The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (best summer reads .TXT) 📕

my shopping and return in an hour or so at which time she would have “photocopies you might look at in your leisure.”

I did so, and she had a small sheaf of paper for me when I returned, saying, “No charge for the service.” When I was surprised at that, she explained, “The few I know from the village say that although an American, that you and your husband are among the nicest tenants in Cranburgh Grange in many a generation.” I blushed at the compliment and said she’d surely be invited to any other galas held there in future. She had used the word “nice” in the British sense of apt, appropriate, mannerly, and correct.

This is what I read in the obituary:

Although Lady Sofia was said to be extremely eleemosynary, with charities both private and public, and she was so beloved by the locals, her life seemed by many to be bedeviled by several unfortunate experiences. She outlived her husband by three decades, and even before he passed, he had spent long periods of time away from home on foreign missions for a White Hall ministerial office. She outlived her two sons and her daughter. The first lad died in action at the Orange River in the Boer War; the second, upon a British ship sunk by a German U-Boat. Her daughter died giving birth to her first child, who was still-born.

But first and chief among the misfortunes was the still unsolved disappearance in 1867 of her husband’s son by his first wife. This lad, just turned seven years old, was by all reports, a sunny, handsome, and active fellow all over the estate, a joy to his father and to most onlookers, engaged in the usual boyish activities such as fishing, hunting with a little bow and arrows fashioned by a village man, etc. He’d gone out as usual one summer day and never returned. Fairly all the shire was enjoined to search for him, which they did for over a week’s time. But no signs of the lad and no remains were ever found. It was then believed that he had been abducted.

Even though his father had three other children by Lady Sofia, he never gave up hope of the boy’s return and spoke of him upon his own deathbed, asserting in his final moments that he sensed the child “very near indeed.”  It was then that Lady Sofia began to open the house up to villagers and shire folk for various communal occasions, which she did until her own passing at an advanced age.

That sealed it as far as I was concerned.

Martin was as pleased as he was surprised by my suggestion: “What do you mean? You really think we ought to call in a psychic?” For the tapping, I responded. “You hear it then?” he asked. I said no, but others did: the parson’s mother for example. “Calling in a psychic is the wackiest thing you ever suggested,” Martin said, laughing, “Let’s do it!”

A week later, M. Alcide Alexander Bonort the Third, an obese and pleasantly saucer-faced young man of indeterminate European origin, dressed like a stage actor in clothing a little bit too small for him, came to tea. Then, with us hovering behind him, he did some kind of “purification” ceremony of the house, room by room, utilizing handle-less brooms of white sage mixed in with violet gorse leaves, and chanting some gobbledy gook. This seemed so absurd that we were almost unable to stop ourselves from laughing until he did something very curious. He stopped at the very same blank wall that the parson’s mother had been staring at when I came upon her. Alcide put down his flaming herbs and said, his voice rising with every phrase, “This is a very bad spot. It resists purification. I cannot remain here!” With the last almost a shriek, he sped out of the hallway and stumbled out of doors and was in his little old purple Dauphine and taking off before we could catch up or even pay him.

We didn’t speak of this incident but the next morning at breakfast, Martin asked if I still had out that book on Cranburgh Grange from the Lending Library. I had returned it and he said he thought he might take a look at it again. He dropped me off at the Parson’s manse, as the old house was called. Once there, I invited myself to tea with the Parson’s mother. I’d suspected she hadn’t too many visitors and I was right. She was happy to see me. Even better, it was she not I who brought up the subject of Lady Sofia and the little boy. Her grandmother had been in the village, which was more populous than now as the local farmers had many for-hire hands, and especially harvest season workers. That was how her mother and father had come to the village, a young couple seeking work. Her mother’s mother followed, because she had already experienced the couple’s great devotion to drink and fun and their equal lack of devotion to caring for their only child, the parson’s mother herself, then a lass of not quite six years. It was the grandmother who had worked at Cranburgh Grange and, perhaps sensitized by her own daughter, had not failed to notice Lady Sofia’s contempt for her new husband’s little heir.

True enough, her Granny had told her, the boy went his own way much of the time, spoiled by his sickly mother’s absence. He had a tutor in the morning, but once he’d finished his noontime meal, every afternoon he would gather up his walking stick or fishing rods or his little bow and arrows for hunting and step out until sunset. “Betimes he brought in river perch or a small leveret, but mostly he came home empty handed and in need of a bath. When his father was away, the Lady disdained him and had him sup, filthy as he was, among the servants,”