The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (best summer reads .TXT) 📕

her grandmother told her. All the more of a shock when the lad went missing and the Lady of Cranburgh Grange waited several days to report it, and then made such a large to-do about it, having all the men and some women available in the shire search for him or of any sign of him, and bewailing his disappearance. “Which some thought overdramatic, since she’d not cared for him a whit.”

I repeated this information to Martin that evening at supper. He meanwhile had obtained the book he’d been seeking and as we were having coffee and trifle, he opened the pages for me to an old photograph and said, “Does this look like the south facade of this house?” I looked and said yes, it much resembled it.  “Really? Then what about this little doorway with a horizontal window above it?” Martin had us step out of doors, the open book in my hands and a strong torch in his, and sure enough, that section of the south façade was instead, a brick wall with neither portal nor ventilation.

The next morning, he showed the illustration to Dmitry Grack and said to him, “I want you to go inside and open the window or door of each room on this first floor that looks out and say hello to us out of it.” Dimitry naturally thought him cracked, but he did as he was asked. Sure enough, there was the walled space with no window. Then, Martin went in again and said he would make a noise of some sort from each wall with the windows closed and Dimitry and I were stand outside and tell him what we heard. “From there and from there,” we pointed on either side of the bricked wall, “We heard you well enough, but we didn’t hear you at all from behind that wall!” He said that he had rapped on every interior wall, every five feet apart, barring none. He then pointed to the brick wall and said, “There’s something behind there different than when the house was built.”

Getting permission from a majority of the disputing heirs to “repair the plumbing at our own cost” took only a fortnight. It was an unusually warm and sunny day when two men came up from Camden Town with tools and levels and all sorts of carpentry equipment I’d never seen before. The first thing they did was sound out the walls every half yard. That way, they located what they believed was a hollower space which might be a little door. On a ten-foot ladder, they then sounded out the upper wall and found the little window behind wood and plaster. Martin showed them the legal permits and they began work up top since it would be easier there, and they knocked out the wood lathing and found the window behind it and cleared it.

“It’s a little room. An empty little room,” their chief said, peering in the window. Martin went up and he also looked in. “Not quite empty. There’s something on the floor in that corner.” The chief opined that it was just a pile of rags or discarded clothing. But Martin gave the order, and by lunch time, they had part of the brick wall below the window torn down. After lunch, they called Martin and all of us went out to look. A little wooden door was there, as in the old photo but very worn. “It’s sealed shut. Shall we break it open and go in?” Martin told them yes.

I recall the loud protests of the old wood as it was stove in by their sledge but even more once the door was pulled off, I recall the strange yet unmistakably thick and pungent must of age that seemed to escape past us before we could enter. There in the far corner of the narrow, high room was the pile of clothing previously noted. Inside the pile of clothes, not really noticeable except for one tiny outthrust hand holding out a pen-knife, and still dressed in play clothes, was the mummy of a little boy. At that very moment through some quirk of physics I’ve never had properly explained, the little window above our head shattered and we had to withdraw out of doors again. I, for one, was glad for it, because I vowed to never step in that room again.

We hastily packed overnight bags and slept in the village inn that we knew so well that night and remained there for the next few days. I soon noticed that everyone who had been so friendly to us now avoided us: the men in the pub, the shop keepers, everyone looked at us quite suspiciously.  And no wonder: we’d destroyed the legend of the good Lady Sofia. I told Martin I wanted to leave and go home, and he drove me to Heathrow and saw me off to America. He used as an excuse for not joining me that there was so much officially still to be done about it all: the police, the local historian and architectural society. But I found out later that he left the inn and returned to the house and he slept there in comfort and quietude.

It was the Parson who wrote and begged me to return. He said the villagers felt lost and at sixes and sevens without their “Lady of Cranburgh Grange” present. I kept telling Martin that I couldn’t, I just couldn’t, not in the light of what we’d found. But since he would not budge from there to return to America, I did eventually go back. The entire back wall and hidden room were gone, of course, and in their place was a new double doorway opened up from the back hall to a charming new terrace looking onto the southern lawn with a view down to the little stream.

And so, the offending little room was expunged. Everywhere I went thereafter in the village, people befriended me, saying they hoped