Life in the Cushing-McMichael house is comfortable and lively Christmas of 1918. The war is over. Eliot, fascinated by the rows of soldiers marching through the streets in celebration, has asked for tin soldiers. He is 13 and wants to be a hero, just like the doughboys. Edith has gently tried to dissuade him, but to no avail. So there are tin soldiers in his stocking come Christmas morning.
Charlotte, a beautiful, bold girl of 16, has only one thing she wants for Christmas and she knows it isn't something she can get in a stocking. She wants the boys to stop following her on the way home from school. They don't frighten her, but they do irritate her, and if there is any one thing that Charlotte despises, it is being irritated by someone else's inconsiderate actions. Her stocking contains a hair stick shaped like a sword that she twists up in to her bun as soon as she sees it. She likes the idea of being a bit menacing. Ever since she pummeled the boy who touched her rear while she crossed the street in front of the school, she has had a reputation for being wild, and she quite likes it. Her father has encouraged it, to some degree, and taught her how to fight.
Edith sits with the children while Alan makes breakfast. She does not know how many more of these holidays she will have with both of them. Charlotte is nearly old enough to set out on her own and soon there will be further studies at a university and weeks away from home at a time. There is a mischief, a curiosity, about the girl that reminds her of Thomas- of the moments he was working on his mining machine, the head of steam building with this enthusiasm and his laughter when something worked. She laughs like him, too. There is a pure joy of discovery that she basks in and seeks out. There are days when Edith wonders if Charlotte will set out for the far reaches of the world some day, never to return.
There is a pile of post on the end table that she has neglected over the celebrations of Christmas. She absentmindedly sifts through it. There are a few holiday cards, a note from Alan's mother that he has already read once, and one from Mr Ferguson. She opens this one.
Mrs McMichael,
I have been contacted by The British Clay Mining Corporation. They are interested in purchasing Allerdale Hall. The contract they have proposed is enclosed, along with my proposals to make the deal more favourable to you. I would recommend travel to England to assure that their interest is legitimate.
Best wishes for the holidays.
She looks over the other documents and then tucks them back into the envelope. There will be time for business later. Alan calls from the kitchen that there are latkes ready and Eliot cheers, abandoning his soldiers. Charlotte laughs and chases after him.
"Coming, Edith?"
"In a moment."
"You'd best be quick or there won't be any left!"
She sets the envelope on the endtable, "Well, Thomas, I hope you're resting well and there are no more secrets in the clay."
Once the room is empty, Thomas slips the letter from the table and reads over the documents. Mining. His clay. He smiles and shakes his head. Someone is interested in making Edith rich beyond measure, the family cared for long into the future. He was right. His clay was good. And this is the best Christmas present he could have hoped for.
A few days later, Edith writes back to Mr Ferguson to enter negotiations for the sale of Allerdale Hall.
They are ready to sign papers in the spring and Edith prepares to return to England. Alan closes his practice for Easter week and beyond and they set sail. The weather worries him- steamship travel has seemed less safe since 1912. But the weather is clear and there are no icebergs. They land in Southampton and travel by train to London. Mr Ferguson is waiting for them there. Alan takes the children to the British Library and the museums while Edith prepares paperwork. The mine company solicitor asks to meet at Allerdale Hall to discuss the house and property. Edith hesitates, but because she does not want to hold up the sale, she agrees to briefly meet there and then to conduct business in the nearby village.
The carriage stops at the gate to the property. She requests that they go no further.
"We'll have to take down the manor house, of course. Do you know anything of its construction?"
"The mines are under the house. The elevator led from the cellars to the attic. And the walls ooze clay. So does the floor. The house looks as though it bleeds."
"That's morbid, ma'am."
"And to think, you don't know the stories and you never lived there."
"You're sure you don't want to clear it out?"
"Absolutely."
"Then let's retire to someplace warm to finish this deal."
From the library window, a black figure watches the carriage ride away from the house. She knows who is in it. She knows the house will soon end. She wonders how, as a place-bound ghost, she will continue to exist once there is no more place to be bound to. She wonders if the house has a ghost, too, and if she will simply inhabit the ghost-house for all eternity.
While Edith, Alan, Mr Ferguson, and the solicitor for The British Clay Mining Corporation discuss the final details of stocks and contracts, Charlotte pulls Eliot aside.
"Come on, let's sneak back to the creepy house."
"Lottie, come now, we'd be in terrible trouble when they found out."
"Oh, they'll be at this for hours, El! We'll be back before they even finish."
"It takes hours to ride out there!"
"It'll be fine. Come on- where's your sense of adventure, soldier boy?"
"Don't call me that."
"Soldier boy. Playing with your little tin men...you're not brave enough to explore the collapsing house, how are you going to go to war?"
"The hope is not to have to go to war."
"No, the hope is to be brave enough to go when you have to. Go with me. We'll build you some courage."
He throws up his hands, "Fine! Better I go with you than you end up falling through the floor and dying in the clay."
She claps without making noise and grabs his hand, tugging him out of the room. It only takes a few moments to hire horses and ride off the same direction as the carriage carried them. When Allerdale Hall grows out of the mist, she feels a thrill in her chest and looks over to Eliot.
