The house looms over the grounds, haughty and oppressive as we approach it.
“When do you become a proper lord, exactly?” Goose asks.
“You know, I’m not sure? Oddly enough, it hasn’t been a priority.”
“Fair,” Goose says, just as one of the volunteers or staff—I haven’t spent enough time here to know the difference at first glance—exits the gatehouse and approaches us.
One does not simply walk into the Shaw manor, unless one is a Shaw. Everyone who isn’t has to either work there, or buy a ticket. And unlike the funeral situation, where I was prominently displayed and presented as heir apparent, today I might as well be anonymous.
Which is why we’re stopped by this well-intentioned, exceedingly polite and apologetic man.
“Sir,” he says, facing Goose. “Sir, I’m afraid you’re at the wrong entrance.”
“We’re not, actually,” I say, stepping between them and extending my non-fucked-up hand to shake his. “I’m Noah Shaw. Would you please inform Elliot and Sylvia their grandson is here?”
Far from being surprised, however, the man smiles, managing to convey polite disdain and condescension at once. “Identification, please, sir?”
“Alas, lost,” I say. “But Albert has known me my entire life. He can clear this up for us right quick, I’m sure.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know an Albert, sir.”
“Albert Stratton? The family valet?” It’s exceedingly un-English to lose one’s composure, but I began the day at a disadvantage, and I’m edging close to a breakdown as it is. It’s unfair, I realise; the man is probably just a volunteer, but nevertheless.
“Sir, you’re going to have to go through the regular entrance if you would like to purchase admittance.” His shoulders rise in a phonily apologetic shrug.
“Of course,” Goose says with an equally phony smile. The man hands him a map with a satisfied nod and waddles back to the gatehouse.
Reentering the great hall without Mara is more than a bit sobering, I confess. Goose and the tourists blur into the background, and I feel strangely alone, but not. It feels like Mara’s here, somehow, shadowing my steps. I look up at the balcony that rings the hall and for a moment I think I see an afterimage of her in mourner’s black, standing with her back to me, in the space where she stood just weeks ago. Or was it months?
Burying one’s dreadful parent is always complicated, I imagine, but my father was uniquely appalling and the circumstances of his death uniquely complicated, after all.
I remember telling Mara about it, when he went missing, and then when his body was found. She put her arms around my waist, fitted her chin against my chest.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
That was the moment I should have begun to wonder.
A tour group approaches, and a fresh, rosy-cheeked brunette delivers introductory sound bites about the architecture and paintings, a welcome distraction, however brief. I’m half tempted to join them.
Instead, I gamely lead Goose to the East Wing, where the family (what remains of it) resides. I’ll need to get him a pass and let my grandparents know we’ll be staying for a bit, at least until our shit arrives.
I walk with purpose, but find myself oddly hyperaware of my surroundings. Heads seem to turn in my direction. My footsteps alone seem to ring out on the marble floor.
Most of my memories of this place are a child’s memories, with a strange, alien tint. My stepmother was ruthless when it came to watching me, given my propensity for self-injury and my grandmother’s fear that I’d damage something priceless in the process, which meant that most of my exploring happened outdoors or after dark. I liked playing about in the ruins, obviously, but my favourite haunt was the falcon mews, back when my grandfather still hunted.
He’d had a gyr named Lucy; a stunning hunter, notoriously crusty to everyone but him. We were visiting for Christmas, once, when I snuck out through the old servants’ kitchen, stopping off at the mini-fridge my grandfather kept full of dead mice for her. I grabbed a handful of them and set out.
I must’ve been ten or eleven—old enough to have learned how to properly tie jesses and fit a hood, but I didn’t plan to fly her. I stalked my way through the yew trees until I reached her cage.
She awoke in an instant when I approached, fixing me with steely, intelligent yellow eyes. I opened the mew the way my grandfather had shown me, and offered her a mouse on the glove.
She made me wait for it, not breaking eye contact. After an age, though, she hopped onto the glove and took it. I gave her another. And another. She let me stroke her feathers with my ungloved hand as she ate the last one. Then she looked me in the eye, and took to the air.
My grandfather spent twelve days following her from tree to tree, sleeping when she slept, waiting for her weight to come down to get her back to the glove. He never did. She’s still out there, for all I know.
Goose thrusts something in my face. “Here, take this.” The map.
“What?” I ask absently. Then, “I don’t need it.”
“We’ve just passed that leering, mannish baby statue again. For the third time.”
“No, that leering baby was on a goat. The others were on horseback.”
“Just take the map, I beg you.”
“I just need to find someone who knows me.” I look around; we’re the only people in this corridor. There’s a velvet rope blocking off the stairwell at the end of it.
“Follow me,” I say with authority. Then, with a flourish, I step over the sign hanging from the velvet rope, marked PRIVATE.
“The silent alarm will go off, and someone will come along to scold us,” I explain. “Then they can deliver us to the lord and lady.”
“Or we could check the map,” Goose says. “Whilst we wait.”
“Never,” I say. “It’s a point of pride, now.”
“You’re intolerable.”
“I know.” The corridor remains empty. “Right. Let’s go downstairs.” Goose heaves an exaggerated sigh, but does as he’s told.
