Page 44 of Whispers of Shadowbrook House

Climbing the stairs to the upper floor, Oliver’s legs felt heavy, as if the staircase had grown steeper. He knew such an impression was all in his mind, but his mind was moving powerfully after all the emotion of the past few days.

Before he felt entirely ready, he found himself knocking at the door of the room he had discovered his uncle in during his last visit to this once-forbidden wing.

His uncle did not call for him to enter, nor did he tell him to go away. Oliver knocked again, and when there was still no response, he turned the knob and opened the door.

The room was vast. A huge bed rose from the center of the room with posts that seemed as tall as ship’s masts. Dark-blue damask hangings draped the walls, windows, and bedposts. Large mirrors in gilt frames hung from two walls, making the enormous room seem even bigger.

The effect of the decorations must once have been elegant and luxurious, but to Oliver’s eye, it looked dark and spooky.

“Uncle Arthur?”

There was no answer. Oliver stepped farther into the room. This was one of the many rooms in Shadowbrook House where builders had given no heed to squares and rectangles. The walls opened and formed as if they grew independent of any consideration for a room’s standard proportions.

“Uncle?” Oliver called again. He moved deeper toward the room’s corners and found an open passageway leading directly from the room itself, a path which seemed to connect the bedroom to another space.

Oliver had never seen this section of the house, but he was beyond being surprised by Shadowbrook’s twists.

He followed the passage, turning as the walls directed him.

Moving deep into the interior of the house, Oliver called out once again.

In reply he heard a whisper. A murmur. Was it a warning or a welcome, or was it only the wind and rain on the roof and walls?

The passageway seemed to rise beneath his feet. He felt himself climbing, even though there were no stairs. Oliver looked behind him, but he could no longer see any sign of the blue bedroom he’d first entered.

In addition to the whispers, he heard echoes of the grief-filled violin music.

He continued to climb until he reached an open door in the wall in front of him. Oliver put his head around the dark wood. With the ceasing of his own footsteps, he heard more clearly the low, keening sound of the violin. The interior of the room was cocooned in darkness.

Oliver’s ears filled with the music and the hushed and whispering voices, echoes of the sounds he’d heard as a child. He couldn’t make out words, but the whispers were undeniable.

The wall ahead of him glowed with a suggestion of light, but no candle or gas flame was in sight.

For a moment, he wasn’t certain what he was looking at, then his eyes adjusted to the dimness of the room. Upon each of the surrounding walls hung portraits in elegant frames. What he thought was light was the white of oil paint against the room’s darkness.

Eyes adjusting to the gloom, he turned to glance at the other walls. With a jolt, he realized he stood face to face with his missing portrait, the one taken from his bedroom. Here it stood against a dark wall in an isolated room in the heart of the house.

Isolated, but not unreachable.

Accessible only from his uncle’s bedroom.

He stared up at his mother’s eyes.

The artist who’d painted her had a gift for capturing expression, for the face in the painting wore a smile Oliver had seen in his mother’s happiest days. The smile she’d shown him when she spoke of his father.

How long had it been since Oliver had witnessed that lovely smile?

Here she is , the voices whispered . The notes of the music soared, brittle and aching.

He stood many minutes before his mother’s painting before he moved slowly about the room and saw several other portraits, each of a lovely woman.

At first, Oliver didn’t find the paintings or the artists’ influences familiar, but as he studied the faces, he realized he recognized the subjects.

One was a representation of his maternal grandmother, a painting his mother must have had copied, for a small version of the same portrait had hung in his childhood home before his mother died.

The woman posed with a gorgeous chestnut mare, her fair hair tangling with the horse’s auburn mane in a wind he used to think he could feel.

He stepped in front of the painting and wished he could reach out and touch the grandmother he’d never met.

His mother’s mother. Uncle Arthur’s mother.

The next painting was of a radiant, smiling woman holding a honey-colored violin. As he met her eyes, the music in his mind seemed to draw to a close, a note lengthening before it faded to quiet.

Then, on an adjoining wall next to a small cluster of framed drawings, Oliver saw his own features looking out at him from a miniature portrait, one that might have been fashionable fifty years earlier.

This wasn’t an antique, however. The likeness was too striking.

He stared into his own eyes. This was a drawing of Oliver himself. He couldn’t doubt it.

Here you are , the voices seemed to whisper. Here you’ve always been.

The drawings surrounding his miniature caught his attention for their own familiarity.

He leaned in for a closer look. A childish outline of the dock outside Shadowbrook House hung next to a fanciful pen-and-ink sketch of a large, turreted building.

He knew these pictures. He had drawn them.

Left them behind when he’d escaped Shadowbrook for school.

And now they hung in this strange gallery.

Something rustled at the far side of the room, and Oliver turned to see Uncle Arthur, a stick in his hand and something under his arm. He shuffled out of a shadowy corner, and Oliver saw he was holding a violin’s bow.

The whispers fell silent.

Oliver’s first instinct was to apologize for intruding on his uncle’s privacy.

He stepped forward but chose to say nothing.

