drove slowly looking for a spot to pull in. If Sandy Kenton was being held there\u2014though he'd checked it before\u2014he intended to surveil it from the outside before checking the interior.\n\nTomorrow was going to be a busy day, including questioning Marva again. Dane had lawyered up fast both when Gabe's father suspected him and again recently. Marva might too, but not, he hoped, before he saw her again. Even if she and Dane had nothing to do with the Cold Creek kidnappings, Marva, who had been poor so long, was sitting pretty for the rest of her life if she was Dane's heir. So Gabe knew he had to look into the possibility that she'd left the farmers' market, hidden in the cornfield to kill her brother, then come home later, faked surprise and shock\u2014and tried to blame Tess.\n\nHe was also planning to catch Reese Owens when he came out of church around noon. At least the mayor wanted to talk to him too. Then Gabe planned to be at the evening church service, the candlelight vigil and procession to the gift shop, where Sandy Kenton had been abducted. As for today, Tess sure as heck better be home or at his place when he got back, because all he needed was to have to go check on her with her cousins at that weird Hear Ye compound after dark. He trusted Bright Star Monson about as much as he did a Taliban terrorist.\n\nHe parked on the near side of a woodlot not far from the driveway. The old Green house and outbuildings looked dark and deserted. Though he'd check them out now, he'd come back with Vic and Mike with a search warrant later\u2014if he could pry another one from the judge. Before he got out of his vehicle, he muted the volume on his portable radio and drew his semiautomatic pistol. He pulled his flashlight from his duty belt but didn't turn it on.\n\nHe hiked across the driveway at a good pace until he heard the other equipment in his duty belt bounce. No need to make noise, even if the hushed sound of the waterfall covered some of it. He slowed to a walk.\n\nThe front windows were still boarded up with cheap plywood. No wonder this place hadn't sold. He'd buy Tess's house over this any day. The Green property did have more acreage than hers, though.\n\nAt the side of the house, he bent down and played his light through a broken basement window. Nothing much, except some chemical smell. Cleaning fluid? Maybe Marva had scrubbed the basement before she left. Mixing some toxic cleaning fluids gave off an acrid smell and could even cause a minor explosion. He knew Mrs. Taylor in town had gotten badly burned that way. But this reminded him of the stink of a deserted meth lab, like the ones he'd always come across too late to catch the cookers. At that thought, he walked even more quietly and carefully.\n\nAround the back of the house, he slowed his steps. Would he ever get over the fear he'd felt before going into a small shop in a market or an Iraqi house, searching for a bomb?\n\nHe stepped up onto the small porch. The back door stood ajar. The smell grew stronger. He knew it was chemicals. He heard a strange sound, then a grunt or sob. Could someone still be inside?\n\nHe jumped away from the door to take cover, and his foot went through a board with a sharp crack. He sat down hard. His flashlight went spinning away, landing somewhere off the porch. Still holding his gun in one hand aimed toward the open door, he swore under his breath and tried to pull his foot back out. The broken boards scraped his shin. He pulled his leg free, scraping it more. When he stood, pain shot through his ankle. Throwing himself flat against the outside wall next to the door, he shouted, \"Police! Don't move!\"\n\n\"Gabe?\" came a shaky female voice within. \"It's Tess.\"\n\n\"Tess? What the h\u2014\"\n\n\"Get away! Don't come in. I'm alone. There's a meth lab here. The stuff is bubbling pretty hard, and I think it's going to explode!\"\n\n\"Get out here!\"\n\n\"They tied me up when they ran!\"\n\nIn the dark, he stumbled through the door, into a small room, down a hall, feeling his way, following her voice.\n\n\"I lost my flashlight!\" he said. \"Where are you?\"\n\n\"Gabe, go!\"\n\n\"Not without you!\"\n\nBut as he careened into the darkness, through an acrid stench that burned his eyes, he had a flashback. He thought he'd gotten over those long ago. Having to search a dark place at night, disrupt the bomb, feel the heat of the desert, feel the hate of whoever left the IED. He could see the detonation cord and the electrical wires within, the foam casing, the steel frags of ball bearings, nuts, bolts and nails all around it, meant to puncture body armor. Where were his armored gloves? He had bare hands, holding his pistol that would do him no good now, so he shoved it back in its holster.\n\n\"Gabe!\" Tess cried, cutting through his waking nightmare. \"This cooker they use\u2014it could explode. They've been gone awhile. I'm tied here. You should go. I...I really care for you\u2014love you. Please go.\"\n\nHe fell to his knees beside her, wanting to hold her but not having time.\n\n\"Gabe, please\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut up, Tess. Damn, you're trouble, but not more than you're worth! Where are you tied? Help me, tell me.\"\n\n\"Hands behind my back. Tied to a table leg with rope and some kind of netting. But there's a cooker on the table above my head, and one on the counter too.\"\n\nHe ran his hands down her shoulders to her wrists. His gut instinct was to tip the table away to free her and run, but disturbing the stuff could make it blow. He fought not to recall the earsplitting BANG! and fireball that had once tossed him like a toy soldier. And the one that had blown his team to bits.\n\nHe groped for his utility knife in his duty belt, slid it by feel between her wrist and the cords. \"Pull your wrists toward me to give me room,\" he told her. He shoved the knife, sawed. She gasped once.\n\n\"Your legs tied?\"\n\n\"No, just there\u2014ah!\"\n\nHe wasn't sure if he'd cut her, but she was free. He yanked her to her feet and dragged her down the little hall toward the door. His shin and ankle felt as if they were on fire. He lunged over the porch and pulled her with him. They hit the ground, rolled on the grass. He pulled her to her feet and, staggering like drunks, they ran into the darkness.\n\n* * *\n\nTess knew her left wrist was cut, but she didn't care. As they limped along past a small, ramshackle back building, she gasped, \"That's where they hid their car\u2014one woman and three men.\"\n\n\"Can you ID them?\"\n\n\"Two of them\u2014a young woman and the guy who tied me up. His name is Hank. But they said someone named Jonas tipped them off that 'the law' was coming, and that's why they took off. I ran too, and Hank caught me\u2014threw my backpack with my phone and car keys over there somewhere.\"\n\nHe swore under his breath. They finally stopped at the edge of the open field and sucked in breaths of damp air while the light rain seemed to wash them. They sank to the ground, holding tight, her sitting with her back to his chest between his spread legs. His trouser leg was torn. He tore her scarf in half. She wrapped his bloody ankle, then he tied the rest around her wrist.\n\n\"The walking wounded,\" he said, giving her a hug. \"Tess, some good news in all this. Marian Bell's daughter's been found living with her father in South America.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's great! You were right about her! I'm sure Marian's ecstatic, even if she doesn't exactly have her child back.\"\n\n\"And that might be another battle,\" he admitted as he took out his cell phone.\n\nStill shaking, Tess caught her breath while he called his deputy and told him to stop entry traffic on both ends of Blackberry Road, except for the fire trucks, and to tell people there could be a gas explosion in the deserted Green house.\n\n\"No,\" she heard Gabe tell Jace. \"We're both all right and can walk out to our cars when the fire guys get here.\" He put his phone away. \"If the meth lab doesn't blow, I'll need a BCI tox crew in the morning to clean it up, get evidence, so I'll call Vic,\" he said. \"And that's bad news about the call from Jonas, if it's Ann's brother, because she'd be his source. As for you, coming here like this...\"\n\n\"Don't start.\"\n\n\"I'm going to start, because it could have finished you. But maybe it was worth it to hear your confession of how you feel about me. It was probably only the fact that I have the same feelings that made me crazy enough to try to save you.\"\n\n\"You do? I thought maybe it was just that you need me.\"\n\n\"I do need you, and not just the way you're thinking.\"\n\n\"For getting me out of there\u2014I'll never be able to thank you enough.\"\n\n\"When this mess is over, we'll find a way,\" he said.\n\n\"Maybe my so-called confession of love was just in the heat of the moment.\"\n\n\"Maybe there's heat in every moment we're together,\" he muttered, and turned her in his arms to hold her sideways across his lap. He tipped her head back and kissed her hard.\n\nShe threw her good wrist up around his neck and held his lips to hers. His mouth opened, moved against hers. His beard stubble rasped her chin and cheeks, but it felt so good. Her back balanced against his good leg, she held to him, breathing to match his ragged breaths, kissing him back. His hand gripped her waist, slid up her rib cage to cup and finger a breast, then dropped to squeeze her thigh through her jeans. She leaned into him, her wrapped hand grasping his back. It was the most beautiful, stunning thing that had ever happened to her, as if the entire world was on fire...golden lights...the noise in her head and heart pounding...\n\nIt took Tess a moment to realize the meth lab had blown.\n\nThey sat up, clinging to each other as orange-red flames belched into the air and heated their faces. They blinked and ducked in the sudden brightness, before Gabe pulled her down, flat in the cold soil of the field, and covered her with his body. But they were far enough away. The ground shuddered with a second blast.\n\nFinally, when the explosions stopped, they watched the old house burn. He spoke loudly to make sure she could hear. \"I'm cursed when it comes to preserving evidence. I came looking for a kidnap site and got this.\"\n\n\"There's no way this can tie to the kidnappings. Those people weren't smart enough to pull those off, I can tell you.\"\n\n\"Except there's the drug connection. I'd still bet on Dane for drugging his kidnap victims. Still, I suppose you could have had meth or some version of it in your wine to cause your hallucinations. And I never could figure how I kept missing the cookers by just a couple of minutes when I'd go to check a place. At least now I've got Jonas and Ann to interrogate, and they may give up names.\"\n\n\"Could Ann have tipped off Dane that you had your search warrant and were heading for his place, so he panicked and killed himself?\"\n\n\"Everything's up for grabs. But panicked over what, since we found nothing in his house or the vet buildings? Ann volunteered to come in tomorrow even though it's Sunday, because so many people will be in town for the evening church service, candlelight vigil and march to the gift shop. I'll decide what to do about her then.\n\n\"Tess,\" he went on as they watched the flames dance and crackle, \"I'm sorry if it puts you in danger again, this time with the Simons clan if they find out you're my witness. I swear, I'm gonna have to lock you up. I'd chain you to my bed, except I'm seldom in it.\"\n\nHe held her tight as they finally heard the distant sounds of the volunteer-manned fire engine. They sat, arms around each other, as if they were watching a big bonfire on an autumn night. Even when the rain got heavier, it didn't seem to calm the blaze. The old wood fed the fire like a giant torch in the damp, black night. But by that light, Tess saw something that convinced her even more that this could have been the house where she was kept prisoner.\n\nIn the flicker of the flames, off to the side, she glimpsed something she had not noticed in the dark.\n\n\"Look at those!\" she cried, turning and pointing.\n\nTo her surprise, Gabe drew his gun. \"I don't see anything. Only old white man-made beehives. I think George Green once sold honey.\"\n\n\"But to a child\u2014me\u2014upstairs, they must have looked like tombstones! And I remember those back stairs I was hiding on tonight, I'm sure I do! This must have been the place. You can hear the waterfall from here, and there's a train track a couple of miles over, though I didn't hear one tonight.\"\n\n\"It's enough to give me more reasons to question Marva. Whether it was Dane or her husband behind it, she would know\u2014\"\n\n\"But what if it was Marva herself? Maybe she wanted children around. But then where would Sandy be held right now?\" She shuddered and glanced at the burning house again. \"I pray she wasn't upstairs.... Surely not in that tanning salon. The girls are still missing and so is a piece of the puzzle.\"\n\n\"Like I said, I'll start with Marva. And if Ann's been tipping off her brother, who then phones the meth cookers, maybe she's also been telling Jonas where I've been looking for his dogfight spots for years so he can stay one step ahead of me. What an idiot I've been with her. I may have to charge her as an accessory to these crimes\u2014if I can nail Jonas. I hate to fire her, just when I need someone on the desk during the day. Want a temporary job?\" he asked, giving her a little squeeze. \"Peggy Barfield, the night dispatcher, could teach you the system.\"\n\n\"Are you serious?\" she asked, turning to look at him in the dancing firelight. \"It would keep me out of trouble, you mean. Sure, I could help for a little while if it comes to that, but\u2014this old farmhouse, the layout of it, now these wooden-frame stacked beehives that look like tombstones... I think I've finally remembered the place where I was held.\"\n\n\"Walking into that house to get you tonight, I had a flashback to defusing bombs. Don't need more of those memories.\"\n\n\"But, as awful as they are, I need mine,\" she said in a whisper when they'd been almost shouting to be heard over the roar of the fire.\n\nThey both jolted when the farmhouse roof caved in with a crash just as a train screeched its warning in the dark distance. All the clues Tess could remember fit this place, coming together just as it disintegrated in its fiery death.\n24\n\n\"Sorry to get you out so early on a Sunday morning,\" Gabe told his young deputy as they exited their separate vehicles. Dr. Nelson had taken care of him and stitched up Tess, though Gabe was still walking on a gimpy ankle. \"But there's three Simons brothers when I don't even trust one of them anymore. I think we'll find Jonas alone at his place, but you never know.\"\n\n\"No problem about my missing church. Carolyn just said the memorial service tonight will count,\" Jace said as they started walking through the trees and up the hill toward the house.\n\n\"Not a memorial service. A prayer service and candlelight vigil,\" Gabe reminded him. \"Memorial would mean Sandy's gone, and I hope to God she isn't.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I knew that. Gotta admit I'm nervous, going in on a big, shifty guy who's good with pit bulls and chain saws. You ever see that Chainsaw Massacre flick?\"\n\n\"Save it. I'm hoping this will be a knock-and-talk at first, but I've learned to expect the unexpected, especially since I hope to arrest him. Just let me do the talking but cover me from a stand of trees where you can see us, like we planned. Even if he asks me in, I'll have him step out into the open. I'll give you time to get set.\"\n\nGabe left Jace and limped toward Jonas's large log cabin home. Ann had let slip that the new home's interior was beautifully finished and cost a lot. Then she'd tried to backtrack on the expense comment. Gabe figured that was because Jonas's job at the mill didn't provide a big paycheck even if he did get a discount on wood. He might not be only running illegal dogfights but also getting drug money from tipping off the meth lab gang through Ann. Gabe couldn't think of anyone else named Jonas around here, but there could be\u2014though not with links to key information from the sheriff's department.\n\nHe had to get something out of Jonas before he accused Ann of anything. She was a lot smarter than her brothers, so, as tough as they were, Gabe was betting she wouldn't crack as easily.\n\nThe minute he stepped into the yard, about ten pit bulls behind a wire fence went wild, barking, snarling.\n\nJonas stuck his head out the front door, looking like death warmed over.\n\n\"Hey, Sheriff,\" he said, laughing and scratching his belly through a loose flannel shirt. \"You come to ask me for Ann's hand? I'd agree to a shotgun wedding. Should I go get mine?\"\n\nGabe moved closer but not too close. At least the man seemed to be in a good mood, but he knew it wouldn't last too long.\n\n\"Step out so we can have a talk please,\" Gabe called to him. \"I'm here to ask why you didn't come in Friday morning to retrieve your dog. The one John Hillman mounted for you before it was stolen from the taxidermy shop. Ann did give you a quick call from the office as soon as she knew about it, didn't she?\"\n\nGabe watched the big man closely as he stepped out of the house but saw no hint Jonas got what he was implying. Although the man really annoyed him, Gabe kept his game face on, as impassive as possible. He glanced around at the open door, the front windows, the side of the house he could see, in case Jonas wasn't alone.\n\n\"I heard the dog doc shot and killed himself,\" Jonas said, coming no closer than the edge of the porch. Gabe kept an eye on his hands. He could have a gun stuck in his waistband under that loose shirt.\n\n\"Answer my question, Jonas. I told you to be there on Friday. Dr. Thompson died yesterday. Since this is Sunday, you're a couple of days late.\"\n\n\"Didn't come in 'cause I had to work at the mill. And 'cause I didn't want to get questions from you like this. I don't have nothing to do with nothing. And I don't like the way you been treating Ann lately,\" he said, propping his fists on his hips, which at least suggested there was no hidden gun.\n\n\"You didn't want questions because you have something to hide?\"\n\nJonas came down off the porch. Gabe stood his ground.\n\n\"You trying to say I'm fighting dogs again? You just go see if any of them look torn up.\"\n\n\"I would imagine you get rid of the ones who are injured. Bury them in the woods? No, I came to tell you that I have information you're tied to the gang of meth cookers.\"\n\n\"What? Says who?\" he said, edging toward the dog cages instead of coming closer.\n\n\"Stay there. Stay put,\" Gabe commanded.\n\n\"You mean like 'heel'? I ain't someone you can order around, like Ann, just 'cause she works for you, is soft on you.\"\n\n\"You give me your contact's name in that gang\u2014Hank's last name\u2014and where I can find him, and things will go a lot easier for you in court.\"\n\nGabe saw the man's eyes widen when he heard the name Hank.\n\n\"You're nuts, man! You come out here, accusing me of...of what? You been tapping my phone? You can't prove nothing! How would I know anything about any meth lab gang? I can prove where I was last night!\"\n\n\"Last night? You mean someone tipped off the meth lab gang last night, so that's when you need an alibi? I didn't mention last night, and you wouldn't have to be with them to tip them off. No, I haven't tapped your phone, but since you're innocent, how about you just let me check calls on your cell? I will tell you Hank and his friends are going to be charged with attempted murder when we arrest them, so you might want to come into the station and make a statement to help me locate them faster than I'm going to anyway. That would make it go easier on you and anyone else who is tipping you off so you can tip them off. And quit shuffling toward that dog compound. You loose those dogs on me, I'll have to shoot them. I'd rather not, nor would Deputy Miller, who has my back right now.\"\n\n\"You're bluffing.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Gabe said. \"Deputy Miller,\" he called, without taking his eyes off Jonas. \"You there?\"\n\n\"Fully armed, Sheriff!\" Jace called out. He shot a single bullet into the air, which made Gabe jump as much as Jonas did.\n\nGabe put his hand on the holster of his gun. At first he thought Jonas would lunge to free the dogs, but instead he looked as if he was going to cry.\n\n\"Don't mind for me,\" he said, as if talking to the dogs, \"but for Ann.\"\n\nFinally, Gabe thought, he'd found Jonas's soft spot. \"Like I said, your cooperation\u2014and Ann's,\" Gabe said, \"will go a long way in all this. How about you let me take you in, make a statement? She can too.\"\n\n\"I'm not friends with those lowlifes, Hank McGuffey and his crew, just could use the extra money. Mill don't pay enough, selling extra firewood neither. Don't need no bank foreclosing on my dream home here.\"\n\nAgain, the big man looked as if he was close to tears.\n\nGabe had expected a fight, was even, if those dogs got loose, prepared to have to climb a tree. With all this hitting him at once: losing Ann in the office, suspecting Marva as a possible suspect for the kidnappings, wanting to protect Tess but afraid he couldn't\u2014in more ways than one, he felt he was up a tree whatever happened next.\n\n\"Jonas,\" he said. \"I'm going to read you your Miranda rights and explain them.\"\n\n\"I'll cooperate. That should go a long ways with you and in court. Ann had no idea I was passing things on. Told her I was just interested in police work, and asked her stuff.\"\n\nGabe didn't believe any of that, and realized this might not be smooth sailing after all.\n\n* * *\n\nSunday morning Tess fixed breakfast for herself and Vic, since Gabe was long gone. \"The pancakes are great,\" Vic said, tucking into his second stack of them. \"So much better than those toaster waffles and quick-fix stuff. I'm a disaster in the kitchen.\"\n\n\"I thought you were married.\"\n\n\"Was,\" he said, pouring on syrup. \"Can't be married to a wife and the career I've had. I don't blame her for taking a hike. I was married though, when I was here for your case, and she suffered right along with me until you turned up. See,\" he said, his hands resting with his fork and knife beside his plate, \"we lost our daughter to cancer when she was young. My wife was real happy when your mother got you back. Our Tiffany had neuroblastoma\u2014rare but with only about a five percent survival rate.\"\n\n\"Vic, I'm sorry,\" she said, sinking into the chair across the table from him. Tears burned her eyes, but she blinked them back.\n\nHe sighed. \"Well, yeah. Thanks. I think it's why I was really shook when Jill Stillwell went missing, and I was assigned somewhere else so I couldn't work that case. And now the Kenton girl. I might come off hard as nails, but I know how it feels to lose a young girl.\"\n\n\"Speaking of marriage under the strain of the man's career, it was obviously hard for Gabe's mother.\"\n\nHe started to eat again. \"Speaking of obvious, I had no idea you didn't know about your father and Gabe's mom.\"\n\n\"It's best I know. I don't hold it against you. My family should have told me. But what you said about your wife too\u2014no wonder Gabe has never married in his position.\"\n\nHe narrowed his eyes and stared straight at her. \"He and Ann were done before he found out she betrayed him, you know.\"\n\n\"That's what he said.\"\n\n\"You thinking of the two of you\u2014him and you?\"\n\n\"Of course not. With all that's going on, and I've only known him\u2014as adults\u2014for six days, no way! I'm heading back to Michigan as soon as this is all over.\"\n\n\"'Methinks the lady doth protest too much.' That's Shakespeare\u2014impressive, huh? Look, I can see you two care for each other. That's why he asked me to keep a good eye on you today at the church service for Sandy, the candle walk, all that.\"\n\n\"I'll be fine in the crowd.\"\n\n\"Because the person or persons out to scare you off or keep you quiet only come out of cornfields and we'll be uptown? Nope, I'm sticking by you today. You know,\" he said, with a shake of his head and slight smile as he poured more maple syrup on his last few bites, \"I saw a tabloid newspaper when Jill Stillwell went missing that claimed 'the Hillbilly Kidnappings' were done by the same aliens that make crop circles in the fields.\"\n\n\"No kidding? What a joke! That's terrible\u2014saying Hillbilly too! I'll bet Mayor Owens had a fit over that. But I guess, unless Marva confesses, aliens make as much sense as anything.\" She hesitated for a moment. \"Vic, one other thing.\"\n\nHe looked hard at her as if he knew something bad was coming.\n\n\"I'm going to phone my father.\"\n\nShe thought that would surprise him, or he'd speak against it, but he surprised her. \"Take notes. Hey, I'll clean up here. You go call him. And keep your spirits up in case he doesn't want to talk. I tell you though, I'd give years of my life\u2014my entire life\u2014to talk to my girl again.\"\n\n* * *\n\nGabe saw Ann jump up from behind her desk when he and Jace came in with Jonas in handcuffs.\n\n\"Gabe!\" she shouted. \"What? What?\"\n\n\"He's agreed to answer some questions. Just call Peggy for me, get her out of bed again and tell her I need her in here on the desk.\"\n\n\"But what's the charge?\"\n\n\"Ann!\" Jonas said. \"Get outta here and call us some fancy lawyer from Lake Azure, 'cause there's a bunch of them there.\"\n\n\"Us? Gabe...\"\n\nHe took Jonas into the smaller conference room, uncuffed him and left Jace with him. He went back to Ann, took her arm and steered her toward her desk. \"You said you were disappointed in me the other day for cooling off on you. But I\u2014\"\n\n\"Since Tess\u2014\"\n\n\"It's not her fault. I'm more than disappointed in you. Now, I'd like you to sit down at your desk and write out a statement. How long and how often you've been tipping off Jonas or anyone else about my comings and goings. Specifically reference the warning call to Jonas to tell Hank McGuffey and the other meth cookers last night, right after I told you that's where I was going. No wonder you didn't tell me who owned that stuffed dog, then tried to talk me out of linking it to Jonas. Now I know why I never could break up his dogfights, let alone the drug dealers he was tipping off.\"\n\nShe yanked her arm away and snatched her purse from behind her desk. \"You're a loser, you know that!\" she shouted. She rushed over to the coat pegs on the far wall of the waiting area and grabbed her jacket. \"You\u2014like father, like son\u2014couldn't solve the biggest case this county's ever seen, and I'll bet the kidnapper's right under your nose! Meanwhile, you waste your time with petty things. I am going to get a lawyer.\"\n\nHe refused to shout like she did. He was hurt and furious, but she wasn't worth his emotion, let alone his passion. He spoke calmly. \"You were right under my nose, and you've been caught. You and Jonas both. If you don't write out the statement right now, you can do it in a jail cell.\"\n\n\"He's an idiot to have told you anything! Excuse me\u2014permanently\u2014because I'm done wasting time and effort on you. Now I need to spend some of my hard-earned money to get a lawyer to protect me from something I'm not guilty of. By the way, Marva Green's done the same thing. I took a call from her attorney this morning.\" Her face puckered in a sneer; her voice was snotty. \"He'll contact you on Monday, but you're not to see her without him present! Consider that my last duty and contribution around here!\"\n\nHe snared her arm as she made for the door. \"Take your hands off me!\" she insisted.\n\nWithout a word, he marched her back to the holding cell, took her purse for Peggy to itemize and locked her in. He stomped back to her desk, got a pad and pen, and shoved them through the small food-tray opening at the bottom of the thick door. Through the grate, he said, \"Jace will be right in to read you your rights and let you call a lawyer\u2014unless you want to write out what I asked and leave to see a lawyer yourself.\"\n\nGabe went over and sat at her desk. He called Peggy to come in. Later, he'd go through Ann's records, phone log and computer thoroughly, but right now he just wanted to tell Tess one more time not to come uptown without Vic today. But her cell rang busy. After last night, maybe she needed counseling and comforting from her social-worker sister again, but he wished she'd just come to him.\n\n* * *\n\nTess could not stop shaking, but she was going through with this. A man's voice answered the phone. The past hit her like a sledgehammer. For a moment, she couldn't say a word.\n\n\"Hello? Jack Lockwood speaking.\"\n\nAfraid he'd hang up whether she talked or didn't, she blurted out what she wanted to say in a rush. \"Dad, it's Tess\u2014Teresa. I know this is a surprise but I've wanted to talk to you for a long time. I'm in Cold Creek to sell the house after Mom died. There's been a third kidnapping, so I just had to call you. I mean, it brought things back, and I'm trying to help Sheriff McCord\u2014you know, Gabe's sheriff now\u2014but I still can't remember who took me.\"\n\n\"Teresa. My terrific, terrible Teresa! I'd heard your mother died. I'm sorry. Really, I am...for lots of things.\"\n\nShe was crying now. \"But who told you about her?\"\n\n\"Reese Owens. The bastard calls sometimes. I think to make sure I'm still thousands of miles away. He once accused me of taking you, my own daughter. I wasn't sure you knew any of that. I guess Kate and Char did.\"\n\n\"Dad, was Reese Owens part of the reason you left, because he threatened to accuse you in public?\"\n\n\"Yes. But I'd told Sheriff McCord\u2014Gabe's dad\u2014that he should take a look at George Green. The guy needed money because he was going bankrupt. Your mother said he'd been around that day before she left you at home with Gabe. George was peddling corn on the cob and said you were the prettiest child of the three. I loved all of you, Teresa, but you were such a feisty tomboy. I guess I'd hoped for a son, but I'm glad I got you, since you were most like me.\"\n\nIn a rush, Tess told him she'd changed her name, just to help let the past go\u2014but it hadn't helped. She explained the possible Dane and Marva connection for the kidnappings. He told her he'd read about the Kenton girl's abduction. She explained that Reese Owens was trying to get her out of town fast too, though she didn't mention what she knew about Reese's once molesting a minor.\n\nInstead she changed the subject and talked about her dreams of selling the farmhouse and buying a day care center; about how Kate and Char were doing well in their careers and travels. She asked him about his family. He told her he had two sons, Josh, age seven, and Jerod, just turned five. Silently, secretly, she was glad he had sons but not more daughters. \"I'd like to meet them someday. It's exciting to think I have two brothers.\"\n\n\"Teresa\u2014Tess\u2014I'm sure your sisters are still angry with me, but tell them it wasn't all my choice that I stayed away. A man more powerful than most folks in Cold Creek realize swore he'd make it bad for me if I came back.\"\n\n\"Sheriff McCord or Reese Owens?\"\n\n\"Owens, honey. I must have been his ace in the hole if the sheriff ever needed someone to blame for your abduction. Besides the mayor's friend Dane Thompson.\"\n\nOr in case Vic or Gabe's father suspected the mayor himself, Tess thought.\n\nHer father went on, \"Reese wanted the case solved and closed fast to get bad press away from his precious town.\"\n\nTess couldn't breathe for a minute. Gabe had said he intended to talk to Reese today, right after he came out of church. She looked at the time on her phone. The service would end in about ten minutes. She needed to let him know the things her dad had said. George and Marva Green might look bad right now, but Reese's actions were suspicious for sure.\n\n\"Dad, I have to go, but can I call again?\"\n\n\"I'll call you. I've got your number here on caller ID. Ask your sisters if they'll let me talk to them someday. Sorry about your losing your Mom, honey. She's\u2014she was\u2014a good woman, just like you.\"\n\nThe minute she hung up, she sucked in a huge breath to steady herself then dialed Gabe's number.\n\n\"Hey, I've been trying to get you,\" he said. \"I'm walking down the street to catch Reese Owens when he\u2014\"\n\n\"Gabe, I just talked to my father, and I have to tell you what he said. George Green was at our house that afternoon just before I was taken.\"\n\n\"I know, but he was questioned thoroughly. No go at that time. He had alibis from everybody on the road where he'd stopped to sell corn. Like with Dane, I can't question the dead.\"\n\n\"But there's more about Reese Owens. Just listen to this.\"\n25\n\nThe Community Church bells rang out twelve times. Gabe spotted Mayor Owens shaking the hands of the congregation as they streamed out after the morning worship service. Reese seemed to be greeting as many people as the pastor he was upstaging. Always a politician, and, sadly, they weren't to be trusted, Gabe thought. At least he didn't see his wife with him as the mayor finally headed toward the parking lot. Lillian Montgomery Owens reeked wealth, social class and self-appointed power more than her husband.\n\nGabe cut through a line of cars and fell into step beside Reese, who spoke first. \"So, you heard I wanted to see you. You'll be doing security at the Kenton service and procession tonight?\"\n\n\"I, and my deputy, and Agent Reingold, will be there. Are you expecting trouble?\"\n\n\"Avoiding it. I called you yesterday to find out the details about Dane's death. A shame. And more unwanted notoriety for Cold Creek.\"\n\nIt annoyed Gabe that the mayor kept waving and calling out to others while they were talking. Did the man never stop campaigning? Gabe knew how to get his attention fast, but he didn't want to spring everything on him in public.\n\n\"I need to talk to you too,\" Gabe told him. \"Let's walk down to my office, where it's private.\"\n\n\"I'll drive. Lily's staying here to oversee the ladies planning dinner for the Kenton family before the service this evening. You want to ride with me?\"\n\n\"Sure. Fine,\" Gabe said, not wanting to let him get away.\n\n\"So, shoot,\" Reese said once they were settled in the black Mercedes. Gabe saw Reese could hardly get the seat belt around his girth. \"Oops, shouldn't have used the word shoot when we're talking about Dane's death. I hear he left a note. Confessing, I hope, to the kidnappings. You're pursuing Marva for information? I heard she lawyered up.\"\n\n\"Word travels fast.\"\n\n\"When did it not around here?\" Reese said with a little laugh. \"I'd hate to think they were both involved in these abductions, but it would be a relief to have everything solved. At least I hear we got Marian Bell off our backs with her good news. But tell me about the investigation of Dane.\"\n\n\"He left a vague note, but there's evidence he might have been shot, not shot himself.\"\n\nReese pounded the steering wheel as he pulled into the police station. \"What? You and those fancy BCI boys been sitting on that? You should have told me at once. It's a miracle outside reporters aren't swarming in here over that. That's all I need! A high-profile man murdered in my town and still no definitive answer about who took those girls!\"\n\n\"Let's continue this in the conference room,\" Gabe said. He got out fast enough to go around and open the mayor's door for him. Why a man allowed himself to get so heavy he had trouble getting out of his car was beyond Gabe. He walked ahead and opened the police station door for the mayor. The office was deserted. Tess was going to help fill Ann's daytime shift tomorrow until he could hire someone else, but that was the last thing on his list of things to do right now.\n\nAt least the fact that Jonas had fingered Hank McGuffey and his crew meant Tess didn't have to spend her time going through mug shots, though she would eventually have to testify against McGuffey for trying to kill her and against the others as accessories. But that meant he'd see her then\u2014if she really was moving back to Michigan when this was all over.\n\nIn the smaller conference room, which didn't have all the kidnapping information on the walls, Gabe pulled out a chair for Reese.\n\n\"This is terrible, just terrible, about Dane,\" the mayor said, wiping sweat off his brow. He'd gone red in the face. Surely not just from the effort of walking in here, Gabe thought. \"It opens the door to the kidnapper being someone other than him, or at least someone he was working with, namely Marva. Poor dead George Green\u2014at least for the first two kidnappings, he could be guilty too. Nothing's been solved or going right around here, and I blame you.\"\n\n\"Mr. Mayor, the blame game won't help here. Jonas Simons has been arrested for working with a local meth drug ring, who were picked up this morning by the State Highway Patrol since they live over by Athens. But I provided them with all the information to make the arrests. Sorry to say that Ann Simons was also aiding and abetting the meth gang by passing on info she overheard from me. She's written a statement, been released on her own recognizance and hired a lawyer for herself and Jonas. Oh, by the way, the so-called gas explosion at the old Green place was really a meth explosion. The gang I just mentioned tried to kill Tess Lockwood, who had stumbled on them. So, how about you do your job and I'll do mine?\"\n\n\"Tried to kill her? Then maybe they're the ones you and your father failed to find.\"\n\n\"You don't let up, do you? They're young. They've been cooking meth all over the county, not abducting little girls.\"\n\n\"So that's small potatoes compared to the kidnappings. You need to concentrate on that.\"\n\n\"As a matter of fact, Agent Reingold and I have worked together to run down a very vocal, very involved local man who has a criminal record of child molestation. The man didn't live here at the time he committed that crime, but there was a large, ongoing attempt to cover it up.\"\n\nThe mayor's eyes narrowed and his upper lip went slick with sweat. \"Such as Jack Lockwood, Tess's father?\"\n\n\"He was thoroughly checked out years ago and was clean, although I understand you've been keeping him under your thumb. No, it's a man with a past criminal record, Mr. Mayor, although most of the information on that was expunged. But we have one record of it left and at least one Chillicothe civilian who remembers the details and the ensuing cover-up, including bribes.\"\n\nDespite his satisfaction in seeing this man cornered and speechless, Gabe hoped Reese wasn't going to have a heart attack right in front of him.\n\n\"You can't be serious about that\u2014that wrongful, old charge. A b-b-boyhood indiscretion. You\u2014you're b-blackmailing me?\"\n\n\"Hardly. I'm keeping you informed, just the way you like. And don't try to pull Jack Lockwood out of the hat again. Now,\" he said, trying not to revel in the moment and wondering if this long shot would ever lead to something useful about the abductions, \"although we have a court record, I'd appreciate it if you'd just write out your recollection of the incident between you and the minor named Ginger Pickett, so we can clear you of\u2014\"\n\n\"Damn you, boy!\" he cried, banging his fist on the table between them. \"I don't have anything to do with this, and it's a big mistake for you to be dragging up erroneous information from another place and time! These kidnappings are a whole different bag from that boyhood infraction. And Tess wasn't sexually molested, was she? So I bet the others weren't either, just taken for some other sick, warped reason. But since you're grasping at straws and you and your daddy never managed to solve this terrible case, I'm going to get a lawyer, one from Columbus, not these parts! You want to read me my rights?\"\n\n\"You're not under arrest. You've merely been asked to help clear up a possibility, which an innocent man and the longtime leader of his constituency should want to do.\"\n\n\"Nice try. I'm getting a lawyer. One who will help me have your head for this outrage.\"\n\n\"Good idea to retain a well-known and well-connected Columbus lawyer,\" Gabe said, trying to keep from losing his temper too. \"Marva, Jonas and Ann have already retained Lake Azure attorneys. Besides, a lawyer from the state capital will be within better reach of the national media you'll want to use for interviews. Nice working with you, sir,\" Gabe said as Reese rolled out of his chair and, pulling himself up by the table edge, rose to his feet. \"I'll see you at the church service this evening.\"\n\n\"And you just keep your mouth shut. A couple of words from me and you'll get thrown right out of office!\" Reese shouted.\n\n\"It could happen to the best of us up for election next month,\" Gabe countered. \"I know you've been rubber-stamped as mayor for years, but I'll bet I can find someone to oppose you, especially if you run on your record\u2014your real record.\"\n\nHe didn't open the door for Reese this time as the man stormed out of the room. Gabe kept thinking about how those pit bulls at Jonas's place had rattled their cages. He was like a pit bull now. And he was going to sink his teeth into whoever had hurt those little girls.\n\n* * *\n\nThe town turned out in droves for the church service that evening. Sitting in the second row, Tess stared at the big, hand-painted banner with the words Sandy Kenton: Bring Her Home hanging below the screen with projected photos of the girl. She had now been missing for five days. Tess studied the images, memorizing Sandy's face, but it almost blended with her own early photos, despite their slightly different coloring. Sandy had blond hair and brown eyes. A wide space between her two front teeth made them look even larger in her small mouth. A shy smile, pert nose. There were pictures of her with her family, at a picnic, at a wedding, at a petting zoo with a fawn, being read to by her mother, playing in a princess costume with a magic wand.\n\nJill Stillwell's family sat in the front row along with Pastor Snell and his wife, Jeanie. Tess had spoken with them briefly. And she'd spent a lot of time on the phone with Lindell Kenton, Sandy's mother. Lindell had asked Tess to say a few words this evening, but they'd compromised that she would do a Bible reading instead. She had to admit she was a bit nervous about it, but she wanted to help\u2014anything to help!\n\nShe'd read in one of Miss Etta's library books that Freud, no less, had defined mental health as the ability \"to love and to work.\" Tess figured she was doing both, not just in longing to have her own preschool where she could care for kids, but in working on the investigation. She was going to help Gabe by answering his dispatch and office phone during the day for a while. And as fast as everything had happened here in Cold Creek, she was very sure she was falling in love with him.\n\nShe sat between Deputy Miller's wife, Carolyn, and Miss Etta. Mayor Owens and his wife sat with the families of the kidnapped girls. Although Vic was to be her bodyguard this evening, he and Gabe sat at the back to keep an eye on everything.\n\nLindell Kenton had given Tess a Bible with the short passage to be read clearly marked. Tess held it in her lap, stroking the pebbled leather cover.\n\n\"That's a book people don't read enough anymore,\" Miss Etta whispered to her, reaching over to tap the Bible. Her hand smelled of that sanitizer she always used. \"They think the Good Book is in an old, hard language, but there are plenty of modern versions.\"\n\n\"I thought you might bring your mother tonight,\" Tess said.\n\nMiss Etta looked surprised at first, then said with a smile, \"Speaking of old versions, you mean? No, I used to bring her to church but not anymore. It's too hard to get her around. By the way, Sheriff McCord said he wanted to talk to me tomorrow about my antique gun collection. I'm going to look up the very gun that Dane must have used to do himself in. Also, I have a library book for Gabe to read.\"\n\n\"He's pretty busy.\"\n\n\"Yes, of course he is, and should be. But a book about stress on the job, that's what I'll recommend to him.\"\n\nThe muted buzz in the church quieted as Pastor Snell rose and went to the podium. He spoke a few opening words, said a lovely prayer, and then the organ led them, standing, through the hymn \"O God, Our Help in Ages Past.\"\n\nHow well Tess recalled going to Sunday school downstairs and sometimes coming up to \"big church\" with Mom and Dad. How had everything gone so bad?\n\n\"O God, our help in ages past,\n\nOur hope for years to come,\n\nBe thou our guard while troubles last,\n\nAnd our eternal home.\"\n\nTess knew Sandy Kenton must be thinking about home, longing for home, feeling frightened and abandoned right now. Thank God the child had not been hidden where Tess had been kept, which she was convinced had burned to the ground last night. The firemen and a BCI arson consultant were still sifting through the debris for bones, but Tess was sure there was some other place Dane and Marva\u2014or someone\u2014had been keeping Sandy.\n\nDuring the next prayer, she thanked God for letting her escape her captor or captors and asked for more memories, however terrible, to help Gabe arrest the monster.\n\nWhen her turn came, Pastor Snell introduced her as \"our ray of hope for both Sandy and Jill.\" He explained that Amanda Bell had been found alive in South America and that was an answer to prayer. \"And now the greatest gift in all this grief,\" he announced from the pulpit, \"our own Teresa Lockwood, who now goes by Tess, who came home to us years ago and is back with us again. Though she still bears the mental scars of her captivity, she is here with us today to read words to encourage our hearts. Tess.\"\n\nAs she walked up the three steps to the elevated platform, she was amazed that the audience broke into applause. It was too much. She teared up and sniffed hard. Even Vic was clapping. Gabe too, standing by the back door\u2014her Gabe, who had been there at the time and was now her guard while these troubles lasted. She was surprised to see Sam Jeffers and John Hillman sitting together in the back left corner. It was wrong of her to judge them, of course, but she hadn't expected them to be in church.\n\nShe put the open Bible down on the podium and held up a hand to still the applause. When it quieted, though she'd meant to say nothing personal, she shared her thoughts. \"It means a lot to me to be home. We have to face and recall the past to face the present and the future. And I'm trying, getting better and stronger. Now, Mrs. Kenton has asked me to read to you from Luke 15:4 about a lost sheep who was found.\"\n\nHer voice caught several times as she read the passage. \"What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? And when he comes home, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost.'\"\n\nAs soon as she sat down, Win Kenton got up behind the podium and explained that tomorrow at noon they were going to have another search for Sandy, through bare fields and even those still filled with corn. He explained that Aaron Kurtz needed prayers while bedridden with a dangerous blood clot and that others would soon be cutting his cornfields for him, but that they wanted to search them now.\n\n\"Also,\" he said, his voice breaking, \"we need to search the cornfields now so that when the big reapers come through, no one is in the way, no evidence Sheriff McCord or his assistants need to trace\u2014to find Sandy...\"\n\nHe meant, of course, her body could be out there. He choked up, just standing mute for a moment. \"We need to find traces of her, not have them destroyed. Our family thanks you for your help and prayers.\" He hurried back to his seat beside his wife.\n\nAgain, Tess visualized the cornfield, the big reaper. Then someone had leaped at her, put a needle right in her neck\u2014she was sure of it. She jerked at the memory, and Miss Etta put a steadying hand on her arm. At least, Tess thought, she was remembering more and more, like the waterfall of memories. And, strangely, she kept seeing a mounted deer head\u2014a stag\u2014with its glassy eyes looking down at her, as if to say, \"Bad things can happen to you if you don't behave.\" She would have Gabe ask Marva if her house had once had a deer head on the wall. But she might lie. And what if Tess was just recalling how creepy John Hillman's taxidermy shop had been?\n\nAfter they sang a final hymn and the pastor made an announcement about signing up for the new search, Tess stood to go. It was getting dark; people at each door were passing out pink candles with white paper drip guards. \"Are you going to the ceremony at the gift store?\" Miss Etta asked.\n\n\"Yes. Are you?\"\n\n\"I think I'd best get home to Mother. She spends enough time alone as is. I just hope everyone's careful with those candles. The gift store isn't so far from the library with all those books. I know I'm a worrywart and a perfectionist, but I just hope everyone's careful.\"\n\n\"Miss Etta, can I ask you a question?\"\n\nShe looked surprised. \"Why, of course, my dear.\"\n\n\"Were you ever in Marva and George Green's house, their living room?\"\n\n\"I was indeed, delivering books there more than once when George was so ill. Why do you ask?\"\n\n\"You have such a good mind for everything. Do you recall if they had a big stag head mounted on the wall there? It was over the fireplace, I think.\"\n\nMiss Etta frowned, evidently trying to remember. \"You know, my dear, I've been in and out of so many Cold Creek houses, I can't rightly recall. Why do you ask?\"\n\n\"Just that either those books you gave me or just helping Gabe is freeing up my memories a bit.\"\n\n\"I see. I'm relieved to hear it, and I shall look for more books to help you along. And you tell Sheriff McCord that I expect him promptly at ten when the library opens tomorrow morning to talk about that antique pistol.\"\n\nEver quick and spry, the old woman was out the door before Vic made his way to Tess through the crowd.\n26\n\n\"I'll bet you never thought you'd be taking on bodyguard duties when you came here to help solve a kidnapping,\" Tess said as she and Vic walked out to his car parked behind Gabe's house. The wind was up today, and the cornfield was waving as if it was restless, waiting for the big search for Sandy this afternoon. Tess hoped they'd find the girl but not lying in a cornfield. She was proud of herself that the field didn't frighten her that much anymore. \"But,\" she added as they got in the car, \"I can see why Gabe doesn't want me sitting at the front desk when Marva and her attorney get there.\"\n\n\"We don't need another rant at you, and I'd just upset her too. Man, we need a break on this case. Even though Marva and Dane should be looked at, I'm still trying to track down that housekeeper fired from the mayor's house. Her sister said she'd be back in town today. But a side trip to the Hear Ye property is right up my alley. You can see your family, and I'd love to have a chat with Brice, aka Bright Star.\"\n\n\"No, you wouldn't. He's weird and he can make anyone feel guilty. That's what scares me about Lee, Gracie and the kids being there. Bright Star warps minds and lives. Anyhow, I'm glad to have you along. Gabe said he chatted with Lee and Gracie at the farmers' market, and they seemed as committed as ever. I'd rent them the house cheap again to get them out of there, but they'd never agree.\"\n\nVic drove his unmarked black car the few miles down the road to the cult property and parked in the small lot. As ever, a guard, another tall, muscular man, stood at the gate to the compound to stop free entry.\n\n\"Brother Lawrence is my name. How may I help you?\"\n\nLike Bright Star himself, he was soft-spoken. \"I'm here to see my cousins, the Lockwoods. I recently helped Lee find the location of a well here and would like to know how the project is coming,\" Tess said.\n\n\"Ah, yes, I know who you are. The well will be dug soon. But Monday means school for the children. Lee and Grace of God are at work.\"\n\n\"Grace of God?\" Tess asked.\n\n\"She's risen from newcomer status to special, so to speak. If you'll wait here, I'll inquire. And you, sir?\"\n\n\"Friend of the family. Victor Reingold.\"\n\n\"Ah. I do believe everyone is occupied, so perhaps I can get you an appointment for later. Of course, many of our members will be helping with the search for the recently missing girl this afternoon, so perhaps you can catch your family later at that event.\"\n\nVic said, \"Not sure you'd know about the search, since you weren't at the prayer service for her.\"\n\n\"We had our own here for her\u2014for all who are still lost. And we stay informed.\"\n\nWhen he left them standing there, Vic said, \"Nice hospitality here.\" He zipped up his jacket and hunched his shoulders in the wind. \"Glad it's not raining or snowing so we could wait out in that weather. And I suppose all of them speak in that strange way that says nothing but seems eerily important.\"\n\n\"It's a scary situation. I wish I could spirit my family away from here\u2014so to speak.\"\n\nVic walked up to the crest of the hill that overlooked the Hear Ye land. \"No wonder they had the best vegetables at the market,\" he said as Tess joined him. They gazed at the neatly laid-out fields, mostly harvested, and long rows of white, plastic-domed covers to protect the more tender crops from early frost.\n\n\"See how strange that one looks?\" Vic asked, pointing.\n\n\"Strange how? Everything's strange around here.\"\n\n\"I think that plastic in the middle isn't covering crops. See how it's low to the ground, kind of clinging to it? See that it's draped over two small, rectangular plots it outlines but completely covers?\"\n\n\"Maybe there's something newly planted, and the ground sank in a bit.\"\n\n\"Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of,\" he said, starting down the hill. \"If Brother Lawrence comes back, keep him busy. I'm gonna have a look,\" he called over his shoulder.\n\n\"Vic, you'll attract a swarm of people from the compound!\"\n\nBut he kept going. It was obvious he was limping more than usual, which reminded her of Gabe's leg injury. She hoped things were going well at the sheriff's office with Marva and her attorney. If only Marva would answer questions that would help solve this.\n\nWhen Tess heard the gate creak, she went back up toward Brother Lawrence. \"It's a lovely view from there,\" she said, hoping he'd think Vic was enjoying it. But to her dismay, the man ran up the hill, so Tess followed. Vic was peeking under the plastic covering the two sunken areas. As Brother Lawrence hurried down the hill toward Vic, she recognized the voice behind her.\n\n\"Abomination!\"\n\nBright Star had materialized from nowhere as usual. No wonder people thought he was more spirit than flesh and blood.\n\n\"He just wondered what was growing under that since it is so different from the others,\" Tess told him.\n\n\"It's the graves of two blessed infants who have recently passed beyond, and I have county permits allowing us to bury them on our property. Long-established religious groups have their own cemeteries, and we shall too.\"\n\nTess's mind raced. Two infants? Or two dead girls? Surely not.\n\nBelow, Brother Lawrence was arguing with Vic, who ignored him and came limping back up the hill.\n\n\"Bright Star says it's two infant graves,\" she called to him before he reached them. \"And he has permission from the county to have them buried there.\"\n\n\"So I see\u2014about the graves, since they have little stones with angels and lambs and names. All on the up-and-up, Mr. Monson?\"\n\n\"I could report you for trespassing, sir, but that would have to be to Sheriff McCord, and I know you are a confederate of his.\"\n\n\"That I am. So why hide the graves?\"\n\n\"I ordered them covered, not hidden. It upset the grieving mothers and others of the flock to look down at them. It's like an extra cover in the bed of the earth on a cold day or night.\"\n\nMore like it upsets this man to have to admit babies could die in his supposedly perfect place, so he hides their graves, Tess thought. She wondered if they were born here or in a hospital.\n\n\"Miss Lockwood,\" Monson said, turning to Tess. \"Your family can certainly spend time with you alone tomorrow, at noon, if you're available.\"\n\nDespite the fact that she'd told Gabe she'd try to help by answering the dispatch phone and covering the front desk until he could get some permanent help, she knew he would understand, and who knew what else she might learn about strange goings-on. \"Yes,\" she said to him. \"I'll be here.\"\n\nThe man bowed, glared at Vic and walked away, followed by an out-of-breath but now subdued Brother Lawrence.\n\nWhen they were back in Vic's car, he said, \"If Gabe wasn't tied up, I'd phone him right now. I don't like asking for court orders to exhume graves, but it may come to that. That guy's arrogant, positive he can get away with anything. Like looking at the mayor, it's a long shot, but desperate times need\u2014\"\n\n\"Desperate measures,\" she finished for him. \"Not Shakespeare this time?\" she asked, hoping he'd calm down. His face was red and a pulse beat at the side of his forehead.\n\n\"'Thus do all things conspire against us' will have to do for Shakespeare right now.\"\n\n\"But I am starting to recall more things about my captivity. You know I've recalled a graveyard view\u2014but surely not that one. It's true Brice Monson lived on this land years ago in a single house, but even a child wouldn't mistake those long, plastic covers for tombstones. I remember the scarecrow for smackings, of course, and a back staircase in a house\u2014and I'm sure there was a stag's head over the fireplace.\"\n\n\"Good for you and for us, Tess. Now all we need you to remember is a name or a face.\"\n\n* * *\n\nGabe was disheartened and angry. Marva hadn't given him anything he could use and was insisting he solve \"Dane's dreadful murder.\" As if the best defense was a good offense, she'd turned hostile toward him and Tess. Her lawyer had insisted the suicide note had nothing to do with the Cold Creek kidnapper cases. He also continually counseled Marva to \"take the Fifth.\" The whole situation made Gabe wish he could have a good, stiff belt from a fifth of whiskey, even this early in the morning.\n\nAnd now he was late heading to the library to hear what Miss Etta had to say about the pistol that killed Dane.\n\nAs he headed toward the library, Gabe saw several posters about the search for Sandy he'd help spearhead this afternoon. Jace was at the church helping the civilian organizers lay out grids for the volunteer teams to cover. There was a poster on the library door above an Open sign and one that read Come in and Change Your Life! If only that was true, he thought as he opened the door.\n\nMiss Etta was shelving books from a rolling cart as two women he recognized were browsing the shelves. \"Good. You came,\" Miss Etta whispered when she saw him. \"One can't expect a busy sheriff to be prompt, and that's quite all right. Would you like some hand sanitizer?\" she asked as she walked over to her desk to use it herself. \"One can't be too careful with flu season coming.\"\n\n\"Ah, sure,\" he said, letting her pump some of the cool gel onto his hands. \"Thanks for researching about the antique pistol.\"\n\n\"First of all, please tell me, how is Tess?\" she said, taking a book from her desk over to a long wooden table. \"Just let me know if you need help, ladies,\" she said to the two patrons.\n\nGabe sat in the chair beside her. The heavy oak furniture all looked antique, though the overhead lighting was modern and bright. There was an air of solidity about the place. As flighty as she seemed sometimes, this woman suited the place. She seemed unchanged over time, the bedrock of the community in a way Reese Owens would never be. She looked at him expectantly, waiting for his answer about Tess, then added, as if to prompt him, \"I recommended some books on childhood trauma she's been reading. I hope they help.\"\n\n\"I think they have. Some things are coming back, and she's a lot more steady.\"\n\n\"Oh, good. She seemed that way at the church service, and she certainly handled getting up in front of all those people. You know, I hate to speak ill of anyone, but I always thought Dane was highly suspect, so perhaps he has meted out his own justice to himself.\" She leaned slightly closer. \"He liked true crime and murder mysteries, you know.\"\n\n\"Not exactly proof, but\u2014\"\n\n\"But with Marva and George Green's help in the first two abductions\u2014there you go. Dr. Dane Thompson, guilty as your father always believed. Now, here is a picture of that pistol your BCI friend Agent Reingold described to me on the phone. Have I found the correct one?\"\n\n\"That's it,\" he said, looking closely at the sketch and then the two photos.\n\n\"Well, it's of the same era as a few I own. They came down through my family who founded this area. Elias Falls, born 1785, was my great-great-great-grandfather, a contemporary of Daniel Boone in these parts. No doubt Daniel wandered through southern Ohio.\"\n\nGabe was exhausted, but he tried not to let his eyes glaze over. No wonder kids recalled taking field trips to Miss Etta's house for her pioneer-days lectures. He barely remembered her mother, Sybil Falls, who must be up in her eighties now and had been a recluse for years. Sybil had married and outlived a man named Vetter, which was Miss Etta's actual last name, though both she and her mother had always used the prestigious Falls name. Talk about the mayor's wife coming from Ohio \"royalty.\" Etta Falls could take her on any day.\n\n\"As far as I know, that gun was Dane's,\" she said, which made him alert again. \"He wouldn't let me include it in the display we had here because it was his favorite. So, if he did kill himself, I can see why he did it with that one.\"\n\n\"You've been very helpful, Miss Etta.\"\n\n\"And I have just the book for you,\" she said as he rose. \"It's on occupational stress and how to cope with it. I'll just get it from my desk.\"\n\n\"I'll remember that when I have time to read, so\u2014\"\n\nHis cell sounded. He looked at the display. His office phone.\n\n\"Excuse me, Miss Etta. I've got to take this, and I thank you again. Sheriff McCord here,\" he said as he walked out onto the street.\n\n\"It's Vic, Gabe. I've got some good info from going with Tess to the Hear Ye sect, but I also finally got a call back from Reese Owens's former housekeeper, Ruby Purtle.\"\n\n\"I'm on my way to the office, on foot. Be right there.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, be prepared to get your gear and jump in your vehicle because this woman says Reese Owens has a cabin up on a place called Green Mountain that no one knows about, even his wife. And get this\u2014he fired this housekeeper but gave her a big payoff and a good recommendation, she thinks, just because she heard him ordering furniture for it on the phone. Think we can find it?\"\n\n\"As heavy as he is, it can't be far off the single road up there, and I know the area. Yeah, we'll find it!\"\n\nGabe jogged back to the office. Tess was sitting at the front desk with Peggy. \"Just teach her the basics, Peg, and we'll get some other help in ASAP,\" he said, hurrying past them. Adrenaline surged through him as he and Vic grabbed Kevlar vests, guns and clips from the small equipment room.\n\n\"I can't help thinking of this stuff as bomb-squad gear,\" Gabe said, double-checking items in his utility belt.\n\n\"This could be the break we need. Despite the fact that Reese Owens likes to fight with words, I think it's wise we go up there like this. If he's not there himself, he might have a guard for the place\u2014and whatever he's got stashed there.\"\n\n\"As much as Marva's turned into a witch, I'd love to nail Mr. Mayor,\" Gabe said.\n\n\"And if not, there's a couple of hidden, child-sized graves Tess and I spotted on the Hear Ye property.\"\n\n\"You're kidding!\"\n\n\"No. Bright Star claims they're the graves of commune babies who died and says he has permission for a graveyard there. The librarian any help?\"\n\n\"Yeah, but I probably ticked her off by leaving before she could give me a book on stress.\"\n\n\"Get me a copy too.\"\n\nGabe looked up to see Tess standing in the hall outside the equipment room. \"Miss Etta tried to give me that book for you before,\" she said.\n\n\"Yeah, well, at lunch, maybe you and Peg can walk down to get it from her just so I'm not in her doghouse.\" He and Vic walked past her. Gabe gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze.\n\nTess followed them into the front office. \"Call Mike, Peg, and fill him in about our destination of Green Mountain, though we don't know the exact location. Tell him to keep an eye on everyone gathering for the search for Sandy,\" Gabe said. \"I hope we'll be back by then, but I think that cabin's probably in a dead area for cell phones. We'll be in touch ASAP.\"\n\nHe looked back at Tess again. Wide-eyed, she nodded as if to encourage him. She'd come so far in such a short time, and his feelings for her had too. He hurried out behind Vic.\n27\n\n\"I'm glad you didn't wish them good luck,\" Peggy said as Tess sat behind the reception desk with her after Gabe and Vic left. \"They think saying that is bad luck.\"\n\n\"We need more than luck in all this,\" Tess replied.\n\n\"You got that right.\"\n\nTess thought Peggy Barfield\u2014unlike Ann\u2014had a great personality to work in a job that required both a friendly nature and firm control. Tess had only observed her answer a few emergency calls so far, but she'd handled them with ease. Now Tess tried to concentrate on Peggy's explanation about what appeared on the computer monitor when a 911 call came in.\n\nBut her mind\u2014and heart\u2014kept clinging to Gabe. Could she ever be the kind of wife who could send him off toward possible danger, as she had done just now? If she owned a day care center or had children of her own, she could probably keep herself occupied when he was so busy and under such stress.\n\nDespite trying to learn all of the emergency processes Peggy was teaching, the morning dragged. Tess was anxious for a call from Gabe. If the trip to Green Mountain didn't turn up anything, it terrified her to think what no one had put into words yet. The two abducted girls could be in those two graves under plastic\u2014if Bright Star didn't have them dug up and moved when it got dark tonight.\n\nWhen Peggy told her to take a break Tess decided to carry a cup of coffee down to Miss Etta and get that book on stress for Gabe.\n\n\"I'll be right back,\" she mouthed to Peggy, who had just taken a call about someone bitten by a raccoon. She was telling them they had to see Dr. Nelson about possible rabies shots.\n\nOut she stepped with a covered paper cup of coffee into the windy but sunny October day.\n\n* * *\n\nTo Gabe's dismay and embarrassment after telling Vic he'd be able to find the cabin, they couldn't locate a pull-off spot on the single-lane dirt road up Green Mountain. It really wasn't much of a mountain, just another of the tall Appalachian foothills around here, but it did loom above the others nearby.\n\n\"Finally!\" Gabe said as they spotted an area where brush had been cut back to allow access off the road. \"Let's try it.\"\n\n\"No vehicle here right now, but I see ruts. Bingo!\" Vic said when they got out. \"Let's go in armed and all dressed up for a shooting party to check out Mr. Mayor's hidden cabin. Can't imagine he didn't tell his wife about it and fired Ruby Purtle because it's a lovers' nest. No way he'd be meeting his secret ladylove up here, not that guy.\"\n\n\"But remember to expect the unexpected. If he or someone else does arrive, the sheriff's vehicle's a dead giveaway, but it's not like there's alternative parking. Okay, let's go.\"\n\nThey donned their Kevlar vests over their jackets, took their weapons and hiked in. A path was soon discernible, even through falling, blowing leaves. Reese Owens always did drag his feet, but had he dragged something or someone else through here? Gabe felt his heart rate speed up. His mouth went dry. Something had to break on this case, but he was already dreading what he was going to find.\n\n* * *\n\nAn elderly couple Tess didn't recognize, but who greeted her by name, were just leaving the library when she walked in. \"See you at the search for Sandy,\" they said to her, evidently assuming she'd be there. And, even if Gabe and Vic weren't back on time, she planned on that.\n\nExcept for Miss Etta, the library was deserted, but then it was almost lunchtime and the volunteer searchers would be gathering soon. The librarian was busy shelving books.\n\n\"Miss Etta, I brought you some coffee\u2014small thanks for the research you've done for Gabe and me.\"\n\n\"Tess, did you come alone? I rather had the feeling that Agent Reingold was keeping an eye on you.\"\n\n\"He's out somewhere with Gabe right now. I'm learning to answer the dispatch phones in the sheriff's office\u2014just helping out for a while.\"\n\nMiss Etta used the disinfectant on her desk, then, smiling, took the coffee from Tess. \"I must admit I'm a tea person, but this is very kind. Nothing like good sheriff's office coffee when they are out trying to solve their big cases. I do think with Dane's demise, your own case may be resolved by his death and Marva's eventual admissions\u2014you know what I mean.\"\n\n\"That Dane was guilty and she helped him? That could be, since I recall a small graveyard out behind the house where I was held, and Marva's house seemed familiar in several ways.\"\n\n\"Did it? Including its location on Blackberry Road?\" Miss Etta asked, sitting at her desk and rummaging in her lower drawer.\n\n\"Not that so much, but I recall the back stairs, the attic that looked out on old stacked white beehives that resemble a graveyard. Also, I remember certain sounds like the distant train and the muted roar of the falls. Those books you gave me spoke of a cascade of memories, once they start coming back. But\u2014I'm in a hurry. Gabe mentioned he rushed out of here without the book on stress you offered him. Can I get it on my temporary card and read some of it to him? Oh, is it that one on your desk about occupational stress?\"\n\n\"Oh. No, that's one I was looking at, but I have a much better one in the bookmobile parked right out back. I was going to drop it off since the sheriff is so busy. Come on out with me, and I'll get it for you. I'll just put up my out-to-lunch sign and get a bite to eat after I give you that book,\" she said as she walked to the front door and flipped the open sign. \"Well, then, come along.\"\n\nTaking what looked like a brown bag with her lunch, she left her coffee on her desk and, as ever, walked briskly toward the back of the building. Would the old bookmobile be as much of a time machine as this place was? Tess knew one thing. It would be spick-and-span within and the books would be perfectly in their places.\n\nBut the back workroom was a bit cluttered, which surprised her. Boxes and padded envelopes looked partly unpacked. Some sets of large books were stacked on wooden shelves.\n\n\"The so-called ebooks and those electronic tablets and phones are making perfectly good sets of encyclopedias and other reference volumes dead as the dodo,\" Miss Etta said with a shake of her head.\n\n\"You know, I had an excellent idea we should discuss,\" Miss Etta went on. \"You'd be the perfect person to help me with groups of elementary students who come to visit the library or go on field trips to my house, where I talk about the Falls County pioneer days. I'll bet you miss working with youngsters.\"\n\n\"Yes, I do. That sounds great, but I'm not sure how long I'll be around.\"\n\n\"I hope you're not getting too close to Gabe McCord, I mean, if you're leaving soon. Ah, here we are.\"\n\nThe old bookmobile was parked so its back door aligned with the library door. Tess realized Miss Etta must have driven it to work, because she didn't see another car nearby. The woman unlocked the door to the old truck and went up a step, clicking on the inside light. Tess followed. The interior smelled musty. The scent seemed vaguely familiar and suddenly overpowering. It reminded Tess of the basement in her house.\n\n\"Ah, yes, here it is, far superior to that other book,\" Miss Etta said. Pointing, she made room for Tess to pass her in the narrow, single aisle.\n\nAs she moved farther into the bookmobile, the smell grew stronger and Tess was overwhelmed by a memory. She was in the big, tall room where she was allowed to draw pictures if she was good, the room with all the books along the walls, the room where Mr. Mean lived and terrible things could happen.\n\nTess gasped and turned. She had to get out of here!\n\nThe paper bag crinkled loudly as Miss Etta took something from it and jabbed Tess's neck with a needle. Just like that day in the cornfield.\n\n\"No!\" Tess shouted, and tried to shove her away, but she was so strong, the rows between the corn so narrow.\n\n\"It's all right,\" Miss Etta said in a crooning voice. \"It will be all right....\"\n\nTess felt pain. Had she been stabbed or cut? She swung a fist at the woman but missed. She bounced off a shelf of books, kept in place by a cord in case the road was rocky. Tess grabbed for it to keep from falling, pulled it loose with several books and fell to her knees. Would she be smacked with Mr. Mean for messing up the books?\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Miss Etta said, in a calm voice as if she were reading to children who had to listen or they would be punished and hurt. She helped lower Tess to the soil in the cornfield. \"I needed to do that before you remembered more, my dear. A drink of wine would have been kinder, but you gave me no choice. I must risk taking you now.\"\n\nTess tried to hang on to her thoughts. Didn't the drugs in the wine tie in to Dane? She could see the needle on the floor. It had blood on it. Maybe it would explode, because something was exploding in Marva's kitchen and in her brain. However hard she fought it, Tess knew she was going under....\n\n* * *\n\nIf the leaves hadn't been off many of the trees, they might not even have seen the cabin before they were right on top of it. Gabe was amazed the decent-sized building had no view of the creek, distant waterfall or valley below. But then, he realized, Reese Owens hadn't built it for the view outside but the one inside.\n\nHe held up his hand to halt Vic's progress. Instinctively, they both lifted their rifles, despite the fact that they'd found no vehicle parked nearby.\n\n\"You go around back,\" Gabe whispered.\n\n\"Roger that,\" Vic said. He limped toward the upside of the hill.\n\nGabe was grateful to have Vic with him. He still missed his father. If they had both been law officers at the same time, going out on a dangerous call, it might have been like this. And without Vic, he would have had to pull Jace away from the search for Sandy. But what if he could find her first, bring her back...?\n\nVic glanced at him before disappearing behind the cabin. Gabe bent low and moved closer to the front door. There was no porch for sitting out, nothing fancy or fine. It was a far cry from the mayor's mansion in town, more like the small house where Reese had been reared.\n\nHis rifle ready but pointed down, Gabe put his back against the exterior front wall, crept along and twisted his neck so he could peek in a front window. Blackout drapes of some kind blocked his view. His gut twisted. He was going in.\n\nVic came around the front. \"No back door or windows,\" he said to Gabe.\n\nGabe nodded. \"Police!\" he shouted. \"Come out with your hands in the air!\"\n\nNothing. No sound but the birds and wind in the tree branches.\n\n\"That door looks pretty sturdy,\" Vic said, pressed to the wall between the window and the door. \"But I say we go in. We've got cause. The heck with waiting again for a search warrant. He'll find a way to stop it. If it turns out to be nothing, that's the breaks.\"\n\n\"Literally. I'm going to bust out this window,\" Gabe said.\n\nVic shrugged. \"That or get a downed tree limb for a battering ram.\"\n\nGabe broke out the window with his rifle butt. There was no sound but shattering glass, still no reaction from inside. Shoving the heavy curtain aside, he stuck his rifle barrel through, then his head.\n\n\"Clear,\" he told Vic. \"I'll climb in, unlock the door. There's all kinds of stuff covered by black drapes in here. On the back wall, I see newspaper articles and pictures of girls, some in strange poses.\"\n\n\"Bingo, if he's still into molesting. And the articles\u2014maybe he likes to read his own press,\" Vic said, holding Gabe's gun while he climbed through. Gabe tried to avoid slicing his legs up on the jagged glass still caught in the frame.\n\nWhen he unlocked and opened the door for Vic, in the light, they both stopped and stared. Vic started to swear, and Gabe felt sick to his stomach.\n\nThe newspaper articles were all about a TV show called The Biggest Loser, where contestants tried to lose a lot of weight. Before-and-after weight-loss pictures were posted. Charts on the wall tracked Reese's weight\u2014down, then up again. The pictures of girls were really of a thin woman who was giving all kinds of tips on losing weight. Wearing tights and a tank top, she was in various poses, demonstrating squats, lunges, scissors kicks on her back with her legs in the air.\n\nAnd the machines under the drapes included a tread climber, a stationary bicycle, a running track, a rowing machine and a stack of weights.\n\n\"Talk about dumbbells and big losers, huh?\" Vic said. \"Skunked again. There's no evidence of girls here, only a poor, fat sap who wants to get his boyish figure back and isn't going to.\"\n\n\"And now I've got to replace that window, explain to him. He'll really try to get me defeated next month in the election. And maybe he should,\" Gabe said.\n\nVic started shuffling broken glass around with his foot, shoving it toward the door. \"I suppose he'd never know it wasn't some hunter or that bunch of kids with the graffiti habit. Personally, I can't stand the guy.\"\n\n\"Me neither, but I've got to live with myself. Let's board this up. I'll have to tell him. We need to get back. Thank God Tess is safe at the station and people are pitching in to help with another search. Maybe I was nuts not to take that book from the librarian about stress on the job.\"\n\n* * *\n\nWere the cords the woman was wrapping around her wrists the same ones that kept the books from falling when the library truck made a sharp turn? Ropes around her ankles too, and a neatly ironed linen handkerchief stuck in her mouth. Tumbling, turning, Tess fought the darkness. Gabe. Gabe had gone somewhere green when she needed him here in this creeping blackness that was going to drown her under a waterfall.\n\n\"You just take a nap right there,\" a voice said. \"We're going on a little ride back home.\"\n\nIt wasn't her mother's voice, was it? Or maybe Char was counseling her to get more sleep.\n\n\"It will just take me a minute to completely close up, and you just rest while I drive. You should never have run away, you know, you bad girl! Did you think you could hide from me? Remember, Teresa, if you aren't good, I'll put you underground with the bones.\"\n\nAt those words, at the shift in voice to an even lower pitch, total terror came screaming back at Tess. She saw it all, tried to run, tried to shout for help, but black night covered her.\n28\n\nTess felt groggy, but she was finally getting a good night's sleep. Still, the bed was so hard, and now someone was moving her, dragging her out of bed. Was it Gabe? Was she at his house? She wanted to stretch her sore arms and legs, but they didn't move. The cut on her wrist hurt so much, she was afraid she was back in the meth lab, tied up again. She tried to cry out, but there was something in her mouth, and all that came out was a choking sound.\n\n\"Almost there now,\" a woman's voice said. \"Home again, home again, jiggetty jig.\"\n\nA nursery rhyme about the five little piggies. Oh, she was back at the day care center in Michigan, home again. But no, wasn't Cold Creek home?\n\nShe knew that voice, but whose was it? Was there an emergency? Had something bitten her, and she needed shots for rabies?\n\n\"You should never have run away, you bad girl. And you owe me for that broken window all those years ago. Broke it out with Mr. Mean, then stacked books to get high enough to crawl out, didn't you? That's no way to treat books! Mama Sybil was so angry when you were gone she hit me with Mr. Mean.\"\n\nThen Tess knew. Jumping out of the dark doors of her mind, pictures poured at her. She remembered Mama Sybil in her wheelchair. She was the one who was mean. She said she loved Tess, but she beat her, scared her every time she cried for home, every time she didn't cuddle up to be read to. Tess breathed slowly and deeply and her gaze cleared. Miss Etta was dragging her from the bookmobile into a building and room she remembered well. Miss Etta had called it the book barn. Yes, that's where she'd broken a window to escape and was found wandering on a road several miles away because she didn't know how to get home.\n\nTess tried to talk again, hoping Miss Etta would pull the gag from her mouth. It was hard not only to swallow but to breathe because her nose ran and she was starting to cry. She forced herself to continue listening to the woman.\n\n\"All I'd done was run to the bathroom the day you got away, but you were so quick, both in movement and in thought. Surprising, since you didn't like to read as your sisters did, but I know you learned a lot hearing books read to you while you were on Mama Sybil's lap. I was hoping to improve your reading. That's partly why I chose you when I drove the bookmobile past your house that day and saw you running wild in your backyard by the cornfield, you naughty girl. Believe me, it was a long trek through that corn to fetch you and get you past that big mower making its passes. I had to carry you clear to the bookmobile parked on the road!\"\n\nGabe! Tess screamed inside her head. Come find me and maybe you'll find Sandy and Jill before it's too late for all of us.\n\nMiss Etta left her on the floor in the middle of a big, worn, hooked rug. The window she'd escaped through was boarded up, as were the others, but the place was lit by four bare bulbs hanging from electrical cords. Fury cleared Tess's mind even more. This was the place, lined with books, where she'd been allowed to play, to draw pictures. And they'd said over and over they were being kind to her! But Mr. Mean lived here as well as in the house attic, where she'd slept. Miss Etta had moved her from place to place after dark. And in the house, Mama Sybil ruled with an iron fist.\n\nTess blinked back tears and shook her head to force her way through the haze of memories and emotions. Fearful, forsaken. She had to halt the tumble of thoughts right now. Concentrate. Listen and plan.\n\n\"Coming alert, Teresa?\" Miss Etta asked. \"I wasn't sure how much of that drug went into you when you fought like that. Since you're an adult, I'll up the dose later when we go inside to see Mama Sybil. I'll take that gag out for a minute or two, but I have to head back to town, be seen around before I return here. Got to get you all tied up nice and tight until I get back. And they won't find Sandy on their cornfield searches, because you'll both be here, snug as bugs in a rug.\"\n\nSandy is here and alive!\n\nIt had never occurred to Tess that Etta Falls might be crazy. But she was the one. A librarian. One who was so helpful. One who seemed to be everywhere so no one noticed she had buzzed about in that bookmobile and had taken prisoners.\n\nThe minute Miss Etta pulled the gag out, Tess almost dry-heaved. Trying to stay calm, she copied the woman's preachy, almost singsong tone, as if she were talking to a child.\n\n\"Miss Etta, you can't keep people prisoner like this. You'll have to let me go, and we won't say another thing about it.\"\n\n\"Oh, we only keep you girls until you get too big for cuddling and commanding. And you're entirely too big and the only one who got away, Teresa. But we can correct that now. Besides, we can't allow your talking to young Sheriff McCord any more than to his father. Oh, we were worried you'd recall things then, just like now, but you cooperated beautifully. That's why I tried to warn you to leave town and keep your mouth shut with the drugged wine and your old drawing, but you didn't cooperate, did you? So you'll have to pay the price. Mama Sybil's rules, not mine, so we all have to obey her.\"\n\nTess started to shake. After feeling elated that Sandy was alive, she was so scared she broke into a sweat despite the fact that she felt icy cold. The two old women were disposing of their victims when they grew too big? Then Jill\u2014\n\n\"Miss Etta, you know this is wrong.\"\n\n\"People must obey their mothers. Besides, Teresa, some things are only wrong in this big bad world when you get caught. Don't you think we would have been stopped by now if what we are doing is wrong? Mama Sybil loves little girls, just like she loves me. Now let's see about getting you more tightly tied.\"\n\n\"So Jill Stillwell is...gone?\"\n\n\"Why, yes. She's out back. I told her she should be honored to lie among the pioneer Falls family, but she didn't know what I meant. So I put her to sleep and buried her between two graves.\"\n\nOh, dear Lord in heaven, Tess prayed, please don't let Jill be dead. But this crazy woman had buried her in that pioneer graveyard Tess recalled seeing from an attic window upstairs. But recalled much too late...\n\nMiss Etta continued to speak as if all was normal. \"She would have been entirely too heavy and large for Mama Sybil's lap by now anyway. But Sandy's upstairs in the attic, where I'll take you until we can settle everything, and I can make the final preparations. Oh, dear, you've got blood on your neck from where you moved when I gave you that shot. Here, let me get that off with this handkerchief.\"\n\nWith the saliva-soaked cloth, she dabbed at Tess's neck, then wiped her hands. \"Oh, blood on my hands, just like Lady Macbeth, but then I'll bet you don't know about her, do you?\"\n\nShe pulled a small bottle of hand sanitizer from her sweater pocket and washed her hands. \"This does wonders for erasing fingerprints on bottles and doorknobs, though it's not as good as wearing gloves. You know, in the fifties and early sixties we wore white gloves to shop in a nice store, to church, so much more ladylike and sanitary than all that hand shaking and hugging these days.\"\n\nMiss Etta efficiently tied Tess's wrists and legs right over her earlier bonds, then took tape from a box labeled Book Cover Repair and wound it around Tess and one of the supporting roof beams. She ignored Tess's pleas as she worked, dumping Tess's cell phone on the floor with the other things from her purse. Positioning the phone, she went into a back corner and returned with another version of the Mr. Mean scarecrow and smashed the phone to bits.\n\n\"There!\" she declared, clapping her hands free of dust, then digging out the sanitizer again. \"It would give me great pleasure to get rid of all of those. You know, people were much better off when they spoke face-to-face. For example, when we chatted at the church service the other night, you told me that you were recalling too much. That's why I left a version of Mr. Mean when I took Sandy, to see if it would jog your memory at all. Then I would know if I had to get rid of you fast, but now will do. I was trying to plan how, and here you came into the library alone.\"\n\n\"How did you get in the house to drug my wine?\"\n\n\"With a key, of course. I took it from your cousin Grace's coat pocket at the library when she was still living in the Lockwood house, the very day she told me you were coming back to town. You see, I've been buying sleepy-time drugs from Dane for years, but he wanted to charge me more. I said that was immoral and outrageous, but I was afraid he'd tell someone I was using them\u2014I told him I needed them to keep my ill mother calm.\"\n\n\"So you...you shot him?\"\n\n\"I had to. I left a so-called suicide note, which was really an old excuse he'd penned to me\u2014tongue-in-cheek, obviously\u2014about some overdue books on new dog breeds he'd borrowed from the library. My, he had a big fine for those books. The day he left this world, I had him bring his own antique pistol. I told him I'd buy it for an exorbitant price. But the thing is, I'm not certain that the last batch of sleeping potions he gave me are full strength, and I never was good with an intravenous needle, so sorry about that jab on your neck.\"\n\nTess wanted to break down in sobs, but she had the strangest urge to laugh hysterically. Etta Falls should have been committed to the Falls County Insane Asylum in town before it was closed. And her mother must be just as mad.\n\n\"Now, Teresa, I can't move you into the big house until after dark, but I'll be back sooner than that,\" she announced with a pat on Tess's shoulder. \"My, you were such a pretty little girl. Mama Sybil's favorite, I really think so, and then you had to sneak away. But not this time. Not this time.\"\n\nShe produced another neatly ironed and sweetly scented handkerchief and pushed it into Tess's mouth. Tess fought to keep from gagging and hyperventilating. While, humming, Miss Etta swept up what had been Tess's phone into a dustpan. She put the other items spilled from her purse back inside it. Then she went out and locked the book-barn door. The sound of the bookmobile driving away faded, but the hushed roar of the waterfall and the piercing shriek of a distant train hovered heavy in the air.\n\n* * *\n\n\"What do you mean she stepped out and never came back?\" Gabe shouted at Peggy.\n\n\"She got a cup of coffee. I gave her a little break. I was on the phone with a medical emergency call, and she just stepped out, that's all. You didn't tell me to tie her to her chair!\"\n\n\"I know, I know. Vic, will you take my gear and stow it? I'm going to call Tess, tell her to get the heck back here.\" He punched in her number as he went back to his office.\n\nNothing. He got nothing but voice mail when he knew she kept her phone on during the day. His gut twisted tighter. He rushed back out into the hall.\n\n\"She's not answering. I'm going to look for her.\"\n\n\"Look where?\" Vic said, still holding both vests and rifles.\n\n\"I don't know! I obviously don't know where to look for anyone missing!\"\n\n\"Calm down. She's probably just at the church helping to set up the search and hasn't recharged her phone or forgot to turn it on. Call Jace.\"\n\n\"I'll walk down there myself.\"\n\nGabe strode outside, furious at Peggy, Tess, himself, the world. He scanned the street and sidewalks toward New Town, then walked toward Old Town. Only a few people were on the street, none of them Tess. Man, I should have locked her up, he thought. Part of the reason he was having Peggy train her was so he'd know where she was during the day and she'd be at his place at night.\n\nAccording to Peggy, she'd been gone over an hour. Horrible memories hit him hard. Little Teresa missing in the cornfield. \"Well, where is she?\" her mother was screaming. \"She can't just disappear! You were supposed to be watching her!\" His own mother was on the phone, calling his dad to come home. Gabe's panic soared.\n\nHe ran across the street and into the Kwik Shop, walked the ends of the aisles. No Tess. He called Jace.\n\n\"No, she's not here, Sheriff. I'll keep an eye out. We've got the team leaders set for the search for Sandy....\"\n\nGabe said a fast goodbye. If he didn't spot Tess soon, there'd be a double search to organize.\n\nCreekside Gifts had reopened, but he was pretty sure it was being staffed by friends of the Kentons right now. Still, he went across the street again. Lindell Kenton and Tess seemed to have bonded over Tess's agreeing to read from the Bible at the service. They'd had a long talk on the phone and another at the church. Yeah, she could be here. But when he stuck his head in the door, they told her they hadn't seen Tess.\n\nAs he walked toward the library, it hit him. She'd probably come down here to get that book for him. And when talking to Miss Etta, it could be hard to get away. As he reached for the door, he saw a hand turn the Closed sign around to Open. When he opened the door, it almost hit Miss Etta.\n\n\"Oh, Sheriff. I just got back from an early lunch. Did you decide you need that book on stress?\"\n\nHis hopes fell. \"I thought maybe Tess Lockwood came down to get it for me.\"\n\n\"Oh, she was here but just to ask if she could keep the books I gave her longer. Just as you had told me, she said they were of some help to her, but she didn't stay long. I got the impression she was going for a walk.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Miss Etta,\" he said, and ignored her suggestion for the second time to take the book about stress from her desk. He hurried outside.\n\nHis phone rang. Thank God. But it was Vic's phone. Tess was really going to hear it from him when he found her. It sobered him to think how much he cared for her, not just as the first victim, not just because both he and his father had lived and breathed these kidnap cases.... He really wanted her, loved her.\n\n\"Sheriff McCord here.\"\n\n\"Gabe, it's Vic. Haven't seen Tess, but Pastor Snell tracked down that woman who counseled Tess after she was returned to her family. Melanie Parkinson. She lives in Columbus, but I have her contact info if you want to call her. She works late hours but will be at this number after nine this evening.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I want to call her. You know my motto\u2014any clue will do. Anything. Vic, Tess has vanished into thin air.\"\n\nVic read Gabe the phone number, then said, \"I'll go into New Town to look for her. Leave Peg on the phones here. Don't panic, okay?\"\n\n\"Aren't you worried too? Instead of New Town, how about you drive out to my place, then hers?\"\n\n\"Because I drove her this morning\u2014remember? She doesn't have a car.\"\n\n\"But maybe she had someone take her out to get it, since you and I were gone. It's a long shot, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Okay, sure. Stay in touch.\"\n\nStay in touch. Gabe felt haunted by the past. What he feared most in all this was losing Tess a second time.\n\n* * *\n\nIt was just after dark when Miss Etta returned to the book barn, gave Tess another shot\u2014this time in her upper arm\u2014and cut the bonds around her feet. \"That drug is for people, not an animal drug, and doesn't take long to work, believe me.\"\n\nShe pulled the gag from Tess's mouth. Tess gasped for air and moved her tongue, trying to get some saliva going so she could speak. She had to talk this woman out of whatever her warped brain had planned. And facing Miss Etta's mother, whom she recalled now as scary and sadistic, would be a trial too. Why was Miss Etta, at her age, still so completely under her mother's thumb? Tess remembered how Sybil Falls had demanded hugs and kisses and complete obedience or Miss Etta would beat her as the old woman called her bad and evil. Was there some strain of dementia in this family, or had the entire world gone mad?\n\nBut then a thought hit Tess. She'd been just about ready to tell Miss Etta that Gabe knew about Dane's drug source and that he'd found a list in Dane's house of who bought drugs from him. She was hoping the lie would scare the woman, but suddenly realized it might make her move quicker to get rid of her\u2014maybe put her out in that graveyard with Jill.\n\nBut, especially since Miss Etta didn't know how much of a dose to give an adult and was worried Dane had been giving her weaker doses, Tess wondered if she could pretend to be under the influence of the drug and wait for her chance to stop this woman? If it was the drug she and Gabe had researched, she knew it made a person cooperate with a doctor's commands. Maybe she could shove Miss Etta, hit her\u2014something. Mama Sybil must be frail, wheelchair-bound, a paraplegic, so, unless they had more old pistols loaded here, Tess hoped she'd have a chance. She had to fight the effects of the drug, keep telling herself that she could get away from this woman, only pretend to obey her, to stay alert. But she had to find and save Sandy too.\n\n\"Upsy-daisy, little Teresa,\" Miss Etta said, and helped her to her feet. Tess gasped. Upsy-daisy, just like the word smackings, triggered a flood of terrible memories. Tess longed to shake off the woman's hands, but, pretending to be just a bit slow, she let Miss Etta lead her from the book barn. They shuffled past the bookmobile, across the dark yard, up onto the porch and through the back door of the big frame house. Though her hands were still tied behind her, she was desperate to flee. She only felt a bit groggy and thought she could do it. But she had to keep telling herself to comply with this woman's orders until she could find Sandy.\n\nMiss Etta led her up a set of back stairs that must have once been used by servants. How familiar the house seemed. Her ankles burned, and her legs were sore from being tied so long. Her cut wrist pained her. She had to pretend to be subdued, out of it. Her thoughts rampaged when she needed to keep calm.\n\nIf Sandy was upstairs, how Tess wanted to comfort the girl. If only Gabe would realize who had taken her, what had happened. Tess tried to recall what she'd said to Peggy when she left the sheriff's office. She'd been on the phone with that call about a raccoon bite. Tess couldn't remember if she'd told Peggy that she was going to the library or not.\n\nGabe would kill her for walking into a trap\u2014if Miss Etta didn't kill her first.\n29\n\nGabe took Sandy Kenton's mother aside in the church parking lot being used as the base, where scores of volunteers had fanned out for the search. Some were already reporting in\u2014that they'd found nothing.\n\n\"Lindell, I need to tell you something.\"\n\n\"You've found her?\" she demanded, grabbing his arm.\n\n\"No, though we keep eliminating possibilities. Tess Lockwood's gone missing. I just wanted you to know that my deputy and I notified the groups before they left to look for Tess too. I know you've talked to her lately. Any unusual hints about where she could be?\"\n\nThe woman's face went blank for a moment. She'd aged so much in the six days since Sandy disappeared. Stringy hair, no makeup, the ravages of little sleep. The torment of not knowing what was happening to her only daughter\u2014if she was still alive.\n\n\"Tess?\" she asked, her voice shaky. \"Like, the kidnapper's taken her again? An adult this time?\"\n\n\"Around noon today, she walked from the sheriff's office to the library, left there and disappeared.\"\n\nHer eyes widened. \"Oh, no! Oh, no, no!\" She lifted her clasped hands to her mouth, clenching her fingers. \"But wouldn't that mean the same person who has Sandy and Jill wants to harm her\u2014shut her up? Gabe, I know you've lived and breathed this.\"\n\n\"I\u2014 Yes, all over again, times three.\"\n\n\"I hear Tess is special to you. Don't look so surprised. This is Cold Creek, you know. Word gets around. I felt close to Tess the few times we talked. She helped me so much, not only that she came back, but just that she understood my pain. We have to find her and the girls.\"\n\n\"You and Win did a great job with the TV plea you made,\" he said. \"It's been running on most channels, some nationwide.\"\n\n\"So the mayor told me. You know, Tess said she'd thought of running home to Michigan, but there was more than one reason to stay here now. She said she had to help you, stay close to you.\"\n\nTears stung his eye. \"Thanks, Lindell. She hadn't put it like that to me. I'd like to keep her here, but all this has to end. I need to find her\u2014and Sandy\u2014fast.\"\n\nHe touched the brim of his hat and started away, but she grabbed his elbow. \"Maybe they're together. Sandy, Tess and Jill. I'd like to think that. Tess helped me, and I'll bet she could help Sandy too.\"\n\n\"Hold that thought. I've got to get back to the search. You'll be the first to know anything,\" he told her and headed toward his vehicle.\n\nHe got in, started the engine and pulled away. He was so focused on Tess he'd forgotten to tell Lindell that the Ohio State Highway Patrol was going to fly a chopper over local wooded areas using FLIR, heat thermal imaging. Vic was keeping him updated on any tips or other information that came in on the sheriff's phone lines or reports from searchers in the field. In the field\u2014the standard cop term almost made him laugh, but this time it was literal.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Hitchetty-hatchetty, up we go,\" Miss Etta recited as they climbed the back stairs, passed the door to the second floor and kept going toward the attic. Tess was convinced Miss Etta sometimes believed Tess was Teresa, a little girl again.\n\nShe had hoped that would help to get the woman off guard, but the librarian from hell had outsmarted her again. She held a cocked antique pistol pressed tight to her ribs as they climbed. \"As you know I have not one moment's hesitation about using this!\" she'd said, and had given Tess a lecture about the gun's pioneer history. Tess's heart nearly pounded out of her chest and not from the exertion of the climb. What if that old gun went off? It was aimed right at her heart.\n\nMiss Etta chattered nonstop about next to nothing until she said something that put Tess on alert. \"I swear I'm going to have blisters on my hands from all that digging. It's been a while since I dug that much, and my shoulder and back muscles are aching like the very dickens. Interesting that one of the greatest writers in the English language had a last name that's a euphemism for the word devil. That's Charles Dickens, my dear, but he did have a mistress and was unfaithful to his wife, so he wasn't lily-white. Your father wasn't either.\"\n\nHowever much Tess wanted to scream at this woman, she had to try to convince her the drug had made her dopey. \"He's gone,\" she mumbled.\n\n\"Yes, I know, and that is sad for you Lockwood girls that he's so far away, but perhaps best he's out of your lives. In the old days, you know,\" she rattled on, \"these servant stairs were important. The maids and kitchen help slept on the top floor and needed to go up and down without being seen by the family. Speaking of Dickens, servant stairs are very Victorian. Well, times have changed and even my family doesn't have an 'upstairs, downstairs' lifestyle anymore. And this is hardly Downton Abbey.\"\n\nTess tried to ignore all that and desperately looked for her chance. She concentrated on what she'd say when she saw Sandy Kenton, the treasure for which Gabe had searched so hard. She was excited that the most recent drug that had been injected into her arm wasn't making her particularly groggy.\n\nTess prayed she'd be able to keep her head in this. She counted the turns of the stairs, lit by only a ceiling light on each tiny landing. The steps were narrow and steep. Coming down, she could easily fall, especially if she was pulling a child behind her.\n\n\"Now, Teresa, I expect you to apologize to Mama Sybil for running off the way you did, when you knew she loved you. It hurt her terribly. Hurt me too in more ways than one. I'm going to leave you with her and Sandy while I finish something outside, but it won't take me long, and then I'll be back. You, of course, will be tied, and Sandy will be on Mama Sybil's lap. Finally, she's learned to obey. Spare the rod and spoil the child, you know. You learned that much slower than Sandy. You were quite an independent little miss when you first came to live with us.\"\n\nAgain, Tess had to force herself not to answer back, to tell this demented woman off. It made her sick to her stomach, but she murmured only, \"Yes, Miss Etta.\"\n\n\"Actually that old saying, Spare the rod and spoil the child, only takes its inspiration from the book of Proverbs, but verbatim it goes way back to a poem called Piers Plowman in 1377, and then the adage showed up in another poem in 1662.\"\n\nTess wanted to scream. This seemed a nightmare from which she must surely wake. She longed to tell this woman her trivial knowledge was nothing\u2014nothing!\u2014because she was a monster. But she had to hold herself together. At least Mama Sybil would be in her wheelchair, and she should be able to overtake her when Miss Etta went to finish her business. Of digging graves? Even if Miss Etta locked them in, even if she tied Tess, surely, with Sandy's help\u2014if she wasn't drugged\u2014she'd be able to get away, break out, rush downstairs with Sandy, or at least get to a phone in the house to call 911. She'd bet her life\u2014which was probably what she was doing\u2014that this house had a landline, maybe with an old dial phone.\n\nThe other thought Tess had as they reached the chained attic door was that she was still terrified to face that horrible old lady again. If Mama Sybil had a pistol too, would she be risking a bullet to the brain, like Dane?\n\n* * *\n\nEven after all the negative reports came in from the volunteer teams, Gabe had exhausted himself searching. He was running on sheer adrenaline, guts and fear. He'd explored Tess's house, attic to cellar, and about jumped out of his skin when his flashlight had illumined a dummy on the floor of the basement. He remembered that Grace had done sewing and alterations to earn extra money before they moved to the Hear Ye compound. It was an old dressmaker's mannequin, but it had looked like a woman on the floor at first.\n\nHe was so desperate that he had requested another search warrant, this one for Bright Star's compound. He was afraid he was getting to be persona non grata with the judge, but he didn't care anymore. Not about his health, his job, his life\u2014he just wanted to find Tess, Jill and Sandy safe. Had someone taken Tess off Main Street outside the library?\n\nHe drove to the burned-out site of Marva Green's old house and searched the back buildings again. Nothing but trash, owls and rats. He sat down on an upturned tin tub and tried to think about where else he could search.\n\nHe decided to go back to the office, make that call to the church woman who had counseled Tess. His hope was that maybe she'd kind of debriefed little Teresa and could shed new light on what happened all those years ago. He remembered his father saying that Tess's mother thought it best if no one mentioned the horrible experience, but just tried to go back to normal. Normal? Nothing had ever been normal again.\n\n* * *\n\nMiss Etta unlocked the padlock on the chain holding the attic door closed, and it rattled as it uncoiled itself. Tess was tempted to shove the woman down the stairs, but that pistol could go off. And would it endanger Sandy if she was with Mama Sybil on the other side of that door? If only she could get her hands untied like her feet.\n\nTess steeled herself for what she'd find within, but she also realized that, if Miss Etta locked them in again, they weren't getting out of this chained door without an ax.\n\nWith the pistol still pressed to her side, Tess shuffled into the dim attic. She scanned the length of it, built with a long center section and two wings. A small bed under the eaves, a few toys\u2014and another Mr. Mean leaning against the slanted wall under the eaves. Two bare lightbulbs dangled from the ceiling. Old hump-backed trunks were stored here. Stacks of old-fashioned hat boxes, several old, cracked paintings, bedsprings and a headboard, all suddenly, horribly familiar.\n\nBut why would Miss Etta keep her mother up here? Those stairs must be close to impossible for a crippled person in a wheelchair. It was chilly here too, so wouldn't she keep her mother downstairs? Tess recalled that it was the first floor where she'd been forced to climb onto the old woman's lap to be cuddled and petted\u2014and held down to be beaten when she disobeyed, all under the watchful eye of a stag head mounted over the fireplace mantel.\n\nAs Tess's eyes adjusted, she saw Mama Sybil at the far end of the room sitting slumped in her wheelchair. And Sandy\u2014she was alive!\u2014sat in her lap.\n\nMiss Etta prodded Tess closer with the gun still in her ribs. Her first instinct was to comfort Sandy, who, thank God, turned her head and moved one leg to show she was alert. She must be drugged or too terrified to speak.\n\nMiss Etta prodded Tess. \"Apologize to Mama Sybil for escaping!\" She stopped Tess about ten feet from Mama Sybil. \"Get on your knees and tell her you are very, very sorry!\"\n\nTess dropped to her knees with the pistol now pressed to the nape of her neck. Before she could speak, a deep voice behind her spoke. \"Is this our Teresa come back to us, Etta?\"\n\nTess gasped and jerked.\n\nSandy stirred on Mama Sybil's lap and sniffled.\n\n\"I'm sorry I ran away, Mama Sybil,\" Tess said. \"Can I come closer?\"\n\n\"All right,\" the voice from behind intoned. \"But you behave or else.\"\n\nMiss Etta was speaking for her mother. Tess thought maybe the old woman had suffered a stroke and couldn't talk.\n\n\"On your knees, forward,\" Miss Etta said, in what Tess recalled was a perfect rendition of her cruel mother's voice.\n\nTess scooted forward. She forced a smile at Sandy and mouthed reassuring words. Sandy, hello.\n\nThen she gasped. There was no woman holding Sandy. She\u2014it\u2014had no face except an enlarged photograph of Mama Sybil with stuffing behind it and a nylon stocking pulled over it to which a white wig was tied or sewn. The body was maybe wood sticks, like a scarecrow, wrapped with cloth, or stuffed, with fake arms and legs. The gown was old-fashioned and smelled stale and musty. A crocheted afghan was over the legs clear down to a pair of old black, laced shoes. It was so grotesque, yet so real from a distance, that Tess felt she'd been punched in the stomach. She almost screamed.\n\n\"She's not...not there!\" she cried. \"Is she downstairs? Did she die?\"\n\nIt was the wrong thing to say. The blow to her head was hard. It stunned her. She heard the child squeal. And then she hit the floor.\n30\n\nTess felt a small, gentle hand brushing her hair from her face. Her head hurt horribly. Where was she?\n\nThen she remembered. She opened her eyes. Sandy Kenton was bent over her, her little face wet with tears.\n\n\"Is she gone?\" Tess asked.\n\n\"Miss Etta carried Mama Sybil downstairs to put her to bed. She said Mr. Mean would hurt me if I talked to you, but I just want to ask one thing.\"\n\nTess groaned and struggled to sit up. Her hands were still tied behind her back and her feet were bound again. Only Sandy's hands were tied, but the girl was tethered to the empty wheelchair, which she'd dragged close enough to reach Tess.\n\n\"Ask me,\" Tess said, trying to sound calm and quiet when she wanted to sob and scream. \"I'm your friend. My name is Tess.\"\n\n\"Do you know my mommy?\"\n\n\"Yes. Yes, I know her, and she wants you to come home.\"\n\n\"I can't go home. I can't even say it or Mr. Mean\u2014\"\n\n\"I know because they kept me here too once, but I got away from them and Mr. Mean and went home to my mommy. And you can too, if you help me.\"\n\n\"But Mama Sybil is my other mommy now.\"\n\n\"Mama Sybil isn't real. Have you seen her walk and talk since you've been here?\"\n\n\"No, she's always like that, a big doll. But I have to say she's real.\"\n\n\"Sandy, turn your back to my back and let me try to untie you. Then you untie me so we can both go home. Your mommy and daddy want you to come home with me. Come on now, turn around back to back, okay? We might not have much time.\"\n\n\"We don't. Miss Etta said soon you are going to go to sleep with someone named Jill and some pioneer people, her family.\"\n\nTess steeled herself to stay calm. Jill really was dead and buried out back. \"Okay, good job, Sandy,\" Tess said, as the child got close enough that she could begin to fumble with her ties. But her own hands were bound so tight she couldn't grasp a cord to loosen Sandy's. Maybe she should have studied the knots before trying to undo them. At least Sandy's hands were small and sweaty and not tied quite as tight as her own.\n\nAs she tried to loosen the girl's ties, Tess spoke to her about the two searches for her, told her that the police would give back the Barbie doll she left behind. Tess fought the worst headache she'd ever had and prayed that Etta Falls, who must be digging another grave, would not come back in time.\n\nFinally she managed to free one of the child's hands, and then they both popped free.\n\n\"Sandy, turn around and see if you can untie my hands.\"\n\n\"I have scissors I cut out paper dolls with, but they don't have sharp points.\"\n\n\"Yes, get them. Try sawing at my ties. Hurry, please.\"\n\n\"But they're in the corner with Mr. Mean.\"\n\n\"Mr. Mean isn't real, and I won't let him hurt you. Let's run away from here and go see your mommy and daddy! Hurry, honey, please!\"\n\nShe scurried away but was back fast, sawing away at Tess's wrist bonds. \"Miss Etta shoots her old guns out in back sometimes. I hear them go bang!\"\n\nTess tried to stretch the ropes as the girl cut and sawed. Her hands were completely numb. She heard the slam of a door downstairs\u2014surely not the gunshot Sandy had mentioned. Miss Etta must be back in the house.\n\n\"Sandy, never mind that. Try to cut my leg ties. Hurry. Saw at them while I stretch them,\" Tess urged the child as footsteps echoed on the stairs. Tess knew this sort of scissors well, good only for cutting colored construction paper. This wasn't going to work.\n\n\"Listen to me, Sandy. I want you to go over behind the door Miss Etta will come through. Hide behind it and keep really quiet when she opens it. I'll do something to get her attention, and then you run down the stairs and outside. Can you open the downstairs door if it's locked?\"\n\n\"It's dark outside.\"\n\n\"But if we can't both run, you have to get away. That's what I did and someone found me, took me home to my mommy. Can you do that?\"\n\n\"I don't want to go without you. Miss Etta said you and me can be next to her pioneer family. I don't want to be there alone.\"\n\nTess was not only panicked but furious. She yanked at her fraying bonds in a frenzy. The footsteps stopped and Sandy kept cutting. Maybe Miss Etta had gone to the second floor to visit her mother, if she was an invalid. But Tess had the surest feeling Sybil Falls was dead. Miss Etta had probably buried the old woman out back and told no one. She couldn't bear to let the past go and tried to hold on to it any way she could.\n\nSuddenly the ties around her legs gave way! Jumping up on numb feet, Tess stumbled like a drunk, almost lost her balance. Pulling Sandy tight to her, they huddled together behind the door.\n\n\"Listen to me now, honey,\" Tess whispered. \"When she opens this door, don't hold on to me. I'm going to hit the door back into her. Maybe knock her gun away, maybe even push her down the stairs. Then I'll get on my knees and you get on my back like playing horsey.\"\n\nWide-eyed, the child nodded solemnly.\n\n\"Okay, then. When we play horsey, you try to wrap your legs around me. But if you can't because of my tied hands, you just stand on the ropes between my wrists. But there is just one rule. When you put your arms around me for the ride downstairs and outside, don't grab my neck so I can't breathe. Okay? Promise? And\u2014if I fall, or something bad happens to me, you run fast away from here and hide in the cornfield until daylight when a car comes by. Make sure Miss Etta doesn't find you.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid of cornfields at night. Scarecrows can be in them.\"\n\n\"I know, but don't let her find you again. If you see a car going by, you yell your name to them, say that they should call the sheriff. Okay? Promise?\" she repeated as the footsteps sounded on the stairs again.\n\nMaking a little X on her chest, the child whispered, \"Cross my heart and hope to die.\"\n\n* * *\n\nGabe thought Melanie Parkinson's voice was calm, almost soothing. He was sure she must have been a comfort to little Teresa years ago. Had his father even known the child had been counseled at church? That information was never recorded, and he wondered if it could have been some sort of help.\n\n\"I'm asking you to think back twenty years to the Lockwood kidnap case,\" he said to Mrs. Parkinson after he explained the situation.\n\n\"The so-called Cold Creek kidnapper. Yes, I remember the events and little Teresa Lockwood well. She'd been brutalized and terrified, so much so it had changed her personality. Inward, shy, afraid, when her mother said she'd been so bold and outgoing before that.\"\n\n\"What would help me now,\" he said without explaining Tess was missing again\u2014it pained him to even say it\u2014\"is if you can recall anything specific she might have said about the place she was held or the person who held her. Anything!\"\n\n\"Yes, all right. Several of her drawings we did for therapy were of a room with a deer head on the wall and a huge, oversize window. I assume she was wishing she could have gone out it, or that might have been how she actually escaped, because she was iffy on that. Out the window, she drew small gravestones.\"\n\n\"She recently recalled that view. Anything else?\"\n\n\"She once drew a scarecrow and then crayoned through it with near violence. Oh, and for such a young child, I think she referred to the cemetery once as a pioneer cemetery.\"\n\nGabe sat up straight. He knew of only two in the area, one in the very back of the Glen Rest Cemetery outside town, but the only place Tess could have seen that from was the caretaker's house. Clemment Dixon was surely no kidnapper, and he'd been in the hospital in Chillicothe when Tess was taken. And the other such cemetery\u2014a little, old, one-family graveyard\u2014was behind the Falls house on Blackberry Road.\n\nA chill raced up Gabe's spine. It didn't seem possible and yet... The library was just two doors down from the shop where Sandy had disappeared. That old rattletrap of a bookmobile was always parked out back. Tess recalled the sounds of trains and the waterfall...but that cemetery was the thing.\n\n\"Sheriff, are you there? I just thought of something else. Teresa's mother told me she didn't like to read, didn't like to be read to, but several of her drawings had rows of books on shelves lining the walls and\u2014\"\n\n\"Thanks, Melanie. You've been a big help, maybe more than you know. I'll call back later.\"\n\nDisconnecting his phone, he leaped from behind his desk. It couldn't be, and yet it made horrible sense. \"Peg,\" he shouted as he ran down the hall, strapping on his gun belt. \"Call Agent Reingold and Jace. Tell them no lights, no sirens, park on the road, but they need to meet me at the Falls house on Blackberry Road.\"\n\n\"But I didn't get a 911 from her\u2014\"\n\n\"Now!\"\n\n* * *\n\nTess heard the chain rattle loose on the other side of the door. Sandy was holding on to her, but it was too late to remind her not to cling to her when Miss Etta stepped in.\n\nThe door opened. \"I'm back,\" she sang out. Tess could see her through the crack between the door and the frame as it opened, as the librarian stepped up to their level.\n\nTess threw herself against the door. It slammed shut. She heard the woman scream, bounce down the stairs, but how far? And what about the gun?\n\nTess turned her back to the door, grabbed the old knob, twisted it and opened the door. Miss Etta lay on the second-floor landing, looking stunned. In the dim stairwell, Tess couldn't tell if she had the pistol or not, or even if she was conscious.\n\n\"Get on my back,\" Tess told Sandy, bending down. \"Horsey time.\"\n\nThe child obeyed. She was heavier than Tess had expected. At least she could stick her skinny legs between Tess's ribs and her tied arms. Trying to flee, desperate not to fall, Tess started down the steps just as Miss Etta moved, tried to right herself.\n\nTess kept going. The woman had the pistol, raised it and pointed it. They would never dodge a bullet in this narrow space. At least Sandy was behind her, so Tess would take the shot, but that could still leave both of them buried out back.\n\nScraping her shoulder along the stairwell wall, Tess rushed toward Miss Etta, tried to brace herself with the extra weight behind her and kicked at the woman. The pistol went off, but the gun fell to the floor. Tess waited for the pain but felt nothing. Leaning against the staircase wall, she kicked at Miss Etta again to get her out of the way, then edged past her and fled.\n\nDown, turn, down, turn. No doubt the back door would be locked. It was, but the old skeleton-type key was in it. \"Get down, get down!\" she told Sandy. \"I have to turn that key so we can get outside.\"\n\nShe nearly dumped the girl on the hall floor, turned her back and fumbled with the lock. But she heard footsteps on the stairs. Miss Etta could still have the gun, or did those old ones only have one bullet?\n\nHer hands behind her back, Tess twisted the key, then the knob. The door opened. Sandy clung to her waist. The storm door was locked, a small sliding lock.\n\n\"You come back, you bad girls!\" Mama Sybil's deep voice came from above. \"I'll have to smack and shoot you both!\"\n\nPlease, Lord, Tess prayed. Please get us out of this madhouse!\n\nShe was going to kick out the glass. No running into the house, where Miss Etta could trap them. Tied like this, there was no way she could use a phone or get out another door. She was going to leave this place forever, one way or the other. Miss Etta's footsteps and Mama Sybil's voice came closer. Sandy started to wail. It almost took Tess back twenty years, but she fought the fear. She heaved her shoulder into the glass, but bounced back. She had to get Sandy away, run into the safety of the cornfield...\n\nMiss Etta, bloody and disheveled, stumbled down the last few stairs. It looked like another pistol in her hand as the woman bounced off the wall and almost fell. She raised the gun, pointed it at Tess and fired\u2014but the only sound was a click.\n\nTess turned to the glass door, lifted her foot and kicked repeatedly at it. It cracked, crunched and finally shattered, leaving only the frame. Miss Etta righted herself, came closer and grabbed the screaming child, but Tess shoved and elbowed her away.\n\n\"Get outside!\" Tess screamed at Sandy.\n\n\"I have more guns!\" Miss Etta said, in her own voice. \"I'll get my other guns!\" She didn't run back upstairs but down the hall.\n\nWhen Sandy seemed frozen in fear, Tess stepped through the opening, then said, calmly, quietly, \"Sandy, come out now. We are going to see your mommy.\"\n\nThe girl shuffled to the door. \"It's dark and if I run away, Mr. Mean will get me.\"\n\n\"No, Mr. Mean is in the house, and he will get you if you don't come out! Take a big, big giant step out. We are going home!\"\n\nThe child finally obeyed. Tess yearned to be able to lift her, hold her, but there was no time to even get her on her back again. Tess looked behind them. Miss Etta stood silhouetted by the inside light in the open, broken door, holding another pistol. Tess and Sandy ran toward the field behind the graveyard with its old stones like broken teeth.\n\nThe cornfield was a sanctuary, instead of a site that would have terrified her just a few days ago. They'd made it only a few rows in when the entire area seemed bathed with light.\n\n\"Police! Don't move! Put that down, Miss Etta!\" Gabe's voice shouted.\n\nThere was a gunshot. More men's voices.\n\n\"She shot herself!\" Gabe cried out. \"I'm going into the house to find them!\"\n\n\"Gabe!\" Tess shouted. \"Sandy and I are here in the field!\"\n\nWith the child clinging to her waist so hard she had to drag her, Tess walked from the shelter of the cornfield, feeling free for the first time since she could remember. Three big beams of light lit her way, almost blinded her, but she saw Gabe, Vic and Jace Miller, guns drawn. Tess walked right into Gabe's crushing embrace. \"Jill?\" he asked.\n\n\"Dead, I think. The cemetery\u2014not sure who else, but I bet you'll find Sybil Falls there too, when no one knew she was dead. Miss Etta was digging my grave.\"\n\nHe cut Tess's ties, then kneeled to look at Sandy with his hands on her shoulders. \"We'll take you home,\" he told the child. \"Your mother and father are going to be so happy.\" He stood and looked at Tess, lifted his hand to finger the huge, tender scab on her head. \"Maybe we can be happy too,\" he whispered before he turned back to Vic.\n\n\"Etta?\" he asked.\n\n\"Self-inflicted,\" Vic said, pointing to his forehead. \"Doesn't quite resemble Dane. You get Sandy and Tess home, and I'll search the house for Etta's mother just in case. I'll call, then wait for the squad and forensics.\"\n\n\"There's a dummy of Sybil inside that Miss Etta carried around,\" Tess told them. \"I think she put it to bed.\"\n\nGabe's eyes widened, and his mouth dropped open. He pulled her to him. \"Let's take Sandy home while Vic and Jace secure the scene. Then we need to get the forensics team to...to disinter things out here, out back.\" Again, he put a hand on one of Sandy's shaking shoulders. The three of them huddled for a moment, as if they were a little family.\n\nTess kept rubbing her wrists and hands as the blood and feeling rushed back into them. But, after Gabe lifted Sandy in one arm, Tess did feel Gabe's free hand clasp hers.\n\n\"It's finally over,\" he said as, holding hands, they turned toward the road. \"But for us, if you're willing, Tess, it's a new start.\"\n31\n\nIn the sheriff's vehicle, Sandy sat on Tess's lap. They were both in the same seat belt with Tess's arms around the girl. Gabe told Tess how talking to her counselor, Mrs. Parkinson, had been the key to his rushing out to Miss Etta's house. Now Tess hoped to be able to help Sandy get over her terrors. She'd stay in Cold Creek awhile for that\u2014and to see how things worked out with Gabe.\n\nThe clock on the cruiser's dashboard read 9:58 p.m. as he pulled up in front of the Kenton house. It had only been about ten hours since Miss Etta took her this time, Tess thought, but it seemed an eternity. Electric candles shone in each window of the house, and a sign in the yard read Bring Sandy Home!! Together, she and Gabe were doing exactly that.\n\nBut Jill Stillwell's family would soon face devastation, if, at last, closure. Life was like that, the happy and the horrible all mingled together. Despite that, if Gabe let her, she'd like to face life with him.\n\nGabe went up to the front door and rang the bell. Tess got out with Sandy in her arms, the child's arms and legs around her as tight as ropes. Lindell rushed out with Win right behind her.\n\n\"Oh, thank you! Thank you, Sheriff! And Tess!\"\n\nLindell hugged Tess and Sandy hard as Tess passed the stunned-looking child into her mother's arms while her father hugged them both. Tess saw Gabe's eyes as he tried to blink back tears. She went to stand by him, watching the reunion through shimmering eyes and remembering clearly her own homecoming with her parents.\n\nTess realized that her return to Cold Creek had actually been a homecoming. Standing next to Gabe, with his arm around her waist, Cold Creek was suddenly starting to feel a lot like home.\n\n* * *\n\nA week later, Gabe and Tess sat at the picnic table behind her house, eating lunch and watching a big reaper harvest the cornfield. \"It will be nice to see clearly again,\" she told him.\n\nThough it was a long bench, they were sitting close together. He leaned over to plant a kiss on her shoulder, then put his steak sandwich down and wiped his hands. \"And can you see clearly\u2014about us?\"\n\nShe turned to face him and put her cola can down. They both leaned inward. It started out as a little kiss, burned brighter as they squeezed even closer. Despite all the difficult and tragic things that had happened, including the forensics experts unearthing Jill's and Sybil's bodies from the old graveyard, Tess felt almost content.\n\nWhen they finally broke apart, she smiled. \"It's not fair you ask me something like that right before a McCord kiss. I can't think when you do that. But yes\u2014I want to be with you, and I'm not afraid of being here anymore. If I get enough money for this house, this area could use a good day care center. Lindell said Sandy will be my first student, and I know the time I'm spending with her now is helping.\"\n\n\"Then I have a proposition for you.\"\n\nHer insides cartwheeled. \"Such as?\"\n\n\"Let's sell both of our properties and buy one place on the Old Town side of Cold Creek. Then we'd have enough to build your day care out the side, the front\u2014I don't know\u2014of our home, so your commute would be nothing and mine would be less than now. If you like that idea we will go on from there, and, when we're ready, we can talk about other proposals too. So how do you feel about everything?\"\n\nThis man in her life\u2014and the town of Cold Creek\u2014had seemed so scary just a few weeks ago. But now it seemed perfect.\n\n\"I like the way you think, Sheriff McCord. As a matter of fact, I like everything about you. And I know what I'm getting into with the demands of your job. Yet I believe you are worth the price of that or anything.\"\n\nThey kissed again, harder, longer. And the roar of the big reaper cutting and shredding the past seemed like music to her ears.\n\n* * * * *\n\nIf you loved _**Shattered Secrets**_ by _New York Times_ bestselling author Karen Harper, you won't want to miss the next two incredible stories in her gripping _Cold Creek_ trilogy, **_Forbidden Ground_** and **_Broken Bonds_** , available now!\n\n\"Fast-paced action and gripping suspense make this a page-turner for your keeper shelf.\" \n\u2014 _RT Book Reviews on Broken Bonds_\n\n**Collect the series today!**\n\nConnect with us on www.Harlequin.com for info on our new releases, access to exclusive offers, free online reads and much more!\n\nOther ways to keep in touch:\n\nHarlequin.com\/Newsletters \nFacebook.com\/HarlequinBooks \nTwitter.com\/HarlequinBooks \nHarlequinBlog.com\nAuthor's Note\n\nShattered Secrets is book one of a trilogy set in Cold Creek. When Tess's very different sisters come home for her wedding, they both become involved in crime and love. Forbidden Ground will feature Kate as the heroine, and Broken Bonds, Char's story, will follow after that.\n\nI did my undergraduate work in Athens, Ohio (English major, of course!), on the edge of the Appalachian foothills where I chose to set this trilogy, so I do know that fascinating area well. Also, our good friends Dr. Roy and Mary Ann Manning live in Chillicothe, so we have visited there and been given several tours of the area. The mingling of people in this stunningly beautiful region makes a perfect background for conflict in this Cold Creek trilogy.\n\nMy ideas for these novels are literally ripped from the headlines. I enjoy writing books where an \"average\" woman's life is impacted by crime or tragedy. The police may help her, but she also manages to find the strength and courage to solve the crime herself. And rural areas are no exception, unfortunately, for unusual crimes.\n\nI'm grateful for the tour I was able to take of the BCI (Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation) headquarters in London, Ohio. The tour included the latest information of many aspects of criminal investigation, which I am using in these novels. Victor Reingold and other BCI agents, however, are fictional and are only based in some ways on actual agents.\n\nCrimes against children have certainly been in the news in horrific ways as I write this novel. Nothing is worse than harming innocents.\n\nThe two books I found most helpful about childhood trauma and various types of amnesia as background for this story are both by Dr. Lenore Teri, M.D. Unchained Memories: True Stories of Traumatic Memories Lost and Found and Too Scared To Cry: Psychic Trauma In Childhood. On Gabe's explosive ordnance disposal unit in Iraq, I consulted The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows by Brian Castner.\n\nConsidering the villain in this novel, I must make the point that I do love librarians. I would probably not be a fiction writer if it weren't for libraries and their keepers over the years. Nor would much of my education, teaching career or author research have been possible without the help of librarians. My author collection of books and papers is in the care of the Ohio State University Rare Books and Manuscripts Department in Columbus, Ohio, and the librarians there are friends and supporters. Thanks to Dr. Geoffrey Smith and all in charge there.\n\nHappy (and scary!) reading. Please visit my website at www.KarenHarperAuthor.com.\n\nISBN-13: 9781460338414\n\nSHATTERED SECRETS\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2014 by Karen Harper\n\nAll rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.\n\nThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.\n\n\u00ae and \u2122 are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with \u00ae are registered are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.\n\nwww.Harlequin.com\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}} +{"text":" \nCOURT LADY\n\nCOUNTRY WIFE\n\n_Royal Privilege and Civil War:_\n\n_Two Noble Sisters in_\n\n_Seventeenth-Century England_\n\nLITA-ROSE BETCHERMAN\n\n# _Contents_\n\nCover\n\nTitle Page\n\n_Prologue_\n\nPart One\n\n_one_ Two Pretty Sisters\n\n_two_ Dorothy's Choice\n\n_three_ Lucy's Choice\n\n_four_ Buckingham's Charms\n\n_five_ Life in the Country and Life at Court\n\n_six_ The Queen's Favorite\n\n_seven_ Court Politics\n\n_eight_ Death of Carlisle\n\nPart Two\n\n_nine_ Dorothy a Grass Widow\n\n_ten_ Lucy a Wealthy Widow\n\n_eleven_ Family Affairs\n\n_eleven_ Family Affairs\n\n_twelve_ A Noble and Intelligent Friendship\n\n_thirteen_ Strafford's Trial and Execution\n\n_fourteen_ Lucy Changes her Gallant\n\nPart Three\n\n_fifteen_ Mourning a Beloved Soldier\n\n_seventeen_ \"I Would Rather Serve the Prince than Live\"\n\nPart Four\n\n_eighteen_ In the Tower\n\n_nineteen_ A Dysfunctional Family\n\n_twenty_ \"The Old Lady Carlisle is Dead\"\n\n_Notes_\n\n_Bibliography_\n\n_Index_\n\n_Acknowledgments_\n\n_About the Author_\n\nPraise For _Court Lady and Country Wife_\n\n_Note on Names_\n\nCopyright\n\nAbout the Publisher\n\n# _Prologue_\n\n**ON A RAINY FEBRUARY DAY** in 1617, a barge drew up to Tower Wharf on the River Thames and two young women disembarked. From their dress and from the barge bearing a coat of arms, it was obvious that these young women were members of the nobility Dismissing the oarsmen, they crossed the drawbridge over the moat and entered the confines of the Tower of London as the great iron gates clanged shut behind them. Escorted by a pair of oafish guards, they circled the inner wall, carefully averting their eyes from Tower Hill, where their uncle not so many years before had been beheaded, and continued on to the Martin Tower in the northeast corner of the bastion wall. Dorothy and Lucy Percy had come to visit their father.\n\nHenry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, had been a prisoner in the Tower during the years when the sisters were growing up. In 1606 he had been found guilty of complicity in the failed Gunpowder Plot to blow up Westminster Hall at the very moment King James I, having ascended to the throne just three years earlier, was opening Parliament. The case against the Earl had, in fact, never been proven. His conviction rested on guilt by association; during the investigation it came out that the day before the plot was discovered, one of the chief plotters, a distant relative employed by the Earl to collect the rents from his northern estates, had dropped in on him at his country house. Whether guilty or not, the ninth earl was following in the family tradition. His grandfather Sir Thomas Percy had been attainted and executed for his part in the revolt against Henry VIII, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. His uncle, the seventh earl, had been beheaded in the Tower for treason, and his father, the eighth earl, committed suicide when he was sent to the Tower a third time for plotting against Queen Elizabeth I.\n\nYet the room the sisters entered was no dank prison cell. It was the withdrawing room in a suite of six luxuriously furnished rooms. The Earl had brought the finest tables, chairs, and chests from his castles throughout England. The stone walls were hung with tapestries, and Turkey carpets warmed the floors. Even in prison the Earl remained a great noble, living in style as if the Tower were his private castle. Through well-placed bribes, particularly to the Lieutenant of the Tower, he had appropriated the Martin Tower for himself and converted it into this comfortable habitation. As well, he had set up a laboratory for his scientific experiments. Several of his prot\u00e9g\u00e9s \u2014 mathematicians and astronomers\u2014stayed with him in the Tower, and he kept twenty servants, renting a house on Tower Hill for the overflow. With the cooperation of the Lieutenant of the Tower, he acquired the use of Tower grounds for a bowling alley, an archery range, and stables for his horses, which were regularly exercised by his Master of the Horse.\n\nAn irritable and overbearing man, Northumberland was as arrogant in prison as out. When a fellow prisoner wandered onto the gravel path where he took his daily walks, he beat the unfortunate interloper with his cane. It was said of the Earl of Northumberland that were it not for the blot on his escutcheon, he would have been perfectly content with his incarceration.\n\nIf the Earl had paid attention to his pretty daughters on this particular visit in 1617, he might have noticed that they were somewhat subdued. Dorothy was always reserved, but Lucy, the younger sister, was ebullient by nature. This day her contagious laughter was not to he heard by the guards and prisoners. The truth was that the sisters had come with news they knew would make their father exceedingly angry. They had decided their future on their own, in defiance of his plans for them. Each in her own way was looking forward to living happily ever after with a wealthy, well-placed husband. But in their youthful self-confidence, they could not know all that the future held for them or for England itself. As fate would have it, one of them would also end up in the Tower of London and in very different circumstances from those of their father.\n\n# PART ONE\n\nMONEY\n\nAND\n\nMARRIAGE\n\n# [_one_ \nTWO PRETTY SISTERS](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c01a)\n\nDOROTHY WAS SEVEN and Lucy six when their father, Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, was sent to the Tower. On November 4, 1605, he set out by water from Syon House, his country home on the banks of the Thames just west of London, to attend the opening of Parliament the following day Six months later he was found guilty of treason. It would be sixteen years before he returned.\n\nThe sisters' lives, however, hardly changed as a result of their father's imprisonment. Like all children of the nobility, they saw little enough of their mother and even less of their father. Theirs was a world of nurses and maids, grooms and gardeners. In truth, they were better acquainted with the seventy blue-liveried servants at Syon than they were with their father. Nor was the Earl a fond parent to be missed. When he came upon them at play, he would not stop to talk: the conversation of children \"is unsuitable to my humour,\" he was wont to say For their part, the sisters shed few tears at his absence. With their father gone they no longer had to listen to their parents' squabbles. How it had made their hearts pound to hear their hot-tempered mother shouting at their father and his cold, low-spoken replies goading her into wild sobbing.\n\nThe little girls would have had no recollection of it, but their parents had separated when Lucy was an infant and Dorothy just a toddler. In October 1599, the Countess left her husband. Her side of the story was that the Earl had thrown her out for no reason: \"It was his Lordship's pleasure upon no cause given by me to have me keep house by myself,\" she wrote her brother, Essex. It may have been no coincidence that at this very time the Earl of Essex, formerly Queen Elizabeth's pampered favorite, was under house arrest for disobeying the Queen. The ambitious Northumberland had married the sister, Dorothy Devereux, because of the brother: a family connection with the fallen favorite now was politically unwise.\n\nForced to live on her own, Lady Northumberland rented a modest house in Putney, leaving the baby girls with their father. It was not that she did not love her daughters; she simply did not have the wherewithal to provide for them in a manner suitable to an earl's children. Because the land and goods she had brought into the marriage had automatically become her husband's property, she was left with a very small allowance. Nevertheless, several months later when she heard that her daughters were not thriving, she insisted that they live with her. Perhaps Lucy was rejecting the wet nurse's milk, or perhaps the two-year-old was pining away Lord Northumberland allowed the girls to go to their mother but provided no increase in her allowance to care for them.\n\nIn December 1601, Lady Northumberland returned to her husband. Again, the fate of her brother may have determined her own. Essex had recently been beheaded for an abortive insurrection against the Queen, Without a powerful male relative, Lady Northumberland took the most prudent course for her little girls. The resumption of their parents' stormy marriage produced two brothers: Algernon in 1602 and Henry, called Harry, in 1604.\n\nTwo years after Lady Northumberland went home, Queen Elizabeth died in her seventieth year. It had been a pathetic death. Word seeped out of the palace of Her Majesty sitting on a pile of cushions on the floor, unable to sleep and eating nothing, her finger in her mouth like a child. At last, she allowed the doctors to carry her to bed, where on March 23,1603, she passed away.\n\nShe had reigned for almost forty-five years and few could remember an England without her. She had remained unmarried, to be, in her own words, \"king as well as queen\" of her realm. A very visible monarch, while on progress (as royal visits to the country homes of the nobility were called) she would stop at hamlets and villages to show herself in all her glory to her subjects, dazzling them with her jewel-bedecked gowns and winning their hearts with flattering speeches. Everywhere the Virgin Queen went, she was greeted with aves as if she were the Virgin herself.\n\nElizabeth was a true daughter of the formidable Henry VIII. Along with his red hair she had inherited his domineering personality and his charisma. Her father had broken with Rome and declared himself head of the Church of England for no other reason than that he had lusted after her mother, Anne Boleyn, and the Pope would not grant him a divorce from his Spanish queen, Catherine of Aragon. After the short reign of the sickly boy king Edward VI, Roman Catholicism had enjoyed a brief revival under Catherine's daughter Mary, known to history as Bloody Mary for the hundreds of Protestants she burned for heresy. When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, she completed her father's reformation, establishing the Anglican Church and effectively outlawing Catholicism.\n\nBut the Old Faith died hard in England. These were the days of the \"priest's holes,\" where the Catholic nobility hid their chaplains. Indeed, during her reign, Elizabeth had to put down a Catholic rebellion (led by the seventh Earl of Northumberland) and an assassination plot, both of which were aimed at replacing her with her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. Having fled from her hostile barons in Scotland to save her life, Mary Stuart lived as a prisoner in England. Ultimately, Elizabeth had to execute this royal troublemaker.\n\nAlmost as troublesome to Elizabeth as the Anglo-Catholics were the Puritans who wanted to import the strict Protestantism that John Calvin had introduced in Geneva. Calviniste wanted no bishops, no ritual or music in church, sermons by a lay preacher rather than the parson, and a Sabbath without festivals or saints' days. Elizabeth, who favored moderation in religion, regarded the Puritans as zealots. Anglicanism, as she conceived it, was a broad, shallow faith that could encompass all Englishmen.\n\nElizabeth's state Protestantism earned her dangerous enemies abroad. The papacy, still hoping to bring England back into the fold, connived with the Anglo-Catholics, and in 1570 the Pope excommunicated her. Amore dangerous enemy was the Spanish king, Philip II After failing to acquire England through marriage\u2014his wife, Queen Mary, had died and Elizabeth would not have him\u2014Philip resolved to take it by conquest. Elizabeth's wise rule was rewarded in 1588 when her valiant seamen repulsed the Spanish Armada, and Catholic, Puritan, and Protestant Englishmen rejoiced as one nation in Spain's defeat.\n\nTo the end, the old queen had maintained the illusion of an ageless Gloriana, masking her wrinkled face with white lead, covering her thin, graying hair with a flaming red wig, and encasing her shrunken body in rich gowns stiffened with buckram. However, the execution of the Earl of Essex, a hero to the common people for his dash and derring-do, had diminished her popularity, and her last public appearances met with little enthusiasm.\n\nElizabeth had died without leaving an heir. Ironically, her legitimate successor was James VI of Scotland, the son of Mary Queen of Scots whom she had executed. News of Queen Elizabeth's death sent the English courtiers galloping up to Edinburgh to swear allegiance to the Scottish king who was now King James I of England.\n\nTHE FACT THAT the English and the Scots had the same king did not result in a union of the two countries. Scotland continued to have its own parliament, its own laws, and its own version of the Reformed Church: Presbyterianism.\n\nIf, as James believed, he was God's anointed on earth, the Almighty had not chosen a very attractive vessel. He wore thickly padded vests and breeches stuffed with wool (to protect himself, some said, from assassination), giving him a top-heavy appearance. His tongue was seemingly too large for his mouth and he dribbled when he spoke; he had a habit of scratching himself in embarrassing places. He never washed and he drank too much. Yet with all his repellent personal habits, he was a highly intelligent man, a scholar who could argue cogently with theologians and lawyers, and his sobriquet \"the British Solomon\" was not undeserved. Vastly preferring Anglicanism to the severe Presbyterianism he had left behind in Scotland, he worried that the Bible most commonly used in England was the radical Geneva Bible, which, among other tenets, approved of regicide. One of his first acts as King of England was to commission the Authorized Version, also called the King James Bible and still in use today As well as intelligence, James possessed a quick wit, and his thick Scottish burr added flavor to his puns and jests. Like a good humorist, he never laughed at his own jokes. His queen, Anne of Denmark, had provided him with two sons and a daughter. Thus he had the advantage over Elizabeth of giving England a royal family.\n\nJames's court proved to be very different from Elizabeth's. Hers had been refined and elegant, though never lacking in pleasurable festivities. Elizabeth regaled her courtiers with masques and feasts and plays\u2014Shakespeare's _Twelfth Night_ was performed at court by royal command\u2014and there was constant dancing, for she herself was a high-stepping dancer. The Queen was very strict about morals, demanding chastity of her young maids-in-waiting\u2014if she must remain a virgin, so must they Indeed, she preferred her courtiers to stay unmarried, and when they did not, she sulked, or even banished them. Her attendants were, of course, female, and it seemed to visitors that her court was overrun with women. For his part, James held women in contempt, and his inner circle was exclusively male.\n\nWhile Elizabeth thrived on the love of her people\u2014they were the jewel in her crown, she liked to say\u2014James shunned the adulation of the crowd. \"What do they want from me?\" he once inquired of a courtier. \"They want to see you,\" he was told. \"Then I'll pull down my pants and show them my arse.\" As this uncouth remark indicates, the prevailing coarseness and rowdiness in James's court reflected the tastelessness of the sovereign.\n\nElizabeth was parsimonious to a fault, even under provisioning her armies serving abroad. James was lavish with gifts of money, grants, and pensions to his favorites so that his coffers were always depleted. Whereas Queen Elizabeth kept the reins of state in her own hands\u2014it must be said that her indecision nearly drove her counselors mad\u2014James had no patience for the business of governing. At most, he made snap decisions, but as a rule he left state affairs to his overworked and underappreciated Lord Treasurer and Secretary of State, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, while he himself went hunting or hawking with his cronies. In actual fact, James was seldom at his palace of Whitehall in London. Hunting was a passion with him, and most of the time he was at his hunting lodges at Royston or Newmarket.\n\nIt appeared as if the Earl of Northumberland would fare very well under the new regime. He had been among the many English nobles who had offered his allegiance to James in Elizabeth's dying hours. For currying favor at the right moment, he was appointed to the Privy Council\u2014the King's body of advisers composed of the great officers of state and some of the nobility. Moreover, Northumberland had the expensive honor of a royal visit to Syon House, and Lady Northumberland was chosen to assist at the baptism of a royal baby\n\nThen came the discovery of the horrendous Gunpowder Plot. Believing that James had broken his promise of tolerance, four English Catholics, among them a soldier named Guy Fawkes, had planted twenty barrels of gunpowder in the cellar under Westminster Hall, where both the upper and lower houses of Parliament met. The conspirators' plan was to explode the gunpowder when Parliament opened on November 5, 1605. The resulting inferno would have destroyed the royal family, the bishops, and the assembled Lords and Commons\u2014in short, the entire government of the realm. Fortunately, the scheme was discovered in time.\n\nOne of the conspirators captured was Thomas Percy. The very name of Percy being associated with rebellion against the sovereign, Thomas's involvement raised suspicion about his kinsman and employer the Earl of Northumberland, who, though brought up as a Protestant, was a strong advocate of clemency for Catholics. Northumberland was sent to the Tower, and on June 26, 1606, his case came up before the Star Chamber. Glancing around at his judges, Northumberland saw the same men who had been his colleagues on the Privy Council.\n\nThe Star Chamber was simply the Privy Council sitting in judgment. Unlike the common law courts, which were bound by statute and precedent and trial by jury, the Star Chamber had total discretion. Its primary purpose was to deal with matters of sedition and treason, yet their Lordships heard private disputes about adultery, inheritance, property, and money. Although unable to order capital punishment, they had a range of corporal punishment at their disposal, including nose slitting and the chopping off of ears and hands. Sending convicted men and women to stand in the pillory with papers on their head spelling out their offenses was an oft-used penalty for minor offenders. Proud Northumberland was humiliated to be judged by his peers, especially since he regarded each man as inferior to himself in intellect and position. The judgment would have wiped the sneer off his face. He was deprived of all honors, fined \u00a330,000, and sentenced to life in the Tower.\n\nThe Percys were great landowners in Northumberland, Westmorland, and Cumberland\u2014\"the North knows no prince but a Percy\" was the common saying. They also had estates in the warmer and more civilized south of England\u2014the Earl's favorite seat was the mansion of Petworth House in Sussex. From the Tower, Northumberland directed his empire with ruthless efficiency. To be fair to him, his hard dealings with his tenants were partly due to a need to raise cash to pay off the enormous fine levied upon him when he was sent to the Tower\u2014\"the greatest fine that was ever got on any subject in this realm,\" he complained to King James with good reason.\n\nBut while the change of regime from Elizabeth Tudor to James Stuart in 1603 had once more tainted the Percys with treason, it had removed the stigma of treason from Lady Northumberland's own family, the Devereux. Indeed, the reputation of her brother was being rehabilitated posthumously. In Elizabeth's last years, the Earl of Essex had secretly corresponded with the Scottish king to bring about his accession to the English throne. Now James, as King of England, was showing marked favor to the Essex circle.\n\nThe sisters' relatives on their mother's side provided enough drama for a Shakespearean play. Lady Northumberland's mother, Lettice Knollys, had created a sensation in her young days with a secret marriage to the Earl of Leicester, the love of Queen Elizabeth's life. When the marriage came to light, the Queen exhibited all the fury of a woman scorned. Then there was Lady Northumberland's sister, Penelope, Lady Rich, who abandoned her husband and children to live in open adultery, producing five children, until her divorce in 1605 permitted her to marry her lover. Lady Northumberland herself had a romantic past, having first married the man of her choice against the Queen's wishes. Her runaway marriage had not proved a success, but her husband had released her from it by dying. Her second marriage, to Henry Percy, was arranged to seal a political alliance between Northumberland and her brother, Essex. With all the second and third marriages in their mother's family, the Percy children were related to half the aristocracy of England.\n\nAs they had before the Earl's imprisonment, the Countess and her children lived most of the time at Syon House. Lady Northumberland had inherited the lease from her first husband and brought it to Northumberland as part of her dowry In 1604 King James, then full of gratitude to the Earl for supporting his ascension to the English throne, granted the house to Northumberland in fee simple. Once he owned it, the Earl made extensive renovations that continued even after his imprisonment. Today, the low, battlemented Bath stone building looks much as it did in the early seventeenth century. But the White House, as it was known, was disfigured by unsightly red brick wings that time has happily demolished. Vanished too are the walled formal gardens, transformed into an English park by Capability Brown in the following century. The interior of the house has changed beyond all recognition. Reflecting the neoclassical taste of its eighteenth-century owners, the oak-beamed great hall and wainscoted long gallery have been replaced by the marble and gilded decor of Robert Adam\n\nLife at Syon House was pleasant for Dorothy and Lucy, despite their mother's fits of depression, which cast a pall over the household. And they missed their brother Algernon. When he turned seven his father took him to live in the Tower \"to wean him from his nursery company and his mother's wings.\" Until he went to Cambridge in his early teens, the boy lived and studied in the Tower under the noted scientists and scholars who received the Earl's generous patronage. The Earl took less interest in his younger son. Harry was sent at five years of age to the common school in the village of Isles worth near Syon House.\n\nSo the sisters were the only children at home. Having been born just eleven months apart in 1598 and 1599, the \"young ladies\" (as they were respectfully referred to by the servants) were inseparable. The delights of growing up in a country house were doubled because they discovered them together. For their playground they had acres of gardens and orchards stretching down to the river. They skipped along the shaded walks of sycamores and elms, plucked succulent grapes from the vine wall, and watched the gardeners prune the masses of rosebushes. The kitchen gardens were full of strange-tasting pot herbs and salad greens; stomachaches taught the girls the consequences of overindulgence in apples and cherries. Then there were the stables ringing with the clatter of hoofs; Lucy, already a keen rider, was particularly bold in patting the high shiny rumps of the horses. But above all there was the Thames, the main highway of the day, which brought the world to their doorstep. The little girls would sit on the banks of the river, watching the river craft glide past: market barges laden with stacks of wood, bags of grain, piles of coal, and all the products of the farm necessary to feed the two hundred thousand Londoners; and private barges, painted and gilded like the one rocking at their own wharf. Often a bargeman or some gorgeously garbed lady would wave to the children on the riverbank.\n\nInside the house were many things of splendor and beauty to attract the sisters: floral tapestries, Turkey carpets, cavernous fireplaces, high bedsteads richly curtained in velvets and silks. But nothing fascinated them so much as the new \"bathing house\" and \"cabinet\" their mother had recently built into the nooks and crannies in her bedchamber. Although the Earl paid for this indoor plumbing from his counting house in the Tower, he dismissed it with disgust as a fanciful thing \"which this fifteen years before was never missed nor wanting.\"\n\nIn the landscape of their childhood, another house loomed almost as large as Syon. This was Essex House in London. One of the venerable mansions on the Strand between the City and Westminster, Essex House belonged to their maternal grandmother, the Countess of Leicester. She did not occupy it herself at this stage of her life\u2014perhaps the house was too full of memories of her husband, the magnificent Leicester, and of her son, the dashing Essex. After Essex's execution in 1601, she leased the rambling, gabled building to her son-in-law Northumberland. To travel to their town house from Syon, the Countess of Northumberland and her children went by water on their private barge, disembarking at Essex Stairs, or climbed into their large, cumbersome coach and jolted along the deeply rutted London Road.\n\nAlthough the sisters' life in town was still bounded by garden walls and the river, it was more exciting than the country because of the visitors. The most frequent caller was their mother's best friend, Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford\u2014Lucy may have been named after her. Her husband, the third Earl of Bedford, had followed Essex in his failed rebellion against Queen Elizabeth and had saved his own neck only by paying a large fine to the Crown. The Essex connection served Lady Bedford well under the new regime. She was Queen Anne's First Lady of the Bedchamber, and her court gossip fascinated the little girls, particularly her young namesake. A beautiful, intelligent woman in her late twenties, as Queen Anne's favorite lady she was an influential courtier. In the Countess of Bedford, we discover a role model for young Lucy Percy.\n\nThe King and Queen lived amicably but separately Anne of Denmark's official residence was Greenwich Palace, some twenty miles, downriver from London. Possibly influenced by Lady Bedford, Queen Anne remained a staunch friend to Lady Northumberland while the Earl was in the Tower of London. Lady Northumberland would often make the journey by water to Greenwich, dressed in the monstrous farthingale then in fashion, with powdered and frizzed hair and heavily painted face. In the annals of fashion, Queen Anne is famous for taking the farthingale, a cage like construction of whalebone worn under voluminous skirts, to its most exaggerated proportions. She herself was \"never seen without a farthingale as large as a tea-table.\" She even wore it for hunting. A painting by Paul Van Somer shows Anne about to mount her horse. Her riding habit is described with great glee by her nineteenth-century biographer Mrs. Strickland: \"a farthingale of dark green velvet, made with a long tight-waisted boddice, a very queer grey beaver hat, of the clerical shape, called a shovel, with a gold band and a profusion of fire-coloured plumes, and this formidable head-tire is mounted on a high head of hair, like a periwig, elaborately curled and frizzed.\" As Mrs. Strickland would have written these lines sitting in a crinoline, she was in no position to criticize the farthingale.\n\nQueen Anne was passionately fond of masquing. Designed to glorify the monarchy, the masque was a dramatic entertainment combining music, poetry, and dance, using lavish sets and costumes. With scripts by the poet Ben Jonson and sets designed by Inigo Jones, Queen Anne attempted to evoke the golden age of antiquity. Amusingly, Inigo Jones's drawings for the nymphs and dryads show filmy gossamer costumes ballooning out over farthingales. Breaking the tradition of using male courtiers, Queen Anne established the custom of a ladies' masque presented at Whitehall or Hampton Court on Twelfth Night, and this evening had become the highlight of the Christmas revels. The Queen and her chosen ladies (twelve in all, including herself) began practicing their dances for the Christmas masque in early November. Lady Bedford was a regular performer, but from the records we see that Lady Northumberland was not a masquer, although her sister, Penelope, was one of the favored dozen until her death in 1607.\n\nFrom time to time Lady Northumberland would also go to the King's palace of Whitehall to plead for her husband's release. On July 16, 1606, shortly after the Earl's trial and conviction in the Star Chamber, it was reported that she waylaid the King as he went to chapel. James was accustomed to the tearful pleadings of noblewomen on behalf of their disgraced husbands. He gave them \"gracious audience,\" raised their hopes, and sent them away well pleased but no further ahead. A better route (and one pursued by Lady Northumberland) was to work through the Queen, who sometimes brought the King around by such marital discomforts as prolonged sulking or a show of temper. The Queen did what she could to console Lady Northumberland. In the summer of 1607, she honored her with a visit to Syon House.\n\nThe sisters must have wondered why their mother was so eager to have their father back, considering how unhappy he made her. They were too young to understand that their world turned on royal favor, indeed that their own future could be put in jeopardy if their father remained in the Tower.\n\nGROWING UP, Dorothy and Lucy saw nothing of London beyond the gates of Essex House. With a population rising toward a quarter of a million, London was dirty, noisy, smelly, overcrowded, and dangerous\u2014no place for well-brought-up daughters of the nobility, their mother told them. However, the sisters were able to hear some of the sounds of London. If they stood near the gatehouse that fronted on the Strand, they could listen to the cries of the street hawkers: \"Cheese and cream... Knives to grind... Chimney sweep... What d'ye lack.\" At night, lying in their trundle bed, they heard the reassuring sound of the night watchman ringing his bell and calling out, \"Eight o' the clock and all's well.\" By the time he passed again at nine o'clock, the little girls were sound asleep. Night and day there was the tolling of the bells of dozens of London's churches.\n\nLady Northumberland took full advantage of city life. Accompanied by her maid, she drove into town to shop, pay visits, go to a playhouse, or attend church. Her coach, drawn by four matched bays, made slow progress through the narrow, crowded streets. Drivers of interlocked coaches and farm carts shouted abuse at one another. Dreadful specimens of humanity trundled wheeled barrows of eels and fruit and hot spiced gingerbread. In front of the taverns and alehouses, drunken men and women sprawled in the gutters. The diversity of the crowd was a feature of London streets. On Cheap side, the main street, aldermen in scarlet velvet rubbed shoulders with ragged beggars, and fashionable young blades elbowed the dowdy wives of decent citizens out of their way.\n\nMore often than not, Lady Northumberland's destination was the Royal Exchange in Cornhill. Built in Elizabeth's time by the banker and philanthropist Sir Richard Gresham, this was London's financial and commercial center. Merchants conducted their business affairs on the ground floor, while on the second floor, rows of shops offered fine goods of all descriptions. The New Exchange on the Strand, a business venture of the Earl of Salisbury, also offered a tempting selection of goods. As well as shopping, churchgoing was a popular activity of noblewomen. Lady Northumberland attended many of London's churches, but most frequently the footman would hand her down at the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral, the home church of the Archbishop of Canterbury, to hear a sermon by some famous Protestant theologian.\n\nShould her Ladyship be on her way to the Globe Theatre or to the Bear-Baiting Hall (women as well as men enjoyed this gruesome spectator sport), the coachman would have to cross London Bridge, as it was the only bridge connecting the north and south shores of the Thames. Rows of tall houses lined the bridge so that it looked like any other street to the passenger inside the coach. Pedestrians, however, could see the heads of criminals displayed over the gateways.\n\nLady Northumberland's pleasure outings were restricted to central London and the west end, as the east end was the district of the dockyards and the Tower of London. She always turned for home at nightfall, before the footpads and cutpurses came out like an insect infestation.\n\nLondon's air was fetid, pungent with garbage and urine, and no doubt helped breed the plague that came upon the city every few years. Slops, tossed out the windows, ran freely down the gutters, not only in the streets of tenements that housed the poor but also on the Strand, where the wealthy resided. Disease struck rich and poor equally\n\nTHE ONLY TIME THE SISTERS left Essex House was when their mother took them to visit their father. How they must have dreaded these visits! The time was passed in listening to their parents arguing. Besides, their father was a frightening figure. Wreathed in smoke, he sat glowering at a table covered with the diabolical-looking instruments he used for his experiments. To the little girls he was a being straight out of their nurse's tales of wizards and hobgoblins. The one bright spot was the chance to see their brother Algernon\u2014if their father would let him off from his studies. Algernon was tutored daily by the scholars and scientists in residence. But for the really important training of an aristocrat\u2014how to make a marriage that would increase his landholdings or bring influence at court (and how to handle his wife thereafter)\u2014the Earl undertook to tutor Algernon himself. His views can be read in a long letter entitled \"Advice to My Son,\" which was printed after his death.\n\nThe Earl of Northumberland was a man of his time in his attitude toward women and their place in society. In the early seventeenth century, women were regarded as intellectually inferior, slaves of fashion, scolds, and gossips, whose only function was breeding: a desirable wife was a fecund and malleable creature who brought a good dowry. Their education was designed to give them social graces such as a smattering of French and Italian, needlework, dancing, and playing the lute or virginal, but to provide nothing for the mind. A woman intellectual, indeed, was a figure of fun. The London letter writer John Chamberlain heaped scorn on \"complete women for learning, language and all other rare qualities\" and fled them like the plague. In law, women were consigned to the status of children and imbeciles. The use of the property that a woman brought with her in marriage passed entirely into her husband's hands. \"That which the husband hath is his own; that which the wife hath is the husband's,\" commented a bitter proponent of women's rights. A wife could not make a contract or a will without her husband's permission. The only way a married woman could own property was through the establishment of a trust in the name of a male relative or retainer. It was rare for a widow to gain the wardship of her own eldest son. The Court of Wards either made the grandfather the legal guardian or sold the wardship (with the use of the estate) to the highest bidder.\n\nMale bias aside, there was some substance to the stereotype of the shrewish wife. Given the poor education and childlike dependence of women and their constant pregnancies, it is not surprising that many acted like undisciplined children. The bad-tempered, highly emotional woman is a recurring figure in the diaries and letters of the period. Chamberlain's letters (a principal source of Early Stuart social history) are full of anecdotes of upper-class shrewishness. Still, it was an emotional age for men as well as women. They were forever quarreling and dueling, and immaturity and instability were condoned as manly behavior.\n\nMost noblemen spent their days hawking, hunting, bearbaiting, betting on cockfights, jousting, or running at the ring in the tiltyard. Both men and women attended the playhouses, particularly the Globe, where Shakespeare's company performed, and both sexes were addicted to card games and dicing. Backgammon, called \"tables,\" was a favorite pastime.\n\nFilled with the general prejudice against women, the Earl's view was further jaundiced by his own experience of an unhappy conjugal life. Lady Northumberland was a highly emotional woman given to depression. In his long letter of advice to his son, Northumberland wrote that \"women are as wise at fifteen as at fifty\" They have no moral sense and guide themselves only by the dictates of worldly fashion. Their learning is limited to \"love, a little craft, and a little thriftiness, if they are so addicted out of disposition; handsomeness and trimness being the idol of their hearts till time write deep wrinkles on their forehead.\" In choosing a wife he advised his son to select one who is not ugly in mind or body, but above all with wealth and powerful friends who can aid in his advancement. He admitted that it did not work out that way in his own case, because he and his wife's powerful brother, Essex, were \"at war.\" He counseled his son \"never to suffer your wife to have power in the management of your affairs,\" and never to let her keep the coffers. As for the duties of women, they are to look after children, manage the household servants, \"and to have a care when great personages shall visit to sit at one end of the table, and to carve handsomely\" He allowed that they could amuse themselves with needlework and female society. Drawing on his own experience, he warned his son to stay calm in the face of feminine tantrums. \"Will you be angry at a poor woman that understands little?\" Indeed, the whole sex is foolish and must not be taken seriously. \"Treat their extravagant words with silent railery: if they threaten to kill themselves, give them a knife; if to hang themselves, lend them your garter; if to cast themselves headlong out of windows, open the casement; and if to sound and die, let them be till they come to themselves again.\" With more justice than many of his contemporaries, he acknowledged that the fault lay largely in female education. Yet despite this insight, the Earl did nothing about his own daughters but left their upbringing entirely to their mother, whom he regarded as a hysteric. It was Lady Northumberland who hired their teachers and determined what they should study. The sisters received no more than the superficial education of a gentlewoman: Lucy learned to be a beautiful dancer, while Dorothy took to feminine skills such as needlework. As the letters they wrote in later life show, they were never taught to spell.\n\nStill, the very fact that their father was in the Tower gave the Percy sisters an advantage over their female contemporaries when it came to self-assurance. Their mother was not only the chatelaine but also the acting head of the household. It was she who made all decisions regarding the girls and Harry The periodic blasts of orders from the Martin Tower were ignored. In spite of living in a highly patriarchal society, the Percy sisters grew up in a household where male authority was peculiarly absent. Unhampered by their father's restrictive view of women's place and by the tradition of male superiority, Lucy and Dorothy developed strong personalities of their own, personalities that would enable them to thrive in the tumultuous period in English history that lay ahead.\n\n# [_two_ \nDOROTHY'S CHOICE](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c02a)\n\nWHEN DOROTHY TURNED FOURTEEN, finding a suitable husband for her was very much on Lady Northumberland's mind. Having her father in the Tower made her a less desirable catch than other noble young ladies such as Elizabeth Cecil, Lord Burleigh's eldest daughter. Still, Lady Northumberland consoled herself with the thought that the Percys were an ancient line (not like the come-lately Cecils, who first appeared at Henry VIII's court) and possessed vast property holdings. Moreover, she was as much in Queen Anne's graces as ever before. The Queen now spent much of her time at Somerset House in London, which King James had remodeled and renamed Denmark House in honor of his Danish queen. Denmark House was just a short distance up the Thames from Essex House, and Lady Northumberland paid court sedulously at this more convenient royal residence, sometimes bringing her daughters.\n\nAt fourteen, Dorothy was more than old enough to marry. For that matter, so was Lucy at thirteen. Among the nobility and the gentry, the parental search for a good match began as soon as the child entered puberty. Twelve-year-old brides were not uncommon, but if one spouse or both were very young, the marriage was not consummated for several years. The groom was usually sent to tour the Continent while the bride remained in her parents' home. As these very early marriages indicate, the selection of a spouse was not a matter of personal inclination but a parental decision imposed on the children. Although the occasional marriage was contracted \"without the privity\" of the parents, it was always a cause for scandal. Arranged marriages among the nobility were the norm because marriage was determined by political and economic considerations. Sometimes these amalgamations were carried out in the teeth of a violent aversion. Frances Coke, the daughter of the Chief Justice of the King's Bench, and just Dorothy's age, was forcibly married to the unbalanced brother of the King's favorite to shore up her father's shaky position at court. Predictably, the marriage proved a disaster. While Sir Edward Coke's harshness was unusual, few parents permitted their children to choose their own spouse. At best they gave them a veto. Only the most progressive allowed for the vagaries of personal selection.\n\nWe can be sure that marriage was the chief topic of conversation between the sisters. They had no doubt that they would soon be betrothed; the only uncertainty was the bridegrooms. Like all the daughters of the nobility, Dorothy and Lucy idolized the heir to the throne, the eighteen-year-old Prince of Wales\u2014he was, of course, beyond their dreams, as he would certainly marry a foreign princess. Prince Henry was a good-looking, well-built youth with a natural authority beyond his years, who surrounded himself with writers, poets, artists, and architects. To redesign his palace at Richmond and to create Italianate gardens with grottoes and waterworks, he brought over the Florentine Constantino de Servi and the Frenchman Isaac de Caus. They were to work with (and also instruct) his surveyor, Inigo Jones, who as yet was limited to designing sets for the masques. Henry also patronized Dutch and English portrait painters, and he was beginning to collect art. The Prince of Wales's cultured milieu was the antithesis of his father's court.\n\nThe Prince was extremely skilled in the martial arts, and if the sisters saw him at all, it would have been at the palace tiltyard. Taking its name from tilting\u2014charging one's opponent with a lance\u2014the tiltyard was a long field on the grounds of Whitehall where armor-clad noblemen on horseback competed in the medieval games of jousting, running at the ring, and fighting at the barrier. Prince Henry was known to spend six hours a day in armor, practicing at the tiltyard.\n\nAs it happened, the perfect occasion for Dorothy's debut presented itself in 1612. Elizabeth, the Princess Royal, was to be married to Frederick V, Prince Elector of the Palatinate. The religious wars of the sixteenth century had left Germany a patchwork of Catholic and Protestant principalities, and the Elector Palatine was, by inheritance, the head of the Union of Protestant Princes. The Prince of Wales had pressed his father to make this marriage. Young Henry had dreams of leading a military campaign to unite Germany as a Protestant nation.\n\nIn England great plans were afoot for the wedding. On October 16, the groom arrived, accompanied by his uncle Count Henry of Nassau. The aristocracy had come out in full force to welcome him. A flotilla of 150 boats, decorated with flags and banners, escorted him and his suite up the Thames from Gravesend to Whitehall, with cheering crowds all the way and a deafening salute of cannon at the Tower of London. Dorothy and Lucy would have seen it passing by Essex House. To add to their excitement, when he first arrived in England, the prospective bridegroom was lodged in an apartment in Essex House, affording them numerous opportunities to see him. He was far from an imposing figure. \"Young and small-timbered,\" he would not have been the man of their dreams. But from what they heard, the Princess was very satisfied with her suitor; the arranged marriage had turned into a love match. Leaving his uncle to play tennis with the Prince of Wales and joust with the courtiers, the Elector Palatine could not tear himself away from his intended bride.\n\nThis happy state of affairs was not to last. From whispered conversations between their mother and Lady Bedford, the sisters heard the disturbing news circulating around the court that the Prince of Wales was seriously ill. Although he forced himself to continue entertaining the visitors (even including a hectic tennis match with the Elector Palatine), he had a persistent cough and his pallor was becoming more marked every day. At the beginning of November he took to his bed. Rumors were flying as to the nature of his illness, and to the doctors' desperate attempts to save him, the most bizarre being the application of newly killed cocks and pigeons to his shaven head. On November 12, 1612, he died, as we now know, of typhoid fever.\n\nA deep sense of loss was felt throughout the country. Prince Henry had been the only popular member of the new Stuart dynasty. His spindle-shanked, stuttering twelve-year-old brother, Charles, was now the heir apparent. Although King James and Queen Anne were devastated, they cast off their mourning and prepared to stage a spectacular wedding for their daughter. Under the tragic circumstances, it was not for the love of display\u2014that lingering medieval impulse that accounted for the jewel-spangled costumes and lavish feasts of james and his courtiers\u2014but for sound reasons of state. The English people had been rabidly anti-Catholic since Elizabeth's time, and this Protestant marriage was greatly desired. Given the death of the promising Prince Henry, it was astute politics not to delay any further. The marriage ceremony was announced for February 14, 1613. From the Tower came the edict that Dorothy was not to attend the marriage festivities. Lady Northumberland was deaf to her lord's commands.\n\nThe days before the wedding were busy ones for Dorothy, as she was instructed in protocol and fitted for the magnificent and costly gown she was to wear to the wedding feast. The skirt\u2014hanging straight down\u2014was an innovation. King James had banned the wearing of farthingales at the wedding feast because they would create congestion. It seemed that at a recent masque at the Banqueting House, the passageway to the gallery had become blocked when several farthingales got wedged together at the entrance, causing a pileup of ladies in a rush to get seats.\n\nStanding on the terrace of Essex House, the sisters could watch the preparations on the river. Thirty-six gaily painted pinnaces, galleys, and carracks were lying at anchor, rigged and ready to stage a mock sea battle between Turks and Christians, and four floating casties on barges were hung with fireworks. Across the river, on the south bank, a huge model of the fort of Algiers was rising; this was also to burst into light. During the actual entertainment, some of the fireworks fizzled and the mock battle resulted in real casualties: one sailor lost his eyes, two others lost their hands, and many were maimed.\n\nOn the great day, a crowd of cheering Londoners watched the wedding procession enter the Chapel Royal at Whitehall. The groom entered first, wearing a white suit embroidered with pearls and gold. He was attended by a corps of young Englishmen, Scots, and Hollanders. Then came the bride in cloth of silver, with thirteen bridesmaids carrying her long train. Her \"amber coloured hair\" hung down to her waist and was crowned by a gold coronet studded with enormous diamonds that was said to be worth millions of pounds. The bridal couple were followed by the brides men, Prince Charles and the Earl of Northampton. Then came the royal parents. Queen Anne, mourning her son, had abandoned her usual gaudy dress for a simple white gown, relieved only by a few jewels. King James, eccentric as ever, was \"strangely attired in a cap and a feather, with a Spanish cape and a long stocking.\"\n\nIn the center of the chapel a stage had been erected for the ceremony, with stalls on either side for the nobility, men to the right, women to the left. The walls were colorful with banners and tapestries, and the chapel resounded with organ music and choral singing by the Gentlemen of the Chapel. The Bishop of Bath and Wells preached a sermon on the theme of the wedding feast at Cana in Galilee; then the Archbishop of Canterbury performed the marriage ceremony. The King gave away the bride. To the sound of blaring trumpets and the crowd shouting, \"God give them joy,\" the newly married couple led the procession to the Banqueting House for the wedding feast.\n\nStationing herself modestly toward the back of the hall, Dorothy watched the bridal party make its entrance. She was pleasurably excited but more than a little nervous. Would she be able to handle this most important social event? Though she did not have the breezy self-confidence of her younger sister, Dorothy was a self-possessed, dignified girl, and there can be no doubt that throughout the festivities she was a credit to the Percys and the Devereux. A fortune had been spent on dress for this social event of the season. The men's doublets and breeches and the women's gowns were embroidered with jewels, silver, and gold. The court dandies, Sir James Hay and the Earl of Dorset, outdid themselves with their rich outfits. One lord was said to have spent \u00a31,500 dressing his two daughters, and Lady Northumberland was not far behind with Dorothy's finery \"I hear the Earl of Northumberland's daughter was very gallant,\" John Chamberlain wrote his friend Sir Dudley Carleton, the ambassador at Venice, who had been Northumberland's secretary when the sisters were little.\n\nThe masque by Thomas Campion was judged \"long and tedious\" by the blas\u00e9 courtiers, but it would have enchanted Dorothy since it was the first of these extravaganzas she had seen. Court masques were presented on a proscenium, or picture-frame, stage, and in this shallow space Inigo Jones devised astonishing effects with movable sets. On this evening, the guests beheld not only moving clouds and stars but artificial fires with rotating circles of lights. A cloud descending from the upper stage parted to reveal masked courtiers in cloth of silver embroidered with a design of flames, each wearing a flamelike crown topped with a silk feather like a wisp of smoke. From revolving golden niches, silver statues stepped down to partner the \"Star Lords\" in an elegant dance. The masque concluded with a sibyl drawing a silver obelisk by a golden cord to the royal dais and pronouncing a blessing in Latin upon the bridal couple.\n\nThe following day the bridegroom gave a much-applauded demonstration of the art of man\u00e8ge, taking the trained \"high bounding horse\" through its paces, backward and forward and sideways, in figure eights and crosses, and onto its hind legs like an equine ballet dancer. In the evening, lawyers from Lincoln's Inn and the Middle Temple rode to the palace in a colorful cavalcade. With trumpets blaring from open chariots, they circled the tiltyard several times at the King's request. The ladies in the gallery exclaimed with delight over the dozen little boys costumed as baboons, who performed the ante-masque. On the third day, the gentlemen from the other two Inns of Court, Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple, came by water. Their barges, strung with lamps in fantastic shapes, sparkled on the slate-gray Thames like jeweled brooches. Every day the younger or more sporting courtiers displayed their athletic prowess at the tiltyard and the tennis court. The local champions, Sir James Hay and Sir Henry Rich, were outplayed by Count Henry of Nassau, the bridegroom's uncle. A sophisticated, amiable man of thirty or so, Count Henry had been trained in a French academy and possessed the elegant French manners that impressed the insular English.\n\nDorothy found herself sought after by this distinguished visitor. Perhaps he had first seen her at Essex House and had been taken with her. The courtiers were soon gossiping about Count Henry's obvious interest in Dorothy Percy. In a tournament at the tiltyard, the Count declared himself her champion and wore her ribbons on his armor. In the banqueting hall he led her onto the floor for a saraband or a galliard. His attentions continued after the wedding. \"Here is whispering,\" Chamberlain wrote Carleton on March 25, \"that the Count Henry of Nassau hath a month's mind to my Lord of Northumberland's daughter, which if it should fall right might prove a great match for her.\" Indeed it would have. Count Henry was destined to become a famous general and to succeed his brother as Prince of Orange. Even in 1613 he was akin to royalty, and any noble Protestant family would have grasped at an alliance with him. Just how serious his intentions were toward Dorothy remains unknown. Whatever they were, Count Henry went home to Holland unbetrothed after the departure of his nephew and his bride at the end of April.\n\nAnd how did Dorothy feel about her princely admirer? She made no reference to this extraordinary chapter in her life in any letters now extant. We can safely conjecture that she was flattered, but did she regret that the affair had petered out? Or did she think the Count too old at twice her age? Probably not, because girls her age were married off to men old enough to be their grandfathers. (In the case of the Earl of Nottingham, the Lord High Admiral, a great-grandfather!) Or did she not want to leave her family and go to live in a foreign country? Or was Dorothy already in love?\n\nNorthumberland was shrewdly aware that his daughters had reached marriageable age. Shortly after Dorothy began going to court, he used their need for dowries to plead for a settlement of his fine. \"The time of their preferments for all their lives is at hand and will not admit long delay,\" he petitioned King James. Whether this argument helped or not, the fine was reduced from \u00a330,000 to \u00a311,000, and Northumberland paid it all off in 1613. Still, he did nothing about a husband for Dorothy\n\nOffers for her began to come in. In the autumn of 1614, she had a suitor in the eminently suitable person of Walter, second Lord Scott of Buccleuch. His family was influential at court, and Chamberlain wrote Carleton that \"some think [the marriage] may be a means of her father's delivery.\" But despite any political advantages it may have promised for the Percys, by Christmas it was clear that the marriage would not take place. Had Dorothy used her veto? More to the point, was she pressing for another match?\n\nIn March 1615, Northumberland began negotiating a marriage for his elder daughter with Robert Sidney, the son of Viscount Lisle. Although nineteen-year-old Robert paid a visit to the Earl of Northumberland and was received amicably enough, the negotiations foundered almost immediately over the always contentious issue of the dowry. Lady Northumberland was extremely upset that the negotiations had broken down between the two fathers over money when \"the world had taken so much notice of the young couple's affection.\" It would be a disgrace to her daughter, she berated her husband, \"if a money matter should break off so fit a match.\"\n\nTrue to form, Lady Northumberland did not hesitate to reopen negotiations on her own initiative, without telling her husband. She was closely connected with the Sidney family through her mother, who was Viscount Lisle's aunt by marriage. Not only that, but Sir Philip Sidney, Lisle's elder brother, had addressed his finest love poems to her sister, Penelope, and her brother, Essex, had married Sir Philip's widow. The closeness had continued into the present generation. Dorothy and Robert Sidney had known each other from childhood. Lady Northumberland's eagerness to promote this particular match rather than the Buccleuch one indicates that Dorothy had set her heart on Robert Sidney\n\nTHE SIDNEYS LIVED at Penshurst Place in Kent, where they had been Lords of the Manor since 1552. They also owned lands in Sussex, Wales, Warwickshire, and Norfolk. But though land rich, they were cash poor. Even Viscount Lisle's marriage to an heiress had not substantially improved the family fortunes, and he was dependent on royal patronage to supplement his income from land. Under Queen Elizabeth he had been Governor of Flushing in the Low Countries, and he was sufficiently in favor with James to be appointed Lord Chamberlain to Queen Anne. Following the restless queen was, however, no sinecure. Judging from his letters, Lisle seems to have found it more tiring and demanding than his youthful soldiering in the Netherlands. As he shuttled between Oatlands, Queen Anne's favorite country residence, and Denmark House in London, he often stopped to rest for a day at a neighbor's manor at Brentford near Syon House.\n\nIt was this neighbor, Sir Francis Darcy, whom Lady Northumberland employed to conduct the marriage negotiations. Darcy knew that Lisle was now free to entertain a proposal for his son. He had recently been disappointed in his hopes of marrying Robert to the sought-after Elizabeth Cecil. Although the Cecil family had lost its primacy at court since the death of the first Earl of Salisbury in 1612, it still retained the wealth engendered by his influence. Elizabeth Cecil was outstanding among girls of her age. Lovely, with a pleasant dignity, she was deemed \"the finest gentlewoman about the court.\" To add to her charms, she came with an \u00a38,000 dowry. The matchmaking was going very well when suddenly her family broke it off. A week later the Cecils announced Elizabeth's betrothal to Sir Thomas Howard, second son of the powerful Earl of Suffolk. Obviously the Cecils preferred an alliance with the Howards to one with the Sidneys, and on May 24, 1614, Elizabeth Cecil married Thomas Howard.\n\nViscount Lisle swallowed his keen disappointment like a gentleman and began looking for another bride for Robert. Like other peers, he regarded his son as a negotiable asset. In 1612 his first-born boy, William, had died of smallpox. From then on the Viscount's hopes centered on Robert, and he was indefatigable in seeking a good match for him. Robert was not handsome; he had a long, narrow, pockmarked face; nevertheless, he was a personable enough young man. Educated at Oxford and well traveled, he was chiefly interested in books and study. Sir Henry Savile, the erudite provost of Eton, described him as \"a very proper gentleman and exceedingly well given in every way.\" Well bred and endowed with a well-stocked mind, Robert was a strong candidate for the hand of an heiress.\n\nWhen Sir Francis Darcy approached him on behalf of Lady Northumberland, Lisle was of two minds. On the one hand, the Percys were the old aristocracy and immensely rich; on the other, they were in disgrace. And Lady Northumberland was asking Lisle to use his influence at court to obtain her husband's release. As for the monetary settlement, she was offering a respectable, but not exceptional, portion of \u00a35,000 and land worth \u00a3350 a year, which Dorothy would inherit on her mother's death. This was little or no improvement over the dowry proposed by the Earl, which Lisle had refused. Ambivalent toward the match, Lisle drove a hard bargain, insisting that the dowry be raised to \u00a36,000. At this Darcy confessed the difficulties facing Lady Northumberland. In fact she had not informed her husband of her matchmaking. Like all wives, she could not transfer her own property without her husband's consent; moreover, Northumberland was determined not to have any land alienated from the estate that would ultimately be passed to his elder son. Lisle's response was to make Darcy promise that Northumberland would be spoken to immediately, and that he, Lisle, should be advised how matters stood within eight days.\n\nIt is obvious from the frank correspondence between Lisle and Darcy that, before long, Lisle would be looking to break off negotiations with the Percy family. He was afraid the King would disapprove of the marriage; he did not want to use his credit at court pleading Northumberland's case; but the prime drawback was uncertainty over the dowry Without a word to Darcy, Lisle started negotiating for another bride for his son. This time the girl was the daughter of a rich but low-born official named Thomas Watson. ? teller in the Exchequer (it was these officers who issued tallies for payment from the royal coffers). Master Watson was a useful person to have as a family connection. Lady Lisle was particularly \"earnest,\" even \"rather violent\" for this match. But the way was not all clear for the capture of this desirable plebeian. Another aspirant for Watson's daughter had brought suit in the ecclesiastical court, claiming that she was already contracted to him. According to the marriage laws, when a man and woman had contracted themselves to each other, neither was free to marry another person.\n\nWhen Lady Northumberland heard that Lisle was treating for another match, she was outraged. Although their negotiations had not reached the stage of a marriage contract, she had believed matters sufficiently advanced to \"reserve herself very honourably\" or, to put it bluntly, to pull Dorothy off the marriage market. Reflecting her anger, Sir Francis Darcy wrote a strongly worded letter to Lisle: \"It is told my Lady of Northumberland that your Lordship should entertain conference, and that in great forwardness, in a far meaner place, and of much less reputation, which is very distasteful unto her, and very unkindly taken.\" At least, Darcy admonished, she should have been informed of \"your resolution to surcease\" negotiations for her daughter \"before you would have entered conference with any other.\" The letter ended with a reminder of the advantages of marrying into one's own class: \"I confess I know not where your lordship should have matched so happily\" But Lisle was hot on the trail of a middle-class fortune. He reminded Darcy that he had warned him that Lady Northumberland \"should not for me forsake any other good match should such be offered unto her.\" Having thus exculpated himself, Lisle continued his courtship of Master Watson and his wife. In August the Watsons were invited to Penshurst. Evidently the Watsons were favorably disposed to the match, but nothing could be done until the judgment came down on the other suitor's claim. The case was long drawn out and caused a good deal of talk. Although in the end the ecclesiastical court found that no prior marriage contract existed, the evidence was enough to soil the young woman's reputation.\n\nWriting to Ambassador Carleton in February 1615 about the Watson court case and the stalled match with young Sidney, Chamberlain remarked, \"It is thought the young gentleman inclines to a daughter of the Earl of Northumberland, and grows weary of hunting in a foiled scent, that hath been haunted by so many suitors.\" When the Sidneys broke off the Watson match, the girl's irate father pursued the perfidious aristocrats with threats of a lawsuit.\n\nAlthough the unsentimental negotiations between their parents had broken down, Dorothy and Robert had taken matters into their own hands by falling in love. As Lady Northumberland had informed her husband, the romance was no secret. Beyond a doubt, theirs was a love match. The lovers met no opposition from Lady Northumberland or the Lisles\u2014it was, after all, a suitable match. Dorothy and Robert were married early in 1616, even though the dowry question had not been resolved. The Earl of Northumberland was not informed of his daughter's marriage.\n\nSince her father had not been told, Dorothy's mother decided that the marriage should be kept secret. It seems to have leaked out, however. The Countess of Dorset, a neighbor at Knole House and a friend of the Penshurst ladies, recorded in her diary in March 1616 that now \"the marriage between Sr Robert Sidney and my Lady Dorothy Percy was openly knowne.\" As there is no mention of the marriage in the newsletters, diaries, or correspondence of the time, knowledge of it probably did not go beyond the great houses in the vicinity of Penshurst. In any event, it did not penetrate the fastness of the Martin Tower.\n\nIn May Robert accompanied his father to the Netherlands. Since the days of Queen Elizabeth, England had held the three towns of Flushing, Brille, and Rammekens as pledges for loans made to the Dutch during their war of independence from Spain. In the sixteenth century the Netherlands, composed of seventeen states, formed part of the Spanish empire. The predominantly Protestant northern provinces rebelled against the heavy hand of their Spanish overlords, declaring themselves the United Provinces of the Netherlands, or the Dutch Republic. Spain sent in an army to quell the rebellion and the Dutch turned to England for help. Elizabeth sent troops and money, receiving the so-called cautionary towns as collateral. After trying in vain for years to recapture the northern provinces, in 1612 Spain signed a truce with the triumphant Dutchmen. The southern provinces had joined in the revolt initially, but they were reconquered and continued as the Spanish Netherlands, also known as Flanders.\n\nIn 1617 the de facto Dutch Republic redeemed the cautionary towns from England, and Viscount Lisle was sent over to formally render them. This transaction was personally advantageous to him. As a former governor of Flushing, he was granted an annuity of \u00a31,200 from the proceeds, and, under the terms of the settlement, his son Robert was given a regiment of English troops in the Dutch service with the rank of colonel.\n\nWhen father and son set out, it had been agreed that Robert would stay on and travel through France and Germany to improve his languages. Although he had already taken the customary continental tour of the young aristocrat, his family wished to give him every opportunity to prepare himself for a brilliant career in the royal service. Despite all the interest travel offered, the young man seems to have been thinking more of the joys of marriage awaiting him. From France his mother received instructions \"to have a lodging ready for him and his wife against winter,\" and she was reminded of her promise to give them a particular bed. All that summer Robert traveled on the Continent and kept Dorothy informed of his whereabouts and his homecoming plans. Sadly, his letters have been lost. They must have been beautiful, for Robert was a sensitive, well-educated young man and very much in love. \"Other news I cannot learn out of France,\" Lisle wrote his wife in September, \"but such as my daughter and my Lady Lucy brought with them to Penshurst.\" Robert was expected back at the end of September. Dorothy had come to Penshurst with her sister to wait for his return. It is most unlikely that the marriage had been consummated before Robert left. Dorothy was to prove so fecund that had they lived together as man and wife she would undoubtedly have been pregnant already. As it was, when Dorothy visited Penshurst with her sister, Lucy, in September 1616, she was still a carefree, laughing girl.\n\nPenshurst looks now much as the sisters saw it in the autumn of 1616. In a vast rambling manor house of old-gold stone, the fourteenth-century great hall is still intact and the paneled long gallery has been restored to its original proportions. But the garden wall is just a token of the crenellated curtain wall that enclosed the house and gardens and the famous orchards in the seventeenth century. A Tudor village with its ancient church nestles nearby, and both village and great house gaze eternally on the sweep of the Kentish weald. This smiling countryside made a perfect setting for the lovely Percy sisters. Their gaiety and charm delighted their hosts. Back on duty at Oatlands, the Queen's country house, Viscount Lisle wrote his wife: \"I trust they continue merry there still, which I was very glad to see, and I pray you tell them.\" With what regret he tore himself away from the company of the adorable sisters is evident: \"I take it exceeding kindly that they should like so well of their entertainment, and was very sorry that I was forced to come so soon from them.\"\n\nIn October Robert at last returned from abroad and Dorothy's married life finally began. Although she was passionately in love with her new husband, she found that marriage brought many problems.\n\n# [_three_ \nLUCY'S CHOICE](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c03a)\n\nDURING THE MONTHS of Dorothy's courtship and marriage, Lady Northumberland began taking Lucy to the King's palace of Whitehall. She was an immediate success at court. While Dorothy was a handsome young woman, the younger sister had grown into a beauty Her oval face with its ivory complexion and perfect features was like an exquisite cameo framed by lustrous, wavy brown hair. She had a voluptuous figure and carried herself like a princess. The consensus of the courtiers was that she was \"the most lovely damsel in all England.\" Her gaiety and girlish laughter added to the charm of her person. Basking in admiration, Lucy was utterly dazzled by court life: the masques and feasts, the pomp and ceremony, the gay bravado of the tiltyard, the swooping players on the tennis court, the gambling until the candles guttered.\n\nWhitehall, located in London itself, was the principal royal residence and the official court of English monarchs since Henry VIII. A sprawling complex on the Thames, it housed fifteen hundred servants of the King, ranging from the Lord Chamberlain, who was in charge of the palace, down to the rat catcher and the chimney sweep.\n\nThe King's private apartments, known as the Bedchamber, and the adjacent state apartments occupied the upper floor of the palace. In the Presence Chamber, James, seated on his throne, received arriving and departing ambassadors or gave audiences on special occasions. Next to this room was the Privy Chamber, always filled with courtiers waiting for the King or a privy councillor to appear. For less official meetings with foreign envoys and for reports from his officers of state, James used the Withdrawing Room. The gallery, stretching the length of the facade, served as the meeting place for the court: here, officials, courtiers, and suitors paced up and down, holding confidential discussions, gawked at by ordinary folk, for Whitehall was open to the King's subjects.\n\nAs well as the Great Hall, dating back to Henry VIII, a Banqueting House had been built in 1606 for masques and other royal entertainments. Indeed, the palace provided a veritable recreation center for the courtiers, with the tiltyard, tennis courts, bowling alleys, a cockpit, and the Privy Garden for strolling in good weather. For religious ceremonies and great events, such as weddings and funerals, there was the Chapel Royal. Entrance to the royal compound was either by Whitehall Stairs or through the gatehouse on King Street.\n\nScattered around the palace grounds were the lodgings of the officials of the royal Household\u2014the Lord Chamberlain, the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, the Grooms of the Privy and Presence Chambers, the Master of the Horse. As well, there were cubbyholes for the carvers, cupbearers, sewers, Clerks of the Closet, pages, and messengers. Owing to James's laxity and extravagance, their numbers\u2014and their expensive upkeep\u2014had more than doubled since Elizabeth's day.\n\nCommodious lodgings were also provided for the great officers of state: the Lord Treasurer, the Lord Chancellor and Keeper of the Great Seal, the Lord Privy Seal, the Lord High Admiral, the two Secretaries of State, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Some of these officials conducted their business at Whitehall, but the law courts, including the Star Chamber that derived its name from the gilt stars on its ceiling, were located at Westminster Hall, where Parliament sat, a short distance by water from Whitehall.\n\nLucy was a quick study in the ways of the court. She saw that it was the Howards\u2014great magnates like her family\u2014who held the important posts. Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, had become Lord Treasurer upon the Earl of Salisbury's death, and Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham, was the Lord High Admiral. The Howard family had recently consolidated its position by marrying the Earl of Suffolk's daughter, Frances Howard, to the King's favorite, the Earl of Somerset.\n\nSuitors flocked around Somerset and the Howards. For a price these grandees would use their influence with the King to obtain grants of land, patents, or other rewards for their clients. Like all royal officials, they traded in offices shamelessly, selling them to the highest bidder. Indeed, bribery greased the wheels of the administrative machine. Salaries and fees for service were a mere pittance; officials received their payment in the form of \"gifts\" or bribes. Lucy would see courtiers bearing massive silver salvers, entering the apartments of the officers of state or the household. Less flagrant were the cash gifts that passed from hand to hand. Some officials used their wives and daughters as surrogates to receive the money Lucy was never approached because her imprisoned father could not oblige anyone. Lucy took the general corruption at court for granted. At church on Sunday, she would hear the minister preach respect for the nobility and unquestioning allegiance to the King.\n\nAlthough Lucy took great interest in the court's favorite game of who's in and who's out, she cared not a whit about the truly important issue of the reign: King James's growing conflict with Parliament. James met little opposition from the House of Lords, but the House of Commons no longer accepted without question the divine right of kings to rule. These knights and squires\u2014sheriffs or justices of the peace in their own counties\u2014came to Westminster as the elected representatives of their constituents. Their dogged defense of their \"privileges\" clashed with the King's insistence on the royal \"prerogative.\" Both antagonists had their strengths. Parliament could not meet unless called by the King, but, compelled by his penury, James had to call it. Unless Parliament passed votes of supply for him, he did not have the right to levy taxes.\n\nIn the distant past, a king of England had been able to be financially independent. Enough income had been generated from customs duties (also known as tonnage and poundage, and granted by Parliament for an entire reign), rent or sale of royal lands, wardship, occasional \"gifts\" from the nobility, and the fees from the Crown's feudal rights to pay for the upkeep of the household, the state departments, and the navy. There was no government payroll to speak of because civil servants supplemented their nominal salaries by accepting bribes. But the traditional sources of revenue were totally inadequate by Queen Elizabeth's time. The war with Spain had been extremely costly To raise money by taxation was essential. Thus the monarch had to go, cap in hand, to Parliament annually for permission to lew taxes. Elizabeth had used her charm and awe of her person to extract enough votes of supply to keep her government functioning. James, on the other hand, was inept in handling the members of Parliament. Increasingly, they would not grant supply before the King satisfied their grievances, the most complained of being his wholesale granting of monopolies to favored courtiers. The last parliament, in 1614, had ended with rancor on both sides.\n\nLucy had expected the heir to the throne, Prince Charles\u2014a shy youth of her own age\u2014to be surrounded by servile flatterers; instead, it was George Villiers, King James's new favorite, who was fawned over by all the courtiers. Villiers, a younger son of a Leicestershire knight, was born without money or prospects; however, he was stunningly good-looking and his widowed mother groomed him for a career at court as a page. With this modest ambition in mind, she stretched her finances to send him to France for \"finishing\" at a French academy. At an academy at Blois in the Loire country he learned to sit a horse well, dance and fence gracefully, and speak a passable French. George was to far exceed his mother's fond hope. On his return to England in 1614, he was taken up by a cabal determined to oust the current favorite, the Earl of Somerset. Knowing the King's weakness for beautiful young men, this cabal, headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, paraded Villiers before the monarch like a prize stallion. James was immediately smitten, and Villiers's rise began. When Lucy started coming to court in 1614, he had just been knighted and made a Gentleman of the Bedchamber. After Somerset's fall some months later, the King appointed Villiers his Master of the Horse and named him to the elite Order of the Garter. In August 1616, he made him a baron and a viscount, with a gift of \u00a380,000 in land to boot. Then in January 1617, the doting King created his new favorite Earl of Buckingham.\n\nKing James was very often away from court, either hunting or on a progress, but when he was at Whitehall, Lucy would see him leaning on young Villiers, pawing him and kissing him on the mouth. Homosexuality, or more precisely bisexuality, was common at James's court. Not only the King but many of the married lords had their minions\u2014pretty young men who warmed their beds, or more, for them. The Lord Keeper, Sir Francis Bacon, had a stable of such favorites, and his brother, Sir Anthony, who worked for English intelligence abroad, had been charged with sodomy in France. Lucy would also have heard whispers about the passionate \"friendships\" among the Essex set that had clustered around her late uncle.\n\nWhitehall saw something of Queen Anne. James's consort appeared dutifully with him at all formal events, but, sadly, her Christmas masques were a thing of the past. Since her son's death in 1612, she had given up masquing though not the farthingale.\n\nHANDSOME YOUNG MEN from the best families were swarming around beautiful Lucy Percy, but before long she was swept off her feet by a dandy and royal favorite, Sir James Hay, a recent widower more than twice her age, with two children. A Scot from a modest family of gentry, James had come to England with King James in 1603. Unique among the King's rowdy early favorites, he was sophisticated and polished, the result of several years traveling in Italy and France. The King heaped grants upon him, and James lived extravagantly on the royal bounty. In 1613 he was given the office of Master of the Wardrobe. As this entailed purchasing supplies for the royal household, the emoluments were far in excess of the token salary A fine house on Upper Thames Street in the Blackfriars neighborhood went along with this lucrative office, and the Master's entertainments there were famous for their showy display At court Sir James was always on hand to dance in a masque or run at the ring.\n\nA magnifico in his dress, for a ceremonial visit to the French court in the summer of 1616 he ordered twenty suits for a stay of twenty days. This entailed weeks of work for his tailor. A suit consisted of doublet and hose\u2014a close-fitting vest with a short skirt of overlapping tabs and above-the-knee breeches with a cloak to be thrown casually over the shoulders. The long stockings were held up by sewing them to the breeches or by strings that went under the doublet and were tied to loops at the waist. A pleated ruff circled the straight collar of the doublet\u2014instead of an uncomfortable metal frame, the ruff was now stiffened by the new invention of starch. A hat with a plume and shoes adorned with large rosettes completed the outfit. Just after James's tailor had made up all the suits, news came out of France that fashions had changed. This had put James \"out of countenance,\" Chamberlain gleefully wrote Carleton, because he always had to be \"set out after the last edition.\"\n\nPhysically, Sir James Hay was slim and of middle height. His features were finely drawn and aristocratic, but pouches under his eyes and a sagging of the cheeks spoke eloquently of too much food, drink and keeping late hours. By the time Lucy met him, he was no longer as young as he liked to appear, and the odd attack of gout foreshadowed middle age.\n\nHay's clique was the other free-spending, high-living courtiers, notably his late wife's cousin Sir George Goring and Lucy's first cousin Sir Henry Rich. Both looked up to Hay as a greater favorite than themselves. Goring had soldiered in the Low Countries, fighting for the Dutch in their revolt against their Spanish overlords, and he retained the bluff manner of the military caste. An inveterate partygoer, he arranged tasteless foolery and practical jokes to amuse the monarch\u2014he and two other jokesters were known around the court as the King's \"chief and master fools.\"\n\nSir Henry Rich was some seven or eight years younger than his cronies. He was the second son of the Earl of Warwick, and his mother was that aunt of the sisters whose mother had abandoned her children to run away with her lover. Rich had also done a stint in the Dutch wars but was far better suited to the court than to the camp. Although a fop, he was extremely good-looking and, gradually, by his friend James's example, was acquiring savoir faire and courtly graces. While Goring was good-natured and took the world as it came, Rich had a hair-trigger temper and was quick to call out other nobles to the dueling field. He had married Betty Cope, the colorless daughter of one of the Earl of Salisbury's right-hand men, only to have the all-powerful Lord Treasurer die, taking with him the worldly influence of his new father-in-law. However, Rich was compensated for bestowing his handsome person on Betty Cope when his father-in-law died in 1614 and a fine country estate at Kensington passed into his hands. Rich neglected \"his poor Lady\" shamefully and had one affair after another. Hay was much superior to his two sidemen. Though reckoned \"a cunning observer\" and a \"bell-wether of court favour,\" he was invariably courteous and full of civilities to everyone.\n\nIn spite of his sophistication, his age, and much experience with women, Sir James Hay fell madly in love with Lucy Percy. As only an older lover could be, he was totally bemused by this enchanting girl. At the same time, it is easy to see what attracted Lucy to him. In her eyes he personified the exciting court life. His lavishness, his gorgeous clothes, his prowess at sports impressed her still-adolescent mind. In her fancy she saw him as the godlike Jove of the masques. (And\u2014no small thing in an age that set little store by personal hygiene\u2014he was sweet-smelling. The royal physician, Theodore de Mayerne, has left a list in Latin of the \"scents and emollients\" he prepared for Hay. These included hair powder, toothpaste, mouthwash, and a lotion to keep the hands soft and white. Lucy would not yet have benefited from the lozenges he took \"to keep the breath sweet in the bedchamber.\") James was a past master of the flattering phrase, and for a young girl his exquisite compliments were heady stuff indeed. Nor were they without effect on her mother. Encouraged by the Countess of Bedford (who floated like a fairy godmother over this whole affair), Lady Northumberland allowed Hay to pay court to her younger daughter. Before long Lucy and James reached an understanding.\n\nWhile the sisters were disposing of themselves without their father's knowledge, the Earl began to show a sudden interest in them. Deciding that they were now ready for marriage, he determined to take charge and arrange suitable matches. Unlike Viscount Lisle, who was primarily interested in money, Northumberland was looking for powerful alliances to dispel the cloud hovering over the House of Percy. Regarding his lovely daughters through a haze of tobacco smoke, he had no doubt that, with a sweetening of generous dowries, they could make the most brilliant marriages in England. To bring them under his influence, he commanded them to visit him daily.\n\nFor an entirely different reason their mother was also urging them to visit him. In the spring of 1616, the Tower had received two more illustrious residents, the Earl and Countess of Somerset. Two years earlier, after her divorce from the third Earl of Essex (whom she had publicly and falsely branded as impotent), Frances Howard had married the favorite Somerset in the King's presence and-with his enthusiastic consent. However, the couple did not enjoy their felicity long. Within little more than a year they were tried and found guilty of murdering Sir Thomas Overbury, a former friend of Somerset's. Whereas a poor man in Stuart England was hanged for stealing a sheep, the Somersets were merely established in a comfortable suite in the Tower. From the day this Jezebel arrived, the Earl of Northumberland was totally spellbound. Casting aside his usual irascibility, he set out to make himself \"friendly and sociable.\" Visitors to the Tower observed him strolling in the garden with the Somersets, dancing attendance upon the young, pretty countess. Wounded by her husband's notorious infatuation with Lady Somerset, Lady Northumberland stopped her visits to the Tower, sending her daughters in her place.\n\nBY FEBRUARY 1617, both sisters realized that they must inform their father of their respective matches. Dorothy was pregnant, and Lucy had contracted herself: there was no time for delay. The prospect of such an interview would have terrified most young women, but Lucy and Dorothy were not the ordinary dutiful daughters. Conditioned by their upbringing to be independent, they were further fortified by their united front. Since the spankings of childhood, the sisters had stood together against all threats. Now grown up, they were mutually supportive, come what may. Their father's long imprisonment had both removed paternal authority and created problems for them\u2014witness Viscount Lisle's initial lack of enthusiasm for Dorothy as a daughter-in-law. Beleaguered by the world, the sisters had learned to face it shoulder to shoulder.\n\nWhen they went to the Tower to break the news to their father of Dorothy's marriage and Lucy's betrothal, he was sitting at his usual place at his writing table, wearing a black velvet gown trimmed with gold braid and wreathed in smoke from his habitual pipe. Other than offering them some sweetmeats\u2014the Earl had a very special Genoa paste of quinces, spices, and sugar that he kept in a little cupboard\u2014he showed little interest in his daughters' arrival. His thoughts were clearly on the tubular instrument with glass ends that he was fingering\u2014it was called a telescope, he told the girls, and looking through it one could see the stars clearly.\n\nDorothy spoke up first and told her father of her secret marriage. Despite the deceit of his womenfolk and his dislike of the Sidneys, he took it calmly. The Sidneys, after all, were members of the peerage, and Robert, with his bookish habits, promised to be a congenial companion for his father-in-law. The Earl was sufficiently brought round to provide a dowry of \u00a36,000 for Dorothy. Though not extraordinary, it was somewhat more than the \u00a33,000 to \u00a35,000 with which most aristocrats endowed their daughters.\n\nIf Northumberland grudgingly accepted Dorothy's choice, he was adamantly opposed to Lucy's. He hated the courtiers who had come from Scotland with the King, displacing the old English families. He was a Percy, he stormed, \"and could not endure that his daughter should dance any Scottish jigs.\" He had no use for Sir James Hay in particular. It is not difficult to understand why James's lifestyle appeared utterly frivolous to the serious-minded earl and a special affront to him in his captivity Moreover, James had no land but lived on royal gifts and offices. Not only that, but as the son of an obscure Scottish knight he had no lineage, according to the standards of a Percy Hoping to dissuade Lucy from marrying this man of whom he was so contemptuous, Northumberland promised her an extraordinary dowry of \u00a320,000 if she would let him choose a husband for her.\n\nAngrily, she told her father that nothing he could offer would make her give up James. He was her chosen husband and she would have no other. Taken aback by his daughter's spirited response, the Earl said no more that day. After Lucy flounced out, the Earl began to plot a diabolical scheme.\n\nOn the sisters' next visit to the Tower, they found their father extraordinarily benign. He kissed them both and acted quite out of character in a new role of loving father. After they had been there some time, he dismissed Dorothy, telling her to go home to her husband and to send Lucy's maids to attend her, \"for that he meant not to part with her but that she should keep him company.\" Lucy suddenly found herself a prisoner in the Tower for the crime of choosing her own husband.\n\nLucy's restraint could not have come at a worse time. That evening James was throwing a feast the likes of which London had seldom seen, ostensibly for a visiting French diplomat. But the real guest of honor was the host's intended bride. This was subtly broadcast by his choice of the Countess of Bedford as mistress of the feast; Lady Bedford, as all the court knew, was managing his campaign to marry Lucy Percy. When Dorothy arrived with the news that Lucy was confined in the Tower, James was distraught. The supper and masque (in which Goring and Rich were the principal dancers) cost several thousand pounds, and without Lucy it was all gall and wormwood to him.\n\nThe great romance was the talk of the court. When the King set out on a progress to Scotland in April, James forsook his duty and stayed behind, \"his vain hope in obtaining my Lord of North umber land s daughter being the chief cause of his stay,\" gossiped one courtier. The same source observed that Hay \"prosecutes\" his suit \"with all violence.\" He besieged Northumberland with letters and visits from his friends. But while the Earl remained deaf to these appeals, the Tower failed to keep his daughter from her ardent suitor. Unknown to the Earl, Lucy and James were meeting secretly with the help of Lady Somerset. Encouraged by her father to visit this lady of whom he was so enamored, Lucy was soon running in and out of her apartment on a familiar basis. At the same time, James was often at the Tower, carrying royal messages to the Somersets. It was an easy matter for the sly Lady Somerset to arrange a rendezvous for the lovers; her purpose in doing so may have been to oblige an influential courtier or it may simply have been mischief making.\n\nWhen Northumberland discovered what had been going on under his nose, he threw Lucy out unceremoniously He ranted to all around him that his ungrateful daughter had betrayed him and that she and her Scot would not see a penny of his money His wrath was so monumental that, for once, Lady Northumberland was intimidated, and when Lucy came to her at Essex House, she was afraid to take her in. Not so Dorothy, who was staying at the London town house of Robert's cousin. She welcomed her sister with open arms. Lucy's sojourn at Baynard's Castle in 1617 marks the beginning of a recurring pattern: Dorothy providing a refuge for Lucy to recover her health or spirits, and Lucy, for her part, bringing to her sister's uneventful life all the excitement and color of her own. Though they were as close as ever, their relationship was changing to one where Lucy was the star and Dorothy the sympathetic audience. Some weeks later, when Sir James could no longer put off going to Scotland, it was decided that Lucy would move into his house at Blackfriars during his absence. To make sure that she lacked for nothing, he gave her \u00a32,000. Another theme was emerging to change the familiar sisterly equality: Lucy luxuriating in money, Dorothy having difficulty making ends meet.\n\nBy the time of the summer exodus from London, Lady Northumberland had recovered her spirit and took Lucy with her to Syon House. In July Sir James posted back from Scotland at record-breaking speed. Nevertheless, while the marriage was a foregone conclusion, it did not take place immediately King James was still in Scotland, and as he had promised to give the bride away, they had to wait for his return. \"Lord Hay thinks long till the King's coming that he may consummate his marriage,\" Chamberlain wrote Carleton. Waiting for the King was only part of the reason for the delay. Lucy's suitor was still trying to win over Northumberland and some, at least, of the \u00a320,000 dowry. His chances were poor, for the Earl was very bitter. Not only was he angry at his disobedient daughter, but he was deeply hurt by Lady Somerset's perfidy. He was aware that he had made a fool of himself over her, and his anger was mixed with shame. Proud Northumberland was in no mood for conciliation. To be near Lucy, James rented Sir Francis Darcy's house at Brentford. From there he visited Syon House every day and was \"wonderful observant and obsequious\" to both mother and daughter. At least twice a week, he feasted them at his rented house at such expense that Lady Northumberland claimed she could not hope to reciprocate; poor James had to interrupt his daily visit to return to his own house for dinner. The delightful summer afternoons usually found the trio driving in his coach and six, and so Viscount Lisle encountered them one day on his way to Oatlands.\n\nMEANWHILE, AT PENSHURST, Dorothy was getting ready for the birth of her first child\u2014\"I hope you and the greate belly and all the rest came well to Penshurst,\" her jovial father-in-law wrote his wife in July Robert was abroad on summer maneuvers with his regiment, and Dorothy was lonely and bored, despite her mother-in-law's daily lessons in housewifery and the great number of visitors. How happy she was when Lucy arrived with their cousin Isabella Rich. Isabella was several years older than the sisters. A short childhood marriage had given her the freedom of a widow, and she was pleasure-loving and worldly. The house party was further enlivened when Viscount Lisle arrived with James. The two men were old friends and associates, bound together in service to the royal family. It would not have been James's first visit to Penshurst. Seeing the sisters together at Penshurst, James understood how deep the attachment was between them. To entrench himself still further in Lucy's affections, he suggested that Dorothy come to his house at the Wardrobe to have her baby, assuring everyone that he and Lucy would be married by that time. On their return to Syon House, Lady Northumberland was enlisted in the scheme. She wrote Dorothy that she liked the idea of her lying-in at the Wardrobe since \"my Lord was making so earnest request for it.\" But James's plan had to be discarded when Dorothy entered her final month of pregnancy and he and Lucy were still not wed. From London Lisle wrote anxiously to his wife: \"My daughter's time draws on and some place for her must be thought of.\"\n\nLying-in was no simple matter for a noblewoman. Nor was it cheap, what with the childbed linen and elaborate hangings for the bedchamber, to say nothing of providing a fine and impressive bed. Lisle was clearly afraid of the expense, and Dorothy herself wished to be with her mother. Thus in late August, very pregnant, she set out for Syon House accompanied by her mother-in-law. Lucy and her somewhat discomfited fianc\u00e9 met them halfway at Bromley in Kent. In September, Dorothy gave birth to a girl. Robert was back from the Continent and by her side. A week later the peripatetic grandfather stopped in at Syon and reported to his wife that he found the new mother well \"and the little one also, who is a very pretty one, God bless it.\" The baby was christened Dorothy after her mother and her maternal grandmother.\n\nLisle also reported that James and Lucy's wedding date remained uncertain. Actually, the famous love match had been put off so long that the gossips were at work. \"For so hot love,\" wrote Chamberlain, \"they have a great deal of patience, but the world suspects it begins to cool and if matters go not forward, we might chance hear no further of it.\" Aside from Chamberlain's remark, there is no evidence that James or Lucy wished to break the engagement. Certainly there is no hint of such a thing in Lisle's letters to his wife. From his correspondence it appears that the couple were still trying to get Lucy's father's consent and, with it, a dowry. On October 25, Lisle was able to inform his wife that James had seen Northumberland and finally obtained his consent. The wedding was now expected to take place \"very speedily.\" Nothing was said about a dowry. Northumberland had evidently washed his hands of the whole affair.\n\nAt the end of September, when King James returned from Scotland, there was no further need to wait.\n\nOn November 6,1617, Lucy Percy and Sir James Hay were married at the Wardrobe, the groom's fine house at Blackfriars, in the presence of King James, the Prince of Wales, the favorite, Buckingham, and a host of lords and ladies. King James gave the bride away\u2014a signal honor bestowed upon the couple. All those at the ceremony exclaimed that the new Lady Hay was the most radiant and beautiful bride they had ever seen. After the ceremony the groom provided a splendid wedding supper. King James was in a convivial mood, struggling to his feet to toast the bride and groom a dozen times and downing one cup of wine after another until he was plainly inebriated. During the evening he kept wandering into the bedchamber to chatter with Lucy's handsome gentlewoman, Mistress Washington. Lucy charmed King James. One wedding guest has left a description of the bride kneeling beside the seated king while they toasted each other's health. The only thing that dampened Lucy's happiness was that neither her sister nor her mother was at the wedding: Dorothy was resting after giving birth, and Lady Northumberland did not want to vex her irate husband any further over this marriage that he so disliked.\n\nImmediately after the wedding, Lucy's training for court life began. It was obviously James's desire to shape his young wife into a courtier in his own image. To dress fashionably, entertain opulently, amuse the royal couple: these were the requirements of a favorite at the Jacobean court. During the hectic days leading up to the Christmas festivities, Lucy organized a masque of ladies (at their own expense) to entertain the King and Queen on Twelfth Night. Dorothy, slim once more, was among the masquers, as were Isabella Rich, the wives of Sir Henry and Sir Robert Rich, and Dorothy's sister-in-law, Barbara Sidney Lucy was to play the stellar role as Queen of the Amazons. The ladies practiced every day and were \"almost perfect\" when the royal couple put a stop to the masque. The King had had his fill of Amazons. He was so disgusted with strong-minded women who were rocking the court with scandal that the masque's subject matter alone was enough to disqualify it. But Queen Anne felt even more strongly, regarding it as pure presumption for young Lady Hay to appropriate her own discontinued Christmas masque. This initial setback seems to have discouraged Lucy from similar endeavors; henceforth masque playing was never one of her favorite pastimes.\n\nJames had no difficulty turning Lucy into a clotheshorse like himself. As soberly dressed Puritans were never tired of declaiming, feminine interest in fashion was excessive, and young Lady Hay was no exception. During Lent in 1618, it was remarked that she wore a new dress to church every Sunday Like the rest of the upper class, Lucy had her own tailor who came to the house with his fabrics and patterns. Her gowns would have had a very daring d\u00e9collet\u00e9, a tightly laced bodice, and, we must assume, the farthingale. Queen Anne's undeviating devotion to that table like skirt continued until her death in 1619, and Lucy was under instructions from her husband to dress in a manner to please the Queen. In these years, if a lady went out without the farthingale it was thought worthy of mention. The Countess of Dorset noted in her diary on November 2,1617, that she went to church, to a dinner party, and to court in a green damask gown \"without a farthingale.\" Before long, Lucy Hay would set the style rather than follow it.\n\nWe can be sure that the fashionable Hays enjoyed many a shopping spree. There was no limit to the luxury goods available at the two Exchanges: muffs of Russian sable, Persian silks, Indian jewels, richly colored cloth from Venice, lace from France, leather gloves from Spain. Sir James Hay was an incorrigible spendthrift. His contemporary the historian Lord Clarendon said of him (in a coarse idiom of the day) that \"he had no Bowels in the Point of running in Debt or borrowing all he could.\" To bedeck his beautiful young wife, money would have been no object with Hay Perhaps Lucy's valuable pearl necklace, which was to play a part in the English Civil War, was a honeymoon gift.\n\nBy spring Lucy knew that she was pregnant. James was delighted and began to think dynastically. Although he had a son and a daughter by his first marriage, he took little interest in them. In the early days of his second marriage, they lived with their maternal grandparents. Now that he was about to have a child by Lucy, he decided to invest in land and establish a country seat. He entered into negotiations to purchase a large landed estate in Essex called Copt Hall. Ultimately the owner refused to sell. In the meantime, however, James had taken over the lease of Essex House from Lady Northumberland and was spending a fortune renovating the old mansion and improving the garden.\n\nThe fact was that James needed a town house because he was giving up the Wardrobe and, with it, the luxurious dwelling on Upper Thames Street that he had occupied free of charge. Why did he resign the office? Though the King paid him the large sum of \u00a320,000 for surrendering it, the money would not have compensated him for the handsome kickbacks from suppliers that went with the post. His own explanation was that his lack of experience in purchasing might have bred corrupt practices among the officers under him. Many suspected that it was Sir James himself who could not stand an investigation.\n\nReforms were under way. Lionel Cranfield, a City merchant co-opted by the King and Buckingham, was applying businesslike methods to combat the waste and corruption in government departments, both in and out of the royal household. Cranfield's reforms had already brought down the Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Suffolk. James probably feared the same fate. This was the opinion of various astute court watchers like the Venetian ambassador. That James exploited his office shamelessly is indicated by a petition to Parliament from tradesmen who had done work for the palace. The petitioners charged that Lord Hay had defrauded them of their payments. Although the morality of public office sanctioned such practices as taking bribes, using cash balances for private money lending, and selling inferior offices, to put money in one's pocket in lieu of paying poor tradesmen was not permissible. That James saw the light in time undoubtedly owed something to Cranfield's friendly advice. With a further payment of \u00a39,000 or \u00a310,000 to James, Cranfield himself took over the Wardrobe.\n\nThis same summer saw James elevated to the peerage as Viscount Doncaster, an honor that may have been part payment for relinquishing the Wardrobe. By coincidence, Dorothy's husband, Robert Sidney, became a viscount at the same time, the result of his father becoming the Earl of Leicester. As a reward for all his shuttling between Oatlands and London, Queen Anne had prevailed upon the King to revive the earldom and to bestow it upon her loyal, if bibulous, servant. Thus Lucy and Dorothy became viscountesses at the same time.\n\nDorothy's husband may have become Viscount Lisle, but the couple could not compete financially with Viscount Doncaster. In 1618 the Earl of Leicester settled \u00a3200 annually upon the young couple, derived from rents in Sussex and Kent; he promised to raise the amount to \u00a3400 when Robert gave up his regiment. This was undoubtedly the best he could do. The only way Robert and Dorothy could subsist at all on their niggardly income was by living with his parents. In the summer they stayed at Penshurst. During the winter, then becoming the social season in London, they lived at Baynard's Castle. This venerable mansion belonged not to the Earl of Leicester but to his sister, the Dowager Countess of Pembroke, and her stepson, the present Earl of Pembroke, who was a boon companion and favorite drinking partner of Leicester's. So it was as perennial house-guests that Dorothy and Robert wintered in London.\n\nBy the time of her confinement, Lucy at the age of nineteen was the Viscountess Doncaster and the mistress of her childhood home, Essex House. Toward the end of November 1618, she gave birth to a son. A week later the baby was christened with nobody present but his godparents: the new Viscount Lisle, Isabella Rich (who had just remarried), and Doncaster's cousin Sir George Hay. The private christening surprised the court; it was not the Doncasters' style at all. \"The World thinks it a great change,\" observed Chamberlain, \"and contrary to both their brave spirits, to huddle up things thus in secret, but it seems they grow wise, and see that such a place as the Wardrobe is not easily found again.\" Despite Chamberlain's usually well-informed opinion, belt-tightening had nothing to do with it. The truth was that the infant was sickly and not expected to live. Two weeks after the christening it was dead, following a fit of convulsions.\n\nInfant mortality was so taken for granted that Lucy probably regarded the loss as simply a disappointment, to be quickly remedied by another pregnancy. She was young and healthy. She could be expected to follow her sister's example\u2014Dorothy was expecting her second child imminently. The nobility did not practice birth control, and since the women of Dorothy's and Lucy's class did not nurse their babies, a birth every twelve or thirteen months was the norm. Families of a dozen children (of which perhaps three would grow to adulthood) were common. Although inept deliveries and childbed fever decimated the ranks of new mothers, such was the social pressure that women entered upon the annual contest with death eagerly and proudly.\n\nIn mid-January 1619, there was \"much joy\" at Baynard's Castle when Dorothy gave birth to a son. She had an easy delivery and was feeling well; everyone was congratulating her for having produced \"a brave boy\" for her husband. But the rejoicing among the family turned to grief a few days later when Dorothy took sick with smallpox. Fear of this disease hung over all classes, \"for it was very common among great ladies as inferior ones.\" It was particularly dreaded by upper-class women because good looks were so important to them. At the same time as Dorothy was struck by smallpox, another victim was Isabella Rich's new bridegroom, Sir John Smythe, \"and she forgetting her late promise of better or worse in sickness and in health,\" snorted Chamberlain, \"is fled to save her fair skin.\" Dorothy was so ill that her life was despaired of, yet she managed to survive and so did the infant who, in due course, was christened Philip after his famous great-uncle, the poet-soldier Sir Philip Sidney.\n\nBoth sisters had suffered and worried about each other's suffering: trouble had only brought them closer together. But unfortunately a coolness had developed between their husbands. For some time, Lisle had not visited the other's home. Lisle complained of Doncaster treating him with neglect or coldly with much ceremony, as if he were a stranger. \"I often asked him what was the reason for his strangeness towards me,\" Lisle would later say. The likely reason is that Doncaster was resentful and jealous of Lisle because of their father-in-law's obvious preference for him. On Lisle's part there was bound to be jealousy when Doncaster spent ten times Lisle's annual income on a single banquet. Moreover, Lisle resented Doncaster's failure to help him get royal patronage. Eager to give up his army commission in the Low Countries, he could not do so until he had some other employment. What particularly galled him was that his influential brother-in-law could so easily have helped him if he chose.\n\nIN JANUARY 1619, King James appointed Doncaster to undertake a very sensitive embassy involving the King's daughter and her husband, the Elector Palatine. Since the end of the religious wars in the sixteenth century and the truce between the Dutch states and Spain, a shaky peace had prevailed in Europe. Under the august title of the Holy Roman Empire, the Austrian Hapsburgs ruled most of central Europe, including Bohemia. In 1619 the Bohemian Protestant majority rejected the Emperor's appointed king, Ferdinand of Styria, threw the imperial envoys out of the windows of Prague Castle, and offered the crown of Bohemia to the Elector Palatine, James's son-in-law, Frederick. From Vienna, the Emperor denounced the action of the Bohemians as a rebellion against his authority. If the Elector Palatine accepted the Bohemian crown, it could lead to war with the imperial power. Moreover, if the Union of Protestant Princes supported the Elector Palatine, the league of Catholic princes and bishops would probably support the Emperor, and Germany would erupt in flames. The domino effect did not stop there. The Spanish kings were Hapsburgs, and Philip III would no doubt take the side of his imperial cousin the Holy Roman Emperor.\n\nJames hated war; he could not afford it, and he had no stomach for it. He reveled in his self-bestowed title of Peacemaker of Christendom. One of his first acts on coming to England had been to sign a peace treaty with Spain. Indeed, his foreign policy was based on good relations with Spain, and his dynastic plan was to marry Prince Charles to a Spanish infanta. Now, the nice boy whom he had come to like so much during his six months' stay in England, and to whom he had given his daughter, was threatening to shatter the peace of Europe and possibly drag his father-in-law into war with Spain. Doncaster was being sent to mediate the dispute between Frederick and the Emperor's designated King of Bohemia, Ferdinand.\n\nNotwithstanding the strained relations between them, Doncaster invited Lisle, as well as another brother-in-law, young Algernon Percy, to travel with his suite to Germany. But Doncaster's departure was delayed by the death of Queen Anne. Lisle and Algernon went ahead to do some traveling before Lisle had to go to Holland to take his regiment on summer maneuvers.\n\nThe Queen's death was not unexpected. She had been lying ill all winter at Hampton Court with what her physicians, for want of a better diagnosis, called dropsy. Three times a week Kingjames visited her from London until he himself became ill with an attack of \"the stone\" (gallstones). On March 2,1619, the Queen passed away. She had not believed that she was dying and had refused to make a will. At the last moment, she made an oral will, leaving everything to Prince Charles. She had intended a casket of jewels for her daughter, Princess Elizabeth, but it was filched by her closest personal servant, Danish Anna.\n\nLike a royal marriage, a royal funeral required much planning. It was not until May that the corpse was transported by water to Denmark House, where it lay in state until the thirteenth of the month, when the burial took place. The King did not attend the funeral. Although he had recovered from the stone, his legs were so weak that he had to be carried in a chair. James remained at Theobalds palace in Hertfordshire, and many of the courtiers judged it more rewarding to be with a live king than a dead queen, and they too missed the funeral.\n\nRigid rules of protocol determined the order of the cort\u00e8ge that accompanied the coffin from Denmark House to Westminster Abbey, where the Queen was to be buried. Leading the procession were a phalanx of barons, bishops, eldest sons, viscounts, earls, the Lord Chancellor, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the late queen's Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Leicester. Prince Charles walked directly in front of the coffin that was borne by eight earls and marquesses. (Buckingham was at Theobalds with the King and had another peer stand in for him as pallbearer.)\n\nNext came the chief mourner, the Countess of Arundel, whose train was carried by the Countesses of Derby and Sussex. The choice of trainbearers had been the subject of gossip in the weeks before the funeral. It seemed that Lady Northumberland and Lady Shrewsbury had been asked first but had refused the honor, saying they would not stoop to bear the train of a woman of their own rank.\n\nLady Northumberland's daughters, however, accepted the invitation to take part in the cort\u00e8ge. Dorothy and Lucy were among the second tier of noblewomen following the coffin. (Dorothy's mother-in-law, the Countess of Leicester, and the Countess of Bedford were in the group ahead of them.) Walking with the sisters was their cousin Isabella Smythe. We can imagine the glances (and possibly giggles) the three young women exchanged as they dragged themselves along in the heavy black robes that were issued to the mourners. There may have been some flirting, for each lady had a gentleman to lean upon.\n\nSpectators lining the road thought the ladies made a poor show of it. Chamberlain wrote Carleton that they came \"laggering along, apparelled all alike, tired with the length of the way and the weight of their clothes, every Lady having twelve yards of broad cloth about her and the Countesses, sixteen.\" The whole funeral march, he said, was \"a drawling, tedious sight.\"\n\nTWO WEEKS BEFORE the funeral, Doncaster had finally set out for Germany with twenty-four carriages and his entire entourage of hundreds, including the poet John Donne as chaplain, all clothed in mourning for the late Queen Anne. Before his departure, Doncaster and Lucy had made a great show of their sorrow at being parted. There were \"long cong\u00e9s and leave-takings\" in public. On the day he left, weeping Lucy lamented that she could not live without him for so long; kissing away her tears, Doncaster promised that he would be faithful and would bring her lovely presents from Heidelberg and Vienna. When Doncaster was delayed at the coast by foul weather, it was the talk of the court how his devoted wife followed him to Gravesend and \"would not forsake him\" until he sailed. Waving until the ship was out of sight, Lucy, now a grass widow, journeyed to Syon House.\n\nThat summer Lucy stayed in the country with her mother, her two stepchildren, her gentlewoman, Mistress Washington, and William Woodforde, the family chaplain, whose letters to Doncaster are the source of our information. Lady Doncaster, he wrote, \"received content in nothing more than to hear of you and from you.\" The children were well, he assured their father. Ten-year-old James was working conscientiously on his lessons, but Woodforde hoped the French tutor would arrive soon, because the boy had the bad habit of \"frenchifizing\" English when he did not know the French word. The greatest excitement for the household, Woodforde wrote, was the arrival of Sir Robert Killegrew from Germany with Lord Doncaster's commands for his family. Dorothy was living an identical life at Penshurst, with two babies and an absent husband.\n\nThe tedium of country living was shattered for both sisters in August when their mother took a sudden fever and died at Syon House. Lucy, of course, was with her when it happened and mourned the best of mothers, but we do not hear that her grief was immoderate. Dorothy, on the other hand, went to pieces. She and her mother had always been particularly close. Feeling like a stranger in her mother-in-law's house, Dorothy was inconsolable. \"Lady Lisle is at Penshurst and much bemoans her mother,\" one family friend wrote another. Coming on top of two babies in two years, an almost fatal attack of smallpox, loneliness for her husband, and the boredom of country life, Dorothy found this blow just too much to bear.\n\nThat Dorothy took Lady Northumberland's death to heart was to be expected. But the Earl of Northumberland's excessive grief sur-jrised everyone. All his arrogance, contempt for women, and rivalry with his dead wife dissolved into self-recrimination. He condemned himself for his ingratitude, citing her unceasing efforts to have him Freed. Obviously his unspoken guilt over the Lady Somerset interlude was torturing him. Determined to accord his late wife all honor in death, at least, he planned an impressive funeral for her. The dead woman was floated down the river by barge from Syon House to Petworth House in Sussex, where she was interred with great pomp in the Percy crypt.\n\nONCE FINISHED WITH his regiment's summer maneuvers, Lisle joined Doncaster's embassy for a short time before returning to England. In a dispatch dated July 9,1619, Doncaster informed Secretary of State Sir Robert Naunton that Lisle would explain to him and the King why the mission was taking so long. Indeed, the mission had turned into a fool's journey, with Doncaster chasing up and down the rivers and byways after the elusive King Ferdinand and just missing him. When he finally caught up with Ferdinand, he was treated to a polite but unproductive audience. Apparently, Lisle was in no hurry to get home because Naunton scribbled in the margin of Doncaster's dispatch: \"I have not heard of my Lord Lisle's arrival.\"\n\nMeanwhile, the Bohemian situation had evolved past the point of no return. In the late summer, the Elector Palatine accepted the crown of Bohemia, and he was asking for King James's assistance against the Hapsburgs. Doncaster was all in favor of supporting him. His dispatches left no doubt that it was too late for diplomacy. Prophetically, Chamberlain wrote to Carleton: \"There is now no place left for deliberation, nor for mediation of peace till one side be utterly ruined.\"\n\nOnce back at Penshurst, Lisle found himself unable to alleviate Dorothy's grief over her mother. She longed for her sister's company, so in October they went to stay with Lucy at Syon House. Immediately after Doncaster's return in January 1620, Lisle wrote to him in the hope of healing the breach between them\u2014considering Lisle's habitual reserve, the letter probably did not appear as conciliatory as he intended. Doncaster's answer was, in Lisle's opinion, unsatisfactory Nevertheless, \"desiring only an outward familiarity,\" Lisle began visiting Doncaster's house once more \"because of the love between our wives.\"\n\n# [_four_ \nBUCKINGHAM'S CHARMS](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c04a)\n\nWHEN DONCASTER RETURNED from Germany in the winter of 1620, little did he suspect that George Villiers, now Marquess of Buckingham, had turned his attentions to Lucy.\n\nVilliers's power and physical charms would have made him irresistible to a young woman of twenty-one. He was extraordinarily handsome, with that natural grace that is equally attractive to men as well as women. A Gentleman of the Bedchamber noted that Buckingham's \"hands and face seemed especially effeminate and curious.\" The celibate Bishop William Laud of London confessed in his diary that he dreamed Buckingham got into bed with him. Whether dancing or riding at the ring or playing tennis, he was an Adonis in motion. King James adored him\u2014a combination of homosexual yearning and paternal pride. When first introduced at court in 1614, George Villiers had been the most agreeable of young men, radiating good humor and making himself generally well-liked. Six years later he was still as charming when he chose to be, but he had become increasingly arrogant and overbearing.\n\nNo longer simply the favorite, he had become James's chief minister and the Lord High Admiral, though he knew nothing of the sea. Most important, he was the sole channel of patronage. Buckingham carried the burden of office obtrusively. The ready smile that had once enchanted the court was replaced by a preoccupied frown. Holding himself above the crowd, he insisted that the shoals of suitors approach him through one or other of his intimates or retainers. In spite of the signs of corrupting power, Buckingham retained his amazing personal magnetism. King James was as doting as ever, and the heir to the throne, Prince Charles, was equally attached to him. Buckingham and the Prince were constant companions, hunting and playing tennis together or indulging their shared interest in art collecting. To his political role Buckingham brought abundant energy and some administrative ability. But he was too impressionable, too easily influenced by suave ambassadors, so that his foreign policies were impulsive and even whimsical.\n\nBuckingham was a notorious womanizer. As demonstrated by his later attempts on the virtue of the Spanish prime minister's wife and even the Queen of France, no woman was safe from his desires. His tactics were crude. When he saw a woman he desired, his friends would lure her to a respectable house where he would then turn up \"as by accident\" and debauch her, \"while all his Train attended at the door as if it were an honourable visit.\" Inevitably, he would set his sights on the most beautiful woman at court. Lecher that he was, he would have insisted upon a physical relationship. It is unlikely that the impressionable and ambitious Lucy put up much resistance.\n\nDoncaster had been married to his adored Lucy for just over two years. It was only six months since she had made her romantic journey to Gravesend to spend every last moment with him. He had received reports that all summer she had been the picture of the devoted wife. Now he was back, and instead of a happy reunion he found a disgruntled wife who did not appear at all glad to see him. When he tried to tell her of his embassy (though he had accomplished nothing, he had been treated royally), Lucy's response was to raise her eyebrows and gaze out the window. He even made a bid for sympathy, turning a mild attack of purple fever at Montauban into a life-threatening illness. The warm, soft arms that had once embraced him remained folded severely across her chest. Doncaster had to demand his marital rights.\n\nThey were soon quarreling openly Tobie Mathew, the apostate son of the Archbishop of York, heard while traveling on the Continent the rumors that the famous love match had soured: \"It hath been written hither,\" he informed Doncaster, \"that there is some little disgust between thy noble lady and thyself (saving that no disgust can be little between such a couple of creatures as you two).\" What caused the quarrel?\n\nThe French ambassador's correspondence reveals what Doncaster soon found out: his wife was having an affair with the King's favorite. Indeed, the Comte de Tilli\u00e8res, the French ambassador, believed that Buckingham had deliberately delayed Doncaster's return in order to complete his conquest. \"They say that it is not the King's business that necessitates the ambassador's return visit to the Emperor,\" he reported to Paris in November, \"but to consummate a love that the Marquis of Buckingham has for someone very close to him.\" A few years later Lucy was widely known to be Buckingham's mistress. An extramarital affair would explain why the passionate romance that had so titillated the court in 1617 had suddenly ended. No doubt it would have provided grim satisfaction for Lucy's father and a vindication of the practice of properly arranged marriages.\n\nAdultery was commonplace in James's court, especially after Queen Anne's death. As well, Doncaster was bound to suffer by comparison with the youthful favorite in Lucy's eyes. He was now forty years old and showing his age; he had given up masquing and the tiltyard. All his feasting had caught up with him, lending him a decidedly dissipated appearance. The bags under his eyes, combined with his sloping forehead and sandy hair and beard, had inspired the playful Princess Elizabeth to dub him \"camel face\" during his recent visit to Germany. Lucy was quickly losing the girlish admiration that had formed the basis of her side of the love affair. His self-esteem crushed, he began to complain to his crony Sir George Goring about his wife's treatment of him. Lucy's relationship with the favorite undoubtedly was the cause of the quarrels that marked their marriage until Buckingham's death.\n\nWhatever his personal feelings, Doncaster had little choice but to accept the situation, A court lord without an acre of land, he was dependent on royal patronage, and Buckingham controlled its dispensation. Not only that, but the costly diplomatic missions that he so much enjoyed would cease if he broke with the favorite. So Doncaster in effect swore fealty to his wife's lover. During a public quarrel with Lisle in 1622, he declared, \"I am so much this noble lord's servant [indicating Buckingham] that I will perform whatsoever he commands me.\" Always the politician, he became the most reliable of Buckingham's intimates. In the Privy Council, he followed the favorite's shifts and turns faultlessly, most notably over the Palatinate issue.\n\nIN OCTOBER 1619, James's son-in-law had moved his family to Prague and assumed the title of King of Bohemia, notwithstanding the fact that imperial forces were massing at the border, ready to oust him as soon as the snow was off the ground. At the Battle of the White Mountain, Frederick was decisively defeated. Meanwhile, the Spanish general Ambrogio Spinola had invaded the Palatinate and taken Frederick's hereditary lands away from him. Having no home either in Germany or in Bohemia, Frederick fled with his family, seeking refuge.\n\nThey had left everything behind them and were virtually penniless. Elizabeth was in the last stages of a pregnancy From Silesia, King James received a heartbreaking letter from his daughter. Describing their misfortunes, Elizabeth pleaded with her father to have pity on them and not to abandon her husband. She herself was resolved never to leave him, she wrote. If he perished, she would perish with him. King James wept when he read her letter. But then he comforted himself with the thought that he had warned Frederick not to assume the Bohemian crown. Frederick had preferred to listen to the advice of his uncle Prince Maurice of Orange, who approved of the venture. Well then, James said to himself, let Prince Maurice look after him. As it happened, Maurice did so, inviting the couple to Holland, where he supported them in decent fashion at The Hague. Prince Maurice was in complete sympathy with the exiles. The truce with Spain had broken down, and the Dutch states were once again fighting the Spanish Hapsburgs in the Netherlands.\n\nThe English people were outraged by the treatment of their beloved Princess Elizabeth at the hands of the Catholic Hapsburgs and demanded that England send military help. It had all unfolded just as James had predicted. Although he bemoaned his beloved daughter's sad situation, James refused to send over troops. Any that went would have to go as volunteers. Buckingham had initially supported the war party, donating \u00a320,000 to the war chest, and in the Privy Council he had sided with the pro-war councillors, boasting that he would bring the King around. But under the influence of the Spanish ambassador, the Conde Gondomar, Buckingham changed his mind; he now agreed with King James that England should not become involved militarily in Frederick's plight.\n\nDoncaster had returned from Germany advocating war in support of the Elector Palatine's claim to the Bohemian throne, but when Buckingham dropped his war policy, Doncaster unhesitatingly concurred. In return, Buckingham encouraged the King's generosity to the older favorite. Doncaster's intimacy with Buckingham reinforced his position at court, to the point where he became one of James's chief diplomats in the last years of the reign.\n\nIn due course, the Doncasters' quarrel was resolved, but the marriage took on a brittleness, a stylish superficiality As a couple they enjoyed tremendous social success: he, the essence of courtliness, and she, the most elegant woman at court. To be in fashion had become Lucy's absorbing passion. We can picture her in the provocatively masculine styles of 1620 (the \"manlike and unseemly apparel\" inveighed against from the pulpit) that had women wearing pointed doublets and broad-brimmed hats: some went so far as to stick a stiletto in their belt and bob their hair. Lord and Lady Doncaster's continual entertaining on a gargantuan scale provided the London news-writers who congregated at St. Paul's churchyard with perpetual subject matter for their provincial readers. Essex House was the scene of suppers, balls, musical soir\u00e9es, masques.\n\nHer husband's new alliance with the favorite meant that Lucy had to associate with the Buckingham women\u2014a dubious pleasure on both sides. First and foremost was his mother, the domineering Countess of Buckingham, who shouldered her way into the void created by the death of the royal consort and queened it over the court. Then there was her daughter, the Countess of Denbigh, a younger version of herself. She, in turn, had produced a daughter who, though barely at puberty, had been married to the great Scottish lord the Marquess of Hamilton. Then there were the countless cousins and nieces of the favorite who came in from the country to find a husband. One by one, Buckingham married them into the best families in order to form a solid power base for himself.\n\nBut Lucy could hold her own with these women. She was indisputably the most beautiful woman at court, and the Buckingham ladies had to listen to their husbands lavishing praise upon her. She was the wife of a leading courtier and, if the rumor was true, the mistress of the Marquess of Buckingham, to whom they owed their good fortune. Lady Doncaster was certainly not a person to be cowed by feminine cattiness. Even as a child she had been self-confident, riding spirited horses and daring Dorothy to do the same. While other girls were brought up in homes where obedience to the father was the law, Lucy had received little discipline from her indulgent mother and at eighteen had defied her father by marrying against his wishes. Behind her smiles and compliments, there was the hidden dagger of a sharp wit. The rather plain ladies of the Buckingham connection did not tangle with the exquisite Lady Doncaster.\n\nIn the spring of 1620, Buckingham himself got married, predictably to a wealthy heiress, Katherine Manners, the Earl of Rutland's daughter. The Earl was adamantly opposed to the marriage, in part because of Buckingham's reputation as a libertine. Relentless as always in his pursuit of women, Buckingham, with the collusion of his mother, abducted the girl and kept her a willing captive overnight under the same roof as himself. Having ruined her marital chances, Buckingham then turned around and told the infuriated father that he could have her back. Rutland had to practically beg the insolent favorite to marry Katherine. The marriage took place quietly in May.\n\nThe new Lady Buckingham\u2014no beauty judging from her pictures\u2014was passionately in love with her handsome husband. Sensible and undemanding, she soon realized that he was unfaithful. She once referred to his \"one sin\" of \"loving women too well.\" She cannot have been fond of Lady Doncaster. Nevertheless, they were thrown together constantly.\n\nLord and Lady Doncaster danced attendance upon Buckingham and his family In September 1620, Chamberlain reported to Carleton that they gave \"a great feast at Syon to the Lord Marquis, his Lady and the Countess his mother.\" Happily, it was all worthwhile. Grants poured in upon them. According to Chamberlain, the King was so generous to Doncaster at a time when royal finances were strained that it created considerable animosity toward him. Conceding that he was \"a very sufficient, bountiful, complete, and complimentai gentleman,\" Chamberlain goes on to say of the Scottish Doncaster, \"yet I have heard divers wise and judicious men wish (for more respects than one) that he had never seen England, or England never seen him.\"\n\nOne royal grant was particularly pleasing to Lucy. In May 1620, Doncaster received the keepership of Nonsuch Palace \"and the gardens and parks thereof for life.\" About twenty miles out of London in Surrey, Nonsuch had been built by Italian and Flemish craftsmen for King Henry VIII to rival Fontainebleau and the Loire castles. To the visitor arriving by coach along the road from London, the palace rose up from the rolling countryside like a fantastic mirage. Flanked by octagonal corner towers five stories high, its exterior walls were completely covered with plaster bas-reliefs and life-size statues in niches. The garden was as fanciful as the building, with animal topiary and an elaborate stone fountain of an antlcred Acteon and three naked goddesses. The palace was surrounded by miles of parks and salubrious springs, providing all the healthful amenities of a spa. Lucy loved her country retreat and spent much time there. The air and water agreed with her, and no doubt she thought a fairy-tale castle a suitable residence for her. Lucy's new status was beginning to go to her head.\n\nHaving a suite of rooms at Nonsuch Palace did not interfere with Lucy's summer visits to Penshurst to be with Dorothy In September 1620, she was there as usual (as we know because the Earl of Leicester sent his best regards to her through his wife), and the devoted sisters spent a great deal of time in each other's company. For part of each winter, Dorothy and Robert were in London, and there were daily visits back and forth between Essex House and Baynard's Castle. Dorothy put off returning to the country as long as possible. In 1621 she extended her stay throughout the spring, with no plans for returning to Penshurst until June.\n\nMuch of Lucy's time in London was taken up with the family of the French ambassador, the Comte de Tilli\u00e8res. Doncaster was the resident expert on France; he spoke the language perfectly, knew the country, and had many contacts at the French court. In fact, he was under instructions from the King to sound out de Tilli\u00e8res on a possible French marriage for Prince Charles, should the negotiations for a Spanish princess fall through. Doncaster could be said to have a vested interest in a French match, so he and Lucy cultivated the French diplomats.\n\nThe Comte de Tilli\u00e8res, his wife the Comtesse, and her niece, Mademoiselle Saint-Luc, were a great addition to the social life of the court circle. Among other French fashions, they introduced the \"running masque\"\u2014a movable version of the courtly theatricals, which played each night at a different house. Enthusiasm over this new craze was so high that the aristocratic masquers happily turned themselves into strolling players. But Buckingham, Goring, and Rich were upstaged by \"the great porter at court\" who played the part of a giant and came on holding the Earl of Montgomery's diminutive page like a falcon on his fist. After a first performance at the ambassador's residence, the players moved on to Essex House, where the Doncasters improved upon the occasion by offering their guests a banquet and a ball attended by the King and the Prince of Wales.\n\nAt the same time as Doncaster was conducting serious business with the Comte de Tilli\u00e8res, according to a Venetian envoy he was \"very intimate\" with Madame de Tilli\u00e8res. A sophisticated _parisienne_ of his own age, she was the sister of a French marshal and very knowledgeable about politics. The Venetian claimed that she even influenced Doncaster's views on Anglo-French relations. Lucy could not have been unaware of her husband's liaison and seemingly accepted it just as he accepted hers.\n\nMonsieur de Tilli\u00e8res and his family were frequently entertained at Essex House; but none of these lavish functions compared to the feast that the Doncasters gave in January 1621 in honor of a special French envoy, the Mar\u00e9chal de Cadenet. Even in an age of ostentatious display the feast shocked contemporaries with its \"sumptuous superfluity.\" For weeks the Essex House \"cater\" had been buying up the choicest meats and fowl in such quantities as to create a shortage. There were 240 pheasants alone, dozens of partridges and larks, fresh salmon from the Thames, and huge Muscovy salmon purchased at the London docks. As well there were the \"grosser meats\"\u2014swans, chines of beef, and two whole suckling pigs. Eight days before the event, a brigade of a hundred cooks, forty of them master chefs, marched into the kitchens and baked, boiled, roasted, marinated, jellied, and concocted sixteen hundred dishes. They used \u00a3300 worth of precious ambergris (a perfume ingredient then used sparingly in cookery) and mounds of spices, such as mace, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and ginger, as well as raisins and currants by the peck. Sweating porters carried casks of wine off the barges docked at Essex Stairs and rolled them into the cellar while the butler counted them off: a pipe of canary, a tun of claret, another of Rhenish, a butt of sack, and so on.\n\nOn the great night itself, liveried footmen ushered the guests to the lower gallery, where a long table was spread with the most luscious array of food. But this was a feast for the eyes only It was all whisked away and replaced by a second feast, this one to be consumed! After supper the glutted guests were led upstairs to watch a masque and partake of sweetmeats piled on huge salvers almost too heavy for the footmen to carry: these alone were said to have set the host back \u00a3500. This Lucullan feast with the novelty of the ante-supper\u2014another French importation perhaps suggested by Madame de Tilli\u00e8res\u2014further consolidated Doncaster's status. King James, seated at the head of the table with the Prince of Wales and the French ambassadors, was seen enjoying himself hugely. It was a triumph for Lord and Lady Doncaster, albeit a costly one, for estimates ran as high as \u00a33,000. On the Mar\u00e9chal de Cadenet's departure, Doncaster gave him some horses and Lucy presented him with two waistcoats and petticoats for his wife, \"all of an extraordinary richness.\"\n\nLUCY APPEARED ?? have achieved her mother's ambitions for her: a wealthy, titled husband and a high position at court. Yet from time to time Lucy's hectic social life was interrupted by bouts of stomach disorders that may have been psychosomatic in origin. There were no more babies to replace her dead infant son, and at this stage of her life she perhaps regretted it. Fecundity was a woman's greatest glory; the barren woman was an object of pity, second only to the spinster. Like most young women of her time, Lucy accepted these values. Her childlessness would have aggravated her dissatisfaction with her marriage. Since she had no history of organic disease, her ailments were possibly a sign of nervous tension.\n\nThe beginning of this hypochondria is indicated by a journey abroad to Spa in the summer of 1621. For years the English nobility had been traveling to this little village near Li\u00e8ge in the Low Countries to drink the healthful waters. Doncaster probably advised Lucy to go since he had been there himself in the summer of 1619. On the first of June, Lucy set out with the faithful William Woodforde and a suite of servants. She was accompanied by her cousin Isabella Smythe. This social butterfly was in a pitiable situation as her new husband had deserted her, fleeing to the Continent with his cousin Tom Smythe. Isabella's second marriage was a casualty of town life in the upper circles. Writing to his father to explain his bunk, young John Smythe blamed \"the clamour of creditors, the high state of expense he was fallen into and the avoidance of some company unfit for him.\" In his rake's progress he was aided and abetted by his cousin Tom, a nineteen-year-old homosexual far gone in debauchery Two years before, Tom Smythe had eloped with Barbara Sidney, Dorothy's sister-in-law, and married her without the knowledge of either family. Tom's clandestine marriage had amazed Chamberlain, for, as he told Carleton at the time, \"he is known to have no more mind to her than to any other woman, and perhaps not so much.\"\n\nThe journey was arduous: to Gravesend by the river, across the Channel to Flushing (contrary winds could hold travelers up for a week), then days of uncomfortable coach travel, culminating in twelve hours in a bone-shaking wagon on the rutted road from Li\u00e8ge to Spa. Also, the continental inns were unsanitary, bed linen was never changed, and the traveler arose in the morning, after a sleepless night, covered with flea bites. Considering the hardships of travel, many travelers must have thought the cure worse than the disease.\n\nLucy and Isabella either rented a house for the season or stayed at the comfortable Golden Fleece Inn. They then entered upon the strict regimen of the cure. On the first day the _curiste_ drank ten to twelve ounces of the acidic water, increasing it to as much as fifty or even seventy ounces, tapering off to a daily dose of a glass or two. The waters were of four strengths. The strongest, often causing vomiting, was taken only by those most dedicated to the cure; those less Spartan mixed the water with wine to make it more palatable. Lucy and Isabella would have soon fallen into the routine of rising at four, drinking the waters, and strolling or visiting with the other aristocratic visitors. The constant wet dampened their spirits, however. The place had \"a habit of raining,\" Lucy complained to Woodforde, \"that would not be easily removed.\"\n\nLucy's journey to Spa was timed to coincide with another of Doncaster's missions. In July he was sent to France to remonstrate with Louis XIII over his treatment of the Huguenots. The Huguenots, as the French Protestants were known, had been granted toleration and a number of fortified towns in southwest France by the Edict of Nantes of 1598, which ended fifty years of religious wars. Nevertheless, the struggle between the monarchy and the Huguenots continued into the next century Around 1620 a wily cleric, Armand du Plessis de Richelieu, bishop of a backwater diocese, insinuated himself into the position of Louis XIII's principal adviser. Soon to become the all-powerful Cardinal Richelieu, he aimed to create a strong central monarchy, not only for domestic reasons but ultimately to challenge the territorial ambitions of the Austrian and Spanish Hapsburgs. Regarding the Huguenot fortified towns as a state within a state, Richelieu moved King Louis to systematically retake them. Doncaster's impossible assignment was to make peace between the King of France and the Huguenots.\n\nBefore Lucy left for the Continent, Doncaster gave her the enormous sum of \u00a35,000 for her expenses, half the amount the King had given him for his embassy. This generous sharing indicates the nature of their relationship. Although both went their separate ways romantically, a partnership had evolved between husband and wife. Doncaster respected Lucy's intelligence and ability, as yet confined to the conventional feminine sphere. She had proved an apt pupil in the social arts and an extraordinary helpmate in his lavish entertaining. Although not a happy marriage, it was successful in a worldly sense. In contrast to the Earl of Northumberland's low opinion of women, Doncaster's admiration for his wife can be seen as a rare tribute to her.\n\nWhile Lucy was at Spa, her father at long last was released from prison. Like all other favors, his freedom came through the grace and favor of the Marquess of Buckingham, although Doncaster was behind it. Actually, Northumberland could have got out of the Tower much sooner had he not scorned his son-in-law's good offices. Now, however, he condescended to leave, and on a fine July day Doncaster drove up to the Tower in his magnificent coach and six and carried the Earl to Essex House. Buckingham and all the great lords rushed to pay their respects, and Northumberland, looking not a day older after fifteen years in prison, was immediately reinstated in his preeminent position in the social hierarchy. A few days later, Doncaster set out for France, and Northumberland retired to the country. After spending ten days at Syon and a few weeks at Petworth in Sussex, he went to visit Dorothy at Penshurst. He had long since forgiven her for marrying without his permission and, despite his misogynist personality, was devoted to her and her family.\n\nLucy returned from the Low Countries still unwell. Unfortunately, taking the laxative waters had addicted her to purgatives, and she was swallowing stronger and stronger dosages. Purging and blood letting (using leeches) were the popular remedies of the day for everything from cholera to typhoid to cancer. The fashionable court physician, Monsieur de Mayerne, was a great believer in both, so much so that when Prince Henry died of typhoid fever in 1612, Mayerne was severely criticized for excessive purging of the hopelessly ill boy. The criticism had blown over, and Mayerne continued to minister to the royal family and the nobility The purgatives used were of extraordinary strength. After \"glisters\" and \"purging syrup\" taken orally (with what damage to the digestive system can only be imagined), the patient was confined to the bedchamber for days. All autumn and into the winter of 1622, Lucy dosed herself in this fashion, no doubt under Mayerne's prescription, and when Doncaster returned to England for fresh instructions in February, he found her extremely ill. She had so weakened her body through overdoses of physic that she was thought to be \"at the last cast.\" A worried Doncaster remained with her until mid-March, when she was sufficiently out of danger for him to return to France.\n\nAs soon as she was fit to travel, Lucy went to Penshurst. During her husband's long absences, and particularly when she was not well, she always turned to Dorothy. An additional reason for retiring to Kent this time was that her father had reclaimed Syon for his own use, and when he was in London, he treated Essex House as if he were still paying the rent. Undoubtedly Lucy showed him the outward deference of a dutiful daughter, but too much unpleasantness had passed between them to be forgotten. Not only had he imprisoned her against her will to stop her marriage, but she resented the scant respect he showed her husband. That Northumberland was equally uncomfortable under the same roof as his younger daughter can be inferred from his renting a town house the following season.\n\n# [_five_ \nLIFE IN THE COUNTRY AND LIFE AT COURT](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c05a)\n\nWITH THE DEATH of her mother-in-law in June 1621, the running of the great house at Penshurst became Dorothy's responsibility She quickly proved herself an excellent manager, not only of the manor house but of the entire estate. Her father-in-law was usually away in London, and her husband was only too happy to leave the practical concerns of household and estate management to her. Lisle was at his happiest in his study, reading or scribbling down his thoughts, and it was with a sense of relief that he handed over as many of his responsibilities as possible to his capable wife.\n\nDorothy, always pregnant, found running the estate exhausting. There were bad days when the manager would come to the great house with his ledger in hand to report that some of the tenants were in arrears with their rent, or the gamekeeper would stomp in in his heavy boots and, in his strong country accent, complain that poachers were killing all the deer, or the bad-tempered cook would threaten to leave if the housekeeper did not stay out of her kitchen. Trained by her mother-in-law, Dorothy had acquired the necessary skills of a good housewife: distilling, pickling, preserving, smoking and curing bacon, salting fish, drying herbs and lavender (the latter to keep the sheets sweet-smelling), storing apples and roots over the winter away from marauding mice and rats. She was also well versed in the medicinal use of herbs, cordials, and physics, because the lady of the manor was the doctor for house and village, dressing wounds and even setting bones. Dorothy was responsible for the family, and in the seventeenth century that included all the servants as well as her children.\n\nHer new obligations as mistress of Penshurst ruled out long winter visits to London, and it was at this time that Dorothys complaints about the boredom of life in the country began seriously She had inherited her mother's tendency to melancholy, and Penshurst brought out the worst in her. (Even her more cheerful mother-in-law had grown melancholy there, as the first earl's correspondence reveals.) By nature Dorothy loved society and its excitements as much as Lucy, but through force of circumstance she found herself living in the country and tied down with a growing family Her youthful gaiety became inverted and a somberness took its place. As she went about her rounds, her chatelaine's keys jangling at her waist, the outwardly sober young matron longed for the delights of London and the court. The contrast of her life with her sister's unsettled her, particularly since she would have submerged such thoughts. With every visit or letter from Lucy, describing the festivals and weddings at court, Dorothy's feelings of discontent were heightened and found expression in complaining to her husband. Still, Dorothy was deeply in love with her husband, and he reciprocated her feelings as much as his narrow, introspective nature would allow.\n\nLike all couples, they had their areas of conflict. Dorothy was often impatient with Lisle for spending his time reading, and her complaints in turn drove him back to his books behind the closed door of his study. Nevertheless, there was a strong current of passion between them, which Lucy was never to know in or out of marriage.\n\nFor the first summer since his marriage, Lisle did not go abroad in 1622. With no preferment in sight, he had given up his regiment in the Dutch service. He had last spoken to Doncaster in February when the latter came over briefly from France, but his brother-in-law's vague promises had so far yielded no result. Lisle was extremely depressed about his future. Dorothy was pregnant again. He was becoming desperate for some employment to subsidize this burgeoning family, and perhaps also to escape from the heavy family responsibilities that weighed upon his slim scholar's shoulders. In July 1622, when Doncaster returned from France in even greater favor with the King and Buckingham, Lisle decided to try again to obtain his help. Putting aside his pride, when both were at Petworth in early August, he went to Doncaster to reopen the subject of his preferment. He found Doncaster sitting in the withdrawing chamber near the parlor \"with his men pulling on his breeches and stockings being sewed together.\" On seeing him, Lisle said, Doncaster \"stood up on one leg and saluted me only with a strange look.\" Deeply offended by what he regarded as a snub (could Doncaster have simply been embarrassed to be caught in such an undignified posture?), Lisle grew angry and some hot words passed between them.\n\nA month later, both were at Syon House, where their father-in-law was entertaining Buckingham and other nobility According to Lisle's account, Doncaster was frankly insulting to him in front of the guests. Humiliated by such treatment, Lisle sought out his brother-in-law to remonstrate with him in private. Finding him surrounded by his hangers-on, he tried to talk calmly but in a matter of moments the two were exchanging blows. The news of their fight spread through the house. Summoned to their father-in-law's bedside, they stood before him in the presence of Buckingham and the Duke of Richmond like sheepish schoolboys. For the sake of his daughters, Northumberland commanded them, they must reconcile their differences because continuing this feud would be \"a great grief\" to their wives, who would be unable to \"enjoy one another's company so much as they had.\" It was only a sham reconciliation. Both men were burning with indignation, the more so because they had forsworn any further action.\n\nIt is Lisle's version of the quarrel that has come down to us, and his self-portrayal as the innocent party must be heavily discounted. The sensitive youth of courtship days had matured into an overly sensitive man who took offense easily He often imagined slights where none were intended; he may well have done so here. Moreover, it is difficult to reconcile Lisle's picture of Doncaster with \"the complete and complimentai\" gentleman others saw. Doncaster was known for his unfailing courtesy. It would have been more characteristic of him to turn Lisle away with a polite word, if such was his intention. On the other hand, Lisle was undoubtedly correct that Doncaster was jealous of him because of Northumberland's patent preference for him. Granting that he had offended Lisle, Lisle had also offended him, and Doncaster made a point of calling upon Lisle's father to tell him so. In a letter to his son, who was now licking his wounds at Penshurst, the Earl of Leicester reported on the visit. Though Doncaster had been as friendly as ever to him, he was obviously angry over something that Lisle had said or done after leaving Petworth. This could explain his coldness at Syon. \"He told me,\" Leicester wrote, \"that he retained very much estimation of you but protested not to love you.\" The old earl was clearly upset by the quarrel. Far from exonerating his son, he urged him to patch it up without delay. Of course Leicester was a wily old courtier and would not have wished to offend his influential colleague.\n\nIn September 1622, Doncaster was created Earl of Carlisle and shortly afterward was granted an annual pension of \u00a32,000 for twenty-one years to help maintain his new honor. He and Lucy, now the Countess of Carlisle, threw themselves into the social life of the Buckingham set with renewed vigor. That Christmas they were all caught up in a hectic round of feasting and dancing, \"somewhat like fiddlers,\" remarked Chamberlain wryly The Comtesse de Tilli\u00e8res and her niece were returning to France, and there were numerous farewell parties for them. The court was sorry to part with the adorable Mademoiselle Saint-Luc. Kingjames offered her a choice of young lords if she would stay in England. Among those proffered with such careless royal largesse was the sisters' twenty-year-old brother, Algernon, who promptly left for the Continent. On his own account, Carlisle was sorry to part with Madame de Tilli\u00e8res, and, according to embassy gossip, he began looking out for a mission to France.\n\nNaturally, the Carlisles entertained for the departing ladies. But on this occasion the court's most notable party givers suffered an acute embarrassment. Buckingham took so sick at supper that he had to be put to bed at Essex House. Lord and Lady Carlisle undoubtedly berated the kitchen staff, from the master cook to the scullery maid who washed the dishes. However embarrassing for the hosts, Buckingham's illness was not serious, and the next day he was able to rejoin the festivities. When Mademoiselle Saint-Luc finally tore herself away from her English admirers, the Buckinghams and the Carlisles jointly presented her with some costly jewelry.\n\nEARLY IN 1623, news broke that Prince Charles, accompanied by Buckingham, had traveled incognito to Madrid to woo the Infanta in person. Carlisle was one of the few people Buckingham had confided in beforehand. Knowing that Lucy could not keep a secret (as we too shall see), Carlisle would not have told her.\n\nNegotiations for a marriage between the English and Spanish Crowns had been dragging on for some time. King James was especially anxious at this time for the Spanish match, hoping that in this way he could recover the Palatinate for his son-in-law without going to war. Some towns in the Lower Palatinate were in Spanish hands, and handing them back to Frederick would make a nice wedding gift for Prince Charles. James was encouraged to believe in this happy ending by the Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, and it was this suave diplomat who planted the idea in Buckingham's head that the marriage could be expedited if he and Prince Charles went to fetch the Infanta themselves. Masquerading as simple Tom and John, the two young men paid a quick visit to Paris, then galloped south into Spain, staying at hostelries like any ordinary travelers. This required some explaining at the French court, and Carlisle was sent to the Louvre Palace to smooth over the Prince's precipitous dash through French territory. That mission completed, he was dispatched to Madrid to lend some dignity to the unseemly proceedings. He was also to teach the King's \"sweet boys\" some of the finer graces. James had written a letter of thanks to King Philip for the good reception accorded his son. Buckingham was to deliver it. King James advised him to do it with the \"best compliments thou can, and Carlisle can best instruct thee in that art.\"\n\nJust before Carlisle left for the Continent, his son and heir, fifteen-year-old James Hay, came to stay at Essex House. Carlisle had never liked this child of his first marriage. Perhaps his attitude reflected his feeling for his first wife, or perhaps he still hoped to have a son with Lucy and resented the fact that his first-born would inherit his title. As a result of this parental indifference, young James lived for long periods with his grandparents, Sir Edward Denny and Lady Mary. He was the apple of their eye, and they parted with him so reluctantly that we wonder why he went to live at all at Essex House. \"I have at length sent you your jewel, Donna Maria's darling and my best beloved,\" the grandfather wrote Carlisle in January, \"not doubting that with Lady Carlisle's help, with over-making of him, and very often fetching him as we have done from school, we shall make him in the end a most learned clerk without book.\" The jocular tone does not conceal the grandfather's worry that the boy would be left unwanted at school over holidays.\n\nFor some time Sir Edward had been pressing Carlisle to obtain a knighthood for James. The doting grandfather wished to leave his estate to the boy but was held back by fears of wardship. If Carlisle should die while his son was a minor, Denny claimed that one-third of any inheritance James received during his minority would be forfeited. (Indeed Denny never ceased to raise the specter of wardship with his former son-in-law. While Carlisle was in Spain, he received the following parental advice: \"As for you, dear son, though I am not wise enough to advise you, yet I find love to admonish you to have a care in your feasts, a fig too much mean ruin to me and mine.\" Such a reminder of his own mortality would have taken the joy out of that night's feasting!) According to Denny, if the youth were knighted, the estate would not be subject to the Master of the Wards. At his age Denny did not feel that he could gamble on staying alive until James reached his majority He warned Carlisle that if no knighthood for James was forthcoming, he would be forced to leave the estate to an adult male relative, adding that \"whenever the deed is signed it will be sealed with tears.\"\n\nCarlisle was constitutionally unable to refuse outright to do a favor. He promised to speak to the King, but a year went by and nothing happened. Denny finally realized that Carlisle would never act, and while the latter was in Spain, Denny personally solicited the Privy Council for the knighthood. Of course it was assumed that he acted with Carlisle's knowledge and approval, and Cranfield, the Lord Treasurer, eager to oblige Buckingham's close friend, went out of his way to accomplish it. On March 30,1623, he wrote triumphantly to Carlisle:\n\nMy Lord Denny your lordship's father-in-law did lately make a suit for the knighting the Lord Viscount Doncaster your hopeful son; where with all though you were not pleased to acquaint me, yet well knowing your lordship's design went with it, as matter of much importance to your lordship howsoever the precedent might produce some ill consequence, yet I dealt therein for your lordship as for my most esteemed friend and so that business is despatched.\n\nWhen Carlisle returned from Spain in April, he found his son had already been knighted. He was doubtless better pleased with a warrant from the Lord Treasurer for \"a good round sum\" for himself.\n\nLucy did not become a dutiful stepmother, \"over-making\" young James as Sir Edward had hoped. But the very fact that he had looked to her for this is significant. An admirer would later say that Lady Carlisle's salon was an academy superior to those in Italy and France. Denny's remark indicates that at twenty-four Lucy already enjoyed a reputation for great savoir faire. Certainly she could not have had a better teacher in the art of compliment than her husband\u2014witness King James's advice to Buckingham in Spain. And tiresome as it was, her attendance upon the Buckingham women was proving an excellent training in the courtier's craft of ingratiating oneself with the powerful.\n\nWhile Lucy was gaining in admiration, Carlisle's ever-increasing ostentation was causing some snickering behind his back. Even by the standards of an age that loved finery, his costumes verged on fancy dress. By now the ruff had given way to a falling collar, but Carlisle continued to affect that strange piece of neckwear that made the head look as if it were sitting on a platter. \"But for the Earl of Carlisle, wearing of ruffs and gartering of silk stockings would be forgotten,\" sniffed Secretary of State Sir Edward Conway, himself a bon vivant and man of fashion. And although Carlisle adopted the black suit that became the rage when the English courtiers returned from Spain, his was embroidered all over with gold pearls. A constant belittler of the new earl was his father-in-law. Northumberland told people that the only reason he kept a coach with eight horses was to surpass his son Carlisle and the Spanish ambassador with their \"six carrion mules.\"\n\nDespite these sour notes, Carlisle enjoyed great prestige. His diplomatic career was flourishing. His newest assignment was a joint embassy with Henry Rich, now Baron Kensington, to arrange a marriage between Prince Charles and King Louis XIII's youngest sister, Henrietta Maria. The Spanish match had failed. The Prince and Buckingham had returned to England without the Infanta, and Buckingham (consoled with a dukedom) was now in pursuit of a French match. As a matter of course, Carlisle supported Buckingham's anti-Spanish policy in the Privy Council.\n\nWith Carlisle in France, Lucy took the opportunity to stay with Dorothy at Penshurst. The continuing bad feeling between their husbands made life difficult for the devoted sisters, but Carlisle was away so often that they had plenty of time to be together. Once again Lucy's health was not good, as we learn from a letter of Sir George Goring to Carlisle:\n\nYesterday I fetched my sweet dear mistress from Penshurst to Hansworth where she intended to make but short stay, and so back again. I thank my God she hath much more quickness in her face though not more flesh than when your lordship left her, in so much as I am now undertaking [?] her with a rule of diet from my own experience which if she observe carefully [illegible]. Tomorrow I am to kiss her hands again.\n\nGoring's solicitude for Lucy went beyond simple friendship for Carlisle. He clearly exhibits the idolatry that she inspired in men\u2014 her \"slaves,\" Dorothy called them. We can only imagine what Lady Goring made of such knight errantry.\n\nAt Penshurst the atmosphere was somber. Family finances were in a deplorable state. To help pay his debts, which included arrears to the Crown going back to his father's lifetime, the Earl of Leicester had been forced to mortgage the Sidney estates in Wales. He had now mortgaged the Warwickshire lands as well. Lord Lisle was despondent. His patrimony was being \"eaten out with interest,\" and he was much pressed by his own debts. He had received no preferment and had only his classical philosophers for consolation. His letters to his father at court were unremittingly bleak. One letter was so despairing that the poor earl was alarmed. \"It was small comfort that you write that you sometimes wished yourself out of England, nay out of the world, in regard of your wants,\" he replied to his son. With her husband in such a state, Dorothy, who was melancholy in the country at the best of times, also fell into the depths of depression. In the spring of 1625, Leicester wrote his son that he would like to retire to Penshurst to escape from the expenses of court for a time, \"if the state my daughter is in will permit it.\" It is unlikely that he was simply referring to Dorothy's latest pregnancy.\n\nTHE LAST DAYS of King James were filled with sadness. His favorite and his son had come back from their foolish knight errantry, bent on war with Spain. King Philip and his chief minister, the Conde Olivarez, had duped the two inexperienced negotiators. Although Buckingham and Charles had made concession after concession, the Spaniards continually demanded new terms in the marriage contract, blaming it on the papacy. For six months the English contingent, which had swollen to several hundred, lingered on because Charles was enamored of the blond princess; he thought her beautiful in spite of her projecting lower lip\u2014a physical trait of the Flaps-burgs. For his entire stay he was never allowed to be alone with her; indeed, it seems they never exchanged two words\u2014so much for courting her in person.\n\nFurious with their reception in Spain, on their return to England, Buckingham and Charles informed James brusquely that his pro-Spanish policy, which had given England peace and a flourishing trade for twenty years, was obsolete. England must return to the heroic days of Queen Elizabeth, when Spain was recognized as the enemy. The new anti-Spanish policy that Charles and Buckingham forced on King James was enthusiastically seconded by the members of the Commons who equated Spaniards with Catholicism: when one member cried out that the hearts of the English papists were \"knit with the Spaniards,\" with one voice the other members shouted, \"Hear, hear.\" On the eve of his reign, Charles had the support of the Commons for his foreign policy and no significant opposition from the Lords, who felt they had better go along with Buckingham if they wanted any patronage. But by lifting the ban on discussion of foreign affairs, Charles and Buckingham were buying present favor at the cost of future opposition from Parliament.\n\nAlmost as if he were playing King Lear at the Globe Theatre, James was shunted aside by his favorite and his son. He put up little resistance. Judging by his erratic behavior, his babbling speeches to Parliament, and his pathetic letters to his \"sweet boys\" begging for their love, it is apparent that he was slipping into a second childhood.\n\nHis physical health was also deteriorating. Crippling arthritis kept him in his bedchamber over the Christmas revels at Whitehall. Then at Theobalds, in March, he came down with an intermittent fever, diagnosed as tertian ague (probably a form of malaria). Soon he was having convulsions. The end came with a stroke on March 27,1625.\n\nWith the death of King James, a new era began at court. Gone was the flamboyant, free-spending society where Carlisle had shone. The new king was a highly refined individual with a reserved, even in-trovertine, personality. From the first, Charles was burdened by his royal duties. Perhaps because of a stammer, he preferred to leave the onstage role to Buckingham. A man of great taste, for some years he had been collecting art (particularly the Venetians, after seeing the glorious Titians and Tintorettos at Madrid). He was as knowledgeable about art as the Earl of Arundel, the greatest collector in England, and certainly more so than Buckingham, who relied on expert advice in the assembling of his famous art collection at York House. Only in his love of hunting was Charles his father's son.\n\nShortly before James's death, Carlisle and Henry Rich (who had bounded up from Baron Kensington to Earl of Holland) had concluded the negotiations for Charles's marriage with the French princess. The ambassadors were far from pleased with the terms of the marriage treaty They had been bested at every turn by Cardinal Richelieu, the new power behind the French king, but with war with Spain imminent, Buckingham was set on a French alliance. The English had to be content with Richelieu's vague assurances that France would help Charles's sister and brother-in-law, the so-called King and Queen of Bohemia, living in exile in Holland with their children. Frederick had never recovered his hereditary German lands seized by the Spanish Hapsburgs, and although the recovery of the Palatinate was held to be the principal object of English diplomacy, the marriage treaty was concluded without any military commitment from the French. On the other hand, the English had given in to French demands for guarantees of religious toleration for English Catholics. In the end, England had got nothing out of the treaty but a wife for Charles.\n\nIn May the wedding took place by proxy on the porch of Notre Dame cathedral. As King Charles was in mourning for his father, he could not be present in person. Two weeks later, Buckingham arrived in France to bring Henrietta Maria to England. His nine days in Paris were a sojourn Parisians would never forget. He caused a sensation wherever he went: he was so handsome, so magnificently accoutered\u2014one white velvet suit was embroidered with pearls loosely sewn on, so that he literally shed jewels in his wake. His French counterpart, Cardinal Richelieu, gave a lavish f\u00eate champ\u00eatre in his honor in the beautiful gardens of his country house, and King Louis and his queen, Anne of Austria, tendered him a sumptuous banquet.\n\nBuckingham took full advantage of his Parisian holiday to give vent to his sexual appetites. But it was not his adventures with court ladies that astounded _le tout Paris,_ it was his scandalous pursuit of the French queen. The courtiers looked on in amazement while the two danced English country dances, which permitted close contact between the dancers, for all the world like a couple in love. But Anne of Austria's timorous personality preserved her honor and the honor of France, and she repulsed Buckingham when he exceeded the bounds of propriety Buckingham had come with hopes of obtaining French support for a war against Spain. Instead, he made himself persona non grata in France for the rest of his life. Tales of his extravagant behavior at the French court preceded his arrival at Dover with the new queen of England.\n\nWhile Buckingham's wife displayed her usual patience with his infidelity, his mistress was less forgiving\u2014if the Duc de La Rochefoucauld is to be believed. In his memoirs La Rochefoucauld recounts that in a fit of pique over her lover's public passion for Anne of Austria, Lady Carlisle conspired with his archenemy Cardinal Richelieu to take revenge on Buckingham. From a woman he had placed around Anne of Austria, Richelieu learned that on the eve of Buckingham's departure, the Queen had sent him a gift of a dozen diamond pendants from a necklace recently given her by the King. Anxious to destroy what little influence Anne had over Louis, Richelieu saw a golden opportunity to show the King that his consort was unfaithful.\n\nWhen gossip reached the French court that the Countess of Carlisle was furious with Buckingham, Richelieu secretly sent her a note asking her to make up with Buckingham and, if the occasion arose, to steal the diamonds and send them over to him. Lady Carlisle went along with the plan, made herself agreeable to Buckingham, and, while dancing with him at a masked ball at Windsor Castle, snipped off two of the diamond pendants, which Buckingham was wearing as a shoulder knot to hold his sword belt in place. After the ball, his valet drew his attention to the missing jewels. Buckingham immediately guessed that Lady Carlisle was the culprit and realized at once the purpose of the theft. In his capacity as Lord High Admiral, he ordered all Channel ports closed, ostensibly for reasons of state but really to give his jeweler time to cut stones to match the remaining ten. A trusted courier was then dispatched to Paris with all twelve diamonds and given instructions to deliver them to the Duchesse de Chevreuse. This incorrigible troublemaker had been Buckingham's hostess in Paris and had tried her best to bring the French queen into his bed. As Anne of Austria's dearest friend, she was able to carry the diamonds into the Louvre without exciting Richelieu's suspicions. Anne got the replicas just in time before Richelieu received the originals from Lady Carlisle. Confident that his scheme had succeeded, the Cardinal hurried to the King. He told Louis that he had secret information that the Queen had given away a dozen diamonds from the gift necklace, and that he himself had been offered two of them by an English jeweler, insinuating that the jeweler had purchased them from the Duke of Buckingham. King Louis commanded the Queen to produce the necklace at once. Expecting to find the diamonds missing, he opened the jewel box to see the complete necklace sparkling up at him. The Queen smiled as the royal wrath descended upon the red hat of the shamefaced cardinal.\n\nThis story reads like the plot of a cloak-and-dagger novel, and indeed it inspired Alexandre Dumas's _The Three Musketeers,_ but it may be true. The Duc de La Rochefoucauld was one of Madame de Chevreuse's legion of lovers; he could have heard it from her as a bedtime story\n\nLucy's affair with Buckingham survived this betrayal (if indeed it occurred) and became even more notorious under the new reign. Surprisingly, her husband's relationship with the favorite was closer than ever. Carlisle's biographer Roy Schreiber describes him at this period as the Duke's most trusted confidant. Thus if it was true, as Henrietta Maria's chaplain claimed, that Buckingham planned to make Lady Carlisle the King's mistress, it must be understood that he hatched this plan not only with her consent but with her husband's full knowledge.\n\nHENRIETTA MARIA ARRIVED in England in May 1625 an underdeveloped adolescent, at sixteen still tied to her French governess. Charles had first seen her in Paris practicing a masque with Queen Anne and a group of ladies, when he and Buckingham had gone to the French court incognito on their way to Spain in 1623. She had seemed little more than a child to him. Besides, he had had eyes only for Queen Anne, whose beauty, he wrote his father from Paris, had made him even more eager to see her sister, the Infanta.\n\nWhile the Infanta had flaxen hair and a pink and white complexion, Henrietta Maria was a brunette with dark brown hair and large eyes almost as black as jet. She was somewhat buck-toothed, but then the Infanta had had the projecting Hapsburg jaw. She was pert and quick, as Charles had discovered when he went to welcome her at Dover. The ambassadors at Paris had referred to her small stature, and Charles, having little recollection of her appearance, had feared she might be almost a midget. As if reading his thoughts, Henrietta Maria had pointed to her feet and said in French: \"Sire, I stand upon mine own feet; I have no help from art; thus high am I, neither higher than lower.\" Charles was short, just five feet, four inches. He found his bride just the right size for him.\n\nThe marriage was consummated satisfactorily at Canterbury the night after her arrival. Determined to avoid the traditional invasion of the newlyweds' bedchamber by boisterous well-wishers that his sister, Elizabeth, had endured, Charles locked all the doors of the bridal suite. The next morning he slept late, and when he arose was very \"jocund\" with his courtiers, who had been deprived of their fun.