“Mrs. Crow?”
The older woman folded her hands in front of her and cocked her head slightly to one side. “But of course your ladyship would not be remembering me, having just returned so far from outside the house. It is completely understandable and you shouldn’t trouble yourself about it. You are as always welcome here, your ladyship, but I am surprised to see you below stairs. I’d offer her ladyship a cup of tea but if he’s after you again then you’ve no time to lose.”
“Who?” Ellis struggled to regain her composure. “Who is after us?”
“Why, I suspect Lord Merrick is at your heels again,” Mrs. Crow said with a demure smile. “Was not his lordship the reason you fled the house in the first place?”
“I don’t … I don’t recall,” Ellis said as she shook her head slightly, her eyes fixed on the woman. Mrs. Crow had every appearance of benign servitude. Her smile was pleasant. There was a slight rosy blush to her cheeks. Her dress was clean and neatly pressed with a style that was simple and unadorned. She might as easily have fit the role of someone’s doting grandmother. As for the position of housekeeper, Ellis was hard-pressed to imagine anyone more perfectly suited for the role. Yet there was something about her, something that Ellis could not put into words, that raised the hair at the back of her neck as she spoke to the older woman.
“Well, I most certainly do recall,” Mrs. Crow said cheerfully.
“Ellis, let’s go,” Jonas urged. His eyes were fixed on Mrs. Crow, his face a mask of disapproval.
“In those?” Mrs. Crow considered Ellis’s Columbine costume, an abrupt laugh bursting from her lips, which she quickly stifled. “You can hardly pass unnoticed.”
“Our departure was somewhat unplanned,” Ellis commented with a glance toward Jonas.
“Well, we shall have to do something about that.” Mrs. Crow raised her right hand slightly, her index finger barely extended. Her eyes shifted their gaze slightly to Ellis’s left. “Margaret?”
“Yes, Mrs. Crow.”
Ellis jumped slightly within her skin, startled by the sudden appearance of the young woman at her elbow. She had last seen Margaret as they were rushing past her in the theater several floors above them and a dizzying number of hallways between. Yet, at the mere mention of her name by Mrs. Crow, Margaret had appeared at her side in a seeming instant.
“Margaret, her ladyship will be needing something to wear for the evening,” Mrs. Crow said, appraising Ellis with a set of critical eyes.
“May I suggest something casual,” Margaret offered, her eyes fixed on Ellis’s astonished and concerned countenance. “Something she can move about in at her ease.”
“That would be quite satisfactory,” Mrs. Crow agreed. “Perhaps a traveling suit?”
“I believe I know just such an outfit, ma’am,” Margaret responded with a sideways glance at Ellis. “If her ladyship will kindly follow me back—”
“NO!” Ellis’s single word echoed down the interminable servants’ hall, leaving a shocked silence in its wake.
Mrs. Crow raised her white eyebrows as she turned to the lady’s maid. “I believe, Margaret, that her ladyship prefers not to be seen in public at the moment. She might wish to avoid any awkward encounters in the private quarters. If you would be so kind as to fetch her ladyship a suitable outfit and bring it at once to my own room, that would be satisfactory.”
“But Mrs. Crow,” Margaret protested, “I am her lady’s maid and it is my duty to—”
“Do as you’re told, girl.” The deep blue of Mrs. Crow’s eyes fixed on the lady’s maid, a chill firmness edging her voice. “I’ll brook no nonsense from you today. Be quick about it and not a word to anyone about Lady Ellis. Her ladyship may have a long journey ahead of her and cannot be delayed by a single moment.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Margaret replied with a surly tone.
“And Jonas,” Ellis added, turning to call after Margaret as she hurried down the hall. “He’ll need a change of clothing as well before we … Where is he?”
“Jonas, of course,” Mrs. Crow replied cheerily. “He’s our hallboy. New, really, and I don’t know as to whether he is going to work out. He tends to come and go at his own liking.”
“But he was just here,” Ellis insisted.
“And I’ve sent him to change, as your ladyship commands,” said Mrs. Crow as she bowed slightly and motioned for Ellis to follow her down the hall. “I’m sure he’ll return at once. I’ll have a word with him when he does. For now, would your ladyship join me until Margaret arrives? She won’t be but a moment. I promise no one will come looking for you in my room and this old woman is in the mood to reminisce.”
Reminisce? Ellis considered a concept for a moment: how did one reminisce without memories? Yet she had remembered something.
Hold still, Ellie, and the butterflies will come to you.
