The House of Dead Maids (5 page)

“They must know about dead people, then,” admitted the little boy.

After breakfast, my charge was restless indoors, possessed with a keen desire to climb onto a sideboard and pluck down one of the weapons that hung as decoration above it: a reasonable course, he did not tire of telling me, as they belonged to no one else. To discourage his martial zeal, I persuaded him to walk with me in a private garden that lay next to the house, though the sky was lowering and the wind was chill. This garden I had seen through the windows of Miss Winter’s room, and I had spotted its high walls while I was up on the hillside the day before.

Once there, I discovered I didn’t like it. The high rock walls gave us shelter, but the north wind
whistled and moaned in their cracks. It was a topiary garden; but while the general form of such plantings is orderly and geometric, with neat hedges and cunning shapes, this had become overgrown, and its present gardeners had no interest in restoring order or design. The yew bushes were enormous, taller than a grown man’s head, and clipped into irregular, bulbous shapes, like huge dark puddings.

There I learned that the mind is unhappy with uncertainty and tries to make sense of the senseless. The yews seemed to my mind like giants huddled in dark cloaks, fat men with wide hats, stacks of millstones, or heaps of boulders. So far were they from their original size that we had to turn sideways to edge past their unnatural forms. Their effect within the enclosed space was suffocating.

My companion, being smaller, didn’t mind as much as I. To him, they were ideal barricades from which to prepare an ambush for the enemy, a fallen twig supplying him with a gun and another becoming a knife. He ran and shouted, collected spiders and executed them with great cruelty and solemnity, and amused himself for an hour with little assistance from me.

At length, he tired of vigorous pursuits and settled in a mossy corner where garden wall met
house wall and the monster yews drew back a pace. Here he set to building a dungeon scooped out of the mold, and for prisoners, peopling it with earthworms.

It vexed me that he had no name, so I sat by while he played and tried out all the names I knew. None of them seemed to suit him. They matched healthy English boys who played ball on the village green. My charge was assuredly not English, with his sallow face and gibbering speech; in play, he lapsed again and again into his barbarous tongue. Like a fairy-tale beast that required a special word to tame it, he required a name beyond the ones I knew.

“Do you know what name you were christened by?” I ventured to ask, but his ignorance on the point was so profound that he had doubtless never been christened at all. Then superstition took hold, and I began to fear I would be naming him for the first time, and thus become responsible for his fate. There is a witchcraft in names. They are not a trifling matter.

“I’m a heathen git,” he proclaimed with satisfaction. “That’s my Christian name.”

“Don’t be vulgar,” I said. “You don’t know what that means.”

“Can you tie a hitch?” he asked, picking up a
twig, and he proceeded to demonstrate the art with one of the prisoner worms. This interested me: it was something like knitting, so I entered into the play. Before long, he had progressed in his instruction, and I could splice a brace of worms as neatly as any sailor. I repaid him by demonstrating the best love knot I knew; but here our resources failed us and we had to go digging again, for the love knot required many worms.

I began to grow uneasy. I could feel a person’s gaze, and yet no one was there. I supposed Miss Winter walked in the garden, for now and then I thought I caught a flash of black dress between the shapes of yew. But I could not be sure. The day was drear, and the tall bushes rose like slabs of dark rock to block my line of sight.

“Untie the short one there, I’ll add it to the end,” directed Himself. This was the title I had bestowed on him in my mind for the purpose of avoiding a name.

I caught movement at the corner of my eye a few feet off in the garden. Black dress. Black sockets. The dead maid. But the instant I saw her, she vanished.

“What do I do after this turn?” he asked. “Hi! Don’t scoot there, you’ll mash the end.”

Just at the edge of my vision, she walked by again. I scooted further, ignoring his curses. “I don’t like facing the corner, that’s all.”

We were playing by the slender trunk of a short exotic tree, with long thin leaves clustered like a child’s fingers. I turned my back to the tree and to our corner, facing down the crowd of formless shrubs. A gust of wind blew the little leaf hands down to tickle the back of my neck. One of the hands was ice cold.

