It rains, all the time it rains.
Rain. Fog. Condensation. My first word was ‘rain,’ said to a wet nurse who had never learned to write.
That was before we lost mama. It was a bad day, not because we lost her, but because the rain had been falling through the cracks in the roof in turrets, winking out the few candles lining the walls. Papa claimed she slipped and slid all the way down the stairs because of the water. He left out the way her head cracked open, her blood pooling like the rain leaking through the roof. Without the light of the candles, it could have been ink.
It would have been a believable accident, had Papa not followed in a similar fashion just weeks later. His head had remained intact, though the same could not be said for his neck. There was no blood that time, at least not on the floor. There was always blood in this house.
With the black drapes of mourning their only lingering presence, I thought I would have been sent from the haunted, cobwebbed halls to live with my aunt in the city.
The bustling, endless city, where nothing remained of the country save for the horses to pull upscale, gilded carriages filled with upscale, gilded people. Even the air in London was gilded, though some call it smog.
Alas. Brother was given rule over the house and everything in it.
Me. The puddles. The cracked and rotting bodies in the crypt. And why would he have sent me to London when he could go instead?
“Miss, the house master returns soon. Should we set out rugs to collect the water?”
I turn to Servant, their milky white eyes somehow still focused on me. There was an unspoken addition to their question: As your parents always suggested.
“No.” The softness of my voice, so rarely used, could have belonged to any of the ghosts that wander the halls. I could have been a ghost, were it not for eternal damnation. Not immortal, but eternally damned all the same; Mama and Papa must be learning that now.
“Miss?” Servant’s eyebrows, or what is left of them, draw together.
“Let the master see his full home.” I turn to the front doors, the black fabric wrapped across them now damp with the rain.
Servant moves on, and I stand in the hall, waiting for Brother to arrive. The massive arched doors have been opened in preparation, inviting the rain and fog into the cavern of the house. Brother at least had the good sense to install gas lamps that withstood the rain.
Unlike the other grand houses in this dreary strip of country, the highest point of High Point Manor, cleverly named by my ancestors, is right where I stand. Built within the only hill in the surrounding landscape, the massive staircase descends into lamp-glow darkness, a muffled sense that my eyes were born adjusted to. Even now, the midday clouds rolling across the open country are almost too bright for my gaze. Another benefit of the city smog; constant darkness.
I turn and move my foot along the marble floor of the entryway, careful not to let my heavy charcoal mourning skirts drag.
It is so easy to move the water just so, invisible to the onlooker stepping through the door.
Brother will not see it. He fancies himself cleverer than Mama and Papa, but he is not cleverer than I.
Horses approach, pulling a carriage whose wheels drag over the gravel, and I step beneath the massive archway of the main doors.
I smile at Brother when he descends the carriage steps, his clothing the same black as my own. Dark spectacles sit on his nose, covering his eyes from the brightness as I wish to do now.
Brother tips his tall hat to me, a new style he picked up in London. My smile at his approach is anything but warm.
I step back into the entryway, counting the breaths until I am free.
Brother steps forward.