Taking up her suitcase once again, Aisha advanced toward him. He hadn’t seen her yet.
‘Cassius!’ she hollered.
Cassius looked up.
‘Good morning, Miss,’ he said. ‘May I help you with your bag?’
‘Thank you, Cassius,’ she said. ‘I can help myself. Just show me to the car.’
Together they left the station, the suitcase rattling on the bumpy pavement.
‘Did you find the coffee beans I mentioned?’
‘Of course, Miss,’ said Cassius. He fished in his pocket for his car key.
‘Fantastic news!’
‘It was no trouble, Miss.’
Aisha found it strange that he should call her ‘Miss’. He was somewhere in his thirties which would make him only slightly older than herself and by no means was he a servant. Cassius had been the caretaker of her late grandmother’s estate and maintained the property as best he could.
It was thirty minutes by car to the property.
‘We are very pleased to have you, Miss,’ said Cassius. ‘We’ve been very lonely out here these past few years since your grandmother passed.’
‘Thank you,’ she said unsure if that was the right thing to say. It sounded odd considering it was her house he was welcoming her to.
She watched the road marking approach from afar and then disappear under the hood of the car. She bit her lip, detesting every inch of the rural landscape in front of her. Cassius fell silent, probably sensing Aisha’s self-imposed isolation, and she closed her eyes and focused her mind on that flame of hatred burning in her breast.
Cheating on an exam!
The idea was repugnant to her and yet there the accusation was – cheating, plagiarism, the whole nine yards. It had been her classmate Morgan who had accused her, but she knew the mastermind of it all was Sergeant Foster. It was revenge for turning the cold shoulder.
Within the course of thirty six hours, this one malicious lie had crushed all of her dreams and ruined her reputation. Why shouldn’t it? They had all the “evidence” they needed to prove it and prove it they did. The only problem was that none of it was true. But none of the relevant people knew that. Only Aisha and the two conspirators knew the truth. She had been out-voted.
And so here she was, with no prospects, unable to pay her rent, forced to relocate to a two hundred-year-old house in the middle of no-where. There, just ahead of them under a grey sky. Planted in front of the house was an ancient chestnut tree, twisting its way out of the cobble-stone driveway. It greeted them as they approached in the car.
‘This is it, Miss,’ said Cassius. ‘Not much has changed since last you were here.’
And Aisha knew that he was right.
Chapter Two Ghosts of Selves Past
The house had been built, if Aisha’s memory served her correctly, in 1801 on the ruins of a previous property. Her grandfather had bought it immediately after the end of the second World War. Her mother had been raised in it and her grandmother had died in it. It had stood empty, except for the occasional comings and goings of Cassius, for the better part of three years.
A modestly-sized Georgian manor house, with a yard extending half-an-acre from the back door, it was pleasant and quaint, but simple and unostentatious. Aisha stepped out of the car and squinted at the blinding Chantilly-colored facade reflecting the overcast glare. The gabled roof was covered by brown shingles. Two chimneys peaked out from the opposite side of the house, just tall enough for the pots to be seen from Aisha’s vantage point. The house was, in-deed, exactly as she remembered.
‘I saw to it that a spare key was made for you,’ said Cassius as they approached the front door. Aisha dragged the clunky suitcase over the gravel and up the small flight of stairs to the porch. ‘I left it on the mantle over the north fire-place.’
‘You didn’t have to go to so much trouble, Cassius,’ said Aisha, though she was thankful she didn’t have to see to this herself.
Cassius turned the key in the door. The wrought iron lock whined. There was a loud click, and Cassius pushed the door open. ‘I also took the liberty of tidying the place up a bit. Mostly I aired it out and dusted the surfaces. I don’t usually bother when it’s just us.’ He shook his head as though he had made an error. Aisha raised an eyebrow. ‘I mean,’ he smiled, embarrassed, ‘I mean, when it’s just me.’
