The Attic Window at Greymoor House

Source written for Revision Library in a classic literary style (original, copyright-free).

The coach had been three hours upon the moor road, and still the rain came on, driving hard against the windows and turning the track to a ribbon of black mud. Eleven years old and quite alone, Eleanor Fairweather pressed her face to the glass and watched the last grey light drain from the sky. The wind rose and fell in a doleful voice about the coach, and once, as they rounded a bend, she glimpsed the gaunt trunk of a lightning-blasted oak, standing black and leafless against the clouds. She was a diffident child by nature, unused to speaking her fears aloud, and she had never before travelled so far from anyone who loved her; the wind's low moaning seemed only to echo the hollow feeling that had settled in her chest since her mother's death six weeks before.

At last the coach drew up before a house that stood apart from any village, narrow and grey, with tall chimneys that seemed to claw at the darkening sky. Ivy had crept across half the frontage, and the failing light appeared almost to swallow the building whole, so that for a moment Eleanor could scarcely tell where the house ended and the night began. She climbed down, her boots sinking into the gravel, and the coachman set her small trunk and portmanteau upon the step before turning the horses about and disappearing into the rain without so much as a farewell.

Eleanor stood before the great door for a full minute before she found the courage to lift the knocker. Her hands, she noticed with some surprise, were trembling, though whether from the cold or from something less easily named she could not have said. At length the door swung inward, and there stood a stout woman in a plain grey gown, a candle held aloft in one reddened hand. 'You will be Miss Fairweather, I don't doubt,' said the woman, whose name, Eleanor would soon learn, was Mrs Hodge, the housekeeper, and who entreated her at once to come in out of the wet before she caught her death.

The hall within was dim and narrow, and Eleanor had scarcely set down her trunk when a second figure appeared at the top of the stairs, candle in hand, her expression imperious and unsmiling in the flickering light.

'So you have come at last,' said Aunt Prudence, descending slowly, her voice querulous, as though the very lateness of the hour had been arranged to try her patience. 'I had begun to think the coach had lost its way entirely, and I am not accustomed to being kept waiting. Well, well, there is no help for it now. You are travel-worn, I daresay, and hungry besides, though I confess I had pictured a taller girl.' She studied her niece for a long moment with an expression Eleanor could not read, then admonished her sharply to wipe her feet before crossing the hall, and turned upon her heel. 'Mrs Hodge will see you fed. We will speak further in the morning, when I am better able to consider what is to be done with you.' Outside, the wind rose to a higher pitch, keening about the chimneys like a soul denied shelter, and a loose shutter somewhere above began to beat a slow, uneven rhythm against the wall.

Mrs Hodge led Eleanor down a narrow passage to a warm kitchen, where a fire burned low in the grate. 'Sit yourself by the hearth,' she said, in a voice pitched low, as though she feared the words might carry up the stairs. 'You must have a little forbearance with your aunt, my dear. She is not an unkind woman, only a reticent one, who says less than she feels, and she has had losses enough in her time to try a saint's patience.' She set before Eleanor a bowl of bread and warm milk, and watched, arms folded, until the child had eaten every crumb, saying nothing further, though her eyes were not unkind.

When at last Eleanor was shown up three flights of narrow stairs to a small room beneath the roof, she found a single window set deep into the slope of the ceiling, through which she could see nothing but darkness and the shapes of bare branches tossing in the wind. She was obliged to leave her trunk unopened, for her fingers were too numb and too weary to manage the clasps, and so she sat upon the narrow bed in her travelling coat and kept a lonely vigil at the glass. Her mother, in her last days, had besought her to be brave, and Eleanor tried now to remember the exact words, though sleep, when it came at last, arrived before she could quite recall them.