Free We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

knows it is going to be punished, but she had not forgotten her manners. “Thank you,” she said to Constance, putting her hand out and then taking it back again quickly. “I had a very nice time. Goodbye,” she said to Uncle Julian. They went into the hall and I followed, to lock the door after they had gone. Helen Clarke started the car before poor Mrs. Wright had quite finished getting herself inside, and the last I heard of Mrs. Wright was a little shriek as the car started down the driveway. I was laughing when I came back into the drawing room, and I went over and kissed Constance. “A very nice tea party,” I said.
    â€œThat impossible woman.” Constance put her head back against the couch and laughed. “Ill bred, pretentious, stupid. Why she keeps coming I’ll never know.”
    â€œShe wants to reform you.” I took up Mrs. Wright’s teacup and her rum cake and brought them over to the tea tray. “Poor little Mrs. Wright,” I said.
    â€œYou were teasing her, Merricat.”
    â€œA little bit, maybe. I can’t help it when people are frightened; I always want to frighten them more.”
    â€œConstance?” Uncle Julian turned his wheel chair to face her. “How was I?”
    â€œSuperb, Uncle Julian.” Constance stood up and went over to him and touched his old head lightly. “You didn’t need your notes at all.”
    â€œIt really happened?” he asked her.
    â€œIt certainly did. I’ll take you in to your room and you can look at your newspaper clippings.”
    â€œI think not right now. It has been a superlative afternoon, but I think I am a little tired. I will rest till dinner.”
    Constance pushed the wheel chair down the hall and I followed with the tea tray. I was allowed to carry dirty dishes but not to wash them, so I set the tray on the kitchen table and watched while Constance stacked the dishes by the sink to wash later, swept up the broken milk pitcher on the floor, and took out the potatoes to start for dinner. Finally I had to ask her; the thought had been chilling me all afternoon. “Are you going to do what she said?” I asked her. “What Helen Clarke said?”
    She did not pretend not to understand. She stood there looking down at her hands working, and smiled a little. “I don’t know,” she said.

3
    A change was coming, and nobody knew it but me. Constance suspected, perhaps; I noticed that she stood occasionally in her garden and looked not down at the plants she was tending, and not back at our house, but outward, toward the trees which hid the fence, and sometimes she looked long and curiously down the length of the driveway, as though wondering how it would feel to walk along it to the gates. I watched her. On Saturday morning, after Helen Clarke had come to tea, Constance looked at the driveway three times. Uncle Julian was not well on Saturday morning, after tiring himself at tea, and stayed in his bed in his warm room next to the kitchen, looking out of the window beside his pillow, calling now and then to make Constance notice him. Even Jonas was fretful—he was running up a storm, our mother used to say—and could not sleep quietly; all during those days when the change was coming Jonas stayed restless. From a deep sleep he would start suddenly, lifting his head as though listening, and then, on his feet and moving in one quick ripple, he ran up the stairs and across the beds and around through the doors in and out and then down the stairs and across the hall and over the chair in the dining room and around the table and through the kitchen and out into the garden where he would slow, sauntering, and then pause to lick a paw and flick an ear and take a look at the day. At night we could hear him running, feel him cross our feet as we lay in bed, running up a storm.
    All the omens spoke of change. I woke up on Saturday morning and thought I heard them