The House of Dead Maids

by Clare B. Dunkle

  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 chambers exhibited 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 gave no 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 out and 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 you put me in,” I declared at last. “Somebody has been in it. Somebody has been playing!”

  I expected her to deny it, and I was prepared with my facts. I knew that none but a child would treasure that little hoard, or treat those feathers with such care. But Mrs. Sexton merely cinched her wrinkled lips tighter around the stem of her pipe.

  A clatter of pattens in the hallway just then brought me out of the kitchen at a trot, but by the time I reached the door, the person had gone. I heard the clatter go by again just out of sight around a corner, but another empty corridor was my reward. At length, I followed the sound to a bright, clean passage. I tried a door and found a pleasant parlor there, and Miss Winter glanced up from her book.

  “Have you brought tea?” she inquired. A clock on the mantel chimed five, the only clock I had seen in the whole house.

  “I was looking for the girl,” I confessed. “I thought she came in here. Mrs. Sexton said there isn’t a girl, but there is. She’s been in the room where I sleep.”

  “She comes and goes,” said Miss Winter. “I’m sure she’ll find you when she wants to. Tell that worthless woman in the kitchen I want my tea.”

  I stood in the doorway for a bit, but she didn’t look up or speak again, and I was too cowed to ask questions. Perhaps the other girl is simple, I thought, returning to the kitchen. Perhaps she’s not as she should be, and that makes the servants loath to mention her to strangers. It isn’t worth a quarrel, after all. And I persuaded Mrs. Sexton to let me take Miss Winter her tea, just for the pleasure of having an occupation.

  We ate our own meal in the kitchen, sharing the big wooden table between us. I loitered by the fire until the heat made me sleepy, and when Mrs. Sexton saw me nodding, she took me up to bed. She tended the fire, passed a pan of hot coals between the sheets to warm them and turned the key in the lock as she left.

  Late at night, the other girl returned to our chamber and climbed into bed with me. And, oh, how cold she was! The arms that twined around me were icy, and her dress was wringing wet. I grew cold to my bones as I hugged the thin form, attempting to warm it up. Vague fears troubled me, and Miss Winter’s stern figure haunted my sleep: nothing but a white face and hands, with her dress swallowed up in the night.

  When morning came, my little companion was gone, but not my indignation, and I was quite short with Mrs. Sexton when she pushed back the curtains on the bed.

  “The other girl was here last night,” I said severely, “and you needn’t pretend she wasn’t. What a state she was in! She’ll catch her death, the way you let her run about in wet things.”

  Mrs. Sexton only stared at me. Then she heaved a sigh and turned to tend to the fire.

  “You needn’t lock the door anymore, either,” I added. “It didn’t keep her out.”

  “Lock’s not for them,” muttered Mrs. Sexton. “Lock’s for you, to keep you from wandering the house at night and waking me up.”

  “I can be trusted to stay where I’m put,” I answered as I climbed down the wooden stepladder. “What’s that?”

  A handsome dress lay on the chair over my old one. The cloth of it was sturdy and new, and if it lacked the layers of petticoats that were the fashion in town, this did nothing to diminish my growing joy, for as I held the dress up, I could see beyond all doubt that it had been made for no one but me.

  “The village finished it last night,” said Mrs. Sexton, ignoring my pleasure to scrape the ashes.

  I smoothed the wide skirts, my bad temper forgotten at the amazing news that a village had worked together to clothe me. The dress was black, as black and perfect as a crow’s wing, a miniature copy of Miss Winter’s imposing garment. “I can wear this to church today,” I said, and that put the capstone on my delight. Never had I so much as dared to dream of poor ugly little Tabby Aykroyd showing off a new dress in church.

  “Church?” asked Mrs. Sexton, pausing to eye me askance.

  “It’s the Lord’s Day,” I reminded her. “Oh, dear! I need to wash. What time do the house staff leave for service?”

  “Wash if you like and go where you like,” said Mrs. Sexton. “I stay here.” And she picked up her bucket and left the room.

