That was Hannah’s first glimpse of the castle, and of Aunt Fae and Uncle Stuart, hands gripped together at the gate, mouths set in a line.
Aunt Fae was Mom’s sister, and Mom spoke of her only in the pejorative, her tone lilting a bit, dragging out the -ae, mocking her in a way Hannah and her sister didn’t understand. Oh, you know Fae, she’d say, but in truth they didn’t. Not really. She and her husband had come to visit a handful of times in their lives. If asked, they’d have to concentrate to come up with their aunt’s and uncle’s names.
They knew Aunt Fae was more rounded in the middle than Mom, who was bony and flat. After that first summer they knew Fae would hug them in a way Mom never did. They knew Uncle Stuart would bop the crowns of their heads with a soft closed fist and a little pop of his tongue. They knew their aunt and uncle would laugh sometimes, shockingly, from the back of their throats, in a way their mother and stepfather did not. Yet Aunt Fae’s eyes were always a bit rheumy, like she’d just finished crying.
But that first summer of 1998, all they knew was they got to live in a castle for almost three months. The castle was a square, with turrets at each corner and a courtyard at the center, bursting with flowers and arbors, stone walkways. It smelled like peonies and honeysuckle, the whole expanse of garden exploding with reds, yellows, pinks; deep-orange lilies; sedum and daisies; tall splashes of lupine and irises. Deep-green vines fingered their way up the stone walls, wrapped around lancet windows, their Gothic arches softened in the midday sun.
Hannah took a room in the turret, the round expanse of windows looking out into that courtyard. She saw it all for the first time, flinging open the windows to smell the lavender, freesia. She hoped she’d never go home again, back to the powder-blue-and-white bedroom, the stale silence of her mother’s absence, and felt disloyal. Julia took the room next to hers, down the hall (what a long hall! Built for cartwheels!), but eyed Hannah’s exuberance enviously, a thirteen-year-old who wanted desperately to be a teenager and still a child at the same time. They discovered a door between their rooms—technically two doors, with a small space between them. Julia would sometimes leave Hannah notes or tiny gifts in that little space. At least, in the beginning.
Hannah squealed with delight at her first view of the woods, trees and trees as far as she could see from her bedroom window—“A thousand acres in all,” Aunt Fae told her proudly—imagining hours of lost time, exploring, finding brooks, salamanders, tree hideouts, secret passageways. Nothing but her imagination, stretched far and wide, and her best friend, Julia. The Beaverkill River ran below Valley Road to the west, shallow and burbling in the dry July heat. The girls could hear it from the castle, an always-welcoming music box, mixed with the sounds of the birds, the silence of the mountains, and the smell of pine and something earthy and rotting.
Hannah discovered that if she lay in the right place, right in the center of the courtyard between the honeysuckle and the roses, next to the fountain, she could see all four turrets at once in periphery, their towers poking at the listing clouds, the blue above her like a song, and she’d never known happiness like that, a bubble in her chest about to burst, gasping like she couldn’t catch her breath. Even years later, Hannah couldn’t remember a better kind of peace.
Julia once asked about the history of the house, who had lived there, had it been a queen and king? Aunt Fae laughed and told her, “No one important, just us.” They’d inherited it, Fae told them. Which Hannah understood to mean it had been given to them, but by whom? Why? Any further questions were always met with vague responses, hmm-hmmms and oh, just family, until the girls got bored and wandered away.
The grounds were wild in appearance but cared for, vines and ground cover creeping over everything. Trimmed daily by Stuart with his shears as he whistled a lilting tune, something unknown to Hannah but melancholy, ripe with sadness to match the hoods of her uncle’s eyes. All the adults in her life seemed so sad, even if only when they thought no one was watching them. Her mother was a frequent crier, and her stepfather, Wes, was given to bouts of anger, particularly when drunk. She’d never known an adult in her life to display actual joy.
But the house! She counted thirty-three rooms: ballrooms and sitting rooms and winding staircases (more than one!) and servants’ quarters and empty bedrooms, closed off and drafty even in the belly of summer. She thrilled at imagining ancient horrors hidden behind the doors, even after Fae insisted it was simply easier to close them up than to clean them.
“Then why are they locked?” Hannah persisted, following behind Fae as she cleaned and puttered up and down the hallways, driving her aunt crazy.
“Because I don’t want you girls making a mess. There’s no reason. Some of them don’t even have furniture! It’s expensive to keep up a home this size.” Fae shooed Hannah outside, the conversation over.
Hannah had goose bumps in certain corners of the castle, some hallways that were colder than others.
Each year they learned more about the woods: her trees and creek beds, her trails, her vines and crumbling stone walls, her bugs, bees, birds, the chirps and calls the soundtrack to their wild days, alone and exploring. At least until the year Uncle Stuart bought them bikes and Hannah and Julia rode to town and found other teenagers, and the spell of their childhood, it seemed to Hannah, had been broken.
And that summer, the summer of the broken spell, when they left their castle and let others in—let evil in, as Hannah thought later, so dramatic—was the beginning of the end. The summer of lost chances and faded hope. Brackenhill, she would imagine later, was always frozen in that one moment, the first summer when Hannah had lain in the courtyard and watched the clouds, the points of the towers prodding the sky, breaking it open to rain on her face, matting her clothes to her body, filling her mouth and her eyes, mixing with her tears.
In the end, Hannah would return home alone, and never come back to Brackenhill.
CHAPTER SIX
Now
Rockwell Mountain Road was two narrow lanes with sharp curves, flanked by a steep ravine and the Beaverkill to the west and an imposing vertical wall of shale and slate—the tumbled face of Rockwell Mountain—to the east. As Huck drove, Hannah studied the guardrail, looking for signs that a car had blown through. A mile from town she found the breach—a post had been violently uprooted, the wood splintered. Instinctively Huck punched the brake, and the car jerked and slowed. Hannah couldn’t see over the side, down to the bottom of the ravine. Was the car still there? How long had Aunt Fae lain there, bleeding and in pain, before she’d been helped? On impact, she remembered. Hannah turned her head away from the ravine, toward Huck, and he reached out to grasp her fingertips.
“Turn on Castle Drive at the top of the hill,” Hannah said.
“Inventive.” Huck squeezed her fingertips and gave her a half smile. Hannah tried to form her lips into what would pass as a smile but found she couldn’t. The thrum of dread pulsed in her ears, her chest.
The gate at the end of the road was swung wide, the driveway looming in front of them like an open mouth, the stone archway like large yellowed teeth. Huck inched the car forward, and Hannah held her breath as the tower points came into view.
Hannah’s heart lodged in her throat. She hadn’t been to Brackenhill since a week after Julia disappeared. Her clearest memory of the end of that summer was the house receding in the rear window of the Buick as the car sped down the driveway. She remembered Aunt Fae holding a handkerchief over her face. Uncle Stuart’s left hand raised, unmoving, his face gaunt and stricken.