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By Douglas Clegg


Chapter One

Stet Fortuna Domus.

It was the carving above the keystone of the house: May the House's Fortune Stand.

The old man had stolen that phrase from another Harrow, but it fit this place. At least it fit his wishes for his Harrow.

A telling moment: when I was six years old and on one of my infrequent but wonderful stays at my grandfather's estate, he told me that there were three things to watch for in the world.

While I could not—ten minutes later—remember a single one, what I remember now is the warmth of his hand, the musty smell of the ill-fitting suit that must've lived most of the year within a mothballed closet, and the way he could not stop looking at me as if I were the most important child in the world even with my lies and games and pouts and stolen gingerbread men from the kitchen. It was the only time I felt this in my childhood.

I never forgot that moment.

Even now, I can't judge him beyond knowing that my grandfather loved me and wanted all of this for me. It was the house. What the house held. I would never call a work of architecture evil; nor would I suggest that a house could be anything but a benign presence; it is always the human element that corrodes the stones and the wood and the brick and the foundation. It is the human heart that bends the floors and burns the rooms and imbues the structure with the spirit of error and false remembrance.

Imagine this house, this estate, this property: the acreage, the river, the trees, the gardens, the entire world captured within a home.

It sits on a slope, surrounded by woods; beyond the house, a village, and beyond the gently sloping hills and the woods and the village, the Hudson River. It was built over many years, unfinished in some respects even after my grandfather's death. All anyone really knew of the property was what they'd heard of the rumors and the gossip and the newspaper accounts now and then of an eccentric collector living up the Hudson.

The house had a name, and as with everything that possesses a name, it possessed a personality, as well.

Rumor had it that treasure was buried within its walls; rumor had it that screams had come from it more than once; rumor had it that a madman had built it for his own tomb; rumor had it that no one willingly remained overnight in the house; and rumor had it that a child could still be heard keening from within on an October night.

The year was 1926 when I arrived at Harrow and claimed my birthright.

My name is Esteban, and lest you think I'm from some fascinating heritage, I will tell you what I knew of my parents. My father was from solid New England stock that could trace its line right back to Cornwall and what was not English was French, from my grandmother's side; my mother, whose maiden name was Juliet Chambers, similarly was from an English-Irish-Germanic background.

Esteban, they said, came from a promise my mother said she had made to someone at my birth—a midwife, my mother told me—who had rushed to her side when the carriage she'd been riding in overturned and nearly killed her.

The midwife delivered the baby—which was, of course, me—and asked my mother to name it Esteban, for a saint, which was enough of an aristocratic sounding name that my father begrudgingly allowed it.

My mother told me that without this mysterious woman, I would never have burst into the world with all my limbs attached, nor would she have lived beyond my first cry. Esteban sounded romantic to her ears, and seemed a very suitable and exotic name for someone who had the dark hair that neither parent possessed, although a maternal great-grandmother—who had been Irish had those looks as well.

My mother often told me that she wanted to name me Zebedeiah, and given that as an alternative, I was more than happy to be known as Esteban. My father apparently wanted to anglicize the name to Steven, but fate intervened: other children could not pronounce "Esteban," so, since the age of four or so, I'd been briefly known simply as Easton, another unusual name but falling on the Anglo-Saxon side of the chain for my father. I mispronounced the name with my childhood lisp as "Ethan," and when my father got hold of that name he ran as far as he could with it. It was to become official. It was New England; it was Old England; it was acceptable to him, although my mother was noticeably irked, and would occasionally, right up until her death, call me Esteban now and again.

Thus, by third grade I finally had a name with which everyone (but my mother) felt comfortable, and one that didn't raise the specter of some family scandal purely by its foreignness to Bostonians.

But Esteban has been my secret, true name, so you must know it and remember it.

So, Ethan I became.

My young life was uneventful save for my naming.

My mother, since the accident that had precipitated my birth, had been sickly much of her life. She claimed a weak heart, and her many medications were famous among us: she could not leave her bed without a spoon of some remedy; she could not kiss my father good morning without some wee dram of medical potion to get her heart to its normal capacity; and she often spent months at Spas in Saratoga and across the sea—leaving me with a nanny and my father, neither of whom I had particular fondness for. Once, I saw her laugh and nearly run across the rocky shoreline, but I felt immediately afterward that I must have dreamed this, for I never saw this burst of energy again. I joked with her that her doctor was her real family, and I learned quickly never to make that kind of insensitive joke again.

But mostly I remember her remaining in the shuttered room of Balmoral, the house along the Cape that my father inherited after his mother had died. I knew little of the world other than of Boston and Cape Cod and the Hudson Valley and all the intermediate destinations, until I took a trip to New York City when I was nineteen; then, I wanted to be in no other place in the world than that exciting citadel to ambition, power, and promise. Boston began to seem small and provincial to me.

After my mother died, my father disinherited me over a minor skirmish regarding what he felt, as a son, I should be doing with my life; he felt I should be playing politics and amassing a fortune by taking advantage of "deals" and "opportunities" and "the way the world works for men" and such. I felt I should be pursuing my dreams and ambitions. I went to live in New York, and my life as an adult began.

But I had only seen Harrow in brief spurts of summer vacations or spring weekends. It was the house my grandfather owned and lived in along the Hudson River; I remembered it in flashes and in shadows of thought, of a few moments as a child when my father and I had gone there on short and—as far as my father was concerned—unpleasant visits.

I remember my grandfather intensely.

I remember wanting to be there in my dreams.

To me, it had seemed like a magical place, a palace of wonder and confusion.

To me, Harrow was Mystery.

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