“
Mrs. Barnstable took her to a beautiful room with windows overlooking the gardens. “This is yours,” the housekeeper said. “No one has occupied it before.” The bed was made of light blue upholstered panels, the bedclothes of white linen. There was a graceful lady’s writing desk in the corner, and a satin maple wardrobe with a looking glass set in the door. “Mr. Merripen personally selected the wallpaper,” Mrs. Barnstable said. “He nearly drove the interior architect mad with his insistence on seeing hundreds of samples until he found this pattern.” The wallpaper was white, with a delicate pattern of flowering branches. And at sparse intervals, there was the motif of a little robin perched on one of the twigs. Slowly Win went to one of the walls and touched one of the birds with her fingertips. Her vision blurred. During her long recuperation from the scarlet fever, when she had grown tired of holding a book in her hands and no one had been available to read to her, she had stared out the window at a robin’s nest in a nearby maple tree. She had watched the fledglings hatch from their blue eggs, their bodies pink and veined and fuzzy. She had watched their feathers grow in, and she had watched the mother robin working to fill their ravenous beaks. And Win had watched as, one by one, they had flown from the nest while she remained in bed. Merripen, despite his fear of heights, had often climbed a ladder to wash the second-floor window for her. He had wanted her view of the outside world to be clear. He had said the sky should always be blue for her. “You’re fond of birds, Miss Hathaway?” the housekeeper asked. Win nodded without looking around, afraid that her face was red with unexpressed emotion. “Robins especially,” she half-whispered.
”
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