In a way, Camilla Lyman was born to be a ghost.

Though she was a child of immense privilege — she could trace her lineage back to the very founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and there were Cabots dangling from the family tree and Lodges as well — Camilla never really felt comfortable in the stifling cut-crystal world of the old Brahmin aristocracy. According to almost everyone who knew her, if she could have found a way, even as a little girl, she probably would have erased herself completely. If she could have found a way, she probably would have simply vanished.

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That's certainly the way her sister sees things.

Camilla's Sister, Mary Margaret Goodale

As siblings go, Mary Margaret Goodale could not be more different from her sister. Whereas Camilla was big and a little awkward, Mary Margaret, six years her senior, speaks with a kind of easy grace. Though there is an aristocratic timbre to her voice, there is also a kind of warmth in it. It's clear that while Camilla, it seemed, had done everything she possibly could to bury any trace of her Brahmin breeding and privileged upbringing, Mary Margaret Goodale seems to float in a cool blue haze of aristocratic poise. There is nothing haughty or obviously high-flown about the woman. There was just an air about her. She was born an aristocrat, raised an aristocrat, and had married an aristocrat and there is nothing she could do about it.

All the same, there is an unmistakable sadness that filters through when she speaks of Camilla.

"Well, let me tell you. My sister was the loneliest person I ever knew."

It's easy to imagine the long-lost and splendid isolation of Ricefields, the 100-acre estate in the Boston suburb of Westwood where Camilla Lyman and her sisters were born and raised.

Ricefields Estate

To most of us, the idea of such a vast and sprawling estate, with its horses and its hunting dogs, its chickens and its wide fields of clover, seemed magical and foreign, like something out of a storybook.

"It was a beautiful place," Mary Margaret conceded, built by her mother's mother, a descendant of the Cabots and the Lowells, in 1902. "But it was so isolated."

Ricefields main house

"We didn't have any close neighbors," she said, "unless you count my mother's brother, and his wife and his child, who was Camilla's age. They lived next door, which was, of course, a quarter-mile away. It wasn't as if you could just walk over and say hello."

As a child, Camilla was isolated not only by geography, but by something even more impenetrable — age and the perfidious coldness of her own family, Mary Margaret admitted.

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