"Feeling brave, dear brother?"
"Wary. There's something here I don't like. How is Mum connected to this place again?"
"She owns it."
"But how?"
"Oh El, always with the questions! I don't think that matters, really. She won't soon, anyhow."
"I think she lived here."
"Nonsense, Mum was born and raised in Buffalo. Papa, too. So how would she have lived in a rickety old house in England with no roof?"
"Maybe it had a roof then."
"Well it certainly doesn't now. Shall we go in?"
"I don't like this, Lottie."
She rides over to the rusting hulk on the front lawn and ties her horse to a piece of the machinery that seems stable, "I wonder what this thing was."
"It looks like some sort of steam shovel. Didn't Mum say there was a mine under the house? Maybe it's for pulling up the clay."
"Maybe. Don't fall in the hole. Let's go look in the house!"
From the library window, Lucille watches. The front door groans open as the children enter. She glides to meet them.
Negotiations finish a half an hour after the children leave the village. Edith and Alan look for them and are beginning to worry when the postmaster approaches them.
"Ma'am, are you looking for your children?"
"Have you seen them?"
"They hired horses and rode out of town half an hour ago."
"Ready ours without delay," Alan orders.
"Did they say where they were going?"
"No, Ma'am, but I can hazard a guess."
Edith sighs, "So can I. And that terrifies me."
"Shall we organize a rescue party?"
"No. There's no one living at the house. I think we can manage."
The postmaster nods, "Right. But you should know there are rumours that the living aren't who you should be worrying about at Allerdale Hall." He sends a boy for horses, "If you're not back in a reasonable amount of time for retrieving wayward young people, we'll come riding."
The boy returns from the stables; Alan mounts his horse, but Edith turns to the postmaster, "Kerosene. I need a lot of it. Could you send someone after us with a cart?" He nods. She is soon ready to ride. Alan gives her a quizzical look. She wonders if it is possible to kill a ghost as she spurs her ride forward. He wonders what she is thinking. And the postmaster sends the boy to find kerosene and someone who wants to ride for Allerdale Hall.
"El, look at that staircase! This place must have been beautiful once." Charlotte stands in awe of her surroundings, light streaming down from the hole in the roof from the sunny day it does not shield them from.
The door slams shut behind them and Eliot jumps, "Maybe. But now it's probably going to fall on our heads and kill us."
"No, it won't kill you. At least I don't think it will."
Eyes wide, Charlotte and Eliot turn toward the kitchen- there is a woman standing beside it, her skin black, a turquoise velvet dress draped on her skeletal body, "Who are you?" Charlotte asks.
The woman laughs, "Lucille Sharpe. Welcome to Allerdale Hall."
Eliot wonders how it is that her face still looks somewhat human, even if a bit gaunt and the wrong colour, when her fingers are very obviously bones.
A man fades into view striding from under the balcony; he flickers a little in the light streaming from the lack of roof, "Don't touch them."
"Oh, Thomas! You've returned! Come now, meet our guests."
"I know you know who they are. You're not happy to see them."
Her face hardens, "You stop, Thomas. You've always made me look like the wicked one. And you've always let me take blame. But you...you're the one who ruined it for us."
He turns briefly to Eliot and Charlotte, "Run. Run and don't come back."
Charlotte shakes her head, "No. I don't see why we should. It's our family's property."
Lucille's anger rises, "Yours? You little cretin, it's our house, not yours! We've been here our entire lives!"
"Well by my estimation, you're rather dead and the dead don't have property rights."
Eliot tugs on her arm, "Come on, Lottie. I don't want to be killed by ghosts today."
"Will you stop that? Let go of me."
He backs toward the door, "Fine. But we're leaving now."
"You're just scared."
"Well if you haven't noticed, we're talking to dead people! That's not exactly reassuring!"
Lucille shrugs, "I don't see why it wouldn't be. You could join us."
"No thank you, miss, I don't plan on being dead any time soon."
Thomas places himself between Lucille and the children, "Lucille, stay away from them. They don't know anything of our lives."
"How can you be so certain? She probably told them everything."
"No. Rest. They are just curious. Natural explorers."
"Told us what?" Charlotte asks.
"They really don't know?"
"Correct."
"And what do they know of you?"
"Nothing."
"And she thinks...?"
"Don't say it. Let them stay as they are. Innocent to all this." Lucille grins, "Please, don't."
"Little Charlotte...didn't you ever wonder why you looked nothing like your father? Why your hair is dark as crow's feathers? Why your cheeks are shaped differently than your mother's?"
"No."
"Oh come now, you have to have wondered."
"No. Not at all. I haven't ever met my mother's parents. They're dead. Who knows what they looked like?"
"That's not where it comes from."
"Stop this." Thomas attempts to push her back towards the kitchen, but she drops through the floor and reappears by the stairs.
"You're looking at your father."
Someone pounds on the door.
"It's stuck," Edith says, "Open this door!"
Alan throws his shoulder into it, "Maybe the weather..."
"No, that's not it. You know it. The door was open just a little when we rode by. Now it's closed tight."
