Seven

I went to Lynn Hall again a few days later. I walked, but I wore shoes to leave at his threshold so he would find no wet footprints on his marble flagstones. The early rains had stopped. I had seen him riding out of the wood toward the village, a distant figure but recognizable to me in that unerring way your eyes find the one face you love or hate in the midst of a crowd. Sun broke between the thunderheads. Sheets of water on the muddy fields mirrored light, blue sky, great billows of cloud whipped to an airy froth, burning and paling as the sun passed in and out of them. I smelled wet bark, earth, rotting apples. Sun glittered everywhere in the rain-flecked wood. I caught drops on my fingertips, drank them from bare branches. My shoes and the hem of my cloak were drenched by the time I reached the hall. I left them on the doorstep and drew up my damp skirt in one hand as I opened the door.  I was looking for his past.

Except for a few smoldering coals on the grate, the place looked as if time never crossed that threshold. Was that, I wondered, where his grandfather had died? Beside his skinflint fire in the dead of winter? I searched the floor for a dulled shadow of blood; all I saw were the faint patterns the lichens left. I shifted the tapestry aside so that light fell into the small bedchamber. A chest beside the bed held clothes; the washstand held its bowl and pitcher, a razor folded into a handle of horn, a silver mirror. The mirror gave me back my face. Some part of me had hoped to find his face reflected there. The razor nicked me when I opened it; I put my finger in my mouth, caught my blood. I opened the bed curtains, drew back the fine wool blankets; I could not find, even in those soft linens, the imprint of his body.

I searched more carefully. He had left no trace of himself, not a single gold hair, not a smudged thumbprint on the polished wood. Perhaps he was unnaturally tidy. Or perhaps he did not sleep there. Perhaps he did not sleep.

Doors, he had said to me at Crispin's wedding. Thresholds.Places of passage.

I had not asked him what he meant; he had not wondered that I knew. He had seen me watching him when he passed between worlds. I had not questioned him. I wondered suddenly, intensely, what I knew, what I had stolen into his house to find. A bed that by night was a pile of leaves, a tapestry that hung between worlds, a bowl that held no water, a mirror that reflected ... What? I felt something shake through me: a premonition, a vision. But the mirror held no answers; it reflected only what I saw. I paced impatiently between the rooms, wanting to peel the masks of things away, find out what they hid. A razor, but no soap. A mirror, but no comb. Clothes, but no shoes. I straightened the bed, closed the razor, pulled the tapestry into place. I stood a moment, studying it. The ancient threads suggested faces, shapes, but only if you did not look straight at them. They vanished into formlessness, if you searched, like patterns in smoke. Doors.  Thresholds.  Passages.

Unless he came and went through the chimney, I could see no hint of a life lived between worlds, only a life lived in an eccentric fashion for any world. Perhaps,

I thought bemusedly, he slept in the woodshed, and kept his soap beside a stream.

Or he slept, as he ate, at the inn.

I left finally, having exhausted conjecture as well as his sparse evidence. Wind rattling through bare branches shook raindrops on my head. I lifted my face for more; it was as close as I could come to tasting wind. Halls and palaces drifted overhead, following the sun. Had he come from such an elusive kingdom? I wondered, and then: Why would he have left it?

Not for a ruined hall on land the wood had claimed. Not for any mortal maid; I was the first he saw, and he had not come for me.

I wandered to the well. Water has its moods, flowing or still; it can lure you like a lover, or look as bleak as a broken heart. I pushed the faded vines aside and dipped my hand into the water. Wind rippled it, and my splashing; it would not give me my reflection. But it tasted of those great dreaming clouds, and of the bright winds and broken pieces of blue sky its trembling waters caught. It tasted of the last sun before winter.

When I passed the hall again, on its blind side, I saw smoke blowing from the chimney, and his mare standing at the door, big, dark-eyed, still, as if she had just taken shape from something else waiting at the door, or had appeared too quickly from some place far away. I saw her look at me. But Corbet did not come out, and I slipped quickly and quietly away before he thought of me and I saw his eyes again inside my head.

Laurel laughed at me when I returned, windblown and muddy; she would not have laughed if she knew where I had gone.

I went to the village the next day, to take old Leta Gett some teas for pain and sleeplessness. Her hip had mended, but it still ached;' the cold weather fretted her bones, and brought small ailments, one after another, like passing storms. She was grateful for the tea. Caryl brewed us both a cup, and left us, grateful for a moment to herself. Leta Gett's face was a little withered moon, with restless black eyes, and soft ivory hair so fine it slid out of pins and braids. She loved to talk when she was not in too much pain. She rambled through memory as you would wander from room to room in an old house you once lived in, filling it with stories: This happened here, and this here. Maybe they did, maybe you only wished they had; wishes blur so easily into truth. So I said his name. I tossed it like a pebble into a pond, and watched the ripples.

She got confused quickly by the past, thinking of Corbet, and remembering his grandfather's face.

"I remember how the wild roses grew around that hall. Nobody cared for the gardens; he was too mean to keep a gardener, and he had no interest himself. He worked the men in his fields too hard; he never hired as many as he needed. So no one went back for a second season. He made his son work even when he was small. The boy grew up wild and shy, like an animal; he hardly spoke, in the village. Once I saw a bruise like a hand on his cheek. I asked him - we were both children then, and children think the world is their business. Who hit you? I asked. And he got angry - so angry." She shook her head a little, marvelling at the memory. "He said he had fallen off a ladder. I remember his eyes, that turned so dark when he was angry or frightened. And he was always one or the other, it seemed."

