I gathered up my clothes where I found them bunched up at the foot of the bed, tangled up under the sheets and the quilt. I dressed quickly and hurried out of the room. The nightmare of my father straddling me had been too horrible and vivid for me to even consider returning to the bed in the yellow room that night, let alone fall asleep there. Remembering the chill of the lower part of the house, I stepped back into the moonlit room and retrieved the quilt from the floor. I took care to close the door behind me, though God only knew who, or what, I thought I was locking in that room. I left the window open so that the rest of the smoke could escape and give the room a good airing at the same time.
The upstairs corridor of Wild Fell was unearthly quiet, but I found the staircase and made my way carefully downstairs. The Oriental runner on the stairs under my bare feet was soft and worn, but cold like the rest of the house.
The fire I’d left burning in the parlour fireplace had died down to embers, but with very little effort I was able to coax it back to life. I threw on more logs and settled into a chair to think. My throat was still raw from the smoke, but I had no intention of leaving this room until the sun came up, not even the short distance to the kitchen for a glass of water. Instead, I sat and watched the flames and tried to deconstruct what had occurred in the yellow bedroom.
First point: I fell asleep fully dressed, but I had woken nude. The explanation for that was simple enough: I had undressed in my sleep. The room had grown too hot, and I had been uncomfortable. Then, the smoke had woken me, and all of it was mixed up in those images of unspeakable, unnatural foulness.
Second point: The erotic dream had obviously been a dream of Ame. While I hadn’t thought of her consciously for a very long time, perhaps I had been suppressing feelings of loss—the loss of our marriage, the loss of those months I’d spent in the hospital recovering from the car crash that took away part of my memory; the loss of my father’s memories to Alzheimer’s; and mostly, my loss of him to the disease, and my abandonment of him to come here to Wild Fell, to chase some entirely ludicrous fantasy of opening a summerhouse in the middle of Georgian Bay. The dream was a synthesis of those various intertwined lusts and guilts. Likewise, the figure I thought I’d seen outside the window.
As for the scents, which were as clear to me in the dream as the voice and the outrageous presence of my father in that perverted context—the violets, the liquor, the warm flesh—these could only have been preambles to my brain identifying the smell of smoke.
Also smoke-related had to be my imagining that I had seen the figure standing on the lawn. My eyes had been streaming with tears, my vision had been blurred. My brain had simply plucked another fantasy from my distraught state earlier that evening when I arrived at the house and replayed it. In both cases, what I thought I’d seen proved to be an illusion on second glance. There was no woman standing on the lawn of Wild Fell either this evening, or half an hour ago. I was alone on Blackmore Island and alone in the vast house.
Thank you, Herr Doktor Freud. Very comforting.
But I was not comforted, not at all.
I knew I hadn’t woken because of the smell of smoke; I had woken because of the sound of a man’s voice in my ear muttering obscene carnality and from the weight of my father, who, though more than four hundred kilometres away, was somehow on top of me, trying to fuck me. The sensation of the tongue in my ear had been so vivid that even remembering it caused me to reach inside with my index finger to dry it or to wipe it clean.
In particular, I was horrified by the memory of the voice I’d heard: it had been an educated man’s voice, but there was violence underlying the veneer of civility, even in addition to its liquor-cured coarseness. It had been the voice of a man whose rage was normally kept on a very short chain like a murderous animal, the voice of no man I had ever known, least of all my father. And I was quite sure it had been a real voice.
All of this I pushed away, as much for my own sanity as anything else.
It had to have been a nightmare, nothing more. It had nothing to do with me except for the fact that I had been the nightmare’s vessel. None of it had happened. I recalled Scrooge’s words in A Christmas Carol as he dismissed the appearance of Marley’s ghost as something imaginary: “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”
I pulled the quilt around me and curled myself into a semi-foetal crouch, longing for daylight and for the sound of the city—any city—waking up and coming to life.
Sleep eluded me that night as I lay on a divan in front of the fireplace in the parlour, but I must have nodded off again at some point, because when I opened my eyes again, the sun was shining through the panels of stained glass above the shuttered windows along the wall opposite the hearth.
