Free The Witch of Painted Sorrows by Rose M J

and yet I didn’t turn away as I would have imagined.
    It was one thing for the men who attended my grandmother’s evening salons and visited with her to see these rooms, but to have tourists walking through the house and gaping at our treasures?
    All around me the house seemed to be reaching out and askingfor help. I had to get to her heart and comfort her, reassure her that I would not allow this to happen.
    Suddenly I was sure this emergency was what had brought me back to Paris. After all, I could have taken refuge with my Aunt, my mother’s sister, and her husband, who lived in Chicago and with whom I had spent so much more time. No, of course not. It was not my wild and irrepressible grandmother, who had always flitted in and out of my life on a whiff of L’Etoile’s bespoke fragrance, who had brought me here. It was the house, this living thing, that had called me back so that I might save her.
    I began to run. Back out into the grand foyer. Up the sweeping stairs to the second floor. Up to the third floor. Down a long hallway past rooms used by servants. At the end of the hallway was another staircase that led to the attic. The pathway through the stored trunks and furniture seemed to circle in on itself, and I was caught in its coil.
    I’d discovered this part of the house when I was fifteen. Remembered coming up here and finding a silk robe in one of the trunks and wearing it downstairs, showing off how I looked, only to have my grandmother fly into a fit of rage. It was the same robe as the women in the portraits wore. A beautiful burnt-orange silk, embroidered with russet and cream flowers and green dragons. My grandmother had ripped it off me. Why had she cared so much that I was wearing it? I couldn’t remember now, but she had lectured me adamantly about never venturing into this antique-filled part of the house after that excursion. There was nothing here but old, useless things, she’d said.
    “But what about the door?” I’d asked her.
    Her face fell at the mention of it. “The door?”
    “There are stone steps leading from the attic to a very old wooden door. Why does it look like that? Where does that door go? What’s behind it?”
    Reluctantly she explained that in the fifteenth century a churchhad stood on this plot of land. At some point it had been torn down except for its bell tower, and the house had been erected abutting the ancient structure. A structure my grandmother insisted was not safe. It was too old, too fragile to hold the weight of a person. It was empty, she said, and absolutely not a place to explore. “The steps are broken, and you could trip. The bell tower is only scaffolding now. If you even tried to walk there, you would fall right through!”
    I had never completely believed her. And now, as I walked up that last flight of steps, I thought about how solid the stones felt. Narrow and steep, yes, but sturdy and strong. Three hundred years of bell ringers had tramped up and down them. Could the tower they led to be any less well constructed?
    At last I came to the door. It was not even as wide as my outstretched arms, but every inch was carved with the most extraordinary tiny bas-reliefs, each one intricately detailing events similar to etchings I’d seen in my father’s alchemy books. In the center of this whole amalgam of magick and religion was a facsimile of the same bronze hand from the front door downstairs. But here the hand was flat, not three-dimensional, and in its very center was a keyhole.
    I was out of breath. I’d run all this way to stand here, in front of this strange door. Why? My grandmother had told me it had been locked since she was a little girl and that no one had ever discovered the key.
    “This is astonishing,” Monsieur Duplessi exclaimed as he examined the door. “Where are we?”
    I hadn’t even known he’d been following me, but I was glad. It felt right to have him here with me.
    I explained what my grandmother had told me about this