The Black Lily Society

The Black Lily Society

The long staircase wound about the corner of the hall like a dragon crouching in a dusky corner, waiting to pounce on the next visitor to the hallowed institution. Its historical significance was an obvious enigma; its creation, its organization was a recognition by the people that they had accomplished something great in the annals of their own history. Busts of illustrious men and ancestors alighted from plinths set about the ends of the stacks as if to predict the next intellectual accomplishment that might emerge from a visitor espying their sacred and secular volumes with enthusiasm and esprit. The Greek Revival style that was the fashion of the day imbued the Victorian atmosphere with a lively optimism that would otherwise be confounded by the class oppression of the late nineteenth-century. A woman scholar entered the stacks searching for the topic – salon. The salon was a term applied to art exhibitions of the 18th and 19thcentury at the French Royal Academy of Fine Arts, but also the elite gatherings of Enlightenment intellectuals hosted by society women. To a modern woman, the salon was the place her mother spent Saturdays getting her hair done with plenty of bleach, hair curlers and dryers. The young woman wore a black and white checked fitted tunic with an Edwardian flare, and her shorts made her look younger and more inexperienced than her 29 years. Her eyes scanned the book titles and authors, ingesting centuries of cultural expression in a brief span of several seconds. Magdalena, the famous Polish salon hostess. Her letters were there preserved for all who cared to submerge themselves back into the world of the early nineteenth-century Berlin salon hostess, a pre-emancipation intellectual who fell in love with a vibrant blonde aristocrat, who broke her heart. The politics of race and class skirted all of the young woman’s research like a veil that obscured her own ignominious history of sexual freedom. Today, however, the young researcher was looking for something more substantial: Napoleonic era jewelry.

After serving as an intern in the nether regions of the library, she had acquired a dialog with the stacks that ended from one end of the long hall to the other. She slipped from the elite reading room modeled after so many sophisticated libraries where patrons read books beneath green glass lamps on broad oak polished tables to the dusty back rooms of the stacks and even up to the attic where her cataloging project engaged her. The nineteenth-century origins of the lyceum as an art gallery, forum for public lectures and reading room encouraged her research and her imagination. Her spine tingled with the anticipation of exploring the past lives of men and women which had been reevaluated, sanitized, and packaged for the consumption of posterity. As she breathed in, the dust filled her nostrils, and she felt a longing pull towards the remote end of the building where, gazing downward, her eye caught the name of Magdalena. All her letters were preserved bound and exposed in their most intimate details. Her desire to become a celebrity had certainly been achieved in her own time, as well as her desire to marry an aristocrat. Though he was not the man she desired and was much younger than her, she still pursued her fantasy and brought the handsome young officer to life in her own life drama, Frederich von Essen. His name, von Essen, now graced all her writings but with the desired aristocratic – von – which signaled the remote status of the lineage of the former landowning nobility.

The modern woman, if we can call her that, because dear reader, she was as much a prisoner of the affectations of her time as a Victorian woman was of her time, decided to trace all references to a certain necklace and tierra, which had been designed for the inner circle of the Napoleon’s court. There were two women at the center of Napoleon’s life, Josephine and Marie Louise. Josephine, who first won the emperor’s heart, had not given her the supreme gift that was a symbol of his devotion. In fact, he declared from the front during his early campaigns in Italy that her letters lacked passion, that she was a middle-aged woman who could not muster enough romantic fire to burn the letter from her that he held in his hand. The other woman, Marie Louise, was at the center of the emperor’s plan to establish a dynasty, and for her, a beautiful young blonde Hapsburg princess, a diamond tierra and necklace had been designed to indicate her new imperial status. She was so proud of these that she continued to display them in her portraits as the Duchess of Parma, long after Napoleon’s demise. (Francois Gerard. Portrait of Marie Louise Empress, 1812). The other woman was Josephine, whom he came to disdain for her inability to bear a successor to the throne and her affairs. She was awarded a beautiful diamond diadem by the Emperor of Russia, Alexander. Though the original gems were displayed in the hallowed public institutions of the Smithsonian Museum and Houston Museum of Natural Science, their copies were disbursed throughout the unknown revolutionary world of rapidly shifting and decaying world of the European aristocracy. Afterall, what grand lady or duchess could resist a copy of either queen’s jewels? The modern woman surmised that if she identified the salon visitors and their more regal guests, she could track the gems through their portraits. And so, with a glint in her eye and pen and pad ready, she began scanning for names.

