by Michael Rowe
Last night I had deduced that this had been the bedroom of Alexander Blackmore’s daughter, but until my discovery of the photograph downstairs in the library and the lozenge of the shield of her father’s coat of arms, she hadn’t had a name, or an identity. This wasn’t just “the yellow bedroom,” this had been the bedroom of Rosa Blackmore of Wild Fell, who had been born, lived, and died in this house.
As I walked over to throw the wrappers out, a glimmer of gold in the tangle of sheets on the floor caught my eye when the sun struck it. When I bent down to pick it up, something sharp jabbed into my thumb, piercing the skin and drawing blood. I inhaled sharply and drew back. Hanging from a pin in the soft meat of my thumb-pad was a cameo brooch, obviously very old, with a gold filigree aureole. I pulled the pin out of my thumb and pressed my thumb tightly to my forefinger to stop the bleeding. I held the brooch in my other hand and examined it closely.
Unlike most cameo brooches, which featured women’s faces, either in profile or head on, this brooch was a fine rendering of a bearded man with a noble brow, holding a trident over his shoulder like a royal sceptre—probably Poseidon, the Greek god of the ocean. When I held it up to the window, the sunlight through the shell turned the image from white to radiant, glowing pink. The gold looked genuine. It had clearly been an expensive piece of jewellery in its day, and even now it would likely fetch a good price. I was not a jewellery connoisseur, by any means, but Ame had inherited a cameo from her grandmother—the “something old” part of her wedding ensemble—and it had been half the size of this one, and much less delicately carved, yet Ame had said it was worth a great deal.
I checked my thumb to see if the bleeding had stopped, relieved to find that it had. I placed the brooch in the marquetry box on the mantelpiece, then sat down on the bed. The cameo had obviously gotten caught on the inside of the quilt when the cleaning crew had made the bed. I hadn’t felt it in the bed last night when I went to sleep because I had been dressed, but after all, I had been so exhausted that I’d even managed to undress myself under the covers without waking up, instead weaving it all into a horrible dream about Ame and my father.
Also, it was becoming more and more apparent that the isolation from people, a new experience for me, was beginning to fray my imagination. I needed supplies in town anyway, so I decided to take the boat across Devil’s Lake early that afternoon to the beach where my car was parked, then drive into Alvina. I could do some grocery shopping and perhaps stop at the Alvina library to see if there was any material in the stacks pertaining to Wild Fell or the Blackmore family history.
But first I wanted to continue the exploration of my house.
I had yet to set foot in the servants’ wing on the third floor, and I knew that there was some sort of basement beneath the kitchen, because I’d seen the doorway to it last night.
The servants’ wing was bare except for some ancient single beds made of cheap pine and chests of drawers of the same wood. The Blackmore family clearly either had remarkably loyal servants, or else—more likely—they didn’t care about their comfort. In the class-stratified years of the British-inflected Canadian 1800s, the men, women, and children who toiled for next to nothing in the service of the grand families were required to be hardy and Spartan in their expectations of what was owed them in the way of comforts. No plush Oriental carpets here, just hard, cold floors.
I left the windows as I’d found them, shuttered and with weak light shining through the slats, and walked back through the upper hallways and down the staircase. I paused at the yellow bedroom, finding the door closed, as I had left it. Then I descended to the main floor and made my way into the silent kitchen and the doorway I had seen last night.
I discovered there was no electricity in the cellar. Since I hadn’t brought a flashlight with me, I found some candles in one of the kitchen drawers and fitted one into a silver candlestick I’d taken from the dining room. Holding the lit candle in front of me, I made my way carefully down the stone stairs.
I felt the draft almost at once, the earthy cold of dirt floors and old, old stone.
The cellar was actually not one room, but a sort of subterranean antechamber with doorways leading into what seemed to be three separate storage rooms, each with its own thick wooden door. Two of the doors opened easily, but the third was locked tight and no matter how hard I leaned into it with my shoulder and rattled the handle, it was immovable. When I realized that opening it without a key was a lost cause, I explored the two rooms that were unlocked.
The first one was filled with rubbish—rusted garden furniture, rakes and hoes, smaller gardening implements, and a low, rough wooden table with a shelf over it lined with clay pots and jars containing God only knew what. It had clearly been used as an underground gardener’s shed in the heyday of Wild Fell, but it looked like when the gardens went fallow, this room did, too.
In the second room, however, I made a remarkable discovery.
Amidst the piles of old books and various trunks and suitcases, I found a crate containing the framed oil portraits of the Blackmore family—probably the portraits whose outlines I had seen on the walls of the parlour. There were four in total, each one framed in gold leaf period frames.
Bringing the candle as close to the surface of the paintings as I dared without accidentally singeing the canvas, I tried to make out the faces.
I recognized Rosa immediately from the print I’d found in the library. She was dressed in a similar fashion as in the photograph: a modest but rich-looking gown of what looked like brown velvet, though in this painting the dress had a high collar. Pinned at the throat was the very cameo brooch of Poseidon I had found upstairs in my bed. In this portrait, Rosa appeared no less regal, but there was a softness in her eyes here that hadn’t been present in the photograph. I realized that she was younger in this portrait, likely by a good ten years, though this might merely have been a painterly device to achieve an effect for vanity’s sake, or even a trick of my candlelight.
