Solomon and the Mansion

Traveling alone from Syracuse, New York to visit family in Dayton, Ohio I was tired, when I found a bed-and-breakfast, The Worthington Mansion near the shores of Lake Erie in Painesville, Ohio. I decided it would be a far more interesting choice than a conventional chain hotel off the freeway. As Worthington was my surname, it felt preordained I should stay there. With the fading blue sky that late March evening, the old Mansion came crisply into view, like déjà vu, it somehow felt like I had been here before. 

The bed-and-breakfast bricks were pure 1860s French grandeur: tall mansard roofs, wrought-iron balconies laced with glowing windows like a saccharine Thomas Kinkaid painting, a trap to catch Hansel and Gretel. A scene of which was enough to lose my sense of century.

George Worthington was a Union Captain in the US civil war and a wealthy New York financier. He had built the home in 1867 for his family, and it became known as the biggest and most luxurious dwelling in all of Painesville, Ohio. As I dragged my suitcase bumping over the marble threshold, the ornate 19th century clock struck 7pm.

The front desk innkeeper, Ms. Mary, handed me a heavy iron room key and a knowing smile. Telling me briefly the history of the mansion and its owners “Room 203, Mam, it’s the Sarah Worthington room” she said calmly, looking me straight in the eye, as if I already knew it was my room that I’d be staying in. I was a traveling nurse and at forty-nine I encountered many types of personalities. Her slight smile both comforted and jittered me.

“Oh, Worthington?” She said, “That’s interesting, maybe you are related to our mansion’s namesakes?”

I chuckled, “Yes maybe, I’m from back east but I do have family here in Ohio too”

My surname, Worthington, hung on the walls everywhere, in gilt frames and faded framed documents. The portraits looked back at me, like an old relative who had come home.

“I’m sorry mam, but Thomas our porter is out at the moment, I can have him bring up your suitcase when he returns?”

“Thank you but that’s not necessary. I can manage myself” I said, happy to finally be out of the car.

“Dinner is served in the grand salon until 8pm. And breakfast is in the basement dining room from 6am until 9am”

I climbed the wide staircase to my stately room. Everything here was ornate, impeccably decorated perfectly so, plucked from history, a snapshot in time. Entering the pink room with brocaded and billowing white cotton sheer curtains and a queen-sized bed. A portrait of Sarah, the woman herself in a gilded golden oval frame, hung over the headboard. Her eyes followed me as I inspected the lily glass lights and nineteenth century furniture. I washed my hands in the marble bathroom with fourteen-foot ceilings, splashing cold water from a porcelain basin with bronze faucets, a quick splash to cheeks and neck with almond scented soap for the hands. I looked out the window at the sparse traffic below which seemed to be lit by another centuries gas lights. I thought for a moment I heard footsteps running above my head on the third floor. Maybe it was just the creaky floors of an old home, maybe it was the porter, maybe I was just too tired.

I proceeded to go downstairs to the grand salon for dinner. The hallway on the second floor stretched forever, its photographs, paintings and maps, lined the walls with more gas lamps flickering with antique charm. Other rooms, like the Aviary room and the Captain’s room were at the far end, but something made me pause halfway. A giggle, a high, bright and unmistakable sound. It echoed from the shadows ahead. I turned and no one was there, only the long runner of a Persian carpet and all the dour portraits staring down with solemn Victorian eyes. I told myself it was the wind through the old casements. Yet my skin prickled as if someone small had just darted past my knees. I held onto the old worn wooden railing to steady myself so I wouldn’t fall as I walked downstairs. 

I ate a simple supper of potato and leek gratin soup; glazed carrots bathed in butter and poached pears with ice cream by the fire in the grand salon. I was tired from the day’s drive and decided to curl up with a good book, maybe a love story from the extensive library on the premises.

I crawled into bed but couldn’t focus on my book, sleep refused me. At half past midnight I rose, pulled on a sweater, and stepped into the corridor. The air smelled of beeswax and something sweeter, perhaps the ghost of lavender water from a century ago. I walked slowly, listening. My footsteps placed one after another on the floral carpeted floor taking care not to engage the slightest creak of the old oak floorboards. Listening again I heard another giggle, closer this time, followed by the soft patter of bare feet on hard wood. I followed it around the corner to the northwest wing, where a small alcove held a glass cabinet of family relics the B&B kept for display inside: more yellowed photographs, a child’s Ball and Jax, a tiny pair of scuffed leather boots and a girl’s bonnet.

One photograph stopped my heart.

It was a sepia portrait of a boy and a girl, perhaps six or seven years old. The boy standing stiffly in a velvet suit with a lace collar and a girl in her white petticoat and umbrella shading the summer sun. Their dark curls framed a face that could have been mine at that age, same wide-set eyes, same slight gap between the front teeth, the same stubborn tilt of the chin. The resemblance was uncanny, a bit eerie. Beneath the image, a small, engraved plaque read:

Solomon and Abigail Worthington 1865-1872 Beloved son and daughter of George and Sarah “May they run forever in the halls they loved.”

