AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Why do I trust you?” Jane asks.
“I don’t know,” Ivy says. “I trust you too. And I’ve been trying to imagine finding out that my aunt, who was basically my mom, was an operative. You’ve been so cool about it. I’d be furious.”
“You have no idea.”
Ivy hesitates again. “I think,” she says cautiously, “you should let Mrs. Vanders tell you whatever she knows. All the details, whatever they are. It might not help right away. But maybe it’ll help eventually.”
Jane gives up on her dumbwaiter metaphor. As a tear slides down her face, Ivy takes her hand.
Aunt Magnolia? Jane thinks, then remembers, with a sad tug, that she’s no longer speaking to Aunt Magnolia.
“Come up to the attics,” Ivy says. “You’ll be safe up there.”
* * *
In the west attics, Jane finds Kiran and Mrs. Vanders standing on opposite sides of a long table, arguing.
“You understand this was over a hundred years ago?” Mrs. Vanders is saying in a voice of exasperation.
“What does that matter?”
“The first housekeeper of Tu Reviens had a son,” Mrs. Vanders says. “Her son had gotten mixed up in the Spanish-American War some years before and became an American operative. He’d also fallen in love with a Cuban agent.”
“How romantic,” says Kiran caustically.
“It ended with both of them dead.”
“Of course it did,” says Kiran, “or it wouldn’t be so romantic.”
“They were Mr. Vanders’s grandparents,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Afterward, Espions Sans Frontières approached his great-grandmother, the housekeeper, about secretly using her employer’s house. Given that such an organization might have saved her son, can you really blame her for saying yes?”
“Yes to lying to my great-great-grandfather, who trusted her?” Kiran says. “Yes to endangering everyone in this house, which wasn’t hers, for generation upon generation? For making the family liable?!”
Another pitched battle that’s been taking place behind Kiran finally erupts into something no one can ignore. It’s a quarrel between Patrick and Grace Panzavecchia, who’s refusing to get into the dumbwaiter. “Why don’t you make me?” the little girl yells. “Why don’t you stab me with methohexital, again? I hate you!”
“Yeah,” responds Patrick reasonably, “I know you do, Grace, but Christopher’s down there all alone with Cook.”
“Because you brought him down there!”
“Yes. I know it’s unfair,” says Patrick. “Now, do you want to be awake to look after your little brother, or do you want to be asleep?”
“I hate you!” Grace yells. “You ruined my life! You left Edward Jenner behind!”
Ivy pulls out a chair at the table, then nudges Jane toward it. Numbly, Jane sits, Jasper settling in around her feet. Then Ivy moves to the end of the table and begins wrapping something with long sheets of bubble wrap. Vaguely, Jane recognizes it as the Brancusi sculpture, which is complete again, a flat, oblong piece of marble—the missing fish—attached to the pedestal. Ivy takes great care, as if she’s winding sticking plaster around a broken bone. The fish is pale and smooth, bonelike. It soothes Jane to watch.
“It’s your decision, Grace,” says Patrick calmly. “Awake or asleep?”
“It’s not my decision!” Grace says. “I didn’t decide to go away from home! I didn’t decide to leave Edward Jenner behind!”
“It’s true, she didn’t,” says Ivy quietly. “The least we could’ve done was collect Edward Jenner.”
“Ivy,” says Mrs. Vanders sharply, “that’s enough.”
“Okay,” says Kiran, “I give up. Isn’t Edward Jenner the guy who developed the smallpox vaccine? Like, two hundred years ago?”
“Edward Jenner—” Patrick begins.
“I was not talking to you,” says Kiran behind bared teeth, not looking at Patrick.
“It’s the dog,” Jane realizes.
Mrs. Vanders clears her throat. “Yes,” she says, “that’s correct. When Ivy, Patrick, and Cook collected the children from school and the park, the dog was at home. They had to leave him behind.”
