The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (the two towers ebook .TXT) 📗

day, we’d been apprised that we needn’t bother: our children and three grandchildren had decided instead to come to us. Partly it was curiosity, of course, to see where we resided; partly an excuse for a real holiday.

When I mentioned this to Elspeth Westin and her mother and several other women at “tea,” they looked more than ordinarily pleased and Elspeth added, “emboldened by the news to ask another boon of us.” That boon was the use of the ground floor rooms of our house for a holiday party Christmas Eve with a tiny ball dance. When I wondered how that might be accomplished, the two Westins stood up and asked Dimitry to help them push aside a wall-sized sideboard. Behind it were wide double doors, (see? more of them) barely visible in the flocked ivy wall papering. These doors opened the large dining room to the even larger front formal parlor we sat in, making for a good-sized space that they assured us would sufficiently hold all the guests coming. They would seasonally decorate it all, including an eight-foot tall pine tree for the entry foyer.

“Perhaps,” Martin said when I related all this to him later that day. “They can be persuaded to also provide holiday presents for our relations when they arrive?” I had to laugh but when Elspeth dropped by later with time-worn photographs of how it had all looked decked out on the holidays during “her Ladyship’s final decades,” in the teens of the past century, I had to admit it would not only work well but look marvelous for the grandchildren to see. So that was agreed upon, too.

Good to their word, Elspeth and a group of her minions arrived two days before our children’s arrival and began their assault upon the décor. Dimitry and his mother helped, and Martin and I got out of their way and instead took a long drive to pick up our prepared goose and various accoutrement foods for the holiday dinner itself, to be served the day after the little cotillion. Upon our arriving home, the Gracks excitedly helped us unload our two-seater Ford KA, barring us from the main rooms until after our latish supper in the breakfast nook, at which time we were led blindfolded into the festive area and were delightedly shocked at its transformation via natural and unnatural elements into a winter wonderland.

This holiday event turned out to be nearly perfect, but for one miniscule moment of disquietude. The already elderly parson brought along his quite aged mother, a wisp of a white-haired thing in a handsome oak wheelchair. During the course of the evening, she seemed to disappear and I went in search of her to bring her back to the festivity or to see if she needed anything. I found her in the little used, southeastern end of the house, in a hallway of what I always thought of as Dimitry’s domain, as there were several chambers where he did his various household repairs and storage. I located her chair turned to face a completely unprepossessing stretch of hallway wall and at first, I thought her asleep, she was so utterly still.

As I tried to move her away and back into the main rooms, she said quite clearly, “Of course you don’t hear it, do you?”

“Hear what?” I asked, as one could barely make out the sounds of the musical trio playing this far away.

“Hear what?” she asked. “Why, the tapping.” When I asked what tapping, she instead remarked, “Clear as when I first heard it here when I was a lass of six, helping my own granny.” She began speaking of her visits to the house with her grandmother who occasionally helped out in service here. She spoke so much of her then that I asked where her own parents were. She made a little moue and said, “They weren’t good to me. I was taken away to live with Grams—for my own good.”

I managed to get her turned about and back into the main rooms, where we were both greeted warmly with toasts of eggnog and little gifts. But she had made a distinct impression upon me and I made certain to say goodbye to her again when her wheelchair was ramped into a Caravan on the street to take her home. She grasped my hand then and pulled me close to her face with an unsuspected vigor and fiercely whispered, “You are a far better mistress here than that old witch, you know.” When I looked surprised, she nodded at the house. “The one they all cream over.”

“Lady Sofia, you mean?”

To which she replied, “I heard this myself from my Granny: while that one was carrying her first born, her husband’s child vanished one summer’s day. A bright and handsome little lad. He was never found again.” Then we were pulled apart by the van’s other occupants already inside and clamoring to leave.

It wasn’t until after the holidays when we were alone again that I asked Martin if he still heard the tapping. He looked at me curiously and repeated, “Tapping! Yes, perhaps that’s what it is: not a leak!” I was about to tell him the parson’s mother heard it too when he brushed me off. “I’ve learned to live with it. It’s of no matter, anyway.” But, of course, that made me wonder all the more. I’d not read anything of Lady Sofia’s personal life in the lending library book, which was after all, more broadly narrated and somewhat more architectural in intent. But I’d found out at tea that there was a sort of historical society in the shire’s main town and a few days later while shopping there, I stopped in and introduced myself.

A dark-haired woman looked me up and down and asked what I wanted to know, specifically, about the place. To which I answered, “Well, I suppose about its longest-term mistress, Lady Sofia Cranburgh.” Lydia, for so her name was, suggested I go about