Nobody moved.
The man in the mirror had beckoned to them, clear as anything, and for a long moment none of them moved at all. They stood in the hall like people in a picture, and the rain beat on the windows, and the fire burned low in the drawing room, and the mirror stood there with a dead man in it, smiling.
It was Hugh who moved first.
He walked past them all, into the drawing room, and stopped in front of the mirror, and looked into it.
Elspeth followed him. She did not want to. Her legs carried her anyway.
The mirror was tall, taller than Hugh, and it hung on the wall above the fireplace, where it had hung for a year with its face turned to the wall. The glass was old and spotted at the edges, and it showed the room back at them, the fire and the chairs and the portrait above the mantel.
But it did not show Hugh.
It showed Elspeth standing behind him, and Mrs. Dunmire in the doorway, and Miss Verity with her hands to her face, and Mrs. Bain with her apron in her hands. It did not show Hugh Dunmire at all.
And beside him, where his reflection should have been, stood the man in black. Tall. Gray-haired. His face the face in the portrait above the fire. He stood quite still, and he looked out of the glass at them, and he smiled, and he raised one hand again, slowly, and beckoned.
"Father," Hugh said. His voice shook. "Father, is that you? Are you — are you there?"
The man in the mirror did not speak. He only looked at Hugh, and his hand stayed raised, beckoning.
Hugh reached out, and he put his hand flat against the glass.
Elspeth heard him gasp. He pulled his hand back as if the glass had burned him, and he stood staring at his palm.
"Cold," he said. "It is cold as ice. The glass is cold as ice, and the fire is right there, and the room is warm, and the glass is cold as ice."
Mrs. Dunmire came into the room then, and she stood beside her son, and she looked into the mirror, and her face went white all over again.
"Alistair," she said. Her voice was very quiet. "Alistair, what do you want?"
The man in the mirror looked at her. His smile faded. He lowered his hand. He put it to his chest, over his heart, and he bowed his head, just a little, the way a man bows when he is asking pardon.
And then, slowly, he turned his head, and he looked straight at Elspeth.
Elspeth felt the blood go out of her face. She had never seen this man alive. She had only seen his portrait, and his handwriting, and the letters he had sent from beyond the grave. But she knew, the moment his eyes met hers in the glass, that he was looking at her on purpose. That of all the people in the room, it was her he had come to see.
"Mrs. Dunmire," she said, and her voice came out thin and strange, "why is he looking at me?"
"Sit down," Mrs. Dunmire said. "All of you, sit down. I am going to tell you something I have told no one, not even Verity, not even Mrs. Bain. And then you will understand why the letters come, and why the doors open, and why my husband will not leave this house alone."
They sat. Mrs. Bain put coal on the fire, and the flames came up, and the room grew warmer, but the mirror stayed cold, and the man in it stayed where he was, watching them.
Mrs. Dunmire folded her hands in her lap, and she looked at the fire, and she began.
"My husband was a collector," she said. "You have seen the jars, Miss Drummond. A hundred jars of weather. Rain from the year the river flooded. Snow from the winter the sheep died. Fog from the morning he proposed to me, which he kept in a jar on his desk for thirty years. He believed that a house keeps what is put into it. That a house remembers. That the walls hold on to the days that were lived inside them, the way a jar holds weather."
"The night he died, the seventh of October, the great storm, he went out to the cliff path. He went out in the rain, in the dark, and I begged him not to go, and he went anyway, and he did not come back. They found him in the morning, at the foot of the cliff, and I buried him on the ninth, and I turned the mirror to the wall, because I could not bear to see the room without him in it. And I thought that was the end of it."
"It wasn't," Elspeth said. It was not a question.
"No," Mrs. Dunmire said. "Three days after the funeral, a letter came. In his handwriting. Addressed to me. It said, 'Do not let Hugh leave.' Hugh left the next morning, and he did not come back, and the letters kept coming. Letters to me, in his hand. Letters to Hugh, in Glasgow, in a hand that looked like mine, though I never wrote them. Letters to the housekeeper, letters to the vicar, letters to people who had never set foot in Dunmire House. And then, four days ago, a letter came to you, Miss Drummond, in your own handwriting, copied from your diary, before you had even arrived."
She looked up, and her eyes met Elspeth's.
