Chapter Twenty-Three – Teresa

  Agatha twisted my head a little bit, fingers digging into the hair around my ears. My neck popped, a loud crack that felt like it startled her.

  “Talking about this? It’s making me realize that I barely remember that whole decade. Things were changing too fast for me to get anything really locked away in my head. Aufrey’s still there, though, clear as day. I haven’t been able to forget him – I doubt I could even if I wanted! There’s still two things that stand out, though.”

  “What are they?”

  “Well, the first is that he apologized. How he apologized. I mean sure, he said he was sorry, but then he took off the boots. Shoved them straight into one of those bags that’s bigger on the inside – those are absolutely amazing for laundry duty by the way, if you ever need to do it – but all he had under them were socks. He did it every time he came through here, after that. Just took off his shoes at the threshold and went around in his stockings. The darned man never even wore the same ones twice!”

  She laughed, a softer sound than most of her voice. “Just imagine it, this tall, chiseled, and brooding sorcerer – or whatever he was, I don’t rightly get witchcraft – walking around in the most ridiculous things you’d ever see. Stripes. Dots. Little ducklings. I swear he made a game of it and there was nobody with the bullocks to call him out on it. Us servants didn’t really have a motivation to though – we actually ran a betting pool on what color his next set would be, or what pattern. Won it three times, myself!”

  Wait, was that why there were so many weird socks in one of the hall closets that we’d never seen him wear? I’d thought those had been Mom’s or something that he just wouldn’t throw out. While I was thinking about that she took her hands away and scooted her stool back with that same wooden scraping sound as earlier.

  “Sorry to pause the story Ma’am, but I’m done here. Everything else is best done over by the mirror, so I’ll let you finish up. Just rinse off when you’re done, grab the towel, and we’ll get started on the rest. Can’t take up all our time gabbing, sadly. The Ball’s already starting. I’ll be over there – don’t worry, I’m not one to peek.”

  Her footsteps went off to the side and when I looked back she was fiddling with the tray. Her head was down, facing away from the mirror. That was as good as I was going to get, probably, so I rushed through with washing my face and underarms. They’d been hard to get before without pulling my chest out of the water. I spent about thirty seconds with my hand on the plug, just staring at the dark water. When I pulled it, I rushed to let more water in. I mixed the hot and cold to keep it just on the edge of tolerable, then started using the pitcher to rinse out the last of the things from my hair.

  That’s when I saw the spot.

  The stubborn spot on the back of my hand. A grey patch of caked-on ash that had been soaked in blue blood, right between two of my knuckles. The skin around it looked stained. Like a finger had pressed down, hard, and smeared it around.

  Where he’d held me.

  I scraped at it with the soap until the skin was raw and red. The bar fell apart. So I started scratching. I didn’t stop when the color was gone, or when it started to hurt. Not until the pain turned sharp and my fingers came away bloody.

  The rest of the rinsing was rushed. I closed the taps and let the tub drain as I jumped out, trying to keep my eyes off that hand. The bloody side of the towel I dried off with went onto the ground as I tried not to slip on the wet wood. The second towel wrapped around me, from just above my breasts down to mid-thigh. Way too exposed for comfort, but still better than the alternative.

  This towel was so white that I didn’t want to bloody it. I kept the stinging patch on my left hand covered with my right, which wasn’t easy while keeping the towel tight against me. The shivering on the walk over to Agatha wasn’t just because the air here felt cold.

  She sat me down on the stool without a word, then grabbed a hairbrush and started running it through my hair. I kept my eyes down and both hands holding the top of my towel up. I didn’t want to look in the mirror and see myself.

  She’d gotten halfway through before breaking the silence.

  “You’re awfully stiff again, Ma’am. I know you don’t want to listen to an old bat like me, but you should really relax. Save the tension, the worrying, and all of that stuff for when it can actually make a difference. A person can’t stay all taut like that forever without something snapping. I’d hate to watch it happen to you.”

  I relaxed, but not by much.

  “There, that’s better! You still don’t have to talk, but I believe I’ve got some stories to finish for you. I told you about the socks already, but that wasn’t the main thing. Sorry, I get distracted a lot when I actually get to talk to someone like this. The Masters aren’t exactly conversational, most of the time, and the House doesn’t really talk. Not like you and I. The other servants are always a bit intimidated too, can you believe it?”

  “The unforgettable bit is that he cleaned the entire Great Hall for me. It would’ve taken me days of nonstop work on my own – and that’s if it didn’t decide to change before I finished. You’ll see what I mean by that in a few hours, Ma’am. It’s breathtaking, the first time. Anyway, he helped me up after saying he was sorry – my knees haven’t hurt the same since, by the way – and then he knelt down himself and grabbed my rag.”

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  She sat down her brush and started to fiddle with something off on the table that I wasn’t willing to turn to look at. I tried to swallow the knot in my throat and managed to get out a few words.

  “He did it by hand?”

  “No no no, Ma’am. Or well, sort of? Hands definitely got used, but they weren’t exactly his. Not the way you and I have hands. No, he pocketed the rag for some reason. Still no clue why, actually. Guess I’ll never know now that he’s gone. Then made this grand sweeping gesture across the room. It had to be for my benefit, since even servants with the Gift here don’t really need the hand stuff for things or so they say. He has to be so far beyond us that we can’t even compare.”

