Chapter 23: 23 – Diana

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One of the paintings depicted a vivid scene in front of a stable. Diana lingered on that one, trying to decide whether they were getting ready for a hunt, considering the horses being prepared and the people in riding costume, or simply for an excursion. She didn’t see any hounds, and probably they would have been visible somewhere in the scene if it had been intended as the preparations for hunting, but she wasn’t sure.

What she did know was that the sunlight gleamed on the hides of the horses, highlighting every muscle and contour until she felt like she could see them breathing, and the fabric of skirts and jackets swept in such realistic folds that she practically expected them to move. Tentatively, she reached out to touch the skirt of one lady, just to reassure herself that it was only paint.

Her hand didn’t stop.

Caught completely unprepared, she stumbled forward, throwing out her other hand to catch herself.

For a heartbeat she experienced intense vertigo, then everything stabilized.

Sort of.

She could feel the pressure and rigidity of a corset, much more restrictive than her tea gown, and glanced down. That wasn’t her proper build, it was too slender, under the precisely-fitted oak-green jacket and skirt all trimmed with coppery embroidery. The scant skin she could see between gloves and sleeves was entirely too pale.

The horse right in front of her, a similar copper but with a darker mane, turned its head to nuzzle her. Diana was a city kid, and had never seen a horse in person aside from a pony ride on holiday when she was a child; it had never occurred to her that they would be so enormous. This one seemed gentle and friendly, at least, but there were more in the immediate area, and the people around her seemed to take that absolutely for granted.

Gingerly, she patted the horse’s neck, then, when the horse seemed amenable to that, she peeled off her glove and stroked its nose. It felt like the skin was stretched tight over hard bone, until she got lower, down near the muzzle itself, and there she felt only incredible velvety softness, an extraordinary texture.

She jumped when the horse raised its head a little and lipped at her bare pale hand.

“She’s just hoping for a treat, m’lady,” said one of the uniformed grooms. “Shall I help you mount?”

Diana eyed the contraption on the horse’s back. That looked like nothing she’d seen in movies, but something like occasional pictures she’d seen in books: it had to be a side-saddle, an invention that as she understood it gave women less control over the horse but, more importantly, preserved modesty and maidenhead. “I, ah... not yet?”

The groom ignored the falling petals as though he couldn’t even see them. So did the horse. “As you like, m’lady.”

The big question was, where was she? How could she be a skinny white woman apparently nowhere near the Mallory house?

She turned in place. Well, part of that was wrong: within a small universe that faded out to a disturbing blank whiteness at the edges, she could see the rear terrace of the house, even the dark shadows of the loggia. She was behind the Mallory house, near a stable that no longer existed, and in full daylight instead of deep night. And was a skinny white woman.

She felt a hand slip around her upper arm, a gentle tug, and then that vertigo returned.

When it passed, she was back in the upstairs hallway in front of the paintings.

“You are welcome to entertain yourself with the paintings for as long as you like,” a male voice said casually from just behind her, “but it’s helpful to know that you can always leave them, and quite easily once you know the way of it.”

Diana spun around.

The man behind her was just old enough for some distinguished silver at the temples of his ash-brown hair, anachronistically completely unoiled and long enough that he could probably have pulled it into a tail, and for a few creases in the medium-pale skin around eyes and mouth. He looked like he took care of himself, fit and healthy. The black pants and shoes were timeless; the collarless white shirt was hard to date, but it was being worn in a casual way that would have been highly unlikely for a Victorian gentleman, the sleeves rolled up to mid-forearm. The waistcoat buttoned over the shirt was a vivid burgundy-and-navy brocade that might have been impossible colours for the period, or at least the early part of it. The circular brooch at the throat of his shirt and the heavy rings on two fingers, all gold with glittering coloured stones, looked expensive.

He was too old for her, and besides, she was spoken for, but damn if he wasn’t elegantly handsome in an old-fashioned and charismatic way, with just a hint of rakishness adding spice.

“How to leave... I was in the painting? I guess that shouldn’t feel hard to believe. I... hi. I’m Diana.” A considerable shower of flower petals cascaded to the floor, in a rainbow of hues. Disoriented, she’d forgotten about that.

