The Children(25)

The next day was more of the same, minus the novelty. Snow whitened the windows and cast the rooms in the soft apocalyptic color of ashfall. Ennis threw a ball against the wall in a steady rhythm, until Edith caught it on a bounce and snapped, “No more!” By afternoon Guinevere felt so wild inside her skin she did ten star jumps, cartwheeled into a wall, and cried.

“How much tea did you give her?” Edith asked crossly.

Llewellyn raised his head from the arm of the couch. He’d been lying like a corpse with his arms crossed, staring at the static in the windows. “It’s cabin fever, woman.” He winked at Guinevere. “You’re made of stronger stuff than this, my fairy. It’s day two. Think of John Franklin! Think of the Terror! They were months on the ice! Though they did die eventually.” He subsided a bit, then rallied. “But they didn’t have chocolate. Or crayons. Or playing cards.”

Edith said, “I’m sure they had cards.”

“Pish.” He swung his long body off the couch and out of the room in one motion. A moment later they heard him pelting up the stairs. The three of them waited without looking at one another, like the ragged ends of an unsuccessful party. He returned brandishing a Polaroid camera.

“Alright, you two. We’re mounting an expedition: to find and photograph five things with which to impress your jaded mother.”

“What’s ‘jaded’?” asked Guinevere.

He paused. “As in jade. A mineral of rare and coveted beauty.”

Edith raised a brow and didn’t look up from her book: The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.

Ennis shrugged. “Fine,” he said in a monotone, remembering today that he was mad at his father. “There’s nothing else to do.”

They started on the first floor, and it was tricky. Edith already knew about the fitted perfection of the place, its mystical symmetry and hidden animals. But did she know the knotty wood under the back stairs formed a perfect goblin face? Guinevere peered at it through the camera’s teeny window and clicked. She loved the insect sound it made and immediately wanted to do it again. Dad took it gently from her hands.

“Your brother’s turn.”

The top panel of Ennis’s bedroom window was stained glass, peaches and leaves. Their doubles were cast on the floor: a banquet of fairy fruit glowing with alien vivacity against the flat snow light. Ennis took a long time lining up his shot.

Next it was Llewellyn’s turn. He showed them something they hadn’t noticed before, lifting Guinevere onto his shoulders so she could see: the lavishly carved lintel of a third-floor bedroom, all leaves and bees and, among them—Guinevere had mistaken them, at first, for flowers—cupped human hands. Dad traced one with a finger. “A little spooky for a boudoir.”

Ennis made a face. “Boudoir?”

“Funny word, isn’t it? It means bedroom. For a lady.”

“What lady?”

“Hmm.” Llewellyn ruffled his hair, his thinking gesture. “This was a bit of a love nest. For your great-granddad. Or great great? The other woman—the woman he kept here—she was an artist. All the carvings are hers, and most of the furniture. She was . . .” He hesitated a moment. “She was a cunning woman, they say.”

Guinevere rested her chin on his head. “Who says? What’s ‘cunning’?” The word felt good in her mouth. The kind of word that carries a knife.

Her father reached up to tweak her ear. “All full of wild ways. My cunning girl.”

Guinevere stayed low as he carried her back into the hall, toward the closed door of the seven-windowed room. She didn’t like it before, and she hated it now. Still dreamed sometimes of her mother’s severed finger tick-tick-tick-ing across its floor to find her. From her vantage point atop her father’s shoulders she saw something new: words carved over the door, two lines in an arch. “Dad.” She pulled his hair. “Look.”

The time we like the best of all

Is when the shadows creepy crawl



“‘One after another,’” Llewellyn continued softly. “‘When the golden sun sinks down in the west, and the tired birdie flies home to its nest, and we’re left alone with mother.’”

He broke off. Guinevere craned up to touch the lettering with the pads of her fingers, then wiped the feeling away on her father’s shirt. “Who wrote that?”

“Don’t remember.” He seemed disconcerted. “Didn’t know I knew it. It’s,” he tapped his head, “fairly a junk shop up here.”

He hefted her off his shoulders, kissing her head before setting her feet on the floor.

The fourth photo was a discovery they made together: in the base of a bed frame on the third floor, what looked like solid wood wasn’t. Llewellyn noticed the catches, fan-shaped divots in the wood. Guinevere pressed one and Ennis the other, and out popped a drawer full of games.

Odd ones. Handmade—by the cunning woman, no doubt, who’d once been kept here—and ranging in craft from crude to extraordinary. The kinds of games a witch’s children might play. In a blue velveteen bag were a dozen multi-shaped dice carved from dark wood. A box whose lid lifted on leather hinges rattled with paler wood tiles shaped like dominoes. In place of dots each held an engraved image: a bowl of apples, a sleeping woman, a child in a rowboat beneath a waxing moon. Or maybe—Guinevere squinted—the apples were peaches.