PAGE ONE OF ‘SNOW BEHIND THE DOOR’

My new name is Snow – a name that suits me
even though there are days I wish it didn’t.

I died a very long time ago or was it yesterday? …I think maybe both.

Apart from a few self-possessed phantoms, I live alone in a house of shadows. My father said they were memories of the past and foreshadows of things that might have been. But that was in the ‘high winter’ when he’d been out of sorts, and as soon as he saw my eyes brim with tears, he enfolded me in a bear hug and told me not to worry because he had plans to capture the happy shadows of wonderful things yet to be… and then he left to find them.

Bede Hall is my family, now. I ‘live’ inside its walls and peer through them into grand rooms full of brightly colored people. I especially like to stand behind the great mirror in the dining room, the twin of the one in my Winter Room, and study the girl named Beryl who looks as lost and moody as me.

If anyone could see me in the gilded frame, I would look like a painting of a nine-year-old girl, sometimes smiling, but intently searching their faces for my father who once lived there.

I’ve learned two things since I arrived here in the House of Reincarnations. My friend, Parks, the old head gardener, who used to be King of the Trees, is a ghost like me, and that fairies are dreadful gossips.

I slip unnoticed into times that overlap and fade into each other, so, I’m never quite sure when it is until I see Beryl, who can be my age or a teenager or an old lady dozing by the fire.

But there are days when all that greets me from the other sides of mirrors are white mounds of furniture covered in sheets, when the dust lies thick as time and it’s my turn to comfort the house. It’s not easy being a child or a great house after you’ve been abandoned.

Snow Behind the Door has been shortlisted for Chanticleer’s 2023 Gertrude Gardner Award for middle-grade fiction