Chapter Five
Theodore
Something changes after my conversation with Lady Alilovi? about her painting.
I have come to know her as a bit of a recluse these past few weeks.
She rarely ventures out of her studio when I am working, and when she does, she’s often unaware of the time that has passed since she’s been hidden away.
She never has visitors, though I know that she has friends and family, as I have taken to picking up her mail from the post office in the village before heading up to Echo’s Peak.
Only on two occasions have I ever seen her even leave the chateau, claiming to be visiting the city for a meal with friends.
It feels a lonely life, and I find myself jealous of it.
Not that I don’t enjoy the company of others, of course.
I have found my way into the woods plenty of times with boys in my village—and on rare occasions, some girls.
When the chance arises, I have traveled to the city to spend my day enjoying the anonymity of the crowd and my night enjoying the anonymity of a stranger.
But there is danger in venturing out into a world crowded with people. With meat. My particular cravings grow harder to ignore on those days, and I often find myself stumbling from that stranger’s bed before I have the chance to give in to the ache of my jaw and the itching of my teeth.
Perhaps that is why I enjoy the Widow’s Chateau so much. Why I can understand the Lady Alilovi?’s need for isolation.
There is no threat of losing control up on this peak.
While the Devil still sits within my chest, waiting to consume and feed, he is easier to ignore in a home with only two residents, both of whom are mostly content to leave me be.
It is nice. Comfortable. Safe.
Up on this mountain with nothing but the sea and her ghosts.
The first time the lady of the house asks to join me for lunch, I am so surprised, I cannot taste the bile that usually bubbles up in my throat with each bite of my sandwich.
I tried, in the beginning, not to eat at the manor very often.
I have always found it difficult to eat around other people, if I am able to eat at all, but Mr. Allard is a stubborn man and of the mind that meals cannot be skipped.
By my third week of work, he has managed to bully me into the habit of visiting the kitchens each day for lunch with the incessant argument that, "You are human, Master Villin. You must eat, or you will not work."
It is a kindness on his part, I’m sure, but I cannot help feeling like a burden when I am unable to finish whatever he has prepared for the day.
Cannot help the way my stomach turns with each sickening bite, or the regret that pools in my throat at the disappointed downturn of Mr. Allard’s lips when he wraps the food up for me to take home.
I suppose I can only be grateful he does not insist on using the dining hall to serve me. If I should be forced to suffer through eating, the kitchens are a far more comfortable place to do it.
Lady Alilovi? does not speak when she first joins me in the kitchens, nor does she eat. She simply takes a seat across the island with me, a large glass of dark, red wine in one hand and a nub of charcoal in the other, working silently at the sketchpad in her lap.
Worry and paranoia bubble under my skin at first, pacing around like a cornered animal, convinced that something has happened. Something is wrong. Something has changed. I await her sharp words or her prodding questions, expecting to be told to go home and not return.
But she does not speak, and so neither do I.
Over the next few weeks, I find a comfort in our little routine, if it can be called such. Lady Alilovi? is a flitting creature, coming and going as she pleases, but more often than not, she emerges from her studio or bedrooms to join me for our joint luncheons throughout the week.
It is on one of those days when our routine breaks once more.
“May I ask you a question, Theodore?”
Her voice is so unexpected that it makes me jump, my knee hitting the underside of the island and my elbow slipping off the edge as I whip my head up to meet her gaze.
She stares at me as she always does—with that strange tilt of her head, curiosity brimming in her dark eyes.
Sometimes I have to keep myself from visibly cowering beneath that look.
“Of course, my lady.”
“Mr. Allard tells me you enjoy reading, and I have noticed you bring a new book with you each week to read during your breaks,” she begins, “but there is always one that remains the same, and I find myself curious about it.” She gestures to the book in front of me, the one I’ve been scribbling in since I sat down as I dutifully ignore the bowl of stew Mr. Allard placed beside it.
It's not a question, but I can hear the inflection behind her words regardless. Still, I do not know how to answer.
