An Elegy for an Enemy: Historical Mystery Romance

By Constance Kent

“Didn’t you hear the rumors before coming here?”

The Great War has just ended and Spanish Flu is decimating the population. Ravenswood Hall remains isolated from the world, poised at the top of a hill on an island off the rocky coast of Maine.

It is to this house that Emmaline West has traveled, bent on revenge. She has been left lame from polio, lost her home and her family, and one man is to blame--Garrick Coleridge, her dead sister's fiancé. But instead of the heartless monster she is set on killing, she finds a man tormented by a secret that he risked his life on the battlefield to escape.

The pandemic worsens on the mainland, trapping Emmaline on the island. When a member of the household is murdered, suspicion falls on her. Plunged into the shadowy lives of the Coleridge clan, Emmaline is forced to seek Garrick's help to clear her name.

But this murder is only the beginning. Like peeling back the layers of an onion, the secrets of Ravenswood Hall are revealed and no one is safe. Is it one killer or several? Emmaline and Garrick enter into an uneasy alliance to find out - and to stay alive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Writewood Creations Publishing
• Release date: Jun 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9781988003986

Book preview

RAVENSWOOD HALL

An Elegy for an Enemy

Historical Mystery Romance

CONSTANCE KENT

Copyright 2023 Constance Kent

Writewood Creations Publishing

Alcove, Quebec

Canada

http://constance-kent-historical-romance-8rhv35.mailerpage.io

ISBN 978-1-988003-98-6

All rights reserved.

This publication remains the copyrighted property

of the author and may not be redistributed for commercial

or non-commercial purposes.

Cover Image by Kharchenko_irina7/Nimax

Cover design by Writewood Creations/Canva

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Preface

About the Author

PREFACE

"Didn’t you hear the rumors before coming here?"

The Great War has just ended and Spanish Flu is decimating the population. Ravenswood Hall remains isolated from the world, poised at the top of a hill on an island off the rocky coast of Maine.

It is to this house that Garrick Coleridge returns, broken from the War and wanting nothing to do with his family or the businesses that gave them their wealth.

Emmaline West has fallen on desperate times. Her family has succumbed to the Flu, most recently, a beloved sister who was engaged to Garrick Coleridge. Posing as a nurse, Emmaline stalks her sister's fiancé to Ravenswood Hall, seeking revenge for his cruel abandonment, and finds a man tormented by a secret that he risked his life on the battlefield to escape.

*

A decaying mansion. A feuding family. A dark secret that binds them together even as it drives them apart.

Plunge into the shadowy seductive world of the Coleridge family and discover the lengths a family will go to protect their secrets.

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Chapter One

Ravenswood Island, Maine

December 1918

THE HOUSE ITSELF WAS poised at the top of the hill on Ravenswood Island, its namesake and chief employer. The Coleridge family of Coleridge Shipbuilding and Fisheries was the most powerful name on the Eastern Seaboard since 1830 when Tristan Coleridge arrived from Ireland with his young bride, Cressida.

That couple had produced twin sons, Leyden and Blake, who went on to sire their own twin boys before dying suddenly and mysteriously in 1875. Their successors cemented a dynasty of wealth and power until the advent of railway shipping chipped away at that wealth.

The grip the Coleridge sons and daughters had on the minds of the townspeople was formidable. They were not loved, admired or even respected. They were loathed and feared but they were the only hope the township had to stay alive. Where the Coleridge fortunes fell, so did those of the people of Ravenswood Island.

The house is magnificent, I said as it came into view.

Faded grandeur, the old ferryman grunted. No money to keep it up as it was in the old days. There’s bad blood between the sons. Though they share the same last name, they feud like sworn enemies and won’t let either side get ahead.

The channel was rough and to keep my mind off of my distressed stomach, the ferryman regaled me with the history of the house and its inhabitants. For better or worse, he declared, they were stuck together and in the age of declining demand for ships and fish, where others had profited from the Great War in Europe, the Coleridge family had suffered yet another setback. It was inexplicable to those in town how it could have happened but my companion knew.