"Where was his mother?" I asked.

"Oh, she came from far away, and died young. I only saw her once. She didn't seem real to me. Not like us. You know how children see things. Too full of light or dark, things are. She seemed made of lace or wings, nothing real. Not bones and weary skin - nothing that could ever be old." She paused, her lips twitching, her eyes suddenly too bright. "Nothing that would ache at the turn of the wind, or lose sight of her feet because she's too stiff to bend."

I put my hand on her hand. Lace, her soft skin said to my fingers. Wings.  "How did she die?"

"Who knows, in that house? I saw his eyes, though we all went to see her buried. He wouldn't cry. You could see sorrow everywhere in him; he trembled at every wind, every spoken word. But his eyes were fierce as bitter winter night, and he would let no one touch him."

"His father?" I said, thinking of someone with Corbet's face standing beside such a furious and grieving child. His eyes would have been cold, ice over a running stream of secrets.

"Oh, he wept," Leta said, surprising me. "In front of us all. With no sound. No movement. The tears ran down his face, and he did not even seem to know what they were...."

I shivered suddenly. Corbet must have glimpsed, in his father's eyes, what a terrible, violent, loveless place the old hall had been. But why had he come back at all,

I wondered, if he had money and all the freedom in the world? Land, he had said. For the land. But he could have land anywhere. This village, like the hall, echoed with past. He had come to change an echo. Or perhaps I was right: He was cursed to return to the place where he had been cursed.

Leta drank more tea. Her eyes were drooping; she yawned. She moved more easily, comfrey and willow bark soothing her joints. She held out her cup, for me to take it, I thought, but she wanted more tea. She had not finished with her memories.

"One night after she was buried, one long summer night, warm like summer never is now, and with more stars than ever you see now, we snuck out of our beds and met on the green, and went secretly to Lynn Hall." "Who?" I asked quickly, greedy for different memories.

"Crispin's grandfather Halov, and Anis Turl, and the innkeeper's girl, who ran away to the city-Marin was her name. She had her eye on young Tearle Lynn." "On Corbet's father?"

"Yes. She wanted money, that one; she wouldn't look at the farmers' sons. Later she married someone with a ship ... I think that was her, who did."

"So you all snuck out of your beds and went to Lynn Hall. "

"Well, you know how children are, about places they're forbidden to go. Especially where someone has died ... I remember the scent of the roses. We could smell them on the sweet air long before we reached the hall. Roses and the smell of new-cut hay. So it must have been that time of the year, the golden side of summer. And there we all were, running barefoot through the fields, thinking of what window we would push our faces against, to see what happened there at night. The place was so big, there were so many windows, the thought of them lit up drew us fluttering across the fields like moths. Chandeliers, Marin promised us. And gold cups. And fireplaces as big as kitchens, guarded by stone lions. We were almost there before we realized it, because the hall was completely dark, and we were looking for lines and tiers of light.

"It was late, they had gone to bed. But Marin made us circle the hall; she pushed us and whispered, and made more promises, of velvet hangings, and wonderful things to eat, on porcelain dishes, left untasted on a table as long as the village green.

"Finally we saw one light, in a corner room closest to the wood. It was on the bottom floor. A kitchen, I guessed, or the housekeeper's room. She was a surly woman, that one. She'd say just what she needed to say in the village, one word at a time, as if her mouth was full of straight pins. She wore black, with a black hat that looked like bat wings. She never spoke to us. She nodded to everyone except the innkeeper. She said `Good day' to him. But never with a smile. Where was I?"

"You saw one light."

"Oh, Yes. So we crept to it, expecting her. We were trying not to giggle, or whisper, but we kept tripping on each other, or stepping on thorns with our bare feet. We kept waiting for her face to appear at the window. A long horse face, she had. Bony and colorless as wax. She left at summer's end without a word to anyone. We just stopped seeing her after that."

Leta fell silent then, gazing into her tea. The expression on her face, I guessed, was much as it had been that night so long ago. "What did you see?" I asked eagerly.

She drew breath, blinking, astonished still. "Two rooms," she said. "One had a hanging drawn aside across its entry. We could see a bedpost in the shadows. In the bigger room we saw a single candle, and Tearle's father sitting next to it, just staring at the empty hearth. The door to the hallway beyond that room was boarded shut. That's all they lived in. Those two rooms. The rest of the hall was closed off. He must have put the housekeeper in the stable ... Rois, you've spilled your tea."

The cup had overturned; tea flowed onto the saucer and into my lap. I stood up, brushing myself, feeling moth wings, moth feet, fluttering and prickling all over my skin. "Dear," Leta said sleepily.

"It's all right. I'm used to being wet." I took her cup, too, before it slid out of her hand. She looked at me out of round, perplexed eyes.

"So we never saw a chandelier, and Marin ran away to marry a shipowner. Don't you think that was strange, Rois? That great beautiful house, and all they ever saw were those two rooms. Don't you think that was strange?" She lay back, dropped her hand over her eyes. "That poor, poor boy," I heard her whisper before I left.