A Beautiful Possibility

The Plot

The House Where Nothing Was Supposed to Change

On one of the loveliest islands in the West Indies, a villa sits half-buried in tropical green, with a fountain on the lawn and hammocks on the veranda and a library full of shells, microscopes, petrified wood and pinned insects. Lenox Hildreth came to Barbados as a young man because New England winters were going to kill him, and he never went back. He married a planter's daughter, inherited her father's estates, built a beautiful house, and buried his wife when their only child was six. For nine years since, he and Evadne have been each other's entire world. They hunt specimens together, ride the beach together, read to each other in the evenings. She's fifteen now and can't imagine anything ever being different.

Her father can. One morning he sits down and writes two letters, seals them into one envelope, and addresses it to his brother in Massachusetts. He tells Evadne it's nothing. He tells himself the doctor is a fussy old man imagining germs where none exist.

Lenox Hildreth is a cheerful, generous, thoroughly worldly man who's spent his life laughing at pious hypocrites, and he's never been able to see the point of religion. So when he finally speaks to his daughter about it, what he says is the last thing she expects, and the last thing he ever says to her: make it the business of your life to find Jesus Christ.

He doesn't explain what he means. He doesn't get the chance.

A Question Nobody Wants to Answer

Evadne takes him literally. That turns out to be the problem.

She asks the clergyman who comes to sit with her. He recommends reverence and humble fear. She asks a bishop's wife on the ship north, who offers to lend her a prayer book, then a treatise on church doctrine, and finally crosses herself and starts reciting the creed. Everywhere Evadne goes she asks the same plain question and everywhere she gets a pamphlet, a change of subject, or a horrified look. She doesn't want Christianity. She keeps saying so. She wants the man her father named.

Then the ship docks, and the train pulls into Marlborough, Massachusetts, and there's snow on the ground.

The Coldest House in New England

Judge Lawrence Hildreth's home is one of the finest in the city and the temperature inside it never rises above polite. There's Aunt Kate, who greets her niece with lips touched briefly to the forehead and a worry about how much trouble a fever in the house would be. There's Isabelle, beautiful and glacial, who lends Evadne a Bible the way you'd hand someone a mop. There's Marion, who agrees with whatever Isabelle just said. And there's Louis, cynical and idle and far too clever, who at least finds his Barbados cousin entertaining, and who is not nearly as harmless as his lazy smile suggests.

Evadne is fifteen, orphaned, three thousand miles from everything she loved, and nobody in the house has any use for her. So she does what lonely people do. She finds the one place in the whole establishment where somebody is glad to see her: the coach house, where Pompey grooms the Judge's horses and remembers her father with real affection.

Pompey, it turns out, is the first person she's met who can answer her question without flinching. So is his wife Dyce, who takes in laundry on top of everything else because they keep running out of money to give away. The two of them are treated by the family as furniture. They're also, by a wide margin, the happiest people in Marlborough.

The Locked Drawer

There's something Evadne doesn't know.

Her father left instructions. Two letters, remember, sealed in one envelope: one for his brother, one for her. Lenox Hildreth wanted his daughter to handle her own inheritance, to learn money and business and the management of her own life, with her uncle only supervising. It's an unusual arrangement for 1904 and the Judge thinks it's insane.

He also has speculations that have gone badly, paper out to five times his income, and credit stretched to snapping. And in his library, late at night, he holds his brother's letter and argues with himself about whether a man's last will and testament is really binding when following it would ruin him.

Then he takes his niece for a pleasant drive in the country and tells her, kindly, not to worry her head about columns of uninteresting figures. He'll open her an account. He'll give her the same allowance as his own girls. When she's older, he'll explain everything.

The drawer with the letters in it is double-locked.

The Man at the Gate

That same drive takes them out to Hollywood, the finest stock farm in the county, where Evadne wanders off past the barns while her uncle does business and finds herself leaning on a gate looking at cattle and thinking she'd give anything to belong somewhere the way they do.

Which is how she meets John Randolph.

He's an orphan too, taken in as a small boy by the farm's owner and worked like a hired man ever since, doing two men's labor for a pittance while the owner's son goes to college on the proceeds. He's recently had something happen to him under a sky full of stars that has rearranged his entire life. He is, at this moment, the only person Evadne has met on this continent besides a coachman and a laundress who knows exactly what she's talking about.

She asks him what he thinks of life. He tells her it's a beautiful possibility.

They have perhaps four minutes together. Then a servant comes to say the Judge is waiting, and she goes, and he picks her handkerchief up out of the grass and keeps it.

Everything Comes Apart at Once

Back at Hollywood, the master's son has been carried off a football field and will never walk again without a crutch, and his father, robbed of the son he was going to make a judge of, has turned savage. He needs someone to punish for it. He has exactly one person on the property who can't fight back.

In Marlborough, Evadne stands for an hour in a March wind outside a packed concert hall, and comes home shivering, and can't lift her head from the pillow the next morning, and the French maid takes one look at her and says she's seen this before, that her own sister had it and died.

The Judge listens to the doctor on the front steps and thinks about the letter in his drawer.

Somewhere out at the bend of the river, a young man who owns nothing but a resolution lies face down on the moss, because he's been told to be off the only home he's ever known by nightfall.

Nobody in this story knows yet what the others are about to cost them.

About the Author: Edith Ferguson Black

What's Known

Edith Ferguson Black was born on February 14, 1857, and died on May 29, 1936. She was Canadian, she sometimes published under the name Edith Douglas, and beyond that the historical record is remarkably thin for someone who put four novels into print. She left no famous friends, no scandal, no biography. What survives is the work.

