TRYST

by

Elswyth Thane

Foreword by Leigh Michaels

First published 1939

This edition 2019

This is a work of fiction. The characters have no existence outside the imagination of the author.

He was the man she was born to love... If only he wasn't dead.

As Europe is about to explode into world war, a bullet goes astray and a British secret agent is hit. But he was not supposed to die. Back at home, waiting for a man she's never met—the man she is destined to love—is the girl he would have married... if he had come home the way fate intended, not as a ghost.

As their destiny labors to put things right, the two fall in love during one beautiful English summer, just before the outbreak of World War II.

TRYST (noun): A private romantic rendezvous between lovers.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

About the author

About the editor

FOREWORD

As a romantic-minded teenager (I wrote my own first romance novel at the tender age of fourteen, when I still believed I knew everything), I read Emilie Loring and Mary Stewart – both pioneers in romantic suspense – and Grace Livingston Hill, an early writer of inspirational romance. But it wasn’t until I was a young adult that I stumbled across Elswyth Thane and discovered paranormal romance through the elegant and touching Tryst.

Tryst is the heartwarming story of Sabrina Archer, young and vulnerable and just coming into womanhood, and Hilary Shenstone, the man who was born to be her one true love – except for a small hitch in the cosmic plan...

...Because Hilary is dead, the victim of a stray bullet on his last mission as a British secret agent in India shortly before the start of World War II. He’s come home, as a ghost, to find Sabrina waiting for him.

“Something slipped....” Hilary says in the book. “The timing went wrong.”

While destiny – obstinate and unswerving – labors to correct the error and finally put things right, the star-crossed pair fall in love against a background of endless and beautiful English summer.

Tryst was first published in 1939, just as a global war was about to explode. The outlook was terrifying, Sabrina found:

“New problems presented themselves faster than old ones got solved ... Sometimes the prospect ... oppressed her with such a terror ... that she lay awake in the dark in a hopeless funk, trying to pray without knowing what for.”

Against the terrifying likelihood of years-long war, deprivation, sacrifice, and horrendous loss, this gentle and sometimes sentimental story offered reassurance to readers of the time.

There’s comfort in the idea that no matter how threatening the world sometimes seems right outside our doors, underneath all the uncertainty there must be an essential rightness to events, a pattern in the tapestry of life that we cannot discern while we’re living through the chaos. Only later – sometimes long after the fact – can we see the larger design.

And that message remains just as comforting eighty years later, in today’s unsettled and sometimes unnerving world.

Ghost story, love story, and one of the earliest paranormal romances of the modern era, Tryst is a book which speaks to readers of all ages with its gentle and reassuring philosophy that life has a pattern and true love cannot be denied.

Leigh Michaels

CHAPTER ONE

SABRINA had never picked a lock in her life, but it was done every day in books. She tiptoed along the carpeted upper passage and whisked round the corner to the second flight of stairs leading to the top floor of the house. Gripped tightly in one hand she carried her burglar tools—nail-scissors with curved points, a button-hook, and some wire hairpins stolen from Aunt Effie’s dressing-table.

She climbed the stairs stealthily, step by step, and the fine old oak never creaked once under her scant ninety pounds. Sabrina at seventeen had lost her baby fat, but had not yet begun, as Aunt Effie was fond of remarking, to fill out.

At the top of the stairs she stopped to listen, bending perilously double over the banisters. Not a sound from below. They would think she was reading in her room, which was only natural because it was raining. She was free, reasonably so, till tea time. With a long-drawn breath she faced the locked door, dropped to her knees in front of the keyhole, and set to work.

She bent the hairpins in various ways, patiently. She tried the button-hook from all angles. Then she tried both hairpin and button-hook together. Nothing happened at all, and the small scraping noises she made seemed to reverberate through the tranquil silence of the house. Just as she was about to give up, the hairpin caught and lodged. She exerted cautious pressure with the button-hook. Something gave. Something clicked. She had done it. The lock had turned.

She knelt there, staring at the door, wide-eyed and shaken. The first thing that occurred to her was that now she could never get it locked again. And then she didn’t care, for the knob had turned easily under her hand, and the door moved two inches inward. The crack went on widening before her fascinated gaze until, still kneeling, she beheld the forbidden room. With a quick glance be hind her at the empty stairs, she snatched up her tools and got to her feet—stepped across the threshold swiftly and closed the door, shutting herself inside.

