The rattling on the roof grew louder. It took on a rhythmic tone, almost like a force was beating its fists on the tiles. Clare rose, a towel clutched over her chest, and crept towards the window.
The storm was heavier, if that were possible. She could no longer see the forest in the distance. Even the shrubs below her window had vanished under a blanket of white. She looked up. Lightning arced through the sky. Reflected across a million snowflakes, it was blindingly bright. Clare pressed her hand over her eyes and waited for the specks to fade. The rattling noise fell silent. After a moment, it resumed.
A chill rolled off the window. Clare shuddered as she moved back to the dying fire. She rushed through the rest of her washing, more eager to be dressed again than to be clean.
Beth, I hope you’re not worried about me. I hope you stayed at home instead of coming to look for me. Because there’s no way you could get through the roads like this.
The basin of water was discoloured by the time she finished with it. Clare shook out the maid’s dress and changed into the new clothes. The dress had obviously been designed for the milder autumns, even though it had full sleeves and a high neckline. Clare supposed it made sense that the family didn’t own much cold-weather attire if they never stayed through winter. The outfit was a couple of sizes too large, but a cloth belt let her adjust the waist.
She folded the dirty towels into a stack then rubbed her chilled arms. A noise reverberated from the hallway. Clare tried to pinpoint its source. Something sharp being scraped across stone?
She crossed to the door. It barely made a noise as she opened it. Clare hesitated on the landing, staring into the gloom. Dorran hadn’t turned on any of the lights when he’d left. All Clare could see was a warm candlelit glow coming from the staircase to her right and thin slivers of cold white light glinting out from underneath innumerable doors.
The sound repeated on her left from the path that led deeper into the house. Clare frowned. It sounded close, but she couldn’t see anything.
The carpet muffled her steps. As she ventured farther from her room, the temperature plummeted. Clare hugged herself and breathed in staccato gasps. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she began to make out more of the hallway’s features.
Everything had been built with a high level of skill. The mouldings wove neatly around the support pillars that jutted out of the wall every ten feet or so. The wallpaper was flawless. Clare couldn’t see any gaps or any sign of where one sheet ended and another began. The design on the ceiling swirled above her, creating a bizarre pattern that seemed to beckon her farther into the house.
The hallway split into three paths. As Clare reached the intersection, the scraping sound broke off in a clatter. Clare held her breath as she peered around the corner. The new halls were shorter—they only went on for twenty meters before terminating in cloth-shrouded windows.
“Dorran?” A puff of condensation escaped when Clare spoke. There was no sign of her companion.
Clare’s toes were growing numb, and shivers were setting in. She couldn’t tell if Dorran was right that she was more susceptible to the cold or if the temperature really was that much lower. She crept towards the window at the end of the hall.
The curtain was made of thick cloth that crumpled when she lifted it. The narrow window behind it was coated with frost. When Clare moved close to it, her breath clouded the glass. She rose up on her toes to see into the yard. The window faced the estate’s front. She could barely see an outline of the hedges she’d run between the day before.
A floorboard groaned behind her, and Clare turned sharply. Her shoulder hit the wall, and the cloth crumpled back into place as she stared down the hallway. A shape leaned against the wallpaper a dozen paces away, blending into the gloom.
Chapter Seven
“Dorran?” She reached behind herself for the curtain. The shadow didn’t move as Clare grasped the fabric and began to pull it up. Stark white light spread across the carpet as the window’s edge was uncovered. She kept lifting, exposing more and more of the floor, and the light began to seep up the nearest walls. The shape was just beyond the light’s edge. Her pulse jumped as she pulled the curtain higher.
A hellish scraping noise from above made her flinch. Something dropped past the window’s exterior, and she swivelled towards it, but the object was so fast that Clare only caught a flash of motion in her peripheral vision. She whipped back to the hallway. The shadowed figure was missing.
Clare was breathing too quickly. She pressed one hand to her throat, which had grown tight. She could have sworn a figure was standing in the hallway. But she’d looked away for only a second. There was nowhere it could have run to in that time. Even if it had slipped into one of the bedrooms, she should have seen the door closing.
I didn’t imagine it. She swallowed as she reluctantly turned her back to the hall and faced the window. I couldn’t have.
Outside, something small and dark marred the perfect white world. Clare had to bend close to the glass and crane her neck to see it. A rectangular shape, no bigger than her head, was embedded in the snow below the window. A fresh coat of white was already erasing it. Clare needed only a glimpse to guess what it was, though. A roof tile.
The wind continued to beat at the house, but its whistle pitch had risen a note as it burrowed into the hole it had created. Clare shuddered and stepped away from the window. She reluctantly let the cloth fall back into place.
She’d been unnerved by the wind earlier when she was in her room, but at least she had felt sheltered inside the mansion. The building was so big, solid, and hulking, she’d had trouble imagining that anything could so much as chip it.
But the house was crumbling. The wind had already eaten a gap in the roof and made a home for itself inside. How many more tiles would fall before winter was over?
She couldn’t stop shaking as she followed the hallway back to her room. To reach it, she had to walk over the space where she thought she’d seen the figure. Clare eyed the smooth wallpaper as she passed it. There were no doors in that stretch of the hall, nowhere for the stranger to hide. She felt sick.
I didn’t imagine it. Clare’s footsteps grew faster as she became desperate to put the window and the hall behind her.
She stopped at the door to her room. The crackling fire was warm. Her bed, with tussled and unmade sheets, looked comfortable. But the space still didn’t feel inviting. She imagined sitting in front of the fire, trying to get the flames to reheat the chill inside her chest, as she waited for Dorran to return. It would be just her. Alone with the house.
Clare ducked her head and passed the room, aiming towards the glow at the end of the stairs. It might not be as warm as her bedroom, but it offered something more—human company. The security of companionship would stop her mind from going wild at every little shadow and noise. She never would have expected to turn to the strange man for comfort, but at least Dorran stopped the house from feeling so empty.
The carpet-covered stairs creaked as she descended them. She could see the foyer, but it was empty. A single candle waited on a table at the base of the stairs, perched on an old-fashioned bronze candleholder, and Clare picked it up.
On the third floor, the wind made its presence known unrelentingly. It whistled, spat, and shook anything it could get a hold on. In the foyer, though, its spiteful effects were muted. Instead, echoes surrounded Clare. Every little step, every breath, was whispered back to her.