Roxy's Baby by Cathy MacPhail Page B

Nothing was going to stop her now. If she had to pick the lock, if she had to break the door down, she was determined to do it. That door had to lead into the rest of the house.
    It would be tight, she knew that. But she was carrying this bump of hers neatly, everyone said that. ‘You’d hardly know you were pregnant,’ Anne Marie would tellher. Roxy stretched out her hand between the gap to grasp the door handle, half expecting it to refuse to turn, to be locked. But it wasn’t. She gasped as the door opened, and with a quick look back to make sure she hadn’t been seen, Roxy squeezed behind the table and stepped through the door.
    She found herself in a dark, musty corridor. At the far end a narrow window was shuttered closed, but through the gaps in the shutters streams of light shone through. The bottom half of the walls was panelled with dark wood, the top half had ancient paper peeling from it. She stepped gingerly along the hallway, hardly daring to breathe. There was a smell in here, the smell of long-dead rooms. At the end of the corridor was a door leading to narrow winding staircase and she began to climb. These would have been the servants’ quarters long ago. She was sure of that. No lady would ever have been allowed to use a tiny cramped staircase like this. There would have been no room for their ornate dresses, for a start.
    There was a door at the top of the stairs too, and this one creaked open so noisily that it made Roxy catch her breath, afraid someone might hear. She stood for amoment listening, waiting for a call, or footsteps, but there was nothing. She realised she must be in the main part of the house. She was standing in a hallway that must have once been quite grand. Dusty curtains half hung on high windows. Chairs lay upended on the floor, and thick brocade tapestries rotted against the walls.
    She began to walk, warily, stepping as quietly as she could. She opened a door into one of the rooms, but once again there were only shuttered windows and rotting draperies. No one had been inside this part of the house for years. Yet the part the girls lived in was bright and newly painted. It reminded her of something. She had to think for a moment of what that something was. Then it hit her. It was as if the front of the house, where the girls lived, was the stage in a theatre. Brightly lit, furnished, with actors playing their parts. Here was the back of the theatre, dull, unused and dusty. And it was cold. Though the sun scorched the earth outside it was as if Nature had turned off her heating in these rooms.
    There was a mystery here, there had to be. ‘Aren’t you the one with the imagination,’ Anne Marie would say. But there was a mystery here. Why was one part of the house so bright, taken care of, and another, thispart, just left to fall apart? She could hear Anne Marie’s glib answer to that. ‘It’s expensive enough for them to heat and run this part, you can’t expect them to open the whole house up just for us.’
    But this was their house – the Dyces had said so. And this part wasn’t just closed up, with white sheets covering furniture, as if it was waiting for someone to claim it again. This part of the house had been long forgotten. It looked as if it should be condemned.
    Condemned. She didn’t like the sound of that.
    Here too, carved into doors, on fireplaces, even on the ancient wallpaper, dragons were everywhere. This was indeed Dragon House.
    Roxy climbed another flight of stairs and found herself on the attic floor. Here she found a warren of small rooms, musty and empty, except for rubbish stacked against walls or on the floor. There were more broken chairs, moth-eaten carpets, old curtains. One room had obviously once been a nursery. She found a library too. One room still stacked high with books. Roxy lifted one from a shelf and opened it. Dust exploded from it, the pages almost fell apart. She dropped it to the