“The only other story I’d like to hear,” I said, deliberately trying to alter an atmosphere that I felt began to border on the lugubrious, “is the one in which the heroine is not directed straight into marriage and then onward to the birthing room. I wish for someone to tell me another story. Tell me that story, Miss Grange,” I challenged, catching up my skirts and rising from my seat to stand at the lip of that great hole. “For I am sick unto death of mere love stories,” I pronounced.

“Good girl,” she said swiftly.

I looked back over my shoulder to see my companion’s expression and found she stared directly at me now, the words cast down like a glove between us. I turned right round to face her, now fully discomfited by her tone and manner.

She scrutinized me a minute. “The time has come to tell you one of my own stories,” she said at last, her gaze still fastened upon me. “And I hope that it may lead you to—” But here she broke off, as though she had said too much.

“Lead me! What do you mean?” My voice sounded cracked in the soft air.

She did not move, but continued to watch; and I did not know if a beast had sprung, or still sat, coiled and waiting, so peculiar had she grown.

“Slant, not straight—for it is truth and phantasm combined,” she finally answered, “as are all good stories.” Then she raised her arm and motioned me again to come near.

But I stayed my distance from this unfamiliar smiling woman among the rocks. The entirety of this morning, Miss Grange had addressed me as if she thought me to be like her: a woman who had chosen an attic solitude rather than a first-floor life among her kind. And suddenly, this proximity unsettled. “It is late, Miss Grange,” I said. “Let us return.”

A moment passed, as if my words had lost their way in the air between us.

“Just so,” she replied at last, and rose up from her seat. “The tale can be told only in the House.” She came to join me where I still stood at the quarry’s edge and looked down. Our two forms wavered upon the black water. She reached down and touched the point of her walking stick to the glassy surface, setting us quivering; then she turned to look at me and gave her old smile.

“Come,” she said. “I shall tell it to you this afternoon after tea.” And then she stepped back from the quarry, turned, and, without looking again at me, started back down the path to Grange House.

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SIX

That afternoon, the promise of a story beguiled, hushing the little voice of disquiet summoned up by Miss Grange’s odd intensity, and I climbed the stairs into her attic room.