I went to the window and opened the shutters just a crack. The fresh air that blew in off the lake was soft and cool and magnificently clean after the rain. When I pushed them open all the way, light flooded in, utterly transforming the room. Whereas last night I had seen only shadows and smothered opulence in a Victorian mausoleum, this morning the room was gracious, even welcoming.
Further, I felt it welcoming me. Where the sunlight touched the ancient white paint, the old furniture, and the dark hardwood floors, there was now depth and dimension and the promise of actual beauty in the offing. And it was all mine.
What had that lunatic Fowler woman said? The house and everything in it.
This morning, in this sunlight, there was nothing sinister in her words. I had made an extraordinary real estate investment. For the first time since buying it under such unorthodox circumstances, I saw Wild Fell as a home—my home—not just a house or even a guest house; and certainly not the white elephant I had feared. I walked to the front door and opened it, letting the light into the front hallway. I felt the cool fresh breeze on my face from outside, smelled water, good fresh earth, and wildflowers. When the sun touched the rich mahogany, the grain seemed to pulse with a sumptuous crimson radiance all its own.
I put on my shoes and stepped onto the veranda, then down the great concrete steps to the gravel driveway. In the darkness of the storm last night, I had only seen the exterior of Wild Fell in flashes of lightning through the rain.
In the morning light, however, I saw that my house was more than just a house. It was a masterpiece of gothic revival architecture on par with any manor house I’d ever seen in books or magazines. The old stone exterior walls were shades of grey and taupe. They had acquired a patina over the decades, one that blended perfectly with the surrounding natural palette without challenging it. From where I stood on the driveway, I could clearly make out the complex silhouette of turrets rising from what could only be some sort of anterior wing. I walked the perimeter of the house, feeling ludicrously lordly as I surveyed it and the acres behind it, the wildly overgrown formal gardens that spread out across the acres to the place where the fields sheared downward and became the granite cliffs I had seen from the lake on arrival.
As I came around the part of the house that I knew would lead me back to the veranda and the portico, I noticed that one of the clapboard-sided porticos had fallen into a state of complete dereliction. There had obviously been a fire there at some point. The intact timbers showed signs of having been charred. The other wall had been taken out completely and its burned boards had collapsed. There had been no structural damage to the wing to which it was attached. The porch had a sealed doorway to the rear of the house and its flanking walls were concrete. If the fire had spread, I would be looking at a ruin right now, so perhaps the house was blessed in some ways other than its apparent agelessness.
I allowed myself to imagine Wild Fell with additional furniture, modern furniture, and the all the amenities of a modern guest house, all of which I could afford. I saw new paint, new wallpaper, paintings bought or maybe discovered in the attic, new beds, the gardens restored—if not with the doomed Queen Mary’s black roses, then at least with the best rosebushes money could buy.
An adventure waiting to happen. The loathsome cliché be damned, my heart felt as though it could soar right up into the blue sky—my sky, over my house and my island.
Back inside, I opened the shutters in the library, as well. The effect was the same; the light transformed the room. There were more books than I had noticed last night. The shelves were deeper than I had first surmised and many of the volumes were pushed back against the farthest recesses of the shelving, which was why I hadn’t seen them in the gloom, thinking the bookcases more or less empty. I brought a handful of books closer to the edge of one of the shelves, aligning the spines. It turned out to be a five-volume 1825 leather bound set of The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, magnificent, if a little dusty.
On the shelf immediately adjacent, I noticed three or four rows of books that seemed far older than the works of literature I had perused on the first shelf. These were outsized, the bindings hand-tooled. I read the titles on the spines. Some appeared to be in Latin, but without any real proficiency in ancient languages, I could only guess.
