Castle & Key, page 15
She touched his arm lightly and said encouragingly, “Just think what a good job I’ll do looking after the mistress if I’m not kissing men in the pantry!”
She had undoubtedly said the wrong thing: Mr. Oswald’s face stiffened immediately.
“It’s too late now, anyway,” he said, hunching his shoulders. “Don’t touch me. I don’t want to interfere with the way things ought to run around here. We only just cleaned up from last time.”
And he bustled away nearly as furiously as Mrs. Carmichael before Susan could either bring up the matter of cleaning up and what that entailed, or mention that no one had managed to get the bottle of wine they had meant to collect.
She lingered by the pantry for quite some time, thinking her thoughts, and before long became aware that most of those thoughts involved Emmett, his lips, or both. That wouldn’t do at all, so she started herself into motion, banishing the thoughts at the same time.
It was well past time, she decided, to see the master.
Eight
Janet seemed more weary after her late breakfast with the master than Susan had yet seen her, so it wasn’t hard to get her to promise to keep to her suite and take lunch there instead. Since Susan herself wasn’t planning on going too far from the suite, she had no compunction in taking the hound with her when the hound seemed insistent on accompanying her out of the room, either.
She had a good deal of time in which to explore the manor for any signs of the other horselords in furniture form, but without any success. The hound followed her patiently up and down the halls and into every room that she could get into via a combination of lockpicking and magic use.
Remembering the opening high above the main foyer, with its small remnants of balcony, Susan even nosed around the manor’s second floor for any signs of a staircase that might lead further up into the rafters and ceilings. A manor of this size ought by rights to have some sort of attic system, and what she saw from the foyer seemed to bear that out, but she didn’t find a single staircase that led up rather than down, and after she had been walking for several hours, Susan admitted defeat and went down to the kitchen to fetch dinner for Janet.
When she entered the room, Susan would have sworn that Janet had just been hiding something. There was nothing in her motions to suggest it, thought Susan, taking her time to close the door after the hound with one foot and carrying her tray to the table in the middle of the suite. In fact, Janet was sitting very straight in bed; the indications that alerted Susan to something not quite right were that very stillness—and the very faint flush of red that had brightened Janet’s cheeks.
Susan made a mental note to search the room for anything interesting when she next had the chance, and roused Janet out of bed with a bluff sort of heartiness that seemed to dispel the bride’s uneasiness. Although that uneasiness faded, Susan didn’t think that the thoughtfulness or slightly crushed look had disappeared from Janet’s face, and when the other woman finished dinner by listlessly declaring her intention of going to bed early, she chivvied Janet into her night dress and off to bed with fully as much bluff heartiness as she had chivvied her out of it.
Susan didn’t bother to undress herself. It was early yet, and what she had in mind would be more likely to be effective if she went out earlier: she was far more likely to find the master out and about, for instance. She waited until Janet seemed to sleep, and then for a little bit longer until the bride really did fall asleep, and then left the suite with the hound once more at her heels.
It was past dinner time, but there was still the faintest light from the suns glimmering along the floor from the right wing’s windows as Susan approached the main hall from the left wing. The hound followed without hesitation when Susan took the right-hand turn at the meeting of the halls—stopped obediently without a word from Susan when she paused in front of the mysterious door. It also waited patiently as she tried the handle of the door to again find it unlocked but unmoving.
“Bother you!” said Susan softly, because she could still sense no magic that should be stopping the door from moving. The hound looked up at her and whined, and she added, “Not you. This. You’re lovely and solid; nothing ethereal about you.”
That made her think again and, having done so, to drop to her stomach on the carpet of the hallway to look through the crack under the door. She couldn’t help the deep chuckle of appreciation that came out: there was a thick, dark shadow at the rightmost side of the door, and if Susan wasn’t very much mistaken, that meant that someone had shoved a chock of something beneath the door to prevent it opening no matter who had or didn’t have the key to the lock of the door.
She leapt to her feet and darted a few steps down the hallway to the suit of armour that leaned drunkenly on its stand, and pinched its blunt axe. That popped the chock out from beneath the door in a single, smart tap, and Susan returned it with the sparkling feeling of having accomplished something.
The hound, as appreciative as Susan could have hoped, gave a soft trill when she opened the door, and preceded her inside to curl up on a couch: evidently the hound had no misapprehensions upon the score of this being a quick meeting. Susan grinned and replaced the chock of unpolished wood, then crossed the room after the hound. She didn’t expect it to be terribly quick, either—it was one of the reasons she had chosen to use this particular room for her meeting.
There would always be ways of forcing a meeting, but in this case, Susan thought she preferred waiting for the master to approach rather than seeking him out wherever he was. It wasn’t that she expected people to run away upon meeting her, but the master seemed distinctly flighty to her, and she had the impression that he would be less likely to fly at once if it appeared that he was the one who had brought about the meeting.
It was also far more private and comfortable to be sitting in padded chairs than trying to converse in the hallways where any of the servants could overhear.
