The Spirit Collection of Thorne Hall

by J. Ann Thomas

Genres: Fantasy; Paranormal; Romantic Fantasy; General Fiction; Gothic

Synopsis

A young woman forced to live with ghosts in a mansion frozen in time must decide between forbidden love and the price of freedom in this gothic fantasy where Jane Eyre meets The Haunting of Bly Manor, perfect for fans of Starling House.

    At Thorne Hall, a grand estate nestled in the Berkshires, fifteen restless spirits roam, bound within the mansion’s walls since the Gilded Age. Elegy Thorne bears the weight of her family’s curse to preserve the mansion as it was in the 1890s, using ancient folk songs to keep the spirits secret and silent in order to avoid deadly consequences.

     When a mischievous child spirit wreaks havoc on the manor, the Thorne family calls upon their trusted preservationist to restore the mansion. He brings along his son, Atticus – a vibrant man full of life and ideas of modernization – and Elegy is captivated by him, igniting a longing for freedom she’s never dared to embrace.

     Torn between her desire to follow her heart and her duty to her family and its legacy, Elegy begins searching for a way to release the spirit collection back to the afterlife and set both herself and the ghosts free. With century-old secrets, peculiar magic, and spirits both whimsical and deadly, Thorne Hall will haunt and enrapture readers—and you might just not want to leave.

Release date: February 11, 2025

Publisher: Alcove Press

Print pages: 320

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

October 31, 1902

Willie Abner really ought to have listened to his grandmother.

She had that morning predicted snow by virtue of her aching hip, the patterns of the veins on her left ankle, and the droppings of the raven who had figured out how to lift the rusty latch of the kitchen window and helped himself to a bit of cake now and then. With nary a cloud in the vibrant blue of the cold autumn morning outside her doughty cottage, Willie had declared the very idea ridiculous, earning a pot thrown in the general vicinity of his head. Now, a wary glance at the swiftly gathering gray determined to blot out what little remained of the waning moon made him wish he’d worn woolens beneath his borrowed livery.

Hell, if the old bat had had her way, he would never have left his room at Bidwell House that Samhain evening, however handsomely he stood to be paid for his service, for ’twas an ill omen indeed that the last and greatest of the old sabbats fell upon a Friday that year, even if one was properly outfitted against unseasonable weather.

Blowing furiously into his cupped hands, the tall reed of a boy, all of twenty-four and made of gangling limbs and gaunt hollows, stared down the drive at the endless string of carriages waiting their turn to pass beneath the impressive porte cochere of Thorne Hall and deposit their glittering burdens. He’d never seen so many in one place; it would take an age to get them all through, particularly as they were, at present, waylaid by a regrettable taffeta skirt and an even more regrettable bustle, both belonging to Mrs. Vera Bishop. She was attempting to negotiate, rather poorly, the extradition of her person from a handsome black-and-gold carriage, while her husband scowled and sighed and was absolutely of no help at all. He was every bit as long as she was squat, and where she was of a jovial disposition, he was as dour as a churchyard angel and far less comely.

“Good evening,” said Willie, once Mrs. Bishop had smoothed her skirts and slipped her pudgy fingers into the crook of Mr. Bishop’s elbow. “Welcome to Thorne Hall.”

“Yes, well,” she tutted, thrusting her nose into the air as though it were a terrible affront indeed to have endured such deplorable conditions as languishing on a cushioned seat beneath a velvet blanket. “We’ve been waiting for half of an hour, what say you to that?”

“I am dreadfully sorry,” he stammered, the words clumsy on his freezing lips. “There are a great many visitors to the manor tonight, as you see.”

Invitations to some thirty households had been sent out, and every single one accepted. And still, the sight of them rendered him somewhat stupid, for he was, by occupation, but a footman at a country house some five miles away and the largest party he’d ever seen was a gathering of twenty very old and very slow residents of the Berkshires. That had been a quiet supper of only four courses, followed by card games in the parlor and an early dismissal. There had been very little drinking and no dancing, and he’d spent most of the evening in the kitchens flirting with the cook’s assistant until, at the pathetically early hour of ten ‘o clock, he was summoned to see grumbling old women and their stone-faced husbands back into their carriages.

