Tea had already been had, and the sun had slunk under the horizon, but the day was not yet finished. It shambled on towards evening study time. All through the Virgo House library, there was an uncanny feeling in the air, like sea roke creeping up onto land. No one dared interrupt the silence unless the whole day reset itself, and the sun suffered them another half dozen hours of toil.

Tzipporah craned her head down in her little nook. Her form teacher swanned through the shelves and tables, ready to catch any students flicking rubbers at the wall or folding paper chatterboxes. The mercury glimmer of the moon dappled her workbook, and almost brought some beauty to the doldrums of a biology assignment. Tzipporah resented the sections of her textbook which ceased to concern slender bones and trickling blood, but only molecules and signals and pathways. The biology teacher in the reformatory was never able to convince her that biochemistry was anything but a medieval science; devoid of reason and harmony. Tzipporah preferred the nobler disciplines of alchemy and astrology.

From beneath the workbook, she carefully slid out the little black book in which she noted down all the spells and recipes she came across in the castle. Spells to turn water to flame. Potions to let teenage girls drink snake venom. Spells to make passages of locked doors. Potions more powerful than dynamite, and spells more cunning than calculus.

However much freedom the students of Grimnalghast were granted, Tzipporah doubted her teachers would look kindly on her autodidactism. She spoke her incantations low as she practised. The candle on the desk shivered as if a ghostly hand had passed through it. Fanciful, but the wrong effect. Tzipporah consulted the diagram again, and tried a second time, with more tension in her wrist. The rivulets of wax which poured from the base of the flame crystallised like window frost. Snowflakes of tallow fluttered down to the desk as they chipped off from the candle. Cautiously, Tzipporah held her hand to the flame. Both she and her nervous system expected warmth, but the flame only leached the heat from her, leaving her palm dull and blue like crude oil on a clear day.

Her form teacher walked past and Tzipporah pretended again to study the wonders of the human biosystem.

Outside the walls, out in the murk and black, the wind had been howling since tea time. All the castle groaned and strained, the force so great across its surface that it could crush steel. Tzipporah often looked with stomach-churning curiosity over the edges of the narrow bridges and walkways about the grounds, wondering when it would all finally give way in the wind. The enchantments in the stone held it firm, so the headmistress had told her, but Tzipporah had always found it difficult to trust such pithy assurances.

The room lurched again like an animal throwing up. Tzipporah's hand jumped to steady the candle. She had already had several pages of her textbooks catch fire, and was coming to dislike the danger of open flame, however pleasing she found it.

But before she could curse the disturbance internally any longer, something slammed her face into the desk, and the room around her rushed downwards as if into the floor. Something else blew the candle out, smoke singing her nostrils.

With dizzy eyes, she peered down onto the atrium whose inhabitants were now ant-like and inaudible. Teachers panicked and flittered about around the pillar of stone that Tzipporah was horrified to learn was precisely where she happened to be, perched atop it like a cat with the worst instincts.

The tower of castle foundation shook again. When Tzipporah dared to look up, a twin of its had butted into its side, like two battling stags. From its precipice hung a girl with fat, round glasses and a sweater too large for her. On nothing but her fingertips of steel did she avoid crashing to the floor below.

She craned her gaze up at Tzipporah, shaking her heavy hair out of her eyes, and said, with a glimmer of recognition: — Oh, hi, Tzipporah.

— Hello — Tzipporah said, unsure what was happening.

— I forgot to say hi when you joined our form!

— Do you need me to cast meteorum or podoptera?

— Um... — the girl said, thinking long and hard. — Yes. Thank you.

Once the girls had been rescued, their form teacher placed them out of the way, while incantations were chanted in the atrium to put everything back where it was meant to be.

They waited in a forgotten hall of the building that neither girl had ever walked down. Tzipporah catalogued her personal effects. Wand – undamaged. Tarot deck – corners bent. Stolen MP3 player – scratched. Little black book – virginal. The other girl sat beside her, using a screwdriver to fiddle with a brassy toy beetle. Its long wire antennae twitched with every jerk of her hand. Tzipporah knew that her name was Nausicaä, but had never spoken to her. The girl had tied her sleek black hair up into a pony-tail to keep it out of her face, and in the flicker of the candles beside them, Tzipporah could see the indents of her glasses into her long, hard nose.

