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This is impossible. Jane is laughing again. There is no way for her to recognize the person Ivy is describing, a person who salvaged submarines full of nuclear missiles, full of secret information, full of the bloated corpses of drowned soldiers. Aunt Magnolia took pictures of beautiful animals. She was trying to save the oceans. “That’s enough.”
“Okay,” Ivy says. “I only ever met her a couple times. She had a great wardrobe, and sort of a steady, reassuring temperament. She seemed—eccentric, but also practical, no-nonsense. Kind of like you.”
Ivy’s words make Jane wish, suddenly, for a mirror. She wants to find the parts of her face that are like Aunt Magnolia’s. “Was the Antarctica trip actually a spy trip?”
“As far as we know,” Ivy says, “Magnolia was really going to Antarctica to take pictures of penguins and whales.”
Is it better or worse, Jane wonders, that she died as a nature photographer, not as a spy?
“You know not to trust anyone in the house, right?” Ivy says. “Especially don’t get involved with that guy who’s pretending to be a cleaner, the one who calls himself Ji-hoon. He could be dangerous.”
“He actually is a cleaner,” Jane says. “I mean, he is cleaning things, whatever else he’s doing.”
Ivy smiles slightly. “I still wouldn’t trust him. Even to clean.”
“Why is he so dangerous, anyway?” Jane asks. “Who is he?”
“Mrs. Vanders would strangle me if I told you.”
“Is he, like, armed?”
“Oh, no question he’s armed,” Ivy says. “He wants to get to Grace. She has something he wants.”
“Grace!” Jane says, thinking of the girl, huddled up and crying, angry. Small. “What could Grace possibly have that armed people want?”
Ivy hesitates. “She’s got something in her mind. Information.”
In Jane’s own mind, something stirs. “Grace has an amazing memory,” she says. “She uses mnemonic devices. Her father is very proud of it.”
“Yes.” Ivy starts to say something more, then stops with a frustrated sigh. Strands of hair have escaped her messy knot and her shoulders seem hunched and tight. “I want to tell you everything,” she says. “I’m sorry, Janie. I just can’t.”
Jane wants to reach out and push a strand of hair out of Ivy’s eyes. She wants to touch her shoulder; she wants to understand.
She doesn’t touch Ivy, but Ivy’s eyes do touch hers once, shyly.
“I have to go,” Ivy says. “I’ll leave dinner outside your door in a little bit. I’ll tell Kiran you’re not feeling well, if that would help.”
“Okay.”
After Ivy leaves, Jane goes back to her morning room.
Tu Reviens is making noises. Hums of water, breaths of heat; settling moans. Jasper wanders blearily into the room and comes to lean against Jane’s feet. “This house makes a lot of weird sounds,” she says to him. “Don’t you think?”
A wail begins, so distant and so faint, so mixed with the strange, metallic banging of the heater that Jane would assume it was just a trick of wind or water if she didn’t know it was probably Christopher Panzavecchia, age two, somewhere in the house.
She goes once to the window, peeking down at Ji-hoon. He washes the glass, slowly, like someone giving the house a backrub to help it fall asleep.
Jane tries a deep, jellyfish breath, but she can’t do it. Even the jellyfish feels like a lie.
* * *
The house wakes her from a dream about—what is it? A man who’s stolen Baby Leo Panzavecchia and it’s more terrible than even the newscasters realize, because the man is infected with smallpox, and now Baby Leo is too. He’ll pass it on to Grace and Christopher, to Espions Sans Frontières, to the Sicilian Mafia, and to the fishes, because Baby Leo sleeps with the fishes.
The dream shifts as Jane leaves it behind, as dreams do. She flails around in a fit of itching, calling for Aunt Magnolia, who saves itchy, underwater babies, it’s part of her spy work, and then she’s awake, Aunt Magnolia’s scratchy wool hat pressed against her sweaty neck.
Jane is in her bed in Tu Reviens. A warm basset hound snoozes at her feet. The clock beside her bed glows the time: 5:08 a.m. She breathes through a spinning panic, remembering that in the weeks before that last Antarctic trip, Aunt Magnolia had been unusually distracted. She’d left a burner on one day after heating some soup, unheard-of for Aunt Magnolia. More than once, Jane had caught her staring into a book she clearly hadn’t been reading, because she’d never turned a page. And then there was the night Jane had woken to find her awake, the night Aunt Magnolia had made her promise to come here if invited.
The day Aunt Magnolia had left, Jane went into her own bedroom and discovered the hat sitting in the middle of her bed. Aunt Magnolia always took that hat with her to cold places. But that time she’d left it behind, for Jane to find. Why?
