Family Heirloom Challenge: "Amelia Josephine and the Finding of Great-Grandpapa" -- by Abigail Leskey

Amelia Josephine and the Finding of Great-Grandpapa

By Abigail Leskey

            My name is Amelia Josephine Wilbanks, and I am seven years and four months old, and last March I found my great-grandpapa, who had disappeared.

            I didn’t know that I had a great-grandpapa who had disappeared, until last Christmas. Indeed, I didn’t know that I had one at all. But last Christmas, Papa gave me a pocketwatch that he said Great-Grandpapa had given Grandpapa on Christmas when Grandpapa was eight, and that Grandpapa had given Papa on Christmas when Papa was eight. I am Papa’s only child; Mamma went to Heaven when I was a baby. 

            The pocketwatch is golden, like my hair, and has purple velvet inside it, like my favorite muff, so I am immensely fond of it. The day after Christmas, I was trying to make it fit in the pockets of my dollies’ frocks when it occurred to me that I had never met my great-grandpapa. 

            I asked Papa at dinner, “Papa, is Great-Grandpapa in Heaven?”

            Papa drank out of the wrong side of his moustache cup. “I don’t know, my dear.”

            I also asked about Great-Grandpapa in January and in February, but in January Papa said he needed to balance his accounts, and in February he told me not to ask about Great-Grandpapa. 

In March, Papa told me that he wished to take me to visit his Aunt Maud. I had never met Aunt Maud, but I had heard that when she was fifteen she stole a diamond earring from Aunt Victoria and that when she was twenty-six she jilted her fiancé. I put Great-Grandpapa’s pocketwatch in my dolly Violet’s pocket and held her on my lap as we rode in our carriage for twenty-four miles. 

Twenty minutes after three, we trotted into Aunt Maud’s drive. Her house is stone and has three towers and pointed windows. I think it should have purple velvet curtains and purple pennants on the towers; when I grow up and marry and have a house, it will have purple curtains and pennants. But Aunt Maud’s house has no pennants, and its curtains are black brocade. She does not understand that everything ought to be purple. 

Aunt Maud wears black silk and frowns, and the hairpins in her bun look as if she is hoarding them there until she catches a butterfly. She told me to sit in the parlor and be good.  I took Violet into the parlor and showed her all of the portraits on the walls, naming them after the kings and queens of England since I did not know their names. Some of them looked like Papa; I named them after the Hanoverans, since Papa’s name is George. 

Then I eavesdropped. “You’ve asked me if I have a notion where he is before, George.” Aunt Maud said. “I do not!”

Papa said something I could not hear. 

“No, I will not help fund the search!”

The search? I wondered whom they were looking for (or rather, whom Papa was looking for and Aunt Maud was not looking for) while we had tea. Aunt Maud did not let me have sugar cubes. 

            When the sun began setting, making the sky purple and orange, Aunt Maud conducted me to a room with walls covered in black and grey wallpaper, which would have been prettier if it were purple wallpaper. The room had a bed with bedposts and a grey toile coverlet. “Your Papa will be in the room beside yours,” Aunt Maud enunciated. She patted my head and strode into the hallway and away. 

            I said my prayers and went to bed, where I told Violet a story about a beautiful lady with purple eyes who fell in love with a ghost. I fell asleep after he proposed to her while floating beside a lilac bush. 

And then I woke up. In the moonlight, I opened Great-Grandpapa’s pocketwatch and saw that it was midnight. I had always wanted to walk at midnight and see a ghost, but my house is not haunted, and I had never woken up at midnight in a different house before. 

            I put the pocketwatch into Violet’s pocket again, put on my purple satin slippers, and quietly walked out of my room and into the dark hallway. It had a dark, creaking floor, a dark ceiling, and hair-wreaths in frames on the walls. The glass that protected the hair reflected Violet and me.

            I saw no ghosts in the hallway, but when I opened the door at the end of the hallway and found a staircase, I climbed it because hope springs eternal: ghosts might be upstairs. I held tightly to the rail as I ascended, because one time I fell down the stairs and broke my favorite dolly before Violet, Hydrangea. 

            At the top of the stairs were two doors. I opened one of them and could not see what was inside; there was no moonlight in it. I reached in with my left hand and beside the door I felt a shelf with glass jars on it. I wondered why there was a pantry upstairs. Was the other room an upstairs kitchen? 

            I unlatched the other door and pushed it inward, and gasped. A ghost! In front of a fireplace stood an old gentleman who looked like Grandpapa. “Grandpapa?” I whispered. “Why are you haunting Aunt Maud’s upstairs?” I had wanted to see a ghost, but I hadn’t wanted the ghost to be my grandpapa. 

            Bald on top, and wearing his night-shirt backwards, the old gentleman looked at me and smiled. “Mary, you should be in bed.”

            I walked closer to him. “I’m not Mary, Grandpapa. I’m Amelia, and this is Violet.” 

            He reached out to pat my cheek, smiling affectionately at me. His hand was warm.

            “Oh!” I exclaimed. This old gentleman wasn’t Grandpapa’s ghost—he was Great-Grandpapa! “Papa will be overjoyed, Great-grandpapa! He’s been looking for you! I wonder why Aunt Maud didn’t know you were living—” 

            Great-Grandpapa shook his head. “Maudie is unkind. She says I mayn’t go for strolls.” 

            I gaped as I apprehended that Aunt Maud must have kidnapped him! I needed to take him to Papa, or take Papa to him! I was about to ask him to come with me to Papa’s room, but then I realized he might fall down the stairs. Before I could ask if I might fetch Papa, Great-Grandpapa bent and pulled the pocketwatch out of Violet’s pocket. 

            “Mary, I’ve told you not to play with this,” he said gently, reaching over his shoulder to put it in his backwards nightshirt’s pocket. I realized that he must not be in his right mind.

            “I’m sorry, Great-Grandpapa,” I apologized. “May I fetch Papa to see you? He misses you.”

            Great-Grandpa looked confused, but he said, “Of course, my dear.” 

            I handed Violet to him, and ran down the stairs and down the hallway and knocked on Papa’s door. “Papa! Papa! Papa! Wake up!”

            Papa thumped across the creaky floor, and then he opened the door, his moustache very disordered. “Amelia! Is there a mouse in your room?” 

            “No, Papa! I found Great-Great-Grandpapa living upstairs with a pantry and his night-shirt is on backwards!”

            Papa blinked. “You dreamt, Amelia.”

I shook my head. “Truly, Papa!  He took my pocketwatch, and says Aunt Maud won’t let him stroll, and he looks like Grandpapa!” 

Papa’s eyes became as big as saucers. He grabbed hold of the doorframe, and then ran past me and down the hallway towards the stairs. I followed him up the stairs, bouncing a little.          

Great-Grandpapa looked at Papa with a smile. “Benson!” (Grandpapa was named Benson.) Papa stared at him for a moment and then threw his arms around him, and Great-Grandpapa embraced him too. 

            Now Aunt Maud lives in Connecticut, and Great-Grandpapa lives with Papa and me. He gave me my pocketwatch as a present, a week after we brought him home, and he tells me stories about when he was a little boy pretending to be a general fighting American rebels and he pretended it was a snuff box, and about when he was a naval lieutenant and dropped it in the ocean and jumped overboard to regain it. He says that the ship he jumped from was purple, and the carpet he played on was purple too.