Twenty-One

On the morning of her twenty-first birthday, Cordelia Blackthorn woke to find the whole house dressed for a funeral, and understood that the funeral was meant to be hers. No one had ever said the words to her plainly. That was the Blackthorn way — three hundred years of a family that managed its terrors the way other families managed their silver, with care, and in private, and never at the table. But a daughter learns the shape of a secret by the space the household leaves around it, and Cordelia had been learning the shape of this one her entire life. The firstborn daughter of Blackthorn Hall did not marry. The firstborn daughter of Blackthorn Hall did not leave. The firstborn daughter of Blackthorn Hall was kept close and kept quiet and kept, and on the night of her twenty-first birthday she was taken down the old stair into the dark beneath the house, and she did not come back up, and the family wore black for a year and then never spoke of her again. Cordelia had a great-aunt like that. Honoria, in the portrait on the second landing — twenty-one forever, painted the spring before her birthday, with the family's dark eyes and a small private smile, as though even then she had known something the painter did not. Now the black crape was on the banisters again, and the servants would not meet her eyes, and her mother had wept at breakfast and called it joy. "It is an honour," her mother said, for perhaps the hundredth time in Cordelia's life, though it was the first time the honour had a date attached to it. "It is the oldest honour our family has. You were born to it, Cordelia. The bargain keeps us — the land, the name, the very stones of the hall. Three hundred years, and never once broken. You will not be the one to break it." "And what is it," Cordelia asked, because she was twenty-one now, and twenty-one had made her bold, "that I am being given to?" Her mother's face closed like a fan. "You will go down the stair at midnight," she said. "That is all you need to carry. The rest the dark will tell you itself." So Cordelia spent the last day of her old life walking the house that had always meant to spend her. She walked it without weeping, which surprised her. She had expected terror, and found instead a strange cold clarity, as though some long fever had finally broken. She stood a long while before Honoria's portrait on the second landing, and looked at that small private smile, and found she could not make it agree with the story she had been told. A girl on her way to be devoured did not smile like that. A girl on her way to be devoured did not look out of three hundred years of varnish with her eyes bright and her secret kept and something that was almost — Cordelia leaned close — something that was almost like tenderness in the set of her painted mouth. "What did you know," Cordelia asked the portrait, "that they never told the rest of us?" The portrait, of course, did not answer. But the house did, in its way. All that long day the hall seemed to lean toward her, attentive, expectant — and the old door at the head of the old stair, the door that had been locked her whole life, stood very slightly ajar. Midnight came the way midnight always comes, sooner than anyone is ready for. Cordelia did not wait to be fetched. That was her own small rebellion, and she took a private fierce pleasure in it: she would not be led trembling to the dark like a calf to the block. She lit a single candle, and she walked to the head of the old stair in her plain grey dress with her dark hair down, and she pushed the door wide herself. Cold air came up out of the dark to meet her. It smelled not of rot, as she had braced for, but of stone, and of cold clean water, and — faintly, impossibly — of black thorn flowers, the small bitter blossoms that gave the hall its name and bloomed nowhere now but in the oldest hedges. "I am Cordelia Blackthorn," she said into the dark below, and her voice did not shake, and she was proud of it. "I am the firstborn daughter, and I am twenty-one, and I have come down because three hundred years of my family say I must. But I will tell you this before I take a single step. I have not come to be devoured. I have come to see your face, and to hear, from you and not from them, what was truly bargained — because I am beginning to think, whatever lives in this dark, that my family has been lying to it for just as long as it has been lying to me." For a long moment the dark gave her nothing but the slow drip of water on stone. Then a voice answered her — low, and unhurried, and unbearably gentle, the voice of something that had waited a very long time in the cold to be spoken to as though it were a person and not a price. "They told you I was a monster," it said. "They would. It is so much easier to feed a girl to a monster than to admit what your family did, Cordelia Blackthorn, to put me down here in the first place." And Cordelia, with her one small candle, began to descend.