After all, he wasn’t sorry to be here, to see this collection of portraits, or to find his uncle.

And to begin to understand the mystery of the music wafting through the halls of Shadowbrook.

He turned slowly and continued to inspect the paintings as the two men stood shoulder to shoulder.

When Oliver spoke, he did so in a murmur, much as he would within the walls of a church. The reverent feeling in this dark room felt similar. “What is this place?”

Uncle Arthur shuffled away from the wall and echoed Oliver’s movement. “This is what remains of the beating heart of Shadowbrook House. Here I find all those I have lost.” He pointed to the familiar painting of the woman and the horse. “My mother. You know this one, don’t you?”

Oliver nodded. Would Uncle Arthur speak of her? Tell Oliver a story of the woman’s life, as his own mother used to do? He couldn’t remember a single detail, only the wistfulness in his mother’s voice as she spoke of the grandmother he never knew.

Arthur did not offer anything more about his mother’s portrait; instead, he pointed to the next painting: the fashionable lady with the large sleeves and enormous skirts of thirty years before, rings of curls falling beside her face and the violin in her hands.

“My wife, Christina. The instrument Pearl plays was once hers.”

With a nod, Oliver gestured to the violin the man held beneath his arm. “And you used to play together?”

The lines on Arthur’s face softened. “We still do. Do you not hear her playing sometimes in the halls? On the stairs?”

Oliver had, even though he’d tried to convince himself otherwise.

“She was a gifted musician.”

Oliver had never heard Uncle Arthur speak of his wife.

Looking into the face in the painting, Oliver saw a hint of liveliness around her eyes.

It was impossible to believe Uncle Arthur had once been young and vivacious like this woman, but there must have been something that brought the two of them together.

He wanted to ask his uncle a hundred questions, but he wouldn’t interrupt this strange tour of the hidden gallery.

Arthur gestured to the painting of Oliver’s mother.

“My dear sister. There is much of her in you. See the way her eyes shine? I paid the artist handsomely for this likeness. He earned every penny for capturing that look. This was painted before your father died in battle at sea. When she still smiled.”

Oliver wanted to hear more. All of it, every story. But Arthur turned to a three-paneled display of a rosy-cheeked baby, a girl holding a toy boat, and a young woman. All three had the same striking eyes. Eyes Oliver knew well.

“This is Maxwell’s mother?”

Arthur nodded. “My daughter. Your cousin Bethany. Do you remember the day she came back to Shadowbrook?”

Oliver was sure he’d never met his cousin. She’d left her father’s home when Arthur refused to give his permission for her to marry.

As curious as Oliver had been about his cousin, he’d never asked his uncle about her. Arthur Ravenscroft had not invited confidences. But now, Uncle Arthur seemed willing—even eager—to speak about his only child.

“She was in love, she said. He promised to marry her. She pleaded with me to meet him, to welcome him to the house. Of course, I refused. He was a common sailor, a nobody with no past and no future.” Arthur scrubbed his hand across his face.

“And then he left her. I gave him no reason to stay, so he boarded a ship and disappeared as quietly as he’d arrived. ”

Oliver forced himself to stand still and listen to the tragedy, told in only the barest of detail. Every word seemed torn from Arthur’s throat, leaving him wrecked and wrung out.

“She wrote to a neighbor. Confessed the condition the sailor had left her in. Swore she wouldn’t return to this house.

When it was time for the baby’s arrival, just as you left for school, the neighbor went to be with her.

Bethany’s body could not bear the birth. She died, and Maxwell barely survived.”

The huge hall clock struck from somewhere nearby, each gong reverberating through Oliver’s chest.

Arthur’s voice was scarcely a whisper. “I couldn’t bear to have you at the house when I brought Maxwell to live here. He was so sickly and weak, and I didn’t want you to grow fond of him only to endure another loss.”

These few words turned a latch in Oliver’s mind, forcing him to see his own exclusion from Shadowbrook in a different way. He knew Arthur’s reasoning was unfounded, but the old man believed he’d done Oliver a favor.

Oliver and Arthur stood staring at the portraits of Bethany, each considering his own loss. Oliver wished he could think of something to say.

Arthur ran his hand along the back of his neck in a gesture Oliver knew well. The old man closed his eyes.

“Everyone leaves, and I am forced to carry on alone.”

At this, Arthur Ravenscroft ran out of words.

Moments stretched between the two men as they stood in a gallery of sorrows.

Oliver folded his arms across his chest and felt the crinkling of paper within his waistcoat pocket. He pulled out Dr. Dunning’s letter. “Pearl showed me this.”

Arthur glanced toward the paper and then away. More sorrow suffused his wretched face. “Every decision I make seems only to do harm.”

Oliver shook his head. “I’ve gone to London and brought a doctor, one who comes recommended from the school at St. Barth-olomew. He’s with Max now, and he will continue to care for him. I think Maxwell is in good hands, but there is something else I believe he needs.”

Arthur turned to Oliver, grief painted plainly across every feature. “I am willing to try anything that might help the boy.”

Oliver nodded. “Come and sit beside him. It may be that what he needs in order to heal is you.”