Bird - By Rita Murphy
1
Wysteria did not care where I had come from or where I had been. Nor did she care that I was small and delicate in nature and easily carried off by the wind. She cared only that I stay with her in the great house she occupied on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain.
I came to Bourne Manor on a bright morning in the month of February just as the winter snows had settled in for good along the shore, taking up residence in the open fields and across the cliffs. In those days, I was often picked up by the wind and left in odd places because of it—blown into the tops of low trees or caught up in the scrubs or briars—though never before had I been taken so close to the turbulent waters of a lake.
Knocked hard by a gust, left tangled in the branches of one of the lone elms that skirted the bay, I remembered little of what had come before; only a series of faceless relatives and small drafty houses; only a hollow feeling of something that had once been but was no longer.
From that lonely elm, I was retrieved by two of Wysteria’s Hounds. Pulled from the branches by their strong jaws. I was lost and Wysteria found me. Or perhaps the Manor itself found me, beckoning me to its gates on that February morning.
The home of Wysteria Barrows was a looming structure that had the appearance of having grown sideways out of the earth. Though firmly anchored, it listed dramatically to the left like an old tree turned by the wind, its foundation clinging to the red stone cliffs for support as a tern might cling in a storm.
The Manor was four stories in height with three turrets, two balconies and a widow’s walk at its pinnacle. Its once-ivory paint had been stripped by rough weather, returning it to its natural gray clapboard, and Wysteria had left it so. There were twenty-two rooms in the Manor, five staircases, ten fireplaces and one slender tower on the west wing that held my room, a room with vaulted ceilings and windows that looked out over the harbor and across to the wild Adirondack Mountains. A grand place, my room. And indeed Bourne Manor itself was grand. No grander house could you find in the islands or on the mainland.
As grand as the Manor was, it was always a lonely place, destined from its beginning to be set apart from all other houses. Some said the Manor harbored an ill-gotten fortune within its walls, which carried a terrible and irreversible curse. Others believed that its foundation stones, having been laid crooked, forever doomed it to a perverse and tragic end. Whichever story was true, Bourne Manor knew little happiness within its walls. The four generations of grim ancestral portraits lining the main stairwell bore testimony to this, as did the vacant and lifeless rooms that towered over the cliffs.
The Manor’s ballroom had never been used for dancing, as far as I knew, nor the parlors for entertaining guests, for no guests ever came there. To those on the outside, it was a strange and mournful dwelling that made for ghost stories, of which there were many and for good cause. For although no one ever perished unnaturally within its walls that I knew of, the Manor, set out on its own as it was, battered by the wind, invited the spirits of those long departed and of those who roamed the shores in search of a warm fire, as it had invited me. The lost and aimless: to these Bourne Manor gave its shelter.