The Dark Unwinding (3 page)

T
he sun was almost down, but in the windowless corridor it might as well have been midnight. There was no gaslight here. Lane’s back rose tall before me, only half lit by my guttering candle as he pulled the trunk along on some sort of flat wooden cart. He’d hoisted both trunk and cart up two flights of stairs without effort or speech, and he was silent still, our footfalls muffled by the roses woven into the carpet. He stopped abruptly, and I bumped into the trunk.

“Take your pick,” he said.

I examined my surroundings. The corridor was relatively short, and I thought I could see six closed doors in the darkness, all on the left. On the right, there were only portraits, one for each door.
Like sentinel
s, I thought. Lane stood with his arms crossed, offering neither help nor hindrance. I had no idea where I was, or how to get back to the kitchen. I opened the nearest door.

The windows were full west, catching the very last of the sun before the moor hills shadowed it. Squinting, I could just make out shelves with books, a large desk, and some very dusty lounges. Two more doors, one on each end, connected the room with its neighbors. Not a bedroom, then, but a library or a study. I shut the door, noting the portrait of a bewhiskered gentleman in a ruff that watched me do it, and went quickly to the far end of the corridor. I had not liked the thought of those inner doors. A corner room should have only one interior door, rather than two. I put my hand on the last knob in the hallway.

“It leaks,” Lane said, startling the silence. “And that one, too.” I had taken a step toward the next door. My skirt swished as I made my way to the opposite end of the corridor, to the other corner room. I put out my hand.

“Mice,” he said.

I raised a brow, and grasped the knob anyway.

“In the bed,” he added.

I dropped my hand and looked again at the corridor, this time not at the doors, but at the portraits. One door down from the library, the picture was of an old woman. I held up the candle to look at her. She was gray-headed, simply but elegantly attired in a lace cap, face as expressionless as the others, and yet … most women would not have had their wrinkles painted, at least not so realistically. I opened her door.

A massive mahogany bed stood not against a wall but in the very center of the room, hung with pale pink curtains of satin and velvet that fell perhaps eight feet from the canopy to the floor. Matching material cascaded from four tall windows, the last of the sunlight illuminating a thick rope of cobweb that linked two upholstered chairs with the wood-paneled ceiling. There was a connecting door on the left-hand wall, but on the right was only a wardrobe, heavily carved with faces and foliage, covering the wall from the corner to the marble hearth. No door.

“This one,” I said, and I heard the wheels of the cart squeak as they entered the room. I set the candle on a painted dressing table and pulled aside one of the heavy drapes. Musty damp tickled my nose as I looked out on undulating hills, swaying grass, one or two trees, and a red-gold sky. No dwellings, not even a telltale pillar of smoke. I reached out a finger and touched the dust that lay soft and thick on the windowpane. I wondered if there was any regularity to dust, that if one could measure its depth, it would be possible to figure precisely how long it had taken to accumulate.

I dropped the drape and turned back to the room. The trunk was in the middle of the floor, the valise and my bonnet on its top. I ran to the door and looked up and down the hallway. I was alone.

I shut the door and leaned on it for a moment, then hurried to one of the heavy upholstered chairs and tugged, dragging it backward, making bumps and wrinkles in the filthy carpet. I pushed the chair up hard against the connecting door, gritted my teeth, and did the same with the other chair, wedging it tight against the door to the corridor. Recovering my breath and feeling somewhat better, I considered my stub of a candle. I ransacked each of the seven drawers in the dressing table, doing the same to a side table and an old trunk. I fingered the junked contents of many years before I found the polished box on the chimneypiece full of slender, white tapers, and in a ceramic jar next to that, a ring of keys. I had candles lit and the doors locked before the last of the sun plunged behind the hills.

The furniture was even darker in the flickering light, throwing high, hulking shadows against the walls. I looked at my hands, black with dirt, and then at my dress.
“Gray woolen worsted,”
I could hear Aunt Alice say.
“Nothing is more suitable. It will last forever, and never show dirt….”
What the material never did, in my opinion, was flatter the wearer. But it would have to be decent for the journey back to London, a trip I was determined to begin no later than midday, just as soon as I had seen my uncle and gleaned the information that would ensure Fat Robert’s inheritance.