* * * * * * * *

THE DAY THEY HAD ARRIVED to take possession of the house, a month ago at the end of March, Sabrina on her early explorations had run up the last flight of stairs because there was that closed door at the top and she naturally wondered what was behind it. To her surprise, when she laid her hand on the knob the door would not open. But they had taken the house—3 reception rooms, 9 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, electric light, company’s gas and water, garage—furnished, by the year.

A locked room. How mysterious. Sabrina at once tried to see through the keyhole, but Aunt Effie called to her from below and told her to come away. There was something in the lease about their not having the use of that room, she said.

Sabrina was asking excited questions over the banisters such as Why not, and What was in it, and Whose room was it, when she became aware of the housekeeper—a dour middle-aged woman who went with the house, like the furniture, when you let it—standing at the bottom of the stairs looking up at her. Somehow at sight of the woman’s still, watchful face the questions died on Sabrina’s lips and she came back down the stairs, one foot slowly at a time, towards where Mrs. Pilton stood. And as she reached the bottom—

“That room is kept locked when he’s not at home,” said Mrs. Pilton in her quiet country voice, and she turned without smiling and went away down the back stairs toward the kitchen. She held herself erect and walked well, a self-respecting woman. More like a governess than a housekeeper, thought Sabrina, making you feel in the wrong when you had done whatever it was quite innocently. With a long backward look up the stairs, she returned to her own room midway of the passage, to unpack.

After that, Sabrina had gone round calling it the Bluebeard Chamber until Father heard and said Nonsense, and explained irritably that the locked room merely belonged to one of the sons who was not available to clear out his possessions from the cupboards and drawers and empty the place for the use of a tenant. Father pointed out that they didn’t need the room, just the three of them. Aunt Effie said Mercy, no, the house was too big anyhow. And they both regarded the subject as closed.

Father had retired that winter from his professorship in London, in order to write a book about prehistoric England and those of its highly controversial inhabitants who were responsible for the long barrows, and the mysterious half-obliterated hilltop camps, and the stone circles. The Mendip Hills and surrounding country abound in barrows and stones and ancient mines and encampments, and Father’s intention was to live amongst them while he wrote, making excursions by car to neighboring sites when he felt like it, or when the weather was particularly fine, or his desk work palled, or his womenfolk obtruded themselves too much on his notice. Having been without a wife ever since Sabrina was born, Father was not well broken in as regards womenfolk. Aunt Effie and Sabrina bored him, and kept out of his way as much as possible, which only spoilt him and made him the more incompetent to deal with such domestic situations as arose from time to time. But Aunt Effie, who had never been married, believed that all men were pretty much alike. Unless, of course, they were Rakes, she would add. Father wasn’t a Rake.

Sabrina’s ideas of life were necessarily, in these circumstances, rather constricted, and her experience, compared to that of most girls of her enlightened generation, was calamitously small. Once she had been sent to a fashionable school in Sussex; a very good school, which Aunt Effie chose by an obscure mental process similar to flipping a coin. The fees were high, the personnel prepossessing, the location healthful and picturesque, and the daily régime quite the thing in girls’ schools.

To Sabrina, an only child accustomed either to solitude or to adult society, it was a captivity full of horror. She had to sleep in a room with five other narrow, spartan beds in it, and wash at one of a row of six basins and jugs exactly alike—baths twice a week. The room was lighted after dark by two electric bulbs in white glass shades hung high from the ceiling. She ate at a table for ten among forty-nine other girls. The puddings were heavy, the vegetables were watery, and the lamb was always mutton. In the dining-room the same white light beat down nakedly from above. The pitiless ventilation came from open windows. Strenuous exercise was as inevitable daily as mathematics. Sweets, even if brought from home, were collected by the matron and doled out again on Sundays. Letter-writing was scheduled for two days a week; on other days you had to ask permission to write a letter. If you brought books back with you from holidays at home, they had to be submitted to the Principal. Bells rang all the time, and each one meant you had to stop what you were doing and begin to do something else.

