“I’m sorry.”
“I’ll find you another blanket tonight.”
She nodded. Then she sat down, tucking her cold fingers under her arms to warm them. She heard the soft sigh of Bruce’s breath.
“We’re biking to Wellingborough today, Dad,” he said. His voice was dazed. “I’ll be home for dinner.” Uncle Harold stared after him in amazement as he went out the door. Aunt Catherine shook her head.
“Shock,” she said, and Carol smiled. She leaned against the table, her head in her hands, and the color came back into her face.
“I was so scared to come down here my feet got cold all over again. I’ve done a lot of things, but I’ve never nearly burned a house down.”
“Never mind,” Aunt Catherine said. “The stove should cool down by suppertime. I’ll go and brew some tea on Emily’s stove. Did the bed-warmer work?”
She nodded. “But I knocked it out of bed this morning, and there’s ash all over the place.”
“You slept with it?” Uncle Harold said.
“I thought—that’s what they’re for—I wrapped it in towels—”
Uncle Harold’s hand went to his robe as though he were feeling for his pipe. He didn’t find it, “It’s unorthodox. And a bit dangerous…Catherine, I need a very, very strong cup of tea.”
“I need another stove,” Aunt Catherine said.
Carol wandered outside after breakfast. She climbed an apple tree in the back garden and sat in it awhile, looking far out over the green fields that dissolved into a mist at the horizon. The church bells tolled ten o’clock, clear in the windless morning. She jumped down, threaded her way carefully between neat bean rows, and went toward the front gate. She looked out; the road was empty. She crossed it and found a path on the other side that ran in front of Emily Raison’s house into the graveyard.
The great grey church stood at the end of the path. On each side of it were rows of high rounded stones, tilted and sunken with age. Long grass grew up their faces, covering worn letters. A cat napped, balancing delicately on one of the stones, its paws tucked under its breast. Beneath it, a little round woman in high boots knelt washing the face of the stone.
Carol leaned against the railing, watching. The cat, splashed with color like a patchwork quilt, yawned and settled itself. It opened both eyes at the sudden movement by the railing as Carol hoisted herself up. She landed on her knees on a grave, and the cat made a startled leap off the stone. The old woman straightened as Carol rose, dusting her jeans.
“Bless me.” She sat back on her heels, looking a little uneasy. Then she smiled, and her face wrinkled like a sun-dried apple. “Hello, my dear. You must be Catherine’s niece.”
Carol squatted down beside her. “How did you know?”
“Oh, she showed me a picture of you and said you were coming. You look different from the picture, else I would have recognized you straight away.”
“That was my mother. She made me look nice. What are you doing?”
“I’m washing gravestones. This one belongs to my cousin Harriet. If I didn’t wash them, they’d get all dirty and mossy. I cut the grass round them too, else they’d be overgrown with weeds. That one over there is my uncle’s—that one with the beautiful fat cherub.”
“Are you Emily Raison? Why do you live in a graveyard?”
Emily Raison dipped her cloth in her bucket and cleaned the dirt out of Harriet’s name. “I was a maid in Mrs. Brewster’s house when I was a young girl. I went to this church all my life, and this is where I belong. So I saved my money, and when I had enough, I rented the little house from Mrs. Brewster. Do you like the big house, then?”
Carol looked down the path to the high wall and the rise of the big house behind it. She touched her hair. “I think so. I’m not used to things being so old…I don’t know how to treat old things. And the house is so quiet, and it creaks.”
“It was a great noisy thing in Mrs. Brewster’s day when she was a young girl, and her father had people in and out. I was always busy.”
Carol rested her chin in her hands. “I wish I was,” she said. The cat returned unexpectedly to rub its face against her knee. Emily Raison rinsed her cloth and wrung it out.
“I expect you’re homesick.”
Carol looked at her. “I expect I am,” she said, surprised. Emily Raison heaved herself to her feet.
“You come with me, my dear, and we’ll have a nice cup of tea. Come along, Geraldine. That’s Geraldine, my cat. Don’t they look nicer, now? So much brighter, because they have someone to look after them.”
