Rose Mansion

 Mystery, however slight, is nonetheless a giant to the ready acceptance and scintillation for more to the smitten beholder.  In our story, the reader is brought along the edge of more than meets the eye, and in its latency, its mystic manner becomes more than a link of things to follow, but rather, is causation to the birth of the story.

            As the tall oak springs from the tiny seed, ideas mature and change along the way from first conception.  So to, with our story, which matured from a narrative which I had written.  And from here, out of the smallest thought, it became a favorite of my wife, and to the point of enlargement, she expressed, “You should write a story out of this.”  Which I did.

            The story takes place during the last few months of the War Between The States, and continues for years later through the mystic energies set free by a trespasser unaware of its causal nature.  Concerned and fascinated, the trespasser remains for a period of time, unaware that his curiosity is the reach into this labyrinth of his finding. 

            While quite apart from the battlefronts popular to the South, a lesser, and personal flight and strategy was under way in the search for a suspected Confederate spy in the cover and person of an English professor.  The professor taught at an exclusive school for girls called Wellesley, and became involved with Rose Mansion, a stunning estate in the suburbs of Philadelphia.  The area was actually known as Greenvale, and in its brevity of size, remained unincorporated by the larger, surrounding townships.

            In his flight from the local militia, the professor and suspected spy was, on occasion, stealthily received into the cover of the attic of the senior student, Isabel Chase, resident of Rose Mansion.  After tender scenes of love between the professor and his lovely benefactor, the professor is finally detained as an enemy of the state.

            With the ending of the war, and the total absence of corollary evidence, the professor, Roger Snowe, is freed of any guilt.  Together with his sweetheart, Isabel Chase, he heads south to the charm of Charleston and his plantation, widely known as Freedom Land.  And not a week too soon, as Roger, known of peaceful nature, rallied four plantations against the invading hordes of the Union carpetbaggers in two amazing battles of trickery and deception. 

            There is much that is central to Rose Mansion and its prevailing latency that springs from the curiosity of a trespasser and his later purchase of the estate, which had fallen into disrepair.  The new master of Rose Mansion comes to discover that he was drawn there from the very beginning to free the spirits of Isabel Chase and Roger Snowe from the captivity of the “Netherlands.”