The event this evening at Thorne Hall was so grand that the three footmen whom Mr. Jasper Thorne had brought from his Boston mansion would not suffice at all, and so Willie had been hired along with several other local youths, particularly in the kitchens, for there would be a dinner for three dozen guests prior to the promised entertainment afterward. Said entertainment, which had been kept entirely secret even from the staff, would be witnessed by an additional twenty guests, acquaintances of Mr. Thorne whom he wished to impress but in whose company he did not fancy spending the length of ten courses.

“Humph,” Mrs. Bishop grunted. “Jasper had better deliver what he’s promised. It’s a long way to travel from the city this late in the season. Thank goodness he’s a room for us, else we simply would not have come!”

Willie thought this in poor taste indeed, for it seemed worth the journey simply to glimpse the famed Thorne Hall. The three-story Jacobean Revival manor at his back was laid in red brick and brownstone trim, with ornate spires rising from each gabled wing and banks of leaded and stained-glass windows. Why, the porte cochere beneath which Mrs. Bishop’s carriage now stood was said to be the finest in the Berkshires. And he’d yet to see inside!

The Bishops’ carriage moved on, and Willie met the next, out of which stepped a younger gentleman who had survived the lengthy wait by draining a flask that he now tucked into his pocket as he stumbled down the steps from his hansom cab.

On and on it went, until the last of the dinner guests were seen safely into the manor and Willie

was sent to the kitchens to warm himself and eat before those who had been invited only to the entertainment began to arrive.

He found a place at the end of the long, hand-hewn table, and one of the kitchen maids, a buxom, golden young woman near his age, placed a bowl before him. “You’d best eat,” she told him with a wink. “You look as though one strong gale could knock you clean over.”

“I’m not that skinny,” Willie grumbled, taking up a battered spoon and tucking in. The cook had prepared a lamb stew for those below that evening, and he shoveled it into his mouth with gusto.

The kitchen maid returned with a basket of brown bread still steaming from the oven, and Willie pressed his advantage. “What do you think he’s got planned tonight after the dinner?”

“I really couldn’t say,” the girl hedged, her eyes darting to the kitchen doorway, where a stout woman of perhaps fifty with ruddy cheeks and steel curls beneath her white cap was glaring at them.

At the end of the table, a middle-aged man polishing a set of silver teaspoons spoke without looking up: “He’s dabbling in the occult.”

Willie’s eyes widened, spoon frozen halfway to his mouth. “A séance?”

“Nah.” The man placed a gleaming teaspoon down upon the table with a thump, then looked up with a grin. “Everyone’s done those, haven’t they? Jasper Thorne isn’t everybody.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Word is the master’s playing at raising the dead.”

“You’re teasing,” the kitchen maid admonished, flicking the man with the end of her dish towel, but he paid her no mind. “He never is!”

“That’s impossible.”

Willie hadn’t realized he’d spoken until he lifted his eyes from his bowl to find the man watching him with lips curled in amusement.

“Know something of it, do you?”

In fact, he did, but he wasn’t about to say so in present company, and so he shook his head and concentrated on nothing but his supper until the man finished his work and left the room whistling. Willie finished the last of his stew and bolted back up the steps and into the vicious night, where a distant voice could be heard shouting his name none too kindly.

It was half past ten by the time all of the latecomers had been seen into the house and Willie was at last permitted inside to serve glasses of champagne and spirits to Mr. Thorne’s guests in the great hall, and aptly named it was.

Rich, dark-wood floors and intricate paneling gleamed beneath beamed ceilings, and at its heart was an enormous marble hearth flanked with pillars, atop which sat two proud lions with diamonds at their feet. Directly opposite was the gallery, the long corridor leading to the ballroom where that evening’s entertainment was to take place, roped off with cords of velvet until such a time as the master of Thorne Hall bid them enter.