\n\nNormally the King would have ridden through the streets of London to show the new queen to the people, but plague had broken out for the first time since the epidemic of 1605. Carried in by flea-bearing rats on the ships in the port of London, it made swift headway through the dirty streets of old wooden houses whose floors were strewn with straw\u2014an excellent incubator for the rat population. Bills of mortality were starting to alarm Londoners; those who could left for the country. (The death toll from the plague in Greater London would rise to thirty-five thousand before the plague of 1625 blew itself out.)\n\nTo avoid the plague, the King and Queen traveled to Gravesend and from there by water to Hampton Court. Hundreds of decorated boats followed in their wake. Although it was raining hard, the King and Queen, both dressed in green, opened the barge windows to wave at the cheering crowds on either side of the river. One onlooker commented that he had \"never beheld the King to look so merrily\"\n\nDelighted with his bride at first, Charles was unprepared for her immaturity, which made itself apparent at Hampton Court. If he attempted to take her away from her priests and her French ladies to have some time alone with her, she sulked or threw a tantrum. The courtiers soon learned that although she was \"little of stature, she was of more than ordinary resolution.\" One day, irritated by an overheated and overcrowded room, she scowled so fiercely that, as one courtier present wrote a friend, \"she drove us all out of the chamber.\"\n\nFor the first year of her marriage she would have nothing to do with the English, including her husband, but like the spoiled, immature child she was, withdrew to her private apartments in the company of her priests and French attendants. The most notable example of her withdrawal was her refusal to participate in her husband's coronation. Not without justification, Charles blamed her French suite for her obstinate refusal to assume her duties as wife and queen. Buckingham and Carlisle encouraged him in this belief. The new queen's principal advisers were her chaplain, the Bishop de Mende, and the Comte de Tilli\u00e8res. The Comte had been recalled to France in 1624, but in 1625 he was back in England as Henrietta Maria's chamberlain. Gone were the days when he and his wife were part of the Buckingham set. The intimacy between Madame de Tilli\u00e8res and Carlisle was also a thing of the past. Now de Tilli\u00e8res could not be critical enough of his former friends. He loudly proclaimed that Buckingham and Carlisle were responsible for turning the King against the Queen.\n\nAs the King's favorite, Buckingham had two options: either to attain influence over the Queen or to make sure that she had no influence over the King. The former looked more unlikely every day. Henrietta Maria detested Buckingham, who showed little patience with her childish petulance. She lived more like \"a petite demoiselle\" than a queen, he told her, with a scornful glance at her priests. And he once warned her to behave herself because English queens had had their heads cut off before. When she refused her marital duties by pleading a headache, he told Charles that if she were his wife, he would impose his husband's rights more often.\n\nSix months after the Queen's arrival, Charles was already talking of sending her French entourage home \"for fomenting discontentments in my wife.\" It was an easy matter for Buckingham to convince Charles that the Queen should have English ladies around her to counter the bad influence of the French. In July 1626, Charles formally requested Henrietta Maria to accept Buckingham's wife, his sister the Countess of Denbigh, his niece the Marchioness of Hamilton, and the Countess of Carlisle as Ladies of the Bedchamber. The Queen initially refused. However, when Charles insisted, she agreed to accept Buckingham's relatives but not Lady Carlisle. She had \"a great aversion\" to that lady, she told him: \"It would be very difficult to accommodate herself to the humours of the Countess of Carlisle.\"\n\nThere is no doubt that Lucy was an intimidating personality. Dorothy, who knew her best and loved her, described her as conceited and even \"insufferable.\" Buckingham's favor fed these character traits. Lucy disdained the company of women. For their part, the court ladies envied her beauty and feared her wit. Even in the self-imposed convent in which Henrietta Maria lived, tales of Lady Carlisle's overbearing behavior toward other women would have reached her ears.\n\nBut was this the only reason for her aversion? The Bishop de Mende provides another explanation. In his dispatch of july 24,1626, the bishop informed Richelieu that for two months the Queen had been getting along quite well with the King, and this had made the favorite very jealous. \"His principal aim now was to give his master new affections\" by introducing the beautiful Countess of Carlisle into the royal household. Since this was what her chaplain believed, it is a fair assumption that Henrietta Maria believed it too.\n\nIt is doubtful that Charles heard about Buckingham's scheme. Straitlaced as he was, he would not have countenanced it. In the end, overriding his wife's objections, Charles named Lucy a Lady of the Queen's Bedchamber, along with Buckingham's relatives. Shortly afterward, the Countess of Holland was also appointed. \"Thus gradually,\" remarked the Venetian ambassador, \"they place the ladies most in the Duke's confidence.\" The ambassador advised the Doge that to be a Lady of the Queen's Bedchamber was \"an honour very highly esteemed at the court.\" For Lucy her appointment opened up a fascinating prospect of a career in her own right. No longer would she be a mere appendage to her husband or her lover.\n\nAt the same time, Carlisle was appointed a Gentleman of the King's Bedchamber. While Lucy exulted over her appointment, her husband was disgruntled with his. He had hoped to be Lord Chamberlain, but Buckingham had given that office to the Earl of Montgomery. The upstart duke wanted an alliance with the wealthy and aristocratic Herbert family. The price for affiancing his little daughter to the scion of the Herberts was the appointment of Lord Montgomery to the most coveted post in the royal household.\n\nThe Earl of Holland was also named a Gentleman of the Bed chamber, putting a further damper on Carlisle's enthusiasm over his appointment. He had become jealous and resentful of his former prot\u00e9g\u00e9. It was Holland, not Carlisle, whom Buckingham sent back to France on a joint embassy with Sir Dudley Carleton, and it was Holland who accompanied Buckingham on a flying mission to The Hague. Henry Rich had advanced from Carlisle's faithful follower to his equal (as the Bedchamber appointments confirmed), and Carlisle feared that he might soon outpace him at court.\n\nLucy's introduction to the Queen's service began with a ludicrous incident. When she and the Buckingham women attempted to enter the Queen's quarters, they found their way physically barred by Henrietta Maria's French ladies. This was a last-ditch stand. Shortly after the new appointments were made, Charles expelled his wife's French attendants. From now on, Henrietta Maria was thrown upon the companionship of her English ladies.\n\nWithin a short time, Lucy became her favorite. Daily contact overcame the Queen's aversion to this beautiful woman ten years her senior. (Besides, nothing had come of Buckingham's plan.) Lucy was famous for her outrageously malicious wit. Time and again we read that Lady Carlisle \"made sport of\" or \"game of\" her acquaintances without respect for rank or office. This type of wit, so characteristic of French salon society, delighted Henrietta Maria. A French visitor commented on the Queen's favor to the Countess of Carlisle. Henrietta Maria had taken to having small private suppers with her most charming and amusing ladies. The visitor reported that Lady Carlisle was a regular at these suppers, along with the young and attractive Countesses of Exeter, Oxford, and Bourchier. The table talk sparkled with gossip and witticism\u2014except on one occasion when Charles attended and \"behaved with a gravity which spoiled the conversation.\" The Duke of Buckingham was reported to be most offended that his wife was never invited to \"these little festivities.\"\n\nFor some months after his disappointment over the Lord Chamberlain's post, Carlisle managed to conceal his growing disaffection from Buckingham. As late as September 1626, Dorothy's husband was advised by his London agent that \"two words\" from his brother-in-law to Buckingham would elicit immediate payment from the foot-dragging Exchequer. In November, however, Carlisle finally had a falling-out with Buckingham. He was not alone. The Marquess of Hamilton was also estranged from his wife's powerful relative. But by and large it was Carlisle's palace revolution and there was no secret about it. Word reached into Wales and as far as Venice. Despite an apparent reconciliation, Carlisle's relationship with Buckingham worsened steadily during 1627.\n\nTHE MOST NOTABLE consequence of Charles's French marriage was that it contributed to Parliament's growing alienation from the monarchy. Having only a rudimentary understanding of foreign affairs, the Commons could not appreciate the role of Catholic France in the \"Protestant Cause\"\u2014an alliance with the Dutch and the Danes to recover the Palatinate from the Catholic Hapsburgs. (They need not have worried; Richelieu was not prepared to contribute one soldier to England's war against Spain.) At the same time, the Commons was losing confidence in Charles and Buckingham as war leaders. An attack on the Spanish coast, the Cadiz expedition, planned by Buckingham in his capacity as Lord High Admiral, totally miscarried. The 1626 session of Parliament opened with impeachment proceedings against the Duke in the House of Commons, charging him with mismanagement of the war and with engrossing all the lucrative posts and sinecures. To save his friend, Charles dissolved Parliament without having obtained a single subsidy.\n\nPerhaps to regain popularity with the Puritan majority in the Commons, Buckingham now decided to go to the relief of the Huguenots. In the interest of French national unity, Cardinal Richelieu had set out to destroy the autonomy of the Huguenots once and for all, and government forces were besieging the Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle. With characteristic recklessness, Buckingham launched England into a war with France while she was still fighting Spain. (Richelieu's refusal to let him back into France to continue his seduction of the French queen may have played a part as well, for the personal element as a casus belli should not be overlooked.) A less self-serving explanation for the war with France, put about by Buckingham's supporters, was that saving the Huguenots from extinction would weaken French unity and thereby increase King Louis's dependence on English friendship\u2014and his readiness to join England's war against Spain.\n\nWearing his Lord High Admiral's hat, Buckingham was engaged all the summer of 1627 in a futile attempt to overcome a French garrison on the island of Rh\u00e9 near La Rochelle. During his absence, Carlisle worked openly to undermine him with King Charles. After Buckingham's return in October, he and Carlisle were veiled enemies. Carlisle was soon relieved of his duties with the King and assigned to attend upon the Queen like one of her pet spaniels. (\"He has to accompany the Queen everywhere,\" the Venetian ambassador reported, \"which he much dislikes.\") Worse still, the stately earl found himself in a situation where he had to play second fiddle to his wife.\n\nQueen Henrietta Maria idolized the sophisticated Lucy. Magnificently attired for all occasions, Lucy taught the young queen much about fashion. Styles had changed: the farthingale had died with Queen Anne, and skirts moved gracefully with the body Actually, there were two skirts, an overskirt usually of damask or cut velvet that was drawn back to reveal a silk or satin petticoat. The very low-cut bodice had puffed sleeves and a falling lace collar worn off the shoulder. Lucy also taught the Queen to paint her face with rouge and powder\u2014\"an ignominious thing\" in that era. And gossip had it that, in time, she would lead her royal mistress into even \"more debaucheries,\" for Lady Carlisle's continuing affair with Buckingham provided much gossip. The liaison was talked about at the Royal Exchange and reported in the newsletters that reached the country houses and the diplomatic legations abroad. Buckingham's female relatives were her sworn enemies. \"The Duke's mother, wife and sister hate her,\" an observer commented, \"not only for the Duke's intimacy with her, but also that she has the Queen's heart above them.\"\n\nApart from her manifest physical attractions, Lucy's position as confidante to Henrietta Maria made her indispensable to Buckingham. During the expedition to the Isle of Rh\u00e9, he relied on her to mend his quarrel with the Queen, and she relayed encouraging messages about Henrietta Maria's more friendly attitude toward him. Her powerful position at court was making her even more \"insufferable\" in the eyes of the Buckingham women. Here was one rival who the patient Kate could not stomach. \"Your great Lady that you believe is so much your friend,\" she wrote her husband, \"uses your friends something worse than when you were here, and your favour has made her so great as now she cares for nobody.\"\n\nIn 1627 the Countess of Carlisle wrote to an unnamed correspondent. It is a fair conjecture that the recipient was the Duke of Buckingham, while he was fighting in France. Lady Carlisle \"hopes he will not regret the favours he has done her. She cannot doubt anything he says, and does not feel herself absolutely unworthy, being his humblest and faithfullest servant.\" Far from sharing her husband's quarrel with Buckingham, Lucy continued her liaison with the man who her own brother Harry called \"the desirer and plotter of [Carlisle's] ruin and destruction.\"\n\nCarlisle was generally regarded as a complaisant husband and, seeing his own influence wane, on the surface he condoned his wife's friendship with the favorite. Royal patronage continued to come his way, which would have been impossible without Buckingham's approval. In 1627 Charles granted Carlisle the patent for the island of the Barbados and the Leeward Islands. He also increased Carlisle's Irish holdings. And in the winter of 1628, \"to content them both the better\" (in the words of a news-writer), Lucy was given a sizable pension of \u00a32,000 a year. These emoluments bought Carlisle's silence; yet he was sorely humiliated to be cuckolded and overshadowed by his wife. His quarrels with Lucy increased, and so did his complaints about her to his old crony Sir George Goring.\n\nTo beat \"an honourable retreat from court,\" Carlisle was pressing for an overseas mission. Buckingham also wanted to get him away, and the desired appointment was shortly announced. According to gossip at the Exchange, the affair with Lucy was not the main factor in Buckingham's decision to send Carlisle abroad. \"For putting him off for the better access to his lady,\" said one news-writer, \"it needed not, for he was quiet enough with all that was done by her.\"\n\n# [_six_ \nTHE QUEEN'S FAVORITE](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c06a)\n\nIN APRIL 1628, Carlisle set out with pomp and ceremony on an embassy said by King Charles to be of \"the greatest importance.\" Yet nobody seemed to know whether it was to enlist allies against France or against Spain or both. The Florentine agent predicted that its results would be \"more showy than substantial,\" and the Venetian ambassador remarked that the purpose was simply \"to gratify private passion.\" The Prince of Orange told the Venetian ambassador at The Hague that Carlisle's mission had \"no real motive beyond some affection of Buckingham for Carlisle's wife.\"\n\nTraveling in Carlisle's entourage were his son, James, and Goring's twenty-year-old son, George. For both young men this was the first stage of their grand tour, the period of continental travel that capped the spotty education of aristocratic youths. James was to stay away a year to improve his French and to learn Italian. As was customary, he was put in the charge of a tutor, one James Traill. These traveling tutors were usually impoverished clerics or pedagogues not much older than their charges, with whom they had discipline problems from the first footfall on the Continent. But Carlisle's son James was a dutiful sightseer and diligent linguist, judging by the lack of tutorial complaints in the many letters Traill wrote to the Earl after the men set off on their own.\n\nDuring Carlisle's absence, Lucy was left with the sole responsibility for his daughter by his first marriage. A girl about the Queen's age, Anne Hay had been living with her father and stepmother for some time. Shy by nature and sickly, she stayed in the shadow of her brilliant stepmother. Few at court had ever spoken with her, yet this self-effacing young woman had quite unwittingly aggravated the ill will between her father and Buckingham the year before. Neglected by her father, she had become involved with one of the Queen's court musicians, a fleshily handsome, profligate French lute player named Gautier. No harm would have come of it had Gautier not got in trouble by boasting that \"by the dulcet tones of the lute he could make his way even into the royal bed and had been urged to do so.\" As a result of his loose talk, he was imprisoned in the Tower. Under torture he spilled forth a stream of confessions, including the admission of \"a close intimacy with a daughter of the Earl of Carlisle.\" Among the charges brought against him was an allegation that he had planned to murder Buckingham; poor Anne came under suspicion briefly as an accomplice. Buckingham vindictively broadcast the story of Anne's involvement with the lute player. Naturally, the Venetian ambassador reported to the Doge, her father \"would have preferred silence.\" Henceforth, Carlisle disliked the sight of his daughter.\n\nWhile Carlisle was making his ceremonial progress through Europe's capitals, Lucy and her stepdaughter passed the early summer of 1628 at Nonsuch Palace with the King and Queen. Lucy never felt better than she did at Nonsuch, where she spent long hours on horseback. In June the court physician, now Sir Theodore Mayerne, wrote Carlisle that his wife and daughter were well, and that he would continue to watch over their health. Lucy was still the uncontested favorite, according to the Queen's secretary. Like the other courtiers, she rejoiced to see the royal marriage improving day by day. (Charles's relations with Parliament had soured to the point where he had been presented with the Petition of Right, a serious attack on the royal prerogative; this was an unpleasant subject avoided in the royal circle.) Henrietta Maria had matured into a vivacious, pretty young woman, although somewhat dark-complexioned by English standards. Charles was falling more and more in love with her, and she visibly reciprocated his affection. During Buckingham's absence fighting the French the previous summer, their mutual attraction had had a chance to take root. With Buckingham about to take out the fleet again this summer, there would be no impediment to the flowering of the royal romance.\n\nIn July Lucy and Anne accompanied the Queen to Northamptonshire, where she went to take the waters at Wellingborough. With the Dutch and the Spanish fighting in the Low Countries, Spa was inaccessible, so English watering places had come into their own. Bath, of course, with its sulfurous waters for drinking and bathing, was an old established resort, but newer ones such as Tunbridge Wells in Kent, only a few miles from Penshurst, and Knaresborough in Yorkshire, whose waters were said to be similar to those at Spa, were \"much frequented\" of recent years. Wellingborough was one of the newest. This was Henrietta Maria's second summer there. During the royal sojourn, Lucy and Anne stayed nearby at I Ioldenby, a country house built by an ambitious peer to entertain Queen Elizabeth.\n\nThus Lucy was at Holdenby House when the shocking news arrived that the Duke of Buckingham had been assassinated at Portsmouth. He was on the point of taking out a huge fleet in a second attempt to relieve the Huguenot city of La Rochelle, still under siege by French government forces. The expedition the previous year had ended in humiliating defeat. After a day and a half of Fighting on the Isle of Rh\u00e9, Richelieu's superior force had slaughtered hundreds of Buckingham's soldiers and sailors, including many colonels and captains. Buckingham had returned to Plymouth a disgraced Lord High Admiral. He had become the most hated man in England. His retainers were carrying pistols when they went into the town, and his astrologer, Dr. Lamb, was torn to pieces by a mob. Desperate to repair his reputation, Buckingham had prevailed upon King Charles to give him a second chance, and somehow Charles had found the money to outfit the fleet. Sailors were rounded up by press gangs.\n\nOne lovely June clay, Charles and Buckingham had visited the shipyards at Deptford to view ten fine new fully rigged fighting ships. \"George,\" Charles had said gravely, \"there are some that wish that both these and thou mightest both perish. But care not for them. We will both perish together, if thou doest.\" It would be twenty years before the King's part of the pact would be carried out.\n\nStrangely enough, just before leaving for Portsmouth, Buckingham had commanded the actors at the Globe to perform Shakespeare's _Henry VIII._ It was remarked that he and his party had left right after the death scene of the sixteenth-century Duke of Buckingham.\n\nBuckingham was assassinated at a house in Portsmouth in full sight of his army commanders and the usual swarm of servants and suitors. He had just finished breakfast and was moving into the next room. Waiting for him in the passageway, the assassin struck a knife deep into his victim's left side. With blood gushing from his wound, Buckingham pulled out the knife, stumbled into the hall, and expired. At the hubbub, the Duchess of Buckingham and her sister-in-law, the Countess of Anglesey, came out on the gallery overlooking the hall and, seeing the Duke in a pool of blood, began weeping and screaming. Witnesses to the dreadful scene said they had never in their life heard such \"screechings, tears, and distractions.\"\n\nThe assassin made no attempt to flee but lingered in the kitchen. With everyone shouting, \"Where is the villain?\" he stepped forward boldly and declared, \"I am the man. Here I am.\" He gave his name as John Felton and said he was a former lieutenant in an infantry regiment. He freely described how he had bought a cheap knife in a shop on Tower Hill in London and had made his way to Portsmouth, partly on foot and partly on horseback. Under interrogation he offered a mixed bag of motives, one of them being that after reading of the Duke's abuses in Parliament's Remonstrance against him, he thought that he would do his country good service by killing him. Taken to the Tower by water, he was cheered by crowds shouting, \"The Lord be merciful unto thee.\" Puritanism was spreading among the common people, and it sanctioned tyrannicide. Felton's execution was relatively merciful. Instead of being drawn and quartered while still breathing, he was simply hanged.\n\nThe death of the Duke of Buckingham was greeted with relief and joy all over England. One Englishman spoke for the country when he called him \"a monster not to be endured.\" Under Charles, Buckingham had become the effective ruler of England. He controlled all patronage, creating lucrative monopolies for his brothers and his sycophants while selling government posts for enormous sums. He himself held a plurality of lucrative offices. It was no secret that he had bought the office of Lord High Admiral from the incum bent in 1619 with \u00a33,000 from King James, and popular opinion blamed his mismanagement for the navy's decay He had led the country into two expensive wars, with one military disaster following another. In the Remonstrance that had inspired Felton to kill him, Parliament had named the Duke \"the cause of all misfortunes.\" Yet, sustained by royal favor, he was unassailable until an assassin's knife felled him.\n\nKing Charles was heartbroken and planned a funeral for his best friend even more sumptuous than King James's funeral. The projected cost, to be borne by the Crown, was estimated at \u00a340,000. But Charles's advisers argued that the Duke was so unpopular that a state funeral would undoubtedly be disrupted by a mob. The grandiose plans were laid aside. Instead, six men carried an empty coffin through darkened streets to Westminster Abbey, followed by no more than a hundred mourners. The corpse had been buried the day before at the Abbey, as it was feared \"the people in their madness\" might have broken open the coffin.\n\nWhether Lucy would have shared in the general rejoicing or mourned a personal loss there is no way of knowing, because at that very time she fell ill with smallpox. It was a bad case, but Mayerne and the other royal physician, Matthew Lister, gave her a favorable prognosis. Their treatment was to let blood under her tongue; since she did not die, it was regarded as highly effective. The disease ran its course and, in spite of the medical care, by the beginning of September, Harry Percy was able to reassure Carlisle that Lucy was out of well-meaning people see behind the mask? The truth of the matter was revealed by Mayerne, who informed the Earl of Carlisle that the disease \"has scarcely left a mark.\" The few pockmarks dismissed so lightly by her doctor would nevertheless have been agonizing for Lucy. She had the vanity of a spoiled beauty. Her refusal to remove the concealing mask suggests the extent of that vanity.\n\nBy mid-September Goring (now Baron Goring) was writing Carlisle in glowing terms of Lucy's return to health. \"Your Lady, my mistress, is recovered miraculously, and not a whit marked with that venomous beast,\" he reassured his friend. As for her plans, he reported that \"this week she intends to be at London, and the next with the Countess of Berkshire to air herself there awhile before returning to her sacred mistress.\" Lady Berkshire was that same Elizabeth Cecil who had married Tom Howard in preference to Robert Sidney, thus clearing the way for Dorothy She and her husband were close friends of the Carlisles, who frequently visited them at Charlton Park, their estate in Wiltshire. Unpredictable always, Lucy changed her mind at the last minute and, taking Anne Hay with her, went instead to Dorothy at Penshurst. Robert and Dorothy were now the Earl and Countess of Leicester; the genial old earl had died in 1626.\n\nOn October 3, Leicester wrote Carlisle from the \"solitude\" of Penshurst that \"Lady Carlisle is here, perfectly recovered and unblemished by her great sickness.\" He described the effect in England of Buckingham's death. \"The fall of the great tree planted by your old master has made such a percussion in the air as I doubt not but the noise has far out gone the place where you heard it. In these nearer parts it has caused such a brawl in divers things (as they say) that to right and quiet them your presence is wished by many.\" The brothers-in-law had become reconciled. Although Leicester would later say sourly that they were never friends again, their correspondence from 1628 on was unreservedly friendly. Carlisle even revived his old affectionate nickname for Robert\u2014\"Noks\"\u2014and Robert responded warmly. With what joy the sisters would have welcomed the end of hostilities between their husbands.\n\nA few months before his death the old earl had taken out insurance in the form of a second marriage to a wealthy widow, and life at Penshurst was more agreeable with the improvement in the family's finances. Under Dorothy's careful management, the houseful of servants carried out their appointed tasks like clockwork. The principal rooms, filled with tapestries and paintings, chairs and stools upholstered in needlework and cloth of gold, were kept \"clean and sweet-smelling\" by the Groom of the Chamber. When the Earl and Countess dined in the medieval great hall on formal occasions, the usher saw to it that those at the second table sat \"orderly, civilly and quietly.\" This sharp-eyed upper servant also took care that \"broken meats\" (partially carved roasts and fowl) were put in the tub for the poor. In the buttery the butler kept regular hours like a publican, dispensing bread and beer to all comers through the hatch. The master cook presided over the vast kitchen, chasing out scroungers and scolding his helpers if they forgot to wear their caps while dressing the meat.\n\nAt the main gates the porter was on duty around the clock. Promptly at ten o'clock, he shut up for the night, and any stragglers who returned later than \"that lawful hour of reposing themselves\" were reported. To make doubly sure that the house was fast for the night, the housekeeper checked the gate, as well as all doors and passageways. Women servants working in the nursery, laundry, or dairy were forbidden to receive their swains while on duty And to keep order among the unruly band of grooms and stable hands, the coachman slept in the stable. For all servants there were rules against blasphemy, fighting, or urinating in the passages \"where the same may be offensive.\"\n\nAfter a dozen years of marriage, Dorothy had filled the nursery to overflowing. \"Young Dorothy, or Doll, as they called her, was now a beautiful, sweet-natured eleven-year-old. Philip and Algernon were eight and six, respectively. Toddling around the nursery were three-year-old Lucy and two-year-old Robert. A sign of Dorothy's love for her sister, when the first baby Lucy died in 1624, was that the next girl, born the following year, was given the same name. The never-empty cradle was now occupied by infant Anne. Dorothy had not fattened on childbearing. Energetic to a fault, she was always hurrying to attend to one matter or another. Her good works extended beyond the walls surrounding the great house to the little village of Penshurst, where they centered upon the ancient parish church. The cycle of birth and death, the seasonal celebrations, and religious observances claimed much of Dorothy's time. She also had her duties as a hostess. Although Penshurst under the second earl was not the scene of lavish hospitality as in the days of his father and grandfather, once again, after the lean years, friends and relations came to visit. Particularly welcome were Viscount Mandeville and his second wife, a cousin of Dorothy's, who often stopped to visit on their way to Kimbolton, the country house of Mandeville's father, the Earl of Manchester.\n\nBut Dorothy's melancholy spirits had not lifted with the improved finances, her busyness, or the visits of friends. The loneliness of country living had become her constant complaint, unmitigated by her husband's presence. Only the short parliamentary sessions took Robert away from Penshurst in these years. The older she got, the more Dorothy was becoming like her mother. At times she let herself go in fits of temper that illustrated only too well her father's uncomplimentary opinion of the female sex. By her own admission, Dorothy would fly into a passion and rail at everyone. Like most husbands of short-tempered women, Robert came in for much of this abuse. He met these outbursts with appeasement, and those close to the household regarded him as henpecked. When Dorothy's sudden storms burst upon his head, he retreated without a word to his study, but Dorothy in her wifely wisdom knew that he went not out of meekness but glad of the excuse to retire to his books and shut out the cares of the household. Indeed, much of Dorothy's temper was provoked by Robert's scholarly detachment. Warm, passionate, and fiercely loyal, she sometimes feared that her husband did not sufficiently reciprocate her strong feelings\u2014her \"extraordinary passion,\" as she called it.\n\nIn spite of Dorothy's many responsibilities, during Lucy's convalescence the entire household revolved around her. Even in the best of health Lucy was self-centered. Several years later Dorothy spoke of her sister's conceit as a confirmed personality trait. Lucy's present situation certainly was such as to flatter her vanity Goring had always been her \"slave\"\u2014that was an old story\u2014but now other lords were her courtiers, eager for the latest health bulletin. Above all, there was Queen Henrietta Maria herself \"sending day and night to her.\" Lord and Lady Leicester could not help but see that their familiar house-guest had become a very important personage.\n\nDorothy was not envious of Lucy's career. She had no desire to play the courtier. But she was ambitious for Robert. She viewed the hours he spent poring over his books as time wasted. Still, he continued in his study, not averse to receiving a call from King Charles but doing nothing to elicit it. Observing Lucy's growing influence, both husband and wife hoped that she would be able to assist his as yet un-launched career. For the moment, however, Dorothy's concern was simply to cater to her sister and watch over her recovery.\n\nDorothy was also very hospitable to Lucy's stepdaughter. Anne was not well. Sir Theodore Mayerne acquainted her father with her poor state of health but did not say what ailed her. Probably nobody had ever been as kind to the lonely young woman as Dorothy was, for in Anne's stilted letters to her father, only her gratitude to Lord and Lady Leicester emerges as anything more than a copybook exercise. Poor Anne penned beautiful letters in both French and English to her absent parent, but she was never able to win his approval. In all her letters there is a note of contrition, as if she was always conscious that she had not been forgiven for her involvement with the French lute player. From Essex House she wrote that she continually did those things she thought would please her father. From Penshurst she gladly undertook to obey his commands; another letter, in French, assured him of her humble duty. Carlisle supported the daughter of his first marriage not ungenerously\u2014from abroad he arranged with a London banker to send \u00a3100 to the Earl of Leicester for her keep\u2014but he did not love her.\"\n\nRelaxing in her sister's company, Lucy had little urge to take up her life at court. In mid-October, however, she went back to London, accompanied by Anne, for whom Mayerne had prescribed a course of physic. Shortly afterward, Dorothy arrived at Essex House to keep her sister company, but she could not stay long and after a few weeks returned to Penshurst, taking Anne with her.\n\nCommanded by the King and Queen to come back to court as soon as possible (\"with leave to keep on my mask,\" she wrote Carlisle), Lucy put in an appearance at the end of November. Still listless from her illness, she was seized by a nostalgia for the days when her husband and Buckingham had been the peacocks of the garish, colorful court of the old king. Plaintively, she told Carlisle that if he saw the little gallantry there was at court, he would believe it no great adventure for her to go there after her bout with smallpox. \"It was most desolate,\" she reported, and she had \"no great desire to return till she was made happy with his company\" This sentiment is characteristic of her letters to Carlisle during her convalescence. There was in Lucy at this period a retrospective yearning for her husband's protection. It was years since she had turned to him with such words as these, written from Penshurst: \"I wish you would speedily return for I have been in great danger.\" Still, as her strength revived, so did her independent spirit and her zest for court life. That was her milieu. She had striven to earn a place for herself. She was not likely to give it up on the whim of a moment. She had become the confidante of queens.\n\n# [_seven_ \nCOURT POLITICS](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c07a)\n\nIN THE VACUUM created by Buckingham's death, two factions at court were jockeying for power: one favored a French alliance, the other, alliance with Spain. The French party, Puritan to a man, supported the cause of the exiled King and Queen of Bohemia and the treaty with the Dutch that Charles had signed in 1625. Among the French faction were Puritan lords like the Leicesters' good friend Viscount Mandeville and the sisters' cousin the Earl of Holland. The strong anti-Spanish sentiments of these lords could be accounted for only partly on religious grounds, since France was also a Catholic country Closer to the mark was the fact that many of the French partisans at court had extensive interests in the West Indies that would not permit them to recognize the New World as a Spanish preserve. They had visions of reviving the privateering of Elizabeth's reign, when English ships plundered Spanish settlements in the Caribbean and captured Spanish galleons, and of profiting from the new concept of exploitive colonization. So long as England was at war with Spain, Charles assumed the right to plant colonies in the Indies and grant charters to his favorite courtiers. The Earl of Holland had just been appointed governor of the newly chartered Providence Island Company, which planned to finance a Puritan colony in the West Indies that would yield a nice profit to its \"adventurers,\" as the shareholders were called. King James's tacit observance of the Spanish monopoly in the Americas had left the English meager pickings, and they wanted to ensure that Charles did not return to the pro-Spanish policy of his father. As England's self-interest led them to advocate continued war with Spain, of necessity it made them proponents of peace with France. As Buckingham had discovered, two wars were one too many. The French faction was considered to be the majority on the Privy Council, and, in fact, Mandeville was the council president.\n\nAround King Charles, however, a new body of advisers was forming that reflected his undeclared leanings toward Spain. There was Sir Francis Cottington, who enjoyed a secret pension from the Spanish king. In November 1628, Cottington was appointed a privy councillor and soon after Chancellor of the Exchequer, making him one of the most powerful men in the kingdom. Politically, Cottington seconded his friend the Lord Treasurer, Sir Richard Weston, another \"Spanish pensioner\" and a closet Catholic. After Buckingham's death, Weston became Charles's principal minister. Secretive and wily, he kept his politics and his religion to himself, but he fooled nobody. His unpopularity with the growing number of Puritans throughout the country was matched only by that of the Bishop of London, William Laud, another new appointee to the Privy Council.\n\nWhile the French party wanted peace with France only, the Spanish party wanted peace with everybody so that England could resume trade with Spain and the Spanish Netherlands. Contemporary opinion held that the Spanish trade was more profitable than the French. Spain bought what England had to sell\u2014woolens, cotton, linen, hardware, leather, tin, butter, tobacco, and Newfoundland fish\u2014and sold what England wanted to buy\u2014wool from Segovia, Mcxican dyes, olive oil, Spanish wines, and fruits. Moreover, the Anglo-Spanish war had a devastating effect on England's carrying trade since Spain, as an enemy, no longer used English ships to transport goods to and from the Spanish Netherlands.\n\nThe reopening of the lucrative Spanish trade and the end of expensive wars appealed to Charles, as it had to his father. After the tumultuous parliaments of 1628 and 1629, he had decided he would no longer humble himself by seeking parliamentary subsidies, which came at the expense of his royal prerogative. No doubt in retaliation for Charles's forced loans after the 1627 session, the parliament of 1628 presented him with the Petition of Right prohibiting \"any gift, loan, benevolence or tax, without common consent by act of parliament.\" Initiated in the Commons, the bill had been passed by the House of Lords. Charles had signed it and proceeded to ignore it. In 1629 the Commons was even more unruly, refusing to allow the King's officers to collect custom duties called tonnage and poundage\u2014a royal practice that had been rubber-stamped by parliaments for two centuries. When Charles attempted to adjourn Parliament, irate members held the Speaker in his chair by physical force. In a portentous speech to the House of Lords (he did not invite the Commons), Charles reasserted his divine right to rule but assured the Lords that he would \"maintain the ancient and just rights and liberties of our subjects.\" It was a speech such as King John might have delivered to the barons when he signed the Magna Carta in 1215. Charles dissolved Parliament and was not to reconvene it for eleven years. During his Personal Rule (as historians have named this period), Charles levied taxes and forced loans as he pleased.\n\nCARLISLE'S NATURAL PLACE was with the French party, particularly since he was the proprietor of the island of the Barbados and the Leeward Islands. Many members of this faction looked to him for leadership and urged him to return quickly from the Continent. However, Carlisle lingered abroad, and by default the leadership of the French party passed to his rival the Earl of Holland.\n\nOnce back at court, Lucy threw herself into promoting her absent husband's interests. She realized that in this war of factions she would stand or fall with her husband. All the Scottish courtiers adhered to the party that wanted peace with France, and they regarded Carlisle as their leader. Lucy's activities on her husband's behalf were greeted with warm approval by this group. At the end of December 1628, Sir David Murray wrote Carlisle of \"a secret working for his continuance abroad by those who carry an outward show of friendship to him\"\u2014a patent reference to the Earl of Holland. The writer then went on to say that \"Fair Lucibella, or rather Philocles, has played her true part, which more and more procures her the writer's love and respect.\" From numerous sources Carlisle was informed of Lucy's devoted efforts for his good. Goring, as might be expected, rubbed it in. Lady Carlisle, he wrote on November 22, was her husband's \"careful friend beyond that of ordinary in a wife.\" After all she was doing for him, Goring rebuked his friend gently, \"let old Goring not hear one syllable of old quarrels.\" On December 22, he reported on \"the great esteem for Lady Carlisle throughout the court.\" He advised Carlisle to let her know \"how heartily he takes her watchful and truly loving respects.\" (The good-natured Goring also tried to keep the peace between his cronies, assuring Carlisle of Holland's goodwill, \"much for my comfort, for so should old friends live.\")\n\nThrough this Venetian intrigue, the masked \"Lucibella\" (as Sir David Murray dubbed her) moved with confidence, her power base the Queen's affection. Pregnant with her first child, Henrietta Maria was becoming \"a great courtier.\" Naturally all her efforts were bent toward promoting an accord between her husband and her brother Louis. On \"the Queen's side\"\u2014the suite of rooms at Whitehall occupied by Henrietta Maria and her ladies\u2014the Spaniard was very much the villain. The rivalry between Louis XIII and the Hapsburgs had flared into open conflict. Having subdued the Huguenots and the French nobility, Richelieu was ready to challenge Hapsburg hegemony. French and Spanish troops were fighting in Mantua over the ducal succession. The Duke of Mantua had died, and each of the rival nations had its candidate to succeed him. Henrietta Maria was full of wrath against Spain and the Spanish party at court. In her heavily accented English she vilified Weston, Cottington, and Laud.\n\nWhile Lucy's influence increased with the Queen's participation in affairs of state, she was placed in a difficult position by persistent rumors that Carlisle inclined toward an alliance with Spain. She alerted her husband that he was thought \"hugely Spanish.\" To her the rumors were ridiculous. It was not the Spanish but the French ambassadors they had been wining and dining through the years. She would need more than \"a common report\" to \"believe him a Don Diego,\" she wrote, but in the meantime \"the noise of it troubled some of his best friends.\"\n\nThe truth of the matter was that Carlisle was abroad acting on secret instructions from King Charles. In the last months of his life, Buckingham had actively sought peace with Spain. With his death, it was generally felt that the peace talks would terminate. There was rejoicing in the Venetian and Dutch embassies and among the French party when Charles called the Spanish negotiations \"cabals and things of no consequence.\" But far from abandoning an Anglo-Spanish treaty, he was deeply committed to it. This meant reneging on his obligations. In 1625, when he had needed allies against Spain, he had signed a treaty of alliance with the Dutch against Spain for fifteen years. At the same time, he had solemnly promised his sister and her husband, the self-styled King and Queen of Bohemia living in exile at The Hague, that he would fight to recover their hereditary Palatinate. Since he was now proceeding unilaterally to make peace with Spain without his Dutch allies or his sister and her husband, Charles encouraged the belief that Carlisle had acted on his own initiative in visiting pro-Spanish powers.\n\nCharles was eager to keep his spirited wife as uninformed of his peace feelers as his allies. All Henrietta Maria heard was the rumors of Carlisle's purported \"leanings toward Spain.\" Lucy devoted much of her time and effort to convincing the Queen that the rumors were false. In February 1629, Carlisle came home from his thankless mission, and Lucy found that the rumors of his Spanish leanings were only too true. Since the King had not made his own position clear, Carlisle said little publicly, but he was known to have formed \"a triumvirate\" with Weston and Cottington. To the consternation of his erstwhile friends in the French party, he was frequently closeted with Charles. A worried Venetian ambassador reported that \"Carlisle perseveres in his cabals\" and expressed his fear that he \"captivates the mind of a young king.\"\n\nLucy soon learned that her husband's political change of heart had affected her own position with the Queen. Henrietta Maria was basking in her pregnancy, her only worry that her husband might not make peace with her brother. From various sources she heard that Carlisle was privately talking against the French, and this earned him her strong displeasure. \"His wife has already begun to find this out,\" reported the Venetian ambassador with satisfaction. At times Henrietta Maria was almost cold to Lucy The vivacious face no longer lit up automatically at her appearance. One day Lucy would find the Queen her old self, another day even her wittiest conversation could not draw forth a royal smile. Where previously the Queen had claimed to be bored by the Countess of Holland, she now sat stitching needlepoint and talking placidly with her by the hour. Lucy reacted to the Queen's indifferent treatment with superb composure. Every inch a Percy in her pride, she had the l\u00e8se-majest\u00e9 of her forefathers ingrained in her. Not for her the chair in the anteroom. She simply ceased her daily court attendance and appeared when she felt like it.\n\nMeanwhile, the magnificent Lord and Lady Carlisle were having money problems. Though their opulent lifestyle continued unabated, Carlisle was heavily in debt. There were no more royal gifts of thousands of pounds. As all the court knew, King Charles could barely find means to provide for himself and the Queen in the style to which they were accustomed. In March 1629, Charles dissolved the turbulent parliament without obtaining a subsidy, so there was little financial relief in sight for him or for his courtiers. Carlisle had always spent money as if the golden stream would never dry up. He had no savings and his assets were of a speculative kind. After several years \"the island business\" had not yielded him above \u00a3200. And while prospects were good for the Irish wine customs and the Irish lands that King James had granted him, so far they were not very profitable either. His mainstay was his pension and the several thousand pounds that flowed from his influential position as First Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Carlisle's expenditures were so high and he was so negligent in his business affairs that he owed over \u00a3100,000 to London moneylenders on which he was paying interest at 20 to 30 percent. Only by pawning plate and jewels was he able to maintain the grand style.\n\nAs if that weren't enough, the couple found themselves ousted from Essex House, the splendid if somewhat run-down mansion in the Strand that Carlisle leased from Lucy's grandmother, the aged Dowager Countess of Leicester. Out of the blue she wrote her \"grandson\" requesting him to leave the house he had \"so long held\" of her and to deliver up his leases so that she might dispose of the property. Moreover, Carlisle was two years in arrears with the rent and the old lady demanded immediate payment \"in order to make repairs.\" The eviction notice closed with a grandmotherly blessing on the Earl and her \"noble daughter.\" This unpleasant letter was not to be dismissed as the whim of a relative in her dotage. At ninety years of age, the wealthy countess was in command of all her faculties, conducted her own business affairs (as this letter shows), and had the physical stamina to walk a mile every morning. In the end, she went to court to evict them.The Carlisles had to go house hunting. From this time on, they were to move their costly possessions to a series of rented houses, like a general in the field who, wherever the battle takes him, sets up his tent with its silver-fitted folding camp furniture.\n\nMoreover, Carlisle was having a bother with his children. Anne had been living at Penshurst ever since Lucy's recovery from smallpox the previous autumn, supposedly on a visit to improve her health in the country air. Her father and stepmother were quite satisfied to leave her there indefinitely. On Carlisle's return to England in February 1629, Dorothy had written him a little note excusing herself for not welcoming him in person and promising to come up to London soon with Anne to show him \"how well she had grown.\" At the end of May the young woman was still at Penshurst, and Leicester advised his brother-in-law that he would be \"forced to part with Lady Anne.\" He explained that he and Dorothy were about to go to Petworth for a visit, and the Earl of Northumberland was restricting them to one child only and a small number of servants. He asked Carlisle to consider where Anne might best be placed. Thus Carlisle was squarely faced with his parental responsibility. He was far from pleased. Once again poor Anne was associated with something unpleasant in her father's mind. Northumberland's preference for Leicester still rankled with Carlisle. He would have liked to spend the month of June at Petworth; in fact, he had angled for an invitation. Early in May he wrote his father-in-law full of concern about his health. Northumberland replied civilly enough, complaining of the weather and a bad cold, but extending no invitation.\n\nOver the years the old earl had become even testier, and he was a trial to his children. He was strongly opposed to Algernon's prospective marriage to Anne Cecil, the eldest daughter of the second Earl of Salisbury \u2014 the Salisbury Papers contain a series of very cranky letters from him on the subject. Northumberland was against this love match because he still harbored resentment against the first Earl of Salisbury for his imprisonment. However, he was somewhat mollified by the present earl's tact. At times his letters reveal a more amiable side, as, for instance, when he wrote that the young woman would be lucky to escape living under such an ill-natured person as himself. Like his sisters, Algernon went ahead and married the person of his choice, secure in the knowledge that his father had settled almost all his estate on him twelve years earlier. \"I am simply a tenant for life,\" grumbled Northumberland to Salisbury. Still, the old man had retained \u00a3200,000 in ready money, which he dangled before his children's noses. Except for Algernon, he was not very generous to any of them. Harry was about to set out on his grand tour, but the Earl told a family friend that \"he will go as a younger son and not in pomp.\"\n\nElderly and sickly as he was, he had some woman living with him, and this caused his children concern. It would seem that Salisbury was also worried by this misalliance, with its prospect of additional heirs, because there is a letter from Algernon reassuring his father-in-law that his father had no intention of remarrying, \"and his marrying that woman the most unlikely thing of anything that is not impossible.\" In spite of everything, the old curmudgeon's word was his children's command. When he asked the Leicesters to hasten their coming to Petworth, they quickly altered their plans. As Leicester wrote Carlisle, \"No kindness from him must be slighted.\"\n\nAbout the time that Anne came back to London, her brother, James, returned from the Continent. After parting from Carlisle in the Low Countries the previous autumn, he and his tutor, James Traill, had set out for Italy. At Turin the young tourist had fallen ill with smallpox. Traill reported that during his illness the English ambassador to the ducal court of Savoy, Sir Isaac Wake, had been \"like a father to him.\" This was just as well since his own father appeared to be as unconcerned as a stranger. When James was well enough to travel in mid-December, he and his tutor continued to Genoa, and from then on they never heard from Carlisle. In March, which found them in Florence, Traill expressed his concern in a letter to Ambassador Wake: Lord Carlisle had not written a word and they needed instructions about going home. In April James wrote his father from Rome that since leaving Turin he had received no commands, and he feared his father had not got his letters. Meanwhile, Carlisle was being badgered by Edward Denny, now Earl of Norwich, to bring his grandson home. Still, Carlisle kept silent. Finally, in May, James announced flatly that he was returning to England. His traveling companion, another English youth, was going home, and as he did not want to travel on alone with his tutor, \"in self defence\" he too was leaving. It is clear that as James grew up, Carlisle liked him even less than he had in his boyhood. It was a strong, unnatural antagonism. Carlisle no longer expected to have a second family with Lucy, and James was his only son. The boy had grown into a fine, upstanding young man, according to his proud grandfather. On James's return from his travels, Norwich told Carlisle he was \"much affected with his manliness and all the good hopes which may well be entertained of him.\"\n\nNEITHER THE MOVE from Essex House nor the reappearance of the unwelcome Anne and James deflected Carlisle and Lucy from the courtier's life. In May the Queen had given birth prematurely and the baby boy had died. This called for constant attendance from Lucy, who had gone through the same sorrowful experience herself. Once again Henrietta Maria clung to Lucy, favoring her above all her ladies. Carlisle's tireless attendance at court was matched only by Holland's. In April an armistice was signed with France. This considerably enhanced Holland's prestige. But the French party's jubilation was premature. A French alliance alone would lead to an escalated war with Spain and the reconvening of a parliament to finance it. After the last obstreperous session of Parliament, Charles had no intention of ever calling another one. At the same time as he signed the armistice with France, he had Weston send word to Spain that he was ready to open peace negotiations. However, he did not make his views known; in fact, he played the factions against each other. To his courtiers he was a Delphic oracle whose every word or action had them cudgeling their brains to interpret it correctly.\n\nIn June 1629, there was great excitement at court over the arrival of diplomatic representatives from both France and Spain. Since the breaking off of diplomatic relations early in the reign, there had been no embassies from either country. The first to arrive was Peter Paul Rubens, the famous painter from the Spanish Netherlands, who had come to make preliminary arrangements for an Anglo-Spanish peace treaty. According to one observer, no one was happier to see him than the Earl of Carlisle, who \"entertained him with great affection and invited him to dine with him.\" A few weeks later, it was Holland's turn to rejoice when the French ambassador, the Marquis de Ch\u00e2teauneuf, made his entry into London, accompanied by fourteen coaches. Ch\u00e2teauneuf was an impressive-looking man in his early fifties, tall and heavy with a luxuriant black beard. He had been sent on numerous diplomatic missions by Henrietta Maria's father, the great Henri IV, but of recent years he had not been much employed in this capacity. The Marquis exhibited all the arrogance and tactlessness that characterized most aristocratic legates, regardless of the country they represented. Standing on ceremony on all occasions, he would not take a step without an entourage. The first thing he did was to insist that the Master of Ceremonies, Sir John Finet, give him the use of the best royal coach while he was in England.\n\nDespite his affiliation with the Spanish party, Carlisle could not resist an ambassador, and at the beginning, he and Lucy were on very friendly terms with the Marquis. They had him to dinner frequently and took him to visit their friends the Earl and Countess of Berkshire at their country house. Carlisle was appointed to escort the ambassador to Windsor Castle for the signing of the peace treaty on September 6. After the ceremony, he had to share him with Holland; the two rivals escorted him back to London, stopping over at Moor Park in Elertfordshire to show him the gardens and waterworks. Ch\u00e2teauneuf also went with the two lords to Cambridge (Holland had succeeded Buckingham as chancellor of the university), where he was awarded a master of arts degree and entertained royally.\n\nIt was soon apparent that Ch\u00e2teauneuf intended to make use of the Queen in his negotiations. But he found her unresponsive. Henrietta Maria was \"troubling her head very little with affairs of state.\" Satisfied that peace had been signed with her brother, she was more concerned with becoming pregnant again than with \"playing the courtier.\" Nevertheless Ch\u00e2teauneuf persevered, confident of his ability to influence her and, through her, the King. As her countryman, Henrietta Maria had granted him the right to come to see her informally, without having the Master of Ceremonies arrange an audience. Ch\u00e2teauneuf took full advantage of this privilege and was a habitual visitor to the Queen and her ladies.\n\nIt was this self-important diplomat who was to bring the Queen's wrath down upon Lucy's head. While everyone was paying court to the new ambassador\u2014her own husband attended upon him daily-Lucy could not resist mocking him in her inimitable fashion. By nature hypercritical and encouraged by her audience, the bored court circle, she had developed her satirical gifts into a minor art form. With a well-chosen phrase she would expose the personal foibles of the men and women around her. Dissecting one another was a favorite pastime at the Caroline court. It was the fashion to circulate anonymous word portraits, or \"Characters,\" as they were called. Then there would be endless speculation about their authorship. Because of her talent for satire, Lady Carlisle was frequently hailed as the author. She always disclaimed them. But she could not deny her spoken character assassinations, which were quickly passed around the court. By this stage of her life she had added to her reputation as a beauty that of a \"bright and sharp-witted\" woman. She was serenely undisturbed that her sharp wit had earned her some enemies; it was not that she did not understand discretion but that she scorned it. This time, however, she had met a formidable adversary.\n\nWhen the Marquis de Ch\u00e2teauneuf heard that Lady Carlisle had \"made game of him,\" his dignity was outraged and he determined to pay her back. He informed the Queen \"that Lady Carlisle abused her favour, and bore herself with little respect, going so far as to make sport of her actions.\" Henrietta Maria had heard Lucy's performance too many times not to find this report credible. Deeply hurt and angry, she wanted Lucy out of her sight at once. Without any investigation of the facts, she insisted that her husband remove Lady Carlisle from court. The King himself took Lucy aside and, as tactfully as possible, told her that \"it would be advisable for her to abstain from coming to court until the Queen was appeased.\" Shocked beyond measure by this sudden disgrace, Lucy asked to know the accusation against her that she might defend herself But Ch\u00e2teauneuf had no desire to prove his charges. He convinced the Queen that it was beneath her dignity to argue the matter with one of her husband's subjects.\n\nThus, in November 1629, Lucy found herself banished from court. Rumors were rife as to the cause. Many thought it was because of a quarrel with the Countess of Holland. It was true that Lucy had never liked her cousin's dull, prissy wife, and the Queen's sudden show of favor to Lady Holland had not improved their relationship. Undoubtedly, there was some strain between the Ladies of the Queen's Bedchamber at this time. But only the inquisitive Venetian ambassador sniffed out the true cause of Lady Carlisle's banishment\u2014the malice of the French ambassador.\n\nHaving ousted Lucy, Ch\u00e2teauneuf was trying to replace her permanently with another favorite. Although Lady Holland would have been the logical choice as the wife of the leader of the French party, he realized that she was too tedious for the Queen's taste after the scintillating Lucy Instead, he was busily promoting another candidate in the person of the attractive Countess of Exeter. In seeking to ruin Lucy, the French ambassador had a political as well as a personal motive. He wanted the Earl of Holland to be appointed Lord High admiral to replace Buckingham, but Carlisle was effectively blocking the appointment. At the Privy Council, Carlisle argued reasonably enough that if his fellow councillors wanted a navy because of their mistrust of France, it was hardly good policy to leave the choice of admiral to the French ambassador. It was not difficult to see why Ch\u00e2teauneuf was striving to destroy the influence of Lord and Lady Carlisle.\n\nThe dispute over the admiralty brought out into the open the smoldering enmity between Carlisle and Holland. Although they had not been real friends for years, they had continued to march in tandem on the courtiers' daily rounds. They had been partnered so long in the sporting fields, in diplomatic missions, and in ceremonial and social life that they were usually spoken of in the same breath. Similar in their endowments and motivation, they responded to life in the same manner. Ambitious and spendthrift (Holland a younger son and Carlisle from the Scottish gentry), both were totally dependent on royal favor, either directly from the King or indirectly through the momentarily powerful. They were always the first to greet an ambassador and never more than two paces from their sovereign's elbow. Even when their quarrel had grown to some height, the Venetian ambassador paired them in his dispatches: \"Carlisle and Holland dance attendance upon the Lord Treasurer... Carlisle and Holland live in great splendour and perpetually follow the court.\" Even in adversity they were twinned, the Venetian adding that \"they are borne down by their great expenses.\" In December came the break. Opposed politically, their ambitions clashing, Carlisle and Holland quarreled publicly.\n\nWhereas this kind of disturbance had been endemic in his father's court, Charles would not tolerate it. After the last two sessions of Parliament, with the ferocious attacks on his prerogative, he had made up his mind to call no more parliaments and to finance his government through extraparliamentary measures. As Parliament receded like a bad dream, he envisaged his court as some private Elysium for himself and his queen, an elegant and cultured milieu free of jarring notes, the realization of the perfect court in Castiglione's _Il Cortegiano._ Two days before Christmas, when life at court was at its most delightful with revels and feasts in the best taste, of course, Charles summoned the two earls before him. Although he was soft-spoken, his was the voice of command. Their unseemly quarrels were disturbing the Queen's pleasure in the Christmas festivities, he told them sternly. They had better make peace between them or he would ban them both from court. With downcast eyes, the no-longer-young miscreants swore that they would quarrel no longer. Their stiffness and cold expressions belied their words, and it was a sham reconciliation. The event provided the day's news: \"The two great lords reconciled yesterday,\" a letter writer reported on December 24,1629, \"but Lady Carlisle is still commanded from the court.\"\n\nAll through the New Year's festivities and into the January season of masques and banquets, Lucy remained at home. When the newly arrived Spanish ambassador had his public audience in the Banqueting House, she was conspicuously absent from the assembly of \"the noblest and fairest ladies of court and town.\" For her sake, Carlisle would have nothing further to do with the French ambassador. And out of the King's presence, he and Holland were not on speaking terms. At the end of the month, however, a second reconciliation took place and this one was effective. At the same time, Lady Carlisle was permitted to resume her duties around the Queen. The King had personally acted as peacemaker, persuading his wife to reinstate her suspended Lady of the Bedchamber. By February 1630, Lucy was back at court although, it was whispered, \"not so much a favourite as she was wont to be.\" Ch\u00e2teauneuf predicted that she would never be prime favorite again. He was quite complacent that he had planted the seeds of distrust in the Queen's mind.\n\n# [_eight_ \nDEATH OF CARLISLE](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c08a)\n\nHENRIETTA MARIA WAS in her private chapel at St. James's Palace, praying that the baby she was carrying would survive. Her first baby, a son, had died the day of his birth. While telling her beads, she gazed around her. The April sunlight coming in through the three long windows over the high altar, gilding the statues of saints in the niches around the walls and the coffered vault of the ceiling, seemed to the Queen to be a benediction. She had chosen to give birth at St. James's Palace because of this beautiful chapel. Originally intended for the Infanta, it had remained partially constructed until 1627, when it had been completed for her own use. The Queen and the twenty or so priests and French attendants she had been permitted to keep with her in England were alone in the vast chapel. Because of the recusancy laws, English Catholics were not allowed to come for mass here; and to ensure that none entered, guards were posted outside the street door. With a final genuflexion to the statue of the Virgin Mary, Henrietta Maria raised her swollen body and, with her ladies hovering over her, withdrew from the chapel.\n\nShe repaired to a small room in her private apartments, where a woman was shortly brought to her. Her visitor had tight graying curls, a vague smile playing upon her lips, and pale blue eyes that seemed to be looking into some far-off place. This was Lady Eleanor Davies. She had made a reputation as a seeress by foretelling the death of Buckingham. She had also prophesied that the King's first-born would not live. For that, which had turned out to be only too true, Charles had banished her from the Queen's presence. If Charles knew she was consulting Lady Eleanor, the Queen thought, he would be angry, but she simply had to hear what the seeress was prophesizing for this baby. The answer was as vague as the lady's smile.\n\nTo add to Henrietta Maria's anxiety, the midwife dispatched by her mother from Paris had been captured at sea, along with Henrietta Maria's pet dwarf, who had been sent to fetch her. In her present state of mind, the Queen was a difficult mistress for all her Ladies of the Bedchamber. To Lucy she sometimes showed an edge of rancor, the indelible residue of the French ambassador's spiteful charges. But most days, the Queen welcomed Lucy warmly Henrietta Maria delighted in frivolities. She loved masquing, clothes, and games of all sorts \u2014 indeed, she sent to France for the newest ones in vogue. Above all, she enjoyed having witty people around her. Consequently, she could not resist Lucy's charming company for long.\n\nAlthough Henrietta Maria no longer gave Lady Carlisle the unquestioning love she had lavished upon her as a young girl, it was obvious to the courtiers that she still preferred her above all her other ladies. \"It is more than I can hear,\" Tobie Mathew reported to Sir Henry Vane, another of Lucy's great admirers, \"if there be at Court any other lady but she.\"\n\nAt the end of May, the Queen was successfully delivered of a strong, healthy baby boy, an heir to the throne christened Charles after his father. As tradition required, certain nobles and officers of state were present at the last stages of her labor for the purpose of assuring the King that no other infant had been substituted for the royal infant. After giving birth, the Queen remained in her bedchamber for weeks. When she had \"lain in\" for the obligatory month, the Queen was taken to be churched, a celebratory occasion to give thanks for a successful delivery.\n\nA few days later, the christening ceremony of the future Prince of Wales took place at St. James's Palace. The infant was brought on a velvet cushion to the Queen's Privy Chamber by the Countess of Denbigh, the appointed governess, who then passed the precious burden to her daughter, the Marchioness of Hamilton. Preceded by a procession of aldermen, judges, peers, great officers of state\u2014all in full regalia\u2014the young marchioness, supported by the Earl Marshal and the Lord Treasurer, carried the royal infant, under a canopy held by four lords, to the Chapel Royal (not the Queen's Catholic chapel, the palace was careful to point out). Behind her came the widowed Duchess of Richmond, whose train was borne by little Mary Villiers, the daughter of the late Duke of Buckingham. Then came countesses in pairs. The Master of Ceremonies, Sir John Finet, did not list the Countess of Carlisle among the countesses in the procession to the chapel, but in his notebook he recorded that \"other ladies that should have preceded these had been invited, and were expected, but appeared not that day with apprehension, it was thought, that they might be called to lend a hand to the train of the duchess.\" Lucy was probably one of these proud ladies who disdained to carry the duchess's train; we recall that her mother before her had done the same at Queen Anne's funeral.\n\nJust past thirty, Lucy was at the zenith of her charms. Availing herself of the benefits of cosmetics, she glowed with the bloom of youth while other women of her age were already worn out with childbearing. As well, she was a fashion plate, favoring full skirts of a rich material, pulled back to display an embroidered petticoat, and a low-cut bodice edged with a wide collar of filmy muslin or lace. Fashion decreed that the perfect accessory for these silk and satin gowns was elbow-length leather gauntlets, so, however incongruous they looked, Lucy certainly added them to her costume. She wore her hair in the style of the day\u2014flat on top of the head with frizzy curls on either side of the face. Tobie Mathew declared that other women learned how to dress merely by observing Lady Carlisle. She loved jewelry, in particular a magnificent pearl necklace that she is wearing in all her portraits. Her preoccupation with her appearance was frequently commented upon. In his 1636 \"Character of the Countess of Carlisle,\" Mathew observed that \"she takes the greatest joy in the perfections of her own person.\" Her narcissism is implicit in the flowery tributes of her admirers, who often portrayed her gazing in a mirror.\n\nAs one of the Queen's ladies, Lucy was assigned lodgings at court, and when she was in residence the great men flocked to her \"chamber.\" The poet Edmund Waller has depicted her holding court at Whitehall, receiving tribute from the great men of the land like some wise and untouchable goddess:\n\nThe gay, the wise, the gallant and the grave \nSubdued alike, all but one passion have. \nNo worthy mind but finds in hers there is \nSomething proportioned to the role of his; \nWhile she, with cheerful but impartial grace \n(Born for no one, but to delight the race \nOf men) like Phoebus so divides her light \nAnd warns us that she stoops not from her height.\n\nPartly they came in tribute to her beauty and charm, but primarily they cultivated her because of her influence with the Queen. Reciprocally, Lucy chose as friends only those who were \"of the most eminent condition, both for Power and Employment.\" Thus her salon was an important element in the shifting political scene at court, and there she presided with all the finesse she had learned from Carlisle.\n\nWe see her through the eyes of the Earl of Exeter, a sixty-year-old member of the Cecil family, still very attracted by feminine beauty. Unable to come to court at the time, he sent her his homage, \"which it would have been more pleasure to pay in her lodging at court, when she sees her perfections in the glass, adding perfection to perfection, approving the bon mots spoken in her presence, moderating the excess of compliments, passing over a dull jest with a sweet smile, giving a wise answer to an extravagant question.\" Were he young again, he wrote gallantly, he would not go to Italy or France to attend an academy, but \"would be a humble suitor that she would vouchsafe that her lodging might be his academy\" It was springtime and he was looking forward to the violets that would be out in a few days, but her perfections outweighed all other delights.\n\nLucy's salon was almost exclusively male. She preferred the company of men, mainly because they were the movers and shakers in the political world that so attracted her; besides, women were jealous of her and fearful of her mocking wit. One who dauntlessly paid court was an unmarried gentlewoman, Marjorie Crofts. As worldly-wise as Lucy herself, Mistress Crofts was a habitu\u00e9 of the salon.\n\nSir Tobie Mathew was the majordomo of Lucy's salon. An aging homosexual with some literary reputation, he was possibly the papacy's most gratifying English convert\u2014his father was a former Archbishop of York and his mother's four sisters had all married Anglican bishops. Because of his religion, Tobie Mathew had spent most of his adult life in exile on the Continent. With his inseparable companion, a younger man from an old Anglo-Catholic family, he had perambulated the courts of Catholic Europe, performing favors for English friends and patrons, for instance purchasing paintings for them by the great Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens. Following some undefined assignment at Madrid during the ill-fated visit of Charles and Buckingham in 1623, he was finally allowed to come home and even knighted, \"for what services God knows,\" Chamberlain had written Carleton.\n\nSir Tobie had been a friend of Carlisle's for many years, but his friendship with Lucy did not flourish until her emergence as an influential courtier in her own right. For her part, she appreciated his knowledge of punctilio and protocol, acquired at European courts, and his finely tuned feeling for politics. Since his return to England, Sir Tobie had been the perennial houseguest of the Lord Treasurer. Soon to become the Earl of Portland, Sir Richard Weston was effectively the prime minister in Charles's nonparliamentary government. Naturally Lucy had enlisted him for her coterie of eminent friends. It may have been this connection that brought Tobie Mathew into her circle.\n\nIn any event, it was she, not Sir Tobie, to whom Portland imparted advance information about diplomatic and political appointments and other important news. Thus, Sir Tobie's power at the English court was at one remove. If people sought him out, it was because he was the confidant of the Countess of Carlisle. He admired her extravagantly. She was (he wrote Sir Henry Vane in 1632) \"the highest creature\" he had known, the possessor of \"all kinds of excellencies,\" one whom other \"woeful creatures\" could not approach \"in any other posture than that of doing her reverence.\" He would not have been unhappy if these remarks had come back to Lucy It was Sir Tobie's very real fear that one day Portland's enemies would triumph over him. In the Countess of Carlisle he found a second protector. In her case, everything depended upon her willingness to perform her court duties.\n\nLucy was a far cry from diligent servant of the Queen. Whether this sprang from a feeling that Henrietta Maria had not proved a constant friend to her, or from her own arrogance and conceit, the result was a sporadic attendance at court. The attendance record of the Countess of Carlisle was a matter of ongoing comment in court news. \"My Lady Carlisle... is become a pretty diligent waiter,\" a courtier informed a friend abroad in November 1630, adding \"but how long the humour will last in that course I know not.\"\n\nCarlisle was a much more reliable royal servant than his wife. No longer of any political importance, he still enjoyed considerable personal influence at court as First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, or Groom of the Stool. Charles was a stickler for observing ceremonial fine points, and he utilized Carlisle's exhaustive knowledge of protocol to deal with the constant flow of ambassadors to his court. Even Sir John Finet, the Master of Ceremonies, consulted him. We come upon Carlisle (in Finet's notebooks) conducting the French and Spanish ambassadors to their public audiences with the King to sign the peace treaties of 1630 and 1631. We see him in his magnificent coach and six, often assisted by his son, James, and Goring's son, George, driving the visiting diplomats hither and yon. The diplomats were always of ambassadorial rank, however, for an earl could attend only upon an ambassador; envoys of lower rank were squired by a baron.\n\nCharles was comfortable having this urbane, faithful courtier around, so Carlisle hunted with him, viewed paintings with him, and accompanied him on all royal progresses. He carried messages to and from the King, interpreting Charles's Delphic utterances for the benefit of anxious suitors.\n\nOne suitor has described Carlisle's mediatory role. The King was at Newmarket; he had hunted all day and was tired and unapproachable. The suitor, who had come from London, sought out Lord Carlisle for assistance. Carlisle padded upstairs to see if the King would receive the visitor. As it turned out, he would not grant an audience, but Carlisle was happy to report that the King had read every word of the suit and the suitor left well pleased.\n\nIt was observed by those around Carlisle at this stage of his life that he was utterly negligent of his own affairs and interested only \"in doing civilities and courtesies to his friends.\" Gone were the days when Leicester could complain that his brother-in-law did not use his influence on his behalf. After a visit to the Carlisles in London in the autumn of 1630, Leicester was positively effusive in his thanks for some unidentified assistance: Carlisle was so \"noble in his favours that if a man be not well provided of gratitude there is danger in making a request of him.\" In the high-flown metaphorical style of the day, Leicester indicated his own capacity for gratitude by likening his heart to a house: there was only one room in his heart and few guests were lodged there; but those that were entertained were so at home that they might, as the saying went, \"throw the house out at the window.\" Needless to say, Carlisle was an honored guest in Leicester's heart.\n\nThe metaphor of the house suggests that the favor on this occasion was Carlisle's promise to obtain the King's permission for Leicester to build a town house on property he owned in London. Unlike most of the nobility, the Sidneys did not have a London residence. When they came to town, they had to impose upon friends or family, as Leicester had just done. How Dorothy must have complained about the lack of a town house! No doubt to please her (or to quiet her complaints), Leicester now decided to build. But to do so required a royal license, and the King was strongly opposed to the no ability forsaking their country seats for life in the city: Charles believed that just as it was his duty to be a father to his people, the nobles had a paternalistic duty to their tenantry. Yet it was nothing for Carlisle to manage the matter, and on August 14,1631, he was able to inform the Attorney General that it was \"the King's pleasure\" that a license be prepared for the Earl of Leicester \"to build upon a piece of ground called Swan Close in St.-Martin-in-the-Fields, a house convenient for his habitation.\" For some reason, probably financial, the house was not begun until 1636.\n\nThe same benignity pervaded Carlisle's relationship with his wife in these years. No longer was he jealous of Lucy's ascendancy nor of the swarm of admirers who crowded her Whitehall lodgings. At his own lodgings Carlisle still kept the best table at court. Thomas Raymond, the nephew of one of the Earl's retainers, recalled in his autobiography: \"I have often seen his [Carlisle's] diet carried from his kitchen across the court at Whitehall, 20 or 25 dishes covered, most by gentlemen richly habited, with the steward marching before and the clerk of the kitchen bringing up the rear, all bareheaded. This for the first and as many more for the second course.\"\n\nWhen not on duty, the Carlisles entertained at their rented house on the Strand. But it was another age, and the fabulous feasts of their early married life were a thing of the past. Sir Tobie Mathew was, of course, a regular guest at their suppers. And so was Marjorie Crofts until she made the error of setting her cap for her courtly host. \"Mistress Crofts is not so great a courtier at Lady Carlisle's,\" reported Tobie to Sir Henry Vane. Another observer remarked that the ladies were both so wise that they made it seem \"the coolness in their friendship\" was attributable to a drifting apart rather than to any malice. In any event, Mistress Crofts soon left England to become a lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Bohemia at The Hague, whence she wrote Carlisle letters of the most fulsome flattery and subtle encouragement.\n\nIt was at this time that poor sickly Anne Hay passed away, in her early twenties. Had it not been for an elegiac poem by the courtier poet Thomas Carew, her early death might have gone unrecorded. The poet admits that he never saw her, and the poem is more a tribute to her father's position than to Anne:\n\nBut when I heard the noble Carlisle's gem, \nThe fairest branch of Denny's ancient stem, \nWas from that casket stol'n, from this trunk torn, \nI found just cause why they, why I, should mourn.\n\nCarew put more feeling into the New Year's poems he dedicated to Lucy, or \"Lucinda,\" as he called her. In one poem he expressed the wish \"that no access of years presume to abate \/ Your beauty's ever-flourishing estate.\" In another, he is more certain that her beauty is ageless:\n\nGive Lucinda pearl nor stone, \nLend them light who else have none: \nLet her beauties shine alone. \nGums nor spice bring from the East, \nFor the phoenix in her breast \nBuilds his funeral pile and nest. \nNo tire thou canst invent \nShall to grace her form be sent: \nShe adorns all ornament.\n\nIn November 1631, the Queen gave birth to a daughter, Princess Mary, and this time she honored Lucy as well as Lady Denbigh, naming them both the infant's godparents along with the Lord Keeper, Lord Coventry. In spite of Henrietta Maria's show of favor to Lucy, it was evident to the court that again there were strains between the two proud women. For those who depended on Lucy's influence with the Queen, this was a worrisome state of affairs, so when the Earl of Holland suddenly began paying court to Lucy, her friends were well pleased. In the circle around the Queen, Holland was the most influential male courtier as Lucy was the female\u2014and more consistently in favor. He and Lucy were first cousins; in spite of the falling-out between Holland and Carlisle, they had remained friendly. As members of the Queen's set, it was inevitable that the cousins would see much of each other. The change was that a political alliance was forming between them. \"Lord Holland's friendship with Lady Carlisle is fully perfected,\" a courtier wrote Sir Henry Vane in December 1631. \"Her friends hope his credit may restore her to the Queen's favour; his apprehend her pride may endanger him.\"\n\nWhat were Holland's reasons for this \"sudden friendship\"? No doubt he realized that Lucy would soon swing back into favor\u2014he had seen the pattern repeat itself often enough. Some regarded it as a sound move on Holland's part to strengthen the anti-Weston faction. But his wooing of Lucy was not just political. He had become infatuated with her. How long he had harbored these feelings is not known, but by the end of 1631 Holland had joined the ranks of those whom Dorothy labeled drily Lucy's \"slaves.\"\n\nAt forty, Holland cut as fine a figure as ever. Striding down the palace halls, head thrown back, he attracted many admiring glances (though those who knew him well were aware that there was not much gray matter behind the handsome exterior). Like Lucy he was a clotheshorse. A full-length portrait by Daniel Mytens, painted in 1632, shows him in a red and gold doublet and breeches, with slashed sleeves over a white satin shirt, a lace collar and the blue ribbon of his Order of the Garter, a stick in one hand and his plumed hat in the other, scalloped hose tops turned down over high-heeled boots, and the brown leather gauntlets that inspired the current female fashion. He has a pointed beard and curly brown hair, and a lovelock (one long lock worn over the shoulder). The cousins were mirror images of each other in their good looks and elegance. In fact there was a family resemblance\u2014the same oval faces with arched eyebrows, as if asking the world to state its business. Although a father of eight, Holland had had many affairs. As the Venetian ambassador said of him, he was \"more given to amours than politics.\" Yet despite his infatuation with his beautiful cousin, their relationship was generally understood to be a political alliance rather than a romantic liaison.\n\nThis would suggest that Lucy was a faithful wife at this stage. Thomas Raymond, admiring her \"excellent beauty and majestic person\" from afar, certainly thought she was. He wrote in his autobiography that \"notwithstanding the great disparity in years between her and the Earl (he growing old), she to his last breath approved herself (as I have often heard by those that know it) a most virtuous, tender and loving wife.\" Obviously Raymond was unaware of Lucy's long affair with the Duke of Buckingham, so his testimony to Lady Carlisle's virtue must be given little weight, except as it presents an outsider's perception of the Countess.\n\nA view from inside the court circle comes from the poet Sir John Suckling, who did not hesitate to write a scurrilous set of verses portraying her as no better than an elegant trollop. \"Upon My Lady Carlisle's Walking in Hampton Court Garden\" is in the form of a dialogue between Suckling and his fellow poet Thomas Carew. In parody of Carew's \"Lucinda\" poems, Suckling has Carew exalt Lady Carlisle as a deity whose passage through the garden makes the very flowers \"start from their beds.\" Suckling's own responses are earthy, to say the least. Watching her stroll along in her fashionable mask and hood, he sees \"no divinity\" and is, in fact, mentally undressing her. Carew is shocked and warns his friend that at the sight of this goddess nude, he would be utterly lost. But Suckling sneers:\n\nWhat ever fool like me had been \nIf I'd not done as well as seen? \nThere to be lost why should I doubt, \nWhere fools with ease go in and out?\n\nWas Lucy as promiscuous as Suckling claims? As a character witness he has low credibility. He was a libertine, a gambler who played with marked cards, and, above all, a cynic. In _Brief Lives,_ John Aubrey dubbed him \"the greatest gallant of his time\" and told how he baited his hook with magnificent entertainments for \"Ladies of Quality, all beauties and young, which cost him many hundreds of pounds, where were all the rarities that this part of the world could afford, and the last service of all was Silk stockings and Garters, and I think also Gloves.\"\n\nAgainst Suckling's besmirching we have Sir Tobie Mathew's word that Lady Carlisle had no inclination for the opposite sex and \"no passion at all.\" In his 1636 \"Character of the Countess of Carlisle,\" Mathew maintained that she \"played with love, as with a child.\" She would \"freely discourse of love, and hear both the fancies and powers of it\"; but (he cautioned) let the listener \"boldly direct it to herself\" and she would quickly stifle the discussion. The passionless woman who turned aside any amorous remarks may well have been an attempt to whitewash Lucy's questionable reputation. Promiscuity was officially frowned upon at Charles's court. The royal couple set the example of monogamy. With evident surprise, a newly arrived Venetian ambassador reported to the Doge that the English king \"loves his wife with remarkable affection, which keeps him from the slightest approach to anything that might give the Queen the slightest jealousy.\"\n\nWith philandering out of place in Charles's Elysium, there was much discussion about the ideal of platonic love. \"The Court affords little news at present,\" wrote a court watcher in 1634, \"but that there is a love called Platonic Love, which much sways there of late; it is a Love abstracted from all corporeal gross Impressions and sensual Appetite, but consists in Contemplations and Ideas of the Mind, not in any carnal fruition.\"Enjoying her own fruitful carnality in holy wedlock, Henrietta Maria encouraged the court poets and wits to versify in this vein; indeed she commanded a masque on the subject of platonic love. Since platonic love was the cult of the day, the ever-adaptable Lucy (with Sir Tobie's help) now presented herself as its high priestess. Seen in the context of the vogue for platonic love at the Caroline court, Sir Tobie's portrayal of Lucy as a woman cold to the point of frigidity (and therefore beyond any accusations of immorality) becomes less convincing. Suckling may have given us the real flesh-and-blood Lady Carlisle.\n\nALTHOUGH TURNING thirty heralded an even more brilliant career for Lucy as the reigning beauty of the court and a powerful courtier, for Dorothy it meant the approach of middle age. A sour note crept into the sisters' relationship. Isolated in the country while she longed for the city, Dorothy was growing envious of Lucy's exciting life and increasingly discontented with her own lot. Contrary to the Early Stuart ideal of womanhood, the fecund sister envied the childless one. Dorothy achieved some gratification, however, when in 1632 Leicester was appointed special envoy to the Danish king. At last he had commenced the career in the royal service for which he had been groomed and that Dorothy had so earnestly hoped for him. Since he had waited so long for preferment, it is probable that Carlisle had finally put in a good word for him with King Charles. On September 14, 1632, Dorothy saw her husband off at Penshurst. He was to be away at least several months.\n\nDorothy had achieved her vicarious ambition, but it meant even greater loneliness. Leicester was only too aware of the unhappiness he left behind him. From Denmark he wrote her brother Algernon, begging him to visit her at Penshurst. Her disposition was \"apt enough to be melancholic,\" he wrote, \"especially in that solitary place where, though it be the best I have, I must confess it was her ill fortune that placed her there.\" How often he must have listened to Dorothy's reproaches on this subject for, filled with guilt, he added: \"In recompense whereof my greatest study is to procure comforts for her, which she shall never want of, if my life can serve her with any.\" Compounding Dorothy's unhappiness, in November her father died. She had been the old earl's favorite daughter, and a few months before his death he had visited her at Penshurst. Although hardly as grief-stricken as when her mother died, she found that her father's passing increased her feelings of desolation.\n\nLucy's mourning was certainly very measured. There was no sisterly reunion to commiserate together. The younger sister was caught up in the life of the court. The Queen's on-again, off-again favor to the Countess of Carlisle continued to fascinate the courtiers, who had little else to occupy their minds. Henrietta Maria had long since learned that Lucy could not be relied upon to turn up for all her court functions. When the Queen presented her pre-Lenten masques at Somerset House, Lucy was seldom among \"the divers great ladies\" who acted with her. Lucy had a distaste for performing in the masques that were the Queen's chief delight and usually excused herself. She deigned to appear, however, in _Chlorida_ in 1631 and Inigo Jones's _Tempe Restored_ in 1632. In 1632 the roving ambassador Sir Henry Vane was informed by a London correspondent that \"Lady Carlisle was firm to her principles\" and lived just as she had when Vane left England the year before: \"If any change it is to less attendance.\" Notwithstanding her spirit of independence, Lucy was a royal favorite and the recognized conduit to the Queen.\n\nThis is confirmed by the man who was to become the paramount figure in Lucy's life for the rest of the decade. In May 1633, Sir Thomas Wentworth came to London before taking up his appointment as Lord Deputy of Ireland. In a letter to Carlisle, who accompanied King Charles to Scotland for his long-deferred coronation (although Charles had succeeded his father as King of Scotland, in eight years he had not found time to go to his northern realm to be crowned before this), Wentworth wrote, \"The Queen's favours to my Lady are apparent and much spoken of amongst us; and in good faith I persuade myself will continue so long as it shall please my Lady to set herself in the way to have them bestowed upon her.\" Because of his leanings toward the Spanish party, Wentworth was in the Queen's bad books. Not the least of his motives in coming to London during the King's absence was the hope of finding someone who could ameliorate Henrietta Maria's opinion of him. Lady Carlisle was the obvious person.\n\nA wealthy Yorkshire landowner, in the 1620s Wentworth had been one of the King's severest parliamentary critics. Charles had co-opted him by making him Lord President of the Council of the North. The northern council, an arm of the royal government in London, was established to quell the endemic disorder resulting from rivalry between \"bullying magnates\" and from festering family feuds. By bringing the magnates to heel, Wentworth had earned the reputation of an outstanding administrator\u2014an ability rare, if not unique, under Charles's personal rule. Now he was being sent to Ireland to bring order out of the chaos that habitually reigned there. He would have much preferred a London appointment\u2014he had his eye on the lord treasurer ship\u2014but as the viceroy of Ireland he could look forward to holding one of the most important posts in the royal service. Wentworth was an old friend of Carlisle's. From Yorkshire he sent him a kennel of hounds, indicating that he would do more once he was in Ireland. Carlisle had extensive Irish interests and at the time was pressing a land claim. In his letters, Wentworth always asked to be remembered to Carlisle's lady. It is doubtful that he had known her other than casually up to this time, but in 1633 they would see a great deal of each other.\n\nAt this stage of her life, Lucy was described by one besotted lord as '\"the killing beauty of the world,\" and Wentworth was clearly dazzled by her. Indeed his cousin Christopher Wandesford dared tease him about \"my fair lady of Carlisle, your most sweet Egeria.\" (Egeria was the fabled consort and counselor of Numa Pompilius, a legendary king of Rome.) The admiration was mutual. Lucy conceived an immense respect for the ungainly man with the beetling brows, whose simple dress made him look like one of the Puritans hauled up before the Star Chamber. Brusque and somewhat ill at ease in society; Wentworth had none of the smooth graces of a Holland or a Carlisle. Certainly he did not regard himself as an attractive man. \"This bent and ill-favoured brow of mine was never prosperous in the favour of ladies,\" he responded to ragging (probably about Lucy) from the Earl of Exeter. But Lucy knew a great man when she saw one, and in this admirer she found a person worthy of her admiration.\n\nFrom all signs, Wentworth was content to keep the friendship on a high plane. In the first place, it would have been folly to risk alienating Carlisle, who was so close to the King. It is a fair conjecture that Wentworth and Lucy had many a discussion about platonic love, for a friend who was with him in Ireland said that the Lord Deputy often discoursed privately on the subject. Wentworth's love life was actually rather strange. The year before his close friendship with Lucy, he had married his third wife, the daughter of a Yorkshire neighbor, but for no apparent reason the marriage was kept secret until Wentworth arrived in Dublin. Clearly an undemanding young woman, his wife by satisfying his physical needs left his fancies free to dwell on Lady Carlisle's empyrean virtues.\n\nA platonic friendship notwithstanding, during his stay in London that summer Wentworth displayed unmistakable signs of jealousy. The Earl of Holland was as enslaved as ever by Lucy. They spent much time together in the Queen's inner circle, and Wentworth glowered at reports of the \"great courtesies\" that passed between them. In a letter eloquent in its mixed motives, he warned the absent Carlisle that Holland and his clique were wooing Lucy frantically. Wentworth and Holland were members of opposing factions at court, and, seen in this light, an attempt to convert Lucy to the French party would run counter to Wentworth's political interests. But there was also the personal element. Holland was Carlisle's b\u00eate noire, as Wentworth well knew. An alarmed husband might be the best way of ridding himself of a rival. The letter ended with Wentworth's assurance that he had \"no other interest\" than the \"honour and happiness of your Lordship and my Lady.\"\n\nAt the end of July 1633, Wentworth left for Ireland, satisfied that in Lord and Lady Carlisle he had friends at court. (He had undoubtedly made known to Lucy his burning desire for an earldom.) Henrietta Maria was in the final months of another pregnancy, and Lucy was assiduous in attending her, as she always was at such times. On October 14,1633, the Queen was delivered of a son. The christening of the baby James took place at St. James's Palace, as had that of his brother Charles. Once again, as at Charles's christening, Lucy had to take a back seat at the ceremony The day belonged to her rivals the Buckingham women. The Countess of Denbigh, who as First Lady of the Queen's Bedchamber held the equivalent position to Carlisle's with the King, had the honor of carrying the royal infant in the august procession. Her daughter the Marchioness of Hamilton stood up as deputy godmother for King Charles's sister, the Queen of Bohemia. Her train was borne by Mary Villiers, Buckingham's ten-year-old daughter. With Buckingham long gone, Henrietta Maria no longer disliked his female, relatives. If anything, she showed more constant, if lukewarm, favor to them than she did to Lucy. As Lady Denbigh remarked smugly to her son, there was nothing that could put her out of her place \"but my want of health which thank God I now enjoy very well.\" In January 1634, Lucy retired from the court, pleading illness. But it is more than possible that rancor against the Queen for her favoritism to Lady Denbigh and her family played a large part.\n\nIn the same month, the Reverend George Garrard, Wentworth's faithful correspondent, informed him that Lady Carlisle, although she looked well, had \"utterly lost her stomach\" and was staying at home in the Carlisles' rented house in the Strand to take physic and recover her health. Whether this was more hypochondria or whether she was genuinely ill we do not know. Wentworth wrote her, full of concern, and the indiscreet Lucy \"showed his letters to everybody.\" This was reported to him by his horrified sister, who asked him what on earth he was doing writing to Lady Carlisle who, in her opinion, was simply \"wild.\" True, Lucy had a bad habit of sharing private letters. Dorothy once cautioned Leicester to be careful what he wrote to the Earl of Holland, as he would show the letters to Lucy, \"and from thence it spreads all over England.\" Wentworth thought none the less of Lucy for her indiscretion. He may have charged it to her \"ingenuousness,\" which he found very appealing. He once remarked of Lady Carlisle that \"she will not seem to be the person she is not, an ingenuity I have always observed and honoured her for.\"\n\nLucy remained away from court for months, purportedly taking physic. Carlisle was also sick with an interminable cold. At the end of the year, however, Lucy returned to her duties, and in early January 1635, Garrard was able to report that \"my Lady Carlisle lives now constantly in court again.\" She had given the Queen a very fine New Year's gift, which was graciously accepted. Viscount Conway, the son of the late secretary of state, a close friend and neighbor of Lucy's brother Algernon (who had become the tenth Earl of Northumberland on his father's death), wrote Wentworth that the real reason for her long absence was pique. Yes, Lady Carlisle was back at court, but there would never be \"a perfect friendship\" with the Queen. She and her sister-in-law, Lady Northumberland, were not in the Queen's pre-Lenten masque. They had not offered, and the Queen and her ladies had not asked them, for fear of being refused.\n\nLucy's influence over her aging husband was an accepted fact. The French ambassador reported in 1634 that the Earl of Carlisle \"can only be reached through his wife who controls him absolutely\" He added that she also controlled Sir Thomas Wentworth but went on to say that Lucy, in turn, was controlled by her brother, \"who leans to the French side but has to be wooed with presents.\" The ambassador was referring not to Northumberland, whose probity was above question, but to Lucy's younger brother, Henry Percy\n\nHarry had become a diligent courtier, making his addresses mainly to the Queen\u2014he was her Master of the Horse. As a younger son with little money, he had remained a bachelor and was reputedly a rogue with women. Someone-who clearly disliked him described him as a weak man but subtle and artful for his own ends \u2014\"bold and busy putting himself into every fiddling business.\" Dorothy saw her younger brother in much the same way. She was particularly scornful of him for making use of Lucy's influence, \"yet when the Queen speaks of her with neglect he hears it with as much patience as if it did not concern him.\" It is unlikely that Lucy allowed herself to be ruled by Harry, and in fact Conway reported to Wentworth in January 1635 that sister and brother had shocked the court by quarreling in public. At the same time, Harry had a falling-out with Lucy's husband, telling all who would listen that he would \"rather be damned than receive a courtesy from my Lord of Carlisle.\" This did not stop him from freeloading at his brother-in-law's well-stocked table although, laughed Conway, \"not being much bid welcome.\"\n\nViscount Conway's opinion of Lucy also belies the French ambassador's remark that she let Harry rule her. \"Lady Carlisle,\" Conway wrote Wentworth, \"will be respected and observed by her superiors, be feared by those that will make themselves her equals, and will not suffer herself to be beloved but of those that are her servants.\" Wentworth, in the throes of fighting corruption and mismanagement in Ireland, replied: \"I admire and honour her, whatever be her position at court,\" and he asked Conway to relay a message. \"You might tell her sometimes when she looks at herself at night in the glass that I have the ambition to be one of those servants she will suffer to honour her.\"\n\nBy the summer of 1635, rumors were circulating that the Earl of Carlisle was seriously ill. He did not go on progress with the King, and, aside from a week's visit to the Earl of Northumberland at Petworth, the Carlisles remained in London. There, at the end of July, the Leicesters' agent found the Earl of Carlisle in good spirits and ready to expedite the recovery of some stolen plate if, he joked, his brother-in-law would return \"the yellow book on the House of Austria\" that he had misappropriated from him. Thomas Raymond has left us another, more somber picture of the ailing earl. Listening to a sentimental ballad of Elizabeth's reign, he was moved to tears by the words \"his golden locks time hath to silver turned.\" On July 30,1635, Garrard wrote Wentworth that Carlisle had just settled an estate of \u00a32,500 a year on his lady, to be held in trust by the Earl of Northumberland, who had come up from Petworth especially to sign the trusteeship document.\n\nThough Carlisle seemed to recover in the late summer, Lucy saw the end coming. On September 7, she sent a letter to Wentworth. After apologizing for engaging him in some unspecified \"trouble\" without his leave, she went on to ask for \"the absolute security\" of his protection. Wentworth's answer was the height of chivalry: \"Surely Madame there are many of greater understanding and power you might have commanded, but not any that will more readily and cheerfully serve you than myself.\" His fervor to serve his lady was no doubt sharpened by a letter from Conway in November, informing him that Lady Carlisle had a new admirer, the young Duke of Lennox. As a result, Conway gossiped, Holland hated Lennox and had formed a friendship with the Marquess of Hamilton against their common enemy. He had better end this letter, Conway said, \"lest I write a libel.\"\n\nBy January 1636, Carlisle was plainly dying. \"With much grief,\" Garrard reported to Wentworth that he \"infinitely decays, his stomach gone.\" He could hardly walk but valiantly insisted that he would not yield to Goodman Death. At the end of February the Venetian ambassador reported that the Earl of Carlisle was in \"an almost hopeless condition.\" By March he was having convulsions, and for a short time he lost his speech and recognized no one. He came out of the stroke, but, convinced now that he would die, he began to put his affairs in order. His debts were enormous, upward of \u00a380,000. To frustrate his creditors he put his estate in trust for Lucy. Everything was to go to her.\n\nHis son and daughter-in-law sat by his bedside faithfully, yet young Viscount Doncaster would get nothing but the title of Earl of Carlisle. Although his son had assisted him in his duties as First Gentleman of the King's Bedchamber, Carlisle still disliked him. James had aggravated this dislike by marrying the daughter of the Earl of Bedford in 1632 without his father's permission. Also left out of the will was Carlisle's kinsman and faithful agent in Ireland, Sir James Hay. Carlisle had borrowed a great deal of money from him and his brother Archibald. This oversight was to cause Lucy considerable bother.\n\nIn the midst of his suffering, Carlisle was greatly comforted by several visits from King Charles, who stayed for hours and was demonstratively affectionate to his old favorite. Shortly before his death, Carlisle beseeched the King to confirm to Lucy for her lifetime all the benefits he himself had enjoyed. And to ensure that his creditors could not seize these grants legally, he asked Charles to accept their surrender on the understanding that they would be returned to Lucy after his death. Charles readily agreed to help Carlisle evade his debts. Meanwhile from Ireland Wentworth assured Lucy that he was looking after the Carlisles' interests and that he would be leaving for England very soon. But delayed by a cruel attack of the stone that made him too weak to travel, he did not arrive before Carlisle died at the end of April. Clearly stricken by the \"sad news,\" Wentworth wrote Lucy a tormented letter in which he cursed the ill health \"that denied me the honour to kiss his hands before his departure and here detained me from the place where I might hope to be of some use in that trust whereby your Ladyship hath been pleased to dignify me.\"\n\nSir James Hay, Viscount Doncaster, Earl of Carlisle\u2014for nineteen years Lucy's husband\u2014had been a faithful courtier to two kings. Contemporaries regarded him as \"a gentleman every way complete,\" unaffected and courteous, whose \"sweet and candid compliments\" and \"humbleness\" warded off envy and left him without a single enemy. (In reality, he quarreled with his brother-in-law, had a falling-out with Buckingham, and maintained a long-standing rivalry with Holland.) His missions to mediate conflicts abroad had met with no success, but he had carried them out with great finesse. A spendthrift and clotheshorse, his name was a byword for lavish display. In a society where land meant wealth and power, Carlisle was a landless peer, whose prestige rested upon his access to the Throne. \"He left behind him,\" the historian the Earl of Clarendon writes, \"the reputation of a very fine gentleman and a most accomplished courtier, and after having spent, in a very jovial life, above 400,000l., which, upon a strict computation, he received from the Crown, he left not a house or acre of land to be remembered by.\"\n\nCarlisle was, of course, embalmed while elaborate funeral arrangements were being made. We are told that the embalming of an earl required exceptional care. In the hands of a surgeon and an apothecary, the corpse was disemboweled (perhaps removing the heart to be kept in an urn by the bereaved) and the cavities filled with aromatic spices. The body was then sealed in wax and encased in lead, molded to its shape by a \"plummer,\" and this served as the coffin. In this condition, the body could be kept above ground as long as required. An unleaded body had to be buried at once, which was a disgrace to a noble family\n\nOn the evening of May 6, 1636, the Earl of Carlisle was buried with full honors, the nobility turning out in force to pay its last respects. Starting from the Carlisles' house in the Strand, the cort\u00e8ge proceeded toward St. Paul's Cathedral, where the Earl was to be buried. Heading the procession were seventy poor men from an almshouse in black gowns provided for in Carlisle's will, and after them the Earl's thirteen watermen. Then a seemingly endless line of nobles and knights filed past, followed by a rider less horse in black velvet trappings with black plumes on its head. Officials representing the Wardrobe and the Bedchamber\u2014the government departments Carlisle had headed\u2014walked in front of the Earl's personal servants. Heralded by the somber strains of trumpets, the hearse carrying the black-draped coffin came in sight, drawn by six black horses. The Earl's coronet and his Order of the Garter lay upon a pillow on the hearse. Unfortunately, there was no family member walking in front of the coffin, because Carlisle's only son was ill and unable to attend the funeral. After the coffin passed, royal heralds hired for the funeral came bearing the achievements of the deceased: his banner, sword, spurs, gauntlets, his helmet with his crest, and silver and gold ceremonial ornaments presented to him in the course of his long diplomatic career. Bringing up the rear were the Earl's household servants, each carrying the white staff of his office. Arrived at the cathedral, the coffin was carried into the old Gothic building by the pallbearers to its final resting place.\n\nCarlisle's impressive funeral did not escape criticism. \"Few bewail the Earl of Carlisle,\" one cynical observer wrote his son. \"It is poor satisfaction to the Londoners, his creditors, to pay them with laying his bones in St. Paul's.\"\n\nLucy found herself a wealthy widow: \u00a35,000 a year, the Irish wine customs said to be worth \u00a320,000, and a \u00a32,ooo-a-year pension confirmed by the King. The Venetian ambassador reported, \"It is reckoned that the Countess will have \u00a35,000 for her life and more than \u00a370,000 besides with jewels, furniture and plate, which will be at her free disposition.\" Not only had she inherited her husband's estate (through conveyances that were possibly fraudulent), but as a widow she came into the large jointure he had settled upon her at the time of their marriage. (Though one letter writer hazards the opinion that Carlisle was \"making her some repair from his personal estate... for his failings to her of late in his person,\" the fact is that both husband and wife had long found sex outside marriage.) Lucy had flouted all the rules for a good wife. Instead of wifely obedience and fidelity, she had established herself as her husband's equal and gone her own way. Yet Carlisle admired her and loved her to the end.\n\nApparently, Lucy did not spend much time mourning her departed lord. She did not attend the funeral (widows seldom did), and Edmund Waller poetizes that this was just as well because her beauty would have diverted the male mourners:\n\nWe find not that the laughter-loving dame \nMourned for Anchises; 'twas enough she came \nTo grace the mortal with her deathless bed, \nAnd that his living eyes such beauty fed; \nHad she been there, untimely joy, through all \nMen's hearts diffused, had marred the funeral.\n\nAt the age of thirty-seven, Lucy was finally free of an old husband, and she was rich.\n\n# PART TWO\n\nAT THE\n\nKING'S\n\nCOMMAND\n\n# [_nine_ \nDOROTHY A GRASS WIDOW](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c09a)\n\nTHE DAY AFTER Carlisle's funeral, Leicester left for France to take up an appointment as ambassador to the court of Louis XIII. His mission to Denmark had been a failure, but he had conducted himself creditably (not least in walking away unassisted from the table after a marathon drinking bout with the Danish king) and had thus placed himself in line for a promotion. With this high employment in the foreign service, Dorothy at last saw her ambitions for her husband achieved.\n\nCharles's diplomacy in these years of nonparliamentary government centered on recovering the Palatinate for his sister's husband, and after 1632 for her son, at no cost to himself. With this objective he sent his envoys on contrary missions. Some were dispatched to the King of Spain to urge him to yield the garrisons he held in the Palatinate and to use his influence with the Holy Roman Emperor and the Duke of Bavaria for total restitution. Others, such as Leicester, were sent abroad to see what help they could get from France. Charles had a pet plan. It called for the French to cede Lorraine to the Hapsburgs in exchange for the Hapsburgs' returning the Palatinate to the Elector Palatine. Charles himself would give up nothing. But Charles persuaded himself that because France was involved in a war with Spain, his brother-in-law, Louis XIII, could be induced to fall in with his plan in order to ensure English neutrality. This was Leicester's task. As he would at length discover, the French would only help in the restitution of the Palatinate if England would join them in their war with Spain\u2014the two superpowers had finally made their enmity official with a declaration of war on May 19, 1636. But Charles would not go to war under any circumstances, for fear of having to call a parliament.\n\nProvided he staved out of the continental wars and was very careful to cut down on domestic expenses, Charles could muster enough revenue to dispense with Parliament permanently His extraparliamentary taxes and forced loans, however, were very unpopular. Ship money a tax to raise money for the navy, which had been previously limited to the ports, was extended to the inland towns and cities. Customs duties were farmed out to favorites who paid the King an annual rent\u2014merchants complained that the farmers were steadily increasing the rates. Similarly, the King granted monopolies of staples, even salt and soap, from which he received royalties. Long-disused feudal statutes were revived, and offenses under these new-old laws were heavily fined. In particular, the revival of the forest laws alienated the landed classes. Their ancestral holdings, which had been cultivated by tenant farmers for generations, were suddenly classified as forest, and heavy fines were imposed for trespassing on the King's property Large landowners, who had enclosed the common land on their estates to raise sheep, were fined under ancient statutes for depopulating the area. Then there was the knighthood tax. Any landowner worth \u00a340 a year or more had to pay a substantial fine for refusing the responsibilities of knighthood. Tame judges and intimidated juries legitimized the King's nonparliamentary money raising.\n\nLeicester took his two older sons, Philip and Algernon, with him to Paris. Robin, the ten-year-old, was sent to board with his tutor. Dorothy, pregnant as usual, remained at Penshurst with her five girls, all under eleven except Doll. Before going abroad, Leicester put the entire management of his estate in Dorothy's capable hands. The rents from Penshurst and the landholdings in Wales and Warwickshire were to be paid to her. He himself planned to live on his \"entertainment\"\u2014his allowances from the Exchequer. King Charles had assured him that he would not suffer from his employment abroad, and Leicester, who was still owed over \u00a32,000 for his Danish embassy in 1632, believed him.\n\nFrom the time Leicester's first bills began arriving from France, it was obvious that getting the Exchequer to pay up would be a major problem. Dorothy was in constant correspondence with Leicester's London agent, William Hawkins, who spent day after day at court waiting upon the Lord Treasurer, the two Secretaries of State, and numerous other officials, soliciting for his master's allowances. While Hawkins cooled his heels in the antechambers of Whitehall, from Penshurst Dorothy enlisted the help of the Earl of Holland, her cousin and Lucy's besotted admirer. Not only was he a favorite of Queen Henrietta Maria, but he had now stepped into Carlisle's boots as First Gentleman of the King's Bedchamber. Initially, Holland lived up to his reputation as a very influential courtier, assuring Dorothy that a warrant would be issued to pay her husband's bills and his monthly allowance retroactive to his arrival in France. But as weeks went by and no money was forthcoming, Dorothy sent Holland a strong letter, impressing upon him that she had pawned her jewels and borrowed from her friends (including a loan of \u00a3500 from Lucy, although she did not mention this to Holland); she finished off by saying that her husband could hardly get any more credit in France. Lucy chided her sister that this far from tactful letter hurt Holland's feelings. Dorothy was unrepentant. \"I did not say one syllable offensively or unkindly,\" she assured Leicester.\n\nWith single-minded purpose, Dorothy now solicited help from Archbishop Laud\u2014the former Bishop of London had risen to the highest ecclesiastical office, that of Archbishop of Canterbury. When Leicester's allowances were eventually paid, Dorothy believed it was thanks to Laud, for, as she informed her husband, Holland's influence was more apparent than real. For his part, Holland claimed the credit and was offended with Dorothy (as she heard from her brother Northumberland) \"for doubting of his power and employing the little bishop.\" Whoever it was that pried the payment out of the royal revenue, it simply marked the beginning of years of solicitation at court by Hawkins for \"my lord's money business.\" While it was true that the Exchequer was a poor paymaster, Leicester lived in such state at Paris that he always exceeded his allowances anyway. Bills came for his lavish entertaining and for liveries of unnecessary servants. Then Hawkins had to scrounge around for lenders, or Dorothy had to put in rent money after all. The quiet scholar had turned into a big spender!\n\nFrom Dorothy's letters it is clear that she took firm control of Leicester's financial affairs. She made all the decisions from felling timber to send to the ironmaster, to determining which creditors would be paid first. Not quite satisfied with a report she had from Hawkins, she summoned the agent to Penshurst to explain every detail to her. Hawkins learned to have the greatest respect for her business acumen. Unlike \"many other noble ladies,\" he wrote Lord Leicester, she was careful to pay off debts as promptly as possible, which was necessary if they were to preserve the family's credit.\n\nAnother responsibility that devolved upon Dorothy was overseeing the completion of Leicester House in London. It was almost ready for occupancy. A long, low building of red brick, it was built on the north side of a field known as Swan Close (today Leicester Square). The surrounding area was just beginning to be built up. Aside from a few other mansions, among them one belonging to Lord Goring, the house stood in open country From Penshurst Dorothy arranged for the exterior woodwork to be painted and gilded and a balustrade erected on the roof. She had already seen to an impressive gate. A handsome chimneypiece was installed in the great chamber, and she ordered gilt leather for the walls of the stairway and the anteroom. Furniture was next.\n\nLeicester had sent some pieces for the withdrawing room, but there remained the furnishing of the great chamber. It was all a tremendous expense, she sighed. The cost would go well beyond what they had allowed, but she assured her husband that she would make the money stretch as far as possible.\n\nThey missed each other sorely. Their correspondence reveals the extent to which Leicester was still passionate about his wife. He poured out his sexual frustrations in his letters, which Dorothy read \"with a little shame but no dislike.\" She did not need to be persuaded, she said, to give him in her thoughts what he desired, \"for had I the happiness to be with you, certainly nothing should be denied to you which is in my power to bestow.\" At one point he seems to have complained that she was not passionate enough, for she replied with spirit: \"If there can be one in the world that can love above all others, I am deceived if I am not she.\" Leicester continued to vent his frustrations. After receiving some mirrors and pictures for Leicester House from Paris, Dorothy wrote: \"If what you desire in return from me could be sent with as much ease as these goods, it should not be denied.\"\n\nHow incensed she would have been had she known that her good friends \"Will Crofts and \"little Wat\" Montagu were offering her sex-starved husband a mistress. From Tours in July 1637, Sir William Crofts wrote Leicester: \"I have seen a lady here who thinks herself very happy in your Lordship's acquaintance although it be but small.\" It seems Walter Montagu had introduced the lady to Leicester, and Crofts told Leicester he was \"sure\" that if they met again \"you would be yet more satisfied with one another... Your lordship could not choose but be with her.\" In case Leicester took offense, Crofts covered himself by presenting the woman as a person interested in learning more about England. We do not know if Leicester availed himself of the opportunity to take a mistress.\n\nSeparation from Leicester would at least give Dorothy a respite from her chronic state of pregnancy. In the autumn she gave birth to another girl. Girl babies were hardly prized in Stuart England. Some weeks later, when her sister-in-law was delivered of a girl, Northumberland did not even bother to tell Dorothy. She must have taxed him with this neglect, because on December 5 he wrote from Syon House that \"the having of another girl I thought so inconsiderable that I made no haste in acquainting you with it.\" This was his fourth daughter in a row, and in light of his entailed estate, Northumberland was understandably eager for a male heir. The infant was christened Elizabeth after her maternal aunt, but Northumberland had named the last two girls after his sisters. Since the only quality that parents could hope for in a female child was beauty, when his daughter, born in 1635, was named Lucy, a well-wisher remarked: \"Pray God it may prove as handsome, and as brave a Lady as her aunt that bears that name.\"\n\nDorothy did not share the prevailing preference for boys. In fact, she favored her eldest daughter far above her sons. Doll was the apple of her eye. Next to Leicester himself, she loved her \"above anything in this world.\" Doll's silent, retiring personality complemented her mother's bossiness and kept the mother-daughter relationship running smoothly Doll resembled her aunt Lucy except that she was fairer, and her beauty inspired the poet Edmund Waller to write a scries of sonnets to her under the name of \"Sacharissa,\" which circulated in manuscript around the court. A recent widower, Waller harbored some hope that Doll might have him. But as a simple country gentleman, he did not meet the Countess of Leicester's requirements for her eldest daughter's husband, although she was pleased enough to have him broadcast Doll's beauty far and wide. She may have agreed with her husband that Waller could have one of the younger girls, but nothing came of that. Poor Waller was said to have suffered a nervous breakdown over the unattainable mistress of his verse.\n\nDoll was nineteen now. She had been in the market for a husband for well over a year. In January 1635, the Reverend George Garrard, writing to Wentworth, mentioned Dorothy Sidney as one of three daughters of the nobility \"ripe of marriage.\" Her mother was beginning to worry that she would be called \"a stale maid.\" The problem was the limited number of prospective bridegrooms for a girl of Doll's \"quality.\" The best prospect, and certainly Dorothy's first choice, was William Cavendish, the third Earl of Devonshire. He had all the requisites of rank, wealth, and good looks. And he and Doll had a bond between them because his sister Anne, Lady Rich, was Doll's best friend. Although his tutor, Thomas Hobbes, had not made a philosopher of him, Devonshire was reasonably intelligent. He had recently returned from his grand tour of Europe with Hobbes and was presumably ready to settle down. Just with whom, however, would be the decision of his widowed mother, a strong-willed Scottish lady who was said to rule him absolutely The Dowager Countess of Devonshire was a great friend of the Earl of Holland. In fact, she was one of the ladies the court laughingly referred to as his petticoat cabinet. Once again Holland was sanguine that he could oblige Dorothy, and she lived in hopes that he would bring in a proposal.\n\nIn the meantime, her letters to Leicester were full of her habitual complaints about \"the solitariness I suffer in this place.\" Writing to him on November 10, she complained that her brothers and sister, engrossed in their busy lives, were ignoring her. Northumberland, whom the King had appointed admiral of the ship-money fleet, was long back from summer maneuvers in the Channel but had not come to see her. She had offered to visit him (if he would pay for her journey), but no invitation had followed. There was a \"coldness\" in her brother, she told her husband. And Lucy was at Nonsuch Palace, basking in the admiration of the Lord Deputy, who had been in England since June. Until he returned to Ireland, Dorothy said, she had little hope of seeing her sister. Brother Harry, as usual, was dancing attendance upon the Queen. Thoroughly sorry for herself, Dorothy wrote Leicester that she would \"content myself the best I can with this lonely life, without envying their greatness, their plenty or their jollity\" Dorothy was probably suffering from postpartum depression, because she was certainly not as neglected by her kinsfolk as this depressing letter indicated. After all her complaints about her brother, an affectionate letter arrived from the usually aloof, self-contained Northumberland, explaining that problems in the navy were keeping him from coming to Penshurst: \"Believe me, I long for nothing more than to see you,\" he wrote. And no doubt at Lucy's behest, Sir Thomas Wentworth sent her a kind note from Nonsuch, offering his services for anything that lay in his power. Dorothy seized the occasion to ask him to put in a good word for Leicester with the Archbishop of Canterbury.\n\nWentworth had come over to England to seek reassurance that his enemies in Dublin were not undermining him with the King through their friends at Whitehall. To his intense satisfaction he received a wonderful reception. Charles commended him on his good work in Ireland before the entire Privy Council. The Queen was gracious, and even the Earl of Holland was civil\u2014surely Wentworth had Lucy to thank for these courtesies. He was particularly gratified by her own warm welcome. \"My Lady of Carlisle never used me with so much respect,\" he wrote Wandesford. At Hampton Court, where the King and Queen were in residence in June, Wentworth saw a good deal of the widowed Lady Carlisle. Later in the summer, when she was staying at Penshurst, he traveled down to Kent to see her. Then, after spending some weeks on his Yorkshire estates, he joined her at Nonsuch Palace. Lucy still enjoyed the use of the palace as she had when Carlisle was alive. To ensure this, in July the Queen had appointed Northumberland and Holland the keepers of Nonsuch during her own lifetime and that of Lady Carlisle.\n\nIt was a glorious rendezvous, much of it spent galloping over the countryside in the golden English autumn. Both were enthusiastic equestrians. \"Much in love I am with riding which this place is not improper for, having very good Downs,\" Lucy told Wentworth. For his part, gout made walking torture; the only way he could take exercise was on horseback. Returning from their rides, there were long conversations in their private apartments when her witty sallies would make him burst out laughing. To sweeten the occasion still further, Wentworth had brought her \u00a33,500 out of her Irish profits. They seem to have had the palace to themselves \u2014 the Queen and her suite were at Hampton Court. Did they become lovers? Carlisle was gone and the circumstances were ideal for romance. Yet the chivalric tone of Wentworth's letters argues convincingly for a continuation of a platonic relationship. In any case, they delighted in each other's company. Two years later, Lucy was back at Nonsuch for the first time since they were there together. \"I cannot like it so well as I then did,\" she wrote Wentworth. Wentworth dallied at Nonsuch longer than he had intended. On October 25, Dorothy wrote Leicester that the Lord Deputy was leaving that week for Ireland; however, on November 10, he was \"still thereabouts,\" and she was still waiting for Lucy.\n\nThe Lord Deputy went back to Ireland in mid-November, and Lucy arrived at Penshurst, followed by cartloads of baggage containing gowns and petticoats of velvet, satin, and silk, collars of the finest Brussels lace, silk ribbons for lacing bodices, a mink stole (called a tippet), fur muffs, leather gloves (short, midlength, and long), embroidered slippers, and a pair of wooden clogs for wet weather; one case was reserved for an array of face paint and powder. Lucy did not travel lightly As always, she was full of herself, recounting all her triumphs to her sister. Dorothy was shown all the verses by the court poets extolling Lucy's beauty in her mourning garb. To Waller she was no less than \"a Venus rising from a sea of jet.\" Robert Herrick waxed poetic about the black mourning twist around her arm. After a week of her company, Dorothy told Leicester that she found her sister \"greater in her own conceit than ever she was, for her two gallants are more her slaves than I think ever men were to any woman.\" Dorothy was of course speaking of Holland and Wentworth. She had observed how the Lord Deputy was under Lucy's spell when he came to see her at Penshurst during the summer: \"She has more power with him than any creature,\" Dorothy told Leicester. Holland was an abject slave. As well as these two, the Duke of Lennox, twelve years Lucy's junior, was so smitten with her that he was evading the King's orders to marry the young widow Mary Villiers Herbert, the daughter of the late Duke of Buckingham. Young Lennox's infatuation was much remarked upon in court circles. \"It seems that his affections rather lead him towards the widowed Countess of Carlisle,\" the Venetian ambassador reported.\n\n\"Her great fortune, the observations of powerful men and the flatteries of some mean ones doth make her less sufferable than ever she was,\" Dorothy complained to Leicester, her patience clearly running out. Indeed, the sisters were not getting along at all well. \"It is impossible for me to stoop to her as I believe she expects,\" Dorothy wrote in exasperation. There can be little doubt that Dorothy was resentful of Lucy at this point in their lives. While she was having difficulty making ends meet, her wealthy sister's talk was all about jewelry purchases and the investments Wentworth was making for her. In a letter to her husband during Lucy's stay, Dorothy apologized for dwelling so long on \"money discourses,\" remarking sarcastically that she had learned it from the rich among whom \"it is the fashion.\" Not only was Dorothy more than a little jealous of Lucy's money, but she was also bitter because she felt her sister was not exercising her influence sufficiently on her family's behalf. \"I believe she might do us many courtesies,\" Dorothy told Leicester, but she was not doing so.\n\nAt the beginning of December the sisters had a great quarrel. It had been brewing since Lucy arrived. A small incident had been the last straw for Dorothy Lucy showed off an expensive brooch that one of her admirers had given her. Dorothy's resentment welled up and she accused Lucy of neglecting her duty to the family. What good was her prominence at court if she did not use it to advance her own flesh and blood? She was giddy and selfish, Dorothy charged. Lucy responded with fury. What gave Dorothy the right to criticize her? Dorothy was sour, hard on her family, and always complaining. Robert was fortunate to have escaped from her bossiness. The upshot of this ugly quarrel was that Lucy announced she was leaving.\n\nThat Lady Carlisle was \"ill-satisfied\" with her sister reached the ears of Viscount Conway in London, who reported to Wentworth that \"the carts were sent for to carry away her stuff.\" But while there was no tearful reconciliation, the sisters made up to some extent. The following week, Dorothy wrote Leicester that Lucy's \"humour is a little amended\" and she was not speaking of leaving any more. However, added Dorothy sourly, her sister was not staying on out of any love for her. In mid-December the sisters were diverted from their quarreling by the pleasure of a four-day visit from their brother Algernon. At thirty-four he was greatly looked up to by his older sisters, not only because he was the head of their house but because his personality commanded respect. Northumberland was one of those people who are born old, just as Harry, the younger brother, with his combustible temper that earned him the nickname Hotspur after an impetuous ancestor, was an eternal adolescent. Carlisle had called Northumberland \"one of the honestest, discreetist and ablest young lords about the court,\" and this was the general opinion. He impressed everyone as \"a wise and able man,\" though the great contemporary historian Lord Clarendon would say that Northumberland got his reputation for sagacity because he was wise enough to speak very little.\n\nDorothy enjoyed her brother's brief visit to the full. They were continually together so that she had no time even to write her weekly letter to her husband. But apart from this minor lapse, Dorothy was the most faithful of correspondents. For that reason she felt a burning resentment when she did not get any letters from Leicester. On December 19, she complained of receiving only one letter in six weeks, and she resented it as \"a great unkindness.\" In a revealing sentence she wrote: \"Quarrels of any sort are troublesome though they proceed from an abundant affection which you know by experience, for most of my exception to you has ever been on that subject.\" Within the next week two letters arrived, and Dorothy was in heaven: \"Your letters did not only give me satisfaction in my exceptions, but delivered also such inexpressible contentments as nothing but seeing you can go beyond what I did enjoy.\" Then followed two weeks without a letter. \"Your letters come so rarely to me,\" she wrote sadly, \"that I begin to think myself faulty in writing so often.\" If it was his duties that kept him from writing she had no complaint, but if it was his \"old inclination to reading\" she would not forgive it. Her complaints continued throughout January 1637 although she acknowledged receipt of two letters and mentioned that there had been no post from France for two weeks.\n\nOn his side Leicester was also experiencing delays in the delivery of her letters, and he was understandably annoyed with Dorothy's harping on the subject. Apparently he let her know it. \"Though you reproach me for chiding,\" she wrote in a happy mood after receiving three letters in a row, \"I hope consideration of the cause shall free me from any further punishment than that gentle rebuke you have London, taking Doll with her. Leicester had urged her to go, because he wanted to get her away from the loneliness of the countryside. And Dorothy felt that in London she could better promote her husband's interests with the King, while Doll would have a better chance to catch Lord Devonshire. Word that the Countess of Leicester was in residence at her fine new town house brought a flock of company. Despite the plague, which had flared up in the late winter, London was full of society because the royal family was at Whitehall. The Queen was about to give birth and planned to lie in as usual at St. James's Palace. Lucy was in town, attending diligently on the Queen, and was obviously glad to see her sister. Dorothy found her \"very jolly,\" abusing most of her friends behind their backs, including the devoted Holland. He was more her slave than ever and had taken to writing poetry to her\u2014\"the worst that was ever seen,\" Dorothy told Leicester. In fact, Holland was making himself a laughingstock over Lucy. Lord Conway reported to Wentworth with amusement that \"her Dog hath lately written a sonnet in her praise, which Harry Percy burnt, or you had now had it.\" It is unlikely that Wentworth was as amused as Conway Both Harry and Lucy were regular dinner guests at Leicester House, drinking up the fine burgundy that Northumberland's butler had selected from the wine cellar. Dorothy found the two closer than she had ever seen them. Harry was paying court to his wealthy, childless sister so shamelessly that Dorothy said she could not do it \"for the best reversion in England.\"\n\nDorothy lost no time in going to court to pay her respects to the King. Charles was clearly eager to show her some special attention but seemed at a loss for something to say. At last he remarked that he thought her fatter than she used to be. \"You must have been too kind to your husband when he was with you, and that was what kept you lean,\" he told Dorothy. Where Lucy would have laughed this off, Dorothy\u2014a prim and proper country lady\u2014blushed to the roots of her hair. Indeed, as she admitted to Leicester, she was \"so extremely out of countenance that all the company laughed at me.\"\n\nThough Charles's embarrassing kindness to her augured well for Leicester's future, Doll's future was less encouraging. Dorothy was ited Leicester House the very next day. A few days later, Doll was invited by his sister, her friend Anne Rich, who was married to Holland's nephew, to come to supper at Holland's lodgings at Whitehall. Devonshire was among the company, and after supper the party all went to see the Queen. After this, the whole town was talking of a marriage; Holland was confident that the Devonshires would make an address, Dorothy reported happily to her husband. Alas, the young lord vanished as quickly as he had appeared. Leicester House saw nothing more of him, and the match petered out.\n\nDorothy stayed in London through April and May. We hear of her attending a sermon at Whitehall with her brothers. There were visits to Lady Essex and others who she hoped might help with her matchmaking. Leicester House was inundated with visitors, which led her to complain to her husband: \"More company we have every day than I desire, and I think more than any other house in the town has, which is something chargeable to me but I do not know how to avoid it.\" The Queen had given birth to a daughter on March 17 and, after secluding herself for a month, was holding court again by Easter. Dorothy waited upon her frequently, and Henrietta Maria was charming to her. On one occasion the Queen was sitting on a low pallet, speaking so softly that Dorothy had to kneel to hear her. In this position the two women had a private chat for about a quarter of an hour, during which the Queen said many kind things about Leicester. The following day Lucy told her that the Queen had said the King was very satisfied with Lord Leicester.\n\nDorothy was delighted to report these expressions of royal favor to her husband, but she wondered why the King was most satisfied with him when the French treaty was going badly. Leicester might be deceived in believing the King really wanted the treaty concluded. It seemed to her that whenever Leicester made headway with the negotiations, the Secretary of State Sir John Coke criticized him for overstepping his instructions. Dorothy showed more astuteness in divining the King's intentions than his courtiers did. Although a draft treaty had been signed in February 1637, there was growing evidence that neither side was prepared to ratify it. As Dorothy suspected, the credit so that Lucy's part remains obscure. Dorothy suspected that it had been minimal.) Success depended on keeping the plan secret, Harry explained. The King did not like such matters to proceed without his knowledge: \"Nothing would destroy the design so much as that.\" The Queen would handle it in her own way at the proper moment. Harry returned to court, leaving a very hopeful sister at Penshurst.\n\nAlas, in September Harry wrote that \"Mercurius\" (Dorothy's false friend Walter Montagu) had tattled to the King. \"Our master loves not to hear other people give what is only fit for him,\" Harry wrote. Dorothy refused to give up. Convinced that the Queen could still bring her doting husband around, Dorothy drafted a letter to Henrietta Maria, setting out the case for Leicester in the strongest terms. She sent it to Harry to deliver. Her uncourtierlike language shocked Harry. \"I would have had it changed to a more mild style, where there was such a difference of persons,\" he wrote his brother-in-law, but Dorothy would not change a word. Reluctantly, he brought the letter to the Queen, excusing his sister's presumption as the strong feelings of \"a kind wife.\"\n\n# [_ten_ \nLUCY A WEALTHY WIDOW](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c10a)\n\nDURING HIS VISIT to England in 1636, the Lord Deputy of Ireland commissioned the court painter Sir Anthony Van Dyck to paint two portraits of him in the black armor he wore for ceremonial occasions in Ireland, one full-length, the other three-quarter-length. The latter, which Wentworth referred to as \"the short one,\" was for Lady Carlisle, and immediately on his return to Ireland he instructed his agent, William Railton, to have it carefully set in the frame he had chosen. It was to be left at Sir Anthony's until Railton knew where Lady Carlisle wanted it delivered. Lucy had promised to reciprocate with a Van Dyck portrait of herself, and Railton was told to make sure that her Ladyship's portrait would be shipped with the rest of his goods to Ireland.\n\nOf the numerous portraits Van Dyck painted of Lucy, the gift portrait for Wentworth is far and away the most beautiful. From her youthful appearance it was painted three or four years earlier, probably soon after Van Dyck came to England from the Netherlands in 1632. It is the portrait of a slim, graceful figure in a magnificent satin gown. The artist has caught the sex appeal of this woman who enslaved so many men. In his recent biography of Van Dyck, Robin Blake perfectly describes the charm of the painting and its sitter: \"Lady Carlisle draws aside a hanging to reveal the shadowed room within. Casting a glance towards the spectator and with arched eyebrows and a sly, sexy smile, she seductively invites you to follow her into the dark.\" It is significant that it was this seductive portrait that Lucy chose to give to Wentworth.\n\nSometime after the exchange of portraits with Wentworth, Lucy posed with Dorothy for a double portrait by Van Dyck. Now at Sudeley Castle in Cheltenham, the painting shows the sisters seated in a garden. Lucy is elegantly gowned in silver-blue satin with bare shoulders; Dorothy is in a matronly brownish-purple gown, her shoulders covered by a stole. Lucy is pointing to a wall fountain from which water flows into a basin. This iconography is said to symbolize tears of grief at the absence of their husbands\u2014in Dorothys case, Leicester's long but temporary absence in France; in Lucy's, the finality of death. It has been suggested that Lady Carlisle commissioned the painting \"in response to questions about the propriety of her relationship with Thomas Wentworth.\" However, the fact that the painting was hung at Penshurst indicates that the commission came from Dorothy.\n\nIn the double portrait, Dorothy is seen to have a long, thin face with a long, thin nose. Lucy looks little different than she does in the gift portrait for Wentworth. Van Dyck painted another portrait of Lucy that probably shows her as she actually looked around 1637. She is dressed in a rich burnt orange gown, with a fur tippet or stole; there is a hint of a double chin. But time was passing\u2014she was thirty-eight, after all\u2014and the portrait with the tippet was painted when she was already the Dowager Countess.\n\nWhere other women faded from view when their husbands died, Lucy enjoyed her greatest prestige in the years after Carlisle's death. Having fashioned herself into an independent courtier, she had avoided the pitfalls of widowhood. Her new inherited wealth and close friendships with the Earl of Holland and the Lord Deputy of Ireland enhanced her importance immeasurably. It did no harm also that Algernon, with whom she was very close, was playing an increasingly active role in court politics. Under the tenth Earl of Northumberland, all the stigma attached to the Percy name had been erased. The youthful earl was one of the greatest magnates in England and a foremost court lord. (His two portraits by Van Dyck permit us to see the aristocratic hauteur that so awed Northumberland's contemporaries.) To hear the Secretary of State Sir Francis Windebank thanking Northumberland for the privilege of delivering a letter to Lady Carlisle gives us an inkling of the status of the brother and sister. \"I hold it a great honour vouchsafed me by your giving me that occasion to kiss her hands and to make profession of my devotions to your most noble house,\" he fawned. Bishop Brian Duppa, who became the Prince of Wales's tutor in 1637, later recalled Lady Carlisle as \"a great lady waited on by all the great persons of the court.\"\n\nIt was at this triumphant stage of her life that Sir Tobie Mathew wrote his famous \"Character of the Countess of Carlisle.\" These \"pictures drawn in black and white,\" as he liked to call them, were his claim to wit. Unfortunately, they evoked laughter more often at him than with him. While in Spain in 1623, he had \"drawn\" a picture of the Infanta\u2014\"the foolishest thing that ever you saw,\" Buckingham and Prince Charles had written King James. After finishing the Countess of Carlisle's character, he ventured one on Queen Henrietta Maria that was \"held a ridiculous piece.\" His word picture of Lucy, however, was thought very clever and earned him a grudging place in Sir John Suckling's \"A Session of the Poets\":\n\nToby Mathew (pox on't! how came he there?) \nWas busily whispering in some-body i th'ear \nWhen he had the honour to be named i' the Court. \nBut sir, you may thank my Lady Carlisle for't;\n\nFor \nHad not her Character furnished you out \nWith something of handsome, without all doubt \nYou and your sorry lady these had been \nIn the number of those that were not to come in.\n\nKnowing that the Lord Deputy liked to see the latest satires and verses, the Reverend George Garrard sent him a copy. Wentworth would not have been pleased to see his admired friend described as a \"sorry lady.\" Suckling was unique among the court poets in disparaging Lady Carlisle.\n\nNo one knew the Countess of Carlisle better than Sir Tobie. She was his patroness and, after the Earl of Portland's death in 1633, his protector. Tobie Mathew was a man who needed protection at the English court. In the first place, he was a Jesuit, some said a priest, in a country where such were banned. More than that, his effeminate manner made him a figure of amusement to some. Others, like Suckling, were openly disdainful of him. Now in his sixties, Sir Tobie found a safe harbor with Lucy. He was never far from her side\u2014dining, supping, beaming at her witticisms, and tendering his own. Everyone knew where to find him. \"You may hear of Sir Tobie Mathew at my Lady of Carlisle's,\" Leicester informed Hawkins in a postscript.\n\nIt has been suggested that the Countess of Carlisle was seeking to form a rival salon to the Queen's at her house in the Strand. There is no foundation for this supposition. In the first place, Lucy, like her brother Harry and her cousin Holland, was a member of the Queen's set, barring those periods when Lady Denbigh was in the ascendancy, at which time Lucy, in her excessive pride, withdrew from the Queen's court. Moreover, to tempt the courtiers away from Henrietta Maria, Lucy would have had to provide the kind of entertainment she herself despised. Queen Henrietta Maria was even more in love with masquing than her mother-in-law had been, and, encouraged by the King, she always had a masque in progress. For her part, Lucy had disliked masquing since her humiliating experience as a bride, when King James and Queen Anne had forbidden her to stage the masque of the Amazons. Nevertheless, while the Cavalier poets who buzzed around the Queen Bee were not habitu\u00e9s of Lady Carlisle's gatherings in the Strand, they nevertheless lavished almost as much praise upon her as they did upon the Queen. Rather than competing with the Queen, Lucy's gatherings may be said to have been the anteroom to Henrietta Maria's salon for aspiring dramatists and poets. A well-phrased tribute to Lady Carlisle could have served as a letter of recommendation to the royal patron.\n\nWaller, Carew, Sir William Davenant, and lesser poets such as William Habington all paid tribute to Lucy's beauty and charm, but a college don and occasional playwright named William Cartwright extolled her intelligence and influence as well in his \"Panegyric to the Countess of Carlisle\":\n\nYou appear a Court, and are no less \nThan a whole Presence, or throng'd glorious Press; \nNo one can ere mistake you. 'Tis alone \nYour lot, where e'r you come to be still known. \nYour Power's its own Witness: you appear \nBy some new Conquest, still that you are There.\n\nThat the poet most in vogue in Paris found his way to Lady Carlisle's house in the Strand on a visit to London is not surprising. Vincent Voiture, worldly and charming, was the lion of the leading Parisian salon of the day, that of the Marquise de Rambouillet. Though he found Lady Carlisle to be as beautiful as he had heard, the celebrated French poet detected an underlying \"poison\" in her charms, and did not hesitate to say so in a poem. Lucy also made less than a good impression on another French visitor, this one a politician, the Comte de Brienne, who conceded her beauty but was not impressed with her intelligence. In this light, Lucy may not have measured up to the standards set by the \"bluestocking\" Madame de Rambouillet.\n\nBut it was not poets who dominated Lucy's gatherings. Since her First emergence at court, she had sought out the power brokers. The talk at her salon was of court politics. (Had this subject not always fascinated her?) While Lucy expressed her opinion of people often unkindly (apparently uncowed by the disgrace she had brought upon herself by her disparagement of Ch\u00e2teauneuf), she added little to the substance of the important discussions, according to Tobie Mathew. She was wise enough to know her limitations.\n\nNot only was Sir Tobie the majordomo of her salon, but he was also her jester, as the following story (related by Conway to Wentworth) illustrates. One day Sir Tobie was expatiating on the delicious-ness of a cup of chocolate. Imported from the Spanish overseas dominions, chocolate was as yet almost unknown in England, but Sir Tobie had often enjoyed it during his travels in Spain. After hearing him praise the strange concoction, Lady Carlisle expressed the desire to taste it. Shortly afterward, he arrived at her chamber with some chocolate and with much bustle made up a cupful. He poured out half for himself, drank it, and then (Conway chuckled) \"liked it so well that he drank up the rest,\" and Lady Carlisle \"had no share but in the laughter.\"\n\nThe \"Character of the Countess of Carlisle,\" which passed around the court in manuscript, made him her laureate as well. But it was a panegyric only on the surface. Those who read it carefully would have seen that Tobie Mathew was slyly getting back at his patron for her laughter when he drank all the chocolate, for all the times she cut him with her rapier wit, for the \"prithee, Sir Tobie do this and Sir Tobie do that.\" It is the picture of a powerful courtier through the eyes of a hanger-on. Years of attendance on her had taught him what lay under Lady Carlisle's famous civility. He was obviously speaking from experience when he described her as an ungrateful friend. She would give you a gracious reception one day and scorn you the next. Her very occasional acts of gratitude were no more than \"cold charity\" Those near her were taken for granted, and she would do more for total strangers. (How this must have rankled, for he calls it \"her greatest injustice.\") In short, the more you obliged her, the less she valued you. But the subtle Sir Tobie was a master of euphemism and equivoque. \"She has as much Sense and Gratitude for the actions of friendship, as so extreme a Beauty will give her leave to entertain.\" And again, \"She is of too high a mind and dignity, not only to seek, but almost to wish, the friendship of any Creature.\"\n\nDespite suave reference to her \"unnumbered perfections,\" the character portrays Lady Carlisle as self-centered, vain, and lacking in tenderness. Cold and passionless, she could not love anyone. (Sir To-bie's equivoque: \"She hath too great a heart to have naturally any strong inclination to others.\") Choleric by nature, she controlled herself, not out of concern for those around her but because a show of temper was beneath her dignity. She was merciless in her satire, \"discovering that which we strive most to conceal, our imperfections and errors.\" Because of her egotism, her conversation went \"by way of compulsion towards herself.\" Mathew confirmed that she was of \"a cheerful nature.\" According to him, she had been told by her physicians that she was inclined to be melancholy. \"This opinion of theirs,\" he wrote, \"proved to be the best remedy for it, by the mirth which she expressed at it.\" She could suffer no condition but \"plenty and glory,\" failing which she would retire out of sight. Her ambition was strong but undirected, because there was nothing left for her to desire. If Sir Tobie's character of Henrietta Maria was in the same vein, no wonder the Queen called it \"an ungentle libel.\"\n\nReading this character analysis of Lucy, we begin to better understand Dorothy's complaints about her. Yet offsetting Lucy's self-centeredness that her sister so disliked was her strong family feeling. She \"extremely loves\" her brothers and sister, Mathew wrote, mainly because the same blood ran in their veins as in hers. For that reason, she also loved their children; but she cared little for more distant relatives because they had too little common heredity with her to share in her excellencies.\n\nThe fact that Lucy did not quash the \"Character\" (at the end of her life she allowed it to be published) indicates that she saw in it only what she wanted to see: she was without equal in beauty and wit, that \"the Majesty of her person teaches Reverence,\" \"she hath a grace and facility in her expressions... that refines the Language,\" and all the other outrageous compliments by which Sir Tobie disguised his criticism.\n\nA side of Lucy that did not appear in the character was her stinginess. In contrast to the prodigality that marked her life with Carlisle, Lucy lived \"thriftily\" in her widowhood, according to her sister. Having inherited a fortune, she was very cautious about spending it. \"I learn frugality from those that are rich and have none to care for,\" Dorothy remarked snidely to Leicester, apparently as disapproving of her sister's thriftiness as of her husband's extravagance. The only thing on which Lucy spent lavishly was jewelry, and that was an investment as well as an adornment. She saved money wherever possible. In February 1637, while Dorothy was still in the country, she was put out to hear that Lucy was stabling her horses and keeping her servants at Leicester House without even asking her. Indeed, both Lucy and Harry used Leicester House as an inn in Dorothy's absence. But Dorothy did Lucy an injustice when she told Leicester that her wealthy sister \"gives nothing that 1 hear of,\" because a month later, in April 1637, Lucy made her a most generous gift of \u00a3500 out of her profit from the Irish wine customs.\n\nApart from a pension of \u00a32,000 a year, Lucy's principal income came from the Irish grants she had inherited from her husband. Although a widow (a feme sole, in legal terminology) could administer her own estate technically, it was customary for her male relatives to act as her trustees. In accordance with Lucy's wishes, Lord Wentworth became her trustee along with her two brothers. Wentworth managed her Irish interests and acted as her financial adviser. Much of his correspondence with her, although couched in gallant terms, was really about money.\n\nLucy's Irish wine customs grant dated back to the previous reign. King James had prodigally granted away from the Crown its traditional revenue from customs duties\u2014\"farming out\" the customs, as it was called. In return, the customs farmers paid the King an annual rent or a percentage of the profits. James had farmed out all the customs duties on goods imported into Ireland and had assigned the wine duties from the Irish farm to the Earl of Carlisle. This was just part of the generous patronage James had given his old favorite. As well, Carlisle had been granted the profitable licensing of wine and aqua vitae in Ireland. The wine customs grant and the licensing of beverages had all passed to Lucy on his death.\n\nIn addition, Carlisle had bequeathed her his lands in County Wicklow, known as the Birnes Country. Alarge strip of land along the east coast not far from Dublin, the Birnes Country included the manor of Newcastle and comprised some eighty thousand acres, of which the arable land was worked by freeholders. Carlisle had purchased the manor and received a patent for the rest shortly after Charles ascended the throne. Subsequently, the patent was rescinded and only later partly restored. Since then, Irish officials had been making difficulties about \"finding\" the title to the land. (This was a standard tactic to wear down the patentee so that he would relinquish his claim to the officials at well below value.) Establishing title to the Birnes Country, Wentworth told Lucy, \"had troubled my Lord all his life and holds the same for us after his death.\" Wentworth had urged Carlisle to sell his grant to the Crown, and just before his death Carlisle had agreed to do so for \u00a315,000. Nevertheless, he died without surrendering the grant, and it turned out that he had assigned his interest in the Birnes Country to his kinsmen, Sir James Hay and Archibald Hay, to whom he was deeply in debt. Lucy's trustees now-found themselves engaged in a wrangle with the Hays; but in the meantime she was receiving a very nice income from the encumbered lands.\n\nFrom the moment Lucy came into possession of her inheritance, Wentworth strongly advised her to give up her Irish grants, promising that with the money he would buy her new land. In taking this position he had a double purpose; as he told his friend Archbishop Laud, he wanted to fetch the grants back to the Crown and also to serve her Ladyship.\n\nAfter Charles dissolved the parliament of 1629, he had to find his revenues in other ways. Wentworth had dedicated himself to putting the shaky royal finances on a firm foundation, and to this end he was trying to restore to the Crown all the lucrative sources of income James and Charles had granted away. Since coming to Ireland he had bought in most of the Irish farm for the King. This was noble enough in purpose to suit even the righteous, unvenal Archbishop Laud. But what was little known was that the Lord Deputy had secured a quarter interest for himself in the customs farm. For, admittedly, he had a third purpose: to enrich himself during his office in Ireland. Happily for King Charles, Wentworth's private purpose was not incompatible with serving the royal interest. As between Lucy and the King, Wentworth maintained a delicate balancing act. But the truth was that his dual role as Lady Carlisle's trustee and the King's agent put him in a conflict of interest.\n\nDuring Wentworth's visit to England in 1636, he had talked to Lucy about surrendering the wine customs grant. She was not averse if he could find her other investments yielding an equal revenue. Her other caveat was that he should not go ahead with the sale unless she was satisfied. Wentworth thought he had her convinced; but when he returned to Ireland she had second thoughts. She sweetly informed him that certain people were telling her that the grant was worth more than Wentworth said and that he was advising her to sell it too cheaply. According to these unnamed persons, her grant was worth \u00a320,000, and they were even suggesting that the Lord Deputy was not giving her all her profits from the customs, which, they said, should amount to \u00a32,000 a year. Wentworth was outraged at this attempt to discredit him in Lucy's eyes. On December 12, he wrote her an agitated letter. Where did \"these gentlemen\" get the figure of \u00a32,000 per annum? For the past thirteen years the profit had never exceeded \u00a31,000 to \u00a31,300 a year; he sent her a certification from the customs officers to prove it. As for their total value of \u00a320,000, her brother the Earl of Northumberland, as one of her trustees, should demand \"to hear the reasons of those who value it so highly.\" Suspecting that it was the Hays, Wentworth explained to Lucy how it was to their advantage if she kept the grant. They could make a claim for payment of her late husband's debts against her profits from the wine customs. And if she died before the term of the lease expired, they could recover their money from her executors. \"As long as you keep this lease there is hope for your creditors,\" he told her bluntly.\n\nThough he may have undervalued the grant in the King's interest, he was quickly proven right about the Hays. In March 1637, they petitioned the Lord Treasurer for payment of their loans out of the money Lucy received from the wine customs. It seemed that Carlisle had also assigned his share of the customs to his creditor cousins. The Lord Treasurer granted them a warrant, but the customs farmers refused to pay, saying that the late earl had given assignments to a number of other creditors who were clamoring to be paid out of the customs. So far the Hays were blocked, but their continuing attempts on her income from the wine customs made Lucy more amenable to surrendering the grant. On April 28, Northumberland wrote Wentworth that he had spoken with his sister about parting with her Irish customs. Although some people were telling her the price was too low, she was \"resolved to be governed by your Lordship.\" However, canny Lucy was not ready to let the wine customs go at any price Wentworth might set. \"She believes,\" continued Northumberland, \"that if she part with them under eight years' purchase [a price equal to eight years' income], she lets them go at a much under-value.\" As far as he was concerned, he would be very glad if she were \"well rid of them, and that the money were employed as your Lordship proposed.\" Wentworth replied that he would do his utmost for Lucy's profit, both in drawing up the contract with the Crown and in putting her money in land. He assured Northumberland that he would \"never give my consent that my Ladyship part with her interest till my conscience be satisfied the offer be brought up to the very uttermost value,\" but he asserted that eight years' purchase was too high. Moreover, the buyer (the King) was not eager. It would seem that Wentworth was weighting the balance in favor of the King in these negotiations, a suspicion strengthed by his telling Secretary of State Coke that Lady Carlisle's wine customs grant could be bought in for seven years' purchase.\n\nThe same underlying conflict of interest cropped up in the matter of Lucy's landholdings. Wentworth was trying to convince her that her best course was to sell the Birnes lands to the Crown. In an alarmist letter dated April 17, he outlined the difficulty he was having in settling \"the Birnes business.\" Although they both knew that her late husband had intended the money to go to her, the \"plain truth\" was that there was a defect in the grant, and, worse than that, the estate clearly belonged to the new earl as the heir at common law. This could bring in question the sizable payments already made to her. However, he could reassure her in one respect. Even if her stepson discovered that the Birnes Country was his by right, he would never be able to secure title \"without me.\" Moreover, if the land reverted to the Crown, the Hays and the other creditors \"will be turned to grass,\" which he imagined would not make her sorry. Knowing Lucy's indiscretion, Wentworth cautioned her not once but twice to keep this information to herself. In raising the defect as a reason for disposing of the grant, Wen tworth was not being candid with Lucy He had used the same argument to talk Carlisle into selling. He had known for years that the title to the land could be \"found,\" or proved, at any time.\n\nBy the end of 1637, Wentworth, with Lucy's approval, had struck a bargain with King Charles to buy back the wine customs grant for the Crown. On December 1, Charles issued an order to the Lord Deputy \"to pay the Dowager Countess of Carlisle \u00a316,000 in compensation for the surrender of her share in the profits of the wine impost in Ireland.\" Nevertheless, the transaction did not go through at this time. Northumberland may have been the stumbling block, because six months later Wentworth was urging Lucy not to let her brother \"depart from the conditions or break off the bargain.\" As it turned out, the delay in consummating the sale was very much to Lucy's advantage. Receipts from the Irish customs were rising spectacularly, thanks to the increase in trade owing to Wentworth's efficient administration of the economy. In 1638 Lucy's profit from the wine customs was \u00a35,000\u2014a hefty increase over what she had formerly received.\n\nMeanwhile Wentworth was looking for land to buy for her with the proceeds from a sale of the Irish wine customs\u2014and getting in a lot of trouble for it. As he ruefully told Archbishop Laud, people thought he was buying land for himself, and it was \"raising one great dust about me.\" No Lord Deputy of Ireland had ever had more enemies than Thomas Wentworth. His fearless and high-handed methods had deprived many great persons of their spoils, and, at the same time, rumor had it that he was lining his own pockets. Now his \"calumniators\" were trying to turn the King against him, he told Laud, by claiming that \"I purchase all before me.\" Despite his injured tone, Wentworth was indeed acquiring land for himself through purchase and grant; he had just bought ten thousand acres in Cosha near the Birnes Country, a rough, wooded terrain where he built himself a hunting lodge that he named Fairwood.\n\nHe went there often for relaxation, and many of his letters to Lucy were written from Fairwood Park at Cosha. Recalling the wonderful days when they rode over the downs together at Nonsuch, he dreamed of having her visit him. Cosha, he wrote her in the summer of 1638, was \"a wild and melancholy place,\" but her conversation would render it as pleasant and healthy a situation as any he had ever seen\u2014\"I mean for two or three months in the summer.\" The woods and rocks of Cosha evoked the romantic in Wentworth. His most high-flown sentiments were written to Lucy from there. With his wife and children in Dublin, his thoughts dwelled on Lucy. Indeed, he projected them onto the very place itself. \"So long as I am here,\" he once wrote her, \"even these barbarous rocks, mountains, and habitations are able to think as much honour of your Ladyship as the fairest pastures, deepest meadows, and most frequented cities of the world.\"\n\nWhile Wentworth could only dream of Lucy's charming presence, his archenemy Holland was with her every day. The two men had detested each other for years, and now they were rivals over Lucy. She wanted to bring them together, and to please her, Holland wrote a conciliatory letter to Wentworth in September 1637. their mutual devotion to \"that excellent person\" was not sufficient to turn them into friends. Conway confided to Wentworth that Holland was no more his friend than in the past, but requested him not to tell Lady Carlisle that he had said so.\n\nLucy's continuing influence over Holland was legendary at court. Among his patronage appointments, Holland was Chief Justice in Eyre; this gave him power to levy fines on landowners who he determined were making illegal use of the royal forests. The revival of this obsolete statute was not working out too well, according to Conway: \"This business of the forests is getting Holland many enemies and little money for the King,\" he wrote Wentworth. In 1637 Holland levied a huge fine of \u00a320,000 on the Earl of Salisbury. This was as much as it cost Salisbury to maintain his opulent lifestyle for several years, and it led to a great quarrel between the two nobles. To resolve the matter to his father-in-law's satisfaction, Northumberland got Lucy to speak to Holland. Since \"her dog\" could refuse her nothing, the fine against Salisbury was remitted.\n\nIndeed, Lucy was such a mover and shaker at court that even Archbishop Laud acknowledged that he was \"beholden to her.\" As the enemy par excellence of the papists who surrounded the Queen, Laud was persona non grata with Henrietta Maria. Nevertheless, disturbed by the number of conversions to Roman Catholicism among the aristocracy in the autumn of 1637, he felt he had to speak to the Queen. Despite the King's assurance that he would find her \"very reasonable,\" the Archbishop was sure he would not get a favorable hearing unless Lady Carlisle smoothed the way for him. So he asked the Lord Deputy if he thought her Ladyship would help him. Wentworth replied that he was confident she would, if it lay in her power. And he gave his friend his assessment of Lucy. \"I judge her Ladyship very considerable,\" he wrote Laud, \"for she is often in place, and is extremely well skilled to speak with advantage and spirit for those friends she professeth unto, which will not be many.\"\n\nWentworth knew whereof he spoke. Lucy expended her influence and powers of persuasion on his behalf as she had for no one else, and he turned to her repeatedly For instance, when he refused to give captaincies in the Irish horse troops to Henrietta Maria's favorites, he looked to Lucy to handle the strong-willed Queen. (Wentworth bitterly resented Henrietta Maria's \"meddling\" in Irish appointments \u2014 she should leave such matters to the King and himself, he told Lucy.) Lucy was his goodwill ambassador at the English court. His letters to her are full of gratitude for all she was doing for him.\n\n# [_eleven_ \nFAMILY AFFAIRS](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c11a)\n\nON DECEMBER 6, 1637, Lady Northumberland, not yet thirty, lay on her deathbed at Syon House, her blond hair fanned out on the pillow, her lovely face covered with the pustules and craters of smallpox. She had had the last rites that morning. In a far corner of the room, Sir Theodore Mayerne and Dr. Matthew Lister were holding a consultation. With a sinking heart, Lord Northumberland observed them shaking their heads. As he held his wife's cold hand, it took a supreme effort of will to contain the tears welling up in his eyes. His beloved Anne, whom he had married for love against his father's wishes, was being taken from him. At the foot of the bed stood her father. Lord Salisbury made no attempt to control his grief but wept audibly A shudder agitated the delicate frame on the bed, then the dreaded sound, and Anne was gone. The Reverend George Garrard led the bereaved husband from the room.\n\nAs soon as Dorothy heard the news, she rushed to Syon House to comfort her brother. The Earl of Northumberland gave way to his grief in a manner that surprised Garrard, who, together with Lord Conway, never left his side. \"Passion hath the least outward power [over him] of any man I know,\" Garrard wrote Wentworth, \"yet in cost Salisbury to maintain his opulent lifestyle for several years, and it led to a great quarrel between the two nobles. To resolve the matter to his father-in-law's satisfaction, Northumberland got Lucy to speak to Holland. Since \"her dog\" could refuse her nothing, the fine against Salisbury was remitted.28\n\nIndeed, Lucy was such a mover and shaker at court that even Archbishop Laud acknowledged that he was \"beholden to her.\" As the enemy par excellence of the papists who surrounded the Queen, Laud was persona non grata with Henrietta Maria. Nevertheless, disturbed by the number of conversions to Roman Catholicism among the aristocracy in the autumn of 1637, he felt he had to speak to the Queen. Despite the King's assurance that he would find her \"very reasonable,\" the Archbishop was sure he would not get a favorable hearing unless Lady Carlisle smoothed the way for him. So he asked the Lord Deputy if he thought her Ladyship would help him. Wentworth replied that he was confident she would, if it lay in her power. And he gave his friend his assessment of Lucy \"I judge her Ladyship very considerable,\" he wrote Laud, \"for she is often in place, and is extremely well skilled to speak with advantage and spirit for those friends she professeth unto, which will not be many.\"29\n\nWentworth knew whereof he spoke. Lucy expended her influence and powers of persuasion on his behalf as she had for no one else, and he turned to her repeatedly. For instance, when he refused to give captaincies in the Irish horse troops to Henrietta Maria's favorites, he looked to Lucy to handle the strong-willed Queen. (Wentworth bitterly resented Henrietta Maria's \"meddling\" in Irish appointments \u2014 she should leave such matters to the King and himself, he told Lucy.)30 Lucy was his goodwill ambassador at the English court. His letters to her are full of gratitude for all she was doing for him.\n\n# [_eleven_ \nFAMILY AFFAIRS](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c11aa)\n\nON DECEMBER 6, 1637, Lady Northumberland, not yet thirty lay on her deathbed at Syon House, her blond hair fanned out on the pillow, her lovely face covered with the pustules and craters of smallpox. She had had the last rites that morning. In a far corner of the room, Sir Theodore Mayerne and Dr. Matthew Lister were holding a consultation. With a sinking heart, Lord Northumberland observed them shaking their heads. As he held his wife's cold hand, it took a supreme effort of will to contain the tears welling up in his eyes. His beloved Anne, whom he had married for love against his father's wishes, was being taken from him. At the foot of the bed stood her father. Lord Salisbury made no attempt to control his grief but wept audibly A shudder agitated the delicate frame on the bed, then the dreaded sound, and Anne was gone. The Reverend George Garrard led the bereaved husband from the room.\n\nAs soon as Dorothy heard the news, she rushed to Syon House to comfort her brother. The Earl of Northumberland gave way to his grief in a manner that surprised Garrard, who, together with Lord Conway, never left his side. \"Passion hath the least outward power [over him] of any man I know,\" Garrard wrote Wentworth, \"yet in this it had got on him a great mastery.\" While Northumberland had followed his father's advice to the letter and governed his wife and family with great strictness (\"No man was more absolutely obeyed\" in his household than he was, according to a contemporary), the death of his wife left him utterly devastated. Dorothy was not surprised. She once told Leicester that, despite a coldness in her brother's manner, \"there is more truth and fidelity in him than in a thousand Hollands and as many Henry Perries.\" The dead woman's grief-stricken father, the Earl of Salisbury, kept repeating over and over that he wanted to die himself.\n\nThe two earls, however, were at odds on the type of funeral for their dear Anne. Northumberland wanted an expensive funeral with all the trappings, but Salisbury was against it. So the body was embalmed and sent by barge to Petworth, where it was interred in the Percy crypt. After the funeral, Northumberland went to London to stay with Lucy. She would cheer him up more than Dorothy could.\n\nLucy had recently moved into Salisbury House, one of the stately mansions on the Strand whose gardens ran down to the Thames. Salisbury House had been built by the present earl's father in 1602, when he was Queen Elizabeth's principal minister. But times had changed, and most of the great houses on the Strand had been broken up into apartments. The Cecil mansion had been divided into Great Salisbury House and Little Salisbury House; Lucy rented the latter. The Percys and the Cecils were united not only through marriages but also through Lucy's friendships with the Cecil ladies. If Lucy could be said to have any close female friend, it was Elizabeth Howard (n\u00e9e Cecil), Countess of Berkshire. Dorothy was a little jealous of Lady Berkshire, although she pretended otherwise, for Lucy spent a good deal of time at Charlton, the Berkshires' country house in Wiltshire, and was virtually a member of the family In April 1637, when the eldest son married a Roman Catholic and the parents were \"in great affliction,\" Lucy was there with the Cecil ladies, \"all highly incensed against the young lord.\"\n\nThere was \"much ado about Papists\" both at court and in the country. A papal legate named George Con had come to England from the Vatican in the autumn of 1636. Exuding suavity and charm, he had made himself the darling of society. The Queen adored him, and he was received in the finest houses. Of course, he knew enough to become an admirer of the Countess of Carlisle, and, being in fashion, he qualified for her friendship. They were seen together frequently. She brought him to dine at Leicester House with Dorothy. His success in making converts among the ladies had earned him a very bad name among the Puritan-minded nobility. The King was greatly opposed to these society conversions, as was Laud, who hated the papists every bit as much as he hated the Puritans. Because she defended Con in conversation, Lucy was accused of being a papist by some. But, as Con told Cardinal Barberini, there was nothing to it because \"Lady Carlisle has no religion but her own complexion.\" Sir Tobie Mathew also disagreed with those who said she was likely to change her religion, because that would be admitting she had formerly lived in ignorance.\n\nMuch of the hysteria about popery was generated by fear that Archbishop Laud was leading England back to Rome. Had his critics been able to read his diary they would have known that nothing would have been more hateful to him. Nevertheless, it was true that Laud loved the ceremonial ways of the Old Faith, as was evident in his \"innovations,\" such as a railed-off communion table, kneeling and genuflections by the laity, and clergy in rich, embroidered copes. Moreover, under Laud's High Church doctrines, the episcopacy, like the Catholic bishops, claimed to hold their miters in apostolic succession, while the only authority the Puritans recognized was the Scriptures.\n\nAlthough resentment of the Laudian church merely simmered in England, Charles's attempt to foist it upon Presbyterian Scotland caused an explosion. The spark that set it off was King Charles's order to the Scottish bishops to use a revised form of the English Book of Common Prayer. The new prayer book promulgated all Laud's innovations in ceremony and vestments, and these were anathema to a people who followed the severe Calvinism adopted by John Knox in the sixteenth century Moreover, the Scots generally regarded the bishops imposed on them by King Charles as the instrument of English domination. The Presbyterian church, the Kirk, sought to replace the official Episcopal church in Scotland with its own system of governance by assemblies of elders, or presbyters, chosen by the people.\n\nIn July 1637, when Laud's new Book of Common Prayer, with its \"Catholic\" liturgy, was read out in Edinburgh Cathedral, the people rioted. The dean was pelted with sticks and stones and the bishop's robe was torn to shreds before he could escape the crowd. The same outcry greeted its reading in all the Scottish churches.\n\nStrange to say, the riot in Scotland over the Book of Common Prayer was almost completely ignored in England. A lawyer named Edward Hyde, later to be the Earl of Clarendon and the historian of the Rebellion and the Civil Wars in England, marveled at the lack of interest. Although the whole kingdom avidly read about events in Germany or Poland in the \"corantos\" or gazettes, hardly a word about Scotland appeared in the weekly newsletters sent to paying customers abroad or in the provinces. Neither was it discussed at the Privy Council. The King referred the whole matter to the Marquess of Hamilton, whose qualifications for bringing an end to the civil disorder rested on his being Scotland's greatest landlord, albeit an absentee one.\n\nBy the winter of 1638, however, discontent in Scotland had turned into a rebellion. Almost unanimously, the Scottish people had signed a National Covenant abolishing the episcopate and rejecting all the innovations introduced in Laud's prayer book. The bishops were afraid for their lives. Recalling his father's saying \"No bishops, no king,\" Charles faced up to the inevitable war. As a first step, he put his council in the picture. No one at court could now claim ignorance; nevertheless, the lack of concern continued, courtiers preferring to pursue their usual scramble for patronage.\n\nThe Scottish troubles did not yet impinge on Lucy's life. Of greater interest to her was the arrival in May 1638 of the Duchesse de Chevreuse. Marie de Chevreuse never traveled simply for pleasure, and the nature of her business was soon an open secret. A leader of the French nobility that opposed Cardinal Richelieu, she was in the pay of Spain and, in fact, came to England directly from that country. She brought with her the tentative project of a marriage between the King of Spain's son and Princess Mary, the King of England's eldest daughter, then seven years of age.\n\nThe prospect of a Spanish match appealed to Charles as much as it had to his father, especially under the present circumstances, when he might need Spanish gold to wage war against his disobedient Scottish subjects. For this reason, Madame de Chevreuse was shown every courtesy. Although the wife of the French ambassador stood in Henrietta Maria's presence, Madame de Chevreuse was given a tabouret, or little stool, to sit on as if she were a visiting queen. Trying to explain \"the matter of the tabouret\" to Richelieu's satisfaction kept the Earl of Leicester busy for months at Paris.\n\nHis diplomacy was further put to the test by the presence in England of Marie de Medici, Henrietta Maria's mother. Following a failed coup against Richelieu in 1630, she had been exiled from France by her son, Louis XIII. She had spent most of her exile as a discontented and unwanted guest of the Spanish governor at Brussels. Having worn out her welcome in the Spanish Netherlands, she and her bedraggled courtiers had moved on to The Hague and from there to England. Charles could hardly turn away his wife's mother, who was nothing more than a refugee in reality. Her presence in England, however, further complicated Anglo-French relations. The Queen Mother and the Duchesse de Chevreuse, despite a common enemy in Richelieu, were constantly conniving against each other, disproving the maxim that politics make bedfellows, strange or otherwise.\n\nActually, as all the court knew, the French duchess had found a most congenial bedfellow Being a lady who could not go to bed alone (Cardinal de Retz said of her that she had to love someone), Madame de Chevreuse had immediately taken up with her former lover the Earl of Holland. Surprisingly, their flagrant affair did not evoke Henrietta Maria's famous scowl that could empty a room. The gay little queen, older and more sophisticated now, no longer expected her dashing favorites, men like Holland and Henry Percy, to be monogamous or celibate. As with the ideal of chivalric love in the medieval courts, platonic love at the court of Charles I was honored more in the breach than in reality. This was reflected in court poets such as Suckling, Thomas Carew, and Sir Richard Lovelace, in whose love poems sexual innuendo lay barely hidden under the high-flying, saccharine sentiment.\n\nTo Dorothy, Lucy made fun of the Duchess's love of intrigue, but she listened enthralled to her tales of the dangerous liaisons, secret negotiations, and derring-do that filled Marie's life. For her part, the French duchess was charmed with Lady Carlisle. In fact, Holland was quite put out to find his lady friends preferring each other's company to his. From Marie, Lucy heard the inside story of the downfall of the Marquis de Ch\u00e2teauneuf, the French ambassador who had almost ruined her career at court. For her own purposes, Madame de Chevreuse had inspired \"a fatal passion\" in the dignified diplomat. Mad about his temptress, he had joined her cabal against Richelieu. The Cardinal had discovered his treachery and imprisoned him in the fortress at Angoul\u00eame, where he languished for years. With such delicious news from abroad, Lucy gave little thought to the Scottish threat on England's doorstep.\n\nFamily aggrandizement and court rivalries continued to occupy her mind. The Percy family had received great honor with Northumberland's appointment as Lord High Admiral in March 1638. Since Buckingham's death, the Admiralty had been in commission (administered by a committee), and the King simply appointed an admiral of the fleet each summer; Northumberland himself had been put in command for the past two summers. Holland had been angling for the permanent post for a decade, and when he lost out he was furious. With tongue in cheek, Conway reported to Wentworth that Holland had gone off in a huff to his estate at Kensington, called a council of his petticoat cabinet, and put the question: Should he bear his disappointment patiently or publish his resentments? With his habitual contempt for Holland, Wentworth replied that this dashing of his hopes should give the Earl more leisure to write a Character and to visit Madame de Chevreuse. The Queen and Lady Carlisle were also making great sport over poor Holland's disappointment. Actually, Northumberland was a very poor choice. Since his wife's death he had been sick most of the time, and by midsummer he had still not taken out the fleet.\n\nLucy's financial affairs also claimed her attention far more than the rebellion in Scotland. The sale of her Irish wine customs was still not through by the summer of 1638, despite Wentworth's eagerness to have it done with. However, at the beginning of June, Lucy finally surrendered her patent to the Birnes Country to the Crown, as Wennvorth had been urging. The price, \u00a315,000, was \"really and bonafide paid,\" but Lucy may have had to share it with her stepson, for a later survey indicated that the land was conveyed by the second Earl of Carlisle, his wife, the Dowager Countess (Lucy), and the trustees. In any event, Lucy received at least \u00a38,000 \"down upon the nail,\" to use Wentworth's expression. Although he was acting as her trustee, the money appeared to be for him. He remarked sarcastically to King Charles that this would give \"those noble friends I have near Your Majesty\" the opportunity to \"report me for a mighty good man, that is, in the phrase of the City, for a mighty rich man.\" In tact, the honest broker was well rewarded. From his recovered Irish lands, Charles granted Wentworth the choice parts: the manor of Newcastle and a newly created manor of Wicklow, both yielding a good rent. Nevertheless, Wentworth had still made a good bargain for the Crown, and he pressed on with his plan to redeem the Carlisle grants. He advised Charles to buy out the second earl's interest in the West Indies, \"as not indeed fit to rest in the hands of any subject.\"\n\nAs he had promised her, Wentworth purchased other land for Lucy with the money realized from the Birnes Country sale. In County Monaghan in Ulster, he bought her the leases for the lands of Upper Trough and Glaslough from Sir Robert Parkhurst, a London alderman with considerable Irish holdings. To hold the leases in trust for Lucy, he put them in the names of two of his reliable underlings, Captain William Billingsley and Sir Philip Percival, clerk of the Irish Court of Wards and Liveries. He also took a twenty-two-year lease for her, in Percival's name, of Shillelagh in County Wicklow, which abutted his own property of Cosha.\n\nThe Shillelagh lease, purchased with \u00a34,000 of Lucy's money, is a striking illustration of the legal nonentity of women, and their helpless reliance on the good faith of their male trustees. Though endorsed \"a copy of my Lady Carlisle's lease,\" the document on its face states that Sir Philip Percival bought the lease from one Calcott Chambre. There is no mention that Percival is holding the lease in trust for Lady Carlisle. Moreover, she did not get physical possession of the document. No wonder she was to have great difficulty establishing her right to Shillelagh in years to come.\n\nHaving made these land purchases for her, Wentworth wrote Lucy at the end of July 1638 that it was an \"absolute necessity\" that she name her heirs. Only she knew for whom she intended her lands in the event of her death. Was it \"my Lord Admiral, Mr. Percy, or my Lady of Leicester?\" Cagey about her wealth, Lucy refused to make her intentions clear. Simply convey the land to me and my heirs without naming any other person, she instructed Wentworth. That \"will give me a power of disposing of it as I please and tis that I wish, not being willing to tie myself any way\" That would keep Harry attentive and Dorothy hospitable! Wentworth replied that her wishes would be \"perfectly obeyed in the estating of your lands.\"\n\nWHILE LUCY WAS RIDING over the downs at Nonsuch and Algernon was convalescing at Petworth or Syon, Dorothy was spending her summer at Penshurst, weighed down with her customary responsibilities. Repairs had to be made on the estate\u2014some of the cottages were \"near falling down,\" she told Leicester\u2014and many things had to be done about the house. All this cost money, and Leicester's out-of-line expenses were swallowing up the rents. Moreover, nothing had come in of the \u00a3900 due from the Norfolk lands that Leicester had inherited in 1637 from a distant relative. Absence had not made Dorothy and Robert fonder. In fact, their loving relationship had been eroding over the two years they had been apart. Dorothy's criticism of his spending and her well-meant advice on just about everything had antagonized Leicester to the point that in late 1638 he wrote her flatly \"not to trouble herself with anything that concerned him.\" As if this were possible with the family finances and the administration of the estate all on her shoulders! In reply to his \"unkind expression\" Dorothy wrote:\n\nThough you are pleased to give me much of your affection and to desire mine, yet will you not allow me the liberty of a friend, which I am sure may be prejudicial to you, but if you have me to say nothing but what I am sure agrees with your humour, I can conform myself to it; and had I not an extraordinary passion for you, I should have brought myself to that complaisance long since. But I do so tenderly consider what concerns you as I can hardly keep myself from telling you such things as to my knowledge are prejudicial to you, but will endeavour it no more than I have done, for I am weary of angering you.\n\nA less controversial subject was the beds, silver, and other household goods that Leicester had purchased in France for Penshurst and the London town house. French luxury goods were famous. One could get far better things there than in England, Dorothy told her husband. French fabrics, above all, were superior to English. Among the things Dorothy most appreciated was a yellow damask bed, which \"if it please God to bless our endeavours, may come seasonal for Doll.\"\n\nPoor Doll! Beautiful as she was, at twenty-one she was still unmarried. Eligible men were being picked off rapidly. Rakish Lord Lovelace had just been betrothed. In the autumn of 1638, Dorothy made a final push to capture the Earl of Devonshire for her daughter. Through Lucy she enlisted the aid of the Queen and her favourite equerry, Sir Henry Jermyn. The Queen could easily make the match if she would only talk to Lady Devonshire, Dorothy grumbled, but despite Henrietta Maria's promises, she had not yet done anything. Dorothy recruited anyone who had any influence with the Devon-shires. Their cousin the Earl of Newcastle had been very much on side for a while. But then he had written \"a foolish letter\" to Lucy, who, characteristically, had laughed at it and shown it to everyone. He learned of this, of course, and since then had turned \"very cold.\"\n\nIn Paris, Leicester was doing his best to line up a husband for Doll. He was ideally placed to do so since all the young English lords making the grand tour paid their respects at the English embassy. A few years earlier he thought he had a good prospect in William Russell, the fourth Earl of Bedford's son and heir; but as it turned out Russell was in love with the vivacious and pretty daughter of the infamous Lady Somerset and had married her on his return from the Continent. Leicester had put himself out to an extreme degree for the Earl of Devonshire when that most desirable of husband material had been in Paris. At the present juncture, another very eligible young man was on the scene: Lord Henry Spencer, who, at nineteen, was already in possession of his title as a baron and in two years would come into his fortune. But Leicester had discovered that the youth was pining for Elizabeth Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury's second daughter and the sister of the dead Countess of Northumberland. The Cecil girl was also Doll's principal rival for Devonshire. Dorothy agreed that it would be hard work to divert Spencer. He was known to be so infatuated with the Cecil girl that he had been unwilling to leave England. If she did not get Devonshire, she would most certainly get young Henry Spencer.\n\nWith all her problems, Dorothy did not mention the King's troubles in her letters until December 1638, when she reported to Paris that the payment of all pensions had been suspended until the Scottish affairs were settled. The King was making plans to march against the rebellious Scots, and, according to Northumberland, the royal coffers were never emptier. Dorothy wondered how Lucy would react to having her pension stopped. Not surprisingly, Lucy complained to Wentworth, but all he did was commiserate. Holland did more. As a New dear's gift he presented Lucy with a diamond bracelet that cost him \u00a31,500. Even the Queen did not get anything as valuable that year, except from the King. Lucy was more in favor with the Queen than she had been for a long time. Henrietta Maria appointed her and Lady Denbigh collectors for a special contribution from the ladies of the realm toward the Scottish expedition.\n\nAs war with Scotland came closer, Wentworth was increasingly keen on settling the business of Lucy's wine customs. In February 1639, he wrote Northumberland that although profits were at their best this past year, he feared they would not see such a good year again in a hurry With the uncertainty ahead, he wanted to complete the sale of the grant while the Irish customs were still \"in repute and credit.\" \"A word from your Lordship to the Irish committee would end the business,\" he told Northumberland. In April the Commission on Irish Affairs was still considering the contract for the King's purchase of Lady Carlisle's wine customs. Aware that Northumberland was not pressing the matter, Wentworth advised Lucy to go to the commission with her brother and speak to the commissioners herself. She should let them know that she was willing to accommodate the King by surrendering her grant, but she should insist on a fair price.\n\nBY THE SPRING of 1639, the mustering of an army to do battle with the rebellious Scots had begun. The Earl of Arundel was named General-in-Chief and the Earl of Essex, General of the Army. Holland was in his glory. Through the Queen's influence, he had been made General of the Horse. The Earl of Northumberland, however, was ordered to remain in London. With a real war at hand, the command of the fleet had been given to the inexperienced Marquess of Hamilton. The Lord High Admiral was given a far more important charge, in the King's opinion if not his own. Bringing the Queen to Northumberland, His Majesty said, \"This is my jewel and I entrust her to you.\"\n\nTroops and the money to pay them were now Charles's overwhelming concern. He sent letters to the Lord Lieutenants, commanding them to come to York with a specified number of horse and foot from their counties. Letters in the name of the King went out to knights and squires across the country, asking for contributions. Nineteen contributed, twenty-one promised but did not pay up, and hundreds did not even reply to the letter. Ultimately, however, Charles was able to gather an army of 19,614 foot soldiers and 3,260 cavalry. Among the nobility who answered the call for troops was Harry Percy, who brought a regiment of 867 infantry\n\nCharles planned to lead his army himself into battle. On March 27, the anniversary of his coronation, he left for York; with him in his coach were the Earl of Holland and the Duke of Lennox.\n\nThe war went badly for him from the start. Scottish royalists were easily beaten by the rebel Covenanters, and \"like Job's messengers,\" couriers brought news to York that even the strongly royalist city of Aberdeen had fallen. Charles now sent Lord Hamilton into Scotland with three thousand cavalry to subdue the rebels. He himself moved up to Berwick on the River Tweed, which bordered on Scotland. He sincerely hoped that Hamilton would stop the Covenanters' army before it crossed the river because he simply had no confidence in his own army\n\nFrom his tent, Charles observed the troops bivouacked in the camp at Berwick. They were a sad lot of raw conscripts. Not only were they untrained, but they were undisciplined. He listened to the shouting and swearing from the camp with enormous distaste. His officers reported that the men were shooting at them. He had to believe this when one day he found a bullet hole in his own tent. Charles at Berwick was no Henry V at Agincourt. Not only would he not rally his men with inspiring speeches, but he dared not go among the mutinous fellows.\n\nAs it happened, the frightened Hamilton did not have to engage the Scottish forces. The Scottish general stayed on his side of the Tweed and sent word to Charles that he wished to negotiate a truce. An insultingly small delegation of Scots arrived at Charles's tent at Berwick with conditions he abhorred\u2014namely, that Presbyterianism be the official religion of Scotland. Charles was no less determined to impose the Anglican form of Protestantism on his Scottish subjects. It was a standoff.\n\nHOW UNIMPORTANT EVENTS across the Channel were to Charles and his ministers was obvious from the caliber of English diplomacy. Totally unrealistic and utterly hopeless, it gave the men conducting it such malaise that all begged for their recall. As the ambassador to Spain put it, his role was \"no more but to hear and advertise.\"\n\nWith the Anglo-French treaty out of the question, Leicester too wanted to vacate his post. As it happened, there was renewed hope that he could become Secretary of State. Sir John Coke, to whom he had reported all his years abroad, was nearing eighty There was much talk of his retirement\u2014a retirement, truth to tell, which the old gentleman was being hustled into by overeager candidates for his position. Sir John Temple was Leicester's advocate at this juncture. Temple, a minor officeholder in the royal service, was an old friend of Dorothy's and Robert's. His father had been secretary to both their famous uncles\u2014Sir Philip Sidney and the Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth's favorite. Because of this tie, Leicester had given the living of Penshurst to Temple's brother-in-law, the Reverend Henry Hammond. On their frequent visits to the rectory, Sir John and his wife spent a good deal of time at the manor house with Dorothy The previous November, Lady Temple had died at her brother's house. During her long, lingering illness, Dorothy was kindness itself. Temple was filled with gratitude, and when he returned to court was resolved to do his utmost to help the Earl and his \"incomparable lady.\" He was soon aware of the jockeying for the secretaryship and urged Dorothy to come up to London to plan strategy. From Temple we learn that Dorothy had established a faction at court, having enlisted her friends and relatives in her husband's cause. On February 7,1639, Temple wrote Leicester: \"I hope it [the secretaryship] may be happily accomplished by that Party and Strength her Ladyship can draw together here.\" Coke's biographer certainly viewed Dorothy as a pernicious influence in the old secretary's downfall: \"Historians do not agree in their assessment of the ambition of the earl of Leicester, but there is no doubt about the glaring ambition of his wife. She saw her husband's embassy as a stepping-stone to higher things\u2014to Coke's Secretaryship.\"\n\nTemple set out to convince Leicester that it was the proper time for him to move in. If he neglected this opportunity, Temple wrote, some inferior person would get the position. England needed \"able men\" to carry it through \"the shocks and violent concussions\" likely to ensue. Leicester heeded the call and, pleading \"urgent private business,\" applied for leave of absence. Northumberland informed his brother-in-law that the King had \"stuck\" a little at the request but finally agreed after some cajoling by the Queen. Leicester obtained two months' leave, and the Lord High Admiral sent a ship to bring him over.\n\nThe \"private business\" concerned not only Leicester's own future but Doll's as well. At last he had procured a prospective husband for her\u2014nineteen-year-old Henry Spencer. The elusive Devonshire had become betrothed to Elizabeth Cecil. In March they were married, leaving young Spencer in Paris to swallow his disappointment and look elsewhere for a bride. Seizing the opportunity, Leicester proposed his own daughter. Aided by an exquisite painting of Doll by Van Dyck, which Dorothy had just sent over to Paris, he found Spencer a most willing suitor. Devonshire's marriage created much less disappointment at Penshurst than might have been supposed, considering Dorothy's three years of unremitting efforts to capture him for her daughter. So far as Doll was concerned, she suffered a far greater sense of loss over the sister than over the brother. Anne Rich had died a few months earlier following a short illness. Doll was so distraught over her friend's death that Waller wrote a poem about her \"tears and sorrow-wounded soul.\" Dorothy shed no tears over Devonshire but waited in happy anticipation for Henry Spencer, back from his grand tour, to come to pay suit to Doll.\n\nAfter all their years of separation, Dorothy and Robert had no time to get reacquainted. Leicester no sooner arrived in London than the King commanded him to join the nobility at York. Charles thanked him fulsomely for his wise and conscientious service abroad and informed him that he was appointing him to the Privy Council, but sadly there was no mention of the post of Secretary of State, and Leicester was ordered to return to his ambassadorial post. On reflection, Leicester felt that he had been a little too forward in advising the King to accommodate his differences with the Scots. In May Leicester was back in London, and soon afterward at Penshurst, where he assumed the gratifying role of father of the bride.\n\nThe couple had met and fallen in love at first sight. They had a good deal in common. Both were serious young people who wanted the same things in life: to live at Althorp, the Spencers' ancestral home in Northamptonshire, to look after the tenantry, and to raise a family Studious and intelligent, they earnestly discussed books and life as they strolled along the avenue of beeches in Penshurst's park. By early June they were betrothed. Dorothy and Robert were delighted with the match. And so were their close friends, particularly Lord Mandeville, who sent a messenger with his good wishes as soon as he heard the news. Their old friend had had a special fondness for Doll since her childhood\u2014his mock chivalric wooing of her was a family joke. Thanking Mandeville for his congratulatory message, Leicester wrote that nothing \"could more confirm me in my opinion of my daughter's good fortune than your approbation of her choice.\" He was particularly glad that the young couple would be living in the vicinity of Lord and Lady Mandeville. He told his Puritan friend that while he himself was a \"reprobate,\" he understood that young Spencer's ancestors had inclined to the Puritan \"brotherhood.\" Unless he was very much deceived in his prospective son-in-law, he said happily, \"he is like to prove both a good husband and a good man.\" The groom's mother was as pleased about the match as the bride's parents were. Since her son was still a minor, she joined with him in a petition to the Court of Wards to have his lands released \"in view of his marriage agreed upon with Lady Dorothy Sidney.\" Leicester meanwhile was instructing Hawkins to get the necessary documents signed by the Keeper of the Privy Seal before the end of term. It all worked out, and on July 11, 1639, Dorothy and Robert saw their \"dear Doll\" married to a suitable young man who adored her.\n\nThe wedding at Penshurst was a great affair attended by many guests. The marriage ceremony was performed according to the Book of Common Prayer by the Reverend Henry Hammond. Leicester, usually glum, was in a joyful mood as he gave the bride away. When the ceremony ended with the newly wedded couple exchanging a kiss, Lucy and Dorothy embraced each other with tears of happiness running down their cheeks. Everyone present was taking pleasure in this perfect union. Even the disappointed suitor, Edmund Waller, graciously told the twenty-two-year-old bride that she was as freshly beautiful as when he wrote his famous lines to \"Sacharissa\" some half a dozen years before, and, on request, he recited them: \"Go, lovely Rose! \/ Tell her that wastes her time and me \/ That now she knows \/ When I resemble her to thee \/ Flow sweet and fair she seems to be.\" (After what he called \"the common joy at Penshurst,\" Waller wrote a letter to Doll's sister in which, tongue in cheek, he wished on Doll \"the first curse imposed on womankind\u2014the pains of becoming a mother!\")\n\nIt was a glorious midsummer day, and after the ceremony the guests strolled through the gardens, then in full bloom, and plucked cherries and peaches from the trees in the famous orchards. A Lucullan feast of viands grown and raised on the estate, thanks to Dorothy's overseeing, was mightily enjoyed by the company For the moment, the perilous times that lay ahead were far from their thoughts.\n\nAll the nobility had come home from the north, for the war was quickly over. After bivouacking outside Berwick with his forces for some weeks, Charles had signed a treaty with the Scots on June 14 and disbanded his army. None but the most optimistic thought that the treaty of Berwick was anything but a truce. Charles had hardly taught the rebels a lesson. Indeed, the one encounter with the Scots at Duns near Berwick had been a fiasco. The Earl of Holland, magnificently accoutered with a gleaming breastplate and richly laced breeches with a knot at the knees, had remained stationary with his crack cavalry troop, gaping at the small company of Scots while the horses pawed the ground impatiently. Convinced that he was outnumbered, he turned around and galloped back to camp. Notwithstanding his \"shameful retreat,\" Holland was at the wedding in all his finery glorying in the title of general.\n\nAfter the wedding Leicester returned to France, taking twelve-year-old Robin with him. Dorothy was to join him with her elder girls Lucy and Anne, and Lord and Lady Spencer, as soon as arrangements could be made. Many things had to be done first. The newlyweds had to pay visits to Henry's uncle, the Earl of Southampton, at his country seat, and of course to his mother at Althorp in Northamptonshire. Meanwhile Dorothy had her retainers looking out for six fine coach horses to take with her to France. She also wanted to give the City merchants who did business in France enough advance notice of her departure so that they could present her with gifts, if so inclined. \"If they expect more courtesies from my lord, I think they will be content to oblige me,\" she told Hawkins. Most important were the handing over of the estate business to Hawkins and the instructions to the governess who was to take charge of the four little girls during her absence. Then there was the packing up of household stuff for two families. They were moving into an unfurnished house because, shortly before coming to England, Leicester had been forced to leave the H\u00f4tel des Ambassadeurs, where he had been lodging at the French government's expense since his arrival. So Dorothy was taking beds, stools, chairs, tapestries, rush mats, Turkey carpets, linens, and her sedan chair from Penshurst. The Spencers had eleven trunks. There was also a box of books, which Leicester had ordered, on the Scottish nobility, on Charles's Scottish coronation in 1633, and on the holding of a Scottish parliament\u2014a scholar's response to the war with Scotland!\n\nOn September 12, the goods were shipped from the port of London, bound for Rouen. Shortly afterward, Dorothy and her family set out for Dover, stopping to spend the night at Canterbury with Leicester's sister Barbara, Lady Strangford. The next day they boarded the _Antelope,_ which Northumberland had commanded his vice admiral to have ready for them. The Channel crossing was calm all the way, a mercy since her Ladyship was pregnant\u2014not the bride, but the bride's mother, yet again.\n\nDorothy arrived in Paris to find Robert installed in a magnificent residence right next door to the palace of the Louvre, for which he was paying the exceedingly high rent of 480 pistoles per annum. Some time before her arrival, Leicester had written to King Charles virtually demanding an increase in his allowance in order to furnish the embassy in a \"decent manner.\" Had Dorothy been there, she might have stopped him from sending this foolish letter, for, as she had warned him more than once, the King had no desire for his envoys to put on a show for the host country. Wishing his diplomats to spend as little as possible, the King was antagonized by the pretensions of his ambassador extraordinary to France. The Queen relayed the King's displeasure to Northumberland, who wrote Dorothy that Charles had showed such \"adverseness to paying for the hiring and furnishing of your house as I should not advise the pressing it further; for their Majesties being at this time very intent upon saving, it would certainly receive a denial.\"\n\nLeicester's extravagance may have been one of the reasons he did not become Secretary of State when Coke was turned out of office some months later. In an encoded letter to Leicester on November 21, 1639, Northumberland dashed his brother-in-law's hopes: \"I was much surprised to understand how peremptorily the King refused the Queen's {request] to make you secretary. What the reason should be I cannot imagine, except it proceed from the Archbishop who certainly wished not your Preferment; but I hope we may hereafter prevail, though we have failed at this time.\"\n\nAfter three years of intense lobbying, Leicester had failed to wir either of the positions he so coveted.\n\n# [_twelve_ \nNOBLE AND INTELLIGENT FRIENDSHIP](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c12a)\n\nLUCY HAD NO SOONER said good-bye to Dorothy than she found herself welcoming Wentworth. The Lord Deputy arrived in London on September _21,_ 1639, and it was as if they had last met three days before and not three years. Their unspoken mutual benefit pact, sweetened by letters of compliment, had cemented their friendship. With Lady Wentworth safely tucked away in Dublin, Lucy assumed the role of the Lord Deputy's dearest friend and confidante. Wentworth told Lucy in confidence that King Charles had sent him a handwritten note at the end of July, commanding him to come over-only a crippling attack of gout had stopped him from answering the call at once. Charles had ordered him not to reveal that he had been summoned but to find some private reason for his trip to England. This posed no problem. As a result of Wentworth's heavy-handed housecleaning in Ireland, he was plaintiff or defendant in half a dozen suits before the Privy Council and the Star Chamber.\n\nCharles had turned to Wentworth in desperation. The Scots were as intransigent as they had been before the truce at Berwick. A renewal of the war was inevitable, and meanwhile the Exchequer was empty. All his counselors had turned out to be slender reeds. Holland with his white satin suits and foppish manners was no wartime general, nor was Hamilton, who was indecisive and divided in his loyalties between England and Scotland. Northumberland had a sound head but an unsound body; at every crisis he took to his bed. Pembroke and the others had no advice to offer. On the other hand, Charles had complete confidence in Wentworth. He had done a firstrate job in Ireland, setting up a workable administration and increasing royal revenues substantially. He was the only adviser the King could count on.\n\nWentworth was received at Whitehall like a conquering hero. He radiated power. As he strode down the palace corridors, shoulders hunched and head thrust forward, the courtiers bowed and fawned. He lived like a king in Ireland and had taken on kingly ways. The country house he was building in County Kildare had greater frontage than the Earl of Salisbury's Hatfield. And at Dublin he held court in a manner to rival Whitehall.\n\nLucy preened herself in the company of this powerful man who so obviously admired her. He would do anything for her and sought every means to please her. Knowing how eager she was for the advancement of her family, he confided that while in England he expected to be made Lord Treasurer, and then he would urge the King to appoint Leicester to succeed him as Lord Deputy. One day he asked her how old her nephew Viscount Lisle was. When she told him that Philip was twenty, he said the King was raising three thousand cavalry, and, if she wished, he would make the boy a colonel. Exhilarated by her power over the man of the hour, Lucy boasted to her sister and brother-in-law that she could guarantee them Wentworth's utmost assistance: \"He intends great kindness and service to you and all your family\"\n\nSoon after his arrival, Lucy told Wentworth that she was in need of money. With pensions going unpaid, she was dependent upon her Irish income. In letter after letter to Sir George Radcliffe, his longtime friend and lawyer whom he had made principal secretary in Ireland, Wentworth tried to expedite Lucy's payments from the Irish wine customs. She herself had discovered that some \u00a3999 was owing her for the year 1635, and she was claiming this in addition to her current profits. It will be recalled that Sir James Hay, Carlisle's agent in Ireland, had advised Lucy that Wentworth was undervaluing the profits from the customs. Wentworth had vigorously denied it, accusing Sir James of malice. It appeared that Lucy had been shortchanged after all, and Wentworth clearly wanted to make amends. He directed Radcliffe to see if the money had been paid into the Exchequer, and if it had, to find some way of reimbursing Lady Carlisle, \"it being most justly due to her ladyship.\" This was an admission that he had been remiss as her trustee. Since the money had not gone into his pocket, it was either negligence or, more likely, an attempt to cheapen the price the King would have to pay to buy in her grant. Now it was Lucy's best interests that were uppermost in Wentworth's mind.\n\nBeing in London gave him the opportunity to \"settle the business\" of the wine customs once and for all. The settlement differed from the original 1637 contract under which the grant was to be bought in by the Crown. Instead, Lucy would transfer title to the King (by way of a conveyance) but continue to receive the profits from the wine impost for the remaining eight years of the grant. She would covenant to pay the King \u00a32,000 per annum until the grant expired. Radcliffe expressed some disapproval of the transaction. \"I do well understand you,\" Wentworth replied. He would also have preferred to have the grant bought in outright, \"but that must not move me to wrong my Lady, or injure [?} the trust her Ladyship reposes in me.\" Meanwhile, \u00a34,000 from the wine customs was due Lucy immediately, to be issued out of the Irish revenues. Wentworth dispatched a letter of authorization from the King for the Lord Justices of Ireland and the necessary warrants for the Vice-Treasurer. He pressed Radcliffe to ' 'speedily\" send over the money for her Ladyship's use.\n\nAlas, Lucy's happy reunion with Wentworth was spoiled when word came from France in October that Dorothy was seriously ill. Lucy was frantic with worry. All her love for her sister and her dependence on her, going back to their childhood days at Syon House, welled up. \"It is not possible for me to express the trouble I have suffered for my sister's indisposition,\" she wrote Leicester. She besiaed him for a detailed report of Dorothy's condition. She could scarcely contain herself from rushing over to Paris, but then decided it would be more sensible to wait for word. A week later, Dorothy's condition was unchanged. Lucy's only consolation was that her sister was reportedly cheerful\u2014a good sign since cheerfulness was \"not her humour.\" Northumberland was as worried as Lucy, declaring to Leicester that his sister's recovery was the thing in the world he most earnestly desired. (Harry was at Bath, taking the waters for a sore arm acquired on the tennis court. No letter on his sister's illness has survived.) By the end of the month, Leicester was able to reassure them that Dorothy was out of danger and on the road to recovery.\n\nWhile Dorothy was ill, Lucy could think of nothing else, but now the tense political situation thrust itself upon her. \"The Scotch business grows worse every day,\" she wrote Dorothy on November 7, 1639, and on November 21, she reported that there was \"great expectation of war.\" Using the cipher that Leicester had sent her (replacing names with agreed-upon numbers), she passed on all the inside information that she had gleaned: Northumberland was to be offered command of the King's forces; the Lord Deputy was going to Ireland to bring over an army of ten thousand, and it would not cost the King a penny. She had been told in confidence (she wrote on December 5) that a parliament would be called to raise subsidies for the war, but they must keep this secret until they heard it from others. She revealed things about the Queen that would have caused whispered conferences between Dorothy and Robert in the privacy of their bedchamber. Lucy had overheard the Queen use \"strange, violent persuasions to the King, such as must make us ill with France, which were a strange action in the condition we are in.\" (Under the combined influence of her mother and her friend Marie de Chevreuse, Henrietta Maria had conceived a great dislike of Richelieu and was, at the moment, strongly opposed to her brother's regime.) Lucy hinted at a relationship between the Queen and her bland Master of the Horse, Sir Henry Jermyn. \"There are some things that I scarce dare write you,\" she told Dorothy Did her sister understand her ciphered letters, she inquired. Was there a danger they would be intercepted? \"My heart would not conceal anything from you, so much it loves and trusts you.\"\n\nOne thing that disturbed her was that their brother Algernon did not see eye to eye with Wentworth. Following the failure of his talks with the Scottish commissioners in December, Wentworth concluded that it was too late for the neutrality he had always urged upon the King, and he was now counseling war. Northumberland, also a member of the newly appointed Council of War, disapproved of Wentworth's hawkish policies. As strongly as Wentworth argued his point of view, Northumberland could not be persuaded. Moreover, while Wentworth was for the King, right or wrong, Northumberland's latent animosity to the monarchy surfaced. When Wentworth instituted a collection among the nobility for the war, setting a good example with a contribution of \u00a320,000, Northumberland gave only \u00a35,000. \"The reason I do so,\" he wrote Leicester, \"is that I believe the King would not expect more from me whose House hath in these latter ages received little or no assistance from the Crown.\" Let those who had made fortunes through royal favor or held beneficial places make the big contributions, he commented with obvious disgruntlement to his brother-in-law.\n\nOn December 19, Lucy was pleased to report that Northumberland and Wentworth were getting along much better, and she took the credit herself for the reconciliation. She had made them be friends, she exulted to her sister. Meanwhile, regrettably, it looked as if Wentworth would not be leaving his post so soon. He had been promoted, with the grand new title of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. But Dorothy and her husband could be assured that when he did step down, he would see that Leicester got his place.\n\nIt was probably disappointment over the lord deputyship that made Leicester write a mean-spirited letter to Lucy, accusing her of taking more interest in Wentworth than in her own kith and kin. Lucy replied that she hoped she had misunderstood his heavily ciphered letter, but if Leicester thought it a fault in her to express friendship to the Lord Lieutenant, then she was \"very guilty, not having omitted anything that I could imagine for his service.\" Indeed, if she had done otherwise, Leicester could expect her to fail him too. \"For if I could be so ungrateful to a person so extremely deserving from me, it were neither just nor safe for any other person to trust me.\" She could not see how her friendship with Wentworth could be a disservice to him, she told Leicester, with more than a touch of asperity.\n\nIt is hard to reconcile the writer of this letter with Sir Tobie Mathew's \"Character of the Countess of Carlisle.\" Wentworth brought out the best in Lucy. Of a sardonic humor himself, he was, nevertheless, above the kind of character assassination indulged in by her circle at court. And Lucy responded with a similar high-mindedness when she was with him. Her letter to Leicester revealed the fires of compassion and loyalty that Tobie Mathew had suspected lay banked in her nature \"like suppressed flames.\"\n\nHer loyalty was not misplaced. Wentworth was doing everything he could to get her money for her. When it was not forthcoming from Ireland as \"speedily\" as he had hoped, he deducted a portion from her last rent payment to the Crown for the wine customs and consigned it back to her. Through this and other \"shifts,\" he managed to obtain about a thousand pounds for Lucy out of the tight English revenues, but \"the rest must be made up\" from Ireland as soon as possible, Radcliffe was told. Even if construction work on Dublin Castle had to be delayed, Lady Carlisle must be paid: \"Let the buildings stay, in the name of God till Spring,\" he ordered Radcliffe.\n\nAt the beginning of January, Lucy informed her sister that Wentworth was to be created an earl. The impressive ceremony took place in the Presence Chamber at Whitehall on january 12,1640. Preceded by heralds, Thomas Wentworth was presented to their Majesties by five earls. First came Newcastle, carrying on his arm the upper robe, then Cleveland bearing the sword, next Clare with the coronet, finally Northumberland and Hamilton (in his English creation as the Earl of Cambridge) flanking Wentworth on either side. As Secretary of State Sir Francis Windebank read out the patent, Wentworth was robed, his sword girt to him, and the coronet placed on his head by each earl in turn. When the ceremony ended, the new Earl of Strafford, accompanied by the other earls, withdrew from the chamber to the sound of drums and trumpets.\n\nThis was the realization of Wentworth's dream. He had begged Charles for an earldom\u2014on his knees, in fact, when he had come over in 1636 \u2014 and now with the kingdom on the edge of disaster he had received it. Sadly, an earldom in Charles's court in 1640 did not mean what it had in the past. Perhaps that was why Lucy made only passing reference to it. The foundations of Lucy's world\u2014a world founded on royal favor\u2014were beginning to crumble. No longer did the courtiers seem eager to ingratiate themselves with the King and Queen. That season, when the royal masques were staged, the room was almost empty. \"Though they speak of making His Majesty happy,\" Lucy wrote Dorothy, \"there is yet little appearance of it.\" She was impatient for her sister's return. \"There are few things can make me happy; and your company is the principal.'\" Lucy's growing pessimism was not shared by Strafford. The new earl sincerely believed that kingship based on divine right could not fall.\n\nIF STRAFFORD HAD dropped into a tavern and listened to the talk swirling around him, he would not have been so certain.\n\nOpposition to Charles's personal rule had become vocal, even violent. While the King's arbitrary methods of taxing the people continued to be a source of discontent, it was the religious issue that lit the fire. The Bishops' War, as the war with the Scots was called, was about to be renewed. The idea of fighting Protestants\u2014and those his own natural subjects\u2014was turning the ordinary Englishman against the King, especially since the perception was that he was relaxing the antipapal laws to please his Catholic queen. In this climate of suspicion and distrust, there was widespread opposition to Archbishop Laud's insistence on \"popish\" ritual in the churches, such as bowing to the altar or kneeling to receive the sacrament. Another abuse in the popular mind was the High Commission, the religious counterpart to the Star Chamber, where ministers who questioned the Laudian reforms were fined, deprived of their livings, and excommunicated. Posters vilifying Laud were appearing all over London. One day a riotous mob attacked the Archbishop s palace at Lambeth, but Laud had sufficiently fortified the place (as he said, he had cannons as well as canons), and the attackers turned around and departed.\n\nWith an Irish appointment out of the question for the time being, the Leicesters revived the idea of Robert replacing Secretarv of State Coke. In February the old man was dismissed, made the scapegoat for the disgraceful conduct of the war with Scotland the previous year. Northumberland poured cold water on the Leicesters' hopes, and the newly minted Earl of Strafford regretfully informed Lucy that Leicester had little chance. When Sir Henry Vane got the post, Strafford was almost as disappointed as Leicester, for the new secretary\u2014\"a bustling, subtle, forward courtier\"\u2014was no friend to him. Still hoping to oblige Lucy and her family, Strafford was casting about for some other plum for Leicester. He floated the idea of Leicester succeeding Sir Francis Cottington as Master of the Court of Wards. Cottington had been indisposed a good deal recently, and Strafford insisted that he was dying of consumption. The plan died a lot sooner than Cottington.\n\nEverything at court now centered on the expedition against Scotland. Northumberland was named Commander-in-Chief. (Clarendon would later say that Strafford had ceded the command in the hope of binding the Lord High Admiral closer to the King's cause.) To pay for the war effort (estimated by Northumberland at no less than a million pounds a year), Charles had no other recourse than to call Parliament. Strafford, the proponent of this distasteful expedient, was to make a flying visit to Ireland, hold a parliament there to raise an army, returning in time for an English parliament in mid-April. Yet, in the midst of all his stress, Strafford did not forget Lucy's business. One suspects that in her sweet, tactful way, she made sure of it. He instructed Radcliffe to prepare an order for payment of \"that \u00a3999 demanded by my Lady Carlisle\" so that the money would be ready when he came over.\n\nBefore Strafford left for Ireland, Lucy arranged for him to lease Leicester House. Toward the end of February, she and Northumberland took him on a tour of inspection, and he liked the place very well. Dorothy and Leicester welcomed the extra income. Like all of Charles's diplomats, Leicester was still not getting his allowances from England. In the present penury, it was far beyond Hawkins's power to get any money for his master, and indeed the Earl was borrowing from his agent and his relatives. Even Northumberland was coming up against a stone wall when he pressed for Leicester's payments. The truth was, he told his brother-in-law, that there was \"not a groat in the Exchequer.\"\n\nIn spite of criticizing Lucy's friendship with Strafford, Leicester had no compunction about asking for his help. Hawkins was instructed to hold off soliciting for money until the Lord Lieutenant returned from Ireland. \"I think he will assist me,\" Leicester told his agent.\n\nWhen the new tenant of Leicester House wanted two new beds, Lucy asked her sister to purchase them in Paris. These beds were to cause a royal row between Dorothy and Robert. Dorothy used her \"best care\" in having them made up, \"one of green wrought velvet lined with satin, garnished with gold and silver, the other of red damask garnished with silk.\" With the twelve chairs and six stools for each bed, which Dorothy said was \"just the number that is used here to all good beds,\" they came to \u00a3446 sterling. Strafford paid Hawkins promptly but the agent used the money to pay off one of Leicester's most pressing debts. When Dorothy heard of it, she flew into a passion, screaming at her husband that she had engaged her credit for those beds and that she was being importuned to death by her creditors. Chastened, Leicester hurriedly wrote Hawkins that if he had not yet paid over the money, he must send it at once \"for the use to which it was designed.\" In March Dorothy had given birth to yet another girl in \"a rich bed of crimson velvet,\" purchased by Leicester for her lying-in. Having her eleventh child at the age of forty-one, when she herself was about to become a grandmother (Doll was pregnant), had clearly not improved Dorothy's temper.\n\nLucy was also confined to her bedchamber in March, with a bad attack of her chronic stomach trouble. For months she had been complaining to Dorothy about stomach pain, vomiting, and heavy menstrual bleeding, but she had kept going for Strafford's sake. While he was in Ireland, she gave way to her illness, dousing herself with physic and other nostrums. Her brother Algernon understood how miserable she felt and would have come to see her had he not been ill himself. There was precious little sympathy from Harry, however. On April 9, he wrote the Leicesters that their sister was much better and would be completely well if she would stick to any one course of treatment. On April 16, the patient herself wrote that she planned to take a little air for the first time since she fell ill. She also informed them that \"the Parliament has begun this day so strangely as I find everybody despairs of any good that can come from it.'\"\n\nStrafford was still not back when Parliament\u2014the first since 1629\u2014convened on April 15. He had left Ireland on April 3 with a severe case of dysentery, crossed the Irish Sea in a gale, and collapsed at Chester. Bedridden at the coastal town for a week with \"gout, late seasickness, and continuing looseness,\" by force of will he dictated a blizzard of letters to his secretaries. Not least of his concerns was Lucy's money. To Radcliffe he wrote: \"Send me the accounts, how they stand betwixt my Lady Carlisle and me... so as thereby I may particularly understand what I have to pay unto her Ladyship, and see the same may be performed accordingly.\" He knew full well that \"something may be expected from me as soon as I come to London.'\"\n\nOn April 18, Strafford arrived at London, too late to manage the parliamentary session effectively Lucy's foreboding had not been for nothing. The session was a replay of the parliament of 1629. The Commons, under the leadership of John Pym, a veteran of the parliaments of the 1620s and a prime mover of the Petition of Right, refused to grant supply for the war before their grievances were heard. Charles played his part by dissolving it before three weeks were out. At the Privy Council, Strafford lost control to Sir Henry Vane and, in the end, voted in favor of dissolving Parliament as being the King's will. Not Northumberland. He spoke out against dissolution and, as Lucy told Dorothy, did not seem to care that the King and Queen were displeased with him. \"It grieves my soul,\" he wrote Leicester a few days after dissolution, \"to be involved in these councils; and the sense I have of the miseries that are likely to ensue, is held by some a disaffection in me.'\"\n\nIn the general fear and foreboding at court, Lucy was astonished at Strafford's optimism. \"My Lord Lieutenant is the only person I hear hopeful of the King's affairs,\" she wrote Dorothy It seemed to her that everything was on his shoulders. He was so busy that she hesitated to remind him of his promise to find employment for Leicester. But he brought it up himself, she was pleased to tell her sister. Busy as he was, he was acting as Leicester's advocate with Laud and the King and Queen.\n\nSome of Strafford's other activities pleased her less. There was some negotiation with the Spaniards that he would not tell her about, and when she asked he always denied it. Yet people saw the Spanish agent going in and out of Leicester House. She expressed her worries to Dorothy. \"They say we shall have money from them, which our people extremely apprehends.\" It was only too true. Strafford was attempting to negotiate a loan from Spain, and under very unfavorable terms at that. To use money from Catholic Spain to fight their Scottish brethren was a damnable thing to most Englishmen. Lucy understood the anti-Spanish sentiment in England much better than Strafford did.\n\nIn June Strafford had a relapse and lay dangerously ill at Leicester House. The grossly fat royal physician Sir Theodore Mayerne huffed and puffed up the stairs daily to weaken the patient with more bloodletting. Outside the house, an angry mob armed with stones shouted and threatened. \"Black Tom,\" as they called Strafford, was immensely unpopular with the London apprentices, hundreds of whom worked in the wool and cloth trades in the capital. All over England, the Earl of Strafford was held to blame for the dissolution of Parliament and the impending renewal of war with the Scots. When the King, left without supply by the Short Parliament, seized the bullion in the mint deposited by merchants and goldsmiths\u2014an action condemned by Northumberland as \"the most mischievous thing\"\u2014Strafford was falsely blamed for it.\n\nIn the London taverns, the talk was that Strafford would bring over an Irish army of papists, some said to fight the Scots; others darkly hinted the forces would be used to preserve the King's tyranny in England. Rumors that he would be accused of treason were so persistent that Lucy reluctantly brought up the subject with him. He was now sufficiently convalescent to take a little air in the garden, and Lucy would walk beside his sedan chair \"on the high gravel walk,\" worriedly discussing this dread possibility He scoffed at the rumors. \"My Lord Deputy is still confident he cannot be accused of treason,\" she wrote Leicester on July 7.\n\nIn this same letter, Lucy answered another accusation from her brother-in-law that she was favoring her friend over her family. It seemed that some visiting Englishmen had commented to him about his sister-in-law's close connection with the Lord Lieutenant. No doubt egged on by Dorothy, who was forever grumbling that her sister did not use her influence for their good, he wrote Lucy another carping letter. She replied that she could \"not yet find how your believing that my excessive considerations of others should make me negligent of your service,\" but this time she was more conciliatory, assuring Leicester that his concerns came first with her. No matter what Dorothy thought, Lucy's strongest loyalty was to her family.\n\nIt was this strong family feeling that impelled Northumberland to overcome his distaste for mixing in the affairs of Charles's faltering government and to busy himself, finally with Lucy's Irish grants. In spite of Strafford's repeated pleas, he had done nothing to quicken the sale of her wine customs\u2014it had been left to Strafford to conclude that business. The matter of her grant to license wines and aqua vitae in Ireland still remained. In the face of riots against the government in England\u2014\"so general a defection in this kingdom hath not been known in the memory of any,\" he wrote Leicester in June 1640\u2014Northumberland was worried that prerogative grants might soon not be worth the paper they were written on. He sprang into action, presenting the Commission on Irish Affairs with a \"scheme\" for the purchase of his sister's grant, which was readily accepted by the commissioners. On July 19, the King, then at Hampton Court, gave his approval and ordered that \"the necessary sums\" (\u00a37,200) be paid into Northumberland's hands. Lucy's grant had been unloaded none too soon. A year later the grant was worthless because, as the Irish Lord Justices informed Secretary Vane, liquor was being sold throughout Ireland without a license. Thanks to her brother's scheme, Lucy received some money for surrendering her licensing grant. It cannot have been much, for she was now in real financial straits, according to Strafford. \"You must take care that the moneys for my Lady Carlisle be paid to her at London this term,\" he impressed upon Radcliffe, \"for she have need of it.\"\n\nThe Earl of Northumberland did not show equal dispatch in carrying out his responsibilities as commander-in-chief of the King's forces as he had just shown in his sister's affairs. In July the army commanders were leading their pressed soldiers northward, but the Commander-in-Chief remained behind at Syon House, observing dispassionately to his brother-in-law that the troops that did not desert would be readier to draw their swords against their officers than against the Scots. In fact, there was a series of mutinies among the troops levied in Essex, Hertfordshire, Warwickshire, and Dorset. An Essex company killed their lieutenant on a rumor that he was a papist, while some from Dorset (as it was reported to the Privy Council) \"in a most barbarous and inhumane manner dragged [an officer] through the streets, and after hanged up his dead body\"\n\nIn August, after successive fits of ague (a common sweating fever), Lucy was nursing herself back to health at Tunbridge Wells. We see an example of the flatterers who swarmed around her at the spas. Sir Kenelm Digby, an ambitious courtier who had managed to get himself appointed as the Queen's envoy to the Pope, was taking the waters before setting out for Rome. Sir Kenelm was delighted to find the Countess of Carlisle there for (as he expressed it to Sir Tobie Mathew) \"the eminency of her condition maketh her able to sow blessings everywhere she passeth.\" She was most gracious to him, and he was flattered to be able to walk and talk with her. Hoping to consolidate this new intimacy, he asked Sir Tobie to convey his thanks to Lady Carlisle for her favor at the Wells, as she was so eminent he dared not tell her himself. \"I have ever esteemed this brave lady above all others our climate may brag of,\" he declared with questionable sincerity But if self-interest guided his pen, Sir Kenelm was clearly charmed by Lucy: \"So much sweetness and civility as she is mistress of, mingled with all other excellencies, I never yet met with in any besides herself.\"\n\nWhile Lucy was at the spa, she received news that the Earl of Northumberland was very ill. She left at once for Syon House, where she found Algernon feverish, attended by Sir Theodore Mayerne and another court physician. Harry was there as well, and brother and sister waited anxiously for the fever to break. In a few days the doctors reassured them that the Earl was out of danger; though very weak, he was on the mend. Harry, meanwhile, was occupied with raising a second cavalry troop at his own expense to serve with the royal horse guards. It was a measure of King Charles's respect for the Earl of Northumberland that he took time out from his war counsels to pay a visit to the patient at Syon House. Though he could not offer his own services, Northumberland informed Charles that he was sponsoring two troops under his nephew Lord Lisle for His Majesty's horse guards.\n\nNorthumberland could not have chosen a more inauspicious moment to fall ill. The Scots were on the march. With the commander-in-chief out of action, the King surprised his Privy Council by announcing that he would go in person to hearten his troops. At this the Earl of Holland made the most astute remark of his career: what the soldiers wanted was their pay, he said, and the King's presence would not provide that. When all was said and done, Strafford was the only person to replace Northumberland, and although he had never fully recovered from his winter illness and was now suffering a bad case of the stone, he undertook the task of leading the army Traveling in great pain, he arrived at York just behind the King. Meanwhile, the Scots had crossed the Tweed into England. Under strict orders from Charles, Strafford stayed in his sickbed while his trusted friend Lord Conway was easily routed in a skirmish at Newburn and abandoned the important city of Newcastle without a struggle.\n\nStrafford's command was undermined from the beginning. The English had no heart for this fight. A dozen Puritan peers, among them the Earls of Bedford, Essex, and Warwick, who throughout the wears of Charles's personal rule had shunned the court, signed a petition asking for a parliament. (Indicative of the esprit de corps at York, Harry Percy and his nephew Lord Lisle were fighting over precedence for their troops.)\n\nHow to pay for the renewed war against Scotland was Charles's problem. The Spanish loan had not materialized. Word was coming in from the regional lord lieutenants that the sheriffs and constables could not raise the trained bands (the militia) without money. (The response from the Privy Council was that at a time of invasion, every man was expected to serve at his own charge.) An appeal by Henrietta Maria to the Catholic aristocracy produced little in the way of contributions and increased the antipapist hysteria.\n\nIn feudal style, Charles summoned the nobility to come to York for a Great Council of Peers \"to perform the services due for their tenure.\" The peers answered this archaic call for fealty in such numbers that the harried Master of Ceremonies, Sir John Finet, could not find a single earl in London to act as escort for the Danish ambassadors. The only place at York that could hold such a crowd was the dean's house, which stood beside the Gothic church of Yorkminster. There, on September 24, Charles, seated on a throne like chair under a canopy of state, addressed the nobles. \"An army of rebels was lodged within this kingdom,\" he said, and what advice did their Lordships have for him? Their advice was to sign an armistice with the Scots and to summon Parliament. Charles had already accepted the inevitable, and Hawkins, who happened to be at York on September 24, wrote the Earl of Leicester that the writs for a parliament had been issued that day.\n\nOn November 3, Lucy attended the opening of Parliament in the old palace of Westminster. She had dressed for the occasion in a fashionable velvet gown, modestly filling in the low-cut bodice with an inset of muslin and covering her shoulders with a cape against the damp cold of the stone hall. As always, Lady Carlisle looked magnificent, but the double chin that had just been hinted at in her last Van Dyck portrait was now unmistakable.\n\nWhereas for the opening of Parliament in April, the King had ridden through the London streets in the royal coach to display himself to the populace in the black velvet and ermine robes of state and wearing his crown, this time he avoided the eyes of the public by going by barge the short distance from Whitehall to Westminster. He was met at Westminster Stairs by the Lords in a body, who escorted him first to Westminster Abbey for prayer and then to the House of Lords, where he took his seat on the throne. Crowned and in the robes of state, Charles emanated the aura of majesty, but Lucy sensed a lack of confidence in him that she had not seen since his youth.\n\nThe King began his address to the assembled Lords and Commons with the stark statement that the honor and safety of the kingdom was at stake. He admitted that the war against the Scots had so far been a failure. The Scottish army was sitting in Newcastle, and he warned that unless Parliament voted supply for the war, the English army would have to be disbanded before it could put the rebels out of England. He told Parliament that a loan from the City of London was enough to maintain the army for only two months. If the parliamentarians would grant him adequate supply, he promised to \"satisfy their just grievances\" and to \"concur so heartily and clearly with them that all the world would see his good intentions.\" Lucy feared that this blanket promise would be taken as a sign of weakness. The King then stated that Lord Keeper Sir John Finch would give an account of events since Parliament had last met in April. Not only did this very nervous official not help the King's cause, but Lucy thought he gave the worst speech she had ever heard. Writing to the Earl of Leicester after the opening, she reported that the King's speech was very well received\u2014\"with much reason, for he made them great promises.\"' But any initial spirit of cooperation between King and Parliament soon evaporated.\n\nThe temper of the parliament that convened in November 1640 was one of sullen hostility to the royal government. The King's party was sadly outnumbered in the Commons. Men known to be in opposition to the court had been returned over Charles's handpicked candidates. One after another, the members read out petitions from their constituents, complaining of arbitrary punishments inflicted by the Star Chamber and the High Commission. Overwhelmingly Puritan, they opposed Laud's changes to church doctrine and liturgy. Like most of their countrymen, they were opposed to the weakening of penalties against English Catholics. To a man, they were firmly opposed to Charles's personal rule financed by extraparliamentary measures such as ship money, forced loans, and the sale of monopolies.\n\nThese knights and squires, most of whom had trained as lawyers or had spent at least one semester at Oxford or Cambridge, could rise to oratorical heights. Sir John Colepeper, member for Kent, fulminated against monopolies, calling them \"a Nest of Wasps or swarm of Vermin which have over-crept the Land: these like the frogs of Egypt, have gotten possession of our Dwellings, they sup in our Cup, they dip in our Dish, they sit by our Fire, we find them in the Wash-House and Powdering-Tub, they share with the Butler in his Box; they have marked and sealed us from Head to Foot, they will not abate us a Pin: These are the leaches that have sucked the Commonwealth so hard, that it is almost become hectical [feverish as with a consumption].\"\n\nIn the upper house, the Puritan lords were equally opposed to Charles. Many kept strict households in their vast country houses where Scripture was their guide, and they abominated Laud's changes, which had their tenants bowing and kneeling before the altar in their village churches. There were secular concerns as well. Some lords felt hampered in their exploitation of the Americas by Charles's pro-Spanish foreign policy, constrained by his forest laws, and pinched by substantial fines in the Star Chamber. In both the upper and lower houses, virtually all were opposed to the war with the Scots, and Strafford was blamed for it.\n\nOn the eve of his journey south to certain impeachment, Strafford sent an earnest appeal to Radcliffe: \"For love of Christ, take order that all the money due to my Lady Carlisle be paid before Christmas, for a nobler nor more intelligent friendship did I never meet with in my life.\" But Lucy was not to get her money. Within days of Strafford's impeachment, the English parliament sent for Sir George Radcliffe and charged him with high treason too, thereby silencing Strafford's key witness.\n\nA king who believed he ruled by divine right, a parliament in revolt against his autocratic rule, a disaffected nobility, the Puritans' detestation of the Laudian Church of England, a widespread fear of Catholicism among the common people, an unpopular war with the Scots\u2014all of these forces and factions would coalesce in an explosion that would rock England to its foundations.\n\n# [_thirteen_ \nSTRAFFORD'S TRIAL AND EXECUTION](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c13a)\n\nLUCY WAS SICK IN BED, nursing a fever, when she heard the dreadful news that the Earl of Strafford had been accused of high treason and was now in custody. She had expected that he would come back from the north to a dangerously hostile parliament, but she was unprepared for the suddenness of the attack.\n\nHaving ridden hard all night, Strafford had taken his seat in the House of Lords that morning. After a few hours, he had left to consult with the King nearby at Whitehall. Their discussion was interrupted by a breathless man who had come to warn Strafford that a delegation from the Commons was going to the Lords to ask for his impeachment. At this, Strafford had rushed back to Westminster Hall. But John Pym, the spokesman for the Commons, had already laid the charge of treason before the Lords. Strafford was ordered to wait outside while the Lords considered the charge. After ten minutes of standing in the lobby with a group from the Commons, who kept their hats on to show their disrespect for him, he was recalled to the House of Lords and ordered to kneel while the Earl of Manchester read out the charge of treason. Strafford's request to speak was denied, and he was informed that he would hear the articles of impeachment in due course. When he attempted to enter his own coach, he was held back by the Black Rod\u2014the principal usher of the House of Lords\u2014who informed him that he was under house arrest and would be staying with him at his lodgings.\n\nStrafford's impeachment was largely the work of one man: John Pym. Now close to sixty, Pym was a devout Puritan lawyer who had been a very active member of Parliament since James's reign; in fact, he had been a manager of the abortive attempt to impeach the Duke of Buckingham in 1627. In those years, he and Wentworth (not yet Earl of Strafford) had fought side by side against Charles's determination to override the law. Wentworth's desertion to the King's side in 1629 undoubtedly influenced Pym's relentless attack on him in 1640.\n\nOver the years when Parliament was suspended, Pym had been treasurer of the Providence Island Company of which the Earl of Holland was governor. This employment had brought him into close association with Holland and his brother, the second Earl of Warwick, as well as other great Puritan lords involved in the overseas venture. Now with Parliament once more in session, Pym was able to use that connection as a conduit to the upper house. In the lower house, he resumed his lifelong fight to bring the King under the laws of Parliament. To accomplish this, Pym sincerely believed that the Earl of Strafford, the dangerous champion of the divine right of kings, had to be destroyed.\n\nWhile Pym fleshed out the charge, Strafford remained a prisoner in the house of the Black Rod, his request for bail refused. The Earl was to be tried by his peers, and on November 25, he was brought before the Lords to hear the articles of impeachment. Lucy was among the spectators who listened to the long list of allegations. It was alleged that he had intended to subvert the fundamental laws of the kingdom and introduce a tyrannical form of government. He was accused of assuming royal power over the King's subjects in England and Ireland, of enriching himself at the expense of the royal revenues, of encouraging papists, of stirring up enmity between England and Scotland, of incurring dishonorable defeats at Newburn and Newcastle, and of incensing the King against parliaments. Pym left it open to add other charges.\n\nAfter the reading of the articles, Strafford spoke. He asked for time to consider the charges and for leave to consult counsel and call witnesses\u2014no more than a prisoner's right to natural justice. Lucy, not an unbiased spectator, raved about his speech and bearing to the Leicesters. Everyone had been filled with wonder, she said; indeed, she had never heard \"so great and so general a commendation of any action.\" Moreover, he was sincerely confident that he would overcome all the accusations. She had never seen him discomposed for one minute, she told her relatives. Yet when he was taken away in a closed coach, this time to the Tower of London, he left a dejected woman sitting with the other gorgeously clad courtiers. \"So much am I distracted with my own thoughts,\" she wrote her brother-in-law, that she could not attend to anybody's business but Leicester's own.\n\nIn the fluid political situation, Lucy and her brothers were still trying to get another appointment for Leicester. \"Some advantage should fall to him out of all the changes,\" was how Northumberland put it. They were not agreed, however, on which potential vacancy was the most desirable. Northumberland favored the lord deputyship while Harry liked secretary of state; Lucy's first choice was lord treasurer, but since that was unlikely, she preferred secretary over lord deputy because that would give her Dorothy's company in England. Northumberland was not going to court these days but was keeping to his house. He had rented the Earl of Newport's mansion in St. Martin's Parish because it was near Leicester House, and there Lucy went to discuss their strategy regarding Leicester. She scolded her brother gently, telling him that he would have to take a more active part if they were to succeed. She also informed him that Holland was secretly after the lord deputyship for himself, although she thought him \"the unlikeliest in the kingdom\" to get it, since he was in disfavor with both their Majesties. She herself, she was happy to say, was very much in the Queen's good graces and therefore able to assist the business.\n\nHarry, as usual, was striving to appear as important as his elder siblings. In his letters to Leicester, he tried to cut Lucy out, urging his brother-in-law to make him his exclusive agent with the Queen. It was no wonder that Dorothy, in disgust, complained to Lucy of the \"divisions among their friends.\"\n\nNo matter who approached her, Henrietta Maria was always very well disposed toward Leicester. She was at this time trying to enlist as many friends for the King as she could. But despite his need for supporters, Charles was extraordinarily averse to any promotion for his ambassador to France\u2014even with all the Queen's blandishments. Only Algernon could bring the King around, Lucy told Dorothy. The King would do anything to secure him to his service, but their brother was \"so backward in engaging himself at this time\" that he was of little help to Leicester. She suggested that Dorothy urge Algernon to show more interest in the King's service but not to let him know the suggestion came from her. Lucy also told her sister that Leicester's greatest well-wisher was the Lord Lieutenant. She knew as a fact that he was pressing the King to name his successor, for if people saw that he would not be kept in the royal service, it might be some advantage to his defense and would certainly accord with his private desires.\n\nOn her visits to the Tower, Lucy found Strafford unvaryingly cheerful. \"My Lord Lieutenant's confidence does daily increase,\" she told Dorothy. But his good spirits no longer reassured her, because she realized that the man was fearless. As Christmas drew near, she became more and more depressed. \"We shall know no more of my Lord Lieutenant's business till after Christmas,\" she wrote Dorothy on December 17, \"which gives me great pains, for uncertainties and doubts are very unpleasant to me where I am so much concerned as I am in all his Lordship's interest.\" Indeed, she took it \"so much to heart\" that she had made herself sick. She had been in bed for a week, she informed her sister, but was feeling a little better now after the doctor came and let blood.\n\nDorothy's reponse was heartless. She accused Lucy of preferring Strafford to her own brother Northumberland, which elicited a frantic denial. With a shock, Lucy realized that Dorothy was prejudiced against Strafford. In this greatest sorrow of her life, she was to have no support from her sister. As for Northumberland, he was clearly indifferent to Strafford's fate. Of her family, only Harry remained staunch to their once-great friend.\n\nEven in her despair, Lucy did not lose her consuming interest in finery. With Dorothy in Paris, she could not resist the opportunity to acquire the latest fashions. A portrait of Doll had just arrived, and Lucy was taken with her dress. She would be much obliged, she wrote Dorothy in mid-December, \"if you would command me a petticoat and bodice of the fashion of my Lady Spencer's picture.\" It did not have to be green satin like Doll's; Dorothy could use her own discretion as to color and material, but Lucy was eager for a similar dress \"for I must consider the fashion.\"\n\nDorothy was pregnant again. And seemingly Doll had inherited her mother's high fertility, for she was already expecting her second child. Notwithstanding their condition, the ladies of the English embassy participated in all the seasonal merrymaking, and Dorothy-gave Lucy a full report. \"We are so glad to hear some of your gallantries,\" Lucy replied, adding that she had never seen a London Christmas with so little going on. People talked of nothing but miseries. There were none of the customary masques, theatricals, or dances. \"It is a charity to divert us,\" she told her sister.\n\nParliament was on a witch hunt. Strafford's impeachment had been followed by Laud's and Lord Keeper Finch's. Like Secretary Windebank, Finch fled to the Continent. The bishops were next; popular fury was such that they were hunted through the streets, and insults and even stones were hurled at them. As Hawkins told Leicester, \"every day begets new accusations.\" Charles was desperately trying to mollify his outraged subjects. In the new year, there was talk of a major government shuffle. Members of the opposition group were to be given some of the highest positions in the kingdom. The meddling queen tried to buy Pym off by offering him the chancellorship of the Exchequer but was turned down with a wry smile. If the Queen and Northumberland, working together, could not get either the lord deputyship or secretar)' of state for Leicester in the present state of affairs, \"there must be a curse upon us,\" Lucy declared to Dorothy\n\nMeanwhile the Leieesters were growing impatient with their \"influential\" relatives and their promises. At the beginning of 1641, they enlisted the help of sycophantic Sir John Temple who was still in London, waiting to take up his appointment as Master of the Rolls in Ireland. On January 1, Leicester set the project in motion with a letter to Temple. The target was the Queen's favorite, Sir Henry Jermyn. Temple was to bribe Jermyn to support Leicester's candidacy for the lord deputyship. Temple replied approvingly that the Earl was \"now absolutely fallen upon the right way for compassing his designs.\" Barring intervention by Parliament, the Queen would make all the new state appointments: her power over the King was so great that those around him were \"fain to use some artifice to conceal it.\" And Jermyn's influence over the Queen was known to everyone at court. Jermyn, in turn, \"took counsel\" only with his secretary, Robert Long. Temple would work through Long, \"of whom he is as confident as of himself, and so may the Earl of Leicester be likewise.\"\n\nWhile dealing through the King's friends, Leicester was also mending his fences on the parliamentary side by writing to Viscount Man deville\u2014probably under Dorothy's prodding. Her hardheaded approach was manifest in the entire scheme to bypass their well-meaning courtier relatives. Leicester was chronically irresolute. Like many intellectuals, he was too analytical; he saw the pros and cons of every action and so took none. Dorothy, on the other hand, was adversarial by nature and thrust straight ahead to her goal without a backward glance. Around the turn of the year, Leicester wrote at least two letters to Mandeville, professing his sympathies for the Puritans and stating that he wanted \"to live in the good opinion of the brethren.\"\n\nTemple reported that Jermyn was pleased with the Earl's proposal, but the latter would have to name the specific amount of the \"present.\" Robert Long impressed upon Temple that he had never seen Jermyn clo anything without money. He informed Temple that Sir Henry Vane also wanted the deputyship and was ready to pay for it. On January 21, Temple wrote Leicester with obvious trepidation that to forestall Jermyn's closing with Vane, he had been forced to make an offer of \u00a34,000. Leicester was coldly furious, informing him that he would never pay so much money But Temple was wise in the ways of the court. Through Long he negotiated a deal with Jermyn whereby Leicester would guarantee him an equivalent amount in patronage when he became Lord Deputy of Ireland. It would be up to Leicester whether he wanted to honor this commitment, of course, wily Temple told him.\n\nLucy and her brothers knew nothing about Temple's commission except that he was earnestly trying to help Leicester. After the new appointments were made, with once again with nothing for Leicester, Lucy and Harry regarded his \"business\" as \"desperate.\" Still, no successor to Strafford had been named. Holland's bid for the deputyship was out in the open, and some of the parliamentary leaders were about to petition the King on his behalf. Temple was pleased to report that Lady Carlisle was zealously working to cross her old admirer Holland.\n\nOn January 30, Strafford was brought to the House of Lords to hear the detailed charges against him. Out of pity he was allowed a stool to sit on. If strangers were moved, seeing the ravages that two months in a damp prison had wrought in his appearance, Lucy's distress can only be imagined. She was \"so distracted\" that it took her a week before she could pick up her pen and write to her sister. She reported that the Lord Lieutenant was still superbly confident, \"with much reason, both from his own innocence and the weakness of his charge.\" His strength of character simply amazed her. \"To see him, you would not believe he had ever been happier,\" she told Dorothy in wonderment.\n\nIn fact, Strafford was feeling relieved. Notwithstanding all Pym's best efforts, the ninety-one pages of charges did not contain a single one that constituted high treason. There were serious accusations certainly, particularly the claim that he had raised an army in Ireland to enforce King Charles's prerogative in England, but in Strafford's opinion, none were capital crimes, and he returned to the Tower to draft his response\u2014ever optimistic. On February 24, when he was brought to deliver his answer, he was in such good spirits that, waiting for the Lords to call him in, he passed the time drawing caricatures\u2014no doubt of his accusers. He had rebuttals for all nine general and twenty-eight specific accusations, above all stressing that he never advised using the Irish army against the English but simply intended \"to reduce the Scots to their obedience.\" For Pym and his friends, the opportunity given the prisoner to answer the charges against him was just a formality, and plans for the trial began at once.\n\nHenrietta Maria had now become Strafford's champion. Although the opposition clothed their intentions in declarations of allegiance, the attack on Strafford was in fact an attack on the King. Charles knew it, and Henrietta Maria (whose antipathy to Wentworth it had been Lucy's task to soften) belatedly realized that the fallen statesman was the royal family's mainstay. From her experience of the venality of the English courtiers, she believed she could buy off his enemies. In the dark of night she held rendezvous with those she regarded as \"the most wicked,\" meeting them all alone at the back stairs of the palace and leading them up by torchlight to a vacant apartment of one of her ladies-in-waiting. In later years she would admit that she made few converts.' Lucy could not have failed to know about the Queen's intrigues. She was extremely close to Henrietta Maria at this time, and even if she had not discovered these nocturnal meetings for herself, the indiscreet queen would have told her. According to Clarendon, knowing Lucy's great concern for Strafford, the King and Queen included her in all their anxious discussions on how to save him.\n\nLucy would also have known about the army plot that Harry was hatching with some other daring officers. It all began when Parliament allocated an enormous sum to pay off the Scottish army squatting in the north of England, while leaving the English army unpaid. Harry had gone into debt raising a troop for the Scottish war, and so had other commanders of his acquaintance; they met to air their discontent in Harry's chamber at court. While they were in their cups, the idea was born of taking control of the northern army and bringing it to London to save Strafford. Each conspirator brought in others until the group included the court poets Suckling and Davenant; George Goring, the son of Lucy's old admirer; Sir Henry Jermyn; and that same Captain Billingsley in whose name Strafford had put one of Lucy's Irish leases. Even in such a clandestine operation, quarrels over precedence erupted, and these proved fatal to the undertaking. When the others refused to let Goring be Commander-in-Chief, he revealed the embryonic plot to Pym's friends.' Pym filed it away for future use.\n\nWhile Strafford's future was looking dim to everyone but himself, Temple's negotiations on Leicester's behalf were at last proceeding very satisfactorily. Jermyn was only waiting until \"the Earl of Strafford's business be despatched,\" Temple reported on March 4. He cautioned that Jermyn's name must never be mentioned in connection with the appointment lest it prejudice Parliament against Leicester. Nor his own name, for that matter. The Lord Admiral and Lady Carlisle must have all the honor of it.\n\nON MARCH 22, 1641, Strafford's trial began in the awesome setting of Westminster Hall, whose great raftered ceiling soared above the scaffolding erected to seat the public. At the far end of the hall was the throne with a chair placed beside it for the Prince of Wales; but the King had been requested to stay out of sight in one of two enclosed \"closets\" built for the occasion for the royal family. In front of the raised dais with its empty throne, the Earl of Arundel, the Lord High Steward, was seated on the green woolsack, presiding over the trial in his most lordly manner. In front of him were the great officers of state, the judges in their scarlet robes, the black-gowned clerks huddled around their table (among them John Rushworth, whose transcribed shorthand notes would provide an official daily record of the trial), and, to the side, the peers of the realm in ermine-lined red velvet. All these sat as on a stage, facing the bar covered in green baize. Standing at the bar were a dozen members of the Commons, led by John Pym, who were to conduct the prosecution. A table had been set out for the prisoner at the bar, who was constantly attended by the Lord Lieutenant of the Tower. Behind Strafford sat his four secretaries, who handed him papers as he required them, and behind them his lawyers at a long table piled with tomes.'\n\nFor such a \"glorious assembly\" the decorum was remarkably bad. A Scottish commissioner, who attended daily, reported home that the spectators in the galleries ate throughout the proceedings, \"not just confections but flesh and bread, bottles of beer and wine going thick from mouth to mouth without cups, and all this in the King's eye.\" Some people even urinated through the scaffolding.\n\nHalf hidden by a tapestry in one of the enclosed boxes, the Queen and her ladies, among them Lucy, attended every day, taking copious notes that they discussed in the evening. Unfortunately none of Lucy's letters about the trial have survived; however, from those of the period leading up to the trial we can safely surmise that her distress was intense. Just looking at her friend would have been enough to move her to tears. She had not seen Strafford since the end of january because only his lawyers, his doctor, and a few servants were permitted to visit. Strafford had turned into an old man in the Tower, bent and gray-faced, wearing a snug little cap to keep out the cold. But if he was broken in body, his mind was as sharp as ever. He defended himself, as the Queen said, \"with dauntless spirit and irrepressible wit.\" All those who were not his sworn enemies were struck by his courage and greatness of mind. \"Truly his Lordship carries himself very gallantly,\" Temple reported to Leicester. To Pym, impatient to be done with the business, Strafford's able rebuttals were simply \"impertinent exceptions.\"\n\nHow Lucy's heart must have pounded when the prosecution moved on to the charge that the Lord Lieutenant had enriched himself in Ireland at the expense of King Charles and his subjects. She had reason to fear that she would be questioned when, on Monday, March 29, the matter of her own Glaslough lands inadvertently came up. Strafford had testified that he had referred all land claims to the courts, and to disprove this the prosecution he cited the case of Viscount Baltinglas. This Irish peer had owned the estate of Glaslough and had mortgaged it to Sir Robert Parkhurst. A dispute had arisen, and Parkhurst had petitioned the Lord Lieutenant to determine possession. The prosecution charged that not only had Strafford heard the case, but after deciding it in Parkhurst's favor and dispossessing Lord Baltinglas, he had leased the land for himself. Strafford ac knowledged that he had bought the lease from Sir Robert Parkhurst; however, it was not for himself \"but in trust for a Noble Person.\" By not naming Lady Carlisle, he gallantly protected her from being called as a witness. Two days later, he was even more protective during an inquisitionlike examination concerning his profits from the Irish customs.\n\nStrafford was looking very bad. The prosecution was making a strong case that he had engrossed the profits from the customs while serving as the country's highest official; moreover, that he enhanced his profits by raising the tariffs, to the great distress of the native population. When the prosecution stated that the Earl of Carlisle had surrendered his grant to the King in 1633 and accused Strafford of getting his hands on the wine customs as well, he could easily have refuted the charge. He did not tell them that the grant had continued to be held by Lady Carlisle and that she had enjoyed the profits virtually to the present time. If Lucy was grateful to her friend for not involving her in these horrendous proceedings, she may have been less appreciative of his care of her when she heard Sir James Hay's testimony\n\nSir James had been called to testify as to the profits from the wine customs. Stating that Lord Carlisle had sent him to Ireland as his agent in 1635, he produced an account for that year prepared by the auditor for Ireland. This showed that the profits from the wine customs, after the King's rent was deducted, amounted to \u00a32,387\u20143 far cry from the \u00a31,388 Lucy had received from Strafford.' This was not news to her; it was obviously from Hay that she had learned about the \u00a3999 outstanding from 1635. \"Yet hearing the auditor's account read out baldly in the court, it would have been natural to feel some bitterness that Strafford, her trustee, had knowingly undervalued the grant when she first inherited it\u2014especially since it looked as if she would never see her rightful profits now.\n\nApril 5 was a day of high drama, when witnesses were examined on the most serious of the charges. The great question was whether, at a meeting of the Privy Council on May 5, 1640, the Earl of Strafford had advised using the Irish army to subdue the Scots or the English. With a little prompting, the Secretary of State, Sir Henry Vane, recalled that it was the latter. His testimony was refuted by all the lords who had attended the council meeting in question. Seeing the weakness of Vane's testimony, Pym tried to buttress it with what was clearly manufactured evidence. In the Commons a few days later, he produced a piece of paper that, he said, contained a copy of Vane's minutes of the fateful council meeting, given to him by Vane's son. Sir Henry Vane the Younger, one of the most radical parliamentarians, immediately jumped up to corroborate Pym's statement. He declared that he had made the copy without his father's knowledge and that the original minutes had later been burned. Pym acknowledged that the piece of paper he held in his hand was his own copy of young Vane's copy, which he had destroyed after transcribing it. Carefully emphasizing the damning words supposedly spoken by Strafford to the King, Pym read aloud: \"You have an army in Ireland you may employ _here_ to reduce _this kingdom_ ,\" From the reaction it was clear that the Commons was prepared to find Strafford guilty of treason on the doubtful evidence of a copy of a copy\n\nOn April to, at Westminster Flail, Strafford summed up his defense in a brilliantly logical speech that would have convinced any listener with an open mind. He had little trouble discrediting Vane, whom he called \"a single witness disavowed by all the rest.\" He maintained that none of his actions in Ireland or England could be stretched to constitute a treasonable offense under statute or common law. Was he to be punished by a law that did not yet exist? Ominously, he warned his fellow peers of setting a dangerous precedent: \"Beware that you do not awake these sleeping lions by the raking up of some neglected, some moth-eaten records\u2014they may sometime tear you and your posterity in pieces.\"\n\nStrafford's peroration was a defense of the royal prerogative, but with qualification. The prerogative was a necessary reserve power for extraordinary occasions\u2014\"the laws must have place at all other times.\" The best way to nourish both the rights of the subject and the royal prerogative was by \"the frequent use of parliaments.\" To sum up his philosophy of governance, he declared that \"the happiness of a kingdom consists in the just poise of the King's prerogative and the subject's liberty and that things should never be well till these went hand and hand together.\" (It must be said that his political philosophy was not borne out by his practice in fourteen years of public life.) At the end, when he spoke of his children, he had to stop for weeping.\n\nIt was beginning to look as if Strafford would be acquitted despite \"the universal hatred\" for him. Having foreseen just such an eventuality, Pym was steering a bill of attainder through the lower house. If the prisoner could not be found guilty under the laws of the land, he would be voted guilty by an act of Parliament. \"Nothing will satisfy the House of Commons but his head,\" Sir John Temple reported to the Earl of Leicester. On April 21, the bill of attainder passed the Commons and was sent up to the Lords.\n\nIn the midst of these terrifying events, Lucy was called upon to perform what must have seemed a travesty of her old duties as Lady of the Bedchamber. To appease the Puritans, Charles had arranged a Protestant marriage for his eldest daughter, Mary, a child of ten, with the fifteen-year-old son of the Prince of Orange. On April 27, the young Prince William arrived in England for the wedding. Although the celebrations were muted, there was dancing and masquing, and, thanks to Dorothy's purchases for her, Lucy was in the height of Parisian fashion. On May 2, the festivities culminated in the marriage ceremony. The royal wedding was a macabre event haunted by the ghost in the Tower.\n\nThe time had come for Pym to use the younger Goring's revelation of the foolhardy and ineffectual conspiracy of Harry Percy and the other commanders. On May 3, Pym informed the House of Commons that a plot was afoot to bring the army from the north to \"overawe\" Parliament, take over the Tower, and effect the Earl of Strafford's escape\u2014all this in conjunction with a French invasion by sea. He named no names, except to say that the conspirators were people close to the Queen. Jermyn, Suckling, and Davenant fled to the Continent safely, but Harry Percy was recognized at Dover and beaten within an inch of his life. Suffering a badly injured leg, he dragged himself back to London to his brother's house.\n\nNorthumberland had by now defected from the King's party and become a Pym supporter. Lucy had slowly come to realize where his sympathies lay. At first she had thought that only illness was keeping him away from the court. Then she began to see that he was actually avoiding it. By January he was murmuring about giving up his army command. Because Lucy's correspondence with Dorothy ceased in early February 1\u00d341, we do not know what strains Northumberland's change of loyalties placed on the relationships among the sisters and brothers. Temple's letters show, however, that the family maintained a united front in their efforts to secure a lucrative post for Leicester. And it is significant that Harry, in his hour of need, sought sanctuary with his brother.\n\nSomehow, Pym and his friends learned that Northumberland was harboring his brother. No doubt they threatened to reveal the whereabouts of the injured conspirator. Northumberland may even have gone along with them out of conviction. In any event, by some means they got him to persuade his brother to write a letter of confession to Parliament, exposing the plot and the plotters. Pym agreed that Northumberland could withhold the letter until Harry could make his escape. On May 5, it was read out in the Commons and a resolution was passed charging Harry Percy, Jermyn, and Suckling with treason. Later that day, Northumberland, in his capacity as Lord High Admiral, grimly signed a writ for the \"strict stopping of the ports\" and the arrest of his brother and his fellow conspirators.\n\nPanic and fear gripped the easily excitable London mob. As the House of Lords deliberated on the bill of attainder, thousands of shouting people milled around Westminster demanding Strafford's death, inflamed by news of the army plot to save him. On May 7, the bill passed the Lords. It was generally thought that it would stop there, that the King would never assent to it. Indeed, he had told Parliament on May 1 that he could not in good conscience do so. But on May 10, after agonies of indecision, fears for his queen's safety (an angry mob had gathered under her windows), and a letter from Strafford releasing him from his promises, Charles signed the attainder. The following day he sent the eleven-year-old Prince of Wales to the House of Lords with a fruitless appeal for life imprisonment instead of death for Strafford.\n\nOn May 12, 1641, hours before daylight, the stands erected on Tower Hill to seat thousands of spectators were already filled. Thousands more were standing, some of the more adroit scrambling onto piles of lumber or large rocks for a better view. There was an air of festivity, as if the crowd had come to see a coronation. When the black-hooded executioner mounted the scaffold at the top of the hill and began adjusting the position of the block, an anticipatory buzzing ran through the enormous crowd. This became a hush when they sighted the Earl of Strafford approaching with his brothers, his chaplains, a guard of soldiers, and his servants. He himself was walking between his cousin the Earl of Cleveland and an Irish archbishop. The crowd receded to allow a pathway for them. One spectator observed that Strafford carried himself \"more like a general at the head of an army than a condemned man.\" His behavior on the scaffold was as edifying as Lucy and his other admiring friends would have expected. In a clear, modulated voice that carried far, he said he submitted to the judgment \"with a quiet and contented mind.\" Although it was his \"ill hap to be misconstrued,\" he said he had never done anything but that which aimed at the prosperity of the King and his people. I Ie questioned whether \"the beginnings of the people's happiness should be written in letters of blood,\" and he expressed the hope that \"no one drop of my blood rise up in judgment against them.\" His courage never flagged. He took off his doublet \"as cheerfully,\" he told those around him, \"as if I were going to bed.\" Refusing a handkerchief for his eves, he laid his head on the block. With one stroke the executioner beheaded him.\n\nSEVERAL DAYS BEFORE the execution, Leicester had quietly come over to England. Although he asserted in his journal that he had been summoned by the King, he had in fact come without leave at Temple's instigation. With \"Strafford's business despatched,\" Temple had written, the Irish appointment would soon be filled, and if Leicester was not on the spot, someone else might extort it from the harassed King. But Jermyn had kept his part of the bargain after all. Charles had agreed to appoint Leicester. Besides, Charles realized that Leicester would be acceptable to Parliament as Northumberland's brother-in-law and Lisle's father (Philip was now a warm supporter of Pym). ? week after Strafford's execution, the King named the Earl of Leicester Lord Lieutenant of Ireland\u2014\"the greatest employment of this kingdom,\" exulted Temple.\n\nFrom Paris Dorothy sent a surprisingly lukewarm letter of congratulations to her husband: \"According to my weak devotion I have given God my humble thanks for the satisfaction that you have received, and I shall not omit to present my best prayers for a blessing upon all your proceedings, and that this new honour may bring to you an increase of all that is called happiness.\" Possibly she realized that it was too late to be happy in Charles's service. Moreover, she was extremely uncomfortable in this late pregnancy. \"Till God will be pleased to deliver me from that great pain and danger, I cannot rejoice at anything for my own sake.\" Harry's situation naturally disturbed her also. He had just arrived at Calais, she informed her husband, and she asked him to communicate the news to her brother and sister.\n\nPoor Harry had landed in France in a dreadful state. He had not had time to recover before fleeing England, and for weeks he was immobilized at Calais with his badly injured leg. At last he was able to move, and on July 22, he arrived at Paris. Dorothy welcomed him with open arms and, seeing him \"very weak and indisposed,\" immediately began looking after him. But the next morning a messenger arrived posthaste from Dieppe with a letter from her husband, ordering her not to receive Harry into the house. Even for an independent woman like Dorothy, an authoritative order from the husband was to be obeyed. She was forced to turn her own brother away from her door. The King's troubles with his subjects had at last shattered the family solidarity of the Percys.\n\n# [_fourteen_ \nLUCY CHANGES HER GALLANT](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c14a)\n\nOVER THE SUMMER of 1641, Parliament was busy paring down King Charles's powers. Under Pym's guiding hand, legislation was passed to require the summoning of Parliament every three years, to prevent the dissolution of the present parliament without its consent, to abolish the Star Chamber and the High Commission, and to end ship-money levies and the forest laws. A bill was also introduced to abolish church government by bishops \"root and branch,\" but it was premature for such a radical motion. The King's every move was blocked. At loggerheads with his English parliament, Charles placed his hopes on winning over his Scottish parliament, and in August he left for Scotland. Henrietta Maria took up residence at Oatlands in Surrey, the lovely dower manor of English queens.\n\nIt was while the King was in Scotland that Lucy did an extraordinary thing. After mourning the Earl of Strafford for several months, she became a bosom friend of John Pym, the pudgy little man of sixty who seemed to have no life outside the committee room and whose skill at managing Parliament had brought her dearest friend to the executioner's block. A disgusted royalist sneered that Lady Carlisle \"had now changed her gallant from Strafford to Mr. Pym.'\" Edward Hyde (the future Lord Clarendon), who was still a member of Pym's inner councils at this time, attributed Lady Carlisle's turning coat to disillusionment with the King and Queen. 'After she had for a short time murmured for the death of the Earl of Strafford,\" he would later write, \"she renounced all future devotion for those who would, but could not, protect him, and applied herself to and courted all those who murdered him, with all possible condescensions.\" Lucy may well have asked herself why she should give her fidelity to a king and queen who could not even save their most loyal subject. Besides, she saw the King at too close quarters: wrongheaded, ineffectual, ruled by a wife who was sadly wanting in judgment.\n\nBut was Lucy also disillusioned with the friend she had so trusted? Under Strafford's trusteeship, the substantial Irish holdings she had inherited from Carlisle had melted away Partly it was the troubled times; the empty Irish and English Exchequers could not be squeezed to pay out the \u00a316,000 she was supposed to receive for surrendering her wine customs grant\u2014she was fortunate to have got even \u00a31,000. But there were no rents coming in from Ireland either. In fact, her Irish lands were in jeopardy. Viscount Baltinglas was petitioning the English parliament to recover the Glaslough estate, and an Irish peer named Lord Brabazon was making claims on Shillelagh. Strafford had died, leaving Lucy with nothing to prove her right to the leases that he had purchased with her money from the sale of her inherited lands. At the time, he had given her to understand that the proper documents had been drawn up to verify that the leases were held in trust for her. Now she needed those documents. Time and again she asked William Railton, the Wentworth family's London agent, to get these \"writings\" for her. He promised to do his best, but, so far, she had not received them. For these worthless leases she had given up her valuable inherited lands! Strafford had talked her into selling the vast tract of the Birnes Country to the King by telling her that the title was defective, yet it had been perfected quickly enough once she surrendered the grant. And while he had got her a fair price, she now knew that he had personally profited to the tune of several thousand pounds a year in rents from the two manors in the Birnes Country that the King had regranted to him. Indeed, a modern historian has written, \"It is not unreasonable to suggest that this incident of the Birnes Country may have had something to do with the famous transfer of Lucy Carlisle's platonic affections from Strafford to Pym.\" In retrospect, Lucy may have felt that she had less reason to be grateful to her dead friend than she had supposed. Among her new friends there was no dearth of people to tell her that Strafford had been unworthy of her trust. One of these was Sir John Clotworthy, an old enemy of Strafford's from Ireland, for whom Pym and his friends had found a safe seat in the English Commons, where he had seconded Pym's campaign against Strafford.\n\nThe Queen was unaware of Lady Carlisle's desertion. In fact, Henrietta Maria believed that Lucy was on her side and that she was getting valuable intelligence about the King's enemies from her favorite lady-in-waiting. One September day in 1641, Lucy arrived at Oatlands with a paper that she said she had obtained from Viscount Mandeville, a leader of the parliamentary opposition. Secretary of State Edward Nicholas thought it useful enough to the royal cause to have it published. At the time she brought this paper to the Queen, Lucy was already in daily contact with Mandeville and Pym. In Edward Hyde's opinion, they were using her as a conduit to the impressionable and talkative queen.\n\nLady Carlisle was ideal for their purposes. Henrietta Maria trusted her, not only because of her long years in the royal service but because of the \"eminent and constant affection\" she had shown the Earl of Strafford during his impeachment. And Lucy was not reticent about the Queen in her conversations with her new allies. As Hyde put it, she \"communicated all she knew, and more, of the natures and dispositions of the King and Queen.\" Pym was able to extract from Lucy a psychological portrait of the little queen who wielded such power over her husband. A master at manipulation, in the great game he was playing to change the government of England, Pym moved people like pawns. At will he could summon up a mob of apprentices from the London workshops to demand the measures he was trying to push through Parliament. By means of Lady Carlisle, he sent the Queen messages that stirred up her excitable nature. Foreseeing her reaction, he planned his next move.\n\nIt was likely at Viscount Mandeville's house in Chelsea that Lucy became so friendly with John Pym. There, a cabal of opposition lords met regularly with Pym and his lieutenants in the Commons to plan their parliamentary strategy. Among them were some of the greatest peers of the realm. Several were privy councillors appointed during Strafford's trial, when King Charles still hoped to win them over; the Earl of Essex had been named Lord Chamberlain as late as July 1641. Essex, Warwick, Holland, and Newport were Lucy's first cousins. Mandeville (who was to become Earl of Manchester in 1642 on his father's death) was her cousin by marriage. As treasurer of the Providence Island Company, Pym had known these Puritan lords for years. There is little doubt that Lucy was brought into the cabal by the Earl of Holland. Lucy had drifted away from Holland after Strafford returned to England in the autumn of 1639. The two men were on the worst possible terms, and, with all her savoir faire, she had been unable to maintain a friendship with both. But now, with Strafford gone, she fell back on Holland. In this new phase of their friendship, they were on more equal ground. Lucy was in her forty-second year, and Holland was over fifty. He no longer wrote poetry to her, and she no longer \"made sport\" of him. The gallantry of the past was replaced by a \"strict friendship\" that would carry the pair into dangerous waters in the turbulent years ahead.\n\nHolland had been disaffected from the King for a year or more. Indeed, in April 1640, Archbishop Laud was advised that while the Earl of Warwick was the visible head of the Puritan party, his brother Holland was the invisible head. Had Holland not been a younger son with an insatiable desire for luxurious living, he would have joined his brother and the other Puritan lords in the political wilderness during the 1630s. By blood ties, business interests, and religion he belonged with them. When there was nothing more to be gained from the royal service, he deserted.\n\nAt Henrietta Maria's urging, Charles made one last effort to retain Holland. Before leaving for Scotland he appointed him Lord General of His Majesty's Forces beyond the Trent River. As the war with the Scots was over\u2014peace was signed on September 2, 1641\u2014 this glorious title entailed no more than disbanding the northern army. After his return from the north, Holland all but ignored the Queen and consorted with \"those Lords who were against the bishops and the Book of Common Prayer.\" Not only did Holland attend the meetings at Lord Mandeville's, but he frequently played host to Pym and his friends at his beautiful country house in Kensington.\n\nPolitical intrigue had always fascinated Lucy. She had played a considerable role in court politics by cultivating great men. Now Pym was the great man of the hour. Through him she was at the center of momentous events. Canny Pym had found a natural _intriguante_ in the Countess of Carlisle. Whether there was a sexual side to Lucy's relationship with John Pym is doubtful. But his personal influence over her can be inferred from the manner in which she assimilated his Puritan ways. We do not hear of Holland \"condescending\" to attend a sermon by one of Pym's favorite fire-and-brimstone preachers. Yet Lady Carlisle \"became such a she-saint that she frequented their sermons and took notes.\"\n\nIt was in this \"fashion\" that Dorothy found her sister when she returned from France in October 1641. Leicester had gone back to Paris to take formal leave of the French court and to bring his family home. Before leaving France, Dorothy had stocked up on luxury goods suitable to their anticipated viceregal splendor in Ireland, most notably a rich and costly coach.'- Showing off her magnificent purchases to a soberly dressed Lucy, Dorothy may have thought with some satisfaction that their roles had been reversed. Here she was, the country wife, dazzling the great court lady with the latest things from Paris.\n\nLeicester expected that on the King's return from Scotland, he would get his orders to take up his post as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. In the meantime, he had to be in London to attend the Privy Council and the Committee on Irish Affairs, so Dorothy settled the family into Leicester House. Doll and I Ienry Spencer had left France in June and spent the summer with their two babies at Althorp, his family home in Northamptonshire. To Dorothy's delight, in the autumn they came up from the country to join the family at Leicester House in order for Henry, now twenty-one, to take his seat in the I louse of Lords. Dorothy did not need grandchildren to have a baby in the house. Her latest, born that summer, was a boy christened Henry\u2014a Percy name but also a compliment to a beloved son-in-law. This child, who was to be her last, was as dear to Dorothy as her firstborn. Golden-haired and smiling, he brought joy into the family life, which, all too often, was made discordant by the parents' arguments.\n\nDuring the three years they had been parted, the personality traits that had caused temporary rifts between husband and wife in the past had grown more pronounced. Naturally assertive, Dorothy had turned into a strong, no-nonsense, controlling woman. Her always limited powers of conciliation had rusted, and she no longer troubled to save her husband's feelings. For his part, Leicester had always had a tendency to withdraw into isolation. living a bachelor's existence in Paris for so many years, he found it difficult to readjust to married life. Frustrated by his aloofness, Dorothy had become more aggressive and demanding during her two years in France. Now, back in England, the tensions between them erupted into more quarrels about money.\n\nThe Leicesters' financial arrangements were like those of total strangers. Certainly, it was unusual between spouses that when Dorothy borrowed money from her husband she had to pay him interest, and he, in turn, had to pay her for his keep as if he were staying at an inn. Hawkins was once again delivering the rent money to Dorothy. Leicester would later complain that she did not pay interest on his debts, so that his indebtedness grew \"as it proved very near to my undoing.\" Nevertheless, he did nothing about it at the time but, typically, allowed his resentment to fester in his mind.\n\nSuddenly, Leicester had more to worry about than his business accounts with his wife. Lie received word that the Irish Catholics had risen against the Protestant English settlers. It had been the policy of both Elizabeth and James to \"colonize\" Ireland with English families, granting them large plantations that had displaced the native Irish. The Irish Rebellion of 1641 was an attempt to take advantage of King Charles's problems at home. A conspiracy to take over Dublin Castle and seize the armaments had been uncovered in time, but in northern Ireland the rebels were attacking castles and government arsenals. Rumors were rampant of burning and plundering and of atrocities against Protestants. Leicester immediately informed the Privy Council, which went in a body to the Commons. On center stage for once, Leicester informed the members of Parliament of the bloody events in Ireland. Sounding purposeful and decisive, he declared that men and money must be sent at once \"to save Ireland, for the safety of England depends upon it.\" Laying aside the Grand Remonstrance\u2014a comprehensive attack on the royal prerogative and the episcopacy that Pym was steering through the House at this time\u2014the Commons passed a series of resolutions dealing with the Irish business. These included an urgent request to the Lord Lieutenant to name officers and to hasten over to Ireland himself with all due diligence.\n\nAfter his hard-hitting speech to the Commons, Leicester subsided into his habitual indecisiveness, and when an ordinance was passed by both houses directing him to levy volunteers in England \"to secure Dublin and the English Pale,\" he dithered, questioning whether he could raise troops without the King's warrant. This led the Commons to take a further bite out of the prerogative, declaring that an ordinance of Lords and Commons was sufficient in itself.\n\nDorothy had none of her husband's difficulties over divided loyalties. She threw herself into Lucy's faction with gusto. Indeed, Hyde thought her \"equally active and tempestuous\" as her sister. According to him, she \"drew the principal persons who were most obnoxious to the Court, and to whom the Court was most obnoxious, to a constant conversation at Leicester House.\" In Dorothy's wainscoted withdrawing room, the talk was allowed to roam freely, with no respect for persons, and bordered more than a little on l\u00e8se-majest\u00e9. Lucy appears to have introduced Pym into Dorothy's salon, for when Dorothy went to Penshurst in the summer, Pym kept in touch with her by letter.' How did Leicester feel about his wife's nest of anti-rovalists under his roof? Hyde believed it was very disagreeable to the Earl's \"nature and prudence.\" Arguing against this, however, were Leicester's continuing close friendships with Northumberland, Mandeville, and Pembroke, all of whom were openly opposed to the King.\n\nMeanwhile, Lucy continued to carry Pym's planted stories to the Queen. Unlike most messengers bearing bad news, she was received with open arms. Poor Henrietta Maria closed her mind to any doubts she may have had about Lucy; there were so few people she could trust any more, as she said to Secretary Nicholas.' It may well have been Lucy who brought her the sinister report about a meeting at Holland House where, during a discussion of the many plots and conspiracies of the day, the Earl of Newport was said to have advocated seizing the Queen and her children. Not long before this, Henrietta Maria had received a most disturbing visit from the Earl of Holland. Her erstwhile courtier informed her that because of \"the Jesuits and other dangerous persons\" in her house, Parliament wanted the instant removal of the Prince of Wales and Prince James, the Duke of York, to their own palace of Richmond. The Queen gained a reprieve by saying that the princes were at Oatlands to celebrate their sister's birthday. However, the report of Newport's remark, on top of Holland's visit, had her badly frightened.\n\nThe story about the Earl of Newport was one of the many tales of woe that Henrietta Maria had to tell her husband when he finally returned from Scotland at the end of November. The Irish Rebellion had fueled anti-Catholic sentiment in the country. Both in and out of Parliament, it was focused on the Queen. Many Puritans honestly believed that she was the center of \"a malignant party\" that intended to bring back Roman Catholicism and to destroy the liberty of the English people. Rumor had it that she and her clique had actually incited the Catholic rising in Ireland. Mobs of London apprentices roved around Westminster shouting the catchphrase \"Down with papists and popery.\"\n\nAt Christmastime an enormous crowd, armed with staves and other crude weapons, assembled outside Westminster and Whitehall Palace to protest the King's replacement of the Puritan Lieutenant of the Tower with one of his own most trusted veterans, one Captain Lunsford. Storming into Westminster Abbey, they threatened to pull down the organ. They were so threatening that the militia had to be called out. Only when word spread among the crowd that the King had revoked Lunsford's appointment was a riot averted. From then on, Charles had a guard put on the palace around the clock.\n\nThere were no revelries at Whitehall this Christmas. Inside the palace the Queen could not shut out the sound of the tumultuous crowd. With her protruding teeth and nervous gestures, she was like a cornered mouse when Lady Carlisle, plump and sleek, arrived one day during Christmas week with horrible news. Pym's party intended to accuse Her Majesty of high treason, she confided to the Queen. It was true that there was some private talk of her impeachment, but Hyde was certain that it \"was imparted to her upon design.\" Lucy was undoubtedly sent by Pym to frighten the Queen into some precipitate and foolish action.\n\nPym was anxious to bring matters to a head. King Charles was winning over some of the moderates in Parliament with assurances that he had no intention of deviating from the religion and liberties of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Moreover, the extremist demands in the Grand Remonstrance had alienated some of Pym's worthiest supporters. Edward Hyde, for example, had gone over to the royalist side. Another was Sir John Colepeper, who had made the colorful speech against monopolies in 1640.\n\nWith Lucy's help, Pym played on the Queen's fears with the desired result. Frightened out of her wits, Henrietta Maria urged Charles to impeach her enemies before they could impeach her. The purported threat against his wife galvanized the King into action. On January 3,1642, he sent his Attorney General to the House of Lords to accuse Viscount Mandeville and five members of the Commons of high treason. The five were the worst troublemakers: John Pym, Denzil Holies, John Hampden, William Stroud, and Sir Arthur I Iaselrig. The charges centered on \"a traitorous endeavour\" to deprive the King of his rightful power and to alienate his subjects. Simultaneously, the Sergeant-at-Arms, quaking in his boots, asked the Speaker of the House to render up the five members at the King's command.\n\nParliament stonewalled the King. The Lords coolly struck a committee to \"examine precedents,\" and the Commons sent respectful word to the palace that since their privileges were involved, they would require time to consider the matter. Not only did Parliament refuse to obey the King, but it countermanded a royal order to seal the trunks and papers in Pym's and Holles's lodgings.\n\nAS WE HAVE SEEN, Lucy was not above putting her ear to the door when the King and Queen were having a private discussion. The day after Parliament refused to render up the five members, she heard them arguing. Placing her hands on her silk skirt to stop the rustling, she tiptoed to the door and eavesdropped. Henrietta Maria was railing at her husband for allowing the parliamentary leaders to defy him. She threatened to leave him if he did not go to the Commons and \"pull these rogues out by their ears.\" Charles seemed reluctant, offering sound reasons why it was a dangerous course to take, but Henrietta Maria was in such a temper that Charles finally agreed. He would go to Parliament with a small guard that afternoon.\n\nWithout a moment's hesitation, Lucy betrayed her royal masters. She sent a warning to Pym that the King was coming to Parliament in person to arrest him and the other four members that day That was in the late morning. Shortly after noon, Lucy entered the Queen's private chamber to find her alone, silent and unmoving as a statue, staring at the watch in her hand. The minutes ticked by All of a sudden, Henrietta Maria became her effervescent self. \"Rejoice with me,\" she exclaimed to Lucy, \"at this hour the King is, as I have reason to hope, master of his realm, for Pym and his confederates are arrested before now\"\"\n\nThe Queen's joy was premature. Before Charles and his guard of soldiers arrived at Westminster, an army officer burst in and informed the House that the King was on his way with several hundred soldiers. \"Whereupon,\" recorded John Rushworth, the parliamentary clerk, \"a certain Member of the House\" jumped up and announced that he had received \"private intimation from the Countess of Carlisle that endeavours would be used this day to apprehend the five Members.\" The five men hurriedly departed. Forewarned by Lucy, they had planned their escape. At Westminster Stairs a boat was waiting to waft them down the river to the City, where friends were on hand to give them sanctuary.