As if he knew and resented being made the topic of discussion, Bruno continued on his way. In his wake, the rustling came again faintly, only to be drowned out when a nearby phone began to ring.
Percy stood very still, listening the way people do when they’re awaiting confirmation that someone else has picked up.
The ringing continued until disconsolate silence closed around its final echo.
“Come along,” said Percy, a note of agitation clipping her voice. “There’s a shortcut through here.”
THE CORRIDORwas dim, but no more so than the others; indeed, now that we’d emerged from the basement, a few diffuse ribbons of light had appeared, threading their way through the castle knots to spill across the flagstones. We were two-thirds of the way along when the phone began again.
This time Percy didn’t wait. “I’m sorry,” she said, clearly flustered. “I can’t think where Saffy is. I’m expecting an important telephone call. Will you excuse me? I shan’t be a moment.”
“Of course.”
And with a nod she disappeared, turning at the end of the corridor and leaving me stranded.
I blame what happened next on the door. The one right across the hall from me, a mere three feet away. I love doors. All of them, without exception. Doors lead to things and I’ve never met one I haven’t wanted to open. All the same, if that door hadn’t been so old and decorative, so decidedly closed, if a thread of light hadn’t positioned itself with such wretched temptation across its middle, highlighting the keyhole and its intriguing key, perhaps I might have stood a chance, remained, twiddling my thumbs, until Percy came to collect me. But it was and I didn’t; I maintain that I simply couldn’t. Sometimes you can tell just by looking at a door that there’s something interesting behind it.
The handle was black and smooth, shaped like a shin bone and cool beneath my palm. Indeed, a general coldness seemed to leach from the other side of the door; though how, I couldn’t tell.
My fingers tightened around the handle, I started to twist, then—
“We don’t go in there.”
My stomach, I don’t mind saying, just about shot through the roof of my mouth.
I spun on my heel, scanned the gloomy space behind. I could see nothing, yet clearly I wasn’t alone. Someone, the owner of the voice, was in the corridor with me. Even if she hadn’t spoken I’d have known: I could feel another presence, something moving and hiding in the drawing shadows. The rustling was back now, too: louder, closer, definitely not in my head, definitely not mice.
“I’m sorry,” I said to the cloaked passage. “I—”
“We don’t go in there.”
I smothered the panicky surge in my throat. “I didn’t know—”
“That’s the good parlor.”
I saw her then, Juniper Blythe, as she stepped from the chill darkness, and slowly crossed the corridor towards me.
SAYYOU’LLCOMEDANCING
HERdress was incredible, the sort you expect to see in films about wealthy debutantes before the war, or hidden on the racks of upmarket charity shops. It was organza, the palest of pink, or it had been once, before time and grime had got busy, laying their fingers all over it. Sheets of tulle supported the full skirt, pushing it out as it fell away from her tiny waist, wide enough for the netted hemline to rustle against the walls when she moved.
We stood facing one another across the dull corridor for what felt like a very long time. Finally, she moved. Slightly. Her arms had been hanging by her sides, resting on her skirt, and she lifted one a little, leading from the palm, a graceful movement as if an unseen thread stitched to her inner wrist had been plucked from the ceiling behind me.
“Hello,” I said, with what I hoped was warmth. “I’m Edie. Edie Burchill. We met earlier, in the yellow parlor.”
She blinked at me and tilted her head sideways. Silvered hair draped over her shoulder, long and lank; the front strands had been pinned rather haphazardly with a pair of baroque combs. The unexpected translucence of her skin, the rakelike figure, the fancy frock: all combined to create the illusion of a teenager, a young girl with gangly limbs and a self-conscious way of holding them. Not shy, though, certainly not that: her expression was quizzical, curious, as she took a small step closer into a stray patch of light.
And then it was my turn for curiosity, for Juniper must have been seventy years old and yet her face was miraculously unlined. Impossible, of course; ladies of seventy do not have unlined faces, and she was no exception—in our later meetings I would see that for myself—but in that light, in that dress, through some trick of circumstance, some strange charm, it was how she appeared. Pale and smooth, iridescent like the inside of a pearl shell, as if the same passing years that had so busily engraved deep imprints on her sisters had somehow preserved her. And yet she wasn’t timeless; there was something unmistakably olden days about her, an aspect that was utterly fixed in the past, like an old photograph viewed through protective tissue in one of those albums with the sepia-clouded pages. The image came to me again of the spring flowers pressed by Victorian ladies in their scrapbooks. Beautiful things, killed in the kindest of ways, carried forward into a time and place, a season, no longer their own.
The chimera spoke then, and the sensation was compounded: “I’m going in to dinner now.” A high, ethereal voice that made the hair on my neck stand to attention. “Would you like to come too?”
I shook my head, coughed to clear a tickle from my throat. “No. No, thank you. I have to go home soon.” My voice was not itself and I realized I was standing very rigidly, as if I was afraid. Which, I suppose, I was, though of what I couldn’t say.
Juniper didn’t seem to notice my discomfort: “I have a new dress to wear,” she said, plucking at her skirts so that the top layer of organza pulled up a little at each side, like the wings of a moth, white and powdery with dust. “Not new exactly, no, that isn’t right, but altered. It belonged to my mother once.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“I don’t think you ever met her.”
