Joan Smith Read Free

Two
     
    There is French blood from the days of the Normans in the Sinclair family. The name of the estate, Troy Fenners, is a corruption of Trois Fenêtres, which is presumably the number of windows in the original home. There are considerably more than that in the present building. I counted eighteen on the facade alone as we drove up to it.
    But before we get through the park, let me say that the setting was ideally gothic. Mrs. Radcliffe might well have been describing the place in any of her gloomy word pictures. There were ancient oaks and elms to distribute the requisite tenebrous shadows, with a stand of willows to droop forlornly behind the house. The dark yews in front of the windows would do a good job of stealing light within, and the upper windows were being invaded by ivy to prevent a surfeit of daylight.
    The soaring lancet windows, the battlements, gargoyles, finials, the aging stone, the general spooky atmosphere were very evident in daylight. When evening shadows stretched, the place would be enough to frighten a witch. The whole of it was blasted with antiquity.
    Living in this house might well have incited my aunt to write her novels. It lacked only an uninhabited wing with mysteriously locked doors containing deep, dark secrets to be a perfect model of a haunted castle.
    “Uninhabited wing? Why, no, I live in the whole place. There are no locked doors, but only a secret passage, and of course the oubliette in the cellar.”
    “You mean—a dungeon?” I asked, enraptured,
    “A horrid old place, full of mice and spiders, with irons and chains rusting in the walls. I would like to have it all cleaned up, made into something useful, but it seems a waste of good money.”
    My aunt had plenty of good money, so the redoing of the oubliette must have been a passing whim, no more. Her staff, who lined up to welcome us, were distressingly modern and normal. There wasn’t a saturnine butler or a dour housekeeper in the lot. A squinting parlor maid was the closest we came to it, and she was not at all sneaky-looking, but only rather ugly. It was quite a disappointment.
    The house was dark and gloomy, however, with a long-case clock that had a haunting way of wheezing, emitting quite a human sound before it struck the hour. I suspected that on a windy night the chimney would belch smoke and distort the wind to a nice eerie pitch. The stairway too creaked, and the ivy tapped mysteriously at my windowpane. The canopied bed was done up in funereally dark shades of green, while the clothespress was of the proper size to hide a body or two.
    When I began putting my things away later, I discovered to my dismay that it held nothing but clothes hangers and two dry orange pomander balls, without a bit of scent left to them. They were as hard and brittle as porcelain. They rattled when shook, from the dried seeds within and the dried cloves outside. Soon the press contained my clothing too, not through my own efforts, but—joy of joys!—through the good offices of a servant assigned to my own particular service. It was the squinty-eyed girl who came tapping at my door, sent by Aunt Loo to tend me. I saw, all of a sudden, that the girl was not at all disfigured by her poor squinting eyes. If she proved a good worker, I would be finding her beautiful before too long. Her name, she told me, was Hester Pincombe, but she was commonly known as Pinny.
    While Pinny performed for me those duties beneath a lioness, I went below to dine on a meal fit for my species. Aunt Loo’s cook did her proud; one did not eat at Troy Fenners—one dined. What a marvelous difference, and without Elleri and Marie there to count how many refills my plate and glass had too. I lost count of the latter myself, but I was by no means staggering when we retired to the paneled saloon. Aunt Loo, eager to get to her work, reverted to the matter of killing off our villain.
    “I do like the notion of a dagger, dripping with blood, and perhaps dropping a few