\n\nMoments later the door of the House was thrown open and the King, gesturing to the soldiers to remain outside, entered with his nephew. Walking toward the Speaker's chair, he cast a glance at the empty bench where Pym normally sat. Taking the chair from the Speaker, he asked the Commons to render up the five members he had impeached. Then, looking around the room and not seeing any of them, he sadly observed that \"the birds were flown.\" The House was in an uproar. As he walked out, the members shouted insultingly, \"Privilege! Privilege!\"\n\nThe King's coup had failed, largely because of Lucy. Certainly the five members of Parliament gave her full credit. Sir Arthur Haselrig later expressed \"his thanks to God that through the timely notice given by the kindness of that great lady, the Lady Carlisle, bloodshed had been prevented.\" Bulstrode Whitelocke, present in the House during these dramatic events, confirmed in his _Memorials_ that Lady Carlisle was regarded as a heroine by the parliamentarians:\n\nAnd divers imagined that if the five members had not received a secret notice from a great court lady, their friend (who overheard some discourse of this intended action, and thereof gave timely notice to those gentlemen) whereby they got out of the House just before the King came: otherwise, it was believed, that if the King had found them there, and called in his guards to have seized them, the members of the House would have endeavoured the defence of them, which might have proved a very unhappy and bad business.\n\nTo royalist supporters, the Countess of Carlisle at last stood revealed as a spy and a traitor. It was, of course, the end of her long service at court. Unaware of Lucy's eavesdropping, Henrietta Maria blamed herself entirely for her _malheureuse indiscretion_ in confiding in her, the more so as the King never uttered a word of reproach.\n\nKing Charles felt he could no longer stay in London. The City was in a veritable state of mutiny, boldly harboring the five fugitives. On January 10, 1642, Charles quietly left Whitehall with his family and slipped down the river to Hampton Court. He had commanded his First Groom of the Bedchamber and the Lord Chamberlain to accompany them, but Holland and Essex refused point-blank to do their duty.\n\n# PART THREE\n\nTHE\n\nFORTUNES\n\nOF\n\nWAR\n\n# [_fifteen_ \nMOURNING A BELOVED SOLDIER](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c15a)\n\nIN LATE AUGUST 1642, a great stave with its fluttering banner was planted outside the walls of Nottingham Castle in the north of England. Charles had raised his standard, and the war between King and Parliament had begun. Dorothy, who was at Penshurst in the south, was not afraid for her household. \"But who can tell what may happen,\" she wrote Hawkins, \"for our miserable divisions, in my opinion, are more like to increase than conclude.\" Her husband and son-in-law were among the lords attending the King at the raising of the standard at Nottingham Castle. Both had been late in declaring their colors. While some peers and Commons members had gone over to the King when Parliament introduced a bill giving itself the right to raise a militia, the Earl of Leicester and Baron Spencer had continued to attend the parliamentary sessions. It was only in July that the Lord Lieutenant-elect of Ireland joined the King. Doll's husband had remained an active member of the Commons through the winter and spring, but in the summer, when every man had to choose sides, with a heavy heart and little inclination, young Henry Spencer followed his uncle the Earl of Southampton to royalist headquarters at York. He volunteered for the King's bodyguard\u2014a cavalry troop of wealthy young noblemen and gentlemen, one of whom estimated that together they were worth \u00a3100,000 a year. Fighting for the King was the lesser of two evils, Henry told Doll, since he would rather be hanged than fight on the Parliament side.\n\nDoll was at Penshurst with her babies, awaiting her third child. Swcet-natured as ever, she never complained, but she lived for Henry's letters. It was such a comfort for Dorothy to have her there with her dear little girl, whom they all called Poppet, and baby Robert, sharing the nursery with Dorothy's own babies, Frances and I lenry. A little over a year old, Henry already gave promise of extraordinarily good looks. Like Doll, he had the best features of both sides of the family, having been exempted from the long, narrow face of the Sidneys and from his mother's thin, pointed nose, inherited from the Percys. The war would certainly touch Dorothy's older sons. She supposed they would have to join the royalist army, considering their father's position. As she wrote to Hawkins unenthusiastically, she did not see how her son Philip could avoid going to the King.\n\nWith her husband and son-in-law serving the King, Dorothy and her household were regarded as royalists. In truth, her heart was with the parliamentarians. She encouraged Pym's letters: \"Mr. Pime [sic] need not fear the miscarriage of his letters to me,\" she informed Hawkins, \"for they have not opened any one of mine since I left London.\"' In doing so she felt no disloyalty to her husband, because she knew that only self-interest kept Leicester in attendance upon the King. Day after day he waited upon Charles, pleading for permission to take up his post in Ireland, but he was always put off. Dorothy began to despair of ever being the chatelaine of Dublin Castle. This did not make her any more zealous for the royalist cause. Moreover, most of her family and friends were on Parliament's side. Her cousin the Earl of Essex was Commander-in-Chief of the parliamentary forces, and her friend the Earl of Manchester (Viscount Mandeville) was in command of one of Essex's foot regiments. Of all of them, of course, her brother Algernon had the greatest influence on her. When thirty-two peers left the House of Lords and went to York, Northumberland did not budge. No longer Lord High Admiral\u2014Charles had dismissed him in a very bitter letter\u2014he sat on the Committee of Public Safety that was attempting to govern the country without the King and the Great Seal. Parliamentary politics agreed with him as the royal administration never had. He was in excellent health and was about to remarry His wife-to-be was the daughter of the Earl of Suffolk. As part of her dowry, she was bringing with her her family's magnificent London mansion in the Strand.\n\nLucy was as involved as ever in her intrigues. She would arrive at Penshurst full of mysterious hints of secret plans and conferences with Holland. But more often she talked about her problems with her Irish property Lord Baltinglas and Lord Brabazon were pursuing their claims to her Glaslough and Shillelagh lands in the English parliament, and although she had been pressing the Wentworths' agent in London, William Railton, for months to get her the documents she needed to prove her ownership, she still had not got them. No doubt it was Dorothy who suggested she enlist the aid of Sir John Temple. The Leicesters' devoted friend had assumed his duties as Master of the Rolls in Ireland and was living in Dublin. Getting no satisfaction from Railton, Lucy sent word to Temple to procure the documents for her from Sir George Wentworth, Strafford's brother and chief executor. In due course, Temple wrote back to say that he had pressed for them on numerous occasions but had been unsuccessful. All George Wentworth could find, which he passed on to Temple, were some useless papers regarding the Birnes Country, which Lucy had long since surrendered to the Crown.\n\nAt this time, Lucy's nephew Philip, Lord Lisle, was in Ireland fighting the rebels, and at the end of May 1642, he and Temple called upon Sir Philip Percival. The only thing Percival could tell them was that when Strafford gave him the money to purchase the Glaslough and Shillelagh leases, he had indicated verbally that they were in trust for the Countess of Carlisle. Percival showed them the lease for Shillelagh. It was in his name without any reference to the trusteeship. (With the Irish Rebellion raging, it is doubtful if either the Strafford heir or Percival was receiving any rents from these lands; Percival's own rent roll was drastically reduced.) He assured his visitors that he would make over the leases to Lady Carlisle \"if her Ladyship obtains license of the House and consent of Lord Strafford's trustees.\" The best Temple and Lisle could do was to obtain a note from Percival setting out what he had told them.\n\nSir George Radcliffe's release from prison in the autumn of 1642 gave Lucy some hope. On October 13,1642, she wrote Railton asking him to speak to Radcliffe for her. The letter was subtly threatening. As usual, she put her demands in the mouths of others\u2014an understandable circumlocution considering the legal powerlessness of women. People were telling her, she wrote, that she was never going to see those writings, and they were pressing her \"to take some other way for the getting of them.\" But it would be extremely against her own desires \"if ever I do one act or have a thought, but to serve all creatures that had any relation to my Lord of Strafford.\"\n\nWhile Lucy was waiting impatiently for this \"writing,\" she received several letters from Leicester, who was waiting just as impatiently for his orders to go to Ireland. There could have been few things more uncongenial to a private person like Leicester than following the King and his army. But follow them he had, from York to Nottingham. In September, from the camp at Nottingham, he sent Lucy several letters in which the classical balance of his sentences mimicked his own inhibiting faculty of seeing both sides of every question:\n\nThe Parliament bids me go presently, the King commands me to stay till he despatch me. The supplies of the one and the authority of the other are equally necessary I know not how to obtain them both, and am likely to have neither; for now they are at such extremes as to please the one is scarce possible, unless the other be opposed. I cannot expect the Parliament should supply me, because it is not confident of me; and as little reason is there to think that the King will authorize me, for he is as little confident.\n\nHe had always thought himself an honest man, he said, but here he was, suspected and distrusted by both sides.\n\nWhy did Leicester cry on Lucy's shoulder? It is likely that he hoped his sister-in-law would show his letters to her parliamentary friends. Shortly afterward in a letter to Northumberland, he mentioned that he had written \"to some particular friends, in hope that thereby the Truth might be known, and myself rightly understood.\" The letter to Northumberland was an attempt to justify his prolonged stay at court and was intended for the eyes of Parliament: \"You may communicate it to the House of Peers, as in your judgment and favour to me you shall think fit.\" He explained that he had gone to Nottingham because he was told that there he would get his orders. But despite \"perpetually soliciting to be despatched\" he still did not have the King's leave to go to Ireland. He then went on to declare that he was \"as innocent as a new-born child\" in a controversial matter over some horses. It seemed that Parliament had allocated funds to buy several hundred draft horses for the Irish service. These were at Chester waiting to be shipped for Ireland when Charles commandeered them to pull his munition wagons. Parliament was incensed, and Leicester was clearly afraid that he would be blamed. He wanted the parliamentarians to know that not only had he objected, but he had actually countermanded the King's orders, to no avail. Northumberland presented this letter to the House of Lords, and it was subsequently printed by order of Parliament. Those who read it might well have thought the subject matter metaphorically apt, for Lord Leicester was clearly trying to ride two horses at once.\n\nMeanwhile at Penshurst, the women waited for their men. Doll felt the loneliness and pain of a soldier's wife. She would sit by the hour at the difficult task of deciphering Henry's coded letters. For Dorothy it was a prolongation of the years of separation. Once again she had the responsibility of running the estate and getting in the rents. As her letters to Hawkins show, one of her problems was deciding which of the creditors should be paid out of the dwindling rent roll. In one instance Dorothy gave priority to her own sex. Leicester House was under repair, and the workmen were going unpaid. Authorizing Hawkins to distribute \u00a3100 that she was able to spare from her meager resources, she wrote: \"Let the poor clamourous women be satisfied and do the best you can to give them all some contentment with this money\"\n\nHenry was on the march with the King. From Nottingham they marched west to Derby, Stafford, and Leicester, and on to Shrewsbury. At the county seats and major towns, Charles made fine, noble addresses to the inhabitants, who readily contributed money and plate to his campaign. The local gentry raised troops so that by the time they reached Shrewsbury, I Ienry was able to report that King Charles had six thousand foot, fifteen hundred dragoons, and above two thousand horse. The life of a Cavalier (the popular name for the King's troops, while the parliamentary troops were known as Roundheads) held no charms for Henry. He was disgusted with the jostling for position and the \"bandy discourse\" more suitable to a drawing room, he said, than a military camp. If there was any way out with honor, he would take it, he wrote Doll from Shrewsbury. But there was no way out, and not only did he hazard his life for King Charles, but he gave \u00a32,000 to the war chest.\n\nIt was a camp divided into militants and moderates. Prominent in the King's councils was the war party headed by George, Baron Digby, his father, the Earl of Bristol, and Charles's nephew, Prince Rupert. Rupert, the second son of Elizabeth of Bohemia, had arrived at Nottingham covered with glory from the Dutch campaigns. He at once began the work of shaping the King's supporters into a fighting force. He was famous above all for his daring cavalry charges; Henry and the rest of the horse guards were quickly instructed in this dangerous maneuver. Rupert had come to fight, and fight he would; but the Digbys, father and son, had more selfish reasons for promoting the war. They were on Parliament's list of delinquents; in the event of an accommodation, they would lose their estates. Most of this militant faction consisted of the Queen's courtiers, and since she was vengefully opposed to anything but Parliament's unconditional surrender, these men worked against any peace negotiations. Henrietta Maria had gone to Holland in February to pawn the Crown jewels to raise money for the royalist army Henry heard (and passed it on to Penshurst) that she was coming back to England to stop the King from making peace. Charles was totally under her influence, and until she returned he was deaf to all advice. Henry loathed the Queen's party, which he never called anything else but \"the Papists.\"\n\nHenry belonged to the group of moderates in the royalist camp. Led by his uncle the Earl of Southampton and Lucius Gary, Viscount Falkland, they were urging Charles to reach an accommodation with Parliament before it was too late. Although the two lords had been treated with scant respect when they went to Westminster with some propositions from Charles, Henry remained convinced that the way was still open for a treaty with Parliament\u2014and he told the King so personally. He found Charles \"very much averse to peace,\" which he attributed to the pernicious influence of the Queen and her party. His letters became increasingly gloomy The enemy he feared was not so much Essex, then on the march with a large army, but the Queen's party. If the royalists won, he told Doll (and he knew how this would grieve her), they would have to leave England, because the papists would make life insupportable for those like him who had opposed them. Already the moderates were receiving threats from these warmongers.\n\nAs the royalist army marched south to Birmingham, the soldiers assumed they were on the way to London. This was the one bright spot for Henry, because from London, he assured his pregnant wife, \"by the Grace of God I will come to Penshurst, where I hope to see you past all your pains.\" But Doll's hopes were raised for nothing, because the royalist forces did not reach London. After a bloody and inconclusive battle at Edgehill (where Henry and the other volunteer guardsmen, eager to dispel their reputation as show troops onlv, went dashing in the vanguard against the enemy's pikes and muskets), the royalists were turned aside by superior forces near London and retreated to Oxford, where Charles established his headquarters. In November, when Doll went into labor and gave birth to a daughter, Henry was not with her to hold her hand. Instead, he was at Oxford, chafing at the bit that held him honor-bound at Charles's wartime court.\n\nIn spite of the war, there was some good news for the women at Penshurst. Leicester had finally received permission to go to Ireland. November found him at Chester, waiting to take ship. Unfortunately, he was still there weeks later. First of all sickness, then adverse winds detained him. In vain did his sons, fighting the Irish rebels, urge him to come quickly. Leicester nursed his illness and stared moodily at the rough sea, forgetting the old adage that he who hesitates is lost. In December he was ordered by the King to return to Oxford.' No reason was given, but Charles was known to have been very offended by Leicester's printed letter to Northumberland about the horses.\n\nAt Oxford, the embittered Leicester took rooms in Queen's College. The cloistered and spired university city, where he had studied in his youth, was his perfect habitat, but the times were wrong. The quadrangles were filled with quarreling Cavaliers, and the colleges were overrun with women who had come to join their fighting menfolk. Flirtations and intrigues flourished. When not in the field, Prince Rupert set an example for \"indulging his pleasures.'\" The atmosphere at this wartime court was even more uncongenial for Henry than for Leicester, who, after all, could spend his days in the libraries. As a member of the nobility, Henry was quartered in St. Aldgate's Parish so as to be near the King's lodgings at Christ Church college. Virtually all the houses in Oxford had been requisitioned and were abominably overcrowded. Nevertheless, room was found for Henry's four servants. In January 1643, he was sent home to Northamptonshire to recruit troops. I Ie did such a good job in what was actually parliamentary territory that it was said of him that he \"mustered and trained half the county\" In the course of this duty, he managed to pay a short visit to his wife at Penshurst.\n\nFor Doll and Henry in the winter of 1643, it would have meant a bittersweet renewal of lovemaking, admiring the new baby together, and playing with the toddlers. Poppet, the eldest, was at the baby talk stage. On his return to Oxford, Henry would write with mock gravity that he regretted he could not correspond with the young lady, but he was not learned enough in her own language. Dorothy was almost as pleased to see Henry as Doll herself. She loved this young man who was the answer to her prayers for this special daughter. Often impatient and scolding with her own husband and children, Dorothy was quite tamed by young Spencer. He took a fond and bantering tone with his formidable mother-in-law, teasing her for her refusal to accept compliments gracefully. Dorothy basked in the transitory happiness of the young couple. All too soon Henry was saying good-bye to his wife, his mother-in-law, and \"the little ladies,\" as he called his numerous sisters-in-law.\"\n\nHenry was back at Oxford when the Earl of Northumberland arrived in February at the head of a parliamentary delegation bringing propositions for a treaty. The delegation found Charles polite but intransigent. Confident of victory in the field and knowing that his wife, who was expected in England momentarily, would never approve, he rejected the harsh conditions for peace laid down by Parliament. In March Northumberland was again dispatched to Oxford, this time to see if he could arrange a truce based on the disbandment of both armies. Having experienced the wartime shortages at royalist headquarters, Northumberland wisely brought his own furniture, his own food, and wine from his excellent cellar at Syon House. Bulstrode Whitelocke, one of the parliamentary commissioners who accompanied him, recorded that the Earl \"provided sumptuously for his colleagues and himself\" and that \"the King came in for his share of the good things which he did not disdain to accept.\" Even Northumberland's best burgundy could not smooth the way for a truce, though according to Whitelocke they did at one point reach an agreement that the Queen's party sabotaged overnight.\n\nHenrietta Maria had just arrived in England, bringing with her much-needed money and arms. From York, where she was under the protection of the Earl of Newcastle, the royalist general in the north, she commanded her husband not to disband under peril of losing her. \"If you make a peace, and disband your army before there is an end of this perpetual parliament,\" she wrote Charles, \"I am absolutely resolved to go to France, not being willing to fall again into the hands of those people, being well assured that, if the power remains with them, it will not be well for me in England.'\" Thinking only of herself she used her excessive influence over the King to make a truce impossible. Charles refused to disband his army, and on April 15, Parliament recalled its commissioners. The collapse of the treaty negotiations at Oxford was a terrible disappointment to the moderates at court, to no one more than Henry Spencer.\n\nIn June, however, Henry had exciting news to report to Doll. King Charles had made him an earl. Doll, pregnant again from their short reunion in January, was now the Countess of Sunderland. Not only that, but Henry was making plans to have her join him at Oxford as soon as he could find a suitable house. This was no easy matter because evacuees from parliament-held districts were pouring into the garrison town. In other news from Oxford, Harry Percy had returned from the Continent and was fighting for the King at the head of his own regiment.\n\nThe fortunes of war were favoring the royalists. The Earl of Newcastle had won the north with a decisive victory over the parliamentary generals Ferdinand, Baron Fairfax, and his son, Sir Thomas Fairfax. In the west of England, the royalist Sir Ralph Hopton had defeated Sir William Waller and his Roundheads. In the raids and skirmishes around Oxford, Prince Rupert's cavalry were a terror to the opposing forces. Fighting beside Rupert at Chalgrove Field on June 18, Harry Percy's regiment distinguished itself, falling on the flank of the enemy and \"putting the reserve of the rebels to flight.\" It was partly in recognition of this feat that Charles created Harry Baron Percy of Alnwick. On July 13, Henrietta Maria made a triumphal entry into Oxford. Henceforth the battle cry of the Cavaliers was \"God for Queen Mary.\" Meanwhile at Westminster, Pym was ailing and seemed to have lost his touch. Parliament was divided, with extremists undermining Pym's management and Essex's conduct of the war.\n\nAt this juncture, the Civil War was being fought on Dorothy's doorstep. Kent was in Parliament's territory, but popular sentiment was for the King, and, encouraged by events, a royalist uprising began in nearby Tunbridge and Sevenoaks on July 18. Dorothy had reason to be thankful that Penshurst was regarded as a royalist household, for once-respectful townsfolk were plundering the great houses belonging to parliamentary families. For a week the looting and rioting continued, until the rising was put down by a parliamentary force. One sad result for Dorothy was that the indispensable Henry Hammond, the rector of Penshurst Church, a known royalist, was forced to flee 1 of God,\" but his God-fearing soldiers had pursued and slaughtered the fleeing royalists, gratuitously slashing the faces of their female camp followers.\n\nThe Civil War had ended. Cromwell's New Model Army was simply mopping up the remains of the royalist forces.\n\nThe Independents were triumphant. Some were even talking of forcing the King to abdicate in favor of his six-year-old son, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and making Northumberland Protector; Parliament had recently appointed the Earl guardian of the royal children. Even more disturbing for the representative of French absolutism were the republican and democratic ideas freely expressed in the burgeoning popular press, freed from royal censorship. Montereul immediately took up with Holland and the Countesses of Carlisle and Devonshire. An extremely civil and cultivated diplomat\u2014he had served his apprenticeship as secretary to a Roman cardinal\u2014not the least of his attributes was his \" _agr\u00e9able, divertissante et complaisante\"'_ table talk. At Lady Carlisle's dinner table, Montereul listened attentively as his hosts outlined the position of the English Presbyterians. Lucy and Holland had expected to find a partisan in him and they were not disappointed. In a report to Mazarin, Montereul praised their \"zeal and courage\" and particularly commended Lady Carlisle for doing \"her duty to her king and country [without] considering what she owes to the ties of blood and the interests of her brother [Northumberland].\"\n\nHolland and his ladies were having second thoughts about the King coming to London. Their present plan \u2014 the very one for which Harry Percy had been banished\u2014was to have the Prince of Wales (\"who was not yet odious to the people\") come to Parliament to act as mediator. Regarding this plan as foolhardy, Montereul was able to bring them back to the idea of salvaging the monarchy by inducing Charles to accept Presbyterianism. Since a Presbyterian monarchy was better than no monarchy at all, Mazarin gave Montereul the go-ahead but warned that Henrietta Maria's opposition would be the stumbling block. Montereul arranged for Sir Robert Moray, a Scot who had served in the French army and was highly regarded at the French court, to go secretly to France to win her over.' At First (as Harry wrote Lucy from Saint-Germain) the Queen would not listen to the Scottish envoy, telling him bluntly that the Scots and the English Presbyterians together \"could not have a power equal to that of the Independents.\" Only after Mazarin made her see the essential republicanism of the Independent party would she agree to advise her husband to accept Presbyterianism. But the sacrifice of his religion was the one thing Charles would not do for her. As the disastrous year of 1645 came to an end, he was ready for desperate courses. He offered to go to London personally to negotiate a treaty with Parliament.\n\nIn late December, Montereul reported to Mazarin that \"Holland and his friends now agree it is dangerous for the King to come to London.\" In their opinion, the only course open to the King (and Montereul concurred) was \"to make a dash for the Scottish army.\" The startling idea of the English monarch giving himself up to the Scots was duly authorized by Mazarin, and Montereul sounded out the Scottish commissioners in London. What guarantees would they give if the King voluntarily went over to their army in the north of England? They were profuse with their promises. The King would be received with honor, he would enjoy perfect security, no one would force his conscience, and the Scots would assure his prerogative if the English parliament tried to remove it. The coterie at Lady Carlisle's were just as forthcoming with their promises. When King Charles was safe with the Scottish army, they assured Montereul, there would be no trouble at all in getting the English Presbyterians and the City of London to declare for him. Quite reassured, one cold January day Montereul journeyed to Oxford and unfolded the plan to the King.\n\nCharles's proposals for a personal treat)' had been rebuffed by Parliament, and he had been informed that should he come to London he would not be admitted to Westminster. He knew it was only a matter of time until Oxford was taken and he was captured. So he listened to a proposition that would have been unthinkable a few months earlier. The loyal Sir Philip Warwick was present at the discussions where \"Mr. Montreville [sic] averred it in his master's name that if the King would put himself into the hands of the Scots, he should be there safe both in person, honour and conscience.\" It was this assurance, Warwick stated in his memoirs, that decided Charles to go along with the idea. On a wet spring evening, he stole away from Oxford in disguise, accompanied only by his Groom of the Bedchamber, John Ashburnham, and a minister named Hudson.\n\nOn May 5,1646, King Charles rode into the camp of the Scottish army. He was taken to Newcastle, where he became a virtual prisoner. The Scottish army commanders immediately disavowed any undertakings made by their commissioners in London. Ashburnham was sent away, and although Hudson was allowed to remain, the King was badgered without cease by Presbyterian divines to sign the repugnant Covenant. Even his wish that the young Duke of York be allowed to join him was denied. His next affliction was a set of \"impudent\" proposals from the London parliament that his hosts tried to force upon him with such insistence that by comparison (he wrote Ashburnham) the pressure over the Covenant \"was but slight insinuations.\" When the abject Montereul arrived at Newcastle on July 9, he found the King utterly hopeless. Indeed, that very day Charles had written to Ashburnham at Saint-Germain that he was \"lost\" if he did not escape to France before the end of August. \"Take heed that I be not believed too late,\" he warned. Montereul explained how he had been misled by the Scottish commissioners in London but could find no words to express his dismay. The perfidious Scots had cozened them all\u2014King Charles, Mazarin, and himself and the Earl of Holland's circle of English Presbyterians. Montereul left somewhat consoled by the King's assurance that he did not blame him. As Charles wrote his wife, he blamed Mazarin, not Montereul, for inducing him to throw himself into the arms of the Scots.'\n\nCharles was a chess player, and to help while away the time, he played the game a good deal in captivity. Of an ironic turn of mind, he could not help thinking, as he played, that in England's great game of chess, the king had become a pawn. The Scottish army was using its royal prisoner to bargain with the English parliament for its back pay. At the beginning of 1647, the Scots sold him for half the arrears, amounting to \u00a3200,000. When the thirty-six carts of gold reached Newcastle, the Scottish army handed over its monarch to the parliamentary commissioners and marched home.' Within a few weeks Charles was taken to I loldenby House in Northamptonshire, where the new French ambassador, Monsieur Pomponne de Belli\u00e8vre, found him \"guarded with great severity although enough ceremony.\" Charles was under such close restraint that his guards watched him even at his private prayers.\n\nThe English Presbyterian leaders, Warwick and Manchester, were as keen as Holland and Lady Carlisle on coming to an agreement with the King while he was in the hands of a parliament controlled by their party. For reasons of his own\u2014perhaps not least an avuncular feeling for the royal children in his care\u2014Northumberland joined the would-be peacemakers. They had drafted a four-point proposal that they wanted Charles to send to Parliament as his own. It called for him to agree to Presbyterianism for three years and parliamentary control of the militia for ten; he was to declare that the Irish were rebels and to confirm the appointments made by Parliament under its own Great Seal. If Charles would send this message, the English Presbyterians would do their utmost to enable him to come to London to negotiate a settlement with Parliament. As with the earlier schemes, the English Presbyterians were working with France. Referring the proposal to his superiors, Belli\u00e8vre pointed out that it contained some very hard conditions, but given the King's perilous state he thought it was the only course.\n\nThroughout February 1647, Belli\u00e8vre was in daily conference with Holland and Lady Carlisle. Their main concern was to get the King out of custody. As Belli\u00e8vre told his superiors, the worst thing was for the English people to become accustomed to seeing him in prison. Early in March, Charles's assent to the plan came by a circuitous route. In a letter to Belli\u00e8vre, Mazarin said he had been informed by Henrietta Maria's confidant Sir Henry Jermyn that King Charles would agree to the four points, provided that the Earl of Northumberland would promise to support him in Parliament. Lady Carlisle was to write the Queen if her brother would engage himself to do this. But by this time, Parliament was facing a crisis.\n\nParliament and the army had been heading into a confrontation for months. The war was over, and both houses had voted to disband the New Model Army. It was like trying to cage a tiger. Officers and soldiers, brimming with confidence, refused disbandment until their arrears were paid. When Parliament reacted with niggardly offers and sanctions against those who petitioned for their pay, the army turned into a formidable enemy.\n\nAt the beginning of June, rumors were circulating that the army might seize the King. Lucy and her friends panicked. This would destroy all their plans. On June 2, Belli\u00e8vre reported that he was being pressed by \"the Presbyterians of the Lower House, the Scots here, the Counts of Warwick and Holland, the Countesses of Devonshire and Carlisle\" to write to King Charles, imploring him on their behalf \"to do everything possible to avoid falling into the hands of the army\" \"They say,\" Belli\u00e8vre wrote without conviction, \"that his Majesty should escape from Holdenby and come to London where they have assurances from the principal people in the City that they want the King... His Majesty should come with dispatch and go to the mayor's, then to Parliament accompanied by the mayor and all the City, and after a few words on the good of the realm they do not doubt he will be able to install himself happily at Whitehall.\" They had no proposals, however, as to how the King was to escape from Holdenby, nor could they give any assurance of success. Belli\u00e8vre concluded by saying that with \"such a dangerous and uncertain business,\" he himself had no advice to give.\n\nIt is doubtful that Charles ever received this counsel of desperation. That same Wednesday, June 3, 1647, a cavalry detachment of some five hundred men from General Fairfax's army, under Cromwell's orders, clattered into the courtyard of Holdenby House. The parliamentary guard refused to fight his old companions-in-arms, and the low-ranking officer in charge, one Cornet Joyce, strode unannounced into the King's bedchamber. He woke him rudely and ordered him to get dressed because he was taking him to other quarters. The King asked him on what authority he was acting. Gesturing toward the troops that could be seen out the window, Cornet Joyce replied, \"On that authority.\"\n\nIt looked like checkmate and game. With the King a prisoner of the army, Holland, Lady Carlisle, and Lady Devonshire retired from political intrigue for the moment. Northumberland, quite in character, reverted to the pro-army faction, which began its own negotiations for a settlement with the King.\n\n# [_seventeen_ \n\"I WOULD RATHER SERVE THE PRINCE THAN LIVE\"](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c17a)\n\nTHOSE YEARS WHILE Lucy was deep in political intrigue, Dorothy was living privately in the bosom of her family under the shadow of the Civil War. Leicester had retired completely from the public arena, thoroughly disapproving of everything that was done by both sides. When Northumberland tried to get him to resume his seat in the House of Lords, he declined. However, there was considerable satisfaction in the Sidney household when, in 1646, Parliament appointed the eldest son, Philip, Viscount Lisle, to his father's old post of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.\n\nThe marriages and careers of her children were Dorothy's main concern. In 1645 the alliance with the Cecils that had begun with Northumberland's first marriage was cemented when Philip married Catherine Cecil, the second-youngest of the Earl of Salisbury's daughters. The effect of the war on aristocratic finances was indicated by Catherine's dowry. While Salisbury had given \u00a312,000 with Anne when she married Northumberland in 1628 and \u00a310,000 when Elizabeth married Devonshire in 1639, he gave only \u00a36,000 with Catherine.' Still, it was a gratifying alliance so far as the Leicesters were concerned. On January 24, 1647, the two families rejoiced together at Salisbury House at the christening of the young couple's first son. Although Salisbury seconded Northumberland in supporting the Independents while Lucy was a prominent supporter of the English Presbyterians, all quaffed their wine together, united by family sentiment. A week later Philip left for Ireland, accompanied by his brother Algernon, whom he had appointed Governor of Dublin. But Philip was known to be a creature of Cromwell's, and he was not in Ireland four months before the Presbyterian faction in Parliament had him recalled with his brother. This was simply a temporary setback. As ardent supporters of Cromwell, both were rising young men.\n\nRobin, Dorothy's third son, was following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. After completing his exercises at a French academy, he went to Holland, where, through his father's influence, he became colonel of an English regiment in the Dutch service. Doll was still living with her parents. Regarded as a paragon of piety, charity, and perfect maternity, she was placed on a pedestal by everyone around her\u2014a living statue of a virtuous matron. It was taken for granted that she would never remarry but would carry the torch for her gallant husband forever. As for the other girls, negotiations were in hand to marry Lucy to the son of a well-to-do baronet, although the Leicesters did not think much of the father's honesty. But Lucy was twenty-two and a husband had to be found. There was no talk of marriage for twenty-one-year-old Anne. This patient young woman seems to have been earmarked to look after the parents in their old age. Three of the other girls, Mary, Elizabeth, and Frances, were showing telltale signs of tuberculosis. Their gentle, dry coughing was a familiar sound in the house. The prettiest of the girls (always excepting the peerless beauty of the eldest) was Isabella. Flighty and fun-loving, at thirteen she was a charmer. She already had an admirer, her first cousin Viscount Strangford, a boy of about her own age who came to live with his uncle's family in the summer of 1646.\n\nDorothy had been most eager for this wealthy orphan to become Leicester's ward. The boy's father, the unsavory rake who had run off with Barbara Sidney in 1619, had died shortly after his son's birth in 1634. At that time Leicester's sister had begged him to take the wardship, but the Earl had refused; instead, one Sir Thomas Fotherley had become the boy's guardian. In 1642 Lady Strangford died. Leicester was then at Oxford, and Dorothy wrote him that she understood from a reliable source that the boy's estate was worth some \u00a34,000 a year, \"the rents I believe as well paid as any in England.\" She was very upset to think that a stranger had the disposal of such a fortune and urged Leicester to ask the King to remove Fotherley and give the wardship of his nephew to him. \"I do not know how you can hope for the like opportunity of obtaining such a benefit,\" she told her husband. Leicester, who possessed a finer conscience than his wife, felt he should sound out the present guardian first. He found Fotherley loath to part with the wardship, and the latter drove such a hard bargain that Leicester dropped the matter. Then, in February 1646, Parliament abolished wardship along with all other vestiges of the royal prerogative. Although there was still money in it for the guardian, free use of the income from the estate was now a thing of the past.\n\nWhen next approached, Fotherley was more amenable, especially since the Earl's letter included an invitation for him and his wife to accompany young Strangford on a visit to Penshurst. By coincidence, Fotherley had been employed by Dorothy's father for many years as receiver general for the Percy estates in the north of England.' Possibly from profits made while in this employment, Fotherley had gone on to become a landed gentleman and member of Parliament. In 1640 he had been knighted. Dorothy had not seen him since he was a liveried servant in her family, but with young Strangford's fortune at stake, she would have been as gracious as she knew how. In the pleasant surroundings and in an atmosphere of flattering intimacy with the Earl and the Countess, Fotherley agreed to let the youth remain with his uncle and to provide the Earl with an annual allowance of \u00a31,000 out of the boy's estate to care for him. As was to be expected, young Strangford's allowance led to fresh quarrels between Dorothy and Robert. She insisted on having \u00a3900 of it to help defray household expenses, and in retaliation Leicester took the Warwickshire rents away from her. He claimed this was but the barest compensation, because \"the troubles\" had reduced those rents \"to little more than \u00a3100 per annum.\"\n\nEvery Michaelmas, \"with much ado and more unreasonable wrangling,\" husband and wife worked out a financial agreement for the coming year. It was a time for the other members of the family to stay clear. Leicester was very bitter about Dorothy's avariciousness, as he perceived it. He complained in his diary that she engrossed all the income while leaving him with much of the expenses. Justly or unjustly, he complained that out of the \u00a3100 remaining to him of Strangford's allowance, he had to pay the wages of the youth's servants and other charges. Certain things in particular riled him. For instance, when he asked Dorothy to pawn a few small jewels so he could send Robin to Holland, she refused \"with anger and scorn, wondering, as she said, that I would desire them of her.\" And there was the time that Lord Salisbury's son was drinking the waters at Tunbridge Wells, and Leicester invited him to stay at Penshurst instead of lying at some farmer's house. Dorothy exacted \u00a3100 from her husband on that account. All this, of course, is Leicester's version.\n\nUnfortunately, Dorothy did not record her side of the story, but undoubtedly she felt justified in taking control of the family's much reduced income in order to run Penshurst and Leicester House. As she knew only too well, Leicester had no money sense, and so far as she was concerned, he could do without a boxful of books every few weeks in these times of austerity.\n\nDespite the expense of living in London, the family spent every winter at Leicester House, where Lucy was a regular visitor. With her news and her anecdotes, she cheered up her morose sister and brother-in-law. She had lost nothing of her malicious sense of humor in the prevailing religiosity and made sport of the famous preachers of the day, as she had once done of the courtiers. Her stories were often racy, which shocked the prim and proper Dorothy, but Leicester loved them, the racier the better. One tale amused him so much that he recorded it in his diary for February 7,1646:\n\nLady Carlile told my wife and me this story. Mr. Sedgwick, minister of the Covent Garden and of great credit among the Presbyters, being in his study, his wife came to him for a booke or to aske him some question. But he desyring to give her some other entertainment, fell to dally and to play with her. She finding how he was disposed, spake to him to stay till night which then grew neare, for it was evening, but he went on with his purpose. Then she said to him, If you have a mined to do that, stay till anon, when we shall be in bed. To which he answered, Yes, now and anon two. It happned that a maide was at the doore and, looking through the keyhole, spyde and heard what they did and said, which she having told again it came to the knowledge of the Countess of Peterborough, who at that time had some dislike to Sedgwick, and sent [some]one to him to desire him to send her his new booke lately printed and called _Now and Anon two,_ referring to the words aforesaid. How he tooke it I know not, for there ends the story. But he is said to be a sensual and voluptuous man.\n\nThe Earl and Countess were doing little entertaining in these years, but on January 20, 1648, they celebrated the marriage of their daughter Lucy to John Pelham with a fine entertainment for their friends. It was the last occasion for merriment that Leicester House was to witness for some time, for England was moving swiftly into the Second Civil War.\n\nKING CHARLES WA s determined to escape from Hampton Court. Although the conditions of his captivity were not severe, he suspected that he might be poisoned. In late-night conversations with his longtime Groom of the Bedchamber, John Ashburnham, and Sir John Berkeley, Charles planned his escape route. The first stage went well. He walked down the palace back stairs unimpeded and, under cover of night, joined his friends. Unfortunately, no decision had been reached beforehand as to where he should go once he successfully escaped. Each man recommended a different destination. Finally, Charles agreed with Ashburnham to seek sanctuary at Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. Leaving the King at the house of the Earl of Southampton, Ashburnham and Berkeley journeyed to the Isle of Wight to sound out the governor of the castle. Colonel Robert Hammond. I lammond, a former colonel in the New Model Army, agreed to receive the King.'. By voluntarily walking into captivity at Carisbrooke Castle, Charles had made the worst possible decision.\n\nIn Parliament power seesawed between the Presbyterians and the Independents. With the latter in control in January 1648, parliamentary orders were issued to Colonel Hammond to dismiss the King's servants and to keep him within the castle walls. (On hearing that Charles's imperturbability had for once deserted him, Leicester wrote in his journal that it was no wonder, \"being reduced from three kingdoms to three rooms in a poor castle.\") In the I louse of Commons Cromwell was ranting against monarchical government. Army officers were talking freely of bringing the King to trial. In the face of the King's peril, royalists had formed an alliance with the Presbyterian party to rescue Charles and the monarchy. All over the country, groups of royalists were meeting secretly, accumulating arms and ammunition in preparation for a nationwide rising. Charles had made a secret treaty with the Scots, and in Scotland Hamilton (now Duke of I Iamilton) and his brother, the Earl of Lanark, were raising an army to march into England to join forces with the English royalists. At Saint-Germain, the Prince of Wales was eager to get to Scotland to take up arms for his father but was frustrated by the politics of his mother's court. It must be said that there were reasons for the rising that had nothing to do with fealty to King Charles. Though the Independent part)' was led by landed gentry such as Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law, Henry Ireton, many of the rank and file were Anabaptists, Levellers, and other radicals who wanted to abolish private property. Fear of losing what they had was driving the privileged classes into the royalist camp or even out of the country. In the winter of 1648, there was a positive exodus of wealth to the Continent, the price of gold shot up, and ordinary people were saying that \"some of our great masters intend to fly from us and leave us in the lurch.\" In February Northumberland was making no secret of his intention to go to France. He did not go, but a large shipment of his goods was staved on its way to Holland.\n\nAt the center of the royalist plot in London were the Earl of Holland and Lady Carlisle. Holland had managed to get the Prince of Wales to name him general for the projected uprising, and he was busy commissioning officers right and left. But shortage of money for arms was a real problem. The war had blown away all the pensions and sinecures Holland had long enjoyed as a royal favorite. Lucy was another financial casualty of the war. Cut off from her Irish income, she was on the verge of actual poverty. Nevertheless, she pawned her pearl necklace for \u00a31,500 to equip Holland's troops. Lady Devonshire was also active in \"these glorious designs,\" to use her biographer's grandiloquent phrase. Although living in the country at Ampthill, her brother's estate, she was in continual correspondence with the English and Scottish royalists. In addition, Lucy and Holland were cheered and encouraged by the reappearance of an old friend. Many of the exiles had quietly returned to England from the Continent to rally to King Charles. Among the returning royalists was George Goring\u2014Holland's dear old crony and Lucy's lifelong admirer.\n\nCharles had no more loyal subject than George Goring. \"Had I millions of crowns or scores of sons,\" he had written his wife from abroad, \"the King and his cause should have them all.\" In 1644 Charles had repaid Goring's devotion by raising him to the peerage as Earl of Norwich\u2014a title that had become extinct with the death of Carlisle's first father-in-law, Edward Denny. During the First Civil War, Charles had employed Goring as his special ambassador, first to France and then to The Hague. Now he was back in England to give his life if necessary for his king.\n\nThese old courtiers were involved in a dangerous business. People more discreet than Lucy and Holland would have had difficulty concealing their activities; in their case, with their habitual indiscretion, it was an impossibility. In March it was rumored that the Earl of Manchester, the Earl of Holland, and the Countess of Carlisle were going to Spa \"to avoid the storm they have just cause to fear.\" In fact, Holland had taken the precaution of obtaining a pass to go to Spa. Suspected by Cromwell and the Independents, Holland and Lucy nevertheless remained in England.\n\nIn spite of the danger, Lucy threw herself recklessly into the royalist plot. She conducted Holland's correspondence with the Hamiltons in Scotland and was in constant touch with the Queen's court at Saint-Germain. (Though Henrietta Maria appeared to be completely reconciled with Lucy, at this very moment she was pouring the story of Lady Carlisle's perfidy into the sympathetic ear of Madame de Motteville.) Lucy was in fact the clearinghouse for correspondence among the foreign and domestic conspirators. The Queen's letters to the King were sent to Lucy, who forwarded them by various couriers, and the King ordered that his letters to the Queen be sent under cover to Lady Carlisle because he did not trust the postmaster. Charles, the Prince of Wales, now a smooth, frenchified eighteen-year-old, wrote Lucy letters full of gratitude and praise, which she undoubtedly showed to everyone.\n\nIn fund-raising she was indefatigable, begging and borrowing money from wealthy London aldermen and the impoverished aristocracy. To raise money in the City, she worked hand in glove with a merchant named Lowe.' She may have recruited him, or, as some said, he may have \"taken pains to insinuate himself\" into the royalists' inner circle. In any case, he had gained their confidence. The royalists were banking on the City, which appeared to be swinging over to the King, and Lowe's good connections in London were an asset to the cause. He was particularly trusted by the Presbyterian faction. But Edward Hyde, then on the Continent with the Prince of Wales, thought the garrulous and gregarious Lowe a poor risk, wondering that any \"sober man could be imposed upon by him.\"\n\nSome of the money raised by Lucy and Lowe went toward helping Charles escape from Carisbrooke Castle. As his imprisonment became increasingly harsh and began to look like a life sentence, Charles made a number of attempts to escape. These were engineered by a motley group of mainly little people: his few remaining retainers, some of the servants in the castle, royalists on the Isle of Wight, and a handful of others based in London. One of the principal conspirators was Captain Silus Titus, a guard sent by Parliament who had defected to the King. Another was Jane Whorwood, an independent young woman whose flaming red hair suited her fiery nature. Jane Whorwood undertook dangerous courier missions for the royal cause, and for weeks on end kept a ship ready to transport Charles to Holland. Sir Henry Firebrace was another key figure in the attempted escapes. Firebrace had been a Page of the Bedchamber before the war and continued to serve his master in captivity.'\n\nIn late March, a plan was hatched for Charles to make his escape by sawing off the bars in his window. The plan foundered, however, when Charles found he could not squeeze his shoulders through. After this latest failed attempt, Firebrace, Titus, and several others were dismissed by Parliament; Colonel Hammond had received full particulars about their part in the conspiracy from Cromwell and the Derby House committee. \"Intelligence came to the hands of a very considerable person,\" Cromwell wrote Hammond, \"that the King attempted to get out of his window, and that he had a cord of silk with him, whereby to slip down; but his breast was so big, the bar would not give him passage.\" Clearly, an informer had infiltrated the King's inner circle. There was much finger-pointing among the conspirators, and Lucy and Lowe did not escape suspicion. Mrs. Whorwood suspected Lowe, and Firebrace distrusted Lucy, reminding the King that the Lady Carlisle had \"proved faulty.\" Nevertheless, Charles persisted in trusting her. \"I think she wishes now well to me,\" he replied in code, although he granted that her first loyalty was to \"546, 493\"\u2014no doubt her brother Northumberland.\n\nAt this time Northumberland, although a member of the Derby House committee, was holding clandestine meetings with the royalist plotters. \"Northumberland and other lords are now much of your part,\" Alexander Fraser, a Scottish doctor living in London, reported to the Earl of Lanark. But the Derby House committee's secret correspondence with Hammond reveals that Northumberland himself signed some of the letters informing the governor of his royal prisoner's escape plans. On March 13, 1648, Northumberland had sent Hammond advance notice of the escape planned for later that month, and had advised him that two of his own men were involved. Charles's correspondence passed through Lucy's hands, and as she could never resist showing private letters, it is a distinct possibility that she showed the Isle of Wight correspondence to her brother. So Lucy may have betrayed the King again, perhaps unwittingly, for, like Dr. Fraser, she may have regarded Northumberland as a partisan of the King's cause at this time. Yet no one was more familiar with Northumberland's change of loyalties than Lucy. She and her co-conspirators knew how provoked he had been in February by the revelation of a royalist attempt to spirit Prince James, the Duke of York, to Scotland or Holland. He had wanted to give up his guardianship of the royal children after that, but the House of Commons would not let him. When the young duke actually made his escape to Holland two months later, the royalist plotters rightly suspected that the angry Northumberland had turned back to Cromwell and the Independents.\n\nBy April Lucy and the English royalists were deeply discouraged by the Hamiltons' inaction. A Scottish royalist in London scolded the Earl of Lanark: \"Your Cavalier and Presbyterian friends are all perishing or languishing in expectation of your help, and unless your assistance prove opportune in money as well as in the army, it is to be feared you will spare your purse to spend your blood.\" Lanark blamed the delay on obstructionist tactics by the Marquess of Argyle, the head of the rival Campbell clan, but in the meantime the Hamilton brothers' failure to march into England with their army of ten thousand men, as promised, was causing divisions and desertions among English royalists. In particular, Lanark's outspoken Scottish correspondent warned him to make haste or he could not count on the influential Northumberland, whose \"unconstant mind\" made him unpredictable. The writer added that \"Lady Carlisle is yours heartily.\"\n\nBy May the Hamiltons' \"patient friends\" in England were tired of waiting and began the uprising without them. In the north, royalist forces took Berwick and Carlisle. In Wales, a pocket of resistance at Pembroke Castle turned into a full-fledged royalist insurrection. In Kent, a spontaneous rising took the London organizers by surprise. Loyal Kentish gentry were swarming to a series of rendezvous, ready at a word to march on London. At this point, Holland attempted to take control of the situation, dispatching some of his commissioned officers to Kent. When his old crony Norwich volunteered to be general, he filled out a commission for him on the spot. The \"pleasant and genial\" Norwich was a poor choice for a general in the field. He was by nature a conciliator, and in trying to please everyone he showed himself unsuited to command. The royalist cause received an unforeseen advantage (\"a call from Heaven,\" in Hyde's words) when, simultaneously with the Kentish rising, a mutiny broke out among the sailors on the dozen or so ships lying in the Kentish Downs, waiting to go out on summer patrol duty. Putting their officers ashore, the common seamen of the fleet declared for King Charles and sailed for Holland to put themselves under the command of the youthful Duke of York.\n\nQuite apart from the spontaneous mutiny, negotiations had been under way in London with Captain William Batten, who had just been replaced as vice admiral of the parliamentary fleet. The royalists were trying to win him over to their side with as much of the fleet as he could command. Should he agree to join the Stuart cause, the plan was for him and his loyal seamen \"to fetch the King from the Isle of Wight.\" The taciturn Batten, already disaffected with Parliament, was prepared to \"adventure his life and his fortune in the business,\" but first he wanted some form of written engagement from Scotland.\n\nThe agent who had negotiated with Batten asked the Earl of Lanark to send the required paper at once, under cover of a letter to Lady Carlisle. She was fully conversant with the affair, he told Lanark, and receiving the paper \"from her hand Captain Batten will esteem highly of it.\"' But Lucy waited and waited, and still the paper for Batten did not arrive from Scotland. Neither did the Hamiltons' army. Meanwhile the rising in Kent under Norwich's generalship had been put down by Fairfax. Faithful old Norwich had then moved into Essex and was now under siege with his troops at Colchester. Pembroke Castle had been captured by Cromwell, and Berwick and Carlisle could not hold out much longer. An abortive escape attempt by the King had further damaged the cause. Some of the most active of the King's party had been imprisoned, while others had fled to the Continent, finding England \"too hot\" for them. Holland was complaining of being let down on all sides.\n\nIn spite of the urgency, the I lamiltons had not yet sent the paper for Batten, so Lucy and Lowe decided to take matters into their own hands. On June 24, they forged a letter from the I lamiltons \"to speed Batten on his way.\" After the deed was done, Lucy wrote a contrite letter to the Earl of Lanark, confessing that she had \"committed a greater fault than my last.\" (We are left wondering what her former indiscretion was.) However, she had no need to apologize for the result. Captain Batten came over to the royalist side, bringing with him several ships including the _Constant Warwick,_ \"one of the best frigates the Parliament had built.\" At the same time as Batten sailed into the Dutch port of Helvoetsluys, the Prince of Wales arrived from France to take command of the \"revolted fleet.\" Writing to the Prince of Wales on July 14, Lucy took full credit for winning Batten over, suggesting that the captain's \"interest and power with people who may be useful\" made him a most desirable catch. The Prince clearly agreed with her, for he knighted Batten and made him rear admiral of his fleet.\n\nIn the meantime, Holland had at long last taken to the field, spurred into action by the incessant demands of the young daredevil Cavaliers. With these officers and a levy of untrained men, Holland set out on July 4 to relieve Colchester, taking a roundabout route through. Surrey in the hope that many more would rally to his standard. But as Norwich had found out, the ordinary Englishman was indifferent to the Stuart cause and the number of recruits was negligible. On July 7, Holland's forces were attacked near Kingston by a parliamentary regiment and routed; pursued by the Roundheads, the retreating remnant was decisively defeated at St. Neot's in Huntingdonshire on July 10.1 lolland himself did not see action. He had gone ahead to Kingston to provide quarters for the troops and was taken prisoner at his inn, caught with his boots off. It was another inglorious battle for Holland.\n\nLucy's dismay at this disaster can be imagined. With Holland under house arrest in his ancestral castle of Warwick, it was up to her to deal with the aftermath. Writing to the Prince of Wales, Lucy acknowledged that the expedition to relieve Colchester had been un dertaken without sufficient caution, but she asked him to judge people \"from their intentions, not from their success.\"\n\nAs I Iolland's co-conspirator, Lucy was in great clanger. A woman in a man's world, she may have longed for a protector at times. Lady Norwich had just died, and perhaps Lucy began to look on old George as a possible husband. The Dowager Countess of Lindsev certainly thought so.\" But Norwich was still holding out at Colchester in the wettest summer in living memory, facing disgruntled troops and imminent starvation when all the horses were eaten. Despite any qualms she may have felt in the dark of night, Lucy showed no signs of flagging. In fact, after Holland's arrest, Lucy was recognized by the royalists as \"the person that hath the authority.\" The Prince of Wales and his council had given her sole authority to lew funds and to make disbursements in the Prince's name. She was so trusted that the Prince's secretary sent her blank checks \"for Colchester to do what she will, for the rest he leaves it to her discretion.\" Strict orders were issued to the gentleman making collections for the fleet that any monies received were to be paid to Lady Carlisle and to her only. In his own hand, the Prince declared how much he owed \"to her endeavours and more to her affections daily expressed to the King and himself.\" Lucy replied in the courtier's language: she would \"rather serve the Prince than live,\" she wrote young Charles.\n\nIt was near the middle of July when the Duke of Hamilton finally crossed the border with an army of ten thousand men. The Argyle clan and the politically powerful Presbyterian ministers had foiled his plans to enlist the battle-seasoned Covenanters' army, so his troops were mainly crofters on his own lands or those of the lairds under Hamilton influence. Marching in the van of the troops, the Duke of Hamilton made a glorious appearance with \"trumpeters before him. all in scarlet cloaks full of silver lace, and a life-guard of Scotch-men, all very proper and well-clothed, with standards and equipage like a Prince.\" But for the rest, he did not conduct himself like a general. Instead, he led his troops in such a lackadaisical manner that he was suspected of having some ulterior purpose.\n\nWhile Cromwell was marching north with his psalm-singing veterans to meet the Scots, the Prince of Wales put to sea. By the end of July, his fleet was lying in the Kentish Downs, blockading the Thames. Hammond and the Derby House committee worried that he had come to rescue his father from the Isle of Wight. The royalists, however, took it for granted that he was simply marking time before joining Hamilton and the Scottish army. Among the crowd of Cavaliers aboard the Prince's flagship, the _Constant Reformation,_ was Harry Percy. Indeed, Lord Percy was a leading member of the Prince's clique. Here again the family connection was at work, with Harry and Lucy reinforcing each other in the Prince's esteem.\n\nA rather peculiar set of circumstances provided Lucy with the ideal opportunity for communicating with the Prince of Wales while his ship lay in the Downs. En route to England, the Prince's fleet had captured an English ship bound for Rotterdam, carrying a cargo of cloth belonging to the Company of Merchant Adventurers. Delighted with such easy pickings, on entering the Thames the fleet took a number of other merchant ships, including one belonging to the East India Company. In the City there was great consternation over this disruption of commerce and the financial loss. The City asked Parliament's permission to negotiate the release of the ships. Surprisingly, Parliament quietly allowed commissioners to board the Prince's flagship. Mr. Lowe \"with wonderful address\" got himself appointed a commissioner. Since he could come and go freely to the fleet, Lowe was the perfect go-between for carrying Lucy's messages to the Prince. In her letter of introduction, she stated that \"the bearer has been so faithful a servant to the King your father and his interest that I cannot refuse the recommending of him to Your High-ness's favour.\" Anyone vouched for by Lady Carlisle was good enough for Prince Charles.\n\nThrough Lowe, Lucy kept young Charles informed of \"the condition of affairs in England.\" More than that, she offered advice that Edward Hyde regarded as pernicious. In his opinion, Lady Carlisle and Holland had all along given the royalists false hopes of the support they could expect from the City of London. Now, cautioned by Lucy and Lowe not to alienate the City, which they assured him was inclined to the King, the Prince released the cloth ship for a fraction of its value. At the same time, he gave written assignments to certain lenders to the Crown to reimburse them out of the proceeds from the sale of the other prize ships. According to Hyde, one of those favored was Lucy, who was to be repaid for the \u00a31,500 she had raised by pawning her necklace, \"upon the sale of a ship that was laden with sugar, and was then conceived to be worth above six or seven thousand pounds.\" And she probably received the money, for Harry was \"a very importunate solicitor\" on his sister's behalf. By assigning the prize goods to individuals, the Prince of Wales was left without money to pay or provision his fleet. The sailors became very discontented, forgetting their recent vows of loyalty and obedience to the King, and when the Prince of Wales sailed back to Holland, chased by Parliament's new fleet under the Earl of Warwick, many of his seamen defected.\n\nThe Prince had pulled up anchor because by the beginning of September 1648, the royal cause was hopelessly lost. On August 19, after three days of fierce fighting, Cromwell, with half the number of troops, defeated the Scots and the North Country royalists at the battle of Preston. Hamilton fled but was taken prisoner. His army was so scattered that Leicester, following events from Kent, heard that there were not twenty men together anywhere. No longer able to expect relief from the Scots, Norwich rendered up Colchester to General Thomas Fairfax on August 27. Norwich was taken prisoner, and the other two royalist generals were executed on the spot. Back at The Hague, the Prince and his council finished up the paperwork by sending Lucy \"blank acquittances with particular sums\" for those who had financially supported the King's lost war.\n\nTHE SECOND CIVIL WAR had not left Penshurst unscathed. Roundhead troops, quartered nearby at Sevenoaks, harassed the household and treated the Earl of Leicester with \"incivility and affront.\" But Northumberland was always there to stand up for the family, and on September 28, the committee at Derby House issued orders to the officer in charge to cease such conduct forthwith.\n\nThe household had other troubles. During the summer their daughter Mary had succumbed to consumption, and while mourning their loss, Dorothy and I Leicester were vexed by a lawsuit brought against the Earl in the Court of Chancery by formerly trusted associates. Not only that, but I Leicester was involved in some well-bred wrangling over his daughter-in-law Catherine's jointure and dowry payments with Lord Salisbury. Northumberland was mediating the latter dispute. The squabbling between Dorothy and Leicester was getting even more acrimonious. Leicester argued that with one daughter married and another dead, Dorothy's allowance should be reduced, but she would not hear of it. Nevertheless, at Michaelmas, when it came time to settle their \"contract\" for the coming year, he successfully beat her down from \u00a3900 to \u00a3700 of the \u00a31,000 per annum that his nephew paid to live with them.\n\nYoung Strangford himself was a cause of dissension. Though only fifteen, the precocious lad had asked for his cousin Isabella's hand, and Dorothy, whose greatest aim was to make advantageous marriages for her children, was completely in favor of his suit. Leicester disapproved because of the close blood relationship and also because he had his doubts about his nephew's character. But with Doll and his son Algernon seconding Dorothy, he agreed much against his will to the betrothal, imposing the conditions that the young couple wait a year to wed and that they continue to live at Penshurst until Strangford came of age.\n\nWhile Dorothy's mind was bounded by family life, Leicester pored over the flood of new books and pamphlets from the now un-censored presses, following in detail the momentous events that were unfolding in the autumn of 1648. These periodicals were fiercely partisan. Indeed, it was a war of words. No doubt because of the King's perilous situation, the royalist press was very active, publishing a succession of short-lived periodicals with _Mercurius_ in the title. Some antimonarchical papers were also called _Mercurius,_ so that a reader paying his penny might find he was reading propaganda for the other side. The most scurrilous antimonarchical journalist was Marchmont Nedham, who edited or wrote for a number of periodicals. _Perfect Occurrences,_ a weekly paper edited by a disreputable forger named Henry Walker writing under the pseudonym of Luke Harruney, was nothing more than a mouthpiece for Cromwell. For straightforward domestic news, there were diurnals, published daily. Leicester undoubtedly subscribed to _The Moderate Intelligencer,_ which covered foreign news.\n\nIn September a parliamentary delegation hurried to the Isle of Wight in a last-ditch effort to reach agreement with the King before the army usurped Parliament's power. For weeks the commissioners (Northumberland among them) urged Charles to conclude a treaty quickly. Charles made some grudging concessions, and at the end of November the commissioners returned to London with a treaty. But time had run out. On December 2, a bitter, blustery night, a large company of soldiers landed on the Isle of Wight. The following day they took the King to Hurst Castle, a foreboding pile little better than a dungeon. There, the last of his well-wishers among his Parliament-appointed attendants, James Harrington (future author of _The Commonwealth of Oceana_ ), was summarily removed. Before Harrington left, Charles managed to pass a letter to him for Sir Henry Firebrace. The smuggled note requested Firebrace to forward the King's best wishes to his friends Captain Titus, Lady Carlisle, and Jane Whorwood. A gentleman to the last, Charles had sent them thank-you notes.\n\nThe outraged House of Commons voted to censure the army's seizure of the King. But on the same day that Charles was hurried off to Hurst Castle, General Fairfax's army marched to London and took up its quarters at Whitehall and St. James's Palace. On December 6, when the members came to the House, they found the doorway barred by Colonel Thomas Pride and his musketeers. Consulting a list of names supplied by his superiors, the colonel separated out some hundred members who were excluded or taken into custody. Among those sent to prison was Sir John Clotworthv, Pym's old follower and Lucy's friend. The sixty or so members left sitting after Pride's Purge were dyed-in-the-wool republicans. Just before Christmas the King was moved to Windsor Castle, but the familiar comforts there were akin to the condemned prisoner's last meal. Before the year was out, the Rump Parliament (as it was now called) brought in an ordinance for the trial of Charles Stuart, charging him with high treason for waging war upon his subjects.\n\nFor some time Northumberland had not been attending the House of Lords (in fact, only five or six peers were sitting regularly), but at this critical juncture he returned with half a dozen other lords to do his utmost to stop the trial. Very much to the point as always, he argued that since treason was a crime against the King, the King could not be tried for treason against himself. Linder Northumberland's leadership, the House of Lords refused to pass the ordinance for the King's trial. The Commons proceeded anyway, appointing a commission under the presidency of John Bradshaw, a respectable barrister recently named Chief justice of Chester, to act as the King's judges. More illustrious lawyers had declined the honor.\n\nAt this time the family at Penshurst was surprised by the unexpected arrival of Philip and Algernon, who stayed for a week. Although both had been named to the commission to try the King, Dorothy's sons did not have the stomach for regicide.\n\nThe decision to try the King for treason was made by the strongman of the hour, Oliver Cromwell. Initially reluctant to put him on trial for his life, Cromwell had ultimately agreed with the army radicals that Charles was \"a man of blood\" who must die, and monarchy with him. While supposedly listening to peace overtures from Parliament and the army, Charles had incited a second bloody civil war and secretly negotiated with the Scots to invade England. In Cromwell's mind, Charles had proved himself incorrigibly untrustworthy, and so long as he lived, England was in danger of returning under the yoke of his absolute rule. Waging war against his people was the charge against him, but, taking the long view, the divine right of kings was on trial. It would happen in different circumstances, but with the same results, in France in the eighteenth century and in Russia in the twentieth.\n\nON JANUARY 20, the King's trial began in Westminster Hall before sixty-seven undistinguished men sitting as a High Court of Justice. Charles was brought in under guard and took his seat on a red velvet chair placed within a partitioned box at the bar that had been specially constructed for the trial. To his right were the prosecution lawyers. The left section was vacant because he was not allowed any counsel. Keeping his hat on to show his disdain, Charles cast \"a stern look\" around him at the galleries filled with friends and relatives of the commissioners, and at the great pushing crowd behind his box kept back by guards with halberds; finally he directed his unwavering gaze to the body of grim-faced men who were to be his judges. Prominent in the front row with Lord President Bradshaw were Cromwell and his son-in-law, Henry Ireton.\n\nWhen the chief prosecutor, John Cook, stood up to speak, the King tapped him reprovingly on his shoulder with his silver-headed cane, as he would a servant who was out of line. For an instant, Cook hesitated. Impatiently, Lord President Bradshaw ordered him to read out the charge. \"As the author of all the cruel and bloody wars,\" Cook intoned, \"Charles Stuart, the King, was guilty of treason.\" Charles inquired by what authority he was being tried. In the name of the Parliament, Bradshaw told him. With a wry expression, Charles replied that to his knowledge Parliament consisted of the Lords, the Commons, and the King, and he saw no Lords present. Despite Brad-shaw's insistence, Charles refused to plead guilty or not guilty until, as he said, he was convinced of the court's lawful authority. It was his duty to defend the people, and \"if power without law may make laws... I do not know what subject he is in England that can be sure of his life or anything that he calls his own.\" The exasperated Bradshaw informed him that if he did not plead, he would be assumed guilty.\n\nNotwithstanding the King's contemptuous refusal to answer the charges against him, yea or nay, the proceedings continued for two more days. One session was taken up with the clerk reading in a monotone the sworn depositions of thirty-five witnesses, all humble folk, among them an ironmonger, a shoemaker, and a barber surgeon, who had either seen the King raise his standard at Nottingham (one deponent, a painter, said he had painted the standard pole himself) or observed him leading his troops into battle. When Charles attempted to give his reasons for his actions, the Lord President cut him off, declaring that as a prisoner, he could speak only when authorized to do so by the court. _\"I am not an ordinary prisoner.\"_ Charles thundered, losing his composure. Strange to say, his stammer had disappeared during his trial.\n\nOn January 27, 1649, the Lord President pronounced the High Court's decision. \"Charles Stuart, as a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and a public enemy to the good people of this nation, shall be put to death by severing of his head from his body.\" Escorted by the guards, Charles was hurried out of the hall. Sneering soldiers blew tobacco smoke in his face as he passed them.\n\nIt was widelv known that Cromwell had to resort to threats to get the signatures on the death warrant. In one case, he held the wrist of a reluctant signatory and guided his hand to spell out his name.\n\nOn January 30, 1649, a multitude of people were milling around Whitehall. They had come to see the King beheaded. The scaffold had been constructed so as to adjoin the classical facade of Inigo Jones's Banqueting House, and at the appointed hour Charles stepped out of one of the long windows. I Ie was accompanied by the Duke of Richmond, the Earl of Southampton, his chosen spiritual adviser Bishop William Juxon, and Colonel Francis Hacker; the latter had been his keeper throughout the trial and had signed the warrant for the executioner.\n\nAt last Charles was able to have his say, although only those on the scaffold could hear him. Declaring his innocence, he claimed it was Parliament, not he, who began the war, but God's judgment upon him was just, because he had allowed an unjust sentence (meaning the death penalty for Strafford) to take effect. He forgave everyone, as Bishop Juxon could bear witness, but speaking from his wounded soul he called himself \"the martyr of the people.\" In due course, the English people would grant him this title. With the final comment that he was going from a corruptible to an incorruptible kingdom, he turned to the executioner. \"I shall say but very short prayers, and then thrust out my hands.\" That would be the signal for the ax to fall. Stuffing his flowing locks into a white nightcap handed him by the bishop, he lay down and put his head on the block. At the agreed-upon signal, the executioner at one blow cut off his head. Charles's courageous demeanor instantly became the stuff of legend.\n\nTHE NEXT FEW DAYS after the King's execution witnessed a constitutional revolution. As well as formally abolishing the office of King, the Rump Parliament voted to abolish the House of Lords. Any peers who wished to do so could stand for election to the single house. (To Leicester's scorn, both his cousin the Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Salisbury took their seats as \"cheerful Commoners.\") Vesting all legislative power in itself, the unicameral parliament established an executive Council of State, composed of a maximum of forty members with a president, that met at Derby House. The Leicesters and their connections were well represented on the Derby House committee. Their son Philip, Lord Lisle, was appointed a member, as were Pembroke and Salisbury. There were a few other peers, but the greater part of the committee was composed of regicides.'\n\nIn February Lucy received a letter from the Prince of Wales (now proclaimed Charles II by the Scottish parliament). The letter came from The Hague and was dated two days before his father's execution. Charles wrote that he was \"truly sensible\" of her kindness to his father and himself. He explained that he would write her more often if he were not afraid that his letters exposed her to danger. However, he \"could not forbear to take notice\" of Lord Northumberland's support for his father in the House of Lords and prayed Lady Carlisle to tell her brother so. He promised that if it was ever in his power, he would make \"such real acknowledgment thereof both to him and to her that she shall have cause to believe that he is truly and unchangeably, Her very affectionate Friend.\"\n\nAs gracious as this letter was, it is unlikely that it afforded Lucy much comfort. By the time she received it, Holland and Norwich were on trial, along with the Duke of I Hamilton, Baron Arthur Capei, and Sir John Owen, for instigating the Second Civil War. In the autumn, when Parliament was dominated by the Presbyterian faction, it had looked as if they would simply be banished; but when Cromwell and the Independents regained control, their fate was sealed. As in King Charles's case, a special High Court of Justice under Bradshaw was constituted. The trial of the lords began in Westminster Hall on February 10. In spite of desperate behind-the-scenes efforts to save their lives, on March 6,1649, they were condemned to death by beheading.\n\nAll the condemned men petitioned Parliament for mercy. I lamil-ton's and Capel's petitions were denied with little debate by the majority, and Sir John Owen was unexpectedly reprieved; but in Holland's and Norwich's cases, the suspense was almost unbearable. The debate over Holland lasted from eleven in the morning until seven at night; when the vote was taken there were thirty for him and thirty-one against. When Norwich's petition was voted upon, one of the naysayers was out of the chamber, so the yeas and nays being equal, the Speaker cast the deciding vote. In the charged atmosphere, Speaker William Lenthall gravely pronounced his vote in the prisoner's favor. Thus by a single vote each, Holland's life was lost and Norwich's saved. In March the three unlucky lords were beheaded in Palace Yard in Westminster. Hoping for a last-minute reprieve, both Hamilton and Holland made long, rambling speeches on the scaffold. Among all his high-sounding sentiments, Holland surprised his listeners by declaring that Lady Devonshire would have to believe in his sincerity now, and he seemed to derive comfort from the thought.\n\nThroughout these dreadful days, Lucy was staying with Dorothy at Leicester I louse. Doll's five-year-old son Harry was dying (probably of consumption), and on Wednesday, March 14, \"the sweet boy,\" so beloved by the family, breathed his last. The house was in deep mourning when, on the following day, there was a loud knock on the door and there stood Colonel Thomas Harrison with a guard of soldiers. Known as one of Cromwell's most fanatical colonels, Harrison was the usual escort for important political prisoners. It was he who had escorted King Charles from castle to castle during his last days. When Lucy heard who it was, she knew he had come for her and quickly ran to her room. On being told that Lady Carlisle had retired, Colonel Harrison demanded that she come down at once. When she appeared in the hall, he read out a warrant for her arrest. The women were alone. Leicester was still in the country. Dorothy ran to Lucy and tried to speak to her, but she was shoved aside by the soldiers.\n\nLucy was taken under guard to the Council of State at Derby House, where she was examined. One suspects that her nephew Viscount Lisle and her friend the Earl of Salisbury would have made it their business to be absent for her examination. Instead, strange and hostile faces confronted her, among them General Cromwell's leathery countenance with the prominent nose and the large wart over his eyebrow. She was informed that she had been arrested on suspicion of treason. (Much of the evidence against her had come to light during the trial of Holland and the others.) After a harrowing examination, which she had to undergo without benefit of counsel, she was taken back to her own lodgings by the same uncouth guards who had brought her. For five days she was kept closely guarded under house arrest. One day her house was searched and her papers taken away. Another day a committee came from the Council of State and questioned her for hours. Then on March 21, she was taken to the Tower. The Lieutenant of the Tower was handed a warrant from the Council of State, ordering him to keep Lady Carlisle a close prisoner.\n\nThe Countess of Devonshire narrowly missed a similar fate. She too was under suspicion, and, in fact, an armed guard was dispatched to her brother's country house to bring her up to London. By luck, the goldsmith with whom she did her banking got wind of her imminent arrest from his friends in the government and bribed a member of the Council of State, \"whose narrow fortunes rendered him greedy enough of money,\" and the case against Lady Devonshire was dropped. The Countess of Carlisle's imprisonment was on every one's lips. Some said that the Council of State meant to put her to death; others maintained that her brother the P2arl of Northumberland would save her by giving his undertaking that she would no longer \"play the stateswoman.\"\n\n_The Commonwealth of Ladies,_ a salacious lampoon on royalist noblewomen published in 1649, made capital out of Lady Carlisle's misfortunes:\n\nThis is a Lady indeed, that seven years since took saile with Presbytery, being charged in the _Fore-deck_ by Master _Hollis,_ in the _Poop_ by Master _Pym,_ whilst she clap my Lord of _Holland_ under hatches. And this was a lucky _Supply_ at that time, because _Toby Matthewes_ and _Wat Montague_ were both _fled for Religion._ About 3 years since, being weary with that _faction,_ she revived a correspondence upon the _Royall accompt;_ among the rest with divers _foreign Ambassadors,_ especially _Mons. Believerey,_ till she was put in the _Tower,_ where she now pines away for want of _fresh-Cod_ and knoweth not which way to lead her _Nags_ to water, since the _State_ hath cut off all her pipes of intelligence.\n\nMercifully, proud Lucy would not have seen this scatological attack on her as she endured the long, painful days in the Tower of London.\n\n# PART FOUR\n\nA\n\nNEW ORDER\n\n# [_eighteen_ \nIN THE TOWER](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c18a)\n\nAS HER DAYS IN THE TOWER dragged on, Lucy's mind inevitably returned to her childhood visits to her father and to the time in her early womanhood when he kept her with him to try to prevent her marriage. Then her stern father had enjoyed the liberty of the Tower, strutting, cane in hand, on the ramparts or in the gardens. Through lavish bribery of the warders (who had wept to see him leave) he had converted the Martin Tower into his own private castle with every convenience, including a laboratory for his experiments. Lucy's comfortless existence in the Tower, in contrast, was more like Strafford's. Little had she dreamed when she visited that courageous man in his cold, damp quarters, where the gloom of night never lifted, that one day she would be confined in similar circumstances. Held as a close prisoner, she was not permitted to step outside for a breath of fresh air. The few faithful servants she had with her in her captivity bartered with the warders for her necessities. With some money at her disposal, however, Lucy was still living in relative luxury, compared with some royalists whose estates had been sequestrated and, having no ready cash, were literally starving to death in prison.\n\nApart from her servants and warders, the only living creatures she saw were four members of the Council of State who had been appointed to examine her\u2014Thomas Scot, John Lisle, Colonel Edmund Ludlow, and a Mr. Holland. All were regicides. She was usually questioned by Scot, the head of intelligence for the new Commonwealth. His presence on the committee indicated the seriousness with which the government viewed Lady Carlisle's activities in the royalist uprising. Beleaguered by questions she could answer only by incriminating others, Lucy was no longer the great lady but a helpless prisoner.\n\nOn more than one occasion, Lucy was shown the rack. A royalist newsletter reported that she was terrified at the sight of the great wooden wheel that pulled the victim's bones apart as easily as a chicken's, and implored her jailers, \"Do not hurt me for I am only a woman and cannot endure pain, I will confess whatsoever you have me.\" In view of her overweening pride and her courage in plots past and future, these words seem out of character, and, in fact, another source asserts that Lady Carlisle remained staunch under questioning. In any case, her warders were bluffing her. The rack and the torture chamber known as the Room of Little Ease had been abolished along with the Star Chamber in 1641. But Lucy's health, always uncertain, was breaking under the strain of the harsh conditions and constant interrogation, and she petitioned the Council of State to lighten the conditions of her imprisonment.\n\nMeanwhile, the outside world had no idea what was happening to her. \"I hear no more of the Lady Carlisle what shall become of her, I hope she will save her life,\" the Dowager Countess of Lindsey wrote her cousin Lord Montagu on April 12,1649. She added that she hoped Lucy Carlisle would live to get a husband since her best prospect, Lord Norwich, was rumored to be marrying Lady Kingsmill. (The diarist John Evelyn heard this rumor too and passed it on to his father-in-law, Sir Richard Browne, in France.) Although Norwich did not marry Lady Kingsmill, he was not to provide a safe haven for Lucy. On his release from Windsor Castle in May, he left England to join Charles on the Continent and did not return until just before the Restoration.\n\nOn April 11, the Council of State ordered the committee dealing with \"Lady Carlisle's business\" to bring in its report. For one reason or another, the report was deferred from session to session, and it was not until April 21 that the council got around to considering it. On April 24, Thomas Scot was instructed to report to the House on the Countess of Carlisle's case with all speed. Until Parliament's pleasure was known, she was to remain in the Tower. Nevertheless, her petition had been favorably received, and on April 26, the Council of State directed the Lieutenant of the Tower \"to permit the Countess of Carlisle to take the air and see her friends within the Tower, in his presence or that of his Deputy.\"\n\nAttempts by the family to get her liberty enlarged still further met with no success. The charges against her were extremely serious; there is reason to believe that it was only her sex that saved her from execution along with Holland. One suspects that her nephew Lisle could have done more to at least ease the conditions of her imprisonment. He was a leading member of the Council of State, sitting on dozens of important committees. He was also the bosom friend of the influential parliamentarian Sir Henry Vane the Younger and a close associate of Cromwell. But Lisle was averse to soliciting personal favors, and he was certainly fainthearted so far as his aunt was concerned. Unfortunately, at this juncture Northumberland was in the political wilderness. He had made no secret of his disdain for the regicide government and was living in retirement on his estates.\n\nWhile Northumberland could do nothing for the one sister, he was in a position to oblige the other. Along with his withdrawal from all public affairs under the new Commonwealth government, Northumberland was giving up the guardianship of the royal children. In early April he requested the Council of State \"to relieve him of the expense and responsibility\" of their charge. But when he told Dorothy what he had done, she indicated that she would be glad enough to take over the care of the children. That the government allowed \u00a33,000 a year for their maintenance was undoubtedly an inducement. Northumberland immediately wrote the younger Vane recommending his sister the Countess of Leicester as the children's guardian. \"You know her so well,\" he told this family friend, \"that I am confident you believe she will as much intend the good education of the children as any person that can be employed about them, and for her good affections to the Parliament, I think none that know anything of her will doubt them.'\" The appointment was confirmed, and on June 14,1649, Dorothy brought nine-year-old Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and fourteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth to Penshurst.\n\nDorothy was under strict orders from Parliament not to treat the children like royalty. They were to be simply Harry and Betty, and to be treated the same as her own children and grandchildren. To the extent that Gloucester took his lessons with her son Henry and her grandson Robert, Dorothy abided by this injunction. But for the rest (and despite Northumberland's assurance to Vane that Dorothy was a good republican), she created a little court for the royal children. She sent to Whitehall for a loan of furniture and plate, and in due course there arrived velvet bedsteads fringed with gold and silver, jewel-toned Turkey carpets, and a treasure trove of silver\u2014dishes and plates, porringers and candle cups, candlesticks, snuffers, basins, ewers, and a warming pan. Dorothy set up a separate table for the royal lodgers, where they were waited upon by their own retainers (they had brought an establishment of ten or eleven servants), and their bedsteads and carpets were placed in the largest of the bedchambers.\n\nThey were sweet children. The Duke was no different from other little boys his own age, preferring the playing field to the classroom and, according to the tutor Mr. Lovell, finding Latin particularly \"painful.\" Princess Elizabeth was the image of her father, with the same innate dignity. She wrung Dorothy's heart when, in her quiet manner, she described the last meeting she and her brother had with their father. Indeed, she had written it all down so that she would not forget a word. It was the day before his execution.\n\nThe Earl of Northumberland had brought the children from Syon House to St. James's Palace. The King had greeted them tenderly, embracing them both, and then, taking Elizabeth's hands, he had spoken to her very solemnly. He told her she was not to grieve for him, because he was dying a glorious death for the laws and the religion of the land. He gave her a message for her mother, which he made her repeat very carefully: she was to tell the Queen that his thoughts had never strayed from her and that his love for her would be the same to the last. While she wept uncontrollably, he tried to console her, saying that they would all be happy again and that God would restore the throne to her brother Charles. Above all, he made her promise never to give up the Church of England, and he prescribed some books against popery that she was to read. Then he took her little brother on his lap and said, \"Sweetheart, now will they cut off thy father's head, and perhaps make thee a king, but mark what I say, you must not be a king as long as your brothers Charles and James live.\" Choking with emotion, Elizabeth told how her brother, though only nine years old, had replied, \"I will be torn in pieces first.'\"\n\nThe royal children settled in very well at Penshurst. The young duke had his playmates, and Princess Elizabeth, so mature for her fourteen years, soon became fast friends with Frances and the older Sidney girls. Not surprisingly, the young princess developed a schoolgirl crush on Doll. Dorothy, who was always sympathetic to lonely young people (we recall her kindness to poor Anne Hay, Carlisle's neglected daughter), created a real home for these illustrious but unfortunate children. Alone among the numerous family at Penshurst, the master was unhappy about the royal visitors. He complained to Dorothy that their presence would increase his expenses in \"fuel, wasting of household stuff,\" and so on, that he would have \"less liberty in his own house,\" and that he would \"be obliged to attendance which would be troublesome\" to him. Dorothy soon discovered that all this grumbling was simply a preamble to a further reduction in her allowances. Coming to the point, Leicester argued that \u00a33,000 a year was \"a great accession of means\" to her, well beyond what she would have to spend on the children's upkeep. Truly, he \"thought it strange\" that he should have \"almost nothing for all expenses, debts, interest money, charges at law, etc.\" while she should have \"near \u00a37,000 a year to keep this family.\" Therefore, he ventured, it was only \"reasonable to abate a great part\" of the \u00a3700 she was getting for Lord Strangford.\n\nDorothy was singularly unmoved by all her husband's arguments and, predictably, began to \"rant and scold.\" But Leicester had resolved to take off \u00a3400 a year from his wife's share of Strangford's allowances, come what may. Wearily but triumphantly he recorded in his diary that \"this caused a huge storm in the house, but 1 persisted in it.\"\n\nSUMMER IN THE TOWER was a double penance for Lucy. She had always spent her summers in the country. How she missed the fresh air of Penshurst! In September Lisle informed his family that Lady Carlisle's servants had appeared before the Council of State to try to \"obtain leave for her to go sometimes with the Lieutenant to take the country air.\" But this attempt (he wrote) received the same answer \"which all our other motions have done, that the business must be reported to the House before they enlarged her liberty.\" In his opinion, little could be gained for her at the present time. Indeed, the delay in proceeding with her case was wearing Lucy down. Although in August the Council of State again directed Scot to report to the House regarding the Dowager Countess of Carlisle, she heard nothing further for months.\n\nIt is not surprising that Lady Carlisle's case was in abeyance, because the new Commonwealth was undergoing tremendous difficulties. The obstreperous Irish had risen in support of Charles II, and in July Cromwell had gone to Ireland to put down the rebellion. He had done so by a brutal massacre of the Irish garrisons at Drogheda and Wexford. But Ireland was only one source of trouble. In the winter of 1650, the new government was fearful of yet another invasion from the troublesome Scots. To lessen the danger from within, the House ordered \"all delinquents and papists\" out of London. Since the Council of State was empowered to decide which delinquents should be proceeded against and which released and pardoned, Lisle offered a glimmer of hope for his aunt. This might \"open a door for my Lady Carlisle,\" he wrote the family.' Still nothing happened, and it was not until March 1650 that Lucy's case again came up before the Council.\n\nThe papers taken from her house were to be examined, and the Lieutenant of the Tower was summoned to attend. This caused great trepidation among her relatives. Were there incriminating letters from Dorothy or Northumberland among the papers? Happily, Lisle was able to allay their fears. Scot had assured him that there were no letters from either Lord Northumberland or Lady Leicester and, in fact, \"whatsoever there is of only private concernment shall be concealed.\" In the bedchamber of Lucy's maid, however, the officers had found a cipher that appeared to be for corresponding with Lord Jermyn in Paris. If this proved to be so, it did not bode well for his aunt.'\n\nMeanwhile, despite her perilous situation, the incorrigible Lucy had become involved in another conspiracy. Once again a plot was afoot to rise for the King\u2014this time for King Charles II. It was a complicated operation involving the English Presbyterians and Cavaliers, royalists abroad, and the Scots. The plan called for Charles to lead a Scottish army into England where he would be joined by a powerful force of supporters from across the country. On June 24,1650, Charles duly landed in Scotland. That same month a royalist agent on the Continent, one Thomas Coke, was sent to England to coordinate plans with the London Presbyterians.\n\nThat Lucy, confined in the Tower for her part in the royalist rising of 1648, was fearlessly engaged in the plot to restore the Stuarts two years later shows that intrigue was in her blood. Nor was it difficult for her to acquire intelligence and pass it along to her brother Harry on the Continent. Security at the Tower was far from tight. The warders had their price for everything, and their paid services included spiriting confidential letters in and out of prison. We can visualize Lucy in her prison chamber, holding a newly arrived letter in front of the fire until the secret message, written in a special water that only became visible when warmed, emerged. This fluid was widely used by conspirators. Thomas Coke confessed that he had \"a little glass of the same water in my study at Gray's Inn.'\" Although in 1650 the Council of State was unaware of her clandestine activities, her case was further postponed, so for a second summer Lucy remained in the fetid air of the Tower.\n\nThe tense political situation in 1650 also had its effect on Dorothy's household. The first sign that something was stirring was a visit to Penshurst in August by the Speaker of the House, William Lenthall. He arrived at dinnertime and, seeing the royal children dining apart from the family, expressed his great displeasure to Lady Leicester. What was the reason for this special treatment? Had she not been ordered to treat them no differently than her own children? If he expected a docile answer, he was most certainly taken aback. Fixing him with a haughty stare worthy of her brother Northumberland, Dorothy replied defiantly that she would never allow any member of her household to sit at the table with the King's children.\n\nThe next thing the Leicesters knew, an official notice arrived from Parliament informing them that the children were to be removed from Penshurst. They were instructed to get them ready for Anthony Mildmay, who had been assigned by Thomas Harrison, now Major General Harrison, to escort \"Henry Stuart and Lady Elizabeth\" to Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. Lady Leicester was ordered to pack up all the plate, hangings, and other stuff belonging to the Commonwealth, for transport to London. Dorothy may have thought that it was her impolitic response to Lenthall that was the cause of the children's removal, but she would have been wrong. With Charles in Scotland and James in Holland, the shaky Commonwealth government thought it prudent to get their young brother out of the country so he would not become a rallying point for royalist activity. Princess Elizabeth too was regarded as a potential threat by the regicide government. The frail young girl was acquiring a reputation as a virtual saint. \"Miraculous reports\" were circulating among royalists at home and abroad \"of her virtues and abilities, of her piety and adherence to all her Father's principles.\"\n\nIt was a terrible wrench for the children. They had been happy at Penshurst with Lady Leicester and her family, and now they were to be taken away. Dorothy and Doll were especially worried about the Princess being kept in that bleak, drafty castle where her father had been imprisoned. Of recent months she had become increasingly pale and wan and had spent many days just lying down in her bedchamber. Delicate to begin with, in all probability she had contracted consumption at Penshurst, for seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Sidney was in the highly contagious, final stages of the disease. Before leaving Penshurst, Princess Elizabeth entrusted two pieces of jewelry to the Earl and Countess of Leicester for safekeeping. One was a very valuable pearl necklace given to her by Prince William of Orange at the time of his marriage to her elder sister, Mary. The other was a diamond necklace. In case she should die, she said, the pearl necklace was to go to her sister, but the Countess of Leicester should have the diamond necklace because of her great kindness to her and her brother. At the same time, she left some trinkets with Doll as keepsakes.'\n\nDorothy had little time to regret the loss of the children and the guardianship, with its perquisites and allowances. The allotted year had run out, and Isabella and young Strangford were clamoring to be married, undeterred by the fact that poor sister Elizabeth was dying. She was suffering greatly, with constant pain in her stomach, but bore it all with angelic patience, sustained by her deep religious convictions. For the imminent events of marriage and death in the family, the Leicesters required an Anglican clergyman to administer the sacraments. Parliament had outlawed the Church of England: bishops were abolished, church lands were sold, and using the Book of Common Prayer for the rites of baptism, marriage, and burial was made a criminal offense. Many Anglican priests and ministers had been deprived of their livings. Parliament had usurped the Earl of Leicester's right to name the rector of Penshurst Church, and the family at the great house would have nothing to do with the parliamentary appointee. (The village church itself, so dear to Dorothy, had been sadly desecrated by zealous Puritans, the stone heads of the statues knocked off and the furniture and vessels destroyed.) Fortunately, the vicar in the nearby village of Leigh was willing to risk conducting the services according to the outlawed rites of the Church of England.\n\nOn August 22, the Reverend Robert Antrobus married Isabella Sidney to her cousin Viscount Strangford in the chapel at Penshurst\u2014to the joy of her mother and the misgivings of her father. On October 7, he buried Elizabeth Sidney, to the infinite sorrow of both parents. As portrayed in Leicester's journal, this young woman was a model daughter. Though he had seen little of her while she was growing up, since his return to Penshurst five years earlier they had grown very close. Her \"heavenly disposition\" provided a refuge from his stormy life with her mother. In the last months of her life, he had spent many hours sitting by her bedside while they talked of God and the efficacy of prayer. Half an hour before her death, she held his hand and told him she would pray for him. The heartbroken father recorded in his journal that Elizabeth died with \"such a divine assurance of her future happiness that she left the world with more joy than if she had gone to be married to the greatest Prince on the earth.\"\n\nThe family at Penshurst soon learned of the death of another young Elizabeth. Early in September, word came from Mr. Lovell, who had left Penshurst to become the Duke of Gloucester's tutor, that Princess Elizabeth had passed away soon after arriving at Carisbrooke Castle. His former employers lost no time in preparing a declaration for Lovell to sign, to the effect that on her deathbed the Princess had confirmed her intention of bequeathing the diamond necklace to the Leicesters. With Lovell's signature on the document, Dorothy assumed the necklace was hers. Accordingly, she made no mention of it to Anthony Mildmay, who advised the parliamentary revenue committee that all that remained in her Ladyship's hands were some damask linen tablecloths and napkins. When the matter came to light a year later, Cromwell and Parliament demanded that the jewelry be handed over to the state, and Dorothy entered upon a wrangle with the authorities that was unresolved at her death.\n\nOn September 3,1650, the Lord General Cromwell defeated the Scottish army at Dunbar in Scotland, killing three thousand Scots and taking ten thousand prisoners. Cromwell claimed a loss of not more than thirty soldiers on the English side. This resounding victory inspired the Commonwealth leaders with new confidence, and the Council of State settled down to its normal business, including the matter of political prisoners in the Tower. On September 19, Thomas Scot was ordered to make his report on the papers discovered at Lady Carlisle's house. Perhaps to oblige his friend Lord Lisle, Scot's report was sufficiently benign that on September 25 orders were issued to release the Countess of Carlisle, \"prisoner in the Tower,\" for two months \"for the benefit of her health,\" on her own recognizance. She was required to reside twenty miles outside London and to post a bail of \u00a310,000. Considering that other prisoners were bailed on recognizance's of \u00a31,000 or \u00a32,000, the amount of her bail was extraordinarily high. It would seem to reflect the council's recognition of Lady Carlisle's legendary mischief making, as well as her relationship to the wealthy Earl of Northumberland. In the meantime, until her bail was ready, she was to have the liberty of the lower.\n\nIt is likely that the Glaslough estate was put up as security for her bail. She had succeeded in getting back this part of her Irish lands at least. Sir Philip Percival had died in 1647. Shortly before her arrest in 1649, she sent his son and heir, John Percival, then a student at Cambridge, a copy of the note her nephew Lisle and Sir John Temple had obtained from Sir Percival in 1642. This was the note acknowledging that, on Strafford's instructions, he had bought the Glaslough and Shillelagh lands in trust for the Countess of Carlisle. On the strength of this note, Lucy asked John Percival to assign over the leases to her. Encouraged by his mother, Percival sent the note to the second Earl of Strafford, then living in exile at Caen in Normandy. He himself knew nothing about the business, John Percival wrote, \"but of the Lady's nobleness he had such a high value that he is sure she would claim nothing but what she conceives to be her own.\" The young earl asked the advice of his uncle and trustee, Sir George Wentworth. Wentworth was not satisfied to have his nephew drop all claims to the Shillelagh lease; no doubt some confusion existed because of the first Earl of Strafford's own land acquisitions around Shillelagh. But in June 1650, while Lucy was still in prison, Sir George sent a declaration to John Percival, giving him clearance to convey the Glaslough lease to Lady Carlisle \"without fear of question from the Earl of Strafford or any other.\" Accordingly, John Percival took the necessary legal steps. At long last, Lucy acquired possession of the Glaslough lands that Strafford had purchased with her money in 1638.\n\nON OCTOBER I, 1650, Lucy walked out of the Tower a free woman for two months. Her ordeal had certainly affected her health, yet her spirit was unbroken. Optimistic by nature, she was confident that she would find some way out of returning to the Tower. Her intention was to go to Dorothy at Penshurst (just the thought of the country air made her feel better), but for a day or two she rested at Leicester House. On the day she was leaving for the country, she received a visit from Colonel Henry Cromwell, the Lord General's brother.' Perhaps this was simply a courtesy call, or, more likely, he had come to remind her that her recognizance required her to behave herselfand '\"to do nothing prejudicial to the present government.\"\n\nThe reunion of the sisters was rendered even more emotional because it occurred in the shadow of Elizabeth Sidney's death. Ironically, Lucy's imprisonment had begun with a death in Dorothy's family, and she had come out of prison just in time for another. In all probability, the sisters had not seen each other since the dreadful day of Lucy's arrest, because up to her final hours in the Tower, Lucy had been under close restraint and had had no visitors. Dorothy was shocked by the ravages that a year and a half in prison had wrought in her sister's appearance. For her part, Lucy found Dorothy not only in mourning but in a deteriorating marriage and bemoaning the fact that Doll, after all their years together, had recently gone to live on her own at Althorp with her young family and her sister Anne. In their mutual need, the aging sisters clung to each other as closely as in their childhood. Once again it was the two of them against the world.\n\nIn November, pleading ill health, Lucy asked for an extension of her leave, which was granted for a further three months. At the end of that period, the Council of State allowed \"the Countess of Carlisle liberty to continue in the country upon her bond in the same sums and former condition of her recognizance for three months longer.\" But in March 1651, the royalist agent Thomas Coke was taken prisoner by the Commonwealth government and turned informer. Among the hundreds of people he implicated in the plot was Lucy. In his confession to the Council of State in April 1651, Coke declared: \"The ladies looked upon as active in the Presbyterian design are the Lady Carlisle and the Lady Peterborough, the former, though in prison, yet kept weekly correspondence by ciphers till the King went into Scotland, with her brother, the Lord Percy, who always acquainted the King therewith, and sometimes me, with his intelligence.\"\n\nSir Edward Nicholas, a royalist living in exile at The Hague, left no doubt that Coke's revelations were true. Writing to Edward Hyde on May 3,1651, Nicholas lamented:\n\nThe King's business and friends in England are totally ruined by the many discoveries lately made there by what Mr. Tho. Cooke hath [it is said] voluntarily discovered. He, being a perfect and prudent Presbyterian, was [it seems] held fittest to be in trusted with the secrets of all His Majesty's designs and friends in England, which he hath so fully and clearly made known to his old friend Bradshaw as it is said there are not less than 2000 noblemen and gentlemen of quality imprisoned and under restraint there at present.\n\nTo another royalist correspondent, Nicholas described the Coke affair as the worst misfortune to befall Charles \"since the horrid murder of his blessed father, it being like to prove the ruin of most of His Majesty's best affected subjects in England.\" In his revelations, Coke ungallantly named not only Lady Carlisle and Lady Peterborough but also that other inveterate plotter the Countess of Devonshire, whose house in Bishopsgate served as a meeting place while Lady Carlisle was in prison.\n\nFor some reason, the Council of State did not see fit to put Lucy back in the Tower. In June, following a report from Thomas Scot, she was granted an indefinite extension of leave on good behavior, on condition that she not travel more than five miles from Penshurst without Parliament's permission. Even the discovery of her correspondence with Charles II while Prince of Wales, which was taken at the battle of Worcester in September 1651 by Cromwell's victorious forces, did not cause her recommitted. In March 1652, Lucy was officially freed and her bail bonds discharged. Apparently the Council of State had decided that Lady Carlisle, aging and ill, no longer posed a security threat to the Commonwealth.\n\n# [_nineteen_ \nA DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c19a)\n\nIN THE SUMMER OF 1652, Doll surprised everyone by remarrying. Dorothy was in favor of her remarriage \u2014 or at least not opposed to it, apparently, since she held the wedding at Penshurst\u2014but Leicester strongly disapproved of his daughter's choice. The bridegroom, Robert Smythe, was the grandson of the wealthy widow of Sir Thomas Smythe whom his father had married shortly before his death. The aftermath of that match had been some unpleasant litigation. Leicester's sister Barbara's marriage to the heir of the Smythe fortune, the first Viscount Strangford, had been far from happy, and now Isabella's marriage with their son seemed destined for trouble. Allying the Sidney pedigree with Smythe money had always turned out badly, in Leicester's opinion. John Evelyn, drinking the waters at Tunbridge Wells, just happened to drop in at Penshurst on the day of the wedding. He found it \"full of company on the marriage of my old fellow collegiate, Mr. Robert Smith, who married my Lady Dorothy Sidney, widow of the Earl of Sunderland.\" Among the wedding party milling on the lawns that fine summer day, the father of the bride was conspicuously absent, having chosen (as he noted in his journal) to remain in London.\n\nPoor Doll was coming in for a good deal of criticism over her remarriage. Her very perfections had consecrated her to eternal singleness, like some vestal virgin. Her remarriage certainly disillusioned William Temple for one. The son of the Leicesters' old family friend Sir John Temple, William had adored Doll as a schoolboy. When his idol stepped off her pedestal and made this unexceptional second marriage, he was keenly disappointed. He wrote his fianc\u00e9e, Dorothy Osborne, that the Countess of Sunderland would have \"gained by keeping herself a widow.\" Dorothy Osborne, then at Tunbridge Wells, was astonished by the marriage. \"Who would ever have dreamt Mr. Smythe should have had my Lady Sunderland,\" she wrote William. It was not that she thought him not good enough for Lady Sunderland, but that she thought her Ladyship regarded herself as too good for him. She passed on a bit of gossip about Lady Sunderland making the rounds at the Wells: \"I think I shall never forgive her one thing she said of him, which was that she married him out of pity. It was the pitiful lest saying that ever I heard, and made him so contemptible that I should not have married him for that reason.\" Indeed, if Dorothy Osborne can be believed, Doll was very condescending toward her new husband, receiving his respectful approaches \"like a gracious princess.\" \"They say 'tis worth going twenty miles to see it,\" the caustic young woman informed her fianc\u00e9.\n\nLeicester came to accept Doll's marriage, but at the end of December 1652, he had a serious quarrel with his eldest son, Philip, that ended in a more or less permanent estrangement. There had been trouble brewing between the two for years. Lisle complained that his father never omitted an opportunity to reproach him. It is true that Leicester often made snide comments, sneering at Lisle's \"frequent use of 'God Willing' and 'as God pleases' and other cant expressions of the times.\" While Leicester continued to be a lukewarm royalist, Lisle was ever more devoted to the republican cause. But it was not Lisle's close association with Cromwell and the Commonwealth government that aggravated Leicester; it was his failure to use his position for the family's advancement. This reluctance on Lisle's part came to the fore when Leicester's cousin the Earl of Pembroke died in 1650. Leicester wanted Lisle to obtain part of his deceased cousin's estate for him, but instead some colonel got it. When Leicester complained to his son that he had neglected the family's interests, Lisle replied that he never asked for gifts from Parliament, \"and it was exceedingly contrary to my disposition to solicit such a thing.\" In Leicester's eyes, this branded him both un-filial and a fool.\n\nOn this ill-fated winter day at Penshurst, perhaps goaded by Leicester's sarcasm, Lisle struck his father. Leicester's anger spurts from the pages of his journal like blood from a wound: \"The Lord Lisle most unnecessarily and causelessly, undutifully and impiously, defied and affronted me, and not only so but assaulted and struck me in my own house.\"There was no forgiveness in Leicester's heart, and the bad relations between father and son made life more difficult for Dorothy, the more so as she was raising Philip's two older children, because his wife had died in childbirth in August 1652.\n\nAs if her husband's break with her eldest son were not enough, shortly afterward, Dorothy found herself cut off from her daughter Isabella. Strangford had taken up with dissolute companions and, early in 1653, though still not of age, had left Penshurst with his wife and rented lodgings in Covent Garden. On the advice of his tavern companions and a litigious lawyer, he was now suing his father-in-law in the Court of Chancery. Though he had not asked for a dowry at the time of his marriage, now suddenly he was threatening that if he did not get a large one, he would renege on the jointure he had settled on Isabella. He was also claiming repayment of most of the \u00a31,000 per annum that the Leicesters had received for his keep for all the years he lived with them. He demanded an accounting and the return of the signed document that enabled Leicester to collect his rents during his minority Henceforth, he would collect his own rents, he informed his father-in-law.\"\n\nLeicester's response to these unwarranted demands was one of cold resentment. Dorothy, however, wrote a stinging rebuke to her ungrateful son-in-law. She had little time to write, she told him, but \"in short\" he was \"abased,\" and she would not give \"five pounds\" for all that he would get \"by these violent courses.\" She went on to castigate him for alienating her daughter: \"You have made an unpleasant separation between your wife and me, but I hope you will recompense it to us both in giving her all the contentment you can.\" Clearly, the ardent lover had turned into a bad husband. Dorothy's heart was sore for her child. \"1 am much assured of her kindness to you,\" she continued, \"and I think her deserving other ways, yet will she not by her merit be protected from injuries, if you give up your judgment to the dispose of low mean people that serve nothing but their own interest.\" She ended her scolding by saying that \"except you drive me from it, I will continue to love and serve you.\" Unfortunately, the youth did not mend his ways. He was drinking heavily with boon companions whom Leicester scorned as no better than \"cheating knaves, half-witted and half mad.\"\n\nThe quarrel was out in the open. Strangford calumniated his inlaws all over London, and in self-defense Leicester had \"to let the world see you deal ill with me.\" Things came to a head in September 1653, when Strangford served notice to his tenants that their Michaelmas rents would be collected by his own agents, and he forbade them to pay a cent to the Earl of Leicester's agents.\"\n\nLeicester was furious and decided to go up to London to see a lawyer. But on the eve of his departure, he and Dorothy had a violent quarrel. It started out as the usual row, with Dorothy ranting and railing at her husband about something that displeased her. Suddenly Leicester, who was seldom heard to raise his voice when his wife berated him, began shouting at her in a terrifying manner that he would not stand for her unreasonableness any longer. The crash of cabinets and Dorothy's cries indicated that he was ransacking her room. Leicester had exploded and run amok after a lifetime of quietly tolerating Dorothy's domestic tyranny. Before leaving Penshurst for London, he dismissed all the servants and left Dorothy \"to digest it\" as best she could.' Arrived at London, he went directly to Leicester House, where he continued his rampage, ordering the houseful of relatives, dependents, and hangers-on to get out. Among those staying there was his sister-in-law. Not choosing to wait for further abuse, Lucy wasted no time in gathering her things together and was the first to flee the house. Leicester\u2014that most reserved and private of gentlemen\u2014had created a public scandal.\n\nDescribing his descent on Leicester House to her favorite nephew Lord Bruce, Lady Devonshire (who had a firsthand account from Lucy) remarked that \"the infinite divisions and distractions of that family are not imaginable.'\" She could not describe them all since they were as numerous as the many people reportedly living in the house. Dorothy Osborne was frankly relishing the gossip. \"Is it possible what they say that my Lord Leicester and my Lady are in great disorder, and that after forty years patience he has now taken up the cudgels and resolves to venture for mastery?\" she asked William Temple in amusement.'\n\nWith Leicester House no longer available, Lucy had to make new living arrangements. Little Salisbury House, where she had resided before her imprisonment, was occupied by two of the Cecil daughters and their families, so Lucy rented herself a fine lodging at Covent Garden.' (Built in the 1630s by the Earl of Bedford, Covent Garden was the first of London's squares.) Thanks to the honesty and goodwill of John Percival, she had recovered all her Irish property and could live in comfort.\n\nThe recovery of the Shillelagh property had come about in the following way The previous winter, while Lucy was staying with Dorothy at Leicester House, Sir John Clotworthy had come to pay his respects to her. As a leading parliamentary Presbyterian, he too had suffered imprisonment for several years. They passed a pleasant hour or two talking about mutual friends, no doubt agreeing that if John Pym were still alive, he would have joined them in prison, for the first wave of reformers had become Oliver Cromwell's victims. In the course of their reminiscences, the name of the late Sir Philip Percival came up. Sir John was related to the Percivals, and Lucy took the opportunity to show him Sir Philip's note acknowledging that he held Irish lands in trust for her. Explaining that the younger Percival had turned over the greater part of the trust to her some years earlier, she consulted her visitor as to how she could obtain possession of the rest. Charmed and flattered, Sir John offered to help. He advised her to draw up the proper legal document, \"confidently\" assuring her that John Percival would concur in anything she suggested. He himself would write to his young kinsman.\n\nLucy acted quickly on Sir John's advice. She had a declaration of trust drawn up for John Percival's seal and signature and dictated an accompanying letter. The letter stated that his father was her trustee for the lease of the lands called Shillelagh, bought with \u00a34.000 of her money from Calcott Chambre for a twenty-two-year term. The truth of the trust was manifested in his father's note of May 30,1642, a copy of which she had formerly sent him. He had already assigned her the Glaslough lease mentioned in the note. But now with the Shillelagh lease nearing the end of its term, \"and to prevent the total loss of the future profits and thereby of the \u00a34,000 given for the same,\" she was asking him to sign the deed declaring this trust; the legal interest would remain with him until she desired an assignment. To these formal documents she added a pretty little note in her own scrawl:\n\nSir\n\nI have already found the effects of your Justice, in the most considerable part of your father's trust, so as I do with much confidence make you this demand, both as I know you to be very civil, and obliging, and as I am assured by many, that what I now ask, will never be refused, by those, from whom I expect less favor, this opinions, and many more, that I have taken in your advantage, make me here particularly,\n\nYour faithful servant \nLucy Carlile\"\n\nDorothy had a friend, Robert Worsley, who shuttled between England and Ireland, and on his next journey he took Lucy's documents to John Percival in Dublin. In addition, Worsley brought Sir John Clotworthy's letter urging Percival to \"relinquish the trust to its rightful proprietors.\" He also presented the young man with a letter from his mother. \"You must do what is just, honest and honourable towards Lady Carlisle,\" Lady Percival instructed her son, \"by which you will do her Ladyship but right, and yourself more.\" John Percival was only too eager to please Lady Carlisle (although he had the declaration redrafted to indemnify himself against any claims for rents or arrears of rents), and in due course Lucy got possession of the Shillelagh lease. Owing to Strafford's carelessness as her trustee, his execution, and the Civil Wars, it had taken fifteen years.\n\nWhile her new lodgings were being prepared, Lucy decided to stay as a paying guest with the delightful Carlile family at Richmond. She had known Lodovic Carlile (no relation to her late husband) as a not very successful playwright at court. His wife, Joan, was an artist\u2014equally unsuccessful. Before the Civil Wars, they had got along on Lodovic's sinecure as Keeper of the Deer at Richmond Park, where they lived in the lodge. Surprisingly, the Commonwealth government had allowed them to stay on at the lodge, and they managed to subsist by taking in lodgers. Petersham Lodge, just inside Richmond Park, was a very comfortable, genteel boardinghouse patronized mainly by royalist society. The Carliles supplied everything but linen, and one satisfied guest remarked that staying there was like being in one's own house. The Carliles treated each \"new set of sojourners\" like a house party; they planned picnics in the park and took their guests visiting the many noble houses in and about Richmond.\n\nRichmond had always been a favorite spot with the nobility. Famous for its good country air, it had the advantage of proximity to London. In 1650 Lady Devonshire purchased Roehampton, one of the finest of the estates at Richmond; its original owner, the Earl of Portland, had lavished a fortune on it. Here she presided in the same state as she did at Devonshire House in London. On October 11,1653, she had a visit from Lady Carlisle, who came to tell her that she was to be her neighbor. During Lucy's stay at Petersham Lodge, the two old friends spent much time together, making the social rounds. Among those whom they called upon was Bishop Brian Duppa, living in retirement in a modest house at the foot of the hill. The bishop was so depressed about the abolition of the episcopacy and the fate of the Anglican clergymen ejected from their livings that he had no heart for gallivanting. But he was no match for the commanding countesses, who took it upon themselves to draw him out of his seclusion. Half pleased and half annoyed, the elderly prelate wrote a benefactor: \"I am for the present in the midst of two very noble neighbours, my Lady Devonshire at Row-Hampton, and my Lady Carlile at Petersham, who will not suffer me to be so much a hermit as otherwise I would be.\"\n\nBishop Duppa had known Lady Carlisle well in the late 1630s, when he was tutor to Charles, then the Prince of Wales. He was astonished to see \"this great lady formerly waited on by all the great persons of the court\" taking pleasure in the simple joys of country life. One day he found her sitting alone on the seat at the top of Richmond Hill, gazing down on the lovely view of the winding Thames. During his ascent he had been meditating upon \"the uncertainty and vanity of worldly things,\" and, sitting down beside her, he could not resist sermonizing on this theme with \"that great lady\" who had experienced both the heights and the depths of fortune. He was gratified to find her a willing listener (clearly Lucy had not lost her charm), and the good bishop returned to his home convinced that Lady Carlisle was \"enjoying herself more in this retiredness than in all her former vanities.\" If Bishop Duppa was right, it was the fulfillment of Sir Tobie Mathews prophecy that should Lady Carlisle ever fall from her eminent position, she would go \"to the other extreme of retiredness\" and live in obscurity.\n\nBut Dorothy Osborne would have thought the bishop laughably gullible. In her opinion, Lady Carlisle was a worldling of the most insincere kind. \"All she aims at,\" Dorothy wrote her fianc\u00e9, \"is to go beyond everybody in compliment.\" Dubbing her \"the most extraordinary person in the kingdom,\" Dorothy begged Wlliam to send her a sample of Lady Carlisle's writing. When he sent her a letter (probably one that Lucy had written to his father), Dorothy was devastating. \"T is writ in the way that's now affected by all that pretend to wit and good breeding,\" she sneered, \"only I am a little scandalized I confess that she uses that word faithful, she that never knew how to be so in her life.\"\n\nThere were others who shared her opinion of Lady Carlisle's character. At The Hague, Sir Edward Nicholas was disturbed to learn that Charles was going to make Harry Percy his Lord Chamberlain, and he wrote Charles's chief adviser, Edward Hyde, to try to avert it. Lord Percy was not to be trusted, Nicholas said, not the least because of his relationship to Lady Carlisle: \"He will discover all things that are communicated to him to his dear and virtuous sister Carlisle, who has been, through the whole story of his late Majesty's misfortunes, a very pernicious instrument, and she will assuredly discover all things to her gang of Presbyterians who have ever betrayed all they know to the ruling rebels.\"\n\nThere was good reason for Nicholas's sarcasm. He had been Secretary of State when Lucy betrayed her royal masters by warning the five members of Parliament of their impending arrest. As a loyal servant of the Crown, he would have found her detestable. But he had a more current and personal reason for wanting to keep her and her brother away from young Charles. The royalists in exile were divided into two factions: the party of Queen Henrietta Maria and her unofficial consort Lord Jermyn, which had close links with the English Presbyterians; and the opposition group headed by Hyde, composed of Cavaliers on both sides of the Channel. These groups battled for the heart and ear of the king-in-waiting. Nicholas, a member of the Hyde faction, was certainly biased against Percy and Lady Carlisle, both of whom adhered to the Queen's party.\n\nBy the middle of November 1653, Lucy was settled in Covent Garden. True, she loved the country, but she loved city life even more and was far from forsaking worldly vanities. Although Cromwell had replaced the corrupt, self-perpetuating Rump Parliament with a convention of godly men from each county (known to an increasingly cynical population as the Reign of Saints), life for the upper classes seemed to have taken on a prewar gaiety in 1653. \"All I can tell you,\" Lady Devonshire wrote her nephew at the end of November, \"is that suppers and balls are much in request.\" If he wanted to be received by \"the nobler society,\" she told him in jest, he would have to reclaim his \"high flying hawk and swift tiring fox.\" She reported that the Earls of Warwick and Salisbury were off to Newmarket for the races, and she asked him to pass on to his wife that \"the garb in the town is ladies all in scarlet, shining and glittering, as bright as any 'ante-maske.'\" Though Lucy was now in her midfifties, we can picture her resplendent in a red gown\u2014advancing age would not have stopped her from keeping up with the fashion.\n\nBut daily life was about to darken. On December 16,1653, Oliver Cromwell was solemnly invested as the Lord Protector, and a corps of bullying major generals took over the running of the country. The new Lord Protector and his family were ensconced in solemn state at Whitehall and I Iampton Court. England had a new king lacking only the name. In its first few months, the military dictatorship issued a stream of ordinances bringing back Puritanism with a vengeance. To the disgust of Warwick, Salisbury, and the other sporting lords, horse racing was among the interdicted activities. Women's fashions obediently reflected the new order. Soon Lady Devonshire was advising her nephew's wife, who was coming up to London for the season, that the times required \"frugality and that no clothes are quite out of fashion.\"\n\nLEICESTER HAD RETURNED to Dorothy, and their married life ground on in the familiar pattern, but the washing of the family's dirty laundry in public had left its scars. Dorothy was a proud woman, and she differed from Lucy in that there had never been a breath of scandal about her before. Nevertheless, she had gone on the offensive, broadcasting far and wide that Leicester had broken open her cabinets and taken her letters and jewels. Leicester denied it vehemently but for weeks this had been the talk of the town. The report had spread throughout England and to the Continent\u2014even Harry Percy heard about the fracas in France. With peace restored, Dorothy was sadder but little wiser. Leicester complained to Northumberland that his wife \"demanded unreasonable things,\" and if she did not get them would \"rail and asperse those who displeased her.\"* Dorothy was particularly sharp with her spinster daughter Anne, who had returned to Penshurst when Doll remarried. Well-meaning and kind under it all, Dorothy could have saved herself much grief if she had learned something of the courtier's art of tact from her sister.\n\nAs she grew older, Dorothy became more devout. She was given to long discussions with tutors and chaplains about the vanity and falseness of the world. In a letter to Robert Worsley, she observed that change for the better was an illusion: Parliament and the Protectorate had turned out to be as arbitrary, unjust, and tyrannical as the monarchy. Perhaps some of her disillusionment had to do with the fact that Princess Elizabeth's necklace was locked up in the Exchequer instead of in Dorothy's own jewel box.\n\nDuring the Protectorate, Algernon Sidney was living at home with his parents. He had retired to Penshurst in disgust when Cromwell assumed kinglike power. In fact, when the Lord General dismissed the Long Parliament in April 1653, Algernon, sitting by the Speaker, had been one of those whom Cromwell had ordered Major General Harrison to forcibly eject. Algernon spent his retirement from public affairs studying and writing about republicanism. Reading Shakespeare's tragedy _Julius Caesar,_ he saw a parallel to his own times: a great general making himself a king. He conceived the idea of staging the play privately as a form of protest against Cromwell. Playacting had been banned and the theaters closed since 1642. Nevertheless, private performances by professional players, as well as amateur theatricals, were put on in the great houses. However, _Julius Caesar_ had not been seen since the closing of the theaters. Algernon himself took the role of Brutus, playing Caesar's murderer with gusto. The first performances took place in the great hall at Penshurst for the family alone; had they been limited to this, there would have been no great flurry of excitement. But after the tryout in the country, Algernon moved the play to Leicester House. All the town flocked to see it and were immensely entertained. Lisle, whose loyalty to Cromwell was unimpaired, complained bitterly to his father that it was \"a public affront\" to the Lord Protector. Algernon had intended it to be so.\n\n\"Death to the tyrant\" was being proclaimed offstage as well as on. Conspiracies against the life of the Lord Protector followed one another in rapid succession. Algernon Sidney was only one of the doctrinaire republicans bitterly alienated by Cromwell's assumption of supreme power. One disillusioned fellow dogged the Protector's footsteps, armed to the teeth with a variety of weapons. Threats also came from radical groups such as the Levellers: even Major General Harrison was imprisoned for plotting with the Anabaptists against the Protector. The royalists, guided by a secret council known as the Sealed Knot, never ceased plotting. In 1655, encouraged by Charles from abroad, a group of Cavaliers attempted a rising that was nipped in the bud. Cromwell had known all about it through paid informers and (as Bishop Burnet wryly put it in his _History of His Own Time)_ \"had all the King's Party in a net.\"\"\n\nLucy continued to busy herself with the royalist schemes, although she no longer played the leading role she had while Holland was alive. She was in constant touch with the Queen's party at the Louvre through Harry, and her friends at home were the English Presbyterians, who were all royalists now. Much of her activity was devoted to reconciling Charles's quarreling supporters\u2014although her intervention was usually unsolicited. When Lord Salisbury and Denzil Holies fell out on one occasion, she convinced Holies to accept Northumberland as arbitrator, even though (as she told Salisbury rather proudly) Holies recognized the advantage Salisbury might derive from his close ties of \"friendship and alliance\" with her brother. She was not unaware that she had the reputation of a busybody. \"Tis not from my inclination of being busy,\" she assured Salisbury, \"but my earnest concern in all that relates to your Lordship.\"\n\nLord Salisbury was a great friend to Lucy in the dark days of the Protectorate, and she was a frequent visitor to Hatfield House. Unlike his Cranborne Manor in Dorset, which had been sacked by the royalists, to whom he was \"despicable\" for sitting in the regicide parliament, Salisbury's great house in Hertfordshire had come through the troubles unscathed. Imposing Hatfield\u2014with its turrets, strap-work, oriel windows, great hall, minstrels' gallery, and a clock tower like the one at her beloved Nonsuch Palace\u2014had hardly changed since Lucy's first visits with Carlisle. She would have found life there as agreeable as ever. A disappointing heir to the brilliant Cecils who had made his family fortune, William Cecil was a simple soul at heart. He confined his Puritanism to the chapel; for the rest, he lived in luxury, enjoying his paintings, horses, falcons, and guests. His household accounts reveal that during the influenza epidemic of 1657, he traveled to London himself \"to fetch my Lady Carlile down to Hatfield.\" In return for his hospitality, Lucy kept him informed of developments in London. Every day brought more bad news. She wished she could write \"something that were pleasant,\" she told him in 1658, \"but our world is too full of sad stories to do that for we hear of nothing but High Courts and imprisonments.\"\n\nTrials for treason were a regular occurrence. In the winter of 1658, the Earl of Ormonde, the last of Charles I's Irish viceroys, visited England. Suspecting that he had come to spy, Cromwell had him closely followed. On being informed that John Mordaunt, an incorrigible royalist plotter, was often seen with Ormonde, Cromwell ordered Mordaunt's arrest. His suspicions were justified. Mordaunt was indeed implicated in a plot to overthrow him. This struck hard at Lucy's immediate circle. Mordaunt was the younger son of her Presbyterian friend the doughty Dowager Countess of Peterborough, who was a cousin of Luc\/s old friends the Earl and Countess of Berkshire. On April 23, 1658, Lucy wrote Salisbury (himself a cousin of Lady Berkshire) that she had been at Berkshire House to commiserate \"with some of the afflicted.\" \"They do not apprehend so much danger for Mr. Mordaunt as I do,\" she told Salisbury. She had arrived at Berkshire House to find Mordaunt's young wife relating in a \"most delightful\" manner an interview she had had that day with the Lord Protector.\n\nBeautiful and vivacious, Elizabeth Mordaunt was widely admired as the perfect helpmate for her dauntless Cavalier. Her charm brought him supporters and funds, and she had extricated him more than once from the consequences of his rashness. Now she had gone to Cromwell to save her husband. Accustomed to influencing people, she was confident that she had completely won over the all-powerful Protector. Indeed, she informed her admiring audience, she was expecting him to wait upon her the next morning, as he had promised. In a few well-chosen words, Lucy sketched a \"Character\" of this young woman for Salisbury, showing her reveling in the romantic part of the loyal, courageous, and selfless wife. \"I have heard a long time as all romances must have extremes of gallant and mean, so she play her part to the full,\" Lucy said, adding that the Protector \"who understands such things so well\" played up to his visitor's \"romance humour\" by acting the gallant. It was no surprise to Lucy that not only was Mordaunt not released, but he was subjected to the same harsh treatment in the Tower that she had undergone. His imprisonment was shared by his loyal wife. In June he was tried for treason in Westminster Hall, and his life was saved by the mere margin of the President's casting vote.\n\nIt is doubtful that Lucy spent much time at Penshurst. She would not have felt welcome in Leicester's house after he had turned her out with the others during his dreadful public quarrel with Dorothy in 1653. Now London society was gossiping again about the Earl and Countess of Leicester. They were said to be on the verge of a separation. The rumors were only too true. In the early winter of 1658, Leicester finally decided to leave Dorothy after forty-two years of marriage. Politely declining Northumberland's offer to arbitrate their differences, he explained how impossible his life with Dorothy had become. While acknowledging that his own temper was often out of control (\"some passionate and hasty words upon great provocations peradventure have escaped me\"), he assured his brother-in-law that he had paid Dorothy \"all the civilities due to the Earl of Northumberland's daughter, and I have loved her better for being your sister than I could have loved any woman that was not so.\" Whatever little time remained to him, he told Northumberland, he \"would fain pass it quietly.\" Therefore he was \"thinking of a retreat for myself that your sister may live somewhere secure from my passions and more to her contentment.\"\n\nBefore her husband could leave her, however, Dorothy fell mortally ill. Likely some form of cancer, her illness was described by her son Algernon as \"long, languishing, and certainly incurable.\" Though suffering greatly, Dorothy became surprisingly mellow, her only complaint that she could not see her darling youngest son, Henry before she died, as he was traveling on the Continent. She took great comfort in religion and the certitude of an afterlife and, when not racked with pain, lay calm and peaceful in her canopied bedstead, surrounded by her Mortlake tapestries, family portraits, and lacquered cabinets. In her new and unexpected benignity, she drew Leicester back to her. As he sat by her bedstead day after day, a semblance of their old love was rekindled.\n\nOn July 10, 1659, with her husband's permission, she made her will. She left \u00a31,000 to Algernon and the rest to her beloved Henry. Nothing for poor Anne, the remaining unmarried daughter who nursed her in her illness. For all Leicester's complaints about Dorothy's avariciousness, she had precious little to bequeath. Clearly, the money wrested from him at each Michaelmas accounting had gone toward the management of the estate. She left some lands in Kent, which her Lord had allowed her to buy in her own name, two annuities totaling \u00a3300, and personal effects valued at \u00a3500. Still tenaciously claiming Princess Elizabeth's necklace, Dorothy listed it among her belongings.\"\n\nFor over a year, Dorothy dragged on. Though we have no accounts to draw on, Lucy would, of course, have visited her, and we can imagine these visits by looking backward to the time when Dorothy was very ill in Paris. Lucy was so frantic then that had Dorothy not recovered fairly quickly, she would have gone to her in France. Now, Dorothy was dying. She had found serenity through religion and the revival of her husband's love, and it is a fair conjecture that it was she who comforted the sobbing Lucy rather than the other way around.\n\nEarly on the morning of August 20,1659, Leicester was awakened with the news that his wife was dying. Hurrying to her bedside, he found her failing fast but still lucid. She took his hand and (Leicester recorded in his journal) spoke these words: \"My love hath been great and constant to you and I beseech you to pardon my anger, my angry words, my passions, and whatsoever wherein I have offended you, even all my faults and failings towards you.\" She then turned to Anne, who was kneeling by her bedside. \"Nan,\" she said, \"I confess that I have been sometimes sharp and unkind to you, but I have always loved you well. I desire you to forgive all my passions and sharp speeches.\" Having sought absolution from her dear ones for her human failings, Dorothy quietly expired one month past her sixty-first birthday.\n\nIt was ten days before Leicester could bring himself to write to Northumberland about his sister's death, and when he did, it was in the anguished tones of the inconsolable widower. Her passing was the greatest sorrow he had ever suffered, he told Dorothy's brother; he had lost that which he loved best in the world.\n\nIt was the story of Dorothy's father all over again. Death seemed to have erased all memory of the years of marital strife; even his so recent intention to leave her was forgotten, and Leicester mourned Dorothy's passing extravagantly. Undoubtedly, a sense of guilt and remorse at his shortcomings as a husband was an element in his grief. Without Dorothy's energy and life force, Leicester became a shell of a man, alienated from his children, alone in his study overlooking the garden and the crenelated walls, perhaps straining his ears for an echo of the impatient voice that had once so disturbed his peace and quiet.\n\n# [_twenty_ \n\"THE OLD LADY CARLISLE IS DEAD\"](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#c20a)\n\nDOROTHY'S DEATH CERTAINLY was a great (although expected) blow to Lucy. From early childhood, the sisters' lives had been as intertwined as the grapevines growing up the garden wall at Syon House. They were not always compatible. There had been the tensions of their middle years when Dorothy, lonely and bitter, had been unbearably provoked by Lucy's swollen self-satisfaction. But while the strong sisterly bond may have been strained, it was never broken. In 1640 Lucy could in all sincerity describe herself to Dorothy as \"the person [that] loves you best, and can most joy in seeing you contented.\" One of the most vivid pictures of the sisters is of Dorothy running to Lucy when the Roundhead colonel came to arrest her.\n\nLooking back over their lives, it is clear that Lucy depended on Dorothy for emotional support. From her youth she had turned to her sister at every crisis of her life: when their father was attempting to stop her marriage; when she was recovering from smallpox; when she was widowed\u2014in short, whenever her glittering life had gone awry. Penshurst had been her refuge during her years on parole, and on her release from prison, she had continued to live with Dorothy until Leicester's revolt.\n\nLucy was doubly bereaved in 1659. In March word came from France that Harry was dead. Though she had not seen him for years, they had kept in close touch. It was well known that in all the multifarious plots hatched in these years, Lord Percy and Lady Carlisle were collaborators, each on his or her own side of the Channel. As young Charles's Lord Chamberlain, Percy wielded considerable influence in the royalist government in exile. Much of his intelligence came from his sister in England. Harry's dying abroad created complications, so that Northumberland had to send his steward over to France to arrange matters. Since he died without leaving a will, his estate devolved upon his wealthy brother.\n\nHowever shaken she was by the deaths of her sister and brother within a few months of each other, Lucy's mourning was cut short by the momentous events that were developing in England and in which she again could not resist playing a part. In the autumn of 1658, Cromwell had died after a swift decline, to be succeeded by his son Richard, who proved unequal to the task of governing and was forced to step down in May 1659. Since then, confusion had reigned. Richard's last official act was to call a parliamentary election, but the resulting parliament was soon engaged in the familiar tug-of-war with the army. The effect of this jockeying for power was a breakdown of the normal processes of government. In short order, the country witnessed the dissolution of Richard's parliament, his de facto abdication, and the restoration of the Rump Parliament. Not surprisingly in these anarchical times, a royalist rising was planned for the late summer. Charles was to come over from Flanders, and Cavaliers all over England would take up arms. In the event, nothing much happened beyond John Mordaunt and his Howard cousins staging an abortive rising in Surrey Lack of coordination and Parliament's early warning of the plot doomed the uprising to failure. Mordaunt fled to Calais, where he was soon joined by his ever-faithful Elizabeth. Meanwhile General John Lambert, an ambitious former officer of Cromwell's, entered Westminster with his troops and expelled the Rump, only to have it restored within two months.\n\nIn the cold winter of 1660, people could talk of nothing but \"a full and free parliament\" to settle the nation. It was understood that this was the first step in restoring the monarchy. 'As to his Majesty's restoration, all things and men concur,\" John Mordaunt wrote I Iyde. The question was how and when a full parliament could be called. The man who held the key was General George Monck, a \"dull, heavy\" fifty-year-old professional soldier who had fought in all Cromwell's wars at home and abroad. Commander-in-chief of the Scottish forces, Monck was plodding his way south in January with seven thousand seasoned troops. Monck publicly opposed reviving free elections, but he could not have helped being influenced by the mass of petitions he received in every county, begging him to recall \"the old, long-interrupted parliament.\" On February 3, Monck's army tramped into the capital, greeted on all sides by cries for a free parliament. Monck ordered the House to admit the members excluded by Pride's Purge in 1648 (which prompted one witty lady to remark that the Rump had become a \"gigot\"). Bonfires were lit all over London, and a jubilant citizenry roasted hindquarters of meat in celebration of the Rump's demise. In March writs were issued for a free election, and Parliament dissolved itself. In the taverns, men were openly toasting the King's health (something only a Cavalier in his cups would have dared before this), and at the Exchange people were shouting \"God Bless King Charles the Second.\"\n\nTo bring matters to this pass, there had been a good deal of maneuvering behind the scenes by the royalists. The mastermind was Edward Hyde, Charles's Lord Chancellor. Among those Hyde sent over to England to facilitate the restoration of the monarchy was John Mordaunt, who had joined the exiles in Holland after his failed Surrey uprising. Despite his limited commission, Mordaunt had taken upon himself the authority of a plenipotentiary (nor did he discourage admirers from proclaiming that \"the King would owe his crown to my Lord Mordaunt\"). His pretensions did not go unchallenged. His letters to Hyde were full of complaints about other royalists. His particular bugbear was Lucy: \"Here are so many lies every day made of me by the Lady Carlisle and her friends that it amazes me,\" he wrote Hyde. According to Mordaunt, all her intelligence came from France, that is to say from Henrietta Maria's party, and whatever she heard she immediately passed on to her nephews, Lisle and Algernon Sidney. \"She is still Sempronia,\" he concluded scornfully. Since Algernon was in Sweden and Lisle in sullen retirement, Lucy could hardly have revealed royalist secrets to them. There is no doubt, however, that she was still the \"busy stateswoman\" of Ben Jon-son's _Cataline._ Unlike Hyde and Mordaunt, who trusted Charles implicitly and were tying no strings to his return to England, Lucy and her Presbyterian friends believed that conditions had to be imposed before he assumed the throne. Indeed, Lucy did not hesitate to predict that once he was crowned, Charles would break all the engagements he had made.\n\nThis was Northumberland's conviction as well. He was utterly opposed to an unconditional restoration of the Stuart dynasty. He favored a monarchy but a limited one, a monarchy substantially different from the autocratic rule of Charles's father. It now became clear that this concern was behind all his juggling, from his initial support for Pym to his eleventh-hour efforts to save the life of Charles I. Suspecting that General Monck was being won over by Hyde's representatives, Northumberland assembled a small group of lords and gentry who shared his views, including the Earl of Manchester and Denzil Holles, the leaders of the Presbyterian party. Their aim was to make Charles accept the same limits on his power that they had attempted to impose on his father while the King was a prisoner on the Isle of Wight. They made no secret of their nightly meetings at Northumberland House. \"I must now acquaint you with a cabal here which gives all honest men sad hours,\" Mordaunt warned Hyde on April 19. \"The persons are Lord Northumberland and Lord Manchester, who have debauched Lord Fairfax, Mr. Holies...,\" and numerous others. Mordaunt added that \"My Lady Carlisle lays about her too.\" Needless to say, Lucy was involved in intrigues, but hers went beyond the cabal's objective of a limited monarchy. Devoted to the interests of Queen Henrietta Maria and Lord Jermyn, Lucy was working for a restoration that would leave the Queen's party in control.\n\nUnfortunately, the Restoration was not to be the limited monarchy that Lucy and her brother had hoped for. The English people were in no mood to wait for the Presbyterian party to negotiate terms with Charles. They had had enough of the Puritans' dreary and repressive republic. Seeing the way the tide was running, when the new parliament convened on April 26, Monck informed the members that he \"could not answer for the peace either of the nation or the army\" if there was any delay in sending for the King. Any conditions could wait until he came over, and Monck moved that commissioners be dispatched at once to Holland to bring back Charles. His motion was greeted with a deafening shout of approval. Elizabeth Mordaunt proudly informed Hyde that \"after the House rose, most of the considerable Members came to her husband to assure him that they and their interest would follow his directions in order to the King's service.\"\n\nOn May 8, 1660, Charles was proclaimed King at Westminster, Temple Bar, and the Royal Exchange. When he stepped ashore at Dover on May 25, he came in without conditions (to which, says Bishop Burnet, \"may be well imputed all the errors of his reign\"). It was a triumph for Hyde and those of his party such as Mordaunt and Ormonde.\n\nLucy and her Presbyterian friends were dejected; all their plans to limit the power of the monarchy had been totally defeated. \"They have daily consultations at the Lady Carlisle's,\" it was reported, \"and some of them have expressed that they wished things had not succeeded in this manner if the Marquess of Ormonde and Sir Edward Hyde must govern.\" But their opposition to the new regime was short-lived. Hyde, Lord Chancellor and soon to be the Earl of Clarendon, had predicted that once Charles II was on the throne, \"the Presbyterians will become as great Cavaliers as any in the pack.'\" The Presbyterian leaders proved him right. Denzil Holies happily became a baron, and Manchester was only too pleased to be named Lord Chamberlain and a privy councillor. Even Northumberland accepted the new king's unfettered power. Commanded to court, he and Leicester went with great trepidation, only to find to their relief that they were to be sworn in as privy councillors.' Northumberland was so grateful that he presented King Charles with some fine antique statuary. Lucy herself received a windfall. With the restoration of royal property, the keepership of Nonsuch Palace was restored to her. In September she sold the office to George Lord Berkeley for \u00a31,100. The King had no such forgiveness for the regicides. Major General Harrison was hanged, drawn, and quartered. As Lucy was carried around the town in her sedan chair, she would have seen the gruesome sight of his head set on a spike beside Westminster Hall.\n\nOn November 1, the Queen Mother arrived in London with her youngest daughter. People who had not seen Henrietta Maria since she went to France would not have recognized her in the \"very little, plain old woman,\" dressed no better (Samuel Pepys observed) than any ordinary woman. Lucy was cheerfully anticipating a reunion with her former mistress. Throughout the Interregnum, Lady Carlisle had served the cause of the exiled queen, and Henrietta Maria had long since forgiven her for her disloyalty at the time of the abortive arrest of the Five Members.\n\nOn November 5, Lucy was preparing for her reunion with Henrietta Maria. After a good dinner at home, she ordered her sedan chair to be brought round and began her toilette for the visit. She was cutting a piece of ribbon when she was suddenly stricken. Without speaking a word, she died about five or six o'clock. Leicester, to whom we owe the details of her sudden demise, observed that it was the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, for which her father had been imprisoned. A further coincidence he mentioned was that she died at the same age as her sister\u2014sixty-one years and one month.\n\nLucy died as she had lived, in the enjoyment of good food, fine fashions, and royal society. Her death made no impression in the new reign. \"The old lady Carlisle is dead, well yesterday morning and died last night,\" remarked one letter writer. Another, equally dispassionate, reported that \"the old Countess of Carlisle died yesterday suddenly of an apoplexy\" Neither Pepys nor Evelyn thought to record her passing in their diaries.\n\n# _Notes_\n\nSee the bibliography for the full details of references cited in abbreviated form in these notes.\n\n## _Prologue_\n\n1. Brenan, _House of Percy,_ II, chap, 1; Chamberlain, _Letters,_ I, 463; Batho, \"Wizard Earl,\" 346.\n\n### PART ONE MONEY AND MARRIAGE\n\n## _Chapter_ 1 _Two Pretty Sisters_\n\n1. Batho, \"Difficult Father-in-Law,\" 744.\n\n2. Ibid., 745.\n\n3. Hibbert, _Virgin Queen,_ 259.\n\n4. Willson, _King James VI and I,_ 379.\n\n5. Ibid., 165.\n\n6. Brenan, _House of Percy,_ II, 129.\n\n7. Ibid., II, 93.\n\n8. Batho, \"Wizard Earl,\" 346.\n\n9. Brenan, House of Percy, II, 146.\n\n10. _Northumberland Papers,_ xxiii, lv.\n\n11. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ 1,306.\n\n12. Strickland, _Queens of England_ , VII, 344.\n\n13. Barroll, _Anna of Denmark,_ 59.\n\n14. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ II, 230, 344.\n\n15. Old St. Paul's was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and replaced by Sir Christopher Wren's domed cathedral that we see today.\n\n16. Brenan, _House of Percy,_ II, 176\u201380.\n\n17. Quoted in Thomson, _Women in Stuart England and America,_ 162.\n\n## _Chapter_ 2 _Dorothy's Choice_\n\n1. See Strong, _Henry Prince of Wales, 86_ et seq.\n\n2. Nichols, _Progresses,_ II, 463\u201367.\n\n3. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ I, 381.\n\n4. Strickland, _Queens of England,_ VII, 351.\n\n5. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ I, 418, 423.\n\n6. For the wedding and festivities, see Nichols, _Progresses,_ II, 542 et seq., and Chamberlain, _Letters,_ I, 423\u201326.\n\n7. De Fonblanque, _House of Percy,_ II, 327.\n\n8. Batho, \"Difficult Father-in-Law,\" 746\u201347.\n\n9. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ I, 436.\n\n10. For Sir Francis Darcy's negotiations with Viscount Lisle, see _Sydney Papers,_ II, 346, and _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ V, 222.\n\n11. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ I, 570.\n\n12. Brenan, _House of Percy,_ II, 191.\n\n13. Clifford, _Diary_ , 30.\n\n14. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ I, 624.\n\n15. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ V, 408.\n\n16. _Ibid., V, 409._\n\n## _Chapter_ 3 _Lucy's Choice_\n\n1. Brenan, _House of Percy,_ II, 189.\n\n2. In 1619 the Banqueting House burnt down and was replaced by the present Palladian-style Banqueting House built by Inigo Jones.\n\n3. _DNB,_ Hay, James, first Earl of Carlisle.\n\n4. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ II, 13. We have a firsthand description of a suit Hay took with him on his mission to France in 1616: \"I saw the cloak and hose made of a very fine white beaver [a plushlike material], embroidered all over with gold and silver; the cloak, almost to the cape, within and without, having no lining but embroidery. The doublet was Cloth of Gold, embroidered so thick, that it could not be discerned, and a white beaver hat suitable, brimfull of embroidery both above and below.\" Wilson, _History of Great Britain,_ 93.\n\n5. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ I, 554, 560; II, 30.\n\n6. Ibid., II, 16,41.\n\n7. Ellis, _Letters,_ 2nd ser., Ill, 247.\n\n8. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ II, 16, 19; Brenan, _House of Percy,_ II, 172\u201373.\n\n9. The Earl would have seen a variant of the new invention of the telescope, as Thomas Harriot, an astronomer who was one of his \"Three Magi,\" was experimenting with \"perspective trunks\" to see Venus \"horned like the moon.\" Batho, \"Wizard Earl,\" 349.\n\n10. _Northumberland Papers,_ lv.\n\n11. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ II, 57.\n\n12. Ibid., II, 85.\n\n13. Ibid., II,57.\n\n14. Ibid.\n\n15. Sainsbury, _Rubens,_ 117, n.150.\n\n16. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ II, 77.\n\n17. Ibid., II, 94.\n\n18. _De L'Isle and Dudley MSS,_ V, 411.\n\n19. Ibid., V, 412; _Sydney Papers,_ II, 350. Anne Clifford also mentioned the Penshurst house party in her diary, although her husband, the Earl of Dorset, would not permit her to attend. She wrote that her husband \"hunted and lay there all night, there being my Lord Montgomery, my Lord Hay, my Lady Lucy [whom the editor mistakes for Lucy Bedford], and a great deal of other company.\" Clifford, _Diary_ , 90.\n\n20. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ V, 413.\n\n21. Ibid., V, 415.\n\n22. _De Fonblanque_ , _House of Percy,_ II, 345; Willson, _King James VI and 1,_ 388\u201389.\n\n23. Bentley, _Jacobean and Caroline Stage,_ V, 1288\u201389; Chamberlain, _Letters,_ II, 125.\n\n24. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ II, 181.\n\n25. Ibid., II, 168,378; _CSPV, 1617\u20131619,_ 281. The salary for the Master of the Wardrobe was \u00a3222 13s. 4d. Lionel Cranfield, the next Master of the Wardrobe, claimed that Hay made some \u00a34,000 per annum through perquisites and deals with the purveyors of materials. As well as supplies for the royal household and maintenance of the palaces, costumes for masques and revels were purchased through the Wardrobe. Jones and Stallybrass, _Renaissance Clothing and the Materials,_ 201.\n\n26. _Sydney Papers,_ I,121.\n\n27. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ II, 190,195.\n\n28. Manchester, _Court and Society,_ 1,331.\n\n29. _Sydney Papers,_ I,121.\n\n30. Schreiber, _First Carlisle,_ 24; Carlisle Papers, 2592, folio 73.\n\n31. Strickland, _Queens of England,_ VII, 358\u201363.\n\n32. Nichols, _Progresses,_ III, 531. Queen Anne's funeral is described in full on pages 538\u201343.\n\n33. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ II, 237.\n\n34. Ibid., II, 235.\n\n35. Carlisle Papers, 2592, folios 97,134\n\n36. CSPD, 1619\u20131623,71.\n\n37. Gardiner, _England and Germany,_ I,156.\n\n38. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ II, 263.\n\n39. _Sydney Papers, I,_ 121.\n\n## _Chapter_ 4 _Buckingham's Charms_\n\n1. Bergeron, _King James,_ 102\u2013103.\n\n2. Wilson, _History of Great Britain,_ 149.\n\n3. Carlisle Papers, 2595, folio 164.\n\n4. Baschet Transcripts, 31\/3\/53, folio 52, Tilli\u00e8res to Puysieux, 12 November 1619.\n\n5. _Sydney Papers,_ 1,126.\n\n6. Ellis, _Letters,_ 1st ser., III, 113\u201314.\n\n7. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ II, 294.\n\n8. Ibid., II, 297. Buckingham's manuscript letter to the Earl of Rutland is astounding in its effrontery: Harley MSS, 1581.\n\n9. Gardiner, _History of England,_ VI, 188.\n\n10. _CSPD, 1619\u20131623,_ 145.\n\n11. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ II, 280, 285.\n\n12. _CSPV, 1623\u20131625,360\u201361._\n\n13. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ 11,333.\n\n14. Ibid., II, 255, 228.\n\n15. Stoye, _English Travellers Abroad,_ 289\u201390; Malloch, _Finch and Baines,_ 37.\n\n16. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ II, 381.\n\n17. Ibid., II, 424.\n\n## _Chapter_ 5 _Life in the Country and Life at Court 1._\n\n1. The list of housewifery skills is taken from Godfrey, _Home Life under the Stuarts,_ 229\u201330.\n\n2. _Sydney Papers,_ I,121\u201327.\n\n3. Ibid., II, 354\u201355.\n\n4. _CSPV_ , 1623\u20131625,361.\n\n5. Schreiber, _First Carlisle,_ 48.\n\n6. Ellis, _Letters,_ 1st ser., Ill, 140\u201341.\n\n7. _CSPD, Addenda_ , 1580\u20131625, 649\u201350.\n\n8. Ibid.; Carlisle Papers, 2595, folio 191.\n\n9. Ibid., 2595, folio 183.\n\n10. Ibid., 2596, folio 14.\n\n11. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ V, 438\u201339.\n\n12. La Rochefoucauld, _M\u00e9moires_ , II, 12\u201313. La Rochefoucauld mentioned \"the long attachment Buckingham had for the Countess of Carlisle.\"\n\n13. _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ (1955), La Rochefoucauld, Fran\u00e7ois de.\n\n14. Ellis, _Letters,_ 1st ser., Ill, 122,196.\n\n15. Rushworth, _Collections,_ I,199.\n\n16. Tilli\u00e8res, _M\u00e9moires,_ xxvii, 100.\n\n17. Charles, _Letters,_ 40.\n\n18. Tilli\u00e8res, _M\u00e9moires,_ 135; _CSPV, 1625\u20131626,_ 494,498.\n\n19. Schreiber, _First Carlisle,_ 97.\n\n20. Denbigh, _Royalist Father,_ 49.\n\n21. Smuts, _Court Culture_ , 194.\n\n22. CSPD, 1628\u20131629,81.\n\n23. CSPD, 1627\u20131628,381; _CSPD_ , 1626\u20131627,363.\n\n24. CSPD, _Addenda, 1625\u20131649,_ 291.\n\n25. CSPC, 1575\u20131660, 85\u201386. The English Leewards consisted of the islands of St. Christopher, Nevis, Antigua, and Montserrat. Carlisle Bay commemorates Carlisle's proprietorship of the Barbados.\n\n26. CSPD, 1628\u20131629,81.\n\n## _Chapter_ 6 _The Queen's Favorite_\n\n1. CSPV, 1628\u20131629,108.\n\n2. _CSPD_ , 1628\u20131629,356. In his letter to Carlisle, Goring sends his \"blessings to Lord Jimmie and George.\"\n\n3. _CSPV,_ 1626\u20131628, 93, 97, 107. Gautier, the French lute player, had formerly been employed by Buckingham: _Salvetti Correspondence,_ 104\u2013107.\n\n4. _CSPD_ , 1628\u20131629,169,218.\n\n5. Ellis, _Letters,_ 1st ser., Ill, 253.\n\n6. D'Ewes, _Autobiography and Correspondence,_ 210.\n\n7. For an eyewitness account of Buckingham's assassination, see Ellis, _Letters,_ 1st ser., Ill, 254\u201360.\n\n8. For Buckingham's funeral, ibid., III, 263\u201365.\n\n9. _CSPD_ , 1628\u20131629,293,310,343.\n\n10. Chamberlain, _Letters,_ II, 245; Clifford, _Diary,_ 115.\n\n11. _CSPD, Addenda,_ 1625\u20131649,298, 294.\n\n12. _CSPD,_ 1628\u20131629,343. For \"Noks,\" see 395.\n\n13. _De L'isle and Dudley MSS, VI,_ 1\u20132.\n\n14. Osborne, _Letters,_ 101.\n\n15. _CSPD, Addenda,_ 1625\u20131649, 297.\n\n16. Ibid., 298,308; _CSPD, 1628\u20131629,_ 393.\n\n17. _CSPD_ , 1628\u20131629, 335.\n\n18. Ibid., 343,378.\n\n## _Chapter_ 7 _Court Politics_\n\n1. Newton, _Colonizing Activities,_ 60 et seq.\n\n2. _CSPD_ , 1628\u20131629, 413.\n\n3. Ibid., 296, 391, 413.\n\n4. Ibid., 413.\n\n5. _CSPV_ , 1628\u20131629, 283.\n\n6. Ibid., 538; _CSPD. 1628\u20131629,_ 395,412.\n\n7. _CSPD,_ 1628\u20131629, 335. Carlisle had missed a wonderful opportunity in 1628 when a consortium of London merchants offered to buy the island of St. Christopher for \u00a320,000 plus \u00a31,000 per annum. In 1629 the Spaniards took the island, and the consortium withdrew its offer _(Buccleuch MSS,_ III, 345). The English retook the island shortly afterward. For Carlisle's far from efficient proprietorship, see Dunn, _Sugar and Slaves,_ 49.\n\n8. _CSPD,_ 1628\u20131629,556.\n\n9. _CSPD,_ 1629\u20131631,139.\n\n10. Schreiber, _First Carlisle,_ 140.\n\n11. _CSPD, Addenda,_ 1625\u20131649, 330; _CSPD,_ 1628\u20131629,558, 559.\n\n12. _Salisbury MSS,_ XXII, 242.\n\n13. Ibid., 269.\n\n14. _CSPD, 1628\u20131629,_ 558.\n\n15. Ibid., 396, 398, 405, 446, 469. Traill's letters to Carlisle and other correspondents, together with young James's unanswered letters to his father, provide an interesting account of a seventeenth-century youth's Grand Tour.\n\n16. Ibid., 598.\n\n17. Finet, _Notebooks,_ 69.\n\n18. _CSPV,_ 1629\u20131632,263.\n\n19. Ibid., 205.\n\n20. _Buccleuch MSS,_ III, 347.\n\n21. CSPV, 1629\u20131632,271,281.\n\n## _Chapter_ 8 _Death of Carlisle_\n\n1. _CSPD,_ Addenda, 1625\u20131649,367.\n\n2. Finet, _Notebooks,_ 87\u201389.\n\n3. Mathew, _Letters._\n\n4. _CSPD,_ 1634\u20131635,408.\n\n5. _CSPD,_ 1631\u20131633,437.\n\n6. _CSPD,_ Addenda, 1625\u20131649,382.\n\n7. Strafford, _Letters,_ I, 218.\n\n8. _CSPD,_ 1629\u20131631,366.\n\n9. _CSPD,_ 1631\u20131633,132.\n\n10. Raymond, _Autobiography_ , 24.\n\n11. _CSPD,_ 1631\u20131633, 293\u201394,322; Carlisle Papers, 2597, folio 110.\n\n12. Ellis, _Letters,_ 2nd ser., II, 265.\n\n13. _CSPD,_ 1631\u20131633, 205.\n\n14. Raymond, _Autobiography,_ 24.\n\n15. Suckling, _Works._ The salacious last verse was omitted in the 1646 publication of the poet's works. According to Carlisle's biographer, Lucy \"had a reputation for libertinism during these years of which even the diplomats stationed in England were aware. At the end of 1631 she may have even become involved with Holland. She unquestionably contributed a great deal to the fantasy life of more than one gentleman of the era, whatever she may have actually done with them. Yet, through all of the stories that emerged from this period, there was no hint that Carlisle ever criticized her or was not on the best of terms with her.\" Schreiber, _First Carlisle,_ 135.\n\n16. Aubrey, _Brief Lives,_ 287.\n\n17. _CSPV,_ 1632\u20131636,363.\n\n18. Howell, _Familiar Letters,_ I,317.\n\n19. _Sydney Papers,_ II, 372.\n\n20. Lindley, _Court-Masques,_ 273.\n\n21. _CSPD,_ 1631\u20131633, 322.\n\n24. Strafford, Letters, I, 85.\n\n23. Carlisle Papers, 2597, folios 76,108.\n\n24. _CSPD._ 1634\u20131635, 229.\n\n25. Comber, _Life of Sir Christopher Wandesford,_ quoted in Brenan, House of Percy, II, 240.\n\n26. Strafford, _Letters,_ I,179.\n\n27. Carlisle Papers, 2597, folio 140.\n\n28. Finet, _Notebooks,_ 145.\n\n29. Denbigh, _Royalist Father,_ 87.\n\n30. Burghclere, _Strafford,_ I, 260.\n\n31. _Sydney Papers,_ I, 455.\n\n32. Strafford, _letters,_ I,120.\n\n33. Ibid., I, 360, 363.\n\n34. Von Ranke, _History of England,_ II, 407.\n\n35. _Nicholas Papers,_ I, 293, 301; De _Lisle and Dudley_ MSS, VI, 85.\n\n36. Strafford, _Letters,_ I, 363; Burghclere, _Strafford,_ I, 261.\n\n37. Raymond, _Autobiography,_ 25. The ballad that brought tears to Carlisle's eyes was \"A Farewell to Arms,\" dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, by George Peele (1558?\u20141597).\n\n38. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 40; Strafford, _Letters,_ I, 447.\n\n39. Strafford Papers, XV, folio 211, Lucy to Wentworth, 7 September 1635; VIII, folio 287, Wentworth to Lucy, 14 October 1635.\n\n40. Strafford, _Letters,_ I, 479,511,525.\n\n41. _CSPD,_ 1631\u20131633, 293; _CSPV, 1632\u20131636,_ 558.\n\n42. CSPV, 1632\u20131636,338.\n\n43. Strafford Papers, VIII, folio 377, Wentworth to Lucy, 14 May 1636.\n\n44. Wilson, _History of Great Britain,_ 154.\n\n45. Stone, _Crisis of the Aristocracy,_ 260\u201361.\n\n46. Schreiber, _First Carlisle,_ 137.\n\n47. _CSPD,_ 1635,420.\n\n48. Strafford, _Letters,_ I, 525; _CSPV, 1632\u20131636,_ 558.\n\n49. _Various Collections_ , VII, 412.\n\n50. Edmund Waller, \"To the Countess of Carlisle in Mourning.\"\n\n### PART TWO AT THE KING'S COMMAND\n\n## _Chapter_ 9 _Dorothy a Grass Widow_\n\n1. Howell, _Familiar Letters,_ I, 295.\n\n2. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, xviii.\n\n3. _Various Collections,_ VII, 413.\n\n4. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 55\u201356,60,66\u201367,71.\n\n5. _Sydney Papers,_ II, 450.\n\n6. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 108.\n\n7. Ibid., VI, 86,124.\n\n8. De Elsie MSS, C 95, folio 1, Sir William Crofts to Earl of Leicester, 12\/2 July 1637. (The continental calendar was ten days ahead of the English calendar. Thus, July 2 in England was July 12 in France.)\n\n9. _Sydney Papers,_ II, 450.\n\n10. Strafford, _Letters,_ I,469.\n\n11. _Sydney Papers,_ II, 451. Writing to her sister, Edmund Waller describes Doll as \"she that always affected silence and retiredness\": Cartwright, _Sacharissa,_ 74; Aubrey, _Brief Lives,_ 308.\n\n12. Strafford, _Letters,_ I,359; _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 60,93.\n\n13. Strafford, _Letters,_ II, 156.\n\n14. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 60,64,66; _Sydney Papers,_ II, 445.\n\n15. Carte, _fames, Duke of Ormonde,_ V, 220.\n\n16. _CSPD,_ 1639\u20131640,186.\n\n17. Strafford Papers, XVIII, folio 102, Lucy to Wentworth, 7 August 1638; VIII, folio 398, Wentworth to Sir James Hay, 11 December 1636.\n\n18. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 67; _Sydney Papers,_ II, 455.\n\n19. _CSPV,_ 1636\u20131639,148; _Various Collections,_ VII, 413.\n\n20. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 70, 90.\n\n21. Ibid., VI, 72; Strafford _Letters,_ II, 45.\n\n22. Ibid., I, 218.\n\n23. De Elsie MSS, C 82\/9, Dorothy to Leicester, 19 December 1636; _Sydney Papers,_ 11, 463.\n\n24. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS_ , VI, 79, 83.\n\n25. Ibid., VI, 77, 90; _Sydney Papers,_ II, 455.\n\n26. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 85, 94; Strafford, _Letters,_ II, 48.\n\n27. _Sydney Papers,_ II, 472, 480 et seq.\n\n28. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 89,101,106.\n\n29. Ibid., VI, 87,100,103,104\u2013105.\n\n30. Ibid., VI, 60.\n\n31. Ibid., VI, 62.\n\n32. _Sydney Papers,_ II, 514, 516.\n\n## _Chapter_ 10 _Lucy a Wealthy Widow_\n\n1. Millar, _Van Dyck in England,_ 67\u201369.\n\n2. Blake, _Van Dyck,_ 332.\n\n3. Wheelock, Barnes, and Held, _Anthony Van Dyck,_ 68, n.44.\n\n4. The Sudeley Castle archivist, Jean Bray, kindly supplied the provenance of the double portrait of the sisters. From the collection of the Earl of Leicester at Penshurst, the painting was inherited by Lady Brownlow, who bequeathed it to Lady Yonge. The latter sold it to Horace Walpole, afterward Earl of Orford, \"for nine and twenty guineas.\" Inherited by Earl Waldegrave, it was sold at the Strawberry Hill sale in 1842 to James Morrison for \u00a3231. It remained in the Morrison Collection at Basildon and Fonthill until finally it came to Sudeley Castle.\n\n5. _CSPD,_ 1637\u20131638, 366; _Duppa-Isham Correspondence,_ 74.\n\n6. Strafford, _Letters,_ II, 149.\n\n7. This is the view of Julie Sanders in \"Caroline Salon Culture and Female Agency.\"\n\n8. Anselment, \"Countess of Carlisle.\" On the question of a salon to rival that of Henrietta Maria, Anselment wrote, \"Though she [Lady Carlisle] did not preside over a literary salon or circle... she appears indeed the unrivalled focus of ambition and hope\" (221).\n\n9. Strafford, _Letters,_ II, 118,125.\n\n10. Mathew, _Letters._ Dedication by John Donne, son of the poet, who \"hopes you [Lady Carlisle] will favour us, for many years to come, with your presence here; whose absence would make such a Chasm in our Galaxie.\"\n\n11. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 85, 90.\n\n12. Ibid., VI, 122; Strafford Papers, X, folio 5, Wentworth to Lucy, 15 April 1637.\n\n13. CSPI, 1633\u20131647,229.\n\n14. Strafford Papers, X, folio 2, Wentworth to Lucy, 17 April 1637. See Cooper, \"Fortune of Thomas Wentworth,\" and Ranger, \"Strafford in Ireland.\"\n\n15. Strafford, _Letters,_ II, 106.\n\n16. Cooper, \"Fortune of Thomas Wentworth,\" 243\u201344.\n\n17. Strafford, _Letters,_ II, 76,106; Strafford Papers, VIII, folio 395, Wentworth to Lucy, [12 December] 1636.\n\n18. CSPD, 1637\u20131638, 11.\n\n19. Strafford, _Letters,_ II, 71, 76, 91.\n\n20. Strafford Papers, X, folio 2, Wentworth to Lucy, 17 April 1637; Ranger, \"Strafford in Ireland,\" 37.\n\n21. _CSPI,_ 1633\u20131647,175, 229.\n\n22. Strafford Papers, X, folio 155, Wentworth to Lucy, 25 July 1638.\n\n23. Ibid., X, 227, Wentworth to Lucy, 28 November 1638.\n\n24. Strafford, _Letters,_ II, 106.\n\n25. Wedgwood, _Thomas Wentworth,_ 225.\n\n26. Strafford Papers, X, folios 170, 352, Wentworth to Lucy, 31 August 1638 and 13 August 1639.\n\n27. Strafford, _Letters,_ II, 102,125.\n\n28. Ibid., II, 124. See Donagan, \"Courtier's Progress,\" 326\u201327. For Holland's many offices, see ibid., 325.\n\n29. Strafford, _Letters,_ II, 131,138.\n\n30. Strafford Papers, X, folio 307, Wentworth to Lucy, 13 May 1639.\n\n## _Chapter_ 11 _Family Affairs 1._\n\n1. Strafford, _Letters,_ II, 142.\n\n2. Ibid., II,73.\n\n3. Albion, _Charles I,_ 212 et seq.\n\n4. _CSPV,_ 1636\u20131639,410.\n\n5. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 143\u201344, 147\u201348.\n\n6. Campbell, _Intriguing Duchess,_ 151 et seq.\n\n7. Strafford, _Letters,_ II, 156.\n\n8. Ibid., II, 175; _Egmont MSS,_ I, 222; Cooper, \"Fortune of Thomas Wentworth,\" 242; Ranger, \"Strafford in Ireland,\" 37\u201338. Ranger assumes that Carlisle received \u00a315,000 for the surrender of the Birnes Country but Cooper correctly states that Carlisle did not surrender the grant in his lifetime. The sale did not actually take place until two years after his death, when the money was paid to Lucy.\n\n9. Strafford, _Letters,_ II, 175.\n\n10. Ibid.\n\n11. _Egmont MSS,_ 1,177, 494.\n\n12. Strafford Papers, X, folio 155, Wentworth to Lucy, 25 July 1638; XVIII, folio 102, Lucy to Wentworth, 7 August 1638 [holograph], and X, folio 174; X, folio 170, Wentworth to Lucy, 31 August 1638.\n\n13. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS._ VI, 153\u201354.\n\n14. Ibid., VI, 155.\n\n15. Ibid.\n\n16. Strafford, _Letters,_ II, 280.\n\n17. Strafford Papers, X, folio 301, Wentworth to Lucy, 16 April 1639.\n\n18. _CSPD, 1638\u20131639,_ 621.\n\n19. Rushworth, _Collections_ , III, 886, 910\u201315, 926\u201327. For an example of Charles's commands to the Iord Lieutenants, see Charles, _Letters,_ 111\u201312.\n\n20. Carlton, _Charles 1_ ,205.\n\n21. De L'isle MSS, C114\/1.\n\n22. _Sydney Papers,_ II. 592.\n\n23. Young, _Servility and Service,_ 254.\n\n24. _Sydney Papers,_ II, 597.\n\n25. _Manchester MSS,_ 55.\n\n26. _CSPD,_ 1639, 349.\n\n27. Cartwright, _Saeharissa,_ 74.\n\n28. CSPD, 1639,383.\n\n29. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 176.\n\n30. _CSPD,_ 1639, 504.\n\n31. _Sydney Papers,_ II, 607, 613.\n\n32. Ibid., II,618.\n\n## _Chapter_ 12 _A Noble and intelligent Friendship_\n\n1. Strafford, _Letters,_ II, 374.\n\n2. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 211.\n\n3. Radcliffe, _Letters,_ 183,188.\n\n4. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 195; _Sydney Papers,_ II, 614.\n\n5. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 201, 203, 208. For Henrietta Maria's dislike of Richelieu and French policy, see Smuts, \"Puritan Followers,\" 26\u201345.\n\n6. _Sydney Papers,_ II, 629.\n\n7. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 215.\n\n8. Radcliffe, _Letters,_ 188,194,197.\n\n9. Finet, _Notebooks,_ 271.\n\n10. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 222.\n\n11. _Sydney Papers,_ II, 618; Warwick, _Memoirs,_ 154.\n\n12. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS_ , VI, 219.\n\n13. Radcliffe, _Letters,_ 197.\n\n14. De Elsie MSS, C 85\/14.\n\n15. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 243.\n\n16. Ibid., VI, 234, 287,312.\n\n17. Ibid., VI, 245.\n\n18. Radcliffe, _Letters,_ 198.\n\n19. _Sydney Papers,_ II, 652.\n\n20. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 262,270, 295.\n\n21. De Elsie MSS, C 85\/16.\n\n22. _CSPI,_ 1633\u20131647, 243, 299.\n\n23. Radcliffe, _Letters,_ 221.\n\n24. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 285.\n\n25. Rushworth, _Collections,_ III, 1193.\n\n26. Bligh, _Sir Kenelm Digby,_ 240\u201341.\n\n27. _De L'Isle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 319,329.\n\n28. Rushworth, _Collections,_ III, 1252.\n\n29. Ibid., III, 1275.\n\n30. Ibid., III, 1335.\n\n31. _De L'Isle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 337.\n\n32. Rushworth, _Collections,_ III, 1338.\n\n33. Radcliffe, _Letters,_ 221; Wedgwood, _Thomas Wentworth,_ 319.\n\n## _Chapter_ 13 _Strafford's Trial and Execution_\n\n1. Wedgwood, _Thomas Wentworth,_ 316\u201317.\n\n2. Rushworth, _Collections,_ VIII, 8.\n\n3. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 343\u201344.\n\n4. Ibid., VI, 361; De Elsie MSS, C 85\/21.\n\n5. _De L'Isle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 346\u201347.\n\n6. Ibid., VI, 351.\n\n7. Ibid.\n\n8. Ibid.\n\n9. Ibid., VI, 361.\n\n10. Ibid.\n\n11. Manchester, _Court and Society,_ I,362.\n\n12. _De L'Isle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 367.\n\n13. Ibid., VI, 374.\n\n14. Wedgwood, _Thomas Wentworth,_ 326.\n\n15. _Wynn Papers,_ 271; Rushworth, _Collections,_ VIII, 22\u201332.\n\n16. Strickland, _Queens of England,_ VIII, 6 o.\n\n17. Rushworth, _Collections_ , VIII, 746\u201348.\n\n18. Ibid., preface; Baillie, _Letters,_ I, 316 et seq. See Wencelas Hollar's etching of Strafford's trial reproduced in Wedgwood, _Thomas Wentworth,_ illustration 8.\n\n19. Baillie, _Letters,_ 1,316.\n\n20. _Buccleuch MSS,_ III, 412.\n\n21. Strickland, _Queens of England,_ VIII, 60; _De Lisle and Dudley_ MSS, VI, 393.\n\n22. Rushworth, _Collections, V_ III, 218.\n\n23. Ibid., VIII, 242\u201344.\n\n24. Baillie, _Letters._ I, 341\u201342; Wedgwood, _Thomas Wentworth,_ 348\u201349; Rushworth, _Collections,_ VIII, 554\u201355. Holland, Hamilton, and Cottington gave viva voce evidence. Northumberland pleaded illness and the court had to make do with his deposition taken the previous December, which \"entirely contradicted Vane's evidence.\" Wedgwood, _Thomas Wentworth,_ 349.\n\n25. Wedgwood, _Thomas Wentworth,_ 358.\n\n26. Rushworth, _Collections,_ VIII, 633\u201360.\n\n27. Ibid., VIII, 735; Clarendon, _History,_ I, 330.\n\n28. De Fonblanque, _House of Percy,_ II, 432.\n\n29. Rushworth, _Collections,_ IV, 255\u201357; HMC, _5th Report,_ 413.\n\n30. Ibid., VIII, 760, 762; Wedgwood, _Thomas Wentworth,_ 385\u201389.\n\n31. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 403.\n\n32. PRO, State Papers France, 78\/111, folio 63.\n\n## _Chapter_ 14 _Lucy Changes Her Gallant_\n\n1. Warwick, _Memoirs,_ 225.\n\n2. Clarendon, _History,_ I, 434, n.1.\n\n3. _Egmont MSS,_ I,177.\n\n4. Strafford Papers, XIX, folio 114, Lady Carlisle to William Railton, 13 October 1642.\n\n5. Ranger, \"Strafford in Ireland,\" 38.\n\n6. Clarendon, _History,_ I, 224.\n\n7. \"The Private Correspondence between King Charles I and Sir Edward Nicholas,\" in Evelyn, _Diary_ , IV, 75.\n\n8. Clarendon, _History,_ I, 388, 434, 481.\n\n9. Evelyn, _Diary,_ IV, 76.\n\n10. _CSPD,_ 1640,278.\n\n11. Clarendon, _History,_ I, 387\u201388, 434; Donagan, \"A Courtier's Progress,\" 345\u201346; Forster, _Five Members,_ 29.\n\n12. Warwick, _Memoirs,_ 225.\n\n13. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 404.\n\n14. Ibid., VI, 556.\n\n15. Rushworth, _Collections,_ IV, 399.\n\n16. Evelyn, _Diary,_ IV, 119.\n\n17. Clarendon, _History,_ I,434\u201335.\n\n18. Ibid.; _De L'Isle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 412,556.\n\n19. Evelyn, _Diary,_ IV, 118.\n\n20. Ibid., IV, 105; Rushworth, _Collections,_ IV, 463\u201365.\n\n21. Clarendon, _History,_ I,555.\n\n22. Rushworth, _Collections,_ IV, 474.\n\n23. Forster, _Arrest of the Five Members,_ 138.\n\n24. The parliamentarians received last-minute warnings that the King was on his way; contemporary sources, including Clarendon, attributed the advance warning to Lady Carlisle.\n\n25. Madame de Motteville, quoted in Strickland, _Queens of England,_ VIII, 70.\n\n26. Rushworth, _Collections,_ IV, 474.\n\n27. Forster, _Arrest of the Five Members,_ 145.\n\n28. Strickland, _Queens of England,_ VIII, 71.\n\n29. Clarendon, _History,_ I, 507.\n\n### PART THREE THE FORTUNES OF WAR\n\n## _Chapter_ 15 _Mourning a Beloved Soldier_\n\n1. _De L'isle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 412.\n\n2. Parliament's clerk slightingly compared the royal standard to the \"City Streamers used at the Lord-Mayors Show.\" Rush-worth, _Collections,_ IV, 783.\n\n3. Warwick, _Memoirs,_ 253.\n\n4. Cartwright, _Sacharissa,_ 88.\n\n5. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 412.\n\n6. Strafford Papers, XIX, folio 114, Lady Carlisle to William Railton, 13 October 1642.\n\n7. HMC, _Egmont MSS,_ I, 97\u201398,177.\n\n8. Strafford Papers, XIX, folio 114, Lady Carlisle to William Railton, 13 October 1642.\n\n9. Cartwright, _Sacharissa,_ 83.\n\n10. Rushworth, _Collections,_ V, 13\u201315.\n\n11. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 412.\n\n12. Cartwright, _Sacharissa,_ 88, 91; Ashburnham, _Narrative,_ II, appendix, vi. As well as the outright gift, Sunderland also loaned the King \u00a35,000. Cartwright, _Sacharissa,_ 81.\n\n13. Warwick, _Memoirs,_ 253.\n\n14. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 413\u201316.\n\n15. Warwick, _Memoirs,_ 248.\n\n16. _Portland MSS,_ I,89.\n\n17. Cartwright, _Sacharissa,_ 90,100.\n\n18. Whitelocke, _Memorials,_ 174. For the Oxford Propositions, see Smith, \"Impact on Government,\" 42, 45. In addition to disbandment of royalist forces, the sticking point with Charles was Parliament's demand to abolish the bishops.\n\n19. Strickland, _Queens of England,_ VIII, 80.\n\n20. Warwick, _Memoirs,_ 262.\n\n21. Cartwright, _Sacharissa,_ 94\u201396.\n\n22. Crawford, _Denzil Holies,_ 97.\n\n23. Cartwright, _Sacharissa,_ 99.\n\n24. Rushworth, _Collections,_ V, 367\u201368.\n\n25. Cartwright, _Sacharissa,_ 99,101.\n\n26. De Lisle and Dudley MSS, VI, 435.\n\n27. Ibid, VI, 434\u201335.\n\n28. Ibid.\n\n29. Cartwright, _Sacharissa,_ 104\u2013106.\n\n30. Ibid., 101.\n\n31. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 436.\n\n32. Cartwright, _Sacharissa,_ 110\u201312.\n\n33. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 437.\n\n34. Warwick, _Memoirs,_ 297; Strickland, _Queens of England,_ VIII, 85\u201387.\n\n35. _Sydney Papers,_ II, 130\u201331.\n\n36. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 557.\n\n## _Chapter_ 16 _Secret Cabals at the House of the Countess of Carlisle_\n\n1. Heath, _Flagellum._\n\n2. Aubrey, _Brief Lives,_ ci-cii.\n\n3. Earl of Manchester, Letter to the House of Lords, December 1644. \"Quotes about Oliver Cromwell.\" Cromwell Association, www.olivercromwell.org\/quotes2.htm.\n\n4. On his return from Oxford, Holland was initially allowed to take his seat in the House of Lords but was shortly disabled from sitting by parliamentary ordinance: _DNB,_ Rich, Henry, first Earl of Holland.\n\n5. _DNB,_ Percy, Algernon, tenth Earl of Northumberland.\n\n6. Wedgwood, _King's War,_ 386, 407, 410.\n\n7. Forster, _Arrest of the Five Members,_ 137.\n\n8. Disraeli, _Commentaries,_ III, 178\u201380. Disraeli quoted a letter from Sabran to de Brienne, in which the former reported on a letter he received from Lady Carlisle.\n\n9. Crawford, _Denzil Holies,_ 109.\n\n10. _Burnet's History_ , I, 29.\n\n11. Pomfret, _Countess of Devonshire._\n\n12. Part of the spoils of war at the battle of Naseby was the capture by the victorious Roundheads of Charles's and Henrietta Maria's private correspondence. Parliament published a selection of the most damaging of these papers under the title _The King's Cabinet Opened._ Rushworth, _Collections,_ V, 888, 892.\n\n13. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 563; _CSPV, 1642\u20131643,_ 237.\n\n14. Von Ranke, _History of England,_ V, 475, 479; Crawford, _Denzil Holies,_ 109.\n\n15. Disraeli, _Commentaries_ , III, 181.\n\n16. Rushworth, _Collections,_ V, 892.\n\n17. \"The Private Correspondence between King Charles I and Sir Edward Nicholas,\" in Evelyn, _Diary,_ IV 137. For the Uxbridge Propositions, see Smith, \"Impact on Government,\" 42,45.\n\n18. Waller, \"Recollections,\" 125.\n\n19. Montereul, _Correspondence,_ I, 91; Von Ranke, _History of England,_ V, 479.\n\n20. Rushworth, _Collections,_ VI, 42\u201346 (between pages 42 and 43, there is an engraving of the battle formations, signed I. Sturt); Gentles, \"Impact of the New Model Army,\" 87.\n\n21. Carlton, \"Impact of the Fighting,\" ibid., 28.\n\n22. Montereul, _Correspondence,_ I,117.\n\n23. Von Ranke, _History of England,_ V, 484\u201387.\n\n24. Montereul, _Correspondence,_ I,75.\n\n25. Ibid., I, 89; Von Ranke, _History of England,_ V, 487; Wedgwood, _King's War,_ 527.\n\n26. Warwick, _Memoirs,_ 322.\n\n27. _Hamilton Papers,_ 142.\n\n28. Charles, _Letters,_ 199.\n\n29. Ashburnham, _Narrative,_ II, 141.\n\n30. Von Ranke, _History of England,_ V, 492.\n\n31. Rushworth, _Collections,_ VI, 389\u201390.\n\n32. Von Ranke, _History of England,_ V, 511; _Nicholas Papers,_ I, 79.\n\n33. Montereul, _Correspondence,_ I, 430.\n\n34. Von Ranke, _History of England,_ V, 510, 512. King Charles appears to have offered something like these terms in an undated letter addressed to the Speaker of the House, which may or may not have been sent. Charles, _Letters,_ 214\u201319.\n\n35. Von Ranke, _History of England,_ V, 515.\n\n## _Chapter_ 17 \" _I Would Rather Serve the Prince Than Live\"_\n\n1. Stone, _Family and Fortune,_ 30.\n\n2. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 561, 566.\n\n3. Cartwright, _Sacharissa,_ 121\u201322.\n\n4. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 558.\n\n5. _Northumberland Papers._ The Earl's accounts list cost of livery for Fotherley (153).\n\n6. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 558.\n\n7. Ibid., VI, 557\u201358.\n\n8. Ibid., VI, 558,561.\n\n9. Carlton, _Charles I,_ 320\u201323.\n\n10. Clarendon, _History,_ IV, 292\u201396; _Hamilton Papers,_ 150,154.\n\n11. Stoye, _English Travellers Abroad,_ 306; _Hamilton Addenda,_ 10.\n\n12. Clarendon, _History,_ IV, 318\u201319, 414.\n\n13. CSPD, 1644, 261.\n\n14. _Hamilton Addenda,_ 19; Rushworth, _Collections,_ VII, 100; _Hamilton Papers,_ 159.\n\n15. Hillier, _Attempted Escapes,_ 90.\n\n16. _DNB,_ Hay, Lucy, Countess of Carlisle.\n\n17. Clarendon, _History,_ IV, 362.\n\n18. For Titus, Whorwood, and Firebrace, see _DNB._\n\n19. _Hammond, Letters, 41._\n\n20. Hillier, _Attempted Escapes,_ 89,143,147.\n\n21. _Hamilton Papers,_ 171.\n\n22. Hammond, _Letters,_ 36, 41. 22. _Hamilton Papers,_ 196.\n\n23. Ibid.; _Hamilton Addenda,_ 18.\n\n24. Clarendon, _History of the Rebellion,_ IV, 331\u201332, 343\u201344, 355\u201357.\n\n25. _Hamilton Papers,_ 202.\n\n26. Ibid., 221. This letter is unsigned but from the contents it can reasonably be attributed to Lucy. In particular, the references to her associate Mr. Lowe argue for her authorship: \"Mr. Loe [sic] and I were necessitated to make a letter as from your Lop and your freinds...\" Moreover, it was Lucy, after all, who was waiting anxiously for the letter of authorization.\n\n27. Clarendon, _History,_ IV, 341.\n\n28. _Pepys MSS,_ 294, \"A letr, dated July 14 and endorsed recd. Aug. 10,1648. Lady Carlile's letrs. concerning Sir Will. Batten.\" The _Pepys MSS_ contain \"Ten Papers concerning [Lucy], Countess of Carlisle,\" taken at the battle of Worcester and reported to the Council of State on 16 April 1651, of which this one is numbered (2) in the margin.\n\n29. Clarendon, _History,_ IV, 384\u201386.\n\n30. _Pepys MSS,_ 295, ? letr. signed Carlile, supposed to be her own hand: dated July 12. Endorsed, Lady Carlile.\"\n\n31. _Buccleuch MSS, 1,311._\n\n32. _Pepys MSS,_ 306, \"The Lady Aubigny's letter August 5,1648.\"\n\n33. Ibid., 296, \"Minutes of Orders taken by Secretary Long.\"\n\n34. Ibid., 294, \"A letter without date or subscription, supposed to be own hand-writing. Endorsed, Lady Carlile.\"\n\n35. Rushworth, _Collections,_ VII, 1193.\n\n36. _Hamilton Papers,_ 238.\n\n37. Rushworth, _Collections,_ VII, 1214; Clarendon, _History,_ IV, 362.\n\n38. _Pepys MSS,_ 305, \"Letter dated July 31 received August 2,1648.\"\n\n39. Clarendon, _History,_ IV, 414.\n\n40. Rushworth, _Collections,_ VII, 1254.\n\n41. _Pepys MSS,_ 307, \"Sent about 25 August to my Lady Carlile.\"\n\n42. _CSPD,_ 1648\u20131649,292.\n\n43. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 446\u201351,558,577.\n\n44. Cartwright, _Sacharissa,_ 123\u201324.\n\n45. _Egerton MSS,_ 1788, folio 47, cited in Carlton, _Charles I,_ 341.\n\n46. Rushworth, _Collections,_ VII, 1382,1389.\n\n47. Cartwright, _Sacharissa,_ 114.\n\n48. Rushworth, _Collections,_ VII, 1395\u20131425.\n\n49. Clarendon, _History,_ VI, 223.\n\n50. Rushworth, _Collections,_ VII, 1428\u201330.\n\n51. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 586.\n\n52. CSPD, 1649\u20131650,6.\n\n53. _Pepys MSS,_ 295, \"Copy of a lettr. dated Hague, 28 Jan., 1649 n.style endorsed copy of the letr to my Lady Carlile.\"\n\n54. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 587.\n\n55. Ibid.\n\n56. Ibid.; _CSPD. 1649\u20131650,_ 43\u201344,47,49.\n\n57. Pomfret, _Countess of Devonshire,_ 80.\n\n58. Evelyn, _Diary,_ III, 37.\n\n59. Neville, _Newes._\n\n### PART FOUR A NEW ORDER\n\n## _Chapter_ 18 _In the Tower_\n\n1. _CSPD,_ 1649\u20131650,49, 221.\n\n2. Quoted in _DNB_ entry on Lucy.\n\n3. PRO, State Papers, 5 May 1649.\n\n4. CSPD, 1649\u20131650,73.\n\n5. _Buccleuch MSS,_ I,311; Evelyn, _Diary,_ III, 37.\n\n6. _CSPD,_ 1649\u20131650,43.\n\n7. Cary, _Memorials_ , II, 127,138\u201339.\n\n8. Cartwright, _Sacharissa,_ 116\u201317.\n\n9. Carlton, _Charles I,_ 356.\n\n10. De _L'isle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 558.\n\n11. Ibid., VI, 456\u201357.\n\n12. Ibid., VI, 458.\n\n13. Ibid., VI, 476.\n\n14. _Portland MSS,_ I,585.\n\n15. Cartwright, _Sacharissa,_ 117\u201318.\n\n16. _Nicholas Papers,_ I,190.\n\n17. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 484.\n\n18. _Penshurst Church and Village,_ Guide Booklet (London, 1970), 3.\n\n19. Ibid., 13.\n\n20. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 599, 600.\n\n21. Ibid., VI, 484.\n\n22. \"The Countess of Leicester's Case,\" ibid., VI, 488\u201391.\n\n23. De Fonblanque, _House of Percy,_ II, 405; _CSPD, 1650,_ 356,521.\n\n24. _Egmont MSS,_ I, 177, 487, 494, 515\u201316. Lucy's note to Percival: Addit. MSS, 46934.\n\n25. _CSPD,_ 1650,409.\n\n26. _De Lisle Dudley MSS,_ VI, 559.\n\n27. _CSPD,_ 1650,465.\n\n28. _CSPD,_ 1651,95,255.\n\n29. _Portland MSS,_ I, 585.\n\n30. _Nicholas Papers,_ I, 237.\n\n31. Ibid.\n\n32. _CSPD,_ 1651\u20131652,167.\n\n## _Chapter_ 19 _A Dysfunctional Family_\n\n1. Evelyn, _Diary,_ I,285.\n\n2. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 613.\n\n3. Osborne, _Letters,_ 51, 54, 61.\n\n4. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 477.\n\n5. Ibid., VI, 614.\n\n6. Ibid.\n\n7. Ibid. VI, 492.\n\n8. De L'Isle MSS, C130\/9.\n\n9. Cartwright, _Sacharissa,_ 147.\n\n10. _De L'Isle and Dudley MSS, Vl,_ 495.\n\n11. Ibid., VI, 492.\n\n12. Ibid., VI, 500.\n\n13. Ailesbury MSS, 158.\n\n14. _Osborne,_ Letters, 101.\n\n15. _Duppa-Isham Correspondence,_ 74.\n\n16. Egmont MSS, l, 515\u201316.\n\n17. Ibid.; Addit. MSS, 46934.\n\n18. _Egmont MSS,_ 1,515.\n\n19. Addit. MSS, 46934.\n\n20. _Duppa-Isham Correspondence,_ 33.\n\n21. _Ailesbury MSS,_ 158.\n\n22. _Duppa-Isham Correspondence._ 71.\n\n23. Ibid., 75.\n\n24. _Osborne, Letters,_ 100,106,109.\n\n25. _Cal. Clar. SP,_ 11,334\u201335; _Nicholas Papers,_ II, 65.\n\n26. _Ailesbury MSS,_ 159.\n\n27. Ibid., 161.\n\n28. _De L'Isle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 500; Cartwright, _Sacharissa,_ 158. Af _ter Dorothy's death, Anne, seemingly destined for spinster-hood, at thirty-lour eloped with the family chaplain, the Reverend Joseph Cart, vicar of Leigh. For marrying beneath her station, her father cut her off, despite her plea for foigiveness;_ De L'Isle and Dudley MSS, _VI, 624. Yet it is nice to know that \"poor Nan\" lived happily enough in the vicarage with a loving, if lowly, husband; Cartwright,_ Sacharissa, 165\u201366.\n\n29. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 496.\n\n30. _Cartwright, Sacharissa,_ 143.\n\n31. Burnet's History, _I, 69\u201370._\n\n32. Salisbury MSS, _XXII, 437._\n\n33. Ibid., XXII, 431, 433\n\n34. Ibid.; Mordaunt, _Letterbook,_ xi.\n\n35. _Sutherland MSS,_ II, 152.\n\n36. _De L'Isle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 500\u2013501.\n\n37. _Cartwright,_ Sacharissa, 156\u201357.\n\n38. Ibid., 158.\n\n39. Ibid., 160.\n\n## _Chapter_ 20 \" _The Old Lady Carlisle Is Dead_ \"\n\n1. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 271.\n\n2. _Cal. Clar. SP,_ IV, 180. Lord Clarendon's papers, housed at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, have been calendared in four volumes (1869\u20131932). A selection of the papers themselves was printed in _State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon (Clar. SP)._\n\n3. Mordaunt, _Letterbook,_ xi-xvii.\n\n4. Clar. SP, III, 664.\n\n5. Pepys, _Diary,_ I,77,84, 86; Evelyn, _Diary,_ I,353\u201354.\n\n6. _Clar._ SP, III, 685.\n\n7. Ibid., III, 681.\n\n8. Ibid., III, 729.\n\n9. Ibid.\n\n10. Ibid., III, 734. According to Evelyn and Mordaunt, \"then in great favour,\" was selling pardons for \u00a31,000. Evelyn, _Diary,_ I,355.\n\n11. _Burnet's History,_ I, 96.\n\n12. Jesse, _Memoirs,_ III, 211.\n\n13. _Clar. SP,_ III, 735.\n\n14. _De L'Isle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 622.\n\n15. Pepys, _Diary,_ I,175.\n\n16. Dent, _Quest for Nonsuch,_ 199.\n\n17. Pepys, _Diary,_ I,241, 246.\n\n18. Ibid., I, 269.\n\n19. _De Lisle and Dudley MSS,_ VI, 623.\n\n20. _Sutherland MSS,_ 184.\n\n21. Ibid., 157. Lucy was buried near her father in the Percy crypt at Petworth in Sussex.\n\n# _Bibliography_\n\n## ABBREVIATIONS\n\nBL | British Library, London \n---|--- \n_DNB_ | _Dictionary of National Biography_ \nHMC | Historical Manuscripts Commission \nPRO | Public Record Office\n\n## CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTS\n\nAddit. MSS | Additional Manuscripts collections, BL. \n---|--- \n_Ailesbury MSS_ | _Ailesbury Manuscripts._ HMC, 15th _Report. London, 1898._ \nAshburnham, _Narrative_ | Ashburnham, John. _A Narrative... of his attendance on King Charles._ 2 vols. \n| London, 1830. \nAubrey, _Brief Lives_ | Aubrey, John. _Aubrey's Brief Lives._ Ed. \n| Oliver Dick. London, 1958. \nBaillie, _Letters_ | Baillie, Robert. _Letters and Journals._ \n| Ed. David Laing. Edinburgh, 1841\u201342, \nBaschet Transcripts | Baschet Transcripts, PRO. \n_Buccleuch MSS_ | _Buccleuch Manuscripts._ HMC. Vol. I, London, 1899. Vol. Ill, London, 1926. \n_Burnet's History_ | Burnet, Gilbert. _Bishop Burnet's History of His Own Time._ Ed. Thomas Burnet. 4 vols. London, 1818. \n_Cal. Clar. SP_ | _Calendar of Clarendon State Papers._ Eds. M.A. Ogle, W.H. Bliss, W.D. Macray, and F.L. Routledge. 4 vols. Oxford, 1869\u20131932. \nCarlisle Papers | Carlisle Papers, Egerton MSS, BL. \nCary, _Memorials_ | Cary, Henry _Memorials of the Civil War._ 2 vols. London, 1842. \nChamberlain, _Letters_ | Chamberlain, John. _The Letters of John Chamberlain._ Ed. N. E. McClure. 2 vols. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society 12. Philadelphia, 1939. \nCharles, _Letters_ | Charles I, King of England. _The Letters, Speeches and Proclamations of King Charles I._ Ed. Sir Charles Petrie. London, 1935. \n_Clar. SP_ | _State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon._ Eds. R. Scrope and T. Monkhouse. 3 vols. Oxford, 1767\u20131786. \nClarendon, _History_ | Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of. _The History of the Rebellion and Civil_ \nClarendon, _History (cont'd)_ | _Wars in England._ Ed. W. D. Macray. 6 vols. Oxford, 1888. \nClifford, _Diary_ | Clifford, Anne. _The Diary of Anne Clifford, 1616\u20131619: A Critical Edition._ Ed. Katherine ?. Acheson. New York and London, 1995. \nConstitutional Documents | _The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625\u20131660._ Ed. S. R. Gardiner. Oxford, 1889. \n_CSPC_ | _Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, 1574\u20131660. London, 1860._ \n_CSPD_ | _Calendar of State Papers, Domestic._ Volumes covering 1611\u20131660, London, 1858\u20131886. \n_CSPI_ | _Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, 1633\u20131647._ London, _1901._ \n_CSPV_ | _Calendar of State Papers, Venetian._ Volumes covering 1615\u20131661, London, 1908\u20131931. \nDe L'Isle MSS | De Elsie Manuscripts, Kent County Council Archives \n_De L'Isle and Dudley MSS_ | _De Lisle and Dudley Manuscripts._ HMC. Vol. V, London, 1962. Vol. VI, London, 1966. \nD'Ewes, _Autobiography_ | D'Ewes, Simonds. _Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D'Ewes._ Ed. J. A. Halliwell. London, 1845. \n_Duppa-Isham Correspondence_ | Duppa, Brian. _The Correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa and Sir Justinian Isham, 1650\u20131660._ Ed. Sir Gyles Isham. \nAubrey, _Brief Lives_ | Northamptonshire Record Society Publications. Northampton, 1955. \n_Egmont MSS_ | _Egmont Manuscripts._ HMC. Vol. I, pt. 1, London, 1905. \nEllis, _Letters_ | Ellis, Henry ed. _Original Letters Illustrative of English History,_ 1st ser., 3 vols. London, 1825. 2nd ser., 4 vols. London, 1827. \n_England and Germany_ | _Letters... Illustrating the Relations Between England and Germany at the Commencement of the Thirty Years War._ Ed. S. R. Gardiner. 2 vols. Camden Society. London, 1865. \nEvelyn, _Diary_ | Evelyn, John. _Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn._ Ed. William Bray. 4 vols. London, 1859. \nFinet, _Notebooks_ | Finet, John. _Ceremonies of Charles I: The Notebooks of John Finet, 1628\u20131641._ Ed. A.J. Loomie. New York, 1987. \n_Hamilton Addenda_ | _Hamilton Papers Addenda._ Ed. S. R. Gardiner. Camden Miscellany 53. Reprinted by permission of the Royal Historical Society London, 1885. \n_Hamilton Papers_ | _Hamilton Papers._ Ed. S. R. Gardiner. Camden Society, new ser., 27. London, 1880. \nHammond, _Letters_ | Hammond, Robert. _Letters between Colonel Robert Hammond... and the Committee of Lords and Commons at Derby House._ London, 1764. \nHarley MSS | Harley Manuscripts, BL. \nHeath, _Flagellum_ | Heath, James. _Flagellum, or the Life and Death, Birth and Burial of Oliver Cromwell, the Late Usurper._ 2nd ed. London, 1663. \nHowell, _Familiar Letters_ | Howell, Joseph. _Epistolae Ho-Elianae or The Familiar Letters of James Howell_ Ed. Joseph Jacobs. 2 vols. London, 1892. \nLa Rochefoucauld, _M\u00e9moires_ | La Rochefoucauld, Fran\u00e7ois de Marsillac, Duc de. _M\u00e9moires du duc de la Rochefoucauld._ Eds. D. L. Gilbert and J. Gourdault. Grands \u00c9crivains de la France. Paris, 1874. \n_Manchester MSS_ | _Manchester Manuscripts._ HMC, appendix to 8th Report, pt. 2. London, 1881. \nMathew, _Letters_ | Mathew, Tobie. _A Collection of Letters made by Sr Tobie Mathews Kt. With a Character of the most Excellent Lady, Lucy Countess of Carleile._ London, 1660. \nMontereul, _Correspondence_ | Montereul, Jean de. _The Diplomatic Correspondence of Jean de Montereul and the Brothers Belli\u00e8vre._ Ed. and trans. J. G. Fotheringham. Scottish History Society. 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1898. \nMordaunt, _Letterbook_ | Mordaunt, John. _Letterbook of John Viscount Mordaunt._ Ed. Mary Coate. Camden Society, 3rd ser., 69. London, 1945. \nNeville, _Newes_ | Neville, Henry _Newes from the New Exchange, or the Commonwealth of Ladies._ London, 1650. \n_Nicholas Papers_ | _The Nicholas Papers: 1641\u20131652._ Ed. George F. Warner. Camden Society, new ser. London, 1886. \nNichols, _Progresses_ | Nichols, John. _The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivals of King James the First._ 4 vols. London, 1828 \n_Northumberland MSS_ | _Northumberland Manuscripts._ HMC, appendix to 3rd Report. London, 1872. \n_Northumberland Papers_ | Northumberland, Henry Percy, 9th Earl of. _The Household Papers of Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northumberland._ Ed. G. R. Batho. Camden Society, 3rd ser., 93. London, 1962. \nOsborne, _Letters_ | Osborne, Dorothy. _The Letters of Dorothy Osborne._ Ed. Dorothy Gardiner. London, 1933. \nPepys, _Diary_ | Pepys, Samuel. _The Diary of Samuel Pepys._ Ed. H. B. Wheatley. 8 vols. London, 1904. \n_Pepys MSS_ | _Pepys Manuscripts._ HMC. London, 1911. \n_Portland MSS_ | _Portland Manuscripts._ HMC. Vol. 1. London, 1981. \nRadcliffe, _Letters_ | Whitaker, T. D. _Life and Letters of Sir George Radcliffe._ London, 1810. \nRaymond, _Autobiography_ | Raymond, Thomas. _Autobiography of Thomas Raymond._ Ed. Godfrey Davies. Camden Society, 3rd ser. Vol. 28.1917 \nRichelieu, _M\u00e9moires_ | Richelieu, Armand du Plessis. _M\u00e9moires._ Ed. Robert Lavoll\u00e9e. Paris, 1925. \nRushworth, _Collections_ | Rushworth, John. _Historical Collections of Private Passages of State._ 8 vols. London, 1721. \n_Salisbury MSS_ | _Salisbury Manuscripts._ HMC. Vol. XXII, London, 1971. \n_Salvetti Correspondence_ | _Salvetti Correspondence, Skrine Manuscripts._ HMC, appendix to 11th Report, pt. 1. London, 1887. \nStrafford, _Letters_ | Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of. _The Earl of Strafford's Letters and Despatches._ Ed. William Knowler. 2 vols. London, 1739. \nStrafford Papers | Strafford Papers, Fitzwilliam MSS, Sheffield Central Library. \n_Sutherland MSS_ | _Sutherland Manuscripts._ HMC, appendix to 5th Report, pt. 1. London, 1876. \n_Sydney Papers_ | _Letters and Memorials of State... Written and Collected by Sir Henry Sydney faithfully transcribed from the Originals at Penshurst Place in Kent._ Ed. Arthur Collins. 2 vols. London, 1746. \nTilli\u00e8res, _M\u00e9moires_ | Tilli\u00e8res, L\u00e9veneur de. _M\u00e9moires in\u00e9dites du L\u00e9veneur de Tilli\u00e8res._ Ed. M. C. Hippeau. Paris, 1863. \n_Various Collections_ | _Various Collections, Bruce Manuscript._ HMC, 7th Report. London, 1914. \nWarwick, _Memoirs_ | Warwick, Philip. _Memoirs of the Reigne of Charles the First._ London, 1813. \nWeldon, _Court_ | [Weldon, Anthony]. _The Court and Character of King James, whereunto is now added the Court of King Charles._ London, 1651. \nWhitelocke, _Memorials_ | Whitelocke, Bulstrode. _Memorials of English Affairs from the Beginning of the Reign of Charles the First..._ Ed. R. H. Bulstrode. London, 1860. \nWilson, _History_ | Wilson, Arthur. _History of Great Britain._ London, 1653. \nWynn Papers | _Calendar of Wynn Papers, 1515\u20131690._ National Library of Wales. London, 1926.\n\n## SELECTED BOOKS AND ARTICLES\n\nAdamson, J. A. \"The English Nobility and the Projected Settlement of 1647.\" _Historical Journal_ 30 (1987): 567\u2013602.\n\nAlbion, Gordon. _Charles I and the Court of Rome._ Louvain, 1935.\n\nAnselment, Raymond. \"The Countess of Carlisle and Caroline Praise: Convention and Reality.\" _Studies in Philology_ 82 (Spring 1985): 212\u201333.\n\nBarroll, Leeds. _Anna of Denmark, Queen of England: A Cultural Biography._ Philadelphia, 2001.\n\nBatho, G. R. \"A Difficult Father-in-Law: the Ninth Earl of Northumberland.\" _History Today_ (November 1956): 744\u201351.\n\nBatho, G. R. \"The Wizard Earl in the Tower, 1605\u20131621.\" _History Today_ (May 1956): 344\u201351.\n\nBeattyjohn L. _Warwick and Holland._ Denver, 1965.\n\nBentley, Gerald Eades. _The Jacobean and Caroline Stage._ 5 vols. Oxford, 1956.\n\nBergeron, David M. _King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire._ Iowa City, 1999.\n\nBirch, Thomas. _The Court and Times of Charles I._ 2 vols. London, 1849.\n\nBirch, Thomas. _The Court and Times of James I._ Ed. R. F. Williams. 2 vols. London, 1848.\n\nBlake, Robin. _Anthony Van Dyck: A Life 1599\u20131641._ London, 1999.\n\nBligh, E. W. _Sir Kenelm Digby and His Venetia._ London, 1932.\n\nBrenan, Gerald. _A History of the House of Percy._ Ed. W. A. Lindsay. 2 vols. London, 1902.\n\nBurghclere, Winifred, Baroness. _Strafford. 2_ vols. London, 1931.\n\nCampbell, Dorothy de Brissac. _The Intriguing Duchess._ New York, 1930\n\nCarlton, Charles. _Charles I: The Personal Monarch._ London and Boston, 1983.\n\nCarlton, Charles. \"The Impact of the Fighting.\" In Morrill, _English Civil War._\n\nCarte, Thomas. _The Life of James, Duke of Ormonde._ Oxford, 1851.\n\nCartwright, Julia. _Sacharissa._ London, 1893.\n\nCooper, J. P. \"The Fortune of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford.\" _Economic History Review,_ 2nd ser., 11 (December 1958): 227\u201348.\n\nCrawford, P. _Denzil Holies. 1598\u20131680: A Study of His Political Career._ Royal Historical Society. London, 1979.\n\nDavies, Godfrey. _The Early Stuarts,_ 1603\u20131660. 2nd ed. Oxford History of England. Oxford, 1959.\n\nDe Fonblanque, E. B. _Annals of the House of Percy. 2_ vols. London, 1887.\n\nDe Fonblanque, E. B. _Lives of the Lords Strangford._ London and New York, 1877.\n\nDenbigh, Cecilia Fielding, Countess of. _Royalist Father and Roundhead Son._ London, 1915.\n\nDent, John. _The Quest for Nonsuch._ London, 1970.\n\nDisraeli, Isaac. _Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles I. 4_ vols. London, 1828\u20131830.\n\nDonagan, Barbara. \"A Courtier's Progress: Greed and Consistency in the Life of the Earl _of Holland.\" Historical Journal 19,_ no. 2 (1976): 317\u201353.\n\nDunn, Richard S. _Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624\u20131713._ New York, 1973.\n\nFirebrace, C. W. _Honest Harry, Being the Biography of Sir Henry Firebraee._ London, 1932.\n\nForster, John. _Arrest of the Five Members by Charles the First._ London, 1860.\n\nGardiner, S. R. _History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 1603\u20131642._ 10 vols. London, 1883\u201384.\n\nGentles, Ian. \"The Impact of the New Model Army.\" In Morrill, _English Civil War._\n\nGodfrey, Elizabeth. _Home Life under the Stuarts._ London, 1925.\n\nHamilton, Elizabeth. _Henrietta Maria._ New York, 1976.\n\nHibbert, Christopher. _The Virgin Queen: The Personal History of Elizabeth I._ London, 1990.\n\nHillier, G. _A Narrative of Attempted Escapes of Charles I._ London, 1852.\n\nHull, Felix. \"Sidney of Penshurst: Robert 2nd Earl of Leicester.\" _Arc bacologica Cantiana_ 3 (1993): 43\u201356.\n\nJesse, J. H. _Memoirs of the Court of England._ Boston, 1901.\n\nJones, A. R., and P. Stallybrass. _Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory._ Cambridge, 2000.\n\nKearney, I I. F. _Strafford in Ireland 1633\u20131641: A Study in Absolutism._ Manchester, 1959.\n\nLee, Patricia-Ann. \"Lucy Percy, Countess of Carlisle 1599\u20131660.\" In _Research Guide to European Historical Biography, 1450 to the Present,_ vol. 3, pp. 1599\u20131608. 4 vols. Washington, 1992.\n\nLindley, David. _Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments, 1605\u20131640._ Oxford, 1995.\n\nLockyer, Roger. _Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592\u20131628._ London, 1981.\n\nMalloch, A. _Finch and Baines: A Seventeenth Century Friendship._ Cambridge, 1917.\n\nManchester, William Montagu, Duke of. _Court and Society from Elizabeth to Anne._ 2 vols. London, 1864.\n\nMillar, Oliver. _Van Dyck in England._ Exhibition catalog, National Portrait Gallery London, 1982.\n\nMorrill, John, ed. _The Impact of the English Civil War._ London, 1991.\n\nNewton, A. P. _The Colonizing Activities of the English Puritans._ New Haven, 1914.\n\nPeck, Linda Levy _Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England._ London, 1991.\n\nPomfret, Thomas. _Life of the Countess of Devonshire._ London, 1685.\n\nRanger, T. \"Strafford in Ireland: A Revaluation.\" _Past and Present_ 20 (April 1961): 26\u201345.\n\nSainsbury, W. N., ed. _Original Unpublished Papers Illustrative of the Life of Sir Peter Paul Rubens._ London, 1859.\n\nSanders, Julie. \"Caroline Salon Culture and Female Agency: The Countess of Carlisle, Henrietta Maria and Public Theatre.\" _Theatre Journal_ 52 (December 2000): 449\u201364.\n\nSchreiber, Roy. _The First Carlisle: Sir James Hay, First Earl of Carlisle as Courtier, Diplomat, and Entrepreneur, 1580\u20131636._ Transactions of the American Philosophical Society Vol. 74, pt. 7. Philadelphia, 1984.\n\nSmith, David L. \"The Impact on Government.\" In Morrill, _English Civil War._\n\nSmuts, R. M. _Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England._ Philadelphia, 1987.\n\nSmuts, R. M. \"The Puritan Followers of Henrietta Maria in the 1630's.\" _English_ _Historical Review_ 93 (1978): 26\u201345.\n\nStone, Lawrence. _The Crisis of the Aristocracy._ Abridged ed. Oxford, 1967.\n\nStone, Lawrence. _Family and Fortune: Studies in Aristocratic Finance in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries._ Oxford, 1973.\n\nStoye, J. W. _English Travellers Abroad 1604\u20131667._ London, 1952.\n\nStrickland, Agnes. _Lives of the Queens of England._ 12 vols. Philadelphia, 1860.\n\nStrong, Roy _Henry Prince of Wales and England's Lost Renaissance._ London, 1986.\n\nSuckling, John. _The Works of Sir John Suckling._ Ed. Thomas Clayton. Oxford, 1971.\n\nThomson, Roger. _Women in Stuart England and America._ London, 1974.\n\nVon Ranke, L. _A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century. 6_ vols. Oxford, 1875.\n\nWaller, Edmund. _The Poems of Edmund Waller._ Ed. G. Thorn Drury. London and New York, 1893.\n\nWaller, William. \"Recollections,\" in _The Poetry of Anna Matilda._ London, 1788.\n\nWedgwood, C. V. _The King's War._ London, 1958.\n\nWedgwood, C. V. _Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of Strafford, 1593\u20131641: A Revaluation._ London, 1961.\n\nWheelock, Arthur K., Jr., Susan J. Barnes, and Julius Held. _Anthony Van_ _Dyck._ New York, 1990.\n\nWillson, David H. _King James VI and I._ London, 1956.\n\nYoung, M. _Servility and Service: The Life and Work of Sir John Coke._ London, 1985.\n\n# Index\n\nThe pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.\n\n## A\n\nAdam, Robert. 14\n\nAnne of Austria, Queen. 84\u201386. X- 92\n\nAnne of Denmark, queen of England, n, 16\u201318, 20, 27. 31. 4L, 51. 16\u201357, 63. 93\n\nAntrobus, Rev: Robert, 309\n\nArgyle, Marquess of, 2.84. 287\n\nArundel, (Countess of, 57\n\nArundel, Earl of, 83, 186, 220\n\nAshburnham, John, 271, 2\u20139\n\nAubrey, John, 130\n\n## B\n\nBaltinglas, Viscount, 221, 229, 243\n\nBate, George, 263\n\nBatten, Capt. William, 28?, 286\n\nBedford, 3rd Earl of 16, 208, 251\u201352\n\nBedford, Lucy Russell, Countess of, 16.17, 46\n\nBellieve, Pomponne de, 2\u20132\u201373\n\nBerkeley. George. Lord, 336\n\nBerkeley, S irJohn, 279\n\nBerkshire, (outness of (Elizabeth Cecil).tot. 116, 177, 185, 1S9, 2\u20135, 327\n\nBerkshire. Earl of, 116, 327\n\nBillingsley. Capt. William. 182, 220\n\nBlake. Robin, 162\u201363\n\nBoleyn, Anne, 9\n\nBrahazon, Lord, 229, 243\n\nBradshaw. John, 292. 293, 296\n\nBrienne, Coxnte de, r66, 266\n\nBristol, Earl of, 246\n\nBrown, Capability. 14\n\nBrowne. Sir R iehard, 302\n\nBuckingham, Countess of, 66\n\nBuckingham, George Villiers, Earl of. 40\u201341 assassination of, 97\u201399, 101, 107, 121, 181 and Carlisle, 86, 91. 93\u201394- 96in Erance. 84\u201386.93. 97 impeachment proceedings against, 92 and Lucy, 61\u201364, 85\u201386, 93\u201394.100, 130 power base of, 66. 78, 83, 84, 88 90, 91. 92, 93, 99 war policy of, 65, 82\u201383, 92. 97. 99. 107. 110\n\nBuckingham, Karherine Manners.\n\nMarchioness, 6(1\u201367.98\n\n## C\n\nCadenet. Marechal de, 09\u201370\n\nCalvin, Johni, >\n\nCampion, Thomas, 28\n\nC'.apel, Baron Arthur, 296\n\nCarew, Thomas, 127\u201328.166, 181\n\nCarlcton, Sir Dudley, 28. 34, 90\n\nCarlile, Lodovic and Joan, 321\u201322\n\nCarlisle, James Hay, Earl of and Buckingham, 86.01.93\u201394.96 career at court, 90, 91, 92, 93\u201394, 115\u201316, 118\u201319, 125_27, 140 children of, 96, 104, 112\u201313, 114 debts of, 111\u201312, 139, 141 diplomatic missions of, 78\u201379, 81, 94, 95\u201396, no estate of, 94, 108, 111, 138, 139, 169\u201374, 222, 229 and French faction, 108\u201310, 115\u201316, 119 illness and death of, 138\u201341 and Leicester, 113, 126, 132 lifestyle of, 77\u201378, 80\u201381, m-12, 114, 127, 140 and Spanish faction, 109\u201311, 115\n\nCarlisle, Lucy Percy Hay, Countess of: aging of, 263, 266, 314, 321\u201324 arrest of, 296\u201398, 312, 331 and Buckingham, 61\u201364, 85\u201386, 93\u201394, 100, 130 and Civil Wars, 243, 262\u201366, 267, 276, 281\u201382, 286\u201389, 295\u201396 at court, 104\u20135, 108\u20139, n4_ I7. 123, 125, 131, 135, 136, 157, 163\u201366, 181, 200, 208\u20139, 243 death of, 336 and Dorothy, 153\u201354,: 56, 197, 215\u201316, 232, 278, 312, 329, 331 financial interests of, 139, 141\u201342, 154, 163, 168\u201374, 182\u201383, 185\u201386, 195\u201396, 199, 201, 203, 205\u20136, 210, 220, 221\u201322, 229\u201330, 243\u201344, 281, 311\u201312, 319\u201321 and Henrietta Maria, 89\u201391, 92\u201393, 96, 100, 104, 109\u201311, 114\u201315, 116\u201317, n9> 121, 125, 128, 132\u201333, 165, 175, 185, 214, 219, 230, 234\u201336, 282, 326, 334 and Holland, 128\u201329, 135, 136, 153, 157, 163, 174\u201375, 185, 231, 262\u201366 ill health of, 81, 99\u2013101, 105, 136, 202\u20133, 206, 302, 312 imprisonment of 297\u201398, 301\u20133, 306\u20137, 311\u201312 indiscretions of, 136, 173, 184, 197, 230, 281\u201382, 284, 334 influence of, 104, 108\u20139,123 124, 128\u201329, 133, 137\u201338, 152.154, 156, 163, 174\u201375. 198\u201399, 206\u20137, 244\u201345 and James away, 81, 96, 108\u20139, 135 king betrayed by, 236\u201338, 284, 323 lifestyle of, 77\u201378, 100, 104\u20135, m-12, 114, 122\u201325 men's admiration of, 81\u201382, 123\u201324, 127, 129, 135, 153, 206\u20137, 232 personal traits of, 89, 91, 100\u2013101, 103\u20134, 116\u201317, 121, 122\u201324, 125, 130. 136, 153, 165, 167\u201368, 263, 278\u201379, 322 at Petersham Lodge, 321\u201324 poetry about, 123, 128, 130\u201331, 142, 153, 157, 165\u201366 portraits of, 162\u201363, 209and Pym, 228\u201329, 230\u201331, 232, 236, 237, 262 release from Tower, 312\u201314 and royalist plots, 307, 313,326, 333\u201335 salon of, 80, 123\u201324, 165\u201368, 263andWentworth\/Strafford, 134\u201338, 152\u201353, 154, 162\u201363, 174.175. 94.195, 198\u201399. 215\u201316, 218, 221, 229\u201330 and young James, 79, 80\n\nCartwright, William, 166\n\nCataline (Jonson), 263\n\nCatherine of Aragon, 9\n\nCatholics:\n\nAnglicans vs., 9\u201310, 26\n\nFrench faction, 106, 107, 108\u201310, 115\u201318, 200 and Gunpowder Plot, 12 in Ireland, 233, 257 as \"Papists,\" 177\u201379, 200, 208, 210, 235, 246\n\nProtestants vs., 91\u201392, 204\u20135, 210, 211, 233, 235, 266 and recusancy laws, 120\n\nCavendish, Gen. Charles, 264\n\nCecil, Anne (Northumberland), 113, 136, 176\u201377, 275\n\nCecil, Catherine, 275, 290\n\nCecil, Elizabeth (Berkshire), 23, 31\u201332, 101, 116, 177, 185, 189, 275, 327\n\nCecil, Robert, see Salisbury\n\nCecil, William, see Salisbury\n\nChamberlain, John, letters of, 20, 21, 28, 29, 30, 34, 42, 48, 57, 59, 67, 70\u201371, 77, 124\n\n\"Character of the Countess of Carlisle\"\n\n(Mathew), 131, 164\u201365, 167\u201368, 199\n\nCharles, Prince of Wales: birth and christening of, 121\u201322 as Charles II, 295, 305, 308 and Civil Wars, 267, 269, 280, 281, 282, 286\u201389 fears for safety of, 235 Irish uprising in support of, 306 and Strafford trial, 220, 225\n\nCharles I, king of England: ascending the throne, 83\u201384 brides sought for, 78, 81, 82, 84 and Civil Wars, 241, 244\u201353, 257\u201358, 261\u201374, 279\u201385, 288, 291\u201392 coronation of, 88, 133, 192 enemies of 200, 234, 268 execution of, 294\u201395, 304 and Henrietta Maria, 81, 84, 86\u201391, 96\u201397, 131, 236\u201338, 246, 249, 266, 268, and Lucy, 86, 236\u201338, 284, 323 and Parliament, 91\u201392, 96\u201397, 108, in, 115, 118, 146, 170, 201, 203, 204, 208\u201310, 211, 228, 236, 237\u201338, 270\u201372, 292, 323\n\nPersonal Rule of, 108, 124, 146, 210, 211\n\npersonal traits of, 83, 89, 125, 209, 229\n\nPetition of Right, 96\u201397, 203 as Prince, 26, 27, 40, 56, 57, 62, 81 as prisoner of the army, 272\u201374, 291\u201392 and Scottish army, 270\u201372 and Scottish rebellion, 179, 180, 185, 187, 191\n\ntrial of, 292\u201394, 296 and war with Scotland, 194, 198, 207, 208, 209\u201311 and war with Spain, 82\u201383, 106, 107\n\nCharles II, king of England, 295, 305, 306, 308 in exile, 323, 326, 332 and Restoration, 307, 313, 333\u201335\n\nChateauneuf, Marquis de, 115\u201318, 119, 166, 181\n\nChevreuse, Duchesse Marie de, 86, 179\u201381, 197\n\nChurch of England, 9\u201310, 26, 187, 211, 228, 236, 257, 264\u201365, 305, 309, 321\n\nCivil War, 241\u201358, 260\u201374, 275\n\nbattle at Nasebv, 267\u201368\n\nbattle of Cropredv Bridge, 258, 265\n\nbattle of Marston Moor, 258\n\nBristol surrender, 251\n\nCavaliers, 246, 248, 250, 267, 268\n\nCommittee of Public Safety, 243\n\nCouncil of the Two Kingdoms, 262\n\nCromwell in, 257\u201358, 260\u201362, 264, 267, 268\u201369\n\ndefections to royalist side, 251\u201352, 262 end of, 267\u201369 financing of, 246, 249, 257\n\nGloucester siege, 251, 252\n\nIndependents, 260, 261\u201363, 264\u201365, 269, 270, 276 and Irish army, 257\n\nKentish uprising, 250\u201351\n\nking as army prisoner, 273\u201374\n\nNew Model Army, 260, 261, 268\u201369, 273, 280 and Presbyterianism, 257, 260, 261\u201366, 269\u201373, 276\n\nRoundheads, 246, 250, 256, 265, 268\n\nScottish Covenanters, 257, 265\u201366, 271, 287\n\nSecond, see Second Civil War\n\nsequestration orders in, 256\u201357, 259\n\nSpencer\/Sunderland in, 241, 245, 246\u201356\n\n'York siege, 258\n\nClare, Earl of, 251\u201352\n\nClotworthy, Sir John, 230, 292, 319\u201320\n\nCoke, Sir Edward, 24\n\nCoke, Frances, 24\n\nCoke, Sir John, 159, 160, 172, 188, 193, 201\n\nCoke, Thomas, 307, 313\n\nColepepper, Sir John, 210, 236\n\nCon, George, 177\u201378\n\nConway, Sir Edward, 81\n\nConway, Viscount Edward, 136, 137\u201338, 154, 157.174, 176, 207\n\nCook, John, 293\n\nCottington, Sir Francis, 107, 109, no, 201\n\nCranfield, Lionel, 52\u201353, 80\n\nCrofts, Marjorie, 124, 127\n\nCrofts, Sir William, 149\n\nCromwell, Henry, 312\n\n(Cromwell, Oliver, 306, 310 background of, 260\u201361 and Charles I, 273, 280, 283, 292, 293, 294 in Civil Wars, 257\u201358, 260\u201361, 262, 264, 267, 268\u201369, 284, 285, 288, 289, 319 death of, 332 followers of, 276, 280, 281, 291, 303, 316 as Lord Protector, 324, 325\u201328 and Lucv, 262, 297, 314 and Parliament, 262, 280, 296, 323\n\nCromwell, Richard, 332\n\n## D\n\nDanby, Earl of, 158\n\nDarcy, Sir Francis, 31, 32\u201333, 48\n\nDavenant, Sir William. 166, 219, 224\n\nDavies, Lady Eleanor, 121\n\nDenbigh, Countess of, 66, 89, 122. 135, 136, 165, 185\n\nDenmark House, London, 23\n\nDenny, Sir Edward, 79\u201380 as Earl of Norwich, 114, 281\n\nDevereux, Dorothy, Countess of\n\nNorthumberland, 7\u20138, 13\u201314\n\nDevonshire. Dowager Countess of, 151, 263\u201364, 281, 297.313, 319, 321\u201322, 323, 324 3 7 8 -- Index\n\nDevonshire, William Cavendish, Earl of '50\u201351, 157, 158\u201359. 185\n\nDigby George, Baron, 246, 257\n\nDigby, Sir Kcnclm, 206\u20137\n\nDoncaster, James Hay, Viscount, 53 and Buckingham, 63\u201364, 65, 67, 76 diplomatic missions, 55, 56, 57\u201360, 64, 65, -1\u201372 as Earl of Carlisle, see Carlisle, James Hay lifestyle of 65, 67, 68\u201370 and Lisle, 55, 59\u201360, 75\u201377 and Lucy, 62\u201363, 65, 72, 73\n\nDoncaster, Lucy Percy, Viscountess, 53 and Buckingham, 61\u201364 ill health of, 70\u201371, 72\u201373 and James away, 58, 61, 68\u201369, 72 personal traits of, 66, 72 social life of, 65, 67\u201370, 75\n\nDonne, John, 57\n\nDuppa, Bishop Brian, 164, 321\u201322\n\n## E\n\nEdward VI, king of England, 9\n\nElizabeth, Princess \"Betty,\" 304\u20135, 308\u20139, 310, 325, 329\n\nElizabeth, Princess Royal\/Queen of\n\nBohemia, 25, 26\u201327, 55, 56, 64\u201365, 87, 106, no, 246\n\nElizabeth I, queen of England, 2, 8\u201310, 11\u201312, 14, 16, 31, 35, 40, 83, 106\n\nEngland:\n\nBishops'; War, 200; see also Scotland\n\nCivil War, 241\u201358 as Commonwealth, 306, 308, 310, 313, 316, 321 court\" life in, 37\u201341, 63 disease in, 19\u201320, 54, 87\n\ndivine right of kings in, 39\u201340, 96\u201397, 108, 118, 200, 211, 292 fashions in, 17, 26, 51, 93 as military dictatorship, 324 platonic love in, 131, 181 as Protectorate, 324, 325\u201328 recusancy laws in, 120 religious strife in, 9\u201313, 26, 83, 91\u201392, 177\u201379, 200, 204\u20135, 208, 210, 211, 260\n\nRestoration in, 302, 307, 333\u201335\n\nSealed Knot (secret council) in, 326\n\nStar Chamber in, 13, 210, 228\n\nwar with Scotland, see Scotland\n\nwar with Spain, 82\u201383, 84, 92, 106\u20137, 115\n\nwomen's roles in, 20\u201322, 32, 54, 70, 183, 244\n\nEssex, 2nd Earl of (Devereux), 8, 10, 13\u201314, 16, 21, 30, 188\n\nEssex, 3rd Earl of, 186, 208, 231, 238, 242, 247, 250, 252, 253, 258\u201359, 260, 261, 262, 264\n\nEvelyn, John, 302, 336\n\nExeter, Countess of, 91, 118\n\nExeter, Earl of (Cecil), 123\n\n## F\n\nFairfax, Ferdinand, Baron, 250\n\nFairfax, Sir Thomas, 250, 261, 268, 273, 289, 291, 334\n\nFalkland, Lucius Cary, Viscount, 247, 254\n\nFawkes, Guy, 12\n\nFelton, John, 98\u201399\n\nFerdinand of Styria, 55\u201356, 59\n\nFinch, Sir John, 209, 216\n\nFinet, Sir John, 115, 122, 125, 160\n\nFirebrace, Sir Henry, 283, 291\n\nFotherley, SirThomas, 276\u201377\n\nFrance:\n\nCatholic faction of, 106, 107, 108\u201310, 115\u201318, 119, 200 and Henrietta Maria, 84, 109, 197, 200 Huguenots in, 71\u201372, 92, 97, 109 treaties with, 115, 116,159, 188\n\nFraser, Alexander, 283, 284\n\nFrederick V, Elector Palatine, 25, 28, 55\u201356, 64\u201365, 78 as king of Bohemia, 59, 64, 84, 106, no, 145\n\n## G\n\nGarrard, Rev George, 136, 138, 150, 165, 176\n\nGondomar, Conde, 65, 78\n\nGoring, George (son), 95, 125, 219\u201320, 224\n\nGoring, Sir George, 42, 63, 81, 94, 101, 104, 109, 148 as Earl of Norwich, 281, 285, 286, 287, 289 trial of, 296\n\nGunpowder Plot, 1, 12, 336\n\n## H\n\nI labington, William, 166\n\nHacker, Francis, 294\n\nHamilton, Marchioness of, 9, 122, 135\n\nHamilton, Marquess\/Duke of, 66, 91, 138, 179 and Civil War, 280, 284\u201388 trial and execution of, 296 and war with Scotland, 186, 187, 195\n\nHammond, Rev. Henry, 188, 190, 250\n\nHammond, Robert, 280, 283, 288\n\nHampden, John, 236\n\nHarrington, James, 291\n\nHarrison. Thomas, 296\u201397, 308, 325, 336\n\nHaselrig, Sir Arthur, 236, 238\n\nHawkins, William, 147, 148, 190, 202, 208, 216, 241, 242, 245\n\nHay, Anne (daughter), 96, 97, 101, 104\u20135, 112\u201313, 127\u201328 1 lay, Archibald, 170\n\nHay, Sir James, 28, 29, 100 lifestyle of, 46, 50\u201352, 55 and Lucy, 41\u201343, 46\u201348, 49 as Master of Wardrobe, 41\u201342, 52\u201353 as Viscount Doncaster, 53 see also Carlisle, James Hay\n\nHay, James (son), 58, 79, 79\u201380, 95, 114, 125, 141\n\nI lay. Sir James (kinsman), 170, 196, 222\n\nHay; Lucy Percy, 50\u201354; see also Carlisle,\n\nLucy Percy Hay\n\nLlenrietta Maria, Queen: and affairs of state, 116, 152, 161, 186, 189, 197, 208, 216, 217, 219, 231 and (Charles, 81, 84, 86\u201391, 96\u201397, 131, 236\u201338, 246, 249, 266, 268, 305 children of, 128, 159, 180, 269, 303\u20135, 308\u20139 and Civil Wars, 246, 247, 249, 250, 252, 258, 265, 266\u201367, 268, 269, 280, 282 entourage of, 89\u201390, 92, 267, 323 in exile, 323, 326 fears for safety of, 225, 235\u201336 and France, 84, 109, 197, 200 and Lucy, 89\u201391, 92\u201393, 96, 100, 104, 109\u201311, 114 15, 116\u201317, 119, 121, 128, 132\u201333, 165, 175, 185, 214, 219, 230, 234\u201336, 282, 326, 334\n\npersonal traits of, 87, 88, 180, 229, 230\n\npregnancies of, 109, 111, 114, 116, 120\u201321, 135, 157, 258 as Queen Mother, 336 salon of, 165\u201366 and son Charles, 121 22 and Strafford, 219, 221 and war with Scotland, 186\n\nHenri I V, king of France, 115\n\nHenry; Prince, Duke of Gloucester, 269, 304\u20135\n\nHenrv, Prince of Wiles, 24\u201326, 73\n\nHenry of Nassau, Count, 25, 29\n\nHenry VIII (Shakespeare), 98\n\nHenry VIII, king of England, 2, 9, 67\n\nHerrick, Robert, 153\n\nHobbes, Thomas, 151\n\nHolland, Countess of, 90, 117\n\nHolland, Henry Rich, Earl of: career at court, 90, 115, 118\u201319, 147, 181, 218, 231\u201332, 238 and Civil \\X4irs, 243, 251\u201352, 261\u201366, 267, 269\u201370, 272, 281\u201382, 284\u201387, 289 in French faction, 106, 108, 109, 115, 116, 118, 180 influence of, 147\u201348, 151 and Lucy, 128\u201329, 135, 136, 153, 157, 163, 174\u201375.185, 231, 262\u201366 and New World colonics, 106\u20137 and royal marriage, 84 trial and execution, 296, 297, 303 and war with Scotland, 186, 187, 191, 194\u201395, 207 231\n\nHolies, Denzil, 236, 260, 263, 264, 266, 326, 334, 335\n\n[ lopton, Sir Ralph, 250\n\nHoward, SirThomas (son), 31\u201332, 101\n\nHoward, Thomas, Earl of Suffolk, 39\n\nHuguenots, 71\u201372, 92, 97, 109 1 Ivde, Edward (later Clarendon):and Civil Wars, 236, 257, 282, 285 on Lucy, 228\u201329, 230, 288\u201389 notes as historian, 140, 155, 179, 234, 323 and Restoration, 333\u201334, 335 and royalist plots, 282, 288\u201389, 3T3> 333\u201334\n\n## I\n\nIreton, Henry, 268, 280, 293\n\nIrish Rebellion (1641), 233\u201334, 235, 243, 272\n\n## J\n\nJames, Prince, Duke of York, 135, 235. 284, 305, 308\n\nJames I, king of England, 1, 10\u201314, 107 and children, 26, 27, 64\u201365, 78 court of, 37\u201341, 42\u201343, 50\u201353, 67, 69 death of, 82\u201384, 99 and homosexuality, 41, 61, 83 and Lucy's marriage, 48, 50 and Parliament, 39 petitions to, 17\u201318 and Queen Anne, 16, 23, 56 war hated by, 56, 82\u201383\n\nJermyn, Sir Henry, 184, 197, 217\u201318, 219, 220, 224, 225, 226, 272, 323, 334\n\nJones, Inigo, 17, 24, 28, 133, 294\n\nJonson, Ben, 17, 263\n\nJuxon, Bishop William, 294\n\n## K\n\nKillegrew. Sir Robert, 58\n\nKing James Bible, 11\n\n## L\n\nLanark, Earl of, 280, 283\u201386\n\nLangdale, Sir Marmaduke, 268\n\nLa Rochefoucauld, Due de, 85, 86 3 8 0 -- Index\n\nLaud, Bishop\/Archbishop William, 61, 107, 109, 147, 170, 175, 204 impeachment of, 216 \"popery\" of, 178\u201379, 200\u2013201, 210, 211\n\nLeicester, 1st Earl of, 77, 82\n\nLeicester, Dorothy Percy, Countess of, 101\u20135 ambitions for Robert, 104, 132, 145, 151, 157, 159, 161, 188, 217, 227, 242\n\nchildren of, 102\u20133, 146, 149, 150, 232\u201333, 275\u201379, 290;see ako names under Sidney and Civil War, 241, 242, 245, 250, 256, 259, 275\n\ndeath of, 330 financial concerns of, 147\u201349, J54> 160, 183\u201384, 201, 233, 245, 256, 259, 277\u201378, 290, 305\u20136, 317\u201318, 329 in France, 192\u201393, 216, 232 and Henry's death, 254\u201356 ill health of, 196\u201397, 328\u201330 and Lucy, 153\u201354, 156.197, 215\u201316, 232, 278, 312, 329, 331 marriage of Robert and, 103, 149, 155\u201356, 183\u201384, 259, 290, 318\u201319, 324\u201325, 328 at middle age, 131\u201332\n\npersonal traits of, 103, 132, 151, 157, 233, 234, 324\u201325\n\nportrait of, 163\n\npregnancies of, 146, 149, 192, 202, 216, 227\n\nresponsibilities of, 102, 147\u201349, 183\u201384, 191, 202, 245, 255, 259, 278 and royal children, 303\u20135, 308\u20139, 310\n\nsalon of, 234\n\nLeicester, Lettice Knollys, Dowager\n\nCountess of, 14, 16, 112\n\nLeicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of, 14, 101\u20132\n\nLeicester, Robert Sidney Earl of, 101 career dependent on others, 104, 126, 132, 151, 154, 156, 157, 160\u201361, 188\u201389, !93, 198\u201399, 201\u20132, 204, 205, 214\u201315, 217\u201318, 220, 225, 226\u201327, 232, 244\u201345, 248, 256\u201357.316\u201317 and Carlisle, 113, 126, 132 and Civil Wars, 241, 242, 275, 290 diplomatic tasks of, 132, 145\u201349, 155\u201356, 159\u201360, 180, 188, 189, 191, 192\u201393, 197, 202, 227, 232, 233\u201334, 242, 244, 247\u201348, 256 and Dorothy's death, 330\n\nfinancial affairs of, 147\u201348, 160, 183\u201384, 193, 202, 233, 256\u201357, 277\u201378, 290, 305\u20136, 317\u201318 and Henry's death, 254\u201356 marriage of Dorothy and, 103, 149, 155\u201356, 183\u201384, 259, 290, 318\u201319, 324\u201325, 328\n\npersonal traits of, 103, 217, 233, 259, 328\n\nLeicester House, 148\u201349, 156, 157, 159, 169, 201, 202, 232, 234, 245, 278\n\nLennox, Duke of, 138, 153, 187\n\nLenthall, William, 296\n\nLindsey, Dowager Countess of, 287, 302\n\nLisle, Dorothy Percy, Viscountess: children of, 58, 75, 102\u20133 as Countess of Leicester, 101\u20135;see \"ho\n\nLeicester, Dorothy Percy\n\nLucy's visits with, 67\u201368 and mother's death, 58\u201359\n\npregnancies of, 74, 76, 82\n\nLisle, Philip Sidney, Viscount, see Sidney, Philip\n\nLisle, Robert Sidney, Viscount, 56, 58, 191 career dependent on others, 55, 75\u201376, 82, 9i and Doncaster, 55, 59\u201360, 75\u201377 as Earl of Leicester, 101; see also Leicester,\n\nRobert Sidney\n\nfinancial concerns of, 82\n\npersonal traits of, 76\u201377\n\nLisle, Viscount (father of Robert), 30, 31\u201333, 35. 36, 48.49\u201350\n\nLister, Matthew, 99, 176\n\nLong, Robert, 217\u201318\n\nLouis XIII, king of France, 71\u201372, 92, 109, in, 145\u201346, 180\n\nLovelace, John, 158\n\nLovelace, Sir Richard, 181\n\n## M\n\nManchester, Earl of, 103\n\nManchester, Earl of (Mandeville), 231, 242, 257, 260, 261, 262, 264, 272, 334\n\nManchester, Earl of (son), 103, 212\n\nMandeville, Viscount, 103, 106, 107, 217, 230\u201332, 236\n\nMantua, Duke of, 109\n\nMary, Princess, 128, 180, 224, 309\n\nMary Queen of Scots, 9, 10\n\nMathew, Tobie, 63, 121, 122, 124\u201325, 127, 178, 322 on Lucy's character, 131, 164\u201365, 167\u201368, 199 and Lucy's salon, 124, 165\u201368 in Suckling's verse, 164\u201365\n\nMaurice of Orange, Prince (uncle), 64\n\nMaurice, Prince (nephew), 268\n\nMayerne, Theodore de, 43, 73, 96, 99, 101, 104, 176, 204, 207, 258\n\nMazarin, (CardinalJules, 265, 269\u201372\n\nMedici, Marie de, 180, 181\n\nMende, Bishop de, 88, 89\n\nMildmay, Anthony, 308, 310\n\nMonck, Gen. George, 333, 334, 335\n\nMontagu, Walter, 149, 161\n\nMontereul, Jean de, 267, 269\u201371\n\nMontgomery, Earl of, 90\n\nMontrose, Earl of, 265\n\nMoray, Sir Robert, 269\n\nMordaunt, John and Elizabeth, 327\u201328, 332, 333\u201334: 335\n\nMotteville, Madame de, 282\n\n## N\n\nNaunton, Sir Robert, 59\n\nNedham, Marchmont, 291\n\nNewcastle, Earl of, 250, 257\u201358\n\nNewport, Earl of, 235\n\nNew World, colonies in, 106\u20137, 182, 210\n\nNicholas, Sir Edward, 230, 313, 322\u201323\n\nNonsuch Palace, 67\u201368, 96, 152, 336\n\nNorthumberland, 7th Earl of, 9\n\nNorthumberland, Algernon Percy, 10th Earl of, 136\u201337, 138 animosity to monarchy, 198, 203\u20134, 224\u201325, 242\u201343, 284, 334 and Anne's death, 176\u201377 and Charles's trial, 292 children of, 149\u201350 and Civil Wars, 242, 249, 251, 262, 263, 274, 280, 284, 290, 291 and Dorothy, 151, 155, 158, 242, 330 and financial matters, 171, 172, 173, 186, 202, 205\u20136, 290, 332 and Leicester's career, 214\u201315, 216, 245, 2J7. 275 as Lord High Admiral, 181\u201382, 186, 189, 201, 225, 242\n\npersonal traits of, 154\u201355, 195\n\nremarriage of, 243 and Restoration, 334, 335\u201336\n\nretirement ofj 303 and royal children, 269, 272, 284, 303\u20134 and war with Scotland, 197, 198, 201, 206, 207\u20138\n\nNorthumberland, Anne Cecil, Countess of, 113, 136, 176\u201377, 275\n\nNorthumberland, 1)orothy Devereux, Countess of, 7\u20138, 13\u201314, 22 and daughters' marriages, 23\u201336, 37, 43\u201344 death of, 58\u201359 and husband in Tower, 16\u201318, 23, 32 in London, 18\u201319, 57 marriage of, 14 moods of, 15, 21 and Queen Anne, 16, 18, 23\n\nNorthumberland, Henrv Percy, 9th Earl of, 81, 112\u201313\n\nattitude toward women, 20\u201322, 59, 72 and daughter's marriages, 30, 34, 44\u201348, 50, 73, 76\n\ndeath of, 132\n\nmarriage of, 14\n\nrelease from lower, 72, 73 in Tower, 1\u20133, 7, 13, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23, 32, 39, 44\u201348, 113 and wife's death, 59\n\nNorwich, Edward Denny, Earl of, 114, 281\n\nNorwich, George Goring, Earl of, 281, 285, 286, 287, 289, 296, 302\n\nNottingham, Charles I Ioward, Karl of, 39\n\n## O\n\nOlivarez, Conde, 82\n\n(Ormonde, Earl of, 327, 335\n\nOsborne, Dorothy, 316, 319, 322\n\nOverbury, Sir Thomas, 44\n\nOwen, Sir John, 296\n\n## P\n\nParkhurst, Sir Robert, 182, 221\u201322\n\nParliament: and the army; 273\u201374, 291 Church of England outlawed by, 309 and Civil Wars, 241\u201353, 256\u201358, 261\u201374, 280, 283, 285, 288\u201389, 291\u201392, 294 and constitutional revolution, 291, 295\u201396\n\nGrand Remonstrance, 234, 236 1 louse of Lords abolished by, 295 and King (Charles, see (Charles I and Kingjames, 39\u201340\n\nLong Parliament, 261, 325\n\nPetition of Right, 96\u201397, 108, 203\n\nPresbyterians in, 273, 280, 296\n\nPuritans in, 92, 210, 231\n\nReign of Saints, 323 and Restoration, 333, 335 and royal prerogative, 277\n\nRump Parliament, 292, 295, 323, 332\u201333 and Strafford's case, 212\u201314, 216, 218\u201319, 224 and war with Scotland, 201, 203, 209, 219\u201320 witch hunts of, 216, 230, 296\n\nPelham, John, 279\n\nPenshurst, 35\u201336, 48\u201349, 67\u201368, 72, 73, 74\u201376, 81, 82, 102\u20133, 147, 183\u201384, 188, 250, 259, 278, 289\u201390\n\nPepys, Samuel, 336\n\nPercival, John, 311, 319\u201321\n\nPercival, Sir Philip, 182\u201383, 243, 311, 319\u201320\n\nPercy, Algernon, 160, 163\u201364, 203 birth and childhood of, 8, 15 as Earl of Northumberland, 136, 154\u201355; see also Northumberland, Algernon Percy\n\nmarriage of, 113\n\ntravel of, 56, 77, 132\n\nPercy, Dorothy:\n\nchildhood of, 7\u20138, 15\u201316, 20, 22\n\neducation of, 22 and her father, 1, 2\u20133, 20, 22, 44\u201345 of marriageable age, 23, 26\u201336, 37 personal traits of, 22, 28, 45 as refuge for Lucy, 47\n\nwedding of, 34, 36; see also Sidney\n\nDorothy Percy\n\nPercy, Henry, see Northumberland, Henry\n\nPercy\n\nPercy, Henry \"Harry,\" 113, 227 in army plot, 219\u201320, 224\u201325, 269 as Baron Percy of Alnwick, 250 birth of, 8 childhood of, 15, 22 and Civil Wars, 250, 265, 267, 288, 289 at court, 137, 151, 160\u201361, 180, 214\u201315, 216\n\ndeath of, 332 as Lord Chamberlain, 322\u201323, 332 and Lucy, 99, 137, 157, 265, 323, 332\n\npersonal traits of, 154\u201355 and war with Scotland, 186, 207, 208, 219\n\nPercy, Lucy:\n\nchildhood of, 7\u20138, 15\u201316, 20, 22\n\nat court, 37\u201341 and her father, 1, 2\u20133, 20, 22, 39, 45\u201348 of marriageable age, 23, 37, 41\u201344, 46\u201349\n\npersonal traits of, 22, 45, 66 in the Tower, 46\u201348\n\nwedding of, 50; see also Hay, Lucy Percy\n\nPercy, Thomas, (Gunpowder Plot), 12\n\nPercy, Sir Thomas, (Pilgrimage of Grace), 2\n\nPercy family, 13, 45, 164, 177, 242, 277\n\nPeterborough, Dowager Countess of, 327\n\nPhilip II, king of Spain, 10\n\nPhilip III, king of Spain, 55, 78, 82\n\nPortland, Richard Weston, Earl of, 124\u201325, 165\n\nPresbyterianism, 10, 179, 187, 257, 260, 261\u201366, 269\u201373, 276, 280, 296, 323, 334\u201335\n\nPride, Thomas, 291\n\nPride's Purge, 291, 333\n\nProtestants, 9\u201310, 26 in Bishops' War, 200, 204 vs. Catholics, 91\u201392, 204\u20135, 210, 211, 233, 235, 266\n\nPuritans, 9, 92, 98, 106\u20137, r90> 210, 211, 224, 231, 235, 260, 309, 324, 326, 335\n\nPym, John, 203, 216, 220, 225, 234 and Charles, 228, 236, 237 and Civil War, 250 and Cromwell, 261 death of, 260 ill health of, 250, 257 and Lucy, 228\u201329, 230\u201331, 232, 236, 237, 262 and Strafford, 212, 213\u201314, 218\u201319, 223\u201324, 230\n\n## R\n\nRadcliffe, Sir George, 195\u201396, 199, 201, 203, 206, 210-n, 244\n\nRailton, William, 162, 229, 243\u201344\n\nRambouillet, Marquise and Madame de, 166\n\nRaymond, Thomas, 127, 130, 138\n\nRestoration, 302, 307, 333\u201335\n\nRich, Lady Anne, 150\u201351, 159, 189\n\nRich, Sir Henry, 29, 42\u201343 as Baron Kensington, 81, 84 see also Holland, Henry Rich, Earl of\n\nRich, Isabella, 48, 50, 53\n\nRich, Lady Penelope Devereux, 14, 17, 30\n\nRichelieu, Armand du Plessis de, Cardinal, 71\u201372, 84, 85\u201386, 89, 91\u201392, 97, 109, 179, 180, 197, 265\n\nRichmond, Duke of, 294\n\nRobert the Bruce, 263\n\nRubens, Peter Paul, 115, 124\n\nRupert, Prince, 246, 248, 250, 251, 253, 258, 268\n\nRushworth, John, 220, 237\n\nRussell, William, 185\n\n## S\n\nSabran, Monsieur de, 265\u201366, 267\n\n\"Sacharissa\" (Waller), 150, 191\n\nSaint-Luc, Mademoiselle, 68, 77, 78\n\nSalisbury, Robert Cecil, Earl of, 12, 19, 39,\n\n\"3, 174\u201375, 176\u201377\n\nSalisbury, William Cecil, Earl of, 251, 275\u201376, 290, 297, 326\u201327\n\nScot, Thomas, 302, 303, 306, 311, 312\u201313\n\nScotland:\n\nBishops' War, 200\n\nBook of Common Prayer in, 178\u201379 and (Civil Wars, 257, 260, 262\u201366, 267, 271\u201372, 285, 289, 292 and Commonwealth, 306, 310\n\nPresbyterianism in, 10, 179, 187, 257, 260, 264\u201366\n\nrebellion in, 179, 180, 185, 191 and Restoration, 307 war with, 186\u201387, 194. 197. 198, 200, 201, 204\u20135, 207\u20138, 209\u201311, 219\u201320, 231\n\nScottish Covenanters, 257, 265\u201366, 271, 287\n\nScott of Buccleuch, Walter, Lord, 30\n\nSecond Civil War, 279\u201392\n\nbattle of Preston, 289\n\nCavaliers, 284, 286, 288\n\nCharles as prisoner in, 280\u201381\n\nCharles seized by army, 291\u201392\n\n(Charles's execution, 294\u201395\n\n(Charles's trial, 292\u201394 and constitutional revolution, 291, 295\u201396\n\nCromwell in, 280, 281, 283, 284, 285, 288, 289, 292\n\nexodus of wealth in, 280\n\nIndependents, 284, 296\n\nLadv Carlisle arrested, 296\u201398\n\nPenshurst harassed in, 289\u201390\n\nperiodicals published in, 290\u201391\n\nRoundheads, 286, 289\n\nroyalist plots in, 281\u201389, 302\n\ntrials in, 296\n\nSidney, Algernon, 102, 146, 258, 276, 290, 292, 325, 328, 329, 334\n\nSidney, Anne, 102, 192, 324, 329\n\nSidney, Barbara, 51, 70\n\nSidney, Dorothy \"Doll\": birth of, 49 childhood of, 102, 146 of marriageable age, 150\u201351, 157\u201359, 170, 184\u201385, 189, 263 marriage to Spencer, 190\u201391\n\nSidney, Dorothy Percy: pregnancies of, 44, 48\u201349, 54 see also Lisle, Dorothy Percy\n\nSidney, Elizabeth, 276, 309\u201310, 312\n\nSidney, Frances, 242, 276, 305\n\nSidney, Henry, 232\u201333, 242, 304, 328, 329\n\nSidney, Isabella, 276, 290, 309, 315, 317\n\nSidney, Lucy; 102, 192, 279\n\nSidney, Mary, 276, 290\n\nSidney, Sir Philip, 30, 54, 188\n\nSidney, Philip, 102, 146, 158, 334\n\nbirth of, 54 and Civil War, 242, 243, 276 and his father, 316\u201317 and king's trial, 292 as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, 275, 276 and Lucy's imprisonment, 297, 303, 306\u20137, 311\n\nmarriage of, 275 as Viscount Lisle, 195, 207, 208, 227, 243, 244, 275, 297\n\nSidney, Robert, 30\u201331, 32\u201336, 48, 191\n\nmarriage to Dorothy, 34, 36, 45 as Viscount Lisle, 55; see also Lisle, Robert Sidney\n\nSidney, Robert (son), childhood of, 102\n\nSidney, Robin, 146, 276, 278\n\nSkippon, Philip, 268\n\nSmythe, Isabella Rich, 53, 57, 70\u201371\n\nSmythe, Sir John, 70\n\nSmythe, Robert, 315\u201316\n\nSmythe, Sir Thomas, 315\n\nSmythe, Tom (Viscount Strangford), 70\n\nSomerset, Earl of, 39, 40\u201341, 44\n\nSomerset, Frances Howard, Countess of, 39, 44.47. 48\n\nSouthampton, Earl of, 192, 241, 247, 294\n\nSpain:\n\nCatholicism in, 83, 204\n\nloans from, 204, 208\n\ntrade with, 107\u20138\n\ntreaties with, 56, 110\u201311, 115\n\nwar with England, 82\u201383, 84, 92, 106\u20137, n 5\n\nSpencer, Dorothy \"Doll\" Sidney: and Civil War, 245, 247, 248, 250\u201356 as Countess of Sunderland, 250 family life of, 232, 248, 259, 312 and Henry's death, 254\u201356\n\nmarriage of, 190\u201391\n\npersonal traits of, 276, 305, 316\n\nportraits of, 189, 216\n\npregnancies of, 202, 216, 242. 247, 255\n\nremarriage of, 315\u201316, 324\n\nSpencer, Dorothy \"Poppet\" (daughter), 242, 248\n\nSpencer, Henry (son), 259, 296\n\nSpencer, Lord Henry, 185, 189 and Civil War, 241, 245, 246\u201356 death of, 253\u201356 as Earl of Sunderland, 250\n\nmarriage to Doll, 190\u201391 384\n\nSpcncer, Lucy, 276\n\nSpencer, Robert, 242, 304\n\nStrafford, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of, 199\u2013200 at court, 201, 203\u20134\n\ndeath of, 225\u201326\n\nenemies of, 204\u20135, 210. 212, 221, 224\n\nimpeachment of, 211, 212\u201314, 230\n\nimprisonment of, 215\u201316, 220 and Lucy's financial interests, 201, 203, 210, 220, 221\u201322, 229\u201330, 243\u201344, 311\u201312, 321\n\ntrial of, 218\u201319, 220\u201324, 225, 231, 257, 294 and war with Scotland, 207\u20138, 210, 219, 222\n\nStrangford, Barbara Sidney, Lady, 192, 276, 315\n\nStrangford, Viscount, 276\u201378, 290, 306, 309, 315, 317\u201318\n\nStrickland, Mrs., 17\n\nStroud, William, 236\n\nSuckling, Sir John, 130\u201331, 164\u201365, 181, 219, 224, 225\n\nSudbury, Rev. John, 253\u201354, 255\n\nSuffolk, Thomas Howard, Earl of, 39, 52, 243\n\nSyon House, 7, 14\u201316, 18, 58, 59, 67, 73, 76, 149, 176, 207\n\n## T\n\nTemple, Sir John, 188, 217\u201318, 220, 224, 226, 243\u201344, 311, 316\n\nTemple, William, 316, 319\n\nTillieres, Comte de, 68\u201369, 88\n\nTillieres, Comtesse de, 68\u201369, 77, 88\n\nTitus, Capt. Silus, 282\u201383, 29'\n\nTraill, James, 95\u201396, 114\n\n## V\n\nVan Dvck, Sir Anthony, 162\u201363, 164, 189, 209, 217\n\nVane, Sir Henry, 121, 125, 129, 133, 201, 203, 206, 222\u201323\n\nVane, Sir Henry the Younger, 223, 260, 262, 264, 303\n\nVan Somer, Paul, 17\n\nVilliers, George, see Buckingham\n\nVilliers, Mary (Herbert), 122, 135, 153\n\nVoiture, Vincent, 166\n\n## W\n\nWake, Sir Isaac, 114\n\nWalker, Henry, 291\n\nWalker, Robert, 253\n\nWaller, Edmund, 123, 142, 150, 153, 160, 166, 189, 191\n\nWaller, Sir William, 250, 258, 267\n\nWarwick, Sir Philip, 258, 270\u201371, 272\n\nWarwick, Robert Rich, Earl of, 208, 231, 289\n\nWatson, Thomas, 33\n\nWentworth, Sir George, 243, 311\n\nWentworth, Sir Thomas, 133\u201339\n\ncareer at court, 152, 156, 195, 199\u2013200 and Dorothy, 151 as Earl of Strafford, 199\u2013200; see also Strafford, Thomas Wentworth as Lord Deputy of Ireland, 156, 194\u201395 and Lucy, 134\u201338, 152\u201353, 154, 162\u201363, 174 175, 194, 195.198\u201399 and Lucy's financial interests, 139, 152, 154, 170\u201373, 182\u201383, 185\u201386, 195\u201396, 199\n\npersonal traits of, 195, 199\n\nportraits of 162\n\nreputation of, 133 and Spanish faction, 133, 135 >and war with Scotland, 198\n\nWeston, Sir Richard, 107, 109, no, 115, 124, 129\n\nWhitelocke, Bulstrode, 238, 249\n\nWhorwood, Jane, 282\u201383, 29'\n\nWilliam, Prince of Orange, 224, 309\n\nWilmot, Henry, 265\n\nWindebank, Sir Francis, 164, 199, 216\n\nWoodforde, William, 58, 70\n\nWorsley, Robert, 320, 325\n\n## Y\n\nYork, Prince James, Duke of, 271, 285\n\n# _Acknowledgements_\n\nI AM DEEPLY GRATEFUL to my Canadian editor, Phyllis Bruce, for her masterly editing of the manuscript, which infinitely improved it, and to my American editor, Carolyn Marino, for her expertise and her confidence in the project. I also wish to thank Jennifer Civiletto, who oversaw production of the book, and Noelle Zitzer along with Katie Hearn on the Canadian side. My thanks to Barbara Czarnecki for her painstaking copyediting. I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude to my agent, Beverley Slopen, for her unfailing support and sage advice. Special thanks to my husband, Irving Betcherman, for his constant encouragement in this, as in all my ventures.\n\nI wish to acknowledge permission received for access to their family papers from the tenth Duke of Northumberland, the first Viscount DeL'Isle, and the tenth Earl Fitzwilliam.\n\n# _About the Author_\n\nLITA-ROSE BETCHERMAN received a doctorate in Tudor and Stuart history from the University of Toronto and was the Women's Bureau director for the province of Ontario. She is the author of three books on Canadian history. She lives in Toronto.\n\nVisit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.\n\n# [PRAISE FOR \n _Court Lady and Country Wife_](9781443402101_epub_toc_r1.htm#cola)\n\n\"An intimate view of Stuart England.\"\n\n_\u2014New York Times Book Review_\n\n\"Personalities, fashion, intrigue, and even parliamentary and military history blend to provide a multifaceted entry into a period not always accessible to general readers of history.\"\n\n_\u2014Publishers Weekly_\n\n\" _Court Lady and Country Wife_ is a fascinating and substantial read, rich with historical and political detail, complex and sharply drawn characters, and more plot twists and turns than could be contained in any novel.\"\n\n\u2014Diane Schoemperlen\n\n\"[A] fascinating dual biography of two seventeenth-century British sisters.\"\n\n_\u2014Booklist_\n\n_\"Court Lady and Country Wife_ is a captivating portrait of two daring sisters at the center of a tumultuous period in history Betcherman depicts the story of the two Percy sisters in a way that integrates the domestic and the political, the personal and the public, giving a refreshingly complete and balanced portrait of England in the seventeenth century. I found it absorbing, rich with detail, and highly readable.\"\n\n\u2014 Sandra Gulland, author of the Josephine B. trilogy\n\n\"Betchcrman skillfully manages to keep the reader enthralled with the thriller like pace at which she delivers the story.... The details of court life, clothing, and customs are superb.... A gripping and fabulously well told story.\"\n\n_\u2014 Globe and Mail_ (Toronto)\n\n# _Note on names_\n\n**IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN,** influential men vied with one another for titles that would elevate them to the peerage. The king could grant five titles. In ascending order, these were baron (whose wife would be baroness); viscount (viscountess); earl (countess); marquess or marquis (marchioness); and duke (duchess). The titles were hereditary, passing in most cases to the peer's eldest son or closest male heir, though some ancient peerages allowed for the title to pass to a daughter in the absence of a male descendant. Knights and baronets, who are not in the peerage, were customarily addressed as \"Lord\" in the seventeenth century, a usage that would be considered incorrect today.\n\nHere is a list of principal characters and the date of their new titles:\n\n_Lucy Percy\u2014_ Lady Hay (1617), Viscountess Doncaster (1618), Countess of Carlisle (1622)\n\n_Dorothy Percy\u2014_ Lady Sidney (1616), Viscountess Lisle (1618), Countess of Leicester (1626)\n\n_Sisters'father\u2014_ Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland (1585)\n\n_Sisters' mother\u2014_ Dorothy Devereux, Countess of Northumberland (ca.1594)\n\n_Sisters' brothers\u2014_ Sir Algernon Percy, tenth Earl of Northumberland (1632) \u2014 Henry Percy (Harry), Baron Percy of Alnwick (1643)\n\n_Lucy's husband\u2014_ Sir James Hay, Viscount Doncaster (1618), first Earl of Carlisle (1622)\n\n_Lucy's stepson_ \u2014James Hay, Viscount Doncaster (1623)\n\n_Dorothy's husband\u2014_ Sir Robert Sidney, Viscount lisle (1618), second Earl of Leicester (1626)\n\n_Dorothy's elder sons\u2014_ Philip Sidney, Viscount Lisle (1626) \u2014Algernon Sidney\n\n_Dorothy's father-in-law\u2014_ Sir Robert Sidney, Viscount Lisle (1605), first Earl of Leicester (1618)*\n\n_Dorothy's son-in-law\u2014_ Henry Spencer, Baron Spencer (1636), first Earl of Sunderland (1642)\n\n_Sisters' uncle\u2014_ Robert Devcreux, second Earl of Essex (1576)\n\n_Cousins\u2014_ Robert Devcreux, third Earl of Essex (1601) \u2014 Sir Henry Rich, Viscount Kensington (1623), first Karl of Holland (1624)\n\n_Friends\u2014_ Sir George Goring, Baron Goring (1628), Earl of Norwich (1644) \u2014 Edward Montagu, Viscount Mandeville (1626), second Earl of Manchester (1642)\n\n\u2014William Cecil, second Earl of Salisbury (1614) \n\u2014Thomas Howard, Earl of Berkshire (1626) \n\u2014Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford (1640)\n\n_Royal favorite\u2014_ George Villiers, Viscount Villiers (1616), Earl of Buckingham (1617), Marquess of Buckingham (1618), first Duke of Buckingham (1623)\n\n*Not to be confused with Queen Elizabeth's Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley who had died in 1588 without leaving a legitimate heir. King James conferred the extinct title on the Sidney family\n\n# Copyright\n\n_Court Lady and Country Wife_ \n\u00a92005 by Lita-Rosc Betcherman.\n\nAll rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.\n\nA Phyllis Bruce Book, published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd\n\nNo part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.\n\nFirst published in hardcover by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd: 2005 This trade paperback edition; 2006\n\nHarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2 Bloor Street East, 20th Floor Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4W 1A8\n\n_www.hurpercollins.ca_\n\nLibrary and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication\n\nBetchcrman, Lita-Rose, 1927-Court lady and country wife: royal privilege and civil war: two noble sisters in seventeenth-century England \/ Lita-Rose Betcherman\u20141st trade pbk. ed.\n\n\"A Phyllis Bruce book\". \nISBN-13: 978-0-00-639460-0 \nISBN-10: 0-00-639460-4 \nEPub Edition \u00a9 NOVEMBER 2010 ISBN:9781443402101\n\n1. Carlisle, Lucy Hay, Countess of, 1599-1660. 2. Leicester, Dorothy Sidney, Countess of, 1598? 1659. 3. Great Britain\u2014Court and courtiers\u2014History\u201417th century. 4. Penshurst Place (England). 5. Percy family. 6. Great Britain\u2014History\u2014Stuarts, 1603-1714 \u2014 Biography. 7. Countesses\u2014Great Britain \u2014 Biography. 8. Sisters\u2014Great Britain\u2014Biography. 1. Title.\n\nDA378.P47B48 2006 941.06'0922 \nC2006-903972-0\n\nRRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1\n\n# About the Publisher\n\n**Australia** \nHarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd. \n25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321) \nPymble, NSW 2073, Australia \nhttp:\/\/www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au\n\n**Canada** \nHarperCollins Canada \n2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor \nToronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada \nhttp:\/\/www.harpercollinsebooks.ca\n\n**New Zealand** \nHarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited \nP.O. Box 1 \nAuckland, New Zealand \nhttp:\/\/www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz\n\n**United Kingdom** \nHarperCollins Publishers Ltd. \n77-85 Fulham Palace Road \nLondon, W6 8JB, UK \nhttp:\/\/www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk\n\n**United States** \nHarperCollins Publishers Inc. \n10 East 53rd Street \nNew York, NY 10022 \nhttp:\/\/www.harpercollinsebooks.com\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}} +{"text":" \n# \nPublished 2018 by Prometheus Books\n\n_Bureau of Spies: The Secret Connections between Espionage and Journalism in Washington_. Copyright \u00a9 2018 by Steven T. Usdin. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.\n\nCover design by Liz Mills \nCover image \u00a9 Eric Nathan \/ Alamy Stock Photo \nCover design \u00a9 Prometheus Books\n\nTrademarked names appear throughout this book. Prometheus Books recognizes all registered trademarks, trademarks, and service marks mentioned in the text.\n\nThe internet addresses listed in the text were accurate at the time of publication. The inclusion of a website does not indicate an endorsement by the author or by Prometheus Books, and Prometheus Books does not guarantee the accuracy of the information presented at these sites.\n\nInquiries should be addressed to \nPrometheus Books \n59 John Glenn Drive \nAmherst, New York 14228 \nVOICE: 716\u2013691\u20130133 \u2022 FAX: 716\u2013691\u20130137 \nWWW.PROMETHEUSBOOKS.COM\n\n22 21 20 19 18 5 4 3 2 1\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nNames: Usdin, Steven T., 1961- (author)\n\nTitle: Bureau of spies : the secret connections between espionage and journalism in Washington \/ by Steven T. Usdin.\n\nDescription: New York : Prometheus Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.\n\nIdentifiers: LCCN 2018016005 (print) | LCCN 2018033650 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633884779 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633884762 (hardcover)\n\nSubjects: LCSH: Espionage\u2014Washington (D.C.)\u2014History. | Spies\u2014Washington (D.C.)\u2014History. | Journalists\u2014Washington (D.C.)\u2014History. | Subversive activities\u2014Washington (D.C.)\u2014History. | National Press Club (U.S.)\u2014History.\n\nClassification: LCC JK468.I6 (ebook) | LCC JK468.I6 U8 2018 (print) | DDC 327.1273\u2014dc23\n\nLC record available at \n\nPrinted in the United States of America\n\n# \n#\n\nNote from the Author\n\nIntroduction: Spying between the Lines in the National Press Building\n\nChapter One: Washington Merry-Go-Round\n\nChapter Two: A Popular Spy\n\nChapter Three: \"Kike Killer\"\n\nChapter Four: American Liberty League\n\nChapter Five: We, the People\n\nChapter Six: British Security Coordination\n\nChapter Seven: Frying Fish and Fixing Franks\n\nChapter Eight: Zapping Zapp\n\nChapter Nine: Fake News\n\nChapter Ten: Battling the French and Irish\n\nChapter Eleven: Eight Days in December\n\nChapter Twelve: Carter Goes to War\n\nChapter Thirteen: TASS: The Agency of Soviet Spies\n\nChapter Fourteen: Back Channels\n\nChapter Fifteen: Continental Press\n\nChapter Sixteen: Project Mockingbird\n\nChapter Seventeen: Active Measures\n\nChapter Eighteen: _CovertAction_\n\nEpilogue\n\nNotes\n\nIndex\n\n#\n\nThis book is a history of the connections between intelligence and journalism, of spies who pretended to be reporters and reporters who dabbled as spies, told by examining covert activities that occurred in a building four blocks from the White House, the National Press Building.\n\nConducted properly, spying leaves few traces. Some of the stories in _Bureau of Spies_ have been revealed because governments no longer feel compelled to keep them secret. Others were revealed when Nazi Germany and imperial Japan found themselves on the wrong side of history and were forced to disgorge their secrets. Post-Watergate attempts to rein in government abuses of power led to revelations about collaboration between American news media and the CIA, as well as the CIA's illegal surveillance of reporters. A few brave Russians took advantage of the turmoil swirling around the collapse of the Soviet Union to smuggle secrets from the KGB's archives that have been released to the public. And some old spies are willing to tell war stories.\n\nAlong with espionage, notable instances of subversion, including subversive propaganda, are described in this book. These are important because, like stealing secrets, they raise questions about the boundaries between reporting and making news, cultivating sources and seducing recruits\u2014and between building up and tearing down democracy.\n\nWhile the intelligence exploits of some of the journalists who operated in the National Press Building are spectacular, their activities are in no way representative of the profession. The vast majority of the tens of thousands of men and women who worked in or visited the Press Building in the eight decades covered in this book had no association with spying. Revelations about the connections between a small number of journalists and intelligence agencies have coated all reporters with an undeserved layer of suspicion. American reporters who have worked overseas or taken an interest in uncovering government secrets are routinely and usually falsely accused of being, or collaborating with, spies. Such accusations are insidious because efforts to disprove them are interpreted as evidence of the quality or depth of an individual's \"cover,\" while shrugging off or joking about unfounded rumors can be misinterpreted as acknowledgment of their veracity. Labeling reporters as spies can tarnish or destroy reputations and provoke threats to innocent persons' liberty or safety. To avoid causing harm, I have taken care in this book to avoid associating any individual with espionage unless they have acknowledged the connection or there is strong documentary evidence.\n\nIn writing this book I've benefited greatly from the assistance of Ken Jacobson, who helped shape its form and substance, the perceptive comments of Carl Feldbaum, who challenged me to do better, the critical comments of John Haynes and Mark Kramer, the confidence of my agent, Kathi Patton, and editorial assistance from Barbara Egbert. I'd like to thank Gil Klein, chair of the National Press Club's History and Heritage Committee, Jeffrey Schlosberg, the NPC's archivist, and John Powers of the National Archives for their generous help. Of course, any mistakes are entirely my responsibility.\n\n#\n\nDuring the winter of 1925 sledge hammers smashed into the last remnants of Washington's Newspaper Row, a string of ramshackle buildings dating to the 1840s that staggered like the often-inebriated reporters who worked in them up the east side of 14th Street from Pennsylvania Avenue to F Street. The blows crashed into offices bearing the names of newspapers from around the country, along with the Ebbitt House Hotel and its beloved bar\u2014all demolished to make way for the National Press Building, the new home for Washington's press corps and the National Press Club. Reporters who scurried into temporary quarters had witnessed the improbable trajectory of the club from its origins as a boozy poker parlor in rented rooms into an organization that would own an office building around the corner from the White House.\n\nA fourteen-story human beehive rose from the rubble, humming with men and women collecting, organizing, and disseminating news\u2014and providing perfect cover for espionage, subversion, and propaganda. Over the decades, an assortment of professional spooks and freelance spies have hidden there in plain sight, blending in with the legions of reporters who used the Press Building as a base for informing, misinforming, entertaining, and enraging the public through the craft of journalism. Those spying between the lines from the Press Building's offices, corridors, and bar stools have included homegrown and German fascists, spies for imperial Japan, British intelligence operatives, representatives of Soviet civilian and military intelligence agencies, and CIA officers.\n\nLike all great spy stories, tales of espionage rooted in the Press Building are filled with colorful characters performing tense dramas against a backdrop of world-changing events. While they are interesting in isolation, assembling these stories serves a larger purpose: showing how intelligence and news organizations have used and shaped each other, and revealing the roots of phenomena that continue to influence events around the globe today. The history of espionage in Washington's National Press Building reveals that there's nothing new about industrial-scale dissemination of fake news, foreign governments covertly influencing American elections, or massive disclosures of government secrets.\n\nFour decades before Edward Snowden's birth, a reporter working from a Press Building office plastered the War Department's most closely held secrets across the front pages of the _Chicago Tribune_ and the _Washington Times Herald_ , giving Hitler's generals a roadmap to America's war plans. President Franklin Roosevelt, like many of his successors who faced similar leaks, considered prosecuting the reporter and his publisher for espionage\u2014and ultimately decided to do nothing.\n\nLong before the internet made the production of fake news child's play, offices in the Press Building served as conduits for a foreign government to plant rumors and lies in American newspapers.\n\nYears before he organized the Watergate burglary as part of a program of espionage and dirty tricks supporting the campaign to reelect President Richard Nixon, a CIA officer used a front company based in the Press Building to spy on the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater.\n\nWikiLeaks wasn't the first anti-secrecy group to dump huge quantities of classified data into the public domain. In the late 1970s, comrades of a rogue CIA officer published a magazine from a Press Club office that revealed intelligence secrets with the explicit goal of shutting down American covert operations.\n\nThe chain of events that led to construction of a building dedicated to journalism, which was also a uniquely fertile ground for espionage, was set in motion by the yearning for a warm, comfortable place to drink and play poker.\n\nThe National Press Club's origins, and by extension the roots of the Press Building, can be traced to a conversation between Graham Nichol, a one-legged _Washington Times_ police reporter, and James Hay Jr., White House reporter for the _Baltimore Sun_. The discussion took place a block north of the intersection of Newspaper Row and Rum Row, a collection of taverns that started at 14th Street and dribbled several blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol. Hay recalled the event a quarter century later:\n\nOn a wet and windy day near the end of February, 1908, I was standing at the corner of Fourteenth and F Streets\u2014about ten feet from the northwest angle of the National Press Building of the present\u2014when I saw, approaching on crutches against the gale that always howled about that particular locality on breezy days, the tall and broad-shouldered figure of the [Press Club] founder, the late Graham Bright Nichol, red as to hair and altogether satisfactory as to personality.... [Nichol] in his Big Bertha voice made this statement, confession and prophecy: \"I'm getting damned tired of having to hunt a stuffy, ill-ventilated little ballroom in a cheap boarding house every time I want to play a game of poker! Hell's Bells! Why don't we get up a press club? A place where the fellows can take a drink or turn a card when they feel like it?\"\n\nHay explained how dream was turned into deed:\n\nThat night the determined Mr. Nichol betook himself to Number One Police Station, then on Twelfth Street, a short distance below Pennsylvania Avenue, the rendezvous, loafing ground and pseudo-club of the city's police reporters and their friends.... [The reporters] immediately confessed to the same yearning for the luxury of a \"few upstairs rooms\" that had so upset and agitated the soul of Mr. Nichol.\n\nNichol gathered pledges of ten dollars apiece from the enthusiastic crowd, held a meeting three weeks later in the F Street Parlor of the Willard Hotel, and officiated on May 2, 1908, when the National Press Club opened its doors as a going concern, occupying the second and third floors over a jeweler's shop at 1206 F Street.\n\nThe surroundings were far from palatial\u2014the steep staircase to the card room on the third floor \"might have disheartened an Alpine goat,\" Hay complained\u2014but from the start the National Press Club was a magnet for reporters, government officials, diplomats and celebrities. Buffalo Bill Cody, the British and Japanese ambassadors, a handful of actors, and a bevy of minor luminaries joined publishers, correspondents, and reporters at the club's official housewarming on May 18.\n\nIn its earliest days, Press Club leaders established a rule that reflected their deep understanding of reporters' psyches and laid the foundation for the institution's longevity: All bills were due on presentation. This simple, practical decision ensured the NPC's viability even as press clubs around the country faltered and collapsed under the burden of unpaid bar tabs from fiscally improvident hacks.\n\nThe Club prospered and outgrew its modest quarters, moving three times to larger, plusher rented rooms. In 1925 a handful of members came up with a bold idea that would have seemed a drunken fantasy just a few years earlier. They envisioned a massive office building on one of the most valuable real estate parcels in the city. It would be large enough to accommodate Washington's entire press corps, with space set aside as a permanent home for the club, and an income stream from rents to fund the club's operations into perpetuity.\n\nConceived in the middle of a decade of unrivaled optimism and economic growth, the Press Building seemed destined to succeed. A bond prospectus solicited investments in an edifice \"designed to be the national headquarters of the Press and to consolidate under one roof offices for the Washington representatives of practically every publication of importance in the country.\" It boasted that the National Press Club's Board of Governors had already approved over 150 lease applications, representing \"most of the metropolitan newspapers of the United States.\"\n\nFrom the start, the project was meant to be more than an office building. Its scale and location made the Press Building a steel and concrete expression of the importance and power of the American news industry, and of Washington's role as the capital of an emerging world power. The most modern building in the nation's capital, with more than five hundred miles of wiring and enough electricity to power a city of ten thousand, it was also Washington's largest private office building. Press Building superlatives included housing the 3,500-seat Fox Theater, the largest theater south of Philadelphia.\n\nA full page advertisement in Washington's _Evening Star_ in August 1927 touting the building's unique features highlighted a free twenty-four-hour answering service \"equivalent to an attendant in your office day and night.... This service, the first of its kind, is one of the many innovations for the comfort and convenience of the National Press Building.\"\n\nThe _Washington Post_ hailed the Press Building's completion as a \"dream come true,\" and a \"monument to journalism.\" It was, a _Post_ editorial asserted, \"less a mark of the accomplishments of the members of the press than evidence of the power of the profession they represent.\" The paper also acknowledged that in gaining prestige and gravitas, the Washington press corps was also losing some of its rough-edged charm\u2014a lament that has been repeated over the years as journalism has become ever more professional and respectable, and the behavior of journalists more restrained. \"The press, more especially in the United States, has attained a new dignity within the last few decades,\" the _Post_ proclaimed pompously. \"It has lost, possibly, some of its picturesqueness, but it has gained in worth and stability.\"\n\nAt fourteen floors, the NPB exceeded the city's height limit, which was modified to permit its construction. Coming to life at a time when Washington was starting its long, slow transition from sleepy, stagnant southern backwater to semi-sophisticated city, it also strained the boundaries of contemporary manners. This tension was on display in the building's elevators, where young female operators posed a quandary in a city that clung to old ideas of decorum long after they'd been abandoned in more modern metropolises like New York and Chicago. \"Going up and down certain male tenants doff their hats for the charming operators. Others keep on their Kellys until some other woman enters the car, and they uncover the old bean, although the passenger may be half as good looking or gracious as the elevator operator,\" a _Washington Post_ columnist informed readers in October 1927. \"Indeed, the woman passenger may be in the building distributing propaganda for more equal rights for women, or for the suppression of tobacco, or the repeal of the inalienable right of a married man to get out at least one night a week. There is a third class of men who lift their hats neither for the female operator nor the woman passenger.\"\n\nThe Press Building management made special accommodations for newspapermen who refused to bow to convention, reserving an elevator for the exclusive use of men, shielding them from obligations to remove hats or extinguish cigars in the presence of the fairer sex.\n\n#\n\nNational Press Building, 1930s.\n\nWhile women operated its elevators, and there were a handful of female reporters working in the building, very few of them got off on the top floor, which was occupied by the Press Club. Women weren't admitted to, or with the exception of special events, even allowed to set foot in the National Press Club until 1971. This was sixteen years after a hotly contested referendum resulted in a decision to admit the first African American member. Prior to 1955, the only black men to step inside the Press Club were employees or entertainers, like the \"Negro members of the CCC camp at Alexandria, Va.\" who, according to a _Washington Post_ report, sang spirituals for Press Club members, Vice President John Nance Garner, and other dignitaries in April 1935.\n\n#\n\nFrom its creation in 1908 through the 1970s, bourbon and poker were at least as important as press conferences to reporters at the National Press Club.\n\nCredit: National Press Club archives\n\nPretty elevator operators and a prestigious address were selling points, but they weren't the main reasons the National Press Building became a magnet for reporters\u2014and intelligence operatives. Easy access to the Press Club's meeting and card rooms, home away from home for all but the most reclusive reporters, was at least as enticing as the building's central location and modern amenities. The Press Club was an informal guild hall and a venue for press conferences and formal dinners. Above all it was a drinking club, home to an unending series of poker games, and the best place in Washington to pick up gossip that was too juicy to print.\n\n#\n\nReports from the first known spy in Washington's National Press Building started flowing into the Lubyanka, the headquarters of Soviet intelligence, in 1933. There was a symmetry and an invisible connection between the buildings. The elegant Lubyanka, originally built as the headquarters of a Czarist-era insurance company, dominated one side of a square in central Moscow a few blocks from the headquarters of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, while the Press Building is four short blocks from the White House. It took five minutes to drive from the Lubyanka to the Kremlin. In the '30s a reporter could pick up a Coke in the lobby of the Press Building, hop into a taxi on 14th Street, and finish it in the Capitol rotunda before it warmed up. The Lubyanka and the Press Building were wired with state-of-the-art telecommunications technology; both buildings buzzed around the clock as their inhabitants struggled to stay on top of news streaming in from around the globe.\n\nThe parallels between the headquarters of the _Obyedinyonnoye gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravleniye_ (OGPU), as Soviet intelligence was called at the time, and the home base for the Washington press corps echo the real affinities as well as the misleading resemblances between journalism and espionage. A glance inside the two buildings revealed the essential differences. In 1933 there was a newsstand in the lobby of the Press Building, the National Press Club occupied its top floors, and the dozen floors in the middle contained the largest concentration of reporters in the United States, probably the world. In the Lubyanka's basement cells the innocent were starved, beaten, and shot, while above them thousands of employees worked for the world's largest, and arguably most ruthless, intelligence organization.\n\nIn contrast to the heavily guarded Lubyanka, the Press Building, designed and built to provide modern offices in the nation's capital for the world's news media, has always been open to the public. This accessibility created a constant flow of humanity that provided excellent cover for espionage. The tens of thousands of journalists who have worked and played in the Press Building over the last nine decades camouflaged a sprinkling of professional spies who pretended to be reporters and of real reporters who, motivated by ideology, patriotism, a longing for adventure, or greed, collaborated with foreign and domestic intelligence agencies.\n\nThe OGPU's first known operative in the building was Robert S. Allen, an American reporter who dabbled in espionage but was not a professional spy. He worked from an office on the 12th floor and was identified in an initial report to OGPU headquarters in January 1933 by the codename Sh\/147. Subsequent reports used the cover name George Parker. A fixture at the Press Club, at Washington dinner parties, and on the pages of America's most prestigious newspapers, Allen produced a continuous stream of information and gossip that was essential reading for anyone interested in American politics, whether they were in Minneapolis or Moscow. Equally important to the almost infinitely patient Soviet spymasters, he was well positioned both to gain access over time to tightly guarded secrets and to identify other potential agents.\n\nAllen's Soviet handler provided his superiors in Moscow a thumbnail sketch of the new recruit's career, starting with a description of _Washington Merry-Go-Round_ , a book Allen co-wrote in 1931. The OGPU officer penned a summary that would have made a great dust-jacket blurb: \"The characters he depicts in the book are a reflection of the pettiness and emptiness of many of Washington's current Republican congressmen and Cabinet members.\" The book's actual dust jacket promised, and _Washington Merry-Go-Round_ did a good job of delivering, access to \"what the newspapers do not print about the politicians of this country and what the Washington correspondents write only between the lines: the inner realms of politics, society, the diplomatic corps, the White House and the press itself.\"\n\nAllen \"knows most of the lawmakers and cabinet members, and also has extensive contacts in all of the departments\" of the US government, the OGPU report noted. It highlighted his friendship with Raymond Moley, the head of Roosevelt's brain trust. Moley coined the term \"New Deal\" and served during the transition as FDR's de facto chief of staff. Allen, his Soviet handler stated, also \"knows Roosevelt himself, as well as the House majority leader\" and \"is a valuable contact, especially bearing in mind Roosevelt's future administration.\"\n\nAs in most real spy stories, many of the details of Allen's espionage career are unknown and will probably never be uncovered. The name of his OGPU handler isn't revealed in the fragmentary records about Allen that have leaked out of the KGB's archives. Not clear are how Allen linked up with the OGPU, the full scope of his espionage, and what motivated him to spy for the Soviet Union.\n\nA parenthetical comment at the bottom of an OGPU memo\u2014\"(For now the payment is 100 American Dollars a month)\"\u2014shows that Allen's involvement with Soviet intelligence went beyond the legitimate give-and-take of a reporter with a source. It may explain why a journalist like Allen with no ideological or familial ties to communism or the USSR agreed to spy for Stalin's secret intelligence service. On the other hand, money may not have been the only, or the primary, reason Allen provided information to the OGPU. He wasn't a communist, but he was, in the 1930s, a man of the Left and an ardent antifascist.\n\nWhatever his motivation, there can be no doubt that Allen was acting as a witting agent of a foreign intelligence service. Relationships between reporters and sources are sometimes ambiguous; Allen's collaboration with the OGPU wasn't close to the gray zone. Allen had seen enough of the world to recognize the boundary between journalism and spying, and to know he'd stepped over it by accepting money from a foreign intelligence agency to hand over confidential information obtained from American government officials.\n\nA short, red-haired man with an impulsive, incendiary temperament, by 1933 Allen had already had enough adventure to last most people a lifetime. In 1916, as a sixteen-year-old, he quit his job as a copy boy at the _Louisville Courier Journal_ , lied about his age to join the Army, and rode into Mexico as a private in General John J. Pershing's expedition against Pancho Villa. Two years later, Allen followed Pershing to Europe, sailing home in 1918 as a boy lieutenant. Soon after returning to the Midwest, he hung up his uniform and enrolled in the University of Wisconsin to study journalism.\n\nMost journalism students ease into the profession, but Allen wasn't satisfied covering football rivalries or school board meetings. Working as a police reporter for the Madison _Capital Times_ , he risked his neck infiltrating and writing expos\u00e9s of the Ku Klux Klan. The stories earned Allen a scholarship to study abroad. He picked the University of Munich, arriving in time to write freelance accounts for the _Christian Science Monitor_ of Adolph Hitler's November 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch\u2014a failed attempt to take control of Bavaria and use it as a springboard to Berlin\u2014and the future F\u00fchrer's subsequent trial.\n\nWhen Hitler entered a makeshift courtroom on February 27, 1924, to defend himself against a charge of treason, Allen was close enough to report that the prisoner \"laughed and joked and shook hands with a number of friends and supporters who rushed up to him and encouraged him to keep his head up, whereupon Hitler replied. _'Ach! Wir werden schon siegen_ ' (We shall win all right).\"\n\nLike other foreign journalists at the trial, Allen was befriended by an avuncular Nazi\u2014and future American intelligence operative\u2014named Ernst Hanfstaengl. Speaking in fluent English, Hanfstaengl tried to smooth the rough edges off Nazism. He failed to charm Allen, who claimed the honor of being the first American journalist to despise Hitler.\n\nAllen's reporting from Germany led to a job in Washington reporting from an office in the National Press Building for the _Christian Science Monitor_ , an influential paper with a national readership.\n\nIronically, at the time when he was recruited as a paid covert informant for the Soviet Union, Allen was viewed by his peers as a _victim_ of espionage. President Herbert Hoover, incensed by his portrayal in _Washington Merry-Go-Round_ , had demanded that the Secret Service identify its author or authors. They quickly homed in on Allen. As the OGPU file noted, \"Hoover insisted that he be fired.\"\n\nThe _Monitor_ immediately sacked Allen, bringing tensions between the Washington press corps and the White House, which had been simmering for years, to a boil. From the moment he stepped into the White House, Hoover had barely tolerated the press. Relations between the Fourth Estate and the leader of the executive branch dimmed as the Depression cast an ever-darker cloud over America, and Hoover's name became a synonym for misery. Shantytowns came to be called \"Hoovervilles;\" newspapers were dubbed \"Hoover blankets.\" A president once celebrated by the press as \"The Great Humanitarian\" seethed as his reputation withered. Enraged by stories he considered defamatory, Hoover struck back, encouraging his personal secretary, a former private investigator, to spy on and intimidate reporters. Allen's unmasking and rapid dismissal, rare victories during a period when almost nothing went right for Hoover, were savored in the White House and lamented at the Press Club.\n\nA _Washington Post_ columnist wrote that Allen's firing \"is of more than passing interest because of its possible bearing on the espionage atmosphere that has prevailed over the nation's capital for the past two years.\" The columnist added, \"Whether there is anything to it or not, it is amazing the number of people here, in our official life and on the fringe, who sincerely believe their telephones are being tapped. They know what they are talking about, they insist; they can hear the click. And they relate hair-raising instances of being shadowed.\" Reporters who felt the Hoover administration was terrorizing them petitioned the Press Club to form a committee to investigate White House censorship.\n\nFear of White House surveillance didn't stanch the flow of gossip or deter Allen and his co-author, Drew Pearson, from writing a sequel, _More Merry-Go-Round_. They didn't describe the scene at the Press Club\u2014reporters drinking moonshine, playing poker and billiards, smoking cigars, spitting tobacco, and occasionally urinating into tall brass spittoons\u2014but they did repeat stories told there that were far more colorful and truthful than those that made it into newspapers. \"Washington probably boasts more small, independent bootleggers per capita than any other city in the country and has established a unique and universal system of liquor distribution,\" Allen and Pearson wrote. Secreted among the city's monuments were \"quiet unobtrusive places where, if the right word is spoken, one may enter a guarded door, place one's foot on a rail, and partake of Maryland rye, cut Scotch or beer, usually spiked, but sometimes the genuine article brought from Baltimore.\" The _Merry-Go-Round_ sequel reported that one of the liveliest speakeasies, located in an alley across the street from the State Department, was forced to close when \"an act between a Follies girl and a derelict newspaper man\" brought unwanted attention.\n\nThe _Merry-Go-Round_ books sold 180,000 copies, an impressive achievement in the depth of the Depression.\n\nThe success of the two books\u2014and the fact that Allen and Pearson had been fired\u2014prompted them to team up on a syndicated newspaper column, also called Washington Merry-Go-Round. The column took off slowly. When Allen started working for Soviet intelligence Washington Merry-Go-Round was earning its two authors a grand total of twenty-five dollars a week. Allen kept bread on the table by reporting for the _Philadelphia Record_. A hundred dollars a month from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics must have been a welcome boost.\n\nAllen may have come to the OGPU's attention when he and Pearson reported in their column on December 8, 1932, that William Borah, an irascible Idaho Republican who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, \"didn't support Governor Roosevelt, but he is eager to cooperate with him\u2014on Soviet Russian recognition.\" Washington Merry-Go-Round followed up on December 19 with a report on a \"steady drift towards Russian recognition.\"\n\nThe next month, Allen disclosed a bit more information to his Soviet intelligence contact than he had provided to the public. Borah, one of the most powerful politicians in Washington, had informed Allen in confidence about a conversation with Senator Robert Bulkley, a Democrat from Ohio. Allen reported to the OGPU that after visiting Roosevelt, Bulkley told Borah, \"You are going to win out on Russian recognition when Roosevelt takes office. He told me he was going to act promptly on that as soon as he takes over.\"\n\nThe news must have been welcome in Moscow. Stalin viewed America as a counterweight to Japanese aggression in the Soviet Far East, a source for technology desperately needed to modernize Soviet industry, and a base for espionage against European nations and the Russian diaspora.\n\nAllen's report to the OGPU on Borah illustrates the asymmetry in US and Soviet intelligence capabilities. At a time when the United States had almost no capacity to collect or analyze foreign political intelligence and the Kremlin was a black box to American policymakers, men in the Lubyanka were privy to a private conversation between two US senators revealing a controversial, secret policy decision made by America's next president. It was the dawn of a golden age for Soviet intelligence in America, a period lasting more than a decade, during which Stalin's operatives, including a surprising number who were handled by officers based in the National Press Building, peered into every crevice of American society. From the mid-1930s to the late 1940s, spies reporting to Moscow penetrated the White House, the Justice and State departments, the military and its contractors, Congress, and Hollywood.\n\nAllen had good sources in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the only effective American foreign-intelligence organization in the decade leading up to World War II. They informed him that the United States wasn't going to make a fuss about communist subversion in Japan, and Allen passed the news to Soviet intelligence. \"Roosevelt shares the general attitude of the admirals and Navy strategists that an uprising 'of any kind' is to be hoped for in Japan,\" Allen told the OGPU. Naval intelligence officers knew that radicals plotting against the Japanese government were communists, Allen said, but they \"manifest no hostility because of this fact. What their attitude would be if a Communist regime were to be set up in Japan they do not say. But to start with they would view with 'friendly' interest internal turmoil in Japan.\"\n\nThe ONI secrets Allen passed on included details about Japanese military preparations in the Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall Islands, specks on the map that Tokyo was administering under a League of Nations mandate. Japanese authorities had rebuffed American requests to visit, so in the summer of 1932, Allen reported, \"Four American naval officers, speaking Malayan, disguised themselves by staining their skins, and reached the islands as native fishermen.\" They discovered extensive military fortifications.\n\nAllen's reports on Japan suggest he was actively responding to Soviet requests, not merely passing along scraps of information that he happened to come across. In the early 1930s, the US government and military were secondary targets for Soviet intelligence. The Lubyanka was far more interested in Washington as a source of information about the USSR's potential adversaries\u2014and Japan topped the list. The information on Japan Allen provided to the OGPU never made it into Washington Merry-Go-Round columns.\n\nPerhaps to demonstrate that he had personal access to the highest ranks of government, Allen gave his OGPU handler a letter on Columbia University letterhead that he had received from FDR confidant Moley. It requested Allen to \"in all confidence, go the Congressional Library and look up the files of _Wallace's Farmer_ and give me your opinion of Wallace as (a) a Progressive and (b) a man of forceful expression. You will readily see why I am asking for this and I turn to you as a good judge of these questions.\" Henry Wallace was appointed secretary of agriculture in the first Roosevelt administration, a critical position at a time when ameliorating conditions in the Dust Bowl and pumping up deflated commodity prices were prerequisites to pulling America out of the Great Depression.\n\nAllen's work as a covert agent for the Soviet Union didn't last long. It isn't clear when or why he stopped feeding the OGPU confidential information. The last known report mentioning information from Allen was sent in February 1933. Maybe the Soviets tired of paying for slightly enhanced versions of stories that anyone with a nickel to spare could read in the _Merry-Go-Round_ columns. Given Soviet intelligence agencies' penchant for developing sources over long periods of time, it is more likely that Allen broke off the relationship. Possessing a strong temper, a short fuse, and no patience for threats to his independence, it is easy to imagine that he chafed at requests to gather sensitive political or military information. Or perhaps he no longer needed the money. Washington Merry-Go-Round quickly became one of the nation's most widely distributed columns, and a profitable business.\n\nThe records that have leaked out of the KGB's archives about Allen do not tell the whole story of his apparently brief collaboration with Soviet intelligence. He was privy to confidential information from FDR's brain trust, the War Department, and Congress that would have been of interest in Moscow. Few people knew as much as Allen about the peccadillos, secrets, and weaknesses of Washington's power elite\u2014information of tremendous value to a foreign intelligence agency seeking to recruit spies.\n\nAllen may not have broken any laws by passing information to Soviet intelligence. The Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires anyone who works on behalf of a foreign government to publicly register with the Justice Department, wasn't enacted until 1938. He definitely violated confidences, both with men and women who wouldn't have shared their secrets with him if they'd had an inkling that their insights would be transmitted to the Kremlin, and with readers, who had no idea Washington Merry-Go-Round's reporting was tainted: in its early days by a covert financial relationship with Stalin's secret police, and later by the specter of exposure that must have been in the back of Allen's mind whenever he reported on issues of interest to the USSR.\n\nAllen spied for the OGPU for only a short time, but he remained entangled in the world of espionage for decades, including serving as an intelligence officer for General George Patton during World War II. Throughout the early decades of the Cold War, Allen was both predator and prey, ferreting out and publishing secrets from American intelligence agencies and becoming the subject of efforts to plug leaks, including an illegal CIA wiretap.\n\n#\n\nRobert S. Allen's peers had no idea that he had collaborated with Soviet intelligence, and if word had leaked out the resulting scandal could have ended his career. The men in the National Press Club felt quite differently about the second known foreign intelligence operative in the Press Building, Vladimir Romm. Reporters treated him as a representative of the Soviet state, and given the Bolsheviks' reputation for conspiracy many assumed he was a spy. This did not prevent even conservative anti-communists from admiring him. No other Soviet official\u2014and few Americans\u2014was as well liked or respected in Washington as Romm.\n\nVladimir Georgievich Romm was born in May 1896 into a world that has so thoroughly disappeared that it is difficult today to even imagine. In the Romanov Empire, ethnicity\u2014an amalgamation of race, religion, and language\u2014was all-encompassing, defining possibilities and determining how people were identified by others, thought of themselves, and perceived their surroundings. The overarching importance of ethnic identity extended even to the name of Romm's hometown. As Jews, the largest population in the city, Romm's family called it Vilna, as did Russians, the third-largest group. While Romm was growing up, Vilna was known as the \"Jerusalem of the North,\" a description Napoleon, astonished by the sight of a Jewish city on the edge of Christian Europe, came up with in 1812. Poles, who ruled the city they called Wilno from the fourteenth century until Napoleon's defeat brought Russian rule, were the second-largest ethnic group. Lithuanians, less than three percent of the city's population when Romm was born, called it Vilnius.\n\nThe Romms were a prominent family that had dominated and profited from Hebrew printing and publishing in Czarist Russia. Vladimir attended an elite private college in St. Petersburg, an opportunity that was generally denied to Jews. His father, George Romm, a physician, had been imprisoned for membership in the Bund, a Marxist Jewish organization, and as a boy Vladimir helped his two brothers run a clandestine cell of the underground Socialist Revolutionary Party.\n\nRomm was conscripted into the Russian army in 1916, serving in the infantry and secretly preaching the merits of socialism to his comrades. After the Czar was deposed in March 1917, Romm served as a commissar, traveling in November 1917 to Petrograd as a delegate to the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. He likely witnessed one of the more dramatic moments of the revolution when messengers burst into the Congress at three a.m. announcing that the Winter Palace had been stormed and that members of the provisional government had been arrested. Few realized at the time, but this was one of the defining moments of the twentieth century: the establishment of the Soviet Union.\n\nRomm's life in 1918 reflected the tumultuous times. He started the year in Novgorod, near Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was called during the war), serving as an official of the local government. Spring and fall were a blur: back in Petrograd in May, working in the Popular Commissariat of Foreign Affairs; unemployed in June, living nine hundred miles north in Arkhangelsk, a bleak city on the coast of what Russians call the Northern Icy Ocean. By November Romm was a thousand miles south working for the provincial government in Voronezh. In December he washed up on the outskirts of his hometown, Vilna, and helped Soviet forces take control of the city.\n\nBy the end of this restless year, Romm found his life's calling. He had been recruited into the _Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie_ (GRU), the Red Army's intelligence service. Romm became a member of the first, and most talented, generation of Soviet intelligence officers, an elite group of men, and a few women, born in the last years of the nineteenth century on the shifting edges of empires, who had experienced the downfall of the Hapsburgs and eagerly participated in the destruction of the Romanovs. They shared a passionate utopian vision of communism and, without exception, were ultimately consumed by the vicious reality of Stalinism. Americans and Europeans were impressed by their idealism, intelligence, and selflessness. Few of their Western acquaintances realized that these cultured patriots, who could discuss literature and art intelligently in three or more languages, were just as capable of stalking and brutally murdering \"enemies of the people.\"\n\nIn April 1919 Polish troops pushed the Soviets out of Vilna. Romm was posted as assistant military attach\u00e9 in the Soviet embassy in Kaunas, capital of the independent Lithuanian state that had been created in 1918. He stayed until May 1921, organizing a network of espionage agents, then was transferred to Kharkov, Ukraine, where he witnessed, and must have had a hand in implementing, a massive crime against humanity. Intelligence officers like Romm were on the front line of a deliberate manmade famine. They forced peasants in Ukraine onto collective farms, confiscated their grain, and prevented them from leaving, condemning a million Ukrainians to agonizing deaths from starvation.\n\nRomm was sent on his first posting to the West in August 1922, splitting his time between Berlin and Paris. In the City of Light, he was part of a network of agents who infiltrated the city's caf\u00e9s and garrets to keep the GRU's eyes on thousands of Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9s as they hatched innumerable plots and counterplots aimed at overthrowing or spreading, subverting, or promoting the newborn Bolshevik regime.\n\nRomm acquired his cover as a journalist in December 1924 when he was appointed head of foreign operations for the Soviet newspaper _Trud_ (Labor). Three years later he was fired from the GRU for \"not being completely devoted to the line of the Central Committee.\" Romm's deviation must not have been considered serious, because rather than suffering the fates typically experienced by Soviet spies who fell from grace\u2014imprisonment in a labor camp, even execution\u2014he was allowed to transfer from military intelligence to the rival OGPU. The OGPU gave him the kind of assignment that was offered only to the most trusted individuals.\n\nRomm was sent to Tokyo. His cover job was working as a correspondent for the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS), the official Soviet government news service. Most Soviet citizens who traveled abroad were forced to leave their families behind as collateral against the temptation to defect. It is a mark of his superiors' trust that Romm was accompanied by his wife, Galena, and their infant son. Both Japanese and French intelligence services quickly determined that he was a spy and kept an eye on him.\n\nRomm traveled widely, spending a great deal of time in China, especially in Manchuria. He or his superiors had correctly anticipated that Northern China would be the launching pad for the Japanese empire's expansion. His job was to answer a critical question: Which way would the Japanese leap, south to China or north to Siberia?\n\nWhile posted to Tokyo, Romm signed the \"Declaration of the 83,\" a critique of Stalin's foreign policy written by Leon Trotsky and other prominent Communists. Published just as the split between Stalin and Trotsky broke into the open, the declaration included extensive discussion of the situation in China, one of Romm's areas of expertise. After it became clear that Stalin had come out on top, Romm submitted a groveling letter to the Communist Party apologizing for signing the Declaration. He must have been valuable; he retained his life, freedom, party membership, and OGPU job.\n\nIn 1930, after spending two and a half years in Asia, Romm was sent back to Europe, reporting to OGPU _rezidents_ (station chiefs) in Geneva and Paris. Since his previous European stint Soviet intelligence had woven intricate networks throughout Western Europe, penetrating government and industry. A well-oiled apparatus sent Moscow a stream of intelligence on defense strategies and military plans, diplomatic alliances and commercial secrets. Its top priority, however, reflected Stalin's obsession with enemies of the people. Russian emigre organizations were so saturated with Soviet intelligence agents that many would have collapsed if Moscow's provocateurs and informers had pulled out. Even as Mussolini and Hitler came to power, fascist dictators were secondary targets for the OGPU, as Stalin was fixated on gathering intelligence on, and plotting to kill, Trotsky.\n\nRomm maintained his cover as a journalist, working for TASS. He was treated by other foreign reporters both as a representative of the Soviet government and as an exemplar of the kind of men the regime was believed to be creating. John T. Whitaker, an American journalist who knew him in Geneva, where they both covered the League of Nations, later wrote that Romm \"had come because Moscow anticipated the Japanese attack on Manchuria and believed that its success or failure would be decided by the diplomatic struggle in Geneva. Romm was one of their aces; they wanted a man of his ability and background on the spot in Geneva.\"\n\nRomm was a living embodiment of Americans' fantasy of Soviet Man: erudite, charming, and selfless. His demeanor in Geneva's Bavaria Hotel dining room, the unofficial nocturnal headquarters for international journalists and diplomats posted to the League of Nations, helped persuade influential men that the USSR could be integrated into the modern world. \"Of the hundreds of correspondents of all nationalities at Geneva during this period, Vladimir Romm was among the most popular and widely known, especially among his American colleagues,\" an American foreign correspondent remembered. \"And this popularity had its effect in the almost unanimous press support of the Soviet's application for entrance into the League.\" Romm's circle included Allen Dulles, a well-connected diplomat who returned to Geneva during the Second World War as an intelligence officer and went on to become the longest-serving director of the CIA.\n\nWhile Romm and his OGPU comrades were popular in the salons of the European elite, they were also engaged in less convivial activities. Soviet intelligence was very much a contact sport during Romm's second European posting. Well out of sight of the diplomatic receptions and dinners, GRU and OGPU officers and their agents operated with relative impunity, kidnapping and killing White Russians, even shooting their own agents who had come to be suspected of treachery.\n\nOn June 2, 1934, Romm stepped out of the small circle of diplomats and journalists who frequented Geneva's Bavaria Hotel and onto the pages of the _New York Times_. \"One of the most significant visitors from the Soviet Union to the United States since the Bolshevist revolution will depart for Washington next Thursday,\" the _Times_ reported. \"He is Vladimir Romm of the newspaper _Izvestia_ , who will be the first permanent correspondent of the Soviet press in the United States.\" Before Romm departed, American reporters were invited to a lunch in his honor at _Izvestia_ 's headquarters on Pushkin Square in central Moscow. The boisterous group included _Izvestia_ editor Karl Radek, the most colorful member of the Bolshevik inner circle and the only top Communist to socialize with American reporters. The Americans, enlivened by liberal quantities of vodka, wished Romm well and assured him his life in Washington would be far easier than theirs was in Moscow.\n\nRomm's arrival in Washington was noted in the _Goldfish Bowl_ , the Press Club's irreverent newsletter, which reported in July 1934 that he was \"Russia's first native contribution to the Washington press corps since we recognized the Soviet.\" It added that \"Mr. Romm, ably introduced about town by our own Larry Todd, represents _Izvestia_ , semi-official Soviet morning newspaper with 2,000,000 subscribers.\" Todd, a popular Press Club member, headed the TASS office on the thirteenth floor of the Press Building, which he shared with Romm.\n\nRomm attended State Department briefings, White House receptions, and society dinner parties. As the first Soviet journalist in the United States and one of a handful of Soviet citizens living in Washington, he was the object of intense curiosity. Curiosity quickly turned to respect as Romm tirelessly responded to endless questions about life in the Soviet Union, communism, and Stalin. In addition to reporting\u2014for _Izvestia_ and for the OGPU's successor, the NKVD\u2014Romm acted as an informal ambassador, giving speeches to university students, meeting with industrialists, and swapping stories with American reporters.\n\nRomm told his American friends that he'd taught himself English while living in Tokyo by listening to jazz phonograph records. He knew more popular American songs than most professional singers.\n\nThe Washington press corps admired the somewhat reserved Romm. They were bowled over by his blond, vivacious wife, Galena, who told one and all that her name meant \"chicken\" in Italian, and by their eleven-year-old son, who was known by the very American nickname \"Billy.\"\n\nErnie Pyle, a journalist whose stories about ordinary Americans made him one of the most loved and influential writers of the era, devoted an entire column to praising Romm in terms that would have made an _Izvestia_ editor blush: \"You could call Vladimir Romm a devout Communist. He feels that his life belongs to the party, and that giving it his complete devotion is little enough. I didn't get that from him, but from his friends. He doesn't try to propagandize you. He talks gently, in a low soft voice, about his paper and his American friends and about America. He doesn't try to sell Russia to you.