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« I’m looking for Lord Even Fleming, miss,» said the notary, a well dressed man in his forties with a pretentious name that she didn’t register. His voice carried a sort of accent that Xion couldn’t exactly place, but it was that kind of talk that pinches the r a bit too roughly and stretches the vowels a little longer. As Xion was moving to the side to let him in, someone upstairs opened up the door of their room and was walking briskly toward the set of stairs. The man at the door almost beamed at the sight, looking like he had just found out the most precious treasure. He walked toward him immediately.
« You’ve come here earlier than I expected,» her father told him, straightening the tie around his neck; a movement done more as a way to fill the space between them than actually fixing up something that was already perfect. His eyes focused briefly on her. When he presented her, the man curtly bowed again, as if he had forgotten about five seconds earlier. « Shall we go?»
Xion closed the door behind her. « Should I call the governess for some tea, Father?»
By looking at his expectant eyes and big smile, the man seemed ready to answer positively to the offer; but before he had any chance to say anything, her father had already answered. « This will certainly take little time from the both of us, there is no need,» then, he returned his attention to the young man once again and with a small, gracious smile, added, « please, follow me.» And so they went, to great disappointment from the young man and small relief from Xion, who could go back to her lesson.
It indeed took little from the both of them - Xion had the time to go through a couple of bars and a scolding from her teacher for “how ungracious her posture was” before she heard the shuffling of steps coming from upstairs - some curt words exchanged in front of the door and then the closing of it once again. Xion was sure she could feel her father’s eyes studying every single movement of her hands on the keyboards, if their positions were correct and if her shoulders were squared enough. Under her father’s scrutiny, Xion felt like she needed to adjust herself better, like she needed to straighten her back even more so, and she needed to be gentler with the keys.
She was in the middle of fixing her posture when she hit the wrong note, the gentleness of the piece ruined because of that single creeking sound. Her teacher clicked her tongue - mesmerizingly enough, it was a sound louder than any other note she could have played from there on out.
« I’m sure Herr Mozart would have lost the favour of the king had he indulged in such easy distractions,» the teacher said, gentle, but with firmness. « You need not to fix your posture when you feel the crowd behind you, but at the start of the performance.»
Xion told her she was right, biting her tongue so hard that she was sure she would have started tasting copper if she kept at it.
The teacher sighed heavily, her eyes going from her to her father, still standing at the entrance of the living room and in perfect silence - as if Xion was still playing and he didn’t want to disturb her performance. « But I believe every artist get easily intimidated by their own father.»
Even showed a hint of a smile at that. « I would like to speak with my daughter in private. I won’t keep her long.»
« Certainly,» and at that, the woman bowed and exited the room, directed toward the kitchen.
« Is everything alright, Father?» Xion asked him, tilting her head slightly to the side as he came closer. He had a small stack of documents under his arm and there was a hint of worry edged into the creases of his forehead.
« The man who came to visit is a notary,» he started to say, dropping the parchments onto the bookstand in front of her - it was a mess of tiny words that Xion wasn’t able to read and a small stamp at the left corner of the page. He exhaled a long sigh, shoulders slumping like some deflated balloon at the fair. He straightened herself up. « You must know my mother - your grandmother - recently passed away. I don’t believe you remember her.»
Xion did not, in fact, remember the woman her father was talking about; yet, ironically enough, she remembered her letters: these thin parchments coming through at least once a month, slightly scented with a perfume so sweet that Xion felt lightheaded just thinking back about them. Even so, she never read them, nor her father let her read them after. Instead, he had always kept them in the drawer of his desk, the only one he closed with a key.
« The notary that was here came to tell me that, as her only son and heir to her legacy, I’m inheriting her mansion. My mother has been living out in the countryside since the death of my late father. She couldn’t bear the city anymore after his death and retired herself to quiet and peace.»
« Alone? In the countryside?» Xion’s head went to this enormous castle and this small, fragile figure that Xion imagined to be her grandmother wandering alone through its halls for years, waiting for death to catch up with her. The thought filled her with dread.
« She had a full staff with her and many of her friends lived close to her, one trip away. Do not fret,» he said, but his smile was little consolation to Xion. « Still, there’s much to be done with that house. It is my intention to leave as soon as possible.»
They stayed silent for a while. Her father didn’t look sad, but there was something in his eyes that made her so intimately aware that something wasn’t right. His eyes, usually green as the brightest emerald, now were clouded, looking more like an open field waiting for the storm to bring ruin. He didn’t look like he wanted to say more, but he still remained fixed on his feet, shoulders squared and eyes travelling left and right on the white keyboards of the piano.