  She sighed, dreamily. “However he did it went over my head, that’s for sure, but I saw what he did. The floor started to ripple. Like a heat haze that you could feel, I think, or those mirages that sailors always talked about. I swear, I’ve never seen the wood of the House shiver like that, not before or since. It went out like a rock into a pond, but instead of waves it was little hands reaching up. They were each smaller than my thumb, like miniature versions of mine. Right down to the weird knuckle.”

  She held up her right hand in the mirror and waggled the digit. She was clutching a handful of hairpins, or at least that’s what they looked like, in her other fingers.

  The knuckle didn’t look all that weird.

  “Those things were tough. They went all through the hall in a few seconds and picked up the people and furniture. Then they started sweeping. No rags or water or anything; they just grabbed or pushed or dragged everything on the ground that wasn’t meant to be there and passed it along until the hands by the door tossed everything out into the Wood. It was one of the most surreal things I’ve ever seen here, ma’am, and that’s a high, high bar.”

  She started smiling again before I looked down at the table. Despite it all I had to bite back a laugh when I saw that she’d stuck some of the pins in her mouth while juggling a brush and a vial of oil between her hands. They stuck up, one almost poking into her nostril, and bounced around like a Walrus’s tusks. She didn’t say anything until she had a part sectioned off and was running the brush and oil through it.

  “The little wonders waved at me once they had everything cleaned out. Then they all just sank back into the floor. I swear they’re still around here somewhere; something keeps loosening any bad stains I go to clean up and I know I see them around sometimes. It’s not all that outrageous no matter what people say about me, right? Even back home something a man like your grandfather did would stick around a bit, I think, but here it literally can’t help but leave some echoes.”

  She moved onto another section of my hair while she was paused. Whatever the oil was, it made my hair shine. Literally. It was reflecting some of the light here when she rustled it around, looking more golden than the usual flax color. Hesitant as I was to think it – it was actually pretty.

  “The other thing I won’t forget were his eyes. You have them too Ma’am, with that purple and the gold and the green. His cheeks too, I think. You’re exactly what I expected when I heard his daughter had kids; you’re a spitting image of her.”

  Nobody had ever said that before. Then again Grandpa didn’t like talking about her and nobody else we were around had known her. We’d never had any pictures up, either. For the eyes, though, I could sort of see what she meant. People always said they were hazel and that the purple look was just light being weird – but looking here it was a lot more like a dark purple than a distorted brown where the threads of gold and green ran through the iris.

  “His eyes, they had something more though. I can’t put it into words, but whatever it was isn’t there in yours. It was like time stopped when I looked up into them. I know I sound like some rich mistress waxing poetic about her beau of the week while she fans herself on a fainting couch, Ma’am, but it really did feel like my heart sped up and everything else slowed down. Everyone that saw it says it was just a few seconds. To me, it was like a lifetime.”

  She sighed and put in the last of the pins. Her hands hovered in the air over my shoulders for a bit before she dropped them to her sides.

  “Everything around me faded away. The floor, the great hall, him – all that was left were his eyes and vague blurs that squirm away when I try to remember them. The pounding in my chest was like I’d been running for hours, the warmth on my skin was like the sun had been beating down on me the whole time. It’s not a feeling you get here, Ma’am. Oh hells do I miss it. I felt my hair moving in a warm breeze that rustled leaves around me, twirling around as it carried the taste of flowers and bark. That was impossible too – there’s no wind in the House, not like that. No leaves, either, not healthy ones. I know I’ve been here for a while, but I remember what a windy forest sounds like. It shouldn’t rasp like that.”

  She sniffled and wiped a few tears away with the back of her hand.

  “It’s like I was falling into something else, somewhere and someone different. I could feel my skin start to prickle and my bones start to shift around, like I needed to change. To be whatever I was remembering – whatever was still in his eyes. He stopped it by looking away. It didn’t hurt even when everything snapped back in place. Not until it all hit me. The sadness. As crushing as when I saw my own daughter dead and fled here. I was missing something and I couldn’t even say what it was. The thoughts, the feelings, they ran off just as quickly as everything else. All that was left were the scraps of memories.”

  “He had this little, sad smile on his face as he steadied me there. It didn’t reach his eyes. The happiness it had started with stuck with me, but with the rest it was so hollow. There had to be more to it, but it just wasn’t there. I never asked him about it, never even went up to him again. I was always too nervous or too busy or he just came through too fast for me to catch him. Then he had your mother with him and I almost did, but the Masters actually stopped me. Said to let dead things lie.”

  She sucked in a breath and put down the brush.

  “The last time I saw him, she was gone and he just looked so – so broken. Now he’s gone too, and I’ll never know what it was. I don’t even know if I’m better off this way.”

  She was quiet for a few seconds and her voice trembled when she did talk.

  “It was part of his past, I think. Something special. Even if other people had felt it or seen it, it wouldn’t have been the same. I can feel that in my bones. It was still just a piece. And knowing that the rest was out there, that something hurt him so badly and I didn’t know what it was, then that it’s just gone now? I can feel it missing if I look, a gap that he left that won’t ever heal. When I think about it, it’s like a hole rips open in my chest and a rope goes taut around my throat.”

  The tears took both hands to wipe away, and her sobbing left me feeling so, so small.