As she jotted down interesting names such as, Eisenstadt, von Michel, Hohenberg, etc., the commander watched her. Indeed, it would take another 30 years before he could intercept her email traffic and bug her computer. By then the story was over, but the author was just beginning to write, to reflect, to analyze. From the perspective of the 21st century, the researcher was an accomplished professional, but for all her tact and circumspect decorum, the contemporary commander read and misinterpreted. If she had been the target of a plot to uncover the copy of the diamond necklace and tiara, should -he,- and I apply this term with ambiguity, not acquire the role of the male character and consider similar actions against our heroine? It was yet another dilemma to add to the pile of plots and dilemmas arising from her case. To record herself in the 21st century meant to be read but also to inspire copycat actions. For she knew, deep in her heart, that the values she espoused were not those of an enemy who still sought to displace her. Revenge was an odd thing for he could not feel the impulse to revenge against one individual, but must feel it indeed towards all Victorian women, their predecessors and their researchers. However, thirty years previously, our heroine was still blissfully ignorant of such conjectures, excited by the thrill of the hunt, she became lost in the world of fantasy and luxury of the Berlin salon. A certain Michael Hofbrau’s name caught her attention, and she decided to track the name as far as she could. It appears that he did attend the salons and soirees in Berlin and came in contact with said Levin. Upon further research she found that he had married Countess von Rechtstadt and offered her a necklace similar to Napoleon’s empress, Marie Louise’s. Digging deeper into the dustier volumes of correspondence and property, she discovered a portrait of the countess also wearing the necklace; her noble bearing was accentuated by the high mass of dark locks piled upon her head, with two long curls tumbling down either side of her face. Her elegant dress was in the Empire style, suggesting that she had had contact with the French imperial court of Napoleon and sought to emulate its high fashion. Long streams of taffeta ornamented her flowing Grecian style garment. Without the internet, finding the current location of this portrait proved difficult, if not impossible. Our ambitious researcher began searching auction catalogs, starting with the biggest auction houses, Sotheby’s, Christies, Skinner. She began to lose hope, when she spotted the portrait in a Skinner catalog. There she was – the Countess von Rechstadt, but with an inscription from Andrew Marvel’s poem, “To His Coy Mistress” now revealed in a photo taken of the reverse of the frame:

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found;

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song; then worms shall try

That long-preserved virginity,

And your quaint honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust…

The auction caption read: Sold 15 April 1987. In her excitement, the researcher, left her pen and pad in the stacks, and trotted down the spiral staircase into the main hall. She quickly grabbed her coat and backpack from the coat check room and ran outside. In her excitement, she looked for a phone booth, there was none visible on either side of the busy intersection. Damn! She thought. It would take no less than three hours and three bus transfers to get home, and by then their offices would be closed. She walked dejectedly to the bus stop and waited, thinking about the Countess von Rechstadt. The commander followed her tracks, first out into the street, and when he saw her board the bus, he went back to the stacks where she had been working. He picked up her pen and pad and began skimming her scribbled notes for names…He was a security guard employed by the library to ensure that patrons did not take their bags into the stacks, but he was also a member of a secret organization known as the Black Lily Society, known for their distinctive spiked red hair and continental accent. While the everyday humdrum of watching researchers come and go from the library stacks was not what he aspired to devote his career to, the BLS, offered something more, they promised their members powerful high ranking posts in exchange for spying on patrons and uncovering their weaknesses. She was very weak from the perspective of the BLS. Our researcher had many weaknesses. Not only was she a woman, she was not a lawyer, a doctor, a scientist, etc. She had worked as a waitress and a bank teller, before deciding to become a historian. She took courses at the local community college and was highly motivated, too motivated for a former bank teller and waitress, from the perspective of the Friendfop commander, who assumed she was hiding something.

The young researcher named Ginger Frank, Mary Hadalamb or Ellen Lukizov, depending upon the married name she preferred at the moment--you may call her what you like--, boarded her bus, heart thumping in her chest, glared at her watch. She would call the big auction houses tomorrow, find the current location of the painting and ask for more information.

