The Secret Bliss of Calliope Ipswich

Copyright
© 2014

The Secret Bliss of Calliope
Ipswich
by Marcia Lynn McClure

www.marcialynnmcclure.com

All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the US Copyright Act of 1976, the contents of this book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or distributed in any part or by any means without the prior written consent of the author and/or publisher.

Published by Distractions Ink

1290 Mirador
Loop N.E.

Rio
Rancho, NM  87144

Published by Distractions Ink

©Copyright 2014 by M. Meyers

A.K.A. Marcia Lynn McClure

Cover Photography by ©Larry Mateyer/Dreamstime.com and

Cover Design and Interior Graphics by Sandy Ann Allred/Timeless Allure

First Printed Edition:  May 2014

All character names and personalities in this work of fiction are entirely fictional,

created solely in the imagination of the author.

Any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental.

McClure, Marcia Lynn, 1965—

The Secret Bliss of Calliope
Ipswich
: a novel/by Marcia Lynn McClure.

ISBN:  978-0-9913878-5-4

Library of Congress Control Number:  2014943232

Printed in the United States of America

You fill my heart with love and tender memories
,

My mind with images of simpler, more romantic times,

And my soul with faith, hope, and strength!

I love you so much, Mom!

~Marcia

The following is a short but lovely memory reminisced upon and quickly written down by my mother,
Patsy Christine States Reed, in 1991. Her sweet, handwritten memories will forever continue to inspire me!

Sometime when I was four years old, we moved to the Walker Ranch at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. This was a beautiful setting! The house was a rustic brown and sat back at least a half-mile from the main road. It had an upstairs in which the ceilings were pointed because they went up to the pitched roof of the house. The bedroom I loved had a small window that swung open like a door, and the bubbling sounds of the creek could be heard. There was another window in that room on the outside sill of which a robin built her nest one spring, and Mom and I lay on the bed sometime each day watching her first build her nest, then sitting on her eggs, then the eggs hatching, then feeding her babies. I will always remember those blue speckled eggs, the speckled breasts of the young birds, and their feeding them. What a wonderful experience!

In the spring, summer, and fall, I would go out to the wood pile and, from the round, short pieces of quakies which had been cut for the winter wood, find some pieces that were flat enough on both ends to stand up and be used for furniture. I sat these up in little make-believe rooms. Mom cut out paper doilies for the tops of them, and I would play house. I had some little pans. I took little petals from the dandelions for corn, the little fuchsia petals from another very tiny little plant for beets, small green leaves for greens, and just had an imaginative good time.

“Oh!
Do
link arms with me, Calliope,” Blanche whispered, her brown eyes widening with apprehension. She took Calliope’s arm, tightly linking it with her own. “The old Mulholland house still gives me the willies every time I walk past it. I hate to think on what might have gone on inside. It’s truly terrifyin’!”

“Oh
, don’t be silly, Blanche,” Calliope said, feigning calm. “Poor Prudence’s lunacy…it’s sad. And besides, her fiendish acts were not committed inside the house. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just…it’s just a sad, empty building.” Calliope Ipswich felt the hypocrite, however, as an uncomfortable shiver of residual dread and unease shuddered down her spine.

More than six months had passed since the All H
allow’s Eve when the dangerous state of Prudence Mulholland’s fracturing mind had been revealed to the townsfolk of Meadowlark Lake. And now, each time Calliope thought of poor Prudence and her family, her heart ached for their family’s unhappy lot, and a chill of lingering horror rippled through her being.

In truth, at times Calliope wondered if it had all been simply a bad dream—a nightmare.
But it hadn’t. It really had happened—all of it. Jealous of Calliope’s older sister Amoretta at having won the heart of the handsome Brake McClendon, Prudence Mulholland had endeavored to scare Amoretta—at first. Yet when Brake and Amoretta’s love proved unalterable, Prudence’s fracturing mind had prompted her to attempt to eliminate Calliope’s sister altogether. Thankfully, Brake McClendon was a strong, heroic man and had stopped Prudence from taking any human lives, especially that of his beloved Amoretta. Yet Amoretta and Brake would both forever bear the physical scars of Prudence’s attempt to separate them, all the same.

As Calliope studied the now empty house where the Mulholland family had once lived, that fateful Halloween night
somehow seemed so long ago. But it was still far too fresh in the minds of those who dwelt in Meadowlark Lake, especially Calliope’s. The terror had ended six months past, and Prudence Mulholland was now tucked away in an asylum, while Brake and Amoretta McClendon were happily married and living in the nearby town of Langtree. Her sister and brother-in-law were safe, as was everyone else in town. Hence, Calliope wondered why she still trembled whenever she passed by the old Mulholland house.

“Well
, empty, sad buildin’ or not, no one will ever buy it and move in again,” Blanche noted. “Not after what happened to Prudence. That new family in town—the Chesterfields?—even they did not consider the old Mulholland house once they’d been told what had happened with Prudence.”

Calliope sighed, feeling rather compassionately heartbroken.
“Poor Pru,” she said. “Even now I can’t believe it most of the time. All of us were such dear friends with Prudence! We sat in sewing circles with her, got into mischief in spying on the men at the mill with her. And all the time…all the time none of us even suspected she was suffering as she was, hearing strange voices in her head…killing animals, people’s pets.”

“I know,” Blanche sighed, glancing over her shoulder once more to the abandoned house.
“Poor Prudence…and poor Samuel.”

