“Miss Sarafina,” someone with the same accent as Henrik’s said gently.
The cold air hit my arms as I pulled them out of the blanket to stretch. Jet lag had set in full force, so I felt exhausted.
“You’re just a girl,” the voice said again.
I opened my eyes and saw a pretty young blonde—bright-eyed with pale skin—standing beside my bed. “I’m not a girl,” I said as I sat up. “I’m eighteen. I’m an adult.”
“But you’re a teenager, like me. I’m the only other one in the household, you know. So I’m really glad you’re here.”
My drapes had been drawn, so I could see the sun barely coming up. I also noticed that the door on the side of my room was open and that the main one wasn’t. “Are you like my next door neighbor?” I asked jokingly as I pulled the covers around my shoulders against the cold. The fire had long since gone out.
“What’s a neighbor?” the girl asked.
I stared at her a little dumbfounded. “You don’t know what a neighbor is?”
She shook her head. “I’ve never left the grounds.”
It was true that there didn’t seem to be another living soul for miles around. “A neighbor’s someone who lives next to you.”
“Oh. Then yes! I am your neighbor. How exciting…I’m Helena, Miss Sarafina.”
“It’s Sara.”
“Really? Everyone’s been calling you Sarafina for days.”
“Well, it’s Sara.”
“Hmm...All right, Sara, let’s get you dressed. Master Halvandor will want to meet you for breakfast.”
“We met last night, actually.” I climbed out of bed to go poke at the red coals in the fireplace and put some sticks on them.
“But you’re a musician. You’re important enough to eat in the dining room with the Halvandor family. And you get to wear the most beautiful dresses.”
The kindling began to smoke as I turned to watch Helena, in a ruffly white shirt and long blue skirt, walk into my closet. “Is that a bun in your hair?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“No—I mean a real bun.” It seriously looked like she had her hair wrapped in a bun around a bread bun.
“Yep.” She poked her head out of the closet. “You never know when you might get hungry. Now what’s your favorite color?”
I had to fight back laughter. “Red,” I said with a little burst in my voice. Blood red has always been the most intensely beautiful color there is, in my opinion.
Helena disappeared for a minute before reappearing behind three long red gowns, two of them unnecessarily elaborate. She threw the craziest one down on the bed and held the other two up on each side of her. “Do you want to wear one of these?” She furrowed her eyebrows and shook her head. Then she laid them on my bed and picked up the other one. “Or this one?” she asked, nodding her head excitedly.
I threw a bunch of small pieces of wood on the first little flames and went to pick up the scarlet one, velvety with wide-ending sleeves, but simple and elegant. The one Helena was holding looked more like a five hundred dollar Halloween costume to me. “This one’s more me,” I said.
“But this one’s so beautiful, and it looks more like what the Halvandor women wear.”
“Really?”
She nodded.
I stared at the ridiculous dress. It was pretty amazing, it was just so—so—ridiculous. But the men last night had been wearing those fancy old suits, so maybe I should be wearing a matching dress.
“All right.” I laid down the one I really wanted to wear, assuming she knew better than I did, and took the other one from her.
“I’ll give you a minute to change. Then I’ll show you where breakfast is served,” she said, walking toward the door on the side of my room.
“Wait,” I stopped her halfway. “When will someone be going to town again?” I really needed to contact my parents.
As far as leaving goes, my nerve had deserted me during the night. I won’t say I didn’t still want to go home, but I will say my heart really wanted something to happen with Enock. And I was kind of scared to tell the mistress of the house I wanted to go home when she’d only just flown me out here.
“Next month.”
“Next month?! But I need to let my parents know I’m okay.”
Helena looked worried. “I’m sorry. Master Halvandor only sends Henrik out at the end of each month. It’s important to him that we keep away from the world.”
“Why?”
She shook her head and turned away, reaching the door before she turned back to face me. “Trust me. It’s better that you don’t know.” Then the door shut and she was gone.
So weird. I wondered if the secret was simply the true nature of Enock and the other Halvandors, and why she knew. Everything about this place was strange, but not any stranger than I’d expected. I just really hoped Enock would make sense of it all.
Feeling all kinds of sick and sad—and cold—I pulled my clothes off. In a rush, I stepped into my sneakers, hoping the long skirt would hide them. As I pulled on the dress, I hoped it would be too tight or something, but it was a perfect fit. It zipped up easily over my back and the ends of the skirt hung just above the ground, maybe half an inch. Even so, it was extremely itchy and uncomfortable with the hard material inside of it keeping the bodice stiff and the skirt puffed out. Looking down, I felt like a red-riding Cinderella, but when I stepped in front of the mirror, I decided it looked more like Cupid had thrown up all over me. My lip curled and there was a scraping sound I couldn’t believe I slept through as Helena came back in.
