Bird Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Rita Murphy

  Copyright

  To my loving family

  1

  Wysteria 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 i
n 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.

  3

  The 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.