“Also,” Xanthe continued, “a one-legged soldier from when the home served as a hospital in World War II. He sets off the air raid siren on still nights. It can be heard all across the moor. I’ve even heard it in the village, six miles away! Drives the neighbors balmy, and the groundskeeper gets proper grumpy coz he’s always getting out of bed to switch it off. He can’t stand the sound of it, says it gives him the willies. To be honest, I suspect dodgy wiring, but people have sworn they hear the soldier walking with his wooden leg around the floor in the green drawing room, directly above us. Shuffle-clunk-shuffle-clunk.” She pointed upward, and everyone looked at the ceiling as if expecting to see evidence, perhaps a ghostly wooden leg poking through the central medallion.
“Not forgetting the granddad of the current owner. He disappeared in the fog on the moor twelve years ago.” The guide dropped to a near-whisper. “Sometimes, on foggy days, you can make out his silhouette on the moor. Though, to be honest with you, on foggy days you can imagine just about anything. Plus, there’s a ghost cat trapped in the walls, scratching to get out.” Everyone looked nervously at the wainscoting. “Though that could just be rats.”
“Does anyone still live here?” Amelia asked. “Anyone alive, I mean?” She’d heard quite enough about the dead inhabitants.
“Only one. The eleventh Earl of Hawthorne died a year or so ago, and his heir lives in London, so it’s just the second son knocking about here now. Tom. Viscount Moorleigh, officially. Named after the local village. But whatever you do, don’t call him that!”
“He’d be a Right Honorable, yeah?” asked a woman, as she tightened the belt on her Burberry coat. “TheViscount Moorleigh, with a ‘the’?”
“You’d address him as Lord Moorleigh though, would you not?” someone else suggested. “Or ‘My Lord’?”
“Most definitely not,” Xanthe said, laughing heartily. “He insists on being addressed as ‘Just.’”
“Just?”
“Just Tom.”
A few people laughed.
“He lives in this big house by himself?” a woman asked, peering into a tall brass birdcage.
“The groundskeeper, Duncan, lives in an old cottage on the estate, but yeah. Duncan’s been here longer than I’ve been alive. He’s my father-in-law.” Xanthe absentmindedly rubbed her bump. “Or will be, soon.”
“So the spare lives here and not the heir,” someone remarked.
“But the heiristhe earl now, yeah?” another tourist asked. “The bloke in London?”
“Second sons don’t normally get a title, do they?” asked the woman in the Burberry coat. “Wouldn’t the oldest child of the current earl get the viscountcy, not his younger brother?”
“This is not your normal family,” Xanthe said carefully.
“Are any of their lot ‘normal,’ really?” someone beside Amelia muttered.
Xanthe cleared her throat. “Tom’s older brother is sadly not likely to have children, so the 11thearl—that’s his late father—got a dispensation to give the spare title to Tom, to help ensure the estate would keep going. By royal decree, and all. It’s a long story, but…” A loud creak groaned from the next room, and Xanthe nervously glanced at the doorway. “Ever so sorry, I’m going off tangent. Sometimes I get muddled up between the Austen tour and the Brontë tour. We’ll head up to the servants’ sleeping quarters, in the attics.” She opened a door disguised as a wallpapered wall, to a chorus of oohs from the group. “This is the secret servants’ stairwell. Goes right up from the basement to the attics, so they could go back and forth from the kitchenand laundry and stuff without being seen. Bit awkward if you bumped into your chambermaid carrying your bedpan through the halls. ’Scuse me,” she called, pointing at Amelia. “Would you mind pulling that sash beside you?”
Amelia located a braided silk bell cord and tugged it. Nothing happened.
“Oh no, give it a real good yank. And everyone be totally quiet for a sec.”
Amelia did. From somewhere downstairs came the faint tinkle of a bell.
