“It’s gold,” Wildfire said.
“Oh,” said Duncan. “The squire at my old village had a marble statue with gold-plating on one part of it. It was a man holding a golden ball in his hand. It seemed like the servants were always polishing it. No wonder this one was so tarnished, if no one’s been tending it for years.”
Wildfire sighed heavily. “Dame Groach’s statues aren’t gold-plated. They’re solid gold.”
“Oh.” Duncan didn’t really know how else to respond to this. Here he had assumed that the manor was derelict because its owner had no money to spare, but if she had statues of solid gold, surely she might have sold one off to pay for repairs.
“You’re not in the least bit interested in how someone like Dame Groach came to have a collection of gold statues?” Wildfire asked irritably.
The thought had not occurred to him. “She’s got a lot of strange stuff,” he replied defensively. “She’s a strange old lady, so of course she collects strange things. Did you know that each of the upper rooms in the manor house has a specific color, and that absolutely everything in the room is a shade of that color?”
“Yes, I did know, in fact,” said Wildfire.
“Oh. So how did she come to have a collection of gold statues?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
Duncan thought this was beyond unreasonable. “If you don’t know, then why did you even bring it up?”
“It’s not that I don’t know. It’s that I can’t tell you,” Wildfire replied. “There’s some sort of charm in place, I think. I’ve tried to tell you more than once, but the words won’t come out. This has happened before, Duncan. You need to be careful.”
The white horse had never been this serious before. “All right,” Duncan told him. “I don’t know what I’m being careful of, but I’ll be careful.”
“Dame Groach is a witch,” Wildfire said forcefully. “You really should run for your life. She won’t be back for a few more days. You could probably cover quite some distance in that time.”
“What about you?” Duncan asked.
“Forget me. I’m doomed.”
He didn’t like the way those words fell from the horse’s lips. He could see, however, that Wildfire was in no mood to be reasoned with tonight. “I guess we’re doomed together, then,” he remarked. “I’d feel too guilty abandoning you here.”
Wildfire snorted unhappily and slinked back into the darkest shadows of his stall.
Goliath whinnied, and Duncan chucked a handful of straw into his oat bin in response.
He made certain to take the great black horse out of his stall once a day, but he typically put him right back, before the first whack of the cane could wear off. If Goliath’s temperament had been even marginally better, Duncan would have exercised him properly. As it was, he felt no qualms over taking Dame Groach’s commands literally.
During his tenure as caretaker, the condition of the estate had improved quite a lot. The front lawn was manicured and the garden had begun to take shape. He had been through every room of the manor house at least once, had beaten rugs and cleaned the grime from paintings. He had unstopped chimneys and scrubbed floors. One day, toward the end of the week, he went through the grounds and polished as many of the statues as he could find. There were certain jobs, though, certain repairs that he kept putting off because of lack of supplies.
Dame Groach reappeared in the stable yard at noon exactly a week after her departure. Duncan had expected as much and stood waiting for her.
“Hello,” he said in open greeting. “How was your trip?”
“Did you take the black horse out of his stall every day?” she demanded in lieu of answering.
“Yes,” he said.
“Did you let the white horse out?”
“No.”
“And you’ve been beating the vicious brute faithfully?”
He was thankful for her choice of words, because it allowed him to answer quite truthfully, “Yes, I have.”
Dame Groach grunted and started toward the house.
“Is there a town nearby?” Duncan suddenly asked, for this was the reason he had waited for her.
She paused and glared at him suspiciously.
“There are some repairs that the manor house needs, and I don’t have the supplies to make them,” he said in answer to that scrutiny.
“What repairs?”
“The broken stairs, and the sagging eaves, and everything that needs to be repainted—I keep putting off those chores, but the others are pretty much under control.”
“Industrious one, aren’t you,” she observed, and she seemed disgruntled about such industriousness.
“I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t keep busy,” said Duncan.
Dame Groach turned her full attention on him then, in a piercing stare that unnerved him. Duncan held very still, unsure what to make of her. “Is that the problem?” she asked, her cackly voice severe. “And here I thought the opposite. You’re a rare one, you know?”
He didn’t. He had no clue whatsoever, in fact.
She continued with a gruff wave of her hand. “The nearest town is too much of a hassle to visit. Don’t worry about the repairs. Just keep the grounds as you were contracted to do.”
“But—” he started to protest.
Dame Groach suddenly thumped her cane against the ground twice, and a strange little burst of energy rippled away from it. Duncan turned in surprise, just in time to see a fresh coat of paint wash over the manor house behind him. The sagging eaves straightened, and the weathered wood took on a supple appearance.
His eyes bugged out at the sight.
“There. All done,” said Dame Groach. “Go tend to the flower garden now.” She hobbled past him toward the house.
“If she can do that, what’s she need with a caretaker?” Duncan said to no one in particular.
It was all well and good for her to tell him to tend the flower garden, but when he obeyed, he discovered the place to be in immaculate order. The ripple from her cane had extended in all directions. He wondered if that meant that everything in the estate had been repaired.
