Page 56 of Bought for Blood

“Longer,” she says. “I started as a girl. My mother kept his kitchen before me, and her mother before that. He pensions us off at sixty whether we like it or not. He pays every grandchild’s schooling. In forty years he’s never asked what any of us do with our off days.” A glance over her shoulder. “You won’t find a soul in this house with a word to say against him, if that’s what you’re digging for.”

“It was.”

“Thought so.” No offense anywhere in it. She stacks bowls. “Dig away. It passes the time.”

I try the others while I finish the soup. The boy at the sink has been here two years, blushes when I speak to him, and gives me “yes miss, no miss.” The gardener’s wife does the flowers and talks ten minutes about forcing bulbs and not one word about anything else.

It’s maddening.

I turn back to Marthe. “What are the other places like?” I ask.

“Much the same,” she says. “Some grander. He has them all over the world. The ancestral home is in Aquitaine, and it’s magnificent.”

“Aquitaine?” I say, wondering what “magnificent” would look like if she doesn’t think this place could be called that.

“In France,” she says. “Bordeaux. They make wine there.”

“Ah,” I say, as if that makes perfect sense. I guess it does. Explains the accent and the way he’s always holding a glass. “Did you work there too?”

“Not officially, though we’ve visited. My mother used to tell stories that she heard from her mother, who heard from her mother.” Marthe dries her hands. “There were sixty staff in my great-grandmother’s day. Grand balls in the long gallery, entire wings lit gold.”

“What stopped it?”

“Can’t say. I suppose the world changed.” She hangs the towel on its rail and squares it. “Or maybe he did.”

I stare into my empty soup bowl, not sure what to ask next. I go with the first thing that comes into my head.

“I saw a cat,” I say. “A black one. In the hall.”

“Oh, that?” She smiles. “That would be Maximilian XV.”

“The fifteenth? The cat is royalty too?”

“No, he’s the fifteenth Maximilian. The Seigneur has always liked having a cat around. Always Maximilian. Always black.”

“So he can pretend they’re the same cat?”

She tilts her head. “You know, I never thought of that. Yes. I think you’re right.” She chuckles and takes my bowl from me. “Now, there’s a fresh loaf wrapped by the door. Take it up with you. A wolf shouldn’t go three hours empty.”

She turns to her ovens, and the kitchen goes back to work around me. I leave the room with a warm loaf and more questions than I brought down.

Sébastien-Laurent de Val-Serein. I’m not sure I’ll ever get my tongue around it.

Bastien.

He collects clocks, but doesn’t have them show the right time. He has a cat he’s pretended is the same one for decades. And he’s lived here for twenty years, ready to move when he’s tired of it, but never left.

“The man makes no sense,” I murmur.

Or maybe just nuts,a little voice says.

I take the loaf back through the long gallery, and halfway down there’s a glass-paneled door I missed this morning. Through the panes there’s a walled garden, clipped brown for winter, sunlight all over it.

I try the handle. It turns.

I stand on the step in the cold with my face turned up and the sun full on it. The wolf turns her face up next to mine, and we stand there, breathing frost and cut yew. It’s the same sun I stood in before I left the compound yard. My skin takes it the same way here.

Because this is the same thing. The leash is long, and the front door is unlocked, but I’m still a prisoner.