Brian asked, “So my wife's aunt never mentioned anything to you about planning to sell off the house?”
“Not a word. Which is more than passing strange, seeing as how we were Heather's closest friends.”
A voice from the dark muttered, “Or we thought we were.”
“Hush up, you.” Gladys leaned forward. “Did Trevor really find a letter from Heather amid the teacups?”
“Yes.”
“How utterly thrilling. Imagine, sitting there for two years, just waiting for you to show up.”
The old man's silhouette reappeared from the murk. “Just goes to show the sort of job the cleaner was doing.”
“She didn't have any reason to go fishing in among the china, now, did she?” Turning to Brian, Gladys explained, “The real estate agent sent his cleaning lady over once a month to do a spot of dusting.”
“Spot is right,” Arthur grumbled. “And a ruddy lot of good it did us, having the hall floor swept when it's so dark we can't see a hand in front of our faces.”
Brian caught the drift. “So the Realtor hasn't been keeping up on the repairs?”
“Now, don't you start us on that.” She blocked Arthur with her girth. “You just go get some rest, and we'll save all that for when you have time to come down for a spot of dinner. So nice to finally meet you proper, dear.”
“Glad to see you up and about,” her husband added before the door closed.
Brian stood and felt the air impacted by the shutting door and the voices within, Arthur grumbling and Gladys chiding, two people so used to living together that they could not consider a life alone. He started up the stairs, lit now by the flashlight's gleam, and wondered if he would ever grow used to the void within.
When the house had been refashioned to include a downstairs apartment, a wall and a set of grand double doors had been inserted on the upstairs landing. The sweeping twin staircase joined on what was now a broad balcony, as large as a parlor, and embellished with a chandelier that did not work. The doors opened into a wide hallway running the length of the house, leading to what had once been three grand salons and a library, with the eat-in kitchen at the house's south end. Refrains of former grandeur were everywhere, crowded by shadows and age. Brian walked down the hall away from the kitchen, opened another door, took a deep breath, and started up the stairs.
The envelope in his shirt pocket seemed to reopen and whisper to him. The voice of a woman he had met only once reached across the impenetrable distance and spoke in time to the squeaking stairs, repeating all the letter's surprises.
“My dear Brian,” Heather wrote. “I wish to apologize. My hands no longer follow my mind's command, so my letter must be brief. In the space of too few words, I offer you years of repentance. I was horrid to you. Not because of who you were. No. Because I was a selfish old woman. I tried to force dear Sarah to choose between the two people she loved most, you and me. What a dreadful mistake that was. I deserve all the loneliness that life has punished me with.
“You, however, do not. I understand the agony you are going through. Oh yes. Far more than you would ever imagine. For I, too, have lost a love. You probably never knew that. How could you? I never gave you a chance to know me at all. Until now.”
The manor's third floor was a narrow copy of the second, with lower ceilings and somewhat smaller rooms. The chambers and windows were modest only in comparison with those downstairs. The dust was thick enough to clog the chilly air, the scents stuffy and very old. No cleaning person had ventured up here in a very long while.
Brian entered the room closest to the stairwell, and though all the furniture was draped in yellowed white dustcloths, he knew instantly he stood in Sarah's room. To his vast relief, there was no sense of tragic longing. The room was just a room, despite matching her descriptions exactly. He tried the wall switch and was rewarded with a yellow glow from the dusty, fly-specked chandelier. It, too, matched his wife's account, hand-blown in the shape of an hourglass. Brian turned slowly, reliving the nights they had spent sharing her happiest memories, almost all of which began here in this room. And all the while, Heather's murmurings and the letter in his pocket kept him company.
“Once I knew the love of a soul mate,” Heather wrote. “Forgive my brevity. It hurts to write of that time. Even saying these few words leaves my heart as pained as my hands. His name was Alexander. We were married three short years, and then God took him away from me. I fear the loss drove me a bit mad.
“A year and five months later, a little princess arrived at my doorstep. She was eight years old and as beautiful as an English summer dawn. Her name was Sarah. She was sad, lonely, and terrified of me. And with every reason. It was her presence that drew me back from the depths of my own living death. And returned me to God. For I knew that alone I would not be able to find either the love or the answers that this little child required.”