I carefully placed her portrait against the side of the crate and took out the next.
This one was a painting of an older woman dressed entirely in black. Her thick white hair was elaborately styled, piled on top of her head and set with a pair of jewelled tortoiseshell combs. I took it be a portrait of Rosa’s mother, Alexander Blackmore’s wife, though there was no plaque affixed to the frame indicating the identity of the subject. Her face was severe and angular, and while the artist had obviously tried to flatter his subject, there was something frail, even sickly about her in spite of the imperious tilt of the head.
When I compared the two portraits side by side, I saw that there were echoes of the older woman in Rosa’s face, but whereas Rosa’s lips were full and lush, her mother’s were thin and pinched in an expression that hinted at pain so long suppressed and hidden that in hiding from the world, the pain had become second nature. As if to smooth away traces of whatever illness the painter was trying to camouflage, the older woman was ornately jewelled: against the black velvet of her dress shone a necklace of diamonds and pearls, and she wore a pair of diamond and emerald earrings. The effect was almost perfectly achieved. At a distance, there was nothing of the portrait that would have been out of place in a baronial hallway in any great house anywhere. It was only upon close scrutiny that the woman’s face hinted at secrets, or pain, or private grieving.
I withdrew a third portrait from the crate, and here I met Malcolm Blackmore, Rosa’s brother. Her twin brother, judging by his face, which was nothing less than a masculinized version of his sister’s.
I found myself surprised, not only by their close resemblance, as if they were mirrored selves, far beyond what linked either his sister or himself to their mother, but by the man’s sheer physical presence. To call Malcolm Blackmore merely handsome was to do him a great injustice, especially in the context of the era of the portrait—an era when well-to-do men were usually portrayed as voluptuous and spoiled-looki
ng, red lipped and full-fleshed. By contrast, the young man in the portrait looked as though he had been carved from the very granite of the island that bore his family name. His thick hair was dark brown, almost black. It tumbled from a high, intelligent forehead. The nose was strong and straight, the jaw consequential.
Malcolm Blackmore’s eyes were the same clear charcoal grey-green as Rosa’s, and he looked out at the world through the painting with a similar aristocratic distance, but the similarity in their expressions ended there. There was a warmth and humour in Malcolm Blackmore’s face that was entirely absent in Rosa’s. That and—in spite of his obvious virility—a suggestion of gentleness, perhaps even weakness, in the turn of his mouth.
The final portrait stunned me even more than the one of Malcolm Blackmore, though not for any reasons associated with the portraiture, which was, again, excellent. Judging by the indecipherable signature in the lower right-hand corner of the painting, the same artist had painted all four paintings.
But if the artist had taken pains to flatter Mrs. Blackmore and her children, even his consequential skills as a flatterer had met their match in this instance.
The portrait showed a man in the colder years of late middle-age: hair iron-grey and still thick, eyebrows still dark, the nose and jawline as strong as his son’s—for this was clearly Alexander Blackmore, the patriarch. But here the resemblance to either of his children ended entirely. Aside from everything else, they had obviously inherited their mother’s pellucid eye colour. The eyes of the man in the portrait were almost black. More dramatically, there was an arrogance and a venal cruelty in Alexander Blackmore’s face that chilled me. It was the face of a conqueror that took no prisoners and cared little or nothing for the carnage he left in his wake.
I had encountered this expression often enough in photographs over the course of my history studies at university, particularly one course that dealt with the phenomenon of North American robber barons—the men who imposed their will on an unyielding landscape with their sheer implacability. In some cases, this strength manifested itself in photographs and paintings as a sort of forced noblesse oblige, one that never entirely succeeded in masking the reality that the titan in question was the son of a butcher, or a fishmonger, or a tailor, or merely that his was generic Victorian masculinity—strength, albeit more often than not a bully’s strength.
But in this case, by candlelight, in spite of the veneer of ducal hauteur in this portrait of the laird of Wild Fell, the face rendered here was the face of a monster.
The surface of the painting had been slashed with some kind of long, sharp instrument. There were no jagged edges; rather the cuts appeared to have been made almost lovingly, as though the vandal in question had taken his or her time and profoundly enjoyed the sensation of carving Alexander Blackmore’s face into strips.
I shuddered and turned the portrait away from me, facing it against the side of the crate. At that moment, a cold draft wafted through the basement, and I distinctly heard a soft sigh from the darkness behind me. The flame of my candle flickered, then went out. I heard something behind the locked third door, something that sounded like a piece of furniture being dragged across a stone floor.
I didn’t wait for the scraping sound to repeat itself. I turned tail and stumbled as fast as I could back through the basement. When I found the stairs, I took them three at a time, as though the light from the kitchen windows was oxygen and I had been buried alive in the dark.
Chapter Six
THE TOWN LIBRARY
The Bass Tracker was full of water. I’d forgotten the tarp and hadn’t turned it upside down when I’d landed just as the storm came. It had collected water all night, and now the water swished around inside as though it were a child’s wading pool.
