The Splendour Falls by Unknown, Rosemary Clement-Moore

the old carriage house rebuilt into a car palace. So ‘garage apartment’ was nowhere as shabby as it sounded.
    I was upstairs, in a small room in the back corner of the house. It hadn’t been refurbished yet, and the wallpaper was a faded yellow with a tiny print of pale pink and green flowers. A woven rug warmed the floor, which was spotlessly clean, but scuffed and in need of a polish.
    When I’d come up after settling Gigi, I’d found my suitcase waiting for me. I’d stashed my toiletries and undies in the cabinet that served as a closet, then slid the rest of my stuff, still in the case, under the bed. I guess part of me was prepared if Paula kicked Gigi and me out, or I decided to run away, or I got carted off in a jacket with arms that tied in the back.
    The brass bed frame was an antique and the mattressfelt like one. There was a tiny writing desk under the window, and a small upholstered chair and footstool in the corner. As I lay in bed, I caught a faint whiff of lilac, which I assumed came from the soap on the Victorian washstand, which also held a basin and a ewer. Very quaint. And practical, since I could wash my face without going down the hall to the bathroom.
    When the alarm on the nightstand said it was midnight in Alabama – one a.m. by my internal clock – I figured I’d given everyone enough time to reach REM sleep. Without turning on the light – I’d been lying in the dark in case Paula poked her nose upstairs to check on me – I rolled out of my Gigi-less bed and headed for the door.
    The knob was a brass oval, darkened with age; I grasped it and paused, listening for any sounds outside, my heart beating a fast and guilty tattoo. You would think I was up to something a lot worse than sneaking in my dog. Maybe I was overidentifying with some ancestress who had to creep out from under the strict eye of her nursemaid. I had no trouble casting Paula in that role.
    I brushed off the thought and turned the knob carefully so it wouldn’t squeak. Leaving the door open, I headed to the first-floor landing, where the wood floor gleamed in the light coming through the French doors at the end of the hall.
    It had cooled off considerably, and I wished I’d put on my slippers. The chill seemed to travel up through the bones of my feet and ankles and settle in the healed fissures of my leg. By the time I reached the carpet runner covering the stairs, I was shivering in my thinpajamas.The night air eddied through the open centre of the house, brushing the nape of my neck, where wisps of hair had fallen from my scrunchie-knotted ponytail.
    The downstairs foyer wasn’t much better. Moonlight spilled through the window over the door, a cold, silver glow. I headed quickly towards the back of the house, to the big kitchen where earlier we’d sat down to Clara’s blackberry cobbler.
    The air felt warmer here. So did the tile floor, which should have been icy compared with the wood planks elsewhere in the house. Maybe it was because the kitchen was a later addition, something to do with ventilation or more-modern insulation. Back in the day, most of the cooking had been done in an outbuilding, to keep the heat away from the main house. Paula had told me the present kitchen had been expanded early in the last century, so that food prep could be done closer to the family’s swank house parties. It all sounded very Great Gatsby ; apparently Prohibition hadn’t been much of an impediment to anyone’s partying. Not the Davises’, anyway.
    The downstairs also featured a formal dining room and a small breakfast nook for future guests of the B&B, but I could tell that the kitchen was the heart of the house, and that was obviously Clara’s doing. Earlier that night, when I’d come in from settling Gigi on the porch, she’d pointed me, with a queenly gesture worthy of a despot welcoming me to her domain, towards a big trestle table that