Crimson Peak: The Official Movie Novelization (11 page)

T
HE HILLS WERE
barren and the sky was clotted with fog. Warmed by blankets and her traveling coat with the magenta bow, Edith, who was dozing in the open carriage, got lost in a hazy dream that she was riding in a hearse toward a cemetery. Not so much riding as being conveyed to the graveyard, which signified that she was the one who had died. The last of the Cushings. But she was a Cushing no longer. She was Lady Sharpe.

Through the chill, she felt the warmth of her husband and knew that she was dreaming, and roused herself. Then Thomas said, “Edith, Edith, wake up. We are here.”

When her eyes opened, she saw Thomas. His dear face, the angles as keen-edged as the facets of her garnet ring, his eyes bluer than the exquisite cameo Wedgwood belt clasp she had eyed, then rejected, while shopping in London. Thomas had encouraged her to allow the purchase but she wanted all possible funds to be spent on developing his clay-harvesting machine. She had a wonderful trousseau that would stand her until his own fortune was restored.

If only her father could be there to see that.

The horse brought the carriage closer to the gates of the Sharpe family seat, and in some ways, the place matched the engravings she had studied in her book. The bones of the grounds and the house were still there. Short columns supported an iron arch dominated by the family crest, which was often wrought in pictures in brilliant red as a nod to the crimson clay from the Sharpe mines, and included the image of a chained skull, very dark and Gothic, in her view. The crest had been impressed in the red wax seal on the back of Thomas’s desperate love letter. Below the crest wrought in iron were the words
ALLERDALE HALL
.

The bleak house stood at the end of a red clay path, surrounded by dead brown grass and skeletal trees and backed by a dark gray sky. Gone were the boulevards lined with trees and topiaries. No porte cochère to shelter aristocrats’ coaches as they disgorged visitors; indeed, no visitors. No servants, either, just one man, she had been told. Thomas and Lucille could no longer afford staff, and so had given up entertaining.

I will change all that.
Upon the death of her father, control of the family fortune had passed to her. She would restore Allerdale Hall and its master to their former glory. The worry lines on her beloved’s dear face would disappear. They would waltz in their own home surrounded by friends and family. And children.

She blushed.

As to the hall itself, two Gothic spires of unequal height dominated the asymmetrical silhouette as it sat wedged between life-size versions of Thomas’s mining equipment. It had been built on over the centuries, in many styles of brick and stone; there were walkways, turrets and towers, numbers of which had deteriorated so badly as to fall. Glazed glass panes stared at her beneath eyebrows of arched brick. Allerdale Hall looked at once to be simultaneously unfinished and too tired to go on, as if it were alive and slowing dying. What was the saying? Giving up the ghost.

Thomas had prepared her, but the sight of the once-magnificent estate now fallen into such terrible ruin stunned and saddened her. There was a desperate dignity about her new husband as he gazed at her taking it in. Like his beautiful but dated clothing, his home spoke of a life begun in refinement and elegance, but without the means to maintain it. It spoke of loss. She remembered what he had told the captains of Buffalo industry: that he was possessed of an indomitable will. It seemed to her now that Allerdale Hall stood aboveground only through the sheer force of that will; that if owned by a lesser man, it would have disappeared into the fog like a mirage.

The carriage rolled to a stop and a manservant approached and greeted Thomas deferentially, bobbing his head to Edith. He was arthritic and quite old, his eyes milky, and his homespun clothes were even more threadbare than Thomas’s dark blue suit.

“Hello, Finlay. How have you been keeping?” Thomas asked him warmly.

“Never better, Sir Thomas. I knew it was you a mile off.”

“Finlay, this is my wife.”

“I know, I know, milord. You’ve been married a while,” the man—Finlay—replied. Then he went round the carriage to fetch the luggage.

Poor thing
, Edith thought.
His mind is giving out.

Thomas handed her out of the carriage. Together they walked toward the front steps of the house she was now mistress of. Thomas opened his mouth to say something, but at the same moment, a cute little dog scurried around the carriage and yipped in ecstasy at the sight of them.

Edith cried, “And who is this? You never told me about him! Or is it a she?”

