Sophia and I took up residency in a small house at the back of the property that had been occupied by a watchman’s family, a place to which we could retreat from the stench of sewers, the reek of paint, and the chatter of hammers.
There were also interruptions. Von Goldereau d’Lornschilde dropped by frequently, usually to be told we were not home. We heard it rumored that he had challenged Sophia’s identity, on the grounds that Stentor’s granddaughter should be older than Sophia appeared to be. Hearing of this, Sophia summoned an attorney and sent him to Von Goldereau with a message saying that friends of the Siblinghood were granted the favor of youth, as indeed, we were, and members of the Siblinghood would be glad to testify for us. She and I had aged mostly on the Gardener’s time.
A day or two after we arrived, a strange old man came with a bunch of keys, which he said Stentor d’Lorn had put in his keeping with instructions they were to be given to his granddaughter and none other.
“There’s a man been looking high and low for these,” the old man said. “Name’s Von Goldereau d’Lornschilde.”
“He didn’t know you had them?” I asked him.
“No. He looked among the mighty, never thought to look among us, the little folk.”
“Why did d’Lorn leave them with you?” I asked.
“Oh, I owed him a favor, ma’am. He took my son, Fessol, his name is, when he was only six years old. Stentor d’Lorn took a liking to him and sent him to another world to be educated and made into a fine gentleman. Told me if I’d keep these keys until his granddaughter came to reclaim them, she’d see I got to go there, see my boy, how wonderful a life he has.”
I shivered when I heard this, for no reason except that such an act of charity was out of character for the man who had brooked no opposition from anyone during his life, and who had killed his son-in-law out of hand—as was well known in Bray. Sophia, however, took the keys without comment, asking only for the oldster’s name and where he might be found, that she might properly reward him when she learned where his grandson had gone.
A goodly number of cooks and butlers and other assorted functionaries were hired and let go again before the heiress had assembled a staff that could, in her opinion, acquit itself well in opening the house to guests.
“Anytime soon?” I asked in dismay.
“Not soon, no,” said Sophia almost fretfully. “I want to be an influence for good on this world, and this house…it works against me! I’m not comfortable in it.”
No more was I. Shadows swallowed the corners; sounds chittered along the ceilings; a foul smell which was not sewers came and went at intervals. The place displayed luxury without comfort, ostentation without art. I hated it. Each day saw the arrival of people paying calls, not only people from Bray but from all the cities up and down the shore. Some of them, who hinted to Sophia’s butler that they had handled her grandfather’s business (wink, nod, wink), she declined to speak with personally, leaving it to the servants to put them off with evasion or hauteur or whatever worked best.
Sophia learned of a man in Bray who located people, and she hired him to find any still living who had served the house in Stentor’s time. When they were ferreted out, she spoke with them, giving them generous gifts in return for information. From one of the former gatekeepers, she learned where Benjamin Finesilver’s bones had been hidden. She sent for them to be moved into the tomb of the d’Lornschildes, directly above the tomb that held Stentor himself, but she planned no vengeance on those who had followed her grandfather’s orders. We had both learned from the Gardener that old vengeance is like old cake: still seeming sweet, but so dry that one invariably chokes on it.
Some days, I simply had to get away from the place, and since there was always marketing to do, I took the basket and strolled down into the town to spend a few hours among the sellers of eggs, fruit, vegetables, fish—many of them things I had eaten in Swylet—and in the little alleys where stilt walkers and fire-eaters, fortune-tellers, magicians and jugglers amused the populace. One I most enjoyed was a Trajian, long-armed and long-legged, with a furred little body and a face like a sloth, a visual cross, I thought, between that animal, a teddy bear, and a monkey. He always finished his act by putting out a little table and two chairs, then seating a doll in one of the chairs, a doll dressed as a crowned king. The Trajian juggled the table, the chairs, the king, who promptly came apart in the air, arms, legs, body, head, crown, all seven parts spinning off in different directions, only to be skillfully gathered on the fly and reassembled. Each time I saw the performer, he looked directly at me and smiled. This confused me a little. Trajians, so the Gardener had told me, kept themselves at a distance from people of other races, for they were a people many times unjustly accused of everything from laying misfortune to the spread of