All in all, thought Susan, throwing herself down beside the hound and stuffing her hands into the pockets of her breeches around considerably more material than she usually had to deal with due to a growing skirt, it was a happy circumstance and bound to produce happy results. She had to wriggle a little to fit both herself and the hound on the couch, after which, panting, she was free to look around the room and try to figure out exactly why the master had wanted to keep Janet from being in here—or exactly why Janet had so much wanted to get in.
It appeared to be a library of sorts, but it also held a great many ferns and other potted plants, some of them with flowers, some without. It also, Susan noticed, with sharp eyes, held a violin that she suspected to be the same violin she had heard a few nights ago—it sat out of reach but not out of sight, shut in a glass box that was probably as soundproof as it looked.
Had the master rescued it himself, or had it been put here as a sop to him?
Susan wasn’t sure, but she was even surer than before that the master would come to her without any trouble if she remained where she was.
She was confident enough in her assessment that she snoozed a little as she waited. Luckily, she had remembered to put the chock back under the door when she closed it, and it was the soft snick of the chock of wood being smartly tapped out from beneath the door that woke her from her sleep.
Susan kept her eyes closed until the door shut behind the intruder, a soft light threw across the room, and a cold, haughty voice said, “What is that?”
She opened her eyes to find herself being stared at in well-bred, disdainful surprise by the master. His dark eyes were heavy with lashes, and his lips had been pulled slightly awry by a scar that ran upward toward his cheekbone on the left side. She could also, despite the shadows in the room, see the same distinctly blue sheen to the deep blackness of his hair that she had seen earlier.
He purposefully slid his gaze sideways to indicate the subject of his questions, and Susan patted the hound reflexively.
“It’s your dog,” she said. She didn’t have a lot of patience for class as a weapon, and she had an idea that the master was trying to intimidate her. “Or so I presumed.”
One side of his mouth made a small expression of irritation. “What is it doing on the couch?”
“Sleeping, by the looks of it. I shouldn’t try to get it off, if I were you; I got back strain just trying to make space enough to sit down.”
The master made a brief little choke of laughter and then tried to look as though he had never dreamt of laughing in his life to cover the slip.
“It’s too late,” Susan told him. “I heard you laugh. Do you want an apple? I pinched some of those tiny ones from the garden; they’re delightfully sweet, and a couple of them fit in my pockets pretty easily.”
“Those are my apples anyway,” he said, his nose tilting upward very slightly. “Why did you come in here?”
“I heard you being rude to Janet about this room, and I thought that you’d only be very cranky about it if you spent a bit of time here and didn’t want to be interrupted when you feel like being alone.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t consider that I might be annoyed at finding you here when I wanted to be alone, then.”
“Oh, I considered it!” said Susan, bluntly honest. “But I thought you’d be a lot more annoyed if I collared you in the hallways.”
Now that she had a chance to see him from the front, Susan could understand what Janet had found so immediately appealing. She herself didn’t care for the very faint tinge of blue to the man’s hair—she preferred hair of a lighter colour that had caramel tints to it—but there was an intensity and raw magnetism to the master’s eyes that would have interested Susan herself if she had seen him as a free man.
Those eyes currently displayed a fresher pain than she would have expected. Adding that to Janet’s rather crushed appearance when she’d walked the other woman back to her suite from the breakfast room, it seemed evident that something akin to a lover’s quarrel must have happened earlier that day.
The master’s eyes shuttered briefly, whether in surprise or protection, Susan wasn’t sure. He said, “You couldn’t have collared me in the hallway, anyway.”
“It wouldn’t have been easy, but you always have your back to me, so I expect I’d be able to manage the thing.”
The master stared at her. “You’re not allowed to do that!”
“I expect that’s in the rules, too,” Susan said. “Well, if it is, the rules should say something about you always having your back to me, shouldn’t they?”
“It’s got to be that way!” he said, perplexed. “Otherwise, we’d have too many problems with maids falling in love with the master!”
Susan eyed him in some wonder. “Are the maids you’ve had so far particularly impressionable?”
“I’m quite good-looking, you know,” he said, rather stiffly.
“Of course you are!” she said soothingly. “There’s no need to be defensive. I suppose you’re just a bit raw after quarrelling with Janet this morning."
"I'm not—I’m not raw!”
“You can’t tell me that the two of you didn’t quarrel,” Susan said. “Well, you can, but I won’t believe you. Not after you were serenading her on your violin and the two of you were gazing at each other through windows in the wee hours of the morning. Now she’s down the hall, crushed, and you’re in here, crushed.”
“I couldn’t help liking her,” he said. “But that’s all it is.”
It sounded defiant, and that amused Susan a little.
“You’re allowed to like someone,” she said. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”
“You won’t have to,” he said. This time his voice was grim. “It doesn’t help to talk about things. Things come out without talking about them, anyway.”
“What a pleasant outlook on life that must be. I can assure you that I won’t be talking out of turn.”
“You’re already talking out of turn,” he said.
“Yes, but only to you,” she pointed out.
