The Art of Inheriting Secrets(10)

“This is a little creepier,” I admitted. Vines grew over and through the windows, creating a green interior. A dining room table with sixteen or twenty chairs was littered with chunks of fallen plaster, with more debris on the floor. Wallpaper hung in strips. A great crawling black stain marked one wall and half the remaining ceiling, but I also noticed a lighter rectangle on another wall. “Where’s the art? Wouldn’t there be portraits or something?”

“I dunno.” He tucked his hands into the pockets of his hoodie, mouth turning downward. “There’re some paintings upstairs in one of the bedrooms, but they’re not portraits. Kind of fantastical.”

I thought of my mother’s work. “Are they forests?”

He swung around to look at me. “No. Gardens and things.”

Behind me, Rebecca squeaked. “Mouse!” she cried and bolted, right back out the way we’d come.

I turned, looking, but if there had been a mouse, it had fled in terror. I shook my head, and Samir led the way through a pile of debris in the doorway into another room that must have been a sitting room or the like. Wooden panel doors hung at an angle, and the ceiling-high mullioned windows were almost entirely covered with growth.

“Look at that.” He pointed, and I saw a blooming rose, white or pink, like a nightlight in the darkness. “It must be warmer in here than outside.”

“It makes me think of Beauty and the Beast,” I said, and I couldn’t help picking my way over to the rose to touch it. “A house under a long curse.”

“What did it take to break it? The curse?”

“The beast has to learn to love and accept love in return.” I bent my head to the rose and was pleased to discover it smelled of lemons.

“Yeah, yeah. Women always like those brooding beastly types.”

I smiled, coming back to his side. “You are not in that category, are you?”

“No.” He sighed.

“Don’t lose hope. Women eventually learn that beasts are only beastly.”

He raised one thick brow. “Do they?”

“Mmm.”

“Good to know.” He offered a hand to help me over a rotted ottoman. “All right?”

“I’m good. Lead the way.”

“This is the best part of whole house.” He paused in the doorway, his eyes glittering. “Ready?”

“Yes.”

He pushed at the door with a shoulder, pretty hard, and the door gave with a groan, dust flying into the air. We tumbled into a vast hallway with a wide carved staircase. Light filled the room.

“Oh, wow.” I made my way into the center and looked up.

The area was enormous, three stories high, and every inch was paneled with elaborately detailed squares of golden wood. It glowed with the light coming in through an enormous stained glass window made of three broad arches, each showing a saint in what I imagined were acts of miraculousness. I knew the deep reds and clear blues were signs of early stained glass. Not a single pane was broken. I pressed a fist to my chest. “It must be eleventh or twelfth century. How in the world has it survived?”

“Crazy, right?” He was looking upward, too, black hair tumbling backward away from the strong bones of his face, high cheekbones, carved jaw. “They say it’s the window from the abbey.”

“Where’s the abbey?”

“Just south. It’s only a ruin now, but it’s on an old pagan site, they say. There’s a spring, and some of the local witches tend the herb garden.”

I laughed. “Really?”

“Really. It’s been there since medieval times, and it’s supposed to be full of all sorts of blessed plants and healing herbs.” He pronounced the h in herbs. “It’s meant to be one of the best gardens of its kind.”

“Medieval,” I echoed. “So much time.” Looking upward, I thought of my mother, once upon a time, coming down the steps and before her, my grandmother and her mother, stretching back to the Elizabethans who’d moved the window and even further back to the monks who’d lived in the abbey. I moved around the space, looking at the carvings in the paneling. “It’s amazing that this is still in such good shape.”

“So random,” he said from behind me. “Some rooms are completely wrecked, and others look as if someone just stepped out.”

I nodded.

“This is one of the spots that is supposed to be haunted.”

“It is really cold,” I commented, half-flippantly. “Who’s the ghost?”

“A girl who jumped from the gallery.” He pointed to an opening three stories up.

“These must be the towers then, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Why did she jump?”

“It’s always love, isn’t it?”

“Hmm. I guess it is.” I stared upward at the shadowed gallery, where once minstrels might have played. I imagined a girl so distraught that she would jump to her death on these tiles, and a shiver walked up my spine.

My leg was starting to ache in the cold, and I wished suddenly that my mother was here to tell these stories, share her history with me. “How do you know so much about it?”

“If you grow up in the village, you know all the stories.” He moved, circling a pile of what looked like rotted magazines, and looked upward. “It’s drawn me since I was a child. It just seems sad, doesn’t it? Like it wants to be set free.” He gave me a quick smile. “Uncursed.”