by Jane Ashford
He considered the idea, then shook his head. “You mustn’t go wandering about alone.” He took candlesticks from the small table beside the door and lit them. “The first part is dim.” He held his light high and led the way to a hidden corner. There was a spiral stair tucked away there, built of great blocks of stone. “Please walk very carefully. The steps can be treacherous.” Ada took her candle and started up before he could change his mind.
The stair was a challenge. The inner sides of the steps were too narrow to stand on, and the passage was just wide enough for one person. Though tiny slits of windows added some illumination, there was no rail to cling to. Ada wondered that Delia had wanted to climb this corkscrew to her bedchamber. But then, Delia had not been a very practical person.
They walked around several turns in silence and came to a small landing. “That door leads to the upper floor,” said Ada.
“Very observant,” Compton replied. “It’s covered by a tapestry. Delia liked secret entrances.”
They moved on. “She climbed up here every day?” Ada had begun to feel oppressed by the stone walls. They were not closing in on her, of course. She knew that.
“More than once sometimes,” he replied.
“And the servants. How did they ever carry wood and hot water all this way?” She didn’t like to think of the old footmen toiling up this stair.
“They didn’t have to. Delia discovered a pulley suspended outside one of the tower windows. She rigged up a rope for raising things.”
“How clever.”
“She was.”
They hadn’t passed a door for a long time. “We must be very high up by now,” Ada said.
“Quite. This tower is one of the tallest parts of the house, though not the oldest. It was added fifty years ago by a forebear with a taste for the medieval.” They came around a final turn, and he stopped before a low door. “Here we are.”
They were crowded together on the small landing. Their shoulders touched. Ada waited, but he made no move to go in. She put a hand to the doorknob. It didn’t turn. She looked at him. Candlelight flickered over his features.
“I came up here just after Delia died,” he said, his voice gone distant. “I found the door locked. The key was with her things when they were returned to me, but I didn’t try again.”
“So you haven’t been inside?”
“No.”
“At all?”
He shook his head.
“You didn’t want to come alone,” said Ada, certain she was right.
Compton looked down at her. “Perhaps I didn’t,” he replied. “Can that have been it?” he murmured.
“Well, I am with you now.”
“Yes.”
He still didn’t move. She couldn’t be sure of his expression in the dimness. There was sadness, certainly, and perhaps discomfort. “So you haven’t been in her room since…a while ago.”
“Or ever?” he replied, as if asking himself. “I must have looked in when I was a boy. I was all over the house. But I’ve not been to this chamber since Delia moved in when she was fourteen.”
“Not at all?”
“She wouldn’t tolerate invaders. She called this tower her bastion.”
Ada was amazed that she’d been allowed to do so. Her parents would never tolerate that kind of behavior. “So it’s just as she left it.”
The duke nodded. His face seemed full of doubt.
“I don’t think she’d mind if we went in. Now.” She needed to enter.
“Don’t you?” He gazed at the door. “I think she would have wanted the room sealed, like a forbidden chamber in a fairy tale.” As soon as the words escaped him, Peter wished them unsaid. Not that they were untrue. He could easily imagine Delia expressing such a wish. But they sounded daft.
Miss Ada cocked her head. “Perhaps,” she said. “For a while. A year and a day, like in a story.”
It had been almost that, Peter realized. Time passed so swiftly. When it didn’t crawl.
“But then she would have expected someone to come and break the spell,” the girl added.
She had taken up his idea as if it wasn’t the least odd. Peter felt an uncomfortable mixture of gratitude and remorse. He’d been rude about her eyebrows. He shouldn’t have said what he did. Awkward remarks just popped out sometimes. Far too often really.
“And we were the ones closest to her.”
“You were, perhaps,” Peter replied. He’d never felt more distant from his sister than at this moment. He could almost imagine Delia’s ghost swooping down to warn them off.
“She worried about you.”
He blinked in surprise. “Me?”
“She said so. She wanted to help you.”
“With what?”
“Well.” Miss Ada gestured at their surroundings. “Everything.”
Did she mean the house? The dearth of money to keep it up? The slow crumbling of a noble heritage? Or the darkness pressing close upon them? None of those bore thinking of.
“All your efforts to maintain the estate,” she added.
In the glow of candlelight, Peter saw admiration in her eyes. There was no mistaking it. He’d been admired before, by a few younger boys in his last year at school, by tenants he strove to help. He knew the expression. But to see it on the face of a young lady was quite different. Peter enjoyed the sensation. His impulse to turn tail and retreat died.
He reached out and unlocked the door with the key that had been returned from this girl’s house in his dead sister’s luggage. He ducked under the low lintel and stepped into the circular room beyond. Miss Ada Grandison followed him.
Space opened out around them. The slender tower bulged at the top, Peter remembered, like an upended onion. It looked incongruous from the outside, stuck onto the corner of an English house, another sign of the Rathbones’ eccentricity. But from the inside it was roomy, nearly twenty feet across. He found no memory of being in this room before, certainly not since it had become his sister’s fantastical nest.