Here then was what appeared to be an actual sixteenth century edition of Malleus maleficarum, maleficas, & earum haerisim, ut phramea potentissima conterens by Henricus Institoris and Jacobus Sprenger, the famous Hammer of Witches published in Cologne in 1520. I recognized the title from a paper I had written in my second year at university on the European witch burnings of the seventeenth century. Also here was Jean Bodin’s De la demonomanie des sorciers from 1586; Pierre Le Loyer’s A Treatise of specters or strange sights, visions and apparitions . . . also of witches, sorcerers, enchanters and such like; Daemonolatreiae libri tres by Nicholas Remy. It would have cost a fortune to assemble a collection of first edition antique books and folios of this calibre.
There were other titles here too—some in English, others in French and German, all of them apparently pertaining to the history and practice of witchcraft. While many appeared to be genuine first editions from the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, others appeared to be from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, published in English, with titles like To Call the Ancients, Grimoire of the Nine Stars, The Eye of Horus, and Lore and Summoning of the Bridge-Builders of Time.
I frowned. In my newly minted role as proprietor of an ancient library, I took one of the newer volumes off the shelf to buff it gently against my shirt to try to clean it.
As I did so, something fluttered out from its pages and landed lightly on the faded Oriental carpet at my feet. I laid the book on the trestle table and bent down to pick it up.
Holding it up to the sunlight from the window, I saw that it was a faded sepia-toned nineteenth-century photograph of an imperious-looking young woman. A rip in the emulsion ran halfway across the surface of the image, cutting across the woman’s mouth and neck. Oddly, the effect of the rip, which technically obscured the woman’s mouth, was to stretch her smile in a way that stopped just short of the grotesque without any compromise to her beauty.
Her hair was gathered in a loose knot behind her head, tendrils of which tumbled with contrived casualness down the back of her neck. The dress she wore was modest in design, the under-sleeves trimmed with lace, the bodice buttoned, and flaring out into a wide skirt. Though relatively plain, it was obviously the garment of a woman of significant wealth. From the way the photographer had highlighted the folds of the dress, I took it to be organza or some other expensive silk that caught the light and held it.
Her head was inclined slightly, as though barely deigning to acknowledge the camera—indeed she seemed not to acknowledge any imperative to be pleasing at all, though her beauty was such that she couldn’t be anything less.
When I looked closer, I made a discovery that astonished and delighted me.
The woman had been posed regally, at a three-quarter angle with her hand on the back of an elaborately carved chair in the classic Victorian style, but I saw that the image was a clever optical illusion.
While she was indeed posed against a photographer’s seamless backdrop, the photograph wasn’t of a woman in front of a backdrop; it was a photograph of the reflection of a woman standing in front of a backdrop, as recorded in the glass of an ornate mirror, the frame of which I could see at the frayed edge of the photograph.
I turned the photo over. There was writing there in violet-coloured ink, now long faded: To my dearest brother Malcolm from his best-beloved only true love, Rosa, Wild Fell, Alvina, autumn 1872.
I reached for the book on the trestle table and opened it. Inside the cover was another of the floral bookplates I’d found yesterday in the small book of Wordsworth’s poetry, Ex Libris Rosa Blackmore. I felt a thrill of proprietary detective excitement. The woman in the photograph was Rosa Blackmore, daughter of Alexander Blackmore, the man who had built Wild Fell. I looked closer at the bookplate. There was a diamond-shaped lozenge in the lower centre of the design. Inside the lozenge was a heraldic griffin holding what appeared to be a Scottish thistle.
I carried the book out into the hallway and retraced my steps backwards from my arrival last night. I looked up at the archway at the carved coat of arms. The shield was the same as the design inside the lozenge on the bookplate.
The coat of arms on the archway was clearly that of Alexander Blackmore. As his daughter, Rosa would use her father’s arms in a lozenge, as befitted a lady born into the antiquated traditions that Alexander Blackmore had clearly intended to perpetuate here in what must have been rough, rude country.
“Well, my lady,” I said out loud. “It appears we’ve found each other.”
