Did you hear about the ghost that haunts the Wilbur Manor? Yes, that palatial structure on top of Cranberry Hill. It used to belong to Bernard Wilbur, who was dubbed ‘The Duke’ by the people of James Port City – for he had a lavish aristocratic way of life despite not having a single drop of blue blood in his veins. Every now and then, The Duke would throw grand parties where the cream of the society would come dressed in their best jewels to dance the night away. And the manor would be so bright and lively, it would shine like a festive odd star against the silence and shadow where the rest of the town beneath it lay. The residence was indeed magnificent back in the days. But that was all before it became haunted, of course. Before the household servants began to flee one by one early in the morning and before everyone started pretending that the place even existed.
Anyways, they say that The Duke really came from a very humble beginning. His father, Alfred, was a thin man who didn’t say much and hauled coal on his bare back from the factory to the ships waiting at the dock. He lived only for his son and worked for 27 years before finally retiring - a little hunchback and smelling perpetually of burnt wood. He died soon enough unfortunately, perhaps from sniffing too much carbon during his lifetime.
When The Duke was young, Alfred would tell his son that his mother had died soon after she gave birth to him. She was very sick, he would say. But everyone else knew how much that was not true. James Port City is a small town. Everyone knew that The Duke’s mother had abandoned her family to flee with the Spanish captain who ran El Monstruo Marino, the ship that lived up to its name both in size and reputation. Yet no one was surprised when that striking beauty left her laborer husband for the better prospect. She had always talked about living in huge mansions and wearing pretty dresses and had always complained about how she could not stand her baby’s wailing. She had married Alfred only because her father owed Alfred money he needed for gambling. Alfred woke up one day to find her wedding band on the dresser and his baby howling for the mother. So he wept silently for 5 seconds, picked up his son and moved on with his life. He never spoke of his wife again unless asked by the little boy. And even then, he would always tell him the same thing the boy already knew: that she was dead.
What Alfred never knew, however, was that The Duke knew the truth as well. He had found out when he was playing hide-and-seek behind Marjorie Hacksman’s rundown furniture shop. The gruff loudmouthed woman was cursing Albert for rejecting her marriage proposal, not knowing that the 8 year old was hiding inside a crate underneath her window waiting for Tommy Linton to come and find him. The Duke listened to everything he needed to hear then quietly scrambled out of hiding before Tommy could get there and reveal him. He never told Alfred what he heard from Marjorie that day -for he loved and respected his father too much to deliberately expose his little big lie - but he did stop asking Alfred about his missing mother. And Alfred happily assumed that the boy was just no longer interested.
Then one day, El Monstruo Marino came back to James Port City. The Duke had just turned 13 the week before. And for his birthday, his father had bought him a muffin and a pair of new socks and gave him 10 cents to buy himself a new book of his liking. So The Duke was in the bookstore browsing for a book when he heard John Thacker talk to Alex Smithson about the ship arriving the next morning.
-to be continued-