It’s the tainted blood, he said with a shrewd look at me. It is a cursed house you are going to, Miss West. Didn’t you hear the rumors before coming here?

Up until that moment, I had been paying scant attention to the Coleridge story, being preoccupied with not being sick. The ferryman enjoyed talking and I had not minded listening but I was not interested in contributing to their legend.

I have no fear of tainted blood, sir. I won’t be here long enough to be affected.

I thought you were entering their employ?

I have a letter asking for an interview. Angelique Coleridge may find me unsuitable.

The ferryman left my side, disappointed by my lack of maidenly alarm. Perhaps it was my youth that made me resistant to the fears of the elderly. My generation had witnessed our decimation in a senseless war and now Spanish influenza threatened to wipe out those of us who remained. The ghosts of a decaying mansion had no power over me.

I wore leather gloves against the bitter December cold and a navy blue wool coat that came to my ankles. It was belted and buttoned with shiny brass. My hat was equally sensible; a felt poke bonnet without the feather that had recently come into fashion. The shirtwaist and vest I wore were not warm enough and the corset was arguably too loose but it was given to me at no cost and beggars can’t be choosers. However, my feet in the black leather boots were beginning to freeze.

I could sit inside the cabin with the other passengers but I needed the cold wind to keep my stomach steady. And watching the house on the hill get closer and closer was invigorating.

There had been little time to pack. Once I found out where he was, I wasted no time in setting my plan in motion. I wondered if he’d recognize me, if he would see my sister’s face in mine. There was much I wondered about, but the mysterious history of the Coleridge family was not one of them. Let them fall. Let them go bankrupt and take the whole island down with them. They were nothing to me.

I didn’t always feel that way about them. There was a time when I thought it was wonderful luck Selena would be taking the name of Coleridge. The mighty Coleridges of Maine had very nearly been my in-laws.

Garrick Coleridge had proposed to Selena West on her twenty-fourth birthday. Three days later, after the sinking of the Lusitania, he joined the European war effort, sailing to London and from there to the Front. My sister had been proud of him and followed the news closely. However, when months turned into years without word from her fiancé, she began to believe that he had forgotten her.

Then in September, a letter arrived at our house from Captain Garrick Coleridge, asking to be released from his promise. He said he didn’t have the heart or the stomach to take a wife after all that he had witnessed in the past three years. He was not the man he was.

The message was terse and unapologetic. Selena was convinced he must be in terrible anguish to behave so cruelly. I had never met him—I didn’t know what sort of man he was before he severed all contact. I was staying with a school friend on Staten Island when he proposed and by the time I made arrangements to return home to help plan the wedding, Coleridge had abandoned my sister for the glories of war.

After the cold, dismissive letter, Selena was desperate to find him. She believed that if he saw her again, he would realize the depth of her love and his mistake. After writing many letters to various commanders and enlisting the assistance of our father, Garrick was traced to a hospital in Boston where he was recovering from the effects of mustard gas.

The doctor on the ward replied to our father’s query, saying the Captain had recovered physically but his mind was gone. His hands shook uncontrollably and he lapsed into long spells of silence that no amount of conversation could break.

Selena went alone to see him, foolish girl. She wept and begged and pleaded with him to remember what they once were to each other, until at last, he turned his handsome face to hers and in a tone so brutally cold that she shrank from it—he requested her removal from his sight.

Then he turned back to the wall and refused to speak to her thereafter.

I was unaware of all of this and only heard the details from the nurse on the ward a week ago, after my sister’s death. The nurse had witnessed the entire humiliating scene.

Selena contracted Spanish flu while at the hospital and brought it home to our parents. They succumbed to the virus first and just when I had recovered from that grief, Selena became ill. She did not linger and Garrick Coleridge’s abandonment was to blame.

All of her hopes had been dashed waiting in vain for him to make her his wife. Selena had transformed from a happy, vibrant woman of twenty-five to a neurotic weeping spinster of twenty-seven. I was not with my sister through her brief illness. I never contracted the disease myself. My constitution remained stubbornly immune to that plague. It was another that felled me.