He confirmed as much that afternoon. An extended stroll through the grounds showed him immaculate paths and well-trimmed shrubbery. The place reminded him of the squire’s manor near his father’s farm, but on a much grander scale. The magical repairs had extended even to the derelict tower in the very back corner of the estate.
“Now what am I supposed to do?” asked Duncan in confusion.
He dolefully returned to the manor house in the falling dusk. Dame Groach was descending the stairs in her black cloak, with her knobbly cane in one hand. An almost giddy smile brought her pattern of wrinkles into high relief on her face.
“I’ll be gone for another week,” she announced as she turned her steps toward the stable yard.
“You’re leaving again?” Duncan asked, bewildered. “Already?”
“Third time’s the charm,” she said with a cackle. “I think I’ve prepared everything perfectly this time. Remember your duties while I’m gone, boy.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
As with the other two times, she gathered her cloak and vanished in a crack of thunder.
At least he still had the horses and canaries to tend to, Duncan thought glumly.
The inside of the manor house was as immaculate as the estate grounds. He thought of all the weeks he had spent scrubbing and cleaning, of all the loads of laundry he had done and all of the rugs he had beaten. With a simple thump of her cane, Dame Groach had restored everything to its pristine condition, far better than he in his clumsy house-keeping skills could manage. He went from room to room that night and marveled at the changes. Even the servants’ quarters looked perfect, right down to the fresh linens folded across each empty bed in the row.
Duncan took one look and retreated with his little candle, back down the hallway. A strange scratching sounded from the door under the stairs as he passed.
“I wonder what she repaired in there,” he muttered, and he picked up his pace.
He slept restlessly that night, plagued with visions of Dame Groach chasing him with her knobbly cane. She wanted to repair him with magic, kept saying that his hair was too long and his clothes too worn. When Duncan awoke to a gray dawn he scowled up at the black bed curtains for a full five minutes and adjusted his mind toward the coming day.
“Start with the canaries, I guess,” he muttered at last.
The two little birds in Dame Groach’s hideous pink room chirped happily at him as he entered. Feeding them took all of two minutes, but Duncan stopped to talk to them, aimless comments.
The bird with the gray-banded wings sang a trill back at him, as though carrying on a proper conversation. Duncan wondered if he would get punished for removing the cage from its rosy environment, for he thought the canaries might be nice company to have, and they’d probably appreciate getting out of that awful room.
In the end, though, he left them there and went on his way, down to the kitchen for a quick breakfast and then out to the stables.
“Good morning,” he called to the two horses within. Goliath snorted, and Wildfire poked his head out of the far stall. “She left again last night,” Duncan told him.
“Looks like she did more than that,” replied the white horse with a significant glance around at the stable. The place looked like it had been entirely rebuilt with new wood. Out of curiosity, Duncan climbed up to the loft where he had stored the bulk of the magic oats. They were still there, but the old sacks were new again, with no danger of splitting open.
He sighed. “Want to turn yourself black and go for a walk?” he asked. “I’ve got nothing to do today.”
“I guess you should move on to another job, then,” Wildfire replied. “Just leave Dame Groach a note that you’ve gone to look for a job that needs you.”
“I can’t write,” Duncan reminded him.
The white horse rolled his eyes. “Then just go. You can see plainly enough that she doesn’t need a caretaker.”
This remark left Duncan to muddle over just why the old crone had brought him here in the first place. No satisfactory answer came to his mind.
After a short walk around the stable yard with Goliath, Duncan retreated back indoors for the day. Wildfire had stayed at the back of his stall, apparently uninterested in leaving the confines of the stable a second time. He was in a terrible mood, and Duncan had no idea what had caused it, so he simply steered clear.
He spent the majority of the day in Dame Groach’s library, flipping through her books to look for pictures. After lunch he carted the canaries in there with him to listen to their cheerful chirps as he turned pages. Most of the books held nothing of interest to him. A few of the older, handwritten ones had numbers listed next to words, and Duncan surmised that they must be recipe books or something similar. A few of these had sketches of shapes and diagrams, patterns of lines that were interesting to look at but that held no meaning to him.
He found one book that was filled with sketches of different plants, and he wished not for the first time in his life that he could read the text alongside them. Some of the plants he recognized; others were completely foreign to him. He thought about taking the book down to Wildfire to read for him, but then he recalled that the white horse was in a bad mood.
At dusk he retreated to the kitchen to make a meager supper from the supplies there. A scratch and a whimper sounded from behind the small door beneath the stairs as Duncan passed. He shuddered and moved onward.
Chapter 7
“I am so bored, I think I might die from it!” Duncan declared to an empty room.
Dame Groach had been gone almost a week already, and in that time he had flipped through every book in the library and explored every cabinet and cupboard in the house. He had matched every key on his ring to its corresponding lock, and had used them all but one. The little door beneath the stairs he tried to avoid entirely.
Halfway through the week, he had ventured out to the garden in the hopes of weeding away any errant sprouts that might have germinated since the place had been cleansed, but there were none. Back on his father’s farm, weeds had sprung up almost overnight. They had done much the same here prior to Dame Groach’s thump of her knobbly cane. Faced with a still-pristine garden four days later, though, Duncan started to wonder whether the estate would need any upkeep at all.
