The House On Highgate Hill

By Ann Michaels

With her parents dead and living in an isolated house on Highgate Hill, across from the cemetery, Adoria leads a very small and fearful life, cut off from the world. She has little knowledge of her true situation and lacks the control and ability to shape her own destiny; she is like a fly caught in a trap.

Adoria does, however, have one hope that, she may be able to reach the age of 21, without being forced to marry. But, her Uncle Howell seems to have other plans.
As Adoria becomes aware that women in the Victorian era have little agency, she also begins to realise that, there is much that she does not know about the people and situations around her; she begins to investigate, and manages to find her voice, despite the forces set against her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ann Michaels
• Release date: Apr 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311786531

Ann Michaels

“Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. ... It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.” —Enid Bagnold “It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.” —PD James Samuel Beckett was the poet laureate of the comma splice. He closed his novel “The Unnamable” with a long sentence that ends: ... perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. Which goes to show, I suppose, that rules are made to be broken.

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The House on Highgate Hill

Smashwords Edition

copyright 2016, Ann Michaels

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Contents

Chapter 1. Where the Other Begins

Chapter 2. Love and Death

Chapter 3. Shall Waken From Their Sleep

Chapter 4. Neither liberty Nor Safety

Chapter 5. Wisdom Comes With Winters

Chapter 6. Scratch a Lover

Chapter 7. Between The Lines

Chapter 8. Light on Broken Glass

Chapter 9. More Than Kin.

Chapter 10. Searching For a Magic Door

Chapter 11. Vaulting Love…Or Ambition

Chapter 12. You Would Not Be Without Friends.

The House on Highgate Hill

Chapter 1.

Where the Other Begins

Footsteps echoed on stone somewhere within the heart of the house, and Adoria Thorne froze like an animal of prey. Soon enough, Adoria’s wits retuned and she swiftly snuffed out the single candle and sat in the darkness listening to the deep moan of the wind, as it rattled the leaded window pane, and to the unmistakable sound of the approaching footsteps.

Uncle Howell had returned.

Leaning out of the hooded oak porter's chair, where she sat reading, Adoria peered out the narrow window, set deeply in the stone of her room, where she saw, in a few clicking seconds, a black night bird wing past, and two figures, like wafts of smoke, disappear into the belly of the cemetery; she felt her heart contract with apprehension. Her uncle, generally, disappeared for long stretches at a time, doing God only knows what, and when he returned, it was as though he brought with him an ill wind.

Staring out into the dark cold night, Adoria then became aware of the whitish weeping angel, rising up like a giant finger from with the misty grounds of Highgate Cemetery; an old and familiar friend. But she thought that she could also discern a small nimbus of light, through the ragged mist, coming from where her father’s grave was located. Adoria shivered, her poor father. She would visit his grave tomorrow, if she was able. This would bring her comfort.

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A heavy gloom hung about the house on Highgate Hill, as Adoria rose stiffly in the frigid room the next morning and poured the freezing water from the grimy ewer, into the cracked basin. The housekeeper, if that’s what Mrs Grast could rightly be called, barely performed her role in the house.

Adoria did find simple and scanty helpings of food left out for her three times a day, by Mrs Grast, and her few pieces of clothing were washed every so often, and hung back in her carved walnut armoire. But the house was rarely cleaned, and so, it had grown increasingly dusty, damp and neglected.

Adoria, however, kept to her room and another small adjoining room, which was filled from floor to ceiling, with old leather, bound books. This room, which had belonged to her father, also contained a large, cracked leather Chesterfield lounge chair and a Cabinet of Curiosity, filled with stuffed birds, polished stones, strange and unusual shells, a collection of antlers and claws, insects skewered to boards, and other paraphernalia, collected by her late father.

At a small oak table, by the Cabinet of Curiosity, Adoria was sitting eating her morning repast, a grey lump of porridge and luke-warm tea, when the handle of the door from the passageway began to turn. With a groan, the door opened and Adoria’s Uncle Howell slid into the room.

Tall and thin, with a head like an Easter Island Statue, and black hair which curled on each temple like the Devil’s horns, Uncle Howell loomed over Adoria, causing her heart to flutter like a cornered bird. She looked up fleetingly into the large and cavernous shadows of his face, and waited for him to speak. She knew better than to speak first, for Uncle Howell was of the belief that women should be submissive and silent.

‘So niece, you have been comfortable and industrious, I trust? ‘Uncle Howell droned, in his usual sneering and sermonical manner. Adoria inclined her head, as was required, and waited.

Adoria nodded, even though this house on Highgate Hill was hardly comfortable; drafty and dusty as it was. And how she was to be ‘industrious’, was beyond her, when all she could do during the long and dragging hours was read, clean her room and sew items of clothing, when she was given a piece of cloth. Willingly, she would have cleaned the whole of this dilapidated house, but Mrs Grast had been outraged when she had first tried, and her complaints had sent the quiet but pernicious fury of her uncle, Adoria’s way.

That was seven years ago, when Adoria had been ten years of age; some months after her father had died in highly mysterious circumstances.

Adoria had been emerging from the months of suffocating grief, when she had looked about her and found that her home had descended into squalor. She also noticed that the housekeeper, Mrs Beadell had been sent away -- or had left, which left the cook, Mrs Grast, to fulfil all household roles. This upheaval in those wretched weeks of mourning had further caused Adoria to feel adrift and abandoned. But in an attempt to right her world on its axis and bring some order to chaos, she set about washing windows and floors, scrubbing walls and tiles, polishing and waxing woodwork, and beating the dust from the heavy window coverings.

As she was cleaning, she discovered that her Uncle Howell no longer dwelt in the basement, but now occupied the large bedroom, which had only recently belonged to her father. She had been shocked to find her uncle’s greasy faded suit,