The House on Parchment Street Read online

“I imagine she does,” Uncle Harold said. “I don’t enjoy being bothered with phone calls like that before I am properly awake, and I wish you would refrain from troubling Mrs. Brewster. I am not going to lecture you on smoking, because you are old enough to make your own decision about that. But what has been troubling me is something different. I saw a ring of boys on bicycles tormenting Mrs. Simmons’ boy on his way to his cello lesson, and I was disturbed to realize that they formed a perfect, orderly circle as they rode, as though they had practiced it many times before. I was never so ashamed of you in my life.”

  He was quiet. Aunt Catherine’s hands had stilled among the dishes. Bruce stared down at the table. Then his head lifted abruptly, his eyes going to Carol’s face.

  She sat startled a moment by what she read in them, and then her face blazed. “I didn’t tell,” she snapped. “I can fight for myself.”

  Uncle Harold looked at them bewilderedly a moment. Then his hand hit the table with a little smack.

  “Not Carol, too—”

  “He wasn’t with them.”

  “It doesn’t matter that I wasn’t,” Bruce said. “I probably would have done it, if I didn’t know who you were.”

  “That’s a marvelous welcome to give to guests in your own country,” Aunt Catherine said tartly. “It’s a wonder she didn’t turn around and go home.”

  “She wanted to.”

  “I was going to.”

  “Well, what stopped you?”

  “Bruce!”

  “I’m not being rude, I’m being curious. I would have gone.”

  “Well, I don’t like running away from things. Or people.”

  Uncle Harold said distinctly, “Will you please apologize to her.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bruce said tightly. He looked at Uncle Harold. “If you see that circle again, there won’t be me in it. Ever.”

  He turned and left. Uncle Harold dropped his head into one hand. Aunt Catherine washed dishes with a harsh, rhythmic clatter. Then she slowed and turned to Carol, sitting mute in her chair with her hair hiding her face. Aunt Catherine wiped her hands on her apron. She sat down beside Carol.

  “I’m glad you didn’t go,” she said softly.

  Carol’s shoulders moved in a little shrug. “I’m used to being teased. I’m skinny, and I’m taller than half the boys in my class, and my hair looks like a haystack on fire, and I can’t walk up to the blackboard at school without stepping on somebody’s lunch. But most of the time, I don’t let people bother me. I can’t fight all of them.”

  “Well, you’re wiser than I was at your age. I couldn’t go down the aisle either without tripping over my big bony feet.”

  Uncle Harold dropped his hand. “Your feet aren’t big and bony.” His voice was tired.

  “They were then,” Aunt Catherine said. “I don’t know what’s troubling Bruce these days. He rarely talks to us, and we can’t read his mind. The only thing I can do is leave his fish and chips in the oven for him and remember that once he had a very sweet smile.”

  Uncle Harold’s mouth relaxed. He looked at Carol. “Well,” he said gently, “are you still in the mood for a guided tour?”

  Carol sighed. “Yes. If I wake up hungry in the middle of the night, I don’t want to get lost.”

  There were four large rooms on the ground floor: the kitchen; a room across from it that Uncle Harold said had been the morning room where the vicars had once eaten their breakfast, but which was now Aunt Catherine’s laundry room; the living room connected to the kitchen, with a great, fat-legged round table, and a fireplace built of huge squares of grey stone and dark, heavy, smoke-blackened beams; and the room across from it, Uncle Harold’s study, with his desk and papers and endless shelves of books. Upstairs were four bedrooms.

  “It’s a bit big for us,” Uncle Harold said, “but I like old things. Most of the furniture belongs to Mrs. Brewster. She was born in the house. Her father bought it when the church across the way turned Catholic again after four hundred years, and the new priests decided they didn’t want to support a large, rather chilly historical monument. Mrs. Brewster lived here until her husband died, and then she began to rent the house. I’ve had my eye on this house for several years, but it wasn’t until last winter that we were able to rent it from her.”

  “Why did the church turn Catholic? I didn’t know churches did that.”

