“I don’t know. Must have been before my time,” he said through his purr. The sofa must have been comfortable. “It’s only ever been him here, as far as I know.”
Jealousy roiled in my stomach like a bad stew. I walked to the dressing table, a frivolous thing on spindly legs that looked like they were about to take off running, and stared into the mirror. The thing was surrounded by a frame like that around an oil painting, which looked very odd encircling my face, I can tell you.
The room made me feel all sorts of painful longings that I thought I had long ago suppressed. I felt a pang of anger at my mother, for dying when she did and leaving me without anyone to talk to about such things—how to care for your hair and skin, how to dress, how to talk to someone you found appealing.
And then I felt a great surge of guilt, because whose fault was it that she had died? Perhaps I was better off alone, rather than subjecting someone else to the curse of my bad fortune. I turned my back on the mirror, walked over to the bed, and touched the coverlet. Black lace.
“You said the House would show me things as I needed them,” I said. “Why do you think I need this room?”
“How should I know?” said Cornelius. “I’m just a cat. The House probably has its reasons.”
I opened every drawer and cupboard. Mayhap this was where the sorcerer kept my heart, amid his lover’s frills and furbelows. In an ornate box perhaps, like a piece of jewelry to be presented to a lover; because this was the kind of room a rich man would give his lover. I couldn’t fool myself into thinking he kept it for when his mother visited (if he had one)—there was far too much skimpy lace nonsense in the drawers for that. I rummaged about but didn’t find anything but more clothing.
After a while, I gave up and left the room, closing the door softly behind me as if to avoid disturbing an invisible occupant. There was such a strong sense ofpresencein there.
“So will this room stay here, like the kitchen?” I asked Cornelius.
“I keep telling you, I don’t know for sure,” said Cornelius.
When I tried the doorknob again, however, giving in to a shameful desire to finger those soft fabrics again and imagine the fine lady inside them, the room was gone.
I had missed my opportunity, whatever it was. I hadn’t seen what the House wanted to show me. Or maybe I was giving it too much credit or imagining it to be too much on my side. Maybe it had just wanted to taunt me with the specter of the kind of woman I would never be.
The next room of any interest that appeared to me was more prosaic than the boudoir. I was on my way to the kitchen, this time, when another door appeared in front of me, and another doorknob insinuated itself under my hand. I rolled my eyes and opened it.
I don’t know what I had expected—another bedchamber? Very little would have surprised me. A room full of nothing but pungent black lilies, for example, or a torture chamber hung with blades and screws, or an enormous corridor lined with oil paintings with eyes that followed you about. Any of those would have seemed quite at home in the sorcerer’s black mansion, and plenty stranger things would have fit right in, too.
What I saw, instead, was a plain room, still black, lined with locked cabinets, with a wide plain table in the center. There was a floor that needed sweeping, some cobwebs, and a painting covered by sackcloth. Or perhaps it was a mirror; I couldn’t tell.
Before I could step in, the door wrenched itself from my hand and slammed shut, as if from a gust of wind, leaving me gaping.
“What are you doing?” said a voice from behind me, and I almost jumped out of my skin. I whirled around. The sorcerer stood just behind me, so close that it set my senses swirling. He was watching me rather as a well-fed cat watches a bird—with speculation rather than predatory intent.
“You’re exploring,” he said.
So he knew about my wanderings through the House. I almost apologized, but I managed to stop myself in time. “It’s my job to clean, isn’t it?” I said. “And I wouldn’t call it exploring. My feet get twitched out from under me, and I find my hand on a new doorknob, that’s all.” As casually as I could, I added, “I found a bedchamber. A woman’s, by the look of it.”
“My sister’s.”
A sorceress? But I was shamefully relieved it hadn’t been the chamber of a lover.
“She lives here?”
“She used to.” Something flickered across his face that I couldn’t identify.
“Oh.”
I waited for him to tell me to stop snooping, but he did not. He stared at me for a moment, then turned on his heel and strode away, his hair lifting and settling about his shoulders.
And so things continued for the next several days. The sorcerer and I barely spoke. I came in at every meal, announced myself, announced what was on the plate, and left. After a day or two, however, he started to request certain dishes, or protest petulantly that he didn’t like cabbage, or clams.
It was no skin off my nose. The House provided everything I needed, however exotic, and it all seemed real enough. I did wonder, though, if the food we ate was like the mice the House created for Cornelius to chase—convincing, but not quite as nutritious as the real thing.
Whether it was real or not, Cornelius had already grown plumper on my cooking, and the sorcerer’s throne room was clean of plates and smelled of soap rather than rotting meat, which could only be an improvement.
It had been a satisfaction to scrub that room properly for the very first time and see the stains disappear. The sorcerer had watched me in silence while I worked, chewing on his nails, and hadn’t offered any charms or cantrips to help speed the process.
I learned my way about, for the most part, if the House behaved and kept things in the same places, and I grew used to sleeping in the huge bed with the enveloping black covers.