"Mum! We're in here!" Eliot calls.
"Lucille, open the door," Thomas walks toward her, but again, she disappears. This time, she is on the balcony, "Oh, let them figure it out. It's not locked."
"No, but you're doing something to it."
"How? I'm up here. We aren't magic. Just very fast. I can't be doing something to the door."
"Open it."
"You. If you want to let them in so badly, you open it."
Thomas walks by Charlotte, whose eyes are locked on him, studying his face, his movements, "Excuse me, Miss Charlotte."
When he arrives beside Eliot, he grabs the handle and yanks with all his strength. The door yields.
"Is it true?" Eliot asks.
Thomas looks to Edith, "May I?"
Edith looks between her children, sees Lucille on the landing, and knows something is not right, "What was said?"
"This man is Charlotte's father. The lady said it. Is it true?"
"Yes. It is."
"Who is he?"
"My first husband."
Eliot tries for a small smile, "I'd ask what happened, but I can hazard a guess- he died?"
She laughs at his attempted joke, "That's the short of it, yes...but it's so much more complicated than that. I will tell you on the ride back to London. But right now, I have work to do."
Alan gathers Charlotte and takes her out of the house. Eliot follows. Edith meets a man with a flat wagon on the driveway. On it, there are bales of straw and spouted cans. She directs him to enter and shows him where to pile the bales. Then she takes a can and goes up the rotting stairs.
Lucille stares as she walks across the balcony to the bedroom, "What do you think you're doing?"
"A favour for the mining company." Lucille follows her, Thomas at her heels. Edith uncaps the spout and douses the bed in the liquid. She pours a trail to the dresser and drowns it as well.
"Stop it! Stop!"
Edith shoves by and Lucille reaches for her, but Thomas is there to hold her arms back, "No. You will let her. This ends."
"But I'm bound here! What if it ends me?"
"Then so be it. For both of us."
Edith returns with another can. She pours a trail down the hall and then retrieves a third can. With this one, she douses the bed she slept in. Thomas appears in the doorway. They can both hear Lucille frantic in the other bedroom, pawing at the soaked, rotting bed in a desperate effort to shove the saturated sheets away.
"Even our bed?"
"This never was our bed. The only one we really shared is in the village."
"I'm sorry, Edith."
"I know."
"I'm sorry she told Charlotte. I tried to stop her."
Edith empties the gas can in a trail to the stairs and returns with a fourth, "I am sure you did."
"Please believe me."
She stops by the elevator, "I do."
He nods and returns to the bedroom, sits on the kerosene soaked bed, and wonders what it will be like to burn.
Edith drowns the stairs. The man with the wagon has drenched the straw. They leave as he runs a wick from the straw, a river of kerosene trickling out the front door. She helps him load the empty cannisters on his wagon and Alan lights a match.
"Ready?"
"I was ready nearly seventeen years ago." She pauses, "I'm sorry, Thomas. But if you are to escape it, it can't be here."
Eliot brings the horses from the mining machine. Alan lights the wick. The flame licks its way across the ground, picking up speed as it touches the places where the wick has soaked in kerosene. And then the pool in the middle of the floor lights and the fire races to the stairs, to the straw, and it isn't long before it is shooting out the bedroom windows.
Edith goes to the mining machine and crouches down beside it, "I wish I could take just this piece. It's nothing, really, but it represents so much..."
Alan has her point it out and he tries to reach in to remove the valve, "I'm sorry, but I can't."
She sighs, "That's fine. But it's getting warm and I don't want to go up in flames- there's likely kerosene on my hems."
They mount their horses and ride back to the village. They are met by both the solicitor for The British Clay Mining Corporation and Mr Ferguson.
"You don't need to worry about Allerdale Hall," Edith tells them, "Excuse me, I would like to change." The scent of kerosene wafts from her skirts as she passes.
"What do you mean?" the solicitor asks.
"I lit a fire."
"You what?"
"Burned it down." She looks to the rising plume of black smoke on the horizon, "Well, it's burning presently. It should fall to rubble very shortly. The kerosene will make short work of that."
"But you just sold it!"
"No. I signed a contract to sell it. As Lady Sharpe, I still have the rights to that property until the money is in the bank. That is what we agreed. I could take whatever I wanted or- what was it you said? "Clear it out for sentimental tokens of my ladyship" -whenever I wished. And I liquidated it. Or, rather, turned it to ash. The one piece of sentiment I could have kept is rusted to a mining machine in the yard. You can keep it."
He gapes at cloud of smoke, "That's an intense fire. Look at that... But why? Why not just let us demolish it?"
"Because six people died in that house before I moved in- at least four of them were murdered- the child died of natural causes and I don't know about Baronet Sharpe's father. Thomas was number seven, killed by his sister. Alan and I were to be eight and nine. And I killed Lucille with a shovel to make sure we weren't. Needless to say, there was nothing left there I wanted and I never want to see Allerdale Hall again. Now I have assured it." He stares, horrified, "I hope you aren't a superstitious man."
And with that, Alan guides his family back to the main street so Edith can purchase a new set of clothes before they embark on their trip back to London