Xion slid slowly to the side of her bench. « Sit with me, Father. I want to play a little more, if you don’t mind. And I like your company.»
Even agreed he would like that as well and sat down next to her. Her father didn’t touch a single key for the whole session, but still he looked like he wanted to join. But for the whole thing, Even was just happy to sit next to her daughter and hear her play.
They left home in the following days, after instructing the staff about the next course of action and advising Xion’s piano teacher that for at least the whole month they wouldn’t be in town - this didn’t stop her from warning the girl to keep practicing lest she fell into disaccustom and returned to her lessons without even being able to read the bars.
The journey on the train to the countryside was long and uneventful; Xion couldn’t keep her mind focused too long on the book on her lap - edging too much into philosophical speech and theology for her likings. On the contrary, her father kept rummaging and working through his documents for the whole journey, glasses slowly slipping to the tip of his nose until he remembered to push them back by putting a finger on the side of the frame. The movement alone filled Xion’s heart with familiarity and warmth and for a split second she wondered if he inherited that as well from his mother.
« Are you sad, father?» Xion asked, the book almost forgotten on her lap but still with a finger pinched between pages.
Her father raised his head to look at her. « No, my dear, why should I be? Do I look sad to you?»
Xion shrugged. « I meant to say,» she started saying, playing with the corner of the page, « you lost your mother. It must be sad to you.» A moment of silence to regain her thoughts. « The idea of losing you is enough to be excruciating to me. So I don’t know how it is to you.»
Even said nothing, but his hands collected the parchments and folded them neatly inside his bag. He crossed one leg over the other and removed his glasses. « My-- your grandmother was old, Xion. She was ninety-one. When one comes to be at this age, you expect death to come at any moment. As her son, I expected to receive this kind of news soon enough.» He cleared his throat. « Of course, this doesn’t hurt any less. But when you’re older, you understand.»
Xion tilted her head. « Understand what?»
Even smiled. « That loss doesn’t hurt the same way each day. Today it hurts a bit less than yesterday. You will understand that as well, my love,» he let out a small laugh, but there was no mirth in that. « And I can only hope it will happen later rather than sooner.»
Xion wanted to smile, but she couldn’t find the strength to. She was feeling tight around the throat; her eyes were prickling slightly, too. She’d rather focus on the book and on the lines that she couldn’t seem to be able to read anymore, as blurry as they were.
Their stop came around late afternoon. The station was small and almost deserted, except for two people standing in the far corner of the verge: one big man in a top hat and one, tall woman, both of them apparently waiting for their arrival. She had a stern look on her face and she immediately reminded Xion of one of those big guardian statues put in front of the church doors - big and beautiful and intimidating.
« Lord Flemish?» She asked, the corner of her lips barely turning up in a smile. Her father presented himself first and Xion right after. « I’m the Governess of the late Lady Flemish, Miss Corduroy. My condolences for your loss.» And at that, the woman bowed slightly her head. « You must be exhausted from your journey. Please, follow me. There’s still some way to go before you can rest.»
The journey was mostly silent, except for the instances of small talk that the Governess tried to table with her father, who was gentle, but made clear right away with his curt answer he didn’t want to engage into shallow conversation at the moment.
The mansion was massive, a building of red stone and big windows that to Xion resembled the castle of a princess. When she stepped out of the carriage, the whole thing seemed looming over her like a bad omen. The moonlight was hitting the windows of the west wing and, right there, on the second floor, Xion’s eyes met a flickering light.
There was somebody behind the glass. And the white, pale figure seemed to stare straight at her. Even with the light of the moon hitting straight through the window, Xion couldn’t make much of the figure - aside from her long, blond hair, those clouded eyes that she couldn’t see properly but could feel on her.
« Come along, Miss, or you’ll catch a cold out here.»
Xion’s eyes went to the Governess for just one second, nodding along to whatever thing she just said. When she raised her eyes once again, the figure at the window was gone.
°
Xion found out soon enough that, even with a mansion so big, there was little she could do to pass the long, stretching days. She had been led for a tour for the whole mansion, even finding a small reading room for her where no one would have disturbed her if she so desired; there were at least two drawing rooms and in the big hall on the first floor she could practice with the piano like her teacher wanted her to. It was a big, grandiose thing, nothing like the small piano they had back at home - still beautiful and sleek, but humble if compared to the instrument before her.
