Читать книгу In the Night Wood - Dale Bailey - Страница 28

Hollow House enveloped them.

As Erin’s ankle healed, she and Charles explored their new home, children in a haunted mansion in a tale: the downstairs rooms, the dining room to the right of the entrance hall, the drawing room to the left. The vast salon with its twin staircases and the adjoining library, accessible by lustrous wooden doors at either side of an enormous fireplace. And beyond that a handful of smaller rooms: the music room, the game room, an office where Cillian Harris managed the estate’s affairs. Bedrooms and sitting rooms opened off the gallery encircling the salon, everything luxurious, everything ornate but for the servants’ quarters on the top floor: narrow, dormered chambers with rusting iron bedsteads, vestiges of another era.

And everywhere the motif on the balusters repeating itself: leaves and vines, those cunning vulpine faces. They peered from mantels and window casings, from finely wrought moldings and armchairs. Stealthy and gamesome, they retreated into the foliage in one place only to peep out anew in another, entire rooms subtly aswarm — a trick of the eye, unsettling and strangely beautiful.

Lissa would have loved it, Charles thought, but they did not speak of her. They rarely spoke at all.

Work would save them, Erin’s therapist had once said.

So they went to work, each in their separate orbit. Charles took refuge in the library, all burgundy and leather, with heavy velvet curtains and plush carpets, a long table, and an antique silver globe mapping a world that had long since passed out of existence. Everything polished, everything gleaming. Comfortable chairs surrounded the cold fireplace. And books, ranks and ranks of them, stood shelved on every wall, behind glass doors with shrewd faces looking down from the corners of their frames.

“You’ll want to keep the curtains closed,” Mrs. Ramsden told him. “The spines of the books would dry and crack in the sunlight. Many of them are first editions, Mr. Hayden, quite valuable. A nice dim room and saddle soap once a year, that’s what they want.”

“I’m sure they do,” Charles said. And then: “Personal documents, Mrs. Ramsden. Anything relating to Caedmon Hollow? Any ideas where to start?”

“Cabinets on the west wall, perhaps, though anything that old is more likely to be in the archives downstairs.”

“Archives?”

“It was Mr. Hollow’s little joke,” she said. “What it really is is boxes, Mr. Hayden. Boxes and boxes and boxes. You have your work cut out for you, I’m afraid.” Then: “Will there be anything else, sir?”

“No, thank you,” he said.

And then he was alone, overwhelmed by the task before him.