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Ivy flashes a grin. “Yeah, basically. Some of the houses were being remodeled, or torn down. Octavian bought parts. But in other cases, it’s hard to say how he got his hands on them.”
“Are you saying he stole?”
“Yes,” Ivy says. “Or bought stuff that was stolen. That’s why the pillars don’t match, or the tiles, or anything really. He collected the art the same way, and the furniture. Apparently ships would arrive full of random crap, maybe a door from Turkey, a banister from China. A stained-glass window from Italy, a column from Egypt, a pile of floorboards from some manor kitchen in Scotland. Even the skeleton is made of the miscellaneous crap he collected.”
“So . . . the house is like Frankenstein’s monster?”
“Yup,” she says, “speaking of sci-fi. Or like some kind of cannibal.”
“Will it eat us?”
Her smile again. “It hasn’t eaten anyone yet.”
“Then I’ll stay.”
“Good,” she says.
“Some of the art seems newer.”
“Mrs. Vanders and Ravi do the buying these days. Octavian gives them permission to spend his money.”
“What things do they buy?”
“Valuable stuff. Tasteful stuff. Nothing stolen. Ravi works as an art dealer in New York now, actually, with Kiran’s boyfriend, Colin. It’s like his dream job. I think he cries with happiness every morning on his way to work. Ravi is bananas about art,” she adds, noticing Jane’s puzzled expression. “He’s been known to sleep under the Vermeer. Like, in the corridor, in a sleeping bag.”
Jane is trying to imagine a grown man sleeping on a floor beneath a painting. “I’ll try to remember that, in case I’m ever walking around in the dark.”
“Ha!” says Ivy. “I meant when he was a little kid. He doesn’t do it now. We used to play with some of the art too, like, pretend-play around it. The sculptures, the Brancusi fish. The suits of armor.”
While Jane tries to file all this information away, rainwater pounds on the glass ceiling of the courtyard. “What about the courtyard?” she says, taking in the pink stone, the measured terraces, the hanging nasturtiums. “It isn’t unmatching. It feels balanced.”
“Mm-hm,” says Ivy with a small, crooked smile. “The first Octavian rescued the entire thing from a Venetian palace that was being torn down, and brought it over on a boat in one piece.”
There’s something preposterous about a ship carrying three stories of empty space around the Italian peninsula, through the Mediterranean, and across the Atlantic.
“This house kind of gives me the creeps,” Jane says.
“We’re about to go into the servants’ quarters,” Ivy says. “It’s nice and simple in there, with no dead polar bears.”
“Does that bother you too?”
Ivy gives a rueful shrug. “To me, he’s just Captain Polepants.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what Kiran and Patrick called him when we were little. They thought it was hilarious, because Kiran’s half British, and in the U.K., pants means underpants. Mr. Vanders had a name for him too,” Ivy says, screwing her face up thoughtfully. “Bipolar Bear, I think it was. Because he likes psychology. Funny, right?”
“I guess,” Jane says. “My aunt was a conservationist. She took pictures of polar bears instead of making rugs out of them.”
“Speak of the devil,” Ivy says, looking down to the courtyard below. An elderly man darts across the floor. He’s a tall, dark-skinned black man in black clothing, with a ring of white hair. He carries a small child on one hip, maybe two or three years old. All Jane can see of the child from above is wavy dark hair, tanned skin, flopping arms and legs. “Why?” the toddler yells, squirming. “Why? Why!”
“Kiran never mentioned there’d be so many kids here,” Jane says, remembering the little girl digging in the rain outside her window.
Ivy pauses. “That was Mr. Vanders,” she says. “He’s the butler, and Mrs. Vanders is the housekeeper. They manage a pretty big staff. He’s always in a hurry.”
“Okay,” Jane says, noticing that Ivy’s said nothing about the child, and that her face has gone measured, her voice carefully nonchalant. It’s weird. “You said we’re going into the servants’ quarters?” she adds. “Mrs. Vanders actually told me I’m not allowed there.”
“Mrs. Vanders can bite me,” says Ivy with sudden sharpness.
“What?”
