Free Wessingham Awaits (Book 1, Music) by Owen Maddox

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    WESSINGHAM AWAITS
     
     
    PROLOGUE
     
     
    Sometimes, when I am in a quiet place, alone, and I think back to Henry Godwin, when I think of his Wessingham, I hear the waxing of choral music. It resonates high in the loft of my imagination, if not memory, my inner sanctuary. The excitement and expectations come back to me, the naivety and vulnerability, the fear and hurt, and yes, the anger.
    I had little choice, no resistance—for what girl does not want to become a princess?
    Sometimes, then, the music is outright dark and overpowering, in a minor key, escalating like a tribal drum only to fade and return at another moment on wings in a different light.
    It is all sacred to me now, the good and bad, however I might make sense of it—his claim that “Once upon a time there was a great king. The king lived in a great castle.  The castle was in a great and mountainous kingdom. And yet this kingdom was hidden from rest of the world. This kingdom,” Henry said at twelve years of age, “was hidden somewhere in the United States of America.”
    By now you know it is the stuff of Appalachian lore, a tale told not by idiots, but by drunkards, a legend created just as surely from the moonshiner’s still. How else to pass the time? Well, rest assuredly my love, this is not idle entertainment. I have a tumor growing inside of me, and there are things that I must tell you before I am gone.
    On the hour of my death, you will gain command of a vast fortune, an estate that exceeds all reason and experience. The sum at your disposal would make Croesus curse, Vanderbilt blink, and Rockefeller drop his morning cup of coffee.  Of more value, and hence importance, you will inherit the story contained in this volume and the awesome responsibility that accompanies it. If ever there was a man who must persevere amidst great adversity, he is now you.
    In my experience, transcending one’s assumed limitations requires a love equally transcendent, a love that does not falter in the face of loneliness and hardship, but invigorates and assuages like the fortuitous wind that saves the blistered sailor. To accomplish great deeds, we must first feel worthy of those accomplishments.
    Along with the unsettling revelations contained herein, you are about to receive charge of a legacy that seems wholly unimaginable, much less manageable. Daunting though it will be, isolated though you may feel, if you continue to love and trust yourself as I have, my story, now yours, older than Britain herself, will continue.
    Godspeed, my love. I will be with you.
     
    Elizabeth Favian 1928

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    “Facile cred, plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum universitate.
    Sed horum omnium familiam quis nobis enarrabit?
    Et gradus et cognationes et discrimina et singulorum munera?
    Quid agunt? Quae loca habitant? ”
    Thomas Burnet,
    Archaeologia Philosophicae ,
    London 1692
     
     
    “I can easily believe that there are more invisible than visible beings in the universe.
    But who will describe to us their families, ranks, affinities, differences, and functions?
    What do they do?  Where do they live?”

 
     
     
     
     
    WESSINGHAM AWAITS
    BOOK 1
    MUSIC
     
    1
    Once upon a time, in the year 1890 to be exact, a peculiar little girl named Elizabeth Bowyer received a transparent mirror for her fourth birthday. As strange as it might sound, her parents had cut a rectangular hole in the wall separating the parlor from the convalescent room, and over it they placed the mirror, framed as ornately as any portrait. When visitors called, they saw reflections of themselves in the mirror, their cups of tea and broad hats of ostrich feathers, not the homely little girl staring at them from the other side.
    It was fair to suspect that even the closest friends of the Bowyer family were not altogether aware of Elizabeth’s existence. They knew of Helen, the prettiest of the Bowyer children. They knew of