Her Perilous Mansion

by Sean Williams

  ‘The choice, I believe, is not yours,’ Permilia said, standing taller and smoothing down the front of her golden robe. Her expression grew stern. ‘I said before that there is no easy way out of this situation. No easy way for me… and why should it be easy, eh? I am entirely at fault. It is only fair that I should bear the lion’s share of the responsibility.’

  The sorcerer began moving her hands again, but this time in complex shapes that seemed to mould the air front of her, the very fabric of space.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Almanac, his throat tightening.

  ‘Making a new spell,’ she said, ‘to finish this once and for all.’

  ‘What’s it going to do?’ asked Etta. ‘Kill us for good?’

  ‘Would that be such a terrible thing?’

  ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘I mean … maybe. It really should be up to us!’

  ‘What would you do?’ asked the sorcerer, turning on her. ‘Take a vote? Choose one amongst you to decide life-or-death for all the others? No, I could not do that to you. The decision is not yours to make.’

  Her hands drew apart, stretching out a sentence of shimmering force before her. Etta gasped: she had never heard of a sorcerer so powerful they could write on the air itself with only their hands! The language was one not even Doctor Mithily had seen before, but that it had meaning was apparent to everyone. They cowered from the words, feeling as though the world was pressing them flat. Magic coursed through every atom. Their breath seemed to sing along with it. The sorcerer’s lips moved silently and rapidly.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Almanac cried, reaching for Etta.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, clutching back at him. ‘But I think we’re going to die for good this time!’

  ‘We have to stop her.’

  ‘I don’t think we can!’

  Nonetheless, they did what they could. Reaching into his pocket, Almanac produced the soapstone pendant and the hairpin. He tossed the latter to Etta, who caught it with all the strength that she could find in her translucent hands. Shouting a spontaneous battle-cry, she lunged against the magical force while Almanac threw the soapstone at the sorcerer’s head. Maybe if they distracted her, the sorcerer’s new spell wouldn’t take hold – or perhaps they could make a mess of her magical handwriting …

  The soapstone and hairpin were flung to the ground, along with the ghosts, by a supernatural shockwave that made the walls shake. The ceiling shuddered. Plaster shattered and glass cracked, and finally Permilia’s hands dropped to hang at her sides, their work done. Her expression was full of sorrow.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said with absolute finality.

  Almanac braced himself. He had come to the house in search of a life outside the orphanage, leaving behind the only family he’d ever known. In place of Josh, he had Etta now. At least he would die knowing what it felt like to have made a new friend.

  Etta too bravely confronted her own demise. At home, she had never been wanted, not really, but here, with Almanac and the others, she’d felt valued. She had been their spokesperson! The word dying didn’t seem so terrifying to her when it was followed by together.

  Each of the ghosts, in their own way, came to terms with the reality of their impending death.

  Then a commanding voice wrenched them from their final contemplations.

  ‘Don’t just lay there,’ yelled Permilia over the sound of collapsing masonry. ‘I was saying goodbye to the house, not to you!’

  Their eyes snapped open. Bricks and mortar rained all around them, but nothing came close enough o cause them harm. An umbrella of invisible force somehow kept every missile at bay. The sorcerer herself stood in the frame of a shattered window leading from the sunroom into the garden and was waving for them to escape. A torrent of rare and valuable goods – dinner services, silverware, portraits, sculptures, clothes – swept past her into the safety of the grounds, flying as though on invisible wings.

  Almanac and Etta did as they were told, mystified by what this strange new development meant. Who talked to houses? Sorcerers, apparently. But what would the house say back?

  It was cold outside, the eastern sky just beginning to lighten. When they had reached a safe distance, they turned to face the manor in the hope of learning what ailed it. Its many roofs were collapsing, sending up clouds of dust. Its walls were buckling. With a terrible rending noise, it began to fall in on itself, as though aging hundreds of years in mere moments. The flood of items flying from within slowed to a trickle, then a stop.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Etta asked Permilia, barely able to make herself heard over the sounds of destruction. Many of her fellow ghosts were weeping at the sight of their beautiful home, prison though it had been, falling into ruin.