\"\n\nPyle continued: \"He is courteous and affable. People like him. But nobody knows much about him. That is because of his deep feeling that the party, and not he, is of importance. It isn't even a conscious reticence about himself. It is sober preoccupation with the cause.\" Pyle noted that Romm spoke English, French, and German well, and \"some Italian and Japanese.\"\n\nRomm \"expects to go back to Russia in a year or two, and probably stay there,\" Pyle reported. \"He hasn't taken foreign assignments for pleasure or the adventure, but because he feels he should go out in the world and learn how people of other nations think and live. It gives him a broader and more accurate background for his future work back in Russia.\"\n\nPyle may have been right about Romm's motives, but in fact many of the Soviet spy's adventures in Washington were pleasant, and they certainly didn't prepare him for his future in Russia. The warm embrace of the Washington press corps gave Romm a front seat at events like the annual Founder's Day dinner at the National Press Club, held in 1936 on a warm evening in May. Romm watched President Franklin Roosevelt, the guest of honor, laugh as journalists lampooned him and his cabinet in a series of skits. The contrast with Moscow, where the penalty for joking about Stalin was imprisonment or death, must have been shocking.\n\nRomm traveled to Yosemite National Park in August 1936 to participate as one of two representatives of the Soviet government in a conference convened by the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), an international organization dedicated to fostering peaceful relationships among nations bordering the Pacific Ocean. Characteristically, he was remembered as one of the hardest-working participants. Inevitably, Americans who spent time hiking around the park and in roundtable discussions with Romm came to view him as a friend. As the only participant who could speak Russian, English and Japanese, Romm seemed to be everywhere and to know everything and everyone.\n\nThere was, however, one important thing that Romm didn't know: he wasn't the only Soviet spy in Yosemite Park. In an extraordinary coincidence, Romm spent much of the meeting sparring with a member of the Japanese delegation, a young journalist who like Romm was an expert on China\u2014and, unknown to Romm, a spy for Stalin. Ozaki Hotsumi was the most important member of an intelligence ring that operated in Tokyo under the direction of the legendary Soviet intelligence officer Richard Sorge. To preserve his cover, Hotsumi argued passionately at the Yosemite meeting against the Soviet position, rationalizing Japan's expansionist policy in China. Romm accused Hotsumi of defending an imperialist government led by warmongers.\n\nThe conference marked a turning point in Hotsumi's career. His skillful justification of Japan's expansionist policy in China brought him to the attention of powerful politicians, and the friendships he forged in Yosemite with Japanese aristocrats put him on a path to penetrating the inner circle of Japan's political and military elites. Five years later, these connections allowed Hotsumi to obtain precise information about the timing of the Nazi invasion of the USSR, intelligence that Stalin, at great cost to the Soviet Union, ignored.\n\nSoon after Romm returned from California, he and Galena told their American friends that they had received instructions to pack up and return to Moscow. It was, they said, a temporary stop, as he'd been assigned to a prestigious new position as _Izvestia_ 's London correspondent. Soviet ambassador Alexander Antonovitch Troyanovsky hosted a farewell lunch at the Soviet embassy, mirroring the send-off Romm had received before leaving Moscow. Romm may have believed he was actually headed to London, but it is almost certain that as Troyanovsky toasted his long-time friend, the old Bolshevik knew or suspected the truth. As the OGPU defector Walter Krivitsky wrote, a \"barbed-wire frontier separate[d] the old Bolshevik Party from the new. During the purge there was only one passport across this frontier. You had to present Stalin and his OGPU with the required quota of victims.\"\n\nEven if he chose to ignore it, Romm was aware of the danger. A number of his comrades had been recalled to Moscow with sugar-coated promises, only to be arrested, imprisoned, and, more often than not, executed. His former superiors in Berlin and Paris had already fallen victim to the madness. They were falsely accused\u2014and, in an almost universal feature of Stalin's purges, had falsely confessed\u2014to absurd charges of treasonous plots. Romm's fate was more dramatic, and grotesque.\n\nShortly after Romm's return to Moscow, foreign correspondents and international diplomats flocked to the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union to attend one of the show trials of prominent Communists that Stalin used to consolidate power. The audience heard Stalin's chief prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, accuse Karl Radek, the former _Izvestia_ editor, Lenin confidant, and central committee member, of plotting with Trotsky to commit an astounding range of crimes: assassinating the Leningrad Party chief Sergey Kirov, sabotaging the Russian railways, and plotting to overthrow Stalin and return capitalism to Russia. Even Walter Duranty, Moscow correspondent of the _New York Times_ and a sycophantic apologist for Stalin, was shocked when Vyshinsky announced that the witnesses at the trial would include Romm, who had been arrested and had confessed his participation in the Trotskyist conspiracy.\n\nWhen word of Romm's arrest reached the National Press Club, his friends were stunned. Though their circumstances couldn't have been more different, members of the Washington press corps reacted just as countless loyal communists did when, after answering a late-night knock on their apartment doors, they found themselves in one of the NKVD's \"black raven\" police vans speeding through Moscow to the Lubyanka: \"There must be some kind of misunderstanding. If only someone can get word to comrade Stalin, everything will be sorted out.\"\n\nCharles O. Gridley, a _Denver Post_ reporter who was president of the National Press Club, immediately launched a campaign to convince the Soviet government that they'd made a terrible mistake. Gridley and a Who's Who of the Washington press, including editors and reporters representing the _New York Times_ , _Washington Post_ , and Associated Press, sent a cable to Duranty, asking him to present it to the American ambassador for delivery to Soviet authorities. The former OGPU operative Robert Allen was among the signers.\n\n\"All members of the Washington newspaper corps have read with anxiety of the arrest of our colleague, Vladimir Romm,\" the telegram stated. \"In our dealings with Romm we found him a true friend and advocate of the USSR. Never once did he even faintly indicate lack of sympathy for or disloyalty toward the existing government. He did more than any other Soviet envoy to popularize the Stalin regime in this country.\"\n\nWhen Romm was escorted, squeezed between two armed guards, into the courtroom the next day, it became clear why he'd been sucked into the madness. Previous show trials had depended on forced confessions, but the effect had been somewhat blunted by a lack of detail. In the absence of a storyline, it was difficult for some to follow or believe in the plot. Radek's prosecution opened the curtain on a new kind of Stalinist tragic opera, one in which fantastic confessions from the accused were rendered somewhat more credible by elaborate testimony from secondary characters.\n\nTo weave together the story of a grand conspiracy between Radek and Trotsky, Vyshinsky needed a human link between the protagonists. Not only did Romm know Radek, Romm had been in France at precisely the time Trotsky was shuffling around the country trying to avoid Soviet assassins. Conveniently for the Soviet fabulists, Romm had also traveled between Paris and Geneva at exactly the times when Radek had visited the League of Nations. He was the perfect candidate for the role of counterrevolutionary vector. Adding icing to the cake, Romm's signature on the Declaration of the 83 was presented as evidence of his devotion to Trotsky.\n\nStalin's interrogators so ruthlessly broke the spirits of the accused with physical and psychological torture, and especially with entirely credible threats to their families, that witnesses eagerly admitted to terrible crimes. Perversely, some loyal Bolsheviks felt that by falsely testifying against themselves they were serving the cause they'd devoted their lives to advancing. The prosecutors who orchestrated the trials compensated for the absurdity of their accusations by providing compliant witnesses with piles of false facts, details that added an air of verisimilitude to what would otherwise have been farcical dramas. The descriptions of precise details of the crimes convinced gullible people around the world that the trials were fair, while the sight of dedicated Bolsheviks freely confessing to heinous crimes terrified those who knew they were lies.\n\n\"I had full knowledge of the terrorist plot against the Soviet Government,\" Romm testified, as he launched into an account of how he'd acted as a courier, conveying messages between Radek in Geneva and Trotsky in France. Romm described a meeting with Trotsky at the end of July 1933 in a dark alley in Paris near the Bois de Boulogne. Soviet intelligence apparently didn't realize that the French authorities hadn't permitted Trotsky to set foot in Paris and that he'd been sick in bed hundreds of miles away at the time Romm was supposed to have met him.\n\nTrotsky, Romm said, had steeled him for his mission, which was nothing less than destroying the Soviet Union, by quoting a Latin proverb: \"What medicine cannot heal, iron will heal, and what iron cannot heal, fire will heal.\" Romm told the court that he had smuggled a letter from Trotsky to Radek pasted inside the cover of _Tsusima_ , a Russian novel about Czarist Russia's humiliating naval defeat in the Russo-Japanese war. The letter, Romm and Radek told the court, described how Japan and Germany were poised to conquer the Soviet Union, as well as deals Trotsky had made to give the USSR's enemies territorial concessions in exchange for appointing him ruler of Russia. Radek testified that he had burned the letter.\n\nRomm admitted that he'd agreed with Trotsky's son to serve as eyes and ears for the counterrevolution in Washington. \"So!\" Vyshinsky cried, \"You were correspondent for _Izvestia_ and special correspondent for Trotsky!\"\n\n\"It is a sad and dreadful thing to see your friends on trial for their lives,\" Duranty wrote in the _New York Times_. \"And it is sadder and more dreadful to hear them hang themselves with their own words.\" Duranty wrote that he had \"known and liked\" Romm since 1930. His old friend spoke in the courtroom \"with the same charm and courage that made him popular among Washington newspaper men\u2014one of the most exclusive and intelligent groups in the world and one that would never tolerate anyone shoddy or second rate.\" Incredibly, Duranty\u2014who worked out of the two-room TASS office in the National Press Building when he visited Washington in preference to the well-appointed _New York Times_ offices\u2014seemed to believe that his old friends Romm and Radek were guilty as charged.\n\nReferring to the Russian journalist's signature on the Declaration of the 83, Duranty told his readers that \"Mr. Romm declared he was a Trotskyist by conviction because he was not satisfied with the policy of Josef Stalin in China in 1926\u201327.\"\n\n\"It is still a mystery,\" Duranty wrote, that men like those on trial \"could continue to follow Trotsky\" when it had been obvious since 1923 that \"Stalin was the man Russia needed and [was] Lenin's destined successor.\" Of course, it is even more of a mystery how Western reporters like Duranty could continue to praise and tell lies on behalf of Stalin despite clear evidence of his crimes against humanity.\n\nThe _Times_ reporter had no illusions about Romm's fate. \"Mr. Romm is not on trial\u2014not yet, at least. But he is not a good risk for life insurance.\"\n\nDuranty was a cynical Stalinist, but the American ambassador, Joseph Davies, was something worse: a complete fool who accepted the Moscow show trials at face value. He wrote to Arthur Krock, the _New York Times_ Washington bureau chief, to assure him that Romm's testimony must be true because he provided so many details. \"While his appearance on the stand was rather downcast, he looked physically well and as far as I could judge, his testimony bore the hallmarks of credibility,\" Davies wrote.\n\nRomm's friends in the National Press Building were naive about the Soviet Union, but they weren't as stupid as Davies. Press Club president Gridley led a delegation of editors and reporters to the Soviet embassy, located in an elegant mansion on 16th Street, a short walk from the Press Building, where they expressed their \"shock and dismay at the news of Mr. Romm's arrest.\" _Washington Post_ editor Felix Morley spoke for the group, telling Ambassador Troyanovsky that they knew Romm well and had often spoken with him about the Soviet Union, and that \"he defended the policies of the Soviet government without qualification and with every indication that he believed in them wholeheartedly. Regardless of our views, we were compelled to recognize his brilliance and persuasiveness. In view of our experience with him, it will be extremely difficult for us to believe that he is guilty of any deliberate act of disloyalty to the Soviet government.\" A statement the reporters handed Troyanovsky noted that Romm had been \"a member in good standing not only of the press gallery but also of the National Press Club,\" described him as \"a journalist of unusual attainments and ability,\" and expressed \"a lively professional and personal concern about Mr. Romm.\" The leaders of the Washington press corps were not sentimental men; their efforts on Romm's behalf were a testament to the extraordinary affinity they felt for him.\n\nThe reporters apparently had no idea of the danger they were placing Troyanovsky in. The ambassador didn't want to remind anyone in Moscow about his close relationship with Romm, which stretched back to Tokyo and to his comrade's ill-advised decision to sign the Declaration of the 83. Countless men and women had been destroyed in the terror as a result of casual contacts with someone who was later purged. The Press Club delegation also failed to grasp the complete irrelevance of Romm's innocence. If Troyanovsky was touched by their naivet\u00e9, he kept his feelings to himself.\n\nThe ambassador tried to make the best of a bad situation, treating his visitors cordially and acknowledging that he shared their opinions of Romm's abilities. With a straight face, he also confided that Romm had been an outspoken Trotskyite prior to his posting to Washington. Describing Trotskyism as a kind of indecent addiction, Troyanovsky said that he'd helped wean his friend of the affliction, that while Romm was in Washington it seemed he'd been cured, but that, alas, it had been secretly lurking beneath the surface.\n\nMany of Romm's former friends in Washington were convinced of his innocence, but some influential American journalists\u2014especially those who viewed Stalin and the USSR favorably\u2014found it hard to believe that the Soviet government would present outrageous lies as truths, or that innocent men would confess to crimes. In an editorial published on January 26, 1937, the liberal _New York Post_ posited,\n\nThe Moscow trials require one to believe either (1) that Leon Trotzky [ _sic_ ] is a monster or (2) that Joseph Stalin is a monster. And no ordinary monsters. For either Trotzky and some of his followers have plotted with German and Japanese emissaries to dismember the Soviet Union so that they might overthrow Stalin, or Stalin has staged the greatest frameup in world history to discredit Trotzky.... In all thirty-three men have confessed. Almost all of them were old revolutionaries, men who had faced death and torture. One must believe either (1) that their confessions are true, or (2) that not one of the thirty-three had the courage to let out a protest before the assembled representatives of foreign powers and the foreign press. Not one.\n\nThe editorial was written by Isidor Feinstein. In subsequent editorials, Feinstein, who is better known by the pen name he adopted the next year, I. F. Stone, made it clear he believed the official Soviet version of the show trials. Even in those days, long before he became famous as a skeptic's skeptic, Stone was known as a muckraking gadfly who delighted in skewering the powerful, exposing mendacity and shaming politicians by publicizing their concealed conflicts of interest. Stone had accused the FBI of \"carrying on OGPU tactics\" against organized labor and written an editorial condemning the terror Stalin had unleashed after the assassination of his rival Sergey Kirov.\n\nStone knew that the Soviet secret police employed brutal, immoral tactics, and he was acquainted with reporters who swore that Romm was innocent, but he never connected these thoughts. Stone traveled often to Washington in 1936, working out of the _Post_ 's National Press Building office. Given his interest in the Soviet Union, as well as numerous common friends in the small circle of Washington reporters, it is almost certain that he met Romm at the Press Club or a social event.\n\nStone's editorial about the Radek trial is easier to understand in the light of a secret that he carried to his grave. While working to promote the New Deal, and writing sympathetically about Stalin, he had also sealed a secret bargain with representatives of the Soviet government.\n\nSoviet intelligence files reveal that Stone was introduced to an officer of the NKVD in April 1936. The young journalist had been spotted as a possible recruit by a long-time Soviet intelligence agent, Frank Palmer, the head of Federated Press, a leftist news service that presented itself as an alternative to the middle-of-the-road Associated Press. Stone was assigned the cover name \"Blin\" (pancake). By mid-May Blin had entered the \"channel of normal operational work\"\u2014meaning he had been recruited as a witting agent\u2014according to a note in the NKVD files. Decades later, Oleg Kalugin, a retired KGB general, confirmed that Stone had been a Soviet agent in the 1930s.\n\nStone probably didn't give the Soviets classified information\u2014it is unlikely that he ever had access to any\u2014but he was nonetheless a valuable and valued agent.\n\nUnlike in novels and films, most espionage doesn't involve white-knuckle exploits of muscular secret agents. To support the work of spies who steal secrets, operatives are needed to serve as couriers, provide cover identities, and identify and help vet potential recruits.\n\nTo understand the utility of someone like Stone beyond his obvious ability to write stories that helped the USSR, it is helpful to imagine yourself in the shoes of a Russian intelligence officer posted in 1935 to the Soviet consulate in New York or the embassy in Washington. In contrast to elite operatives like Romm, you don't speak English well and don't have a nuanced understanding of American society. Yet your career, possibly your life, depends on your ability to persuade Americans to put themselves at tremendous risk by spying on their own country. To make the task even more harrowing, there is only one thing even more pressing than establishing and maintaining a network of informants who are willing and able to provide valuable information: doing so without getting caught. A single screw-up\u2014a clumsy approach to an American who runs to the police or the newspapers, or a failure in tradecraft that alerts the FBI\u2014will result in your expulsion.\n\nAgents like Stone who could identify potential recruits and describe their motivations, weaknesses, and access to information were priceless to Soviet intelligence. This was especially true in the first few years after the establishment of diplomatic relations, when it became possible for intelligence officers to work under diplomatic cover in New York, Washington, and San Francisco.\n\nIn addition to his value as a talent spotter, Stone helped the Soviet cause through his writing. Soviet intelligence prioritized the recruitment of \"agents of influence.\" These were typically individuals like journalists who penned editorials and who were in a position to shape public opinion or tweak government decisions in ways that favored the Soviet Union.\n\nThe May 20, 1936, NKVD report noting Stone's recruitment stated that \"he went to Washington on assignment for his newspaper,\" has \"connections in the State Department and Congress,\" and knows \"Prince.\" Prince was Frank Prince, the nation's leading expert on anti-Semitism, an investigator who worked for the Anti-Defamation League as well as for congressional committees.\n\nResponding to a Soviet directive to provide derogatory information about the Hearst Corporation newspapers, a bastion of anti-Bolshevism, Stone reported that it had entered into a contract to supply Nazi Germany with a large consignment of copper.\n\nMore important from the perspective of an intelligence agency desperate for recruits, Stone reported that Hearst's star reporter in Berlin, an American named Karl von Wiegand, was disillusioned by his employer's close ties to the Nazi regime. Von Wiegand had known Hitler since 1922, when he had hired the then-obscure rabble rouser to write commentaries for the Hearst newspapers about German politics. In the 1930s von Wiegand wrote stories praising the German dictator and suggesting that the F\u00fchrer would never provoke or risk war with his neighbors. At the same time, von Wiegand privately opposed the Nazi regime and Hearst's pro-fascist editorial policy. He even met in secret with President Roosevelt in 1935 to express concerns about Hearst's support for Hitler.\n\nStone reported that von Wiegand had traveled to the United States on the maiden voyage of the _Hindenburg_ zeppelin. The NKVD, Stone suggested, could approach him through his son-in-law, Joseph Freeman\u2014a friend to the USSR. Freeman's brother Harry worked for TASS in its Press Building office. There is no evidence, however, that the NKVD recruited von Wiegand.\n\nIt is impossible to know whether Stone's writing about the USSR in general, and the Radek trial in particular, was shaped by his entanglement with the NKVD, or whether both Stone's covert work for Soviet intelligence and his editorial positions are better understood as reflections of his faith in Soviet Communism. What is certain is that Stone abused his readers' trust by claiming to present an objective account of the Soviet reality while secretly working for the NKVD. An accurate depiction of the show trials from a leftist like Stone would have convinced many Americans of Stalin's barbarity.\n\nStone and the _New York Post_ may have been fooled by the Radek trial, but other American reporters understood what was happening in Moscow. A few days after Stone's pro-Stalin editorial hit the streets, the syndicated columnist Rodney Dutcher told his readers what the trial looked like to members of the National Press Club: \"Few happenings abroad in late years have caused so much emotional disturbance\u2014especially among the newspaper crowd, which is sure Romm was loyal to his government\u2014as worry over the possibility that Romm might be shot.\"\n\nStalin and his regime were savage, but they tried to present a human face to the world. Konstantine Aleksandr Oumansky, who had succeeded Troyanovsky as Soviet ambassador to Washington, told the credulous US ambassador Davies that pleas from the Press Club had led to a mitigation of Romm's sentence. He was, Oumansky claimed, \"sent to do work in the interior.\"\n\nIn fact, Romm was executed in the usual fashion, by a bullet fired into the back of his head, on March 8, 1937. Galena was forced to suffer the horrors of a Siberian labor camp, while their son was turned over to an orphanage and subjected to the cruelties imposed on children of enemies of the people.\n\nThe execution was not announced, so reporters didn't know Romm's fate when, a few weeks later, Oumansky, speaking at a National Press Club luncheon, told them the USSR was \"fundamentally on the side of democracy but is surrounded by enemies and we must defend ourselves.\"\n\nRomm wasn't the only former National Press Club member to suffer from the fatal embrace of the Soviet Union's intelligence services. Alexei Neimann, _charg\u00e9 d'affaires_ at the Soviet Embassy, had joined the club a month before Romm's arrival in Washington. Neimann returned to Moscow in 1935 and continued to work for the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. In contrast to Romm, Neimann had not made much of an impression at the Press Club. None of the reporters who jumped to Romm's defense was in touch with him when the NKVD arrested him on August 9, 1937, and none was aware of Neimann's execution on April 8, 1938. Along with millions of other Soviet citizens who had been unjustly executed or imprisoned, Neimann and Romm were \"rehabilitated\" in 1956.\n\nAllen, Romm, and Stone were the first of a long line of Soviet intelligence operatives who used the National Press Building as a base for espionage, operating with relative impunity despite often-intense FBI surveillance. Soviet intelligence had a continuous presence in the building, but they were never alone. Over the decades, spies pretending to be journalists, and journalists moonlighting as spies, working to advance the interests of a number of governments\u2014including that of the United States\u2014have hidden in plain sight in the NPB's offices and corridors.\n\nFrom the early 1930s to Pearl Harbor, German and homegrown fascists, American and Soviet Communists, British intelligence operatives, Japanese agents, and members of an unofficial, unnamed private intelligence network that reported to President Roosevelt all rubbed shoulders in Press Building elevators, jostled against each other in its narrow corridors and stood shoulder to shoulder at the Press Club bar. Mingling among the thousands of legitimate journalists, lawyers, and lobbyists who reported to the building every day, they pursued covert agendas: plotting to make America safe for plutocrats by overthrowing the government, inciting racial hatred in pursuit of an imaginary homogeneous past, giving Stalin's espionage networks a foothold in Washington, and conspiring with British intelligence officers to shape American public opinion and defeat politicians who advocated neutrality.\n\nGovernments didn't have a monopoly on espionage and subversion conducted in the Press Building. Especially during the long years of the Great Depression and the anxious months that culminated in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, private citizens and corporations plotted behind Press Building doors to advance agendas that had a great deal in common with the fascism that was spreading across Europe.\n\n#\n\nArmy sharpshooters scanned the crowds from rooftops on the morning of March 5, 1933, as Herbert Hoover, his grim expression matching the foul weather, stepped into an open-topped limousine for his last ride as president of the United States. The dour Hoover and ebullient president-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt shared a lap blanket as the car traveled down the White House driveway, turned right onto Pennsylvania Avenue, dog-legged down 15th Street, and turned left back onto Pennsylvania Avenue past the National Press Building. Reporters who weren't on the Capitol grounds crowded into the Press Club lounge to listen, along with millions of Americans, to a radio broadcast of FDR delivering the most important inaugural address of the twentieth century. His assurance that \"the only thing we have to fear is fear itself\" was punctuated by the crackle of sleet hitting the microphone.\n\nAfter the speech, Roosevelt retraced the path to the White House, this time as the thirty-second president of the United States. He was followed by an eighteen-thousand-person parade featuring brass bands, horse-mounted cavalry, and Indian chiefs in feathered headdresses. As the human river flowed past the White House, FDR watched from a chair on the lawn, behind bullet-proof glass\u2014a reminder of how, on a sunnier, more carefree day three weeks earlier, he and the country had learned how vulnerable they were to the threat posed by even a single man determined to change history.\n\nRoosevelt owed his life, and America its salvation from the Depression, to a flimsy chair. The president-elect had been making jocular remarks from the backseat of a convertible to a crowd in Miami's Bayfront Park on February 15 when Giuseppe Zangara, an Italian anarchist bedeviled by a decades-long stomachache, climbed onto a folding chair, raised his arm, and took aim. Just as his revolver discharged, the chair wobbled, jiggling Zangara's arm. The bullet missed Roosevelt, striking and killing the man seated next to him, Chicago mayor Anton Cermak. Paralyzed by polio, Roosevelt couldn't move. He didn't flinch in the sickening seconds after Cermak fell, seconds when a more accurate second shot could have found its mark. Before this could happen, Zangara toppled to the ground and civilians in the crowd pounced on him.\n\nFears about the president's safety on Inauguration Day accentuated a terror that gripped and united the country, from the boardrooms of withering corporations to the kitchens of desiccated farms. Over four thousand banks failed in January and February 1933, wiping out the savings of millions and compounding the misery of Americans who were already struggling with massive unemployment, a drought that had turned Midwest farms into dust, and the near-total collapse of manufacturing. By Inauguration Day, the banking system had almost ceased functioning and the nation was on the brink of catastrophe. \"The atmosphere which surrounded the change in government was comparable to that which might be found in a beleaguered capital in war time,\" the _New York Times_ reported.\n\nThe spirits of the \"ten times ten thousand men, women and children\" who had gathered in front of the Capitol to hear Roosevelt \"were as somber as the grey sky above,\" _Time_ reported. The cover of the magazine, which hit the newsstands a week after the inauguration, featured a watercolor painting of a newly elected national leader sitting in a verdant garden, gazing serenely into the future, a friendly dog by his side. But it wasn't FDR with his Scottish terrier Fala (who wasn't born until 1940). _Time_ 's cover story was dedicated to Adolf Hitler's election as chancellor of Germany and the founding of what would come to be known as the Third Reich.\n\nWhen democracy failed them, millions of Europeans turned to strongmen, and there is no reason to believe Americans had been inoculated against autocracy. Roosevelt was being encouraged to emulate Hitler or Mussolini. A _Chicago Tribune_ editorial on his inaugural address ran under the headline \"For Dictatorship if Necessary.\" Eminent Americans, including the country's most powerful newspaper publisher, William Randolph Hearst, urged the president to assume absolute power to save the country from disaster. Hearst even produced and distributed a film, _Gabriel Over the White House_ , about a president who experienced an epiphany following a near-fatal accident that transformed him from a lightweight playboy into a dictator who brought prosperity to the United States and peace to the world.\n\nIt soon became clear that the new president's instincts veered more to the left than the right, and that the energetic steps taken in the weeks after he assumed power had averted the threat of revolution. Men at the top of the capitalist food chain found themselves aligned with rabble-rousers on the fringes of society in their quest for an American dictator, or at least a president more sympathetic to their interests.\n\nIt was from the National Press Building that, in the desperate years of the Depression, combatants in some of the bitterest battles for America's future planned and executed their campaigns. The Press Building was home to organizations promoting extremist social and political ideologies, some operating on shoestring budgets from hole-in-the-wall offices and others with almost unlimited funds occupying sprawling suites. Even as they exploited access to the nation's front pages to burnish their credibility and amplify their messages, these groups took pains to obscure their most unpalatable goals. Those with close ties to foreign interests tried to appear as American as the Fourth of July, while organizations dedicated to undermining the country's democratic institutions promoted themselves as patriots and defenders of the Constitution.\n\nHunger and anger brought strange, ugly characters out of the sewers, including some who hoped a National Press Building address would disguise their stench. James True was a prime example.\n\n#\n\nJames True's patent for a policeman's truncheon. True marketed the truncheon as a \"kike killer.\"\n\nAlthough he had plenty of company on the fringe of the political spectrum, True stood out as the oddest, and most odious, character to ever occupy a National Press Building office. Operating behind locked doors on the tenth floor and from the comfort of Press Club armchairs, True cloaked his efforts to further Nazi ideals behind a nativist fa\u00e7ade and seasoned his fascist social theories with pro-business bromides. But he made no secret of his animosity to the children of Israel and the descendants of African slaves.\n\nThe newsletters and brochures emanating from True's office were as vile as any produced in Germany\u2014in fact, many were translations of Nazi propaganda. True peddled more than hateful literature: his publications marketed the \"kike killer,\" a wooden truncheon he had designed that featured one edge shaped like a cutlass, designed to crack a skull more efficiently than an old-fashioned Billy club. The Patent Office filed the invention under \"Amusement Devices and Games.\" Ever the gentleman, True designed a smaller \"ladies'\" version.\n\nSix-foot-two with translucent skin covering a toothpick-thin body topped by alabaster hair, True looked like a septuagenarian minister. Visitors to his office quickly learned that the mild appearance was deceptive. A kike killer hung from a leather strap above his desk. He was afraid of the telephone, wrongly believing the FBI was listening, but wasn't shy about showing visitors the pistol in his desk's upper-right-hand drawer. Though True was ostensibly a journalist and publisher specializing in economics and business, somehow conversations in his office always turned to killing Jews and lynching blacks.\n\nTrue wasn't the first person in Washington to promote anti-Semitism or racism, but he was a leader in bringing prejudice that had once been shaded by euphemisms into the sunlight. Quiet forms of exclusion were woven into the fabric of American society, from the committees that guarded the purity of country-club membership rolls and vetted prospective medical students, to covenants that barred blacks, Jews, and Arabs from living in Washington's best neighborhoods, and a thousand other common forms of bigotry. For generations Jews had experienced discrimination, but there had been a tacit agreement to keep it under wraps, both by WASPs who sought to preserve their privilege and their peace of mind and by Jews who felt that publicly resisting prejudice would invite a violent backlash. True helped make the 1930s different. He and his admirers printed and shouted out loud their hatred of Jews, openly invoking the example of Nazi Germany as a model for America.\n\nArdent anti-Semitism didn't disqualify True from enjoying the company of his peers at the National Press Club, where he was a member in good standing while working overtime to become one of the nation's leading purveyors of hate. True and his proclivities were well known to his colleagues. In a column that ran in newspapers around the country, a Press Club member, Charles Stewart, wrote about True's convictions as if they were an amusing sort of eccentricity. \"He's a likeable chap\u2014if you don't happen to be a Jew,\" Stewart, who clearly was not one, reported.\n\nThe Press Club's relaxed attitude toward casual displays of rancid racism was proudly displayed on the pages of its newsletter, _The Goldfish Bowl_. More than a decade after True had joined the club, the publication, which had a habit of reprinting amusing squibs from newspapers, selected the following tidbit from the Clio, Mississippi, _Press_ for the edification of its members: \"The negro did not hang at Abbeyville last Friday. He was dressed and ready for the execution when a telegram from the Governor granted a respite for two weeks. The large crowd was very much disappointed.\" True must have chuckled when he read the headline crafted by the _Goldfish Bowl_ 's editors: \"Better Luck Next Time.\"\n\nTrue portrayed himself as pro-business and anti-communist, but he hated Jews and blacks more than Reds. His flagship publication, a weekly launched in July 1933 under the bland title _Industrial Control Reports_ , was a mixture of real and imaginary news aimed at explicating and discrediting the New Deal, all the while promoting race hatred. One of the first American fascist periodicals, _Industrial Control Reports_ used expressions like \"Jew Deal,\" celebrated the formation of anti-Semitic vigilante groups, and informed its readers that what True considered biased foreign reporting in American newspapers should surprise no one because \"you can safely state that 60 per cent of the New York Associated Press personnel is Jewish.\" Communism and Judaism were fused in his mind, leading him to inform his readers that \"Christian Nazism is the last bulwark against Jewish communism.\" True peddled the notion that blacks were allied with Jews as part of a vast conspiracy. He wrote about Jews hiring \"big, buck niggers\" to rape white women.\n\n_Industrial Control Reports_ was aimed at businessmen and sold for twelve dollars a year, a steep price at the time. It was influential beyond its circulation, which never topped five thousand. The _Reports_ served as a fascist guidepost because True often got the Nazi party line first, even scooping the German American Bund's _Deutscher Weckruf_ newspaper. American fascists looked up to True as an elder statesman and leading thinker. Adding to the proceeds from subscriptions to his newsletter and sales of fascist tracts, secret funding for True's activities came from anti\u2013New Deal organizations that were backed by some of the most powerful businessmen in America, including Pierre du Pont, a director of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, and Alfred Sloan, chairman and president of General Motors.\n\nTrue coordinated closely with George Deatherge, a fascist who in the 1930s reconstituted and led the Knights of the White Camellia, a terrorist hate group similar to the Ku Klux Klan. One of Deatherge's innovations was an attempt to persuade his members to plant burning swastikas instead of crosses outside the houses of African Americans.\n\nTrue's activities aroused interest at the highest levels of government. In 1934 the White House ordered the Bureau of Investigation, which later became the FBI, to investigate the publisher of _Industrial Control Reports_. The Acting Attorney General concluded that it would be possible to try True for libel, but \"prosecution would bring the most widespread publicity, and a failure to convict would bring an unfortunate result.\" FDR ordered another investigation in 1937 which again resulted in a recommendation against prosecution.\n\nThe Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) took an interest in True as part of an investigation of Nazi efforts to recruit American Indians. The Nazis wanted to persuade Native Americans that they were members of the Aryan race, and therefore superior to African Americans and Jews, as part of a propaganda effort aimed at building up support for Hitler in the United States. ONI learned that True was secretly funneling money from the German American Bund to Alice Lee Jemison, a pro-fascist Seneca Indian activist. He gave Jemison the code name Pocahontas, paying her to publish articles and tour the country giving speeches attacking the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Roosevelt administration while urging support for American fascist organizations. Jemison lobbied for the Seneca tribe in Washington, testifying at congressional hearings alongside fascists.\n\nTrue had a number of admirers on Capitol Hill. His most vocal fan in Congress was Minnesota senator Thomas David Schall. Schall liked to ride horses and show off his prowess with a revolver despite having been rendered blind as a young man in a freak accident involving an electric cigar lighter. He accused FDR of plotting to \"Sovietize\" the United States, drawing evidence from the pages of _Industrial Control Reports_. Schall arranged for True's fascist articles to be reproduced in the _Congressional Record_ and disseminated at government expense.\n\nSeeking a broader audience, in 1934 True organized a new company, America First Incorporated, therewith coining a phrase that was to be adopted by American isolationists and brown shirts, and revived by twenty-first-century nationalists. The organization's mission statement attacked FDR and the New Deal as communist dupes and falsely asserted that \"Soviet Russia is spending $6,000,000 this year in the United States on communist propaganda and the financing of riots.\" True's publications equated the New Deal with Bolshevism, rooted Bolshevism in an international Jewish conspiracy, and urged the WASP majority, which he called \"the real American patriots,\" to resist both\u2014preferably with bullets and batons. In September 1934 newspapers across the country printed a public letter to FDR signed by \"James True, President, America First!\" that accused New Deal officials of \"following the theories of Karl Marx\" and basing \"their plans on the Soviet Russian system of regimentation and collectivism.\" Among other sins, True accused various government officials of belonging to an organization that advocated \"negro equality.\"\n\n\"America First is an extremely conservative organization headed by a group of individuals who are quite sure that most of Roosevelt's advisors are being subsidized by Stalin,\" the _Washington Post_ informed its readers. \"It is Mr. True's boast that he is the man who first informed industry that the Administration was heading straight down the road to Moscow.\" While the _Washington_ _Post_ handled True with thinly veiled sarcasm, _New Masses_ , the literary bible of the Left, branded him an imminent threat to national security in a lurid article titled \"Plotting American Pogroms.\" The expos\u00e9 was written by John Spivak, a crusading investigative reporter.\n\nTrue often accused his opponents of being communists and Soviet agents\u2014and when it came to Spivak, he was absolutely right. Spivak, who vehemently denied membership in the Communist Party, was not only a card-carrying member but also an official in its feared security apparatus that was charged with discovering and expelling ideological deviants.\n\nIn addition, Spivak was a paid Soviet intelligence agent. In the 1930s, while leading a public crusade against fascists, he secretly worked with Jacob Golos, at the time the most talented and productive OGPU operative in the United States. Spivak gained the trust of congressional staff and of investigators at Jewish organizations, and he passed information he gleaned from them about Nazi propaganda and espionage activities to Golos for transmission to Moscow. He also used his contacts and investigative skills to track down Trotskyites.\n\nWhether he was writing for progressive publications or the OGPU's files, Spivak's reporting was colorful. For example, in a 1935 report to Moscow on the disappearance of a German named Count Alfred von Saurma-Douglas, Spivak noted that the aristocrat \"had been castrated,\" and his wife \"is a hermaphrodite.\"\n\nSpivak's sources, like his readers, had no idea he was an OGPU agent. One of his most useful informants, an investigator in Washington for the Anti-Defamation League, slipped Spivak files from confidential congressional investigations about White Russians and Nazis. Another of Spivak's sources, a woman who worked on a congressional committee, provided him reports with details \"about the chemical warfare industry, the division of the sphere of influence among the largest global arms producers, bribing methods, ties with intelligence agencies, purely technical military questions about individual types of weapons, etc.,\" according to a report in the KGB's archives.\n\nIn his articles and books, Spivak attacked any and all public references to Soviet espionage as shameless Red-baiting. At the same time, his descriptions of the scale and sophistication of Nazi and Japanese espionage in the United States were wildly exaggerated. The only intelligence operation that matched the scope and accomplishments he attributed to Germany's infiltration of American government and business was headquartered a thousand miles to the east of Berlin, on Moscow's Lubyanka Square.\n\n_Industrial Control Reports_ and _New Masses_ spent the summer of 1936 sounding alarms about imaginary communist subversion and equally improbable fascist pogroms. True kicked off the season by informing his readers that a Zionist conference had been held in Providence to \"perfect plans to take over the nation starting Jewish New Year, September 15.\"\n\nA few weeks later, True gained national notoriety when _New Masses_ published an explosive article about him under the headline \"Pogrom in September!\" The story recounted how the author had gained True's trust by claiming to be a representative of the Republican Party seeking educational materials about the Jewish conspiracy to take over America.\n\nTrue's National Press Building \"office is a key post in the anti-Semitic movement in America,\" _New Masses_ told its readers. \"From it literature is disseminated. From it come instructions in how to recruit Jew-baiters, how to spread the doctrine of intolerance, race hatred, persecution. From it James True has announced the first American pogrom will occur next month, September 1936.\" News of the planned \"Jew shoot\" prompted the Secret Service to assign guards to prominent Jewish government officials.\n\nTrue was one of a dozen Americans invited by a German Nazi agent in early 1939 to serve on a council that would \"link together all patriotic movements in the United States for the purpose of recovering our country from control of the Jews.\" In May 1939 a prominent American fascist, Anna B. Sloane, wrote to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels seeking money to create a newspaper to be called _The National Patriot_. Her letter named True as a member of the paper's advisory board.\n\nTrue often advocated splitting African American heads and shooting Jews, but all that he personally assaulted was truth and decency. He provided aid and comfort to Nazis in the years before World War II, served as a conduit for Nazi propaganda, and likely provided some assistance to the stream of emissaries from Berlin that passed through his office.\n\nThe Department of Justice indicted True in 1942 as part of a group of twenty-nine Axis propagandists charged with conspiring to destroy the morale of American soldiers. Much of the eight thousand pages of evidence the prosecution submitted to the court was secretly provided to the Justice Department by British intelligence, which had been shadowing and harassing American fascists for over a year. The trial was a circus, continually interrupted by defendants leaping to their feet to shout at the judge, each other, and their own attorneys. A mistrial was declared after several months when the judge died. In 1944 many of the same defendants, including True, were tried for conspiring with officials of the German Reich and leaders and members of the Nazi party to incite mutiny, otherwise sabotage the war, and set up a Nazi regime in the United States.\n\nTrue died during the trial.\n\n#\n\nThree floors below James True Associates and many steps closer to the center of the political spectrum and the top of the economic pyramid, a powerful organization fought Roosevelt's New Deal even more ferociously, and far more effectively, than True. The American Liberty League pioneered many of the practices that characterize American politics today: secretive funding of \"grassroots\" political groups with extreme agendas, massive expenditures on political campaigns by shadowy groups that are ostensibly independent of the candidates they support, and worship of interpretations of the Constitution that align with the financial interests of the wealthiest Americans while disregarding passages intended to check the powers of the privileged.\n\nThe Liberty League was also at the heart of a murky plot to replace FDR with a pro-business dictator.\n\nThe League was the direct descendent of an organization that fought for the right of Americans to drink legally, the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA). Both the AAPA and Liberty League claimed to be dedicated to promoting liberty, and both were funded by a group of plutocrats who believed that the most important freedom was the freedom to avoid paying taxes. The AAPA was a decade-old in 1928 when Pierre du Pont took over its leadership. He recruited John J. Raskob, a vice president at E. I. du Pont de Nemours and former Treasurer of General Motors, to lead the organization. At the time, Raskob had his hands full with two very different projects: building and managing the Empire State Building in New York and modernizing the Democratic Party in Washington.\n\nRaskob provided more than $100,000 from his personal funds in 1930 to establish a permanent Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters with offices in the National Press Building. Previously, both political parties had operated temporary national offices only for about four months prior to presidential elections. Raskob, who had been chairman of the DNC since 1928, remained in New York, dedicating himself to marketing the world's tallest, and for years one of New York's emptiest, buildings. He left day-to-day operations at DNC headquarters in the hands of a savvy operator named Jouett Shouse, a man with two passions: politics and ponies. His bets about the former were far more often on the money.\n\nTrying to match Raskob, the Republican National Committee also created a permanent headquarters office. Naturally, it was also located in the Press Building. This marked the start of the modern era of permanent campaigns waged by full-time professional political operatives.\n\nRaskob fought bitterly to deny Roosevelt the presidential nomination, and having lost was forced to resign his DNC position in 1932. He turned his attention to the repeal of Prohibition, opening an AAPA office in the Press Building and putting Shouse in charge. The operation was funded by Pierre du Pont and his younger brothers, Ir\u00e9n\u00e9e and Lammot; Raskob; Grayson Mallet Prevost Murphy, a banker who served on the boards of Anaconda Copper, Bethlehem Steel, and New York Trust; and other industrialists.\n\nThe wealthiest men in America weren't investing their time and money to repeal Prohibition because they longed to order cocktails at the Plaza Hotel bar. While Prohibition offended the spirit of individualism they considered a hallmark of American society, and promoted lawlessness exemplified by thugs like Al Capone, these were minor inconveniences to the Robber Barons who backed the AAPA. If these had been the only drawbacks to banning alcohol, the du Ponts and their confederates could have waited for legislated temperance to die a natural death.\n\nRaskob, the du Ponts, and their comrades detested and went to war against Prohibition because they blamed it for the one threat that kept them awake at night, a scourge that they feared would\u2014and that ultimately did\u2014destroy their way of life: income taxes.\n\nTo keep the government afloat during World War I, Congress established a tax on the incomes of the wealthiest Americans. The du Ponts expected the affliction, like a similar tax imposed during the Civil War, to be temporary. Those hopes were dashed in January 1919 by ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, which made Prohibition the law of the land. Revenue from taxes on alcohol sales evaporated, blowing a huge hole in the federal budget. This led Congress to expand rather than rescind the income tax.\n\nRaskob and Shouse attracted donations to the AAPA with promises that the income tax would be washed away in a flood of beer if the saloon taps were reopened. The largest, most sophisticated American lobbying campaign up to that time was launched to support the unspoken proposition that government should be funded by taxing the drinking habits of millions of Americans rather than the incomes of a tiny elite.\n\nWorking from his Press Building office, Shouse created front organizations and funded the campaigns of \"wet\" candidates for state legislatures and Congress. The AAPA intervened in fifty congressional races, winning 90 percent of them. It was so effective that even Utah, home to the teetotaling Mormon Church, approved the Twenty-First Amendment repealing Prohibition on December 3, 1933, sloshing the repeal movement over the threshold of the two-thirds of states needed to change the Constitution. Roosevelt tried to take credit for the deed, sending the first legal shipment of beer in Washington to the thirsty hacks at the Press Club, but Arthur Krock of the _New York Times_ correctly attributed the success to Shouse and the AAPA. The association's efforts had shaved two years from the life of Prohibition, Krock estimated.\n\nEven as he raised a glass at a celebratory banquet held a few hours after Utah pounded the final nail into Prohibition's coffin, Shouse realized that the New Deal meant that he and his patrons had won a battle but not the war. Although Prohibition had been repealed, the income tax wasn't going away\u2014and, even more than the tax, the Roosevelt administration's fiscal, regulatory, and social policies posed an existential threat to the lifestyles of the ultrarich. Three days after the celebration, the directors of the AAPA, in a more sober mood, passed a resolution calling on the board to consider forming a new group dedicated to defending \"the principles of the Constitution.\"\n\nA letter to Raskob from Robert Ruliph Morgan Carpenter, a retired du Pont vice president and member of the company's board of directors, encapsulated the mindset of the AAPA's directors and the kinds of threats they were organizing to oppose. Writing in March 1934, Carpenter complained, \"Five negroes on my place in South Carolina refused work this spring...saying they had easy jobs with the government. A cook on my houseboat at Fort Myers quit because the government was paying him a dollar an hour as a painter.\" Carpenter asked Raskob to present his travails to Roosevelt as evidence of the need to scrap the New Deal before the country was ruined. Raskob wrote back without a hint of irony to suggest that Carpenter, who was married to Pierre du Pont's sister, \"take the lead in trying to induce the du Pont and General Motors groups, followed by other big industries, to definitely organize to protect society from the sufferings which it is bound to endure if we allow communistic elements to lead the people to believe that all businessmen are crooks.\"\n\nRealizing that no one else was going to do it, Raskob took the initiative, calling on his peers to join him to form an organization dedicated to unraveling the New Deal. When it came to organizing a massive effort to influence government and public opinion, Raskob had both a precedent and an energetic operative to run it. He recruited Shouse to crank up the apparatus he'd created to fight Prohibition. This time the goal wouldn't be amending the Constitution, it would be preserving the liberty\u2014and fortunes\u2014of the men who invented the modern corporation, men who had a great deal to lose if Roosevelt succeeded in creating a New Deal for American workers. Raskob and his comrades humbly envisioned the American Liberty League's mission as annihilating the \"imported, autocratic, Asiatic Socialist party of Karl Marx and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.\"\n\nThe roster of American Liberty League directors and funders read like a Who's Who of the American plutocracy. The men who ran US Steel, General Motors, the Chase Manhattan and JP Morgan banks, Standard Oil, and, until FDR's presidential nomination, the Democratic Party joined the du Pont brothers and Raskob in a crusade against what they viewed as populist tyranny.\n\nOn August 22, 1934, Shouse ushered a group of reporters into his office, suite 781 of the National Press Building\u2014next door to the Democratic National Committee, where he'd been executive director\u2014to announce formation of the American Liberty League. Sitting in his shirt sleeves, he said the League would \"defend and protect the Constitution of the United States,\" and \"teach respect for the rights of persons and property as fundamental to every successful form of government.\"\n\nAt first its intended victim treated the Liberty League as a joke. President Roosevelt told reporters he'd \"laughed for ten minutes\" after reading in that morning's _New York Times_ that \"talk in Wall Street indicated that the announcement of the new American Liberty League was little short of an answer to a prayer.\" FDR criticized the League as a tool of the superrich, quipping that one of its tenets was \"love thy God but forget thy neighbor,\" and adding that its God was property.\n\nWhile FDR had shown amusement, news of the League's formation and of its powerful backers stunned and alarmed a retired Marine general named Smedley Darlington Butler. Reading newspaper stories about the organization persuaded Butler that attempts by a group of bankers and industrialists to recruit him to lead a coup that would take power from FDR had been real\u2014and that the plotters must be stopped.\n\nButler was a strange candidate for right-wing generalissimo. As the most-admired soldier in America and a tireless advocate for veterans, it was plausible that Butler could recruit a mob of superannuated soldiers. On the other hand, vilifying bankers and capitalists was his favorite pastime.\n\nButler had spent much of the first three decades of the twentieth century commanding Marines from China to the Philippines, and especially in Central America. He came to believe that America's muscular foreign policy benefited big business, hurt the people who found themselves on the wrong side of Yankee bayonets, and did nothing for regular Americans. Summing up his career in an August 1933 speech to the nation's largest veterans organization, the American Legion, Butler said he'd been a \"high-class muscle man for Big Business.\" He recounted that he'd \"helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers,\" had helped make Mexico \"safe for American oil interests,\" and had flexed military muscle to help American business interests in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba: \"I helped the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.\" Having spent fifty years in uniform and twice been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, Butler was drummed out of the service in October 1931 after causing a diplomatic incident by falsely accusing Benito Mussolini of running down and killing a child.\n\nThe same individuals who had financed the AAPA and later created the Liberty League tried to convince Butler to take over the American Legion and use it to mount a coup against President Roosevelt. Their models were the black-shirted veterans who put Mussolini in power and the _Croix de Feu_ (Cross of Fire), a fascist paramilitary group recruited from French veterans. The idea was to keep FDR in office as a figurehead, much as King Victor Emmanuel III had stayed on when Mussolini took control of Italy.\n\nButler played along with the plotters, gathering evidence that he intended to use to disrupt the scheme. At one point, one of the conspirators told Butler that a new organization was being formed to support the putsch: \"You watch; in two or three weeks you will see it come out in the papers. There will be big fellows in it. This is to be the background of it. These are to be the villagers in the opera.\" It would, Butler was told, be presented to the public as a society to maintain the Constitution. Butler later told congressional investigators that about two weeks later the \"American Liberty League appeared, which was just about what he described it to be.\"\n\nNot only did the Liberty League appear when Butler had been told to expect it, spouting the kind of slogans about the Constitution and liberty that he'd been told to expect, but its principal officers included the men who had been pressing him to take over the American Legion. Butler became convinced that the plan to raise an army of veterans and wrest control of the country from Roosevelt wasn't just chatter from con men.\n\nDetermined to thwart the plot, and realizing that in the absence of evidence or witnesses he would be dismissed as a crank, Butler turned for help to a journalist at the _Philadelphia Record_ , Paul Comly French, who had worked in the past as his personal secretary. Presenting himself as Butler's assistant, French visited Gerald MacGuire, an oleaginous bond salesman who had been the intermediary between the Liberty League and Butler. French rushed from the two-hour meeting to a nearby office where he typed a memo recording the bond salesman's remarks: \"We need a Fascist government in this country to save the Nation from the communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built in America. The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader. He could organize a million men overnight.\" MacGuire also suggested that arms and equipment could be obtained from the Remington Arms Co. on credit through one of the du Pont brothers who owned a controlling interest in Remington\u2014and who were among the most enthusiastic backers of the Liberty League.\n\nFrench broke the story of what came to be known as the Business Plot in identical articles published in the _Philadelphia Record_ and the _New York Post_ on November 30, 1934. The story quoted Butler as saying he had been asked by a group of \"wealthy New York brokers to lead a Fascist movement to set up a dictatorship in the United States.\" Other newspapers reported French's revelations with a combination of skepticism, incredulity, and scorn.\n\nEditors were reluctant to give credence to the tale, but it piqued the interest of two members of Congress, John W. McCormack of Massachusetts and Samuel Dickstein of New York, publicity hounds who headed the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities. They deemed Butler's allegations credible enough\u2014and the drama of uncovering a potential coup plot sufficiently likely to generate headlines\u2014to merit an investigation. Butler, French, and MacGuire all testified to the committee in executive sessions.\n\nIn a report released in February 1935, the committee concluded: \"Evidence was obtained showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country. There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.\"\n\nThe report astounded Butler, not because of its revelations, but rather because of what wasn't revealed. There wasn't even a hint of the most explosive information he'd given the committee. The American Liberty League, the du Ponts and other powerful men Butler believed were behind the plot, weren't mentioned.\n\nJohn Spivak, the crusading _New Masses_ reporter and Soviet spy, got wind of the cover-up and traveled to Washington to investigate. A committee staffer inadvertently gave him unexpurgated transcripts of all of the testimony the committee had received in executive session. For Spivak, the suppressed testimony was irrefutable proof that the conspiracies he'd been writing about for decades were real: Wall Street bankers _were_ plotting to destroy democracy; the threat of fascism wasn't a fantasy. He became intoxicated by the prospect of bringing down the nation's most powerful capitalists. Instead of simply reporting the facts, in two articles published in _New Masses_ in January and February 1935, Spivak buried an accurate account of \"Wall Street's fascist conspiracy\" in a feverish, baroque, anti-Semitic conspiracy theory so complex that he had to publish a chart showing how the various players were allegedly connected. The stories were ignored or ridiculed.\n\nHistorians have shrugged off the Business Plot, but at the time it seemed real to many. FDR's secretary of Interior, Harold Ickes, believed the story was suppressed as a result of secret agreements between the American Liberty League and the country's major newspapers, which were owned by individuals who were members, or closely associated with members of the League. These connections, Ickes claimed, led publishers to ensure that their papers distorted and covered up the episode \"in the interest of their advertisers and in defense of the capitalist class.\" Four decades later, McCormack said he believed a dangerous plot had been disrupted: \"If General Butler had not been the patriot he was, and if they had been able to maintain secrecy, the plot certainly might well have succeeded.\"\n\nThe Liberty League can be considered the Dr. Jekyll of the pro-business Far Right, which would make the Sentinels of the Republic, a spin-off from an older organization originally created to oppose women's suffrage, the Mr. Hyde. Operating with funding from the League\u2014which at one time contemplated merging with the Sentinels\u2014and from the same members of the du Pont, Pew, and Pitcairn families who funded the League, the Sentinels worked from an office on the Press Building's thirteenth floor. The group sent editorials on a regular basis to 1,300 newspapers denouncing as un-American progressive initiatives that put the interests of ordinary people above those of the rich. Child-labor laws, maternity benefits, unemployment insurance, and the distribution of birth-control information, were, according to the Sentinels, steps down the path to godless communism.\n\nThe tycoons who funded the Sentinels felt compelled to distance themselves from it in 1936 after an investigation by Senator Hugo Black revealed both their funding of the organization and its hateful nature. Black released a letter in which Sentinel representatives referred to FDR's policies as \"Jewish Communism\" and asserted both that middle-class Americans longed for an American Hitler and that the \"fight for western Christian civilization can be won: but only if we recognize that the enemy is world-wide and that it is Jewish in origin.\"\n\nIn addition to funding the Sentinels, the Liberty League and its leaders funneled money to another anti-Semitic group with a National Press Building Office, the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, which shared members and goals with the Ku Klux Klan. This connection didn't faze the League. In fact, when it was being formed, the Liberty League's founders had contemplated aligning their organization with the KKK.\n\nStarting in October 1934, Ir\u00e9n\u00e9e du Pont and Shouse corresponded and held a series of meetings with KKK leaders, including Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans, about merging the two groups. The merger didn't happen because the businessmen believed the KKK's membership had dwindled to the point that it wouldn't be of much value; they weren't opposed to collaborating with hooded men who killed and terrorized African Americans. Even after the idea of a merger had been dropped, Pierre du Pont tried to enlist the KKK in the Liberty League's work. He wrote to Evans suggesting that the KKK emulate \"vigilance committees\" that had been formed on the West Coast to prevent government seizures of property, and argued that the time had come to reorient the KKK toward the protection of property.\n\nAlthough the Liberty League\/KKK alliance was not consummated, the fact that some of the wealthiest men in America considered working with thugs who celebrated the lynching and terrorizing of innocent men, women, and children provides insight into their character and lends credence to the notion that the League backed the Business Plot.\n\nPublic disclosure of the Liberty League's ties to the Business Plot didn't diminish the enthusiasm of the organization's backers. The League poured over a million dollars, an unprecedented sum at the time, into defeating Roosevelt in the 1936 election. Its staff was three times larger than the Republican National Party's Press Building headquarters operation. Much of this money was spent creating one of the largest publishing enterprises in Washington, certainly the largest headquartered in the Press Building, where it had expanded from Shouse's desk to take up an entire floor. William C. Murphy Jr., quit his job as Washington correspondent for the _Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger_ and resigned as president of the National Press Club to take on the task of running the League's publicity operation.\n\nThe League printed and distributed over five million pamphlets and leaflets during the campaign, and it bombarded newspapers with copy that generated thousands of anti-Roosevelt news stories and editorials.\n\nRoosevelt branded the League a band of \"economic royalists,\" but the recipients of its largesse were anything but aristocrats. The League's Southern strategy included secretly financing Gene Talmadge, the white-supremacist governor of Georgia. When Talmadge asked for help financing a national convention to offer himself as an alternative to Roosevelt, Raskob and Pierre du Pont each contributed $5,000 and General Motors president Sloan threw $1,000 into the pot. Their money helped Talmadge print a phony magazine, _Georgia Women's World_ , and have it distributed at the convention. The magazine featured a photo of Eleanor Roosevelt with two African American Howard University students above a caption describing the occasion as the first lady's \"going to some nigger meeting, with two escorts, niggers, on each arm.\"\n\nUndisguised proselytizing for the rights of the rich, not reports of its role in the Business Plot or support for racist propaganda, led to the League's downfall. A dinner the League held at Washington's Mayflower Hotel in January 1936 was the beginning of the organization's end. The event was billed as a celebration of Al Smith, the Democratic Party's 1928 presidential candidate and a leader of the movement against FDR. Smith's contention that the New Deal was an attempt to replace the \"clean clear air of America\" with the \"foul breath of Soviet Russia\" didn't disturb ordinary Americans nearly as much as the atmosphere in the room where he made these remarks. Newspapers described a saturnalian debauch at which two thousand raucous men in evening dress and soused women flashing diamond jewelry cavorted under crystal chandeliers. They were jammed \"tailcoat to tailcoat, fluttery bouffant dress to sleek black velvet dress,\" the _Washington Post_ informed those among its readers who were not fortunate enough to have secured an invitation. Coming at a time when millions of Americans were hungry, the detailed descriptions of the sumptuous food and drink were almost pornographic.\n\n\"Al Smith chewed his cigar, discovered it was unlit, and unmindful of Arnold Bennett's maxim that 'Cigars and love affairs cannot be relit,' struck a match scratchily before the microphone for it,\" the _Post_ reported. The reporter didn't reveal whether Smith managed to reignite the butt; in any case the League's flame sputtered on that night and continued to dim until it was finally extinguished in 1940, when its Press Building office was closed.\n\n#\n\nThe largest and the most eccentric intelligence operation ever run out of the National Press Building had no name, didn't officially exist, and is little more than a footnote in histories of American intelligence. From 1941 to 1945 it operated in complete secrecy and in the open. Camouflaged by a newspaper column, it reported directly to President Franklin Roosevelt in the White House and deployed agents across the United States and to Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Soviet Union. Its agents included journalists, businessmen, wealthy socialites, Somerset Maugham's gay lover, and Hitler's piano player.\n\nHeadquartered in room 1210 of the National Press Building, this espionage agency was modeled on the legendary Bureau of Current Political Intelligence (CPI), a super-secret agency buried deep inside the State Department. According to an account of the CPI from the 1930s, \"if you want to find out what is in Stalin's mind or are curious concerning the substance of the next Papal Encyclical, [the CPI] will find out for you. If you need a man to discover the source of the latest shipment of machine-guns to a Central American bandit, or the reason why a permit has been denied to a Central Asiatic 'scientific expedition,' it will serve you very well, even though the trail of evidence leads straight to Whitehall, Wall Street or the _Gaimusho_ at Tokyo.\"\n\nThe CPI's head, Dennis Tyler, was suave, debonair, unflappable, and, like the CPI, entirely fictional. Both were products of the imagination of a writer named John Franklin Carter, who signed some of his books \"Diplomat.\" As the _New York Times_ noted in an October 1932 review of Diplomat's first novel, _Murder in the Embassy_ , the author displayed \"a close knowledge of the diplomatic service and a sense of humor that is refreshing in the serious business of concocting successful mystery tales.\"\n\nCarter pulled off a remarkable feat: he created and led a _real_ intelligence service that was modeled on the fictional CPI. He got his start when he wrote a nonfiction book profiling the leading contenders in the 1932 presidential election. The book didn't shy from describing Franklin Delano Roosevelt's physical disabilities, labeling him \"the liveliest cripple in American politics.\" Like many Americans, Carter misjudged FDR, predicting that as president, \"when cornered he will play dead dog\" because \"he is not a fighter.\" Reflecting the frustration of reporters who found it impossible to goad the candidate into taking positions on controversial topics, Carter wrote that Roosevelt \"is as hard to pin down as a live eel on a sheet of oilcloth.\" Despite these reservations, he concluded that \"we could do far worse than elect as President a man who has been brought up to believe that privileges confer obligations and that life is not so serious that one can afford not to act like a gentleman.\"\n\nRoosevelt was enough of a gentleman that he wasn't offended by the young author's lack of deference, and the two became friends. That friendship led, almost a decade later, to a secret collaboration between Roosevelt and Carter. Together, FDR and Carter created a real intelligence operation based on Diplomat's fantasy of an off-the-books, secret intelligence operation led by a cultured wisecracker who battled the forces of evil between cocktails.\n\nWhile the organization Carter created didn't approach the omniscience of the imaginary CPI, it did have the ear of the president, who treated Carter's reports as seriously as those produced by formal intelligence agencies. Carter's network operated in total secrecy, a feat that is noteworthy because some of the world's most inquisitive minds walked past its headquarters in the Press Building every day. Carter and his operatives didn't hide behind locked doors; they often climbed a short flight of stairs to swap stories and lies with reporters at the Press Club bar. One of Carter's men had the habit of over-patronizing the club's Tap Room and sleeping off the consequences on a nearby sofa. Throughout his clandestine career Carter wrote newspaper columns, spoke on the radio, and sought public attention.\n\nWhen Carter and Roosevelt first met in the summer of 1932, neither the writer nor the candidate\u2014an avid reader of mysteries and detective novels\u2014could have devoted much attention to transforming the imaginary CPI into a real intelligence agency. Roosevelt had an election to win, and if successful he would have to steady the nerves of a nation teetering on the precipice of ruin, then try to make good on his promises to restore prosperity.\n\nCarter had a very different priority: earning a living. The sober, humorless men who ran the State Department had solved the mystery of the identity of Diplomat and his alter ego Jay Franklin, the pseudonym Carter used for magazine articles. They gave Carter a choice: either stop writing\u2014not even publish poetry\u2014or clean out his desk in the State, War, and Navy Building. He picked prose over public service. Broke, eager for adventure, and anxious to avoid the constraints of conventional employment, the former diplomat sailed to Europe hoping to make his mark as an international freelance correspondent.\n\nIn Budapest, Carter stayed with an old friend, Nick Roosevelt, a former _New York Times_ reporter and diplomat, who was roughly halfway between Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt in the sprawling Roosevelt family tree. Roosevelt suggested that Carter travel to Germany and look up Ernst Hanfstaengl, an old acquaintance of the Roosevelt family who was serving as the gatekeeper for foreign journalists seeking access to Nazi leaders. President-elect Roosevelt had also asked Carter to deliver a message to Hanfstaengl: If Hitler became too volatile \"think of your piano-playing and try and use the soft pedal.\"\n\nBy the time Carter left Germany a few weeks later, he and Hanfstaengl had formed a friendship that changed the course of both men's lives and years later, under Roosevelt's direction, formed the basis for a madcap intelligence operation.\n\n#\n\nErnst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl, Adolf Hitler, and others, 1933.\n\nCredit: _Sueddeutsche Zeitung_ Photo \/ Alamy Stock Photo\n\nCarter and Roosevelt, like all of Hanfstaengl's friends, called him \"Putzi,\" which roughly translates as \"little tyke,\" a name he'd acquired as an infant and hadn't managed to shed even as he grew into a towering man with a head too large to fit in a standard-issue German army helmet. Hanfstaengl was raised in Germany in a bicultural home, the son of a Bavarian aristocrat who had married the daughter of a prominent New England family.\n\nHanfstaengl traveled to Boston and started classes at Harvard in 1905. His outgoing character, musical talents, and family connections ensured that he was one of the most prominent young men on campus. The aristocratic German barely satisfied the college's academic requirements, but he excelled in the social sphere, befriending scions of the Astor and Roosevelt clans, and landing invitations to White House parties, where he played the piano for Theodore Roosevelt. After graduating, Hanfstaengl managed the family's art business in New York and spent evenings in front of a Steinway at the city's Harvard Club, where he met Franklin Roosevelt.\n\nPutzi's sweet life soured in 1914. Regardless of their social connections or bonhomie, German patriots were less than welcome in wartime America. The US government seized the Hanfstaengl family's art as alien property and auctioned it for pennies on the dollar. Decades after the war, government investigators uncovered evidence that Hanfstaengl had provided the dynamite to saboteurs who blew up an arsenal on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor in July 1916, igniting more than a million pounds of ammunition. The explosion, the equivalent of a 5.5 magnitude earthquake, caused $20 million in damage (equivalent to about $500 million in 2018) and denied valuable materiel to the British.\n\nGiving up on life in America, Hanfstaengl moved back to Germany in 1921. The next year, at the request of a Harvard alumnus who was studying the German political scene for the State Department, Hanfstaengl attended a speech by an obscure rabble-rouser. Recognizing Adolf Hitler's potential to exploit Germany's chaotic political and economic situation, he charmed his way into the Nazi inner circle, becoming the first wealthy aristocrat to embrace Hitler and Nazism.\n\nHanfstaengl was just a few steps behind Hitler at the B\u00fcrgerbr\u00e4ukeller beer hall on the night of November 8, 1923, pushing tables over, rushing to seize the stage and, with it, control of the government from the Bavarian prime minister. Putzi remembered the scene in a memoir: \"Hitler clambered on a chair and fired a round at the ceiling. Hitler then told the audience: 'The national revolution has broken out! The hall is filled with 600 armed men. No one is allowed to leave. The Bavarian government and the government at Berlin are hereby deposed. A new government will be formed at once. The barracks of the _Reichswehr_ and the police barracks are occupied. Both have rallied to the swastika!'\"\n\nThe poorly planned putsch was quickly suppressed. Hanfstaengl fled to Switzerland, while Hitler sought refuge in Putzi's home in the Bavarian Alps. When police arrived at the door, Hanfstaengl's American-born wife, Helene, persuaded her despondent houseguest to drop his revolver, along with his intention to commit suicide. The diminutive Hitler must have looked like a child playing dress-up when he met the authorities wearing Hanfstaengl's pajamas.\n\nFollowing the trial that Robert S. Allen had covered, Hitler was sentenced to five years of confinement but served only nine months. After Hitler's release, Hanfstaengl became even closer to the Nazi leader, banging out Wagner operas on a piano for hours as the F\u00fchrer worked himself into a frenzy and then flung himself onto stages at political rallies. Hanfstaengl's contributions to the Nazi cause included suggesting the _Sieg Heil_ salutation and accompanying straight-arm salute, both inspired by his experiences as a cheerleader for the Harvard football team. Ironically, Hanfstaengl couldn't bring himself to salute Hitler.\n\nLater dismissed as a court jester, Hanfstaengl did more to bring the Nazis to power than entertain its leader. He introduced the uncultured politician to members of the aristocracy, whose support was critical to his rise to power, financed a Nazi newspaper at a time when the party couldn't afford it, and, after the fascists gained control, served as the party's liaison to the foreign press.\n\nWhen Hanfstaengl and Carter exchanged life stories they realized that Carter's parents had decades earlier been friends with Hanfstaengl's mother, the descendent of a famous Civil War general, John Sedgwick. Hanfstaengl arranged for Carter to observe Hitler delivering a speech and to interview the second-most powerful man in Nazi Germany, Herman Goering. Carter's friendship with Hanfstaengl did not make him sympathetic to the Nazi cause, but it did form the foundation for one of the oddest intelligence operations of World War II, a three-way partnership bringing together the German American aristocrat, Carter, and President Roosevelt.\n\n#\n\nJohn Franklin Carter in 1936.\n\nCredit: Farm Security Administration\u2014Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)\n\nSoon after Carter returned to the United States, just a few weeks before the election, FDR invited him for lunch at his Hyde Park, New York, estate. The wheelchair-bound Roosevelt, who relied on friends and relatives to travel and serve as his eyes and ears, must have appreciated Carter's impressions of Germany and his account of Putzi's rise to prominence in the Nazi hierarchy. FDR flattered the former diplomat by soliciting his ideas about reorganizing the State Department.\n\nCarter became a New Dealer, landing a job in 1934 as secretary of agriculture Henry Wallace's speechwriter and advisor. He also continued writing articles and books under various pseudonyms, including accounts of the activities of Dennis Tyler and the Bureau of Current Political Intelligence.\n\nAfter two years Carter left Wallace's staff, rented an office on the twelfth floor of the National Press Building, and began a career as a journalist. His pro-Roosevelt syndicated column, We, the People, ran in hundreds of newspapers under the Jay Franklin byline, often alongside the Washington Merry-Go-Round column by Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, Eleanor Roosevelt's My Day column and Walter Winchell's On Broadway.\n\nCarter's writings were more than partisan boosterism. He used access to editorial pages to advance agendas that he was pursuing behind closed doors. When he provided glimpses of Washington power struggles and inside dope on administration polices, the revelations were designed to affect the outcomes of the conflicts and shape policies. Although he had used the modest pseudonym \"The Unofficial Observer\" for _The New Dealers_ , a book published in 1934 that billed itself as providing a Who's Who of the New Deal, Carter was not content with the role of observer. Nose pressed to the glass as some of the most momentous decisions of the era were made, he desperately wanted to be in the room making history, not just writing about it.\n\nAn incident in October 1939 illustrates Carter's close ties to the Roosevelt White House. It also demonstrates that although his column claimed to represent \"the people,\" when he was forced to choose between informing readers and supporting the president, \"the people\" always came second. Carter had provided the White House an advance copy of a column describing a split within the Catholic Church between supporters of Father Charles Coughlin and Cardinal George Mundelein. Coughlin was using a popular radio program to preach anti-Semitism, race hatred, and disdain for FDR and the New Deal, while Mundelein, a friend and supporter of the president, was trying to steer Catholics into the mainstream of American society. If American Catholics failed to support Mundelein, Carter warned, Coughlin \"may become either a Savonarola or a Martin Luther.\"\n\nAfraid that it would ignite a backlash against liberal church leaders, FDR asked Carter to kill the column. Carter responded immediately, scrambling to contact newspapers across the country. A note typed by one of FDR's personal secretaries, Grace Tully, and placed in the president's confidential files reported that the column had been \"too dangerous\" for Francis Spellman, a Roosevelt ally who had recently been appointed Archbishop of New York, and that it \"was, therefore, 'pulled' from all papers except the 'Washington Star,'\" which had already printed it. Tully's note added that FDR felt Carter's column \"tells a desperate truth about the Church, Coughlin, and liberalism.\"\n\nBy that time, Carter had devoted seven years to tireless promotion of the New Deal, mining his personal relationships with FDR and just about every political player of any consequence in Washington for insights and anecdotes that filled his books, radio broadcasts, and newspaper columns. While he may have convinced some of his readers, he had not convinced himself. The New Deal, Carter concluded, was a failure.\n\nMore important, Carter understood sooner than most of his peers that domestic policies were becoming irrelevant. The future, he realized, wouldn't be pounded out on government-issue typewriters but in dive bombers and tanks; America's fate would be shaped on European and Asian battlefields, not at Georgetown dinner parties. A president hobbled by Congress and the courts and harassed by powerful corporations couldn't meet the new challenges.\n\n\"The bitter time is at hand when we must speak and face the truth,\" Carter wrote in a book published in January 1940. \"What we call democracy is not working to the general satisfaction of the American people. What we call capitalism is not succeeding in distributing sufficient goods and services to more than a third of our nation. What we call individualism is facing the critical competition of other social philosophies which rest on collective authority. We face the necessity of armed defense East and West, and the difficult problems of reform and reorganization at home, and we are hampered by a political system which puts a premium on evasion and delay.\"\n\nCarter argued in favor of strengthened authority for the president and told Americans that their prosperity and freedom required them to cast aside a defining characteristic of American democracy dating back to George Washington by electing FDR to a third term. He didn't inform his readers that he had been working for months out of the public eye to build support in the Democratic Party for a movement to nominate Roosevelt for an unprecedented third term.\n\nAs the calendar turned from 1939 to 1940, danger and deceit weren't confined to the pages of Diplomat's mystery novels. Nazi officers were reveling in Parisian nightclubs, the Luftwaffe was pounding London into a smoldering ruin in preparation for invasion, and FDR was simultaneously promising to keep America out of the war and desperately trying to equip the military with the men and weapons needed to win it.\n\nRoosevelt was trying to steer the country through these crosswinds with one hand tied behind his back by an alliance of right- and left-wing isolationists, and with his vision obscured by an almost complete absence of foreign intelligence. At a time when Churchill, Stalin, Japanese leaders, and, to a lesser extent, Hitler could rely on large, sophisticated intelligence agencies with extensive networks of agents and skilled analysts, the American president's capacity for obtaining and assessing intelligence from abroad hadn't advanced much beyond Thomas Jefferson's. Like Jefferson, FDR relied on volunteers to travel abroad and report impressions, gossip, and undigested bits of news.\n\nCarter summed up the situation in February 1941 when he told assistant secretary of state Sumner Welles that American intelligence was \"pretty well loused up and floundering around.\" The solution, the newspaper columnist said, was \"a small and informal intelligence unit operating out of the White House without titles, without any bullshit.\" And he knew just the man to head it: himself. The assignment, Carter believed, would be a just reward for the hard work he'd done behind the scenes to help secure the president's unprecedented nomination for a third term.\n\nAlthough his ability to provide the president the secret information and sophisticated analyses needed to support critical decisions was debatable, Carter's diagnosis of American intelligence weaknesses was accurate. Europe and Asia were at war, it was clear that the United States would be compelled to join the fighting, and the men in charge of the nation's meager intelligence resources were spending more energy pursuing turf battles than collecting and analyzing intelligence for the president. Carter didn't know it, but there was a single bright spot in the American intelligence firmament: a tiny, underfunded Army team had been startlingly successful in breaking Japanese codes, thereby providing real-time insights into Japanese military and diplomatic actions and intentions.\n\nLacking military or law-enforcement experience, the conventional gateways to running an intelligence organization, and having built a career from publicizing rather than protecting confidential information, Carter was an unlikely candidate to play the part of FDR's Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth I's swashbuckling spymaster. With characteristic immodesty, Carter presented the traits that appeared to disqualify him as assets. Professionals in formal intelligence agencies were not and could not get the job done, he said. The president, Carter suggested, needed a nimble organization staffed by outsiders who were fast on their feet and unencumbered by legal niceties or a bureaucratic mentality. His work as a columnist was the perfect cover, providing opportunities to frequent the White House without attracting attention and a license to speak with almost anyone about almost anything.\n\nWelles knew Carter's idea would captivate Roosevelt, who had long been fascinated by intrigue, plots, and conspiracies. The president was convinced that espionage and intelligence were too important\u2014and far too much fun\u2014to be left to professionals.\n\nDuring World War I, while serving as assistant secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt had tried to organize a Naval Reserve Force consisting of private yachts that would travel the seven seas gathering intelligence. He was a voracious consumer of spy and detective novels, and he liked to dabble at code making and breaking. Roosevelt even took the time from his hectic White House schedule to dictate the plot for a detective story and allowed a friend to commission six prominent authors to write chapters based on the plot. They were serialized in a magazine and collected into a book, _The President's Mystery_.\n\nRoosevelt approached espionage as a game, and like all games he believed it was best played with friends. FDR's closest friends, the four men with whom he had escaped for a bachelor's cruise on the yacht _Nourmahal_ in 1931 just after a failed assassination attempt, had since 1927 run a secret club called \"The Room\" that met in a Manhattan townhouse fitted out with globes, maps, and comfortable chairs. The Room could be dismissed as men acting like boys, except that its wealthy, aristocratic members had ready access to prominent politicians, tycoons, explorers, and real intelligence operatives. The Room was run by FDR's friend Vincent Astor, who had inherited fantastic wealth and an international business empire when his father, John Jacob Astor IV, went down with the _Titanic_. Astor and FDR shared a love of the sea and a passion for intrigue.\n\nCarter was banking on Roosevelt's appetite for adventure on the afternoon of February 13, 1941, as he walked the four blocks from his office in the National Press Building to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Carter entered the White House a successful novelist, columnist, and political operative. He emerged from a meeting with FDR with an additional occupation: leader and, for the time being, sole member of a new intelligence operation that would work exclusively for the president under the strictest secrecy.\n\nCarter had in essence become Dennis Tyler, the \"diplomatic detective,\" and the president had blessed his plan to create a real version of the fictional Bureau of Current Political Intelligence. Carter and Roosevelt were well aware of the tradition, dating back to Christopher Marlowe and more recently practiced by Somerset Maugham (a visitor to the Room), of secret agents' writing novels that titillated the public with fictional and embroidered versions of the covert lives they had previously sworn to keep secret. As they met in the White House, the president and the creator of the fictional Dennis Tyler must have relished the irony: Carter was the only person in history to reverse the sequence, _first_ creating an imaginary master spy, along with a fictional intelligence agency, and then, with the help of the president of the United States, turning himself into a facsimile of that character and establishing a real organization modeled on the fictional entity.\n\nFDR gave Carter's plan the green light on the condition that it be kept secret and with the understanding that if any hint of Carter's covert activities leaked to the public, the White House would deny any connection to him. The operation was off the books and lacked an organizational structure or official budget\u2014even a name.\n\nThe president financed Carter's work from a slush fund Congress had provided to deal with unspecified \"emergencies.\" Money for Carter's operation, starting at $64,000 for the remainder of 1941 and growing to $120,000 for 1943 (equivalent to about $2 million in 2016), was laundered by the State Department. Assistant secretary of state Adolph Berle signed the checks, but Carter did not inform Berle about most of his activities. Berle took a dim view of those he learned about and quietly tried to undermine the amateur spy.\n\nCarter's first report to FDR, dated March 1, 1941\u2014\"Raw Material Situation in Belgium, as reported by Antwerp factory manufacturing electrical equipment for the Occupying Authorities\"\u2014consisted of three pages of lists of materials, from benzene to zinc, and notations about whether they were readily available, scarce, or unobtainable in the German-occupied country. Like hundreds of memos Carter sent to the president over the next four years, it was typed on stationery under the letterhead: _JOHN FRANKLIN CARTER, \"We, the People,\" 1210 National Press Building, Washington, D.C._\n\nThe president replied in writing, instructing Carter to show his information to \"the Army, Navy and State Department\u2014and also to the British Embassy.\" FDR's many notes to Carter, always terse and sometimes humorous, were typed on White House stationery by one of his personal secretaries, Grace Tully. They were addressed to \"Jack Carter\" and closed with the typed initials \"F.D.R.\"\n\nThe Belgian economic intelligence report was the first of a deluge of similar accounts Carter sent FDR based on interviews he and his agents conducted with a random assortment of individuals such as the chief dental officer of the Iraq Petroleum Company, who had fresh knowledge of situation on the ground. The descriptions of economic, political, and social conditions in Germany, Nazi-occupied Europe, Asia, and Latin America lacked context, and little effort was made to distinguish fact from rumor.\n\nA March 8, 1941, memo from Carter on \"Nazi Activities in the Union of South Africa\" shows one reason why FDR looked forward to the novelist's reports while those from government bureaucrats gathered Oval Office dust. Carter told FDR that Nazi supporters in South Africa \"number a quarter of a million of all sexes, shapes, ages and sizes,\" and that soldiers on their way to England \"are set upon and beaten up in dark alleys, they are spat at by foul-breathed women...\" It is a safe bet that Roosevelt didn't receive any other reports that day with images as evocative as \"foul-breathed women\" spitting on soldiers.\n\nIn April, Carter forwarded to FDR a report written in confidence by a reporter for _Time_ and _Life_ magazines that painted an alarming, and accurate, picture of Japanese infiltration, subversion, and espionage in the Philippines. The Japanese, FDR was informed, had deployed agents under a variety of covers, especially as the owners of photography studios, to every corner of the archipelago, had blanketed the country with propaganda, and corrupted members of parliament, all in preparation for invasion and occupation.\n\nTo cope with an expanding covert workload, Carter decided that he needed a second-in-command. He had three criteria: The candidate must be acceptable to the president, have social standing and\/or wealth, and be on friendly terms with the Brits. The last qualification stemmed from Carter's understanding that because of the centuries of experience and vast global reach of British intelligence, an upstart American intelligence operation couldn't hope to succeed without at least tacit support from London. Carter was in bad odor with the UK Foreign Office because at the State Department he'd been in charge of the British Empire Desk, which meant that his job often involved saying no to requests from his majesty's servants.\n\nCarter decided that Henry Field, whom he had met while canvassing for FDR's third term, fit the bill. Field was a great nephew and the financial beneficiary of the wealthy Chicago merchant Marshall Field, had grown up in England, had been educated at Eton and Oxford, and was as anglophilic as an American can be. He was also the black sheep of the Field family. Just before Carter met him in 1940, Field's uncle, who ran the Field Museum, had been forced to recall a book Henry had written about folklore in western Asia after it was discovered he'd plagiarized much of it. It wasn't an isolated incident: throughout his career Henry Field had a slippery relationship with the truth and a penchant for self-aggrandizement.\n\nField had decided to redeem himself by joining the Navy. He was sitting in a hotel room in Washington preparing for an appointment to finalize paperwork to join the Office of Naval Intelligence when Carter knocked on the door and informed Field that he could not accept the commission because he'd been assigned to other duties \"on higher authority.\" Field balked, saying he was determined to join the Navy. Carter, with typical overstatement replied, \"I don't think you quite understand. The President has _ordered_ you to work for him. I am head of a small team working for the White House. You are now part of this team.\"\n\nFDR kept Carter and his agents immensely busy. In the months before Pearl Harbor they spent as least as much time and energy on domestic as on foreign intelligence\u2014though a great deal of their work stretched the boundaries of the concept of intelligence. Today it would be called \"opposition research,\" and it wouldn't be legal to finance it with funds entrusted to the president for \"emergencies.\"\n\nRoosevelt sought Carter's assistance in dealing with a crisis in April 1941. He needed ammunition to attack a potent political opponent: the most admired man in America, Charles Lindbergh. \"Lucky Lindy,\" at the time a colonel in the Army Air Corps reserve, had been the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic, a feat that made him one of the original American celluloid celebrities. He had parlayed fame into access to political and business leaders around the world, including Nazi military leaders who boasted to Lindbergh about their progress in creating the world's largest, most powerful air force. The American aviation hero became convinced that the neither the United States nor England could win a war against Germany. This view meshed with his anti-Semitism, as well as his complete confidence in the cultural and moral superiority of Northern Europeans.\n\nAmericans looked up to Lindbergh not for his ideas, which until 1941 most had never heard, but for his exploits and persona. When he began to speak out against intervention, halls were packed and radio audiences swelled with people eager to see and hear the man who had captured the world's imagination. Lindbergh proclaimed German victory inevitable and American intervention folly, legitimizing a broad popular movement to keep America out of a war that Roosevelt had privately determined the nation must enter and win. Roosevelt desperately wanted to knock the wind from Lindbergh's sails.\n\nFDR's strategy for neutralizing Lindbergh was typically indirect. He asked Carter to prepare a detailed study of the \"Copperheads,\" a term of derision that had been applied during the Civil War to Southern sympathizers and defeatists in the North. Carter gave Roosevelt a fifty-five-page report on April 22 and was in the Oval Office three days later for a typically raucous White House press conference. FDR began by railing against reporters who for a year and a half had been calling the aggressive patrols by US Navy ships in Atlantic and Pacific shipping lanes \"convoys.\" This was like calling a cow a horse, the president said, repeating the simile several times and congratulating himself on his wit. He then dropped a bombshell, revealing that he intended to expand the patrols, which many Americans believed were provocations intended to drag the country into war. US Navy ships would travel \"as far on the waters of the seven seas as may be necessary for the defense of the American hemisphere,\" Roosevelt said. He refused to say what they would do if and when they encountered the German navy.\n\nNear the end of the press conference, Constantine Brown, a reporter for the _Washington Star_ , asked, seemingly out of the blue, \"How is it that the Army, which needs now distinguished fliers, etc., has not asked Colonel Lindbergh to rejoin?\"\n\nThanks to Carter's report, FDR was armed with a response to the discreetly planted question. The president launched into a Civil War history lesson, noting that while there were \"liberty-loving people on both sides\" of the conflict, the Union and the Confederacy also had to deal with defeatists. \"The Confederacy and the North let certain people go. In other words, in both armies there were\u2014what shall I call them?\u2014there were Vallandighams.\" It must have been the first time a president had uttered the name Vallandigham since 1863, when the Copperhead had been court-martialed and exiled from Washington to Richmond, the Confederate capital. Driving the point home, FDR continued, \"Well, Vallandigham, as you know, was an appeaser. He wanted to make peace from 1863 on because the North 'couldn't win.'\" The president made it clear that he considered Lindbergh a contemporary version of a Vallandigham Copperhead.\n\nAn Associated Press story, which ran on April 25 in the _New York Times_ and other newspapers across the country, reported, \"Asserting that it was dumb to consider a Nazi victory inevitable, President Roosevelt classed Colonel Lindbergh today with appeasers who urged peace in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars on the ground that those wars could not be won.\" The story also noted that just a few days before Lindbergh had said in a speech that the \"United States cannot win this war for England, regardless of how much assistance we extend.\"\n\nIt seemed at first that Roosevelt had overplayed his hand. Newspaper columns portrayed his attack on Lindbergh's patriotism as unfair. If the aviator had remained silent, he could have emerged from the incident stronger. But FDR had astutely judged his adversary.\n\nLindbergh took the bait. Three days after newspapers reported FDR's comparison of Lindbergh to Vallandigham, the aviator released a public letter resigning his military commission, citing the president's remarks about \"my loyalty to my country, my character, and my motives.\" Coming as Americans were being drafted under the recently enacted Selective Service Act, Lindbergh's resignation was viewed by the public as proof that Roosevelt's accusations were on target\u2014as if Lindbergh was resigning to avoid putting himself in harm's way. One of the president's fiercest and most credible critics was discredited. Neither Lindbergh nor his reputation ever recovered.\n\nAs Carter expanded his network and began producing more, and more interesting, reports, Roosevelt started forwarding them to other players in similar informal intelligence networks he had created or encouraged. For example, on May 19, 1941, FDR sent Nelson Rockefeller copies of two of Carter's memorandums about Nazi activities in South America. Rockefeller, head of the blandly named \"Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs,\" was leading a covert effort to push the Nazis out of South America. He was also providing financial and logistical support to British intelligence operatives who were waging a covert war in the United States to counter German interests. FDR's cover letter was marked \"Private\" and instructed Rockefeller, \"Please show this to nobody. You might speak with me about this at your convenience.\"\n\nAbout this time Carter added his voice to the chorus of those predicting a German invasion of the Soviet Union. It would come, he stated in a May 16 report to FDR, \"about June 1.\" Although accurate, the intelligence wasn't startling: Drew Pearson and Robert Allen had published a similar prediction a month earlier, and Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had received numerous secret reports pointing to a June attack. Stalin disregarded over a hundred specific, accurate warnings. When the NKVD forwarded from its spy in Tokyo a precise description of the planned invasion Stalin denounced the report as lies from a \"shit who has set himself up with some small factories and brothels in Japan.\"\n\nIn June FDR passed a report to Carter indicating that the situation in Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean, was deteriorating. Pro-US mayors had been imprisoned by the Vichy government and the island had stockpiled a two-year food supply that would allow it to survive an embargo or siege. The president asked Carter to send one of his agents to assess the potential for the Caribbean island to become a base for hostile military operations against the United States.\n\nCarter jumped on the task, informing Roosevelt that he had selected a Chicago businessman named Curtis Munson to travel to Martinique. Munson, Carter reported, was an old friend of undersecretary of commerce and FDR confidant Wayne Taylor, had visited Martinique in the past, and had military experience, having served as an aviator in the French Army during World War I. \"He is a competent, level-headed business man, untainted by politics and without a record which could embarrass him,\" Carter wrote.\n\nCarter arranged for Munson to travel to Martinique as a representative of the Department of Agriculture to compile a report on the food security situation. The French government held up Munson's visa for two months. In the interim, Carter sent FDR reports about Martinique from European Jewish refugees, including one from the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who, fleeing the Nazis, had stopped there en route to Brazil. Levi-Strauss told one of Carter's agents that the \"colored people of Martinique have been persuaded that if the US takes over the island, instead of having complete equality with the whites as they do under the French, they will revert to the position of the negro in the American south.\"\n\nRoosevelt held a typical press conference on August 26, 1941, treating the assembled reporters to an amusing story\u2014the punchline involved Mongolian ponies\u2014and criticizing unnamed columnists for spreading \"falsehoods\" that originated with \"certain forces [seeking] to sabotage the program of aid to opponents of Hitlerism.\" As the reporters were filtering out of the room, Roosevelt casually asked Carter to stay behind. Munson, who had slipped into the White House by the side door and wasn't listed on the appointment calendar, joined Carter and delivered a verbal report on the political, economic, and military situation in Martinique. He had determined that fears about Martinique's military preparations were overblown.\n\nWhile Munson was investigating Martinique, Roosevelt was looking north, to Iceland, where the British feared their small garrison was in danger of being overwhelmed by the Germans. A Nazi naval base could have imperiled the convoys that were keeping Britain alive. The _New York Times_ had reported on July 4, 1941, that Montana senator Burton Wheeler, the most ardent isolationist in Congress, said American troops were preparing to take over Iceland. Wheeler was trying to mobilize public opinion to head off military action; he was also putting American troops and national security at risk by tipping off the Germans. The leak alarmed FDR, prompting him to cut short a trip to Hyde Park for urgent meetings with Navy and State Department officials. Three days later, the White House announced that US Marines had landed in Iceland.\n\nWhite House spokesman Stephen Early went out of his way to express support for British newspaper reports slamming Wheeler for providing advance warning that the Germans could have exploited to disrupt the operation. FDR asked Carter to find out how Wheeler had learned of the secret plans.\n\nCarter had been digging up dirt on Wheeler for months and sending it to Roosevelt, who passed it on to political operatives working to engineer Wheeler's defeat in the upcoming elections. Carter learned from an informant he'd recruited on Wheeler's staff that the senator had been tipped off about the Iceland expedition from Boston mothers who wrote Wheeler protesting that their sons were being loaded on ships along with equipment for a Polar expedition.\n\nCarter often found that to obtain information Roosevelt had requested, he needed cooperation from government agencies, especially the FBI. This was problematic because he lacked any official standing. Some government officials, especially law enforcement and intelligence professionals, thought he was a crank, and seized on his informal status to justify ignoring Carter. Carter and his operation exemplified characteristics FBI director J. Edgar Hoover detested. A fanatic about discipline and order\u2014he'd turned the FBI into a world-class law-enforcement agency in part by creating one of the world's most efficient filing systems\u2014Hoover despised loose cannons and dilettantes. Even worse for Carter, the FBI director hated criticism. He rarely forgot or forgave a slight, real or imagined, public or private. Carter had a record of insulting the FBI director in ways both real and public.\n\nThat record was on Hoover's mind on September 5, 1941, when Carter telephoned his office saying he had just met with the president, who had asked him to bring Munson to meet with the director. To prepare for the meeting, Hoover's staff pulled the columnist's file. The first item was a January 7, 1937, _New York Post_ story under the Jay Franklin byline poking fun at the FBI in general and Hoover in particular. Hoover had instilled a vigilance regarding criticism in his subordinates; he must have been pleased to note that without any prompting from Washington, the day after the article was published Special Agent R. C. Hendon had written and placed in the file a three-page memorandum summarizing Carter's professional career. It concluded that an informant \"claimed [Jay] Franklin had an international bias with at least liberal if not radical tendencies.\"\n\nMore recent items in Carter's file included a We, the People column from March 1941 accusing Hoover of attempting to create an American Gestapo and predicting that as a result of congressional investigations into illegal arrests and wiretapping \"our No. 1 G-man may become the first American political casualty of World War 2.\" Carter concluded that Americans \"don't want a gang of G-men to go around beating us up and destroying our liberties in the name of high-pressure patriotism.\"\n\nThe columns alone would have been more than enough to turn Hoover against Carter. In addition, Hoover felt that Carter's work for Roosevelt was an incursion into territory that should be reserved for the FBI. If these infractions weren't enough, the improvisational, and in many cases incompetent, style in which Carter ran his operation infuriated Hoover.\n\nGiven the trust the president had placed in Carter, Hoover couldn't insult him or refuse to cooperate\u2014at least not until he'd collected some dirt on the upstart. A memo Hoover dictated for the FBI's files immediately after his first meeting with Carter reflected his caution. It noted that Carter and Munson had visited to inform him that Munson was traveling to New York at Roosevelt's request to study the refugee situation. Hoover added that he had informed B. Edwin Sackett, the special agent in charge of the bureau's New York Office, \"to be very courteous to Mr. Munson in view of his influential backing.\" The memo stated that \"J. Franklin Carter, who writes under the name of Jay Franklin, has always viewed the FBI as a fascist organization and has stated that we are opposed to liberal thought; therefore, I instructed Mr. Sackett to see that Mr. Munson received as good an impression of the Bureau and its attitude as possible.\"\n\nHoover's distaste was of little importance to Carter as long as he had Roosevelt's confidence. The president seemed to enjoy Carter's company and appreciate the boyish enthusiasm the newsman and novelist brought to serious matters. Regardless of his workload, he always found time to talk with Carter, to read and comment on his reports, and to give him oddball assignments that straight-laced military leaders and cabinet officials would have been reluctant to undertake.\n\nCarter didn't wait for Roosevelt to assign him tasks. He sent a never-ending flow of memos to the president consisting largely of voluminous, useless, or absurd intelligence reports, harebrained schemes, and gossip, leavened by occasional nuggets of genuine insight or valuable intelligence. These often included half-baked suggestions for or criticisms of government officials. FDR usually had Tully pass Carter's reports to the head of the relevant government body with a terse note asking them to look into a matter or read one of Carter's memos and return it to the White House. These notes made it clear that although Carter had no official status he enjoyed the president's trust, a fact that led senior government officials to return his calls, meet with him, and at least pretend to collaborate with him.\n\nWhile most of Carter's voluminous intelligence output was of little or no use beyond providing entertaining diversion for the president, he did produce some valuable information. The country would have been well served if FDR had acted on reports he requested from Carter in the fall of 1941 assessing the loyalty of Japanese living on the West Coast. Roosevelt was very concerned about the threat from fifth columnists, and he knew that Japanese living in California had many reasons to resent the American government. They were subject to prejudice and abuse that was in some ways worse than the treatment of blacks in the South.\n\nActing on orders from Carter, Munson spent three weeks on the West Coast interviewing FBI agents, military intelligence officials, and people from all walks of life\u2014businessmen, students, fish packers, lettuce pickers, and farmers\u2014to assess the loyalty of the Japanese community.\n\nRather than restricting himself to the immediate task, assessing whether Japanese Americans posed a security threat, Munson felt it necessary to educate Carter and the president about the Japanese mind and soul. A sentence from a report he sent Carter on October 18, 1941, that was intended to sum up the mentality of Japanese Americans is typical of Munson's muddled approach (and his maddening run-on sentences):\n\nTake the Shinto religion, Buddist [ _sic_ ] religion, Christian religion, ancestor worship, family worship, all tied back to sun worship of which the emperor of Japan is the living titular head on earth; add to this the Oriental mind, western business culture, innate politeness and fear; add also the fact that each individual Japanese is playing all by himself in a field the size of the Yale Bowl with his own conscience as umpire, carrying the ball with as much competitive spirit as an American, while the stands\u2014whom he wishes to please\u2014are filled to overflowing with his departed ancestors each of whom is vitally interested and sitting judgement on his personal gyrations; add again a number of other things of varying importance, such as the fact that the Japs are the greatest joiners in the world and have associations for everything to join from \"Fixing flowers properly in a bowl\" to \"War relief for Japanese Soldiers in China.\"\n\nMunson's memos make it clear that the idea of putting Japanese Americans behind barbed wire was in the air. He argued that because rounding up the Japanese would be relatively easy, it was safe to leave this as a last resort. \"In the first place there are not so many people of Japanese descent in the US that in an emergency they could not all be thrown into a concentration camp in 48 hours,\" Munson wrote. \"Of course you might get a few Chinamen too because they sort of look alike. But the looks are a great aid to rounding them up and in keeping them away from sabotage or other troublesome pastimes.\"\n\nSuch extreme measures were, Munson pointed out, unnecessary. \"We do not want to throw a lot of American citizens into a concentration camp of course, and especially as the almost unanimous verdict is that in case of war they will keep quiet, very quiet. There will probably be some sabotage by paid Japanese agents and the odd fanatical Jap, but the bulk of these people will be quiet because in addition to being quite contented with the American way of life, they know they are 'in a spot.'\"\n\nDespite his racism and fascination with plumbing the depths of the Japanese soul, Munson managed to produce a report that in its conclusions was remarkably prescient. He told FDR that the Japanese in California were \"straining every nerve to show their loyalty to the US. The Japs here are in more danger from us than we from them.\"\n\nMunson's most valuable source was Kenneth Ringle, an Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) lieutenant commander who had learned to speak Japanese during a three-year posting to Japan. When Munson met him, Ringle had spent over a year spying on the Japanese community in California. His activities included planning and leading a second-story job straight out of a Hollywood movie. One night in the spring of 1941, Ringle drove to the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles and, with police and FBI agents keeping watch outside, broke into the office. Just like in a B-movie, he had sprung a safecracker from prison to help with the caper. The ONI officer carefully removed and photographed every document in the safe, returned them to their original positions, and drove the safecracker back to prison.\n\nThe burglary provided ONI and the FBI a comprehensive list of Japanese agents in California and taught American counterintelligence something critically important: the Japanese government distrusted American-born Japanese and was very unlikely to recruit them as intelligence operatives or saboteurs.\n\nCarter presented Munson's findings to FDR in late October, telling the president that \"reports from Curtis Munson still confirm the general picture of non-alarmism already reported to you.\"\n\nMunson's final report from California, delivered to FDR on November 7, 1941, emphasized that while the majority of Japanese were loyal, there were some Japanese intelligence operatives in California. He reported that ONI had 750 to 900 Japanese suspects under surveillance, of whom they thought 150 to 180 \"can be classed as really dangerous.\" The threat of terrorism couldn't be discounted, he noted, as \"there are still Japanese in the United States who will tie dynamite around their waist and make a human bomb of themselves...but today they are few.\"\n\nMunson discovered a vulnerability more worrying than the possibility that a handful of Japanese Americans were capable of terrorism or treason. He was \"horrified to note that dams, bridges, harbors, power stations etc. are wholly unguarded everywhere.\" This point, far more than Munson's and Carter's assessment that the vast majority of Japanese Americans were loyal, attracted FDR's attention. Roosevelt's responses to Munson's reports made no mention of his overall conclusion that the vast majority of Japanese were loyal Americans. In a November 11, 1941, \"Dear Jack\" letter, the president instructed Carter to discuss West Coast security with coordinator of information William Donovan and Hoover \"in view of the fact that immediate arrests may be advisable.\"\n\nAfter spending several weeks in California, Munson sailed to Hawaii to continue his investigation, leveraging his status as a personal representative of the president to gain access to FBI agents, ONI officers, and other Navy personnel, who were remarkably free with information and opinions. Admiral Harold Stark issued an order granting Munson access to naval intelligence records.\n\nThe long, mostly irrelevant reports Munson sent from the Pacific failed to mention the most important conversation he had in Honolulu.\n\nMunson had asked Navy captain Ellis Zacharias, commander of the _Salt Lake City_ , a cruiser based at Pearl Harbor, and an expert on Japan, if Japanese residents of Hawaii were likely to mount an armed insurrection in case of war. \"Forget about it,\" Zacharias replied. \"Hostilities would commence by an air attack on the fleet, [and] because of the necessity of secrecy on the part of the Japanese, they would not have been able to disseminate the necessary information on which to base an uprising or extensive sabotage.\"\n\nZacharias had devoted decades to studying Japanese military strategy and tactics. In 1926, while posted to Washington, he spent long evenings drinking martinis, playing poker, and trying to penetrate the mind of the Japanese naval attach\u00e9, Isoroku Yamamoto. Fifteen years later, Yamamoto planned the attack on Pearl Harbor.\n\nBased on his knowledge of Japanese military tactics\u2014sneak attacks were integral to Japanese military doctrine\u2014and conversations he'd had in February 1941 with the Japanese ambassador to the United States, Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, Zacharias predicted to Munson that a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would be launched on a Sunday; that it would happen at a time when three Japanese diplomatic envoys were in Washington; and that the attack would come without warning from the north.\n\nLike Munson, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet, had heard and disregarded Zacharias's predictions. American planes were parked wingtip to wingtip, maximizing the damage from Japanese bombers.\n\nOn December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor unfolded precisely as Zacharias had predicted\u2014on a Sunday, from the north, when three Japanese envoys were in Washington\u2014Carter forwarded to FDR a rambling, seventeen-page report from Munson. Roosevelt couldn't possibly have had time to struggle through Munson's musings about the socioeconomic structure of Hawaii. Defense workers who moved to the islands from the mainland, Munson informed the president, \"contain the dregs of the waterfront element\" and \"include many of the 'Okie' class...to [whom] any brown-skin is 'Nigger.'\" The report is valuable in retrospect, however, because it reveals how ONI's lists of suspected Japanese agents made it possible to neutralize Japanese espionage in Hawaii without resorting to mass arrests.\n\nThe Pearl Harbor attack shocked Americans, but it was secretly celebrated by the nation's closest allies. Prime Minister Winston Churchill knew the blow would bring the United States into the war, a goal British intelligence had been pursuing relentlessly for almost two years through an enormous intelligence operation that included covert operatives based in the National Press Building.\n\nCarter and Americans working for the Brits weren't alone in realizing the potential of the Press Building as a base for espionage. As separate conflicts in Europe and Asia merged into World War II, the United States remained nominally neutral. The Press Building and especially the Press Club came to resemble Humphrey Bogart's Casablanca. Operatives working for Japan, Great Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union (Germany's ally from August 1939 until June 1941), and American intelligence services worked and relaxed in intimate proximity, squeezing together into crowded elevators, passing each other in narrow corridors, and standing elbow-to-elbow in front of the Press Club bar.\n\n#\n\nIn the spring of 1940, as war raged in Europe, Britain launched a vast, covert foreign-intelligence operation in the United States, deploying legal and illegal techniques to subvert America's political institutions and manipulate its news media. British intelligence operatives, including American journalists in the National Press Building, worked to elect candidates who favored US intervention, defeat those who advocated neutrality, and silence or destroy the reputations of American isolationists they considered a menace to British security.\n\nDuring the desperate year and a half between Dunkirk and Pearl Harbor, British intelligence operated from several outposts in the National Press Building. These included a front company that produced polls engineered to influence rather than assess the opinions of the public, spied on and smeared isolationist members of Congress, and organized and supported organizations of \u00e9migr\u00e9s from neutral and Nazi-occupied countries to press for American intervention. The Press Building was also home to the Washington bureau of a news agency that was subsidized by, and served the interests of, British intelligence. Complementing the efforts of those on London's payroll were a number of reporters and columnists working in the Press Building who, motivated by opposition to fascism and a desire to get the United States into the war as soon as possible, volunteered to serve as clandestine operatives for British intelligence. Scores\u2014perhaps hundreds\u2014of American journalists who believed that fighting fascism justified unethical and, at times, illegal behavior, cooperated with British intelligence in 1940 and '41.\n\nReporters, including several in the Press Building, infused American newspapers and radio programs with fake news that had been generated in London, and ran pro-intervention lobbying organizations that secretly took directions from British intelligence. They did so because they knew that by shaping public opinion they might change the course of history. Franklin Roosevelt's ability to send food, fuel, and weapons across the Atlantic that were vital to Britain's survival, and ultimately to the security of the United States, hinged on his ability to persuade skeptical Americans and their elected representatives of the wisdom of assistance.\n\nGiven the stakes, Britain's intelligence services certainly weren't going to sit by and simply hope for the best. They targeted American public opinion aggressively and tenaciously. The scale and audacity of the British Secret Intelligence Service's (SIS) activities in the United States in the eighteen months prior to Pearl Harbor were without parallel in the history of relations between allied democracies.\n\nBritish intelligence employed the full range of cloak-and-dagger techniques in America. In addition to recruiting and running espionage agents, covert weapons it unleashed on its closest ally included: forgeries, seductions, burglaries, electoral dirty tricks, physical surveillance, intercepting and reading letters, disrupting public meetings, and illegally bugging offices and tapping phones. Practices that are usually reserved for enemies were employed because the competition for American public opinion was at least as important to the outcome of the fight against fascism as anything that happened on a battlefield. Newspapers and radio programs were the front lines in hard-fought battles to determine whether Americans would back Britain or keep to itself, antagonize or appease Japan, or even help Germany.\n\nAmerican communists, fascists, and isolationists protested bitterly that Britain was manipulating the US media and secretly intervening in elections as part of a campaign to pull America into the war. These accusations, dismissed by liberal politicians and newspaper columnists as paranoid ravings, were inaccurate only in that they were understated. Even the most alarmist commentators and conspiracy mongers underestimated the depth and effectiveness of British covert activity.\n\nThe isolationists were right about one thing: While pledging to keep America's sons home, Roosevelt was doing everything he could to prepare the country to intervene in the war. British prime minister Winston Churchill was eager to lend a disguised hand. The task of persuading the president to accept secret assistance from Britain fell to William Stephenson, a Canadian businessman, World War I flying ace and former bantamweight boxer who served as the head of British intelligence in the United States.\n\nThe last thing British leaders wanted to do was antagonize or undercut Roosevelt, They knew that sending spies to a friendly country could irritate even the closest ally. Stephenson decided in the spring of 1940 to test the waters. First, he asked a mutual friend, the former heavyweight world boxing champion Gene Tunney, to arrange a meeting with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover, a master of bureaucratic knife fighting, told Stephenson that he would be pleased to cooperate with his British counterparts, but under US law any communication between an American government agency and a foreign government would have to be conducted through the State Department. This requirement could be set aside, he noted, only on the personal orders of the president. Employing the bureaucratic version of a wink and a nod, Hoover added that if Stephenson got FDR's okay, \"we'll do business directly. Just myself and you. Nobody else gets in the act. Not State, not anyone.\" Stephenson replied that he would secure the president's endorsement.\n\nTo accomplish this, Stephenson sent another athletic emissary, Ernest Cuneo, to query Roosevelt. Cuneo's career had started with stints as a professional football player for the Orange (New Jersey) Tornadoes and the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the sensibilities of the gridiron\u2014intense personal friendships, loyalty to one's team, and ferocious rivalry with opponents\u2014infused his subsequent careers as journalist, consigliere to politicians and pundits, and spook. In 1940 he was an advisor to Roosevelt, attorney for muckraking journalist Drew Pearson and the king of gossip Walter Winchell, and one of the most effective fixers in New Deal Washington.\n\nRoosevelt told Cuneo that he favored \"the closest possible marriage between the FBI and British Intelligence.\" The president used the same expression in a separate conversation with the British ambassador, Lord Lothian. This gave Hoover the green light to work with Stephenson. Remarkably, FDR asked both Cuneo and Lothian to keep the State Department in the dark about the SIS's activities.\n\nStephenson worked from a base in New York, initially as director of the British Passport Control Office, the traditional cover for the UK's SIS. When the operation became so large that it couldn't plausibly hide under the Passport Control cover, Stephenson turned to Hoover for advice. The FBI director suggested that SIS create a new entity and call it British Security Coordination (BSC). The organization's duties were as vague as its name. By mid-1941, BSC had almost a thousand employees in the United States and another two thousand in Canada, Central America, and South America, making it one of the largest foreign operations British intelligence had ever mounted.\n\nA great deal of information about the BSC is available because Stephenson ordered his staff to write a history of its activities. The account, written in 1945, when memories were fresh, and kept secret until 1999, provides a candid picture of London's espionage and propaganda activities in America.\n\nThe BSC history makes it clear that although most of the American reporters and editors who collaborated with BSC to create and disseminate propaganda were not on the British payroll, it isn't an exaggeration to characterize them as British agents. In fact, this is precisely how BSC thought about them. \"The conduct of political warfare was entirely dependent on secrecy,\" notes the BSC history. \"For that reason the press and radio men with whom BSC maintained contact were comparable with subagents and the intermediaries with agents. They were thus regarded.\" Discussing the relationship between reporters and BSC, Edmond Taylor, an American journalist, said that British intelligence agents \"connived\" with \"Americans like myself who were willing to go out of regular (or even legal) channels to try to bend US policy towards objectives that the British, as well as the Americans in question, considered desirable.\"\n\nOne of Stephenson's most pressing objectives in 1940 was to convince Roosevelt to authorize the transfer of superannuated American destroyers to Britain. The destroyers were needed to augment Royal Navy ships that were protecting convoys in the North Atlantic. Sending them would have great symbolic significance, showing the British people that America was standing behind them.\n\nThe destroyer deal, and the larger issue of sending American weapons to Britain, was hostage to a conflict between two factions within the US government. One advocated supplying Britain weapons, food, and any other supplies it needed to fight Germany. The other, led by US ambassador to Great Britain Joseph Kennedy, deemed Britain a lost cause and advocated cutting off aid and husbanding resources that would be needed to meet the threat from Germany.\n\nMost of Roosevelt's cabinet and the nation's military leadership supported Kennedy's view. They found it hard to believe that the twenty miles of salt water separating England from France would be an insurmountable barrier to German troops who had occupied most of continental Europe with shocking speed. Military leaders knew the United States was undermanned and completely unprepared to fight a modern war.\n\nThe BSC history draws a straight line from planting pro-British stories in the American media to Roosevelt's decision to send destroyers to London. The transfer happened, according to BSC, because Stephenson had \"means at his disposal for influencing American public opinion in favour of aid to Britain. In fact, covert propaganda, one of the most potent weapons which BSC employed against the enemy, was harnessed directly to this task.\"\n\nTwo of the BSC's most enthusiastic connivers, a _Chicago Daily News_ reporter named Edgar Ansel Mowrer and William \"Wild Bill\" Donovan, a lawyer, World War I military hero, and friend to FDR, played leading roles in overcoming America's, and Roosevelt's, skepticism about the United Kingdom's ability to hold out against Germany.\n\nThe operation started with Stephenson suggesting to Donovan that he visit London on a fact-finding trip for the president. Roosevelt had known Donovan since they were classmates at Columbia Law School, and although Donovan was a Republican, the president trusted him.\n\nDonovan brought the idea to Frank Knox, secretary of the Navy, publisher of the _Chicago Daily News_ , and one of the few enthusiastic supporters of Britain in the cabinet. Knox arranged for Donovan to pitch Roosevelt on Stephenson's idea of obtaining an independent assessment of Britain's prospects. Knox offered to provide cover for the trip by arranging for Mowrer, the most talented journalist on the _Daily News_ staff, to accompany Donovan and by commissioning the pair to write a series of stories based on their trip. Roosevelt readily agreed.\n\nMowrer had a thirst for adventure, a deep hatred for fascism, and a strong affinity for secret intelligence and espionage tradecraft. Fearless reporting from Berlin earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1933; it also gave him bragging rights as the first American reporter to be thrown out of Nazi Germany. Getting expelled by dictators became a habit. Mussolini forced Mowrer to leave Rome in 1936, and Stalin booted him out of Moscow the next year. Mowrer continued reporting on Europe's descent into barbarism from Paris, fleeing in June 1940 just ahead of the German army.\n\nExplaining their mission to Mowrer, Donovan told the reporter that \"at Knox's request he and I were to collect and publish information on the 'Fifth Column' activities which had so helped the Germans in Norway, Poland, Belgium, France. What were the British and Americans doing about the problem? Beyond this, however, lay [our] real assignment\u2014finding out for President Roosevelt the thing he most needed to know: would and could the British hold out against the Germans?\"\n\n\"Knox knew of my intimacy with members of the Churchill government,\" Mowrer recalled. \"As a newsman I could legitimately poke my nose into everything and ask indiscreet questions.\"\n\nOn July 15, 1940, Donovan telephoned his wife with the news that he was leaving on a secret mission of indefinite duration to a location that he could not disclose. The next day, Stephenson triumphantly cabled Sir Stewart Menzies, head of the SIS: \"Colonel William J. Donovan personally representing President, left yesterday by Clipper,\" the transatlantic flying boat. Donovan's dramatic exit was marred by a leak to the press. Mrs. Ruth Donovan, and anyone else who cared, learned the next day from the _New York Times_ that her husband had traveled to London on an undisclosed mission.\n\nThe Brits pulled out the stops for Donovan, arranging an audience with King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, dinner with Churchill, briefings by Menzies, and a tour of the code-breaking campus at Bletchley Park, the crown jewel of British intelligence, as well as meetings with George Orwell and other prominent intellectuals. Everything was choreographed to showcase the determination, grit, and ingenuity of the British people, and to create the not-entirely-accurate impression that the country was well prepared to repulse an invasion.\n\nMowrer was given similar, if less flashy, treatment. He was appalled by the lack of military preparations for the invasion that everyone believed was coming, but this perception was outweighed in his mind by Churchill's steely determination. During his month in England, Mowrer filed only one story. The Vichy government couldn't be trusted and the only Frenchmen the United States should support were those \"fighting, or ready to fight, against Nazi Germany,\" he told Americans. Behind the scenes, Mowrer interceded on Charles de Gaulle's behalf with Churchill, urging the prime minister to recognize the prickly general as the leader of France. Before leaving London, Mowrer and Donovan agreed on their message to Roosevelt: \"Britain under Churchill would not surrender either to ruthless air raids or to an invasion.\"\n\nHaving been persuaded that with enough American support Britain could hold off the Germans, and determined to do everything he could to increase the flow of weapons, food, and fuel across the Atlantic, Donovan boarded a camouflaged British flying boat on August 3. He arrived in New York the following day and was greeted by a _New York Times_ reporter who had clearly been briefed on the mission. The paper reported that Donovan \"denied he had discussed the possibility of turning over old destroyers in this country to England and he declined to discuss the war conditions in England.\"\n\nStephenson cabled London: \"Donovan greatly impressed by visit and reception...has strongly urged our case re destroyers...is doing much to combat defeatist attitude in Washington by stating positively and convincingly that we shall win.\"\n\nDonovan joined Roosevelt on a driving vacation across New England, spending two days touring, picnicking, and bending the president's ear about the need to support Britain.\n\nMowrer made his way back to the United States in less spectacular fashion. By August he was at the _Chicago Daily News_ office in Washington, in the Colorado Building, a block from the National Press Building. He frequented the Press Club and spoke on NBC radio's \"National Press Club Forum\" broadcasts. While serving as the _Daily News_ bureau chief, Mowrer devoted all of his time and talent to overt and covert attempts to hasten United States engagement in the fight against fascism.\n\nMowrer's first byline from Washington, on August 19, 1940, was shared with Donovan. An introductory note written by Knox explained that it was the beginning of a series that was being \"made public by secretary of Navy Frank Knox in connection with the national defense program.\" Knox wrote that it was a \"most thoroughgoing survey of German 'fifth column' methods used in weakening resistance of possible enemies and undermining the morale of countries they propose to attack.\" To maximize their impact, Knox offered the articles free to competing papers. Hundreds, including the _New York Times_ and the _Washington Post_ , accepted the offer, ensuring that Americans from all walks of life read them. Anyone who didn't read the stories may have heard Donovan discuss them on the first national radio broadcast featuring a speaker other than the president.\n\nThe articles painted a wildly exaggerated picture of the effectiveness and scope of Nazi subversion, claiming that Germany spent $200 million annually on foreign propaganda, a figure that was a figment of the SIS's imagination. The critical point, which Donovan and Mowrer pounded into their readers, was that Germany's success in decimating its neighbors' armies and occupying almost all of Europe save the British Isles was the result not of superior military strategy, technology or training. Instead, they attributed the victories to years of psychological warfare and legions of fifth columnists\u2014threats they said had been recognized and neutralized in the United Kingdom, making it far less vulnerable than its continental neighbors.\n\n\"No amount of genius would have accomplished what the Germans accomplished in so short a time without...the Germans abroad and sympathizers in the victim countries,\" the first article in the Donovan\/Mowrer series explained.\n\nDonovan and Mowrer made fanciful claims that Hitler, who in fact had given little thought to the United States, was plotting to use German Americans as an advance force that would help turn the United States into a \"Nazi Gau,\" or state. \"It is safe to say that a very fair proportion of the non-refugee Germans who have become American since Hitler came to power did so with the secret intention of turning free and democratic America into 'their'\u2014that is, Hitler's, America,\" they wrote.\n\n\"It is conceivable that the United States possesses the finest Nazi-schooled Fifth Column in the world, one which, in case of war with Germany, could be our undoing,\" Mowrer and Donovan told their readers. It was conceivable\u2014but there wasn't a shred of evidence behind the assertion, which turned out to be wrong.\n\nIn early September FDR informed Congress\u2014he did not seek its approval\u2014that the US government had agreed to exchange American destroyers for leases on British bases in the Caribbean, a move that he called \"the most important action in the reinforcement of our national defense that has been taken since the Louisiana Purchase.\"\n\nComing in the heat of an election campaign that hinged on the president's ability to persuade Americans that he would keep the nation out of war, the destroyers-for-bases deal, which effectively made the United States a nonbelligerent ally of Britain, was a bold step. It was particularly remarkable because more was at stake than losing an election. The legal basis for bypassing Congress was so weak that Roosevelt believed he was risking impeachment.\n\nRoosevelt had been emboldened to release the destroyers by reports that American public opinion had shifted over the summer, swinging from a strong belief that German domination of Europe, including Great Britain, was inevitable to a conviction that, with sufficient American assistance, Britain could hold on. BSC believed this shift was a decisive factor in Donovan's success in persuading Roosevelt to agree to the destroyers-for-bases deal\u2014and that British propaganda, especially the Donovan\/Mowrer articles, had been responsible for changing Americans' attitudes.\n\nConvinced that Donovan had immense influence with Roosevelt, and that he was a completely reliable friend, the British government bolstered his standing with the president. Stephenson had been maneuvering behind the scenes for months for FDR to create a centralized intelligence service and to put Donovan in charge of it. This work culminated in a meeting held at the White House at 12:30 p.m. on June 18, 1941, between Donovan, Knox, and FDR at which Donovan was put in charge of a new organization, the Office of the Coordinator of Information, and charged with overseeing all of the US government's intelligence activities. Soon after leaving the White House, Donovan briefed Stephenson on the meeting, and the next day Stephenson sent an encrypted telegram describing the conversation to Menzies.\n\n\"Bill [Donovan] saw the President today and after long discussion wherein all points were agreed he accepted the appointment,\" Stephenson wrote. \"He will be co-ordinator of all forms of Intelligence and will control all departments including offensive operations...\" Donovan, who was given the rank of major general, reported directly to Roosevelt. \"Bill accuses me of having 'intrigued and driven' him into appointment,\" Stephenson reported. \"You can imagine how relieved I am after three months of battling and jockeying for position at Washington that 'our man' is in a position of such importance to our efforts.\"\n\nThe office of Coordinator of Information was a British idea, according to Cuneo, who was involved in its creation. \"It was conceived by Stephenson as an American solution to British problems in the Western hemisphere,\" Cuneo wrote in an unpublished memoir. Stephenson had persuaded Donovan \"in the interests of the common defense of Western civilization, to build an American intelligence agency which would assist him in carrying on his covert and clandestine operations in the Western hemisphere.\" The Office of the Coordinator of Information was later expanded into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which formed the basis for the CIA.\n\nMowrer stayed in close touch with Donovan and conducted at least one secret overseas mission for the Coordinator of Information. In August 1941, Donovan asked him to travel to East Asia on a mission similar to their trip to London. \"Knox will provide a letter identifying you as his personal representative, but you will pass as a newspaper correspondent just as you did in England,\" Donovan told him.\n\nMowrer visited Singapore, Java, Thailand, Burma, and China. Everywhere he was told Japanese invasion was inevitable and imminent. The only disagreements were about the route: some were confident Tokyo's target was Siberia, while others told Mowrer war would come first to the Philippines and Southeast Asia. One American government official even predicted a Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and a simultaneous invasion of the Philippines. Like the American military, Mowrer failed to pluck this strand from the tangle of rumor and deception that contributed to America's costly intelligence failure.\n\nMowrer wasn't the only journalist who participated in BSC's multidimensional project to persuade FDR to release destroyers or its larger campaign to influence American views about the war. British intelligence also supported the activities of an informal network called the Century Group, which played a pivotal role in the destroyers-for-bases deal. Named after a private club in New York where it held many of its meetings, the Century Group consisted of about three dozen highly placed individuals who decided in the summer of 1940 to dedicate themselves to three goals: persuading the public to support \"all aid short of war\" to Britain, including the transfer of destroyers; publicly combating isolationists; and advocating government actions that would inevitably result in the United States' joining the war.\n\nThe Century Group's Washington operations were run by Ulric Bell, an old-school, hard-drinking newspaperman, from a Press Building suite across the hall from John Franklin Carter's office. Bell, a former National Press Club president who had been among the small group of Press Club members who guaranteed the original construction loans for the Press Building, was the Washington bureau chief for the _Louisville Courier-Journal_. Little of his reporting in 1940 and 1941 made it into print, and that was fine with the paper's publisher, Barry Bingham Sr. Bingham paid Bell's salary and expenses while encouraging him to work full time for the Century Group and for other pro-intervention groups with close links to British intelligence. Years later, Bingham forged a close relationship with the CIA.\n\nUnlike most of BSC's American operatives, Bell met directly with British intelligence officers and diplomats. He believed that American and British interests were indistinguishable and that the best way to help his own country was to work on behalf of a foreign government, including by acting as an intermediary between BSC and the White House. Bell was on friendly terms with President Roosevelt. He was also a close friend of FDR's press secretary, Steve Early, and of General Edwin \"Pa\" Watson, the president's friend and military aide, and schemed with both to nudge the president and the country closer to intervening in the war. At Bell's request, Early assigned White House typists to compile mailing lists for the Century Group based on pro-interventionist correspondence that had been sent to the White House. Bell and other leaders of the Century Group, and a larger group that it spawned, were in daily touch with Roosevelt's speech writer, Robert Sherwood.\n\nThe White House was happy to have the Century Group pushing for intervention\u2014as long as the president's fingerprints weren't evident. On one occasion, concerned that FDR might take offense at a planned article criticizing him for being timid in backing Britain, Bell brought the draft text to the White House and handed it to the president. Roosevelt, according to one of his advisors, \"read it, and then\u2014cocking his cigarette holder at a jaunty angle\u2014turned to Bell. 'If you're going to give me hell,' he said, 'why not use some really strong language? You know, pusillanimous isn't such a bad word.\"\n\nBell and other members of the Century Group operated as covert liaisons between the British government and the American press, providing leaks and disinformation generated by BSC to friendly reporters and columnists. The Century Group also conducted delicate, secret negotiations between the Republican presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, and FDR. The connection to Willkie, who had put his election at risk by tacitly supporting FDR's efforts to prepare the United States for war, was to prove critical to getting the destroyers deal done.\n\nWillkie was probably unaware of the attention and resources BSC devoted to smoothing the path for him to gain the Republican nomination. The Brits wanted Roosevelt to win, but they hedged their bets by trying to ensure that if a Republican replaced him the White House wouldn't be home to an isolationist. Part of the strategy was to marginalize Republican leaders who wanted to cast the GOP as the \"peace party.\"\n\nOn June 25, the second day of the GOP's national convention, the _New York Herald_ reported that a poll found that three-fifths of the delegates supported helping the allies \"with everything short of war.\" The result was a surprise given the strong isolationist streak in the Republican Party. The story reported that the poll had been \"conducted by Market Analysts, Inc., an independent research organization.\" It didn't reveal that Market Analysts had organized and phrased its questions in a manner that was designed to make the case for intervention and to exclude the possibility of opposing increased assistance to Britain. For example, delegates were asked \"If you think we are endangered, do you favor our helping the Allies with everything a) short of war; b) would you declare war now; or c) send navy or air force units to Europe.\" While the _Herald_ positioned the results as a strong show of support for aiding Britain, in fact the majority picked the answer that was least interventionist. They were not given the option to suggest that the United States withhold assistance. Market Analysts didn't reveal the premise of the question, or that only 0.7 percent of those surveyed favored a declaration of war.\n\nIn fact, contrary to the _Herald_ story, Market Analysts was anything but independent. It was run for the BSC by Sanford \"Sandy\" Griffith, an American who had worked for British intelligence since the late 1930s. His experience included serving in the French and US armies in World War I and as a _Wall Street Journal_ reporter in London. Griffith returned to New York in the late 1920s, turned his hand to selling securities, and, accused of swindling his clients, avoided jail by the skin of his teeth. He operated Market Analysts from an office in New York City that housed several other BSC operations.\n\nGriffith hired an experienced covert operator, Francis Henson, as his right-hand man. Henson had a colorful background, which included working in Europe to rescue refugees who were fleeing Nazi Germany and a job in Detroit trying to flush communists out of the United Auto Workers union.\n\nHenson worked undercover for Griffith in 1940 and 1941 from the eleventh floor of the National Press Building. Sometimes Henson said he worked for Market Analysts; on occasion he presented himself as an employee of a fictitious company called \"Information, Incorporated.\" Letterhead advertised Information, Inc.'s ability to provide \"Confidential Research for the Facts You Seek,\" and directed correspondence to \"Mr. Francis A. Henson, Regional Director, Washington Research Division, 1196 National Press Building, Washington, D.C.\" The stationary conjured images of a well-appointed office. The reality was less grand. Henson rented a desk in a room with two reporters and a representative of the Bible Truth Seekers Foundation.\n\nOne of Henson's many jobs for Griffith and BSC was conducting public opinion surveys, like the poll taken at the Republican National Convention that appeared to show strong support for aiding Britain. Many of these polls were aimed at influencing politicians.\n\nIn a resume written in 1948, Henson recounted that his job from 1940 to 1942 \"was to use the results of our polls, taken among their constituents, to convince on-the-fence Congressmen and Senators that they should favor more aid to Britain.\" Market Analysts' polling results always supported British goals. Henson and Griffith accomplished this by asking questions like those posed at the Republican convention that were crafted to elicit the desired responses, by carefully selecting the individuals whose opinions were solicited while pretending that they had been chosen at random, and by suppressing any results that didn't come out as intended.\n\nWilliam Allen White, a respected voice in the Republican Party who headed a pro-intervention group called the William Allen White Committee, had commissioned the poll of delegates to the Republican convention. He wrote in a newspaper column that it had been \"carefully and rather expensively made...by a professional group of interviewers.\" The column, which was printed in the _Boston Globe_ and other newspapers across the country, cited the poll as evidence of the delegates' opposition to Hitler, as well as their eagerness to bolster American defenses and to forge an economic alliance with Central and South American nations against Germany. White argued that the survey results demonstrated that Willkie, a former Democrat who felt that \"America's first line of defense is Great Britain,\" best represented the Republican Party's views.\n\nIt isn't clear whether BSC's assistance was decisive, but Willkie, who did not campaign in the primaries, went into the convention an underdog and\u2014to London's delight and the astonishment of the Republican establishment\u2014emerged as the GOP candidate.\n\nHenson and Griffith were also deployed to the Democratic convention in July.\n\nNewspapers stories based on their polling reported that more than 90 percent of \"advance guard delegates\" favored sending aid to Britain, and after the convention was underway 86 percent of an unspecified number of delegates felt that Britain's defeat would endanger America, and 45 percent believed that if Hitler conquered Britain, he would immediately attack the United States. The poll was intended to show that rank-and-file Democrats were more inclined to go to war to prevent the defeat of Great Britain than the men who wrote the party's platform, which pledged that the United States \"will not participate in foreign wars, and we will not send our army, naval or air forces to fight in foreign lands outside of the Americas, except in case of attack.\"\n\nThe White Committee declared in a press release that \"a wide disparity exists between the Democratic Platform and the opinions of the individual delegates, as revealed in a very complete poll.\"\n\nIn addition to their polling work at the Democratic convention, Henson and Griffith posed as representatives of Information, Inc., handing out business cards with Henson's Press Building address and interviewing delegates who were promoting pacifism. The interviews, which were forward to Cuneo, were intended to help BSC develop propaganda to counter pacifist arguments.\n\nAlthough they worked to solidify Democratic support, the BSC's operatives devoted far more attention to Republicans in the summer of 1940 as part of an all-out push to keep the destroyers-for-bases deal alive. Willkie supported FDR's foreign-policy goals, but he also wanted to win the election, so the White House couldn't assume that he would acquiesce to sending American ships to Britain without congressional approval. Even a hint that Willkie might accuse Roosevelt of overstepping his authority could have scuttled the deal. As the first president to snub George Washington's precedent of voluntarily stepping aside after two terms, Roosevelt was vulnerable to accusations that he was behaving like a dictator. He also knew that while the public was split about the merits of helping Great Britain, most Americans wanted to stay out of the war, and that Congress wouldn't agree to transferring destroyers to Britain.\n\nBell worked behind the scenes with other members of the Century Group to persuade Willkie to endorse the transfer, or at a minimum to adopt a neutral attitude toward it. On August 30, Bell and other members of the group gathered at the Hay-Adams House, Washington's most luxurious hotel, awaiting news from their contacts in the Republican campaign. They received two telephone calls that afternoon from Willkie's aides conveying the candidate's promise not to criticize the destroyer deal. Bell wasted no time in conveying the news to the White House. The president, assured that he wouldn't pay a devastating political price, announced the deal at a press conference four days later.\n\nBSC's championing of Willkie was exceptional. Most of its interventions were intended to destroy rather than build political careers.\n\n#\n\nEngineered polls at the Republican and Democratic conventions were the opening salvos in an extraordinary campaign BSC waged in 1940 and 1941 against isolationist politicians. British intelligence intervened in American elections with an intensity and employing methods that no foreign government had ever attempted. BSC agents based in the National Press Building were central players in the drama.\n\nHamilton Stuyvesant Fish III, a New York Republican and leading isolationist who had represented residents of the Hudson Valley in Congress since 1920, was at the top of the British hit list. Removing a politician who threatened American support for Britain was far more important to BSC than respecting the will of his constituents.\n\nTo dig Fish's political grave, BSC created and funded the Non-Partisan Committee to Defeat Hamilton Fish. It operated from the same New York City address as Market Analysts Inc. and other fronts for British intelligence. Like the faux polling firm, the committee was run by Sandy Griffith and Francis Henson. In October 1940 Henson traveled from his Press Building office to Poughkeepsie, New York, where he set up a war room in the Campbell Hotel. In addition to pulling a thorn from the British government's side, the campaign against Fish was intended to \"put the fear of God into every isolationist senator and congressman in the country,\" one of Henson's comrades told a potential financial contributor. In a letter to Cuneo dated October 18, 1940, Henson wrote that because there was \"a very good chance of...putting Fish on ice,\" he and Griffith planned to remain in Poughkeepsie working on the campaign until election day. The Democratic Party, which did not consider Fish vulnerable, put almost no resources into the race, so for the most part the campaign against a sitting member of Congress was led by British operatives.\n\nThe Non-Partisan Committee engineered a series of dirty tricks. For example, Henson and Griffith manufactured a tale about Fish renting property to German Nazis who paid him inflated rents as a covert bribe. In a classic \"October surprise,\" Drew Pearson and Robert Allen, acting in concert with Cuneo, reported the story in their Washington Merry-Go-Round column on October 21, just a few weeks before the election. They were fortunate that Fish decided against following through on threats to sue them for libel.\n\nHenson and Griffith also circulated a photo that appeared to show Fish meeting with the \"American Hitler,\" Fritz Kuhn. The leader of the German American Bund was serving a jail sentence at the time for embezzlement. The caption asked \"Voters of Dutchess, Orange and Putnam Counties is Hamilton Fish Pro-Nazi?\" Contrary to the impression created by the photo, Fish had never met privately with Kuhn. The photo had been taken in 1938 at a congressional hearing.\n\nFish was reelected by 9,000 votes, half the margin he'd had in 1938. In an after-action report to Cuneo, Griffith wrote: \"Francis [Henson] probably reported to you on the Hamilton Fish fight. Our size-up of the situation was correct\u2014that $2,000 or $3,000 additional a week or two ahead would have been sufficient to put it over. The local Democratic machine in the district was of practically no help.\" Griffith also sent Cuneo a four-page memo with recommendations for the best methods to beat Fish and other congressmen in the future. His pointers included avoiding all appearance of a centralized campaign, the need to make planned attacks seem spontaneous, and the importance of keeping \"in the background any protests emanating from New York City, and protests from Jewish and foreign groups.\" Covert campaigns should take care to \"tie-in attacks with current events. Study, and where necessary create, incidents which give sufficient news pegs on which to hang a story.\" He also recommended actions in Washington, including pinning \"on the pro-Nazi and obstructionist labels\" and cooperating \"with the Administration and hostile colleagues to assure their ganging up on Fish whenever he obstructs.\"\n\nHenson and Griffith weren't the only assets BSC deployed against Fish. In spring 1940, British intelligence threw out a net that ultimately snared Fish, two dozen other isolationist members of Congress, and to the delight of the White House linked the America First Committee to Nazi Germany.\n\nThe story started when a man named Henry Hoke became curious and, as he investigated, furious about pro-Nazi propaganda that was flowing through the mail to hundreds of thousands of Americans. Hoke, publisher of _The Reporter of Direct Mail Advertising_ , took an interest in the techniques that were used to target and disseminate the propaganda.\n\nIn May 1940 Hoke published a story in _The Reporter_ revealing that the German Library of Information sent a pro-Nazi publication, _Facts in Review_ , every week to 90,000 ministers, school teachers, legislators, and publishers. Hoke detailed other German-financed propaganda activities, such as an initiative by the German Railroads Information Office to send \"about 40,000 weekly mimeographed bulletins to hotel managers, travel agencies, stock brokers, bankers, and small businessmen\" that were intended to \"convince Americans that the Nazi system of doing business was _best._ \" The Postmaster General should prevent foreign governments from using the US mail to distribute propaganda, Hoke demanded.\n\nThe article also reported that individuals on the German Library mailing list were \"receiving reprints from the _Congressional Record_ , mailed under a Congressman's frank, containing Nazi-phrased and Nazi-inspired material which followed the line of editorials appearing in _Facts in Review._ \" The \"frank\" Hoke referred to was a privilege extended to all members of Congress to send an unlimited amount of mail at no cost on envelopes that bore their printed signatures instead of postage stamps. Such envelopes were supposed to be used exclusively for communications sent by a member of Congress, such as the _Congressional Record_ , an official government periodical that publishes congressional speeches and debates.\n\nHoke's story garnered a small amount of attention in left-wing newspapers but didn't make a major splash. The waves were strong enough, however, to come to the attention of BSC, which, sensing an opportunity to disrupt a Nazi subversion operation and embarrass isolationist politicians, provided Hoke undercover investigators and funding. Before long, BSC's Griffith in New York and Henson in the National Press Building were supporting what had become a personal crusade for Hoke. Two other BSC collaborators in the National Press Building, Bell, who had become a leader of a BSC-aligned group called Fight for Freedom, and one of Fight for Freedom's members, Washington Merry-Go-Round columnist Robert S. Allen, also helped investigate and publicize what became known as the congressional franking scandal.\n\nBSC had infiltrated the German Library's staff, so it was a simple matter to arrange for the insertion of phony names at BSC-monitored addresses onto its mailing list. Soon letters containing reprints of the _Congressional Record_ with speeches that would have warmed Joseph Goebbels's heart started showing up at these addresses. The letters were sent postage-free under the franks of more than two dozen members of Congress. American taxpayers were footing the bill for the dissemination of German propaganda.\n\nBSC determined that addresses on the franked envelopes were printed using an antiquated duplicating machine, and found that the Steuben Society, a Nazi organization in New York, owned one of the few working models of the machine. It obtained confidential bulletins issued by the society and learned not only that the envelopes were printed on the society's duplicating machine, but also that the group was inviting its members to come to meetings where they could pick up speeches by isolationist senators Burton Wheeler and Gerald Nye in franked envelopes to mail to their friends.\n\nBSC and Hoke had uncovered part of the story, but they had not learned how the _Congressional Record_ reprints and franked envelopes ended up in the hands of the Steuben Society. They got a break when a representative of the Order of the Purple Heart wrote to Hoke complaining that his article had incorrectly accused the veteran's organization of sending propaganda to its members in franked envelopes. BSC looked into the matter and determined that the Order had been falsely accused. The investigation also uncovered a very interesting bit of news. The Order's \"Commander\" in Washington was a WWI veteran named George Hill who worked as a personal secretary for Representative Fish.\n\nBSC zeroed in on Hill. It either had sources in place on Capitol Hill capable of keeping a close eye on Fish's offices or quickly recruited them. Henson was almost certainly involved in this aspect of the operation. The Brits also targeted Hill with an agent identified in British intelligence reports as \"a very capable female operator.\" She extracted information from Hill about his background, associates, and financial situation.\n\nThe sleuthing revealed that Hill had accumulated wealth far beyond the level that could be obtained as a secretary to a member of Congress. BSC figured out that Hill was running an elaborate and lucrative scam that linked unwitting members of Congress to Nazi propagandists.\n\nHill's enterprise was based on an intimate knowledge of Capitol Hill procedures. He knew that members of Congress routinely stood up on the floor of the House or Senate and asked for unanimous consent, which was always granted, to have written remarks inserted into the _Congressional Record_.\n\nHill had cultivated a group of female secretaries on Capitol Hill who, in exchange for small gifts, arranged to have their bosses insert speeches into the _Record_ that Hill had supplied. Although the congressmen were listed as authors, they rarely read them. The speeches coincided with their isolationist beliefs, so they didn't recoil on the rare occasions when they did skim the text.\n\nActing in his capacity as Fish's secretary, Hill sent orders to the Government Printing Office for thousands of reprints of the speeches and paid for them at the official rate, which was less than a third of the cost of commercial printing. He then sold them at a hefty markup to organizations like America First and the McWilliams Anti-Semitic League. If these groups knew Hill was profiting on the arrangement, they wouldn't object because he provided the reprints in franked, unaddressed envelopes, thus saving the groups the cost of postage.\n\nHill used his relationships with the secretaries of isolationist members of Congress, and his knowledge of their postal habits, to create a related business. Senators and representatives receive massive amounts of mail from constituents. Sorting and replying to constituent mail is still a major activity in every congressional office. In those days the common practice was to reply to as much mail as possible as soon as it arrived and to destroy the vast majority of incoming correspondence within a day or two. This was an act of self-preservation: so much mail arrived on Capitol Hill that retaining a week's worth would have created a fire hazard, and the legislative branch would have drowned in the mail accumulated in a month.\n\nInstead of destroying them, Hill persuaded the secretaries to set aside mounds of letters from constituents who had expressed pro-isolationist sentiments. He had bags of these letters delivered to an office where eight women typed the return addresses on notecards. Hill had the cards duplicated and sold the resulting mailing lists to the same organizations that bought the speeches.\n\nBSC brought the fruits of its investigation to the attention of the FBI, but the bureau expressed little interest in pursuing a case. BSC had more luck persuading a sympathetic federal prosecutor to convene a grand jury to investigate illegal franking. The grand jury sent a subpoena to one of Hill's associates requesting that he turn over copies of _Congressional Record_ speeches in franked envelopes. The associate panicked and called Hill demanding that he immediately pick up twenty sacks of franked mail.\n\nBSC operatives were watching as a truck marked \"US House of Representatives\" picked up the sacks and delivered them to Fish's office, not to his storehouse as Hill had instructed. The secretary who met the delivery man knew what was in the sacks, and it was her turn to panic. The deliveryman refused her adamant demands to remove all of the bags, and after a heated argument agreed to take all but eight of them to the address she provided\u2014the Washington office of the America First committee.\n\nA BSC operative, possibly Henson or someone working for him, called the Federal Marshal's office to report the location of the subpoenaed mail sacks. The operative also tipped off a _Washington Post_ reporter who observed the Marshals' raid on America First, and then raced back to Capitol Hill where he poked around in the sacks that had been left outside Fish's office. A breathless description of the escapade made it onto the front page of the _Post_ and was picked up by newspapers around the country.\n\nA secret report BSC sent to London in May 1941 noted that the delivery mix up and raid were \"our opportunity to see that Hamilton Fish's office, and therefore George Hill, as Fish's Secretary, got into the newspapers.\" The BSC report added that \"most of the stories printed in the newspapers are only partially true as we only gave them sufficient [information] to drag Hill's name before the public and the appropriate Washington authorities.\"\n\nPro-intervention newspapers seized on the opportunities to run headlines linking Fish to the Nazis. A _Washington Post_ story ran under the banner \"8 Bags of Evidence in Nazi Probe 'Turn Up' at Rep. Fish's Bin in House Storeroom,\" while the leftwing _PM_ plastered \"Ham Fish Snatches Evidence Wanted in US Nazi Hunt.\" In an hour-long speech to the House, Fish asserted his ignorance of Hill's activities and denied any connection to Nazis or tolerance for anti-Semitism.\n\nAlthough BSC spun the news to reporters in a way that made Fish look culpable, in its internal report it acknowledged that it had painted him as an active participant in the scandal when in fact he had been an unwittingly victim. The congressman's public remarks about the affair were \"ridiculous, due no doubt to the fact that Fish simply doesn't know what he is talking about and did not wish to know what had been going on right under his nose,\" the BSC report noted. BSC's assessment accurately predicted \"that the case will develop into the biggest scandal Washington has had in many years.\"\n\nTying the bow on the box, BSC revealed to the press and the Department of Justice that the speeches Hill had arranged for isolationist members of Congress to insert in the _Congressional Record_ had been written by George Viereck, a well-known Nazi propagandist who had registered with the State Department as an agent of the German government. The connection to Viereck seemed to validate Roosevelt's assertions that America First, which was distributing the speeches, was a Nazi front. Stories linking the Nazi propagandist to America First tarnished the group's reputation, alienating isolationists who wanted nothing to do with Nazis.\n\nBSC's friends in the press, including reporters in the Press Building office of the _New York Herald Tribune_ , as well as Pearson and Allen, ran with the story, taking care to mention Fish, who denied all knowledge or involvement. BSC's sleuthing and the publicity led the Justice Department to indict Viereck for failing to report his Nazi ghost writing activities on foreign agent registration forms.\n\nBSC's staff took complete credit for the franking scandal. \"In May 1940 we first claimed there was a 'tie-up' between the Nazi Propaganda Organization in the United States the postal 'Franking' privilege of members of Congress of the United States. Recent indictments of George Sylvester Viereck, and George Hill (secretary to Congressman Hamilton Fish) have been the direct results of our efforts to expose the 'tie-up,'\" BSC boasted in a report to London.\n\nBSC continued to chase Fish. For example, in September 1941 it obtained a franked envelope from his office and stuffed it with anti-Semitic literature, including excerpts from the notorious and libelous _Protocols of the Elders of Zion_. A BSC operative wrote \"Fight for Jewdom\" above Fight for Freedom's address on the envelope and dropped it into a mailbox. Despite Fish's honest assertions that it was a fabrication, _PM_ newspaper ran a story with photographs of the envelope and its contents.\n\nEven after America's declarations of war against Japan and Germany rendered them toothless, British intelligence didn't give isolationist politicians any peace. In October 1942, Griffith and Henson arranged another October surprise for Fish. A Washington Merry-Go-Round column falsely accused the congressman of accepting $3,100 from German propagandists in the Romanoff Caviar company. Fish managed to hang on by a fingernail, winning the election by 4,000 out of 100,000 votes cast.\n\nTwo years later, after twenty-four years in Congress, Fish was defeated by a liberal Democrat. In his concession speech, the Republican said his loss \"should be largely credited to Communistic and Red forces from New York City backed by a large slush fund probably exceeding $250,000.\" A few weeks later he claimed it had taken \"most of the New Deal Administration, half of Moscow, $400,000, and Governor Dewey to defeat me.\" As BSC's secret history crowed: \"He might\u2014with more accuracy\u2014have blamed BSC.\"\n\nFish, one of the strongest voices against coming to Britain's assistance, was on the wrong side of history. Policies he advocated would have made America disastrously unprepared for war. On the other hand, contrary to BSC's slurs, there is no evidence that he was either an anti-Semite or a Nazi sympathizer. The fact that a foreign government led a years-long effort to trick New York voters into voting against Fish does not make him a more sympathetic figure, but it also doesn't burnish the reputation of British intelligence or the Americans who helped it. Whatever their feelings for Fish, most of his constituents, and Americans across the country, would have been outraged if they had learned that a foreign government had conspired to engineer his defeat.\n\nFrying Fish was far from an isolated incident.\n\n#\n\nBSC recruited some of America's most prominent journalists and columnists, including several in the National Press Building, to disseminate truths, half-truths, and outright lies as part of Britain's attempts to sway American public opinion and deceive Nazi Germany. Still, the pages of American newspapers remained contested territory for much of 1941.\n\nIn spring 1941 Bill Donovan warned BSC's William Stephenson that the two German news agencies, DNB and Transocean News Service, were being far more effective than the British in setting the tone of American press coverage of the war. At the end of April 1941 Stephenson sent a coded cable to Menzies noting that over the previous fortnight there had been an \"almost complete failure to prevent Axis monopoly of war news coverage\" in US newspapers. \"Axis news reports reach here more quickly than ours, and Transocean and DNB keep the flow and build up stories even in quiet periods.\" Stephenson and his allies were determined to undermine the credibility of the German news agencies, especially Transocean, and if possible to prevent them from sending news to or operating in the United States.\n\nWhen it was founded in 1914, Transocean News Service was a legitimate news service, a German version of Reuters or Associated Press. After Hitler took power it portrayed itself as being independent of both the German government and the Nazi party. By 1939, when it opened its US headquarters in New York and a Washington bureau in the National Press Building, Transocean was, in fact, an arm of Joseph Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, which wrote much of its copy. German intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover in the Washington embassy handled Transocean's US business affairs and helped direct its efforts to influence public opinion throughout the Americas. It used journalism as a cover for espionage, and traded on its pre-Nazi reputation to persuade newspapers to print Nazi propaganda.\n\nTransocean's US operations were headed by a small man adorned with an extravagant mustache and an electric name, Manfred Zapp. Zapp lived in style in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan and also had a home in the Washington suburbs. A Federal Communications Commission counterintelligence team that pioneered radio-monitoring technology targeted his house in a unsuccessful effort to catch him sending clandestine radio signals to Germany.\n\nIt must have irritated Zapp's Washington correspondent, Tom Davis, every morning when he had to walk past the offices of the Jewish Telegraph Agency to reach Transocean's office in suite 1092 of the National Press Building. Davis and Zapp tried to integrate into the routines of Washington correspondents, but were only grudgingly accepted by the press corps. Press Club members advised Roosevelt, who habitually made off-the-record remarks during press conferences, to be on guard when German reporters were present. US State Department officials pressured American reporters to shun job offers from Transocean, and reporters harassed stringers when their connection to the news service came to light.\n\nZapp frequented the Press Club, where members remembered him as \"an inconspicuous little man trying to make friends.\" He didn't make many. Curiously, while he lived in luxury, Zapp was habitually late in paying his Press Club dues, a failing that anti-fascist reporters tried unsuccessfully to use as an excuse to expel him. The atmosphere in the club, where many members had traveled to Europe to report on fascist dictatorships, was cold for Germans.\n\nZapp tried to fly under the radar, but he attracted the attention of investigators for the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities. In 1940 the committee subpoenaed Transocean's records, and its investigators raided the press service's New York and Press Building offices, seizing financial records and private correspondence. For an organization that was acting clandestinely, Transocean kept a lot of incriminating documents in its offices, including correspondence with German government officials and American citizens that hinted at illegal activities.\n\nCommittee investigators found a letter sent to Zapp in November 1939 by a German intelligence officer, Ernst Schmitz, who operated under the cover of directing the German Railroads Information Office. Schmitz invited Zapp to dine with him and \"a number of people of the Intelligence Service of the Rome-Berlin Axis.\" Zapp's handwritten note on the letter indicated that he had attended the dinner. In another letter, Zapp informed a client in Berlin that he'd found \"a suitable racially pure German editor\" who could send information from America.\n\nThe Committee concluded that \"Transocean News Service was nothing more nor less than a propaganda arm of the Nazi regime.\" It also noted that Zapp's activities \"were not confined entirely to the United States. It was also his job to set up Transocean in South and Central America.\"\n\nTransocean gave its news to some South American newspapers free, and even paid some to print its stories. These included propaganda intended to arouse anti-American sentiments, like fictional accounts of US military incursions into Mexico and stories falsely blaming the American government for an airplane crash that killed the president of Paraguay.\n\nZapp had a much harder time marketing the German perspective to American newspapers. He complained in a letter to his superiors in Berlin that \"my difficulties are almost superhuman.\" Contrary to fearmongering about Fifth Columnists, there was little appetite in the United States for Nazism or even for news provided by an ostensibly independent German news service. Zapp wrote in despair to the German Foreign Office that while he had been successful in peddling Transocean's news in South and Central America, readers in the United States \"hold the peculiar subjective notion that only they are objective and consequently they will not read news that does not sail under their own flag. They are avid for 'news' but it must come from American sources.\"\n\nIn addition to peddling propaganda, Zapp proposed a two-track strategy for keeping the United States out of the European war: exacerbating tensions between the United States and Japan on the theory that America lacked the resources and will to fight in both the Pacific and Europe, and winning over business leaders to an appeasement policy. \"The only and at the same time the strongest guarantee of American neutrality appears to be continued ruffling of American relations with Japan,\" Zapp wrote in a cable to Berlin. \"Such a course for the present and for an indefinite period will not permit a European involvement of the United States.\"\n\nTransocean's tactics included covert sponsorship of the printing and distribution of forged documents. In 1940 Zapp paid Ralph Beaver Strassburger, the pro-Nazi publisher of the _Norristown Times-Herald_ , a daily newspaper published in rural Pennsylvania, to print and distribute 60,000 copies of _The German White Paper_ , which was billed as a dossier of State Department cables that had allegedly been discovered by the Germans in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The forged cables allegedly documented how American diplomats in Europe deliberately provoked war with Germany.\n\nAt first, the scheme seemed to be a success. Representative Hamilton Fish trumpeted the _White Paper_ , claiming it constituted grounds for impeaching Roosevelt. Asked about the documents at a press conference, the president said that they should be taken \"with a grain of salt,\" amended that to \"two grains of salt,\" and a moment later advised reporters to \"make it three grains of salt.\" The caper backfired when the _White Paper_ was revealed to be a fabrication.\n\nBritish intelligence turned the episode against Fish, informing American reporters that his reelection campaign had placed full-page ads in Strassburger's _Times-Herald_ and one other newspaper that was among the handful of American publications that subscribed to and printed stories provided by Transocean.\n\nA year later, on March 11, 1941, a grand jury indicted Zapp and one of his employees, Guenther Tonn, for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act by failing to register as agents of the German government and Nazi party. Zapp posted $5,000 bail and was able to attend the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents' Association a few days later. Having received an advance copy of Roosevelt's speech, Zapp and Kurt Sell of DNB, departed before FDR, whose speech was broadcast live across the country, called the Nazis barbarians who must and would be defeated. The president shot barbs straight at Zapp and his collaborators. \"From the bureaus of propaganda of the Axis powers came the confident prophecy that the conquest of our country would be 'an inside job'\u2014a job accomplished not by overpowering invasion from without, but by disrupting confusion and disunion and moral disintegration from within. Those who believed that knew little of our history. America is not a country which can be confounded by the appeasers, the defeatists, the backstairs manufacturers of panic.\"\n\nFive days after Zapp's arrest, the Nazis snatched a United Press International reporter, Richard Hottelet, off a Berlin street and imprisoned him on espionage charges. Hottelet was, of course, being held hostage for the two Transocean employees. The gambit worked. Zapp and Tonn were deported and Hottelet was released and allowed to return to the United States.\n\nZapp left behind an unpaid debt of sixteen dollars at the Press Club.\n\nPrompted in large part by intelligence BSC had provided the FBI and State Department, on June 16, FDR moved to evict Axis spies. German consulates and several German businesses, including Transocean, were ordered to close and repatriate their employees by July 10.\n\nZapp and Tonn were tried in absentia. Summing up the case, George A. McNulty, an assistant attorney general who had worked with BSC on the Viereck prosecution, argued that the \"real purpose of the Transocean agency was war. Not a shooting war, but a war of propaganda, a phase of the Nazi ideal of total war.\" Evidence presented at trial proving that Transocean was a German government operation rather than a legitimate business included documents showing the news agency earned a grand total of $3,045.46 from sales of its products in the twenty-five months it operated in New York and Washington, and received $164,652 in subsidies from Berlin during that period.\n\nMemories of Zapp's illicit promotion of fascism apparently faded. In the 1960s, he headed the German office of Hill & Knowlton, a multinational public relations firm.\n\n#\n\nA new line of black lettering neatly drawn on the glass door of suite 1059 of the National Press Building in the spring of 1941 spelling out \"Overseas News Agency\" was the first sign in Washington of one of BSC's most intriguing enterprises.\n\nONA had been launched in July 1940 as an adjunct to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. JTA informed newspapers that the ONA's mission was to \"gather and distribute news about minorities in Europe, supplementing news coverage of other services.\" It promised to \"devote itself exclusively to reporting facts\" and claimed that it would \"indulge in no propaganda, preach no theory or philosophy.\" The new name alerted editors that JTA was expanding its coverage beyond reporting on issues of relevance to Jews. It also facilitated work in Central and Eastern Europe at a time when the only doors a business card with the word \"Jewish\" on it would open were hanging on prison cells.\n\nFrom the start, attacking Nazi Germany was a higher priority for ONA than hewing to the truth. Much of its copy was based on sources close to the imagination of its writers and their friends in London. For example, its second bulletin, distributed in August 1940, cited anonymous \"qualified Czech\" sources reporting that \"Czechoslovak girls and young women have been transported from the Protectorate to German garrison towns to become white slaves.\" It claimed that \"Nazi officials, dispatching these trainloads of prospective white slaves to the Reich, informed husbands and relatives that the women 'will be entrusted with the important work of amusing German soldiers, in order to keep up the morale of the troops.'\"\n\nA few weeks before ONA opened its Washington office, the president and chairman of JTA reached an agreement with William Stephenson, the head of British Security Coordination. BSC agreed to give the ONA a monthly subsidy in return for a promise of cooperation. The commitment included giving ONA credentials to British spies around the world. British intelligence reports to London about propaganda activities in the Americas routinely mentioned securing ONA employment as cover for agents. ONA also recruited its own spies.\n\nJTA and ONA founder Jacob Landau spent the last five months of 1940 in South America, setting up bureaus in Buenos Aires and Rio and hiring correspondents in other countries. After the United States entered the war, it became clear what he had been doing when he approached a senior FBI agent, offering to help in the fight against fascism. Landau said he had established \"particularly intimate contacts\" with Jewish groups and leaders in South America, and noted that there were 600,000 Jews living on the continent who \"are anti-Nazi and are vitally interested in the victory of the United Nations.\"\n\nIn addition to providing information from South America, Landau told the FBI that it could use the ONA \"for the gathering of information among the foreign-language groups and the various foreign politicians who have come to our country.\" In case the FBI didn't understand what he was offering, Landau made it plain: \"It is suggested that a special division be established [at ONA] devoted to the gathering of information in which your office would be interested.\" He stressed the advantages of using an intermediary like ONA to obtain information from non-citizens: ONA's staff would be in a better position than the FBI to judge the informants' trustworthiness, and in case anything went wrong the bureau's involvement would be hidden.\n\nThere is no record of the FBI availing itself of ONA's services.\n\nLandau also discussed his Latin American intelligence organization with Soviet intelligence officers, though the extent of his collaboration with the KGB isn't clear from the available decrypted cables.\n\nThere can be no doubt about the ONA's close relationship with British intelligence. As the BSC history notes, ONA's primary value \"lay in its ability not only to channel propaganda outwards but to assure wide dissemination of material originated by BSC and intended for internal [American] consumption.\"\n\nIn part because of the money and information\u2014both true and false\u2014provided by BSC, the ONA became a trusted source of news from around the world for newspapers that reached most Americans.\n\nONA's reporters were almost certainly unaware of the fact that their salaries were being underwritten by a foreign intelligence organization that had, according to the BSC history, \"effective control\" over the news agency. They probably wouldn't have been bothered. ONA staff felt an affinity for Britain's war aims and a passionate hatred for Americans who favored neutrality.\n\nThe publishers and editors of scores of newspapers, ranging from the _New York Times_ , the _New York Herald Tribune_ , the _San Francisco Chronicle_ , the _Philadelphia Inquirer_ , and the _Washington Post_ to tiny papers like the Circleville, Ohio, _Daily Herald_ \u2014all important sources of information in the pre-television era\u2014had no idea that ONA was sending them stories written with a keener eye on Britain's war needs than on objective truth.\n\nBritish funding helped ONA send copy in various languages, so its reports appeared in hundreds of foreign-language papers published for immigrant communities throughout the United States. Many of these papers were also distributed in Nazi-occupied and neutral countries.\n\nONA hired Harry Hart Frank, a talented writer who used the pen name Pat Frank, to run its Washington bureau. He was already working in the JTA's National Press Building office writing a syndicated column called Frankly Speaking that had been warning of the Nazi threat for years.\n\nFrank's first big scoop for ONA, a series of stories based on a November 1940 trip to Martinique, was typical of the news agency's best work: brave, compelling, and slanted to advancing the war aims of Great Britain. The story, which ran in newspapers across the country, began by establishing Frank's credentials as both a Washington insider and an intrepid reporter: \"The Caribbean Sea is supposed to be an American lake, according to what you hear in Washington. But after you've looped around it a while you discover there are some people in the Caribbean who don't agree with that and are preparing to argue the issue with guns, not words.\"\n\nFrank reported that he'd been sent to the largest island in the French West Indies, \"where a group of French soldiers, sailors, and civilians are quarreling about what to do with some $240,000,000 worth of gold bullion and several million dollars' worth of bombing planes and warships.\"\n\nFrank depicted an island preparing for a siege, and ready to serve as a base for attacking shipping in the Caribbean. He also suggested that it was ripe for a pro-American uprising. The \"250,000 inhabitants of the island are on the verge of revolution, but have no arms to rise against their rulers,\" Frank reported, adding that \"to the people of Martinique, Roosevelt is practically a God.\"\n\nFrank's observations, which were at odds with the picture painted by both the US government and French officials on Martinique, and with the report Curtis Munson gave FDR in the summer of 1941, were printed in hundreds of American newspapers, and he was interviewed on national radio programs. ONA's stories about Martinique served British interests by piercing Americans' comfort zone, reinforcing the idea that if they didn't go abroad to fight the fascists, they would have to fight them much closer to home. Frank's stories also bolstered arguments against America's continuing to trade with the Vichy government. Convincing the United States to sever financial ties with the French puppet government was a high priority for Britain.\n\nFrank returned to the theme of tropical fascism in February 1941. Papers around the country ran his stories from Puerto Rico and Haiti which painted a dire and unrealistic picture of Haiti joining the Axis and serving as a jumping off point for Nazi raids on the Panama Canal, Miami, and Puerto Rico. \"There is enough Nazi activity in Haiti to create a Caribbean Sudetenland,\" Frank claimed. Like his reporting from Martinique, the stories were intended to shake Americans' sense of comfort and drive them to take the war to Hitler before he brought it to their doorsteps.\n\nBSC fed about twenty rumors a week to American reporters and kept close track of its success in getting them into print. The British didn't restrict themselves to stories that had the potential to inflict immediate or severe damage to the enemy, and they weren't concerned about the veracity or believability of the rumors. For example, in August 1941 the _New York Times_ published ONA's report, which had been concocted in London, that the death of a 130-year-old Bedouin soothsayer was seen in the Middle East as \"a sign of a coming defeat for Hitler.\" BSC also sponsored a US tour for Louis de Wohl, a Hungarian \"astro-philosopher.\" In press conferences and an appearance at the annual convention of the American Federation of Scientific Astrologers, de Wohl pontificated about astral signs of Hitler's doom and Roosevelt's success: \"A yogi once told me a man born on the date Hitler came into power would cause his downfall. Hitler rose to power on Jan. 30, and that is Roosevelt's birth date.\"\n\nAmerican newspapers and radio played an important role in conveying false information to the Axis during the two years between the Nazi\/Soviet invasion of Poland and Germany's declaration of war on the United States. The Brits would feed a rumor to a London newspaper, which could be relied upon to cable its New York correspondent for confirmation. BSC then fed the New York reporter additional information. \"At the same time, the London newspaper would make inquiries of an American news agency, which in turn would cable its Berlin correspondent. The rumour would thus be planted in Berlin\u2014with the German censors, the Gestapo and the Berlin correspondent of the US news agency, who would in all likelihood discuss it with other correspondents,\" according to the BSC history.\n\nOne of ONA's tasks was to help BSC get disinformation broadcast on WRUL, a shortwave radio station located on Long Island with a powerful signal that could be heard clearly throughout Europe. The operating rules for WRUL, which had programming in several languages, specified that it would broadcast only news that had already appeared in print. ONA published BSC-generated rumors, WRUL repeated them, and by the time other newspapers and radio stations picked them up, BSC's and ONA's fingerprints had disappeared.\n\nThese rumors weren't the result of happenstance.\n\nThe British government had a well-oiled, coordinated scheme for generating and disseminating rumors, which it called \"sibs,\" short for _sibilare_ , the Latin word for _whisper_ or _hiss_. In continental Europe British sibs were distributed almost exclusively through whispering campaigns. In the United States ONA was used to place sibs in American newspapers that were unaware that the material was in any way inspired by the British government.\n\nMany of the sibs were silly or outlandish, but British intelligence took them extraordinarily seriously. \"The object of propaganda rumours is in no sense to convey the official or semi-official views of H.M.G. [His Majesty's Government] by covert means to officials in the countries concerned,\" a secret report circulated to British intelligence officers and diplomats noted. \"It is rather to induce alarm, despondency and bewilderment among the enemies, and hope and confidence among the friends, to whose ears it comes. If a rumour appears likely to cheer our enemies for the time, it is calculated to carry with it the germs of ultimate and grave disappointment for them.\" Rumours, the memo stated, \"are expected to induce a certain frame of mind in the general public, not necessarily to deceive the well-informed.\" The memo said that rumors are \"the most covert of all forms of propaganda. Although the enemy may suspect that a certain rumour has been started by the British Government, they can never prove it. Even if they succeed in capturing an agent engaged in spreading whispers, there will be no written evidence against him, and should they exhort a confession from him, nothing is easier [than] for the British Government to deny the whole story.\"\n\nBSC didn't mince words in describing the goals of its American fake news operations. In a memo to the British Foreign Office, Sydney Morrell, one of two journalists in charge of BSC's work with the press, described his unit's remit as conducting \"subversive propaganda in the United States\" and \"countering isolationist and appeasement propaganda which is rapidly taking on the shape of a Fascist movement, conscious or unconscious.\" It also sought to leverage \"America's prestige and neutrality by directing ostensibly American propaganda towards the three Axis powers and enemy-occupied territories.\"\n\nBritish intelligence agencies were careful about terminology. To set out the distinction between \"publicity\" and \"propaganda,\" the UK Political Warfare Executive (PWE) produced a memo titled \"The Meaning, Techniques and Methods of Political Warfare.\" Each copy was numbered and marked \"Secret,\" and carried on its cover page the instruction: \"To be kept under lock and key.\" The memo defined \"publicity\" as \"the straightforward projection of a case; it is the build-up of a picture in the mind of the audience which will win their confidence and support,\" and explained it was intended to persuade through \"the presentation of evidence, leaving the judgment to the audience.\"\n\nPropaganda, PWE made clear, was publicity's evil twin. The term was used in reference to deliberate, covert activities, not run-of-the-mill publicity campaigns, its purpose being to \"direct the thinking of the recipient, without his conscious collaboration, into predetermined channels. Propaganda is,\" PWE summed up, \"the conditioning of the recipient by devious methods with an ulterior motive.\"\n\nAn organization called the Underground Propaganda Committee (UPC) met twice a week in London to approve new sibs. The UPC sent thousands of sibs out into the world. For many, the first stop was ONA's New York and National Press Building offices.\n\nTo cite one example, at a meeting of the UPC on August 8, 1941, a decision was made to release a series of sibs that, according to the meeting minutes, were \"intended to suggest that the F\u00fchrer, who is alone responsible in the face of a good deal of opposition for the Russian campaign, is becoming more and more unbalanced as he realises that the vast gamble is miscarrying.\" Summaries of the planned rumors included:\n\nSibSD\/7: Hitler's megalomaniac paranoia is getting rapidly worse. He can't bear any contradiction or opposition. He is in constant fear of assassination. His memory is becoming confused. There is great secrecy about his movements.\n\nSibR\/183: Sauerbruch (Hitler's doctor) visiting Switzerland told Professor Jung that Hitler isn't at the Russian front at all, but at Berchtesgaden suffering from violent epileptic fits.\n\nSibR\/185: Hitler's paranoia has reached the point where he suffers from delusions. He has an uncontrollable fear that his mustache is growing more and more like Stalin's, and he has it shaved every morning much closer than usual.\n\nEight days later the _New York Post_ ran an article supplied by ONA citing \"circumstantial evidence for a belief that Hitler is not at the Russian front but at Berchtesgaden suffering from a severe nervous breakdown.\" The article went on to assert that the F\u00fchrer's personal physician had traveled to Switzerland to consult with the famed psychiatrist Carl Jung to discuss \"the rapid deterioration of Hitler's mental condition,\" which ONA reported was characterized by delusional rages in which he confused the contemporary battle for Smolensk with a World War I battle in France. \"Confusion of memory and rage at any kind of opposition were stated to be symptoms of the F\u00fchrer's condition, accompanied by the return of his old megalomaniac paranoia in aggravated form.\"\n\nEven the Soviet press helped propel this rumor on its trip around the world. TASS Washington bureau chief Laurence Todd cabled it from the National Press Building to Moscow, which published the news under a Swiss dateline. British reporters picked up the Russian story, and, completing the circuit, a United Press International reporter read it in London and cabled it to the United States, where it is was published in numerous papers as fresh news.\n\nOn July 11, 1941, the UPC approved a sib for distribution in US newspapers, where Japanese diplomats would read it, indicating that if Japan attacked Indochina, the Soviet Union would attack Japan by air. The next day the _New York Times_ and other American newspapers ran an AP story that cited \"reliable persons\" reporting that Japan was poised to \"make a move against French Indo-China soon.\" The story noted that \"Russia has a large air force within easy range of Japan's vulnerable centers of population.\"\n\nThe UPC approved another sib involving Hitler on July 11, this one alleging that the German leader had purged a number of mid-level Nazis whom he believed to be plotting against him. On August 18 the _Baltimore Sun_ ran a story that had been provided by the _New York Herald Tribune_ , one of BSC's favorite vehicles for disseminating disinformation. The headline asked \"Purge of Nazi Minor Officials?\" Like many UPC sibs, the story relied on anonymous sources and was built not on reporting but on paraphrasing a story from another newspaper that had itself relied on murky sources. The first sentence read like an abstract of the UPC's sib: \"Reliable information from Germany leaves no doubt that there is grave disunity within the Nazi party and between the party and the army leaders with neither side daring to openly express the points in dispute, according to an article to appear in the _Daily Telegraph_ and _Morning Post_ tomorrow by the paper's diplomatic correspondent.\"\n\nThe British devoted a lot of attention to persuading German soldiers that any attempt to cross the English Channel would be foolhardy. The men in charge of the sibs were thrilled when they learned that captured German pilots had expressed horror to interrogators about a new secret weapon that could set the sea on fire, incinerating any pilot who ejected or was forced down over the water. The imaginary weapon was one of the UPC's rumors.\n\nSome of the sibs were so outlandish that they must have been aimed more at bolstering morale in England, or giving the men who came up with them a laugh, than alarming the enemy. There is no evidence that any German believed rumors the UPC spread that two hundred man-eating sharks had been imported from Australia and released in the Channel, where they could devour pilots and sailors unlucky enough to find themselves in the water.\n\nBSC asked ONA in November 1941 to help dent the morale of U-boat crews. ONA released a report, allegedly based on news from Ankara, stating that the British had invented a new super-explosive and were frantically stuffing it into depth charges. American reporters followed up on the ONA story with questions to British officials, who played along with the game. Newspapers gave prominent coverage to an AP story disclosing that \"the British were filling their depth charges for naval warfare with an explosive forty-seven times more powerful than TNT.\" Testing the credulity of their readers, the papers reported that the \"new ammunition is more than ordinarily secret,\" and in the same story quoted British military sources providing details about its manufacture and deployment\u2014as if the British government was in the habit of revealing military secrets to any reporter clever enough to ask the right questions. To its credit, after publishing the AP story on its front page on November 2, the _New York Times_ ran a small story buried on page C18 of the next day's paper suggesting that \"the more imaginative rumors crediting the British with new and 'highly secret' ammunition for use against German submarines in the Battle of the Atlantic should be taken with perhaps a little more than the proverbial grain of salt.\"\n\nA surprising number of sibs were aimed not at the brains, or even the hearts, of targeted populations, but rather at the genitals. For example, on December 5, 1941, three sibs were approved:\n\n\"The tremendous demand for aphrodisiacs among quite young soldiers returning from Norway seems to tie up with the general fear of impotence which is spreading among German troops.\"\n\n\"The drugs the Germans give foreign workers to supplement the poor food supply are rendering them impotent.\"\n\n\"The Germans are blaming the housing crisis for the decline in their birthrate; actually the food concentrates now used are causing widespread impotence.\"\n\nThe practice of planting rumors in American newspapers did not stop when the United States joined the war. Officials responsible for British propaganda carried on a lively debate in February 1942 about the merits of informing coordinator of information Bill Donovan about its system for planting fake news in American newspapers, and of seeking his prior approval for rumors connected with or disseminated in the United States. One official, who referred to Donovan as Britain's \"'underground' friend,\" argued that he shouldn't be burdened with the information, presumably because he would be expected to keep it secret from his superiors. Another official characterized the suggestion that Donovan should be given any say over fake news involving the United States as \"outrageous,\" and he vowed to do his utmost to kill it. In the end Donovan, and the American government, were kept out of the loop.\n\n#\n\nLong before the United States entered the war, a handful of American reporters and editors in the National Press Building privately declared war against Germany and its partners in the Vichy French government. Their actions went well beyond writing articles designed to elicit sympathy for the British people or blacken the reputations of isolationist politicians, and included pressuring the US government to seize German companies and working with BSC to neuter Vichy espionage capabilities. BSC operatives in the Press Building were also active in a less successful operation aimed at Britain's neighbor Ireland.\n\nPreventing the Vichy government from conducting espionage, disseminating propaganda, and benefiting from commercial operations in the United States was a difficult problem for BSC. There was a good deal of sympathy in the United States for the French people, and as an officially neutral government, the Vichy regime was legally permitted to operate in the United States.\n\nBSC was typically thorough and ruthless in its approach to the problem. First it dispatched an American agent, Betty Pack, wife of Arthur Pack, a British diplomat, to seduce Charles Brousse, the press attach\u00e9 in the French embassy in Washington. After gaining his admiration and confidence, Pack, referenced in BSC files by the cover name Cynthia, \"confessed\" to him that she was an American intelligence agent. It was a shrewd deception because the Anglophobe Brousse would never have divulged secrets to someone he believed was a British agent.\n\nShe persuaded Brousse to provide unencrypted copies of all encrypted cables sent to and received by the embassy, as well as detailed reports of private conversations involving the ambassador, Vichy officials in France, and the German government. The cables kept Britain informed of Vichy activity in Washington and helped its cryptanalysts defeat French codes. Brousse also provided the names and addresses of undercover agents in the United States. A male BSC officer used romance to recruit a lonely embassy secretary who filled in details that Pack's lover was not privy to.\n\nThe British were so curious about the activities of a Vichy agent named Jean Louis Musa that a BSC operative befriended him, proposed a business partnership, and, to facilitate the fictitious business, provided an office. BSC bugged the office, tapped its phones, and swooped in every night to copy documents, including those locked in a safe. Musa may have attracted BSC's attention because he was involved with Havas News Agency, a pro-Vichy news service that had an office in the National Press Building.\n\nIn July 1941 BSC wrote up a summary of Vichy operations in the United States that included transcripts of illegal telephone taps and copies of secret documents, and gave a copy to Roosevelt. He awarded it his highest compliment, saying he was reading it \"as a bedtime story,\" and gave his permission to have the information made public.\n\nBSC, which had some of England's most talented journalists on its staff, spun the Vichy dossier into a series of newspaper articles. The stories were handed to a BSC contact, Ansel E. Talbert, who worked in the _New York Herald_ _Tribune_ 's National Press Building office. The first article in the series, which was reprinted in over one hundred American newspapers, was published on August 31, 1941. It accurately reported: \"Operations of a clique of Vichy agents, working under direct control of Gaston Henry-Haye, French ambassador to the United States, whose activities are designed to create sentiment for the Nazi 'new order' in Europe, have come to light in Washington.\" The story described how the Vichy government's intelligence operation in the United States had \"thwarted actual military moves of Britain and her allies,\" and said it aimed to create \"an ever-widening network to bring Vichy's message of defeatism before isolationists, noninterventionists, and all others who will listen.\"\n\nThe stories revealed that Vichy agents had attempted to obtain blueprints and plans of the improved Bren gun, a mainstay of the British invasion defenses, and described Musa's role in thwarting efforts to mass produce an improved version of the machine gun in the United States for export to England. Remarkable details were included, such as news that an Allied effort to overthrow the Vichy garrison at Dakar, Senegal, had been derailed because de Gaulle's plans for the battle were smuggled into the United States for transmission to the Vichy in the gasoline tank of an automobile shipped from London to Hoboken aboard a Greek steamer. The gas tank also held lists of French officers and pilots who were fighting Germany as part of the Free French movement.\n\nThe BSC-written articles pointed out that the US Treasury was unintentionally financing Vichy's nefarious activities by unfreezing $1 million per month of French government funds, which were supposed to be used only for diplomatic activities and to provide assistance to colonies like Martinique that had been cut off from France.\n\nTreasury secretary Henry Morgenthau publicly praised Talbert and personally complimented the journalist for his brilliant expos\u00e9. Morgenthau was apparently unaware of the source of the articles, and Talbert didn't tell him that his biggest contribution to the series was lending his byline.\n\nThe articles had their intended effects. The Vichy embassy was indelibly marked as a tool of Nazi Germany, the State Department and FBI forced the Vichy intelligence service to curtail its activities in the United States, and American sympathy for representatives of the Vichy government evaporated. A BSC source in the French embassy reported to BSC that the ambassador had \"described the whole affair as 'De Gaullist-Jewish-British-FBI intrigue.' But he never really suspected the British.\"\n\nAt the same time as it was battling the Vichy embassy in the press, BSC was using similar tactics to combat commercial collaboration between American and German companies. Stephenson's men worked on the project with some of the most prominent reporters of the era.\n\nDrew Pearson and Robert S. Allen were particularly aggressive in confronting Nazis. They coordinated closely with Ernest Cuneo, BSC's liaison to American government officials and reporters. One example of this collaboration is a May 1941 Washington Merry-Go-Round report that \"Justice Department sleuths\" had discovered that the US subsidiary of the German pharmaceutical company Schering AG was illegally funneling millions of dollars to Nazi Germany. The story followed revelations from other reporters that the pharmaceutical company had violated antitrust laws.\n\nPearson and Allen knew, but did not disclose, that the sleuths who discovered Schering's illegal ties to Nazi Germany had more in common with Sherlock Holmes than Elliott Ness. Schering was targeted, according to the BSC history, because it was part of a \"vast and intricately organized network of companies [that] became the backbone of the German intelligence and propaganda systems in the Western Hemisphere, and its existence seriously endangered the security and the economy of both Britain and the United States. To devise a way in which to combat and if possible to liquidate it was one of the most important problems which confronted BSC in late 1940.\"\n\nBSC's first step was to obtain proof that the subsidiaries of German companies operating in America were sending money to their parent companies in violation of US law. The second step was to expose these connections, launch a campaign to persuade the public that American\/German firms posed a threat to America, and finally to pressure the US government to take control of German and collaborationist businesses.\n\nThe Brits recruited a Schering employee in New Jersey who revealed the company's secret connections to Germany. In addition, he photocopied documents demonstrating that Schering was a party to cartel agreements that violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. BSC contacted a friendly reporter at the International News Service who, in return for exclusive rights to the story, \"agreed to follow a course of action which BSC suggested to him and promised at the same time not to reveal his source.\" The course involved showing the documents to a Justice Department official and giving him an ultimatum: The United States must initiate legal proceedings against Schering within three weeks or contend with headlines asking \"Why is the Department of Justice sleeping at such a critical time?\" The reporter obeyed his instructions, as did the Justice Department.\n\n\"Startling facts indicating that Nazi Germany is waging a concerted undercover 'economic blitzkrieg' on the US through an ingenious network of 'dummy' corporations has been unearthed by the department of Justice,\" Americans read on April 10, 1941. Pearson and Allen were among the scores of journalists who reported the story. The media firestorm prompted the Canadian government to confiscate the assets of Schering's Canadian subsidiary. The US Department of Justice first fined the US subsidiary, and later acquired its stock and supervised the firm's operations for the duration of the war.\n\nBSC operated with impunity because Stephenson knew that he had enthusiastic, though passive, backing from the highest levels of government. Roosevelt encouraged British covert operations in the United States, even telling Stephenson, \"I'm your biggest undercover agent.\" On April 1, as Washington Merry-Go-Round was preparing to break the Schering story, Stephenson cabled Menzies with news that FDR had told Cuneo he planned to bring the United States into the war \"very shortly.\" Menzies passed the message on to Churchill.\n\nBritish efforts to push America into the war were not universally admired in Washington, and as BSC became bolder in the autumn of 1941 isolationists began to detect hints of its activities.\n\nOn the morning of November 10, 1941, Burton Wheeler stood on the floor of the Senate and excoriated the US and British governments for conspiring to disseminate pro-intervention publicity through front groups that typically had the word \"committee\" in their name. He decried a \"rising tide of propaganda\" created by \"committee after committee\" and said that many Americans wondered \"how far the Government of the United States and the British Government have acted in collaboration behind these committees.\"\n\nWheeler read from the confidential minutes of a meeting that had been held a month earlier in Donova'sn office. The meeting was held, Wheeler noted with a hefty dose of sarcasm, to plot the formation of an organization dedicated to lining up Irish Americans \"behind the war policies of the United States and on the side of Ireland's ancient and warm-hearted friend, the British empire.\" The group \"is called American Irish Defense Committee,\" Wheeler reported. \"There is very little Irish about it except the green ink in which it prints some of its literature.\" Wheeler didn't reveal the source of the confidential minutes.\n\nTurning up the heat on his sarcasm, Wheeler told his colleagues that the meeting had been attended by \"great Irish champions and prominent Hibernians,\" and proceeded to list several attendees who had non-Irish names. Wheeler's colleagues were familiar with, and weary of, his conspiracy theories and attacks on Roosevelt. The few who listened to the speech paid little or no attention to his claim that the American Irish Defense Association \"originated in New York, in the minds of gentlemen closely associated with the British government.\" Wheeler's accurate assertion that the association was not seeking dues or contributions from prospective members because \"expenses will be paid by England,\" was reported in only one major newspaper, the isolationist, Roosevelt-hating _Chicago Daily Tribune._ \"\n\nThe senator from Montana was shooting in the dark. If he had been well informed when he read into the _Congressional Record_ the names of those in attendance at the meeting, he wouldn't have been content to note that Sanford Griffith ran the meeting and the attendees included Francis Henson; he would have identified them as paid agents of British intelligence.\n\nIn fact, Wheeler's guess was correct. BSC created the American Irish Defense Association because existing Irish American groups were militantly anti-British. The Ancient Order of Hibernians and the American-Irish Historical Society had teamed up with isolationist, violently anti-Roosevelt organizations like America First. In the minds of BSC's leaders, this marked Americans of Irish ancestry as fair game.\n\nDescribing the origins of the American Irish Defense Association, the BSC history states: \"After the usual preliminary steps had been taken in the way of collecting intelligence, BSC sponsored an Irish interventionist society in the autumn of 1941.\" Any overt connection with the British government would have rendered the association radioactive to Irish Americans, so BSC was careful to maintain contact through \"a good cut-out, a man who followed directives from the BSC office and kept BSC posted on every move it made.\" This was probably Henson.\n\nBSC's effort to organize pro-British sentiment among Irish emigrants was a direct response to requests from Winston Churchill. The prime minister wanted the American government and private citizens to pressure the Irish government to allow Britain to use bases in southern and western Ireland to provide air and naval cover for Atlantic convoys.\n\nProminent Irish Americans were recruited to lead chapters of the association in New York, Boston, Washington, and other cities. BSC funded a publicity blitz that included radio broadcasts, news releases, dinners, mass meetings, street corner meetings, and personal appearances of film stars and other Irish celebrities. Although it failed to persuade Ireland to join the war or provide naval bases for Britain, the association was effective in mobilizing Irish Americans to set aside their antipathy to Britain and to endorse American aid to the United Kingdom at a time when interventionists needed every friend they could muster.\n\nWheeler's denunciation of the American Irish Defense Committee fell on deaf ears. The idea of a conspiracy between the Roosevelt administration and the British government to create a phony propaganda operation didn't seem credible, even to Republican senators.\n\nA week after Wheeler's speech, BSC and the White House rushed operatives, including several based in the National Press Building, to Detroit to collaborate on an urgent project. Their mission was to defuse the threat posed by John L. Lewis, leader of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) union, who was openly plotting to use a convention of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to launch an insurrection against the White House's plans to prepare the nation for war.\n\nLewis and Roosevelt had once been close allies, but by 1940 they had parted ways. Hatred for the president had so clouded Lewis's judgment that he first aligned himself with communists and then backed Herbert Hoover\u2014the man many Americans believed was responsible for the Depression\u2014as the Republican presidential candidate. After the GOP convention, Lewis endorsed Wendell Willkie and said that if workers did not follow his lead he would regard it as a personal repudiation and would step down as head of the CIO. Workers did not follow him and Lewis quit.\n\nIn November 1941 Lewis, desperate to regain his stature and determined to stymie Roosevelt's efforts to prepare labor and business for war, threatened to paralyze the steel industry by calling a massive coal miners' strike. At the same time, he plotted to push isolationist resolutions through the CIO national convention that could have led to widespread strikes in other industries. A _Wall Street Journal_ headline captured Lewis's motives and intentions: \"He Hates Roosevelt; He Hates War; He Wants a Showdown\" and is \"Ready to Go Through with the Coal Strike, Come Hell or High Water.\"\n\nThe conflict was as important to Churchill as it was to Roosevelt: if Lewis prevailed, the flow of materiel across the Atlantic would stop, and with it hope for Britain's survival. BSC mobilized its forces, in close coordination with the White House, to battle Lewis. The CIO convention, the BSC history noted, \"offered BSC a dramatic opportunity to attack the union's isolationist fa\u00e7ade.\" There was, BSC believed, grave danger that the convention would adopt isolationist resolutions \"which would have long-lasting and possibly disastrous consequences.\"\n\nRepeating a tactic from the previous summer, Henson conducted a poll of delegates. \"The questions asked were designed to be 'educational,' a euphemism in this case for tendentious,\" according to the BSC history. The poll, newspapers around the country reported, showed that 98 percent of CIO delegates believed it was more important to defeat Hitler than to keep the United States out of war.\n\nFight for Freedom, a pro-intervention group backed by BSC, launched a massive publicity campaign at the convention, handing out buttons and flyers and meeting with CIO leaders. John Franklin Carter's representative, Jim Gillan, circulated among the delegates at Detroit's Moose Temple Lodge. Gillan called Carter with frequent updates, which he had typed up and delivered to the White House. The news was good for Roosevelt. Lewis was marginalized and the isolationists were routed. The convention voted overwhelmingly for a resolution stating that \"Hitler and the Nazi government...directly menace the security of the United States,\" condemning appeasement, calling for \"all possible aid\" to Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China, and backing FDR's foreign policy without reservation. Lewis lost control of the CIO and, a few weeks after the convention, called off the coal strike.\n\nPresident Roosevelt was aware of and appreciated the role Fight for Freedom, and BSC, had played in defanging Lewis.\n\nIt took decades for information about some of BSC's operations to start leaking out, and by the time a reasonably complete picture emerged few remembered how fraught the situation had been, or how bitter were the divisions in American society.\n\nWith the clarity of hindsight, some may write off the extraordinary collaboration in 1940 and 1941 between journalists in the National Press Building and a foreign intelligence agency as little more than a historical curiosity. Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war vaporized notions of neutrality, rendering British intelligence's efforts to defeat America's isolationists superfluous. In reality, given the depth and strength of the opposition to FDR's efforts to aid Britain in 1940 and 1941, and the importance of the lifeline that pro-British propaganda made possible, it is clear that the efforts of Mowrer, Bell, Henson, Carter, Frank, and many others who viewed themselves as partisans in a fight to defend western civilization helped change history.\n\nTo cite one example, during the summer of 1941 the Roosevelt administration went all out to persuade Congress to amend an emergency military conscription law extending mandatory service from a year to two and a half years. The House of Representatives passed the extension on August 12 by a one-vote margin. It is easy to imagine, though impossible to prove, that the efforts of BSC's operatives in the National Press Building to bend and bully politicians away from isolationism tipped the balance in favor of the law.\n\nBSC privately took credit for, and its operatives in the Press Building played a major role in, the destroyers-for-bases deal that provided a vital morale boost for Britain in one of its darkest hours. British influence on public opinion and shaping of the political climate were important factors in another bitterly fought pre\u2013Pearl Harbor initiative, the lend-lease program that allowed the United States to ship massive quantities of supplies to the Allies.\n\nWithout American assistance, Britain wouldn't have been able to hold Germany at bay in 1941. Roosevelt barely mustered the public support that enabled him to provide that aid. The manipulation of American opinion by British intelligence, exemplified by the covert actions of its operatives in the National Press Building, is one of the least-known and most-successful applications of covert propaganda in modern history.\n\n#\n\nFor a week and a day in December 1941 two separate dramas, both combining volatile mixtures of journalism and intelligence, played out in close proximity in and around the National Press Building. One involved a Japanese reporter who watched helplessly as his secret efforts to help prevent war between his country and the United States went up in flames. The other was an all-too-public and equally futile plot by two American journalists who hoped that by exposing closely guarded secrets they could stop America's slide into war with Germany. Instead of preserving peace, Chesly Manly, the Capitol Hill reporter for the _Chicago Tribune_ , and Frank Waldrop, political editor for the _Washington Times-Herald_ , handed Hitler's generals a roadmap to America's plans for fighting an unavoidable war.\n\nManly and Waldrop met for dinner at the National Press Club on the evening of December 3, 1941, to discuss the pros and cons of publishing a story they knew would define their careers\u2014and they believed could change history. A few hours earlier Manly had been handed the biggest and potentially most damaging leak of military secrets any American reporter had ever received.\n\nBy the time Manly and Waldrop finished their meal, neither had even the slightest doubt that the story should be published. The revelations would be a kick in the teeth to President Roosevelt that could, the two journalists believed, stymie his efforts to push the nation into what from their perspective was an unnecessary and unwinnable war.\n\nThe next morning the _Tribune_ 's headline stretched across the front page, screaming, \"F.D.R.'s War Plans! Goal Is 10 Million Armed Men.\" The timing was especially satisfying for Manly: the _Tribune_ 's world-class scoop hit the streets just in time to dim the glow of the inaugural issue of the _Chicago Sun_ , a paper that had been created to diminish the influence of the isolationist, Roosevelt-hating _Tribune_.\n\n#\n\nMain Lounge, National Press Club. In 1945, the widow of Manuel de Oliviera Lima, the Brazilian ambassador to the United States, donated a painting of the Greek courtesan Phryne, adorned in nothing more than slippers and a smile, to the club. The painting became the subject of controversy after women were admitted to the club in 1971. In 1998 the Press Club's board of directors decided to remove the painting. In 2005 _Phryne_ was auctioned for $80,000.\n\nCredit: National Press Club archives\n\nA cartoon next to Manly's story showed men in trenches with the words \"Illinois,\" \"Chicago,\" \"Indiana\" and \"Ohio\" written on their jackets and hats. They were standing in front of a fortress labeled \"The Middle West\" and were looking to the east, where the words \"War Propaganda\" were stenciled in the sky above the Capitol dome in Washington. The caption heralded the Midwest as \"The Stronghold of Peace.\" The sketch illustrated the reality that even though isolationism had been infiltrated, corrupted, and discredited by anti-Semites, fascists, and racists, the movement was alive and well in the heartland.\n\nManly's story played on the fears of Americans who believed FDR was plotting a massive, disastrous war. \"A confidential report prepared by the joint army and navy high command by direction of President Roosevelt calls for American expeditionary forces aggregating 5,000,000 men for a final land offensive against Germany and her satellites,\" Manly reported. \"It contemplates total armed forces of 10,045,658 men.\" The story, which had a December 3 dateline, added, \"One of the few existing copies of this astonishing document, which represents decisions and commitments affecting the destinies of peoples thruout the civilized world, became available to the Tribune today.\" The _Washington Times-Herald_ also ran the story, ensuring that military officers who would have risked their lives to prevent the information from reaching America's enemies read it as they choked down their scrambled eggs and toast.\n\nManly had gotten his hands on the War Department's \"Rainbow Five\" report\u2014so named because it consisted of five contingency plans for war, each assigned a different color. The report revealed that America's small, ill-equipped military was completely unprepared to fight a major war. It outlined the Army and Navy's plans for building up the nation's fighting capacity and pointed out precisely where and when troops would be sent if the US military was called on to intervene in the wars that were raging in Europe and Asia.\n\nAs Manly reported, one of the plans assumed that \"Germany and her European satellites cannot be defeated by the European powers now fighting against her.\" This, he told readers, led to the military planners' conclusion that \"if our European enemies are to be defeated it will be necessary for the United States to enter the war, and to employ a part of its armed forces offensively in the eastern Atlantic and in Europe and Africa.\" The \"report assumes that Germany, Italy, all German occupied countries cooperating with Germany, Vichy France, Japan, Manchukuo, and possibly Spain and Portugal are potential enemies. It calls for continuation of the war against this assumed combination of enemies even tho the British commonwealth and Soviet Russia should be completely defeated, and predicts that Russia will be militarily impotent by July 1, 1942.\"\n\nThe _Tribune_ reporter cherry-picked portions of the report calculated to offend Midwestern isolationist sensibilities. For example, he plucked out a few sentences that made it seem that America's principal war aims included \"prevention of the destruction of the British empire,\" a goal for which few American mothers were willing to sacrifice their sons. Manly also crowed that Rainbow Five proved that Charles Lindbergh, \"who has been maligned as a defeatist, an appeaser, and a Nazi sympathizer by administration war propagandists and the interventionist press,\" was correct when he said the British and Soviets alone were not capable of defeating Germany.\n\nManly was right when he wrote that the document was astonishing, but its contents were not as astonishing as the _Tribune_ 's decision to make them public. It was obvious at a glance that knowledge of the Rainbow Five plans would be of immense value to Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and Tojo's Japan; it didn't take a military genius to understand that publication of the nation's most sensitive military plans would put the lives of American soldiers at risk. The _Tribune_ disregarded the threat to national security because the paper's publisher, Colonel Robert McCormick, along with a large segment of public opinion, believed, as Waldrop put it, that Roosevelt was \"lying us into a war with Germany and had to be stopped.\" Manly and Waldrop felt they were fulfilling journalism's highest duty: to hold government accountable by illuminating its darkest recesses.\n\nFor isolationist politicians the Rainbow Five plan was clear proof of the president's duplicity. They immediately cited it as evidence that even as he was promising American mothers that he wouldn't send their sons to fight a foreign war, Roosevelt was privately ordering plans for just such a war. Isolationists who considered themselves patriots and who had been vilified for months as traitors and Nazi dupes were not swayed by White House press secretary Steve Early's observation that all countries engage in contingency planning and that doing so did not commit the United States to a particular course of action.\n\nA few hours after Manly's story hit the newsstands, Rep. George Holden Tinkham waved it around on the floor of the House of Representatives, shouting that the Rainbow Five plan was a \"betrayal of the American republic.\" Tinkham wasn't a know-nothing isolationist; a Republican from Massachusetts, he was known for his staunch defense of the rights of African Americans. Tinkham sought and received unanimous consent to have Manly's story printed in full in the _Congressional Record_. The report proved that \"the President of the United States has assumed the position of being a dictator in this land and he is enjoying it,\" Kansas Republican congressman William Lambertson told his colleagues. The Rainbow Five story had landed in the middle of\u2014and almost derailed\u2014a ferocious debate over an $8 billion military spending bill. After a couple of hours of fulmination, however, the bill was nonetheless passed.\n\nAxis agents in the United States immediately grasped the significance of Rainbow Five. Unlike the overheard conversations, private assessments, and whispered confidences that were the raw material for most intelligence reports, the _Tribune_ story, if accurate\u2014and America's enemies didn't doubt its authenticity\u2014was an account of the US military's actual plans for war. Within hours of its publication verbatim copies of Manly's story were cabled to Rome, Tokyo, and Berlin. Axis armies learned vital elements of America's plans, such as the number of ships that would be required to transport American soldiers to fight in Europe, how long it would take to build them, the number of airplanes American industry was expected to produce, and plans for constructing new airfields in England to serve as bases for bombing Germany.\n\nMost crucially, German war planners, who had very little knowledge of American military strength or doctrine, learned that the United States had no intention of staying out of the war even if Britain and the Soviet Union fell. The United States was starting on a course of enlisting, training, and equipping a massive army that would by July 1943 be capable of taking on Axis forces in Europe. The information in Manly's story was far more valuable, specific, and actionable than any information Hitler's spies had learned about the United States through years of espionage.\n\nIn a cable to Berlin, Hans Thomsen, the charg\u00e9 d'affaires at Germany's embassy in Washington, wrote that Manly's story was \"doubtlessly\" based on an authentic report. Thomsen warned that the secret document confirmed that America's military and political elite believed that \"Germany can be conquered neither by dollars, American bombers, nor by American subversive propaganda, [but] only by an American expeditionary force of several million men.\" He noted that American military measures against Japan would be of a defensive character, so Japanese policymakers were \"justified in concluding that America will, in the event of a two-ocean war, make its main offensive effort in the direction of Europe and Africa.\"\n\nManly's story was immediately translated and sent to Germany' top military officers. General Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff of Germany's Armed Forces High Command, along with Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and Admiral Erich Raeder, dropped everything and started at once on an analysis of the Rainbow Five plan as revealed in the article. The Nazi military planners realized that in the face of a potential invasion of the scale described in Rainbow Five, the ongoing Russian campaign was a distraction they could not afford. All of Germany's resources must urgently be diverted to fending off America. On December 6, only two days after publication of Manly's scoop, they sent the analysis and a set of recommendations to Hitler at the Eastern front.\n\nThe plan, which Hitler quickly agreed to implement, detailed steps Germany would take to immediately and dramatically change its military priorities to counter the threat from North America. Formalized as \"F\u00fchrer Directive Number 39,\" the plan was designed to take full advantage of the time it would take the United States to move its forces into Europe. It called for Germany to halt its invasion of the Soviet Union, establish a strong defensive line in Russia and redeploy one hundred divisions to occupy the entire Mediterranean coastline and Iberian Peninsula. Britain would be isolated and then crushed, and all possible routes for an American invasion hardened. The idea was to deny America any opportunity to mass soldiers and weapons within striking distance of Germany or German-occupied Europe.\n\nThomsen's conclusion that Manly's story would have a soothing effect on Japanese leaders and strategists was correct. The knowledge that defeating Germany and Italy were America's top priorities and that it planned to devote minimal forces to the Pacific reinforced the logic behind the planned attack on Pearl Harbor and simultaneous attacks on the Philippines, Dutch East Indies, Malaya, and Singapore. Rainbow Five indicated that the United States wouldn't attack the Japanese fleet for five long years, taking advantage of its immense industrial superiority and the buffer provided by the Pacific ocean to construct an invincible Navy. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese Navy, believed that he could win only a short war with the United States, and that he could not prevail in the prolonged war of attrition outlined in Rainbow Five. Manly's leak reinforced Yamamoto's conviction that dealing the US Navy a rapid, humiliating and crippling defeat was Japan's best hope.\n\nAs America's adversaries were analyzing the _Tribune_ 's account of the Rainbow Five report, in Washington a massive effort to find Manly's source was underway. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover personally interrogated suspected leakers, including Navy secretary Frank Knox, and rumors of plots and plotters swirled around the city. At a cabinet meeting FDR wondered if _Tribune_ publisher McCormick's status as a reserve officer made it possible to court-martial him. Cabinet members discussed prosecuting Manly and Waldrop for violation of the Espionage Act or bringing some kind of conspiracy charge. Publicly, however, White House officials said that Manly and the _Tribune_ hadn't violated any laws.\n\nDecades later, Manly's source was revealed to be Senator Burton Wheeler, a Montana Democrat who was among the most ardent isolationists in Congress\u2014and one of the first to demand an investigation into the leak. It turned out that since June 1940 Wheeler had been getting secret briefings from an Army Air Corps captain who claimed the Roosevelt administration had been lying to Congress by exaggerating the readiness of the American military.\n\nOn December 3 the captain, whom Wheeler never identified, brought to the senator's home a document as thick as a novel, wrapped in brown paper and labeled \"Victory Program.\" It was the full Rainbow Five report. Wheeler asked the officer if he was afraid to deliver the most closely guarded secret in Washington to a senator. \"Congress is a branch of the government,\" he replied. \"I think it has a right to know what's really going on in the executive branch when it concerns human lives.\"\n\nWriting later in his memoir, Wheeler recalled that, as he scanned the document, \"My blood pressure rose. I felt strongly that this was something the people as well as a senator should know about. It would awaken the public to what was in store for them if we entered the war and the fact that we probably would. The document undercut the repeated statements of Roosevelt and his followers that repeal of the neutrality acts, lend-lease, the destroyer deal, and similar measures, would keep us out of the European conflict.\"\n\nWheeler also deduced that no Army captain could on his own obtain and borrow such a sensitive document. The source of the disclosure, he felt, must have been much higher in the military chain of command.\n\nAfter skimming the report, Wheeler called Manly, who he knew shared his distaste for Roosevelt, at the _Tribune_ 's Press Building office and invited him to come to his house. Wheeler also summoned one of his secretaries. The senator and reporter took turns that evening reading the most important sections to the secretary, who furiously scribbled their words in shorthand. The captain returned the report to its home in the War Department before its absence could be detected, and later that evening Manly and Waldrop dined together at the Press Club.\n\nThe FBI and military investigators never determined who had ordered the Rainbow Five leak. Wheeler believed that General Hap Arnold, the head of the Army Air Corps, authorized the leak because he was peeved that the plan didn't allocate sufficient resources to ramping up the production of airplanes. This theory doesn't seem plausible: the plan didn't stint on air power, and it is almost inconceivable that Arnold would commit what amounted to treason to advance his military career. It is a testament to the deviousness and inscrutability of Franklin D. Roosevelt that some historians believe he ordered the leak as part of an elaborate strategy to goad Hitler into declaring war.\n\nManly and Waldrop quickly came to hope that a story that had seemed like the hottest scoop of their lives would be forgotten\u2014or at least forgiven. Waldrop said that he became so disturbed by his role in making the Rainbow Plan public that \"I felt like slitting my throat.\"\n\nThe biggest leak of military secrets in American history had been overshadowed by the most devastating military intelligence failure in the nation's history. Three days after Manly's scoop hit the newsstands, Japanese bombers blasted the search for its source off the FBI's priority list.\n\nThe attack also marked the end of Masuo Kato's tenure as Washington bureau chief for Domei, Japan's official news agency.\n\nOn the morning of December 7, 1941, Kato slept late and cooked himself a breakfast of griddle cakes smothered in butter and maple syrup. Breakfast is the last meal a foreigner gives up in a new country, so Kato's fondness for pancakes and especially for butter\u2014a food abhorred by many Japanese at the time\u2014was a mark of his integration into American society. Still, no matter how well he assimilated, no Japanese citizen could feel comfortable in Washington in the winter of 1941. The hostility of former friends prompted Kato to work that morning from his home, an apartment on 16th Street near Dupont Circle, instead of traveling to his office in the Press Building or to the Press Club, where he often monitored the newswires and used the typewriter room as an informal office.\n\nFor months American newspapers had been seething with hostility toward Japan. The press stoked anger over Japan's refusal to retreat from China and its invasion of French Indochina. The papers were full of predictions that Tokyo was planning to bomb the Panama Canal, invade the Philippines, or pivot to bite off a piece of Siberia.\n\nIsolationist newspapers were determined to prevent war with Germany and Italy, but there were few voices calling for restraint when it came to Japan. In the popular imagination Japanese troops were short, buck-toothed runts who wouldn't be a match for American soldiers, and even top military planners in the United States and Britain believed that Japanese were incapable of flying airplanes or prevailing in combat against European or American soldiers.\n\nMonths of speculation about war in the Pacific had turned the convivial atmosphere of the Press Club frosty for anyone identified with Japan. Reporters who for years had bantered with Kato turned their backs when he approached the bar. Word had circulated around the club that the talented and affable Domei editor was only pretending to be a newspaperman, that he was actually a commander in the Japanese Navy who was using journalism as a cover for spying.\n\nIn fact, Kato wasn't a covert military officer, but, by American standards, nor was he an ordinary reporter. Journalism and espionage were tightly coupled in pre-war Japan. The link was so close that the Japanese government and public found it inconceivable that foreign reporters in their country were not spies. As a result, American journalists who had the misfortune to find themselves in Japan or a place under Japanese occupation during the war were treated brutally.\n\nA fluent English speaker, Kato had attended university in the United States and, starting in 1937, had served a three-year stint as Washington bureau chief of Domei. At a time when Japanese were exotic and unusual in Washington, he blended in, living at the University Club, playing golf at the Kenwood Country Club, and drinking with American reporters.\n\nKato had returned to Japan in 1940 with no expectation of returning to Washington. He was at the dock in Yokohama on January 23, 1941, when Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, Japan's newly chosen ambassador to Washington, and its last hope for averting war with the United States, departed in the _Kamakura Maru_ ocean liner. Soon Kato followed in his wake, assigned to cover Nomura's negotiations with the US government.\n\nSix feet tall, sporting a ready smile, an amiable manner, and a glass eye\u2014a memento of a Chinese nationalist's assassination attempt\u2014Nomura was the opposite of the stereotypical Japanese diplomat. He was known to be fond of America and a personal friend of President Roosevelt.\n\nWhile Nomura hoped to prevent war with the United States, it wasn't clear at the time and still isn't certain whether this was really possible. Japanese politics was a byzantine swirl of intrigue and assassination. No one, including Nomura, knew if his appointment was a grand gesture on the part of a Foreign Ministry seeking to avert war or a cynical ploy intended to buy time while the imperial Army created new facts on the ground.\n\nStarting with his first meeting with Roosevelt, on February 14, Nomura's mission to Washington was extraordinary. FDR greeted the admiral like a long-lost friend and Nomura spoke frankly, declaring that he had come to try to find peace with the United States and confiding that the biggest obstacles to success were chauvinistic militarists in his own country. The president suggested that Nomura enter into secret, informal discussions\u2014the word \"negotiations\" was assiduously avoided\u2014with Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Nomura was assured that he could meet with Roosevelt if the need arose and was shown a side door to the White House that he could use to avoid detection by the press.\n\nA drama worthy of a Kabuki performance played out over the coming months. Nomura and Hull had fifty or sixty secret meetings, many held in Hull's apartment, and Nomura and Roosevelt met secretly eight times in the White House. At their first meeting, Nomura and Hull vowed that they would never lie to each other. After every meeting Hull dictated a short memorandum for the State Department's files summarizing the encounter, and Nomura sent an encrypted report with his impressions to the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo. The Foreign Ministry sent Nomura a continuous stream of messages instructing him how he should conduct the negotiations.\n\nThe Kabuki aspect came into play as a result of one of the few effective intelligence operations conducted by the American government prior to World War II, the breaking of the Japanese diplomatic code. Hull and Roosevelt were reading translations of intercepts of Nomura's secret messages to Tokyo the day he sent them\u2014and they were often able to read copies of the Foreign Ministry's messages to Nomura before he was. Hull was privy to Nomura's candid assessments of their talks, and he knew just how far his counterpart could go in making concessions to American demands. Nomura was in the dark both about America's intentions and about the intentions and plans of his compatriots.\n\nEnglish translations of the decrypted Japanese cables were stamped \"Top Secret MAGIC,\" an allusion to the US Army Signal Intelligence Service chief's habit of calling his cryptanalysts \"magicians.\" Circulation of Magic decrypts was limited to ten people: the president; the secretaries of War, Navy, and State; the chief of staff; the chief of naval operations; the chiefs of the two services' war plans divisions; and the chiefs of their intelligence organizations. The highly restricted distribution list protected the secrecy of a vital intelligence tool, but it also ensured that no one who read the cables had a deep knowledge of Japanese history or culture.\n\nBecause of the Magic decrypts, Hull and Roosevelt knew Nomura's private assessments of their discussions, and because they had read his instructions they could be ready with well-considered responses to the ambassador's proposals the instant he made them. It gradually became clear to the Americans that Nomura was playing a desperate game, shading the truth or omitting details in his reports to the Foreign Ministry in an effort to avoid stirring up anti-American feelings in Tokyo. At the same time, when he thought he could get away with it, he ignored explicit instructions to deliver messages to Hull or Roosevelt that could have antagonized the American side.\n\nKato watched closely as Nomura attempted to outmaneuver the militarists and prevent war. Like every other Japanese enterprise operating in the United States, the news service was subject to close supervision by officials in the Japanese embassy. Kato spent as much time at the embassy as he did at the Press Building, much of it with Hidenari Terasaki, the embassy's press secretary.\n\nFor a press secretary, Terasaki kept an almost comically low profile, rarely if ever communicating with American reporters, shunning the Embassy Row social scene, and managing to almost completely avoid having his name mentioned in American newspapers. Despite his passion for anonymity, Terasaki was well known to American counterintelligence officers. A March 14, 1941, Magic decrypt revealed that Terasaki had been put in charge of coordinating Japanese intelligence and propaganda operations in North and South America.\n\nThe day after Nomura presented his credentials to Roosevelt and the secret discussions with Hull were started, a Magic decrypt revealed priorities for Japanese intelligence operations in the United States. These included determining America's political, economic, and military strength. Tokyo also tasked its spies with identifying potential agents and collaborators by conducting \"investigations of all persons or organizations which either openly or secretly oppose participation in the war,\" and of \"anti-Semitism, communism, movements of negroes, and labor movements.\"\n\nIf war broke out between Japan and the United States, the cable stated, \"our intelligence set-up will be moved to Mexico, making that country the nerve center for our intelligence net.\" It ordered Terasaki to \"set up facilities for a US-Mexico international intelligence route.\" Terasaki was instructed to cooperate with the German and Italian intelligence organs in the United States.\n\nGiven his broad mandate, reclusive nature, and limited resources, Japanese reporters who spoke good English and understood American society were a valuable force-multiplier for Terasaki. They didn't have to steal secrets, or even personally favor Japanese imperialism, to be useful. Kato and most of the handful of other Japanese reporters in Washington occupied a gray area between independent journalism and espionage. At the most basic level they helped Terasaki by providing insight into the thinking of government officials, picking up gossip at the Press Club, and identifying sympathetic or vulnerable Americans who might spy for Japan.\n\nWhite House and congressional credentials allowed Japanese reporters to attend press conferences and roam the halls of government buildings. Kato mingled with top Roosevelt administration officials, for example, attending Secretary of State Cordell Hull's seventieth birthday party. American reporters who weren't happy about having a \"Jap\" in their midst kept a close eye on Kato and his colleagues.\n\nThe mood was reflected in a June 1941 column by Tom Treanor, a _Los Angeles Times_ correspondent. Treanor set up the story by recalling an incident that had occurred in the State Department press room immediately after Hull had made sharp remarks about Japan at a press conference and stipulated that they were off the record. \"Little Kato went to a typewriter in an adjoining office and started a story to this effect: 'Secretary Hull today in an off-the-record press conference said, etc., etc., etc.'\" Treanor continued: \"He left the paper in the machine where all could see it and went to wash his hands.\" The column noted that \"correspondents here think he's too smart to have done it through carelessness. It must have been some sort of diplomatic swordplay for Mr. Hull's benefit.\" Interviewing Kato at the Press Club, Treanor asked if anyone had told him he \"should get out of Washington or that you are a spy.\" Kato replied, \"One man told me I should get out once, but I say to him: 'That is a matter for governments to decide, not persons like you.'\"\n\nAlthough it did not restrict his access to press briefings, the State Department included Kato on a list of Japanese agents it provided in November 1941 to Colonel William Donovan, President Roosevelt's Coordinator of Information. The list was probably based on a secret cable sent from the Japanese consulate in New York on December 17, 1940, and decrypted by Army magicians three weeks later. Both the cable and the roster provided to Donovan included the representatives of Domei in the United States, as well as reporters for the newspapers _Asahi_ _Shimbun_ and _Yomiuri Shimbun_ as possible Japanese intelligence sources.\n\nFukuichi Fukumoto, a Japanese reporter who had been working in New York as a representative of the Osaka _Mainichi_ and Tokyo _Nichi Nichi_ newspapers, was also on the list. In March 1941 his employers had ordered him to return to Tokyo. In April American codebreakers learned that Terasaki had managed to have the order rescinded and to get Fukumoto posted to Washington, where he joined other reporters at the Press Building. After an American reported to the FBI that Fukumoto had offered to pay him $2,300 for drawings of an exhaust supercharger used in airplane engines, the State Department, anxious to avoid a public quarrel with Japan, quietly arranged for Fukumoto's repatriation.\n\nJapanese reporters in Washington were industrious collectors of information, but much of their work never made it into print. Domestic newspapers and radio were censored and rather than getting to read the meticulously collected reports from Japan's large contingent of international journalists, the population was subjected to relentless propaganda. Many of the cables Kato sent to Tokyo in the months prior to the Pearl Harbor attack were circulated only to a small circle of government officials that included the emperor. Aware of his elite audience, Kato tried to leverage access to leaders on both sides of the Pacific to suggest ways Tokyo could find common ground with Washington.\n\nBoth sides were anxious to avoid publicity about the discussions between Nomura and Hull. Roosevelt feared that if word leaked he would be branded an appeaser, and Nomura knew that publicity prior to a peace agreement would give the militarists in Japan the opportunity to scuttle the talks. It is a mark of Kato's status as a semi-official actor that Nomura confided in him about the ongoing discussions, including Tokyo's reluctance to take steps to come to an accommodation with the United States.\n\nKato tried to support Nomura's efforts, for example by suggesting in stories ostensibly written for publication\u2014but in fact intended for circulation in government circles\u2014that Japan should stop demanding that Washington cut off aid to the Chinese government because the United States would never abandon Chiang Kai-shek. He even sent a cable recommending that General Hideki Tojo be replaced with a prime minister who was less inclined to lead Japan into war with the United States. Kato, who didn't realize how brutal the _Kempeitai_ military police had become since his departure, lived to tell his story because colleagues at Domei destroyed that cable before anyone in government saw it.\n\nIn the last week of July 1941 developments in Washington, Tokyo, and on the ground in Southeast Asia made it impossible to continue to defer forever decisions about whether war would break out between the two nations. On July 24 Japan invaded French Indochina. In response, two days later Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the United States, and the United States, Britain, and the government of the Dutch East Indies imposed an embargo on oil sales to Japan. FDR calculated that this would force the Japanese, who had no domestic sources of petroleum, to make concessions to the United States. If Roosevelt had a deep understanding of Japanese society, or had been advised by someone who did, he would have realized that for Japan's military leaders backing down in the face of a public threat was unthinkable.\n\nAs the cool autumn in Washington turned to a cold winter, Hull, Roosevelt, Nomura, and Kato all watched as the thin tendrils of peace the Japanese ambassador had been clutching were snatched from his fingers.\n\nBy the first week of December it was obvious to Kato and anyone else paying attention that at a minimum Japan was planning to break off diplomatic relations with the United States, and that in all probability war was just around the corner. Nomura was kept in the dark about Japan's plans, as were American policymakers who relied heavily on decrypted Japanese diplomatic cables. Although war seemed inevitable, the conventional wisdom, which Kato shared, was that it would begin with an incursion into the Dutch Indies. Japan, American leaders believed, would try to secure the oil its military needed to survive and stop short of provoking a strong American response.\n\nWhen Kato received a cable on December 2 ordering him back to Tokyo, he replied that he wanted to continue to work in Washington \"to the end, whatever happened.\" A few days later he learned that embassy staff were burning documents, a clear signal that a break in relations with the United States was expected.\n\nOn December 3, Roosevelt was briefed on a Magic decrypt of a cable the embassy in Washington had received ordering it to destroy all but one of its code machines. He understood its significance immediately: war was imminent. The only reason for scuttling the machines was to prevent them from falling into the hands of the enemy. Embassy staff disassembled two electromechanical code-making machines, smashed them with hammers, and dissolved the remaining bits in vats of acid. Some of this frenetic activity took place in the embassy garden, where an Office of Naval Intelligence officer observed it.\n\nAt noon on December 6, Kato attended a going-away party at the Mayflower Hotel for Terasaki, who was being transferred to Rio de Janeiro. Other embassy officials had already departed for Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. Kato must have realized that Terasaki's departure was yet another sign that war was close. It was a clear signal to American intelligence analysts that Tokyo was putting in place the contingency plan for moving its intelligence operations to Mexico and South America that had been mentioned in the January cable.\n\nThat evening Kato dined with two Japanese reporters at a Chinese restaurant and shared gallows humor about how they would pass their time in an American prison after war broke out. Kato said he would write a book.\n\nIn his reports Kato grasped at any sign that war could be avoided, but by the morning of December 7, there wasn't much hope to cling to. The smell of pancakes was still in the air when he handed the text of a story\u2014his last dispatch from the United States\u2014to a Western Union messenger at 2:00 p.m. The cable reported on the American public's reaction to the breakdown in negotiations between Washington and Tokyo and concluded that \"there is still a thirty percent hope for peace.\" Kato walked out of his apartment on 16th Street half an hour later, just missing the first radio broadcasts that would have forced him to revise his estimate.\n\nThe Domei reporter was literally dressed for a funeral\u2014a senior Japanese officer had died in Washington a few days earlier and the service was slated for 3:00 p.m.\u2014as he strolled down 16th Street, passed the White House, and turned right. He had almost arrived at the State Department when he hailed a taxi, oblivious to the tense drama unfolding a few blocks away in Hull's office. Japanese diplomats who, like Kato, were unaware of the Pearl Harbor attack were handing the furious secretary of state, who was all too aware of the attack, a note cutting off diplomatic relations.\n\nAs he settled into the backseat of the taxi, Kato caught the tail end of a news bulletin on the radio\u2014something about Japanese forces bombing Manila. \"God damn Japan,\" the driver declared, apparently unaware of the nationality of his passenger. \"We'll lick hell out of those bastards now.\"\n\nKato ducked out of the funeral with another Japanese reporter and headed to the Japanese embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. They were greeted by an angry crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk. The two reporters, who were well known to the embassy guards, were admitted at once.\n\nInside, Kato learned that the bombs hadn't fallen just on Manila and that his initial suspicion\u2014that rogue elements of the Japanese military were to blame\u2014was wrong. Officers in Tokyo might have imagined that they could push the Americans out of Asia with a single decisive blow, but men like Kato who had lived in the United States did not share this delusion. \"There was no excitement evident in the faces of those gathered there that afternoon,\" Kato remembered in a memoir published after the war. \"There was more of a disheartened sense of failure. Everyone spoke in hushed, expectant tones. There was no cheering or speech-making. The atmosphere was more like that of the funeral from which I had just come than that of an embassy drawing-room on the first day of war.\"\n\nKato spent about an hour in the embassy. As he stepped out of a side exit he smelled smoke, looked up, and saw white puffs drifting into the clear sky. He ran inside to raise the alarm, unintentionally provoking the only laughter heard in the embassy that afternoon; embassy staff told him they were torching papers to keep them out of the hands of the Americans. There wasn't much left to get rid of: the bonfire had been burning for five days.\n\nWhen Kato reached the sidewalk, he saw that the crowd had grown larger and angrier. \"You,\" a man told him, \"are the last son of a bitch we're going to let out.\" Kato's first instinct, like that of many other reporters, was to head to the Press Club. If he had followed through on the impulse, he would have been astonished by the scene\u2014and the presence of a representative of Japan's news agency would have caused a stir. Hundreds of reporters had crowded into the club, seeking the company of comrades and competitors, all scrambling for information about the worst military disaster in American history. The bells on the wire service teletype machines were ringing like fire alarms, ten bells on the United Press machine, a dozen bells on the AP printer preceding one urgent bulletin after another. Seven floors below, a Japanese reporter on temporary assignment in Washington spent the evening in the United Press bureau bowing, weeping, and apologizing.\n\nInstead of heading to the Press Building, Kato sought sanctuary in the home of an acquaintance who worked for the State Department. When he returned home, two FBI agents were waiting in the lobby. They told him to stay in his apartment. A short time later Thomas Qualters, a Secret Service agent who served as FDR's personal bodyguard, knocked on Kato's door. He had been sent by the president, not to make an arrest but rather to confiscate Kato's White House Correspondents Association card.\n\nThe next morning, Kato and other Japanese citizens were interned at a makeshift detention center near Philadelphia. Germans and Italians joined them after Hitler declared war on the United States.\n\nIn his December 11 speech to the Reichstag announcing the declaration of war, Hitler blamed the United States and claimed that Germany was defending itself against American aggression. \"With no attempt at an official denial there has now been revealed in America President Roosevelt's plan by which, at the latest in 1943, Germany and Italy were to be attacked in Europe by military means,\" Hitler said. He was referring to Manly's story about the Rainbow Five report.\n\nThe Wehrmacht was already laying plans to implement F\u00fchrer Directive Number 39, the strategic pivot from trying to conquer the Soviet Union to focusing on defeating America's Rainbow Five plans. The directive might have worked; in any case, its implementation would have immensely complicated America's invasion of Europe and changed the course of the war in the East, altering the fate of millions of people.\n\nThe directive was never put into effect because Hitler, enraged by reverses on the eastern front, ripped it up on December 16, took personal command of the army, and ordered an irrational and disastrous continuation of the Russian campaign. Just as the German army's path into the Soviet Union had been smoothed by Stalin's insistence that warnings from his intelligence services of impending invasion were provocations, Germany's best shot at avoiding defeat was scuttled by a dictator's decision to reject recommendations based on an accurate assessment of his adversary's capabilities and strategy.\n\nA similar failure led America to stumble into a war with Japan as a result of a devastating attack that could have been avoided or thwarted. The Pearl Harbor disaster was not the result of a lack of intelligence, but rather of the lack of a coordinated system for synthesizing and analyzing all of the nation's intelligence.\n\nIt was obvious in November and December 1941 that war with Japan was both inevitable and imminent. The American government had several separate streams of intelligence suggesting the Japanese were planning a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. These weren't detected because they were embedded in a blizzard of intelligence reports, and there was no mechanism in place to sift through these reports or even to systematically analyze them. The Army and Navy didn't share intelligence with each other. Rather than solving the problem Roosevelt dithered and put up with it. As his relationship with John Franklin Carter demonstrated, FDR also believed that methods that had served George Washington and Thomas Jefferson\u2014sending friends and acquaintances abroad to spy on foreign powers and having the president personally evaluate their reports\u2014were sufficient to cope with the risks posed by a much more complex world.\n\n#\n\nIt took the Pearl Harbor debacle, a sucker punch that cost 2,400 American lives and destroyed much of the Pacific fleet, to convince Franklin Roosevelt he needed to sort out the nation's intelligence mess. To prevent another sneak attack, and to support the war the attack had launched, America would have to emulate its enemies and allies by creating secret services capable of seeing, hearing, comprehending, and influencing events around the globe. The need was obvious. The disaster in Hawaii sparked a frenzied competition among the leaders of government agencies to fill it\u2014and in the process vastly expand their power and prestige. They all knew that decisions about divvying up responsibilities and creating new intelligence capabilities would be made personally by the president.\n\nJohn Franklin Carter, the newspaper columnist operating a secret, unofficial intelligence unit from a nondescript office in the National Press Building, was in the scrum as ambitious rivals seeking an oversized piece of the intelligence pie jostled for the president's attention. He was competing with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover; FDR's coordinator of information, William Donovan; State Department officials; and the heads of Army and Navy intelligence. Compared to its rivals, Carter's unit was infinitesimal. Based on its capabilities and his experience, he shouldn't have been a serious contender in turf battles with men who had spent decades in law enforcement, diplomacy, and the military. The journalist and amateur spymaster was in the mix because he had an asset they lacked: a close relationship with and easy access to Roosevelt.\n\nWhile others wrote formal memorandums to the president through official channels and begged for coveted time on his calendar, Carter sent him chatty notes and lingered behind in the Oval Office after White House press conferences for informal meetings. He was in constant touch with Grace Tully, officially one of Roosevelt's private secretaries but in practice an influential, trusted member of the president's inner circle. Tully was the only person other than FDR who was fully aware of Carter's activities; she occasionally responded to his requests without consulting the president.\n\nHoover summed up his feelings about Carter in a handwritten note scrawled at the bottom of an internal FBI memo: \"We know Carter well & most unfavorably. He is a crack-pot, a persistent busy-body, bitten with the Sherlock Holmes bug & plagued with a super-exaggerated ego.\"\n\nThe FBI director barely disguised his contempt, but Donovan, who shared Carter's love of idiosyncratic schemes and sought to exploit the journalist's access to the White House, maintained cordial relations. \"Yesterday afternoon,\" Carter wrote in a January 9 memo to Roosevelt, Donovan's aide \"David Bruce showed me the master-plan he has developed for organization of a general world-wide secret intelligence service for the United States.\" Carter damned the plan with faint praise, writing that it was a good \"model for a central-office organization of intelligence,\" but was \"very hazy on actual operations.\" He added that the plan was based on British and German methods that weren't suitable for the United States. Replicating the hazy thinking he criticized in Donovan's plan, Carter wrote that European intelligence methods were \"the result of experience, plus development, plus national character\" and therefore weren't applicable to the United States.\n\nSummarizing his own approach to intelligence, Carter suggested that \"we should strive to develop something much simpler, more happy-go-lucky and casual, and utilize ignorance in the place of secrecy as a method.\" By ignorance, he meant a decentralized intelligence system composed of teams that operated independently and without knowledge of each other's existence. Of course, Carter also knew just the man to lead such an organization. \"I am very ambitious to be allowed to try to do something along these lines on a modest and experimental scale and would like to tell you my concrete plan of operations the next time you can spare a couple of minutes after a press conference,\" he wrote to the president.\n\nA week later, Roosevelt signed a secret directive that, to Hoover's delight, assigned to the FBI authority for intelligence and counterintelligence throughout the Americas, from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego. Hoover immediately telephoned the heads of intelligence at the State Department, Army, and Navy to inform them of the arrangement, making a point of reading a note the president had handwritten on the order: \"I think that the Canadian and South American Fields should not be in the Coordinator of Information Field, nor in that of the J. Franklin Carter Organization.\" Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) director Rear Admiral Theodore Wilkinson told Hoover he was pained that FDR had acknowledged Carter's organization in writing, even in a secret directive. Hoover consoled Wilkinson, observing that FDR's note meant that \"Carter would only operate in the United States.\"\n\nIn reality, Carter was not restrained by geographic or bureaucratic boundaries. Reporting only to the president, he dispatched agents to roam around Mexico and the Caribbean, travel to Moscow, and collect intelligence from and about every continent except Antarctica. The topics of Carter's inquiries were as wide-ranging as Roosevelt's curiosity, touching on military and geopolitical issues, political intelligence about Democrats and Republicans, the loyalty and competence of government officials, wacky inventions, screwball conspiracy theories, labor issues, military and civilian morale, domestic and foreign propaganda, the latest gossip from New York's \"Caf\u00e9 Society,\" and countless other topics.\n\nCarter's activities during the first full month of the war, January 1942, exemplify his activities over the coming years. He and his team were frenetically busy, but most of what they stirred up was dust. FDR seems to have kept the game going because Carter uncovered a few flecks of gold, and because he provided a welcome diversion.\n\nOn New Year's Day, Vannevar Bush, the government's top scientist, rebuffed Carter's request for information about an experimental internal combustion engine. Writing under letterhead with his National Press Building address, Carter had informed Bush that he was inquiring about the invention on FDR's instructions. The skeptical scientist requested \"a copy of your direction from the President,\" which Carter was unable to provide as Roosevelt refused all his requests for credentials or official documentation of his status.\n\nThe next day Tully called Carter conveying a request from FDR to discuss his proposals about enlisting organized labor to fight Axis sabotage with secretary of labor Frances Perkins. There is no record of the secretary's response to Carter's offer to serve as a \"personal, unofficial, informal point of liaison for various efforts of organized labor to contribute intelligence as well as strength and skill to the conduct of the war.\" Carter's offers of unconventional assistance often left cabinet officials nonplussed.\n\nOn January 3, Carter forwarded a useless report to Roosevelt on an interview one of his agents had conducted with an American lawyer who had been posted to Tokyo. He sent scores of similar reports over the coming months.\n\nA few days later, the president was treated to the first of a series of fantastic, and fantastically stupid, reports that Carter's number two, Henry Field, claimed had been produced \"under conditions of extraordinary secrecy from a man who is believed to have accurate and swift means of communication with Moscow.\" The reports spun a tale that would have seemed ridiculous even in one of Carter's novels. An American military genius working for Stalin was directing the operations of the \"Siberian Army,\" an entity that, Field's report claimed, was poised to attack Japan within days using 8,300 planes that had been hidden in underground hangars. The imaginary American was, Field claimed, a member of Stalin's Strategy Board, \"which is composed of 3 Americans, 1 German (brother of the man who arrested Hitler in Munich Putsch), 1 British General (hated by Chamberlain), and a Frenchman named Collet (brother of General Collet in Syrian campaign).\" The report presented an elaborate back story for the hero, including graduating from MIT and leading victorious Soviet military campaigns from Finland to Rostov. Subsequent reports claimed the USSR had spent $6 billion building a series of underground forts from Leningrad to Odessa that were stuffed with troops waiting for orders to emerge and vanquish the Wehrmacht. The reports were filed in FDR's personal safe and were shared with Army intelligence.\n\nOn January 9, Roosevelt dictated a note to Tully requesting that Carter inform Army and Navy intelligence of his concerns about Nazi infiltration of the United Service Organizations (USO), the voluntary organization formed to entertain American troops. The same day, another note communicated the president's tentative approvals of Carter's plan to send a _Saturday Evening Post_ reporter to Mexico City to report on Axis activities, and his proposal to investigate wealthy refugees in New York.\n\nAs Tully was banging out these notes, Carter was dictating a cover letter for his first valuable report of the month. It was an accurate and chilling account of the Soviet government's abysmal treatment of Polish soldiers and civilians who had been arrested when the USSR occupied half of their country. Tens of thousands were suffering in Russian prisons and labor camps.\n\nAlso on January 9, Carter sent FDR his critique of Donovan's plans and his own proposal to establish a worldwide intelligence unit. The package he dropped off with Tully included a request, which the president ignored, that Vice President Henry Wallace sign identification cards for Carter's agents who were operating overseas.\n\nRoosevelt and his closest advisors were certain that Hitler had sprinkled secret agents throughout the United States who were busy collecting intelligence and waiting for orders to begin sabotage operations. Carter fed the paranoia, for example with a January 12, 1942, report from one of his agents, the retired businessman Curtis Munson, expressing confidence that \"there is a wealthy and entrenched fifth column in this country\" that was waiting for a \"green light by their superiors.\" Ironically given his passionate defense of the civil rights of Japanese Americans, Munson advocated following Lincoln's Civil War precedent by suspending the right of _habeas corpus_ and imprisoning thousands of German Americans or, alternatively, rounding them up and sending them to South Dakota to plow fields. FDR instructed Carter to \"talk this over with the Attorney General and possibly the Immigration Commissioner and Mr. Hoover.\"\n\nThe German fifth columnists were no more real than Stalin's Strategy Board or the Nazi spies Carter imagined were hiding in Bob Hope's USO entourage.\n\nCarter had assigned to another of his agents, a journalist named William Irwin, the task of investigating Japanese intelligence activities along the US-Mexico border. Irwin drove for thousands of miles through Mexico and Texas compiling lists of Japanese doctors, dentists, and ice-cream-shop proprietors. Based on rumors and intuition, he labeled many of them \"key men\" in a massive, and largely imaginary, intelligence operation directed from Tokyo. On January 16, Carter forwarded scores of pages of Irwin's notes to FDR, the FBI, the State Department, and military intelligence organizations.\n\nAdditional topics of Carter's reports to Roosevelt in January covered: infighting between American intelligence organizations, such as attacks on Donovan by the FBI, Army and Navy intelligence, and the State Department; \"sedition among the South Boston Irish\"; efforts to manufacture the Sea Otter, a crackpot idea for a ship powered by automobile engines that had caught FDR's imagination; notes on interviews with American businessmen who had been stationed in Asia; a scheme to recruit members of de Gaulle's Free French intelligence operation in Mexico as American operatives; intelligence on proposed Japanese bombing targets; a report on Argentinian domestic politics based on an interview with the Buenos Aires representative of the Otis Elevator Co.; and plans to send Field on an intelligence-gathering mission to Trinidad.\n\nAlong with this flurry of covert activity, Carter attended press conferences at the White House and produced newspaper columns.\n\nWith the help of a staff that grew to twenty-five, Carter maintained this frenzied pace for three and a half years. Hoover, Donovan, generals and admirals, senior State Department officials, and nearly every member of the cabinet came to dread the notes Tully sent from Roosevelt forwarding one of Carter's memos with a request for comment or action. Nine times out of ten they were time-sucking nonsense: a suggestion forwarded to General Hap Arnold that the Army Air Forces consider bombing Japanese volcanoes to set off earthquakes; a report asserting with great confidence that the labor leader John L. Lewis was conspiring with French intelligence to mount a coup and depose Roosevelt; or fantasies about Ukrainian terrorists hell-bent on assassinating the president.\n\nSome of Carter's intelligence, however, was helpful. He passed on a tip in July 1942 from Gerald Haxton, Somerset Maugham's secretary, who noted that it was possible to pick up a telephone in New York and put a call through to Switzerland. Given the ease of communicating between Germany and Switzerland, this posed an obvious security risk, most immediately from German submarines to ships departing from Atlantic ports. As a direct consequence of Carter's information, Roosevelt ordered restrictions on communications with neutral countries that undoubtedly reduced the flow of intelligence to Germany.\n\nAlong with piles of garbage, Carter's agents provided Roosevelt with information that was accurate and even profound.\n\nOf the thousands of reports Carter sent Roosevelt, the most alarming and probably the most significant was a 130-page dossier titled \"Reports on Poland and Lithuania.\" Compiled by the Polish underground, it was the most detailed report to date to reach the White House about the Holocaust. The dossier, which Roosevelt and undersecretary of state Sumner Welles received on December 30, 1942, reinforced and expanded on information the administration had received from other sources.\n\nThe report included the first news to reach Washington about the Belzec concentration camp in southeastern Poland: \"Inside and outside the fence Ukrainian sentries are posted. Executions are carried out in the following manner: a train carrying Jews arrives at the station and is moved up to the wire fence where the guards are changed. Now the train is brought to the unloading place by German personnel. The men are taken into barracks on the left, where they have to take their clothes off, ostensibly for a bath.\" It went on to describe how men and women were herded into a building and killed, their bodies buried in a ditch that had been dug by \"Jews who, after they have finished the job, are executed.\"\n\nThe dossier revealed the existence of mobile extermination trucks in which poison gas was used to murder Jews, described the Auschwitz concentration camp, liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, and atrocities in Lithuania. An appendix containing photographs of corpses stacked like firewood and other horrors made it difficult even for anti-Semites in the State Department to doubt the authenticity of the information.\n\nCarter's team also continued in early 1942 to collect intelligence on the threats posed by\u2014and, even more, to\u2014Japanese, both citizens of the United States and of Japan, living on the West Coast and in Hawaii.\n\n\"We are drifting into a treatment of the Japanese corresponding to Hitler's treatment of the Jews,\" Munson warned in a note to Tully. It was late February 1942, and Munson, Carter's agent on the West Coast, was despondent. Rather than protect the Japanese as Munson advised, the government was standing by as anti-Japanese hysteria threatened to boil over into an American version of Kristallnacht.\n\nCarter had been sending reports to Roosevelt for months\u2014before and after the Pearl Harbor attack\u2014reiterating his conviction that 98 percent of Japanese on the West Coast and in Hawaii were loyal to America. There is \"no substantial danger of Fifth Column activities by Japanese,\" Carter informed FDR on December 16, 1941.\n\nIn January 1942, Carter gave Roosevelt Munson's recommendations for handling the \"West coast Japanese problem.\" These included the president or vice president issuing a statement reassuring loyal citizens of Japanese descent that their rights would be protected, giving reliable second-generation Japanese Americans responsibility for ensuring the good behavior of all Japanese American residents, and creating a process to clear Japanese Americans for work in defense plants.\n\nDespite Hoover's determination to sideline Carter and his organization, the amateur spy kept tabs on the bureau's energetic efforts to round up suspected Japanese spies operating in California and Hawaii. Working from lists prepared in advance by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI quickly neutralized the real threats of sabotage and espionage.\n\nCarter was also receiving from and sending to the White House reports from sources in local law enforcement and British intelligence, as well as private citizens, describing how unscrupulous individuals were terrorizing Japanese Americans into giving up their homes, farms, and businesses. In California, the Hearst newspapers were fomenting racial hatred, politicians were calling for mass evacuations, and there was an ever-present threat of vigilante violence.\n\nIn addition to Roosevelt, Carter's reports about West Coast Japanese were circulated to Hoover, the secretaries of War, State, and Labor, and Army officers who were responsible for defending the Pacific Coast. By the time Munson wrote to Tully in February, it was clear that the battle for a morally defensible policy was lost. Plans were already being drawn up for internment. To Carter's credit, he continued to stand up for the rights of Japanese Americans even after tens of thousands were sent to desolate concentration camps.\n\nCarter's most spectacular operation was even more controversial than his advocacy for Japanese Americans. It centered on his and Roosevelt's fondness for the prominent Nazi, Ernst \"Putzi\" Hanfstaengl, whom Carter had met in 1932 at FDR's suggestion, and their decision to bring him to the United States.\n\nHanfstaengl had taken a wildly improbable path to America. One of Hitler's earliest supporters, by the time the Nazis came to power he had fallen out of favor with the party leadership, so it came as a surprise when Hermann G\u00f6ring summoned him to Berlin in February 1937. G\u00f6ring, second only to Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy, told Hanfstaengl that the F\u00fchrer had personally ordered him to travel to Salamanca, Spain, on a secret mission.\n\nThe journey began eight days after Hanfstaengl's fiftieth birthday, on February 10, 1937. After take-off, he was horrified when the pilot said that rather than landing in a part of Spain controlled by the pro-German nationalists, his orders were to eject Hanfstaengl over Republican-held territory. Terrified that he wouldn't survive his first parachute landing or that he'd be killed by anti-fascist forces, Hanfstaengl wasted no time when the plane developed engine trouble and landed near Leipzig. He fled, first to Switzerland and later to Britain, defying G\u00f6ring's orders to return home.\n\nAt the start of the war the British government interned Hanfstaengl as an enemy alien. In a bid to escape confinement, he expressed an interest in aiding the fight against Hitler. Asked if he was willing to help destroy Germany, he replied that he wanted to overthrow Hitler, not destroy his country. The Brits decided correctly that Hanfstaengl was still a Nazi, locked him up, and in September 1940 shipped him along with hundreds of Nazis to an internment camp in Ontario, Canada.\n\nIn February 1942 Carter, seeking information about a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt's whom he erroneously believed was a Nazi spy, asked the FBI to track down Hanfstaengl and obtain permission from British intelligence to conduct an interview. When Carter met with Hanfstaengl in March 1942, their conversation was supposed to be about the counterintelligence investigation. Instead, Carter quickly turned it into a recruitment pitch. Hanfstaengl was in a tight spot, squeezed between Canadian guards who treated him with all the consideration they believed a despicable Nazi deserved and German inmates for whom he was a traitor. Half starved, suffering from untreated dental maladies, and fearing violence from fellow prisoners, Hanfstaengl viewed Carter's offer as a lifeline.\n\nSoon after he returned to Washington, Carter met with Roosevelt and Welles and proposed that they spring Hanfstaengl and bring him to Washington. When they asked what Putzi could possibly contribute to the war effort, Carter replied, \"He actually knows all these people in the Nazi government. He might be able to tell you what makes them tick.\"\n\nHanfstaengl's potential value as an analyst didn't come close to justifying the political risks associated with bringing him to the United States. The American public would have been outraged if word leaked out that Roosevelt or his administration was collaborating with a leading Nazi. The presence of Hitler's confidant in Washington could also cause troubles in Moscow by exacerbating Stalin's fears that the United States and Britain were plotting to negotiate a separate peace with Hitler that would free the Germans to defeat and occupy the Soviet Union.\n\nRoosevelt seemed to have something in mind other than importing an analyst or propagandist when he agreed to Carter's plan. The Germans were at the apogee of their power. It was hard to envision how the United States could defeat a military machine that had occupied most of Europe and appeared to be on the verge of victory in Russia. Roosevelt apparently hoped Hanfstaengl could help devise or implement a strategy that would inspire the German military to depose Hitler and negotiate peace with the Allies. That's certainly how Carter and Hanfstaengl interpreted Roosevelt's invitation.\n\nGiving Carter the green light to bring Hanfstaengl to Washington, Roosevelt said, \"You can tell him that there's no reason on God's earth why the Germans shouldn't again become the kind of nation they were under Bismarck. Not militaristic. They were productive; they were peaceful; they were a great part of Europe. And that's the kind of Germany I would like to see. If he would like to work on that basis, fine.\"\n\nThe British government fought to keep Hanfstaengl in Canada but gave in when Roosevelt raised the issue with Churchill. The Brits insisted that Hanfstaengl remain under guard and that his presence in the United States be kept strictly secret. Sir Gerald Campbell, British Consul General to the United States, wrote to Carter in May 1942 noting that the \"British authorities view the proposal to make use of Hanfstaengl with considerable misgiving.\" He added, \"I think we can all agree about the danger of confusing anybody's mind at this time into the belief that there are good and bad ex-Nazis.\"\n\nIn fact, Carter had long believed in good and bad Nazis, and he put Hanfstaengl in the former camp. His idea to bring Hanfstaengl to Washington, and apparently FDR's consent for the plan, were animated by this belief.\n\nThese notions weren't a secret. In a May 1941 newspaper column, Carter had suggested that the flight to Scotland of Rudolph Hess, the third most powerful man in Germany, was a sign that the conflict between warring Nazi factions was coming to a climax. He wrote that one faction wished to \"stabilize German victories, leaving Germany the supreme power on the continent, but foregoing political empire,\" while the other \"propose to follow the world-revolution to world supremacy at any cost to German manpower and German ideas.\" He informed his readers that \"from the start of the Hitler revolution it has been obvious that there was a group of sincere, able and patriotic Germans who worked whole-heartedly for a greater Germany and a German mission which would create a Germany and a German people free to work out their destinies and to socialize and to rationalize the life of Europe.\"\n\nIt was, of course, incredible for anyone to make such statements at a time when German troops were enjoying their opportunity to \"socialize\" in Paris, Jews all over the continent were experiencing the Nazi efforts to \"rationalize the life of Europe,\" and innocent civilians were experiencing Luftwaffe pilots' attempts to \"work out their destinies\" by bombing British cities.\n\nIn the column, which was printed in the _Boston Globe_ and newspapers across the country, Carter counted Hess and several other leading Nazis as likely members of the enlightened Nazi group: \"Putzi Hanfstaengl, long since exiled, also belonged to this group, as perhaps did Dr. Goebbels himself. Theirs was a European concept which, however brutal and inconvenient, was not necessarily incompatible with a world-order or Christian civilization.\"\n\nAccording to Hanfstaengl, when discussing terms for the transfer, Carter had attributed the restrictions to the machinations of small-minded men\u2014and Jews. \"There was quite some opposition to your being brought to Washington from some small unimportant men\u2014some were jealous, some were Jews, some incompetent and stupid and afraid of competition,\" Carter said, Hanfstaengl recorded in his diary a few hours after the conversation.\n\nRoosevelt was anxious to avoid publicity. While in the United States, Hanfstaengl was referred to as \"Dr. Sedgwick\" after his mother's maiden name, or simply as \"Dr. S.,\" and the enterprise was referred to as the S Project.\n\nThe S Project began in a dramatic fashion.\n\nOn the afternoon of June 30, 1942, Hanfstaengl, the most senior Nazi to set foot on American soil during World War II, shook hands with the commanding general at Fort Belvoir where he was to be interned and strode across a conference room, stopping in front of a large world map. \"There is only one place for you to start the invasion of Europe, General, and that is here,\" he boomed, thumping a long, bony finger on Casablanca. \"Here is the weakest spot.\"\n\nHanfstaengl, believing he had merely stated the obvious, wasn't prepared for the response to his pronouncement. The general stormed out of the room, ordered a tripling of the guard outside the bungalow where the German prisoner was being held and had him confined to the building during daylight hours. As Hanfstaengl learned later, Casablanca was one of the primary targets for the most closely guarded secret in the American military, Operation Torch, the Anglo American invasion of North Africa that was launched in December 1942. Roosevelt had to intervene personally to persuade the Army that their prisoner had made an educated guess and that he wasn't a Nazi spy.\n\nCarter's enthusiasm for working with Putzi was tempered by one concern. The British government had spread the rumor that Hanfstaengl was homosexual. While Carter was happy to associate with a racist anti-Semitic Nazi, he was wary of homosexuals. He consulted Claire Boothe Luce, who suggested leaving the German alone with Gerald Haxton, Maugham's German-speaking secretary and lover, to see what transpired. When Hanfstaengl told Carter \"I wish you'd get rid of this man. One of the things I couldn't stand about Hitler was all the fairies he had around him,\" Carter decided he had passed the test.\n\nHanfstaengl quickly wore out his welcome at Fort Belvoir after terrorizing African American soldiers. Souring on Hitler did nothing to sweeten his racism. He was moved to Bush Hall, a crumbling estate in Alexandria, Virginia, that Carter rented from two of Field's aged relatives. The scene quickly degenerated into a cross between the television comedies _Hogan's Heroes_ and _Fawlty Towers_. The madcap scene, which Carter found amusing only in retrospect, featured the moody and petulant Hanfstaengl, drunken rebellious servants, balky plumbing, and a leaky roof. FDR, who remembered his German acquaintance's performances at the Harvard Club, ordered that a Steinway piano be placed in the house. Field, who despised Hanfstaengl and secretly kept the British government informed of his activities, ensured that it was never tuned. It was appropriate that the piano, like the whole S Project, was off-key as Hanfstaengl filled Bush Hall with the sounds of Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner, music that he'd once used to arouse Hitler. Carter and Field visited often, occasionally bringing intelligence officers who sought advice from \"Dr. S.\" Adding to the farcical nature of the adventure, for a time, Hanfstaengl was \"guarded\" by his son Egon, an American citizen who had enlisted in the US Army.\n\nWhen Egon shipped out for service in the Pacific, he left his .38 caliber revolver with his father. One day a Pentagon official happened to see it sitting on a table at Bush Hall and was appalled at the idea that a Nazi prisoner had access to a weapon. Carter took possession of the gun and later issued it to a recent college graduate named Alexander Sturm, whom he had recruited into his operation. The day Sturm reported for work Carter gave him the .38 in a left-handed holster\u2014Sturm was right-handed\u2014along with a temporary National Press Club membership card, a check for twenty dollars, and vague instructions about his duties as guard and assistant to \"Dr. S.\"\n\nHanfstaengl listened to German radio broadcasts on a shortwave receiver that had been installed at Bush Hall by technicians from the Federal Communications Commission and wrote memos suggesting counterpropaganda, lacing his recommendations with information that he believed would get under the skin of Hitler and his inner circle. Roosevelt took an active interest in Hanfstaengl's work, reading his reports and occasionally sending questions through Carter. FDR solicited Hanfstaengl's ideas about how \"word could effectively be brought to reach the German people with the assurance that we do not propose a general massacre of Germans and that in future a peaceful German people can protect and improve their living standards.\" In response, Hanfstaengl suggested a broadcast to German soldiers by General Eisenhower or Marshall. The idea, which was never put into practice, was to plant the seeds for the German military to mount a coup against Hitler.\n\nIn his reports, Hanfstaengl often urged the United States to drop its demand for Germany's unconditional surrender. For example, in an analysis of one of Hitler's speeches he wrote that \"it is alone the 'unconditional surrender' clause which is in effect acting as a welcome corset in favor of the reeling Hitler regime, holding together what otherwise would burst asunder. That Hitler's days could be very substantially shortened by modifying the intransigence of this clause can be doubted by no one.\"\n\nHanfstaengl wrote a psychological profile of Hitler, spicing it up with salacious tidbits and speculation about the F\u00fchrer's sex life. Hitler had an erotic fascination with whips, and he had probably been infected with a venereal disease by a Jewish prostitute in Vienna in 1909, his former supporter and friend wrote. \"Real and complete sexual fulfillment\" was impossible for Hitler, and sexual frustration led him to \"into brooding isolation, and artificially dramatized public life.\" Hanfstaengl commented somewhat cryptically on \"rumors\" that \"Hitler's sexual life, such as it is, demands a unique performance on the part of the women, the exact nature of which is a state secret.\" The F\u00fchrer's combination of artistic sentiments and cruelty made him a hybrid of a romantic poet and a gangster, according to Hanfstaengl. \"He is a compound, say, of Lord Byron and Al Capone.\"\n\nWhen she heard about the Hitler profile, Tully knew Roosevelt would be interested. She arranged for a copy to be bound and delivered to the White House. As predicted, Roosevelt loved it, reading it in bed and advising Harry Hopkins and other White House officials to study it carefully for insights into Hitler.\n\nHanfstaengl also wrote profiles of four hundred \"key Nazis\" that were turned over to Army intelligence.\n\nIn December 1942, journalists at _Cosmopolitan_ magazine learned of Hanfstaengl's presence in the United States\u2014almost certainly from British intelligence\u2014and the broad outlines of his activities. _Cosmopolitan_ 's editor told Carter he planned to give the story to the virulently anti-Roosevelt Hearst newspapers. Carter convinced the editor to hold off until February 1. The State Department and White House agreed to Carter's plan to get in front of the story by issuing a press release on January 28. Carter contacted the columnist Dorothy Thompson; the foreign editor of the _New York Herald Tribune_ ; Henry Luce, the publisher of _Life_ , _Time_ , and _Fortune_ magazines; and several other journalists, persuading them all to spin the story in a way that was favorable to FDR.\n\nIncredibly, Carter himself broke the news in an article distributed by the North American Newspaper Alliance. Writing as if he had only recently learned the bare outlines of the story, Carter told his readers that the \"government is making public one of the best-kept secrets of its psychological warfare against Hitler and the Nazis, the fact that Dr. Ernst Sedgwick (Putzi) Hanfstaengl has been giving our government the lowdown on Hitlerism for several months.