“There’s bell pulls all over the abbey and each one rings a different bell, with a different tone. The servants had to learn the sounds of the bells for the rooms they worked. This here’s the music room, so it’s got a proper musical sort of tone. Up we go, then. Watch your step and stay close. The servants’ stairs are a bit of a maze and darker than a black cat in a coal cellar, and there’s places where the gaps in the boards will have your ankle.”
Screw it, Amelia thought as the procession filed through the fake wall. This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. She wanted to be in her own head, in her own time, lost in a ye-olde world. If anyone asked, she could say she got disoriented in the maze.
She hid behind an empty marble plinth as the hidden door closed behind the group, and waited to see if her absence was noticed. Low voices and shuffling footfalls faded, replaced by the distant shushing of the river and the rich, woody chime of a clock. The wall remained a wall.
She cracked open the doors to the next room. Detecting no life within, she pushed one open. Artifice dropped away so swiftly it was like stepping from the stage of a declining Broadway theater into the wings. Here, the darkened rectangles on the walls hadn’t been filled, the faded wallpaper was peeling and water-stained, and black mold coated elaborate ceiling cornices. The few pieces of furniture were mostly hidden undercalico. A small bird flapped off the antlers of a mounted deer head. Amelia squeaked in fright. It flew out a missing windowpane. Amelia caught the odor of smoke again. How much of the cloud outside was coming down and how much was going up?
Through the next set of doors, she found herself on the mezzanine balcony of a large space—the ballroom, surely. The balcony wrapped around three sides of the room, its path marked by a marble colonnade. Below her, a rusted trampoline squatted in the middle of the dance floor. She nearly laughed out loud.
Out in the entrance hall, if you ignored the signs of decline, you could believe that Darcy himself had just that minute stridden out of the room. In the rooms of the tour, you could believe that the director had just called “cut.” But here you could count the years since carriages and curricles had rolled to a halt outside in the cracks in the plasterwork.
Amelia descended the nearest staircase, imagining the space filled with music and dancing and chatter. Society mothers hoping for good matches for their daughters, grand dames as imperious as the house itself, an assortment of lords… The light seeping in through the arched Palladian windows upstairs and French doors downstairs was diffuse, thanks to grime and the dull sun, and many of the latticed windowpanes were taped over. But Amelia let her imagination take over. For a few glorious seconds, the panes cleared, bright sunlight cut out corresponding squares on the floor, and the three sets of French doors were thrown open to the terrace and garden tucked into the crook of the horseshoe-shaped building.
She pirouetted on the parquet flooring. Her sneaker caught on a wayward finger of wood, forcing her into fancy footwork to avoid falling. Imagine, a ballroom as your childhood playroom.A playroom with intact navy silk brocade wallcoverings.Amelia ran to one, stifling a giggle. When she was doing her grad degree, she would examine scraps of fabric at the Cooper Hewitt without daring to breathe on them, and here was a textile older than the state of New York covering an entire wall. Recklessly, she pressed her cheek to it, feeling the raised paisley teardrop pattern.
She waltzed across to the staircase at the other end of the room and climbed it.Ascendedit—it wasn’t the kind of staircase one merely walked up. Several doors led off into more rooms that begged to be explored. The first was ajar. She nudged it. Inside, a balding man in a blue puffer jacket stood over an old desk, opening and closing drawers. Her face went cold. “It’s not bloody here now, is it?” he said. Another man, out of view, responded in a mutter she couldn’t decipher. She heard papers being shuffled. Holding her breath, she retreated onto the mezzanine, and clonked into a large glass vase on a hall table. She managed to catch it and right it, but the noises in the room silenced. Shit. She scooted through the next open doorway into what might once have been a sitting room and darted behind a curtain, finding herself in an alcove around a bay window. She pressed her back against the side of the alcove, to avoid making a silhouette. Anyone outside would clearly see her, but nothing stirred but skeletal, tawny trees bending in the wind and the twisting river, bisected by an old stone footbridge.
