The House of Dead Maids Read Free

me and puzzle out what to do.
    Back I went into the dim passageways, a tangle of turnings as twisted as a lover’s knot. With my belly full and no employment to hurry me along, I rambled at my leisure. Room let onto room in inconvenient arrangements, and steps ran up or down in the most inexplicable fashion. Some chambersexhibited great extravagance in the form of elaborate stained glass or magnificently painted ceilings, but the entire place seemed to belong to a bygone age.
    Here is the answer, I thought: the master has better houses and comes here but seldom. Probably he’s close with his money and resists paying wages to maintain such a monstrous old castle. He’ll stay locked in with his agents while he’s here, turn a blind eye to the dust, and leave as soon as he can. And what will I do then? For surely he’ll take his child with him.
    Dismayed by these musings, I found myself liking the place less and less. There was little of cheer or comfort about it. Such decoration as I came upon breathed a predatory spirit, dominated by the steel relics of war. Pikes and halberds, chain mail, and crossed arrows adorned the walls. Upon one heavy sideboard clustered a trio of cannonballs in little hollows, and on a chest of drawers sat a cavalier’s helmet. Everywhere were hunting trophies in the form of animal skins, or antlers, the weapons of the beast.
    To fix my bearings, I looked out the windows whenever the glass would permit a view. To the west, the great green ridge rose up behind the house and loomed over us like a frozen wave, but it gaveno shelter, for the house stood on a mound or hill far enough out from it to catch the winds that came tumbling down its slope. To the east, and well below us, I caught glimpses of the silver curves of the stream that had brought me there, and close by its bank, the dark roofs of a small village. North lay stark moorland, rising into blunt, rocky crests and falling into treeless valleys, a desolate place devoid of shelter or human habitation, the haunt of the fox, the plover, and the solitary crow.
    No window looked south.
    I found when I returned to my bedchamber that someone had been in to tidy it, and the green curtains around the bed were tied back. This hardly seemed like the work of Her Majesty, Miss Winter. Mrs. Sexton must have come in to take care of it, but she had left the work half done. The door to the bottom cabinet of the clothes press was standing open. Next to it on the floor ranged a neat line of small objects. I came close and found that they were feathers.
    A board that formed the bottom of the clothes press had been tilted up to reveal a shallow compartment between it and the floor. Within that compartment were a great many objects of charm but little value. One by one, I took the items outand arranged them next to the feathers. There were any number of curious buttons, as well as two striped snail shells and the tiniest bird’s egg I could imagine, five foreign coins, a cracked game piece fashioned like a horse’s head, and a pebble as round as the moon. Beneath them lay several slips of paper and two small worked samplers. The ink on the pages had faded and the paper darkened until the pen strokes were all but indistinguishable, and the samplers were stiff and brittle with age.
    Then I had a surprise. At the back of the compartment lay a sock, an old friend in a crowd of strangers, for it was the style we knitted at Ma Hutton’s school. I pictured the girl Izzy, who had come to this house before me, chancing upon this delightful little hoard. I looked at the neat line of feathers. Then I put the objects back into their hiding place, jumped to my feet, and ran downstairs.
    I found Mrs. Sexton in the kitchen, chopping carrots for the stew. “A person has been in that room,” I told her.
    She gave me a sidelong glance. “What room?” she asked, and this silenced me for a few troubled moments. On no account could I bring myself to call it mine.
    “That room