“Let’s go inside,” I said, jumping up and accidentally treading on our knot.

Himself continued tying worms. “You’re doing what he wants,” he told me. “Act like you don’t see him.”

“Who?” I asked, turning from side to side in my agitation.

“The old man with eyes like windows.”

Black cloth flashed between the yews, but this time Mr. Ketch came through the dark green shapes, dressed in a sober suit of dull black twill. He cut a fine figure, but his handsome face had lost its color and fallen into lines. Our worm knots set him laughing, and he resumed his accustomed appearance.

“How’s my little heathen git?” he demanded,
and the sallow-faced boy answered him with a joyful shout.

“Sir, do you know his name?” I asked.

Mr. Ketch clapped his protégé on the shoulders and gave him a playful shake. “A young rogue like this doesn’t need a name, do you? Young rogue, I hate this house. I most particularly hate this garden. What do you say to a little shooting out on the moor?”

Himself shouted louder. Mr. Ketch glanced behind me and hurriedly looked away. “Good, good,” he said. “Let’s be gone. God, what a place for the nerves.” And he marched Himself off so quickly that I couldn’t keep up with them, though I had no liking for the garden either.

I whiled away the afternoon with Mrs. Sexton in the kitchen, helping her put the marks on a new set of sheets. We neither of us said ten words to the other and so got on capitally, for I’m not one to mix talk and work, and Mrs. Sexton was not one to talk at all. When we heard the shots, I thanked the Almighty that our bench was no closer to the window. I wouldn’t have put a gun in that boy’s hands for gold.

Arnby brought Himself into the kitchen some time later, the pair of them wearing long faces.

“The young master’s not to go shooting,” he told me, “nor do aught else that could be dangerous. Maidie, I expect you to see to it. Keep weapons out of his hands. And just look, young sir, it’s started raining. You’d be coming inside regardless. We’ve got your health to think of, haven’t we?”

This did little to mend matters with Himself, who retreated behind that shaggy black forelock of his and glowered like a thundercloud. He held his peace while Arnby stood by, but he made me leave my sewing, and when we had gained the passageway, he gave full vent to his spleen. Old Master Jack and he had been having a grand time shooting birds when Arnby had come rushing up the hill. Then he and Master Jack had had a talk, and that was the end of the fun.

I came in for a share of his bad humor when I pointed out that spring was no time for shooting, as the birds were still raising their young. “I’ve a right to do as I please on my land,” he exclaimed furiously. “I can shoot an egg if I want to!”

We were near Miss Winter’s rooms just then, in a passage with homely rag rugs, one of the few passages in the house lit by its own window. This pleased me better than the dusty rooms upstairs, so we took it over for our play, Himself running and
sliding on the rugs while I sat by on the stairs. Then he hit upon the plan of searching the house for objects of treasure—“loot” was his curious word for it.

“We’ll take it to our room,” he said. “I’m the leader, but we’ll go share and share alike.”

I thought this an excellent plan: it had the advantage of keeping us indoors and my charge out of harm’s way. If he truly were master, as they all feigned, he could arrange the household goods as he liked, and if he weren’t master, then this “loot” scheme would bring a swift end to the farce. Either way, we would learn a thing or two worth knowing.

The first room we searched was small and devoted primarily to books, which stood by the dozens in neat rows behind the glass of two mahogany cases. Several pictures of dull landscapes hung on the walls, and three large Dutch plates of blue and white reclined in a rack above a fruitwood chest of drawers.

A horse’s hoof shod with a brass plate stood upon one of the bookcases. It struck my companion’s fancy, but I pronounced it barbaric. A teapot with a bright scene painted on its side sat upon a small table next to a comb-backed chair. I should have liked to call it loot, but Himself refused, paying me in kind for dismissing his hoof.

He tried the drawers, but they were locked. Then he examined the right-hand bookcase, which was not. He took out a book, turning it various ways, and his eyebrows shot up when it opened.

