Desiderium

Screams echoed through Norspire Hall, splintering the floorboards below my feet. As the autumn gales bore down on the manor, so, too, did the halls tremble with cries; porcelain sets, supped on only the night prior, clashed against each other, and the warm refuge of candlelight faded and rebirthed. The screams tore all around me, emanating from every vein of wood into the darkness. Initially, I thought it a dream, not unlike those terrors that beset me under every clouded night. The first wails had woken me, and I followed their summon to the farthest corner of the manor, to the trembling door at the end of the hall. We locked gazes, myself and the door, gawking for fear of what the other saw.

Thrown over my shoulder, my affectionately coined “tug-tug,” the quilt Mother had hand-spun and sewed, dragged across the floor. Though I had no memory thereof, mother and father retold without exhausting how I – not more than a month old – slept only when shrouded in the quilt’s embrace. Every year, mother added a new row to the original three, so that now the splendid ten row quilt was taller than I. “A growing quilt for my growing girl,” I recollected Mother’s voice in my head.

As I crept towards the door, I clutched the quilt until the pink left my fingers and the wool stuffing parted beneath them. I pressed my ear to the cold wood; laden beneath the cries, hurried female voices barked and bade, shouted, and soothed. I recognized the agony inside; once before, when Raymond was born, such wallows drowned the manor. Mother and Father had promised me another sibling after Raymond, and now I remembered Mother’s swelling stomach and Miss Hawthorne’s curious return to the manor – the nursemaid who, though living in Yorkshire since girlhood, mannered herself as if she never left Paris. I regretted her arrival, for daily ridicule on my impropriety always accompanied it.

The screams – like winter frost – bit into my skin and stole me from the sanctity of thought. I knew not what lay behind the door, only that it, the horror of uncertainty, could never be worse than the certainty at my back; the halls of the manor heretofore never seemed so empty, as though a great darkness lurked inside, and everyone had escaped to the room except me. Why had they left me here? The darkness stalked me – I was alone.

“Mama!”

My call extinguished the chittering voices inside. There, in the spaces between heaving breaths, Mother’s screams penetrated the naked air and through my spine. The voices began again; Miss Hawthorne’s accent, distinguishable even in whispers, particularly cursed the stillness. She spoke this time softer so that I might not hear.

“She will not see this! I forbid it – I forbid it!” Father’s voice, I recognized, notwithstanding a gravel foreign to his refined speech, silenced the room. When he spoke, time halted; the shaking flames died, and the hall fell to the darkness. Petrified, I stood, wanting to run away – to run towards –wanting nothing more than to cease.

I heard a choke, short, wavering gasps, and a buried moan beneath – what I know now to be – the weight of love. The door creaked open. Behind it, Father held, with a failing grip, to the handle. His frame was wrought with insomnia; the skin around his eyes was dark, and his body looked more ghostly than man. He stood in the doorway, buckling through his chest to his feet. At the sight of me, his strength failed him at last, and he collapsed to his knees. Never before, and never again, should I see my father cry. The room, which a moment ago felt like safety, I wish had never existed at all – the lonesome darkness of the hall seemed so bright before the man in front of me.