Castle & Key, page 24
Susan, whose sharp eyes had taken in the various lotions, soaps, and clothes that were carefully—almost ritualistically—laid beside the bathing pool, drew in a long, thoughtful breath through her nose.
“Not so much that you don’t like your bathing time and your women’s underwear,” she said. “I did the same when dressing as a boy, by the way. Men’s underwear isn’t as comfortable as ours, and it was a nice way of still holding on to that part of me.”
“I am a man,” said Mr. Oswald, her face taut and despairing. “I am a man! Why else would the story have chosen me? What woman dresses in trousers and doesn’t care for jewellery and prefers to be out and doing instead of sitting and sewing?”
“Well,” said Susan apologetically, “ones like me. There are quite a few of us, you know. We’re not a monolithic structure—and it’s not as though wearing trousers makes you a man, after all!”
“I can’t cook—I can’t even be beautiful!”
“All right, all right,” protested Susan. “I had no idea that I was so manly! You might care to know that my sister Isabella has also had occasion to dress as a boy from time to time—not to mention the height to pull it off—and that she sews better than any seamstress I know! Being a woman isn’t what she does, it’s what she is.”
“The story knows what it’s doing,” Mr. Oswald said, turning her face away. “I’m content this way. I only come here from time to time when I don’t seem to be able to bear it any more.”
“Yes,” said Susan. “That’s the bit that sticks with me now that I know: the fact that you don’t seem to be able to bear it without a break. I don’t see why you can’t wear your hair queued and keep your trousers and be free to be a woman anyway.”
“I did so once,” Mr. Oswald said, as if she couldn’t help herself. “And there was someone who loved me as I was. But no one stays here long, and if you want the Perfect Result, you have to look and act the part. You’ll learn that before long—I did, in the end.”
“Yes,” Susan said thoughtfully. “The curse really is very concerned about the way things look and how people act. I don’t suppose you’ll believe me if I say that there never is a Perfect Result?”
“There has to be,” Mr. Oswald said, and the despair was back in her eyes. “There has to be. It can’t be so cruel as to refuse us the Perfect Result after everything I’ve given up.”
Susan took in a breath that caught in her chest, sharp and sorrowful, and let it out more gently. “I see. If it helps, I think Janet is doing a very good job as the bride.”
“Quite a few of them do, at first. But the story knows people, and it knows that they always choose wrongly.”
“That happens quite often when the deck is stacked,” Susan said, but she said it beneath her breath. She took her feet out of the water and rose carefully; she still had Emmett and Brennan to see, and she couldn’t see them if the curse had caused her to knock her brains out on slippery tiled floors now that she knew a little more about it than she should. “Will you be all right?”
“As well as I usually am,” Mr. Oswald said, and Susan saw in her shoulders the familiar pinch of fear that she had taken for stiff demeanour the first time she met the woman. “You can’t—you won’t tell anyone, will you? You can’t tell anyone.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, because she knew exactly what it was Mr. Oswald was asking. “I won’t tell Mrs. Carmichael or the master that I saw you.”
She had made no promises not to tell Emmett or Janet, though Susan saw no need to tell anyone other than Emmett if absolutely necessary. They both already knew that the curse was inclined to push on people feelings and roles that they had no desire to play, and Susan, softly padding through the halls to find her way back out of the maze she’d found herself in, didn’t particularly want to think too deeply about this new reminder.
The problem, she was very well aware, was that she hadn’t yet been presented with such a heavy and unmistakeable proof of the best reason to be more careful in her dealings with Emmett. It was all very well to say that she was simply going along with the story of the curse and that she had to do everything she could to keep herself and Emmett safe, but there was a difference between gliding along beneath notice in a magic system and subsuming oneself in the system for whatever temporal gains could be had. Susan wasn’t sure which she was doing, and she didn’t like that feeling.
When this curse was undone and they were safely out, it was going to be very hard to readjust to the fact that Emmett’s feelings would dissolve along with it. In the meantime, and in the light of her own swiftly growing feelings, Susan found it very difficult to prevent herself from taking advantage of those feelings being there.
“This is what happens when you repress feelings for too many years,” she muttered to herself as she passed down the lower hallway and toward Brennan’s little nook in the front foyer.
It wasn’t until she was well across the moonlit floor that she saw the bizarrely empty shadows that occupied the corner that should have been warmly full of wood and grumblings.
“Brenners!” she said sharply, darting across the last of the chequered floor, but he wasn’t there.
He wasn’t anywhere in the foyer, either. Susan threw a look around the entire place, even lifting her eyes as high as the chandelier and the remnants of a balcony so high up in the recesses of the ceiling that she couldn’t see it properly. It wouldn’t have surprised her at this point to see that the hall stand had been propped up on one of the ledges that ran around the walls higher up as a continuous sort of sconce around the room.
Failing to see him there, Susan took a swift lap around the room, checking into the recessed windows and back down the hallway again. She went as far down the right wing as she could go, ignoring the heaviness of her heart that told her there was no chance of finding him again, and couldn’t stop herself from searching as much of the left wing as she could access as well. Night was pitch black by the time she got to the upper level of the manor, but Susan didn’t hesitate; she darted straight down the right wing of the manor in search of Brennan or Emmett—or perhaps both.
