Handry came back with the key. It was looking slightly rusty, he reported, but it fit in the lock of the front door and turned with a grinding sound and a little persuasion. The door opened.
The house smelled neither musty nor stale from being shut up, Vincent discovered. The cleaners he paid to come in once a fortnight must be doing a conscientious job. There was a smell, though, an indefinable something that brought back memories of boyhood days and of his mother and his sisters as they had been when they all lived here. Even faint memories of his father. It was strange that he had never noticed the smell while he lived here—perhaps because he had not needed to notice smells in those days.
He felt about the hall with the aid of his cane. The old oak table was still where it had always been, opposite the door, the umbrella stand beside it. Both were draped with holland covers.
“I know this house like the back of my hand,” he told Martin, pulling the cover off the stand and placing his cane in it. “I am going to explore it on my own. And then I am going to lie down in my room for an hour or two. A carriage is not designed for sleeping in, is it?”
“Not when it has to travel over English roads,” Martin agreed, “and there isn’t any alternative that I have discovered. I’ll go and help Handry with the horses. And then I’ll bring your bags inside.”
One thing Vincent particularly liked about Martin Fisk was that he cared for all his needs without fuss and bluster. Best of all was the fact that he did not hover. If Vincent walked into the occasional wall or door or tripped over the occasional object lying in his path or even once in a while tumbled down a flight of steps or—on one memorable occasion—head first into a lily pond, then Martin would be there to deal with any cuts and scratches and other assorted consequences and to make appropriate or inappropriate comments without any sentiment creeping into his voice.
He even occasionally informed his master that he was a clumsy clod.
It was better—ah, infinitely better—than the solicitous care with which almost everyone else of his acquaintance smothered him.
He was an ungrateful wretch, he knew.
Actually, his fellow members of the Survivors’ Club treated him much as Martin did. It was one reason why he loved his annual stay at Penderris Hall so much, he supposed. But then all seven of them had been badly wounded in the wars and still bore the scars inside or out or both. They understood the frustrations of too much sympathetic care.
When he was alone in the house, he made his way to the sitting room on his left, the room in which all the daytime living had been done. Everything was as he remembered it and where he remembered it, except for the fact that all the furniture was covered. He moved through to the drawing room, larger and less used than the other room. Sometimes there had been dancing in the drawing room. Eight couples had been able to form for a country set with some comfort, ten with a little less comfort, twelve at a squeeze.
There was a pianoforte in this room. Vincent found his way to it. Like everything else, it was hidden beneath a cover. He was tempted to pull it off, to lift the lid over the keyboard and play. But the instrument must be horribly out of tune.
It was strange that he had never learned to play it when he was a lad. No one had even thought of suggesting that he might. The pianoforte was for the girls, an instrument of torture peculiarly their own—or so Amy, his eldest sister, had always claimed.
Strangely, now that he was here, he missed all three of them. And his mother. Even his father, who had been gone for eight years now. He missed those carefree days of his childhood and youth. And they were not even so very long ago. He was only twenty-three now.
Twenty-three going on fifty.
Or seventy.
He sighed and decided to leave the cover where it was. But standing there at the pianoforte, his hands resting on the top of it, his head bowed, he was suddenly smitten by a familiar tidal wave of panic.
He felt the blood drain from his head, leaving it cold and clammy. He felt the breath cold in his nostrils and so thin that there seemed not enough of it to inhale. He felt all the terror of the unending darkness, of the sure knowledge that if he closed his eyes, as he did now, and opened them again, as he did not, he would still be blind.
Always and forever.
With no reprieve.
No light.
Not ever.
He fought to control his breathing, knowing from long experience of such episodes that if he lost control of it, he would soon be gasping for air and even losing consciousness until he came out of his swoon, perhaps alone, perhaps—much worse—with someone hovering over him. But still sightless.
He kept his eyes shut. He counted his breaths again, trying to concentrate upon them to the exclusion of all the thoughts that teemed and tumbled through his mind.
In. Out.
After a while he opened his eyes again and loosened his grip on the top of the pianoforte. He lifted his head. He would be damned, he thought, before he would allow the darkness to encroach upon his inner being. It was enough that it was there outside himself for all time. His own stupidity in battle had caused the outer darkness. He would not compound that youthful folly by allowing the light that was within him to be doused.
He would live his life. He would live it to the full. He would make something of it and of himself. He would not give in to either depression or hopelessness.
He would not, by God.
He was desperately tired. That was the problem, he supposed, and it was easily solved. He would feel better after a bit of a sleep. He would continue his exploration of the house after that.