To the immediate left of the front entrance stood the famous oak staircase, a towering marvel of superior craftsmanship. It was rumored to have been inspired by the staircase at Tilden House, a Jacobean manor in the English countryside outside Lincolnshire where Thorne Hall’s mistress had spent a summer or two as a girl; when consulting with the pair of architects Jasper had hired from the city, she had declared she wanted a staircase not to match but to rival that of not only Tilden but all other houses in the Berkshires.

Thus, the four pillars and nine panels that bordered the twenty-five stairs from the first to the second floor were intricately carved in patterns of diamonds and peacock feathers, flowers and filigree, polished and gleaming, and crowned with soaring

arches.

Some ten feet above the great hall but only midway to the second floor, a cunning landing was furnished with several brocade chairs as well as a newfangled invention known as a two-seater, meant to facilitate intimate conversation, before the marvelous stairway proceeded upward upon the right to the second and third floors. The usual furniture had been relocated for the occasion, save for a grand piano in one corner of the great hall near a bank of stained-glass windows that led to the veranda, alight with torches and, beyond, the sprawling lawn that gave way to the thick unruliness of a New England forest.

Willie was instructed by Cartwright, the butler, to assist at the champagne table, where he wore white gloves and handed out coupes of effervescent gold alongside Jasper’s first footman, a handsome man called Felix, perhaps ten years Willie’s senior with perfectly coiffed black hair.

The cheerful strains of a string quartet drifted from the landing as Jasper Thorne’s guests drank and laughed. And amongst them moving here and there, with a coupe of champagne in hand, was the most beautiful woman Willie had ever seen. She’d hair like flame and she wore it piled atop her head and crowned with diamonds, which also dripped from her ears and neck and gleamed at her wrists. There was not a soul who could deny that her gown of gold silk was the finest in the room, nor that her smile was the most blinding.

No one needed to tell Willie who she was, though he’d never set eyes upon her before that night.

Delilah Thorne, the mistress of Thorne Hall.

It was said that the manor stood only as testament to how much Delilah loved a party and how much her husband loved Delilah. Willie could well believe it. He was as helplessly entranced as the rest of them, basking in what little glow was to be had as she flirted and charmed and laughed, the sound purer than the crystal in his trembling fingers. But the more Willie watched her, and he could not seem to help himself, the more he noticed that her smile only lingered so long as her admirers did. In the moments between one and the next, her expression thinned.

Willie could scarcely fathom what cause someone like Delilah Thorne might have to fret. Perhaps she was simply exhausted. Events such as these, with so many guests and arrangements and accommodations, must be consuming.

At long last, Mr. Thorne’s guests were invited to make their way to the ballroom.

Willie’s spine straightened as the excited chatter grew to a crescendo, the crowd surging forward as though a dam had broken, and amidst the kerfuffle, he heard the sound of glass shattering upon the floor, followed by the crunch of heels treading upon it carelessly. There would be an awful mess to clean later, but Willie was too excited to worry over it.

The ballroom was anything but intimate. Twenty marble columns held aloft a gilded ceiling of intricately carved leaves and flowers that seemed a more fit canopy for an ancient Athenian temple to Chloris than a dwelling place for mortal man. Gold stanchions hung with velvet cords partitioned off the center of the magnificent room. Guests crowded the perimeter and whispered amongst themselves regarding what had been painted upon the wood floor: a white circle made of strange symbols with four cardinal points illuminated by the flickering flames of hundreds of beeswax candles.

At the center, a woman stood alone.

She was perhaps in her late twenties, with enormous gray eyes and hair the color of honey that spilled over her shoulders in a wild, tangled mess. Her lips were full and wide, and her chin pointed above the impossibly high neck of the black crepe

gown she wore, long out of fashion. She was not beautiful, not in the way Delilah was beautiful, or any of the number of glittering young woman who gawked at her as though she were an exhibit at a fair, but Willie found himself unable to look away from her for long.

Behind her in a row stood four other women who bore such a startling resemblance that he thought they must be kin. They all wore the same sort of black dress with their pale hair free and falling. The oldest was close to his grandmother in age, while the youngest could not be more than ten. How very strange that she should be present when, Willie knew, Mr. Thorne’s own son and daughter, older than she, had been left with their governess in the city.

