Closing my eyes, it all seems like it was yesterday. The day I arrived in the shadows of Cartier estate, that grand manse left in decaying grandeur, my inheritance had seemed a dream from another era. Sheltered by the salt-sea wind by craggy rock, the mansion perched in the discreet shadows of a high cliff. Below, the relentless surf pounded a dim shoreline of rocks and reed-choked sand. Shattered bits of driftwood flowed in and out of the tide’s grasp, weird and wonderful shapes visible to the eye in distorted magnificence.
I’d come here once to this place, as a little girl on a hot summer day. I’d skipped playfully over the rocks, one chubby hand holding the brim of my straw hat. Ribbons flowed from my pigtails, smooth pebbles rolled beneath my heels. Mother was never far, strolling in the company of her aged relative, the Lord of the estate. They had spoken of many things, said many words which I was too young to understand yet knew pertained to me.
“The gift...,” my great uncle said slight eagerness in his fluttering pink hands. “Rowan has it?”
Mother’s lips pursed as she did when she was angry. “It has yet to manifest itself.”
Uncle sighed. “There has yet to be another in five generations. Perhaps, the blood has thinned.”
“It is exceedingly rare.”
Uncle paused, bent and gathered sand into his palm, pouring by thin trickle into his other outstretched palm. “To see a world in a grain of sand..., ah, if only, if only young Rowan were different.”
I was old enough to know the whispered thread of hopelessness in his tone.
If only I - Rowan, were special.
There were few of the family left in the old mansion on the cliff. Somehow, I’d imagined there would always be a member of my family living within its walls, playing out life’s dramas. Now as I walked through the emptied halls and dusty sheet-covered furniture lurking in forgotten corners, I wondered when the world had moved on.
Certainly, the house had been kept in a trust for one such as my great uncle deemed special. He - dead five years after the conversation I’d overheard as a child, hadn’t seen fit to provide my struggling parents with a legacy that might secure our future happiness. My father had died of a failing heart some said was caused by overwork; mother had taken on menial jobs to support us living on in one of Chicago’s poorer neighborhoods.
We were never invited to the summer wedding of one of my distant cousins. The lavish affair was one of the last the old house had seen; I knew of it from reminisces of the housekeeper yesterday morning over cups of strong Turkish brew.
“Were they special?” I asked during a lull in the conversation, envious in my turn of thinking that someone of the blood had possessed what I lacked.
“No,” the housekeeper said, tired in her black widow weeds. “And the house passed from them into solitude and disrepair. Until you, Miss.”
“Until me,” I repeated when I’d left her, entering into the foyer of the mansion that had become mine. There was no one else to who it could pass down into. No one, save for me, one tried and lacking in the thing that had set my family apart for centuries. There was no one left to wait for any-more. Taking the keys to hand, I opened every door, parted every shade. The day was a dim cloudy afternoon, cold in the brisk wind that swept off the surf below.
As I walked through the main hall to the foot of the grand staircase, my hand rested lightly on the balustrade. The wood was warm to the touch. Surprised, I withdrew my hand. Had someone been there before me? Resting their hand ever so gently on the aged Honey wood?
The thought was mildly unsettling in my mind. I’d given the housekeeper the day off, wanting to explore the house on my own terms. Had someone come in without me seeing? I pondered the possibilities of someone driving the distance from the nearest town along the curving cliff road. It wasn’t likely unless it were someone with vandalism in mind.
My fears rampant, I went through the paneled drawing room, through the faded gilt ballroom and upstairs into bedrooms of neglect. Nothing seemed touched; footsteps that appeared in soft dust were my own. Disturbed, I returned below to the foot of the stair, gazing about me in guarded curiosity. Perhaps I had been imagining the warmth of someone’s hand that I’d placed my own over, imagined a sigh where there was none.
I shook my head slightly; imagination was best left on the drawing table where it belonged.