Why do dreams make us wake with questions that have nothing to do with the dreams?
Under the covers, Jasper crawls around until his head is resting against her elbow. Jane listens to his steady breathing, wondering if maybe Jasper breaths are even better than jellyfish breaths.
* * *
The day dawns yellow and green. Jane hasn’t really succeeded in falling back asleep. Finally she slips out of bed, quietly, so as not to disturb Jasper. She goes to the morning room and peers out the window.
A figure approaches the house from the ramble: Colin Mack, dressed all in black. He seems in a hurry, glancing over his shoulder more than once. It’s a little strange; does he think he’s being pursued? Why is he out there? Surely not everyone in the house is a spy? She watches him enter the house through the door that leads to the swimming pool.
When she turns back to face the room, the ruined umbrella on the floor undoes her. Its broken pieces are angled such that she can see purple fabric with the merest glimpse of a silver-gold interior. It creates a shimmer in her mind, the way a bright light will create a memory of itself that lingers inside a person’s eyelids, then fades. A momentary ghost of Aunt Magnolia.
“Aunt Magnolia?” Jane says out loud.
She’d always responded swiftly when Jane had called her, putting aside her own concerns whenever Jane had said her name. Those moments had been real.
Gently, Jane lowers her butt to the floor, her head leaning back against the window glass. The umbrella is a trick, nothing more.
* * *
Apparently Jane is allowed to attend breakfast when the time arrives, because no one tries to stop her. The route to the banquet hall passes through the ballroom. She keeps close to the walls and tries to avoid the team of women cleaning the ballroom floor.
No one is at breakfast, and no one seems to be serving, either. A carafe of coffee sits at the far end of the long table next to fruit, cold cereal, milk, sugar, and a pot of congealed oatmeal. She pours herself some cornflakes and eats quickly. Then it’s back to the receiving hall, which is swarming with people. She’s not sure where to go next, really, until she sees Jasper on the second-story bridge. He’s sitting contentedly on his rump, his nose poking through the balusters, and Jane thinks that maybe he has the right idea. She climbs to him. “I guess you’ve witnessed a lot of gala mornings, haven’t you, Jasper?”
The hullabaloo below begins to make more sense. The people resolve themselves into separate currents: cleaners and caterers and musicians. Patrick and Ivy, zooming across the hall or up and down the stairs at random intervals, no doubt doing spy stuff. Do they ever even do any housework at all? Who knows. Mrs. Vanders herself does not zoom. Mrs. Vanders stands like a rock in the center of the receiving hall, the currents swerving gracefully around her. She barely speaks, as if she’s controlling the action with her eyeballs.
Kiran comes along the bridge and stops on the other side of Jasper, yawning. Yet another person who has no idea what’s going on in her own
house. Don’t make me have to lie to you, thinks Jane.
“Morning,” Kiran says with half a smile. Her hair is pulled back into a ponytail and Jane thinks maybe she’s not wearing any makeup yet. “Getting the bird’s-eye view?”
“It makes more sense from up here,” Jane says.
“Are you feeling better?”
“Yeah, I’m lots better today.”
Kiran leans her elbows on the railing. “When we were little,” she says, “these were our favorite days of the year. I used to love standing here with Patrick, watching all the people. Ivy was tiny then; she would hold my hand and stare, her eyes big as saucers. Ravi loved getting in everyone’s way.”
“How? What would he do?”
“Mainly he would slow everyone down by insisting on carrying things himself, and having really bad ideas about where everything should go.” Kiran flicks her ponytail over her shoulder, half smiling. “I’m sure he thought he was helping.”
“And he was allowed to do that?”
Kiran shrugs. “Not if Mr. or Mrs. Vanders or Octavian caught him at it, but they were always running around like crazy themselves. Ravi knew how to avoid them. He was a charming little autocrat. It was . . . educational to watch how people responded to him.”
“Educational?”
“A lesson in class,” Kiran says. “Probably also sex, and certainly age and race. What does a white, female string quartet do when a little half-Bengali rich boy whose white daddy owns the house tells them to set their stage up someplace really stupid, like the middle of one of the staircases?”
“I don’t know,” Jane says. “What?”
“It was generally one of three things,” Kiran says. “Ignore him; stall until a Vanders or Octavian came through and shut him up; or do what he said while shooting him hateful looks. In that particular case, they ignored him, and when he started howling, they kept ignoring him, and finally Octavian came in and carried him away on one shoulder, kicking and screaming for Mum. Who of course didn’t come, because she was working.”
“What would Octavian do next?” Jane says. “Spank him?”
“Probably go bowling with him,” Kiran says, “while having a man-to-man talk about respect for other people.”
