Part 10

I move through the kitchen and down the hall, as best I can make out where it would have been - there are a few pieces of brick wall and foundational stone showing, which help as well, but the number of broken brick pieces half-buried under the field grass and wild-sown flowers confuse the outlines in places.  (I wonder if some of the fallen brick was carted off for re-use after the fire?  Brick scorches but I don't think it burns, and there definitely aren't enough bricks on the ground here to have made up the three- and four-stories of the house and its tower.)  I look to either side, trying to envision where the other rooms were - but there's no blurring of my vision to shift me back now, to check against the house as it once was.  I linger a long moment at the threshold of the front entryway... but there's nothing to fix my attention here today.  I have a carriage house to go find!
          Once out of the house's shadow, my pace picks up and my mood lightens.  I slip out the lovely ironwork of the front gate (pausing a moment to let my eyes linger on the motto that spans it), and look along where I think the path should have run by the house.  The most I'd seen of that gravel path was the night of the fire, so I didn't get a particularly good look at it, but it's an impression to go on at least.  And that impression is enough that, if I look for it, I can see the connections between a few areas of sparse grass with patches of gravel beneath.  As I continue along beneath the sometimes thin, often heavy, canopy of the trees that have encroached on the grounds over the years, I realize there's a tiny bit of a path.  I bet it's from Jim Cumbings and his dog - luckily for me, it seems the path they take isn't far off from what the drive would have been, so I don't have to blaze through as much undergrowth as I'd feared.
          Though the drive seems to have curved around a bit, the fence is rarely hidden from my view - and usually from plantgrowth rather than distance.  I'm a horrible judge of distance, but I've gone maybe half a mile at most, when I spot what looks like a roof.  A roof!  And reddish coloring peeking from the leaves near it, just the color of bricks.
          Of course, this is where I hit a particularly dense section of brush - I nearly trip on some vine that's evidently sturdier than I am, and, naturally, among the grape vines and burdock and general weedy things, there are some thorns too.  Not roses, or blackberry bushes, judging by the leaves, but I don't know what they actually are.
          By the time I finally stagger over to a brick wall, I'm sweating and angry and covered in scratches and brushburns.  I push gently at said wall, and as it gives no sign of falling over, I slump down to sit on the ground and lean my back gratefully against it for awhile.  While I'm eager as all hell to investigate, there's not the clearing I'd expected to find here - it's grown up even worse than the front gate of the house, with no space at all between the green growth of the woods and the old brick walls.  Looking along the wall I'm leaning on as best I can, I realize there less than no space between them - I can see a vine growing gleefully in and out of some broken window panes not far off.  It's going to be a battle just to walk around this thing, let alone find a way in!
          As it turns out, walking around it turns out to be much trickier than finding a way in.  All I wound up having to do was turn the corner, and I found the shattered remains of two very large wooden doors.  I remember Avery telling his mother the horses would have bolted the night of the fire - I wonder if they caused the damage, or if it's been vandals in the years since, or if it's just the fate of unmaintened wooden things in the rain and humidity of a hundred years in North Carolina.  Whatever the cause, the doors stand ajar, what I presume was once white paint still clinging in a few places to the weather-grayed wood.  Most of the panes of glass in the windows are gone, but the frames are still there - a few feet across, oval in shape, with bars criss-crossing it in almost a snowflake shape.  Though kudzu covers most of this side of the building, I can see glimpses of elegant arches over the doors here and above other windows.  I can't see enough of the brickwork to confirm, but I'm sure if I could, I'd see the same patternwork as the main house had.  So much beauty and thought put into every detail of this place...
          A little nervous, I step inside, half-fearing to find myself entering, I don't know, a bear's den, a hobo camp, a fugitive rapist lurking in the shadows, dead bodies... I grin wryly and shake my head.  Right.  Because after everything I've seen, I'm going to find something that someone in the outside world would actually believe I'd found.