When Xion expressed the wish to play on it, the Governess produced a tiny key from inside her pockets and gave it to her. « Please, be gentle with it. The Lady was so jealous of it, she didn’t want anyone to touch it during the worst of her illness.»
Xion turned abruptly toward her, the key locked inside the piano. « Illness?»
The Governess looked at her with something that looked like pity. « Of course, your Father would never tell you. And he would surely chastited me for saying this to you now,» still, she kept pressing on, not before looking around as to make sure nobody was in earshot. « Many doctor visited her, told us that she suffered from mania or melancholia - it depended who you asked to. The truth is she was just a poor, forgetful woman. At least to me. Didn’t hurt a fly her whole life and was never rude to any of us, I can’t seem to remember a single instance when she lost her patience with us. I’m sure your Father hid this from you for your own good, Miss,» she said, as a way to console from the hidden truth. She looked around one more time. « Come with me.»
Xion went along, her eyes set on another goal and completely forgetful of the key.
The Governess led her to the library. The room was filled everywhere with books, even in places where they shouldn’t have been - like the chairs and on the corners of the room. Like her grandmother had completely forgotten to put them back in places. There was one still open on the armchair.
« See the low shelf there, Miss? Those are your grandmother’s diaries. She spent most of her days writing, sometimes she would skip a meal.» She had a soft smile while saying that, but Xion could see the sadness tugging slightly at the corner of her lips. « Even the last days she tried to write, but her head was… already somewhere else.»
Xion had nothing to say to her, nor the Governess: they had no comforting words to offer each other, so they left it at that. Miss Curdoroy returned to her tasks briefly after; Xion, instead, took the first diary and started reading.
Her grandmother’s writing was nothing like she expected it to be: all elegance and neat spaces between the words and an even amount of words for every page, looking more like a printed book than an actual diary. Her grandmother had started to write when his husband had died - many times throughout the entries, she said she kept dreaming of him and there was no tragedy in those dreams, “but the sweetness of honey and kisses between lovers”.
Xion’s cheeks blushed at the comparison, hands flipping fast to the next page. There was no philosophy in her grandmother’s life, nor she had the time to concentrate on these kinds of things. Instead, her diaries were filled with the single joy that could come from governing her own house, throwing her own balls and having her own friends whom she could confide to. Sometimes she would even talk about her own son and sometimes, surprisingly enough, even talking about her.
Xion, “that little star that came crashing from the clouds. I will raise a glass for her tonight. I hope to see her soon.”
The single sentence filled her eyes with tears.
The last four diaries, stretching through the last two years, were the worst - the handwriting was becoming less and less neat, harsh edges and on the corner of the pages small drawings that didn’t even seem to come from the same hand. One thing became a constant: the worsening of her condition and a single name, coming through the pages like a beacon through the storm.
Namine .
Not her son or her nephew’s name, but one that Xion never heard before. She tried to retrace it back to the previous diaries - a friend that she had overlooked or a distant cousin that she had never met before then. But instead, Namine came like a summer storm: sudden and loud.
“Namine came to visit me again tonight. She’s always so kind. She likes to hear me playing.”
“I tried to go for a late night walk with Namine tonight, but she said she couldn’t possibly go outside. I told her some fresh air might do her good, but she had already run out somewhere.”
“Namine always looks so sad. Like she longs to leave, but doesn’t dare to.”
“She draws so beautifully”
« Xion.»
The first sound in such deep silence made her jump on the seat, diary tumbling out of her hands. On the doorframe was standing his father, glasses dangling from the front pocket of his waistcoat. He looked tired.
« Come down to dinner,» he eyed briefly the book on the ground, but did not say anything, nor he moved forward to pick it up.
Xion nodded absently, collecting the book from the ground and leaving it on the armchair. « You seem tired, father,» she said, taking his arm to walk all the way toward the hall.
« I am, just a little,» he answered, « I heard you play the piano earlier this afternoon. You sounded lovely.»
Xion raised her head toward him. She had spent the whole afternoon in the library. The key to the piano had stayed there the whole time in the case and she was sure she didn’t even open it before following the Governess. She smiled up at him and thanked him, trying to sound as genuine as possible.
When she went to see it for herself after supper, the key was tucked in the music stand and the case was open.
°
« A blonde girl in a white dress?» Miss Curdoroy poured a small cup of coffee for her and then rounded the table to bring her forward the sugar.