“You look gorgeous,” she said. “Spin around so I can see it all.”
I turned as quickly as I could, getting poked and jabbed the entire time. “I could fit ten people under this skirt in the back,” I said, looking over my shoulder.
“No, you couldn’t,” she laughed.
“You really think I should wear it?”
She nodded brightly.
“All right, but before we go to breakfast, can you show me where people use the bathroom out here?”
“You mean no one told you where it is last night?”
“No.”
“It’s right across the hall from my room.” Helena pulled a standing screen over in front of the fireplace. “Come on.” She grabbed my hand and I took one last glance in the mirror before I let her pull me away from my room.
“Why are all the doors so heavy?” I asked as she pulled mine open.
“My mom said that when the first Halvandor had this place built, he wanted to make it as hard as he could for an intruder to get to a Halvandor. If you barricaded one of these doors from the inside, it would be practically impossible to break through.”
They must have really been worried to go to so much trouble, I thought. “What about the windows?”
“They haven’t been part of the house for nearly as long as the doors have.”
Helena crossed the hall diagonally and forced open the door to a dark bathroom. It was weird because it had a modern porcelain toilet and sink, but an archaic pump in between them. “You have to get a candle if you don’t want to be going in the dark,” Helena said, going to fetch one from the end of the hallway. Then she handed it to me, saying, “Just crank the pump a few times before you use any water. I’ll wait here so I can help you with your hair and take you to meet everyone in the kitchen.”
Her natural pink cheeks were so rosy and cheerful. It was a big contrast to the men from the night before.
I took the candle and walked into the bathroom. Everything was bronze—handles, pictures and mirror frames, the giant cat statue in the corner—so the glint of the little candle’s light was really pretty. And I was so glad for a halfway decent bathroom.
I hurried, since someone was waiting for me on the other side of the door, and then came out to find Helena eating the bun I was pretty sure came from her hair. And sure enough, when she walked past me into the bathroom, it wasn’t there anymore.
“Come on, I can’t wait to fix your hair,” she said.
I walked up to the big mirror above the sink as she pulled a little drawer out of the side of the cat’s head and took several bobby pins from it. As I looked closer, I realized the entire side of the statue was lined with little drawers. “Are they all filled with hair accessories?”
“Um, I’m not sure what accessories are, but there’s also soap and ointments and such.” She reached in a lower and much larger drawer to pull out a hairbrush.
“Does everyone use that brush?” I asked, moving away when she reached for my hair with it. I’m not one to share things like that.
“It’s here for anyone to use, but we usually do our hair in our own rooms, so I don’t know if any of the women in our hall have actually used it. I haven’t, though.”
I didn’t see any hair in it, so I turned back to face the mirror, deciding it was safe. My lifeless hair didn’t take long to brush. Then Helena pulled all of it back except for two strands in the front, and pinned it against the back of my head so that little spouts of hair came out. “I’d do more, but I feel like we should hurry. Maybe you’ll let me do something with your hair tomorrow, too.”
“Sure.”
Following Helena out of the bathroom and down the hall, I felt a bit nervous when we walked through the door on the end I’d never been through. We entered a small, triangular-shaped room, each wall with an identical door in the middle.
“The dining room’s through that door and the kitchen’s through here,” Helena said, pointing to the right and then the left. She reached for the one on the left. “I hardly ever get to go in the dining room.”
As soon as the door cracked open, I was hit by heat and laughter. It was hard to believe all the noise was kept in so well. All the women wearing long, boldly colored skirts and white shirts matching Helena’s reminded me of giant M&Ms. Their hair was damp with sweat, and they were working hard washing dishes or preparing food, but they also seemed so happy, like they were having the time of their lives. A woman said something in Norwegian before popping a spoonful of gravy into another woman’s mouth. Someone else said something a moment before a lemon was tossed to her.
“Everyone!” Helena called out. ”This is Miss Sarafina. She says to call her Sara.”
“Sara,” they all said, following with a great deal of cheering. Half the kitchen came to crowd around us.
The lemon-tossing woman with long brown hair grabbed my hand. “What beautiful piano-player hands,” she said.
“This is my mother, Aria,” Helena said, pointing to a skinny lady with rosy cheeks just like hers.
“My Helena has been so looking forward to having you here,” Aria said.
A tiny old woman standing right in front of me said something foreign and then smiled at me expectantly.
I stared at her for a second, feeling bad for my cluelessness. “I’m sorry. I only speak English.”
“That’s all right,” Aria said. “Most of us speak English and Norwegian. Emma was just saying how she hopes you’ll tell her about where you came from. Helena or I can translate.”
“Okay.”
