第8章 The Portrait Gallery

The portraits were in the west wing, in a long room whose windows had been boarded from the inside, and she found them because Crispin forgot to lock a door. She had taken to walking the shut parts of the house when the house was quiet, not to break her word, exactly, but because a woman who is to spend a year somewhere had better know what she is spending it in. The west wing was cold and smelled of old plaster and mice, and the boards over the windows let in thin blades of daylight, and the blades fell across the walls and the walls were thick with faces. There were dozens of them, in gilt and in plain black frames, hung frame to frame in rows that reached the ceiling. The Withergraves of three hundred years, one after another, and they were all painted the same way, seated or standing, dark-clothed, with the flats behind them and the same grey light over their shoulders, and the same eyes looking out, and the same hands, and after the first few rows Romilly stopped believing in the individual faces and began to see a single face wearing a hundred hats. She walked the length of the gallery slowly. At the far end there was a gap in the rows, a place where two hooks stood empty, and beneath the hooks the wall was paler than the rest, as though a frame had hung there for a long time and then been taken down. And beside the gap there hung the newest portrait of them all, and it was not like the others. It showed a young woman in a pale dress, seated, with a book in her lap and a window behind her, and she was laughing. That was the thing that stopped Romilly in the middle of the gallery. Of all the Withergraves on those walls, this one alone had been painted mid-laugh, with her head turned and her mouth open and her eyes alive and warm and full of a private joke that the painter had caught and the house had never managed to forgive. Romilly stood before it for a long time. At the bottom of the frame there was a small brass plate, and she bent to read it, and the plate said: Ilsabeth Withergrave, 1889. She was still bent over the plate when Honoria's voice came from the doorway. You are not to be in this room. Romilly straightened. The old woman stood in the door with the light behind her and a cane in her hand she did not lean on, and she was not angry, which Romilly had come to understand was the worst of her moods. The living blood of the house looked past Romilly at the laughing woman in the frame and something crossed her face, quick and sour, like a shadow on water. I was walking, Romilly said. The door was open. Doors are open and doors are open, Honoria said. You have a mind that reads the difference, I think, which is a trouble to me and may yet be a use. Come away from her. Who was she, Romilly said. My daughter-in-law, Honoria said. The first wife of the Keeper. She died in the winter of her first year in this house, six weeks before her Confirming, and the house has not painted a bride since. She walked into the gallery and stood beside Romilly and looked up at the laughing face with an expression Romilly could not read. She was not suited to us. She laughed in this house. It is a thing that does not last here. Romilly looked at the two empty hooks beside the portrait, at the pale unmarked wall beneath them. There was another picture here once, she said. Honoria's hand tightened on the head of the cane, and Romilly saw it and filed it away. There was, the old woman said. It was taken down. There is a rule in this house that you have not been taught, because it is not written with the others. We do not speak of what is taken down. She turned to go, and then stopped, and said without looking back, You are to begin your duties. The Keeper keeps the wall and the accounts. The mistress keeps the blood. And a bride keeps the household, and the household is about to fill, and there is a great deal to do. What is about to fill it, Romilly said. The winter turning, Honoria said, and went out, and the boards laid their thin blades of light across the empty hooks, and Romilly stood a while longer before the laughing woman who had died in her first year, in the winter, six weeks before the thing the rules called the Confirming. She found Severin in the library that evening and she did not sit. Who was Ilsabeth, she said. He did not look up from the ledger. You have been in the gallery. Answer me. She crossed to the table and put both hands flat on the open book, so that he had to look at her, and he did, and this close his eyes were not grey, as she had thought, but the pale green of water over sand, and she wished she had not learned that just then. She died in her first year. Honoria says she was not suited to the house. The house has not painted a bride since. What happened to her. He was quiet a long moment, and then he closed the ledger on her hands, gently, so that she had to take them away. She died, he said, and it was not the house that killed her, whatever the village says, and it was not me. And that is all of it I will give you tonight. He stood and took the ledger under his arm and walked to the door, and at the door he stopped, and said, with his back to her, There is a thing you should know before the winter turning, because you will need to be ready for it, and I would rather say it now than have Honoria say it to you badly. Say it, she said. She looked at him across the table and understood that the two of them had been circling the same thing for weeks from opposite sides. He had spent eleven years keeping a door shut so that what lay behind it would not come out. She had spent six weeks trying to open it so that what lay behind it would come into the light. Neither of them had ever once been told the whole truth about why the door was there, and the woman who had told them their truths had told each of them a different one, and she was old and she was the blood of the house, and she had had sixty years to learn exactly which lie to give to whom. That was the thought Romilly carried into the evening, and it was the thought that made her certain, before he spoke again, that whatever he was about to say would be true, because a man who has been lied to by his own house for eleven years learns to hear the difference in the way a thing is said. The Confirming is not a formality, he said. It is the reason this house took you. It is the reason for the contract's last page, which you read and did not understand. He turned then, and in the failing light his face was tired in a way she had never seen it, tired and open and, for the first moment since she had met him, honest. This house is going to ask something of you at the winter turning, Romilly. Something the contract does not name. And I am the man who will have to see that you do it. ---