The Poe Estate by Polly Shulman Page A

Melville, and Poe, Washington Irving and Laetitia Flint, James Fenimore Cooper and Harriet Beecher Stowe, bound in leather or faded crimson cloth. Some looked old enough to be first editions. I checked to see if any of the authors had signed them—if Cousin Hepzibah was right and they wrote some of their stories about our family, maybe they were friends of our ancestors. A signature might make a book evenmore valuable. But I didn’t find any signed copies.
    I did find something much more exciting, though: One whole bookcase held diaries! The Thorne ladies had filled volume after volume with their faded, spidery descriptions of apple harvests and new bonnets, steamship jaunts to Providence, toothaches, baby nieces, and recipes for arrack punch. Reading the diaries gave me a strange thrill—it was like traveling back in time and talking to my own ancestors!
    I pulled volumes off the shelves and opened them at random, getting lost in the stories. Theodosia Thorne, the lady who presided over the expansion of the outbuildings in the 1830s, had strong opinions about horses: Her favorite mare was Scheherazade, a white Arabian, and her favorite carriage horses were called Twilight and Novalis. I remembered seeing a painting of a white horse in the gun room—I wondered if that could be Scheherazade.
    But Windy had lived long before the 1830s. I combed the shelves for older volumes. In the 1790s, Miss Mary Thorne accompanied her brother John on a trip to the Far East, where she greatly admired the shape of the pagoda roofs and brought back a set of porcelain from Canton—maybe the very teacups we’d just been drinking from.
    Even the 1790s was too late for Windy, though. I made myself put down Miss Mary’s account of a typhoon east of Japan to search the rest of the room.
    I couldn’t find any diaries by Windy or Beedie, so I opened the fancy secretary desk beside the door. I found a bundle of family papers there, and a lot more in the cabinets by the windows: wills and deeds and account ledgers and endless bundles of letters tied up with cloth tape. It was overwhelming. Where would I even begin?
    Notes in the big leather-bound Bible and a calligraphic family tree drawn by some 1880s Thorne confirmed the outlines of Cousin Hepzibah’s story. Squinting at the doves and curlicues and trumpet-blaring cherubs, I read that Obadiah Thorne and his wife—Patience, née Cloyse—had had two daughters, Hepzibah and Obedience; Hepzibah had married Phineas Toogood and Obedience had married her second cousin, Japhet Thorne; Hepzibah Toogood and her young son, John, had died within a month of each other, not long after Phineas; and Thornes in every subsequent generation died young. The Bible and the family tree had nothing to say about murders or buried treasure, however.
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    I brought a few volumes of diaries upstairs that night to read in bed. Miss Mary had started keeping hers when she was just a girl, only nine, and the way she took care of John, her little brother, reminded me of Kitty. She wrote about him impatiently, complaining about how he pushed through the bushes to get to the blackberries and tore his new “frock,” the one she had just finished sewing. “He made me eat all the Ripest fruit, pushing them between my Lips. He stained my Collar with juice. He is a Naughty, Naughty little Love, and I am very Vex’t with him.”
    That sounded like Kitty complaining about me. She used to scrub my scraped knees with alcohol wipes. “Ow, Kitty! That stings!” I would wail, trying to twist away.
    â€œStand still! You’re getting blood all over me. You’ll get an infection if I don’t clean that.”
    â€œI don’t care!”
    â€œWell, I do. What if your legs fall off and I have to carry you everywhere? Stop crying! I was just kidding, your legs aren’t really going to fall off, because you’re going to stand still and