Flowers in the Rain & Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

in a horror film. Inside, the high, unheated hallway struck with a damp chill. The floors were stone, an immense fireplace stood flanked by dusty armour and crowned with a ring of ancient swords. He crossed this hallway and went through another set of doors, and now it was as though he had left the Middle Ages behind and was stepping into a set for some film taking place in the Italian Renaissance.
    When he had first come to Kinton as a small boy, expecting only spiral staircases and secret passages, and small, darkly panelled rooms, he had been flummoxed by all this opulence. He had looked forward to living in a medieval castle, and felt slightly cheated. But when questioned, Ned had explained to him that a Victorian forbear had taken as his wife a lady of great wealth, and one of her conditions for marrying him was that she should be allowed a free hand with the interior of the castle. So besotted was he with this lady that he agreed to her terms, and she had subsequently spent five years and a great deal of money in transforming Kinton to a show-piece of pseudo-Renaissance splendour.
    Interior walls, as much as possible, were ripped away. Architects devised the enormous curving stairway, the wide panelled passageways, the delicately arched and pillared windows. Craftsmen were rounded up to work in wrought iron and marble, to carve mantel-pieces, and construct immense and beautiful double doors to all the main rooms.
    An Italian was imported from Florence to design and paint the highly decorated ceilings and to transform the walls of the heiress’s boudoir, by means of a trompe-l’oeil mural, into a Mediterranean terrace, complete with plaster troughs of scarlet geraniums and views of an azure sea.
    After all this structural work had been completed, it was still another six months before the young couple were able to take up residence. Wallpapers were chosen, curtains hung, new carpets laid in all the rooms. Furniture, some old and some new, was carefully disposed. The Kinnerton portraits were hung on the dining-room walls. Family mementoes were displayed in glass-fronted cabinets. Sofas and chairs were upholstered, and scattered with cushions of embroidered Chinese silk.
    But since those palmy days of mad extravagance, nothing very much had been done to Kinton. Nothing had been changed or renewed, although from time to time various articles might be glued or nailed together, mended, repainted, or patched. The same curtains, however, still hung, in tatters of faded red brocade. The same carpets lay threadbare down the long passages. The sofas wore sagging slip-covers of some indeterminate print, and were usually covered in dog hairs. Fires smouldered in the grates of sitting-rooms, but passages and bedrooms, dark and sunless, were apt to be piercingly cold. There was a monster boiler down in the basement, and sometimes, in midwinter, if Mabel was feeling extravagant, she would get this going, whereupon a thin warmth would emanate from the huge, bulky radiators. But most of the time they stood, jeering, cold as stone.
    There was a smell; musty, familiar, dear. Tom ran up the curve of the staircase, taking the steps two at a time, his hand brushing lightly against the mahogany rail that had been polished to a sheen by generations of hands doing just this thing. At the top, he paused on the wide landing. He listened. There was no definite sound, but the old walls stirred and whispered about him, and he knew that Mabel would be somewhere around.
    He called her name.
    “Tom! I’m here!”
    He found her in the library, wearing an apron and a hat, surrounded by the usual selection of old and faithful dogs, as well as a litter of newspaper and flower stalks. She was constructing, in a priceless Chinese bowl, an arrangement of white cherry, yellow forsythia, and enormous yellow trumpet daffodils.
    “Oh, my dear.”
    She laid down her secateurs and enfolded him in her embrace, which was something of an experience, as she was as