Read Online The Book of Hours by Davis Bunn - Free Book Online

through. Oh yes. Far more than you would ever imagine. For I, too, have lost a love. You probably never knew that. How could you? I never gave you a chance to know me at all. Until now.”
    The manor’s third floor was a narrow copy of the second, with lower ceilings and somewhat smaller rooms. The chambers and windows were modest only in comparison with those downstairs. The dust was thick enough to clog the chilly air, the scents stuffy and very old. No cleaning person had ventured up here in a very long while.
    Brian entered the room closest to the stairwell, and though all the furniture was draped in yellowed white dustcloths, he knew instantly he stood in Sarah’s room. To his vast relief, there was no sense of tragic longing. The room was just a room, despite matching her descriptions exactly. He tried the wall switch and was rewarded with a yellow glow from the dusty, fly-specked chandelier. It, too, matched his wife’s account, hand-blown in the shape of an hourglass. Brian turned slowly, reliving the nights they had spent sharing her happiest memories, almost all of which began here in this room. And all the while, Heather’s murmurings and the letter in his pocket kept him company.
    â€œOnce I knew the love of a soul mate,” Heather wrote. “Forgive my brevity. It hurts to write of that time. Even saying these few words leaves my heart as pained as my hands. His name was Alexander. We were married three short years, and then God took him away from me. I fear the loss drove me a bit mad.
    â€œA year and five months later, a little princess arrived at my doorstep. She was eight years old and as beautiful as an English summer dawn. Her name was Sarah. She was sad, lonely, and terrified of me. And with every reason. It was her presence that drew me back from the depths of my own living death. And returned me to God. For I knew that alone I would not be able to find either the love or the answers that this little child required.”
    Each wall held a mural, painted at Heather’s request by a local artist. They depicted passages from Sarah’s favorite books. It had become part of Sarah’s excitement over returning to Castle Keep each summer, waiting to discover what Heather had ordered up. The entire right-hand wall showed a covered bridge from whose heights Christopher Robin and Pooh and Tigger raced twigs upon a smooth-running stream.
    The room was dominated by a four-poster bed, which beneath its dustcovers looked like an ancient vessel ready to sail upon the seas of night. Brian stared at the bed and felt the first heart twinges as he imagined his little Sarah nestled there, sent by parents who had never really been parents at all. Lost and frightened and alone, she had hidden deep within the covers of a bed so big it seemed to go on forever. She had felt trapped here, inside a house so huge it took even her tiny footsteps and echoed them over and over like ghostly drums. And watched by an aunt whose eyes did not seem able to track together, especially at night. That first summer, Aunt Heather had cast a terrifying figure, with a rat’s nest of graying hair and hands that danced to music Sarah could never hear. Yet somehow this strange old biddy had become Sarah’s grandest friend, introducing her to the wonders of a house filled with mysterious places and ancient secrets, acquainting her with other mysteries as well—those of faith and hope, those of laughter and belief in a tomorrow worth living.
    Heather’s quiet chant was still with Brian as he turned from the room and its treasured yesterdays, and it sent him down the hall on a quest he still did not understand. “Sarah arrived wounded by her own past,” Heather wrote. “Don’t ever think children are incapable of harboring tragedy. Their spirits can also be stained crimson by the injustices of life. I wanted to help her, but could not do so alone. So I turned to God for help, and found