The ambitions of the architect outstretched the progeny of the elder Burns, and whole wings had alternately been shuttered and rehabilitated in the generations my family had been living here. As a child I used to make a game of the empty chambers, searching for ghosts or treasure, or making up stories about the ancestors who'd once lived in those dusty rooms. This only got worse as the family's fortunes declined. No servants meant no servant quarters. No parties meant no formal dining room. No money meant no library, no stockhouse, no stables. All of those rooms had been sealed away or just left empty, until the Manor Burn was mostly a graveyard of bedrooms and corridors and closets. So when Billy said that father was upstairs, I assumed that meant in one of the recently lived-in sections of the house. Before I left, my father and mother made their quarters in the master suites, just off the solar on the second floor. I found it abandoned.