  “The old Protestant parishioners died or moved away until there weren’t enough people to support the church. Sometimes, when that happens, the church is destroyed to make room for something else. But the Catholic population in the town had grown out of its own little modern church, so they bought this one instead of building a new one. It was Catholic, of course, when it was built first, because it is nearly eight hundred years old.”

  Carol drew a slow breath. They were climbing the last part of the stairway, that led to the rooms beneath the roof. “My father gave me a silver dollar once that was made in 1887. That was old, to me.”

  Uncle Harold smiled. “You live in a young country.” They reached the landing. There were two small rooms, one on each side of the hall. “This is where the maid and the cook would sleep, if we had them. Now they’re Mrs. Brewster’s storage rooms.”

  Carol went into one. She knelt down on the window-seat between the thick walls, and looked out. Uncle Harold unlatched the window and opened it. The scent of cool grass mingled with his sweet pipe smoke. A single star hung beyond the high dark tower of the church.

  “It’s so quiet…”

  “Mm.”

  “At home, there’s a freeway running near our house. I can hear trucks on it even late at night.” She looked down. “I wonder how Emily Raison can stand living in a graveyard.”

  “It doesn’t seem to bother her. She doesn’t like dogs, or cows in fields when she goes blackberry picking, but she’s not afraid of graves. There’s no reason to be. The people in them lived in the same world you and I live in, and often their thoughts about it were not very different from ours. Well. You’ve seen everything except the cellar and the gardener’s shed and—”

  Carol turned. “There’s a cellar? I’ve never been in one.”

  “Good heavens. Come along, then. I should go down anyway and get coal to feed the stove tonight.”

  “Do you leave it on all night?”

  “Oh, yes. It would take hours to heat it up properly every morning.” He switched on the hall light as they went downstairs, and said meditatively, “I can’t decide which Catherine hates most: the stove or the stone floor in the hall. It is dreadfully cold during winter.”

  He stopped in the kitchen to get the coal bucket, then led her to a little door behind the main staircase. She smelled cold stones and damp earth as he opened it. He switched on the light, and she saw narrow, worn stone steps leading to a great black mountain of coal at the bottom. She followed him down and looked around as he cracked coal bricks with the edge of the can. There were two rooms beyond the coal room; in the first one she found a freezer and a water tank and a cat licking itself on a pile of rags.

  Its eyes caught light from the coal room and blazed at her like cut amber. Then they vanished as the cat turned and slipped silently into the third room. Carol followed it.

  “I didn’t know you had a cat.” She crouched at the doorway and called it softly.

  “We don’t.”

  “There’s one down here.”

  “Is there? They slip in, sometimes, through the broken windows. Emily Raison’s cat Geraldine had a litter of six down here once. Is it calico?”

  “No. It’s black. It’s male.” She called it again, her voice high, coaxing, and it moved across a table of old china and fragile figurines so smoothly it seemed only a shadow. It faded imperceptibly into the shadows, and she blinked, suddenly finding nothing to call. She moved into the room, looking behind stacks of boxes of books, old picture frames, more china. The grey cellar stones in the twilight were thick and old as the stones of the outer wall of the house. She s
aw a movement out of the corner of her eye, and turned toward the window. She saw beneath it the slow fading of a man walking into the wall.

  The touch of Uncle Harold’s hand on her shoulder jolted her. She shivered.

  “I called you,” he said gently. “You didn’t hear me.”

  She looked up at him. His face was calm, familiar behind his pipe. The full coal bucket was in his hand.

  “You’re frightened. What’s the matter?”

  Her mouth was too dry for speaking. She swallowed. And then she laughed, drawing a little jerky breath. “It was your shadow, going across the wall. It scared me. I thought—it looked like—it looked like somebody walking into the wall.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. Don’t let the house trouble you. It creaks quite a bit, but I doubt if there are ghosts wandering through the walls.”

  He followed her back up, switching the lights off behind him. She turned suddenly at the top of the stairs and looked down into the dark rooms. Uncle Harold waited patiently. Her brows crept together. She looked at him puzzledly.

  “But I wonder where that cat went.”

