Chapter 10: Chapter 10 – At the villain´s place

Thornfield was the name given to the Northrop property. A very apt name, since often in the novel it had been found that this family of three was like a bouquet of roses full of thorns. And, although on the outside they were pleasant to look at, if you got too close you ran the risk of ending up regretting it. Of course, it should be noted, here all those who were branded as sullen and malevolent in a work like this were those who did not sympathize with the Cornells or who, although they did, did not have an outgoing and affable character in society.

So when Oscar apostatized at Thornfield's door, resigning himself to complying with the mandate imposed by his masters, he consoled himself by thinking of this. Since the Northrop were not even there as antagonists -but merely secondary cannon fodders- little was known of their character except from what Madeleine perceived in her few encounters with them.

A butler opened the door and Oscar involuntarily stepped back.

Come on! He himself was aware that in his original life he was a coward, that in this one he was still a coward... And in the future cowardice would not be taken away from him either! But this was too much. Please, if he just had to show up at Thornfield, hand over some documents Cornell had promised to get to old Northrop and then leave. He didn't even need to talk to anyone.

"Oscar? Is it you?"

He had barely handed the butler a folder when he saw a young woman in a wheelchair appear from behind him. That girl was Letitia Northrop, the same one he had met on two previous occasions. Oscar, having put all the dots together, could now remember her name.

"I only came for an errand from my employer," he explained, after greeting her, "now that I have finished, it would be better if I didn´t delay in returning."

"Oh, do you have more to do at Rose Cottage? If you're in a hurry, I won't stop you”

The door had been fully opened and the butler had stepped aside so that Oscar and Letitia could talk face to face. In truth, Oscar did not feel like staying because he was afraid of meeting Albert again. Nor was it that he had a mountain of work awaiting him when he returned, indeed, that had been the last of his chores that day.

"I would have waited for an occasion when the Cornells would come over for tea to show you, but since you're here, it seemed like a good idea to show you what we were both talking about when we were in London," Letitia continued. “But if you really don't have time, we can save it for another day”

Oscar remembered it well, during that brief talk they had, the subject of literature came up. And, with it, the desire to own a library as huge as the ballroom used in that party organized by the Summerfields. Letitia commented that at her house they had a good library; not as large as the dance hall, of course, but large enough to house a collection that had nothing to envy any other nobleman of similar social position might have. Letitia, seeing that Oscar was interested in it, invited him to visit her.

And Oscar, being that he did not remember the youngest of the Northrop, accepted out of courtesy. At that time it did not cross his mind to really visit her because, in addition to believing that her invitation was made to look good, with no real intention for the visit to take place, she never told him her address. Although, he now saw it clearly, the latter must have been because she assumed he already knew.

Then, as for that invitation they were offering him at this moment, he did not want to take it for fear of meeting Albert again and thus receiving all the accumulated quarrels: one for daring to take so many trusts with his sister, another was likely that it had to do with Madeleine and, one more, that he would earn by entering his house so suddenly.

But on the other hand, he did want to see the library! Letitia had told him her father had been collecting classics from other countries for many years and that, compared to the dozens of wasted volumes on politics and economics in the Cornell state, was far more appealing to him.

"Are you sure it's okay for me to stay?" Oscar asked this question with one foot outside the house and the other inside.

He no longer knew what to do but, luckily, Letitia was there to encourage him.

"I've finished all my homework for today, so I'm not busy. My father has gone out into town and won't be back until dinner. As for my brother, he is locked in his room (as he usually is, at this time), so I don't think anyone will bother us either”

If it weren't for Letitia being a correct and thorough person, Oscar would have thought that this was an indecent proposal which harbored ulterior motives. That is, the original novel was labeled "HOT +18", although to be honest, he skipped each and every one of those pages where the sex scenes were, because it was all so badly done that it looked like a summary of a pornographic video: Nothing realistic, and misogynistic in the extreme.

Fortunately, either because the villain's family did not have much prominence or because they were not that type of person, there was no known sex scene starring Letitia or anyone from that house. So in that sense he could be calm. He was not going to be raped.

With this tranquility, added to the certainty that even if Albert appeared, he would not dare to break his legs while his sister was watching, Oscar decided to let himself be guided. In the worst case scenario, he could always apologize, be docile to any show of violence, and remember he still had one last urgent task to do, assigned by his employer. It was an old and unbelievable trick, but it used to work.

The Northrop library was far better than the one they owned at Rose Cottage, no doubt about it. Not only did he triple his capacity and his books seemed much more interesting to Oscar, but the decoration and the arrangement of the shelves were better cared for. In the Cornell's, the shelves were scattered haphazardly, as if they had been arranged as they fit, as new volumes arrived. Not here. Here the owner had made sure that everything fit together, that there was even a perfection in symmetry.