If it didn’t, he thought he really should resign his position when the old crone returned. He didn’t know what to do with himself when he had nothing but spare time.
Wildfire continued in his sour mood. Every time Duncan came to the stable, the white horse would immediately ask, “You haven’t been doing anything foolish, have you?”
Duncan didn’t bother to tell him that he’d carried a couple of canaries all over the house, or that he’d shuffled through Dame Groach’s book collection and investigated her cupboards. He didn’t think any of that was particularly foolish, but the horse probably wouldn’t approve anyway.
“No, I haven’t,” he would say.
“Well, don’t,” Wildfire always replied.
Since the horse refused to be any more specific about what sort of foolishness he was supposed to avoid, Duncan went carelessly along his way. The manor house was home to all sorts of curiosities. Relics and baubles from across the world adorned its many shelves and walls, but Duncan had had plenty of time to inspect them when he had been cleaning them for the past two months. Now that they were all restored to their original glory, he had neither desire nor excuse for handling them.
Boredom was a phenomenon he’d never before experienced. He’d never gone this long without doing something productive, and he was starting to feel skittish about it. He’d even gone so far as to take Goliath for an extended walk one particular afternoon, but the great black beast had only snorted and gnashed at his hands in thanks. Duncan’s stroke of the magic cane had gotten a little more forceful that day, tired as he was of Goliath repaying every kindness with viciousness. He skipped the walk entirely the following day.
Dame Groach was due back the next evening. Duncan was counting the hours. “So bored,” he muttered again as he stopped in the kitchen to get something for supper. At this rate, he really would have to resign from his post. He couldn’t very well take wages when he wasn’t doing any work. He felt bad about leaving Wildfire behind, though, and tried to think of whether he could convince Dame Groach to give her wicked white horse over into his care since she didn’t seem to want him.
He knew that was a losing prospect even as it occurred to him. In his private thoughts he tried to imagine the conversation, but it always ended with him on the receiving end of a whack from the knobbly cane.
A simple egg-on-toast served for his supper that night, the same thing he’d eaten every evening that week so far. Even the food was boring, he thought morosely as he chewed, and this was from someone who had subsisted on bread and milk for the majority of his life.
“I’ve been spoiled, that’s all,” he told himself. “I’ve gotten used to having lots of work and eating new, different things every night, and now there’s nothing for me to do. I’ve got to be of use!”
Even the dishes in the kitchen cleaned themselves, though. Duncan had tried every night to wash up, but if he so much as turned his back to the dirty dishes, they were clean when he turned again. Tonight, in morose surrender, he simply stacked them on the drain board and went on his way.
The little door beneath the stairs had been quiet the past two nights when he skirted by it. He didn’t know what had caused that scratching noise, and he didn’t care to find out. Since it was gone now, he didn’t give the closet as wide a berth as before. As he passed, from behind the door came a most unexpected sound.
“Help me, please.”
Duncan stopped dead in his tracks, candle holder in one hand and the skin on the back of his neck crawling with sudden terror. That mournful plea sounde
d like it came from the voice of a child. It had echoed, so soft that he thought his mind must be playing tricks on him. For a full minute he did not move, hardly even breathed, as he listened for it again.
“Please, help,” it whimpered, and that too-familiar scritch-scratch on the little door followed.
“Who’s there?” Duncan called out. “Who are you?”
Dark shadows danced beyond the light of his candle.
“Help me, please,” the forlorn voice said again. Scratch-scratch-scratch went the door.
The hair on his arms stood on end. It might not be a child, he told himself. If Dame Groach had a talking horse, she could very well have another animal that could talk. He was forbidden to unlock the door beneath the stairs.
The voice moaned pitifully. Duncan’s resolve broke. He knew he would never be able to sleep again under this roof if he did not discover what had made those plaintive sounds. Carefully he rested the candle holder on the floor and extracted his ring of keys. It did not take him long to find the only one that he had never used.
“Please, help,” said the little voice again.
Foreboding welled in Duncan’s chest as he inserted the small brass key into its lock. He half-hoped that it wouldn’t fit, that it wouldn’t turn the tumblers. A twist of his wrist was met with no resistance, though. The lock clicked. Gingerly, Duncan opened the door a crack.
“Hello?” he called.
Silence met his ears, and a thread of cool air ghosted past his face.
“Hello?” he said again, and he pulled the door open wider. Within was pitch-blackness. Duncan snatched up his candle. By its light he discovered that, far from holding the old lady’s coats or a captive child, the closet was completely empty save for a hole in the floor and a ladder that led downward into inky darkness.
He extended the light as far downward as he dared and listened carefully. A low current of air hummed upward through the hole, and he thought he heard the sound of running water, very distant.
“Hello?” he called one last time, but the mysterious voice never answered. Skin crawling with terror, Duncan shut the door and locked it up tight. Then, stowing away his keys in his pocket, he hurried away, up to the black bedroom on the upper floor.
Goldmayne: A Fairy Tale Page 7