Sensitive, self-contained, old for her years, Sabrina found the detailed supervision of her days wholly fantastic, and considered a good deal of it sheer busybodying on the part of the mistresses. For years at home she had read anything she chose from a large and miscellaneous family library. For years at home it had been assumed that she understood the rudiments of personal hygiene and diet—as for instance, if she ate too many chocolates and then was uncomfortable, it was acknowledged to be her own fault. She was dosed and possibly put to bed, but no one dreamed of confiscating the box. Half the items of the school routine were to her indignities, and most of the others bored her.

Squabbles between sisters, gigglings over boy-friends, half-baked harangues about marriage and careers, passionate cinema crushes—all the normal, cheerful chatter of the dormitory and recreation hours, left her stranded and bewildered, with nothing to contribute. She had no ambition to be a novelist or an actress or an aviatrix or a doctor. She hadn’t a secret love affair. She had nothing to boast of, nothing to conceal, nothing to confide. Most of the girls ignored her after a while, and a few of them actively disliked her for a prig or a dolt.

She could not fit in, she did everything out of turn, she was stricken dumb in the classrooms, and failed miserably at games. Every now and then she cried herself sick and begged to go home. She was the problem-child for all time of that very sane and unimaginative school.

Eventually Aunt Effie came and had a mutually confusing interview with the headmistress, who seemed unable to comprehend that Sabrina was only shy, and used to being by herself, and hated gongs, and public ablutions and prayers, and most of all hated competitive games. Then she took Sabrina away—when a whole new term had just been paid for, too—and there was another governess. But governesses, said Aunt Effie, were not what they had been in her day.

The governess was let go when they came to Nuns Farthing, as it would soon be Easter anyhow, and time for a holiday. They had never lived in the country before, because Father needed to be near the British Museum Reading-Room and the University, but in her youth Aunt Effie had been a fervid gardener, and Sabrina was hoping to own a kitten. She did not want a dog, on account of Aunt Effie’s Bella, a jealous barrel-shaped fox terrier who got older and crosser and fatter each year, and who in Aunt Effie’s eyes could do no wrong.

It was typical of the way Father did things that neither Aunt Effie nor Sabrina had seen the house before they arrived from London prepared to stay in it for an indefinite period of time.

“I have taken a house in the Mendip Hills,” said Father one night in London at the end of dinner. “Not far from Dolebury Camp,” he added, as though that explained everything.

“To live in?” exclaimed Aunt Effie, pardonably surprised, for she had had absolutely no warning.

Father said, though it was really beneath him, that he had no intention of dying in it.

“Well, really, Alan, you might have told me! That is, I’d like to have known!” Aunt Effie remonstrated.

Father looked at her patiently over his spectacles and pointed out with great reasonableness that she knew now.

“Has it got a garden?” she demanded at once.

Father said Yes, he believed things grew.

“And has it got bathrooms?” persisted Aunt Effie in the order of their importance.

Father set down his after-dinner coffee cup with a small irritable clink.

“My dear Effie,” he said, for she was after all his own sister, “there is no reason for you to suppose that I would take a lease on Dolebury Camp itself for a home. The house has three bathrooms, and is otherwise adequately furnished. It is called Nuns Farthing. And don’t ask me why,” he continued hastily as both their mouths came open, “because I don’t know. Wells is the nearest town of any size. I shall be able to use the museum there.”

He rose then, and left them, disappearing behind the closed door of his den.

“Men!” said Aunt Effie hopelessly, to the astonished air.

Sabrina was delighted, and began at once to pack.

They arrived at Nuns Farthing by motor with their hand luggage, on a late afternoon in March, with a damp, chilly wind blowing off the Hills.

They had come down the Bath Road from London, with luncheon at Marlborough, and Sabrina had not been so far afield since she was a small child. She had gone a little giddy with a mounting rapture of escape, and freedom, and adventure, brought on by a countryside pregnant with spring and by her own secret conviction that now at last, at last, she was going to live happily forever after. One could never feel sure of that in London, somehow. But from now on she would wake up every morning in the country—in a house, instead of a flat—with a garden outside—with the Hills beyond— with spring coming on. No school. No maimed men singing in the gutters, and hopeless pavement artists with heart-breaking little dogs doing tricks for pennies. No terrifying newspaper contents-bills wherever you looked. No aeroplanes overhead and no nerve-racking traffic underfoot. Nothing but peace and stillness and all this greenness....

