Page 3 of Cinder House

Months passed, and seasons, and years.

Ella’s family grew older.

And Ella grew to understand all three of them far better than she had when she was a living tapestry of self-absorption and anxiety to be liked, as most sixteen-year-olds are.

Patrice had come from no money and was terrified of tipping back there.

She’d married cleverly and murdered cleverly, and had a sound head for managing wealth.

She didn’t waste Ella’s inheritance on fripperies and ribbons.

She sent it out into the world, well supervised, so that it could grow.

When she spoke with men about investments, or entertained them socially, she was gracious and charming, always letting them know her to be clever but believe themselves to be cleverer.

But she also held one hand folded over her other wrist in a way that might as well have been a hedge of thorns: this far, thank you, and no farther.

Tough-fabricked Patrice had house and fortune and no need to marry again, and indeed showed absolutely no inclination to do so.

Her daughters were another story.

Danica at least had harmless passions to keep her busy and give her depth and colour.

She’d always been an avid reader—Ella had hoped they might bond over it, when they were living girls sizing one another up under their parents’ supervision.

She also enjoyed riding in the fields and forest trails outside the city, and Patrice paid the stabling fees because it threw Danica into the company of the right people.

In death Ella clung to some of her hopes.

If not a sister or a friend, perhaps Danica could become at least a casual confidant, or a source of information about the changing outside world.

But there was too much working against Danica’s personality for that.

Even the best seeds struggled in poor soil and poor water.

When Danica was cruel it was because she was afraid of her mother and sister.

Knowing where it came from didn’t make the cruelty any easier to bear, and Ella was the only one in the house whom Danica could force to bear it without consequence.

Ella abandoned all hope of extricating Danica from the others like a snail winkled from its shell with a two-tined fork.

Marriage would one day winkle Danica from the house entirely.

Though Ella was in no great hurry for this to happen, because that would leave her alone with Patrice and Greta.

Oh, Greta.

The girl grew into a young woman, blond and plump and beautiful, with a tilted nose and bright brown eyes.

She would not be thrown into anyone’s company; she believed they should come to her, and so they did.

Like her mother, Greta could be very charming when it suited her. She charmed the sons of merchants to bring her pretty things; most of all she enjoyed butterflies in jars, the more uncommon the better. The first of any new kind, or with novel and striking patterns on the wings, would make her smile the sweetest. She would kill the insect with ether and pin it into place in her collection.

Sometimes she wouldn’t bother with the ether.

The sons of merchants only had so much time and money to spend on rare butterflies.

Before long their gifts, no matter how pretty, were duplicates.

“Thank you,”

Greta said anyway, but her smile was not sweet.

When the suitor of the day had been discouraged out the door, Greta picked up the domed glass case containing several gold-winged insects.

“Open the window, Ella,” she said.

The curtains drew back and the window cracked wide.

Some days Ella, still determined to be as much a person as possible, might walk across the room and do it with her hands.

Today she had an instinct not to move much within Greta’s view.

Greta lifted the glass from the base.

The released butterflies were like scraps of goldcloth caught in a breeze, their gleam flashing greenish as they flittered into patches of sunlight.

One of them passed through Ella, who wrinkled her nose.

It was a still, cool day. They watched as the butterflies sensed the invitation of fresh air coming through the window.

The first one caught fire a few inches from freedom.

It shrivelled up almost at once: a flare of panicked, darting ember, and then nothing but a dead eye of red quickly fading to a piece of dull black ash.

Then the next was alight.

It took Ella four butterflies to realise what it was she was feeling in her walls and, startlingly, in the brass of the lamp brackets and the gold inlay of the best porcelain.

Only the household silver in the mahogany cabinet refused to hum in response to Greta’s small sorcery.

When the last butterfly was specks of ash drifting down to the rug, Greta looked at Ella, who was motionless in something that wasn’t really shock.

A thud of revelation, perhaps.

A piece of a jigsaw puzzle settling into place.

“How long have you been able to do that?”

Ella blurted.

“Not long,”

said Greta, careless.

“It comes on one like the monthly courses, I’m told.

Some get it younger or older than others.”

“Told? By who?”

She’d said it too quickly.

Greta had a nose for interest and a better one for weakness; a smile spread on her lips.

