Sam helped himself to a glass of tea and drank it down while standing in front of the sink. His warm hazel gaze met Molly’s while he said, “I put Molly’s luggage in the seaside turreted room. Is that okay?”
“That’s perfect. Are you going to stay for dinner?”
He shook his head. “I’m rank as a buffalo. I need to shower, and I have some contracts to go through this evening, as well as an early-morning appointment.”
After he took his leave, Sarah said, “Sam’s a landscape architect. He runs a very popular business.”
Molly told her, “It’s nice how he looks after you.”
Sarah’s expression softened. “I call him my great-nephew, but the reality is there’s a few more ‘greats’ involved. He and I are the last of our direct family line. He’s a good person—strong, kind, and committed to doing wonderful things.” She pushed to her feet. “Come with me, and I’ll show you the house.”
It was a spacious place. From the outside it looked like it had three stories, but Sarah only took her through two. There was a door at one end of the second-floor hall that was closed. She guessed it led to an attic.
Curiosity had her lingering. In her mind’s eye, she could feel/see sparks hanging over her head like stars. “What is that?”
“That’s my workroom,” Sarah replied. “Some things up there are dangerous. I keep it locked so strangers won’t go poking around up there.”
“Gotcha,” she murmured. What would a workroom of a very old witch look like? Maybe if she was lucky Sarah would show it to her sometime.
Upstairs, there were eight bedrooms in total, counting Molly’s turreted room, which she adored the moment she set eyes on it, and two upstairs bathrooms, one on either side of the house. The bedrooms were small, but the bathrooms were spacious and modernized with showers installed in claw-foot tubs, the shower curtains hanging from oval metal rings suspended overhead, and white-painted cabinets and floors tiled with Carrara marble.
On the first floor, there was a large entrance hall, a comfortable reception room, Sarah’s bedroom that had once been a library, a formal dining room, the large main kitchen with a breakfast nook, and another large back kitchen that had been built as an extension off the main house.
That room had windows on three sides and would be an ideal place to do the hot, heavy work of canning in the summer without heating up the rest of the house. The area underneath the counters was filled with boots, gardening tools, and odds and ends.
Last, but not least in Molly’s view, there was the walk-in pantry, the laundry room, and a water closet that had been recently renovated into a tiny bathroom with modern fixtures and a compact shower with a small bench upon which to sit.
Like all Victorian homes, it was an enormous and expensive beauty, and other items and areas glowed with magic, not with the attic’s bright, dangerous sparks, but with a soft, gentle subtlety.
A stained-glass piece hung in a kitchen window, with a circular, repeating design that seemed to go on forever.
A small, rustic-looking broom, tied with a blue ribbon and decorated with spring colors, hung on the wall near the front door. A wrought iron candelabrum sat in the clean fireplace in the reception room, filled with lavender-scented beeswax candles that looked homemade and felt gently, deeply magical.
Outside the french-style doors in the breakfast nook, there was a patio with a round table and chairs. The tabletop was a mosaic of a pentagram, made with pieces of bright polished glass and stone. The pattern was repeated in the flagstone floor of the patio. Farther out in the yard, a large labyrinth made of small white stones spread out over a large yard.
The house would have been a work of art all on its own. With the magic that had been woven over the years into wall art and the everyday furniture and items, there was a complexity about the place, both visually and mentally, that Molly found compelling.
Moving as though her joints pained her, Sarah sat at the kitchen table again. “You’re welcome to stay while you and I get acquainted. I might not suit you as a teacher, and Everwood has its quirks, so not everyone feels comfortable here. You’re the only guest, so please clean your own room and keep up with your bedding and towels. If you find a place