\" He added that \"details of the transfer from Canadian to American jurisdiction are still shrouded in official secrecy.\" The story ran in newspapers around the country, including on the front page of the _New York Times_.\n\nWhile the _Times_ didn't reveal Carter's role in the affair, other newspapers mentioned that he was involved in the operation. Carter lied to his colleagues, minimizing his role. If his fellow reporters knew anything about the other covert services Carter was providing the White House, or the existence of his intelligence unit, they kept the information to themselves.\n\nThe storm blew over quickly, but the publicity prompted an immediate and vociferous demand from the British government to return the prisoner.\n\nCarter had done just about everything he could think of to persuade Roosevelt to keep the S Project alive. On the morning of February 17, 1943, he stopped at St. Matthew's Cathedral on his way to the White House and said a prayer for Putzi, paused on the way out to drop a dollar bill into the Poor Box, and realized after it was too late to retrieve it that by mistake he'd deposited a five. It was, Carter confided to his diary, money well spent. When he arrived at the White House, Roosevelt said he would defy the British and hold onto Hanfstaengl. Carter drove out to Bush Hall with Field. \"Much jubilation, rum punch and congrats,\" Carter recorded in his diary.\n\nHanfstaengl's reports became increasingly unhinged from reality, featuring predictions that Germany would invade Spain, Nazi armies would occupy Sweden, and many other events that never transpired. Roosevelt rejected Hanfstaengl's requests for a personal meeting and ignored his fantasy of sitting down with both the president and Churchill to plan the post-war order.\n\nIn the summer of 1944, the British turned up the heat, threatening to leak information about the administration's treatment of Hanfstaengl to Roosevelt's Republican challenger. The threat of newspaper stories about the White House pampering a Nazi in a mansion with servants were the last straw. Any sentiment FDR may have felt toward Putzi was no match for the risk of losing an election. In any case, the president had dropped all thoughts of anything other than complete military victory over Germany, so the Nazi insider's views on strategies for provoking an uprising against Hitler were no longer of interest.\n\nOn June 28, 1944, Tully noted in a memo for the official files that \"The President directed me to notify Dr. Henry Field that he did not feel it was worthwhile to continue the Dr. S. project and therefore it will be terminated as of July 1.\" Tully repeated the message to Carter on July 7, prompting him to write a memo to FDR praising Hanfstaengl, saying his life would be in danger in England, and arguing that returning him would serve as a deterrent against any German in the future taking risks on behalf of the American government.\n\nRoosevelt was unmoved. The British and Canadian governments squabbled over which country should take him, delaying Hanfstaengl's departure. In the end, Roosevelt said, \"Hell, just put him on a plane and fly him over to England and turn him over. That's it.\" And on September 24, 1944, that's exactly what was done.\n\nTully's file note on the termination of the S Project included one bit of welcome news for Field and Carter. Roosevelt had approved continuation of the \"M Project,\" a secret study of options for post-war migration (hence \"M\") of the millions Europeans expected to be displaced by the war. FDR found time on the afternoon of July 30, 1942, in the midst of a schedule packed with meetings with Soviet ambassador Maxim Litvinov, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and General Arnold, to dictate a memo greenlighting the M Project:\n\nI love your memorandum of July thirtieth in regard to the multi-adjectived anthropologist. I think you are completely right. I know that you and Henry Field can carry out this project unofficially, exploratorially, ethnologically, racially, admixturally, miscegenationally, confidentially and, above all, budgetarily.\n\nAny person connected herewith whose name appears in the public print will suffer guillotinally.\n\nRoosevelt was expressing satisfaction with Carter's report on his visit with Ale\u0161 Hrdli\u010dka, curator of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Roosevelt had carried on a lively correspondence with Hrdli\u010dka for over a decade and had absorbed the scientist's theories about racial mixtures and eugenics. Roosevelt, the scion of two families that considered themselves American aristocrats, was especially attracted to Hrdli\u010dka's notions of human racial \"stock.\"\n\nA prominent public intellectual who had dominated American physical anthropology for decades, Hrdli\u010dka was convinced of the superiority of the white race and obsessed with racial identity. Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack he'd written to Roosevelt expressing the view that the \"less developed skulls\" of Japanese were proof that they were innately warlike and had a lower level of evolutionary development than other races. The president wrote back asking whether the \"Japanese problem\" could be solved through mass interbreeding.\n\nRoosevelt had asked Carter to recruit Hrdli\u010dka to head up a secret international committee of anthropologists that would study the \"ethnological problems anticipated in post-war population movements.\" Carter's report on the meeting, which prompted Roosevelt's effusive memo, called Hrdli\u010dka a \"stubborn, erudite, arrogant, charming, authoritarian, friendly, difficult, delightful old gentleman.\"\n\nOutlining the president's charge for the committee, Carter told Hrdli\u010dka it was expected to \"formulate agreed opinions as to problems arising out of racial admixtures and to consider the scientific principles involved in the process of miscegenation as contrasted with the opposing policies of so-called 'racialism.'\" The instructions were consistent with views Roosevelt had expressed for decades.\n\nIn 1925, while undergoing therapy for polio at Warm Springs, Georgia, FDR wrote a series of columns for the _Macon_ _Telegraph_ , including one that touched on his ideas about immigration. He praised elements of Canada's immigration policy, especially its regulations \"to prevent large groups of foreign born from congregating in any one locality.\" He added, \"If, twenty-five years ago, the United States had adopted a policy of this kind we would not have the huge foreign sections which exist in so many of our cities.\" The future president remarked that \"no sensible American wants this country to be made a dumping ground for foreigners of any nation, but it is equally true that there are a great many foreigners who, if they came here, would make exceedingly desirable citizens. It becomes, therefore, in the first place, a question of selection.\" Roosevelt informed his readers that \"a little new European blood of the right sort does a lot of good in every community.\"\n\nWhile the column doesn't define \"the right sort,\" it provides two examples of good emigrants, those from Southern Germany and Northern Italy. Roosevelt also expressed the opinion that \"for a good many years to come European immigration should remain greatly restricted,\" and that \"foreigners\" who had congregated in large American cities should be encouraged to disperse into the heartland. FDR apparently held onto these opinions when he moved into the White House. They may explain why he declined to intervene in the 1930s to lift or exploit loopholes in immigration caps that prevented Jews from escaping Nazi oppression, as well as his enthusiasm for the M Project.\n\nRoosevelt's goals for the committee were consistent with the views he had expressed in 1925. He wanted it to identify \"the vacant places of the earth suitable for post-war settlement\" and the \"type of people who could live in those places.\" Initial work was to focus on South America and Central Africa. Roosevelt wanted the committee to explore questions such as the probable outcomes from mixing people from various parts of Europe with the South American \"base stock.\"\n\nFDR asked the committee to consider some specific questions, such as: \"Is the South Italian stock\u2014say, Sicilian\u2014as good as the North Italian stock\u2014say, Milanese\u2014if given equal economic and social opportunity? Thus, in a given case, where 10,000 Italians were to be offer[ed] settlement facilities, what proportion of the 10,000 should be Northern Italians and what Southern Italian?\"\n\nRoosevelt \"also pointed out,\" Carter informed Hrdli\u010dka, \"that while most South American countries would be glad to admit Jewish immigration, it was on the condition that the Jewish group were not localized in the cities, they want no 'Jewish colonies,' 'Italian colonies,' etc.\" Keeping with this theme, the president also tasked the committee with determining how to \"resettle the Jews on the land and keep them there.\"\n\nHrdli\u010dka ultimately refused to participate in the M Project because Roosevelt wouldn't give him absolute control. Isaiah Bowman, president of Johns Hopkins University, was promoted from his role as a member of the committee to the head of the project. Roosevelt knew Bowman well and so was presumably aware of his anti-Semitic views. Bowman understood what Roosevelt was trying to achieve through the M Project. Years earlier, in November 1938, he had undertaken research for FDR about the prospects for European settlement in South America. Requesting the research, Roosevelt wrote to Bowman: \"Frankly, what I am rather looking for is the possibility of uninhabited or sparsely inhabited good agricultural lands to which Jewish colonies might be sent.\" Roosevelt added that \"such colonies need not be large but, in all probability, should be large enough for mutual cooperation and assistance\u2014say fifty to one hundred thousand people in a given area.\"\n\nThe M Project expanded far beyond Roosevelt's original charge, producing tens of thousands of pages of reports, maps, and charts analyzing the suitability of locations around the globe for settlement by Europeans who were expected to be displaced by the war, analyzing the characteristics of myriad racial and ethnic groups, and theorizing about optimal proportions in which to combine them in their new homelands.\n\nWhile settlement contingencies for a wide range of peoples were studied, when Roosevelt described the M Project to Churchill during a lunch at the White House in May 1943, he focused on one particular group. FDR described it as study about \"the problem of working out the best way to settle the Jewish question,\" Vice President Henry Wallace, who attended the meeting, recorded in his diary. The solution that the president endorsed, \"essentially is to spread the Jews thin all over the world,\" rather than allow them to congregate anywhere in large numbers.\n\nVery few people outside the team that produced the reports were allowed to see them and they had no discernable impact on policy decisions. In retrospect, the M Project's principal accomplishment was to shed light on FDR's thinking about race and immigration, and to illuminate the hubris of 1940s social scientists who believed they could and should decide the fate of millions without consulting either those who would be resettled or the people who would host them.\n\nWhen Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, his personal files contained over three thousand pages of correspondence with Carter, profiles of hundreds of Nazis that Hanfstaengl had compiled, plus the massive outpouring from the M Project. Carter wrote to Truman explaining his work for FDR, offering to continue his unit's covert activities, and urging the new president to fund completion of the M Project.\n\nTruman was deeply skeptical about the need for espionage or secret intelligence, and he had been informed by the State Department that the $10,000 per month that was being spent on the M Project was a waste of money. He terminated Carter's operations and cut off funding for the migration studies.\n\nFollowing the termination of his career as a secret agent, Carter continued to write newspaper and magazine articles and books, including one that included a brief description of his wartime work for Roosevelt.\n\nCarter resumed his relationship with the White House in the fall of 1948, when he was recruited as a speechwriter for a campaign that most observers had written off as quixotic. He traveled on Truman's \"whistle-stop\" tour and wrote or contributed to most of the major speeches Truman gave in the final months of the campaign. As always, Carter didn't feel any need to inform his readers that along with writing about the news, he was working behind the scenes to make it.\n\nPerhaps because he was on the right side of history, Carter has never been publicly criticized for his decisions to use journalism as a cover for spying or for deceiving his readers and colleagues by feigning objectivity about events in which he was secretly participating.\n\nOn November 28, 1967, at age seventy, Carter suffered a heart attack and died in his chair, behind a desk in his office in the National Press Building.\n\n#\n\nWorking from the offices of TASS, the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union, in New York and one floor above John Franklin Carter in the National Press Building, Vladimir Sergeyevich Pravdin did exactly what Carter only imagined he had accomplished. From the fall of 1941 to the summer of 1945, the Soviet intelligence officer used journalism as a cover for an effective espionage operation. Pravdin pulled it off because he was everything Carter wasn't: disciplined, tough, and above all ruthless. The contrasts between Carter and Pravdin exemplify the differences between professional spies who pretend to be journalists and journalists who moonlight as spies.\n\nAlthough the irony of a Soviet newsman's being named Pravdin, which means \"man of truth\" in Russian, must have occurred to American reporters and editors, given his serious demeanor it is unlikely that anyone joked with him about it. Pravdin wore the name like the suits he purchased on London's Regent Street. The name was comfortable because, like everything about his well-tailored persona, it was a lie.\n\nPravdin's real name was Roland Abbiate. He was born in England, the son of a French cellist from Monaco. When Abbiate was six, the family moved to the tsar's glittering capital, St. Petersburg, where his father joined the faculty of the conservatory. Abbiate left Russia in 1920 as a sixteen-year-old, living in Monte Carlo and Marseilles before arriving in New York in 1926. According to a Russian biography, he was a waiter at the Astoria Hotel on Times Square from 1926 to 1928. He actually did spend a few months working in New York hotels in 1926, but for most of his stay in New York Abbiate was an involuntary guest of the US government. He was arrested in April 1926 for impersonating an immigration officer and, after serving a two-year prison term, was deported to England.\n\nMen like Abbiate who were comfortable sliding between cultures and languages\u2014he spoke English, French, and Russian flawlessly\u2014were valuable to Moscow. Abbiate's sister had been recruited into the OGPU, Stalin's intelligence service, and he followed her into the service in 1931.\n\nAlways impeccably dressed and occasionally armed, fond of a good drink, capable of seducing women and of calmly extricating himself from mortal peril, Pravdin was a real-life James Bond, minus the wink and witty repartee. A short autobiography he submitted in 1944 to Moscow Center, as the intelligence service's personnel referred to its headquarters, reads like the resume of a character from a spy story.\n\n\"February 1935: was sent to Norway to determine the precise whereabouts of the Old Man; completed assignment in one month.\" The Old Man was Trotsky; locating him was the first step in a planned assassination.\n\n\"August 1936: Accompanied a ship carrying military equipment from Finland to Bilbao. In the English Channel, prevented transfer of the ship to Franco's naval forces by threatening the ship's captain with immediate execution.\" At the time, the Basque region was surrounded by Franco's forces and the port of Bilbao was a critical entry point for military supplies headed to the Republican government opposing Franco. Losing the ship would have been a blow to the Republicans, and a disaster for Abbiate, who would certainly have been imprisoned and would likely have been executed.\n\n\"February 1937: Was sent to the countryside with an assignment to liquidate Old Man; after failing to carry out the assignment, was recalled in May to fulfill another one.\" The \"countryside\" was Soviet intelligence's cover name for Mexico. Abbiate was one of many Soviet agents who attempted to penetrate Trotsky's inner circle. Three years later, one of them succeeded and plunged an ice pick into the Old Man's head.\n\n\"July 1937: On my own, tracked down and liquidated Raymond.\" Raymond was the cover name for Ignace Reiss, a Soviet intelligence officer who, disgusted by the execution of old Bolsheviks in the purges, had sent Stalin a letter returning his Order of the Red Banner medal, resigning from the NKVD, as OGPU had been renamed, and announcing his allegiance to Trotsky. Immediately after sending the letter, Reiss went into hiding from the assassins he knew Stalin would certainly send. The task of silencing his comrade fell to Abbiate. To set the trap, Abbiate seduced Reiss's one-time lover, Gertrude Schildbach, convincing the much-older woman that he had fallen madly in love with her and wanted to marry her. Acting on Abbiate's orders, Schildbach gave Reiss a box of strychnine-laced chocolates, but, fearing that Reiss's wife or child would be killed, she immediately snatched it back. Abbiate quickly improvised another plan, instructing Schildbach to lure Reiss to an isolated road in Switzerland where he \"liquidated\" the defector with a Soviet PPD-34 submachine gun. Reiss died with a lock of Schildbach's gray hair in his clenched fist.\n\nThe execution of Reiss had been conducted sloppily. In addition to recovering the poisoned chocolates, Swiss police found a blood-stained coat at the crime scene with a receipt from an upscale London tailor in the pocket made out to \"R. Abbiate.\" Abbiate and Schildbach eluded the police and made their way to Moscow. Her squeamishness over possibly poisoning an innocent woman and child was not appreciated in the Lubyanka. Instead of being rewarded with the romantic bliss Abbiate had promised, Schildbach was arrested and sent to a Siberian prison camp, while he was rewarded with a promotion.\n\nLookout notices for Abbiate had been posted to borders from Dover to Singapore, but as he'd never used it before, \"Pravdin\" was not among the five aliases listed on the bulletins.\n\nTraveling on a Soviet diplomatic passport and with credentials identifying him as an editor at TASS, the man known for the rest of his life as Vladimir Pravdin arrived in New York in September 1941. He quickly came to the FBI's attention. For the next four and a half years, the bureau was on the lookout for Abbiate and was also keeping an eye on Pravdin; it had no idea that they were the same person.\n\nBritish intelligence was also in the dark. At a time when Pravdin was known to members of British Security Coordination in New York, a British counterintelligence officer wrote a memo noting that Abbiate and another Soviet agent \"seem to have disappeared from human ken since they were involved in the murder of Reiss in 1937.\" The memo suggested removing Abbiate from a \"post-war black list,\" of individuals who were to be excluded from Britain when normal travel resumed. The recipient of this memo, a senior British intelligence officer named Kim Philby, must have been pleased. A longtime Soviet agent, Philby relished evidence of his British colleagues' cluelessness. Philby approved the proposal to strike Abbiate from the list.\n\nReturning to Manhattan, the city where he'd been arrested fifteen years earlier, marked a complete reversal of fortune for Pravdin. Now he was dining with the editor of the _New York Times_ and the chiefs of the Associated Press and United Press wire services in hotel restaurants like those where he'd once waited tables.\n\nIn January 1944, Pravdin was promoted to head of TASS operations in the United States and co-leader of the NKVD's US operations. He shared intelligence responsibilities with a twenty-nine-year-old officer who had little experience and, according to whingeing memos Pravdin sent to Moscow Center, very limited abilities. In April 1945 his rival was shipped off to San Francisco, and Pravdin was officially put in charge of Soviet intelligence in New York and Washington.\n\nPravdin traveled often to Washington, transforming the TASS bureau in the Press Building from a news-gathering organization that did some spying on the side into an intelligence operation that used journalism as a cover for espionage. The TASS men worked under stern photos of Lenin and Stalin in a single room on the top floor of the Press Building, certain the FBI was taping their phone and bugging the office. It isn't surprising that they didn't spend much time behind their desks, preferring to soak up whiskey and gossip at the Press Club bar, hang around the State Department press room, and attend White House briefings and congressional hearings.\n\nThe longtime TASS Washington bureau chief, Laurence Todd, was one of the most popular reporters in Washington. There is no evidence he was a Soviet intelligence agent, but he must have been aware of his colleagues' covert activities. Before joining TASS, Todd worked at a news service that was a front for Soviet espionage, and for decades at TASS Todd worked elbow-to-elbow with Soviet intelligence officers. His circle of close friends encompassed more than a dozen Americans who spied for Stalin, including several who were alarmingly indiscreet. Only an idiot would have been unaware that his colleagues and friends were stealing political and military secrets from the US government, and Todd wasn't an idiot. In November 1936 he was one of two Press Club members who correctly predicted the exact number of electoral votes Roosevelt would receive, and five years later he was the only member of the State Department press corps to pass an exam given to prospective Foreign Service officers.\n\nTodd and the other American journalists who reported to the TASS office in the National Press Building during World War II were on friendly terms with an impressive range of Washington insiders: reporters, editors, and publishers; diplomats; government officials; labor union and Democratic Party operatives; and, naturally, individuals who were openly or secretly members of the Communist Party of the United States.\n\nUnder Pravdin's leadership, the TASS bureau operated on two parallel tracks. In addition to cultivating sources who spoke with him and other TASS employees openly, treating them as legitimate reporters, Pravdin managed and recruited a roster of spies. He used the Press Building as a base for handling agents with positions in the White House, the Treasury and Justice Departments, as well as at the British embassy.\n\nThe Americans who spied for Stalin in Washington during Pravdin's tenure were motivated by a deep, almost religious faith in communism. From Pearl Harbor to the Japanese surrender they justified their actions by convincing themselves that while it was illegal, stealing secrets for an ally was honorable, even patriotic. This argument is contradicted by some uncomfortable facts: many had spied for the USSR during the time when Stalin and Hitler were allied, and those who were given the opportunity continued to spy after the war, when they believed violent conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was inevitable.\n\nIn addition to using employment at TASS as a cover, Soviet intelligence prioritized the recruitment of American journalists. In 1941, twenty-two of the NKVD's American agents were journalists. The only occupation to surpass journalism was engineering, with forty-nine agents stealing so much sensitive military technology that the Soviets worried they would run out of the 35mm film that was used to make copies.\n\nFew reporters have regular access to classified information, but many associate with individuals who generate and are privy to the nation's most closely guarded secrets. In addition to picking up information and insights from sources and providing expert commentary on politics, journalists are well-positioned to identify individuals who might be willing to betray their country.\n\nPravdin had talent-spotting in mind in the spring of 1944 when he transferred Samuel Krafsur, an American working in the TASS New York bureau, to the news agency's Washington office and recruited him as an NKVD agent. Krafsur had already risked his life for communism by volunteering as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a battalion of American communists, and being wounded in the Spanish Civil War. In a memo to Moscow Center, Pravdin wrote that Krafsur was \"absolutely devoted to the USSR\" and had provided a list of more than twenty potential recruits. Krafsur's \"extensive connections will give opportunities for obtaining valuable information and also of studying individual subjects for signing on\" as agents, Pravdin noted.\n\nEven more than their role as talent-spotters, journalists were valued as agents and sources because Moscow Center believed they had sensitive inside information that never made it into print. This was mostly wishful thinking. Then, as now, journalists generally published everything they knew\u2014and occasionally things they didn't know.\n\nOne exception to this rule Walter Lippmann, the most influential journalist in America. Lippmann aimed to influence, not just report on events, so he spent more time working behind the scenes shaping events than reporting on them. He was a confidant of presidents, prime ministers, senators, generals, and, above all, the elite that made and executed American foreign policy.\n\nRecognizing Lippmann's stature, the NKVD had recruited his personal secretary, Mary Price, as an agent in 1941. For two years she rifled his files, eavesdropped on his conversations, and scanned his correspondence, passing on everything of interest to the NKVD. By 1943 Price was burned out. Over the objections of Soviet intelligence officers, she resigned from undercover operations and started to work openly for organizations affiliated with the Communist Party of the United States of America.\n\nThe NKVD did not, however, lose access to Lippmann. To the service's surprise, Pravdin developed a close working relationship with the doyen of American journalism, whom the Soviets referred to by the cover name \"Imperialist.\" Pravdin's cover name was \"Sergey,\" a nod to his patronymic.\n\nA March 31, 1944, memo from the NKVD's New York station to Moscow Center described Pravdin's unlikely success in cultivating Lippmann:\n\nContrary to all expectations, the person with whom \"Sergey\" succeeded in achieving the biggest results in the task of establishing a good relationship was with \"Imperialist.\" The primary reason for this is the fact that \"Imperialist\" himself obviously was seeking to have connections with responsible representatives of our circles in the [United States]. He views the acquaintance with \"Sergey\" precisely in this light, and naturally he is attempting to use the acquaintance with him to determine our viewpoint on various issues of international politics. He is doing this, of course, very subtly, with the utmost tact. It should be recognized that, by attempting to draw \"Sergey\" into making candid comments, \"Imperialist\" is sharing his own information with him.\n\nThey met so regularly that in reports to Moscow Pravdin referred to his \"usual talks\" with Lippmann. Lippmann, a man who couldn't list humility among his virtues, must have thought he was in control of the situation. He was, after all, the most famous journalist in the English-speaking world, while as far as Lippmann knew Pravdin was merely the director of a second-rate news agency's US operations. In fact, Pravdin, a trained and hardened intelligence operative, had the upper hand. A man who could induce Schildbach to conspire to murder the only man who had loved her wouldn't find it difficult to seduce an American journalist into telling him more than he should.\n\nReports the two men filed in confidence after one of their long, chatty meetings in May 1944 illuminates their relationship. After the lunch, Lippmann called Joseph Grew, a senior State Department official, to pass on information he'd acquired from Pravdin. Lippmann told Grew that the USSR had territorial ambitions in Port Arthur, in Manchuria. Pravdin had also confided that the Soviet Union was concerned about how the United States would perceive its support for communists in China. Grew, who had been US ambassador to Japan at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, sent a report on Lippmann's account of Pravdin's unsurprising comments to the secretary of state.\n\nPravdin's report to Moscow about the same lunch suggests that he got much more from the conversation. Lippmann had told him that the US military leadership was confident of the success of the coming invasion of Europe, and that officials in Washington had assured Eisenhower that sufficient trained reserves were available to ensure reinforcement of the invading forces. Lippmann described Anglo American relations, reporting to his Soviet acquaintance that Undersecretary of State Edward Stettinius had told him that Churchill initially opposed the Americans' invasion plans but had come around to supporting them. Lippmann passed along Washington's views on Soviet-Polish relations, advising that Moscow give up its claims to Lvov; described confidential conversations he'd had with US ambassador to the USSR W. Averell Harriman about the Soviet Union's entry into the war with Japan; and reported that the United States expected to seize the Philippines, Formosa, and Singapore by the end of the year.\n\nIn December 1944 Lippmann told Pravdin about private conversations he'd had in Europe with General Dwight Eisenhower about American military plans. The US Army, Lippmann said, was planning a \"breakthrough onto the left bank of the Rhine in the middle of January\" and assuming it would coincide with a Soviet offensive in Poland heading toward Krakow.\n\nWhile signing up Lippmann as a witting Soviet agent was out of the question, recruiting or, more accurately, re-recruiting the journalist I. F. Stone, the Washington editor of the _Nation_ magazine, was very much on the NKVD's agenda. The two men were, by temperament and political affinity, polar opposites.\n\nLippmann was conservative and elitist, an assimilated Jew who so thoroughly embodied the establishment that he advocated limiting the number of Jews admitted to Harvard. He was worshipped at the Press Club, while Stone was merely tolerated there\u2014and only until 1943. That's when he invited an African American attorney to a club luncheon. Management refused to serve them; it might not be able to bar a black man from sitting in the ballroom, but the Press Club certainly wasn't going to feed him. Unable to persuade more than nine club members to protest against its adherence to Washington's Jim Crow traditions, Stone resigned from the Press Club and denounced it in the pages of the _Nation_.\n\nIn September 1944 Pravdin and Krafsur tried several times to approach Stone to propose that he resume spying for the Soviet Union, but each time he brushed them off. Pravdin finally met privately with Stone in October and made the pitch. According to Pravdin's account of the conversation, Stone said he'd like to help out, and that he had been avoiding the Soviets only because their approaches weren't sufficiently discreet. Stone indicated that he wasn't averse to the NKVD's topping off the salary he earned from the _Nation_. His circumstances, however, had changed since he had worked for Soviet intelligence in the 1930s. Now he was a family man with three children and a substantial income. Pravdin requested resources from Moscow to facilitate the \"establishment of business contact\" with Stone.\n\nBased on the information that has leaked from the KGB's files, it isn't clear whether Stone was put back on the NKVD payroll, but it is certain that he stayed in touch with Pravdin after the Soviet intelligence officer indicated he was an intelligence officer seeking secret information. Washington's loudest whistleblower, a man who made a career ferreting out malfeasance and hypocrisy, felt no need to inform his readers that the Soviet Union was trying to recruit him and other journalists as spies.\n\nWhile Stone didn't have access to secrets, the most important agent Pravdin recruited, Judith Coplon, routinely handled classified information that was of great importance to Soviet intelligence. A twenty-seven-year-old Barnard College graduate who worked for the Department of Justice, Coplon was brought to the NKVD's attention in 1943 by another Barnard alumna, Flora Wovschin. Wovschin was working at the Office of War Information and living with Yuri Okov, an employee of the Soviet consulate who happened to be an officer of the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. A memo in the NKVD files noted that when Wovschin became pregnant, Okov paid half the cost of an abortion, and that she frequently visited the Soviet consulate.\n\nCoplon gave confidential information from her job at the Department of Justice's economic intelligence unit to Wovschin, who told her that the secrets would be passed on to the Communist Party of the United States. Coplon was delighted and excited to be helping the cause. Unaware that Wovschin, following instructions from her Soviet friends, had broken off contact with the Communist Party, Coplon was anxious to deepen her commitment by joining the party.\n\nThe US government had a strict ban on employing Communist Party members. Although many civil servants hid their party membership, the NKVD was worried that the Justice Department would find out if Coplon joined. Not only would she be fired, but the resulting investigation could ensnare Wovschin and others. Writing to Moscow Center in February 1944, an NKVD officer in New York warned that if Coplon wasn't recruited soon and instructed in tradecraft, \"it is not out of the question that she will feel so weighed down by being cut off from the local progressive movement that she will decide to officially join the local fellowcountryman organization and then she will be lost to us.\" \"Fellowcountrymen\" was a cover name for the Communist Party.\n\nThe NKVD's requests to Moscow became more insistent. In July 1944 an officer in New York warned that Coplon \"is talking more and more often about her desire to establish direct contact with the fellowcountrymen. It is urgent that she be recruited\" and instructed to avoid contact with the party.\n\nTo head off the threat and recruit her as an agent, Pravdin met Coplon on January 4, 1945. He was impressed. \"There is no question about the sincerity of her desire to work with us,\" Pravdin reported. \"In the process of the conversation [Coplon] stressed how much she appreciates the trust placed in her and that, knowing whom she is working for, from now on she will redouble her efforts.\"\n\nHer position gave Coplon access to information that was interesting to Soviet intelligence but not compelling. Pravdin's confidence in her, however, was soon rewarded. The Justice Department shifted Coplon to a department that reviewed foreign agent registration documents, a job that required access to classified FBI counterintelligence files. At first she worked on cases involving France, but she was quickly transferred to the department's top priority, the Soviet Union. The Justice Department even paid for her to take Russian classes.\n\nPravdin warned Coplon to avoid removing documents from the office until she was completely trusted. She ignored the admonition, bringing a cache of documents to Pravdin soon after their first meeting. Don't worry, she told him: no one was watching her or her co-workers, sensitive files were strewn around the office where anyone could look at them, and employees were not searched when they exited the building.\n\nBecause it was far easier to prove that spies had failed to register as foreign agents than to catch them red-handed committing espionage, investigating and prosecuting violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act was a common counterintelligence tool. As part of her job, Coplon received\u2014and passed to the NKVD\u2014information about FBI spy-catching methods and details of its investigations of suspected Soviet spies. The NKVD warned its agents to break-off contact with several individuals after Coplon revealed they were under investigation. Her information prevented the FBI from identifying numerous Soviet spies.\n\nEven with the benefit of Coplon's access to information about FBI investigations of Soviet espionage, Pravdin found the task of maintaining operational security immensely challenging and nerve-wracking. He inherited sprawling networks of spies populated almost entirely by Americans who were secret members of the Communist Party. Pravdin's predecessors had given these agents freedom to operate in ways that violated the most basic precepts of Soviet intelligence doctrine and common sense. For example, in March 1945 Moscow Center reacted with alarm to its officers' failure to control Wovschin, who was known by the cover name \"Zora.\" Instructions were sent to \"immediately and in detail enlighten our liaison about the serious mistakes he has committed in the work with 'ZORA.' As an ultimatum warn ZORA that if she does not carry out our instructions and if she undertakes steps without our consent, we shall immediately terminate all relations with her. Forbid ZORA to recruit all her acquaintances one after the other.\" The memo cited security risks posed by Wovschin's activities as an illustration of not only the NKVD's failure to adequately control and educate its agents, \"but also the lack of understanding by our operational workers of the most elementary rules in our work.\"\n\nLoose lips and sloppy tradecraft made it inevitable that eventually one of the many agents operating in Washington would be discovered. Agents from different networks socialized and discussed their espionage activities with each other and kept incriminating materials in their homes. Because they knew each other's identities, if a single spy were compromised or defected, the FBI could quickly learn about the activities of scores of spies. Pravdin was horrified to learn that some of his agents were so undisciplined that they attempted to recruit friends and relatives, revealing their connections with Soviet intelligence to individuals who had not been cleared by Moscow.\n\nJust as troubling for Pravdin, many of the agents working for Soviet intelligence in Washington were emotionally unstable. The NKVD's messages to Moscow Center were filled with accounts of personal and professional jealousies, bickering, adulterous affairs, even a m\u00e9nage \u00e0 trois. The entire edifice was resting on a house of cards that could be toppled by the slightest wind.\n\nAfter one particularly frustrating meeting with an agent in Washington, Pravdin wrote a bitter memo to Moscow Center complaining that American communists \"are always ready to promise the moon in words, but never carry out our assignments if they require effort and time.\"\n\nThis was an exaggeration. Although they lacked the discipline and work ethic that Pravdin expected, the agents he was responsible for in Washington and throughout the country produced a continuous, valuable stream of high-level intelligence. During Pravdin's tenure as co-director or head of NKVD operations in the United States, the service's spies obtained technical data that accelerated the Soviet Union's acquisition of atomic weapons and jumpstarted its development of radar, jet aircraft, and a host of other modern military technologies. On the political side, Stalin was briefed about secret deliberations in the White House, Pentagon, American intelligence services, and State Department. He knew about Roosevelt's conversations and conflicts with Churchill, American and British plans for winning the war and for dealing with their vanquished enemies, and their attitudes toward the Soviet Union.\n\nIn addition to recruiting agents and supervising the work of NKVD officers who ran clandestine networks, Pravdin debriefed valuable agents who had been serving the Soviet cause for many years. He met in the summer of 1944 with one of the NKVD's top sources, an Englishman named Donald Maclean. The son of a former cabinet member and a graduate of Cambridge, Maclean was the embodiment of the British establishment. At Cambridge he had been recruited into the USSR's most devastatingly effective spy ring along with Kim Philby and four others. The Cambridge spy ring penetrated the highest echelons of British government and society.\n\nWhen Pravdin met with Maclean, he had been posted to Washington as first secretary in the British embassy. This position gave him\u2014and the NKVD\u2014access to high-level diplomatic intelligence, especially about the Anglo American relationship, a topic of importance as Stalin schemed to peel back the strong bond between Roosevelt and Churchill. Maclean's work facilitating cooperation on atomic weapons between the United States and the UK also provided access to information of great value to the USSR.\n\nPravdin debriefed some of Soviet intelligence's most productive American spies. For example, he traveled in May 1945 to San Francisco, ostensibly to report for TASS on a conference where the treaty creating the United Nations was being negotiated, but actually to meet with an NKVD agent, Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury. White, a senior advisor to the US delegation, told Pravdin that President Truman and Secretary of State Stettinius \"want to achieve the success of the conference at any price.\" If pushed, he revealed, they would be willing to give the Soviet Union a veto over UN actions. This and other inside information White provided to Pravdin put the USSR at an advantage in negotiations with the American and British governments.\n\nPravdin received a rare rebuke from Moscow Center in May 1945. His decision to hire William Dodd Jr., to work as a reporter for TASS at its Press Building bureau without seeking approval from Moscow had been a mistake. Dodd was the son of the former US ambassador to Nazi Germany. His work for TASS had been reported in newspapers, attracting unwanted attention to the news agency. He had been identified as a potential recruit by I. F. Stone in 1936 and recruited as an espionage agent in 1938 by his sister, Margaret Dodd.\n\nThe NKVD secretly gave Dodd $1,000 in 1938 (equal to about $17,000 in 2017) to finance his unsuccessful effort to unseat a conservative Democratic member of Congress in Virginia. Moscow Center was so enthused by the notion that it could subsidize a congressional candidate that it sent a message to NKVD officers in New York asking for a budget estimate for a comprehensive program aimed at electing a slate of pro-Soviet politicians. The Soviet officer assigned the task threw up his hands, complaining that it was impossible to know how much it would cost to fund campaigns and pay off journalists; doing it right might require $1 million a year for each politician.\n\nIn December 1939, Dodd, who had been assigned the cover name \"President,\" asked Moscow to help him purchase the _Blue Ridge Herald_ newspaper to support his plan to run for Congress again. \"The direction of the newspaper will depend entirely on us,\" an NKVD officer in New York reported. \"We will work out every detail of the newspaper's agenda with 'President.'\" The Soviets planned to mask their involvement by ensuring that the paper hewed to a moderate editorial line. \"It should not be too left-wing, and it should not be pro-Soviet\u2014nor, it goes without saying, should it be anti-Soviet.\" The goal was a \"moderately liberal local newspaper with a direct connection to liberal Washington journalists.\" Moscow Center allocated $3,500 for the purchase, $1,500 short of the amount Dodd needed. He neither purchased the paper nor ran in the 1940 primary.\n\nDodd kept in touch with Soviet intelligence, providing interesting bits of information but nothing of great value. In 1943, while working in a midlevel job at the Federal Communications Commission, he was called before a House committee that was investigating communist subversion. In a muddled performance at a public hearing, he disavowed all connection with or sympathy for communism but also admitted that he'd written several pro-communist magazine articles. Moscow Center wrote a scathing review of his performance, telling its officers in New York that Dodd had \"conducted himself in a foolish and sometimes disgraceful manner.\" Congress forced the FCC to fire Dodd.\n\nDodd's decision to take a job at TASS in 1945 amounted to a public advertisement that he was indeed a communist. Moscow Center, irritated by his bungling congressional testimony and seeking to avoid unwanted attention to its espionage activities, instructed Pravdin to fire Dodd.\n\nWhile Pravdin and his comrades had achieved incredible access to American secrets, information from Coplon and other sources made Soviet spymasters uneasy. Hints of danger had been filtering into the Lubyanka for some time. In the spring of 1944, the NKVD learned from one of its agents, Lauchlin Currie, a senior assistant to Roosevelt, that American codebreakers were on the verge of decrypting high-level Soviet cables.\n\nIn February 1945, Wovschin set off alarms in Moscow Center when she revealed that American counterintelligence knew some of the cover names the Soviets used in their encrypted communications, such as Bank (State Department), House (Moscow Center), and Club (Department of Justice). The NKVD changed its cover names and continued to try to impose discipline on its unruly volunteer spies.\n\nPravdin's biggest security headache was Elizabeth Bentley. Bentley, whose Russian cover name was _umnitsa_ or \"clever girl,\" had been the courier, assistant, and lover of Jacob Golos, the most important Soviet spy handler in the United States in the 1930s and early 1940s. Golos (\"voice\") was an alias. His real name was Jacob Reizen. Starting in the early 1930s, Golos forged tight links between Soviet intelligence and the Communist Party of the United States, operating for years with loose direction from Moscow. His romantic relationship with Bentley, whom he met after recruiting her as an agent, was among Golos's many violations of tradecraft rules.\n\nThe FBI had missed an opportunity to catch Bentley. When Pravdin first arrived in New York, the bureau took an interest in his wife, Olga Pravdina, tailing her for several months before deciding she was nothing more than an overweight housewife. If the G-men who followed her to grocery stores and movie theaters, describing her as \"quite heavy set\" and recording that she \"has big feet and wears flat heeled shoes,\" had been more persistent about tracking her activities and less fixated on her appearance, they might have discovered that in April 1942 Pravdina started meeting with Bentley.\n\nFollowing Golos's death in November 1943, Moscow Center told Pravdin to split up the agent networks that she handled and bring them under the control of trained, disciplined handlers. Bentley bitterly resisted demands to turn over agents to professionals who had been sent from Moscow, and quickly came to despise and fear the rough-edged Russian NKVD officers who insisted on cutting her off from the tasks that made her life meaningful. Fortified by several dry martinis, in September 1945 Bentley told an NKVD officer exactly what she thought of him and his colleagues, referring to them as \"gangsters.\" She threatened to reveal all that she knew to the FBI. After sobering up, Bentley realized she'd made a serious, possibly fatal mistake. She knew of at least one American woman who had been \"liquidated\" by Soviet intelligence and feared similar retribution.\n\nThe NKVD did consider killing her but decided that less extreme measures\u2014giving her a few thousand dollars, finding her a job and perhaps a husband\u2014would suffice. These tactics might have worked, but the combination of a romantic encounter with a man who falsely claimed to be an FBI agent and a dispute over money with the Communist Party pushed Bentley over the edge. Convinced that the FBI was poised to swoop in any minute and that the Soviets would kill her if she didn't reconcile with the NKVD, Bentley decided it was time to choose sides.\n\nBentley later said that God had spoken to her, but it seems more likely that she analyzed her options and decided that a jail cell was more attractive than a coffin. In long sessions over fourteen days between November 9 and 29, she gave the FBI a detailed and fairly accurate picture of Soviet espionage networks in Washington and New York, prevaricating only to spare some agents whom she considered friends. On the 30th, she signed a 105-page statement that identified many of the Soviet Union's most valuable American agents and included leads that could allow the FBI to identify more.\n\nBentley's information was compelling, but she had no documentary evidence; in a courtroom it would be the word of a woman who could easily be depicted as hysterical or unhinged against sworn denials by men who had sterling reputations.\n\nTo gather evidence to support prosecutions, the FBI decided to turn Bentley into a double agent. Making statements in the privacy of the FBI's Manhattan offices was one thing, but meeting face-to-face with the men and women she was betraying was a far more daunting and unpleasant task. It was, however, an offer Bentley could not refuse. Having confessed to committing espionage during wartime, a crime punishable by death, Bentley felt she had to do whatever the FBI asked.\n\nThe plan might have worked if the FBI had implemented it properly. Ironically, it was disrupted by a mistake made by none other than J. Edgar Hoover. Recognizing the importance of Bentley's information, the FBI director had imposed restrictions on communicating about her identity, which were intended to prevent leaks. He even ordered the bureau to refer to her by a male cover name, \"Gregory.\" Contrary to his own strict instructions, Hoover discussed the case with someone who did not have an absolute \"need to know,\" William Stephenson, the head of British Security Coordination. By November 20, roughly in the middle of her first round of FBI debriefings, news of Bentley's defection traveled from Stephenson to Philby, the NKVD's agent in British intelligence. Philby immediately conveyed the news to Moscow.\n\nOn Thanksgiving Day, eight days before Bentley signed her statement, and before the FBI deployed her as a double agent, Pravdin received an encrypted message from Moscow Center: Bentley \"has betrayed us.\" The Soviets knew that Bentley's information would allow the FBI to capitalize on the shortcuts and mistakes they had made in the United States over the previous decade. Scores of agents were at risk of detection and arrest. The espionage edifice Pravdin had been desperately trying to fortify had collapsed, but the tip-off that originated with Hoover allowed Pravdin and his comrades to protect their agents from being crushed in the rubble.\n\nPravdin was instructed to \"take the appropriate precautionary measures,\" such as establishing passwords and methods of contact for the future, then break-off contact with all American agents.\n\nBentley had identified Pravdina as a Soviet intelligence officer, prompting the FBI to assign a team of G-men to resume its surveillance. It was too late. Pravdin had already warned Bentley's contacts that she had switched sides, and he and his wife had ceased communicating with American agents. Because the Soviets acted quickly, Bentley's information, which could have put scores of Soviet spies in prison, resulted in only one successful prosecution, of a government economist named William Remington.\n\nWhile complete disaster had been averted, the era of virtually unfettered access to American secrets was over. Soviet intelligence had many successes over the coming decades, but it never came close to achieving the depth of penetration of the US government, military, and industry that it had during World War II.\n\nPravdin, Pravdina, and their daughter sailed from New York on the _Kirov_ on March 11, 1946. Blamed for the collapse of the Soviet Union's American networks, and under suspicion as a foreigner, Pravdin was fired the next year. He committed suicide in Moscow in 1970.\n\nMoscow Center had been warning its officers in the United States since 1941 that the FBI was bugging their offices and tapping their phones. The alarm had turned out to be premature, but by the time Pravdin departed the FBI was doing this and more. The bureau tapped the TASS office phone lines in the basement of the Press Building and photographed envelopes before the mail was delivered. It recruited a building maintenance worker who collected the TASS office's trash every evening and handed it over to agents in the FBI's Washington Field Office who had the unenviable job of sorting through the cigarette butts, chewing gum, and paper scraps for clues. Before TASS moved its desks and photos of Lenin and Stalin to larger offices on the ninth floor in 1947, the FBI obtained a key to its new suite and a copy of the floor plan, and made sure that their surveillance of the news agency's mail and trash was not interrupted.\n\nIn early 1948 the NKVD gradually and carefully began reactivating agents who hadn't been compromised by Bentley. Just as it looked like the situation had stabilized, however, another typhoon struck.\n\nAn American NKVD agent who was working as a linguist for a US Army codebreaking operation, William Weisband, told his Russian handler in February 1948 that the Americans were making great progress in decoding and decrypting the Soviet Union's most sensitive communications. Weisband had literally peered over the shoulder of American codebreakers as they read portions of cables sent during the war between Moscow Center and the NKVD's New York station. Separately, in 1949, Philby, who had been posted to Washington as liaison between British foreign intelligence and the FBI, learned the details of the decryption program, which came to be known by the cover name \"Venona.\"\n\nThe NKVD's use of cover names meant that decrypting cables was only the first step toward identifying Soviet agents. In December 1948, the FBI made the first of what ended up being hundreds of identifications. The bureau didn't have to go far to find the spy. It was Coplon.\n\nThe FBI put Coplon under surveillance and fed her documents that were certain to be of great interest in the Lubyanka. Coplon took the bait, bringing the secret counterintelligence files to New York. She was arrested moments after passing them to a Soviet diplomat in March 1949. To Hoover's immense frustration, although there was no doubt of her guilt, Coplon walked away from two trials after convictions for espionage and conspiracy were overturned on legal technicalities. Even more troubling to Hoover, the FBI had been forced to acknowledge that it had illegally tapped Coplon's phone.\n\nCoplon ended up running two Mexican restaurants in New York that during the Cold War attracted both FBI agents and KGB officers hoping to catch a glimpse of the spy who got away. She married her defense attorney and never spoke in public or with her family about her involvement with Soviet espionage.\n\nStories about Bentley's revelations, the Coplon prosecutions, and other spy cases heralded the beginning of the Cold War and sparked a search for communist infiltrators.\n\nMoscow Center decided it needed to get a firmer grip on its Press Building outpost. Todd was demoted to senior correspondent in 1949 when a Russian NKVD officer, Mikhail Fedorov, replaced him as bureau chief. The Army's Venona decryptions had rendered Krafsur useless as an agent so the NKVD had TASS fire him. Todd was unceremoniously put out to pasture two years later.\n\nThe Washington press corps tolerated but did not hide their distaste for the Soviets who stepped into the positions once held by Todd and Krafsur. The two congenial Americans had been replaced by sour foreigners who religiously attended White House and State Department press conferences but never asked questions, and who took great umbrage at suggestions that they were propagandists or spies.\n\nWashington reporters' already dim view of their TASS colleagues darkened considerably in April 1951, when William Oatis, an Associated Press reporter, was arrested in Prague. Czechoslovakia resisted American demands to release Oatis, tortured him into confessing to espionage, and put him on trial. Actually, Oatis was \"tried\" several times, undergoing four or five dress rehearsals with real judges and prosecutors and an audience of carefully chosen government officials. Oatis didn't know until it was over if a given performance was a real trial or a rehearsal. The procedure ensured that when journalists and government officials came to watch the actual trial, Oatis and witnesses recited the lines they'd been fed. It also minimized the chances that they would ad lib or slip in anything unexpected. Oatis was convicted on July 4, 1951, and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment.\n\nCalls for reciprocation and revenge rang out from the barstools in the Press Club Tap Room to the halls of Congress. Politicians demanded that Soviet bloc journalists be expelled from the United States, or at least that their government-issued press credentials and privileges be revoked. To increase the pressure on Czechoslovakia, the FBI raided the TASS offices in New York and the Press Building, asserting the government's right to inspect business records to confirm that the news agency was complying with the Foreign Agents Registration Act.\n\nThe Press Club denounced the Czech government and demanded that it release Oatis. The statement wasn't sufficient for some of its members, who agitated for throwing the TASS men out. Resistance to erecting an Iron Curtain around the club came from an unlikely source: _New York Daily News_ reporter Frank Holeman, chairman of the club's Board of Governors. Holeman, a pal of Vice President Richard Nixon's, had no sympathy for communism. A young man with a quick wit and an abiding confidence in the value of fair play, he did, however, believe in the inalienable right of reporters to swap lies over the rims of alcoholic beverages.\n\nIt was certainly difficult to argue that allowing Soviets to enjoy the benefits of Press Club membership presented a national security risk. Nothing discussed in its bar stayed secret long. In those days, as Holeman remembered decades later, the club was a colorful mix of \"people who could recite Beowulf and people who knew exactly which horse was running at the fifth race at Hialeah and what his chances were.\" It was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with a bar that was supposed to close at 2:00 a.m. but sometimes stayed open much later. Most nights three or four men could be found snoring in the library's overstuffed chairs, and at least one remittance man made the club his home, rarely venturing beyond its front door.\n\n#\n\nNational Press Club members at rest. In the 1950s and 1960s, Press Club members often used its comfortable chairs to recuperate after an evening at its bar.\n\nCredit: National Press Club archives\n\nHoleman won the battle to ensure that TASS employees and Soviet embassy staff retained the right to wander through the blue cigar haze of the Press Club's cardroom, hear from heads of state at its formal luncheons, and enjoy the opportunity to buy a drink on Sundays, when every other bar in town was closed. To show his appreciation, the press attach\u00e9 invited Holeman to a lunch at the Soviet embassy. Over vodka, caviar, and _blinis_ , Holeman was introduced to Georgi Nikitovich Bolshakov, a GRU officer who had replaced Fedorov as TASS bureau chief.\n\nBolshakov had spent a decade in military intelligence before being posted to Washington, but he wasn't stamped from the standard Soviet intelligence officer mold. Armed with self-deprecating humor and an irrepressible smile, he was the first Soviet journalist-spy in Washington since Vladimir Romm left in 1936 possessing the self-confidence to socialize with American reporters. Bolshakov owed his position to his friendship with Khrushchev's son-in-law, Aleksei Adzhubei, and had served as a personal assistant to Soviet marshal Georgi Zhukov. He had the easy manner of a man comfortable around power.\n\nThough they were an unlikely couple, Holeman, who hid his hardscrabble roots behind a patrician persona and a bow tie, developed a tight bond with Bolshakov. The American newsman told Nixon about his comrade, and the vice president, eager for insight into Soviet politics and personalities, encouraged the friendship. For four years, Holeman peppered Bolshakov with questions about the Soviet Union, including some Nixon had suggested, and passed on the gist of the Russian's answers to a politician who had built his career on hardline anti-communism. Bolshakov, his superiors, and Khrushchev knew that his comments were being passed to the vice president.\n\nLike other intelligence officers posted to the TASS office, Bolshakov had to perform his cover job and live on a TASS salary. This was intended to maintain the fiction that they were reporters, give them legitimate reasons to contact potential recruits, and make it somewhat more difficult for the FBI to distinguish between the \"clean\" TASS employees who worked exclusively as journalists and professional intelligence officers. Bolshakov wrote stories chronicling the history of American race riots and other sordid sides of life in the United States.\n\nJust before Bolshakov's scheduled return to Moscow in 1955, he introduced Holeman to another GRU officer, Yuri Gvozdev, who was posing as a cultural officer in the embassy. Holeman's role expanded from friend and drinking companion to secret intermediary. He conveyed messages from Gvozdev, which he believed came from Khrushchev or those close to the premier, to Nixon, and Nixon used Holeman to send messages back to the Soviet leadership. Both sides felt they benefited from an informal exchange of views, unencumbered by the need to clear their messages with bureaucrats or to formulate them in the bone-dry language of diplomacy. The _Daily News_ essentially gave Holeman a year-long sabbatical when he was elected president of the Press Club in 1956, so he had plenty of time to cement his relationships with Soviet intelligence operatives and with Nixon.\n\nDuring crises, the messages Holeman communicated between the Soviet and American governments were urgent and specific. For example, in February 1958 Gvozdev asked Holeman how the United States would respond if Moscow's ally, Syria, moved troops into Lebanon. Holeman conveyed Nixon's response: \"Stop at the Lebanon border or you'll be in real trouble.\" That summer, after Eisenhower sent troops to defend Lebanon, it was Gvozdev's turn to warn the United States to back off. The Soviets would interpret the movement of US or British troops toward Iraq as a provocation, he said. If it felt threatened, the Soviet Union would attack the United States, not its allies in Europe or the Middle East, Gvozdev told Holeman.\n\nHoleman also passed on a message that was intended to avoid an armed confrontation in the heart of Europe. In November 1958 Khrushchev issued a public ultimatum: the United States, Britain, and France had six months to withdraw their forces from Berlin. The implication was that if they failed to do so, the Soviets would impose a blockade. West Berlin's population had grown too large for a repeat of the 1948 airlift. The use of force to get food to the city could quickly spin out of control. In Washington and Moscow, it seemed that if there was going to be a third world war, Berlin is where it would start.\n\nHoleman carried a message to Nixon from Khrushchev: contrary to the bellicose ultimatum, the Soviet Premier had no intention of starting a war over Berlin. Back channels like the Gvozdev-Holeman connection allowed leaders of the superpowers to gain understanding of each other's intentions at a time when a false move by either side could have triggered World War III. As soon as the Berlin situation calmed, Gvozdev enlisted Holeman to facilitate a visit by Nixon to the Soviet Union. The negotiations were successful and the vice president made the trip in July 1959, famously debating Khrushchev at an exhibit about American daily life in Moscow's Sokolniki Park.\n\n#\n\nFrank Holeman, _New York Daily News_ reporter and intermediary between Soviet military intelligence officers and senior US government officials.\n\nSource: National Press Club archives\n\nThe _New York Daily_ news reporter told Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, that the Soviets didn't believe that he was simply a reporter. He joked with her that she should call him \"Frank Holeman, boy spy.\" While Holeman didn't work for either American or Soviet intelligence, he was trusted by both the White House and the Kremlin. The temptation for Holeman, a tabloid reporter who had dedicated his life to breaking news, to reveal the secrets he'd learned must have been tremendous. Yet throughout the Cold War, during the countless hours he spent telling stories at the Press Club bar, and in articles he wrote for the _Daily News_ , Holeman never even hinted at his role as a covert communications link between the United States and Soviet leadership.\n\nBy the end of the Eisenhower administration Holeman had conveyed messages that helped defuse some of the most dangerous confrontations of the Cold War.\n\nHe was, however, just getting started. After the election of John F. Kennedy, Holeman's life became far more interesting.\n\n#\n\nFrank Holeman earned his stripes as a \"boy spy\" during the Cuban missile crisis. As the drama in the Caribbean uncoiled over the last two weeks of October 1962, President John Kennedy and his top advisors called on him and other reporters in the National Press Building to serve as back channels to communicate secretly with Soviet intelligence services and, through them, to the Kremlin. In parallel with these semi-official interactions, Soviet intelligence officers based in the Press Building desperately tried to gather intelligence from American journalists. The muddled messages that emerged included a shard of a conversation that flew off a Press Club barstool into the hands of a KGB officer and landed in the Kremlin at a critical moment, helping persuade Nikita Khrushchev to pull the world back from the brink of catastrophe.\n\nLike many crises, this one started with admonitions to remain calm and assertions that everything was under control.\n\nOn the evening of Monday, October 15, Edwin Martin, the secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs, stood at a podium in the Press Club and assured reporters that Soviet military activity in Cuba was of little concern to the United States government. \"As the President has said, this military buildup is basically defensive in character and would not add more than a few hours to the time required to invade Cuba successfully if that should become necessary,\" he said.\n\nA waiter who had been hovering a few feet from the podium handed Martin a note as soon as he finished the speech: \"Call the White House. Ask for your signal. Telephone number NA 8-1414.\" Martin finished his dinner, left the club and stopped at a telephone booth. Martin's call was transferred to Roger Hilsman, head of intelligence at the State Department. Hilsman's terse comment was as clear to Martin as it would have been incomprehensible to anyone listening in: \"The pictures that were taken Sunday show those things. Start thinking. We will be seeing the President in the morning.\"\n\nMartin knew that Hilsman was referring to pictures that had been taken by a U-2 reconnaissance plane over Cuba, and that \"those things\" must be Soviet nuclear missiles. He also knew that it meant that United States and the Soviet Union were on the brink of a nuclear conflict that could kill hundreds of millions and leave much of the planet a smoldering ruin that would be uninhabitable for centuries.\n\nThe story of the roles journalists and spies played in creating and defusing the crisis started six months earlier, at 4:00 p.m. on May 9, 1961, when Holeman placed a call from his Press Building office to the Soviet embassy. He had been calling the embassy since noon asking for Georgi Bolshakov. Bolshakov, a colonel in the GRU who Holeman had befriended when he was running the TASS bureau, had returned to Washington in the fall of 1959, this time based in the embassy as press attach\u00e9, and had resumed his friendship with the _New York Daily News_ reporter. When Holeman finally reached him, the Russian explained that he'd been at a print shop proofreading galleys of an issue of the slick propaganda magazine _USSR_. Holeman invited Bolshakov to lunch, picked him up in a taxi, and, together, they drove to a restaurant in Georgetown.\n\nThough their friendship was real, there was more to Holeman's meetings with Bolshakov than camaraderie. At a time when Americans were digging fallout shelters and Soviet civilians were conducting civil defense exercises in anticipation of nuclear attacks, the reporter and the intelligence officer felt they were making the world a safer place. The exchange of information and views they facilitated could, they believed, reduce the chances that misunderstandings between their governments would trigger a war.\n\nFollowing Nixon's loss in the 1960 election, Holeman found a way to continue serving as a carrier pigeon between the Soviet and US governments. Although he was known in Washington as a Nixon supporter, in those days it wasn't uncommon to have personal relationships across party lines. Holeman told Edwin Guthman, his best contact in the new administration, how his friendship with Bolshakov had evolved into a covert link between the White House and the Kremlin. Guthman, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, was serving as press secretary to Attorney General Robert Kennedy.\n\nThe Kennedys were convinced that tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were caused by poor communication between the two governments and that, on the US side, the CIA and State Department were largely to blame. Seizing the opportunity to connect directly with the Soviet leadership, Robert Kennedy told Guthman to urge Holeman to continue meeting with Bolshakov. Holeman, in turn, made it clear to Bolshakov that he was briefing Guthman about their conversations and that Guthman was passing along the information to the president's brother.\n\nAbout forty minutes into their late lunch on May 9, at 5:20, Bolshakov caught Holeman checking his watch and asked if it was time for him to leave. \"No,\" Holeman replied, \"it is time for you. Bobby Kennedy is expecting you at 6.\"\n\nThe Russian couldn't hide a look of alarm. \"Georgi, are you afraid?\" Holeman asked.\n\nIt wasn't the first time the idea of meeting the president's brother had come up. Holeman had suggested it in April, but Bolshakov was forced to decline after his superior had strictly forbidden him from accepting the invitation. The GRU, like most intelligence services, was both risk-averse and afflicted with jealousies and office politics. If Bolshakov, a relatively inexperienced officer who had achieved a prestigious posting to Washington on the strength of his social connections and language skills, screwed up a connection with Robert Kennedy, the chief of the GRU's Washington station would pay dearly for approving the meeting. And if he pulled it off, he would outshine higher ranking GRU officers who had little to show for their months or years in Washington.\n\nGiven his previous order to avoid meeting RFK, Bolshakov had to think fast. Even if Bolshakov had time to drive to the embassy, his boss wouldn't be there. It was Victory Day, the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, the holiest day in the Soviet calendar, and embassy staff were out celebrating.\n\nBolshakov decided to go for it. \"No, I'm not afraid, but I'm not prepared for the meeting,\" he told Holeman.\n\n\"You are always prepared, Georgi,\" the American replied.\n\nHoleman hailed a taxi and they drove down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the White House and the National Press Building, to the Department of Justice. \"We walked slowly so we would reach the side entrance exactly at 6,\" Bolshakov recalled. \"Robert Kennedy was standing in a white shirt with a suit jacket hanging over his shoulder at the entrance and speaking with two co-workers. Frank Holeman saluted to him by raising his hand and walked back.\"\n\nThe two men walked to the Mall and sat on the grass. Suddenly the heavens opened, and a bromance was born. \"The lightning will kill us and the newspapers will write that a Russian agent killed the president's brother,\" Kennedy said. \"Let's go!\" Kennedy and Bolshakov walked, then ran, back to the Justice Department through a torrential downpour, flying past security guards and into the attorney general's private elevator. In his office they peeled off their shirts and spent hours sitting in their undershirts talking.\n\nKennedy drove Bolshakov home after 10:00 p.m. The GRU officer was so excited he didn't sleep that night. With Moscow's approval, Bolshakov stayed in close touch with Kennedy, meeting forty or fifty times over the next fifteen months. The number of meetings isn't certain because many of the meetings weren't recorded on Kennedy's official calendar. Nor did he take notes about the conversations, speaking freely and off the cuff about the president's desire for peace with the Soviet Union and the pressure he faced from hawks in the military and \"reactionaries\" in Congress.\n\nHoleman stayed in the picture, helping the Kennedys keep their back channel secret. To prevent the gossip and leaks that would result from repeated calls from the Soviet embassy to the attorney general's office, Bolshakov asked Holeman to make the arrangements. The reporter would call Guthman and say, \"My guy wants to see your guy.\" Holeman often picked Bolshakov up in a taxi and tried to give the FBI and whoever else might be following the Russian diplomat the slip. Kennedy and Bolshakov sometimes met at a donut shop next to the Mayflower Hotel.\n\nWhile Bolshakov bantered with RFK, he never forgot who he was working for. Everything he said about Soviet policy and politics had been carefully crafted by men in Moscow. If Kennedy asked for responses to any topics that Bolshakov hadn't been briefed about, he stalled until he'd had time to check with his superiors.\n\nIn the run-up to the June 1961 summit in Vienna, Bolshakov read Robert Kennedy personal messages that Khrushchev had written to John Kennedy and conveyed messages from the president to the premier. Despite the intensive covert preparations, the summit was a disaster for John Kennedy. Khrushchev bullied the young president, berating him for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and threatening him in an effort to scare the United States into abandoning West Berlin. When they parted, relations between the two countries were worse than before the summit.\n\nThe Kennedys didn't blame Bolshakov for the failure in Vienna. Instead, they came to trust him even more. In the autumn of 1961, when Bolshakov was accompanying a Soviet delegation to the White House, President Kennedy walked over, took hold of the Russian's elbow, and steered him into an empty room. \"I am grateful to you for the favors that you did before Vienna, they were very timely for me as well as for Premier Khrushchev,\" Kennedy told him. \"I think in the future, if there are no objections from your side, we will continue communicating with Premier Khrushchev through you.\"\n\nIn addition to meeting with Robert Kennedy, Bolshakov delivered messages from Khrushchev to John Kennedy through other members of the president's inner circle. He played up the covert nature of the communications, sometimes concealing messages in newspapers and removing them with a flourish.\n\nBolshakov charmed his American contacts, making them feel as if they were playing a game together. He'd call Pierre Salinger, the White House press secretary, say he needed to discuss \"a matter of urgency,\" and arrange a clandestine rendezvous. Once, on a dark street corner in downtown Washington, Bolshakov furtively slipped an envelope into Salinger's pocket, clapped a hand on his shoulder, and said \"Every man has his Russian, and I'm yours.\" Salinger almost burst out laughing. Though they'd been warned by the FBI that Bolshakov was an intelligence officer, the Kennedys and their inner circle viewed him almost as a member of their team rather than the representative of a hostile intelligence service.\n\nThe FBI and the CIA had detailed information about the true affiliations of Soviet intelligence officers in the embassy and working undercover for press organizations, the United Nations, and trading companies. American intelligence knew Bolshakov worked for the GRU, and suspected that equipment in his apartment, which had a clear view of the Pentagon, was intercepting military communications.\n\nThe information Bolshakov and other intelligence officers sent to Moscow didn't prevent the GRU, and the Kremlin officials it reported to, from viewing the United States through a cracked kaleidoscope. Soviet military intelligence produced phantasmagorical reports in 1961, and again in 1962, asserting with complete confidence that the Pentagon was on the verge of ordering nuclear first strikes against the USSR.\n\nAlthough these reports were wildly inaccurate, there was a strong sense in Washington that the world was on a precipice and that an accidental or careless move could send it tumbling into nuclear oblivion.\n\nMinimizing this threat was on Robert Kennedy's mind when he called Bolshakov at home on the morning of the last day of August 1962, asking him to come as soon as possible to the Justice Department. Kennedy knew that his friend was flying home the next day for a vacation\u2014the two had discussed the possibility of RFK's joining him for a pleasure trip through Siberia. As soon as Bolshakov arrived, the attorney general told him that the president was expecting him. \"He knows that you are going to Moscow and wants you to give a message to Premier Khrushchev as soon as you arrive,\" Robert Kennedy said.\n\nAt the White House, President Kennedy told Bolshakov that the US ambassador in Moscow, Llewelyn Thompson, \"has informed me that Khrushchev is concerned about our planes flying around Soviet ships that are heading to Cuba. Tell him that today I ordered a stop to the fly-overs.\" Kennedy, Thompson\u2014and Bolshakov\u2014had no idea why the Soviet leader had expressed concern about American close surveillance of ships traveling halfway around the world to the Caribbean. Whether Kennedy actually ordered a halt to the flyovers, and whether the military complied, are among the many unknowns surrounding what came to be known as the \"Cuban Missile Crisis.\"\n\nAbout ten days later, Bolshakov was at Khrushchev's summer home in Pitsunda, on the Black Sea. The Soviet leader wanted to hear his impressions of the Kennedys. Khrushchev's sharpest questions were about Cuba. Would Kennedy invade the Communist-ruled island? Bolshakov predicted that he would, citing \"pressure from reactionary forces, the military and extreme right who are striving for revenge for the CIA's failure at the Bay of Pigs and only waiting for a convenient moment to destroy the Republic of Cuba.\"\n\nCuba was also on Kennedy's mind. On September 13, he stepped up to a podium in the State Department press room. \"There has been a great deal of talk on the situation in Cuba in recent days both in the Communist camp and in our own, and I would like to take this opportunity to set the matter in perspective,\" he told the assembled reporters, along with the American people, who were watching a live television broadcast of his remarks. Kennedy probably had the reassurances he'd received through Bolshakov in mind when he said that although the Soviets had stepped up military assistance to their Caribbean ally, \"these new shipments do not constitute a serious threat to any other part of this hemisphere\" because the Soviets were sending only defensive weapons. If Cuba became \"an offensive military base of significant capacity for the Soviet Union,\" Kennedy said, the United States would invade to remove the threat.\n\nJohn Kennedy wasn't as confident about Soviet intentions as he had told the American people. While Bolshakov was in the Soviet Union, Kennedy ordered intense surveillance of Cuba by U-2 spy planes, a move that he knew the Soviets would consider a provocation.\n\nAt 8:45 on the morning of October 16, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy told President Kennedy that a U-2 had brought home \"hard photographic evidence\" of medium-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads in Cuba. The missiles had been unloaded and Soviet personnel were working to make them ready. There was a short time to intervene before they were operational.\n\nThe moment they learned the Soviets were shipping nuclear missiles to Cuba, John and Robert Kennedy realized that they'd been played, that trusting Bolshakov had been a blunder. They had been lulled into believing he was a friend, both to them personally and to the United States. In fact, whatever feelings Bolshakov may have had for the Kennedys, he was playing a part, and the script had been written in Moscow. His words and demeanor were calibrated to validate John Kennedy's instinct that the narrow-minded cynicism of cold warriors was to blame for poor relations with the USSR. Rejecting the views of advisors who warned that Khrushchev was irredeemably duplicitous, the Kennedys were happy to go around the professionals, and instead to lean on Bolshakov, and on amateurs, especially journalists, to establish lines of communication with the Soviet leadership.\n\nTellingly, in his memoir of the crisis, Robert Kennedy juxtaposes the messages Bolshakov and others had conveyed from Khrushchev claiming arms shipments to Cuba were defensive with his receipt of news that the Soviets had placed nuclear missiles on the island: \"Now, as the representatives of the CIA explained the U-2 photographs that morning, Tuesday, October 16, we realized that it had all been one gigantic fabric of lies. The Russians were putting missiles in Cuba, and they had been shipping them there and beginning construction of the sites at the same time those various private and public assurances were being forwarded by Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy.\" Robert Kennedy added that \"the dominant feeling was one of shocked incredulity. We had been deceived by Khrushchev, but we had also fooled ourselves.\"\n\nInfuriated by the deception, and determined to prevent the Soviets from making nuclear missiles ninety miles from Florida operational, the Kennedys' first impulse was to bomb and invade Cuba. Fortunately, given the stakes, rather than act immediately the president ordered an urgent review of his options.\n\nAs the president and his hand-picked team worked long hours to formulate a strategy for dealing with the missiles and the military prepared for a variety of contingencies, reporters started to pick up hints and rumors that a major crisis was brewing. President Kennedy and senior administration officials reached out to trusted reporters at the _New York Times_ and _Washington Post_ to persuade them to keep a lid on the story until the White House was ready to make it public. Some reporters didn't have to be persuaded. Charles Bartlett, the Washington correspondent for the _Chattanooga Times_ and a columnist for the _Chicago Daily News_ , dined with President Kennedy three times during the crisis, discussing the situation in detail with him as events unfolded, but didn't breathe a word about it to his editors or readers. Bartlett was one of President Kennedy's closest friends. In May 1951, convinced that Kennedy's political career would stall unless he got married, Bartlett had played cupid, introducing JFK to his future wife, Jacqueline Bouvier. Bartlett was at Kennedy's side during the presidential election, as a friend rather than journalist, and in case anyone didn't know about their relationship, _Life_ magazine ran photos in December 1960 of Bartlett cradling the president-elect's newborn son, John Kennedy Jr.\n\nUnlike Bartlett and other White House favorites, the _New York Herald Tribune_ 's scrappy Pentagon reporter, Warren Rogers, was not an insider. No one thought to pledge him to silence.\n\nThroughout 1961 and 1962, Rogers had been chasing stories around the globe, from Germany to Vietnam. To atone for his absences, on the night of October 21 he took his family to dinner at Billy Martin's Carriage House in Georgetown. As soon as they sat down, Rogers looked across the room and spotted familiar faces: experts on Soviet and Caribbean affairs from the State Department and the Pentagon huddled around a table. Rogers walked over, saying, \"Hi, guys. What are you all doing working on a Sunday?\" They turned green and muttered incomprehensively. Rogers walked back to his wife, who saw the look on her husband's face and said, \"I guess we're going home.\"\n\nRogers drove by the State Department and saw lights on at the Soviet desk. At home he worked the phones, and then called a story into the _Herald Tribune_. His story, which ran on the front pages of the _Tribune_ and the _Boston Globe_ on Monday morning, reported:\n\nTop American diplomatic and military officials held extraordinary conferences behind a wall of secrecy as large-scale air-sea and ground movements were reported under way.\n\nIt seemed to have something to do with Cuba or Berlin or both.\n\nRogers wrote that \"it was dangerous to speculate\" in the absence of any official guidance, but he did so anyway. His first guess was on the money: \"Perhaps the Kennedy administration had found out that Cuba has acquired offensive military capability.\"\n\nThat evening President Kennedy addressed the nation: \"This Government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.\"\n\nKennedy mentioned the numerous public and private assurances the Soviet leadership had given him that only defensive weapons would be installed in Cuba. Then he outlined a measured response. Rather than invade, the United States. would start by imposing a \"strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba.\" He made it clear that success was not guaranteed. \"The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are\u2014but it is the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation and our commitments around the world.\"\n\nThe entire world seemed to hold its breath for the next five days. Across the country, and especially in Washington, many went to bed believing they might not live to see another sunrise. White House officials and journalists bought camping gear, loaded cans of food into station wagons, and made plans for their families to flee the city on a moment's notice. They either imagined it was possible to outrun Armageddon or believed it was better to die trying than be incinerated in their homes.\n\nPresident Kennedy and his advisors tugged on every string they could find, looking for one that would untie the diplomatic knot in time to avoid war. That included overcoming their rage at Bolshakov's betrayal and continuing to use him as a channel to communicate with Khrushchev.\n\nBolshakov had a series of meetings with reporters on October 23 that in retrospect fell somewhere between critically important and irrelevant. In the morning, Holeman called the embassy and said he needed to speak with Bolshakov. This time the call was official: out of work because of a New York newspaper strike, Holeman had taken a temporary job working for Guthman, RFK's press secretary. At their meeting, Holeman, who said he was conveying a message from the attorney general, suggested a swap: the United States. would remove its missiles from Turkey and Italy in exchange for the Soviets' doing the same in Cuba. As Bolshakov wrote in a report to Moscow, Kennedy had instructed Holeman to say that \"the conditions of such a trade can be discussed only in a time of quiet and not when there is the threat of war.\" Bolshakov repeated the now discredited Soviet claim that its military operations in Cuba were purely defensive. He also told Holeman that Soviet ships would disregard the US blockade.\n\nA few hours later, Bartlett called Bolshakov and invited him to lunch at the Hay Adams hotel. Acting on Robert Kennedy's instructions, Bartlett told Bolshakov that the president, who was aware of their meeting, compared the Soviet deception to the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Kennedy didn't want to invade Cuba, Bartlett said, and hoped the Soviet Union would agree to have the missiles removed through an agreement mediated and verified by the United Nations.\n\nBolshakov, who was not authorized to negotiate on behalf of the Soviet Union, had little to say to Bartlett. In an effort to get a more energetic response, Robert Kennedy pressed Bartlett to call Bolshakov to the Press Building for a second meeting a few hours later.\n\nWhen the Russian entered Bartlett's office, the first thing he saw was easels with large aerial photos of Cuban missile sites. Robert Kennedy had instructed Bartlett to confront him with the pictures, which had not been publicly released and were stamped \"secret.\" Bartlett let the Russian peruse the photos and asked how, faced with such evidence, he could deny that Soviet missile bases were under construction in Cuba. Bolshakov replied that he'd never seen photos of missile bases; the clearings could be baseball fields for all he knew.\n\nAccording to Bolshakov's report to Moscow, Bartlett, like Holeman earlier in the day, suggested that a withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba could be linked to a reciprocal withdrawal of US missiles from Turkey.\n\nThe next day, October 24, Pentagon officials told Rogers about contingency plans for an invasion of Cuba. He was one of eight reporters given the opportunity to accompany the troops. That evening, Rogers and his bureau chief, Robert Donovan, discussed their reporting on the crisis over beers in the Press Club Tap Room. Rogers asked Donovan for a $400 advance to cover expenses to travel to Florida, where he would join the Marines if Kennedy ordered an invasion.\n\nAs they spoke, they barely noticed Johnny Prokoff, the Press Club's popular bartender, standing nearby. Prokoff, a Russian from Lithuania, had escaped desperate poverty by stowing away on a freighter. For a decade he worked as a cabin boy, dodging police on the wharves of hundreds of ports before he finally scurried off a ship in Mexico, snuck across the border into the United States and managed to obtain citizenship. Prokoff had a keen interest in the work and lives of the newsmen whose days often started at his bar with a \"breakfast of champions\"\u2014a double Virginia Gentleman bourbon on the rocks. Thirsty hacks were piled four-deep in front of the bar by four in the afternoon, and most nights a few had to be ushered out the door, or onto a soft chair in the library, at 2:00 a.m. closing time. For a generation of reporters, Prokoff's shouted greeting, \"Have a drink and be somebody,\" conjured up fuzzy memories of inebriated cheer.\n\nAt about 1:00 a.m. Anatoly Gorsky, a KGB officer who worked undercover as a TASS reporter, walked into the Tap Room and ordered a drink. Prokoff, speaking softly so the other patrons didn't hear, told the Russian about the conversation he'd overheard between Rogers and Donovan. Prokoff hated communism, but he had a personal bond with Gorsky: both were avid and talented chess players.\n\nLike everyone else at the Press Club, Prokoff must have assumed that Gorsky was an intelligence officer. It isn't known whether his disclosure was motivated by friendship, by a desire to affect history, or by a wish to taunt Gorsky. There is no evidence to support another possibility, that Prokoff was a KGB informant. In any case, Gorsky made a hasty exit and sprinted to the embassy with the first confirmation that Kennedy was planning an invasion.\n\nEither Prokoff had misheard, or Gorsky mixed things up during his late-night dash to the embassy. When he got there, Gorsky told Alexander Feklisov, the KGB _rezident_ , or chief of station, that it was Donovan who was traveling to Florida \"to cover the operation to capture Cuba.\" Gorsky said the invasion was slated to start by the 26th. Feklisov had no sources in the Kennedy administration, so he grabbed hold of this bit of bar talk and ran with it.\n\n#\n\nPlaque that hangs in the National Press Club's Reliable Source bar commemorating Johnny Prokoff. A beloved National Press Club bartender, Prokoff inadvertently helped resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis by informing a KGB officer of American contingency plans to invade Cuba.\n\nCredit: National Press Club archives\n\nTrying to verify Prokoff's tip, Feklisov assigned one of his officers, a young embassy official, to stake out the parking lot behind the Willard Hotel, where Rogers usually parked. When Rogers got out of his car, the KGB officer asked him what he thought about the situation in Cuba. Years later, Rogers recalled that he replied that it was \"extremely grim.\" The official also asked whether \"Kennedy means what he says,\" to which Rogers replied, \"You're damn right he does.\" Back at the embassy, the KGB officer told Feklisov that Rogers had predicted that the United States would invade Cuba within two days.\n\nRogers hadn't been in his office long when he received a call from the Soviet embassy asking if he would have lunch with an official whom he barely knew. Hoping it would yield a story, Rogers agreed. Instead of learning anything, he spent most of the lunch expressing his opinions about how Kennedy would resolve the crisis in Cuba. He said the military was planning a massive invasion, and that Kennedy was holding the soldiers back for a few days to build up the justification for action. The KGB might have believed that Rogers was in touch with the White House or had some other inside source of information. In fact, he was speaking only for himself and did not inform anyone in the US government about his conversations with embassy staff.\n\nNews of Rogers's Tap Room conversation and his discussions the following day with embassy officials landed on Khrushchev's desk along with a GRU report that US forces had been placed on alert for nuclear war. These reports played into the Soviet leader's decision to respect the American blockade and to announce his decision to remove offensive weapons from Cuba.\n\nBolshakov, Holeman, Bartlett, and Rogers weren't the only journalists in the Press Building who played a high-profile role in the Cuban missile crisis.\n\nJohn Scali, a reporter for ABC television, received a telephone call from Feklisov on October 26, 1962, inviting him to meet for lunch at the Occidental Restaurant, across the street from the Press Building. Feklisov, who used the cover name \"Fomin\" during his postings to the United States, had first contacted Scali in 1961 to suggest that they meet occasionally for informal, off-the-record conversations. The Russian was well-acquainted with the United States. He'd worked in New York during World War II and developed a friendship with the American spy Julius Rosenberg. Unlike in the 1940s, and in contrast to the separate operations the GRU ran in Washington, Feklisov and the KGB had no ability in 1961 or 1962 to obtain valuable secret information in Washington. He was reduced to begging for table scraps over lunch with reporters who had no intention of helping the Soviet Union.\n\nScali had notified the FBI about Feklisov's proposal. The bureau told him that Feklisov was the KGB _rezident_ in Washington and persuaded Scali to meet with him as often as possible and report on their conversations.\n\nAccording to Scali, at the Occidental Feklisov \"seemed tired, haggard and alarmed in contrast to the usual calm, low-key appearance that he presented.\" The two men were both so addled that they didn't notice until the meal was over that the Russian was eating Scali's crab cakes and Scali had consumed Feklisov's pork chop. Everything else about their interactions over the next two days was similarly muddled.\n\nScali went straight from the lunch to Foggy Bottom, where he gave the State Department's intelligence chief Hilsman verbal and written accounts of the conversation. According to Scali's version, Feklisov had asked if the United States would be willing to go along with a deal under which the Cuban missile \"bases would be dismantled under United Nations supervision and Castro would pledge not to accept offensive weapons of any kind, ever, in return for a US pledge not to invade Cuba.\" Scali told Hilsman that Feklisov, anxious to receive a reply as soon as possible, had written his home telephone number on a piece of paper and handed it to him before they parted.\n\nHilsman, the Kennedys, and other members of the team working to resolve the crisis were convinced that Feklisov was acting as a back channel from Khrushchev, and they immediately started working on a response.\n\nSecretary of State Dean Rusk composed a response to the offer he believed Feklisov had made, ran it by the White House, and gave it to Scali. \"I have reason to believe that the United States government sees real possibilities in this and supposes that the representatives of the USSR and the United States in New York can work out this matter with [UN secretary-general] U Thant and with each other. My definite impression is that time is very urgent and time is very short.\"\n\nScali met Feklisov at the Statler-Hilton's coffee shop, around the corner from the embassy. After Scali recited the message, which he said \"came from the highest sources in the United States government,\" they hurried to the cashier. Feklisov dropped a five-dollar bill on the counter for his thirty-cent coffee and rushed out without waiting for change\u2014highly unusual behavior for a Soviet official. In the KGB's offices on the top floor of the embassy, Feklisov wrote a report that he believed could avert nuclear war.\n\nFeklisov's account of the conversation at the Occidental was similar to Scali's with one critical difference: he wrote that _Scali_ had proposed the deal. According to Feklisov's cable, and comments he made decades later, he had been fishing for information when he met Scali, not conveying messages from Khrushchev.\n\nEven in an emergency, the embassy operated according to protocol. Feklisov could send cables to Moscow Center, but Ambassador Anatoly Fyodorovich Dobrynin had to sign-off on any cables for Khrushchev or other members of the Presidium. Dobrynin pondered Feklisov's report for two hours and then refused to send it. The ambassador, who was holding his own secret talks with Robert Kennedy, had a dim view of the intelligence services bypassing the Foreign Ministry. He'd already told Kennedy to ignore Bolshakov and he wasn't going to let a KGB officer hijack negotiations with the White House.\n\nMeanwhile, the Kennedys and other top American government officials were certain that Feklisov was acting under direct instructions from Khrushchev and that the Kremlin had picked Scali as an intermediary to communicate with the White House. They were angered and confused when the Soviet leader sent messages that made no reference to the deal that Scali had described or to their carefully crafted responses.\n\nFeklisov eventually sent his cable to the KGB, where it took half a day for it to be decoded and move up the chain of command to the Kremlin. By that time the die had been cast. Khrushchev had already decided to back down; there is no reason to believe that he ever saw Feklisov's memo. Although they thought they were on center stage, the drama between Feklisov and Scali was a sideshow, a dangerous distraction.\n\nDespite the confusion, a deal was struck. Khrushchev swallowed his pride and withdrew the missiles in exchange for Kennedy's pledge not to invade Cuba. Both sides kept secret Kennedy's promise to remove American missiles from Turkey.\n\nAfter the dust had settled, the Kennedys realized that while Bolshakov had deceived them, he hadn't lied. When Bolshakov said the USSR had no intention to send offensive weapons to Cuba, it was because that's what Khrushchev had told him, and he had believed it.\n\nThe Kennedys and other American officials continued to believe incorrectly that Scali had played a decisive role in resolving the crisis. The ABC newsman kept silent about the affair until Hilsman revealed it in a book and magazine article in 1964. Journalists, with Scali's encouragement, built up the tale until it seemed that a humble journalist had saved the world from nuclear destruction.\n\nIn his memoir, Kennedy's press secretary Salinger wrote that the \"nation and the world owe John Scali a great debt of gratitude. He chose to put aside his tools as a newsman in favor of the greater national interest at a crucial time in history.\" Salinger added that while Scali was \"the meanest man who ever sat down at a poker table,\" his role in \"averting nuclear catastrophe was of enormous importance.\"\n\nScali dined out on the story of his secret diplomacy with \"Mr. X,\" as Feklisov was called in early versions of the tale, for the rest of his life. It sent his career on a trajectory that ended with an appointment by President Richard Nixon as US ambassador to the United Nations.\n\nIn 1994, the Occidental Restaurant installed a plaque on the wall next to the table where the reporter and spy lunched. \"At this table during the tense moments of the Cuban missile crisis a Russian offer to withdraw missiles from Cuba was passed by the mysterious Russian 'Mr. X' to ABC-TV correspondent John Scali. On the basis of this meeting the threat of a possible nuclear war was avoided.\"\n\nAcross the street at the National Press Club, a plaque behind the bar commemorates Prokoff. In contrast to the apocryphal history etched into brass at the Occidental, the club memorializes him as a friend to journalists, and for his salutation \"Have a drink and be somebody!\" It doesn't mention the part Prokoff unwittingly played in avoiding a nuclear war.\n\nA room at the National Press Club is dedicated to Holeman, who devoted eighteen years to representing the tire industry after retiring from journalism in 1969. Few members or visitors have any inkling of his secret life as a \"boy spy.\"\n\nRogers didn't learn about the role his conversation in the Press Club's Tap Room had on history until 1997, when Feklisov's cables were described in a book by an American and a Russian historian.\n\n#\n\nThe management of Continental Press Service never told anyone which continent the name referred to, and they were a little hazy about the services they provided. If anyone had thought hard about what was going on in its twelfth-floor National Press Building Office, the operation would have seemed suspicious. The credentials and decades of experience of the journalists who ran it, however, were solid, and for over a decade Continental Press flew under the radar, unmolested and unquestioned.\n\nWhile the reporters who worked at Continental Press pretended to be independent journalists, they were in fact employed by the CIA. Their jobs were to produce propaganda, provide cover for spies and facilitate illegal domestic espionage. The news service was a cog in a vast machine the CIA had created to weaponize information and to deputize reporters as undercover partisans in America's undeclared global war against communism.\n\nThe activities of Continental Press Service, a CIA \"proprietary\" or front company, exemplified the cozy relationships many American reporters had with the agency during the Cold War. They also provide a glimpse of the CIA's massive overseas media operations and show how it sometimes became enmeshed in domestic politics.\n\nThe CIA's role in creating and running Continental Press surfaced in the fallout from the foiled Watergate burglary. It was disclosed by E. Howard Hunt, a man who had dedicated his life to protecting secrets. The retired CIA agent had been sentenced in 1973 to a provisional thirty-five-year prison term for planning the Watergate break-in and for refusing to cooperate with the Justice Department's investigation of the crime. When Judge John J. Sirica sentenced Hunt, he promised to reduce the punishment if Hunt broke his silence.\n\nTraumatized by prison and grieving the death of his wife\u2014she was killed in a plane crash with $10,000 in $100 bills in her bag, money intended to purchase legal assistance for and the silence of Watergate burglars\u2014Hunt decided to talk. On the morning of December 18, 1973, he was driven by armed guards from the federal penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania to Capitol Hill for a private meeting with Senator Howard Baker Jr. and staff members of a Senate committee that was investigating the CIA's role in the Watergate burglary. Hunt told them that his role in Watergate hadn't been an aberration. Years earlier, when he was a senior CIA officer, he had been ordered to spy on a presidential election campaign. The operation, Hunt reported, involved a front company located in the National Press Building called Continental Press.\n\nHunt didn't tell the investigators much about Continental Press, and the CIA still refuses to divulge anything about the operation. Enough information is available, however, from public documents and passing references in declassified documents to assemble an outline of its history and activities.\n\nThe story starts with Fred Zusy, a jovial reporter who joined the Associated Press in 1941, covered the war in Europe, and remained overseas, serving as AP's bureau chief in Cairo in 1951 and then holding the same position in its Istanbul and Rome bureaus. With his resume and contacts, Zusy could have landed a job at a major newspaper. Instead, when he quit the AP in 1959, Zusy moved to Washington and started Continental Press, a small news service that provided stories to obscure newspapers that none of his peers would ever read.\n\nAfter his death in 2010, Zusy's wife explained why his career had taken such an unusual turn. \"He was,\" she said, \"in the clandestine service of the CIA after he left the AP.\" This was accurate but almost certainly incomplete. Zusy's relationship with the agency had probably begun long before 1959. The CIA wouldn't have trusted Zusy with a sensitive operation unless it had already developed a deep trust in him. That kind of confidence is accrued over time and earned by acquitting oneself well in difficult circumstances. Certainly his reporting from the Middle East in the early 1950s, especially about the nationalization of oil companies and efforts by communists to overthrow the Shah of Iran, would have been of great interest to the CIA.\n\nThe Press Building was the logical place to locate Continental Press. At the time, it was peppered with small news shops. Lone reporters who eked out a living from freelance assignments rented tiny offices where they slept on sofas under piles of old newspapers. In slightly larger offices entrepreneurial journalists dreamed of expanding trade publications or specialized newsletters into media empires. There was a sense of camaraderie and a roguish approach to ethics among Press Building tenants in those days. It was common for reporters to write and file stories for a colleague who was incapacitated by a night of hard drinking, and nobody batted an eye at the Press Club when they overheard a reporter dictating a story from the _Washington Star_ into a phone to an editor halfway around the country as if he'd written it himself.\n\nZusy presented Continental Press as the Washington bureau for foreign publications that couldn't afford to send a correspondent to the United States. Zusy's clients consisted of newspapers like the _Globe Press_ of Istanbul, Tehran's _El Akhbar & Akhbar El-yom_, the _Dawn_ , headquartered in Karachi, and the _Ashanti Pioneer_ of Kumasi, Ghana. Zusy never explained how clients like this provided enough income to put food on his table, cover office rent, salary for a secretary, and after a few years support several other reporters. These were not the kinds of publications that were in the habit of paying generously for stories. In fact, they weren't in the habit of paying at all, as freelancers who have worked for newspapers in developing countries have learned through bitter experience.\n\nThe newspapers Continental Press serviced were, however, precisely the kinds of publications the CIA\u2014and the KGB\u2014favored as vectors for disseminating propaganda. Both intelligence services purchased, subsidized, and infiltrated hundreds of newspapers in developing countries and in Europe, coopting them as combatants in the global struggle between the superpowers. Stories planted in obscure publications were often picked up by newspapers with national or regional reach. For the CIA, the fact that they were unlikely to be read in the United States or cited by American news organizations was a benefit, as the agency tried to minimize the chance of \"blowback,\" as it called operations that ended up harming the United States. The agency was worried that false information it planted abroad could influence and distort American policy, or that the American public would be infuriated if it learned that its news was being contaminated by the CIA.\n\nA second reporter, Russell Brines, joined Continental Press in 1961 as executive editor after resigning as editor of the Copley News Service, a wire service that was owned by the Copley newspaper chain. Like Zusy, Brines had been a foreign correspondent for AP. The wire service sent him to Tokyo in 1939 and transferred him to Manila in November 1941. A few weeks later, after the Pearl Harbor attack, Brines, his wife, and his daughter were interned by the Japanese. They were released in a prisoner swap after nineteen months. Brines wrote a book, _Until They Eat Stones_ , about the brutal treatment he, and especially military prisoners, received at the hands of the Japanese.\n\nBrines started working for Copley in the 1950s, serving as the first editor and manager of Copley News Service. The company's owner, James S. Copley, had in 1947 offered the services of its reporters to President Eisenhower \"as the eyes and ears...for our intelligence services\" to fight communism. He was one of a cohort of news executives CIA director Allen Dulles turned to when he wanted stories planted in American newspapers. At one point twenty-three Copley employees were working for the CIA. The Copley News Service was particularly useful to the agency in Latin America. It is almost certain that Brines had, like Zusy, been working for the CIA for some time before he joined Continental Press.\n\nA year after Brines joined Continental Press, the CIA gave Hunt responsibility for the operation. Hunt considered the assignment a punishment. He'd been deeply involved in the CIA's disastrous attempt to depose Fidel Castro by landing a ragtag group of Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Like many agency officers associated with the fiasco, Hunt was put in a kind of purgatory, assigned a desk job that lacked the excitement or career-advancement potential of foreign clandestine operations.\n\nHunt supervised all CIA domestic propaganda activities from 1962 to 1964. His duties included working with the US Information Agency to coordinate CIA foreign and domestic propaganda. He ran operations that had cryptonyms like WUHUSTLER, WUBONBON, and WUPUNDIT.\n\nWUBONBON included the CIA's work with book publishers, such as Eugene Fodor, publisher of the Fodor's travel books. It is likely that Hunt used Continental Press to launder the transfer of funds from the CIA to Fodor's.\n\nFodor, a Hungarian who grew up in Czechoslovakia, wrote his first travel book in 1936. He joined the US Army in 1942, was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and, after the war, worked for the CIA in Vienna and Budapest. In 1949 he founded Fodor's Modern Guides, Inc., and began producing travel books. Starting in the 1950s he hired CIA officers as writers. He was more than willing to provide cover for clandestine activities, but he insisted the CIA only send him talented writers who were willing to do their cover jobs.\n\nFodor's connection to the CIA, and the CIA's connection to Continental Press, were unknown outside the agency until Hunt revealed them to Senate investigators in 1973. His testimony was leaked to the _New York Times_ , which, to the consternation of Hunt, Fodor, and the CIA, in 1975 revealed Fodor's covert activities, as well as the existence of Continental Press.\n\nAs part of WUBONBON, Hunt also managed the CIA's covert relationship with another former intelligence operative turned publisher, Frederick Praeger. Praeger fled to the United States from Austria in 1938, joined the US Army in 1941, and served in Army intelligence during the war. He started Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., an academic publishing company, in 1950. While the majority of Praeger's activities had no association with the US government, the CIA provided subsidies to and other assistance for several of the company's books. The most famous CIA-Praeger collaboration was _The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System_ by Milovan Djilas, a top official in Yugoslavia's Communist Party who became the most famous dissident in the Soviet bloc. Praeger took on the book, and accepted covert payments from the CIA, after several other western publishers declined to publish it. Praeger also published CIA-subsidized books promoting the US government's perspective on foreign-policy controversies such as the war in Vietnam and the 1965 US military occupation of the Dominican Republic.\n\nHunt imagined himself a swashbuckling secret agent and hated working as a propagandist. Even so, his supervisors couldn't have been more pleased by the way he handled the assignment. \"In the WUHUSTLER project,\" the cover name for Continental Press, Hunt \"vindicated his faith in a moribund clandestine asset by demonstrating, after about a year and a half under his personal direction, that is it is one of the most effective activities of its kind,\" according to a glowing annual performance review he received in 1964.\n\nOver a six-week period in the late summer of 1964, Hunt deployed Continental Press staff to undertake a new type of project: infiltrating the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater on behalf of President Lyndon Johnson.\n\nThere is some dispute about whose idea this was. In 1975, then CIA director William Colby told the House Select Committee on Intelligence that spying on Goldwater had been the brainchild of Tracy Barnes, head of the CIA's Domestic Operations Division. According to Colby's version of events, Barnes proposed it to Chester L. Cooper, a CIA officer working in the Johnson White House on temporary assignment to the National Security Council.\n\nA memo Colby provided to Congress stated that in 1973 Cooper told a member of the CIA Office of Inspector General that in 1964 Barnes had asked him \"if he would like to have copies of [Goldwater's] speeches and would it be useful to have them before he (Cooper) read them in the newspapers.\" Cooper said he would. The memo concluded, \"There is no question that Mr. Cooper was serving the White House in the political campaign while on the CIA payroll and that he was assisted, in part, by a member of the Agency's Domestic Operations Division.\" The CIA didn't say why Barnes offered to spy on Goldwater. He may have been seeking to enhance the agency's stature at a time when President Johnson had a strained relationship with its director.\n\nIn blaming Barnes and saying that he hadn't informed anyone more senior about the operation, Colby created a convenient dead end: by the time the agency pinned responsibility on Barnes, he had been dead for several years.\n\nIn a memoir published in 2007, Hunt claimed the idea to spy on Goldwater originated in the White House. President Lyndon Johnson had, Hunt claimed, \"become obsessed with obtaining his competitor's plans.\" Having come to office through tragedy, and deeply resenting suggestions that he wasn't up to the job, Johnson yearned for a blow-out victory. Hunt reported that he had arranged for some of his \"outside assets\"\u2014possibly a reference to Continental Press or employees of another CIA proprietary company\u2014to infiltrate the Goldwater headquarters. \"My subordinates volunteered inside, collected advance copies of position papers and other material, and handed them over to CIA personnel\" who provided the documents to Cooper, according to Hunt.\n\nHunt's assets included a secretary on Goldwater's campaign staff, who provided advance copies of speeches and press releases. A CIA employee who worked from the Continental Press offices picked up the material and delivered it to Cooper.\n\nWhoever came up with the idea, Johnson was aware of the spying and wasn't squeamish about using it. He did so in a blunt fashion that must have made CIA officers cringe. Goldwater campaign staff noticed that the Johnson campaign had the unnerving habit of responding to points in their candidate's speeches before he had delivered them. Johnson didn't seem to notice or care that his actions made clear to Goldwater that he was being spied on.\n\nOne of the most glaring incidents took place on September 9, 1964, after Cooper had received an advance copy of a speech Goldwater was slated to deliver that evening in Seattle. The Republican planned to announce formation of a Task Force on Peace and Freedom headed by Richard Nixon that would advise the campaign on foreign affairs. The idea was to calm fears that Goldwater had insufficient foreign-policy experience and that he would pursue a radical international agenda.\n\nJohnson swung into action and called a \"flash\" press conference. While Goldwater was on an airplane on the way to Seattle, LBJ announced the formation of a \"panel of distinguished citizens who will consult with the President in the coming months on major international problems facing the United States.\" Johnson's ploy worked perfectly: news of his advisory panel was widely reported, including on the front page of the _New York Times_ , while Goldwater's task force received little attention.\n\nThe disparity caught the attention of the journalist Arthur Krock, who in a nationally syndicated column suggested that Goldwater had \"forfeited a chance to name his 'task force' first, and then represent the President's as another instance of 'me too.'\" Krock noted that when Johnson called the press conference, reporters in Washington had already received a copy of Goldwater's remarks but had agreed to delay reporting on it until shortly before the speech was delivered. The column didn't even hint at the possibility that LBJ had also gotten an advance peek at the speech. Instead, Krock remarked on the \"incomparable\" staging: \"The President of the United States in the classic d\u00e9cor of his oval office at the White House; his helplessly scooped opponent in the modernistic carnival setting of the Coliseum that was built for the Seattle World's Fair.\"\n\nKrock presented the situation as a triumph for Johnson and an example of the natural advantages a sitting president had in an election campaign. \"Among advantages a president in a campaign to succeed himself has over his opponent is command of the channels of publicity,\" he told his readers.\n\nThe truth is that by breaking a media embargo, the CIA had made it possible for Johnson to dominate the news cycle that day.\n\nHunt told Senate staff, and wrote in his memoir, that he'd been disturbed by the order to spy on the Goldwater campaign. This wasn't because he had any hesitation about conducting what was obviously an illegal operation. Rather, it was because Hunt was one of the few Goldwater supporters in the CIA. \"However, as distasteful as I thought it was, I performed the duty, accepting White House orders without question,\" Hunt recalled.\n\nIn October 1964 Hunt took a medical leave, blaming a stomach ulcer on the CIA's \"failure to assign me to an appropriate post abroad following my participation in [the Bay of Pigs operation] and the passive, non-challenging nature of the domestic work I was given.\" Following a six-week convalescence, Hunt was transferred to work that he found more congenial, including recruiting agents in Spain.\n\nWhen Hunt's revelations were leaked to the press, Senator Goldwater said that during the 1964 campaign, he had come to believe he was being spied on. \"I just assumed it was one man or two men assigned at the direction of the President.... It never bothered me,\" he said. \"I guess it should have, but knowing Johnson as I did, I never got upset about it.\" Goldwater did not suggest that the CIA's spying had cost him the election.\n\nAfter Hunt's departure Continental Press continued to produce propaganda for foreign publications and, presumably, to provide cover for CIA operatives. In 1965, Continental Press hired Enoc Waters, one of America's leading African American reporters, to report from Africa. Waters had traveled to Uganda in 1964 to help set up an English-language newspaper. Three years later he was still working for Continental Press. There is no evidence that he was a witting CIA operative.\n\nWhen Continental Press closed in 1970, Zusy moved two floors down to the Press Building offices of the CIA-friendly Copley News Service. That year Hunt retired from the CIA. He was hired as a security consultant by the White House in 1971, where he led a unit known as the Plumbers that was dedicated to plugging leaks within the Nixon administration, playing dirty tricks on Nixon's opponents and obtaining political intelligence. Unrestrained by the CIA bureaucrats he loathed, went on to plan a spree of illegal and ill-conceived ventures culminating in the Watergate burglary. Later, he cited the CIA's infiltration of the Goldwater campaign as a precedent for the break-in at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters. His logic was that if it was okay to use surreptitious methods to obtain political intelligence on behalf of one president, it was acceptable to do the same for another president. \"Since I'd done it once before for the CIA, why wouldn't I do it again [inside Watergate in June 1972] for the White House?\" Hunt explained to the _New York Times_ in December 1974.\n\nThe Watergate scandal set in motion investigations by Congress and the media of the CIA's illegal domestic activities. The resulting revelations, combined with disillusionment with American policy in Vietnam and revulsion against Nixon's abuses of power turned journalists from willing allies of the CIA into wary adversaries. Reporters who had cooperated with the agency sought to hide or minimize their connections, while senior editors and publishers scrambled to convince staff and the public that American publications and broadcasts were untainted by association with organizations that were dedicated to deception.\n\nCongressional investigations, and reporting by news media, revealed that hundreds, perhaps thousands of reporters in the United States and overseas had close relationships with the CIA from its creation in 1947 through the late 1970s. It paid some reporters to collect information and engaged in informal information exchanges with many more. It bought, subsidized, and manipulated newspapers, magazines, and news services around the world. Major news agencies such as CBS News and the _New YorkTimes_ cooperated extensively with the CIA. The agency slipped its officers into newsrooms, usually with the knowledge and consent of newspaper publishers and television network CEOs. _New York Times_ publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA and allowed it to disguise about ten officers as _Times_ journalists, stringers, or clerical staff in the 1950s.\n\nMany of the American journalists and news executives who collaborated with the CIA were motivated by patriotism. They'd seen how intelligence failures had left the United States vulnerable to sneak attack at Pearl Harbor and later witnessed the USSR's ruthless domination of Eastern Europe. Eager to help ensure that the United States wasn't blind-sided by communists at home or abroad, they failed to comprehend or chose to ignore the threat to democracy posed by secret alliances between government and the press. Joseph Alsop, one of the most influential American columnists in the '50s and '60s, said of his extensive cooperation with the CIA, \"I'm proud they asked me and proud to have done it.\"\n\nThe CIA vigorously defended its relationship with the press as a logical and necessary tool for fighting the Cold War. In 1977, a year after he resigned as CIA director, Colby told Congress that the conflict with the Soviet Union was a war of ideas that could only be fought through the news media. \"We should not disarm ourselves in this contest in the hopes that the rest of the world will be gentlemen,\" he said. Colby railed against criticism of the CIA's foreign propaganda, arguing that \"a larger view of the cultural and intellectual battle which raged in Europe and the less developed world in the 1950's and 1960's would recognize that CIA's support of the voices of freedom in the face of the massive propaganda campaigns of the Communist world contributed effectively to the cohesion of free men during that period.\" He decried the \"ostrich-like tendency to pretend that journalism can be purified by a total separation from CIA.\"\n\nColby and other former CIA officials conceded the possibility that foreign propaganda could harm US interests if false news planted overseas returned to the United States and not only misled the American public but was also taken as real by policymakers. Colby said the risk of CIA disinformation corrupting American policy was minimal, but in fact as the world became every more interconnected, it became inevitable.\n\nIronically, the CIA was a victim of blowback from its own disinformation during the Reagan administration. Secretary of State Alexander Haig read a prepublication galley of _The Terror Network_ , a book by the journalist Claire Sterling, and had been impressed by its conclusion that the Soviet Union was responsible for European terrorism. CIA director William Casey was also smitten by Sterling's work. He even held it up in front of a group of CIA analysts and sneered at them that he'd learned more from a book written by a journalist based on publicly available sources than from the agency's secret reports.\n\nWhen CIA analysts refuted Sterling's conclusions, Casey contracted with an independent scholar to analyze the book. The academic found something startling. Sterling had diligently dug into the archives of obscure newspapers to document her assertions, but the nuggets she'd mined turned out to be fool's gold. Many of the articles she cited were disinformation that had been planted by the CIA. Despite the strong objections of CIA staff, the allegations in Sterling's book were incorporated into a National Intelligence Estimate and used to justify expansion of CIA covert activities in developing countries. Tainted news seeds the agency had planted from Lahore to Lisbon had sprouted and taken root in a book that influenced the Reagan administration's intelligence policy and diplomacy.\n\n#\n\nThe CIA's interactions with American journalists, especially those who have revealed its secrets, have not all been cordial. Project Mockingbird, which was undertaken in 1962, shows that the agency was willing to go to great lengths, including illegal wiretapping, to shut down leaks. Presidents from both parties have leaned on the CIA to tap the phones of American reporters as part of largely futile efforts to identify their sources.\n\nMockingbird was the first operation conducted by a CIA team formed at President John Kennedy's request that was dedicated to finding and plugging national-security leaks. The team reflected his intense interest in the media, as well as his willingness to use the CIA to tame it.\n\nKennedy had briefly worked as a reporter after World War II, knew many reporters and publishers personally, and, as president, devoted a great deal of attention to burnishing his public image. Intimate awareness of how the game was played may explain why Kennedy was infuriated by unauthorized leaks. Disclosures of classified information that he hadn't initiated or authorized sometimes helped America's adversaries\u2014but almost always diminished his authority and power.\n\nThroughout his presidency Kennedy trusted journalists to keep secrets that, had they been revealed, could have had dire consequences for both national security and his reputation. He was the first president to routinely grant exclusive interviews to favored reporters, pleasing the few who toed the White House line and angering many more who were excluded. Still, JFK's trust in a handful of reporters and editors didn't reflect confidence in the entire profession, his cultivation of the press didn't immunize him from criticism, and his understanding of the news industry's penchant for exaggeration and controversy didn't thicken his skin.\n\nKennedy read newspapers as voraciously as he chased women, noting and taking offense at the smallest slights. He also considered himself a master of the art of the leak and the trial balloon. His administration made no apologies for lying to reporters to protect national security. For example, Kennedy's Pentagon spokesman, Arthur Sylvester, told reporters that it was the government's inherent right \"to lie to save itself.\" And Kennedy approved unprecedented steps to prevent unauthorized releases of information. His administration was the first to require that government employees keep track of and systematically report on their interactions with journalists. It was also the first to allow television cameras to cover press briefings, creating new opportunities for the White House to bypass print reporters and to shape the daily news cycle.\n\nThe press was incensed by Kennedy's attempts to manipulate news coverage and plug leaks. Arthur Krock, the _eminence grise_ of American news, wrote in March 1963 that the administration was managing the news \"more cynically and boldly\" than had previously been attempted in peacetime. \"President Kennedy reads more newspapers regularly than any predecessor appears to have done,\" reported Krock, who had headed the _New York Times_ Washington bureau from 1932 to 1953 and once considered himself a friend of the Kennedy clan. \"And his bristling sensitiveness to critical analysis has not been exceeded by that of any previous occupant of the White House.\"\n\nMore ominously, Krock wrote that it was \"well known...that President Kennedy was prone to turn loose the FBI in a search for the official source of any published information that appeared in a form displeasing to him for one reason or another, especially when the publication was in the nature of an unmanaged 'leak.'\" This was a reference to the FBI's heavy-handed investigation of a _New York Times_ reporter, Hanson Baldwin, who in a July 1962 scoop had reported classified information about US satellite surveillance of Soviet missiles. Baldwin described details about the construction of Soviet missile silos, and in the process revealed the capabilities of American satellites. This allowed the Red Army to camouflage sensitive military activities or take evasive measures when it knew satellites would be overhead.\n\nKrock didn't know that J. Edgar Hoover had agreed only reluctantly to White House requests to spy on Baldwin and other journalists, or that the president had turned to the CIA to plug leaks. As the FBI's actions against peace activists a decade later demonstrated, Hoover wasn't squeamish about conducting illegal surveillance. He did, however, drag his feet when he felt there was a risk that the FBI's unlawful activities could be exposed.\n\nKennedy agreed to assign the CIA the task of investigating unauthorized national-security disclosures at an August 1, 1962, meeting of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). Details of the meeting are known because in the spring of 1962 Kennedy had secretly ordered installation of a taping system in his office. The president could secretly start and stop the tape recorder, which was located in the White House basement, by activating switches concealed in a pen socket on his desk, in a bookend, or in a coffee table. Beyond the president, the only people who knew about the taping system were Kennedy's private secretary, the Secret Service agents who installed and maintained it, and Robert Kennedy.\n\nMembers of the PFIAB told Kennedy that Baldwin's story would cause grave damage to national security. The FBI was trying to find his sources, but based on the bureau's past performance, it was unlikely to succeed, the president was told. The PFIAB had discussed the situation prior to the meeting and decided that the \"FBI may not be the best agency to conduct investigations of leaks of this kind,\" its chairman, James Killian, reported.\n\nThe bureau had \"never been enthusiastic or successful in dealing with serious security breaches,\" Killian told Kennedy. \"As I am sure you are fully aware, Mr. Hoover apparently doesn't like to get into this field. He feels it is an administrative responsibility rather than an FBI type of responsibility.\" Furthermore, starting an investigation was a painfully slow process because FBI agents first had to be cleared to receive highly classified information and then educated so they could distinguish between facts that were in public domain and those that were supposed to be secret.\n\n\"We would suggest, therefore, that the Director of Central Intelligence be encouraged to develop an expert group that would be available at all times to follow up on security leaks,\" Killian said.\n\nClark Clifford, an advisor to the president, chimed in, endorsing the recommendation to create a unit at the CIA dedicated to monitoring journalists, establishing who was supplying them national-security information and plugging the leaks. \"Times have changed,\" Clifford said. \"You can't do this anymore on a hit-or-miss basis like we've done in the past because now incidents of this kind are infinitely more important and more damaging than they've ever been.\" General Maxwell Taylor, at the time an advisor to the president and later chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also spoke in favor of the idea.\n\nKennedy was convinced. \"That's a very good idea,\" he said. \"We'll do that.\"\n\nAlthough Clifford had helped write the CIA charter, which prohibited the agency from undertaking operations inside the United States, he didn't express any concern about investigating journalists working in the United States for American newspapers. The attorney general, Robert Kennedy, failed even to suggest that the government should obtain warrants before investigating American citizens.\n\nCIA director John A. McCone told Kennedy three weeks later that he had formed a group to investigate leaks.\n\nThe first reporters targeted for warrantless surveillance by the CIA were Robert S. Allen and his partner, Paul Scott. This was the same Robert S. Allen who had briefly spied for the Soviet Union in 1932 while launching the Washington Merry-Go-Round column with Drew Pearson.\n\nAllen had taken a break from journalism in 1942 to join the Army. In 1945, while serving on General George Patton's staff as an intelligence officer, Colonel Allen was wounded and captured. His right forearm was amputated in a German field hospital. Four days later he was liberated by American forces, and less than three weeks after the surgery was back working on Patton's staff. His wounds had not healed, however, and when the war in Europe was over, Allen spent a year recovering at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington.\n\nAllen learned to type with his left hand. Rather than rejoin Pearson, who had reneged on a promise to pay him a royalty on the Merry-Go-Round column's revenues while he served, he started a new syndicated column with Scott. They specialized in military and intelligence scoops.\n\nAllen came to believe that, like in the '30s, the United States and other democracies were sleepwalking into a confrontation with evil. This time the enemy was the USSR. Allen's distrust of the Soviet Union may have been accentuated by personal experience of the ways its intelligence services had infiltrated Washington, or by a sense of guilt over his secret assistance to Stalin.\n\nAllen was convinced that Kennedy's policies toward the Soviet Union amounted to appeasement. He and Scott developed sources in the Pentagon, CIA, Congress, and even the White House who provided a constant stream of classified information that the two reporters fashioned into darts aimed at piercing American complacency. They focused a spotlight on the CIA. Ironically, while their column was shunned by the _New York Times_ , _Washington Post_ , and other leading American newspapers, TASS, _Izvestia_ , and Radio Moscow frequently repeated its allegations of CIA impropriety and incompetence.\n\nAn _Izvestia_ story in December 1961 quoted \"the Washington observer Robert Allen\" as revealing that the CIA's $400 million budget included extensive funding of front groups and propaganda. \"Allen notes in particular that in West Europe 'the Central Intelligence Agency organized or financed almost all major international conferences of socialists which took place on the continent during the past ten years,'\" the Soviet paper reported. It added that the Allen-Scott column \"unmasks the faces of the traitor-socialists who have sunk to the role of agents in the pay of the American intelligence service.\"\n\nMost of the Allen-Scott story about the CIA budget was both true and classified. CIA director McCone wrote a line-by-line analysis of the column as part of an unsuccessful investigation the agency conducted to try to figure out how the columnists had gotten their hands on secret budget documents. CIA security staff's analysis of the story led them to believe that an agency employee was leaking to Allen and Scott as part of a sophisticated attempt to influence policy. Most of the column was an attack on a top CIA official, Cord Meyer Jr. The column included information about Meyer that McCone told CIA security personnel he had no prior knowledge of, such as the fact that before joining the CIA Meyer had been a strong advocate of world government and had led an organization dedicated to creating a global government. These beliefs were an abomination to anti-communists who viewed the United Nations as a plot to subjugate the United States. CIA security staff surmised that the employee who leaked to Scott was \"playing a clever game, [by] endeavoring to bring to Mr. McCone's attention these facts or statements through the medium of this column with the possible belief or supposition that some form of inquiry into these matters would be made by Mr. McCone.\"\n\nIn January 1962 Allen and Scott reported about American satellites that had been launched and others that would be deployed over the coming year to keep an eye on Soviet and Chinese military activities. In February, citing a leak from the Defense Intelligence Agency, they told their readers that \"an intelligence estimate that Russia has shipped poison gas to Cuba has spread an almost visible chill through the Kennedy administration.\"\n\nIn addition to causing concern about national-security leaks, Allen and Scott irritated the CIA by providing ammunition to the agency's critics in Congress. For example, under the heading \"Another CIA blooper,\" they wrote in July 1961 that the CIA had \"chalked up another in its long line of busts\" by failing to anticipate a military coup in South Korea.\n\nA CIA memo describing the reasons for targeting Allen and Scott for surveillance mentioned that the agency was puzzled about how they obtained and reported on classified information. \"Although much of the information contained in the columns was garbled, it was apparent that key points were frequently direct quotes from classified reports and summaries of recent vintage.\"\n\nEveryone involved in arranging for the CIA to tap the telephones at Allen and Scott's National Press Building office and at their homes knew that by involving the agency in a purely domestic operation they were crossing a line, and very likely violating the law. Reflecting concerns about possible legal jeopardy and the certainty of negative publicity should the operation be disclosed, the CIA minimized the Project Mockingbird paper trail. Staff who handled the wiretapping received their instructions verbally. Knowledge of the operation was limited to a small group. Only Robert Kennedy, who had requested the wiretaps, McNamara, McCone, and a handful of other intelligence officials were aware of Mockingbird.\n\nThe surveillance started on March 12, 1962, and was halted three months later, on June 15, upon the retirement of the CIA's head of security. It isn't clear why the CIA cut off the project early; internal CIA documents express disappointment that the wiretaps were discontinued prematurely. It is possible that the agency believed its operation had been exposed.\n\nEven in this limited time the CIA learned a lot. The two reporters gathered more secrets in a few months than a pair of KGB officers could have dreamed of collecting in decades of spying in Washington. \"Monitors of MOCKINGBIRD were frequently amazed at the sheer bulk of information [Scott] would acquire in the course of a day,\" according to a CIA memo. \"The intercept activity was particularly productive in identifying contacts of the newsmen, their method of operation and many of their sources.\"\n\nThe wiretaps revealed that Allen and Scott were receiving confidential and classified information from a dozen senators and six US representatives, including House Speaker John McCormack, as well as twenty-one congressional staff members. In the executive branch they received classified information from a White House staffer, more than one member of the vice president's staff, an assistant attorney general, and employees of the State Department and NASA.\n\nThe CIA was most anxious to determine which of its own employees were leaking to Allen and Scott. Some of the disclosures, a CIA internal report noted, came from a CIA employee \"who feels that the policy of the Agency should be shifted to one which would not be harmful to US interests.\" The report doesn't describe the policy, and although CIA leadership had a suspect, it wasn't able to confirm that he was the leaker.\n\nWhile it never identified Scott's CIA source, the wiretaps did uncover a White House leaker. It was a clerk who habitually brought documents home, and sometimes shared them with Scott, a neighbor and friend. The clerk's wife once joked on a telephone conversation, which the CIA had intercepted, that if her husband \"kept all the papers he brought home from the White House, the home would look like the White House trash room.\"\n\nThis clerk, who is not identified in the CIA documents that have been declassified, once gave Scott a copy of a secret speech that Walt Rostow, Kennedy's deputy national security advisor, had delivered at the Army's Special Warfare School. Rostow outlined a proposal to create an international organization under UN control to combat communist insurgencies in developing countries. According to a story Allen and Scott wrote about the speech, Rostow enlisted Sen. William Fulbright and liberal foundations to support his idea. The proposal \"hit the Pentagon like one of Mr. Khrushchev's megaton bombs,\" Allen and Scott reported. The reporters detailed classified plans the military had crafted for a completely different approach. The idea, which was later implemented, was to set up training schools around the world to give representatives of trusted governments military and propaganda tools to fight communism.\n\nThe CIA was surprised to discover that Allen and Scott received several warnings that they were being investigated. Although they weren't specifically informed about Mockingbird, both were told that the Defense Department and CIA had launched investigations into their sources of classified information.\n\nThe surveillance solved a riddle that had been puzzling the CIA: although the Allen\/Scott columns contained nuggets extracted from sensitive intelligence reports, the accompanying explanations were often inaccurate. \"At first it was believed that the garbling was a by-product of [Allen's] regular state of intoxication; however, later it became apparent that the garbling was used to disguise the source.\"\n\nThe CIA learned through its wiretaps that Scott was planning to write a story claiming the agency had contributed money to a political campaign to defeat a congressman; that it had funded a foreign trip to Outer Mongolia by one of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's favorite targets, the scholar Owen Lattimore; and that a dozen communists worked at the CIA. The declassified files do not identify the member of Congress or reveal whether the CIA had actually worked to defeat him. In any case, Allen and Scott never reported this information, nor did they write about Lattimore or reputed communists at the CIA.\n\nThe CIA may have exploited its early warning to give Allen and Scott information that cast doubt on the veracity of the leaks. Or the columnists may have decided they couldn't publish them without inadvertently disclosing their sources. Only a small fraction of the information provided to Allen and Scott ever made it into their columns. Some was set aside to protect the identity of a source. Even after sequestering these secrets, they received far more classified information than they could use, so they passed some of it on to other reporters and correspondents, who published the leaks under their own bylines.\n\nAllen continued to be a thorn in the CIA's flesh until illness forced him to stop working in 1980. He committed suicide in 1981 at age 80.\n\nHaving been both a Soviet spy and the object of White House\u2013ordered surveillance in the 1930s and 1960s put Allen in a class by himself, but he was far from being the first or last reporter to have his or her phones tapped. Illegal electronic surveillance of reporters, including those with Press Building offices, didn't start or end with the Kennedy administration, and while Hoover dragged his feet in response to requests from John Kennedy to wiretap reporters, he was more accommodating to other presidents, including Dwight Eisenhower.\n\nIn May 1955, the White House requested that the FBI find the source of a leak as soon as possible, and made it clear it didn't care how it did it. A two-man newsletter, _Petty's Oil Letter_ , had revealed a confidential discussion between President Eisenhower and the head of the Office of Defense Mobilization about plans to create an oil pipeline from Texas to the Northeast. The pipeline was intended to ensure that an atomic attack wouldn't cut oil supplies to the East Coast.\n\nThe head of FBI counterintelligence assembled a team and told them they were \"free to do whatever was necessary\" to find out who was leaking. It was necessary, the agents decided, to break into _Petty's Oil Letter_ 's National Press Building Office and plant a microphone. The head of maintenance for the Press Building, who was already helping the FBI keep tabs on TASS, was happy to assist with the job. The bug caught Milburn Petty and his partner Jim Collins discussing the source of the leak. The FBI confronted the leaker and persuaded him to confess.\n\nHoover was so concerned about Congress or the public discovering that the agency used illegal bugs and wiretaps that he ordered the bureau to employ euphemisms in all official communications. The agents who handled the _Petty's Oil Letter_ operation received commendations from Hoover praising their \"very effective utilization of a certain special technique,\" and internal FBI documents about the operation referred to the bug as a \"special technical installation.\"\n\nNational security was used again as a justification for FBI electronic surveillance of reporters during the Nixon administration. Acting on orders from the White House, starting in 1969 the FBI tapped a number of reporters, including Marvin Kalb of CBS television and two _New York Times_ reporters, William Beecher and Hedrick Smith. The bureau didn't seek warrants for the taps.\n\nHenry Brandon, the Washington correspondent for the London _Sunday Times_ , was also tapped. Brandon, who worked from a Press Building office, was the consummate Washington insider, known and respected by presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon, and the object of envy by rival journalists who lacked his access. The reasons for tapping Brandon are murky and explanations are contradictory. Nixon said on several occasions that he hadn't initiated the tap. Hoover had started listening to Brandon's telephone calls during the Johnson administration and he had simply agreed to continue the practice, Nixon claimed.\n\nIn an interview recorded after his resignation, Nixon said that on his first day as president a thick envelope was waiting on his desk marked \"Top Secret\u2014Eyes Only\u2014for the President.\" It was an intelligence report about Brandon. Nixon recalled, \"I called Hoover, and I says, 'What the hell is this?' He says, 'Oh, Henry Brandon, he's a British agent.'\" Nixon said he threw the envelope in the \"out\" box with a note asking Kissinger to look into it, and that he never heard another word about it. \"I'm sure Brandon thinks I put the tap on, but apparently Johnson had it on all the time.\" In 1973 Nixon told a White House aide, \"Brandon's been zapped for years. That's what Hoover told me.\"\n\nJustice Department officials denied that Brandon had been tapped during the Johnson administration, and no evidence of a tap prior to 1969 has surfaced. If Hoover had proof that Brandon was a British intelligence officer, he took it to his grave. What is incontrovertible is that Brandon's privacy, along with the privacy of anyone he spoke with on the telephone, was violated for more than two years, and there was no discernable national security justification.\n\n#\n\nStarting in the late 1950s, Soviet spies who operated from the TASS bureau in the National Press Building engaged in a tense, high-stakes version of cat and mouse with the FBI. Both sides viewed their interactions as a kind of game, but their rivalry wasn't playful. The men Moscow sent to the Press Building were determined to obtain secrets that could give them an edge in the geopolitical conflicts that defined the latter half of the twentieth century\u2014and potentially in the nuclear war that Kremlin leaders believed could break out at any moment.\n\nUnlike its Soviet counterparts, who tracked American spies in Moscow around the clock, the FBI lacked the manpower required to maintain continuous surveillance of all of the known or suspected hostile intelligence operatives in Washington. The bureau compensated by exploiting its home-court advantage: bugging the TASS office, tapping its phones, sifting through its trash\u2014and enlisting volunteers from all walks of life, from Press Club presidents to maintenance workers, to keep an eye on Soviet intelligence officers.\n\nThe KGB had its own challenges to overcome. Its American intelligence networks were decimated in the 1950s by the revelations of defectors, the US Army's decryption of KGB World War II intelligence cables, and an increase in American security awareness. Starting in the late 1940s the FBI and the US military instituted background checks on personnel with access to classified information and systematically weeded communists out of sensitive positions. The Soviets had to assume that every one of the assets had been compromised. The chances of a KGB officer finding someone like the true believers who had worked for Soviet intelligence in the past was slim. The FBI had thoroughly infiltrated the Communist Party of the United States, draining a favored Soviet recruiting pool, and following revelations of Stalin's crimes and the death of over 30,000 GIs in the Korean War, almost no Americans outside the party were willing to put their lives on the line to advance the interests of communism. In the absence of ideologically motivated spies, the KGB had to find people with access to secrets who were willing to betray their country for money or, less commonly, who could be entranced through romance or entrapped by blackmail.\n\nThe war might have been cold, but in the 1950s and '60s it didn't feel that way for Americans, who lived in fear of nuclear annihilation. The Soviet Union dominated the public imagination. School children were drilled on how to \"duck and cover\" as if their desks would protect them from a nuclear attack. Newspapers and television were filled with stories that painted Russians as dangerous and duplicitous. In this environment, Soviet reporters and diplomats were widely, and correctly, assumed to be spies. Nonetheless, they were objects of mostly friendly curiosity at the National Press Club, one of the few places in Washington where Americans and Soviets mingled freely.\n\nValentin Ivanov, a short, pudgy Russian who sported a bushy mustache and thick glasses, didn't cause a stir when he started hanging around the Press Club in the summer of 1957. He was entitled to membership as press attach\u00e9 at the Soviet embassy. Ivanov's visibility increased in the spring of 1958, when he demolished a series of competitors in preliminary rounds of the club's chess championship and easily won the first two games in the final. He would have taken first prize if he hadn't thrown the last three games; someone in Moscow likely ordered him to avoid the scrutiny that would have been generated by a Soviet victory. Spies are supposed to use activities like playing chess to meet and size up potential recruits, not to call attention to themselves.\n\nIvanov was less reticent on the evening of May 7, 1960. At 6:18 p.m. Press Club members watched in astonishment as he dashed out of the club crying, \"Admitted! Admitted! Admitted! Admitted!\" Ivanov had been aroused by an official State Department statement acknowledging that the Eisenhower administration had lied when it claimed that an American weather plane had accidentally strayed into Soviet territory and crashed. In fact, as the government confessed, it had been a U-2 spy plane on an espionage mission.\n\nIt was a remarkable moment. The U-2 statement was perhaps the last time journalists and the public were stunned to learn that a US president had been caught perpetrating a bald-faced lie. And it was the first time that the American government publicly acknowledged that it violated borders and sovereignty during peacetime to conduct espionage.\n\nPress Club members were surprised by Ivanov again on August 12, 1960, when they woke up to find a story describing his extracurricular activities on the front page of the _Washington Post._ It wasn't about the Russian's prowess on the chessboard. Instead it was an account of a sleazy and inept attempt at espionage.\n\nIvanov had befriended a sometime merchant seaman and part-time cook named Roger Foss, whom he had persuaded to move from New York to Washington and to apply for a government job. Ivanov's goal, Foss told the _Post_ , was to \"infiltrate the Government and society.\" The story didn't explicitly state that Ivanov was a spy, but it provided details that left little doubt. For example, Foss described how his Russian benefactor set up secret meetings: Foss was instructed to leave a chalk mark on a lamppost near Ivanov's home as a signal that he wanted to meet\u2014a classic technique the KGB used in Washington for decades. They met about fifteen times over the course of a year, usually in Chinatown. \"He loved Chinese food; I got so sick of it,\" Foss moaned. \"I'll never touch another bite.\" Ivanov paid Foss $500 to cover tuition at a business school, plus living expenses to tide him over until a government job opened up.\n\nOne hot day in August, while he was waiting for the results of his civil service exam, Foss wandered into the offices of the American Nazi Party in Arlington, Virginia, across the bridge from Washington. After speaking with its leader, George Lincoln Rockwell, he decided fascism suited him better than communism. At Rockwell's urging, Foss told the FBI and later the _Post_ about Ivanov's attempts to set him up as a sleeper agent.\n\nThe day after Foss's story appeared in the _Post_ , the State Department declared Ivanov persona non grata, and he was never again seen in the Press Club.\n\nIvanov's name reappeared in the newspapers a month later, after two National Security Agency codebreakers, William Martin and Bernon Mitchell, denounced the United States at a dramatic press conference in Moscow. They were the first employees to defect from an organization that was so secret at the time that its initials were said to be short for \"No Such Agency.\" Congressional investigators told reporters that Ivanov had recruited Martin and Mitchell at a Washington area chess club. If true, from the KGB's perspective this would have more than mitigated Ivanov's botched attempt to insinuate a fascist loser into a government job.\n\nWith the exception of Martin and Mitchell, and an Army Colonel named William Henry Whalen who sold military secrets to the Soviets, the KGB didn't have much success in Washington in the first half of the '60s. Khrushchev, who had great faith in his own ability to assess international affairs, was far less enthusiastic about foreign intelligence than his predecessors. The KGB's Washington station became a backwater. Its fortunes changed in 1964, when Leonid Brezhnev, who had a more traditional Soviet veneration for espionage and respect for intelligence services, toppled Khrushchev and took over the Soviet government.\n\nThe KGB sent a new station chief, Boris Solomatin, to Washington in 1965 to turn things around. He selected a rising star, Oleg Kalugin, as his deputy. Kalugin had studied journalism in New York at Columbia University a decade earlier as part of the first Cold War student exchange program. Like most of the \"students\" Moscow sent to Ivy League universities, he was a professional intelligence officer. Kalugin had returned to New York in 1960, working undercover in the guise of a correspondent for Radio Moscow.\n\nIn his third posting to the \"main adversary,\" as Soviet intelligence agencies called the United States, Colonel Kalugin's cover was as second secretary and press attach\u00e9 in the Soviet embassy. He was actually in charge of political intelligence, with half of the KGB's forty Washington-based officers reporting to him.\n\nCultured and quick-witted, Kalugin easily formed bonds with intelligent men and attractive women. In addition to trying to recruit agents with access to the White House, Congress, and the State Department, he focused his considerable charm on journalists. The leading liberal columnists of the day, Walter Lippmann, Joseph Kraft, and Drew Pearson, regularly and openly met with Kalugin, as did reporters like Chalmers Roberts and Murray Marder of the _Washington Post_. Kalugin's circle of friends included the unofficial dean of foreign correspondents, Henry Brandon of the London _Times_. Kalugin was a familiar presence at the Press Club and other watering holes, where prominent journalists exchanged their perspectives on American policy and politics for the insights he provided about the USSR.\n\nKalugin was far too smooth to try to recruit most American reporters as agents, but he did pitch at least one. Over a series of lunches, Kalugin tried to bring I. F. Stone, who had been a Soviet intelligence operative in the 1930s, back into the fold. Infuriated by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Stone broke off contact with Kalugin in the summer of 1969.\n\nKalugin had more luck with the foreign reporters. His paid recruits in the Press Building included the Washington correspondent for a major European newspaper\u2014as late as 2014 Kalugin refused to identify the journalist or his country\u2014and reporters from developing countries.\n\nIn addition to recruiting agents and informants in the Press Building and directing the operations of KGB officers in the TASS bureau, Kalugin found that the building was a perfect spot for evading surveillance and meeting agents. The FBI didn't hide the fact that it was watching Kalugin. He and other KGB officers, however, were convinced that they could detect FBI tails and that intense observation was sporadic, usually lasting a week or two followed by breaks of several weeks.\n\n#\n\nNational Press Club Bar, circa 1965. Women were not permitted to join the National Press Club until 1971. Prior to 1971 women were allowed to enter parts of the club when accompanied by members, but were strictly excluded from the bar, card room, and other male sanctuaries.\n\nCredit: National Press Club archives\n\nAccording to the FBI's unwritten rules of engagement, its agents might tail Kalugin to the lobby of the Press Building, but they wouldn't get on the elevator with him and they couldn't easily follow him into the Press Club. Once he was in the club, Kalugin could take advantage of stairwells to descend to lower floors. There, long corridors arranged in a rectangle with uninterrupted sightlines were perfect for covert meetings.\n\nAbout once a month for several years, a diplomat from a Western European country slipped unnoticed through the Press Building lobby. He got off on one of the middle floors and walked down the corridor at a prearranged time. Just as he rounded one of the corners, he would see Kalugin walking toward him. If anyone else was in sight, they would walk past each other and wait for another day to rendezvous. If the coast was clear, they would duck into a stairwell, where the diplomat passed Kalugin a package. The contents ranged from copies of diplomatic cables and top-secret reports to recordings of the diplomat's ambassador's conversations. Kalugin handed his agent an envelope with cash and a note indicating the date, time, and floor number for their next assignation. Following an exchange that took less than a minute, Kalugin jogged back upstairs to the Press Club bar for a drink with a reporter. He'd been absent from the bar for about the amount of time it would have taken to visit the bathroom.\n\nWhile Kalugin had recruited a handful of foreign reporters and was on friendly terms with scores of American journalists, his closest collaborators were KGB subordinates who worked from the cramped TASS office on the third floor of the Press Building. The TASS bureau chief, Mikhail Sagatelyan, and most of his staff were KGB officers. There were also a few military intelligence (GRU) officers at TASS who worked completely independently of the KGB. Like every foreign TASS bureau, the Press Building office had a couple of \"clean\" staff, real reporters who had to carry the load for the spooks, who did as little work for the news agency as they could get away with. In addition to KGB officers working undercover at TASS, all Soviet journalists in Washington, including those working for _Izvestia_ , the Novosti news agency, and Soviet radio and television networks, were obliged to cooperate with and obey instructions from the KGB. The sole exception was employees of _Pravda_ , the Communist Party newspaper, which was completely off-limits to the intelligence services. In the Soviet hierarchy the only body more privileged than the intelligence services was the party.\n\nIn 1967 Kalugin hatched a plot with Viktor Kopytin, a KGB officer working under TASS cover, which reflected the Washington station's appetite for risk. The idea was to plant a bug in a congressional hearing room and listen in on closed sessions where classified and sensitive military information was discussed. Kopytin cased the Senate Armed Services Committee room, decided that security was too tight, and advised Kalugin that the House Armed Services Committee room would be a better target.\n\nA KGB unit in Moscow that specialized in spy tech\u2014like poison dart guns camouflaged in umbrellas\u2014created a custom bug. The battery-powered microphone and transmitter were concealed in a piece of wood that matched a table in the committee room. There were metal spikes on one side so it could be stuck onto the table.\n\nOn a summer afternoon, Kopytin lingered in the room after a hearing, waited until he believed that no one was watching, and casually slipped his hand under the table and firmly attached the bug. KGB officers in a car parked on Capitol Hill huddled anxiously over a receiver, but they never heard a peep from the bug. It turned out that Kopytin was overly confident in his ability to detect surveillance. He'd been seen planting the microphone. The FBI neutralized the device and kept the room under observation, hoping to catch a KGB officer attempting to retrieve it. The Soviets, however, didn't take the bait.\n\nKopytin's congressional caper had probably been seen by a member of an FBI unit that specialized in counterintelligence against the KGB. It operated from the FBI's Washington Field Office, three blocks from the Press Building in the Old Post Office building. (The building was renovated and repurposed as a Trump Hotel in 2017.) Once the FBI suspected that someone was a KGB spy, an agent from the unit was assigned to keep track of him.\n\nAn FBI agent named W. Peyton George was assigned to Kopytin in 1968. He learned that his target, like most TASS reporters, gave a high priority to establishing relationships with American journalists. George was eager to find out what Kopytin was discussing with reporters because learning what kind of information the KGB was fishing for could shed light on its priorities. This wasn't a straightforward task because FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, obsessed with preventing negative publicity, had laid down strict rules governing his agents' contacts with the media. Prior to contacting a reporter, an FBI agent had to conduct a background investigation and receive approval from FBI headquarters, a process that could take a month.\n\nUnder Hoover's rules, there were no restrictions on agents speaking with reporters who volunteered to help the FBI. This loophole led George to come up with a pragmatic solution. When he learned through FBI electronic surveillance of the TASS office that Kopytin was planning to have lunch with a reporter, George would call Alan Cromley, Washington bureau chief of the _Daily Oklahoman_ and, in 1968, president of the National Press Club. In some cases, Cromley would tell George to steer clear of a reporter who was a \"leftist\" and therefore unlikely to cooperate with the FBI. In other cases, Cromley would make a discreet telephone call, and ten minutes later one of Kopytin's sources would call George to offer to keep the FBI informed about their conversations. In addition to consulting Cromley about his own cases, George called Cromley on behalf of other FBI counterintelligence agents. After Cromley's term was over, the FBI agent established a similar working arrangement with another Press Club president, Michael Hudoba, an editor at _Sports Afield Magazine_.\n\nGeorge ran a classic operation against Kopytin. As in the best counterintelligence operations, the KGB had no idea it had been snared and, in fact, believed it was scooping up valuable secrets under the FBI's nose. Appropriately, it all began in a bar, when Kopytin overheard two men talking about \"multiple reentry vehicles\" and other bits of arcane defense terminology. It turned out that they were analysts at a think tank that worked for the Department of Defense. Kopytin joined in the conversation, telling the Americans that he was a Soviet journalist. Before long the Russian found a common interest with one of his new acquaintances\u2014the man's grandfather had emigrated from Russia.\n\nThe American, who has not been publicly identified, reported his contact with Kopytin to the FBI, and George encouraged him to develop the relationship under the FBI's direction, as a double agent. Kopytin ran the recruitment according to the standard KGB playbook. He started by asking the American for innocuous information, gradually upping the ante until he was requesting and paying for classified information. To the intense irritation of the American intelligence community, Senator J. William Fulbright had publicly released a list of classified projects that the Defense Department was funding. The list gave Kopytin and other KGB officers a carryout menu to order secret documents from. The FBI and the National Security Council set up a process to vet Kopytin's requests and determine which reports could be given to him without damaging national security.\n\nKopytin met with the American about once every six weeks to receive the classified reports, usually over dinner. The KGB officer would punch his finger in the double agent's chest and say, \"We want to know what your President is thinking!\" Between courses, he slipped his informant an envelope with three to six thousand dollars in crisp twenty-dollar bills. When the defense analyst moved to Massachusetts, the FBI paid for his travel back to DC for the meetings and put him up at the Hilton or the Watergate Hotel, covering the expenses with the KGB's twenty-dollar bills.\n\nBased on the information Kopytin was requesting, it became clear to Pentagon officials that the Soviet government had obtained the complete US negotiating strategy for nuclear disarmament talks that were being conducted in Geneva. Kopytin \"even had the United States' Position Points in chronological order,\" George recalled.\n\nThe State Department expelled Kopytin in May 1969, ostensibly in retaliation for the Soviet Union's expulsion of a _Washington Post_ reporter. The FBI was proud of the way it had handled the TASS reporter and KGB officer. The bureau didn't discover for another eighteen years that even as it was playing Kopytin it had failed to detect one of the KGB's most successful espionage operations.\n\nOne of the worst security leaks in American history started on a cold day in October 1967 at the Soviet embassy, an old mansion that had a quirk that made it especially easy for the FBI's surveillance teams: there was a single front entrance and no back door. Nonetheless, the FBI didn't notice when John Anthony Walker, a chief warrant officer in the US Navy, walked up to the front door and rang the bell. He stepped inside and asked to speak with \"someone connected with intelligence.\" Walker told a KGB officer that he wanted to strike up a business relationship with the USSR, and he handed over a sheaf of Xeroxed papers to prove that he had access to valuable information. The documents were brought to Kalugin and his boss Solomatin, who quickly realized they were real\u2014and that they were extraordinary. Walker had handed over information that could help the Soviets decrypt the most secret American Navy communications.\n\nKalugin spent hundreds of hours over the following months scouting \"dead drops,\" sites where Walker could deposit documents and pick up money and instructions without meeting face-to-face with a KGB officer, and poring over the material Walker sold the KGB. Walker was one of the most effective Soviet Cold War spies, providing high-level intelligence about American Navy codes, technology, strategy, and tactics. Information he supplied allowed the USSR to track American ships, submarines, and war planes in real time, and to know in advance where they were going.\n\nIn addition to giving Moscow secrets that could have provided it a decisive military advantage in a war with the United States, Walker gave a career boost to Kalugin, who left Washington in December 1969 to start a new job in Moscow as the KGB's deputy chief of foreign counterintelligence.\n\nBesides stealing secrets, while in Washington Kalugin had engaged in what the KGB called \"active measures,\" intelligence operations designed to advance Soviet objectives and influence events in foreign countries. Active-measures techniques included creating forged documents, disseminating disinformation, recruiting \"agents of influence,\" as the KGB called individuals who could shape policy or public opinion, organizing political influence operations, and creating and funding front groups. Soviet propaganda thrived on \"whataboutism,\" pointing to supposed moral equivalencies between the Soviet Union and its adversaries. When there was no real evidence, the KGB was tasked with using active measures to create it.\n\nOne of Kalugin's small contributions to the KGB's massive active-measures campaigns involved creating disinformation to divert attention from entirely accurate accounts of Soviet discrimination against Jews. His first move was to flood American Jewish organizations with anonymous anti-Semitic materials. Then Kalugin found individuals who were willing, for a fee, to desecrate Jewish graves and paint swastikas on synagogues. He sent photographers to document the wave of hatred that the Soviet press claimed was sweeping across America.\n\nAfter Kalugin's departure, the KGB revisited the theme. In 1971, KGB chief Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov personally approved the distribution in New York of pamphlets presented as if they had been written by the Jewish Defense League that attacked African Americans as \"black mongrels.\" The Jewish Defense League staged a more overt, and colorful, operation at the Press Building the same year. To protest unfair \"scapegoating\" of Jews in Leningrad, they chained a sedated goat to the door of the TASS office. The goat wore a sign indicating that he was a \"Jewish scapegoat.\" Other \"gifts\" left at the TASS office have included an effigy with a noose affixed to its neck and a sticker modifying the word TASS to UNITASS, which sounds like \"unitaz,\" or toilet in Russian.\n\nDuring the Democratic primaries for the 1976 presidential campaign, the KGB forged FBI files that accused Senator Henry \"Scoop\" Jackson, a hardline opponent of the Soviet Union, of being a homosexual. The documents were sent to the _Chicago Tribune_ , _Los Angeles Times_ , and other newspapers, but none of them fell for the ruse.\n\nThe KGB's Washington station, most likely including officers working in the TASS office, had more success with a provocation intended to stir up racial tensions ahead of the 1984 Olympics. The KGB printed up flyers that appeared to be products of the Ku Klux Klan and sent them to the Olympic committees of African and Asian countries. The flyers announced that the Olympics were \"for whites only\" and warned \"African monkeys\" that rewards would be paid to Americans for lynching or shooting them. Newspapers around the world ran stories about the flyers. Some of them followed up with stories noting the US State Department's assertion that they were KGB disinformation.\n\nKGB active-measures activities in Washington included more subtle, and more effective initiatives. For example, Yuri Shvets, a KGB officer who was posted to the TASS Press Building office in 1985, successfully targeted an influential journalist, Claudia Wright, the Washington correspondent for _New Statesman_ , a British magazine. Wright, an Australian who was strongly pro-Soviet and vehemently anti-American, had been unwittingly serving as a vehicle for KGB fabrications for several years. In 1982 she wrote a story claiming that Jeane Kirkpatrick, the US ambassador to the United Nations, had a clandestine relationship with apartheid South Africa's military intelligence. The story was based on a letter the KGB had forged.\n\nShvets decided in October 1985 to kick it up a notch by meeting Wright and offering her an ongoing working relationship with the KGB. She immediately agreed and became a classic agent of influence. Rather than steal secrets for the KGB, she slipped its disinformation into her stories. After her recruitment, Wright's stories appeared regularly in _New Statesman_ , and occasionally in the _Washington Post_ , _New York Times_ , and _Foreign Affairs_. They always favored Moscow's interpretation of events, were anti-Israeli, and expressed great confidence in the wisdom of the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. For example, Wright repeated Soviet disinformation in a story printed in the Dublin, Ireland, _Sunday Tribune_ on September 3, 1989, asserting that \"the Korean Airlines jumbo jet, shot down by the Soviet Air Force six years ago today, was on a spy mission for the US.\"\n\nThe KGB and GRU continued to send officers to work as TASS reporters in the National Press Building up until the final days of the Soviet Union and, according to defectors, the Russian Federation continued the practice.\n\nOne of the last Soviet intelligence officers to work in the National Press Building, Stanislav Lunev, a colonel in the GRU, arrived in Washington in 1988. He was working in the TASS Washington bureau on Christmas in 1991 when Mikhail Gorbachev turned the lights out on the Soviet Union and transferred power to the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin.\n\nLunev met one of his most valuable agents at a press conference for the environmental advocacy group National Resources Defense Council. In a memoir published in 1998, Lunev described one adventure involving the agent, whom he did not identify. On a sunny evening in the summer of 1990 Lunev drove to Northern Virginia, and pulled over near a pay phone, lifted the hood of his Mercury Sable and waited. If the phone had rung three times, and then three times a few minutes later, he would have aborted the mission. That would have been a signal that his compatriots, who were monitoring radio frequencies used by FBI agents, had detected surveillance. Relieved by the phone's silence, Lunev drove to secluded spot, parked, and stooped down to pick up a Coca Cola can. Inside the can, which was rigged to destroy its contents if someone tried to open it improperly, Lunev's agent had placed undeveloped film. It was a transcript of a closed Senate Intelligence Committee hearing about US strategy on the disintegration of the USSR, and included sensitive details about agents and operations against the Soviet Union.\n\nLunev defected in March 1992 and spent a year at a safe house in Maryland briefing American intelligence officials. Among other things, he told them that he'd spent a great deal of time scouting locations where small nuclear bombs, so-called suitcase nukes, could be pre-positioned in advance of a war between the United States and the USSR.\n\nTASS was not the only organization in the National Press Building that carried out active measures for the KGB. Soviet intelligence backed another active-measures project based there, which seriously damaged the CIA.\n\n#\n\nThe CIA had previously experienced damaging and embarrassing leaks, but these were droplets compared to the torrent that poured out of _CovertAction Information Bulletin_ , a publication dedicated to using disclosures of secret information to cripple America's capacity for conducting intelligence operations. For a time it was surprisingly successful.\n\nA low-budget magazine with an erratic publishing schedule, _CovertAction_ wasn't much to look at, but it packed a punch. Its power came from exposing the identities of CIA officers and operatives, and describing some of the agency's most sensitive operations. _CovertAction_ also educated its readers around the world about CIA tradecraft, provided lessons on spotting spooks, as well as detecting and evading electronic surveillance, and encouraged citizens to apply this knowledge to mount vigilante attacks on American spies and their operations.\n\nThe CIA viewed _CovertAction_ and books published by its staff as an existential threat.\n\nRonald Reagan's CIA director, William Casey, told Congress that the individuals who produced _CovertAction_ \"understand correctly that secrecy is the life blood of an intelligence organization and that disclosures of the identities of the individuals whose intelligence affiliation is deliberately concealed can disrupt, discredit and\u2014they hope\u2014ultimately destroy an agency such as the CIA.\"\n\nWhile its _raison d'\u00eatre_ was exposing secrets, _CovertAction_ held tightly onto its most important secret: its founder's close collaboration with communist intelligence services.\n\n_CovertAction_ was created by Philip Agee, a renegade former CIA officer who was devoted to destroying the institution he had once served. It was secretly supported by the _Direcci\u00f3n General de Inteligencia_ (DGI), Cuba's intelligence service, and by the KGB, which considered the publication one of its most effective \"active measures\" against the United States.\n\nThe pages of _CovertAction_ and books produced by its staff disclosed the identities of over two thousand undercover CIA officers, impairing and in some cases destroying their ability to collect intelligence or conduct secret operations. Along with publishing accurate depictions of CIA activities, including some that many Americans would find abhorrent, such as the subversion of democratically elected governments and complicity in torture, the magazine also served as a conduit for Soviet propaganda and disinformation.\n\nAccording to the CIA, while they were working for _CounterSpy_ , a precursor of _CovertAction_ , the magazine's staff published revelations that directly led to the murder of a CIA station chief in Athens. The CIA also blamed _CovertAction_ for an attack on the top CIA officer in Jamaica. Agee and _CovertAction_ 's staff denied that they inspired either incident.\n\nAgee also denied any connection to communist intelligence services.\n\nLike anything viewed through the rearview mirror of history, the competition between the United States and the USSR seems to shrink in importance over time, especially as living connections to the Soviet Union pass away. But as he looked out into the world in 1957, when he joined the CIA, all Agee could see was the Cold War and the proxy hot wars it inspired. He was an uncritical supporter of American foreign policy at a time when all other goals were subordinate to containing and rolling back communism.\n\nFor a dozen years Agee recruited agents and ran covert operations in Ecuador, Uruguay, and Mexico. He witnessed and participated in the CIA's incitement of armed uprisings, plotting of coups, subversion of elections, and tainting of the media with propaganda. Agee came to believe, much like Smedley Butler four decades earlier, that American activities in Latin America were not intended to promote democracy but rather to advance the financial interests of American capitalists. Echoing Butler's disillusionment, Agee later wrote that the CIA was \"nothing more than the secret police of American capitalism, plugging leaks in the political dam night and day so that shareholders of US companies operating in poor countries can continue enjoying the rip-off.\"\n\nSearching for explanations for the economic inequality and poverty he witnessed, Agee, who had been educated by Jesuits, shed his Catholicism and adopted Marxism. The failure of his marriage may have contributed to his crisis of faith. In 1968, while stationed in Mexico City, he submitted his resignation to the CIA, effective early the next year. Agee remained in Mexico City and, seeking an outlet for his anger, and an instrument of retribution against the CIA, started writing a book about his experiences. Agee contacted publishers in New York seeking a contract and advance, but was rebuffed by editors who wanted a spectacular expos\u00e9, not the Marxist treatise he pitched.\n\nUndeterred, Agee traveled to Havana in May 1971 determined to write his book. He later acknowledged that he had received assistance from Cuban officials in researching his book in exchange for pledges that it would be \"politically acceptable to the Cubans.\" Given the de facto state of war between the DGI and CIA, it is inconceivable that he would have been able to enter Cuba, or to retain his freedom there, without collaborating with its intelligence service.\n\nAgee maintained a low profile and apparently stayed off the CIA's radar until October 1971, when a newspaper in Montevideo published a letter to the editor he had sent from Havana. It warned that the CIA was likely to mount covert operations to prevent a leftist party from winning Uruguay's upcoming national elections. Publication of the letter tipped off the CIA that Agee had turned against it, sparking an investigation that revealed his plans to write a book about the agency. By the time the CIA started looking for him, Agee had traveled to Paris. CIA agents posing as leftists befriended him and tried to obtain a copy of his manuscript. To help the agency keep tabs on Agee, they lent him a typewriter in which he found a concealed microphone and transmitter. The CIA pressured Agee's family to entice him to return the United States, presumably so that he could be arrested, but he stayed in Europe. Decades later, Agee claimed he had evidence that the CIA was so anxious to quash his book that it had plotted to kill him before it could be published.\n\n_Inside the Company: CIA Diary_ was published in Britain in April 1975 and was an immediate sensation. The public, and especially journalists, were fascinated by firsthand accounts of the agency's use of bribery, forgery, bugging, wiretapping, and blackmail throughout Latin America. And they were appalled to learn that the CIA was abetting torture.\n\nIn one of the most dramatic passages, Agee described how he and his colleagues had come up with a scheme to drive a wedge between the government of Uruguay and the Soviet Union. It involved fabricating a plot by four Soviet diplomats to conspire with leftist labor unions to overthrow the government. As part of the operation, Agee recommended that the police place a young labor leader named Oscar Bonaudi in protective detention. A few days later, on December 12, 1965, Agee was visiting a police station when he heard agonized screams emanating from a nearby cell. Agee immediately suspected that it was Bonaudi, the man he had falsely accused. A few days later he learned that this was correct, and that the torture had continued for three days.\n\nThe horror, Agee asserted, went far beyond the CIA abetting the brutalizing innocent individuals. CIA subversion, he wrote, was directly responsible for the seizure of power across Latin America by corrupt, authoritarian dictators who oppressed and impoverished millions of people.\n\nTo the extreme consternation of his former employer, unlike previous books that criticized the CIA, Agee's made no attempt to mask the identities of intelligence officers or their agents. _Inside the Company_ featured an appendix that named 250 CIA officers and provided detailed information about government officials and private citizens they had recruited. For example, Agee accused the future president of Costa Rica, Jose Figueres, of being a \"front man for CIA operations.\" The book listed hundreds of organizations from newspapers to labor unions that, Agee claimed, had been penetrated or coopted by the CIA.\n\nPublished in the United States six months after its release in London, _Inside the Company_ was a bestseller.\n\nThe CIA assumed that Agee, who had spent considerable periods in Havana, must have been in touch with the DGI. It also suspected he was cooperating with the KGB. For decades, however, there was no evidence to support these suspicions. The first confirmation came from a remarkable source\u2014notes secreted from the Lubyanka by a former KGB employee named Vasili Mitrokhin.\n\nThe journey that brought those notes to the CIA's attention started in 1956, when Mitrokhin was a foreign intelligence officer. He participated in a discussion at work about Nikita Khrushchev's famous speech revealing Stalin's crimes. While his colleagues denounced Stalin, Mitrokhin asked, \"Where was Khrushchev when all these crimes were taking place?\" This impertinent question helped derail his career as a spy. The young skeptic was relegated to working in the service's dusty archives, where having learned his lesson, he kept his growing disillusionment with the KGB and the Soviet Union to himself. In 1972 Mitrokhin was put in charge of moving 300,000 foreign intelligence files from the Lubyanka in downtown Moscow to a new building in the suburbs. He spent his days alone in the archives and hatched an audacious plan: At tremendous risk, over a decade the archivist took detailed notes and smuggled them out of KGB offices. He hid them under the mattress in his apartment, and on weekends took them to his family's _dacha_ , stuffed them into containers, and buried them beneath the floorboards. His plan was to find a way to alert the world to the KGB's actions\u2014especially its crimes.\n\nTaking advantage of the chaos following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Mitrokhin contacted representatives of British intelligence in late 1991, and a year later he, his family, and his extraordinary notes were \"exfiltrated\"\u2014surreptitiously moved\u2014to Britain. The British shared the information with the CIA.\n\nAmong the many revelations buried in the exhumed notes are excerpts from files indicating that Agee worked closely with the DGI in researching and writing _Inside the Company_. Furthermore, Mitrokhin's records indicate that the KGB played a major role in the project. An internal KGB memo took full credit for the book, claiming that it was \"prepared by Service A, together with the Cubans.\" Service A was the KGB's \"active measures\" department.\n\nOne of Mitrokhin's conditions for turning over his treasure trove to British intelligence was that the information would be released to the public. _The Sword and the Shield_ , the first of two books based on the files, was published in 1999. It described Agee's collaboration with the DGI and KGB. Later, Mitrokhin's raw notes were made available to the public.\n\nIn 1994, prior to publication of the _Sword and the Shield_ or any other public discussion of Mitrokhin's allegations about Agee, the former KGB general Oleg Kalugin published a memoir that included a description of the provenance of _Inside the Company_. Kalugin, who headed KGB counterintelligence during the time that Agee was completing his book, reported that the CIA defector initially approached the KGB in Mexico City offering damaging information about the CIA. He was turned away by officers who thought he was a \"dangle,\" or false defector.\n\nThe threat of dangles wasn't hypothetical, as Agee knew. While he was working for the CIA, Agee learned that an American master sergeant had been dangled to the KGB in Mexico City in 1968. The soldier met with twenty-six KGB case officers over eight years in Mexico, West Germany, Switzerland, Japan, and Austria, giving the United States tremendous insight into KGB operations and, presumably, opportunities to feed its rival disinformation. The operation lasted until 1976, when Agee tipped off the KGB.\n\nThe KGB approached Agee only after reviewing secrets he'd spilled to the Cubans and realizing that his defection was genuine. \"The Cubans shared Agee's information with us. But as I sat in my office in Moscow reading reports about the growing list of revelations coming from Agee, I cursed our officers for turning away such a prize,\" Kalugin wrote. While Agee was finishing his manuscript, the KGB kept in touch with him through Edgar Anatolyevich Cheporov, the London correspondent of the Novosti news agency and of the Soviet literary weekly _Literaturnaya Gazeta_. Agee complied with a request from Cheporov to remove references in his manuscript to the CIA's penetration of Latin American communist parties. This information presumably would have tarnished the parties' reputations.\n\nA review in a CIA journal concluded that _Inside the Company_ \"will affect the CIA as a severe body blow does any living organism: some parts obviously will be affected more than others, but the health of the whole is bound to suffer.\" Agee and his backers in the DGI and KGB must have been pleased by the impact. They were, however, aiming for more than a body blow.\n\nThe next punch was thrown in August 1978 at the Eleventh World Festival of Youth and Students in Havana. Agee and a small group of supporters distributed copies of a new book, _Dirty Work_ , which identified seven hundred CIA staff who were at the time or had previously been stationed in Western Europe. Agee had never been posted to Europe, so the information must have come either from research he and his collaborators conducted, from the KGB, or a mix of the two.\n\nThe co-author of _Dirty Work_ was Louis Wolf. A Quaker and conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, Wolf had become radicalized while performing alternative service in Laos where, he believed, the CIA had turned him into an unwittingly pawn in its clandestine war against communists.\n\nIn addition to rolling out _Dirty Work_ , Agee and his comrades used the festival to announce the launch of _CovertAction_. As with _Inside the Company_ , the KGB privately took credit, claiming in an internal memo that the magazine was founded \"on the initiative of the KGB.\"\n\nThe inaugural issue of _CovertAction_ included a Naming Names column. The magazine explained that as a \"service to our readers, and to progressive people around the world, we will continue to expose high-ranking CIA officials whenever and wherever we find them.\" It apologized for including only one name, Dean J. Almy, the CIA chief of station in Jamaica, and promised to provide longer lists in future issues.\n\nThe lead article, written by Agee and Wolf, presented _CovertAction_ 's philosophy. It called the CIA the \"Gestapo and SS of our time\" and asserted that \"exposure of its secret operations\u2014and secret operatives\u2014remains the most effective way to reduce the suffering they cause.\" Agee and Wolf proposed a \"novel form of international cooperation\" in which opponents of the CIA would scour lists of Americans working as diplomats or on aid projects, identify likely CIA operatives using techniques described in a chapter in _Dirty Work_ called \"How to Spot a Spook,\" then send the information to _CovertAction_. The magazine promised to check the research and publish all the information it could confirm. It estimated that the CIA had about five thousand officers experienced in running clandestine operations and suggested that it should be possible to identify almost all of those who had ever worked under diplomatic cover. The article concluded with a call to action: \"We can all aid this struggle, together with the struggle for socialism in the United States itself.\"\n\nAfter the youth festival, Agee returned to London. While he was listed on the masthead and contributed articles, most of the work of producing _CovertAction_ was undertaken by Wolf; Ellen Ray, a journalist; and Bill Schaap, a lawyer. Newspaper and magazine articles about _CovertAction_ and its staff invariably highlighted its location in the Press Building, a setting that had clearly been chosen to bolster its claim to protection under the First Amendment to the US Constitution. A profile of Wolf distributed by the _New York Times_ news service described a \"miasma of suspicion about the office\" and stated that \"Wolf believes the telephones are tapped by the National Security Agency on behalf of the CIA.\"\n\nAnother article about the _CovertAction_ team, printed in the _Village Voice_ , set the scene by reporting that it was based on an interview the author had conducted in the Press Club bar with Ray, Schaap, and Wolf. It described how the turmoil of the '60s, and especially the Vietnam War, shaped the outlook of _CovertAction_ 's staff. While Wolf was working with peasants in Laos, Schaap and Ray were in Okinawa, \"organizing workers at the big air base and helping GI's get out of going to Vietnam,\" the _VillageVoice_ reported. And, the story continued, \"they had these kites...these kites to bring down B-52s, kites with tinfoil stringing from them that they'd fly right up there in front of these huge jets loaded with 10,000-pound bombs lofting off the runways of Okinawa on another run to the Mekong Valley. Bill and Ellen, standing there at the end of the runway with their kites, trying to lasso a goddamn B-52!\"\n\nThere is no evidence that Wolf, Ray, Schaap, or anyone else connected with _CovertAction_ wittingly collaborated with intelligence services, or that they were aware of Agee's connections to the DGI and KGB. It didn't take much imagination, however, to guess where Agee obtained the secret CIA documents and biographies of undercover CIA officers he provided to the magazine. Like Agee, Wolf, Ray, and Schaap were driven by a visceral hatred for American covert operations, affinity for the Soviet Union\u2014at least their fantasy of the Soviet Union\u2014and a fervent desire to help socialism triumph over capitalism.\n\nThe denunciations of human rights abuses in the pages of _CovertAction_ never extended to those committed by the Soviet Union, China, or their allies. The magazine trained a spotlight on government surveillance activities but failed to aim it at East Germany's Stasi, which was tapping, bugging, and spying on its population. And _CovertAction_ 's sympathy for the plight of the oppressed didn't extend to the millions of innocent people whose lives were destroyed in the Soviet prison camps or their analogues in China, North Korea, and other workers' paradises.\n\nInside the second issue of _CovertAction_ there was an account by a former CIA finance officer, James Wilcott, of techniques the CIA used to target and recruit foreign diplomats. Wilcott and his wife, Elsie, a former CIA secretary, were advisors and frequent contributors to _CovertAction_. Wilcott's article was accompanied by a guide to identifying CIA officers working undercover as diplomats, an interview with a Cuban intelligence officer who claimed he had infiltrated the CIA for ten years, and the Naming Names column revealing the identifies of CIA personnel in France, Italy, India, Venezuela, El Salvador, and Jordan.\n\nThe KGB created a task force dedicated to supplying _CovertAction_ with material that would harm the CIA. In addition to providing names of agency officers, Soviet intelligence gave the magazine classified documents. For example, in 1979 the KGB provided _CovertAction_ with \"Director of Central Intelligence: Perspectives for Intelligence, 1976\u20131981,\" a classified document that had been mailed anonymously to the KGB's Washington _rezident_.\n\nAlso in 1979, according to Mitrokhin's notes, two KGB officers \"met Agee in Cuba and gave him a list of CIA officers working on the African continent.\" Some of this information was featured in the fourth issue of _CovertAction_ , which provided extensive information about CIA activities in Africa, including a Naming Names column with the identities of sixteen CIA station or base chiefs on the continent.\n\n_CovertAction_ 's coverage of Africa was expanded into a book, _Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa_. In the introduction Agee addressed critics who had called out the one-sided nature of the _CovertAction_ team's reporting. \"There is no pretense of trying to 'balance' this book by describing similar, or different, activities of socialist nations,\" Agee wrote. He argued that although the USSR and its allies \"may well employ clandestine operations, the frequency and depth of such activities have been modest in comparison with secret intervention by Western powers.\" Assistance to African countries from the Soviet bloc \"tends to be public, well-known, and without the stigma attached to political support, overt or covert, from the US and the former colonial powers,\" Agee claimed.\n\n_CovertAction_ got its hands on a manual used in CIA training called \"The Principles of Deep Cover,\" and reproduced the ten-page document in its August 1980 issue. While the magazine presented the manual as a contemporary document, it had actually been written in 1961. Despite its vintage, the insights were relevant twenty years later and remain so today.\n\nThe manual described the lengthy, detailed planning that went into establishing \"deep cover,\" defined as the ability of intelligence officers to live \"as legitimate private citizens with such authenticity that their intelligence sponsorship would not be disclosed even by an intensive and determined investigation.\" It advised that CIA officers consider employing \"natural cover,\" by recruiting individuals who were working for a private company and teaching them to be intelligence officers. \"Some companies are willing to furnish information on all the young men they recruit for their foreign branches and to make those selected as potential agents available for training with reasonable assurances that they will eventually be assigned where the service wants them.\"\n\nThe manual also explained why elaborate measures to create and maintain deep cover were necessary. \"The simplest and therefore the most used device an intelligence service has for getting its unwelcome officers covertly into other countries is to assign them to cover jobs in its government's diplomatic missions, consulates, and other official representations there,\" it explained. While simple, this practice, which the Soviets called \"legal\" and Western intelligence services called \"official\" cover, has the \"disadvantage that the disguise is a pretty shabby one. It requires no Herculean counterintelligence effort to determine which foreign officials probably have intelligence connections; they can be kept deniable, but not really secret.\"\n\nPeeling off the thin layer of subterfuge covering CIA officers posted under official cover was one of _CovertAction_ 's core activities. While it wasn't difficult for the KGB or other sophisticated intelligence service's to spot CIA officers working abroad under official cover, their jobs became far more difficult when their identities had been made public. The KGB, fearing reciprocal unmasking by the CIA of its officers working under legal cover, rarely did this. Kalugin and his comrades were delighted, however, to help Agee and Wolf make the lives of CIA officers miserable. This happened when a newspaper, say in Ouagadougou, ran a story based on data from _CovertAction_ pointing out that a local US Agency for International Development representative was a spook. This often led to demonstrations in front of the outed agents' homes, threats to their families, and the disruption of their ability to recruit and run agents.\n\nIn some cases, _CovertAction_ didn't restrict itself to \"naming names\" in print. It actively publicized the identities of CIA employees and tried to get them run out of town. In the most dramatic incident, Wolf traveled to Kingston, the capital of Jamaica, and on July 2, 1980, read out the names of fifteen reputed CIA officers at a press conference. He also provided their home addresses, telephone numbers, and car license-plate numbers. In case anyone missed the press conference, which was televised live in Jamaica and later rebroadcast, Prime Minister Michael Manley's party printed the information on handbills.\n\nThe performance was intended, according to Wolf, to counteract a destabilization campaign that the CIA was running against Manley's socialist government.\n\nTwo days later, at 2:30 a.m. on the night of July 4, the home of the CIA chief of station, Richard Kinsman, was raked by machine-gun bullets. A small bomb exploded on his front lawn. The bullets missed the bedroom where Kinsman was sleeping; his family was traveling outside of Jamaica. American newspapers immediately blamed Wolf and _CovertAction_.\n\nWolf issued a press release and held a press conference denying any responsibility for provoking the violence. He suggested that it had been staged by the CIA to smear _CovertAction_ and revive stalled efforts to pass legislation criminalizing the disclosure of the identities of intelligence officers.\n\nThe CIA seized the opportunity. On July 8 deputy director Frank Carlucci sent a package of press clippings about the attack to members of congressional intelligence committees and the Senate and House leadership. \"The incident exemplifies most vividly the potential for harm which flows from activities of organizations like CovertAction Information Bulletin, and why I continue to believe such activities should be restricted under the law,\" he wrote in a cover letter. \"I further believe we can ill afford to wait until another member of a US overseas mission comes home in a casket before the Congress addresses this pressing problem.\"\n\nPublicity about the attack revived interest in the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), a bill that had been first introduced in 1975 after the murder of Richard Welch, the CIA chief of station in Athens. As in case of the 1980 incident in Jamaica, the CIA and its supporters attributed Welch's murder to an article in _CounterSpy_ , the Washington-based magazine that was launched and had folded prior to the establishment of _CovertAction._ Agee, Ray, and Schaap, who all worked for _CounterSpy_ at the time, blamed CIA security lapses, not their disclosure of his identity, for Welch's assassination.\n\nThe IIPA, widely referred to as the \"get Agee bill,\" stalled over objections that it would be impossible to outlaw the outing of CIA staff without violating the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. These objections were based in part on the fact that official cover could be breached without access to classified information, simply by using the tools of journalism. Wolf or anyone else who had been trained to detect the tracks of a covert CIA career could dive into the National Archives, immerse themselves in obscure government documents, and emerge with lists of putative CIA officers.\n\nWolf and his comrades tried to persuade American journalists that an attack on _CovertAction_ was an attack on the right of all publications to report about intelligence operations. The IIPA, according to Wolf, was a \"serious threat, not only to the _Bulletin_ , but also to freedom of the press, investigative journalism, and reform of government abuses here in the United States.\"\n\nWhatever sympathy mainstream news media had for this view was blasted away by Agee's and _CovertAction_ 's pro-Soviet orientation, the joy they took in naming names, and their indiscriminate disruption of CIA operations. After the shooting and bombing of Kinsman's home, the _New York Times_ and _Washington Post_ editorial pages endorsed the need for legislation to protect the identities of intelligence officers. They also pushed for limitations that would not restrict what they considered legitimate journalism.\n\nThe _Post_ excoriated Wolf and those who emulated his practice of naming names of CIA operatives: \"Though they work with a pen rather than a gun, they are terrorists in spirit, and their true purpose is to destroy democracy.\"\n\nResponding to the _Post_ editorial, Wolf, Ray, and Schaap called themselves \"journalists in the traditional sense, with good faith, just as much as your reporters are, and there is no way a law can distinguish between us.\" They challenged the _Post_ 's accusation that they sought to destroy democracy with the assertion that the \"CIA represents the least democratic aspect of the entire US government.\"\n\nThe _Times_ branded Agee a \"villain for all seasons\" and wrote that he had \"abused his former access to intelligence methods by systematically publicizing the names of those he knows or suspects to be secret operatives.\" Its editorial board wrote that imposing harsh penalties on \"those who so callously violate their oaths of secrecy\" wasn't sufficient:\n\nMr. Agee is contagious. He has inspired Louis Wolf and others who never worked for the CIA to spot the names of US agents and to name them in publications like Mr. Wolf's _CovertAction Information Bulletin_. They have a common purpose: to blow the agents' cover and thus destroy vital intelligence functions. They are indifferent to the safety of the agents. They don't even pretend to distinguish between useful and questionable spy projects.\n\nThe _Times_ nonetheless urged caution, noting that \"several of the bills aimed at Mr. Wolf would punish the publication even of widely known facts.\" Proposals to require prosecutors to prove a sinister intent provided little reassurance, it added: \"Since Government is all too quick to equate criticism with treason, and to consider all public discussion of intelligence as harmful, the requirement to prove a hostile intent may be no protection whatever.\" The self-appointed voice of mainstream journalism concluded, \"Congress should pass only the most tightly drawn identities bill and then get on with more pressing matters: the quiet but smart management of the spy service, for instance.\"\n\nWolf, Schaap, and Ray responded to the _Times_ by asking: who made _you_ the arbiter of what disclosures are acceptable? The staff of _CovertAction_ and their supporters, including the American Civil Liberties Union, wondered aloud why newspapers, including some like the _Times_ that had long histories of collaboration with the CIA, should be permitted to decide that publication of the Pentagon Papers was in the public interest while details of CIA operations published in _CovertAction_ were not.\n\nBy September 1981 the IIPA was advancing and the _Times_ and other newspapers were concerned that in trying to suppress disclosures by individuals who mined their scoops from open sources, Congress would violate the First Amendment and chill legitimate journalism. By \"outlawing what Louis Wolf does,\" a version of the bill under consideration in the House \"strikes at every reporter and scholar who would publish facts that Government prefers to keep concealed,\" the Gray Lady warned. The paper's complaint was language subjecting a publisher to criminal penalties if it \"had reason to believe\" disclosure would harm national security.\n\nCongress eventually convinced itself that it had threaded the needle. The final version of the IIPA makes unauthorized intentional disclosure of information identifying a covert agent a crime if the person responsible for the disclosure knows that the United States is trying to conceal the agent's association with American intelligence. Disclosures by individuals who did not have access to classified information can be punished only if the perpetrator participated in a pattern of activity designed to discover and reveal the identities of covert agents with the intent to harm US intelligence operations. President Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law on June 23, 1982, at a ceremony at CIA headquarters.\n\nWolf and his collaborators had seen the writing on the wall. \"Because of the imminent passage of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, this will be our last Naming Names column until such time as the constitutionality of the Act has been decided by the courts,\" _CovertAction_ announced in its October 1981 issue. Realizing that judges and juries were unlikely to be sympathetic to activists promoting a worldwide socialist revolution, they decided to wait for someone else to challenge the law in court. The magazine vowed, however, \"to continue our struggle against covert operations and US secret intervention around the world.\" It went out with a bang, listing the identities and biographical details of sixty-nine CIA officers in forty-five countries, from Bangladesh to Zambia.\n\nWhile _CovertAction_ was waging war on the CIA from the National Press Building, the CIA was keeping Agee on the move. CIA pressure prompted the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands to deport Agee. He eventually found refuge in Germany. In 1979 the US State Department revoked Agee's passport. The decision was provoked by reports that Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary government had invited him to travel to Iran to serve on a tribunal judging American actions in the country. There were also news reports that he had been asked to help student militants who were holding fifty-two American diplomats hostage prove that they were CIA spies. Agee publicly said that he'd recommended to the Iranian government that it demand complete CIA documents on the agency's operations in Iran as a condition for releasing the hostages. Agee also said that he would not travel to Iran until the hostages were released.\n\nAgee sued in US courts to recover the right to use his passport. The case made its way to the Supreme Court. In agreeing to consider the case, the court stated that the \"right to hold a passport is subordinate to national security and foreign policy considerations, and is subject to reasonable governmental regulation.\" In 1981, the Supreme Court ruled against Agee. Revoking his passport was legal because he had \"jeopardized the security of the United States\" and endangered the interests of other countries, according to the decision. Grenada and Nicaragua provided him passports until communist regimes in those countries were overthrown. Agee ended up with a German passport, granted because he was married to a German citizen. The US government never charged him with a crime and Agee eventually traveled to the United States several times without incident.\n\nWith _CovertAction_ shorn of its ability to name names, the frisson of excitement that accompanied publication of each new issue dissipated. Its stories detailing the CIA's paramilitary attacks on communist regimes throughout the developing world rippled across the mainstream media, but they didn't stir of waves of outrage. The magazine became more polemical, and even more obviously pro-Soviet. Mirroring the KGB's and the Kremlin's darkest fantasies, _CovertAction_ continually warned its readers that the United States was on the verge of launching an unprovoked nuclear war. It also distributed Soviet disinformation that was so crude that no other American publication would touch it.\n\n_CovertAction_ falsely accused the CIA of responsibility for a Cuban outbreak of dengue fever, saying it was \"only the latest in a long line of outrageous, immoral and illegal CBW [chemical and biological warfare] attacks against Cuba.\" It repeated old, discredited allegations that the United States had dropped \"germ bombs\" on North Korea during the Korean War, and repeated phony Soviet stories that the United States. was spreading dengue and yellow fever in Afghanistan under cover of malaria-eradication efforts.\n\nOf all of the Soviet propaganda _CovertAction_ regurgitated, perhaps the most pernicious was dissemination of lies about the origins and nature of AIDS. It ran lengthy articles presenting pseudoscientific theories about AIDS, many of them involving nefarious plots by the American government. These stories laid out numerous ways in which AIDS could have been an intentional or inadvertent product of American CBW activities. _CovertAction_ 's preferred theory was that the CIA had plotted to contaminate pig vaccines in order to impoverish Third World peasants, that something had gone wrong with the vaccine, and that the mistake somehow inadvertently led to the worldwide AIDS epidemic. _CovertAction_ suggested that its readers take seriously the views of Peter Duesberg, a UCLA researcher whose denial that HIV is pathogenic had influenced South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki to reject drugs that could have saved millions of lives.\n\nIn 1988, summing up the morass of nonsense about AIDS it had served up in series of stories, _CovertAction_ stated that \"one conclusion is clear: Western institutions\u2014military, governmental, corporate and especially medical\u2014played a major role in the origin and spread of AIDS. This was probably more through their 'normal' functioning than by a specific CBW 'conspiracy,' though that cannot be ruled out.\"\n\nThe editors of _CovertAction_ did not applaud the demise of the Soviet Union. Searching for explanations for what it clearly considered a catastrophe, the magazine constructed an elaborate conspiracy in which the National Endowment for Democracy, a private, US government-financed foundation, was the tip of the spear for \"one of the largest coordinated covert operations ever set in motion.\" It pointed to the endowment's leader, Allen Weinstein, a historian then little-known outside academe, as the mastermind behind the plot. Boris Yeltsin's rise to power was not a democratic revolution, _CovertAction_ informed its readers, but rather a \"victory in a new kind of warfare.\" Anticipating arguments adopted by Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, _CovertAction_ warned its readers that the success of America's project to destroy the USSR by promoting democracy \"is bound to be reproduced and exported around the world.\"\n\nThe shuttering in 2005 of _CovertAction_ , by then a fringe publication that hadn't made the leap into cyberspace, was little noticed. The debates it provoked in the first half-dozen years of its existence, however, are as relevant today as they were in the final decade of the Cold War. The _CovertAction_ experience foreshadowed the way governments and society have responded to dumps of classified data by WikiLeaks, disclosures of the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and reporting on emails associated with Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Like _CovertAction_ 's naming of names, these events raised questions about the definition of journalism, and the responsibilities of reporters and publications to their readers and to society. They also challenged governments to defend the ethics and legality of covert intelligence operations, and revived old concerns about the ability of open societies to protect themselves against attempted subversion by totalitarian states.\n\n#\n\nThe National Press Building is no longer the focal point for Washington journalism or for the nexus between journalism and espionage. The business of reporting in the nation's capital has grown so large that it cannot be contained within the walls of a single building. There may still be spies roaming the Press Building's corridors, but they are more likely to be found in the newsrooms scattered across Washington and its suburbs that feed cyberspace's insatiable demand for political news and gossip.\n\nRegardless of its role in today's covert dramas, the history of eight decades of espionage in the Press Building provides valuable insights into the secret connections between journalists and spies that drive events today. Advances in technology have changed the tactics, but many aspects of the game endure. Governments and individuals continue to use press credentials as shields for espionage. The practice of spilling secrets in the hope that disclosures will change policies, and perhaps alter the course of history, has become routine. \"Fake news,\" once a topic of discussion only among professional propagandists, has entered the contemporary lexicon.\n\nBritish intelligence's organized campaign to spread rumors during World War II could be considered a precedent for Russia's twenty-first-century troll factories. Like their British predecessors, executives at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg craft lies, inject them into news feeds, and then track them as they fly around the globe, watching rumors mutate into more potent formulations or crumble into Twitter dust. And Britain's campaign of dirty tricks against American interventionist politicians has obvious echoes in activities undertaken by Russia and other entities in the 2016 elections.\n\nThere are, however, critically important differences between covert attempts to influence the American public in 1940 and 1941 and twenty-first-century intervention in American politics.\n\nBritain's intervention in the American press was effective because most people trusted newspapers and radio broadcasts. The idea was to slip a stream of plausible but fake stories, along with accurate stories that were obtained using clandestine, illegal methods, into the river of real news. The last thing British Security Coordination or its collaborators in the United States wanted was to make readers and listeners believe their newspapers were irredeemably tainted by lies and propaganda. That would have rendered the British-inspired stories useless. This principle is at work today. For example, the entities behind the release of hacked emails during the 2016 American presidential election, as well as those responsible for disclosures like the Panama and Paradise papers leaks of confidential offshore banking data, relied on the mainstream news media to provide context and credibility.\n\nAttempts by governments to manipulate mainstream news media continue unabated. At the same time, the press\u2014and the public who rely on it\u2014are facing a different threat. Vladimir Putin's government, and public actors like Donald Trump who emulate its tactics, have moved beyond adulterating the news with calibrated doses of information derived from clandestine sources and carefully prepared disinformation. Rather than use the news as a vehicle to influence the public, they have another goal. This is to undermine confidence in the news media, to create so much cacophonous noise that people believe there is no such thing as truth, or that it is impossible to distinguish between truth and lies. The Russian government's success in shaping its citizens' thinking stems in large part from its domination of domestic television networks, and America's ability to resist a similar fate will depend on the strength of its independent news media. When a bogus story can bounce from a bedroom in Montenegro, Montevideo, or Mar-a-Lago to millions of smartphones in an instant, and elected officials remain silent in the face of torrents of lies spewing out of the White House, traditional journalism may be the only defense against autocracy and nihilism.\n\nIt is neither possible nor desirable to return to a time when three television networks and a handful of publications controlled what Americans saw and read. It is, however, useful to recall the successes and failures of the press in insulating America from Soviet disinformation. A handful of active measures, such as false accounts of the origins and nature of AIDS, penetrated the United States. These were exceptions. The Soviets had little success in spreading fake news in the United States. That's why the KGB, like the CIA, focused fake-news initiatives on developing countries.\n\nAnother thing that has changed since World War II and the early decades of the Cold War, at least in the United States, is the attitude of journalists and editors toward intelligence services. Partnering with British intelligence in 1940 and 1941 to battle isolationists and Nazi sympathizers seemed noble and natural to principled American reporters. The transition from fighting Nazis to confronting communists was, for many, a natural progression. The cachet of the CIA in the decades before the Vietnam War, combined with the inherent allure of sharing secrets, made cooperating with the agency irresistible to many journalists.\n\nWhen stories emerged of ABC television reporter John Scali's secret meetings with a KGB officer during the Cuban missile crisis, Scali was hailed as a patriot and a hero. A reporter who stumbled into circumstances similar to Scali's today would probably not be celebrated. Collaboration with the FBI, CIA, or any other intelligence service has come to be considered a mark of shame.\n\nThe CIA has also changed. Responding to the backlash against post-Watergate revelations of deep ties between the CIA and journalists, the agency vowed to cut its ties to the news media. Arrangements that were routine during the early decades of the Cold War, a time when the CIA could count on cooperation from senior management of newspapers and television networks in placing its officers on their payrolls, are gone.\n\nThe CIA has, however, left the door open to receiving information from reporters who volunteer their assistance, and acknowledges it would use journalism as a cover in an emergency. Moreover, the CIA has made no commitments to steer clear of reporters working for foreign news media. And intelligence services of other countries have not made comparable commitments. This ambiguity creates dangers for reporters who are falsely accused of being spies, and for the public who cannot be sure that the information they receive is free of government-sponsored propaganda.\n\nThere are many reasons why arm's-length dealings between journalists and spies are best for both professions, and for society. One of them is the impossibility of geographically containing propaganda. In an era when the most obscure publications in distant countries are never more than a click away, and Facebook can spread news at the speed of light, \"blow back,\" or contamination of US government decision-making from fake news disseminated overseas, is no longer a hypothetical possibility. It is a certainty.\n\nIt also seems inevitable that governments and individuals will see more of their secrets spilled into cyberspace. Responses by governments and the news media to disclosures by WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden resemble those Philip Agee and _CovertAction_ provoked more than two decades ago. The Supreme Court's 1981 decision to uphold the State Department's right to revoke Agee's passport set a precedent that facilitated the revocation of Snowden's passport in 2013. Like _CovertAction_ 's disclosures of the identities of CIA officers, disclosures by Snowden and WikiLeaks have raised questions about what constitutes the news media and the boundaries of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. And the activities of Snowden and WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange, like those of Agee, raise the specter that individuals and organizations that present themselves as whistleblowers could be manipulated by intelligence services. Revelations of secret partnerships between reporters or their employers and intelligence services would only add to the public's distrust of the media.\n\nAt a time when lives are ruled, and more than occasionally ruined, by frictionless electronic exchanges of information, it is important to remember that the most advanced devices will never supplant the oldest and most important form of communication, talking face-to-face. The National Press Club remains a place where reporters and sources meet to solve humanity's problems over a beer. That, ultimately, is the National Press Building's greatest legacy, and a sign that even in dark times decency may prevail.\n\n#\n\nIntroduction: Spying between the Lines in the National Press Building\n\n. _National Press Club Yearbook_ (Washington, DC: National Press Club, 1932), p. 28.\n\n. Ibid., p. 30.\n\n. Ibid., p. 31.\n\n. Ibid., p. 32.\n\n. _Reliable Sources: 100 Years at the National Press Club_ (Nashville, TN: Turner, 2008), p. 42.\n\n. Advertisement in the _Evening Star_ (Washington, DC), December 9, 1925, p. 31.\n\n. \"Concrete in Press Building Would Build 15-Mile Road,\" _Evening Star_ (Washington, DC), September 4, 1926, p. 13.\n\n. \"National Press Building Opens September First,\" _Evening Star_ (Washington, DC), August 21, 1927, p. 10.\n\n. \"The National Press Club,\" _Washington Post_ , December 30, 1927, p. 6.\n\n. Theodore Tiller, \"Bareheaded Men in Elevators,\" _Washington Post_ , October 2, 1927, p. M13.\n\n. \"National Press Building Houses Capitol Newsmen,\" _Holland_ (MI) _Evening Sentinel_ , April 20, 1948, p. 10.\n\n. Karl Schriftgiesser, \"European News Hardest to Get, 3 Tell Editors: Brains, Courage, Spying Needed, Correspondents Declare Here,\" _Washington Post_ , April 20, 1935, p. 7.\n\n. _Reliable Sources_ , p. 8.\n\nChapter One: Washington Merry-Go-Round\n\n. \"Vassiliev Yellow Notebook, No. 4, 1923\u20131950,\" 2009, Alexander Vassiliev Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, pp. 24\u201325, (accessed April 11, 2018); Charles Fisher, _The Columnists_ (New York: Howell, Soskin, 1944), p. 241.\n\n. \"Vassiliev Yellow Notebook, No. 4,\" p. 24.\n\n. \"Leaders in Capital Twitted in a Book,\" _New York Times_ , July 16, 1931, p. 25.\n\n. \"Vassiliev Yellow Notebook, No. 4,\" p. 25.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"Biography: Robert S. Allen: Co-Author of 'Daily Washington Marry-Go-Round' (1932?),\" (Washington, DC: American University Special Collections, Digital Research Archive), (accessed April 11, 2018); Sam G. Riley, _Biographical Dictionary of American Newspaper Columnists_ (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995), p. 7.\n\n. Dan Nimmo and Chevelle Newsome, _Political Commentators in the United States in the 20th Century: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook_ (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997), p. 270.\n\n. [Robert S. Allen], \"Guilt Admitted by Adolf Hitler,\" _Christian Science Monitor_ , February 27, 1924, p. 1.\n\n. Riley, _American Newspaper Columnists_ , pp. 7\u20138.\n\n. \"Vassiliev Yellow Notebook, No. 4,\" p. 24.\n\n. Walter F. Jones, \"Espionage System at White House Revealed in Book,\" _Modesto_ (CA) _News-Herald_ , October 6, 1931, p. 11.\n\n. Robert Sharon Allen and Drew Pearson, _More Merry-Go-Round_ (New York: Liveright, 1932), pp. 299\u2013300.\n\n. Samuel Nicholson, \"A Most Unlikely Agent: Robert S. Allen,\" Washington Decoded, September 11, 2010, (accessed April 11, 2018); Fisher, _Columnists_ , p. 230; Nimmo and Newsome, _Political Commentators_ , p. 270.\n\n. Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, Daily Washington Merry-Go-Round, December 8, 1932, American University Digital Research Archives, (accessed April 11, 2018); Pearson and Allen, Daily Washington Merry-Go-Round, December 19, 1932, http:\/\/auislandora.wrlc.org\/islandora\/object\/pearson%3A27042?solr_nav%5Bid%5D=cf04c4a293b162039007&solr_nav%5Bpage%5D=0&solr_nav%5Boffset%5D=7#page\/1\/mode\/1up (accessed April 11, 2018).\n\n. \"Vassiliev Yellow Notebook, No. 4,\" p. 25.\n\n. Dennis J. Dunn, _Caught between Roosevelt & Stalin: America's Ambassadors to Moscow_ (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), pp. 6\u20137; Nikolai Sivache and Nikolai Yakovlev, _Russia and the United States_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 103.\n\n. Christopher Andrew and Julie Elkner, \"Stalin and Foreign Intelligence,\" _Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions_ 4, no. 1 (2003); John Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, _Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America_ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).\n\n. \"Vassiliev Yellow Notebook, No. 4,\" p. 25.\n\n. Ibid., pp. 25\u201326.\n\n. \"Vassiliev Black Notebook, 1932\u20131954,\" 2009, Alexander Vassiliev Papers, p. 4, (accessed April 11, 2018).\n\n. \"Vassiliev Yellow Notebook, No. 4,\" p. 27.\n\n. Donald Ritchie, _Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 136.\n\nChapter Two: A Popular Spy\n\n. Theodore R. Weeks, \"From 'Russian' to 'Polish': Vilna-Wilno 1900\u20131925,\" (paper; Washington, DC: National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, 2004), (accessed April 11, 2018).\n\n. Kazuo Nakai, \"Soviet Agricultural Policies in the Ukraine and the 1921\u20131922 Famine,\" _Harvard Ukrainian Studies_ 6, no. 1 (March 1982): 43\u201361.\n\n. Julius Wachtel, _Stalin's Witnesses_ (New York: Knox Robinson, 2012), pp. 375\u2013404.\n\n. Andrew Meier, _The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service_ (London: Orion, 2010), p. 161; Christopher Andrew and Julie Elkner, \"Stalin and Foreign Intelligence,\" in _Redefining Stalinism_ , ed. Harold Shukman (London: Frank Cass, 2003).\n\n. John T. Whitaker, _We Cannot Escape History_ (New York: Macmillan, 1943), p. 340.\n\n. Constance Drexel, \"Spotlight on Foreign Affairs,\" _Brooklyn_ (NY) _Daily Eagle_ , January 26, 1937, p. 7.\n\n. Harold Denny, \"Soviet to Send First Permanent Reporter; Americans Tell Him There Is Freedom Here,\" _New York Times_ , June 2, 1934, p. 19.\n\n. _Goldfish Bowl_ 4, no. 6, National Press Club newsletter, July 1934, p. 3.\n\n. \"Dictatorships Temporary, Says Soviet Envoy Who Sees Russians Turning to Democracy,\" _New York Times_ , June 27, 1935, p. 1.\n\n. George Durno, \"The National Whirligig,\" _Detroit Free Press_ , June 15, 1934, p. 6.\n\n. Ernie Pyle, \"Party First, Soviet Writer Considers Self Secondary in Importance,\" _The Toledo_ (OH) _News-Bee_ , February 6, 1936, p. 13.\n\n. \"President Gives Talk at Dinner of Press Club,\" _Washington Post_ , May 10, 1936, p. M15.\n\n. _San Francisco Chronicle_ , January 1, 1937, p. 2, cited in Institute of Pacific Relations, _Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary_ , US Senate, 82nd Cong., 2nd session (May 2 and June 20, 1952), (accessed April 11, 2018).\n\n. Robert Whymant, _Stalin's Spy: Richard Sorge and the Tokyo Espionage Ring_ (London: I. Tauris, 1996), p. 93; \"Red I. P. R. Delegate in Attack on Japan: Lauds Red Army, Raps Nippon Trade Policy,\" _China Press_ , August 23, 1936, p. 1.\n\n. Whymant, _Stalin's Spy_ , p. 93.\n\n. \"American Writers Attempt to Save Romm,\" _New York Times_ , January 24, 1937; Walter G. Krivitsky, _In Stalin's Secret Service_ (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939), p. 28.\n\n. Walter Duranty, \"Radek Wins Tilt of Wits at Trial,\" _New York Times_ , January 25, 1937, p. 3.\n\n. \"American Writers Attempt to Save Romm.\"\n\n. Joseph B. Phillips, \"Radek Flaunts Story of Plot, Blames Trotsky,\" _New York Herald Tribune_ , January 25, 1937, p. 6.\n\n. \"Old & New Bolsheviks,\" _Time_ , February 1, 1937, (accessed April 11, 2018); Leon Trotsky, \"Trotsky Gives His Proof of Moscow Trial Falsity,\" _New York Times_ , February 16, 1937.\n\n. Duranty, \"Radek Wins Tilt of Wits.\"\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\"\"\n\n. Joseph Davies, \"Mission to Moscow,\" _Times Herald_ (Olean, NY), June 10, 1942, p. 4.\n\n. \"Friends Act Again in Romm's Behalf,\" _New York Times_ , January 27, 1937, p. 10; \"Reporters Visit Troyanovsky in Plea for Romm,\" _New York Herald Tribune_ , January 27, 1937, p. 13.\n\n. \"Friends Act Again in Romm's Behalf,\" _New York Times_.\n\n. Isidor Feinstein, \"????????????\" _New York Post_ , January 26, 1937, p. 6, as quoted in D. D. Guttenplan, _American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone_ (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012), p. 109.\n\n. Robert K. Landers, \"Iffy Izzy,\" _Commonweal_ , February 12, 2010, pp. 22\u201323.\n\n. D. D. Guttenplan, \"Red Harvest: The KGB in America,\" _Nation_ , May 6, 2009, p. 25.\n\n. Max Holland, \"I. F. Stone: Encounters with Soviet Intelligence,\" _Journal of Cold War Studies_ 11, no. 3 (Summer 2009): pp. 144\u2013205, (accessed April 11, 2018); \"Vassiliev Black Notebook, 1932\u20131954,\" 2009, Alexander Vassiliev Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, p. 23 (accessed April 11, 2018); Oleg Kalugin, personal interview with author, March 7, 2014.\n\n. \"Vassiliev Black Notebook,\" p. 24.\n\n. Ibid., p. 23.\n\n. Ernst Hanfstaengl, _Hitler: The Missing Years_ (New York: Arcade, 1994), pp. 153\u201354; William E. Dodd, letter to FDR, March 20, 1935, FDR Library Digital Collections, (accessed April 11, 2018).\n\n. \"Vassiliev Black Notebook,\" p. 24; \"Vassiliev White Notebook, No. 2, 1927\u20131975,\" Alexander Vassiliev Papers, p. 69, (accessed April 11, 2018).\n\n. Rodney Dutcher, \"Behind the Scenes in Washington,\" _Ogden_ (UT) _Standard-Examiner_ , January 30, 1937, p. 4.\n\n. Davies, \"Mission to Moscow,\" p. 4.\n\n. Julius Wachtel, \"Vladimir Georgievich Romm (1896\u20131937)\" (unpublished paper, 2001).\n\n. Photo caption, \"Newsmen Hear Russian Ambassador. Washington, DC,\" LC-H22-D-1322, April 22, 1937, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, (accessed April 11, 2018); \"Romm, Ex-DC Correspondent, Feared Shot in Russian Purge,\" _Washington Post_ , March 1, 1938, p. 1.\n\n. Wachtel, \"Vladimir Georgievich Romm.\"\n\nChapter Three: \"Kike Killer\"\n\n. United Press, \"Hour of Triumph Strikes for F. D. Roosevelt Today,\" March 4, 1933, _Piqua_ (OH) _Daily Call_ , p. 1.\n\n. United Press International, \"Zangara Says Crowd Kept Him from Killing Roosevelt,\" February 16, 1933, (accessed May 15, 2018).\n\n. Arthur Krock, \"100,000 at Inauguration,\" _New York Times_ , March 5, 1933, p. 1.\n\n. \"The Presidency,\" _Time_ , March 13, 1933, (accessed April 11, 2018).\n\n. Arthur Sears Henning, \"For Dictatorship if Necessary,\" _Chicago Daily Tribune_ , March 5, 1933, p. 1.\n\n. George Wolfskill and John Hudson, _All But the People: Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Critics_ , _1933\u201339_ (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 69.\n\n. James True, Policeman's Truncheon, US Patent 2,026,077, \"'\" filed September 30, 1935, issued December 31, 1935.\n\n. Wolfskill and Hudson, _All But the People_ , p. 69.\n\n. Ibid., pp. 66, 69.\n\n. Charles P. Stewart, \"Dies and Ickes Exaggerate,\" _New Castle_ (PA) _News_ , December 7, 1938, p. 4; Charles P. Stewart, \"What's What at a Glance,\" _Nevada State Journal_ (Reno, NV), June 23, 1935.\n\n. \"Better Luck Next Time,\" _Goldfish Bowl_ 7, no. 48 (first quarter 1940), p. 9.\n\n. _Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, Hearings Before a Special Committee on Un-American Activities_ , House of Representatives, 77th Cong., p. 2743; _Industrial Control Report_ , Washington, DC, November 23, 1935.\n\n. Wolfskill and Hudson, _All But the People_ , p. 92.\n\n. _Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities_ , p. 2747; John Roy Carlson, _Under Cover:_ _My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America\u2014The Amazing Revelation of How Axis Agents and Our Enemies Within Are Now Plotting to Destroy the United States_ (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1943), p. 145; Drew Pearson, Washington Merry-Go-Round, July 18, 1944, American University Digital Research Archives, (accessed April 11, 2018).\n\n. _Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States_ , vol. 5, May 18, May 22\u201324, May 31\u2013June 1, 1939, Special House Committee on Un-American Activities, p. 3470.\n\n. James True trading as the James True Associates, US Bureau of Investigation file no. 62-2930, September 18, 1934; Acting Attorney General William Stanley, correspondence to Louis McHenry Hoew, secretary to the president, August 17, 1934; Memorandum for the Secretary of the Treasury, October 19, 1937; all in the James True folder, FDR archives, Hyde Park, NY.\n\n. Regin Schmidt, _Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States_ (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004), p. 34; Paul Rosier, _Serving Their Country: American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 75; Timothy Dowling, ed., _Personal Perspectives: World War II_ , vol. 2 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2005), pp. 233\u201334; Charles J. Weeks, \"The Eastern Cherokee and the New Deal,\" _North Carolina Historical Review_ 53, no. 3 (July 1976): pp. 303\u201319, (accessed April 11, 2018).\n\n. \"Blind Senator Thomas D. Schall of Minnesota Uses a Revolver for Target Practice, Guided by Sound as a Wand Taps the Bulls Eyes,\" December 1935, ed. danielharden44, Critical Past, April 12, 2012, (accessed May 25, 2018).\n\n. Wolfskill and Hudson, _All But the People_ , pp. 69\u201370; \"Death of Schall,\" _Time_ , December 30, 1935.\n\n. \"America First! Incorporated: Confidential Statement,\" FDR archives, James True folder.\n\n. \"Oust 24 Aides, America First! Asks Roosevelt,\" _New York Herald Tribune_ , September 17, 1934, p. 6; James True, \"Seeks Dismissal of Those 'Prolonging Depression,'\" _Register_ (Sandusky, OH), September 16, 1934, p. 3.\n\n. Edward A. Williams, \"Washington's 'Big Leagues' Take a Hand in Political Game,\" _Washington Post_ , October 28, 1934, p. B2; John L. Spivak, \"Plotting the American Pogroms, Part I: Organization of the Anti-Semitic Campaign,\" _New Masses_ , October 2, 1934, pp. 9\u201313, (accessed May 25, 2018).\n\n. John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, _Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America_ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 160; \"Whalen Offers Secret Proof of Soviet Plot,\" _New York Herald Tribune_ , July 19, 1930, p. 1; Harvey Klehr, John Haynes, and Fridrikh Firsov, _The Secret World of American Communism_ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 26.\n\n. \"Vassiliev White Notebook, No. 2, 1927\u20131975,\" 2009, Alexander Vassiliev Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, p. 33, (accessed April 11, 2018).\n\n. Ibid.; \"Vassiliev Black Notebook, 1932\u20131954,\" Alexander Vassiliev Papers, p. 11, (accessed April 11, 2018).\n\n. \"Vassiliev Black Notebook,\" p. 14.\n\n. Raymond Lonergan, \"Wild Yarns Broadcast,\" _Labor_ , September 15, 1935, p. 1.\n\n. Wolfskill and Hudson, _All But the People_ , p. 69.\n\n. United Press, \"Dies Hears Evans, Moseley Named: Atlantans Mentioned in Letter to Goebbels on Proposed Newspaper,\" _Atlanta Constitution_ , October 22, 1939, p. 14A.\n\n. \"The Sedition Trial: A Study in Delay and Obstruction,\" _University of Chicago Law Review_ 15, no. 3 (Spring 1948): 691\u2013702; James E. Chinn, \"Court Removes Two From Trial,\" _Washington Post_ , July 14, 1944, p. 1.\n\nChapter Four: American Liberty League\n\n. Ranjit Dighe, \"Pierre S. du Pont and the Making of an AntiProhibition Activist,\" _Social History of Alcohol & Drugs: An Interdisciplinary Journal_ 24, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 97\u2013118.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.; Daniel Okrent, \"No Closing Time for Income Taxes,\" _New York Times_ , June 12, 2010, p. WK11.\n\n. Sheldon Richman, \"A Matter of Degree, Not Principle: The Founding of the American Liberty League,\" _Journal of Libertarian Studies_ 6, no 2 (Spring 1982).\n\n. Arthur Krock, \"AAPA, Its Work Well Done, Passes Out of Existence,\" _New York Times_ , December 31, 1933, p. E1.\n\n. _Investigation of Lobbying Activities, Special Committee to Investigate Lobbying Activities_ , US Senate, 74th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1936), p. 2059.\n\n. Frederick Rudolph, \"The American Liberty League, 1934\u20131940,\" _American Historical Review_ 56, no. 1 (October 1950): 19\u201333.\n\n. Blanche Wiesen Cook, _The Defining Years, 1933\u20131938_ , vol. 2, _Eleanor Roosevelt_ (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999), chap. 17.\n\n. Elliott Thurston, \"Leaders of 2 Parties Set to Sift New Deal,\" _Washington Post_ , August 23, 1934, p. 1.\n\n. Associated Press, \"President Cool on Liberty Body,\" _Washington_ (DC) _Star_ , August 25, 1934, p. 1; David Kyvig, _Repealing National Prohibition_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 191.\n\n. Smedley Butler, \"On War,\" The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), 1933, .\n\n. \"Investigation of un-American propaganda activities in the United States. Hearings before a Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Seventy-fifth Congress, third session-Seventy-eighth Congress, second session,\" US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1935, p. 20.\n\n. Paul Comly French, \"$3,000,000 Bid for Fascist Army Bared,\" _Philadelphia Herald_ , November 20, 1934, p. 1.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Special Committee on Un-American Activities, \"Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities ad Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities, House of Representatives, Seventy-third Congress, second session\" US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1935, p. 10.\n\n. Sally Denton, _The Plots against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right_ (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 215.\n\n. \" _Investigation of Lobbying Activities, Special Committee to Investigate Lobbying Activities_ ,\" pp. 1948\u201349, 1958, 2051\u201352, 2094; Jared A. Goldstein, \"The American Liberty League and the Rise of Constitutional Nationalism,\" _Temple Law Review_ 86, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 287\u2013330.\n\n. Robert Burk, _The Corporate State and the Broker State: The Du Ponts and American National Politics, 1925\u20131940_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 158; Patrick C. Patton, \"Standing at Thermopylae: A History of the American Liberty League\" (PhD diss., Temple University, 2015), pp. 177\u201388.\n\n. Roger Biles, _The South and the New Deal_ (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), p. 140.\n\n. Patton, \"Standing at Thermopylae,\" p. 188.\n\n. Franklyn Waltman Jr., \"Happy Warrior 'Looks at Record,' Sees 'Debts, but No Progress,'\" _Washington Post_ , January 26, 1936, p. M1.\n\n. \"Smith's Oratory Dominates 2,000 Hilarious New Deal Foes,\" _Washington Post_ , January 26, 1936, p. M1.\n\n. Ibid.\n\nChapter Five: We, the People\n\n. John Franklin Carter, _Murder in the State Department_ (London: J. Cape & H. Smith, 1930.), p. 19.\n\n. Bruce Rae, \"New Mystery Stories,\" _New York Times_ , October 19, 1930, p. 70.\n\n. John Franklin Carter, _What We Are About to Receive_ (New York: Covici, Friede, 1932), p. 21.\n\n. John Franklin Carter, \"The Year of Crisis,\" John Franklin Carter Papers, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY.\n\n. John Franklin Carter, interview by Charles T. Morissey, John Franklin Carter Papers, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ernst Hanfstaengl, _Hitler: The Missing Years_ (New York: Arcade, 1994), p. 188.\n\n. \"US All Set for Welcome to Hanfstaengl,\" Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June 15, 1934, (accessed April 12, 2018); Scott Christianson, _The Last Gasp: The Rise and Fall of the American Gas Chamber_ (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), p. 127.\n\n. Ernst Hanfstaengl, _Hitler: The Missing Years_ (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1957), p. 100.\n\n. Christof Mauch, _The Shadow War against Hitler: The Covert Operations of America's Wartime Secret Intelligence Service_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 49.\n\n. \"Back Channels,\" _Washingtonian_ 31 (June 1996).\n\n. Jay Franklin, We, the People, _Evening Star_ (DC), October 6, 1939, p. A-13.\n\n. FDR PSF files, subject file, \"Carter, John F., 1939,\" box 97, (accessed April 12, 2018).\n\n. Jay [John Franklin] Carter, _1940_ (New York: Viking, 1940), p. 9.\n\n. Carter, interview by Morissey.\n\n. The chapters were serialized in _Liberty_ magazine in 1935 and assembled into a book, _The President's Mystery Story_ (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936).\n\n. Joseph E. Persico, _Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage_ (New York: Random House, 2001), pp. 8\u201311. In addition to Astor, the Room's members included the three other companions who accompanied FDR on the _Nourmahal_ : Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt's son; William Rhinelander Stewart, a wealthy philanthropist; and Frederic Kernochan, a member of the Roosevelt clan and a state judge.\n\n. \"Memo from Miss Tully,\" John Franklin Carter, April 24, 1945, in JFC papers, (accessed April 12, 2018).\n\n. Mauch, _Shadow War against Hitler_ , p. 63.\n\n. \"Raw Material Situation in Belgium,\" John Franklin Carter, March 1, 1941, in JFC papers, (accessed March 16, 2018)\n\n. \"Nazi Activities in the Union of South Africa,\" John Franklin Carter, March 8, 1941, in JFC papers, (accessed March 16, 2018)\n\n. Carter, interviewed by Morissey.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"Navy Department, 1940\u20131941,\" Box 44, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Files of Dr. Henry Field, p. 6, (accessed April 12, 2018).\n\n. Executive Office of the White House, transcription of press conference, April 25, 1941, p. 35, (accessed April 12, 2018).\n\n. Ibid., p. 43.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Associated Press, \"President Defines Lindbergh's Niche,\" New York Times, April 26, 1941, p. 5.\n\n. Unsigned, \"Lindbergh Quits Air Corps,\" New York Times, April 29, 1941, p. 1.\n\n. Albert Fried, _FDR and His Enemies_ (New York: St. Martin's, 1999), p. 196.\n\n. Franklin D. Roosevelt, \"Memorandum for Nelson Rockefeller,\" May 19, 1941, in JFC papers, (accessed April 12, 2018).\n\n. \"Memorandum on Report From Stockholm to a Chicago Investment Trust,\" May 16, 1941, in JFC papers, (accessed May 16, 2018)\n\n. Christopher Andrew and Julie Elkner, \"Stalin and Foreign Intelligence,\" _Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions_ 4, no. 1 (2003): 78\u201379.\n\n. Franklin D. Roosevelt, \"Memorandum for John Franklin Carter,\" June 7, 1941, in JFC papers, (accessed April 12, 2018).\n\n. John Franklin Carter, \"Memorandum on Martinique,\" June 23, 1941, in JFC papers, (accessed April 16, 2018).\n\n. Transcription of FDR press conference, August 22, 1941, (accessed April 16, 2018).\n\n. Byron Fairchild, \"Chapter 3: Decision to Land United States Forces in Iceland, 1941,\" in _Command Decisions_ , ed. Kent Roberts Greenfield (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, Department of the Army, 1958), (accessed April 16, 2018).\n\n. \"Says Wheeler Put Troops in Danger,\" _New York Times_ , July 9, 1941, p. 12.\n\n. \"Mr. Whitley Tele. from New York,\" Federal Bureau of Investigation, January 30, 1937, FBI File 62-47509-1; \"Memorandum for Mr. Joseph,\" January 7, 1937, FBI File 62-47509-2.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"Memorandum for Mr. Tolson,\" Federal Bureau of Investigation, September 5, 1941, FBI File 62-47509-6.\n\n. C. B. Munson, \"Japanese on the West Coast,\" in _Asian American Studies: A Reader_ , ed. Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Min Song (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000).\n\n. John Franklin Carter, \"Memorandum Concerning Japanese Situation on the West Coast,\" October 22, 1941, in JFC papers, (accessed April 16, 2018).\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ken Ringle, \"What Did You Do Before The War, Dad?,\" Washington Post, December 6, 1981, p. SM54.\n\n. John Franklin Carter, \"Memorandum Concerning Japanese Situation on the West Coast,\" October 22, 1941, in JFC papers, (accessed April 16, 2018).\n\n. John Franklin Carter, \"Memorandum Concerning Japanese Situation on the West Coast (Supplementary)\" November 10, 1941, in JFC papers, (accessed April 16, 2018).\n\n. John Franklin Carter, \"Memorandum Concerning Japanese Situation on the West Coast (Supplementary)\" November 10, 1941, in JFC papers, (accessed April 16, 2018).\n\n. Franklin D. Roosevelt, \"Dear Jack,\" November 11, 1941, in JFC papers, (accessed April 16, 2018).\n\n. Report of the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Congress of the United States, Pursuant to S. Con; Res; 27, 79th Cong., pp. 453, 455.\n\n. David A. Pfeiffer, \"Sage Prophet or Loose Cannon?\" _Prologue Magazine_ 40, no. 2 (Summer 2008), (accessed April 6, 2018).\n\n. Munson, \"Japanese on the West Coast.\"\n\nChapter Six: British Security Coordination\n\n. Ernest Cuneo, \"CIA's British Parentage,\" Cuneo papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.\n\n. Curt Gentry, _J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets_ (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 265.\n\n. Nigel West, _The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940\u20131945_ (Mt. Prospect, IL: Fromm International, 1999), p. 1.\n\n. H. Montgomery Hyde, _Room 3603: The Incredible True Story of Secret Intelligence Operations during World War II_ (New York: Lyons, 2001), pp. 26\u201327.\n\n. West, _Secret History of British Intelligence_ , p. 3.\n\n. Ibid., p. 20.\n\n. Thomas Mahl, _Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939\u201344_ (London: Brassey's, 1999), p. 50.\n\n. West, _Secret History of British Intelligence_ , p. 11.\n\n. West, _Secret History of British Intelligence_ , p. 9; Joseph E. Persico, _Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage_ (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 64; Christof Mauch, _The Shadow War against Hitler: The Covert Operations of America's Wartime Secret Intelligence Service_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 21.\n\n. Kermit Roosevelt, \"War Report of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services)\" (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1949), p. 26.\n\n. Mauch, _Shadow War against Hitler_ , pp. 20\u201321; Associated Press, \"Edgar Ansel Mowrer Dies at 84,\" _New York Times_ , March 4, 1977, p. 32.\n\n. Edgar Mowrer, _Triumph and Turmoil: A Personal History of Our Time_ (New York: Weybright & Talley, 1968), pp. 314\u201315.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Persico, _Roosevelt's Secret War_ , pp. 65\u201366; West, _Secret History of British Intelligence_ , p. 9; \"Colonel Donovan Leaves on the Atlantic Clipper,\" _New York Times_ , July 16, 1940, p. 30.\n\n. Mowrer, _Triumph and Turmoil_ , pp. 316\u201317.\n\n. Mauch, _Shadow War against Hitler_ , p. 21;\n\n. \"British Plane Here on Regular Flight,\" _New York Times_ , August 5, 1940, p. 1.\n\n. West, _Secret History of British Intelligence_ , p. 10.\n\n. Persico, _Roosevelt's Secret War_ , p. 68.\n\n. \"Radio Today,\" _New York Times_ , February 19, 1941, p. 42; \"Today's Radio Programs,\" _New York Herald Tribune_ , February 19, 1941, p. 36; \"Radio Today,\" _New York Times_ , December 31, 1942, p. 31.\n\n. Hyde, _Room 3603_ , p. 41.\n\n. Mauch, _Shadow War against Hitler_ , pp. 14\u201315; Edgar Mowrer, \"Donovan Bares 5th Column Acts in Europe and Warns America,\" _New York Herald Tribune_ , August 20, 1940, p. 7.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Franklin D. Roosevelt, \"Message to Congress on Exchanging Destroyers for British Naval and Air Bases,\" Washington, DC, September 3, 1940, (accessed April 16, 2018).\n\n. Sanford Levinson and Jack M. Balkin, \"Constitutional Crises,\" _University of Pennsylvania Law Review_ 157, no. 3 (February 2009): 707\u201353.\n\n. \"USA: Liaison with Authorities in USA and London,\" June 6, 1940\u2013January 29, 1943, FO 1093\/238, UK National Archives.\n\n. Cuneo, \"CIA's British Parentage.\"\n\n. Mowrer, _Triumph and Turmoil_ , p. 323.\n\n. Ibid., pp. 325\u2013426.\n\n. Jon Lellenberg, \"The Secret War, 1939\u201345,\" \"Churchill's North America,\" 29th International Churchill Conference, Toronto, October 13, 2012 (accessed April 12, 2018)\n\n. Mark Chadwin, _The Hawks of World War II_ (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), pp. 44\u201345.\n\n. Ibid., p. 178; Carl Bernstein, \"The CIA and the Media,\" _Rolling Stone_ , October 20, 1977, p. 3.\n\n. Betty Houchin Winfield, _FDR and the News Media_ (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 58; \"May 24, 1935,\" Franklin D. Roosevelt Day by Day, FDR Presidential Library, (accessed April 16, 2018); \"May 16, 1937,\" Franklin D. Roosevelt Day by Day, FDR Presidential Library, (accessed April 16, 2018); and \"April 9, 1938,\" Franklin D. Roosevelt Day by Day, FDR Presidential Library, (accessed April 16, 2018).\n\n. Chadwin, _Hawks of World War II_ , pp. 51\u201352; Lynne Olson, _Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939\u20131941_ (New York: Random House, 2014), p. 324.\n\n. Chadwin, _Hawks of World War II_ , p. 205.\n\n. Ibid., p. 74.\n\n. Bernard Kilgore, \"G.O.P. Convention: Roosevelt's Cabinet Changes May Make G.O.P. the 'Peace Party,' Help-Allies Group Weakened by Stimson and Knox Action, Observers Feel Effect on Candidates Unclear,\" _Wall Street Journal_ , June 21, 1940, p. 1; Turner Catledge, \"Republicans Confused on Eve of Convention,\" _New York Times_ , June 23, 1940, p. E10.\n\n. \"Delegate Poll Says 60% Favor Help for Allies,\" _New York Herald Tribune_ , June 26, 1940, p. 1;\n\n. Ibid; \"Opinion Poll at the Republican National Convention,\" June 19\u201325, 1940, Francis Henson folder, Ernest Cuneo papers, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY.\n\n. Mahl, _Desperate Deception_ , p. 87; \"Sanford Griffith, Internal Security Act Investigation,\" Francis J. Galiant, March 10, 1952, FBI NY 65-4098.\n\n. Mahl, _Desperate Deception_ , p. 91.\n\n. August 9, 1940, correspondence in Francis Henson folder, Ernest Cuneo papers, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY.\n\n. \"Opinion Poll at the Republican National Convention,\" Francis Henson folder.\n\n. \"Francis Henson to Ernest Cuneo,\" December 27, 1948, in Francis Henson folder, Ernest Cuneo papers, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY.\n\n. Mowrer, _Triumph and Turmoil_ , p. 318.\n\n. William Allen White, \"G.O.P. Convention Clash Between Old and New Party Ideas,\" _Boston Globe_ , June 28, 1940, p. 10.\n\n. \"Poll Shows Delegates Fear Nazi Peril to US,\" _New York Herald Tribune_ , July 15, 1940, p. 34; Sanford Griffith to Ernest Cuneo, July 22, 1940, Francis Henson folder, Ernest Cuneo papers, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY.\n\n. \"Poll Shows Delegates Fear Nazi Peril to US.\"\n\n. Mahl, _Desperate Deception_ , p. 93.\n\n. Chadwin, _Hawks of World War II_ , p. 105.\n\nChapter Seven: Frying Fish and Fixing Franks\n\n. Thomas Mahl, _Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939\u201344_ (London: Brassey's, 1999), p. 107.\n\n. Francis Henson to Ernest Cuneo, October 18, 1940, in Francis Henson folder, Ernest Cuneo papers, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY.\n\n. Mahl, _Desperate Deception_ , p. 111.\n\n. Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, Daily Washington Merry-Go-Round, October 21,1940, American University Digital Research Archives, (accessed April 11, 2018).\n\n. Mahl, _Desperate Deception_ , p. 110.\n\n. Sanford Griffith to Ernest Cuneo, November 13, 1940, in Francis Henson folder, Ernest Cuneo papers, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY.\n\n. Henry Hoke, _Black Mail_ (New York: Reader's Book Service, 1944), p. 4.\n\n. Ibid., p. 5.\n\n. Ibid., p. 6.\n\n. Mahl, _Desperate Deception_ , p. 124; \"Nazi Propaganda in US and Abuse of the US Congressional Frank,\" November 10, 1941, Report No. S.O. 517, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, British National Archives, (accessed April 16, 2018); Mark Chadwin, _The Hawks of World War II_ (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), p. 213.\n\n. Nigel West, _The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940\u20131945_ (Mt. Prospect, IL: Fromm International, 1999), pp. 75\u201380.\n\n. \"Nazi Propaganda in US\" British National Archives; West, _Secret History of British Intelligence_ , pp. 75\u201380.\n\n. \"Nazi Propaganda in US,\" British National Archives.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. West, _Secret History of British Intelligence_ , p. 78\u201379.\n\n. \"Dennett, Fish Deny Knowing Secret of Wandering Files,\" _Washington Post_ , September 26, 1941, p. 1.\n\n. \"Nazi Propaganda in US,\" British National Archives.\n\n. Dillard Stokes, \"8 Bags of Evidence in Nazi Probe 'Turn Up' at Rep. Fish's Bin,\" _Washington Post_ , September 28, 1941, p. 1.\n\n. \"Nazi Propaganda in US,\" British National Archives.\n\n. \"Fish Is Linked to Removal of Dennett's Files,\" _New York Herald Tribune_ , September 26, 1941, p. 8; \"Mail Bags Linked to No-War Groups Are Investigated,\" _New York Times_ , September 27, 1941, p. 1; West, _Secret History of British Intelligence_ , p. 79.\n\n. \"Nazi Propaganda in US,\" British National Archives.\n\n. \"Anti-Semitic Propaganda Carried in Franked Envelopes of Congressman Fish,\" Jewish Telegraphic Agency, August 28, 1941, (accessed April 16, 2018); Edward Willards, \"Fish Assails Smear Drive by War Mongers: Tells Foes' Tactics in House Speech,\" _Chicago Daily Tribune_ , September 30, 1941, p. 1; Chadwin, _Hawks of World War II_ , p. 214.\n\n. Mahl, _Desperate Deception_ , p. 131.\n\n. West, _Secret History of British Intelligence_ , p. 80.\n\nChapter Eight: Zapping Zapp\n\n. Nigel West, _The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940\u20131945_ (Mt. Prospect, IL: Fromm International, 1999), p. 68.\n\n. _Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States. Hearings before a Special Committee on Un-American Activities_ , House of Representatives, 75th Cong., 3rd Session, and 78th Second Session, on H. Res. 282 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940), (accessed April 16, 2018).\n\n. George E. Sterling, _The History of the Radio Intelligence Division Before and During World War II_ , ed. Albert A. Evangelista and E. Merle Glunt, (accessed May 25, 2018).\n\n. Donald Ritchie, _Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 98; _Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities_.\n\n. B. N. Timmons, \"Nazi Newsman Is Captured,\" _Amarillo_ (TX) _Daily News_ , April 27, 1945, p. 10.\n\n. \"Horrors of War,\" _Goldfish Bowl_ 7I, no. 47, p. 1.\n\n. \"News Service Bureau Chief to Accept Subpoena Dies,\" _Washington Evening Star_ , September 17, 1940, p. 1.\n\n. _Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities_.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"Letter by Zapp Tells Woes of a Propagandist,\" _New York Herald Tribune_ , June 17, 1941, p. 6.\n\n. Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, Washington Merry-Go-Round, November 15, 1940, American University Digital Research Archives, http:\/\/auislandora.wrlc.org\/islandora\/object\/pearson%3A8150?solr_nav%5Bid%5D=5e2f233f6371cb367541&solr_nav%5Bpage%5D=0&solr_nav%5Boffset%5D=5#page\/1\/mode\/1up\/search\/zap (accessed April 16, 2018).\n\n. \" _Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities_ ,\" p. 1054.\n\n. Philip Jenkins, _Hoods and Shirts: The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania_ , _1925\u20131950_ (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 154; FDR Press Conference no. 630, March 19, 1940, White House transcription, p. 19, (accessed April 16, 2018).\n\n. Dillard Stokes, \"Jurors Want Fish to Face Widened Quiz,\" _Washington Post_ , November 22, 1941, p. 1.\n\n. Franklin D. Roosevelt, \"Address at the Annual Dinner of White House Correspondents' Association,\" March 15, 1941, American Presidency Project, (accessed April 16, 2018).\n\n. \"Propaganda Trial,\" _Time_ , August 4, 1941, (accessed April 16, 1941).\n\n. Associated Press, \"US Jury Convicts Nazi News Agency: Transocean Found Guilty,\" _Baltimore Sun_ , July 26, 1941, p. 1.\n\n. _PR Blue Book_ and supplement to the _International Who's Who in Public Relations, 1960_ (Meriden, NH: PR Pub. Co., 1960\u201370).\n\nChapter Nine: Fake News\n\n. \"News Agency Set Up,\" _New York Times_ , July 15, 1940, p. 32.\n\n. \"Czechs Charge Girls Transported to Reich for White Slavery,\" _Overseas News Agency_ 1, no. 2 (August 15, 1940).\n\n. For example, in British National Archives, \"America: Fortnightly Progress Reports\u2014SOE Activities in America,\" November 22, 1941: \"ONA Cover Provided for Hacswnski, New Agent of G4000,\" (accessed April 17, 2018).\n\n. Foxworth to Hoover, FBI file 62-67633-1, April 23, 1942.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Moscow to Mexico City, September 7, 1944 (cable), _Mexico City KGB\u2013Moscow Center Cables: Cables Decrypted by the National Security Administration's Venona Project_ , arr. John Earl Haynes (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2011), p. 216, (accessed April 24, 2018); New York to Moscow, February 2, 1944 (cable), _New York KGB Station\u2013Moscow Center Cables, 1944_ , p. 7, (accessed April 24, 2018); Mexico City to Moscow, January 15, 1944 (cable), p. 17.\n\n. Nigel West, _The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940\u20131945_ (Mt. Prospect, IL: Fromm International, 1999), pp. 58\u201359.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Zbynek Zeman, _Selling the War: Art and Propaganda in World War II_ (Ossining, NY: Orbis, 1978), p. 132.\n\n. Pat Frank, \"US Navy Alert; Hint Nazis May Man Warplanes: Where US Navy Keeps Watch,\" _Boston Globe_ , November 14, 1940, p. 1.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Pat Frank, \"US Defense Imperiled by Fascist Bands in Puerto Rico, Haiti,\" _Oakland_ (CA) _Tribune_ , February 11, 1941, p. 2.\n\n. Overseas News Agency, \"Bedouin Chief Dies at 130,\" New York Times, August 31, 1941, p. 22.\n\n. Associated Press, \"Hitler's Star Setting, Declare Astrologers in Convention,\" _Los Angeles Times_ , August 7, 1941, p. 1.\n\n. West, _Secret History of British Intelligence_ , p. 125.\n\n. Political Warfare Executive Correspondence, Underground Propaganda Committee Minutes (SIBS) MS\/42\/XI\/4a, British National Archives.\n\n. Nicholas Cull, _Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign Against American \"Neutrality\" in World War II_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 132.\n\n. Political Warfare Executive, \"The Meaning, Techniques, and Methods of Political Warfare,\" File 462\/88G, Political Warfare Executive paper, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, British National Archives, p. 4, (accessed April 24, 2018).\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"Underground Propaganda Committee: Meetings, Minutes, and Reports,\" FO 898\/69, Minutes 1940\u20131945, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, British National Archives, (accessed April 24, 2018).\n\n. Overseas News Agency, \"Report Hitler in Collapse.\" _New York Post_ , August 15, 1941, p. 1.\n\n. Overseas News Agency, \"Mind of Hitler Slipping, Rumor in Geneva,\" _Boston Globe_ , August 17, 1941, p. B1; Overseas News Agency, \"Report Hitler in Collapse,\" _New York Post_ , August 15, 1941.\n\n. Lee Richards, _Whispers of War: Underground Propaganda Rumour-Mongering in the Second World War_ (East Sussex, UK: Psywar.org, 2010), pp. 26\u201327, https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=Q4CBDJIW-ZwC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed April 24, 2018); Associated Press, \"Japan Said to Fear Soviet,\" _New York Times_ , July 12, 1941, p. 2.\n\n. Joseph S. Evans Jr., \"Purge of Nazi Minor Officials? Division between Party and Army Over,\" _Baltimore Sun_ , August 18, 1941, p. 1.\n\n. FO 898\/70, Memo, Underground Propaganda Committee, September 27, 1940, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, British National Archives.\n\n. Richards, _Whispers of War_ , p. 16.\n\n. West, _Secret History of British Intelligence_ , p. 112; Associated Press, \"British Using Deadly New Sea Explosive: Secret Weapon Reported 47 Times as Powerful as TNT in Depth Charge,\" _New York Herald_ , November 2, 1941, p. 1; Associated Press, \"New High Power British Explosive May Be Decisive in Atlantic Battle,\" _Boston Globe_ , November 2, 1941, p. B21.\n\n. \"Super-Explosive Tales,\" _New York Times_ , November 3, 1941, p. C18.\n\n. FO 898\/70, Memo, Underground Propaganda Committee, December 5, 1940, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, British National Archives.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Propaganda: Underground Propaganda Committee Minutes Correspondence, February 1942, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, British National Archives.\n\nChapter Ten: Battling the French and Irish\n\n. Mary Lovell, _Cast No Shadow: The Life of the American Spy Who Changed the Course of World War II_ (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), pp. 198\u201399.\n\n. Nigel West, _The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940\u20131945_ (Mt. Prospect, IL: Fromm International, 1999), p. 198.\n\n. Ansel E. Talbert, \"Vichy Embassy in US Shown as Heading Clique of Agents Aiding Nazis,\" _New York Herald Tribune_ , August 31, 1941, p. 1.\n\n. Ansel E. Talbert, \"Vichy Agents in US Tried to Steal Plans for Improved Bren Machine Gun,\" _Washington Post_ , September 2, 1941, p. 2.\n\n. Talbert, \"Vichy Embassy in US Shown as Heading Clique of Agents.\"\n\n. Nigel West, _The Secret History of British Intelligence_ , p. 201.\n\n. Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, Washington Merry-Go-Round, May 15, 1941, American University Digital Research Archives, https:\/\/auislandora.wrlc.org\/islandora\/object\/pearson%3A9858?solr_nav%5Bid%5D=86297a489a747019dd5b&solr_nav%5Bpage%5D=0&solr_nav%5Boffset%5D=6#page\/1\/mode\/1up\/search\/Schering (accessed April 24, 2018).\n\n. West, _Secret History of British Intelligence_ , p. 136\u201343.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Lee Rashall, \"Federal Men Air Financial Blitzkrieg,\" _(Cincinnati) Enquirer_ , April 11, 1941, p. 2.\n\n. William Stevenson, _A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible WWII Narrative of the Hero Whose Spy Network and Secret Diplomacy Changed the Course of History_ (Guilford, CT: Lyons, 2000), p. 132.\n\n. Menzies to Cadogan, April 1, 1941, FO 1093\/238, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, British National Archives.\n\n. \"Wheeler Blasts Irish-American War Propaganda,\" _Chicago Daily Tribune_ , November 11, 1941, p. 17; _Congressional Record_ , November 10, 1941, pp. 8692\u201394.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"Wheeler Blasts Irish-American War Propaganda,\" _Chicago Daily Tribune_.\n\n. West, _Secret History of British Intelligence_ , pp. 84\u201386.\n\n. Mark Chadwin, _The Hawks of World War II_ (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), p. 148.\n\n. West, _Secret History of British Intelligence_ , p. 85.\n\n. Albert Fried, _FDR and His Enemies_ (New York: St. Martin's, 1999), p. 161.\n\n. Fred Warner Neal, \"John L. Lewis: He Hates Roosevelt; He Hates War; He Wants a Showdown,\" _Wall Street Journal_ , November 19, 1941, p. 1.\n\n. West, _Secret History of British Intelligence_ , pp. 82\u201383.\n\n. George Tagge, \"CIO Delegates Put Approval on Mine Strike,\" _Chicago Daily Tribune_ , November 18, 1941, p. 2.\n\n. Paul Tobenkin, \"C.I.O. Votes All Aid to Defense as Murray Backs Coal Strike,\" _New York Herald Tribune_ , November 19, 1941, p. 1.\n\n. West, _Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas_ , p. 84.\n\n. Wendell Willkie met with William Stephenson, the head of British Security Coordination, in January 1941 to strategize on tactics for getting Congress to approve lend-lease. Willkie briefed Stephenson on a confidential meeting with President Roosevelt, FO 1093_238-6.\n\nChapter Eleven: Eight Days in December\n\n. Amanda Smith, _Newspaper Titan: The Infamous Life and Monumental Times of Cissy Patterson_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), p. 392.\n\n. Frank C. Waldrop, \"A 'Scoop' Gave Axis Our World War II Plans: Called 'Rainbow Five,'\" _Washington Post_ , January 6, 1963, p. E5.\n\n. Chesly Manly, \"FDR's War Plans!: Goal Is 10 Million Armed Men,\" _Chicago Daily Tribune_ , December 4, 1941, p. 1.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Waldrop, \"'Scoop' Gave Axis Our World War II Plans.\"\n\n. Smith, _Newspaper Titan_ , p. 394.\n\n. George H. Tinkham, \"The American Republic Betrayed,\" _Congressional Record_ , December 4, 1941, p. A5448.\n\n. William Lambertson, _Congressional Record_ , December 4, 1941, p. 9449.\n\n. James C. Gaston, _Planning the American Air War: Four Men and Nine Days in 1941_ (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1982), p. 100.\n\n. _Documents on German Foreign Policy_ , series D, vol. 13 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1954), p. 950, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. Gaston, _Planning the American Air War_ , p. 101.\n\n. Paul Dull, _A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1941\u20131945_ (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2007), p. 7.\n\n. William Strand, \"Nation Stirred by AEF Plan: House in Uproar Over FDR War Aims,\" _Chicago Daily Tribune_ , December 5, 1941, p. 1.\n\n. Burton Wheeler with Paul Healy, _Yankee from the West: The Candid, Turbulent Life Story of the Yankee-Born US Senator from Montana_ (London: Octagon Books, 1977), p. 32.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Thomas Fleming, _The New Dealers' War: FDR and the War Within World War II_ (New York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. 22\u201323.\n\n. Smith, _Newspaper Titan_ , p. 395.\n\n. Masuo Kato, _The Lost War: A Japanese Reporter's Inside Story_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), p. 39.\n\n. John Hughes-Wilson, _Military Intelligence Blunders_ (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1999), p. 110.\n\n. Kato, _Lost War_ , p. 22.\n\n. Peter de Mendelssohn, _Japan's Political Warfare_ (Crow's Nest, New South Wales, Australia: George Allen & Unwin, 1944), p. 67.\n\n. H. R. Baukhage, \"Popular Mr. Kato,\" _Atlanta Constitution_ , October 14, 1937, p. 6.\n\n. Hugh Byas, \"Japan Sends US an Admiral,\" _New York Times_ , February 9, 1941, p. SM14.\n\n. _The \"Magic\" Background of Pearl Harbor_ , vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 1978), p. 4, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. Ibid., p. 9.\n\n. \"Red and Purple,\" _Pearl Harbor Review_ , May 3, 2016, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. Office of Naval Intelligence, \"Japanese Intelligence and Propaganda in the United States During 1941,\" December 4, 1941, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. Ladislas Farago, _Burn After Reading: The Espionage History of World War II_ (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003), p. 180.\n\n. _\"Magic\" Background of Pearl Harbor_ , vol. 3, p. 32.\n\n. Ibid., vol. 1. pp. A-75\u201376.\n\n. \"Magic\" Background of Pearl Harbor, vol. 1, p. A-87.\n\n. Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, Washington Merry-Go-Round, October 8, 1941, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. Tom Treanor, \"The Home Front,\" _Los Angeles Times_ , June 30, 1941, p. 1A.\n\n. Roger B. Jeans, _Terasaki Hidenari, Pearl Harbor, and Occupied Japan: A Bridge to Reality_ (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), p. 83; _\"Magic\" Background of Pearl Harbor_ , vol. 1, p. A-73.\n\n. _\"Magic\" Background of Pearl Harbor_ , vol. 1, p. A-87.\n\n. Kato, _Lost War_ , p. 28.\n\n. Ibid., p. 27.\n\n. Ibid., p. 29.\n\n. Ibid., p. 32.\n\n. Kato, The Lost War, p. 37.\n\n. David Kahn, _The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet_ (New York: Scribner's and Sons, 1997), p. 44.\n\n. Kato, _Lost War_ , p. 36.\n\n. Ibid., p. 38.\n\n. Ibid., p. 56.\n\n. Ibid., p. 57.\n\n. Ibid., p. 59.\n\n. Lyle C. Wilson, \"Recalls Pearl Harbor Day in Washington on Sabbath,\" _Chicago Defender_ , December 7, 1959, p. 5.\n\n. Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, Washington Merry-Go-Round, December 14, 1941, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. Adolf Hitler, \"Speech Declaring War against the United States,\" December 11, 1941, Jewish Virtual Library, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\nChapter Twelve: Carter Goes to War\n\n. Memorandum for Mr. Nichols, March 4, 1947, FBI HQ File 62-47509-70.\n\n. John Franklin Carter to FDR, \"Report on the Organization or Development of a World-Wide Intelligence,\" January 9, 1942, PSF, John Franklin Carter, box 122, FDRL.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Memo for Mr. Tolson, Mr. Tamm, Mr. Ladd, January 16, 1942, FBI 62-49507-21, 62-49507-22.\n\n. Vannevar Bush to John Franklin Carter, January 1, 1942, PSF, John Franklin Carter, box 122, FDRL, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. Tully to John Franklin Carter, January 2, 1942, PSF, John Franklin Carter, box 122, FDRL.\n\n. \"Report on Interview with C. C. Smith,\" January 3, 1942, PSF, John Franklin Carter, box 122, FDRL, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. \"Report on Stalin's Secret Board of Strategy,\" January 7, 1942, PSF, John Franklin Carter, box 122, FDRL, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. \"Report on Confidential Soviet Intelligence,\" PSF, John Franklin Carter, box 122, FDRL, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. Memorandum for Jack Carter, January 9, 1942, PSF, John Franklin Carter, box 122, FDRL, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. \"Report on Polish Prisoners of War,\" January 9, 1942, PSF, John Franklin Carter, box 122, FDRL.\n\n. Memorandum for Mr. Carter, January 13, 1942, PSF, John Franklin Carter, box 122, FDRL.\n\n. \"Report on Japanese Activities along the West Coast of Mexico from Nogales, Sonora, South to Manzanillo,\" January 16, 1942, John Franklin Carter, box 122, FDRL.\n\n. \"Report on Alleged Intrigue between Free French and John L. Lewis,\" October 8, 1942, PSF, John Franklin Carter, box 123, FDRL.\n\n. John Franklin Carter, \"Poland and Lithuania,\" July 1942, box 128, FDRL; PSF, John Franklin Carter, box 123, FDRL.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. C. B. Munson to Grace Tully, undated, PSF, John Franklin Carter, box 122, FDRL.\n\n. J. Franklin Carter, \"Memorandum on Summary of West Coast and Honolulu Reports by Munson Etc.,\" December 16, 1941, John Franklin Carter, box 121, FDRL.\n\n. Memorandum for Mr. Ladd, November 17, 1941, FBI 62-47508-7; Memorandum for the Director, December 13, 1941, FBI 62-47509-14; Hoover to Carter, January 7, 1942, 62-47509-19; J. Franklin Carter, \"Memorandum on Summary of West Coast and Honolulu Reports by Munson Etc.,\" December 16, 1941, John Franklin Carter, box 121, FDRL; \"Progress Report on the West Coast Japanese Problem,\" January 13, 1942, PSF, John Franklin Carter, box 122, FDRL; Stimson to FDR, February 5, 1942, PSF, Stimson, Henry L, box 84, FDRL.\n\n. John Franklin Carter, oral history interview, February 9, 1966, John Franklin Carter Papers, FDRL, http:\/\/www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu\/archives\/collections\/franklin\/index.php?p=collections\/findingaid&id=345 (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. \"'Memorandum for the Director,\" February 13, 1942, FBI 62-47509-30.\n\n. Carter, oral history interview, February 9, 1966.\n\n. Peter Conradi, _Hitler's Piano Player: The Rise and Fall of Ernst Hanfstaengl: Confidant of Hitler, Ally of FDR_ (Boston: Da Capo, 2009), p. 267; Jay Franklin [pseud.], _The Catoctin Conversation_ , with an introduction by Sumner Welles (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1947), p. xiii.\n\n. Carter, oral history interview.\n\n. \"Memorandum on the Hanfstaengl Case,\" January 31, 1943, PSF, John Franklin Carter, box 123, FDRL, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. Jay Franklin, \"Hess for 'German' Germany, Hitler for World Conquest: Rift Seen Nearing Climax,\" _Boston Globe_ , May 14, 1941, p. 7.\n\n. David George Marwell, \"Unwonted Exile: A Biography of Ernst 'Putzi' Hanfstaengl\" (PhD dissertation, SUNY Binghamton, 1988), p. 509.\n\n. Memorandum on Ernst Hanfstaengl, Henry Field, October 29, 1965, Files of Henry Field, box xx1, FDRL; Conradi, _Hitler's Piano Player_ , p. 259.\n\n. Carter, oral history interview.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Conradi, _Hitler's Piano Player_ , p. 302.\n\n. Ibid., pp. 297\u201398.\n\n. \"Report on 'Sedgwick's' Answer to Your Question,\" December 1, 1942, PSF, John Franklin Carter, box 123, FDRL, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. Memorandum on Hitler's Speech, November 8, 1943, \"Franklin D. Roosevelt, Papers as President: The President's Secretary's File,\" (PSF), box 99, FDRL.\n\n. File Note, June 28, 1944, PSF, John Franklin Carter, FDRL, (accessed April 25, 2018); \"Analysis of the Personality of Hitler,\" President's Secretary's File (Franklin D. Roosevelt administration), October 1943, FDRL.\n\n. Conradi, _Hitler's Piano Player_ , p. 283.\n\n. \"Report on Public-Relations Technique in the Hanfstaengl News-Release,\" February 1, 1943, PSF, John Franklin Carter, box 123, FDRL.\n\n. North American Newspaper Alliance, \"Hanfstaengl Is Now Aiding US,\" _New York Times_ , January 28, 1943, p. 1.\n\n. Memorandum on the Hanfstaengl Case, January 31, 1943, PSF, John Franklin Carter, box 123, FDRL.\n\n. John Franklin Carter, \"The Year of Crisis\u20141943,\" diary in the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.\n\n. File Memo, Grace Tully, June 28, 1944, PSF, John Franklin Carter, box 100, FDRL.\n\n. .\"Report on Turning Putzi Hanfstaengl Over to the British,\" July 7, 1944, PSF, John Franklin Carter, FDRL, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. Carter, oral history interview.\n\n. Memorandum for John Franklin Carter, July 30, 1942, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. Greg Robinson, _After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics_ (Berkley: University of California Press, 2012).\n\n. Report on Interview with Dr. Ales Hrdli\u010dka, July 30, 1942, PSF, John Franklin Carter, FDRL, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. Memorandum for Dr. Hrdli\u010dka, July 30, 1942, PSF, John Franklin Carter, FDRL, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. \"As Roosevelt Sees It,\" _Macon_ (GA) _Telegraph_ , April 21, 1925, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. Memorandum for Dr. Hrdli\u010dka, August 7, 1942, PSF, John Franklin Carter, FDRL; Memorandum for Dr. Hrdli\u010dka, July 30, 1942, PSF, John Franklin Carter, FDRL.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Memorandum for Miss Tully: Hrdli\u010dka correspondence, August 7, 1942, PSF, John Franklin Carter, FDRL, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. Jason Kalman, \"Dark Places Around the University: The Johns Hopkins University Admissions Quota and the Jewish Community, 1945\u20131951,\" _Hebrew Union College Annual_ 81 (2010): 233\u201379, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. FDR to Bowman, November 2, 1938, in FDRL, President's Personal File 5575, (accessed May 22, 2018).\n\n. Rafael Medoff, \"What FDR Said about Jews in Private,\" _Los Angeles Times_ , April 7, 2013, p. A26.\n\n. Franklin, _Catoctin Conversation_.\n\n. John Franklin Carter, oral history interview by Jerry N. Hess, October 7, 1966, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, Washington, DC, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. \"John F. Carter Dead; News, Political Figure,\" _Washington Post_ , November 29, 1967, p. C9; \"John Franklin Carter, 70, Dies,\" _New York Times_ , November 29, 1967.\n\nChapter Thirteen: TASS: The Agency of Soviet Spies\n\n. Biography of Roland Abbiate, School of Karl May [in Russian], (accessed May 25, 2018).\n\n. E. L. Spencer to Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Special Branch (memo), September 1, 1946, KV 2\/2389, p. 80, Soviet Intelligence Agents and Suspected Agents, Records of the Security Service, National Archives, Kew, Surrey, UK, (accessed April 25, 2018); M. J. Lynch to Mr. R. H. Hollis (memo), October 25, 1944, KV 2\/2389, p. 96.\n\n. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, _The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB_ (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 75.\n\n. \"Vassiliev White Notebook, No. 1, 1930\u20131947,\" 2009, Alexander Vassiliev Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, pp. 61\u201362, (accessed April 11, 2018).\n\n. Gary Kern, _A Death in Washington: Walter G. Krivitsky and the Stalin Terror_ , rev. ed. (New York: Enigma Books, 2004), p. 129.\n\n. Ibid., pp. 127\u201330, 440.\n\n. Case No. 14, September 3, 1938, KV 2\/2389.\n\n. Lynch to Hollis, KV 2\/2389; H. Shillito to H. A. R. Philby, August 10, 1945, KV 2\/2389, p. 96.\n\n. H. A. R. Philby to H. Shillito, August 25, 1945, KV 2\/2389; \"Re. Olga Pravdina,\" n.d. (memo), KV 2\/2389.\n\n. \"Briton and TASS Writer Lead Field as Prophets,\" _Baltimore Sun_ , November 5, 1936, p. 2; Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, Washington Merry-Go-Round, March 23, 1941, American University Digital Research Archive, (accessed May 22, 2018).\n\n. \"Vassiliev Black Notebook, 1932\u20131954,\" Alexander Vassiliev Papers, pp. 172\u201373, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. New York to Moscow, May 17, 1944 (cable), _New York KGB Station\u2013Moscow Center Cables, 1944: Cables Decrypted by the National Security Administration's Venona Project_ , arr. John Earl Haynes (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2010), p. 127, (accessed May 22, 2018).\n\n. \"Vassiliev Black Notebook,\" pp. 174\u201376.\n\n. John Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, _Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America_ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 176.\n\n. \"Vassiliev White Notebook, No. 1,\" p. 60.\n\n. Dayna L. Barnes, _Architects of Occupation: American Experts and Planning for Postwar Japan_ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), p. 180.\n\n. New York to Moscow, May 16, 1944 (cable), _New York KGB Station\u2013Moscow Center Cables, 1944_ , p. 117.\n\n. New York to Moscow, December 23, 1944 (cable), _New York KGB Station\u2013Moscow Center Cables, 1944_ , p. 748.\n\n. Ronald Steel, _Walter Lippmann and the American Century_ (London: Bodley Head, 1980), pp. 193\u201394.\n\n. New York to Moscow, October 23, 1944 (cable), _New York KGB Station\u2013Moscow Center Cables, 1944_ , p. 599.\n\n. \"Vassiliev Black Notebook,\" pp. 23\u201324, 101; \"Vassiliev White Notebook, No. 1,\" p. 56; \"Vassiliev White Notebook, No. 3, 1934\u20131951,\" Alexander Vassiliev Papers, pp. 73, 76, (accessed April 25, 2018); \"Vassiliev Yellow Notebook, No. 2, 1934\u20131971,\" Alexander Vassiliev Papers, p. 40\u201341, (accessed April 25, 2018); _New York KGB\u2013Moscow Center Cables, 1944_ , pp. 488, 599, 748.\n\n. \"Vassiliev White Notebook, No. 1,\" p. 77.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid., pp. 77, 78.\n\n. Ibid., p. 78.\n\n. Moscow to New York, March 28, 1945, _New York KGB Station\u2013Moscow Center Cables, 1945: Cables Decrypted by the National Security Administration's Venona Project_ , arr. John Earl Haynes (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2010), p. 123, (accessed April 25, 2018).\n\n. Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev, _Spies_ , p. 276.\n\n. Ibid., p. 509\u201313.\n\n. \"Vassiliev White Notebook, No. 1,\" pp. 71\u201373.\n\n. Ben Macintyre, _A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal_ (Oxford: Isis, 2015), p. 144.\n\n. Andrew and Mitrokhin, _Sword and the Shield_ , p. 126.\n\n. Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev, _Spies_ , p. 260.\n\n. San Francisco to Moscow, May 5, 1945, _San Francisco KGB Station\u2013Moscow Center Cables, 1943\u201346: Cables Decrypted by the National Security Administration's Venona Project_ , arr. John Earl Haynes (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2010), p. 228, (accessed May 22, 2018).\n\n. \"Vassiliev Black Notebook,\" p. 53.\n\n. Ibid., p. 86.\n\n. Ibid., pp. 163\u201364.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev, _Spies_ , p. 183.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Preface, _Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939\u20131957_ (Washington, DC: National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency, 1996), (accessed April 25, 2017).\n\n. \"Re. Olga Pravdina,\" KV 2\/2389, p. 69.\n\n. \"Vassiliev White Notebook, No. 2, 1927\u20131975,\" Alexander Vassiliev Papers, p. 32, (accessed April 25, 2018); Kathryn Olmsted, _Red Spy_ _Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), pp. 93\u201394.\n\n. \"Vassiliev White Notebook, No. 2,\" p. 30.\n\n. Ibid., p. 31.\n\n. \"Vassiliev White Notebook, No. 1,\" p. 79.\n\n. Andrew and Mitrokhin, _Sword and the Shield_ , p. 145.\n\n. FBI File No. 100-17076, \"TASS News Agency,\" July 31, 1951.\n\n. Ibid.; FBI File No. 100-17076-159, Hotel to Springston, September 21, 1950; FBI File No. 100-17076-226, September 6, 1951, USSR Information Bulletin Internal Security.\n\n. Sam Roberts, \"Judith Coplon, Haunted by Espionage Case, Dies at 89,\" _New York Times_ , March 2, 2011, p. A22.\n\n. \"Procedure Followed in Preparing Oatis for Trial\" (information report), August 10, 1951, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC, (accessed April 26, 2018).\n\n. A. H. Raskin, \"Report on Moscow's Reporters in America,\" _New York Times_ , November 4, 1951, p. 188; NYHT News Service, \"FBI Is Probing TASS Bureau,\" _Washington Post_ , October 24, 1951, p. A6.\n\n. Christy Wise, \"Oral History Interview with Frank Holeman,\" transcript (Washington, DC: National Press Club, October 21, 1991), (accessed April 26, 2018).\n\n. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, _\"One Hell of a Gamble\": Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958\u20131964_ (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 111.\n\n. Michael Beschloss, _The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960\u201363_ (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), p. 132.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid., p. 153.\n\nChapter Fourteen: Back Channels\n\n. Steve Smith, Amelia Hadfield, Tim Dunne, _Foreign Policy: Theories, Actors, Cases_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 272.\n\n. John R. Cauley, \"A Calm Career Man at Heart of Cuban Missile Crisis,\" _KansasCity_ (MO) _Times_ , April 24, 1963, p. 32, quoted in Robert Anthony Waters Jr., \"Only Ninety Miles Away: A Narrative History of the Cuban Missile Crisis\" (PhD dissertation, University of Mississippi, 1994).\n\n. Roger Hilsman, _To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy_ (New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 194.\n\n. Georgi Bolshakov, \"Goryachaya Linaya\" [Hot Line], _Novoye Vremya_ , no. 5 (1989).\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, _\"One Hell of a Gamble\": Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958\u20131964_ (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 112.\n\n. Bolshakov, \"Goryachaya Linaya.\"\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Michael Beschloss, _The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960\u201363_ (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), p. 133.\n\n. Bolshakov, \"Goryachaya Linaya.\"\n\n. Frederick Kempe, _Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth_ (New York: Berkley, 2011), p. 19.\n\n. Pierre Salinger, _With Kennedy_ (New York: Avon Books, 1967), p. 200.\n\n. Ibid., p. 198.\n\n. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, _The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB_ (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 182.\n\n. Bolshakov, \"Goryachaya Linaya.\"\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. President Kennedy news conference no. 43, State Department Auditorium, Washington, DC, September 13, 1962, (accessed April 26, 2018).\n\n. Robert Kennedy, _Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis_ , with introductions by Robert S. McNamara and Harold Macmillan (New York: Norton, 1969), pp. 22\u201323.\n\n. \"The High Point in a Notable Week,\" _Life_ , December 19, 1960, p. 29; Charles Bartlett, oral history interview by Fred Holborn, JFK Presidential Library, no. 2, February 20, 1965, (accessed April 26, 2018).\n\n. Warren Rogers, \"Eyewitness at the Missile Brink,\" _Washington Times_ , October 23, 2002, (accessed April 26, 2018).\n\n. Warren Rogers, \"Capital Secrecy Hints New Crisis,\" _Boston Globe_ , October 22, 1962, p. 1.\n\n. John F. Kennedy, \"Radio and Television Address to the American People on the Soviet Arms Build-Up in Cuba,\" October 22, 1962, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, (accessed April 26, 2018).\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Evan Thomas, _Robert Kennedy: His Life_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), p. 222; Fursenko and Naftali, _One Hell of a Gamble_ , pp. 249\u201350; \"Discussion between President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy on 23 October 1962,\" Tapes 36.1 and 36.2, John F. Kennedy Library, President's Office Files, Presidential Recordings Collection, Digital Edition (Philip Zelikow and Ernest May, eds., _The Great Crises_ , vol. 3 [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014], (accessed April 26, 2018).\n\n. Fursenko and Naftali, _One Hell of a Gamble_ , p. 251.\n\n. Bolshakov, \"Goryachaya Linaya.\"\n\n. \"Discussion between President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy on 23 October 1962.\"\n\n. Llewellyn King, in telephone interview with the author on September 24, 2017; Johnny Prokoff memorial plaque, Fourth Estate bar, National Press Building, text written by Llewellyn King.\n\n. King, in telephone interview with the author; Fursenko and Naftali, _One Hell of a Gamble_ , p. 258.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid., p. 260\u201361.\n\n. Ibid., p. 261.\n\n. Ibid., p. 262.\n\n. Andrew and Mitrokhin, _Sword and the Shield_ , pp. 182\u201383.\n\n. Fursenko and Naftali, _One Hell of a Gamble_ , p. 264.\n\n. \"John Scali, ABC News,\" ABC transcript, August 13, 1964.\n\n. John Scali's notes on his first meeting with Alexander Fomin during the missile crisis, confidential, memorandum of conversation, October 26, 1962, p. 1, DNSA collection: Cuban Missile Crisis.\n\n. \"Report on Meeting between John Scali and Aleksandr Fomin on October 26, 1962, 7:35 p.m.,\" Digital National Security Archive collection: Cuban Missile Crisis.\n\n. Report on meeting between John Scali and Aleksandr Fomin on October 26, 1962.\n\n. Michael Dobbs, _One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War_ (Waterville, ME: Thorndike Press, 2008), pp. 167\u201368.\n\n. Ibid., p. 168.\n\n. Ibid., p. 167\u201368.\n\n. Salinger, _With Kennedy_ , p. 278.\n\n. Occidental restaurant plaque, , accessed April 26, 2018.\n\n. Rogers, \"Eyewitness at the Missile Brink.\"\n\nChapter Fifteen: Continental Press\n\n. Seymour M. Hersh, \"Hunt Tells of Early Work for a CIA Domestic Unit,\" _New York Times_ , December 31, 1974, p. 1.\n\n. Will Lester, \"Former AP Correspondent Fred Zusy Dies,\" Associated Press, June 4, 2010, (accessed April 26, 2018).\n\n. Frank Holeman, interviewed by Christy Wise of the NPC Oral History Committee, October 21, 1991, at the National Press Club, ; Llewellyn King, in telephone interview with the author, September 24, 2017.\n\n. \"Veil Ripped from Ugly Face of Jap Monster,\" _Los Angeles Times_ , December 31, 1944, p. B4; Associated Press, \"Calls Enemy Torture Deliberate,\" _New York Times_ , January 30, 1944, p. 28.; \"Copley News Head Named,\" _Los Angeles Times_ , May 23, 1960, p. 11; Official Congressional Directory, 88th Cong., 1st session (1963).\n\n. Joe Trento and Dave Roman, \"The Spies Who Came in from the Newsroom,\" _Penthouse_ , July 1977, p. 45.\n\n. Herbert Foerstel, _From Watergate to Monicagate: Ten Controversies in Modern Journalism and Media_ (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001), p. 76; Stephen Kinzer, _The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War_ (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2014), p. 125; Memorandum for Henry Kissinger from Brent Scowcroft, \"Proposed New Membership of the PFIAB,\" June 26, 1975.\n\n. Howard Hunt CIA file 104-10194-10023, pp. 197\u2013200.\n\n. Hersh, \"Hunt Tells of Early Work.\"\n\n. \"Praeger Discusses CIA Book Ties,\" _Publisher's Weekly_ , March 6, 1967, p. 48; \"Praeger Published '15 or 16' Books at CIA Suggestion,\" _New York Times_ , February 24, 1967, p. 16.\n\n. Howard Hunt CIA file, pp. 196\u2013200.\n\n. US Intelligence Agencies and Activities, Hearings Before the Select Committee on Intelligence, US House of Representatives, Ninety-Fourth Congress, First Session, November 6, 1975, Statement of William Colby (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1976).\n\n. Howard Hunt CIA file, pp. 197\u2013200.\n\n. E. Howard Hunt, _American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond_ (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), p. 155;\n\n. William J. Middendorf II, _Potomac Fever: A Memoir of Politics and Public Service (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011)_ , pp. 100\u2013101.\n\n. Lee Edwards, \"Johnson's 'Watergate,'\" _National Review_ , June 7, 2005, (accessed April 26, 2018); \"Partial Text of Goldwater's Seattle Coliseum Walk: Look at the Record,\" _Washington Post_ , September 10, 1964, p. A22.\n\n. Lyndon B. Johnson, The President's Press Conference, transcript, Washington, DC, September 9, 1964.\n\n. Robert Semple Jr., \"Johnson Selects Foreign Advisors,\" _New York Times_ , September 10, 1964, p. A1.\n\n. Arthur Krock, \"It's a Bit Easier for the President,\" _Atlanta Constitution_ , September 12, 1964, p. 4.\n\n. Hunt, _American Spy_ , p. 155.\n\n. Howard Hunt CIA file.\n\n. Lawrence Meyer and John Hanrahan, \"Hunt Tells Senate Panel He Spied On Goldwater in '64 on LBJ Order,\" _Washington Post_ , December 20, 1973, p. A1.\n\n. \"Enoc P. Waters Gets Africa Assignment,\" _Chicago Daily Defender_ , June 10, 1965, p. 16; Doris E. Saunders, \"Confetti,\" _Chicago Daily Defender_ , January 3, 1968, p. 12.\n\n. Hunt, _American Spy_ , p. 155.\n\n. Seymour M. Hersh, \"Hunt Tells of Early Work For a C.I.A. Domestic Unit,\" _New York Times_ , December 31, 1974, p. 1.\n\n. John M. Crewdson, \"The CIA's 3-Decade Effort to Mold the World's Views,\" _New York Times_ , December 25, 1977, p. 1; Carl Bernstein, \"The CIA and the Media,\" _Rolling Stone_ , October 20, 1977, p. 3.\n\n. Bernstein, \"CIA and the Media,\" p. 3.\n\n. Ibid.; _The CIA and the Media, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Oversight of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House Of Representatives_ , 95th Cong., 1st and 2nd Sessions, December 27, 28, 29, 1977, January 4, 5, and April 20, 1978, p. 20.\n\n. Claire Sterling, _The Terror Network_ (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981)\n\n. George Lardner Jr. and Walter Pincus, \"Former Analyst's Testimony Could Be Crucial for Gates: Hill Hearing Tuesday to Review CIA Tenure,\" _Washington Post_ , September 30, 1991, p. A1; Melvin A. Goodman, \"Ending the CIA's Cold War Legacy,\" _Foreign Policy_ no. 106 (Spring 1997): 128\u201343; Garry Wills, \"CIA's Planted Falsehoods Complete the Circle: The Amazing Mindset of Bill Casey,\" _Chicago Sun-Times_ , October 10, 1987, p. 17; Robert Pittman, \"CIA's Planted Falsehoods Complete the Circle,\" _St. Petersburg_ [FL] _Times_ , October 25, 1987.\n\nChapter Sixteen: Project Mockingbird\n\n. \"US Aide Defends Lying to Nation,\" _New York Times_ , December 7, 1962, p. 5.\n\n. Arthur Krock, \"Mr. Kennedy's Management of the News,\" _Fortune_ , March 1963, p. 82.\n\n. Hanson Baldwin, \"Soviet Missiles Protected in 'Hardened' Positions,\" _New York Times_ , July 26, 1962, p. A1.\n\n. \"Meeting of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board,\" Washington, DC, August 1, 1962, John F. Kennedy Library.\n\n. Timothy Naftali, ed., \"The Presidential Recordings, John F. Kennedy,\" _The Great Crises_ , vol. 1 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 195.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Tim Weiner, \"JFK Turns to the CIA to Plug a Leak,\" _New York Times_ , July 1, 2007, p. 4.\n\n. \"CIA-Socialist Deals,\" _Izvestia_ , December 4, 1961.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Robert Allen and Paul Scott, \"More Spy-in-the-Sky Satellites,\" _Los Angeles Times_ , January 8, 1962, p. B5.\n\n. Robert Allen and Paul Scott, \"US Checks into Report of Soviet Poison Gas Shipments to Castro,\" _Los Angeles Times_ , February 14, 1962, p. A5.\n\n. Robert S. Allen and Paul Scott, \"Shakeup of the CIA Will Keep a Civilian at Its Helm,\" _Miami News_ , July 13, 1961, p. 8.\n\n. \"Project Mockingbird,\" CIA memo, Box 3, folder \"O-R (IV-FF), Project MOCKINGBIRD - Telephone Tap of Newspaper Columnists\" of the US President's Commission on Central Intelligence Agency Activities within the United States Files at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, p. 9.\n\n. Ibid. p. 4.\n\n. Ibid. pp. 10\u201311.\n\n. Ibid. p. 17.\n\n. \"Memorandum for the Record,\" December 29, 1961, Box 3, folder \"O-R (IV-FF), Project MOCKINGBIRD - Telephone Tap of Newspaper Columnists\" of the US President's Commission on Central Intelligence Agency Activities within the United States Files at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library; \"Project Mockingbird,\" CIA memo, p. 25; Robert S. Allen and Paul Scott, \"McCone Set to Curb Free Spending by CIA,\" _Los Angeles Times_ , December 4, 1961, p. B5.\n\n. \"Memorandum for the Record,\" December 29, 1961.\n\n. Robert S. Allen and Paul Scott, \"Officials Battle Over War Plan,\" _Los Angeles Times_ , October 1, 1961, p. B5.\n\n. \"Project Mockingbird,\" CIA memo, pp. 11\u201312.\n\n. Ibid., p. 9.\n\n. Ibid., p. 17.\n\n. \"Robert S. Allen, Political Columnist,\" _New York Times_ , February 25, 1981, p. B6.\n\n. John T. Conway, interview by Stanley A. Pimentel, June 9, 2009, Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, (accessed April 26, 2018); Edward L. Beach, Memorandum of Conference with the President, May 26, 1955, (accessed April 26, 2018).\n\n. Conway interview by Pimentel; L. V. Boardman to A. H. Belmont, July 20, 1955, FBI file 65-63450.\n\n. David Binder, \"How the Wiretapping Program Began,\" _New York Times_ , September 11, 1973, p. 10.\n\n. Nicholas M. Horrock, \"Hoover Defended on 1969 Wiretaps,\" _New York Times_ , January 25,1976, p. 23; Nicholas M. Horrock, \"Nixon Testifies Kissinger Picked Wiretap Targets,\" _New York Times_ , March 11, 1974, p. 1.\n\n. Richard Nixon, interview by Frank Gannon, transcript, June 13, 1983, Nixon\/Gannon Interviews, Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection, (accessed April 26, 2018).\n\n. President Richard M. Nixon, Alexander M. Haig, and Stephen B. Bull, conversation 442-8, June 4, 1973, Secret White House Tapes, Miller Center, University of Virginia, (accessed April 26, 2018).\n\n. John Crewdson, \"US Aides Dispute Nixon on Wiretapping of British Newsman,\" _New York Times_ , March 11, 1976, p. 28; Seymour Hersh, \"Nixon and Kissinger in the White House,\" _Atlantic Monthly_ , May 1982, p. 35.\n\nChapter Seventeen: Active Measures\n\n. _Shrdlu: An Affectionate Chronicle_ (Washington, DC: National Press Club, 1958).\n\n. David Wise, Thomas B. Ross, \"US Admits Spy Flight Over Russia,\" _Washington_ _Star_ , June 10, 1962, p. A3.\n\n. Leslie H. Whitten, \"American 'Nazi' Reveals Trysts, $500 Aid from Russian Attach\u00e9,\" _Washington Post_ , August 12, 1960, p. A1.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Warren Rogers Jr., \"Red Embassy Official Ousted by US as Spy: Russian First Secretary,\" _New York Herald Tribune_ , August 14, 1960, p. 1.\n\n. Robert S. Allen, \"House Probers Are Probed,\" _Abilene_ (TX) _Reporter-News_ , September 30, 1960, p. 51; Jack Anderson, \"The Near Arm of Soviet Espionage,\" _Washington Post_ , September 4, 1960, p. E5.\n\n. Associated Press, \"Retired Colonel Pleads Guilty in Soviet Agent Plot,\" _New York Times_ , December 7, 1966, p. 14.\n\n. Oleg Kalugin, _The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage against the West_ (New York: St. Martin's, 1994), p. 72; Oleg Kalugin, in personal interview with the author, March 7, 2014.\n\n. Kalugin, _First Directorate_ , p. 73.\n\n. Ibid., p. 74; Kalugin, in personal interview with the author.\n\n. Kalugin, in personal interview with the author.\n\n. Kalugin, _First Directorate_ , p. 78; Kalugin, in personal interview with the author.\n\n. Kalugin, in personal interview with the author.\n\n. Kalugin, _First Directorate_ , p. 91.\n\n. Kalugin, _First Directorate_ , p. 91; W. Peyton George, interview by Brian R. Hollstein, June 29, 2009, transcript, Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, (accessed May 24, 2018).\n\n. George, interview.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Kalugin, _First Directorate_ , pp. 84\u201385.\n\n. C. W. Young, \"Soviet Active Measures in the US: An Updated Report by the FBI,\" _Congressional Record_ , December 9, 1987, pp. E-4716\u201317.\n\n. Kalugin, _First Directorate_ , p. 93.\n\n. Tom Trede, \"Vigilantes Keep an Unauthorized Eye on Soviet Spies,\" _Daily Intelligencer_ (Montgomery, Pennsylvania), July 7, 1983, p. 3.\n\n. Lurma Rackley, \"Goat Is Chained to TASS Door,\" _Washington Star_ , May 18, 1971, p. 10; Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, _The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB_ (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 238, 240.\n\n. Andrew and Mitrokhin, _Sword and the Shield_ , p. 238.\n\n. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, _KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev_ (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 587.\n\n. Yuri Shvets, _Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 40\u201346; Yuri Shvets, C-SPAN Booknotes interview, June 18, 1995; \" _Soviet Active Measures in the 'Post-Cold War' Era 1988\u20131991_ ,\" report prepared at the request of the United States House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations (Washington, DC: United States Information Agency, June 1992), (accessed April 26, 2018).\n\n. Shvets, _Washington Station_ , pp. 134, 144, 159.\n\nChapter Eighteen: _CovertAction_\n\n. William J. Casey, \"Statement for the Record,\" before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, May 8, 1981.\n\n. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, _The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB_ (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 230.\n\n. Philip Agee, _Inside the Company: CIA Diary_ (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1975), pp. 558, 562.\n\n. Ibid. pp. 562\u201363.\n\n. Ibid., pp. 567\u201373.\n\n. Philip Agee, \"Philip Agee on CIA Role,\" letter to the editor, _Los Angeles Times_ , August 22, 1992, (accessed April 26, 2018).\n\n. Agee, _Inside the Company_ , p. 389.\n\n. Andrew and Mitrokhin, _Sword and the Shield_ , p. 3.\n\n. Ibid., pp. 3\u201315.\n\n. Ibid., p. 230.\n\n. Ibid., p. 206.\n\n. Oleg Kalugin, _The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage against the West_ (New York: St. Martin's, 1994), p. 192.\n\n. Andrew and Mitrokhin, _Sword and the Shield_ , p. 231.\n\n. \"Inside the Company: CIA Diary,\" Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 19 No. 2, Summer 1975, p. 35.\n\n. Philip Taubman, \"Gadfly Exposes CIA's Covert Activities and Agents,\" _New York Times_ , July 10, 1980, p. A12.\n\n. Andrew and Mitrokhin, _Sword and the Shield_ , p. 233.\n\n. Naming Names, _CovertAction Information Bulletin_ , no. 1 (July 1978): 23.\n\n. Philip Agee, \"Where Myths Lead to Murder,\" _CovertAction Information Bulletin_ , no. 1 (July 1978): 7.\n\n. Philip Taubman, \"CIA Foe Blows Agents' Cover,\" _Ottawa Journal_ [Ottawa, Canada], July 28, 1980, p. 26.\n\n. Jeff Stein, \"Spooking the Namers,\" _Village Voice_ , November 12\u201318, 1980, p. 22.\n\n. _CovertAction Information Bulletin_ , no. 2 (October 1978).\n\n. Andrew and Mitrokhin, _Sword and the Shield_ , p. 233.\n\n. Ibid., p. 234.\n\n. Ellen Ray, William Schaap, Karl Van Meter, and Louis Wolf, eds., _Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa_ (London: Zed Press, 1980), p. 3.\n\n. C. D. Edbrook, \"Principles of Deep Cover,\" _Studies in Intelligence_ 5 (Summer 1961): 1\u201329, (accessed April 26, 2018).\n\n. C. D. Edbrook, \"The Principles of Deep Cover,\" _CovertAction Information Bulletin_ , no. 10, August\u2013September 1980, pp. 45\u201354.\n\n. Edbrook, \"Principles of Deep Cover.\" _Studies in Intelligence_ 5 (Summer 1961).\n\n. \"'Destabilizing' Jamaica,\" editorial, _Washington Post_ , July 28, 1980, p. A18.\n\n. Louis Wolf, interview by Eyewitness News, WDVM TV, July 10, 1980, Washington, DC; Editorial, _CovertAction Information Bulletin_ , no. 10 (August\u2013September 1980), p. 2.\n\n. Frank Carlucci, CIA deputy director, to Rep. C. W. Bill Young, letter, July 8, 1980, (accessed April 26, 2018); \"Passing the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982,\" _Studies in Intelligence_ , approved for release December 29, 2008, (accessed April 26, 2018).\n\n. Editorial, _CovertAction_ , no. 10 (August\u2013September 1980): 2\u20133.\n\n. \"The Philip Agees, the Louis Wolfs,\" _Washington Post_ , July 20, 1981, p. A12.\n\n. Ellen Ray, William H. Schaap, and Louis Wolf, \"To Call Us Terrorists Is a Dangerous Flimflam,\" _Washington Post_ , August 29, 1981, p. A21.\n\n. \"Secrecy Is Not the Only Security,\" editorial, _New York Times_ , July 21, 1981.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"A Dumb Defense of Intelligence,\" editorial, _New York Times_ , September 28, 1981, p. A18.\n\n. Jennifer K. Elsea, \"Intelligence Identities Protection Act,\" Congressional Research Service, April 10, 2013.\n\n. Naming Names, _CovertAction Information Bulletin_ , no. 14\u201315 (October 1981): 7.\n\n. \"Agee's Passport Revoked,\" _Washington Post_ , December 24, 1979, p. A1.\n\n. Haig v. Agee, 453 US 280 (1981), (accessed April 26, 2018).\n\n. Bill Schaap, \"US Biological Warfare: The 1981 Cuba Dengue Epidemic,\" _CovertAction_ no. 17 (Summer 1982): 28\u201331.\n\n. Ken Lawrence, \"The History of US Bio-Chemical Killers,\" _CovertAction_ , no. 17 (Summer 1982): 5\u20137.\n\n. Robert Lederer, \"Origin and Spread of AIDS: Is the West Responsible,\" _CovertAction Information Bulletin_ , no. 29 (Winter 1988)\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Sean Gervasi, \"Western Intervention in the USSR,\" _CovertAction Information Bulletin_ , no. 39 (Winter 1991\u201392): 4\u20139.\n\nEpilogue\n\n. Kate Houghton, \"Subverting Journalism: Reporters and the CIA,\" Attacks on the Press in 1996, Committee to Protect Journalists, New York, 1996, (accessed May 25, 2018); CIA's Use of Journalists and Clergy in Intelligence Operations, Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate, One Hundred Fourth Congress, Second Session (US Government Printing Office, 1996); Martha Bayles, Jeffrey Gedmin, \"The CIA and Journalists,\" _Boston Globe_ , January 4, 2015, p. 16.