The sound of my own voice startled me in the stillness, and I realized that I had already grown accustomed to the general silence that lay over Wild Fell, the same silence that had doubtless blanketed it during the entirety of its lonely untenanted century. I was struck yet again by the house’s bizarre apparent agelessness, especially as I knew that it had lain vacant and shuttered for so many decades in a raw northern environment. This had been one of the selling points of the house, and I counted myself surreally fortunate that it fell into my hands under these circumstances, but I was still baffled by the how. There was no trace of mice, let alone birds or raccoons or any other of the wild fauna that made nests for themselves in old abandoned houses in the middle of nowhere. Aside from the dust that had obviously accumulated between the last departure of the cleaning crews and my arrival last night, there was nothing to indicate that the house was uninhabited.
It occurred to me that I was exhibiting a pathetic case of insecurity, a form of reverse narcissism that made it impossible for me to picture myself as extraordinary—even lucky—ergo there must be some sort of “catch,” some sort of downside to my good fortune. I could probably trace that insecurity back to my childhood—to the bullying I had endured as a frail child, to my mother’s disassociation and emotional distance—but I had always resisted that sort of pop psychiatry, finding it unbearably maudlin. I had been able to bury it by becoming useful: an athlete, a friend, a lover, and eventually a caregiver. Still, the existence of the exact insecurities I was feeling now as a property owner were undeniably entrenched. They hadn’t come from nowhere.
When I’d asked Mrs. Fowler about a “catch,” she had been offended, pointing out that the house had been inspected and been found structurally sound, even of superior condition. If the inspector had shared my questions about the how the structural integrity had been maintained, he hadn’t shared them in his report. Too, I reminded myself that the house had not come cheap. Not only had I never written a cheque of that size, I’d never dared to imagine having that amount of money in my bank account in my lifetime.
And now the house was mine, and I was a lucky man. It was that simple. It was time I made friends with that notion and moved on. If the house was extraordinary, then perhaps it had chosen me; perhaps becoming one with Wild Fell would make me extraordinary, too.
In any event, there would be a great deal of work to do to get the house ready for next year’s guests at the Happy Ghosts Bed and Breakfast. Mrs. Fowler might be half a bubble off of plumb, but that was a damn good name for a B&B. Maybe I’d use it after all.
I suddenly realized that I was famished. I remembered the protein bars in my suitcase upstairs in the yellow bedroom. Involuntarily, I felt my stomach contract at the thought of going back up there. Moving from room to room downstairs this morning had buoyed my spirits immensely but the memory of that terrible dream came back to me in a wave. I shoved the memory away, annoyed with myself for lapsing back into self-indulgent melodrama so soon after deciding that I would no longer yield to such things. As the sun had risen outside, the wood inside the house had begun to warm, releasing its particular perfume into the air. I was standing in a shaft of dazzling jewel-toned sunlight from one of the two stained glass windows in the hallway, and it was beautiful. More, it was mine. Again, I felt Wild Fell gather me in its century-old embrace, and this time I yielded to it willingly.
There was nothing for me to be afraid of anywhere in this house, my house. I would sleep wherever I chose, or walk wherever I chose. That decided, I mounted the stairs to the upper hallway. In the soft morning light, the Oriental carpet runner on the staircase revealed its rich patterns of burgundy, navy blue, and gold. It, too, would have been there for at least as long as the house had remained empty, if not longer. But like so much of the rest of the house, it had somehow retained its integrity. Though worn in places, the weave was tight and lush, the colours still vibrant, if low-burning, like the finest examples of carpeting of its type.
I proceeded down the hallway and stopped outside the yellow room. The door was closed, exactly as I had left it last night. I sighed with exasperation at my own reluctance to open it, then turned the handle and stepped across the threshold. I took the room’s measure.
Everything was exactly as I’d left it: the mess of sheets on the floor, the suitcases, the t-shirt I had been wearing under the flannel shirt when I went to bed, the t-shirt I hadn’t put back on when I went downstairs after the nightmare. I still smelled the smoke from the fireplace, but I was delighted to see that there was no ash on the floor, nor had the smoke blackened the room’s walls.
The windows. I stood very, very still. The windows were closed.
