Chapter 23
Rikard
The front door of Hanna’s old home had swollen in its frame. Rikard had to shoulder it open with enough force that it sent a colony of beetle carcasses scattering across the threshold.
“Charming,” he said, holding the lantern up to illuminate the dark entry hall. A few white moths flitted in and out of the circle of light, whispering with excitement.
“It’s been nine years,” Hannalinde said defensively as she stepped past him into the house, one hand on her belly and the other trailing along the wall.
Plaster flaked off beneath her fingertips.
“Nine years without a fire to chase away the damp or a window cracked for air. I’m surprised it’s not worse. ”
The damp had indeed had its way. The hall smelled of mildew.
The floor was tiled in a pattern of pale blue and cream that he could barely discern beneath the dust. To the left and right, arched doors led to what were presumably sitting rooms. A single staircase rose at the back, its ornate wooden banister dull with old wax.
Stairs with a railing, wide and shallow enough for a human woman with a growing belly to mount them easily. The sight of them relieved him. Hanna should live here, or somewhere like it.
“This was the receiving room.” Hannalinde pushed through one of the arched doors, her voice animated.
She pulled the linen shroud from a piece of furniture and coughed at the swirling dust cloud.
The chair beneath was carved oak, human-scaled, with a needlepoint cushion.
“My mother held her morning audiences here. The wives of the palace quarter would come for tea and gossip, and she’d sit in this chair. ”
She moved through the room, pulling off covers and opening shutters.
Each window she forced open admitted a shaft of pale moonlight that carved the dust into columns.
Now he could see the delicate flowers and vines that decorated the dark wood paneling.
Above the mantel hung a silver mirror that reflected a row of empty vases.
They should be full of flowers. He’d fill them for her.
He was already making a mental catalog of the repairs necessary for Hanna to live here again.
This house was clearly the best place for her.
It was just as secure as the Tower, and it was safer for her physically, at least until after the birth and her recovery.
He followed her through the rest of the rooms, listening as she described their purpose.
It was larger than he’d expected of a human dwelling.
Three stories and a cellar, with rooms branching off a central corridor on each floor.
A kitchen and storerooms were found below ground, cold and cobwebbed.
On the main floor, a dining room with a table that could seat twelve.
A library with empty shelves and a window seat crusted in bat droppings.
A music room and a parlor. A receiving room and a ballroom.
Upstairs, bedchambers with beds still made, their linens gray with dust. A child’s playroom and a breakfast room.
Dressing rooms and secret stairways for maids and footmen.
And the light, high-ceilinged attic level was reserved for the servants.
“This was mine,” she said at one door. The room beyond had two windows overlooking the garden and pale pink walls.
A girl’s room, not a woman’s. A narrow bed with a canopy and a writing desk were covered with linen sheeting to protect them, though another sheet had fallen from a bookshelf and the few remaining books on it appeared cracked and swollen.
“I’m surprised they didn’t sell the furniture. ”
“The whole thing seems forgotten,” he mused.
Clearly some possessions had been stripped away, the most valuable and portable things, and the rest hastily covered.
But it had not been destroyed, not purposefully.
It was like the house had been holding its breath, waiting for her to return.
Part of him was surprised there were not still servants residing in their quarters.
She nodded, looking wistful as she stared around the room. “It’s a shame it’s all ruined.”
He touched her arm. “It’s not. Most of this can be repaired.”
She gave a wild laugh, colored with emotions he could not easily identify. Memory, grief, tenderness? “In another nine years, perhaps.”
“It’s not so bad.” His resolve firmed when she gave him a skeptical look.
“Let me handle it. I don’t have a hundred keepers at my beck and call for nothing.
” Her chin wobbled, and he gripped it between two fingers to still it.
He kissed her, a chaste brush of lips, and her eyes filled with tears.
He released her chin to sweep them away with his thumb.
“Before you protest that it’s too much, let it be my gift to the mother of my child. ”
“The garden,” she said thickly, turning from him. “Let’s go see the garden.”
The garden was at the back of the house, accessed through a pair of glass-paned doors in the library. Thankfully, this set of doors was intact.
