Welcome to Prenderghast Puzzle, Act 1: Center Piece, a story that has taken forever—and I mean forever—to research.

This is Act 1. Act 3, Filling in the Holes, will be popping up soon after this one. Act 2: Loosing Pieces will be deliberately delayed, for timing reasons, until Part 1 of Act 1 is completely finished. As it is a puzzle, it is recommended that you read all three in either the order they are updated while they are still being completed, or in whatever order you please, to have the full effect of each—despite being separated by chronological order, there is no actual order to how they should be read. They are separate stories in separate times, but very much linked. The order in which I post will be a suggested order, but the Acts can even be read backwards if you so desire (although you might have to wait until the story's finished to actually read it backwards).

Prenderghast Puzzle, Act 1: Center Piece

Part 1: Making a Scene

Prologue

A Foreword.

Let it be known to all that come before me and all that come after: I have indeed (however unwillingly) followed tradition. As current Head of the family, I leave the records of my life to the library of my descendants—from the beginning to the end.

This shoddy book, and I apologize for the condition it is in, is the earliest record I have ever kept of my life. My mother thought it would be a worthy practice of my penmanship. It covers the autumn of 1711 to the autumn of 1712, a little over a full year of my life. Admittedly, as glad as I am for having an account of it, I truly despise this book. It, and this note, dredge up great pain.

Truly I believe that if anyone wished to know anything of my life, their curiosity would go no further than my late pre-bridal years. Before that I had no purpose and no tale to tell. My tale—horrible as it began—began here.

May I say, before we begin, that I firmly believe that Death is humanity's second companion. The first, of course, would be Life, though few ever give it the credit it is due. As the daughter of someone calling himself a pilgrim of the New World, Death was always emphasized. Both, however, are steadfast in their accompaniment, as guides and as raconteurs, and have a talent for teaching us exactly what we need to know, even if we find we do not like the lesson.

Blithe Hollow, the village in which I was born, was well acquainted with death, surprisingly so even in its earliest times. I doubt it will forget the dreadful year of 1712, because if there is one thing I have learned from Goodie Knotham, it is that people always relish speaking of tragedy as long as it is not their own. Though one would be hard-pressed to get any local to admit it, the year of 1712 was never the only hardship the town had seen. Few are willing to remember more troubling parts of the town's history—actually, few are even willing to remember the year of 1712, not in its entirety. Selective memory is for the guilty and the unstable. But speaking of that is for later.

Blithe Hollow almost never saw the year of 1712 at all. It almost never witnessed the strangely dry, mild winter it had in those early months, or the balmy days of summer that were, for the children, filled with bees and wildflowers and fireflies at night. We had almost abandoned the town all together, would have done so, too, if everywhere else were not just as bad. And I would have missed meeting some of the most important people I have ever met… and perhaps their lives would have been spared.

The year seventeen-hundred and eleven was the most horrific year any of us would remember, or so I thought. It certainly seemed like it then. We'd heard our blight had started in Boston and most were set a-panic when it finally arrived in our little village. The diggers couldn't dig fast enough to match the body count.

The New World's own plague, Yellow Fever, is disturbing enough to look at without all the dead bodies involved. The people of Blithe Hollow took all sorts of precautions against it. Giles Abery, a tradesman unable to set out on his ship because other towns were refusing our exports, had spent a whole day down at the vicar's and managed to arrange a house blessing to ward off the disease. Goodie Temper, the dairy woman, had requested for the same to protect herself and her daughter, but had, according to rumor, also led Father Hardwick to her ice house to bless her milk.

There are always better tactics, though, afforded to rich individuals, and in the early Fall, the patriarch of our family, the Honorable Judge Jonathan Hopkins, sent urgently to Basse River* for a nursemaid that had already contracted the Yellow Fever and recovered.

It was most unfortunate that she arrived too late.

Abigail, my dear beloved sister, died on the morning of September 7th, 1711, at the age of three years old. Many people remembered it as a very gloomy, wet Monday. The air rolled in off the sea thick and moist and hard for the ill to breath.

And I remember the day very well. It was the day that spelled the end for the awkward peace that our household had patched together over the years, and is a marker in my mind for the first calling to rise to the challenge of the hardest task I would ever encounter in life.

Living.

My mother was the one to discover Abigail's illness. The girl had refused to move the previous Wednesday morning, only a week earlier, and did not climb out of bed when called by Nanny Sharpe. The woman felt her forehead and, dreading over-exhaustion, let the girl rest while she went to fetch the mistress. Mother, already afraid of the plague, immediately called for the doctor. The doctor diagnosed Abigail and left, fearful of somehow catching her disease.

Mother did not take it very well. Frantic and overly-concerned, she abandoned her tutoring me and spent the next five days at Abigail's bedside, cleaning, treating and feeding her while often forgetting to take care of herself. Whenever she finally ran herself ragged and collapsed, I stepped in and the servants took my mother out of the room.