Suddenly remembering that Blanche had been very sweet on Prudence’s brother, Samuel Mulholland—realizing that Blanche’s melancholy was far deeper than perhaps even her own—Calliope reached up, tucking a flaxen strand of breeze-blown hair behind one ear
, and said, “Well, we have a lovely path before us today, anyway. All springy and sunshine, with bright blue skies and the delightful conversation that awaits us at Winnie’s house.”

Blanche rolled her eyes and giggled.
“I do not understand why it is you enjoy the sewin’ circle so much, Calliope.” Blanche’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “I’d say that it was for the sake you might catch a glimpse of the handsome Fox Montrose. Yet somethin’ inside me thinks maybe you aren’t as sweet on Winnie’s older brother as he is on you, Calliope Ipswich.”

Calliope giggled, her sky-blue eyes twinkling with amusement.
“Oh, every girl in town is sweet on Fox Montrose, Blanche. You know that. To some degree or another, all the young ladies in Meadowlark Lake like to catch a glimpse of him.”

“He
is
very handsome,” Blanche confirmed. “You’re so lucky that his interest has settled on you, Calliope.” She giggled. “Perhaps I should have your stepmother brew me up a batch of some sort of love potion. Then I might be blessed with his smile when he looks at me the way you are when he looks at you.”

“Kizzy is a gypsy, Blanche
, not a witch,” Calliope teased. “And besides, since she married Daddy, she doesn’t really sell her gypsy wares anymore.”

Blanche laughed, and her coiffed brown hair bounced in rhythm with her vocally expressed amusement.
“Oh, I so adore that your father, the important county judge, fell in love with the gypsy from the wood. It’s so romantic!”

“It is romantic,” Calliope sighed contentedly.
“And Daddy loves little Shay as if she were his very own child, which she is now, I suppose, being that the adoption has been final for some time. The way Daddy dotes on Shay, one would never guess she’d been Kizzy’s alone before Daddy and Kizzy met.”

Blanche’s smile broadened.
“Your whole family dotes on Shay! You Ipswich girls are gonna spoil your little stepsister rotten if you’re not careful,” she teased.

Calliope giggled and nodded.
“We do adore her so much. But I don’t believe you can spoil children by loving them. Perhaps sparing discipline and teaching or giving them too many material things might spoil them. But there is no such thing as too much love.”

“That’s true,” Blanche agreed.
She exhaled a heavy sigh. “Oh, Calliope, what I wouldn’t give to be in your shoes—a successful judge for a father, a beautiful young gypsy woman for a stepmother, two older sisters who love and adore you, and a little sister who thinks the sun and moon rise and set by you. And let’s not forget Fox Montrose being sweet on you too! Why, you’ve got everything a girl could ever wish for!”

Calliope smiled and admitted, “I’ll not deny the fact that God has blessed me and my family with love and comfort
, for he has. I would be selfish to wish for anything other than what I already have.”

Blanche quirked one eyebrow and studied Calliope for a moment.
“And yet?” she ventured. “That’s what you’re thinkin’ right now, isn’t it?”

Calliope shrugged.
“Sometimes I do wish I could one day have the kind of love my sister Amoretta has with Brake…what Daddy and Kizzy have.”

Blanche’s pretty forehead puckered with a slight frown.
“You don’t like Fox as much as he likes you, do you, Calliope? You’re not in love with him.”

Calliope silently scolded herself for having let her countenance and words reveal her secret to Blanche.
The truth was that she was not as sweet on Fox Montrose as he was on her. Yet there were secrets in her heart that could never be revealed to anyone—not even to Blanche, not even to Calliope’s own sisters.

Therefore, she chose a counter maneuver with which to distract Blanche and said, “Oh, I adore Fox!
I just think these things may take time, you know, for me to…to…”

“To really fall in love with him, you mean,” Blanche finished.

“Yes. Perhaps that is what I mean,” Calliope responded.

“But you seem to forget that you’re out west now, Calliope.
This isn’t Boston,” Blanche reminded. “Many people out here marry for practical reasons—simply to survive hardship and to work together.”

“Well, in
Boston, one lives in fear of being saddled with an arranged marriage,” Calliope countered.

“Still?
Truly?” Blanche gasped.

“Sometimes,” Calliope answered.

Blanche inhaled a deep breath of determination, however, straightened her posture, and said, “Don’t you worry, Calliope Ipswich. You’ll fall in love with Fox Montrose eventually.” She giggled, lowered her voice, and whispered, “And if you don’t, I’ll do it for you and gladly take him off your hands, all right?”

Calliope giggled as well, agreeing, “All right.”

Yet as they neared the Montrose house—as Calliope returned a friendly wave that Sallie Ackerman tossed to her as she entered Fox and Winnie’s home—trepidation welled up in Calliope’s bosom, for she knew that if she hadn’t fallen in love with Fox Montrose by now, she never would. Furthermore, she didn’t want to.

A secret bliss was nestled deep inside Calliope Ipswich.
It had been nestled there from nearly the moment the Ipswich family had arrived in Meadowlark Lake all those months past. And though it was a bliss she owned in knowing something about herself that even her own sisters did not know, it likewise brought her pain at times—for it was the very reason she knew she would never fall in love with Fox Montrose. Calliope’s love was already spoken for—and no one in all the wide world, save Calliope Ipswich herself, would ever know it.