Briony Collins

More than anything, Lacey wanted to be in her bed asleep. Instead, she was up early on a Saturday in Beatrice’s empty house next door, cleaning in preparation for her Christmas visit. The wooden boards of the front porch cried under Lacey’s feet as she searched for the key to the front door. Columns held up the roof which had shed so many tiles in the storm that Lacey wondered how there could be any left. The pillars brought a regality to the old house that seemed out of place against the splintered floorboards and flaking paint. She frowned as she stretched up to the wall light and stuck her hand into the upturned shade. As she fished for the spare key, a tickle spread up to her wrist. Slowly, she pulled away to see a spider creeping up her arm, triggering each hair like a tripwire. She jerked back when she saw it. It dropped onto the deck with the keys. Before she could blink, it scurried into a gap between two dried up plant pots that were too sheltered to catch the rain. Lacey scrunched her nose, picked up the keys, and unlocked the door.

A cold gust of air hit her face as she stepped inside and she zipped her coat up two more centimetres, as if that would make a difference. The living room was exactly as Beatrice had left it when she had gone back to Scotland six months ago. Papers were scattered across the oak desk in a trail that ended in the wastepaper basket next to the chair. Lacey immediately started tidying away all the loose paper into the bin. She was sure it wasn’t all rubbish, but it wasn’t her job to sort out the post. It wasn’t even her duty to clean Beatrice’s holiday home in the first place, but her father would never do it. As she dusted the desk, the swords above the fireplace caught Lacey’s eye.

They were family heirlooms from some old war, initially used to defend Scotland and now coated in dust and hanging like trophies in the decrepit farmhouse. Both were identical and crossed over each other the way swords are on pirate flags. Underneath, a musket ramrod hung parallel to the mantelpiece. It was long and metal, with an end shaped like a tulip. Lacey decided it was almost pretty, until she thought about the petals of the rod pushing cloth and bullets down the barrel of a gun.

Across the room from the fireplace, stairs clung to the wall. Above them, long dresses hung with bonnets above them like apparitions from the eighteenth century. She understood why Beatrice would want to keep so many historical items, but Lacey couldn’t figure out why they would be used as decorations. In this house, treasures of the 1700s were displayed as mundanely as framed photos of Beatrice’s border collie. It was stranger still that Beatrice would put them on show in her second home of all places, as if she not only came here to come to a different country, but to escape to another time.

Lacey pulled a cloth out of her pocket and began to wipe down the windowsill by the desk, knocking the shells of long-dead insects onto the floor by her feet. She stepped on one accidentally and it crunched and cracked like a dried leaf. The dust piled up on the cloth until she couldn’t see the fabric through it. Lacey sighed and went to the kitchen to wash it off.