20. Chapter 20
Serenity
I wake at ten with the sun through the shutters I left open, and I lie still and wait for the dream to evaporate.
It doesn’t. I’m in a bed with sheets that are probably silk, and pillows stuffed with goosedown.
“This is surreal,” I whisper.
So I run last night through from the start: dinner, diamonds, cards, a kiss on the knuckles, a door he walked away from. He didn’t take anything. Nobody came in the night. The necklace is on my nightstand, worth more than he paid for me.
How much did he pay for me?
I push it aside and focus on what matters.
I woke up warm and fed, and nobody has hurt me. I don’t know how to process that. Cruelty I can plan around. Kindness I don’t understand anymore.
So I get up and do the one useful thing. I plan my day.
Breakfast arrives while I’m dressing, carried by the driver from yesterday. Gray hair cropped short, steady hands. He sets the tray at the window table and pours the coffee without being asked.
“You drove the car,” I say.
“I did, mademoiselle. I am Yves. I keep the Seigneur’s house, drive him, and do whatever else wants doing.” He sets the pot down. “The kitchen wasn’t sure how you take it.”
“Just like that.” I sit and breathe it in. God. Real coffee. I’d forgotten. “Where are we?” I ask.
“Somewhere very safe, mademoiselle. Will you take cream?”
He says it with the pot already tipped, and I look at him.
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“I answered the one that matters, mademoiselle. Cream or no?”
“We drove two hours yesterday. West, mostly. I had the sun on my side of the car. That puts us—”
“That puts you at breakfast,” Yves says, “with your eggs going cold. Will there be anything else?”
“How long have you worked for him?”
“A long time.”
“Long enough that it shows,” I say. I watch his face. It stays blank. “You’d have been young when you started.”
“I was, mademoiselle. It didn’t last.” A shallow bow.
“The house is yours to walk. The kitchen is down the west stairs, and they’ll be glad you’re here.
Cooking for one man who doesn’t eat wears on their pride.
If a door is locked, it’s storage.” He pauses at the door. “The front door is open to you.”
“How far can I go?” I ask.
“To the boundary, mademoiselle.”
“And beyond that?”
“Beyond that is not safe.”
He goes. I drink the coffee. It’s better than anything I’ve tasted in my life.
They’re too good at this. You don’t train staff to stay quiet by accident. I eat my breakfast and stop thinking about it, because everything is good and I feel like I’ve been hungry forever.
The house takes me all morning to explore, and it tells me more than Yves did.
It’s enormous. Corridors forty doors long, a library two floors tall with a ladder on rails.
Everything is clean and waxed and tended.
Almost none of it is lived in. I open door after door on furniture under white sheets, on beds stripped to their frames, on a music room where the piano is shut, and the stool is pushed all the way in. Nobody plays.
A black cat crosses the corridor ahead of me with the air of an owner, which I suspect he is in some way.
He stops at a door at the far end and sits down to wait.
It’s heavier than the others. Sealed tight.
I try the handle on my way past. It doesn’t give.
By the time I’ve closed the distance, he’s gone, around a corner I didn’t see him take.
A cat. He has a cat?
“Here, Kitty,” I call after him. I can’t remember the last time I saw a cat.
Outside the library, I stop and reach for my magic, enveloping one hand with it. My fingers go vague against the paneling, hard to look at. I count. Nine breaths before it slips. Five in the compound, nine here.
Bit by bit, it’s coming back.
The clocks bother me most. They’re everywhere—mantel clocks, a grandfather clock on the main landing twice my height—and every one of them is stopped. Different times, all wrong, pendulums hanging dead. Nobody winds them.
Why not? Everything else in this place is polished to perfection.
In the drawing room there’s a small brass carriage clock, the key sitting in its back where somebody left it. I wind it without deciding to. It’s a small, ordinary sound, ticking into the silence. I leave it running and keep walking before I can decide whether that was allowed.
The shutters I test as I go. Ground floor: sealed, no latch on my side. First floor: the same. My rooms are the only ones where the sun gets in. I check eleven others to be sure.
The wolf walks with me, close under my skin, ears turning at staff sounds two floors away. She’s steady about it. Strong. Every stair I climb without my knees shaking says the same thing: I’m coming back. Here, of all places. Being kept well.
Being kept.
For my own safety.
But who’s more dangerous? Them or him?
The kitchen at noon smells of stock and fried onion, and it goes quiet when I walk in, four faces turning, a knife stopping mid-carrot. Then a broad woman in gray by the ovens wipes her hands on her apron and points me to a stool with a wooden spoon.
“Sit. You’re the reason I’ve an order in for lamb and white beans.” It’s the housekeeper from last night. Up close, she has flour to one elbow and a warm face, fifty or so. “Call me Marthe. You’ll get lunch now if you don’t mind eating here.”
