Bird (2 page)

3

T
he attic of Bourne Manor was filled with all manner of strange inventions. The day I finally found my way inside, I thought the room full of savage birds. Great gossamer wings and sharp beaks met me; exotic tails encircled my head. I screamed and turned away, fearing I would be picked up at any moment by their fierce talons.

But they were, of course, not birds, for what birds can live in a cage, even one of that size, for long? They were kites. Dozens of silk and paper kites intertwined with laces and strings and arched bamboo frameworks. Their designs were foreign to me, wild swirls and pinwheels of color, painted faces and bared teeth. They were tied at the ends with fanciful ribbons and feathers, and all the paper kites, every single one, trailed braided cords and oddly shaped clasps.

How I found this extraordinary room and came to mingle with the great wings was a mystery in itself, for it was not a place that was meant to be found, as there was never a more arduous task in finding anything.

Every room in the Manor, with the exception of the widow’s walk and the enormous open sitting room on the first floor, was locked. There was a key for every door and also for every cupboard and every drawer of every desk. There was even a key to lock and unlock the windows. Every evening at ten o’clock Wysteria walked the halls of the Manor locking each door, including my own, and then unlocking them again at dawn. She carried all the keys on a great chain kept at her waist, and only she knew which key was which.

“I lock the rooms, Miranda,” she explained, “to keep out the drafts. I cannot bear a draft, not even of the smallest kind.” She spoke as if a lock could keep the wind from slipping under the doors or stealing across the floorboards. Obsessed with drafts, Wysteria was forever stuffing bits of old newspaper into cracks in the walls. It made little sense to me, but I never questioned her in the beginning. I trusted her then more than I trusted myself, and I honestly did not care to go into any of the dark and vacant rooms. Better that they stay locked, I thought, and keep whatever was inside, draft or not, away from me in the night. But as I grew older and spent more and more of my days inside, the lure of the upper floors of the Manor conquered my imagination and I began to wonder what lingered behind the locked doors. What was it that Wysteria tried to hold in or keep out? I wondered. Perhaps, as some believed, the rooms were filled with a rare fortune and stacked from floor to ceiling with gold coins, or perhaps they held only dusty and useless furniture, the remnants of a time long past. I found myself watching her carefully when she chose a key, waiting for my opportunity to examine it more closely. But Wysteria never let the keys leave her side; even when she walked into town, she carried them on her person.

Wysteria left many nets for me to mend whenever she went out of the Manor, secure in the notion that I would spend my hours quietly consumed with my weaving and have the repairs complete upon her return.

One afternoon in late October, before Wysteria departed for town, she presented me with a heavy load of nets. “Will twenty keep you, Miranda?”

“Yes. Twenty will do.” Twenty nets required several hours of tedious attention on my part, for many of them concealed rusted hooks which could lodge easily in my palms. It was treacherous work, and though I was careful never to get caught on a barb, my fingers were often left raw and bleeding after many hours of pulling against the rough cordage.

It did little good to complain to Wysteria, for she believed that the only cure for bleeding fingers was more work. “Building up proper calluses is the only solution, Miranda. More nets is the answer to your suffering.” Wysteria always seemed pleased at the sight of my tortured skin, as if it showed a serious commitment to my work. Whether or not I believed that callused skin was a sign of a job well done, I was never able to harden my own against the rubbing of the nets.

“Perhaps I will bring you a gift from town,” Wysteria offered upon leaving. She did not spend money on gifts in the usual sense. She never brought a doll or a new dress home to reward me for my work. My reward, she reminded me, was a sound roof over my head and food on the table. To purchase a small tin of candies or a sachet for my drawer was extravagant on her part.

“Thank you, Wysteria. That would be fine.”

The Hounds rose from beside the fire in anticipation of Wysteria’s departure, and I rose with them to see her off.

“I shall return no later than six o’clock. Tend the fire and mend the nets. If I’m not back by nightfall, light the lantern.” I assured her I would. Lighting the lantern was, by far, my favorite part of the day.

Perched at the very top of the Manor, encircled by the widow’s walk, was a little house made entirely of glass. It was reached by a trapdoor, which opened up into a spacious room. At the very center of this room stood a table with an enormous lantern upon it. Each night after supper, I lit the lantern, as every caretaker of Bourne Manor had done since the house was built. The closest light was twenty miles to the north at Bolton Island, and so, in the event of fog, Bourne Manor kept a lantern burning midlake for any ship coming in late off the water and to warn all souls against sailing too close to the rocks that guarded its shores.

The central chimney of the Manor passed through the glass house, and its opening could be reached from the roof. It was situated as such for access in the event of fire. Three large bags of sand sat at the ready to be poured into the flue to prevent the whole structure from burning to the ground. Fire from either the lantern or the chimney was Wysteria’s greatest fear, and she instructed me early on never to put wet logs in the grate or leave the lantern case open, for often we used lamp oil instead of candles and oil was most flammable.