“Oh, Mama found a tutor for me.

Very discreet.

We haven’t moved on to the ghosts part of magic lessons yet, but…”

She let her brown gaze fall to the small piles of ashes on the floor.

That smile gave a satisfied ripple.

“You can fly, Ella, can’t you?”

Ella wanted to say that floating was not flying.

She wanted to say that she could not be smothered, or pinned.

But she knew better than to put the image of a sharp object into Greta’s fancy.

“I’ll sweep up,”

she said quietly, and went to fetch a brush and pan.

No, Greta would not be pushed by anyone, least of all her mother.

She simmered in magic and read the social columns of the newspapers, her fingernails tapping on the names of counts and marquises and princes.

Greta’s ambition had nothing to do with beauty and little to do with money.

Her flirtations were rehearsal for what she believed, unshakably, was a higher destiny.

Ella understood why Patrice was anxious to marry them both off.

Danica first, to protect her.

And so that, eldest safely disposed of, Patrice could then find someone to marry Greta before her younger daughter became too openly monstrous or the small animals which occasionally disappeared in this part of town could be traced to their house.

Ella, who couldn’t be married off, grew older, too.

At least in appearance.

She didn’t know if this was normal for a ghost, if it was part and parcel of being a house—which, after all, gathered rust and peeled paint and cracks in its wood like any aging thing—or if it was driven by her own vague sense that she should be older.

She was pleased.

She had never wanted to be sixteen forever.

The day-dress grew with her; even when Ella looked eighteen, or nineteen, she also looked like a girl dressed younger and hopelessly out-of-mode.

Ella grew to hate the dress as much as she hated anything, and to look away if she caught a flash of lavender in any piece of polished silver.

Sometimes she preferred not to be seen by anyone—and she could do that too, if she wished, simply shed her visible self and exist anywhere in the house.

Her family didn’t seem to care or notice, so long as she did the tasks they demanded of her.

What a perfect sort of servant she was, Ella thought sourly, and dug letter paper and envelope and stamp book out of her stepmother’s study drawers.

She dipped pen in ink and wrote out an order for some books which had appeared in that month’s postal catalogue.

Romances, mostly.

Ella was going through a mood of wanting to devour stories of bodily lusts and joys, eating up the pages with wild envy.

She enclosed payment for the books and went to coax a bathroom tap to drip, so she could run the envelope edge and stamp across the moisture.

A ghost might tear a stamp, but she couldn’t lick it.

She laid it out to join the next morning’s mail.

Ella had been doing the household’s ordering and managing their deliveries for years, and Patrice only inspected the occasional receipt now.

And they were all used to new books sprouting in corners thanks to Danica’s own purchases and the borrowing library.

So Ella existed, if not lived, and let words expand her world when no amount of magic seemed likely to do so.

And for a while that was enough.

No.

Not enough.

But something.

* * *

Everything changed the night Ella fell off the roof.

It was a clear and freezing night just past midwinter.

There had been a violent thunderstorm earlier, but the clouds had packed up their blankets and gone home.

Ella’s bricks felt brittle and her iron tight and shrunken, and the grass of her front lawn anticipated the clinging frost of the small hours before dawn.

Downstairs in Ella’s hall the grandfather clock struck quarter past eleven.

Ella sat gazing up at the perfect half-a-pie of the moon, her thoughts leaping idly through stories she’d recently read.

On the very edge of the roof were a few oddly nocturnal pigeons, shuffling sleepily back and forth.

Several roof tiles were loose from the storm and needed mending.

She should tell Patrice to send for a roofer.

Or perhaps there were books she could order, which would tell Ella how to do it herself.

Any skill which fixed or improved the house came easily to her.

She was wiggling the nearest tile idly with her outstretched hand, enjoying it like the discomfort of a loose tooth, when a piece broke off in her grip: perhaps half the size of her palm, rough-smooth and red.

The severing didn’t really hurt.

Ella tossed the chunk in her hand a few times and then threw it over the heads of the pigeons, who startled indignantly and took flight.

She expected the tile to stop at the boundary of the roof edge, just as she herself would have been forced to.

It didn’t.