“It’s like a box,” he said, tipping it upside down and fanning out the covers. “It holds things.” But his voice was doubtful.

“Books hold words,” I said, turning it over so we could see the pages. “These marks are all words. See, there’s A. That’s a word.”

“Why keep old words?” he wondered. “Cannot you make new ones?”

“People write down words so that others can read them later,” I said. “Like the name of this house over the door, or names on tombstones. Then the passersby can see if they knew that person, or if they’re a relative. I know how to spell my name, Aykroyd, and I look for it when I pass graveyards.”

“So a dead person did this?” asked Himself, growing interested.

A slight sound distracted us. Miss Winter stood in the doorway, with a countenance that made me wish I were elsewhere. Perhaps the loot plan was a bad one after all.

“I see you’ve had enough of polishing the hall floor,” she remarked.

“We’re taking loot,” Himself told her. “Share and share alike.”

“Then you may leave. I’ve no grace to squander on a pair of urchins rifling through my things.”

“They’re
my
things,” retorted Himself. “If you ask for them, I’ll give them back.”

Miss Winter bestowed a tight smile on him. “Yes, the master owns everything, don’t you? How gracious to give me my things. And what do you have there, master?”

“It’s a box to put words in,” he said. “Dead people’s words.”

Miss Winter laughed at him. “Admit that you don’t know what it is. Fine possessions won’t help you if you’re too stupid to know what to do with them.”

Himself stiffened, and his black eyes blazed. I thought he meant to strike her. But he tore out a handful of pages instead and hurled the book into the grate. While Miss Winter knelt to pluck it from the ashes, he ripped the loose pages into fragments. He said, “I knew what to do with that one, at any rate.”

I expected her to box his ears at once for his rudeness and the ears of his nursemaid into the bargain. But when Miss Winter turned from the hearth,
she still smiled, though it was an unpleasant smile, to be sure. “A good master wastes nothing,” she declared. “He knows each object has a use. But a fool doesn’t bother with what he knows nothing about, and that’s what you are—a fool.”

I thought this speech no harsher than her usual way, but her words struck their intended target. Himself flushed deep red. Eyes averted, he dropped the ragged slips of paper and quitted the chamber at a run. He pattered down one passageway and up another to the broad staircase of the entrance hall; then he charged up it and disappeared into a room at the top.

The chamber’s only furnishing was a massive oak buffet. I arrived to find one of the cabinet doors standing open, and Himself crawling inside. “Come out,” I coaxed, kneeling by his hiding place. “We’ll play a better game.” But he made no answer, nor did he speak thereafter, though I made the offer more than once.

The chamber, poor in furnishings, was rich in decoration, and I had leisure to study it while I knelt in the dust and made my entreaties. Painted leather panels covered the walls, displaying curling vines and bold flourishes of fanciful red and blue flowers. A raised pattern of interlaced circles enlivened the
white plaster ceiling, and a carved wooden overmantel surrounded the stone fireplace.

While sufficient daylight entered the diamond-paned window, the painted panels gleamed with mellow warmth. But as the low dark clouds thickened and rain beat against the panes, color leached out of the chamber. The painted flowers began to look like winter’s withered leaves, and the molded ceiling like a frozen pond etched by the blades of skaters. Twilight gathered in the corners, and the rich details melted into the gloom. The heavy carving of the overmantel, muffled in dust, seemed to writhe with voluptuous shapes. Stains on the leather panels took on sinister forms.

“Boy! Come out now,” I begged. “I’m cold, and I want my tea.”

Himself made no answer.

A point of darkness flickered at the edge of my vision—the shadow, as it were, of a candle flame. Frightened, I squinted at the square door of the buffet, determined not to take notice. The point thickened and spread, blocking the light from the window. A black dress next to my black dress. Gray hands reaching for mine.

With a shriek, I dove inside the cabinet, surprising the little boy who huddled there. “Shift yourself!”
he ordered, shoving at me. “You’re treading on my legs.”