Chapter 28: 28 – Diana

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“We’ve been talking for some time,” Richard said. “I suggest that you drop by the library if you want further information on the history of this house. There are several photographs and two paintings on display showing the house and grounds from different angles and at different seasons, and there is a book Ségolène put together while we were building the house, documenting the entire process so we could look back on it ourselves or leave its history to our heirs. If you can’t find it, Sally is usually near the library on Hallowe’en night and can assist. She knows the library better than anyone, including Ségolène and I.”

“Oh, I definitely need to see those. I met Sally, she tried to be nice even though I was pretty freaked out, and I think she probably kept me from hitting my head.” She tried to figure out just how long she’d been talking to Richard. She must have lost track in her excitement.

“Sally and her best friend Wanda are both very outgoing and friendly, and they often do their best to arrange to be the ones to welcome guests. They are not alone in being friendly. So. You look like you’ve recovered from the surprise the painting gave you. They are very entertaining, when you’re prepared and you know how to return from them. You will always find yourself within one of the figures in the painting, but not always the same one, and if several enter, it can be rather chaotic establishing who is inhabiting which form—or trying to guess.”

“I... I suppose they would be. Is getting out hard?”

“Not at all. You only have to decide that you are leaving. It will not work simply because you think of leaving or wish to leave. The trick is the effort of will involved, or so my wife tells me. If you wish to experience any of our talented artist’s other works, or return to the one you were in, now you know how to leave without assistance. Not that I’m not delighted to offer that assistance, but it’s difficult to depend on random proximity. Perhaps I should stay long enough to be certain you can leave the paintings on your own. Even if you don’t choose to explore now, you might later.”

“Um, sure, but how? I just fell before.” She didn’t exactly want to go back to that weird setting, having escaped it, but he made a very good point. When she stirred to get up, he rose more quickly and offered a hand, and kept pace beside her back to the same painting she’d been in before, since at least she knew what to expect from that one.

“Extend both hands as though you intend to place them against the canvas and step forward. I’ll give you a moment, and if you don’t emerge on your own, I’ll pull you out again. No harm can come to you inside a painting.”

“That’s good to know. And I just have to decide that I’m leaving.”

“Correct.”

Diana took a deep breath, and reached out.

Vertigo, and... she was beside the horse again.

Right, and all she had to do was decide to leave.

It took longer than it felt like it should have. She thought about leaving, pictured the upstairs hall, and even started to want to leave. None of it worked. The copper-red horse kept nuzzling at her, and she told the groom twice that she didn’t want help.

Beginning to feel both embarrassed and exasperated, she told her surroundings firmly, “Oh, that is enough! I’m going back!”

That succeeded where the rest had failed.

“Well done,” Richard said. “Once you’ve seen how it works, it should be easier to reproduce it in the future.”

“I think I get it now. Thanks.”

“You are, of course, very welcome. Do you have your balance back now?”

“I think so. I’m fine.”

On the last word, her stomach gurgled.

She felt her cheeks grow hot.

Richard didn’t so much as crack a smile. “May I suggest a visit to the kitchen to see what our brilliant cook has prepared? I think we have potato and wild leek soup today, if I saw correctly, although two types of soup is a frequent occurrence these days since we have three family members who are mostly or entirely vegetarian for various reasons, and it’s late enough for more than one to be available. We’ve been blessed with a cook who loves the diversity of this household and enjoys keeping us all well-fed.”

“I did bring snacks with me for overnight, but my bag is... it’s with Cosmo. And they’re literally just snacks.” Diana sighed. “I think I have to accept. Where?” The petals showered around her, but there were fewer on the floor than there should have been after all her talking to Richard, so Cosmo must be right about short existence. That was some comfort, at least.

“Come with me.”

He escorted her along the corridor opposite the direction of Cosmo’s rooms, all the way to the end. Immediately around the corner, he indicated a narrow flight of stairs.

“Not the best stairs in the house, I fear, thanks to some outdated notions that I didn’t entirely manage to avoid at the time but hope I’ve outgrown since. However, if you take these down, and proceed straight ahead when you reach the bottom, you will be in the kitchen. Tarragon will make certain you have what you need, I haven’t the slightest doubt.”

“Tarragon. Right. Thank you. For everything.”

“You’re very welcome. Enjoy the meal and, afterwards, the art. Or whatever else you might stumble across. My house is, at least, never dull.” He gave her another of those deep nods, almost a suggestion of a bow, and vanished back around the corner.

Diana gathered her long dress in her hands to keep from tripping, just in case, and descended the stairs. They were clearly meant as the servants’ back stairs, steep and less well-lit than the ones she’d seen on the far side of the house. She didn’t envy those who had used them on a daily basis, possibly while carrying loads of laundry or firewood.

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The kitchen was warm and bright and rich with delicious smells, and she could hear conversation and laughter even before she reached the bottom. One voice was deeper, with an unusual resonance; the other sounded to her like a youngish male.

Just inside the kitchen, she paused, startled, though she probably should not have been.

