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    A Treasure of One's Own
    A Treasure of One's Own
    A Treasure of One's Own
    Ebook69 pages56 minutes

    A Treasure of One's Own

    By Lydia San Andres

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    About this ebook

    Socorro knows better than anyone that spinsters must be either useful or entertaining. What she doesn’t know is that her decision to conduct a seance to amuse the other guests at a houseparty will lead to a treasure hunt, a friendship with the ghost of a lady pirate, and a romance with a most vex

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLydia San Andres
    Release dateApr 30, 2020
    ISBN9780463266458
    A Treasure of One's Own
    Author

    Lydia San Andres

    Lydia San Andres lives and writes in the tropics, where she can be found reading and making excuses to stay out of the heat. A Summer for Scandal is her first novel.

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      Book preview

      A Treasure of One's Own - Lydia San Andres

      A Treasure of One’s Own

      A Treasure of One’s Own

      Lydia San Andres

      A Treasure of One’s Own

      Ciudad Real, 1908

      In Socorro’s estimation, there existed two kinds of spinsters: the ones who made drudges of themselves as they strove to be useful additions to their loved ones’ households in order to avoid being cast out into the streets, and the ones who were so entertaining—sometimes even naturally so—that their friends and family fought over who got to host them instead of fighting over who had to.

      Early on in her spinstership—which, if you asked any member of Ciudad Real society, had begun roughly fifteen years before on the eve of her twenty-first birthday, when her lack of suitors turned from concerning to tragic to a grievous personal and moral failure—she resolved to make herself into a third kind of spinster, the kind that was both useful and entertaining and, as such, so indispensable to whichever household made the best hot chocolate that she would always have her pick of places to live.

      To wit—the kind of spinster who hosted seances in the front parlor.

      Modesty aside, it was a stroke of genius. Making contact with the dead was fashionable enough that it didn’t invite censure from the paragons of virtue that ruled society, and scandalous and dangerous enough to lend a whisper of excitement to the proceedings. The fact that she had not a scrap of otherworldly sensitivities didn’t enter into the equation. She had wit, she had a solid ability to read people’s thoughts and desires, and perhaps most useful of all, she had a great deal of theatrical experience.

      Coco, her younger, very married and currently outrageously pregnant sister said one morning, you can’t really mean to hoodwink everyone we know.

      It’s only a bit of fun, Socorro replied airily, taking a sip of the hot liquid—one could hardly call it cocoa—filling her cup. I won’t ask for payment so no one can claim I’ve defrauded them, I won’t bamboozle the newly bereaved, and I won’t make anyone hand over their family jewels, which is more than I can say for some mediums. In any case, the deed is done. I dropped the merest hint of it yesterday during the Molinas’ garden party and I’ve already got a stack of invitations taller than Manuela Perez’s pompadour.

      Alicia sighed. You know you’re welcome to stay here for as long as you like.

      Lovely as it is to spend time with you and your frightfully ill-behaved children, I did have my heart set on doing some traveling. Besides, Socorro added with her characteristic if infrequently applied honesty, your housekeeper makes the worst cocoa I’ve ever had the displeasure of tasting. How is it that she manages to burn the milk every morning?

      I wouldn’t expect less, what with the children’s passion for terrorizing the kitchen. Most days, I’m content that it’s only the milk that’s been burned, rather than the entire household.

      Socorro gave a horrified shudder. And that is why I’m picking a home with no children. Or pets. Or any creatures other than reasonable, if slightly gullible, adult humans.

      And spirits, her sister added.

      I won’t be needing any of those. Socorro waved a hand in the air. I’ve my ingenuity, and that will be more than enough.

      And it might have been, if the household she’d selected hadn’t turned out to be haunted.

      It was the home of one of her closest friends from childhood, Matilde Gonzalez—Matilde de Pantaleon after her marriage to Daniel Pantaleon, a man whose taste in cooks aligned closely with Socorro’s own. The house itself was fairly new, having been rebuilt after the 1903 earthquake…and the 1899 hurricane…and the floods of ’87.

      Socorro didn’t know whether Matilde’s family was stubborn, persistent, or just particularly dense to have continuously rebuilt on what was obviously a cursed stretch of land, but she was rather glad her friend had inherited the house.

      It had been equipped with all the modern conveniences—that was to say, a lavatory with an occasionally working shower, a telephone in the landing of the staircase that only sometimes refused to connect to the operator, and bright, glaring electrical lights that were set aflicker with the merest hint of a breeze. This was slightly inconvenient, given that the house was situated an eight minutes’ walk from the pristine beach that had turned Santa Lucia del Mar into a bustling resort town, and the occasional breeze was wont to drift in from the sea.

      This deep into the summer season, the bustle was almost a frantic dash of people scurrying from the yacht club to the athletic club to the casinos that had popped up all along

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