When she made it home-- five years later,-- she opened the door to the cottage. It was a cute Cape Cod style cottage that had been built near the harbor by a sea captain. In the rear of the building, the paint peeling, begged for a complete restoration as a historic landmark. No longer a researcher cataloging references to auction catalogs, Ellen was a museum curator. She spent her weekends traveling to antique shops trying to uncover bargains that matched what she saw in the regional historical societies. The Countess von Rechstadt had all but escaped her memory and her imagination. She discussed ship models which a local guy, who, were he not so knowledgeable on the subject, would have bored her to death. She couldn’t complain though; no one accused her of becoming the life of the party either. Ellen Lukizov frowned at herself in the mirror; two eyes peering back at her, a straight nose and a small mouth. Well, everything was there anyway. The restoration of the seaman’s cottage became her pet project, next to antiquing and visiting and historical museums. She researched the original owner of her cottage only to be heartbroken by the name, William Coffin, a sea captain descended from coffin makers. She planted wisteria in her gardens and walked along the long winding road along to the ocean to Hockey Neck and then Pierson Point. She sat for hours gazing at Macher’s Island with its distinctive twin lighthouses. From her vantage point on the large boulders, she had a magnificent view of the ocean bathed in rosy, pink light. She painted seascapes on wooden boards and placed them for sale in a local cabinetmaker’s shop.

After 5 years the garden never grew; every tulip bulb she planted was a bust and her dream of carpets of flowers along the borders of the backyard never materialized. It was time to think about leaving this haven behind. Then, one day her mind drifted back to the countess. She contacted Spinner’s auction house and started her search again for the diamond necklace and tiara. She found some good leads and decided to start making enquires as a researcher seeking to write a history of Napoleonic era jewelry. After exhausting most of her sources, she had two left. She hesitated before deciding to call the last one; there was something familiar about the name, Allen Rickter. She had known a boy in school with that name and she wondered, could it be the same guy? She picked up the phone and dialed, letting it ring, one, two, three…Someone picked up the phone and said in a shy deep voice, “hello?”

Ellen’s life, such as was read like a script, a script someone was writing. They had begun writing in a dark drafty attic room on a spikey manual typewriter and continued writing into the computer age. From the picturesque setting on her childhood in an antique house along the river banks where she swam, boated and broke her own horse, they kept typing. They could have typed her into NASA, but they did not. They could have typed her into Wall Street, but they did not. They didn’t even have the decency to type her into the gymnastic teams and cheerleading squad she practiced for so diligently. Neither would accept her; she was average in appearance. Ellen’s script writer could only predict failure. They wrote her back into the nineteenth century where she was continually confronted with her own inferiority. Love was out of the question, but her finishing school never ended. There was painting, writing, more painting and more writing. There was dancing, a lot of dancing. Ellen was prolific, such as it was in her eternal finishing school. She never knew whether she was intended as some dashing detective’s first mate, or his first displaced mate; the latter seemed more likely, since as Ellen learned over the decades, her genes also belonged in the nineteenth-century and had completely bypassed the necessities of modern media which required that a woman be flawless to sell products, to sell life. Her boyfriends, her husbands, ‘dicks’ for life, always found their true callings, with true call girls, glamourous models. Were homely women different in the Napoleonic era she wondered? Well, the fashions seemed to prop them up quite literally and suggest that if nothing else about their homely faces, they might give birth to handsome men.

Ellen was struck by the mournful quality of contemporary travelogues of Italy. It seemed natural to her that she should place the 21st century traveler in the context of the past nineteenth-century. After all, the revolutions of the 20th century, including WWII and the refugee crisis, had been just as dramatic for the contemporary scholar as the Risorgimento was for the nineteenth-century British and American traveler to Italy. The women’s travelogues of the 1950s interjected the recent political events of the 20th century –like the execution of Sicilian Mafia criminal and the reaction of his mother -- into their silent creeping account of historic monuments from Ancient Rome, the Renaissance and Baroque periods. This disruption of the chronological progression of time is also a feature of the travelogues of the nineteenth-century by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller, among others. Authors perceived the historicism of Italy in the context of temporal shifts in time in a continual cycle of violence and renewal, that leave behind great monuments in its wake. Ellen soon became aware that her own life and time offer the same opportunity for such leaps. revolving around rise and the defeat of Napoleon’s empire.

Where did Ellen’s journey begin? After graduate school and several museum internships, she worked as a museum curator at the McEwen Historical Museum in harbor town of Painesville, MA for seven years…

Day after day, Ellen stared at the magazine picture tacked to the wall above her desk. It was glazed in pink and purple like the sunsets she watched when she walked to the rocky beaches near Pierson Point. The picture was of a ski resort in Colorado. She had never skied, but I wanted to, and imagined the thrill of gliding down the mountain slope. The picture was just one of many pinned above her desk that illustrated things that she would like to do.