Last night I had left them open to air the room out and now they were closed. More than that, they weren’t closed the way the wind might have blown them shut; rather they were closed with the latch in place, something that could only be accomplished deliberately, from inside the room. I closed my eyes tightly, then opened them. I repeated it, blinking quickly, trying to clear my head.
Had I closed them before I went downstairs and simply forgotten? It was late. I was disoriented and terrified from the nightmare. There had been smoke everywhere and visibility was reduced to the moonlight outside and only that much once I’d been able to throw the shutters open and let in the cold night air. But I was sure I hadn’t closed them. I could have sworn to it in a church, or in a court of law.
And yet there they were, shut tightly, the latch in its place.
I walked over to the windows and tapped the glass lightly, half expecting to feel someone, or something, tap back. Nothing did, of course.
I felt no fear. There was no sense at all that I was anything but alone in the old house, even with having thought I’d seen the human figure on the lawn yesterday. I’d dismissed it as the result of last night’s nervous fantods. There was only one possible explanation, the same explanation I had used to dismiss the nightmare: all of the stresses leading up to my arrival on Blackmore Island were causing my mind to play tricks.
I heaved my suitcase onto the bed and unzipped it, rummaging around the interior for the protein bars I had tucked away just in case. I found them there among the socks and t-shirts. Ravenous, I tore the wrapper off one of them and devoured it in three quick bites. The chocolate taste of it stimulated my hunger and I ate a second one, only slightly more slowly than I had the first.
When I had swallowed the last bite, I wadded up the wrappers in my hand and automatically looked around the room for a wastepaper basket of some kind. It was a reflexive thought, one that people who live in normal houses have several times a day. It didn’t occur to me that there was no reason for there to be waste, or somewhere to put it, in a room that had not been slept in for over a hundred years. And yet, there it was, on the ground next to the white ash vanity table, a small wastepaper basket covered in embroidered fabric. Again, the pattern was roses and violets of the kind that had been enwreathed on the bookplates belonging to Rosa Blackmore.
Last night I had deduced that this had been the bedroom of Alexander Blackmore’s daughter, but until my discovery of the photograph downstairs in the library and the lozenge of the shield of her father’s coat of arms, she hadn’t had a name, or an identity. This wasn’t just “the yellow bedroom,” this had been the bedroom of Rosa Blackmore of Wild Fell, who had been born, lived, and died in this house.
As I walked over to throw the wrappers out, a glimmer of gold in the tangle of sheets on the floor caught my eye when the sun struck it. When I bent down to pick it up, something sharp jabbed into my thumb, piercing the skin and drawing blood. I inhaled sharply and drew back. Hanging from a pin in the soft meat of my thumb-pad was a cameo brooch, obviously very old, with a gold filigree aureole. I pulled the pin out of my thumb and pressed my thumb tightly to my forefinger to stop the bleeding. I held the brooch in my other hand and examined it closely.
Unlike most cameo brooches, which featured women’s faces, either in profile or head on, this brooch was a fine rendering of a bearded man with a noble brow, holding a trident over his shoulder like a royal sceptre—probably Poseidon, the Greek god of the ocean. When I held it up to the window, the sunlight through the shell turned the image from white to radiant, glowing pink. The gold looked genuine. It had clearly been an expensive piece of jewellery in its day, and even now it would likely fetch a good price. I was not a jewellery connoisseur, by any means, but Ame had inherited a cameo from her grandmother—the “something old” part of her wedding ensemble—and it had been half the size of this one, and much less delicately carved, yet Ame had said it was worth a great deal.
I checked my thumb to see if the bleeding had stopped, relieved to find that it had. I placed the brooch in the marquetry box on the mantelpiece, then sat down on the bed. The cameo had obviously gotten caught on the inside of the quilt when the cleaning crew had made the bed. I hadn’t felt it in the bed last night when I went to sleep because I had been dressed, but after all, I had been so exhausted that I’d even managed to undress myself under the covers without waking up, instead weaving it all into a horrible dream about Ame and my father.