  ‘Long did my ancestral seat harbour that spell,’ said the sorcerer in a mournful voice. ‘Its existence was unnaturally extended, at great cost to you all. Your life gave it life, and much of it is still here, in the grounds and walls around us. Your vital energy had become imbued within the house itself, and now the house is gone I can give it back to you. Breathe deeply, child. Breathe deeply, all of you who wish to live! Or hold your breath and pass from this world to your rest. The choice is yours!’

  A feeling of warmth and life rushed out of the inward-falling house towards those assembled before it. Etta automatically gasped and inhaled to the full extent of her lungs. So did Almanac, feeling as if this was the first proper breath he had taken for weeks. Hackett and Elsie did the same, the latter with a tiny hiccup, like she had drunk too suddenly from a cold spring. Doctor Mithily let the feeling thrill through her, fascinated and full of wonder. Others – Lord Nigel, Olive, Lakitia, Owen, Silas, Ugo – also took their fill.

  But others stopped their lips tight, content to let the rush and tumble of life pass them by. They dissolved into mist and were dispelled by the first rays of the rising sun, Madame Iris amongst them.

  Then with one final, tinkling crash, the house settled into a vast pile of splinters and fragments, and was silent.

  Those who had breathed felt a sudden jolt as the house gave back what life it had left to them, and their hearts began beating once more.

  Etta checked her hands. They were as solid as they ought to be, not transparent at all. The cuts on her hands were bleeding again. A broad grin spread across her face, and Almanac answered her with a smile of his own. It was over.

  Almost.

  Permilia stepped forward with the scroll raised before her in both hands. Her eyes scanned the words a third and final time, and then with swift, powerful motions she tore the parchment into tiny pieces and scattered them on the dawn breeze.

  The letter she had written to herself and then forgotten about went from an accidental spell to just words, and then nothing at all.

  Etta and Almanac raised linked hands above their heads and, in chorus with the other survivors of the spell, whooped at the joy of being alive.

  The sun was barely halfway up the sky before the harsh reality of their situations truly settled in.

  Surrounded by piles of riches they might be, but they had no food or water, and no proper shelter. The youngest ones might survive the night, but what about the rest, and what about the next night, and the night after that? They had all come to the mansion seeking respite from the real world, and on returning to the real world they found it no less unforgiving than it had ever been.

  Housemaid or hall boy, lady or lord, these eleven survivors had nowhere to go, and no one to belong to except each other.

  The sorcerer was moved.

  Producing an elaborate pen from one pocket and a scroll of thick vellum from another, she wrote quickly and surely.

  ‘Here,’ she said, thrusting the finished document into Etta’s hands, recognising her as the one who spoke for the rest. ‘This is a bespelled and therefore binding bill of sale transferring Stormleigh and its surrounds to you. All of you. Build again or burn what remains and sow the land with salt – I care not. I am rich enough. All this is
yours now, to do with as you will.’

  ‘What?’ asked Etta, staring at the scroll in disbelief. ‘You shouldn’t joke with us. That would be cruel.’

  ‘I, joke? When a single word out of place could ruin all? I have never been more serious – and I know that you were serious too when you told me that this was your house. Words have power, you understand, even if you are not a sorcerer.’

  Etta opened her mouth, then closed it. What would Dizzy say if she found out her little sister held a magical deed to a house worth more than their whole village? Perhaps a brief note to her sister through the post would be in order.

  Almanac was no less dumbstruck. For a boy who had once been glad simply to leave the orphanage, being given a house and land was generosity out of step with reality.

  ‘You will need help, of course,’ the sorcerer went on. ‘The villagers of Lower Rudmere will embrace you if you tell them my birth name and that I gave you this estate. There will be a sorcerer there who can help with surveying and planning. You can afford one now. Selling some of the precious things I saved from the house will give you all the funds you need. The one thing I did not see was my portrait—’

  ‘It’s in the stable, safe,’ said Almanac.

  ‘We’d never sell that,’ added Etta.

  ‘Good. That is all I ask.’ She took the young ones in her arms and smiled at the elders gathered around. ‘This is your home now. I leave you to decide what form it will take.’

  An argument immediately broke out over what the survivors should do, but it was not a bitter one. It was an argument borne of conflicting possibilities rather than shared desperation.

  ‘First things first,’ said Almanac. ‘We should sort the wreckage into materials. I’m sure much of it will be reusable. The stones of the old tower would make a fine wall, for instance. All we have to do is find them … ’

  Already in Almanac’s mind was a home that people truly never wanted to leave, unlike the orphanage, which he missed in some ways but never wanted to return to. He didn’t know what the new manor might look like, but he would have a stake in it, and so would everyone gathered around him. And Josh, too. The very second he was able to, he would write to the orphanage and invite his friend to join them.