I wiped my hands on the inside of my skirt, where the dirt would not show, then peeled off the skirt along with all three of my petticoats and tossed them over my trunk. I jerked a corset string and let that fall to the dirty floor, swinging my arms wide in the freedom of only a chemise and an underskirt, filling my lungs to capacity for the first time since that morning. I turned my attention to the massive bed.

I pushed on it once, knowing full well there would be no way to shift it, but I dreaded the thought of sleeping with all that open space behind my head. The coverlets seemed relatively dust free, thanks to the hangings, though they felt clammy and damp beneath my hand. Thinking of dry linens, I went to the wardrobe and tugged on a door. Locked. I took the ring of keys and inserted them one by one in the keyhole, the clinking of metal loud in the quiet, and on the sixth key, the lock clicked.

The door swung open, and a scented air, like lilies and cinnamon, wafted over me. I tilted back my head to stare not at linens, but at dresses, stacks upon stacks of them, lying on shelves that stretched from the level of my waist to the top of the wardrobe. Silks of lemon, lavender, and rosebud shone against the dark wood, dotted here and there by a white lawn or a winter-blue wool with sleeve lace the color of cream. There was nothing of yellow fog, sooty bricks, or suitability about them. Nothing of London. They were from another world.

A little ladder folded down and outward from the bottom shelf and, like a child who cannot resist a shiny toy, I pulled it out and climbed two rungs. I reached far above my head for a satin that was neither green nor blue but something in between, a shade I’d only seen once, in a painting of the Caribbean Sea. I pulled the dress free, watching it glimmer as it slithered downward in the candlelight, smooth as water in a stoneless stream.

A moan sliced through the air, so close to my head that I nearly fell from the ladder. But it was only the wind in the chimney, a noise I’d heard a hundred times. A breeze must be picking up outside. I stepped down, mesmerized by the shining dress. I knew I should go to bed. The next day would likely require all my wits, and sleep in this room could be long in coming. I knew all this, but I slipped the dress over my head anyway, tugging it quickly into place. I tied the ribbon sash, then snatched up the edge of the velvet drape and wiped at the grime on the dressing-table mirror, gazing at the blurry image.

The dress fit, not just marginally, but as if I had been measured for it by a seamstress. The waist was high, in the style of decades ago, edged with ribbon that ran up and around my neck. The skirt flowed in long gathers, needing no other decoration than the fabric, touching just at the toes of my boots. The boots looked shabby next to all that color, but I did not. I touched my skin, no longer drab as when next to the worsted, but ivory and peach. I yanked out my hairpins, setting the curls free, and saw glints of auburn come alive in the brown. I had never been beautiful, and I still was not beautiful, but this was … striking.

I hurried back to the wardrobe, folded up the ladder, and found a key that would fit the first drawer below the shelves. The chimney wind groaned again, a low, lonely sound that I almost did not hear in my excitement. The drawer was filled with shoes, delicate slippers of varying shades, and there was a box of long gloves as well, many pairs, ending well above the elbow, a bit yellowed, but sound. I kicked off my boots and wiggled into ivory slippers with blue-and-green flowers stitched on their sides and almost laughed. They fit perfectly. I would pin up my hair next, and leave ringlets that would fall about my face. I twirled once, listening to the swish of the blue dress, and put the key into the bottom drawer of the wardrobe, hoping for bonnets. I pulled open the drawer and thrust in my hand.

Something cold and soft surrounded my fingers, many somethings tickling my skin. And then I saw that it was human hair, dark brown and curling, gathered in silken bunches. The curls twisted, writhing, one upon the other, like dead things thrown into the same coffin. I jerked back my hand. The tresses filled the drawer, bound with ribbon as blue as a tropical sea, and in the flickering light I caught glimpses of color, glints of auburn coming alive amid the brown.