  II

  IN THE LIVING ROOM THEY FOUND AUNT CATHERINE knitting in a rocking chair beside the fireplace. The fireplace, built of red brick with a mantel of dark rich paneling, was enclosed in a deep alcove of thick stone from which unfamiliar things hung, gleaming in the lamplight. Aunt Catherine’s mouth was set in a straight grim line. Carol looked over her shoulder to see what she was knitting, and she dropped her hands in her lap with a sigh.

  “What is it going to be?”

  “Heaven knows. I want it to be a scarf. Emily Raison is teaching me. She can knit whole sweaters.”

  “It looks all right,” Carol said. She sat down on the brick ledge in front of the fireplace. Uncle Harold came back from putting coal in the stove and sat down, dusting his hands. Something clanged faintly in back of him, and he shifted his chair forward. A brass frying pan with a four-foot handle swung gently against the stones behind him. Carol leaned forward to look at it.

  “What is that?” She raised the hinged lid. “It’s too heavy to be a popcorn popper.”

  Uncle Harold laughed. “It’s an antique bed-warmer. The vicars didn’t have electric heaters to warm their rooms, so they put coals in the pan and warmed their sheets before they went to bed.”

  “There are times when I’ve been tempted to use it myself,” Aunt Catherine said, frowning at her knitting.

  “You can’t say you weren’t warned,” Uncle Harold said. “I warned you about English weather, but you married me anyway.”

  “I was young and innocent. I wonder why there is a hole in the middle of my scarf…”

  Carol looked behind her at the row of fragile teacups on the mantel. She shifted, leaning back against the stones, and glanced up to find a dark, unfamiliar shape hanging over her head. She stood up and reached for it.

  “Be careful,” Uncle Harold murmured. “It’s heavy.”

  The weight of the iron ball pulled her hand downward. She caught at it and numbed her fingers against the spikes protruding from the ball. She shook her hand absently, staring puzzledly at the arrangement of the ball, linked by heavy chain to a polished wooden handle. Then she said,

  “Oh.”

  “It’s a flail. Knights used them during the Crusades. I expect they were quite effective.”

  “I bet they were.” She weighed it experimentally in her hand. The dark ball swung back and forth like a pendulum. “I can’t imagine really killing someone with one of these. There wouldn’t be much left of him, and you would have to see it…It’s a little like a baseball bat, I guess. You adjust the weight over your shoulder and—”

  The door opened, and Bruce came in. He stopped abruptly as Carol turned, and the iron ball, swinging gracefully through the air, smashed one china cup to splinters on the mantel and knocked another to the floor.

  The ball bounced painfully against Carol’s elbow, but she did not seem to notice it. She stared horrified at the bits of cup at her feet. Uncle Harold took the flail from her limp hands and hung it back up.

  “It’s a bit damaging to civilization,” he commented. Bruce closed his mouth. He held out a letter.

  “I came—I just came down to give you this. The postman gave it to me this morning so he wouldn’t have to bother climbing the hill.” His voice shook and he stopped. Carol raised her head. Her eyes glittered with tears.

  “I’m so sorry—” she whispered.

  “Never you mind,” Uncle Harold said. Aunt Catherine leaned over the side of her chair, a suspicious pucker at the sides of her mouth.

  “Soon as I finish this row I’ll sweep it up. Don’t cry. Mrs. Brewster has dozens of bone-china cups.”

  Carol sniffed. Her face, half-hidden from them in the fall of her hair, had flushed red. A tear trickled down to the edge of her chin. Aunt Catherine dropped her scarf. She put an arm around Carol and led her to the kitchen.

  “She’ll never miss them.”

  “It’s one of those days when everything goes wrong—”

  “I suspect you need a hot bath and a good sleep.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to help.” She wiped her face on a dishtowel while Aunt Catherine took a bottle of milk out of the refrigerator. “I don’t know if this house will be able to stand me for a month.”

  “It’s stood all kinds of people for more than three centuries,” Aunt Catherine said. She shook the milk bottle and poured half of it into a pan. “The first thing I broke in this house was a hideous Victorian vase shaped like a green Chinese dragon. Harold accused me of doing it deliberately, and I think he may have been right.” She smiled as Carol laughed in the middle of a sniff. “Why don’t you go up and get ready for bed, and I’ll make you some hot chocolate to take to bed with you.”

