The 13th Mage (7 page)

She stood there staring at him for a moment and smiled.

“I’m sorry.
I’m not used to taking orders from people my age.
I’ll get used to it, where did you say my room was?”

“Down the hall beside kitchen, what did you say your name was?”

“Jennifer, Jennifer Stone, nice to meet you Owen O’Neil,” she answered taking his hand. An electric bolt met her and traveled up her arm taking her by surprise.
Owen looked at his hand puzzled.

“Must be static energy,” she said, but it didn’t feel like static energy, it felt like she had known Owen all her life, it was probably his amazing similarity to Sean
, and
that was what she told herself.

She had s
uch soft hands, beautiful hands.
Owen had felt her essence through her hand. He could feel someone else there too, someone like him
. H
e tried to reach for that entity.

“I’ll go to my room then,” she said, breaking the spell.

Owen stopped staring, “yes.”

It wasn’t that she felt lonely, although she did.
It was the strangeness of the place that got to her.
By the time she’d been at
Oak Place
a week she had realized that Owen was not a normal young man.
The builders commented on it too, it was like working for a 90 year old, now she understood why Mrs. Crow had spoken about him that way.

He gave the impression of being very young at first, but after a while he seemed very set in his ways, very old fashioned and too knowledgeable for man in his twenties.
She’d found out his real age when a birthday card arrived from his firm of solicitors.
It was so sad to be orphaned, she thought, to have solicitors sending you birthday cards instead of your parents.
She got him one herself and bought a birthday cake as well.

She wondered how Sean was spending his
twenty fifth
birthday.

Owen had been very touched with the detail, he was left speechless.

After Jennifer and the builders sang him Happy Birthday and eat the cake he went into this study and didn’t come out until the next day.
She was sure he was holding back the tears.

Maybe people hadn’t been kind to him before, she thought.

She concluded that Owen wore his body and didn’t actually live in it like a normal person did.
Even thinking of a body as something one lived in was new to Jennifer, who had never actually thought about things like that before.
She would have to find the local library and get a book about it.

The builders were extremely fast at their work, no problems, no increases in budget, no delays, it was quite exceptional, and the house was finished in no time at all.

When the decorator firm moved in there were a few arguments about fashion and taste, which Owen as the owner finally won, and they too were finished in no time at all.

After all the workmen had gone Jennifer found herself with a lot of time in her hands, especially during the day.
Her duties were very few and the house seemed to stay clean all on its own, except perhaps for the attic.

The attic was everything Jennifer thought an attic should be.
Covered in a thick layer of dust, every object had to be cleaned before being identified. It was the kind of place that gave her a tingle in her stomach, like the storeroom in her mother’s bookshop, or the old section of the public library back home.

Old chests filled with long forgotten priced possessions, toys, clothes, shoes, books.
There were books piled from ceiling to floor in every crook and cranny.
She didn’t know much about antiques but the books alone she knew must be worth a fortune.

Owen never went up there. W
hen she mentioned the attic he just nodded and scribbled something in his little notebook.
When she mentioned cleaning it he nodded again and told her to do whatever she pleased with it, when scribbled something else in his note book and walked away.

Armed with duster and pan she spent the first day simply sitting in the middle of the room taking it all in.

There were no light fittings in the attic so she polished a couple of large candleholders and bought candles to fit, it gave the room an eerie feeling, like being shot into a remote past where time had stood still.

Some of the chests had belonged to previous staff, she could tell by the content.
Others were more refined.

A couple of weeks into her discovery she found a chest that had probably belonged to one of Owen’s ancestors.
There was an
em
broide
re
d box with the portrait of a beautiful young woman inside it
. S
he was wearing a purple dress and hat.
With the portrait there was a collection of letters addressed to a young man called Owen and signed “yours forever, A.”
They were passionate letters filled with yearning.
A married woman, married to someone much older than herself, obviously an arranged marriage.
The letters were to her lover, Jennifer looked at the dates, some quick math revealed the lover to have been Owen’s great-grandfather.
They span two whole decades, and then suddenly stopped. She spent three evenings reading them, she would make herself a cup of hot chocolate and retire to the attic where she would light the candles and sit on a strange contraption she felt must be for sitting on.

She wondered what had happened to the rest of the letters, if there had been any.
Maybe the lovers had been caught, or maybe one of them had died.
She looked for more letters from “A”, but there were no more, not in the attic at any rate.

The thought of looking for them in Owen’s study when he wasn’t there crossed her mind, making the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.
There was absolutely no reason they should be there, but the promise of finding them was too great.

Thinking better of it Jennifer decided to take the letters to Owen and asking him if there were any more of them, maybe he knew what happened to the lovers.

Owen’s face became ashen grey.
He sat quietly holding the letters in his hands while Jennifer told him all about them.
When she finished he stroked the letters gently and handed them back.

“She died of a miscarriage,” he said, “at thirty-seven. In those days it was a common occurrence. I… I think my great-grandfather could
have done something to save her. H
e was schooled in medical
matters.
But he didn’t find out about her death until she failed to arrive at their meeting place.”

“That is so sad,” said Jennifer looking down at the worn letters, “he must have been heartbroken, poor man.
They used to meet in
Brighton
you know, once a month without fail, twice in the summer.”

