“It’s nowhere near me,” Kiran grumbles. “It’s near Ravi.”
“Well,” says Mrs. Vanders with a sudden softening of expression, “we still have sleeping bags if you want to have sleepovers. You and Ravi and Patrick liked to do that when you were young and Ivy was just a baby, remember? She used to beg to be included.”
“We used to toast marshmallows in Ravi’s fireplace,” Kiran tells Jane, “while Mr. Vanders and Octavian hovered over us, certain we were going to burn ourselves.”
“Or set the house on fire,” says Mrs. Vanders.
“Ivy would make herself sick and fall asleep in a sugar coma,” Kiran says wistfully. “And I would sleep between Patrick and Ravi on the hearth, like a melting s’more.”
Memory comes on sharply; memory has its own will. Sitting with Aunt Magnolia in the red armchair, beside the radiator that clanked and hissed. Reading Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. “Sing Ho! for the life of a Bear!” Aunt Magnolia would say as Christopher Robin led an expotition to the North Pole. Sometimes, if Aunt Magnolia was tired, she and Jane would read silently, wedged together. Jane was five, six, seven, eight. If Aunt Magnolia was drying socks on the radiator, the room would smell of wool.
The car approaches the house from behind, roars around to the front, and pulls into the drive. It’s not a ship anymore, this house, now that Jane sees it up close. It’s a palace.
*
Mrs. Vanders opens a small, person-sized door set within the great, elephant-sized door. There is no welcoming committee.
Jane and Kiran enter a stone receiving hall with a high ceiling and a checkerboard floor on which Jane creates small puddles everywhere she steps. The air whooshes as Mrs. Vanders closes the door, sucking at Jane’s eardrums and almost making her feel as if she’s missed a whispered word. Absently, she rubs her ear.
“Welcome to Tu Reviens,” says Mrs. Vanders gruffly. “Stay out of the servants’ quarters. We don’t have room for visitors in the kitchen, either, and the west attics are cluttered and dangerous. You should be content with your bedroom, Jane, and the common rooms of the ground floor.”
“Vanny,” says Kiran calmly, “stop being an ogre.”
“I merely wish to prevent your friend from skewering her foot on a nail in the attic,” says Mrs. Vanders, then stalks across the floor and disappears through a doorway. Jane, unsure if she’s meant to follow, takes a step, but Kiran puts a hand out to stop her.
“I think she’s going to the forbidden kitchen,” she says, with half a smile. “I’ll show you around. This is the receiving hall. Is it ostentatious enough for you?”
Matching staircases climb the walls to left and right, reaching to a second story, then a third. The impossibly tall wall before Jane almost makes her dizzy. Long balconies stretch across it at the second and third levels, archways along them puncturing the tall wall at intervals. The balconies might serve as minstrels’ galleries, but they also serve as bridges connecting the east and west sides of the house. The archways glow softly with natural light, as if the wall is a face with glowing teeth. Straight ahead, on the ground level, is another archway through which greenery is visible and the soft glow of more natural light. Jane hears the sound of rain on glass. Her mind can’t make sense of it, in what should be the house’s center.
“It’s the Venetian courtyard,” Kiran says, noticing Jane’s expression, leading her toward the archway. She sounds defeated. “It’s the house’s nicest feature.”
“Oh,” says Jane, trying to read Kiran’s face. “Is it, like, your favorite room?”
“Whatever,” Kiran says. “It makes it harder for me to hate this place.”
Jane studies Kiran instead of the courtyard. Kiran’s pale brown face is turned up to the glass ceiling, the pounding rain. She is not beautiful. She’s the kind of plain-looking that a good deal of money can disguise as beautiful. But Jane realizes now that she likes Kiran’s snub nose, her open face, her wispy black hair.
If she hates this place, Jane wonders, why does she consent to come when Patrick calls? Or does Kiran dislike every place equally?
Jane turns to see what Kiran sees.
Well. What an excellent space to stick in the middle of a house; every house should have one stuck in its middle. It’s a glass-ceilinged atrium, stretching fully up the building’s three stories, with walls of pale pink stone and, in the center, a forest of slender white trees; tiny terraced flower gardens; and a small waterfall shooting from the mouth of a fish. At the second and third levels, long cascades of golden-orange nasturtiums hang from balconies.
“Come on,” Kiran says. “I’ll show you to your room.”
“You don’t have to,” says Jane. “You can just tell me where to go.”
“It’ll give me an excuse not to go looking for Octavian yet,” Kiran says. Laughter erupts from a room not too distant. She winces. “Or the guests, or Colin,” she adds, grabbing Jane’s wrist and pulling her back into the receiving hall.
It’s strange to be touched by someone as prickly as Kiran. Jane can’t tell if it’s comforting or if she feels a bit trapped. “What’s Colin like?”
“He’s an art dealer,” Kiran says, not directly answering Jane’s question. “He works for his uncle who owns a gallery. Colin has a master’s in art history. He taught one of Ravi’s classes when Ravi was an undergrad; that’s how they met. But even if he’d studied, like, astrophysics, he’d probably have ended up working for his uncle Buckley. Everyone in that family does. Still, at least he’s using his degree.”
Kiran has a degree in religion and languages she’s apparently not using. Once, Jane remembers, Kiran wrote a paper on religious groups working with governments to encourage environmental conservation that fascinated Aunt Magnolia. She and Kiran had talked and talked. Aunt Magnolia had turned out to know a lot more about politics than Jane had realized.
Kiran backtracks through the receiving hall and takes the east staircase on their left. The walls going up are covered with a bizarre collection of paintings from all different periods, all different styles. On every landing is a complete suit of armor.
Dominating the second-story landing is a particularly tall realistic painting done in thick oils, depicting a room with a checkerboard floor and an umbrella propped open as if left to dry. Jane feels she could almost step into the scene.
A basset hound, coming down the steps toward them, stops and stares at Jane. Then he begins to hop and pant with increasing interest. When Jane passes him, he turns himself around and follows eagerly, but his long radius makes for slow turning, and basset hounds aren’t designed for steps. He treads on his own ear and yelps. He’s soon left behind. He barks.
“Ignore Jasper,” Kiran says. “That dog has a personality disorder.”
“What’s wrong with him?” asks Jane.
“He grew up in this house,” Kiran says.
*
Jane has never had a suite of rooms to herself.
Kiran’s phone rings as they step through the door. She glances at it, then scowls. “Fucking Patrick. Bet you anything he has nothing to say. I’ll leave you to explore,” she says, wandering back out into the corridor.
Jane is free now to examine her rooms without needing to hide her amazement. Her gold-tiled bathroom, complete with hot tub, is as big as her bedroom used to be, and the bedroom is a vast expanse, the king-sized bed a mountain she supposes she’ll scale later, to sleep in the clouds. The walls are an unusually pale shade of red, like one of the brief, early colors of the sky at sunrise. Fat leather armchairs sit around a giant fireplace. Jane opens her umbrella and sets it to dry on the cold hearth, noticing logs stacked beside the fireplace and wondering how one goes about lighting a fire.