  Half an hour later Carol sat in bed drinking chocolate and listening to the house creak around her as it settled in the night air. Through the open curtains she could sec patterns of stars above the swaying graveyard trees. She reached down once and tucked the covers more securely around her feet. The wind, still through the long twilight, had risen again, fresh and chill. The church bells tolled a quarter hour half-muffled by it. Carol finished her chocolate and lay back. The events of the long day ran in a kaleidoscopic stream through her mind. She rolled over, drawing the covers in a hood over her head and shifting her feet to find a warm spot between the cold sheets. The wind whispered through the eves, shook the window, then turned and sighed away through the trees. A floorboard cracked somewhere in the house. Carol rolled over again. She sat up finally and drew her knees under her chin and rubbed her feet. They were icy. She sat for a moment, holding them. Then she reached for her robe and went quietly downstairs, sliding down the banister.

  She took the bed-warmer and the hearth shovel from the fireplace and brought them into the kitchen. She found the coals in the stove behind a small door on the side. The thick heat pushed against her face as she shoveled coals into the bed-warmer. She added a few more to the stove from the half-empty coal bucket, closed the door, and replaced the shovel. Then she found thick dishtowels in a kitchen drawer and wrapped them around the pan. The warmth melted through them to her hands as she carried it down the cold hall, up the stairs. She put the pan between the bed sheets and lay down, resting her feet on top of it. She drifted to sleep lulled by the night wind and the soft pulse of heat slowly thawing her feet.

  Aunt Catherine’s cry jerked her upright in the morning almost before she could open her eyes. She heard doors opening and rolled out of bed, kicking the bed-warmer open. A stream of ash fluttered to the rug. She struggled into her robe and ran into the hall, nearly bumping into Uncle Harold, who was leaning over the banister with a razor in his hand. There was a trickle of blood in the lather on his face.

  “Catherine,” he said. Bruce’s door opened. He came out tying his robe, his hair sticking up.

  “What’s the row?”

 
“No coffee,” Aunt Catherine said succinctly. “No breakfast. Harold, I will never cook another thing on that stove. You can gift-wrap it and leave it on Mrs. Brewster’s front porch.”

  “Catherine, what happened?”

  “I don’t know! I know I closed the coal door last night; I remember distinctly checking, but it wasn’t latched properly, and it may well have burned the house down.”

  Uncle Harold went downstairs, wiping the soap off his face. Bruce followed him, not noticing Carol on the landing above him, standing white and still, her cold hands covering her mouth. She heard their voices from the kitchen and moved finally.

  The heat welled from the open kitchen door, warming the hall floor. The stove, both round burners uncovered and red hot, seemed to shimmer. Aunt Catherine stood looking grimly at it. Uncle Harold opened both oven doors.

  “I don’t understand it,” he said.

  “I do. Impulse.”

  “Catherine, not even this stove acts on impulse—”

  “Aunt Catherine,” Carol said. Her voice sounded small, dreamlike in her ears. They turned to her, as though hearing an unexpected note in it, and she drew a long breath. “It was me.”

  “You,” Aunt Catherine said blankly. Carol gave a little nod.

  “Yes. I needed coals. For—for the bed-warmer.” Their faces were still around her, bewildered. Her voice dwindled. “My feet were cold.”

  Uncle Harold stared at her. He gave a sudden odd moan. Then he sat down at the table and laughed until tears ran down his face, and Aunt Catherine’s face twitched into a smile in spite of herself. Carol watched them, too numb to laugh or cry. She looked up and found Bruce’s eyes on her, the aloofness in them overcome by incredulity. She looked away. Uncle Harold straightened finally, and wiped his eyes on his sleeve.

  “Do you always do things the hard way, Carol?”

  “I didn’t think,” she whispered. “All I could think about was my feet.”

  “Well, after all,” Aunt Catherine said. “That’s what bed-warmers are for. Carol, if you don’t latch that small door tightly, the coals will overheat from too much air. That’s why we always check it at night. So I can have coffee in the morning without melting the bottom of the pot.”