The Visconti House (24 page)

“Would Leon be able to come, too?” asked Laura eagerly.

Leon looked horrified, shaking his head at her, but Laura’s mother just laughed.

“We can’t make any promises. We’ll have to wait and see what happens, but it is a wonderful idea. And if we do go, Leon should definitely come, too.” She smiled at him. “The discovery belongs to you, too, you know.”

Leon flushed and looked down at his shoes.

“And in the meantime,” said Laura’s father, “we should have some cake to celebrate. Excitement always makes me hungry, and after this much excitement, I’m starving.”

As they all made their way back to the kitchen, Laura turned to look down the hall to the entrance area and the uncovered cellar. For a moment, in the
shadows, she saw the figure of an old man. He inclined his head toward her and smiled. The memory of the first time she had seen the house flashed into her mind. She had thought then that it was enchanted, and she had been right. It was.

My family will tell you that I have an extremely unreliable memory and that I see what I want to see, not what is really in front of me. I have been known to swear that there was an old fountain in a garden when, in reality, there was only a clothesline. I had replaced the clothesline in my mind with the image of a wonderful gray stone fountain, covered in moss and dry grass. Such memory transformations are now referred to by my family as “fountain moments” and, while they may be frustrating at times, are extremely helpful in storytelling.
The Visconti House
sprang from just such a moment.

Driving through central Victoria, we stopped in Inglewood to stretch our legs. I wandered off and came across an old house that captured my imagination. I found myself weaving a story around it. Later, when I saw a photo of the house, I realized I had transformed it from an old Victorian mansion into an Italianate villa, but by that time, I already had Mr. Visconti
tap, tap, tapping
his way through my thoughts and the shadow of Veronica Mackenzie falling across the garden. I had the whole Italian background worked out. It was about this time that Laura Horton moved
into my mind and started exploring the house. And as soon as Laura arrived, so did Leon Murphy, and I knew exactly what I wanted to write.

As Mr. Visconti’s house became more focused, I realized that two other houses had influenced its creation. One was a tall gray house on a hill in Hamilton, Victoria. In my memory, it was in the Italianate style and overlooked the town, but this may be another “fountain moment.” The other was a house near where I grew up. It was a very grand house built by the chain-store proprietor Oliver Gilpin in the 1940s. By the time I knew it, however, it was a convent, and on festival days we children would go to explore it, marveling in the strange network of canals that ran through the garden and the vacant pens, bordered by stone fences, that had once housed exotic animals in a private zoo. We were told that the house had been built for a woman but that she never lived in it. I don’t know if this is true, but the story continued to haunt me, and I never passed the house without thinking of it.

So it is from these three houses that the Visconti house and its bittersweet history emerged.

I would like to thank L. M. Montgomery for filling my childhood with dreams, Sandra Kipp for sharing my love of writing, Christine DePoortere for seeing possibilities in my story, Sarah Foster for offering me the chance to put it into print, and Meredith Tate and the team at Walker Books for guiding me so perceptively through to publication. My love and gratitude, as always, go to my husband and children, who have believed in me wholeheartedly. They make everything worthwhile.

ELSBETH EDGAR
has worked as a teacher and a librarian. When her children were young, she started writing stories for them, following their interests as they moved from dinosaurs, dragons, and furry animals to school experiences and relationships. Elsbeth Edgar lives in Melbourne, Australia, with her family and their cat, Sasha.