“Don’t the other ones?”
“Most of them are too old. Hundreds of years old.”
She picked up the bucket and led Carol to her gate. Someone passed them: a young, fair-haired priest in a black cassock who called as he went by,
“Good morning, Miss Emily. Have you been washing your relatives?”
“Good morning, Father Malory. Yes. Don’t they look lovely?”
“Bright spots in a wilderness. Hello, there.”
“Hello,” Carol said, and he whisked past like a cheerful, energetic crow to be swallowed up in the shadow of the church.
They had tea and raisin buns in Miss Emily’s neat kitchen. Miss Emily talked in her gentle, cheerful voice about her life long ago in the big house, about her myriad relatives, living and dead, and about how hard it was to climb the sloping hill up to the churchyard after she went shopping. The bells rang unheeded quarter hours as she talked, and Carol’s eyes glazed, and she began shredding a raisin bun into her cold tea. The bells struck twelve, and she woke a little to count.
“But Susan wouldn’t stay,” Miss Emily was saying, “no matter how Mrs. Brewster cried. She was always a passionate little girl, Mrs. Brewster was, and she loved Susan. But Susan wouldn’t stay, not after what happened in the cellar.”
“What happened in the cellar?” Carol asked mechanically.
“Oh, my dear, she never told anybody.”
“Oh.”
“She was just a little bit of a thing, not much older than you, and so fearful about breaking things when she dusted. And when she ran up shrieking with her apron over her face we couldn’t think what she had broken in the cellar when there was nothing but coal. And she had hysterics, right in the library in front of two visiting priests. She never would say what happened.”
“Never?”
“Not a word. She was so delicate I thought she wouldn’t last long, but two years later I got a nice wedding picture from her, and she lived to have five children.”
Carol swallowed a yawn. “I should go,” she said. “Aunt Catherine will be wondering what kind of trouble I’m in now.”
Miss Emily accompanied her to the door. “Well, you tell your Aunt Catherine she can make whatever she likes on my stove while hers cools.”
Carol blushed. “I will. Thank you—thank you for cheering me up.”
Miss Emily patted her hand. “You come anytime you like, dear.”
“Goodbye.”
Miss Emily closed the door. Carol threaded her way through the maze of the colorful garden. Then she stopped. On the other side of the gate, blocking it with his bicycle, was a familiar, fair-haired boy.
Carol’s mouth pinched into a thin set line. She glanced back at Miss Emily’s door, but it was firmly shut. So she walked to the corner of the yard, stepping delicately in the pansy bed, and climbed onto Miss Emily’s white fence. The boy coasted in front of her before she could jump down.
“You’re still angry,” he said. “I can tell.” He put out a hand to balance himself. His eyes were grey and undisturbed.
“Will you please move.”
“Please, I want to talk.”
“I know. If you had known I was Bruce’s cousin, you wouldn’t have called me a matchstick.” The color flared into her face at the word.
“I wasn’t going to give you an excuse. We were rotten, that’s all. You aren’t a matchstick, Carol. That’s your name. I remember now.
I’m Alexander.”
“I want to get off Miss Emily’s fence.”
Alexander sighed. “Oh. Right, then. You’re still angry, and you won’t talk…” He rode slowly beside her as she walked, her chin high. “Will you just answer a question? Just to be polite. Where’s Bruce?”
“He went to Wellingborough.”
“Mm. He had intentions to go, then…He does that, sometimes, you know. He sort of vanishes. Without a word of warning. Everyone else went to Wellingborough. But then, what’s in Wellingborough? I mean, why should he go there, if he doesn’t choose to?”
Carol looked at him. “He didn’t go there?”
“No. So I thought I’d look round for him a bit, because I’d rather go nowhere with Bruce than somewhere with everyone else. You know.”
Carol opened the gate. “I don’t know why you would,” she said crossly. “I wouldn’t like to go as far as the other side of the street with him.” She closed the gate and went across the lawn toward the front door, standing open to the still summer day. She heard her name called before she reached it. She saw Alexander’s face between the leaves above the high wall.
