Fallam's Secret Read online

  Fallam’s Secret

  Also by Denise Giardina

  GOOD KING HARRY

  STORMING HEAVEN

  THE UNQUIET EARTH

  SAINTS AND VILLAINS

  Fallam’s Secret

  Denise Giardina

  Copyright © 2003 by Denise Giardina

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth

  Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Giardina, Denise, 1951–.

  Fallam’s Secret / by Denise Giardina.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-34027-3

  1. Americans—England—Fiction. 2. Young women—Fiction. 3. Time travel—Fiction. 4. Great Britain—History—Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–1660—Fiction. 7. West Virginia—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.I136 F35 2003

  813' .54—dc21

  2002015942

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street,

  London W1T 3QT

  IN MEMORY OF LAURA FORMAN

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Part One

  1. The Fire

  2. The Mystery Hole

  3. Lydde Falling

  Part Two

  4. The Arrival

  5. John Soane

  6. St. Pancras Church

  7. The Interrogation

  8. The Sermon

  9. Thin Places

  10. Virginia Copperheads

  11. The Raven

  12. Mossup, Bounder, and Rose

  Part Three

  13. Aunt Lavinia’s Visitor

  14. The Hanging

  15. The World Turned Upside Down

  16. Coombe Manor

  17. “I Thee Worship”

  18. The Tempest

  19. Decisions

  20. The Mumming

  21. Christmas Day

  THANKS TO Jane Gelfman, Amy Cherry, David Wohl, Sherry Wolford, Arla Ralston, Colleen Anderson, Ancella Bickley, Julie Pratt, Arline Thorn, Sarah Sullivan, Jim and Judy Lewis, Gordon Simmons, Grace Edwards, Kate Long, John Richards, Barbara Ladner, Jack Magan, Tod Ralstin, Hazo Carter, Juris Lidaka, Barbara Bayes, Cathy Pleska, Al Peery, Chuck Wyrostock, Rosalie Blau, Leona Giardina, and Phyllis Giardina.

  Author’s note: I will not attempt to re-create word for word the speech of characters in the seventeenth century. Suffice it to say that Lydde Falcone’s training in seventeenth-century drama came to her aid. Once she picked up certain inflections she became more easy with the speech of the past and even slipped into the manner of it herself, as though back on the stage again and performing an improv version of As You Like It or The Winter’s Tale, but with a slight flavor of the talk she’d heard from old people back home in the mountains of West Virginia.

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  The Fire

  TIME, UNCLE JOHN explained to Lydde over supper, is like pasta. Not a straight hard length of supermarket spaghetti, but pasta cooked and poured into the colander, then tumbled into a bowl, heaped and tangled and layered. He gestured to his own steaming plate of carbonara when he said it, fork aloft and trailing strands of spaghetti. He had cooked the meal himself, because Aunt Lavinia only did roasts.

  Uncle John fell in love with Italian food as a boy, at the same time his older sister Margaret fell in love with an Italian immigrant. Margaret and John were the pampered children of the superintendent of a West Virginia coal camp and lived in the big house on the hill. Margaret was only sixteen when she met Carlo Falcone.

  Carlo was twenty-two, a coal miner whose father had been killed in the mines. He lived with his widowed mother and youngest sister in a four-room shack in Tally Hollow. Nine-year-old John was Margaret’s cover when she snuck out of the house to meet Carlo. John was a restless boy, and to give their mother some peace and quiet, Margaret offered to take him places in the evenings. The place they went was the Falcone house, where Carlo’s Sicilian mother sat John at the kitchen table and fed him heaps of pasta slick with tomatoes and olive oil, and sometimes a little cup of red wine to go with it, while Margaret and Carlo courted in the front room.

  That’s how Uncle John came to love Italian food. He loved time because he just did, and when he grew up he became a professor of physics.