Abigail's bedroom was small and grey, with almost no toys (they were seen as frightfully improper) and very little furniture. It was because Abigail was a rambunctious child and loved to climb around, no matter how much her energy irked our father, that our mother had all of the furniture removed so she couldn't hurt herself. With the exception of her bed, a close stool with which to relieve herself, and a dresser that was much too large for her to jump atop of, her room was empty.

The nursemaid had not arrived in time from Basse River. I do not know how long the journey typically takes, as back then I rarely ever left the house and had never left the village, but I remember cursing the woman's delayed timing with everything I could manage. My sister, my giggly, smiley, tiny little sister, had been reduced to an off-color, shivering, vomiting, blood-spewing shell of herself, and then her breath had extinguished like a moth that had forgotten to flutter.

But the nursemaid was not without work. Out in the town, dozens were falling ill with the same symptoms. The Honorable Judge Hopkins instead recommended her to others who needed her care with the assurance that if we needed her again, God forbid we did, we would call on her. At least she would be closer.

The day Abigail died, Mother retired to her room at last for the first time in a week. Her face was pale and drawn, and she seemed to be in a daze. She came into my room just after sundown and faintly bade me goodnight before heading off to her room to sleep.

This, all who read, is where the seeds of madness were planted. Seven months before my life intersected with any of the Prenderghasts, I find myself looking back and realizing that the end had already begun.

~Foreword of the 1711-1712 Diary of Julia Elizabeth Hopkins, 1743

AN: The Prenderghast family fascinated me from the first time I saw the movie. Blithe Hollow is an intricate town in an intricately crafted world; a mix of realism, fantasy and especially satire. Implications have weight in that world, things left unsaid are still felt. Despite this mysterious family not getting a lot of focus, the hints alone lead to implications and questions. Thus, Prenderghast Puzzle: the story of a family—actually, two families—and how they survived those hellish three-hundred years.

A question for you guys: do you think I should stick with a K+ rating, or should I move to T because of obvious character death? Also, what do you hope this story will include? I've got the plot and the chapters pretty much set in stone, but I want to see what you guys think anyways.

~Historical Notes & Extras~

Julia Hopkins:

One could say Julia will be the protagonist of the Center Piece Act, with Aggie as the role of Deuteragonist. In the original drafts, this arc was planned from primarily Aggie's perspective, but I realized that while I can follow her at times, there were many problems with her being the protagonist if I intended this to be a long story—which I do. The main one is, if it was from Aggie's perspective, we already have an idea of how that would go. She was presented as a parallel to Norman, and the movie already thoroughly explored his experience as an outcast; her emotions would just feel like a rehashing of the movie, without the happy ending, and we also already know how the ending would go. It'd be sad, yes, but boring and predictable. Thus was born Julia, someone in position to see a different side of all of the characters, just by being, instead of victim, a blood relation of the supposed victor. She came into being because of my desire to explore who exactly the Judge was, but also to explore the Colonial Prenderghast family a little more (this is Prenderghast Puzzle, after all!). And of course, her central conflict ties her into the new theme as well.

Parallelism is presented throughout the movie between the modern era and what little we see of the witch hunts; its purpose was to emphasize and deconstruct the reality of bullying and ostracizing, and the horrible consequences, by showing both a 'good end' and a 'bad end.' Parallelism was used because, in this way, we didn't have to see more of Aggie's time to know the important things about it; her and Norman are similar enough that we already can guess. Parallelism is embedded into the fabric of the story because parallelism is why they designed the characters the way they did. To write a story about Blithe Hollow, you can't get away from it. Instead of severing it, I want to make a different kind of parallel between modern times and early times besides the one given in the movie: family.

This fueled Julia's importance and conflict in the story besides just being there to witness the Witch Trials. We've seen the dysfunctional relationship between Norman and his family, but the one parallel not shown between Norman and Agatha was her family, as well as the obvious dysfunction of both modern and historical Blithe Hollow. There's also the 'middle-era' Prenderghasts and Norman's unnamed Great Uncle Prenderghast to talk about. In essence, the movie was ripe with interesting conflicts that were implied but never focused on (due to there being, obviously, only one movie), and I would like to explore that more.

On the Geographic Area: Basse River was the old name of the town of Beverly, which is in fact very close to Salem. It was founded in the mid-17th century, so it surely would have been there in 1711. Because Blithe Hollow was supposed to be a smaller parody of Salem, Massachusetts, I'm acting as if the two towns were very close geographically, and as Beverly is relatively close to Salem, it is, in this, also very close to Blithe Hollow.

There will be slight references to other series throughout Prenderghast Puzzle, and Act 3: Filling in the Holes is a full-on crossover.