With her heart in her throat, she jogged silently along the hallway, daring it to change while she was running, and heard the soft sounds of someone else approaching just in time to dart sideways and behind one of the suits of armour.
Janet swept past a moment later, and Susan could have called out to her, but she had no patience for talking with the bride when her mind was so full of Brennan, so she waited in the shadows, perfectly still, until Janet turned the corner. Then she stepped out again softly, her bare feet noiseless against the carpet, and went after Emmett. There was a coldness in her heart that had as much to do with Brennan being missing as it did with seeing Janet coming from the direction of Emmett’s quarters; it was unsurprising but equally unpleasant to catch sight of Emmett mere moments after she started out again. Janet and Emmett had been meeting by either design or accident, but they had certainly met—they wouldn’t have been able to avoid it.
That bitterness was in the back of Susan’s throat, but all she could ask Emmett was, without preamble, “Have you seen Brenners?”
Emmett’s brow lined at once. “I thought you’d know where he was! I couldn’t find him earlier tonight, either.”
“Someone’s moved him, and I don’t know who,” Susan said, biting her lip. “I can’t even see that they’ve moved him with magic, and you know how little magic there is in the outer parts of the manor!”
“I’ve been along the top hall and down as far as I could on the left side.”
“I went through the bottom half of the manor, and not a hall moved out of place. If he’s still in the manor, he’s somewhere I can’t get to.”
Emmett nodded, his brows still pinched up in worry. “We’ll have to ask the footmen.”
“They won’t be out and about,” muttered Susan. “Not if they’re like Helfer: they’ll be caught up in the walls somewhere, being dribble-fed an idea the entire night that they’ve gone home and come to work the next day.”
“We’ll have to wait until tomorrow, then,” said Emmett, but Susan was under no misapprehensions that he liked the idea any more than she did.
“I’ll go after the footmen early,” she warned him, and he only nodded.
She had no doubt that he would want to be right there with her, asking.
Emmett walked her silently back to the hallway that ran toward the front of the house, and Susan couldn’t quite decide if he was busy with thoughts of Brennan or thoughts of a recent meeting with Janet in the shadowy halls. She didn’t ask, but Susan couldn’t decide if that was because she was worried about Brennan or worried about the answer to her question—and she wasn’t sure which made her feel more wretched, either. She went to bed still wretched.
* * *
Susan slept badly and woke early the next morning. She was up early enough to leave Janet sleeping with the hound stirring gently on the bed as she left the room, and made it back down to the lower half of the manor before anyone but the footmen were up.
Defying Mrs. Carmichael, she darted down the grand staircase at the front of the manor and nearly collided with one of the footmen, who was dusting something beneath the staircase.
“You, whichever one you are!” she said at once. “Where’s the hall stand?”
The footman looked at her moonishly. “The hall stand is gone,” he said. “We carried it out yesterday.”
“You carried it out?” Susan felt the air leave her lungs in a slow suffocation. “Where? Why?”
“The master ordered it burned,” said the footman.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Ordered it burned,” repeated Footman Two, coming up behind her.
With the sound of those words in her ears, Susan left the manor at a run, ignoring the danger of being alone anywhere around the manor, ignoring the protracted stares of the footmen as the door slammed behind her and cut off their vision. She had only one thought in her mind, and that was to get to the fire pit as quickly as possible.
It felt as though she had to fight through the mist—as though it clung to her and weighed her down—and Susan barely knew where she was or how she had gotten there until she was stumbling into the slightly warmer ambience of the furnace with its metal shell.
The fire was low and small. Susan, panting and very nearly sobbing, stared at it wildly and tried to convince herself that it was too small and cool to have been burning something as large as a hall stand so recently as last night without anything to show for it. She couldn’t convince herself, but neither could she say it wasn’t likely that a hallstand could have been burned. And after she had sifted through what she could of the ashes to find any remnant that might clear up the matter one way or another, and found nothing, Susan could only return to the manor. There was still a little hope, but it was very little indeed.
She took the stairs of the servants’ staircase three at a time and tumbled back into the suite to find the bride surprised and then flushed and pleased to see her. That would have tugged at Susan’s heart if she had had the wherewithal to feel anything other than dread.
“The hall stand,” she said, her words tumbling over themselves to get out. “Have you seen it?”
“The hall stand?”
“The one in the entryway. Have you seen it?”
“Oh yes, the talking hall stand,” said Janet.
“I beg your pardon?”
Janet looked at her in surprise. “The hall stand that talks! You must have heard it muttering to itself when the mist creeps in! Lately, I sit there and talk to it; it helps to clear my mind and unburden myself.”
“Yes, that’s the one,” Susan said, wondering rather wildly why Brennan would have talked with anyone when he knew it could be dangerous, and who else he might have spoken with.
Whoever it was, whatever he had learned in talking with them was likely to be the reason that he had been summarily carted off. Had it really been the master who had ordered it to be done? Why? What did he know, and had Susan been so wrong about his character as to have imagined him a good person when he wasn’t?