  MOST of what Lydde knew of her family came from Uncle John and Aunt Lavinia. Uncle John told her the story of how her parents met at the dime store in Lafayette, when Carlo wandered by the ladies’ wear department as Margaret was choosing a dress and suggested she try the green one instead of the brown one she held in her hand. John had emerged from the toy department across the aisle, clutching a model airplane kit, to find his sister twirling before a mirror in the green dress, her face flushed. A dark young man sat on a red vinyl chair and watched her intently. Margaret bribed John with a chocolate soda to keep him from telling.

  When Lydde was older, Aunt Lavinia told her how Carlo and a pregnant Margaret had eloped to Virginia, where there was no waiting period for a marriage license. The courting sessions in Tally Hollow had moved from the front room to the bedroom with the passive approval of Mama Falcone, who thought her boy richly deserved a Boss Man’s daughter. Carlo and Margaret returned from Virginia to confront her family with the indisputable results. Margaret was disowned, and Carlo took a job at Boomer coal camp, since his new father-in-law refused to hire him.

  WHAT did Lydde actually remember, what did she know of her family that didn’t come secondhand? Precious little. She recalled there had been other children, all older than she was. She remembered chickens in pens behind the house, frightening her with their clawing and gabbling, and her father in the yard running a board into a buzz saw. He seemed angry. On the mountainside winter trees loomed, stripped of leaves, their branches joined together like claws holding hands. Someone picked Lydde up and carried her inside.

  She had no memory of someone called Mother. But she recalled a smiling face close to hers, singing to her, a lullaby, when the bough breaks the cradle will fall, and down will come Lydde, cradle and all.

  Aunt Lavinia showed Lydde pictures and asked, “Who do you remember? Anyone?”

  Lydde studied the photographs and then pointed to a girl with delicate arched eyebrows and long dark hair.

  “That’s Mary,” said Aunt Lavinia. “Your oldest sister. By the time you came along, Margaret was covered up with children, so Mary took charge of you. She hauled you around everywhere with her.”

  “She sang to me,” Lydde said, not really remembering, but knowing. “And she told me stories.”

  Lydde’s other memory was of a faraway house of red and gold flame, so pretty she wanted to touch it.

  CARLO Falcone, inevitably called Carl by his West Virginia neighbors, had come to America as a child in 1918. Poverty brought his family across the ocean, but also trouble with the Black Hand, which had been antagonized by Carlo’s father. Carlo was seven, and furious. He left behind a small sharecropped farm on the coast of Sicily, an impossibly blue Mediterranean cove, olive trees and lemon trees and vineyards, and worst of all, a beloved donkey. In return he got a tiny house in a dusty coal camp, cheek by jowl with other houses, winters of blackened slush and bitter cold, fruit and vegetables from tin cans. Poor then in every way. He would never get over so much loss, never.

  Carlo returned to Sicily during World War II with U.S. Army intelligence.

  “The war was a terrible time for him,” said Uncle John, who also served in Sicily. “Something happened he
would never talk about. Whatever it was, they pulled him out and sent him to a British unit headed for the mainland. For his own safety, I’m guessing.”

  With money Margaret saved from his Army pay, Carlo bought thirty acres of cove—half of it relatively flat, the rest hillside—halfway up Fallam Mountain near the head of Shades o’ Death Creek. The land skirted the edge of the ancient New River Gorge and, unusual in that part of West Virginia, included the mineral rights as well. Security, Carlo told Uncle John. There’ll be no mining around me.

  Until Uncle John and Aunt Lavinia moved into Roundbottom Farm just down the mountain, Margaret was unhappy with Carlo’s choice. There were rumors among the neighbors that Carlo’s property was haunted. It was told that just after the Revolution, a boy was out scything in the cove near the head of the creek. He failed to see his little sister playing in the tall grass and accidentally cut off her head. When the boy realized what he had done, he tore off in a frenzy the quarter mile along a spit of land that narrowed and narrowed until it ended in a prow of rock surrounded on three sides by a sheer drop into the Gorge. Fallam Point. The distraught boy threw himself over. That was how Shades o’ Death Creek got its name.