A hush descended upon the crowd as a tall, sharp-featured man entered the room. Willie recognized him at once from his picture in the newssheets. He was even more striking in person, his thick black hair only just beginning to silver at the temples, and like his beguiling wife, he exuded a force so magnetic that the spines of every man in his general vicinity straightened.

’Twas said in certain circles that he’d been born with figures upon his tongue and that by the time he was but six years of age, could reliably speak on the subject of strategy and profit and investments. He’d made his first million at the age of eighteen, and by the time he was thirty, half the world was safe and secure in his pocket. For all its magnificence, Thorne Hall was only his summer cottage; he’d a mansion on Fifth Avenue whose ballroom could easily hold a thousand guests and several other properties scattered along the New England coast, as well as two in London.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, and although he’d not raised his voice, the room immediately fell silent. “Delilah and I welcome you all to Thorne Hall this Samhain night. Some of you have traveled quite far, and I hope you will believe me when I say it was a trip well worth taking—if not for the entertainment, then certainly for the champagne.”

His roguish wink drew good-humored chuckles from his guests, and even Willie found himself smiling, though he’d not tasted a drop.

“By now I am sure you have heard rumors of what is to transpire, but before we begin, let me assure you that this is no charlatan performing a sham séance for the naïve and gullible. You will find no children scurrying beneath a shrouded table nor mechanisms meant to mimic miracles. What you will see here tonight is as real as I am.”

As he spoke, Mr. Thorne walked slowly toward the woman who stood apart and, once he’d reached her, placed his hands upon her narrow shoulders. Out of the corner of his eye, Willie watched Delilah stiffen and look away.

“This woman is a true medium, and tonight she will summon the dead to stand before you.”

There was no laughing now; the room was flooded with murmurs, of whispers and titters. Only Willie knew the truth: Jasper Thorne was a liar.

Oh, there was many a thing that could be done with the canny arts, or so said his mum. She ought to know, being what she was, and sometimes death was very near them, what with their tenets being the very stuff of it: blood and bone, earth and song. But a true death could not be reversed, she said; not without sacrifice, and not without a black curse upon them who’d done it.

Unease unfurled in Willie’s stomach at the memory of a wailing woman at the door of their cottage in the black of night when he was just a boy, come because she’d heard a whisper that his mother could do the very thing Mr. Thorne claimed this medium capable of.

The woman had left disappointed. She’d also left with no memory of her dead lover, for when Willie’s mother refused to raise him from the dead, she’d paid her two gold 

 coins to eradicate him from her heart entirely instead. After the woman had gone and his mother had stashed the coins away in a small, hand-carved wooden box, her eyes had flickered to where he cowered at the threshold of the room, and she beckoned him forth.

“What are you doing awake at this hour?” she said as she went down upon one knee before him.

Willie worried his lower lip. “Could you have done it? Brought him back?”

“I could have.”

“Why didn’t you?”

His mother was silent for so long that he feared she’d gone away as she sometimes did, until at last she asked him, “Do you remember the song about the woman sitting upon her lover’s final resting place?”

“ ‘The Unquiet Grave,’ ” answered Willie; he hated that song.

“And do you remember why the dead man does not want her there?”

“He is sad because she’s withered away.”

“And why else?” his mother prompted gently.

Willie’s voice fell to a whisper: “She grieves so much he cannot find rest.”

“I do expect, of course, absolute discretion on the part of you all,” Jasper Thorne continued. “Nay, I insist upon it.”

The slant of his brows, the firm set of his jaw, the way his piercing blue eyes swept over the hushed assembly told them all well enough what would become of them should they defy him. It was nearly as frightening as the idea of the undead.

“But is it safe?” a woman’s voice called. Clad in aubergine silk with a collar of diamonds at her throat, she clutched her husband’s arm with wide eyes. This was a sentiment evidently shared by a great many others in the crowd, for they looked at Mr. Thorne with the same trepidation.

“You’ve naught to worry,” Mr. Thorne replied smoothly. “You are perfectly safe within these walls.”

