House of Masques by Fortune Kent Page A

cadets from the summer encampment at the Point. I had to go to Newburgh to hire the musicians.” He spoke rapidly, and for the first time an excitement entered his voice. She wondered if he was speaking to her or thinking aloud. “I’ll make this house come alive, perhaps for the last time for me and perhaps only for one night. But alive.”
    They entered the house and passed curtsying maids on long curving stairs, walked down corridors lined with portraits, explored dusty attics piled haphazardly with trunks and boxes filled with clothes and toys from long ago. A steep stairway descended into the old section of the house. The Captain pointed to the beams in an ill-lighted bedroom. “My great-grandfather built this himself at the turn of the century,” he told her. The past must have been a narrow, rough-hewn place, Kathleen thought.
    He showed her the library last. A young girl finished flicking a feather duster over the books and hurried from the room. “When I was young,” the Captain said, “this room was my favorite. If there’s a secret passage anywhere in the house, I think it must be here. But no matter how I searched, I never found one.”
    â€œI didn’t know you grew up on the Estate.”
    â€œI wasn’t born here. My parents moved from the West when I was five and I lived in this house for ten years. The happiest years of my life.” He leaned with his back against a table while his hand idly spun a globe. She remembered the globe at Gleneden. What is Josiah doing now? she wondered. When will I see him again?
    â€œI guess I came back here last winter because of the way I felt when I was a boy living in this house,” he went on. “To try to recapture the feeling I had then.” He stopped the globe with a slap of his hand. “I found you can’t.” He turned to her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Here, take a novel with you, I must see to the horses.” He handed her The Curse of Clifton and Little Women.
    Kathleen climbed the back stairs. At the top she opened the door, expecting to find the hall to her bedroom, but after going several steps she stopped, realizing she was in a sewing room instead, a room so small it was almost filled by a frame upon which stretched a partially completed patchwork quilt. A faint scent of lavender filled the air.
    â€œCome in, child.” A woman’s voice from near the one small window. The room still hoarded the shadows of night and Kathleen was forced to look closely before she found a shadow blacker than the rest. As her eyes accustomed themselves to the dark, the shadow became an old woman in a rocking chair, a chair which moved to and fro so slowly that the motion was more a suggestion than a fact.
    â€œI’m so sorry,” Kathleen said, backing toward the door. “I’m afraid I was wool-gathering. Can you tell me the way to the main hall?”
    â€œThe main hall?” The blank tone told Kathleen she might as well have asked the route to Zanzibar. “My eyes get tired,” the old woman said with a nod in the direction of the quilt. “Yours will too when you’re as old as I am. I was eighty-four last May. When I weary of sewing I sit by my window. Come here beside me.” Her voice had become sharp, imperious. Kathleen maneuvered around the frame to stand by the rocker.
    â€œLook,” the old woman nodded to the window. “See, down there, the kitchen and the whole yard on this side of the house. And to the west.” Kathleen saw the driveway disappearing into the woods. Beyond the cluster of trees ribbons of smoke rose from the village to merge with the overcast.
    â€œYes, yes, you have a pleasant view,” Kathleen said impatiently.
    â€œI don’t see many folks these days,” the woman told her. “Not since Becky married last summer and moved to Connecticut. I hope someone cares more about you when you’re