The Quiet Stillness of Empty Houses by L.V. Russell EPUB & PDF

The Quiet Stillness of Empty Houses by L.V. Russell EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online

• Status: Available for Free Download
• Author: L.V. Russell
• Language: English
• Genre:Gothic Fiction
• Format: PDF / EPUB
• Size: 2 MB
• Price: Free

I am nobody, who are you?
Death was no stranger to Theodora Corvus. It had gathered at her cradle,
whisper-soft and unseen, to take her mother’s cooling hand. Upon the eve
of her eighth midsummer, beneath the old oaks near the lake as the sun
slipped behind the hills, Death also took her father’s hand.

Age had not claimed him; it had only begun to show marks on his skin
—a wrinkle at his eye, a thread of silver in his golden hair. It was a winter’s
cold that stilled the joy-filled heart of her father, an illness that had swept
over all of them, even her grandmother. But where Theodora only suffered a
minor fever, and her grandmother a sore throat and ill humors, it stole the
life from the lord of Woodrow House.

It took him in pieces, bled the color
from his skin, the spark from his eye, the mirth from his lips, all so slowly.
She had sat beside him, the dappled light sprinkling down from the green
above, the trees watching over them, far older than the house. He had his
blanket on his knees, his hand in hers and he did not say they were waiting
for anything. But Theodora knew. So, as they waited, with the warmth of
the summer air fading over them, the shadow of Woodrow at their backs,
her father took a last lingering breath, and then took no more.

Theodora had watched him be lowered into the earth; her small hand
clasped in the wrinkled folds of her grandmother’s fingers. The old woman
had turned to her, nose as sharp as the birds they were named for.
“Do not weep, child,” Grandmother told her. “Save your tears for
someone who will care to see them. Waste them not, for no good will they
do you here.”

So, Theodora swallowed her tears, and it was as though they never quite
made it to her stomach, instead solidifying around her heart. She could feel
it in her chest, the soft thudding of a grief-heavy organ. But she did not
weep, and that made Grandmother very proud.
Her grandmother held her hand until long after the swarm of blackrobed mourners had left and, with one passing glance at her son, tugged
Theodora away. No tears stained her withered face.
I would care to see them, Grandmother.

Theodora was unused to grief, too young to miss her mother and too
fearful to mourn her father. It sat there like a stone upon her chest. It
allowed her to breathe, but only just, shallow and quick.
She shifted her body to allow for the weight, straightened her spine until
her grief, that loss, became another part of her.

Woodrow House stood exactly a mile from the village, its crumbling
white stone walls so covered in ivy, it looked as though the vines were
stitching the cracks back together. It had belonged to the Corvus family for
generations, and each generation had failed to maintain its sprawling
corridors and pitched roofs, until it resembled nothing more than a damp
husk. Parts of it had caved in completely, curling into itself like a giant
spider.

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