\n\n#\n\nAbbiate, Roland. _See_ Pravdin, Vladimir Sergeyevich\n\nABC television, , ,\n\nAdzhubei, Aleksei,\n\nAgee, Philip, , ,\n\nand _CovertAction Intelligence Bulletin_ , \u2013, , , ,\n\nand Cuban intelligence, , ,\n\nand KGB, \u2013\n\npublication of _Inside the Company: CIA Diary_ , ,\n\nAIDS, KGB disinformation about, , ,\n\nAllen, Robert S., \u2013, ,\n\nand campaign against Hamilton Fish,\n\nCIA surveillance of, \u2013\n\nexposing Nazis,\n\nand franking scandal,\n\nand Schering AG,\n\nand Vladimir Romm,\n\nAlmy, Dean J.,\n\nAlsop, Joseph,\n\nAmerica First Committee, , ,\n\nAmerica First Incorporated, ,\n\nAmerican Civil Liberties Union,\n\nAmerican Federation of Scientific Astrologers,\n\nAmerican Irish Defense Association, \u2013\n\nAmerican Legion, ,\n\nAmerican Liberty League, , \u2013, , \u2013\n\nAmerican Nazi Party,\n\nAnaconda Copper (company),\n\nAndropov, Yuri Vladimirovich,\n\nAnti-Defamation League,\n\nArnold, Hap, , ,\n\n_Asahi Shimbun_ (newspaper),\n\nAssange, Julian,\n\nAssociation Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA), \u2013\n\nBaker, Howard, Jr.,\n\nBaldwin, Hanson,\n\nBarnes, Tracy,\n\nBartlett, Charles, , ,\n\nBeecher, William,\n\nBell, Ulric, , , ,\n\nBentley, Elizabeth, , , ,\n\nBerle, Adolph,\n\nBethlehem Steel (company),\n\nBingham, Barry, Sr.,\n\nBlack, Hugo,\n\n_Blue Ridge Herald_ (newspaper),\n\nBolshakov, Georgi Nikitovich, , , \u2013, , , , , , ,\n\nBorah, William, ,\n\nBouvier, Jacqueline,\n\nBowman, Isaiah,\n\nBrandon, Henry, ,\n\nBren gun,\n\nBrezhnev, Leonid,\n\nBrines, Russell,\n\nBritish Passport Control Office,\n\nBritish Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). _See_ British Security Coordination (BSC)\n\nBritish Security Coordination (BSC), , , ,\n\ncampaign against Hamilton Fish, \u2013\n\ncampaign against Vichy in US, \u2013\n\nand Century Group, ,\n\nand destroyers deal, , ,\n\nand fake news, , , ,\n\nfake polling by, ,\n\nand franking scandal, \u2013\n\nmobilization of American Irish to support Britain, \u2013\n\nand Overseas News Agency (ONA), , ,\n\nrumors spread by, \u2013\n\nsupport for Wendell Willkie, ,\n\nBrousse, Charles, ,\n\nBrown, Constantine,\n\nBruce, David,\n\nBulkley, Robert,\n\nBundy, McGeorge,\n\nBureau of Current Political Intelligence, (CPI), , ,\n\nBureau of Indian Affairs,\n\nBureau of Investigation, . _See also_ Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)\n\nBush, Vannevar, ,\n\nBush Hall, ,\n\nBusiness Plot. _See_ American Liberty League\n\nButler, Smedley Darlington, \u2013,\n\nCampbell, Gerald,\n\nCarpenter, Robert Ruliph Morgan,\n\nCarter, John Franklin, \u2013, , \u2013, ,\n\nand Charles Lindbergh,\n\ncreation of intelligence service, , , \u2013\n\nprediction of Nazi invasion of USSR,\n\nrecruitment of Ernst Sedgwick Hanfstaengl, ,\n\nrelationship with J. Edgar Hoover, , , ,\n\nreports on Holocaust,\n\nreports on Japanese Americans, , , ,\n\nCasey, William, ,\n\nCastro, Fidel,\n\nCBS News, cooperation with CIA,\n\nCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA)\n\nactivities in Latin America,\n\nblowback,\n\nand _CovertAction Information Bulletin_ ,\n\nDomestic Operations Division,\n\nJamaica station chief exposed,\n\nProject Mockingbird, \u2013\n\nrecruitment of journalists, ,\n\nspying on Barry Goldwater, , \u2013\n\n_See_ _also_ Agee, Philip; Continental Press Service\n\nCentury Group, , ,\n\nCermak, Anton,\n\nChase Manhattan Bank,\n\nCheporov, Edgar Anatolyevich,\n\n_Chicago Daily News_ (newspaper), , , . _See also_ Knox, Frank; Mowrer, Edgar Ansel\n\n_Chicago Daily Tribune_ (newspaper), , , , . _See also_ Manly, Chesly\n\n_Chicago Sun_ (newspaper),\n\n_Christian Science Monitor_ (newspaper), ,\n\nChurchill, Winston, , , , , ,\n\nCIA. _See_ Central Intelligence Agency\n\nClifford, Clark,\n\nColby, William, , , ,\n\nCollins, Jim,\n\nCommunist Party of the United States,\n\nCongress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), ,\n\nContinental Press Service, \u2013,\n\nCooper, Chester L., ,\n\nCopley, James S.,\n\nCopley News Service, ,\n\nCoplon, Judith, , , , , ,\n\n_Cosmopolitan_ (magazine),\n\nCoughlin, Charles,\n\n_CounterSpy_ (magazine),\n\n_CovertAction Information Bulletin_ (newsletter), , \u2013, \u2013\n\n_Croix de Feu_ (Cross of Fire),\n\nCromley, Alan,\n\nCuban intelligence. See _Direcci\u00f3n General de Inteligencia_ (DGI)\n\nCuban missile crisis, \u2013\n\nCuneo, Ernest, , , , ,\n\nCurrie, Lauchlin,\n\nDavies, Joseph,\n\nDavis, Tom,\n\nDeatherge, George,\n\n\"Declaration of the 83,\" , , ,\n\nDefense Intelligence Agency,\n\nDemocratic National Committee (DNC), ,\n\nDepartment of Justice\n\nJudith Coplon's spying on,\n\nprosecuting of Schering AG,\n\nand Watergate prosecution,\n\n_See also_ Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)\n\nDickstein, Samuel,\n\n_Direcci\u00f3n General de Inteligencia_ (DGI), , , , , ,\n\n_Dirty Work_ ,\n\n_Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa_ ,\n\nDjilas, Milovan,\n\nDobrynin, Anatoly Fyodorovich,\n\nDodd, Margaret,\n\nDodd, William, Jr., ,\n\nDomei (news agency), , , , . _See also_ Kato, Masuo\n\nDonovan, William, , , , ,\n\nappointment as coordinator of information,\n\nand British fake news,\n\nand British Security Coordination, ,\n\nfifth column stories by, \u2013\n\nmission to Britain,\n\nDulles, Allen, ,\n\ndu Pont, Ir\u00e9n\u00e9e, ,\n\ndu Pont, Pierre, , , ,\n\nDuranty, Walter, ,\n\nDutcher, Rodney,\n\nEarly, Stephen, , ,\n\nEbbitt House Hotel,\n\nE. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, ,\n\nEisenhower, Dwight, , , ,\n\nEvans, Hiram,\n\n_Facts in Review_ (magazine),\n\nfake news, , , ,\n\nFederal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)\n\nand British intelligence, ,\n\nand Georgi Bolshakov,\n\nhandling of Elizabeth Bentley,\n\nand John Scali,\n\nleak investigations by, , , ,\n\nand Overseas News Agency,\n\nsurveillance of Oleg Kalugin,\n\nsurveillance of Soviet reporters by, , , , ,\n\nand Viktor Kopytin,\n\nand Vladimir Pravdin, ,\n\nand Walker spy ring,\n\nWorld War II counterintelligence responsibilities of,\n\nFederal Communications Commission, , ,\n\nFederated Press,\n\nFedorov, Mikhail,\n\nFeinstein, Isidor. _See_ Stone, I. F.\n\nFeklisov, Alexander, \u2013\n\nField, Henry, , , ,\n\nField, Marshall,\n\nFight for Freedom, , ,\n\nFigueres, Jose,\n\nFish, Hamilton Stuyvesant, III, \u2013,\n\nand franking scandal, ,\n\nand _German White Paper_ ,\n\nFodor, Eugene,\n\nFodor's Modern Guides, Inc.,\n\nFomin, Alexander. _See_ Feklisov, Alexander\n\nForeign Agents Registration Act, , ,\n\nFoss, Roger,\n\nFrank, Harry Hart. _See_ Frank, Pat\n\nFrank, Pat, , ,\n\nFranklin, Jay. _See_ Carter, John Franklin\n\nFreeman, Joseph,\n\nFrench, Paul Comly, ,\n\nFukumoto, Fukuichi,\n\nFulbright, J. William,\n\nGarner, John Nance,\n\nGaulle, Charles de,\n\nGeneral Motors, , , , ,\n\nGeorge, W. Peyton, \u2013\n\nGerman American Bund,\n\nGerman Library of Information, ,\n\nGerman Railroads Information Office, ,\n\n_German White Paper, The_ ,\n\nGillan, Jim,\n\n_Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie_ (GRU), , , , , \u2013, , , , ,\n\nGoebbels, Joseph, , ,\n\nGoldwater, Barry, , , , , , , , ,\n\n_Goldfish Bowl_ (newsletter), ,\n\nGolos, Jacob, , ,\n\nG\u00f6ring, Hermann, , ,\n\nGorsky, Anatoly,\n\nGrew, Joseph,\n\nGridley, Charles O., ,\n\nGriffith, Sanford, , , ,\n\ncampaign against Hamilton Fish,\n\nrole in franking scandal,\n\nrole in mobilizing Irish Americans to support Britain,\n\nGRU. See _Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie_ (GRU)\n\nGuthman, Edwin, , ,\n\nGvozdev, Yuri, \u2013\n\nHaig, Alexander,\n\nHanfstaengl, Egon,\n\nHanfstaengl, Ernst Sedgwick, , , , \u2013,\n\nand Adolph Hitler,\n\nescape from Nazi Germany, \u2013\n\nHarvard Club,\n\nHavas News Agency,\n\nHaxton, Gerald, ,\n\nHay, James, Jr.,\n\nHearst, William Randolph,\n\nHearst Corporation,\n\nHenry-Haye, Gaston,\n\nHenson, Francis, ,\n\ncampaign against Hamilton Fish, , ,\n\nfake polling by, ,\n\nrole in franking scandal, , ,\n\nrole in mobilizing Irish Americans to support Britain, ,\n\nHess, Rudolph,\n\nHill, George, \u2013\n\nHill & Knowlton (company),\n\nHilsman, Roger, , ,\n\nHitler, Adolph, , ,\n\nBritish rumors about, ,\n\nand Ernst Sedgwick Hanfstaengl,\n\nand Rainbow Five report, , , ,\n\nsex life of,\n\nHoke, Henry, , ,\n\nHoleman, Frank, , , ,\n\n\"boy spy,\"\n\nand Cuban missile crisis, \u2013,\n\ndefends Press Club membership for Soviets, ,\n\nHoover, Herbert, , ,\n\nHoover, J. Edgar, ,\n\nand British intelligence,\n\nand Elizabeth Bentley,\n\nand John Franklin Carter, \u2013,\n\nand Judith Coplon,\n\nand leak investigations, , , \u2013\n\nrestrictions on contacting reporters,\n\nHopkins, Harry,\n\nHotsumi, Ozaki,\n\nHottelet, Richard,\n\nHouse Special Committee on Un-American Activities, ,\n\nHrdli\u010dka, Ale\u0161, , , ,\n\nHudoba, Michael,\n\nHull, Cordell, , , , , ,\n\nHunt, E. Howard, , , , \u2013,\n\nIceland, ,\n\nIckes, Harold,\n\n_Industrial Control Reports_ (newspaper), , , ,\n\nInformation, Incorporated,\n\nInstitute of Pacific Relations (IPR),\n\nIntelligence Identities Protection Act, , ,\n\nInternational News Service,\n\nInternet Research Agency,\n\nIrwin, William,\n\nIvanov, Valentin, , ,\n\n_Izvestia_ (Moscow newspaper), , , ,\n\nJackson, Henry \"Scoop,\"\n\nJapan, ,\n\nJapanese Americans, loyalty of, \u2013\n\nJapanese intelligence,\n\nJemison, Alice Lee,\n\nJewish Telegraph Agency, , . _See also_ Overseas News Agency\n\nJodl, Alfred,\n\nJohnson, Lyndon B., \u2013\n\nJP Morgan Bank,\n\nJung, Carl,\n\nKalb, Marvin,\n\nKalugin, , \u2013, \u2013, , , , , , , , 362\n\nKato, Masuo, \u2013, \u2013, , ,\n\nKeitel, Wilhelm,\n\n_Kempeitai_ ,\n\nKennedy, John\n\nand Cuban missile crisis, , , , ,\n\nand Project Mockingbird,\n\nKennedy, Joseph,\n\nKennedy, Robert\n\nand Cuban missile crisis, \u2013, , ,\n\nand Project Mockingbird, \u2013,\n\nKGB, , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nand active measures, \u2013, \u2013, \u2013,\n\nand _CovertAction Information Bulletin_ , , , ,\n\nand Cuban missile crisis, \u2013\n\nKharkov, Ukraine,\n\nKhrushchev, Nikita, , , , , , , ,\n\n\"kike killer,\" ,\n\nKillian, James,\n\nKimmel, Husband E.,\n\nKinsman, Richard, ,\n\nKirov, Sergey, ,\n\nKissinger, Henry,\n\nKnights of the White Camellia,\n\nKnox, Frank, , ,\n\nKopytin, Viktor, \u2013\n\nKrafsur, Samuel, , ,\n\nKraft, Joseph,\n\nKrivitsky, Walter,\n\nKrock, Arthur, , ,\n\nKu Klux Klan, , , ,\n\nKuhn, Fritz,\n\nLambertson, William,\n\nLandau. Jacob,\n\nLattimore, Owen,\n\nLeague of Nations, ,\n\nLevi-Strauss, Claude,\n\nLewis, John L., ,\n\nLindbergh, Charles, , ,\n\nLippmann, Walter, , , ,\n\nLitvinov, Maxim,\n\nLothian, Lord,\n\n_Louisville Courier Journal_ (newspaper), ,\n\nLubyanka, ,\n\nLuce, Claire Boothe,\n\nLunev, Stanislav,\n\nMacGuire, Gerald,\n\nMaclean, Donald,\n\nMagic decrypts, , , ,\n\n_Mainichi_ (Osaka newspaper),\n\nManley, Michael,\n\nManly, Chesly, , , , , , ,\n\nMarder, Murray,\n\nMarket Analysts, Inc., ,\n\nMartin, Edwin,\n\nMartin, William,\n\nMartinique, , ,\n\nMaugham, Somerset, ,\n\nMcCone, John A., ,\n\nMcCormack, John, , ,\n\nMcCormick, Robert, ,\n\nMcNulty, George A.,\n\nMcWilliams Anti-Semitic League,\n\nMenzies, Stewart, , ,\n\nMeyer, Cord, Jr.,\n\nMitchell, Bernon,\n\nMitrokhin, Vasili, , , ,\n\nMockingbird, Project, \u2013\n\nMoley, Raymond, ,\n\nMorley, Felix,\n\nMorrell, Sydney,\n\nMowrer, Edgar Ansel, , \u2013, ,\n\nM Project, , \u2013\n\nMundelein, George,\n\nMunson, Curtis, , , ,\n\nassessment of Japanese American loyalty, , , , ,\n\nmission to Martinique, , ,\n\nMurphy, Grayson Mallet Prevost,\n\nMurphy, William C., Jr.,\n\nMusa, Jean Louis, ,\n\nNational Press Club, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nas bastion of decency,\n\ndemands for release of William Oatis,\n\nFranklin D. Roosevelt at,\n\nhostility to Japanese before Pearl Harbor attack, , , ,\n\nManfred Zapp at, ,\n\nOleg Kalugin at, \u2013\n\norigins of, \u2013\n\nracism of, ,\n\nrole in Cuban missile crisis, , \u2013,\n\nTASS reporters at, , ,\n\nand Vladimir Romm, , , , , , , ,\n\nwomen denied membership, ,\n\nNational Resources Defense Council,\n\nNational Security Agency, ,\n\nNeimann, Alexei,\n\n_New Masses_ (magazine), , ,\n\n_New Statesman_ (magazine),\n\n_New York Herald Tribune_ (newspaper), ,\n\n_New York Post_ (newspaper), , , ,\n\n_New York Times_ (newspaper), , , , ,\n\nNew York Trust (company),\n\n_Nichi Nichi_ (Tokyo newspaper),\n\nNichol, Graham,\n\nNixon, Richard, , ,\n\nand Frank Holeman, , ,\n\nwiretapping of journalists by,\n\nNKVD, , , , , , , , , , \u2013, \u2013\n\nand I. F. Stone, \u2013, \u2013\n\nfunding of primary election campaign,\n\nsecurity lapses of, \u2013\n\nNomura, Kichisaburo, , \u2013, , ,\n\nNon-Partisan Committee to Defeat Hamilton Fish, ,\n\n_Norristown_ (Pennsylvania) _Times-Herald_ (newspaper),\n\nNovosti news agency,\n\nNye, Gerald,\n\nOatis, William, , ,\n\n_Obyedinyonnoye gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravleniye_ (OGPU), , , , , , , , , ,\n\nOffice of Naval Intelligence (ONI), , , , , , , , ,\n\nOffice of Strategic Services (OSS),\n\nOGPU. See _Obyedinyonnoye gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravleniye_\n\nOkov, Yuri,\n\nOrwell, George,\n\nOumansky, Konstantine Aleksandr,\n\nOverseas News Agency (ONA), , , ,\n\nPack, Betty,\n\nPalmer, Frank,\n\nPatton, George,\n\nPearl Harbor attack, , , , , ,\n\nPearson, Drew, , , , , , ,\n\nand campaign against Hamilton Fish,\n\nand franking scandal,\n\nPetty, Milburn,\n\n_Petty's Oil Letter_ (newsletter),\n\n_Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger_ (newspaper),\n\n_Philadelphia Record_ (newspaper), ,\n\nPhilby, Kim, , ,\n\nPhryne, painting of,\n\nPolitical Warfare Executive (PWE),\n\nPraeger, Frederick,\n\n_Pravda_ (newspaper),\n\nPravdin, Vladimir Sergeyevich, \u2013, \u2013,\n\nFBI surveillance of,\n\nimprisonment of,\n\nmurder of Ignace Reiss,\n\nrecruitment of Judith Coplon, \u2013\n\nrelationship with Walter Lippmann, ,\n\nPravdina, Olga, ,\n\nPresident's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB),\n\nPrice, Mary,\n\nPrince, Frank,\n\nProhibition, \u2013\n\nProkoff, Johnny, , ,\n\npropaganda, , , , , , , . _See_ _also_ KGB: and active measures\n\nPutin, Vladimir,\n\nPyle, Ernie,\n\nQualters, Thomas,\n\nRadek, Karl, , , , , ,\n\nRadio Moscow,\n\nRaeder, Erich,\n\nRainbow Five report, \u2013,\n\nRaskob, John J., \u2013\n\nRay, Ellen, , , ,\n\nReagan, Ronald,\n\nReiss, Ignace,\n\nRemington Arms Co.,\n\nRepublican National Committee,\n\nRingle, Kenneth,\n\nRoberts, Chalmers,\n\nRockefeller, Nelson,\n\nRockwell, George Lincoln,\n\nRogers, Warren, , , , , ,\n\nRomm, Galena, , , ,\n\nRomm, Vladimir, \u2013,\n\nimprisonment and execution, \u2013, \u2013\n\nat League of Nations, \u2013\n\nin Washington, DC, \u2013\n\nRoom, the (club),\n\nRoosevelt, Eleanor, ,\n\nRoosevelt, Franklin D., , , , , , , ,\n\nand American Liberty Lobby, ,\n\nanti-Nazi speech,\n\nassassination attempt, ,\n\nand British intelligence,\n\nand British spying on Vichy,\n\nand Century Group,\n\nand Charles Lindbergh, ,\n\nand destroyers deal, , , , ,\n\nand Ernst Sedgwick Hanfstaengl, , , ,\n\nand James True,\n\nand Japan, , ,\n\nand Japanese Americans,\n\nand John Franklin Carter, , , , , ,\n\nand John L. Lewis, ,\n\nracial ideas of, ,\n\nand Rainbow Five report leak,\n\nreceives reports on Holocaust,\n\nRoosevelt, Nick,\n\nRoosevelt, Theodore,\n\nRosenberg, Julius,\n\nRostow, Walt,\n\nRusk, Dean,\n\nSackett, B. Edwin,\n\nSagatelyan, Mikhail,\n\nSalinger, Pierre, ,\n\nSaurma-Douglas, Alfred von,\n\nScali, John, \u2013,\n\nSchaap, Bill, , , ,\n\nSchall, Thomas David,\n\nSchering AG (company),\n\nSchildbach, Gertrude, ,\n\nSchmitz, Ernst,\n\nScott, Paul, , \u2013\n\nSea Otter (ship),\n\nSell, Kurt,\n\nSherwood, Robert,\n\nShouse, Jouett, , , ,\n\nShvets, Yuri,\n\n_sibilare_ (sibs), , ,\n\nSirica, John J.,\n\nSloan, Alfred, ,\n\nSloane, Anna B.,\n\nSmith, Al,\n\nSmith, Hedrick,\n\nSnowden, Edward, , ,\n\nSolomatin, Boris, ,\n\nSorge, Richard,\n\nSouthern Committee to Uphold the Constitution,\n\nSpivak, John, , ,\n\nS Project. _See_ Hanfstaengl, Ernst Sedgwick\n\nStalin, Joseph, , , , , , , , , ,\n\nStark, Harold,\n\nStasi,\n\nState Department, , , , , , , ,\n\nStephenson, William, , , , , , , , ,\n\nSterling, Claire,\n\nSteuben Society, ,\n\nStewart, Charles,\n\nStone, I. F., \u2013, ,\n\nStrassburger, Ralph Beaver,\n\nSturm, Alexander,\n\nSulzberger, Arthur Hays,\n\nSylvester, Arthur,\n\nTalbert, Ansel E.,\n\nTalmadge, Gene,\n\nTASS. _See_ Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union\n\nTaylor, Edmond,\n\nTaylor, Maxwell,\n\nTelegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS), , , , \u2013, , ,\n\nactive measures, , , , , , , ,\n\nand Cuban missile crisis,\n\nFBI surveillance of,\n\nVladimir Romm's cover, \u2013\n\nTerasaki, Hidenari, , ,\n\nThompson, Dorothy,\n\nThompson, Llewelyn,\n\nThomsen, Hans, ,\n\n_Time_ (magazine),\n\nTinkham, George Holden,\n\nTodd, Laurence, , , ,\n\nTojo, Hideki,\n\nTonn, Guenther,\n\nTransocean News Service, \u2013\n\nTreanor, Tom,\n\nTrotsky, Leon, , , , , , ,\n\nTroyanovsky, Alexander Antonovitch, ,\n\n_Trud_ (newspaper),\n\nTrue, James, \u2013\n\nTruman, Harry,\n\nTrump, Donald,\n\nTully, Grace, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nTunney, Gene,\n\nUnderground Propaganda Committee (UPC), ,\n\nUnited Auto Workers,\n\nUnited Mine Workers of America (UMW),\n\nUnited Service Organizations (USO),\n\nUS Army Signal Intelligence Service,\n\nUS Information Agency,\n\nUS Steel,\n\nVenona project, ,\n\nVichy government, , ,\n\nViereck, George, ,\n\nVilnius, Lithuania, , ,\n\nVyshinsky, Andrei, , , ,\n\nWaldrop, Frank, , , ,\n\nWalker, John Anthony,\n\nWallace, Henry, , , ,\n\n_Washington Merry-Go-Round_ (Allen and Pearson), ,\n\nWashington Merry-Go-Round (column), \u2013, , , , , , ,\n\n_Washington Post_ (newspaper), , , , ,\n\n_Washington Times Herald_ (newspaper), ,\n\nWatergate break-in, , , ,\n\nWaters, Enoc,\n\nWatson, Edwin \"Pa,\"\n\nWeisband, William,\n\nWelch, Richard,\n\nWelles, Sumner, , , ,\n\nWhalen, William Henry,\n\nWheeler, Burton, , , , , ,\n\nWhitaker, John T.,\n\nWhite, Harry Dexter,\n\nWhite, William Allen, ,\n\nWhite House Correspondents Association, ,\n\nWiegand, Karl von,\n\nWikiLeaks, , ,\n\nWilcott, James,\n\nWilkinson, Theodore,\n\nWillkie, Wendell, , , , ,\n\nWinchell, Walter,\n\nWohl, Louis de,\n\nWolf, Louis, , , , , ,\n\nWoods, Rose Mary,\n\nWovschin, Flora, , ,\n\nWright, Claudia,\n\nWRUL (radio station), \u2013\n\nYamamoto, Isoroku, ,\n\nYeltsin, Boris,\n\n_Yomiuri Shimbun_ (newspaper),\n\nZacharias, Ellis,\n\nZangara, Giuseppe,\n\nZapp, Manfred, \u2013, ,\n\nZhukov, Georgi,\n\nZusy, Fred, , , , , \n 1. Cover \n 2. Title Page\n 3. Copyright Page\n 4. Dedication Page\n 5. CONTENTS \n 6. Note from the Author\n 7. Introduction: Spying between the Lines in the National Press Building\n 8. Chapter One: Washington Merry-Go-Round\n 9. Chapter Two: A Popular Spy\n 10. Chapter Three: \"Kike Killer\"\n 11. Chapter Four: American Liberty League\n 12. Chapter Five: We, the People\n 13. Chapter Six: British Security Coordination\n 14. Chapter Seven: Frying Fish and Fixing Franks\n 15. Chapter Eight: Zapping Zapp\n 16. Chapter Nine: Fake News\n 17. Chapter Ten: Battling the French and Irish\n 18. Chapter Eleven: Eight Days in December\n 19. Chapter Twelve: Carter Goes to War\n 20. Chapter Thirteen: TASS: The Agency of Soviet Spies\n 21. Chapter Fourteen: Back Channels\n 22. Chapter Fifteen: Continental Press\n 23. Chapter Sixteen: Project Mockingbird\n 24. Chapter Seventeen: Active Measures\n 25. Chapter Eighteen: CovertAction\n 26. Epilogue\n 27. Notes\n 28. Index\n\n 1. \n 2. \n 3. \n 4. \n 5. \n 6. \n 7. \n 8. \n 9. \n 10. \n 11. \n 12. \n 13. \n 14. \n 15. \n 16. \n 17. \n 18. \n 19. \n 20. \n 21. \n 22. \n 23. \n 24. \n 25. \n 26. \n 27. \n 28. \n 29. \n 30. \n 31. \n 32. \n 33. \n 34. \n 35. \n 36. \n 37. \n 38. \n 39. \n 40. \n 41. \n 42. \n 43. \n 44. \n 45. \n 46. \n 47. \n 48. \n 49. \n 50. \n 51. \n 52. \n 53. \n 54. \n 55. \n 56. \n 57. \n 58. \n 59. \n 60. \n 61. \n 62. \n 63. \n 64. \n 65. \n 66. \n 67. \n 68. \n 69. \n 70. \n 71. \n 72. \n 73. \n 74. \n 75. \n 76. \n 77. \n 78. \n 79. \n 80. \n 81. \n 82. \n 83. \n 84. \n 85. \n 86. \n 87. \n 88. \n 89. \n 90. \n 91. \n 92. \n 93. \n 94. \n 95. \n 96. \n 97. \n 98. \n 99. \n 100. \n 101. \n 102. \n 103. \n 104. \n 105. \n 106. \n 107. \n 108. \n 109. \n 110. \n 111. \n 112. \n 113. \n 114. \n 115. \n 116. \n 117. \n 118. \n 119. \n 120. \n 121. \n 122. \n 123. \n 124. \n 125. \n 126. \n 127. \n 128. \n 129. \n 130. \n 131. \n 132. \n 133. \n 134. \n 135. \n 136. \n 137. \n 138. \n 139. \n 140. \n 141. \n 142. \n 143. \n 144. \n 145. \n 146. \n 147. \n 148. \n 149. \n 150. \n 151. \n 152. \n 153. \n 154. \n 155. \n 156. \n 157. \n 158. \n 159. \n 160. \n 161. \n 162. \n 163. \n 164. \n 165. \n 166. \n 167. \n 168. \n 169. \n 170. \n 171. \n 172. \n 173. \n 174. \n 175. \n 176. \n 177. \n 178. \n 179. \n 180. \n 181. \n 182. \n 183. \n 184. \n 185. \n 186. \n 187. \n 188. \n 189. \n 190. \n 191. \n 192. \n 193. \n 194. \n 195. \n 196. \n 197. \n 198. \n 199. \n 200. \n 201. \n 202. \n 203. \n 204. \n 205. \n 206. \n 207. \n 208. \n 209. \n 210. \n 211. \n 212. \n 213. \n 214. \n 215. \n 216. \n 217. \n 218. \n 219. \n 220. \n 221. \n 222. \n 223. \n 224. \n 225. \n 226. \n 227. \n 228. \n 229. \n 230. \n 231. \n 232. \n 233. \n 234. \n 235. \n 236. \n 237. \n 238. \n 239. \n 240. \n 241. \n 242. \n 243. \n 244. \n 245. \n 246. \n 247. \n 248. \n 249. \n 250. \n 251. \n 252. \n 253. \n 254. \n 255. \n 256. \n 257. \n 258. \n 259. \n 260. \n 261. \n 262. \n 263. \n 264. \n 265. \n 266. \n 267. \n 268. \n 269. \n 270. \n 271. \n 272. \n 273. \n 274. \n 275. \n 276. \n 277. \n 278. \n 279. \n 280. \n 281. \n 282. \n 283. \n 284. \n 285. \n 286. \n 287. \n 288. \n 289. \n 290. \n 291. \n 292. \n 293. \n 294. \n 295. \n 296. \n 297. \n 298. \n 299. \n 300. \n 301. \n 302. \n 303. \n 304. \n 305. \n 306. \n 307. \n 308. \n 309. \n 310. \n 311. \n 312. \n 313. \n 314. \n 315. \n 316. \n 317. \n 318. \n 319. \n 320. \n 321. \n 322. \n 323. \n 324. \n 325. \n 326. \n 327. \n 328. \n 329. \n 330. \n 331. \n 332. \n 333. \n 334. \n 335. \n 336. \n 337. \n 338. \n 339. \n 340. \n 341. \n 342. \n 343. \n 344. \n 345. \n 346. \n 347. \n 348. \n 349. \n 350. \n 351. \n 352. \n 353. \n 354. \n 355. \n 356. \n 357. \n 358. \n 359. \n 360.\n\n 1. Cover\n 2. Begin Reading\n 3. Copyright Page\n 4. Dedication Page\n 5. Contents\n 6. Introduction: Spying between the Lines in the National Press Building\n 7. Epilogue\n 8. Notes\n 9. Index\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}} +{"text":"\n\n\n\nProduced by Roberta Staehlin, Pat McCoy and the Online\nDistributed Proofreading Team at http:\/\/www.pgdp.net (This\nfile was produced from images generously made available\nby The Internet Archive\/American Libraries.)\n\n\n\n\n\nTRANSCRIBER NOTES:\n\n Words enclosed in ='s are indicated as BOLD-FACED TYPE.\n\n Words enclosed in _'s are indicated as ITALIC TYPE.\n\n [Symbol: Right] indicates a small illustrated hand pointing\n towards the right.\n\n [Symbol: Left] indicates a small illustrated hand pointing towards\n the left.\n\n Additional notes may be found at the end of the text.\n\n\n\n\n WIVES AND WIDOWS;\n\n OR,\n\n THE BROKEN LIFE.\n\n BY\n\n MRS. ANN S. STEPHENS.\n\nAUTHOR OF \"RUBY GRAY'S STRATEGY,\" \"FASHION AND FAMINE,\" \"THE CURSE OF\nGOLD,\" \"THE REJECTED WIFE,\" \"THE OLD HOMESTEAD,\" \"THE WIFE'S SECRET,\"\n\"MABEL'S MISTAKE,\" \"THE GOLD BRICK,\" \"SILENT STRUGGLES,\" \"MARY DERWENT,\"\n\"DOUBLY FALSE,\" \"THE HEIRESS,\" \"THE SOLDIER'S ORPHANS,\" ETC., ETC.\n\n\n When falsehood genders in a human soul,\n Blossoms may hide the reptile in his creeping,\n But every pulse will stir at his control,\n Or feel the burden of his poisonous sleeping,\n Until the tight'ning circle of his coils\n Binds down the heart, which God alone assoils.\n\n In honest hearts the gentle truth reposes;\n As nightingales, with rapturous music filled,\n Nestle down, softly, in the clust'ring roses,\n While the sweet night and moonlit air is thrilled\n With perfect harmonies,--truth will arise\n And send its voice, upringing, to the skies.\n\n\nPHILADELPHIA:\nT. B. PETERSON & BROTHERS;\n306 CHESTNUT STREET.\n\n\n\n\n TO\n\n MISS ELIZA S. ORMSBEE,\n\n OF\n\n PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND,\n\n THIS BOOK IS\n\n MOST AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED.\n\n ANN S. STEPHENS.\n\n ST. CLOUD HOTEL, NEW YORK,\n NOVEMBER, 1869.\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS.\n\n\n CHAPTER PAGE\n\n I. LEAVING MY HOME 25\n\n II. MY NEW HOME 31\n\n III. A NEW LIFE 35\n\n IV. THREATENED WITH SEPARATION 40\n\n V. AFTER THE WEDDING 48\n\n VI. TELLING HOW LOTTIE INTRODUCED HERSELF 53\n\n VII. OUT IN THE WORLD 59\n\n VIII. OUR GUEST 63\n\n IX. FANCIES AND PREMONITIONS 70\n\n X. NEW VISITORS 76\n\n XI. THE BASKET OF FRUIT 81\n\n XII. BREAKFAST WITH OUR GUEST 86\n\n XIII. JESSIE LEE AND HER MOTHER 88\n\n XIV. INTRUSIVE KINDNESS 92\n\n XV. THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT 97\n\n XVI. AFTER DREAMING 101\n\n XVII. LOTTIE EXPRESSES HER OPINION OF THE\n WIDOW 106\n\n XVIII. THE UNWELCOME PROPOSAL 109\n\n XIX. OUT UPON THE RIDGE 112\n\n XX. ADROIT CROSS-QUESTIONING 118\n\n XXI. THE EVENING AFTER BOSWORTH'S PROPOSAL 121\n\n XXII. SOWING SEED FOR ANOTHER DAY 125\n\n XXIII. AN OUTBREAK OF JEALOUSY 130\n\n XXIV. THE OLD PENNSYLVANIA MANSION 135\n\n XXV. THE MOTHER AND GRANDMOTHER 139\n\n XXVI. SICK-BED FANCIES 143\n\n XXVII. THE FIRST SOUND SLEEP 147\n\n XXVIII. THE INTERVIEW IN THE WOODS 150\n\n XXIX. TROUBLES GATHER ABOUT OUR JESSIE 155\n\n XXX. MRS. DENNISON GATHERS WILD FLOWERS 159\n\n XXXI. LOTTIE'S ADVICE 165\n\n XXXII. MRS. LEE DREAMS OF PASSION-FLOWERS 169\n\n XXXIII. COMPANY FROM TOWN 173\n\n XXXIV. OUR VISIT TO THE OLD MANSION 177\n\n XXXV. YOUNG BOSWORTH'S SICK-ROOM 181\n\n XXXVI. LOTTIE'S REPORT 184\n\n XXXVII. MY FIRST QUARREL WITH MR. LEE 188\n\nXXXVIII. MR. LAWRENCE MAKES A CALL 192\n\n XXXIX. LOTTIE AS A LETTER-WRITER 197\n\n XL. YOUNG BOSWORTH RECEIVES A LETTER 200\n\n XLI. OUT IN THE STORM 206\n\n XLII. JESSIE GETS TIRED OF HER GUEST 208\n\n XLIII. A CONSULTATION WITH LOTTIE 211\n\n XLIV. THE MIDNIGHT DISCOVERY 216\n\n XLV. BAFFLED AND DEFEATED 221\n\n XLVI. LOTTIE OWNS HERSELF BEATEN 225\n\n XLVII. MR. LEE SENDS IN THE ACCOUNT OF HIS GUARDIANSHIP 227\n\n XLVIII. COMING OUT OF A DANGEROUS ILLNESS 231\n\n XLIX. LOTTIE SEEMS TREACHEROUS 237\n\n L. CONFIDENTIAL CONVERSATION BETWEEN THE WIDOW AND\n MRS. LEE 240\n\n LI. THE FATHER AND DAUGHTER 247\n\n LII. THE FATAL LETTER 252\n\n LIII. DEATH IN THE TOWER-CHAMBER 257\n\n LIV. MRS. LEE'S FUNERAL 261\n\n LV. OLD MRS. BOSWORTH'S VISIT 265\n\n LVI. LOTTIE'S REVELATIONS 268\n\n LVII. MRS. DENNISON URGES LAWRENCE TO PROPOSE 272\n\n LVIII. AFTER THE PROPOSAL 277\n\n LIX. A HEART-STORM ABATING 282\n\n LX. THE TWO LETTERS 286\n\n LXI. THE DEPARTING GUEST 290\n\n LXII. WHOLLY DESERTED 297\n\n LXIII. OLD-FASHIONED POLITENESS 302\n\n LXIV. NEWS FROM ABROAD 306\n\n LXV. LOTTIE LEAVES A LETTER AND A BOOK 313\n\n LXVI. MRS. DENNISON'S JOURNAL 316\n\n LXVII. OUR FIRST VISITOR 323\n\n LXVIII. THE WATERFALL 329\n\n LXIX. THE THREATENED DEPARTURE 338\n\n LXX. THE MIDNIGHT WALK 348\n\n LXXI. AWAY FROM HOME 355\n\n LXXII. OUT IN THE WORLD AGAIN 358\n\n LXXIII. FIRST WIDOWHOOD 362\n\n LXXIV. LOTTIE'S LETTER 385\n\n LXXV. LOTTIE IN PARIS 392\n\n LXXVI. THE CASKET OF DIAMONDS 395\n\n LXXVII. ALL TOGETHER AGAIN 404\n\n\n\n\nWIVES AND WIDOWS.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER I.\n\nLEAVING MY HOME.\n\n\nAt ten years of age I was the unconscious mistress of a heavy stone\nfarm-house and extensive lands in the interior of Pennsylvania, with\nrailroad-bonds and bank-stock enough to secure me a moderate\nindependence. I shall never, never forget the loneliness of that old\nhouse the day my mother was carried out of it and laid down by her\nhusband in the churchyard behind the village. The most intense suffering\nof life often comes in childhood. My mother was dead; I could almost\nfeel her last cold kisses on my lip as I sat down in that desolate\nparlor, waiting for the guardian who was expected to take me from my\ndear old home to his. The window opened into a field of white clover,\nwhere some cows and lambs were pasturing drowsily, as I had seen them a\nhundred times; but now their very tranquillity grieved me. It seemed\nstrange that they would stand there so content, with the white clover\ndropping from their mouths, and I going away forever. My mother's\ncanary-bird, which hung in the window, began to sing joyously over my\nhead, as if no funeral had passed from that room, leaving its shadows\nbehind, and, more grievous still, as if it did not care that I might\nnever sit and listen to it again.\n\nOne of the neighbors had kindly volunteered to take charge of the gloomy\nold house till my guardian came, but her presence disturbed me more than\nfunereal stillness would have done. I had a family of dolls up stairs,\nand any amount of tiny household furniture, which I would have given the\nworld to take with me; but this thrifty neighbor protested against it.\nShe said that I was almost a young lady and must forget such childish\nthings, now that I was going into the world to be properly educated.\n\nTo a shy, sensitive child, this was enough. So, with a double sense of\nbereavement, I saw my pretty dolls and delicate toys swept into a basket\nand carried off to the woman's house, between two stout Irish girls, who\nseemed to be taking my heart off with them.\n\nIn less than half an hour one of this woman's children came down the\nroad with my prettiest doll under her arm. Its flaxen curls were all\ndisordered, and its tiny feet, with their slippers of rose- kid,\nhad evidently been in the mud, where she had probably insisted on making\nthe doll walk. While I sat by the window, waiting and watching, this\nbare-headed little girl sat down by a fragment of stone that had fallen\nfrom the wall close by, and began pounding the head of my doll upon it\nwith all her might. A cry broke from me that made the little wretch\nstart and run away, leaving my poor mutilated doll by the stone.\n\nI ran out, seized upon my ruined doll, and came back to the house,\ncrying over it in bitter grief. With trembling hands I unlocked my\ntrunk, which was ready packed for travelling, and laid my broken\ntreasure down among the most precious of my belongings. Just then Mrs.\nPierce, our neighbor, came in, and in a half jeering, half kind way,\nexpostulated with me for being such a little goose as to cry over a\ndoll. This woman did not mean to be hard with me; far from it. Persons\nexist who are really kind-hearted, and seem cruel only because they\ncannot comprehend feelings utterly unknown to themselves. To me that\ndoll was a type of my wrecked home; to her it was a combination of wax,\nsawdust, and leather, which a few dollars could at any time replace;\nbesides that, she was put a little on the defensive by the fault of her\nchild.\n\nWhile she reasoned with me in her coarse kindness, which only wounded me\ndeeper, a carriage had driven up, and two persons entered through the\nouter door, which had been left open by the little girl when she ran\ninto the house to claim her mother's protection. I was sitting on the\nfloor by my trunk, with both hands pressed to my face, sobbing\npiteously, when a sweet, strange voice checked the force of that woman's\nharangue; some one sank down to the floor by me, and I was all at once\ndrawn into a close embrace.\n\n\"Don't cry, dear; it is all very sad, no doubt, but you are going with\nus, and to-morrow will be brighter.\"\n\nI looked through a mist of tears that half blinded me, and saw the\nkindest, sweetest face that my eyes ever dwelt upon. It was that of a\nyoung woman, perhaps twenty or twenty-two years of age. \"You must not\nfeel yourself alone, dear child,\" she said, smoothing my hair with one\nhand, from which she had drawn off the glove.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Mrs. Pierce, pushing her daughter behind her, \"you will never\nbelieve, marm, what she is crying about,--leaving home, you think it is?\nOh, no; Miss is just taking on about a snip of a doll which my little\ngirl here smashed a trifle, not meaning any harm, for children will be\nchildren, you know.\"\n\nHere Mrs. Pierce patted her child's head, who cast sidelong glances at\nme and attempted to hide herself behind her mother's dress.\n\nI looked up at the young lady, blushing red, and begging her in my heart\nnot to think me so very ridiculous.\n\nShe smiled encouragingly, and turning upon Mrs. Pierce, said, very\ngravely,--\n\n\"I am surprised, madam, that you should think this a slight cause of\ngrief. The smallest thing connected with the child's home must be dear\nto her.\"\n\nMrs. Pierce gave her head a fling, and muttered that she meant no harm.\nMiss was welcome to all her things back again; her children did not want\nthem, not they.\n\n\"You are right,\" said the young lady, quite seriously; \"have everything\nshe has owned or loved packed up at once.\"\n\nMrs. Pierce went out muttering; the child followed her with a finger in\nher mouth.\n\n\"Now,\" said the young lady, \"is there anything else you would like to\ntake away,--a bird, a little dog, or the cat you have loved; we can find\nroom for them?\"\n\nMy heart leaped. I had the dear old canary-bird; and lying upon the\ncrimson cushions of my mother's easy-chair was \"Fanny,\" a pretty\nchestnut- dog, that had all the grace of an Italian greyhound,\nand the brightness of a terrier.\n\n\"May I take her with me?\" I cried, springing up and falling on my knees\nbefore my mother's arm-chair, and hugging Fanny to my bosom. \"I am so\nglad, so grateful, so--\"\n\nHere I broke down, and burying my face in Fanny's fur, cried and laughed\nout my thankfulness. When I looked up, one of the handsomest men I ever\nsaw stood by the young lady, who was smiling upon him, though I saw\nbright tears in her eyes.\n\n\"So this is your father's ward,\" said the gentleman, reaching out his\nhand as if he had known me all his life.\n\nI put my hand in his, and felt my heart grow warm, as if it had found\nshelter from its loneliness. He exchanged glances with the lady, and I\nfelt sure that they were pleased with me.\n\n\"Now,\" said the gentleman, \"we have a little time, if you want to take\nleave of anything.\"\n\n\"Oh, I have been taking leave ever since she died,\" I answered, saddened\nby his words. \"I couldn't do it again.\"\n\n\"Perhaps that is best,\" said the gentleman; \"so get on your things; we\nhave a long ride before us.\"\n\nI started to obey him, but all at once a doubt seized upon me. Who were\nthese people? I did not know them. Mr. Olmsly, my guardian, I had been\ninformed, was an old man. What right had these people to take me away\nfrom my home?\n\nI stole back to the gentleman, trembling, and filled with sudden\napprehension.\n\n\"Please tell me who you are,\" I said; \"Mr. Olmsly! I thought he was an\nold man.\"\n\n\"And so he is,\" answered the gentleman, smiling pleasantly, \"but he is\nnot very well, and so his daughter came after you in his place. This is\nMiss Olmsly.\"\n\nThe young lady stooped down and kissed me. My arms stole around her neck\nunawares, and from that moment I loved her dearly. When I turned away\nfrom the young lady's caresses, her companion said,--\n\n\"Now you would like to know who I am; isn't that so?\"\n\nI nodded my head, feeling that I could tell at once who he was.\n\n\"Her brother, I am sure of that, you are both so--so--pleasant.\"\n\nI was about to say \"handsome,\" but changed it to the less flattering\nword.\n\nThey both laughed, and the gentleman glanced at Miss Olmsly's face,\nwhich, I was surprised to see, turned red as a wild rose.\n\n\"No, I am not her brother,\" he said, flushing up himself; \"but I shall\nbe a great deal at your guardian's, and I shall think that you are\nalmost my sister. Will you like that?\"\n\n\"So much!\" I replied, with a light heart, for all my anxieties were put\nto rest. \"Now I will get my things.\"\n\nI went up-stairs and entered my own little room for the last time. How\nhomelike and familiar everything looked: the little bed in the corner,\nwith its draperies of white net; the muslin window-curtains, through\nwhich I could see great clusters of old-fashioned white roses, still wet\nwith morning dew, and lying like snow among the vivid green of the thick\nleaves; my little walnut-wood desk, where I had got my first\nlessons,--all appealed to me with a force that swept away the dawning\ncheerfulness which the conversation down-stairs had inspired. I sat down\nby the window and looked sadly out. The sash was open, and a sweet\nfragrance came up from the white clover-field, mingling with that of the\ngreat rose-bush, which had reached the second-story windows, ever since\nI could remember. I could not bear to leave all these things. Yet the\nhouse had been so lonely that I had no clear wish to stay. To me there\nwas something terrible in leaving that safe home-shelter. I grew cold,\nand began to cry again. Afar off I could see the graveyard where my\nmother was lying. Her presence was close to me then. How could I go away\nand leave her resting there within sight of the old house? But she had\nherself arranged that I should live with my guardian. Why should these\nbitter regrets depress me, while obeying her? It was that strong home\nfeeling which has never left me during my life,--the feeling which\nprompted me to gather a handful of those white roses, and keep them till\nthey crumbled into nothing but the ashes of a flower. Oh, how my heart\nached when we drove away from that old stone house! the picture is even\nyet burned in on my brain. That tall hickory-tree at one end--the willow\nin front. Those fine old lilac-bushes, and the clustering roses reaching\nluxuriantly to the upper windows, in the full rich blossoming of early\nJune. Many a time since, when in sadness and sorrow this picture has\ncome back to my mind, I have wondered if it might not have been better\nhad I stayed in that quiet old home.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER II.\n\nMY NEW HOME.\n\n\nMr. Olmsly was a very wealthy man. His property stretched far into an\niron and coal district of Pennsylvania, and every day increased its\nvalue. It lay in and around a fine inland town, situated among some of\nthe most picturesque scenery to be found in the State. His residence was\nabout five miles from this town, and a most beautiful spot it was. The\nhouse was built on the last spur of a range of hills, which ran for some\ndistance down the valley of the Delaware. Around this tall ridge the\nnoble river made a bold sweep, turned an old stone mill on its outer\ncurve, and went careering down one of the richest and most beautiful\nvalleys that the eye ever dwelt upon. The whole of this mountain spur,\nthe mill and the land down to the river, which swept around it like an\nox-bow, was the property of Mr. Olmsly. His house of heavy stone was\nbuilt half-way up the side of the ridge, in the form of the letter T,\nwhich ran lengthwise along the face of the hill, presenting a pointed\nroof, and one sharp gable in the front view. The walls were stuccoed\nlike many houses to be found in European countries, and were settled\nback on the hill by three curving terraces, two of them blooming with\nrare flowers. These terraces cut the hill as with a girdle of blossoms\nabout half-way up from its base. The first was a carriage-road, which\nwas connected with the house by a long flight of steps leading across\nthe first flower-terrace to the front door.\n\nIn front, the house was three stories high. The basement story opened on\nthe first broad terrace, with its wreathing vines, and glowing blossoms.\nAn oriel window curved out from the gable, and a square balcony\nsurrounded by an arabesque railing, formed a pleasant lounging-place\nover the front entrance. At the back of the house the entrance was from\nthe third terrace, directly to the second story, which was half occupied\nby a broad hall, ending in the square balcony; a noble drawing-room,\nwhose latticed windows opened on every side save the front, from which\nthe oriel jutted, opened upon a platform some ten feet wide, which\nformed a promenade around one end of the second story, and along the\nback of the building, surrounded by a low balustrade, to which a hundred\nrare plants and vines were clinging; beyond this was a labyrinth of\nflower-beds, through which a broad gravel-path wound gracefully,\nseparating the green turf of the hill-side from the third and last\nterrace, which was most beautiful of all.\n\nThese terraces threw broad belts of flowers half across the face of the\nhill, and ended in pleasant footpaths which led through the turf and\nunder some sheltering trees to the top of the ridge. There everything\nwas wild as nature left to herself can be. At noonday the sunshine was\ndarkened by the woven branches of pines, hemlocks, beech, and oak trees,\nwith a tangle of blossoming laurel among the dusky undergrowth. From\nthis eminence, you commanded a glorious sight of two magnificent\nvalleys,--one stretching off toward the Blue Ridge and overlooking the\ntown, the other opening in rich luxuriance down the banks of the\nDelaware, mile after mile, league after league, till villages in the\ndistance seemed scarcely more than a handful of snow-flakes.\n\nHalf-way down you saw the house I have been describing, the\ncarriage-road that wound beneath it, and below that, the hill sloping\ndownward in a broad, rolling lawn, which lost itself with gentle\nundulations in the green bosom of the valley.\n\nThis was the home to which I was brought, and this beautiful view lay\nbefore me as I stood upon the terrace-steps, wondering that the earth\ncould be so lovely. Miss Olmsly paused by my side, enjoying my\nsurprise.\n\n\"You like it,\" she said; \"we shall be very happy here, for I know how it\nwill be with my father when he sees your demure little face.\"\n\n\"Happy,\" I said, looking at the flowers which bloomed around me\neverywhere. \"I did not know that there was any place in the world so\nlovely as this.\"\n\n\"I am glad you are pleased, young lady.\"\n\nI started, turned toward the speaker, and saw a fine old gentleman, with\nsoft brown eyes, and hair as white as snow, standing on the step above\nme.\n\n\"It is my father, dear,\" said Miss Olmsly, mounting a step higher and\noffering the old man a kiss; \"she is a dear, good child, papa, and we\nlove her already.\"\n\n\"I am glad of that,\" he said, stooping down and kissing me on the\nforehead. \"Your father was my friend, child, and I will be yours. Come\ninto the house; you must be tired and hungry.\"\n\nWe entered the house which was henceforth to be my home. Miss Olmsly\ntook me directly to a pretty chamber, that had been evidently prepared\nfor my coming. Everything was simple, neat, and pure as snow. As if they\nhad known how I loved flowers, they were placed in the deep\nwindow-seats, on the white marble of the mantelpiece, and the principal\nwindow opened on the loveliest portion of the third terrace, where a\nworld of flowers were in bloom from May till November.\n\nThere I hung up the bird-cage which I had brought from home in the\ncarriage, and the little inmate began to sing joyously, as if he\nunderstood all the beauties of our new home and rejoiced over them.\n\nFanny, too, put her paws on the window-seat, and looked out demurely, as\nif taking a survey of the landscape. She dropped down with what seemed a\nlittle bark of approval, and curling herself up on my travelling-shawl,\nwhich had dropped to the floor, watched me as I unlocked my trunk and\nprepared for dinner.\n\nMiss Olmsly was right. I had a demure little face, but it looked upon me\nfrom the glass less sorrowfully than I had seen it since my mother's\ndeath. The sombre blackness of my dress threw it all into shadow and\nmade the deep blue-gray of my eyes darker, by far, than was natural.\nThis, contrasting with the slightness of my form, made me look like a\nlittle woman who had known suffering, rather than the sensitive child\nthat I really was.\n\nThe dinner filled me with awe; the bright silver, the cut-glass, and\ndelicate china impressed me greatly, and I was half afraid to tell the\nwaiter what I wanted, he seemed so great a gentleman. Everybody was\nkind, the conversation was bright and cheerful; I understood it all, and\nfelt myself brightening under it. Once or twice I caught myself laughing\nat the pleasant things the old gentleman was saying.\n\nAfter dinner, when Mr. Olmsly was asleep in his great easy-chair, Mr.\nLee and Miss Olmsly went out on the platform, lifted a little from the\nthird terrace, and walked up and down, now and then looking in through\none of the open French windows, and saying a kind word to me. I remember\nthinking what a splendid couple they were, and how happy they seemed to\nbe in each other's company. No wonder; she was a lovely creature,\nslender, graceful, and caressing in all her ways, while he was like a\ndemigod to my imagination, grand as a monarch, and good as he was\nkingly. Even then, young as I was, the smile with which he occasionally\nbent to her, made my heart yearn with a strange desire that I, too,\nmight be so smiled upon.\n\nStill, I was neither lonely nor home-sick, for my whole heart had gone\nout toward those young people, and I had begun to connect the old\ngentleman lovingly with my own father, whose face and kind ways I could\njust remember.\n\nAfter a while I stole up to my own room again, unpacked my trunk, hung\nup my mourning dresses, and lingered regretfully over my doll a few\nmoments, ashamed of having loved it so; for the sneers of Mrs. Pierce\nhad made a deep impression on me, and I began to feel that I ought to be\nsomething more than a child. Still I could not put the poor, broken\nthing entirely away, but a sight of it always gave me a heart-ache. It\nis a terrible thing when one's childhood is broken up with harsh words\nand coarse jeers.\n\nWhere refinement is, illusions remain beautiful far beyond childhood.\nThey belong to innocence, and seldom dwell long with the worldly and the\nbad.\n\nMrs. Pierce had swept away one joy from my life, but a beautiful\ncompensation had been sent me in my new home and my new friends. It all\nseemed like paradise to me when I went to bed that night.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER III.\n\nA NEW LIFE.\n\n\nThe next morning, Miss Olmsly came into my room and helped me arrange my\nlittle mementos in a homelike fashion. My work-box was brought forth and\nplaced on the little table provided for it. My pretty writing-desk was\nunlocked and placed convenient for use. Brackets were ready for the\nornaments that had been so dear that I could not leave them behind. From\nthat hour, this room became in fact my home; the old stone farm-house\nreceded into the shadows of the past. I thought of it sometimes sadly,\nas I thought of the graves where my parents lay. The sight of an\nold-fashioned damask-rose has still power to bring tears into my eyes,\nand my heart would thrill if I passed a white clover-patch, years and\nyears after that I left at home had been ploughed out of existence. But\nafter all, the brightest sunshine of my life fell through the latticed\nwindows of my room on the Ridge.\n\nNo humming-bird ever loved flowers as I did;--no artist ever gave\nhimself up to the enjoyment of a fine landscape more completely than it\nwas in my nature to do. I have no doubt that the beauty that surrounded\nme was one great cause of the tranquil happiness which settled upon my\nwhole being as I became accustomed to the place. I loved to spend whole\nmornings alone on the Ridge, collecting mosses and searching for\nbirds'-nests, which were abundant in the pines and the drooping hemlock\nboughs. Among Miss Olmsly's old school-books I found one that gave me an\nelementary knowledge of botany; I did not consider it a dry study, but\nloved to sit upon a rock carpeted with moss, and look into the fragrant\nhearts of the wild-flowers, searching out their sweet secrets with a\nfeeling of profound sympathy in their loveliness and in the races to\nwhich they belonged. Child as I was, these things satisfied me, and I\nwanted no other companionship.\n\nMr. Olmsly's land covered extensive woods beside those on the Ridge.\nThere was nothing likely to harm me anywhere in the grounds, and I was\nallowed to run wild out of doors wherever I pleased. Thus I made\nacquaintance with many things beside the flowers; gray squirrels and\npretty striped chipmunks, with bushy tails curled over their backs,\nwould sit upon the tree-boughs just over my head and look at me with shy\nfriendliness. Now and then, I saw a rabbit peeping at me through the\nferns. These pretty creatures were not afraid, for no sportsman was ever\nallowed to bring his gun into those woods, and I think they knew how far\nI was from wishing to harm them.\n\nMy mother had been a timid woman, and her love for me always rendered\nher unduly careful. She had a terror of allowing me out of her sight,\nand being feeble herself, kept me mostly indoors, where I had learned\nto content myself in a passionate love of my dolls, that really seemed\nto me like living creatures capable of loving me as I worshipped them.\n\nBut at the Ridge I really did enjoy living companionship. Nature lay all\nbefore me, wild as the first creation; or so blended with art that its\nrichest beauties were enhanced threefold. There was also vitality and\nintelligence in these living creatures that stirred my heart with a\nstrange sympathy.\n\nMy dog Fanny sometimes troubled me a little: she would insist upon\nrouting the ground-birds from their nests, and in an effort to become\nfriendly with the rabbits, would send them scampering wildly into the\nunderbrush. I loved Fanny dearly, but it was not pleasant to see my pets\ndriven off by her frolicsome way of making herself agreeable.\n\nOne day I had gone farther than usual into the woods, and come out upon\nthe outer verge of Mr. Olmsly's estate. Here the trees grew thin and\nscattered off into a pasture, where a flock of sheep was grazing; beyond\nthat, some fine meadow sloped down toward the valley, cut in two by the\nhighway, on which a large stone house was visible through the trees\ngrowing thickly around it.\n\nA flat rock, half in sunshine, half in shadow, lay hidden in the grass\nclose by the footpath I had been pursuing, and I sat down upon it,\nsomewhat tired from my long walk in the woods. Fanny was with me and\nsprang with a leap to my side, but kept moving restlessly about, as if\nshe did not quite like the position, or saw something that displeased\nher.\n\nI had gathered some spotted leaves of the adder's-tongue, with a few of\nits golden flowers, and had found some lovely specimens of cup-moss on\nan old stump, which nature was embellishing like a fairy palace, and sat\nadmiring them in the pleasant sunshine, when Fanny gave a sudden yelp,\nand bounded from the rock, barking furiously.\n\nI dropped the flowers into my lap, half frightened by her sudden\noutburst; but as she continued wheeling around the rock, darting off and\nback again, yelping like a fury, I ordered her to be quiet, and fell to\narranging my treasures once more.\n\nAll at once Fanny ceased barking, but crept close to me, seized upon my\ndress with her teeth and began to pull backward, almost tearing the\nfabric. Just then I heard a rustling sound on the rock behind me;\nforcing my dress from the dog's teeth, I sprang up, and saw quivering\nupon the moss what seemed to be a dusky shimmer of jewels all in motion.\nIn an instant the glitter left my eyes. I felt myself turning into\nmarble. There, coiled up ready for a spring, its head flattened, its\neyes glittering venomously, was a checkered adder preparing to lance out\nupon me.\n\nI could not move, I could not scream; my strained eyes refused to turn\nfrom the reptile, who, quivering with its own poison, seemed to draw me\ntoward him. For my life I could not have moved; my lips seemed\nfrozen,--a fearful fascination possessed me utterly. It was broken by\nthe rush of a fragment of rock, under which I saw the reptile writhing\nfiercely. Then my faculties were unchained, and a shriek broke from my\ncold lips. I sprang from the rock and was running madly away, when Mr.\nLee caught me in his arms, and I shuddered into insensibility there.\n\nWhen I came to, the crushed adder lay dead upon the rock, from a crevice\nof which he had crept forth upon me. Fanny was barking furiously around\nit, and Mr. Lee had carried me to a spring close by, where he was\nbathing my face with water.\n\nI looked around in terror. \"Is it gone? is it dead?\" I questioned,\nshuddering.\n\nHe pointed out the adder, which hung supine and dead over the edge of\nthe rock, and attempted to soothe my fears, but I trembled still, and\ncould hardly force myself to take a second look at my dead foe.\n\nHow kind Mr. Lee was then; how tenderly he compassionated my terror, and\nassured me of safety. Fanny, too, forgot her rage, and came leaping\naround me. Oh, how grateful I was to that man. My heart yearned to say\nall it felt, but found no language. I could only lift my eyes to him now\nand then in dumb thankfulness, wondering if he cared that I was so\ngrateful, or dreamed how much a girl of my years could feel.\n\nHow foolish all these thoughts were; of course, he only thought of me as\na frightened child. From that day I never knelt to God, morning or\nevening, without asking some blessing on the head of Mr. Lee. Gratitude\nhad deepened my reverence for that man into such worship as only a\nsensitive child can feel. Yes, worship is the word, for this young man\nin the grandeur of his fine person, gentle manners, and superior age,\nseemed as far above me as the clouds of heaven are above the daisies in\na meadow. Even now I cannot comprehend the feelings with which I\nregarded him.\n\nHave I said that Mr. Lee was a partner in the Olmsly Iron Works, and\nthough he boarded in town, half his time was of necessity spent at the\nRidge? My guardian only attended to business through him, and expected a\nreport at least twice a week.\n\nMany and many a time, when I knew that he was coming, have I wandered\ndown the carriage-road to the grove where it curved off from the\nhighway, and was closed into our private ground by a gate. There,\nsheltered by the spruce-trees and hidden by the laurel-bushes, I have\nwaited hours, listening for the tread of his horse, and feeling\nsupremely rewarded by a brief glimpse of his manly figure, as it dashed\nup the road, unconscious alike of my presence and my worship.\n\nI never mentioned these feelings, or all the secret sources of happiness\nto which my soul awoke, not even to Miss Olmsly. I would have died\nrather than breathe them to any human being; they were sacred to me as\nmy prayers. Sometimes I would be days together without speaking to Mr.\nLee, but I was seldom out of the sound of his voice when he visited the\nRidge, and would follow him and Miss Olmsly like a pet dog about the\ngarden, glad to see her brighten and smile when he looked upon her, and\nloving them both with my whole heart.\n\nSometimes other company came from the town. We frequently drove over\nthere and brought Mr. Lee home with us; indeed, he was one of the family\nin every respect, save that he did not sleep at the Ridge, and called\nhimself a visitor. One thing is very certain--on the days he did not\ncome Miss Olmsly was sure to grow serious, almost sad; only there never\nwas any real sadness at our house in those days.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IV.\n\nTHREATENED WITH SEPARATION.\n\n\nThis beautiful life must have an end. Even childhood has its duties, and\nmine could no longer be invaded.\n\nOne day Miss Olmsly came into my room, and looking around, sighed; but\nthere was a smile on her lip and an expression in her face that made me\nwonder at the sigh; for I had not learned that superabundant joy has\nsometimes the same expression as grief; but oh, how different the\nfeeling.\n\nShe sat down by the window, and drawing me close to her, kissed my\nforehead two or three times with so much feeling that I began to\ntremble.\n\n\"Is anything the matter?\" I said, winding my arms around her neck; \"have\nI done wrong?\"\n\n\"Wrong, my sweet child, no; who ever accused you of being anything but\nthe best girl in the world? I was only thinking how lonesome you would\nbe without us.\"\n\n\"Without you?\" I faltered,--\"without you?\"\n\nI felt myself growing pale, my arms fell away from that white neck, and\nI looked piteously in her kind face, afraid to ask the meaning of these\nwords.\n\n\"Don't look so frightened, dear,\" said Miss Olmsly, drawing me fondly to\nher side. \"Even if we were not going, you must have been sent to school.\nNo young lady can get along without education, you know; still, I shall\nfeel very anxious about you.\"\n\n\"Are you going away; am I to be left?\"\n\nI could ask no more; the very idea of parting with them choked me.\n\nMiss Olmsly drew my face to hers as if she wanted to keep me from\nlooking at her so earnestly. My cheek was wet with tears, but hers was\nred as it touched mine, and I could feel that it was burning.\n\n\"I am about to tell you something that I hope you will be glad to hear,\ndarling,\" she said, almost in a whisper. \"In two weeks Mr. Lee and I are\ngoing to be married. Why, how you shiver, child! I should have told you\nof this first; the very thought of a school terrifies you.\"\n\nI heard this and no more. Another death seemed upon me; I fell upon my\nknees and caught at her dress with both hands.\n\n\"Oh, do not leave me--I shall die! I shall die!\" She lifted me from the\nfloor and attempted to soothe me, but I was not to be pacified. To live\nwithout him--never to see him! There would be nothing worth loving in my\nlife after that.\n\n\"Is it so hard to part with us,\" she said, smoothing my hair with both\nhands.\n\nI flung my arms around her neck in passionate grief.\n\n\"Let me go too; oh, take me, take me!\"\n\n\"But we are going to Europe.\"\n\n\"Over the sea? I know, I know, take me!\"\n\nShe kissed me again, and seemed thoughtful. My heart rose: I began to\nplead with hope. She listened tenderly; told me not to cry, and left me\nin a state of suspense hard to bear. An hour after this I saw her\nwalking in the garden with Mr. Lee. She was addressing him with sweet\nearnestness. He looked smilingly down into her face and seemed to\nexpostulate against something that she was urging. At last he appeared\nto give way, but shook his head and threatened her with his finger,\nwhich she answered by tossing the ripe leaves of an autumn rose in his\nface. As he shook them laughingly away, his eyes fell on me where I\nleaned from the window, and he made a sign for me to come down.\n\nBreathless, and wild with anxiety, I ran down to the garden and stood\nbeside him, panting for breath, eager to speak, and yet afraid.\n\n\"Well, little lady,\" he said, holding out a hand; \"you are determined\nthat we shall not leave you behind.\"\n\n\"It would kill me,\" I murmured, striving to read my fate in his eyes.\n\n\"But we shall be gone from home a long time.\"\n\n\"My home is where--where she is,\" I answered.\n\nWhy did I hesitate to include him. I think he noticed it, for he said,\nlaughing, \"Then you care everything for her, nothing for me?\"\n\nI burst into tears and cried out in my trouble, \"Oh, you are cruel to\nme; you laugh when I am so unhappy.\"\n\n\"But no one shall be made so unhappy when--when--\" Here Miss Olmsly\nbroke off what she had begun to say, and flushed like the rose she had\njust torn to pieces.\n\n\"When we are married; that is what she will not say, sweetheart,\" broke\nin Mr. Lee, blushing a little himself; \"and if it really will make you\nunhappy to stay behind, why, there must be some way found by which you\ncan go with us.\"\n\nI caught a deep breath and felt a glow of keen happiness rush up to my\nface, but no word would leave my lips.\n\n\"Now, this will make you happy?\" questioned Miss Olmsly, looking into my\neyes,--I think as much to avoid his, as from a wish to read my joy\nthere.\n\n\"So happy,\" I answered.\n\n\"But we shall be gone a long time and shall travel a great deal, while\nyou must be put to school.\"\n\nThis dampened my spirits a little, but I answered, bravely, that I did\nnot mind, so long as there was no ocean between us.\n\nThen they informed me that Mr. Olmsly had consented that I should go\nwith them to Paris and remain in school while they travelled. Then he\nwould join us and make new arrangements for the future.\n\nAfter explaining all this to me, the young people walked off together,\nsatisfied that I was made happy as themselves; and so I ought to have\nbeen; but my poor heart would not rest, and I went off into the woods\nlike a wild bird, wondering why it was that a flutter of pain still kept\nstirring in my bosom.\n\nThey were married just two weeks from that day. All the principal\nfamilies of the place were invited, and the entertainment proved a grand\naffair. All the grounds were illuminated for the occasion. The house was\none blaze of lights. Every tree on the hill-side or the sloping lawn\nseemed blossoming with fire, or drooping with translucent fruit, so\nnumerous were the lamps and gorgeous lanterns that hung amid\ntheir foliage.\n\nIt was like fairy-land to me. The moon was at its golden fulness, and\nnever before had the purple skies seemed so full of stars; but, spite of\nthis, I was sad and restless. Miss Olmsly insisted upon it that my\nmourning should be laid aside, and I felt strange in the cloudy\nwhiteness of my dress, simple and plain as it was. Indeed, the whole\nthing seemed to me like a dream which must pass away on the morrow.\nPerhaps it was this abrupt change in my dress which made me feel so\nlonely when all the world was gay and brilliant beyond anything my short\nlife had witnessed. Perhaps I felt sad at the thought of leaving my\nnative land. Be this as it may, I can look back upon few nights of my\nlife more dreary than that upon which the two best friends I ever had,\nor ever shall have, were married.\n\nMemory is full of pictures; events fade away, feelings die out, but so\nlong as the heart keeps a sentiment or the brain holds an image, groups\nwill start up from the past and bring back scenes which no effort of the\nmind can displace. It is strange, but such pictures are burned, as it\nwere, upon the soul unawares, and often without any remarkable event\nwhich can be said to have impressed them there. You may have known a\nperson all your life, yet remember him only as he was presented to you\nat some given moment. Whole years may pass in which you scarcely seem to\nhave observed him; but at some one moment he comes out upon your\nrecollection with all his features perfect and clearly cut as a cameo.\n\nOf all the pictures burned in upon my life, that of Mr. Lee and his\nbride, as they stood up in that long drawing-room to be married, will be\nthe last to die out from my mind. No bridesmaids were in attendance; no\nushers coming and going drew attention from that noble couple. This was\nthe picture,--a woman standing at the left hand of a tall, stately man.\nHe was upright, firm, and self-poised as the pillar of some old Grecian\ntemple. She drooped gently forward, her hands unconsciously clasped, the\nlong black lashes sweeping her cheeks; a soft tremor, as of red\nrose-leaves stirred by the wind, passing over her lips; draperies of\nsatin, glossy and white as crusted snow, fell around her; a garland of\nblush-roses crowned the braids of purplish-black hair thickly coiled\naround a most queenly head. Draperies of rich, warm crimson fell from\nthe windows just behind them, and swept around the foot of a noble vase\nof Oriental alabaster, from which a tall crimson and purple fuchsia-tree\ndropped its profuse bells. Directly the clergyman, with a book in his\nhand, broke into the picture; but my mind rejects him and falls back\nupon the man, and the woman who stood with lovelight in her eyes and\nprayers at her heart, waiting to become his wife.\n\nThere was great rejoicing after the picture was lost in a crowd of\ncongratulating friends; music sent its soft reverberations out among the\nflowers, that gave back rich odors in return; for it was a lovely\nautumnal night, and the whole platform to which the windows opened was\ngarlanded in with hot-house plants. I remember seeing groups of persons\nwandering about in the illuminated grounds. Their laughter reached me as\nI sat solitary and alone in the oriel window, over which lace curtains\nfell, and were kindled up like snow by the lights from without.\n\nI was very sad that night, and felt the tears stealing slowly into my\neyes. Every one was happy, but joy had forgotten to find me out. All at\nonce the lace curtains were lifted softly and fell rustling down again.\n_She_ had thought of me even in her happiest moments. Her arms were\nfolded around me; her lips, warm with smiles, were pressed to my face.\n\n\"All alone and looking so sad! why will you not enjoy yourself like the\nrest?\" she said.\n\n\"I am so young and so wicked,\" I answered, wiping the tears from my\neyes.\n\n\"Wicked! oh, not that, only there is no one of your own age here; come\nout a little while; he has been asking for you.\"\n\n\"For me?\"\n\n\"Of course; who else should he think of? Why, child, you will never know\nhow dearly we both love you.\"\n\n\"And you always will?\" I asked, holding my breath in expectation of her\nanswer.\n\n\"And always will, be sure of that. Ah! here he comes to promise for\nhimself.\"\n\nYes; there he stood holding back the curtains, proud, smiling, and\nstrong, as I shall always remember him.\n\n\"Ah! you have found her, silly thing, hiding away by herself,\" he\nexclaimed, kindly.\n\n\"I have just made a promise for you,\" answered the bride with gentle\nseriousness.\n\n\"Which I will keep; for henceforth, fair lady, am I not your slave.\"\n\n\"I have promised to love this girl so long as I shall live, and that you\nwill be her very best friend, and love her dearly.\"\n\n\"Dearly, you say?\"\n\n\"Most dearly.\"\n\n\"Next to yourself?\"\n\n\"Next to myself; and after me, best of all.\"\n\n\"Ah, it is easy to promise that, for, next to yourself, sweet wife, she\nis the dearest creature in existence.\" She held my hand in hers while he\nwas speaking. When he uttered the word wife, I felt her finger quiver as\nif some strange thrill had flashed down from her heart, and the broad\nwhite lids drooped suddenly, veiling the radiance of her eyes.\n\n\"Now that I have promised, let us seal the compact,\" he said, with\ntouching seriousness; and lifting me for a moment in his arms, he\npressed a kiss upon my lips.\n\n\"Why, how she trembles; don't be afraid, you sensitive little thing;\ncome, come go with us and see how the people are making themselves\nhappy.\"\n\nThe bride took his arm, and leading me with his disengaged hand, he\ncrossed the drawing-room and went out on the flower-wreathed platform,\nwhere a band of music was filling the night with harmonies.\n\nHere an ecstasy of feeling came upon me; I remembered all that both\nthese persons had promised, and that it would be a solemn compact which\nthey would never think of breaking. I should be with them, not for a\ntime only, but so long as I lived. Remember, I was an imaginative girl,\nand knew but little of the mutability of human affairs. I only felt in\nmy soul that these two persons whom I loved so entirely, would be\nfaithful to the promise they had made that night, and this certainly\nfilled me with exultation that was, for the time, something better than\nhappiness. After a while, Mr. Lee dropped my hand, but it crept back to\nhis, and I made a signal that he should bend his head.\n\n\"It is a promise,\" I whispered; \"you will never, never send me away from\nyou?\"\n\n\"It is a promise,\" he answered, smiling down upon me.\n\n\"Good night,\" I said, longing to be alone in my room where I could feel\nof a certainty that the few words spoken that night had anchored me for\nlife. \"Good night; I shall never leave you or her while I live.\"\n\nIt seemed a rash promise, but I made it to God in my prayers that night.\nThe reader shall see how I kept it.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER V.\n\nAFTER THE WEDDING.\n\n\nOur Jessie was born in Paris, a little more than a year after her\nparents were married, and a lovelier child never drew breath. I was in\nschool then, and she was two months old before I saw her, but she had\nlearned to smile, and was a beautiful, bright little creature even then.\nHow I worshipped the child! no elder sister ever rendered her heart more\ncompletely up to an infant of her own blood, than I gave mine. All the\naffection I had ever felt for the parents was intensified and softened\ninto infinite tenderness for their little girl. In her I resolved to\nrepay some of the kindness which had been so lavishly bestowed on me.\nHow this was to be done, I could not tell, but I had dreams of great\nsacrifices, unlimited devotion, and such care as one human being never\ntook of another. Thus the first existence of this child was woven into\nmy own better life and became a part of it.\n\nOur Jessie was two years old when Mr. Olmsly joined us in Europe, and\nfor the first time saw his little grandchild; before she had counted\nanother year, the good old man was dead and buried in a strange country.\nHe left a will contrary to all expectation, written after he had seen\nand loved little Jessie. All his vast property was left to Mr. Lee and\nhis wife, but on the death of Mrs. Lee, even though the husband was\nstill living, one half the estate was to revert, unrestricted and\nuncontrolled, to her daughter.\n\nThis was all, and with it the persons in interest were satisfied;\nindeed, the property was large enough to have been divided half a dozen\ntimes, and still have been sufficient for the ambition of any reasonable\nperson.\n\nMr. Lee did not return to the United States at the death of his\nfather-in-law; there was, in reality, nothing to call him home. He had\nretired from active business soon after his marriage, and the old world\nhad so many resources of knowledge and pleasure, for persons of their\nfine cultivation, that they lingered on, year after year, without a wish\nfor change, sometimes travelling from country to country, but making\nParis their head-quarters so long as I remained in school.\n\nAfter that, we spent a year in Italy, and some months in Germany and\nSpain, where I became perfect mistress of the languages, and found\nhappiness in imparting them to \"Our Jessie,\" who became more lovely and\nlovable every year of her life.\n\nAt last we went to the Holy Land, and lingered a while in Egypt, where\nMrs. Lee was taken ill, almost for the first time in her life, and then\ncame the only real sorrow that we had known since Mr. Olmsly's death.\n\nThe moment it was possible, we returned to Paris, in order to get the\nbest medical advice. It came all too soon; Mrs. Lee was pronounced a\nconfirmed invalid, some disease of the nerves, in which the spine was\nimplicated, threatened a tedious, if not incurable illness.\n\nAt this time Jessie was ten years old, and I had entered the first\nstages of womanhood; as her mother became more and more frail, the dear\nchild was almost entirely given up to me, and my love for her became\nabsolute idolatry. The child had always been taught to call me aunt, and\nfor her sake I was ready to give up all the bright social prospects that\nopened to me just then. Indeed, there never was a time in my life that I\ncould not have found pleasure in sacrificing anything to the parents or\nthe child.\n\nOne thing troubled Mrs. Lee at this time,--a craving desire to go home\nseized upon her. With an invalid's incessant longing, she wearied of the\nobjects that had so pleasantly amused her, and sighed for rest. But it\nhad been arranged that Jessie should be educated at the same school\nwhich I had left, and the gentle mother could not find it in her heart\nto be separated from that dear one.\n\nNow came the time for my dream to be realized. Why should \"Our Jessie\"\nbe given up to the hard routine of a school, when I could make her\nstudies easy and her life pleasant. It was in my power to keep the\nmother and child in one home.\n\nI found Mr. Lee and his wife together one day, and made my proposition.\nI would become Jessie's governess.\n\nMy generous friends protested against this. It was, they said, the\nopening of my life. In order to do this, I must give up the society\nwhich I had but just entered, and perhaps injure my own prospects in the\nfuture. No, no, they could not permit a sacrifice like this.\n\nBut if they were generous, I was resolute. To have Jessie always with\nme, had been the brightest dream of my girlhood. I could not be\npersuaded to give it up. What did I care for society, if she was to\nsuffer the dreary routine of the school-life from which I had but just\nbeen emancipated? I really think it would have broken my heart had the\ndear child been left behind. But great love always prevails. We sailed\nfor America a united family, happy even with the drawback of Mrs. Lee's\nillness, which in itself was seldom painful, and her untiring\ncheerfulness was never broken.\n\nThe valley of the Delaware had become highly cultivated in our long\nabsence. A railroad ran up the banks of the river, from which our house\ncould be seen standing on the hill-side miles and miles away. I started\nwith surprise when it first met our view. A square stone tower, three\nstories high, loomed up behind the pointed gables and balconied front,\ngiving a castellated air to the whole building.\n\nThis had been done by Mr. Lee's orders. He had drawn the plans, and his\narchitect had carried them out splendidly. Our first view of the house\nwas accompanied with exclamations of pleasure which delighted Mr. Lee,\nwho had kept all his improvements a secret, that he might enjoy our\nsurprise. Indeed, the site of the house was so finely uplifted from the\nvalley, that the effect was that of many lordly mansions we had seen on\nthe Continent, though I do not remember one more picturesque in itself,\nor that could command a landscape to compare with this in extent or\nvaried beauty.\n\nIt was a lovely June day when we reached the Ridge; everything had been\nprepared for our reception. In the years of our absence nothing had been\npermitted to go to decay, but many improvements presented themselves as\nwe turned up the carriage-road. A young peach-orchard had grown into\nbearing trees; grape trellices were tangled thickly with vines; choice\nfruit-trees of every kind had just lost their blossoms. A range of\nhot-houses glittered through the trees. All this made the Ridge more\nbeautiful by far than it had been years before when it seemed a paradise\nto me. On entering the house, we were still more pleasantly surprised.\nEverything rich and rare that a long residence abroad had enabled Mr.\nLee to collect, was arranged through the rooms,--bronzes, statuettes of\nmarble, old china carvings, pictures, ornaments of malachite, and Lapes\nlazula, met us on every hand. All this might have seemed out of place in\na country house of almost any ordinary description, where the occupant\nwas likely to spend half the year in town; but Mr. Lee had fitted up\nthis place as his principal and permanent residence. The health of his\nwife demanded quiet; her tastes required beautiful objects, and all\nthese rare articles had been carefully selected for her pleasure. Here\nshe found many a precious gem of art which she had seen in her travels,\nadmired, but never thought to possess. But he had remembered her\nfaintest preference, and the proofs of his unbounded devotion met her at\nevery turn, as we entered, what was, in fact, the blending of an old and\nnew home.\n\nNot one article of the old furniture was missing, every sweet\nassociation had been preserved with religious care; but affection had\ngrafted the new life she had been leading on the reminiscences of her\ngirlhood, and, spite of her infirmity and fatigue, Mrs. Lee was\nsupremely happy as she entered her home. The square tower was entirely\nmodern, and everything it contained had been sent from abroad. The lower\nroom was a library, with pointed windows, a black-walnut floor, and a\nsmall Gobeline carpet in the centre of the room, upon which a heavily\ncarved table was placed. From floor to ceiling the walls were lined with\nbooks, richly bound, and carefully selected; the book-cases were each\nsurmounted with a bas-relief in bronze, representing some classical\nsubject, while the glass that shut in the books was pure as crystal.\nEasy-chairs of every conceivable pattern stood about this room, and\nbetween each book-case a bronze statuette reminded you of some classic\nname, or hero known to history.\n\nThe second story of the tower opened into the main building; thus the\nlarge square chamber fitted up for Mrs. Lee was connected with two\nsmaller rooms, one intended for her personal attendant, the other a\ndressing-room.\n\nThe principal window of this room opened upon a balcony, which\noverlooked the brightest portion of the terraces; near this window a\ncouch was drawn, from which even an invalid might attain lovely glimpses\nof the clustering flowers, without changing her position. A carpet,\nthick and soft as a meadow in spring, covered the floor, and in the back\npart of the room stood a bed, surmounted by a canopy carved from some\nrare dark-hued wood, from which curtains of lace that a countess might\nhave worn, swept to the floor, and clouded the bed, without in any\ndegree obstructing the air. In this room everything invited to repose.\nThe pictures were all dreamily beautiful. On one side of the large\nwindow a marble child lay sleeping, with a smile on its lips. On the\nother, just within the frost-like shadow of the curtains, an angel, of\nthe same size, knelt, with downcast face, and hands pressed softly\ntogether, praying. This was the room into which Mr. Lee carried his\nwife, after she had rested a few minutes in the drawing-room. He laid\nher upon the couch with gentle care, but she rose at once, and leaning\nupon her elbow, looked around. Everything was new and strange; but, oh,\nhow beautiful! tears came into her eyes; she leaned back upon the\ncushions, and held out both hands.\n\n\"And you have done all this,\" she said. \"Was ever a woman so blessed?\"\n\nThen she turned her eyes upon the window and saw the flowers gleaming\nthrough.\n\n\"The garden is as he left it,\" she murmured. \"I am glad of that--I am\nglad of that.\"\n\nMr. Lee sat down by her couch, smiling, and evidently rejoiced that he\nhad given her so much pleasure. Jessie was moving about the room, happy\nas a bird; to her everything was new and charming, and the restlessness\nof childhood was upon her.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VI.\n\nTELLING HOW LOTTIE INTRODUCED HERSELF.\n\n\nAs we were settling down to a quiet admiration of all these things, a\nstrange little girl appeared at the door, where she hesitated, and\npeeped in as if half afraid. Thinking that she wished to speak with some\nof us, I went toward her, but she waved me off with an air, saying,--\n\n\"It's no use your coming, you're not the madam, I'll bet.\"\n\nWith these words she walked into the room and took a general survey of\nour party. First she cast a sharp glance at Mr. Lee, but withdrew it\ndirectly; passed a careless look over my person, broke into a broad\nsmile as Jessie came under her observation, and having thus disposed of\nus, came up to Mrs. Lee, who opened her eyes wide, and was for a moment\nastonished by the sudden appearance of the girl.\n\n\"Perhaps you don't want me here, now that so many other folks are\ncoming,\" said the girl, clasping and unclasping her hands, which at last\nfell loosely before her. \"They tell me down-stairs that I don't belong\nhere nohow, and hadn't ought to put myself forward. But I haven't got no\none to speak up for me, being an orphan, so here I am; do you want me,\nor must I up and go.\"\n\n\"Who are you, my girl?\" asked Mrs. Lee, in her gentle way.\n\n\"My father was the gardener here, marm, but he's dead; so is my mother,\nlong ago. My name is Lottie, and I've stayed on here doing things about,\nbecause I hadn't anywhere else to go. That's pretty much all about it.\"\n\n\"And you wish to stay?\"\n\n\"Do I wish to stay, is it? Yes, I do, awfully. I can earn my board and\nmore, too, in the kitchen, cleaning silver and scouring knives and\nfeeding chickens, but since I catched sight of you being carried up them\nsteps, marm, my ideas have ris a notch. I should like to tend on you\ndreadfully. You could tell me how, you know, and I'm cute to learn; ask\n'em down below, if you don't believe me.\"\n\nMrs. Lee broke into a faint laugh; the manners and abrupt speech of the\ngirl struck her as comical in the extreme. As for myself, I have seldom\nseen a creature so awkward, so brusque, and yet so interesting. She was,\nI should fancy, about eight years of age, square, angular, restless, but\nno lily was ever more pure than her complexion, and her hair, thick and\nsoft, was of that delicate golden tint we find in new silk, before it\nis reeled from the cocoon. Altogether, she was a strange creature, full\nof vivid feeling and dreadfully in earnest. Mrs. Lee liked her, I could\nmake sure of that, from the serene pleasure which came to her face as\nshe looked into the girl's large gray eyes, which were shaded with\nlashes much darker than her hair.\n\n\"And you would like to make yourself useful up here,\" she said, smiling\nat the girl's intense eagerness.\n\n\"Goodness--wouldn't I?\"\n\n\"But, can you be quiet?\"\n\n\"As a bird on its nest.\"\n\n\"And cheerful?\"\n\n\"Why, marm, I'm the cheerfullest creature on these premises. You may\ncount in the squirrels, rabbits, and robins, and after that, I can say\nit.\"\n\nMrs. Lee turned her eyes on her husband, who sat near her couch, greatly\namused by the dialogue.\n\n\"What do you think? She seems bright, and I dare say will try her best.\"\n\n\"At any rate, she promises to be amusing,\" answered Mr. Lee, and a\ngood-natured smile quivered about his lips.\n\n\"And kind-hearted, I will answer for that, don't you think so, Martha?\"\n\n\"I am sure of it.\"\n\nAs the words left my lips, Lottie made a dive at me, took my hand in\nboth hers, and kissed it with a wild outgush of feeling. \"You're good as\ngold, silver, and diamonds,\" she said. \"I was sure that you would be on\nmy side, though you do look as if butter wouldn't melt in your mouth.\nTell me just what to do about the lady, and see if I don't come up to\nthe mark. It's in me, I know that.\"\n\nMrs. Lee closed her eyes wearily; even this short conversation was too\nmuch for her weak nerves.\n\n\"Go down-stairs now,\" I said to the girl in a low voice; \"by-and-by you\nshall be told about your duties. The first and greatest is quietness.\"\n\nShe nodded her head, put a finger to her lips, and went out of the room\non tiptoe.\n\nMrs. Lee opened her eyes as the girl went out, and beckoned to Jessie.\n\n\"Do you like that strange little orphan?\" she questioned.\n\n\"Like her? indeed I do, mamma,\" said the kind-hearted girl. \"She is so\nwarm, so earnest, and uses such queer words. But Aunt Martha will cure\nher of that. I was just thinking how pleasant it would be to teach her.\"\n\n\"That is a good idea, child; who knows what we may do for her?\"\n\nHere Mrs. Lee turned upon her cushions a little wearily, and from that\ntime, Lottie became her attendant.\n\nNow our domestic life began in earnest. Mrs. Lee's disease was not often\npainful, nor immediately dangerous. Contented with the love that\nsurrounded her, she fell gently into the invalid habits, which had\nsomething pleasant in them when incited by a home like that.\n\nFor my part, I knew no more attractive spot than her room. There Jessie\ntook her lessons in the morning, and in the afternoon, Mr. Lee always\nsat with us, reading to her while we worked or studied. Never in this\nworld, I do think, was a family more closely united, or that seemed so\ncompletely uplifted from care or trouble as ours.\n\nSometimes Mrs. Lee would regret what she called the waste of my youth in\nher daughter's behalf, but I had no such feeling. Society was nothing to\nme, while those I loved so dearly were part of my every-day life. Of\ncourse I had seen my share of social life in Europe, had met many\nagreeable people, and knew what it was to be admired,--perhaps\nloved,--but my heart had never, for one moment, swerved from its old\naffections. Ardently as in my childhood, I loved those two first and\nlast friends. As for \"Our Jessie,\" I cannot trust myself to speak of\nher. If ever one human being adored another, I adored that bright,\nbeautiful girl. They talked of sacrifices; why, it would have broken my\nheart had Jessie been taken from me and sent to school. Of course, we\nhad plenty of society, the best people from the town visited us often,\nand sometimes an old friend whom we had met on our travels would find us\nout. But Mrs. Lee's state of health precluded much hospitality, and so\nwe were left almost entirely to the quiet home-life which all of us\nloved so well.\n\nThus months and years rolled on, stealing the freshness and bloom from\nme, and giving them tenfold to my darling.\n\nIf I have dwelt somewhat at length on my early life, it is not because I\nam attempting to give prominence to my own feelings or actions, but that\nthe reader may understand how intense and all-absorbing a feeling of\naffectionate gratitude may become,--how it may color and pervade a whole\nexistence.\n\nIn my helpless orphanage, two noble young people had found me lonely,\ndespondent, and almost friendless. At once, without question or\nreservation, they took me into their hearts and gave me a permanent\nhome. Now that my benefactress had fallen into entire dependence upon\nthose she loved for happiness, was it strange that I stood ready to give\nup my youth for her and her beautiful child?\n\nThis generous woman was forever speaking of my action as a noble\nsacrifice. But to my thinking it was happiness in itself. I loved to\nwatch what might have been my own life, dawning brightly in the youth of\nJessie Lee; and when her first lover appeared, I was almost as much\ninterested as the girl herself, who was, in fact, quite unconscious, for\na long time, that the young man loved her at all.\n\nHe was a splendid young fellow, though, and even \"Our Jessie\" might have\nbeen proud of the conquest she had unconsciously made.\n\nYoung Bosworth was the grandson of a fine old lady, born in England, I\nthink, who inhabited the large stone house I have spoken of as forming a\npicturesque feature in the landscape, on the day I was rescued from the\nadder. He was interested in an iron company near the town, financially,\nand was about to enter into active business in the partnership, having\njust completed his minority. His business brought him frequently to our\nhouse, for Mr. Lee was considered a safe adviser in such matters; thus\nan intimacy sprung up between the young man and \"Our Jessie\" just when\nthe first bloom of her girlhood was deepening into the rare beauty for\nwhich she was so remarkable in after-years.\n\nBut Jessie was all unconscious of the love that I could detect in every\nglance of those fine eyes, and in every tone of the voice that grew\ntender and musical whenever it addressed her. Indeed, the young man took\nno pains to conceal the feelings that seemed to possess him entirely. No\none but a person utterly innocent and unconscious of her own attractions\ncould have remained an hour ignorant of such devotion.\n\nI think Jessie liked this man, and if nothing had happened to intervene,\nthat liking would have ripened gently into love, as fruit exposed to the\nsweet dews of night and the warm noonday sun, ripens and grows crimson\nso gradually that we mark the result without observing the progress.\n\nBut something did happen, which not only interrupted the pleasant\nrelations which had been established between this young man and our\nfamily, but which broke up all the quiet and happiness of our domestic\nlife.\n\nHitherto our lives had been so tranquil that there was little to\ndescribe. We had, to an extent, isolated ourselves from the general\nworld, and so surrounded ourselves with blessings, that the one\nmisfortune of our lives had proved almost a beneficence, for Mrs. Lee's\nillness had only drawn us closer together. But all was to be changed\nnow.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VII.\n\nOUT IN THE WORLD.\n\n\nWhen Jessie reached her eighteenth year, Mrs. Lee became more languid\nthan usual, and early in the season her physician suggested a few weeks\nat the sea-side.\n\nI think the dear lady was induced to follow his advice from a desire to\ngive our girl a glimpse of the life which should have been opened to her\nabout that time, rather than from any hopes of benefit from sea-bathing.\nShe entered into the project at once, and brightened visibly under the\ninfluence of Jessie's openly expressed enthusiasm. The dear girl had in\nreality seen nothing of life, and she was happy as a bird at the\nprospect of entering what seemed to her like an enchanted land.\n\nLate in June, that year, we went to Long Branch upon the Jersey shore,\nand there among the crowd of fashionables from Philadelphia and New\nYork, a new life opened to our Jessie, whose wealth and exceeding beauty\nsoon made her an object of general admiration.\n\nI cannot tell you how we first became acquainted with Mrs. Dennison. She\nwas a Southern woman, about whom there was a vague reputation of wealth\ninherited from an old man, whom she had married in his dotage, and of a\nvery luxurious life which had commenced so soon after the funeral as to\ncreate some scandal. She was certainly a very beautiful woman, tall,\nexquisitely formed, lithe and graceful as a leopardess. Her manners were\ncaressing, her voice sweetly modulated, and her powers of conversation\nwonderfully varied. At first I was fascinated by the woman. She occupied\nrooms that opened on the same veranda with ours, and had stolen so\ncompletely into our companionship by a thousand little attentions to\nMrs. Lee, before we really knew anything about her, that afterward it\nseemed unnecessary to make further inquiry. It would have proved of\nlittle avail had our research been ever so rigid, for no one seemed\nreally to have any positive knowledge about her. Even the gossip I have\nmentioned could always be traced back to a remarkably bright mulatto\nlady's-maid, who was generally in attendance upon her, and who conversed\nfreely with every one who chose to question her. But all the\nintelligence so gathered was sure to add to the power and wealth of a\nmistress whom the mulatto pronounced to be one of the most distinguished\nand beautiful women of the South. All this rather interested Mr. Lee,\nwho found this lady so often bestowing little attentions upon his wife,\nthat he came to recognize her as a friend, and, after a time, seemed to\ntake great pleasure in her conversation. All this troubled me a little.\nWhy? surely the feeling which turned my heart from that woman was not\njealousy. Had I indeed so completely identified myself with my friends,\nthat the approach to confidential relations with another person gave me\npain? I could not understand the feeling, but, struggle against it as I\nwould, the presence of that woman made me restless. She never touched\nMrs. Lee that I did not long to dash her hand away.\n\nJessie, like the rest, was fascinated with her new friend. They would\nwalk together for hours on the shore, where a crowd of admirers was sure\nto gather around them, while I sat upon the veranda with my\nbenefactress, anxious and disturbed.\n\nAfter a time, another person was introduced into our party. He first\nbecame acquainted with Mrs. Lee, and seemed to drop into our\ncompanionship in that way without any connection with Mrs. Dennison; but\nI learned afterward that Mr. Lawrence had been very attentive to her\nfrom her first appearance at the Branch, and that a rumor had for a time\nprevailed that they were engaged.\n\nAll this might not have interested me much but for something that I\nobserved in Jessie, who was evidently far better acquainted with the man\nthan any of us; for it seems he had been in the habit of joining her and\nMrs. Dennison in their walks long before he attained an introduction to\nMrs. Lee. Lawrence was a tall, powerful man, very distinguished and\nelegant in his bearing, wonderfully brilliant in conversation, and one\nwho always would be a leader for good or evil among his fellow-men. He\nhad been a good deal connected with the politics of the country, and at\none time was considered a power in Wall Street, from which he had\nwithdrawn, it was impossible to say whether penniless, or with a large\nfortune.\n\nThis man was soon on terms of cordial intimacy with our family, but I\nwatched him with distrust. He was just the person to dazzle and\nfascinate an ardent, inexperienced girl like our Jessie, and I saw with\npain that her color would rise and fade beneath his glances, and that a\nlook of triumph lighted up his eyes when he remarked it.\n\nHere was another source of anxiety. This man of the world, who had spent\nhalf his life in the struggles of Wall Street and a tangle of politics,\nwas no match for a creature so pure and true as our Jessie. Yet I\ngreatly feared that her heart was turning to him at the expense of that\nbrave, honorable young man whose very existence seemed to have been\nforgotten among us.\n\nBut young Bosworth came at last, and I was more at rest. Jessie was\ncertainly glad to see him, and, much to my surprise, he dropped at once\ninto intimate relations with Lawrence, and recognized him as an old\nfriend whom he had met during the few months that he had spent abroad.\n\nI have not said that Lottie was one of the attendants whom we brought\nfrom the Ridge. This girl had grown somewhat in stature, but was still\nvery small. Her light-yellow hair was wonderfully abundant, and she had\na dozen fantastic ways of dressing it, which added to the singularity\nof her appearance. At times, her eyes were clear and steady in their\nglances; but, if a feeling of distrust came over her, both eyes would\ncross ominously, and she seemed to be glancing inward with the sharp\nvigilance of a fox.\n\nThere always had been a remarkable sympathy between me and this strange\ngirl. From the day I first saw her, she seemed to divine my feelings,\nconceal them as I would, and to share all my dislikes almost before they\nwere formed. At first, she had kept aloof from the servants of the\nhotel. This was not strange, for Lottie was, in fact, better educated\nthan some of their mistresses. She had managed to pick up a great deal\nof knowledge as she sat by while Jessie took her lessons, and I had\nfound pleasure in teaching her such English branches as befitted her\nstation in life. In fact, Lottie had become more like a companion than a\nservant with us all.\n\nTo my surprise, after keeping aloof for a whole week, Lottie fell into\nthe closest intimacy with Cora, Mrs. Dennison's maid, and I could see\nthat she lost no opportunity of watching the mistress and Mr. Lawrence.\n\nWhat all this might have ended in I cannot tell, for just as our\nintimacy became closest, the strong sea-air began to have an unfavorable\neffect on our patient.\n\nA sudden longing for home seized upon her one day, after Lottie had been\nwith her talking about the Ridge, and it was decided that we should\nleave the Branch at once, though the season was at its height, and\nJessie had entered into its gayeties with all the zest of her ardent\nnature.\n\nI think Mr. Lee was rather reluctant to go away so suddenly. He had been\nso long excluded from this form of social life that it had all the charm\nof novelty to him; but the least wish of his wife was enough to change\nall this, and he became only anxious to get her safely home again.\n\nI do not know how it happened, or who really gave the invitation, but\non the night before I left we learned from Mrs. Dennison herself, that\nshe had promised to make us an early visit; and half an hour later, as I\nsat alone in the lower veranda, young Bosworth and Mr. Lawrence passed\nme, talking earnestly. \"Of course, my dear fellow, I shall come if a\ncareless person like me will be acceptable to that fine old lady, your\ngrandmother. That promise of partridge-shooting is beyond my powers of\nresistance.\"\n\nIt was Mr. Lawrence who spoke, and I knew by this fragment of\nconversation that he too was coming into our neighborhood.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VIII.\n\nOUR GUEST.\n\n\nI stood in the oriel window that curved out from one end of the large\nparlor and looked toward the east; that is, it commanded a broad view\nfrom all points, save the direct west. The heavenly glimpses of scenery\nthat you caught at every turn through the small diamond panes were\nenough to drive an artist mad, that so much unpainted poetry could\nexist, and not glow warm and fresh on his canvas. I am an artist, at\nsoul, and have a gallery of the most superb brain-pictures stowed away\nin my thoughts, but among them all there is nothing to equal the scene,\nor rather scenes, I was gazing upon.\n\nThe window was deep, and when that rich volume of curtains shut it out\nfrom the parlor, it was the most cosy little spot in the world. A deep\neasy-chair, and a tiny marble stand, filled it luxuriously. On the\noutside, white jasmines, passion-flowers, and choice roses, crept up to\nthe edge of the glass in abundance, encircling you with massive wreaths\nof foliage and blossoms.\n\nThis window had always been my favorite retreat, when sadness or care\noppressed me, as it had begun to do seriously of late, for a degree of\nestrangement had arisen between Jessie and myself, after our return from\nthe sea-side. I could not share her enthusiasm regarding some of the\npersons we had met there, and for the first time in her life she was\nhalf offended with me.\n\nI can hardly express the pain this gave me. All her life she had come to\nme in her troubles; and her bright, innocent joys I always shared; for,\nlike a flower-garden, she sent back the sunshine that passed over her,\nenriched and more golden from a contact with her loveliness. I can\nhardly tell you what a thing of beauty she was; yet, I doubt if you\nwould have thought her so very lovely as I did, for my admiration was\nalmost idolatry. Of late I had remarked a certain reserve about her, the\nreticence which kept a sanctuary of feeling and thought quite away from\nthe world, and alas, from me also. Yet she was frank and truthful, as\nthe flower which always folds the choicest perfume close in its own\nheart. What secret feeling was it that kept her from me, her oldest and\nbest friend.\n\nI was thinking of Jessie while I sat in the easy-chair, looking down the\ncarriage-road that led through our private grounds from the highway; for\nours was an isolated dwelling, and no carriage that was not destined for\nthe house ever came up that sweep of road. I looked down upon it with a\nsad, heavy feeling, though my eyes passed over a terrace crowned with a\nwilderness of flowers, reached by a flight of steps. The gleam of these\nflowers, and the green beyond, were a part of the scenery on which\nI gazed, yet I saw nothing of them.\n\nWe expected Mrs. Dennison. The carriage had gone over to the country\ntown which lay behind the hills piled up at my left, and I was listening\nfor the sound of its wheels on the gravel with a strange thrill of\nanxiety. Why was this? What did I care about the young widow who had\nbeen invited to spend a few days with our Jessie? She was only a\nwatering-place acquaintance--a clever, beautiful woman of the world,\nwho, having a little time on her hands, had condescended to remember\nMrs. Lee's half-extorted invitation, and was expected accordingly.\n\nJessie was rather excited with the idea of a guest, for it so chanced\nthat we had been alone for a week or two; and though I never saw a\nfamily more independent of society than Mrs. Lee's, guests always bring\nexpectation and cheerfulness with them in a well-appointed country\nhouse.\n\n\"I wonder what keeps them?\" said my darling, softly lifting one side of\nthe silken curtains, and unconsciously dropping them into the background\nof as lovely a picture as you ever saw. \"Here are some flowers for the\nstand, Aunt Matty. She'll catch their bloom through the window, and know\nit is my welcome.\"\n\nI took the crystal vase from her hand, and set it on the little table\nbefore me.\n\n\"Hush!\" she said, lifting the drapery higher, and bending forward to\nlisten. \"Hush! Isn't that the carriage coming through the pine grove?\"\n\nI turned in my chair, for Jessie was well worth looking at, even by a\nperson who loved her less fondly than I did. Standing there, draped to\nartistic perfection in her pretty white dress, gathered in surplice\nfolds over her bosom, and fastened there with an antique head, cut in\ncoral, with its loose sleeves falling back from the uplifted arm, till\nits beautiful contour could be seen almost to the shoulder, she was a\nsubject for Sir Joshua Reynolds. I am sure that great master would not\nhave changed the grouping in a single point.\n\n\"No,\" I said, listening; \"it is the gardener's rake on the gravel walk,\nI think.\"\n\nShe bent her head sideways, listening, and incredulous of my\nexplanation. Some gleams of sunshine fell through the glass, and lay\nrichly on the heavy braid of hair that crowned her head in a raven\ncoronal.\n\nWe always remember those we love in some peculiar moment which lifts\nitself out of ordinary life by important associations; or, as in this\ncase, by the singular combinations of grace that render them attractive.\nTo my last breath, I shall never forget Jessie Lee, as she stood before\nme that morning.\n\n\"Well,\" she said, with an impatient movement that left the curtains\nfalling between us like the entrance of a tent, \"watched rose-buds never\nopen. I'll go back to the piano, and let her take me by surprise. I'm\nglad you're looking so nice, aunt. She'll be sure to like you now in\nspite of herself, though you were so cold and stiff with her at the\nBranch, and I defy you to help liking her in the end.\"\n\nAs Jessie said this, her hand fell on the keys of the piano, and\ninstantly a gush of music burst through the room, so joyous that the\nbirds that haunted the old forest-trees around the house burst into a\nriot of rival melody. Amid this delicious serenade the carriage drove\nup.\n\nI saw Mr. Lee alight, in his usual stately way; then Mrs. Dennison\nsprang upon the lowest step of the broad stairs that led up to the\nterrace, scarcely touching Mr. Lee's offered hand. There she stood a\nmoment, her silk flounces fluttering in the sunlight, and her neatly\ngloved hands playing with the clasp of her travelling satchel, as the\nservant took a scarlet shawl and some books from the carriage. Then she\ngave a rapid glance over the grounds, and looked up to the house,\nsmiling pleasantly, and doubtless paying Mr. Lee some compliment, for\nhis usually sedate face brightened pleasantly, and he took the lady's\nsatchel, with a gallant bow, which few young men of his time could have\nequalled.\n\nCertainly our guest was a beautiful woman: tall, queenly, and conscious\nof it all; but I did not like her. One of those warnings, or\nantipathies, if you please, which makes the heart take shelter in\ndistrust, seized upon me again that moment, and I felt like flying to my\ndarling, who sat amid the sweet harmonies she was herself creating, to\nshield her from some unknown danger.\n\nI left my seat and passed through the curtains, thinking to warn Jessie\nof her friend's arrival; but when I was half across the room, our\nvisitor came smiling and rustling through the door. She motioned me to\nbe still, and, darting across the carpet, seized Jessie's head between\nboth hands, bent it back, and, stooping with the grace of a Juno, kissed\nher two or three times, while her clear, ringing laugh mingled with the\nnotes which had broken into sudden discords under Jessie's fingers.\n\n\"So I have chased my bird to its nest, at last,\" she said, releasing her\ncaptive with a movement that struck even me--who disliked her from the\nbeginning--as one of exquisite grace. \"Hunted it to the mountains, and\nfind it in full song, while I searched every window in the house, as we\ndrove up, and fancied all sorts of things: a cold welcome among the\nleast.\"\n\n\"That you will never have,\" cried Jessie, and the smile with which she\ngreeted her guest was enough of welcome for any one. \"The truth is, I\ngot out of patience, and so played to quiet myself while Aunt Matty\nwatched.\"\n\n\"And how is the dear Aunt Matty?\" said the guest, coming toward me with\nboth hands extended. \"Ah! Jessie Lee, you are a fortunate girl to have\nso sweet a friend.\"\n\n\"I am fortunate in everything,\" said Jessie, turning her large, earnest\neyes on my face with a look of tenderness that went to my heart, \"and\nmost of all here.\"\n\n\"And I,\" said Mrs. Dennison, with a suppressed breath, and a look of\ngraceful sadness. \"Well, well, one can't expect everything.\"\n\nJessie laughed. This bit of sentiment in her guest rather amused her.\n\n\"Ah, you never will believe in sorrow of any kind, until it comes in\nearnest,\" said the widow, with an entire change in her countenance; \"but\nI, who have seen it in so many forms, cannot always forget.\"\n\n\"But,\" said Jessie, with one of her caressing movements, \"you must\nforget it now. We are to be happy as the day is long while you are here.\nIsn't that so, aunt? We have laid out such walks, and rides, and\npleasant evenings--of course, you have brought your habit.\"\n\n\"Of course. What would one be in the country without riding?\"\n\n\"And your guitar? I want Aunt Matty to hear you sing. She never was with\nus when you had an instrument.\"\n\n\"Oh! Aunt Matty shall have enough of that, I promise her; the man who\nfollows with my luggage has the guitar somewhere among his plunder.\"\n\n\"I'm very glad,\" said Jessie, smiling archly. \"Now everything is\nprovided for except--\"\n\n\"Except what, lady-bird?\"\n\n\"Except that we have no gentlemen to admire you.\"\n\n\"No gentlemen!\"\n\n\"Not a soul but papa.\"\n\nThe widow certainly looked a little disappointed for the first instant,\nbut she rallied before any eye less keen than mine could have observed\nit, and laughed joyously.\n\n\"Thank heaven, we sha'n't be bothered with compliments, nor tormented\nwith adoration. Oh! Jessie Lee, Jessie Lee! I am so glad of a little\nrest from all that sort of thing: a'n't you?\"\n\n\"I never was persecuted with it like you, fair lady, remember that,\"\nreplied Jessie, demurely.\n\n\"Hypocrite! don't attempt to deceive me; I had eyes at the sea-side.\"\n\n\"And very beautiful ones they were--everybody agreed in that.\"\n\n\"There it is!\" cried the widow, lifting her hands in affected horror;\n\"when gentlemen are absent, ladies will flatter each other. Pray, put a\nstop to this, Miss,----\"\n\n\"Miss Hyde,\" I said, rather tired of these trivialities; \"but Jessie, in\nthe eagerness of her welcome, forgets that our guest has scarcely time\nto prepare for dinner.\"\n\n\"Ah! is it so late?\" said Mrs. Dennison.\n\n\"Shall I show the way to your chamber?\"\n\n\"We will all go,\" said Jessie, circling her friend's waist with her arm\nand moving off.\n\nWe crossed the hall, a broad, open passage, furnished with easy-chairs\nand sofas, for it was a favorite resort for the whole family, and opened\ninto a square balcony at one end, which commanded one of the heavenly\nviews I have spoken of. The widow stopped to admire it an instant, and\nthen we entered the room I had been careful to arrange pleasantly for\nher reception.\n\nIt was a square, pleasant chamber, which commanded a splendid prospect\nfrom the east; curtains like frostwork, and a bed like snow, harmonized\npleasantly with walls hung with satin paper of a delicate blue, and fine\nIndia matting with which the floor was covered. We had placed vases and\nbaskets of flowers on the deep window-sills, those of the richest\nfragrance we could find, which a soft, pure wind wafted through the\nroom; the couch, the easy-chair, and the low dressing-chair were draped\nwith delicate blue chintz, with a pattern of wild roses running over it.\n\nMrs. Dennison made a pretty exclamation of surprise as she entered the\nroom. She was full of these graceful flatteries, that proved the more\neffective because of their seeming spontaneousness. She took off her\nbonnet, and, sitting down before the toilet which stood beneath the\ndressing-glass, a cloud of lace and embroidery, began to smooth her hair\nbetween both hands, laughing at its disorder, and wondered if anybody\non earth ever looked so hideous as she did.\n\n\"This woman,\" I said, in uncharitable haste,--\"this woman is insatiable.\nShe is not content with the flattery of one sex, but challenges it from\nall.\" Yet, spite of myself, I could not resist the influence of her\nsweet voice and graceful ways; she interested me far more than I wished.\n\n\"Now,\" said Jessie, coming into the hall with her eyes sparkling\npleasantly,--\"now what do you think? Have I praised her too much? Are\nyou beginning to like her yet?\"\n\nI kissed her, but gave no other answer. A vague desire to shield her\nfrom that woman's influence possessed me, but the feeling was misty, and\nhad no reasonable foundation. I could not have explained why this\nimpulse of protection sprung up in my heart, or how Jessie, the dear\ngirl, guessed at its existence.\n\nBut she was perfectly content with the approval which my kiss implied,\nand went into the parlor to await the coming of her guest. That moment\nMrs. Lee's maid came down with a message from her mistress, and I went\nup-stairs at once.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IX.\n\nFANCIES AND PREMONITIONS.\n\n\nIt seemed a wonder that Mrs. Lee ever could have been a beautiful woman\nlike her daughter, for she had faded sadly during her illness. Her hair\nwas still thick and long, but the mountain snow was not whiter. Her\nface, too, was of opaque paleness; while her delicate eyebrows were\nblack as jet; and the large eyes beneath them had lost nothing of their\npenetrating brightness.\n\nMrs. Lee was lying on the couch, in the light of a broad window which\nopened to the south; the balcony was as usual filled with plants, and\nevery morning her couch was moved, and the window drapery put back that\nshe might command some feature in the landscape over which her eye had\nnot wearied the day before. It was a harmless enjoyment, and one which\nthe whole family loved to encourage. Indeed, there was not a fancy or\ncaprice of hers which was ever questioned in that house.\n\n\"Ah, Martha, it is you; I am glad of it. For when I am ill at ease, you\nalways do me good.\"\n\nShe held out her little thin hand while speaking, and pressed mine\nalmost imperceptibly.\n\n\"What has happened, Martha? During the last half hour something\noppresses me, as if the atmosphere were disturbed; yet it is a clear\nday, and the roses on the terrace look brighter than usual.\"\n\n\"Nothing has happened, dear lady. Mr. Lee has come back from town,\nbringing the lady we all expected.\"\n\n\"Mrs. Dennison?\"\n\n\"Yes, Mrs. Dennison. She has just gone to her room.\"\n\nMrs. Lee closed her eyes a moment and opened them with a faint smile,\nwhich seemed to ask pardon for some weakness.\n\n\"Have you seen her?\"\n\n\"Yes. I was in the parlor when she came, and went with her to her room.\"\n\n\"And you like her better than at first, I hope?\"\n\nI hesitated.\n\n\"She is beautiful!\"\n\n\"Yes, in a certain way,\" I answered; \"but when one has got used to our\nJessie's style, nothing else seems to equal it.\"\n\nThe mother smiled and held out her hand again.\n\n\"You love Jessie?\"\n\nI felt the tears filling my eyes. There was something so tender and\nsweet in this question that it made a child of me. The mother turned\nupon her couch, bent her lips to my hand, and dropped it gently from her\nhold.\n\n\"Martha Hyde, what is this which troubles me?\"\n\n\"Indeed, I cannot tell.\"\n\n\"Does Jessie seem happy with her friend?\"\n\n\"Very happy; I have seldom seen her so animated.\"\n\n\"But you have not told me plainly. Do you like this lady?\"\n\n\"I--I cannot tell. She is beautiful; at least most people would think\nher so;--rich, I believe?\"\n\nI rather put this as a question.\n\n\"I think so. She had splendid rooms at the hotel, you know, and spent\nmoney freely, so Mr. Lee was told; but that is of little consequence; we\nwant nothing of her riches if she has them.\"\n\n\"Certainly not; but if she has expensive habits without the means of\ngratifying them within herself, it is an important proof of character,\"\nI said. \"May I ask, dear lady, who really recommended Mrs. Dennison to\nyou or your daughter?\"\n\n\"Oh! a good many people spoke highly of her; she was a general\nfavorite!\"\n\n\"Yes; but did you meet any person who had known her long?--who had been\nacquainted with her husband, for instance?\"\n\n\"No, I cannot remember any such person.\"\n\n\"And you invited her? she said so.\"\n\n\"That is it. I cannot quite call to mind that I did invite her.\nSomething was said about our house being among pleasant scenery, and she\nexpressed a desire to see it. I may have said that I really hoped she\nwould see it some time; and then she thanked me as if I had urged her to\ncome. Still Jessie liked her so much that I was rather pleased than\notherwise, and so it rested.\"\n\n\"Well,\" I said, \"if Jessie is pleased, that is everything, you know,\nmadam. I sometimes think the dear girl ought to have the company of\nyounger persons about her.\"\n\n\"Yes, certainly; but with a girl like my Jessie, so sensitive, so proud,\nfor she is very proud, Martha.\"\n\n\"I know it,\" was my answer. \"I have never seen more sensitive pride in\nany person of her age.\"\n\n\"Well, with a disposition like that, the kind of young person she is\nintimate with is very important. This is the reason I wished to see you\nand learn if your opinion has not changed regarding our guests; my own\nfeelings are strangely disturbed.\"\n\n\"You are not as well as usual this morning,\" I replied. \"Let me draw the\ncouch nearer and open a leaf of the window.\"\n\nShe assented, and I drew the couch so close to the window that with a\nsash open she could command a view of the richest corner of the\nflower-garden and a of the lawn. The wind swept pleasantly over\nthe balcony, in which pots of rose geraniums and heliotrope had been\nplaced. Mrs. Lee loved the breath of these flowers, and sighed faintly\nas it floated over her with the fresh morning air.\n\nShe lay some time in this pleasant position without speaking. When she\nwas disposed to be thoughtful, we seldom disturbed her, for so sensitive\nhad disease rendered her nerves, that the sudden sound of a voice would\nmake her start and tremble like a criminal. So I kept my place behind\nthe couch, looking down into the garden, and thinking of many things.\n\nAll at once, sweet, dear voices rose from among the flowers, and I saw\nour Jessie and the widow Dennison turning a corner of the house, each\nwith an arm around the other's waist, laughing and chatting together.\nJessie had not changed her dress, but a cluster of crimson roses glowed\nin her hair, and coral bracelets tinted the transparency of her sleeves.\nThe sun touched the black braid which surrounded her head as she came\nout of the shadow, and no raven's plumage was ever more glossy.\n\nMrs. Dennison was strangely attired. The period of which I speak was\nabout the time the Zouave jacket took its brief picturesque reign. This\nwoman was, in a degree, her own inventor of fashions, and something very\nsimilar to this jacket fell over the loose habit-skirt that draped her\nbosom and arms. This garment of black silk, richly braided, matched the\nrustling skirt of her dress, and the Oriental design of the whole was\ncompleted by a net of blue and gold, which shaded half her rich brown\nhair, and fell in tassels to her left shoulder.\n\nIn my whole life I never saw a more striking contrast than these two\npersons presented. I cannot tell you where it lay. Not in the\nsuperiority which the widow possessed in height--not in her elaborate\ngrace. Jessie was a little above the medium height herself, and a more\nelegant creature did not live. But there was something which struck you\nat once. It is of no use attempting to define it. The difference was to\nbe imagined, not explained. The mother felt it, I am certain, for her\neyes took a strange, anxious lustre as they fell on those two young\npersons, and she began to breathe irregularly, as if something oppressed\nher.\n\nShe looked up to me at last to see if I was watching them. I smiled and\nsaid, \"At any rate, she is a splendid creature.\"\n\n\"No one can dispute that! But our Jessie! Do you know, as I was looking\nat them, something came across me. Through the hazy light which settled\naround me, I saw a bird with its wings outspread flitting in the folds\nof a serpent? The picture passed through my brain one instant, and was\ngone--gone before Jessie, who had stooped to gather something, regained\nher position. This has happened before in my life--what can it be?\"\n\n\"You are anxious and nervous, dear lady, that is all. Since your visit\nto the sea-side, these strange visions have become more common.\"\n\n\"I hope they will pass off,\" she murmured, pressing a pale hand over her\neyes. \"But there was another in the group; behind Jessie's frightened\nface, I saw that of Mr. Lee.\"\n\nWhile she was speaking, I saw Mr. Lee come out of the hall-door, and\ncross the platform which led to the garden, where his daughter and her\nguest were walking. He was a handsome man, still in the very prime of\nlife, one of the most distinguished persons that I ever saw. It was from\nhim that our Jessie had inherited her queenly pride, which the exquisite\nsensibility of the mother's nature had softened into grace.\n\nMrs. Lee closed her eyes, and I saw her lips turn pale; but she repulsed\nmy approach with a motion of the hand. I have no idea what she had seen\nwhich escaped me. But when I looked again, Mr. Lee was talking with his\ndaughter; while the widow stood by, grouping some flowers which she held\ncoquettishly in her hand. I saw Mr. Lee look at her, indifferently at\nfirst, then with smiling interest. They were evidently talking of her\ngraceful work, for she held it up for both father and daughter to\nadmire.\n\nAs Jessie lifted her eyes, she saw us near the window, and, forgetting\nthe bouquet, waved a kiss to her mother. That instant I saw the widow\npress the bouquet lightly to her lips.\n\nMr. Lee reached forth his hand; but she shook her head, laughed, and\nplaced the flowers in her bosom.\n\nMrs. Lee was not in a position to see this. I stood up and had a better\nview; but she instantly complained of dizziness, and faint spasms of\npain contracted her forehead.\n\nI had seen nothing, absolutely nothing. Yet the glances of that woman,\nas she looked at Mr. Lee over the cluster of flowers, seemed absolutely\nlike wafting kisses with her eyes. Jessie saw nothing, save that the\nlittle cluster of blossoms somehow found its way into her friend's\nbosom. So, in her sweet unconsciousness, she passed on, and was lost on\nthe other side of the tower.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER X.\n\nNEW VISITORS.\n\n\nMrs. Lee never went down to dinner, or, if she did, it was so rarely\nthat we looked upon her presence as a sort of holiday. She was very\ndainty in her appetite, and on ordinary occasions was served by her own\nmaid, or of late by Lottie. I think she had rather intended to come down\nthat day in honor of our guest, but the illness that seized upon her\ndrove this idea from her mind; so, leaving her with Lottie, I went away\nrestless and unaccountably unhappy.\n\nHow bright and blooming they came in from the garden, bringing its\nfragrance with them to the dinner-table! What a joyous, piquant\nconversation it was, that commenced with the soup and sparkled with the\nwine! There is no disputing it, our guest was a wonderful creature, her\ngraceful wit sparkled, her sentiment fascinated. She was calculated to\nkeep the man her beauty should win,--no doubt of that. Her conversation\ncharmed even me.\n\nJessie was constantly challenging admiration for her\nfriend--interrogating me with her eyes, and looking at her father to be\nsure that he fully appreciated the brilliancy which filled her own heart\nwith a sort of adoration. But the widow seemed quite unconscious that\nshe was an object of special admiration to any one. Nothing could be\nmore natural than her manner. At times she was really child-like.\n\nStill I did not like her. Why, it is useless to ask. Perhaps Mrs. Lee\nhad left an impression of her strange fancies on my mind,--perhaps the\natmosphere which surrounded her mingled with the subtile vitality of my\nintelligence and gave me the truth.\n\nWe had music in the evening. Our Jessie possessed the purest of soprano\nvoices. Many a celebrated prima donna has won laurels from inferior\ncapacity. As in all other things, her musical education had been\nperfect. Mrs. Dennison was her inferior in this. She performed\nsplendidly, and her rich contralto voice possessed many fine qualities;\nbut our birdie swept far above her, and soared away upon an ocean of\nharmonies that seemed born of heaven.\n\nThe windows were open, and we knew that this heaven of sweet sounds\nwould float to the invalid's chamber. Indeed, when I went out upon the\nplatform, back of the house, I saw Mrs. Lee lying in her white, loose\ndress, on the couch, as if the music had lulled her to sleep.\n\nI think Mrs. Dennison was not quite satisfied with herself. The glorious\nvoice of our Jessie seemed to take her by surprise, for after the first\ntrial she refused to sing again, but still kept the piano, and dashed\nthrough some fine opera music with spirit. Was she exhausting her\nill-humor in those stormy sounds?\n\nOn the next day, our young ladies rode on horseback. Both were superb\nequestrians; and Mr. Lee's stately management of his coal-black horse\nwas something worth looking at. As they dashed round a curve of the\nroad, Jessie turned on her saddle and waved me a kiss, where I stood on\nthe square balcony watching them. What a happy, bright creature she\nlooked!\n\nIt took me by surprise; but when the equestrians came back, two\ngentlemen had joined the party. One was young Bosworth, who had returned\nto the old country place, a mile down the valley, directly after we\nleft Long Branch, and since then had managed to join our Jessie in her\nrides oftener than any supposition of mere accident could warrant. The\ndear girl seemed a little annoyed when these meetings became more\nfrequent; but she bore our joking on the subject pleasantly, and up to\nthat morning had, I fancy, given little thought to his movements. The\nother man I recognized at once. It was Mr. Lawrence.\n\nThis gentleman rode up with Mr. Lee and Mrs. Dennison, who was evidently\ndividing her fascinations very equally between the two gentlemen. Jessie\nfollowed them with her cavalier, and I observed, as they dismounted,\nthat her cheeks were flushed, and her lips lightly curved, as if\nsomething had disturbed her.\n\nThe gentlemen did not dismount, for Jessie left Mrs. Dennison on the\nfoot of the terrace-steps, and, without pausing to give an invitation,\nran into the house.\n\nI left the balcony and went up to her chamber. She was walking to and\nfro in the room, with a quick, proud step, the tears sparkling in her\neyes.\n\n\"What is it?\" I said, going up to where she stood, and kissing her. \"Who\nhas wounded you?\"\n\n\"No one,\" she answered, and the proud tears flashed down to her cheek,\nand lay there like rain-drops hanging on the leaves of the wild\nrose,--\"no one. Only, only--\"\n\n\"Well, dear?\"\n\n\"You were right, Aunt Matty. That man really had just the feelings you\nsuspected; I could hardly prevent him from expressing them broadly. Keep\nas close to papa as I would, he found means to say things that made my\nblood burn. What right has any man to talk of love to a girl, until she\nhas given him some sort of encouragement, I should like to know?\"\n\n\"But perhaps he fancies that you have given him a little\nencouragement.\"\n\n\"Encouragement! I? Indeed, Aunt Matty, I never dreamed of this until\nnow!\"\n\n\"I am sure of it; but then you allowed him to join your rides, and\nseemed rather pleased.\"\n\n\"Why, the idea that he meant anything never entered my mind. Ah! Aunt\nMatty, haven't we said a thousand times that there must be some blame,\nsome coquetry on the lady's part, before a man, whom she is sure to\nreject, could presume to offer himself?\"\n\n\"But has he gone so far as that?\" I asked.\n\n\"Let me think. Alas! I was so confused, so angry, that it is impossible\nto remember just what he did say.\"\n\n\"But your answer?\"\n\n\"Why, as to that,\" she cried, with a little nervous laugh, \"I gave Flash\na cut with the whip and dashed on after the rest. Aunt Matty, upon my\nword, I doubt if I spoke at all.\"\n\n\"My dear child, he may half imagine himself accepted then.\"\n\n\"Accepted! What can you mean?\" she exclaimed, grasping her whip with\nboth hands and bending it double. \"I shall go wild if you say that.\"\n\n\"Why, do you dislike him so much?\"\n\n\"Dislike! no. What is there to dislike about him?\"\n\n\"Well, then,\" I said, a little mischievously, \"he is rather\ngood-looking, well educated, of irreproachable family, and rich.\"\n\n\"Don't, don't, Aunt Matty, or I shall hate you.\"\n\n\"Not quite so bad as that,\" I cried, kissing her hot cheek. \"Now, let us\nbe serious. All young ladies must expect offers of this kind.\"\n\n\"But I don't want them. It distresses me.\"\n\nI saw that she was in earnest, and that young Bosworth's attentions had\nreally distressed her. So, drawing her to a sofa, we sat down and talked\nthe matter over more quietly.\n\nI told her that it was useless annoying herself; that, until the young\ngentleman spoke out more definitely, she had nothing to torment herself\nabout; and when he did, a few quiet words would settle the whole matter.\n\n\"But can't we prevent him saying anything more? Or, if he does, will you\njust tell him how it is?\" she said, anxiously.\n\nI could not help smiling; there was no affectation here. I knew very\nwell that Jessie would give the world to avoid this refusal; but in such\ncases young ladies must take their own responsibilities: the\ninterference of third parties can only produce mischief.\n\nShe began to see the thing in its true light after a little, and talked\nit over more calmly. Many a girl would have been delighted with this\nhomage to her charms; but Jessie was no common person, and she felt a\nsort of degradation in inspiring a passion she could not return.\nBesides, it placed upon her the necessity of giving pain where it was in\nevery way undeserved; and that she had never done in her life.\n\nWhile we were talking, a light knock at the door heralded Mrs. Dennison.\nThere was nothing to call her to that part of the house, and her first\nwords conveyed an apology for the intrusion, for we both probably looked\na little surprised.\n\n\"I beg ten thousand pardons for rushing in upon you; but the gentlemen\nare waiting in the road to know if they can join us to-morrow. I could\nonly answer for myself, you know.\"\n\n\"Let them join you,\" I whispered; \"the sooner it is over with the\nbetter.\"\n\nJessie stood up, gathered the long riding-skirt in one hand, while she\nwalked past her guest with the air of a princess, and stepped out on the\nbalcony, from which she made a gesture of invitation, which the two\ngentlemen acknowledged with profound bows, and rode away.\n\n\"That's an angel!\" exclaimed Mrs. Dennison, laying her hand on Jessie's\nshoulder. \"I almost thought something had gone wrong, by the way you\nleft us. Poor Mr. Bosworth was quite crestfallen.\"\n\nJessie made a little gesture of annoyance, which the widow was quick to\nobserve, and instantly changed the subject.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XI.\n\nTHE BASKET OF FRUIT.\n\n\n\"I should not have thought, by the way you parted, that you and Mr.\nBosworth were old friends.\"\n\nJessie seemed annoyed, and replied, with a flush on her cheek, \"that it\nwas rather difficult to be demonstrative on horseback.\"\n\n\"At any rate, he's a splendid man,\" said the widow. \"Rich or poor? Bond\nor free? Tell us all about him. I never thought to inquire before, but\nthis looks serious.\"\n\n\"What strange questions you ask!\" answered Jessie, and the color\ndeepened in her cheek.\n\n\"Well, well, but the answer?\"\n\nHere I interposed: \"Mr. Bosworth is not very rich. At least I never\nheard that he was.\"\n\n\"What a pity!\" whispered the widow. \"But the other questions?\"\n\n\"If having no wife is to be free, you can hardly call him a bondman.\nYes.\"\n\n\"What has he ever done to distinguish himself, then? Can you tell me\nthat, Miss Hyde?\"\n\n\"He is considered a man of brilliant parts, certainly,\" I answered; \"but\nat his age few men have won permanent distinction, I fancy.\"\n\n\"At his age! Why, the man must be over eight-and-twenty, and half the\ngreat men that ever lived had made their mark in the world before they\nreached that age.\"\n\n\"Well, that may be,\" I replied; \"but in these times greatness is not so\neasily won. The level of general intelligence, in our country at least,\nis raised, and it requires great genius, indeed, to lift a man suddenly\nabove his fellows. In a dead sea of ignorance, superior ability looms up\nwith imposing conspicuousness. This is why the great men of past times\nhave cast the reflection of their minds on history;--not entirely\nbecause they excelled men of the present age, but from the low grade of\npopular intelligence that existed around them.\"\n\n\"Why, you talk like a statesman,\" said the widow, laughing. \"I had no\nidea that anything so near politics existed in the ladies of this\nhouse.\"\n\n\"What is history but the politics of the past?\" said Jessie. \"What is\npolitics but a history of the present?\"\n\n\"Perhaps you are right,\" said the widow, flinging off her careless\nmanner, and sitting down on one of the rustic chairs, where she began to\ndust her skirt with the fanciful whip fastened to her wrist. \"I have\noften wondered why it should be considered unfeminine for an educated\nwoman to understand the institutions of her own or any other country.\"\n\nMrs. Dennison looked at me as she spoke. Was the woman playing with my\nweakness? Or, did she really speak from her heart? If the former, she\nmust have been amused at my credulity, for I answered in honest\nfrankness:\n\n\"Nor I, either; except in evil, which is always better unknown. I can\nfancy no case where ignorance is a merit. Imagine Queen Victoria pluming\nherself on lady-like ignorance of the political state of her kingdom,\nwhen she opens Parliament in person.\"\n\nMrs. Dennison laughed, and chimed in with, \"Or the Empress of France\nbeing appointed Regent of a realm, the position of which it was deemed\nunwomanly to understand; yet, on the face of the earth, there are not\ntwo females more womanly than Victoria of England, and Eugenie of\nFrance.\"\n\n\"What true ideas this woman possesses!\" I said to myself. \"How could I\ndislike her so? Really, the most charming person in the world is a woman\nwho, under the light, graceful talk of conventional society, cultivates\nserious thought.\" While these reflections passed through my mind, the\nwidow was looking at me from under her eyelashes, as if she expected me\nto speak again; so I went on,--\n\n\"It is not the knowledge of politics in itself of which refined people\ncomplain; but its passion and the vindictive feelings which partisanship\nis sure to foster. The woman who loves her country cannot understand it\ntoo well. The unwomanliness lies in the fact that she sometimes plunges\ninto a turmoil of factions, thus becoming passionate and bitter.\"\n\n\"How plainly you draw the distinction between knowledge and prejudice!\"\nshe said, with one of her fascinating smiles. \"But you must have\ndiscussed this subject often--with Mr. Lee, perhaps?\"\n\n\"Yes, we talk on all subjects here. Nothing is forbidden, because few\nthings that are not noble and true ever present themselves.\"\n\n\"I was sure of it!\" exclaimed the lady, starting up with enthusiasm. \"I\nhave never been in a house where everything gave such evidence of\nhigh-toned intelligence.\"\n\nShe sat down again thoughtfully, dusting her habit with the little whip.\n\n\"I have not yet seen my hostess, but that does not arise from increased\nill health, I trust. She seemed very feeble when we met on the\nsea-shore, last season--somewhat consumptive, we all thought.\"\n\nI did not like the tone of her voice. There was something stealthy and\ncreeping in it which checked the rising confidence in my heart.\n\n\"Mrs. Lee is very far from well,\" I answered, coldly.\n\n\"Not essentially worse, I trust.\"\n\nShe was looking at me keenly from the corners of her almond-shaped eyes.\nIt was only a glance, but a gleam of suspicion sprung from my heart and\nmet it half-way.\n\n\"It is difficult to tell. In a lingering disease like hers, one can\nnever be sure.\"\n\n\"Mr. Lee must find himself lonesome at times without his lady's society,\nfor she struck us all as a very superior person.\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" I replied, with a quick impulse, for she still kept\nthat sidelong glance on my face; \"on the contrary, he spends most of his\nleisure time in her chamber, reads to her when she can bear it, and sits\ngently silent when she prefers that. A more devoted husband I never\nknew.\"\n\nI saw that she was biting her red lips, but as my glance caught hers,\nthe action turned to a smile.\n\n\"There is Mr. Lee going to his wife's room now,\" I remarked, as that\ngentleman passed the hall-door, with a little basket in his hand filled\nwith delicate wood-moss, in which lay two or three peaches, the first of\nthe season.\n\nThe exclamation that broke from Mrs. Dennison at the sight of the fruit\narrested his steps, and he turned into the hall, asking if either of us\nhad called.\n\nShe went forward at once, sweeping the cloth skirt after her like the\ntrain of an empress.\n\n\"Oh, what splendid peaches--and the basket! The bijou!\" She held out\nboth hands to receive the fruit, quite in a glow of pleasure.\n\n\"I am very sorry,\" said Mr. Lee, drawing back a step, \"but this is--is\nfor my wife. She is an invalid, you know.\"\n\n\"You misunderstand,\" replied the lady, coloring to the temples. \"I only\nwish to admire the arrangement. It is really the prettiest fancy I ever\nsaw.\"\n\nHe hesitated an instant; then held out the basket and placed it between\nher hands, with some little reluctance, I thought. Her side-face was\ntoward me; but the look, half grieved, half reproachful, which she\nlifted to his face did not escape me.\n\n\"Shall I take the basket to Mrs. Lee?\" I said, reaching out my hand.\n\"She must have heard the horses return some time ago, and will expect\nsome one.\"\n\n\"No,\" said the gentleman, bending his head, and taking the fruit. \"I\ncannot allow you to deprive me of that pleasure.\"\n\n\"And I,\" rejoined the widow, with animation, \"I must take off this\ncumbersome riding-dress.\"\n\nI went to my room early that evening. Indeed, I had no heart to enter\nthe parlor. Anxieties that I could not define pressed heavily upon\nme--so heavily that I longed for solitude. In passing through the hall,\nI met Mrs. Dennison's mulatto maid, who had, I forgot to say, followed\nour guest with the luggage. She was going to her mistress's chamber,\ncarrying something carefully in her hand. When she saw me, her little\nsilk apron was slyly lifted, and the burdened hand stole under it, but\nin the action something was disturbed, and the half of a peach fell at\nmy feet.\n\nI took up the cleft fruit very quietly, told the girl to remove her\napron, that I might see what mischief had been done, and discovered a\nsecond basket filled with mossrose-buds from which the half peach had\nfallen.\n\nI laid the fruit in its bed, saw the girl pass with it to her lady's\nchamber, and then went to my own room sick at heart. The half of a\npeach, offered among the Arabs, means atonement for some offence. What\noffence had Mr. Lee given to our guest in carrying a little fruit to his\ninvalid wife?\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XII.\n\nBREAKFAST WITH OUR GUEST.\n\n\nMrs. Dennison was late the next morning. Indeed, she generally was late.\nIt was sure to produce a little excitement when she entered, if the\nfamily were grouped in expectation, and her system of elegant\nselfishness rendered any consideration of the convenience of others a\nmatter of slight importance. She was always lavish in apologies, those\noutgrowths of insincerity; and, in fact, managed to weave a sort of a\nfascination out of her own faults.\n\nThis certainly was the case here. If Mr. Lee was resolute about anything\nin his household, it was that punctuality at meals should be observed:\nindeed, I have seldom seen him out of humor on any other subject. But\nthis morning he had been moving about in the upper hall a full hour,\nglancing impatiently at the papers which always reached us before\nbreakfast, and walking up and down with manifest annoyance. Yet the\nmoment that woman appeared with her coquettish little breakfast-cap just\nhovering on the back of her head, and robed in one of the freshest and\nmost graceful morning dresses you ever saw, his face cleared up. With a\nsmile that no one could witness without a throb of the heart, he\nreceived her apologies and compliments all mingled together on her lips\nlike honey in the heart of a flower, as if they had been favors of which\nwe were all quite undeserving.\n\nWe went down to breakfast at last; but just as we were sitting down, our\nguest took a fancy to run out on the terrace and gather a handful of\nheliotrope which she laid by her plate, exhaling the odor sensuously\nbetween the pauses of the meal. I don't know what the rest thought of\nall this, but I was disgusted. It is a strong word, I know, but I have\nno other for the repulsion that seizes upon me even now when I think of\nthat woman. Her very passion for flowers, to me almost a heavenly taste\nin itself, was so combined with materialism, that the perfume of the\nheliotrope sickened me.\n\nJessie did not seem to sympathize in these feelings, nor care that her\nown choice flower-plot had been rifled of its sweetest blossoms. In\nfact, the fascination of that woman's manner seemed more powerful with\nher than it had proved with the proud, strong man who sat opposite me.\n\nJessie, the darling, either because she did not like the restraint, or,\nwhat was more like her, wishing to give me dignity in the household,\nalways insisted that I should preside at the table; Mrs. Lee, from her\nfeeble state of health, being at all times unequal to the task. Three\ntimes did that insatiable woman return her coffee-cup: first, for an\nadditional lump of sugar, again for a few drops more cream, and then for\nthe slightest possible dilution of its strength. While I performed these\nsmiling behests, she sat brushing a branch of heliotrope across her\nlips, exclaiming at the beauty of the scene from an opposite window, and\nbehaving generally like an empress who had honored her subjects with a\nvisit, and was resolved to put them quite at ease in her presence.\n\nBut Jessie could not see things in this light. She was evidently as well\npleased with her guest as she had been the night before, but, though she\nsmiled and joined in the pleasant conversation, I saw by the heavy\nshadows under her eyes that some anxiety disturbed her. The fact that\nshe had made an appointment to ride with a suitor whom she must reject\naccounted sufficiently for this; Jessie had the finest traits of a\npurely proud nature, and the idea of giving pain was to her in itself a\ngreat trial. Still, these observations only applied to the undercurrent\nthat morning; on the surface everything was sparkling and pleasant.\n\nMr. Lee was more than usually animated, and, before the meal was ended,\nquite a war of complimentary badinage had commenced and was kept up\nbetween him and our guest.\n\nJessie always went to her mother after breakfast. So, immediately on\nquitting the table, she stole away to the tower, looking a little\nserious, but not more so than her peculiar trial of the day accounted\nfor.\n\nI followed her directly, leaving Mrs. Dennison and Mr. Lee on the square\nbalcony, on which the early sunshine lay in golden warmth.\n\nMrs. Lee had not rested well; her eyes, usually so bright, were heavy\nfrom want of sleep; and the pillow, from which she had not yet risen,\nbore marks of a thousand restless movements, which betrayed unusual\nexcitement.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XIII.\n\nJESSIE LEE AND HER MOTHER.\n\n\nJessie was sitting on one side of the bed holding a Parian cup in her\nhand; the amber gleam of coffee shone through the transparent\nvine-leaves that embossed it, and she was stirring the fragrant beverage\ngently with a spoon.\n\n\"Try, dear mother, and drink just a little,\" she was saying, in her\nsweet, caressing way. \"It makes me very unhappy to see you looking so\nill.\"\n\n\"Indeed I am not ill, only a little restless, Jessie,\" answered the\nsweet lady, rising languidly from her pillow and reaching forth her hand\nfor the cup. She tasted the coffee and looked gratefully at her\ndaughter. \"It is nice; no one understands me like you, my daughter.\"\n\nJessie blushed with pleasure, and began to mellow a delicate slice of\ntoast with the silver knife that lay beside it, making a parade of her\nefforts, which she evidently hoped would entice her mother's appetite:\nand so it did. I am sure no one besides her could have tempted that\nfrail woman to eat a mouthful. As it was, one of the birds that was\npicking seeds from the terrace could almost have rivalled her appetite:\nthe presence of her daughter, I fancy, gave her more strength than\nanything else.\n\n\"So you have had a bad night, my mother,\" said Jessie, tenderly; \"once\nor twice I awoke and felt that you did not sleep.\"\n\n\"Indeed!\" said the mother, with an earnest look breaking through the\nheaviness of her eyes.\n\n\"Yes, indeed; but then I never wake in the night without wondering if\nyou sleep well.\"\n\n\"Did you see me?\" questioned the mother, anxiously.\n\n\"See you, mother?\"\n\nMrs. Lee smiled faintly, and shook her head as if to cast off some\nstrange thought.\n\n\"Of course, it was impossible. I must have slept long enough to dream;\nbut it seems to me as if I was in your room last night. Something called\nme there, a faint, white shadow, that sometimes took the outline of an\nangel, sometimes floated before me like a cloud.\"\n\n\"Oh, my good mother! it was kind to come, even in your dreams,\" said\nJessie, kissing the little hand that lay in hers.\n\nMrs. Lee looked troubled, and seemed to be searching her memory for\nsomething.\n\n\"It took me--the cloud-angel--you know, into the blue room.\"\n\n\"The blue room!\" Jessie and I exclaimed together, for that was the\napartment in which Mrs. Dennison slept, though the fact had never been\nmentioned to Mrs. Lee, and another chamber had at first been intended\nfor our guest. \"The blue room?\"\n\n\"Yes, the blue room!\" she said; \"but like all dreams, nothing was like\nthe reality. Instead of the enamelled furniture, everything was covered\nwith the prettiest blue chintz, with a wild-rose pattern running over\nit.\"\n\nJessie and I looked at each other in consternation, for the furniture\nwhich Mrs. Lee described as familiar to the blue room had been removed\nto the chamber we had first intended for Mrs. Dennison, and that with\nwhich we had replaced it being too rich for a sleeping-room, we had\ncovered it with the pretty chintz, without mentioning the fact to Mrs.\nLee or any one else.\n\n\"There was a toilet instead of the dressing-table, I remember,\"\ncontinued the lady, \"with quantities of frost-like lace falling around\nit and on it; with other things, a little basket, prettier than mine,\nfull of mossrose-buds.\"\n\n\"Was there nothing else in the basket?\" I questioned, holding my breath\nfor the reply.\n\n\"Nothing else,\" answered the lady, smiling; \"oh! yes, combs and\nhair-pins, rings and bracelets, the whole toilet was in a glitter.\"\n\n\"But nothing else in the basket?\" I persisted.\n\n\"No; rose-buds--mossrose-buds, red and white. Nothing more,\" she\nanswered, languidly.\n\nMrs. Lee paused a moment with her eyes closed. Then starting as if from\nsleep, she almost cried out,--\n\n\"There was a woman in the room--in the bed--a beautiful woman. The\nruffles of her night-gown were open at the throat, the sleeves were\nbroad and loose; you could see her arms almost to the shoulders. She\nwore no cap, and her hair fell in bright, heavy coils down to her waist.\nShe had something in her hand; don't speak, I shall remember in a\nminute: the color was rich. It was, yes, it was half a peach, with the\nbrown stone partly bedded in the centre; the fragrance of it hung about\nthe basket of roses.\"\n\n\"And you saw all this, dear lady?\" I exclaimed, startled by the reality\nof her picture, which, as a whole, I recognized far more closely than\nJessie could.\n\n\"In my dream, yes; but one fancies such strange things when asleep, you\nknow, dear Miss Hyde.\"\n\n\"Strange, very strange,\" murmured Jessie; \"but for the basket of roses\nand the fruit, we might have recognized the picture. Don't you think so,\nAunt Matty?\"\n\n\"Did you get a look at the lady's face?\" I inquired, suppressing\nJessie's question.\n\n\"No, no; I think not. The thick hair shaded it, but the arms and neck\nwere white as lilies. She had bitten the peach; I remember seeing marks\nof her teeth on one side. Strange, isn't it, how real such fancies will\nseem?\"\n\n\"It is, indeed, strange,\" I said, feeling cold chills creeping over me.\n\n\"Besides,\" continued the invalid, while a scarcely perceptible shiver\ndisturbed her, \"notwithstanding the freshness and beauty of everything,\nI felt oppressed in that room--just as flowers may be supposed to grow\nfaint when vipers creep over them; the air seemed close till I got to\nyour chamber, Jessie.\"\n\n\"And there?\" said the sweet girl, kissing her mother's hand again.\n\n\"There, the angel that had been a cloud took form again. It beckoned\nme--beckoned me--I cannot tell where; but you were sleeping, I know\nthat.\"\n\n\"It was a strange dream,\" said Jessie, thoughtfully.\n\n\"The impression was very strong,\" answered the mother, drawing a hand\nacross her eyes,--\"so powerful that it tired me. This morning it seemed\nas if I had been on a journey.\"\n\n\"But you are better now,\" I said; \"this sense of fatigue is wearing off,\nI hope.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes!\" she answered, languidly.\n\n\"And you will be well enough to see Mrs. Dennison before dinner, I\nhope,\" whispered Jessie.\n\n\"Perhaps, child.\"\n\n\"Father will persuade you.\"\n\n\"Where is your father, Jessie?\"\n\n\"Oh! somewhere about. On the front balcony, I believe, with Mrs.\nDennison, who declares that she never will get tired of looking down the\nvalley.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is a lovely view. We used to sit on the balcony for hours--your\nfather and I--but now--\" Mrs. Lee turned away her face and shaded her\neyes with one pale hand.\n\nI walked to the window and lifted the curtain; but there was a mist over\nmy eyes, and I could not discern a feature of the landscape.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XIV.\n\nINTRUSIVE KINDNESS.\n\n\nSome one knocked at the door. I went to open it, and found Cora, Mrs.\nDennison's maid, who had been brushing her mistress's riding-habit on\nthe back terrace, and flung it across her arm before coming up-stairs.\nThe girl was a pretty mulatto, with teeth that an empress might have\ncoveted, and eyes like diamonds; but there was something in her face\nthat I did not like--a way of looking at you from under her black\neyelashes that was both searching and sinister.\n\n\"Mistress told me to run up, and inquire if it wasn't time for Miss Lee\nto put on her habit,\" she said, shooting a quick glance into the room;\n\"the horses are ordered round.\"\n\nI felt the color burning in my face. The impertinence of this intrusion\nangered me greatly.\n\n\"Miss Lee is with her mother,\" I said, \"and cannot be disturbed; when\nshe is ready, I will let your mistress know. Until then the horses must\nwait.\"\n\nThe girl gave the habit on her arm a shake, and went away, casting one\nor two glances behind. What possible business could the creature have in\nthat part of the house? Had the mistress really sent her? It was an hour\nbefore the time for riding, and it had not been our custom to hurry\nJessie away from her mother's room.\n\nWhile I stood by the window, thinking angrily of this intrusion, another\nknock called me back to the door. It was the mulatto again, with her\nmistress's compliments, and, if Mrs. Lee was well enough, she would pay\nher respects while the horses waited.\n\nI went down myself at this, and meeting Mrs. Dennison on the terrace,\ninformed her, very curtly, I fear, that Mrs. Lee was not out of her\nbedroom, having spent a restless night, and was quite incapable of\nseeing strangers.\n\nI put a little malicious emphasis on the word _strangers_, which brought\na deeper color into her cheeks; but she answered with elaborate\nexpressions of sympathy, inquired so minutely into the symptoms and\ncauses of Mrs. Lee's prostration, that I felt at a loss how to answer.\n\n\"Dear lady!\" she went on, \"I'm afraid these severe attacks will exhaust\nthe little strength she has left; they must make life a burden.\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" I said, \"there is not, I am sure, a person living who\nso keenly enjoys the highest and most lofty principles of existence.\nWith the love of God in her heart, and domestic love all around her,\nlife can never be a burden.\"\n\n\"Indeed!\" she answered, with something in her voice that approached a\nsneer; \"I never was sick in my life, that is, perhaps, why it seems so\nterrible to me. Nothing could reconcile me, I am sure, to a life like\nMrs. Lee's. At her age, too, with disease helping time to chase away\nwhat beauty one has left, how she must feel it!\"\n\n\"You quite mistake the case, madam,\" I answered; \"Mrs. Lee never\ndepended on her beauty, which, however, no one can dispute, as a means\nof winning love; her sincerity, intelligence, and gentle wisdom are\nenough to outlive the loveliness of a Venus.\"\n\n\"You are enthusiastic, Miss Hyde.\"\n\n\"I love Mrs. Lee, and speak as I feel.\"\n\n\"I am afraid,\" she said, in her blandest manner, \"that my interest in\nthe dear lady has led me into obtrusiveness, or, at least, that you\nthink so. But she is so very superior--so perfect, in fact, that one\ncannot shake off the interest she inspires. It was this feeling which\ntempted me to ask for the privilege of paying my respects;--I see now\nthat it was inopportune; but a warm heart is always getting one into\nscrapes, Miss Hyde. I shall never learn how to tame mine down. It seemed\nto me that the sweet invalid yonder must feel lonely in her room, and\nthis was why that importunate request was made.\"\n\n\"Mrs. Lee is a woman who would find something of paradise in any\nposition. Her sitting-room, up in the tower yonder, has always been\nconsidered the pleasantest apartment in the house.\"\n\n\"No doubt; it was this conviction which made me anxious to be admitted.\nStill, I must think that a confinement, that only promises to be\nrelieved by death, must be a painful thing.\"\n\nWhy did the woman always return to that point? In my whole life I had\nnever heard the probable result of Mrs. Lee's illness alluded to so\noften, as it had been hardly mentioned since Mrs. Dennison's arrival. It\nshocked me, and became the more repulsive from the usual levity of her\nmanner. She seemed to weave the idea of my dear friend's death with\nevery luxury that surrounded her dwelling; to my prejudiced fancy, she\neven exulted in it. I stood looking her in the face while these thoughts\ntroubled my mind. What my eyes may have spoken I cannot tell, but hers\nfell beneath them, and, with an uneasy smile, she turned to walk away.\n\nThat moment Jessie came out to the terrace, looking a little anxious.\n\n\"Where is father?\" she said; \"mother is up and waiting for him.\"\n\nI saw a faint smile quiver around the widow's lips, but she busied\nherself with some branches of ivy that had broken loose from the\nterrace-wall, and did not seem to heed us. Just then the tramp of horses\nsounded from the front of the house, and Jessie exclaiming with a little\nimpatience, \"Dear me!\" walked quickly to the square balcony. I followed\nher, and saw Mr. Lee standing at the foot of the steps ready to mount.\nHe was giving some orders to the groom, and seemed particularly anxious\nabout the horse which Mrs. Dennison was to ride.\n\nJessie's face flushed, and a look of proud surprise came across it. Mr.\nLee turned his head that way and called out,--\n\n\"Why, Jessie, where is your habit? I never found you late before.\"\n\nJessie did not answer, but passed me, descending to the terrace and down\nthe flight of steps. She spoke to her father, looking back anxiously.\nAfter the first words, he started and seemed taken by surprise. Even\nfrom the distance I could see a flood of crimson rush to his forehead.\nThey both ascended the steps together. Mr. Lee went to the tower, and\nJessie ran up-stairs to put on her riding-dress.\n\nI went up to help her, but walked slowly; everything conspired to\ndepress me that morning. One serpent was enough to destroy the perfect\nhappiness of Eden. Our little paradise seemed changing after the same\nfashion, and yet no one could tell why.\n\nJessie was buttoning her habit as I went in. She looked restless and\nhurt.\n\n\"Aunt Matty,\" she said, \"I have a great mind to give up this ride; the\nthought of meeting that gentleman troubles me. Look how my hands\ntremble.\"\n\nYes, the serpent was doing its work. Even our sweet, honest Jessie was\nbeginning to cover up her true feelings under false issues. It was\nsomething nearer home than the dread of an unwelcome offer that made her\nso nervous. For the first time since her remembrance Mr. Lee had\nforgotten his wife. But for Jessie's interposition, he would have ridden\naway without inquiring after her. I recollected how he had blushed when\nreminded of this.\n\nOf course, I could not speak of the true cause of this discontent, the\ndelicate reticence becoming to a daughter was too sacred for that; but I\nsaid quickly,--\n\n\"Yes, yes, darling, you must go. It is your duty.\"\n\nShe looked at me earnestly, then dropping her eyes, went on with her\npreparations.\n\nA second time Mrs. Dennison came to her chamber. Our coldness the day\nbefore had left no impression on the materialism of her nature.\nSparkling with cheerfulness, and brilliant with smiles, she swept in,\nbending her flexible whip into a ring, with both hands, and letting it\nfree again with a prolonged snap.\n\n\"All ready? That's right, my Lady Jess! The day is heavenly, and our\ncavaliers are coming up the road!\"\n\n\"Thank heaven!\" I heard Jessie whisper, as she drew on her gantlets.\n\nIf she fancied that the coming of Mr. Bosworth and his friend would\nrelease Mr. Lee, and leave him at liberty to spend his morning with the\ninvalid, she was disappointed in the result, though not in the fact.\nJust as the party were mounting, he appeared on the terrace, and,\ndescending the steps, joined them, whip in hand.\n\nI watched all these movements keenly; why, it would have been impossible\nfor me to explain even to my own judgment; but shadows tormented me at\nthis time, and all my senses were on the alert. Mr. Lee rode by his\ndaughter, leaving his guest to the other gentlemen, between whom she\nrode triumphantly, as Queen Elizabeth may have entered Kenilworth,\nflirting royally with her handsomest subjects. Jessie and her father\nseemed to be conversing quietly, as I had seen them a hundred times\nriding down that road.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XV.\n\nTHE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT.\n\n\nAfter the party was out of sight, I went into Mrs. Dennison's room to\nsee that the maid had performed her duty, as was my custom; for I had\nassumed these light cares in the household, and loved them from the fact\nthat they attached an idea of usefulness to my residence in the house.\n\nEverything seemed in order. Cora, the mulatto girl, was busily arranging\nthe dress her mistress had just taken off. Ear-rings and a brooch of\nblue lava were lying on the toilet, and the pretty cap, with its\nstreamers of black velvet and azure ribbon, hung upon one of the\nsupports of the dressing-table, as she had left them.\n\nI looked for the basket of mossrose-buds, but it was gone; some buds\nwere opening in one of the toilet-glasses, but that was all. Why had the\nwidow Dennison taken such pains to put the basket out of sight?\n\n\"What have you done with the basket?\" I inquired very quietly of the\ngirl. \"If you wet the moss again, we can fill it with fresh flowers.\"\n\n\"What basket, Miss?\" inquired the girl, lifting her black eyes\ninnocently to my face.\n\n\"The basket you brought in here last evening.\"\n\n\"Oh, that!\" she continued, dropping her eyes; \"I've made so many of them\nthings that mistress doesn't seem to care for 'em any more.\"\n\n\"You--you make them?\"\n\n\"Yes, indeed! Is there any harm, Miss?\" she said, lifting her eyes\nagain, with a look of genuine earnestness.\n\n\"And you arranged those buds in the moss?\"\n\n\"Yes, indeed!\"\n\n\"And placed the half peach among them?\"\n\n\"Was there any harm, Miss?\"\n\n\"The half peach--after an Oriental fashion?\"\n\n\"Dear me! I hope there wasn't any harm in the gardener's letting me have\nthat one. It was the first I had seen this year, so I couldn't give up\nmore than I did; but it was the biggest half that I saved for the\nmistress.\"\n\nNothing could be more natural than her dawning contrition, nothing more\nsatisfactory than the solution she had given to a subject that had kept\nme awake half the night. What a fool I had been! Was I, in fact,\nbecoming fanciful and old-maidish--ready to find error in shadows, and\ncrimes in everything? Heaven forbid that anything so unwomanly and\nindelicate as this should come upon me.\n\nWas it possible that I, in the waning freshness of my life, had begun to\nenvy brighter and handsomer women the homage due to their attraction,\nand had thus become suspicious? The very idea humiliated me; I felt\nabashed before that mulatto girl, who sat so demurely smoothing the\nfolds of her mistress's breakfast-dress across her lap. It seemed as if\nshe must have some knowledge of the mean suspicion that had brought me\nthere. How artful and indirect my conduct had been! In my heart I had\nrather plumed myself on the adroit way in which my questions had been\nput regarding that annoying basket. Now, I was heartily ashamed of it\nall, and stole out of the room bitterly discomfited.\n\nIn shutting the door, I glanced back; the girl was looking up from her\nwork. The demure expression had left her face, the black eyes flashed\nand danced as they followed me; but the moment my look met hers, all\nthis passed away so completely, that my very senses were confused, and\nthe doubts that I had put aside came crowding back upon me.\n\nI went up to Mrs. Lee's room. She was resting on the lounge, sound\nasleep; but her face seemed cold as well as pale. There was a strange\nlook about it, as if all the vitality were stricken out; yet she\nbreathed evenly, and though I made some noise in entering, it did not\ndisturb her in the least.\n\nI sat down on a low chair by the side of her couch; for Jessie had\ndesired me to sit by her during all the time I could command. Thus I was\nplaced close to the gentle sleeper. The deathly stillness in which she\nlay troubled me; it seemed too profound for healthy slumber. One little\nhand fell over the couch. I took it in my own, and passed my other hand\nsoftly over it. Strange enough, she did not move, but began to murmur in\nher sleep, while a cold, troubled cloud contracted her forehead.\n\n\"Ah! now I can see everything--everything; they are cantering by the old\nmill. I haven't seen it before in years. How beautifully the shadows\nfall on the water; the waves are tipped with silver; the trees rustle\npleasantly! No wonder they draw up to look at the mill; it always was a\npicturesque object!\"\n\nShe was following the equestrians in her dreams--those strange dreams\nthat seemed to drink up all the color and warmth from her body.\n\nAccording to the best calculation I could make, the party would have\nreached the old mill about this time. It stood under the curve of the\nprecipitous banks, a mile or two up the river, and Mr. Lee had spoken of\nriding that way at breakfast. Thus it seemed more than probable that the\nparty was exactly as she fancied it. Mr. Lee had doubtless informed her\nwhat route he would take, and so her imagination followed him while her\nfrail form slumbered.\n\nShe stirred uneasily on her pillow, drew her black eyebrows together,\nand spoke again:--\n\n\"Why does he leave my Jessie? She don't want to be left with that young\nman;--and he, poor fellow! how frightened he is! What is that he is\nsaying? Wants to marry my Jessie! Alas! how the heart shrinks in her\nbosom! My poor child! he should not distress you so! Yet it is an honest\nheart he offers--full of warmth, full of goodness! Can't you understand\nthat, my darling?\"\n\nAfter this speech she lay quiet a few minutes, and then spoke like one\nwho had been examining something that puzzled her.\n\n\"Jessie, Jessie! what is this? Why does your heart stand still while he\nspeaks to her? It troubles me, darling. I am your mother, and this thing\ndisturbs me more than you can guess. You have driven one away--he\nretreats to the rear, heart-broken. That other one comes up. Who is he?\nwhat is he? Ask her, for she is watching him, and her loaded heart\nfollows after, though he, my husband, is by her side.\"\n\nHere she dropped into silence again, only breaking it by faint moans,\nand a single ejaculation, \"Oh, not that! not that!\"\n\nHer face grew so painfully wan, and she gave evidence of so much inward\nanguish, that I was constrained to arouse her. My voice made no\nimpression, and the clasp of my hand only threw her into a more deathly\nslumber. I began to comprehend her state. I had heard of deep trances,\nwhen the soul seems released from the body, or is gifted with something\nlike prophecy. I knew, or believed, that this was an unhealthy state,\nthe result of disease, or the offspring of a badly balanced\norganization; and this thought horrified me; there was something of the\nsupernatural in it that filled my soul with awe. By the contraction of\nher pale forehead, I saw that there was some distress in the head; so\nlifting my hand, I passed it across her brow, hoping to soothe away the\npain.\n\nCertainly, the face became calm, a smile stole across the lips, and\nafter a moment her eyes opened, and looked vaguely around, as a child\nawakes from its sleep.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XVI.\n\nAFTER DREAMING.\n\n\n\"I have been asleep,\" said Mrs. Lee, pleasantly; \"sound asleep. When did\nyou come in?\"\n\n\"Only a short time since.\"\n\n\"And you have been sitting here while I slept?\"\n\n\"Yes; after a restless night, I fancied a quiet sleep would do you no\nharm.\"\n\n\"Harm? It has given me strength.\"\n\n\"Do you think so?\"\n\nShe smiled.\n\n\"Have you been dreaming again?\" I inquired, a little anxiously.\n\n\"Dreaming? No, my sleep was profound, perfect rest. But where is Jessie?\nShe sat where you are when I fell off.\"\n\n\"Indeed!\"\n\n\"Yes, I remember--her left hand held mine, with her right she was\nsoothing the pain from my forehead.\"\n\n\"That was some time ago; she has gone out to ride since, and I am quite\nsure Mr. Lee came up here after she left you,\" I said.\n\n\"I am glad of it,\" she answered, gently. \"He was rather late this\nmorning, I remember thinking; but Jessie would not own it. So he came\nup, and I did not hear him. Miss Hyde, this is the first time in my\nwhole life that his lightest footstep failed to awake me,--what can it\nmean?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" broke in Lottie, who had been hanging around the door, unnoticed;\nfor we had all become so used to her presence in that room, that it was\nno more heeded than that of the canary-bird in its cage on the\nbalcony,--\"yes, ma'am, Mr. Lee came up with his spurs on, and his whip\nall ready, just like a trooper, clang, clang, clang. I thought the noise\nwould make you jump out of the window in that white, loose gown, just\nlike an angel with its wings spread; but law! there you were, ma'am,\nsnoozing away right in his face, and he making up his mind, with the\nwhip in his hand, whether to kiss you good-bye or not.\"\n\n\"And did he?\" inquired the lady, with a faint flush of the cheek.\n\n\"No, ma'am; I suppose he was afraid of scaring you out of that nice\nsleep. He only looked at you sort of earnestly, and went off trying to\nwalk on tiptoe; but mercy! didn't them boots creak?\"\n\n\"I thought not,\" murmured the lady, with infinite tenderness in her\nvoice; \"I must have been dead if that failed to arouse me.\"\n\n\"Lor, Mrs. Lee,\" continued the maid, spreading her flail-like arms in\nillustration, \"I wish you could have seen that new widder-woman when\nthem two gentlemen helped her on to the horse. Didn't her dress swell\nout--and didn't she keep Mr. Lawrence a-tinkering away at her stirrups,\nwith one foot in his hand, till it made me sick looking on. Awful 'cute\nlady that is, Miss Hyde; you ain't no match for her, nohow!\"\n\nI really think that witch of a girl was gifted with something almost\nlike second sight. I never had a secret taste or dislike that she did\nnot understand at once, and drag it out in some blundering way before\nthe whole world.\n\n\"What makes you think so, Lottie?\" I inquired, a little annoyed.\n\n\"Because you're straightforward right out, and flat-footed honest; and\nshe--oh my!\"\n\n\"What makes you say, 'oh my!' Lottie?\"\n\n\"Nothing, Miss Hyde; only I've got eyes, and can see right through a\nmill-stone, especially when there's a hole in the middle. Perhaps you\ncan't, then again perhaps you can; I don't dispute anything; only, as I\nsaid before, that widder-woman is too 'cute for such a mealy-mouthed\nlady as you are. My!--wouldn't she ride over you rough-shod and with\nspurs to her slippers!\"\n\nWe spoiled that girl. She was neither servant, companion, nor protegee,\nand yet partook of the position which three such persons might have\noccupied in the family. She waited upon every one with the faithfulness\nof a hound and the speed of a lapwing, seemed to be always in the\nkitchen, constantly flitting through the parlor, yet never beyond the\nsound of her mistress's voice. She belonged everywhere and nowhere in\nthe household. She had taken her position out of the kitchen entirely,\nby refusing to sit down at the table there, whatever the temptation was,\nshe invariably carrying off the tray into her own little room, after the\nmistress was served, taking her meals in solitary grandeur from frosted\nsilver and china so delicate that you could see a shadow through it.\nNay, she affected great elegance in this little room, which was a sort\nof select hospital for all the old finery in the household. Lace\ncurtains, condemned as too much worn for the parlor-windows, after\npassing through her adroit hands, appeared at the casement of her little\nroom transparent as new; silk hangings, when faded from their first\nsplendor, she managed to revive into almost pristine brightness. She\nwould cut out the freshest medallions from an old carpet, and make it\nbloom out anew under her own feet. Then she had pretty knick-knacks and\nkeepsakes scattered about, which made her little nook quite a\nboudoir--indeed, almost the prettiest one in the family.\n\nMrs. Lee was rather proud of her unique handmaiden's retreat; it\ngratified her own exquisite sense of the beautiful; and, as the room\nopened into her own, it was but a continuation of the refinements that\nsurrounded her.\n\nIn her dress, too, Lottie was more original than half the old pictures\none sees offered for sale. Jessie's cast-off dresses were remodelled by\nher nimble fingers into a variety of garments really marvellous. Indeed,\nLottie was generally the most perfectly costumed person in our\nhousehold. No one felt disposed to check this exuberant taste in the\nstrange girl: it pleased the invalid, and that was reason enough for\nanything in our family.\n\n\"Yes, I say it again,\" persisted the strange little creature, folding\nher arms and setting her head on one side, \"widders are monstrous smart,\nup to a'most anything. I've often wished that I'd been born a widder\nwith both eye-teeth cut, as theirs always is--are, I meant. Lor! Miss\nHyde, you ain't a circumstance; just leave this one to me.\"\n\n\"Lottie, Lottie,\" said Mrs. Lee, shaking her head, \"you speak too loud\nand look bold, it isn't becoming. Besides, the guests in a house must\nalways be honored, never made subjects of criticism: in short, my good\nchild, we are spoiling you.\"\n\nLottie withered into penitence with the first words of this reproof.\nWhen it was ended, a deep flush settled around her eyes, as if tears\nwere suppressed with difficulty.\n\n\"Spoiling me! not with kindness, I should die without that,\" she said,\nhalf sitting down on the ottoman, half kneeling by the couch. \"I won't\nspeak another word against that--that lady. There, I've got it out; say\nyou are not angry with me.\"\n\n\"Angry! no, my child. Only be careful not to say harsh things of any\none, it is a bad habit.\"\n\n\"I am sorry!\"\n\n\"Well, well.\"\n\n\"Very sorry!\"\n\n\"There, there, child, it is not so very terrible.\"\n\n\"I'll never call the lady a widder again. Never!\"\n\nMrs. Lee smiled, and sent her into the next room. She seemed troubled\nafter the girl went out; for certainly tears had glittered in Lottie's\neyes, a thing I had never witnessed before.\n\n\"Go in, Miss Hyde, and comfort her, poor thing! It was cruel to reprove\nher so harshly; but my temper is getting ungovernable.\"\n\nIt was almost amusing to hear that gentle creature condemn herself with\nso little reason; but she would not be convinced that something of the\nspirit of a Nero had not been manifest in that mild reprimand; so I went\ninto Lottie's room, much better disposed to give her a second lesson\nthan to console her for the first.\n\nMiss Lottie had curled herself up in the window-seat, with both hands\nclasped around her knees, and her face buried upon them.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XVII.\n\nLOTTIE EXPRESSES HER OPINION OF THE WIDOW.\n\n\n\"Lottie,\" I said, going up to the girl, \"what are you huddled up in that\nplace for? Is there nothing you can find to do more profitable than\npouting?\"\n\n\"I'm not pouting, Miss Hyde,\" she said; \"only grinding my teeth in peace\nand comfort. Why can't you let me alone, I should like to know?\"\n\n\"What folly! Do get down and act like a sensible creature.\"\n\n\"Well,\" she said, throwing herself off the window-seat with a\ndemi-summersault, which landed her in the middle of the room, \"here I\nam. What's wanted?\"\n\nIt was rather difficult for me to say just that instant what I did want,\nhaving only a charge of consolation on hand.\n\n\"Well,\" she added, \"what have I done to you, Miss Hyde, that I can't be\nallowed to sit still in my own room?\"\n\n\"Nothing, Lottie; I was only afraid that you might be fretting.\"\n\nHer eyes instantly filled with tears, which she dashed aside with her\nhand.\n\n\"So I was; what's the use of denying it? She never said a cross word to\nme before, and wouldn't now but for that Mrs. Babylon. I hate that\nwidder; I want to stomp her down under my feet. It makes me grit my\nteeth when she comes sailing out into the garden, and looks up to Mrs.\nLee's window, just like a dog hankering after a bone.\"\n\n\"Why, how can you feel so bitterly, Lottie, about a person you never\nspoke to a dozen times in your life?\" I said, shocked and surprised by\nher vehemence.\n\n\"Didn't I, though? How 'cute people can be with their eyes shut! Well, I\nfancy that the widder and I are slightly acquainted--better than she\nthinks for.\"\n\n\"Why, how can that be possible; you are always in Mrs. Lee's room?\"\n\n\"Generally, generally--not always. There is hours in the morning, before\nshe gets up; hours in the evening, after she goes to bed; when I break\nout, and do a little exploring about the premises. This morning I was in\nMrs. Babylon's room before any of you were up.\"\n\n\"Indeed! How did that happen?\"\n\n\"That sneaking mulatto girl came to the chamber-door as I was passing,\nand beckoned me to come in.\"\n\n\"And you went?\"\n\n\"Me! Why not? If a girl never sinsatiates around, how is she to find out\nwhat's going on? Besides, I wanted to know just how Babylon looked in\nher own room; so, being invited, I went in.\"\n\n\"But what did she want of you?\"\n\n\"Don't know. Something besides doing a braid up in eleven strands, I\nsurmise; but that was what she made believe it was about--just as if\nthat mulatto creature didn't understand that much of her business. I did\nit though, meek as Moses--such hair! a yard long in the shortest part.\nIt was worth while trying a hand at it; but, after all, it seemed like\nbraiding copperheads and rattlesnakes. I hate to touch anybody's hair if\nI don't like 'em; it makes me crawl all over.\"\n\n\"But why don't you like Mrs. Dennison?\"\n\n\"Why--because I don't; and because you don't either.\"\n\nI could not help smiling, and yet was half angry with the girl. She\nshook her head gravely and went on:\n\n\"It wasn't the hair, Miss Hyde; that copper- girl knew more than\nI did about it, often as I've braided for Miss Jessie.\"\n\n\"Then what did she want?\"\n\n\"I've found out--never you fear.\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"Can't tell anything about it. It's like a patch-work quilt in my mind,\nthe pieces all sorted, but not laid together; the colors will get\nship-shape by-and-by, and then I'll answer everything. She wants me to\ncome into her room every morning, and I'm going.\"\n\n\"What, when you dislike her so much?\"\n\n\"Yes, in spite of that, and fifty times as much. I'm going to do up Mrs.\nBabylon's hair for her.\"\n\n\"Well, well, I am glad you are not heart-broken about Mrs. Lee's mild\nrebuke.\"\n\n\"Heart-broken! I'd die rather than have a real cross word from her; for\nI tell you, Miss Hyde, if ever there was an angel with a morning-dress\nand slippers on as a general thing, that angel is the lady in yonder.\nMiss Jessie is considerable, and you sometimes come almost up to the\nmark, but you can't hold a candle to her, neither one of you.\"\n\nIt was of no use reproving or questioning Lottie; she was in reality the\nmost independent person in the house, so I went away rather amused by my\nefforts at consolation.\n\nEarlier than I expected, the riding party came back. Everybody seemed a\nlittle out of sorts. Jessie was pale and looked harassed. Young Bosworth\nrode by her side, but it was with the appearance of a man returning from\na funeral. He lifted Jessie from the saddle. She reached forth her hand\nbefore ascending the steps, and seemed to be speaking earnestly. I saw\nhim wring the hand with unusual energy, and spring to his saddle again.\n\nAs he was turning his horse, Mrs. Dennison rode up with Lawrence and Mr.\nLee. For a voice so musical, hers was rather loud, so I could distinctly\nhear her call out,--\n\n\"Remember, Mr. Bosworth, your engagement for this evening; don't hope to\nbe excused.\"\n\nBosworth bowed, and rode slowly away; but Lawrence sprang from his\nhorse, and ran up the steps after Jessie, leaving Mr. Lee to help the\nother lady from her saddle.\n\nJessie heard him coming, and fairly ran into the house, a piece of\nrudeness that seemed to surprise him very much; but unlike as this was\nto her usual manner, it did not astonish me. The dear girl's face was\ntoward me, and I saw that it was flushed with tears. Bosworth had\noffered himself, and been refused, poor fellow! I was sure of that.\n\nMrs. Dennison laughed till her clear voice rang far out among the\nflowers as she witnessed Lawrence's discomfiture. He a little\nangrily, and would have passed her on the steps, but she took his arm\nwith exquisite coolness, and smilingly forced him into the house.\n\n\"Babylon's got two strings to her bow,--smart!\"\n\nThis strange speech was uttered at my elbow. I looked round and saw\nLottie close to me.\n\n\"Better go up-stairs,\" she said, pointing over her shoulder; \"she\nwouldn't let me help her; you must.\"\n\nMrs. Dennison entered the upper hall. Her eyes sparkled, her lips curved\ntriumphantly. She had carried away her captive and exulted over him with\ncharming playfulness, which he answered in a low, impressive voice.\n\nI went up-stairs, leaving them together: Jessie stood in the upper\npassage leaning against the banister. She was pale as death, and her\nlips quivered like those of a wronged child; but the moment she saw me,\nthe proud air natural to her returned, and she moved toward her room,\nwaving me back.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XVIII.\n\nTHE UNWELCOME PROPOSAL.\n\n\nIt was true, Jessie had received the proposal she so much dreaded,\nreceived it exactly as her mother had described the scene. If other and\ndeeper feelings prevailed with her, they were buried far out of sight\nby the delicate reticence of a nature which shrunk from any revelation\nof feelings which would, perhaps, never receive a generous response.\nThough the most single-hearted and frank creature in the world, Jessie\nwould have died rather than confess feelings such as I fear occupied her\nheart even at this time.\n\n\"Well, Aunt Matty, I have obeyed you,\" she said, with a sorrowful look\nof the eyes, the moment we were alone together. \"It breaks my heart, but\nI have listened to all he could say, poor fellow! and it is over. What a\nterrible, terrible thing it must be to love a person who does not care\nfor you. Oh! Aunt Matty, Aunt Matty! it is--\" She hesitated, turned\ncrimson, and added, \"it must be like death, worse than death; for to\ncrush one's pride is to deprive life of its dignity, and this thing I\nhave done for him.\"\n\n\"And do you begin to regret it?\" I said, sitting down, and drawing her\nhead to my shoulder.\n\n\"Regret it? The thought oppresses me; I am so sorry for him; my heart\naches when I think of the look he gave me. Oh! why is it that love\ncannot always be mutual?\"\n\n\"That would destroy half its romance, I fear,\" said I, smiling in spite\nof my sympathy in her distress.\n\nShe gave a little nervous laugh and said, \"she supposed so; but it was\nvery hard to see a good man suffer disappointment and mortification such\nas she had just witnessed. Some ladies might glory in these things, but,\nfor her part, she hoped never to have another offer in her life. It was\nhard to give pain, harder by far than to endure it. Poor John Bosworth,\nhow wretched he must be!\"\n\nI strove to comfort her, for there was no affectation in all this. She\nreally did suffer all her broken speech implied, but she felt the\nhumiliation she had given too keenly for argument.\n\n\"He bowed himself before me as if I were a queen; and to be rejected\nafter all, it was very cruel!\" she exclaimed, excitedly; \"but what\ncould I do? There was Mrs. Dennison--but no matter about her.\"\n\nJessie stopped suddenly, and a flame of crimson spread and glowed in her\ncheeks.\n\n\"You don't like Mrs. Dennison, Aunt Matty?\" she said, after a moment's\nsilence.\n\n\"No, I never did like her,\" was my prompt reply.\n\n\"She is a strange woman,\" said Jessie, thoughtfully; \"so brilliant, so\nfull of attractions, everybody is charmed with her at first sight. I\nwas.\"\n\n\"And now?\" I suggested.\n\nShe looked at me a moment, then smiled, a little bitterly, I thought,\nand said,--\n\n\"Who can help like--admiring her?\"\n\nSomething was wrong in that quarter; I was sure of it. Two natures so\nopposite as those of our Jessie and Mrs. Dennison could not long\nharmonize under the same roof.\n\n\"Well,\" I said, smoothing the raven braids of Jessie's hair, \"the worst\nis over now. Mr. Bosworth will think all the better of you for being\ntruthful and honest; we shall have him for a friend still, never fear.\"\n\nJessie shook her head quite dejectedly.\n\n\"No, that can never be; these rides and invitations have been\nmisunderstood. He really thought I was encouraging him, when you know,\ndear Aunt Matty, I hadn't the least idea of what it all meant. He talks\nof going to Europe at once, or--or--\"\n\n\"Or what?\" I inquired, with an inclination to smile; \"drown himself by\nthe old mill, perhaps?\"\n\nShe glanced at me a little roguishly, and said, with a half-sigh, \"Yes,\naunt, I believe he almost threatened that.\"\n\n\"So much the better,\" I said, gravely enough; for she was on the alert\nfor any signs of ridicule. \"The disappointment that takes that form is\nnot killing.\"\n\n\"Don't!\" she said, with a contraction of the forehead, which gave\nevidence of real pain, \"the very remembrance of his face is a reproach\nto me; and there _they_ sat so quietly in the shade of a tree enjoying\nthe scenery. To them, I dare say, the world contained nothing else to\nthink of. Mrs. Dennison even pointed at us with her whip, as if we made\nup the figures of a picture.\"\n\n\"Well, but she did not know,\" I suggested.\n\n\"Heaven forbid!\"\n\nWe were interrupted then, and Jessie went to her mother, whose gentle\nsympathy was always at command, though the cause of grief might be\nunexplained. The presence of that woman was like a calm autumn day--it\nsaddened while it made you better.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XIX.\n\nOUT UPON THE RIDGE.\n\n\nI could not divine why it was, but for some reason Mrs. Dennison\nappeared ill at ease after her ride that morning. Mr. Lee was about the\nhouse all day; but she rather avoided him, and disappeared altogether\nfrom the square balcony, where he was in the habit of reading when the\nshadows crept round to that side of the house.\n\nLate in the day I went out for a walk, and, mounting the hill back of\nthe house, wandered along its upper ridge, where a thick growth of\nhemlocks and forest-trees shut out a glorious landscape on either hand;\nfor this hill formed a spur of the mountains which partially separated\ntwo broad valleys. That on the east I have already described; but the\nother and broader space of country could only be commanded from one or\ntwo prominent points on the ridge. A large rock, fringed with ferns and\nmountain pinks, marked one of these spots. A footpath led to it through\nthe trees, and, as the rock crowned a precipitous declivity of several\nhundred feet, it ended there.\n\nI sat down upon the rock weary from my long walk, and gazed dreamily\nupon the broad plain at my feet. It was in a state of beautiful\ncultivation: a large county-town lay under the shelter of the near\nmountains, over which a cloud of smoke floated from the numerous iron\nfoundries in full blast in the environs. The breaks and gossamer\nfloating of this cloud interested me, not the less because its source\nwas in the useful development of the resources of a great commonwealth.\nI loved to think that with every wreath of that graceful vapor came\nassurance of bread for the working-man, and profits to the capitalist;\nfor to me such thoughts give dignity to the beautiful. I am not one of\nthose who would object to having the waters of Niagara lowered half an\ninch, if it would give the poor better and cheaper flour.\n\nWell, as I was saying, the hives of industry which lay in the hazy\ndistance made the landscape one of peculiar interest. The signs of rich\ncultivation upon the undulating grounds stretching to a range of the\nBlue Ridge, so far away that the mountain peaks seemed embankments of\nclouds, took a new aspect every time I saw them.\n\nLike the busy city, every beautiful object conveyed an under-thought of\nprosperity; even the distant noise of some forges under the mountain\nsounded harmonious in connection with the broad scene.\n\nAs I sat looking upon this glorious picture, reflecting that my beloved\ncountry could boast of thousands on thousands equally rich, both in\nbeauty and thrift, a footstep in the grass disturbed me, and, turning my\nhead, I saw Mrs. Dennison walking slowly along the footpath.\n\nThe woman was in deep thought, and evidently did not observe me, for I\nwas sitting on a of the rock, and a mossy fragment rose up between\nus. She held a letter in her hand, which seemed to give her anything but\npleasure, for as she read, a cloud fell heavily on her forehead, and the\nbeautiful brows contracted. She stopped in the middle of the footpath,\nand seemed to read the letter over a second time. During all this time\nshe was so near to me, that I could distinguish the heavy sigh with\nwhich she folded the paper.\n\nAfter this she stood a moment gazing upon the landscape at her feet. She\nseemed to feel the beauties this glorious point of view presented, and\nher face cleared up.\n\nThat moment I spoke to her. She gave a little start, hid the letter away\nsomewhere in the folds of her dress, and sat down upon the rock. That\nwoman, I do think, never took a position which did not at once settle\ninto lines of grace. Just then the scarlet folds of her shawl fell in\nrich contrast with the green mosses of the rock and cool foliage of the\ntrees, and I could not help observing that, even for my sake, she\ncondescended to be artistic.\n\n\"Ah, Miss Hyde, I am glad to find you here; these woods were getting\nlonesome,\" she said, pleasantly.\n\n\"But it is not lonesome here,\" I replied; \"this moment I was thinking\nwhat a cheerful idea of life the whole scene yonder presented.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she answered, looking toward the distant city; \"after all,\ncivilization has its fine points, even in a picture. I do not wonder you\nlove this spot, if it were only from its contrasts. A moment back, I was\nalmost chilled by the lonely murmur of the pines, and the dull sweep of\nwaters answering them; surely there is some river near, Miss Hyde.\"\n\n\"Yes, at the foot of this hill.\"\n\n\"Oh! true, I can see gleams of water through the gloom. How steep it\nis!\"\n\n\"Yes, almost a precipice,\" I answered. \"One would not like to attempt a\ndescent.\"\n\n\"Indeed, I would rather like it. If one had a mania for suicide now, it\nwould be a romance. A single false step, and you could hardly hear the\nplunge or a cry for help, if the actor were coward enough to give it.\nThe waters are very black and sullen down yonder.\"\n\nI turned away from them with a shudder; this idea of death and crime\nwhich she had advanced chilled me. The waters did, indeed, look black as\nwe saw them weltering on through the piny gloom far below us.\n\n\"Do you know,\" she said, smiling blandly upon me, \"I found a pretty\nbird's-nest under a tuft of fern-leaves up yonder, with four lovely\nspeckled eggs? My red shawl frightened the poor birds, and they made a\nterrible fluttering; so, in pity to the little creatures, I came away\nonly half satisfied.\"\n\n\"Oh! you have found my nest!\" I exclaimed, thanking her kindness from\nthe depths of my heart. \"My own little birds; they have built in that\nspot for three years; I dare say some of the birds hatched under those\nbroken leaves are singing to us now. No one ever molests them here.\"\n\n\"Indeed I did them no harm; only took one little peep at the eggs and\nran away; so, don't look so terrified; the birds did not seem half so\nmuch frightened.\"\n\nI smiled and dropped the subject. The truth is, I really am silly about\nmy birds, and always keep their hiding-places secret, if I can, even\nfrom Jessie, who does not understand their dainty habits as I do.\n\nMrs. Dennison busied herself looking about on the landscape.\n\n\"Tell me,\" she said, \"whereabouts is that delightful old mill which we\nstopped at this morning? I do assure you, Miss Hyde, it is the most\npicturesque bit that I ever saw out of a picture; this river must be the\nstream on which it stands.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I answered; \"but the mill is not visible from here.\"\n\n\"We had a delightful five minutes examining it,\" she resumed, \"that is,\nmy good host, Mr. Lawrence, and myself. As for our sweet Jessie and her\ncavalier-lover, must I say--\"\n\n\"Jessie Lee has no lovers,\" I answered, coldly, for there was something\nin the side-glance of her almond-shaped eyes that I did not like,--a\nsinister questioning that aroused all the original distrust that her\nsimple manner had, for a time, laid to rest.\n\n\"Indeed! What, no lover? and she so beautiful, such a peculiar style! I\nthought young Bosworth was something more than a neighborly cavalier; a\nfine young fellow, Miss Hyde, and a catch, isn't he?\"\n\n\"I don't know exactly what you mean by a catch, madam,\" I replied, more\nand more repulsed.\n\n\"Oh! I see; not worldly enough for boarding-school vulgarisms; but I,\nwho am naughty enough to remember them now and then, will explain that\nthere is nothing very terrible in a 'good catch.' It only means a\nhandsome, fashionable, and rich man, whom every marriageable young lady\nis dying for and only one can get.\"\n\n\"Then our young neighbor will not answer to the character, for he is\nneither fashionable nor more than comfortably rich; nor has he any\nnumber of young ladies dying for him.\"\n\n\"Only one, perhaps?\"\n\nThe same sidelong glance, the same crafty undercurrent in her\nquestioning.\n\n\"If you mean Jessie, Mrs. Dennison, I am very sure she has no such\nfeelings as you suspect, toward any one.\"\n\n\"Oh, I dare say not; one always likes to talk nonsense about such\nthings, but it amounts to nothing. Of course, people are always\nexpecting hosts of lovers when an heiress is in question, and Miss Lee\nhas the reputation of immense expectations.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I answered, artfully, \"I am afraid Jessie will be very rich,\nindeed. Along that valley she will own land enough for a small\nprincipality, if such things were recognized in this country, and many a\nsmoke-wreath that you see curling up from the city yonder comes from the\ndwellings that will yet be hers, and so will several foundries that are\ncoining money for her out of iron.\"\n\nMrs. Dennison's eyes kindled. \"Show me,\" she said, eagerly, and shading\nher eyes with one hand, \"where does the land lie--this principality of\nwhich Jessie will be mistress?\"\n\n\"Yonder to the left, around and far beyond that hill.\"\n\n\"The hill with so many grassy s, and crested with groves? That\nhill, and the lands around it, will it surely be Jessie Lee's\ninheritance?\"\n\n\"Every foot of land, every smoke that curls from several blocks of\nhouses in the centre of the city.\"\n\n\"And does Mr. Lee have all this income?\"\n\n\"Every cent.\"\n\nHer eyes sparkled. Fresh roses bloomed out on her cheeks. She threw out\nher arm, and waved it inward, as if gathering the property in one\nsweeping embrace.\n\n\"Ah! what a world of enjoyment you or I could get out of all that if it\nwere ours!\" she said, with unaccountable exultation in her voice. \"No\nwonder he lives like a prince.\"\n\nI answered her with constraint. This enthusiasm disturbed me.\n\n\"I am not sure, madam, that either you or I would be happier for\npossessing so much care as this wealth would bring; for my part, that\nwhich I enjoy without responsibility, is enough.\"\n\nHer beautiful mouth curled with a sneer, the first I ever saw on those\nlips.\n\n\"Ah! it requires taste and habits of power to prepare one for these\nthings; some people are born with them. Some people are born for them,\nand others--\"\n\n\"Well?\" I said, smiling with satisfaction that she had at last broken\nloose from her system of crafty adulation.\n\n\"And others,\" she said, adroitly, \"are so gentle and unselfish, that\nthey live in the happiness of their friends. It would be a pity to\ncumber such with all the anxieties of wealth; one would as soon think of\nweighing the angels down with gold.\"\n\nI declare, the quickness of that woman frightened me. The sneer left her\nlips in a glow of smiles before it was formed. Her eyes were bent on my\nface innocent as a child's. She sat down by me, folding the scarlet\nshawl lightly around her.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XX.\n\nADROIT CROSS-QUESTIONING.\n\n\n\"Now that we are talking of rich people,\" said Mrs. Dennison, with an\nair of the most natural confidence, \"do tell me about this Mr. Lawrence.\nIs he very much in love with our Jessie, or not?\"\n\n\"I never heard or thought that he was in love with her, Mrs. Dennison.\"\n\n\"Nor she with him?\"\n\nThe question stung me. It gave form to a painful thought that had been\ngrowing in my heart, and I felt myself blushing hotly under her glance.\n\n\"Mrs. Dennison, are such questions honorable?\"\n\n\"Not if you cannot answer them without blushes. I beg pardon.\"\n\n\"Are they delicate?\" I urged, angrily.\n\n\"Not if they touch her friends so keenly. Again I beg pardon.\"\n\n\"Mrs. Dennison,\" I said, conquering the anger that burned in me like a\nfire, \"excuse me if I seem rude, but if there is anything of excitement\nin my manner, it is because I am not used to canvassing the feelings of\nmy friends, even with those nearest and dearest to me.\"\n\n\"And me you consider a stranger,\" she said, deprecatingly.\n\n\"Almost,\" I replied, with blunt truth.\n\n\"And one whom you cannot like?\"\n\nI bit my lips to keep back the words that pressed against them.\n\n\"At my age, Mrs. Dennison, new feelings spring up slowly in the heart.\"\n\nShe made another desperate attempt at my weak side.\n\n\"At your age? My dear Miss Hyde, am I to judge what it is by that smooth\ncheek, or by your words?\"\n\n\"I am afraid it is best to be judged of by the slow growth of feelings\nsuch as we speak of,\" I replied, gravely.\n\nShe looked down sadly, and tears came trembling into her eyes. I really\nthink she felt it. Her habits of fascination were such that she was\ndoubtless wounded that they could fail even with so unimportant a person\nas I was.\n\n\"You are unkind, I would say unjust; only that feeling is seldom a\nmatter of choice. But I, who was prepared to love you as the friend of\ndear Jessie, who did like you so much at the first sight, it does seem a\nlittle cruel that you should meet all this with repulsion.\"\n\nHer tears made me uncomfortable; one had fallen to her cheek, and hung\non its roses like a dew-drop. A man, I think, would have yielded to her\nthen and there; a quiet person of her own sex was not likely to be so\nimpressible. But her grief touched me, and feeling that there had been\nsomething of rudeness in my speech, I strove to soften it.\n\n\"Not repulsion, Mrs. Dennison, but we country people are a little on the\nreserve always. Do not think me unkind because I do not care to talk\nmuch of those who trust and shelter me.\"\n\nShe laid her hands on mine and smiled sweetly through her tears.\n\n\"You are right. It was all rash childishness, not curiosity; how could\nit be when dear Jessie tells me everything with her own sweet lips?\"\n\nI longed to draw my hand from under hers, but conquered the impulse, and\nseemed to listen with patience at least.\n\n\"But we will drop our sweet Jessie,\" she said, \"and talk of some one\nelse--Mr. Lawrence, for instance. Are you sure that he is not really\npoor?\"\n\n\"Indeed, I cannot tell. He lives in another State, and may be rich or\npoor, for aught we know of a certainty; all that I can say is, that his\nfriend Bosworth never represented him as wealthy to us.\"\n\n\"That is a pity,\" she said, thoughtfully, \"a great pity; an heiress\nstands no chance with such men.\"\n\nI started, feeling as if it were Jessie she was speaking of.\n\n\"And why, pray?\" was my sharp response.\n\n\"Ah! these splendid men, proud and poor, how can you expect them to face\nthe world as fortune-hunters? After all, wealth has its drawback. I\noften pity a girl with money, for the most sensitive and the most noble\nkeep aloof. I can imagine a man like this Lawrence now wearing his heart\nout, or turning it to iron if it brought him to the feet of an heiress.\nSuch men like to grant, not take.\"\n\n\"Isn't that a sort of proud selfishness?\" I asked, struck by the force\nand truth of her worldly knowledge.\n\n\"Selfishness? Of course it is. What else do we find in the noblest\nnature? But you are looking serious, and I have watched that cloud of\nsmoke till it wearies me.\"\n\nShe arose while speaking, and walked away, passing through the trees\nlike some gorgeous bird whose home was beneath the branches.\n\nI watched her with a strange feeling of excitement. What would her\nobject be in cross-questioning me as she did? Was it mere vulgar\ncuriosity, or some deep-seated purpose? Why this anxiety about Jessie's\nexpectations? In short, had the woman come to us bent on mischief of\nsome kind, or was I a suspicious wretch, determined to find evil in\neverything?\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXI.\n\nTHE EVENING AFTER BOSWORTH'S PROPOSAL.\n\n\nThat evening Messrs. Lawrence and Bosworth came, according to some\nprevious engagement. I was a little surprised at this, but after awhile\nsaw that a generous and noble motive lay at the bottom of it all. Jessie\nhad besought Bosworth to remain her friend; he had promised, and thus\ngenerously kept an engagement made before his proposal, and when it must\nhave been a painful sacrifice.\n\nNothing could be more delicate and lovely than Jessie's manner of\nreceiving him. She neither nor looked down, but came toward him\nwith a deprecating stoop of the whole person, while there was a depth of\nsadness in her eyes that more than begged pardon for the wound she had\ngiven.\n\nBosworth was grave, but very gentle in his reception of this kindness.\nHe moved toward a far end of the room, and they sat down together,\ntalking earnestly to each other.\n\nMr. Lee was in the room and watched them rather gravely, I thought; but\nMrs. Dennison, who was chatting merrily with Lawrence, called him to her\nside, and after that he seemed to forget everything but her.\n\nBeing left to myself, I was crossing the room to go out, when Jessie\nbeckoned me to the sofa, where she was sitting.\n\n\"Ah! Miss Hyde,\" she said, earnestly, \"try and persuade Mr. Bosworth to\ngive up his wild plan of going away.\"\n\n\"And have you really formed such an idea?\" I asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, striving to smile; \"one cannot loiter forever in these\npleasant country places. I have been a dreamer too long.\"\n\n\"But not yet,\" I pleaded, answering the appeal in Jessie's eyes; \"you\nwill not go in this unfriendly way.\"\n\n\"Unfriendly?\" he repeated, glancing at Jessie. \"No, I shall never do\nthat; never feel unfriendly toward any of you, Miss Hyde.\"\n\n\"But we cannot spare you, and I am quite sure Mrs. Dennison will be\nheart-broken if--\" I hesitated, conscious of the impropriety contained\nin these impulsive words.\n\n\"Oh! Mrs. Dennison will never be quite heart-broken at anything, I\nfancy,\" he replied, with a faint smile; \"but if you really desire it, I\nwill not break up the arrangements of our guests. A few weeks more or\nless need make little difference in a life-time.\"\n\nJessie brightened at this, and looked so gratefully on her rejected\nlover, that he smiled, but very mournfully, as if reproaching her for\nbeing so kindly and yet so firm.\n\nEarly in the evening, Mrs. Lee's little maid, Lottie, came into the\nparlor, and after casting her bright eyes in every corner of the room,\nwent up to her master and whispered something. Mr. Lee arose and went\nout. I beckoned Lottie, and asked if her mistress was worse?\n\n\"No, Miss Hyde, I can't say that she is, or that she isn't; because she\nhasn't said a word about it. But she isn't asleep, and it seems lonesome\nup there, within hearing of all the fun, and not know what it is about.\nFor how Mrs. Bab--how that lady's voice rings through the tower when she\nlaughs.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said I, \"she has a clear, sweet voice.\"\n\nLottie gave an almost imperceptible toss of the head.\n\n\"Besides,\" she said, drawing me aside, and speaking in a low voice,\n\"mistress can look right into the window where those people stand; I\ndon't know as she did, but I can.\"\n\n\"Well; could you discover more than we did, who are in the room,\nLottie?\"\n\nThe toss of her head was defiant now, but she made no other reply,\nexcept to whisper, \"Mrs. Babylon is coming this way, and I'm off.\"\n\n\"Stop,\" I said; \"did Mrs. Lee send for--for any of us?\"\n\n\"Send? No; but she expected, and being all alone evenings is what she\nisn't used to.\"\n\n\"I'll go up at once.\"\n\n\"There now, always flying off! It isn't you she wants.\"\n\n\"How do you know that, if she asked for no one in particular?\"\n\n\"How do I know? Well, that's good! As if I didn't know the difference\nbetween her wanting you and him! When she wants you, it's all quiet and\ndon't-care-much-about-it in her looks. When he ought to be there, and\nisn't, something comes into her eyes that makes your heart ache. I never\nsaw it till lately; but that look is growing on her, and would more, if\nit wasn't for me.\"\n\n\"Why, how can you prevent it, Lottie?\"\n\n\"Well, in a good many ways, Miss Hyde. One of 'em is by nice little lies\nthat hurt nobody, but do her lots of good. I know just how he makes\nbouquets, and when they don't come at the right time, I run down and\nmake up a bunch of flowers myself. I stole some pink and blue ribbons\nfrom his room to tie 'em with. Oh! it's worth while to see her eyes\nsparkle when I bring them in. Then I've studied his way of sending\ncompliments and messages. Don't pretend to be a genius like you that\nwrite poetry.\"\n\n\"Lottie!\"\n\n\"Oh! don't be frightened. I sha'n't bring you to disgrace about it. Made\nup my mind to that from the first. You needn't get mad and blush so; I\nain't a genius, but I can make up stories in my head; and why not tell\n'em to her? Why not, I say, when they please her? You should hear the\nelegant messages I bring from Mr. Lee, at least four times a day. When\nshe gets a nice little dish for dinner, it gives her appetite to think\nhe ordered it; but the cook knows.\"\n\n\"But, Lottie, this is wrong.\"\n\n\"Wrong! Well, I like that, Miss Hyde.\"\n\n\"It isn't the truth, Lottie.\"\n\n\"The truth! Who said it was? As if I didn't know it was lying, and glory\nin it!\"\n\nI could hardly keep my countenance. As for arguing a moral question with\nLottie, the thought was too ridiculous. She had her own ideas, and kept\nto them without the slightest regard to those of other people.\n\nWhile we were talking, Lottie had gradually edged herself out of the\nroom, and her last speech was delivered on the platform of the terrace.\nMrs. Lee's window was up, and I saw her husband enter the room with what\nseemed to me a reluctant step. He sat down, and opened a book, as if to\nread aloud. This had been his usual custom, but the last few evenings he\nhad spent in the drawing-room. I would have taken his place, but she\nrejected my offer with one of those deep sighs that excite so much pity\nwhen they come from an invalid.\n\n\"You talk against fibs, Miss Hyde; now what do you think of that? She\nnever would 'a' sent for him--died first, like a lamb starving in the\ncold. Hist! there comes Mrs. Babylon and her private beau.\"\n\nTrue enough, Mrs. Dennison and Lawrence had passed through one of the\ndrawing-room windows, and were slowly coming down the terrace platform,\nwhich, as I have said, ran around one end and the back of the house. It\nafforded a fine promenade, and they were enjoying the moonlight that\nfell upon it. My attention was occupied by them a moment, during which\nLottie disappeared. The railing of this platform was lined with a rich\nshrubbery of hot-house plants, lemon-trees, tall roses, and such\ncreeping vines as bear most choice blossoms. These cast heavy shadows,\nand I fancy that the girl disappeared among them,--listening, perhaps,\nbeing considered as one of the accomplishments which she devoted to the\nbenefit of her mistress.\n\nWhen I went back to the drawing-room, Jessie was at the piano, and\nBosworth sat near, watching her sadly as she played. She did not attempt\nto sing, and he offered no request of the kind. Altogether, it was a\ngloomy evening. Really, I think this idea of turning love into\nfriendship is an absurd way of settling things. Throwing ashes on hot\nembers only keeps the fire in more certain glow. Jessie was young, and\nhad no idea of prudence in such matters. I did not quite understand the\nundercurrent of her nature, but, in my heart, thought it best that\nBosworth should leave the neighborhood.\n\nThe next morning I saw Lottie coming out of Mrs. Dennison's room,\nlooking demure as a house-cat.\n\n\"I've taught 'em how to do another braid,\" she said, innocently. \"If\nthey tangle it, you know, I ain't to blame.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXII.\n\nSOWING SEED FOR ANOTHER DAY.\n\n\nAfter our conversation on the ridge, Mrs. Dennison made the best of her\nadvantages, and, having ingratiated herself into the room of our\ninvalid, managed to pass a good deal of her time there. I think Mrs.\nLee, without knowing it herself, exercised a little selfishness in this;\nfor it happened--so naturally that I never should have observed it but\nfor Lottie--that Mr. Lee visited his wife more frequently when his guest\nwas there than at any other time. Indeed, it was not many days before\nthe invalid ceased almost entirely to see him alone.\n\nAfter my attention was drawn to this by one of Lottie's curt sayings, I\nnoticed another thing that troubled me more than Mrs. Dennison's visits.\nCora, the mulatto girl, was constantly following her mistress to the\nroom, asking for orders, or reminding Mrs. Dennison of something that\nshe had been desired to remember. She made one or two efforts to fix\nherself in Lottie's apartment, but that singular female rebuffed the\nfirst attempt, by standing square in the door, and asking point-blank if\nthere were anything in that room which Cora wanted. The girl answered,\n\"No,\" and went away rather crestfallen.\n\nIt is very difficult to repress the aggressions of a guest under your\nown roof, especially one who invariably disarms you with honeyed words\nand apologies for anything that threatens to offend. It was not for me\nto regulate a visitor's movements in Mr. Lee's house; and so adroitly\nwere they managed, that no power, however on the alert, could have\nreached them.\n\nTo my surprise, Lottie, all of a sudden, not only seemed to lose her\nanimosity to the widow, but hung about her with assiduity almost equal\nto that bestowed on her mistress. But one thing was remarkable: none of\nher bright sayings, or exhibitions of sharp, good sense were manifested\nin Mrs. Dennison's presence. With her she was dull and quiet, nay,\nalmost stolid. I have heard her ask questions with the most innocent\nair, which a child of three years old could have answered. It was\nsurprising how anything so near a witch in her real nature could tame\nherself into that lump of stupidity. She was a great deal in Mrs.\nDennison's room; and once I saw them seated together on the hill-side,\ntalking earnestly. Still, for several days nothing happened worthy of\nremembrance.\n\nMr. Lee and the widow rode out once or twice without Jessie, who,\nfeeling a little hurt for her mother's sake, decided to remain at home\nand sit with the gentle invalid. I do not know that she observed it, but\nthere certainly was very little entreaty used to induce her to join\nthem. Indeed, upon the third morning nothing was said on the subject;\nJessie was not even invited.\n\nOne day, just after Mr. Lee and his guest had ridden from the door, Mr.\nLawrence called. He had seen them from a distance, he said, and came to\ninquire after Miss Lee's health. The flood of crimson that rushed over\nJessie's face, when I told her this, made my heart beat heavily. She\narose, and went down, avoiding my anxious glance as she passed me.\n\nThe doors were all open, but I heard no voices in the drawing-room; they\nmust have been talking very low: what did that portend between two\npersons perfectly alone? So anxious had I become that it seemed to me as\nif some harm were intended our Jessie among these strange people. She\nhad never seemed really happy since their advent among us. Indeed, there\nhad been little of comfort for any one.\n\nWhat passed between Jessie and Lawrence I learned afterward. But only so\nfar as a young girl can force herself to speak of things pertaining to\nher affections. One thing is certain: when she came up-stairs, after his\ndeparture, a look of uncertain joy pervaded her face, and she breathed\nquickly. I asked no questions, and was not surprised that she said\nlittle about the interview. After that day Jessie's manner became more\nelastic; and from some words that escaped, I am confident that, up to\nthis time, she had fancied Lawrence engaged to Mrs. Dennison; or, at\nthe least, ready at any moment to assume that position. Indeed, the\nwidow had told her as much.\n\nThe next day Jessie was invited to join Mr. Lee and his guest in their\nride; but she refused it coldly, nay, almost haughtily. Her father, for\nthe first time in his life, seemed really angry with her. He said\nnothing, however, but rode forth with a flush on his brow.\n\nAgain Mr. Lawrence called, or would have called, but that he saw Jessie\nwandering off toward the pine woods, and followed her. I saw them\nsitting a long time on a garden-chair stationed on the skirts of the\ngrove, but said nothing to any one, not even to herself when she came\ndown the hill, alone, with a light in her eyes that I had never seen\nthere before.\n\nI think Lawrence must have made five or six of these morning visits\nbefore they were suspected by any one in the house. Cora was generally\nbusy in her mistress's room all the forenoon, and Lottie took the\noccasion of Mrs. Dennison's absence to sit with loving watchfulness by\nour invalid, only too happy if a low word or patient smile rewarded her\ndevotion. But it came out at last.\n\nOne day I went suddenly upon the terrace platform, and found Cora\nstanding close by one of the drawing-room windows, with her shoulder\nagainst the framework. The blind swinging open concealed her from any\nperson within; and the position she maintained, while sorting the shades\nfrom some skeins of worsted that she held, was that of careless rest.\nShe moved indolently, and sauntered away on seeing me; but it was with a\nheavy, sullen manner, as if she had been unwarrantably disturbed. I\nlooked into the sitting-room in passing, and, as I expected, Lawrence\nand Jessie were sitting on a sofa close to that window.\n\nMrs. Dennison was in splendid spirits when she came back from her ride\nthat day. There was something triumphant in her step which put one in\nmind of some handsome Amazon returning from battle. She leaned heavily\non Mr. Lee, as he lifted her from the saddle; nay, I am certain that she\nrested against him a moment longer than was necessary.\n\nJessie was standing near me, but noticed none of these things. Noble\ngirl, she was never on the lookout for evil. Her upright mind tinted\neverything with its own pure hues.\n\nMr. Lee stayed a long time, giving orders about the horses. When he came\nup the steps, I had an opportunity of observing him closely. He was\npale, and looked strange. I cannot describe what I wish to be\nunderstood, but all the influences that had so long dwelt around that\nman seemed swept away. The very dignity of his tread was gone. What had\noccasioned this? I know now, and never doubted then. The woman sweeping\nthrough our hall, at the moment, had produced this transformation; yet\nno words had passed between them that his own daughter might not have\nheard without reproof.\n\nMrs. Dennison gave us a triumphant glance, as she passed the balcony\nwhere we were standing, and proclaimed that she had never enjoyed a ride\nso much. It was a heavenly day, and the landscape transcendent.\n\nJessie smiled softly, and turned a bright glance on my face, which said,\nmore plainly than Mrs. Dennison's words, \"I, too, have had a heavenly\nday, which will go with my dreams into many another day, making an Eden\nof them all.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXIII.\n\nAN OUTBREAK OF JEALOUSY.\n\n\nIn a few moments Mrs. Dennison came out of her chamber, still in her\nriding-habit. She was pale as death, her eyes gleamed, and her lips\nquivered. She dashed into the balcony, and laid her hand on Jessie's\nshoulder with such rude suddenness, that the young girl drew back with\nan impulse of surprise.\n\n\"What is the matter, Mrs. Dennison?\"\n\nMrs. Dennison looked at her a moment, subdued the quivering of her lips\nwith a great effort, and broke into a laugh so hoarse and constrained\nthat Jessie shrunk back.\n\n\"What is the matter?\" she said. \"Why, nothing; only we have but just\ntime to dress for dinner, and here you stand as if the whole world could\nwait.\"\n\nI could see that her frame was trembling from head to foot. The color\nwould not come back to her face. With all her powers, she was but a\nwoman, and a jealous woman at the best. From that moment I felt very\nsure that Cora had performed her mission promptly. Jessie could not\nunderstand it, but stood looking at her guest in blank amazement.\n\n\"You have ridden too far,\" she said, coldly, \"and the fatigue has shaken\nyour nerves, I fear. Shall I send for a glass of wine? it will be some\ntime before dinner.\"\n\n\"Wine? no; but--but I will take a glass of water, if you please, Miss\nHyde.\"\n\nJessie seemed anxious to get away, for she started before I could\nanticipate her to order the water, and I was left alone with Mrs.\nDennison. Her self-command was giving way again. She sat down, and,\ncovering her face with both hands, shook from head to foot; but she did\nnot weep. Something too hard and fiery for tears possessed her.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said at last, \"Miss Lee is right! These long rides do shake\none's nerves terribly!\"\n\nDirectly Jessie came bringing a glass of water. With her usual delicacy,\nshe would not intrust the duty to a servant, who might witness her\nfriend's discomposure and comment upon it.\n\nMrs. Dennison held the water a moment, regarding Jessie with gleaming\neyes, as if she longed to dash the contents in her face; but the insane\nfit went off. She drank the water, and arose to leave the balcony.\n\n\"I am not usually nervous, but this ride has completely upset me.\"\n\nWith these words she left the balcony and went back to her room.\n\n\"She is very ill, I am sure, Aunt Matty,\" said Jessie, full of gentle\nsympathy; \"pray go and see if nothing more can be done?\"\n\nI went to Mrs. Dennison's chamber and knocked; no one came or spoke. But\nthe door stood upon the latch, and the vibration of my hand unclosed it.\nMrs. Dennison was standing in the middle of the room, white with rage,\nand with specks of foam on her lips. She was tearing open her habit with\na violence that made the buttons start. The face with which she met my\nintrusion was that of a beautiful fiend.\n\nI closed the door and went back repulsed. But without giving me time to\ncross the hall, she came to the door, opened it wide, and called me in\nwith a laugh.\n\n\"Come back one moment,\" she said, \"and tell me which of these two\ndresses is most becoming. That which I had intended for dinner, Cora has\nbeen altering, and she has spoiled it entirely. I confess, Miss Hyde,\nthat my temper is not good enough to stand a pet dress in ruins. The\nfact is, I have frightened poor Cora half to death.\"\n\nQuick as lightning, while her mistress spoke, Cora laid some dresses on\nthe bed, apologizing, in a low voice, for the mischief she had done. If\nI had possessed no clue to the scene, it would have deceived me\ncompletely; but I comprehended it too well, and absolutely felt myself\ngrowing faint with disgust.\n\n\"I am no judge in these matters,\" I said, without any pretence at\ncordiality; \"nor would my opinion be of the least consequence if I were.\nYour dresses always prove becoming, Mrs. Dennison.\"\n\n\"The first compliment I ever received from you,\" she answered,\nimpressively; \"I shall remember it with gratitude.\"\n\nI went quietly out of the room, tired of the scene.\n\nA little while after this, Lottie came to me with one of her keen\nsmiles, and, opening her hands, which were folded palm to palm, gave me\none glimpse of a little note, primrose-tinted, and sealed with a drop of\ngreen wax, in which an antique head was stamped.\n\n\"What is it? whom is it for?\" I inquired, thinking that it must be\nintended for Jessie.\n\n\"You'll see to-night, or to-morrow morning,\" she answered. \"Mrs. Babylon\nwrites on handsome paper; I won't use white any more. I'll say this for\nher: when it comes to dress and pretty things, she can't be beat easy.\nDon't quite come up to Mrs. Lee: who can?--but putting her aside, I\ndon't know Mrs. Babylon's match.\"\n\n\"And is that Mrs. Dennison's note?\"\n\n\"Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no lies.\"\n\n\"But how came it in your possession?\"\n\nShe eyed me a moment sideways, then broke forth as if some grand thought\nhad just seized upon her.\n\n\"Now, I'll make a bargain with you, Miss Hyde. If you'll just persuade\nmy mistress, or Miss Jessie, to buy me half a dozen sheets of that\nstraw- paper, I'll tell you all about it.\"\n\n\"But what can you want of primrose paper, Lottie,--you that never write\nletters?\"\n\n\"No; but I may take to writing poetry; who knows?\"\n\nShe said this with a twinkle of the eye that provoked me. How on earth\nhad that creature got hold of my secret weakness?\n\n\"It isn't at all likely that you'll want paper for that purpose, Miss\nLottie.\"\n\n\"Miss Lottie--Miss! Well now, I have always said that if there was a\ngenuine lady, and no nonsense in this house, it was you, ma'am. Even my\nmistress hasn't got up to that mark--Miss Lottie! Wouldn't that look\nbeautiful on a yellow note like this? Miss Lottie--\"\n\nShe plumed herself, like a bird, in the ecstasy of my random speech, and\nboth her hands and her heart opened at once.\n\n\"Now, I'll tell you all about it! There's no secret, and if there is, I\ndidn't promise not to tell; that is, down in my heart. Cora came to me\njust now, and says she, 'Lottie, you know all the men about the\npremises, I suppose?'\n\n\"'Well, pretty much,' says I.\n\n\"'I thought so,' she said. 'Now, here is a little note that my mistress\nwants to have sent right off. If you can coax one of the men to take a\nhorse from the stable, and just gallop over to Mr. Bosworth's with it,\nand bring an answer back, she'll give you that dress you took such a\nfancy to.'\n\n\"'Well,' says I, 'hand over the note; I'll get it done.' She had been\nholding the note seal up all the time, and says she, 'Lottie'--not Miss\nLottie, mind--but, 'Lottie, can you read writing?'\n\n\"'Can you?' says I.\n\n\"'No,' says she; ' people seldom do.'\n\n\"'Well, then I don't.'\n\n\"'Well, this note is for a lady that is staying at Mr. Bosworth's; she's\nan old friend of Mrs. Dennison's, and we want to hear from her.'\n\n\"'All right,' says I. 'If you hadn't told this, it would be Greek and\nLatin to me.'\n\n\"She handed over the note, and told me to put it in my bosom for fear of\nits being seen. So I did; and came here, but not till I had read Mr.\nLawrence's name on the outside. Now, Miss Hyde, just tell me what to\ndo.\"\n\n\"There is one thing you must not do, Lottie, and that is, tempt any of\nthe men from their duty.\"\n\n\"But then that dress! Light green foulard, with bunches of roses--sweet\nroses!\"\n\n\"Wait a moment, Lottie; we must not do anything without Mr. Lee's\nsanction: that will never answer.\"\n\nI went up to Mr. Lee, who was sitting in the window recess, apparently\nreading, and asked if he could spare a horse and man long enough to ride\nover to Mr. Bosworth's.\n\n\"Who wishes to send?\" he inquired, indifferently.\n\n\"Mrs. Dennison,\" I answered, not unwilling to give him the information.\n\nHe held the paper a little tighter in his hand, repeating:\n\n\"Mrs. Dennison! What correspondent has she at Mrs. Bosworth's?\"\n\nThere was an effort at indifference in his voice, but it did not conceal\nthat he was touched.\n\nI did not feel at liberty to answer his question, and said nothing.\n\nAfter a moment's silence, he said,--\n\n\"Certainly, Miss Hyde. Our guests always command here.\"\n\nI went back to Lottie, and told her to carry Mr. Lee's orders to the\nstable, and, if she wished it, claim her reward. She seized my hand in\nan ecstasy of delight.\n\n\"Oh! Miss Hyde, I never will talk about poetry again, never so long as I\nlive; but I'll tell everybody that you don't know a thing about it, no\nmore than I do; and I believe it.\"\n\nWith this outburst she went away. Directly after, I saw one of the\ngrooms riding down the road. Two hours after, he came back, and gave\nLottie, who was waiting near the pine woods, with great appearance of\nsecrecy, a note, with which she went at once to Mrs. Dennison, evidently\nresolved to keep up appearances, and leave her employers in the belief\nthat the whole thing had been managed privately.\n\nI had thrown the subject of the note quite off my thoughts, when the\ngroom, who had been to Mr. Bosworth's, came to me in the garden with\ndistressing news.\n\nPoor young Bosworth was ill--so ill, that he had not been out of his\nroom for some days; and his mother desired very much that I should come\nover and see him. He had spoken of it several times, and, now that he\nwas growing worse, she could refuse him nothing. It was asking a great\ndeal, but would I come at the earliest time possible?\n\nThis was indeed sad news. I liked the young man. He was honorable,\ngenerous, and in all respects a person to fix one's affections\nupon--that is, such affections as a lady just dropping the bloom of her\nyouth may bestow on the man who looks upon her as a sort of relative.\n\nOf course I would go to see Bosworth in his sickness. \"God bless and\nhelp the young man,\" I whispered; \"if she could only think of him as I\ndo!\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXIV.\n\nTHE OLD PENNSYLVANIA MANSION.\n\n\nThe Bosworths lived behind the spur of the mountain which shut out a\nportion of the valley from our house by its crown of forest-trees. I had\ntaken little exercise in the open air of late, for Mrs. Dennison\nmonopolized the horse I had been in the habit of riding, with my usual\nseat in the carriage. Perhaps I felt a little hurt at this, and would\nnot ask favors that had until now been mine without solicitation. In my\nlove of out-door exercise I am half an English woman. So, mentioning to\nMrs. Lee and Jessie that I was going out for a long walk across the\nfields, I started for Mrs. Bosworth's house.\n\nIt was a splendid afternoon. The sunshine, warm and golden, without\nbeing oppressive, was softened by transparent clouds that drifted like\ncurrents and waves of gauze athwart the sky. The meadows were full of\ndaisies, buttercups, and crimson clover, through which the blue-flies\nand bumble-bees fluttered and hummed their drowsy music. In the pastures\nclouds of grasshoppers sprang up, with a whir, from the clusters of\nwhite everlasting that sprinkled the s like a snow-storm; and\nlittle birds bent down the stately mullein-stalks with their weight, and\nsang cheerily after me from the crooks of the fences.\n\nHow I loved these little creatures with their bright eyes and graceful\nways! How quietly they opened my heart to those sweet impulses that make\none grateful and child-like! My step grew buoyant, and I felt a cool,\nfresh color mounting to my cheeks. The walk had done me good. I had been\ntoo much in the house, indulging in strange fancies that were calculated\nto make no one happy, and were, perhaps, unjust. How could I have sunk\ninto this state of mind? Was I jealous of Mrs. Dennison? Yes, possibly!\nBut not as another would have understood the feeling. It was rather hard\nto hear the whole household singing her praises from morning till night;\nand Jessie, my own Jessie, seemed so bound up in the woman.\n\nWell, after all, these things seemed much more important in the house,\nwhere I felt like an involuntary prisoner, than they appeared to me,\nwith the open fields breathing fragrance around me, and the blue skies\nspeaking beautifully of the beneficent God who reigned above them.\n\nI really think the birds in that neighborhood had learned to love me a\nlittle, they gave such quaint little looks, and burst into such volumes\nof song among the hazel-bushes as I passed. Before I knew it, fragments\nof melodies were on my own lips. I gathered handful after handful of the\nmeadow-flowers, grouping the choicest into bouquets, and scattering the\nrest along my path. Thus you might have tracked my progress by tufts of\ngrass, and golden lilies, as the little boy in fairy history was traced\nby the pebble-stones he dropped.\n\nMrs. Bosworth's house was one of the oldest and finest of those\nponderous Dutch mansions that are scattered over Pennsylvania. There\nwere rich lands to back that old-fashioned building, and any amount of\ninvested property, independent of the lands. After all, young Bosworth\nwas no contemptible match for our Jessie, even in a worldly point of\nview. If his residence lacked something of the elegance and modern\nappointments for which ours was remarkable, it had an aspect of age and\naffluence quite as imposing. Indeed, in some respects it possessed\nadvantages which our house could not boast.\n\nMajestic trees that struck their roots in a virgin soil, and shrubbery\nthat had grown almost into trees, surrounded the old house. One great,\nwhite lilac-bush lifted itself above the second-story windows, and\nold-fashioned white roses clambered half over the stone front. Then\nthere was a huge honeysuckle that spread itself like a banner upon one\ncorner, garlanding the eaves, and dropping down in rich festoons from\nthe roof itself.\n\nBut all this was nothing compared to that magnificent elm-tree, which\noverhung a wing of the building with its tent-like branches, through\nwhich the wind was eternally whispering, and the sunshine was broken\ninto faint flashes before it reached the roof. I had never been so much\nimpressed with the dignity of old times, as when I approached this\ndwelling. It possessed all the respectability of a family mansion,\ngrowing antique in the prosperity which surrounded it, without any\nattempt at modern improvements.\n\nThe very flowers on the premises were old-fashioned; great snow-ball\nbushes and rows of fruit-trees predominating. In the square garden, with\nits pointed picket-fence, that ran along the road, I saw clusters of\nsmallage, and thickets of delicate fennel. On each side the broad\nthreshold-stone stood green boxes running over with live-forever and\nhouse-leeks, while all around the lower edges of the stone foundation\nthat exquisite velvet moss, which we oftenest find on old houses, was\ncreeping.\n\nI lifted the heavy brass knocker very cautiously, for it was ponderous\nenough to have reverberated through the house. Even the light blow I\ngave frightened me. No wonder people felt constrained to muffle knockers\nlike that in the good old times, when sickness came to the family.\n\nA quiet, middle-aged woman came to the door. She knew me at\nonce, though it was the first time I had entered the house in years.\n\n\"Come in, Miss Hyde,\" she said, welcoming me with a genial look. \"Mrs.\nBosworth said, if you called she would come right straight down and see\nyou; so walk in.\"\n\nShe opened the door of a sitting-room on the right of the hall. It was\nold-fashioned like the exterior of the building. Windows sunk deep into\nthe wall, ponderous chairs, and a capacious, high-backed sofa with\ncrimson cushions, and embroidered footstools standing before it,--all\nhad an air of comfortable ease. The carpet had been very rich in its\ntime, and harmonized well with the rest of the apartment.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXV.\n\nTHE MOTHER AND GRANDMOTHER.\n\n\nI seated myself on the sofa, and waited with some anxiety. Surely, my\nyoung friend must be very ill to have abandoned this room for his own!\nWhat a comfortable look the place had! How delightfully all the tints\nwere toned down! There stood a queer, old work-table, with any amount of\ncuriously twisted legs, and on it an antique bible, mounted and clasped\nwith silver. Such books are only to be found now in the curiosity shops\nof the country. Under this table, and somehow lodged among its\ncomplication of legs, was the old lady's work-basket, in which I\ndetected a silver-mounted case for knitting-needles, some balls of\nworsted, and an embroidered needle-book. Ladies are always noticing\nthese little feminine details; they aid us greatly in that quick\nknowledge of character which men are apt to set down as intuition.\n\nWhile I was thinking over these speculations, a step in the hall, and\nthe rich, heavy rustle of those old silks that our grandmothers were so\nproud of, disturbed me. The door opened, and an old lady, very old\nindeed, came into the room.\n\nI stood up involuntarily, for the person of this old lady was so\nimposing, that it exacted a degree of homage which I had never felt\nbefore. I can imagine a figure like that, wandering through the vast\npicture-galleries of some fine English castle, and there I should have\ngiven her a title at first sight. As it was, her person struck me with\namazement. Not that it was out of keeping with the premises, but because\nthis lady was altogether a grander and older person than I had expected\nto see in that house.\n\nShe received my salutation with a slow curtsy, very slight and\ndignified in its movement, and, advancing to a huge, crimson easy-chair\nthat stood near the work-table, sat down.\n\n\"My daughter is in her son's room,\" she said, in a soft and measured\nvoice, glancing at me with her placid eyes. \"He is very ill, and we are\nfrightened about him.\"\n\n\"Is not this sudden?\" I inquired.\n\n\"Yes, very; we don't know what to make of it. He is always so healthy\nand so cheerful; something has gone wrong with him, Miss Hyde.\"\n\nShe looked at me earnestly, as if expecting that I would explain the\nsomething which was beyond her understanding.\n\nI felt myself blushing. It was not for me to speak of Jessie's affairs\nto any one, certainly not in a case like this.\n\nThe old lady dropped her eyes, and, taking her knitting-case from the\nbasket, laid it in her lap, evidently disposed to give me time. At\nlength she spoke again.\n\n\"My grandson has enjoyed himself so much since we came to the country,\nespecially since his friend, Mr. Lawrence, arrived; and now to have him\nstruck down all at once--it is disheartening!\"\n\n\"Is he so very ill?\" I inquired.\n\n\"He has been restless and excited, more or less, for a week or more, but\nduring the last three days has fallen seriously ill. Now he is entirely\nout of his head; my daughter sat up with him all last night; the doctor\nwas here this morning. He pronounces it a brain-fever.\"\n\nI was really disturbed. She saw it and went on.\n\n\"He asked for you three or four times during the night; and--and for\nanother person whom we could not venture to invite here.\"\n\n\"I am glad you sent for me,\" I replied, anxious to waive all\nexplanation. \"At home they consider me a tolerable nurse.\"\n\nShe looked at me seriously a moment, and then said, in a gentle,\nimpressive way,--\n\n\"Miss Hyde, be kind to an old woman who has nothing but the good of her\nchild at heart, and tell me if Miss Lee has--has repulsed my grandson?\"\n\n\"No, not that, madam; but, but--\"\n\n\"She has rejected him, I see it by your face; I suspected it from his\nwanderings,\" she said, sorrowfully.\n\nI was silent; the mournful accents of her voice touched my heart.\n\n\"You have no hope to give the old woman?\" she said. \"Yet to her it seems\nimpossible for any one not to love Bosworth.\"\n\n\"I am sure there is no man living for whom Miss Lee has more respect,\" I\nanswered.\n\nShe smiled a little sadly.\n\n\"Respect! That is a cold word to the young heart, Miss Hyde.\"\n\nThat moment the door opened and Bosworth's mother came in. She was\naltogether unlike the stately old lady with whom I was conversing. Her\nsmall figure, wavering black eyes, and restless manner, spoke of an\nentirely different organism, which was natural enough, as she was only\nconnected with the stately dame by marriage with her son, a union that\nhad been consecrated by an early widowhood.\n\nIt was easy to see that the elder lady was mistress of that house, and\nthat the daughter-in-law held her in profound reverence. Poor lady! she\nwas in great distress, and came up to me at once.\n\n\"You are kind, very kind,\" she exclaimed; \"he has asked for you so\noften. Oh! Miss Hyde, it is terrible to see him in this state with no\nway of helping.\"\n\n\"It is indeed,\" I answered, pitying her from my heart.\n\n\"Will you go up now? He asked for you and some one else only a few\nminutes ago,\" she said, walking up and down the room in nervous\ndistress. \"It was an out-of-the-way thing to send for you, almost a\nstranger, for the Ridge has been empty so long that you all seem like\nnew people, but I am sure you will excuse it. Oh! Miss Hyde, we love him\nso. We two lonely women, and to lose him!\"\n\nHere the poor mother burst into a passion of tears; while the old lady\nsat down by her work-table and looked on with a sorrowful countenance.\n\nA noise from up-stairs arrested the younger Mrs. Bosworth in her walk.\n\n\"He is calling,\" she said. \"Oh! Miss Hyde, he cannot bear me out of his\nsight! Just as it was years ago, when he would plead with me to sit by\nhis bed, after our mother there insisted on the lamp being put out.\"\n\nThe old lady shook her head, and smiled sadly. \"You were spoiling the\nboy, Hester, making a little coward of him; but he soon ceased to be\nafraid of the dark,--a brave young man, Miss Hyde, and a comfort to his\nmother; God spare him to us!\"\n\nHester Bosworth began to cry afresh at these encomiums; and, going up to\nher mother-in-law's chair, bent her head upon the back, sobbing aloud.\n\nThe old lady reached up her soft, little hand, and patted the poor\nmother on the cheek as if she had been a child.\n\n\"Don't fret so, Hester. Our boy is young, and his constitution will not\ngive way easily. A little sleep--if we could only induce a few hours'\nsleep!\"\n\n\"I have made a hop pillow for him, and done everything,\" sobbed the\nmother; \"but there he lies, looking, looking, looking, now at the wall,\nnow at the ceiling, and muttering to himself.\"\n\n\"I know--I know,\" said the grandmother, hastily lifting her hand, as if\nthe description wounded her. \"Will nothing give him a little sleep?\"\n\nI remembered how often Mrs. Lee, in her nervous paroxysms, had been\nsoothed to rest by the gentle force of my own will. Indeed, I sometimes\nfancy that some peculiar gift has been granted to me, by which physical\nsuffering grows less in my presence.\n\n\"Shall I go up with you, Mrs. Bosworth?\" I said, inspired with hope by\nthis new idea. \"He may recognize me as an old friend.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, yes!\" she exclaimed, leading the way. \"Mother, will you come?\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXVI.\n\nSICK-BED FANCIES.\n\n\nWe mounted the staircase, a broad, old-fashioned flight of steps,\nsurmounted with heavy balustrades of black oak. There was a thick carpet\nrunning up them; but, lightly as we trod, the keen ear of the invalid\ndetected a strange presence, and I heard his voice, muffled and rough\nwith fever, calling out, \"Yes, yes, I knew, I knew, I knew that she\nwould come!\" Then he broke into the notes of some opera-song.\n\nThere was a cool, artificial twilight in the chamber when we entered it;\nbut through the bars of the outer blinds a gleam of sunshine shot across\nthe room, and broke against the wall opposite the great, high-posted bed\non which young Bosworth was lying. The chamber was large, and but for\nthe closed blinds would have been cheerful. As it was, a great\neasy-chair, draped with white dimity, loomed up like a snow-drift near\nthe bed; which being clothed in like spotless fashion, gave a ghastly\nappearance to everything around.\n\nYoung Bosworth lay upon the bed with his arms feebly uplifted, and his\ngreat, wild eyes wandering almost fiercely after the sunbeams which came\nand went like golden arrows, as the branches of an elm-tree near the\nwindow changed their position.\n\nI went up to the bed, and touched the young man's wrist. The pulse that\nleaped against my fingers was like the blows of a tiny hammer; his eyes\nturned on my face, and he clutched my hand, laughing pleasantly.\n\n\"How cool your hand is!\" he said, with a child-like murmur. \"You have\nbeen among the clover-blossoms; their breath is all around me.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, dropping into his own monotone without an effort, \"I came\nthrough the meadows, and brought some of the flowers with me. See how\nfresh and sweet they are.\"\n\nHe took the flowers eagerly, grasping them with both hands.\n\n\"Did she send them?\" he whispered, mysteriously. \"Did she?\"\n\nI smiled, but would not answer. The delusion seemed pleasant, and it\nwould be cruelty to disturb it. He held the blossoms caressingly in his\nhand; a smile wandered over his lips, and he whispered over soft\nfragments of some melody that I remembered as one of Jessie's favorites.\n\nDirectly the flowers dropped from his grasp, and he began to search\nafter the sunbeam again, clutching at it feverishly, and looking in his\nhands with vague wonder when he found them empty.\n\nI do not think the young man recognized me at all; but my presence\ncertainly aroused new associations.\n\nHe looked wistfully into my face with that vacant stare of delirium\nwhich is so painful, and then his eyes wandered away, as if in search of\nsome object they could not find.\n\n\"Jessie,\" he murmured; \"Jessie Lee, are you there? Won't you speak to me\nonce more, Jessie?\"\n\nThe expression of his countenance changed so entirely--a look of such\ntender, earnest entreaty settled about his handsome, sensitive\nmouth--that I felt the tears come into my eyes. When I looked up, I saw\nthe stately old grandmother gazing directly upon me; while little Mrs.\nBosworth, in her very efforts to be at the same time perfectly quiet and\nextremely useful, fluttered about in a feeble way that would have\nannoyed me beyond endurance had I been the sick person.\n\nBut the young man, apparently susceptible neither to outer sights nor\nsounds, saw nothing and heard nothing but the fanciful shapes and\nmocking whispers of his fever-visions.\n\n\"Put these flowers in your hair, Jessie,\" he said, somewhat brokenly,\n\"they are wild flowers such as you love, and I love them for your\nsake--for your sake.\"\n\nHe put out his hands, moving them to and fro over the counterpane, to\ngather up the blossoms he had scattered there; but his fingers wandered\nso uncertainly, that even when he succeeded in collecting a few, they\nwould drop from his grasp. I saw he began to grow impatient, and I knew\nthat the least thing would excite his fever and thereby increase the\ndelirium, so I put the flowers softly into his palm. He smiled in a\nsatisfied way.\n\n\"Here they are,\" he said; \"take them, Jessie; see what a pretty wreath\nthey make.\"\n\nThen the smile changed to a look of pain. He let the flowers fall to the\ncounterpane with a low moan.\n\n\"She has a wreath on now!\" he exclaimed. \"Jessie Lee, who gave you that?\nWhite flowers! Bridal flowers!\"\n\nHe started up in the bed with such violence, that his mother hurried\nforward with a cry of dismay, and, getting into mischief, as people in a\nflurry are sure to do, she upset a bottle of cologne and a goblet, but\nfortunately the old lady caught them before they reached the floor.\n\n\"Oh my!\" sobbed little Mrs. Bosworth, in nervous fright, \"what have I\ndone? Oh! dear, dear!\"\n\n\"Sit down, my dear,\" said her mother-in-law, with a good deal of\nsteadiness; \"you only disturb him.\"\n\n\"But he looks so wild. Hadn't I better send for the doctor?\"\n\n\"No, no. He will be here before long. Leave my grandson to Miss Hyde;\nshe will quiet him.\"\n\nThe old lady looked at me, with confidence in my powers, and the mother\njoined her in a helpless, despairing manner, mixed with a little\nmaternal jealousy, at seeing me in the place that was hers by right. I\nfelt quite nervous and disturbed by this joint appeal; however, I was\nnot foolish enough to give way to any weakness or nonsense when\ncomposure was required, so I drew close to the bed, and laid my hand on\nBosworth's arm. He was muttering wildly, and I could catch the words,--\n\n\"Are they bridal flowers, Jessie Lee?\"\n\n\"She has taken off the wreath,\" I whispered.\n\n\"No, no; it is there on her forehead. Who gave it to her?\"\n\n\"She has thrown it aside,\" I protested; \"she would not wear it a moment\nafter she knew it pained you. It is gone now.\"\n\nHe looked earnestly at the place where he thought Jessie stood, and fell\nback on his pillows with a sigh of satisfaction.\n\n\"Kind Jessie,\" he said, \"kind Jessie!\"\n\nBut that quiet only lasted for a few moments. He grew more restless than\nbefore; and I saw old Mrs. Bosworth looking at me still, as if she had\nfully made up her mind that I could compose him, and nothing less than\nthat desirable effect would satisfy her. Really, with those old-world\neyes fastened upon me, I could not avoid exerting all my powers,\nalthough in my heart I fairly wished the fidgety little mother safe in\nher own room.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXVII.\n\nTHE FIRST SOUND SLEEP.\n\n\nI sat down by the young man's bed; I talked to him in a low voice--a\ngreat deal of nonsense, I dare say; I was not thinking how it might\nsound, but was only anxious to soothe him; and while I talked I smoothed\nhis hair and passed my hand slowly across his forehead, after a fashion\nwhich I had acquired in my attendance upon Mrs. Lee, during her numerous\nillnesses.\n\nI cannot pretend to account for it, but from my earliest girlhood I\nalways had a faculty for taking care of sick people, and of soothing\nthem when no other person could.\n\nMy art did not fail that time. Bosworth's voice grew lower and lower;\nhis hands crossed themselves upon the counterpane; his eyes closed, and\nvery soon his measured breathing proved that he was quietly asleep. When\nI looked up, that stately old duchess of a grandmother was regarding me\nwith such a blessing in her eyes, that I felt the dew steal into mine;\nwhile the younger lady, subdued out of her fidgetiness, appeared almost\ntranquil, and was quite silent.\n\nNobody stirred or spoke. There we sat and watched the sick man as he\nslept--that quiet sleep which the physician had pronounced so necessary\nfor him, and which his art had failed to procure. It is not often that I\nfeel thoroughly satisfied with Martha Hyde, but I confess that just then\nI did; not that it proceeded from a sense of self-importance, or\nanything of that sort, but it is seldom that a quiet person like me has\nan opportunity of doing good to anybody, and when the occasion does\narrive, it is more pleasant than I can at all describe.\n\nBosworth must have slept nearly an hour; the instant he opened his eyes,\nI saw that the fever had abated a little. He smiled faintly at his\nmother and the old lady; then his glance fell upon me. Through the\nfeverish flush still on his face there appeared a glow of thankfulness\nand pleasure, which was beautiful to behold.\n\n\"Is that you, Miss Hyde?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" I said; \"I have been sitting here for some time. You have had a\nnice sleep; to-morrow you will be better.\"\n\n\"Thank you; I hope so.\"\n\nLittle Mrs. Bosworth began to flutter; but the old lady put her down\nwith a strong hand, and the weak female subsided into her chair, meek as\na hen-pigeon that has been unexpectedly pecked by her mate.\n\nI saw, by the way Bosworth looked at them, that he wished to speak with\nme alone; the old duchess saw it too, and said, with the decision which\nwas evidently habitual to her:\n\n\"My daughter, if Miss Hyde will sit with our boy a little longer, we\nwill go into the garden for a breath of air.\"\n\nBosworth called them to him, kissed his mother's cheek, and the\ngrandmother's hand, and the old lady went out in her stately way, while\nthe small woman followed in her wake, like a little boat tacked to a\ngraceful yacht.\n\n\"Miss Hyde,\" said the young man, the moment the door closed, \"you came\nalone?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I replied; \"I hurried off without telling any one where I was\ngoing.\"\n\n\"You are very kind,\" he repeated. \"They are all well, I hope, at the\nhouse?\"\n\n\"Very well; they will be sorry to hear that you are sick.\"\n\n\"Miss Hyde!\" he exclaimed, hurriedly,--so weak from sickness that he\nforgot all the reticence and self-command which characterized him in\nhealth,--\"Miss Hyde, do you think she would come to see me?\"\n\nI knew whom he meant--there was no necessity for mentioning any name.\n\n\"Would she come, do you believe?\" he asked again.\n\n\"I am certain that she would,\" I replied. \"You are an old friend to all\nof us; why should she not?\"\n\n\"Yes, an old friend,\" he answered, sadly; \"I know, I know! I won't pain\nher; she shall not be troubled; promise to bring her, Miss Hyde.\"\n\n\"I can promise unhesitatingly,\" I said; \"I have no doubt Mr. Lee will\nbring her himself, to-morrow.\"\n\n\"To-morrow--oh! how much I thank you!\" And he smiled like a tired child.\n\"Will you call my mother now?\" he continued; \"she will feel troubled if\nshe thinks I can do without her.\"\n\nI went out into the hall, where the two ladies stood, and beckoned them\ninto the room. We all remained about the bed for a few moments, talking\ncheerfully; then I bade Bosworth good-bye, answered the entreaty in his\neyes with a smile, and went down-stairs.\n\nThe grandmother followed me, and, when we reached the outer door, took\nmy hand between both of hers.\n\n\"You are very good!\" she said. \"We have long been strangers to each\nother, Miss Hyde; but an old woman's blessing cannot hurt you, and I\ngive it to you.\"\n\nI was so much affected, that it was all I could do to keep from crying\nlike a child; but I did not give way, and, mutually anxious to restrain\nour feelings, we parted with a certain degree of haste, which an\nunobservant looker-on might have construed into indifference. But I\nthink that grand old woman understood me, even from that short\ninterview, and I know that, for my part, I went forth from her presence\nsolemnized and calmed as one leaves a church.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXVIII.\n\nTHE INTERVIEW IN THE WOODS.\n\n\nI walked slowly homeward, reflecting upon the events of the morning, and\nwaiting, oh, how fervently! that Jessie Lee might learn to know young\nBosworth as I did, and be able to shed a ray of light into the darkness\nwherein he had fallen.\n\nI left the path through the fields, and took my way into the woods, as I\nknew a short cut that would lead me more quickly into our grounds.\n\nI had passed half through the grove, perhaps, scarcely heeding anything\naround me, but on reaching a little ascent, I saw, through a break in\nthe trees, two persons standing at a considerable distance from the\npath. Their backs were toward me, but I recognized them instantly. They\nwere Mrs. Dennison and Mr. Lawrence.\n\nI understood at once the meaning of the note which she had sent to\nhim--it was to ask for that interview.\n\nEvery day my dislike of that woman increased; each effort that I made to\nconquer the feeling only seemed to make it grow more intense, and this\nlast plot that I had unintentionally discovered filled me with something\nvery like abhorrence. Of course, I was not so silly as to conjure\nanything really wrong out of the request she had made; but I was certain\nthat something more than trivial coquetry was hidden under it.\n\nInstinctively, I began to tremble for Jessie: by what series of ideas I\nmanaged to connect her with that meeting, I cannot say; but I did so,\nand after that first glance I went on, burning with indignation against\nthe artful woman, who seemed to have brought numberless shadows into the\nsunshine, which, before her coming, had pervaded our pleasant home.\n\nOnce, as I hastened on through the dark woods, I looked back at the\npair,--they were conversing earnestly. In Lawrence's manner there was a\ndegree of impetuosity and impatience; while from Mrs. Dennison's\nattitude and gestures I felt certain that she was pleading with him to\nchange some purpose he had formed.\n\nJust as I passed from the woods into the grounds, I saw that ubiquitous\nLottie steal out from among the trees, and flit like a lapwing toward\nthe house.\n\nIt was not difficult to imagine what new mischief she had been\nat--spying and listening, no doubt. Lottie did not count it a sin, and I\nknew very well that she had been coolly out into the woods to overhear\nMrs. Dennison's conversation with Lawrence.\n\nSome noise that I made attracted her attention; she dropped down on her\nknees--like a rabbit trying to hide itself in the grass--and began\nhunting for four-leaved clovers where clover had never grown since the\nmemory of man.\n\n\"What are you doing, Lottie?\" I asked, walking toward her.\n\nShe looked round with a fine show of innocence, although her eyes\ntwinkled suspiciously.\n\n\"Oh! it's you, Miss Hyde,\" she said, in no wise confused, rising from\nher knees with great deliberation and majesty.\n\n\"Yes, it is I. And what brings you here?\" I inquired.\n\n\"There's several things I might have been doing,\" she answered, walking\non by my side; \"picking flowers, or saying my prayers, or--\"\n\n\"Well--what else?\"\n\n\"Oh! anything you please; poetry people ought to be able to guess.\"\n\n\"Lottie! Lottie!\"\n\n\"There--I won't say a word more! I'm dumb as Miss Jessie's canary in\nmoulting-time.\"\n\n\"Then, perhaps, you will manage to find voice enough to tell me where\nyou have been?\"\n\n\"Of course, Miss Hyde; I never have any secrets--that's just what I was\nsaying to Cora, this morning.\"\n\n\"Never mind Cora.\"\n\n\"But I do; she's worth minding, and so's her mistress. Mrs. Babylon and\nI are alike in one thing--we are both fond of fresh air.\"\n\n\"Indeed! You seem well acquainted with the lady's tastes.\"\n\n\"Well, I may say I am; and you needn't take the trouble to contradict!\nAcquainted with them? Well, if I ain't, I flatter myself there's nobody\nin our house that is.\"\n\nI did not answer; the girl's conversation was too quaint and amusing\neven to sound impertinent, still, I did not wish to encourage her by any\nsign of approval.\n\n\"Miss Hyde,\" she asked, \"did you see any strange birds in the woods?\"\n\n\"None, Lottie.\"\n\n\"Buy a pair of spectacles, Miss Hyde; don't put it off a day longer! I\ntell you, out yonder there's two birds well worth watching;--the\nqueerest part is, that it's the female that sings--ain't she a red\nfellar?\"\n\n\"I saw Mrs. Dennison and Mr. Lawrence, if you mean them,\" I replied.\n\n\"Hush! don't mention names! You mean Babylon and her prey! Oh my! that\nBabylon! Well, I declare, sometimes I'm ready to give up beat; that\nwoman goes ahead of anything _I_ ever came across.\"\n\nLottie paused, took a long breath, flung up her arms, and performed a\nvariety of singular and dizzy evolutions, by way of expressing her\nastonishment; then she went on,--\n\n\"What do you think she's at now?\"\n\nI shook my head.\n\n\"It's as good a thing as you can do,\" said Lottie, approvingly; \"but you\nmight shake it till doomsday before you'd get Mrs. Babylon's\nmanoeuvres through it, I can tell you that, Miss Hyde.\"\n\nI wanted to reprove the girl; I felt mean, dishonest; yet I was so\nanxious about Jessie that I could not prevent myself listening to any\nrevelations the little imp might see fit to make.\n\n\"She's put a hornet into Lawrence's hair this time, and no mistake,\"\nsaid Lottie; \"and Lord! don't it sting, and make him jump?\"\n\n\"What do you mean, you ridiculous child?\"\n\n\"Mean, Miss Hyde? A whole bucketful--a seaful! Why, Babylon's been\ntelling Lawrence that young Mr. Bosworth and our Miss Jessie are\nengaged.\"\n\n\"Impossible, Lottie! She could not assert so unblushing a falsehood!\"\n\n\"Oh! couldn't she?\" cried Lottie, clapping her arms as if they were\nwings, and giving vent to a crow to express her enjoyment. \"As for\nblushing, don't she know the rub of mullein-leaves? But she did tell him\nso. She said she was sure that they had been engaged, and that he,\nLawrence, had innocently made trouble between them by flirting with Miss\nLee;--now, what is flirting, Miss Hyde?\"\n\n\"The abominable woman!\" I involuntarily exclaimed.\n\n\"Oh, no,\" said Lottie, \"she's only Babylon. But I tell you what, that\nLawrence isn't much of a snoop. He's a nicer fellow than I took him for.\nWhat do you think he did?\"\n\n\"I can't imagine.\"\n\n\"He just turned on Babylon, like a hawk on a June-bug. 'I cannot believe\nthis,' says he; 'but I will go to Bosworth this very day and explain.'\n\n\"Then Babylon began to flutter; she didn't want that to happen, you\nknow.\n\n\"'He's sick,' says she; 'not expected to live.'\n\n\"'The more reason why I should explain,' says he.\n\n\"Then she twisted, and fluttered, and coaxed, and finally got him to\npromise not to say a word to anybody, to be regulated by her advice,\nand so on--she would be his friend--oh! how sincere a friend!--and then\nshe took his hand, squeezed out a tear or so, and before long she had\nhim in her clutch. Oh! it was as good as one of Miss Jessie's\nplay-books.\"\n\nI had not interrupted Lottie; when she paused, I was speechless still.\n\n\"What do you think now?\" she demanded, triumphantly.\n\n\"I do not know,\" I answered, so troubled and despondent that I had no\ncourage to rebuke the girl.\n\n\"We'll fix her yet,\" said Lottie; \"don't you fret, Miss Hyde. I'll pay\nBabylon off before she's many weeks older, or you may call my head a\npuff-ball.\"\n\n\"You silly child,\" I returned, smiling in spite of myself, \"what can you\ndo?\"\n\n\"Come, I like that!\" snapped Lottie. \"Why, what sort of a state would\nyou all be in if it wasn't for me--tell me that? I've got my dear\nmistress, and Miss Jessie, and you, and everybody on my hands; but I'll\nbring you out square, I will, Miss Hyde.\"\n\n\"I wish you would leave things as they are, Lottie, and attend to your\nown affairs.\"\n\n\"These are my affairs, Miss Hyde, now don't say they ain't! I'm not a\nbad girl; I love them that have been kind to me, and I'd sooner have my\nhand burned off than not try to help them when I see they need it.\"\n\n\"Be careful that you get into no mischief.\"\n\n\"I'll take care of myself! Only wait, Miss Hyde. Keep tranquil and cool,\nLottie's around!\"\n\nShe gave another jump, a louder crow, and lighted on her feet, in no way\ndiscomposed by her impromptu leap.\n\nBy this time we had come in sight of the house. Lottie looked back.\n\n\"I see Babylon's red shawl,\" said she; \"off's the word. Good-bye, Miss\nHyde.\"\n\nShe darted away before I could speak, and I walked on toward the house,\nin no mood to encounter the woman at that moment. I saw Jessie and Mr.\nLee standing upon the terrace; he turned and went into the house after a\nfew seconds. I paused a moment, collected myself as well as I was able,\nand walked toward the spot where Jessie stood, determined to tell her at\nonce of my visit to Mr. Bosworth, and urge her to comply with the\nrequest which he had made.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXIX.\n\nTROUBLES GATHER ABOUT OUR JESSIE.\n\n\nJessie did not look up as I approached; she stood absently pulling the\nflowers from a vine that fell in luxuriant masses over a trellis by her\nside, and appeared so much engrossed by her own thoughts, that she did\nnot even hear my footsteps.\n\nThey were not pleasant reflections which filled her mind. Sunny visions,\nsuch as those which, a few weeks since, had made her face so bright and\nbeautiful, were seldom on her features now. I could see by the mournful\nexpression of her mouth, and the despondency of her whole attitude,--so\nunlike anything I was accustomed to remark in our Jessie, that something\nwas troubling her.\n\n\"You naughty girl!\" I said, as I ascended the steps; \"how can you find\nthe heart to spoil that pretty vine?\"\n\nShe started, turned quickly round, and a burning blush shot up to her\nforehead, while she looked at me in a confused way, as if she supposed\nme able to read her very thoughts.\n\n\"Oh! is it you, Aunt Matty?\" she exclaimed, trying to laugh and seem\nmore at ease.\n\n\"I believe so,\" was my answer; \"I have every reason to suppose that I am\nthat person, and very tired into the bargain.\"\n\n\"You look fatigued,\" she said, with her usual kindness; \"do go up-stairs\nand lie down before dinner.\"\n\n\"Now, my dear, you know I am never guilty of that weakness.\"\n\n\"I forgot.\"\n\n\"How could you? I am astonished--when you know how much I pride myself\non regular habits and a systematic disposal of my time!\"\n\nShe laughed a little at my nonsense, which was the thing I desired; for\nit pained me greatly to see her look so weary and disconsolate.\n\n\"At all events, you will sit down, I suppose,\" she said, running into\nthe hall and bringing out a chair. \"Your rigid principles do not prevent\nthat!\"\n\n\"Thank you, my dear. I am happy to say they do not.\"\n\nI seated myself, really glad of an opportunity to rest; for now that\nexcitement had passed, I was astonished to find myself worn out in body\nand mind. The mere walk could never have produced that sensation--I was\ntoo much accustomed to out-door exercise for any fine lady feebleness of\nthat kind; but my interview with Bosworth and his friends, the sight of\nMrs. Dennison and Mr. Lawrence in the wood, together with Lottie's\nrevelations, had so worked upon my mind, that I had no strength left.\n\n\"Dear me! Aunt Matty!\" exclaimed Jessie; \"how tired and pale you look! I\nnever saw you so overcome!\"\n\n\"It is nothing. I walked faster than I ought, perhaps.\"\n\n\"That is not all,\" she answered; \"I am sure something troubles you.\"\n\n\"So there does!\" I said,--\"very greatly!\"\n\n\"Can I help you? You know how gladly I will do it.\"\n\nShe began untying my bonnet-strings, drawing off my shawl, and\nperforming every little office possible to show her solicitude.\n\nGenerally, I dislike to have anybody touch me, or assist me in any way;\nbut it was always a pleasure to feel Jessie's fingers smoothing my hair,\nor arranging my collar; and just then her assiduity quieted me more than\nanything else could have done.\n\n\"Did you take a long walk?\" Jessie asked, apparently anxious to turn my\nthoughts from the painful theme upon which she supposed them to be\ndwelling.\n\n\"Yes, very long, Jessie; I have been over to old Mrs. Bosworth's.\"\n\nShe looked at me in astonishment.\n\n\"Why, you hardly know the ladies! How came you to go there, Aunt Matty?\"\n\n\"The old lady sent for me.\"\n\n\"Sent for you!\" interrupted Jessie, in wonder and displeasure, while her\ngreat eyes gave me a searching glance.\n\n\"Young Bosworth is very sick, and he wished so much to see me that his\ngrandmother put aside all ceremony, and desired me to go as soon as\npossible.\"\n\nJessie turned very pale while I spoke, and leaned heavily against the\narm of my chair.\n\n\"Was it sudden?\" she asked, trembling. \"Has he been sick long, Matty?\"\n\n\"For several days, I believe.\"\n\nI had not the heart to tell her that he was stricken down the very day\nafter his last visit to her father's house, lest she should accuse\nherself as the cause.\n\n\"What is the matter?\"\n\n\"He has brain-fever, Jessie.\"\n\nShe uttered a cry.\n\n\"Oh! Aunt Matty! Aunt Matty!\"\n\n\"I hope he is not in great danger,\" I said, anxious to soothe her. \"He\nwas able to talk with me, and he had a comfortable sleep.\"\n\nShe put her hands in mine, with a look so beseeching and helpless, that\nI answered as if she had spoken.\n\n\"He asked for you,\" I said. \"He wants to see you, Jessie.\"\n\nShe shrunk back, and held up her hands like a child pleading for pity.\n\n\"Oh! I cannot go! indeed I cannot!\"\n\n\"That is unlike you, Jessie. I did not think you would have refused a\nsick friend any request!\"\n\n\"Don't blame me--please don't! I would do anything for him; but, indeed,\nI have not the courage to go there.\"\n\n\"Why, what do you fear, my child? I am sure he would not for the world\nspeak a syllable that could pain you.\"\n\n\"I know that, Aunt Matty--I am certain of it.\"\n\n\"Then what is it?\"\n\n\"Old Mrs. Bosworth has such a stately way; so soft, yet decided. She\nwill look at me so sharply.\"\n\n\"I found her very kind and grateful.\"\n\n\"But she may think that I have done wrong.\"\n\n\"She is too just, too noble, Jessie, to blame any one for that which was\nnot a fault.\"\n\n\"Oh, Aunt Matty! even you speak and look so grave! I cannot bear\nit--indeed I cannot!\"\n\nI was softened at once. How could I speak so coldly to my Jessie, while\nshe stood there trembling, with her great eyes full of tears.\n\n\"My own darling!\" I said, quickly. \"You know I could never feel anything\nbut love for you. Don't shake so, dear! We won't speak of this, if it\ntroubles you.\"\n\n\"No, no! I ought to hear--I must not be so weak.\"\n\nShe struggled against her feelings, brushed away her tears, and stood up\nso firm and determined, that I felt a new respect for her. It was\nbeautiful to see how the true womanhood that lay at the bottom of her\nnature roused itself, and asserted its supremacy in that moment of doubt\nand distress.\n\n\"You are a brave girl!\" I exclaimed,--\"my dear, honest-hearted Jessie!\"\n\n\"You must not praise me,\" she said. \"I feel so guilty and wicked.\"\n\n\"That is wrong; you should not give way to these morbid feelings.\"\n\n\"Indeed, Aunt Matty, I am not like the same girl I was a few months\nago.\"\n\nI knew whence the change came--I could have given its exact date; but it\ndid not extend back over a period of months--a few weeks had served to\nbring that unrest and trouble upon the sweet girl. With the coming of\nMrs. Dennison all those shadows had crept into the house, gathering\nsilently but surely about every heart, dividing those who before had no\nthought nor wish that was not common to all. I felt, too, that she was\npreparing the way for deeper and darker troubles, which lingered not far\noff, only awaiting the command of the arch-magician to approach and wrap\nus in their folds.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXX.\n\nMRS. DENNISON GATHERS WILD FLOWERS.\n\n\nWhile I was lost in gloomy thoughts which those words had aroused,\nJessie turned from my chair and walked slowly up and down the terrace,\nafter a habit she had inherited from her father in any season of doubt\nor perplexity. At last she came softly back and leaned over me again.\n\n\"Aunt Matty,\" she whispered, timidly.\n\n\"Yes, dear.\"\n\n\"I have made up my mind.\"\n\nI looked in her face, and its expression told me at once what her\ndecision had been.\n\n\"You will go,\" I said.\n\n\"Yes, I will. It is right--it is my duty! If he were never to get well,\nI should reproach myself bitterly for not having granted his request.\"\n\n\"God bless you, Jessie! I knew you would not refuse.\"\n\n\"I am sure that my parents will have no objection.\"\n\n\"I can answer for that--the most scrupulous person could see no harm.\nBesides, Bosworth is a favorite both with your father and mother.\"\n\n\"Yes. Dear mamma will be so sorry to hear that he is ill--poor young\nman!\"\n\n\"We will go to-morrow, Jessie. I dare say your father will accompany\nyou.\"\n\n\"But I want you also, Aunt Matty; I should have no courage if you were\nnot there.\"\n\n\"I will go, of course. You must speak to Mr. Lee about it--don't\nforget.\"\n\n\"I am not likely to; I will tell him this evening. But Aunt Matty--\"\n\n\"Yes. Don't hesitate so. One would think you were afraid of your old\nfriend. Not a cross one, am I?\"\n\nThat made her laugh again; but the merriment died quickly. Her sensitive\nheart was so sorely troubled that her usual gayety was quite gone.\n\n\"I shall never fear you; but what I meant was that I don't wish Mrs.\nDennison to know that I am going.\"\n\n\"She is not likely to learn it from me, Jessie.\"\n\n\"She would laugh at me--and this is no subject nor time for a jest.\"\n\n\"I should think not, indeed. The woman who could make a mockery of such\nfeelings would be a libel on her sex.\"\n\n\"Ah! you must not be harsh.\"\n\n\"Only the old bitterness--don't mind it, Jessie. But we won't tell Mrs.\nDennison.\"\n\nAt that moment I detected a rustle in the hall. My hearing was always\nsingularly acute,--Jessie used to say that I was like a wild animal in\nthat respect,--and I felt confident that I heard some one stealing away\nfrom behind us.\n\nI started up at once, hurried into the hall, and met Cora, Mrs.\nDennison's maid, face to face. She was running off--I could have sworn\nto that; but the moment she heard my step she turned toward me with her\nusual composure and pleasant smile.\n\n\"What do you want here, Cora?\" I asked, more sharply than I often spoke\nto a dependant; for, of all people in the world, it is my habit to treat\nservants kindly. \"Pray, what brings you into this hall?\"\n\n\"I was just coming to look for my mistress, ma'am. Excuse me; I didn't\nknow it was wrong.\"\n\n\"I have not said that it was,\" I answered, still convinced that she had\nbeen listening; \"but our own domestics are never permitted to pass\nthrough this hall unless called.\"\n\n\"I will remember--I beg pardon.\"\n\n\"Mrs. Dennison is not here.\"\n\n\"Oh! excuse me--\"\n\nShe stopped. I saw her curtsy, turned, and there stood Mr. Lee, looking\nat me gravely. He had heard my ill-natured tone, and could see the flush\nof anger on my face.\n\n\"What is the matter, Miss Hyde?\" he asked, quietly enough; but the tone\ndispleased me, and I replied with a good deal of sharpness,--\n\n\"I am not aware of anything, sir; Cora was searching for her mistress.\"\n\n\"That is right enough, I am sure.\"\n\n\"She is not here,\" I continued, feeling a savage pleasure in the words\nI spoke; \"she is out in the woods with Mr. Lawrence.\"\n\nMr. Lee slightly, but managed to conceal his discomposure.\n\nCora hurried away after giving me a spiteful glance, and Jessie, who had\nheard my words, came into the hall.\n\n\"Mrs. Dennison told me that she should be busy all the morning in her\nroom,\" she said, quickly.\n\n\"I can't help what she said, my dear; I only know that I saw her walking\nwith Mr. Lawrence.\"\n\n\"Surely it is her privilege, if she feels disposed, to walk with any\nperson,\" Mr. Lee said, laughing with a very bad grace, while Jessie\nlooked much disturbed.\n\n\"I have no desire to interfere with the lady's movements,\" I said, my\ntemper still in the ascendant; \"but I see no necessity for saying one\nthing and doing another.\"\n\nMr. Lee appeared surprised at my outburst. I dare say it was not\nlady-like; but I am not made of stone, and my real feelings will peep\nout occasionally.\n\n\"I am afraid Mrs. Dennison would think you spoke harshly to her\nservant,\" he said. \"I shouldn't like a guest in this house to be\nannoyed.\"\n\nFor the first time I was angry with Mr. Lee. I was not a dependant; I\nwas not accustomed to anything but affection and respect in that house,\nand the reproof in his voice, added to my own feeling of\nself-dissatisfaction, made me quite furious.\n\n\"Sir,\" I said, \"you have always requested us not to permit servants to\nenter this hall; when you wish to change any of your regulations, be\ngood enough to inform me in advance.\"\n\nI turned away before he could speak, and Jessie went to him, saying\nsomething in a low voice.\n\n\"Miss Hyde!\" he called out, approaching me and extending his hand. \"Why,\ndear friend, you are not angry with me? I would rather cut off this\nright hand than have that happen.\"\n\nMy anger evaporated at once; like a silly fool as I am, the tears\ngathered in my eyes. He shook my hand heartily, while Jessie hovered\nabout us like an anxious bird.\n\n\"I really meant no harm,\" he began; but I would not hear a word.\n\n\"I am ashamed of myself,\" I said, \"and that is the end of it; I am tired\nand cross.\"\n\n\"You are not well,\" he replied, kindly. \"Jessie, make her go and lie\ndown.\"\n\n\"She never will, papa.\"\n\nShe put her arm caressingly about my waist, and Mr. Lee stood holding my\nhand, petting me as if my words had been a matter of the greatest\nconsequence. Suddenly Mrs. Dennison entered from the terrace, and\nexclaimed, with a gay laugh,--\n\n\"What a pretty scene! Are you acting a comedy, Mr. Lee? How well you do\nit!\"\n\nHe dropped my hand in some confusion, and turned toward her.\n\n\"Better comedy than tragedy,\" he said.\n\n\"Oh, yes, a thousand times! But Miss Hyde's role seems to be a\nsentimental one--she looks very lugubrious!\"\n\nI longed to strike her full in her insolent mouth; but as that was\nimpossible, I determined to pay her off for once in her own coin. A\nspirit of retaliation was roused within me that I had never before\npossessed.\n\n\"You seem gay enough to make amends,\" I said. \"Did you and Mr. Lawrence\nhave a pleasant walk?\"\n\nWhat a fool I was to think I could send a blow that would have any\neffect upon that piece of marble!\n\nShe laughed outright, and clapped her hands in childish exultation.\n\n\"She wants to accuse me of being a flirt!\" she exclaimed; \"Oh, you\nnaughty Miss Hyde! I did meet Mr. Lawrence, but I had no idea of doing\nso when I went out. I think now I shall make a merit of my intention!\"\n\n\"You might always do so, I am sure,\" said Mr. Lee, gallantly.\n\nShe held up a beautiful bouquet of wild flowers.\n\n\"I heard Mrs. Lee wish for some blossoms fresh from the woods last\nnight,\" she said; \"so I went to gather them.\"\n\nMr. Lee's face grew all sunshine at once; even Jessie was appeased, and,\nunseen by either, the widow shot me a quick glance of scorn.\n\n\"How kind it was of you!\" Jessie said. \"Mamma will be so much obliged!\"\n\n\"I wanted to please her, darling Jessie,\" replied the widow. \"But I must\nmake one confession; will you grant me absolution, Mr. Lee?\"\n\n\"I can safely do that in advance. I am sure you have no very terrible\nsin to reveal.\"\n\n\"Oh, I told a fib!\" And she laughed archly. \"I wanted to go all alone,\nso that dear Mrs. Lee would give me full credit for my thoughtfulness.--\nYou see how vain and selfish I am!--so I told Jessie that I was going to\nbe occupied in my own room.\"\n\n\"I think when selfishness takes a form like this, it is a very valuable\nquality to possess,\" returned Mr. Lee.\n\nMrs. Dennison treated me to another flash from her scornful eyes, then\nadded,--\n\n\"And while I was picking flowers, who should pass but Mr. Lawrence; so I\nmade him stop. But I might as well have let him go on.\"\n\n\"Why so?\" demanded Mr. Lee.\n\n\"Because he was very ungallant; did nothing but talk of Jessie, and\nnever said a pretty thing to me.\"\n\nJessie blushed, but the smile on her lips showed that she was far from\nannoyed.\n\n\"So that is all my secret,\" continued Mrs. Dennison. \"Now, we will take\nthis unfortunate bouquet up to Mrs. Lee. Come, Jessie.\"\n\n\"May I go?\" asked the gentleman.\n\n\"If you will be very good. But mind you do not tease for the flowers--we\ncannot spare a single one!\"\n\n\"I promise.\"\n\n\"Then come with us.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXXI.\n\nLOTTIE'S ADVICE.\n\n\nMrs. Dennison had one arm about Jessie's waist; she kept Mr. Lee close\nat her side, and so engrossed and fascinated both father and daughter,\nthat they passed on without remembering that I was there.\n\nIt was just what the woman intended: she wished to make me feel of how\nlittle consequence I was in the house when she chose to exercise her\nsupremacy. That was her way of revenging herself for my rude speech in\nregard to her ramble.\n\nIf it is absolutely necessary for me to tell the entire and exact truth,\nI must admit that she succeeded perfectly in wounding me. I was greatly\npained, but not altogether from jealousy or sensitiveness. Hurt as I was\nto see how completely my friends were made to forget their solicitude at\nthat woman's bidding, I was still more troubled to perceive how, every\nday, her influence in that house increased, how artfully she wove the\nthreads of her net about us, and entangled everybody more helplessly in\nits meshes.\n\nWhile I stood thinking of those things, I was startled by a sound close\nat hand--a very singular noise, such as one might expect from an\nantiquated raven troubled with bronchitis. From behind a screen that\nstood in the hall bounded Miss Lottie, emitting another of those\nunearthly croaks, and stationing herself directly in front of me with\none of her most impish looks.\n\n\"I am astonished at you!\" said she, shaking her head, and pursing up her\nlips until her words came out in a sort of strangled whistle. \"I really\nam more astonished, Miss Hyde, than I should be to see two Christmases\ncome in the same year!\"\n\n\"What is the matter now?\" I asked, laughing in spite of myself.\n\n\"To think of your going and trying to circumvent Babylon! Why, she's\nalmost more'n a match for me, and to see you floppin' up at her quite\ntook my breath away!\"\n\n\"You are impertinent, Lottie!\"\n\n\"Well, I don't mean to be! But just let me caution you a trifle. Don't\ntry any such game--she'll only fling it back right in your teeth, as she\ndid just now, sail off with her feathers spread, and leave you feeling\nas flat as a pancake!\"\n\nI had an internal conviction that Lottie was correct in her judgment;\nbut not considering it necessary to admit as much, I made an effort to\nturn the subject.\n\n\"What were you doing behind that screen? I hope you haven't taken to\nlistening to the whole house.\"\n\n\"Now, Miss Hyde, I didn't think you'd accuse me in that way. But I don't\nblame you--Babylon's made you huffy! Cut in agin, Miss Matty, if you\nwant to!\"\n\n\"But you should not do those things, Lottie!\"\n\n\"Not quite so fast, if you please. I can tell you what I went behind\nthere for.\"\n\n\"I do not wish to inquire into your proceedings,\" I said, coldly, and\nwas moving away; but she caught me by the arm.\n\n\"Please don't go off mad, Miss Hyde,\" she pleaded; \"I'll tell you the\ntruth. I was in the little room looking out a book Mrs. Lee wanted, when\nI heard you and Miss Jessie talking on the terrace. I didn't know what\nyou said, and didn't want to; but just then I saw Cora creep through the\nhall, and stand listening by the door. So I slips out, got behind the\nscreen, and, once there, I had to stay till the folks got off.\"\n\n\"Then she was listening?\" I said.\n\n\"I should rather guess she was! and a-shaking them big ear-rings. She\ndidn't miss a word, you may be sure!\"\n\n\"Why does she do those things?\"\n\n\"Why? Come, now, that's good! 'Cause Babylon tells her to, and 'cause\nher heart's blacker than her face, and she loves mischief as well as the\ngray cat does cream.\"\n\n\"You cannot think her mistress would countenance her in such\nproceedings.\"\n\n\"I don't think nothing about it--I know, Miss Hyde. She's got\ncountenance of her own, though, to help her through a'most anything! But\nI tell you she's sot on to spy and listen.\"\n\n\"That is a fault you ought to judge leniently, Lottie.\"\n\n\"No, 'tain't, Miss Hyde! I've always been above things of that sort; but\nsince Babylon's come the world's changed, and I have to fix myself\naccording to circumstances. But don't you fall foul o' either of them\nagain--'tain't no use! Why, she walked Mr. Lee and Miss Jessie right off\nafore your eyes, and you may bet your front teeth that by this time\nshe's made them believe you're cross-grained, and jealous as a lap-dog!\"\n\n\"I begin to think I am, Lottie.\"\n\n\"No, you ain't--you can't stay cross two minutes! And as for good\nlooks--wal, if you furbelowed yourself off like some folks that shall be\nnameless, you'd be more than as young-looking as some folks\nthemselves.\"\n\nI turned again to go, but Lottie had, as usual, a few last words which\nmust be spoken.\n\n\"See here, Miss Hyde,\" said she; \"Babylon'll carry Mr. Lee off, I know,\nand Miss Jessie's got her heart so full that she'll slip away to her own\nroom; so you must go and sit with Mrs. Lee.\"\n\n\"I will go to her room as soon as Mrs. Dennison leaves.\"\n\n\"That won't be long. She ain't going to coop herself up for nobody;\ntrust her!\"\n\n\"Very well; I shall be ready.\"\n\n\"And, Miss Hyde--\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"Now, don't be mad--I must say it! Just leave Babylon to me--you ain't\nno shakes where she is concerned; you'll only get yourself into a brile,\nand muddle matters--leave her to me!\"\n\nShe gave her head a consequential toss and darted away, singing some\ndolorous ditty about \"Long Ago.\"\n\nI went up to my chamber, sad and sick at heart. Our little world seemed\ngoing very wrong; but how to remedy that which was amiss I could not\ntell. I was powerless, and could only remain quiet and let things take\ntheir course, praying that God would shield those so dear to me from\nsorrow and harm.\n\nPerhaps an hour after, there was a low tap at my door, and, in obedience\nto my summons, Lottie danced into the room.\n\n\"She's all alone, Miss Hyde. Babylon's trotted Mr. Lee into the garden,\nand Miss Jessie's in her own chamber. Come right along and sit with Mrs.\nLee.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXXII.\n\nMRS. LEE DREAMS OF PASSION-FLOWERS.\n\n\nI rose at once and went to the chamber of our dear invalid. She was\nlying on a sofa, supported by pillows, and looking with pleasure at the\nbouquet of wild flowers that had been placed on her table.\n\n\"I am glad to see you, Miss Hyde,\" she said. \"Come in and sit here close\nby me. Look at my pretty flowers.\"\n\n\"They are very lovely!\" I replied.\n\n\"They make me feel as if I were in the woods.\"\n\nShe sighed, checked the vain regret, and added cheerfully.\n\n\"Mrs. Dennison brought them to me. Was it not thoughtful of her? I was\nwishing for them last night.\"\n\n\"Very thoughtful,\" I said.\n\n\"You look tired,\" she observed; \"sit down and we will have one of our\nold, quiet hours. Mr. Lee had to go out, and Mrs. Dennison has gone to\nJessie's room; so we shall be all alone.\"\n\nAnother falsehood! My blood fairly boiled! Lottie had just seen the pair\nin the garden. But I could not speak--a word, a look might have\ndestroyed that poor creature's peace forever! No syllable from my lips\nshould send a thought of suspicion to her heart!\n\nI did sit down, and we had a long, pleasant conversation; for with those\nwhom she knew well, Mrs. Lee was an exceedingly agreeable companion,\nalthough ill-health had made her nervous in the presence of strangers.\n\nAfter a time she began to speak of Jessie, and then it occurred to me\nthat it would be a favorable opportunity to tell her of Jessie's desire\nto visit Mrs. Bosworth.\n\nShe was shocked to hear of her young favorite's illness, and when I\ntold her how anxious he was to see Jessie, and how necessary it seemed\nthat he should not be opposed, she agreed with me that her daughter\nought to go.\n\n\"Certainly, certainly,\" she said. \"Mr. Lee will think so too. You were\nquite right to promise, Miss Hyde.\"\n\n\"I thought so.\"\n\n\"Poor young man! Do you know, Martha Hyde, I used to think he was very\nfond of our Jessie? But of late I have so seldom left my room, or seen\nany one, that I don't know what goes on.\"\n\nI did not answer, and she changed the subject, with the excitability of\nall sick people.\n\n\"Mrs. Dennison makes the house very gay,\" she said.\n\n\"Very! Her manners are charming!\"\n\n\"She seems a superior woman. Do you begin to like her, Martha?\"\n\n\"Oh, I am difficult to please, you know,\" I replied, trying to laugh.\n\"Girls, old or young, and widows seldom agree; besides, I can only care\nfor people whom I have known a long time.\"\n\nShe did not answer, but pushed her hair back from her forehead, and\nlooked absently at the flowers.\n\n\"I have such bad dreams,\" she said; \"I never can recall them distinctly;\nbut they seem full of trouble.\"\n\n\"Of whom do you dream?\"\n\n\"All of you--principally of Jessie. Sometimes I think I must be awake\nand standing in her room--the vision is so real.\"\n\n\"Such fancies are very common to an invalid,\" I said.\n\n\"Oh, yes; I don't mind them.\"\n\nShe pulled the flowers toward her, and began playing with them after\nJessie's childish fashion. It gave me a strange feeling to see those\nblossoms in her hand; when I remembered whose gift they had been, I felt\nas if my friend held Cleopatra's venomous asp in every flower that she\ntouched.\n\n\"Will you read to me a while?\" she asked, at length. \"There is a new\npoem on the table; take that.\"\n\nOf course, I complied at once, and read to her for some time; then I saw\nthe flowers drop from her hand--her head sank back among the pillows,\nand soon her regular breathing proved that she was sleeping quietly.\n\nI laid down the volume, and looked at her with pain and solicitude. She\nwas so helpless! The least shock might terminate that frail existence;\nand I had grown so nervous that I was always expecting some trouble to\nforce itself into that room, which, until lately, had been securely\nguarded by a husband's love.\n\nShe moved restlessly in her sleep; broken words fell from her lips; very\nsoon they framed themselves into complete sentences. She had sunk into\none of those singular somnambulistic slumbers which formed such a\nstrange feature of her illness.\n\n\"I am tired,\" she said; \"I have walked so fast! How pretty the\nsummer-house looks! It is so long since I have been here! There is Mr.\nLee--\"\n\nShe paused and breathed rapidly.\n\n\"Why, Mrs. Dennison is with him! She said she was going to Jessie's\nroom! How earnestly she talks to him! She lays her hand on his arm!\"\n\nShe paused again, with a sort of cry.\n\n\"Martha Hyde! Martha! my husband is giving her flowers--passion-flowers!\nShe asks him to put them in her hair! What does that mean, say?\"\n\nShe became so violently agitated that I thought it best to rouse her. I\nleaned over her and shook her arm slightly. The change of position\nseemed to alter the dream, and once more she slept quietly.\n\nI went back to the window, and sat looking out behind the curtains. It\nwas sunset, and gorgeously beautiful. But in the distraction of my\nthoughts I could not heed its loveliness.\n\nWhile I sat there I saw Mr. Lee and Mrs. Dennison pass along one of the\npaths. They had been out on the upper terrace, and were approaching the\nhouse. The lady had no bonnet on, and wreathed in her hair I saw some\nsuperb passion-flowers which the poor wife had described in her dream.\n\nI grew sick and faint with doubt and horror. I must do something; I\ncould not longer sit passive and dumb, and see that woman wreck all our\nlives. But what to do? which way to turn?\n\nAlas! I was very helpless after all! There was no one to whom I could\nconfide my suspicions--no one to whom I could open my heart, and the\nonly hope I had was in that wild girl, who had understood the real\ncharacter of our visitor so much more quickly than any of her superiors.\n\nWhile I was thinking of this thus painfully, the door of the inner room\nopened, and Lottie stood there, beckoning to me.\n\nI went into her chamber, and she closed the door. She was in great\nexcitement and glee.\n\n\"Babylon's been at it,\" she whispered.\n\n\"At what?\"\n\n\"Talking about you. Oh, my! hain't you woke up a hornet's nest! Cora's\nmad too; golly, don't she go on. I told you to let things alone.\"\n\n\"I care very little for Mrs. Dennison's anger,\" I said.\n\n\"I don't suppose you do. But she'll pay you off if she can. So look\nsharp, Miss Hyde; these are times for sleeping with both eyes open. No\nchance to dream or make verses now.\"\n\n\"Nonsense, child!\"\n\n\"Nonsense, if you choose; but that don't alter the matter. Babylon's\nbrought Mr. Lee back to the house; she had him out in the garden to make\nall right about Lawrence.\"\n\n\"Stop, Lottie!\"\n\n\"I have stopped--sha'n't say no more! Hark! what was that?\"\n\nIt was a call--an appeal for help. A voice from Mrs. Lee's room cried\nwith energy,--\n\n\"Martha Hyde! Martha Hyde!\"\n\nI rushed into the chamber, followed by Lottie, and found Mrs. Lee half\nrisen on her sofa, tossing her arms about, and calling still upon my\nname, although she was yet asleep.\n\nMany moments passed before I could rouse her, and when I did, she sank\nback on the pillows perfectly exhausted. I administered such\nrestoratives as were at hand, and, with Lottie's assistance, succeeded\nin bringing her out of the half swoon into which she had fallen; but she\nwas fearfully weak, and much excited.\n\n\"I have had such terrible dreams,\" she moaned, \"I am afraid to go to\nsleep.\"\n\n\"They are over now,\" I said, soothingly; \"you shall sit up and have your\ntea.\"\n\n\"Yes, please. Don't let me sleep any more, don't, Martha Hyde.\"\n\nAll the while she held fast to my hand and looked wildly in my eyes,\nrepeating,--\n\n\"Such dreadful dreams, Martha Hyde--oh! such dreadful dreams!\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXXIII.\n\nCOMPANY FROM TOWN.\n\n\nThat evening we had a number of visitors from the town, and so much\ngayety that it quite passed from my mind to speak with Mr. Lee\nconcerning the call upon young Bosworth. Indeed, I was not in the\nparlors much of the time, for he came to me and asked if I would sit a\nwhile with his wife, as he could not leave his guests, and she was so\nmuch more nervous than usual, he did not like trusting her entirely with\nLottie.\n\nI felt grateful to him for remembering her, and went away at once. As I\npassed toward the hall, I saw Jessie at the piano surrounded by a group\nof gentlemen, Lawrence nearest, turning over the music, and talking to\nher at intervals.\n\nMrs. Dennison was flitting about like a gorgeous butterfly, making\nmerriment and pleasant conversation wherever she went.\n\nHer quick eyes detected me as I passed the music-room door. She moved\nalong, smelling carelessly at her flowers, the sight of which made me\nsick; they were roses from the choicest varieties that Mrs. Lee\nconsidered peculiarly her own.\n\n\"Going to preserve your bloom by an early sleep, Miss Hyde?\" she asked,\npleasantly.\n\n\"I am going to sit with Mrs. Lee,\" I replied, coldly enough, I dare say.\nI was not accustomed to dissimulation, and when I disliked and doubted a\nperson as I did her, it was very difficult for me to conceal it.\n\n\"You are quite the guardian-angel of the house,\" she returned, so\nsweetly that no one except a suspicious creature like me would have\nperceived the covert insult under her words; \"I expect every day to see\nyou unfold your wings and fly off.\"\n\n\"This is my home,\" I answered, quietly, \"so I shall not fly very far\nfrom it in all probability.\"\n\nShe laughed in her charming way; but there was an expression in her eyes\nwhich would have startled me, had I not felt that she was powerless to\ndo me personal injury.\n\n\"And a pleasant home you have,\" she said, with a sigh; \"you can't think,\nMiss Hyde, how delightful it seems to a tired worldling like me.\"\n\nI was in no humor to listen to sentiment, and I replied curtly,--\n\n\"Not tired, Mrs. Dennison, or, of course, you would forsake the society\nthat wearies you.\"\n\nShe shook her head patronizingly and smiled, oh, such a sweet, sad\nsmile--she must have practised for days to attain such perfection in it.\n\n\"How innocent you are!\" she said; \"I envy you, dear, kind Miss Hyde!\"\n\nHow I longed to fling back her affectionate epithets with the scorn they\ndeserved; but, of course, that was impossible, so I made a movement to\ngo, trembling all over with repressed indignation.\n\n\"You are running away from me as usual,\" she said, reproachfully; \"I\nnever get a moment now of your honest, sensible conversation.\"\n\n\"I trust you do not suffer much from the loss,\" was all the answer I\nmade.\n\nI know I am not very wise; I do not deny having my share of little\nvanities; but Mrs. Dennison had not found the road which led to them.\n\n\"I do indeed,\" she replied; \"but I see you will not believe me.\"\n\n\"You have not an exalted opinion of my courtesy, Mrs. Dennison.\"\n\n\"Ah, now you are going to be sarcastic--my dear Miss Hyde, that is not\nin your way.\"\n\nShe added a few more playful words, then I was resolute to go. I left\nher standing there in one of her graceful attitudes, playing negligently\nwith her roses.\n\nOnce in the hall, I glanced back; the widow had changed her\nposition,--she was stationed by a window,--I saw Mr. Lee approach her,\nand they began an earnest conversation. I turned and went up-stairs,\ngrowing sadder and more sick at heart.\n\nMrs. Lee slept quietly nearly the whole time, so that I had ample\nopportunity for my sorrowful reflections,--more than I desired, since\ndwelling upon the things which troubled me only increased my\nrestlessness, without bringing me any nearer a conclusion that could\nhave been of the least value.\n\nAfter Mrs. Lee had gone to bed, I went into my own room, and saw no one\nagain that night. When it was too late, I remembered that I had not\nspoken to Mr. Lee, but consoled myself with fancying that Jessie would\ntell him, or that I should have an opportunity in the morning.\n\nI was disappointed both ways. When I went down to breakfast, I found\nthat Mr. Lee had been obliged to ride over to the iron works. He had\ngone before any one was stirring, and would not return until late in the\nafternoon.\n\nWhile one of the servants was giving me that information, Mrs. Dennison\npassed through the hall. She hurried on with a smile, but I noticed that\nthe skirt of her dress was wet and soiled; I felt certain that she knew\nof Mr. Lee's intention, and had gone out to meet him, and hold one of\nher private conversations.\n\nBefore she appeared again, Jessie joined me in the breakfast-room.\n\n\"How late we all are!\" she said; \"it is too bad.\"\n\n\"I quite overslept myself,\" I replied; then I remembered my thought of\nthe last night. \"Oh, my dear! did you ask your father to go with us to\nMrs. Bosworth's?\"\n\n\"I had no opportunity,\" she answered, blushing crimson. \"I am afraid,\ntoo, that I half forgot it.\"\n\nI knew the reason of that; Lawrence had been talking to her all the\nevening.\n\n\"It does not make much difference,\" I said; \"I will go with you.\"\n\n\"I am sure papa would be willing,\" she observed, looking troubled at the\nidea of the visit.\n\n\"I spoke of it to your mother; she desired you to go.\"\n\n\"Very well then,\" replied Jessie; \"suppose we start after breakfast; we\ncan get back before mamma will want us in her room.\"\n\n\"I shall be ready; we can walk across the fields.\"\n\n\"Yes; then Mrs. Dennison need not know anything about it.\"\n\n\"Hush!\" I said; \"there she is.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXXIV.\n\nOUR VISIT TO THE OLD MANSION.\n\n\nMrs. Dennison came in airy and graceful as usual; I noticed that she had\nchanged her dress. She kissed Jessie with as much affection as if she\nhad not seen her for a week, and began discoursing with great\nvolubility.\n\n\"I was up before either of you,\" she said; \"I have been out in the\ngarden, ruining my white dress, and racing among the beds, to the great\nastonishment of the old gardener.\"\n\n\"You look fresh and charming as the roses themselves,\" Jessie replied.\n\n\"Of course. But don't pay compliments; Miss Hyde does not like them.\"\n\n\"If they are sincere, I do,\" I said.\n\n\"Ah! then you must like mine. Indeed, I should be afraid to tell you a\nstory; I am certain those honest eyes of yours would detect it at once.\"\n\nI disclaimed any such extraordinary powers for my poor eyes, and the\nwidow rattled on about something else. She always went from one subject\nto another in a rapid, graceful way, like a bird flying about in the\ntrees.\n\n\"Why, where is Mr. Lee?\" she asked.\n\n\"Gone out,\" said Jessie; \"he went early.\"\n\n\"How ungallant,\" she returned; but she looked so very innocent that I\nwas more than ever convinced she had seen him before his departure.\n\nOne thing I could say for Mrs. Dennison, she never troubled her hosts to\nentertain her. Directly after breakfast, she went, as usual, her own\nway, and Jessie and I were free to start upon our expedition.\n\n\"We had better go at once,\" I said; \"there is no telling when she may\ndance in upon us again.\"\n\n\"You don't like her, Aunt Matty,\" replied Jessie; \"I am sure you don't,\nyet she is very charming.\"\n\n\"Never mind; there is no time to discuss my fancies,\" I said. \"Get your\nbonnet, Jessie.\"\n\nShe hesitated and grew a little pale, but complied at once. We were\nready in a few moments, and, passing through the garden, went down the\npath by the grove, and took our way across the fields to the old house.\n\nJessie was very silent during our walk, and I was so much occupied with\nmy plans and my fancies that I had little time to break the thread of\nher thoughts.\n\nWhen we reached the gate that led into the door-yard, Jessie stopped.\n\n\"Oh, I am so frightened,\" she said.\n\nPoor child! she was very pale, and shook from head to foot with an\nagitation that reminded me painfully of her mother's nervous\nexcitements. I did my best to soothe her, but, in spite of her efforts,\nit was some moments before she could go on.\n\n\"You will not mind it after the first meeting,\" I said.\n\n\"I am very foolish, I know. There, I am ready now.\"\n\nAs we turned into the avenue, I saw Mr. Lawrence pass along the road on\nhorseback. He gave a sharp, quick look, and rode on. I said nothing to\nJessie; it was useless to agitate her further. His passing at that time\nmight have been mere chance.\n\nJessie clung to me as we went up the two broad steps and entered the\nhall. I did not speak, contenting myself with a reassuring pressure of\nthe hand; for I knew from experience that in cases of nervous dread one\nis only made worse by persuasions and cheering speeches.\n\nWe were shown into the room where I had before waited for old Mrs.\nBosworth, and very soon I heard the rustle of her dress in the hall.\n\nThe old lady came in with her stately manner, but I could see that\ntrouble and watching had left their effect upon her, and it seemed to me\nthat I could discover smothered pain in her eyes when she greeted\nJessie. But she was exceedingly kind,--so gentle and caressing, that the\ngirl soon recovered from her fright and began to look like herself.\n\n\"You will excuse my daughter's absence, I hope,\" the old lady said; \"she\nis lying down. She is not very strong, and watching has quite worn her\nout.\"\n\n\"But you think your grandson better?\" I asked.\n\n\"Much better; yes, much better.\"\n\nThere was thanksgiving in her very voice. Jessie said, tremulously,--\n\n\"We were very sorry to hear of his sickness.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Miss Lee; I was sure you would be.\"\n\nThe old lady's fingers worked nervously; I knew, in spite of her pride,\nwhat was in her heart. She longed to take Jessie in her arms, to beseech\nher to speak the one word that would bring her boy back to life and\nhappiness.\n\n\"He suffers less with his head, I suppose?\" I said, breaking the little\npause which would soon have proved awkward.\n\n\"It is quite easy this morning; indeed, last night he slept for several\nhours undisturbed. He is so patient,\" she continued, \"so gentle; but\nthat is natural to him.\"\n\nI knew she was glad to have that opportunity of praising Bosworth; she\nfelt as if it was indirectly doing something to interest Jessie in his\nfavor.\n\n\"It was very kind of you to come, Miss Lee,\" she said. \"I thought you\nwould be willing to humor a sick man's fancies, and he pined so to see\nall his old friends,\" she added, quickly, with her old-world tact, for\nthe color began to flicker on Jessie's cheek.\n\n\"My father would have come also,\" said the girl, talking rapidly, \"but\nhe was obliged to go out very early; and you know my mother seldom\nleaves her room.\"\n\n\"It is sad that she should be so great an invalid,\" said the old\nduchess--I must call her so. \"My daughter and I go out very little. We\nhave often wished to see more of you, but age and infirmity are by force\nunsocial.\"\n\n\"Mrs. Lee is fond of company,\" I said. I longed to do all I could to\ndraw the two families together.\n\n\"Ah, if that is the case, we shall call frequently upon her. It may do\nher some good;\" she looked at Jessie as she spoke.\n\n\"Mamma will be so pleased,\" she said, quite firmly; \"it is very\nmonotonous to live always shut up in her room; she is naturally very\nsocial, and to such, solitude is mournful.\"\n\n\"So it is; but I pity the young most! If I could only have taken my poor\nboy's illness in his stead.\"\n\nShe was checked by the entrance of an old servant, who whispered\nsomething in her ear.\n\n\"Will you go up-stairs?\" she said, turning to me; \"my grandson knows you\nare here.\"\n\nShe took Jessie's hand softly, leading her away, and I followed. Jessie\nbore up like a little Spartan, but I could see what an effort it was,--I\npitied her far more than any one else.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXXV.\n\nYOUNG BOSWORTH'S SICK-ROOM.\n\n\nWhen we entered the sick-room, it was a shock to Jessie. In spite of all\nI had said, she was not prepared to find Bosworth so changed. They had\nput a dressing-gown upon him, but its gay colors only increased the\nghastliness of his face, already wasted and worn by fever.\n\nHe was so happy to see us--so like a child that fears to give pain by\nits own pleasure. I think Jessie took heart after the first few moments;\nand I could see the old lady watching her in secret, as if she thought\nthat, unless she were only a beautiful piece of marble, she must be\nsoftened now.\n\n\"It was very selfish of me, Miss Jessie,\" he said, \"to call you away\nfrom your amusements to visit a poor, sick fellow.\"\n\n\"I was very glad to come,\" she replied; \"my mother is so anxious about\nyou, she could not rest till some of us had been here.\"\n\n\"She is very kind,\" he said, with the touching smile of illness.\n\nAt last we fell to talking quite cheerfully. I did my best to prevent\nthe restraint we were all under becoming perceptible; I dare say it was\nblunderingly done, but it succeeded tolerably well.\n\nBosworth made Jessie tell him all about her flowers--he was a great\nbotanist--and I chimed in with the wonderful history of a nest of young\nbirds I had found, and really made him laugh at my nonsense.\n\nBut he was weak, and soon grew weary,--I saw it, and made Jessie a sign\nto go.\n\n\"Not yet,\" he said, as we rose; \"stay a while longer, please.\"\n\nSo we sat down again, but I saw by his eyes that his senses began to\ncloud a little.\n\n\"What is that hymn you sing, Miss Jessie?\" he asked, suddenly; \"it has\nbeen running in my head all the morning.\"\n\nJessie could not speak; she was trying with all her might to keep back\nher tears; so I said,--\n\n\"You mean that little gem of Mrs. Hemans--'Child Amid the Flowers at\nPlay.'\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he replied, \"that is it. Won't you sing it for me?\"\n\nIt really was heroic, the way that poor girl struggled with herself and\nforced back her composure. She turned her face a little from the light\nand began to sing; her voice was very low and tremulous, but I never\nheard it sound so sweet; Bosworth lay back on his pillow and listened\nwith a happy smile.\n\n\"Thank you,\" he said, when she finished; \"I can sleep now--you were very\nkind to come.\"\n\nHe tried to take her hand, said a few more broken words, and then we\nwent away. I saw that Jessie could endure nothing more. Old Mrs.\nBosworth detected it too; she must have felt for the girl, and was\ngrateful to her for that visit. She did not accompany us down-stairs,\nand I was glad to make our farewell as short as possible.\n\nThe moment we were out of the house, Jessie gave way completely, and\nsobbed and wept as I never before saw her.\n\n\"Do you think he will die, Aunt Matty?\" she asked.\n\n\"I do not; he is certainly better.\"\n\n\"But he looks dreadfully; I never saw anybody altered so much.\"\n\n\"You are not accustomed to fevers, my dear. I am, and he will get\nbetter. I am glad you have made this visit; it will do him good.\"\n\n\"Then I am glad, too,\" she replied, wiping away her tears. \"Oh! if\nanything had happened, I never should have forgiven myself.\"\n\nIn reality, there was no blame to be attached to her; she had been\nguilty of no encouragement or coquetry. I could not bear that she should\nbrood over his illness, until she accused herself as the cause, and\nreally grew horrified at what she might fancy her own wickedness.\n\n\"He is in God's hands,\" I said; \"either way it would have been as He\nwilled.\"\n\n\"Then you do not think that any trouble--any--\"\n\n\"I think he would have been sick,\" I replied, seeing her unable to go\non; \"he has not looked well for some time past, and his grandmother told\nme that he had always been somewhat subject to fevers.\"\n\nJessie breathed heavily, and looked relieved.\n\nIn our preoccupation we had passed from the grounds into the high-road,\ninstead of taking the footpath.\n\n\"We must strike into the clover-field at the turn,\" I said, when I\nobserved our error; \"it would make too long a walk to follow the road.\"\n\nJessie did not answer. I heard the tramp of horses' hoofs, and looking\nup saw Mr. Lawrence riding rapidly toward us. He did not check his\nhorse, but lifted his riding-cap, gave a low, stately bow, a quick\nglance at Jessie's tear-stained face, and galloped on.\n\nI heard Jessie utter a smothered exclamation, but she did not speak a\nword.\n\n\"Mr. Lawrence seems in great haste,\" I observed, but she did not answer.\n\nI was confident Mrs. Dennison had been besetting him again, for he was\npale and looked fiercely excited.\n\n\"Here is the path,\" said Jessie, suddenly.\n\nWe turned into it and walked home, scarcely once breaking that unusual\nsilence.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXXVI.\n\nLOTTIE'S REPORT.\n\n\nWhen we reached the house, Jessie went directly up to her room. I did\nnot attempt to detain her, knowing that she would be much better alone.\n\nI went to my chamber, likewise, but I was not left long to my\nbewildering meditations, for Lottie's quick tap sounded at the door, and\nin she danced in the fantastic manner which always betrayed great\nexcitement.\n\nShe closed the door carefully, and stood before me with her hands folded\nbehind her back.\n\n\"I told you how it would be!\" she exclaimed.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" I asked.\n\n\"Why, you're flying out at Babylon; she's mad, and you'll take the\nconsequences, you will.\"\n\n\"I do not imagine they will be very terrible, Lottie.\"\n\n\"That's as a body may happen to think. There's been a great time since\nyou started.\"\n\n\"What has happened?\" I inquired, losing all scruples as to the manner in\nwhich Lottie might have obtained her information.\n\n\"In the first place, we had Lawrence--\"\n\n\"Was he here?\"\n\n\"No, no. Babylon went out to walk for her health--you see Babylon needs\nexercise. After you stole away, I had my eye on her--\"\n\n\"Why, you did not see us go.\"\n\n\"Oh, didn't I?\" she demanded, ironically, nodding her head with great\nsignificance. \"I was at my window, Miss Hyde, and I always keep my eyes\nopen. Howsumever, I wasn't watching you; I'm above such tricks, unless I\nfeel it my duty, then I never stop at nothing--anything, I mean,\nthinking of the grammar.\"\n\n\"Did she see us, too?\"\n\n\"I don't know; but she knew where you were going.\"\n\n\"Why, how did you find that out?\"\n\n\"Heard her tell Mr. Lee, to be sure.\"\n\nI was so angry that I felt myself growing pale. Lottie saw it and\ntittered.\n\n\"You would like to choke her, now, wouldn't you, Miss Hyde? What a pity!\nit's agin religion and the law. I should just enjoy fixing her myself.\"\n\n\"For shame!\" I said, but I am afraid it was only because I thought it a\nduty to check such expressions, not from any lack of sympathy with them.\n\nLottie tossed her head; but she was in too great haste to communicate\nher intelligence for much indignation.\n\n\"After you'd gone I watched her; she went about very uneasy for a while,\nthen she put on her shawl and streaked off to the grove. I wanted some\nwild grass, so I went along, but Babylon didn't see me. She waited in\nthe grove till Mr. Lawrence rode by, when she hailed him.\n\n\"'Where are you going?' said she.\n\n\"He stammered a little, and said something about it being his custom to\nride every morning, and at that she laughed right out in her tantalizing\nway. Oh, she's awful tantalizing is Babylon.\n\n\"'You'd better tell the truth,' says she; 'you didn't believe what I\ntold you last night, and you've been to see with your own eyes. Did you\nmeet them?'\n\n\"'Miss Jessie and her friend have just entered Mrs. Bosworth's gate,' he\nanswered, cross as two sticks.\n\n\"'Of course,' says Babylon; 'I tell you he is her lover. It was to be\nexpected she'd visit him during the sickness brought on by jealousy. You\nsee a grand flirtation has its inconveniences.'\n\n\"He shook uneasily in his saddle, but she hadn't any pity, and went on\nat an awful rate about all of you. Then she tried the old dodge--she\nwas his friend--he might trust her. She went up to him and reached her\nhand, but he didn't seem to see it.\n\n\"'I must go,' said he.\n\n\"She tried to stop him, but he wouldn't hear a word.\n\n\"'When will you come again?' she asked.\n\n\"'God knows!' was all he said, and rode off like a whirlwind.\n\n\"Babylon watched him as long as he was in sight, then she gave way to\nthe awfullest mad fit I ever see. I really thought she'd break a\nblood-vessel. She danced and wrung her hands, and clenched 'em both into\nfists, which she shook after him, and she bit her lips to keep from\nscreaming; and then all of a sudden she started for the house on a\nfierce run. I went after her, and as I got into the garden I saw Mr. Lee\nride up. She followed him into the house.\n\n\"I went round the corner and stood on the veranda, picking roses and\nhumming 'Katy Darling;' only I chose all the low parts, and heard quite\ncomfortable.\"\n\n\"That was wrong,\" I said, \"very wrong.\"\n\n\"Oh! I didn't listen to him,\" she replied; \"but I had to keep watch of\nBabylon.\"\n\nI may as well confess my weakness. I longed to ask Lottie all she heard.\nHowever, I did not have to wait long for the communication.\n\n\"'Jessie has gone out,' said she. He asked her where, and she put on\nsuch an innocent face. 'You must know,' says she; 'your daughter would\nnot have taken such a step without your permission. No, no; I understand\nJessie's womanly prudence too well.'\n\n\"He just stared at her; then he asked in that voice he has when he's\nangry, what she meant. She hemmed and hawed, and put him off; said he\nknew, and wouldn't speak.\n\n\"'Mrs. Dennison,' said he, 'what does this mean? Where has Jessie\ngone?'\n\n\"She put on the innocent look again; she really did it beautifully.\n\n\"'Don't you know?' she asked; 'don't you actually?'\n\n\"She worked him up almost into a fit. Goodness knows what fancy he got\ninto his head.\n\n\"I have seen no one this morning,' he said; 'there were none of the\nfamily down when I went away. Where has Jessie gone?'\n\n\"Then she pretended to back out; she had been wrong--it was doubtless an\ninnocent little secret of Jessie's--she ought not to have spoken--she\nwas so frank and indiscreet--she would rather bite her tongue off than\ntell what Jessie wanted kept private, and all that. He grew white as\ndeath; you know nothing makes him so mad as to think there's any mystery\nin the house, or anything going on he don't understand.\n\n\"'Mrs. Dennison,' says he, 'if you won't speak, I must go to my wife.'\n\n\"'Don't, don't,' she said; 'she is so feeble; don't agitate her.'\n\n\"'Then tell me yourself,' says he.\n\n\"Then she went all through the old performance, but at last it came\nout--Jessie had gone to visit Mr. Bosworth in his sick-room. Lord, how\nmad he was! She told him you was with her, said she didn't blame Jessie,\nguessed it was all one of your old-maidish romances, and made him\nfurious against you.\"\n\n\"How did it end?\" I asked.\n\n\"It didn't really have no end; some man called him off on business. Just\nthen you and Miss Jessie came up the steps, and I cut round here to tell\nyou. Babylon--she sat down to the piano, and went to playing a jig; she\nlikes the fun. I tell you she's all right when there's a row. But I'm\ngoing to Mrs. Lee; she must want to get up by this time. You're in a\nhobble, Miss Hyde--a precious hobble--was sure you would be. You\nplaying a game with her--the idea!\"\n\nAway she danced, trying to hide her uneasiness; but at the door she\nstopped and exclaimed,--\n\n\"I can't think what ails my head, I'm so dizzy.\"\n\nShe staggered and would have fallen, but I caught her; she was deadly\npale. I gave her some water, and she soon grew better.\n\n\"Are you ill?\" I asked.\n\n\"No, I guess not; but lately my head feels so queer every morning.\nYesterday, when I went to get out of bed, I fell flat on the floor like\na great awkward lobster.\"\n\nShe laughed, but I was very uneasy about her, though she declared she\nwas well again, and hurried away to her duties; for, wild as she was,\nLottie was an orderly little thing, and always punctual.\n\nI sat and thought over what she had told me, with some anxiety; but that\ndid no good, so I went down-stairs.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXXVII.\n\nMY FIRST QUARREL WITH MR. LEE.\n\n\nAs I entered the lower hall, I met Mr. Lee. He gave me a look such as I\nnever before saw in his face; it so increased my indignation, that, if\nit had not been for Jessie, I would have walked out of the house that\ninstant.\n\n\"Miss Hyde,\" he said, in the low, measured tone his voice always took\nwhen he was angry, \"will you step into the library for a moment?\"\n\n\"Do you wish to speak with me?\" I asked, rebelliously.\n\n\"If you have leisure.\"\n\nI swept before him into the room. Every drop of blood in my veins\ntingled as if on fire. He followed me, and closed the door.\n\n\"How does it happen,\" he began, \"that you and Jessie went upon an\nexpedition like that of this morning without consulting me?\"\n\nI did my best to answer quietly, although his manner aggravated me\nalmost beyond endurance.\n\n\"Simply because you were not here to consult,\" I replied.\n\n\"But you could have told me last night.