We pass living rooms and state rooms and music rooms on our odyssey, not that I can tell the difference between them. The portraits in each look on us with a reptilian coldness as we walk by. I hate them all, every single one, men, women, children. They manage to look as though they feel entitled to everything both within and without their canvas prisons, down to their collective melancholy mien. Even the children seem absurdly sombre. What monstrous privilege!
With the exception of our footsteps, it’s dead quiet one floor below the main, which is possibly why I decide to enter one of the music rooms. Goose arranges himself in a copy of one of the more ridiculously posed portrait subjects.
“We’re going to die down here,” he says cheerfully. I sit at a harpsichord. “Some unsuspecting NatTrust volunteer will stumble upon our desiccated corpses in a hundred years, hold our skulls aloft, and exclaim, “ ‘Where be your gibes now?’ ”
I play a few jaunty notes.
“What are you doing?”
I think the voice is in my head, at first, which is why I don’t turn around.
“Noah.”
My sister’s voice escalates in volume and annoyance. She stands in the doorway, nostrils flared. I marvel silently at this.
“What’s wrong with you?”
I can’t decide if she’s actually here, or if this is merely the leftovers of my drug-induced, hallucinatory nightmare. I look at Goose, who is looking from her, to me, and back again.
He sees her too. That’s good. “What are you doing here?” I ask her.
“Am I not allowed, now that it’s your house?”
“This isn’t my house.”
“No? I was told otherwise, by Grandmother.”
“Right,” Goose drawls, backing out of the room. “I think I’ll let you two catch up. Quality time.” Katie steps aside to let him out, but doesn’t come farther inside. She doesn’t follow him, either.
I rise from the harp
sichord bench. Lean back against the instrument.
“Stop,” Katie says.
“What?”
“You’ll break it.”
I stop leaning.
“What happened to your hand?” she asks warily.
I catch my reflection in an antique mirror. No wonder people have been staring—it’s bruised and cut and rather obviously so in the T-shirt I’m wearing.
“Spot of bother in a pub,” I say to my reflection. It agrees.
“Over Mara?”
“Mara?” That gets my attention. “No.”
Katie looks past me, meeting my eyes in the mirror. “Is she here too?”
I shake my head, swallowing hard. “Why?”
She shrugs. The simple gesture is loaded with meaning.
“What?” I ask her.
“Nothing,” she says venomously.
“What are you doing here, though, really?” I ask quickly, changing the subject.
“I came back. Like you.”
“I’m not back back.”
“You’re here.” She arches an eyebrow.
“Ruth said you were going to Florida.”
“I changed my mind.”
“Are you in school?”
“Do I look like I’m in school? What is this conversation?”
I don’t know how to talk to her, or even what I’m supposed to say. I honestly can’t remember the last thing I did say to her. She’s been little more than a footnote in my life for months.
How is it that I could be so close to Mara’s family, that her brothers feel like my own, when my sister is such a stranger to me?
“Is Grandmother here?” I ask stupidly.
“Somewhere,” she says. “She didn’t tell me you were coming.”
“She didn’t know.”
“I heard about what happened in New York,” Katie says, after a pause.
I decide to say nothing, in the hope of drawing her out.
“The fire?”
“Oh.”
“Mum was worried.” Mum. Ruth, she means. She scratches compulsively at a bit of wax on one of the silver candlesticks squatting on the mantel, crusting her fingernails in the process.
“Sorry?” The word sounds more like a question than an apology.
“You didn’t call her.”
“I . . . meant to,” I say. I did mean to, in a vague sort of way. But so much happened between then and now—who’d have the time, honestly?
“Right,” she says, turning on her heel.
“Wait.” I cross the room in two strides, reaching for her shoulder—
“You don’t give a shit!” she explodes, when I make contact. Her angelic face reddens. “About any of us!”
I’m blown back by the display of emotion. Funeral aside, I can’t remember ever seeing her cry, let alone scream.
“That’s not true.” Is it? I feel guilty. Perhaps because I am guilty.
“When’s my birthday,” she says coldly.
“September twenty-third.”
She stands there, the silence unspooling as I do the maths.
“I missed it,” I realise.
“Yes, you missed it,” she echoes mockingly. “And Mum’s. You didn’t even stay for Dad’s funeral.”
“I—didn’t,” I say, feeling ghastly. “I’m sorry, Katie—”
“Kate. It’s Kate.” She whips back into the hall, her light chestnut hair bouncing against her shoulders with the force of her strides. She’s tall, and fast, but I’m taller and faster. I catch her round the shoulders.
“I’m not sorry about missing Father’s funeral,” I say. She stops in the corridor. Waits. “I am sorry about missing your birthday, and Mum’s. And for worrying you both.”
Her silence cools. I try and divine some hint of what she’s thinking in order to say something that’ll appease her, but without my ability, it’s impossible to really know. I assume she’s still angry.
“We’re orphans,” she says, and I respond with the next thing that comes to mind:
“How Dickensian.”
It is the wrong thing. Her strong brows draw together and her jaw tightens. At fifteen—no, sixteen, I suppose—she looks more like the pictures of my mother than I’d remembered. Whilst I was off with Mara, she was growing up.
