the other seventeen-year-olds who hung around the War Memorial downtown, or could be found crowded into coffeehouses like Le Hibou and Le Monde on the weekends. Their hair was long—Sara’s a cascade of brown ringlets, Julie’s a waterfall spill the colour of a raven’s wing; they wore beads and feather earrings and both eschewed makeup.
“I used to think it spoke to me,” Sara said.
“What? The garden?”
“Um-hmm.”
“What did it say?”
The dreaminess in Sara’s eyes became wistful and she gave Julie a rueful smile.
“I can’t remember,” she said.
* * *
It was three years after her parents had died—when she was nine years old—that Sara Kendell came to live with her Uncle Jamie in his strange rambling house. To an adult perspective, Tamson House was huge: an enormous, sprawling affair of corridors and rooms and towers that took up the whole of a city block; to a child of nine, it simply went on forever.
She could wander down corridor after corridor, poking about in the clutter of rooms that spread like a maze from the northwest tower near Bank Street—where her bedroom was located—all the way over to her uncle’s study overlooking O’Conner Street on the far side of the house, but mostly she spent her time in the library and in the garden. She liked the library because it was like a museum. There were walls of books, rising two floors high up to a domed ceiling, but there were also dozens of glass display cases scattered about the main floor area, each of which held any number of fascinating objects.
There were insects pinned to velvet and stone artifacts; animal skulls and clay flutes in the shapes of birds; old manuscripts and hand-drawn maps, the parchment yellowing, the ink a faded sepia; kabuki masks and a miniature Shinto shrine made of ivory and ebony; corn-husk dolls, Japanese netsuke and porcelain miniatures; antique jewelry and African beadwork; kachina dolls and a brass fiddle, half the size of a normal instrument…
The cases were so cluttered with interesting things that she could spend a whole day just going through one case and still have something to look at when she went back to it the next day. What interested her most, however, was that her uncle had a story to go with each and every item in the cases. No matter what she brought up to his study—a tiny ivory netsuke carved in the shape of a badger crawling out of a teapot, a flat stone with curious scratches on it that looked like Ogham script—he could spin out a tale of its origin that might take them right through the afternoon to suppertime.
That he dreamed up half the stories, only made it more entertaining, for then she could try to trip him up in his rambling explanations, or even just try to top his tall tales.
But if she was intellectually precocious, emotionally she still carried scars from her parents’ death and the time she’d spent living with her other uncle—her father’s brother. For three years Sara had been left in the care of a nanny during the day—amusing herself while the woman smoked cigarettes and watched the soaps—while at night she was put to bed promptly after dinner. It wasn’t a normal family life; she could only find that vicariously in the books she devoured with a voracious appetite.
Coming to live with her Uncle Jamie, then, was like constantly being on holiday. He doted on her and on those few occasions when he was too busy, she could always find one of the many houseguests to spend some time with her.
All that marred her new life in Tamson House were her night fears.
She wasn’t frightened of the house itself. Nor of bogies or monsters living in her closet. She knew that shadows were shadows, creaks and groans were only the house settling when the temperature changed. What haunted her nights was waking up from a deep sleep, shuddering uncontrollably, her pajamas stuck to her like a second skin, her heartbeat thundering at twice its normal tempo.
There was no logical
“I used to think it spoke to me,” Sara said.
“What? The garden?”
“Um-hmm.”
“What did it say?”
The dreaminess in Sara’s eyes became wistful and she gave Julie a rueful smile.
“I can’t remember,” she said.
* * *
It was three years after her parents had died—when she was nine years old—that Sara Kendell came to live with her Uncle Jamie in his strange rambling house. To an adult perspective, Tamson House was huge: an enormous, sprawling affair of corridors and rooms and towers that took up the whole of a city block; to a child of nine, it simply went on forever.
She could wander down corridor after corridor, poking about in the clutter of rooms that spread like a maze from the northwest tower near Bank Street—where her bedroom was located—all the way over to her uncle’s study overlooking O’Conner Street on the far side of the house, but mostly she spent her time in the library and in the garden. She liked the library because it was like a museum. There were walls of books, rising two floors high up to a domed ceiling, but there were also dozens of glass display cases scattered about the main floor area, each of which held any number of fascinating objects.
There were insects pinned to velvet and stone artifacts; animal skulls and clay flutes in the shapes of birds; old manuscripts and hand-drawn maps, the parchment yellowing, the ink a faded sepia; kabuki masks and a miniature Shinto shrine made of ivory and ebony; corn-husk dolls, Japanese netsuke and porcelain miniatures; antique jewelry and African beadwork; kachina dolls and a brass fiddle, half the size of a normal instrument…
The cases were so cluttered with interesting things that she could spend a whole day just going through one case and still have something to look at when she went back to it the next day. What interested her most, however, was that her uncle had a story to go with each and every item in the cases. No matter what she brought up to his study—a tiny ivory netsuke carved in the shape of a badger crawling out of a teapot, a flat stone with curious scratches on it that looked like Ogham script—he could spin out a tale of its origin that might take them right through the afternoon to suppertime.
That he dreamed up half the stories, only made it more entertaining, for then she could try to trip him up in his rambling explanations, or even just try to top his tall tales.
But if she was intellectually precocious, emotionally she still carried scars from her parents’ death and the time she’d spent living with her other uncle—her father’s brother. For three years Sara had been left in the care of a nanny during the day—amusing herself while the woman smoked cigarettes and watched the soaps—while at night she was put to bed promptly after dinner. It wasn’t a normal family life; she could only find that vicariously in the books she devoured with a voracious appetite.
Coming to live with her Uncle Jamie, then, was like constantly being on holiday. He doted on her and on those few occasions when he was too busy, she could always find one of the many houseguests to spend some time with her.
All that marred her new life in Tamson House were her night fears.
She wasn’t frightened of the house itself. Nor of bogies or monsters living in her closet. She knew that shadows were shadows, creaks and groans were only the house settling when the temperature changed. What haunted her nights was waking up from a deep sleep, shuddering uncontrollably, her pajamas stuck to her like a second skin, her heartbeat thundering at twice its normal tempo.
There was no logical
Similar Books
