“Don’t you think I’d know if such a thing existed? And you—what—live here for about five minutes, and now you are educating me as to the architecture of my own home?”
“Is there a trapdoor anywhere in this house?” he asked, as though I hadn’t been rude to him in the slightest.
“Why do you want to know?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at him.
“Because there’s one in ours. I discovered it in the kitchen one night when I couldn’t sleep and was hungry. I was looking around, and I noticed an uneven patch in the floor. When I pried it up, there were stairs leading down.”
“And you investigated?” I didn’t want to admit it, but I was impressed by his bravery.
“Not that night. It was getting close to dawn, and I didn’t want to scare the cook by popping up again through the floor.”
“That was thoughtful of you,” I grudgingly allowed.
“But the next night,” he went on, “just after everyone else was asleep, I went back. This time, I was prepared. I had a candle with me, and a compass as well. It was dark down there, and the path was long.” I pictured him late at night, beneath the earth in his nightclothes. “When I arrived at the end there was a door. It wasn’t easy getting it to open. I formed the impression it had been a very long time since anyone had tried to. Then, when I did get it open, I saw what looked like a large room. You’ll probably laugh at me, but I grew scared then and closed the door back up.” I wasn’t laughing. “I realized that room was under someone else’s house. That’s when I looked at my compass and realized it was your house.”
“But I don’t understand.”
“A compass is a device for determining directions by means of a magnetic needle or group of needles turning freely on a pivot and pointing to the magnetic north.”
“I’m not talking about that!” I practically shouted, causing Mother to shoot a sharp glance in my direction. “I know what a compass is,” I hissed out the words in a lower voice. “But I don’t understand how a trapdoor in your house could somehow lead to a similar place in my house … and I not know about it.”
“You never answered before: is there a trapdoor in your house?”
“Yes.” This time I answered immediately. “In my father’s study, but it doesn’t lead to any tunnel. It only leads to a cellar.”
“Have you ever been down there?” he shot back immediately.
“Of course not. It’s a cellar!”
“Yes.” He nodded. “I think that part is right. But I think there’s a door in that cellar, that cellar you’ve never seen, and that door leads to a tunnel that stretches between our houses.”
I finally had to admit: there was no reason for him to make up such a story.
“Fine,” I allowed. “So there are trapdoors and secret tunnels.”
“Tunnel. Singular.”
“Fine. Tunnel.” I shrugged, as he had done so many times earlier. “What does it matter?”
“I don’t know, do I?” He looked enigmatic now. “But it is interesting, isn’t it? It’s different.”
I hesitated, nodded.
“Do you think you might ever investigate the tunnel yourself?” he wondered.
“You mean go down into that cellar?”
He nodded.
“I suppose I might, someday. I don’t know. I already said the trapdoor is in my father’s office and he spends a lot of time there. I think he’d be a little put out if I ever tapped on his door and said, ‘Oops! Don’t mind me! Just here to check out your trapdoor because the nosy boy next door wants me to!’ But I might. Someday. When he’s not around.”
“That’s good.” Kit nodded. “You never know when such a thing might come in handy.”
“Kit!” Mrs. Tyler called. “We’re leaving now!”
Five minutes later, they were gone.
“Well, that was pleasant,” Aunt Helen said. “That Mrs. Tyler seems such a nice woman.”
With half a mind, I wondered if she meant that as a compliment or not—something about her tone of voice suggested that nice might not be such a very good thing at all. The other half of my mind was still occupied with trapdoors and secret tunnels. Sorry. Tunnel.
“And I thought it was very nice,” Mother said, “how you and Kit got on so well. At first I was worried about you two, but then it looked like things grew much better. Such a nice boy, isn’t he?”
I pulled a face.
• Fifteen •
I had just cracked open the spine on a new book when the knock came.
Knock.
My father lately had been distracted from his usual mission to guide all my reading and so I had selected a volume that I thought would interest me.
Knock.
It was George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, and I was very comfortable in my curled-up position in the corner of the sofa.
Knock, knock, KNOCK!
I tossed the book aside in disgust. Sometimes I wondered why my father bothered paying all these servants. Didn’t anyone else ever answer the door around here anymore? Next thing I knew, I’d be doing the cooking and cleaning as well.
When I opened the door, I saw Aunt Martha standing on the stoop. On the ground beside her feet was a large bag. In her hand, she held a wooden cane with a sterling silver lion’s head for a handle. Immediately, I wondered if she really needed it—she had never needed one before and it made her look so much older—and I also wondered if that was what she had been using to hammer on the door.
“Lucy, why are you answering the door?” she demanded.
“Because no one else does anymore,” I countered.
“Please call a servant to carry my bag in,” she directed, brushing by me as she began to remove her gloves. “Aren’t your parents at home?” she asked after a servant had carried in her bag.
“Mother is out with Aunt Helen, paying courtesy calls,” I told her. “My father is in his study. I believe he is writing.”
“Well, don’t dawdle.” She banged her new cane against the floor for emphasis. “Tell Frederick I am here.”
