Today's Reading
Somewhere down that drive lay Carrick Hall. My mother's childhood home, the storied manor house at the foot of the Wolvern Hills. What little I knew had been pieced together over the years from Mum's rare descriptions, few of them happy. Forty-two rooms, many of them shrouded or empty or locked. A strange landscape of sculpted yews, known as topiaries, which drew tourists from all over the world. Grandfather Torstane, famous art collector, long dead. And Grandmother, a great beauty, all alone save for a handful of staff.
And my mother, Gwendolyn, their only child, gone for twenty years.
Which baffled me. Why leave such a fascinating place? Why abandon such an intriguing family? When questioned, Mum always demurred: "I'll explain someday." Her reticence only made the mystery more tantalizing, my curiosity more insatiable.
But now, I hoped, I'd finally learn everything.
"Ready?" Mum whispered. She seemed a hundred times more nervous than I was.
I took her hand. "Are you?"
She squeezed my hand and gazed straight ahead.
Paxton maneuvered the Bentley through the archway. We now followed the course of a stream through a narrow valley of pasturelands and woodlands, ascending all the time. The fog thickened.
We passed an orchard, mist drifting between the trees. A figure emerged, pushing a wheelbarrow: a boy not much older than me. He was lean and black-haired, pale features almost elfin. He nodded at the car as Paxton lifted a hand.
"He 'must' be a Stokes," Mum said, looking back.
Paxton nodded. "Aye, that's Frankie Addison. Holly's eldest. Helps his grandfather Stokes with the gardens after school."
"My word," she said, facing forward. "I keep waiting for news that old Stokes has retired, but he never does."
"Stays on for tradition's sake." Unlike 'some' people, Paxton's tone suggested. But Mum, if she noticed, ignored it.
"And the boy," Mum continued. "Eldest of five, I believe?"
"Aye, madam. Holly's got her hands full, what with helping daily at the Hall and her Jim gone driving lorries."
"Is he?" Mum said, frowning.
"Not enough work in the Wolverns."
She looked away and pressed her lips together.
"After school?" I whispered to Mum. "Don't kids get the summers off here?"
"What?" she said distractedly. "Oh. Not till later. Schools run on trimesters here, you see—and summer term lasts through the end of July."
The trees cleared, and Carrick Hall rose from the valley like an old gray dragon. Through the fog I could make out a sprawling manor house of high walls and peaked roofs surmounted by a square central tower. Still higher behind it rose those stark, empty hills, half- veiled by swirling clouds. My bottled-up excitement threatened to burst.
As we swept around a circular drive, an enormous green figure loomed out of the mist: a larger-than-life topiary of a snarling wolf. Next to him crouched what appeared to be a gargoyle, expertly sculpted from living greenery. Other fantastical figures now came into view: ogres and dragons, centaurs and sprites, scattered around the grounds, emerging from flower beds and hedgerows. A bizarre menagerie.
"You weren't kidding about the topiaries," I murmured. "I wasn't kidding about anything," Mum said.
I glanced upward as the car drew alongside a flight of steps. Near the great front doors stood what looked like a stone statue of a stately older woman in gray—beautiful, with tragic eyes.
The car stopped. We climbed out. The figure stared at me, one hand clutching its chest. Then it gasped raggedly and looked at Mum.
The statue of flesh and blood was my grandmother—and, for a moment, she thought I was the living dead.
"Hullo, Mother," my own mum said pleasantly. "Paxton made good time, I think. Tea ready?"
Once upon the Warp of Time, Magister the World-Weaver fashioned a flat world. A vast sea spread across it from edge to edge in every direction, and in its center rose a wide landmass of high mountains and deep woodlands, moors and deserts, fens and dales.
Rich was this land, vibrant and lovely.
Magister the World-Weaver then brought forth animals to roam the land, birds to soar the skies, and sea-beasts to ply the waters. So, too, did he make strange creatures, which, in other worlds, are the stuff of legend. Dryads and dwarves, satyrs and centaurs, and wise animals of every kind...all woven into being and called to make their home in that fresh new world.
"Mesterra, Magister called it. For the land seemed suspended in all the vast blueness between sea and sky like a sparkling jewel." —Ternival: Selected Tales by A. H. W. CLIFTON
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