"I have spent a year telling myself that I wrote those letters," Mrs. Dunmire said. "That grief had made me write them, and that I had forgotten writing them. But I never wrote in my husband's hand. Not once. Not since he died. I could not. And now a letter has come to my son, in his father's hand, and my son has come home, and my husband is standing in the mirror, and I cannot pretend any longer. Something in this house is writing letters. And something in this house is keeping my husband here."
Miss Verity broke the silence. She had been sitting very still, her hands folded, and now she leaned forward, and she said, in a voice Elspeth had never heard from her before, low and steady, "Catherine, there is something I have never told you either."
Mrs. Dunmire turned to her sister. "Verity?"
"The portrait," Miss Verity said. "It was painted the summer before Alistair died. He sat for it in this very room, in front of that mirror. And the painter was a young man from Dunmire village, and he was not a good painter, and Alistair laughed about it, and he said, 'Paint me as I am, boy, not as you wish I were.' And when the painting was finished, Alistair looked at it, and he went very quiet, and he said, 'He has painted me as I will be, not as I am.'"
"What does that mean?" Hugh said.
Miss Verity looked at the portrait, and then at the mirror.
"The portrait shows him gray-haired," she said. "Gray, all through. But that summer, Alistair's hair was still dark. Dark as yours, Hugh. He did not go gray until the last month of his life. The painter painted him gray before he was gray. I think he did not paint Alistair as he was. I think he painted the man in the mirror."
And then she saw something that made her heart stop.
The man in the mirror was not looking at her any more. He was looking down, at the rug in front of the fireplace, at a spot where — where something was lying.
Elspeth followed his gaze, and she saw it.
A letter. A folded sheet of paper, lying on the rug, in front of the fire, where no letter had been a moment before. No one had put it there. No one had come into the room. It had simply — appeared.
Hugh bent down, and he picked it up, and he unfolded it, and he read it, and his face changed.
"Mother," he said, very slowly. "It is addressed to Miss Drummond."
Elspeth took the letter from him. Her hands were shaking, and she had to hold the paper with both hands to keep it still.
It said:
*Elspeth — You came to this house because you needed work, and you stayed because you are kind. The house has been keeping something that is not hers to keep. It is not a jar, and it is not a bird, and it is not a letter. It is a life. Mine. I put it here myself, on the night I died, because I was afraid to lose it, and now I cannot get it back, and I cannot leave, and the house will not let me go. You are the only person in this house who did not know me, and so you are the only person who can see me as I am. Come to the mirror tonight, when the house is quiet, and I will show you where it is hidden. Do not tell the others. Do not be afraid. — Alistair Dunmire.*
"Miss Drummond," Mrs. Dunmire said, and her voice was sharp with worry, "what does it say?"
Elspeth folded the letter, and she put it in her pocket, and she stood up, and she looked at the five faces turned toward her in the firelight, and she knew that she could not tell them. Not yet. Not until she knew what the mirror was going to show her.
"It says," she said, and she was surprised at how steady her voice sounded, "that your husband is glad Hugh has come home. And that he wants us all to rest tonight, and to talk in the morning, when we are not so tired, and not so frightened."
Mrs. Dunmire looked at her for a long moment, and then she nodded, and she said, "Yes. Yes, of course. We are all tired. Mrs. Bain, will you show Mr. Hugh to his old room? Miss Drummond, you will stay, of course. You will stay, and in the morning we will talk, all of us, together."
They stood. Mrs. Bain took Hugh upstairs. Miss Verity kissed her sister's cheek and went to her own room. Mrs. Dunmire lingered in the doorway, and she looked back at the mirror, and at the portrait, and at Elspeth, and she said, very quietly, "Miss Drummond. Whatever he said to you in that letter — be careful. My husband was a good man. But the house is not my husband. The house is something else. And the house does not always tell the truth."
She looked at the mirror. The man in it looked back at her, and he smiled, and he raised one hand, and he pointed at the clock on the mantelpiece.
It was half past nine.
Three hours until midnight. Three hours until she would have to walk down the stairs, in the dark, alone, and stand in front of the mirror, and find out what Alistair Dunmire had hidden in his own house — and what it would cost her to set him free.
She went upstairs to her room, and she sat on the edge of her bed, and she waited for the house to go quiet, and she listened to the rain, and to the ticking of the clock, and to her own heart, beating far too fast.
And downstairs, in the cold glass of the mirror, the man in black stood watching the empty room, and smiling, and waiting for midnight.
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