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Chapters (36)
  1. Title Page
  2. Epigraph
  3. VOLUME I
  4. CHAPTER ONE
  5. CHAPTER TWO
  6. CHAPTER THREE
  7. CHAPTER FOUR
  8. CHAPTER FIVE
  9. CHAPTER SIX
  10. CHAPTER SEVEN
  11. CHAPTER EIGHT
  12. CHAPTER NINE
  13. CHAPTER TEN
  14. VOLUME II
  15. CHAPTER ELEVEN
  16. CHAPTER TWELVE
  17. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  18. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  19. CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  20. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  21. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  22. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
  23. CHAPTER NINETEEN
  24. CHAPTER TWENTY
  25. VOLUME III
  26. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
  27. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  28. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  29. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
  30. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
  31. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
  32. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
  33. AFTERWORD
  34. PRAISE FOR Grange House
  35. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  36. Copyright Page

If you like, think of me as you would a companion by a quiet fire. Imagine me leaning forward a little to listen. For I will listen, and well. Your papa was a friend to me—long ago. Twice he came up to Grange House on quarry business—the first time to work with Father. And the second—well, the second time, he walked cross the threshold of our sad household and breathed new life into us all.

Ever yours,

Nell Grange

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER TWELVE

There. There it lay—a purpose. Miss Grange’s letter pressed upon the spring and a hidden drawer popped open. I climbed the stairs to my schoolroom and unlocked the cabinet in which I had neatly stacked my copybooks last June, and I pulled one out. It fell open to a Latin translation heavily marked by Papa, and my eyes blurred. Come back! my heart cried. Come back! I looked down at my words and at his corrections, and I sniffed.

I brought the book to the round table and, sitting down, turned to an empty page. Where should I begin? With his death? My hand hesitated, stunned by the sudden image of him lying bent and broken at the bottom of that jagged hole. No, I thought, with his name.

LUDLOW THOMAS, I wrote at the top, and began:

The Ludlow Thomases trace their forebears back to a still-extant castle in England. When the young John Milton staged his masque, the bright scenes played across the faces of the Ludlow family. Some callow, intrepid Ludlow left Shropshire in the seventeenth century, following fast behind the Mayflower, to settle first in Massachusetts, then in the wide, rich Connecticut River Valley, to end at last among the elms of Brooklyn Heights, whose vistas opened out into New York Harbor. It was 1815 by then, and the father of this story’s Ludlow Thomas, son and heir of the Black Ball shipping line, was pulled crowing into the Brooklyn clamor of the new century. The rise of the early years of the century expanded his fortune; the older he got, the more his familiars dropped away: The brighter, it seemed, burned his star, and one evening he bent over the head of his new son, Ludlow, pulled into the year of 1838, august as—