When the little car—driven by Aunt Effie, with Sabrina in the rumble seat so that Bella could make her self comfortable in front between Father’s feet—turned into the prim, dreaming streets of the Bath suburbs, Sabrina was still excited, still gazing eagerly to right and left, though her eyes had begun to water with the cold and her cheeks were feverish with windburn. She did not mind sitting outside under a rug when the hood was up, because you could see more, even while the wind tangled your upper eyelashes with your lower ones and whipped your hair into wisps and made your ears ache. You hadn’t got to listen to people out there, and could think your own thoughts. In her lap under the rug was a book about the Bath Road and coaching days and highwaymen and Beau Nash. She knew it almost by heart, so it didn’t matter that she hadn’t been able to open it comfortably for reference along the way. The dark tower of the Abbey rose serene and old against the pale March sky—and not having been inside she didn’t know how bleak and yet cluttered was its interior, with all those white monuments and tablets.

It was too early for tea, but they stopped at a garage for petrol and when they drove on again she glimpsed the row of Roman Emperors round the top of the Baths, and the place where Bath Oliver biscuits are made—and was amused for several miles because of a sign outside the latter which offered broken bits at a reduced rate per pound.

By that time the Hills began—not bleak and stony as they would have to be round Dolebury, but starred with tree clusters; dipping, rolling, heaving, delicious land, all turning a shy, incredible green. As the road dropped down exquisitely into Wells, the feeling in the pit of Sabrina’s stomach had nothing to do with the tired springs of the little car, or with cold, or tea time. She felt all the time now as though one of Selfridge’s lifts had plunged downward beneath her, but it was a sensation of sheer excitement and joy.

This was a day she had been coming towards all her life. It would bring the fulfillment of some tremendous, half-dreamed desire. Ugliness and vague fears and unaccountable uncertainty had been left behind, and just ahead, at the end of this day’s journey, some still inconceivable enchantment was waiting in the house called Nuns Farthing. I’m coming home, I’m coming home, she told herself over and over again, and had to let it go at that.

Father was chilly and wanted his tea, so they stopped at the Swan in Wells, and went up a flight of carpeted stairs to sit at a table in a window which overlooked the lawn in front of the cathedral. It was a good tea, with strawberry jam and very superior cake, but Sabrina was feeling too odd inside to appreciate it.

“You haven’t eaten anything all day,” Aunt Effie complained, munching brown bread-and-butter. “At breakfast you were too excited about starting. I’m always a little excited myself about starting somewhere—though it’s much worse when one’s catching a train, I always think. But we’re nearly there now, so you ought to be able to eat something!”

Nearly there. Sabrina rested her eyes on the cathedral beyond its greening lawn—how motionless it is, she thought—and wondered at the tingling happiness which sang in her veins.

“Look, Sabrina, chocolate cake!” Aunt Effie urged her. “There’s all that unpacking and settling in to be done before dinner time—Alan, don’t you think she ought to eat a piece of this lovely chocolate cake?”

But Father’s mind was on Wookey Hole, which lay beside the road still ahead of them, northward, along the western rim of the Hills. Prehistoric man had refuged there from Mediterranean invaders. Bones of the mammoth and the bison and the reindeer, to say nothing of the urus, had been found in the caves. There was a museum. Father adored museums. “I supposed it would be foolish to stop there today, just for a swift look round,” he said wistfully. Aunt Effie said that it would, and filled his cup for the third time.

Sabrina sat quietly between them, her cheeks aflame from the wind, trying not to choke on the chocolate cake, which was dry and tasteless in her throat. She was not in a hurry—she knew no agonizing need to press on. Whatever it was had been waiting for her a long time, and would still be there when she came. And with this half-formed thought of it, another wave of dizzying sensation surged through her, so that she laid down the cake and fastened her eyes on the cathedral’s twin towers for steadiness.

“Well, let’s be getting on,” said Aunt Effie at last, brushing crumbs out of her tweeded lap. “We’ve got all summer to see Wells, goodness knows.”

It was not a lovely house, at Sabrina’s first sight of it, standing gaunt and gray against a barren hillside in the chill early twilight of that March day. Nothing much had been done about the garden, though a few bulbs seemed to be coming up. It was hardly late enough for lights, and the many casement windows watched them blankly as they came round the curve of the drive.

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