And in an entirely different family, in a sense. She has no memory of our mother at all, or so she’s always claimed, and to her, our father was perfect. I never really understood how siblings worked till I got to know Mara’s family. When one of them fought with their parents, the other two would rally behind him (her, usually) in solidarity. Any fight I’d ever had with our father, Katie would check out of. Which I get. I’m older. I should’ve been protecting her, not the other way around.
But there never really was anything to protect her from, though, was there? She’s had everything she ever asked for. My father outwardly adored her. She’s always been popular. She’s always had friends, made friends. Did the things girls—normal girls—seem to do. She was never a rogue doctor’s test subject, as far as I’m aware, nor was she ever menaced by a living human experiment gone wrong. No track marks I can see, never any extended bathroom trips after meals that I remember. Looks healthy. Seems fine.
“I don’t understand,” I say finally, impatiently. “I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I don’t want anything from you anymore,” she says. “You’ve made it quite clear that you couldn’t be less interested, so after you get whatever it is you’ve come for, just . . . go. Back to New York or Florida or wherever it is that Mara’s gone.”
The words hurt because they’re true. I haven’t been interested in anyone who isn’t Mara, or anything that doesn’t involve her, since we met. I’m a few steps away from the closest family I’ve got left, and I hardly know her.
“Go,” she says, indicating the stairs ahead. “You’re free.”
I nearly laugh at the absurdity of the words. I couldn’t be less free.
“I don’t want to go,” I say, though it isn’t completely true, not really, and she’s smart enough to know it.
“Really,” she says icily. “You couldn’t get away from us fast enough after Daddy . . .” Her words trail off. “What, now that he’s gone and you’re getting everything, you’re here to claim it, is that it?”
“That is not true, and not fair. I told the solicitor I didn’t want anything, that you should get it—”
“Well, I didn’t, and it’s not about the bloody money, don’t be so appalling.” She swallows. “I don’t understand, you hated him, why would he give you—” She catches herself, closes her eyes. “I don’t care. I honestly don’t. Just take what you’ve come for and go back to Mara.”
“I’m not going to do that.”
“Why? Why are you here, then? Not because of the fire, certainly. You could go anywhere, buy a bloody flat anywhere Mara likes,” she says.
I say nothing.
“Surely Yorkshire isn’t her destination of choice, not when you could buy her the world, now.” Her eyes narrow, and I can see her working it out. Her expression—angry just seconds ago—relaxes into a blank mask. “She’s left you, hasn’t she?”
“Kate—”
“She did. She broke up with you.”
After a moment, I say, “I ended it with her, actually.”
The mask breaks, revealing a bitter smile. “I’m sure that’s what you’re telling yourself.” She turns around, heads for the arched staircase, putting more space between us. Then, facing me once more, “I can’t believe I actually thought for a second that someone told you I was here and you came for me.”
“Wait—”
“Don’t worry,” she says, “I’m not angry.”
“No?” I ask, hopeful. Stupid.
“No. Just disappointed,” she adds witheringly, echoing our father’s favourite line. As she ascends the steps, she says, “By the way? Those trousers are a mistake.”
17
LIKE SISYPHUS
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br /> SHE’S RIGHT, ABOUT THE TROUSERS.
She’s right about the rest of it, obviously. I might be able to catch up with her, but what would I say to her?
There are things about our father you don’t know.
I can’t go back to Florida or New York, not without Mara.
If I had it to do over, I would leave the funeral again.
That’s the truth of it. I’d do it all again, probably. She doesn’t know our father was a monster, and I’m glad of it, mostly. She deserves every happy memory she has, and I wouldn’t want to corrupt them.
Though it is unfair that I’ve been cast as the villain for it. Missed birthdays don’t really stack up to everything else I’ve been dealing with, do they?
I’m a bit torn between righteous indignation and guilt. She doesn’t know who our father was, the things he did, and she never will. I try to imagine a world in which I could tell her without hurting her, invite her into the other world I straddle the way Mara invited Daniel.
But she isn’t Daniel. She wouldn’t want to know about my other world. She likes the one she has, and revealing the existence of mine would spoil it.
That’s what’s so fucked about being here. The fact that I should be here, for normal, rational, human reasons, like Kate. Not because I let myself be dragged here by M, or was nudged here by the professor’s bloody fucking condolence card with that bit about my inheritance.
I want to escape. I can’t escape.
My feet carry me toward the music room. I aim for the harpsichord again under the ever-watchful eyes of the portraits—there are so many. They can’t all be Shaws, can they?
“May I help you?”
“God!” I spin, startled. There seems to be a woman behind me, where Katie—Kate—had been standing.
“Mrs. Balfour, actually,” the woman says. “Have you gotten turned around?”
“I’m not lost,” I say slowly.
“Come along,” she says, in a way that brooks no disagreement. “I’ll show you the way back upstairs.”
“I’m looking for . . .” For what? I ran into Kate, made a bloody disaster out of that. Goose likely used his horrid map to find the café. What am I looking for?
The Reckoning of Noah Shaw Page 8