The plane touched down --- again --- this time in Rome; Ellen traveled to Rome for the third time in fifteen years. The new house in Texas with its immaculately landscaped swimming pool was gone, the new baby was gone, and Erik was gone. An unemployed museum curator was no match for a large law firm that represented Erik and his city in divorce court, especially when the city newspaper paid his attorney fees. Ellen’s attorney acted like a slapstick character from a Charlie Chaplin movie, or perhaps the Three Faces of the Three Stooges, and he had trouble arriving to court on time, another subliminal cue for “don’t show up either.”

Since moving to Texas, Ellen had traveled to Europe seven times: Cambridge, Paris, Geneva, Cologne, Helsinki, Florence, Venice. This time she was headed to the International Humanities Research Center in Rome for the second time where she was staying as a scholar in residence. This time was different, so she thought. She arrived as the large sunny Renaissance palazzo at the top of the Janiculum hill. It is nestled among embassies, including the American embassy to the Papal See, a building owned by the IHRC, and the Irish Embassy. But it was also close to historic sites she was researching for a new study on Anglo-Italian authors and artists during the Risorgimento.

Janiculum Hill was the location of a decisive battle between republicans and papal forces. After establishing the short-lived Roman Republic in 1848, the republicans lost the battle on Janiculum Hill to the French forces who restored the papacy in 1849. Margaret Fuller reported on the fighting for the “glorious revolution” in her dispatches from Rome to the New York Tribune. The gateway through which visitor enter, commemorates this historic loss, or victory, depending upon which side you take. The park that extends beyond is beautiful. There energetic tourist finds the Villa Doria Pamphilj perched like a large wedding cake at the very top at the center of a large park. It is surrounded by statues, fountains and orchards, but an iron fence keeps visitors away from the villa itself like barrier between the temporal and the divine.

After receiving a brief orientation at the IHRC, Ellen hurried to her first point of interest, the Capitoline Museum. When Ellen entered for the first time, she became lost among all of the heads of goddesses, all perfectly formed. Venus, Minerva, Juno. But now, she had a new target, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Marble Faun. She ascended the steep stairs to the top of Campidoglio on Capitoline Hill and entered the museum. “Can you tell me where Praxiteles’ Satyr is located,” asked Ellen. “No,” was the reply. She finally found a brochure with a picture of the Capitoline Venus from the rack on the counter. “Where is this?” she asked. “Oh, the other building.” That was all.

“How do I get there?”

“Underground.”

She followed the stairs and hallways to the facing building, the Palazzo Nuovo. She searched each gallery. Here she was greeted by the heads of philosophers and emperors. Labels were scarce, but Socrates’ bust was easily recognizable. Finally, in the final salon, I saw him. He was short, unlike the usual seven-foot tall statues of Greco-Roman gods and athletes. The Hellenistic Dying Gaul was at the center of the room.

Ellen returned to the IHRC triumphant. She had found the pivotal piece after which Hawthorne titled his popular novel, The Marble Faun in 1859. His plot concerns four art students in Rome who are swept up in the recent events of the Risorgimento, though this is only hinted at by the placement of French troops and emphasis on lengthy descriptions of imperial Roman monuments.

Ellen’s fiction began to take shape and form like ghosts from her past seeking to claim their new territory. She evaluated her gender and reevaluated her abilities against the inherent historical weakness of sex, which only in the 20th century claimed equality. She typed a passage into her manuscript: The council of Nine had voted to give her the executrix title for life after she passed the test of nurturing forgery in which an infant had been placed under her guard for ten consecutive terms. The battle of wills that ensued ensured that she was the dominant mother. But her gender was of concern to herself since she knew herself to be inferior and was regarded as such by the council. When she went to university, the octogenarian teaching advanced mathematics droned on into incoherent babble as his hand lost its former verve and loosely scribbled off the end of the chalkboard into the form of a limp dangling puppet suddenly abandoned by its puppeteer.

