Left to itself, the house fell ever more quickly into decay. Animals crept into the pantry and the kitchen, eating the few crumbs and scraps that remained and making their dens inside the walls. Soon, owls discovered this abundant food supply, and they built heavy nests in the entry hall and the ballroom, straining the already weakened rafters. Great gaps appeared in the moldy walls.
When the cord holding a portrait to the wall rotted through, nobody was there to see if it was Great-Great-Grandmamma Esther or Great-Grandpapa Edwin who lay facedown in the dust. A few years later, heavy snow caused a great section of the roof to cave in, but even the thunder of its collapse was not loud enough to be heard in the warm little lodge at the edge of the forest. The laughter of the wedding guests and the music of the fiddles drowned it out. But the musicians’ gallery in the enormous ballroom fell on an autumn day when all was quiet, startling a baby out of his sleep.
“Shhh, my darling,” whispered the baby’s mother, as his father went to see what the noise was.
“Just your family ghosts again, Jane,” he said when he returned. He picked up his fretful little boy. “Hush, my son—here’s some of your Aunt Maude’s teething syrup,” and he rocked the baby back to sleep in his strong woodcutter’s arms.
And when an errant bolt of lightning in a summer thunderstorm struck the decaying pile several years later, no one attempted to put out the blaze. It had been a wet spring, and there was little danger of the fire spreading, so the villagers and the people of the woods gathered with the family and watched the flames reach higher and higher. They backed away when the heat grew uncomfortable, and rats and mice fled from the ruins and ran squeaking over their feet into the trees behind them.
“Poor little things,” Isabella said, holding her daughter’s hand, as the little girl leaped and danced to avoid the scrabbling claws. “Don’t be frightened, Serafina. They’re just running from danger. They mean you no harm.”
And in a few more years, the magnificent mansion with its sweeping staircase, its marble floors, its glaring portraits, was nothing more than a memory. As time went on, the history of the house and of the family that had once lived in it turned into the stuff of legend, and what was true and what was story blended until nobody could say where one ended and the other began.
* * * * *