“I saw the gardeners carrying it across the foyer last night,” Janet said. “I thought it was odd, but I suppose it was needed somewhere else in the house.”
“I don’t think so,” Susan said, her throat very tight. “They said they were told to burn it.”
This time, Janet’s gaze was horrified. “Burn it? But it’s sentient!”
“Exactly,” Susan said grimly. “And they said it was the master who told them to do it.”
There was only a slight pause before Janet said, “You want me to ask him about it, don’t you?”
“I think you’re the only one who could get anything out of him about it,” Susan said, dropping to the floor and resting her back against the wall with her head dropped over her knees. Her throat still felt tight, because no matter what she did, or what information Janet got out of the master about Brennan, it would already be too late. Brennan was gone—gone and burned, or broken apart for firewood.
She had promised to keep him safe and to undo what she had caused to happen to him, and she hadn’t been able to do it.
Susan felt rather than heard or saw Janet leave the suite, and she was wearily glad for it. She had no strength to talk with the bride at that moment, and when the hound’s claws tapped over the threshold as it followed Janet out, another care was taken from her. She stayed as she was, in a convoluted mess of despair and occasional, thready hope, until the door softly opened again and Emmett dropped down beside her.
Susan automatically laid a hand on his arm to feel the warmth of his skin before she spoke. Then, when she did speak, she didn’t seem to have the energy or desire to remove it, so it simply stayed there, soaking in warmth.
“They said they burned him,” she said wretchedly. “Those two moonstruck footmen. He said he had something to tell me—something he overheard—and I told him I’d come back last night. He was already gone by then; you saw it too.”
“We don’t know that he’s dead,” Emmett said. “We’ll check the manor again, top to bottom. Even if he’s not here, the curse could have changed him to something else.”
“Could have,” said Susan, laughing bitterly. “Do you think it has?”
His silence was enough to tell her that he believed it as little as she did. “I don’t feel the kind of movement around the place that I did when Helfer died,” he said, after a moment. “There’s more of a pulling tighter, but nothing severed and joining together again.”
“There’s that, I suppose,” Susan said, sitting up a little bit straighter. “Brenners said—he warned me not to drink anything without getting the hound to have a bit of it first.”
“He thought someone was trying to poison you?”
“I suppose so. Someone must have known that he knew—and they had to know that Brennan wasn’t just a hall stand, too.”
“These people—” Emmett started, then stopped in frustration. “They know so much, and not enough.”
“Yes,” said Susan, feeling awfully numb. A thought occurred to her, and she asked, “Did Janet send you?”
“She said something had happened and told me where to find you.”
Susan took in a deep, silent breath through her nose and said, “I’ll have to find a way to talk to her again.”
“Did you quarrel?”
“Nothing like so easy, lummox,” Susan said tiredly. “Let’s not worry about that right now, shall we? I’ve a feeling I’ll need to do something about it later, but I don’t know that I can do it well right now.”
“I’ll see what else the footmen have to say about Brennan, then,” said Emmett, rising.
Susan wondered if he knew exactly how threatening he looked at that moment and thought that perhaps he did. He probably meant it, too.
“They were pretty open about it,” she said reluctantly, but she rose with him. “They said the master gave orders to burn it, and that they burned it. Janet says she’ll ask him about it, but she doesn’t believe he’d do something like that.”
“Do you think she will ask?”
“Oh yes,” Susan said tiredly. “That’s one thing I think she will ask. That’s what makes it so hard to—”
She stopped, and briefly met Emmett’s eyes.
He asked, “What’s hard?”
“Oh, everything, right now,” she said. “Let’s not talk about the bride just now, lummox. We’ve more important things to worry about.”
* * *
A kind of darkness lingered over the next day from breakfast through until well after dinner. Susan would have put it down to her own heaviness of heart if Janet hadn’t remarked on that darkness as well; apart from that passing remark, however, she saw little enough of the bride, who seemed content to spend as much time as possible that day with the master. Susan didn’t regret it.
Adding another layer of discomfort to the day, Mr. Oswald still wasn’t in evidence at all, and that worried Susan in a numb sort of way. It didn’t seem to worry Mrs. Carmichael.
Regan had said rather grimly at the breakfast table that morning, “We’re losing a lot this time, aren’t we, Mrs. C?”
Mrs. Carmichael didn’t so much as look at the breakfast table. “Mind your own Ps and Qs, or you’ll find yourself going the same way, Miss Regan.”
“No fear!” said Regan, getting up. “I know what’s what. I’ll go do the fireplaces, shall I? We’ll need the warmth today.”
She had given Susan a grin on the way out, jerking her thumb at the footmen who had just bumbled their way into the kitchen in step. That had chilled Susan more than the footmen themselves, who, if unpleasantly unsettling, at least seemed to be unaware of their own oddness.
Regan, fresh from the death of her closest co-worker, merely seemed to find the threat laughable instead of awful. Was she so used to death that the feeling faded quickly, or was that something else that the curse seemed to do as well? Susan wasn’t sure, but she found that the thought made her colder than the dense frigidity of the day.