The journal is an old one, thick and worn with age, filled to the brim with a decade’s worth of cramped writing and blotted ink. My father brought it home on my fifteenth name day and presented it with a smile and a flush, a small bow tied around the leather to hold a new ink pen atop it.
“You disappear into your mind so often, I wonder what worlds you’re living in up there,” he’d said, not an ounce of judgment in his voice. “I thought perhaps you’d like to write them down.”
That night I’d curled up beneath my open window, lit a candle on the sill, and put pen to paper.
I haven’t stopped writing since. I fear one day I will use all the ink in the world, and still I will cut myself open to dip my pen in, as I would rather write in blood than not write at all.
Since that day, I’ve barely left home without the small book.
I filled it long ago, but still I shove loose pages between its binding and tie it shut with a braided red cord I’d cut from a spool in the shop.
I flip its pages until I catch the first sight of empty space, and I fill it with letters so small they can hardly be read at all.
“It’s nothing,” I tell her, offering a thin smile as I pull the book closer to myself. “Nothing important, that is.”
I expect her to leave it at that. Most do, after all. But Lady Alilovi? has never played toward expectations, and she does not start now. She clicks her tongue at me, leaning forward to rest her chin in her hand, abandoning whatever work she’d been sketching away at in her own pad of paper.
“I do not entertain liars, Theodore,” she says, tone dripping with both warning and amusement. “You do not have to tell me if you don’t wish to, but I do ask that you don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not—”
She tuts again, interrupting whatever argument I’d been ready to spit out. “You look at that book like I look at my paints. Like a life without it would be no life at all.”
And, well… I suppose she is right, in a way.
I could not imagine a day without it in my possession, without the comforting weight of it in my bag or my pocket.
Even when I have nothing yet to write, I find myself brushing my fingers over weathered pages, tucking my nose into the spine to breathe in the scent of the dried ink.
I glance down at the book’s battered edges and crinkled cover, and I think it is the closest one might get to my soul, if I had one. I cannot help but wonder what will happen to me when there is no more room left to write.
“They’re stories,” I say quietly, pulling the book closer and tucking it against my chest, “and poems. Thoughts. I, um—I fancy myself a writer, sometimes, and I have so many words filling my head that I have to write them down somewhere, or I fear they’ll tear me apart one day.”
Lady Alilovi? blinks at me, interest sparking like candle flame in her eyes as she leans ever forward. I wonder what it is she sees beyond the surface of the scruffy boy in too-big clothes and a face too thin to be anything but sickly. I wonder what she looks for, what she has found.
“That is why you search for stories in my paintings.” She doesn’t ask it like a question, but I nod anyway, and a pretty smile twitches across her lips. “Do you wish to be published one day?”
Yes.
The word is on the tip of my tongue, but I bite it back. Do I wish to be published? To put my soiled soul out into the world for all to see? Do I want them to know me so intimately? To know my thoughts and my dreams, my fears and my shames?
I have never thought too much about it, if I were being honest. Sainte-Falaise is such a small village, I would have no hope of finding success here.
And though I dream of one day leaving for the world beyond our forest, it is nothing but that—a dream.
Those born in Sainte-Falaise are rooted there for all their lives, never meant for anything past the blandness of mundanity and repetition.
But God knows I crave more.
"I very much doubt anyone out there would like my writing," I finally answer. "It's not much of anything special."
She frowns at me. "Why do you think that?"
Tucking my book into my satchel, I shrug the bag over my shoulder. "Why do you hide yourself away behind paintings that serve as nothing more than masks? Perhaps we both fear what people might see behind them."
Her eyes widen in surprise at my words, and a mild shock of worry sparks in my hands.
I've never interacted much with the upper elite, but I am sure there is a rule somewhere about being respectful towards them and their secrets.
Those on the lower side of society have no right to question those higher than them, and while Lady Alilovi? is not royalty, her name is one of nobility, regardless.
"Apologies, Lady Alilovi?," I begin, offering a small bow. "I believe I spoke out of turn."
"Azizi."
The name throws me off kilter, somewhere I am finding myself often around this woman. My face twists in confusion, my fingers tightening around the strap of my bag. "Pardon?"