They went inside. Cassius had not opened the drapes. It was very gloomy inside, and not very much warmer than the weather outside. Aisha cringed. Nothing at all had changed since she had last visited the old manor house. Even the morbid lighting was identical, since her grand-mother almost always had kept the drapes closed for fear of the sunlight causing her precious furniture to fade.
‘When was the last time you were here, Miss?’ asked Cassius.
‘Oh,’ Aisha sighed. ‘I don’t think I remember.’
‘Pardon me for my subterfuge, Miss, but I do remember, actually. It was seven years, five months, and fourteen days ago.’
‘Oh.’ Aisha nodded.
Cassius helped Aisha drag her suitcase up the stairs to her grandmother’s old bedroom.
‘Thank you,’ she said. She looked around the room. She was having trouble seeing in the low light.
‘Cassius,’ she said, ‘might we draw the curtains and let in some light?’
‘Certainly,’ he said. He scurried to the drapes and hoisted them open. Cool light streamed in through an enormous paned window which ran the height of the western wall of the bedroom.
‘Will you require anything else, Miss?’ he said.
She laughed. ‘Cassius. You aren’t a servant. You needn’t wait on me. I can take care of myself.’ She wondered to herself if this last statement were really true.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘If perchance you need me, you know where I’ll be.’
‘Just leave the coffee in the kitchen. I must have my coffee, let me tell you.’
‘Of course.’
Cassius made for the door.
‘Cassius?’ she called after him.
He turned around. ‘Yes?’
‘Is it always so cold?’ She was shivering.
‘You’d best get used to it, Miss,’ he said, ‘or find yourself a blanket. It’s not customary to light fires here.’
‘Oh?’ What a strange thing to say, she thought. But on the other hand, she couldn’t think of a time when her grandparents had had fires burning in the fireplaces.
‘No,’ said Cassius. ‘Your grandmother was so afraid of the house catching afire that she had all the flus sealed up permanently. I’m glad you brought it up. I’d hate for you to start a fire and flood the house with smoke.’
‘Well,’ said Aisha, a little perplexed by this in-formation, ‘thank you for the warning, Cassius.’
‘And you’re certain, Miss, you needn’t any help unpacking?’
‘Yes, very certain.’ She was suddenly tired of Cassius and wanted him to leave her alone. ‘Just be sure to leave the coffee.’
‘Have a lovely stay, Miss,’ he said, and left the room. Soon she could hear him shuffling about the lower floor, then the door creak open and slam shut. The house shook and groaned. Then the rumble of the car starting and cruising away from the manor house. Finally there was silence, and Aisha could be at peace.
She looked around her. The room was a virgin white – white dresser, white walls, white curtains, a white canopy bed, a white rug thrown over the wooden floor. It all seemed like a dream. She considered this was probably the room where her mother had been conceived, and she was surprised to find that this thought made her happy.
In the corner was a cream-colored rocking chair. It was in that very chair that her grand-mother had passed into eternity. This too, Aisha found strangely comforting. The room was like a womb of life and death for her. All of existence, she thought, could be explained by the goings on in this single bedroom.
It was midnight before Aisha finally convinced herself to go to sleep. She had recently developed a
sour attitude toward sleeping, and tried to live on less than three hours a night. But the day’s hustle and bustle got the better of her, and she lay down in her grandmother’s bed listening to the eerie but soothing sounds of the old house creaking, buffeted by the brisk country wind.
Somewhat to her relief, she awoke only four hours later. Her satisfaction soon turned to con-fusion, however, as she found herself covered in sweat and burning up. She threw off the covers and sat up in the bed. She was panting. The chill she had complained of earlier had somehow given way to the most stifling, sweltering heat Aisha had ever experienced.
I can’t be ill! She thought. I’m never ill. But it had been a long and stressful couple of weeks. Perhaps her immunity had simply taken a hit with the rest of her life. She sat in the bed, hoping perhaps she would acclimate to the heat and she could simply go back to sleep and worry about whatever ailment had seized upon her in the morning, but after a minute or two she couldn’t take it anymore.
Huffing and puffing with irritation and confusion, she climbed out of the bed – now moist with her sweat – and sought refuge downstairs where she planned to make some more coffee.