Each wall held a mural, painted at Heather's request by a local artist. They depicted passages from Sarah's favorite books. It had become part of Sarah's excitement over returning to Castle Keep each summer, waiting to discover what Heather had ordered up. The entire right-hand wall showed a covered bridge from whose heights Christopher Robin and Pooh and Tigger raced twigs upon a smooth-running stream.
The room was dominated by a four-poster bed, which beneath its dustcovers looked like an ancient vessel ready to sail upon the seas of night. Brian stared at the bed and felt the first heart twinges as he imagined his little Sarah nestled there, sent by parents who had never really been parents at all. Lost and frightened and alone, she had hidden deep within the covers of a bed so big it seemed to go on forever. She had felt trapped here, inside a house so huge it took even her tiny footsteps and echoed them over and over like ghostly drums. And watched by an aunt whose eyes did not seem able to track together, especially at night. That first summer, Aunt Heather had cast a terrifying figure, with a rat's nest of graying hair and hands that danced to music Sarah could never hear. Yet somehow this strange old biddy had become Sarah's grandest friend, introducing her to the wonders of a house filled with mysterious places and ancient secrets, acquainting her with other mysteries as wellâthose of faith and hope, those of laughter and belief in a tomorrow worth living.
Heather's quiet chant was still with Brian as he turned from the room and its treasured yesterdays, and it sent him down the hall on a quest he still did not understand. “Sarah arrived wounded by her own past,” Heather wrote. “Don't ever think children are incapable of harboring tragedy. Their spirits can also be stained crimson by the injustices of life. I wanted to help her, but could not do so alone. So I turned to God for help, and found that He had brought Sarah just for that purpose. Such wondrous subterfuge within the divine mind.”
Heather's own chambers were also as Sarah had described, a series of four adjoining rooms that flowed one into the other. Brian's footsteps made a dusty trail across the ancient carpets as he walked and searched. Here in these rooms, with the covered paintings upon the walls staring at him like sightless eyes, Heather's voice seemed clearer still.
“To my delight, I discovered that Sarah loved puzzles. I turned this grand old house into one large maze and used its mysteries to teach her both to discover herself and to trust me. I found a healing in this. For me, and thankfully for Sarah as well. And in the making of my clues and watching her uncover the rewards, I found a bond growing between us. And a miracle. For it was not only Sarah who was learning to trust and love and laugh and live. I returned to life as well.”
The bedroom opened into a small salon, with its high-backed padded chair and fainting couch both made lumpish and vague by yellowing covers. All the lights worked, revealing a blanket of dust upon the hardwood floors and making the tattered velvet wallpaper appear faded as sun-bleached parchment. From there he entered a dressing salon, with a marble-tiled bath beyond. Brian halted in the dressing room, took the letter from his pocket, and listened as Heather's scratchy voice finished reciting the final passage.
“This, then, is my gift to you. Rather, it is our gift. For Sarah has worked with me every step of the way. All those conversations through the good and bad times of our respective illnesses, this is much of what we spoke of. We recalled the past. Did you ever hear her laughing on the telephone with me, even when the pain and the weakness crippled her? What a miracle our memories can be. We spoke and remembered better times. And we planned, Sarah and I. We gave ourselves hope of a future, which illness had robbed us of, through hoping for you, dear Brian. I pray you will permit me to say those words, for through Sarah's love and her sorrow of leaving you, I have learned to care for you as well. Dear, dear Brian, mainstay of my darling Sarah's life. I pray that you shall heal. I pray that you will come to know hope in a future. Not the future you might have wished for yourself. No. But a future just the same.
“Our gift is to be a series of puzzles. In reading our clues and seeking our answers, we hope and pray you will find a future as well. A morrow filled with reasons to live, and a purpose grand enough to bestow upon you the gift of hope. For you deserve it all, my dear Brian. All the hope a tomorrow worth living can bring.
“Here, then, is the first clue: From the hope tossed skyward on your beloved's happiest day, in a grand palace made to make a child feel grander still, search for the heart, search for the heart, search for the heart of your beloved. Yours ever, Heather.”