“Sorry.” Ivy looks sheepish. “But she’s not in charge of the house. She just acts like she is. You do whatever you want.”
“Okay.” Jane wants to see the house, every part of it. She also wants to not get yelled at.
“Come on,” Ivy says, pushing away. “If we see her, you can just pretend you don’t know which part of the house we’re in. You can blame me.”
She’s backing away across the bridge while facing Jane, willing Jane to follow her. Then she shoots Jane her wicked grin again, and Jane can’t say no.
* * *
“Every time I step into a new section, I feel like I’m in a different house.”
Jane spins on her heels, examining the unexpectedly serene, unadorned, pale green walls of the forbidden servants’ quarters, in the west wing of the third story. All the doors are set into small, side hallways that branch off the main corridor.
“Wait till you see the bowling alley downstairs,” Ivy says, “and the indoor swimming pool.”
Jane realizes she’s been breathing the faint, rather pleasant scent of chlorine ever since Ivy joined her. “Are you a swimmer?”
“Yeah, when I have time. You can use the pool whenever you want. Tell me if you want me to show you the changing rooms and stuff. That’s my room,” she adds, pointing down a short hallway to a closed door. “Hang on, let me put my camera down.”
“What are you taking pictures of?”
“The art,” she says. “Be right back.” She leaves Jane in the main corridor, where Jasper leans against her legs, sighing. Jane’s clothing has dried, mostly; at any rate, she no longer feels like a soggy, cold stray. She’s exposed out here, though; she imagines Mrs. Vanders peering at her disapprovingly around corners, and she also wishes she could see Ivy’s room. Do the servants have hot tubs and fireplaces too? Is Ivy always on the clock? Does she get to travel to New York like Kiran does? If she’s nineteen, will she go to college? How did she go to high school? For that matter, how did Kiran go to high school?
Ivy emerges.
“Do you have a hot tub in there?”
“I wish,” says Ivy, grinning. “Want to see?”
“Sure.”
Jane and Jasper follow Ivy into a long room with two distinct realms: the bed realm, near the door, and the computer realm, which takes up most of the rest of the space. Jane never knew one person could need so many computers. A jumble of ropes is propped beside one of her keyboards, along
with two of the longest flashlights Jane’s ever seen. Large, precise drawings—blueprints, sort of—cover the walls. Jane realizes, looking closer, that they’re interior maps of a house that are so detailed that they show wallpaper, furniture, carpets, art.
“Did you make these?” asks Jane.
“I guess,” says Ivy. “They’re the house.”
“Wow.” Jane sees familiar things now: the Venetian courtyard, the checkered floor of the receiving hall, the polar bear rug.
Ivy seems embarrassed. “Patrick and I share a bathroom in the hall,” she says. “Mr. and Mrs. Vanders have their own suite, though, and it has a hot tub.”
“You could use my hot tub.”
“Thanks,” says Ivy, pulling the tie out of her messy bun, shaking her hair out, and winding it back up again. The air is touched with the scent of chlorine, and jasmine.
“Marzipan,” Ivy says randomly, giving her hair a final tug.
Jane is used to this by now. “Yeah?”
“Another great word to play in that same spot, because of the position of the z.”
“Are you always thinking up good eight-letter Scrabble words?”
“Nope. Only since you came along.”
“Maybe I’ll be good for your Scrabble game.”
“It’s looking that way. Brains are bizarre,” says Ivy, going back into the corridor and leading Jane and Jasper past more hallways and doors.
“If you grew up here,” says Jane, “how did you go to school?”
“We were all homeschooled,” says Ivy, “by Octavian, and Mr. Vanders, and the first Mrs. Thrash.”
“Was it strange? To be homeschooled, on an isolated island?”
“Probably,” says Ivy with a grin, “but it seemed normal when I was a kid.”
“Will you go to college?”
“I’ve been thinking about it lately,” Ivy says, “a lot. I’ve been saving up, and I took the SATs last time I was in the city. But I haven’t started applying.”
“What will you study?”
“No clue,” she says. “Is that bad? Should I have my whole life plotted out?”