          I don't see much at first - the woods have grown so closely around the building (which I can't even get a good sense of the size of yet), they've blocked up the windows and let in barely any light.  But a section of the roof has fallen in somewhere farther back, and that lets in a little more light, though it's pretty faint by this door.  I've stepped into a large open space with a high ceiling - and I realize, duh, it's a carriage house, and this was the front garage door.  There'd have to be enough clearance for a carriage's height, and I'm sure the Masons would have had more than one.  The darkened remains of decaying straw cling in moldy mounds to portions of the floor, though most has become soil at this point.  I kick aside some of it, wondering about the floor beneath - remarkably flat paving stones, at least in this area.  I don't see anything at all stored in this area, but I guess the Masons would have had someone in town sell it all off when they left.  Or maybe they just left it here, and, knowing the family would never be back, bit by bit it was stolen over time.
          The interior walls are wood - nearest the doorway, they're in pretty rough shape, with some paneling fallen away completely leaving only the underlying beams.  But most sections are not only intact, but still showing their original beauty.  Walking carefully over the uneven piles of decay on the floor, I move closer to one on the left.  The wood is a deep dark red, and incredibly smooth.  There's curved molding running along where the walls meet, and apart from a few places near windows or other open spaces, it looks like the wood hasn't warped or fallen out of place at all.  I don't know a whole lot about woodworking, architecture, or building in general, but even I can tell the craftsmanship that went into this glorified barn is just stunning.
          Following the wall along, I find an opening, which is outlined with square beams that are carved with gorgeous designs, echoing the graceful geometry of the windowframes.  Not all that different from the Turkish tiles in the garden, come to think of it.  It looks like I've stepped into a storage room of some sort or another - a tack room, maybe?  (My horse-obsessed phase was a little less thorough than some of my others as a kid, I think I spent about a year inhaling Black Beauty, Misty of Chincoteague, and The Saddle Club series, but it seems not much has stuck with me.)  Plenty of nails on the walls, and a few dried-out leather straps, but nothing much else.  A few other small rooms yield much the same - some buckets, a few brushes, rings and hooks set into the wall in places.  A small desk and chair of the same deep red wood that's everywhere, but unfortunately the desk is empty of anything but dust and a few dead bugs.  Still, I'm struck by the beauty of the woodwork - everything is perfectly finished, and there are elegant little touches in every direction, whether it's a bit of carving by a window, smooth columns tucked into gaps between half-walls and the ceiling... the ceiling itself!  It's much lower in the side rooms than in the carriage room, I'm guessing that larger room's ceiling is two floors up, whereas these have rooms on the story above.  More of the same richly colored wood, perfectly smooth, with barely any gaps showing between them despite the lack of maintanence.  The cross-beams that run along the ceiling are richly carved with the same patterning, but with accents tucked in here and there, made of some kind of warm golden metal (brass maybe?), tarnished in most places, but with a hint of shine still in more protected areas.  Some of these are squares embossed with a continuation of the pattern, others are shaped flowers or stars or other ornaments, inset among the tangle of patterning to become a part of it.  Like golden stars set into a mahoghany sunset sky.
          One of the rooms has more moldering piles of straw in it, and there's a square opening in the ceiling - I'm guessing this would have opened up to the hayloft?  And sure enough, I soon find myself in a hallway with stalls on either side.  The ceiling opens up here again, and the whole room feels light and airy - the hole in the roof is in a corner here, a tree fell onto it at some point in years past, the trunk still rests partly inside the building, with piles of debris on the floor all around it.  The air is much fresher, though still tinged with the smell of mold, and the heady scent of old wood that permeates the entire building.  The walls around the stalls are maybe four or five feet of smooth paneling, topped with a gorgeous latticework of the same golden metal as I saw in the ceiling beams, in a matching pattern.  Glass-globed lamps are attached to the walls at intervals, as are more hooks and an occasional shelf.  There's a waterpump in one corner with a long basin, a number of barrels not far from it.  Another set of doors stands at the end of the aisle, and I can tell that though they're closed, they've been broken as well, there are cracks of light where they're hanging a bit off-kilter.