  This put me in a predicament. Weekly service was inevitable, inescapable, as firmly fixed in the cycle of exis
tence as the baking of the household loaves of bread. Now I asked myself, did I want to go to church? And the answer was by no means simple. Sometimes a curate had the gift of preaching, but more often than not, service was a contest of endurance to see whether the preacher’s voice would give out before I lost the feeling in my dangling toes. The thought that I might choose—that I might go or not as I pleased—awakened in me guilty relief.

  I did have a suspicion that the quarrelsome, untruthful behavior of the residents of this house could not be improved by their impiety and that I should seek a different course if I did not wish to become like them. Nonetheless, such is the frailty of human goodness that I soon stifled this counsel with a dozen practical suggestions. Before I had concluded washing, I had decided to remain at home. Already I viewed my absence from divine worship that day with melancholy regret, as though it were a circumstance that had happened long ago instead of an event that had yet to take place.

  I blush to own that this regret was quite drowned out by another, and that was the lack of an adequate looking glass. The old one in the beaded frame returned only a suggestion of features. I longed to see my new clothes, and as I stepped into the passage, I was just turning over in my mind where I might have seen a better mirror. When first I caught sight of the small figure in black, I thought it was my reflection.

  She stood very still in the dusky passage where the light was poorest. Like me, she wore the black dress that proclaimed her a maid of the house, but where mine was new, hers was spoiled by mildew and smears of clay. Thin hair, dripping with muddy water, fell to her shoulders in limp, stringy ropes. This was my companion of the night before—and she was dead.

  The dead hold no terrors for me. I have watched by the beds of those who have passed on, comforted by their sorrowless repose. But this little maid was a ghastly thing, all the more horrible because she stood before me. It wasn’t the pallid hue of her grimy face that shocked me, or her little gray hands and feet. It was the holes where her eyes should have been, great round sockets of shadow.

  The dead girl opened her lips as if she meant to speak. Her mouth was another black pit like the black pits of her eyes. She was nothing but a hollowed-out skin plumped up with shadow. I had the horrible idea that if I were to scratch her, she would split open, and the darkness within her would come pouring out.

  I remember that she reached out a hand towards me, and I remember running away. I remember throwing open the door to the kitchen, and Mrs. Sexton’s startled curse. I stood for long minutes by the bright, sunlit window, my teeth chattering uncontrollably. The comprehension that this was the icy form I had held through the night sputtered across my nerves and set the room to spinning.

  Then Mrs. Sexton brought a glass, and brandy coursed through me like fire. Sense returned, and with it, an over-powering fervor. This had been a judgment upon me. I needed no other sign.

  “I’m going to church!” I gasped.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Mrs. Sexton didn’t hinder me with questions, which would have made me worse again. Seeing that I couldn’t eat, she tied up bread and cheese in a napkin and sent it along with me. Not five minutes later, I stood trembling in the sunshine of a breezy spring day, as glad of my escape from that dark house as I had been of anything in my life.

  The kitchen garden shone with dew, and the green slope of the great ridge climbed into the sky before me, facing the rising sun. I pushed past a sheep gate in a low stone wall and came around the side of the house. Then I discovered why I had seen no southern windows the day before. This side of the house was a long high barn with stables. Nor had the barn seen kinder treatment than the house: weeds grew in pens where the farrowing sow should lie, and the stalls stood empty, their paint peeled and faded. Only a few black-and-white hens scratched here and there in the barnyard and squawked their displeasure as the gusts caught them crosswise and sent them round like weathervanes.

  Letting myself out the barnyard gate, I came to the front of the house, with a broad door in the middle of it and fancy lettering carved overhead. The village was out of sight beneath the brow of the hill, but I chose a likely path, scooped into a deep brown rut by generations of feet and littered with loose rocks. As I picked my way along it, drinking in the clean air, the gray phantom I had left behind began to lose its horror.

  When I was nine, I had helped to nurse our curate’s family during a fever. We lost them over several months, first the wife and babies and finally the curate himself, but not before that gentle man had made a lasting impression upon me. He liked to talk of godly things as he lay on his sickbed, and he gladly answered any question my childish mind could pose. He had not doubted that his family waited for him in the joyous kingdom of the Lamb, and when once I had asked him about ghosts, he had swiftly assured me that the dead do no harm to the living. My desire to attend worship this morning had much to do with that good man, whose conviction upon this point I longed to share, though I was in no wise convinced.