She must have been seventeen when they met, she thought.
Married off at seventeen.

Owen got up to go to his study, “it’s best if you put them back where you found them,” he said.

She watched him walk away, he was upset about something but she couldn’t recall if he had been upset before she showed him the letters or whether the letters had upset him.
Then the realization hit her, his mother had died at childbirth and this woman had died due to a miscarriage.
She had been so thoughtless in asking him about it!
She should have known better.

Putting the letters in their box, she went to his study.
The door was closed as always.
She wanted to knock but something stopped her every time she lifted her hand, it was like a lack of willpower.

Jennifer wondered if she was feeling too embarrassed to apologize to Owen, as the thought entered her mind the lack of willpower increased dramatically.
“Don’t be silly,” she said to herself and fought against it.

The effort was so great that when she finally managed to knock on the door, instead of a gentle rasp, which she had intended, a loud, urgent knock resulted instead.

The door swung open.

“How the hell did you manage that!”

“I am so sorry Owen, I didn’t mean to startle you, I just wanted to apologize about the letters, if I didn’t know it was going to upset you like that about that lady dying like that.”

“How the hell did you manage to knock!
?
”

“”I’m sorry?”

Owen stood back a little and gave her piercing look the kind of which she had never experienced before.

“I didn’t mean it, I was so embarrassed about having upset you that I had to force myself to knock and, well, it didn’t come out like I wanted it.
It was meant to be...” She realized she was making things much worse than they already were, Owen looked very odd indeed, concerned, worried, stressed, something intense for which she had no name. “Ok.
I am going to go now and start supper or something,” she said and turned to leave, but Owen reached her shoulder and gently turned her back.

“There are things...” he began, “there are things that you do that you are not supposed to do.”

“I know, it was none of my business anyway, but I got pulled into it, the whole love affair thing and had to find out what happened.
I will stay away from any of your family’s papers.”

“Right,” he said.
His expression softened as he looked into her eyes, “right.”

He took her hand in his and said, “you are not like anyone I have ever met.
I can’t seem to figure you out.
It’s fine about the letters, you can read anything you
find
, keep them if you like.”

Jennifer felt his warmth engulf her and her heart started racing.
It was almost as though he was hugging her but he was only holding her hand.
She quickly pulled her hand away, mumbled something about supper and quickly walked away from him.

Before turning the corner at the end of the corridor she looked back and saw him still standing there at the doorway, a light haze around him, his face... so much like Sean’s, but yet different, whole, complete.

She tore her eyes away from him and carried on toward the kitchen.
She felt breathless, her cheeks were hot and she felt her heart thumping so hard she could hardly hear her thoughts.

That evening Jennifer sat and let dusk engulf her in the attic, night time crept slowly into the attic without noise or electrical lights to push it away.
Owen had not come out for his supper that evening.
He had stayed in his study.
She left his plate out on the kitchen table with instructions on how to warm it up in the microwave in case he came out during the night and was hungry.

She touched the embroidery on the box of letters.
She had forgotten to ask what had happened to Owen’s great-grandfather.
She wondered what had become of him after the death of his love.
Had he carried on living?
Married?
Had a family?
Or had he also been married when the affair happened?
There were no clues as to his marital status on the letters, maybe he had already had a son before he met “A”.
Or maybe he met someone else after she died.

She opened the chest and put the box back to where it belonged.

She imagined the O’Neils to have traveled
widely through the world. She had
found objects from every exotic place on earth.
But neither the Sanskrit scrolls nor the Chinese paintings had captured her imagination
like
those simple letters had.
One day she thought she would write them up in a book.
She would write about him and how he must have felt the day his lover did not turn up at their favorite spot in front of the sea.

It didn’t escape her attention that everything in the attic seemed to be male, things a man would keep.
There was no trace of any O’Neil women.
She wondered about that, w
hat had happened to the women? What had happened t
o their things?
Owen’s mother had
died at childbirth yet there were no photos of her anywhere in the house, the attic had nothing belonging to his grandmother or great-grandmother, nor aunties.

It was a mystery she would have to investigate.

The days came and went in the house as though separate from the outside.
Jennifer always had the feeling that she had just arrived from holidays when she went to the shops, even if she had been there
the
day before.
It felt as though there was more time to the hours and minutes inside the house than outside.

It was strange.

She had worked out a routine that suited Owen’s needs a lot better than the time table he had given her the day she arrived at
Oak Place
.

Breakfast at mid-morning, lunch at mid
-
afternoon, tea at various times in the day, and supper on the kitchen table with heating instructions.
She would always find the empty plate in the morning.

Owen kept to himself more and more as the weeks went by.

Sometimes he would come out of his study and chat away
with
her for hours, telling her about all sorts of strange things and watching her reaction with interest.

Still, there were things about him, and the house, that rang alarm bells somewhere inside her mind. Little things. Like, sometimes Owen would answer questions before she said them, and insist she had already asked them. Then there was the little matter of ghosts. Jennifer didn’t believe in ghosts, or at least she hadn’t believed in them before moving into Oak Place.

It was a bright afternoon, she had just arrived from the shops and after putting the groceries on the kitchen table she went to put her coat in her room, and there it was.
Large as life, although transparent.
An old man.