The man simply smiled and caught a petal that fluttered in his direction. “Good evening, Diana, and welcome to my house. I’m Richard Mallory.” He offered a hand; when she laid hers in it, he raised her hand to his lips. That kiss was so light she barely felt anything except his breath, and only for a heartbeat before he released her. “You certainly look like you fit right into your surroundings—an aesthetic setting and a striking dress for a lovely lady.”

“I, um... thank you.” Everything she’d ever read about formal courtesy escaped her at the moment, and she couldn’t have formulated a gracious response to save her life.

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He inclined his head in a sort of nod. “You still look a little unsteady. Perhaps you should sit for a moment?” He gestured to a chair near the windowed outer wall, no more than ten feet from her. Without touching her, he nonetheless guided her to it.

The name finally registered. “You built this house!”

“Not single-handedly, but I did have some involvement, yes.”

“I searched everywhere I could think of or get access to and I couldn’t find much of anything on the history of the house. Is the stable in the painting based on reality? Were the horses real?” She sat down on the ornate chair, then realized he’d had a hand ready to help if she’d needed it, and regretted she hadn’t. “Was there really a separate cottage for an estate manager who looked after the everyday stuff and was in charge when you were away?”

Richard chuckled. “Let me fetch the other chair so I’m not hovering over you, and we’ll see what I can answer.”

There turned out to be a matching chair in a mirror position farther down the plant-rich wall of windows. Richard picked it up and returned with it so he could sit facing her at a comfortable angle. Victorian furniture was usually meant to encourage good upright posture, but somehow, Richard managed to look casual and comfortable.

“Now. Jake, the artist, based the stable from the painting on its appearance in photographs in the library and on the original plans, which are also there. The horses are no more real than the humans in the painting, created simply for that scene, but they are plausible. What was the other thing you asked? Ah, yes. We did indeed hire an estate manager. I spent quite a lot of time working, and my wife Ségolène has her own ways of keeping busy. The estate included a working farm large enough to provide the house with a substantial percentage of our diet, some of it eaten fresh and some of it stored or processed for later use, and that meant staff for that as well as the house, the stables, the garage, the grounds. It was a large and complex entity. Seeing to matters like bills and maintenance and staffing could have devoured an enormous amount of time—enough to keep one person employed full-time at it, in fact. And yes, there was a separate cottage, a short distance outside the gates and surrounded by its own garden. It was of moderate size, more than enough for one or two adults though it might have become crowded with children as well, and we saw to it that it was constructed and furnished well. We scandalized everyone by hiring a woman to take the position, but she did a wonderful job of it.”

“Was there a reason? That you hired a woman, I mean.”

“Her husband worked for me. He died of an illness. I wanted to help her and her young daughter, as they had no family to turn to and few options. Whatever my failings, I learned too much from my mother and Ségolène to believe that a woman could inherently not do the job, and I had reason to believe she had the skills needed. She proved me right.” He paused, and smiled. “I recognize that look. I’m the son of a skilled bricklayer and a writer who deserved more recognition than she ever received, so I grew up with craft skills and familiar with building sites but also highly literate—and numerate as well, I might add. Building sites required clerks to manage all the administrative duties. It was not an occupation with high pay or status, but it was better than many, and I was good at it and in some small demand. Ségolène, my wife, was born in Quebec. Her mother was one of the last of a line of witches, and she doesn’t know her father. They often had to move from place to place when they became locally unpopular, and her mother died when Ségolène was in her teens. By my endlessly good fortune, she happened to stumble into my life a few years later, although I wish that journey had been gentler for her. We not only fell madly in love, we discovered that we are a very good match in many ways. Thanks to Ségolène, I uncovered a circle of corruption and fraud at a public building site I worked at—a somewhat larger degree of fraud than the normal, I should say—and was recognized for it. It took time and hard work and Ségolène’s magic, but I built up enough to be able to invest in a project she was certain would succeed, and ensured it did so, which led to a profit I could then invest further. It took some years before I owned my own construction company and could afford to build this.” He gestured around them. “Born of my wife’s skills and my own, braided together. We had a townhouse in the city by then, quite a pleasant one, but this was our home.”

“No children?”

