Milady
I had a reason for going home. Not that I wasn’t sick of the silences and secrets that hung in the air between us until we were all nearly choking on them. We were all so careful not to say anything that would upset the balance we had somehow won for ourselves. Well, I was fed up with it, and ready to unbalance, disturb and undo any amount of careful, cautious equilibrium.
However, I did have another reason. Mother’s house, the first home we had ever known, and the place that would always mean home to me, was also, I felt, the place where all the secrets started. I had some time ago begun to suspect that Mother’s story and the beast’s were one and the same.
If I had any imagination at all I think I would have been afraid to walk up to the dark house of the edge of the forest alone. We had kept no servants in the house since Mother died and we moved away, and the place had been shut up for years, with only the occasional cleaning and upkeep by an ageing couple from the village.
I had left the coach at the inn to be brought round tomorrow; there wasn’t a man, woman or child who would venture out here after dark now. I took a bag over my shoulder and an unfortunately awkward case to carry and made my way along the few miles from the inn to the house. About halfway along the journey I began to think that I had made a mistake; either the route had grown longer in the years I had been gone, or I was less used to walking. The way was quiet – uncannily so, I suppose, but I appreciated the calm. This at least was a natural silence, in contrast to the strain I had experienced at home in the city.
I came to the house long after the sun had set, and the moon was hidden behind the trees. The house was one large shadow amongst the overall gloom, not looming precisely, but lurking. I let myself in the front door; the key was stiff and the door nearly stuck halfway, so I had to push the bag and case in first and squeeze myself around afterwards. I lit a candle; all of the furniture in the house was covered up against the dust and the years. Hob might have seen numerous white, ghostly women or pale phantom dancers filling each empty room, but I saw only furniture under white sheets by the candle flickering in the draughts that whistle through the old house.
I was there to look for secrets, but it was late now, as well as dark, and I felt somehow that it would be better to wait for the light. At the least, it would be easier to see what I was doing.
The next morning, after the coach had been brought round, my baggage unloaded, the coach put away and the horses ridden back to the inn, I started my hunt. I left all of my luggage right where it was in the hall; I had brought nearly everything I owned, in an effort to separate myself from the house in the city, so it was quite a pile. David had promised to join me as soon as I wrote to him – in turn I had promised not to take too long. I hoped I would not need to.
I went up to the attic. All three of us have always had a certain affinity for attics – as children we were never happier than when rooting around in the decades of flotsam and jetsam that had been abandoned up there, and the nature of attics, filled with parcels, trunks and every sort of box made them excellent places to play house, or castle, or even haunted forest and troll bridge. Mother had liked our games too, and I thought that if she had left anything behind, it would be there. After all, the rest of the house had been stripped of everything but the heaviest furniture after her death, and it had only been replaced sporadically since.
The attic was fairly well lit by rays of sun streaming in through the cobwebbed skylights. There were five on each side of the roof, which ran the whole length of the house, and Father had once said they must have cost an absolute fortune to put in – if we could have sold them we would not have had to worry about money for a year. I never found out why they had been put in, but we had been glad of them as children and I was glad of them now.