Also, it was becoming more and more apparent that the isolation from people, a new experience for me, was beginning to fray my imagination. I needed supplies in town anyway, so I decided to take the boat across Devil’s Lake early that afternoon to the beach where my car was parked, then drive into Alvina. I could do some grocery shopping and perhaps stop at the Alvina library to see if there was any material in the stacks pertaining to Wild Fell or the Blackmore family history.
But first I wanted to continue the exploration of my house.
I had yet to set foot in the servants’ wing on the third floor, and I knew that there was some sort of basement beneath the kitchen, because I’d seen the doorway to it last night.
The servants’ wing was bare except for some ancient single beds made of cheap pine and chests of drawers of the same wood. The Blackmore family clearly either had remarkably loyal servants, or else—more likely—they didn’t care about their comfort. In the class-stratified years of the British-inflected Canadian 1800s, the men, women, and children who toiled for next to nothing in the service of the grand families were required to be hardy and Spartan in their expectations of what was owed them in the way of comforts. No plush Oriental carpets here, just hard, cold floors.
I left the windows as I’d found them, shuttered and with weak light shining through the slats, and walked back through the upper hallways and down the staircase. I paused at the yellow bedroom, finding the door closed, as I had left it. Then I descended to the main floor and made my way into the silent kitchen and the doorway I had seen last night.
I discovered there was no electricity in the cellar. Since I hadn’t brought a flashlight with me, I found some candles in one of the kitchen drawers and fitted one into a silver candlestick I’d taken from the dining room. Holding the lit candle in front of me, I made my way carefully down the stone stairs.
I felt the draft almost at once, the earthy cold of dirt floors and old, old stone.
The cellar was actually not one room, but a sort of subterranean antechamber with doorways leading into what seemed to be three separate storage rooms, each with its own thick wooden door. Two of the doors opened easily, but the third was locked tight and no matter how hard I leaned into it with my shoulder and rattled the handle, it was immovable. When I realized that opening it without a key was a lost cause, I explored the two rooms that were unlocked.
The first one was filled with rubbish—rusted garden furniture, rakes and hoes, smaller gardening implements, and a low, rough wooden table with a shelf over it lined with clay pots and jars containing God only knew what. It had clearly been used as an underground gardener’s shed in the heyday of Wild Fell, but it looked like when the gardens went fallow, this room did, too.
In the second room, however, I made a remarkable discovery.
Amidst the piles of old books and various trunks and suitcases, I found a crate containing the framed oil portraits of the Blackmore family—probably the portraits whose outlines I had seen on the walls of the parlour. There were four in total, each one framed in gold leaf period frames.
Bringing the candle as close to the surface of the paintings as I dared without accidentally singeing the canvas, I tried to make out the faces.
I recognized Rosa immediately from the print I’d found in the library. She was dressed in a similar fashion as in the photograph: a modest but rich-looking gown of what looked like brown velvet, though in this painting the dress had a high collar. Pinned at the throat was the very cameo brooch of Poseidon I had found upstairs in my bed. In this portrait, Rosa appeared no less regal, but there was a softness in her eyes here that hadn’t been present in the photograph. I realized that she was younger in this portrait, likely by a good ten years, though this might merely have been a painterly device to achieve an effect for vanity’s sake, or even a trick of my candlelight.
I carefully placed her portrait against the side of the crate and took out the next.
This one was a painting of an older woman dressed entirely in black. Her thick white hair was elaborately styled, piled on top of her head and set with a pair of jewelled tortoiseshell combs. I took it be a portrait of Rosa’s mother, Alexander Blackmore’s wife, though there was no plaque affixed to the frame indicating the identity of the subject. Her face was severe and angular, and while the artist had obviously tried to flatter his subject, there was something frail, even sickly about her in spite of the imperious tilt of the head.