The Books

Her output was small and spread out: A Princess in Calico in 1903, this novel in 1904, Allan Knight in 1907, and Shipmate in 1915. Four books across twelve years, all of them driven by the same engine, which is the collision between a good-hearted young person and a world that has agreed to be respectable instead of good.

Where She Published

This novel came out of Philadelphia, from the Union Press, in 1904. That's worth noticing. A Canadian writer, setting a book in Barbados and Massachusetts, published by an American religious house. She was writing for the enormous turn-of-the-century market in what publishers called "inspirational fiction," books sold by subscription agents and given as Sunday school prizes, a market that could move staggering numbers of copies and then vanish from literary memory entirely. Which is more or less what happened.

Fun Facts About the Book

The Title Is a Line of Dialogue

It isn't a description of the plot or a theme imposed afterward. It's the answer John Randolph gives when Evadne, a total stranger, asks him at a farm gate what he thinks of life. The whole book is an argument for whether he's right.

She Used a Pen Name

Black also wrote as "Edith Douglas," which was common enough for women novelists of the era but adds a small extra layer to how completely she's disappeared. There are two names to search and almost nothing behind either one.

The Squirrel

The novel opens its second thread with a seventeen-year-old boy standing over a squirrel he just shot for fun, feeling sick about it, and burying the animal at the foot of a tree with a pencilled grave marker reading "Here lies the germ of a resolve." Animal welfare runs through the entire book with surprising force: overdriven horses, a beetle crushed and left to suffer, a cow talked to like a person. In 1904 this was not standard equipment for a religious novel.

It's Easier to Read Than Most Books Its Age

Project Gutenberg scores its readability at roughly a sixth-grade level. For a Victorian-adjacent novel full of theology, that's unusually approachable. The sentences are short, the dialogue does most of the work, and there's almost no authorial throat-clearing.

The Football Injury Was Ripped From the Headlines

One character is permanently crippled in a college football match, which reads to a modern eye like melodrama and was, in 1904, closer to reporting. American college football in that era used mass formations like the flying wedge, with minimal protective equipment. The 1905 season alone produced roughly eighteen deaths and well over a hundred serious injuries, prompting Theodore Roosevelt to summon coaches from Harvard, Yale and Princeton to the White House and demand reform. The meetings that followed produced the organization that became the NCAA. Black published this book the year before all of that broke open.

The Villains Are All in Good Standing

There's no obvious antagonist. The people who do the most damage in this novel are a respected judge, a society hostess, a popular preacher and a charming young man with a college education. Every one of them is a pillar of the church. That's the point.

A Wealthy Skeptic Gets the Best Lines

Lenox Hildreth is dead by chapter two and he's still one of the most likeable people in the book. Black gives the case against organized religion to a man readers will genuinely mourn, and she gives it to him with wit. It's a bolder choice than the genre usually allowed.

Themes

Christ Versus Christianity

The central engine of the whole novel is a fifteen-year-old asking a simple question and watching adult after adult substitute an institution for a person. Church doctrine, prayer books, popular sermons on sociology, fundraising socials with tulle butterfly wings. Everyone has something to offer Evadne except the thing she actually asked for. Black is writing a religious novel that is savagely impatient with religion.

Respectability as a Hiding Place

Judge Hildreth doesn't think of himself as a thief. He thinks of himself as a man protecting a foolish child from a foolish arrangement, and he can quote scripture supporting it. The novel is fascinated by how a decent man talks himself across a line one reasonable-sounding sentence at a time, and by how much cover a good reputation provides.

Who Actually Knows Anything

The two characters with genuine spiritual authority in this book are a coachman and a laundress. The people who lecture them about culture and refinement are miserable. Black is deliberately inverting the household hierarchy, and she keeps the inversion going long past the point where a safer book would have made it a single tidy moment.

Money and Power

"Wealth gives power," the Judge tells his niece. "Money is one of the greatest things in the world." Evadne, who has never thought about money in her life, has just read something in a borrowed Bible that says otherwise. The novel puts those two sentences side by side and spends the rest of its length weighing them.

Work as Worship

John Randolph mends harness, cobbles shoes, doctors horses, plans to learn blacksmithing, and does all of it to a standard nobody is checking, because he's decided he's working for someone who's always watching. Pompey polishes harness the same way for the same reason. The book takes an idea that could be pure Sunday school moralizing and makes it genuinely appealing, mostly by making the men who hold it more alive than everyone around them.

Belonging

Two orphans, both taken in by households that fed and housed them without ever quite claiming them. "If I only belonged, like the cows," Evadne says at a farm gate before she knows anyone is listening. It's the most honest line in the novel and it's about wanting to be someone's, not something's.

The Book's Legacy

This is not a book that conquered the world. It was one of thousands of inspirational novels moving through American and Canadian religious publishing in the early 1900s, a market that sold enormously and then evaporated. There were no film adaptations, no critical rediscovery, no place in any syllabus. Black's name appears in bibliographies of early Canadian women writers and almost nowhere else.

What kept it alive was digitization. Volunteers transcribed it in 2003 and it's been quietly finding readers ever since, mostly people who stumble on it and are startled by how readable it is and how sharp its teeth are. It's a much angrier book than its cover suggests.

Modern readers should know what they're walking into on one count. Pompey and Dyce, the Black servants who are the moral heart of the novel, are written in heavy phonetic dialect and cast in the devoted-retainer mold that was standard in 1904. Black clearly means them as the most admirable people in the book, and she gives Pompey a scene of quiet dignity under an assault that indicts an entire class of well-bred white people. But the affection is paternalistic in the way of its era and the dialect is thick going. It's worth knowing before you start, and it's worth reading anyway.

The thing that survives best is the question at the center. A dying man tells his daughter to go find someone, and she takes him at his word, and it turns out that almost nobody around her has any idea what she's asking or where to look. That's not a period concern. That still lands.