“I had no idea,” Thomas murmured.

Edith bent to examine the bouncy creature. She could feel its delicate bones beneath its icy, matted coat. “It has a collar. Is it a stray, do you think?”

“Impossible,” he said, wrinkling his forehead. “There’s no other house for miles and the town is half a day’s walk away.”

“Well, the poor thing is in a terrible state. Can I keep it? It looks famished.”

“As you wish,” he said indulgently. “Now, Your Ladyship, may I have the honor?”

With a flourish, he picked her up and carried her over the threshold of their home. They both burst into happy giggles.
Married.
And home at last from their honeymoon—if one could properly call it a honeymoon. They had not shared the marriage bed as yet. She was so grateful that Thomas had respected her mourning—and yet, she was ready to be a proper wife to him.

In all respects.

He set her down just inside the foyer, and as he slowly took off his top hat she was reminded of a magician drawing back the curtain of a magic trick. She had her first glimpse of the interior of the great house. There was a huge foyer, paneled in dark wood, and above it three stories of lacy balconies and Italianate galleries, profusions of finials, and Gothic arches decorated with quatrefoils. Portraits of centuries of Sharpe ancestors in gilded frames compounded Edith’s impression that she was standing in the ghost of Allerdale Hall, a memory of lost vibrancy, that the actual house was gone. Yet there seemed to be a birdcage elevator of moderate size, able to hold perhaps three people—a single note of modernity—and it reminded her of Thomas’s ingenious mining machine. This place
would
live again, and it
would
come into the present. She would see to that.

“Lucille!” Thomas called, his voice practically echoing. “Lucille! Lucille!”

The little dog barked a delighted chorus. Snowflakes drifted from the holes in the ceiling, soundless and melancholy. Edith found herself thinking of the rose petals she had scattered over her father’s casket—their skin-like texture and dying scent—and shivered.

She said over her shoulder, “I think it’s colder inside than outside.”

“It is an utter disgrace,” Thomas responded. “We try to maintain the house as best we can, but with the cold and the rain and the mines right below… it’s almost impossible to stop the damp and erosion.”

Indeed, there was evidence of damage everywhere, rust and mold and streaks and pools of red clay. Her father could have set all to rights with his engineering expertise, of that she was certain; she spared a moment for another, deeper pang of grief, felt it as palpably as if it were creeping up her body, then set it aside for her dear new husband’s sake.

“How many rooms are there?” she asked him.

He blinked, surprised. “Why? I don’t really know.” Then he grinned at her, and there was the charm that had won her over so quickly. “Would you like to count them?”

She laughed. “Oh, I will. But how can you sustain this house, just you and Lucille?”

Mr. Finlay entered with some of her trunks. “Take it upstairs, young master?” he asked. She smiled at the old man’s slip in speaking to Thomas as if he were still a child, his affection for Thomas evident. Edith’s father had always told her that if you wanted to measure the character of a man, then watch how he dealt with his servants. Thomas treated Finlay quite civilly, and there was a real bond between them. That pleased her deeply.

“Yes, Finlay, please.” Thomas brushed Edith’s lips with a kiss and returned his full attention to her. “It is a privilege we were born into and one we can never relinquish. But we manage, darling, somehow. My workshop’s in the attic. I can’t wait to show you.”

He turned with a “wait-for-me” air and disappeared into the gloom. To locate his sister, she supposed. It was uncanny how, with a few quick steps, he seemed to vanish. How the house appeared to swallow him up. Despite her book of engravings, she hadn’t realized just how enormous it was. It could contain several Cushing Manors and a few copies of the McMichael home as well. She didn’t understand Thomas’s slavish devotion to it, but he came from an old family in a country steeped in tradition, custom, and duty. She couldn’t imagine enduring a life in this house for any other reason than love. And love would keep her here.

With Finlay upstairs and Thomas off to find his sister, she was ostensibly alone in the large, cold room. Except for the cute little dog, of course. The pup had grown so quiet that she had almost forgotten it was there. Now, as she looked at it, she realized that its tail was curled fearfully between its legs. Slightly uneasy, Edith drew her coat more closely around herself. The dog continued to cower, and she looked around, trying to see what it saw. But there was nothing. What was it frightened of?