“I’m really quite nice inside,” he said, smiling helpfully. “I say, if you see Bruce, tell him—”
The sharp slam of the door cut his sentence short.
She saw Bruce finally in the late afternoon as she sat on the window-seat in her bedroom chewing the end of a pen, with an unwritten postcard on her lap. He came slowly through the gate, wheeling his bicycle. He walked stiffly, his head bowed, and bits of his clothing fluttered oddly. She straightened slowly, seeing even from that distance the long weals on his forearms.
Aunt Catherine came out of the laundry room as he wheeled the bike to the porch. He let it down easily, kneeling beside it. He looked up at them as they came out the back door, and his face was a map of angry scratches.
Aunt Catherine knelt on the walk beside him. “Bruce, what happened?” She turned his face gently from his bicycle so she could see it. He sighed through stiff lips.
“Two flats. And the body is so scratched.”
“I noticed. Bruce, what happened to you? You look like you tangled with an irate zoo.”
He was silent a moment. His eyes flicked to Carol’s face, then away. He sighed again, his hands moving over a torn tire. “Oh…I wasn’t thinking…They saw a picture at Wellingborough this afternoon. I met them when they were coming home…They took a shortcut through the fields where Emily Raison does her berry picking.” He paused again. The wheel spun futilely under his hands. “Well. They were all excited about the picture. It had a man in it—Steve McQueen. And he had a motorcycle, and he could jump anything with it—hills, hedges, walls—anything, as long as he had the momentum. All he—all he had to do was jerk the front wheel up and sail over—”
Aunt Catherine touched her eyes with her fingers. “I see. Oh, Bruce. Don’t tell me—”
“Well, you asked me to. And it seemed a good idea at the time. We did have a hill for momentum, but I can’t remember why we chose a blackberry hedge to jump over.”
Something broke inside of Carol. She sat down on the sidewalk and gurgled helplessly into her knees. “Steve McQueen on a bicycle,” she gasped. “I can just see it. Even if you had cleared the blackberries, you would have bent the bicycle frame landing—”
She felt the sudden coolness of Bruce’s shadow as he stood up. She lifted her head. “How do you know? I suppose you’ve done that, too. No. Perhaps you had sense enough not to do that at least—”
“Bruce!”
“I didn’t laugh at you when you broke Mrs. Brewster’s teacups swinging the flail, or nearly burned the house down to warm your feet. They were good ideas, even though they didn’t turn out, and it’s not fair of you to laugh at mine.”
Carol rose. Her eyes glinted. “I didn’t know you wanted me to be nice to you.”
“I don’t! I’m talking about fairness—”
“So am I, and you couldn’t be fair about anything—especially niceness—even if you wanted to be, which you don’t!”
Aunt Catherine looked up at them helplessly. “Shall I make you a scorecard?” she suggested. Bruce’s fists clenched. He stepped across the bicycle and went into the house. The slam of the door rattled the porch windows.
Carol folded herself into an angular shape on the walk, her knees bent, her head hidden in her arms. “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. Her voice was muffled. Aunt Catherine spun the bicycle wheel. Light danced endlessly from one spoke to another.
“I’m not,” she said reflectively.
Carol went to curl up again on her window-seat. She rested her chin on her knees and stared outside and saw nothing. The house was quiet around her, as though it were drowsing in the afternoon. Light fell in a changeless pool on her floor boards. She stirred restlessly, hunched against herself, and saw the fishpond, open water lilies burnished in the sunlight. The trees were motionless beyond it. She hugged her knees in a tighter grip, and loosed her breath in a slow weary sigh. Then she uncurled, her feet hitting the floor with a thump. She went aimlessly downstairs, sliding down the banister when the stairs began to crack sharply. She sat a moment on the end of the banister, her chin in her hand, staring at nothing. The living room door opened so abruptly she jumped.
“Harold! Oh, Carol. I’m glad you’re still here. Father Malory is coming to dinner tonight, and I haven’t been able to use the stove, besides forgetting I even asked him—Would you mind going down to the cellar and getting a blackberry pie out of the freezer? Thank you, dear. Harold!” She touched the top of her neat hair lightly in despair. Carol dismounted. She heard Uncle Harold’s shout back, as she opened the cellar door and over it, Aunt Catherine’s voice calling upstairs. “Bruce! I need some flowers!”