\"\n\nThen I flashed up a little, and said,--\n\n\"Mr. Lee, I am not a school-girl, to be crowded into a corner and\ncatechized.\"\n\n\"Madam,\" he returned, \"I think I have a right to know everything\nconnected with my daughter; I will permit no mysteries in this house.\"\n\n\"There have been none on my part or Jessie's,\" I replied.\n\n\"Then be good enough to give me an explanation of what, I own, seems to\nme a singular proceeding in a lady of your acknowledged discretion.\"\n\n\"It is easily done,\" I answered, still remembering Jessie, and so\nremaining reasonably calm. \"Yesterday, old Mrs. Bosworth sent for me;\nher grandson is very ill--he has brain-fever. He begged to see us\nparticularly. I came home and told your wife; she said Jessie should go\nto-day. We expected you to accompany us. Last night there was no\nopportunity of speaking to you, every moment of your time was occupied.\nThis morning, you were gone; but as I had the mother's permission, I\nthought it no harm to start. A visit to a sick, almost a dying man, can\nnever injure your daughter, Mr. Lee.\"\n\nHis face flushed at once.\n\n\"I was mistaken,\" he said.\n\n\"You must have been cruelly mistaken or misinformed,\" I replied, coldly,\n\"when you could address me as you have done.\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon, Miss Hyde,\" he returned.\n\nI granted it with a sullen bend of the head.\n\n\"Who told you where we had gone?\" I asked, bluntly.\n\nHe hesitated, and I followed up my advantage.\n\n\"No one knew of it but Mrs. Lee,\" I said; \"you have not seen her to-day.\nYesterday you reproved me for sending Cora out of the hall; sir, she was\nlistening while I told Jessie, and repeated it to her mistress. I don't\nknow what you may think of such conduct on the part of a guest; but to\nme the idea of making trouble in a house where one has been hospitably\ntreated, seems very contemptible.\"\n\n\"Miss Hyde! Miss Hyde!\" he exclaimed, \"I assure you Mrs. Dennison did it\nthoughtlessly--she had no idea.\"\n\n\"Excuse me,\" said I, still burning with indignation, \"I am quite capable\nof forming and holding my own opinions; it is a right I shall not\nreadily relinquish.\"\n\nI am sorry to say we very nearly had a serious quarrel; but I was so\ndissatisfied, so indignant that a man of his sense and refinement could\nbe duped in the way he was, that I could not control myself.\n\nWe parted civilly enough, however; and when I went up-stairs, Jessie\nknew all about the affair; Mrs. Dennison had been to her crying and\nbegging for forgiveness. She had thoughtlessly repeated to her father\nwhere we had gone, he was angry, and the whole thing was breaking her\nheart.\n\n\"I dare say she meant no harm,\" added Jessie; \"she is so giddy.\"\n\n\"Pray, how did she know?\" I asked.\n\n\"She fancied it, she said.\"\n\n\"That was a falsehood,\" I retorted. \"Cora told her--I knew she was\nlistening yesterday.\"\n\nJessie was as much shocked with me as her father had been. With their\nexaggerated ideas of hospitality, they considered it little less than a\ncrime to acknowledge that a guest could have any fault.\n\n\"Oh, Aunt Matty!\" she said, \"I never knew you unjust before.\"\n\nI was forced to go out of the room; my anger was over, and I felt the\ntears rushing to my eyes. I passed a very uncomfortable day. Jessie and\nher father came to an understanding; Mrs. Dennison soon had them both\nunder her spell again, and I knew they blamed me exceedingly.\n\nI loved them too well for real indignation; but I was broken-hearted at\nthe idea that this woman could come between Jessie and her love for me.\n\nThere was company at dinner. I spent the evening in Mrs. Lee's room--the\nfirst comfortable hour I had passed since morning. She did not know that\nanything had gone wrong, pitied my head, which she was sure ached\nterribly, and by her sweet and tender kindness made me somewhat more\nreconciled to life.\n\nI sat in my own room after I left her, but did not retire until very\nlate. I heard the guests go away--heard the different members of the\nfamily pass up to their rooms; but still I sat by the window, sad and\nlonely. At last the clock struck one. I rose, startled into common-sense\nagain, stopped star-gazing, and closing my window, prepared for rest.\n\nSuddenly I heard a noise--very faint, but my nerves were wonderfully\nacute that night. I opened the door and looked into the hall; as I did\nso, I saw a figure clad in white glide out of Lottie's chamber, and\ndisappear down the passage.\n\nI fairly thought it something supernatural at first, then I ran out, but\nthere was nothing to be seen. I stole to Lottie's room and looked in;\nshe was sleeping soundly, so I went back to my own apartment. That\nincident, added to the excitement of the day, kept me awake for hours. I\ntried to convince myself that it was only one of my ridiculous fancies:\nbut the effort was in vain; I knew that I had seen that white shape\nsteal by--it was no delusion. Who was it? What was it?\n\nI determined to say nothing, feeling certain that everybody would laugh\nat me. I knew that it was silly, but I could not drive away the terror\nthat chilled my heart. Everything had gone so wrong of late, that quiet\nhouse was so changed, that the least thing disturbed me more than events\nof importance would once have done.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXXVIII.\n\nMR. LAWRENCE MAKES A CALL.\n\n\nLawrence called upon us the next day: that is, he came to the house and\ninquired for Mrs. Dennison, without one word regarding the rest of the\nfamily. Mr. Lee was sitting in the square balcony when the gentleman\nrode up, and cast a meaning glance at Jessie, as if he felt certain that\nthe visit was for her. She shrunk from his look with something like\naffright; and when the servant came up with word that Mr. Lawrence was\nin the drawing-room, waiting for Mrs. Dennison, she gave me a look of\nwild reproof, as if I had been the cause of his evident displeasure.\n\nMr. Lee sat with his eyes upon her; and when Mrs. Dennison came from her\nchamber, the expression of his face became so like that which pained me\nin Jessie's, that I could not escape the idea that both suffered from\nthe same cause.\n\nThe shock of this thought made me tremble. It had never fastened upon me\nas a reality before. Why did I turn so faint? Why did my soul rise up in\nsuch bitter protest? God help me, I am not wise enough to answer; the\ntumult of trouble within me was something I had never, till then,\nexperienced. Still the idea was a terrible one. How could a woman of\nright principles feel otherwise? Thus I explained it away, and soothed\nmyself into a belief that any true-hearted person living in that family\nas I did must have felt all the miserable sensations that tortured me.\n\nThese thoughts made me dizzy. When I could see clearly again, Jessie was\ngone, and Mr. Lee sat a little more upright in his chair, looking hard\nat the wall over the top of his book. I was glad those stern eyes were\nnot turned on me.\n\nMrs. Dennison came sweeping out of her chamber, leaving a scarcely\nperceptible perfume in the hall as she passed. She did not observe me,\nfor I sat a little out of range from the door, and she evidently was not\nconscious that Mr. Lee was looking after her. She caught his glance,\nhowever, in turning to go down stairs, paused abruptly, and came back as\nif she were eager to explain something; but again she stopped short on\nseeing that I occupied a seat which commanded the balcony, and saying\nhastily, \"Oh, I thought Miss Jessie was here,\" went down the hall again,\nevidently discomfited.\n\nMr. Lee resumed his volume, but there were no signs of reading. He\nsimply looked hard at the page without turning it over, and sat gnawing\nat his under lip with a kind of ferocity I had never witnessed in him\nbefore. I was getting sadly nervous, and felt a painful sensation in my\nthroat; what was all this coming to? What did it mean?\n\nI left the balcony and went up to Mrs. Lee's chamber; here everything\nwas pure and quiet. The invalid lay upon her couch, with a book before\nher; one slender and almost transparent hand rested upon the opposite\npage to that which she was reading. It started like a frightened bird as\nI came in, and she turned her head with one of those heavenly smiles I\nhave never seen equalled. But her face clouded over in an instant.\nEvidently Martha Hyde was not the person that gentle invalid had hoped\nto see.\n\nI went up to the couch and sat down on the low seat at its head. She\nhanded me the book with a smile, saying that it made her eyes ache.\n\"Would I read a little till Mr. Lee came up?\"\n\nShe said this languidly, and there was a strange look about her eyes, as\nif they had been overtaxed. I received the volume, but fell into thought\nwith it in my hand, forgetting that she was observing me.\n\n\"What is the matter?\" she said, touching me with her shadowy hand. \"Has\nanything gone wrong? No bad news about our young friend, I hope.\"\n\n\"No,\" I answered, starting; \"I have not heard from him this morning.\"\n\n\"Well, what is it then? You look strangely, as if something had\nfrightened you.\"\n\n\"Do I? No, indeed, nothing has frightened me.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" she said, with a little hesitation, \"you are getting anxious\nabout me; these heavy feelings that hang about my head in the morning\nare a little depressing; I don't really know what to make of them.\"\n\nI looked at her anxiously; there certainly was a singular expression in\nher eyes which made me thoughtful. She went on in a soft, dreamy way, as\nif talking to herself.\n\n\"Then I used to sleep so lightly. It was a great affliction,--that state\nof semi-wakefulness which left everything unreal, but was not sleep,\nwore me out; now I fall into such profound slumber, but it gives me no\nmore rest than the other state; and I awake with the sensation of a\nperson who has been struggling hard through the night.\"\n\n\"But this may arise from opiates.\"\n\n\"Opiates! Indeed, you know that I never take them, Miss Hyde.\"\n\nI answered with some surprise that I had accounted for the strange\nfeeling which oppressed her by the idea that it must be something of\nthat kind; but omitted to say that Mrs. Dennison had bewailed to me the\nhabit of taking preparations of opium which Mrs. Lee had fallen into.\n\nThe invalid seemed a little hurt by this suggestion, and said over and\nover again in her sweet way,--\n\n\"No, no, my dear. It must be terrible pain which can force me to take\nthese things; and thanks to Him and to all the loving care around me, I\ndo not suffer greatly.\"\n\n\"Still you are changed, dear lady,\" I said. \"How, I cannot explain; but\nin your face I find that look of struggle which you complain of.\"\n\n\"It is oppressive,\" she said, putting a hand to her forehead, \"and I am\nafraid makes me but dull company. Mr. Lee is not here quite so much as\nusual: or is that a sick fancy, Miss Hyde?\"\n\nI answered with a tremor in my voice, for her earnest look troubled me,\nthat we all thought quiet better for her, even than the pleasant\nexcitement which his company might bring.\n\nShe shook her head, and observed with one of her touching smiles, \"that\nit did not help the flowers to keep back the dew when they thirsted for\nit.\"\n\nI had no answer; all my petty evasions against her affectionate\nentreaties were like straw flung on the surface of a brook; I had no\nheart to attempt more.\n\nShe had fallen into silence, and lay shading her eyes with one hand,\nwhen Mr. Lee came in with a heavy, ringing step, and a cloud on his\nface. His wife started up, and her eyes sparkled as she held out her\nhand.\n\n\"Were you asleep? Have I disturbed you?\" he said, abruptly.\n\n\"Oh! no, that is impossible, I think; but--but you look troubled. What\nis it?\"\n\n\"Troubled? Do I? Nothing of the kind. How fanciful you are, my dear!\nWhat should any of us have to do with trouble?\"\n\n\"Not while we are together,\" she said, touching the seat I had\nabandoned with her hand, thus delicately inviting him to her side.\n\nBut he strode to the window, and looked out with anxiety. Something was\nevidently on his mind. Just then I heard voices in the garden. It was\nMrs. Dennison calling aloud for Jessie.\n\n\"Jessie, Jessie, darling, where have you hidden yourself? Here is some\none wishes to see you.\"\n\nThe voice came ringing up clear and distinct; Mr. Lee heard it, and the\nfrown grew lighter upon his forehead. Directly a light step came up the\nstairs. Mr. Lee turned and looked toward the door. Mrs. Dennison entered\nthe chamber without waiting for her knock to be answered.\n\n\"Where is Jessie?\" she cried, all cheerfulness and animation; \"she is\nwanted, and I am quite out of breath searching for her in the garden,\nMr. Lee. Dear Miss Hyde, pray help me to find her.\"\n\nMr. Lee came forward at this challenge, almost smiling.\n\n\"Have you been to her room?\" he said.\n\nShe answered him that she had not, but added something in a low, hurried\nvoice. Guarded as it was, I caught the sense.\n\n\"There was a little misunderstanding between them,\" she said; \"he wanted\nme to mediate, and is waiting for her in the garden.\"\n\nMr. Lee listened, and one of the rare smiles I have spoken of beamed\nover his face. He made a movement as if to go out with the widow; but\nseeing the anxiety in Mrs. Lee's eyes, I went forward at once, saying,\nas I hurried by the couple,--\n\n\"As you are here to sit with Mrs. Lee, sir, I will look for Jessie.\"\n\nThe smile that crept across Mrs. Dennison's lips was like a reptile\nfeeding on a rose.\n\n\"You are very kind,\" she said. \"I had no idea of enlisting Mr. Lee; his\nduties here are too sacred for that.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XXXIX.\n\nLOTTIE AS A LETTER-WRITER.\n\n\nI hurried on to escape the sound of Mrs. Dennison's voice, for in any\ntone it filled me with loathing; but as the door closed after me, that\nof Lottie's opened, and the imp thrust out her head and emitted a mellow\ncrow, clapping her arms as if they had been wings, thus indicating that\nfor once my conduct had met her full approval.\n\nI could not help laughing; at which she put a finger to her lips, and\ndarted back of the door, closing it softly in the process.\n\nI went up to Jessie's room, but she was not there, nor could she be\nfound in any part of the house. When assured of this, I went into the\ngarden and found Lawrence walking leisurely toward the grove where his\nhorse was tied. He turned as I called him by name, and looked back with\nan expression of surprise.\n\n\"I have been searching for Miss Lee to inform her of your wish to see\nher,\" I said; \"but she has gone out.\"\n\nHe drew his fine figure up proudly, and said, with a smile that had more\nof irony than sweetness in it,--\n\n\"I beg pardon; but my visit here was to Mrs. Dennison. I was only\nwaiting for her to return with her parasol, as she found the sun rather\nwarm.\"\n\nI felt myself coloring, but answered the moment I could find voice,--\n\n\"Then you did not inquire for Miss Lee?--did not ask Mrs. Dennison to go\nin search of her?\"\n\n\"Not that I am aware of,\" he replied, with the same smile. \"I supposed\nit more than probable that the young lady had gone to visit her\nsick-lo--friend, over yonder. Heaven forbid that I should disturb an\narrangement so full of delicate romance!\"\n\nI looked at him steadily. There was more of insult in his tone than\nthese words conveyed. At first I was prompted to explain and defend: but\nwherefore? If he could distrust a creature like our Jessie, any attempt\nat exculpation appeared to me like a sacrifice of dignity, so I turned\naway in silence. He followed me a few paces, as if wishing to continue\nthe conversation; but I hurried on, burning with indignation. Why had\nthose abominable people entered our pleasant homes? Why did they remain\nthere, making us all miserable? Oh! how I wished for authority to send\nthem away together; for in my resentment, I, perhaps unjustly, coupled\nthe gentleman with the lady, and forgot that he was her dupe rather than\nassociate.\n\nWhen Lawrence was yet almost on a level with me, the widow came out from\nthe tower, looking flurried and anxious. She saw me apparently in\nconversation with her friend, and turned crimson to the temples; but\nadroitly dropping the open parasol over her face, she came slowly on,\nconcealing the agitation but too visible a moment before. Without\nheeding me in the least, she sauntered up to Lawrence, drooping her\nparasol almost in my face, and said with careless insolence,--\n\n\"Now, my good friend, with Miss Hyde's permission, we will go on with\nthe history of that little affair.\"\n\nSo she swept him off, somewhat bewildered, I fancy, and I went into the\nhouse, detesting her more than ever.\n\nBefore entering Mrs. Lee's room, I opened the door of Lottie's little\napartment, intending to inquire if Mr. Lee had gone out. The young girl\nwas seated at a small gilded table, which had been broken in the\ndrawing-room and mended by her deft hands, after which, of course, it\nbecame her property; an open letter lay on the table, and she was busy\nwriting. When I opened the door, she started up, snatched at the letter\nand held it behind her, looking at me with a comical sort of defiance.\n\n\"Miss Hyde,\" said she, \"if you'll just tell me what's wanting, I'll come\nout; but this room isn't large enough for two--no, not if its owner had\na twin sister wandering about in want of a bed to sleep in.\"\n\n\"Excuse me, Lottie, but I only want to know if Mrs. Lee is left alone.\"\n\n\"No, Miss Hyde, that thing don't happen while I am on hand. Mr. Lee's in\nthere, and that angel of a woman is talking to him with tears in her\nthroat, if they haven't got up to her eyes yet. I can hear the sound\nwithout listening, and I hope it will do him good, that's all!\"\n\nI turned to go away, but she followed me to the door, still with one\nhand behind her, in which I could hear paper rustling.\n\n\"Miss Hyde, I can't help but say, if it does puff you up, that are dodge\nof yours was a crowner; I heard it and all Babylon said: my! isn't she a\nthing or so? For once you were too smart for her. Didn't her face blaze\nup when she saw you walking with that chap? I couldn't 'a' done it\nbetter myself. Now, mind I say that to encourage you, not to lift you on\na high horse; so don't make a bad use of kindness.\"\n\n\"You are very kind, and I try not to be spoiled, Lottie.\"\n\n\"I'm your friend out and out, and the friend of this family, if ever\nthere was one. Never fear about that; but this thing is getting beyond\nme and destroying my usefulness. I wish you wouldn't give me no more\nlectures about listening and finding out things. True enough, I don't\npay no regard to such ridiculous notions; but then just as a creature\ngets nestled down under a bush, or fits her ear to a keyhole, comes the\nthought, 'Now Miss Hyde would call this mean,' and it drags your\nattention away from what's going on and takes all the relish out of it.\nI don't like it, Miss Hyde; such peaked notions do well enough for an\nold maid; but I ain't a going to be that, if there is a man cute enough\nto match me in all creation.\"\n\n\"Well, Lottie,\" I said, almost laughing, \"as my preaching only annoys\nyou, it is hardly worth while to repeat it.\"\n\n\"That's a good soul!\" answered Lottie, with benign condescension. \"You\nhoe your row and I'll hoe mine, we shall come out together at the end of\nthe lot, never fear.\"\n\nThe next morning, when our man brought the letters from town, I noticed\nMrs. Dennison examining one which she took from among those left on the\nhall-table, with the keen look of a person whose suspicion has been\naroused. In tearing it open, she examined the adhesive edge a second\ntime, and apparently found it all right, for her face cleared up, and\nshe put the letter in her pocket without reading it. Still she could not\nhave been quite satisfied, for after that no letters of hers were ever\nleft with those of the family to be mailed.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XL.\n\nYOUNG BOSWORTH RECEIVES A LETTER.\n\n\nThat day I resolved to go and see young Bosworth. I had no lover to get\njealous or find fault with this; indeed, it was doubtful if any one\ncared enough about my movements to observe them when disconnected from\nthe family.\n\nI had no heart to enjoy the walk; it was a cold, raw day, with gloomy\nclouds floating along the sky, and gloomier shadows sweeping the earth.\nThe dampness of a night succeeded by no sunshine lay upon the meadows;\nspiders' webs were stretched across my path; and a rain of moisture fell\nfrom the hazel-bushes as my garments brushed them in walking. Still, it\nwas not absolutely stormy, and the gray shadows harmonized with my\nfeelings so completely, that I had no wish to change them. Nothing\ncould be more gloomy than my own heart.\n\nWhen I reached the house, old Mrs. Bosworth came to the door herself.\nShe seemed a good deal disturbed, and I fancied, from the heaviness of\nher eyes, that she had been crying.\n\n\"Come in, Miss Hyde,\" she said, taking my hand. \"He is not so well this\nmorning. Indeed, indeed he is much worse. A letter came here last night,\nand I was foolish enough to let it go to him. One of your people brought\nit, and I fancied, perhaps, that it might do him good, for it was a\nlady's handwriting, and she was so kind that morning.\"\n\n\"You thought it was from our Jessie,\" I answered, in the first impulse\nof my surprise.\n\n\"Yes, it was a foolish thought, I dare say,--but that was my idea.\"\n\n\"And have you learned whom it did come from?\"\n\n\"No,\" answered the noble old lady. \"He fainted, and it fell from his\nhand; but I laid it under his pillow without even looking at it; it\nmight have wounded him, you know.\"\n\n\"And is he so much worse?\"\n\n\"Oh, Miss Hyde, the fever has come back; he is wild again.\"\n\n\"And had you no way of guessing the cause?\"\n\n\"I think it was something about Mr. Lawrence, for he called for him till\nthe house rang with his cries, after the first dumb shock went off.\"\n\n\"Did Mr. Lawrence know of this?\"\n\n\"He was away at the time; and after that your young friend's name was so\nwildly mingled up with it all, that I could not think it right to bring\nMr. Lawrence to the room. It would have seemed like challenging his\ncompassion.\"\n\nMy heart ached, for I saw that her penetration had discovered Jessie's\nsecret, and that she was protecting it with much delicacy.\n\n\"Besides, he is our guest,\" she said, prompted by that old-fashioned\nfeeling of honor which rendered the shelter of a friend's roof a\nsanctuary, \"and he might have construed my grandson's words into a\nreproach; altogether, we thought it best to keep them apart.\"\n\nThere was a mystery about all this that baffled me. Who could have\nwritten that letter brought by one of Mr. Lee's servants? Not Jessie, I\nwas sure of that, for she never could have taken a step of so much\nimportance thus privately. Besides, save for the brief time of\nLawrence's visit that day, when, wounded and heart-sick, she left the\nhouse, and wandered off into the thickest of the woods, she had not been\nabsent from her mother's room scarcely a moment. Mrs. Dennison had seen\nher passing through the outskirt of the woods, or she would never have\nventured to call for her so loudly.\n\nAll this I knew, but it was unnecessary; a thorough understanding of\nJessie's character rendered conjectures regarding her part in this\nmatter quite superfluous. But who had written the letter? and what was\nits import? Of course, my suspicions fell on that woman; but what was\nher object? Surely she was not anxious to ensnare this young man\nalso--her vanity could not be so insatiable as that.\n\nPerhaps it was Mr. Lee; his handwriting was exquisitely clear and\ndelicate as a woman's; what if his displeasure against our visit had\nbeen expressed here? But no, Mr. Lee was not a man to rudely force his\nanger into a sick-room.\n\nAgain my thoughts fell back on the widow; what unprincipled work was she\ndoing here? What benefit could she find in sowing discord upon that poor\nyoung man's pillow?\n\nOf course, one thinks rapidly, and all these broken ideas took but\nlittle time in flashing through my brain. The old lady stood with one\nhand on the back of her easy-chair, observing me with a troubled look.\n\n\"You think the letter was not from your young friend?\" she said, reading\nmy thoughts with that subtile magnetism which is a part of true\nwomanliness.\n\n\"I am sure it was not, dear lady!\"\n\n\"Nor from her father?\"\n\n\"Not if it gave him pain; Mr. Lee is incapable of that.\"\n\nThe old lady drew a deep breath, as if infinitely relieved, and sat\ndown, spreading out her ample skirts mechanically after her usual dainty\nhabit.\n\n\"Miss Hyde,\" she said, with a little tremor of the voice, and a movement\nof the hands, which fell into her lap and clasped themselves nervously,\n\"Miss Hyde, I am sure you are my poor boy's friend!\"\n\n\"I am indeed!\" was my earnest response.\n\n\"And you know--\"\n\n\"Yes, dear madam, all that an affectionate heart can learn by its own\nobservation.\"\n\n\"I have thought, perhaps,\" said the dear old lady, coloring as she\nspoke, \"that Mr. Lee, with his enormous wealth, might have considered\nthe modest property of my grandson insufficient, and for this reason\nhave influenced his daughter.\"\n\nI had nothing to answer. If Mr. Lee knew of this unhappy attachment, he\nhad given no sign; but I told her that his general character was opposed\nto anything so mercenary.\n\n\"If this were so,\" answered the old lady, growing more anxious, \"I think\nit would be easily remedied. My grandson, it is true, has little more\nthan a handsome independence; but I, Miss Hyde, am perhaps richer than\nour neighbors think. In fact,\" she added, blushing, as if there were\nsomething to be ashamed of in the confession, \"my income, if I chose to\nuse it, would not compare meanly with that of Mr. Lee. When one spends\nbut little, with tolerably fair possessions, property accumulates\nrapidly at the end of a long life. I had intended to endow charities,\nperhaps; but the sight of my boy up yonder has changed all this.\"\n\nI could only say, \"You are very liberal, madam;\" for I felt sure that\nthe trouble did not lie where she supposed.\n\n\"If you could in any way make this understood, Miss Hyde, without\nbringing it prominently forward, I should be so grateful. I called you\nin here for this purpose. You have been so kind, so truly good to us.\"\n\n\"Oh, no, no,\" I protested.\n\n\"So delicate,\" she persisted; \"and now when his life is in such fearful\nperil, I am forced to take liberties--forced to think if anything can be\ndone to save him, forced to beg for help.\"\n\n\"Oh, if I could help you!\" I exclaimed, feeling the tears rush to my\neyes.\n\n\"You have, you can; already we are greatly indebted to your kindness. I\nam not eloquent to express thanks, sometimes feeling that silence is\nmost delicate; but I feel all this, Miss Hyde, and so did he, my poor\nboy!\"\n\nAgain I expressed the happiness it would give me to help her or him.\n\n\"I am an old woman,\" she continued; \"very old, and require so little\nthat property has become burdensome. If--if this thing can be arranged,\nall that I have, every cent, shall go to him; not after my death, but\nnow, while I can see them enjoy it. They will remember my habits, and my\nlittle wants, I am sure; and it will be very pleasant to have young\nvoices around me again. Will you take an opportunity to suggest this to\nMr. Lee?--not the young lady--my grandson must owe everything to himself\nthere; but with a parent these are important considerations, sometimes.\"\n\nI could not see her face, for tears half blinded me. The feeling which\ncould induce this fine old woman to give up all the appliances of her\npride, all the power of her life, in order to purchase happiness for her\ngrandson, was one of those noble outgushes of human nature that always\nmake me weep. I could have kissed the hem of her garments, and felt\nennobled by the act. It was no little thing to uproot the fixed habits\nof almost a century. With all that love of property which grows strong\nin age, from a sentiment of generosity another might have thought of\ndividing, but she was ready to give up all.\n\nI had no heart to discourage her. Warmly and truly as my wishes went\nwith hers, I would not uproot all hope in my own mind. Time, I whispered\nto myself, has many changes, and so has the human heart. So I took the\nold lady's hand in mine and kissed it with affectionate reverence. She\nsmiled upon me in her benign way, and called me \"her dear young friend,\nher fair, sweet friend.\"\n\nOh! I am getting to be a forlorn creature, or these words would never\nhave swelled my heart with such throbs of gratitude. Have I indeed\nanything lovable or attractive about me which the old lady's deeper\npenetration has discovered, or is it only because I have been a little\nkind to her grandson? I wish it were possible to know about this, for\nsince Mrs. Dennison has been at our house, I have begun to doubt and\nfear about myself in a way that never possessed me before. Her\noverpowering elegance has put down all my little quiet claims to notice\nso completely, that it seems as if I never should lift up my head again.\nNo wonder I cried and kissed that soft hand like a child. People don't\nthink how much we require praise and petting, at all stages of\nexistence, or how much of childhood runs from the cradle to the grave in\nevery human life.\n\nIt was very foolish and romantic, but without at all knowing it, I had\nfallen on my knees by the old lady; and when she saw my eyes so full of\ntears, she smoothed my hair, and called me a good girl. With this I laid\nmy head on her lap, and begged her to let me love her always, telling\nher that sometimes I was lonely for the want of a right to love\nanything. Then I grew ashamed and stood up, blushing through the tears\nthat had betrayed me into such weakness, but her gracious look reassured\nme.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XLI.\n\nOUT IN THE STORM.\n\n\nAfter this the younger Mrs. Bosworth came into the parlor, her eyes red\nwith weeping, and looking weaker and more in affliction than ever. She\nhad done everything, she said, dropping helplessly into a chair, and\nnothing would pacify him. There he was, trying to read over a letter\nthat he kept hid away under the pillow, that shook and shook in his\nhands till the whole room was full of its rustling, and it made her so\nnervous she was afraid to stay alone with him--muttering, muttering as\nif he were angry with her, that had been a good mother to him all his\ndays; no one could say to the contrary of that, she was sure.\n\nAnother woman of a character so much above the level of that poor\nmother's, might have become impatient; but the old lady listened to her\nwith great sympathy, excused her futile grief by half implied apologies,\nand finally succeeded in persuading her to lie down on the sofa, while\nwe went up-stairs and watched by her son.\n\nThe young man was indeed very ill, entirely out of his head, and talking\nangrily to himself. The letter which Mrs. Bosworth had mentioned was\ncrushed in his hand, and he was rolling it into a round ball between his\ntwo palms. While I stood looking upon him, thus troubled by some unseen\nenemy, and flung back upon a sick-bed, it seemed impossible that any one\ncould be cruel enough for such work, unless the heart of a fiend had\nsomewhere taken human form.\n\nI would have stayed in the sick-room longer, for my poor talent for\nnursing was never more required, but the old lady seemed anxious to send\nme home. Having done her utmost to relieve the unhappy situation of our\npatient, she was restless till her object was put in some state of\nforwardness; so I went away, leaving her rather hopeful, but very\ndesponding myself.\n\nAs I went home, the clouds that had been broken and scattered were\ngathered into vast tent-like masses, and a slow rain began to fall,\nwhich gradually wet me through. I did not heed it; nothing could be\ngloomier than my feelings. It seemed to me as if I were going to a house\nof strangers, so completely had the machinations of that woman shut me\nout from my old place in the family. So I let it rain on, without a wish\nto escape the discomfort.\n\nWhen I was nearly across the fields, I saw a figure approaching through\nthe gray mists, and would gladly have avoided it by turning into the\nwoods; but a voice called me by name, and I stopped at once. It was\nJessie, who had come out into the storm to meet me. Lawrence had called\nat the house and informed the family of young Bosworth's relapse.\n\n\"He is there now, I suppose,\" she said, excitedly; \"but I came away,\nguessing where you had gone. I cannot breathe in the house when they are\ntogether, and he lying so ill and helpless.\"\n\nI looked up at these words. The storm was beating in her face, but her\ncheeks were like fire underneath. It might have been all rain that\nflashed down the burning surface; but I thought not, for there were\nsuppressed sobs in her voice when she spoke.\n\n\"Is--is your father at home?\" I inquired, hesitating in my speech, I\ncannot tell wherefore.\n\n\"No; he rode over to town before the storm came on. They have the house\nto themselves.\"\n\nShe spoke bitterly. In truth, I scarcely recognized my own sweet Jessie\nwith those wet garments clinging around her, and that excited face. We\nwalked on in silence, for she turned to retrace her steps. At last she\nsaid, abruptly:\n\n\"How is he, Aunt Matty? Does he suffer?\"\n\n\"Greatly, I think, Jessie.\"\n\n\"No wonder he is ill,\" she said, passionately. \"It is enough to break\ndown anything human.\"\n\n\"I am glad you can feel for him, Jessie.\"\n\n\"Feel for him! Who can help it? But who feels for--for--\"\n\nShe broke off abruptly, turning pale and cold.\n\nI walked on, distressed by this broken confidence, but knew well that\nJessie was too proud for anything more definite.\n\nAs we came into the field bordered by the carriage sweep, a horseman\ndashed up to the gate, which had been left open, and was passing at a\nswift gallop toward the house. It was Mr. Lee returning from town, and\nriding fast to escape the rain. He saw us dragging our way through the\ngrass, and drew up, regarding our condition with a look so stern that it\nchilled me.\n\n\"He is angry with me for going out, I suppose,\" said Jessie, drearily.\n\"Well, I could not help it.\"\n\nAfter regarding us for a full minute with that hard look, Mr. Lee rode\non, his horse tramping heavier than before, and sending back broken\nflakes of mud, as if casting it purposely against us. He rode directly\nto the stables. Jessie and I slunk into the house by the back entrance\nlike culprits.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XLII.\n\nJESSIE GETS TIRED OF HER GUEST.\n\n\nI kept my chamber that day, striving to make up my mind about what\ncourse was best for me to pursue. My life at Mr. Lee's had become so\nharassing, that it was absolutely burdensome. I did not know friends\nfrom enemies in that house, for every being in it seemed changed. I sat\ndown alone and wept in bitter grief. Should I go away and leave the\nill-contested field to that woman, who was surely working out some great\nevil to the whole family? I was not dependent. Considerable property was\nvested in my favor, but it was in Mr. Lee's hands; and so generously had\nhe provided for every possible want, that even the income remained\nuntouched.\n\nI had ability, and could have earned my bread anywhere, either as a\ngoverness or a teacher, had that been necessary. Thus, personal\nconsiderations could not have bowed down my spirits to the state of\ndepression that fell upon me. Something deeper lay at my heart. Was it\nlove for Jessie? was it fear that the poor girl would be left without\ndefence, to the machinations of that cruel woman? I cannot tell. If\nother and more selfish feelings existed in my bosom, I did not know it.\nIndeed, so absorbed were all my faculties in the difficulties that\nthickened around us, that I had no time for self-examination. Dear, dear\nJessie! how could I help her? That was the burden of my thoughts.\n\nThe thorough drenching which I had received made me hoarse and really\nill. In my anxiety, I had neglected to change my clothes; but the cold\nshudders that crept over me aroused my attention to the danger, and,\nchanging my damp garments, I lay down, striving to get warm.\n\nI have a vague recollection that the sun broke out, and came flashing\nthrough the leaves into my chamber. Then I heard voices in the garden\nbeneath, which chilled me worse than the cold.\n\nMr. Lee and Mrs. Dennison were conversing together on the terrace, where\ncamp-stools and garden-chairs were always standing. I could have heard\neverything; the temptation was great, but I put it away, burying my head\nin my pillow, and drowning their voices with my sobs.\n\nToward night Jessie came to my room. She was sad and disheartened; Mr.\nLee had not spoken to her since our return; and even her mother was\nvexed that she should have exposed herself to the storm.\n\nI inquired if Mr. Lawrence was at the house when her father returned.\nJessie thought not, but could not say positively; only he seldom was\nthere, except in her father's absence.\n\nShe said this abruptly, and turned the conversation; the very name of\nLawrence seemed to distress her.\n\n\"Aunt Matty,\" she said, after a dreary silence, \"will this widow never\nleave our house? Shall we remain in this state till it brings ruin on us\nall? Mother seems fading away, and no one appears to care. You look\nyears older; and as for me--\"\n\n\"Well, Jessie?\"\n\n\"No matter about me; but something must be done. So long as it was\nmyself only, I made an effort to bear it; but we are all changed, all\nunhappy--dear, sweet mamma, and even Lottie. There is poison in the very\natmosphere, I think.\"\n\n\"Let us have patience, Jessie; this cannot last much longer; but while\nMrs. Dennison remains here, do not forget that she is your mother's\nguest.\"\n\n\"But how long--how long, I say, will this last? My father is getting\nmore distant and estranged every hour. I feel like an alien under his\nroof--a stranger to my very self.\"\n\nShe was greatly excited, and wrung her hands with passionate vehemence.\nThe proud reticence of her character was all swept away; she fell upon\nher knees by the bed on which I lay, and sobbed aloud. I am sure this\nwould not have happened with any one else; but I had become almost a\nsecond self to the dear girl, and she was not ashamed to give way to her\ngrief in my presence.\n\nWhile she was on her knees, Lottie opened my chamber-door and looked\nin. Seeing Miss Jessie, she drew back, placed a finger on her lips, and\nperformed a series of pantomime that would have been exceedingly\nludicrous but for the anxiety that beset me. As it was, I saw that she\nhad something to communicate, but was afraid to ask her in while Jessie\nwas so disturbed.\n\nShe saw this, and darting a finger backward over her shoulder and\nforward at me, as if it had been a weapon, retreated, making up faces\nthat grew more ludicrous with every step.\n\nJessie had seen nothing of this. She arose, after a little, and went\nout, sighing heavily.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XLIII.\n\nA CONSULTATION WITH LOTTIE.\n\n\nDirectly after she was gone, Lottie came back, and, closing the door,\nbolted it inside and stole up to my bed on tiptoe. She looked pale and\nfrightened, but her eyes shone through the shadows that had suddenly\nsettled around them, and she moved like a hound doubling on its prey.\n\n\"Miss Hyde,\" she said, \"just listen while you have time; that red\nBabylon has gone and done it. I've had my hands full all day scooting\nabout among the wet bushes, and holding my breath behind\nwindow-shutters. Now, would you believe it? I've been two hull hours\nsquinched up in that big rosewood book-case with the green silk lining;\nfor them new painted winders in the tower library are the most\naggravating things to one as wants to keep her eyes open. Thanks be to\ngoodness! the new books haven't arrived, and I should have had lots of\nroom if human beings had been built flat. As it was, I got along by\nholding in my breath and bowing the doors a trifle.\"\n\n\"But what did you go into the book-case for, Lottie?\" I inquired,\nanxious to bring her to some point in her communication.\n\n\"What did I go into the book-case for? Why, only to hear what was going\non in that room, to be sure. Wasn't that Mr. Lawrence and Mrs. Babylon\nthere, sitting on the sofa together two hull hours?\"\n\n\"And you listened to the conversation?\"\n\n\"In course I did.\"\n\nShe seemed waiting for me to ask more questions, but I could not force\nmyself thus indirectly to partake in a dishonorable act.\n\n\"You won't ask what they said, and yet are a-dying to know, any fool can\nsee that. Well, thanks be to goodness! I ain't a lady, and if I was, for\n_her_ sake I'd do worse things than that; my ears were made to hear\nwith, and I ain't going to fight agin nature.\"\n\n\"But you came to see me for something, Lottie?\"\n\n\"Certainly I did. But how is one to tell things without talking right\nout? Well, if you won't ask what I heard in the book-case, I must tell\nyou promiscuous. This she-sarpent has about done up your business for\nyou, as she means to for me and the rest of 'em before long.\"\n\n\"Done my business for me, Lottie! What does that mean? I do not\nunderstand.\"\n\n\"Likely enough; but I'll tell you; Babylon is in love with Mr.\nLawrence.\"\n\n\"I wish from my heart he'd marry her,\" I thought.\n\n\"But she won't have him,\" said Lottie, as if answering my thought. \"At\nany rate, not yet.\"\n\n\"Well, well, Lottie, tell me what brings you here? My head aches.\"\n\n\"So does mine,\" said Lottie, lifting a hand to her head, and pressing\nher forehead hard with the palm. \"Well, Miss Hyde, a little while ago,\nMr. Lee and Mrs. Babylon were sitting on the platform under this very\nwindow. It was just after the rain, and they happened to meet as he was\ncoming out to enjoy the sunshine. I happened in the same way to be\ndusting the sofa close by the window, and it took me a good while. Don't\nput up your hand, Miss Hyde, you'd 'a' listened yourself. She was\ntalking about you.\"\n\n\"About me?\"\n\n\"Yes. I can't give the words; but she was saying, in her silky way, that\nMiss Jessie was so much altered since she met her at the sea-shore, so\nobstinate and demonstrative, vulgarized, as one might say, if anything\nso very beautiful could be vulgarized. But didn't Mr. Lee think that a\ncompanion who followed her pupil into society was rather a drawback, and\napt to get a predominating influence over that of the parents? Was he\ncertain of Miss Jessie's friend,--of her prudence and disinterestedness?\nOf course, she had no right to give an opinion: but when the time came\nfor a young lady to enter society, was there no reason to think that a\nhousehold companion, like Miss Hyde, might become a dangerous\ncounsellor? Of course, Mr. Lee knew best, his wisdom was never at fault;\nbut would not a companion, perfectly dependent, and who had some\nexperience in society, produce a better result?\n\n\"I wish you could 'a' seen Mr. Lee's face, Miss Hyde. He looked up all\nof a sudden, and his eyes flashed fire; Babylon saw it, and looked down\nas if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth; and then he took her hand in\nhis,--it wasn't the first time, Miss Hyde, I'd bet my head on that, for\nit all came too easy--and I've seen what I have seen;--then he said how\ndifficult it was to find such a person,--one who was an ornament to\nsociety, and yet willing to live in a place like that which Mrs. Lee's\nillness made, in some sort, like a prison.\n\n\"She left her hand in his, and lifted her eyes to his face sideways--you\nknow how--and said a few words almost in a whisper. I couldn't catch the\nfirst word, but he turned red as fire and lifted her hand to his lips,\nalmost; then he dropped it again and begged her pardon.\"\n\nI had no power to stop Lottie's narrative. The import of this\nconversation struck me with a sudden pang. It seemed as if sentence of\ndeath had been pronounced upon me. What could I do? Where on earth was a\nhome like that to be found? What would Jessie and Mrs. Lee do without\nme? That woman in my place! The thought was anguish. I almost hated her.\n\nLottie stood by the bed, looking at me, with trouble in her face.\n\n\"I knew that it would be a blow; but this is worse than I expected,\" she\nsaid. \"How white you are--how your lips quiver! But don't take on so.\nLet them try it; let Babylon do her worst--she'll find her match. I've\nlearned a thing or two, since she came, that I didn't know\nbefore,--especially how to droop your eyelids and look meek, then open\n'em quick and flash out fire. It's taking, I've tried it with--with--\"\n\n\"With whom, Lottie?\"\n\n\"With--but no matter; when the birds sing, chickens have a right to\npeep. Babylon isn't the only person who can turn a feller's head, and\ngood looks is according to one's taste. Then there's a difference in\nflirting, when the object is a good one; don't you think so, Miss Hyde?\"\n\n\"I don't know, Lottie,\" was my dreary answer; \"you must ask about these\nmatters of some one who has had more experience.\"\n\n\"Oh! I don't care about asking; it all comes natural enough after the\nfirst lesson. But you won't let them drive you away--it would break her\nheart, I know it would.\"\n\nLottie's eyes were full of tears. Poor girl! she had a good heart.\n\nThis sympathy touched me deeply. I was so desolate and felt so wronged,\nthat a kind word filled me with gratitude, even from Lottie.\n\n\"Oh! ma'am, don't mind it! Babylon sha'n't hurt you while I can help it.\nOnly be firm, and don't go off in a fit of pride. Stand your ground to\nthe last, and when the worst comes to the worst, depend on me.\"\n\nThe girl took my hand and kissed it; then, kneeling down by the bed,\nlaid her face close to mine.\n\n\"Miss Hyde--\"\n\n\"Well, my good girl.\"\n\n\"I have something to say, something that worries me dreadfully; are you\nlistening?\"\n\n\"Yes, child.\"\n\n\"It is about mistress. Don't you see how dreadfully thin she is getting?\nYou can almost look through her hand.\"\n\n\"Yes, Lottie, it makes my heart ache to think of it. Have you any idea\nof the cause?\"\n\n\"_He_ don't visit her much now.\"\n\n\"You have noticed it, you--\"\n\n\"I count the minutes every day.\"\n\n\"This might vex her, but not to the extent that seems so visible.\"\n\n\"No, there is something else. I cannot understand it; but wait awhile,\nMiss Hyde, I'm on hand.\"\n\nI hardly heard this. The idea that my presence in that house had become\na burden, that I might be at any moment desired to leave my place in the\nfamily for that woman to fill, absorbed my faculties, and in the\nselfishness of my distress, I gave less heed than the subject claimed to\nwhat the girl was saying.\n\nShe saw this, I suppose; for, with renewed entreaties that I should hold\nfirmly to my position and trust to her for the rest, she crept from the\nroom, almost crying.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XLIV.\n\nTHE MIDNIGHT DISCOVERY.\n\n\nAbout an hour after this I arose, bathed my forehead, and went into Mrs.\nLee's chamber, for the pain of my solitary thoughts became unendurable.\nThe poor lady was lying on the sofa, with her eyes closed, looking more\nwan than ever. Something troubled her, I am sure; for tears were\nswelling under the transparent whiteness of her eyelids, and her hands\nwere clasped over her bosom. This was an attitude habitual to her when\ndisturbed by any grief, and seeing it, I turned to go away; but she\nheard my footstep and opened her eyes. There was something in her manner\nthat went to my heart--a sort of mournful constraint, as if she shrunk\nfrom my presence. Still she held forth her hand.\n\nI sat down in my old place, and she closed her eyes again, as if any\neffort at speech was beyond her strength. In the broader light which\nfell upon her face, I saw that she had been crying--an unusual thing\nwith her at any time; for all sources of trouble had been kept so\nsedulously from that room, that grief amounting to tears seldom found\nits way there.\n\nAfter a prolonged silence that chilled me to the heart, she laid her\nhand on mine, and I saw that her earnest eyes were searching my face.\n\n\"Dear Miss Hyde, we have been so happy together--I thought no family was\never united like ours!\"\n\nI understood the pathos in her voice, the meaning of her words. Mr. Lee\nhad begun the subject; already they were about to prove how troublesome\nand useless I had been--how much my place was wanted for another.\n\n\"You do not speak,\" she said, \"surely, nothing has been said to wound\nyou?\"\n\n\"No,\" I answered, \"I only come to see if you were in want of anything.\"\n\n\"Ah! you have always been so attentive, so kind! How shall I get along\nwithout you?\"\n\nSo it was decided. He had spoken, and they had settled my destiny; the\ngentle invalid yielding without a murmur while her best friend was\ndriven from under her roof. I had no heart to continue the conversation,\nand she, poor lady! evidently lacked the courage to speak plainer. Thus,\nwith apprehensions and grief, we remained together in silence. Her eyes\nwere closed, but not with sleep, I am sure of that; and I felt a dead\nheaviness creeping over me, which carried with it a dreary sense of\npain.\n\nIt was getting dark when I left the chamber. The depression was so heavy\nupon me that I went down to the kitchen, thinking to ask the cook for a\ncup of warm tea. Lottie was there busy at the range, and, singular\nenough, making tea, as if my wants had been divined.\n\n\"A handful, cook,\" she said, holding out the silver teapot for a renewed\nsupply. \"I want it good and strong, something that will make one's eyes\nsnap.\"\n\nWhen the cook turned to put her canister in its place, Lottie went to\nthe closet and brought out two cups and saucers.\n\n\"Miss Hyde,\" she said, \"you have just come in time. I knew it'd be\nwanted: try a good, strong cup, it will have the ache out of your head\nin no time.\"\n\nI thanked her and took the cup she offered. It was strong to bitterness,\nand I did not like the taste; but when I passed it back, Lottie put in\nmore sugar and cream, but no water. I was too weary for protest, and\ndrank the bitterness without further comment.\n\nLottie seemed pleased, and insisted earnestly that I should take a\nsecond cup, filling her own for the third time, and draining it with\nwhat I thought must be heroism instead of desire.\n\n\"There,\" she said, setting her cup down, \"that will do, I reckon; it\nmakes my head as light as a cork. How do you feel, Miss Hyde?\"\n\n\"It is very, very strong, Lottie, and I fear it will keep me awake all\nnight.\"\n\n\"Fear!\" cried the girl, \"fear! Why, of course it will! To tell you the\ntruth,\" she added, bending toward me, and whispering, \"I begin to think\nthis isn't the house where one can sleep honestly. Now just go up to\nyour room, if you please, and don't let them see you looking so\nmiserable. There's trouble enough without that.\"\n\nThe cook came toward us before I could answer. She was preparing to send\nup tea for the family, and muttered something about ladies always being\nin the way in a kitchen. So great was the depression of my spirits, that\nI allowed this to wound me, and went away in deeper dejection.\n\nNo human soul came near me during the evening. I could not sleep--the\nstimulus urged my brain into swift action. I reviewed all the\ndifficulties of my position over and over again; strange projects came\ninto my mind, ways by which my wrongs--for I had been wronged--should be\nredressed; speeches more eloquent than ever could reach my lips inspired\nme, and these were to be addressed to Mr. Lee, in the presence of that\nwoman. A thousand wild fancies seized upon my brain and held it. I had\nno wish to change my position. Having thrown myself on the bed in my\nclothes, I remained there, thinking, thinking, thinking till my brain\nached, but would not pause for rest--a terrible inspiration was upon me.\n\nI heard a bustle in the house, as if the family were retiring; then the\nclock struck eleven, twelve, one. The hours did not seem long, but the\nstillness almost terrified me. All at once, it was after midnight some\ntime, a sound approached my chamber like the rush of a bird through the\nair. I started up and listened. The door opened softly, and a figure\nglided in.\n\n\"Miss Hyde, are you awake? Get up this minute and come with me; if your\nshoes are on, take them off. Come.\"\n\nI sprang up and followed Lottie swiftly and silently as she had reached\nmy chamber. She drew me through the passage into her own little room. As\nI passed along the hall which led from the main building to the tower,\nit seemed to me that my dress brushed against some one crouching in a\ndark corner; but Lottie had not seen it, and I followed her, holding my\nbreath. She glided through her own room into the chamber where Mrs. Lee\nslept. The carpets were thick as wood-moss, and our feet gave no sound.\nWhen she was fairly in the room, Lottie paused, and I heard a slight,\nscraping noise; then the sudden flash of a match was followed by the\nblaze of a candle which the girl carried in her hand.\n\nAs the light broke up, a faint cry came from the bed; a figure which\nbent over it rose up suddenly, and I stood face to face with Mrs.\nDennison, the whitest woman that ever my eyes dwelt upon. She held a\ncrystal toilet-bottle in one hand, and in the other a wet\npocket-handkerchief.\n\n\"Stand by the door, Miss Hyde. Don't let her move a foot. I'll be back\nin a flash.\"\n\nLottie darted from the room as she spoke, leaving the candlestick on the\ncarpet.\n\nThe woman turned upon me then with the spirit of a tigress. Her eyes\nflashed fire, the white teeth shone through her curved lips. She\nattempted to pass me, but I retreated to the door and kept the\nthreshold. She came forward as if to force me away, still holding the\nbottle and handkerchief in her hands. Never in my life had I seen a face\nso beautiful and so fiendish. There was desperation in her eyes,\nviolence in her action; but though weaker and smaller than her, I would\nhave died on the threshold of that door rather than have allowed her to\ncross it.\n\nAll at once her face changed. She was looking, not at me, but over my\nshoulder; a flash of quick intelligence shot from her eyes, and the next\nmoment she had thrown both arms about my neck and pressed my face to her\nbosom. I knew that some one came close up behind me, and heard the clink\nof glass; then a rush of feet through Lottie's room, and along the\npassage. All this could not have lasted a minute. I struggled from the\nwoman's embrace, and pushed her from me with a violence that made her\nstagger. Her face had changed to its old look of triumph. She laughed,\nnot naturally--that was beyond even her powers of self-command--but in a\nway that made me shiver.\n\n\"Dear Miss Hyde, is it you?\" she said, in a voice that quaked in spite\nof herself. \"How terribly frightened I was! Poor Mrs. Lee must have been\nvery ill. I heard her moaning and calling for help in my room, and came\nat once; she seems quite insensible now.\"\n\nI looked toward the bed. Mrs. Lee lay upon it, white, and still as a\ncorpse, her eyes closed, and her lips of a bluish white. Was she dead?\nHad the woman killed her? A strong, pungent smell filled the room--a\nsmell of chloroform. It was almost suffocating.\n\nMrs. Dennison seemed to think of this suddenly, and, darting toward the\nwindow, flung open two of the sashes before I knew what she was about. A\ngush of fresh air swept through the room; the pungent odor grew fainter\nand fainter, at which she smiled on me triumphantly.\n\nI looked at her, as she stood in the light; a toilet-bottle was still in\nher hand, but it was of crimson glass, spotted with gold; that which she\nheld, when I came in, was white and pure as water. How had she managed\nto change the crystal flask? What had become of the handkerchief?\n\nStill smiling on me, she approached the bed and scattered fragrant drops\nfrom the crimson flask over the pillows and the deathly face of my poor\nfriend. How still she lay! The whiteness of her face was terrible, but\nI dared not approach her; my post was by the door till Lottie came; but\nit made my blood run cold to see that woman bending over her, smoothing\nthe pillows with her hand, and filling the room with that lying\nfragrance.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XLV.\n\nBAFFLED AND DEFEATED.\n\n\nIt seemed an eternity before Lottie came back, yet she had not been\nabsent three minutes. She came alone, and stood by me at the door,\nregarding Mrs. Dennison's movements with the keen vigilance of a fox.\nBut a glimpse of Mrs. Lee's face made her start forward with a cry of\ndismay.\n\n\"My mistress, she is dead! They have killed her!\"\n\nShe would have fallen upon her knees by the bed, but Mrs. Dennison put\nher aside. It was an easy thing, for Lottie had lost all her strength in\nthat terrible fear.\n\n\"Foolish child! she has only fainted,\" said Mrs. Dennison, holding her\nback; \"the air will bring her to.\"\n\nLottie's courage returned with these words, and struggling from Mrs.\nDennison's hold, she sat down upon the bed, chafing Mrs. Lee's cold\nhands and kissing them with loving tenderness.\n\n\"Is she really and truly alive?\" said the poor girl, appealing to me.\n\nI could not resist the wistful anxiety of that look, but came forward,\nholding my breath, with a dread that her fears might be true.\n\nThat moment Mr. Lee entered the room, and directly came Jessie, with a\nlook of terror on her face. She trembled like a leaf at the sight of\nher mother, and turned to me, looking the question which she could not\nframe in speech.\n\n\"It is not death! I hope and believe that it is not death!\" I said.\n\nJessie fell upon a chair and burst into tears.\n\n\"Hush, child!\" said her father; \"let us learn what has happened. Mrs.\nDennison, can you tell me?\"\n\n\"I hardly know myself,\" answered the widow, innocently. \"I heard moans\nand a cry for help coming from this room, and, springing up from my\nsleep, ran to see what it meant. There was no light in the room, but I\nfelt that Mrs. Lee was cold and still as she lies now--alive, but\nmotionless. I had snatched a bottle from my toilet, and was bathing her\nhead with its contents, when Miss Hyde and the servant came in. They\nwere very much terrified, and alarmed the house, I hope unnecessarily.\nIt is a deep fainting fit. I am sure she will come out safely in time.\"\n\nAs the woman said this, Lottie stood looking in her face, dumb with\nastonishment. She saw the red flask in Mrs. Dennison's hand, felt the\nchanged atmosphere of the room, and, for once, her presence of mind gave\nway.\n\n\"Poor thing! she was half frightened to death,\" said Mrs. Dennison,\ncasting a patronizing glance at the crestfallen girl, \"I never saw\nanything so wild in my life.\"\n\n\"And I never saw anything so wicked!\" Lottie burst forth, clinching her\nhands and almost shaking them at the woman.\n\n\"Wicked! Oh, not so bad as that, my good girl,\" said the woman, gently.\n\"One can be frightened, you know, without being wicked.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Lottie, with a sob, \"and a person can be wicked without\nbeing frightened, I know that well enough.\"\n\n\"Lottie!\" exclaimed Mr. Lee.\n\nLottie stood for one instant like a wild animal at bay; but directly her\neyes fell upon her mistress, her form relaxed, and, creeping to the\nbedside, she began to cry.\n\n\"Oh, bring her to! bring her to! and I won't say another word,\" she\npleaded, looking piteously at the widow.\n\n\"I am not omnipotent, poor child!\" was the sweet reply. \"But see! I\nthink there is a movement of her eyelids.\"\n\nLottie rose from her knees and looked eagerly in that worn face. \"Yes,\nyes, she is alive; she is coming to herself. Oh, my mistress! my\nmistress! I will never, never leave you again. I'll sleep on the floor\nat the foot of your bed, like a dog, before anybody reaches you!\"\n\nTears rained down poor Lottie's face, and her voice was so full of grief\nthat no one had the heart to chide her, though it seemed to disturb the\ninvalid, who was slowly recovering consciousness.\n\nMrs. Lee at last opened her eyes, and looked vaguely around at the\npeople near her bed, without seeming to recognize them; when Lottie\ncaught her vacant gaze, she burst forth,--\n\n\"Oh, ma'am, don't you know me? It's Lottie--it's Lottie!\"\n\nThis pathetic cry gained no response. Those dreamy eyes wandered from\nface to face, with a helpless, appealing look indescribably touching.\nJessie bent over her mother, striving to make herself known; but her\nsweet voice passed unheeded. Every kind effort failed to draw her from\nthis dull state of half-consciousness, till Mr. Lee passed his arm under\nher head and drew it to his bosom. Then a thrill seemed to pass through\nher whole frame, a smile dawned on her pale mouth.\n\n\"Have I been ill?\" she murmured, resting her head against the bosom to\nwhich he gently lifted her,--\"very ill, that you all come here in the\nnight?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" answered Mr. Lee, very tenderly; for he seemed to forget\neverything in her danger. \"But for our kind guest, I fear it might have\ngone hard with you.\"\n\nLottie, who was crouching at her mistress' feet, with her face buried in\nthe bed-clothes, uttered a sudden, \"Oh! oh! I can't bear it!\" and,\nstarting up, rushed into her room, looking at Mrs. Dennison over her\nshoulders like a wild cat.\n\n\"Poor Lottie!\" muttered Mrs. Lee. \"How it troubles her to see any one\nsuffer! And you, my kind guest--\"\n\nThe gentle lady held out her hand to Mrs. Dennison, smiling wanly, but\ntoo feeble for any other expression of gratitude.\n\n\"Mamma,\" said Jessie, quickly, \"do not try to speak, but rest. This has\nbeen a terrible attack.\"\n\n\"You here, my child, and I not know it!\" whispered the invalid; \"forgive\nme.\"\n\nMrs. Dennison pressed forward; but Jessie stepped between her and the\ninvalid, not rudely, but with quiet decision which became the daughter\nof that proud man.\n\n\"Aunt Matty,\" she said, glancing past the widow, \"had you not better\nleave her to papa and me? So many faces excite her.\"\n\nJessie was very pale, and I saw that her lips were quivering with\nagitation. Something had wounded her almost beyond bearing.\n\n\"Yes,\" I answered, promptly, \"we will withdraw;\" and, looking at Mrs.\nDennison steadily, I waited for her to move first.\n\n\"This may be of service,\" she said, sweetly, placing the ruby-tinted\nbottle in Jessie's hand. \"I found it very useful in reviving her.\"\n\nJessie took the bottle, but set it down at once. Indeed, her hand shook\nso violently that it must otherwise have fallen.\n\n\"Now, Miss Hyde, I do not see that our presence will be of further use,\"\nsaid the widow, gliding toward the door.\n\nI stepped back to avoid contact even with her garments. My heart was\nfull of bitter loathing. I grew cold as she passed me, and answered her\nsmile with a look that frightened it from her lips. We passed through\nLottie's room, but I could not force myself to enter it till even her\nshadow had disappeared.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XLVI.\n\nLOTTIE OWNS HERSELF BEATEN.\n\n\nWhen the woman was gone, I went in and spoke to Lottie, who had curled\nherself up in the window-seat, with her knees drawn up, and both hands\nlocked over them.\n\n\"Don't speak to me; don't anybody dare to speak to me!\" she said,\nmotioning me off with her head. \"I ain't worth noticing. I'd give\nsomething to any decent person that'd whip me within an inch of my life,\nor bite me--I don't care which--so long as it hurt.\"\n\n\"Lottie,\" I whispered, pressing my hand on her shoulder to enforce what\nI said, \"do not speak a word of this till I have seen you. Come up to my\nroom.\"\n\n\"I won't. Nothing on earth shall take me out of her sight again.\nThere'll be murder if I do.\"\n\n\"Hush! Lottie, I do not understand all this.\"\n\n\"But _I_ do; and I give up, she's out-generalled me. I'll never pretend\nto crow over her again; but it's awful, oh! it's awful!\"\n\nShe shuddered all over, and crouched closer together, winding both arms\ntightly around her knees.\n\n\"Tell me all about it, Lottie. I must know, in order to judge how to\nact.\"\n\nShe moved on the window-seat, that I might sit closer to her; then\ndrawing my head down with her arm, whispered,--\n\n\"I knew that she was doing something, and that Mrs. Lee was suffering by\nit; but what? that was the question. I tried to keep awake at nights,\nbut it was of no use; no log ever slept as I did. Last night, you\nremember, I drank that strong tea. It wasn't because I liked it; but I\nwas determined to keep awake. I wanted you to be on hand as well, and\ngave you a powerful dose; and wasn't you wide awake as a night-hawk when\nI came into your room?\n\n\"Well, I went to bed just as I always do, and lay down with my eyes\nshut, waiting. Babylon had gone to her room; but Cora was floating about\nin the passages a good while; finally she went in, and everything was\nstill. It seemed to me as if I kept growing sharper and wider awake\nevery minute; but I never heard that woman's step till she stood over\nme, and her shadow fell clear across the bed; I bit my lips to keep from\nscreaming, but lay still and waited.\n\n\"She called my name two or three times, whispering louder each time; but\nI drew my breath even and deep, waiting for her. All at once that\nstrange smell that was in the room when you came almost strangled me;\nbut as I bit my lips harder, down came a wet cloth over my face. It\nalmost smothered me, for she pressed it close with her hand till I felt\na strange falling away, as if she had forced me over a rock, and I was\nmyself sinking. One minute more, and I should have been nowhere; but\nsome noise in the entry took her away.\n\n\"I snatched the cloth from my face and crept softly out of bed. The\nwhirl and weight made me so dizzy, I could not walk, but crept on my\nhands and knees through the door which she had left open. Here the fresh\nair blew over me, and I felt steady enough to run to your room.\n\n\"You know how we found her, and how she put us down. I thought we had\nher, safe and sure; but here we are worse off than ever. I believe she\nwould kill that blessed angel before his face, and no one would believe\nit.\"\n\nI sat in silence, wondering what course it was best for me to pursue.\nThat this woman was undermining Mrs. Lee's feeble life, by repeated\napplications of chloroform, I could not doubt; but how convince the\nfamily of this? It was an act so hideous in itself, that the very\ncharge, if unbelieved, would be considered a crime. I was sure that,\nwith the help of her maid, she had changed the bottle which contained\nthe chloroform while struggling with me at the door; but how was I to\nprove this? Lottie--alas! this woman had so fascinated those who held\npower in the family, that her story would be of no avail without some\nindisputable proof to sustain it.\n\nJessie would believe us, I was sure; but the belief, without power to\nremedy a state of things so terrible that it made my heart sink, would\nonly produce pain. What could I do? Helplessly I asked the question. Yet\na terrible necessity required all my energies.\n\nThe dejection of poor Lottie had a numbing effect upon me. She, usually\nso full of resources, so ardent in her courage, sat on the window-seat,\ncrestfallen and beaten like myself. One thing was certain, Lottie would\nkeep strict guard now. Whatever the woman's motives were, the events of\nthat night would never be repeated, so long as that faithful creature\nkept her place in the household. But how long would she keep that place?\nHow long should I be left under the same roof with her?\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XLVII.\n\nMR. LEE SENDS IN THE ACCOUNT OF HIS GUARDIANSHIP.\n\n\nThe pain of my apprehensions hunted me out of all society. I crept away\ninto the woods, the next day, wondering what I should do, how it was my\nduty to act. I could not bear to see any of the family. No charge had\nbeen made, no suspicion cast on Mrs. Dennison; but it seemed to me that\nevery member of the household must read my thoughts and condemn me for\nthem. I felt broken down and driven forth by this woman.\n\nI did not remember or care for the hours of breakfast or dinner;\nexcitement had driven all thoughts of food from my mind. This increased\nmy languor and made me more helpless still. Why had this beautiful woman\ncome to torment me? What had I done to be thus virtually driven into the\nfields like a wild animal? I wandered off to the ridge, and sat down on\nthe rock where I had once conversed with Mrs. Dennison. I do not know\nwhat time of the day it was; for the sun was obscured and the heavens\nwere fleecy with black clouds. My head ached sadly; but that was nothing\nto the pain at my heart.\n\nA storm came up while I sat there; but I was quite unconscious of it\ntill my clothes were wet through, and I felt all my limbs shivering with\nthe cold. I did not think of the consequences; it seemed so natural that\nI should be beaten down, that I cowered under the fierce rain like a\npoor flower that grew by me on the rock. The sunshine might revive\nthat--would it ever come to me?\n\nI remember feeling a mournful companionship with this solitary blossom,\nand sheltering it with a corner of my wet shawl. It was some distraction\nto the thoughts that harassed me to fancy the pretty thing as wretched\nas myself. Still I sat upon the rock, and still the rain beat down upon\nme. At last I heard Lottie's voice through the drifting storm, calling\nfor me anxiously.\n\nI arose and stood up, trembling from head to foot--the wet had chilled\nthe very heart in my bosom.\n\n\"Why, what is this? Where have you been? What's the matter? Ain't you a\nfool, good and strong? Mercy! how you look--how your teeth do chatter!\nNow, speak out and let's know if you really are alive!\" cried the\nkind-hearted creature, attempting to shake the wet from my shawl, but,\nfinding that hopeless, wringing it between both hands, like a\nwasherwoman.\n\n\"I've been with her all day; haven't left her one minute alone--not even\nwith him. When he came, I planted myself by the bed, and there I stood\nlike a monument. She kept asking for you.\"\n\n\"For me?\" I faltered, smitten with compunction. \"I did not think of\nthat.\"\n\n\"You've given up thinking of anything, I'm afraid,\" said Lottie,\nshivering. \"It wasn't just the thing to run off and leave me to bear the\nbrunt of all their looks and questions! Not that I answered them--oh,\nno! but I wanted to get off and have a good cry as well as you.\"\n\n\"I am very sorry, Lottie.\"\n\n\"But that was nothing till she asked for you over and over again; then\nI'd 'a' given anything to have jumped up and after you. Besides, Miss\nJessie was hunting up and down, wondering where you were, and Mr. Lee\nlooked like a thunder-cloud.\"\n\n\"Mr. Lee?\"\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Lee! But there you stand with your teeth going\nchatter--chatter--chatter--like a squirrel cracking hickory-nuts. Do\ncome into the house!\"\n\nI followed her, meekly enough; she scolding and reviling, and petting me\nall the way as if I had been a lap-dog out of favor.\n\nWhen we reached the house, it was late in the afternoon. I had eaten\nnothing that day, and still loathing the idea of food, felt its want in\nall my frame.\n\n\"Go up to your chamber, quick,\" said Lottie, hurrying me through the\nhall. \"Babylon is in the drawing-room, and I wouldn't have her see you\nlooking so like a drowned hen for nothing. Wouldn't it tickle her!\"\n\nThis speech aroused me a little, and I struggled up the stairs and\nentered my room. Lottie followed me to the door, said something very\nperemptory about changing my clothes, and went away.\n\nWhat possessed me, I do not know; I remember flinging off my wet shawl\nand shuddering, with a sense of extreme coldness, as it fell with a\nsplash on the carpet; I remember, also, feeling how necessary it was\nthat I should exchange my clothes for dry ones. But as I went toward the\ntoilet, a letter lying upon it drew my attention from everything else. I\nhad not the courage to touch it--a reptile coiled there could not have\ndisturbed me more. So I stood looking at it in the dreary wetness of my\ngarments, knowing what it meant, and dreading it. I took the letter up\nat last. It was thick and heavy; my heart sunk beneath its weight, my\nlimbs trembled so violently, that I was obliged to sit down on the bed.\n\nI broke the envelope. A thick paper covered with figures fell into my\nlap, a leaf of note-paper on which there was writing, fluttered after\nit.\n\nI knew what it was. For the first time in my life Mr. Lee had sent me an\naccount of his guardianship. Those figures, dancing in such fantastic\nrows before my eyes, contained an exact statement of my property, its\ngrowth, and aggregate amount. I knew this without the power to read or\nmake an estimate. I knew also what it all meant. I had long been of age;\nmy guardian, in that tedious combination of figures, was giving up his\ntrust. That woman had prevailed; I was no longer welcome under Mr. Lee's\nroof. The paper fell from my hands. I took up the note, but only read\nthe first few lines. They were very kind, but confirmed my fears. I\ncould not read the note through--the whole room swam around me--a faint\nsickness crept to my vitals--nothing but darkness; into this I sank\nhelplessly, and lay in its sombre depths for weeks.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XLVIII.\n\nCOMING OUT OF A DANGEROUS ILLNESS.\n\n\nI asked if it was late--if I had overslept myself. It was Lottie to whom\nI spoke. She bent her face to mine; she looked into my eyes with a\nfervor of gladness in hers that made my nerves shrink. She caught up\nboth my hands and kissed them; then burst into tears, and ran into the\nhall, crying out,--\n\n\"Miss Jessie, oh, Miss Jessie!\"\n\nMy darling came, looking pale and harassed; but for the moment her face\nlighted up, and she approached me eager and breathless.\n\n\"You are better, dear Aunt Matty? Say that you know me.\"\n\n\"Know you, my darling?\"\n\nI tried to say this, and felt very helpless when my voice died away in a\nstrange whisper; but a glow was on my face, and I know that my lips\nsmiled, though they could not speak.\n\n\"You know me!\" she cried, joyously.--\"Oh! Lottie, it is true, she knows\nus--she will get well!\"\n\nHad I been ill? Was that the reason I felt so like a little child?\n\nJessie read this question in my eyes and answered it, kissing my\nforehead with her cool lips.\n\n\"Oh, yes, Aunt Matty, _so_ ill! Out of your head, poor soul!\"\n\nOut of my head! The thought troubled me. Why? Had I anything to conceal?\nTo question one's soul requires strength, for it is a stern task. I was\nvery weak, and so put the subject aside. The very sight of Jessie's face\nhad wearied me.\n\nShe sat down on the bed, and then I saw how sad and thoughtful she had\nbecome. Her very lips were pale, and her eyes were shaded by their inky\nlashes, which threw her whole face into mourning. Had she suffered so\nmuch because I was ill, or were other sorrows distressing her?\n\nShe held my hand in hers, clasping it tenderly. I strove to return the\ncaress; but my poor fingers only fluttered in hers like the wings of a\nbirdling when it first sees food. She knew that I wanted to return her\nlove, and smiled upon me; but oh! how sad her smile was! Then I fell off\ninto a quiet sleep.\n\nThe next day I could ask questions. How long was it? Four weeks--four\nweeks, in which they had been so anxious! The doctors had given me up,\nbut she and Lottie had always hoped. It seemed as if I could not be\ntaken from her just when she wanted me so much.\n\n\"And her mother, was all well?\"\n\nMrs. Lee was better, stronger, and more cheerful than she had been for\nweeks before I was taken ill. Indeed, she had once crept to my chamber,\nand cried over me like a child.\n\n\"Mrs. Lee better, and more cheerful? Then why was Jessie so sad?\"\n\nThe dear girl turned away her face and made no answer. Her silence cut\nme to the heart.\n\nThen I remembered the letter; that sheet of paper, with its red lines,\nand crowded with figures, came before me with a pang, as if some one had\nstruck me on the heart. The grief that convulsed my face frightened\nJessie; she understood it and strove to reassure me.\n\n\"It is all well,\" she said; \"never think of it again.\"\n\nShe might as well have asked a wounded man to forget the bullet rankling\nin his flesh. How much that package had hurt me, no human being could\never tell!\n\n\"Father has been very anxious about you,\" she said; \"I never saw him\nsuffer so much.\"\n\n\"What have you done with it?\" I inquired.\n\nShe knew what I meant, and answered, gently,--\n\n\"I gave them back to my father--all except the letter, which I burned.\"\n\n\"Thank you, dear child.\"\n\nThere was silence awhile. I wanted to ask a question, but it made me\nfaint. I think she would have answered that without waiting for words,\nonly that the subject was a pain to her, as it was agony to me.\n\n\"Is _she_ here yet?\"\n\nI knew that a whiteness was creeping over my lips as I uttered the\nwords, and I felt a thrill of disgust pass over Jessie.\n\n\"She is here.\"\n\nThe bitter distress in her voice told me all that was in her heart. But\nit was a subject we could not speak upon.\n\n\"I have done everything in my power to send her away; but she will\nunderstand no hint, and I have no right to take decisive steps while my\nparents both like her so much.\"\n\n\"Both?\" I questioned.\n\n\"Yes; I think so. Mother seemed pleased to have her in the room.\"\n\n\"And is she much there?\" I questioned, faintly.\n\n\"Yes, very often, and for hours together.\"\n\n\"Alone?\" I inquired, starting from my pillow and falling back from\nweakness.\n\n\"Seldom--never, I think. Father is generally with them, and Lottie--what\na dear, faithful creature she is!--will never leave the room. If they\ndrive her out, she is sure to retreat into her own little den and will\nleave the door ajar.\"\n\n\"Faithful, good Lottie!\" I murmured.\n\nJessie kissed me and said, with mournful lovingness, that I must not\ntalk, for I was all the friend she had to stand by her. She hesitated a\nmoment and added, \"Except, of course, my parents.\"\n\nObedient to her gentle command, I closed my eyes; but the anxieties that\nhad taken flight in temporary insanity crowded back upon me, and my poor\nbrain labored fearfully under them.\n\nWas I right--knowing what I knew, and thinking what I thought--to keep\nanything back from Jessie? I had been so in the habit of mingling Mrs.\nDennison's acts with those of Mr. Lee, that it seemed impossible to\nseparate them, or speak of her without condemning him, at least by\nimplication. I could not do this with his own child; for it was very\ndoubtful if Jessie's entire and now very evident dislike of the woman\nhad not sprung exclusively from the course she had taken with Lawrence.\nBy word or look she had never given a sign of any other thought.\n\nAfter pondering over these things in my mind, I remembered that, after\nall, Mr. Lee was not connected with anything I knew, except in my own\nsuspicions; and even then I was not base enough to impute a wrong\nmotive, much less a wrong act to him. Why should I fear, then, to speak\nopenly to Jessie? While chained to that pillow--as I must be for days to\ncome--who could guard Mrs. Lee as well as her own daughter?\n\nWhile these reflections passed through my brain, Jessie had been sitting\nmotionless on the bed, afraid to move lest she might disturb the sleep\ninto which she fancied me to have fallen. When I opened my eyes, she\nsmiled down upon me.\n\n\"You have been a little troubled with dreams, I fear,\" she said,\nsmoothing the hair back from my temples.\n\n\"No, Jessie; I have not been asleep, but thinking. Lie down here on my\npillow; I want to tell you something.\"\n\nShe laid her beautiful face close to mine. In a weak voice, and at\nintervals, I told her everything, but never once mentioning her father,\neven remotely. Indeed, there was no occasion; for I am certain he knew\nas little as the innocent girl at my side of that wicked night-work, in\nwhich our invalid had sunk so rapidly.\n\nI never saw horror and dismay exhibit itself so forcibly on any\ncountenance as it appeared on that lovely face. It touched mine like\nmarble.\n\n\"What can we do?--what must we do?\" she said. \"Why did you not tell papa\nat once?\"\n\n\"I had no proof--he would not have believed me.\"\n\n\"But your word--who ever doubted that?\"\n\n\"Her word would have prevailed against mine. Oh! Jessie, Jessie, she is\na terrible woman!\"\n\n\"And my mother--my poor, suffering mother! What can her object be? No\ndove was ever more blameless than poor, dear mamma!\" she said, with\ntender pathos. \"Was she not content with what she had done against me?\nBut I will go at once to papa and tell him everything about her.\"\n\n\"No,\" I said, trying to hold her with my feeble hand; \"he will not\nbelieve you.\"\n\n\"Not believe me, Aunt Matty?\"\n\n\"I fear not--Jessie, don't look so wounded! But he would demand your\nauthority, and you would, of course, give me.\"\n\n\"Not without your permission.\"\n\n\"You would have it; but all might end in her triumph over us both. You\nremember the letter which came to me, that account of his stewardship?\nAsk yourself if it was the work of Mr. Lee's own heart.\"\n\n\"No, no, I am sure it was not!\"\n\n\"Yet it came on the very next day.\"\n\n\"And broke your heart, dear Aunt Matty. I could not understand it. The\nfirst lines about money fastened themselves upon me I don't know how. I\ndid not think, in my fright, when Lottie told me that you were ill,\nabout its being a private letter; still I only read that and carried\nthe paper back. What was in the letter I did not know; but I burned it\nto pacify you.\"\n\n\"The rest was only a kind dismissal from the house, Jessie!\"\n\n\"A dismissal from the house! You--you?\"\n\n\"Yes. I am only here now on sufferance,\" I answered, with feeble\nbitterness, which ended in a flood of more feeble tears.\n\nJessie was terribly distressed; but she made gentle efforts at soothing\nme, and at last I sobbed myself into quietness like a child, with my\nhead resting on her shoulder.\n\n\"But you shall never go--never while I live,\" she said, with her old\nqueenliness of manner. \"I may stand by and see this woman robbing me of\nthe love that was mine, when pride forbids me to cry out; but you, my\noldest, my best friend! She must not attempt that.\"\n\nHer eyes sparkled, her beautiful face took a positive expression. How I\nloved her!\n\n\"But about my poor mother,\" she said; \"what can we do?\"\n\n\"Wait and watch,\" I answered.\n\nShe was very thoughtful, and the look of distress upon her face made my\nheart ache.\n\n\"Lottie is honest,\" she said. \"Now I understand why she would never\nleave the room even to nurse you. Good girl! she has been more faithful\nto my mother than her own child; but who could have known this?\"\n\n\"Be dutiful!\" I whispered, for this conversation had taken away my last\nremnant of strength.\n\n\"I will,--and watchful. Others may doubt this,--I believe it.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XLIX.\n\nLOTTIE SEEMS TREACHEROUS.\n\n\nLottie came into the room while we were talking, and, after closing the\ndoor, Jessie began to question her about the events of that night. To my\nastonishment, Lottie looked blankly in her face, and protested that she\ncould not understand what we were thinking of. Mrs. Lee had fainted, and\nMiss Hyde had been called, of course, and that raised a fuss, as such\nthings generally did. This was all she knew about it.\n\nJessie looked at her steadily a moment and turned away.\n\nI was astonished and grieved. What could the girl mean?\n\nAfter Jessie went out, the creature came up to my bed, and, doubling up\nher fist, shook it in my face, thus mocking my indignant weakness.\n\n\"You're a pretty Miss Hyde to trust a secret with, you are! What\npossessed you to tell that? How many cooks do you mean to have in one\nmess of soup? She can't keep it more than you could; and the next thing\nwill be, you and I'll be swept out of this house like a nest of wasps.\nNot that I'd go, but there'd be a tussel, such as never was seen here\nbefore. Of course, you'd give in, and curl up like a caterpillar on a\ndry leaf; but I'll never do it while she lives and wants me. But all\nthat don't mean that I'm going to fly in the face of Providence, and\ngive Babylon a chance to turn me out, for it mightn't be convenient for\nme to get sick--not that I think your sickness isn't the genuine\narticle, mind; I know it is, more shame to 'em, but I'm bound to be on\nhand with a sharp eye and close tongue. Trust Miss Jessie, indeed! Well,\ncrazy folks will be crazy folks, any way you can fix it.\"\n\nI was so weary that all this scarcely made an impression on my poor\nbrain. But I had a vague feeling that the girl was right, and that I had\nacted very rashly. Indeed, I was not sure that Lottie's stout denial of\nthat woman's work might not shake even Jessie's confidence in me. The\ndistress and excitement of these thoughts shook my poor, quivering\nnerves, till I fell back into the old delirium, and after that no\ntalking was allowed in my room for a long time.\n\nNo wonder Mr. Lee started as if he had seen a ghost, when I crept by him\nin the passage leading to his wife's chamber, the first time that I was\npermitted to move from my room. The color mounted to his face. He\npaused, turned back and gave me his hand, striving to smile.\n\nI could not touch his hand, or even attempt to smile. He had wounded me\ntoo deeply for that.\n\n\"My dear Miss Hyde,\" he said, dropping the hand which I had no strength\nto touch, \"no one can be more rejoiced than I am at your recovery. Pray\nforget everything that might make you think otherwise; it was all a\nmisunderstanding.\"\n\nI did not speak, but tears swelled into my eyes, and I turned away\nwounded a second time by his confused explanation.\n\nMrs. Lee was so overjoyed to have me with her again. She looked much\nbetter, and seemed more cheerful than I had seen her since Mrs.\nDennison's advent in the family.\n\nMrs. Dennison came into the chamber while I was there. She recognized me\nwith careless politeness, called my attention to the improvement in Mrs.\nLee, and, in a thousand adroit ways, triumphed in showing me how\ncompletely I was crowded out from my place in the household--even in\nthat sick-chamber, where my chief usefulness lay.\n\nI was feeble and unduly sensitive, or this conduct would not have\nwounded me so keenly as it did. Spite of myself, the pain of this\ninterview would make itself visible; so I arose and went into Lottie's\nroom, for my strength availed no farther than that.\n\nThe young girl sat quietly in her little domicile close by the door,\nsewing upon some second-hand finery, but with every stitch she cast a\nvigilant glance into Mrs. Lee's chamber, as if such watchfulness had\nbecome a habit, of which she was herself unconscious.\n\nLottie was always exceedingly repugnant to permitting any one into her\nroom; but when she saw me come toward her, looking so miserably feeble,\nthe frown left her face, and, starting up, she arranged the pillows on\nher little white bed, and, sweeping back the curtains, motioned me to\nlie down. I fell helplessly on the pretty couch, and she drew the\ncurtains around it, clouding me in lace.\n\n\"Do you feel like sleeping?\" she whispered.\n\n\"No, Lottie, my heart aches too much for that.\"\n\n\"Then lie still, and keep watch while I go out. It is ten days since I\nhave breathed the fresh air. Can I trust you?\"\n\n\"Yes, Lottie.\"\n\nThe creature bent down and kissed me with great feeling; she too was\naffected by the general depression. All her wild animal spirits seemed\nhushed for the time.\n\n\"I didn't mean to be hard with you the other day,\" she whispered, \"so\ndon't mind it. Nobody thinks more of you than this child, you may\nbelieve that.\"\n\nShe glided out of the room, leaving the door open. Mrs. Dennison turned\nher head quickly as she went out, but did not seem to observe that the\nbed was occupied.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER L.\n\nCONFIDENTIAL CONVERSATION BETWEEN THE WIDOW AND MRS. LEE.\n\n\nI was greatly exhausted. The walk from my room to the tower, and that\nbrief interview with Mrs. Lee, had proved more than I could bear. So I\nlay helplessly on the bed, watching the scene in the inner room like one\nin a dream. How softly that woman moved about the chamber--how low and\nsweet were the tones of her voice! No wonder the invalid grew calm and\ncheerful under such ministration; it soothed even me.\n\nOur invalid had left her sofa, and sat in the easy-chair. The widow\narranged her footstool, and settled down upon it, covering those small\nfeet with a cloud of muslin, while her beautiful face was uplifted, and\nher neck curved back with the fascinating grace of a serpent. Mrs. Lee's\ndark eyes were bent upon her, so full of affection that the look made my\nheart ache. In the stillness, I could hear every word that passed\nbetween them. I was too much exhausted for thought; but even in another\nstate my position would have been the same, knowing what I knew, and\nsuspecting what I did, no refinement of honor would have driven me from\nmy post.\n\n\"Then I am beginning to be a little comfort to you, dear lady,\" said the\nhaughty woman, looking sweetly in that gentle face, with her eyes full\nof solicitude, as if the great hope of her life lay in the idea of being\nuseful.\n\n\"Oh, a great comfort. If Jessie now were--\"\n\nThe sensitive heart checked her speech, and she broke off with a sigh.\n\nMrs. Dennison drooped her eyes in delicate sympathy, and, taking a fold\nof the muslin dress, which fell like billows of snow over the carpet,\nbegan to plait it thoughtfully between her fingers.\n\n\"You must not think that Jessie neglects you,\" she said. \"The\nconfinements of a sick-room are so irksome to youth. I am sure she loves\nyou.\"\n\n\"But she used to spend half her time with me. In the morning, she would\nbring her work or her drawing, and we had such pleasant hours in my\nchamber.\"\n\n\"Yes, but it was before she came into society; that is sure to distract\nthe attention. Still, the dear girl must be unaware of the higher and\npurer happiness she sacrifices.\"\n\nMrs. Lee's face clouded, and she said, with a sad smile,--\n\n\"Well, you have not permitted me to feel this. By-and-by Jessie will get\nsome of your thoughtfulness.\"\n\n\"You must not think of this, my dear friend,\" said the widow,\ncaressingly. \"Only remember how well you are getting. I say nothing of\nmy own poor efforts; but surely Mr. Lee makes up for all deficiencies in\nour sweet Jessie.\"\n\nMrs. Lee's face brightened beautifully. \"Oh, yes,\" she said, \"he is with\nme so much now; you charm him this way, I think.\"\n\n\"Me? Oh! nothing like it. This change in yourself, dear friend,\nconstitutes the charm. You were dropping into such dreary ways, and\nlooked so ill in that eternal white dress; but now that you have\nconsented to brighten it up with ribbons, and pretty French caps, the\nchange is marvellous.\"\n\n\"You think so,\" was the sweet reply. \"I dare say it is true; but Jessie\nalways liked my dress, and she has fine taste.\"\n\n\"But he likes something fresher and more worldly; and one dresses for a\nhusband.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes; and these things do give something bright to the toilet,\nthough Lottie scouts them.\"\n\n\"Well, never mind, so long as _he_ is pleased. We need not trouble\nourselves about the opinion of a wild, crazy girl like her, or of that\nprudish thing, Miss Hyde.\"\n\nMrs. Lee drew her hand from the widow's caressing clasp, and sat upright\nin her chair.\n\n\"Oh! don't say a word against Miss Hyde,\" she protested, with unusual\nresolution. \"She is the dearest, best creature.\"\n\n\"I know, I know,\" persisted the widow, drawing a quick breath. \"She is\neverything that is good, if she only had the power to make her\namiability a little more interesting, and, I may add, useful; but when\nany person comes into a family to attach herself particularly to one\nmember of it, there is a possibility of her gaining too much influence.\nI know Miss Hyde is very deserving, but has it never struck you that\nyour daughter's heart lies a little too exclusively with her friend?\"\n\n\"No; I had not thought of that,\" answered Mrs. Lee.\n\n\"It was not my business, and, I dare say, there is impertinence in the\nobservation, but when Miss Hyde was sick, your daughter scarcely left\nher room. I never witnessed such devoted attention.\"\n\nThe widow sat playing with the knots of lilac ribbon that fastened Mrs.\nLee's dress, as she made the observation. I saw the poor lady's face\ncloud, and her lips began to quiver. She was evidently drawing the\ncontrast between Jessie's devotion to me, and the almost total desertion\nof her own room. Dear lady! she had no means of knowing that the eternal\npresence of that woman in her chamber had drawn the most devoted\ndaughter that ever lived from her bedside.\n\nMrs. Dennison went on with her crafty work, still playing with the knots\nof ribbon, and pausing now and then to blow them about, till they\nfluttered like butterflies under her concentrated breath.\n\n\"If we only had sweet Jessie entirely to ourselves now to join our\npleasant morning readings, wouldn't it be charming? But that is\nhopeless, so long as she gives herself entirely to one person, you\nknow.\"\n\nMrs. Lee lifted her slender hand, passing it with troubled haste\nrepeatedly across her forehead.\n\n\"But Miss Hyde has been such a true friend, so faithful, so every way\nworthy and agreeable, it seems as if Jessie could not love her too much.\nThen she is such a favorite with Mr. Lee.\"\n\n\"Is she?\" was the dry question which followed these remarks.\n\n\"Oh, yes! Besides, I never can forget her kindness to myself when Mr.\nLee was absent. You know that my husband has a great many duties, and it\nis only of late that it has been in his power to stay with me so much.\"\n\n\"But his heart--his heart is always with you, dear friend; I noticed\nthat from the first day of my entrance to your house. In conversation,\nyour name is always on his lips, and it is easy to see that you are\nnever for a moment out of his thoughts.\"\n\nMrs. Lee leaned back in her chair, and her fine eyes filled with the\nbrightest drops that ever sprung from a loving heart.\n\n\"I ought to be more grateful,\" she murmured, sweetly; \"the blessed Lord\nhas been so good to me. Oh! if all this should lead me to think less of\nHim, and more--sinfully more of my--my family.\"\n\n\"But this will never be; your nature is too well regulated.\"\n\n\"Ah! but Mrs. Dennison, you cannot imagine--you can form no idea how I\nhave worshipped--how I do worship my husband. From the first hour I saw\nhim to this, when we have sunk into mid-life together, it has been one\nstruggle to keep him from overshadowing the love of God in this heart.\"\n\nA heavenly expression came over that pale face, as the noble woman spoke\nwords that the reticence of her nature had kept back even from me, her\ntried friend up to that hour; and now they were poured forth to the\ngreedy ear of that woman like an overflow of wine upon the sandvile\nsand, which a thousand repulsive things had trodden over.\n\nI could scarcely keep from crying out under the pressure of disgust that\nseized upon me when the creature lifted her eyes to the heaven of that\nface. In my whole life I had never seen an expression like that--so\nquick, so unutterably vicious. That instant some evil idea was born in\nthe woman's brain; I saw it clearly, as if the map of her bad heart had\nbeen laid out before me. This idea, gendered from the loving goodness of\nMrs. Lee's speech, broke into her eyes as the serpent bursts the\nmother-egg when hot sunshine is upon it.\n\nThis expression revelled in her eyes a moment, and then crept away as if\na reptile had left her eyes and coiled itself in the depths of her soul.\nI could detect a tone of exultation in her voice when she spoke again;\nbut it was low still, and vibrated with strange fascination on the ear.\n\n\"And you love him so much?\"\n\n\"I thought in my youth that it was impossible to love him better--that\nit was wrong to love any human being so much. Night and morning I prayed\nGod to keep me clear of man-worship; but how can one pray against love\nto a God who is love itself? When I saw how completely my whole being\ngave itself to my husband, how impossible it was to weaken one throb of\nthe joy which filled me at his approach, I gave up the struggle, and\nsoon rendered double gratitude to the Divine Being for giving him to me.\nIt was all I could do.\"\n\n\"And did he love you so much?\"\n\nWith what insidious craft the question was put! How quietly the new-born\nserpent coiled itself in her eyes as the lashes drooped over them!\n\n\"So much? That is impossible! No man--no woman ever gave so great\nworship to a fellow-being! He was not even aware of it, I think; for\nthis love was a treasure that I kept closely locked. It must have been\ntender questioning, indeed, that could have drawn such feelings into\nexpression.\"\n\n\"But still he loved you?\"\n\n\"Loved me? Oh, yes; I never doubted it, even then; but after I became so\nhelpless, so dependent on him for my very life--for if he had failed me\nI must have died--the beautiful affection of his nature manifested\nitself. He became my support, my very being. Oh! God has been\nexceedingly good to me!\"\n\n\"And in all this devotion, this excess of love--for so I must think\nit--has no distrust ever arisen between you?\"\n\n\"Distrust? Who could distrust him?\"\n\nMrs. Dennison did not seem to hear--she was musing, with her eyes on the\nfloor. At last she murmured, vaguely,\n\n\"But jealousy is the natural growth of inordinate affection. I wonder it\nnever sprung up between you. What if he had loved another person?\"\n\n\"Loved another person, and I know it? That would have been death!\"\n\nAgain the woman's eyes gleamed so brightly that I could see the flash\nthrough her thick lashes. She arose and walked hurriedly up and down the\nroom.\n\nMrs. Lee looked at her wonderingly.\n\n\"You think it wrong--you condemn me, as I have condemned myself a\nthousand times,\" she said, with meek pathos.\n\nThe woman returned to her seat, smiling.\n\n\"No, no. How can one woman condemn another for a fault so angelic? I\nonly envied you the delicacy that could deem it wrong to give one's\nwhole being up to the first element of a woman's nature--entire love.\"\n\nMrs. Lee drew a heavy breath and lay back in her chair, smiling.\n\n\"You have seen him,\" she said, at last. \"How grand, how magnanimous he\nis, never forgetting me, never feeling the solitude of this room\nirksome, but loving it more and more; giving me hours out of each day\ntill, of late, he almost lives in my apartment and never finds it\ntiresome!\"\n\nA strange smile stole over Mrs. Dennison's lips; but she did not look\nup, and it passed unnoticed by its object.\n\nAs the two ladies sat together, Jessie came into the room. Mrs. Dennison\ndid not move, but, on the contrary, leaned nearer to Mrs. Lee. Jessie\npaused by the door and seemed about to retire; but Mrs. Lee spoke to\nher, holding out a hand.\n\nThe daughter saw this and came close to her mother's chair, leaning over\nit; while the widow kept her place, so that every word which passed\nbetween the mother and child was subject to her vigilance. Thus the\nconversation was constrained, and Jessie went away with a sad look,\nwhich went to my heart.\n\nThen Mr. Lee came into the chamber, and all was bright as sunshine\nagain. Mrs. Dennison kept her position, and Mr. Lee bent over his wife's\nchair. It was a beautiful group--I have never seen three more\ndistinguished-looking people in one tableau.\n\nThey fell into conversation, in which Mrs. Lee took her gentle part. I\nlistened, with a strange feeling of pain, to the graceful dialogue, and\nceased to wonder that the invalid had grown more cheerful under the\ninfluence of scenes like this. Perhaps my jealous thoughts invested all\nthey said with unreal attractiveness; for jealousy, like love, creates\nqualities which do not exist, and I acknowledged now that the feeling\nwhich burned at my heart had many a jealous pang in it. How could this\nbe otherwise? For years I had been the closest friend that lady\npossessed; and, within the hour, had I not heard a woman, who should\nhave been a stranger, decrying me to her as if I had been a servant she\nwished to see discharged?\n\nIn this way I excused the bitterness that filled my heart as the cruel\nscene passed before me. It was hard to bear when that woman's sweet\nlaugh came ringing through the chamber after some witty saying which\nbrought a thousand animated expressions into the faces of the two\npersons I prized above all others, but from whom she had separated me.\n\nAll the morning they spent in Mrs. Lee's room. Lottie informed me\nafterward that this had been their habit during my sickness. Why, she\ncould not tell, unless it was that Babylon was hoping to find another\nchance to finish her work.\n\nI could not sleep that night, and for many a long night after that. The\nfever had left me very low and nervous; I could not bear to meet the\nannoyances which were sure to beset me if I went into the family, and\nseldom left my room. I think Mrs. Lee hardly missed me. Indeed, it is\ndoubtful if my absence was a matter of regret to any one; for Jessie\ncame to my room as a sort of shelter from the scenes that I had\nwitnessed, and thus our family became more and more a divided one.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LI.\n\nTHE FATHER AND DAUGHTER.\n\n\nI had soon cause to regret my rashness in having opened my heart to\nJessie. The dear girl was too frank and high-minded for a secret of that\nkind to rest safely with her. She believed all that I suspected, and\nwith this conviction came a perfect loathing of the woman, who was now\nher forced guest. I saw that this subject was preying upon her, and\nrepented keenly having given up the bitter fruit of knowledge before it\nwas an absolute necessity; Lottie was wiser in the rude kindness of her\nattempt to put me down.\n\nI did not grow strong; the harassing trouble at my heart kept me nervous\nand irritable. If a person entered my room suddenly, I would start and\ncry out; if I met any of the family in the grounds, my first impulse was\nto hide away, or pretend to be occupied till they passed. Lottie scolded\nme, not in her old way, but with a sort of tearful authority. The humor\nand drollery of her rare character was changed into quaint sarcasm. The\nserpent creeping through our house had bitten her most severely of all.\nTo Mrs. Lee the girl was more humble and heedful than ever; to us she\nwas abrupt.\n\nThis state of things could not continue without results. With feelings\nsmouldering like the fire which turns wood into charcoal, this general\nirritation would break forth.\n\nJessie was the first to give way. For some time she had scarcely spoken\nto Mrs. Dennison, except in a grave, quiet fashion, which was as far\nfrom rudeness as it was from cordial hospitality. Sometimes this checked\nMrs. Dennison's great flow of spirits, and she would take on a look of\ngentle martyrdom that must have had a peculiar fascination to one who\ndid not understand her.\n\nI do not know how it arose, for I had left the table; but one day Jessie\ncame into the library, to which I had retreated, looking greatly\nexcited; her eyes were full of troubled fire, and there was a stern\npressure of the beautiful lips that I had never seen before. She did not\nspeak, but walking up to the window, stood looking through it steadily,\nas if some beautiful landscape lay beyond, which she was examining\nthrough the gorgeous coloring, and which admitted of nothing beyond its\nown richness.\n\nIt was a gloomy day outside, and her face looked more sorrowfully sombre\nfrom all our surroundings.\n\nI had arisen and was going toward her, when the door opened and Mr. Lee\ncame in. How much the father and child looked alike at the moment! I had\nnever seen either of them so imperial in their anger before.\n\nMr. Lee did not observe me, I think, but he walked across the library\nand laid one hand on Jessie's shoulder as she stood with her back toward\nhim. She drew aside and looked up in her father's face.\n\n\"Jessie,\" he said, \"what is the meaning of this? What have you been\nsaying to wound Mrs. Dennison so terribly?\"\n\nJessie struggled with herself; I could detect it by the blue veins that\nrose along her neck and forehead; but her countenance changed in\nnothing, and she answered his stern question steadily.\n\n\"I have done nothing that should wound Mrs. Dennison, father.\"\n\n\"But I left you at the breakfast-table with our guest tranquil as usual.\nWhen I came back, you were gone, and I found her in tears.\"\n\n\"I cannot answer for the lady's tears, father. She was shedding none\nwhen I came out of the breakfast-room.\"\n\n\"This is an evasion, Jessie. I insist upon knowing what passed between\nyou and our guest after I left the room.\"\n\n\"You have a right to question me, father; but indeed I cannot tell you.\nMrs. Dennison said something about what we should do next winter; and I\nlooked at her a moment, in displeasure perhaps, for she has already\nstayed far beyond the time usual for our guests; and I am not aware that\nany one has extended a second invitation to her. I certainly have not.\"\n\nMr. Lee's face darkened.\n\n\"And is this what you have done?--given her one of your haughty looks,\nand at my table, Jessie Lee?\"\n\n\"Father!\"\n\n\"Do not call me father. Do not speak to me again until you have\napologized to the lady for this rudeness.\"\n\nMr. Lee's voice was stern, almost cruel, as he said this. Jessie grew\npale as death.\n\n\"Father, I cannot apologize for anything I have done; it is impossible\nwhen the lady entered a complaint to you--\"\n\nMr. Lee interrupted her.\n\n\"Mrs. Dennison entered no complaint.\"\n\n\"Oh, father! and you were ready to condemn me without a word. When was\nthis so before?\"\n\n\"When were you rebellious before?\"\n\nJessie's lips began to quiver.\n\n\"When did we have trouble like this? When was it that we became a\ndivided family?\" she said. \"Never till I was unhappy enough to invite\nthis lady here.\"\n\n\"She was your own guest, and you have treated her cruelly,\" said Mr.\nLee, softening a little.\n\n\"No, father, not cruelly; coldly, perhaps, but not cruelly!\"\n\n\"And why coldly?\"\n\n\"Because I do not like Mrs. Dennison.\"\n\n\"And why, pray?\"\n\n\"Because she comes between you and your own child--between you and your\nown wife--because--\"\n\n\"Jessie,\" I said, rising from my seat, and for the first time becoming\nvisible to Mr. Lee,--\"Jessie--\"\n\n\"It is well, Martha, that you are here to check her. Another word, and\nshe would have been no longer a daughter of mine.\"\n\nHe was white as marble. Never in my life had I seen him so agitated.\n\nJessie looked at him sorrowfully. There was something more than anger in\nhis face--a wild, troubled doubt, that made him tremble. Jessie laid her\nhand on his arm, and her lips quivered into a smile.\n\n\"Oh, father! listen to me. Let this lady go; take us back to your heart\nagain; her influence here has been terrible.\"\n\nHe shook off her hand, drew himself up, and spoke with proud\ncalmness,--\n\n\"Jessie, be careful, if you would not forfeit my love--at once be\ncareful.\"\n\nJessie drew back, and leaned on my shoulder, trembling from head to\nfoot. The idea that her father could ever really turn against her had\nentered her heart for the first time. She was so white that her very\nface terrified me.\n\n\"Speak to him,\" she whispered,--\"speak to him.\"\n\nI was about to say something, but Mr. Lee waved his hand, silencing me\nwith a haughty gesture. Jessie stood up, and spoke in a low, sad\nvoice,--\n\n\"Father, if I have done wrong, tell me how to atone for it, and I will\nobey you.\"\n\nMr. Lee turned away, walking the room three or four times before he\nanswered. Then he took Jessie's cold hand, with some degree of returning\nkindness, while she stood, with downcast eyes, waiting for the\nhumiliation his words would convey.\n\n\"Be yourself, my child; conquer your unreasonable prejudice against the\nlady who has been of great service to your mother, and is in every way\nestimable. I do not ask any unnecessary humiliation of my daughter; but\nbe your own gracious self again, Jessie, and she will understand that\nyou are sorry.\"\n\nJessie bent her bowed face a little lower, in token of acquiescence,\nand, bending his grand head, Mr. Lee kissed her. Then, turning to me, he\nsaid, with stern significance,--\n\n\"You will remember, Miss Hyde, these scenes are not to be renewed.\"\n\nWhen he was gone, Jessie threw herself on the floor, and, folding her\narms in the seat of an easy-chair, moaned piteously. She did not\ncry--the pain at her proud heart seemed too hot for tears. I tried to\nconsole her; but she only murmured,--\n\n\"You were right; I am not fit to be trusted with such things. They burn\nme like fire.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LII.\n\nTHE FATAL LETTER.\n\n\nAfter this scene, our house was quiet as the grave--not a laugh sounded\nwithin its walls, not a brilliant word enlightened the stiff monotony.\nJessie kept her promise. Nothing could be sweeter or more gracious than\nher manner toward Mrs. Dennison; but all this was accompanied by no\nwarmth. It was impossible to find fault with anything she did or said,\nyet her submission seemed to annoy our guest more than anything. It\nproved how deep was the gulf which lay between them.\n\nAs for me, nothing could render my position more disagreeable than it\nhad already become. A few days after that scene in the library, I was\nsitting with Mrs. Lee, while Lottie went out for a little recreation.\nMr. Lee, Mrs. Dennison, and Jessie, had gone out on horseback, and, with\nthe enemy away, Lottie thought that I might be trusted with her charge;\nbut while Mrs. Dennison was in the mansion, she never would leave her\npost on any consideration. With all the keen longings of youth for\nchange, this confinement, voluntary though it was, told painfully on the\nyoung girl, and when she did get a few moments of freedom, it was seized\nupon as a bird darts from its cage.\n\nThat morning she was gone some time, having taken a run through the\ngrounds with a favorite dog that always followed her footsteps. I saw\nthem rioting up and down among the flower-beds, with a feeling of\nthankfulness that anything on earth could find enjoyment when my heart\nwas so heavy!\n\nMrs. Lee was unusually silent that day, and, without asking me to read,\namused herself with a book of engravings that Mr. Lee had ordered for\nher from the town. I felt the change. Every day this lady, who had been\nmy dear friend so long, seemed more and more independent of me. Lottie\nshe still clung to, but I had become a useless waif in the household.\n\nWhile thinking over these depressing truths, I watched with a vague\nsensation of regret. All at once I saw her stop, beat the dog back, and\nshade her eyes with one hand. It was only one of our people, who had\nbeen over to the town, and had attracted her observation. I saw the man\nbeckon to her. She darted down the walk, along the sloping lawn, and\nover the wall, holding out her hands for a package which he held out.\nThere was some talk between them as the man gathered up his bridle,\nwhile she examined something in her hands which seemed like a letter.\nThen, nodding her head repeatedly, she ran toward the house.\n\nI cannot tell why it was, but these movements interested me greatly. A\nstrange apprehension took possession of me, and I began to wonder what\nthe letters could be about--if any of them related to me, and if new\ntrouble was coming.\n\nIn the midst of these vague thoughts, Lottie came into the room, with a\nletter in her hands.\n\n\"I left all the rest, papers, books, and trash, on the hall-table,\" she\ncried, joyously; \"but here's a letter for the dear mistress, and I\nbrought it up. Such a nice letter--white and satiny as the leaves of a\nwater-lily! I know there is something sweet and good in it that will\nmake you smile.\"\n\nShe went up to Mrs. Lee, dropped on one knee at her feet--a common thing\nwith the strange girl--and held up the letter between her hands.\n\nMrs. Lee took it, with a pink flush of the cheek. During her long\nillness she had gradually given up writing, and a letter, directly to\nherself, was an event sufficiently rare to create a little excitement.\nLottie's prophecy regarding the letter brought a smile to those usually\npale lips. She broke the seal, took the letter from its envelope, and\nmurmured, pleasantly,--\n\n\"If it is something very pleasant, you shall have a new dress, Lottie.\"\n\nThis promise kept the girl on her knees, reading the face of her\nmistress with keen eagerness. She saw it change as if a flash of fire\npassed from neck to forehead; then a cold, gray tint settled over it so\ngradually, that no one could tell when it came.\n\nLottie sprang to her feet with a sharp cry.\n\nMrs. Lee had fainted--no, not that; no common fainting fit ever took a\nform so painful--a look of unutterable misery had settled on the face,\nimpressive as the agony which has become immortal in the features of\nthat marble father who strives to rescue his children from the writhing\nserpents in the Vatican.\n\nMrs. Lee had fallen sideway in her chair. The movement had been gradual,\nand accompanied the gray changes of her face with such stillness, that\nits meaning did not strike Lottie till she sprang up and uttered that\ncry.\n\nWe lifted the lady from her chair and laid her on the bed. She gave no\nsign of life, but seemed to be growing colder and colder. Lottie\nattempted to draw the letter from her hand, but her fingers clung to it\nwith a tenacity which could not be forced without wounding the hand; so\nwe left the paper in her grasp.\n\nWhat we did I cannot tell. Everything that two frightened creatures\ncould devise we attempted, in order to restore her; but it seemed to me\nan age before any sign of life returned.\n\nAt last a shiver passed over her, and, with her disengaged hand, she\ntore at the muslin over her bosom as if some pain were burning at her\nheart, and then I saw her poor lips redden for the first time--but it\nwas with blood. Piteously she opened her eyes and looked into ours. She\nhad not recovered then, nor did she remember what event had produced\nthis illness.\n\nI could tell when the first dawn of a recollection came upon her, for\nshe rustled the letter in her hand as if to be sure it was there, and a\nreality; then the pain all came back to her features, and the blood came\nin heavier drops up from her broken heart.\n\nThey came back from a long ride while she lay thus. We had sent for the\ndoctor, and sat by her in helpless grief, waiting his arrival. I went\nout to meet Jessie, intending to break the painful intelligence of her\nmother's attack to her with gentleness. She was coming up the steps with\na harassed look. The weight of her skirts seemed to drag at her frail\nstrength. Mrs. Dennison was lower down the steps, looking over her\nshoulder at Mr. Lee, and talking in a gay, excited manner that did not\nseem quite natural. Jessie looked upward, with a weary, sad glance as I\ncame down the walk, and I saw that the company of this woman was\noppressing her dreadfully.\n\nI was so pale in those days that my countenance did not frighten Jessie\nas it might have done in happier times; thus I was obliged to tell her\nin words that something had happened to injure her mother, and that she\nlay in great danger in the tower-room. I shall never forget the wild\nagony of those eyes. She did not speak a word, but passed me like a\nshadow.\n\nMrs. Dennison's strained laugh followed her with a sound of the most\ncruel mockery I ever heard. It was altogether unintentional. The woman\nhad not seen me, nor was she aware that Jessie had disappeared; she was\nonly bantering words with her host in her usual fashion, while he was\npreparing to follow up the steps.\n\nI stood upon the edge of the terrace and watched them as they came up.\nThere was no cheerfulness in the woman. Her cheeks were hot and red, her\neyes full of restless fire. She understood my countenance better than\nJessie had done; for a look of something like affright swept her face,\nand the heavy riding-skirt dropped from her hold, entangling her feet\ntill she stumbled and almost fell.\n\nMr. Lee sprang forward and saved her.\n\n\"What is the matter? What has happened?\" he questioned.\n\nShe laughed nervously.\n\n\"Nothing. It was Miss Hyde standing there like a Nemesis that startled\nme.\"\n\nMr. Lee glanced upward, and said something in an under-tone, at which\nshe said,--\n\n\"How unkind you are to the poor thing.\"\n\nI had hesitated to tell Mr. Lee that his wife was on her death-bed--the\nshock at my own heart was so painful that I pitied him; but now a cruel\nstrength came over me, and I said at once, in a cold, hard way,--\n\n\"Your wife is ill, sir, very ill--I fear dying.\"\n\nHe left that woman standing alone in her cowardly sin, and went swiftly,\nas his daughter had done, toward the tower-room. Mrs. Dennison gave a\nlight scream and followed, demanding of me how it had happened, and who\nhad been near to harm the dear saint.\n\nI gave her no answer. The very sound of her voice made me shudder with\nfresh loathing. She had been pale for a moment, but now all the fire\ncame into her countenance again, and she passed me haughtily, saying,--\n\n\"Stupid as ever--I will inquire for myself.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LIII.\n\nDEATH IN THE TOWER-CHAMBER.\n\n\nThe woman did inquire, and the very sound of her voice made the poor\nvictim on the bed shake till the counterpane moved like snow disturbed\nby the wind. Jessie was holding the pale hand, and, feeling it quiver,\nshe clasped it closer, and said to Mrs. Dennison,--\n\n\"Madam, your voice troubles my mother; please to leave us alone.\"\n\nMr. Lee looked from his daughter to the woman; but it was no time for\nanger--he only lifted one hand to deprecate further noise, and bent over\nhis wife with such solemn tenderness in his eyes as I had never seen\nthere before.\n\n\"My wife, my poor wife!\" he said, sheltering the frail form with his\narm, as if that could keep death away.\n\nShe heard him, and the tension on her delicate nerves relaxed. The\nletter, which had hitherto been clenched in one hand, fell away and\nrustled to the floor. Mrs. Dennison picked it up, folded it\ndeliberately, and held it toward Mr. Lee.\n\n\"This has just fallen from her hand,\" she said; \"it may have some\nreference to this strange attack.\"\n\nAgain that shiver ran through Mrs. Lee's form, and her face contracted\nwith the pain, while fresh drops of crimson gathered on her lips.\n\n\"Madam, your presence tortures her,\" said Jessie; \"these attacks come\nand go with your voice.\"\n\n\"My friend, my dear, sweet friend; will you not give me one look before\nI go?\"\n\nMrs. Dennison bent over the bed as she spoke, and, sure enough, Mrs. Lee\nopened her eyes wide, and turned them on the woman's face. Never shall I\nforget that look! Its wounded expression haunts me yet. Those great,\nmournful eyes dwelt on that face, which grew slowly pallid, for a full\nhalf-minute, and then turned away.\n\nMrs. Dennison was awed; but, feeling our eyes upon her, she took\nstrength, and, with a pathetic \"Farewell!\" on her lips, pressed them to\nthose of Mrs. Lee.\n\nThere was a faint struggle, a gasping cry broke from the bed, and when\nMrs. Dennison lifted her face, a drop of fresh blood crimsoned her lips.\nShe did not know it; but with the red blood burning there, retreated\ninto Lottie's room, where she hovered over the scene as if afraid to\nleave it entirely.\n\nMr. Lee forgot everything in keen anxiety for his wife. When her eyes\nturned sorrowfully upon him, he cried out,--\n\n\"Oh! speak to me, speak to me, my wife! Give some sign that I have not\ncome too late!\"\n\nThe most wonderful expression I ever saw stole over that face; it came\nlike moonlight on dark waters,--a gleam of hope breaking through the\nagonies of death. Her lips moved. He bent down and listened.\n\n\"You have loved me?\"\n\nThere was no noise; but we knew that she was saying this by the movement\nof her lips.\n\nFor an instant, Mr. Lee seemed stunned. The question struck him to the\nsoul; then his noble head was uplifted, and, looking tenderly into those\nwistful eyes, he said, \"I have always loved you, my wife. God is my\nwitness, I have always loved you.\"\n\nThat expression deepened on her face. She lifted her hands feebly, and,\nunderstanding the sign, he raised her to his bosom. The muslin drapery\nof her sleeve got entangled in his dress. I attempted to disengage it\nwhile her face lay on his bosom. In doing this I touched her hand; the\nfrail fingers clasped mine with the tenacious feebleness of an infant's;\nand, laying my palm on Mr. Lee's hand, she pressed them softly together,\nwhispering,--\n\n\"Be good to her.\"\n\nHe shook all over, while my poor hand lay quivering on his. I drew it\naway with hushed breath.\n\nShe was dying on his bosom; her eyes were uplifted to his; her breath\ncame in faint gasps; the two frail hands folded themselves; and, as the\nmists of night settle on a lily, that dear face hardened into the marble\nof death.\n\nI cannot remember all that passed after this, who came into the room, or\nwho went out. I only know that the stillness of death was in the house,\nthe pain of life in our hearts. Sweet sufferer, gentle lady! How white\nand still she lay on the pretty French bed, with its volumes of lace\nbrooding over her like the clouds in which we imagine seraphs to be\nsleeping! There was no noisy grief in the room. Even Mrs. Dennison had\nfled to her own apartment; the suddenness of our calamity shocked even\nher.\n\nLottie knelt by the bed, her face buried in the clothes, dumb and still.\nJessie clung to her father, who was striving to comfort her; but\nstruggle against it as he would, the force of a mighty anguish spoke out\nin his broken words.\n\nThose were mournful days during which she lay in that tower-room. We had\nthe dead to ourselves--that woman never intruded on us. Cora came each\nday informing us that her mistress was ill from grief. _He_ heard the\nmessage, but gave no sign beyond a grave inquiry. The sadness in his\nface deepened every hour; stern thoughts perhaps had stamped the sorrow\ndeeply in his soul. There was something more than natural grief there;\ngleams of remorse broke through all the rest.\n\nThe night before Mrs. Lee was buried, I went into her room; to sleep was\nimpossible, and I longed to be alone with her once more. I am no\nenthusiast, and have little superstition, but it seems to me impossible\nto doubt that the dead are often with us on this side the eternal shore.\nWe feel their presence in our heart of hearts without caring to see it\nwith the sense.\n\nHow young she looked--how good and quiet! Some white flowers lay on the\npillow with rich colors burning in their hearts, that cast a sort of\nillumination over the frozen stillness of her face. The white draperies\ngathered above her, the shaded lights stealing like star-gleams through\nthe room, made the stillness of death holy!\n\nI sat down by the bed, in the great easy-chair which she had occupied\nwhen Lottie came in with the letter. A faint perfume of violets hung\nabout the cushions, and on the seat lay the delicate handkerchief she\nhad been using. It seemed only a moment since I had seen her resting\ntranquilly upon the seat that supported me. Could death be so cruelly\nsudden?\n\nI wept quietly as these thoughts filled my mind, and with them came\nvague conjectures regarding the letter which had apparently produced a\nresult so fatal. Who had written that letter? What could the subject\nhave been? Where was it now? I remembered that Mr. Lee had taken it\nmechanically from Mrs. Dennison's hand and put it in his pocket,\nevidently unconscious of its mysterious importance. Surely the woman\ncould have nothing to fear from that letter; at any rate, she had held\nno part in its fatal delivery. Then who could have possessed the power\nto break the frail life which had been quenched? It was all a painful\nenigma, impossible to solve; but the great, mournful fact lay before\nme,--my friend--the best friend I had ever known on earth--was dead.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LIV.\n\nMRS. LEE'S FUNERAL.\n\n\nAs I sat buried in miserable thoughts, a faint stir in the bed draperies\nmade me start and hold my breath. It was Lottie, who had been all the\ntime crouching close to the floor, guarding the remains of her mistress\nin profound stillness. The light was so dim that I had not been aware of\nher presence till then. Such companionship did not disturb me; indeed,\nwithout the faithful girl that death-chamber would have been desolate\nindeed.\n\n\"Lottie,\" I said, in a whisper,--\"Lottie, is it you?\"\n\nShe was sitting on the floor, with both arms locked around her knees, on\nwhich her forehead rested. The girl looked up, and her heavy eyes met\nmine.\n\n\"Yes, it's me, Miss Hyde; I haven't left her a minute since then,\" she\nsaid, drearily. \"Don't ask me to go away--I couldn't do it.\"\n\n\"Ask you to go away, Lottie? Oh! no, my poor girl! We have watched\ntogether in this room many a time; but never in this sad way.\"\n\n\"I know it,\" she said; \"you were always good to her, and she felt it.\nBut tell me, Miss Hyde, do you think it was the letter I brought that\nlaid her there?\"\n\n\"I cannot tell. Still it must have been, she was so well only a moment\nbefore it touched her hand. Who could have written it?\"\n\n\"I have been thinking and thinking, Miss Hyde. The writing was like Miss\nJessie's; I thought so at the time.\"\n\n\"Miss Jessie's? Are you sure?\"\n\n\"So it seemed to me; but I've got the envelope, look for yourself.\"\n\nI took the crumpled envelope which she took from her bosom and held\ntoward me. It was of creamy-white paper, very thick, and with an inner\nlining of blue, a color that Jessie affected where it could be\ndelicately introduced among her stationery. The writing was like hers,\nbut with a slight appearance of disguise.\n\n\"You see,\" said Lottie, still in a whisper, \"it looks like Miss\nJessie's; but what could she write to _her_ about?\"\n\n\"It is strange,\" I murmured.\n\n\"Terribly strange! I can't make it out. All the time, for two whole\nnights and days, I have thought of it; and the more I think the darker\nit all grows. Oh, if she could only speak; but that will never be\nagain--\"\n\nHer voice broke here, and clasping her knees tighter, she began rocking\nto and fro, uttering faint, dry moans, that went to my heart. Lottie had\nnot shed a tear since her mistress's death.\n\n\"Never again--never again!\" she kept whispering.\n\n\"Don't Lottie,\" I said; \"it breaks my heart to hear you go on in this\nway.\"\n\nShe looked at me earnestly; then dropped her face and said, with\ninfinite pathos,--\n\n\"Oh! that _my_ heart could break!\"\n\nI bent over her.\n\n\"Be comforted, Lottie. If our friend could speak, this is what she would\nsay--\"\n\n\"Don't, don't. Who could be comforted, and she lying there like a\nbeautiful lily broken off at the stem? Look at her, Miss Hyde, and see\nif the smile is there yet.\"\n\n\"Yes, Lottie, there is a heavenly look on her face. See for yourself.\"\n\n\"No, no, I cannot stand it; in the morning I will kiss her hands for the\nlast time. Let her sleep with the angels to-night; I won't come between\nher and them. They will take care of her now she don't want me.\"\n\n\"Oh, Lottie!\"\n\nShe shook her head disconsolately, then it sunk on her knees once more,\nand was not lifted again all night; still I do not think she slept a\nmoment.\n\nJessie came to her mother's room late that night. Lottie did not move; I\narose to go, knowing how sacred were the rights of an only child; but\nshe asked me to stay, saying--oh, how sadly--that her mother's true\nfriend could not be in the way even there.\n\nI told her that Lottie was watching, and had not once left her place by\nthe bed. She went round to where the girl was crouching and kissed that\nportion of the forehead left exposed by the folded arms. Then, for the\nfirst time, I heard low sobs break from the faithful creature, and felt\nglad to know that she was crying.\n\n\"She is happier far than I am,\" said Jessie, with unutterable sadness.\n\"It seems as if I should never shed tears again.\"\n\nShe came back to where I was sitting, and sinking on the footstool that\nalways stood near the chair, her head fell on my lap, her hands clasped\nthemselves under the pale forehead, and thus she lay, heavy and still,\nweary with pain, but sleepless, till the day dawned.\n\nThat morning Mrs. Lee was to be buried.\n\nWith the first gray of dawn, we heard Mr. Lee's step coming up from the\nlibrary below, where he had passed the night. Jessie and I arose, and,\nbending over that calm face, left our solemn kisses on the lips and went\naway, giving her up to the man she had loved so devotedly. Even Lottie\nwas aroused by his approach, and, rising to her feet, went heavily into\nher own little room, which was soon filled with bitter sobs.\n\nWe met Mr. Lee on the stairs. He had not been in bed that night and\nlooked strangely haggard. No words passed among us; but Jessie and her\nfather exchanged a mournful glance that was more eloquent than\nlanguage.\n\nIt rained when we took her away from her home, and a heavy gloom lay\nupon the beautiful landscape she had loved so well. Across the terrace,\nand down the flight of steps bordered with flowers that wept heavy\ndrops, she passed away into the valley--away to her eternal rest. On a\nrise of ground on the verge of the hills, we paused amid a cluster of\nwhite stones where sods lay in a heap, and the torn earth contrasted\nmournfully with the fresh grass.\n\nAs we neared the hill, a burst of sunshine broke the clouds asunder and\nlighted us forward. There were no sobs at the grave; our sorrow was very\nsilent, and solemn as death itself. The very air seemed thrilled with\nawe as the funeral service rose upon it. Some one, Lottie I suppose, had\nlaid a garland of white flowers on the coffin, knotted together with\nsnowy ribbons. As they lowered the coffin the wind took these ribbons,\nand they fluttered up from the grave like the wings of an angel striving\nto rise heavenward; and through the first shovelful of earth rose a\nfaint perfume pressed from the flowers which the gravel had bruised upon\nher coffin.\n\nIt was all over, and we returned to the house. On the steps, Mrs.\nDennison stood to receive us clothed in white, with black ribbons\nknotting up the sleeves and clustering at the bosom of her dress. This\nwas the first time I had seen her since that fatal day.\n\nNothing could have been more decorous than her demeanor; her beautiful\neyes seemed heavy with unshed tears, and Christianity itself is not more\ngentle than her tone and manner.\n\n\"Come,\" she said, addressing our Jessie, \"let us mourn together as\nfriends who have lost one who is dearest to us. If I have ever pained\nyou, dear Jessie, forgive me for her sake.\"\n\nMr. Lee heard this, and looked wistfully at his daughter. Poor girl! she\nwas too heart-broken for resentment, and held forth her hand. Mr. Lee\nstepped forward and laid his hand on those that the beautiful woman had\njust clasped.\n\n\"Jessie,\" he said, in a voice that thrilled all within its influence,\n\"remember this lady was very dear to your mother.\"\n\nJessie did not answer; I think she could not command words, but she bent\nher head in acquiescence and passed into the house.\n\nIt is a strange thing to say, but I believe that the few weeks that\nfollowed Mrs. Lee's funeral were the most tranquil of any that had\npreceded them since Mrs. Dennison came to our house. The great central\nobject of interest in the household was at rest. All the little cares\nthat had occupied us were over; the very altar of our household had been\ntorn away, and for a long time we found it impossible to find new\nchannels of interest, or settle ourselves down to anything. There was no\nlonger an attempt at amusing our guest, and she did not seem to require\nit; indeed, from all appearances she had become a member of the family.\nWe seldom met now, but kept our own rooms. Jessie became sadder and\nsadder each day; nothing interested her; she absolutely pined to follow\nher mother.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LV.\n\nOLD MRS. BOSWORTH'S VISIT.\n\n\nCompacts made in a state of excitement are seldom lasting. If Jessie's\nheart had softened toward Mrs. Dennison in the extremity of her grief,\nit came back to the old standpoint as that grief took thought. Something\nmore subtile than her own will held her confidence back. But this was no\ntime for excitement of any kind; the depth of grief into which we had\nfallen kept all worldly passions back. So, as I have said, we were more\ntranquil than of old.\n\nPoor, poor Lottie! she went about the house like a wounded bird that had\nseen its nest destroyed. Without asking for leave, she had arranged Mrs.\nLee's room, in the tower-chamber, exactly as it had been during her\nmistress's life, and guarded it from her own pretty den with all the\nvigilance of old time. If any one entered the chamber and touched an\narticle that had been Mrs. Lee's, Lottie would cry out as if struck by a\nsudden pang, and fall into a nervous tremor till the intruder had\ndeparted. She never allowed any one, not even Jessie, to enter the room\nwithout following her like a watch-dog.\n\nNo one was surprised at this. The devotion of that girl to her mistress\nhad been something wonderful. That she should feel great attachment to\nanything belonging to her was beautifully natural. So it happened that\nshe fell into possession of the rooms in the tower, and secluded herself\nthere, taking little interest in anything else.\n\nSome days after things had settled into this state, old Mrs. Bosworth\ncame over in her heavy family carriage. In our sadness, this became an\nevent, and both Jessie and I left our room to meet her, grateful for\nanything that showed real sympathy for our bereavement.\n\nThe sorrows which this good old lady had passed through, placed her in\ndelicate sympathy with us. She met Jessie with such motherly gentleness,\nthat tears came into the young creature's eyes almost for the first time\nsince our loss. The old lady saw this, and, drawing the agitated face to\nhers, kissed it.\n\n\"We have been very sorry for you, Miss Lee. Indeed, ours has been a\nhouse of mourning also; for there are cases where the same grief touches\nmany hearts. I have wept for you, my child--prayed for you.\"\n\n\"I know it--I was sure of it,\" answered Jessie, resting her proud young\nhead on the old lady's shoulder, and weeping those soft, warm tears that\nrelieve the heart so much. \"I have thought of you and of him. Tell me\nthat your grandson is no worse.\"\n\nThe old lady kissed her again, and tenderly smoothed the glossy hair\nupon her temples.\n\n\"He is no worse, dear child--a little better, I think, since we have\nbeen quite alone--the tranquillity has done him good.\"\n\n\"I should like to see him,\" said Jessie. \"Miss Hyde and I have missed\nhim so much in our loneliness.\"\n\nThe old lady cast a grateful glance at me; then, turning to Jessie, she\nsaid,--\n\n\"It would make him strong enough to come, if he knew that his sweet\nfriend desired it.\"\n\nJessie looked at that dear old face earnestly, and smiled through her\ntears.\n\n\"You are very kind.\"\n\nWhile we were sitting together, Mr. Lee came in. He had seen Mrs.\nBosworth's carriage at the door, and, knowing how seldom the old lady\nwent out, sought her to pay his respects.\n\nIt is seldom that two persons so thoroughly bred, and so singularly\nintelligent as Mr. Lee and our visitor, ever meet. Notwithstanding the\nsorrow that oppressed us, the conversation which sprang out of the first\ngreeting brought cheerfulness with it. They did not talk directly of our\nloss, but every subject touched upon had a tinge of sadness in it, which\nbetrayed the buried feelings and sympathy which lay behind.\n\nI had not believed that such power of pleasing could be carried into\nextreme old age, as this old lady manifested.\n\nWhile we were conversing, Mrs. Dennison came in, much to our\nastonishment; for of late she had rather avoided both Jessie and myself.\nMr. Lee presented her to our visitor, who put on her stateliest manner,\nand, after rising, stood as if ready to go; but her clear eyes were\nfixed on Mrs. Dennison's face, and she seemed reading her to the soul.\n\nI think that Mrs. Dennison was, for once, awed by the moral force\nopposed to her; for such it really was. The graceful flippancy of\nmanner, which most people considered so captivating, refused to come\ninto action, and, for the moment, she really was awkward.\n\n\"I did not know that you had guests,\" said the old lady, with a stiff\nbend of the head. \"If I remember, Mr. Lawrence told me that this lady\nwould leave the neighborhood about the time he did.\"\n\nThe color flashed into Mrs. Dennison's face, and she replied, with\nsuppressed anger,--\n\n\"Mr. Lawrence presumed, madam, when he ventured to regulate my movements\nby his own.\"\n\nAgain the old lady gave her a quiet, searching look, and, without\nreplying, moved toward the door.\n\nJessie and I went down to the terrace with Mrs. Bosworth, while Mr. Lee\ntook her to the carriage.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LVI.\n\nLOTTIE'S REVELATIONS.\n\n\nThe conduct of old Mrs. Bosworth made a profound impression in our\nfamily. Nothing could have been more unfortunate for Mrs. Dennison. Mr.\nLee, up to that time, had been so occupied with the genuine grief which\nsprung out of his wife's death, that he had evidently given little\nthought to the real condition of his household; but the grave look of\ndisapproval which met Mrs. Dennison's entrance, when the dear old lady\nmade her visit, was too decided for him or any one else to ignore.\nJessie's ill-timed remarks had affected him but little, for, alas! he\nwas prejudiced there; but the evident condemnation of this fine old lady\nhad its effect.\n\nMr. Lee began to understand that a guest in our house just then, not\nsanctioned by ties of blood, or even of old friendship, must have a\nstrange appearance in the neighborhood. His own fine sense of propriety\nwas disturbed, and this gave his intercourse with the lady, all the rest\nof that day, an air of constraint which she was not slow to comprehend.\nShe grew more quiet and thoughtful, all her fine spirits vanished, and,\nmore than once, I caught her lifting her beautiful eyes to Mr. Lee's\nwith a sad, misty look of appeal, that would have touched the heart of a\nsavage. It almost reached mine.\n\nThis lasted all that day and evening. There was little conversation; but\nthe eloquence of that woman's face was above all language.\n\nAt night I went into Jessie's room, as usual; not to talk; everything\nhad become too painful for those little confidential chats that make a\nhome so pleasant; but Jessie was always sad now, and the news about\nyoung Bosworth had affected her greatly, in what way it was difficult to\ndetermine; so I went to her room, knowing that the presence of an old\nfriend would be some comfort to her.\n\nAs we sat together talking on vague household affairs, Lottie knocked at\nthe door and came in.\n\n\"I don't want you to be taken by surprise or anything,\" she said,\nbluntly, \"but Mr. Lawrence will be here to-morrow; and, before\ntwenty-four hours, he will beg Miss Jessie's pardon for slighting her,\non his bended knees, and ask her to marry him right out.\"\n\nJessie started up, pale as death, her eyes flashed and her lips\nquivered.\n\n\"Lottie!\"\n\nThe voice was low, but it made the girl hold her breath.\n\n\"Don't let her get mad!\" cried the strange creature, appealing to me; \"I\ndidn't bring him, gracious knows. Mrs. Babylon has done it, that's what\nyou ought to know, and I've told it.\"\n\n\"But how did you find this out, Lottie?\" I said, for Jessie had fallen\nback to her seat, and was shrouding her face with one hand.\n\n\"I won't tell you! If I did, some of your queer notions would come in\nand I should catch it. Just you take care of honor and dignity, and all\nthat. I don't pretend to no such nonsense; I know he's coming, because\nBabylon sent for him; she's ready to take claws off now that--oh, dear!\noh, dear!\"\n\nHere the strange girl flung herself down on the floor, and, burying her\nface, began to cry bitterly.\n\nI knew how she would have finished that sentence but for Jessie's\npresence, and shrunk from drawing forth another word.\n\nAt length Lottie lifted her wet face and shook the hair back from her\neyes.\n\n\"I'm a queer jewsharp, ain't I?\" she said, with a giggle that broke up\nthe sob in her throat; \"but it's true as the gospel. Mr. Lawrence is\ncoming, and you mark if he don't go through with that very performance,\nkneeling and all!\"\n\n\"Well, well! It was right to tell us, and Miss Jessie thanks you in her\nheart,\" I said, raising the girl from her lowly position. \"Now go to\nyour room.\"\n\nShe arose, looked wistfully at Jessie an instant; then creeping to her\nside, knelt down as she had often done at the feet of Mrs. Lee, and,\ntaking the hand which fell listlessly down, kissed it.\n\nJessie started at the touch, and gently releasing the hand, laid it on\nthe young girl's hair.\n\n\"I thank you,\" she said, looking down to the honest eyes into which\ngreat tears were crowding fast; \"my mother loved you, and so do I.\"\n\n\"I--I'm a-trying to do my best and be a mother to you myself, now that\nshe is dead and gone,\" answered Lottie, with a look of honest affection\nbeaming over her face.\n\nJessie almost smiled; at which Lottie blushed like a child, and,\nstarting to her feet, went away, closing the door softly after her.\n\n\"Can you believe this?\" said Jessie, after she was gone.\n\n\"Yes,\" I answered. \"Whatever her sources of information may be, Lottie\nis always correct.\"\n\n\"And he will dare--at her request--by her consent, perhaps--he will\ndare!\"\n\nShe arose and walked the room, her black dress sweeping the carpet like\nan imperial robe.\n\nI did not speak; anxiety kept me dumb. Was this a burst of anger that\nwould pass away? When that man, with all his bewildering attractions,\nshould stand before her--humble, imploring--how would it be? The hopes\nwhich had begun to dawn in my heart for young Bosworth faltered,\nnotwithstanding this queenly manifestation of pride.\n\n\"_She_ has sent for him indeed!\" burst from those curved lips; \"there is\nnothing humiliating in this, Aunt Matty. She invites gentlemen to my\nfather's house and allows them to approach me. Perhaps she has found out\nthat half this property is mine now, and sent him word.\"\n\nI started. This might be true. There certainly was something\ninexplicable in the evident understanding between Lawrence and our\nguest.\n\n\"Well, let him come,\" said Jessie, drawing a deep breath. \"Let him come;\nI understand myself now.\"\n\n\"You will not accept him then?\" I inquired, anxiously.\n\n\"Accept him!\" she replied, with a calm smile, which told how deep and\nsettled her pride had become, far more clearly than the flashing eye\nand writhing lip that had startled me a moment before. \"You need not\nfear that, my friend.\"\n\n\"And you do not love him?\"\n\n\"No, my friend, I do not love him; nor am I sure that he is worthy of\nany good woman's love.\"\n\nI clasped my hands in thankfulness. Her words had lifted a painful\nweight from my bosom.\n\n\"Thank God!\" I murmured.\n\nShe looked at me gratefully, and we parted for the night.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LVII.\n\nMRS. DENNISON URGES LAWRENCE TO PROPOSE.\n\n\nThe next morning Mrs. Dennison kept up the subdued character of the\nprevious night. Her eyes were heavy and full of troubled mist, her\nmovements had lost their elasticity, and an air of touching depression\nsupplanted the graceful audacity of her usual manner.\n\nMr. Lee was grave and silent; he once or twice glanced at our guest,\nwith some anxiety in his look, but made no comment on her changed\nappearance.\n\nAfter breakfast I went out for a walk. The morning was bright and cool,\ninviting me to a long ramble. But my health was not altogether restored,\nand anxiety made me listless; so I walked slowly across the face of the\nhill, came out at the footpath on the ridge, and wandered on till I came\nto the rock which terminated it. I had been sitting on it a little\nwhile, gazing languidly down at the gleams of water that came up through\nthe green hemlocks, some two hundred feet beneath, when the sound of\nvoices from the grove disturbed me.\n\nI had a nervous dread of being seen by Mrs. Dennison or her friends, and\nlet myself down from the rock to the face of the precipitous descent--a\nperilous exploit--for a false step might have sent me headlong to the\nriver below. I became sensible of the danger of my position after the\nfirst moment, and, clinging to a young ash-tree, pressed myself against\nthe leaning trunk of a hemlock and waited for the persons, whose voices\nI had heard, to pass.\n\nDirectly two persons came winding down the path, and stood upon the rock\nI had just left. It was Mrs. Dennison and Mr. Lawrence, talking eagerly.\nThe languor that had marked her appearance at breakfast was gone. She\nwas sharp and animated, spoke with earnestness, and seemed now pleading,\nnow explaining. I caught a glimpse of his face. It was flushed with\nanger, not to say rage.\n\n\"It is useless to upbraid me. I loved you; it was death to give you up.\nAt a distance it seemed easy enough; but when I saw you together and\nmarked something too real in your devotion, it drove me mad. I could not\nmarry you myself, poverty-stricken wretches that we are! but you cannot\nblame me if the trial of giving you to another was beyond human\nstrength.\"\n\n\"But you were false. You told me that she also was false; that she\nsecretly encouraged young Bosworth; that I was treacherously undermining\nmy own friend.\"\n\nLawrence spoke in a loud, angry voice. The look which he bent on her was\nstormy with passion.\n\n\"Lawrence, this rage is useless. I did all that lay in my power to break\nup the work I had helped to do. For a time, poverty, anything seemed\nbetter than the possibility of seeing you the husband of that proud\ngirl. Then my own future was uncertain; now it is assured. Between them\nthe father and daughter have unbounded wealth. It is worth a great\nsacrifice--I make it. This is my first step, my first humiliation. It\nwas false. All that I told you was false. She did not love that young\nman, she did love you. I fancied--and here the trouble arose--that you\nwere beginning to love her, that it gave you no pain to change. This\nembittered me. I misrepresented her, told you that she visited\nBosworth's sick-chamber from affection, when I knew that it was only the\npersuasion of that troublesome Miss Hyde which sent her to the house.\nNow I take it all back. She is heart-whole save in love for you. She\nnever cared for him in the least. It was you she loved.\"\n\nI caught a second glimpse of his face as he turned it from her; a flash\nof triumph passed over it, breaking its frowns as lightning cleaves a\nthunder-cloud. My heart fell. The man loved our Jessie. With his\nstrength and power of character, could she resist a passion that was\nevidently genuine?\n\nMrs. Dennison looked at him sharply; but his face was dark enough under\nher glance, and she went on, perhaps satisfied of his indifference.\n\n\"There is no time for hesitation, Lawrence. It will be impossible for me\nto keep my post here many days longer. The young lady scarcely endures\nme, Miss Hyde turns to marble when I enter her presence, and there is\nthat imp of a girl crossing my path at every turn. I must leave the\nhouse--and that within a few days--unless you forgive me and find means\nof appeasing the young lady. That accomplished, I shall be more\nnecessary to the household than ever. Everything will be on velvet\nthen.\"\n\n\"Are you so sure of the old gentleman then?\" inquired Lawrence, with a\nhalf sneer.\n\nShe smiled, and gave her head a disdainful movement.\n\n\"Am I sure of my life?\"\n\nHe turned upon her with a look of scornful approbation.\n\n\"You are an extraordinary woman, widow.\"\n\n\"You have said as much, in a more complimentary fashion, before this,\"\nshe answered.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" he answered, carelessly; \"but we understand each other too\nwell for fine speeches. Now, let us talk clearly. On your word of honor\nas a lady, all that you told me regarding Miss Lee before I took that\nrude departure, was false?\"\n\n\"Yes; though you might use a softer word.\"\n\n\"And you believe she loves me yet in spite of my ungentlemanly\nwithdrawal?\"\n\n\"I am certain of it.\"\n\n\"You wish me to beg pardon and propose?\"\n\n\"Wish!\"\n\nThe woman locked her hands passionately, and turned her pale face upon\nhim.\n\n\"Wish! You know I _cannot_ wish it; but it is inevitable.\"\n\n\"In order to smooth your way with this grand old gentleman.\"\n\nThe woman shuddered visibly, and clasped her hands once more till the\nblood flew back under the almond-shaped nails, leaving them white as\npearls.\n\n\"How indifferently you speak of a thing which drives me mad!\"\n\n\"Indifferently? No. You have made your arrangements, and do me the honor\nto include mine with them.\"\n\n\"You are angry with me--hurt that I can decide on this marriage.\"\n\n\"No, neither angry nor hurt on that point.\"\n\nShe looked at him imploringly.\n\n\"Is this said in order to wound me?\"\n\n\"It is said because I feel it.\"\n\n\"And you do not care that I bind myself for life to this man?\"\n\n\"Care? Yes; why not?\"\n\n\"I have thought it all over hundreds of times, when we talked of\nmarriage those lovely nights on the beach. It was a sweet dream, worthy\nof two young people in their teens. We forgot everything,--the\nluxurious habits which had become second nature to us both,--the\nimpossibility of making even love wild as ours suffice with everything\nelse wanting. We were neither young enough nor foolish enough to carry\nthat idea out.\"\n\n\"Or, even then, to entertain it seriously for a moment,\" said Lawrence,\ncoldly breaking in upon her.\n\n\"Perhaps not,\" she said, mournfully. \"It was a dream, and as such we\ndiscussed it; but the wish--oh! that was strong with us both!\"\n\nA cloud of disgustful feelings swept over the man's face, such as fill a\nrefined heart while reviving some passion that has died out in contempt.\n\n\"Well, we will not dwell upon these moonlight dreams, but the future.\"\n\n\"Which will, at least, give us the right to see each other, and will\nsecure between us one of the largest fortunes in the United States. If\nwe cannot be all in all to each other, everything else necessary to\nhappiness will be ours.\"\n\nAgain that expression swept over his face, but she was not looking at\nhim; the thoughts in her mind were such as turn the eyes away from any\nhuman countenance. I could read all this plainly in their two faces.\n\n\"Let us pass over these things,\" he said, gravely regarding her. \"You\nand I ought to know that human will seldom regulates events; let us try\nto act rightly and leave them with a higher power.\"\n\nShe looked at him in amazement an instant; then answered, with a\nself-sustained laugh,--\n\n\"Strong spirits make their own circumstances! We are making ours!\"\n\n\"I know that is your opinion; but no matter, this is no place for\ndiscussion. Once again, let me understand. I am not disposed to\ncriticise your motives for this--I will use the softer word--\nmystification; but now we must take clear ground. You again assure me\nthat, in seeking Miss Lee, I shall not meet with a rebuff either from\nthe lady or her father?\"\n\n\"I am sure of it.\"\n\n\"Then I will go at once. But how can I explain?\"\n\n\"Say that you were informed of her visit to Bosworth, and went off in a\nfit of jealousy.\"\n\n\"And if she asks of my informant?\"\n\n\"Say that you saw her with your own eyes.\"\n\n\"Don't you think it would be as well to speak the truth for once?\" said\nLawrence, with a grave smile.\n\n\"That _is_ the truth; you saw her returning home.\"\n\nLawrence sat down upon the rock, and, covering his forehead with one\nhand, seemed to reflect.\n\n\"You find this task an unpleasant one?\" said the woman, touching his\nhand with her own.\n\nHe swept the hand across his forehead, scattering rich waves of hair\nover the temples.\n\n\"It is very painful,\" he said, bitterly; \"but, thank heaven! the\nmischief was not of my own making. No matter; I will go now.\"\n\nHe turned to leave her. She grew pale and troubled.\n\n\"Where shall I see you after it is over?\"\n\n\"Here, if you have the patience to wait.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she answered, \"I will wait; it will not be long. Oh, heavens! how\nlittle time it takes to separate us forever and ever!\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LVIII.\n\nAFTER THE PROPOSAL.\n\n\nHe did not answer this; but his footsteps were still heard among the\nleaves that had fallen along the footpath, and she followed his\nretreating figure with eyes so full of anguish that I could not help\npitying her.\n\nWhen Lawrence could no longer be seen through the trees, she sunk to the\nrock, folded both her hands over her knees, and fairly moaned with pain.\nThere was no weeping; but dry sobs broke from her lips like gushes of\nlava from a crater.\n\nI remained still crouching at the foot of the hemlock, and sheltered\ncompletely by one of its wing-like branches. I was safe from detection,\nso steep was the descent that, without stepping to the very verge, there\nwas no chance that any person could discover me. I had no compunction or\nquestion of honor to contend against. The contest going on in our\nhousehold had become too serious for shrinking from anything that was\nnot absolutely criminal in our defence. So bracing my foot against the\nash, and sheltering my presence under the dusky hemlock, I too waited,\ndetermined not to move till that wretched woman left the ridge.\n\nMrs. Dennison was very restless, changing her position every moment, and\nstarting up if the least sound reached her from the woods. As time wore\non, she seemed to listen till the very breath upon her lips paused. The\nbirds, that, as I have said before, were very tame on the ground, made\nher restive with their singing. She hated them, I am sure, for the sweet\nnoise that prevented her hearing his footsteps.\n\nI softly took out my watch and counted the time. He had not been absent\nmore than fifteen minutes, when she sprang up, clenching both hands as\nif about to strike some one, and began to prowl up and down the path\nlike a leopardess searching for her cubs. Now and then her voice broke\nthrough the foliage, and I could see her wringing her hands, or stamping\nher feet upon the dead leaves.\n\nAt last a footstep sounded from the woods; it was a man's step coming\nrapidly through the leaves. It had a hard sound, and I felt sure that\nthe man was desperate. She evidently thought otherwise. Her arms fell\nhelplessly down, and she crept back to the rock, white and still, but\nwith her face turned away as if she would not let him see how anxious\nshe was.\n\nHe came up to the rock from the woods, crossed the footpath with a\nsingle stride, and stood before her so stern, so bitterly incensed, that\nshe shrunk away from his first glance, yet a flash of irresistible joy\nshot to the eyes with which she eagerly questioned him.\n\n\"Well!\"\n\nThe lips from which this word came were almost smiling. Nature was\nstrong in the woman, and, spite of her selfishness, she exulted over the\nruin of her own plans.\n\n\"Well!\" was the bitter response; \"I have humiliated myself like a\nhound--proposed and am rejected.\"\n\nThe woman sprang toward him with both hands extended; but he stepped\nback, and she clasped them in an outgush of joy.\n\n\"Then it is over! Oh, heavens, how glad I am! this hour has been such\ntorture! What would a whole life be? I should go mad. Let the property\ngo--sweep the whole thing aside! How many poor people in the world are\nhappy! In poverty or out of it, you and I will be all in all to each\nother!\"\n\nShe was \"pure womanly\" then, notwithstanding her crafty nature and bad\nheart; there was something in her abandonment that made my blood thrill.\n\nBut Lawrence stepped back, and his face clouded.\n\nShe looked at him in amazement.\n\n\"What is this? Can wounded vanity affect you so much?\"\n\n\"Wounded vanity, madam? Will you forever misunderstand me? How dare you\nconsider me as an accomplice in your odious designs? If I have passed\nthem by in silence, it was no sign that I approved or shared them.\"\n\nThese words were uttered with the force of terrible indignation. The\nwoman to whom they were addressed stood confounded before the speaker,\nwhom she had evidently, up to that moment, believed to be her lover.\n\n\"Lawrence--Lawrence! can this be real?\" at last broke from her quivering\nlips.\n\nWhile speaking, she laid her hand on his arm, but he pushed it off\nloathingly, as if a reptile had been creeping over him.\n\nAt this repulse, all the queenliness of her air fell away, and she\nseemed to shrink into a smaller person. The anguish so evident in her\nface appeared to touch his compassion; his features cleared themselves\nof stormy rage and hardened like marble. He took one of her hands in a\nfirm grasp, and addressed her from that moment in a low, concentrated\nvoice, that thrilled through one as nothing but true feeling can.\n\n\"Mrs. Dennison, this is the last time that you and I shall ever converse\ntogether.\"\n\nThe woman uttered a low cry, and seized his arm with her disengaged\nhand. He paused an instant, glanced calmly down at her hand, which clung\ntrembling to his sleeve, and went on:--\n\n\"We met at a watering-place unknown to each other, people of the world,\nadventurers, if you will, and between us sprang up one of those\nflirtations which are so far removed from genuine affection that the two\nnever exist together. We called it love--perhaps thought it so--for a\nbrief time; for I confess to a sentiment regarding you which no ordinary\nperson could have inspired.\"\n\nThe woman lifted her eyes at his softened voice, and with an expression\nthat must have gone to his soul; never in my life had I seen so much\ngratitude in a glance.\n\n\"But this was not love!\"\n\nThe white hand dropped away from his arm; he grasped the other tighter,\nas if to impress his words more forcibly on her.\n\n\"I never did love you, Mrs. Dennison. Such expressions as are admitted\nin society, without real meaning, I may have used, and you perhaps\nconstrued them into deeper significance than they possessed. I--\"\n\nMrs. Dennison lifted her two hands with impatient deprecation.\n\n\"Enough, enough!\" she said; \"more words are useless; I comprehend you.\"\n\n\"And hold me blameless, I trust?\"\n\n\"Blameless? Oh, yes!\" There was bitter whiteness on her lips, and her\neyes flashed fiercely.\n\nThe sneer relieved him. There had been something of compassion, even of\nregret, in his voice till then; but the curl of her lips drove all such\nfeeling away.\n\n\"At least,\" he continued, promptly, \"any blame that I might myself feel\nit just to assume, has been a thousand times overbalanced by your\nconduct, regarding one of the brightest and sweetest creatures that the\nsun ever shone upon.\"\n\nThe bitter sneer spread all over the woman's face, leaving it cold and\nwhite.\n\n\"You speak of Miss Lee?\"\n\nThe voice in which she uttered these words was fearfully concentrated,\nand her agitation kept her still as a serpent before it springs.\n\n\"Yes, madam, I speak of the lady who once, at least, received me kindly;\nbut who, yielding to your machinations, has just sent me from her\npresence forever, a rejected, desperate man, for I love her better than\nmy own soul!\"\n\nA faint sound, sharp as a cry, deep as a grave, broke from the woman.\nLawrence did not heed it, but turned away and left her, seemingly\nforgetful that it was a farewell. She followed him with her great, wild\neyes, struggled with herself, and evidently strove to cry out; but her\nlocked features refused to stir. The cold lips took a blue tinge, but\ngave no sound. She stood like Lot's wife, with all the vitality stricken\nfrom her limbs, listening to his footsteps as they died among the\nleaves. Then she uttered a low cry, sprang forward to follow him, and\nfell prone across the footpath.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LIX.\n\nA HEART-STORM ABATING.\n\n\nI seized the lithe stem of the ash, and lifted myself up the bank,\nprompted by an irresistible impulse of humanity. The woman lay upon the\nground in a position so like death, that it frightened me. Her white\nface was half hidden by the turf. The folds of an India shawl were\nentangled around her, like the broken wings of some great tropical bird;\none hand was clenched deep in a fleece of wood-moss, where its jewels\nflashed like rain-drops.\n\nI attempted to raise her face from the turf, but it fell back like lead\nfrom my hands; the cheek which rested for a moment on my arm was cold as\nsnow. There was no life perceptible; I looked around for water. A\nhundred feet below me it was rushing forward in abundance, but that was\nunattainable. The house was some distance, but there alone could I hope\nfor succor.\n\nI detested that woman in my soul; but some pure womanly feeling impelled\nme to keep her terrible condition a secret. I could not find it in my\nheart to expose her humiliation. So entering the hall unseen, I seized a\npitcher of water that stood on the marble console and hurried back,\ncarrying it so unsteadily that the ice-drops rained over my hands at\nevery step. When I reached the rock, breathless with haste, the woman\nwas gone, and but for the crushed grass, and a handful of moss torn up\nby the roots, there remained no proof of the scene I had just witnessed.\n\nWhere had she gone? Not to the house. I must have seen her had she taken\nthat direction. Surely she had not followed Lawrence! I stepped to the\nrock, which gave me a view of the footpath and the precipitous bank. She\nwas not in the woods, nor on the line of the ridge. Had she thrown\nherself down the bank, and so perished in the river below?\n\nI seized the ash-tree, and, supporting myself by it, leaned over,\nsearching the depths with a trembling dread of what I might find.\n\nHalf-way down the descent, I saw the gorgeous colors of a shawl\nshrouding some object crouched upon a point of rock that jutted out from\nthe bank, and fairly overhung the black waters fifty feet below. In my\nfright, the ash-tree escaped my hold, and, starting back with a sharp\nrecoil, made a great rustling among the leaves.\n\nThe woman sprang up, lifted her white face toward me, and for a moment\nstood poised over the water, with her garments fluttering in the wind so\nviolently, that their very motion threatened to destroy her balance.\n\nI threw out my arms, pleading with her to come back; but she sprang\nforward into a heavy covert of pine-boughs that swept the descent, and\ndisappeared.\n\nI waited some minutes, hoping that she would appear again; but\neverything was still; and after lingering about the rock some time, I\nreturned to the house.\n\nWhen I entered the hall, Mrs. Dennison was leaning over the balustrade\nof the square balcony, gazing down upon the scenery of the valley, to\nall appearance tranquil as a child.\n\nShe looked around with a furtive movement of the head as I set the\npitcher upon the console, and then I saw that her face was still\ndeathly pale. I said nothing to any one of what I had seen; it could\nhave availed little; my report would only have met with denial and\ndiscredence. I felt sure of this and went to my room, there most\nearnestly praying God to direct me how to act.\n\nMrs. Dennison did not come down to dinner that afternoon, and Cora\nreported that she was in her room, suffering greatly. Something was the\nmatter; the dear lady had been crying for hours together as if her heart\nwere broken.\n\nThis was said in the presence of Mr. Lee, and I saw that he listened\nkeenly.\n\n\"Do you know any reason for this distress?\" he inquired of the pretty\nmulatto.\n\n\"No, sir; no reason in the world, without it is the high airs that old\nlady took with her. I was in the hall, sir, and saw it; since then my\nlady has been crying half the time.\"\n\nWe were at the table when Cora came down with this account of her\nmistress. Mr. Lee poured out a glass of champagne and placed it on the\nsilver tray, upon which Jessie was arranging some delicacies from the\ndesert.\n\n\"Ask your mistress to try and join us in the drawing-room this evening,\"\nhe said, kindly; \"solitude will only depress her.\"\n\nCora bowed and went away, but returned directly with a message from Mrs.\nDennison. She had a severe headache, and was afraid that it would be\nimpossible for her to meet the family that evening. To-morrow she\ntrusted to be better.\n\nPoor woman! she was true for once, though even her real illness was\nafterward turned to account.\n\nAfter dinner, I found myself alone with Jessie. She had been a little\nexcited after Lawrence left; but as the day wore on, her self-poise\nreturned, and a sweet gravity settled upon her. As I sat by the window,\nshe left the piano, from which a plaintive air had been stealing, and\ncame to my side.\n\n\"Aunt Matty,\" she said, in her sweet, trustful way, \"I have something to\ntell you. Mr. Lawrence has been here.\"\n\nI did not express any knowledge of the fact, but looked at her, waiting\nfor more. A faint flush rose to her cheek; but her eyes looked clearly\ninto mine.\n\n\"You know what he came for?\"\n\n\"I suppose so, Jessie; and that he went away disappointed.\"\n\n\"I think he loved me, Aunt Matty.\"\n\n\"And you?\" I questioned, anxiously.\n\nShe shook her head and smiled wistfully.\n\n\"You remember the violets we took from the spring down in the meadow\nyonder? How fresh and hardy they looked! But we tore them up too\nroughly, and they never would take root again! They were young plants,\nyou said, and hard usage withered them. The violets are all uprooted and\ndead here.\"\n\nShe pressed one hand to her heart, and, stooping down, kissed me to hide\nthe sadness that crept into her eyes.\n\n\"And you do not regret it?\" I whispered, drawing her close to me.\n\n\"As I regretted the death of our violets, with a little sadness for the\nperfume that is gone.\"\n\n\"And it is decided?\"\n\n\"Nothing can change me. His intimacy with that woman gave her influence\nenough to poison his mind with thoughts that should never enter the\nheart of a true man. This was reason enough, if love ever reasoned; but\nhis power is gone from me. I could never live with a man who had once\nbeen, even partially, controlled by a woman like that.\"\n\n\"Did you give him this reason?\"\n\n\"As I have given it now.\"\n\n\"And he considers it as final?\"\n\n\"Undoubtedly. I am glad he came--glad that he has spoken; for it sets me\nfree--heart and soul.\"\n\nI kissed her fervently, thanking God for this great deliverance.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LX.\n\nTHE TWO LETTERS.\n\n\nThat very evening young Bosworth came to the house, looking almost well,\nand _so_ animated. It was not quite dark, and he saw me walking on the\nterrace; for I had need of air and solitude. He took my hand with the\nold cordiality, and would not let it go.\n\n\"Lawrence has been at our house,\" he said. \"You know what has happened.\nShe rejected him--she does not love him. This he told me with his own\nlips. It was generous; but he is a noble fellow. Indeed, I pity him.\"\n\nI pressed the hand which grasped mine, and, reading the question that\nspoke from his face, told him to go in, that Jessie was in the\ndrawing-room--and alone.\n\nHe listened for a moment to the music which came stealing through the\nwindows, holding his breath in sweet suspense; then he lifted my hand to\nhis lips and went into the house. The roses were bright on Jessie's\ncheek when I entered the drawing-room an hour after, and, for one night,\nwe had something like a dream of happiness in that gloomy dwelling.\n\nThe next day Mrs. Dennison kept her word, and came out from her\nsolitude. She must have suffered terribly; for I have never seen a face\nso altered. All her bloom was gone in one night; her eyes had grown\nlarger with hidden anguish, which left dusky circles around them. Both\nJessie and Mr. Lee were struck visibly by the change.\n\nWe were all in the library when she came in, grave, sad, and with that\nlook of deep sorrow in her face. Mr. Lee was greatly disturbed and went\nforward to meet her, inquiring anxiously about her health.\n\nThe woman let her hand rest in his clasp a moment, and drew it away with\na sorrowful glance from beneath her drooping lashes. Advancing up the\nroom, she leaned one hand on a table for support, trembling visibly from\nagitation or weakness.\n\n\"Mr. Lee!\"\n\nThe voice faltered with his name, and once more she lifted those\nmournful eyes to his.\n\n\"Are you ill, or has some trouble come upon you?\" inquired Mr. Lee,\ngreatly agitated.\n\n\"Yes, I am ill, and in deep trouble,\" she answered. \"Oh! Mr. Lee, let me\nbeseech you to protect my good name from the enemies that have assailed\nit!\"\n\n\"Your good name, my dear madam? Who would dare say a word against any\none sheltered under my roof?\"\n\n\"I do not know--the whole thing bewilders me; but some great wrong has\nbeen done--some cruel slander said, or I should not be called upon to\nendure such insults as met me from that proud old lady--should not be\noutraged by letters like this!\"\n\nShe took a letter from her pocket and gave it to Mr. Lee, watching him\nas he read it.\n\nThe letter was a brief one; but Mr. Lee was a long time in reading it.\nHis eyes went back upon every line, and the fire burned hotly in them\nwhen he came to an end. There was something very startling in the\nchanges of his face as he glanced from the paper to Jessie and from her\nto me. Never have I seen a look so terribly stern.\n\n\"Where did you get this letter?\" he inquired, crushing the paper in his\nhand.\n\n\"It came to me by the mail; you will see by the post-mark,\" was the\nreply.\n\nHe glanced at the post-mark, which was that of the nearest town; then,\nstriding up to his daughter, held the open letter before her eyes.\n\nJessie read it bewildered; but at last her features settled into a look\nof astonishment.\n\n\"Is this your writing, Miss Lee?\"\n\n\"No,\" she answered, but in a hesitating way. \"No, no; I never wrote\nthat!\"\n\nShe had read a portion of the letter, when this emphatic denial broke\nfrom her lips.\n\n\"Yet a disinterested person would swear that it was your handwriting,\nJessie Lee.\"\n\nThe color flashed into Jessie's cheek; but she constrained herself,\nanswering calmly,--\n\n\"I did not write it, father.\"\n\nMr. Lee searched her through and through with his stern glances; then,\ncoldly taking the letter from her hand, he held it toward me.\n\n\"Say, madam, you should be acquainted with that young lady's\nhandwriting; is this hers?\"\n\nI took the letter and read it. The handwriting was certainly like\nJessie's, but with an attempt to disguise. The contents convinced me\nthat she never wrote it. They ran thus:--\n\n \"MADAM: You have wrought mischief enough in the family of an\n honorable man to be content without bringing disgrace upon your\n own name. It should be enough that you have broken the life of as\n good a woman as ever lived; that you have alienated a father from\n his only child, and separated Mr. Lee from his best friends. If\n you have still any regard for your own reputation, or for the\n welfare of those who have never wronged you, leave this house.\n\n \"A FRIEND.\"\n\n\"No,\" I answered, \"Jessie did not write this; the thing is impossible!\"\n\n\"I make no charges--heaven forbid!\" said Mrs. Dennison; \"but it is\nenough that a letter like that could have been written to me while under\nyour roof, sir. Self-respect forbids that I should remain here another\nday. I have sent to the town for a carriage.\"\n\n\"You cannot intend it!\" exclaimed Mr. Lee. \"Not till this thing has been\nthoroughly explained and atoned for, must you leave a house that has\nbeen honored by your presence. Jessie Lee, have you nothing to say?\"\n\n\"Father, what can I say?\"\n\n\"Nothing, my dear Miss Lee; I ask nothing, and accuse no one further\nthan is necessary to my own exculpation,\" said Mrs. Dennison, in a\ngrieved voice. \"But I have been cruelly assailed. One word more, Mr.\nLee, and I am ready to go. Forgive me if I speak on a subject painful to\nus all; but the death of your wife has been alluded to in that infamous\npaper--alluded to in connection with myself. When Mrs. Lee was taken\nill, she had in her hand a letter, which only left her hold in the last\nmoment. It was open. You may remember I picked it up from the floor,\nfolded it, and gave it into your own hands. Of course, I did not read\nthe letter, and am, to this day, ignorant of its contents; but I did\nglance at the handwriting, and it was like this.\"\n\nI felt myself growing cold; the faces before me swam in mist. Had not\nLottie said that the envelope was directed in Jessie's handwriting? Had\nI not myself recognized the fact?\n\nMrs. Dennison spoke again:--\n\n\"Another thing has haunted me since that mournful day. As I bent over\nthe dying angel, she whispered three words in my ear; they were: 'Read\nthe letter.' Sir, there is a connection between this and the letter\nwhich your wife held in her grasp when she died. I entreat, nay, I\ndemand, that you tell me what the connection is.\"\n\n\"The letter!\" said Mr. Lee, with a start. \"She did hold a paper, and you\ngave it to me, I remember. It is here; I had no heart to read it.\"\nThrusting a hand beneath his vest, he drew forth a small pocket-book,\nand took from it the paper which I remembered so well. It was crushed\nand had been hastily folded; but even from the distance I could see that\nthe handwriting was that of the note I had just read.\n\nIn Mr. Lee's eyes alone you saw the agony of astonishment that possessed\nhim. At last he turned his gaze from the letter and fixed it on Jessie.\nShe was greatly disturbed--the very sight of the paper in her father's\nhand was enough for this; but she met his glance with a mournful look.\nThere was neither terror nor surprise in it; simply deep sorrow, such as\nsprings from a renewal of painful memories.\n\nHe walked toward her with the paper in his hand, touched it with his\nfinger, and tried to speak, but could not--the anguish that locked his\nfeatures chained his voice also. Jessie was frightened and sprang up.\n\n\"Father, father! what is the matter? What have I done?\"\n\nHe laid his hand heavily on the paper, and bent his white face toward\nher.\n\n\"Jessie Lee, you have slandered the father that loved you better than\nhis own life. You have killed your mother!\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LXI.\n\nTHE DEPARTING GUEST.\n\n\nThey were gone, and a gloom like that of the grave fell on everything in\nthat room. While Jessie Lee lay cold and insensible on my bosom, smitten\nto the heart by her father's denunciation, Mrs. Dennison took the letter\nfrom Mr. Lee and read it from end to end. After that she uttered some\nwords which I did not understand--for the cold head upon my bosom had\nfrozen up my faculties--and went her way from the room, and oh! thank\nmy God! from our presence, I prayed inly, forever and ever.\n\nI do not know when or how Mr. Lee left the room, but I was alone with\nJessie, and she dead, for the moment, as if in her winding-sheet.\n\nI had no strength to lift her, or remove her from the room, but I laid\nher gently on the carpet, and, taking the crimson pillows from a couch,\nrested her head upon them. All this had been done with great quietness;\nno unusually loud word had been spoken during that terrible scene--not a\nsoul in the house, except us four, knew that anything had happened.\n\nStriving to subdue my agitation, I went up-stairs in search of\nrestoratives. The crystal flasks in poor Mrs. Lee's chamber had never\nbeen emptied of their contents, so I went there hoping to find something\nthat would bring the stricken girl out of her deathly sleep.\n\nThe room was dim, but filled with the breath of flowers, as it had been\nin its owner's life-time. Every article of furniture was in its old\nplace. The white bed gleamed out from the twilight of the apartment like\na snow-bank; the soft lace curtains covered the windows, flowing down\nbeneath the silken over-curtains like ripples of falling sleet.\nEverything was so natural, so almost holy in its stillness, that even in\nthe terrible anxiety that filled my soul, I felt like falling down by\nthe bed and praying that sainted one to help me save her child.\n\nA wild petition did spring to my lips; but it was a time for action; so,\nsnatching a flask from the dressing-table, I was turning to leave the\nroom, when Lottie arose from a stool, at the foot of Mrs. Lee's\neasy-chair, and stood before me like a ghost.\n\n\"What are you doing here, Miss Hyde?\" she said, in a whisper. \"She does\nnot like people to come to her room.\"\n\nI held up the flask and was going on; but she seized it between both\nhands.\n\n\"It is for Miss Jessie--for her child--she is ill.\"\n\nThe girl's hands dropped.\n\n\"Take it--take it,\" she said, and followed me from the room.\n\nWhen Lottie saw her young mistress lying so still and marble-like on the\nfloor, a cry of anguish broke from her.\n\n\"Oh! my poor, poor lady! how much she looks like her--how much she looks\nlike her!\"\n\nJessie came to at last: that is, she breathed again, and her eyes\nopened; but this was all. She had no strength, and all the rich, young\nlife that made her so beautiful had left her frame.\n\nWhile she lay thus but half conscious, swift footsteps passed through\nthe hall, a spasm swept over that pale face, and Jessie made a struggle\nto move and get away from the hateful sound. It was but a faint motion,\nand she was still again. Then came a low smothered sound of conversation\nnear the door, and all was silent after that.\n\nI had hoped that Mr. Lee would come back and help me save his child from\nthe depths of her trouble; but he did not appear, and I dared not send\nfor him.\n\n\"Lottie,\" I said, at last, \"will you help me? Can you and I carry her up\nto her room, or must I call one of the people?\"\n\n\"You and I--no one else.\"\n\nWe lifted Jessie from the floor, and carried her up-stairs, meeting no\none.\n\nAs we came to the passage which led to Mrs. Lee's chamber, Lottie paused\nand drew a heavy breath; then looking down on that still face, she\nturned toward the sacred chamber.\n\nI did not protest. That room seemed the most natural place for Mrs.\nLee's daughter when driven forth from her father's heart.\n\nPoor Jessie! We laid her down on her mother's bed, and there she rested\nfor many a long day and night--if rest was ever known to a nervous fever\nlike that which fell upon her from the hour of her father's wrath.\n\nWhile Jessie lay on the bed with her eyes wide open, and shudders of\ndistress passing over her, Lottie drew me to another part of the room,\nand asked, in a troubled voice, what had made her young lady so ill.\n\nI had no other friend in whom it was possible to confide. Lottie, with\nall her eccentricities, was true as steel, but I did not myself know the\nentire cause of all this disturbance, and could not speak of it with\nanything like certainty, so I only answered her, as quietly as I could,\nthat Mrs. Dennison was going away.\n\nA quick light flashed into Lottie's eyes. She looked from side to side,\nas if wondering what direction to take. Her sharp intellect almost\ncaught the truth.\n\n\"But Miss Jessie isn't fretting so about that. There's something else.\nOh, Miss Hyde! do tell me what it is!\"\n\n\"I cannot tell you, Lottie, what I do not understand myself.\"\n\n\"And you won't listen. High notions will be the death of you yet. Oh,\nhow I hate airs! Now, if it had been me, I'd have known all about it, by\nhook or by crook, but it's of no use talking. Are you sure Babylon is\ngoing; if she is, her last trump has been played, and she thinks she's\nwon High, Low, Game, and a Jack turned up. Oh, if I only had time to\nmake this all out, but it's hop, skip, and a jump; here they jump right\ninto the dark.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, Lottie?\"\n\n\"Oh, nothing particular. You keep your secrets, and I'll keep mine.\nThat's fair.\"\n\nAs Lottie spoke, the door of our room was open, and this gave us a view\nof the hall, at the other end of which was Mrs. Dennison's chamber. The\ndoor of that room also was wide open, and we saw the widow talking\nearnestly with her mulatto maid, who had drawn a couple of trunks from\nthe closet, and was now emptying a wardrobe in what seemed to be angry\nhaste. With three or four dresses flung over her arm, she turned\nfiercely upon her mistress, and seemed to be upbraiding her.\n\nMrs. Dennison answered with an imperative gesture, at which Cora tossed\nher head, like a racer under curb, and flung the dresses in a heap upon\nthe bed, stamping angrily on the floor as Mrs. Dennison left the room\nand turned down the staircase which led to the library.\n\n\"By gracious! they are packing up, sure enough!\" exclaimed Lottie, \"and\nI standing here like a frightened goose. Take care of Miss Jessie,\nma'am. I couldn't help you now--no, not if she were dying. Babylon is\nplaying that last trump this minute.\"\n\nLottie left me instantly, and I saw her draw close to Cora, with whom\nshe had become very intimate during the last few weeks.\n\n\"Do tell me what all this fuss is about,\" I heard her say. \"Miss Jessie\nis off in hysterics, and your madam looks like a thunder-gust--quarrelling,\nI should surmise.\"\n\n\"Quarrelling? I should think so,\" answered the mulatto. \"Here she comes\nall in a storm, and orders me to get ready in an hour, as if I had a\ndozen hands--no consideration--no feeling. In an hour, and all her\ndresses to fold! It's too bad! I believe she thinks I'm her slave yet;\nbut I'll show her--I will! Just look at the pile of dresses on the bed,\nall to fold and pack in an hour.\"\n\n\"I'll help you,\" answered Lottie, in her stolid fashion, which I noticed\nshe had always used with Cora, who seemed to hold her in profound\ncontempt. \"I can fold dresses first-rate.\"\n\n\"Oh! she would never trust you with them; but I'll tell you what will\nhelp just as well; there is her writing-table, with the drawer running\nover, and the top loaded with books; just pack that heap of things away\nin the smallest trunk.\"\n\n\"Well, I'll do that, if you'd rather,\" said Lottie, with apparent\nreluctance; \"but not knowing how to read, you see I might get the wrong\nthings.\"\n\n\"No, everything belongs to her; just empty the drawer, and pack them\nnicely away.\"\n\n\"But you're not really going?\" inquired Lottie.\n\n\"In an hour.\"\n\nI saw Lottie move toward the table, and begin to gather up books and\npapers with great indifference; but when Cora's back was turned, she\ngrew vigilant as a fox, and seemed to be searching for some particular\nobject with breathless anxiety. I saw her take a book, bound in purple\nleather, from a back part of the drawer, examine it closely, and thrust\nit back again as Cora turned toward her, when she became active in tying\nup other parcels, and packing them away.\n\nAll at once Cora seemed to have some doubt regarding the dress she was\nto leave out for travelling.\n\n\"Just like her, not to tell me. Goes off on her own hook in everything\nwithout a word, as if I was of no account when she wants to move. Which\nway did she go?\"\n\n\"Toward the library,\" said Lottie; \"gone to say good-bye to Mr. Lee, I\nsuppose. You can hear him tramp, tramp, tramp, up and down the floor.\"\n\n\"Tramp or no tramp, I'll know what she wants,\" said Cora, who was\nevidently enraged at this sudden movement.\n\n\"I'll be back in a minute.\"\n\nAway Cora darted along the hall, and down the stairs. Just as quickly\nLottie seized upon the purple book, flung her apron over it, and ran\ninto her own room, slamming the door in my face. After a moment's\nabsence, she flitted back again, with both hands under her apron, as she\nhad come forth.\n\n\"Don't sit there; don't seem to be looking after me. That yellow witch\nwill think something is going on if you do,\" she said, in a hurried\nwhisper, darting in at the door, and out again.\n\n\"But what are you taking away, Lottie?\"\n\n\"Nothing--not a thing. I'm taking it back again; don't you see?\"\n\nBack she went, and directly after I heard her talking with the mulatto\ngirl in the most friendly manner possible.\n\nIn half an hour I heard Mrs. Dennison sweep past the door, and knew that\nshe was finding fault with Cora, because everything was not in\nreadiness. The girl answered her sharply, and some angry words passed,\nsuch as might have been tolerated in equals, but which sounded strangely\nout of place between mistress and servant. I knew that this lady was\ngoing in anger from our house, but had no desire to see her before she\nwent; for since the scene which had flung poor Jessie almost insensible\non that bed, my dislike of the woman had deepened into absolute horror.\n\nIn a little more than an hour I heard the sound of heavy trunks being\ndragged through the hall, and the roll of a carriage along the lower\nterrace. Then I could distinguish the tread of Mr. Lee, words spoken in\na low tone, and a rustle of garments moving down-stairs.\n\nThen all was still for a moment. Lottie stood in the hall, listening\nintently; I could not breathe, my heart so longed for the sound of that\nwoman's sure departure.\n\nIt came at last. I heard the carriage-wheels and the tramp of hoofs\nbearing her away. I saw Lottie fling up her arms in silent thankfulness.\nJessie, too, unlocked her hands, and turned her eyes upon me, drawing a\ndeep, deep breath, as if something had cleared the atmosphere that\nweighed her down.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LXII.\n\nWHOLLY DESERTED.\n\n\nThat night I received a message from Mr. Lee, and went to him in the\nbreakfast-room. The passions that had locked his features so fearfully\nstill kept their hold. He was not a man to be reasoned with, or touched\nby appeal in that state; the ice must melt, and the storm burst, before\nhuman sympathies could reach him.\n\nI saw this, and stood silent in his presence--silent, but with a sort of\nsolemn courage. The worst had come, and with that thought strength\nalways lies.\n\n\"Miss Hyde,\" he said, in a voice of ice, \"to-morrow morning I leave this\nhouse, and in a week this country, possibly forever. I do not stop to\nask how far you are to blame for the evil developed in the person who\nwas once my child; but she loves you, and I will not deprive her of any\ncomfort. She will be left in full possession of this place, with\neverything that a woman can desire. The law gives her this and more. So\nlong as she wishes it, stay with her; for myself, I go alone, wifeless\nand childless.\"\n\nI was about to speak, for there was a touch of regretful feeling in his\nvoice; but he motioned me to keep silent and went on:--\n\n\"Let there be no explanation to the neighbors or servants. What has\npassed must rest with the four persons who parted in that library; for\nthis secrecy I trust to you.\"\n\nI bent my head and tried to speak, but could not. He looked searchingly\ninto my face, and his stern eyes softened a little.\n\nI went up to him, reaching forth my trembling hands; the ache of pain\nbroke away from my heart in a flood of tears. What I said, even a word I\ncannot recollect; but I have the remembrance of a frail woman standing\nbefore that haughty man, with her hands clasped and tears falling down\nher face like rain. She was eloquent, I know; for the man's face changed\ngradually, and his eyes grew misty as they looked into hers. But just as\nan outgush of hope thrilled her heart, a name dropped from her lips--a\nname that she loathed, and uttered bitterly, no doubt; then all the\ngentle light left his face, and he was iron again. So the woman went\naway wounded to the soul, and with limbs that almost refused to support\nher. She sat up all night watching with the sick girl, while her own\nheart scarcely beat beneath its load of dull pain.\n\nAt daylight, this unhappy creature heard faint noises in the house; but\nshe did not move. Then came the sound of wheels upon the terrace-road;\nstill she sat motionless. You might have shot her through the heart, and\nshe would not have lifted a hand to put back the threatened death.\n\nThe sound of those carriage-wheels moving away through the pine grove\naroused the beautiful invalid. She started up from her pillow, and\nthrowing out both arms toward the window, cried out,--\n\n\"Father, oh, my father!\"\n\nNo one answered. Her father was gone.\n\nWe were alone now--I had no explanations to make. All the family knew\nthat Mrs. Dennison had gone away, and all except Lottie had been\ninformed that Mr. Lee had started on a long tour in Europe. She, good,\nnoble girl, had been so busy caring for Jessie, that the news only\nreached her after Mr. Lee had been gone some hours. Then she seemed\ngreatly disturbed, and questioned me on the subject in her usual blunt,\nsearching way.\n\nMy conversation with Lottie passed in her own room, and I cautioned her\nagainst speaking of Mr. Lee in his daughter's presence, telling her\ntruly that no one had an idea how ill her mistress was except\nourselves.\n\nThere was something more than curiosity on the young girl's mind. I am\nsure of that, for she was like a wild creature, and seemed frantic to\nknow which way Mr. Lee had gone. But no one could tell her. The coachman\nsaw him take the train for New York, that was all he knew about it; if\nshe wanted to find out, it was not the road Mrs. Dennison had taken. She\nwent the other way--no disputing that. He had taken pains to inquire.\n\nThat night, notwithstanding Jessie's illness was becoming more\nthreatening each hour, Lottie, usually so kind-hearted, called me from\nthe room to inquire if she could be spared for a day or two, and if I\ncould lend her ten dollars. It was a great sum, she knew, but she'd pay\nit back faithfully; yes, if she had to sell the brooch and ear-rings\nthat Miss Jessie gave her out of the dear lady's things.\n\nShall I own it? This hard-heartedness in Lottie gave me something like\nhope--the girl was sharp and courageous. She had thoughts which no one\ncould fathom, and which she was evidently hoarding for the good of her\nbenefactors. Still, I was left, in some degree, her guardian. Should I\npermit her to go off on some wild adventure, only from a forlorn hope\nthat it might benefit her young mistress?\n\nThe strange girl did not put me to the test; but judging from my\nhesitation that I was about to refuse her the money, flew off, saying it\nwas no matter, maybe she should change her mind after all.\n\nThe next morning, when I inquired for Lottie, she was gone.\n\nThree days after she came back, looking very much depressed and so\ncross, except in the sick-room, that all the servants in the house were\ncomplaining of her temper.\n\nShe gave no explanation of her absence, except that, directly after her\nreturn, she gave me a New York paper--one that seldom reached our\nhousehold--in which Mr. Lee's name was announced among the list of\npassengers in a steamer that had sailed the day after he left home.\n\nAll this time Jessie had been delirious, and knew nothing of the trouble\nthat had swept half our household away. It was a mercy. Had she\ncomprehended everything as I did, that delicate organism, so unused to\nsuffering of any kind, must have given way with more lamentable\nconsequences; as it was, the young life was scarcely kept afire in her\nbosom.\n\nIn her delirium, Jessie was always wandering off into the past, and her\npure heart broke forth in a thousand sweet fancies, in which her father\nand mother were always the moving spirits. Strange enough, she never\nonce mentioned Lawrence or Mrs. Dennison, even in her wildest moments;\nbut once, when Lottie came into the chamber, holding a bottle of perfume\nsuch as Mrs. Dennison always used, the dear girl fell back on her pillow\nand fainted quite away.\n\nThe moment news of Jessie's illness got abroad in the neighborhood, old\nMrs. Bosworth came to see us--the dear, old motherly lady--how gentle\nand kind she was! There seemed to be a charm in that plump hand, with\nthe old-fashioned diamond-rings lighting up its whiteness; for when it\nhad rested awhile on Jessie's forehead, the dear girl would drop into a\nsoft slumber, and awake with less tremulous nerves and a clearer brain.\n\nAt last the fever burned itself out, and Jessie awoke to a consciousness\nof actual life. She was too weak for any powerful emotion; and when we\nwere at last forced to admit that her father had gone, and that we had\nno means of communicating with him, she only heaved a feeble sigh, and,\nturning her head, lay, weeping softly, on her pillow, till the very\nexhaustion left her calmed.\n\nSlowly, but with a steady progress, Jessie gained her strength; and, as\nher mother had rested among the crimson cushions of that couch, sat one\nday, when Mrs. Bosworth came to spend the morning with us. We had\nbraided her hair for the first time that morning, and prisoned its\ncoils in a crimson net, with drops of gold in the web, and flashes of\ngold in the tassels. The reflection of its rich Magenta tints gave a\nfaint color to her cheeks; her white morning dress, with its profusion\nof Valenciennes lace about the sleeves and bosom, lost its chilly look\nunder a rich India shawl that we had folded over it. Indeed, altogether,\nthe dear child looked so like herself, that we were rejoicing over her\nwhen the old lady came in.\n\nThey had become very good friends during those sick-hours--that dear old\nduchess and our Jessie. So when the lady came in, rustling across the\nfloor like a rich autumn, our invalid smiled almost for the first time\nsince her illness, and held out her hand.\n\nI was in the habit of leaving Mrs. Bosworth and Jessie to themselves,\nand was stealing from the room, when the old lady called me back.\n\n\"Come, Miss Hyde,\" she said, \"help me to gain a favor of our child. She\nis looking so well, her hand feels so cool; do you think a little\ncompany would harm her?\"\n\nJessie faintly and lifted her eyes to the old lady's face.\n\n\"He has been here every day--don't start, dear! What was more natural\nthan that an old lady like me should want the care of a man strong\nenough to help her if her staff gives way? Nothing has been done that\ncould wound you; but he is very anxious--and now that you are so well,\nand looking so pretty, what if we let him come up? Eh, Miss Hyde?\"\n\nBefore I could answer, Lottie had left the room; with a chuckle and a\nleap she cleared the staircase, and, finding young Bosworth in the\nsquare balcony, presented Miss Hyde's compliments, and desired him to\nwalk up to the tower-chamber.\n\nI was going down to perform the same ceremony, in a different way, when\nLottie met me on the stairs. I stopped on the landing to let the young\ngentleman pass; Lottie followed, opened the door, closed it softly, and\ncame back.\n\n\"What's the use of shuffling about in this way?\" she said. \"She wants\nhim to go up, and he wants to go. When people want a good slide down\nhill, what's the use of putting jumpers in the way? I'm getting sick of\nyour notions, Miss Hyde. Wouldn't give a copper for delicacy; and as for\nhonor, see what it's done. Don't talk to me!\"\n\nWith a sort of Jim-Crow step, Lottie whirled about on the landing, gave\na leap down three stairs at a time, and went off somewhat in her former\nstyle.\n\nI was glad to see a dash of the old spirit coming back to the strange\ncreature; but a moment after I looked out and saw her crying like a\nchild, behind one of the large garden vases. After all, there was no\nreal cheerfulness about Lottie. Spasmodic flashes of her nature would\nbreak out, but at heart she mourned continually.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LXIII.\n\nOLD-FASHIONED POLITENESS.\n\n\nWhen I entered Jessie's room, the old lady was busy arranging some\nflowers, which they had brought, in a vase near the window. She had put\non her gold spectacles, and was examining the tints so carefully, that\nthere was no room for attention anywhere else.\n\nBosworth was sitting near Jessie, looking so pleased at being permitted\nto her presence, that I could not help a throb of sympathetic pleasure.\nHe had, I am sure, been holding Jessie's hand; for as I came in, she\nwithdrew it with a hasty movement, and its delicate whiteness was\nflushed, as if warm lips had touched it. No wonder the young man was\nhappy! Jessie Lee would never have permitted that bearded mouth to\napproach her hand unless a true heart had beaten quicker to the touch.\nLawrence had gained no favor like that in the time of his greatest\npower.\n\nThe old duchess was looking through her spectacles just as I came in;\nbut not exactly at the flowers, or that bland little smile would never\nhave made her mouth look so young, or that demure blush have settled on\nher soft cheek. Dear old lady! All those years, while they taught her\nlimbs the uses of a staff, had left her heart fresh and modest as a\ngirl's. How transparent was the gentle artifice with which she beguiled\nme out of the room, to search for some purple heliotrope that might\nsoften the tints of her bouquet!\n\nAs Jessie grew better, these visits were repeated. Young Bosworth seldom\nfailed to come with his grandmother; and after a little the old lady\nwould often stay behind, contenting herself with some message, or a\npresent of fruit and flowers. Then no excuse became necessary, except\nthat Jessie required a stronger arm than mine to support her first walks\nin the garden; and after that the young man seemed more at home in our\nhouse than he could have been in the fine old mansion behind the hill.\n\nSpite of the painful circumstances that had left us so lonely, we were\nbeginning to feel the strength of our lives slowly returning. True,\nthere was an undercurrent of deep, deep trouble all the time sweeping\nthrough an existence that seemed so bright to others.\n\nThe cruel absence of Mr. Lee, his determined silence, always lay heavily\nupon us; but it was not as if we had deserved the stern displeasure\nwhich had driven him away; and if we mourned over this great sorrow,\nthere was some relief in the oppression that Mrs. Dennison's departure\nhad taken away.\n\nOf this woman we heard nothing, and her name was seldom mentioned, even\nby Lottie. We all shrunk in terror from the reminiscences connected\nwith her. Still our lives were more endurable than they had been for\nmany a month; and but for the aching pain which sprung out of that scene\nin the library, we might have been tranquil,--sad with the great loss\nwhich had fallen upon the house, but hopeful for the future.\n\nBut with that gentle woman, lying in her last sleep down in the valley,\nand the power of our house gone from us, we could only wait and hope\nthat God, in his infinite justice, would yet unfold the truth to Mr.\nLee, and give him back to his home.\n\nSometimes Jessie and I would talk over these matters when quite alone in\nher room; but the whole chain of events was too inexplicable and full of\npain for frequent mention. Jessie hardly yet comprehended the enormity\nof the charge brought against her. What was in the letter which her\ndying mother had grasped so tightly to the last moment? Who had written\nit? Was the handwriting like hers--did I think? Her head had been so\ndizzy that she could not make out a line of it.\n\nThese were the questions she would now and then put to me. I told her\nwhat the anonymous letter to Mrs. Dennison contained, but I had no heart\nto enlighten her with regard to my conjectures about the other. Nor\ncould I for one moment guess what its import might have been, except\nfrom Mr. Lee's words, and the terrible effect it had produced upon him.\nNever for an instant did I doubt Jessie's innocence in the matter,\nwhatever it might prove. She was truth itself.\n\nSometimes I wondered if Lottie had not written those fatal missives. The\ngirl was bright and sharp as steel. She was not without education; and I\nremembered, in confirmation of these doubts, that of late I had often\nfound her writing something which she endeavored to conceal. Had she\nnot, in her practice, copied Jessie's handwriting, and taken this\nmethod of warning her mistress? Nothing was more natural. The girl might\nthus unconsciously have cast suspicion on her young lady.\n\nThat Lottie was capable of writing the letters, I had no doubt--not with\nmalice, but from an ardent desire to drive the woman who had wounded us\nso deeply from the house. With her crude ideas, and intense devotion to\nus all, she might have settled on this method of ridding the house of\nits torment.\n\nI questioned Lottie on this subject, so far as I could venture, without\ninforming her of what had passed in the library, of which she was\nentirely ignorant; but she declared that she knew nothing of the letter,\nwhich had been given to her mistress, till it was placed in her own\nhands by the man who brought our mails from the town. As for Mrs.\nDennison, she would as soon touch a copperhead as write a word to that\nshe-Babylon.\n\nAll this might be true. At any rate, Lottie looked truthful when she\nsaid it; but in her sayings and doings, the girl was not altogether as\nclear as crystal, and, spite of her protestations, I had some doubt\nleft.\n\nNo person except Jessie and myself, either in the house or neighborhood,\nknew the reason of Mr. Lee's sudden departure. It was understood that,\nbroken down by the death of his wife, he had sought distraction from\ngrief in travelling. So the secret, growing more and more bitter every\nday--for we received no letters--rested between us two. As the time wore\non, we became miserably anxious.\n\nHad Mr. Lee utterly abandoned his daughter? Would he never return to his\nhome and prove how true and loving she had always been? His cruel anger\nhad thrown her almost upon a bed of death, yet he could go from his home\nwithout a word of inquiry or comfort.\n\nJessie was a proud girl, as I have said more than once, and as young\nLawrence had good reason to know; but all her haughty self-esteem gave\nway where her father was concerned. She never blamed him, nor ceased to\npine for his presence. What it was that had separated them she could not\nunderstand; but that her father was unjust or wrong, never entered her\nmind for an instant.\n\nAs for me--but what right had I in the matter? The right of anxiety such\nas eats all happiness out of a human life--the hungry feeling of a\nbeggar that dares not ask for food.\n\nI think we should have gone insane--Jessie and I--if this terrible\nanxiety had been without its relief; but, as days and weeks passed,\nbringing no letter, no message, we sunk gradually into a state of\ndespair, not the less wearying that it was silent.\n\nThus six months crept by. The duties of life went on--the household\nroutine met with no obstruction. It was wonderful how little change\nappeared around us. Yet the tower-chamber was empty, and _he_ was\ngone,--we, two lonely women, lived on, to all appearance, the same; but\noh! how changed at heart!\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LXIV.\n\nNEWS FROM ABROAD.\n\n\nWe heard of Mr. Lee once or twice through the public journals, now\ntravelling in the Holy Land, again in the heart of Russia, but no\nletters came. We wrote to him more than once, but directed at random,\nand our letters probably never reached him.\n\nOne day, when Lottie was in the room, I took up a New York journal, and\nread this paragraph from a Paris correspondent,--\n\n \"A wedding is expected to take place within the month, at the\n American Legation in Paris. Mr. Lee, a wealthy landholder of\n Pennsylvania, is to be married to Mrs. Dennison, a beautiful and\n fashionable widow, who is said to have been the intimate friend\n of his first wife.\"\n\nI read this paragraph through. My face must have betrayed the deathly\nfeeling that came over me, for Lottie came behind my chair, read a few\nwords over my shoulder, and snatched the paper from my hand with a\nsuddenness that tore it almost in two.\n\n\"What is it,\" inquired Jessie, started by this action--\"any--anything\nabout _him_?\"\n\n\"About him? I should think so. Sin, iniquity, and pestilence. Read it,\nMiss Jessie, I can't; it seems as if a snake were crawling over it.\"\n\nJessie took the paper, read it, and fainted in her chair.\n\nLottie did not seem to regard the condition of her young mistress, but\nran out of the room, clenching her hand fiercely, as if she longed for\nbitter contest with some one.\n\nThese paroxysms of feeling had been very unusual with her of late; for\nin the quiet of our mournful lives, she had been left a good deal to her\nloneliness in the tower, where she still kept guard over Mrs. Lee's\nchamber.\n\nSometimes she reverted to the past, and would ask anxiously if I knew\nwhere Babylon was spreading her plumes. But I had no means of informing\nher, being in profound ignorance of that lady's movements from the time\nshe left our house.\n\nThis would satisfy Lottie; but I remarked that she had taken a sudden\nand deep interest in her geographical studies, for I seldom went to her\nroom without finding an atlas open upon the table, and a gazetteer close\nby, which she seemed to have been diligently studying.\n\nI had thought but little of these things at the time; but they came back\nto me with force on the very next day, when Lottie came to me in the\ngarden, and inquired anxiously if Miss Jessie wasn't just breaking her\nheart over that paragraph in the newspaper.\n\nI answered that Miss Lee was very sad and unhappy, certainly.\n\n\"I knew it--I was sure of it,\" cried the girl, with quick tears in her\neyes. \"It will kill her--she will pine away like her mother. You know\nshe will, Miss Hyde.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid so, Lottie.\"\n\n\"Afraid, and stand by doing nothing but bathe her head with cologne, and\ncry over her. That isn't the way to cure all this, Miss Hyde.\"\n\n\"But what else can I do, Lottie?\"\n\n\"You? Nothing.\"\n\nShe went off to a flower-bed, tore some mignonette up by the roots,\ntossed it from her, and came back again.\n\n\"Miss Hyde, I am tired to death of all this. The house isn't fit to live\nin since my dear, sweet lady was taken from it. There's been nothing but\nsickness, and quarrelling, and going away since, and I've about made up\nmy mind to go away too. I can't stand it, and I won't, so there!\"\n\n\"Why, Lottie,\" I cried, lost in astonishment, \"what does this mean?\"\n\n\"It means that I'm tired of doing nothing--of being slighted, and made\nof no account. It means that I want to see the world, and know a thing\nor two about life. You and Miss Jessie just mope about like sick\nkittens; and as for the servants--well, I don't belong in that crew,\nanyhow--but they are getting worse and worse. The long and the short of\nit all is, I have made up my mind to go away right off, and do something\nworth while. I only wish you would ask Miss Jessie to settle up with me\nnow, right on the nail, for I'm in an awful hurry to get off.\"\n\nSettle up! I should have been less astonished if the house-dog had made\na sudden claim for wages. Lottie had always been considered as a child\nof the establishment, to be cared for and petted beyond all idea of\npayment. She had never seemed to care for money, nor know how to use it.\nBut while enjoying her life in a state of luxurious ease, almost\nequalling that of her young mistress, she descended upon us with a rough\ndemand for wages--wages from the time she entered the house, a mere\nchild, up to that very day--no inconsiderable sum, according to her own\nestimate.\n\nThis singular outbreak of cupidity astonished me, and half indignantly I\nexpostulated with the girl. But though her cheeks blazed with seeming\nshame, and her eyes sunk under mine, she persisted in this grave demand.\nAll that she had received, her dear, dear mistress had given out and\nout--that had nothing to do with wages; there was her bill--four hundred\ndollars--and she wanted it in gold--hard gold, nothing else.\n\nI went to Jessie with the bill. She did not seem to heed the amount, but\nwas distressed at the idea of parting with her mother's faithful\nattendant. Hoping that something had gone wrong, and that this was a\nsudden impulse, she sent for Lottie, in order to expostulate with her;\nfor it seemed like turning a bird, which had become used to its cage,\nloose upon the world, if we allowed the girl to have her way.\n\nLottie came in, looking dogged and shy; Jessie held out her hand, with a\npiteous smile, for she was thinking of her mother.\n\n\"Lottie, what have we done that you wish to leave us?\"\n\n\"Nothing on earth, Miss Jess. I ain't mad at you, nor any one; but yet I\nwant to go down to York and get a place. It's lonesome here.\"\n\nJessie's eyes filled with tears. It was indeed very lonesome.\n\n\"And will you leave us for that, Lottie?\"\n\nThe girl was troubled; her color came and went. She was about to burst\ninto tears--but answered still,--\n\n\"It's lonesome, and I want to go. Why can't you let me, without all\nthis? I ain't made of cast-iron, nor yet of brass. Please give me my\nmoney and let me go.\"\n\n\"But you are so helpless. What will become of you in a great city?\"\npleaded Jessie.\n\nLottie came up to her and knelt in her old way.\n\n\"Let me go, Miss Jessie, and don't try to stop me, for it'll be of no\nuse, only to make my heart ache worse than it does now. Don't be afraid\nabout me! If God shows the birds their way through the woods, He won't\nlet me get lost.\"\n\n\"Poor Lottie!\" said the young mistress, looking kindly on the girl\nthrough her tears, \"I would rather give up anything than you.\"\n\nLottie seized her hand, pressing her lips upon it.\n\n\"Don't, don't!\" she pleaded. \"You would not say a word if you only--\"\n\n\"Only what, girl?\"\n\n\"Nothing, nothing. I must go, that is the long and the short of it.\"\n\nLottie shook off her tears as a dog scatters the rain from his coat,\nand, starting up, assumed her rude manner.\n\n\"I will not keep you against your will, my poor girl,\" said Jessie,\nsadly; \"but how can you find the way?\"\n\n\"Easy enough, Miss. I've been studying geography and the maps, these\nlast three months, besides reading about everything.\"\n\n\"And have you got any idea of a place?\"\n\n\"Plenty, Miss. I shall be settled the first week. Only give me my wages,\nand don't try to persuade me again what my mind is made up to.\"\n\n\"Well, Lottie, you shall have the money. I am sure that can never repay\nall you have done for my mother!\"\n\n\"Don't, don't, Miss Jessie! I want to make my heart like a grinding\nmill-stone, and you won't let me. Now don't!\"\n\n\"Well, I will not distress you,\" replied Jessie, gently; \"but remember,\nLottie, when you get tired of this new life, or have spent your money,\ncome back to your old home. No person shall fill your place.\"\n\n\"Oh! Miss Jess, Miss Jess! can't you stop?\" cried the wild creature,\nabsolutely flinging up her arms in desperation.\n\nJessie looked at her thoughtfully a moment; then, unlocking her parlor\nsafe, counted out the gold Lottie had demanded.\n\n\"Be careful that the money does not get you into trouble, Lottie,\" I\nsaid, really anxious about the young thing.\n\nLottie took the gold in her apron, and her tears dropped over it as she\nturned away. She really seemed heart-broken.\n\n\"If anything should happen,\" said Jessie, regarding her troubles with\ntenderness,--\"if you should lose it, or fall into want, and still not\nwish to come back, write to me and I will send you more.\"\n\n\"Would you?--would you?\" cried Lottie, with quick animation; \"then, oh!\nMiss Jess! make it six hundred now. I never, never shall want money so\nmuch again in my life.\"\n\n\"Six hundred, Lottie?\"\n\n\"Yes, six! I tried and tried to cipher it out that much; but it wouldn't\nmultiply or add up to the mark; but if you would now--\"\n\nShe paused and looked wistfully at the gold through her tears.\n\nJessie looked at me for encouragement. Dear girl! she had less idea of\nthe value of money than Lottie herself.\n\n\"She was so kind to _her_!\" whispered the mistress, drawing close to me.\n\n\"Or if you'd just lend it to me,\" pleaded Lottie. \"Now, Miss Hyde, don't\ngo to killing the white dove that I see spreading its wings in her\nbosom this very minute; I wouldn't turn against you, nor tell anything,\nyou know that.\"\n\n\"I will give her the money--the good child; how could it be in my heart\nto refuse her?\" said Jessie.\n\nLottie went to the open safe and began to count out the other twenty\npieces of gold, which she jingled one by one against their companions in\nher apron. Her breath came quickly; and when she had done she came\ntoward us eagerly, gathering the apron in her hand, and hugging it with\nthe gold to her bosom.\n\n\"Oh! I'm ready to jump out of my skin with joy and thankfulness!\" she\nexclaimed. \"Good-bye, young mistress--good-bye, Miss Hyde, I'm so sorry\nthat I ever twitted you about writing poetry, and some other things I\nwon't mention.\"\n\nLottie went out of the room in great excitement, and left us astonished\nand very anxious. We talked the matter over without result. If the girl\nwas determined to go, we had not a shadow of power to prevent it, and we\ncould not yet make up our minds that she was absolutely wrong. There was\nsomething in the bottom of her heart that we were unable to fathom.\n\nBut we determined that night to make another attempt to detain the\nstrange girl; if that proved impossible, to send a trusty person to\nprotect her on her way to New York and bring back news of her safety.\nSomewhat consoled by these resolutions, we separated for the night. The\nnext morning, when we sent for Lottie, the servants told us that she had\nbeen gone two hours, having ridden to town with the man who brought over\nthe morning papers, before any one but the servants was astir. We sent\nover to the town immediately, and learned that she had left by a train\nthat passed ten minutes after she reached the depot.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LXV.\n\nLOTTIE LEAVES A LETTER AND A BOOK.\n\n\nThe departure of Lottie added to our trouble. We had learned to love the\ngirl very much, and this wild work, in a creature so utterly unused to\nthe world, distressed us greatly. Unconsciously even to ourselves, we\nhad begun to rely upon Lottie as a friend, and bright, if not safe\ncounsellor. Her untiring spirit amused us when nothing else could.\nIndeed, she was like an April day in the house, half storm, half\nsunshine, but interesting in any phase of her erratic life. It seemed as\nif half the light had left our house, when the man came back from the\nrailroad and told us that she was absolutely gone. Jessie went off to\nher own room with tears in her eyes. I would have given the world to\nknow where that strange young creature was going, and half my life could\nI have followed her.\n\nSadness is sure to seek shelter in shadowy places. Mine carried me into\nthe chamber of my lost friend. It was dim and orderly, like a church\nclosed after service. The white bed on which she died, gleamed upon me\nthrough the dim light like an altar. The blinds were closed, the sashes\ndown; a funereal stillness had settled on everything she once loved to\nlook upon. I sunk down upon my knees by the bed, weeping bitterly. Would\nthat woman ever dare to stand in Mrs. Lee's room, its mistress? Had she\never yet been able to wipe the blood-stain from her own lips gathered\nfrom the heart she had broken by a Judas kiss?\n\nUpon my knees in that room, I felt and knew that a murder, so crafty\nthat the criminal herself could torture it into accident to her own\nconscience, had been perpetrated there. The voice of my dead friend\nseemed calling on me to avenge her, and save the man she had loved\nbetter than her own soul, from a thraldom worse than death. In my\nanguish I cried out, \"What can I do? what can I do?\"\n\nNothing answered me. I was alone, doubly alone, since that girl had left\nus. Never before had my helplessness been so complete. Perhaps I had\nindulged in some wild hope connected with Lottie, and that had been cut\nfrom under my feet by her desertion. If so, I was unconscious of it; but\nno lame man ever felt the loss of his staff, as I felt the cruel\ningratitude of this girl. Still I had a vague trust in her, a hope\nchanging and fantastic as the wind, but still a hope that she might not\nprove the thoughtless creature her conduct seemed to bespeak her.\n\nOne end of the room was less gloomy than the rest, and a bar of light\ncutting across it disturbed me. It came through the partially opened\ndoor of Lottie's little chamber, in which a blind had been left\nunclosed. I went into the room, and there, directly beneath the window,\nsaw the girl's writing-desk, on which lay a letter and a blank-book,\nwhich I remembered to have given Lottie one day, when she had pressed me\nearnestly for something of the kind. The letter was placed\nostentatiously on its edge, and I saw that it was addressed to me. I\nopened it with some trepidation and read:--\n\n MY DEAR, DEAR MISS HYDE:--Please do not think me a heathen and a\n viper of ingratitude, because I have done what I couldn't help,\n but remember me kindly, and make Miss Jessie do the same. It isn't\n in me to be really bad, or anything like it, though I sometimes do\n things out of the common, and make you angry, because you cannot\n understand why I do them; not knowing everything, how should you?\n There is one thing on my conscience, and I am going to own up to\n it. You remember when Babylon went away, I was going in a hurry\n into my room with something in my hand, when you wanted to know\n what it was. I bluffed you off and wouldn't tell, thinking to get\n the article back in good order before she went. But Babylon was\n in a terrible hurry, and I had no chance to do anything before her\n trunks were locked; so without meaning it at all, I was what some\n people might call a--well, I won't use the name, it looks\n dreadfully on paper, but her journal was left in my hand\n promiscuously, as one may say. Still I meant to return it to her,\n and mean to yet, if I ever get a good chance. I only thought at\n the time to get Mr. Lee to read it, but before I could do that,\n off he went, circumventing me in all respects, and making us\n wretched. For my part, with that book on hand--of no use too--I\n felt like a thief. If he had only waited till I could have seen\n him; but he didn't, and that has made me so unhappy that I cannot\n stay at home. I have copied off that she-Babylon's book, almost\n the whole of it, and I leave the copy for you--read it, and then\n say if Judas Iscariot wasn't a gentleman and philosopher, compared\n to this woman. I have got her book in my trunk. You wondered what\n I was writing so much about. Well, it was that. When she went out\n to ride days, Cora was sure to be down-stairs, and I knew where\n she kept her keys, so after awhile I had only to copy what Babylon\n wrote over-night, having got the rest copied by hard work. Well,\n at last everything was huddled up of a sudden, and I was\n behind-hand three or four days--so I made a dash for the book and\n hadn't time to put it back. I wonder if she's missed it? Mercy on\n us! what a time there will be when she does. I wouldn't be in that\n yellow girl's skin for something; but never mind, it will do her\n good--the black snake!\n\n Read the book, and then you will find out what a rattlesnake we\n have had curled up in the bosom of our family.\n\n Good-bye, Miss Hyde; don't think I'm crying because there is a\n drop just here. It's something else, I don't just know what, but\n crying is out of my--my--Oh, Miss Hyde! Miss Hyde! I do think my\n heart is breaking. I can't stand it. Don't expect me to say\n good-bye. Don't think hard of me for going. What else can I say.\n Oh, do, do think well of me; I am not a bad girl, nor ungrateful,\n believe that, and believe me your true LOTTIE till death.\n\nI read the letter through more than once. Then I sat down and\ndeliberated with my eyes on the book. Had I a right to read it, after\nall I had seen and heard of this woman; was I justified in searching out\nher secrets in that way?\n\nBut for the suspicions that still haunted me regarding Mrs. Lee's death,\nI should have decided against it, but I had learned too much for\ncontinued hesitation. Still, my very soul recoiled from the task of\nsearching the life of this woman. When I reached forth my hand for the\nbook, it seemed as if my fingers were poisoned with the touch. I would\nnot take the volume to my own room, but sat down by the window and read\nit through before I arose from my seat. The pages frenzied me.\n\nLottie wrote a bold, plain hand, copying anything before her clearly\nenough. In places the writing gave evidence of hurry and nervousness,\nbut it was in no part really difficult to read. The journal began at the\nmarriage of Miss Wells with old Mr. Dennison, and seemed to have been\ndetached from the other portion of her life about that time. If anything\npreceded it, Lottie had failed to take a copy.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LXVI.\n\nMRS. DENNISON'S JOURNAL.\n\n\nHow many years will this last? I did not expect that this dull\nstagnation of life would oppress me so. I knew that he was seventy years\nof age, and thought it would be no great hardship to be petted as an old\nman's darling, for the few years that might follow. Indeed, he is a\ngentleman, and loves me, I am sure, more devotedly than ever a young man\nloved his bride. At first I really thought myself almost happy. It was\nso pleasant to get away from my old home, after it had been torn to\npieces by hungry creditors, and all the old servants driven into new\nplaces, that protection and kindness made everything seem like a\nblessed new life. Mr. Dennison told me that he has loved me ever since I\nwas a little girl, and always intended to make me his wife. He has been\na firm, firm friend to my father, I know that well enough, and never\nwould have permitted the old home to be torn up had poor papa lived. As\nit is, he let all the rest go, and rescuing Cora and myself from the\nwreck, made me his wife and gave her the liberty she would not take.\n\n\"He was kind in showing us something of the world, before he brought us\nhere for good, yet I am not sure that it was wise to throw me suddenly\ninto the society from which I was to be withdrawn so soon. I learned one\nthing there which sometimes stirs the wish in my heart that I had\nwaited. This thing I have become assured of: I am beautiful, and beauty\nis a great power. No matter, it has done something for me in winning\nthis fine old gentleman; but when I think what it might have\naccomplished, I feel defrauded out of half my life. No, no, I do not\noften feel this. My life was pleasant enough at first, when our wedding\nbrought so many gay and clever people around us. But now that we have\nretreated to the plantation, everything is dull as the grave.\nCotton-fields here, blossoming all over, as with snow by the handful,\ncorn there, tall and thrifty, great live-oaks bearded with moss, and\nhalf strangled under the everlasting clasp of mistletoe, make the\nlandscape beautiful, and these things interested me greatly for a time.\nBut I am getting weary of them, and of the grand old house, with its\nendless verandas and clinging roses, its delicate India matting, and the\nsnowy whiteness of its draperies. I long for change--pine for society,\nwhile he seems to think that his presence alone should make this place a\nheaven. What is it to me, that even in mid-winter I can stoop from my\nwindow and gather oranges from the green boughs that bend across it? The\nnovelty has worn away, and this profusion of roses satiates me. You\nfind them everywhere, hiding the fences in ridges and s of glossy\nfoliage, studded thickly with great stars of whiteness, that would be\nexquisite but for the commonness, the s bringing them to me by the\nbasketful, until I sicken with the fragrance,--yellow, white, crimson,\nand damask, all heaped together in gorgeous masses that delight you at\nfirst, and then become tiresome, are every day brought to me from the\ngrounds.\n\n\"Yesterday one of the s came in with a whole armful of magnolias\nin full bloom. The marvellous white blossoms, with their great chalices\nrunning over with fragrance, filled the air with such richness as I have\nnever dreamed of before. I sat down upon a low stool on the front\nveranda, and with the quivering shadows from a great catalpa-tree\nfalling around me, had these noble blossoms heaped at my feet, yielding\nmyself to the exquisite perfume, till the atmosphere made me faint with\ndelight. It was a delicious, sensuous enjoyment which I shall never\nforget, but one cannot repeat such things, and 'not even love can live\non flowers.' Where love is not and never can be, such things sicken one.\n\n\"While I sat there, with the great white blossoms breathing at my feet,\nand a mocking-bird up in the catalpa-tree thrilling the air with music,\na horseman came riding up the avenue, now in the sunshine, now in the\nshadow of the great live-oaks, leisurely, as if he found pleasure in\nlingering on a road so beautiful and tranquil. He was a young man, tall\nand well-formed, who rode his horse with an easy military air full of\ncommand. Even at the distance I could see that his bearing was noble and\nhis face a grand one.\n\n\"The sight of this man aroused me from the dreamy languor which had been\nso delightful, and I watched his approach with interest. Directly I was\nsensible that he had discovered me sitting there in the shadows; for his\nhorse quickened its pace, and in a moment he drew up, and, leaning from\nhis saddle, addressed me,--\n\n\"'Excuse me, madam; but I have been unable to discover any servant on\nthe ground, and may have intruded. Does this place belong to Mr.\nDennison?'\n\n\"I answered that it did, and arising from my seat, desired him to\ndismount. Mr. Dennison, I said, would be at home in a short time, and\nwould doubtless be happy to see him.\n\n\"The stranger sprang from his horse, and flung the bridle to one of the\nmen who came lazily from the house to receive it. I made a movement\ntoward the door, but he gave a glance around at the beautiful view--the\nflowery thickets and rich s of grass--as if reluctant to leave\nthem. Then his eyes fell upon me, and I saw them light up with sudden\nadmiration. I did not intend it, but at the moment I must have taken\nsome attitude of grace to bring such light into a stranger's\ncountenance. He stood for a whole minute gazing on me as if I had been a\npicture. I felt myself blushing, and drew the flowing muslin of my\nsleeve over the arm on which his glance fell as it left my face. Then he\nturned away, and as I sunk to my seat again, placed himself in a\ngarden-chair, drawing a deep breath.\n\n\"'Ah, forgive me,' he said, 'what awkwardness. I have trodden upon one\nof your beautiful flowers.'\n\n\"'But there still remain more than enough to make the air oppressive,' I\nanswered.\n\n\"'For my part,' he said, smiling pleasantly, 'I could breathe it\nforever. Indeed, lady, you have a paradise here.'\n\n\"Was it indeed so lovely? A moment before my soul had wearied of its\nvery beauties; now a feeling of pride that they were mine stole into my\nthoughts. It certainly was something to be mistress of a place like\nthat. While our visitor seemed to give himself up to enjoyment of the\nscene, I saw that his eyes were constantly returning to me. I had been\nsitting in the open air a long time, and felt that my hair and dress\nmust be in some disorder. This idea made me anxious. I arose, and asking\nhim to excuse me, ran up to my room to make sure that I was not\naltogether hideous. One glance in the great swinging mirror reassured\nme. No cloud was ever more pure than the muslin of my white dress; a\ncluster of red and white roses held back the thick ringlets of my hair,\nand a single half-open bud fastened the white folds on my bosom. My maid\nCora had followed me out on the veranda that morning, and thus arranged\nthe finest flowers she could gather. Had I studied at my glass an hour,\nnothing more becoming could have been invented. That girl is a treasure;\nshe loves and serves me as no other creature ever did or ever will. She\nwas my dower, my inheritance. The only possession I had in the world was\nthis one girl, when Mr. Dennison married me. I sometimes wonder if he\nknows why I love and prize her so much. I heard her voice through the\nwindow. The stranger was asking her some question which she answered\nmodestly, and was going away. I wonder if he thinks her beautiful. To me\nthe pure olive of her complexion, which just admits of a tinge of\ncarnation in the cheek, is wonderfully effective. She is a brunette\nintensified, but oh, how the poor thing hates the blood that separates\nher from us by that one dark shade. No wonder! no wonder!\n\n\"Why should I think of this, while looking in the glass to assure myself\nthat I was presentable? I cannot tell, except that this unhappy girl is\nan object of such profound compassion with me at all times. The\neducation which she has received, I sometimes think, renders her life\nmore bitter than it might have been; but my father would have it so, and\nperhaps he was right.\n\n\"I went down to the veranda again, and found the stranger talking to\nCora, who stood with her back against one of the pillars, answering his\nquestions with downcast eyes. She moved away as I appeared, and went\ninto the house. I saw the stranger follow her lithe movements with his\neyes, and felt myself coloring with anger. Was he searching her\nfeatures from admiration or curiosity? I wish it were possible to\ndiscover.\n\n\"I had been reading, and left a book on one of the little marble tables\nthat stood in the veranda. Some richly embroidery lay in my\nwork-basket close by it, and in taking it up, the volume fell.\n\n\"The stranger stooped to replace it on the table, but his eye caught the\ntitle; a flash of crimson shot across his forehead, and he cast a quick\nglance at me, as if the question in my eyes disturbed him.\n\n\"'A new book, I see; have you read it?'\n\n\"He was turning over the leaves, as he asked the question.\n\n\"'Yes,' I replied, 'I have read it more than once.'\n\n\"'More than once?'\n\n\"'Yes, it is a book that requires some thought. Full of ideas and\noriginal suggestions. The story itself is a painful one. Indeed, I have\nmy doubts--'\n\n\"'Well, you have your doubts?'\n\n\"His face flushed, his eyes searched mine with a look almost of defiance\nin them.\n\n\"'Yes,' I continued, coloring painfully, for I am young and afraid to\nexpress adverse opinions, 'I sometimes doubt if it is not a little\nwicked.'\n\n\"He laughed, 'Oh, you are young, and a woman.'\n\n\"'Well,' I answered, 'this is what I mean, when I finished reading that\nbook, it made me restless, unhappy--discontented with everything around\nme.'\n\n\"'That is, perhaps, because you did not understand it.'\n\n\"'But goodness is so simple, I can understand that always.'\n\n\"'I grant you, but human life is not all perfection; unfortunately, good\nand evil are pretty nearly balanced on this earth, and there is nothing\npicturesque enough in a dead-level of goodness to interest the reader\nthrough an entire story. To attempt that, would be like painting a\npicture without shadows. Your real author understands the force of\ncontrasts.'\n\n\"'But a book which has so little of the virtuous and pure in it, yields\nup this power of contrast, by letting no sunshine into its pages,' I\nsaid. 'The fault of this work is, that it dwells too entirely on the\ndark passions.'\n\n\"'Then you condemn it?'\n\n\"'No, indeed, the pictures are too grand, the passions too strongly\nportrayed for that. The author, whoever he is, must be a man of powerful\ngenius. I only wish he had softened his pictures and let in a few of the\ngentler sentiments.'\n\n\"'And so do I.'\n\n\"He spoke with emphasis, closing the book. Then I noticed that a flush\nwas on his face, and he cast the volume from him with a gesture of\ndislike.\n\n\"'You know the author of that book?' I said on the impulse.\n\n\"'Yes, lady, I know him well--some day he shall be made the wiser, by\nlearning your opinion.'\n\n\"'Oh, I hope not. It was rash, perhaps altogether wrong. I am no critic,\nand only spoke as the book impressed me.'\n\n\"'That is criticism,' he answered, 'and I dare say correct, but the\nvolume is hardly worthy of so much consideration. The author is too much\nhonored, that you have read it at all.'\n\n\"I was about to answer, when Mr. Dennison rode up in his carriage, and\nseeing my companion, waved his hand with that cordial welcome so\nuniversal in the South. The moment he appeared, I felt chilled, and took\nup my embroidery, knowing well that no more conversation that I could\njoin in, would be offered that day.\n\n\"Certainly, Mr. Dennison is a handsome old gentleman. As a father, one\nmight be very proud of him, but now a strange feeling comes over me at\nhis approach. I turn from his elaborate elegance of speech and manner\nwith a wish for something fresher. Cora is not more my slave than I\ncould make him, but the task of perpetual fondness is too much. Oh, if\nhe had only adopted me!\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LXVII.\n\nOUR FIRST VISITOR.\n\n\n\"Mr. Dennison descended from his carriage and came forward with more\nhaste and animation than was usual to him. He was evidently delighted to\nsee his guest.\n\n\"'Why, Lawrence, is it you; when and how did you reach us?' he said,\nextending his hand.\n\n\"'Half an hour ago, by rail and steamer,' answered the gentleman,\nmeeting Mr. Dennison half-way, and shaking hands with him.\n\n\"'Made the acquaintance of my wife, I see?'\n\n\"As he spoke, Mr. Dennison glanced smilingly toward me.\n\n\"'Oh, yes, I think so; if this young lady is your wife.'\n\n\"The gentleman hesitated in some confusion. I think he had taken me for\nMr. Dennison's daughter.\n\n\"The old gentleman turned suddenly red, and laughed a little\nunnaturally.\n\n\"'My wife, yes, almost a bride yet, but we are making her blush. My\nlove, this is Mr. Lawrence, of New York, one of the best friends I have.\nYou must take him into especial favor for your husband's sake.'\n\n\"I am sure there was color enough in my face then. Why will Mr. Dennison\nconstantly drag that odious word, husband, into everything he says? Does\nhe think I can ever forget it?\n\n\"We sat down in company, enjoying the cool shadows of the veranda. All\nmy pleasure was at an end; the conversation turned upon stocks,\nrailroads, and mining. I gathered from it that Mr. Lawrence was a\nstock-broker or something of that kind, and that Mr. Dennison was\nconnected with him in an enterprise for which money was to be supplied.\nOnce or twice I caught the stranger looking at me while my husband\nconversed, but I was occupied with my embroidery, and did not seem to\nnotice him; perhaps he was admiring the contrast between the pure white\nof my dress and the gorgeous richness of the worsteds in my lap.\n\n\"While they were talking, Mr. Dennison insisted that I should sit closer\nto him, and more than once he placed his hand on my work and prevented\nme going on with it, as if I had been a child. This annoyed me. After\nall, one does not care to be so obviously exhibited as 'the old man's\ndarling.' It is embarrassing when the fine eyes of a man like that are\nupon you.\n\n\"After dinner that day, Mr. Dennison stole off to a low divan in the\nlibrary for his half-hour of sleep. I usually occupied my own room at\nthis hour, but as I went that way, our guest came in from the veranda,\nwhere he had been smoking a cigar, and laughingly entreated that I\nshould not leave him alone.\n\n\"I ran up-stairs, threw a black lace shawl over my head, Spanish\nmantilla fashion, and joined him. It was sunset, and all the beautiful\nlandscape lay wrapped in a veil of purplish mist, through which trembled\na soft golden glow that brightened all the west, and shimmered through\nthe tree-tops like flashes of fire.\n\n\"We walked on through the delicious atmosphere, to which the perfume of\ninnumerable flowers gave forth their sweetness, as they brightened under\nthe soft dews that had just began to fall.\n\n\"Unconsciously, we turned out of the oak-avenue and walked toward a\npretty pond, or miniature lake, which lay to our right, sheltered by one\nlive-oak and a cluster of magnolia-trees, from which the blossoms\nbrought to me that morning had been cut. A shrub-like species of the\nmagnolia grew around the pond, hedging it in with great white blossoms,\nand the sedgy borders were aglow with wild flowers. It was not yet time\nfor the water-lilies to be in blossom, but in some places their large\ngreen pads covered the lake with patches of glossy greenness, while a\nlight wind rippled through them, stirring the waters like ridges of\ndiamonds between the trembling leaves.\n\n\"How beautiful it was! The birds were no longer musical, but we watched\nthem fluttering through the leaves and settling down in safe places\namong the rushes, while the sweet stillness of the closing day fell upon\nthem.\n\n\"My hand rested on the arm of our guest; he was talking earnestly, and\nhis eloquence thrilled me with sensations unlike anything I had felt\nbefore. There was unmeasured poetry in every word he uttered. We had, I\ndo not know how, got on to the subject of that book again, and he was\ndefending it in language warm, fervid, and startling, as the story\nitself. My hand shook on his arm; a new idea had seized upon me, and\nagainst my own will I spoke.\n\n\"'You wrote the book,' I said, 'I know it by your language. I can read\nthe fact in this defence.'\n\n\"'And you will like me no longer. You will condemn me as you have that\npoor volume,' he answered, turning suddenly, and looking into my eyes\nwith the glance of an eagle.\n\n\"'Condemn you!' I said. 'What, I?'\n\n\"'But you condemn my book?'\n\n\"'No, I did not. To question a thing, is not to condemn it.'\n\n\"'But the doubt wounds me. You might have found sympathy for much that\nthe book contains. It should appeal to a heart like yours.'\n\n\"He held my hand firmly in his clasp. How it got there, I do not know. I\nstruggled a little to free it, but his fingers closed around mine like a\nvice.\n\n\"'Say that you will read my book again.'\n\n\"'I will. Nothing could prevent me now.'\n\n\"'And you will read it with a new inspiration?'\n\n\"'After this conversation, yes.'\n\n\"'That is, for one day you will think my thoughts, and give them fresh\nbeauties as they pass through your own vivid imagination.'\n\n\"'I will read them, and remember all that you have said.'\n\n\"'Sweet woman, I thank you. If my poor words can touch a heart like\nyours, it is enough.'\n\n\"He bent and kissed my hand, thus releasing it from his clasp. It seemed\nas if some of my strength went out as he did this. The intense eloquence\nof this man had inspired me for the time, now I was weak and silent.\n\n\"'Tell me,' he said, 'what particular passages you disliked in my poor\nvolume.'\n\n\"I could not answer; the book itself had gone out of my mind. I had only\npower to think of the man who stood before me, with that earnest protest\nburning on his lip, and those eyes, dark and luminous, bent upon me. I\nthink that he did not observe my trepidation. He was carried away by a\nwish to protect the offspring of his brain from misconception or\ncensure. I had read the volume hastily, and found it too brilliantly\nintense for the idle lassitude of my humor. It had startled me into more\nthought than I cared to exercise. The quiet of my home seemed like\ndulness after reading it. Now this man, its author, had come and\ncompleted the discontent his book had engendered. I had never seen a man\nof his class before, and to me the charm of novelty and romance\nsurrounded him with a sort of glory.\n\n\"'Tell me,' he repeated, 'in what a thought of mine could have offended\na creature so lovely and so rich in talent.'\n\n\"Was he mocking me because of my absurd criticism? I looked up suddenly,\nand met the full glance of those eyes. The blood rushed to my face, and\nmy eyelids drooped.\n\n\"'You will not help me to amend a fault,' he said, in a tone of\nreproach.\n\n\"'Because I cannot. It was no particular thought--no description in\nitself that disturbed me; but, if I may so express it, the entire\natmosphere of the book. It made me unhappy.'\n\n\"I was driven to desperate frankness by his persistency, and spoke out\nalmost with tears in my eyes.\n\n\"'Then some thought in the volume, or the narrative itself, struck upon\nyour heart, or disturbed your conscience?' he answered, in a low voice.\n\n\"I started. Was this true?\n\n\"'Perhaps some points of the story were not unlike your own experience?'\nhe continued.\n\n\"I felt the tears starting to my eyes. Yes, he was right. It was a sense\nof the barrenness of my own future that had made me so restless. If the\nvolume had produced this effect, how much greater was the disturbance\nwhen its author stood by my side, with looks and voice more eloquent\nthan his writings. He waited in silence for my answer; it only came in\nlow sobs.\n\n\"'Forgive me; I have wounded you unthinkingly.'\n\n\"His voice was like that of a penitent man in prayer; his face grew\nearnest and sad.\n\n\"'Look on me, and say that I am forgiven.'\n\n\"I did look at him, and met the tender penitence in his eyes with a\nthrill of pain. How had the man won the power of arousing such feelings\nin a few brief hours? Was it because I had been familiar with his\nthoughts so long? I could not answer; but the very presence of this\nstranger disturbed me. Sensations never dreamed of in my previous\nexistence rose and swelled in my bosom. The impulse to flee from his\npresence seized upon me. I did turn to go, but he walked quietly forward\nat the same time.\n\n\"The sunset was now fading into soft violet and pale gray tints. Dew was\nfalling thickly in the grass, and fire-flies began to sparkle all around\nus. In the stillness and beauty of coming night, we walked on together\nalmost in silence. I had no words for conversation, and our guest seemed\nto have fallen into deep thought. As we drew near the house, Mr.\nDennison came out to meet us. He had been smoking a cigar in the\nveranda, and flung it away as he drew near us. How heavily he walked.\nHow dull his eyes seemed as he bent them upon me, after the passion and\nfeeling I had read so clearly in those of our guest.\n\n\"Mr. Dennison took my hand and placed it on his arm, laughing\npleasantly, as he asked Lawrence how far we had been walking. Lawrence\ndid not answer. He was regarding us with an earnest questioning look,\nfrom which I turned away half in anger. Was he reading me and my\nposition so closely as that?\n\n\"Why should I think of this man so much? Has the isolation in which we\nhave been living made the advent of a stranger of so great importance\nthat his presence must fill all my being? The first thing this morning I\nlooked out of my window, wondering if he would be visible anywhere in\nthe grounds. Yes, there he was standing by Mr. Dennison, admiring a\nblood-horse that a groom had brought from the stable. It was a\nbeautiful animal, coal-black, wonderfully symmetrical and full of\ngraceful action. Mr. Dennison had bought him only the week before, and\nthis groom had been ordered to break him for my use as a saddle-horse.\nThe gentlemen seemed to be examining him critically, as the groom led\nhim to and fro upon the lawn. For the first time I took an interest in\nthe beautiful animal. Being up to that time a timid and inexperienced\nrider, my husband's purchase had afforded me little pleasure. He had\nlong since given up horseback exercise, and a solitary ride, followed\nperhaps by a groom, did not hold forth much promise of happiness for me,\nso I had allowed his new purchase to stand in the stable unnoticed. But\nnow I looked upon the creature with interest, as he stood restlessly,\nwith the sun shining upon his glossy coat, and shimmering like\nquicksilver down his arched neck.\n\n\"All at once, I saw Lawrence spring upon the horse and dash off across\nthe lawn, sitting bravely as if he and the beautiful animal were one\ncreation. The horse was restive at first and plunged furiously, for they\nhad put a sharp curb in his mouth, and Lawrence was bringing him to\nsubjection with a heavy hand. I shrieked aloud at the first plunge, but\nthere was little need of fear. The next moment horse and rider were in\nfull career over the lawn. That day week I rode my new purchase for the\nfirst time.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LXVIII.\n\nTHE WATERFALL.\n\n\n\"I did not know that the world was so beautiful. This spot is indeed\nlike paradise to me now. There is joy in the very breath of the\nmornings. When I open my window and let in the gushing song of the\nmocking-birds, and the sweet breath of the flowers, sighs of exquisite\ndelight break to my lips. Things that wearied me two weeks ago are\ntaking new beauty in my eyes. It seems to me that I love everything in\nthe world except this one old man.\n\n\"We have been riding every day miles and miles over the country. There\nis not a broad prospect or a pleasant nook within a ten-hours' ride,\nthat we have not visited in company. Mr. Dennison encouraged these\nexcursions. He is anxious that I should learn to ride freely, and seems\ngrateful that Lawrence is willing to teach me. The weather has been more\nthan pleasant, and these two weeks have gone by like a dream. How brief\nthe time has been, yet how long it seems, one lives so much in a few\nhours.\n\n\"My heart is full, so full that I cannot write anything that it feels.\nIn fact, there is nothing tangible enough for words. Dreams, dreams all,\nbut such delirious dreams. Last night I lay awake till a rosy flash\nbroke through the curtains telling me that it was morning. All night\nlong I lay with the curtains brooding over me like a cloud, and the\nsilver moonlight shimmering through the windows half illuminating the\nroom and the bed upon which I rested, which was all whiteness like a\nsnow-drift. There I lay hour after hour, with both hands folded on my\nbreast, whispering over the words that he had said to me. They were\nnothing when separated from his looks, or disentangled from the\nexquisite tenderness of his voice, but oh, how much, when so richly\ncombined, for never in one human being, I am sure, were looks and voice\nso eloquent.\n\n\"I could hear the deep breathing of my husband in the next room, and\nthis made me restless. But for him those words, meaningless in\nthemselves perhaps, would have taken life and force. Ah, why is youth\nand ambition so rash. Had I only waited before these golden fetters were\nriveted upon me!\n\n\"A vase of moss-roses stood upon the little table near my bed. He had\ngathered them for me just as the sun was setting, while the first dew\nbathed them. I took some of these flowers together in my hands, and\nkissed away their perfume, with a delightful consciousness that he had\ngiven it to me. Out of all the wilderness of flowers, now fresh from\nthe dew, these were the gems, for he had brought them to me.\n\n\"When daylight came, I arose and went down to the veranda, not weary\nfrom sleeplessness, but with a gentle languor upon me which was better\nthan rest. For the first time since Lawrence had been with us, I opened\nthe book he had written, and read passages from it at random. How\nbeautiful they were! and I not discover this before. The truth is, their\nvery excellence carried with it exaltation.\n\n\"I read them with a new sense and a keener relish. Their very intensity\nhad, at the first reading, disturbed me almost painfully, now each\nsentence brought thrills of appreciation. In all respects it was a new\nbook to me.\n\n\"I felt that this second reading was dangerous, but the thoughts\nfascinated me, and I read on, while orioles and mocking-birds held a\ncarnival of music in the thickets around me, and a bright sun drove all\nthe rose-tints from the sky. All at once I looked up, a shadow had\nfallen across the page I was reading; I closed the book at once,\nblushing like a guilty creature.\n\n\"'Confess,' said Lawrence, with a gleam of laughing triumph in his eyes,\n'that you have in some degree changed your opinion.'\n\n\"'I have no opinion to change,' was my answer; 'for until now I never\nreally understood your book.'\n\n\"'And you understand it now?'\n\n\"'Yes.'\n\n\"'And feel it?'\n\n\"'Too much.'\n\n\"I felt the blood rush into my face with very shame at this hasty\nadmission. When I ventured to look up, a faint wave of color was dying\nout from his face, leaving it grave and pale. Was he condemning me\nalready? That moment Mr. Dennison came through the front door, looking\ncool and tranquil in his dress of pure linen, which was scarcely whiter\nthan his hair.\n\n\"'Come,' he said, in jovial good humor, 'throw by your books, and let us\nhave breakfast.'\n\n\"I was glad to see him,--grateful that he had released me from the\nthraldom of those eyes.\n\n\"We rode out that day. A waterfall some eight miles off was almost the\nonly point of interest that I had not visited, and there our ride\nterminated. A groom always rode after us, but his presence was\nno check upon conversation, and sometimes he loitered behind so far that\nwe lost sight of him altogether. In fact, our whole excursion was one\nlong _tete-a-tete_.\n\n\"Lawrence had been grave and preoccupied all the way, but when we\nquitted our horses and went down to the fall, his spirits rose, and he\nlooked around upon the scene with animation. The cataract, for it was\nlittle more, leaped through a chasm between two precipices, formed by a\nvast rock, which some convulsion of nature had split asunder. Down this\nchasm the crystal waters plunged nearly a hundred feet, like a stream of\nshooting diamonds, covering the sides of each precipice with fleeces of\nemerald-green moss. From these mosses sprung ferns that waved like ten\nthousand plumes in the current of air that blew coolly down the ravine,\nkeeping every thing in graceful motion. Young trees added their\nluxuriance to the scene, crowning the summit of the rocks like a diadem,\nand a host of clustering vines fell over the edge of the precipice,\nstreaming downwards like banners on a battlement, and sometimes sweeping\nout with the current.\n\n\"We entered the ravine first, and stood within the very spray of the\ncataract; for the stream widened out directly after it left the chasm,\nand went rioting off among boulders and broken rocks, across which a\nplank bridge had been flung, which commanded a full view of the fall. We\nstood a while enjoying the view, and then moved up a footpath that ran\nalong the right-hand precipice, from which we could look down the\nravine, and attain an entirely different view from the one we had left.\nThe path was broken and abrupt, but this was scarcely an objection to\nus. There was something exhilarating in the exercise, and I rather liked\nthe vigorous climbing after so long a ride on horseback; even with the\nobstruction of a long skirt flung over one arm, it was scarcely\nfatiguing. We had nearly reached the top of the precipice, I had taken\nMr. Lawrence's arm, for he insisted that I must be out of breath, and I\nwas protesting against his assertion, when a large dog rushed out of the\nundergrowth, which grew thickly on that side of the path, as if\nfrightened at something, and made a plunge directly against me.\n\n\"My arm was torn from its support, I staggered--reeled on the verge of\nthe precipice, flung out my arms, and plunged down--down--down into\nchaos. I had neither struck the earth nor water, something hard and firm\ngirded my body. My face was smothered in green, damp leaves, and my hair\nalready dripped with falling spray.\n\n\"I heard the roar and rush of waters all around me, and through it a\nfierce cry as of some one in agony. I attempted to move, but the\nbranches that supported me swayed downward, and with a desperate spring\nI caught at the stem of a wild vine, which clung to and spread over the\nface of the precipice, twisting itself in with the young tree, which but\nfor that would have broken under my weight. Looking upward through the\nblinding mist, I saw a white face bending over the precipice, and heard\na voice hoarse with terror calling upon me to hold firmly and keep\nstill.\n\n\"I did hold firmly, but the trembling of my frame shook the tree and\nclinging shrubs with a dangerous vibration, and it seemed to me that\ntheir roots were slowly tearing out from the soil which held them in the\ncleft of the rock. This shook me with an awful terror; I tried to close\nmy eyes and be still, but that was impossible. I saw the blue sky\nbending so calm and quiet above me. I saw the quivering greenness that\nclothed the rocky face of the precipice, and ten thousand tiny white\nflowers trembling through it so close that my face almost touched them.\nThe fall, like a sheet of melted glass, rolled and plunged so near, that\nit seemed ready to leap upon me. My appalled eyes turned shuddering from\na vast whirlpool of foam that rioted thirty feet beneath me, shooting\nforward, curving over, and plunging down great watery hollows, then\nleaping suddenly upward, as if maddened that their prey had not fallen\nat once into the white caldron of their wrath.\n\n\"In vain my eyes closed upon all this threatening horror. Then all was\ndarkness, and the roar of the fall became terrific. The spray swept over\nme like a storm of shooting diamonds, wetting my habit through and\nthrough till it dragged me downward with heavier weight and fresh peril.\nI could feel the drops falling like rain from my hair, and my poor hands\ngrew cold as they clung to the vine. A cry broke from my lips. Surely\nthe tree was uprooting beneath me. I could feel it giving way inch by\ninch. A handful of loose earth broke away and rolled over me, rattling\ndown to the white gulf below. Shriek after shriek--oh, my God! they were\nsmothered and lost in that roar of waters, and could warn no one of this\nnew peril. I seized upon the wild vine higher up, and strove to press\nless heavily on that breaking tree; my foot found a crevice in the rock,\nand, forcing itself through the wet moss, in some degree sufficed to\nlessen the weight that was dragging me down to death. But still my\nsupport was slowly giving way, I could hear the small roots snap, and\nfeel the earth break from around them. My hands were numb and cold, my\nbrain began to reel, and ten thousand broken rainbows seemed shooting up\nfrom the falls, and tangling themselves around me, dragging me\ndown--down--down.\n\n\"A human voice brought me back; a wild, cheerful shout forbade me to\ngive way, and broke the delirium, which in a moment more would have\nloosened my hold, and sent me whirling through that white gulf of waters\ninto eternity. 'Hold fast one moment! For God's sake, be firm!' It was\nhis voice. A thrill of hope drove back the delirium that had seized upon\nme. I pressed my foot more firmly into the crevice, and forced myself\nagainst the rock, clinging with both hands to the vine. A trail of\nblackness fell over the face of the precipice, and I heard the clank of\niron striking against the rock. Directly the air above was darkened,\nand, with a thrill of horror, I saw Lawrence fling himself over the face\nof the precipice, and glide slowly down to my side. He crowded his foot\nclose to mine, thus attaining a foothold, but otherwise supported\nhimself by the line of leathern straps that had aided his descent. With\none hand clinging firmly to this support, he placed the stirrups from my\nsaddle under my feet, told me how to seize upon the straps to which they\nwere attached when he should call out, and seizing the double straps\nabove my head, swung himself upward, and left me alone, shaken with\ndouble terror. Then I knew that a life dearer than mine was in peril,\nand my soul went up with him, uttering a cry of thankfulness when his\nvoice reached me, calling out, cheerfully, from the edge of the\nprecipice,--\n\n\"'Stand firm; do not move till you feel the straps tighten around you!'\n\n\"I obeyed, holding desperately to the vine with one hand, while the\nother was ready for action. I felt the stirrups tighten under my\nfeet,--the leather straps were taut and motionless,--I grasped one with\nmy left hand, but still clung to the vine, afraid to swing out over that\nawful abyss. It was a moment of sickening horror.\n\n\"'Be bold--fear nothing--trust yourself to me!'\n\n\"Instantly my hand left its hold on the vine, my feet were lifted from\ntheir frail support, and with the stirrups beneath them, swung out from\nthe rock. Oh, how fearfully those lines strained and quivered! how those\nwhite waters leaped and roared under me! I drew no breath; my heart\nstood still; a shock of awful terror seized upon me; the minute in which\nI swung out into mid-air seems to me even now as a long, long day. Oh,\nit was terrible!\n\n\"The faces of the angels, when they meet you after death, must give such\npromise of new life, as his gave to me when my frightened eyes first saw\nhim bending over that precipice. The trust of the angels must be like\nmine when I felt his arms around me, and knew that he had lifted me out\nof chaos. Never, on this side of heaven, shall I have another sensation\nlike that.\n\n\"How long I remained in those arms it is impossible for me to say. When\nI came to life, he was sitting upon the turf, where they had laid me,\nwith my head resting on his knee. Some brandy from a flask, which the\ngroom always carried with him, had been forced through my lips, where I\nfelt the taste still burning. That had checked the shudders of cold\nwhich were creeping over me, and for a while I lay speechless, feeble as\na child, but oh, how happy! He had saved me. It was his strength which\nhad rescued me from that whirlpool of waters, from the horrible death,\nfor which I was so unprepared.\n\n\"These were the first thoughts that came to my brain, as I lay there so\ndeathly and motionless. The light fell rosily on my eyelids, but I had\nno strength or wish to unclose them; nay, I checked the very breath as\nit rose to my lips, fearing that it would betray the life rekindling in\nmy bosom, and thus break the dream which was so like Elysium.\n\n\"He bent his face to mine and called me by name. His voice shook with\napprehension; I could feel that he trembled.\n\n\"I could not help it: a smile crept to my lips and warmed them into\nredness. He held my hand, and was chafing it between his smooth white\npalms.\n\n\"'She is recovering,' he exclaimed, joyfully.\n\n\"'So she am, marser,' answered Tom, the groom; 'beginning to look mighty\nnatral. Lor' knows dis thought she was done gone sure 'nuff.'\n\n\"I moved then. Tom's voice had broken up my dream.\n\n\"'Are you better? Speak, dear lady, and tell me that you are not\nseriously hurt.'\n\n\"Opening my eyes wide, I looked into his, and closed them again, feeling\nthe warm, fresh life rushing to my face with a glow.\n\n\"'Ah, your looks tell me that no serious evil will come from this,' he\nsaid. 'Let us thank God.'\n\n\"'I do thank God, but you most of all,' I whispered; 'without that, life\nwould--'\n\n\"What was I about to say. My voice was weak, I do not think he heard me.\nI listened for some response, but none came, and when my eyes turned\nupon him, the look with which he met them was grave and thoughtful.\n\n\"Tom was busy about the saddles at some distance. With that prompt\naction which is in itself success, Lawrence had taken the girths and\nstirrups from the saddles, the martingales and bridles, all of which he\nhad buckled and knotted together into the cable that saved my life.\nWhile Tom was repairing all damages, I grew strong enough to sit up, but\nmy habit was so wet and heavy that it seemed impossible for me to walk.\nA slight lunch had been prepared for us which Tom had brought with him.\nLawrence found a bottle of champagne in the basket, and poured out a\nbrimming cup which he entreated me to drink while the sparkles were\nrising. I drank eagerly, again and again, till the slight chills that\nhad begun to creep over me were broken up, and a glow of strength\nenabled me to rise.\n\n\"'Now,' said Lawrence, 'that you have some color in those cheeks, and\nthe deathly look is gone, let us mount and away. It will be a miracle if\nyou are not ill from this shock.'\n\n\"I arose and prepared to go, but faltered, and found the weight of my\nskirt oppressive. Lawrence threw one arm around my waist, and almost\ncarried me to the horse. For one moment he folded me close in his arms\nbefore lifting me to the saddle, and whispered,--\n\n\"'Forgive me, that I led you into this danger.'\n\n\"I could not answer. The man who had saved my life, at a terrible risk\nto his own, asked me to forgive him. Did he guess that it was worship,\nnot forgiveness, that I felt.\n\n\"We rode home at a gallop. Exercise drove the chills from my frame, and\na strange excitement took possession of me. When I reached home, my\ncheeks were on fire. It was not fever, but a sensation stranger and\nwilder than I had ever felt before. Instead of returning home, I would\nhave given the world to turn my horse and flee to the uttermost parts of\nthe earth, where no one but the man who had saved me could ever know of\nmy existence.\n\n\"Still, the horse was bearing me forward at the top of his speed, and no\none attempted to check him or turn him aside. In the madness of my\nfolly, I almost hoped to see Lawrence seize the bridle, and swerve his\ncourse away from the home I was beginning to hate.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LXIX.\n\nTHE THREATENED DEPARTURE.\n\n\n\"We reached home. The groom had ridden on in advance, to have dry\nclothes prepared for me; but it was of little use, for my habit had\ngradually lost its dampness, and I was feverish rather than chilly. Mr.\nDennison came forth to meet us, his face full of alarm, his walk\nunsteady as if fright had shaken him. The old man lifted me from my\nsaddle, and held me fondly in his arms, kissing my lips and forehead\nwith passionate thankfulness before he set me down. Drops like rain fell\nupon my face, and I knew that the stout old man was weeping, though I\nhad never seen tears in his eyes before.\n\n\"'My darling--my own beautiful wife,' he said, in the abandonment of his\ngratitude, 'what should I have done without you?'\n\n\"Mr. Dennison spoke so earnestly, that Lawrence must have heard him; but\nhe was busy about the horses, and seemed quite unconscious of the\ntenderness which disturbed me so.\n\n\"'Thank God! you have not suffered as I feared,' continued my husband,\nencircling me with his arm, and almost carrying me into the house. 'Your\ncheeks are flushed, your eyes bright. Oh! my poor darling, I expected to\nsee you white and drooping.'\n\n\"I leaned on him heavily, for my limbs were stiff, and I could hardly\nwalk, besides a dead heaviness had seized upon my heart. When I shrank\nfrom the open caresses of my husband, this man did not seem to observe\nthem. Was it that he did not care? This question drove all the unnatural\nexcitement from me. I was white and cold enough then.\n\n\"No, I would not be forced into a dreary bed, and left to my thoughts.\nExhausted as I was, anything seemed better than that. After Cora had\ntaken off my soiled and torn habit, smoothed my hair and bathed my head\nwith cologne, I girded a wrapper of soft white cashmere around me, with\na scarf of scarlet silk which lay upon the sofa, and went down, spite of\nthe girl's remonstrance.\n\n\"They were sitting together, those two men, conversing earnestly. I\nthink Lawrence was giving an account of the terrible danger I had\nescaped, for Mr. Dennison was saying as I came up, treading so softly,\nthat he had no idea of my presence:\n\n\"'My friend, it would be a little thing compared to this, that you had\nsaved my life, for no human being will ever guess how much dearer this\nsweet creature is to me than that.'\n\n\"'She is indeed a most lovely woman,' answered Lawrence; 'any man might\nhold his existence light, in comparison with hers.'\n\n\"He spoke quietly, but I observed that his eyes did not seek those of my\nhusband, and a cold whiteness lay upon his face. Was it the shock of\nthat scene at the falls harassing him yet, or were unrevealed thoughts\nstruggling with him?\n\n\"My husband started up joyfully when I appeared. He drew an easy-chair\nto the window, placed me in it, brought a stool for my feet, and sat\ndown upon it, lifting his glad eager eyes to my face, with the devotion\nof a spaniel, while he patted and caressed the feet his movement had\ndisplaced.\n\n\"I felt myself growing angry. Why would the old man thus expose his\nfolly before our guest, who seemed hewn from marble, so little did he\nregard the fondness that filled me with repulsion and shame.\n\n\"'Ah, my friend, see how she blushes at her husband's great joy and\nthankfulness. My poor child, Lawrence has been telling me all, how brave\nand steady you were, held almost by a thread over that fearful whirlpool\nwithout a shriek, and obeying orders like a veteran. He would not tell\nme all, but Tom did, so far as the fright would let him. Now say, my\nangel, what reward can we give our brave friend? He will not take my\ngratitude.'\n\n\"'But he must take mine,' I cried, reaching out both hands, with sudden\nappeal. 'He must not sit there cold and calm as if he had no interest in\nmy safety. I cannot bear it.'\n\n\"Lawrence started up, and the quick fire leaped to his eyes. He took\nboth my hands in his, with a firm, almost painful grasp.\n\n\"'Not gratitude. I will not have that, because--because it is all so\nundeserved. I did nothing that Tom himself would not have thought of. It\nwas her own sublime courage, sir, that saved us from a terrible\ncalamity.'\n\n\"Mr. Dennison gave me a look that seemed almost like adoration.\n\n\"'I am sure she would behave like an angel anywhere,' he said, 'but that\ndoes not lessen the value of your own brave action, my friend, and for\nthat we are both bound to you forever.'\n\n\"'Well, let it rest so,' answered Lawrence, with an uneasy laugh. 'Just\nnow I feel more like thanking God for a great mercy given, and terrible\nperil escaped, than anything else. Upon my word, Dennison, I can almost\nfeel those white waters boiling around me now.'\n\n\"'They would have made an awful winding-sheet,' I said, with a shudder.\n'But you saved me, oh, yes, you saved me.'\n\n\"'And your husband also, dear one,' said Mr. Dennison; 'for what would\nmy life have been without you. Why, Lawrence, I have worshipped her ever\nsince she was a little girl; even then, her proud saucy ways had their\nenchantment. She did not know it; how could she? but the old man's heart\nwas set upon her while she was playing with her doll and bowling her\nhoop. Her own father never watched her growth with more interest than I\nfelt, and when she learned to love me, why then, Lawrence, I knew for\nthe first time what heaven was.'\n\n\"Lawrence looked at me steadily while the old man was speaking, so\nsteadily, that I felt the hot blood rush to my face. Mr. Dennison\nobserved this, and went on triumphing in the love he so truly believed\nto be his.\n\n\"'You see, my friend, how the very remembrance of that sweet confession\nbathes her face with blushes. She had taken a fancy to the old fellow\nlong before a younger rival could think of entering the field against\nhim, and married him for true love only, not because he was considered\nthe richest planter in this district. She was innocent as a lamb, and as\ndisinterested.'\n\n\"'Oh, Mr. Dennison,' I broke forth, 'do not talk about these things,\nthey only weary Mr. Lawrence.'\n\n\"'Certainly not. I am deeply interested in everything that makes the\nhappiness or misery of my friend,' said Lawrence, coldly.\n\n\"'Ah, she is too modest, I have always told her so, and far too careless\nabout her own interests. Why, would you believe it, Lawrence, I could\nnot get her to look into the state of my property, and learn how much or\nhow little might hereafter come to her. She did not marry my property,\nbut my own dear self; these were her very words, and for such words you\ncannot blame me if I adore her.'\n\n\"I felt myself glowing with shame. If I had ever used such words, it was\nwhen this old man seemed the only refuge left to me in my utter\ndesolation. Perhaps I said them and felt them just then, for quiet home,\nprotection, and a shelter were all I asked or hoped for in life; but\nnow, with that man drinking in every word, I felt such protestations as\na bitter humiliation.\n\n\"I arose to go. The conversation had become unbearable. I felt my lips\nquiver, and tears of intense mortification gathering to my eyes.\n\n\"Lawrence came toward me a step or two, and then retreated, for Mr.\nDennison had given me his arm, and I left the room, bowed down with\nhumiliation, and burning with shame. Why would the old man talk of me as\nhe did? Even if I had loved him, it would have been embarrassing; as it\nwas, all the pride of my nature rose up in revolt against him. At the\nfoot of the stairs I dropped his arm, and insisted on going up alone.\nHe seemed astonished and a little hurt. How would it have been had I\ndared to express all the rage that was struggling in my bosom?\n\n\"Cora was waiting for me. Poor girl! she had been sadly shocked by the\nabrupt account of my danger, which Tom had repeated to every one he met.\nShe is a wayward creature, and at times, I really believe, hates herself\nwith bitter detestation for the black tinge which taints every drop of\nblood in her veins. Never in my whole life have I seen a human being so\nsensitive. No matter to her that she is beautiful, and that even the\nblacks look upon her as apart from themselves, this bitter truth is\nalways uppermost in her mind. She has black blood in her veins, and she\nwas born a slave. I remember how this beautiful girl hated her mother,\nbecause it was through her that the taint and the bonds came. One would\nhave thought this wretched woman was the slave of her own child, for one\nwas made to feel all the degradation of her lot, and the other was, to a\ncertain extent, lifted out of it, from the day she was given to me--a\nchild myself--as my especial maid. How it used to amuse my father when\nthis child would domineer over and scorn her own mother.\n\n\"Sometimes I think Cora is seized with a venomous dislike of myself. I\ndo not wonder at it. In her way, she is quite as beautiful as I ever\nwas, and as for talent, the girl surpasses me in everything. Her\nindustry is untiring, her perceptions quick as lightning. In some other\ncountry she might marry well, and take rank in social life scarcely\nsecond to my own. Sometimes I think her ambition turns that way, for she\nis constantly teasing me to take her to Europe. I only wish it were in\nmy power, for I love the poor girl dearly, and should rejoice to see her\nlifted out of the pitiful condition that all of her race must occupy\nhere, bond or free, for at least a century to come.\n\n\"I have been writing about this girl Cora, because she is so connected\nwith my own life that nothing can separate us. We played together on\nequal terms as children, and when she gradually dropped into the habits\nof a servant, it made no change in my affection for her. In my chamber\nwe have always been friends, more than that--more than that!\n\n\"Cora saw that I was disturbed, and sitting down at my feet, besought me\nto tell her the cause.\n\n\"For the first time in my life I had a secret to keep from this girl. I\ncould not own to her that a few garrulous words from an old man, who had\nbeen so kind to us both, had filled my heart with indignant shame, for\nshe would have asked why such fond words had the power to offend me, and\nthere was no answer ready to my lips.\n\n\"Perhaps Cora guessed this, for she was quick as the flash of a star in\nher intelligence; at any rate, she asked me no questions, but contented\nherself with braiding my hair, smoothing it with her soft palms, and\nstooping to kiss my forehead when she saw a shadow of discontent pass\nover it.\n\n\"'Do not fret,' she said, softly, whispering back the thoughts I was\nstriving to drive from my brain; 'seventy years is longer than most men\nlive. Only have patience and wait.'\n\n\"I was angry with her for understanding that, which I wished buried from\nthe whole world. Dashing her hands away, I swept the hair she was\nbraiding in a coil around my head, and turned upon her with such sharp\nrebuke, that she retreated from me frightened.\n\n\"'Ah! has it gone so far?' she muttered, shaking her head. 'Well, after\nthis there will be neither patience nor peace for any of us.'\n\n\"I ordered her to be silent, and directly after heard her sobbing in the\nnext room as if her heart were broken.\n\n\"Why did Cora's words haunt me all that night? are evil thoughts the\nonly ones which cling tenaciously to the brain? I tried to cast them\noff, heaven knows I did! but that was impossible, nor could I sleep. The\nshock upon my nerves had been far too severe for that.\n\n\"Why would the old man haunt my room and sit by the pillow on which I\ncould find no rest? His presence tortured me. I could not keep my aching\neyes from his white hair and the wrinkles on his forehead, which seemed\nto deepen and grow prominent in the moonlight of my shaded lamp. How\ncould I forget his seventy years, with such things before me in my\nwakefulness? But he would not leave me; anxiety kept him watchful. It\nseemed to me that those bright, earnest eyes read all the dark thoughts\nthat haunted my brain. I turned my face to the wall and pretended to\nsleep. He sat motionless, holding his very breath, for he knew how much\nrest must be needed after the awful shock I had received, and would not\nfrighten it away by a single motion. After a while, when everything was\nstill, I felt him bending over me; directly his quivering old lips\ntouched my forehead, and what appeared to me like a heavy rain-drop fell\nupon my closed eyelid.\n\n\"'Thank God,' he murmured; 'she is asleep at last!'\n\n\"This child-like gratitude touched me more than the protest of a\nthousand clergymen could have done. How purely and dearly the old man\nloved me, and how unworthy I was! Great heavens, why did I ever marry\nhim, and thus make deception almost a duty? There is one excuse for\nme--I did not then know what love meant.\n\n\"Toward morning, Mr. Dennison went into his own room; then I breathed\nagain; true, he was very near, and by changing my position I could see\nhis white head and grand old face upon the pillow, where he had fallen\nasleep with a smile of thankfulness upon his lips. After all, he is\ngenerous, good, and rich in intelligence. Why is it that love will not\ngo with the reason?\n\n\"They would have kept me in bed the next day, but I resisted. The\nminutes were too precious for such waste. I went down-stairs, feeling\nlike a criminal and looking like one, Cora said, but the two gentlemen\nregarded my sadness and my pallor as a proof of illness, and would\nscarcely allow me to speak, such was their anxiety for my welfare. So I\nsat in my easy-chair languid and still, listening to them as they\nconversed, and yet gathering but few of their words into my mind. All at\nonce a blow seemed to have struck me. It was only a word, but that one\nword took away my breath. Mr. Dennison had been asking some question,\nand Lawrence answered,--\n\n\"'To-morrow.'\n\n\"'Not so soon as that. Indeed, my friend, we cannot spare you,' said Mr.\nDennison.\n\n\"I held my breath. It seemed as if my heart would never beat again. A\nslow faintness crept over me while Lawrence answered,--\n\n\"'But I must: the business which brings me South is too important for\ndelay. Already I have spent nearly a month that may cost me dear.'\n\n\"His eyes turned full upon mine. They were dark and heavy with sadness.\nGod forgive me if mine expressed too much!\n\n\"'But my wife will never consent to this. Speak, dear, and give him one\nof your pretty commands. It must be important business indeed, which can\nwin him to disobey you.'\n\n\"I opened my lips to speak, but no words followed the effort. A choking\nsensation came into my throat, and the very light went out from before\nmy eyes. They thought me insensible, but my faculties were locked up; I\nknew everything.\n\n\"Mr. Dennison ran into the house, crying out for Cora. That instant\nLawrence took me in his arms; I felt his breath upon my face when he\ndrew back with a faint exclamation. Cora stood close by him.\n\n\"'She is faint, she is insensible,' he said, hurriedly. His voice was\nconfused, and I could feel that the arm which held me was seized with\nsudden trembling. 'It was imprudent to let her come down.'\n\n\"Cora put him aside, and took my hand from his, just as Mr. Dennison\ncame back to the veranda.\n\n\"'Ah,' he cried, joyfully; 'she is better, the color is coming back to\nher mouth! poor child, poor child! we have let you come out too soon.'\n\n\"He stooped down and kissed me tenderly, but I shrunk from him with\nsudden recoil, and leaning upon Cora, entered the house, so weary and\nsick at heart that I almost prayed to die.\n\n\"There was no rest for me that day. One thought occupied my whole mind:\nhe was going in the morning--going I knew not whither, and the history\nof the last two weeks would be henceforth all of life that I should care\nto remember. I wandered from room to room, wondering what course I could\ntake, and how it would be possible to appease the aching pain at my\nheart. Sometimes I could hear his voice rising up from the veranda. It\nwas low and grave, sometimes I thought constrained, as if the words he\nuttered came from a preoccupied heart.\n\n\"No criminal ever listened for the steps that were to bring him a\nreprieve with more interest, than I felt in gathering up the broken\nsentences of that conversation. He was going away, first to New Orleans,\nthen back to New York, where business must suffer until his return. I\nheard this clearly. It was no rash speech, but a settled determination;\nyet up to that morning he had never spoken of it.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LXX.\n\nTHE MIDNIGHT WALK.\n\n\n\"I could not sleep, though I had seemed tranquil all the evening. Mr.\nDennison, having been broken in his rest the night before, slumbered\nheavily, and this made my wakeful solitude unendurable. The moon shone\nbrightly, and the cool air came through the window with enticing\nsweetness. All day long I had been cramped and restless in the house,\nwhich was growing hateful to me. Oh how I longed for that grand solitude\nwhich lies in space! A wild desire to escape from the deep breathing of\nmy husband seized upon my mind. I dressed myself in noiseless haste, and\ngliding down-stairs, opened a French window, and fled through it\nbreathlessly. I had no object in view, and all places were alike to me,\nso long as I could breathe freely, and cry aloud without fear of being\noverheard. But a footpath lay before me, and I followed it on and on\ntill I came to the pond, or lake, which I had visited with Lawrence on\nthe first day of his coming. It was perfectly beautiful that night. Here\nand there a ripple, as of ten thousand diamond chains tossed on the\nwaters, followed some current, and died off in the shadows. The dusky\ngreen of the magnolia-tree was kindled up with gleams and touches of\nsilver, while its sleeping flowers filled their great chalices of snow\nwith moonlight, and bathed themselves in its dewy radiance. If my heart\nhad not been sad before, the exquisite stillness of this scene would\nhave rendered it so; the very ripple of the waters among the lily pads\naffected me like music, and the dark trailing of the mistletoe-boughs,\nwhich were strangling the great live-oak with ten thousand leafy\ncaresses, made me almost afraid, they were so ghostly.\n\n\"I went into the black shadow of this grand old tree, sat down with my\nback against its trunk, and fell into a passion of bitter weeping. Why\nhad I become all at once so unhappy? What sorrow, or cause of sorrow,\nhad fallen upon me? I would not even attempt to answer this question,\nbut asked it over and over again, as if the solution were not in my own\nheart reproaching me.\n\n\"All at once I heard a noise in the grass--the steady fall of a man's\nfoot. I hushed my tears, and drew my shawl over the white dress that\nthreatened to betray me, even buried as I was in deep shadows. A tall\nfigure directly after appeared in the moonlight, standing by the lake. I\nknew it at once. He also had come out into the beautiful night, unhappy,\nperhaps, and restless as myself. He stood awhile motionless, then I saw\nhim move away, and walk quickly up and down the shore, as if the beauty\nof the night filled him with irrepressible inquietude. Then I asked\nmyself why he could not rest, and what feelings had driven him forth. My\nheart gave a reply which turned its sadness into excitement. Still I\nneither moved nor spoke, but watched his abrupt movements to and fro\nwith breathless interest. Ah, he was wretched as myself--the thought of\nparting had driven him forth. I was sure of that, and the certainty was\nlike a triumph.\n\n\"All at once Lawrence turned from the moonlight, and plunged into the\nblack shadows of the oak, where he walked up and down like a disturbed\nspirit. I could hear broken words fall from his lips, as if he found it\na relief to speak aloud in the solitude. There was passion and pathos in\nhis voice, but I gathered no other meaning from the sounds that reached\nme.\n\n\"Perhaps I stirred, and by a movement of my shawl revealed the whiteness\nof my dress, for he came toward me, exclaiming,--\n\n\"'Great heavens! what is this?'\n\n\"I shrunk back against the body of the oak, and huddled the shawl\naround my person, hoping thus to escape his observations; but he came\nclose to me, and said very quietly, though his voice trembled a\nlittle,--\n\n\"'Do not hide yourself, but come out into the moonlight. I felt that you\nwould be here.'\n\n\"I arose, obedient as a little child, and walked by his side toward the\nmagnolia-tree, where the moonlight fell in white radiance.\n\n\"'Why did you come out at this late hour?' he said, looking down upon me\nwith gentle compassion in his eyes.\n\n\"'I could not sleep. I was so unhappy that the close air of the house\nstifled me.'\n\n\"'I understand,' he replied, almost mournfully. 'It is the old story. I\ntoo--but what matters that--the air of the house was oppressive. No\nmatter, I shall quit it to-morrow.'\n\n\"'To-morrow,--and you will go?'\n\n\"'Yes; Dennison is an old friend--a dear old friend. I shall go\nto-morrow.'\n\n\"'To-morrow, and forever!' I cried, in a burst of passionate despair,\nwhich frightened me the moment it left my lips.\n\n\"He did not answer in words, but took my two hands between his, and bent\nhis eyes upon me with a glance so searching, that I shrunk away from\nhim, for the moonlight gave supernatural intensity to his face.\n\n\"'To-morrow, and I think forever; believe me, it is better so.'\n\n\"'Better? Forever! forever! Oh, these are terrible words!' I cried,\nscarcely caring to conceal the anguish which wrung such expressions from\nme.\n\n\"'They seem terrible to youth, I know,' he answered, sadly; 'but after a\nwhile you will learn that time softens even our ideas of eternity. Life\nis, and must be, one continued scene of parting.'\n\n\"'But parting is such pain,' I pleaded.\n\n\"'Pain does not last forever.'\n\n\"'Oh, it will; it must!' I cried out, in a passionate protest.\n\n\"The man smiled, and shook his head, sadly enough.\n\n\"'It seems so now; but you will know more of the world some day, and\nlearn to cast deep feeling from you. It is a sad drawback in life.'\n\n\"'And you have learned this lesson?' I asked, half in tears, half\nangrily.\n\n\"He paused a moment, made a gesture as if he were casting some great\nrestraint upon himself, and then answered:\n\n\"'Yes, I have learned the lesson. So must you.'\n\n\"'But I can not. God made me as I am. It is my nature to feel and suffer\nkeenly.'\n\n\"'I think so. Yet in a little time how all this may change!'\n\n\"'Never!'\n\n\"'Ah, yes; and when that change comes--when you are brilliant, careless,\na beautiful coquette, perhaps we can meet again, and play with the foam\nof life pleasantly, as it is tossed to our feet by the waves of society;\nbut deep waters are treacherous; we must not trust to them.'\n\n\"'You talk strangely,' I said, feeling an angry fire kindling against\nhim in my bosom.\n\n\"'I talk honestly, as you will admit some day.'\n\n\"I turned from him, angry with the tone of protection and superiority\nwhich he had assumed. Surely I was no school-girl to be thus adroitly\nput upon my good behavior.\n\n\"'You are angry with me?'\n\n\"'Yes; I have cause. You seem to speak from premises which I do not\nunderstand. What have I done that you should lecture me so?'\n\n\"My anger seemed to amuse him. His eyes flashed, and he laughed a low,\nsweet laugh, that the rippling wind carried off in its murmurs.\n\n\"'What have you done, child? Why, wandered off here, at the peril of\nyour health, when you should have been quietly sleeping!'\n\n\"'But you have done the same thing!'\n\n\"'Yes; but nothing harms me. Being a man, I know how to take care of\nmyself.'\n\n\"'Is it a part of manhood to be without feeling?'\n\n\"'And you charge me with that?'\n\n\"'Yes, I do, or you would never speak of me with an idea that I could\nbecome a brilliant coquette.'\n\n\"'Indeed! Why, are you not a woman?'\n\n\"I turned to move away. There was something bitter in his utterance of\nthe last word that irritated me.\n\n\"He followed me.\n\n\"'You did not hear me out,' he said;--'and a beautiful woman--can such\nrare beings escape admiration?'\n\n\"Still I walked on, leaving the live-oak and magnolia-tree behind. His\nlast speech seemed hollow and conventional. Did he think to appease me\nby commonplace flattery like that?\n\n\"He walked by my side in silence some minutes, looking earnestly in my\nface when it turned to the moonlight. All at once he broke out\nearnestly, passionately, throwing off all the constraint that had made\nhim seem so artificial.\n\n\"'Let us be frank with each other,' he said. 'You are my friend's wife.\nI go from his house to-morrow, because I am afraid of loving you more\nthan an honorable man should. Is this honest? Are you angry with me?'\n\n\"My face was lifted to his; my hands unconsciously clasped themselves. I\ntrembled in every limb; but it was neither with anger nor pain.\n\n\"'Am I not right?' he demanded, turning his face away.\n\n\"I did not answer, for I knew well that, right or wrong, his going would\nleave me miserable.\n\n\"'I thought myself stronger and wiser,' he continued, without seeming\nto heed my silence; 'but that day when you were in such peril I learned\nhow deep was the impression your beauty and loveliness had made upon me.\nSince then I have been resolved to go--my honor and my happiness demand\nit.'\n\n\"Still I was silent, partly from a wild sense of triumph, partly from\nterror lest he should guess at the feeling.\n\n\"'You will not answer me; my frankness offends you.'\n\n\"He seemed touched and hurt by the silence, which I could not force\nmyself to break. All at once I was sobbing. He took my hand gently in\nhis, and led me back along the path we had been walking. I cannot repeat\nall that he said to me. It was himself on whom all blame rested. This\nwas the spirit of his conversation. Not for one moment did he hint that\nI could have been interested in anything he did, save as the hospitable\nlady of a mansion in which he was a guest. Was he deceived? I cannot\ntell; but this I do know, every word he uttered was full of loyal\nrespect for my husband. He did not seem to understand or notice the\ntears I was shedding, but quietly led me toward the house. At last he\nstopped, took my hand, pressed it to his lips, and left me standing\nalone within sight of my dwelling.\n\n\"Lawrence left the next morning at daylight. I had been dreaming on my\nsleepless pillow that scene by the lake over and over again. Every word\nthat man had uttered passed through my brain, and made a sweet lodgment\nin my heart. How careful he had been to save my pride while confessing\nhis own weakness. If he had been masterful, and treated me like a child,\nno word of his had conveyed a suspicion that I too was in danger. His\ndelicacy enthralled me more by far than persuasion could have done. He\nspoke only of his own struggles and his own danger, never hinting that I\nmight share in one or the other. How magnanimous, how self-sacrificing\nhe was--and this man loved me!\n\n\"All at once I heard a noise of wheels in front of the house. A sharp\napprehension broke up my dreams. I sprang out of bed, lifted the lace\ncurtain, and saw my husband's light buggy drawn up on the\ncarriage-drive. While Tom was packing a valice under the seat, Mr.\nLawrence stood near drawing on his gloves.\n\n\"He was going without one word of farewell. The thought made me wild. I\nflung up the window with a violence that tore the valenciennes from the\nsleeve of my night-dress, and called out,--\n\n\"'Not yet, not yet!'\n\n\"He did not hear me, or perhaps would not. That instant he sprang into\nthe buggy, snatched the reins from Tom, and drove off. As he passed a\ncurve in the road, he drew up and looked back at the house, as if unable\nto leave it without a farewell-glance. I was still at the window, half\nshrouded by the curtains, but leaning out, with wild unconsciousness of\nmy position. He waved one hand, drew his horse up with the other so\nsharply that the buggy was half wheeled across the road; the next\ninstant the horse made a plunge forward, seemingly unmanageable, and in\nan instant bore him out of sight.\n\n\"I knelt by the window a long time, looking upon the spot where he had\ndisappeared in blank despair. In one minute my life seemed to have\nbecome a barren waste. Points in the landscape that had been so\nbeautiful over-night, struck me with a dreary appearance of change. My\neyes grew hot and ached with the pain of my sudden desolation. I could\nneither weep nor cry out, but knelt there with a dull sense of sorrow\nand utter loneliness creeping over me. Burdened with these wretched\nfeelings, I crept back to my couch, and burying my face in the pillows,\nsuffered silently.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LXXI.\n\nAWAY FROM HOME.\n\n\n\"This house is not the same now; its stillness oppresses me, its\nmagnificence palls on my senses. Wherever I turn, some memory starts up\nto pain me. Why have I filled every beautiful spot with associations\nthat sting me so?\n\n\"I think that my husband is watching me with more interest than\nformerly. If he sees a cloud on my face, some gentle act of attention\nseeks to drive it away. Sometimes he asks, in a troubled voice, what\nmakes me so sad and thoughtful, as if he guessed at the truth, and the\nsuspicion wounded him. Then I fly from the stillness of my sorrow, and\nforce a wild sort of spirits, that make him still more depressed. This\nold man has seen a great deal of the world in his life, and perhaps\nreads me better than I think. Is deception ever a duty? At any rate, it\nis the refuge of cowards, and sometimes of kindness. Now, I should not\nreally be afraid to lay the whole truth before this old man, so far as\nits effect on myself is concerned; but when I think of him and all the\npain it would certainly give, my heart recoils from its expression. If\nhe would only be a little unkind, I should not care so much. But, after\nall, what is there to explain? No word of _his_, or act of mine, could\nbe censured justly. True, I met him at night, unknown to the family, in\na beautiful and solitary spot, where some conversation passed which made\nme both sad and happy, but no wrong was done to any one, and the whole\nscene, if thoroughly explained, should bring no blame with it. I left\nthe house without one thought of meeting any human being. If he saw and\nfollowed me, it was for a most honorable purpose--honorably, but, oh,\nmost cruelly carried out.\n\n\"How miserably slow the weeks and months roll on. I can endure this\nirksome sameness of life no longer; the very fragrance of the air\nsickens me. I long for change--for excitement. Youth has no need of\nrest; its aspirations are always pressing onward. _He_ said that I was\nbeautiful. My husband has told me this a hundred times, but it made\nlittle impression, for what is the worth of beauty in a great dull house\nlike this? I long to go out into the world again, for there is a chance\nthat I may--no, no, I will not think of that. He did not even tell me\nwhere he was going. But change I must and will have; it is the want of\nexcitement that makes me a slave to these fits of depression. While\nsurrounded by the homage of other men, I shall learn to forget that this\none refused it to me.\n\n\"This evening I ventured upon the subject which has been haunting me for\nweeks. Mr. Dennison remarked that I was getting pale, and had lost all\nthe brilliant glow of spirits which made my first coming home like an\nopening of paradise to him. Was I ill, or had he failed in anything that\ncould have made me happy?\n\n\"I did not complain, but smiled upon him in a way that brought light\ninto his eyes, and said pleasantly enough, that I was not quite myself\nin splendid solitude, that female friends were necessary to me, and I\nhad parted with them perhaps a little too suddenly. Sometimes, I\nconfessed, a feeling of discontent would creep over me, and but for him\nand all his generous attentions, I should grow weary of our grand lonely\nlife.\n\n\"Mr. Dennison became anxious at once. 'Would I have guests invited? It\nwas the easiest thing in life to have the great house filled with the\nmost agreeable company to be found in the State.'\n\n\"'Guests? Oh, nothing of the kind! The duties of a hostess were beyond\nme just then,--but a little journey somewhere--how would he like\nthat?--say to New Orleans?--the approaching autumnal weather would\nrender a trip to the city pleasant, and we could come back any day.'\n\n\"Mr. Dennison accepted this proposal at once. He had seemed a little\nanxious at first when I spoke of leaving home, as if some doubt rested\nin his mind; but when I mentioned New Orleans, the cloud left his face,\nand he fell in with the suggestion.\n\n\"My suspicions were right. Mr. Dennison was not altogether at rest about\nLawrence. At first he suspected that I was anxious to be thrown in his\nway again. I could see it in his face, and dared not speak of Saratoga,\nNewport, or any Northern watering-place, which it had been my first\nintention to suggest. So I mentioned New Orleans, and he was satisfied,\nwhile I fairly bit my lips white with the vexation of my failure. But\nNew Orleans was better than nothing. There, at least, we should find\nsociety, amusement and distraction. Besides, our names would be\nannounced in the public journals, and _he_ might learn of our presence\nthere. Yes, yes, New Orleans was preferable to home, especially as the\nautumn was near, and the gay season northward already breaking up.\n\n\"Cora was in ecstasies when I told her that we were going away. Poor\ngirl, she had found my domestic life very dull and depressing; I could\nsee that by the alacrity with which she went to work. Once more she\nbecame bright and animated as a bird. My wardrobe was speedily put in\norder, and we left the plantation, much happier to go away than we had\nbeen to enter it.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LXXII.\n\nOUT IN THE WORLD AGAIN.\n\n\n\"Lawrence was right. Beauty is a great power, and I am beautiful. I know\nit in a thousand ways, but best of all by the homage of men and the envy\nof women. Both are sweet to me. I love to see these envious creatures\nturn pale and whisper their venom to each other, as I am besieged by the\nattentions of their favorites. At first I was a little timid about\nasserting the power that I felt myself to possess. Mr. Dennison, I\nthought, might be displeased, were his wife to accept the position\noffered her as a belle and leader in the best social circles of the\nSouth. I think he was at first annoyed by the great popularity which\nfollowed my advent into society, but I soon forgot to notice these\nindications, and resolved to live my life whether he was pleased or not.\nAfter all, there is a great deal in this world worth living for besides\nlove as a grand passion. The adoration which others are forced to give\nyou has its charms; besides, there arise episodes of love in one's life,\nwhich come and go like the rosy dawn and golden sunset of a summer-day,\nwhich for the time charm one's heart out of its one deep passion. In\nsociety here I forget how deeply I loved that one man, and better still,\nI forget to think of my husband. For his sake my heart was thrown back\nupon itself, and he had become the cause of my humiliation; but for\nthat, Lawrence might have been my slave, as other men have been, and\nwill be, so long as I allow them to kneel at the altar of my vanity. Had\nI remained at the plantation, this conviction would, I do believe, have\ndeepened into hatred of my husband; but I was too pleasantly occupied,\nbrain and sense, for any deep feeling to reach me in that whirl of\nsociety; just then it would have been as impossible for me to hate, as\nto love my husband. I simply cared nothing about him, save as he was the\nsource from whence I obtained gold in which to frame my beauty. Without\nthat, half my power would have disappeared.\n\n\"Lawrence was right. The time has come when I am a careless, brilliant,\nbeautiful coquette, and this he has made me. 'Then,' he said, 'we can\nmeet in safety and play with the foam of life pleasantly, as it is\ntossed to our feet by the waves of society.'\n\n\"I understand all this now. When I am heartless, and altogether given up\nto vanity, he will not be afraid of loving me, because, to a man like\nhim, love for a woman so transformed would be impossible. But am I\ntransformed? Is not the old nature still alive in my bosom? I have no\ntime for a serious answer. The foam he speaks of is mounting too whitely\naround my feet.\n\n\"'What is this? Mr. Dennison ill? Falling away? Forgetting to smile?\nLooking the very ghost of himself?' These were the very words I\noverheard this morning, as I stood unnoticed behind two ladies\nconversing in the great drawing-room of the St. Charles. Was this true?\nI had not noticed. The old man never complained, and I saw nothing. If\nhe had fallen away in his appetite, no one was less likely to be aware\nof it than myself, for it was very seldom that we breakfasted at the\nsame hour, and at dinner I was always too pleasantly occupied for any\nthought of his appetite. But one thing was true, he did look thin and\nterribly depressed. His white linen coat was hanging loosely around his\nperson. The silvery hair, which everybody admired so much, seemed to\nhave grown thinner. Never in my life have I looked on so sad a face.\n\n\"I crossed the room at once, and sat down by Mr. Dennison. His face\nbrightened, he swept the white hair back from his forehead, and smiled\nupon me.\n\n\"'Are you ill?' I said, laying my hand on his.\n\n\"'No, not ill; only a little lonesome.'\n\n\"'Lonesome among all these people?' I answered, still pressing his hand.\n\n\"He looked down at my hand, which was blazing with great diamonds that\nhe had given me.\n\n\"'There is room for one more,' he said, with a sigh. 'I bought it for\nyou weeks ago, but have found no time in which you could receive it.'\n\n\"He took a star of diamonds from his pocket, and placed it on the only\none of my fingers that was not already ornamented. His old white hands\ntrembled a little as he put the ring on my finger, and I could see tears\ntrembling up to his eyes.\n\n\"'How kind, but how childish you are,' I said, kissing the ring, for it\nwas well worth that small sign of gratitude. 'Now tell me what makes you\nlook so pale and so--'\n\n\"'Old, you hesitate to say; but I know it. You are not the only one,\nchild, who has discovered that you are married to an old, old man.'\n\n\"'I have not thought of it. Indeed, indeed the idea never enters my\nmind,' I answered, honestly enough, for he had very seldom been in my\nmemory at all; 'but what makes you look so miserable? Not that idea, I\nam sure. Is it because I have been so extravagant, and spent such loads\nof money? Sometimes I do get frightened about that.'\n\n\"'But I scarcely regard it--perhaps I ought; but money seems so trivial\ncompared to other things.'\n\n\"'Your health, for instance; for you are ill,' I answered, brushing the\nwhite hair back from his temple with my hand, while the ladies opposite\nwere watching me in a flutter of curiosity.\n\n\"'You are kind to think of that,' he said, gently; 'but I am not ill,\nonly reproaching myself.'\n\n\"'Why?'\n\n\"'For the bondage which you are beginning to feel so heavily.'\n\n\"I looked at him earnestly a moment, and in that glance gathered a\nknowledge of all he had suffered. My heart smote me, for that moment I\nwas ready to make any sacrifice that would do him good. In truth, the\nlife I had been leading had already become wearisome. After all, empty\nhomage satisfies no real want of the heart.\n\n\"'Shall we go home?' I said, with a sudden impulse of kindness.\n\n\"He grasped my hand so tightly that the diamonds hurt me.\n\n\"'If you would--if you only would!'\n\n\"'Let us go to-morrow, then,' I answered. 'No, that cannot be, I have\nengagements; but next week. We shall get home in full time for the\norange-blossoms.'\n\n\"'And you _will_ go?'\n\n\"'Certainly. All this is getting very tiresome. Even the spite of the\nwomen has lost its charm.'\n\n\"That morning we went into the breakfast-room together, and then I\nremarked how completely Mr. Dennison's appetite had failed. This made me\nvery thoughtful. What if he should die?'\n\n\"'Cora,' I said that night, as the girl was undressing me, 'have you\nobserved how ill Mr. Dennison looks?'\n\n\"'Yes, I have, young mistress, and it has frightened me dreadfully.'\n\n\"'Frightened you, Cora? Is he so far gone as that? I did not dream of\nyour caring so much for him.'\n\n\"'Neither do I. It is you that I care for.'\n\n\"'And you think that I would grieve?'\n\n\"'Yes, I do.'\n\n\"'It should be so. Indeed, Cora, he is a good man, and has been kind to\nus.'\n\n\"'But that won't last forever, young mistress. The old master is keen as\nhe is kind. If he was to make his will now, have you much idea that his\nproperty would go to the wife, who scarcely speaks to him once in\ntwenty-four hours?'\n\n\"I started, and turned upon the girl.\n\n\"'Why, Cora, you frighten me!'\n\n\"'Not so much as you have frightened me. Poor white widows aren't to my\ntaste. We have tried that once, and I didn't like it.'\n\n\"'Cora, we will go back to the plantation.'\n\n\"'That is the best thing you can do,' answered the girl, quietly. 'Home\nis the place for a man to die in.'\n\n\"'Why, girl!' I cried out, in nervous dread, 'you speak as if he were\nreally in danger.'\n\n\"'And so he is; people seldom get over the disease that has been\ncreeping on him ever since we came here.'\n\n\"'What disease? What are you speaking of, Cora? What disease do you\nthink Mr. Dennison has?'\n\n\"'A broken heart.'\n\n\"'Cora!'\n\n\"'None of your sudden fits--people get over them; but slow and sure: I\nhave been watching it from the first.'\n\n\"'And you think I have done this?'\n\n\"'Of course. Who else?'\n\n\"'Cora, we will go home next week.'\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LXXIII.\n\nFIRST WIDOWHOOD.\n\n\n\"I am a widow. The name fills me with awe, as if I had never heard it\nbefore. It has a new meaning now--a terrible meaning of death, which is\nfull of reproach and horror. He lies yonder, cold and still, the smile\nwhich he had almost forgotten of late frozen on his white lips, the\nlines of age graven deeply in his face,--with something more terrible\nstill, which makes me shiver and shrink as I gaze upon it.\n\n\"Have I done this? Is that look of sorrow but the shadow of a charge\nwhich the recording angel is now writing down in the eternal book\nagainst me? Am I the murderer of this good old man? How he loved me! how\nkind, how generous, how delicate he was! And I--no, no! it must have\nbeen old age. Men of seventy do not sink down and perish in silence\nbecause they are not loved with the intensity given to youth. Oh, how I\nwish it were all over! While he lies in the house, so frozen and cold, I\nshall not draw a free breath. It seems to me as if he could rise up any\nmoment out of that marble sleep with the power to search every thought\nthat has been in my heart during the last year. His knowledge is perfect\nnow; he reads my soul as I dare not read it myself. _Have_ I wished his\ndeath? Have I ever thought of what might happen after that? God forgive\nme, for I seem terrible to myself.\n\n\"Death in the house; this great lonely dwelling, with all its luxurious\nappliances, is but a tomb. The air chills me; its solitude is terrible.\nCora comes to me once in a while with her silky flatteries, and attempts\nto convince me that I have never been blamable as a wife. I know that\nshe does not believe this, and almost hate her for thinking that her\nsophistry can reconcile me with myself. Yet what have I done? Amused\nmyself--gathered crowds of admirers around me--neglected the only true\nlove that ever lightened my life. Shall I ever be worshipped again as\nthat old man worshipped me?...\n\n\"They have carried him out from his home forever, and now the old house\nseems more vast and lonely than before. I still hear the tramping of his\nbearers' feet, and shudder as the pall seems to rustle and sweep by me.\nAh! the first feelings of widowhood must be mournful indeed to a\ndevoted wife; to me they are terrible. The very air seems to reproach\nme. I start at each sound as if it were a denunciation. The very air I\nbreathe seems heavy with funereal shadows....\n\n\"The first great horror has left me, but a feeling of blank desolation\nstill remains. I have not yet thought of the future, or asked myself\nwhat may be in store for the woman whom so many are loading with praises\nand commiseration which she knows in her heart are undeserved.\n\n\"This morning I was aroused from the heavy apathy which has made my life\na blank, by the arrival of my husband's solicitor. Mr. Dennison has left\na will making me the inheritor of everything he had on earth. The lawyer\ntold me this, and, for the first time since my widowhood, I felt the\nheart in my bosom stir like a living thing. Was I indeed so wealthy, and\nfree, too!\n\n\"I observed in a dreamy way that the lawyer looked anxious and\noppressed, as if something yet remained to be told.\n\n\"'Is this all,' I said; 'has he mentioned no other person in the will?'\n\n\"'No other person,' was the reply; 'but I have something to explain\nwhich may change the aspect of my news. It seems that within the past\nfew months a heavy mortgage has been laid upon the plantation, and it\nmust be sold.'\n\n\"'A mortgage!' I said; 'that is something which prevents a man holding\nor selling his own land, is it not?'\n\n\"'It is a debt for which the estate is pledged,' answered the lawyer;\n'but I wonder you do not understand it better, for your own signature is\nattached.'\n\n\"Then I remembered that, during the stay of Mr. Lawrence at our house,\nMr. Dennison had called me to the table in his library and asked me to\nsign a paper. He explained to me clearly enough, no doubt, that the\npaper might deprive me of some claim for dower; but I did not heed it\nat the time, and now it was to fall upon me with all its force. The\nplantation must be sold, the lawyer said, for he was one of the\nexecutors to the will. The mortgage once cleared off and the debts paid,\nthere would still be a handsome property left.\n\n\"All at once I was seized with intense love for the old place. Where\nshould I ever find a home so rich in comforts, so beautifully\nsurrounded?\n\n\"'Is it not possible to keep the place?' I demanded, with growing\ninterest.\n\n\"'No; the mortgage was given, I imagine, in order to raise funds for\nsome dazzling speculation in which Mr. Lawrence was concerned. At any\nrate, there is no money to pay it with, and the estate must go to the\nhammer.'\n\n\"'This is cruel, it is unjust,' I said, angrily.\n\n\"'It was wrong and foolish to involve the estate as Mr. Dennison has,'\nanswered the executor, 'and the loss is a heavy one. Let us be thankful\nthat our good friend has left enough without that.'\n\n\"'But his losses were brought on by Mr. Lawrence?' I questioned,\nspeaking the name with a thrill of pain.\n\n\"'No! they were fellow-sufferers. It is understood that Lawrence has\nlost heavily, and will perhaps be ruined.'\n\n\"Instantly my heart swelled with sympathy for the man who had helped to\nimpoverish me.\n\n\"'Oh! if he had but left the estate unburdened, I should not care.'\n\n\"Heaven knows I was thinking of the man who had, perhaps, wronged me,\nbut the executor misunderstood my words and looked at me wonderingly. I\nsaw this, but could not explain that the great wish of my heart was that\nthere might be enough to redeem the losses that had fallen upon\nLawrence. I could not endure to think of him as a poor man. A poor\nman--that is a terrible word to the ears of a Southern lady.\n\n\"The executor tried to explain everything clearly, and I made an effort\nto understand. He was anxious about the property, and thought the times\nunpropitious. The North and South were that hour verging closer and\ncloser toward a civil war, in which the value of property would become\nuncertain, and I might be a sufferer.