  But when I entered the village on the bank below, I found no stone church, nor parsonage, nor parson, but only a little plot of graves on the green, with headstones plain and square. The village matrons were taking advantage of the sunny weather to wash their laundry and had produced in adjacent dooryards a great boiling of kettles. The brazen spectacle of work thus commenced on the Sabbath fairly took away my breath.

  The children spotted me first and ran to their mothers, who left their work to watch my progress. They appeared cloddish, though I say it, who am no beauty myself; the common run were short and wide, like Mrs. Sexton, with thick limbs and sloping backs. They did not greet me, but stared, and I heard a murmur of “young maid” repeated from mouth to mouth. That woke in me the memory of what I owed these dull people; and when one of them approached me, I endeavored to thank her for my new dress. She did not reply, but she took out her thimble and touched it to me, with the air of one performing a rite.

  I turned away much astonished and continued my quest, and they followed me, pointing and murmuring; but my path soon found the bank of the shallow brook and lost itself in river gravel, where several boats lay pulled up at the edge of the water, and Arnby’s among them. I had no desire to wet my feet, so I walked back through the village accompanied by the whispering throng. I was not sorry when they halted at the little graveyard and we parted ways.

  Going up the path was harder than coming down, and not only because of the climb. I had found no help for my troubles. My heart was heavy and my nerves were at a stretch; and then, there was the discouraging spectacle of the big brown house above me, brooding upon the brow of its hill, and the great green ridge rising above it and brooding over all.

  Not anxious to return so soon to the haunted place, I turned aside to follow a faint trail that took me out of sight of both house and village. It ended at a doorway of arched stones set into the hillside, and a thick studded door standing open. Within I spied a straight passage, walled and flagged with wet stones, that angled up as it bored through the hill. It came to me that this must be another way into the house, or at least into its cellars, a shortcut to save the backs of tradesmen bringing supplies up from boats. I even thought I could see gray light falling into it from the other end some distance off.

  I took a few steps along it, but the gloom oppressed me, and the odor of damp earth brought back the memory of what I had seen as strongly as if the little gray corpse stood in the passage beside me. Before I knew what I was about, I had turned and run back to the friendly daylight. There I stood for a few seconds, gasping.

  Boots scraped the flagstones behind me, and Arnby came striding out of the passage, with dirt clinging to his trousers and a spade over his shoulder. “It’s the little maidie!” he cried, evidently startled to see me. “And where would you be going this fine morn?”

  The knowledge that even he was hard at work on the Lord’s Day sent my spirits tumbling to my toes. “I was going to service,” I told him, blinking back tears. “But I couldn’t find the
church.”

  “Oh, we don’t need churches or churchmen around here,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder. “Every man his own priest these days, isn’t that right? Look here, love, don’t be so down in the mouth. I’ll walk you back up the path. And master’ll be here maybe today, that’ll be grand, eh?”

  As he set down his spade, he tipped the handle slightly so that the metal grip touched my arm, with a casual expression on his face, as if it were only an accident; but I knew it was more than that. I should have demanded what he meant by it, and what the village woman had meant by it, too, taking care to touch me with metal as though I were a witch or a fairy. But I was nothing but half grown then, and shy, and thought it impertinence to pry into the affairs of my elders.

  We came to the front door, and I looked at the letters above it; many fine letters there were. “What does it say?” I asked.

  “It says ‘Seldom House’—that’s the name of the place,” he answered. “You’ll excuse my leaving, young maid. I’ve work to finish before the master returns.” And he set off whistling along the way we had come.

  I stayed to scrutinize the letters above the door; some few of them I knew, and I thought I could tell “House” plain enough, but it seemed to me that other words were carved there besides. Not for the first time did I wish I could read as I scanned the letters for shapes I knew, but though I worked on the puzzle for some time, none of it could I make out.

  Not wishing to lose the good of that rare pleasant weather, and not wanting to go back into that dark house, I skirted the barnyard and climbed up into the pasture beneath the green ridge. There my spirits rose as the glorious day unfolded around me, and larks and lapwings darted and tumbled in the sky. And, remembering my friend the curate in the shadowless beyond, I held church on the hillside and sang with the birds as many joyful hymns as I could recall.