She found the freezer in the room beyond the coal cellar and shifted things in it until she found a pale pie in a plastic bag, neatly labeled. A shadow leaped onto the freezer lid as she closed it, and she jumped, then laughed. The great black cat slipped through her hands so sleekly she barely felt it. She followed it into the last room where it scratched its claws a moment on Mrs. Brewster’s table, then began threading a private maze on the floor, through boxes, stacks of mildewed books, dusty figurines, until it leaped up on the table and then into the window-ledge, brushing as it leaped the dark crown of the broad-brimmed hat of a man.
He stood still as though he were listening for a sound in the quiet house. Beyond the thick stones church bells tolled four o’clock, distant, leisurely, as from another world. His face was a still cold silhouette beneath the flow of sunlight from the cracked window. He turned abruptly, a drawn sword in his hand, and walked into the wall.
III
CAROL LEANED AGAINST THE CELLAR DOOR, HER HEART leaping against her ribs, her mouth dry as if she had been running. She reached behind her and pushed the bolt that locked the door. Then she eased down to the floor and rested her face against her knees, the pie bag in one limp hand at her side. Her heartbeat slowed gradually; she began to hear sounds about her: the rattle of pans in the kitchen, the back door closing, footsteps in the hall. They stopped in front of her. She jumped, but instead of a strange, dark, somber face, she saw only Bruce’s face, patterned with scratches. He held a handful of daisies. She swallowed the dryness away from her throat. He was quiet a moment. Then he drew a breath, as though to speak. Uncle Harold came out of the study, and Bruce closed his mouth.
“What in heaven’s name,” Uncle Harold said, “did that to your face?”
“A blackberry bush. I rode into it.”
“It looks very painful. Did you put something on it?”
“No. I—No.”
“There must be something in the house…” He turned Bruce slowly, surveying the damage, and Bruce’s shoulder jerked under his fingers. “It looks like you dove into it headfirst.”
“I think I did.”
“Come upstairs; we’ll find something.” He looked down at Carol, sitting o
n the floor. “What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
She swallowed, but her voice came in a whisper. “I think I have.”
“Oh. In the cellar?”
“Yes.”
Uncle Harold shook his head. “Remind me to investigate that shadow of yours. Bruce—”
He followed Uncle Harold stiffly, the daisies trailing on the stairs. Carol sat a moment longer, staring at the chill grey flagstone. She got up finally and took the pie into the kitchen.
“Aunt Catherine—”
“Four, five, six,” Aunt Catherine said, counting potatoes. “Thank you, Carol—just put it on top of the stove so it can thaw. Now, will you look in the cupboard by the door and get out the lace tablecloth and spread it on the round table in the living room. Where is Bruce? I didn’t ask for a whole floral wreath.”
“Uncle Harold is putting something on his scratches.” She found the tablecloth and carried it to the living room. She unfolded it and flicked it open so it floated through the air and settled lightly on the table. She leaned on it, staring down at the delicate endless pattern. “Aunt Catherine,” she said softly, “I saw a man in your cellar with a black hat like a Pilgrim on his head and a sword in his hand, and he walked into the wall as though it wasn’t there…” Her voice sounded small, unconvincing in the quiet room. The sun picked out the deep tones of mahogany beneath the lace. She rubbed her eyes again with her fingers, and her shoulders slumped. “Aunt Catherine, I want to go home…”
“Heavens,” Aunt Catherine said behind her, “this room is a wreck.” She straightened the pillows on the couch and picked up sections of the morning newspaper off the rug. Bruce came in, still carrying the daisies. His face was streaked with white. Aunt Catherine glanced at him.
“What is that all over your face?”
He shrugged irritably. “I don’t know. It came out of a tube.”
“You look like a zebra.”
His mouth twitched into an unwilling smile. “I do, rather, I can’t find a vase for these, and I’ve looked everywhere.”
The House on Parchment Street Page 3