The excited chatting went on until a woman squealed. “Your cake’s burning, Aria.”
“Oh dear.” Aria rushed off to one of the cast iron ovens.
“Back to work, ladies,” the tallest woman called out in a rather deep voice—Hilda, I think her name was. “Perhaps Sara will visit us around noon and we can speak with her then.”
I turned to Helena as the busyness returned. “Is there anything I can do to help out?” I asked.
“No, you’re the musician, not a maid. And I should probably be showing you to the dining area anyway.”
I followed her out of the room, feeling even more nervous about entering the second one.
“Hopefully, you will stop by the kitchen again after breakfast,” Helena said once we were in the connecting triangle. “You don’t have to wait until noonday.”
“You mean you’re not going in there with me?”
“No,” Helena laughed. “We’re not allowed in there during dining hours.”
“Who’s we?”
“The maids of the house, the gardeners, and anyone else with that sort of job.”
As she opened the door and I heard only a man’s voice giving someone directions about what part of the countryside they were responsible for, the clear division between “the help” and everyone else began to sink in. It made me a little uncomfortable, since I’d never thought of another human as being beneath me before. Paul stopped talking and everyone stared at me.
I felt my cheeks burn as I searched the faces for Enock. When I couldn’t find him, I decided he had to be the one person who wasn’t watching me, the sliver of a head I could barely see on the far end of the table.
“Miss Sarafina,” the beautiful woman with long, thick, curly hair said from the center of the table, where she sat beside Paul. “You will be sitting beside Enock. This is where you will always be seated. Usually it’s Kristoffer you will sit beside, but since he’s ill and Enock is up a little later than usual, things are slightly off and you will be dining beside him this morning.
“Yes, ma’am,” I responded, crossing the room and not daring to correct who I was fairly certain was Mistress Demora about my name. No one spoke or was merciful enough to turn away.
Enock leaned his forehead against his hand as I sat down, hiding his eyes as golden light burned from them against his palm.
I nearly fell out of my chair due to the oversized hump I was sitting on, with my puffy dress cocooning so much of my hips and rear end. No matter how much it matched the Halvandor’s attire, I was changing out of it the moment I got back to my room and burying it in the back of my closet.
The curly brunette rose from her chair once I was situated. “Listen well,” she directed at me, “for I will only say this once. I am Mistress Demora. You know my husband, Master Halvandor. Beside him sits his sister, Sessily…” She went all the way around the table and I tried to remember everyone’s names, but it was hard because most of them were unfamiliar to me and there were so many of them.
By the time she was finished, I was wishing I was having breakfast with the help. The room was so solemn and everyone in it so serious. The walls were ornamented with crystal and glass cases containing rifles, ammunition, and gold plaques. The size of the table and room and how extravagant everything was made me feel like I was eating with royalty. It made me feel insignificant and out of place.
As Paul began talking again, I tried to ignore the grandeur and survey the table. I decided I wanted the soup that was right in front of me, but I was kind of afraid to reach for it, since no one else was serving themselves. Paul instructed three Halvandor men to sweep the northwest corner of the forest before the balding man to my left whispered to the completely bald man on his other side to pass him a half-full plate of biscuits. After putting three on his plate, he held it out to me, so I took a couple. A jar of jam was between my plate and Enock’s, so I grabbed it, using it as an excuse to get another look at his still-lit eyes.
His face and the hand covering it looked tense. It was making me half crazy, as I spread jam all over my biscuits, to be sitting so close to him and having him ignore me completely like that. He was the only reason I was there, after all, and the biggest one I was staying for.
When I’d put enough jam on my biscuits, I used one hand to eat with and put the other in my lap under the table. I froze mid-bite when something grabbed my hidden hand and set the biscuit down as I looked over at Enock.
“Look away and take this,” he said under his breath, being careful not to move his lips. His fingers moved around as he slipped a piece of paper into the palm of my hand and then squeezed it before letting go.
My heart pounded with longing, and I wanted to use my other hand to reach under the table and grab his to stop it from leaving. But I caught Paul’s eye and realized he was watching me suspiciously, so I picked up my biscuit instead.
As Enock stood, I fought the urge to watch him push in his chair and leave me feeling all alone.
I clutched the paper in my hand as if my life depended on it while I ate breakfast, hurrying so I could get away from the nerve-racking room as quickly as possible. I planned to ask Helena if she thought it would be all right for me to eat in the kitchen at their little table. The people in there were a lot friendlier and less intimidating. Since I’d seen a few people get up and leave without saying anything, I decided it would be okay for me to do the same when I was finished.
“Miss Sarafina,” Demora said as I pushed my chair in. “You will be expected to be here, playing piano, by sunset each evening.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Then I hurried away from the room to see what Enock had written to me.