“Jesus, Franklin, what are you doing here?” asked Caroline, now also standing.
“I saw you go out the back of the house and I was worried about you,” said Harrington, “so I followed. Little did I know you were coming here to tryst with your new boyfriend. And in our old room, yet. Trying to bring back the magic?”
“Shut up,” said Caroline. “You’re being a bastard.”
“So what are you two up to?” he asked.
“Archaeology,” I said.
He turned his attention to me, his eyes dark sockets of shadow in the candlelight. “Digging for mummies?”
“No,” I said. “Pooles.”
He stared at me for a moment before smiling. “Curiosity,” he said, with a lighthearted warning in his voice that wasn’t lighthearted at all. “What is it about the Pooles you want to know, Victor?”
“Mostly,” I said, “I want to know if there are any still alive.”
“And so you came here, to their old haunt, to snag yourself a Poole. Don’t you think you’re a little late? Maybe seventy years too late?”
He circled around the room, examining it by candlelight.
“Ahh, the memories,” said Harrington. “I can truly say some of the happiest moments of my life were spent in this room. But you knew, didn’t you, Caroline, that before this became the scene of our childhood romance, long before, this was Mrs. Poole’s bedchamber? After her husband hanged himself and your great-grandfather deeded her this house, which she accepted only because she had no choice, no other place to go, she spent months in bed in this room, never rising, only weeping.”
“She had her reasons, I figure,” I said.
“Her husband’s suicide was a blow, yes,” said Harrington, as surely as if he were discussing a ball game he had played in a few years back. “She would have killed herself, too, except for her daughter. But even before his death, she had given herself over to mourning. Her husband would lose himself in drink and she would spend her days castigating him or cursing Claudius Reddman to the heavens, blaming their misfortunes on him.”
“How do you know all this, Franklin?” said Caroline.
“I’ve made a study of the Pooles. They’re fascinating, really. A family cursed by luck. Did you know that the grandfather, Elisha Poole’s father, lost everything he owned in the depression of 1878? Ten thousand businesses failed that year, including his. He owned three buildings on Market Street, owned them outright, but mortgaged the buildings to buy shares in a gold mine in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory from a drinking buddy. Fortunes in gold were being dug out of the ground daily then, but not from that mine. With the depression, his tenants couldn’t pay the rents and he couldn’t pay his mortgages. He lost the buildings and spent the rest of his life drinking in celebration of his misfortune. Just like his son, who complained so bitterly about your great-grandfather.”
“Maybe he had his reasons,” I said.
“What reasons, Victor?” said Caroline. “What are you trying to say?”
“Only what you suspected, Caroline,” I said. “Those records you found behind the panel in the library, the accountant looked them over today. They show pretty clearly that your grandfather stole the company right out from under Elisha Poole.”
She didn’t respond, she just blinked at me for a moment, as if she was having trouble processing the information.
“Should I show you the rest of the house?” said Harrington, without even a hint of surprise at what I had said. “Maybe we should start with Emma’s room.”
He strolled out into the hallway and back to the room with the listing bed and the tacks in the wall. Caroline and I tilted our heads uncertainly at each other and then followed. His candlelight bathed the small room in a flickering yellow.
“Emma came to this house of despair when she was five,” said Harrington, the tour guide. “Walked four and a half miles to the public school each day. Cared for her mother through her long bouts of melancholia and then through her final sickness. Though rather unattractive, she idolized the famous beauties of her time, cutting their pictures from the papers and tacking them onto these very walls, Theda Bara, Lillian Gish, Irene Castle. And despite it all she remained rather cheerful and good-natured, until the end of her time here. Then even she lost her battle and turned to bitterness to keep her going.”
“How do you know all this?” said Caroline.
“She moved her mother permanently down to the parlor after a crushing stroke to make it easier to carry the old woman to the porch on warm days and allow her some fresh air. She moved herself out of this room into her mother’s room, which was bigger and had better light. It was in that room, our room, Caroline, that she fell in love and then fell pregnant.”
“Who was her lover?” I asked.
“Does it matter? I think she still believed in love then but just a few weeks before her delivery date her mother died, the deed to the house expired, and she moved out, deserted and alone. She had the baby in an asylum for unwed mothers outside Albany.”
“How do you know all this?” said Caroline. “Tell me, how?”
He turned to look at Caroline, the shadows on his face dancing from the candlelight. “She told me so herself,” he said.
“Who told you?” demanded Caroline.
“Emma,” he said. “She told it all to me.”
He spun around, walked out of the room, and climbed down the stairs. I started shaking from the cold as I watched him go. I turned to Caroline and we stared at each other for a moment before hustling out to follow. We caught up to him in the parlor.
“Franklin, dammit, what are you talking about?” said Caroline. “Who told you all this?”
“Mrs. Poole, Emma’s mother, died right here,” said Harrington. “In her last breath she cursed once again Claudius Reddman, who was still then alive in the big house on the hill. There wasn’t much left to curse; his lungs were tumorous and he medicated himself into a stupor with laudanum every night to keep his whole body from shaking, but that didn’t stop her. She cursed your great-grandfather, Caroline, and all his progeny, much like her husband had fifteen years before. This was just after your grandfather was shot dead by his son, just a few days after actually, and, with one Reddman daughter missing and one Reddman daughter dead, it looked like the curses were all coming true. I wonder if she died at least a little happy, seeing tragedy so visibly visited upon her enemies. Think about what it is to live a life where your only joy is someone else’s tragedy, think of that, Caroline. She was ruined all right, but not by your great-grandfather, no matter how much he stole from that family.”
“Stop it, Franklin,” said Caroline. “Just stop it. I don’t want to hear anymore. In all these years, how come you never told me any of this before?”
“I didn’t think you were interested in anything but your own disasters.”
“Oh, just go to hell,” she said. She walked over to the fireplace and looked up at the old drawing of Elisha Poole tacked above the mantelshelf. “What do you mean she told you so herself?” she asked quietly.
“When I was eighteen,” said Harrington. “It was the spring while I was waiting to hear from Princeton. Your grandmother sent me to her. Emma was living in the Cambium, in the very same apartment where Jacqueline died. Your grandmother was supporting her, paying the rent, paying for a nurse to care for her. She didn’t live long after my visit, almost as if she were waiting for me to come to her before she died.”
The chill I had been feeling the last few minutes grew ferocious. I couldn’t tell now if it was the temperature or the dawning realization. “Why would the Poole daughter be waiting for you?” I asked.
“Because, as I found out that day, I’m her grandson,” said Harrington.
Caroline spun around at that and spit out, “Fuck you!”
“Through my father,” continued Harrington. “Although I didn’t know it at the time, that was why Faith took me out of the orphanage and brought me to Veritas, why she provided for me and paid for my education. For the same reason she was taking care of Emma. Because we were both Pooles. It was Faith who discovered that you and I were lovers, Caroline, which is why she finally introduced me to my grandmother.”