The buckle of the leather strap bit into my left leg. The square of flannel that I had jammed between my shin and the brace must have slipped. If I reached down to adjust it, that would call attention to the contraption and I was still getting used to seeing it myself. Dr. Anderson Milbank said it was too soon to leave the sanatorium. The unaffected muscles hadn’t regained their full strength and he wanted to test a new therapy for nerve cell regeneration.

I’d had my fill of therapies. Positive electricity shocks, almond baths, mustard poultices, radium water, quinine, full body casts that led to muscle atrophy—I had undergone them all. Nothing worked.

In the end, my recovery came about in September when Selena wrote to me about her broken engagement. For her sake, I had to get well.

In late June of 1916, I contracted poliomyelitis while visiting my friend on Staten Island. That summer, the epidemic took the lives of two thousand children and babies in the City. I was one of the lucky ones. At nineteen, I was strong enough to survive the sickness. One day I had a headache and an hour later, I couldn’t move my legs. When I entered Saranac Lake Sanatorium, it was believed I would never walk again. Dr. Milburn told me that how far the virus crept up my spine determined whether I would walk, whether I would breathe, whether I would ever mother a child.

I counted myself fortunate that I only had to wear a brace to move around.

Milbank warned there would be chafing and if I wasn’t careful, I could lose the leg to infection. I understood his concern even if he didn’t understand mine. I had been at the sanatorium for two years and two months and in that time, my whole life had changed.

This journey east had to be undertaken now.

By November, the war was over and I was an orphan without a family to embrace and then I was an orphan without a roof over my head. Our family home and my father’s business holdings had to be sold for taxes and debts that had accumulated during his illness. Unbeknownst to me, he had been leveraging his connection to the Coleridge family to borrow funds to expand his company. When Garrick broke off the engagement, the bank called my father’s loan.

I rejected well-meaning advice to forgive and forget. After burying Selena, I resolved to track down Garrick Coleridge and make him pay for his cowardice and dishonesty.

Before the war, I could count on one hand the number of young ladies of my set who needed to work. Now there were hundreds of us. Nice girls from respectable well-to-do families were taking secretarial courses and entering nursing programs and applying at the telegraph office. We were filling up factories and offices and it was doubtful we would ever go back to being dependent again.

The world had changed too much and I had changed with it. I had found my spine and after my battle with polio, it was as rigid as steel.

The ferryman’s voice boomed from a megaphone.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve received word that the island is under quarantine. A nurse will take your temperature on the pier and if you are ill, you will be returned to the mainland. In future, this ferry will transport provisions and medicine from the mainland only. Please gather your belongings and begin moving starboard. Allow the crew to secure the ramp first before attempting to disembark. Mind your step and welcome to Ravenswood Island.

The pier slid into view leading to a slick and frost-beaten wharf. A ramshackle row of wooden buildings sheathed in clapboard siding that was peeling ran the length of it. The name Coleridge Fisheries was stretched across the roofline of one enormous building in bold red letters.

I could imagine what the wharf must have been like at its peak with fresh paint, crowded with workers and boats. The Coleridge sons didn’t see the end coming. They may have sealed themselves off from the plague but it would wipe them out all the same.

The ferry pulled alongside the icy gray boards and after bidding us to watch our step, the crew handed us off the ferry. I passed the temperature test without incident and my bags were deposited on the pier.

I made my way to the Harbor Master’s Office where I found the Hall’s motor car and driver waiting for me. Caruthers introduced himself and ushered me into a 1915 Hudson Phaeton that sat six. The top was up to keep out the December wind and there were thick rugs to pull over my knees, which I did gladly.

It was astonishing how easy it had been to gain access but my journey was not over yet. As I was transported up the forested hill, I thought over the various obstacles I might face and how to overcome them. The first would be getting past the gatekeeper.

We glided past a hunting lodge on my left that looked closed up and abandoned. It could be due to the season, I thought, and not the change in the family’s fortune.

A high stone wall surrounded the grounds of the Hall, sealed off by a massive wrought-iron gate. Getting past this gate was my chief concern and my heart thudded when the car came to a stop at the gatehouse. A young man emerged and leaned in the driver’s side.

