Cassie didn’t have to worry about that. She’d come from nowhere, and could disappear the same way. She didn’t have a career to worry about, and had abandoned the dream of the fashion internship long ago. Most probably, due to Abigail’s mistake, she was the only person who’d come for the interview and Ms. Rossi had used it to incentivize her to take the job.
If the worst happened, she could go back to the hostel and look for another job. Washing dishes, perhaps, or working as a chambermaid.
She heard voices in the hallway, and then the front door creaked and rattled. That meant that Maurice and Ms. Rossi had headed out for the day.
Cassie went up to the girls’ bedrooms, where she was not surprised to find them already awake and dressed.
“Let’s go and get some breakfast,” she said.
While they ate, Cassie asked them what their schedule was for the rest of the day.
“Do you have a riding lesson later on?” she asked, remembering that the children had said they rode on Sunday. To her surprise, Nina shook her head.
“Our lesson this week was canceled,” she explained.
“Why’s that?” Cassie asked.
Nina took another bite of toast without answering, which made Cassie think that canceling the lesson was part of their punishment. If there had been a genuine reason, she was sure the girls would have told her.
“Well, what do you want to do today? Shall we go out somewhere? Do you want to play a game?”
“I would like to stay at home,” Nina said, and Venetia nodded in agreement.
Cassie stared at them, worried. It seemed as if there was no way of getting through to these children. They wouldn’t let her become close, because they were frightened of the consequences. They didn’t want to do any activities that they hadn’t expressly been told to do, for the same reason. They were effectively trapped here, and although it hadn’t been of their making, they were the ones who were refusing to leave.
Cassie couldn’t blame the girls. All they were doing was trying to avoid conflict, and that was quite normal. But it meant her hands were tied. Their silence wasn’t helping her, and it was protecting their abuser.
Cassie wondered again what had happened to their father. Where was he, and what role did he play in all of this? It could be that he had been the root cause of this, and their mother was continuing with what he’d started.
“We have some homework to do,” Venetia said.
She sounded happy to be mentioning it. It seemed that homework was a safe subject in this house. You couldn’t get punished for doing it.
“Let’s go into the small dining room. You can work there,” Cassie said.
The girls went upstairs and returned with their school bags. Cassie took her phone into the dining room. If they were willing to speak up about what was happening, it would be helpful to record what they said.
“Do you get lots of homework?” she asked Nina.
“Not too much. But I practice what I have learned at school. I need to be in the top of the class, so I repeat the exercises at home,” Nina explained.
Cassie felt a pang of sympathy. This seemed to be their life. School work was the only safe activity they had. She watched Nina’s focused efforts and wondered how she’d ever thought that a nine-year-old would choose to spend her entire day studying. She’d been misled, and believed a scenario that was completely false.
Although Nina focused her full attention on repetitive rows of sums, Venetia seemed tired and fractious, which Cassie guessed might be caused by her long day yesterday with no food. She was trying to behave as she should, but didn’t have the energy to do more than go through the motions. She opened her math book and her notepad, but after doing a few exercises, she started drawing patterns in the margin instead.
Glancing at the artwork, Cassie was impressed by the detail shown, and the eye for shape and proportion that Venetia clearly possessed.
“That’s very pretty,” she complimented the younger girl.
“Thank you,”
Venetia gave her usual polite response, but her voice sounded lackluster. Cassie was sure that by now, any other child would be in tears. After lunch, she decided she would put both the children down for a nap. A rest would do them good.
In the meantime, she was interested to see if Venetia might enjoy drawing something else. Art could be a form of therapy, and perhaps while they were happily distracted, she could ask them about their father and they would open up.
“Do you have a sketch pad in your school bags?” Cassie asked. “I would like to see you both draw a picture.”
When the girls shook their heads—clearly, their mother did not regard art as important—Cassie decided to take matters into her own hands, and damn the consequences.
She marched downstairs and headed to Ms. Rossi’s office. In there, she’d seen a printer, and where there was a printer, there would be paper.
She spotted the box of paper immediately, neatly stacked on a shelf at the back of the office. There was an open ream, and Cassie took a few sheets from it.
Cassie held her breath as she left, because she was sure this counted as disobeying the rules, and she could still remember how furiously Ms. Rossi had fired the intern while sitting in that expensive, leather-upholstered office chair.
Back in the children’s dining room, she placed the paper in front of them. Although the children were short on colored crayons, they had plenty of pencils and blue and black pens, which Cassie hoped would be enough.
“Let’s all draw,” she said, deciding that the activity might go better if she participated, too.
“What are you going to draw?” Nina asked her.
“I’m going to draw my sister, all dressed up for a party,” Cassie said.
She imagined Jacqui, stylishly garbed in one of
