The Admiral's Wife

Prologue

Present Day

The house stood as it always had. The generously sized white washed mansion had been built in the late eighteenth century. A large door with the original brass door knocker still intact opened to a spacious veranda that ran along the front of the house. It had stairs descending on either side to the lawns and was graced with four large portico pillars in true Georgian styling. The three-story wooden structure was set near the banks of a sun dappled little lake and on over two thousand acres of land in rural Nova Scotia. In the early 1800s, it had been the summer home of a prominent man, powerful in his day; in modern times it served as a museum.

Inside, as on the outside, all remained much the same as it had ever been. Modern amenities had not been introduced to the building, and most of the original furniture, artwork, and personal items still occupied each of the rooms. Family portraits of beautiful Regency ladies and handsome uniformed men gazed out from the walls of the parlour and dining rooms. The china displayed on the dining table was reputed to have been a gift from the Duke of Wessex and a testament to the family's one-time importance and aristocratic heritage. Many generations of the family had kept the estate in pristine and original condition until some sixty years previous, when unable to care for it any longer, they had donated it to the province and consequently, it was opened to the public. Visitors to the estate were taken on guided tours of the old place, and the tales about the family who had once lived, loved, and worked within its walls were related again and again.

The woman seated at the pianoforte smiled, albeit somewhat ironically. She could sit and watch these visitors come and go virtually unnoticed. They came during the summer months, and she didn't mind their presence really. Most were respectful and listened intently to the guide as they toured the home. She often wondered however, how her father would have reacted to these strangers traipsing through his home and lands. It had been his retreat and a place of peace. She did enjoy listening to the stories the guides told though; not that they were accurate in their accounts, but she knew that they certainly tried to be loyal to the facts in so far as they knew them. The trouble was that very few, if any, knew the truth.

Late every fall, Ben the old curator would lock the massive front door and close the large shutters that covered the windows, which left the normally bright rooms in a gloomy state of semi-darkness. The people would abruptly stop coming and she would be left alone for the long tedious months of the Canadian winter. The arrival of the visitors in the late spring certainly did much to break up the monotony of her existence. She liked the old man well enough, for he took good care of the house. He was just not able to see her or sense her presence, something she had realized shortly after his arrival, and there was really no use in trying to communicate with him for he seemed to be completely oblivious to her. Only the odd person saw or sensed her there in the parlour and they were usually very frightened by the encounter and didn't stay long.

Mary rose and moved to one of the windows. It was her favourite vantage point and overlooked the lawns, and just beyond that, the shimmering lake named for her mother, Sarah. The snow had finally melted, the trees were in bud, and a few employees worked industriously at the spring cleanup on the grounds that surrounded the old house and the out buildings. This, happily for Mary, included the annual opening of the shutters. Dust particles and cobwebs that had been neglected for the winter now danced and sparkled in the rays of sunlight which once again streamed through the glass of the tall stately windows.

Ben, as he had done for the past forty years, would be returning with his crew to open the doors and set the place to rights. Soon a new barrage of yearly chattering and noisy visitors would be disembarking from the buses they traveled on to reach this place. The roaring large wheeled carriage had at first shocked and frightened her, but in time she had become accustomed to it and so too the smaller wheeled carriages that also came. Or that was how she had thought of them at first. In time, she had learned that larger of the two was called a bus and the smaller a car. "Car" seemed to be a short form and modern term for carriage and that made sense to her. The term bus however, was an enigma.