Four tall casement windows were hung with billows of brocade. The colors didn’t match, but they harmonized somehow—deep blue and scarlet and yellow. Miss Ada went over to touch one of them. “How beautiful,” she said.
“I believe they’re made from the gowns of some Rathbone ancestor. Delia was always foraging in the attics and storerooms. She found them in a trunk.” He did remember her delight in that. Delia was never happier than when she enthused over some ancient treasure she’d discovered. The room was cluttered with such objects, some whole, some broken by the centuries.
“It makes me feel small,” said Miss Ada.
Following her gaze, he looked up. The ceiling was open to the pointed roof, creating a conical space. The fireplace looked far too small to heat it. “I believe my great-grandmother, who ordered this tower built, was inspired by The Castle of Otranto.”
“Is that in Italy?”
“It’s a novel by Horace Walpole. Delia liked it too. I would think spiders might drop on you from that ceiling as you slept.”
“Spiders?” She scanned the beams apprehensively.
“No they wouldn’t,” said Peter. “There’s a canopy over the bed.”
Miss Ada walked over to the large four-poster. “However did they get this up the stairs?”
“They didn’t,” he answered. “Impossible. It must have been built here.” He eyed the tall posts. “It would have to be taken apart to be moved. And even then—”
“Lowered with the rope,” Miss Ada finished. “These posts wouldn’t fit down the stair. They’d get stuck.”
“Yes.” This girl kept revealing new facets, Peter thought. She was quite intelligent.
She gazed around the room. “It’s beautiful, but I think I’d be lonely, so far from the rest of the house.”
“Delia lo
ved solitude. She was like my father in that. Both of them could spend whole days reading and studying alone.” The house could feel empty even when they were in it, he remembered. “And they were equally irritated if one interrupted them. They had much to say when they met for dinner, however.” Conversations full of obscure references that he had rarely understood, as if they inhabited one world and he another.
Miss Ada moved over to the armchair in front of the small hearth. It was flanked by a table piled with books. She picked up one and read the spine. “The Romance of the Forest.”
“Is that Mrs. Radcliffe?”
She nodded. “I remember that name. Our headmistress at school was shocked when she found Delia reading one of her novels. And Delia told her there was much to be learned about the struggle between good and evil, hedonism and morality, in the story.”
Peter smiled. “I can hear her saying it.” His sister had been fond of her own opinions.
“She was never afraid to express her views. I admired that in her.”
“Even when they were quite unusual,” he agreed.
“Yes, but Delia didn’t care,” Miss Ada replied. “She didn’t worry about whether people agreed with her.”
“Very true.” One didn’t dispute with Delia, Peter thought. She simply didn’t bother arguing. She might listen to an alternative explanation, sometimes with exaggerated patience, but he couldn’t recall one instance when he’d convinced her. She’d found certainty at a very young age. Rather too much so, in the end. If she’d listened to advice, she might be alive now.
Miss Ada opened the massive carved wardrobe, another piece that must have been constructed up here. “Oh, I recognize that gown from school,” she said. Tears welled up in her dark eyes. She blinked rapidly.
Peter felt an answering tremor of grief. He might have forged a closer bond with his sister, if she’d lived.
“She would have done such interesting things with her life,” said the girl, closing the wardrobe. “I’m sure of it. It’s so sad.”
He nodded. Both were undoubtedly true. He met her gaze and was overtaken by a sense of shared melancholy, poignant and somehow comforting as well. It was a relief to speak of his sister, even as it hurt to acknowledge her loss. Miss Ada was right. Delia’s name shouldn’t be met by a stretch of awkward silence.
His companion swallowed back tears. Peter felt moved to comfort, an impulse to put an arm around her, draw her close against him. But of course he couldn’t do that. Not here, alone together in a bedchamber. Not anywhere, he reminded himself. Her family wouldn’t approve of even a mild flirtation with him, circumstanced as he was. He ought to get them out of here. She’d seen the room now. Yet somehow he didn’t speak.
“We should tell happy stories about her,” Miss Ada said. “There’s so much more to remember than just her death. Years of things. Tell me something good you recall.”
Peter’s mind was blank at first. “I don’t know what to say.”
“What’s your first memory of Delia?”
“She was the fiercest child,” he said immediately. “As soon as she could walk, she started stumping around the house. And then running when she could. If you tried to stop her, her eyes would just blaze with rage. That glare made you take a step back, I can tell you.” Details of the memory unfolded as he spoke. “Our parents set me to chasing her once. I’d forgotten that I made her a kind of leash.”
“You didn’t!”
“She wouldn’t slow down or watch where she was going,” Peter said. “I was afraid she’d trip. So I tied a rope around her waist. Quite loosely. And she didn’t seem to mind. It made her laugh. She pretended to be a pony.” He smiled at the remembered image of the tiny girl pawing the air and neighing. “She pranced.”
“She loved animals,” said Miss Ada.
“They seemed to know it somehow, too.”
“And learning. Delia loved learning.”