It seemed this room had been located in this wing of the mansion on purpose, with the three large windows that faced the east, so that in the morning it was filled with sunlight. And while at Rose Cottage there were barely a couple of chairs to sit on, here was a desk, a sofa, and several armchairs. A fireplace remained attached to the north wall and, looking upwards, you could even see a series of drawings that seemed to imitate, with great accuracy, the paintings exhibited in some Italian cathedral during the Renaissance.

In truth, Letitia had been overly modest when she told him about her library. And so she let him know.

"You don't need to continue being so polite when you speak to me," she had said later, perhaps feeling uneasy about the deal that had been brewing since they had met in London. “We have known each other since we were children, there is no need to be so formal”

“Okay,” Oscar conceded, thinking that from then on, he would be more ambiguous when using pronouns; he didn't want to disobey Letitia on this, but he didn't dare be casual with her either.

It was true that when they were young, both he and the Northrop met a couple of times. But that was at least ten years ago. There was no way that friendship would recover. Not if you considered the social precepts of the time and Oscar's lack of desire to get into a problem that could cost him his life. Since he was on the Northrop property, he had to stay polite and reject anything from the owners of the place unless he had a compelling reason for it.

Oscar sighed in relief when he realized Letitia was more interested in showing him their collection of novels than in being intimate and reminiscing about old times.

"The books are sorted by continent of origin, genre, language, and author," she was explaining, inviting him to take a look at the shelves. “It´s a somewhat complex system for a newcomer, but once you get used to it, things are much easier to find”

“But it is a good system; everything at Rose Cottage is in alphabetical order... In theory. But the Cornells are not very orderly and, after reading a book, they tend to place it wherever. So the day always comes when you want to look for something, you can't find it where it should be, and a scandal breaks out”

"The Cornells never had a reputation for being orderly people, not only regarding their possessions," Letitia laughed, that was a simple observation without any malice as she immediately added. “But I am convinced that they must have other virtues”

"Yes, yes, others must have. They are not very visible, because my masters are humble people who do not like neighbors talking about them too much. They are definitely not people who likes to brag”

“They aren´t…? I thought Madeleine spent the past season complaining because she wasn´t being allowed to go to London. Has she really changed? I haven't had a chance to talk to her in years!”

It was obvious Letitia would not have been able to catch the sarcasm in Oscar´s tone. First because he didn't let it be perceptible, and second because she, if she had little dealings with the Cornells already, had been confined in recent years in a boarding school for girls hundreds of miles from Snodland. If she had to write to someone from her confinement, that someone would not be Madeleine.

"Well, as much as to change... Ah, but I didn't know in this house you were aware that the Cornell girls were eager to return to the capital."

"Oh, it's not just our house. The whole town knows it. It has happened to me that I go shopping and either through the clients or the grocery owner, that one finds out about things, even if she refrains from asking. In towns as small as this one, it is difficult to turn a deaf ear to these things”

This was true, Oscar knew it firsthand. That is why he did not want to continue dragging the subject of Cornell, for fear that some expletive would escape him about them, and he focused again on the books. Letitia had told him he could roam the room as much as he wanted and choose what he preferred, because she would not bother him. And she, just like she said, didn't bother him. After giving him permission to calmly rummage through the shelves, she took a novel from the desk -which she must have already been reading- and retired to a corner of the room where there was enough space and light to continue her work reading.

A little calmer knowing that neither Letitia had not set in to talk about something inopportune with him, nor to keep an eye on him while he walked from one shelf to another, Oscar relaxed.

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Feeling that no one was looking at him, he scanned the dozens of shelves and read several hundred titles. He was thinking, as he went through the volumes and occasionally touched the spines of those works that caught his attention, that the Northrops went to great lengths to keep his library in perfect condition. The works that were available there were like new, with no pages out of place and the spine devoid of scratches. Both the floors and the furniture shone in the light, the rugs had to be swept often, and the windows were opened daily, since the closed smell that the Cornell library often emitted could not be appreciated either. No, this place was likely to be cleaned daily.

That made Oscar feel comfortable, for he was also one of those people who liked to keep his space well taken care of. When he was back in his world, he could be the most disorderly person on the planet if it was a common space, but when it came to his own room and, especially, his bookshelves, he was a perfectionist who did not admit a single speck of dust.

But, going back to the works there, Oscar did not completely stop his steps until he reached the section in French. It is not that since he could remember he had a particular fondness for volumes in this language, in fact if he had a certain level of French it was because he had studied it as an elective in high school and, at that moment, he thought it would be interesting to read something in that language. The stories he had been given as mandatory reading in his teenage years were too simple for his level and, at the same time, the books before him were too difficult.

Anyway, he told himself, he could not learn if he did not practice. He would already ask Letitia if they had any dictionary.

