The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland

Author:Rebecca Rowland [Rowland, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dark Ink
Published: 2021-03-14T22:00:00+00:00

That sealed it as far as I was concerned.

Martin was as pleased as he was surprised by my suggestion: “What do you mean? You really think we ought to call in a psychic?” For the tapping, I responded. “You hear it then?” he asked. I said no, but others did: the parson’s mother for example. “Calling in a psychic is the wackiest thing you ever suggested,” Martin said, laughing, “Let’s do it!”

A week later, M. Alcide Alexander Bonort the Third, an obese and pleasantly saucer-faced young man of indeterminate European origin, dressed like a stage actor in clothing a little bit too small for him, came to tea. Then, with us hovering behind him, he did some kind of “purification” ceremony of the house, room by room, utilizing handle-less brooms of white sage mixed in with violet gorse leaves, and chanting some gobbledy gook. This seemed so absurd that we were almost unable to stop ourselves from laughing until he did something very curious. He stopped at the very same blank wall that the parson’s mother had been staring at when I came upon her. Alcide put down his flaming herbs and said, his voice rising with every phrase, “This is a very bad spot. It resists purification. I cannot remain here!” With the last almost a shriek, he sped out of the hallway and stumbled out of doors and was in his little old purple Dauphine and taking off before we could catch up or even pay him.

We didn’t speak of this incident but the next morning at breakfast, Martin asked if I still had out that book on Cranburgh Grange from the Lending Library. I had returned it and he said he thought he might take a look at it again. He dropped me off at the Parson’s manse, as the old house was called. Once there, I invited myself to tea with the Parson’s mother. I’d suspected she hadn’t too many visitors and I was right. She was happy to see me. Even better, it was she not I who brought up the subject of Lady Sofia and the little boy. Her grandmother had been in the village, which was more populous than now as the local farmers had many for-hire hands, and especially harvest season workers. That was how her mother and father had come to the village, a young couple seeking work. Her mother’s mother followed, because she had already experienced the couple’s great devotion to drink and fun and their equal lack of devotion to caring for their only child, the parson’s mother herself, then a lass of not quite six years. It was the grandmother who had worked at Cranburgh Grange and, perhaps sensitized by her own daughter, had not failed to notice Lady Sofia’s contempt for her new husband’s little heir.

True enough, her Granny had told her, the boy went his own way much of the time, spoiled by his sickly mother’s absence. He had a tutor in the morning, but once

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