The Time Traveler's Almanac

For Helen was the first of the Boston girls to marry New York money. And such money and such a New York man! Garde’s hands were on all the late nineteenth century levers: steel, railroads, shipping. His origins were obscure. Not quite, a few hinted, Anglo-Saxon. The euphemism used around the Aquaphiliacs’ Society was, “Eastern”.

In the great age of buying and building on Mt. Airey, none built better or on a grander scale than Mr. and Mrs. Garde. The old Stoneham property expanded, stretched down to the sea. The new “cottage”, Joyous Garde, was sweeping, almost Mediterranean, with its Doric columns and marble terraces, its hundred windows that flamed in the rising sun.

With all this, Helen did not neglect Stoneham Cabin up on the mountain. Over the years, it became quite a rambling affair. The slope on which it was built, the pine grove in which it sat, made its size and shape hard to calculate. In the earliest years of the century, after the birth of her son, George, it was remarked that Helen Stoneham Garde came up long before the season and stayed well afterwards. And that she was interested in things Chinese. Not the collections of vases and fans that so many clipper-captain ancestors had brought home, but earthenware jugs, wooden sandals, bows and arrows. And she studied the language. Not high Mandarin, apparently, but some guttural peasant dialect.

Relations with her husband were also a subject for discussion. They were rarely seen together. In 1906, the demented millionaire Harry Thaw shot the philandering architect Stanford White on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden in New York. And the men taking part in the Bachelor’s Point Grand Regatta that year joked about how Simon Garde had been sitting two tables away. “As easily it might have been some other irate cuckold with a gun and Sanford White might be building our new yacht club right now.”

At the 1912 Charity Ball for the Penoquot Landing Fisherfolk Relief Fund in Baxter’s Grande Pavilion, the Gardes made a joint entrance. This was an event rare enough to upstage former President Teddy Roosevelt about to campaign as a Bull Moose.

Simon Garde, famously, mysteriously, died when the French liner Marseilles was sunk by a U-boat in 1916. Speculation flourished as to where he was bound and the nature of his mission. When his affairs, financial and otherwise, were untangled, his widow was said to be one of the wealthiest women in the nation.

Helen Stoneham Garde, a true child of New England, never took her attention far from the money. Horses were her other interest besides chinoise. She bred them and raced them. And they won. Much of her time was spent on the Mt. Airey estates. Stories of her reclusivity abounded. The truth, her granddaughter Julia knew, would have stunned even the most avid of the gossips. For around the turn of the century, Lucius had been replaced. A single arrow in the eye had left the old Rex sprawling on the stone threshold of the shrine. His helmet, his sword and the matched pair of Colt naval revolvers which had been a gift from George Stoneham, lay scattered like toys.

A new Rex, or more accurately a Regina, picked the silver mask out of the dust and put it on. This was Ki Mien from north China, a servant of the goddess of forests and woods and a huntress of huge ability. From a few allusions her grandmother dropped, Julia deduced that Helen Garde and the priestess had, over the next two decades, forged a union. Unknown to any mortal on the Island or in the world, they formed what was called in those days a Boston marriage.

In the years that Helen was occupied with Ki Mien, motorcars came to Mt. Airey. Their staunchest supporter was George “Flash” Garde, Simon and Helen’s son and only child. “A damned fine looking piece of American beef,” as a visiting Englishman remarked. Whether boy or man, Flash Garde could never drive fast enough. His custom-built Locomobile, all brass and polish and exhaust, was one of the hazards of Olympia Drive. “Racing to the next highball and low lady,” it was said at Bachelor’s Point. “Such a disappointment to his mother,” they sighed at Baxter’s. In fact, his mother seemed unbothered. Perhaps this was because she had, quite early on, arranged his marriage to Cissy Custis, the brightest of the famous Custis sisters. The birth of her granddaughter Julia guaranteed the only succession that really mattered to her.

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