Open the panels in order, one at a time. The full chapter rewrites itself one layer at a time. The first four passes make it read cleaner while the thing stays broken; the deep layers, spine, content, and drift, finally make it real.
In the long and uncertain days that followed her terrible discovery in the tower, Eleanor did not leave Thornwood, but neither did she yet allow herself to agree to stay, and she existed instead in a kind of strange and suspended and almost dreamlike state, a state of waiting and of wondering, neither fully committing her heart to the great and dreadful duty that had been laid upon her nor turning her back upon it and fleeing, and she filled the long and quiet and uncertain hours of those days by doing the one single thing that she had always done throughout the whole of her life whenever she had felt herself to be uncertain or afraid or unsure of the path that lay before her, which was to gather information, to read and to study and to learn everything that there was to be learned, because knowledge had always been her armor and her comfort and her shield, and she told herself that if she could only understand this thing fully, if she could only learn everything about it, then perhaps she would at last know what she ought to do.
And the great library at Thornwood was vast almost beyond all reckoning and almost beyond all belief, a library of four great storeys connected by narrow iron staircases and rolling ladders, its shelves rising up and up into a dim and dusty distance that the eye could scarcely follow, and Mr. Ashford gave her completely and entirely free rein to explore it however and wherever she might wish, holding back nothing from her and forbidding her no door and no shelf and no locked cabinet, and so she spent long quiet day after long quiet day among those towering shelves, pulling down volume after dusty leather-bound volume and slowly and patiently piecing together, fragment by fragment and page by page, the long and hidden and secret history of the family that she had never once known that she belonged to.
And what a history it proved itself to be, what a long and strange and sorrowful history, because the Thornwood line stretched back and back across three full and unbroken centuries of time, and every single generation of that long line, without one single exception, had produced a keeper, a woman to stand her watch and hold the dreadful door, and Eleanor read their names one by one in the crumbling and yellowed family records, the names written out in fading ink in a dozen different hands across a dozen different generations, Margaret and Rosalind and Beatrice and Agnes and Isolde and Lavinia and Honoria and so very many others besides, a long and solemn and unbroken procession of women reaching back and back and back into the gathering mists of time, and each and every single one of them, she slowly came to understand, had come to Thornwood exactly and precisely as Eleanor herself had now come to it, uncertain and afraid and wholly unprepared for what awaited her, and each and every single one of them had in the end, despite that fear and despite that uncertainty, taken up the terrible duty, and each and every single one of them had held the door faithfully and well until at last her own time was done and she passed the burden on to the next woman in the line.
And she read their journals too, the private journals and diaries that had survived the long passage of the years, and they were remarkably and movingly and almost unbearably similar to one another, these women who were separated from one another by decades and in some cases by whole long centuries of time, and they wrote, every one of them, of the very same doubts that Eleanor herself was even now feeling, and of the very same fears, and of the very same slow and gradual and seemingly inevitable surrender to the strange and patient pull of the house and to the crushing weight of the ancient duty, and they wrote of the darkness and of its many and varied and subtle temptations, and above all and beyond all else they wrote of the strength, the unexpected and unlooked-for strength, that each of them had discovered buried deep within herself at the very moment that she had needed it most desperately, and one journal in particular among all the others caught and held and would not release Eleanor’s fascinated attention, and it was the journal of a keeper named Isolde who had held the door against the dark some three full centuries before.
And Isolde had been, very much like Eleanor herself, a woman of the wider world before she came at last to Thornwood, a poet of very considerable renown and reputation in her own day, a woman who had given up a brilliant and celebrated and admired career out in the bright wide world in order to come back to this remote and haunted place and take up the heavy burden of her family, and her journal was full to overflowing with beautiful and aching and heartbreaking passages about the bright and shining life that she had left behind her and about the strange and unexpected and hard-won peace that she had somehow, against all odds, managed to find here in its place, and in one particular passage that Eleanor found herself returning to again and again and yet again, reading it over and over by the light of a single guttering candle, Isolde had written that she mourned the woman that she had once been but that she did not, in her deepest and most honest heart, truly wish that woman back again, for she had been clever and she had been celebrated and she had been admired by all, and yet she had been utterly and achingly and bottomlessly hollow at her very core, and that here, in this haunted and lonely and forsaken place, she had at long last become something that she had never once been before in the whole of her life, that here at last and against all expectation she had finally become whole, and each and every time that Eleanor read those particular words they seemed to cut a little nearer to the bone, a little nearer to some buried and aching truth about her own cold and ordered and hollow life that she had spent so very many years refusing to look at.