Instead the tile kept falling, as rocks did when thrown—and the swoop of surprise in Ella twisted into a strange wrenching not dissimilar to when she was sweeping upstairs and Greta demanded something of her down in the kitchen—and then Ella was the roof tile, she was the inexorable arc toward the ground, over the front garden and over the gate and falling to where it would land with a clack in the street.

But there was no clack, because Ella was again holding the piece of tile in her hand.

Her feet, when she looked frantically down, were on the cobblestones.

She didn’t have a heart to beat but she remembered how it felt, the sudden thud like a brass doorknocker, and the memory was almost the feeling itself.

It overtook Ella all at once: the dizzying promise of freedom.

She was aware of the house standing close behind her; but less aware than usual.

She was so aware of the tile in her hand that there was only a faint scrap left over for everything else.

Part of her howled to go back through the gate and reassure herself that she was still attached.

That the house was still hers to haunt.

Most of her knew that after all these trapped years she would prefer to haunt only a piece of broken rock than the grandest palace in existence, if it meant she could leave.

Away, she thought, the word filling her like the incoherent jangling of bells.

That word took her for miles.

To the end of the street and past it, onto a larger street leading to a larger one again.

Outside the house, she could not pass effortlessly from one point to another.

She could move only at the speed a girl could walk, one step after another, not breathing, not tiring, at first barely thinking. Away.

The city was different to how she remembered it: taller buildings, altered shopfronts, a grander sense of sprawl.

It was hard to tell if the change was truly in the place, or in her.

Or if the streetlamps were playing tricks with arching shadows.

The main bridge over the river was the same, lined with frozen statues.

Ella did not stop to lean over the stone railing and see her own lack of reflection in the moonlit water.

It was very late and very cold, and so very quiet.

Ella encountered few people in the streets.

Only after the first trudging man had passed within an arm’s span of her, his eyes never so much as twitching to the side, did she think the rules might be different out here.

It seemed, however, that she was just as invisible; and even more intangible, as she discovered when she paused to pluck a leaf from the inky mass of a tree’s dangling branches.

Nothing came away in her fingers.

There was an unpleasant emptiness to it all, a sense that the magic was only allowing this because its gaze was sleepily averted.

At any moment she could dissolve.

The house, left behind, was still holding her leash.

She shook herself and kept walking. Away.

She had reached the outskirts of town and was still going when the elastic feeling took hold of her again, and in the next moment Ella found herself sprawled on the seventh step of her main staircase, the walls of the house firm around her once more and the grandfather clock shivering with the death throes of midnight’s last strike.

The tile was still clutched tight in her hand.

Ella pushed herself to sitting and drew her knees up and hugged them.

Indescribable emotion rippled up and down the blue-carpeted stairs, stoking Ella higher every time it passed through her, until the sheer shock of it—both this newfound freedom and its limits—broke in Ella and she sobbed, long and violently and in bewilderment.

She cried with the whole house.

Water wept from taps and speckled the basins.

Windows shuddered in their frames and every floor shook with tremors as floorboards pressed at their seams.

Unsurprisingly, it woke the house’s inhabitants.

Alarmed voices in the upstairs hallway asked one another about broken pipes or rogue earth-sprites; Danica, who knew her sister’s power by then, was loudly blaming her, and Greta was hot and withering in return.

Patrice appeared at the top of the staircase, candle aloft in one hand.

She had a poker in the other, which she let drop when she was close enough to realise it was Ella curled up on the stair.

“Saints’ teeth,”

she said, hoarse with sleep and relief.

“Stop that nonsense at once.”

Ella hiccupped.

The nearest framed picture gave a leap on its hook, but didn’t fall.

She was all but cried out by then, the house drained and tired.

Everything settled.

Patrice regarded Ella like a clock with a spring out of place.

Ella had never pretended to be anything but angry about her circumstances.

Obeying domestic orders was enough; they couldn’t expect her to do it with a smile.

But never since Greta and the lentils had she raised her voice, or tried to strangle them, or given them the pleasure of seeing her emotions as clearly as she saw and understood theirs.

Patrice stood there a while.

She had a tempestuous daughter and a sullen one, and her own ways of dealing with them.

Ella was not surprised when Patrice simply said.

“Now that we’ve been so rudely awakened, Ella, you can bring us all some warm milk with brandy,”

and lifted the hem of her dressing-gown as she climbed back up the stairs to her chamber.