With a single, ragged breath Brian drew himself back from the realm of memories and silent voices. He stared into the dressing room's mercury-backed mirror, but felt as though he had been observing a vision, one where angels with wings of gossamer dreams whispered songs from realms where lovers never mourned.
He wiped his eyes to clear them, when suddenly he found himself caught by a living apparition. It took a long moment to realize what it was he was seeing. Then he turned slowly, almost afraid to reach out and touch it.
It was the ribbon that convinced him. Faded and tattered as it was, there could be no mistaking Sarah's handwriting.
The bouquet was of miniature water lilies and teacup roses, dried and faded to the color of time-washed silk. Upon the ribbon that bound the flowers was written a passage taken from the book of Ruth, which Sarah had woven into her marriage vows: “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.”
Brian forced himself to pick up the marriage bouquet, marveling at how it had come to be here. Heather could not have caught it, for she had refused to attend their wedding. In fact, Heather had neither written nor answered any of Sarah's entreaties for more than a year. Brian held the bouquet in his hands and wondered at a young woman's love, one so strong it would retrieve the tossed bouquet, then hold it until it could be taken to a cross and lonely old woman. One whom Sarah had always wished would remarry and start life anew.
Brian stared at the whitewashed wall, from which hung a collection of hats and slippers and gloves. Then he realized that there was something remarkable about this particular hook, which had held the bouquet. In fact, upon closer inspection it looked almost like a lever. Hesitantly, Brian reached forward a second time and pulled the lever down.
The entire wall clicked back slightly. Brian set the bouquet on the dressing table, lifted his flashlight, and pressed. When the wall gave only a fraction, he put his shoulder against the door and pressed harder still. With a squeal of hoary protest, the wall gave way.
Brian pointed his light inside the windowless room, smaller still than the dressing chamber. For a moment he saw nothing, until he aimed his light lower. Then the sight of the past coming vividly alive caused him to cry out loud.
C
ECILIA
L
YONS STOOD BY HER PARLOR WINDOW ON
Thursday and tried to enjoy the slow December dawn. The day was overcast and cool, a mildness more suited to October. The sun had not yet crested the horizon, and all the day was pewter and still. The air was so windless she could hear the faint thunder of wings as birds flittered to and from her feeder. The day's soft beauty seemed only to deepen her gloom. She had not slept well, worried as she was over Tommy Townsend. The previous afternoon she had done what was inelegantly called a sweat test, scraping the child's skin with a sterilized ruler, gathering perspiration and then sealing it into a small glass vial. She had not bothered to hide from Tommy's mother that she was checking the child for yet another early killer. Cystic fibrosis was to become Angeline's latest nightmare.
Cecilia sighed hard, trying to push away worries over what the lab might report back. She decided to take her second cup of coffee and the morning's work out to the riverbank.
Once every two weeks Cecilia had a half-day free for study. There were several such time slots built into her scheduleâclasses every quarter, conferences, opportunities to train further. She took advantage of them all.
A plastic box intended to cart drugs from the suppliers to the pharmacies sat beneath her tall pantry cupboard, which had been moved back into place by the same electrician who had returned power to her kitchen. On these free mornings the plastic box was jammed with medical journalsâboth English and Americanâand dozens of drug circulars left by the pharmaceutical company salespeople. She slipped on a wooly hat, fingerless mittens, and her favorite tattered cardigan. She balanced the cup on top of the pile and carried the box down the drive.
As she rounded the corner of the manor, the sun edged its way over the horizon. The narrow ribbon of blue between the meadow and the cloud-covered sky was instantly transformed into an eternal doorway, and all the world sang a golden chorus to greet the new day. Cecilia continued on as much by memory as by sight, for she walked straight eastward into the sun, and little was visible beyond the world of golden silhouettes. She knew the manor gardens so intimately that she thought of them as her own, and yet she entered a thrilling new realm. Even the dry leaves at her feet became fragile and jewel-like. The sky was no longer gray, but rather draped in streamers the length of heaven, a symphony of color. A pair of magpies flew to each side of her, seraphim sent to welcome her into this new day. She felt convicted by her inability to be happy with the gift, her heart made sadder still by this new failure. Tommy Townsend was not here, but he might as well have been. Her inability to help the little child left her veiled in a sorrow not even the morning's glory could pierce.