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The attic of Bourne Manor was filled with all manner of strange inventions. The day I finally found my way inside, I thought the room full of savage birds. Great gossamer wings and sharp beaks met me; exotic tails encircled my head. I screamed and turned away, fearing I would be picked up at any moment by their fierce talons.
But they were, of course, not birds, for what birds can live in a cage, even one of that size, for long? They were kites. Dozens of silk and paper kites intertwined with laces and strings and arched bamboo frameworks. Their designs were foreign to me, wild swirls and pinwheels of color, painted faces and bared teeth. They were tied at the ends with fanciful ribbons and feathers, and all the paper kites, every single one, trailed braided cords and oddly shaped clasps.
How I found this extraordinary room and came to mingle with the great wings was a mystery in itself, for it was not a place that was meant to be found, as there was never a more arduous task in finding anything.
Every room in the Manor, with the exception of the widow’s walk and the enormous open sitting room on the first floor, was locked. There was a key for every door and also for every cupboard and every drawer of every desk. There was even a key to lock and unlock the windows. Every evening at ten o’clock Wysteria walked the halls of the Manor locking each door, including my own, and then unlocking them again at dawn. She carried all the keys on a great chain kept at her waist, and only she knew which key was which.
“I lock the rooms, Miranda,” she explained, “to keep out the drafts. I cannot bear a draft, not even of the smallest kind.” She spoke as if a lock could keep the wind from slipping under the doors or stealing across the floorboards. Obsessed with drafts, Wysteria was forever stuffing bits of old newspaper into cracks in the walls. It made little sense to me, but I never questioned her in the beginning. I trusted her then more than I trusted myself, and I honestly did not care to go into any of the dark and vacant rooms. Better that they stay locked, I thought, and keep whatever was inside, draft or not, away from me in the night. But as I grew older and spent more and more of my days inside, the lure of the upper floors of the Manor conquered my imagination and I began to wonder what lingered behind the locked doors. What was it that Wysteria tried to hold in or keep out? I wondered. Perhaps, as some believed, the rooms were filled with a rare fortune and stacked from floor to ceiling with gold coins, or perhaps they held only dusty and useless furniture, the remnants of a time long past. I found myself watching her carefully when she chose a key, waiting for my opportunity to examine it more closely. But Wysteria never let the keys leave her side; even when she walked into town, she carried them on her person.
Wysteria left many nets for me to mend whenever she went out of the Manor, secure in the notion that I would spend my hours quietly consumed with my weaving and have the repairs complete upon her return.
One afternoon in late October, before Wysteria departed for town, she presented me with a heavy load of nets. “Will twenty keep you, Miranda?”
“Yes. Twenty will do.” Twenty nets required several hours of tedious attention on my part, for many of them concealed rusted hooks which could lodge easily in my palms. It was treacherous work, and though I was careful never to get caught on a barb, my fingers were often left raw and bleeding after many hours of pulling against the rough cordage.
It did little good to complain to Wysteria, for she believed that the only cure for bleeding fingers was more work. “Building up proper calluses is the only solution, Miranda. More nets is the answer to your suffering.” Wysteria always seemed pleased at the sight of my tortured skin, as if it showed a serious commitment to my work. Whether or not I believed that callused skin was a sign of a job well done, I was never able to harden my own against the rubbing of the nets.
“Perhaps I will bring you a gift from town,” Wysteria offered upon leaving. She did not spend money on gifts in the usual sense. She never brought a doll or a new dress home to reward me for my work. My reward, she reminded me, was a sound roof over my head and food on the table. To purchase a small tin of candies or a sachet for my drawer was extravagant on her part.
“Thank you, Wysteria. That would be fine.”
The Hounds rose from beside the fire in anticipation of Wysteria’s departure, and I rose with them to see her off.
“I shall return no later than six o’clock. Tend the fire and mend the nets. If I’m not back by nightfall, light the lantern.” I assured her I would. Lighting the lantern was, by far, my favorite part of the day.
