The Manor House: a Novel

Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Spring 2017 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2017 The Manor House: A Novel Cleo Rose Egnal Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2017 Part of the Fiction Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Egnal, Cleo Rose, "The Manor House: A Novel" (2017). Senior Projects Spring 2017. 308. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2017/308 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Manor House: A Novel Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College by Cleo Egnal Annandale-on-Hudson, New York May 2017 Acknowledgments I would like to thank my family and friends for being so utterly supportive of this project. To my parents: for reading draft after draft, and for instilling in me a passion for books. To my professors: for continuing to impress in me a love for learning, and broadening my intellectual horizons. Most of all, I would like to thank my advisor, Porochista Khakpour, without whom this novel would still be a twelve-page short story tucked away in my college portfolio. 1 Prologue This is not a love story—or so I once would have supposed. Andrew Little and Maisy Harlan had a wonderful romance, but I still don’t really consider theirs a ‘love story.’ It isn’t one, at least not the kind I used to obsess over—perhaps the way they define those things has changed now. I spent enough time reading in dim candlelight to know a love story when I encounter one. I read of undying vows, endless love, happily-ever- after—those are love stories. I read far into the night, while my sister slept peacefully in the bed beside me, the blankets tucked up to her chin and her eyelids fluttering. The candlelight never bothered her. Sometimes I drew the curtains and let the stars light up the pages. In the summer, the stars were so bright I imagined them to be diamond rings, and when I was older I imagined him holding one out to me, asking me to be his forever. John. I remember the first time we met. I remember our friendship as children, and how it blossomed so easily into romance. My mind often wanders to that night, so long ago, when his strong fingers first brushed the lace at my throat, deftly undoing fragile buttons. My mind wanders too often these days. I think back to so many different times—most frequently my own, usually, but lately that’s changed. Now I think about Andrew and Maisy. Andrew is an old man now, but I remember him so clearly when he was a young man, a boy, just trying to figure out life, doing the best he could, even if it wasn’t always enough. I remember Maisy and her freckles and the way she loved Andrew so fiercely. I think about them both a lot. It can feel like my mind is swimming in thoughts, in memories of things that, principally, I was not a part of. Maybe that's why, some of the time, I forget that I'm dead. I died while I was still in love with a man named John Little, and for some reason the impact of our beautiful, epic romance did not end with my death. Something about our love 2 stuck me fast to the earth, and I haven’t been able to piece together why. All I know is that I have never seen another spirit, not once, not in the hundred-some years since my passing. That was the hardest part, I think, not just having to adjust, but having to do so myself, entirely alone. I did try to pass on, of course, many times. I don’t know exactly what I thought I would accomplish by staring hard at dark spaces, looking for a light or a hand reaching out to me. Yet I tried. The first night I saw John with his wife, looking at her the way he once looked at me. Then again, when John died and did not appear before me, as I had so longed for. Eventually, I just stopped trying. I know that my inability to pass had to do with John, because what I was expecting my existence as a ghost to be was not exactly what it has been. All the ghost stories I grew up with—when I paid any attention to them—were about ghosts haunting places. That does make sense, I suppose. Yet I haunt—well, haunt is a strong word—people. John’s male descendants, more specifically. Through some weird workings of the universe, John had a son, who had a son, who—well, and so on and so forth. Andrew Little is the last one. I suppose I’m lucky, in a way, that I’m not confined to a dingy house somewhere. I don’t really feel confined at all. I don’t really go where I please, sure, but I didn’t have that privilege when I was alive, so it isn’t something I’d know what to do with anyways. I was in love with John Little for as long as I can remember—and my memory spans a very, very long time. His family and mine were close, our fathers partners in some business venture I never bothered to understand. Both of our families were wealthy but the Littles were always one step above. We began spending summers at Little Manor when Father and Mr. Little needed more time to spend together working. So John and I grew up together, and eventually, friendship turned to romance. A forbidden romance, as John was betrothed to a girl named 3 Emily Grant since before he and I met. The Grant family had more money than the Littles themselves, and so John and I could never marry. Everything was about the money. We kept our love a secret, somehow, even from Emily, despite us all spending that fateful winter at the Manor together. We were all there for the wedding, which would take place after the New Year, the year I would never live to see. So I was in love with John, perhaps I still am, but I died and he married Emily Grant and they had a beautiful son whom they named Matthew. I will admit to resenting Matthew before he was born, but from the first breath he took I was mesmerized. When I watched Matthew sleeping for the first time, he wrapped in fur blankets and I in my constant cloak of invisibility, I noticed how small and fragile he was. I knew no one could look after him the way I could. It seems silly, I suppose, that I thought I could look after someone when I couldn’t even interact with the living. Still, my watch was constant and sharp. It was nice to have purpose, to feel free from my jealousy and sadness. Before Matthew was born, I couldn’t understand why I would be made to wander, forced to linger as my John lived happily married with another woman. I tried to forget John entirely, only visiting him occasionally when I knew he would not be near Emily. Eventually, I stopped wondering if he thought of me when he bedded her. Then everything changed—in Matthew’s first month, I realized he could see me. I had been invisible for so long that his direct stare frightened me. It passed, eventually, his ability to see me. After the same thing happened with his son years later, I figured that only children had the ability to see ghosts, and when they grew up they lost the sight. It was sad, of course, but not terribly distressing. It was just one more thing that was out of my control. *** 4 My memories of my first days as a ghost are fragmented, but vivid nonetheless. I wish I could forget them the way I sometimes forget what it felt like to be alive. The first time I tried to hold a book—after—when it didn’t even slip through my fingers because I couldn’t even pick it up, I wanted to scream, I tried to, and nothing came out. I thought I was dreaming. I thought I would wake up under heavy blankets in a room lit by the dying embers of a fire. I thought I would wake up and get dressed and see John and fix everything. But I didn’t wake up; I couldn’t because I wasn’t asleep. How many days did it take for me to accept that? I don’t remember. It could’ve been weeks. Longer. Once John began to warm to Emily, sometime in the year they got married, that’s when I most wanted it all to be a dream. I didn’t think I could bear it, his moving on from me.

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