A Castle for the Uninvited

How it begins

Nathaniel Cole had drawn the front entrance three times before the widow asked him to remove it.

He laid down his pen. The room was cold enough that the ink had become reluctant, and he had no desire to begin a fourth drawing.

'You wish the door moved?'

'I wish it absent.'

Beyond the window, the first cart of stone was sinking slowly into the estate road. Two men argued beside it. A third sat on the wheel eating something from a cloth. Nathaniel envied the third man his understanding of priorities.

His employer stood over the plans without touching them. She wore no jewels except a black brooch that might have been valuable or merely black.

'People have been entering my houses all my life,' she said. 'They come to inspect, advise, congratulate, borrow. This house will be mine.'

Nathaniel understood the wish. He had spent eighteen years designing rooms in which nobody intended to leave him alone.

'Builders will need access.'

'A service entrance. Naturally.'

He drew a small mark at the rear.

A woman appeared in the doorway carrying a pot so large that he first noticed the pot and then wondered how she was managing it. She set it on the hearth.

'That entrance is through my kitchen,' she said.

'The kitchen is not yours,' his employer replied.

'Not yet. I haven't been paid.'

Nathaniel looked at the drawing again. The kitchen was the smallest occupied room in a house whose owner wished not to receive visitors.

The woman pointed with a wooden spoon. 'Where do the men wash before eating?'

He showed her a pump in the yard.

'In winter?'

He did not answer. Outside, the cart sank another inch.

'And where do they sleep when the road floods?'

Nathaniel had designed a hall large enough for forty ancestors in oil paint. He had not drawn a bed for the man who would raise its roof.

He picked up his pen. This time the ink moved willingly.