When I knocked on my father’s door and he at last responded, I poked my head into his room.
“Yes, Lucy.” He barely looked up before returning to the pages he was studying. “What is it?”
“Aunt Martha is here. I think she means to stay.”
“Oh!” He buttoned his coat as he rose.
. . . . .
“Sister,” my father said when he saw Aunt Martha’s new cane, “have you been injured?”
“Of course not,” she snapped with some asperity.
It was strange. All my memories of Aunt Martha from my early years, the talks we used to have—I used to remember her as a kind presence. But now that perception had changed. She had changed.
“But we are none of us getting any younger,” she went on. “I thought it time to acquire an aid before I needed one. Better to prevent a fall than to try to repair the damage afterward.”
“I see,” he said, although he still looked bemused by the notion of a wholly healthy person using a cane she didn’t need, as was I. Still, he continued brightly, “Well, I am very relieved there is nothing wrong with your health. But what brings you here today?”
“What? Am I no longer welcome to visit my own brother’s family without a written invitation?”
“Of course not. We are always happy to see you. All I meant was—”
“Our parents have become insufferable. Insufferable, I tell you!”
“Oh?” He looked only mildly surprised at this outburst. “What have they been doing now?”
“It’s what they don’t do. They don’t do anything. Do you have any idea what it’s like, what it’s been like for me all these years, living out in the country with those insufferably boring people? While you have had all the advantages here? I wish to have some excitement before I die. Or, at the very least, some stimulation over and above which fairy cake to eat at tea.”
“So you have come to stay for �
� a while?” Surreptitiously, he consulted his pocket watch as though trying to ascertain just how long that “while” might take.
“I have come to stay for good.”
. . . . .
By the time Mother and Aunt Helen arrived home, Aunt Martha had already been installed in her new bedroom. When they were informed of the new addition to our household, Mother, perhaps seeing no choice in the matter, hurried upstairs to ensure that Aunt Martha had been made to feel comfortable.
It was like when Aunt Helen had come to stay with us, and yet it felt far different.
“What room has she been given?” Aunt Helen asked.
I told her. Aunt Martha now lived on the same floor as Mother and my father, the third floor, in a large room all the way at the end that overlooked my father’s private garden in the back behind his study.
“Hmm,” was all Aunt Helen had to say in response.
I never did make it back to The Princess and the Goblin that day.
. . . . .
It took Aunt Martha a few days to settle into the household, and then a few more days after that to get truly comfortable. She thought the curtains in her room were too thin, letting in too much sun, so new ones had to be ordered, and she said the bed was too large but she was willing to wait on that. She thought the food Cook prepared was too rich and that our mealtimes were all askew. Breakfast, lunch, dinner—they all needed to be moved up one hour. Aunt Martha liked her bath before everyone else’s, if there were baths to be had, and whenever she sat anywhere she required a footstool upon which she rested the leg that was supported by her new cane; not because there was anything wrong with the leg, but just in case. It did strike me as a trifle mad, and yet it obviously made her happy.
“She’s as bad as Lear,” my father said to me one evening after what he considered to be a too-early dinner, only this time he didn’t look as though he found it funny anymore, “except for the fact that she didn’t arrive accompanied by one hundred soldiers for us to shelter and feed. I suppose we have at least that to be grateful for.”
After she’d been with us a week and the house, while not necessarily breathing a sigh of relief, had at least settled down to the adjustments she’d insisted we all make, she asked me to join her one morning while she enjoyed her tea and cake.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that she’d requested this tête-à-tête because she knew Mother and Aunt Helen were out together, paying calls, and that my father was in his study. Aunt Martha, we had all learned, no longer felt she was of an age where she should be expected to pay calls. People, according to Aunt Martha, should come to her.
Aunt Martha sat on the sofa, her body arranged at such an angle that there was not sufficient room for me, and I had to make do with a chair.
“Where have they gone to this time?” she asked me, forking off a last large bite of cake.
“I believe they planned to start at Mrs. Carson’s,” I said.
“A fine woman.” She held her plate, the cake now reduced to a few crumbs, out to me to place on the table for her. I had to get up from where I was sitting to do so. “Please get me my needlepoint,” she said before I had the chance to sit down again. “It should be in that basket under the window.”
I did as I was told.
“Shouldn’t you be working on your own needlepoint?” she stated more than asked after I brought hers to her.
I returned to the basket, returned to the chair with my own wretched needlepoint.
Aunt Martha was very enthusiastic about her needlepoint.
“Must you make those stitches so wide?” she said to me now. “You could do worse than to pursue this with greater vigor. Men like a woman with accomplishments.”
Accomplishments? Do you have any idea how much I hate needlepoint? came the unbidden thought, following which I could not prevent a wry smile at the remembrance of Kit taunting me about this feminine activity I so despised.
“I do not see that I have said anything funny, Lucy. I haven’t, have I?”
I bowed my head to my work. “No, Aunt.”
“I didn’t think so.” Stitch. Stitch. “Your …other aunt doesn’t do needlepoint, does she?”