They stepped outside, and Hannalinde went still, letting her eyes adjust to the night.
He could see it all clearly. The garden was dead.
Not the tidy dormancy of impending winter but the thorough, choking death of a decade’s neglect.
The rose beds that must have once flanked the walls and paths were mounds of blackened canes, leafless and brittle.
The ornamental hedge at the back had grown wild, then died, leaving skeletal branches tangled into a wall of gray wood.
A stone bench sat at the garden’s center, cracked down the middle.
Its legs sank into earth that had been colonized by dock and thistle, now bare, spiky stalks after fall’s frost. And over everything, climbing the walls of the house and smothering the iron railings and strangling the trellises, the dead rose vines.
They’d consumed the garden the way fire consumed a house.
He waited for her to cry as she surveyed the moonlit mess.
“The soil is still good,” she said, finally. “Underneath. We will have to tear it all down first, but some of the roses might come back if the rootstock survived.”
She crouched awkwardly, her belly forcing her knees wide, and dug her fingers into the earth beside the nearest bed. The soil was dark and crumbling, rich with the decay of years of fallen leaves. She brought a handful to her nose and inhaled.
“I’ll bring the roses from the window box,” she said, standing with difficulty and brushing the earth from her fingers.
“They’ll do better here where their roots can grow deep.
” She turned in a slow circle, mapping the garden.
“We’ll have to replace many of them, of course.
I’ll put Sweet William along the south side, where the sun is strongest. Lavender and lemon balm by the kitchen door. Chamomile there, and—”
“Moonflowers there, for the moths,” he interrupted, pointing at the far wall. “It will keep them away from the windows so they don’t eavesdrop on us in our bedchamber.”
She stopped, her lip caught in her teeth. Her bright happiness faded. “You won’t want to live here. You’ll stay in the Tower,” she said. “Of course. The Nadir’s office is there. Your parents.”
“I have no great attachment to the eyrie. It was my great uncle’s for most of my life.”
“The seventh tier is your home, though.”
“My home is with my wife and child.”
“You want to move here?” she asked disbelievingly. “On the ground?”
He smirked at her expression, his delight building at the prospect. “The ladders are a problem for both of us, not just you. And in all practicality, our child will not fledge for years. This is a much more suitable place for us to live.”
She shook her head, still doubting him. “The moths will talk if you live among humans. Everyone will talk.”
He shrugged, feeling reckless. “They’re already talking. I survived the unsurvivable. I lost my wings. I married a human and took another as a resident mistress. At this point, living on the ground in the palace quarter will hardly register as deviant.”
A laugh escaped, warm and brief. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth, and above them, her eyes were bright. “You’re not joking. You really don’t mind?”
“I famously have no sense of humor,” he returned dryly.
Rikard hired a crew of human laborers recommended by the Head Keeper. Plasterers, carpenters, a glazier for the cracked windows, a bricklayer to repair the chimneys and garden walls. A butler and head housekeeper to staff the estate with maids and footmen and kitchen help. Gardeners.
The dead vines came down first, hauled from the walls in great black tangles that the laborers carted away in barrows, revealing the pale stone facade beneath.
The house slowly emerged. Hannalinde directed the work from the eyrie, choosing the paint for the walls, the fabric for the new draperies, the pattern for the china.
She arranged for a roost to be built in the largest bedchamber.
She drew the garden plan, too, the rows and beds sketched with the same precision she applied to embroidery patterns, and watched through a spyglass from the window as her instructions were followed to the letter.
The soil was amended, the paths re-graveled, and the trellises repaired.
Then new roses were planted, two dozen new bushes from a nursery outside the city walls, selected by Hannalinde from a list the nurseryman had provided.
He did not tell her the extravagant cost. The garden fund was bottomless as far as he was concerned.
For her part, Carlijn giddily supervised the installation of the interior furnishings, visiting each day to direct the workmen since Hanna couldn’t make the climb, telling them where to place the rugs and furniture.
She also conspired with Rikard to decorate the new nursery, as Hanna had shown a marked disinterest in the task, filling it with toys and other things a baby of either species would need.