“You left him alone in the house,” Grace says. “Now some mean people probably have him. He’s living with strangers. He’s a German shepherd! That means he’s genetically predisposed to degenerative myelopathy! Who’s going to take care of him?” Grace’s eyes are swollen and crying, her fists are held tight, and her small body is taut with the fury of despair. In Grace’s eyes, Jane sees something she recognizes. Grace Panzavecchia has been betrayed.
“Why is this necessary?” Jane hears herself asking, with real indignation. “She’s eight years old!”
With a sigh, Mrs. Vanders pulls a chair out and, heavily, sits down. “Because she’s in danger and we intend to help her.”
“But not my dog!” says Grace. “You don’t intend to help my dog! I hate my parents! They drugged me with a diuretic so I’d have to go to the bathroom so you could grab me! What kind of parents drug their kid? You’re all kid-snatchers!”
“Christopher is downstairs alone,” Patrick reminds her.
“I hate you!”
Jasper has stirred from Jane’s feet. He steps out from under the table tentatively. He walks a few steps toward Grace and stands before her.
“That’s not my dog!” says Grace. “That’s the stupidest dog I’ve ever seen! What’s wrong with his legs!” Then she drops down onto the floor and holds out her arms and Jasper climbs into her lap and she starts yelling “Ow! Ow!” because he’s heavy, and then she wraps her arms around him, presses her face into his neck, and starts howling. Jane is proud of Jasper. Possibly he’s the most sensible adult in the attics.
“I am never,” Ivy mutters from her end of the table, “ever, involving myself in anything like this again.” She’s now turned her attention to a painting. It’s the picture of the man in the feathered hat, the Rembrandt Jane saw on her first day in this house, sitting on a table inside Mrs. Vanders’s glass restoration room. It’s large and seems heavy. Ivy labors to move it around.
Grace throws her head back from Jasper and yells, “Someday I’m going to kill you all!”
“This is the last time I’m asking, Grace,” says Patrick. “Awake in the dumbwaiter or asleep in the dumbwaiter?” Patrick remains calm; he might be giving her the choice of broccoli or peas for dinner.
“She’s not going to keep quiet,” says Ivy. “Do you want a screaming dumbwaiter to slide past the gala guests who are looking at the second-story art?”
“No,” says Patrick, “which is why, unless you’re silent all the way down, Grace, Cook is going to put you to sleep the moment you reach the cellars, and then Christopher will see you that way.”
Grace has grown eerily calm. “Someday I’m going to kill you all,” she says, then adds, specially for Patrick, “And I’m going to kill you first.”
“Someday,” Patrick says with a suppressed sigh, “you’re going to look back on this experience and be amazed by how much latitude we allowed you, given the circumstances.”
Ivy makes a tiny snorting noise that brings Mrs. Vanders swinging sideways to direct at her the full force of an outraged expression.
“Ivy,” says Mrs. Vanders, “we’re aware of your dissatisfaction and we’re used to your childish tantrums. But HQ will not extend you the same latitude. If you expect fair treatment from them during your exit interview, you’re going to have to curb your self-righteousness and your sarcasm long before you get to Geneva.”
Ivy doesn’t respond to this, only looks down at the Rembrandt as if she’d like to pick it up and smash it on the floor. Instead, she sighs, runs one gentle finger along its top ridge, then eases a soft sack over its form. She follows this with the most enormous sealable plastic bag Jane has ever seen.
“I wa
nt my brother,” says Grace.
“Have you decided, then?” asks Patrick.
There’s a pause. “I’ll go if I can take the dog with me in the dumbwaiter,” says Grace.
“Quietly?” says Patrick.
“I’ll be quiet,” says Grace. “I can’t help it if the dog starts barking.”
“What are you going to do, pinch him?” says Patrick.
“You would think that,” says Grace, in a voice of the purest disgust. “You would think I’d pinch the dog, probably because you pinch dogs every day for fun.”
“All right,” says Patrick, with a touch of weariness, gesturing toward the dumbwaiter. “Get in.”