Above, soot snaked up the walls and ran into whorls of black smudges on the ceiling, left behind by centuries of candle flame. Through the glass windows, Tzipporah caught slivers of the grounds, pale and blue in the evening dimness. She could have eloped through the room's backdoor, and crept up to bed where the school schedule could keep her no longer.

She hoped this all would not serve as justification for her form teacher to extend private study into her free time. She willed to the world's sense of fairness in her inner voice, until a dripping came from somewhere in the hall that pricked the ever subtle comfort of her ears.

On the other side of the hall, a grand portrait hung of a woman clothed in black paint and shadow, like a reflection in a lake. Its frame was gilt with a line of spindly bones from the hands and feet. Tzipporah stopped counting them once she realised there were more around the painting than were contained in a single human body. Tears stained the painting's pale face, and left her eyes eternally red and wet like a wound. It was a strange painting for a school, she thought, even for a school of wizards. Most in the halls of Grimnalghast wore pleasant looks, with their arms held neatly in their laps. Why would someone wish for tears to be their legacy?

The girl, Nausicaä, let her insect toy walk along the sleeve of her jumper. Its legs and bauble eyes were more lifelike than a toy perhaps should be, but Tzipporah found herself pleasantly wondering where it had come from. The circumstances of her time in the wizard quarter of York had not permitted her to look for toy shops.

The dripping noise overwhelmed her thoughts again. She could see a tap nowhere in the room, let alone a leaking one. It must surely have been in the walls. If she had a wishbone at hand, she would have tested if dowsing truly worked.

A glint caught her eye as she returned to her journal ... A silvery reflection on the ground. There was a puddle of water at the base of the painting. Long streaks ran down to it, down from the painting's face. The water leaked from the woman's eyes as though Tzipporah could walk over and touch her vitreous humour.

It was more substantial than her usual hallucinations. There was too much colour, too much depth. But she knew it was not right to panic. She begrudgingly asked Nausicaä: — Excuse me. Is that painting crying?

Nausicaä glanced up from her beetle at Tzipporah, and then checked the painting, saying to herself if not to Tzipporah: — Oh, wow, it is. That's so weird...

This was often necessary, though Tzipporah had been without anyone to ask since she was separated from her half-sister in the reformatory.

The girl continued: — Oh, I know what that is! It's the Grey Lady.

— Who is the Grey Lady? — Tzipporah pushed.

Nausicaä flicked her wand at her toy and it went limp so that she could pocket it.

— Look, she has crescents on her hands — she said, pointing a finger out. — That's the symbol for silver. She's called the Grey Lady because she worked with it so much that her hands turned grey.

— Argyria. I've read that medieval alchemists often suffered from it — said Tzipporah. It was difficult not to derive a special kind of pleasure from mentioning alchemists and no longer meaning a fiction.

— Mhm! There are lots of stories about her — the girl said, beaming. — People say they see her moving in the corner of their eye. Creepy, right?

— Somewhat. Thank you.

— You're welcome.

The puddle of water trickled between the floor stones and finally reached Tzipporah. She took out her journal and began to write.

Later that night, before curfew could fall, Tzipporah slipped out of the dormitory with her wand and book bag. There was a rickety cage of a lift down to the house library. She could investigate the painting further and be back in time for bed.

At this hour, the sconces were still lit throughout the halls. The fire staved off the autumn chill some small bit, but left the skeletons lining the halls illuminated in all their deathly reality. The misshapen eye holes and unfamiliar nose slit of the skulls became jet-black emptinesses into which Tzipporah's own eyes were tempted. But, beware. "Unnerved" would be a misnomer. Tzipporah was as comfortable with the slumbering corpses of Grimnalghast as a palaeontologist was with living dinosaurs. The word "fear" could never capture what truly fluttered in her heart.

Footsteps came behind her. Tzipporah froze and looked, expecting to see a teacher running a final errand before nightfall, or a group of girls returning from the baths.

She saw only Nausicaä, waving after her.

— Tzipporah, wait! — she shouted. She huffed and recovered beside her, just to blurt out a quick — Hi!

— Hello — Tzipporah said unwaveringly, hoping somewhat that this would be all. She was on a tight schedule.

Nausicaä's hair fell around her head in long, dark waterfalls now, and she had changed into a more domestic outfit: sleeves that went over her hands, and a skirt that touched the floor.