I leapt backward, one hand on my own red-brown curls, slamming the drawer shut with my foot. I backed away, the same suffocating horror creeping up my neck as when I’d watched the child cry silently in the kitchen. The hair in the drawer was mine; somehow it was mine. The moan from the chimney gained in pitch, and a wild wail, a screech like a wounded animal, sounded from just outside the window. I spun about, and another howl, and then another, pierced straight through my head, and with each came a deeper resonance, playing on the edge of my hearing, a noise whose source was nothing living. I threw myself at the bed, clutching my knees, fear pinning my back to the mahogany of the headboard. The lament in the chimney and outside my window fell away only to rise back up again, doubling its intensity. I shut my eyes, and for once let the tears spill.

When the clock pinged its seventh chime the next morning, I was at Mrs. Jefferies’s table wearing my gray worsted, not one curl out of place, bonnet, gloves, and valise beside me, buttering my fourth piece of bread. The wardrobe was locked tight, the blue-green dress inside it, the chairs replaced and the coverlet spread neatly over the bed. Other than my trunk and some disarranged dust, the room, I hoped, would soon forget my existence. I wished I could do the same.

The kitchen door opened and Mrs. Jefferies, properly attired in calico and lace cap, entered and stopped short at the sight of me, a basket of newly pulled carrots balanced precariously on one hip. Her mouth fell open, and I held in a sigh. The woman’s constant surprise was wearisome.

“You found the kitchen,” she stated.

“Of course,” I replied. It had, in fact, taken half an hour, but that was beside the point. I laid down the butter knife. The night may not have given me sleep, but it had given me a plan, and there was no time to waste, not if I wanted to spend the night in Milton. “Mrs. Jefferies,” I said, “I believe I owe you an apology. My behavior yesterday was not what I could have wished. I was overtired from the journey, I’m afraid, and prone to upset.”

She waited for me to continue, wary.

“But I think we can both agree that it would be best if I were to see my uncle at once. I cannot return to London without having done so, not without angering my aunt, and she will only send me again, or come herself….” I was pleased to note Mrs. Jefferies’s displeasure at that thought. “And once I have seen my uncle I can be on my way, this very afternoon, if a carriage can be found. This would suit us both, I think.”

Mrs. Jefferies looked at me a moment. “There’s sense in what you say,” she said gruffly, “and Lane thinks the same. No use putting off what … can’t be helped. He’s coming to take you down to Mr. Tully as soon as … as soon as can be.”

“Take me where, Mrs. Jefferies? Does my uncle not sleep in the house?”

The woman shrugged as she set the basket on the sideboard, running her thick fingers over the dirt that still clung to the carrots. “Most times he sleeps in the workshop. We’ve a little couch for him there, set up for the purpose. Mr. Tully don’t like to be far from his playthings.”

“Exactly what sort of ‘playing’ does Mr. Tulman do in his workshop?”

She shrugged again. “You’ll see.”

She went on picking through the carrots, making what I recognized to be a heroic effort to ignore my doings at her table. I straightened my back and said, “Do you have wolves here at Stranwyne, Mrs. Jefferies?”

She turned to stare at me, snorting. “Are you daft, Miss? There’s no wolves in England.”

I lowered my eyes to the buttered bread. She was right, of course. But it was the only explanation I’d been able to conjure for that unearthly wail in the air.

The door opened and then Lane was filling up the square of bright sunshine. He was clean, his skin the color of a heavily creamed tea. He stood silent, waiting for me. I folded my buttered bread in half and wrapped it in a handkerchief, then slipped it into the valise and picked up my gloves.

“You can leave the bag here,” he said. “I’ve found a wagon for you. Your things will be in it when you’re ready to go.”

“And my trunk?” I inquired.

“That, too.”

I stood, steeling myself for the unknown ordeal of meeting my uncle, the ordeal that would allow me to go back to London and pretend that none of this had happened. I turned to Mrs. Jefferies. “Well, good-bye then, Mrs. Jefferies.”

The woman stayed hunched over the sideboard, her broad back to me. She did not answer.

It didn’t come to me until I was out of the kitchen, feeling morning sun and dew both hot and cool against my skin, that Mrs. Jefferies had not intended to be rude with her silence. Mrs. Jefferies had been crying.