The Children(6)

Later she would claim to have begun writing the Ninth City books in Venice. They were portal stories, and Venice was a city of portals. An artist’s scavenger hunt. The Couriers’ Plaza, she’d say, was based on Piazza San Marco. The Seven-Year Island, a Brigadoon-ish place that would feature in The Salt Witch and the Wildwood Heart, was inspired by Torcello.

Edith would tell interviewers, I spent a year in Italy, studying the masters. Not Titian and Tintoretto, but L’Engle and Aiken. Lewis and Barrie. Milne and Ibbotson and Carroll and Baum. She named them like a child naming the saints.

It made a pretty picture. Edith Sharpe crossing the Grand Canal with a shoulder bag full of blistered paperbacks. And maybe it was true. But Guinevere didn’t remember any of that.

What she remembered was music through the walls, pulsing from an old tape deck. Edith, backlit, breathing smoke through an open window. The smell of her, heavy and sweet, breath laced with turgid espresso. When she was happy, she gave them muscat grapes and cookies bound with marzipan. When she was not, she gave them her back, and their nanny carried them away.

Where was Llewellyn? In the Venice of her mind, Guinevere couldn’t fit her parents into a single frame. They made a diptych: Edith on the left, cast in gloom, bare shoulders rising through it like roundels of moon. And on the right, Llewellyn. Sun King, his lion coloring bright as a standard.

The whole trip was a Hail Mary cooked up by his agent, part owner of the palazzo and one of his last remaining allies. After he left his highly connected first wife for Edith, Llewellyn’s acting career dried to a trickle of voice-over gigs. Italy, his agent told him, would be a place of retreat and creative rebirth. Somewhere to live rent-free, a hop flight from London.

But for all his scheming, Llewellyn’s comeback did not materialize. In the end, Venice was a one-year dream.

There was one last offer on the table. When a pregnant Edith dropped out of her final year of high school to marry a man fifteen years her senior, her parents cut her off. Her father did make her an offer, though. Meant at the time to keep the girl and her belly out of sight, it had become tempting.

The offer was a house. In Vermont, in the woods, very rustic. It had a dubious history: built generations ago by a family patriarch, who died there in the arms of his mistress. An embarrassment. His widow refused to acknowledge the place long enough to sell it.

There was another story there, a sticky kind of shadow that ran beneath the ordinary scandal. Something to do with the mistress. But Edith’s father would not be swayed by any rumor involving a woman.

As far as he knew no one had troubled with the house for years and years, outside of a caretaker who ran the taps and kept the roof from caving in. He’d almost forgotten he owned it.

They could stay there, he told his wayward daughter, as long as they liked.



* * *




Time did a backbend as the Sharpe family pinged westward across the Atlantic. In a hotel room in Manhattan, the bathroom doorway caught her parents at last in one frame: Edith in bra and jeans, cutting off her long hair. Llewellyn standing close behind, running a clipper over her nape. The haircut rendered her an astonishing stranger, ship-line bones and a head sheared as cleanly as a jawbreaker.

After Venice, the hotel’s sanitary odors were so alien to Guinevere they struck her as dangerous. She was glad to leave after one night, stepping off the curb and into a car that seemed suddenly to belong to them. Late sun kneaded her cheek. She held tightly to her brother, any part of him she could reach.

Hours passed. They swapped highways for roads that narrowed between thickening woods. A man sang on the radio, lonesome voice dropping in and out. Edith held a map over her knees. “Up here,” she said, touching her husband’s neck.

Up here. Waiting among the trees.

If Venice was a sleek aquatic creature with sunstone eyes, Manhattan a rumbling reptile scaled with lights, then wooded Vermont was a slow and shaggy beast, lichen clotting its fur. It might slumber by daylight. But it woke at night.

Guinevere felt its waking. Ennis, too.

He undid his seat belt and shifted over to her side. Together they looked at the trees and the spaces between them. Wind touched their faces with fairy fingers and the music cut out. All they could hear were night sounds. They dipped their hands into the dark.

The dark reached back.



* * *




Llewellyn unlocked the front door with a steady hand, ready to face whatever awaited them. Animal infestation, squatters, decay. He meant to be the first one inside, filling the house with his voice and his boldness so the others could be unafraid.

When the house blew that first cool breath into his face, he stopped. He stood a long time there. Hand on the doorframe, key in his fist. His wife, son, daughter slipped past him into the dark, fearless, soundless, until he was left alone.

Being alone did not suit Llewellyn. Against the clamor of some ancient part of him that soft modern life hadn’t entirely crushed, he crossed the threshold.



* * *




The house was made entirely of wood—floors, walls, ceilings. It was laid out with glorious efficiency, each bit fitted neatly into the next. Where the palazzo was so grand and empty it made your insides rattle in sympathy, every inch of this place had a purpose. After years spent empty it should’ve smelled stale, but it was warm and sweet.

Guinevere was five, she didn’t yet like the dark. But she liked this dark. It was full of good things: a fireplace big enough to stand inside, fronted by a pincushion couch. Ornate wooden staircase, kitchen hung with black cowboy skillets like animal heads on the wall. Actual animals, carved in wood and hidden all over: a fox-head newel on the front stair, a rabbit’s head on the back. A stag over the kitchen door. Fat wooden bees browsing the doorframes and spindles, silken when Guinevere ran a finger over their backs. In the biggest room—the great room, they’d come to call it—a doe and her baby grazed in the mantel of the grand fireplace.