Ten Days at Federal Hill: Chapter One

My friend Carolyn asked when I will be publishing (I use that term loosely) my sequel to Three Against the Dark. (If you wonder what that book is, look to the right, on the side bar of my blog. It's a children's book I published years ago. It's available to read on Kindle from Amazon.)

I confessed to Carolyn that I was halfway through the sequel, and I'd become lazy about finishing it. I have 19 chapters written. What am I waiting for? Well ... it's been long enough that I'd have to reread those chapters before I can proceed, and who wants to reread all that? Meh.

So here is "Chapter One: The Cousins." I'm not bothering with Amazon and digital formatting this time. I simply want to get it finished and out there for a handful of children to enjoy before they're too old to enjoy it! (Sorry, guys. I really am!)

A few points of business: Federal Hill is a real home in Virginia. The family who live there in the story is very loosely based on my real cousins. My memory of the actual house is fuzzy, and I've adjusted house, land, people, and names to suit my writing needs. The plot is my own and picks up very much where Three Against the Dark left off. Without further ado ...

Ten Days at Federal Hill by M.K. Christiansen

Chapter One: The Cousins

The Christopher family stopped at their cousins’ house in Virginia at the end of their summer vacation in Philadelphia. Their cousins lived deep in the rolling rural landscape of the Piedmont near Lynchburg. Federal Hill was a very old home on two hundred acres of forest and cattle pasture. Mr. Christopher’s brother Robert was caretaker of the historical property, owned by only two families since the house was built in 1782. Robert and Velma Christopher had seven children, five boys and two girls. The two oldest, college boys, were home for the summer. Robert Christopher was a salesman for a large book publisher and traveled much of the time. Velma, a short, lively woman, managed her high-spirited children with a loose hand and lots of yelling. The children spent most of their time outdoors, getting into and out of mischief without alarming their mother. It was a happy family. In addition, old grandmother Christopher lived with them. She sat quietly knitting in the kitchen rocking chair with two dogs at her feet.

Federal Hill, a white clapboard two-and-a-half-story home, was built by a neighbor and friend of Thomas Jefferson. Broad front steps led to double doors that opened into a wide foyer and then into a formal assembly room. This main reception room was off-limits to the children. Its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were heavy with ancient, dusty first-editions. An imposing brick fireplace and massive black mantel dominated the far wall, and above this hung a large oil painting of a small mahogany table with a document stretched across it and two men bending over it, quill pens in hand. The actual table itself, in its historical spot against the left wall, was a priceless piece of colonial history. The document was an early copy of the Virginia Plan. The two men were James Madison and Edmund Randolph, governor of the state in 1787. The property owners were quite insistent that none of the Christophers’ rowdy children should touch the table, the fireplace, or the books in the assembly room. They could not walk on the carpet, and a swag of fancy rope draped across the open doorway attempted to prevent them. So of course they came at night after their mother had gone wearily to bed and their grandmother was nodding in her rocking chair. They played penny poker on the rug in front of the fireplace and told ghost stories about people who’d died in the house.

Several people had died in the house: a young mother and her baby in childbirth, several other children from smallpox, a father drowned in a storm, a worker fell from the roof, and another small child was lost in the woods and never found. Federal Hill had many secrets. The older Christopher children told the younger ones that a secret passage in that very room held the bones of a runaway slave, and that a long-unused tunnel lay beneath the house. After the stories were finished the boys tiptoed up the sweeping steps to their rooms above, and the girls crept nervously past their parents’ room on the first floor to a small addition, a nursery, on the end of the house. A funny little flight of steps led to it. The girls, Frances and Julia, avoided the third step, which creaked.

At the other end of the house was the cavernous kitchen. When the Christophers arrived for their visit, Aunt Velma was making a huge pot of chicken and dumplings on the gas stove. Steam rose to the high ceiling and the aroma was delicious. Grandmother Julia slowly knitted a scarf. Cecil, Carla, and Connie Christopher bounded up the stone steps into the kitchen. The girls ran to give their aunt a hug.

“Hi, gang! Where are the parental units?” she laughed, and her laugh seemed to bounce and sparkle in the room.

“Hey, Velma,” said Sally Christopher. “How’re you doing?” The two women hugged, and Sally leaned over the pot of dumplings. “Mmmmm. Smells divine!”

“This is supper,” Velma replied, smiling. “And biscuits. You want some tea?”

Daniel Christopher lugged suitcases into the kitchen. The three children stood awkwardly around, wondering where the fun was.

“The kids are outside,” Aunt Velma told them. “I think they’re swimming.”

“Swimming?” Cecil asked.

“In the cattle pond. Back behind the garden in the pasture.” Aunt Velma gave the chicken a last stir and covered it. “You’ll hear the kids screaming.”

They looked at their mother. “Go on!” she said, and they ran out the door.

Cecil shot ahead and disappeared into the woods. Carla rounded the corner of the house. The back yard was no yard at all. It was an acre of boxwood hedges in a giant maze. The bushes were rounded and bulging and some were covered in vines. But Carla could tell it had once been a tailored, formal garden. Now weed trees and tall grasses grew among the boxwoods. In the center a small white statue of a woman stood erect.

“Connie, come look!” Carla said. They wound their way around the lines of shrubs. The scent of the boxwoods surrounded them, and some towered over their heads. Carla made her way to the statue.

“Ugh! These bushes stink!” Connie said. She stopped and held her stomach. “I don’t feel so good.”

“Probably carsick,” Carla murmured. She’d reached the lady statue and placed her hand on the woman’s head. It was quite smooth.

