Facing the Light Read Online Free PDF Page A

the attic, I think. With all the other Christmas stuff.’
    â€˜She didn’t let us play with them at all, though, did she?’ Rilla could remember Leonora saying,
I can’t let you have them for your games, darlings. They’re so fragile, don’t you see? But you like the new family I’ve bought for the house, don’t you?
‘She gave us our dolls as a sort of distraction, I suppose, but we did love them, didn’t we?’
    â€˜Of course we did,’ said Gwen. ‘I can’t remember it bothering us at all that we couldn’t play with the ones Grandmother Maude made. I don’t even know where Mother keeps them these days.’
    Because hardly anyone came into the nursery, there was a quality of chill in the silence that filled the whole room. Rilla thought that the dustsheet covering the house looked a little like a shroud. God, she thought, I’m letting my imagination run away with me.
    Gwen nodded in the direction of the dustsheet and smiled at her sister. ‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Let’s have a look at it.’
    Rilla stared at the tall, rather narrow shape of the house under its white draperies. The roof was at the level of her waist. She reached for a corner of the sheet and lifted it, raised it up and folded it over, so that the dolls’ house was revealed.
    â€˜I used to call it Paradise Mansions,’ she said. ‘Do you remember?’
    â€˜That really annoyed me.’ Gwen laughed. ‘I played with it first when you were no more than a baby. I called it Delacourt House. And the family were the Delacourt family. That was their proper name.’
    Rilla said nothing, but she could still see herself, kneeling down in front of the dining room, picking up the mother doll and pulling off her shawl and throwing it on the floor, and making her lie down on one of the upstairs beds. How furious Gwen used to get! She knew that even now Gwen was feeling a shadow of the outrage she felt then, at the violation of
her
things,
her
dolls.
    â€˜You used to want to murder me when I changed things round that you’d already decided on, didn’t you?’
    â€˜Oh, nonsense,’ said Gwen. ‘We were only children, weren’t we? Children are all little savages.’ Her voice was light, casual, but Rilla knew she was right. Gwen came and knelt beside her on the floor. Rilla knew that however much her sister pretended that all this dolls’ house nonsense was ancient history, it wasn’t really. Bits and pieces of the past lay just under the skin, like buried splinters.
    Rilla crouched down to look at everything more carefully. There were three floors, with the rooms arranged on either side of a long staircase. Kitchen and dining room on the ground floor, drawing room and study on the second floor, and two bedrooms and a bathroom on the third floor. In the attic space under the roof, Ethan had squashed in a tiny room for the maid. He’d made all the furniture, with beds for everyone and chests-of-drawers to stand beside them. Downstairs, the sideboards and the tables and chairs were intricate masterpieces of carpentry. Every wall was covered with some of the paper that Maude Walsh had chosen originally to hang in Willow Court. It was faded now,but you could still see the patterns: William Morris’s Willow, of course, and some by Walter Crane of a pomegranate tree with white birds in it. The sloping roof was a masterpiece of painstaking craftsmanship, and this, surprisingly, was Maude’s own work. She had painted sheets and sheets of thick paper with an intricate pattern of roof-tiles in watercolours and these had been skilfully glued to the plain wood. Leonora had often told them the story of how the new roof had been a birthday surprise from her beloved mother, just before her eighth birthday, just before Maude’s tragic death. Over the years, the greys and browns and pale saffrons had faded so that now it