“If it helps, he laid that floor on top of the ballroom floor, tongue and groove, no glue, specifically so the original hardwood would be protected. Maybe that’s why my grandmother didn’t mind it becoming a shuffleboard court.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. I got the sense he prided himself on being a good steward of the estate.”
“Exactly,” Jay says. “Do you want to go through the rest of the main floor and the grounds, or do you need a break after the excitement of the secret passageway?”
“You mean the near-death experience in the secret passageway?”
“You did not almost die, your majesticalness.”
“I meantyouwhen I almost killed you for touching my noble heinie. Although, to be fair, that almost gavemea heart attack, so maybe we both nearly died.”
“Still sorry, but I wasn’t going to die for real from boosting your foot instead just for manners.”
“All right. Forgiven. Let’s never speak of it again. Tell me what else I should know about the library, then we’ll go through the rest of the floor and hit the grounds.”
As we finish up the main floor, I’m impressed. Harvey Bullard gave me a tour of the estate during my informational interview, and I read everything he’d sent over to me on the Martin House plus whatever I could find in our research databases through the museum. Yet in every room, Jay still provides color and detail that’s new to me.
We’re heading into the final room on the first floor, what Jay referred to as the bottle room. When I interviewed, Harvey called it the east parlor. Like most homes from the era, the house hadn’t been built with a grand foyer. Instead, the front door opened into a hall off which visitors could enter the dining room to the left, or more commonly, theparlor to the right, where they would keep company with the family.
Windows take up two of the walls overlooking the front lawn and the terrace of the ballroom, which adjoins the parlor. But on the wall where the northern light shines strongest, an enormous display case full of glass bottles dominates the room. The cabinet stands at least a foot taller than Jay and fills nearly the entire width of the wall.
The bottles are organized by color. Amber, emerald, cobalt, iridescent, and clear. They’re different shapes and sizes. Some have faded labels, and on others, the glass is stamped or embossed. All of them were once used for medicine, a nod to the early origins of the Martin fortune.
“My fourth great-grandfather started this collection, and every Martin since has added to it. I imagine you know why?”
“Foster told me about the Martin family history, and he included the details with his catalog. He did an incredible amount of work indexing everything on the estate. His overview said the bottles are all a nod to how the Martins began building their fortune.”
“You do your homework,” he says.
“For museum nerds, reading through that stuff is a good time. Will you tell me the Martin lore as someone who descends from it?”
“Now you’re makingmesound majestical.”
“Everyone sounds majestic if you say they have lore.”
“What’s yours?” he asks, his expression curious.
Nope, not going to fall under the spell of interested questions from a good-looking man. “Mine has nothing to do with the museum. Let’s go back to yours.”
“I’m not sure I can add anything to what Foster told you. Some Martins camp by the spring one night and never leave. Farm for a century. A distant cousin comes to visit, and afterhe drinks the spring water, a tooth that had bothered him for months stops hurting. He convinces that Martin to bottle and sell it as a tonic. That goes on for a couple of generations and does well enough for Josiah Martin to build this house in 1795.”
“Do people around here even remember that the Martins once sold magic curative water?” I ask. It’s so unlike anything I can imagine Foster doing.
“I don’t think so. And it’s interesting how it came full circle in its own way over time. You’d think people would make that connection more.”
“Except Mass Meds is straight up legitimate. I rarely think about what company makes my meds, and if I did, I wouldn’t associate Jointment with quack medicine from the 1700s.”
“We have Abigail Martin to thank for that. She badly wanted to become a doctor, but that wasn’t going to happen in her lifetime. When she was twenty-six, her younger brother was old enough to start his education, and she talked him into going to medical school. More than that, she talked her father into sending her to Boston to keep a small set of rooms for her brother, Matthew, and act as his chaperone.”
“That might have been my favorite story,” I say. “How she studied with Matthew and worked beside him when he could sneak her into the laboratory after hours.”
Jay smiles. “In one of his journals, Matthew confessed that Abigail was a far more talented doctor than he was.”
“Kind of a force of nature. Didn’t she shut down the whole tonic business?”
“She did. Caused some resentment with the business partners, but she was adamant. For the next fifty years, we had doctors. The surgery was where the current kitchen is, and you don’t want to think about that too much when you’re making dinner.”
I wrinkle my nose. No, no, I do not.