Richard paced the deck of his yacht still anchored in Naples. He noticed he had missed Ellen’s call and wondered if he should return it. He was interested in moving ahead with their project to collect an exhibition of Napoleonic artifacts and write a catalog. He was certain he could fulfill her every request for this project and bring it to a quick conclusion. Though he had known Ellen when she was 16, the more mature 44-year-old woman frightened him. Granted, she had lived a quiet life since their break-up. If Ellen was incompetent, she didn’t show it, but the feminist literature she had been weaned on began flowing through her veins in unexpected ways. She was no longer naïve, but she was unpredictable. If she could accept her independence and move on, he could wrap things up and move on, but there was one hitch. He knew Ellen was intended to be an estate executor and he had diverted from this peaceful yet lucrative position. In his youth, much like Ellen’s brother, Alyosha, he dreamed of making it big and retiring as a playboy millionaire by age 40. Though the estate was managed by the Black Lily Society Coven, he knew it was her uncle’s estate and that he had willed it to Ellen who was to manage it until she was certain that Uncle Cyrus had no plans of resurrecting and collecting. This could take years even decades since the coven’s members calculated that they were due for a major resurrection at the turn of the 21st century – they might even wait until the 22nd century just to be sure. He knew Cyrus from his army days when the British landowner had tried his hand at diplomacy in Asia. Ellen in his mind was as much of an anachronism as the spiritualists’ congregation she belonged to. Richard was no fool, he knew Ellen was hot on the trail of his uncle Cyrus, and it posed a dilemma for him. He could intercept her before she had the chance to strike, or he could allow her to continue to tag along with him for a few more months. He decided on the latter.

In the UK, Ellen found the old estate of Cyrus Mansfield a crumbling affair tucked away behind a cumbersome knoll that reminded her of a school for especially naughty children. The Elizabethan-Tudor style only reminded her of late nineteenth-century worn out academic buildings in America that campus deans and presidents begged to be torn down so that their academies could join the 21st century. Ellen could only dream of the more pristine neoclassical style that echoed with Jane Austen’s heroines and unruly suitors who glided among the pastel walls and lined with sumptuous Chippendales and austere neoclassical clocks that ticked by the passing romantic time. Once she entered the estate, she was greeted by a manservant named Henry. He was an unprepossessing man with a genteel demeanor and disposition, slender and slightly hunched over, his kind face had lines etched into that suggested an intelligence that went far beyond Ellen’s immediate ken.

Henry explained to Ellen that she had been named in the will as the beneficiary of Sir Mansfield’s collection of illustrious Napoleonic objects, but that the estate executor had been informed that it was Ellen’s wish to oversee a catalog of the collection and offer it for sale at auction. Ellen explained that it was her wish actually to promote interest in the collection by creating a catalog for an exhibition that would promote an exchange among both scholars and buyers and sellers of Napoleonic objects. Of particular interest, she continued, would be the discovery of copies of objects that had been commissioned for admirers of the originals and their more illustrious patrons. A light bulb appeared to turn on in Henry’s slow-moving mind as he raised his eyes upward. “Oh, I see, it is more specialized than I originally thought. Well then, I shall leave it all up to you. Here is a key to room upstairs that houses the collections. You may come and go as you please, and I will retrieve the catalog for you. Do you have accommodations?”

“No,” replied Ellen, hesitantly, unsure whether she would accept his offer.

“Well, you can stay in the village of Mackelshift if you like; it is ten miles down the road, or I can offer you a suite of rooms here.”

Ellen thought a few moments and decided to accept. “It’s so hospitable of you, Henry. Thank you.”

Dining with the butler of one’s deceased uncle is a tenuous affair at best. Most scholars would spend hours drafting their proposals for research grants. The tedious process – much like a job-hunting campaign – would most often end in failure with the award going to a more prestigious scholar at a more prestigious institution. Ellen’s connections appeared to materialize out of think air and save her the trouble of filling out the hundreds of applications.

The butler served her a Greek salad, then tomato basil soup and finally grilled salmon. He served her white wine and afterward coffee. Ellen wondered where the catering truck had delivered her dinner; he couldn’t possibly have prepared everything himself. His age and bearing suggested that he had had a long career as the man servant to Cyrus.

Cyrus never questioned her interest in Napoleonic art and regalia. Ellen on the other hand couldn’t help herself from asking questions about Sir Cyrus’ collection and the vast quantity of items he owned.

“Was he descended from a soldier in the British campaigns against Napoleon? Who started the collections? Where did he buy his treasures?”

