The long gallery door had not opened for Nell once in nine days.
She had put her shoulder to it on the first night and her boot on the jamb, and after the doors came off their latches on day five it had stood ajar for about an hour and then, some time between her going up the east stairs and coming down again, had shut.
On Wednesday at noon Héloïse put her hand on it and it opened, and she took her hand away and looked at it with an expression Nell was beginning to recognise, which was the face of a woman being told something about herself by a piece of joinery.
“After you,” she said.
The gallery ran the whole north side of the house, ninety feet of it, with eleven windows down one wall and the pictures down the other under holland sheets gone grey at…
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