Free Solsbury Hill A Novel by Susan M. Wyler

history.” Her eyes seemed to wobble in their sockets as she tried to remember. “Just a moment, it’s to do with great-grandparents, many times great. These are chips of fine rubies, nonetheless fine for being chips, and these white beads are Russian crystal, but I can’t recall whose this was.” She seemed frustrated, worn and hazy as she was from the morphine she’d been given. “These are old-fashioned, aren’t they?” She dropped the necklace and turned her upper body toward the jewelry box.
    “Eleanor dear, would you open the bottom drawer of it? There’s something more interesting than jewels I want to show you.”
    Eleanor’s fingers were moving gently about in among the necklaces—they felt like her buttons, made the same sort of sound—but she withdrew her fingers now and opened the long drawer at the bottom of eight other drawers. Inside there was a folded piece of paper. Eleanor was careful as she maneuvered the paper out of the drawer, where it was squeezed in tightly. Alice’s fine white hands trembled as she reached toward it.
    “Could you open it for me?” Alice spoke in a whisper from lack of strength. “Years ago, I was moving that old armoire there”—she cocked her head toward a piece of yellow pine onthe wall opposite the windows—“from downstairs where it sat in the kitchen up here to this bedroom, where Gwen and I started to stay whenever we came up from Cambridge. It’s from the seventeenth century. If you look at its details you can see it’s held together without one nail, and inside it there are secret drawers. And in one of them, I found this strange dry parchment paper.”
    Alice held the paper. “Granley’s father took the piece apart to move it upstairs. I was still a young woman. He took the top off, then the drawers out, and I don’t know what made me look to the back of it.” The inside of her lips stuck together as she spoke. Eleanor brought a glass close to Alice’s mouth and placed the straw between her lips. Her eyes closed in quiet pleasure as she took a slow, long sip. “I suppose I was bending down to slide the bottom drawer in when I saw the little knobs hidden inside. And I got a thrill.” The strength of Alice’s voice came and went. “When I opened it. Well, pumpkin, you should open it.”
    Eleanor did so, slowly. The paper was dry and fragile, so she was careful not to break it at the folds. It was a finely drawn family tree with some small portraits, mostly at the top, but Eleanor’s eyes were drawn to her mother’s name and Alice’s name and above that her grandmother’s and grandfather’s names. She saw that her grandfather had had a younger brother and a sister who died in childhood. Eleanor’s eyes climbed the tree trunk up the branches, taking in the names of her ancestors all the way to the top, where waswritten Emily and no name for her partner, a couple who bore a child named Victoria, who married Bertram Enswell and began this family tree’s long line.
    Alice’s eyes were almost lifeless today, but the corners of her lips lifted in a small smile. A smile on the other side of a dark morphine haze. She said, “I was in my twenties when I found it. Gwen had her own thoughts about it.”
    The end of Alice’s forefinger was crooked with arthritis, but she pointed to her parents’ names, her own, and her sister Anne’s name. “That’s my hand. I wrote those in. Once I realized I wasn’t going to do anything with the tree.”
    Exhausted, her head now fell back on the pillow, so light it hardly left an imprint.
    “It’s a gorgeous thing,” Eleanor said. The tree was drawn in pencil and colored with watercolor wash.
    Alice’s eyes had fallen closed and her breathing rattled and was shallow.
    Eleanor sat on the side of the bed. “Aunt Alice?” she whispered.
    “It’s a good family to be part of, all in all,” Alice said as she was drifting off. “It’s a good family you belong to.”
    Alice’s beautiful face lifted and