Vermont Valentine

“Little jaunts like Antietam kind of take it out of a man. Hiram came home, bought up as many acres of maples as he could and just hunkered down. I guess he figured he’d seen as much of the outside world as he needed.”

“So you come by it honestly,” she commented, straying to the edge of the road to brush her fingers over the smooth, bright trunk of a birch.

“I suppose. In every generation there’s been a Trask who keeps to himself.”

“And in every generation has there been a Trask who’s known as the town grump?”

His lips twitched. “Maybe.”

“Then I guess you fit right in. So how do you know so much about them?”

“We’ve got all their journals in the main house. I went through them the year I was sixteen.”

“Summer reading project?”

He shrugged. “I thought I should know more about where I came from.”

She could imagine them coming to life on pages covered in painstaking copperplate. Not distant ancestors but sons and brothers, fathers and uncles, real men with real desires and torments. Somehow, it didn’t seem stifling the way her family’s dusty history did. It felt warm, grounded. Maybe it was part of what made Jacob seem so sure of who he was. “So was the land already in sugar maples when Hiram bought the place?”

“Some. He bought sections of two or three different sugarbushes and tied them all together with open land that he planted himself. He kind of made a life’s work of it.”

She could imagine him, coming back from chaos and carnage to patiently build an ordered retreat from the world, a place of safety and security, a place where knowledge and planning could take the place of luck and survival.

“The trees look like they were laid out by someone who knew what he was doing.”

“Hiram had a whole journal just on maple-farming techniques. Pages of it. He read everything he could get his hands on. Sent his son, Ethan, to school for it.”

“The one who built your house?”

“No, that was his brother, Isaac, who stayed on the farm.”

“By choice or because he had to?”

“A little of both. Education wasn’t cheap back then but his journals sound like he was happiest keeping to himself. He courted a woman for years but she wound up marrying a guy from Boston. Didn’t like the idea of living out in the middle of nowhere, I guess.”

“I imagine it’s an acquired taste,” Celie agreed.

He turned to look at her and his deep-blue gaze jolted her system. “I don’t know that you can acquire the ability to be happy in yourself. You’ve either got it or you don’t.” They rounded a curve and started into a long avenue of oak trees that led to Jacob’s home.

And Celie caught her breath.

She’d expected a small clapboard farmhouse, not this three story Victorian edifice, all gables and gingerbread and carved pillars and railings. The paint job alone was a work of art, a half dozen tones of umber and green and gold that both stood out and melded with the landscape around it. “My God, he built this himself?”

Jacob nodded. “It took him eight years, working on it every minute he wasn’t in the sugarbush. He built it for the woman he hoped would be his wife. She was from Montpelier.” They started down the tree-lined drive.

Celie’s brow furrowed. “Montpelier? That was a long way to go back then. How did they meet?”

“She came to a maple-sugar-on-snow party at the farm. Isaac fell for her hard. Sarah Jane Embree. I think she was fifteen, he was twenty-four. Her father was a lawyer, big in the Montpelier social set.”

The oaks rose to either side, the bare branches curving over their heads. In summer, she thought, they would make a full canopy, leafy-green and glorious. “How could he have courted her? I’d think the father would have kept a farmer as far away from his daughter as possible.”

“Don’t forget, though, Isaac had half of a very prosperous farm coming to him. Embree hedged his bets. He told Isaac he could court Sarah Jane with the intention of marriage, but that her husband had to be able to keep her in the style she deserved as an Embree. Isaac underlined that part in his journal. The style she deserved. The best of everything.”

“Including a mansion.”

Jacob nodded. “That didn’t stop Isaac, though. He just put his head down and started building. Spent every penny he had on materials—marble sinks, crystal door knobs, Tiffany stained-glass windows. He even sold off some of his part of the sugarbush to finance it. He figured if he just worked hard enough, just persisted, he’d win her hand.”

“It didn’t work, though.”

“No. He had it just about finished by 1906—mahogany furniture, running water, even electrical power from a generator out back. She’d gotten engaged by then to her brother’s school friend. No way a house in the woods could compete with Beacon Hill. I still have the ring he bought her.”

“It must have shattered him,” Celie murmured, looking up at the house, lonely even in its splendor.

“He never got over it. Never looked at another woman.”

“She didn’t care for him at all, did she?”

Jacob shook his head. “Isaac thought they had an understanding. The Embrees were just hedging their bets. I tracked down their papers the summer I read the journals. Edwin didn’t even mention Isaac. Sarah Jane’s had a few entries, mostly about how he was always pestering her with plans for the house when all she cared about was the social scene. I don’t think she ever even saw the place.”

“It was a quest. Slay the dragon and you get the maiden.”

“Kind of like that. But when he completed his task, the maiden was gone. Not even his family knew what he was building out here. He kept it a secret.”

“He was obsessed.”

“He was in love,” Jacob said simply.

It seemed unbearably sad to her. “She wasn’t for him.”

“Didn’t matter. He really believed if he just worked hard enough, offered her enough, he could win her.”

“But a house can’t do that. Things can’t do that. All it takes is the right person, if they really love you.” She glanced at Jacob. And she felt a sudden dizziness, as though the world had tilted on its axis. Their gazes met and tangled and then his eyes were all she could see, endlessly blue, endlessly deep, like pools she might fall into, sinking forever into him.

A furious barking broke the spell. With a shake of her head, Celie turned to see Murphy barreling toward them down the aisle of trees. She fell upon him in relief, the strange moment ended. “Who’s this? Who’s this? Who’s this doggie?” she asked, ruffling his neck fur while he leapt around her deliriously.

“Down, Murph,” Jacob said and Murphy subsided, tail wagging so furiously his whole body shook with it.

“Look, Murph, it’s a cookie. I’ve brought you a cookie.” Celie brought the baggie of dog biscuits out of her pocket. “Here’s a cookie for you, here’s a cookie for this good dog.” She held it up. “Do you think if I give it to you your dad will let me look at the inside of the house?”

Murphy barked.

Celie looked at Jacob, laughter in her eyes. “I’d say that’s a yes. What do you say, daddio?”

And he, this generation’s Trask loner, merely nodded.

Isaac Trask had been far more than just a maple-sugar-maker, Celie thought in the glorious entrance hall of the house. He’d had an architect’s sense of design combined with a builder’s meticulousness. The golden oak floors gleamed, the ceilings soared a good ten feet overhead. Sunlight streamed in through the beveled glass oval that lay in the center of the front door.

“My God, this is gorgeous,” she murmured.