  This vision was not incompatible with Doctor Mithily’s imagined scientific retreat, Lady Simone’s health spa, Silas’s carefully curated orchard, and the dreams of all the other survivors. They weren’t going to happen on their own, though, Etta knew.

  ‘This is going to take a lot of work,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to divide up tasks and give them to people who can do them. I barely even know where to start!’

  ‘I think you already have,’ said Almanac with a smile.

  They were so deep in discussing their plans that no one saw the sorcerer turn and walk away, her face a mask of barely-hidden loss. Tangled deep in the memories of her childhood, she followed the familiar avenue that led to the gate. To where the gate had been, she corrected herself, seeing the rusted ruin that sagged in its place. The wall to either side still stood, but only precariously. Many stones had slipped free, and thick weeds crawled up its sides, roots working their way tenaciously into all the dry joints.

  Passing through the unbarred gateway, the sorcerer felt a weight lifting from her shoulders that she hadn’t even known was there.

  She could not buy forgiveness, but she left knowing that she had at least eased a burden. When the survivors learned the true value of the boon they had been given, they would understand that there were possibilities for everyone. Some of the artefacts preserved in the house were immensely valuable. Other gifts were beyond estimation.

  In her mind, she composed several swift gestures that would form a charm to fly her back to Eblon Palace, where she would attempt to repair the breach caused by absenting herself from an important sitting without a single word of explanation.

  Before she could make the spell, however, she found a brass sign lying where it had fallen on the ground outside the wall. Picking it up, she dusted it off and affixed it as best she could to its old position. Reading it, she laughed softly in puzzlement.

  This day had already surprised her greatly, but it retained the power to surprise her still.

  The sign declared neither ‘Stormleigh’ nor ‘Her Perilous Mansion’.

  ‘Normal House’ would do very well instead.

  The idea for Etta and Almanac’s story came from a dream I had in October 2017. I shared it with Garth Nix, as I perhaps do too often, and he did indeed tell me to write it down. There were a lot of steps between there and here, though.

  My original plan was not to write this book at all, at least not so quickly. I spent 2018 living in Dublin, which was marvellous, and in that time I planned to work on two very different novels, neither of which involved magic at all. During that year, my wife and I visited many, many old mansions, while I fielded many, many queries about when I was going to write my ‘Ireland’ book – leprechauns, pots of gold, etc. Nothing remotely like this came to me, but the fictional manor house of Stormleigh did, by subtle sleight of mind, begin to take shape.

  Before I came home, I wrote an article (‘From the Angry Shilling to the Jealous Wall’, available freely on the web) about my favourite houses in Ireland. These include Lissadell House, Westport House and Bantry House – sources, respectively, of the kitchen, library and painted ceiling of Stormleigh. Other houses provided other details while slowly, inevitably, the story itself began to take shape too.

  Thanks to all the welcoming, generous and informative people who befriended us in Ireland and helped in various ways to make this book possible. There are too many to list here, but they are not forgotten. We look forward to visiting again soon.

  Like all books, this one owes a deep literary debt to writers past and present. Otfried Preussler’s Satanic Mill (aka Krabat, The Curse of the Darkling Mill and Krabat and the Sorcerer’s Mill) was given to me in my teens by my best friend’s mother; it’s a story that has haunted me all my life and served as a pivotal inspiration for this novel. Other writers include Garth Nix, Diana Wynne Jones and Georgette Heyer (whose works I read exclusively while living in Ireland).

  I am in immense debt to Eva Mills and Sophie Splatt, my publisher and editor at Allen & Unwin, and to my agent Jill Grinberg. Thanks also to my old friend Katica Pedisic, who provided a much-needed map, to Louie Joyce for his wonderful cover art and to Mika Tabata for designing a perfect package. An extra-special shout-out to my wife Amanda, whose picture outshines the stately home behind her on my phone’s lock screen.

  Sláinte!

  Sean Williams was born in the dry, flat lands of South Australia, where he still lives with his wife and family. He is the author of over 40 novels and 120 published short stories, and teaches creative writing at Flinders University.

  seanwilliams.com