  The New River Gorge was rimmed with rock cliffs like jaws set with gray teeth. When Lydde was a child she imagined someone had flung himself off each of them.

  CARLO Falcone had no time for ghosts. He named his West Virginia cove Montefalco, Falcon’s Mount. In addition to including his own name, it recalled to him the Umbrian village of Montefalco he’d seen while driving a British army jeep through the Vale of Spoleto after its liberation by the partisans. That was a part of Italy where the mafia seemed not yet to reach, and so it was heaven to Carlo. Italia senza cosa nostra, like West Virginia without coal, he told Uncle John. He’d stopped in Montefalco for a rest, to look around, and the only way to escape the swarm of begging children was to duck into the church. There he’d found medieval wall paintings, scenes from the life of Christ transposed from Palestine to a green mountainscape like that of Umbria or West Virginia. And in the crypt, a mummy of a twelfth century bishop. Carlo had briefly felt peace and something like joy in a ravaged Italy, in that church. Back outside, he walked the village, leaving packets of chocolate in his wake, studying the place. He was invited into someone’s home for a meal of polenta and grilled fenocchio.

  When he bought his land on Fallam Mountain, he knew he wanted more than a house. He wanted to recreate Italy.

  He went about it bit by bit, in the hours he could spare from setting up his own construction business. The house first, hardwood floors and wood-beamed ceilings from trees he felled to clear the site. The outside was stucco with elaborate textured swirls, two stories topped with a roof of red tile. Below the house he put up a small stone barn and dreamed of importing donkeys from Sicily. One weekend he built a donkey cart and painted it the traditional bright Sicilian hues, red green blue yellow. He wasn’t an artist who could paint scenes like those on the most elaborate carts in Sicily, so he contented himself with stripes of color. For the bambinos, he said. He built a stone smokehouse for the prosciutto and pancetta he would put up from his own pigs. Behind the house he planted roma tomatoes and an herb garden, basil and parsley and oregano. He built retaining walls and planted grapevines, Treviano for vinegar, Trebbiano and Sciava for wine. Would they thrive in West Virginia? He would never know.

  LYDDE was the last of six children. She used to say their names like a litany. Louis Mary Grace Dominic Jane Lydde. The boys to honor their father’s Sicilian uncles, the girls their mother’s Cabell ancestors. Louis to Lydde, she would say for short as she dug through the ruins of their house with a stick.

  All the children had dark hair, like their father. All but Lydde had his dark eyes as well. Lydde’s eyes were gray like her mother’s.

  Several months before the fire, the five older children had their school pictures taken. They gave wallet-sized copies to Uncle John and Aunt Lavinia, and Lydde inherited them when she went away to college.

  In the photos, each child’s expression was serious, as though the school photographer forbade everyone to smile. Or perhaps he possessed a manner that intimidated the children, unlike the photographer who years later would tease Lydde into a pose of wide-eyed goofiness, much to Uncle John’s amusement.

  Louis had a long face, short hair brushed back from his forehead, and thick Sicilian eyebrows. Mary was thirteen. Her hair was long, parted in the middle, and held back with a barrette. Eleven-year-old Grace had thick unruly hair and was biting her lip. Her eyes were enormous. Dominic wore bangs across his forehead and was the one closest to breaking into a mischievous grin. He had on overalls and his ears stuck out. Jane was only six, with a tiny bow mouth, and she was looking away, upset, as though about to scold someone off camera. Or perhaps she was frightened.

  Lydde thought they were beautiful, but they seemed to know something very sad.

  When Lydde was grown, she carried the photos in her wallet. She didn’t have children. But sometimes, in England or on airplanes, when strangers asked, she would pull out her wallet and say, Here are my children. If the strangers noted the boys’ rough shirts and the old-fashioned dresses of the girls, they didn’t say.

  CHRISTMAS Eve, 1948. The younger children had been coaxed to bed early by Louis and Mary, because two-year-old Lydde was sick. Mary had tried to sing Lydde to sleep, but the baby fretted and wouldn’t go down.