Perched at the very top of the Manor, encircled by the widow’s walk, was a little house made entirely of glass. It was reached by a trapdoor, which opened up into a spacious room. At the very center of this room stood a table with an enormous lantern upon it. Each night after supper, I lit the lantern, as every caretaker of Bourne Manor had done since the house was built. The closest light was twenty miles to the north at Bolton Island, and so, in the event of fog, Bourne Manor kept a lantern burning midlake for any ship coming in late off the water and to warn all souls against sailing too close to the rocks that guarded its shores.
The central chimney of the Manor passed through the glass house, and its opening could be reached from the roof. It was situated as such for access in the event of fire. Three large bags of sand sat at the ready to be poured into the flue to prevent the whole structure from burning to the ground. Fire from either the lantern or the chimney was Wysteria’s greatest fear, and she instructed me early on never to put wet logs in the grate or leave the lantern case open, for often we used lamp oil instead of candles and oil was most flammable.
Outside the glass house was the actual walk itself, surrounded by a wrought-iron railing, where wives supposedly paced while waiting for their husbands to return from the sea. You can be sure that there were no recent grooves of worried soles marking the walk of Bourne Manor, as Wysteria had never waited up for her husband when he was alive. The only signs of activity were the faded and ancient markings of the heels of previous Barrows women, barely covered over by the scrapes from my own steel-weighted boots when I braved the wind and walked it myself.
I loved coming up into that glass house at night on a full moon with the stars, when they were visible, just out of reach. Walking out into the sky or off the precipice of a mountain could have provided no better view. The quiet, the darkness, the sweet sulfur of the match being struck, the running of the wax, were close to heaven, as close to heaven as I had ever been.
From that height, everything seemed possible, and the oppressive and mournful nature of the house fell away from me.
Whenever Wysteria left the Manor, I’d run directly to the top floor and burst onto the walk to catch a parting glimpse of her long, dark cape bustling down the road with the Hounds in close pursuit. In her younger years, she had often traveled to Boston and New York, but of late she ventured no farther than Georgia Plains or the city of Burlington, thirty miles to the south. Still, her departure guaranteed me hours alone to do as I pleased, to spend my day at the top of the house if I so desired, to look down on the life below me and imagine myself free.
That October afternoon, Wysteria’s thin figure having just disappeared around the bend, I settled myself on the large trunk that served as a bench in the glass house. I often brought the nets up there with me—the light was better than down by the fire—but that day I had left them in the foyer, still tangled and snarled, wet from the boats. I was in no hurry to make sense of them yet. They could wait.
The day was clear and cloudless. The sun had risen early, warming the glass on the windows and dancing off the swells on the lake. Though it was warm inside, a chill still hung in the air, and so I opened the trunk on which I was sitting to pull out a wool blanket for my shoulders. I shook it vigorously to knock out the dust, and when I did, a key fell to the floor. It was long and thin with unusual engravings upon it, and from its shape I could tell that it was no ordinary key but a skeleton key, a key that could open more than one door, possibly all. I returned the blanket to the trunk, immediately descended the ladder and diligently began trying the key in every lock in the Manor. By late afternoon, I’d found that it opened all the rooms on the third floor, including my own. After all my years of curiosity, I was greatly disappointed to discover that the rooms were nothing more than dim and barren chambers. There was no hidden fortune, no ancient furniture that seemed worthy of a lock.
The only room that was not empty was Captain Barrows’s study, a large, handsome chamber with a broad stone hearth and bay windows looking out over the water. A sturdy rolltop desk stood in one corner, and heavy woven rugs covered the floor. With the exception of a thick layer of dust from lack of use, the study was surprisingly comfortable. The other rooms were cold and sparsely furnished in comparison, not places where I wished to spend any time. The captain’s study, on the other hand, was warm and full of his life.
Wysteria never spoke of her husband, but that winter, as I spent every free moment I could in his study, I came to know Captain Lawrence Barrows, and I began to like this man whom I had never met, and never would. I came to know him only through his model ships, the logs of his days at sea and the many maps that marked his journeys. The captain had sailed around the world twice, had frequented castles and dined with thieves. And he had the great generosity to help one small girl find her way, for it was from the captain’s room, through a hidden passage, that I discovered the entrance to the attic and his bevy of kites.