— We should be friends — Nausicaä said, as if nothing were more obvious. — I've been here since first year, by the way.

Tzipporah stopped and narrowed her eyes. They were words that she had never thought might come from the mouth of a 16-year-old. There was nothing suspicious in them; Tzipporah was far too mature to believe a lie was occurring; but nor did the sounds emanating through the air immediately strike her as real.

— I suppose — Tzipporah said, more as if answering a hypothetical question.

— Great! — Nausicaä said. — Where are you going, anyway? It's almost bed.

— I was going to see that painting in the library. The Grey Lady, you called it.

— Oh, right ... I'll come with!

— Hm. Alright.

The two of them stuffed themselves into the ancient wrought iron lift to the lower level. Tzipporah silently willed the castle's architecture not to devour them.

— I heard a rumour once about the Grey Lady. Some girl was walking back from night lessons when she saw the painting blushing and giggling. Some people say she even saw her half-naked!

— That seems like the fantasy of an over-active mind.

— Well, maybe ... But who knows? If an enchanted painting can cry, I think it could blush.

— Is the painting enchanted?

— How else would it move?

— I thought it might be haunted.

— Haunted!? No way. Ghosts don't cry.

— I've seen a ghost talk — Tzipporah said.

Nausicaä's eyes went wide.

— Where did you see a ghost?

Her voice was grave now. It was not a matter merely of rumours and tall tales any more. There was a seriousness.

— On the grounds — Tzipporah said vaguely.

— But, I mean... — Her voice dipped into a whisper. — Did you see someone die?

— I don't mean a ghoul — Tzipporah said, having already read treatise after treatise which insisted that there was no such thing as ghosts, but only the curse-possessed remains of the dead. — She was quite nice.

— Like a ghost in a fairy tale?

— Is that less believable than magic?

— No, but just because something is possible doesn't mean it's really true. No one's ever seen a real ghost, only ghouls.

— Perhaps it is only ghouls that show themselves. Haven't you heard the story of World War helmets causing head injuries? — Tzipporah said sagely.

— But, wait, then how could you see that ghost?

The lift door ratcheted open to the corridor outside the Virgo House library. Tzipporah approached the dark iron door that sealed it.

— Oh, right, the library is locked after private study... — Nausicaä lamented. — How are you going to get in? It's not just a normal lock either. There's no keyhole, so there's no way to pick it.

An indulgent smirk flashed on Tzipporah's face.

— I know.

She raised both hands before the door, wand tucked into her palm, and said clearly scytalognosticus.

All across the door, gilded symbols sparkled as if carved into the metal. Tzipporah took out a long strip of paper from her bag and wrapped it about the length of her wand. She noted down the symbols onto it, and then unfurled it like tape from one of her disciplinarian's old computers.

She recalled enough of the substitution key to say aloud to the door: — Antennae.

A crack! like a train starting up came from inside the door, and the entire mechanism creaked slowly open.

— I've never heard of that spell before ... Was it a cypher? — Nausicaä asked plainly.

— A very amateur one.

They stepped into the library. Inside, all the flames had been snuffed out. Nausicaä lit her wand with the phos spell and waved it about to see, before looking back to the door.

— I guess cryptography has advanced a lot since the castle was built. There's no way the station would use such bad encryption!

The explanation that Tzipporah had planned could remain unneeded in her mind. Perhaps Nausicaä's company would not complicate the night as her sister's so often did when they were children.

When they came to the forgotten hall, and the painting within, Tzipporah's suspicions were proven right.

— It changed ... It really is a living painting — Nausicaä whispered.

The woman in the painting had fallen to her knees and hidden her face in her hands, sobbing in utter silence and desperation.

Nausicaä stepped forward, her trainers smacking through the puddle on the floor, and marvelled at the woman. (Tzipporah cast ariditas at the water, waiting for it to vanish into the air before joining the other girl.)

Above the woman in the painting's head was an impasto flourish of ribbon that was teetering on the edge of materialising. Words were stitched into it with an unsteady hand. They had not been there before,. "JE N'AI PAS MA PLACE ICI."

— I wonder why someone would enchant a painting to be sad... — Nausicaä mused to herself.

— The words read: "I don't belong here." — Tzipporah said.

— On the ribbon? Do you know French, Tzipporah?

