I manage to avoid the girl, whoever she is, for the entire morning. But when I go out to Albert’s car to pick up Poppy from school in the afternoon, I nearly run right over her.
She’s lying on her back in the stone courtyard in front of the castle, like a cat basking in the sun, her eyes closed, one hand resting on her flat stomach. She wears black skinny jeans and a loose light gray T-shirt, her dark hair spread out against the gray stones beneath her.
I must have stopped too short and noisily, because she moves her hand to shield her eyes from the sun and looks over at me. “Who are you?” she says, her voice disinterested despite the bluntness of her question. She’s beautiful, in a feline sort of way. Her eyes—slate blue, a color I’ve never seen before—are narrow, almond-shaped, and the line of her nose is long and straight. Her brown hair is so dark it’s almost black, and it shines in long, loose waves. I’m suddenly very conscious of the ever-present frizz in my red curls.
“I’m Fee,” I say, my throat dry. I clear it. “I’m the au pair.”
She props herself up a bit more, her eyes narrowing. “I’ve met the au pair. She’s a sixty-year-old obese woman with pockmarks.” The clipped, aristocratic tones of her accent nearly match Charlie’s, but hers sounds more labored. Maybe I’m just imagining it. Or maybe it seems that way because talking to me is nothing more than a chore for her.
“I’m new,” I answer, trying to match her bored tone but managing only to make my voice a bit breathier. There’s something about the way she’s looking at me, examining me, that makes me nervous. I resist the urge to fidget, to shift my weight from one foot to the other.
“Hmm,” she says. “I’m Blair.”
“Oh, of course,” I say for lack of anything better. My suspicion has been confirmed. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“You’ve heard about me?” There’s something lurking in her tone that makes me think very carefully about how I’m going to answer that question.
I decide on a simple “Yes.”
She straightens her arm, lying back down and closing her eyes once more against the sun. “Nice to meet you, Dee,” she says, deliberately misremembering my name, I’m almost positive.
I hurry to the car, feeling like I’m escaping the clutches of a tiger, and by the time I slide into the backseat, I’m shaking. How has she provoked such a response in me? Is it just because she was Charlie’s girlfriend—scratch that, his pregnant girlfriend? Or was it the look in her eyes, sharp and stormy as they pierced through me?
Albert takes one look at me in the rearview mirror then turns to face me, his eyes crinkled in concern. “What’s happened to you?”
I try to clear my expression with a light smile. “Nothing. I just nearly ran over Blair is all.”
“She doing that lying-in-the-sun thing again?” he asks, starting the car and looking out his side mirror to see her, still there behind us. “Last time she came here was Christmas, bloody freezing, but she still spent half her time in the courtyard.”
I nod. “She’s not really what I expected.” I press my lips closed, annoyed at myself. There I go again.
Albert just laughs. “She’s a nice lass, kind to everyone,” he says, pausing a moment before continuing. “We all like her.”
I keep my lips pressed together, refusing to let any of my many questions spill out. Albert is too perceptive for me to let my guard down. He’d know in an instant that my interest in Blair implies an interest in Charlie, and I don’t really want to know what he would think—or do—about that.
We arrive at Bardwill to see a short woman in a stiff skirt suit waiting out front. It’s not until we get closer that I see that it’s Mabel, out of her traditional uniform and white lace cap. Albert pulls up in front of her, and she opens the passenger door.
“Mabel, I . . . what are you doing here?” I ask as politely as possible despite my surprise.
She glances at me once before settling into her seat. “I’ve just come from a meeting with Poppy’s headmistress. She wanted to speak to her caretaker about her performance in school.”
Right. I’d been meaning to set up that meeting. I’m certainly glad not to have to talk to that woman again, but I never expected Mabel to be the one to talk to her.
“Oh? And how did it go?” I ask coolly.
“I told her we care very much for Poppy,” Mabel says, with a stiff neck and no eye contact, “and that we are doing everything we can to help her through this hard time.”
I nod and keep quiet, but I’m still confused and a bit hurt. Mabel didn’t even tell me about the appointment, let alone ask me to go in with her; she just assumed the responsibility for herself. I keep underestimating how close she is to Poppy.
Poppy doesn’t seem at all surprised to see Mabel, in any case. As she skips over to the car with a group of girls, I see that she’s getting closer to her friends again, opening herself back up. On the way home I learn that apparently Natalie has a mad crush on a boy named Logan from the boys’ school, and Poppy finds it the most fascinating news ever. I let her prattle on with a smile on my face, though I’m still distracted by this new perspective I have on Mabel and her position in Poppy’s life.
Back at the castle, I expect to run into Blair again after we wave goodbye to Albert and head back across the courtyard, but she’s moved from her spot, and I don’t see any trace of her inside.
When Poppy and I are set up in her study, going over a math problem, I ask her, as casually as possible, “What do you think of Blair?”
Poppy looks up from her workbook. “I don’t really know her. I’ve only met her a couple of times. Charlie was never that big on bringing her home to meet Mum and Dad. She seemed really nice, though.”