“I’d rather eat here than in that dining room alone.”
“Sensible.” She sets soup in front of me, then bread, then stands across the table with her arms folded and looks me over, open about it. The others work around us, quiet, listening. “You’re too thin. We’ll see to it.”
I eat, and I dig.
“How long has he lived here?”
She pauses, considering. “Longer than anyone remembers. When he’s not somewhere else.”
“He has another place?”
“He has many places.” She turns back to her pots. “This one is the one he likes now. More bread?”
I nod, reaching for a slice. “The sheets on the furniture. The stopped clocks. How long has it been like that?”
“Since we got here. About twenty years back.”
“You’ve been here twenty years, and you’ve never taken the sheets off the furniture.”
She shrugs. “He likes it that way. Says he can move out whenever he wants to.”
“But he hasn’t wanted to move in twenty years?”
“Seems not. When he tires of it, I suppose he will.”
I look down into my soup. Twenty years and he isn’t tired of the place. I guess that’s something. Maybe it’ll take him twenty years to get tired of me.
“And you’ve worked for him all that time?” I carry on the line of questioning.
“Longer,” she says. “I started as a girl. My mother kept his kitchen before me, and her mother before that. He pensions us off at sixty whether we like it or not. He pays every grandchild’s schooling.
In forty years he’s never asked what any of us do with our off days.
” A glance over her shoulder. “You won’t find a soul in this house with a word to say against him, if that’s what you’re digging for. ”
“It was.”
“Thought so.” No offense anywhere in it. She stacks bowls. “Dig away. It passes the time.”
I try the others while I finish the soup. The boy at the sink has been here two years, blushes when I speak to him, and gives me “yes miss, no miss.” The gardener’s wife does the flowers and talks ten minutes about forcing bulbs and not one word about anything else.
It’s maddening.
I turn back to Marthe. “What are the other places like?” I ask.
“Much the same,” she says. “Some grander. He has them all over the world. The ancestral home is in Aquitaine, and it’s magnificent.”
“Aquitaine?” I say, wondering what “magnificent” would look like if she doesn’t think this place could be called that.
“In France,” she says. “Bordeaux. They make wine there.”
“Ah,” I say, as if that makes perfect sense. I guess it does. Explains the accent and the way he’s always holding a glass. “Did you work there too?”
“Not officially, though we’ve visited. My mother used to tell stories that she heard from her mother, who heard from her mother.” Marthe dries her hands. “There were sixty staff in my great-grandmother’s day. Grand balls in the long gallery, entire wings lit gold.”
“What stopped it?”
“Can’t say. I suppose the world changed.” She hangs the towel on its rail and squares it. “Or maybe he did.”
I stare into my empty soup bowl, not sure what to ask next. I go with the first thing that comes into my head.
“I saw a cat,” I say. “A black one. In the hall.”
“Oh, that?” She smiles. “That would be Maximilian XV.”
“The fifteenth? The cat is royalty too?”
“No, he’s the fifteenth Maximilian. The Seigneur has always liked having a cat around. Always Maximilian. Always black.”
“So he can pretend they’re the same cat?”
She tilts her head. “You know, I never thought of that. Yes. I think you’re right.” She chuckles and takes my bowl from me. “Now, there’s a fresh loaf wrapped by the door. Take it up with you. A wolf shouldn’t go three hours empty.”
She turns to her ovens, and the kitchen goes back to work around me. I leave the room with a warm loaf and more questions than I brought down.
Sébastien-Laurent de Val-Serein. I’m not sure I’ll ever get my tongue around it.
Bastien.
He collects clocks, but doesn’t have them show the right time. He has a cat he’s pretended is the same one for decades. And he’s lived here for twenty years, ready to move when he’s tired of it, but never left.
“The man makes no sense,” I murmur.
Or maybe just nuts, a little voice says.
I take the loaf back through the long gallery, and halfway down there’s a glass-paneled door I missed this morning. Through the panes there’s a walled garden, clipped brown for winter, sunlight all over it.
I try the handle. It turns.
I stand on the step in the cold with my face turned up and the sun full on it. The wolf turns her face up next to mine, and we stand there, breathing frost and cut yew. It’s the same sun I stood in before I left the compound yard. My skin takes it the same way here.
Because this is the same thing. The leash is long, and the front door is unlocked, but I’m still a prisoner.
Stop it. Go inside and eat the bread.
He played poker with me and let me win. The staff love him. He pays their pensions and for their children’s schooling. He has a cat, for God’s sake. You can’t have a cat and be bad.
Unless you’re a Bond villain.
I shake my head and walk to my room. I’m warm, I’m fed, I’m surrounded by luxury. What’s to complain about?
And who knows…
He might even keep me alive for twenty years.