Chapter Three The Rococo Painting
As she crept down the creaky stairs, Aisha felt the oppressive heat lifting, replaced by the expected but no more comfortable icy chill which was usual for the time of year.
Maybe that’s why grandmamma never lit the fires, Aisha thought. Maybe it just got too hot upstairs.
By the time she reached the lower floor, she was shivering and her bare toes were going numb.
‘Either I’m sick or the weather is.’
She made a detour through the drawing room where she snatched up a thick wool blanket which she draped around her shoulders and hugged close to her body.
In the kitchen, Aisha set about boiling some water over the gas stove. Her grandfather had set about updating the technology in the house when he and his wife had moved in, and he had been careful not to let the updates spoil the house’s Regency era charm. The kitchen was outfitted with a refrigerator, a toaster, running water, and (Aisha had made sure of this before she moved in), a coffee grinder. Soon she was sipping a cup of the blackest coffee she had ever brewed. It was oily and bitter and Aisha grimaced cheerfully as it slid down her throat.
Struggling to keep a tight grip on the mug and the blanket from falling off her shoulders, Aisha left the kitchen and made for the stairway. The stairs were covered by a musty brown rug which clung to the wool blanket, causing it to drag. Halfway through the ascent, Aisha advanced too quickly and the blanket was jerked from her body. It pulled her backwards and she slipped, sliding down a step and sloshing coffee onto the carpet before stabilizing herself with the bannister.
She sighed, then made sure she hadn’t entirely emptied the mug.
She hadn’t.
‘Ugh,’ she said aloud, ‘I’ll clean it up in the morning.’
She left the blanket lying in ruffles on the stair-case. It was much warmer up here, though not nearly as hot as when she had woken up. She was in the motion of turning to continue her journey upstairs when she thought she heard a noise.
Aisha stopped to listen. The house creaked and buckled as the wind swirled around it. It was all rather loud now that she was paying attention. She doubted whether it was even possible to hear something else over all that racket.
But there it was again! A tiny, nearly imperceptible squeak, like a whimper.
Aisha stood as still as she possibly could, waiting to see if the whimpering would continue. Nothing. Just the monotonous howling of the wind and the harmonizing house. She frowned and continued up the stairs.
Once in the bedroom, Aisha huddled in her grandmother’s chair, sipping her coffee. She rocked forwards and backwards slightly, nudging the floor gently with her big toe. She felt mysterious and brooding crouched there in the darkness of an old house in the country – like some roman-tic hero harboring a deep dark secret.
She smirked grimly, and meditated upon her situation. What was there to do here? Nothing. The country was to be despised for many reasons, but chief among them was that it was boring. Having lived in the city her whole life, she found herself anxious about her future. All she had wanted to do was to help people, but the reputation of liar and cheater was sure to prevent this forever.
Even if she tried to become an officer in another city, word of her dubious moral character would certainly catch up with her. Her smirk turned to a scowl, and then to a hardened frown. Resentment burned in her heart like salt in a wound.
The full moon cast its ghostly light through the window and onto a painting hanging in a gilded frame about the dresser on the other side of the room.
Aisha knew the painting. It was a portrait of her grandmother in her youth, newly married. Her grandfather had studied Rococo before the Royal Navy demanded his service, and this portrait was a masterful specimen of the style. Her grand-mother sat in a frilly white nightgown at a vanity, cheating toward the spectator, a smile as mysterious as Mona Lisa’s on her full lips. Her blue eyes twinkled mischievously. The artist had made sure to highlight the young wife’s rosy cheeks. She was the very picture (so to speak) of graceful, fruitful, femininity.
There was, however, a feature of the painting which Aisha had never quite been able to figure out. Reflected in the mirror of the vanity was the figure of a little girl, standing what ought to have been – according to the perspective of the painting – about ten feet from where her grandmother sat. Aisha had always assumed this little girl was the thing making her grandmother’s face light up, but who was she? Her newlywed grandparents had not conceived any children at the time the painting had been finished.