“There are ears everywhere in the manor.”
Susan laid her hand on the hound’s head. “Only if we talk too loudly, I fancy.”
He shrugged listlessly. “It’s too late now, anyway. We’ve started, and we’ll have to see how it all turns out.”
“The story, do you mean?”
The master looked at her sharply. “If you want to look after your mistress, you ought to be a bit more careful about the things you talk about.”
“I’m concerned about everyone,” Susan said. “Nobody in this house seems to be terribly safe. Did you know that Janet has nearly died twice already?”
He looked away. “There’s nothing I can do about that.”
“Is there not?” Susan let the question linger in the air as the hound woke and stretched briefly, then closed its eyes again. “It’s eating you up, though, I rather suspect.”
“How do you know what I feel?” The master’s eyes, dark and angry, met hers. “You’re just one of the servants.”
“People are pretty similar, upstairs or downstairs,” Susan said, shrugging. “And here you are, brooding, so you might as well get it off your chest, mightn’t you?”
The master stared at her for a moment longer, then laughed suddenly.
“I didn’t expect her to care,” he said, and Susan didn’t think he was affecting the candour with which he said it. “They don’t, usually. Most of the girls who come here are frightened out of their minds and just trying to survive.”
“Understandably, I suppose,” she said, with something of a dry voice. “They do tend to die pretty quickly, don’t they?”
He muttered, “It’s not my fault. I do my best, but none of them really do what they’re supposed to do.”
That, thought Susan coldly, wasn’t exactly promising. She hoped she hadn’t misread the situation; if she had, it was likely to be as dangerous for herself as it was for Janet. If the master was actually controlling the story curse, she had been far too open with him.
“I find that no one is very communicative about what the rules are,” she said to him. “Perhaps making sure your brides and servants know what not to do would help matters.”
“She won’t be here for long,” he said. “It’s better not to get attached to them. I forgot that for a little while with this one, but I won’t forget again.”
“Janet isn’t a cog in your machinery,” Susan said tartly. “She’s a woman who nearly walked through fire and was hung over the front banisters while trying to stay alive after marrying you.”
The master reddened. “I wasn’t—I wasn’t always like this,” he said, his eyes meeting hers briefly. “I was different, once. But there have been so many in and out that I can’t take a chance on this one being the right one.”
Susan, remembering the set of Janet’s shoulders as she told Susan and the horselords that she would go with the soldiers, and the look of fierce delight and determination in the woman’s eyes when she climbed back into the suite after listening to the master play the violin, asked, “Are you sure about that? She hasn’t died yet, and she’s pretty resilient.”
“That’s the problem!” he burst out. “I don’t know! And anything other than perfect assurance and perfect matching is not good enough!”
“The Perfect Result,” said Susan, nodding. Her heart felt quite light suddenly. So the master wasn’t directing the story curse! “I know it’s dangerous to say too much, but you might try to give Janet a nudge or two in the right direction if you want her to live.”
“She already knows more than most of them,” he said, surprised. “I haven’t had to tell her anything that she didn’t already know: I think that’s why we bonded so quickly. She was trying to get me to push back, too.”
“The violin,” Susan said slowly. She had been right, then: Janet knew a lot more than she had given the woman credit for. “I thought that turned out rather well, actually.”
“It bound us together,” he said. “But it came at a cost: there are other threads now, and it’s the other threads that do the damage.”
“Other threads like your valet?” Susan suggested. “I shouldn’t worry about that, if I were you. I’ll take care of that particular thread.”
The master stared at her in something very like awe. “That’ll pull you in pretty tight. Are you sure you want to do that?”
“I’m already in tight enough,” said Susan. “And if you think it gives me any pleasure to see Janet gazing up at my friend, you’re very much mistaken. I’ve seen the threads that bind them together, and I’m not too pleased about it either.”
He sat down opposite her, his face the most open she’d seen it since he walked into the room, and leaned forward on his knees to gaze at her over the table. “Are you in love with him?”
“I’m not sure,” Susan said. “But I’d like the chance to find that out without having to fight off a curse and a rival at the same time. The curse isn’t playing fair, and when I can see how I could play dirty too, it makes it hard for me to resist. And then there’s another problem—”
The master said grimly, “You don’t know how many of your own feelings are real and how many of them are from this cursed place itself.”
“Exactly,” said Susan. “The most I can do while I’m here is try to keep everyone’s feelings at bay and sort them out later.”
“I wish I could do that,” he said, the dissatisfaction plain in his face. “But everything I do is bound up in feelings and making sure they’re the right ones at the right time.”
“You might try to be a bit more proactive with your bride,” Susan suggested. “She already likes you, and I can’t imagine she’d object to a bit more in the way of direct encouragement from you.”
The master, much like the hound, flopped bonelessly against the seat of his chair and rested his chin on his arms. “Yes, but I’ll have to give it to her soon, and then things will start falling apart,” he said miserably. “They always do.”
“Give her what, exactly?” asked Susan.