And she learned, too, in the course of those long reading days, a very great deal about the darkness itself, about the ancient and patient enemy that the keepers had stood against for so many centuries, though the records upon this subject were strangely and frustratingly vague and incomplete and fragmentary, almost as though even the keepers themselves, the very women who had given over the whole of their lives to holding the thing at bay, had never once truly and fully understood the precise nature of the thing that they guarded against, and it was old, the records all agreed upon that much at least, old beyond all reckoning, older by far than the family and older perhaps than the whole of humanity itself, and it hungered without ceasing and without rest, and it pressed and it pressed and it pressed again forever against the far side of the door without pause and without end, and on the very rare and very terrible occasions across the long centuries when a keeper had faltered and failed and fallen short in her sacred duty, the consequences had been beyond all describing, beyond all imagining, beyond all bearing.
And there had been one such failure, the oldest and the most terrible of them all, some four full centuries ago, when a keeper by the name of Lavinia had abandoned her post and her duty and had fled away from Thornwood in the dead and silent dark of night, simply walked out and left the door unguarded behind her, and the door had weakened in her absence, slowly at first and then very fast, and something had come through it from the far and hungry side, and the surviving records of that dreadful time were fragmentary and water-stained and half-burned and full to the brim with a horror that reached out across the centuries and laid a cold hand upon Eleanor’s own heart as she read, and a whole village that had once stood and thrived nearby had emptied itself entirely within a single season, every soul in it fled or worse, and the crops in all the surrounding fields had failed and withered for a full ten years together, and children had been born wrong in ways that the records would not even fully describe but only hinted at in the margins, and it had taken the next keeper after Lavinia, who was none other than Lavinia’s own daughter, called back to the ruin her mother had made, many long and bitter and sacrificial years of suffering to undo the worst of the damage and to seal the terrible door once more against the dark, and Eleanor closed that particular dreadful book at last with hands that trembled and would not be still, because this was not a fairy story, she understood now, this was not a fable or a legend or a metaphor, this was real, this had truly and actually happened, here, in this place, to these people, and the stakes of the choice that now lay before her were as high and as absolute and as total as any stakes could ever possibly be.
And that night, exhausted and frightened and her head full to bursting with the accumulated grief and terror of three long centuries, she dreamed once again of the woman with her own face standing at the very top of the high stone tower, but this time, in this dream, the woman was not alone, for behind her, stretching back and back and back into the gathering shadows and the dim receding distance, there stood a great and silent and patient multitude, a vast and solemn host of women reaching back through all the long centuries of the line, every single one of them bearing some faint and haunting echo of Eleanor’s own features somewhere in her face, the same grey eyes here, the same set of the jaw there, the same stubborn brow, and every single one of them watching Eleanor steadily and silently with patient and hopeful and infinitely loving eyes, and Eleanor understood, in the strange and certain logic of the dream, that she was being asked to join them at last, to step forward and take her own appointed place in that long and shining and unbroken line of women, and she woke just before the first grey light of the dawn, and for the very first time since she had come to this strange and terrible and beautiful place, she woke wanting, with her whole heart, to say yes.
In the long and uncertain days that followed her terrible discovery in the tower, Eleanor did not leave Thornwood, but neither did she yet allow herself to agree to stay, and she existed instead in a kind of strange and suspended and almost dreamlike state, a state of waiting and of wondering, neither fully committing her heart to the great duty that had been laid upon her nor turning her back upon it and fleeing, and she filled the long and quiet and uncertain hours of those days by doing the one single thing that she had always done throughout the whole of her life whenever she had felt herself to be uncertain or afraid or unsure of the path that lay before her, which was to gather information, to read and to study and to learn everything that there was to be learned, because knowledge had always been her armor and her comfort and her shield, and she told herself that if she could only understand this thing fully, if she could only learn everything about it, then perhaps she would at last know what she ought to do.
And the great library at Thornwood was vast almost vast, a library of four great storeys connected by narrow iron staircases and rolling ladders, its shelves rising up and up into a dim and dusty distance that the eye could scarcely follow, and Mr. Ashford gave her completely free rein to explore it however and wherever she might wish, holding back nothing from her and forbidding her no door and no shelf and no locked cabinet, and so she spent long quiet day after long quiet day among those towering shelves, pulling down volume after dusty leather-bound volume and slowly and patiently piecing together, fragment by fragment and page by page, the long and hidden and secret history of the family that she had never once known that she belonged to.