Abigail? My own middle name was Abigail. The surname, of course, was mine. But the face - my face, staring out from 1872, made the floor tilt beneath me. I pressed my palm to the glass. The wood paneling beside the cabinet felt warmer than it should have. I whispered, half-laughing, half-afraid, “Abigail? Is that you running about these halls?”

A cool breath brushed my cheek, and for the first time I saw him, not as shadow or sound, but clearly. He stood at the end of the corridor in his cerulean-blue velvet suit with silver buttons shaped like acorns, his short wool trousers, barefoot, curls tousled as though he had just tumbled out of bed. His smile was shy and enormous, with that gap in his teeth that made him look like a pirate when he smiled. He raised one small hand and beckoned, then darted around the corner with a laugh that rang like bells.

I followed. Down the hallway, up the third floor, into the attic playroom that guests were never meant to see. There he waited, sitting cross-legged on a faded Palomino rocking horse, the moonlight streaming through the dormer windows. He looked exactly like the photograph, except alive, cheeks pink, eyes bright with mischief.

Then I turned, looked and knelt so we were eye to eye.

“Solomon, you look like me,” I quietly spoke and smiled. I felt a pain in his eyes.

I stayed there for what seemed like hours, talking in the way one does with children and ghosts. He told me, without words, yet I understood how he had loved to race the corridors at twilight, showing me the secret cupboard where he once hid tin soldiers. His mother’s lavender perfume still lingered in the linen cupboards. I wanted to ask the question that burned in my throat, but needn’t as we spoke to one another without speaking, “Solomon, how did you leave us?” his small shoulders slumped. The house had felt like his whole world, until it didn’t.

Two stories lived in the family letters I had read earlier that evening in the library downstairs. One said tuberculosis, the white plague that stole so many children in 1860’s and 1870’s; the other, whispered only among servants, spoke of a jealous cousin who had pushed him down the grand staircase during a Christmas quarrel. No one had ever proven either. The death certificate was lost to fire in 1917. Both endings were possible; neither brought peace.

Solomon’s eyes filled with old, old sorrow.

I reached out, and he handed me his tin soldier, my hand passed through his shoulder, yet I felt the faintest warmth. Somehow, I was able to utter words that felt commanded by someone else, “You were loved. You are still loved. The house remembers your footsteps. But it’s time for you now to run somewhere new”

He studied me for a long moment, that mirror-face searching mine. Then he smiled, the same smile I had seen in my own childhood photographs as we both stood. The air around him shimmered, as if the March frost outside had decided to bloom indoors. I heard distant laughter, a woman’s voice calling “Solomon, Abigail! Time for bed” His eyes widened with recognition.

Sometimes his mother Sarah let him climb into her lap by the nursery fire, the scent of her rosewater perfume wrapping around them both. His father might appear to say goodnight, pressing a coin into his palm “For the poor box at Sunday services tomorrow.”

He looked back at me, lifted a hand in farewell, and ran, not down the hallway this time, but straight into the moonlight, brightened for an instant heartbeat that streamed through the dormer. The light folded around him like a father’s arms. The rocking horse gave one final contented creak, then stilled. He was gone, leaving only the faint scent of lavender and hot chocolate in the air.

The corridor was empty and warm.

The great-great-great-grandniece, me, sat cross-legged on the attic floor of the Worthington Mansion, long after midnight, the tin soldier still warm in my palm. Solomon and Abigail’s spirit had not yet fully faded; a shimmer of moonlight clung to the rocking horse where he had sat. A tilted head, curls bouncing, and without words I understood what he wanted to show me, not the ending, but the long golden middle. The days before the cough or the quarrel or whatever had stolen him.

“Come,” his small voice rustled in my head, like dry leaves across the floorboards. “Watch how I lived.”

I walked back to Room 203 as dawn crept over the mansard roofs. My suitcase had been waiting, where I had left it. On the bedside table, lay the Ball and Jax from the cabinet downstairs, placed there by no living hand. I picked them up; They were cool, solid and real. I tucked it into my coat pocket like a promise.

Ms. Mary met me before breakfast, eyes-knowing. “The boy is quiet this morning,” she said, pouring coffee. “You must have been good company.”

I smiled and said nothing. Breakfast was downstairs in the petit salon: Hot chocolate thick as velvet, served in a silver cup, grits and sausage and slices of buttered brioche still warm from the bread oven, with a spoonful of strawberry preserves. Outside, the March air was crisp and new. Somewhere beyond the frost covered grass and leaves, a little boy was finally running free, hallways behind him, family ahead, the mystery resolved by love alone.

And so, the hallway itself became a theatre of memory. In my blood, his laughter still echoed, lighter than it had been for one hundred and fifty-four years.

I stayed past dawn, tracing his day in my mind like a map I would never lose, his mother would kiss his forehead reading aloud from illustrated storybooks. His favorite “The Tortoise and the Hare”, he always cheered for the tortoise. A little boy in velvet, running free through 1872, unaware that history would one day send his great-great-great-grandniece to keep him company across a century and a half. The mansion had kept his laughter safe all along. Now, at last, Solomon and the Mansion could rest.