« I saw her,» Xion told her, almost edging on her seat, « she was at the window on the second floor, in the west wing. She was there when we arrived.»
Miss Curdoroy laughed. « Oh dear, nobody could have been awake at that hour of the night. Maybe you were just tired.»
But Xion was sure of what she saw - she remembered that night when she arrived. She remembered how the moonlight hit the glass just right, the small curve of that girl’s hand around the candle and the brightness of her hair. She was sure of those details, even though they were starting to feel fainter and more distant by the day.
She shook her head. « And do you know of Namine? My grandmother wrote about her in her diaries.»
The governess seemed awfully sad in that moment, like her age caught up with her all of sudden. « That’s not a good story to put in a diary,» she mumbled out, putting the kettle down.
Xion shot her a puzzled look, but said nothing else. She wanted a piece of truth. So the Governess told her.
Namine had been part of the kitchen staff; most of the time she helped around cleaning after the cooks and making sure that everything was in order after. There was nothing else that Miss Curdoroy could tell for that, every information was rather clouded in uncertainty, aside from the fact that she was born on the grounds.
« So this Namine visited my grandmother often during her last days?» Xion asked, hands around the cup.
The Governess looked at her, puzzled. « Oh, no, Miss, Namine died of tuberculosis very young. My mother used to tell me that her poor father died as well a few days after; an awful story to say in a diary, as I said. Why would she talk about her anyway?»
Strange and stranger, the rest of the morning passed as though Xion was living her day through a lens: too detached to be sure that was the reality of things and too close to deny it. Her mind went to the day before, when her father complimented her for a piece she had never played, on a piano she didn’t even have the time to touch. The name Namine had been used time and time again in her grandmother’s last diaries and, even through madness, there was certainty in what she was seeing - so Xion tried to be as sure, too.
There was not much information she could get her hands on: the staff was too new anyway to know the story and Miss Curdoroy herself had never met her in the first place but was relying on her own mother’s words. Her grandmother’s diaries didn’t say much either in the last, scarsing pages, where she would lose her own thoughts, and entries were getting rarer and scattered. The drawings on the pages were more often covering the rest of the margins - a flower blooming, the sketch of a little dress, a heart, a book: there was no actual reason behind those doodles and Xion wasn’t sure what to make of it. The lines weren’t as hard as the words on the page, but nonetheless Xion had a hard time believing those were the result of Namine’s doing.
But the more she thought about the girl at the window, the more she wanted to know more - see more, with her own eyes and up close. Namine couldn’t leave anyway, apparently, and Xion, too, at the end of the day, had not much going on anyway and the summer was long and unrelenting.
I have to find her.
For the most part of her day, Xion found out that the more she wanted to put an end to the mystery, the more she felt distant from the truth. She approached this with a precision of sorts: Namine apparently drew beautifully and she was sure that the doodles at the margin were hers; so Xion decided to leave so distractedly an open exercise book, with a pencil next to it, on the table of the drawing room. She closed the doors behind her and waited, peeking through the keyhole.
Namine was a ghost after all: she surely would have come through the walls and Xion would have caught her on the spot. But hours must have passed (or maybe just twenty minutes) and Xion was starting to feel a bit tired of waiting. She should’ve brought with her a book to pass the time, but what if she missed the exact instant Namine walked through the wallpaper and into the room?
Miss Curdoroy chose that exact moment to drive her away from her spot - with a sort of distant relief from Xion as if that job that she had chosen to take upon herself had somehow started to get tiring. When Xion came back, the doors were opened. She ran inside, eager to find the girl in the white dress leant over the notebook; but instead, there was only a maid, who had smiled at her before returning to her tasks. No sign of ghosts.
When she reached the exercise book, there was only one, little doodle on the bottom of the page, right next to the corner: a tiny keyhole.
Xion expected to feel anger or disappointment or even fear. Instead, she couldn’t help but smile.
Her second try was slightly different but still travelled on the same line of “pretending to go somewhere else because that was my plan all along and if the thing I vaguely want to happen happens, that's all better for me”. This time, Xion purposely left the piano cover open and went straight for the library: she had all the books she wanted to pass the time and she wasn’t anywhere near the piano. Last time, she had waited outside the room and that was just an artless error; this was genius - at least to her concern.
The only sound that filled the room was the flipping of pages through the book, but still Xion’s ears were all tuned for the outside. She waited and waited until finally she heard a clink: just the pressing of one note, constant and with a pause of six seconds between keys.
