Houses of Stone, KATHY [classic literature books TXT] 📗

The farther back in time she went, the greater the number of offspring. Six, eight, nine, twelve . . . Dates of death were not always given, but it was safe to assume that a good many of those children had died young. The infant mortality rate had been high.

She stopped at a page labeled "third generation." The name was that of Andrew Cartright, born February 26, 1771. One, two, three . . . eleven children. She felt a pang of pity for Elizabeth, Andrew's wife.

The birth dates of the children ranged from 1791 to 1810. Seven of them were girls: Catharine, Elizabeth, Maria, Sarah, Ann, Alexandra, Fanny. No dates of death were given, but there was an additional column, "Married to." The names of the husbands of Ann and Alexandra were listed. The others were described as "Never Married." Because they had remained spinsters or because they had died young? A vital question, that one, but the form did not answer it.

Karen turned back to the preceding generation, to Andrew's father Josiah. Andrew had had sisters, six of them. Some had married, some had not. The youngest of the girls would have been twenty years old in 1800, if she had lived that long.

The names fluttered around in her head, anonymous and without meaning. She hadn't expected to find a Cartright daughter named Ismene. Still, it was disappointing to discover they all had traditional, conventional names. Elizabeth, Sarah, Mary . . . Andrew's sisters and daughters were all possibles—those of them, at least, who had lived to adulthood. How did one go about finding the dates of their deaths? Was that information missing from the genealogy because it had not been available to the researcher, or because nobody gave a damn about females outside the direct line of descent?

For reasons she would have been hard-pressed to justify logically, Karen believed Ismene had been fairly young when she penned the novel. Jane Eyre had been written when Charlotte Bronte was thirty years old. She was dead before she was forty. Emily had been only thirty when she died, Anne twenty-nine. If genius didn't bloom early in those days, it didn't have a chance to bloom at all.

There was too much in those papers to absorb all at once. When Karen looked up she saw that Lisa was watching her with a faint cynical smile.

"Is that what you wanted?" Lisa asked.

"It's one of the things I wanted." Karen knew she had already given herself away; her passionate interest must have been plain to an intent observer.

"I can't sell it without Cam's okay."

Karen sat back on her heels and tried to marshal her arguments. "He told me he'd rather deal with me. I've already offered to buy the material, sight unseen. Now that I've seen it, I'll settle for a copy, if you don't want to part with the original."

"That's more than William was willing to do."

So Bill had seen the papers. Damn him, and damn Lisa for being such a sly, stupid, greedy little schemer. Karen said with great restraint, "Bill isn't the most scrupulous individual I've ever met. What did he offer you?"

"He wasn't willing to pay for a copy. The original or nothing, he said."

"What he was willing to pay for was sole possession of the information," Karen snapped. She fought to control her fraying temper. "He wanted to prevent me from seeing it. I don't suppose he mentioned that he has a fantastic memory? Not total recall, but damned close. He's already got what he needs to go on with. He won't give you a penny now."

"I don't understand."

"I'll try to explain. You see, all this gives me is a list of possible candidates—women who lived during the right time period. From the literary style of the manuscript and my familiarity with the genre I can make an educated guess as to approximately when it was written. Bill probably can too; he had a chance to look through the manuscript. But I haven't found a terminus ad quern or a quo yet ..." Seeing Lisa's smooth brow furrow, she explained. "I'll give you an example. Suppose there was a reference to the American flag and its ... oh, let's say, fifteen stars. I'm no historian; I haven't the faintest idea when the fifteenth state was admitted to the Union. But I'd find out. And then I would know the book was written after that date."

"Why would she mention how many stars there were in the flag?"

"She didn't. She probably won't." Karen tried to control her exasperation. She had a feeling Lisa wasn't as dim as she pretended. "That was just an example. Suppose she mentions the name of a particular book she's been reading. I would know her manuscript was written after the date the book was published."

"Oh. I see what you mean."

"Good. So far I haven't found anything of that sort. At this point I'm looking at a time span of fifty, maybe seventy-five years. At least two generations. The genealogy gives the names of the Cartright women belonging to those generations, but that's all I know about them—their names. And now Bill Meyer knows those names too."

"So what do you do next?"

What Karen yearned to do was hand the whole thing over to Peggy. This wasn't her field. She tried to sound more authoritative than she felt. "The person who traced the genealogy was primarily interested in the people—the men—in the direct line of descent. There must be more information about the women in courthouse records and—and obituaries in newspapers ..."

To her critical ears the speech displayed the abysmal extent of her ignorance, but Lisa nodded. "I get it. You'll have to go find out more about them."

"That's right. Actually, I—and Bill—could get the same information without the genealogy. It's only a short cut. By themselves the names are useless."

"That low-down hound dog," Lisa muttered. "He didn't tell me that. I suppose now that you've seen it you aren't—"

"I'd still like to buy it. Not only