And what a history it proved itself to be, what a long and strange and sorrowful history, because the Thornwood line stretched back and back across three full and unbroken centuries of time, and every single generation of that long line, without one single exception, had produced a keeper, a woman to stand her watch and hold the terrible door, and Eleanor read their names one by one in the crumbling and yellowed family records, the names written out in fading ink in a dozen different hands across a dozen different generations, Margaret and Rosalind and Beatrice and Agnes and Isolde and Lavinia and Honoria and so many others besides, a long and solemn and unbroken procession of women reaching back and back and back into the gathering mists of time, and each and every single one of them, she slowly came to understand, had come to Thornwood exactly and precisely as Eleanor herself had now come to it, uncertain and afraid and wholly unprepared for what awaited her, and each and every single one of them had in the end, despite that fear and despite that uncertainty, taken up the terrible duty, and each and every single one of them had held the door faithfully and well until at last her own time was done and she passed the burden on to the next woman in the line.
And she read their journals too, the private journals and diaries that had survived the long passage of the years, and they were remarkably and movingly and almost unbearably similar to one another, these women who were separated from one another by decades and in some cases by whole long centuries of time, and they wrote, every one of them, of the very same doubts that Eleanor herself was even now feeling, and of the very same fears, and of the very same slow and gradual and seemingly inevitable surrender to the strange and patient pull of the house and to the crushing weight of the ancient duty, and they wrote of the darkness and of its many and varied and subtle temptations, and above all and beyond all else they wrote of the strength, the unexpected and unlooked-for strength, that each of them had discovered buried deep within herself at the very moment that she had needed it most desperately, and one journal in particular among all the others caught and held and would not release Eleanor’s fascinated attention, and it was the journal of a keeper named Isolde who had held the door against the dark some three full centuries before.
And Isolde had been, very much like Eleanor herself, a woman of the wider world before she came at last to Thornwood, a poet of very considerable renown and reputation in her own day, a woman who had given up a brilliant and celebrated and admired career out in the bright wide world in order to come back to this remote and haunted place and take up the heavy burden of her family, and her journal was full to overflowing with beautiful and aching passages about the bright and shining life that she had left behind her and about the strange and unexpected and hard-won peace that she had somehow, against all odds, managed to find here in its place, and in one particular passage that Eleanor found herself returning to again and again again, reading it over and over by the light of a single guttering candle, Isolde had written that she mourned the woman that she had once been but that she did not, in her deepest and most honest heart, truly wish that woman back again, for she had been clever and she had been celebrated and she had been admired by all, and yet she had been utterly and achingly hollow at her very core, and that here, in this haunted and lonely and forsaken place, she had at long last become something that she had never once been before in the whole of her life, that here at last and against all expectation she had finally become whole, and each and every time that Eleanor read those particular words they seemed to cut a little nearer to the bone, a little nearer to some buried and aching truth about her own cold and ordered and hollow life that she had spent so many years refusing to look at.
And she learned, too, in the course of those long reading days, a very great deal about the darkness itself, about the ancient and patient enemy that the keepers had stood against for so many centuries, though the records upon this subject were strangely and frustratingly vague and incomplete and fragmentary, almost as though even the keepers themselves, the very women who had given over the whole of their lives to holding the thing at bay, had never once truly and fully understood the precise nature of the thing that they guarded against, and it was old, the records all agreed upon that much at least, old old, older by far than the family and older perhaps than the whole of humanity itself, and it hungered without rest, and it pressed and it pressed and it pressed again forever against the far side of the door without end, and on the very rare and very terrible occasions across the long centuries when a keeper had faltered and failed and fallen short in her sacred duty, the consequences had been terrible.
And there had been one such failure, the oldest and the most terrible of them all, some four full centuries ago, when a keeper by the name of Lavinia had abandoned her post and her duty and had fled away from Thornwood in the dead and silent dark of night, simply walked out and left the door unguarded behind her, and the door had weakened in her absence, slowly at first and then very fast, and something had come through it from the far and hungry side, and the surviving records of that terrible time were fragmentary and water-stained and half-burned and full to the brim with a horror that reached out across the centuries and laid a cold hand upon Eleanor’s own heart as she read, and a whole village that had once stood and thrived nearby had emptied itself entirely within a single season, every soul in it fled or worse, and the crops in all the surrounding fields had failed and withered for a full ten years together, and children had been born wrong in ways that the records would not even fully describe but only hinted at in the margins, and it had taken the next keeper after Lavinia, who was none other than Lavinia’s own daughter, called back to the ruin her mother had made, many long and bitter and sacrificial years of suffering to undo the worst of the damage and to seal the terrible door once more against the dark, and Eleanor closed that particular terrible book at last with hands that trembled and would not be still, because this was not a fairy story, she understood now, this was not a fable or a legend or a metaphor, this was real, this had truly and actually happened, here, in this place, to these people, and the stakes of the choice that now lay before her were as high and as absolute and as total as any stakes could ever possibly be.
