AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She read the forward where Deuce explained his interest in genealogy, and his hopes that the book would provide a connection to those who came after with those who’d come before.
It opened with the family tree, meticulously documented on a two-page spread. It started in the early 1600s.
“Holy shit, they had eleven children! Two died in infancy, another before he reached five, and another at sixteen. How do you get through that?”
She followed it down, but would look at details later. And there was her father and his twin brother. Her mother’s name and the date they’d married. The date her father died.
The woman Collin had married—that date and the date of her death the same.
And there, her name, connected to her parents.
So many on those branches, she realized. She’d never thought about it. The only child of an only child—so she’d believed—on her father’s side. One aunt and three cousins on her mother’s.
Now there were so many more.
“Dad would have loved this,” she murmured.
Engrossed, she didn’t notice when her tablet played “We Are Family.”
So many births, she mused, with twins running through them. So many deaths.
She turned the page.
Deuce had gone deep into his research, she realized after spending more than an hour reading through the ancestors in the seventeenth century. There had been lords and ladies, soldiers and farmers in her ancestry, and their share of triumphs and tragedies.
By the time she got to the next century, she decided to make tea—a rarity for her—and take that and the book into bed with her.
Tucked up, fire simmering, she worked her way through to the Arthur Poole, from Liverpool, who’d made his home in Maine and founded the family business. An adventurous man, she thought as her eyes began to blur.
Making his way across the sea at the age of seventeen. Heading to a brave new world and leaving the one he knew behind. A shipbuilder by trade, after years of apprenticeship.
And by the age of twenty-four, he’d started his business, and had married a wealthy young heiress, one Leticia Armond, and begun building what would become Lost Bride Manor.
Love for Leticia, she wondered, or money?
They’d had twin sons followed by three daughters, and had been married for nearly twenty-five years before he died.
A fall from a horse.
So his son Collin inherited the manor. Continued his father’s expansion of the original structure while he and his brother ran the business.
A few months later, Collin Poole married Astrid Grandville.
And tragedy.
As she felt herself fading, Sonya closed the book, set it aside. She switched off the light and dropped instantly into sleep.
The clock chimed the hour of three, and the music, soft and sad, drifted into her dreams. She studied herself in the mirror, the young,happy bride in her long white dress. Music, quick and lively, echoed up from the main floor where her husband—ah, such a word,husband—hosted family and friends in celebration. Through the open window, the spring breeze came to flutter at the curtains.
On the other side of the mirror, Sonya smiled at her. You look beautiful, she thought.
The bride smiled in return.
“I will always be beautiful. Young and beautiful. A bride to my groom, a wife to my husband. A mistress of the manor. And I will always return to this day when I held true love and joy in one hand, despair and grief in the other.”
It happened so fast, the woman with the knife rushing in. On the other side of the mirror, Sonya shouted, but the sound couldn’t penetrate the glass. As the knife plunged, she pushed and beat on the mirror to try to get through somehow. But she could only watch in horror as the blood spread red over the long white gown.
As the young bride fell, and the woman cursed her. The murderer took the ring from the dying bride’s finger, put it on her own.
