Chapter Ten
Chapter
Ten
Fletch is sitting on the castle steps when I pull into the courtyard of Maplemead, his back against one of the stone columns and his face turned up toward the low evening sunshine.
He looks as if he belongs there, as if the stonemason whittled him to sit forever at the base of the column looking handsome and inviting to castle visitors.
With any luck Lestat will feel invited to cock his leg and pee on him.
He gets to his feet and dusts off the ass of his jeans as I drag my bag out onto the gravel and give Lestat enough of a shove for gravity to send him tumbling out too.
He’s like a hedgehog: He balls himself up tightly and rolls as far as he possibly can before deciding if he can be bothered to use his stout little legs and walk.
“Ghostbuster,” Fletch says as I draw level with him.
“Hack,” I say, firing him a pithy look. I fish the huge brass key from my back pocket and fit it into the oversized lock feeling like Alice in Wonderland.
“Should I carry you over the threshold?” he says, close behind me, and I pause, remembering that it wouldn’t be the first time he’s carried me today.
“Pick me up again and I’ll stick my foot so far up your backside it’ll come out of your mouth,” I say, battling with the monster key.
“Can I say that prospect isn’t wholly without its appeal?” he says as he leans over my shoulder and twists the key with embarrassing ease.
“Don’t start,” I say, shouldering the door open with a creak. “This is turning out to be one hell of a long day and I’m not in the mood for your particular brand of sarcasm, okay?”
He follows me inside, and I halt in the cool quietness of the reception hall.
It’s different being here as an inhabitant rather than a visitor.
As a visitor I could marvel at the ornate carvings on the walls and be impressed by the huge windows and soaring ceilings.
Now though, the vastness of these grand rooms engulfs and overwhelms me, as if I’m alone at the carnival and got locked inside the haunted house.
Or almost alone. Leaving the front door open for Lestat, I drop the dog bed down on the floor with my overnight bag beside it.
I’m about to speak when my stomach lets out an almighty rumble.
“I was just about to ask if you’d eaten,” Fletch says drily.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Tell that to your guts. You’re hungry all right.”
I shake my head, salivating at the thought of the pancakes I never got to eat because of him. Laying the key down on the side table, I notice a folded note with my name written neatly across the front of it.
There’s dinner for two in the warming cart in the dining room. Mr. Dark and his guests have taken their evening meal in the tower. Breakfast will be served at 8 a.m. in the main castle.
Kind regards, Marilyn Foster, head cook and housekeeper of Maplemead Castle.
It’s curiously formal considering we’ve already met, but I hand it to Fletch to read without comment.
He glances at his watch. “It’s just gone seven.
Shall I see you in the dining room at half past?
” I must have looked skeptical, because he rolls his eyes.
“It’s just food at the same table, Melody. I’m not asking you out on a hot date.”
He’s successfully backed me into a corner where it would sound churlish to refuse, but all the same I struggle to say a civilized yes. I end up waggling my head like a chicken and he just sighs, picks up my overnight bag with his own, then makes for the stairs.
“I can carry my own bag,” I say, starting after him and grabbing for the handles. He doesn’t fight me for it when I take it from him.
“Just trying to be polite,” he says as we reach the first-floor landing.
“Why change the habits of a lifetime,” I grump, half running to reach the door of my bedroom to get away from him.
I hadn’t noticed earlier, but there’s a little plaque attached to the door engraved with Princess Suite.
I don’t feel very princessy at this very minute.
I’ve got the weight of the world and the grime of the day on my shoulders; I want a shower and I need some dinner.
Across the corridor, Fletch pushes open the door of the room he’s decided to sleep in.
I glance along the whole corridor one way and then the other, then frown at him.
“There’s at least five hundred bedrooms on this floor. Do you really have to sleep in the one right opposite mine?”
He taps the little silver plaque on his door. “Every princess needs someone keeping guard, even sarcastic passive-aggressive ones.” I check out the plaque as he goes inside and closes his door.
The Knight Suite. Jeez. Disney would have to be hard up to cast Fletcher Gunn as a knight and me as a princess.