And because Jasper Thorne’s word was law, they began.

None of those gathered wished to be anywhere near the white drawings upon the ballroom floor, and so the medium and the women who accompanied her were afforded a wide berth as they each took their place. Once they had clasped their hands and dropped their heads, the medium began to sing in a clear, pleasing voice, the melody both beguiling and unsettling. Willie’s flesh prickled; he’d never heard the tune before, but his bones recognized its likeness as sure as though he’d penned it himself. Anyone with even an ounce of canny in their blood could tell at once if a song could anchor craft. And this song …

The medium’s sisters picked up the threads of her song one by one and wove them together, unison giving way to dissonance that resolved in harmony all too briefly.

The windows in the ballroom had not been opened that evening, but nevertheless a breeze began to stir, gently ruffling silk and satin, prompting uneasy glances amongst the glittering throng. Many present that night would later swear that with that strange breeze came the caress of fingertips upon the neck of this diamond-encrusted socialite here and this portly banker there, and yet none left. Willie could not be certain whether this was because they were still convinced that, as at other séances they’d attended, this show of Jasper Thorne’s was just that: a show, however realistic. Money, they supposed, could create all manner of illusions to delight and terrify the senses.

And then there were those who believed.

They believed that the

 wraithlike woman standing before them, clad in black to her neck, with her pale skin and wide gray eyes, could do as their host said.

As best Willie could imagine, and imagine he did over the years and years that followed, they’d suffered a great loss, a wound that, left to fester, had grown necrotic and healed wrong, leaving a deep crevice in the skin and in the soul. These guests watched with breathless hope, their chests constricted with it, and they welcomed the wind and the fingertips. It strengthened their resolve to believe that unlike the chintzy affairs in the city they’d slunk from in embarrassment when it became clear they’d been had, this was true spiritualism—and to think they hadn’t had to pay anything at all to see it!

Then came the knife, and their enthusiasm guttered like the flame of a candle with the onset of a sudden storm.

The medium’s sisters continued their song as she drew the little blade with its bleached white hilt from the sleeve of her gown and, holding it aloft, fell to her knees at the center of the circle.

Bone, thought Willie, that’s what that is, all right.

Horrified gasps and cries arose from the crowd at the sight of it, and as the sisters’ song reached a fever pitch, the medium bared her wrist and drew the blade across the fragile skin, crimson blood welling to the surface in beads before spilling over and dripping upon the rich wood of the Thorne Hall ballroom.

Mrs. Bishop promptly fainted, her husband only just managing to catch her. Several others followed suit, and even the faces of the men paled and sweat broke out upon their brows as they pressed the backs of their hands to their mouths.

Willie had grown up on a farm and had a stomach for blood and a spine made of far sterner stuff than the elite trying not to retch upon Jasper Thorne’s ballroom floor. He was less concerned with the medium’s blood than what she was currently doing with it, coating her fingers and drawing symbols at the center of the circle. Her eyes were closed, and through the gasps and fluttering, Willie could still hear her song.

The bloodied runes upon the floor began to blacken and burn. It was at this point in the evening’s festivities that Jasper Thorne’s guests appeared to regret accepting his invitation. Toward the doors they retreated, where the footmen, young and untried, appeared quite panicked as to whether or not to admit them to the corridor.

Willie found himself drawn inexplicably forward, toward the summoning circle, as though there were a barb lodged deep within his chest and the string tied to it were woven around the medium’s hands smeared with blood.

It was the same desperate pull he sometimes felt when his mother would fall into one of her trances, delicate fingertips tracing patterns in the ashes before the hearth as she hummed a melody that made his mouth run dry and the hairs on the back of his neck stand upon end.

When she returned from wherever it was she’d gone (for Willie knew that while her body might be there, his mother was not), she’d reach for ink and parchment, and whatever she wrote there was so valuable that men in fine coats came to their cottage with full purses, and it kept them in meat and grain through long winters.