“Sadly, no. We tried, but we were never so fortunate. But perhaps, if we’d had children, we would not have made the choice we did, and the house would not have been here for...” He broke off. “The house would, I’m sure, be only the dead one you expected, not the living one that you’re currently in. Ségolène and I have never entirely shared the values of our contemporaries, and I’m sure we would have either scandalized our children utterly and been an embarrassment to them, or we would have set them on the path to the same.”

“What choice? You mentioned a choice.”

“The house did not fall between worlds by chance. Ségolène and her familiar Maggie are responsible for that. They did so only with my whole-hearted support. We did see to it that everyone dependent on us had the best possible references and a generous amount of what I suppose you could call severance pay, although there was no requirement for that. No one living here was a servant in the house at the time. They are, nonetheless, our beloved family.”

“Family’s not always where you’re born. Sometimes it’s the one you make.”

“Precisely. As for the house, between the stables, the garage, the estate manager’s cottage, various outbuildings for the groundskeeper including a greenhouse, and the farm as a whole, the estate is much larger than I believe it now is in your reality, where I gather only the house and forecourt remain intact.”

“Yes. There are mounds showing where they were, but the bit of research I did find suggested that a lot of it was scavenged for materials, which would have been illegal since there was no clear ownership, and there were squatters living in them especially during the Great Depression in the thirties when the economy crashed, and the vandalism was pretty bad over time, and with no upkeep they deteriorated.” Flower petals showered down and gathered on her lap and around her feet, but she ignored them as much as she could. “The estate manager’s cottage supposedly was destroyed completely in a fire, no one even realized it was happening until it was too late. Eventually the town decided that the stable and garage and all were dangerous and passed a declaration that if the legal owners did not appropriately fence and then maintain the buildings within ninety days, they were going to have them destroyed for the sake of public safety. It still seems odd, and other people have said that, but the ownership just seems to hang in this weird limbo that allows odd things to happen.”

“That will happen, yes. There’s a lesson there, I suppose, on the impermanence of all things made by human hands. Did you find anything else?”

“Not a lot about the house. Just local gossip. The biggest local event I could find in this whole town’s history since the Depression was the restoration of the historic church a couple of years ago and all the related ups and downs that took most of the nineties to sort out, and second place was a murder trial in the early eighties. Some local woman disappeared off the face of the Earth.”

“Yes? And she was presumed murdered?”

“Her boyfriend was known to have a violent temper and had just lost his job and had left the bar seriously drunk, so there really wasn’t a lot of question about what happened to her, but no one ever found her body and he went to prison still swearing he hadn’t killed her. But people mentioned having seen bruises on her before, multiple times, and that they’d seen her cringe and refuse to argue with him, all that kind of abusive garbage, so even if he didn’t kill her, he was still a scumbag. I hope she had enough and just ran away and found a better life somewhere.” Why Richard cared, she had no idea, but the story had gone on for some time quite prominently and she’d gotten curious enough to succumb to the distraction. She brushed petals off her lap absently.

“I agree. I have no patience with violent men and I wish her well.”

“Sorry, that’s not about your house, just the town. Not a lot seems to happen around here. The bits of info I did find about the house were front-page news, but it took me forever to find it. There are a few references to your house being haunted, and the odd legend about people disappearing out on this road but they’re usually not locals. Some kid hitch-hiking around with a sketchbook in the seventies supposedly vanished but seriously, he probably just moved on, and some guy staying in a bed-and-breakfast for the week who asked about ghosts a lot never came back for his stuff but his credit card covered his bill, I think that was sometime in the early nineties but I don’t remember. They didn’t seem relevant. I was hoping to get out here during the day but my car got cranky and I got held up by a phone call and just... things kept happening, and I ran out of time so I had to risk coming tonight. So other than making sure my boyfriend knows exactly what my plans are and arranging to check in with him first thing, I didn’t pay much attention to the stories about supposed disappearances.” She paused to think briefly. “I don’t suppose you know anything about them.”

“This house connects directly to your world via a single doorway on a single night of the year. That hardly sounds likely to make us a significant threat to the local population, I think.”

“Makes sense. So how many people did you have working here? In the house and farm and all?”

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