And that night, exhausted and frightened and her head full to bursting with the accumulated grief and terror of three long centuries, she dreamed once again of the woman with her own face standing at the very top of the high stone tower, but this time, in this dream, the woman was not alone, for behind her, stretching back and back and back into the gathering shadows and the dim receding distance, there stood a great and silent and patient multitude, a vast and solemn host of women reaching back through all the long centuries of the line, every single one of them bearing some faint and haunting echo of Eleanor’s own features somewhere in her face, the same grey eyes here, the same set of the jaw there, the same stubborn brow, and every single one of them watching Eleanor steadily and silently with patient and hopeful and very loving eyes, and Eleanor understood, in the strange and certain logic of the dream, that she was being asked to join them at last, to step forward and take her own appointed place in that long and shining and unbroken line of women, and she woke just before the first grey light of the dawn, and for the very first time since she had come to this strange and terrible and beautiful place, she woke wanting, with her whole heart, to say yes.
She did not leave, and she did not yet agree to stay. She filled the hours the way she always did when uncertain, by gathering information. Ashford gave her the run of the library. She read the journals in order, the keepers reaching back through the centuries, expecting courage.
The line went back three hundred years. Every generation a keeper. Margaret. Rosalind. Beatrice. Agnes. Isolde. A procession of women, each come to Thornwood uncertain and afraid, each taking up the duty in the end.
Their journals were strikingly alike across the centuries. The same doubts. The same fears. The same slow surrender to the house. One held her: Isolde, a poet of renown three hundred years gone, who had given up a career to come here, and who wrote that she mourned the woman she had been but did not wish her back, that she had been celebrated and hollow, and that here she had become whole. Each time Eleanor read it, it cut closer.
She read of the darkness too, though the records were vague, as though even the keepers had not understood it. It was old, older than the family, and it hungered, and it pressed against the door without rest.
And she read of the one who failed. Four hundred years back, a keeper named Lavinia fled in the night, and the door weakened, and something came through. A village emptied. Crops failed for a decade. Children were born wrong. It took Lavinia’s own daughter years to seal the door again. Eleanor closed the book with trembling hands. This was real. The stakes were as high as stakes could be.
That night she dreamed again of the woman with her own face at the top of the tower. This time a host stood behind her, women reaching back into shadow, each with some echo of Eleanor’s features, watching with patient hopeful eyes. She woke before dawn. For the first time, she woke wanting to join them.
She did not leave, and she did not yet agree to stay. She filled the hours the way she always did when uncertain, by gathering information.
The line went back three hundred years. Every generation a keeper. Margaret. Rosalind. Agnes. Isolde. A procession of women, each come to Thornwood uncertain and afraid.
Their journals were strikingly alike across the centuries. The same doubts, the same slow surrender. Isolde, a poet who had given up a career, wrote that she had been celebrated and hollow, and that here she had become whole. Each time Eleanor read it, it cut closer.
And she read of the one who failed. Four hundred years back, a keeper named Lavinia fled in the night, and the door weakened, and something came through. A village emptied. Children were born wrong. It took Lavinia’s own daughter years to seal the door again.
That night she dreamed again of the woman with her own face, and this time a host stood behind her, reaching back into shadow, watching with patient hopeful eyes. She woke wanting to join them.
She filled the days the way she always did when she was uncertain, by gathering information, because information was the one thing that had never once betrayed her. Ashford gave her the run of the library, four storeys of it, and she read the keepers’ journals in order, the women reaching back across the centuries, and she came to them, she realised later, expecting courage. Expecting a line of brave women who had each found, at the necessary moment, the strength to do a hard and noble thing.
“You will want to skip the spring entries,” Cordelia said from the dark glass that evening, when Eleanor brought a stack of the oldest volumes up to the tower to read by the failing light. “Most of them do. Do not. If you are going to do this, you do it knowing exactly what it is for, and the spring entries are where they wrote down what it was for.”
Eleanor turned the page and did not answer. The journal in her lap belonged to the keeper who had come after Lavinia, the one who had failed, her own daughter, called back to the house as a young woman to repair what her mother had let through the door.
“They were not strong women who found their strength,” Cordelia said. “That is the story that gets told about us, in the few places we get told about at all, and it is a lie, and it is the most dangerous lie there is, because it lets you imagine you will be carried through this on a wave of your own courage. You will not. Read Agnes. Read Margaret. Read what is actually written there, in their own hands, and then tell me you still think this is a thing a woman walks toward with her chin up.”
