Ruling with a New Frame novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Quiet Room
Linnet dies of fever in the cellar and wakes as the Empress, gets out, and names the family doctor's mistake at the Sunday table, only for her grandmother to send her back down.
I died twice in that cellar, and the second time I woke up six years old.
The first thing I felt was the floor.
It was stone, and it was colder than any floor in my palace had ever been.
The second thing I felt was the lungs.
They were small and wet, and every breath rattled in them.
I knew that sound.
I had listened to it in a hundred sickrooms, with my ear pressed to a hundred backs.
It was pneumonia, deep in the left lung, three days old at least.
This child had been dying while I slept inside her.
I sat up in the dark and looked at my hands.
They were tiny, with bitten nails and a yellow bruise across the knuckles.
My memory was whole.
I had ruled for thirty-one years, and I had died at sixty-one in a bed I trusted.
Now I had a name I did not know, and it came up out of the child's memory like a bucket from a well.
Linnet Penhallow.
I was six.
The room was a stone box under a house, with no window and a bucket in the corner.
A strip of light showed under the door.
Above me, through the ceiling, a dinner party was laughing.
The child's memory had it clear.
At breakfast, my grandmother had thrown my dead mother's music box into the fire.
Linnet had cried.
The rule of the house was that a child who cries goes to the Quiet Room until she is quiet.
That had been three days ago.
I stood up and my knees nearly folded.
I put a hand on the wall, breathed through the rattle, and counted my pulse against my own throat.
I had perhaps a day, and a doctor was sitting directly above me eating roast chicken.
I went to the door and found no handle on my side.
It was bolted from outside.
Something small scraped in the hatch at the bottom, and a piece of bread slid through on a napkin.
"Linnet?" a boy whispered.
"Are you alive? I brought the bread. Don't tell Mom."
I crouched at the hatch.
Felix, ten years old, my stepmother's son, who had been creeping down every night with food.
"Felix," I said.
My voice came out thin and rough, but it was not the voice of a child.
It was the voice I had used on generals.
"Draw the bolt. Open this door."
The hatch went silent.
"I can't," he whispered. "I'll get the switch."
"You will not," I said. "I will stand in front of you. Open it now."
I heard him breathing.
Then the iron scraped back, and the door swung out.
A thin boy with taped glasses stared at me in the light of the stairwell.
His mouth hung open.
"Your lips are blue," he said.
"I know."
I took his sleeve and started up the stairs.
Each step cost me a breath.
At the top I stopped, and he whispered, "They're in the dining room. Grandma's got the doctor."
"Good," I said. "That is exactly where I'm going."
I crossed the hall barefoot in a gray nightgown.
I pushed the dining room doors open with both hands.
There were eight people around a long table under a chandelier.
My father, Edmund, sat halfway down, a tall, stooped man with a napkin in his lap.
Beside him sat my stepmother, Joanna, blonde and pearled and smiling.
At the head of the table sat a woman in black wool with iron-gray hair pulled back so tight it lifted her eyebrows.
My grandmother, Marguerite.
A heavy man in a tweed jacket sat on her right, with a glass of wine.
The family doctor.
"Linnet," my grandmother said.
Her voice was flat as a slammed lid.
"You are not to leave the Quiet Room until you are quiet."
I walked down the length of the table, one hand trailing along the wood.
I did not answer her.
I stopped beside the doctor's chair and looked up at him.
"You have seen me three times this week," I said.
The doctor blinked.
"Linnet, you are being rude."
"You gave me a cough syrup and told my grandmother it was temper."
"Because it was."
"Then listen," I said, and I turned my back to him and pulled up my nightgown.
"Left side, low, under the shoulder blade. Put your ear there and tell me what you hear when I breathe out."
Joanna laughed, a small bright laugh.
"She's performing. She's always been dramatic."
"Quiet," said my grandmother.
But the doctor was already looking at my lips.
Then at the way my ribs pulled in with every breath.
He stood slowly and put his ear to my back.
The room was so still I could hear the chandelier tick.
I breathed out, and the crackle came.
I felt him freeze.
He straightened up, and his face had gone the color of the tablecloth.
"Pneumonia," he said. "Lower left lobe. Edmund, she needs oxygen."
My father had half risen from his chair.
"She needs a hospital," the doctor said, and he sounded terrified.
Marguerite put her fork down.
"No outside doctors enter this house, and no Penhallow child has ever been taken out of it for a cough."
"Mother," my father said. "She's blue."
"Then she can be sick quietly," said my grandmother. "In the Quiet Room, like every Penhallow child before her."
Nobody at that table said a word.
My father stood up, walked around the chair, and put his hands under my arms.
He lifted me.
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