“Oh Cyrus, was a great history buff. He got a degree in history in fact from Oxgorge University where he also lectured. I am certain that he planned to write a history of the Napoleonic wars. “

Ellen was intrigued. If this was all true, then certainly her uncle had only selected objects that would have the greatest significance. Later that evening, Ellen ventured into the room with the collections. Among the jewelry was a tiara like the one she was searching for. It must have been a common accoutrement, she thought to herself as she tried it on and admired herself in the mirror. She examined the diamonds; there were three rows of them set into an exquisite setting, each one sparkled proclaiming its wearer the belle of the ball. Ellen searched for gowns to match the tiara. She discovered a sumptuous ruby red gown trimmed with lace; its delicate narrow waist suggested a young woman with a willowy figure who would have graced every ballroom with a queenly air.

Then she suddenly remembered Richard; she had left him at the dock in Naples with no definite plans of meeting him again. He also had found something for the catalog, a sculpture of the Three Graces. It would be a perfect exhibition, one that would include all media and memorabilia. She called him to let him know her progress. There was no answer. She left a message and decided to try again later.

Ellen descended from the attic to her suite of rooms on the second floor. The walls were filled with paintings, many of them portraits of the estate previous occupants. They pieced together a patchwork quilt of history and time, the remnants of which echoed a bygone era of pomp and circumstance. There were antique empire dresses, a real killing from the point of view of a curator. Ellen’s prayers had been answered; she could end her quest and get started on the final details of the exhibition venue and catalog.

After spending several hours in the attic, Ellen descended to the main foyer where she met Henry, the butler. “I took the liberty of fetching your bags from your car,” he said politely. Let me show you to your rooms.

Ellen smiled. As she followed the decrepit bent over figure, she wondered how long he must have worked for Cyrus but was afraid to ask. Their relationship seemed to defy the rules of modern employer-employee relations. Ellen admired the portraits and landscapes that graced the walls of the old manor. She thought she recognized a Titian and a Constable but remained silent since her host seemed lost in a previous century unable to comment on the antiquities of the place he served. She was led to a spacious room on the upper floor of the left wing. Painted in yellow, it was warm and bright which helped cheer her fatigued mood. There she found her suitcases and bags. “Oh thank you, Henry, the rooms are perfect for my research” she responded with her usual polite optimism. “Oh,” he replied, “you may have access to the library where you will find countless volumes on the artifacts collected by Lord Mansfield.”

“Lord – Mansfield?” Ellen replied, hesitantly? She never imagined she was related to the British peerage in England. She wanted to know when Lord Mansfield was ennobled and how he navigated the Glorious Revolution, but she remained silent, sensing that Henry had limited knowledge and could only direct her to a reference source for the family tree.

Ellen entered the library with a great deal of trepidation. Her girlish co-ed confidence had vanished during her flight across the Atlantic and she found herself swept up in an Alice in Wonderland world where her presence necessitated a full-scale theatrical performance complete with costumes, jewels, servants and archaic manors. Henry seemed to force a smile as he stood at the entrance to the library; the cracked horizontal line across his face suggested nothing either positive or negative. She smiled politely back at him and entered the darkened room. The reading lamps on the tables provided small warm glowing green lights that beckoned the reader to sit comfortably for hours perusing the treasures contained within the stacks. A computerized catalog was too much to ask for, and Ellen began flipping through the catalog cards starting with the letter, N. Napoleon, Naples, Napoli. The cards sent off signals to her neural synapses that made her nearly squeal with delight in anticipation of discovering the secrets they contained.

Over the years, Ellen, had developed good manual dexterity from pounding computer keys for her various projects and assignments. She supplemented this daily activity with rigorous tennis instruction to improve her eye hand coordination. She also took up landscape painting, believing that this too would improve her aim. As she flipped through the rolodex of N’s, the speed of the cards flicking through her fingers began to give off sparks and a puff of dust floated up to her nose. Ellen let out one ferocious “AHCCHHOOOO!!!!!!” which echoed throughout the large empty room. She felt dizzy and decided to return to her room and come back the later once she had rested.