  “She can sleep with me,” Mary offered.

  But Jane and Grace put up a fuss, for Mary had promised to tell them stories until they fell asleep, and they had to fall asleep soon or they were afraid Santa Claus wouldn’t come. So Margaret retired early, taking Lydde into bed with her. Carlo stayed below in the dining room and set out Santa gifts around a Christmas tree glittery with shredded aluminum icicles. There was one present for each child—a charm bracelet for Mary, dolls for Grace and Jane, a red Schwinn bicycle for Dominic, Louis’s two-volume set of Shakespeare (he was the bookish one), and Lydde’s teddy bear.

  Margaret banged on her bedroom wall once to quiet the boys, for Dominic had sneaked a glimpse of a bicycle wheel through the banister railing and was bouncing on his bed with excitement. Just as the baby was finally falling off to sleep, Margaret heard a thump on the roof above. Jane heard it too and yelled, “Santa Claus!” Mary tried to shush her.

  Carlo paused, screwdriver in hand, and looked up, but decided a tree limb must have blown onto the house. He finished assembling Dominic’s bicycle, turned out the lights, and climbed the stairs to bed.

  He woke to the smoke and flames, the screams of Margaret and the children. He didn’t think he’d slept long, or really slept at all, only slipped briefly into a moment of unconsciousness. Margaret held up the phone from beside the bed. As from a great distance, Carlo heard her crying that the line was dead. When he tried to describe later what it had been like, he lapsed into the broken English of his childhood.

  Margaret scream from the hall, grab the little one. I go through smoke for the children. Them up and running back and forth gathering up their things. No time for that, no time. Follow me! Grab Dominic by the collar of his pajamas and drag him downstairs, miss a step in the thick smoke and twist my ankle. I lose hold of Dominic. He run to back of the house calling for his bike! No time! Margaret go after him but I grab her and pull her out the front door I turn the children are on the stairs the flames come down the front of the house and I see their shadows through the flames following Dominic to the back. I think they will make the back door. Margaret push the baby to me and run back I put the baby down and follow but so does the baby. Who know she can run so fast on those little legs? Margaret is back in the house I yell they will make it out the back. I pick up the baby and take her back away. The front of the house fall in. All so quick. Like that.

  Like that.

  Carlo carried baby Lydde around to the back of the house, which was now totally engulfed in flames. Red and gold, so pretty, Lydde recalled. Carlo though
t to find the children huddling together after having escaped out the back kitchen door, he was sure he had seen them come down the stairs and flee after Dominic, Louis and Mary each with one of the young ones. He dreaded to tell them their mother had disappeared back into the flames.

  They weren’t there. That was when Carlo fell to his knees and waited until fear and grief and the gray dawn of Christmas morning drove him down the mountain to Uncle John and Aunt Lavinia at Roundbottom Farm.

  THE fire department came in time to survey the smoldering ruins, the police arrived to investigate, hearses waited to take away the bodies. Carlo returned to the scene with Uncle John while Aunt Lavinia looked after Lydde.

  “He seemed to have aged overnight,” Uncle John told Lydde later. “There were patches of gray in his hair I hadn’t noticed before, and a singed spot on the side of his head. Most of his eyebrows were gone, and the right side of his face was raw. He got more of the flame than he realized. He wept on my shoulder when they brought Margaret’s body out to a hearse. He blamed himself. Shameful that a woman had gone back in the house while he cowered outside with the baby. Not that he could have done anything else, not with you to deal with. Anyway he would have died too. But maybe that’s what he wanted.”

  Uncle John tried to coax Carlo back down the mountain so he wouldn’t have to watch the removal of the bodies of the children. But Carlo refused to budge. So they stood and stood while a light rain fell among the hissing gray frosted timbers and scorched cinderblocks. Watched as rubble was hauled out. Identified the twisted metal frame that had been Dominic’s new bike, the blackened spine of the Christmas tree. The hearses waited, empty.