And Eleanor read it. All of it, every volume Ashford brought her, late into the cold nights, and at some point in the small hours she was quietly and thoroughly sick, kneeling on the stone floor of the tower with a dead woman’s journal open beside her, and she did not tell Cordelia, and Cordelia, who could see her face in the glass, did not make her say it. In the morning she went back up and read the rest.
She read the keepers’ journals, the ones that had survived the centuries, and they were not the noble record she had braced herself to find. They were the private diaries of women going slowly to pieces in a tower, decade by decade.
“You will want to skip the spring entries,” Cordelia said from the glass. “Do not. If you are going to do this, you do it knowing exactly what it is for.”
Margaret, who in 1788 wrote the same prayer four hundred times across sixty close pages and nothing else, as though the prayer were a rope she was holding with both hands. Agnes, who had been a botanist of some small reputation before the house took her, and who wrote, near the end: I have not been warm since the year my sister married, and I no longer remember her face, only the blue of the dress she wore.
They had been clever women, and curious women, and women who had wanted things out of their lives, and the house had taken all of it, slowly, the way the sea takes a coastline, and given back nothing but the knowledge that they were holding a line no living soul would ever thank them for, because no living soul would ever know the line was there.
“They were not strong women who found their strength,” Cordelia said. “That is the lie that gets told about us, and it is the most dangerous lie there is, because it lets you imagine you will be carried through this on a wave of your own courage. You will not. Read what is actually written there.”
Eleanor read what their lives had actually been, hour by hour and year by year, and she did not come away from it inspired. She came away from it knowing, and the knowing was the thing that kept her at Thornwood, not courage and not a chorus of hopeful ancestors. Only the plain flat refusal, once she had read these pages, to be a woman who had read them and then walked away and let the next one find out the hard way.
She filled the hours by gathering information, the way she always had, and Ashford gave her the run of the library, and she read the keepers’ journals reaching back through the centuries, expecting courage and finding instead the diaries of women coming quietly apart at the seams.
Margaret, who in 1788 wrote the same prayer four hundred times and nothing else. Agnes, the botanist, who wrote near the end that she had not been warm since the year her sister married, and could no longer remember her sister’s face, only the dress. They were not failures of women. They had simply been asked to give more than a person has, for longer than a person can, and they had done it anyway, and it had cost them exactly what it was always going to cost.
“Read what came up through the floor of the village while the door stood open those four months under Lavinia,” Cordelia said, when Eleanor’s hand slowed on the page. “Read what it did to the Pelham children before anyone understood why the animals had stopped going down the east road. Read what their mother did, after, when she finally understood it had been in the house with them for weeks and she had thought the marks on them were a sickness. Read all of it. Because on the nights it pushes, and you are sixty years old and cannot remember the last time another human being said your name with any love in it, you are going to want a reason, and it had better be a true one and not a story, because a story will not hold under that weight and the truth will.”
Eleanor read all of it. She was sick once, quietly, in the night, kneeling on the cold stone with the journal open beside her. She went back up in the morning and read the rest. She did not tell Cordelia, and Cordelia, who could see her face in the glass, did not make her say it, and that mercy, the small mercy of not being made to say it, was worth more to Eleanor than any amount of comfort would have been.
She filled the hours by gathering information, and Ashford gave her the run of the library, and she read the keepers’ journals in order, the women reaching back across the centuries, and they were not the noble record she had hoped for. They were the diaries of women going slowly to pieces in a tower, written for no one but the next woman who would sit in the same chair.
Margaret, who in 1788 wrote the same prayer four hundred times across sixty pages. Agnes, the botanist, who wrote that she could no longer remember her sister’s face, only the blue of the dress. And the daughter of Lavinia, the one keeper who had failed and fled, called back to the house as a young woman to repair what her mother had let through the door four hundred years before, whose journal of the emptied village and the Pelham children Cordelia would not let her look away from.
“They were not strong women who found their strength,” Cordelia said. “That is the lie. Read what is actually written there.” And Eleanor read what was actually written there, all of it, late into the cold nights, and was quietly sick once on the stone floor, and went back up in the morning and read the rest.
That was the night she stopped thinking of it as a choice she might still un-make. Not because she had been inspired. The opposite. Because she had read what was in the spring entries, in the women’s own hands, and there are things you cannot read and then walk away from and still call yourself the person you were before you read them.
She understood at last that her mother had read these same pages, as a girl in this same house, and had walked away anyway, and had spent the whole rest of her short flinching life knowing precisely what she had left behind for someone else to hold. It was the first time Eleanor had ever pitied her mother instead of resenting her, and the pity was worse than the resentment had ever been, heavier, with no anger in it to give it shape, and she carried it down the tower stairs and it did not get lighter on the way down, and it never afterward did.