As she ascended the stairs, she began to study the portraits. One portrait, by a John Singleton, seemed to stare down at her while emitting smoke through the nostrils of a particularly pugnacious looking nose. The next portrait of a woman named Fanny with a lace doily around her throat, emitted a feminine cough as Ellen glided by. The remaining nineteen portraits of the earls of Mackleford appeared to “hum” and “ha” as she ascended, murmuring, “but where is the butler? But where is the butler?” It seemed to take several hours to pass by all the portraits. By the time she reached the top of the stairs, she saw the doors to the attic room opened for her and inside the assemblage of costume boxes has been transformed into a ballroom. Ellen glanced at herself in a mirror and noticed that her hair and dress were transformed into the Napoleonic Empire style and she now wore the prize diamond tiara on her head. As she entered the room, a young man dressed in the uniform of the Hussars approached her and offered her his arm and they entered a large hall lit by dramatic chandeliers. The couples danced under the romantic lighting while a bright harvest moon shown through the large windows. Glasses clinked and violins screeched out their melodies, a sad memory of the cats who had sacrificed their intestines to great classical-romantic melodies.

Suddenly, the doors slammed shut and bolted. The lights went out. A buzzer went off just outside the door. “Hello?” shouted Ellen, “Can you hear me? Please let me out!” She peered through a hole in the door hidden beneath a small brass shaped cowboy boot. There were six EMTs holding a large strait jacket and other instruments of torture and restraint among them. One object looked like a gigantic syringe of Thorazine, or so Ellen guessed. They were accompanied by three bobbies whose helmet badges reflected the blaring flashlights of the emergency responders.

“Oh dear me,” murmured Ellen, like a frail 82 year old school marm. She felt inside her dress and started padding herself down, looking for her cell phone. At last, she found it in her fashionable high-stepping bootie. “Oh my God, I’ve been kidnapped” thought Ellen frantically! She tried face-timing Richard in Naples. “Come on, come on, come on, pick up you asshole!!!” He had double crossed her and tried to have her committed to an insane asylum! Suddenly, Ellen felt a gleam of hope. She called a cousin she who hobnobbed with the British aristocracy when he played polo, and he was in the London area this season. She knew he had started out in a SWAT team, and when he retired, he started his own rescue business for stranded and injured hikers in the Rocky Mountains. The call went through! Ellen tried to remain calm as she texted him her current predicament and coordinates. Then she went towards the large windows facing the courtyard and began climbing, -- not down – but up! She made up onto the roof and waited for her rescue team!

Ellen waited for what seemed like four hours – 15 minutes -- for the blaring sound of a helicopter, but none appeared. In her delirious state, she decided to go down instead and must have made it down to the ground floor in less than 9 minutes using the fire escape. She was in charge of her senses enough to know that she needed to run and run she did through the brilliant moonlit fields of Mansfield Park. Knowing that they would begin a search for her, she decided to lose her scent by trudging upstream in a narrow ravine. Finally, after several hours, dawn began to appear on the horizon, and she made it to the small village of Mackelshift and hailed a taxi. “Take me London!” she screamed as she jumped in, and the taxi sped off towards the rising sun.

Once they reached the busy metropolis, Ellen asked to the driver to go to Bethany’s Biscuits at 1666 Brewery Lane. She wanted to have a little tête à tête with her cousin and give her a little piece of her mind. Bethany was gifted with a perfect 19th century ladies’ profile; she could have made a fortune as a milliner, designing fancy hats for the Victorian and Edwardian ladies of the day and modeling them in magazine ads. Biscuit making and running a coffee shop was what her 21st century descendent had downgraded to. She could mop the floors in the morning and still don a fashionable cap with a feather in it by sundown. Fortunately, she had already finished mopping this morning, but unfortunately, a bag of rice has spilled on the floor afterwards and she was frantically trying to sweep wet rice off the floor when Ellen walked in.

“What the hell?! Bethany! Where was my ride last night?” demanded Ellen with an irritated tone. “I must have waited for six hours in the freezing night air – ON THE ROOF????”

“Yes, I heard about that. You know Jonathan can’t drop everything at the drop of a hat and come rescue you!”

“You could have sent someone else???”

“Well, no harm done. I see you made all in one piece.” GX35 cooed.

“I was set up? Isn’t there a place anywhere in the universe where that that matters?”

“So, it wasn’t what you expected. Nothing ever matches our fantasies, you know.”

“There are laws,” returned TM29, “Like you can’t frame a Ph.D. in art and literature as a lunatic because she a moderately unattractive or maybe just a little partially attractive woman!!!”

“Yes, I understand,” returned GX 35. “You know we all have to make a living somehow.”

Ellen could see she was getting nowhere with this line of questioning. She really wanted to ask her when the wedding date was, who she had invited to the reception, and why she had stolen her boyfriend, but she said nothing for a few moments.