— My mother spoke it when I was young.

— Is she French?

— She was Algerian.

— Oh ... did she die? I'm sorry.

— It was a long time ago.

Water continued to trickle from the painting. It trickled through the Grey Lady's hands as if they were flesh. Nausicaä said: — My mum and dad died when I was a baby ... I guess this isn't the best way to bond with a new friend, is it?

— There are worse ways. Most wizards seem to pretend parents don't exist — Tzipporah said, eliciting a snort from her.

— I'm glad you have your dad at least. I live with my nan when I'm not at Grimnalghast.

Tzipporah looked away, and quickly fixated on the brass plate screwed into the frame of the framing. She read the inscription aloud in a soft voice: — Phaenna of Bayeux – commissioned by Asia of York.

Another tug at Ariadne's thread, but too little to make up for breaking the lock on the library doors. Tzipporah knew that she would spend the week hunching over rotting old books in search of anything more.

— Bayeux is in France, right? I guess that's why that message was in French — Nausicaä said.

— Perhaps she loathes being in England.

— Do you actually think there's a person in the painting?

— It's as you said: why would someone enchant a painting to cry?

— Maybe it's vandalism. Or maybe whoever made the painting didn't like her. The Normans did do a lot of horrible things to the North ... — she said low. — Asia of York ... I feel like I've heard that name somewhere ... Oh, I know! The champion of Scorpius House was named Asia.

— The champion? — Tzipporah said. The houses of the reformatory were little more than brick huts with a curfew, but those of Grimnalghast seemed like societies unto themselves.

— It's not really official, but all the houses have a historical role model. Someone you're supposed to look up to. Ours is Miriam, the famous alchemist. Scorpius' is Asia, but I don't really know what she's famous for.

(Most famous alchemists, Tzipporah had discovered, were named Miriam. Rather than nominative determinism, she suspected they named themselves for the legendary Mary the Jewess, who, not being a wizard, could not in fact have known anything about alchemy. It kept Tzipporah up at night just thinking about it.)

— Perhaps she was a patron of the arts — Tzipporah suggested. — If the painting truly is enchanted, the others she commissioned might be as well.

— There are lots of stories about moving paintings in the castle. It isn't just the Grey Lady. I remember once the school newspaper had an article about all of them. They even tried to enchant the pages to move, but it didn't look very real...

— I assume there are archives of the newspaper in the grand library. I'll look tomorrow — Tzipporah said.

— Actually, there's one painting we could check right now that I know she might have had made...

— Which is?

— Her own! — she said, ecstatic. — I've never seen it but it hangs outside the passage to the Scorpius House dormitory, like all the other house champions'. It's worth looking, at least.

The two girls made their way to their sister house's dormitory, avoiding the watchful eyes of any teachers they passed, lest they be questioned on where it was they were going at this hour.

Paintings lined every patch of stone in the walls of the great corridor. Some, the size of entire rooms. Others, so small you needed to lean in close to see the figures. Nausicaä used her wand to inflame the sconces around them; the fires weakened as the evening drew on.

— Tzipporah, look... — she whispered, bumping Tzipporah's elbow and gesturing to a painting opposite the entrance to the dorms. — That painting is crying as well.

The crying woman in the painting bore the Saturnine symbol for lead on her hands.

— But that isn't Asia of York — she added.

The largest painting of all sat above the entrance itself, hung so precariously that Tzipporah dared not approach the little passageway in the wall. The woman in the painting was twice as tall as the girls themselves. Pale blue cloth was wrapped about her eyes.

— That is... — Nausicaä said. — But, it doesn't seem like she's moved. Maybe she has nothing to do with it?

Tzipporah stared into the painted woman's veiled face. Like an animal howling into the night, she spoke out against the echoing silence of the hallway: — Excuse me. Why is Phaenna of Bayeux crying?

The silence remained when her words fizzled away into the air, but when Tzipporah blinked, the woman held a tarot card over her lips with delicate fingers, as if that was what had always been painted.

— She moved! — Nausicaä said, half fear, half amazement.

— The arcanum of Justice — Tzipporah muttered dryly, to which Nausicaä's twinkling eyes creased into a frown.

— Maybe the paintings really are a punishment...

— I doubt that it means justice as a concept. Look, she's wearing a blindfold. It's often said that justice is blind.

— Oh, so the card is her symbol.

