The Cracks in the Foundation
The candle guttered as Eleanor Ashworth climbed the east staircase, its flame bending sideways in a draft that had no business existing in a house with its windows shut fast against the November cold. She knew the source of it well enough by now—a gap beneath the sashes where the wood had swollen and split, where damp had crept in over three winters of neglect and made a mockery of any pretense that Ravenscroft Hall was still a place fit for gentlefolk. She lifted the candle higher and pressed on, her wrapper drawn tight about her shoulders, her breath visible in pale curls before her face.
The house did not creak so much as sigh, as though it, too, remembered better days and resented being made to endure this slow diminishment. Eleanor had grown used to its complaints. She had lived among them for six-and-twenty years, first as a child who thought the groaning floors were merely the house talking to itself, and now as a woman who understood precisely what each sound meant: a beam sagging here, a tile lifting there, the whole magnificent skeleton of the place giving way by degrees while she alone kept vigil over its slow collapse.
She reached the door to the long gallery and…