Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Which means finally acknowledging the small wooden door under the stairs.
It’s tucked into the corner of the sitting room beside the fireplace, painted the same deep cream as the wall, set so flush you wouldn’t notice it unless you were looking. The hinges have been painted over more than once until it looks like caterpillars are trying to push through from the other side.
I walk over to it and do nothing but stare for a moment. There is something about hidden doors and small places in old buildings that give me the heebie jeebies. I’m sure there’s nothing inside except for brooms or something but all I can imagine are spiders and other creepy crawlies. For a plant girl, I’ve got an irrational dislike of bugs.
Still, I can’t make this my own place until I know every inch. I sigh and stare at it some more. The latch is iron, looped through a black iron eye, and it’s old enough that opening it requires a small negotiation rather than a turn of the wrist. I work the loop free with my fingertips, and the door swings inward with a long low creak that I feel in my teeth. The smell that comes out is a mixture of camphor and dust and old wool and the particular dry-sweet note of paper that has been sitting in the dark for a long time. What was that smell called again? Lignin?
I take the flashlight from the drawer by the kitchen door, afraid for a moment when I turn my back to the darkness, then turn it on, hoping to catch any menacing insects in the act.
The space inside is the height of my shoulder, sloping down with the line of the stairs, and there’s just enough room to crouch in. The floorboards are bare and cool. A pair of old rubber boots lean against one wall like they’ve been waiting for someone. A broken tea set. A folded piece of oilcloth. A spool of grey twine, mostly unwound. Yes, some brooms too. And in the back, against the lowest part of the slope, under a sheet that has gone yellow at the edges, the shape the size of a steamer trunk.
I duck warily, careful not to get my hair caught in any cobwebs, then get my hands under the handles. The weight surprises me and I have to brace my shoulder against the inside of the doorway and lean back into my hips, and even then, the trunk only comes out in slow stages, dragging on the boards. By the time I’ve got it through the doorway and into the sitting room, my hands are shaking the way they do when I’ve asked too much of them, and I have to sit down for a minute with my back against the armchair to wait for my body to stop yelling at me.
I take in the chest. The brass hardware on the trunk has gone green and the leather straps are cracked. There’s a label tied to the lock with kitchen twine that says, in neat handwriting, Iris.
Seeing my name where it’s not expected is jarring and a tiny thrill runs through me. I don’t know when Effie would have done this—before she went to the hospital or back when she decided this cottage was to be mine—but it’s been waiting for me.
I move the trunk into the kitchen because the kitchen has the best light. I make a fresh cup of tea, then pull a chair up and open the lid.
The hinges sigh. The smell is stronger up close, camphor and the chalky scent of paper that’s been pressed against itself for years. The first thing I see is paper in many forms. Letters tied in bundles with kitchen twine bows, a romantic look of a bygone era. Notebooks, dozens of them, some with cracked oilcloth covers, some leather, some plain spiral-bound pads from the seventies. Loose sketches on heavier paper. Pressed flowers between sheets of waxed paper, the ghost of their color still showing through. A small wooden box that rattles when I lift it. And, lying flat on top of everything, a leather-bound sketchbook.
I open the sketchbook and sit there for a long moment with my hand on the page, letting myself feel what I’m feeling, which is the strange, slightly embarrassing recognition of someone else’s work as kin to my own. The line is the same line. The discipline is the same discipline. Effie painted the way I did, with a watercolor wash laid down first and the ink work over the top, and her plants are accurate the way mine are accurate—every leaf-margin counted, every venation correct, every flower drawn from at least three angles on the same page so the structure can be understood.
I had no idea she did this.