When I compared the two portraits side by side, I saw that there were echoes of the older woman in Rosa’s face, but whereas Rosa’s lips were full and lush, her mother’s were thin and pinched in an expression that hinted at pain so long suppressed and hidden that in hiding from the world, the pain had become second nature. As if to smooth away traces of whatever illness the painter was trying to camouflage, the older woman was ornately jewelled: against the black velvet of her dress shone a necklace of diamonds and pearls, and she wore a pair of diamond and emerald earrings. The effect was almost perfectly achieved. At a distance, there was nothing of the portrait that would have been out of place in a baronial hallway in any great house anywhere. It was only upon close scrutiny that the woman’s face hinted at secrets, or pain, or private grieving.
I withdrew a third portrait from the crate, and here I met Malcolm Blackmore, Rosa’s brother. Her twin brother, judging by his face, which was nothing less than a masculinized version of his sister’s.
I found myself surprised, not only by their close resemblance, as if they were mirrored selves, far beyond what linked either his sister or himself to their mother, but by the man’s sheer physical presence. To call Malcolm Blackmore merely handsome was to do him a great injustice, especially in the context of the era of the portrait—an era when well-to-do men were usually portrayed as voluptuous and spoiled-looking, red lipped and full-fleshed. By contrast, the young man in the portrait looked as though he had been carved from the very granite of the island that bore his family name. His thick hair was dark brown, almost black. It tumbled from a high, intelligent forehead. The nose was strong and straight, the jaw consequential.
Malcolm Blackmore’s eyes were the same clear charcoal grey-green as Rosa’s, and he looked out at the world through the painting with a similar aristocratic distance, but the similarity in their expressions ended there. There was a warmth and humour in Malcolm Blackmore’s face that was entirely absent in Rosa’s. That and—in spite of his obvious virility—a suggestion of gentleness, perhaps even weakness, in the turn of his mouth.
The final portrait stunned me even more than the one of Malcolm Blackmore, though not for any reasons associated with the portraiture, which was, again, excellent. Judging by the indecipherable signature in the lower right-hand corner of the painting, the same artist had painted all four paintings.
But if the artist had taken pains to flatter Mrs. Blackmore and her children, even his consequential skills as a flatterer had met their match in this instance.
The portrait showed a man in the colder years of late middle-age: hair iron-grey and still thick, eyebrows still dark, the nose and jawline as strong as his son’s—for this was clearly Alexander Blackmore, the patriarch. But here the resemblance to either of his children ended entirely. Aside from everything else, they had obviously inherited their mother’s pellucid eye colour. The eyes of the man in the portrait were almost black. More dramatically, there was an arrogance and a venal cruelty in Alexander Blackmore’s face that chilled me. It was the face of a conqueror that took no prisoners and cared little or nothing for the carnage he left in his wake.
I had encountered this expression often enough in photographs over the course of my history studies at university, particularly one course that dealt with the phenomenon of North American robber barons—the men who imposed their will on an unyielding landscape with their sheer implacability. In some cases, this strength manifested itself in photographs and paintings as a sort of forced noblesse oblige, one that never entirely succeeded in masking the reality that the titan in question was the son of a butcher, or a fishmonger, or a tailor, or merely that his was generic Victorian masculinity—strength, albeit more often than not a bully’s strength.
But in this case, by candlelight, in spite of the veneer of ducal hauteur in this portrait of the laird of Wild Fell, the face rendered here was the face of a monster.
The surface of the painting had been slashed with some kind of long, sharp instrument. There were no jagged edges; rather the cuts appeared to have been made almost lovingly, as though the vandal in question had taken his or her time and profoundly enjoyed the sensation of carving Alexander Blackmore’s face into strips.
I shuddered and turned the portrait away from me, facing it against the side of the crate. At that moment, a cold draft wafted through the basement, and I distinctly heard a soft sigh from the darkness behind me. The flame of my candle flickered, then went out. I heard something behind the locked third door, something that sounded like a piece of furniture being dragged across a stone floor.
I didn’t wait for the scraping sound to repeat itself. I turned tail and stumbled as fast as I could back through the basement. When I found the stairs, I took them three at a time, as though the light from the kitchen windows was oxygen and I had been buried alive in the dark.