Outside the glass house was the actual walk itself, surrounded by a wrought-iron railing, where wives supposedly paced while waiting for their husbands to return from the sea. You can be sure that there were no recent grooves of worried soles marking the walk of Bourne Manor, as Wysteria had never waited up for her husband when he was alive. The only signs of activity were the faded and ancient markings of the heels of previous Barrows women, barely covered over by the scrapes from my own steel-weighted boots when I braved the wind and walked it myself.

I loved coming up into that glass house at night on a full moon with the stars, when they were visible, just out of reach. Walking out into the sky or off the precipice of a mountain could have provided no better view. The quiet, the darkness, the sweet sulfur of the match being struck, the running of the wax, were close to heaven, as close to heaven as I had ever been.

From that height, everything seemed possible, and the oppressive and mournful nature of the house fell away from me.

Whenever Wysteria left the Manor, I’d run directly to the top floor and burst onto the walk to catch a parting glimpse of her long, dark cape bustling down the road with the Hounds in close pursuit. In her younger years, she had often traveled to Boston and New York, but of late she ventured no farther than Georgia Plains or the city of Burlington, thirty miles to the south. Still, her departure guaranteed me hours alone to do as I pleased, to spend my day at the top of the house if I so desired, to look down on the life below me and imagine myself free.

That October afternoon, Wysteria’s thin figure having just disappeared around the bend, I settled myself on the large trunk that served as a bench in the glass house. I often brought the nets up there with me—the light was better than down by the fire—but that day I had left them in the foyer, still tangled and snarled, wet from the boats. I was in no hurry to make sense of them yet. They could wait.

The day was clear and cloudless. The sun had risen early, warming the glass on the windows and dancing off the swells on the lake. Though it was warm inside, a chill still hung in the air, and so I opened the trunk on which I was sitting to pull out a wool blanket for my shoulders. I shook it vigorously to knock out the dust, and when I did, a key fell to the floor. It was long and thin with unusual engravings upon it, and from its shape I could tell that it was no ordinary key but a skeleton key, a key that could open more than one door, possibly all. I returned the blanket to the trunk, immediately descended the ladder and diligently began trying the key in every lock in the Manor. By late afternoon, I’d found that it opened all the rooms on the third floor, including my own. After all my years of curiosity, I was greatly disappointed to discover that the rooms were nothing more than dim and barren chambers. There was no hidden fortune, no ancient furniture that seemed worthy of a lock.

The only room that was not empty was Captain Barrows’s study, a large, handsome chamber with a broad stone hearth and bay windows looking out over the water. A sturdy rolltop desk stood in one corner, and heavy woven rugs covered the floor. With the exception of a thick layer of dust from lack of use, the study was surprisingly comfortable. The other rooms were cold and sparsely furnished in comparison, not places where I wished to spend any time. The captain’s study, on the other hand, was warm and full of his life.

Wysteria never spoke of her husband, but that winter, as I spent every free moment I could in his study, I came to know Captain Lawrence Barrows, and I began to like this man whom I had never met, and never would. I came to know him only through his model ships, the logs of his days at sea and the many maps that marked his journeys. The captain had sailed around the world twice, had frequented castles and dined with thieves. And he had the great generosity to help one small girl find her way, for it was from the captain’s room, through a hidden passage, that I discovered the entrance to the attic and his bevy of kites.

4

E
ach morning, before the sun rose and while Wysteria still slept, I used the skeleton key to leave my bedchamber and make my way to the attic and then to the widow’s walk to fly the captain’s kites.

I had come upon the entrance to the attic purely by chance, having accidentally fallen against the far wall of the captain’s study as I tried to free a volume from his bookcase. My weight was enough to move the wall ever so slightly, allowing me to see that it was in fact not a wall at all but a slender panel that when pushed open revealed a steep and narrow staircase. At the top of the stairs was a door that could not be opened by any key, and so I spent several fretful hours picking at it with a hairpin and file. Once inside, I was quickly overtaken by its curious contents: dozens of kites, a few bolts of silk and what appeared to be a paper-making device equipped with screens, frames and buckets for mixing slurry. After more than an hour’s examination, I took several kites from their shadowy lair up onto the walk to examine them in the light, for there was also a stairway that led from the attic, through a hatch that blended perfectly with the floorboards of the glass house.

As far as Wysteria knew, I entered the walk only by the obvious trapdoor and only in the evenings to light the lantern. I had no business up there at any other time, and she would have been shocked and angered to find me there with the captain’s kites about me, for I suspected she knew nothing of their existence. Yet I could think of no place I would rather be. In the light of day, the walk was most spectacular.