She sprinted outside the room, as fast as her large gown allowed her to. She was expecting to find a translucent gleam, a ghostly figure leaning over the keyboard, the tip of her finger gracefully placed on the center of the key. But instead, when Xion arrived in the hall, the piano was silent and nobody except for her was in the room.
The booklet on the music stand had the corner of the page bent, a small fold that Xion was sure wasn’t there before and seemed too precise to be casual. There was no trace of the girl anywhere else.
The more tricks Xion strategically planned out, the harder it was to actually spot Namine. Her days were nothing but a blur of precise, but identical events: practicing, taking a walk around the gardens, trying another brilliant plan of hers to bring Namine out in the open that miserably failed every time, spending the rest of the night with her father or reading in her room. And every day, Namine would leave around just the faintest trace, so fleeting that it could have just been translated as casual or ordinary.
But in all this uneventfulness, there was nothing ordinary in what Xion was going through. Some days she felt closer, like Namine was just a whiff of air behind the nape of her neck just as Xion was leaning over her grandma’s diaries; other times - and those were the worst - she felt exactly like the very first time she arrived at the mansion and looked up to the west wing to stare at a faint shadow.
And then there were those kind of days when Namine’s presence was as natural and as matter-of-fact as any other resident of the castle: she would hear her playing a couple of notes on the piano from across rooms and Xion wouldn’t even sprint to reach for her, knowing that by the time she had crossed the distance, Namine wouldn’t be there anymore; she was getting used to find sometimes doodles scribbled with a white crayon on the corner of her desk. It could be anything: from something as simple as a crescent moon, barely a rounded curve, to a rose in bloom.
For all her mystery, Namine wasn’t keeping her ability to draw a secret to Xion’s eyes. And for every coloured curve that she encountered and every key randomly pressed on the piano, Xion felt a bit closer - not to find her, but to something else that she couldn’t put in words. There was a smile for every doodle she stumbled on, and a lingering touch for every key that Namine had touched until that moment.
The keys weren’t warm, but not even cold as she expected them to be: they were exactly as if Namine had never been there. It was a strange thought, even more so because Xion was so painfully aware of how persistent Namine’s presence was in the house, like part of the staff, like air.
Xion was in the library late in the evening when Even knocked at the door.
« It’s far too late for you to still stay up, young lady,» he said in a hush, poking his head inside.
She smiled at him. « I’m going now, my eyes are getting tired anyway.»
Xion gathered her book and the candlestick, and walked through the door. She bid her father goodnight and walked toward her room.
She was climbing up the stairs when a glimpse of white caught the corner of her eye. For a moment she thought it to be the wind that moved the curtains, but all the windows were shut. Xion stopped on the last step and waited - she didn’t even know what she was waiting for.
Namine…? She thought, because she didn’t dare say it out loud.
She followed suit, walking cautiously down the hall.
The west wing wasn’t unknown territory to Xion, but she rarely wandered around during the nights. In the dark, the hall seemed completely different from the daytime. The windows that usually let the sunlight in, brightening up the room, now cast the whole hall into complete darkness, the curtain all drawn to avoid even the smallest speck of moonlight to peek in. The feeble light coming from her candle cast eerie shadows on the wall, so that Xion jumped at nothing everytime the faintest whiff of air made the flame dance. Still, she pressed on, feet cautiously taking the next step as if she was afraid to wake someone - or something - between these high ceilings and ever seeing painting.
Has this hall always been that long?
She rounded the last corner.
At the end of the hall, the huge portrait of her late grandmother watched over the west wing. And just next to the only window left open, looking outside, there was Namine.
Namine - the ghost that Xion had tried to search for over and over again like a madwoman, chasing hints and drawings and the keys on the piano; that made her spend afternoons thinking about the next plan, the next way to see her just once, to make her eyes linger, to stand in front of each other.
She was exactly how she remembered and yet her mind must have played tricks because she was nothing like anything Xion had ever laid her eyes upon. She had imagined a translucent figure, something feeble and faint that could disappear any second, but when looking at her, XIon had a hard time recalling anyone as real as her.
Namine turned her gaze toward her.
Xion had read gothic books, remembered how everyone who had met a ghost was supposed to feel cold and dread and then an immediate instinct to flee; in the worst case scenario, it could drive people mad at the mere sight. But when looking at Namine, Xion felt like she was supposed to stay.
Oh.
Namine smiled. « Finally,» she said, relieved. « I have been looking for you.»
Xion couldn’t help but laugh.