44
“Have all the servants gone home?” David asked, striding into the kitchen.
Variola looked up from the last of her tasks for the night, wrapping the remnants of her dessert pudding and placing them in the refrigerator. Across the room, Mrs. Hoffman, standing stiffly like a sentinel, also looked over at their employer.
“Yes,” Mrs. Hoffman answered. “The last of them just left.”
“All right,” David said. “I need to speak with you both.”
“Has your wife gone upstairs?” Variola asked, approaching.
David nodded. “She can’t hear us.”
“She is a smart lady,” Variola said. “Smarter than one thinks, upon first meeting her.”
“Liz is indeed very smart,” David agreed. “That’s why I must know what’s going on here.”
“Going on?” Mrs. Hoffman asked, in that plastic, robotic way of hers. “What do you mean, sir?”
“I mean,” David said, his sharp, intense eyes moving between the two women, “I want to be assured that what happened before will not happen again. If the two of you are still playing your silly games . . .”
“Sir,” Mrs. Hoffman said, “I can assure you that we are fully in control of this house.”
“That’s not the assurance I was looking for, Mrs. Hoffman. Your little games are over, are they not?”
“Our little games, as you call them, saved this house, and you.” Mrs. Hoffman’s voice was quiet and severe.
David looked over at Variola. He seemed to think he couldn’t reason with Mrs. Hoffman, so he turned elsewhere. “Are they over, Variola? Tell me the truth.”
The chef smiled. “If you want them to be over, sir, then they are.” She sensed Mrs. Hoffman stiffening beside her.
“Not only do I want them over,” David replied, “but I will make sure they are over.”
“You need not worry, sir,” Variola told him.
He grimaced. “What does Rita know?”
“Rita?” Mrs. Hoffman practically spit her name. “The little twit. She knows nothing. You need not worry about her.”
“Are you certain about that?”
“Yes,” Variola assured him. “She knows nothing more than rumors and gossip, like everyone else.”
“Well,” David said, “she brought my wife to a room upstairs tonight, claiming to have seen some unfamiliar woman come in through the back door and enter that room.”
Variola felt the anger rise from her gut, and looked sharply over at Mrs. Hoffman. “I don’t like the idea of strange people coming and going through my kitchen. Do you know anything about a woman coming in here tonight?”
“Of course I don’t,” she said, but Variola didn’t believe her. She had threatened to continue doing things her way, and that was apparently the case. Variola steamed.
“I won’t have what went on here before starting up again,” David said.
Variola watched as Mrs. Hoffman’s back arched and her chin lifted in defiance. She took several steps toward David.
“You think you have any authority here,” the housekeeper said, her voice burning with anger and resentment. “You think you can tell me what to do.”
Variola saw the life drain from David’s eyes. She had seen this once before, in the aftermath of the accident, when his wife’s body lay here, on the kitchen counter, dripping with seaweed, cold and blue. Mrs. Hoffman had spoken to him in the same way then as she spoke to him now, and Variola realized that all of her lessons of the fine arts of the islands had created a monster. She pulled back now, slightly afraid, and fear was not an emotion Variola was familiar with, or comfortable with.
Mrs. Hoffman stood in front of David with those hard, cold eyes of hers. “Rita is a lunatic,” she said. “And we all know why that is.”
He looked away. “My fault.”
“Yes, your fault,” Mrs. Hoffman agreed.
“I’ll take care of her,” he said, in a small voice.
“The only reason Rita thinks she can get away with whatever she wants to do is because you have given her delusions of her own power.”
David ran a hand through his hair. His anger from earlier had been replaced by anguish. His eyes were locked on to Mrs. Hoffman’s. He was a little boy, frightened of the schoolmarm. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hoffman. Believe me, I am. I take full responsibility. I was weak . . .”
“Yes, weak! That’s what you were. Weak and cruel. And you hurt her. Hurt her terribly.”
Variola realized she wasn’t talking about Rita.
“How she loved you,” Mrs. Hoffman said, drawing closer to David, her voice dropping into a hushed, angry whisper. “Do you remember when her body lay here, dripping and cold? That was your fault, too!”
David was crying.
“How devoted she was to you. It was only because of her pain and her sense of betrayal that we started what you so condescendingly call our ‘little games.’ ”
Variola was astounded at how quickly he had been overcome by Hoffman. He hadn’t even put up a fight. She felt pity for the man, tinged with contempt.
“She would still be here, with us,” Hoffman was saying, “the mistress of this house—”
“But Liz is the mistress of the house,” David said quietly, unconvincingly.
“That’s not so! There will always be only one mistress here, and you know it!”
David shuddered. He had come into this room so full of authority. Now he was small and shriveled.
“You remember her as she was, don’t you, David?” Mrs. Hoffman was saying, drawing even closer to him, speaking almost directly in his ear. “How beautiful she was . . .”
“So . . . beautiful . . .” David murmured.
“We were so happy together.”
“So . . . happy . . .”
“And how you loved her.”
“How I loved her,” David repeated.
“Until Rita came along.”
All at once, David’s eyes clouded over with bitterness.
“And now,” Mrs. Hoffman hissed, “another woman sleeps in her place.”
David’s face twisted in anger.
Mrs. Hoffman pulled back, her voice becoming subordinate again. “Forgive me, sir, if I have been out of line in speaking so plainly,” she said. “But I think you know everything I say is true.”
“True,” he repeated, almost incoherently.
Mrs. Hoffman smiled.
“I . . . I need to go outside . . .” David was mumbling, trembling hands running through his hair. “I need to walk . . . think . . .”
“Of course you do, sir,” Mrs. Hoffman said. “The night air will do you a tremendous amount of good.”
He said nothing more, just stumbled out the back door.
Variola looked over at Mrs. Hoffman. “That was audacious,” she said.
The housekeeper sniffed in derision. “I can’t stand it when he starts trying to act like he’s in charge around here.”
“But he’s right,” Variola told her. “This can’t go on.”
“It goes on until we are done. Until we are successful.”
“We have tried. It is not possible. When will you accept that?”
“How dare you give up?”
Variola frowned. “I have enough blood on my hands.”
“You took an oath.”
“To someone who is no longer here.”
Mrs. Hoffman bristled. “How dare you give up on her?” she repeated, more forcefully.
Variola folded her arms over her chest. “He is right. The games, as he calls them, must end. Too much blood has been shed.” She narrowed her eyes at Hoffman. “Who was the woman who came into the house tonight? How did she get here? What has happened to her?”
Mrs. Hoffman ignored her questions. “If and when our games are to end, I will give that command. You will not tell me.”
“I took no oath to you.”
“I speak with her authority.”
“Ah, but you haven’t been listening to me, have you, Hoffman? The rules are changing. She doesn’t have authority anymore.” Variola smiled. “I do.”
“Don’t you dare to presume supremacy here.”
“It is you who should not dare.” Variola lifted her chin as high as Mrs. Hoffman’s. “Remember who I am. Why you brought me into your games. Do you really want to go head-to-head with me? Are you really that confident of your abilities, Hoffman?”
The other woman backed off, but just a little bit. “I’m confident of hers, and she won’t stand for insubordination.”
That only made Variola burst out laughing. The sound of chimes echoed through the room. When she caught her breath, Variola started to reply, to say something in response to Mrs. Hoffman’s threat, but then she decided against it. Her laughter was all the response that was necessary. So she laughed again, and kept laughing as she climbed the stairs to her room. Mrs. Hoffman stood staring after her, her fists clenched at her sides.