From the top of the house, I could see all of Fairfax County, and absolutely no one could see me. Only a rare gull flying inland might catch a sideways glimpse as I stepped outside onto the walk and let my hair loose. Long and wild and set free of its braid, it was whipped about me in all directions by the strong breezes. In Wysteria’s presence, I was required to keep it securely fastened and pulled tight to my head, as she did her own. “A woman’s hair is a vanity of the worst kind, Miranda,” she often preached at the dinner table.

Although no portrait of her hung on any of the Manor’s walls, it was evident that Wysteria valued her looks and harbored her own unique brand of vanity. I often observed her admiring her reflection in the mirror above the stone mantel in the sitting room. That Wysteria had once been attractive was not difficult to imagine. She had distinctly fine features, high cheekbones and translucent porcelain skin. Her figure was still as slender as a young woman’s. It was not surprising that she clung to her looks; after all, they had saved her from a life of poverty. Yet we were never to speak of appearances. If one was good-looking, one did not mention it. Beauty spoke for itself.

Try as I might, I could not see Wysteria as truly beautiful, for she possessed a cold, hardened quality. I certainly could not see her hair set free and roaming down her shoulders.

I loved the way my own hair fell into the breeze, though, and I would stand, a little too long perhaps, imagining what it would be like to let not only my hair but my whole self be taken again by the wind. Not since the day I was blown to Bourne Manor had I felt the awesome and frightening sensation of that powerful current sweeping beneath my feet, the strange invisible hands pushing me forward faster than I could go myself. I remembered distinctly that familiar prodding at my back, the brush of air at my side and the sudden feeling of being cut loose from the earth and carried along like a leaf. There was nothing I could do, no stopping it.

“Not so high,” I’d called out that last time. “Not so high!” But the wind had done as it pleased, tossing and lifting my light frame into the currents.

Though I cannot remember anyone ever seeing me taken up, there was always the lingering feeling upon landing or finally getting caught by a branch that perhaps someone had seen and, finding no rational explanation for what they’d witnessed, would judge me strange and maybe even wicked in some way. I knew that my being taken by the wind was something that must never be mentioned, something that must always be held close.

Perhaps one day the wind would come for me again, but until then I felt its power in the captain’s kites, which over time I smuggled up to the glass house on my evening’s watch and kept hidden inside the large trunk. My favorite was the Red Dragon. I’d named it for its fierce face and vibrant color. There were many kites with bold faces and long, swift tails, but the Red Dragon was different from the others. It was the most delicate of all, with silk so finely layered it resembled the wings of a dragonfly. It was, too, the most spirited, wild and impetuous like a young bird, ardently pulling against its line and diving dangerously close to the Manor.

I could not take the chance that Wysteria might ever see a kite flying from the top of the house, so I always flew the Red Dragon on the lake side, far from her window and far from the branches of the great elm tree. I was more likely to be swept away at that high spot with a kite in my hand than down at the shoreline, and, not wanting to end up pasted to the outside of Wysteria’s bedroom window, I took the precaution of securing myself to the wrought-iron railing with a long anchor line I’d rescued the summer before from the tide. It smelled of milfoil and fish gone rancid, and I hated to wrap it around myself, for I knew the rank odor would seep into the fibers of my wool bodice, requiring me to wash and dry it so as not to arouse Wysteria’s suspicion. The line remained a necessity, however, as I had stayed as small and thin as on the day that I’d arrived, though I was no longer as frail as in those early years.

I was never sure exactly how the captain’s kites were meant to be flown. The silk kites were simple enough, but the paper kites were unlike anything I had ever seen, as if a part of each was missing or was meant to be connected to something greater than itself. How to explain the extra cords and clasps that hung from their frames? How to decipher the meaning of the little flaps wrapped tightly to the midpole of each?

I could not cast the kites into the air with a running start, as one would on the beach, but instead had to fly them from a standing position on the walk. I devised a system of slowly letting out the line while holding a kite as far as I could from myself, setting it free only when I sensed enough of a breeze picking it from the underside and puffing it gently away from me. Of course, there were days, particularly in the fall and spring, when the weather was too wild to fly any of the kites, even the more robust paper ones, and I kept them inside. I felt a strong obligation to the captain’s creations and didn’t wish any to come to harm.

I became an expert in charting the weather, searching offshore for signs of low-lying clouds or fog and spotting thunderheads. I could feel the wind calling to me on certain days in those wild clouds, and I knew that given a chance it would come for me, ripping at the layers of the heavy woolen dresses and overcoats that Wysteria had so carefully stitched, and steal me away, leaving me high in a tree, or on the top of one of the mountains across the lake. I was not yet ready for such a journey. For that kind of journey I needed time. I needed Farley.