Dear Allerdale Hall

Dear Allerdale Hall,

I can’t count how many ways you curse your land.

From crusty wallpaper and crumbling bricks;

To the children bound to it whose minds hold the same strength as your structure.

The oozing red clay camouflages the harm the inhabitants cause each other.

Which happened first I wonder?

Did your blood fall against the splitting floorboards, and the children found it to their liking;

Staining themselves with the crimson liquid willingly to keep you standing?

Each with their own set of tools, did the children dive into the red around you; the boy with his machine and clay-rodden hands; the girl with her kitchen knives and her brother's wives?

Or did their bidding corrupt your wooden bones? Did their parents, a hateful persistent poison to the children, first lay the foundation these siblings would one day break?

A Poor House is all you are now.

One to show a distant pity, yet a fear that keeps true aid strictly away.

You might, at your peak, have been home to glamour; glittering gut-wrenching glee that turns the stomach over with fear to lose it all.

This shimmer of past fortune was what drew me near; what blinded me to his true intentions when his hand extended in that ballroom.

The candle in his hand masking the rotten stench he held from you and his family.

Or have you been home to those wicked whims before? Men and women spewing acidic venom onto others' skin and souls over centuries could dissolve even the thickest of buttresses. Were you kept alive by the gold stored in locked offices on the higher floors? A naive girl I once was to think all those in the world are good, yet now I know enough money can sweep anything under a rug.

Money once held you together, and now it is the very thing that is tearing you apart.

Their desperation to cling to the last piece of their names as they are entombed together within your decaying monument.

Do you think they hold any remorse? Do you think their grandsires and forebearers held any hope for the family to heal? I am not too sure if they were ever capable, no matter how much they tried to lie to each other and themselves; tempted by a pretty golden curl paired with a new woman’s smile like moths to a flame. If you held any such hope, any such wish your creaks and groans would be heard as the wailing of your pain, then you are truly to pity.

Left alone with nothing but the ghosts of these children, now grown and molding from the inside out, you will wither away in your countryside and one day grace your county when the final piece of stone crumbles into dust.

With sincere and utter disdain,

A woman you couldn't kill.