AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER ONE
This door youmight not open, and you did;
So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed... Here is no treasure hid,
No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring
The sought-for Truth, no heads of women slain
For greed like yours, no writhings of distress;
But only what you see... Look yet again:
An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.
Yet this alone out of my life I kept
Unto myself, lest any know me quite;
And you did so profane me when you crept
Unto the threshold of this room tonight
That I must never more behold your face.
This now is yours. I seek another place.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay,Bluebeard
HERSISTERSWEREin a dither.
This was not an unusual state of affairs. Petronella and Dorothea Charteris had never met a molehill they couldn’t make into the Alps. Angelina, the younger sister they preferred to exclude from anything and everything, usually ignored them.
But as Angelina slipped through the servants’ passageway this evening, racing to change for dinner after another long day of hiding from her family in this petri dish they called their home, she paused. Because she could hear the rise and fall of her sisters’ voices a little too well, and they weren’t discussing one of their usual topics—like why they were cruelly sequestered away in the family mausoleum as their youth and vitality slipped away...
Because it never occurred to them to leave and make their own way, as Angelina planned to do, when they could sit at home and complain instead.
“We shall be slaughtered in our sleep!” Petronella screeched.
Angelina paused, there on the other side of the paper-thin wall of the drawing room, because that sounded extreme. Even for the notably dramatic Petronella.
“It will be me, I am sure of it,” Dorothea pronounced in the trembling tones of an Early Christian Martyr. Her happy place, in other words. “He will spirit me away, and no. No, Petronella. Do not attempt to make this better.” Angelina could hear nothing that suggested Petronella had attempted anything of the kind. “It will be a sacrifice—but one I am prepared to make for the sake of our family!”
Angelina blinked. Dorothea preferred to talk about sacrifices rather than make any, in her experience. What on earth was going on?
Petronella wailed, then. Like a banshee—a sound she had spent a whole summer some years back perfecting, waking everyone round the clock with what their mother had icily calledthat caterwauling. That had been the summer Petronella had wanted to go on a Pilates retreat to Bali with the loose group of pointless women of indiscernible means she called friends—when she wasn’t posting competing selfies on social media. Petronella had claimed the screams had nothing at all to do with Papa’s refusal to fund her trip.
“Everything is blood and pain, Dorothea!” she howled now. “We aredoomed!”
That sounded like the usual drama, so Angelina rolled her eyes. Then, conscious that time was passing and her happiness was directly related to remaining invisible to her stern mother, she hurried along the passage. She took the back stairs two at a time until she reached the family wing. Though it was less a wing and more the far side of the once great house that everyone pretended had not fallen into ruin.
Charming,her mother liked to say stoutly whether or not anyone had asked.Historic.
Angelina was well aware that in the village, they used other words. More appropriate words.Rundown,for example. She had once pretended not to hear the grocer’s wife refer to the once-proud Charteris family estate, nestled in what bits of the French countryside her father hadn’t sold off to pay his debts, as“that crumbling old heap.”
Though it had never been made clear to her whether the woman referred to the house or Angelina’s father.
