The House That Courted Its Tenants
A lonely manor moves its rooms to make two tenants fall in love.
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How it begins
The house moved Clara's bedroom during the night, which was inconvenient because she had already painted it.
She opened the door expecting the west staircase and found a man tuning a piano in his dressing gown.
Neither of them spoke.
Behind him, rain combed the windows. Yesterday those windows had faced the orchard. Today they faced Clara's bed.
"I put a wardrobe against that wall," the man said.
"I slept against it."
"Then I owe you an apology for the scales."
Clara glanced down. A trail of rose petals crossed the landing between them. They were fresh, extravagantly red, and entirely out of season.
She picked one up with the tweezers she kept in her pocket. Architectural conservation did not ordinarily require tweezers before breakfast, but this commission was becoming educational.
"Elias Ward," he said. "East wing."
"Clara Venn. West wing."
They looked at the landing.
"Apparently there has been a merger," he said.
Somewhere below them, a kettle began to sing.
Clara had accepted the manor's cheap rent because the owner wanted its original floor plan restored. She had spent yesterday finding blocked doorways and measuring walls. Her notebook contained forty-three dimensions, two sketches and one firm conclusion: nobody had altered the building in a century.
She took out the notebook.
Every measurement was still there. In the margin, in her own handwriting, someone had added a small heart.
Elias leaned forward. "Did you draw that?"
"No."
"I'd like that recorded."
The corridor shortened by perhaps six inches. Clara felt it in her knees before she saw the piano slide closer.
She shut her bedroom door.
The knob warmed beneath her palm, almost reassuringly.
"Listen carefully," she told the plaster. "I am here to repair your roof. My private life is not a structural defect."
The kettle stopped.
For a moment there was only rain.
Then an envelope slipped under the door. Inside lay a photograph of Clara and Elias at a kitchen table, laughing over breakfast.
She knew the cardigan she wore in it.
She could not remember the breakfast.
Beside her, Elias had gone very still.
"There are more underneath," he whispered. "How long have we been here?"
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Outline and characters
- Clara finds her bedroom relocated beside Elias's piano.
- They establish separate boundaries, which the house ignores.
- A candlelit supper costs them the memory of their first conversation.
- Clara records encounters on paper while Elias marks rooms with musical intervals.
- They discover the house learned love from an abandoned resident's diary.
- Their growing affection gives it increasingly valuable memories to consume.
- Clara realizes she has forgotten the promise that originally brought her there.
- Elias refuses a perfect manufactured reunion and opens the locked servants' stair.
- They separate voluntarily, starving the house's compulsion without abandoning it.
- They return by different doors to begin a relationship the house cannot script.
Characters
- Clara Venn, 37. An architectural conservator who distrusts grand gestures
- Elias Ward, 40. A widowed piano tuner renting the opposite wing
Series possibilities
- A boarding house begins returning memories its former tenants thought they had lost.
