Miriam took in a deep breath as if to steel herself. “I’m going to show you,” she said. “But first I need you to be completely honest with me. The hospital told me you followed a girl into the woods. Is that true?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“Do you know who it was?” She seemed to be holding her breath as she awaited the answer.
“It was a girl who looked just like Grace Louth,” I told her. “She was in the north wing last night—right before James showed up drunk. I saw her again this morning going into the woods, and I tried to follow her to see where she was going.”
Miriam’s eyes darted toward her son. “You saw her in the house last night?”
“Yes. She seemed to be looking for something.”
“Looking for something?” Miriam’s face was ashen. “Are you sure?”
I lost my patience at that point. “Of course I’m sure! I’m not crazy! Sam’s seen her, too.” I looked right at Sam. “Haven’t you? Tell your mom about the girl on the balcony!”
“Calm down,” Sam whispered. “No one thinks you’re crazy. We both know you’re telling the truth.”
“There’s something we need to share with you.” Miriam unsealed the envelope and pulled out an old black-and-white photograph, which she promptly handed to me.
The photo showed two elderly ladies standing in front of Louth Manor. Judging by the style of their dresses, the photo had been taken in the 1940s or 1950s. The two of them were grinning at the camera as if they’d just pulled off the biggest heist in history. I couldn’t understand why they were supposed to interest me. I turned my attention to the manor instead, and scanned its windows for signs of ghosts.
“I don’t get it,” I finally admitted. “What am I supposed to be looking at? Who are these people?”
Miriam reached over and tapped one of the figures. “That’s my great-great-grandmother Edna. She was a maid at the manor when she was young.” Then Miriam slid her finger over to the second woman. “And that is her friend Grace Louth.”
I couldn’t wrap my head around it. “No,” I insisted.
“Yes,” Miriam countered. “Although, by that point, she’d been living under the name Flora Davis for most of her life.”
I studied the photo more closely, recalling the photo of Grace Louth that Lark had pasted into her scrapbook. I could see that girl in the old woman’s eyes. She was the same badass she’d always been.
“This photo was taken on Grace’s first visit to the manor in the sixty-two years since her father’s death,” Miriam told me. “She was eighty years old at the time. She’d waited until she knew that no one in town would recognize her.”
“So Grace didn’t drown when she was eighteen?” I asked.
“No,” Miriam said. “The night she jumped into the river, she simply stopped being Grace Louth.”
I thought of the girl in the mural. For over a century, everyone had assumed the portrait showed Grace running to meet her death. I remembered the first moment I saw her—the morning after I’d arrived at the manor. To me, she’d looked fierce and free. Before I’d heard the stories, I’d gotten a glimpse of who Grace really was.
* * *
—
As I learned from Miriam, there was some truth to the legend of Grace Louth—one little grain around which a grotesque pearl had formed. Grace had indeed fallen for someone her father considered unsuitable. Frederick had intercepted a letter which had made it clear that the two were intending to run away. When confronted, Grace refused to reveal the identity of the letter’s author. All that mattered to Frederick was that his daughter was in love with someone he hadn’t chosen. Girls like Grace didn’t get to pick for themselves.
And yes, Grace was sent to the family’s country home. But it wasn’t to recover from a broken heart. When she’d refused to end her affair, she was imprisoned by her father. Men could do things like that back in those days. If a daughter vanished, her father’s explanation was almost always accepted.
As soon as Grace arrived at the manor, she was locked in the rose room. The servant tasked with looking after her night and day was a twenty-year-old girl who would one day become Miriam Reinhart’s great-great-grandmother. She was Grace Louth’s keeper as well as her cellmate.
According to the tale passed down in Miriam’s family, Frederick Louth considered Grace’s romance nothing more than a temporary nuisance. He’d broken Grace’s mother. He didn’t anticipate any trouble breaking their daughter as well. He assumed that a lover who was out of sight would soon be forgotten. But that wasn’t what happened. Grace spent her first week of captivity scheming to escape and the second week raging at her lack of success. By her third week in Louth, she had fallen into a funk. After a full month in the manor, she was a mere shadow of herself. Locked away day and night, her skin lost its color and Edna began to worry that Grace would disappear completely.
Having spent countless hours together, the servant and the prisoner had grown fond of each other. One came from wealth, while the other’s family was desperately poor. But neither girl had a dime of her own. One was imprisoned, and the other remained technically free. But as young women, neither could control her own destiny. Edna wanted more than anything else to help the fiery girl whose light was dimming. Grace refused to allow her. If she escaped, her father would hold Edna responsible. And what men were able to do to their daughters paled in comparison to the cruelties they could inflict on their female servants.
Edna prayed for an answer, and when she heard that Grace’s mother was coming to town, she was sure her prayers had been answered. Then she laid eyes on the woman, and her hopes drained away. Clara was tall, with a face that resembled her beautiful daughter’s. But though she wasn’t quite forty, everything about Clara Louth was gray. Her skin had turned sallow and her eyes were lifeless. She moved with painstaking caution, as if she were trying not to make ripples in the world around her. Her eyes trailed the ground and she rarely spoke. Marriage to Frederick Louth had left Clara little more than a wraith.
Still, Edna knew she had to try. She begged to speak with Clara Louth concerning her daughter’s health. When she was granted an audience, Edna didn’t mince words. She informed the girl’s mother that Grace would not survive being locked away from the world. Clara said nothing, and Edna left with her spirits crushed. There was no way for her to know that Clara had immediately written to her husband who’d returned to Manhattan for business. She knew she’d never convince him to release their daughter, so she appealed to his common sense instead. A missing daughter was one thing, she wrote him. A dead daughter would be much harder to explain. She asked permission to hire a new servant to help keep Grace alive. A few days later, a young woman arrived at the manor’s door. She was an artist, she informed the staff. She’d been hired to bring the world to Grace’s bedroom.