As if in answer, the wind slammed the front door shut with a boom. She jumped. The dog hunched lower.

With the door closed, the great hall descended deeper into darkness, and she lost sight of many of the architectural details. It was enormous, and it dawned on her that one could look down from above without being seen. What that signified, she had no idea, and she tried to shake off her presentiment of doom. She was very tired, and this was the final destination of the day’s long, cold trip. This was her home now.

So she took off her hat and gloves, settling in, then spotted a large mirror, where she checked her hair. She wanted to look presentable for Lucille, whom she barely knew. Because Lucille had already left for England on that terrible day when Edith’s father had died, she had missed the wedding.

Her hair looked fine; Edith recalled the day she had gone to see Mr. Ogilvie with ink smudges on her fingertips and forehead. So much had happened since then, but the one constant was that she was still working on her novel. She had packed plenty of paper and the exquisite gold pen her father had given her; aside from the garnet ring Thomas had placed on her finger when he had proposed, the pen was her most cherished possession.

The dog was still cowering and as she looked down at the poor mite, she heard a strange, soft buzzing. She glanced down at a tray by the mirror to find, to her astonishment, a handful of dying flies. She frowned; it was so odd and unexpected. She couldn’t imagine how they had ended up inside the frigid house, nor why they were dying at this precise moment. She studied them and scanned the shadows for evidence of food or perhaps a dead animal.

Then the little dog trotted back into the room, startling Edith, who hadn’t even noticed that it had left. The house was freakish in the way it absorbed sound.

The pup was carrying a bright red rubber ball in its mouth and trotted up, wagging its tail as an invitation to its new friend to play fetch.

“You? Where on earth did you find that?” she asked it. She could not imagine any reason for there to be such a dog-sized ball in the fabulous ruin.

The dog persisted. She was about to stretch out her hand when in the mirror, she spotted the dark shape of a woman on the far side of the room. At last Thomas’s sister had emerged. Edith felt a little flutter of nerves. They were strangers who now were family.

She raised a hand, but the figure stayed well away from her, so cloaked in the shadows that Edith couldn’t really make out her appearance. She seemed to be moving strangely… or perhaps that was due to one of Lucille’s tightly corseted Victorian gowns, which constricted movement. Edith far preferred the more modern full skirts and mutton-sleeved blouses of the New Woman, which coincided with her image of herself as a lady novelist.

“Lucille?” she said by way of greeting.

The lady moved away, and Edith was perplexed. Should she follow after her? Was there some reason Lucille was not speaking to her? And—dear Lord, was she
smoking
? The light caught some sort of trail wafting behind the woman in a strange way, faint strands that appeared to be glowing as they floated upward. She simply could not imagine such a refined lady as Lucille Sharpe puffing away on a cigarette.

“Excuse me,” Edith called, walking toward her. It was not Lucille; she could tell that much. For one thing, her height was wrong.

Ignoring Edith, the stranger entered the elevator cage. The mechanism hummed to life and the elevator ascended as Edith hurried over to it and peered upward. Too late; all she saw was the bottom of the cab.

Then Thomas walked back in, and Edith waved her hand at the lift just as it stopped at the top of the house. Or at least so she assumed. The machinery had stopped humming, but she wasn’t certain that the elevator door had opened yet.

“A woman, Thomas, in the elevator,” she told him.

He raised a brow. “You mean Lucille?”

“No, no, Thomas, it wasn’t Lucille,” she insisted.

“That contraption seems to have a mind of its own,” Thomas said, almost fondly. “The wiring gets affected by the dampness in the house. It connects to the clay pits, you see. Promise me you’ll be very careful when using it, and never, ever go below this level. The mines are very unstable.”

She wanted to make it clear that there
had
been a woman in the elevator. It hadn’t just “decided” to go up.

As she opened her mouth, the little dog started barking and bounded toward the foyer. The door opened and Lucille walked in, wrapped in gloves and heavy woolens, and her eyes widened when she saw the dog.

“What is this thing doing here?” she asked curtly. “I thought that you—”