Though tied to the dock, it had drifted back onto the beach. I was horrified. My knowledge of boats was purely practical. I had no idea if the Tracker was constructed to withstand that much water without the engine shorting out. Although common sense told me that there wouldn’t be much point to a motorboat that was sensitive to water, I was acutely conscious of the fact that I was looking at my only method of leaving Blackmore Island. If the Tracker went down, that would be that. The boat was my sole access to the other side of Devil’s Lake, and only possible source of transport to my car and town. I could probably swim across if I had to, but the water was very, very wide, as I discovered on the boat ride across yesterday.
Oh God, if you’re there, was the prayer of my hitherto irreligious self, please let the boat start. Please, please, please let it start.
I turned it over and watched the rain water gush onto the rocky beach, making little river trenches that swept around the small rocks, creating islands out of them in their turn. Once it was drained, I gently pushed the boat out again into deep enough water, then climbed in, using the paddle under the starboard seat to guide it out into deep enough water to lower the motor. I inserted the key into the ignition and turned it. A sputter, then nothing. Again I turned the key. Again it sputtered.
“Fuck you!” I shouted. “Start, you fucking bitch!”
The third time proved to be the charm: the fucking bitch started. The engine turned over and the boat rumbled to life. I pointed it in the direction of the opposite shore and revved it. The tracker shot across the water leaving a deep V-shaped wake in the grey water. I looked back at Blackmore Island growing smaller and smaller every minute, though I continued to see the gabled roofs of Wild Fell through the trees.
Whatever had happened in the basement, whatever the sound had been, it had frightened me badly. Whether it was the cumulative effect of all the odd things that had occurred in the last twenty-four hours, climaxing in the discovery of the four portraits hidden away in a stone chamber under the house, or just a very natural nyctophobic reaction to the sudden darkness, my previous coolheaded awareness that I needed to go into Alvina for supplies had turned into an all-encompassing desire to get out of the house and see other human beings—see them walk, hear them talk. To feel life around me instead of the seemingly borderless silence of Blackmore Island and Wild Fell. What had felt like an adventure this morning was, at least a bit, beginning to seem like a possible mistake.
On the other hand, even though the impulse to return immediately to Toronto, to what was familiar, had occurred to me once I was out of the cellar, I’d already dismissed the thought. Standing by the kitchen windows, it was obvious that what I’d heard was a squirrel, or a raccoon making a nest behind the door. What had blown the candle out was nothing more than the breeze I’d already felt wafting up from the basement when I had opened the door before going downstairs.
Above everything else, the house belonged to me. I had bought it and paid for it. It was my responsibility now. It had been immensely beautiful in the early morning light, beautiful and full of promise. I remembered my fantasies of enriching and modernizing it. Giving all that up because I had noisy raccoons in the cellar would be pathetic. I would look like a fool, even to myself. What I needed was an afternoon in town, some provisions, and a visit to the library to learn something about my house. Perhaps understanding the lives of the people who had lived there, even a bit, would smooth my own transition.
I felt for my car keys in the pocket of my jeans; they were there. I felt the hard plastic contours of the key ring and the jagged edge of the keys, modern and real.
Not surprisingly, the wind on my face had an immediate calming effect on me, the same effect a cool washcloth might have on a fevered face.
The closer I got to the mainland shore, the calmer I felt. By the time the water became shallower and I cut the engine, my heart rate had returned to normal and I was fully in control of myself again. I tied the boat up to the dock and climbed the hill to where the Volvo was parked. The sight of its boxy stolidity cheered me. I fished my keys out of my pocket and opened the driver side door. I started the car up, then realized I didn’t have the faintest clue
where I was, let alone how to get back to Alvina. I had followed Mrs. Fowler’s car to this spot without paying much attention, and I’d left her folder of directions and instructions back at the house. I swore under my breath.
Then I remembered I had a portable GPS in the glove compartment. I hadn’t needed it when I was following Mrs. Fowler and hadn’t thought to turn it on for the sake of getting a route registered.
With the car still running, I punched in Alvina, Ontario. Nothing happened. I tried again, with the same result. The GPS was lighting up and everything seemed to be working, but it wasn’t receiving a satellite signal from where I was parked on the promontory. Perhaps it’s the trees, I thought. Or the rocks. Maybe farther up the road I’ll get a signal. I backed the Volvo up, then turned it around and proceeded down that curious alleyway of trees that led to the main road.
As if by magic, when I’d passed through that corridor, the GPS lit up again. This time when I punched in Alvina, Ontario, the GPS requested a street. I didn’t remember Mrs. Fowler’s office address, and in any case, I had no desire to stop by her office, let alone see her, so I punched in 10 Main Street. Every town had a 10 Main Street, so that was as good a place as any to start.
The GPS took me into Alvina, but it guided me into a different part of Alvina than I’d been in yesterday. This part of town was newer, even a bit garish compared to the mid-century civility of the streets around Mrs. Fowler’s office. There were no boxes of geraniums lining the street, and the lampposts were the ordinary garden-variety ones that were commonplace in small towns everywhere. I had definitely driven down Main Street yesterday but perhaps there were two ends of Main Street—a historic district and this more modern, commercial one.