She smiled rather as he had, Peter thought, at a pleasant recollection. He felt a pulse of connection with this increasingly interesting young lady.
“Girls at school often didn’t, you know,” she went on. “Some found it difficult, and some were lazy. Quite a few thought the only reason to be there was to gain accomplishments, so that they could draw attention to themselves and be admired. But Delia wanted to know.”
“Yes, she did.” She’d shared that temperament with their father. Or absorbed it from him? Peter didn’t know. But the need to learn had certainly drawn them together.
“I didn’t understand at first. How she could be so…enraptured by facts. Greedy for them, like girls who stuffed themselves with sweets. I suspected her of affectation.”
“That is one thing my sister was never guilty of,” Peter replied.
“No.” Miss Ada shook her head, smiling again. “She was the most unaffected person. But not like an innocent.”
“Delia was aggressively unaffected,” suggested Peter. “She presented herself without subtlety. If you didn’t like it, you could…go hang.”
Miss Ada burst out laughing. Peter felt a surge of triumph. He had made her laugh.
“A little like my aunt, really. I just thought of that. Her approach, I mean. They were very different in the…details.”
Peter considered. “I see what you mean.”
“Delia thought everyone should be that way,” said Miss Ada. “Express their true feelings and original thoughts. She encouraged people to do so. When girls worried that they weren’t like the others and that they would be mocked, she told them to ‘defy the small-minded.’”
“That sounds like Delia.” It might have been a motto for her personal crest.
“And of course she stood with them when they did. If they did.”
“Of course.” His sister would have waved a flag on the barricades in the French Revolution had she believed in the cause.
“There was even one of the teachers. Miss Rahm. The girls thought her odd. Well, she is rather odd. She gets agitated if different sorts of food touch on her plate. And she can’t bear open windows, no matter how hot the weather. But she knows six languages!”
“Delia would have admired that.” Peter was admiring his animated companion.
“She did. And she told the girls who laughed at Miss Rahm that they might have opinions when they could speak and write as many. And then Delia began talking to them only in Italian. She could speak it very quickly. Mostly they couldn’t puzzle out what she meant. Though they could certainly suspect it was satirical. We couldn’t believe Miss Rahm would have taught her some of the gruesome words she used. And yet where else would she have found them?”
“Dante?” said Peter.
Miss Ada stared at him. “Of course! Oh, Delia.”
“I would think such twitting might cause resentment,” said Peter.
“Well, yes, it did,” Miss Ada admitted. “But Delia didn’t care. She really didn’t. She just dismissed them.”
He believed it. “Do you see that as a happy memory of my sister?” asked Peter. “Delia could be quite rigid in her…judgments. And she didn’t understand that not everyone is capable of original thought. Or that other talents might be just as…worthy of respect.” He had felt the weight of her disapproval himself. Now and then.
“That’s true,” she admitted. “It isn’t a completely happy memory, I suppose. But very real.”
Peter nodded. Miss Ada Grandison seemed a thoughtful person. More than one expected at her age. With her striking appearance and lively sympathies, it was a potent combination. A kind of inner warning bell told him to watch what he was about.
“And not sad,” she added. “Not about the…end.” Her expression shifted, as if the circumstances of Delia’s death had come rushing back.
It was hard to long to comfort when one couldn’t, Peter thought. He felt another pang at the ending of their confide
nces.
Miss Ada drifted over to the writing desk. Like the rest of the room, it held a collection of odd little keepsakes—a tiny figurine of a rearing horse, a crystal bud vase, a furled fan. “Have you looked at her papers? No, you said you hadn’t come in here.”
Even now it felt like prying. Could a solitary person leave an imprint behind, discouraging intrusion? The threat of Delia’s outrage seemed to hover over Peter.
Then an irregular shape caught his eye. A small ring of keys sat on the desktop—a tumble of metal, familiar, but half-forgotten. A wordless exclamation escaped him.
“What is it?” she asked.
He stepped over and picked up the keys. There were only three on the ring. “These were my father’s. He kept them with him always. I wondered where they’d gone after he died.” Had he asked Delia? He couldn’t remember. Conversation hadn’t been easy then.
“What do they unlock?”
“I don’t know.”
“That could be important.”
“For what?” Peter shrugged as he put the keys in his pocket. All he could see was another sign of the closeness his father and sister had shared. Neither had thought to include him.
“To figure things out,” said Miss Ada. She stood straighter, arms at her sides, chin up. “I came here to tell you something,” she said. “A few days before she…fell, Delia told me that she’d uncovered a secret that would change everything for your family. She was terribly excited.”
“A secret?”
The girl nodded. She waited, vividly expectant.
“What sort of secret?”
“I don’t know. I thought you might.”
“I? Why would I?”
“I supposed she might have talked about it. Whatever it was.” Miss Ada faltered, and Peter realized he was scowling at her. He tried to stop. But he was overwhelmed by melancholy. He was a Rathbone, the last of his name, but he’d never been told any family secrets. He hadn’t been given his father’s keys. This near-stranger apparently knew more than he did.