The Family Game(71)
He nods, taking in my words. ‘I see. Yeah. Stealing the firstborn. Hexes, etcetera. Could be an issue, for sure.’ He grins; he’s joking. Nothing seems quite so bad when Edward shines his warm light of rationality on it.
He tucks a stray strand of hair behind my ear and I feel my heart rate beginning to settle. He gives me a supportive nod, then briskly unfastens his seat belt and pops the car door.
‘Okay, let’s do this,’ he says, getting out, his energy propelling me out into the crisp December air too.
36 The Hydes
Friday 23 December
‘Why is it called The Hydes?’ I ask as Edward carries our bags to the front door. I meant to ask the question so many times, but it’s only standing here on the doorstep that I realize I still don’t have an answer.
‘This was all forest once,’ Edward says, gesturing out at the parkland. ‘When JL bought it, he levelled the building the previous landowner had erected and rebuilt. It was just wild North American forest before us, before them. Hunting ground,’ he says, leaning past me to rap the door’s heavy knocker, the slow reverb of metal-on-metal echoing within. After a few moments in the cold, he shakes his head, leans around the doorway to a nearby window and bellows into the glass of the house, ‘Someone, let us in!’
I raise an eyebrow and he shrugs innocently. ‘They know we’re here. They opened the damn gates.’
I feel a smile creep across my face at the normalcy of what he just did. After everything, it’s a relief to see evidence that the Holbecks are just another family, with all that that entails.
Edward sighs as he tries to recapture his train of thought. ‘Hunting ground, yeah. It was all forest; hunting land. White-tailed deer, wild turkey, waterfowl, black bears. Mitzi had a thing for bears,’ he says with a shake of the head. ‘When the house fell to her and Alfred, she filled it with Black Forest crafts. Carvings, art. Black bears, the forest. There’s hardly any of it left now – Mother is a minimalist at heart – but there’s the odd relic. Anyway, New York State still has some of the best hunting in the country, thousands of acres of game. So, the name, The Hydes, kind of came from that, but there was a mistake. No, wait, what’s it called – a… an orthographical error? You’re a writer, you must have heard of those. Someone, somewhere, at some point, mishearing, misunderstanding a name, writing it down wrong. An auditory error. Or a conceptual error.’ He catches my perplexed expression and explains further. ‘The name was written down wrong in the deeds. It was meant to say “The Hides”. Like hiding. With an I. Because of the old hunting hides that used to pepper the property. But someone wrote it down as The Hydes, with a Y. Like the family name. I guess they thought the family that had bought the land were called Hyde.’
‘Like Jekyll and Hyde?’
‘Ha,’ he smirks. ‘Yeah.’
‘Wait, there are hunting hides here?’ I interject. ‘Like hidden lookouts?’
‘Yeah, hidden shelters in the forest, in the undergrowth, up high. Hunters would set up in them and wait to pick off game below. Like snipers.’
‘Are they still there?’ I ask cautiously, the idea of them nestling in the forest strangely unsettling.
‘What, the snipers?’ he teases.
‘No. The hides.’
‘Yeah, I guess,’ Edward says with a chuckle, unsure why the idea has hooked me so much. ‘We used to play in them as kids. They wouldn’t be in great condition now, but they’ll still be there.’
I look to the edges of the dense woodland across the lawns. I let my thoughts slip between the gaps in the tall trees and fly up to those unseen structures deep within.
The sun breaks through the winter clouds, forcing me to look away. ‘So, the house’s name is spelt wrong,’ I say, returning to his story. ‘Couldn’t JL have fixed that? With all the money in the world, couldn’t he just have corrected the deeds?’
‘No way. He loved it,’ Edward tells me with a grin. ‘The Holbecks have a weird sense of humour. JL had one for sure. He liked it as an origin story. He liked the reminder that no matter what you do, how much work you put in, it will always be misunderstood. There’s something in there about the inadequacy of the human condition – I don’t know. The human element in any enterprise will always be its sticking point. My family loves myth creation. They managed to turn a simple spelling mistake into some kind of life lesson. Hence “The Hydes”.’
As if on cue, the front door’s bolts are drawn back, its oak edifice creaking open to reveal Matilda, her pale face beaming in the dim hallway.
‘Well, hello, strangers. It’s about time. What kept you?’
Unimpressed by the wait, Edward bends to pick up our bags as I follow Matilda into the warm darkness of the house.
Our bags left in the hall, Matilda leads us briskly through the vast stone carved hallway. ‘Everyone’s waiting in the sunroom,’ she says, as I absorb the house flowing past me. The hallway opens out to an enormous stairwell and on its opposite wall gapes a monstrous fireplace carved directly into the Hungarian stone of the building. From the staircase walls, portraits rise and disappear around the bending flights.
‘The whole mob have been scratching around for tea for the past half-hour,’ Matilda explains, turning back to us with a smile. ‘It fell to me to beat them off with a stick. You see, we only have two staff over the holidays, Harry.’