He had taken out a Victor Hugo book and was flipping through the pages when someone approached him from behind, without making a sound. And until he was less than half a meter from him he did not open his mouth to ask, startling him and causing him to almost drop the novel:

“What are you doing here?”

When listening to her brother, Letitia intervened before Oscar had time to put all his thoughts in order to form a sentence:

"I invited him," she pointed out with good humor, as if she had just made a friend and was showing off about him. "He had expressed his desire to visit our library and I thought that, since you don't usually use it in the afternoons, it´d be nice if he came to see it.”

“Is that so?”

This time, Albert turned to Oscar, who got some courage to respond thanks to Letitia taking the initiative and speaking on his behalf just before he could compose himself.

"That's right," he confirmed, returning to a state of imperturbable calm, as if nothing could surprise him, much less intimidate him. “It is a bit inconvenient to develop a taste for reading in Rose Cottage, as most of the books are countable guides or fictional stories about monsters that only incite the patron's paranoia. The few interesting novels out there are reserved for the young ladies. And those cannot be touched without permission”

"I guess the Cornells won't have anything in a foreign language either," Albert said. “I have been able to verify that unfortunately, in that house, they are not prolific in any language”

“I understand that the ladies study French and German, but I can't tell you what level they got because I haven't listened to them. As for books of that nature, although there are some for their studies, they are not within my reach either”

“If that´s the case, then maybe you can solve a question I have. Where did you get the knowledge to conclude you´d be able to read such a complex story in a language you have never studied about?”

Oscar smiled, without losing his cool. It was true that a stable boy would never have the opportunity to touch a foreign book and understand it, but he was already expecting that question.

“In the last few months I have become fond of reading,” he explained. “To the reading of novels in our language, of course. But seeing all these volumes in French I have asked myself, is it as complex as they say? I have been raising some money and with it I have bought some translated novels, one of them is precisely a version of Les Miserables. It may be presumptuous of me to make assumptions so lightly, but I thought I could read the original manuscript with the help of the translation”

That was not entirely a lie: Oscar had bought a couple of contemporary novels to pass the time and not remember he was caught up in such a cliché, but he never intended to compare texts or anything like that.

"Sounds like a good idea to me, especially if you're starting with French," Letitia pointed out. “For good one should hire a professor, but not being able to, it´s a good method to study a book that one likes”

Albert, on the other hand, still sounded skeptical when he said:

"I didn't know you were interested in literature"

Oh right, Oscar thought. The original character was an airhead who would not touch a novel even with a stick. However, such a finding was not an obstacle to him when he replied with complete normality:

"It's a surprise to me too, I can swear. But when my cousin entered university he encouraged me to get into the habit, that knowledge is never a waste or I don't know what nonsense like that he told me... Anyway, the point is that I started reading a little forced, but later I discovered that this universe is undoubtedly interesting”

Albert did not seem entirely convinced when he heard this, and it was natural, since as a child he had coincided with the original Oscar on several occasions. He knew the character from the past, when they were both kids, and it was this fact that this Oscar of now took advantage of. There was a wide margin of years in which he had not met the Northrop beyond courtesy phrases. It could be said that, right now, he was a complete stranger to them, since fifteen years was a huge space for a person's tastes to evolve.

 "Since that's the case, you should take advantage and read what you can," Letitia suggested. “If you want, you can borrow that novel”

"Ah? No, it is not necessary, really. That would be imposing too much”

"You could also stop by to read from time to time, but I think I remember you said you should go back to Rose Cottage. And I don't think Mr. Cornell is very amused you spend part of the day here. For that reason, and because it takes time to dedicate yourself to reading, you could come some free day that you have”

"I could, of course, but I wouldn't want to bother."

The more chances he had to see Albert, he thought, the more chances he would have to screw up and feed a hatred that would end up costing his life.

"You don't bother us," Letitia said with conviction and, turning to her brother, she inquired. “Does he bother you?”

"I don't really mind what he does," he said, as if trying not to get involved. “As long as he behaves and treat the books well, he can come whenever he wants”

Oscar felt he was getting into eleven-yard shirts by accepting that proposal. What was Albert trying to do by consenting? He wasn't going to berate him for anything? Maybe he was glad his little sister had found someone with common interests living so close and, in that case, he would have decided that it would be good if they both met sometime...

No way. That didn't make sense. There was an age difference between them and, apart from that, Oscar was a man. Who the fuck invites a man to keep his teenage sister busy?

It seemed there was another reason to consent, at least on the part of the heir of the Northrop, but that would be found out in his time. Meananing, Oscar was planning to find out one day, since he wanted to go back to that library and lower his guard against these people was not an option for him.

 That's why he said, slowly, in a barely perceptible tone:

"Maybe I could come over for a bit, on my afternoon off."

After all, if it was impossible to avoid the villain's family, the most sensible thing to do would be to strike up a good friendship with them, right?

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