Free The Ghosts of Kerfol by Deborah Noyes

that was not his choosing. He had faced worse.
    The light was buttery and kind, though he knew he would want shade later. Victor carried a portable table out to the rear patio, arranged paint pots and brushes, went away, and returned again with the easel. He sat regarding his nearly finished painting, breathing the good stink of turpentine. He worked, and took pleasure in the work.
    But it seemed to matter, too much, that he had missed Marguerite and her father. He felt vaguely panicked, surveying the vast sweep of foliage threatening to swallow every surface beyond the patio but the chapel, which hunkered now in shadow.
    He lifted a dry brush, idly plying its bristles, and when he looked up again, there was the golden dog again, not ten feet away on the marble tile.
    In a funny way it was as if time had looped backward, as if this were somehow, again, his first day at Kerfol, his first sighting of this animal. Had the days between — the waiting for Mother . . . the cheerful, empty exchanges with Marguerite . . . the reckless success with crayon and brush — been a dream?
    He’ll bark in a minute,
Victor thought,
and someone will come.
But no one would, he knew. Not today.
    Call it an anniversary. One it’s our custom to avoid.
    When the forbidding little animal kept its distance, Victor decided to act before fear disabled him as it had disabled his father in Paris. He would chase away the foolish dog and proceed indoors to the library. Kerfol was exactly the sort of house that someone, at some point, felt compelled to write a history about. That history was no doubt in the estate library, easily accessible. He advanced bravely, but as the dog drew back at his approach, another one, a rough brindled thing, limped forward.
    There are no dogs at Kerfol.
Had Marguerite not said as much?
    But now a third — a long-haired white mongrel — slipped in from the edge of Victor’s vision to join the others. All three stared at him with grave, shining eyes, but none made a sound. They fell back on muffled paws, watchful as he stepped forward.
    Charge me, then,
he thought stupidly.
Isn’t that what packs do?
    They let him retreat beyond the patio as he pleased, following at a distance, always the same distance, always with Victor in view. He paced nervously, aimlessly at the edge of the barrier of overgrown thickets, trying not to trip over ornamental urns, grasping his useless paintbrush.
    He breathed deeply, striding in under the canopy of dangling wisteria, and crossing to the chapel path. He still hadn’t managed to visit the fabled tombs of Kerfol, so he sauntered up the rise, thinking to do so now, impressed with his own bravado. His own maturity. What a fine and civilized diversion! Art. History. Architecture. Father had always indulged these pursuits (though never Mother, unless he begged; she would have him shut in with numbers all day). Some of Victor’s favorite memories involved childhood trips with his father to museums and menageries and the private cabinets of great men. Once, as they stood before an enormous nautilus shell mounted to form the body of a silver-gilt swan in one of the Medici collections, Father lay a hand on Victor’s shoulder.
    “I’m not the ineffectual brute she makes me out to be.” Perhaps he thought Victor too young to grasp or retain such a statement, to equate “she” with Mother. “I like quiet,” he concluded. “That is all. There is far too much fuss and bother in the world for my liking. When at the end of the day”— he’d paused to stroke his only son’s boyish mop of hair —“the sun still sets.”
    Victor stopped now in his tracks.
    In the dark glass of one of the long gothic windows of the chapel, the head and torso of another dog appeared, a white pointer with one brown ear. This was a solemn old soul, larger and more assured than the others, staring out, intent.
How did
you
get in there?
Victor wondered.
    Victor hurried back through the tunnel, only to find the