“I think it’s marble,” she said and turned to her sister. But Connie was stumbling back toward the house. “Connie?” Connie went up the kitchen steps. Carla heard the door slam. The garden was absolutely still as only a hot summer day can be. Lofty oaks and pines reached far overhead around the house, but the afternoon sun shone hot on the boxwoods. The statue’s stone was warm.

Carla traced her finger down the woman’s arms and then she meandered through the garden. Most of the box bushes were only as tall as her waist or her shoulders, but some portions of the garden enclosed her in walls of aromatic green. In one corner a small stool sat in a band of sunshine. “Perfect!” whispered Carla to herself. She sat on the stool, turned her face to the sun, and then reached into her pocket for a folded piece of paper. It was a letter. It read:

“Dear Carla,

When you are missing me and missing Candleford House, close your eyes and pretend your feet are in the stream in the back yard, and remember the smell of the boxwoods in the maze. I will make cake and ice cream the next time you visit. The children miss you. Please come when you can.

Love,

Lucie”

“P.S. Celeste says hello. She is nearly done growing and is almost as tall as I am. She misses you.”

Carla folded the letter carefully. She missed her friend Lucie and all the children who lived in her house – children the Christopher siblings had rescued from a horrible fate. She missed Celeste most of all, the little girl who was brave enough to escape her dangerous life and help other children do the same. Carla closed her eyes and breathed in the pungent aroma of these boxwoods and longed for Candleford House so much it hurt. The bees buzzed in the wildflowers. Faintly she heard the screams and squeals of her cousins splashing and diving in the pond.

Then a few voices grew louder, closer. A girl’s voice squealed in glee and victory. It was Carla’s older cousin, Frances, who was 13. She came tearing through the boxwoods with a pair of goggles in her hand.

“Frances! Give ‘em back!” And an older boy cousin raced passed also, Ben, who rode horses.

“These are mine!” Frances yelled back at him, and she leaped up the kitchen stairs and into the house. Moments later another boy, Abe, who was a bit younger than Carla, followed them, gasping for air.

“No, they’re mine!” he wheezed to nobody in particular.

“Hi, Abe,” Carla said.

“Oh, hi, Carla. Didn’t know you were here.”

“Of course I’m here. Didn’t you see Cecil?”

“Yeah. He’s really muddy. Why didn’t he bring a bathing suit?”

“Mom’s gonna kill him,” Carla noted, and together they walked toward the house.

The kitchen was a hive of activity. The chicken was steaming. The dogs were barking. Frances and Ben fought over the goggles. Aunt Velma stirred a pot of sassafras tea. And Sally Christopher was sitting at the table with Connie in her lap, who looked positively green. Connie held her side.

“Is she carsick, Mom?” Carla asked.

Mrs. Christopher stroked Connie’s forehead.

“I don’t think so. This is a real stomach ache.”

Connie moaned. “Uh uh.” She shook her head. “Over here, on the side.” She winced in pain. “I feel like I’m gonna throw up.”

“Connie, get a bowl from your Aunt Velma.”

A bowl was found, and Connie continued to moan.

Aunt Velma wiped her hands on her apron and sat at the large family table across from her sister-in-law. “I don’t know, Sally, but I’m wondering if it’s her appendix.” Connie’s mother looked at her in alarm. “She has the symptoms. Teddy had it two years ago.”

“I’d forgotten.” Mrs. Christopher stared at her youngest child. “Carla, go find Daddy. He’s upstairs.”

“Yes, ma’am,” she replied, and started across the kitchen, suddenly realizing she had no idea where to go.” “Um … but ….” She looked at Abe. “Where’s upstairs?”

“C’mon,” he said. And they jumped up three stone steps into an enormous room.

Carla stopped and looked up. The ceiling was far overhead, like a church ceiling. Towering windows lined two walls on her right and left. Chair rails and moldings and crenelated moldings ran around the walls, and every window and door was ornate with trim and medallions.

“Wow,” she whispered.

Abe stopped too. “Oh. Yeah. This is the dining room, but we call it the parlor. We always eat in the kitchen.”

The family had put two couches, end tables, a television set, a card table for jigsaw puzzles, a recliner, and several lamps around the room. Still, the furniture was dwarfed by its dimensions.

They dashed through another door into a large foyer. To the left were double front doors with full-sized windows on either side. The foyer was bigger than most normal rooms, and as Carla gazed around her Abe turned up the stairs.

Carla followed him but kept looking overhead. The stairs rose along one wall, stopped at a landing, and turned up another wall. On the second floor, hallways seemed to go in all directions. Under a window on the front of the house, above the front doors, a little girl sat in a window seat reading. She looked up at Carla and smiled. It was her cousin Julia. Julia never did what the other children did, and she was always quiet. Their eyes met and for a second Julia seemed as if she would say something. Then she looked back at her book.

“Dad!” Carla called. “Where are you?”

“He’s this way,” Abe said, and turned to a room in the back of the house.

Daniel Christopher hurried at the sound of his daughter’s voice because Carla rarely yelled. Within minutes he reached the kitchen, examined his youngest child, bustled mother and daughter into the car, hurried back for some suitcases, and spoke with Velma.

“We need to get Connie to the hospital,” he said.

“Of course. Just leave the other two with us. They’ll be fine.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yes! Get going. You can call and let us know what’s happening.”

And they were gone. Carla didn’t know it then, as she watched the dust fly and settle behind the family car racing down the long, curved drive, but she and Cecil would spend ten days at Federal Hill with their cousins, ten of the most exciting days of their lives.

(To read chapter 2, click here.)

[This story is copyrighted by the author, M.K. Christiansen.]