It was the memory of his mother’s eyes and the terrible things they must’ve seen that compelled

 Willie to reach out and wrap his hand firmly about the butler’s trembling arm. “Get them out,” said he, voice pitched low. “Tell them it was all a show on account of the holiday. Get them to the great hall and play music, serve champagne, whatever you must—just keep them calm and get them out.”

That he’d commanded his better should have seen him ejected from the house, but instead, the butler merely nodded in relief.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he called. “I beg you calm yourselves. ’Twas a show and nothing more, and now it is over. Please make your way to the great hall—calmly, now, please do not panic. Calm! I beg you, be calm!”

At the butler’s command, footmen threw open the ballroom doors. As Mr. Thorne’s guests made an eager escape, Willie looked to the summoning circle, and to Jasper Thorne himself hovering upon the fringes. He no longer appeared the very picture of power and confidence. His eyes were wild and fixed upon the bleeding woman as her lips moved in song.

Instinct bid Willie to pull from his back pocket his tattered journal and the bit of charcoal he kept upon him in perpetuity, and he began in haste to record what he could of the runes and song, certain that should the worst befall Thorne Hall that night, another canny one might find it useful.

When the last guest had fled the ballroom, the butler paused and looked to Willie. If he’d any sense at all, Willie would have followed him, would have quit Thorne Hall altogether and left the whole messy affair in the shadows where it belonged, but his feet simply refused to carry him to the door. When it became evident Willie would remain, the butler dipped his head in a solemn nod and pulled the doors firmly shut. Beyond them, the musicians had taken up their instruments once more and the staff was doing its best to pass the bizarre, bloody tableau as a Hallowe’en jest. “Theater,” Willie heard the butler say.

He turned away, back to the runes where the deathly woman knelt unmoving, Jasper Thorne hovering above her, his eyes gone positively feral.

“Sparrow,” he demanded. “Sparrow! Answer me, damn you.”

“She cannot, lad.” This was spoken by the eldest of the medium’s kinswomen, stooped and wizened with age, and yet her gray eyes were bright.

“Why the hell not?”

“She plies her craft now,” answered the next, a woman very near the age Willie’s own mother had been when she’d passed. “That which you asked, sir.”

Jasper raked a hand through his black-and-silver hair, his jagged face contorted in rage. “I did not ask for this!”

The youngest of the women, not yet out of the schoolroom, put her finger to her lips.

“Shh,” she whispered. “He comes now.”

From the blackened hole that the medium’s blood had created, a hand emerged, and then another, clutching wildly at the edge of the floor, and a man hauled his upper body from the abyss below until he was braced upon his elbows, half of him awash in the golden candlelight and the other mired in deepest, oily black. His shoulders heaved on either side of his bowed head, and then with a mighty he pulled himself the rest of the way until he lay sprawled out on the ballroom floor.

His mottled skin was gray as a photograph, and his military jacket was bleached of color as well, though Willie thought he must have been blue once.

Around his neck he bore the unmistakable bruising of a hangman’s noose.

And as Sweet William Ezra Abner stared in mounting horror at the sight, his stomach threatening to vacate its contents upon Jasper Thorne’s blood-smeared ballroom floor, a single thought pierced the gloaming that fear had made of his good sense:

He really ought to

have listened to his grandmother.

 

The Unquiet Grave

Francis James Child ballad #78

The wind doth blow today, my love

And a few small drops of rain

I never had but one true love

In cold clay he was lain

I’ll do as much for my true love as any young lady may

I’ll sit and mourn all at his grave

For twelvemonth and a day

The twelvemonth and a day being gone

A voice spoke from the deep:

“Who is it sits upon my grave

And will not let me sleep?”

“’Tis I, ’tis I, thine own true love

Who sits upon your grave

For I crave one kiss from your sweet lips

And that is all I seek”

“You crave one kiss from my clay-cold lips

But my breath is earthy strong

Had you one kiss from my clay-cold lips

Your time would not be long

’Tis down in yonder garden green, love

Where we used to walk

The finest flower that e’er was seen

Is withered to a stalk

The stalk is withered dry, my love

So will our hearts decay

So make yourself content, my love Till death calls you away” ...