House of Small Shadows

SIX

Uncomfortable with what she intuited as a scrutiny, by whomever had spoken from inside the Red House, Catherine pushed her voice inside like a shy child. ‘Hello?’

She peered around the door without touching it and blinked at the gloom to adjust her sight. Saw a narrow space with tall ceilings. A vestibule with walls papered in claret and patterned with a geometric design that looked medieval. ‘Hello?’

All of the interior doors she could see were closed, one on her left, another one on the right-hand side of the passage. Probably cloak- and boot-rooms. The top panels of the closest doors were made of red stained glass, as was the light shade above her head. It truly was a red house.

Framed pictures hung upon the walls near the doors, but she couldn’t see beyond the glimmers of protective glass. And she had no time to admire the red and black encaustic tiles of the floor, all original and uncracked, because something squeaked like an old wheel that needed oil, somewhere higher up inside the building.

Squinting, Catherine realized that the end of the narrow reception opened into a wider area. With a clatter of heels against the tiles, she entered the Red House reception and crossed the vestibule to peer into, but not enter, the hall. Her eyes found and followed four walls of an aged hardwood panelling, until her groping sight found a carved newel post at the foot of a steep staircase on the left-hand side of the hall, with balustrades moving upwards like ribs.

Bones inside a crimson body.

‘I… It’s Catherine. Catherine Howard. From Osberne’s.’ Inside the hall her voice was flat, small, strengthless.

Dim reddish light fell from a distant skylight out of sight, and within the crimson haze Catherine made out a dark silhouette on the next floor. Seated in something lumpen. The top half of a thin body and what resembled a long neck was leaning forward to see her, but remained half concealed behind a row of wooden balusters.

‘Had you used the house’s bell for its intended purpose, Maude would have greeted you. She is somewhere below.’ The voice may have been dried out by age, but the tone was sharp enough to make her feel immediately diffident.

Catherine flinched at the rapid ring of a small handbell from where the voice had originated. ‘Shit.’ She hoped her own voice hadn’t carried through the thick air of the hallway. Air that smelled of something chemical and pierced the odours of floor wax, varnished timber and mustiness that tried to smother it. The concealing odours reminded her of the barely functioning antique shops and provincial museums she visited, but the sharp underlying scent was unfamiliar.

Her confusion and the dregs of drowsiness from the heat and pollen outside intensified in the stifling, almost lightless interior, enough to disorient her. She reached out and touched a wall.

The indistinct figure upstairs regarded her in a silence that grew tense and heavy, like a strange gravity, one that oppressed Catherine so much she thought of herself as a nervous child before a stern teacher in an ancient boarding school.

‘Maude will show you to the drawing room.’ At the same time the woman spoke, she drew back from the railings. Catherine made out a smudge too white to be a face, atop what must have been some sort of chair. And what did she have on her head? A hat?

The figure was wheeled backwards with an alarming suddenness. The squeak of the wheels and creak of the floorboards that the chair rolled across, carried off and away, above Catherine’s head and out of sight.

And she was left alone, standing in the mouth of the hallway, not sure whether she was suffering from her usual social bafflement, or whether fear made her reluctant to take another step inside the Red House. Which glowered all around her, sullen but observant, staring directly at her with a barely restrained hostility.

The sharp peal of the handbell had provoked a reaction from deep inside the crimson tunnel that began at the front door, crossed the square wood-panelled hall, and continued to what must have been the back of the large building. Muffled footsteps approached from out of the distant darkness. A shuffle that drew closer, suggesting someone old with restricted mobility was feeling their way towards her.

Despite her existing discomfort, she felt a fresh aversion to greeting whoever was on their way to meet her, from somewhere below. This Maude, she presumed.

The natural light available had either followed Catherine through the front door, or fell blood-misty from the skylight above the stairwell. And this hem of vague luminance soon revealed a white shape approaching through the lower passageway. A form seemingly suspended above the ground, with no limbs, jerking itself towards the hall.

Before her confusion could become fear, a portly figure materialized wearing a brilliant-white apron, which in the half-light she’d momentarily taken for a ghost. It was a woman, with a curved bonnet of hair bobbing from side to side atop a squat body that moved with difficulty. As the housekeeper struggled into the hall and was better lit, Catherine’s scrutiny of her turned into gaping.

Every trace of the feminine had been worn from the lined skin of the round face confronting her. And Catherine couldn’t recall ever seeing a face so grim, the kind of face that appeared behind wire during wars that were photographed in black and white. The woman’s hair, as white as a lamb’s fleece, looked as if she had cut it herself around the rim of a bowl with a knife and fork. The apron was pressed out by her hips, belly and bosom, all of which were large. Mannish lace-up boots peeked beneath the stiff hem of a gown. At the other end a high collar disappeared under the woman’s jowls.

Faded eyes beneath unkempt eyebrows fixed upon Catherine, though the woman did not speak. Her expression was utterly humourless, alive with irritation and what looked like disapproval.

Catherine smiled and cleared her throat. ‘I’m Catherine. Catherine Howard.’ She walked into the hall and extended her hand.

The curious figure turned and waddled to the foot of the stairs and began to climb without a word or backward glance.

She watched the woman’s wheezy ascent. The back of what she thought was a gown was actually a high-waisted skirt that dropped to a pair of thick ankles. An undecorated blouse, criss-crossed with apron strings, was separated from the skirt by a thick leather belt. Both the skirt and blouse were tailored from an unappealing grey material as coarse as sailcloth, and the cuffs of the puffy sleeves were stained. The clothes resembled those worn by nineteenth-century factory workers, which made Catherine wonder if an eccentricity, long cultivated in rural isolation, because the Red House was as remote as any house could be on the Welsh border, had now become something less charming. She’d seen plenty of decline before, but never like this. Trailing from the mute housekeeper came the acrid scent she noticed in the reception.

Halfway to the first floor the housekeeper paused, turned her pale face to Catherine and watched her in silence, waiting for her to follow. Which Catherine hesitatingly did, climbing into the vaulted wooden interior as though she was inside a strange church tower, its walls ancient and oaken. There were two storeys above her and she could see balusters around their edges. A great skylight of stained glass angrily watched over the stairwell.

‘Maude?’ she asked. The woman said nothing and continued up, into the Red House.

They arrived at the bottom corner of an L-shaped corridor on the first floor, also poorly lit. All of the interior doors were closed, which kept the light out, and the house upstairs remained silent and rigid with a tension that registered as a pressure against Catherine’s thoughts.

Amidst the fragrance of polished wood and the inescapable staleness of old furnishings, a blend of jasmine, rose and lavender endured as a trace of the house’s owner, who Catherine must have just seen wheeled along this passage. Perhaps returned to one of these rooms by the child she had seen from outside, looking through the window. Catherine thought of the doll sat in her lap at the Flintshire Guest House. Same perfume.

The first-floor walls were wooden like the hall below, which increased the dimness, and all of the doors she could see were six-panelled, the top two fitted with red stained glass.

Maude moved to a door at the heel of the L-section and listened for a moment before she knocked.

‘Enter,’ said a distant voice.

With an expression of morose disapproval on her crumpled face, the servant held the door open for Catherine. Around the housekeeper’s bulky shape, she caught glimpses of a room better lit than the communal areas. A room intense with distractions about its walls, and one she didn’t make it far inside before coming to a shocked standstill.

Catherine thought she’d walked into another world. An enchanted but nightmarish glade of an artificial Victorian forest. One in which scores of small bright eyes watched her from every surface they had clambered upon.