“Grace. You are avoiding the issue. I think the girls are right.”
“Oh, yes, yes. No, I quite agree. It’s just…hard to come to the actual truth of it. That our lovely…little house…”
“It is no longer a lovely little house. We have been mentioned in the papers. I cannot bear to look at it anymore.”
“Yes, oh, yes, Rosamund.”
Grace bent forward, widening her eyes, hands clutched as if containing a small creature frantic for release. Behind her, light glinted on a domed glass cage filled with stuffed birds.
“Well, then. Let’s do it now.”
Rosamund picked up a cane leaning against her chair. She stood and went onto the veranda.
“Please come,” she called to the men. Grace, Flora and Enid rose as the men climbed down and stomped into the hall. Rosamund spoke to them in a low voice, making lifting motions. They glanced at one another. Tanned, scarred hands dropped to their sides, and they followed Rosamund as they trooped through an archway rimmed with mahogany spindles. Grace and the young sisters followed.
In the grand parlour, October sunshine slanted onto Mr. Tuck’s creation, set on a pedestal. The men walked around the miniature house, muttering to one another, their boots silent on the Oriental carpet. Flora felt sudden anguish for the cedar shingles, the size of a baby’s fingernails, covering turrets, veranda roof and dormers; for the shiny red trim; for the flagpole with its cloth Red Ensign; for the shiny, raisin- sized brass doorknobs; for the windowpanes, which she herself had set into their frames.
In one hundred years, she thought, no one would remember that the house had been made by a murderer whose victim had borne the marks of teeth on her wrists and hands; whose blood had sprayed a pattern of stars on the surrounding walls. Yet to allow the house to stand on display in the sister’s parlour was to turn one’s back on the murdered woman herself: Mrs. Elsa Cavanaugh, from County Tyrone, fifty years of age. Whose savings Flora had seen. Whose cherished duck had ridden in a murderer’s pocket, had nestled beneath Enid’s pillow.
Grace put her hands over her mouth. “Oh. So sad.”
“Yes. It is very sad.” Rosamund put an arm around her sister’s waist as the men lifted the house. “It is all very sad. But imagine if one day that monster came back and sneaked around and peered into the window and saw that we still had the house he had made.”
“He would think that what he had done didn’t matter. Or that we believed him innocent.”
“That’s just it.”
They followed as the men carried the house through the door, down the hall and onto the veranda. Men, house and women paraded past the laundry yard where maids were hanging sheets; past the hen house and the donkey barn. They wove between the apple trees. At the paddock, Rosamund held the gate and the men angled the house through the opening. The donkeys lifted their heads and tipped their ears, grass trailing from black lips.
“Here,” Rosamund called, striding ahead, beckoning. “It is always very damp here.”
The men set down the house in a slight depression.
The miniature house was diminished by the wispy grasses, the shrivelled wasp-clung apples, the clumps of donkey manure.
“A facsimile is a thing that dies once the bloom has worn off,” Rosamund said, tapping a turret with her cane. “We would tire of this. It does not change, like a real house. There is no heart to it. I prefer to see it as a wicked man’s trick.”
Flora noticed a cracked window, although she had seen how gently the men had lowered the house to the ground. She knelt and ran her finger over the veranda floorboards. She remembered the sketch, then the detailed drawing, and the gradual accumulation of wood, glue, glass, nails. Clouds sailed over the orchard, disintegrating at their edges like ancient fabric, and she thought how everything, in various ways, vanished and then began again. She wondered what she should do with the money Mr. Tuck had given her, still hidden beneath the floorboards. She thought of her dream, carefully nurtured: a job in Mr. Tuck’s factory; the white house that she and Enid would own, with roses and a wooden fence.
The men returned, one with shovels over his shoulder, the other pushing a wheelbarrow filled with paper and shingles. They dug around the house, slicing away turf, leaving raw soil. They set down buckets of water. One man split shingles over his knee and the other made a skirt of crumpled newspaper around the veranda and the walls and the gables and towers. They criss-crossed broken shingles over the paper. Rosamund folded her arms and then flung them up, shooing away the donkeys, who strayed close, curious. The men leaned chunks of split birch wood against the sides of the house, careful not to break a single windowpane, nor nick the paint, nor snap a balustrade.
One drew a box of matches from his pocket. He glanced at Rosamund.
The roof of the house came to the man’s hip.
It is only a thing, Flora thought. It will gather dust. The shingles will come loose on their brads; the curtains will stiffen. The paint will peel.
Rosamund nodded.
The man struck the match, cupped the flame in his palm and touched it to the paper. The paper flared and blackened. The little flame vanished into the crumpled ball. Smoke came like silent black breath and then a ragged fringe of fire burst from beneath the miniature veranda; it licked up, catching the steps, the posts. The men circled the house, cracking matches, igniting paper beneath the kitchen window, beneath a turret, beneath the portico. The fire made a sharp, steady crackle. Heat radiated and the men tipped water onto the bared soil and onto the grasses at the soil’s