She’d be snarky and refuse to let him drag her from the jaws of the fire-breathing dragon and he’d shrug and pull out his cellphone to video her being eaten and make his fortune on YouTube.
I have one of those moments in the shower, a “should I shave my legs just in case” moment, and then I stop and ask myself this: just in case of what, exactly?
I pick up the razor and put it down again, because I cannot and will not shave my legs for Fletcher Gunn.
I shut off the water and then, just as I go to step out, it strikes me that I should shave my legs for myself, because I’m a thoroughly modern woman who likes to feel good, and that’s exactly what I keep telling myself as I step back under the water and self-righteously whizz the razor up and down.
There. Smooth, and all for my own pleasure and absolutely not for anyone else’s.
I have a similar moment of uncertainty as I get dressed.
I don’t in any way want Fletcher Gunn to think I’ve dressed for him and our nondate, but it seems that all of the underwear I haphazardly threw into my bag is black lace, and I’d forgotten how the filmy fine-knit black sweater Marina gave me for Christmas clings to my waist, or how the wide neck keeps slipping off one of my shoulders.
As I sit and apply a little makeup, I resolutely ignore the fact that I look more adult and feminine than I have in some time, and I applaud myself for acting like a grown-up who can handle herself and knows how to wing her eyeliner.
A slick of mascara and a slash of nude lipstick, and I’m as ready as I’ll ever be to eat dinner with the man who is my business nemesis, a wind-up merchant, and who occasionally turns my blood into fire in my veins.
“You’re not seriously putting those on,” someone says as I sit on the edge of the bed and reach for my black Converse. I look up and find Britannia staring disdainfully at my shoes.
“Did I ask for your fashion opinion?” I ask, but I falter all the same.
“You actually look like a woman tonight. Don’t spoil it with those now.”
She crosses to a huge wardrobe, feels around on top of it for a second, then tosses a little key onto the bed. “This was my room. Use whatever you need.”
“Your room? Did you live here at the castle then?”
She looks momentarily thrown. “For a little while.”
“With your husband?”
I really want to understand what they were doing at the castle when they died.
Britannia chews her lip. “They were all here.”
“All?” I deliberately draw the word out in the hope of drawing more words out of Britannia too. She wraps her arms around herself with a faraway look in her eyes.
“Aunt Eleanor loved the circus. She used to let us spend our winters here; no one wanted to visit the circus in the snow. We’d perform for the villagers in the ballroom sometimes, and in exchange, she’d let the whole troupe stay here and prepare for the new season.”
I can’t imagine that Lord Shilling could have approved of his castle being overrun with acrobats and elephants every winter. He must have loved Eleanor very much.
“Was that when the accident happened? When you were here for the winter?”
She looks at me, thrown. “Accident?”
“The one where you hurtled to your death from the trapeze?”
Her shoulders sag. “Oh. That.”
I know she’s been dead for a long time, but surely she shouldn’t need reminding. Unless, of course, it wasn’t an accident. I file her response away to think about later.
I wait to see what she says next but am left disappointed when she just taps the side of the wardrobe.
“Look inside. And for the love of God, don’t put those shoes on.”
And then she’s gone, leaving only the little silver key on the bed as evidence she’d been there at all.
Curiosity gets the better of me, and leaving my Converse on the floor ready to slip on, I pick up the tiny key and cross to the mahogany wardrobe.
The key turns with a little persuasion, and the door swings open with a creak.
Oh my God. Oh. My. God. The smell hits me first. It’s female and seductive, like heady oriental flowers, instantly evocative of the woman who once owned these things.
Exquisite clothes hang from ivory padded hangers; dresses that are little more than whispers of silk and satin, flashes of crystal hemlines, trails of silken ties, satin-lined fur stoles.
My fingers slide lightly over them all, slippery soft and cool, and I pause and sigh with pure pleasure over an inky-purple floor-length halter-neck dress.
I don’t even wear dresses, but if I did, I’d want them to be like this.
Marina is going to completely lose her mind when she sees all of this.