I did so wish she would not call her that.
“I have never seen her occupied so,” I said simply.
“Then what does she do with all her time?”
What do any of us do with our time? I wondered.
Out loud I said, “She eats, she sleeps, she visits friends with Mother, she visits with those same friends when they come to us.”
I had no idea what Aunt Martha wanted from me, but now I was sure she wanted something.
“And do you …like your …other aunt?”
I set down my needle, looked her in the eye, but she was studying her own work so closely she did not catch my look. “Yes. I do.”
“It is kind of you to pretend,” she said, her placid stitches of a moment ago turning to pricks and stabs as she went on, “but there is no need for that with me. Anyone would understand if you were jealous of her. As a matter of fact, I do believe that if you went to your parents, and explained to them how unhappy you are with her here, how much you dislike her, I am quite certain they would—”
“I don’t dislike her.” I cut her off. I couldn’t remember then if I’d ever interrupted an adult like that before. If I had, it was beyond my powers of recollection. I put my hand over her needlepoint so that she could no longer work, so that she would have to look up and face me as I spoke with great deliberation. “And I don’t just like Aunt Helen. I love Aunt Helen.”
I think I stunned myself as much as her.
I had been thinking a lot about love lately, wondering what it was, what it meant. I had come to realize that there were not many in this world I had that depth of feeling for: Mother, always; my father, about half of the time. And no one else, until Aunt Helen. I knew there should be more, maybe one day there could be more. But for now, that was all there was.
Into the silence that followed my impertinent pronouncement, I heard the creak of a footstep on the stairs.
It was only later on that it would occur to me that whoever had made that creak did not mind if they were heard.
. . . . .
A day went by, then two.
I could feel a silent storm gathering, could almost smell it on the air.
But whatever conversations transpired, whatever was said or not said, done or not done, I was privy to none of it.
The only thing that was made known to me was the outcome.
In a rare show of sensitivity, it was my father who told me of the changes to come, late one night after I had already climbed between the sheets. He sat on the very edge of the counterpane, no parts of our bodies touching.
“I am sorry to be the one to tell you this,” he said gently, “but your aunt will be leaving us on the morrow, probably before you have even risen.”
“What?” I rose up sharply. “Where is Aunt Helen going?”
“I am sorry again. I should have clarified right away: it is my sister who is leaving us. Your mother’s will be staying on.”
That was a relief.
“Your mother would have told you herself, but she has been very distressed about all this. In truth, I feel the guilt is mine. I should have anticipated this. I should never have let Martha stay on here.”
So, Aunt Martha was out, and Aunt Helen was in.
I looked at my father’s troubled face and in that moment saw him as a man who did strive, sometimes against worse instinct, to do what was right. If he took things too lightly at times, at others he took things too hard.
I remembered what I’d been thinking of love a few days earlier, that I loved my father about half of the time.
This was one of those halves.
When he placed a gentle kiss upon my forehead before departing the room, I smiled up at him, hoping he knew how I felt.
. . . . .
As it turned out, Aunt Helen took over the
bedroom at the end of the hall from my parents after Aunt Martha took her leave.
How, I wondered, would my father and his sister ever heal the rift between them? And what in the world had caused it?
Of course, Aunt Helen did not take over right after Aunt Martha’s departure. First, she prevailed upon my parents sweetly, the room needed to be redone. She wanted Aunt Martha’s heavy curtains removed and lighter ones moved in to replace them. She wanted the floral wallpaper ripped down and, in its place, something brighter put up: perhaps something with cleaner lines, like vertical thick cream stripes alternating with a thinner cranberry, maybe some draped accents across the top border in a contrasting pattern. The candelabra fixtures in the wall looked tarnished; something in a shiny brass would do nicely instead. The mirror should be bigger. Just one carpet extending not far beyond the edges of the bed would be fine; she liked the hardwood floors once they were exposed. And that bed. It really did have to go. Too many people had slept in it before. And so, a large bed, the head- and footboards hand-carved out of rosewood, was commissioned.
And then it was finished.
She said I could visit her, even invited me for tea on her first afternoon there, and I went.
“That really was a useful trick you taught me,” she said, surrounded by the splendor that was her new room.
“ ‘Trick’?” I echoed.
“Yes,” she said, “the one about listening from the stairs.”
I still did not understand.
“That day you were talking with Martha,” she said, seeming impatient now with my slowness. “I came back early from making the rounds with your mother. I had a headache, I think, told Aliese to go on without me. As I was heading upstairs, I heard Martha mention my name. Well, of course I had to stop and listen …”
Now I saw it all clearly: Aunt Helen had heard Aunt Martha infer that if I told my parents I no longer wanted Aunt Helen here she would be banished … and then Aunt Helen had told Mother … who had told my father …
“More tea, dear?” Aunt Helen offered.
Aunt Helen said a short time later, as I was leaving, that I could come to visit her there as often as I wished, and I did, at first, but it wasn’t the same, not like when she had been just right across the hall.
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