Mr. Flood's Last Resort(13)

Renata savors her drink awhile, then she turns to me, her eyes lit. “A case is unfolding, I’m sure of it.”

My lips, mouth, teeth, tongue: all benumbed. I manage a groan.

“Let me have my dream,” she says, gazing coquettishly through dark eyelashes. “A house, a labyrinth of rubbish, a crazy old man, and a message in a bottle: all the ingredients of a twisted crime story.”

“In future I’ll be telling you nothing about my day.”

“That’s cruel. You’re my eyes and ears, Maud, my window onto the world. You tell me everything; you always have.”

I never have.

There’s a note of wistfulness in her voice. Perhaps she’s aware of this holding back, of the unreported elements of my workaday life. I study her face. She’s wearing a knowing expression, but that’s habitual.

I knock back the rest of the krupnik, wait until I can speak, then say, “Wind your beak in, Renata. I’m there to do a job only.”

Renata pours us both another glass and makes a joyful toast. “Here’s to you doing your job only, up at Bluebeard’s castle.”

*

IN MY mind I stray, as the television flickers and murmurs with the sound on low and Renata dozes in her wing-backed chair, a slumbering silver-screen siren. Her lovely face illuminated by the glowing embers of the coal-effect gas fire. A milk bottle stands motionless on the coffee table with its genie furled inside. And a long-gone, invisible saint sits cross-legged on the hearthrug, picking the soles of her sandals.

In my mind, I stray to Bridlemere.

Not to the known spaces: the kitchen, the hall, and the downstairs cloakroom.

Tonight I step through the Bridlemere of my imagination.

I’m holding an oil lantern, which is in no way practical (sudden drafts, inconstant light, malfunctioning wicks). I’m barefoot and wearing, of all things, a voluminous white Victorian nightie, which is just asking for trouble.

I start at the bottom of the house, below stairs, for this is where secrets usually lie, approaching the cellar door down a flight of overgrown steps. The ivy peels back from the door frame, sucker by sucker. The padlock swings open; the chain snaps and falls. I hardly even have to touch the handle.

It’s just a step over the threshold (feeling the cobwebs brush against my face and arms) and I’m in, padding through subterranean hallways. The lantern in my hand flares and burns brighter, sending shadows dancing into corners. Above me hang the dusty curls of unrung servant bells.

I take in the cellar, where undrinkable wines lie entombed in catacombs. Forgotten bottles, shrouded with dust, their sediments settling and corks rotting. I see the marble shelves in the pantry, which are for the mice to skate on, and a Belfast sink in the scullery, where colossal powdery moths go to die.

I track up through hidden stairways and corridors, emerging through secret doors (clad in tapestries and wallpaper—you can hardly see the join!). This backstage trickery is the cause of every vanishing maid and materializing butler.

Luckily every door I try is unlocked, as I carry no key. I’ve checked, of course; the pockets of my imaginary nightdress are empty.

There is a library full of black leather–bound esoteric books, with an easy chair by the fire and a skull on the hearth. There is a dining room set for dinner where the only guests are the rats that gnaw the napkin rings and the spiders that swing from the candelabra.

The staircase that coils up through the house is dark wood and the wallpaper that peels down from the landing is crimson flock, as bright as a blood surge above the lacquered black wainscoting. There are portraits too: of ladies in silk dresses, of children with big heads and men in tights with jaunty hand gestures. I lift my lantern to see them. They pretend to stand still but their eyes follow me. There are endless bedrooms where four-posters sag and chamber pots squat and windows are swagged with moldering velvet. There is a nursery with china-faced dolls and a still-creaking cradle. I watch it rock with blithe interest.

I tiptoe over to the window seat and press my face against the bars at the nursery window. I see the fountain below in the moonlit garden. The nymph clutches her shell and hunches her shoulders against the night. In the pond, at her feet, something turns in the water.

I climb the last set of steps.

At the very top of the house there is an attic. With trunks full of pin-tucked dresses, furs with glass eyes, and the yellowed gowns of long-ago brides. Where bats nap amongst the rafters, wrapped in the scent of dusty voile and the perpetual incense of mothballs.

Across the room is the very last door. But it is locked.

A sudden heaviness in my pocket: what could it be? I look down and see a key in my hand—a fairy-tale key!

A key made of bright-black iron, heavy and long-shanked. The head of it adorned with an emblem: a flower maybe, or a mouth, or a mollusk. The key glows a sudden red and whispers to me in the hot rushing tongue of the forge: Here is a door that we mustn’t open.

The key blazes. Searing pain. I drop it.

My palm is branded. A pattern—not a flower or a mouth or a mollusk, but intertwined letters: a monogram.

M F





CHAPTER 5




I have added Mr. Flood’s downstairs cloakroom to my domain, the precarious realm claimed back from the wilderness by the civilizing effects of bleach and bin bags. My domain measures approximately one-sixth of the ground floor of Bridlemere, an area that spreads from the kitchen, pantry, and scullery and out along the hallway. Up to, but not including, the Great Wall of National Geographics.