— It seems the paintings cannot communicate directly. Hm... — Tzipporah searched her school bag for her tarot deck, and then handed it to Nausicaä. — Shuffle them. — She sat cross-legged on the floor. Tzipporah had not planned to conduct a seance, but nor had she planned to become a wizard. Yet, it had always been her dream.

Nausicaä shuffled with the grace and nonchalance of a dealer in a smoke filled parlour, and asked: — Do you take divination class? — Her disciplinarian (who some called "father") was the only person Tzipporah had ever seen shuffle so cleanly. She always hated doing it.

— Yes. The headmistress wanted me to — Tzipporah explained. She had been playing with tarot cards and ouija boards in her bedroom since she could read the words on them, but Tzipporah had learned that even amongst wizards, divination was viewed as a soft art.

— Oh, does she know you?

— Nausicaä, the deck — Tzipporah said indifferently.

She bleated — Oh, right — and handed it over to watch Tzipporah work.

Tzipporah dealt a neat five-card row across the floor stones. It was a canonical but simple spread; a progression of the past into the future; the problem into the solution; the cause into the result.

— Justice, the Ten of Pentacles, the Devil, the Lovers, and the Moon... — Nausicaä read out. — Justice means Asia of York, and maybe the Moon means the Grey Lady, since it's the planet of silver, but what do the rest mean?

A picture at once congealed in Tzipporah's mind, reading through the cards as one might hear the narrative of a symphony through its notes. Two women, connected by blood, and a third woman, connected by love.

— The Devil corresponds to Saturn, the planet of lead. It must be the woman in the painting over there — Tzipporah said, glancing to the other crying portrait. — The Ten of Pentacles symbolises family, or the home.

— So maybe they were sisters, or cousins ... What about, um, the Lovers? — Nausicaä asked, gnawing her lip.

— A partnership, perhaps — Tzipporah, lied.

— None of that explains why the Grey Lady was crying ... Do it again — Nausicaä said, picking the cards up and shuffling them for Tzipporah.

— The Tower, the Hermit, the Moon, a blank card, and the Devil — Tzipporah read from a new spread.

— Does the blank card mean they fell out with each other?

— Or that they were separated by something else, perhaps. The Hermit and the Tower could represent the pain of loneliness — Tzipporah said, enunciating the last phrase in the bored manner one might read a handwritten complaint from a boorish neighbour.

— Maybe that woman was the only friend the Grey Lady had in England ... Though I wonder why she came all the way here if she couldn't speak English ... She probably does want to go home.

— Perhaps — Tzipporah said gruffly, picking up the cards. She looked up at the painting. The tarot card had vanished. Asia of York held her hands now in prayer. — It doesn't seem as though she wishes to say any more.

The paintings may simply have been enchanted after all. Tzipporah would have expected a more meaningful explanation from a ghost. She stood and put the cards away, sensing when to forfeit, at least for the night.

Nausicaä followed as she returned to the dormitory, taking long, clumsy steps and thinking intently.

— It doesn't make sense that they would be so sad just because they stopped being friends — Nausicaä said.

— Perhaps it was a very close friendship — Tzipporah said over her shoulder.

— Maybe, but ... When I was little in the village I grew up in, my nan would leave me with the neighbours, and they would tell me these stories that she never recognised. Because, they were wizard stories. And the stories I always loved most were about these three women ... The Grey Lady, the Dumb Lady, and the Blind Lady.

— Was this the very same Grey Lady?

— Mhm. And now I wonder if the other women were Asia of York and her sister. She doesn't seem dumb ... But, that was the part of the stories that always confused me. The Dumb Lady seemed like she was the smartest one.

— Perhaps the original author meant dumb as in mute. Argyric, mute, blind.

— That makes way more sense! — Nausicaä said, smiling.

Tzipporah only mhmed distantly.

— Are you okay? — Nausicaä asked after some walking. — I know it's sad that we couldn't help them, but I'm sure they'll be okay. I mean, they are just paintings. They can't be sad anyway.

— It's not that — Tzipporah said. — There is something else bothering me about the paintings...

— Like a sixth sense? I've heard some people can receive messages from dead people through their nervous system.

The idea reminded Tzipporah not of anything sorceral, but of her sister. The girl who believed aliens visited the Earth, and who was certain the necklace Tzipporah wore under her top really worked.