She must have been in a bad mood when I met her, then, because Albert had said the same thing. Maybe she really is nice. Maybe the pregnancy has her really stressed out. Or maybe I’m just being paranoid.
“How did she and Charlie meet?” I ask, trying my best to sound perfectly pleasant and merely curious.
Poppy shrugs. “University, I guess. They both went to St. Andrews.” She pauses, then continues, her voice lower, “Mum asked Charlie about her once, a few months ago. She wanted to know why he hardly ever brought her home, you know? So she was asking all these things, like how they met, what she wanted to do after college, if she was from a good family. Charlie went mental, said why did it matter what kind of family she came from? Mum kept asking, like why was he so defensive? And then he said something about her dad, like he was a bad guy or something. And that Blair didn’t talk to her family anymore, but that didn’t make her a bad person. He said that he was her family now, and then just stormed off.”
I raise my eyebrows but say nothing. I must have been wrong. If Charlie feels so strongly about her, she must not be too bad. And it sounds like her home life was a wreck.
Poppy taps the paper in front of her with the eraser of her pencil. “What’s my next step?” she says. I turn my focus to the problem, but I can’t seem to shake the thought of the strange feline girl with the unsettling eyes.
• • •
That night, I tell Poppy that I’m going to be eating with the other servants from now on. The thought of sitting at the table with Charlie and Blair makes my stomach clench, and I know I wouldn’t be able to eat a bite. She only nods in response, but I can tell she’s confused. Maybe even disappointed. I have to remind myself that Blair probably doesn’t want me at the table anyway, since she can’t even remember my name.
“You’ll still have breakfast and lunch with us, though, right?” Poppy says.
“Sure,” I say, unable to say no to that trace of pleading in her eyes. “Of course.”
I’m slipping away from the kitchen and up to my room after dinner with the servants when Charlie catches me. I hear his footsteps behind me in the hallway before I see him, and I know I can’t escape.
“Fee, hey,” he says, his fingers brushing along my arm to stop me. I draw my arm away from his touch as subtly as I can as I turn to face him. “I’d like you to meet Blair.”
He steps aside, and I see she’s been standing behind him the whole time. I can see now that she’s shorter than she seemed in the front hall this morning or in the courtyard this afternoon, a few inches shorter than I am. She offers me a broad smile, but I can feel those narrow blue eyes examine me carefully once more. “We’ve met,” she says.
“Yes, good to see you again,” I say with the barest suggestion of a smile.
She snuggles into Charlie’s side, and he places an arm around her shoulders. They stand there, a unit. Indestructible. “Charlie says you’ve been great with Poppy,” Blair says, her voice syrupy with politeness. What happened to the strange girl lying on the courtyard, who practically refused to remember my name?
“Well, Poppy—she’s great,” I stutter. “You know,” I add quickly, “I was actually on my way up to go help her with her math homework. She’s been doing so well, just got a B on a pop quiz today. I think she’ll be able to pull her grade up nicely.” I’m babbling and staring at Blair like an idiot, so I press my lips shut and shift my focus to Charlie.
“Thanks, Fee,” he says softly, his expression inscrutable.
I hesitate for a moment, trying to read what he’s feeling, but I snap myself out of it quickly and leave before I can make things any more awkward.
“So nice to meet you!” Blair calls brightly after me.
So maybe she is the sweet girl everyone says she is. But then I think of the calculating narrowness of her eyes as she looked at me. And Charlie’s arm around her shoulder.
I need to stop thinking about her, so I dive into a night of helping Poppy with her homework. When it’s Poppy’s bedtime, I retreat to my room with a book about Mary, Queen of Scots, and try to lose myself in the sad tale of a woman who had terrible luck and made some of the worst decisions in life and love.
Hours later, the whole castle is sleeping and still, but I’m still awake, trying to focus on the murder of Lord Darnley, Mary’s second husband. Suddenly, a strange scraping noise starts up, right next to my head. It comes from that outside wall, the same place that the loud bang came from a few nights ago. This time, it sounds as if someone is dragging some kind of metal or wire along the wall, slowly. It can’t just be an errant tree branch or something, not with that metallic screech. It must be from Keira’s room, I decide. Is someone moving furniture in there?
I turn my attention back to the book, but the scraping doesn’t stop. It persists and persists, until the words below me swirl into unrecognizable shapes. I slam my book shut and swing my legs out of bed, trying to think of the politest way to ask my neighbor to quit doing whatever the hell she’s doing.
Thankfully, though, as soon as I reach the door, the metallic scraping stops. But now it’s been replaced by that muffled whispering noise, the one that I mistook for a TV on one of my first nights here. And it’s definitely coming from that outside wall. I look around, bewildered, and catch sight of an air vent on the opposite wall, which I share with Keira. Could it be that the sounds are coming from there, through some weird acoustics caused by the castle’s ventilation system?
I get out of bed again and pull my desk chair up to that wall. I stand on top of it and put my ear to the vent but hear nothing. The sounds are definitely coming from that stupid outside-facing wall.
I throw myself back in bed and pull the pillow over my ear. Worry about it in the morning, Fee. For now, just try to fall asleep.