Another memory and clearer this time. She had been running for days, it seemed, trying to escape a house that seemed without end. Now holding still, learning the rules of this new game and recovering her thoughts was bringing her more success. This kindly appearing servant might help her connect with more. She was the first person she had encountered since she awoke on the train so long ago who was willing to talk to her about the past. Surely only good, she decided, could come from further remembrance.
As she followed Mrs. Crow down the hall, she thought she could hear the receding sound of frantically beating moth wings against the window glass of the kitchen behind her.
* * *
Ellis frowned at the dress laid out on the narrow bed. It was the same ugly traveling suit she had worn on the train when she first came to herself in this place. It was heavy, woolen and, in her opinion, deeply unfashionable. She had worn it, too, when she fled into the rain from Summersend searching for refuge in the Norumbega. She wore that miserable, wet and stained outfit in her desperate run through the endless rooms of this maddening house until Margaret had found her. Now, here Margaret had presented her again with this same dress. At least now it was clean and pressed although how Margaret had managed it during the time she had been in her ridiculous clown costume, Ellis could not imagine.
“Is there something the matter, your ladyship?” asked Mrs. Crow, standing in the doorway behind her.
“No, not at all,” Ellis said, swallowing hard.
“You were always fond of the costume parties,” Mrs. Crow said with a quivering sigh. She reached up from behind Ellis, pulling out the hairpins securing the hat to Ellis’s hair and lifting it free. She set the hat carefully down on the top of a small chest of drawers to their right. “You often told me that you created this house just so that you might hold such grand events.”
“So, this house … Echo House … you say I created it?” Ellis asked, reaching up to the ruff, trying to feel how it was attached to the collar of the jacket.
“Oh, dear me, yes,” Mrs. Crow replied with a happy chuckle. She moved to the rocking chair set with barely enough space in the corner of the room and settled slowly into it as she spoke. “Of course, it wasn’t your first Day. There were a great many others before and, my, some of them were so very fanciful indeed! I think you made more scrapbooks than anyone and never quite seemed to be satisfied with how any of them turned out. You won the Game more often than even Merrick. He always found you a real challenge.”
Ellis was feeling a little dizzy trying to find the meaning in the housekeeper’s words, let alone follow along. “So, this Game that everyone plays. It has rules?”
“Everything has rules, my lady,” said Mrs. Crow.
“How did we get here?” Ellis asked. “In the Game, I mean.”
“Oh, that’s an old story, your ladyship,” Mrs. Crow sighed, leaning until her back came to rest against the wall. “Way before the house ever was.”
“Tell it to me,” Ellis insisted.
“Well, best I can remember, there was this fight between two brothers,” said Mrs. Crow as her eyes narrowed. “One was noble and wanted discipline and order for all of us, to give us purpose. The other was selfish and wanted to do whatever he liked. But their father said we all had to decide for ourselves which of them we were going to follow: the noble one or the selfish one. Some chose one and some chose the other but there were a few who didn’t want to decide at all. Those are the people who came here to the Tween. Those are the folks who are in the Game.”
“So everyone here is part of the Game?” Ellis asked.
“I didn’t say that, ma’am,” Mrs. Crow corrected gently.
“But you said…”
“I said that those were the folks that came to the Tween and are in the Game,” Mrs. Crow replied, straightening up to perch on the edge of the chest. “There are others who have come to the Tween for their own purposes. There are emissaries—some call them angels and some call them demons—who make their way into the Tween trying get some soul to finally make that choice they didn’t want to make in the first place and ally themselves with one brother or the other.”
“So, what is the Game?” Ellis asked.
“Well, it’s a place that we all share.” Mrs. Crow smiled. “It’s a way for us to enjoy a taste of life for a bit.”
“You mean a better life, don’t you, Mrs. Crow?”
“Isn’t that what I said? Here, now, let me assist your ladyship,” said the housekeeper with a kindly, sweet smile. Mrs. Crow stood up and stepped around behind Ellis. She reached forward toward the buttons that closed the back of the costume, her pale, white fingers remarkably deft at the task. The back of the costume parted, exposing Ellis’s back to the chill of the room.
Ellis shivered.
“Oh, and you have such shoulders,” Mrs. Crow said admiringly. “Have you thought where you might go?”
“I need to find Jenny before I do anything,” Ellis said simply, then turned around to face Mrs. Crow. “Do you know Jenny?”
“Miss Jenny? Of course, my lady.” Mrs. Crow chuckled with merriment. “Your sister, as I recall.”