The little girl in the mirror was clothed in some antique dress and bonnet, as if she came from a Jane Austen novel. Stranger than this was the girl’s striking and angelic visage. Her face seemed to radiate light if you examined it too closely. Aisha had never gotten around to asking either of her grandparents about it before they had died. It had always been a minute detail she only thought about when she saw it, quickly for-gotten once her gaze was averted.
I must ask Cassius about this the next time I see him, she thought. He may know something about it.
Strange, to be gazing at the likeness of a woman in her youth from the very place where she had died in her old age. Aisha looked her grand-mother straight in the eye. ‘What did you know that I don’t?’ she asked the painting. No answer. Just the moaning of the wind and the groaning of the house. It was with these thoughts and sounds in her head that she finally drifted off to sleep again.
Chapter Four Home by the Weir
The next day wore on painfully slowly for Aisha. If she had been coming down with some-thing, whatever it was seemed to have passed. Neither fever nor chill bothered her throughout the day. She spent the morning arranging and rearranging clothes in the closet. A newspaper was delivered at midday. Aisha scoured the classifieds, searching for a job advertisement; there was nothing within fifty kilometers. She thought about ringing Cassius and inviting him for tea, but she remembered she hadn’t brought any tea with her, and she was not in a financial situation to be sharing her food.
Once, she took a walk around the yard. The sky was clear today for a change. Returning to the house, she found herself in her grandfather’s study, surrounded by books. The room smelled of tobacco and stale air. There were no windows in this room, the only light provided by an ancient lamp on her grandfather’s hickory desk.
Barely enough light by which to read. She scanned the shelves, hoping she might find something interesting to peruse. To her dismay, her grandfather’s taste in literature had been mostly academic. Aside from a thick copy of the Authorized Bible, the library was entirely devoid of what one might call narrative literature.
She had read the Bible enough times in her life, she thought. The closest thing she could find to a novel was a volume entitled Harcourt’s History of Warwickshire, AD 1000 – AD 1900. Opening t
he book, she began to read a long and tiresome ac-count of the fall of the Kingdom of Mercia, and details about the Forest of Arden which once covered the county. Ten pages in, she began to feel restless. I’d rather stare at the wall than read this, she thought.
If the book hadn’t been so old and fragile she would have tossed it across the room dismissively, but instead she put it back gently in its place on the shelf. An oppressive lethargy settled over the house. Aisha wandered to and fro like one under a witch’s sleeping spell. She managed to brew some coffee, but the caffeine did little to relieve her sloth. She felt dull, numb to the stimuli of the world, like a ghost lost in the haze of death.
~~~~~
That night, Aisha again awoke covered in sweat. This time she felt more than hot air. Now it seemed as if the bed were a red hot iron. It seared her flesh and she leapt from the mattress with a shout. This was not just uncomfortable – it was altogether painful. The wooden floor, too, seemed to be radiating heat. Aisha hopped up and down, trying to keep her feet from burning.
Walking on tip-toes and jerking around like a madwoman, Aisha ran from the room as quickly as her scorched soles would carry her.
She tripped down the stairs, nearly losing her balance more than once.
On the ground floor it was cool again. Aisha rested on the bannister, catching her breath. She lifted her foot and examined it. It didn’t seem to be burnt or even tender now that she was down-stairs. She frowned. Once was an anomaly. Two nights in a row was a curiosity.
Gathering up some blankets and a silk pillow, Aisha took up residence on a love seat in the drawing room. She knew her back would thank her for it in the morning, but it was better than being boiled alive.
She lay down under the blankets, cramped her neck against the arm of the love seat, and closed her eyes.
It was not a restful sleep. She tossed and turned, trying in vain to get comfortable. Her mind spun into the oblivion of the dream world. In the blackness she saw the pink, porcine face of Sergeant Foster. Sweat dripped from his brow. Aisha ran from him, but he pursued her. Further and further down she fell into her subconscious. There seemed to be no end. She heard screaming and cursing and all kinds of misery. Was this her soul? Was this what she had become?
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