\n\n\"I knew all this before; rumors of political strife had reached even our\nsecluded home. I knew that the bitter animosity which had been long\ngrowing between the North and South had even then broken into open\nhostilities. Southern statesmen had retreated in a body from the United\nStates Senate, and resigned their seats in the House. I had taken a\nblind interest in this matter, and, in a loose way, hated everything\nthat opposed the dominant power of my own section; but it was as a child\ntakes sides. I did not, and do not, really understand the questions\nwhich give rise to all this turmoil. Of course, the whole affair will be\nsettled somehow; people never do fight when they threaten so much.\nBesides, the South is so reasonable; she only asks to set up for\nherself, and be let alone. What objection can there be to this? I dare\nsay the Northern people will acquiesce; but if not, it will only take a\nmonth or so to gain our independence. I think the executor is right to\nput off the sale till then; for of course property will rise enormously,\nand this may compensate me for that great drawback, the mortgage. But\nuntil the estate is settled, I must remain a slave here. Perhaps that is\nbest; it would not be proper for a widow to seek society under a year;\nbut oh! how dreary that year will be!\n\n\"I wonder if Mr. Lawrence has heard of his friend's death? Months have\ngone by and not a word from him, not even the usual letter of\ncondolence. Perhaps he is coming. Surely the share he has taken in the\nruin of this property ought to bring some explanation. There is no\nreason now why he should keep aloof.\n\n\"At last I have heard from him. A letter came to the executor, enclosing\none for me. It is in my bosom. I have covered the senseless paper with\nkisses. Yet there is nothing in it but gentle condolence for sorrow. The\nreason he has not written before is that the news of Mr. Dennison's\ndeath reached him in Europe, where he will remain until the end of this\nyear. His letter to the executor was long and thoroughly explanatory of\nall the business which lay between him and Mr. Dennison. This mortgage,\nit seems, was only the accumulation of many others that had from year to\nyear been a burden on the estate. Through the influence of Mr. Lawrence,\na New York capitalist had paid up these mortgages, and concentrated them\ninto one which, after all, does not cover half the value of the estate.\nIt was this act of friendship which brought Mr. Lawrence to our house.\nThere was neither risk nor speculation in the whole business. Even with\nthis encumbrance, Mr. Dennison's will would have left me wealthy, but\nfor the terrible civil war which has broken over us. As it is, there are\nthree hundred slaves, which the mortgage does not touch, and they are a\nhandsome property in themselves.\n\n\"The estate is sold, and the result scarcely covers the mortgage. Still\nthe slaves are left, and my jewels are of great value. Sometimes, when\nmy hand rests upon my black dress, the diamonds with which my husband\nloaded it flame up and burn into my conscience. How could I be so\nnegligent and cold to him?\n\n\"Some months longer I shall remain on the estate. The new owner wishes\nto hire most of my slaves; that arrangement will supply me with an ample\nincome, and permit me to go anywhere; that is, if I can get away, when\nthe whole country is swarming with armed men. Thank heaven! my home has\nescaped all these military disturbances; but they build a wall of\nbayonets between me and _him_. I cannot even get letters....\n\n\"I am going: an opportunity offers. This very day I start for the North.\nMy pass is ready, my escort waiting. How my heart swells! how my courage\nrises! The dangers of war have no terrors for me. I am going to the\nNorth, and _he_ is there....\n\n\"How long it is since I have written a line in my journal, or even seen\nit! In our rough journey there was little time or opportunity for\nwriting, but here I have rest and am entirely out of danger.\n\n\"Lawrence is in the Federal army, commanding one of the city regiments\nwhich have gone down to the war for special duty. How vast and lonely\nthis hotel seems! I am lost in this great wilderness of people. The\nstreets are full of military men; regiments are constantly passing\nthrough on their way to the war. Great heavens! did our people hope to\nwrest away any portion of this great country from men like these? For\nthe first time I understand the madness of the rebellion. It is no light\nthing to rend a great nation asunder. I begin to feel this, and tremble\nfor the people of the South. In the insanity of their ambition they have\nsacrificed everything....\n\n\"He is coming. His regiment is ordered home. I am here at the Fifth\nAvenue Hotel--his home when he is in the city. Lawrence must not find me\nhere. His fastidious delicacy might take the alarm! Besides, I have made\nacquaintances, and am almost acting over the _role_ that made me so\npopular at New Orleans; else the suspense of this long waiting would\nhave been intolerable. Yes, it is far better that I should be away when\nhe comes. If he hears of me, it will only be from admirers. Even with\nthe women, I think that I have left no enemies. It is early for the\nseason, but this very day my rooms at Long Branch shall be taken. Will\nhe follow me there? The question drives the breath back from my lips....\n\n\"I have been at the Branch three weeks. His regiment has returned to\nNew York, but I have not seen him: this suspense is terrible. Yesterday\nI sent Cora to the city, ostensibly to get some articles that I left at\nthe hotel, but in fact to bring me intelligence of him, for which my\nsoul was thirsting.\n\n\"She came back radiant, for the poor girl understands how anxious I am.\nShe saw him--talked with him. He has been very busy with his regiment,\nand attending to neglected business on Wall Street; but next week--next\nweek--oh, how long the days will seem till then!...\n\n\"He is here. I have seen him; we have walked together, free as birds\nupon the shore, where the sea rolls in with bewildering harmonies for\nthe happy, and solemn anthems for those who suffer. To-day the very air\nwas jubilant; the waves came rolling in crested with foam, and dashing\nthe sand with shimmering silver. How the sunshine danced and broke and\nlaughed over the broad expanse of water! The sea-gulls, as they swooped\ndown and dipped their wings in the curling foam, were like doves to us.\nIndeed, this flat, treeless shore on which the ocean is eternally\nbeating, is just now the brightest paradise I ever knew.\n\n\"Weeks roll on, and our companionship is perfect; but he says nothing of\nthe future. We talk of books, of friendship--love even--but in a vague,\ndreamy way, that confirms nothing. I wonder at this, and it disturbs me.\nIs it that he is no longer a rich man? I have heard this, but am not\nsure, for the rumor is often met with contradiction. If this should\nprove true, it will account for his conduct. I know him well enough to\nbe sure that his sensitive honor would take alarm at the thought of\nmarrying a woman whose property would more than match his own; and mine,\nnotwithstanding all losses, is of no ordinary value.\n\n\"These thoughts trouble me. Nothing can be more impressive than his\ndevotion; my society seems all in all to him, but our relationship\nremains the same.\n\n\"A rather singular family has just arrived--some rich iron-man from the\ninterior of Pennsylvania. His wife is a confirmed invalid, but one of\nthe most refined and lovable women I ever saw. She must have been very\nbeautiful in her youth, for her features are singularly like those of\nher daughter, who is considered the most lovely girl at the Branch this\nseason. The rooms which Mr. Lee occupies open on to the same veranda\nwith mine, and as the lady spends a great deal of her time in looking\nout upon the ocean from her luxurious easy-chair, I managed to open an\nacquaintance with her and a lady who is her constant companion, and\neither an elder sister of the beautiful girl I have spoken of, or some\nnear friend of the family. My first advances to this lady were rather\ncoldly received. She has evidently been out of society a long time, and\nappears shy and reserved. The younger lady seemed to be reading my face\nwith more scrutiny than pleased me. She is not really handsome, but has\nlovely hair and an abundance of it, with deep gray eyes that are almost\nalways shaded by long curling lashes, which gives them intense\nexpression when she lifts them suddenly and meets your gaze. Her\ncomplexion is pure and bright, but the mouth is a little too large for\nharmony with the other features. Still, her smile is peculiarly\nexpressive when she does smile, which is not often.\n\n\"I can hardly tell why this person impressed me so forcibly, but a\nstrange sensation came over me when those eyes were first lifted to my\nface. She is not imposing in her presence, but very modest and very\nunobtrusive. Her attentions to Mrs. Lee were more than affectionate; and\nwith the young lady she has the air and manner of a sister who feels her\nsuperiority in age, and nothing more.\n\n\"This morning I met Mr. Lee on the shore, walking alone. He is a\nprincely man in appearance, taller than Mr. Lawrence, and of more noble\nproportions. Still, his finely-cut features lack the keen intelligence\nwhich is only seen where great genius exists. The years he has already\nnumbered scarcely count to his disadvantage. Not very long ago I should\nhave considered this man as far the handsomest of the two; but now the\nsplendor of genius alone can satisfy me....\n\n\"I have had terrible news. President Lincoln has issued a proclamation\nwhich emancipates all slaves in the rebellious States. If this act is\nlawful, and can be enforced, I am almost a beggar. All the property to\nwhich I have a right lies in the strong arms of nearly three hundred\n slaves. A single word, the mere writing of a man's name, has swept\nall my wealth away. With the exception of my jewels, I have nothing.\nThis is a terrible blow, for I have endured poverty, and shrink from it\nwith absolute dread. To me a luxurious ease and elegance are a fixed\nhabit, and so necessary that I could not live without them.\n\n\"One consolation comes out of all this ruin. I am sure that Lawrence has\nhesitated to say all that is in his heart on account of my wealth,\nwhich, if rumor speaks truly, was far greater than anything he can\ncommand. When I think of this and glory in his sensitive delicacy, the\nloss of all my slaves seems a less crushing calamity. This very day I\nwill tell him how suddenly the Act of Emancipation has placed me on his\nlevel.\n\n\"I have told him of the sweeping misfortune which has left me on the\nverge of poverty. He looked at me in alarm. His face clouded over, his\neyes turned away from mine. It was moments before he spoke.\n\n\"'It is a misfortune,' he said, at last, and there was bitterness in his\nvoice, as if some wrong had been done himself. 'Poverty is a terrible\nthing; from my heart I pity you.'\n\n\"'But it is not everything,' I faltered; 'surely happiness can exist\nwithout wealth: you must not frighten me with the thought that my future\nis all broken up.'\n\n\"He shook his head, moved away from me abruptly, and stood for a moment\nlooking out upon the ocean in gloomy silence. At last he came back and\ntook my hand, which was growing cold.\n\n\"'It is a misfortune,' he said, 'but you will hardly feel it. Something\nis left, if properly managed. You are young and splendidly beautiful. A\nfew smiles--a little condescension--and fortunes will be laid at your\nfeet, compared to which that which you have lost will be nothing. As for\nme--but I will not talk of myself. It is only another dream broken up.'\nHe turned abruptly, dropped my cold hand from his clasp, and walked\naway, leaving me stranded, as it were, like a wreck upon the shore.\n\n\"What does this mean? 'It is only another dream broken up.' These were\nhis words. Merciful heavens! has this ruin fallen on my whole life. Will\npoverty frighten back the heart that was mine?\n\n\"'Another dream broken up.' These words signify everything that is\nhumiliating and painful. If they have any meaning at all, he is ready to\ngive me up rather than face the difficulties of my position. And I\nthought him so disinterested, so proud!\n\n\"Alas! I thought myself unhappy before, but this is perfect desolation.\n'Another dream broken up' for him--a life broken up for me.\n\n\"I do not believe it. I mistook the meaning of his words. He loved me; I\nknow he did. Was it not a consciousness of too passionate tenderness\nthat drove him away from me when I was a married woman? Has he not\nsought me since, and told me in a thousand ways how dear I was to him?\nHas he not so mingled our future lives in his conversation that there\ncould be no mistaking the drift of his thoughts? I am foolish to think\nthat this will make any lasting difference. Besides, Lincoln must be\nmaster of the South before my slaves can be reached by any act of his.\"\n\n * * * * *\n\n\"It is true: Lawrence, during the last week, has been gradually\nwithdrawing himself from my society. I have seen him less frequently of\nlate; he seldom joins me unless I am surrounded by others. Our walks on\nthe beach are entirely broken up, and he no longer seeks me when I\npurposely sit apart on the veranda of the hotel.\n\n\"I have been so annoyed and felt so wronged by his conduct, that a\nspirit of bitter retaliation is aroused in my bosom. The most\naristocratic and splendid man here is Mr. Lee. I have noticed once or\ntwice that Lawrence has seemed a little disturbed by the slight interest\nthis gentleman has taken in me. He shall feel this more keenly before\nthe week is over. By that time a prouder and more fastidious man than he\nis shall be my slave. That idea of the power a brilliant coquette may\nwield, which he first planted in my mind, shall bring forth bitter fruit\nfor his eating before I have done with him.\n\n\"This man shall be at my feet again--I do not know whether in love or\nhate; but no living creature shall ever cast me off in this slow,\nheartless fashion. I am young, beautiful, the fashion--but these things\ncount for but little in a contest with men like Lawrence. He it was who\nfirst told me that I possess something far more powerful than all\nthese--intellect, talent, powers of combination, and that subtle\nmagnetism which no man has ever yet had power to resist: compared with\nthis, beauty, youth, and fashion are trivial possessions. But I have\nthem all, and it shall go hard if this proud man is not made to feel\ntheir influence. He thinks I accept the position, and do not feel. Let\nhim. I have not mingled in society and practised his lessons for\nnothing. The 'brilliant coquette' with whom he could associate with\nsafety has at least learned how to conceal her anguish. He shall yet\nfind how fatal and poisonous is the hatred growing up like a upas-tree\nin the desert he has made. My acquaintance with Mr. Lee thrives. I have\nbecome the intimate friend of his daughter, a tender nurse to his\ninvalid wife. They are a singularly refined and intelligent family, so\nloving and true that I almost envy the simplicity which springs from so\nmuch goodness. In my friendship for his wife and daughter I find the\nsurest means of interesting Mr. Lee.\n\n\"What do I purpose by this? Why, to triumph over that ingrate Lawrence\nby a conquest of the only man within reach who is admitted to be his\nsuperior. He has humiliated my pride, wounded my vanity, and, oh\nheavens! thrown back the most passionate love that woman ever bestowed\non man, as too worthless for his acceptance without money. Were Mr. Lee\nan unmarried man, this Lawrence should be invited to act as his\ngroomsman within the month. As it is, he is distinguished and\nunapproachable to the common herd. As to the rest, wait and see--wait\nand see!\n\n\"Even here that man seems determined to thwart and wound me. Once, when\nI was talking with Mr. Lee in a low voice, watching the effect of this\nintimacy on Lawrence, who stood near, from under my half-closed\neyelashes, he came up quietly, and desired to be introduced to my\ncompanion, who that moment moved away unconscious of the request.\n\n\"Lawrence has become acquainted with the young lady. I do not know how\nhe managed it, but this morning when I looked out upon the sea, thinking\nonly of him, they were standing together on the shore, conversing like\nold friends. My heart stood still; I felt my very lips turn white. The\ngirl is rich, beautiful, and of good family. Almost her entire life has\nbeen spent in France, and she has undoubtedly brought all the arts and\ngraces learned in foreign society in order to insure her conquests here.\nHow did she manage to attract Lawrence? No woman has been able to do\nthat since he came here. Until now my influence has been supreme, my\nsociety sufficient to his happiness;--_now_ he is standing by her--yes,\nlooking down into the eyes of that girl with the air of a man entranced.\nWhat can it mean? what can it mean?...\n\n\"I have not slept all night. My brain whirls, my heart aches; all the\npride in my nature rises up in rebellion. I hate that man. He loves her.\nI can see it in his eyes; I can hear it in his speech. There is homage\nin the very bend of his person when he salutes her. Never, even in the\nfirst days of our acquaintance, has he addressed me with such tender\nadmiration. Oh, how I hate her! The blood burns hotly in my veins when\nshe approaches me. I long to strike her down. But be quiet, proud heart!\nthe time will come--the time will come!\n\n\"A gentleman has just arrived at the Branch from the neighborhood of Mr.\nLee's residence in Pennsylvania. He is a bright, chivalrous,\nnoble-hearted young fellow, evidently in love with Jessie Lee, who looks\nupon him only as a generous young man whom she has known all her life,\nand cannot be particularly interested in. I discovered all this at the\nfirst interview. Besides the disadvantage of a long intimacy, she does\nnot care for him because of the fascinations this other man has thrown\naround her. Poor fellow! how sad and bewildered he looks when she turns\nfrom him with such unconscious indifference to listen for the footsteps\nof his rival. How her cheek burns and her eyelids droop when the one man\napproaches her! Ah! I know the feeling, and could almost give pity for\nthe disappointment in store for her; for she shall be disappointed. His\n'brilliant coquette' is on the watch, softly, stealthily, but vigilant\nas a fox. Where two men are in love with the same woman, opportunities\nfor complications are always arising. I shall neither overlook or throw\nthem aside.\n\n\"Days and weeks have worn away,--that is the word,--worn away with such\ndull joylessness that they seem to me like the heavy dreams of a sick\nman. It is true this man would have married me out of lukewarm love and\na thirst for money; but it is all over now. Both inclinations have\nkindled up into fiery passion for this Jessie Lee, and she is in love\nwith him--a first love, deep and shy, but positive. He sees this and\nexults in it, utterly careless that I see and suffer.\n\n\"My friends reproach me for my reckless gayety. They complain that I am\ntoo greedy of pleasure, and give myself no rest. Greedy of pleasure! I\nam only fleeing from pain; I cannot pause to think without loathing the\npast and dreading the future. I rush onward like a wounded animal,\nafraid to pause lest I should be tempted to lie down and bleed to death.\n\n\"Lawrence has become close friends with young Bosworth. They have known\neach other before, it seems, and the acquaintance has been warmly\nrenewed. There is craft and calculation in this. Let me watch and wait.\nI knew it. Lawrence seldom attempts to attract man or woman in vain.\nThis morning the blinds of my window were closed, and I sat thoughtfully\nin the twilight of my room, listening to the murmurs of the ocean, that\nseemed to grow softer and more slumberous as the sun poured its silvery\nradiance upon them. I was very sad. No one would have complained of my\nspirits could they have seen me then.\n\n\"All at once, voices startled me. Lawrence and young Bosworth had paused\nnear the closed blinds of my room. Just before this, some invitation had\nevidently been extended to Lawrence, and he accepted it with evident\nsatisfaction.\n\n\"'Of course I will come, my good fellow. Fine shooting, a good horse,\nand such neighbors as the Lees, would draw a man out of paradise. You\nmay count on me for a month.'\n\n\"'Then it is settled,' answered Bosworth, with a little reserve; perhaps\nhe was not altogether pleased that the Lees were considered as an\ninducement for the visit. 'Then it is settled. We will do our best to\nmake your visit to the old house pleasant.'\n\n\"They passed on after this, and left me trembling with indignation.\nLawrence had made arrangements to follow Jessie Lee in a way that would\ncommit him to nothing. Here, my presence has been some restraint upon\nhim. In the country, his opportunities to see her will be far greater,\nand he will become thoroughly acquainted with all the advantages of her\nposition.\n\n\"Lawrence is going to visit his rival, Mr. Bosworth. I will visit my\nrival, Miss Jessie Lee, at the same time. Before the night closes in, I\nwill have an invitation from both the young lady and her invalid mother.\nAs for Miss Hyde, it would be a thousand years before I got one from\nher. She does not like me, but I will become an inmate of her friends'\nhouse nevertheless. I can almost smile when I think of the confusion\nthis arrangement will make.\n\n\"The night has not darkened yet, and I am invited to The Ridge. This is\nthe name of Mrs. Lee's place in the country. How easily these gentle and\ntruthful women are managed. They had not the least idea of inviting me\nwhen I entered their parlor, but in ten minutes after it was all\narranged. I did not promise to go, however, but left the acceptance for\na future day. This uncertainty will prevent them mentioning the visit to\nLawrence....\n\n\"I am here at The Ridge, an honored guest, welcome to every one except\nMiss Hyde, who never has even pretended to like me. She has great\ninfluence in the family; but how long will it last? My enemies usually\nget into trouble in some unexpected way before I have been with them\nlong.\n\n\"Lawrence is here, but I have managed that he shall not know of my\npresence until we meet face to face. We have a delicate game to play,\nand I shall enjoy the first move.\n\n\"I have seen him. We went out on horseback this afternoon, and he joined\nus. I was in my saddle when he rode up, and smiled upon him as if we had\nmet only yesterday. His face flushed scarlet when he saw me. I made no\neffort to have him near me, but rode on with Mr. Lee, who is really one\nof the most charming men I ever saw. I watched Lawrence closely, to\ndetect some annoyance at this intimacy; but his face was inscrutable.\nOne thing was positive: my presence annoyed him.\n\n\"I think there was an effort made by Miss Hyde to keep me from Mrs.\nLee's sick-room, but all her petty obstacles were swept away like a\nhandful of rushes. Let this dainty little person take care, or she may\nnot long remain the friend _par excellence_ of the family. Mrs. Lee is\nvery delicate, and may at any hour drop out of life. They are enormously\nrich, and most of the money comes from her real estate. I suppose\nLawrence knows all this, or he would not have been in the neighborhood;\nbut he shall never marry this girl--never--never!\n\n\"I am gaining something of my old ascendency over this man; and as I\ngain, she loses--no matter how--but she does. There are things which we\nnever write, or care to see on record even in our own hearts. I think\nthe devoted attentions of my host wound his vanity a little; and it is\nfor this reason I encourage them--with another, so vague and remote that\nit scarcely takes shape as yet. But this is certain: I will not be made\nbankrupt in everything. If love fails me, I will have power and wealth.\nIf he attains this girl, I will sweep everything else out of his reach.\nThe pale woman up yonder in her tower-chamber cannot live forever.\n\n\"There is a little imp of Satan in this house, who is constantly with\nMrs. Lee, vigilant as a fox, but, to all appearance, stolid enough in\neverything where her mistress is not concerned. She is completely\nuneducated, and seems to observe or know nothing beyond her duties in\nthe sick-room; but she is forever there, and, I am sure, listens\nsometimes to our conversation, though it makes no visible impression\nupon her. I have told Cora to gain some influence over this strange\ncreature. Since then she has been in my room frequently, and yesterday\nproposed to dress my head, which was beautifully done. She is very\nquiet, and takes no interest in anything around her, but talks to Cora\nwhen I am away, and the two are becoming very intimate. I shall find her\nuseful. In her simplicity she will tell Cora everything.\n\n\"Young Bosworth has proposed to Jessie and been rejected; I am sure of\nthis, though she is honorably reticent, and Miss Hyde refuses to speak.\nMy relations with Lawrence are getting more and more confidential and\nfriendly. Yesterday he even hinted at his attachment for Jessie. I\nlistened in dead stillness, holding my breath, for it seemed as if some\ncruel hand were clutching at my heart. Does he think that I have no\nfeeling, no pride? Sometimes I hate the man. How would he open this\nsubject? How was I endowed with power to listen without shrieking forth\nthe agony it inflicted?\n\n\"He asked me, with an effort at carelessness, if I thought there was\nanything serious in young Bosworth's attentions to Miss Lee. His voice\nfaltered a little, and I knew that he was anxious. So I answered with\ngentle deliberation that I knew very little of the matter. Cora had\ngathered from the servants that they were mutually attached, but Mr. Lee\nopposed the marriage, as young Bosworth's fortune was in no reasonable\nproportion to that Miss Lee would inherit. Lawrence winced at this,\nunless I am greatly mistaken. Bosworth is a millionaire compared to him.\nIf he has property of any amount, I have been unable to learn the fact.\nIndeed, he speaks of himself always as a poor man; but that may be from\ncalculation. Thinking that Bosworth might know and have spoken of his\nfriend's affairs, I have brought up the subject once or twice when\nconversing with Miss Hyde, but she evidently knew little or nothing\nabout it. Oh, why is he not a rich man! The temptation of Miss Lee's\nfortune would be nothing to him then, and that girl and I would stand on\nequal ground. With the odds so completely against me, I have sworn to\nmyself that he shall never, never marry her.\n\n\"She loves him, and I think he loves her; still he turns to me for\nsympathy and counsel, believing that I forget and forgive.\n\n\"Yes, she has rejected young Bosworth, and he is ill, very ill. That\nfine old lady, his grandmother, has sent for Miss Hyde, who will take\nJessie Lee to visit her sick lover. Lawrence shall know this. He shall\nwatch for her, going and coming. What, but intense love, can account for\na step so singular--taken, too, without the knowledge of her father, for\nI will see that no communication of the fact shall reach him.\n\n\"It is exactly as I wished. He saw her on the road; he knows how angry\nher father was. His mortification is complete. He suffers enough to make\nmy soul rise up in arms against him. To-day he betrayed one fact. The\nhope of gaining her property was a powerful incentive, however much he\nmay love her. The man is worse than poor--heavily in debt--and feels\nhimself compelled to marry riches. Perhaps this is the sole motive that\nbrings him to the feet of this beautiful heiress. If I thought so, he\nmight marry her; and I would wait a little till that frail woman--no,\nthat is a terrible thought; let it sleep--let it sleep. Still, what\nwould I do, even if Lawrence loved me? With extravagant tastes like\nours, and high social positions to maintain without means, and he in\ndebt, a marriage would be madness. If I were only sure that he sought\nher for her money alone--but I will not think of it.\n\n\"Lawrence has gone. I could not endure to see his disappointment, and\nlet him depart supposing her engaged.\n\n\"I cannot live without him. This beautiful place is a desert, with all\nits blossoming flowers and rich appliances. When I feel that he has\ngone, a gloom falls upon everything around me. I am more lonely and\nmiserable than his devotion to this young heiress could make me.\nWithout his society, life would be a heavy burden. But how is that to be\nattained?\n\n\"These few days have been important ones to me. I have conjectured and\nthought till my brain aches and my heart is sore. To-day I stood upon\nthe top of the Ridge, looking out upon the town and the vast landed\nestate owned by this man. Miss Hyde was with me, and something she said\nled me into a new train of thought. It seems that Jessie Lee is an\nheiress in spite of her father. At her mother's death, she will come in\npossession of half the estate. Of course, she will always live near the\nhomestead, and the man she marries must necessarily be almost an inmate\nthere. I have thought of this a great deal. New combinations are\narranging themselves in my mind. If this rich man were free--but I dare\nnot think of it.\n\n\"This lady is very lovely, but life must be a burden to any invalid. I\nshould think death a mercy compared to the dull monotony of a sick-room.\nHe is very tender and kind to her; but full health and continued illness\ncannot long remain in sympathy. He has learned this within the last two\nmonths, or I am greatly mistaken. Jessie Lee is getting distrustful of\nme. Miss Hyde has disliked me from the first, but in the sick-room I am\nall-potent, and this proud man does not himself dream of the power I\nhave attained over him....\n\n\"I will do it; what choice have I? Poverty on one side, loneliness,\ndesolation. On the other, wealth, position, his society. Oh, if I could\nonly be sure that he does not love her!\n\n\"Having made up my mind, I am not one to falter. Yesterday I was talking\nwith her about opiates. She is very nervous and wakeful at night, but\nrefused to take laudanum. Very well; I have persuaded her that\nchloroform will bring rest, and she has some in her room. If she should\ntake an overdose, who can be astonished?\n\n\"Last night I had a fearful struggle in her room. That girl seems\nendowed with wonderful resistance. I cannot put her so deeply into\ninsensibility that she does not come out with a suddenness that\nfrightens me. Perhaps I am nervous; everything startles me, and I feel\npanic-stricken at the least sound.\n\n\"After several failures I at last got the imp into perfect\nunconsciousness. _She_ was lying on her white bed, more like a ghost\nthan a human being. I stood over her; the dim outline of her person was\njust visible, but my hand crept slowly through the darkness, grasping\nthe bottle, which was already uncorked. I was resolute. There was no\ntremor of heart or hand to hold me back. Slowly and steadily she inhaled\nthe drug. Her breath stopped--her hand, which I grasped in mine, was\ngrowing cold, when I heard a scraping noise behind me. In an instant the\nroom was illuminated with pale blue light. I turned in horror, and saw\nthe girl Lottie and Miss Hyde, both pale as death, gazing upon me. I\nescaped them almost by a miracle. Cora came to my aid, and, quick as a\nflash of lightning, changed the bottle in my hand for another, while\nMiss Hyde was absolutely holding me in her arms. The whole family were\naroused, but I received them calmly: the moment of peril had passed,\nand, instead of sinking, my energies rose to the conflict. But after I\nreached my room, the reaction was terrible. I fell from one fainting fit\nto another until morning.\n\n\"That girl Lottie suspects me. No fox waiting for prey was ever more\nvigilant. I dare not venture to that room again.\n\n\"An idea struck me this afternoon. A few words, spoken sadly and\nsecretly by the sick woman, revealed means of reaching the end I wish,\nwhich are entirely free from danger, and may lead to other results. Let\nme think; let me plan. Why did this idea never present itself before?\n\n\"'To think that he did not love me, would be death,' she said. I felt\nthe blood leap from my heart. This sentence revealed a terrible power\nwhich might safely be used. A power so subtle and deep-working that no\nhuman being would ever guess at its fatal effects.\n\n\"I have written this woman a letter, so completely imitating Jessie\nLee's handwriting that no human being can detect the difference. In that\nletter I have accused myself of attempting to entrap Mr. Lee, and of\nusurping the affections that should belong to his wife. I have pointed\nout proof after proof that he has ceased to regard her, and is becoming\nweary of the life her illness forces upon him. I have warned her that\nhis love is already given to another, and that her very life is becoming\nburdensome to him.\n\n\"The letter is adroitly written, but has no signature. Who could suppose\nany woman capable of maligning herself? I have sent it to the mail. It\nwill reach her to-morrow. I cannot sleep to-night. Work like this\nrequires a heart of brass and nerves of steel.\n\n\"It is done. She got the letter while we were out riding. When we came\nback, her heart was broken--poor thing, poor woman! I almost wish it had\nnot been done. The feeling of terror that seized upon me when I saw\ntheir white faces, was awful. A faint sickness crept over me, but I must\ngo on and face the work I had done.\n\n\"I kissed her while she was dying. Did Judas feel so when he betrayed\nthe Saviour? No wonder he went out and killed himself. A drop of her\nlife-blood clung to my lips. I washed it off again and again, but it\nburns there yet--it burns there yet....\n\n\"Weeks have passed, mostly in solitude, for we keep apart from each\nother, and meet gloomily when forced into domestic companionship. I am\nsure this man loves me, though as yet he has given no sign. I am equally\nsure that the other inmates of the house hate me.\n\n\"I have written to Lawrence, explaining away many things that drove him\nfrom the neighborhood. I have told him that Jessie Lee is not\nengaged--that she has loved him from the first. This will bring him\nback. Let him marry her; his presence is my life. That much at least\nwill be secured.\n\n\"He has been here, she has refused him utterly, and he is furious. Oh,\nsuch words as he used, such cruel, hard truths as he told me! They\npierce my heart like arrows poison-tipped. He does not love me--never\ndid. This thought makes me hard as iron, resolute as a tigress.\n\n\"I am about to leave the Ridge. I have separated him from his household.\nIt was the necessity of my position. Had these two women regained their\ninfluence over Mr. Lee, I should have lost him too. As it is, they will\nbe left alone. I shall not be absent from his house twenty-four hours\nbefore he will depart also.\n\n\"He intends to leave home at once and travel in Europe. About the end of\nthis year he will be in Paris. He asked no questions about my movements,\nbut there was anxiety and deep distress in his eyes that I understood.\n\n\"I shall go at once to New York, sell my jewels, and hold myself in\nreadiness for anything that comes. But one thing is certain--this man\nand I meet again.\"\n\n * * * * *\n\nMrs. Dennison's journal closed here. I read it through, word by word,\nuntil my very heart grew cold with horror and dread. It is a terrible\nthing to be made the custodian of a great crime. It haunted me night and\nday, until the very burden of it threatened to undermine my health.\n\nI hid the book away, and locked it close from all knowledge but my own.\nFor the universe I would not have told Jessie one word of the awful\ncrime it revealed. I think it would have killed her. But all this time\nmy soul grew faint with apprehension. The year was wellnigh at its\nclose. Would this woman carry out her project and meet Mr. Lee in Paris?\nThe thought drove me wild. I resolved to leave home and cross the ocean\nrather than allow a noble and good man to be wiled on to a union with\nthat terrible woman. But this was difficult. How could I leave Jessie to\nsuch perfect loneliness? These thoughts filled my mind day and night,\nhaunting me almost into insanity.\n\nSometimes I thought of Lottie with a gleam of hope: possibly she had\nundertaken the daring enterprise which I contemplated with so much\nterror. I resolved to wait a while, hoping that she might send us some\nintelligence.\n\nWeeks went by and we heard nothing of her. She had not promised to\nwrite--still we anxiously expected to hear of her welfare; but nothing\ncame. Like Mr. Lee, Lottie seemed to have been swept out of our lives.\n\nAll this was very sad; but we received a little sunshine in the constant\nvisits of young Bosworth, who was so happy now in his but half\nacknowledged engagement to our Jessie that all our troubles were chased\naway in his presence. As for the old lady--but it is impossible to\nexplain what a protection and comfort her society proved to us at this\ntime.\n\nA month--six weeks went by, and still nothing of Mr. Lee or of Lottie;\nboth had deserted us, and we were indeed alone. Jessie had some\nconsolation in the dawning tenderness of her second love; but I--oh!\nthose were dreary, dreary days to me!\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LXXIV.\n\nLOTTIE'S LETTER.\n\n\nOne morning I found a letter on the hall-table, which sent all the blood\nfrom my heart. The handwriting I did not know, but it had a foreign\npost-mark, and that set my hand to trembling as I touched it. The\naddress was to myself.\n\nJessie was still in the room; so, like a thief, I snatched the precious\nmessenger, and went off to my old place on the Ridge, where I could be\nsure of solitude. I was breathless on reaching the rock, and sat down\nwith a hand pressed hard against my heart, which throbbed with\nsuffocating violence.\n\nI sat down and tore open the envelope. It was a long, heavy letter,\nclosely written. I recognized the handwriting with a thrill of dread.\nWith a sinking heart I turned over the pages, and saw \"Lottie\" written\non the extreme corner of the last sheet.\n\n\"Lottie!\" and the letter dated in Paris! What could it mean? It was some\nmoments before I composed myself sufficiently to make out the first few\nlines, though they were characteristic enough.\n\n\"My very dear Miss Hyde,\" the letter began, \"I a'n't much used to\nwriting letters, and it seems to me as if this would be long and hard\nwork; but things must be told, and if I don't write them, who will?\n\n\"You thought hard of me, I dare say, for leaving you just as I did; but\nI thought just the other way about it, and haven't changed my mind yet.\nIt was tough work, though, to get away from home and bid you both\ngood-bye, as I did. I hope to goodness you will never have to go through\nwith anything like it. I could not tell you then what it was that set me\noff; but I will now.\n\n\"That very morning, before I came down on you for the money, the man\nfrom town brought over some things done up in a newspaper more than six\nweeks old, and in it I read that Mrs. Bab--I beg pardon--Madam Dennison\nhad set sail in a steamboat for a place called Havre, across the\nAtlantic Ocean; I know more of places and things than you might believe.\nI was sure that Havre was in Europe, and knew well enough that Mr. Lee\nwas there--a rich widower--with no one in the wide world to keep him\nfrom getting into scrapes. Of course, anybody that could see through a\nmill-stone might have known what that she-Bab--no, I mean that lady and\nservant--went to Havre for.\n\n\"Well, I thought it all over, and made up my mind what to do. First, I\nconcluded to keep a close mouth in regard to Miss Jessie, for I was sure\nthat she would wilt right down; and as for you--well, no matter: that\nlittle secret lies between you and me. Silent was the word then; but I\nhad made up my mind to travel, and was bound to do it. But people can't\nsail across oceans, and gulfs, and inlets, and such kind of waterworks,\nwithout money, and I hadn't but two half-dollars in the world. You know\nhow I came down on you and the dear young lady like a roaring lion, and\ngot that six hundred dollars; I'd rather have danced on red-hot coals an\nhour than do what I did. It was just highway burglary, and nothing less.\nI hate myself for it yet.\n\n\"Well, after I got the money I made quick work of it, sat up all night,\ndid a little packing, a little praying, and a great deal of crying till\ndaylight came; then I put for the railroad and flashed down to New York.\nA newspaper that I bought of a little boy in the cars told me that a\nsteamer sailed for Havre that very day. The minute we stopped in New\nYork I got lost in a crowd of carriage-drivers and long whips, that\nseemed terribly glad to see me; and one of them took me on one side as\nkind as could be, asking where I wanted to go, promising to take me\nright there--that is, to the steamer--trunk and all, in no time.\n\n\"The man kept his word. I got into his carriage, and we drove through\nlong streets, and cross-streets, down among acres of ships that looked\nlike blasted trees, and at last we got to a steamer with stairs down its\nblack sides, and smoke puffing out from its chimneys in a frightful way.\n\n\"The man climbed up the stairs with my trunk on his shoulder; I\nfollowed. He set it down, and I sat down on it. Then the man wanted two\ndollars, and I gave him one, at which he grumbled a little; but I told\nhim that I had travelled, and knew what was what. Then he went away and\nleft me alone in the crowd; so I had a good cry all to myself, thinking\nof you folks at home, and wondering what would become of me in the end.\n\n\"While I was sitting there _so_ heavy-hearted, the bells started out\na-ringing, the steamer began to heave and groan, half the people went\nhelter-skelter down the side of the vessel, and the other half crowded\ntoward one end. Then we began to move, and I felt the blood creep up and\ndown my limbs as shivery as ice. I remember seeing, through the tears\nthat almost blinded me, handkerchiefs waving and people crying on the\ndeck and down on the wharf; but there was nobody to cry about me, nor\nshake away their sorrow from a white handkerchief; so I just huddled\ndown on the trunk and gave right up.\n\n\"Oh! how my heart sunk as the steamer swung round and dashed out into\nthe great river; and, to scare me worse, a gun went off, bang! sending a\nstream of smoke behind us. I covered my face in my hands and cried--oh!\nhow I did cry!\n\n\"When I looked up again, New York was a great way off; the ships looked\nlike a forest of dead pine-trees, and everything else lay in a blue fog.\nI looked the other way, where the sun was going down in the deep, deep\nwater. There everything was lonesome as the grave, and I almost wished\nthat I was dead. But the steamer kept on prowling along the water, like\na great wild beast, worrying us all into the next world. It seemed as if\nI was going off, far, far away from where my mistress had gone.\n\n\"I had been lonesome before in my life; but this was worse than that. I\nwanted to creep into some corner and die. Then I remembered that I had\npromised _her_, when she lay dead in the tower-chamber, to be a mother\nto you and Miss Jessie, and made a little prayer to God that He would\nhelp me in the thing that I was going about. It was all I could do.\n\n\"When the steamer was out in the deep waters, and the dark came on, a\nman stood by my trunk and asked why it was that I stayed out of my room.\nThen I told him my trunk was room enough for me just then; so he went\naway and brought another man, who asked if I had a state-room and a\nticket.\n\n\"I told him the truth--that I didn't know what a state-room was; but\nthat something I had eaten must have made me sick, and I wanted to lie\ndown dreadfully.\n\n\"The man told me that a state-room would cost more than a hundred\ndollars; so I told him I'd rather stay on deck, for there was no\ncertainty how much money I might want to spend before I got back.\n\n\"Then they began talking about second cabins, and asked how much money I\ncould pay; but, somehow, I was too sick to care much, and let 'em pay\nthemselves; so they took me down into a room with beds made like shelves\nalong the sides, and I fell into one. Oh, mercy! I can't think of it now\nwithout being dizzy.\n\n\"Day and night--day and night--rock, rock--plunge, plunge--till at last\nthere was an end of the eternal waters, and we landed at Havre,--an old\nfussy place that seemed as unsteady as the ship.\n\n\"Europe is a large place, Miss Hyde, and I didn't know whereabouts in it\nMr. Lee or that woman was to be found; but I had money, and the mistress\nalways taught me to trust in God when I couldn't do anything on my own\nhook. So I watched everything that went on among the passengers, and\nkept a prayer for help stirring in the bottom of my heart.\n\n\"At first I was about to ask some of the passengers which way I'd better\nturn, but concluded to wait. So I followed the crowd when it left the\nsteamer, and it took me into a hotel as old as the hills, where women\nwere running round in their nightcaps and chattering like tame crows.\n\n\"I went into a room with the rest, and sat down with my satchel on my\nlap, keeping a keen eye on everything. We had to wait a good while; for\nthe men at the wharf wanted to see if everything was put up nicely in my\ntrunk; but they promised to give it back, and a passenger said he would\nsend it with his to the hotel, as I was alone. I had to wait.\n\n\"As I sat there watching, some gentlemen came in that seemed to know\nsome of our passengers. They had just run down from Paris, I heard them\nsay, to meet their friends on landing. They were nice, genteel men, and\nI listened to their talk, having nothing else to busy myself with. After\na good deal of shaking hands and questioning about the voyage, they\nbegan to talk about Paris, especially about its hotels, and what\nAmericans were at them.\n\n\"I held my breath and listened. The Hotel de Louvre, or Loofer, or\nsomething like that, they said, was the hotel where Americans went most.\nThere was a great number of distinguished persons there now, and they\nwent over a list of names. When they came to that of Mr. Lee, I caught\nmy breath, and sprang up, dropping my satchel, with the gold in it, with\na clank to the floor. No one minded me; so I sat down again, trembling\nall over, and listened. Then Mrs. Dennison's name was huddled in among\nthe rest, and I knew that the persons I was in search of were in the\nsame town together, and very near too; for the men who had run down from\nParis didn't seem out of breath or the least tired. So I made up my mind\nto go there at once, and come back in an hour or two after my trunk.\n\n\"'Please, sir,' said I to one of the gentlemen, 'can you tell me just\nhow far Paris is from this hotel, and which way I must turn?'\n\n\"He looked at me a minute, and smiled with his eyes.\n\n\"'It is about six hours, I think,' he answered; 'any coachman will take\nyou to the depot.'\n\n\"I was rather discouraged. If it took him six hours to run the distance,\nI should find it a long walk. So I concluded to hire a carriage and take\nmy trunk along.\n\n\"After awhile my trunk came up with a heap of other baggage, and, as\neverybody else was starting off in carriages, I hired one too; and when\nthe man asked where I wanted to go, I told him to the Louvre Hotel in\nParis. He drove away at once, and after a few minutes stopped at a\nrailroad depot, and opened the door for me to get out.\n\n\"'This is the right train,' he said, in the queerest English I ever\nheard. 'I will get you a ticket.'\n\n\"I felt myself blushing, but said nothing. He didn't know that I had\nthought of walking. In less than ten minutes I was whizzing along like\nanything over the most beautiful country, and through the queerest old\ntowns, and by the strangest houses with points and caps and corners like\ngreat table-casters cut in stone. Then the dark came on, and I fell\nsound asleep, till a great crash and jar awoke me in a depot right in\nthe midst of a city larger than New York, all blazing with lights and\ncrowded with folks.\n\n\"I had learned a thing or two by this time, and when a driver put\nhimself in my way, told him that I wanted to go to Mr. Louvre's Hotel,\nand that he'd better get my trunk. He didn't seem to understand a word\nexcept the name of Mr. Louvre; but he caught that at once and nodded his\nhead.\n\n\"'_We, we!_'\n\n\"'Yes,' I said, 'both of us. You couldn't very well drive me without\ngoing too, I should think.'\n\n\"So up he came with a little one-horse concern, and in I got. Oh! what\nstreets, and lanes, and roads of lamps I went through! What crowds of\npeople--what tall, tall houses! They made me more dizzy than I had been,\nand that was bad enough.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LXXV.\n\nLOTTIE IN PARIS.\n\n\n\"At last we reached the hotel--a great, grand house, that frightens one\nby its size; it must cover acres and acres; you could not count the\nnumber of lights, and crowds of people going up and down the stairs.\n\n\"They took me into a room half-way up to the sky, and there I sat down\nwith my head aching and clear tired out. You didn't know, I suppose,\nthat I have learned a good many French words from the mistress: such as\n_du pain_, which means bread; and _le the_, for tea; and _sucre_, which\na'n't much different from our sugar, only you mumble it up in your mouth\nbefore speaking, and let it all out at once.\n\n\"Well, I was dying with thirst, and my head throbbed terribly. The man\ncalled me _madmoiselle_, and looked polite and sorry; so I said:\n\n\"'_Donna moia_ a cup of _the_, if you please, _mousheu_.'\n\n\"He looked bewildered a minute, and then brightened up so pleasant:\n\n\"'_Ah! le the! We, we!_'\n\n\"'No,' said I, thinking how improper it would be for that strange man to\nsit down to tea with a young girl in her room that time of night; 'only\nfor myself; one cup will do. Excuse me.'\n\n\"He did not stop to hear, but went off and came back with a china cup\nand saucer on a little silver tray, as if I had been a born lady. I\nstirred up the tea and tasted it.\n\n\"'_Donna moia un petite_ more _sucre_, if _vous_ please,' said I.\n\n\"'_We, madmoiselle, toot sweet,_' says he.\n\n\"The fellow pronounced 'too' as if it had a _t_ in it; but then, how\ncould he understand good English?\n\n\"'No, no--not too sweet' said I; 'the contrary way. I want more _la\nsucre_, sugar, you know.'\n\n\"The fellow really did not understand his own language, but stood there\nlooking wild as a fish-hawk. All at once he brightened up and ran out of\nthe room. Directly he came back with another man. The moment I saw his\nface I jumped up, ready to scream with joy, and--and--yes, Miss Hyde,\ndon't blush! but I sprang right into his arms and gave him a kiss.\n\n\"Who was it? Why, James, Mr. Lee's own man--a person--well, Miss Hyde,\nwe all have secrets; but if ever a girl had a right to kiss a friend in\na strange place, I had--that's all.\n\n\"'Oh! James, James Grant! It's Providence that sent you here!'\n\n\"'No,' he said, holding me tight and stopping my mouth while choke-full\nof words, 'I rather think it was your bad French, Lottie.'\n\n\"I would have struck him; only he held me so near and so tight it was\nimpossible.\n\n\"The waiter went out softly. What sensible people these Frenchmen are!\nThen I forgot my headache and everything but the business in hand. James\nis a good scholar, you know, and understands French like a book. If ever\nProvidence sent a friend at the right time, He did it that night. First\nI began asking questions.\n\n\"Mr. Lee had been away down East in Jerusalem, Palestine, across\ndeserts, and over pyramids, for almost the whole time since he left\nhome. Sorrowful as a man could be, but always going ahead, as if comfort\nlay in sharp work. Then he had come back into Italy, and so into France,\nwhich is Paris, you know.\n\n\"Mrs. Dennison was in the hotel when Mr. Lee got there; James thinks,\nunexpectedly to his master, but is not certain. He knows that she wrote\nletters to him, any way.\n\n\"'She is here, then--she has been setting her traps,' I said. 'Tell me\neverything, James, if you ever loved the sweet lady who is dead, or her\nchild, who is pining herself to death at our own dear home. Tell me\neverything!'\n\n\"'Yes,' he said, 'it's no use going over the tracks; but she's got him,\nand to-morrow they will be married at the American Embassy.'\n\n\"'To-morrow! Married, to-morrow!' I almost screamed.\n\n\"'Yes,' he answered; 'nothing can stop it. I passed a woman who brought\nhome the wedding-dress as I came up-stairs.'\n\n\"I caught hold of James and held his arms down tight.\n\n\"'Nothing can stop it, James? Yes, sir, you and I can stop it; you and I\n_will_ stop it! I never promised right out before, James; but if you'll\nhelp me to expose this woman, I'll--I'll--yes, you and I'll take their\nplace, and be married at the American Embassy right off ourselves.'\n\n\"He--well, Miss Hyde, I won't worry you by telling what he said or did\njust then; but my face burned like fire half an hour after.\n\n\"Now comes the hardest part of my story. Don't clasp your hands and pray\nfor me, as the worst sinner that ever was; for I a'n't quite that!\nStill, you think so much of a little fib, and listening, and breaking\nopen seals, that I'd rather not write it if a great deep ocean of water\nwasn't rolling between you and me. Miss Hyde, I own it, lies a'n't my\ndelight; but I can tell 'em. Peeping through keyholes and windows isn't\nmy nature; but, anyhow, I did it. More than that: I never let one of\nMrs. Dennison's letters leave our house without reading it. One or two\nletters I kept back altogether, because they were written in French, and\nI couldn't read that. They are with me here. It was to give them into\nMr. Lee's hand that I came across the wide ocean. She suspected me--or\nher girl Cora did--and hired one of the men to mail them safely; but I\nknew a better way of bribing him to give them up. True, it made James\njealous to see how thick I was with the man; but I couldn't help that.\n\n\"Babylon was cute, though; she wrote carefully. It was to some old\nfriend--who was as bad as herself--to whom the letters were sent. I have\nsome of her answers, too, as well as the journal; these were the papers\nthat I laid before James Grant that night.\n\n\"I could only make out a word here and there in the French letters. If\nyou hadn't been so crank about honor and all that, I would have brought\nthem to you; I couldn't make up my mind to take the preaching. But I\nwatched. You know, Miss Hyde, no dog ever kept watch as I did over that\nangel!\n\n\"She died. The worst came while I was wondering what to do. There was no\nuse in telling what I had done. She was dead; and I thought then that\nthe woman would go away and leave us to our mourning. If she came back\nagain, I meant to give the journal up and have you read the French\nletters. You know how she left, and why it was Mr. Lee went off in that\nstrange way; I could only guess. You wouldn't trust me; so I wouldn't\ntrust you. But when I found that Babylon had gone chasing after Mr. Lee,\njust as his year of mourning was over, I followed her.\n\n\"I gave the journal and letters to James, and we read them over\ntogether. James reads French, and can turn it into English as easy as\ntalking. So he gave me the English, which was a good deal like her\njournal, full of sin and iniquity.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LXXVI.\n\nTHE CASKET OF DIAMONDS.\n\n\n\"When we had read the letters and the journal, I tied them together, and\nsat down to talk the matter over with James, who is as good as a lawyer\nany day.\n\n\"'Where is our master now?' I said. 'What time is it?'\n\n\"'It is nine. I think he may soon be in Mrs. Dennison's parlor; for Cora\ntold me that her lady wished to try on the wedding-dress, and hoped Mr.\nLee would come in when it was complete. I took the message, and he\nanswered, 'Very well.'\n\n\"'James,' I said, 'we have no time to lose. Is there no way by which I\ncan get into Mrs. Dennison's rooms before the master comes in?'\n\n\"James thought a little, and said, 'Yes, it will be easy. When Mrs.\nDennison is dressed they will go into her parlor. It opens from her\nbedroom by an arched doorway hung with silk curtains. When they leave\nthe bedroom, I will let you in.'\n\n\"He went out to see what was going on, and came back all in a hurry,\nopened the door, and whispered, 'Come, quick!'\n\n\"I went, and in two minutes was in a large bedroom, warmed up like\nsunset with the light that came pouring through the broad red curtains\nwhich hung between it and the next room.\n\n\"'Step softly, and hide somewhere if they come in,' whispered James.\n\n\"'I will,' says I.\n\n\"Then I crept up to the curtain, pushed the red folds back a trifle, and\nlooked in.\n\n\"It was a large room, lighted, like our drawing-room, with a great\nchandelier, and furnished beautifully. _She_ and Cora were standing\nunder the blaze of lights, all in a flutter of pride. It's no use, Miss\nHyde: I've wanted to think that woman wasn't good-looking, but it's\nfighting against one's own eyes. There she stood, with that\nwedding-dress of white moire antique a-sweeping down her tall figure,\nand lying behind her like ridges of snow on the carpet. All down the\nfront and around the neck, which was smooth as a japonica leaf, lace\nwas fluttering, till the whole dress looked soft as snow. On her head\nshe wore a sort of crown made of pearls like the mistress's necklace\nthat she thought so much of, and from under that fell a lace veil that\nlooked like frostwork on a window, and covered her from head to foot.\n\n\"Cora was spreading down the veil as I looked in. Then she stepped back\nand had a good survey.\n\n\"'Will it do?' said Mrs. Dennison, drawing herself up proud as a\npeacock.\n\n\"'It's superb!' answered Cora.\n\n\"'We will make it a little more perfect before he comes in,' says\nBabylon; and, going to a desk, she took out a long morocco case, and\nopened it under the light, when a flame of fire flashed out of it.\n\n\"Cora took the box out of Babylon's hand.\n\n\"'From him?' says she.\n\n\"'Yes,' answers Babylon, curving her neck.\n\n\"'How much did they cost?'\n\n\"'Of course he did not tell me that, Cora. Ten or fifteen thousand\ndollars, I suppose; but they are nothing to what I'll yet have.'\n\n\"'You will not wear them to-morrow?'\n\n\"'Well, no. It would be a little too much, I fear; but we will put them\non now, just to try the effect.'\n\n\"'No,' says Cora, looking very stubborn; 'I want these. It's no more\nthan fair.'\n\n\"'Cora!' cried Babylon, with fire in her eyes.\n\n\"'Why not?' says Cora. 'You have promised over and over again to provide\nfor me when you had the means. Here is something sure.'\n\n\"'Cora, this is too impudent!'\n\n\"'Why? Is it wrong for sisters to share each other's good fortune,\nespecially when one has done as much to earn it as the other?'\n\n\"Babylon doubled up her white fist, and looked a whole thunder-gust from\nunder her bent eyebrows.\n\n\"'Sisters! How dare you?'\n\n\"'Because I am your sister.'\n\n\"'You! whose mother was a black slave!'\n\n\"'And my father your father! What can you say against him?'\n\n\"Babylon seemed to struggle against her temper, and got the better of\nit.\n\n\"'Give me those diamonds, Cora. Of course I do not dispute what you say,\nand always meant to make you independent; but not after this fashion.\nWait till this ceremony is over and I have control of sufficient means.\nYou must see that it would be ruin to part with these.'\n\n\"'I cannot help that. What security have I that you will keep your word\nwhen you are married? It never has been kept. The truth is, I mean to\nstay in this country, where my color is not sneered at, and I must have\nthe means.'\n\n\"'But have I not promised?'\n\n\"'Yes, a good many times; and I mean that you shall perform too! This\nceremony shall never take place till I am sure of that!'\n\n\"Babylon grew pale as a ghost; something seemed to swell in her throat.\n\n\"'Give back the diamonds,' she said, speaking as if she had a cold; and\nyou shall have a written promise for twice their amount three months\nafter I am married.'\n\n\"'When?'\n\n\"'Now. I will write out the paper at once.'\n\n\"'Well, but remember it is made out to Cora, _your half-sister_, or I\nwill not take it.'\n\n\"Mrs. Dennison came to a little table that stood close by the arch, and,\nkneeling down on one knee, began to write. She seemed to hold her\nbreath, and was pale as the pearls on her head. I could have touched\nher with my hand, but I stood still as a mouse until the paper was\nwritten. Cora came and looked over her shoulders as she signed her name.\nJust as it was done, there came a knock at the door, and both the women\nstarted away from the table, leaving the paper on it. I reached my hand\nsoftly through the curtain, and got it safe just as Mr. Lee came in.\n\n\"Babylon was white as a sheet, and shook so that the dress rustled\naround her.\n\n\"'Is she not beautiful, sir?' says Cora, looking as innocent as a lamb.\n\n\"Mr. Lee smiled. Oh! Miss Hyde, isn't he grand? But in a minute his face\nchanged, and, coming up to Mrs. Dennison, he took her hand and kissed\nit.\n\n\"'How pale you are! Does the thought of to-morrow terrify you so much?'\n\n\"She gave him one of her looks, and drew closer to him, like a lamb\nwanting shelter. He bent toward her, and, as Cora slid out of the room,\nput his arm around her waist, whispering something that I was too mad to\nhear.\n\n\"I couldn't stand it. My poor mistress seemed to whisper, 'Now, Lottie,\nI trust to you!' I pushed the curtains aside, and, walking right\nstraight in, stood before them.\n\n\"'Mrs. Dennison,' says I, 'let go of my dead lady's husband. Mr. Lee, an\nangel has just come down from heaven to save you from a wicked, wicked\nfiend. I, a poor girl, am doing her work. Step back, Mrs. Dennison, till\nmy master reads these letters, and this journal, with its purple cover\nand heaps of sin inside. If you want to know all about the bad heart of\nthis woman, read it,' says I to Mr. Lee again; 'then ask her to look\ninto your eyes if she dares.'\n\n\"The woman turned on me with her great scared eyes--saw the journal in\nmy hand--gave a wild look at the table--staggered toward the\ncurtains--flung them back with an outward dash of her arms, and fell\nupon the floor of the other room. As the red curtains closed over her,\nI reached out the papers to Mr. Lee, and whispered, with tears in my\neyes:\n\n\"'Oh, master! read them for her sake, who loved you so dearly.'\n\n\"Mr. Lee put me back so fiercely that I almost fell. He went right up to\nthe woman where she lay shivering and shaking till her white dress\nheaved and fluttered like a snow-heap in the wind. He was pale as a\nsheet, and his eyes looked mad as fire when he turned them toward me;\nbut I stood my ground like a marble image planted on a rock. I hadn't\ncome sailing over the raging ocean, like a pelican in the wilderness, to\nbe looked down by him or fainted down by her--not I, if I know myself,\nwhich I think I do.\n\n\"'My darling,' says he, bending over her, 'why should the sight of this\nwild girl agitate you so? She can have no influence on me.'\n\n\"Babylon seemed to get strength from this. She lifted up her head, flung\nthe veil back from her face, and looked me through and through with her\nwild eyes.\n\n\"'She is put up to this. They hate me. It is another effort to prejudice\nyou against me. You remember the last. Now they will no doubt resort to\nforgery. People who write anonymous letters will not hesitate to go\nfurther. Oh! they will separate us--they will separate us!'\n\n\"'Is this book a forgery?' says I, holding up the purple journal. 'Is\nthis writing yours?'\n\n\"Her face seemed to cramp up; her lips turned blue-white.\n\n\"That moment Cora made a leap upon me, and snatched at the book like a\nhungry wolf; but I wrenched it away from her, and pressed myself back\nagainst the wall, holding it behind me.\n\n\"That moment James came in and stood by me like a hero, as he is.\n\n\"'No you don't,' said I; 'no person touches this book till Mr. Lee has\nread it.'\n\n\"Mrs. Dennison turned her eyes upon me--such beautiful begging\neyes--that, if it hadn't been for my dead lady, I might have given up\nthe book; but I thought of her, and was firm as a rock. 'Leave this\nroom,' said Mr. Lee, turning upon me like a lion. 'How dare you come\nhere!'\n\n\"'My dead lady, your wife, commanded me to come,' I answered, feeling\nmyself grow tall and strong. 'She was murdered by that woman, and you\nare bound to know it. Read this--it is in her own handwriting.'\n\n\"'It belongs to my lady. The imp of Satan stole it!' cried Cora, fierce\nas a wild-cat. 'No one has a right to read it.'\n\n\"Mr. Lee had helped Babylon to her feet, and stood, with one arm around\nher waist, looking from her to me.\n\n\"'It is mine,' she whispered; 'make her give it up.'\n\n\"'But I have read every word of it. I have left a copy at home, which\nMiss Hyde has now. A minute ago you said it was a forgery; now, you both\nown up--you and your yellow sister there.'\n\n\"At this, Mr. Lee seemed to be turning into stone, all but his eyes,\nthat shot fire at me.\n\n\"'What does she mean?' asked Babylon. The words dropped from her like\nlead. It seemed as if she hadn't the strength to speak.\n\n\"'She's crazy!' says Cora. 'My mistress never had either brother or\nsister.'\n\n\"'Hadn't she?' says I. 'Just look at this paper, Mr. Lee, and then ask\nher how she came to write there that this yellow girl is her father's\nchild. I heard the impudent creature threaten her, if she didn't give up\nthe diamonds you sent here this morning, or write this promise just so.'\n\n\"'The diamonds!' said Mr. Lee, loosening his arm from Babylon's waist\nand looking in her face. 'How could this girl know about them?'\n\n\"Babylon shivered, and her eyes seemed to shrink back under her eyelids\nwhen she looked at the table and saw that the paper was gone. Cora crept\nsoftly up to where I was standing, and whispered: 'Half the money if you\nhold your tongue. If you don't, I'll kill you!'\n\n\"I gave the creature one of my looks, handed the journal over to James,\nand held the paper open between my two hands, before Mr. Lee's eyes. He\ncould not help but read it. Babylon lifted her hand as if to strike it\ndown, but it dropped by her side when she saw that he was reading, and\nshe leaned against the door-frame, clenching at the red curtains in a\nspasm. Oh! she looked awful splendid with her white dress pressed\nagainst the red curtains, that shook around her like flaming fire. The\ndiamonds on her head seemed to burn through and through her veil, but\nher white face was cramped worse than ever, and I almost thought she\nwould drop down dead at Mr. Lee's feet.\n\n\"He took the paper from my hands and read it through. Then he looked\nonce or twice from Mrs. Dennison to Cora, who was turning whitish-gray,\nand looked awfully.\n\n\"'Is there any explanation of this strange paper?' he said; and his\nvoice seemed to come out of a heap of ice, it had changed so.\n\n\"Babylon opened her lips, but they would not give out the lie that was\nready, I haven't the least doubt. But Cora came forward bold as brass.\n\n\"'It is a forgery!' she said; 'the lady never promised me anything after\nshe was married. I am no more her sister than that imp of Satan is.\n\n\"'But if this paper was a forgery, how did you know what it contained?'\nsaid Mr. Lee, in the same cold way. And, with this, he walked out of the\nroom without saying another word.\n\n\"Babylon made a spring toward the door when he went out of it, with her\nhands clenched together, and her veil streaming out behind; but when\nshe saw that he never turned or looked back, her knees gave way, and she\nfell in a white heap on the carpet.\n\n\"I began to feel sorry for the poor creature then, and tried to help her\nup, but Cora pushed me away; and would have sent me whirling through the\ndoor, but James caught me in his arms, and so seemed to lead me out.\nWhen we were safe in the passage, I told James to take the journal right\nto his master's room and strike while the iron was hot, or those two\nsea-serpents would get around him again.\n\n\"He went--like a good fellow as he is--and I shut myself up in my room,\nknowing well enough that I had done right, but feeling sorry in my heart\nfor poor Babylon all the same. So I sat down by the window and had a\ngood cry all to myself.\n\n\"In half an hour James called me to his master's room. He was white as\nmarble, and tears stood in his eyes. He took my two hands in his,\npressed them hard, then, leaning one elbow on the table, covered his\nface with his hand. I saw great tears drop through his fingers; they\nbroke my heart. The first thing I knew, down I had fallen on my two\nknees, and was kissing his other hand as if he had been my dear mistress\nwho is dead and gone. That night I told him everything about Miss\nJessie, and all your goodness. Oh! how he thanked me! Miss Hyde, don't\never want to see a man cry; it's enough to break one's heart!\n\n\"The next morning Mrs. Dennison and her servant had left the hotel. In\nthree days I shall be on my way home. Do be glad to see Lottie; for she\nfeels like a bird far away from its nest, and has been, ever since she\nleft the Ridge.\n\n \"Your old friend till death, LOTTIE.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER LXXVII.\n\nALL TOGETHER AGAIN.\n\n\nAfter reading this letter, I told Jessie everything. She had no heart to\nread the journal in my possession, and its worst points--those which\nrelated to her mother's death--I kept from her in common mercy. Of\ncourse, all that she did learn was a relief to her. She knew that her\nfather would soon be at home again, and that no cause of estrangement\nnow existed between them. This removed the only shadow now falling upon\nher young life. That very day she began preparations for her father's\nreturn; and when young Bosworth came, there was a joyous consultation\nbetween them about the best way of receiving him. I saw them looking\ntoward me and whispering mysteriously. Were they consulting about the\npropriety of my residence in the house after they left it? The thought\nfell upon me with a shock of such pain as I pray God may never be\nrepeated. Let what will come, my fate seems to be one of utter\nloneliness. But I am glad to see these young people so happy: never, I\ndo think, was love more complete than that which exists between them\nnow.\n\nIt scarcely seemed possible for a letter to reach us from Europe, when\nLottie herself rushed in upon us with an exquisite French bonnet on her\nhead, and a dress that trailed sumptuously behind her little figure. In\nshe came, darting through the room like an arrow, and was in my arms,\nbathing my face with tears and smothering me with kisses, before I was\nquite aware of her presence. When Jessie came in with Mr. Bosworth, who\nhad been walking with her in the garden, Lottie sprang upon her like a\npet spaniel, clung to her neck, her waist, and at last fell to the floor\nin an outburst of gladness, and embraced her knees, crying, laughing,\nand murmuring words of tender endearment, in which some rather curious\nFrench was mingled.\n\nAfter this Lottie resumed her self-poise. She shook hands with young\nBosworth in a patronizing way, and gave the servants an audience in the\nbasement sitting-room, informing them all that she had just returned\nfrom a pleasure-trip to Europe, where she had seen the Emperor, and\nshould, doubtless, have been invited to court, only the Empress did not\nhappen to be very well while she was in Paris.\n\nIn this way that strange, heroic girl came back to her old home, which\nwas brighter and more cheerful after she resumed her place, not as a\nservant, but as a tried friend of the family, which she retained till\nher marriage with James.\n\nA fortnight after Lottie's return, Mr. Lee came home. He sent us a\nletter from New York, saying that he had landed there, and desiring that\nthe cause and events connected with his absence might never be mentioned\namong us after his return. Everything was understood and explained; all\nthat he asked now was a perfect reunion.\n\nOne night about dusk, Mr. Lee came home very quietly and quite\nunannounced. He was calm, cheerful, and his own noble self again, and\nhis absence seemed almost like a dream to us.\n\nThat night, before he retired, I saw him going toward the library with\nhis arm around Jessie's waist. When they came out again, I could see\nthat Jessie had been crying; but she looked happy notwithstanding these\ntraces of tears, and when she bade her father good-night, he left a\nblessing upon her forehead.\n\nIn the solitude of that half-hour, the proud man had asked forgiveness\nof his own child, and she came forth with a heart almost broken with\ntenderness for him.\n\nAfter this his love for Jessie became a part of his life; he fairly\nworshipped her. But his manner to me changed. He was kind, gentle,\ngenerous; but all this was accompanied with a sort of reserve almost\namounting to shyness. Had I indeed offended him beyond forgiveness? How\noften I asked myself this question, and each time my heart sunk into\ndeeper depression; for who could answer it? Let who would be happy, it\nseemed that I was always to suffer. Indeed, it required some little\nmagnanimity not to feel the difference between the lonely, unloved\nexistence reserved for me, and Jessie's brilliant lot.\n\nA few months after Mr. Lee's return, wedding preparations were making\ncheerful progress in our house. Jessie would leave us on a bridal tour,\nand then come back to the old mansion behind the hill, which the two\nMrs. Bosworths had vacated for a pretty cottage on the grounds, and\nrefurnished sumptuously for the young people. Everybody was\npleased--everybody was happy, except myself. What could become of me?\nWhen Jessie was gone, my home would be broken up again. I must be cast\nforth a waif upon the world. How could I help being sad?\n\nJust a week before Jessie's wedding, I sat alone in the deep window of\nthe drawing-room, thinking of my desolated future, and weeping those\nstill tears that one learns to shed after much sorrow. It was sunset.\nYoung Bosworth and Jessie were in the garden, and I could hear their\nhappy voices coming up from among the flowers.\n\nAs I sat there, so dreary and loveless, some person entered the room. I\nknew by the tread that it was Mr. Lee, and tried to conceal myself; but\nhe came directly to the window and stood at my side, looking out upon\nthe glorious view. In those times I was timid, and almost afraid of his\npresence; so, rising quietly, I attempted to leave the window. But he\nbegged me to remain. There was something that he wished to say.\n\nI sat down, trembling with dread. Was he about to tell me, what I knew\nalready, that Jessie's marriage would render my stay at the Ridge\nimpossible? I would not wait for that, but said at once,--\n\n\"Oh, Mr. Lee, it is quite unnecessary. I know what propriety demands.\nThe very day she leaves home, I shall go back to the old farm-house. It\nwill not be an unhappy life.\"\n\n\"But I have come to prevent this,\" he said, in a low, strange voice. I\nlooked up in sudden surprise, a smile was trembling on his lips. \"Never,\nif I can help it, shall you leave a home which owes half its sunshine to\nyour presence. Without you, the old place would be lonely indeed. You\nmust not all forsake me at once.\"\n\n\"But it is impossible!\" I faltered. \"Even kind old Mrs. Bosworth would\nset her face against it. I might, perhaps, stay with Jessie,\" I added,\nwith a piteous attempt to smile; \"but she has not invited me.\"\n\n\"Because she knew from the first that I could not give you up. She\nguessed how dearly I loved you, almost before I was sure of it myself.\"\n\nI felt myself turning white. This great happiness was beyond all\nrealization. I looked timidly in his face, and read in his eyes what I\nhad never dreamed of before. He sat down by me very quietly, and, with a\nlittle gentle violence, drew my head upon his bosom. I could hear the\nstrong, irregular beating of his heart, and his words, so persuasive, so\nmanly, charmed away the shock and tremor of his first sudden avowal.\n\n\"I have not spoken till now,\" he said, \"because circumstances, that we\nwill never speak of, have made me for a time doubtful if they ever would\nbe forgiven by a proud, good woman like yourself. But I love you, dear\ngirl, with my whole heart and soul; first for your own sake, and next\nbecause the angel who blessed our home so long, owed everything to your\ncare. She loved you dearly, and said it with her last breath.\"\n\nI was sobbing upon his bosom. The memories so sad and touching which\nsprung out of his words flooded my heart with tender grief. Yes, she\nloved me; and that, perhaps, was the golden link which had drawn his\nsoul to mine.\n\n\"Do not weep,\" he pleaded; \"but look up and bless me with one smile, one\nword. Do you love me a little in return for all I feel? Can you love me\nentirely some day?\"\n\nI looked up and my eyes met his. \"You know; you are sure. Why ask that?\"\nI whispered. \"There has never been a time since I was a little girl that\nI have not loved you; first as my kind, kind guardian, then as the being\n_she_ loved better than anything on earth, and now--\"\n\n\"Now as your own husband!\" he exclaimed, folding me close to his bosom,\nand pressing kisses upon my lips. \"Oh, my darling, you have made me\ncompletely happy.\"\n\nIn twenty different ways he told me of his happiness, his love, and the\nsweet necessity there was for my presence in his life. At first it\nseemed impossible for me to believe him; but after a while my heart\nreceived the full conviction of his love, and settled down into that\nfulness of content which makes some one hour of every human life a\nheaven.\n\nAs we sat together, with the twilight gathering around us, the curtains\nfalling over the recess of the window rustled apart, and Jessie came\nthrough them. Her father did not move, but looked up smiling. I felt a\nflood of crimson burn across my face. She looked at him a moment, then\nat me, but obtained only a timid glance in return: it was enough. She\nbent down and kissed me with affectionate warmth; then disappeared\nquietly as she had come, leaving me the happiest mortal that God ever\nblessed.\n\nOne week from that day two weddings were solemnized in that house; but\nonly one couple went away. That home was too dear for any thoughts of\nfashionable travel with us.\n\nThe last year of the war we took a trip to the White Mountains, and made\nsome stay at New York on our return home. Having nothing special to\noccupy us, one evening we joined a party from the hotel, and went to\nhear a reading from the poets, to be given at a public hall in\nBroadway. It so happened that no one mentioned the name of the reader,\nand we had not thought enough about the matter to inquire.\n\nThe hall was full of what seemed to be persons from the upper classes,\nand some little excitement prevailed, as if there was a peculiar\ninterest taken either in the subject or reader. This aroused our\ncuriosity a little, and we waited with more than usual impatience for\nthe lady to appear.\n\nShe came at last from the side platform, a radiantly beautiful woman,\nwith the air of an empress. Her black lace dress, richly flounced, swept\nthe floor; her white neck was exposed, and her superb arms uncovered to\nthe shoulder. A cluster of scarlet flowers glowed in her hair and on her\nbosom. My heart gave one bound, and settled back with a sickening\nrecoil.\n\nIt was Mrs. Dennison.\n\nShe approached the reading-desk, rested her hand upon the volume that\nlay upon it, and looked around upon the audience. Her eyes fell upon us.\nShe recoiled a step; a flash of red shot across her face. But instantly\nshe resumed her former position, looked steadily in our faces, and then\nquietly allowed her eyes to pass over the crowd.\n\nWhile her hand rested on the book, a cry broke over us from the street.\nSome newsboy, shouting as he sped along, sent his voice ringing through\nthe open doors:\n\n\"Further particulars of the battle of the Wilderness! Death of Colonel\nLawrence!\"\n\nThe woman heard this cry. Her hand fell heavily away from the book--her\nface grew livid under the gas-lights--she staggered, and fell to the\nfloor.\n\n THE END.\n\n\n * * * * *\n\n\n =T. B. PETERSON AND BROTHERS' PUBLICATIONS.=\n\n\n NEW BOOKS ISSUED EVERY WEEK.\n\nComprising the most entertaining and absorbing Works published, suitable\nfor the Parlor, Library, Sitting Room, Railroad or Steamboat Reading, by\nthe best writers in the world.\n\n[Symbol: Right]Orders solicited from Booksellers, Librarians,\nCanvassers, News Agents, and all others in want of good and fast selling\nbooks, which will be supplied at very Low Prices.[Symbol: Left]\n\n\n =MRS. ANN S. STEPHENS' WORKS.=\n\n The Curse of Gold, $1 50\n Mabel's Mistake, 1 50\n Doubly False, 1 50\n The Soldiers' Orphans, 1 50\n Silent Struggles, 1 50\n The Heiress, 1 50\n The Wife's Secret, 1 50\n The Rejected Wife, 1 50\n Fashion and Famine, 1 50\n The Old Homestead, 1 50\n The Gold Brick, 1 50\n Mary Derwent, 1 50\n\nThe above are each in paper cover, or in cloth, price $1.75 each.\n\n\n =MRS. EMMA D. E. N. SOUTHWORTH'S WORKS.=\n\n The Changed Brides, $1 50\n The Brides' Fate. A Sequel to\n \"The Changed Brides,\" 1 50\n Fair Play, 1 50\n How He Won Her. A Sequel\n to \"Fair Play,\" 1 50\n Fallen Pride, 1 50\n The Prince of Darkness, 1 50\n The Widow's Son, 1 50\n The Bride of Llewellyn, 1 50\n The Fortune Seeker, 1 50\n Allworth Abbey, 1 50\n The Bridal Eve, 1 50\n The Fatal Marriage, 1 50\n Haunted Homestead, 1 50\n The Lost Heiress, 1 50\n Lady of the Isle, 1 50\n Vivia; or the Secret of Power, 1 50\n Love's Labor Won, 1 50\n Deserted Wife, 1 50\n The Gipsy's Prophecy, 1 50\n The Mother-in-Law, 1 50\n The Missing Bride, 1 50\n The Two Sisters, 1 50\n The Three Beauties, 1 50\n Wife's Victory, 1 50\n Retribution, 1 50\n India; Pearl of Pearl River, 1 50\n Curse of Clifton, 1 50\n Discarded Daughter, 1 50\n\nThe above are each in paper cover, or in cloth, price $1.75 each.\n\n\n =MRS. CAROLINE LEE HENTZ'S WORKS.=\n\n The Planter's Northern Bride, 1 50\n Linda; or, the Young Pilot of\n the Belle Creole, 1 50\n Robert Graham. The Sequel\n to \"Linda,\" 1 50\n Courtship and Marriage, 1 50\n Ernest Linwood, 1 50\n Marcus Warland, 1 50\n Rena; or, the Snow Bird, 1 50\n The Lost Daughter, 1 50\n Love after Marriage, 1 50\n Eoline; or, Magnolia Vale, 1 50\n The Banished Son, 1 50\n Helen and Arthur, 1 50\n Forsaken Daughter, 1 50\n Planter's Daughter, 1 50\n\nThe above are each in paper cover, or in cloth, price 1.75 each.\n\n\n =FREDRIKA BREMER'S WORKS.=\n\n The Neighbors, 1 50\n The Home, 1 50\n Father and Daughter, 1 50\n The Four Sisters, 1 50\n\nThe above are each in paper cover, or in cloth, price $1.75 each.\n\nLife in the Old World; or, Two Tears in Switzerland and Italy.\nBy Miss Bremer, in two volumes, cloth, price $3.50\n\n\n BEST COOK BOOKS PUBLISHED.\n\n Mrs. Goodfellow's Cookery as it Should Be, Cloth, $1 75\n Petersons' New Cook Book, Cloth, 1 75\n Miss Leslie's New Cookery Book, Cloth, 1 75\n Widdifield's New Cook Book, Cloth, 1 75\n The National Cook Book. By a Practical Housewife, Cloth, 1 75\n The Family Save-All. By author of \"National Cook Book,\" Cloth, 1 75\n Mrs. Hale's Receipts for the Million, Cloth, 1 75\n Miss Leslie's New Receipts for Cooking, Cloth, 1 75\n Mrs. Hale's New Cook Book, Cloth, 1 75\n Francatelli's Celebrated French, Italian, German, and English\n Cook Book. The Modern Cook. With Sixty-two illustrations.\n Complete in six hundred large octavo pages, Cloth, 5 00\n\n\n WORKS BY THE VERY BEST AUTHORS.\n\n_The following books are each issued in one large, duodecimo volume, in\npaper cover, at $1.50 each, or each one is bound in cloth, at $1.75\neach._\n\nThe Initials. A Love Story. By Baroness Tautphoeus, 1 50\nFamily Pride. By author of \"Pique,\" \"Family Secrets,\" etc. 1 50\nSelf-Sacrifice. By author of \"Margaret Maitland,\" etc. 1 50\nThe Woman in Black. A Companion to the \"Woman in White,\" 1 50\nA Woman's Thoughts about Women. By Miss Muloch, 1 50\nFlirtations in Fashionable Life. By Catharine Sinclair, 1 50\nRose Douglas. A Companion to \"Family Pride,\" and \"Self Sacrifice,\" 1 50\nFalse Pride; or, Two Ways to Matrimony. A Charming Book, 1 50\nFamily Secrets. A Companion to \"Family Pride,\" and \"Pique,\" 1 50\nThe Morrisons. By Mrs. Margaret Hosmer, 1 50\nBeppo. The Conscript. By T. A. Trollope, author of \"Gemma,\" 1 50\nGemma. An Italian Story. By T. A. Trollope, author of \"Beppo,\" 1 50\nMarietta. By T. A. Trollope, author of \"Gemma,\" 1 50\nMy Son's Wife. By author of \"Caste,\" \"Mr. Arle,\" etc. 1 50\nThe Rich Husband. By author of \"George Geith,\" 1 50\nHarem Life in Egypt and Constantinople. By Emmeline Lott, 1 50\nThe Rector's Wife; or, the Valley of a Hundred Fires, 1 50\nWoodburn Grange. A Novel. By William Howitt, 1 50\nCountry Quarters. By the Countess of Blessington, 1 50\nOut of the Depths. The Story of a \"Woman's Life,\" 1 50\nThe Coquette; or, the Life and Letters of Eliza Wharton, 1 50\nThe Pride of Life. A Story of the Heart. By Lady Jane Scott, 1 50\nThe Lost Beauty. By a Noted Lady of the Spanish Court, 1 50\nSaratoga. An Indian Tale of Frontier Life. A true Story of 1787, 1 50\nMarried at Last. A Love Story. By Annie Thomas, 1 50\nThe Quaker Soldier. A Revolutionary Romance. By Judge Jones, 1 50\nThe Man of the World. An Autobiography. By William North, 1 50\nThe Queen's Favorite; or, The Price of a Crown. A Love Story, 1 50\nSelf Love; or, The Afternoon of Single and Married Life, 1 50\nCora Belmont; or, The Sincere Lover. A True Story of the Heart, 1 50\nThe Lover's Trials; or Days before 1776. By Mrs. Mary A. Denison, 1 50\nHigh Life in Washington. A Life Picture. By Mrs. N. P. Lasselle, 1 50\nThe Beautiful Widow; or, Lodore. By Mrs. Percy B. Shelley, 1 50\nLove and Money. By J. B. Jones, author of the \"Rival Belles,\" 1 50\nThe Matchmaker. A Story of High Life. By Beatrice Reynolds, 1 50\nThe Brother's Secret; or, the Count De Mara. By William Godwin, 1 50\nThe Lost Love. By Mrs. Oliphant, author of \"Margaret Maitland,\" 1 50\nThe Roman Traitor. By Henry William Herbert. A Roman Story, 1 50\n\nThe above books are each in paper cover, or in cloth, price $1.75 each.\n\n\n WORKS BY THE VERY BEST AUTHORS.\n\n_The following books are each issued in one large duodecimo volume, in\npaper cover, at $1.50 each, or each one is bound in cloth, at $1.75\neach._\n\nThe Dead Secret. By Wilkie Collins, author of \"The Crossed Path,\" 1 50\nMemoirs of Vidocq, the French Detective. His Life and Adventures, 1 50\nThe Crossed Path; or Basil. By Wilkie Collins, 1 50\nIndiana. A Love Story. By George Sand, author of \"Consuelo,\" 1 50\nThe Belle of Washington. With her Portrait. By Mrs. N. P. Lasselle, 1 50\nThe Bohemians of London. By Edward M. Whitty, 1 50\nThe Rival Belles; or, Life in Washington. By J. B. Jones, 1 50\nThe Devoted Bride. A Story of the Heart. By St. George Tucker, 1 50\nLove and Duty. By Mrs. Hubback, author of \"May and December,\" 1 50\nWild Sports and Adventures in Africa. By Major W. C. Harris, 1 50\nCourtship and Matrimony. By Robert Morris. With a Portrait, 1 50\nThe Jealous Husband. By Annette Marie Maillard, 1 50\nThe Refugee. By Herman Melville, author of \"Omoo,\" \"Typee,\" 1 50\nThe Life, Writings, Lectures, and Marriages of Fanny Fern, 1 50\nThe Life and Lectures of Lola Montez, with her portrait, on steel, 1 50\nWild Southern Scenes. By author of \"Wild Western Scenes,\" 1 50\nCurrer Lyle; or, the Autobiography of an Actress. By Louise Reeder, 1 50\nCoal, Coal Oil, and all other Minerals in the Earth. By Eli Bowen, 1 50\nThe Cabin and Parlor. By J. Thornton Randolph. Illustrated, 1 50\nJealousy. By George Sand, author of \"Consuelo,\" \"Indiana,\" etc. 1 50\nThe Little Beauty. A Love Story. By Mrs. Grey, 1 50\nThe Adopted Heir. A Love Story. By Miss Pardoe, 1 50\nSecession, Coercion, and Civil War. By J. B. Jones, 1 50\nThe Count of Monte Cristo. By Alexander Dumas. Illustrated, 1 50\nCamille; or, the Fate of a Coquette. By Alexander Dumas, 1 50\nSix Nights with the Washingtonians. By T. S. Arthur, 1 50\nLizzie Glenn; or, the Trials of a Seamstress. By T. S. Arthur, 1 50\nLady Maud; or, the Wonder of Kingswood Chase. By Pierce Egan, 1 50\nWilfred Montressor; or, High Life in New York. Illustrated, 1 50\nThe Old Stone Mansion. By C. J. Peterson, author \"Kate Aylesford,\" 1 50\nKate Aylesford. By Chas. J. Peterson, author \"Old Stone Mansion,\" 1 50\nLorrimer Littlegood, by author \"Hary Coverdale's Courtship,\" 1 50\nThe Red Court Farm. By Mrs. Henry Wood, author of \"East Lynne,\" 1 50\nMildred Arkell. By Mrs. Henry Wood, author of \"Red Court Farm,\" 1 50\nThe Earl's Secret. A Love Story. By Miss Pardoe, 1 50\nThe Adopted Heir. By Miss Pardoe, author of \"The Earl's Secret,\" 1 50\nLord Montague's Page. By G. P. R. James, 1 50\nThe Cavalier. By G. P. R. James, author of \"Lord Montague's Page,\" 1 50\nCousin Harry. By Mrs. Grey, author of \"The Gambler's Wife,\" etc. 1 50\nThe Conscript. A Tale of War. By Alexander Dumas, 1 50\nThe Tower of London. By W. Harrison Ainsworth. Illustrated, 1 50\nShoulder Straps. By Henry Morford, author of \"Days of Shoddy,\" 1 50\nDays of Shoddy. By Henry Morford, author of \"Shoulder Straps,\" 1 50\nThe Coward. By Henry Morford, author of \"Days of Shoddy,\" 1 50\n\nThe above books are each in paper cover, or in cloth, price $1.75 each.\n\nThe Wandering Jew. By Eugene Sue. Full of Illustrations, 1 50\nMysteries of Paris; and its Sequel, Gerolstein. By Eugene Sue, 1 50\nMartin, the Foundling. By Eugene Sue. Full of Illustrations, 1 50\nTen Thousand a Year. By Samuel C. Warren. With Illustrations, 1 50\nWashington and His Generals. By George Lippard, 1 50\nThe Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk Hall. By George Lippard, 1 50\nBlanche of Brandywine. By George Lippard, 1 50\nPaul Ardenheim; the Monk of Wissahickon. By George Lippard, 1 50\n\nThe above books are each in paper cover, or in cloth, price $2.00 each.\n\n\n NEW AND GOOD BOOKS BY BEST AUTHORS.\n\nThe Last Athenian. From the Swedish of Victor Rydberg. Highly\nrecommended by Fredrika Bremer. Paper $1.50, or in cloth, $2 00\n\nComstock's Elocution and Reader. Enlarged. By Andrew Comstock\nand Philip Lawrence. With 236 Illustrations. Half morocco, 2 00\n\nComstock's Chart. Every School should have a copy of it, 5 00\n\nAcross the Atlantic. Letters from France, Switzerland, Germany,\nItaly, and England. By C. H. Haeseler, M.D. Bound in cloth, 2 00\n\nColonel John W. Forney's Letters from Europe. Bound in cloth, 1 75\n\nThe Ladies' Guide to True Politeness and Perfect Manners. By\nMiss Leslie. Every lady should have it. Cloth, full gilt back, 1 75\n\nThe Ladies' Complete Guide to Needlework and Embroidery. With\n113 illustrations. By Miss Lambert. Cloth, full gilt back, 1 75\n\nThe Ladies' Work Table Book. With 27 illustrations. Cloth, gilt, 1 50\n\nThe Story of Elizabeth. By Miss Thackeray, paper $1.00, or cloth, 1 50\n\nLife and Adventures of Don Quixote and his Squire Sancho Panza,\ncomplete in one large volume, paper cover, for $1.00, or in cloth, 1 50\n\nThe Laws and Practice of Game of Euchre. By a Professor. Cloth, 1 00\n\nWhitefriars; or, The Days of Charles the Second. Illustrated, 1 00\n\n\n HUMOROUS ILLUSTRATED WORKS.\n\n_Each one full of Illustrations, by Felix O. C. Darley, and bound in\nCloth._\n\nMajor Jones' Courtship and Travels. With 21 Illustrations, 1 75\nMajor Jones' Scenes in Georgia. With 16 Illustrations, 1 75\nSimon Suggs' Adventures and Travels. With 17 Illustrations, 1 75\nSwamp Doctor's Adventures in the South-West. 14 Illustrations, 1 75\nCol. Thorpe's Scenes in Arkansaw. With 16 Illustrations, 1 75\nThe Big Bear's Adventures and Travels. With 18 Illustrations, 1 75\nHigh Life in New York, by Jonathan Slick. With Illustrations, 1 75\nJudge Haliburton's Yankee Stories. Illustrated, 1 75\nHarry Coverdale's Courtship and Marriage. Illustrated, 1 75\nPiney Wood's Tavern; or, Sam Slick in Texas. Illustrated, 1 75\nSam Slick, the Clockmaker. By Judge Haliburton. Illustrated, 1 75\nHumors of Falconbridge. By J. F. Kelley. With Illustrations, 1 75\nModern Chivalry. By Judge Breckenridge. Two vols., each 1 75\nNeal's Charcoal Sketches. By Joseph C. Neal. 21 Illustrations, 2 50\n\n\n ALEXANDER DUMAS' WORKS.\n\n Count of Monte Cristo, 1 50\n The Iron Mask, 1 00\n Louise La Valliere, 1 00\n Adventures of a Marquis, 1 00\n Diana of Meridor, 1 00\n The Three Guardsmen, 75\n Twenty Years After, 75\n Bragelonne, 75\n The Conscript. A Tale of War, 1 50\n Memoirs of a Physician, 1 00\n Queen's Necklace, 1 00\n Six Years Later, 1 00\n Countess of Charney, 1 00\n Andree de Taverney, 1 00\n The Chevalier, 1 00\n Forty-five Guardsmen, 75\n The Iron Hand, 75\n Camille, \"The Camelia Lady,\" 1 50\n\nThe above are each in paper cover, or in cloth, price $1.75 each.\n\n Edmond Dantes, 75\n Felina de Chambure, 75\n The Horrors of Paris, 75\n The Fallen Angel, 75\n Sketches in France, 75\n Isabel of Bavaria, 75\n Man with Five Wives, 75\n Twin Lieutenants, 75\n Annette, Lady of the Pearls, 50\n Mohicans of Paris, 50\n The Marriage Verdict, 50\n The Corsican Brothers, 50\n Count of Moret, 50\n George, 50\n Buried Alive, 25\n\n\n CHARLES DICKENS' WORKS.\n\n[Symbol: Right]GREAT REDUCTION IN THEIR PRICES.[Symbol: Left]\n\n\nPEOPLE'S DUODECIMO EDITION. ILLUSTRATED.\n\n_Reduced in price from $2.50 to $1.50 a volume._\n\n_This edition is printed on fine paper, from large, clear type, leaded,\nthat all can read, containing One Hundred and Eighty Illustrations on\ntinted paper, and each book is complete in one large duodecimo volume._\n\n Our Mutual Friend, Cloth, $1.50\n Pickwick Papers, Cloth, 1.50\n Nicholas Nickleby, Cloth, 1.50\n Great Expectations, Cloth, 1.50\n David Copperfield, Cloth, 1.50\n Oliver Twist, Cloth, 1.50\n Bleak House, Cloth, 1.50\n A Tale of Two Cities, Cloth, 1.50\n Little Dorrit, Cloth, 1.50\n Dombey and Son, Cloth, 1.50\n Christmas Stories, Cloth, 1.50\n Sketches by \"Boz,\" Cloth, 1.50\n Barnaby Rudge, Cloth, 1.50\n Martin Chuzzlewit, Cloth, 1.50\n Old Curiosity Shop, Cloth, 1.50\n Dickens' New Stories, Cloth, 1.50\n American Notes; and The Uncommercial Traveler, Cloth, 1.50\n Hunted Down; and other Reprinted Pieces, Cloth, 1.50\n The Holly-Tree Inn; and other Stories, Cloth, 1.50\n\nPrice of a set, in Black cloth, in nineteen volumes, $28.00\n \" \" Full sheep, Library style, 38.00\n \" \" Half calf, sprinkled edges, 47.00\n \" \" Half calf, marbled edges, 53.00\n \" \" Half calf, antique, 57.00\n \" \" Half calf, full gilt backs, etc., 57.00\n\n\n ILLUSTRATED DUODECIMO EDITION.\n\n_Reduced in price from $2.00 to $1.50 a volume._\n\n_This edition is printed on the finest paper, from large, clear type,\nleaded, Long Primer in size, that all can read, the whole containing\nnear Six Hundred full page Illustrations, printed on tinted paper, from\ndesigns by Cruikshank, Phiz, Browne, Maclise, McLenan, and other\nartists. The following books are each contained in two volumes._\n\n Our Mutual Friend, Cloth, $3.00\n Pickwick Papers, Cloth, 3.00\n Tale of Two Cities, Cloth, 3.00\n Nicholas Nickleby, Cloth, 3.00\n David Copperfield, Cloth, 3.00\n Oliver Twist, Cloth, 3.00\n Christmas Stories, Cloth, 3.00\n Bleak House, Cloth, 3.00\n Sketches by \"Boz,\" Cloth, 3.00\n Barnaby Rudge, Cloth, 3.00\n Martin Chuzzlewit, Cloth, 3.00\n Old Curiosity Shop, Cloth, 3.00\n Little Dorrit, Cloth, 3.00\n Dombey and Son, Cloth, 3.00\n\n_The following are each complete in one volume, and are reduced in price\nfrom $2.50 to $1.50 a volume._\n\n Great Expectations, Cloth. $1.50\n Dickens' New Stories, Cloth, 1.50\n American Notes; and The Uncommercial Traveler, Cloth, 1.50\n Hunted Down; and other Reprinted Pieces, Cloth, 1.50\n The Holly-Tree Inn; and other Stories, Cloth, 1.50\n\nPrice of a set, in thirty-three volumes, bound in cloth, $49.00\n \" \" Full sheep, Library style, 66.00\n \" \" Half calf, antique, 99.00\n \" \" Half calf, full gilt backs, etc., 99.00\n\n\n =CHARLES DICKENS' WORKS.=\n\n ILLUSTRATED OCTAVO EDITION.\n\n_Reduced in price from $2.50 to $2.00 a volume._\n\n_This edition is printed from large type, double column, octavo page, each\nbook being complete in one volume, the whole containing near Six Hundred\nIllustrations, by Cruikshank, Phiz, Browne, Maclise, and other artists._\n\n Our Mutual Friend, Cloth, $2.00\n Pickwick Papers, Cloth, 2.00\n Nicholas Nickleby, Cloth, 2.00\n Great Expectations, Cloth, 2.00\n Lamplighter's Story, Cloth, 2.00\n Oliver Twist, Cloth, 2.00\n Bleak House, Cloth, 2.00\n Little Dorrit, Cloth, 2.00\n Dombey and Son, Cloth, 2.00\n Sketches by \"Boz,\" Cloth, 2.00\n David Copperfield, Cloth, 2.00\n Barnaby Rudge, Cloth, 2.00\n Martin Chuzzlewit, Cloth, 2.00\n Old Curiosity Shop, Cloth, 2.00\n Christmas Stories, Cloth, 2.00\n Dickens' New Stories, Cloth, 2.00\n A Tale of Two Cities, Cloth, 2.00\n American Notes and\n Pic-Nic Papers, Cloth, 2.00\n\nPrice of a set, in Black cloth, in eighteen volumes, $36.00\n\" \" Full sheep, Library style, 45.00\n\" \" Half calf, sprinkled edges, 55.00\n\" \" Half calf, marbled edges, 62.00\n\" \" Half calf, antique, 70.00\n\" \" Half calf, full gilt backs, etc., 70.00\n\n\n =\"NEW NATIONAL EDITION\" OF DICKENS' WORKS.=\n\nThis is the cheapest complete edition of the works of Charles Dickens,\n\"Boz,\" published in the world, being contained in _seven large octavo\nvolumes_, with a portrait of Charles Dickens, and other illustrations,\nthe whole making nearly _six thousand very large double columned pages_,\nin large, clear type, and handsomely printed on fine white paper, and\nbound in the strongest and most substantial manner.\n\nPrice of a set, in Black cloth, in seven volumes, $20.00\n\" \" Full sheep, Library style, 25.00\n\" \" Half calf, antique, 30.00\n\" \" Half calf, full gilt back, etc., 30.00\n\n\n =CHEAP SALMON PAPER COVER EDITION.=\n\n_Each book being complete in one large octavo volume._\n\n Pickwick Papers, 35\n Nicholas Nickleby, 35\n Dombey and Son, 35\n David Copperfield, 25\n Martin Chuzzlewit, 35\n Old Curiosity Shop, 25\n Oliver Twist, 25\n American Notes, 25\n Great Expectations, 25\n Hard Times, 25\n A Tale of Two Cities, 25\n Somebody's Luggage, 25\n Message from the Sea, 25\n Barnaby Rudge, 25\n Sketches by \"Boz,\" 25\n Christmas Stories, 25\n The Haunted House, 25\n Uncommercial Traveler, 25\n A House to Let, 25\n Perils of English Prisoners, 25\n Wreck of the Golden Mary, 25\n Tom Tiddler's Ground, 25\n Our Mutual Friend, 35\n Bleak House, 35\n Little Dorrit, 35\n Joseph Grimaldi, 50\n The Pic-Nic Papers, 50\n No Thoroughfare, 10\n Hunted Down, 25\n The Holly-Tree Inn, 25\n Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings and Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy, 25\n Mugby Junction and Dr. Marigold's Prescriptions, 25\n\n=Books sent, postage paid, on receipt of the Retail Price, by\nT. B. Peterson & Brothers, Philadelphia, Pa.=\n\n\n CHARLES LEVER'S BEST WORKS.\n\n Charles O'Malley, 75\n Harry Lorrequer, 75\n Jack Hinton, 75\n Tom Burke of Ours, 75\n Knight of Gwynne, 75\n Arthur O'Leary, 75\n Con Cregan, 75\n Davenport Dunn, 75\n\nAbove are each in paper, or finer edition in cloth, price $2.00 each.\n\n Horace Templeton, 75\n Kate O'Donoghue, 75\n\n\n MADAME GEORGE SAND'S WORKS.\n\n Consuelo, 75\n Countess of Rudolstadt, 75\n First and True Love, 75\n The Corsair, 50\n Jealousy, paper, 1 50\n Do. cloth, 1 75\n Fanchon, the Cricket, paper, 1 00\n Do. do. cloth, 1 50\n Indiana, a Love Story, paper, 1 50\n Do. do. cloth, 1 75\n Consuelo and Rudolstadt, both in one volume, cloth, 2 00\n\n\n WILKIE COLLINS' BEST WORKS.\n\n The Crossed Path, or Basil, 1 50\n The Dead Secret. 12mo. 1 50\n\nThe above are each in paper cover, or in cloth, price $1.75 each.\n\n Hide and Seek, 75\n After Dark, 75\n The Dead Secret. 8vo. 75\n\nAbove in cloth at $1.00 each.\n\n The Queen's Revenge, 75\n Mad Monkton, 50\n Sights a-Foot, 50\n The Stolen Mask, 25\n The Yellow Mask, 25\n Sister Rose, 25\n\n\n MISS PARDOE'S WORKS\n\n Confessions of a Pretty Woman, 75\n The Wife's Trials, 75\n The Jealous Wife, 50\n Rival Beauties, 75\n Romance of the Harem, 75\n\nThe five above books are also bound in one volume, cloth, for $4.00.\n\n The Adopted Heir. One volume, paper, $1.50; or in cloth, $1 75\n The Earl's Secret. One volume, paper, $1.50; or in cloth, 1 75\n\n\n MRS. HENRY WOOD'S BOOKS.\n\n Red Court Farm, 1 50\n Elster's Folly, 1 50\n St. Martin's Eve, 1 50\n Mildred Arkell, 1 50\n Shadow of Ashlydyat, 1 50\n Oswald Cray, 1 50\n Verner's Pride, 1 50\n Lord Oakburn's Daughters; or, the Earl's Heirs, 1 50\n Squire Trevlyn's Heir; or, Trevlyn Hold, 1 50\n The Castle's Heir; or, Lady Adelaide's Oath, 1 50\n\nAbove are each in paper cover, or each one in cloth, for $1.75 each.\n\n The Mystery, 75\n A Life's Secret, 50\n\nAbove are each in paper cover, or each one in cloth, for $1.00 each.\n\n The Channings, 1 00\n Aurora Floyd, 75\n\nAbove are each in paper cover, or each one in cloth, for $1.50 each.\n\n Orville College, 50\n The Runaway Match, 50\n The Lost Will, 50\n The Haunted Tower, 50\n The Lost Bank Note, 75\n Better for Worse, 75\n Foggy Night at Offord, 25\n The Lawyer's Secret, 25\n William Allair, 25\n A Light and a Dark Christmas, 25\n\n\n GEORGE W. M. REYNOLDS' WORKS.\n\n Mysteries of Court of London, 1 00\n Rose Foster. Sequel to it, 1 50\n Caroline of Brunswick, 1 00\n Venetia Trelawney, 1 00\n Lord Saxondale, 1 00\n Count Christoval, 1 00\n Rosa Lambert, 1 00\n Mary Price, 1 00\n Eustace Quentin, 1 00\n Joseph Wilmot, 1 00\n Banker's Daughter, 1 00\n Kenneth, 1 00\n The Rye-House Plot, 1 00\n The Necromancer, 1 00\n\nThe above are each in paper cover, or in cloth, price $1.75 each.\n\n The Opera Dancer, 75\n Child of Waterloo, 75\n Robert Bruce, 75\n Discarded Queen, 75\n The Gipsy Chief, 75\n Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, 75\n Wallace, the Hero of Scotland, 1 00\n Isabella Vincent, 75\n Vivian Bertram, 75\n Countess of Lascelles, 75\n Loves of the Harem, 75\n Ellen Percy, 75\n Agnes Evelyn, 75\n The Soldier's Wife, 75\n May Middleton, 75\n Duke of Marchmont, 75\n Massacre of Glencoe, 75\n Queen Joanna; Court Naples, 75\n Pickwick Abroad, 75\n Parricide, 75\n The Ruined Gamester, 50\n Ciprina; or, the Secrets of a Picture Gallery, 50\n Life in Paris, 50\n Countess and the Page, 50\n Edgar Montrose, 50\n\n\n WAVERLEY NOVELS. BY SIR WALTER SCOTT.\n\nCHEAPEST EDITION IN THE WORLD.\n\n Ivanhoe, 20\n Rob Roy, 20\n Guy Mannering, 20\n The Antiquary, 20\n Old Mortality, 20\n Heart of Mid Lothian, 20\n Bride of Lammermoor, 20\n Waverley, 20\n St. Ronan's Well, 20\n Kenilworth, 20\n The Pirate, 20\n The Monastery, 20\n The Abbot, 20\n The Fortunes of Nigel, 20\n The Betrothed, 20\n Peveril of the Peak, 20\n Quentin Durward, 20\n Red Gauntlet, 20\n The Talisman, 20\n Woodstock, 20\n Highland Widow, etc. 20\n The Fair Maid of Perth, 20\n Anne of Geierstein, 20\n Count Robert of Paris, 20\n The Black Dwarf and Legend of Montrose, 20\n Castle Dangerous, and Surgeon's Daughter, 20\n\nAbove edition is the cheapest in the world, and is complete in\ntwenty-six volumes, price Twenty cents each, or Five Dollars for the\ncomplete set.\n\nA finer edition is also published of each of the above, complete in\ntwenty-six volumes, price Fifty cents each, or Ten Dollars for the\ncomplete set.\n\n Moredun. A Tale of 1210, 50\n Tales of a Grandfather, 25\n Scott's Poetical Works, 5 00\n Life of Scott, cloth, 2 50\n\n\n \"NEW NATIONAL EDITION\" OF \"WAVERLEY NOVELS.\"\n\nThis edition of the Waverley Novels is contained in _five large octavo\nvolumes_, with a portrait of Sir Walter Scott, making _four thousand\nvery large double columned pages_, in good type, and handsomely printed\non the finest of white paper, and bound in the strongest and most\nsubstantial manner.\n\nPrice of a set, in Black cloth, in five volumes, $15 00\n \" \" Full sheep, Library style, 17 50\n \" \" Half calf, antique, or Half calf, gilt, 25 00\n\nThe Complete Prose and Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, are also\npublished in ten volumes, bound in half calf, for $60.00\n\n\n[Symbol: Right]Books sent, postage paid, on receipt of the Retail\nPrice, by T. B. Peterson & Brothers, Philadelphia, Pa.\n\n\n HUMOROUS AMERICAN WORKS.\n\n_Beautifully Illustrated by Felix O. C. Darley._\n\n Major Jones' Courtship, 75\n Major Jones' Travels, 75\n Simon Suggs' Adventures and Travels, 75\n Major Jones' Chronicles of Pineville, 75\n Polly Peablossom's Wedding, 75\n Mysteries of the Backwoods, 75\n Widow Rugby's Husband, 75\n Big Bear of Arkansas, 75\n Western Scenes; or, Life on the Prairie, 75\n Streaks of Squatter Life, 75\n Pickings from the Picayune, 75\n Stray Subjects, Arrested and Bound Over, 75\n Louisiana Swamp Doctor, 75\n Charcoal Sketches, 75\n Misfortunes of Peter Faber, 75\n Yankee among the Mermaids, 75\n New Orleans Sketch Book, 75\n Drama in Pokerville, 75\n The Querndon Hounds, 75\n My Shooting Box, 75\n Warwick Woodlands, 75\n The Deer Stalkers, 75\n Peter Ploddy, 75\n Adventures of Captain Farrago, 75\n Major O'Regan's Adventures, 75\n Sol. Smith's Theatrical Apprenticeship, 75\n Sol. Smith's Theatrical Journey-Work, 75\n The Quarter Race in Kentucky, 75\n Aunt Patty's Scrap Bag, 75\n Percival Mayberry's Adventures and Travels, 75\n Sam Slick's Yankee Yarns and Yankee Letters, 75\n Adventures of Fudge Fumble, 75\n American Joe Miller, 50\n Following the Drum, 50\n\n\n D'ISRAELI'S WORKS.\n\n Henrietta Temple, 50\n Vivian Grey, 75\n Venetia, 50\n Young Duke, 50\n Miriam Alroy, 50\n Contarina Fleming, 50\n\n\n FRANK FAIRLEGH'S WORKS.\n\n Frank Fairlegh, 75\n Lewis Arundel, 75\n Harry Racket Scapegrace, 75\n Tom Racquet, 75\n\nFiner editions of above are also issued in cloth, at $1.75 each.\n\n Harry Coverdale's Courtship, 1 50\n Lorrimer Littlegood, 1 50\n\nThe above are each in paper cover, or in cloth, price $1.75 each.\n\n\n C. J. PETERSON'S WORKS.\n\n The Old Stone Mansion, 1 50\n Kate Aylesford, 1 50\n\nThe above are each in paper cover, or in cloth, price $1.75 each.\n\n Cruising in the Last War, 75\n Valley Farm, 25\n Grace Dudley; or, Arnold at Saratoga, 50\n\n\n JAMES A. MAITLAND'S WORKS.\n\n The Old Patroon, 1 50\n The Watchman, 1 50\n The Wanderer, 1 50\n The Lawyer's Story, 1 50\n Diary of an Old Doctor, 1 50\n Sartaroe, 1 50\n The Three Cousins, 1 50\n\nThe above are each in paper cover, or in cloth, price $1.75 each.\n\n\nWILLIAM H. MAXWELL'S WORKS.\n\n Wild Sports of the West, 75\n Stories of Waterloo, 75\n Brian O'Lynn, 75\n\n\n WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH'S WORKS.\n\n Life of Jack Sheppard, 50\n Life of Guy Fawkes, 75\n\nAbove in 1 vol., cloth, $1.75.\n\n Court of the Stuarts, 75\n Windsor Castle, 75\n The Star Chamber, 75\n Old St. Paul's, 75\n Court of Queen Anne, 50\n Life of Dick Turpin, 50\n Life of Davy Crockett, 50\n\n Tower of London, 1 50\n Miser's Daughter, 1 00\n\nAbove in cloth $1.75 each.\n\n Life of Grace O'Malley, 50\n Life of Henry Thomas, 25\n Desperadoes of the New World, 25\n Life of Ninon De L'Enclos, 25\n Life of Arthur Spring, 25\n Life of Mrs. Whipple and Jessee\n Strang, 25\n\n\n G. P. R. JAMES'S BEST BOOKS.\n\n Lord Montague's Page, 1 50\n The Cavalier, 1 50\n\nThe above are each in paper cover, or in cloth, price $1.75 each.\n\n The Man in Black, 75\n Mary of Burgundy, 75\n Arrah Neil, 75\n Eva St. Clair, 50\n\n\n DOW'S PATENT SERMONS.\n\n Dow's Patent Sermons, 1st\n Series, $1.00; cloth, 1 50\n Dow's Patent Sermons, 2d\n Series, $1.00; cloth, 1 50\n Dow's Patent Sermons, 3d\n Series, $1.00; cloth, 1 50\n Dow's Patent Sermons, 4th\n Series, $1.00; cloth, 1 50\n\n\n SAMUEL C. WARREN'S BEST BOOKS.\n\n Ten Thousand a Year, paper, 1 50\n Do. do. cloth, 2 00\n Diary of a Medical Student, 75\n\n\n Q. K. PHILANDER DOESTICKS' WORKS.\n\n Doesticks' Letters, 1 50\n Plu-Ri-Bus-Tah, 1 50\n The Elephant Club, 1 50\n Witches of New York, 1 50\n\nThe above are each in paper cover, or in cloth, price $1.75 each.\n\n\n GREEN'S WORKS ON GAMBLING.\n\n Gambling Exposed, 1 50\n The Gambler's Life, 1 50\n The Reformed Gambler, 1 50\n Secret Band of Brothers, 1 50\n\nAbove are each in paper cover, or each one in cloth, for $1.75 each.\n\n\n MISS ELLEN PICKERING'S WORKS.\n\n The Grumbler, 75\n Marrying for Money, 75\n Poor Cousin, 50\n Kate Walsingham, 50\n Orphan Niece, 50\n Who Shall be Heir? 38\n The Squire, 38\n Ellen Wareham, 38\n Nan Darrel, 38\n\n\n CAPTAIN MARRYATT'S WORKS.\n\n Jacob Faithful, 50\n Japhet in Search of a Father, 50\n Phantom Ship, 50\n Midshipman Easy, 50\n Pacha of Many Tales, 50\n Frank Mildmay, Naval Officer, 50\n Snarleyow, 50\n Newton Forster, 50\n King's Own, 50\n Pirate and Three Cutters, 50\n Peter Simple, 50\n Percival Keene, 50\n Poor Jack, 50\n Sea King, 50\n\n\n EUGENE SUE'S GREAT WORKS.\n\n Wandering Jew, 1 50\n Mysteries of Paris, 1 50\n Martin, the Foundling, 1 50\n\nAbove in cloth at $2.00 each.\n\n First Love, 50\n Woman's Love, 50\n Female Bluebeard, 50\n Man-of-War's-Man, 50\n Life and Adventures of Raoul De Surville, 25\n\n\n MRS. GREY'S WORKS.\n\n Cousin Harry, 1 50\n The Little Beauty, 1 50\n\nThe above are each in paper cover, or in cloth, price $1.75 each.\n\n Gipsy's Daughter, 50\n Old Dower House, 50\n Belle of the Family, 50\n Duke and Cousin, 50\n The Little Wife, 50\n Lena Cameron, 50\n Sybil Lennard, 50\n Manoeuvring Mother, 50\n Baronet's Daughters, 50\n Young Prima Donna, 50\n Hyacinthe, 25\n Alice Seymour, 25\n Mary Seaham, 75\n Passion and Principle, 75\n The Flirt, 75\n Good Society, 75\n Lion-Hearted, 75\n\n\n J. F. SMITH'S WORKS.\n\n The Usurer's Victim; or,\n Thomas Balscombe, 75\n Adelaide Waldegrave; or, the\n Trials of a Governess, 75\n\n\n REVOLUTIONARY TALES.\n\n The Brigand, 50\n Ralph Runnion, 50\n Seven Brothers of Wyoming, 50\n The Rebel Bride, 50\n The Flying Artillerist, 50\n Wau-nan-gee, 50\n Old Put; or, Days of 1776, 50\n Legends of Mexico, 50\n Grace Dudley, 50\n The Guerilla Chief, 75\n The Quaker Soldier, paper, 1 50\n do. do. cloth, 1 75\n\n\n EMERSON BENNETT'S WORKS.\n\n The Border Rover, 1 50\n Ciara Moreland, 1 50\n Viola; or Adventures in the\n Far South-West, 1 50\n Bride of the Wilderness, 1 50\n Ellen Norbury, 1 50\n The Forged Will, 1 50\n Kate Clarendon, 1 50\n\nThe above are each in paper cover, or in cloth, price $1.75 each.\n\n The Heiress of Bellefonte, and\n Walde-Warren, 75\n Pioneer's Daughter and the\n Unknown Countess, 75\n\n\n T. S. ARTHUR'S HOUSEHOLD NOVELS.\n\n The Lost Bride, 50\n The Two Brides, 50\n Love in a Cottage, 50\n Love in High Life, 50\n Year after Marriage, 50\n The Lady at Home, 50\n Cecelia Howard, 50\n Orphan Children, 50\n Debtor's Daughter, 50\n Mary Moreton, 50\n The Divorced Wife, 50\n Pride and Prudence, 50\n Agnes; or, the Possessed, 50\n Lucy Sandford, 50\n The Banker's Wife, 50\n The Two Merchants, 50\n Trial and Triumph, 50\n The Iron Rule, 50\n Insubordination; or, the Shoe-maker's\n Daughters, 50\n Six Nights with the Washingtonians. With\n nine original Illustrations. By\n Cruikshank. One volume, cloth $1 75;\n or in paper, $1.50\n Lizzy Glenn; or, the Trials of a\n Seamstress. Cloth $1.75; or paper, 1.50\n\n\n EXCITING SEA TALES.\n\n Adventures of Ben Brace, 75\n Jack Adams, the Mutineer, 75\n Jack Ariel's Adventures, 75\n Petrel; or, Life on the Ocean, 75\n Life of Paul Periwinkle, 75\n Life of Tom Bowling, 75\n Percy Effingham, 75\n Cruising in the Last War, 75\n Red King, 50\n The Corsair, 50\n The Doomed Ship, 50\n The Three Pirates, 50\n The Flying Dutchman, 50\n The Flying Yankee, 50\n The Yankee Middy, 50\n The Gold Seekers, 50\n The King's Cruisers, 50\n Life of Alexander Tardy, 50\n Red Wing, 50\n Yankee Jack, 50\n Yankees in Japan, 50\n Morgan, the Buccaneer, 50\n Jack Junk, 50\n Davis, the Pirate, 50\n Valdez, the Pirate, 50\n Gallant Tom, 50\n Harry Helm, 50\n Harry Tempest, 50\n Rebel and Rover, 50\n Man-of-War's-Man, 50\n Dark Shades of City Life, 25\n The Rats of the Seine, 25\n Charles Ransford, 25\n The Iron Cross, 25\n The River Pirates, 25\n The Pirate's Son, 25\n Jacob Faithful, 50\n Phantom Ship, 50\n Midshipman Easy, 50\n Pacha of Many Tales, 50\n Naval Officer, 50\n Snarleyow, 50\n Newton Forster, 50\n King's Own, 50\n Japhet, 50\n Pirate and Three Cutters, 50\n Peter Simple, 50\n Percival Keene, 50\n Poor Jack, 50\n Sea King, 50\n\n\n GEORGE LIPPARD'S GREAT BOOKS.\n\n The Quaker City, 1 50\n Paul Ardenheim, 1 50\n Blanche of Brandywine, 1 50\n Washington and his Generals;\n or, Legends of the American\n Revolution, 1 50\n Mysteries of Florence, 1 00\n\nAbove in cloth at $2.00 each.\n\n The Empire City, 75\n Memoirs of a Preacher, 75\n The Nazarene, 75\n Washington and his Men, 75\n Legends of Mexico, 50\n The Entranced, 25\n The Robbers, 25\n The Bank Director's Son, 25\n\n\n MILITARY NOVELS. BY BEST AUTHORS.\n\nWith Illuminated Military Covers, in five Colors.\n\n Charles O'Malley, 75\n Jack Hinton, the Guardsman, 75\n The Knight of Gwynne, 75\n Harry Lorrequer, 75\n Tom Burke of Ours, 75\n Arthur O'Leary, 75\n Con Cregan, 75\n Kate O'Donoghue, 75\n Horace Templeton, 75\n Davenport Dunn, 75\n Jack Adams' Adventures, 75\n Valentine Vox, 75\n Twin Lieutenants, 75\n Stories of Waterloo, 75\n The Soldier's Wife, 75\n Guerilla Chief, 75\n The Three Guardsmen, 75\n Twenty Years After, 75\n Bragelonne, Son of Athos, 75\n Forty-five Guardsmen, 75\n Tom Bowling's Adventures, 75\n Life of Robert Bruce, 75\n The Gipsy Chief, 75\n Massacre of Glencoe, 75\n Life of Guy Fawkes, 75\n Child of Waterloo, 75\n Adventures of Ben Brace, 75\n Life of Jack Ariel, 75\n Wallace, the Hero of Scotland, 1 00\n Following the Drum, 50\n The Conscript, a Tale of War.\n By Alexander Dumas, 1 50\n\n\n GUSTAVE AIMARD'S WORKS.\n\n The White Scalper, 50\n The Freebooters, 50\n The Prairie Flower, 75\n The Indian Scout, 75\n The Trail Hunter, 75\n The Indian Chief, 75\n The Red Track, 75\n Trapper's Daughter, 75\n The Tiger Slayer, 75\n The Gold Seekers, 75\n The Rebel Chief, 75\n The Smuggler Chief, 75\n The Border Rifles, 75\n Pirates of the Prairies, 75\n\n\n LANGUAGES WITHOUT A MASTER.\n\n French without a Master, 40\n Spanish without a Master, 40\n Latin without a Master, 40\n German without a Master, 40\n Italian without a Master, 40\n\nThe above five works on the French, German, Spanish, Latin, and Italian\nLanguages, whereby any one or all of these Languages can be learned by\nany one without a Teacher, with the aid of this book, by A. H. Monteith,\nEsq., is also published in finer style, in one volume, bound, price,\n$1.75.\n\n\n HARRY COCKTON'S WORKS.\n\n Sylvester Sound, 75\n Valentine Vox, in paper, 75\n do. finer edition, cloth, 2 00\n The Sisters, 75\n The Steward, 75\n Percy Effingham, 75\n\n\n WAR NOVELS. BY HENRY MORFORD.\n\n Shoulder-Straps, 1 50\n The Coward, 1 50\n The Days of Shoddy. A History\n of the late War, 1 50\n\nAbove are each in paper cover, or each one in cloth, for $1.75 each.\n\n\n LIVES OF HIGHWAYMEN.\n\n Life of John A. Murrel, 50\n Life of Joseph T. Hare, 50\n Life of Col. Monroe Edwards, 50\n Life of Jack Sheppard, 50\n Life of Jack Rann, 50\n Life of Dick Turpin, 50\n Life of Helen Jewett, 50\n Desperadoes of the New World, 50\n Mysteries of New Orleans, 50\n The Robber's Wife, 50\n Obi; or, Three Fingered Jack, 50\n Kit Clayton, 50\n Life of Tom Waters, 50\n Nat Blake, 50\n Bill Horton, 50\n Galloping Gus, 50\n Life & Trial of Antoine Probst, 50\n Ned Hastings, 50\n Eveleen Wilson, 50\n Diary of a Pawnbroker, 50\n Silver and Pewter, 50\n Sweeney Todd, 50\n Life of Grace O'Malley, 50\n Life of Davy Crockett, 50\n Life of Sybil Grey, 50\n Life of Jonathan Wild, 25\n Life of Henry Thomas, 25\n Life of Arthur Spring, 25\n Life of Jack Ketch, 25\n Life of Ninon De L'Enclos, 25\n Lives of the Felons, 25\n Life of Mrs. Whipple, 25\n Life of Biddy Woodhull, 25\n Life of Mother Brownrigg, 25\n Dick Parker, the Pirate, 25\n Life of Mary Bateman, 25\n Life of Captain Blood, 25\n Capt. Blood and the Beagles, 25\n Sixteen-Stringed Jack's Fight\n for Life, 25\n Highwayman's Avenger, 25\n Life of Raoul De Surville, 25\n Life of Rody the Rover, 25\n Life of Galloping Dick, 25\n Life of Guy Fawkes, 75\n Life and Adventures of Vidocq, 1 50\n\n\n MILITARY AND ARMY BOOKS.\n\n Ellsworth's Zouave Drill, 25\n U. S. Government Infantry &\n Rifle Tactics, 25\n U. S. Light Infantry Drill, 25\n The Soldier's Companion, 25\n The Soldier's Guide, 25\n\n\n WORKS AT 75 CENTS. BY BEST AUTHORS.\n\n Hans Breitman's Party. With other Ballads. New and Enlarged\n Edition, printed on Tinted paper. By Charles G. Leland, 75\n Webster and Hayne's Speeches in Reply to Colonel Foote, 75\n The Brigand; or, the Demon of the North. By Victor Hugo, 75\n Roanoke; or, Where is Utopia? By C. H. Wiley. Illustrated, 75\n Banditti of the Prairie, 75\n Tom Racquet, 75\n Red Indians of Newfoundland, 75\n Salathiel, by Croly, 75\n Corinne; or, Italy, 75\n Ned Musgrave, 75\n Aristocracy, 75\n Inquisition in Spain, 75\n Elsie's Married Life, 75\n Leyton Hall. By Mark Lemon, 75\n Flirtations in America, 75\n The Coquette, 75\n Thackeray's Irish Sketch Book, 75\n Whitehall, 75\n The Beautiful Nun, 75\n Mysteries of Three Cities, 75\n Genevra. By Miss Fairfield, 75\n New Hope; or, the Rescue, 75\n Crock of Gold. By Tupper, 75\n Twins and Heart. By Tupper, 75\n\n\n WORKS AT 50 CENTS. BY BEST AUTHORS.\n\n The Woman in Red. A Companion to the \"Woman in Black,\" 50\n Twelve Months of Matrimony. By Emelie F. Carlen, 50\n Leah; or the Forsaken, 50\n The Greatest Plague of Life, 50\n Clifford and the Actress, 50\n Two Lovers, 50\n Ryan's Mysteries of Marriage, 50\n The Orphans and Caleb Field, 50\n Moreton Hall, 50\n Bell Brandon, 50\n Sybil Grey, 50\n Female Life in New York, 50\n Agnes Grey, 50\n Diary of a Physician, 50\n The Emigrant Squire, 50\n The Monk, by Lewis, 50\n The Beautiful French Girl, 50\n Father Clement, paper, 50\n do. do. cloth, 75\n Miser's Heir, paper, 50\n do. do. cloth, 75\n The Admiral's Daughter, 50\n The American Joe Miller, 50\n Ella Stratford, 50\n Josephine, by Grace Aguilar, 50\n The Fortune Hunter, 50\n The Orphan Sisters, 50\n Robert Oaklands; or, the Outcast\n Orphan, 50\n Abednego, the Money Lender, 50\n Jenny Ambrose, 50\n Father Tom and the Pope, in\n cloth gilt, 75 cents, or paper, 50\n The Romish Confessional, 50\n Victims of Amusements, 50\n Violet, 50\n Alieford, a Family History, 50\n General Scott's $5 Portrait, 1 00\n Henry Clay's $5 Portrait, 1 00\n Tangarua, a Poem, 1 00\n\n\n WORKS AT 25 CENTS. BY BEST AUTHORS.\n\n Aunt Margaret's Trouble, 25\n The Woman in Grey, 25\n The Deformed, 25\n Two Prima Donnas, 25\n The Mysterious Marriage, 25\n Jack Downing's Letters, 25\n The Mysteries of a Convent, 25\n Rose Warrington, 25\n The Iron Cross, 25\n Charles Ransford, 25\n The Mysteries of Bedlam, 25\n The Nobleman's Daughter, 25\n Madison's Exposition of Odd\n Fellowship, 25\n Ghost Stories. Illustrated, 25\n Ladies' Science of Etiquette, 25\n The Abbey of Innismoyle, 25\n Gliddon's Ancient Egypt, 25\n Philip in Search of a Wife, 25\n Rifle Shots, 25\n\n\n THE SHAKSPEARE NOVELS.\n\n The Secret Passion, 1 00\n The Youth of Shakspeare, 1 00\n Shakspeare and his Friends, 1 00\n\nThe three above Books are also published complete in one large octavo\nvolume, bound in cloth. Price Four Dollars.\n\n\n PETERSONS' ILLUMINATED STORIES.\n\nEach Book being in an \"Illuminated Cover,\" in five colors, full of\nIllustrations. This is the most saleable series of 25 cent books ever\nprinted.\n\n Rebel and Rover, 25\n First Love, 25\n The Two Merchants, 25\n A Year After Marriage, 25\n Love in High Life, 25\n The Divorced Wife, 25\n The Debtor's Daughter, 25\n The Lady at Home, 25\n Mary Moreton, 25\n The Two Brides, 25\n Dick Parker, 25\n Jack Ketch, 25\n Mother Brownrigg, 25\n Galloping Dick, 25\n Mary Bateman, 25\n Raoul de Surville, 25\n Life of Harry Thomas, 25\n Mrs. Whipple & Jesse Strang's\n Adventures, 25\n Jonathan Wild's Adventures, 25\n Ninon De L'Enclos' Life, 25\n The Iron Cross, 25\n Biddy Woodhull, the Beautiful\n Haymaker, 25\n The River Pirates, 25\n Dark Shades of City Life, 25\n The Rats of the Seine, 25\n Mysteries of Bedlam, 25\n Charles Ransford, 25\n Mysteries of a Convent, 25\n The Mysterious Marriage, 25\n Capt. Blood, the Highwayman, 25\n Capt. Blood and the Beagles, 25\n Highwayman's Avenger, 25\n Rody the Rover's Adventures, 25\n Sixteen-Stringed Jack's Fight\n for Life, 25\n Ghost Stories. Illustrated, 25\n Arthur Spring, 25\n The Valley Farm, 25\n\n\n USEFUL BOOKS FOR ALL.\n\n Lady's and Gentleman's Science of Etiquette. By Count D'Orsay\n and Countess de Calabrella, with their portraits, 50\n Lardner's One Thousand and Ten Things Worth Knowing, 50\n Knowlson's Complete Farrier and Horse Doctor, 25\n Knowlson's Complete Cow and Cattle Doctor, 25\n The Complete Kitchen and Fruit Gardener, 25\n The Complete Florist and Flower Gardener, 25\n Arthur's Receipts for Preserving Fruits, etc., 12\n\n\n LIVES OF GENERALS AND OTHER NOTED MEN.\n\n Moore's Life of Hon. Schuyler Colfax. By Rev. A. Y. Moore, of\n South Bend. With a Fine Steel Portrait. One vol. cloth.\n Price, 1 50\n The Lives of Grant and Colfax. With life-like portraits of\n each, and other engravings. Cloth, $1.00; or in paper cover, 75\n Illustrated Life, Speeches, Martyrdom and Funeral of President\n Abraham Lincoln. Cloth, $1.75; or in paper cover, 1 50\n Life and Services of General Sheridan. Cloth, $1.00; or in\n paper, 75\n Life, Battles, Reports, and Public Services of General George\n B. McClellan. Price in paper 50 cents, or in cloth, 75\n Life and Public Services of General George G. Meade, the Hero of\n Gettysburg, 25\n Life and Public Service of General Benjamin F. Butler, the Hero\n of New Orleans, 25\n Life of President Andrew Johnson. Cloth, $1.00; or in paper, 75\n The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson, cheap paper cover\n edition, price 50 cents, or a finer edition, bound in cloth,\n price, 1 50\n Trial of the Assassins and Conspirators for the murder of\n President Abraham Lincoln. Cloth, $1.50; or cheap edition in\n paper cover, 50\n Lives of Horatio Seymour and Francis P. Blair, Jr. Complete in\n one duodecimo volume. Price 50 cents in paper, or in cloth, 75\n Life of Archbishop Hughes, first Archbishop of New York, 25\n\n\n LIEBIG'S WORKS ON CHEMISTRY.\n\n Agricultural Chemistry, 25\n Animal Chemistry, 25\n Liebig's celebrated Letters on\n the Potato Disease, 25\n\nLiebig's Complete Works on Chemistry, is also issued in one large\noctavo volume, bound in cloth. Price Two Dollars.\n\n\n SIR E. L. BULWER'S NOVELS.\n\n The Roue, 65\n The Oxonians, 50\n The Courtier, 25\n Falkland, 25\n\n\n DR. HOLLICK'S WORKS.\n\n Dr. Hollick's great work on the Anatomy and Physiology of the\n Human Figure, with dissected plates of the Human\n Figure, 1 25\n Dr. Hollick's Family Physician, a Pocket Guide for Everybody, 25\n\n\n GEORGE FRANCIS TRAIN'S SPEECHES.\n\n Union Speeches. In 2 vols., each 25\n Speech to the Fenians, 25\n Downfall of England, 10\n Slavery and Emancipation, 10\n\n\n REV. CHAS. WADSWORTH'S SERMONS.\n\n America's Mission, 25\n Thankfulness and Character, 25\n A Thanksgiving Sermon, 15\n Politics in Religion, 12\n Henry Ward Beecher on War and Emancipation, 15\n Rev. William T. Brantley's Union Sermon, 15\n\n\n EXPOSITIONS OF SECRET ORDERS, ETC.\n\n Odd Fellowship Exposed, 13\n Sons of Malta Exposed, 13\n Life of Rev. John N. Maffit, 13\n Dr. Berg's Answer to Archbishop\n Hughes, 13\n Dr. Berg on the Jesuits, 13\n\n\n RIDDELL'S MODEL ARCHITECT.\n\nArchitectural Designs of Model Country Residences. By John Riddell,\nPractical Architect. Illustrated with twenty-two full page Front\nElevations, , with forty-four Plates of Ground Plans, including\nthe First and Second Stories, with plans of the stories, full\nspecifications of all the articles used, and estimate of price. Price\nFifteen Dollars a copy.\n\n\n GOOD BOOKS FOR EVERYBODY.\n\n Southern Life; or, Inside Views of Slavery, 1 00\n The Rich Men of Philadelphia, Income Tax List of Residents, 1 00\n Childbirth. Its pains lessened and its perils obviated. Showing\n that the pains of childbirth may be mitigated, if not entirely\n prevented, 1 00\n Peterson's Complete Coin Book, containing fac-similes of all the\n Coins in the World, with the U. S. Mint value of each coin, 1 00\n New Card of Stamp Duties, approved by the last Acts of Congress, 15\n Political Lyrics. New Hampshire and Nebraska. Illustrated, 12\n\n\n CHRISTY & WHITE'S SONG BOOKS.\n\n Christy & Wood's Song Book, 10\n Melodeon Song Book, 10\n Plantation Melodies, 10\n Ethiopian Song Book, 10\n Serenader's Song Book, 10\n Budworth's Songs, 10\n Christy and White's Complete\n Ethiopian Melodies. Cloth, 1 00\n\n\n CURVED-POINT STEEL PENS.\n\n The Slip Pen, per dozen .25, per gross, $2.50\n The Barrel Pen, per \" .50, \" 5.00\n Magnum Bonum Pen, per \" .75, \" 8.00\n\n\n[Symbol: Right]Books sent, postage paid, on receipt of the Retail Price,\nby T. B. Peterson & Brothers, Philadelphia, Pa.\n\n\nT. B. Peterson & BROTHERS;\n\n=No. 306 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia=\n\n\nHave in Press, and are now issuing an entire new, complete,\nand uniform edition of all the celebrated Novels, (which have\nbeen out of print for years,) written by the late\n\nMRS. CAROLINE LEE HENTZ.\n\nThe whole of the novels and stories of Mrs. CAROLINE LEE HENTZ will be\nissued complete in twelve large duodecimo volumes. Two volumes will be\nissued each month, until the series is complete, _one volume on the\nfirst, and another on the fifteenth of the month_. They will be printed\non the finest paper, and bound in the most beautiful style, in fine\nMorocco cloth, with a new full gilt back, and sold at the low price of\n$1.75 each, in Morocco cloth; or in paper cover, at $1.50 each.\n\nThe Novels of Mrs. CAROLINE LEE HENTZ will be found, on perusal by all,\nto be the most exciting and popular works that have ever emanated from\nthe American press. They are written in a charming style, and will\nelicit through all a thrill of deep and exquisite pleasure. They are\nworks which the oldest and the youngest may alike read with pleasure and\nprofit. They abound with the most beautiful scenic descriptions, and\ndisplay an intimate acquaintance with all phases of human character--all\nthe characters being exceedingly well drawn. They are delightful books,\nfull of incident, oftentimes bold and startling, and they describe the\nwarm feelings of the Southerner in glowing colors. Indeed, all of Mrs.\nHentz's stories aptly describe Southern life, and are highly moral in\ntheir application. In this field Mrs. Hentz wields a keen sickle, and\nharvests a rich and abundant crop. They will be found, in plot,\nincident, and management, to be superior to any other novels ever\nissued. In the whole range of elegant moral fiction, there cannot be\nfound anything of more inestimable value, or superior to the charming\nworks of Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz, and they are all gems that will well\nrepay a careful perusal. The Publishers feel assured that this series of\nNovels, by Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz, will give entire satisfaction to the\nwhole reading community; that they will encourage good taste and good\nmorals, and while away many leisure hours with great pleasure and\nprofit, and that they will also be recommended to others by all that\nperuse them.\n\nThe first volume was issued on November 1st, 1869, and was\n=LINDA; OR, THE YOUNG PILOT OF THE BELLE CREOLE=.\n\nThe first volume, \"Linda,\" contains a full and complete Biography of the\nlate Mrs. CAROLINE LEE HENTZ, which has never before been published.\n\nThe second volume was issued on November 15th, 1869, and was\n=ROBERT GRAHAM=. A Sequel to \"Linda; or, The Young Pilot\nof the Belle Creole.\"\n\nThe third volume was issued on December 1st, 1869, and was\n=RENA; or, THE SNOW BIRD=. A Tale of Real Life.\n\nThe fourth volume was issued on December 15th, 1869, and was\n=MARCUS WARLAND=; or, The Long Moss Spring.\n\nThese will be followed, _one on the first, and one on the fifteenth of\neach month, in the following order_, by\n\n=EOLINE; or, MAGNOLIA VALE=; or, The Heiress of Glenmore.\n\n=ERNEST LINWOOD=; or, The Inner Life of the Author.\n\n=THE PLANTER'S NORTHERN BRIDE=; or, Scenes in Mrs. Hentz's\nChildhood.\n\n=HELEN AND ARTHUR=; or, Miss Thusa's Spinning-Wheel.\n\n=COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE=; or, The Joys and Sorrows of\nAmerican Life.\n\n=LOVE AFTER MARRIAGE=; and other Stories of the Heart.\n\n=THE LOST DAUGHTER=; and other Stories of the Heart.\n\n=THE BANISHED SON=; and other Stories of the Heart.\n\nThis series will no doubt prove to be the most popular series\nof Novels ever issued in this country, as they are written by\none of the most popular Female Novelists that ever lived.\n\nAddress all orders, at once, to receive immediate attention,\nfor all or any of the above books, to\n\n[Symbol: Right] _Above Books are for sale by all Booksellers, or copies\nof any or all of them will be sent post-paid to any one, to any place,\non receipt of their price by the publishers._\n\n\n=T. B. PETERSON AND BROTHERS,=\n\nPUBLISHERS AND BOOKSELLERS,\n\nPHILADELPHIA, PA.,\n\nTake pleasure in calling the attention of the public to their Choice and\nExtensive Stock of Books, comprising a collection of the most popular\nand choice, in all styles of binding, by all the favorite and standard\nAmerican and English Authors.\n\nTo Collectors of Libraries, or those desiring to form them.\n\nMany who have the taste, and wish to form a Library, are deterred by\nfear of the cost. To all such we would say, that a large number of books\nmay be furnished for even One Hundred Dollars--which, by a yearly\nincrease of a small amount, will before long place the purchaser in\npossession of a Library in almost every branch of knowledge, and afford\nsatisfaction not only to the collector, but to all those who are so\nfortunate as to possess his acquaintance.\n\nFor the convenience of Book buyers, and those seeking suitable Works for\nPresentation, great care is taken in having a large and varied\ncollection, and all the current works of the day. Show counters and\nshelves, with an excellent selection of Standard, Illustrated, and\nIlluminated works, varying in price to suit all buyers, are available to\nthose visiting our establishment, where purchases may be made with\nfacility, and the time of the visitor greatly economized. Here may be\nseen not only books of the simplest kind for children, but also\nexquisite works of art, of the most sumptuous character, suitable alike\nto adorn the drawing-room table and the study of the connoisseur.\n\nOur arrangements for supplying STANDARD AMERICAN BOOKS, suitable for\nPublic Libraries and Private Families, are complete, and our stock\nsecond to none in the country.\n\n[Symbol: Right]Catalogues are sent, on application, and great attention\nis paid to communications from the country, and the goods ordered\ncarefully packed and forwarded with expedition on receipt of orders\naccompanied with the cash.\n\n\nTo Booksellers and Librarians.\n\nT. B. Peterson & Brothers issue New Books every month, comprising the\nmost entertaining and absorbing works published, suitable for the\nParlor, Library, Sitting Room, Railroad or Steamboat reading, by the\nbest and most popular writers in the world.\n\nAny person wanting books will find it to their advantage to send their\norders to the \"PUBLISHING HOUSE\" OF T. B. PETERSON & BROS., 306 Chestnut\nSt., Philadelphia, who have the largest stock in the country, and will\nsupply them at very low prices for cash. We have just issued a new and\ncomplete Catalogue and Wholesale Price Lists, which we send gratuitously\nto any Bookseller or Librarians on application.\n\nOrders solicited from Librarians, Booksellers, Canvassers, News Agents,\nand all others in want of good and fast selling books, and they will\nplease send on their orders.\n\nEnclose ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred dollars, or more, to us in a\nletter, and write what kind of books you wish, and on its receipt the\nbooks will be sent to you at once, per first express, or any way you\ndirect, with circulars, show bills, etc., gratis.\n\nAgents and Canvassers are requested to send for our Canvassers'\nConfidential Circular containing instructions. Large wages can be made,\nas we supply our Agents at very low rates.\n\nAddress all cash orders, retail or wholesale, to meet with prompt\nattention, to\n\nT. B. PETERSON AND BROTHERS,\n\n306 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Penns.\n\n\nBooks sent, postage paid, on receipt of retail price, to any address in\nthe country.\n\nAll the NEW BOOKS are for sale at PETERSONS' Book Store, as soon as\npublished.\n\n[Symbol: Right]Publishers of \"PETERSONS' DETECTOR and BANK NOTE LIST,\" a\nBusiness Journal and valuable Advertising medium. Price $1.50 a year,\nmonthly; or $3.00 a year, semi-monthly. Every Business man should\nsubscribe at once.\n\n\nPETERSON'S MAGAZINE\n\nTHE CHEAPEST AND BEST IN THE WORLD\n\n=Splendid Offers for 1870.=\n\nThis popular Monthly Magazine _gives more for the money than any in the\nworld_. For 1870, it will be greatly improved. It will contain\n\n =ONE THOUSAND PAGES!=\n =FOURTEEN SPLENDID STEEL PLATES!=\n =TWELVE MAMMOTH FASHION PLATES!=\n =TWELVE BERLIN PATTERNS!=\n =NINE HUNDRED WOOD CUTS!=\n =TWENTY-FOUR PAGES OF MUSIC!=\n\nAll this will be given for only TWO DOLLARS a year, or a dollar less\nthan Magazines of the class of \"Peterson.\" Its\n\n=THRILLING TALES AND NOVELETTES=\n\nAre the best published anywhere. _All the most popular writers are\nemployed to write originally for \"Peterson.\"_ In 1870, in addition to\nits usual quantity of short stories, FIVE ORIGINAL COPYRIGHT NOVELETS\nwill be given, viz.: \"The Prisoner of the Bastile,\" by Mrs. Ann S.\nStephens; \"The Secret at Bartram's Holme,\" by Mrs. Jane G. Austin;\n\"Kathleen's Love Story,\" by the author of \"Ethel's Sir Launcelot;\" \"An\nEnemy's Revenge,\" by the author of \"The Second Life;\" \"How it Ended,\" by\nFrank Lee Benedict.\n\n=MAMMOTH FASHION PLATES=\n\nAhead of all others. These plates are engraved on steel, TWICE THE USUAL\nSIZE, and contain six figures. They will be superbly . Also, a\npattern, from which a Dress, Mantilla, or Child's Dress can be cut out,\nwithout the aid of a mantua-maker. Also, several pages of Household and\nother receipts; in short, everything interesting to ladies.\n\n=SUPERB PREMIUM ENGRAVING=!\n\nTo every person getting up a Club for 1870 will be sent GRATIS, a copy\nof our new and splendid Mezzotint for framing, (size 24 inches by 16),\n\"Our Father Who Art in Heaven.\" This is the most desirable premium ever\noffered. For large Clubs, as will be seen below, an extra copy will be\nsent in addition.\n\nTERMS--Always in Advance:\n\nOne Copy, for one year $2 00\nTwo Copies, for one year 4 00\nThree Copies, for one year 5 00\nFour Copies, for one year 6 00\nFive Copies, for one year, (and one to getter up of Club,) 8 00\nEight Copies, for one year, (and one to getter up of Club,) 12 00\nFourteen Copies, for one year, (and one to getter up of Club,) 20 00\n\n_Address, Post-paid_,\n CHARLES J. PETERSON,\n No. 306 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Pa.\n\n[Symbol: Right] Specimens sent to those wishing to get up Clubs.\n\n\nNEW BOOKS BY MRS. ANN S. STEPHENS.\n\n\nRUBY GRAY'S STRATEGY.\n\nBY MRS. ANN S. STEPHENS.\n\nPrice $1.75 in Cloth; or, $1.50 in Paper Cover.\n\n\n_Fourth Edition Now Ready._\n\n=THE CURSE OF GOLD.=\n\nBY MRS. ANN S. STEPHENS.\n\nPrice $1.75 in Cloth; or, $1.50 in Paper Cover.\n\n\n_Fifth Edition Now Ready._\n\n=MABEL'S MISTAKE=.\n\nBY MRS. ANN S. STEPHENS.\n\nPrice $1.75 in Cloth; or, $1.50 in Paper Cover.\n\n\nT. B. Peterson & Brothers have just issued a new and uniform edition\nof all the popular works written by Mrs. Ann S. Stephens. Their names\nare as follows. Price of each, $1.75 in cloth; or $1.50 in paper cover.\n\n\nANN S. STEPHENS' COMPLETE WORKS.\n\n Ruby Gray's Strategy, $1 75\n The Curse of Gold, 1 75\n Mabel's Mistake, 1 75\n Doubly False, 1 75\n The Soldier's Orphans, 1 75\n Silent Struggles, 1 75\n The Wife's Secret, 1 75\n The Rejected Wife, 1 75\n Mary Derwent, 1 75\n The Gold Brick, 1 75\n Fashion and Famine, 1 75\n The Old Homestead, 1 75\n The Heiress, 1 75\n\nEach of the above books are published in one large duodecimo volume,\nbound in cloth, at $1.75 each, or in paper cover, at $1.50 each.\n\n\nFor sale by all Booksellers. Copies of any of the above books will be\nsent to any one, free of postage, on receipt of price by the Publishers.\n\n\nNEW BOOKS BY MRS. E. D. E. N. SOUTHWORTH.\n\n\n=THE BRIDE'S FATE.=\n\nA SEQUEL TO \"THE CHANGED BRIDES.\"\n\nBY MRS. EMMA D. E. N. SOUTHWORTH.\n\n\n=THE CHANGED BRIDES.=\n\nBY MRS. EMMA D. E. N. SOUTHWORTH.\n\n\n=HOW HE WON HER.=\n\nA SEQUEL TO \"FAIR PLAY.\"\n\nBY MRS. EMMA D. E. N. SOUTHWORTH.\n\n\n=FAIR PLAY.=\n\nBY MRS. EMMA D. E. N. SOUTHWORTH.\n\n\nMRS. SOUTHWORTH'S COMPLETE WORKS.\n\n The Bride's Fate, $1 75\n The Changed Brides, 1 75\n How He Won Her, 1 75\n Fair Play, 1 75\n The Prince of Darkness, 1 75\n Fallen Pride, 1 75\n The Widow's Son, 1 75\n Bride of Llewellyn, 1 75\n The Fortune Seeker, 1 75\n Allworth Abbey, 1 75\n The Bridal Eve, 1 75\n The Fatal Marriage, 1 75\n Love's Labor Won, 1 75\n Deserted Wife, 1 75\n The Lost Heiress, 1 75\n The Two Sisters, 1 75\n The Three Beauties, 1 75\n Vivia; or, the Secret of Power, 1 75\n Lady of the Isle, 1 75\n The Gipsy's Prophecy, 1 75\n The Missing Bride, 1 75\n Wife's Victory, 1 75\n The Mother-in-Law, 1 75\n Haunted Homestead, 1 75\n Retribution, 1 75\n India; Pearl of Pearl River, 1 75\n Curse of Clifton, 1 75\n Discarded Daughter, 1 75\n\nEach of the above books are published in one large duodecimo volume,\nbound in cloth, at $1.75 each, or in paper cover, at $1.50 each.\n\nFor sale by all Booksellers. Copies of any of the above books will be\nsent to any one, free of postage, on receipt of price by the Publishers.\n\nT. B. PETERSON & BROTHERS,\n No. 306 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Pa.\n\n * * * * *\n\n\n\n\nTRANSCRIBER NOTES:\n\n\n page 1: \"Orpaans\" changed to \"Orphans\" (The Soldiers' Orphans).\n\n page 3: \"Montagu's\" changed to \"Montague's\" (author of Lord\n Montague's Page).\n\n page 164: \"?\" changed to \"!\" to better fit the sentence (How kind\n it was of you!).\n\n page 379: \"millionnaire\" changed to \"millionaire\" (Bosworth is a\n millionaire).\n\n\n\n\n\nEnd of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Wives and Widows; or The Broken Life, by\nAnn S. Stephens\n\n*** ","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}} +{"text":"#\n\n#\n\n#\n\n#\n\nCover\n\nMap\n\nPoem\n\nThe Weather Fairies #1: Crystal the Snow Fairy\n\nThe Weather Fairies #2: Abigail the Breeze Fairy\n\nThe Weather Fairies #3: Pearl the Cloud Fairy\n\nThe Weather Fairies #4: Goldie the Sunshine Fairy\n\nThe Weather Fairies #5: Evie the Mist Fairy\n\nThe Weather Fairies #6: Storm the Lightning Fairy\n\nThe Weather Fairies #7: Hayley the Rain Fairy\n\nAlso Available\n\nCopyright\n\n#\n\n##\n\n##\n\n##\n\n#\n\nA Magical Surpise\n\nTrouble in Fairyland\n\nA Snowy Start\n\nThe Grouchy Goblin\n\nA Sneaky Plan\n\nA Very Unusual Snowball\n\n##\n\n#\n\n\"Isn't it a beautiful day, Mom?\" Kirsty Tate asked happily. She gazed out of the car window at the blue sky and sunshine. \"Do you think it will stay like this for all of summer vacation?\"\n\nMrs. Tate laughed. \"Well, let's hope so,\" she said. \"But remember what the weather was like on Rainspell Island? It was always changing!\"\n\nKirsty smiled to herself. She and her parents had been to Rainspell Island for vacation during the last school break. Kirsty had made a new friend there, Rachel Walker, and the two girls now shared a very special secret. They were friends with the fairies! When evil Jack Frost had put a spell on the seven Rainbow Fairies and banished them from Fairyland, Rachel and Kirsty had helped the fairy sisters get back home.\n\n\"Could Rachel come and stay with us for a little while, Mom? Please?\" Kirsty asked, as they pulled up outside their house. The Tates lived in Wetherbury, a pretty village in the middle of the countryside.\n\n\"That's a really good idea,\" Mrs. Tate agreed. \"Now, let's take this stuff inside.\"\n\n\"OK,\" said Kirsty, climbing out of the car. \"Where's Dad?\"\n\nJust then, a voice called out from the distance. \"Hello, I'm up here!\"\n\nKirsty glanced up, shading her eyes against the sun. To the left of the house was an old wooden barn. Mr. Tate was standing at the top of a ladder next to the barn, holding a hammer.\n\n\"I'm just repairing the barn roof,\" he explained. \"It's been leaking.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" said Mrs. Tate, opening the car trunk. She handed two shopping bags to Kirsty. \"We really have to do something about that barn. It's falling down.\"\n\n\"I like it,\" Kirsty replied. Suddenly, she jumped. Something cold and wet had landed on her nose! \"Oh, no!\" she exclaimed. \"I think it's raining.\" Then she stared at the white flakes that had landed on her pink shirt. \"It's not rain,\" she gasped. \"It's _snow_!\"\n\n\"Snow?\" Mrs. Tate looked shocked. \"In summer? It can't be!\"\n\nBut it _was_ snowing. In a flash, the sky had turned gray and snowflakes were floating down.\n\n\"Quick, Kirsty, let's get inside!\" called Mrs. Tate, grabbing the rest of the shopping bags and closing the trunk of the car.\n\nMr. Tate was already climbing down from the ladder. They all rushed inside as the snow swirled around them.\n\n\"This is very strange,\" said Mr. Tate, frowning. \"I wonder how long it will last?\"\n\nKirsty glanced out of the kitchen window. \"Mom, Dad, the snow stopped already!\" she cried.\n\nMr. and Mrs. Tate joined Kirsty at the window. The sun was shining and the sky was blue. A few puddles of water were all that remained of the sudden snowstorm.\n\n\"Well!\" said Mr. Tate. \"How strange! It was almost like magic!\"\n\nKirsty's heart began to pound. Could there be magic in the air? But why? She and Rachel had found all of the Rainbow Fairies, and Jack Frost had promised not to harm them again. Everything was fine in Fairyland now, wasn't it?\n\n\"You'd better go and change out of that wet shirt, Kirsty,\" said her mom.\n\nKirsty turned away from the window. As she did, she spotted something on the kitchen table. It was a rusty old metal weather vane in the shape of a rooster. \"What's that?\" she asked.\n\n\"I found it in the park this morning,\" her father said. \"It will look great on top of the barn once I'm done fixing the roof.\"\n\nKirsty reached a hand toward the weather vane. As she did, the metal glowed, and glittering sparkles danced toward her fingers. Kirsty blinked in surprise. When she looked again, the sparkles had vanished. All she could see was the rusty metal.\n\nConfused, Kirsty ran upstairs to change. Had she imagined the sparkles? Maybe. The snow was real, though. She was sure of that. \"I'll call Rachel after lunch,\" she thought. \"Maybe she's been noticing strange things, too.\"\n\nKirsty hurried into her bedroom. There, on a shelf above her bed, was the snow globe the fairies had given her. It was a very special thank-you gift for helping the Rainbow Fairies. Rachel had one, too. It was filled with glittering fairy dust, in all the colors of the rainbow. When the snow globe was shaken up, the dust swirled and sparkled inside.\n\nRight now, no one was shaking the snow globe \u2014 but the fairy dust was swirling around inside the glass! Kirsty forgot about her wet shirt and kept staring at the sparkling snow globe. She couldn't believe her eyes. \"It must be magic!\" she whispered.\n\nShe ran across the room and grabbed the glass globe, but then dropped it with a gasp of pain. The snow globe was so hot it had burned her fingers!\n\nAs the globe fell, it hit the edge of the shelf and shattered.\n\n\"Oh, no!\" Kirsty exclaimed, upset that she'd broken her beautiful gift. Just then, sparkling fairy dust flew into the air, and floated down around her. Before she knew it, Kirsty was shrinking! It was just like on Rainspell Island. She and Rachel had become fairy-sized when they helped rescue the Rainbow Fairies. Now she was tiny all over again!\n\nKirsty twisted around to look over her shoulder. There were her fairy wings, delicate and glittering. \"Maybe the fairies want me to fly to Fairyland to see them,\" Kirsty said to herself. \"But I don't know how to get there!\"\n\nAs she spoke, the fairy dust drifted around her. Suddenly, a strong breeze swept in through the open window. It picked up the fairy dust and whipped it into a whirlwind of glitter. Then, the whirlwind lifted Kirsty gently into the air and carried her right out the window!\n\n##\n\n#\n\nKirsty was whisked through the sky in a whirl of colorful fairy dust. She flew over rivers, mountains, trees, and houses, passing fluffy white clouds on the way. Soon, she saw the red-and-white toadstool houses of Fairyland below her. There was the river, winding its way through the green hills. The water sparkled like diamonds in the golden sunshine.\n\nThe wind was bringing Kirsty down now, close to the silver Fairy Palace and its pretty pink towers. Kirsty could see King Oberon and Queen Titania waiting for her with a group of fairies. And next to the queen was someone else that Kirsty knew very well.\n\n\"Rachel!\" called Kirsty.\n\nRachel rushed over as Kirsty landed gently on the grass.\n\n\"I came the same way you did,\" Rachel explained excitedly, giving Kirsty a hug. \"My snow globe broke, and the fairy dust brought me here.\"\n\n\"Do you know why?\" asked Kirsty.\n\nRachel shook her head as the king and queen and their fairies joined the girls.\n\n\"It's wonderful to see you both,\" said Queen Titania, smiling. \"But I'm afraid we need your help again,\" she added, looking worried.\n\n\"I hope you don't mind us bringing you here like this,\" King Oberon said.\n\n\"Of course not!\" Kirsty said eagerly. \"Is something wrong?\"\n\nThe queen sighed. \"I'm afraid that Jack Frost is up to his old tricks again.\"\n\nRachel looked shocked. \"But he promised not to harm the Rainbow Fairies anymore!\" she said, glancing up at the sky with a shiver. The sun had disappeared, and it had turned suddenly chilly.\n\n\"That's true,\" Queen Titania replied. \"Unfortunately, he didn't promise not to harm our Weather Fairies!\" She waved her hand at the seven fairies standing nearby.\n\n\"You mean this strange weather is all because of Jack Frost?\" asked Kirsty, as sunshine broke through the gray clouds again.\n\nThe queen nodded. \"Doodle, our weather vane rooster, is in charge of Fairyland's weather,\" she explained. \"Doodle's tail is made up of seven beautiful feathers. Each feather controls one kind of weather.\"\n\n\"Every morning, Doodle decides on the best weather for every part of Fairyland,\" the king went on. \"Then he gives each Weather Fairy the correct feather, and they go off to do their weather work.\"\n\nRachel and Kirsty were listening hard.\n\n\"Come with us,\" said the queen. \"We'll show you what's happened.\"\n\nThe king and queen led Rachel and Kirsty into the palace gardens and over to a golden pond.\n\nThe queen scattered some fairy dust onto the water, and it began to fizz and bubble.\n\nAfter a moment, the water grew still and clear. A picture began to appear on the surface. It showed a beautiful rooster with a magnificent tail of red, gold, and copper-colored feathers.\n\n\"That's Doodle,\" the queen explained. \"Yesterday morning he planned the weather for Fairyland, like he always does.\"\n\nRachel and Kirsty watched as Doodle flew to the top of the palace and perched on one of the pink towers. He spun slowly around, gazing out over the hills of Fairyland. Then he nodded his feathery head and flew down again.\n\n\"Jack Frost has always helped Doodle and our Weather Fairies with the winter weather,\" the king continued. \"There's so much work, with all the ice and snow and frost. But now it's summer, and Jack Frost has nothing to do.\"\n\n\"So he's bored,\" the queen put in. \"And that means trouble! Look....\" She pointed at the pictures appearing on the water.\n\nDoodle was standing on the palace steps, waiting for the Weather Fairies to collect their feathers.\n\nKirsty gasped. \"Look, Rachel!\" she cried. \"The goblins!\"\n\nRachel remembered the goblins. They were Jack Frost's servants, and they were mean and selfish. They had big feet, pointed noses, and ugly faces.\n\nSeven goblins were creeping toward Doodle. The rooster did not see them until it was too late. The goblins reached out and snatched Doodle's tail feathers. Then, they ran away with the feathers, laughing as they went.\n\n\"Oh, no!\" said Kirsty, as the rooster chased after the goblins. \"Poor Doodle!\"\n\n\"It gets worse.\" The queen sighed. \"The goblins escaped into the human world, and Doodle followed them. And now Doodle is very far away from Fairyland, and without his magic tail feathers, his powers just won't work,\" she explained.\n\n\"Doodle turned into an ordinary metal weather vane,\" the king said sadly. \"We don't even know where he is now.\"\n\n\"We need you to find the goblins,\" the queen said. \"It's the only way to get Doodle's tail feathers back. Until then, Doodle is stuck in your world, and our weather will be all mixed up!\" She looked up at the sky as a few raindrops began to fall. \"The goblins are causing weather trouble for humans, too.\"\n\n\"Our Weather Fairies will help you,\" the king told the girls. \"Let me introduce you. This is Crystal the Snow Fairy, Abigail the Breeze Fairy, Pearl the Cloud Fairy, Goldie the Sunshine Fairy, Evie the Mist Fairy, Storm the Lightning Fairy, and Hayley the Rain Fairy.\"\n\nThe fairies gathered around Rachel and Kirsty. \"Pleased to meet you!\" they cried in sweet voices. \"Thank you for helping us!\"\n\n\"Each Weather Fairy will help you find her own feather,\" said the queen. \"And we know the goblins are hiding somewhere here....\"\n\nShe sprinkled more fairy dust over the water, and the picture changed. Now, Rachel and Kirsty could see a pretty town surrounded by lush green fields.\n\n\"Oh!\" Kirsty exclaimed. \"That's Wetherbury! That's where I live. So _that's_ why we had the snowstorm. It was the goblins!\"\n\n\"What snowstorm?\" asked Rachel.\n\nKirsty quickly explained. \"And I think I know where Doodle is, too,\" she went on eagerly. \"I think he's the rusty old weather vane my dad found in the park!\"\n\n##\n\n#\n\n\"Thank goodness Doodle is safe!\" cried Queen Titania happily.\n\n\"But the snowstorm means that one of the goblins is close to your town,\" the king warned. \"And he must have Doodle's magic Snow Feather!\"\n\nKirsty turned to Rachel. \"Do you think your parents will let you come and stay with me?\" she said. \"My mom said it was OK.\"\n\n\"I'll ask them,\" Rachel replied. \"Then we can get the feathers back from the goblins!\"\n\nThe king nodded. \"That would be wonderful,\" he said.\n\nThe queen stepped forward. She had two golden lockets in her hand. \"Each locket is filled with fairy dust,\" she explained, giving them to the girls. \"You can use a pinch of this whenever you need to turn yourself into fairies and back into humans again. But remember!\" She smiled at Rachel and Kirsty. \"Don't look too hard for magic \u2014 it will find you. And when it does, you will know that one of the magic feathers is close by.\"\n\nThe girls fastened the lockets around their necks.\n\n\"And beware of the goblins,\" the king added. \"Jack Frost has cast a spell to make them bigger than usual.\"\n\n\"Bigger!\" Rachel said, feeling nervous. \"As big as humans, you mean?\"\n\nThe king shook his head. \"We have a law in Fairyland that not even magic can make anything bigger than the highest tower of the Fairy Palace.\" He pointed at the tallest pink tower. \"But it means that now the goblins are almost as tall as your shoulders \u2014 when you're human-sized.\"\n\nKirsty shivered. \"We'll have to be careful,\" she said. \"But of course we're happy to help.\"\n\nRachel nodded.\n\n\"Thank you,\" said the king gratefully. \"We knew you wouldn't let us down.\"\n\nThe queen scattered fairy dust over the girls. It whipped around them, and in a few seconds, a whirlwind was gently lifting them up into the sky.\n\n\"Good-bye!\" Kirsty and Rachel called, waving at their friends below. \"And don't worry. We'll find Doodle's feathers and bring him safely home.\"\n\n\"Rachel's here!\" Kirsty shouted, rushing to the front door.\n\nThe Walkers' car was just turning into the driveway.\n\n\"Put on your boots before you go out in the snow,\" called Mrs. Tate from the kitchen. Kirsty pulled on her boots. It was the day after she and Rachel had been to Fairyland, and Rachel's parents had agreed that she could come and stay with the Tates. Kirsty had been worried that the Walkers wouldn't be able to make it to Wetherbury, though. The goblins had been up to their tricks again. There had been a heavy snowfall, and flakes were still drifting down.\n\nKirsty ran outside, followed by her mom and dad. The Walkers were unloading Rachel's suitcase from the car.\n\n\"Hello,\" called Mr. Tate. \"Sorry about the weather. Isn't it awful?\"\n\n\"I packed my boots, scarf, and gloves in my suitcase,\" Rachel whispered to Kirsty as they hugged hello.\n\n\"Would you like to come in for some coffee?\" Mrs. Tate asked.\n\n\"That would be nice,\" Rachel's mom agreed. \"But we shouldn't stay too long, in case the snow gets worse.\"\n\n\"Come and see Doodle,\" Kirsty said quietly to Rachel, as their parents chatted.\n\nMr. Tate had put Doodle inside the hall closet. Gently, Kirsty lifted the weather vane out.\n\n\"Oh, poor Doodle!\" said Rachel when she saw the rusty rooster. \"We have to find his feathers, Kirsty!\"\n\nA knock at the front door made them both turn.\n\n\"I wonder who that is?\" Kirsty said, putting Doodle away again.\n\nKirsty's mom had opened the door and was talking to an old lady who was bundled up in winter clothes.\n\n\"It's Mom's friend, Mrs. Fordham,\" Kirsty whispered to Rachel. \"She lives on Willow Hill.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry to bother you,\" Mrs. Fordham was saying, \"but there's so much snow, I can't get back to my house. I wondered if I could wait here for a while.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said Mrs. Tate, helping her inside. \"Come and have a cup of coffee.\"\n\n\"I've never seen weather like this,\" Mrs. Fordham went on, unwinding her scarf. \"And it seems to be worse on Willow Hill than anywhere else. I don't know why.\"\n\nKirsty and Rachel glanced at each other.\n\n\"Why do you think there's more snow on Willow Hill?\" Rachel whispered to Kirsty.\n\nKirsty looked excited. \"Maybe that's where the goblin has taken the Snow Feather!\"\n\n\"Let's go and find out,\" Rachel suggested.\n\nKirsty ran to ask her mom if she and Rachel could go out to play in the snow. Meanwhile, Rachel quickly changed out of her summer clothes. The girls said good-bye to their parents and hurried outside. It was still snowing.\n\n\"Quick,\" said Kirsty. \"We have to make it to Willow Hill before the goblin gets away.\"\n\n\"Wait for me!\" called a tiny voice behind them.\n\n##\n\n#\n\nKirsty and Rachel spun around.\n\nA tiny fairy with crystal-colored wings was sliding down the gutter pipe. She wore a soft blue dress with fluffy white edging. Her wand was tipped with silver, and her hair was in pigtails.\n\n\"Look! It's Crystal the Snow Fairy!\" Kirsty gasped.\n\nThe girls rushed over to her.\n\n\"Hello again!\" Crystal called. She looked excited. Tiny, sparkling snowflakes fizzed from the tip of her wand. \"Look at all this snow,\" Rachel said.\n\n\"We think your feather is close by.\"\n\n\"So do I,\" agreed Crystal. \"I can't wait to find it! But there must be a goblin nearby, too....\" She shivered, and her wings drooped. \"We have to be careful.\"\n\n\"We're going to Willow Hill,\" Kirsty explained. \"We think the feather may be over there.\"\n\nCrystal fluttered down and landed on Rachel's shoulder. \"Let's go!\" she cried.\n\nThey headed out of the Tates' garden and walked up Twisty Lane onto High Street. There were lots of people around, so Crystal hid inside a fold of Rachel's scarf.\n\nCrowds of children were playing in the park, throwing snowballs and building snowmen. They were having fun, but the snow was causing lots of problems, too. The girls passed a few cars that were stuck in snowdrifts. There were other cars that had broken down. A broken pipe at the post office had flooded the road, and some of the shops were closed.\n\n\"How much farther is Willow Hill?\" Rachel panted. It was hard work, tramping through the deep snow.\n\nKirsty pointed up ahead of them. \"There it is,\" she replied breathlessly.\n\nRachel's heart sank. The snow-covered hill looked very high. As they trudged out of the village, the snow seemed to be getting deeper, too. It was almost up to the top of Rachel's boots.\n\n\"I have an idea,\" Kirsty said suddenly, as her feet sank into a snowdrift. \"Why don't we use some of our fairy dust? Then we can fly the rest of the way!\"\n\nCrystal popped her head out of Rachel's scarf. \"Good idea!\" she said.\n\nKirsty and Rachel opened their lockets. They each took a pinch of fairy dust and sprinkled it over themselves. Immediately, they began to shrink, and wings grew from their shoulders.\n\n\"Come on.\" Crystal took their hands. \"Let's fly to the top of the hill. I can see a house up there.\"\n\n\"That's Willow Cottage,\" explained Kirsty. \"It's Mrs. Fordham's house.\"\n\nCrystal and the girls flew to the top of the hill, dodging the falling snowflakes, which seemed as big as dinner plates to Rachel and Kirsty.\n\nAs they got closer to the cottage, Kirsty spotted smoke coming from the chimney. \"That's funny!\" she said with a frown. \"Mrs. Fordham lives by herself, and she's at our house. So who started the fire?\"\n\n\"Let's look inside,\" suggested Crystal.\n\nThe three girls swooped down and hovered outside a frosty window. Crystal waved her wand to melt some of the frost, making a small peephole. They peered inside.\n\nSitting on the floor, in front of a roaring fire, was a big goblin. And in his hand was a shimmering copper feather, spotted with snowy-white dots.\n\nCrystal gasped. \"The Snow Feather!\" she whispered excitedly.\n\n##\n\n#\n\nAs Kirsty, Rachel, and Crystal watched, the goblin sneezed loudly.\n\n\"A-CCCH-O-O-O!\" When the goblin sneezed, a shower of ice cubes clattered to the floor. They began to melt, leaving behind little puddles of water.\n\n\"The goblin doesn't know how to use the magic feather properly,\" Crystal whispered.\n\nKirsty and Rachel were a little frightened. Because of Jack Frost's spell, the goblin was now pretty big. He looked very scary with his mean face, pointed ears, and big, flat feet.\n\nThe goblin huddled closer to the fire. He was grumbling and rubbing his toes. \"I'm so cold,\" he moaned. \"And my feet hurt!\"\n\nCrystal smiled. \"Goblins hate to have cold feet!\" she murmured.\n\n\"How are we going to get the feather back?\" asked Kirsty.\n\n\"Let's fly around the house and look for a way in,\" Rachel suggested.\n\nThey flew around, checking all the windows and doors. But everything was locked. They could still hear the goblin muttering about his cold feet.\n\nKirsty grinned. \"I have an idea!\" she said. \"Dad just decided to give away a pair of slippers that were too small for him. If I wrap them up in a box, I can deliver the package to the goblin. Then he'll open the door for us, and we can get inside.\"\n\n\"Perfect!\" Crystal agreed, as her wand fizzed sparkly snowflakes. \"The goblin won't be able to resist a present. And if Rachel and I hide inside the box, maybe we can get the feather back.\"\n\nQuickly, they all flew back to the Tates' house. With a wave of her wand, Crystal turned Kirsty human-sized again. Then she and Rachel hid inside Kirsty's pockets.\n\nKirsty let herself quietly into the house and found the slippers, which her dad had put in a pile to give away. Then she wrapped the slippers in lots of tissue paper and put them in a shoe box.\n\n\"You can come out now,\" she whispered to Crystal and Rachel. Luckily, all the parents were chatting with Mrs. Fordham in the living room, and hadn't heard a thing.\n\nCrystal and Rachel flew into the shoe box and hid under the tissue paper.\n\nKirsty popped the lid back on the box and wrapped it neatly in brown paper. Then she set off again for Willow Hill. She couldn't fly up the hill with the package, so she had to walk.\n\nBy the time she reached Willow Cottage, Kirsty was out of breath and wet with snow. \"We're here,\" she said quietly to Crystal and Rachel. Then she took a deep breath, knocked on the door, and waited.\n\nThere was no reply. Kirsty knocked again. \"Delivery!\" she called.\n\n\"Go away!\" the goblin shouted.\n\nKirsty tried again. \"Some nice warm slippers for Mr. Goblin!\" she said loudly.\n\nThis time the door opened, just a crack. Kirsty held the package out. The door opened wider, and a bony hand shot out and grabbed the box.\n\nThen the door was slammed shut in Kirsty's face. Kirsty hurried to the window and peeked in. The goblin was tearing the paper off the shoe box. He pulled out the slippers, popped them on his feet, and stomped around the room to try them out.\n\nThey were a bit big, but he looked delighted. He settled down happily in a chair by the fire, stretched out his feet to admire the slippers, and fell fast asleep. The shining Snow Feather lay on his lap.\n\nKirsty watched as the tissue paper in the box began to move. Crystal and Rachel fluttered out.\n\nCrystal flew over to the snoring goblin and lifted the feather from his lap.\n\n\"You'd better make me human-sized again, Crystal,\" Rachel whispered. \"Then I can open the window and we can escape.\"\n\nCrystal nodded. She waved her wand over Rachel, who instantly shot up to her full size. Then Rachel unlatched the window and pushed it open.\n\nAn icy blast of wind swept into the room.\n\n\"What's going on?\" the goblin roared, jumping up from his armchair.\n\n##\n\n#\n\n\"Quick!\" Kirsty gasped, pulling Rachel through the window.\n\nCrystal flew out too, her face pale with fear.\n\nThe goblin spotted the Snow Fairy and gave another furious roar. He ran over to the window, jumped out, and followed the girls.\n\nKirsty and Rachel hurried down the hill. It was hard to run fast because the snow was so deep.\n\n\"Hurry!\" Crystal called. She was flying above them, the feather in her hand. \"He's getting closer!\"\n\nRachel glanced anxiously over her shoulder. The goblin was catching up!\n\nBut then she saw him fall over in his too-big slippers. Yelling loudly, he rolled head over heels down the hill, picking up snow as he went.\n\n\"Watch out, Kirsty!\" Rachel gasped. \"The goblin's turned into a giant snowball!\"\n\nThe goblin's arms and legs stuck out of the snowball as it rolled down the hill. Quickly, the girls dove out of the way. The snowball shot past them and rolled away, faster and faster. Soon it was out of sight.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" asked Crystal, flying over to her friends. The girls were picking themselves up and brushing snow from their clothes.\n\n\"We're fine!\" Kirsty beamed. \"But can you stop the Snow Feather's magic?\"\n\nCrystal nodded and expertly waved the Snow Feather in a complicated pattern. Immediately, the snow clouds vanished. Overhead, the sky was blue and the sun shone. By the time the girls made their way back to the Tates' house, the snow had melted away.\n\nAs Kirsty and Rachel walked into the house, with Crystal safely hidden in Kirsty's pocket, Mrs. Tate smiled.\n\n\"Hello, girls,\" she said. \"Isn't it funny how the weather's changed? Your mom and dad have gone home, Rachel. At least they won't have to worry about the snow now. I hope it stays nice for the rest of your visit.\"\n\nKirsty and Rachel grinned at each other.\n\n\"Your dad's in the garden, Kirsty,\" Mrs. Tate went on. \"He's attaching that old weather vane to the barn roof.\"\n\nKirsty and Rachel ran outside. They looked up on top of the barn \u2014 and there was Doodle! Mr. Tate was busy in his shed, so he wasn't watching.\n\n\"Quick, Crystal.\" Kirsty took the Snow Fairy out of her pocket. \"Give Doodle his tail feather back!\"\n\nCrystal nodded. Fluttering her shiny wings, she flew up to Doodle and put the big tail feather into place.\n\nThe girls gasped in surprise as copper and gold sparkles fizzed and flew from Doodle's tail. The iron weather vane vanished. In its place was Doodle, just as colorful as he had been in Fairyland!\n\nDoodle turned his head and stared straight at Kirsty and Rachel. \"Beware!\" he squawked. But before he could say any more, his feathers began to stiffen and he became metal again.\n\n\"What was he trying to say?\" Rachel asked, puzzled.\n\nKirsty shook her head. She had no idea.\n\n\"I don't know either,\" sighed Crystal. \"But it must be important. What if he was trying to warn us about other goblins?\"\n\nKirsty frowned. \"Maybe he'll be able to tell us more when we bring back his other feathers.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Crystal agreed. She waved at Rachel and Kirsty. \"And now that you've found the Snow Feather, I have to return to Fairyland. The king and queen will be so happy. Good-bye, and thank you!\"\n\n\"Good-bye!\" Rachel and Kirsty called.\n\nThe girls waved as Crystal flew up into the sky, her wings glittering in the sun.\n\nKirsty turned to Rachel. \"And now we have only six more magic feathers to find,\" she said.\n\nRachel nodded. \"I wonder where the next one will be!\"\n\nRachel and Kirsty looked at the sunny sky and wondered what adventure \u2014 and weather \u2014 the next week would bring.\n\n#\n\n##\n\n##\n\n##\n\nThe Adventure Begins\n\nCake Chaos!\n\nGoblin Discovered\n\nUp, Up and Away!\n\nFlying High\n\nBright and Breezy\n\n##\n\n#\n\n\"I'm so glad I could come and stay with you!\" Rachel Walker said happily. She sat with her friend, Kirsty Tate, in the garden outside Kirsty's house. The sun shone brightly on the green lawn and pretty flowering bushes.\n\n\"Me too,\" agreed Kirsty, smiling. \"And it's very exciting to help the fairies again!\"\n\nKirsty and Rachel had met while on vacation with their parents a few months earlier, and they'd had a wonderful fairy adventure. Jack Frost had cast a nasty spell to banish the seven Rainbow Fairies from Fairyland, and the girls had helped rescue them. With Rachel and Kirsty's help, the fairies were able to bring color back to Fairyland!\n\nNow Jack Frost was causing even more trouble in Fairyland. He had ordered his goblin servants to steal the seven magic feathers from Doodle, the weather vane rooster. Doodle and the seven Weather Fairies were in charge of the weather in Fairyland. But without his magic tail feathers the rooster was powerless! Fairyland's weather would be all mixed up until Rachel and Kirsty could help the Weather Fairies find all seven of Doodle's stolen feathers.\n\n\"I hope we find another magic feather today,\" said Rachel. She and Kirsty had already helped Crystal the Snow Fairy return the Snow Feather to Doodle.\n\nThe goblins were hiding all around Wetherbury, where Kirsty lived. And they had been up to lots of mischief, using the magic feathers to create some very unusual weather in the country village.\n\nKirsty looked anxious. \"We still need to find six more feathers,\" she said. \"Or poor Doodle will be stuck on top of our barn forever!\" She glanced up at the roof of the old wooden barn. Here in the human world, the magical rooster was just a rusty metal weather vane.\n\nJust then, a bush near the garden gate began to rustle. Kirsty and Rachel could see its pink flowers jiggling. \"Do you think there's a goblin in that bush?\" Kirsty whispered.\n\n\"Yes! I can see it moving.\" Rachel gasped. She was worried about facing another goblin. They were much scarier now that Jack Frost had cast a spell to make them bigger.\n\n\"Come on!\" Kirsty said, running across the lawn. \"He might have one of Doodle's feathers.\"\n\nRachel followed her, watching the bush nervously.\n\nAn angry screech came from the middle of the bush. Rachel and Kirsty looked at each other in surprise. Suddenly, two cats shot out and chased each other into the barn.\n\n\"Oh!\" Kirsty exclaimed, and she and Rachel laughed with relief.\n\nJust then, Kirsty's mom appeared at the front door. \"There you are, Kirsty,\" she said. \"Would you and Rachel like to go to the Summer Festival in the village? You can cheer your grandma on in the Cake Competition. She's hoping to win this year.\"\n\nKirsty and Rachel looked at each other and smiled. \"We'd love to,\" Kirsty replied. \"Gran makes the best cakes!\"\n\nMrs. Tate laughed. \"Yes, she does. But you'd better hurry if you want to get there before the judging starts.\"\n\nA few minutes later, the girls were hurrying down Twisty Lane toward High Street. It was a beautiful day. Birds soared in the blue sky and wildflowers dotted the bushes like tiny jewels. As they walked by a thatched cottage with a pretty garden full of roses, a sharp gust of wind blew a shower of flower petals onto the sidewalk.\n\nJust then, a large white envelope landed at Kirsty's feet. \"Where did that come from?\" she murmured, and then she gasped as more letters came spinning and whirling toward her.\n\n\"The wind's really blowing hard now,\" Rachel said, stooping to pick up some of the letters.\n\n\"Hey! Come back!\" called a voice. A mailman was running toward them, chasing the envelopes that had been carried away by the breeze.\n\nThe girls picked up the letters from the ground and handed them to the mailman. He grinned and stuffed them back into his bag.\n\n\"Thanks,\" he said. \"This wind's really strong. Listen, it's even blowing the church bell now!\"\n\nHe walked on to deliver his letters as Kirsty and Rachel hurried toward the festival. As they walked, they could hear the church bell clanging in the breeze.\n\nThe wind seemed to be getting stronger and stronger. When the girls arrived at the festival, they saw that the wind was causing chaos there. Strings of flags had come loose and were blowing in the wind like kite tails. Three tents strained against their ropes as they billowed and swayed. Many of the stallholders had to fight to stop their goods from blowing away.\n\nWith a loud snap, the side of a tent tore free from its ropes and began flapping in the wind. Some men ran over to tie it back down. \"I've never seen wind like this in the middle of summer,\" one of them complained.\n\nAs the girls headed off to look for the Cake Competition, Kirsty noticed a small boy struggling to hold on to a yellow balloon. Suddenly, the wind whipped it out of his hand.\n\n\"My balloon!\" cried the boy.\n\n\"We'll catch it!\" called Kirsty, already running after the balloon.\n\nRachel followed her friend. \"There's something very strange about this wind!\" she shouted.\n\n\"I know,\" puffed Kirsty, jumping up to catch the balloon's string. \"Do you think it could be magic?\"\n\nThe girls looked at each other, their eyes shining with excitement.\n\n##\n\n#\n\nKirsty and Rachel caught the balloon and took it back to the little boy, who was standing outside one of the tents. When he saw it, the boy's face lit up. \"My balloon!\" He beamed. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"You're welcome,\" Kirsty replied.\n\nJust then, she heard a familiar voice.\n\n\"Hello, Kirsty,\" called a plump, jolly-looking lady, as she hurried over to join the girls.\n\n\"Hi, Gran,\" Kirsty said. She turned to Rachel. \"This is my dad's mom, Grandma Tate,\" she explained.\n\n\"Hello, Mrs. Tate,\" said Rachel. She glanced at the huge cake tin that Kirsty's gran held in her hands. \"Is that the cake you're entering in the competition?\"\n\nKirsty's gran nodded. \"It's a chocolate fudge cake,\" she said. \"That grumpy Mrs. Adelstrop always wins the competition. But I think I have a chance this year.\"\n\n\"Who's Mrs. Adelstrop?\" Rachel asked.\n\nJust then, another woman with a cake tin pushed by. \"Out of my way!\" she demanded. \"This wind is terrible!\" With that, she disappeared inside a nearby tent.\n\n\"I'll bet you've guessed who that was,\" whispered Kirsty's gran.\n\n\"Mrs. Adelstrop!\" the girls replied.\n\n\"You got it right on the first try,\" said Gran with a laugh. \"Well, I have to go get ready now. See you girls soon!\" And she followed Mrs. Adelstrop into the tent.\n\n\"Good luck,\" called Rachel.\n\n\"Should we go inside, too?\" Kirsty asked. \"The goblin with the Breeze Feather must be close by. He might even be hiding inside the tent.\"\n\nRachel nodded and the girls wandered into the tent. A tall, thin man with a notepad stood behind a table full of delicious-looking cakes. Mrs. Adelstrop smiled confidently and placed an enormous lemon cake on the table.\n\n\"That looks pretty good,\" Kirsty whispered, noticing the sugared lemon slices on top.\n\nBut then Kirsty's gran took out her chocolate fudge cake. Layers of chocolate sponge and buttercream filling were topped with icing and chocolate leaves. Mrs. Adelstrop's smile faded when she saw it.\n\n\"Wow! That's Gran's best cake ever!\" Kirsty exclaimed happily.\n\n\"It looks delicious,\" Rachel agreed.\n\nBut as Mrs. Tate stepped forward to place her cake on the table, a huge gust of wind blew in through the entrance of the tent. A colored rope covered with flags snaked into the tent and wrapped itself around her legs.\n\nMrs. Tate stumbled, and the cake flew out of her hands. It sailed through the air and landed \u2014 _splat_ \u2014 right in the judge's face!\n\nKirsty's gran looked horrified. \"Oh, how awful! Look at that poor judge,\" she whispered to the girls. \"And there go my chances of winning the Cake Competition this year!\" she added sadly.\n\n\"What an awful accident,\" said Mrs. Adelstrop loudly. Kirsty could tell she was trying not to look happy.\n\nThe judge stood there, covered in chocolate icing, as everyone rushed to help him clean up. The sound of the howling wind surrounded the tent, and the canvas flapped loudly.\n\n\"The wind's getting worse,\" whispered Rachel. \"Let's see if the goblin is hiding under the table.\"\n\nKirsty lifted a corner of the tablecloth and peeked underneath, but there was no sign of a goblin.\n\nRachel glanced around the tent, looking for other possible goblin hiding places. Her eyes fell on a pretty fairy decoration, perched on top of a cake. Suddenly, she gasped. The tiny fairy was waving at her!\n\n##\n\n#\n\nThe fairy's bright green eyes sparkled with laughter. She wore a pretty yellow top and a matching skirt with a little green leaf on it. Her long brown hair was tangled and windswept, and she held an emerald-green wand with a shining golden tip. Little bursts of golden leaves swirled from the tip of her wand.\n\nRachel's eyes widened. \"Kirsty! Over here!\" she whispered.\n\nKirsty hurried over. \"It's Abigail the Breeze Fairy,\" she said happily. She and Rachel had met Abigail and all the other Weather Fairies in Fairyland.\n\n\"Hello, Rachel and Kirsty!\" Abigail said, smiling. She twirled in the air in a cloud of gold-green dust and tiny bronze leaves.\n\n\"Thank goodness we've found you,\" said Rachel. \"We think there's a goblin nearby.\"\n\nAbigail's tiny face paled. \"Goblins are nasty things \u2014 so big and scary! But we have to find this one,\" she said bravely, \"before he causes any more trouble with the Breeze Feather.\" She fluttered her glittering wings and swooped onto Rachel's shoulder to hide underneath her hair.\n\n\"Well, the goblin isn't in this tent,\" said Kirsty. \"Let's go outside and check the booths.\"\n\n\"Good idea,\" Rachel agreed, and the two friends left the tent, struggling against the blustery wind. They hadn't gotten far when they heard a loud creaking noise. Suddenly, the tent behind them collapsed! The girls saw Kirsty's gran rushing to help others, who were crawling out from beneath the canvas.\n\n\"Oh, what a mess!\" said Rachel.\n\n\"At least it doesn't look like anyone's hurt,\" Kirsty pointed out.\n\nThe wind moaned loudly through a group of oak trees nearby. The branches thrashed back and forth, and green leaves rained down.\n\nAbigail's tiny mouth drooped. \"Poor trees. It's too soon for them to lose their leaves,\" she said sadly.\n\n\"This is more goblin mischief!\" fumed Kirsty. \"If that goblin keeps using the Breeze Feather, he'll tear the leaves off all the trees.\"\n\nQuickly, the girls searched the tents and some of the stalls, but they didn't have any luck at all finding the goblin \u2014 or the Breeze Feather.\n\nThen, Kirsty heard a dog barking. \"It's Twiglet,\" she said, pointing at a cute Jack Russell puppy next to the raffle booth. \"His owner is one of our neighbors, Mr. McDougall.\"\n\n\"We haven't searched the raffle booth yet,\" Rachel said. \"Let's go and check there for goblins.\"\n\nThe girls hurried over. \"Hello,\" Kirsty greeted her neighbor.\n\n\"Hello, my dear,\" said Mr. McDougall. \"I don't think Twiglet likes this windstorm.\"\n\nKirsty nodded. She bent down to pet Twiglet, and the puppy jumped up from beside his empty food bowl. He wagged his tail and wiggled his little nose. Kirsty stroked his soft, floppy ears. \"You're gorgeous,\" she said, smiling.\n\n\"What's that?\" Rachel asked, pointing to a torn piece of material in Twiglet's mouth.\n\nKirsty pulled the material away from Twiglet. It was brown leather and it smelled moldy.\n\nRachel and Kirsty looked at it closely.\n\n\"I'm sure I've seen something like this before,\" Rachel said thoughtfully. \"I wonder where Twiglet got it.\"\n\nSuddenly, Twiglet began barking again. He was staring up at the sky, and jumping up and down.\n\n\"That's odd,\" said Mr. McDougall. \"He keeps doing that. I wonder why.\"\n\n\"Maybe he's hungry?\" suggested Rachel.\n\nMr. McDougall shook his head. \"Can't be. His dish is empty. He must have eaten all of his food when I wasn't looking.\"\n\nTwiglet snapped and growled, still looking upward. The girls and Abigail followed the puppy's gaze toward the sky.\n\n\"Look at that!\" Rachel pointed to a hot-air balloon floating in the sky above the festival. The balloon was covered with red and orange stripes, and a large basket hung down from it. The fierce wind sent leaves and bits of paper whirling around it, but the balloon itself seemed to hang in midair without moving. A bright spurt of flame shot from the burner to heat the air in the balloon and keep it floating.\n\n\"That's strange,\" said Kirsty. \"It doesn't seem to be affected by the wind at all!\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Rachel agreed. \"How can it stay so still with the wind blowing all around it?\"\n\n\"The goblin must be hiding in it!\" Abigail exclaimed. \"Only the magic Breeze Feather could protect the balloon from the wind like that.\"\n\nKirsty's eyes widened. \"So we've finally found the goblin,\" she said. \"But he's way up in the sky!\"\n\n##\n\n#\n\n\"How are we going to get up there?\" Rachel asked.\n\n\"Easy!\" Abigail told her. \"We use fairy magic!\"\n\nThe girls immediately reached for their shining golden lockets. The lockets were full of magic fairy dust. They had been special gifts from Titania, the Fairy Queen. A pinch of the dust would turn the girls into fairies, and another pinch would turn them back into humans again.\n\nRachel sprinkled herself with sparkling fairy dust, then laughed with delight as she shrank to fairy size. The grass was as tall as she was, and the buttercups now seemed as big as trees!\n\nKirsty did the same, and turned around to look at her silvery wings. \"Wow! I'm a fairy again!\"\n\n\"We have to hurry!\" Abigail said, zooming up into the air. She was quickly followed by Kirsty and Rachel.\n\nThe higher Abigail and the girls flew, the more the wind tried to blow them off course. Kirsty and Rachel's wings soon felt really tired.\n\n\"Fly right behind me,\" Abigail urged the girls. \"It might be easier for you.\"\n\nRachel and Kirsty gave it a try. Luckily, it was less of a struggle to follow the experienced flying fairy. Abigail seemed to create an invisible path through the sky. Gradually, they drew closer and closer to the balloon's basket.\n\n\"We were right. Look!\" cried Kirsty.\n\nAn ugly face peered over the edge of the balloon's basket. It was a goblin with pointed ears and a big, lumpy nose.\n\n\"He's a very big goblin,\" said Abigail nervously.\n\n\"I don't think he's seen us yet,\" Rachel whispered. \"Let's creep up behind him.\"\n\nThe goblin was staring at Twiglet, who was still barking down below. \"Ha, ha! Silly little doggy. You can't catch me!\" he sneered. Kirsty and Rachel heard the goblin's tummy rumble. It sounded like mud being stirred in a bucket. The goblin gave a huge burp, and a blast of stinky breath blew over Rachel, Kirsty, and Abigail. \"Ugh!\" Abigail held her nose.\n\n\"What a terrible smell!\" complained Rachel. \"What has that goblin been eating?\"\n\n\"Can't catch me, doggy!\" The goblin continued to taunt Twiglet, jumping up and down and waving a shining bronze feather.\n\nDown on the ground, a strong gust of wind swept Twiglet off his feet. The puppy tumbled over, got up again, and shook his head angrily. Then he looked up and began barking even more loudly.\n\nThe goblin jumped back, surprised. Then he recovered. \"I'm safe up here!\" he said to himself, and laughed.\n\nRachel was confused. _The goblin's afraid of Twiglet_ , she thought. _I wonder why._\n\n\"He's holding the Breeze Feather!\" whispered Abigail. Her leaf-green eyes flashed with anger.\n\n\"Yes. And he's using it to tease poor Twiglet!\" said Kirsty. \"What a mean goblin! We have to get that feather back.\"\n\nRachel was thinking hard. \"I've got a plan,\" she told her friends. \"Kirsty, you land in the basket. Then Abigail can make you human-sized, and the two of you can distract the goblin while I fly up and turn off the balloon's burner. The balloon will sink, and we'll have a better chance of getting the feather back once that goblin's back on the ground.\"\n\n\"That's a good idea,\" said Abigail. \"But Kirsty and I will be very close to the goblin. Can you be quick, Rachel?\"\n\n\"I will,\" Rachel promised.\n\n\"Okay, then here I go,\" Kirsty said. She checked to make sure that the goblin wasn't looking, and then flew up and over the edge of the basket. Abigail hovered next to her. With a wave of her wand, she turned Kirsty back to her normal size.\n\nWhen he saw Kirsty, the goblin's eyes grew as big as golf balls. \"Who are you?\" he demanded.\n\n\"I'm Kirsty, a friend of the Weather Fairies,\" Kirsty declared firmly.\n\n\"And I'm Abigail the Breeze Fairy,\" Abigail added in her soft, musical voice.\n\nThe goblin glared at Abigail. \"Boo!\" he shouted, and lunged at her.\n\nAbigail fluttered out of his reach, and the goblin snorted with laughter.\n\nJust then, Kirsty saw Rachel overhead, turning off the burner. _So far so good_ , she thought. _The goblin hasn't noticed Rachel._\n\nThe goblin scowled at Kirsty. \"Get off my balloon!\" he roared.\n\n\"That's not very nice,\" Kirsty said calmly.\n\n\"I don't care!\" snapped the goblin. He looked at Abigail slyly. \"I know what you want and you're not going to get it!\" he said, waving the Breeze Feather.\n\nA huge gust of wind rocked the basket. Kirsty clung to the side as it tilted and wobbled.\n\nThe goblin snickered. \"Too windy for you?\"\n\n\"Your balloon's sinking,\" Kirsty answered.\n\n\"Don't be ridiculous!\" sneered the goblin. Then he looked over the edge of the basket. \"What?\"\n\nDown below, but getting closer all the time, Twiglet barked and growled.\n\nThe goblin's big nose twitched nervously.\n\nKirsty noticed a rip in the goblin's ragged clothing and remembered the piece of material in Twiglet's mouth. \"Why are you afraid of the puppy?\" she asked.\n\nThe goblin looked shifty. \"I might have eaten his dinner,\" he replied sulkily.\n\n_No wonder his breath is so stinky!_ thought Kirsty.\n\n\"Now, tell me why this balloon's sinking!\" demanded the goblin fiercely. \"Or I'll wave the Breeze Feather and tip you out of the basket \u2014 like this!\"\n\nThe basket rocked back and forth. Kirsty's heart pounded, but she hung on to the side. The goblin hardly moved, even though the basket shook and wobbled. He was perfectly balanced on his big, broad feet. He waved the Breeze Feather again, making the basket rock more than ever.\n\nKirsty reached nervously for her fairy locket. She would need her fairy wings if she was tipped out of the basket. But would she have time to use the fairy dust if she fell?\n\n##\n\n#\n\n\"There's too much weight in this basket! That's why we're sinking,\" said Abigail.\n\nThe goblin glared at Kirsty. \"You're too heavy. Get out!\" he ordered.\n\nQuick as a flash, Kirsty sprinkled herself with fairy dust from her locket and fluttered out of the goblin's way.\n\n\"We're still sinking!\" the goblin cried.\n\nSuddenly, his ugly face brightened. \"But I don't need these heavy sandbags. They just help the balloon to land,\" he said. He grabbed the sandbags that hung around the edge of the basket and heaved them over the side. To his dismay, the balloon continued to sink lower and lower.\n\n\"What will I do?\" he wailed. Abigail put her hands on her hips. \"You'll have to throw out that feather!\" she told the goblin firmly.\n\n\"No!\" snapped the goblin. \"It's mine, and I'm keeping it! Besides, it's too light to make any difference.\"\n\nKirsty and Rachel hovered in the air behind Abigail. Would she be able to convince the goblin to get rid of the feather?\n\n\"It's a lot heavier than you think,\" Abigail said.\n\nThe goblin scowled. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"A pound of feathers weighs just the same as a pound of rocks, you know,\" Abigail replied.\n\nKirsty and Rachel laughed softly. _They_ knew that a pound of anything weighs just the same as a pound of anything else! But goblins are foolish, and the girls guessed that Abigail was hoping to confuse this one.\n\nThe goblin blinked and scratched his head. Abigail's plan was working!\n\nOn the ground below, Twiglet barked and jumped up at the balloon. He seemed a lot closer now.\n\n\"Argh! Don't let it get me!\" screamed the goblin. And in desperation, he flung the feather out of the basket. Abigail flew after it in a blur of golden wings, but the feather was caught by the wind and swept away.\n\n\"Come on!\" shouted Rachel, flying after Abigail. Kirsty followed.\n\n\"The wind's too strong. I can't fly!\" cried Rachel in panic.\n\nThe girls were tossed around by the wind. They flapped their wings and tried to regain control, but it was no use. They were drifting farther and farther from the Breeze Feather, and they couldn't even see Abigail through all the leaves and garbage swirling around them.\n\n\"We have to catch the Breeze Feather,\" shouted Kirsty. \"Otherwise it could be lost forever!\"\n\n##\n\n#\n\nSuddenly, Kirsty and Rachel caught a glimpse of Abigail flying to their rescue.\n\n\"Don't worry about us,\" Kirsty shouted above the wind.\n\n\"Just catch the Breeze Feather!\" Rachel yelled.\n\nAbigail must have heard them, because she nodded firmly and sped off after the feather again. She seemed about to grab it, when the wind snatched it away from her. Rachel let out a cry, but then she saw a rope of tiny golden leaves snake out from Abigail's wand and wrap around the Breeze Feather.\n\nThe tiny fairy pulled the feather toward her and finally managed to grab hold of it. She immediately waved it in a complicated pattern. \"Wind, stop!\" she ordered.\n\nWith a soft sigh, the roaring wind died. Kirsty and Rachel could immediately fly properly again.\n\nAbigail flew over to join them. \"It's wonderful to have the Breeze Feather back safe and sound!\" she said happily.\n\n\"What about the goblin?\" asked Kirsty.\n\nAbigail frowned. \"Leave him to me!\" She pointed the feather at the hot-air balloon. \"Wind, blow!\" she commanded. An enormous puff of wind rocked the balloon.\n\nThe goblin hung over the basket. His face looked green. \"I feel sick,\" he moaned.\n\n\"You shouldn't have eaten Twiglet's dinner, then!\" Rachel told him.\n\n\"I wish I hadn't,\" replied the goblin gloomily. \"It wasn't very good, anyway!\"\n\nAbigail waved the Breeze Feather a second time and the big red and orange balloon blew high into the sky. The goblin's cries faded as the balloon flew out of sight.\n\nKirsty, Rachel, and Abigail flew to the festival and slid down one of the tents to the ground. Abigail waved her wand, and Kirsty and Rachel grew back to their normal size. They peeked out from behind the tent. Now that the wind had stopped, people were running around organizing their stalls. Over on the lawn, Twiglet was chewing contentedly.\n\n\"Mr. McDougall gave Twiglet a dog biscuit to chew on,\" said Kirsty.\n\n\"I bet it tastes better than that goblin's clothes!\" laughed Rachel.\n\n\"Kirsty!\" called Kirsty's gran.\n\nAbigail quickly zoomed onto Kirsty's shoulder and hid beneath her hair.\n\n\"Gran!\" Suddenly, Kirsty remembered what had happened to her gran's cake. So why was her gran wearing such a big smile?\n\n\"I won first prize!\" said Mrs. Tate, her eyes shining. \"The judge said my cake was delicious. He couldn't help tasting it when it was all over his face!\"\n\nThe girls were just congratulating Mrs. Tate when Mrs. Adelstrop stomped past, scowling.\n\nKirsty's gran chuckled. \"She's won first prize for the last three years. It's time someone else had a chance!\"\n\nRachel and Kirsty laughed. And only they heard the silvery giggling that came from under Kirsty's hair.\n\n\"Now I have to go,\" said Gran. \"My best friend, Mable, is hoping to win a prize in one of the vegetable competitions!\"\n\nKirsty and Rachel waved good-bye.\n\n\"We should go and give Doodle his magic feather back,\" said Kirsty.\n\nThe girls and Abigail headed home. It was quiet and sunny now, and a warm summer breeze gently rustled through the leaves on Twisty Lane. \"Everything's back to normal,\" said Rachel happily.\n\n\"For now,\" Kirsty added.\n\nBack at Kirsty's house, Abigail flew straight up to the barn roof and carefully put the Breeze Feather into Doodle's tail.\n\nThe weather vane rooster shimmered in a magic haze of gold. And then he fizzed into life and shook himself. Fabulous copper sparkles flew into the air, making Rachel and Kirsty gasp. Doodle's fiery feathers were magnificent.\n\nDoodle shifted to settle the Breeze Feather properly into place, where it glimmered and glowed. Then he looked straight at Rachel and Kirsty. \"Jack\u2014\" he squawked, and opened his beak as if to speak again, but the color of his feathers faded. Doodle became a rusty old weather vane once more.\n\n\"He's trying to tell us something,\" said Kirsty.\n\n\"Last time, he said 'Beware,'\" Rachel reminded Kirsty. \"So now we have 'Beware Jack....' I wonder what he wanted to say next?\"\n\nAbigail floated down from the roof. \"I don't know,\" she said. \"But keep your eyes open. Jack Frost is always up to no good.\"\n\n\"We will,\" Kirsty promised.\n\n\"Now I must fly back to Fairyland,\" Abigail said. \"Thank you again, Rachel and Kirsty.\"\n\n\"Good-bye, Abigail!\" Kirsty said, and Rachel waved.\n\nAbigail's wings flashed, and with a swirl of tiny golden leaves, she was gone.\n\nRachel and Kirsty smiled at each other, enjoying their fairy secret.\n\n\"Five more magic feathers to find!\" whispered Kirsty.\n\n\"I wonder which one we'll find next,\" Rachel said.\n\n#\n\n##\n\n#\n\n##\n\n##\n\n#\n\nMissing Fidget\n\nMagic in the Air\n\nGoblin Hunting\n\nA Sticky Situation\n\nCotton Candy Clouds\n\nA Silver Lining\n\n##\n\n#\n\n\"What's the weather like today, Kirsty?\" asked Rachel Walker eagerly. She pushed back her bedspread. \"Do you think there's magic in the air?\"\n\nKirsty Tate was standing at the bedroom window, staring out over the garden. \"It seems like a normal day.\" She sighed, with a disappointed look on her face. \"The sky's gray and cloudy.\"\n\n\"Never mind.\" Rachel jumped out of bed and went to join her friend. \"Remember what Titania, the Fairy Queen, told us. Don't look too hard for magic \u2014\"\n\n\"Because the magic will find you!\" Kirsty finished with a smile.\n\nRachel and Kirsty shared a very special secret. They were friends with fairies! When Jack Frost had put a spell on the seven Rainbow Fairies and banished them to Rainspell Island, Rachel and Kirsty helped them return to Fairyland. Now Jack Frost was up to no good again \u2014 this time with the Weather Fairies. And once again, the Fairy King and Queen had asked Rachel and Kirsty for help.\n\n\"Look at Doodle.\" Rachel pointed at the weather-vane rooster, which sat on top of the old barn. \"Don't you think he looks a little happier, now that he has two of his tail feathers back?\"\n\nKirsty nodded. \"Let's hope we find all of his feathers before you go home,\" she replied. \"Then the weather in Fairyland can get back to normal again!\"\n\nDoodle the rooster had a very important job. With his seven magic tail feathers and the help of the Weather Fairies, Doodle controlled Fairyland's weather. But then Jack Frost sent his mean goblin servants to steal Doodle's feathers. Doodle chased the goblins into the human world \u2014 but without his magic, and away from Fairyland, he changed into an ordinary, rusty weather vane!\n\nKirsty's dad had found the weather vane lying in the park, and brought it home to put on the roof of the barn. He had no idea what a magical creature Doodle really was!\n\nNow the weather in Fairyland was a big mess \u2014 and it would be a mess until Rachel and Kirsty got all of Doodle's feathers back and sent him home.\n\n\"Well, we're off to a good start,\" said Rachel. \"With the help of Crystal the Snow Fairy and Abigail the Breeze Fairy, we've already found two feathers!\"\n\nThe King and Queen had promised Kirsty and Rachel that each of the Weather Fairies would come to help them find the feathers.\n\n\"Girls, are you awake?\" Kirsty's mom called from downstairs. \"Breakfast's ready.\"\n\n\"Coming!\" Kirsty shouted back.\n\n\"I wish we knew what Doodle was trying to tell us yesterday,\" said Rachel, as she and Kirsty ran downstairs. Each time one of Doodle's tail feathers had been replaced, the rooster had come to life. The first time, he squawked \"Beware!\" The second time, he managed to say the word \"Jack,\" before turning to metal again.\n\n\"I'm sure it was something about Jack Frost,\" Kirsty said thoughtfully. \"But what?\"\n\n\"Maybe he'll tell us if we find another feather!\" Rachel suggested. The girls went into the kitchen. Mr. Tate was setting the table, and Kirsty's mom was making toast.\n\n\"Morning, you two,\" said Mr. Tate with a smile, as the girls sat down. \"What are you planning to do today?\"\n\nBefore Kirsty or Rachel could answer him, there was a knock at the back door.\n\n\" I wonder who that could be!\" Mrs. Tate said, raising her eyebrows. \"It's still pretty early.\"\n\n\"I'll get it,\" said Kirsty, who was closest.\n\nShe opened the door. There were Mr. and Mrs. Twitching, the Tates' neighbors.\n\n\"Oh, Kirsty, good morning,\" said Mr. Twitching. \"We're sorry to bother you, but we were hoping you might have seen Fidget?\"\n\nKirsty frowned, trying to remember. She knew Fidget, the Twitchings' fluffy tabby cat, very well, but she hadn't seen her for the last day or two. \"I haven't seen her lately,\" she replied.\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" Mrs. Twitching said, looking upset. \"She didn't come home for her dinner last night.\"\n\n\"Come in and ask Mom and Dad,\" Kirsty suggested, opening the door wider. \"Maybe they've seen her.\"\n\nAs Mr. and Mrs. Twitching walked into the kitchen, Kirsty blinked. For a minute, she thought she'd seen strange wisps of pale smoke curling and drifting over the neighbors' heads.\n\nShe glanced at Rachel and her parents, but they didn't seem to have noticed anything unusual. Kirsty shook her head. Maybe she was just imagining it... .\n\n##\n\n#\n\n\"When was the last time you saw Fidget?\" asked Kirsty's mom as she poured some coffee for the Twitchings.\n\n\"Yesterday afternoon,\" Mrs. Twitching replied. \"It's very strange, because usually she doesn't miss a single meal.\"\n\n\"Kirsty and I could help you look for her,\" suggested Rachel.\n\n\"Good idea,\" Kirsty agreed, finishing her cereal. \"Let's go now.\"\n\n\"And I'll check our garden and the barn,\" added Mr. Tate.\n\nAs Kirsty and Rachel got up from the table, Kirsty stared extra-hard at the Twitchings' heads. She thought she could see wisps of smoke there again, but they were so pale and misty, it was hard to be sure.\n\n\"Rachel,\" Kirsty said quietly as they headed outside, \"did you notice anything funny about the Twitchings today?\" Rachel looked confused. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nKirsty told her about the wisps of smoke. \"I'm not sure if I really saw them or not,\" she finished.\n\n\"Do you think they could have been magic?\" Rachel asked.\n\nKirsty felt a thrill of excitement. \"Maybe,\" she said eagerly. \"While we're looking for Fidget, we'd better keep our eyes open for magic, too!\"\n\nThe girls walked into the village, keeping their eyes peeled for the tabby cat, but there was no sign of her.\n\n\"I hope Fidget isn't lost for good,\" Kirsty said, looking around. \"Oh!\"\n\nKirsty hadn't been watching where she was going, and she'd bumped into someone. \"I'm so sorry,\" Kirsty said politely.\n\nThe woman glared at her. \"Why don't you be more careful?\" she said grumpily, and hurried off.\n\n\"Well!\" Rachel gasped. \"That wasn't very nice.\"\n\nBut Kirsty looked confused. \"That was Mrs. Hill, one of my mom's friends, and she's usually _very_ nice,\" she said. \"I wonder what's wrong?\"\n\nRachel nudged her. \"Look over there,\" she whispered.\n\nOutside the post office, two men were arguing. They both looked very grouchy. Then Mrs. Burke, who ran the post office, came out to see what was going on. Kirsty was surprised to see that her usually happy face was grumpy and sad. \"There's something strange happening,\" she whispered to Rachel as they went into the park. \"Everybody's in a terrible mood. Look at the kids on the swings.\"\n\nRachel stared at the children in the playground. They didn't seem to be having fun at all. Every single one of them looked sad! They didn't even cheer up when the ice-cream truck stopped close by.\n\nThe girls stopped at the park gate.\n\n\"I think we've been all over Wetherbury, and there's no sign of Fidget anywhere.\" Kirsty sighed, glancing at her watch. \"We'd better go home, Rachel. It's almost time for lunch.\"\n\nRachel nodded. \"We can always keep searching later this afternoon.\"\n\nThe girls turned back toward the Tates' house. On the way, they passed the tiny movie theater. The Saturday morning show had just finished, and the audience was pouring out. Just like everyone else, the people looked grouchy.\n\n\"It must have been a sad movie,\" Rachel whispered to Kirsty.\n\n\"But it wasn't,\" Kirsty replied, frowning. \"Look.\" She pointed to the poster outside the movie theater.\n\n_\"This hilarious film is a must. You'll split your sides laughing,\"_ Rachel read. \"Well, the audience definitely didn't find it very funny,\" she continued. \"Look at their faces.\" Kirsty stared at the people walking gloomily out of the theater. Suddenly, her heart began to pound. There they were again! She could definitely see cloudy smoke drifting over people's heads, just like she'd noticed over her next-door neighbors. \"Look, Rachel!\" She nudged her friend. \"There's that smoke again.\"\n\nRachel squinted at the people who were all frowning. For a minute, she thought Kirsty was seeing things. But then she spotted them, too \u2014 thin, wispy trails of smoke, hovering over the heads of the people like little clouds.\n\n\"It must be fairy magic!\" Rachel said excitedly. \"I'll bet those aren't wisps of smoke at all. They're magic clouds!\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Kirsty agreed, her eyes lighting up. \"We could be close to finding another magic feather!\"\n\nThe girls rushed home. When they entered the house, the first thing they noticed were the clouds hovering over Mr. and Mrs. Tate!\n\n\"Did you find Fidget?\" asked Kirsty's mom. She was sitting on the couch, reading a book. The little white cloud over her head was tinted with pink, like a cloud in a sunset.\n\n\"No,\" Kirsty replied, staring at the gray cloud over her dad.\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" Mr. Tate said, looking sad.\n\n\"I think the goblin with the magic Cloud Feather must be close by,\" Rachel whispered to Kirsty as they ate their sandwiches.\n\nKirsty nodded. \"After lunch, let's go up to my bedroom and plan our next move,\" she said. \"These clouds are beginning to worry me.\"\n\n\"Me, too,\" Rachel agreed.\n\nAs soon as they'd finished their food, the girls ran upstairs. Kirsty threw open her bedroom door.\n\n\"Hello!\" called a tiny voice. \"I thought you would never come!\"\n\nThere, sitting on the windowsill and swinging her legs below her, was Pearl the Cloud Fairy.\n\n##\n\n#\n\nPearl was resting her chin on her hands, and she also looked gloomy. She wore a beautiful pink and white dress with a full skirt, and in her hand, she held a pretty pink wand. The wand had a fluffy white tip. Little pink and white sunset clouds drifted and swirled out of it.\n\nTo Kirsty's amazement, a tiny gray cloud hovered over Pearl's head. \"Oh, Pearl! You have a rain cloud, too!\" Kirsty said.\n\n\"I know.\" Pearl sighed, then her eyes flashed with annoyance. \"It's because one of those nasty goblins is using the magic Cloud Feather \u2014 and he's doing it all wrong!\" she snapped.\n\n\"We think the goblin must be very close, because everyone in Wetherbury seems to have a cloud over them,\" Rachel told Pearl.\n\n\"I'm sure you're right,\" Pearl said. \"This is definitely fairy magic, so that mean old goblin can't be far away!\" She fluttered up into the air, leaving a trail of shining pink and white clouds behind her. \"Even you two are beginning to get clouds now!\" she added.\n\nThe girls rushed over to the mirror to look. Sure enough, tiny gray clouds were starting to form over their heads.\n\n\"Should we go find the Cloud Feather?\" Kirsty asked eagerly.\n\nPearl and Rachel both cheered up at that suggestion. Pearl zoomed over to hide herself in Rachel's jacket pocket. Then they all headed out into the village.\n\nThis time, Rachel and Kirsty could see the clouds over people's heads much more clearly. Some were a pretty pink or orange color, and the people underneath them seemed quiet and dreamy.\n\nOther clouds were black and stormy, and the people under those looked gloomy and annoyed. Some clouds were drizzling tiny raindrops, making their people look very sad. And a few very angry people had clouds with little lightning bolts over their heads. \"Look.\" Rachel nudged Kirsty as a man with a lightning cloud hurried past, scowling.\n\n\"His hair's standing straight up like he got an electric shock!\"\n\n\"Pearl,\" Kirsty whispered. \"Why hasn't anyone else noticed the clouds?\"\n\nPearl popped her head out of Rachel's pocket. \"Only magic beings like fairies can see them,\" she replied. \"And you two, because you're helping us.\"\n\n\"The clouds are getting bigger,\" said Rachel, staring at a woman who passed by with an enormous rain cloud over her head.\n\n\"We must be getting closer to the feather!\" Pearl said eagerly.\n\n\"But where can it be?\" Kirsty wondered. \"We're almost out of the village now.\" She stopped and looked around. Suddenly, she gasped, and pointed at a building to their left. \"Look at the candy factory!\"\n\nThe candy factory stood right on the edge of Wetherbury. A stream of small pink and white clouds were puffing out of the tall brick chimney.\n\n\"The goblin must be hiding inside the factory,\" Pearl cried, whizzing out of Rachel's pocket and fluttering up into the air. \"It's time to rescue the Cloud Feather!\"\n\n##\n\n#\n\n\"Come on,\" Rachel said. \"Let's go inside.\"\n\nThe girls and Pearl rushed over to the door. But their hearts sank when they saw the big, heavy padlock.\n\n\"Of course, it's Saturday. The factory's closed.\" Kirsty said, looking disappointed. \"What are we going to do?\"\n\nThey stood and thought for a minute. Then Rachel glanced up, and a smile spread across her face.\n\n\"Look!\" she said, pointing. \"There's an air vent near the roof. We have our magic fairy dust. Let's turn ourselves into fairies. Then we can all fly in through the air vent.\"\n\nThe Fairy Queen had given Kirsty and Rachel gold lockets full of fairy dust, which they could use to turn themselves into fairies whenever they needed to.\n\n\"Good idea!\" Pearl laughed, clapping her hands happily.\n\nQuickly, Rachel and Kirsty opened their lockets and sprinkled some fairy dust over themselves. Almost immediately, they began to shrink, and beautiful shimmering fairy wings grew from their backs.\n\n\"Come on,\" Pearl cried, zooming back and forth impatiently. \"Up we go!\" And she flew up to the air vent in the wall.\n\nKirsty and Rachel flew after her. Pearl slipped through the vent first, and the two girls followed. They all stopped inside and gazed around the factory.\n\n\"Wow!\" Kirsty gasped, her eyes wide.\n\nLots of big silver machines were busy making all kinds of different candy, Peppermints poured out of one machine, while long strings of strawberry licorice came out of another. Soft ice cream fizzed into paper cups, and pink and white marshmallows bounced along a moving conveyor belt. Chocolate bars were being wrapped in gold foil, while a different machine wrapped caramel candies in shiny silver paper. There were large sticky lollipops and striped candy canes in every color and flavor.\n\n\"Isn't this amazing?\" asked Rachel. \"Look at all the different kinds of candy!\"\n\nKirsty looked confused. \"But the people who work here wouldn't have left all the machines on, would they?\" she pointed out.\n\nPearl grinned. \"I bet they turned them off, but somebody else has turned them on again.\"\n\n\"The goblin!\" Kirsty exclaimed. \"Where is he?\"\n\n\"Let's split up and see if we can find him,\" Pearl replied.\n\nThey flew off to different parts of the factory. Rachel flew toward a machine that was mixing fluffy pink cotton candy in a huge silver tub. She looked at the machine for a minute and was about to fly on, but then she heard the sound of someone loudly smacking his lips.\n\nRachel flew down to take a closer look. There, lying with his back to her, on a huge, fluffy pink cloud, was the goblin! He was greedily scooping up sticky handfuls of cotton candy and munching them happily. He was quite chubby \u2014 probably from stuffing himself with so much cotton candy, Rachel thought.\n\nShe flew a little closer and peeked over the goblin's shoulder to see if she could spot the magic Cloud Feather. There it was, in his hand! Tiny pink and white clouds drifted from it as the goblin waved it in the air.\n\n_I have to tell Kirsty and Pearl_ , Rachel thought. She turned to fly away, but as she did, one wing brushed the goblin's shoulder. With a yelp of surprise, the goblin reached up and grabbed Rachel with one hand.\n\n\"You're not getting my feather!\" he shouted, and stuffed Rachel inside one of the pink clouds that was drifting by.\n\nPoor Rachel was trapped! She tried to push her way out of the cloud, but she couldn't make a hole in it. The cloud drifted farther and farther away from the goblin.\n\n\"Kirsty! Pearl!\" Rachel called as loudly as she could. \"HELP!\"\n\nKirsty heard her friend's voice right away. She turned and saw the cloud with Rachel inside. It was floating past the marshmallow machine.\n\nTo Kirsty's horror, the cloud was heading straight toward the factory's tall chimney.\n\n\"Oh, no!\" Kirsty gasped. \"If that cloud floats up the chimney, we'll never get Rachel back!\"\n\n##\n\n#\n\nQuickly, Pearl flew over to Kirsty. \"Which cloud is Rachel in?\" she asked.\n\n\"That one...\" Kirsty began, pointing. Then she stopped. There were so many clouds floating around, she'd lost sight of Rachel. \"Oh, I don't know anymore, Pearl. That awful goblin did it!\" she said. \"I have a few things to say to him! Can you make me human-sized again?\"\n\nPearl nodded. \"Don't worry,\" she said, \"I'll find Rachel. I promise. You get the feather back.\"\n\nWith a wave of her wand, Pearl turned Kirsty back to her normal size. Then she flew off to search through the clouds. Kirsty stormed over to the goblin. She was usually scared of the nasty creatures \u2014 especially since Jack Frost had used his magic to make them even bigger than before. But Kirsty was so annoyed, she didn't care. Rachel was in danger, and it was all the goblin's fault.\n\nThe goblin was lying on top of his fluffy cloud, still eating cotton candy. When he saw Kirsty marching toward him, he looked nervous. Quickly, he stuffed the Cloud Feather right into his mouth.\n\n\"Give me that feather!\" Kirsty demanded.\n\n\"Wha' fe'er?\" the goblin spluttered, trying to keep his mouth closed.\n\nKirsty frowned. How was she going to get the feather out of the goblin's mouth? Just then, she spotted a peppermint stick lying on the floor. That gave her an idea. She picked it up, and began tickling the bottom of the goblin's leathery foot!\n\nThe goblin began to laugh, but he kept his mouth shut. \"Shtop it,\" he mumbled. But then he couldn't hold his laughter in anymore. \"Oh, ha ha ha,\" he laughed. As his laughter burst out, so did the magic Cloud Feather!\n\nKirsty tried to grab the feather, but the goblin was quicker.\n\n\"Oh, no!\" He grinned, snatching the feather away. \"This is _my_ feather! I'm the only one who knows how to make it work.\"\n\n\"Actually, I know how to make it work, too!\" called a silvery voice.\n\nKirsty turned to see Pearl flying toward them. To Kirsty's relief, she was pulling a pink cloud behind her with Rachel inside.\n\nRachel's head was sticking out of a hole in the cloud, and she grinned at Kirsty. \"Hey, this cloud's made of cotton candy!\" she called. \"And it's delicious. I can eat my way out!\" She took another big bite of the cloud.\n\nPearl flew down to Kirsty and the goblin. \"I can make the clouds do all sorts of things,\" she said. \"They will float exactly where I tell them to. I can even make them dance around me.\" She held out her hand to the goblin.\n\n\"Why don't you give me the feather and let me show you?\"\n\nThe goblin looked sly. \"No, it's mine!\" he said. \"Anyway, I can do those tricks myself.\"\n\n\"Go on, then,\" Pearl challenged.\n\nThe goblin began to concentrate. He waved the feather around in the air. Very slowly, all the clouds in the room drifted toward him. He twirled the feather, and the clouds began to spin around him in a circle, faster and faster. \"See?\" the goblin bragged.\n\n\"OK, you know what to do, Rachel,\" Pearl whispered to her.\n\nPearl let go of Rachel's cotton candy cloud, and she and Kirsty watched as it flew over to the goblin. Rachel's cloud began to whirl around him with the others. It got closer and closer to the goblin. Then, suddenly, as her cloud sped past the goblin's hand, Rachel stuck her arm out and grabbed the Cloud Feather!\n\n##\n\n#\n\n\"Give that back!\" the goblin shouted. Every time Rachel's cloud flew past him, he tried to grab back the feather, but he missed over and over again.\n\nThe clouds were spinning around so fast now that Rachel was getting very dizzy. \"Help!\" she called. \"Somebody stop this cloud!\"\n\nPearl swooped down and plucked the feather out of Rachel's hand. Then she waved it in a special pattern, and the clouds began to slow down and drift away.\n\nKirsty caught Rachel's cloud with one hand, and she pulled it open to free her friend.\n\nRachel dizzily tumbled out. The goblin was dizzy, too, from watching all the clouds spinning around his head.\n\nHe was walking in circles, looking for the Cloud Feather. When he saw that Pearl had it, he lunged forward and grabbed for her. Pearl flew out of the wag just in time, but the goblin lost his balance. He tripped and fell headfirst into the candy wrapping machine!\n\nThe girls and Pearl watched in amazement as the yelling goblin was wrapped in a huge sheet of shiny silver paper. Then the goblin-shaped candy moved along the conveyor belt, and was wrapped with a sparkly silver ribbon.\n\n\"That serves him right!\" Rachel laughed.\n\n\"Corne on,\" said Pearl, smiling. \"Let's get out of here before he unwraps himself!\"\n\nKirsty sprinkled herself with fairy dust and immediately turned into a fairy again. Then the three friends flew out of the factory through the air vent. Outside, Pearl waved her magic wand and returned the girls to their normal size.\n\n\"I'd better make sure everyone else in Wetherbury gets back to normal right away!\" Pearl laughed.\n\nShe waved her feather through the air in a complicated pattern. \"That should do it,\" she said cheerfully. They set off for the Tates' house, and Pearl hid in Rachel's pocket again.\n\n\"Look,\" whispered Rachel, as they made their way through the village. \"There aren't any clouds over people's heads anymore!\"\n\n\"And everyone's happy and laughing again,\" added Kirsty. The kids playing in the park were all smiling now, and as the girls passed the post office, Mrs. Burke gave them a cheerful wave.\n\n\"I'll give Doodle his beautiful Cloud Feather back,\" Pearl said, when they arrived at the Tates' house. \"He'll be so happy to see it!\"\n\nRachel and Kirsty stood in the garden. They watched as Pearl flew up to the top of the barn. The fairy placed the Cloud Feather in Doodle's tail. A minute later, the rooster's feathers began to sparkle with fairy magic.\n\n\"Doodle's coming to life again!\" Kirsty cried. \"Listen up, Rachel!\"\n\nDoodle's feathers shimmered in the sun. \"Frost w \u2014!\" he squawked. But the next minute, he was cold, hard metal again.\n\n\"Beware, Jack Frost w \u2014\" Kirsty said thoughtfully, as Pearl flew down to join them. \"What does it mean?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" replied Pearl. \"But be careful. Jack Frost won't want to lose any more magic feathers! And now I have to return to Fairyland.\"\n\nThe pretty fairy hugged Rachel and Kirsty, scattering little, shiny pink and white clouds around them. Then she fluttered up into the sky. \"Good-bye!\" she called, \"And thank you! Good luck finding the other four weather feathers!\"\n\n\"Good-bye!\" called Kirsty and Rachel, waving.\n\nSmiling, Pearl waved her wand at them and disappeared into the clouds.\n\nThe girls went into the house, where Mr. and Mrs. Tate were in the living room watching TV.\n\n\"Oh, Kirsty, Rachel, there you are,\" said Mrs. Tate, jumping to her feet. \"The Twitchings called a little while ago and invited us over for coffee.\"\n\n\"And they said they have some good news for us,\" Mr. Tate added.\n\nKirsty and Rachel looked at each other.\n\n\"They must have found Fidget!\" Kirsty exclaimed happily.\n\nThe girls hurried next door with Mr. and Mrs. Tate.\n\nMr. Twitching opened the door with a big smile on his face. \"Come in,\" he said. \"We've got a surprise for you!\"\n\nHe led them into the living room, where Mrs. Twitching was kneeling on the rug next to a cat basket. A big, fluffy tabby cat was curled up inside.\n\n\"She's been a very busy girl,\" Mrs. Twitching said proudly. \"Look!\"\n\nThere in the basket were three tiny kittens, snuggled up close to their mom. Two were tabby cats like Fidget, and one was black with a little white spot on the top of its head. They were so young, their eyes weren't even open yet.\n\n\"Oh, Rachel, aren't they beautiful?\" Kirsty whispered, gently stroking the black and white kitten on its tiny head.\n\n\"We'll be looking for good homes for them when they're bigger,\" said Mr. Twitching. \"But they can't leave their mom for eight or nine weeks.\"\n\n\"Oh!\" Kirsty gasped, her eyes shining. \"Maybe I could have one?\"\n\n\"I don't see why not,\" Mrs. Tate said, smiling.\n\n\"Which one would you like, Kirsty?\" Mrs. Twitching asked.\n\n\"This one,\" Kirsty said, stroking the black and white kitten again. It yawned sleepily.\n\n\"And I know the perfect name for her,\" Rachel said, smiling at her friend. \"You can call her Pearl!\"\n\n#\n\n##\n\n##\n\n##\n\n#\n\nA Sunny Spell\n\nGoldie Drops In\n\nGoblin on the Loose!\n\nA Confused Goblin\n\nHappy Pigs\n\nTwilight Magic\n\n##\n\n#\n\n\"I feel like I'm going to melt,\" said Rachel Walker happily.\n\nIt was a hot summer afternoon and she and her friend, Kirsty Tate, were enjoying the sunshine in Kirsty's backyard. A bumblebee buzzed lazily around Mrs. Tate's sunflowers, and a single gust of wind blew through the yellow rosebushes.\n\nThe weather was so warm and sunny that Mr. and Mrs. Tate had given the girls permission to camp out in the yard that night. Kirsty looked up from a jumble of tent poles and bright orange material. \"It's been a perfect day,\" she agreed. \"Let's hope tonight is perfect, too. It wouldn't be much fun to sleep out here in the rain!\"\n\nRachel laughed, and then started untangling tent poles with her friend. \"I think I'd rather take a shower in the _morning_ , not in the middle of the night,\" she agreed.\n\nKirsty held up some poles. \"Right. So how do we put this thing together?\" she asked brightly.\n\nRachel scratched her head. \"Well...\" she began.\n\n\"Need some help?\" came a voice from behind them.\n\n\"Dad!\" said Kirsty, relieved. \"Yes, please. We\u2014\" She turned to look at her father and burst out laughing.\n\nRachel spun around to see what was so funny. She had to bite her lip not to laugh, too. Mr. Tate was wearing the most enormous sunglasses she had ever seen!\n\nMr. Tate looked very pleased with himself. He wiggled the glasses up and down on his nose. \"Do you like my new shades?\" he asked.\n\n\"Well, yes,\" Kirsty said, trying to keep a straight face. \"They're very... summery.\"\n\nMr. Tate knelt down and started putting the tent together. \"The weather has been so strange all week, I didn't know whether to buy the sunglasses or not,\" he said. \"I just hope it doesn't start snowing again!\"\n\nRachel and Kirsty looked at each other but didn't say anything. The two friends shared a very special secret. They knew _exactly_ why the weather had been so strange\u2014Jack Frost had been messing it all up.\n\nDoodle, the weather vane rooster, usually controlled the weather in Fairyland with his seven magic tail feathers and the help of the Weather Fairies. But mean Jack Frost had sent his goblins to steal Doodle's feathers. Without the feathers, the weather in Fairyland and the real world had gone completely crazy. Rachel and Kirsty were helping the Weather Fairies to get them back, but until then, Doodle was just a regular weather vane on top of the Tates' barn.\n\nThe day before, with the help of Pearl the Cloud Fairy, Kirsty and Rachel had returned the Cloud Feather to Doodle. But even though the girls had found the Snow Feather, the Breeze Feather, and the Cloud Feather, they still had four feathers left to find.\n\n\"There!\" said Mr. Tate, stepping back and admiring the finished tent. \"It's all yours.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Dad,\" Kirsty said as he walked away. She put two sleeping bags inside the tent and then flopped down on the grass. \"Phew!\" she said, and whistled. \"It's still so hot! I hope it cools down soon, or we'll never be able to sleep in there.\" Rachel was frowning and looking at her watch.\n\n\"Kirsty,\" she said slowly. \"Have you noticed where the sun is?\"\n\nKirsty looked up and pointed. \"Right there, in the sky,\" she replied.\n\n\"Yes, but look how high it is,\" Rachel insisted. \"It hasn't even _started_ setting yet.\"\n\nKirsty glanced at her watch. \"But it's seven-thirty,\" she said, frowning. \"That can't be right.\"\n\nBefore Rachel could reply, there was a loud _pop_!\n\n\"What was that?\" she whispered.\n\n_Pop! Pop! Pop!_\n\n\"It sounds like it's coming from the other side of those bushes,\" Kirsty said, her eyes wide. \"But there's only a cornfield over there.\"\n\n_Pop! Pop! Pop!_\n\nCautiously, the girls peeked over the hedge to see what was making all the noise. And then they both gasped out loud.\n\n##\n\n#\n\n\"I don't believe it,\" Kirsty said, rubbing her eyes. \"Is that what I think it is?\"\n\n_Pop! Pop! Pop!_\n\nRachel nodded. \"Popcorn!\" she whispered.\n\nIt was an amazing sight. The sun was so hot that the corn in the field was cooking\u2014and turning into popcorn!\n\nBoth girls stared as fluffy golden popcorn bounced everywhere. It looked like the field was one huge popcorn machine at the movie theater! The delicious smell of popcorn drifted over the bushes, and both girls sniffed hungrily.\n\nKirsty and Rachel looked at each other and grinned.\n\n\"There's definitely magic in the air,\" Kirsty said.\n\n\"It must be the goblin with the Sunshine Feather,\" Rachel agreed, feeling her heart beat faster.\n\nBoth girls looked hard at the field, hoping to spot a goblin lurking somewhere, but it was hard to see clearly through the popcorn. It was tumbling and twirling in the air like a sandstorm. Rachel suddenly grabbed Kirsty's hand. \"Look!\" she cried. Zooming above the field was a twinkling yellow light. It was zigzagging through the air between the popcorn, heading straight toward them. As it came closer, the air above the field seemed to glitter with a thousand golden sparkles.\n\nBoth girls could see a pair of delicate wings beating quickly, and the glimmer of a tiny wand.\n\n\"It's Goldie the Sunshine Fairy,\" whispered Rachel, smiling.\n\nThe girls held their breath as the fairy weaved in and out of the bouncing popcorn, dodging each piece. Then she swooped down and landed on the bushes in front of them. \"Phew!\" she said with a laugh. \"Talk about a bumpy ride!\"\n\nKirsty and Rachel watched as Goldie shook popcorn dust from her glittering wings. Her face was framed by long, curly, blond hair, and she wore a dress of fiery reds, yellows, and oranges. A tiny gold tiara sparkled in her hair, and shiny red bracelets glimmered on her wrists.\n\n\"Hello again,\" said Goldie. \"I've heard all about how you've helped Crystal, Abigail, and Pearl. You did a wonderful job finding their weather feathers!\"\n\nRachel and Kirsty grinned at each other proudly.\n\n\"The goblin who has the Sunshine Feather can't be far away,\" Goldie continued, looking up at the sky. The sun still blazed as brightly as ever.\n\n\"That's what we thought, too,\" Kirsty said. \"There's a farm on the other side of this field. Should we start looking there?\"\n\n\"Good idea,\" Goldie replied cheerfully. Her face fell as soon as she turned back toward the cornfield. Popcorn was still whizzing through the air like hot white bumblebees. \"But is there another way across the field?\"\n\n##\n\n#\n\n\"I don't like the idea of dodging that popcorn again.\" Goldie sighed. She leaned back to examine a little mark on one of her wings. \"I almost burned myself last time.\"\n\n\"There's a path that runs down the side of the field to the farm,\" Kirsty told her. \"I'll ask Mom if we can go for a quick walk before bedtime.\"\n\nMinutes later, the three of them were on their way. The air was shimmering with heat. There were cracks in the ground where the dirt had become hardened by the sun, flowers wilted along the sides of the path, and the grass had turned dry and brown. There wasn't the slightest breath of wind in the air. Once the girls and Goldie reached the farm, they started searching for the goblin.\n\nFirst, they peeked into the stables. Two very hot horses were inside, hiding from the sun. \"Hello,\" Goldie said. \"You haven't seen a goblin hanging around here, have you?\"\n\nOne of the horses shook her mane.\n\n\"All we've seen today is this stable,\" she said. \"And there are no goblins in here.\"\n\n\"It's too hot to go outside,\" the other horse whinnied.\n\nNext, the girls and Goldie slipped into the barn where the cows stayed. The cows were all half-asleep in the heat. There was no goblin there, either!\n\nAt last, the three friends came to the duck pond. They wondered if the goblin might be cooling off in the water, but there was no sign of him\u2014or the Sunshine Feather.\n\n\"You should ask the pigs,\" one duck quacked helpfully from a shady spot in the cattails. \"They've been grumbling all day about something. Plus, pigs are nosy. They're always sniffing around! If there's a goblin on the farm, they'll know about it.\"\n\nGoldie politely thanked the duck. \"I think I hear the pigs over this way,\" Rachel said, walking around the side of the farmhouse. Soon they could all hear the pigs grunting and squealing. The duck was right! The pigs seemed very upset about something. But they all turned to look curiously at Goldie when she flew over to them.\n\nGoldie fluttered down and landed on the biggest pig's snout. \"What's wrong?\" she asked kindly.\n\nThe pig squinted at the golden fairy in front of his little blue eyes. \"It's like this,\" he began in a squeaky voice. \"It's been so hot that the farmer added some cold water to the mudhole, so that us pigs could keep nice and cool.\" He twitched his ears indignantly. \"But someone else has stolen our spot in the mud\u2014and he won't let us in!\"\n\n\"It's not fair,\" a piglet squealed, running up to Rachel and Kirsty. \"We're so hot! It's not fair!\"\n\n\"No, it's not,\" Kirsty agreed, giving him a pat on the head.\n\n\"That sounds like the kind of trick a goblin would play!\" Rachel pointed out. \"Where is the mudhole?\"\n\nThe pigs gave them directions, and the girls set off for the mudhole with Goldie flying above them. It seemed to get hotter and hotter as they walked. Rachel crossed her fingers. She was sure that they would find a goblin in the mud. Who else would be mean enough to stop the pigs from cooling off in their own mud pool?\n\nThe girls hadn't been walking for very long when they heard someone singing in a croaky voice:\n\n_\"I've been having so much fun_\n\n_Blasting out this golden sun._\n\n_It's roasting, toasting, popcorn weather._\n\n_Oh, how I love my Sunshine Feather!\"_\n\nKirsty, Rachel, and Goldie all ducked behind a nearby tree and carefully peeked out. There, covered in thick, wet mud, was an extremely cheerful goblin. He waved the Sunshine Feather in the air while he sang. Each time the feather moved, golden sunbeams flooded from its tip, making the air feel even hotter.\n\nEvery time he got to the end of his song, the goblin started all over again, splashing his feet in the mud as he sang. _\"I've been having so much fun...\"_\n\n\"What should we do?\" Kirsty whispered. The goblin held on to the feather so tightly, it looked like it would be impossible to take it away from him.\n\nGoldie twirled around in frustration.\n\n\"I hate seeing him with my Sunshine Feather,\" she muttered, folding her arms across her chest. \"Look, he got mud all over it!\"\n\nRachel frowned. \"Maybe we could distract him somehow, then run over and grab the feather while he's looking the other way.\"\n\n\"I don't know about running through all that slippery mud,\" Kirsty said quietly, eyeing the mudhole doubtfully. \"We'll probably fall over. And look, the goblin is right in the middle of it. He'll be able to see us coming way before we get there.\"\n\nThey moved farther away from the mudhole so that they could figure out what to do next without the goblin overhearing. But after a few minutes, Rachel held up her hand. \"Shh! What's that noise?\" she whispered in alarm.\n\n##\n\n#\n\nKirsty, Rachel, and Goldie held their breath and listened to the strange new sound. It was a loud, wheezing, rumbling noise, somewhere between a grunt and a hiss.\n\n_Grumble-sshhh_ , _grumble-sshhh_ , _grumble-sshhh_...\n\nThe sound was coming from the direction of the mudhole. Kirsty and Rachel crept back to the tree and peeked out from behind it, wondering what sort of terrifying creature had appeared.\n\nWhen Rachel saw what was making the noise, though, she had to clap her hand over her mouth to stop herself from laughing out loud. The wheezy rumble was coming from the goblin\u2014he was snoring!\n\n\"At least he isn't singing anymore,\" Kirsty whispered, laughing.\n\nGoldie fluttered her wings hopefully when she saw that the goblin was asleep, and she flew a little closer to the Sunshine Feather. But her face fell when she saw just how tightly the goblin was clutching the feather to his chest. Goldie flew back to the girls, shaking her head. \"If I try to pull it out of his hand, the goblin is sure to wake up,\" she told them. \"How are we going to get that feather?\"\n\nKirsty smiled. \"Maybe we could...\" she began thoughtfully. Then she grinned from ear to ear. \"Yes! That could work!\" she said.\n\nWithout another word, Kirsty began running back toward her house. \"I'll be back in a minute,\" she called over her shoulder.\n\nRachel and Goldie watched her go. They were both dying to know what Kirsty was up to. Luckily, they didn't have to wait very long. When Kirsty came back, she looked quite different!\n\n\"What is she wearing?\" Goldie whispered to Rachel as Kirsty ran toward them.\n\n\"Her dad's sunglasses,\" Rachel replied, staring at her friend in disbelief. She was starting to wonder if Kirsty had been in the sun for too long. Why had she brought the enormous sunglasses back with her? And why was she carrying a fishing pole?\n\nKirsty grinned at the confused expressions on her friends' faces. \"I'll explain everything,\" she promised, propping the fishing pole and sunglasses up in the tree branches. \"But first, Rachel and I need to shrink to fairy size.\" Both Kirsty and Rachel had been given beautiful gold lockets by the Fairy Queen. Inside each locket was magical fairy dust. A tiny pinch of the sparkling dust turned the girls into fairies in the blink of an eye!\n\nKirsty and Rachel both pulled out their lockets and sprinkled themselves with fairy dust. It glittered a bright sunshine-yellow in the light and then\u2014 _whoosh_ \u2014 they shrank smaller and smaller and smaller. The tree next to them looked enormous as the girls shrank to Goldie's size.\n\nKirsty and Rachel fluttered their wings happily. They both loved being fairies!\n\n\"Now,\" Kirsty said. \"Let's fly up into the tree and I'll tell you my plan.\"\n\nThe three friends all perched near the fishing pole, and Goldie and Rachel watched as Kirsty carefully balanced the sunglasses on the end of the fishhook.\n\n\"We're going to let the fishing line out very slowly,\" Kirsty said, \"and lower the sunglasses right down onto the goblin's nose.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Rachel asked, confused.\n\n\"I don't know if they'll look good on him,\" Goldie said.\n\nKirsty shook her head, trying not to laugh.\n\n\"With sunglasses on, everything will look dark to him,\" she whispered. \"With a bit of luck, the goblin will think the Sunshine Feather is broken!\"\n\nGoldie clapped her hands in delight. \"Oh, what a great idea!\" she cried. \"I love to play tricks on those mean old goblins.\"\n\nVery carefully, Kirsty, Rachel, and Goldie turned the handle of the fishing rod and lowered the sunglasses all the way down in front of the goblin. Kirsty held her breath as the sunglasses landed right on his big nose. Perfect! The girls reeled in the fishing line, and Goldie waved her wand in the air. It released a stream of magical fairy dust. Little golden sparkles fizzed and popped like firecrackers around the goblin's head until he woke up with a start.\n\nHe opened his eyes and blinked when he saw that everything around him had gotten dark. \"My feather's broken!\" he moaned, giving it a shake. \"Shine, sun!\" he commanded.\n\nOf course, the girls knew that the Sunshine Feather wasn't broken. As soon as the goblin shook it, the sun became brighter than ever. But as far as the goblin could see, the world was still dark.\n\nHe waved the feather again. \"I said, shine!\" he ordered. The sun shone like it was the middle of the day, but Goldie and her friends realized that the goblin thought it looked like night. He shook the feather two more times and the sun shone hotter and brighter, but the goblin saw only darkness. As far as he could tell, the Sunshine Feather was not working. \"Broken!\" he announced angrily, and he threw the feather away in disgust.\n\nJust then, Goldie darted out of the tree like a little golden firework. While the goblin was still muttering to himself, Goldie swooped down and grabbed the feather from the mud.\n\n\"Thank you!\" she called, hugging the feather tightly as she flew back to the girls. Kirsty's plan had worked!\n\nWith another sprinkle of fairy dust, Rachel and Kirsty turned themselves human again. They grabbed the fishing rod and started scrambling down from the tree.\n\nBut the goblin spotted the girls and jumped to his feet. As he did, the sunglasses bounced on his nose.\n\n\"Sunglasses?\" he exclaimed, reaching up to grab the glasses in confusion. He pushed them onto the top of his head and squinted at the girls in the dazzling sunlight. \"You tricked me!\" he yelled when he saw Goldie clutching the Sunshine Feather. \"Come back with that feather!\"\n\nKirsty and Rachel looked at each other in fear. Now that Jack Frost's goblins were so big, they seemed scarier than ever. And this one looked _very_ angry at having been tricked.\n\nHe shook his fist and headed straight toward the girls.\n\n\" _Run!_ \" shouted Kirsty.\n\n##\n\n#\n\nRachel grabbed Kirsty's hand and they both sprinted toward the farmhouse as fast as their feet would carry them. The goblin wasn't far behind, making a horrible growling sound in his throat as he ran.\n\n\"Give me back that feather! Give it back!\" he yelled angrily.\n\nRachel's heart thumped in her chest. The goblin was closing in on them. She could hear his breathing. The goblin stretched out his hand to grab her and Rachel gasped.\n\n\"Got y\u2014\" the goblin began. Then his voice turned from anger to confusion. \"Hey! What's going on?\"\n\nIn a swirl of dancing sunbeams, Goldie had waved the Sunshine Feather and pointed it straight at the goblin. Now the sun beat down fiercely upon him\u2014 and the thick mud that covered him started to dry rapidly. As his legs became stiff and heavy with the hardening mud, the goblin slowed down. Then the mud dried completely, and the goblin couldn't move at all.\n\n\"No-o-o!\" he wailed.\n\nDespite having been so scared just a few seconds before, the girls found themselves smiling at the goblin now. \"It's a goblin statue!\" Rachel exclaimed, laughing.\n\nOnly his eyes moved now. They flicked back and forth wildly. The goblin glared at the girls, and then at Goldie. Kirsty noticed that her dad's sunglasses were still perched on top of the goblin's head. She took a cautious step toward him, then another. The goblin didn't move, so Kirsty marched right up to him and carefully grabbed the glasses.\n\n\"I'll take these back now, I think,\" she said. \"If I'd known that these sunglasses would be so useful, I'd never have laughed at Dad for wearing them!\" she told Rachel.\n\nGoldie and the girls made their way back to the farmhouse. The pigs were waiting expectantly for them.\n\n\"The mudhole is all yours again,\" Goldie told the pigs in her sweet voice. \"You'll see a new goblin statue nearby,\" she added. \"But don't worry. I don't think he'll be in any hurry to go back into the mud.\"\n\nThe pigs grunted happily and trotted off toward their cool mud pool. The smallest piglet nuzzled Kirsty and Rachel's legs before he went. \"Thank you!\" he squealed.\n\nRachel watched the pigs go. \"What will happen to the goblin?\" she asked. \"He won't have to stay there forever, will he?\"\n\nGoldie's eyes twinkled mischievously. \"Not forever, no,\" she said. \"The dried mud will wash off as soon as it rains.\" She smiled cheerfully. \"But Jack Frost won't be happy with him when he finds out we got the Sunshine Feather back!\"\n\n##\n\n#\n\nNow that the three friends were out of danger, Goldie expertly waved the Sunshine Feather. The sun began to set, just like it was supposed to. The girls watched as the sky turned orange, pink, and a deep red.\n\n\"Let's bring the Sunshine Feather back to Doodle,\" Kirsty said. \"And then we'd better go to bed!\"\n\nRachel was yawning. \"It's been another busy day, hasn't it?\" She smiled.\n\nAs the sun set, the warmth quickly faded away. The girls soon found themselves shivering in their thin shirts. Goldie fluttered above them with the Sunshine Feather, waving it gently. A few sunbeams flooded onto Rachel and Kirsty's bare arms to keep them warm.\n\nIt was almost dark by the time they all got back to Kirsty's garden. They could just barely see the silhouette of Doodle on top of the barn roof.\n\nGoldie flew up to give the rooster back his magic feather. As she did, Doodle came to life. His fiery feathers glowed brilliantly in the twilight. He turned to look at Rachel and Kirsty. \"Will come\u2014\" he squawked urgently. But before he could say any more, the magic drained away. Doodle's colors faded and he became a rusty old weather vane again.\n\nEvery time the girls returned one of Doodle's feathers, the rooster came to life for a few seconds and squawked a word or two. Rachel frowned as she pieced together all the words that Doodle had said so far. \"Beware! Jack Frost will come...\" she murmured. An icy shiver shot down her spine, as if Jack Frost was already there. \"I think it's a warning, Kirsty. Let's hope he doesn't come soon!\"\n\nGoldie looked worried. \"Take care of yourselves. And thank you for everything,\" she said. She blew them a stream of fairy kisses that sparkled in the darkening sky. \"I must go back to Fairyland now. Good-bye!\"\n\nKirsty and Rachel watched Goldie fly away. Soon she was nothing more than a tiny golden speck in the distance. Then, just as the girls were about to get ready for bed, they heard footsteps. Mr. Tate came out of the house, looking around with a puzzled expression on his face. \"Did I just hear a rooster crowing?\" he asked.\n\n\"A rooster? At this time of day?\" Kirsty replied innocently.\n\nMr. Tate frowned. \"I must be hearing things,\" he said, turning to go back inside. \"Good night, girls. Sleep well.\" He glanced up at Doodle as he headed back toward the house. \"I'm sure that weather vane had a smaller tail before,\" he muttered, then shook his head. \"Now I'm seeing things, too! It's definitely time to call it a night....\"\n\nKirsty and Rachel smiled at each other. \"He's right!\" Kirsty said. \"Doodle _does_ have four feathers now. We only have three more feathers to find. I wonder which one will be next!\"\n\n#\n\n##\n\n##\n\n##\n\n#\n\nA Misty Morning\n\nMagic in the Mist\n\nGoblin in the Fog\n\nPogwurzel Plot\n\nGoblin Pie\n\nBack on Track\n\n##\n\n#\n\n\"Wake up, sleepyhead!\" cried Kirsty Tate, as she jumped out of bed and started to get dressed.\n\nHer friend, Rachel Walker, was asleep in the extra bed in Kirsty's room. She was staying with Kirsty and her parents in Wetherbury. Sleepily, she rolled over and opened her eyes. \"I was dreaming that we were back in Fairyland,\" she told Kirsty. \"The weather was mixed up\u2014 sunny and snowing all at the same time\u2014 and Doodle was trying to fix it.\" Doodle, the magic weather rooster, had been on Rachel's mind a lot lately, because she and Kirsty were on an important mission with the Weather Fairies!\n\nEvery day in Fairyland, the Weather Fairies used Doodle's magic tail feathers to make the weather. Each of the seven feathers controlled a different kind of weather, and each of the seven Weather Fairies was responsible for working with one specific feather. The system was perfect until mean Jack Frost sent his goblins to steal Doodle's magic feathers.\n\nThe goblins took the feathers into the human world, and when poor Doodle followed them out of Fairyland, he found himself transformed into a rusty weather vane. Since Rachel and Kirsty had found the Rainbow Fairies together, the Queen of the Fairies had asked them to help find and return Doodle's magic feathers, also.\n\nIn the meantime, Fairyland's weather was all mixed up\u2014and the goblins had been using the feathers to cause trouble in the human world, too.\n\n\"Poor Doodle,\" Kirsty said, looking out the window at the weather vane on top of the old barn. Her dad had found Doodle lying in the park, and brought him home for their barn roof. \"Hopefully we'll find another magic feathertoday,\" Kirsty continued. \"We already have four of the stolen feathers. We just need to find the other three. Then Doodle will get his magic back!\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Rachel agreed, brightening at the thought. \"But I have to go home in three days, so we don't have very long!\" As she gazed out at the blue sky, a wisp of silvery mist caught her eye. \"Look\u2014that cloud is shaped just like a feather!\" she said.\n\nKirsty looked up, too. \"I can't see anything.\"\n\nRachel looked again, but the wispy shape had disappeared. \"Maybe I imagined it,\" she said, sighing.\n\nThe memory of the dream fizzed in her tummy like bubbles. It felt like a magical start to the day.\n\nRachel loved sharing fairy adventures with Kirsty. The girls had met on vacation in Rainspell Island with their parents. That was when they had first helped the fairies. That time, Jack Frost had cast a nasty spell to send the Rainbow Fairies away from Fairyland, and the girls had helped all seven of them get home safely.\n\nNow, Rachel and Kirsty hurried down to the kitchen. Mr. Tate was sitting at the table. He looked up and smiled at the girls. \"Good morning! Did you sleep well?\"\n\n\"Yes, thanks,\" Rachel replied. When she sat down, she saw a bright green flier on the kitchen table. It read: _Grand Fun Run, Green Wood Forest, Wetherbury. Everyone welcome_. She looked at the date. \"That's today.\"\n\n\"Yes. My mom's running in it,\" said Kirsty.\n\n\"Most of the village will be racing. Why don't you two go and watch?\" suggested Mr. Tate. \"You could cheer Mom on.\"\n\n\"OK,\" Rachel and Kirsty agreed happily.\n\n_Maybe we could look for goblins on the way_ , thought Rachel. She felt excited, and a little bit nervous. Goblins were mean creatures, and Jack Frost had cast a spell to make them bigger than normal. Luckily, the laws in Fairyland say that nothing can be taller than the King and Queen's fairy castle, so the goblins couldn't get too big. But they were still almost as tall as Rachel and Kirsty's shoulders.\n\nMr. Tate finished his cup of coffee and stood up. \"I'm going to pick up Gran and take her to watch the race. We'll look for you there,\" he told the girls.\n\n\"OK, Dad. 'Bye!\" Kirsty said with a wave.\n\nJust then, Mrs. Tate hurried into the kitchen, wearing running shorts, a T-shirt, and sneakers. She smiled at Kirsty and Rachel. \"Sorry, I can't stop, girls. It's almost race time!\"\n\n\"That's all right, Mom. We're right behind you,\" Kirsty said.\n\n\"We're coming to cheer you on,\" Rachel explained.\n\n\"See you at the woods, then!\" Mrs. Tate called cheerfully as she headed out the door.\n\nA few minutes later, Kirsty and Rachel left for Green Wood Forest, too.\n\n\"Let's take the path by the river,\" Kirsty suggested. \"It's a little longer, but it's much prettier.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes! Maybe we'll see some ducklings,\" Rachel agreed.\n\nAs the girls walked up Twisty Lane, sunlight poured through the dancing tree branches. Spots of light speckled the road like golden coins. Soon Rachel and Kirsty reached the river. It was very pretty down by the water, where buttercups dotted the grass and cows grazed happily.\n\nRachel spotted little puffs of mist rising from the water. \"Look! Do you think that could be fairy mist?\" she asked.\n\n\"I'm not sure,\" Kirsty replied. \"There's usually mist near water, isn't there?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, especially in the morning and at night,\" Rachel remembered. She felt a little disappointed, but brightened when she saw two swans gliding by. Dragonflies perched in the reeds beside the sparkling river. \"It's a perfect day!\" she said, smiling.\n\nKirsty nodded. Up ahead, she could see the edge of the forest. Something was shimmering on one of the tree branches. It looked like a silvery scarf, sparkling softly in the sunlight. \"What's that?\" she asked Rachel.\n\nRachel went over to look. \"I don't know, but it's beautiful!\" she replied. \"It looks just like the tinsel that we use to decorate our Christmas tree.\"\n\n\"There's lots more of it on the other branches, too. Isn't it pretty?\" Kirsty touched a strand of the strange, silvery stuff. It stuck to her fingers for a moment before melting away. \"It feels cold!\" Kirsty shivered, rubbing her hands together.\n\nRachel leaned forward for a closer look. Tiny silvery lights shimmered in the fine, silky threads. \"This has to be fairy mist,\" she whispered excitedly.\n\nKirsty's eyes lit up. \"I think you're right,\" she agreed. She looked toward a clump of tall oak trees. A wispy cloud of mist was floating gently down toward the trees from the sky. \"More fairy mist!\" Kirsty pointed out. \"Come on!\"\n\n##\n\n#\n\nThe girls ran toward a path that led into the woods. They were out of breath by the time they stopped in the forest and looked around. Wispy mist clung to trees everywhere and coated the grass with tiny droplets. Every twig, leaf, and flower glowed with a soft silver light.\n\nAnd where the sun reached down through the trees, the fairy mist sparkled with rainbow-colored light.\n\n\"Oh!\" breathed Rachel. \"It's so beautiful!\"\n\nKirsty stared in awe at the forest. It looked almost as magical as Fairyland!\n\nSlowly, the girls moved forward. After a few steps, Rachel realized that she couldn't see very far ahead.\n\n\"This mist is getting thicker,\" she said. \"The goblin with the Mist Feather must be hiding really close by.\"\n\nKirsty nodded as thick fog swirled around them. \"You're right, Rachel,\" she agreed. \"I can hardly see a thing. The goblin could be right behind us!\"\n\nRachel rubbed her bare arms and shivered. Only a few minutes had passed, but as the mist grew thicker, the forest started to feel dark and unfriendly. Nothing glittered or gleamed anymore. The fog was settling around the girls like a cold blanket.\n\nShadowy figures moved up ahead. A man wearing a red T-shirt ran out in front of the girls, and another runner burst out of the trees. They were heading straight for each other. \"Watch out!\" cried Kirsty. But it was too late. _Crash!_ The runners bumped right into each other.\n\n\"Sorry. Didn't see you there!\" one of them said, rubbing his head.\n\n\"I've never seen fog like this in summer,\" replied the other one.\n\nRachel and Kirsty could hear rustles and bumps all around them. Voices echoed through the fog. Lots of runners were getting lost, and had to slow down and walk so they could avoid the trees.\n\n\"What a mess. This fog is ruining the race!\" said Rachel.\n\nThe fog still seemed to be getting thicker. It hung over the trees, making them look dark and frightening.\n\nSuddenly, something caught Kirsty's eye. \"Over there!\" she cried, pointing.\n\nA bright light was moving toward them, shining like a lantern. Soon the girls could see that it was a tiny gleaming fairy.\n\n\"Oh!\" gasped Kirsty. \"It's Evie the Mist Fairy!\"\n\n\"Hello again, Rachel and Kirsty,\" cried Evie in a bright, tinkly voice. She hovered in the air in front of them. The girls had met Evie in Fairyland, along with the rest of the Weather Fairies. She had long dark hair and violet eyes. She wore a fluttery lilac dress with purple boots, and her wand had a sparkly silver tip. Wisps of shimmering mist drifted from it.\n\n\"Oh, we're so happy to see you!\" said Rachel.\n\n\"We really need your help,\" Kirsty added. \"We're sure that the goblin with the Mist Feather is nearby.\"\n\n\"Yes!\" agreed Evie, a frown on her tiny face. \"And he's causing lots of misty mischief!\"\n\n\"Could you leave a magic trail behind us as we go farther into the woods?\" Rachel asked. \"Then we can look for the goblin and still find our way back out.\"\n\nEvie grinned. She waved her wand and a fountain of fairy dust shot out. It floated to the ground and formed a glittering path. \"Of course! Now we won't get lost,\" she said.\n\n\"But we might bump into the runners,\" Kirsty pointed out. \"Let's turn ourselves into fairies, Rachel. Then we can fly.\"\n\nThe Fairy Queen had given Rachel and Kirsty beautiful golden lockets full of fairy dust. The girls sprinkled themselves with the magic dust and shrank to fairy size. The trees seemed as big as giants' castles in the thick fog.\n\n\"I love being a fairy!\" Kirsty sang out.\n\nRachel twisted around to look over her shoulder. There were her fairy wings on her back, shining delicately.\n\n\"Hooray!\" Evie rose into the air, a trail of glittering mist streaming from her wand, and the two girls flew along behind her.\n\nBelow them, the runners were still stumbling through the fog. \"Poor Mom. She was really looking forward to the race today. That goblin is spoiling everyone's fun,\" said Kirsty.\n\nSuddenly, Rachel spotted a dark, hunched shape in the mist below. She waved to Kirsty and Evie. \"Look down there,\" she called softly. \"I think we found the goblin!\"\n\n##\n\n#\n\nThey all floated down to investigate. The mist here was heavier and stickier. It pulled at Rachel's wings as she flew through it. \"Oh, it's not a goblin\u2014it's just a dead tree.\" She sighed, landing on the thick twisted trunk. She felt disappointed. The dark shape had looked just like a goblin from the air.\n\n\"We may not have found him yet,\" Kirsty whispered to her friend, \"but I still think that the goblin isn't far away. The mist here smells musty, and it's harder to fly through.\"\n\nRachel fluttered her shiny wings. \"Yes,\" she agreed. \"It's like cold oatmeal.\"\n\nJust then, they heard a gruff voice complaining nearby. \"It's not fair! I'm cold and I'm lost and I'm hungry!\" There was a loud sniff, like a pig snorting. \"Poor me!\"\n\nRachel, Kirsty, and Evie looked at one another in excitement.\n\n\"That's definitely a goblin!\" declared Evie.\n\n\"Quick! Let's hide in that tree before he sees us,\" suggested Rachel.\n\nThey flew up and landed on the branch of a huge oak tree, then peered down through the thick green leaves. Sure enough, the goblin sat on a log below them. They could see the top of his head and his huge bony feet. They could also hear a horrible gurgling sound, like slimy stuff going down a drain.\n\n\"Lost in this horrible forest! And I'm so hungry,\" moaned the goblin, clutching his rumbling tummy. \"I'd love some toadstool stew and worm dumplings!\"\n\nSuddenly he jumped up.\"What was that? Who's there?\" He peered up into the tree branches. Rachel, Kirsty, and Evie quickly darted behind the oak leaves. After a moment the goblin sat down on his log again. \"Must have been a squirrel,\" he muttered. \"Oh, I want to go home!\"\n\nThe girls could see the goblin clearly now. He had bulging, crossed eyes and a big, lumpy nose like a potato. His arms were long and skinny but he had short legs and knobbly knees.\n\n\"Look what he's holding!\" whispered Evie.\n\nKirsty and Rachel peered through the leaves and saw that the goblin clutched a beautiful silvery feather with a lilac tip in his fingers. \"The Mist Feather!\" the girls exclaimed together.\n\nThen Rachel frowned. \"If the goblin's lost in the fog, why doesn't he use the magic feather to get rid of it?\" she asked.\n\n\"Because he doesn't know how,\" Evie explained. \"He's waving the feather all over the place without thinking\u2014but he's only making more and more mist.\" It was true. The goblin was shaking the Mist Feather and mumbling to himself as thick swirls of fog drifted around him.\n\n\"Earwig fritters, beetle pancakes, lovely slug sandwiches...\" he muttered wistfully.\n\nJust then, one of the runners passed close by. The goblin shot to his feet and hid behind a tree. He was shaking so much that the three friends could hear his knees knocking together. \"It's a...it's a Pogwurzel!\" he whispered in panic.\n\nAs the sound of the runner's footsteps faded, the goblin peeked out again. \"Phew! The Pogwurzel's gone.\" He flopped back down on the log, but kept looking around nervously.\n\nKirsty turned to Evie. \"What is a Pogwurzel?\" she asked.\n\nEvie smiled, her violet eyes sparkling. \"Pogwurzels are strange, magical, goblin-chasing monsters!\" she replied.\n\nRachel looked at the fairy curiously. \"Where do they live?\" She and Kirsty had been to Fairyland a few times now. They had seen elves, goblins, and all kinds of fairies\u2014but never a Pogwurzel.\n\nEvie gave a peal of tinkly laughter. \"Nowhere!\" she said. \"Because they don't exist! You see, goblin children can be really naughty. Their mothers tell them that if they don't behave, a Pogwurzel will come and chase them!\"\n\nKirsty and Rachel laughed so hard that they almost fell off the branch.\n\nThen Rachel turned to Kirsty and Evie in excitement. \"I have an idea,\" she whispered, her eyes shining. \"I think I know how we can get the Mist Feather back!\"\n\n##\n\n#\n\nEvie and Kirsty stared at Rachel. \"Tell us!\" they cried.\n\nRachel outlined her plan. \"If we can convince the goblin that the forest is full of Pogwurzels, he'll do anything to escape. He'll want the mist cleared away so that he can find his way out of the woods. Since he's not clever enough to figure out how to use the Mist Feather himself, maybe we can convince him to give the feather to Evie and let her try.\"\n\nEvie clapped her hands together in excitement. \"Then I can keep it and take it back to Doodle!\" she said. \"It's a wonderful plan!\"\n\n\"But I'm not sure how we can make the goblin think that there are hundreds of Pogwurzels in the forest,\" Rachel added.\n\nThe three friends sat quietly, thinking. Kirsty thought of her mom and the other runners trying to find their way along the race course. That gave her an idea. \"I know how we can convince the goblin that there are Pogwurzels around!\" she cried. \"Evie, if you make us human-sized again, Rachel and I can creep up on the goblin from behind. Then we'll run past him, screaming that a Pogwurzel is chasing us!\"\n\n\"Yes, that could work,\" Evie agreed.\n\n\"We'll have to be very convincing,\" Rachel added.\n\nEvie nodded. \"But you two can do it. I know you can,\" she said encouragingly.\n\nThe three friends flew silently down to the ground behind the oak tree. Evie waved her wand and the girls zoomed up to their normal height. \"Ready?\" asked Kirsty. \"You bet,\" Rachel replied. The girls crept toward the goblin. They could see him sitting on his log, still muttering to himself. \"Now!\" whispered Rachel.\n\nKirsty dashed forward. \"Help! Help! Save us from the Pogwurzel!\" she shouted.\n\nRachel was right behind her. \"It's huge and scary and won't leave us alone!\" she cried.\n\nThe goblin leaped to his feet. His eyes were as big as saucers. \"What?\" he gasped. \"Who are you?\"\n\nKirsty stopped. \"Oh, my goodness, a goblin in Pogwurzel Wood!\" she exclaimed, pretending to be surprised.\n\nRachel stopped, too. \"You must be very brave,\" she declared.\n\nThe goblin's eyes flicked from Rachel to Kirsty. \"Why?\" he demanded shakily. \"Are there many Pogwurzels around here?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" Kirsty chimed in. \"Hundreds. This forest is full of them. One of them was chasing us just now,\" she added, looking nervously over her shoulder. \"He can't be far behind us.\" Just then, Evie fluttered down, her wings shining in the fog. \"Pogwurzels especially love to catch goblins, you know,\" she said.\n\nThe goblin's face turned pale with fear.\n\n\"If I were you, I'd get out of this forest right now,\" Evie continued.\n\n\"But I can't,\" wailed the goblin. \"The fog is so thick that I can hardly see my own toes!\"\n\nEvie smiled. \"I'll help you,\" she said sweetly. \"Just give me that feather you're holding. I'll use it to make a clear pathway out of the forest for you.\"\n\nKirsty and Rachel could hardly breathe. Their plan was working so far, but what would the goblin do next?\n\nHe pinched his nose thoughtfully. \"I don't know. Jack Frost won't like it if I give you the Mist Feather.\"\n\n\"But he's not the one being chased by a Pogwurzel, is he?\" Rachel pointed out quickly.\n\n\"The Pogwurzels in this forest are extra-big,\" Kirsty said. \"And really, really mean.\"\n\n\"So is Jack Frost,\" the goblin said, looking torn. \"I think I'll keep the feather.\"\n\nKirsty's heart sank. It looked like the goblin was more stubborn than they had expected. She looked over at Rachel. Now what could they do?\n\n##\n\n#\n\nEvie hovered close to the girls. \"I have an idea,\" she whispered. \"You distract the goblin, so he won't notice what I'm doing.\"\n\n\"What are you all talking about?\" asked the goblin suspiciously.\n\n\"Oh, we just think we heard another Pogwurzel,\" Kirsty replied.\n\n\"Where?\" the goblin spun around in fear.\n\nWhile his back was turned, Evie waved her wand in a complicated pattern. A big fountain of silver and violet sparks shot into a nearby bush, sending fairy magic there.\n\n\"I can hear it! It's coming this way!\" Rachel called out.\n\n\"I don't believe you,\" the goblin sneered. \"I can't hear it. You're just trying to scare me. I bet you never saw a Pogwurzel at all.\"\n\n\"Listen for yourself, then,\" Evie said.\n\nThe goblin turned his head to one side and frowned in concentration. Kirsty and Rachel waited. They weren't exactly sure what Evie planned to do.\n\nSuddenly a deep, scary roar came from the nearby bush. \" _Raaghh!_ I'm a scary Pogwurzel! And I'm hungry for Goblin Pie for my dinner!\"\n\n\"Wow! Evie's magical voice is really scary,\" Kirsty whispered to Rachel.\n\nThe goblin stiffened. \"Help me, Mommy!\" he cried. \"A Pogwurzel wants to eat me! I'm sorry I put those toenail clippings in your bed. I won't do it again. Help!\" He stumbled behind Kirsty and Rachel, trying to hide. \"Don't eat me, Mr. Pogwurzel! Eat these girls instead. I bet they taste sweeter than I do!\" Evie's magical voice came from the bush again. \"I only eat goblins,\" it boomed. \"Especially really naughty ones\u2014like you!\" The goblin squealed in alarm. His eyes bulged. He took the Mist Feather from his belt and thrust it at Evie. \"Make the mist go away so I can get out of here,\" he begged. \"I don't want to be made into Goblin Pie!\"\n\nEvie smiled, took the feather, and waved it expertly in the air. A clear path immediately appeared through the mist. The goblin gave one last terrified glance over his shoulder and then ran away as fast as he could, his big feet flapping noisily on the ground.\n\nKirsty, Rachel, and Evie laughed.\n\n\"Evie, that trick voice was fantastic!\" Rachel said.\n\n\"It even scared _me_!\" Kirsty laughed.\n\n\"And now we have the Mist Feather!\" Evie said, waving it over her head.\n\nSilver sparks shot into the air and the mist began to fade. Before long, the sun shone down onto the forest again.\n\nRachel and Kirsty beamed. \"We can give Doodle another magic feather!\" Rachel said happily.\n\nEvie flew up and did a joyful twirl in the air. Silver and violet mist sparkled all around her.\n\n\"And the race should be easier now,\" Kirsty added. \"Let's see if we can spot Mom before we head home to visit Doodle.\"\n\n##\n\n#\n\nThe three friends made their way toward the race course.\n\nThe forest paths were tinged with gold, and the smell of earth and leaves filled the air. Runners pounded along between trees marked with big red signs. Everyone could see where they were going now.\n\n\"You'd better hide on my shoulder,\" Rachel said to Evie.\n\nEvie nodded and fluttered beneath Rachel's hair.\n\nSuddenly, Kirsty spotted her mom dashing through the trees. Two other runners were close on her heels.\n\n\"Come on, Mom!\" Kirsty shouted.\n\n\"You can do it!\" yelled Rachel.\n\nKirsty's mom smiled and waved. \"Not far to go now,\" she called.\n\nKirsty and Rachel jumped up and down with delight. Evie cheered, too, but only Rachel could hear her tiny voice.\n\n\"Looks like your mom's doing well,\" said someone at Kirsty's side.\n\n\"Dad! Gran! You're here!\" Kirsty exclaimed.\n\n\"And just in time. That fog held us up,\" said Mr. Tate. \"Strange how it's completely gone now. Almost like magic!\"\n\nRachel and Kirsty looked at each other and smiled.\n\n\"We're going to head home now,\" Kirsty told her dad.\n\n\"Sounds good,\" he replied. \"Gran and I will wait for Mom at the finish line.\"\n\nOn the way home, the girls enjoyed the glorious sunshine, but Kirsty couldn't help missing the sparkly fairy mist just a little bit.\n\n\"Time to give Doodle his feather back,\" said Rachel, as they reached Kirsty's house. \"I wonder if he'll say something to us again.\" Every time the girls had returned a tail feather, Doodle had come briefly to life and started to speak. He'd given them part of a message, and they couldn't wait to hear the rest. \"I hope so,\" said Kirsty. She repeated what Doodle had told them so far. \"Beware! Jack Frost will come...\"\n\nEvie flew up to the barn roof. As she put the feather into place, the girls watched eagerly.\n\nA fountain of copper and gold sparks fizzed from Doodle's tail. The rusty old weather vane disappeared and in its place was a fiery magic rooster. Doodle fluffed up his glorious feathers and turned to stare at Rachel and Kirsty. \"If his\u2014\" he squawked. But before Doodle could finish the message, his feathers turned to iron and he became an ordinary weather vane again.\n\nKirsty frowned. \"Beware! Jack Frost will come if his...\" she said, repeating all the words Doodle had said to them so far.\n\n\"Jack Frost will come if his _what_?\" Rachel wondered.\n\nKirsty shook her head. \"We'll just have to find the next feather and hope that Doodle tells us,\" she said.\n\nEvie nodded. \"It's important to know the whole message. Jack Frost is dangerous,\" she warned. \"And now I must leave you.\" She hugged Rachel and Kirsty. \"Dear friends, thank you for helping me.\"\n\n\"You're welcome,\" said Kirsty.\n\n\"Say hello to all our friends in Fairyland for us,\" added Rachel.\n\n\"I will,\" Evie promised, zooming up into the bright blue sky. Her wand left trails of silver mist in the air. Then she was gone.\n\nKirsty giggled. \"I just remembered something the goblin said. I wonder whose toenail clippings he put in his mom's bed?\" she said.\n\nRachel laughed happily. What an exciting day it had been. There were still two days of her visit left! Who knew what they would bring?\n\n#\n\n##\n\n##\n\n##\n\n#\n\nMagic in the Air\n\nThe Fairy Storm\n\nRachel in Danger\n\nA Wild Idea\n\nKirsty to the Rescue\n\nDoodle's Warning\n\n##\n\n#\n\n\"I can't believe tomorrow is my last day here,\" groaned Rachel Walker. She was staying with her friend, Kirsty Tate, in Wetherbury for a week. The girls had gone on so many adventures together, they knew it was going to be hard to say good-bye.\n\nNow, they were walking to the park, excited to be outside. It had been pouring rain all night, but now the sun was shining again.\n\n\"Put on your coats, please,\" Mrs. Tate had told them before they left. \"It looks awfully breezy out there!\"\n\n\"It's been so much fun having you visit,\" Kirsty told her friend. \"I don't think I'll ever forget this week. Will you?\" Rachel shook her head. \"No way,\" she agreed.\n\nThe two friends smiled at each other. It had been a very busy week. A snowy, windy, cloudy, sunny, misty week \u2014 thanks to Jack Frost and his goblins. The goblins had stolen the seven magic tail feathers from Doodle, Fairyland's weather rooster. The Weather Fairies used the feathers to control the weather, so now that the goblins had them, they were stirring up all kinds of trouble!\n\nRachel and Kirsty were helping the Weather Fairies get the feathers back. Without them, Doodle was just an ordinary weather vane! Kirsty's dad had found it lying in the park. He brought it home and put it on the roof of their old barn.\n\n\"Doodle has five of his magic feathers back now. I hope we find the last two before you have to go home,\" Kirsty said, pushing open the park gate.\n\nRachel nodded, but before she could say anything, raindrops started splashing down around them.\n\nThe girls looked up to see a huge purple storm cloud covering the sun. The sky was getting darker by the second, and the rain was coming down harder and harder.\n\n\"Run, quick!\" Kirsty shouted. \"Before we get soaked!\"\n\nThe girls started to run, and Rachel put her hands over her head as raindrops poured down from above. It was raining so hard that she could hardly see the path ahead. \"Where are we going?\" she cried.\n\n\"Let's just find some place out of the rain,\" Kirsty replied, grabbing Rachel's hand. \"I'm soaked already!\"\n\nThe girls stopped under a big chestnut tree near the park entrance. The tree's wide, leafy branches were perfect for keeping away the rain.\n\n\"Great idea,\" said Rachel, shivering and trying to shake the raindrops off her coat.\n\nJust as she said that, there was a loud clap of thunder, followed by a bright flash! The whole sky lit up with a bolt of lightning.\n\nKirsty and Rachel watched in shock as the lightning bolt slammed right into the chestnut tree.\n\n\"We need to get away from here!\" Kirsty cried, jumping back in fright. \"It's dangerous being under a tree during a thunderstorm!\"\n\n\"Wait a minute,\" Rachel said, staring up at a tree branch. Rain was pouring off her shoulders, but she didn't seem to notice. \"Kirsty, look. That branch is _sparkling.\"'_\n\nAnd it was! The leaves were glittering green, glowing through the dark storm. Tiny twinkling lights flickered all over the branch. It reminded Kirsty of the trees they'd seen in Fairyland. They almost seemed to sparkle with fairy dust! And that made her think that maybe...\n\n\"It's a _magical_ storm!\" Kirsty exclaimed, her eyes almost as bright as the shining leaves. \"Look at the sky, Rachel!\"\n\nBoth girls looked up in wonder as the lightning flashed again. A million sparkling lights danced around the thunderclouds, then faded away into the darkness.\n\nRachel grinned with excitement. \"It's magical, but very wet!\" she said, laughing. \"Let's find somewhere drier and safer. Come on!\"\n\n##\n\n#\n\nRachel and Kirsty ran out of the park and back to the road. The rain was still pouring down, sticking their hair against their heads. It was so dark and wet out that all of the cars driving past had their headlights on and their windshield wipers whipping from side to side.\n\nInstead of running all the way home, Kirsty had another idea. \"Let's go in there!\" she cried, pointing ahead.\n\nRachel blinked the raindrops from her eyelashes and followed her friend up the path to a large red brick building. A small blue sign out front read:\n\nWETHERBURY MUSEUM.\n\nKirsty yanked open the double doors, and she and Rachel tumbled inside the museum. Water dripped onto the doormat as Rachel shook her hair out of her face.\n\n\"Wow!\" she said. \"Talk about stormy weather!\"\n\nKirsty looked thoughtful. \"The goblin with the Lightning Feather must be behind this,\" she said. \"He's nearby, don't you think?\"\n\n\"Definitely,\" Rachel agreed. \"I\u2014\"\n\nBut before she could say anything else, Rachel was interrupted by a deafening _ROOOAAARRR_!\n\nRachel clutched Kirsty's arm. \"What was that?\" she whispered.\n\nKirsty giggled at her friend's alarmed face. \"I should have warned you \u2014 there's a dinosaur display in here,\" she said. \"They found some dinosaur bones in Wetherbury years and years ago. The museum has a huge model of how the dinosaur would have looked. It roars and moves every few minutes. Come on, I'll show you.\"\n\nKirsty pushed open another set of double doors and led Rachel into one of the museum galleries. A group of people was being shown around by a tour guide. Kirsty pointed past them to a gigantic model dinosaur.\n\nRachel stared at the long neck, wide body, and huge tail of the model. The dinosaur was standing in water that was supposed to look like a river. Spiky rubber fish floated around its feet.\n\n\"Wow!\" Rachel exclaimed.\n\nKirsty grinned. \"Watch this,\" she said, pressing a big red button.\n\nThe dinosaur leaned down and opened its jaws. It snapped up one of the fish, then lifted its head so that the fish tumbled down into its belly. \"That's amazing!\" Rachel said, laughing. \"What happens if you press this blue button?\"\n\n_RROOOOOAAARRRR!_\n\n\"That's what happens,\" Kirsty giggled.\n\nAs the dinosaur's roar faded, Rachel couldn't help overhearing the tour guide. \"Listen!\" she whispered to Kirsty. \"... don't know where this fairy exhibit has come from,\" the guide was saying, sounding confused. She shrugged. \"I just came back from vacation \u2014 it must be a new display. Maybe somebody discovered that fairies were around at the same time as dinosaurs!\" The tour group laughed politely. \"Anyway, let's move on to the natural history room,\" the guide said. \"It's this way... .\"\n\nRachel and Kirsty crept to the back of the tour group to check out the fairy exhibit. If they stood on their tiptoes, the girls could see over all the heads to one of the display cases. There seemed to be a tiny shape in there, but they couldn't tell what it was from so far away.\n\nAs the group followed the tour guide out of the room, there was another loud growl of thunder. The girls saw a dazzling flash of lightning through the windows. Once again, the sky seemed to glitter with silver sparkles. Then all the lights went out inside the museum.\n\n\"Oh, dear, it's a power outage,\" the guide said, sighing, as her tour group gasped. \"Follow me, everyone \u2014 I think we have some flashlights over here.\"\n\nRachel and Kirsty waited until the group had left the room, then went to take a closer look at the fairy display case. Inside was a real, live fairy, glowing with magic \u2014 and she was waving frantically at them!\n\n##\n\n#\n\n\"It's Storm the Lightning Fairy!\" cried Rachel, hurrying to open the case. She found a tiny hook on the side and unlatched it so that the glass door swung open.\n\n\"Hello, again,\" said Storm. \"I'm so glad to see you two!\"\n\nRachel and Kirsty had met all the Weather Fairies at the beginning of their feather-finding mission. The King and Queen of Fairyland had brought the girls to Fairyland to ask for their help, so now they recognized the fairy right away. Storm had long, straight blonde hair and wore a bright purple outfit. A golden lightning bolt hung on a chain around her neck, and her purple wand sent out little crackling lightning bolts whenever it moved.\n\n\"Hello, Storm!\" said Kirsty, as the fairy fluttered out of the glass case. \"I was wondering when we were going to see you. What were you doing in there?\"\n\nStorm tossed her hair. \"The goblin with the Lightning Feather trapped me in there,\" she explained, annoyed. \"He's still somewhere in the museum. Have you seen all the lightning he's been making?\" She put her hands on her hips. \"Please help me get my feather back from him. Lightning is powerful stuff, you know.\"\n\n\"We know,\" Rachel told her. \"We were under a tree when lightning struck. One of the branches broke!\"\n\nStorm looked horrified, so Kirsty tried to make her feel better. \"It was very pretty lightning, though, Storm,\" she said. \"All sparkly!\"\n\nStorm smiled. \"It is beautiful, isn't it?\" she said. Then she sighed. \"But I have to get the feather back before that mean goblin does any more damage. Those goblins have no idea \u2014\" Storm broke off in the middle of her sentence. \"Someone's coming,\" she whispered. \"It might be the goblin. Hide!\"\n\nThe girls pressed themselves back against the wall and Storm swooped down onto Kirsty's shoulder. They were half-hidden by a display case in the darkness. Thunder rumbled again, and Kirsty realized that her heart was pounding. She really hoped the noise they heard was just the tour guide coming back, not the goblin. Jack Frost had cast a spell to make all the goblins bigger, so now they were almost as tall as the girls' shoulders. That made it even harder for Kirsty and Rachel to get the Weather Feathers back from them!\n\nThe door creaked open, and the girls and Storm all held their breath. Through the darkness they could see that it was the goblin. And, he was a particularly scary-looking one \u2014 with extra-narrow red eyes, long, pointed ears, and a thin, bony body. The lights were still out in the museum, but the goblin lit up the room. He was waving the Lightning Feather around so that golden bolts of lightning whizzed all over the place. They crackled and fizzed, sending electric blue sparks shooting from everything they touched. Storm put her head in her hands. \"I can't watch,\" she groaned. \"What does he think he's doing?\"\n\n\"Oh!\" gasped Rachel, ducking as a lightning bolt zoomed past her head. \"We have to stop him before he hurts someone,\" she hissed.\n\n\"Who said that?\" the goblin snapped. \"Fairy, was that you? Or is somebody else in here?\"\n\nKirsty's heart pounded so loudly that she was sure the goblin would hear it. He was turning around, looking everywhere to see who'd made the noise. At last, his red eyes fell upon the girls, and he grinned a horrible grin.\n\n\"Oh!\" he cried. \"Planning to sneak up on me, were you?\" And with a wave of the feather, he sent three fiery lightning bolts whizzing right at them!\n\n\"Duck!\" cried Storm, diving into Kirsty's coat pocket. The girls threw themselves behind a display case and the lightning crashed to the ground, only missing them by a few inches. Wisps of glittering smoke rose from a scorch mark on the floor. The smoke drifted up to the ceiling, where it finally fizzled out in a shower of blue sparks like a tiny firework. Fairy lightning was powerful stuff!\n\n\"What do we do now?\" whispered Kirsty, her face white.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Rachel whispered back. \"Storm \u2014 do you have any ideas?\"\n\nStorm shook her head. \"The goblin is holding the feather so tightly, there's no way I can fly over and grab it,\" she said, frowning.\n\nRachel bit her lip. They needed a plan \u2014 fast! \"I'll just peek out to see where he is,\" she whispered. She poked her head around the side of the display case, only to see the goblin creeping closer to them.\n\n\"There you are!\" he yelled, and waved the Lightning Feather again.\n\nTo Rachel's horror, a lightning bolt came shooting right at her face!\n\n##\n\n#\n\nRachel ducked back behind the display case just in time. The lightning bolt whizzed so close to her, it burned the edge of her coat.\n\nStorm fluttered up into the air, a determined look on her face. \"Shrink to fairy size, girls!\" she called. \"It'll be harder for him to blast you when you're small.\"\n\nKirsty's fingers were shaking so much that she could barely open her fairy locket. The Queen of the Fairies had given her and Rachel one locket each.\n\nThey were filled with magical fairy dust. Kirsty finally flipped open the lid and sprinkled the dust all over herself. Seconds later, she felt the familiar whooshing. She shrank smaller and smaller until she was the same size as Storm. She shook out her wings and spun in the air. Being a fairy was so much fun!\n\nRachel looked like a giant next to her. \"I can't find my locket,\" she said anxiously. Just then, Kirsty spotted it shining on the floor under a display case, out of Rachel's reach. She pointed it out. \"It must have fallen off when you ducked for cover!\" she said.\n\nBefore Kirsty could fly down and grab the locket for her friend, the goblin ran over, closer and closer. He held the Lightning Feather tightly in his hand, and Rachel could see a wicked glint in his eye.\n\n\"Help!\" she cried, dodging to one side. \"Can you distract him, Storm?\"\n\nStorm was whizzing through the air, trying to get close enough to Rachel to sprinkle fairy dust onto her, but the goblin was blocking her way. And he was still waving the feather around, sending lightning bolts flashing in every direction. It was too dangerous for Kirsty or Storm to move any closer to Rachel.\n\n\"What are we going to do?\" Kirsty yelled as she watched Rachel run from the goblin. The doors crashed open as Rachel sprinted into the next room. Kirsty and Storm flew behind her, not sure what to do.\n\nThe room was full of animal and insect exhibits. Luckily, there were no people around. The tour group must have headed for home when the power went out.\n\nThe goblin chased Rachel past cases of colorful butterflies, and then around a large glass box full of thousands of bustling ants.\n\nThe goblin waved the feather, and a bolt of lightning slammed against the ant house, scattering the ants inside. Kirsty thought her friend had done a great job of escaping the goblin so far, but she knew Rachel couldn't keep it up forever. She had to think of some way to help!\n\nKirsty racked her brains as she and Storm followed Rachel and the goblin back into the dinosaur room. Suddenly, she spotted a large mirror hanging on one wall. An idea came to her. A crazy idea. A wild idea! But, she thought, it might just work... .\n\n##\n\n#\n\nKirsty pointed up at the mirror. \"Would lightning be strong enough to break that?\" she asked Storm quickly.\n\nStorm shook her head. \"No, fairy lightning isn't like normal lightning. It would just bounce back off a mirror,\" she replied.\n\nKirsty grinned. \"Perfect,\" she said. \"I'm going to try to surprise the goblin. You get ready to grab the feather!\"\n\nKirsty could tell that Rachel was starting to get tired, so she flew down toward the goblin right away. He was just stretching out a bony hand to grab Rachel's coat, when Kirsty tugged hard on one of his long ears.\n\n\"Ow! Who did that?\" he yelped, jumping back.\n\nKirsty fluttered up in front of the mirror. \"Yoo-hoo! Over here!\" she yelled, waving. \"Catch me if you can!\"\n\nShe saw the goblin aim the Lightning Feather right at her. \"Silly little fairy,\" he yelled. \"Take that!\" And another crackling, golden lightning bolt zoomed toward Kirsty.\n\nKirsty held her breath as she watched it whiz through the air. It was so close, she could almost feel its heat on her face!\n\n\"Move!\" Rachel shouted in panic, terrified that her friend was going to get hit.\n\nBut Kirsty waited until the very last second. Then, just as the lightning was about to strike her, she dodged out of its way. The fairy lightning struck the mirror and, as Storm had predicted, it bounced right back \u2014 straight at the goblin!\n\n\"Help!\" he shouted, trying to get out of the way. He tripped over his own big feet and fell to the ground under the dinosaur model, dropping the Lightning Feather!\n\nQuick as a flash, Storm was there, diving toward the feather in a blur of purple and gold. She snatched it up and flew high in the air, out of the reach of goblin fingers. \"Nice work, Kirsty!\" she cheered.\n\n\"Hey!\" yelled the goblin in fury, jumping up to try to reach the feather. He fell awkwardly against the dinosaur, lost his balance, and tumbled right into the water below with the rubber fish!\n\nGrinning mischievously, Storm pointed the Lightning Feather at the model dinosaur. A stream of fiery lightning bolts shot out of the feather and struck the red and blue buttons on the control panel. Rachel's eyes widened as the dinosaur sparkled all over for a second, and then...\n\n_\"RROOOOAAARRRRRR!\"'_ And with that, the dinosaur bent down and snatched up the goblin in its teeth!\n\n##\n\n#\n\nRachel, Kirsty, and Storm watched in amazement as the dinosaur lifted up its head with the struggling goblin still in its mouth.\n\n\"Put me down!\" the goblin cried. _\"Aaaaargghh!\"'_\n\nOf course, the model didn't listen to the goblin but just went through its usual process. It tipped its head back, opened its jaws a little wider, and... _clatter, clunk, bang, bang, crash_!. The goblin tumbled right down into the dinosaur's hollow belly! A furious pounding started inside the model.\n\n\"Let me out!\" yelled the goblin.\n\nLaughing with delight, Kirsty sprinkled another pinch of fairy dust over herself. It glittered bright white. Then she felt her wings disappear and her legs grow and \u2014 _WHOOSH_! \u2014 she was back to being a regular-sized girl again.\n\nShe ran to Rachel and hugged her. \"Are you OK?\" she asked. \"That was scary, wasn't it?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Rachel agreed. \"But everything turned out fine, thanks to your great idea, Kirsty. Now we have Doodle's sixth feather back!\"\n\nStorm flew over to the girls with Rachel's magical locket in her hands. \"Here you go,\" she said, handing it over. \"I think we'd better leave while we can,\" she added nervously. \"It sounds like the goblin's trying to climb out of the dinosaur. It won't take him long to escape and tell Jack Frost what's happened!\" They could all hear the determined scratching sounds that were coming from inside the dinosaur.\n\nRachel fastened her locket carefully around her neck as the three friends headed for the museum's exit. \"I can't believe I missed out on being a fairy today,\" she said with a sigh. \"That's the only bad part. That \u2014 and almost getting zapped by fairy lightning!\" she finished with a smile.\n\nOutside, the rain had stopped and the dark clouds seemed to be melting away. The sun came out and made the wet pavement sparkle.\n\nRachel glanced down and groaned. \"Oh, no,\" she said. \"My coat! I forgot that it got burned by the goblin's lightning.\"\n\nKirsty looked over as Rachel pulled up her coat to examine it. The material was black and scorched, and the stitching had fizzled away.\n\n\"Mom's going to be upset,\" Rachel said. \"This coat was supposed to last through the new school year!\"\n\n\"Let me see,\" said Storm, darting down for a closer look. As soon as she saw the problem, she smiled and gently waved her magic wand along the hem. A trail of twinkling lights fell over the material, and Rachel gasped as the burned part of her coat started shimmering with a bright white light.\n\nShe blinked in the dazzling fairy glow and, when she looked again, she saw that her coat was as good as new! \"Thank you, Storm,\" Rachel gasped in delight. \"Now Mom will never know!\"\n\nStorm winked. \"I should be the one thanking you two,\" she said. \"Doodle will be so happy to have another feather back in his tail!\"\n\nThey hurried down Twisty Lane to Kirsty's house. \"There's Doodle,\" Kirsty told Storm, pointing to the weather vane on top of the old barn.\n\nStorm flew up to return the Lightning Feather to Doodle's tail, and the girls waited expectantly. What was Doodle going to say this time? Every time they had put a feather back before, the rusty old weather vane had magically come alive, just for a second, and squawked out part of a message. So far, he had said, \"Beware! Jack Frost will come if his...\" The two friends couldn't wait to find out what Doodle was going to say next. Jack Frost would come if his... _what_?.\n\nAs Storm carefully put the Lightning Feather into place, Doodle's iron feathers softened and shimmered with a thousand fiery colors. His head turned toward the girls and his beak opened. \"... goblins fail!\" he squawked urgently. Then, just as quickly, the color vanished from Doodle's feathers, his head turned back with a rusty creak, and he was an ordinary weather vane again.\n\nRachel and Kirsty looked at each other. \"Beware! Jack Frost will come if his goblins fail!\" they cried together.\n\nStorm looked worried. \"If you find the Rain Feather, then Jack Frost's goblins will have failed,\" she said. \"That doesn't sound good.\" She fluttered down to Kirsty and Rachel. \"You must be careful, girls. Jack Frost is very sneaky.\"\n\n\"We know,\" Kirsty said, biting her lip. \"But we'll be careful. Don't worry, Storm.\"\n\nKirsty and Rachel hugged Storm goodbye. They watched as the Lightning Fairy flew into the distance, until she was nothing but a purple sparkle in the air. Then she was gone.\n\nThe girls stood in silence for a minute, both thinking about Doodle's warning. Rachel was the first to speak.\n\n\"We've almost done it, Kirsty,\" she said. \"But I think the last feather might be the hardest one to get back.\"\n\nKirsty nodded. \"And even if we do get it, I'm not looking forward to seeing Jack Frost at all,\" she said. Then she squeezed Rachel's hand. \"But we've outwitted him before, haven't we? I'm sure we can do it again.\"\n\nRachel grinned. \"You bet,\" she agreed. \"Watch out, Jack Frost! We're ready for you!\" she shouted.\n\n#\n\n##\n\n##\n\n##\n\n#\n\nWater, Water Everywhere!\n\nGoblin Afloat\n\nStop, Thief!\n\nFeathered Friends\n\nFrost Fright\n\nRainbow's End\n\n##\n\n#\n\n\"OK, OK, I'm awake. You can stop ringing now,\" mumbled Kirsty Tate sleepily. She reached out to turn off her alarm clock. But strangely, the alarm wasn't ringing.\n\n_Quack, quack, quack!_ The noise that had woken her rang through the air again.\n\nNow that Kirsty was awake, she realized that the sound hadn't been coming from her alarm clock at all. It was coming from outside instead. She jumped out of bed and peeked out through the curtains. \"Oh!\" she cried. There was water rising right up to her windowsill. A large brown duck was swimming past, followed by five fluffy ducklings! Kirsty watched as the mother duck fussed over her babies.\n\nIt had been raining really hard all night. In the front yard, the grass and flowerbeds had flooded. Water lapped against the walls of the old barn, and out past the front gate the street looked like a silvery mirror.\n\nKirsty rushed over to her best friend, Rachel Walker, who was asleep in the guest bed. Rachel was staying with Kirsty for a week during her summer vacation. \"Wake up, Rachel! You have to see this!\" Kirsty said, shaking her friend gently.\n\nRachel sat up and rubbed her eyes. \"What's going on?\"\n\n\"I think the river must have overflowed. Everything in Wetherbury is flooded!\" replied Kirsty.\n\n\"Really?\" Rachel was wide awake now, eagerly looking out the window. \"That's odd,\" she said, pointing. \"The water isn't that deep in the front yard and the street. How can it be right up to your bedroom window at the same time?\"\n\n\"Maybe it's Weather Fairy magic!\" Kirsty gasped, her eyes shining.\n\n\"Of course!\" Rachel agreed. She knew that fairy magic followed its own rules.\n\nKirsty and Rachel were special friends of the fairies. The two girls had met while on vacation with their parents on Rainspell Island. There, they had helped the seven Rainbow Fairies get home to Fairyland after Jack Frost's spell had cast them out. Now Jack Frost was up to more trouble, and Rachel and Kirsty were on another secret fairy mission, this time with the Weather Fairies.\n\nRachel looked over at Doodle, the weather vane on top of the barn. Usually, with the help of the Weather Fairies, Doodle the rooster was in charge of the weather in Fairyland. Each of his seven magic tail feathers controlled a different type of weather. But Jack Frost had sent his goblins to steal these magic feathers, and they had run away with them into the human world. Doodle had followed, but without his feathers, and outside of Fairyland, he had transformed into an ordinary metal weather vane.\n\nKirsty's dad had found him lying in the park and brought him home. That's where he would have to stay until Kirsty and Rachel could return all seven of his tail feathers and send him back to Fairyland. They had already found six feathers, so there was just one more left to find!\n\n\"Today's the last day of my vacation,\" Rachel said sadly.\n\n\"I know! We have to find the magic Rain Feather today,\" Kirsty called over her shoulder as she quickly got dressed. \"It's our last chance. At least with all this magical flooding, we can be sure that the goblin who stole the feather isn't far away!\"\n\nJust then, there was a tapping noise at the window. \"What if that's the goblin?\" Rachel whispered nervously. The goblins were mean, and Jack Frost had cast a spell to make them even bigger than usual. There was a rule in Fairyland that nothing could be taller than the highest tower of the fairy palace, but the goblins were still pretty big. They reached up to the girls' shoulders!\n\nKirsty put her finger to her lips. \"Shh,\" she warned, edging toward the window. She peeked out, then threw back the curtains with a smile. An elegant white swan was tapping on the window with its beak. And a tiny fairy was sitting on the swan's back, waving at the girls.\n\n\"Oh!\" Rachel gasped in delight. \"It's Hayley the Rain Fairy!\"\n\n##\n\n#\n\nKirsty was just about to open the window to let Hayley in, but then she hesitated. \"All of the water will rush inside,\" she said, frowning.\n\nHayley laughed. It sounded like a tinkling bell. \"Don't worry!\" she called through the window. \"It's fairy rain. It doesn't spill into people's houses.\"\n\nSlowly, Kirsty opened the window. The water stayed right where it was!\n\nRachel leaned forward. She could tell that a strange invisible barrier was holding the water back. \"It feels like jelly!\" she said, poking her finger into it. The water on the other side of the barrier felt just like normal. Hayley fluttered through the window and blew the swan a kiss. \"Thanks for the ride!\" she said. \"Good-bye!\" The swan dipped its head and glided away. \"Hello, girls,\" Hayley sang happily.\n\n\"Hello again, Hayley,\" Kirsty replied. She and Rachel had met Hayley in Fairyland at the beginning of their adventure, along with all of the other Weather Fairies.\n\n\"We're so glad to see you,\" added Rachel.\n\nHayley hovered in the air. She wore a pretty violet skirt and a matching top. Her long, dark hair was tied up in a ponytail and decorated with a bright blue flower. She folded her arms, and little droplets of blue and violet scattered from her silver wand. \"It's time to get Doodle's Rain Feather back from that terrible goblin!\" she said firmly, eyes flashing.\n\n\"We think so, too,\" Rachel agreed. \"But how can we look for him with all this flooding? We really need a boat.\"\n\nThat gave Kirsty an idea. \"I helped Dad clean out the garage last week, and we found an old raft. Let's go ask if we can take it out to play.\"\n\nHayley dived off the curtain rail, her delicate wings flashing, and landed on Rachel's shoulder. She hid beneath Rachel's hair.\n\nThe girls found Mr. and Mrs. Tate in the kitchen. Mr. Tate looked baffled as he stared out of the window. \"Since I can't get to work in this rain, I think I'll work on a mathematical theory about this flood water...\" he murmured, wandering past them.\n\n\"Hello, girls,\" said Mrs. Tate with a smile. \"Your dad's trying to figure out why the water isn't flooding into the house, Kirsty. But I'm just glad the place is dry! I made some toast. Help yourselves.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Mom.\" Kirsty grabbed a piece of toast. \"Is it OK if we go out in the old raft?\"\n\nMrs. Tate smiled. \"Sounds fine to me. Just be careful, please!\"\n\nKirsty and Rachel rushed out to the garage, finishing their toast on the way.\n\nKirsty pulled out the raft, along with an air pump and two wooden paddles.\n\nIt didn't take long to inflate the raft. Then the girls pushed it out through the window of the garage, onto the water.\n\nThey climbed in carefully. It was just big enough for two people.\n\n\"Perfect!\" said Hayley. She fluttered down to the front of the raft, where she sat like a tiny sparkling figurehead. Blue and violet droplets scattered from her wand.\n\n\"Here we go!\" Rachel dipped her paddle into the water.\n\nKirsty began paddling, too. At first, the raft spun in circles. As the girls got the hang of steering it, they began moving out toward High Street.\n\nSuddenly, a lady in a yellow raincoat and boots jumped out in front of them.\n\n\"Look out, Kirsty! It's the crossing guard!\" called Rachel. She dragged her paddle in the water, using it as a brake. Quick as a flash, Hayley whooshed into Kirsty's pocket, out of sight.\n\n\"Let the people cross!\" said the crossing guard, holding out her arms.\n\nKirsty and Rachel waited for a man to cross the street. He was pulling a floating wooden box with a dog sitting inside.\n\n\"Thank you. All clear!\" The crossing guard smiled at Rachel and Kirsty as they paddled on.\n\nOutside the post office, the girls saw a group of kids splashing about happily. They all wore boots and raincoats and didn't seem to mind the pouring rain at all. But not everyone was enjoying the rain. Kirsty spotted a cat perched in an oak tree in the village square. \"Poor thing,\" she said. \"At least it's safe up there.\"\n\nAs they continued paddling toward the park, Rachel saw a strange, dark shape floating out from behind the playground slide. \"Look over there. It's an upside-down umbrella!\" she cried, pointing.\n\nKirsty's eyes widened. Four ducks, all connected to some sort of rope, were quacking loudly, and pulling an umbrella boat along. Inside sat a hunched, dripping wet figure.\n\nSuddenly, Rachel realized who it was. \"It's the goblin,\" she gasped. \"And he could spot us at any moment!\"\n\n##\n\n#\n\n\"Quick, hide!\" Hayley whispered. \"We need to come up with a plan.\"\n\nKirsty and Rachel looked around desperately. The goblin was coming closer and closer. There was nowhere to hide!\n\n\"What about the trees?\" Kirsty suggested. \"If we turn into fairies, we can hide in the branches!\"\n\nRachel pulled out the magic locket that the Fairy Queen had given her to use in times of danger. Kirsty found hers, too, and both girls sprinkled themselves with glittering fairy dust.\n\nKirsty felt her shoulders tingle as delicate fairy wings grew there. She fluttered straight into the air, heading for the nearest branch.\n\nRachel also felt herself shrinking. She zoomed upward on her sparkly wings and landed next to Kirsty. Just then, she spotted an empty bird's nest on a nearby branch. \"Quick! In here!\" she whispered.\n\nKirsty and Hayley jumped in beside Rachel. The nest was lined with moss and fluffy feathers. It felt cozy and dry. \"Great idea, Rachel. This is a perfect place to hide!\" Hayley said, grinning.\n\nAs soon as the girls were out of sight, the goblin floated beneath the tree in his umbrella boat. One of the ducks flapped its wings angrily, pulling at its rope. The umbrella wobbled in the water and almost tipped over.\n\n\"Hey! I almost fell out!\" the goblin complained. \"Stop trying to get away, you silly ducks. You've got my nice warm scarf for a rope. I'm the one who's freezing! _Achoo_!\" His loud sneeze echoed through the park like a foghorn.\n\nKirsty, Rachel, and Hayley quietly peeked out of the nest. They could see that the goblin was very thin, with enormous hands and feet. Rain poured from the brim of his battered hat and dripped onto his long, crooked nose.\n\nThe goblin shivered and sniffed. He rubbed the tip of his nose, which was all red and shiny. \"It's not fair. I wanted to go after the Sunshine Feather, and instead I get stuck with this rotten old Rain Feather! I should be toasty warm, not as cold as yesterday's mud oatmeal and as soggy as a squashed worm! _Achoo!_ \"\n\n\"He has a really nasty cold,\" murmured Hayley.\n\n\"Serves him right!\" Kirsty said. Just then, the goblin lifted his hat and pulled out a beautiful copper-colored feather with silvery streaks. He jabbed it angrily into the air. \"Just stop this rain, right now!\" he muttered. The rain stopped at once, and the goblin grinned with triumph. \"At least it follows directions,\" he grunted, stuffing the feather back under his hat.\n\n\"Oh, the poor Rain Feather!\" whispered Hayley.\n\nSuddenly, the goblin's miserable face lit up with a grin. He had spotted the girls' raft. \"Oh, goody, a real boat just for me!\" he cried. Using his big hands as paddles, the goblin pulled up alongside the raft. Then he scrunched up his long legs, sprang straight in the air, and landed in the raft. \"Nice duckies. Let's harness you to my new boat,\" he said. \"That's it. All ready now. Off we go!\"\n\n\"That awful goblin! He's stealing our raft!\" Kirsty explained. \"And now he's using the umbrella to keep himself dry.\"\n\n\"I feel like some more rain now!\" shouted the goblin happily. He took out the Rain Feather and waved it in the air. A big, gray cloud appeared above the trees. Rain began to pour down. \"Faster, ducks! Swim faster!\" urged the goblin, his voice growing fainter as the raft sailed out of sight.\n\nRachel, Kirsty, and Hayley watched in dismay. \"How are we going to get the Rain Feather back now?\" Rachel asked, sighing.\n\n##\n\n#\n\nKirsty stood up. \"I have a plan!\" she announced.\n\n\"Hooray! What is it?\" Hayley asked.\n\n\"Remember how the goblin said he had wanted the Sunshine Feather?\" Kirsty began.\n\nHayley and Rachel both nodded.\n\n\"Well, if we could find a feather that looks like the Sunshine Feather, then we might be able to trick the goblin into swapping with us!\" explained Kirsty.\n\n\"It's a good plan. But where can we get a feather?\" Rachel wondered. \"The magic feathers are so long and beautiful.\"\n\nKirsty grinned and flew into the air. \"Follow me!\"\n\nHayley and Rachel zoomed after Kirsty. She led them back over toward her house and then to the nearby farmyard. The farmhouse and cow shed were flooded with a few inches of water.\n\nKirsty swooped through the henhouse door with Hayley and Rachel close behind. Inside, they saw fluffy, dark shapes huddled together on a perch above the wet floor.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" Hayley said politely to the chickens. \"We need your help.\"\n\nThe chickens looked up with dull eyes. \"Eggs all wet. Feet cold and muddy. Feathers all soggy,\" they squawked sadly.\n\n\"Oh, dear. They seem so upset,\" Hayley said with a sigh.\n\n\"It's because everything is so wet. Dad says chickens really hate being soggy,\" Kirsty explained.\n\nHayley flew down to pet the chickens' heads. \"Don't worry, chickens. We can make this rain stop with your help,\" she told them brightly.\n\n\"We need a big feather, as long as this '\" Kirsty said, spreading out her hands to show what she meant.\n\n\"Why didn't you say so?\" squawked a handsome rooster. He twisted around and plucked a feather from his tail. \"Will this do?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes! It's beautiful. Thank you very much.\" Hayley fluttered down and took the feather. \"Now, cheer up!\" she said, flying toward the door. \"We're going to go stop the rain!\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" called Kirsty and Rachel as they followed Hayley to the door.\n\nThe chickens fluffed themselves up, already looking much happier. They lifted their wings to wave at the girls. \"Good-bye!\" they clucked.\n\nOutside, on the henhouse roof, Hayley, Rachel, and Kirsty looked at the long copper-colored feather. \"I don't think the goblin will be fooled,\" Hayley said doubtfully. \"The Sunshine Feather is covered with golden yellow spots.\"\n\nKirsty grinned. \"No problem. There's a can of yellow paint in our garage!\"\n\nThey all rushed back to the garage. Inside, Kirsty struggled to open the paint can. \"The lid's stuck!\" she groaned.\n\nHayley tapped the can with her wand, and a shower of sparkles twinkled around the lid. It popped right open! Moments later, Kirsty had painted tiny yellow speckles on the feather.\n\n\"Perfect! It looks just like the Sunshine Feather!\" exclaimed Hayley.\n\n\"Now all we have to do is find the goblin,\" said Rachel.\n\nJust then, a group of ducks flew by. Without a word, Hayley rose up in a cloud of violet sparkles. Rachel and Kirsty watched her, a tiny spot of light, as she flew next to the ducks in the rain.\n\nBefore long, she was back and she had news for the girls. \"The ducks just saw the goblin in the field behind the museum!\" Hayley declared. \"Let's go!\"\n\nThe girls followed Hayley to the back of the museum. Sure enough, there was the goblin, floating across the flooded field in Kirsty's raft. \" _Achoo_!\" he sputtered loudly. \"I'm sick of being wet and miserable. And my cold's getting worse.\"\n\nHayley, Kirsty, and Rachel floated at a safe distance from the goblin. \"Here goes,\" Hayley said bravely. \"I have something you might like,\" she called to the goblin in a singsong voice, waving the fake Sunshine Feather.\n\nThe goblin's eyes lit up greedily. \"The Sunshine Feather! Give it to me!\" His long arm shot out and his fat fingers grabbed for the feather, but Hayley was too quick for him. She sped backward out of his reach. \"Oh, rats! Almost had two magic feathers!\" said the goblin, scowling.\n\nHayley drifted forward again. \"I'll trade my feather for yours, if you like,\" she offered sweetly. Rachel and Kirsty held their breath. Would the goblin fall for their trick?\n\n\"OK,\" the goblin said right away. \"Anything for some warmth. Now, give it to me!\" Hayley zoomed down and grabbed the Rain Feather, thrusting the pretend Sunshine Feather at the goblin.\n\nHe grabbed it and stroked it fondly with a wide grin on his face. Hayley immediately waved the Rain Feather in a complicated pattern. \"Rain, stop!\" she ordered.\n\nThe rain stopped at once. The gray clouds melted away, and steam rose as the floodwater began to dry up. Then the sun came out, turning the shallow pools and puddles golden.\n\nThe goblin waved his feather triumphantly. \"My Sunshine Feather's working already!\" he boasted. \"I'm leaving now. It's about time I took a vacation.\" He leaped out of the raft and splashed away across the field.\n\nRachel, Kirsty, and Hayley hugged one another happily. \"We did it!\" Kirsty exclaimed.\n\n\"Yes, and now we've found all seven magic feathers!\" cried Rachel.\n\n\"We can return the Rain Feather to Doodle, and he can take charge of Fairyland's weather again,\" said Hayley. She did a happy cartwheel in the air. Violet and blue sparks fizzed around her.\n\nKirsty was about to turn toward home, when she suddenly shivered. \"That's strange. It's getting really cold,\" she said.\n\nRachel looked at her in alarm. \"Oh, no! Remember Doodle's warning? He said 'Beware! Jack Frost will come if his goblins fail!' \" There was a crackling noise as the floodwater stopped draining away and began to freeze.\n\nHayley paled. \"It is Jack Frost,\" she squealed. \"He's coming!\"\n\n##\n\n#\n\nA tall, bony figure, dressed all in white, suddenly appeared out of thin air. Icicles hung from his eyebrows and beard. \"You again!\" he snarled at Kirsty and Rachel. \"How dare you steal those feathers?\"\n\nRachel, Kirsty, and Hayley gasped in fear as Jack Frost towered over them.\n\nKirsty looked at Hayley. \"Go!\" she whispered. \"Take the Rain Feather to Doodle before Jack Frost gets his hands on it.\"\n\nHayley looked unsure, but she nodded and zoomed away, violet fairy dust streaming out behind her like a comet's tail.\n\n\"As for you, you useless goblin!\" Jack Frost was saying. \"I'll send you on a vacation you won't forget!\" He lifted his wand and blasted freezing white light toward the goblin, who was stomping away across the field. With a fizz and a crackle, the goblin became a skinny ice statue!\n\nJack Frost turned back to face the girls. He shrieked with rage when he saw that Hayley had left. He glared at Kirsty, who was reaching for her locket. \"No, you don't!\" he snapped. He pointed his wand and a narrow beam of light shot out, freezing both lockets tightly shut.\n\n\"Oh!\" cried Rachel and Kirsty. Without their fairy dust, they would be fairy-sized forever! Jack Frost looked down at the two tiny girls. \"What's the matter? Are your tongues frozen?\" he asked, laughing noisily. His laughter sounded like feet crunching on snail shells.\n\nKirsty trembled with fright, but she looked straight into Jack Frost's cold, gray eyes. \"Why can't you live in peace with all the other fairies?\" she asked.\n\n\"Fairyland is a wonderful place! Everyone would be your friend if you stopped causing so much trouble,\" Rachel added.\n\nJack Frost's mouth tightened with surprise. He seemed speechless. For a moment, Rachel and Kirsty wondered if he would listen to them. Then Kirsty's heart sank as Jack Frost frowned.\n\n\"How dare you give me advice?\" he roared, his eyes as cold as a glacier. \"You two have interfered too many times. I think it's time I put a stop to that!\" He raised his wand.\n\nRachel grabbed Kirsty's arm and pulled her behind a nearby tree, just as a blast of freezing white light poured out of the wand. There was a loud snapping sound, and thick white ice coated the tree.\n\nKirsty and Rachel shivered. Jack Frost stepped around the tree and raised his wand again. Rachel heard a rushing sound and squeezed her eyes shut, expecting to feel an icy blast at any moment....\n\n##\n\n#\n\nBut, instead, Rachel heard Jack Frost give a scream of rage. She opened her eyes.\n\nDoodle, the fairy rooster, flew up in a great rush of wind and fire. His magnificent tail glittered with sparks of red and gold and copper. \"Get away from them, Jack Frost!\" he ordered, his beak snapping with anger. He flapped his wings furiously. A stream of white-hot sparks sprayed from them and sizzled on the ice.\n\n\"Ouch! Stop that!\" cried Jack Frost, backing away as several sparks landed on his robe. Little puffs of steam leaked from his spiky hair and beard.\n\n\"Doodle's come to save us!\" breathed Kirsty. \"And he's his true magical self again!\"\n\nHayley flew over to the girls. \"Are you all right? You're so brave to face Jack Frost when you were only fairy-sized.\"\n\n\"We had to. He froze our magic lockets shut,\" Rachel told her.\n\nKeeping one fierce amber eye on Jack Frost, Doodle came over and swept Rachel, Kirsty, and Hayley under one wing. Then he peered down his beak at Jack Frost. \"You must pay for what you've done!\" he said severely. \"Not only have you created trouble with the weather, but you have threatened two of Fairyland's dearest friends!\"\n\nJack Frost cowered. Melting ice ran down his face and dripped from his sharp nose. \"They shouldn't have stuck their noses into my business,\" he snapped.\n\n\"What if Jack Frost casts a spell on Doodle?\" Rachel asked anxiously.\n\nHayley shook her head. \"Now that he has all his feathers back, Doodle is seven times as powerful as any one fairy. He's more than a match for Jack Frost!\"\n\nDoodle fluttered his magic tail feathers. Colored sparks shot out, and a rainbow began rising from the ground. Jack Frost started spinning helplessly. \"Stop! Help!\" he cried. The rainbow swept him up, shooting into the sky in a beautiful arc. Jack Frost struggled and yelled, but soon he was a distant speck amid the glowing rainbow of colors.\n\nKirsty and Rachel were still staring at him when they felt themselves being whisked up in a whirlwind of shimmering fairy dust. With Hayley and Doodle, the girls sped through the bright blue sky. Soft feathers floated around them and they could smell sweet summer flowers in the air.\n\n\"Oh,\" breathed Rachel happily. She caught a glimpse of green fields and red-and-white toadstool houses on the ground below. Then some clouds parted, and there were the towers of the beautiful fairy palace, gleaming in the sunshine!\n\n\"It's Fairyland! And look, the weather's still mixed up!\" called Kirsty.\n\nA crowd of fairies waved and cheered as Doodle and the girls landed in the courtyard of the fairy palace. King Oberon and Queen Titania were waiting to greet them.\n\n\"Welcome back, Doodle. We have missed our weather rooster,\" said the King and Queen warmly. \"And our heartfelt thanks to you, Rachel and Kirsty.\"\n\nAll the people of Fairyland cheered again. The Weather Fairies gathered happily around Doodle, eager to get back to their weather work.\n\n\"What's going to happen to Jack Frost, Your Majesties?\" Kirsty asked.\n\nTitania looked stern. \"He will stay at the end of the rainbow until he sees the error of his ways. He's gone too far this time,\" she said.\n\nKirsty and Rachel smiled with relief. _That should keep him out of mischief for a while_ , Rachel thought. \"We'd better give back our magic lockets,\" she said to Kirsty.\n\nOberon shook his head. \"You must keep them, my dears.\" He waved his hand over the lockets. Silver sparkles shot out of his fingers. \"I have filled them with new fairy dust. If you ever need help, this dust will bring you straight to Fairyland.\"\n\n\"Where you will always be welcome,\" added Titania with a sweet smile.\n\nKirsty and Rachel's eyes opened wide. This was a great honor!\n\nThen Doodle came forward. \"I have a gift for you, too,\" he said, and gave them a weather vane that looked just like him.\n\n\"Oh! Thank you all so much,\" said the girls. They hugged each of the Weather Fairies and said good-bye to Doodle and the Fairy King and Queen. Then a whirlwind of sparkling fairy dust swept them upward. In a few moments, they landed back in Kirsty's yard.\n\nKirsty's dad appeared from behind the barn, looking puzzled. \"Oh, you found that old weather vane. I've been looking for it everywhere. Where was it?\"\n\n\"It appeared by magic,\" Kirsty told him, her eyes sparkling. Rachel smiled.\n\nMr. Tate laughed, scratching his head. \"Well, I'd better put it back. I've gotten used to seeing it up there.\"\n\n\"Me, too,\" Kirsty agreed.\n\nJust as Mr. Tate was putting the weather vane up on the barn, a car pulled into the driveway.\n\n\"It's my mom and dad!\" Rachel said, waving.\n\n\"Hello, you two. Have you had a good week?\" asked Mr. and Mrs. Walker as they climbed out of the car.\n\n\"The best! It's been really magical!\" Rachel replied, hugging her parents.\n\nThe girls went upstairs to get Rachel's things together, while their parents had tea in the kitchen. Then it was time for Rachel to leave. Kirsty hugged her friend good-bye.\n\n\"You must come and visit _us_ soon,\" Mrs. Walker said to Kirsty.\n\n\"Yes, soon!\" Rachel added.\n\n\"I'd love to, thanks,\" Kirsty smiled. \"Good-bye, Rachel. I'll see you on our next vacation!\"\n\nAfter Rachel had left, Kirsty stood in the yard thinking about all of their adventures. She looked up at the barn roof. For a moment, a shining rainbow touched the old tiles and the weather vane spun around swiftly. As it did, Kirsty could have sworn she saw the rooster wink at her and sparkle with fairy magic.\n\n#\n\n#\n\n#\n\n#\n\nAll rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Rainbow Magic Limited c\/o HIT Entertainment, 830 South Greenville Avenue, Allen, TX 75002-3320.\n\ne-ISBN 978-0-545-60562-5\n\n_The Weather Fairies #1: Crystal the Snow Fairy_ copyright \u00a9 2004 by Rainbow Magic Limited. \nIllustrations copyright \u00a9 2004 by George Ripper.\n\n_The Weather Fairies #2: Abigail the Breeze Fairy_ copyright \u00a9 2004 by Rainbow Magic Limited. \nIllustrations copyright \u00a9 2004 by George Ripper.\n\n_The Weather Fairies #3: Pearl the Cloud Fairy_ copyright \u00a9 2004 by Rainbow Magic Limited. \nIllustrations copyright \u00a9 2004 by George Ripper.\n\n_The Weather Fairies #4: Goldie the Sunshine Fairy_ copyright \u00a9 2004 by Rainbow Magic Limited. \nIllustrations copyright \u00a9 2004 by George Ripper.\n\n_The Weather Fairies #5: Evie the Mist Fairy_ copyright \u00a9 2004 by Rainbow Magic Limited. \nIllustrations copyright \u00a9 2004 by George Ripper.\n\n_The Weather Fairies #6: Storm the Lightning Fairy_ copyright \u00a9 2004 by Rainbow Magic Limited. \nIllustrations copyright \u00a9 2004 by George Ripper.\n\n_The Weather Fairies #7: Hayley the Rain Fairy_ copyright \u00a9 2004 by Rainbow Magic Limited. \nIllustrations copyright \u00a9 2004 by George Ripper.\n\nAll rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc., 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012, by arrangement with Rainbow Magic Limited.\n\nSCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and\/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc. RAINBOW MAGIC is a trademark of Rainbow Magic Limited. Re. U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and other countries. HIT and the HIT logo are trademarks of HIT Entertainment Limited.\n\nFirst Scholastic printing, March 2006\n\nwww.rainbowmagiconline.com\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}