The Speed of Mercy by Christy Conlin (adventure books to read .txt) 📗

new Bible, a dated Seashells of the World: A Guide to the Better Known Species and a few ragged Stephen King paperbacks. Rushdie was her father’s favourite writer. He would have laughed at the assortment of reading materials. What’s on a bookshelf tells you much of what you need to know, Malmuria. She smiled as she took off her shoes and walked barefoot to the bathroom. She could hear her father’s laughter in her mind. Mal felt old and worn, like a book on a shelf that no one remembered anymore.

Granny Scotia.

Then

“Call me Granny Scotia, Stella darling. Everybody does. I was so happy to hear your father had named you after your aunt. You take after her. Those eyes!” She pinches Stella on the cheek. “I’m sure he’s told you lots of stories about her.” Granny sits back.

“Well, no. He never even mentioned her, not even once.”

Granny huffs. “Men can’t deal with the past as well as women. They dig holes and bury things. It’s been my experience that whatever you bury always claws its way back out. It was terribly upsetting for your father. His sister was only thirteen. Frankie was there as well. Frankie wasn’t the same after that, and he went away to boarding school, as your father did. I never did meet your mother. We were so sorry to hear about her car accident.”

Granny reaches up and strokes Stella’s cheek. “Grief will run its course. It always does. Cynthia and I will take care of you. We’ll just eat in the kitchen tonight. I can’t bear that formal dining room.”

“We haven’t even had lunch yet . . . Granny Scotia?”

Granny shakes her head. “Of course, darlings, what was I thinking. It’s still so light at suppertime it’s easy to get mixed up. I always find late August especially perplexing, half summer, half autumn. Stella, did you see the periwinkle border? Such a pretty blue. The sorcerer’s violet, as it’s also known. It’s said if you gaze upon the flower, it will aid in the restoration of memory. Perhaps I should weave myself a garland and put it on my head.” Granny laughs as she stares across the gardens, at the bay offshore, her eyes on the offing, gazing at something there the girls can’t see.

Stella has a moment of hesitation. She bites her lip. She wants to ask Granny Scotia more about Stella Violette and how she died.

Granny snaps back from wherever she went. “Take Stella inside and give her a tour of the house. It’s not Blenheim Palace but it will do. Frank will sell it, if he has his way.”

The girls go in through a rear sunroom with sofas and chairs and then into the back hall. There is a vast old kitchen to the left.

“Sorry the place is a bit dusty. Granny doesn’t do much housework these days. There was a housekeeper but my dad said she up and quit in spring. Dad says it’s hard to get good help around here, people who can do good work and be discreet.”

They walk into the heart of the house, impressive rooms at either side — a drawing room, a receiving room, a formal dining room with ornate china and elaborate silver place settings on the table.

Stella looks at the china, the grand chandelier. The window at the side is partly opened, an old grey screen keeping out the August bugs. Cynthia beckons from the doorway and then skips down another hall that runs along the side of the house to what Cynthia tells Stella is a butler’s pantry, from way back when there was a butler, maids and a cook, when Granny Scotia was very young. They make their way to the formal dining room, a gigantic portrait of her great-grandfather looms above the fireplace. “Allow me to introduce you to another Franklin Seabury. He was a lumber baron or something. And the grandfather before that was a sea captain. My father says we’re related to an explorer who led the Franklin Expedition to the North where they ran out of food and started eating each other and froze to death and gross stuff like that. The painting is all my father has from his family, an old painting of some uptight old guy. An illustrious sea captain,” Cynthia says. “That’s how my father describes him. Whatever that means. Granny says that he was a sea captain who did a lot of bad things. They had slaves.”

The girls run up the grand staircase, taking two steps at a time, flying by the oil paintings. Upstairs there are two halls off the staircase, grand bedrooms, and then a third flight of stairs. “We don’t need to go up there. It was storage and where the maids slept, a sewing room and sitting room. It’s all just full of antique stuff now. It’s super-hot up there too, in the summer, even with the windows open. Granny Scotia sits up there in the winter by the fire,” Cynthia mentions.

“Granny says the house was modernized in 1900, when they rebuilt it after the fire, and then nothing was done except the wiring. It’s just like it was and Granny wants it this way. Let me show you the original kitchen.” With that Cynthia pounds down the stairs singing and Stella scampers after her, singing along, trying to catch the lyrics but just making up sounds to join in. They enter into a cavernous cellar room with windows on the southern side, a colossal iron cook stove that seems almost built into the stone wall, rows of built-in cupboards.

“This is the only part of the house that didn’t burn. Granny says they just left it as it was, that her forerunners couldn’t bear to do away with the hearth, the kitchen. I guess it was a sacred area.”

And then they hear someone calling their names and run back up to the main floor. A man who resembles Cynthia stands at the top of the stairs.