The huge red cook glanced over one shoulder and freed one hand to wave her inside, the other five and the tail all busy rolling out dough or something on the counter. “Come in! It’s safe. Of the two people present, one doesn’t eat meat and the other prefers feeding humans to eating them.” That was the resonant voice she’d heard, and there was humour in it as well, making the words a joke between friends. The lack of a shirt made sense, and the navy-and-rose apron covered the cook’s entire front; beneath that she saw loose navy-and-grey pants that gathered at the ankle and had an opening for that tail. Long icy-white hair was in five equal braids, each with brightly-coloured neon cords threaded through each strand, and tied off with matching elastic hair ties. All in all, it belonged to no era Diana knew of and possibly no culture on Earth.

Sitting at the table on a high stool was... not the youngish man she’d thought she’d heard, but a youngish black woman, slender under her close-fitting black jeans and tank-top, her hair in many braids each ending in a bead of a bright primary colour. She smiled at Diana with lips of glossy dark red, red-nailed hands busy stirring something in a large steel bowl. In contrast to goo people, plant people, ceramic people, and four-armed red people, she looked startlingly ordinary.

“Hello. Hungry?”

“I hate to admit it...” Diana said ruefully.

“If no one got hungry, I’d have no job,” the red cook said, and glanced at the young woman at the table. “Can you take care of it?”

“Sure thing. Call me Neon. This is Tarragon.” The young woman hopped off the stool and brought the mixing bowl to the counter. “The flowers are pretty, and the dress is gorgeous.”

“Thanks. Sorry about the mess. I’m Diana.”

“Make yourself comfortable. Homemade bread and butter? It’s majorly good. And there’s tea on, if you like that. Is the soup done?”

“Both are,” Tarragon said. “Potato with wild leek, and beef vegetable noodle. Later in the night, if you come back, there will be abundant Canadian-style perogies in bacon, cheese, onion, and mushroom varieties, enough to feed the entire house and still have leftovers. However, those will take longer.”

“Um, bread and butter and tea and potato soup all sound great,” Diana said. The stools were the height of bar stools, not so bad even with her borrowed shoes and dress.

“Coming right up,” Neon said. “You’ve obviously met Cosmo. Having a good night?” Deftly, she flipped a linen napkin off the top of a loaf of bread on a wooden board on the counter, cut two thick slices and deposited them on a plate, and brought them to Diana with a silver dish of butter and a matching butter knife.

“I’ve met Sally and Thalia, and met a minotaur very briefly, and Richard pulled me out of a painting after I fell into it.” It didn’t sound like much, even though it felt like it had been a very long night already.

“Jake doesn’t talk much to most people. That’s the minotaur. He’s a bit shy. The paintings are fun once you get used to them.” The bread was followed swiftly by tea in a delicate teacup painted with blue flowers and green leaves, on a matching saucer, and a sugar bowl and cream pitcher that were clearly part of the same set.

“It was... a bit of a shock.”

“Of course it was. People don’t normally fall into paintings. Art is supposed to just stay quietly and safely on the wall and look awesome.” The soup appeared not in the broad shallow bowl she expected, but in a deep steep-sided black-glazed bowl with red circular designs she thought were Chinese luck symbols, on a plate that matched. “There we go. Anything else I can do, Tarragon?”

“I’ll let you know,” Tarragon chuckled. “Take a break.”

“Cool.” Neon fetched herself a cup of tea and a single slice of bread as well, and joined Diana at the table. “You seem to be doing pretty well, all things considered. I’m sure the others offered a place you could just stay for the rest of the night and avoid the madness. You have another option for that right here. The bench under the window is comfy and people have fallen asleep on it before, and we could tell anyone else to let you be.”

Diana shook her head. “I want to see the house the way it should be. That’s what I do.”

“Look at old houses?”

“I visit them and take pictures and make notes, and do whatever research I can, and I post it all on the Internet on my blog. Um, do you know...?”

Neon grinned. “Don’t worry, we’re not completely backwards around here. It’s kind of like a magazine or a public diary that people can see from all over the world on a computer, right?”

“That works as a definition. I don’t make any money from it, not even enough to cover expenses, but I still love doing it and there are more people all the time who are dropping by to see what I post. My boyfriend is great about it, he’s looking after our daughter while I’m here—this is the first trip I’ve done since she was born that’s more than a day trip where I can take her with me, and he encouraged me to come. When I don’t have a house to visit, I research other parts of history and share that. Mostly it’s roughly the second half of the eighteen hundreds and edging just over into the nineteen hundreds. It wasn’t always the greatest time for everyone, but so much happened that changed the world for better and for worse.”

“I can think of worse vocations than sharing forgotten or misunderstood history with people,” Neon said, raising her teacup in both hands. “And encouraging others who have the same fascination.”

“Vocation.” Diana thought about that, picking flower petals off her bread and stacking them neatly on the edge of the plate. “That’s a pretty good word for it. Not quite a job, just something that I feel like I need to do.”

“This one certainly turned out to be more than you were expecting, though, hm? I’m sorry your camera won’t actually have anything on it. It would be majorly impressive, I bet, being able to show everyone how the house should look. Well, with an occasional more modern touch here and there. And share your very unexpected Hallowe’en with that treasure of a boyfriend.”

“Yeah, it would. But I’ll settle for getting to see it for myself and, with any luck, remembering.”

“That could happen. You’re off to a decent start. You just need to get a bit more... actively involved. We can do something about that, though. Get a decent meal into you and give it a little time to settle, first. And meanwhile, tell me about your daughter.”

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