In the late morning light, the house seemed old and abandoned, but not dangerous. The air smelled of roses and Gretchen walked back up the creaking porch stairs. She had the sense of the entire house taking a breath as she walked into the parlor. Inside she could hear the hum of insects, but no scamper of feet or clomping of hooves.
She walked directly upstairs to the library. The sound of her boots on the old wood echoed loudly, and then suddenly she felt something sharp and hard strike her shoulder, then a crash and glass splintering all around at her feet. One of the old portraits had come loose and fallen. The pain seared and throbbed where the pointed wooden edge had gouged her skin. She put her hand on her shoulder and felt the warm trickle of blood. Another few inches and the corner would have struck the center of her head. She rushed up the stairs, kicking the glass aside and crunching over it.
The library door was open and the great mottled mirror stood across from it, the reflection creating the illusion of another hallway that led to another room; she glanced at it and saw the reflection of the cat as it walked out of the library—but when she turned away from the mirror and looked down, there was no cat.
Gretchen steeled herself and went into the library, shutting the door. The same smell of vintage shops and mold greeted her. She went to work right away, opening the closet, crouching beneath the dresses, and pulling out stacks of leather-bound journals, not bothering to look at each of them but setting them aside to take with her. She did not want to stay long in the house, but found herself frozen in front of the portrait of Fidelia, studying her face. The journal she had read—and now the few letters she’d read since arriving—revealed someone brave and trapped. Gretchen had never considered how women lived before—always took it for granted, like they were so stupid to have wanted to have kids so young, or they were so stupid to always wait on their husbands, to spend their lives doing crafts. Fidelia’s writing was the first she realized those kinds of lives were not chosen. The first she fully felt how trapped women had been.
Next she looked beneath the bed, sliding out several ancient hatboxes and shoe boxes. One was filled with onion-skin paper cut into patterns for dresses—doll dresses, or maybe for little children. She shoved it aside and opened another. In this she found a collection of drawings on stiff white paper, and what looked like saved school lessons. Judging by the handwriting the artists and authors of these works couldn’t have been more than seven years old. The drawing was of a house, the Axton mansion, and people riding horses, carrying torches.
There was also a square of fabric on which someone was practicing needlepoint. A circle of roses in colored thread, and inside the circle it read: As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
A drawer in the side table was full of old bone and shell hair clips, and one of them, which looked like it was made of ivory, she recognized from the portrait of Fidelia. She held it, cool and smooth in her hand like something natural and precious, and brutally obtained.
A cedar chest in a corner of the room held handmade quilts and more needlepoint. So many traditional women’s crafts, Gretchen thought. She hadn’t the slightest idea how to sew or quilt or make lace or needlepoint. With the volume of these beautiful handworks it seemed her ancestors must have busied themselves day and night with it. The number of stitches in each quilt seemed like the work of someone obsessively occupying themselves, almost like a nervous habit. And for the first time she didn’t see it as magnificent handwork—but as the work of someone denied a life outside the home, and slowly losing her mind.
She set all these things aside apart from the journals, a box of photographs, and a box of letters, which she put into a canvas bag she found hanging off the bedpost. She slipped the hair clip in as well and then slung it over her shoulder, took a deep breath, and opened the door, hoping nothing was about to smash down upon her.
A cool wind began to blow through the curtains and she actually heard the entire house creak, like something that was about to break. She looked up at her reflection. It was worse than she’d thought. Her face was slightly swollen from crying the night before, her hair a tangled mass; she was caught off guard by her own expression—determined but on edge. She looked older, taller even, more like her mother than ever before.