“Odd,” Ellis remarked. “She was my cousin last time…”
“Cousin … sister … it makes little difference in the end, does it not, my lady?” Mrs. Crow managed to get the last of the buttons undone. “Have you thought where you might start?”
“I hardly know where I am, let alone where I might begin,” Ellis sighed.
“Well, if I might be so bold with her ladyship, might I make a suggestion?” Mrs. Crow prattled on, her eyes twinkling. She did not wait for a response to her question. “I would begin in the Old Quarter. There are many places there where someone might hide and few here in this house that go there. It reminds them of the past and I think it makes them uncomfortable. Still, you’ve got a guide in that Jonas and that could make all the difference.”
Ellis stepped out of the costume and turned with no small reluctance to the drab green outfit that was so irritatingly familiar to her that lay across the narrow bed.
“And one more word, if I may,” Mrs. Crow said, stepping back and once more crossing her hands in front of her. “That young man Jonas…”
Mrs. Crow paused.
“What is it, Mrs. Crow?”
“I hesitate to say, my lady,” the old woman said through a troubled frown. “It’s not my place…”
“Go on,” Ellis insisted.
“Well, it’s true that he knows something about the Ruins … the Old Quarter of the house, I mean,” the elderly woman said, her words coming slow and with caution. “But he may be a bit too familiar with them, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m sure I don’t.” Ellis glared at Mrs. Crow. “Go on.”
“I’m just saying that some places in the Ruins are not safe,” Mrs. Crow said, holding her pale hands up. “You’ll need him to help you find Miss Jenny but he’s not playing the same Game as the rest of us … or you, for that matter, my lady. In the end, it’ll be only Jonas that Jonas is thinking about saving. Mark my words.”
Ellis picked up the drab, green jacket of the traveling suit from off of the bed, gazing at it thoughtfully. “In the end, Mrs. Crow, aren’t we all just trying to save ourselves?”
* * *
The double doors were still open onto the large garden courtyard. The stones of the path were wet from the rain that had finally ceased. The leaves of the trimmed bushes glistened slightly under the light from the windows of the floors above. The muffled sound of distant laughter drifted down from those same windows, carefree and oblivious around the figure of Mrs. Crow.
She stood in the open doorway watching two figures moving quietly into the hedge maze that filled the courtyard. One was a man dressed in the house livery of a servant, an outfit completely unsuited for the task before them, but Mrs. Crow had insisted that the young man maintain his station. The other was a woman in a traveling dress who stopped at the edge of the entrance to the maze and turned for one last look.
Mrs. Crow smiled and waved encouragingly at her.
She raised her hand in acknowledgment and in a moment both the man and woman were gone.
Beyond the maze rose the dark and forbidding wing of the house known as the Old Quarter or, more commonly, the Ruins. They were not ruins, in the strictest sense of the word, Mrs. Crow corrected herself, but simply abandoned to the decay of memory. The windows there were dark and as hollow as the grave.
Mrs. Crow lingered at the threshold.
Waiting.
“Are they gone?” came the deep voice from the dark hall behind her.
“Yes, my lord.” Mrs. Crow spoke without turning at all, her gaze still cast over the garden. “As I told you they would be. Everything is in place and I have sown the seeds of doubt between them. It will just take a little time for them to take root. That was always part of the plan.”
“But not sending them into the Ruins!” Merrick stepped from the shadows, his face grim as he came to stand beside her.
Mrs. Crow turned toward him, her blue eyes taking on a dull, featureless black color. Her words were as sharp as cold steel.
“Are you questioning my scheme?” Mrs. Crow spoke the quiet words with such authority that they caused the small windows framed in the door to quake. Around them both, shadows began to gather into terrible forms with leathery wings and long sharp claws, their blank eyes turning to stare at Merrick.
“No, not at all, Mrs. Crow,” Merrick said with careful words as he took a step back. “I am just observing that you never said you would send them into the old part of the house.”
“True enough, Lord Merrick,” the old woman said with a suddenly gentle, demure smile. The horrendous shadows around them faded from existence. “But that is where she will discover the most terrible thing of all, the one thing that she cannot fight and from which she can never flee.”
“Indeed?” Merrick raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “And what is this terrible monster she will find?”
“The truth about herself,” Mrs. Crow said gently.
“The truth?” Merrick frowned.
“Yes,” Mrs. Crow chuckled through her malicious grin. “And it will destroy them both.”
Mrs. Crow turned and stepped back into the servants’ hall.
Merrick followed after her.
Neither of them noticed a third figure slip into the garden maze behind them.