Bird
Authors: Rita Murphy
bird
CONTENTS
To my loving family
1
W
ysteria 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.
2
I
was adept from an early age at the art of spinning and making lace. Wysteria, seeing my natural ability to weave, instructed me in the crafting of nets. My slender fingers took easily to this trade, slipping freely through the tenuous holes and seams. Running shuttles and threading meshes came as naturally to me as breathing, and I caught on quickly to the work at hand.
Mending nets for the fishing fleet out of St. Albans was how Wysteria made her living, how she fueled the giant coal furnace in the depths of the Manor, how she kept food in the pantry. With my nimble fingers to weave for her, with my strong eyes to see and tie the knots, Wysteria was free to spend her time with the figures and sums, bargaining with the fleet owners over the best price for our work.
I became an invaluable asset to Wysteria, and I see now that she never would have let me go even if someone had come looking, and perhaps they had. Perhaps a tall man with eyes the same color as mine had come rapping on the front door early one morning, inquiring about a little girl who had been taken from him by the wind. Wysteria would have shaken her head, offered her condolences and sent him away. The Manor was everything to her, and as I could remember no other life, it became everything to me as well. I was warm and well fed, and when a person has known hunger, when she has spent a night in the brambles and awoken to a gray sky with no hope of heat or warmth, small but essential comforts bind her to her keeper.
Whether anyone came to the Manor in search of me, I will never know, but I did occasionally see others as Wysteria and I ventured, as a matter of necessity, to the nearby town of Georgia Plains, a small cluster of buildings and storefronts five miles’ walk from the Manor. We were a most unusual couple: she tall and willowy, with a dramatic nest of white hair piled on top of her head, and I small, my gait slowed by the heavy steel-weighted boots she had made for me.
In those early years, when I was still allowed outside the Manor, Wysteria had fashioned, with the help of the local shoemaker, a pair of boots with a steel plate in each sole to keep me anchored to the ground. She insisted I wear them always, as she feared above all else that I would be carried off by another random gust and lost to her forever.
The open fields and pastures surrounding the Manor were prone to strong blasts off the lake, so whenever we went out we kept to the railroad bed, which was sheltered by a stand of tall pines. There were as well fewer eyes upon us along the rails than on the main road, for as you can imagine, we were a source of much interest in those days. My presence at the Manor, in particular, was a matter of ample gossip in town, as was my diminutive size. This was not helped by the appearance of my clothing, a mix of styles and Wysteria’s unique ability with a needle and thread. My petticoats and skirts were constructed from her many silk evening gowns, lace-edged at the hem and neck. In between, the heavy wool of a fisherman’s peacoat covered my bodice and arms. There was no shortage of wool in the trunks that graced the foyers and stairwells of Bourne Manor. It made up the foundation of most of my outfits.
“Wool deflects water,” Wysteria insisted, unfolding yards of it on to the clothesline to air. “It breathes and keeps the soul warm.”
“It’s itchy,” I complained. But Wysteria did not give my grievance a moment’s thought, in the same way that she did not concern herself with the gossip of the locals, as she referred to them. She never addressed any by name, though I’m sure she must have known their names. The locals were merely there to supply her with small necessities and occasional expertise in the repair of the Manor. Beyond this, she gave little thought to whom or what they chose to talk about. She felt herself far above the common person, though she had started out poorer than most and had only married well, inheriting Bourne Manor from her late husband, Captain Lawrence Barrows, a quiet, reserved gentleman who had had a successful career at sea. It was rumored that Wysteria had married the captain solely for his fortune, that she had never loved him. And, to his great sorrow, refused to bear him any children.
When the captain drowned in the lake during a spring storm, it was no loss to Wysteria. She simply settled his accounts, closed off his study on the third floor and went forward with the upkeep of her one remaining asset, the one thing that kept her above the locals and far from the dirty fishing shacks out on the pier.
“Miranda.” This was the name Wysteria had chosen for me. I’m not sure where she found it. Perhaps it had belonged to another or been borrowed from the pages of a book. Perhaps she simply liked the way it flowed smoothly from the tongue. She said it fit me, though I could not see that myself.
I remembered once that someone had called me Peege and once Meg. Concise, one-syllable names—easy to remember. When you are as small as I was, people often shorten your name, along with their esteem of you, in proportion to your size. Peege could easily disappear. Meg could stand in the shadows. Miranda was needed. Perhaps that is why I stayed longer than I should have with Wysteria. I believed she needed me.
“Miranda, must you drag your feet so? Are they so heavy that you cannot bear to walk like a proper lady?” The boots weighed as much as I did. More, perhaps. I hated them. They may have kept me from the wind, but they were cumbersome and ungraceful and took all my energy to shuffle about in. To reach Georgia Plains was a difficult chore, and I often wished, upon our arrival, to lie down and rest on one of the benches in the town square, but Wysteria would never allow such a thing. We were the owners and residents of Bourne Manor, and as such, we were to remain dignified at all times and never to show signs of fatigue or weakness.
“I will try harder, Wysteria.”
“See that you do.”
I picked up my weary feet and followed her into the shops.
I did not know any of the shopkeepers or the children. Wysteria felt that with my physical delicacy, school was an unnecessary burden she’d rather not subject me to, and so took on the task of educating me in her own unique way.
We studied everything Wysteria was interested in and no more. I learned to figure and do my sums, as Wysteria loved money above all else. She kept it hidden in various places about the Manor. She counted it, stacked it and doled it out in miserly sums. She taught me how to keep the accounts and frequently tested my memory on the names of all the prominent fishing captains along the lake. I learned from Wysteria the geography of Vermont and Fairfax County, and everything there was to know about dogs, particularly wolfhounds, of which she had four. These beasts had no names of their own. Wysteria did not believe in such things. We simply referred to them as the Hounds, which worked well, as they all looked exactly alike and you never saw one without the others. I was often given the task of feeding the Hounds and combing them out after they spent the day roaming the fields, collecting burrs from their shaggy gray fur. The Hounds were bigger than I was, and I had a strange and perhaps unnatural fear of them. I was quite sure they would suddenly turn and ravage me, eat me up entirely. The Hounds, however, were my charges, and I had to learn to face them and, to some degree, trust them. They growled on occasion, exposing their gums and sharp teeth, but in general they were content to lie at my feet while I wove and did my lessons.
I wished that Wysteria had told me about the history of Bourne Manor, about the wind and the currents, and something of the lake tides, but these were not topics she wished to discuss, and so I did not learn them until much later. But I did not mind studying at home. The village school, a cramped clapboard house on the edge of town, would have been much worse. Going there would have meant facing the daily walk along the rails and the stares of the local people, for it was clear from the beginning that I was not welcome among them, not only because of my size, but also because of my relationship to the Manor.
“The heir of Bourne Manor,” the ladies in the shops would murmur as we passed through. I heard the phrase spoken by the men in the fish market and whispered through the spokes of the children’s bicycle wheels. That I was the Bourne heir meant little to me, and rightly so, for there was no inheritance or legacy waiting for me beyond the old house itself, despite what some thought. The Manor’s only value came from the secret that lay within it.