Is this she?

It is.

Hope she knows what she’s getting herself into, he said before moving around the front of the motor to unlock the gate and push the black iron bars open.

Chapter Two

I STARED AT THE gatekeeper as we passed. He was in his mid-twenties by my estimate, with a hard but handsome, weather-beaten face.

What did he mean? I asked Caruthers who was nearer to my age. If he didn’t have such a shifty look about him, I might consider him an ally.

Don’t worry about Easton. He’s got a bitterness in him against the family that he’s nursed for twenty-seven years. I told him he should quit if he hates them so much.

And what about you? Do you hate them, Caruthers?

Me? Not a chance. I see them as an opportunity for advancement. A rich family with that many secrets is vulnerable. You know what I’m saying?

He winked at me in the mirror and grinned.

No, I’m afraid I don’t.

That’s alright then. I’ll keep it to myself. My old gran used to cook for the family in their heyday and I heard a lot of it from her. Mrs. Pym she was called. She lived in the house until she retired and came to know every nook and cranny. She passed that knowledge down to me before she died. I was fifteen and no fool. I saw a chance for advancement and I took it.

You applied to be the chauffeur?

They bought an automobile and that was my foot in the door. We know the world and they don’t, Miss West. Take it from me—get yours while you can. That’s what I plan to do.

I was in agreement with him on getting what I could, but what Caruthers meant beyond that, I didn’t know and I was not interested in finding out.

We proceeded along a gravel drive that wound through a small wilderness which gave way to a lawn that was neatly sculpted by gardens. Snow dusted the scene as it continued to fall intermittently.

The house appeared around a bend and my breath caught at the sight of it.

Ravenswood Hall was constructed of granite and slate, three stories high, discounting the garret at the very top from which I could see small windows reflecting the gray sky. The roof line was broken up by gables and chimneys that added to its impressiveness but also made the house appear secretive and forbidding.

I was not put off by its appearance. It felt familiar to me, like a doll house I once had as a child. I knew every room hidden behind the winking glass that stretched out on either side of the main entrance. The maritime custom of building a widow’s walk had been observed. Iron filigree laced the look-out high above. Stone and glass stretched out on either side, unfolding into a series of rooms, one after the other, sprawling across the property nearly reaching the ocean cliff.

They liked the gray stone, Caruthers said. Those first Coleridges arrived here from Ireland. I guess it reminded them of home. They had it designed to give the guests an ocean view regardless of which room they were staying in. The family is on the second floor of the west wing. Guests are in the east wing. Few-in servants. Most of us employed by the family live in the town and come to work each morning. The practice of keeping live-in servants was done away with many years ago. You’ll find Hutton, the housekeeper. You’ll want to watch yourself with that one. She’s in thick with Angelique Coleridge and what she says goes. Greely is the butler—he took over for his uncle when he passed—and there’s Mrs. Sharpe, the cook. You won’t find a servant under the age of sixty, except for Larklyn but she’s a lady’s maid. Daily help is brought in to clean.

It sounds like the ideal situation, I said.

The fewer the servants—the better. Old and frail was better still. It increased my likelihood of success.

I gazed at the span of windows on the second floor of the west wing, wondering which one was his.

Garrick Coleridge had been permitted to return home to his prosperous life and future, and mine had been torn away from me. He had robbed me of everything I needed to function in this life. A girl made lame by polio had few prospects. My future was tethered to the whims and goodwill of others and that was Garrick’s doing.

The car came to a stop and Caruthers opened my door. Every moment of deprivation, every night of doubt and fear, every morsel of comfort that I had denied myself preparing for this moment was worth it the instant I arrived at Ravenswood Hall.

Caruthers lifted my bags out of the seat behind me and the front door swung open. A tremendous gust of wind caught the snow and swirled it around my ankles.

Miss Emmaline West, I presume? I am Greely, the butler. Mrs. Coleridge is waiting to receive you in the drawing room. Caruthers will carry your belongings inside.

Greely was in his mid-sixties, dressed in full livery and had an intimidating manner that gave me a moment of anxiety. The leather and metal brace on my leg needed adjusting.