— I don't have a 'sixth sense'. It was just a curiosity.

— What is it?

— The women in the paintings seem to have been a trio. Two were friends – or sisters – and two were – partners. The paintings of the sisters were together, so why is the painting of the Grey Lady on the other side of the castle?

— Probably because of whatever happened between her and Asia of York's sister. Though, the stories didn't mention anything...

— Perhaps, but ... there is something else. You mentioned a rumour about the Grey Lady.

— Oh yeah! The girl that saw her blushing and with her clothes off — Nausicaä said. — Well, if you mean why was she blushing, then, I think, maybe...

— No. It was a detail you mentioned: she was returning from night lessons.

— What's weird about night lessons?

— What I mean is: if it was the middle of the night, how could she have seen a painting which is in the library?

— ...The library that's locked at night... — Nausicaä said softly.

— Precisely.

— I didn't know where the Grey Lady was so I never realised. Maybe the story is made up? Or...

Nausicaä's eyes grew wide in the dimness, the wandlight against them like the moon against the sea. Something was on the tip of Tzipporah's tongue – a question, a concern – but she let Nausicaä undergo whatever was happening to her. A grin spread across the girl's face. Tzipporah knew at once what emotion was burning within her. It was that crucial, singular moment in which the world opened itself up just enough to glimpse inside, a sliver of light cast on the eye like a child cracking the door ajar. Nausicaä exploded into words: — Tzipporah! The castle rearranging in the evening! The Grey Lady must have moved.

The gestured wildly as she said: — Asia of York's sister and her weren't separated when they were alive. They were separated today. That's why they're crying suddenly.

She rushed backwards down the hall, back to the paintings, dragging Tzipporah along. She no doubt had some plan that she was too giddy to share, and Tzipporah relented, if only to see what it was.

Nausicaä stood before the wall with her wand raised, whispering an incantation as she waved it back and forth.

— Here! — she said, pointing at a painting of a sleeping unicorn.

— Does that painting have some significance? — Tzipporah asked.

— This is where the Grey Lady was — Nausicaä said, placing her hand on the stone around it. She took out her screwdriver from her pocket, wielding it as though it were a second wand. — We've been learning how the castle was made in mechanics class.

— I trust that the mechanisms in the walls can be manipulated, but surely it would be like trying to hot-wire a fighter jet?

— Maybe. I've never seen inside a fighter jet — Nausicaä said.

She jammed the screwdriver through a slit in the stones, along with her wand, like a rake and tension wrench. In breathy tones, Nausicaä muttered a long spell that Tzipporah could barely parse. The hall quaked and creaked as it had before. The painting of the unicorn – the entire section of wall – slid out of place like a hangar door. It vanished into the darkness that lay between the rooms of the castle.

Tzipporah held her breath.

Like men on guard duty, a new wall appeared from the shadows and slotted into the hole with a thud so great that dust flittered off all the painting frames.

The hall stopped shaking. There was silence again. The Grey Lady stood over them, as tall as a house and as proud now as all the suits of relict armour. Brown eyes like underworld coals stared out of the painting; not at the girls, but at their twins. The frigid, alien blue eyes of Asia of York's sister, clad in her snow-white robes. Neither woman now cried.

Nausicaä turned to Tzipporah, jumping with joy and throwing out mirth and celebration across the room, which smoothly deflected around Tzipporah as if she were an aerofoil.

— Where did you learn that spell? — Tzipporah asked.

— The spell doesn't matter! We helped them get back together — Nausicaä said, shaking Tzipporah by the shoulders, who could manage nothing but a smile that only half of her felt comfortable with.

— It's very touching — Tzipporah mused.

— Oh, sorry... — Nausicaä yelped, letting her go.

The girls soon began their walk back to the dormitory. The flames lining the halls had snuffed themselves out. Only the moon and their own wands lit the way. Scarcely could they see one another's face in the dark. Nausicaä beamed all the way to bed.

— Hey — Nausicaä said. — Tell me about that ghost you met. What happened to her?

🪬

Appendix

As in many non-wizard schools, the students of Grimnalghast School are separated into four houses. In the 12th century, these ‘houses’ were physical boarding houses on the grounds, but as the school has grown, they have transformed into student societies with their own traditions, symbols, and leadership.

The houses in the modern day are: