When the boy reached the age of reason, Maitland said, he decided that he really wanted to get into the world of dog shows, and Camilla threw herself headlong into the task of helping him. "My son wanted to show one of the cocker spaniels. And she was great helping him." Camilla's devotion to the task seemed to go far beyond the simple joy of showing the youngster the ropes, Doris would later say. The spinster heiress, who even then sported a mannish style of dress, usually button-down shirts and culottes that had been altered by Doris, a seamstress by trade, seemed to revel in shopping with Doris's daughter and took a peculiar delight in buying the little girl frilly girlish dresses. "Both of my children she enjoyed tremendously," Doris said.

"She had a tremendous sense of family," Doris recalled. And that sense of family seemed all the more tragic against the grim backdrop of Ricefields, particularly after Arthur Lyman's death.

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But nothing brought that loneliness, that pathos that defined Camilla in so many ways, into sharper relief than Doris's memories of Christmas at Ricefields. It was in the waning years of Mousy's life and Camilla reveled in decorating the festive tree in the old parlor. She'd stack gifts for the children and for Doris and her husband under it, and fill the house with the sound of Christmas carols.

Christmas dinner at the Maitland's, Camilla in red

Though later in life, Camilla would hardly be able to find enough enthusiasm for putting pan to flame to fry herself an egg, back in those days, she would spent hours on end in the kitchen and the old butler's pantry, fussing over the Christmas ham and all the fixings for what should have been a perfect New England Yule.

But always hovering above the Currier and Ives surface of the scene was the frozen loneliness of Ricefields. It was etched in the icy absence of Mousy, who silently seemed to scorn Camilla's efforts. Not once in all the years that the Maitlands shared Christmas with Camilla, did the old women upstairs deign to come down and join the festivities. Instead, she almost ostentatiously stayed away, making just enough noise as she stomped across the creaking floors in her suite of rooms to let Camilla and her guests downstairs know that she disapproved. She was, as Maitland described her, a "caustic woman" and her absence was an accusation that despite Camilla's best efforts, she had again, as always, failed to please her mother.

Camilla tried to pretend that she wasn't hurt by her mother's caustic indifference. But Maitland knew better. "I know she got mad about it, but she couldn't change and be what her mother wanted her to be, and her mother couldn't accept her as she wanted to be, as she expected her to be."

And so, Camilla and her mother spent their lives separated by a flight of stairs and a million miles of desperate silence. Even on Christmas.

It was no wonder then that Camilla turned to anything that might give her comfort in her isolation, say those who knew her. It was no wonder that she turned, at least in part, to that jacket, size 42, a plain brown sports coat, elegant but understated, the kind that even new seems to smell slightly of pipe smoke and autumn in New England, the kind of jacket that seems to rustle like fresh fallen leaves when you put it on. It was the kind of jacket that Arthur T. Lyman had always favored. As Camilla eased it over her ample shoulders for the first time, perhaps she felt a little closer to her father, a little less lost.

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