Patricia McKillip - The Bell at Sealey Head

“Yes, Mrs. Blakeley.”

The old lady gave a gusty sigh. Her hair and her skin had faded all one color over the years; her face looked like an ivory cameo. Or a cracked and yellowing map, Emma thought, to some wonderful realm that everybody had long forgotten existed. “Sad times, Emma,” she murmured. “Sad times . . . And a new mistress at my age.”

“Maybe it won’t come to that, Mrs. Blakeley,” Emma said quickly, stricken by the sorrow in the pale, sunken eyes. “Dr. Grantham will coax her better.”

But Mrs. Blakeley only shook her head silently, turned away. Emma closed the closet door and went down to get the tea tray.

In the kitchen, the cook, Mrs. Haw, was weeping silently as she boiled a pot of seafood shells for stock. Crab, shrimp, scallops, and mussels stood in neat little piles, waiting their turn; the kitchen smelled of root vegetables and brine. The cook, a massive mangel-wurzel of a woman, stirred with one hand and dabbed her tears into her apron with the other. She had a long braid of gray-brown hair and expressive hazelnut eyes, which, at the moment, were red and welling over and salting the brine.

“I’m not so much afraid of having nowhere to go,” she explained to Emma between sniffs. “Amaryllis Sproule has been trying to steal me away from Lady E for years. But I grew up in this house. It’s all I know.”

“Maybe—” Emma began helplessly.

“I was scullery maid when my mother was cook, barely old enough to hold a chopping knife, I was. Oh, the size of strawberries, then! Oh, the radishes! And the late suppers among the gold candlesticks and crystal decanters. Now it’s enough if a half cup of bisque comes back on her tray with a lowered tide line in the bowl.”

Emma murmured something, picked up the doctor’s tray, and escaped. The house, as far as she remembered, had been growing quiet and empty for years. Her mother, before she took to the woods, had charge of the stillroom in Aislinn House. Everyone consulted her, from Lady Eglantyne to the townspeople, who came knocking after twilight at the boot room door. Hesper taught her daughter her letters, her numbers, and how to copy the odd scribbles of stillroom doings, the concoctions, the requests, the various success and failures into the records book. When she was four, Emma had opened the pantry to lay a bundle of herbs to dry, and found the wild-haired little princess instead, with her homely face and enchanting smile. Such richness Emma had glimpsed, such space, such bustling, before she had slammed the door so hard the jars rattled on the stillroom walls.

Her mother, measuring some odd purple powder into a bowl, said only, “Don’t be afraid. But don’t talk about it, either, except to me. It will be our secret.”

“But what is it?” Emma whispered.

“I’m not sure yet. I’ll tell you when I know.”

Emma had begun her training then, learning to care for the ancient house, and using every door it possessed in the process. Doors opened only one way, she realized soon enough, as she and Ysabo became friends. The princess rarely opened her own doors, for one thing. And even then, she never inadvertently found Emma carrying a mop down the hall or winding a clock. It was always Emma, with an armload of folded linens, or heading in to make a bed, who opened a door and found the princess.

Neither ever crossed a threshold. Ysabo was not permitted to leave her house, though, from what Emma understood, it was all part of Aislinn House. And Emma was wary of the doors that only opened one way. They might let her through, but would they let her back? The noisy, brilliant world she glimpsed through randomly opened doors frightened her with its dizzying walls, the strange rituals she sometimes found Ysabo performing, the gruff voices of the knights, the lovely, passionate voices of the ladies, the echoes of quarrels, booming laughter, the magnificent, outlandish feasts where an entire stuffed deer with flaming tapers and crows among its horns might be paraded, accompanied by hunting horns, through the hall before everyone got down to the business of eating it.

Her Aislinn House only got quieter as Emma grew older. The younger servants left or were let go as rooms were shut up; visitors came more and more rarely. Even Emma’s mother left, went to live in a tree in the wood. Someone had built a tiny cottage in a great hollow trunk; Hesper added a hovel here, a lean-to there, and trained some flowering vines from her garden up the walls to give it charm. There she continued her stillroom business, which gave her an income of sorts, mostly in the tender of a cheese or a fish or whatever was ripening in the fields. She encouraged old books, too, as payment, handwritten histories out of people’s attics, for choice.

“I’m still puzzling,” she told her daughter, when Emma asked about them. “I’ll let you know.”

By then, Emma had grown into a young woman in a sparse houseful of the aged. Occasionally, the more absentminded among them, like Fitch the butler, or Sophie, Lady Eglantyne’s antique maid, confused Emma with her mother. She wore her dark hair in the same tidy braid they remembered down her back; she had the same sloe berry eyes and calm voice. When they called her Hesper, she wanted to laugh, for her neat mother now had frosty hair as wild as Ysabo’s, and she only wore shoes when she walked into town. She ran barefoot as an animal in the wood and sometimes slept where she dropped under the stars.

Emma kept an eye on her, leaving a coin on her table now and then, bringing her fresh bread from town and news from Aislinn House. But nothing her mother concocted seemed to help Lady Eglantyne, who spent most of her days in a waking dream.

“She’s old,” Dr. Grantham said simply, when Emma brought the tea tray into the shadowy library, with its scents of polished oak and leather, and asked after her. “She’s not in pain; she only wants to sleep.” He poured brandy into his tea, gazed into it a moment before he sipped. He had been a young man when Emma had been born and Lord Aislinn had died; now she was grown, and he was middle-aged, and Lady Eglantyne was dying. “Someone must send for her heir. I’ve told just about everyone in the house, but nobody really wants the change. I’ve told her solicitors. Even they seem reluctant.” He raised the cup to his lips, eyed Emma speculatively, as though she might take pen to paper and summon the missing heir. “Mrs. Blakeley keeps promising to write, then doesn’t. Is there something ominous about this heir?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir,” Emma said gently. For lack of anyone else in the house to talk to whose wits weren’t intermittently woolgathering, Dr. Grantham tended to forget Emma wasn’t part of the family.

“What is she? A granddaughter of Lord Aislinn’s brother, is that it? Lived in Landringham all her life?”

“I think that’s right, sir.”

“City girl.” He took another sip. “What about your mother? Has she got anything more up her sleeve?”

“Nothing that works any better than what you’ve got.”

“She’s old,” Dr. Grantham said again, sighing. “None of us has a cure for that. Unless there’s some magic your mother stumbles across.”

“I know she’s still trying.”

He set his cup in the saucer, still frowning at it. “Good.”

The sundown bell rang. He didn’t hear it, Emma guessed. Nobody did, really; it was just another noise they lived among, like wind or tide. But he turned abruptly, reached for his bag, as though someone, somewhere, had called to him. She picked up the tray, listening to Fitch tugging the cranky front door to let him out, while all around her, the vast secret house seemed to reverberate with the dying echoes of the bell.

The next morning they had visitors.